PRICE $8.99 DEC. 21 & 28, 2015

WORLD CHANGERS DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

13 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

35 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Margaret Talbot on police shootings in Chicago; Trumped; Miranda and Scorsese; Charles III; James Surowiecki on Mark Zuckerberg’s gift.

ELIZABETH KOlbert 42 THE SIEGE OF MIAMI What climate change means for Florida. Samanth subramanian 52 THE HIT LIST The Islamist war on secular bloggers. MIKE ALBO AND AMANDA DUARTE 57 APPS TO DOWNLOAD FOR 2016 CAROLYN KORMANN 58 THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Microscopes and the power of frugal science. DAVID Remnick 66 NEGOTIATING THE WHIRLWIND John Kerry’s Middle East mission. REBECCA Solnit 78 MEDICAL MOUNTAINEERS Basic care in the remote Himalayas. Peter Granser, Judith Thurman 88 HIGH ASPIRATIONS Architectural futurism in Bolivia.

FICTION TIM Parks 98 “BEDTIMES”

THE CRITICS ON TELEVISION EMILY Nussbaum 102 “Marvel’s Jessica Jones.” BOOKS KelEFA Sanneh 105 A new history of Prohibition. 111 Briely Noted THE ART WORLD Peter schjeldahl 112 A Robert Ryman retrospective. THE THEATRE HILTON Als 114 “Lazarus.” THE CURRENT CINEMA ANTHONY Lane 116 “In the Heart of the Sea,” “Son of Saul.”

Continued on page 6

4 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

POEMS Robert Pinsky 54 “The Robots” Ian Frazier 84 “Greetings, Friends!”

George Booth COVER “Holiday Spirit”

DRAWINGS Edward Steed, Mick Stevens, Tom Toro, Drew Dernavich, P. C. Vey, John Klossner, Liam Francis Walsh, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Farley Katz, Harry Bliss, Shannon Wheeler, Paul Noth, Barbara Smaller, Jack Ziegler, Zachary Kanin, Tim Hamilton, Emily Flake, David Sipress, Benjamin Schwartz SPOTS Sarah Illenberger

“We didn’t want to know the gender in advance.”

6 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

CONTRIBUTORS

Elizabeth kolbert (“THE SIEGE OF MIAMI,” P. 42) won this year’s rebecca solnit (“MEDICAL MOUNTAINEERS,” P. 78) is the author of Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for “The Sixth Extinction: An many books, including “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” and “River Unnatural History,” which is available in paperback. of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West,” for which she won a National Book Critics Circle Award. margaret talbot (COMMENT, P. 35), a staf writer, is the author of She is a columnist for Harper’s. “The Entertainer.” ian frazier (POEM, P. 84) wrote his first holiday poem in 2012. william finnegan (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 38) has published sev- The poem’s past authors were Frank Sullivan (1932-74) and Roger eral books, the latest of which is “Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life.” Angell (1976-2009). samanth subramanian (“THE HIT LIST,” P. 52) is a New Delhi-based peter granser (PORTFOLIO, P. 88), an Austrian photographer, has journalist. His second book, “This Divided Island: Life, Death, and won many prizes for his work, among them the Arles Discovery the Sri Lankan War,” comes out this month. Award. He has published seven books, including “J’ai Perdu Ma Tête,” which came out in 2014. mike albo and amanda Duarte (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 57) are writer-performers and the co-creators of the faux Playbill for “Hurt tim parks (FICTION, P. 8), who lives in Italy, is the author of, most Locker: The Musical,” which was featured in the recent Tony- recently, “Where I’m Reading From: The Changing World of winning Broadway show “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” Books” and the novel “Painting Death.”

Robert pinsky (POEM, P. 54) teaches in the M.F.A. program at Bos- emily nussbaum (ON TELEVISION, P. 102), The New Yorker ’s television ton University. His most recent book, “Singing School,” is an an- critic, won the 2014 National Magazine Award for columns and thology of notable poems, with commentary. commentary. carolyn Kormann (“THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS,” P. 58) is a kelefa Sanneh (BOOKS, P. 105) first wrote for the magazine in 2001 member of The New Yorker ’s editorial staf. and became a staf writer in 2008. james surowiecki (THE FINANCIAL PAGE, P. 40) writes about eco- peter schjeldahl (THE ART WORLD, P. 112) is the magazine’s nomics, business, and finance for the magazine. He is the author of art critic and the author of “Let’s See: Writings on Art from The “The Wisdom of Crowds.” New Yorker.” george booth (COVER) is a longtime New Yorker cartoonist. hilton als (THE THEATRE, P. 114), a staf writer, teaches at the “About Dogs” is one of his many cartoon collections. Columbia University School of the Arts.

NEWYORKER.COM Everything in the magazine, PLUS more than fifteen original stories a day.

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DAILY COMMENT / CULTURAL COMMENT: Opinions and analysis by THE YEAR IN REVIEW: Richard Brody writes about why 2015 was Jeffrey Frank, Emily Nussbaum, and others. a bad year for Hollywood but a terrific one for movies. Plus, New Yorker contributors on their favorite books from the FICTION AND POETRY: Robert Pinsky reads his poem, and Tim Parks past year. reads his short story. HUMOR: A Daily Cartoon on the news, by Benjamin Schwartz. PODCASTS: On the Political Scene, Ryan Lizza joins Dorothy Wickenden for a discussion about the divisions within the VIDEO: Manu Prakash discusses the Foldscope and the beauty of Republican Party. On Politics and More, Emily Nussbaum talks the microscopic world. And, on the latest episode of “Comma with Lindy West about sexual violence on television. Queen,” Mary Norris talks about how to use the ellipsis.

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8 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

THE MAIL

MIND AND MACHINE intelligence globally, allowing people to understand, acknowledge, and temper Nick Bostrom’s work on superintelligence, their behavior. Will that take five hun- as described in Rai Khatchadourian’s dred years? Do we have that much time? article, envisions the Singularity involv- Paul Farrell ing an “intelligence explosion”—the de- Cambridge, Mass. velopment of A.I. that can improve it- self and rapidly achieve intelligence In discussing the extinction potential greater than that of humans—and of technology, Khatchadourian men- weighs the potential efects for good or tions Bostrom’s relative dismissal of ill (“The Doomsday Invention,” No- natural threats, writing, “NASA spends vember 23rd). But there may be much forty million dollars each year to de- more likely scenarios. In order to reach termine if there are significant comets an intelligence explosion, there would or asteroids headed for Earth. (There have to be an incremental advancement aren’t.)” This is not reassuring: as Carl of A.I.—before we get to the super A.I. Sagan used to remind us, absence of brain, we will need to develop a lot of evidence is not evidence of absence. mediocre A.I. brains. What if human- The most obvious failing of the cur- ity finds A.I. mediocrity good enough? rent research program is that it focusses What if something fundamental in hu- on near-Earth objects to the exclusion manity itself prevents A.I. from getting of distant long-period comets, which, to the point of an intelligence explo- given their typical speed and size, may sion in the first place? Or, what if ad- not be discovered soon enough for us versarial groups of humans develop to be able to do anything to stop them competing A.I. systems that get along from colliding with Earth. The pow- no better than their inventors do? Imag- ers that be argue that the minuscule ining a one-way path to an intelligence chance of such a comet wreaking havoc explosion—no matter how fascinating does not justify mounting a Manhat- or how far in the future—can leave out tan Project-size efort in preparation. a lot of messy, but much more proba- Yet Bostrom’s own observation refutes ble, details. this line of reasoning. As Khatchadourian Randy Levine writes, “No matter how improbable ex- Denver, Colo. tinction may be, Bostrom argues, its consequences are near-infinitely bad; In the Khatchadourian piece, a scien- thus, even the tiniest step toward re- tist claims that A.I. could resolve cli- ducing the chance that it will happen mate change, disease, and poverty in is near- infinitely valuable.” We have ways beyond human capacity. But these the means, both technological and systemic problems are not only the re- financial, to add insurance to our sur- sult of a lack of intelligence or resources vival, and we do nothing. Perhaps the or logistics. There is plenty of food, most likely cause of human extinction money, and even plain old human in- is faulty reasoning. telligence devoted to confronting these Joel Marks, Professor Emeritus of problems. What we don’t have is the Philosophy, University of New Haven ability to overcome outmoded and Bioethics Center Scholar, Yale counterproductive evolutionary sur- University vival urges: hoarding against famine Milford, Conn. becomes greed, self-protection becomes aggression, alertness to danger becomes • xenophobic fear, the reproductive im- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail perative for survival becomes overpop- to [email protected]. Letters may be ulation. Expecting A.I. to solve all of edited for length and clarity, and may be pub- lished in any medium. We regret that owing to this for us is asking for it to outsmart the volume of correspondence we cannot reply us. The alternative is fostering human to every letter or return letters.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

DECEMBER WEDNESDAY • THURSDAY • FRIDAY • SATURDAY • SUNDAY • MONDAY • TUESDAY 2015 16TH 17TH 18TH 19TH 20TH 21ST 22ND 23RD 24TH 25TH 26TH 27TH 28TH 29TH

girl groups of the nineteen-sixties helped cement themes in American pop that have stuck to this day: glamour, adolescence, scandal, and the tension between capturing old, universal sentiments classical music | art and instituting new ones. Ronnie Spector, of the pivotal group the Ronettes, was, and still is, an easy THE THEATRE | NIGHT LIFE choice for poster girl. At seventy-two, she remains sinuous and spritely; sharpened by adversity, she is DANCE | movies emblematic of those volatile sixties, which look more familiar with each turbulent, new headline. These days, Spector sits between songs, but her exuberant performances are a lesson in pop history. She ABOVE & BEYOND promises the “Best Christmas Party Ever” at City Winery, Dec. 22-23; with standards like “Be My Baby” and FOOD & DRINK classic renditions of “Sleigh Ride” and “Frosty the Snowman,” it’s a hard holiday evening to beat.

Photograph by Ruven Afanador cASical MUSIC

Peter Schickele, the man behind the comic persona of P.D.Q. Bach, is also a talented composer of serious music. forgotten son P.D.Q. Bach plays a fiftieth-anniversary show at Town Hall. the solemn rituals that attend classical music have long made the genre an can be predicted except that the irresistible target for mockery, most of it obvious and crass. From time to time, though, a host will make his traditional knowing insider produces a satire of classical pretensions that approaches the sublime. The entrance swinging from a rope. honor roll of great put-ons includes Anna Russell’s impression of a vocal recitalist in majestic The comic fame of P.D.Q. decline; Gerard Hofnung’s decimations of mid-twentieth-century British concert life; Victor has inevitably overshadowed Borge’s Dada take on the itinerant piano virtuoso; and, of course, Peter Schickele’s anarcho- Schickele’s serious output. His Baroque incarnation of P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742), who is habitually described as the last of Bassoon Concerto appears Johann Sebastian Bach’s twenty-odd children, and also the oddest. P.D.Q. made his public début on “Full Moon in the City,” in 1965, at Town Hall; fifty years on, Schickele, adopting his familiar guise as a professor of a new recording from the musical pathology at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, returns to the scene Oberlin Music label—one that of the original crime. also contains bassoon-and- Every master parodist must have mastery of the art under attack. Schickele brings to bear ensemble works by Augusta consummate skill as a composer and an instantly recognizable musical voice. Much of the Read Thomas, Libby Larsen, pleasure of the P.D.Q. pieces—“Iphigenia in Brooklyn,” “The Stoned Guest,” and “Wachet Arf!” and Russell Platt, a colleague are typical titles—comes from their combination of the risible and the hummable: you’re never here at The New Yorker. Witty, quite sure whether P.D.Q. was an incompetent composer or a visionary one, his malfunctioning- elegant, concise, and afecting, sewing-machine textures interlaced with touches of bluegrass, minimalism, and rock and roll. the concerto shows Schickele At times, the ingenuity of the jokes is breathtaking: in Schickele’s “Quodlibet,” themes from as a latter-day Haydn. He is the the nine Beethoven symphonies are piled on top of one another, all sharing a tonic-dominant one American composer whose progression. Which is not to say that Schickele is ever in danger of being excessively refined. The name makes everyone smile. jokes go low; the puns border on the wretched. Little about the anniversary concert, on Dec. 28, —Alex Ross

14 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN

Opera has provided an excellent rendition of by the outstanding Choir of Trinity Songs,” a work-in-progress that, like Metropolitan Opera Handel’s beloved oratorio, leavening Wall Street and its conductor, Julian the recent “On Behalf of Nature,” Jeremy Sams’s production of Johann the natural heft of its sound with Wachner. (Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. draws its inspiration from the natural Strauss II’s “Die Fledermaus” a modicum of period-performance 212-570-3949. Dec. 23 at 7.) sciences (specifically epigenetics). maximizes the operetta’s Viennese restraint. The British maestro Jane Afterward, the two women will milieu by setting the action on New Glover, in a long-overdue début, New York String Orchestra join forces in an as-yet-unspecified Year’s Eve, 1899. But the forced leads the concerts, which feature A treasured tradition at Carnegie collaboration, which will likely con- fun that marred the production’s the vocal soloists Heidi Stober, Tim Hall, this annual convocation of tain music, singing, and movement. première, in 2013, has given way to Mead, Paul Appleby, and Roderick young virtuosos is conducted by (St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, a lighter, more confident touch from Williams, with the Westminster Jaime Laredo. The guest for the Second Ave. at 10th St. 212-674-8194. Susanna Phillips (a creamy-voiced Symphonic Choir. (David Geffen mostly Mozartean Christmas Eve Dec. 17-19 at 8.) Rosalinde), Paulo Szot (a blustering Hall. 212-875-5656. Dec. 15-17 and program is Emanuel Ax, the solo- Falke), Toby Spence (a likably louche Dec. 19 at 7:30 and Dec. 18 at 11 A.M.) ist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto S.E.M. Ensemble Eisenstein with a lean timbre), and No. 2 in B-Flat Major; the later Petr Kotik’s group, long devoted to Susan Graham (who sports a spiky Choir of Trinity Wall Street: concert features the young violinist the masters of the postwar avant- white wig as the Russian prince “Messiah” Jinjoo Cho in Tchaikovsky’s Violin garde tradition, returns to the Paula Orlofsky, hysterically channeling The librettist of “Messiah,” Charles Concerto, the capstone of a program Cooper Gallery for its annual concert. the glamorous real-life Siberian Jennens, once referred to his re- that begins with music by Barber (the This iteration, which features such baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky). nowned collaboration with Handel Adagio) and Schubert (an arrangement guest artists as the vocalists Kamala The effervescent score sometimes as an “entertainment”; no rendition of the Quartet No. 14, “Death and Sankaram and Jeffrey Gavett, offers goes flat in James Levine’s hands, in New York comes closer to that the Maiden”). (212-247-7800. Dec. music by Xenakis (“Kassandra”), but Betsy Wolfe and Christopher spirit than this one, which, with 24 at 7 and Dec. 28 at 8.) Alvin Lucier (the U.S. première of Fitzgerald, in the speaking roles the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, 3 “Orpheus Variations”), Lisa Hirsch, of Ida and Frosch, bring plenty of under the baton of Julian Wachner, and other moderns, as well as a dizzy, contagious energy to the show. conveys an unalloyed and vibrantly Recitals surprise: the Serenata in C by the (Dec. 18 and Dec. 23 at 8 and Dec. contemporary sense of joy. (Alice Evgeny Kissin: “Jewish Music seventeenth-century Czech Moravian 28 at 7:30.) • Also playing: For this Tully Hall. lincolncenter.org. Dec. and Poetry” composer Pavel Jan Vejvanovský. (521 year’s family-friendly holiday show, 17 at 7:30. Note: Wachner also leads Bringing technically masterful and W. 21st St. brownpapertickets.com. the Met presents its trimmed-down, performances at Trinity Church on keenly personal interpretations to Dec. 19 at 8.) English-language version of Rossini’s Dec. 16 and Dec. 26.) the stage of Carnegie Hall is nothing bel-canto sparkler “The Barber of new for this pianist, whose enigmatic Peoples’ Symphony Concerts: Seville.” Clocking in at two hours, American Symphony approach to a carefully considered The Knights and Lise de la the show puts young faces in starring Orchestra: “Russia’s Jewish repertoire continues to place him Salle roles, including Isabel Leonard as Composers” among the great living artists. In this The febrile French pianist, a young Rosina and Elliot Madore as Figaro, Leon Botstein’s latest program with concert, he opens up his somewhat player who rocketed to attention almost with David Portillo and Taylor Stay- his intrepid ensemble points the closed public persona to interrogate a decade ago, comes to Town Hall to ton sharing the part of Almaviva. spotlight on several lesser-known some musical aspects of his own play with members of the dynamic Antony Walker conducts Bartlett composers from late-nineteenth- and heritage, performing three rarely Brooklyn chamber orchestra. The Sher’s vibrant production; Ginger early-twentieth-century Russia, each heard twentieth-century works on program includes pieces by Martinů, Costa-Jackson and David Pershall of whom put a different emphasis Jewish themes—sonatas by Ernest Takemitsu, Judd Greenstein (“Be step in for Leonard and Madore, on their ethnic identity. Among the Bloch and Alexander Veprik, and There”), Mozart (the Piano Quartet respectively, on Dec. 29. (Dec. 16 New York and U.S. premières are the “Suite Dansée” of Alexander in G Minor), and Ravel (the Piano and Dec. 21 at 7:30, Dec. 19 at 8, works by Alexander Krein, Mikhail Krein—between which the pianist Trio in A Minor). (123 W. 43rd St. Dec. 24 and Dec. 29 at 7, and Dec. Gnesin, and Stravinsky’s competitor will read selections by the Yid- Dec. 20 at 2.) 26 at 1.) • Michael Mayer’s exuber- Maximilian Steinberg (the Symphony dish poet Yitzhak Leybush Peretz. ant but effective Las Vegas-themed No. 1 in D Major), along with the (carnegiehall.org. Dec. 16 at 8.) Baryshnikov Arts Center: production of “Rigoletto” turns Cello Concerto No. 2 by the Russian “Celebrating Misia Sert” Verdi’s drama of scheming Italian Liszt, Anton Rubinstein (with the Danish Piano Trio Misia!—pianist, patron, salon courtiers into a carnival of American soloist István Várdai). (Carnegie The exciting new trio, which has beauty, and friend and instigator excess. Roberto Abbado conducts Hall. 212-247-7800. Dec. 17 at 8.) just released a recording of ne- of genius on the Franco-Russian the final performance of the season, glected works by Danish Romantic spectrum, from Diaghilev and Proust pacing a cast led by Nadine Sierra, Oratorio Society of New York / composers, makes its U.S. début to Chanel and Toulouse-Lautrec. Jean-François Borras, and Željko Musica Sacra: “Messiah” at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, One event could hardly contain her Lučić (in the title role). (Dec. 17 at Kent Tritle, New York’s choral magus, offering Mendelssohn’s surging influence, but the baritone Michael 7:30.) • Paul Curran’s bare production conducts both of these longstanding Trio No. 1 in D Minor along with Kelly and the pianists David Fung of “La Donna del Lago” is an odd ensembles. The first, an excellent the dulcet Trio in F Major by the and Roman Rabinovich will nobly fit for Rossini’s pastoral-tinged score, avocational group, will offer a nineteenth-century master Niels try, performing works by Satie and but it’s an effective showcase for the heartily affirmative performance of Gade; the American première Ravel (“Histories Naturelles” and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, Handel’s monument, in Mozart’s of “Abgesänge” (“Swan Songs”), “La Valse”). The concert will also who, with her compact voice and fascinating arrangement; the second, by one of Denmark’s preëminent allow the audience to view a Coc- sprightly technique in coloratura a smaller, highly professional chorus, composers, Bent Sørensen; and a teau drawing of Diaghilev and set passages, more or less owns the Ros- will likely give a leaner and more world-première work by Geoffrey and costume designs by Benois and sini-heroine repertoire. She’s in good elegant rendition of the standard Gordon. (212-247-7800. Dec. 17 at 8.) Bakst, from Mikhail Baryshnikov’s company with her fellow bel-canto version. The vocal soloists include personal collection. (450 W. 37th St. specialists Lawrence Brownlee, John the winning bass Matt Boehler, who Meredith Monk and Anne 866-811-4111. Dec. 16-17 at 7:30.) Osborn, Daniela Barcellona, and the sings on both occasions. (Carnegie Waldman conductor Michele Mariotti. (Dec. 19 Hall. 212-247-7800. Dec. 21 at 8 and Both Monk, the composer-performer, Bargemusic at 1, Dec. 22 at 7:30, and Dec. 26 at Dec. 22 at 7:30.) and Waldman, the poet, are devoted One of the floating chamber-music 8. These are the final performances experimentalists who have helped to series’ fondest traditions is enacted of the season.) (Metropolitan Opera “The Little Match Girl define the city’s downtown scene every year on Christmas Eve by House. 212-362-6000.) Passion” since the nineteen-sixties. They the expert and very musical pianist 3 David Lang’s Pulitzer Prize-winning will collaborate for the first time Steven Beck, who performs, on the masterpiece for chorus and percus- at Danspace Project this weekend. house Steinway, Bach’s Goldberg Orchestras and Choruses sion—a vivid, unexpected, and deeply The evening opens with Waldman, Variations. Chocolate and apple New York Philharmonic: moving treatment of the Hans Chris- performing a reading of her new cider are complimentary. (Fulton “Messiah” tian Andersen children’s story—has “Entanglement Variations”; then Ferry Landing, Brooklyn. Dec. 24 at For many years, the orchestra, primar- a holiday home at the Metropolitan Monk and her ensemble will present 7:30. For tickets and full schedule, ily associated with Romantic repertory, Museum. This year, it is performed excerpts from the song cycle “Cellular see bargemusic.org.)

16 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

ART

across the top). MOMA has lasting cause to rue the tardiness with which, at the opportune time, it picked up on Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists. Eurocentrism died hard on West Fifty-third Street. Pollock was eighteen when he arrived in New York from California, in 1930, and began to imbibe the influences of Thomas Hart Benton, who was his teacher at the Art Students League, and the Mexican muralists. The early works in the show are a thrill ride of quick studies, as Pollock devours those models and then suggestions from Picasso, Miró, and

Pollock’s early work is a thrill ride of quick studies. “Stenographic Figure” (c. 1942) eyes Picasso, Miró, and André Masson. André Masson—paying of in lyrically inventive engravings, from the early forties, that The Dripping Point are a revelation here. Pollock was always Pollock, though MOMA charts the evolution—and the liberating breakthrough—of Jackson Pollock. he was long in agonizing doubt, notably about his the museum of modern art is showing nearly all of what it owns by Jackson Pollock— ability to draw. Dripping some sixty works, most of them rarely seen prints and drawings, that date from 1934 to brought a rush of relief, as 1954—in its second-floor graphics galleries. Why? That is, besides: Why not? It’s a boon. he found a steadying and Pollock’s lifelong intensity and, at his peak, sublimity do not pale. The trajectory of his too brief dispassionate, heaven-sent career retains a drama, as evergreen as a folktale, of volcanic ambition and personal torment collaborator: gravity. Drawing attaining a lift-of, with the drip technique, that knitted a man’s chaotic personality and, with in the air above the canvas breathtaking eiciency, revolutionized not only painting but the general course of art ever after. freed him from, among other (It can be argued, and has been, that the matter-of-factness of Pollock’s flung paint germinated things, himself. “Number minimalism.) There’s even, for anyone susceptible to it, a lingering nationalist sweetness: 31” is the feat of a fantastic Pollock’s peak period as the V-E Day of American art. talent no longer striving for MOMA may be dangling bait to philanthropic collectors, in the form of the lacunae in its expression but set to work holdings. True, no other museum has more Pollocks. And none other boasts perhaps his single and monitored. He watched most satisfying work, the songful “One: Number 31, 1950,” more than seventeen feet wide: what it did. We join him in interwoven high-speed skeins in black, white, dove-gray, teal, and fawn-brown oil and enamel watching. Pollock redefined bang on the surface while hinting at cosmic distances. (The Metropolitan’s “Autumn Rhythm” painting to make it accept and, at the National Gallery, in Washington, “Lavender Mist,” both also from 1950, are its the gifts that he had been chief rivals.) MOMA also has the transitional touchstone “The She Wolf ” (1943)—a picture desperate to give. Any time is ferociously conflicted between Jungian voodoo and exasperated originality—and a rough gem the right one to be reminded from the artist’s blocked, sad last years, “White Light” (1954). But the museum’s only other big of that.

drip painting is the audacious but awkward early “Number 1A, 1948” (the one with handprints —Peter Schjeldahl 1980 BAREISS FUND, MR. AND MRS. WALTER NEW YORK. THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, RIGHTS SOCIETY NEW YORK (ARS), / ARTISTS FOUNDATION POLLOCK-KRASNER © 2015

18 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

Museums and Libraries seriously and painted otherwise. agreed to be photographed, and, while MOMA PS1 This essential show opens with a some look uneasy, others confront the Museums Short List “Greater New York” wonderful two-part mural from 1971, camera with a calm assurance. Many Metropolitan Museum This transgenerational group exhibi- festooned with ribbons and fabric of the landscapes present the park “Kongo: Power and Majesty.” tion is a deeply thoughtful if muted scraps, a cheeky update of Seurat’s as an oasis of isolation and comfort, Through Jan. 3. affair, with one selfie-baiting excep- famous “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” but it’s also a site of pursuit, as seen Museum of Modern Art tion: an installation of twenty- four (a child by the lake is now framed in a number of panoramic sequences “Picasso Sculpture.” Through figurative sculptures on the second by a shock of blue hair). Upstairs of men following paths deep into the Feb. 7. floor. They range from John Ahearn’s are earlier forays into burlesque and woods. Through Dec. 23. (Kasher, Guggenheim Museum loving, life-size rendition, in painted bad taste, including modifications of 515 W. 26th St. 212-966-3978.) “Alberto Burri: The Trauma of cast fibreglass, of a South Bronx cheesy thrift-store paintings: curva- Painting.” Through Jan. 6. mother and daughter, made in 1987, to ceous nudes and lakeside villages Cary Smith The Whitney Museum a statue encrusted in beads—a giddy beset by aliens and flying-saucer Smith, who paints hard-edged ab- “Frank Stella: A Retrospective.” hybrid of Umberto Boccioni and invasions. The most surprising works stractions, is a virtuoso of balance in Through Feb. 7. Bootsy Collins—completed last year here are flat assemblages depicting disproportion. Six of the dozen new Brooklyn Museum by the Mexican-born, Brooklyn-based furniture. Don’t be misled by their works here feature intersecting diag- “Agitprop!” Through Aug. 7. Raúl de Nieves. Standing sentinel is melancholic appearance—they’re a onal lines of two distinct thicknesses Dia:Chelsea “Kali Bobbit,” a slapstick warrior-god- perverse breed of zombie, created and suggest mosaics. Elsewhere, “Robert Ryman.” Through dess in the form of a mannequin with elements salvaged from actual Smith daubs swatches of color against June 18. wearing thigh-high stockings and chests of drawers. Through Dec. 23. taxicab yellow and Tiffany blue, and Museum of the City of New a belt full of knives, made in 1994 (Luxembourg & Dayan, 64 E. 77th tessellates white ovoids in a field of York by the feminist pioneer Mary Beth St. 212-452-4646.) red and black. Most of the paintings “Jacob Riis: Revealing New Edelson. Elsewhere, L.G.B.T. issues are square—think Malevich, think York’s Other Half.” Through March 20. are prominent, seen through scrims Takesada Matsutani Instagram—and Smith’s deployment of both nostalgia (Alvin Baltrop’s The Japanese artist was part of the of asymmetric components in an Studio Museum in Harlem candid photographs of gay men postwar Gutai movement, which equilateral frame has, in the best “A Constellation.” Through March 6. cruising on the West Side piers in made a virtue of freedom and cases here, the sprightly invention of the post-Stonewall seventies) and rage performance, but the earliest works a Coltrane cadenza. Through Jan. 9. galleries Short List (the AIDS activism of the collective here were created in the late sixties, (Fredericks & Freiser, 536 W. 24th Uptown Fierce Pussy). Charles Atlas trains after Matsutani had moved to Paris. St. 212-633-6555.) Julie Ault Galerie Buchholz his video camera on the drag legend Paintings from his early days in 17 E. 82nd St. 646-964-4276. Lady Bunny as she champions the France suggest the geometries of Bjorn Sterri Through Jan. 16. disenfranchised in an impassioned Ellsworth Kelly or Kenneth Noland. From Julia Margaret Cameron to Troy Brauntuch rant that could give Bernie Sanders a Their semicircles of red and triangles Sally Mann, photographers have long Petzel run for his money. Through March 7. of green look pretty decorative now, found their muses close to home, in 35 E. 67th St. 212-680-9467. but sculptures from the same period, their own families. Sterri taps into Through Jan. 9. American Folk Art Museum especially those made by coating that tradition in a series of tender, Jane Freilicher “Art Brut in America: The wooden dowels with vinyl adhesive, probing images of his wife and two De Nagy Incursion of Jean Dubuffet” have an enduring surreal charm. In sons, made during the past fifteen years. 724 Fifth Ave., at 57th St. “Ah Jean Dubuffet / when you think of two new wall-spanning works, both Gazing at the camera as if looking 212-262-5050. him / doing his military service in the black, graphite or ink runs off the into a mirror, they look alternately Through Jan. 23. Eiffel Tower / as a meteorologist / in paper and onto the floor, residue of a contented, concerned, amused, and Chelsea 1922 / you know how wonderful the performative painting technique that even blissful. Sterri casts himself as Josephine Halvorson / Leslie 20th Century / can be.” That’s how would make the old guard of Gutai a comically stern dad, whether he’s Hewitt /Jennie C. Jones Frank O’Hara began his poem “Naph- proud. Through Dec. 23. (Hauser & seen stepping into the frame with Sikkema Jenkins tha.” The lines, befitting the offbeat Wirth, 32 E. 69th St. 212-794-4970.) the others or taking it over entirely 530 W. 22nd St. 212-929-2262. Through Jan. 23. charisma of the great French artist, for an occasional self-portrait, one of come to mind in this fascinating show Gina Osterloh which finds him naked in a shallow Ilya & Emilia Kabakov of outsider art from a collection with The promising work of this concep- grave, as if to suggest that, without Pace 510 W. 25th St. 212-255-4044. which Dubuffet (1901-85) sought to tual artist from Los Angeles falls his loved ones around him, life isn’t Through Jan. 23. beget a climate change in the artistic somewhere between drawing and worth living. Through Jan. 9. (Wester, cultures of Europe and the United photography—and between being 526 W. 26th St. 212-255-5560.) Deborah Kass Kasmin States, where the collection resided, and nothingness. First, she sketches 515 W. 27th St. 212-563-4474. in an East Hampton villa, from 1951 loose grids on large sheets of paper, Martha Wilson Through Jan. 23. to 1962. Starting in 1945, he acquired or spray-paints paper with rows of Wilson, the artist who founded the Yoko Ono works by untutored prisoners, chil- soft-focus black dots, which she cuts crucial avant-garde space Franklin Rosen dren, people hospitalized for mental into silhouettes of people huddled Furnace, doubles down on Duchamp 525 W. 24th St. 212-627-6000. illnesses, and eccentric loners, mostly in groups. Then she photographs in her lenticular self-portrait, “Mona / Galerie Lelong French, Swiss, or German, to make the tableaux—scenes of flatness that Marcel/Marge,” in which La Gioconda 528 W. 26th St. 212-315-0470. a point: “civilized” art was false to sneak a curious volume into the sports Marge Simpson’s blue beehive Both through Jan. 23. human nature and redeemable only pictures. Everything in Osterloh’s in addition to the famous drawn-on Downtown by recourse to primal authenticities. world seems to be on the verge of moustache. Wilson’s images tend to Guo Fengyi Dubu et’s claim to have tapped a dissolving—even the artist herself, in be one-liners; in the diptych “Bear Edlin universal creative wellspring can a video in which she tries to merge In Mind / Bare in Hind,” she dons a 212 Bowery, at Spring St. seem murky. For one thing, there’s with her own shadow. Through Dec. panda mask in one frame and moons 212-206-9723. Through Jan. 31. an inevitable period bias in any 19. (Higher Pictures, 980 Madison the camera in the next. But such puns collection. (Ghosts of Joan Miró Ave., at 76th St. 212-249-6100.) are leavened by politics; in the past, Robert Smithson and Paul Klee haunt this one.) For Wilson has satirized Nancy Reagan Cohan 3 291 Grand St. 212-714-9500. another, naïveté is never absolute. and Barbara Bush. Here, she styles Through Jan. 10. Through Jan. 10. Galleries—Chelsea herself as Michelle Obama, with Thomas Roma half of her face and body painted “To Whom It May Concern: 3 Photographs from Beginning in 2008, Roma began black. The deliberately partial use of the Archives of Haaretz Galleries—Uptown taking a series of ambiguous, charged the loathsome minstrel-show trope Newspaper.” Enrico Baj portraits and landscapes in the Vale makes the stakes of the picture clear: Feldman The Milanese firebrand, whose Arte of Cashmere, a section of Prospect in a country as riven as ours, such a 31 Mercer St. 212-226-3232. Nucleare movement of the fifties Park frequented by men cruising parody is defeated before it’s begun. Through Jan. 30. aimed kitsch and satire at a world for sex, seventy-five of which are on Through Dec. 22. (P.P.O.W., 535 shadowed by atomic weapons, thought view here. The men in the portraits W. 22nd St. 212-647-1044.)

20 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

the THEATRE

Also Notable Allegiance Longacre The Color Purple Jacobs Dada Woof Papa Hot Mitzi E. Newhouse Dames at Sea Helen Hayes Gigantic Acorn. Through Dec. 20. The Gin Game Golden Hamilton Richard Rodgers Hir Peter Jay Sharp The Humans Laura Pels The Illusionists—Live on Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the songs for “These Paper Bullets!,” a new play with music at the Atlantic Broadway Theatre Company, which resets “Much Ado About Nothing” in sixties London, featuring a “fab four” called the Quartos. Neil Simon Incident at Vichy Pershing Square Signature Center. Through Dec. 20. Openings and Previews Mother Courage and Her Now Playing Invisible Thread Annie Children A Child’s Christmas in Wales Second Stage. Through Dec. 27. A holiday engagement of the pe- Tonya Pinkins plays the indefatigable The lovely rolling rhythms of Dylan King Charles III rennially sunny musical. Martin war profiteer in Brian Kulick’s pro- Thomas’s remembrances of childhood Music Box Charnin, who wrote the lyrics, directs duction of the Brecht play, featuring yuletides in Swansea—originally a Lazarus for the nineteenth time. Dec. 16-20. music by Duncan Sheik. In previews. radio broadcast, and first recorded New York Theatre Workshop. (Kings Theatre, 1027 Flatbush Ave., (Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th by the poet in 1952—emerge only (Reviewed in this issue.) Brooklyn. 718-856-5464.) St. 866-811-4111.) fitfully in the Irish Rep’s adaptation, Marjorie Prime by Charlotte Moore, who also directs. Playwrights Horizons The Changeling Noises Off Dividing the monologue up among the Misery Red Bull Theatre stages Thomas The Roundabout revives Michael five-actor ensemble feels forced and Broadhurst Middleton and William Rowley’s Frayn’s backstage farce from 1982, choppy. Though beautifully sung, the MotherStruck! Jacobean tragedy, directed by Jesse with a cast including Andrea Martin, frequent segues into traditional and Lynn Redgrave Theatre Berger and featuring Manoel Tracee Chimo, Campbell Scott, Jeremy Welsh Christmas songs also lessen New York Animals Felciano, Sara Topham, and Christian Shamos, and Megan Hilty. Jeremy the impact of the flowing word. New Ohio. Through Dec. 20. Coulson. Previews begin Dec. 26. Herrin directs. Previews begin Dec. And the grown-up actors’ occasional On Your Feet! (Lucille Lortel, 121 Christopher 17. (American Airlines Theatre, 227 adopting of child-like timbres doesn’t Marquis St. 212-352-3101.) W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300.) help, either. Even the stalwart senior Once Upon a Mattress cast member John Cullum struggles, Abrons Arts Center Fiddler on the Roof Our Mother’s Brief Affair giving hesitant readings with book Pike St. Danny Burstein plays Tevye, the Lynne Meadow directs Richard Green- in hand. (DR2, at 103 E. 15th St. Abrons Arts Center. shtetl patriarch, in Bartlett Sher’s berg’s play for Manhattan Theatre 212-727-2737.) Through Dec. 19. revival of the 1964 musical, based Club, starring Linda Lavin as an ailing China Doll Spring Awakening on the stories of Sholem Aleichem. mother who reveals a shocking secret Brooks Atkinson In previews. Opens Dec. 20. to her children. Previews begin Dec. This ignoble effort by the storied (Broadway Theatre, Broadway at 28. (Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th playwright David Mamet tells a tale of Steve 53rd St. 212-239-6200.) St. 212-239-6200.) avarice and spiritual poverty. Mickey Pershing Square Signature Center Ross (Al Pacino) is a businessman How Alfo Learned to Love Sancho: An Act of who spends a great deal of time in Sylvia In Vincent Amelio’s play, directed Remembrance the course of the two-hour piece on Cort by Daisy Walker, a man will lose At the Next Wave Festival, the Royal the phone, dealing with his private Thérèse Raquin his family’s Italian bakery to his Shakespeare Company actor Paterson plane, taxes, and other matters. He Studio 54 married sister unless he finds true Joseph portrays Charles Ignatius Sancho, has an assistant, Carson (Christopher A View from the Bridge love. Previews begin Dec. 16. Opens the first African-British man to cast Denham, a lovely player), who gets Lyceum Dec. 20. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. a vote. Dec. 16-20. (BAM Fisher, 321 Ross’s fellow crooks on the line 212-279-4200.) Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100.) for him, but Carson wants power,

22 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW RAE too. As in many of Mamet’s better new Russia”). The story ends with a horror is real. (Flea, 41 White St. Take Care plays, a younger man aspires to the masquerade ball, but the whole show 212-352-3101. Through Dec. 20.) If the audience-participation spectrum moral rot of his mentor while the glows with the joy and energy of a ranges from light crowd work to hostage older resents getting old at all—and great party. In Yiddish, with English School of Rock situation, this “scored participatory rages against it. Pacino’s performance and Russian supertitles. (Museum Andrew Lloyd Webber is a showman performance” falls decidedly on the is all ego and hyperbole; it’s more of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Pl. who knows how to send his audiences abduction end. (At a minimum, you important for him to be seen than 646-437-4200.) home happy (or, in the case of “Cats,” will be told to wear a plastic poncho, to act, and when he does it’s so bad puzzled into submission), and his and you will need it.) Conceived by you wish he’d stop. (Schoenfeld, 236 Neighborhood 3: Requisition newest musical goes straight for the Niegel Smith and Todd Shalom in W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.) of Doom pleasure center. Adapted from Richard collaboration with the Bats, the Flea’s Teen-agers in an ominous suburban Linklater’s 2003 film, which featured young resident acting troupe, the The Golden Bride subdivision have become obsessed a devil-eyed Jack Black, it boasts an show is a grab-bag of vignettes, songs, Though the script and score are with a violent video game, and the equally exuberant performance by open-mike confessionals, audience in- painstaking recreations of a once-pop- players and their parents discover Alex Brightman, who has all of Black’s structions, and other assorted mayhem, ular Yiddish musical comedy, last too slowly that the game has seeped roly-poly mania and then some. He centered on the theme of hurricanes staged in New York City in 1948, into reality. Jennifer Haley’s genu- plays Dewey Finn, a deadbeat rocker and drawing heavily on worry and this muscular production is no inely frightening script lives in the who poses as a substitute teacher at frustration over climate change, racial museum piece: Bryna Wasserman same neighborhood as David Lynch, Horace Green, a preppy elementary injustice, and their intersection. The and Motl Didner direct a buoyant, David Cronenberg, and George school where the students wear maroon tone is ever-shifting—at first cheerfully full-voiced cast of twenty, and Zalmen Saunders, without feeling derivative; uniforms and the principal (Sierra rambunctious, then aggressive, sardonic, Mlotek’s fourteen-piece orchestra she’s toying with dark ideas about Boggess) is protocol incarnate. (It goofy, righteous, and despairing—and shifts effortlessly between Old World adolescent rage, virtual realities, would be nice if the female characters the show feels like a cross between melancholia and New World swing. and American conformity, which weren’t all killjoys.) Like a latter-day a Nickelodeon game show and an (Izzy Fields deserves special notice only grow more disquieting as the Harold Hill, Dewey transforms his overearnest undergraduate discussion for a delectable array of period cos- play lingers in the mind. (It’s hard classroom into a heavy-metal band—and group. (Flea, 41 White St. 212-352-3101.) tumes.) The plot is fluff—a woman not to make the grim connection, Lloyd Webber’s tunes, with lyrics by raised in a Russian shtetl inherits a intentional or not, between the play’s Glenn Slater, really do rock. But the A Wilder Christmas fortune, moves to America, and offers young killers and the real world’s chief triumph of Laurence Connor’s The Peccadillo Theatre Company marriage to any suitor who can find Internet-indoctrinated teen-age production is the child actors, who stages a pair of holiday-themed one-act her mother—but even at its silliest mass murderers.) Joel Schumacher, give winning, distinctive performances plays by Thornton Wilder, “The Long it’s an often touching time capsule best known for helming Hollywood while playing their own instruments, Christmas Dinner” and “Pullman Car of the hopes and fantasies of Jewish blockbusters, directs with black as Lloyd Webber assures us in a pre- Hiawatha,” under the direction of Dan immigrants circa 1923 (complete with humor and a bare-bones aesthetic. show announcement. (Winter Garden, Wackerman. (Theatre at St. Clement’s, an unexpected anthem extolling “the The performances vary, but the Broadway at 50th St. 212-239-6200.) 423 W. 46th St. 866-811-4111.)

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 23 NIGHT FE

Rock and Pop Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to conirm engagements.

Carnage With just a handful of releases to his name, this electronic producer has demonstrated an expertise in revved-up, sugar-rush club music that sets some of the wildest voices rapping, from the lead-tongued trio Migos, on “Bricks,” to the infantile wails of iLoveMakonnen, on “I Like Tuh.” It’s the sonic equivalent of a cocktail so sweet it masks the bite: Carnage likes things loud and bright, and he’s a regular at face-melting festivals like Electronic Daisy Carnival and Ultra. But don’t expect a stream of trap, the of-the-moment hip-hop strain, when he takes the reins at Webster Hall’s grand ballroom: he’s known to slip into tears of deep house and other eccentric club styles for as long as patrons can keep up. (125 E. 11th St. 212-353-1600. Dec. 19.)

Dan Deacon Baltimore’s prince of kaleidoscopic loft-party noise- pop is still carrying the art-rock torch, even as the basement venues he once headlined are rapidly being The Pittsburgh native Mac Miller has taken many forms in his short rap career: frat hero, MTV bachelor, replaced by luxury condos and startups. Deacon tortured recluse, savvy eccentric. He’ll display all of these shades and more at Terminal 5, on Dec. 16. has stayed relevant, in part by setting his sights a little higher than Charm City; for the past month, can make dance floors feel: his own work is all Holland and the pianist Barron, a formidable figure he’s been on the road, opening for Miley Cyrus deep-end thump and cerulean melodies, and his since his emergence, in the sixties, and a prime and the Flaming Lips, easily his biggest tour to d.j. sets with Klaus, Airhead, and others bridge example of early promise turned golden through date. This evening, he settles in for his own show dance music’s more frowzy corners with urgent experience. He leads a quintet anchored by the at this North Brooklyn bowling alley, rounding out R. & B. The group will play from open to close outstanding rhythm team of Kiyoshi Kitagawa, the year with the sort of mutant dance party for at this Williamsburg complex. (Output, 74 Wythe on bass, and Jonathan Blake, on drums. (Village which he’s known. (Brooklyn Bowl, 61 Wythe Ave., Ave, Brooklyn. outputclub.com. Dec. 19.) Vanguard, 178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. 212- Williamsburg. 718-963-3369. Dec. 29.) 255-4037. Dec. 22-27.) The Sway Machinery Mac Miller Jeremiah Lockwood, the founder and driving force Cameron Brown Appearing relatable, even familial, is a primary of this upbeat sextet, grew up with two disparate A musician’s musician par excellence, the bassist task for new artists trying to attract fans, maybe musical mentors. As a boy, Lockwood sang in Brown has expertly navigated the waters of jazz, more so now than in any previous era. Pittsburgh’s the choir of his grandfather, Jacob Konigsberg, from its bebop to its avant-garde shores, for the Miller was barely eighteen when he released the a renowned cantor who led the High Holidays past five decades. He celebrates his seventieth breakout tracks “Senior Skip Day” and “Kool- services at the Loop Synagogue, in Chicago, for birthday in the company of such illustrious com- Aid and Frozen Pizza,” mirroring the sentiments several decades. When he was fourteen, Lockwood patriots as Sheila Jordan, Jane Ira Bloom, and of high-schoolers nationwide who streamed and began a lifelong apprenticeship with the legendary Don Byron. (Cornelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia shared him into sudden fame. Half a decade later, Piedmont blues master guitarist Carolina Slim, St. 212-989-9319. Dec. 17-19.) he’s aging toward the avuncular: twenty-three and which mainly consisted of busking alongside the scruffier in frame, he raps astutely about employing impeccably dressed Slim in Manhattan subway Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra: Big Band his friends and saving funds for his progeny on stations. These influences, as well as a month-long Holidays this summer’s “100 Grandkids.” His Terminal 5 sojourn to Mali a few years back, helped to shape Although the orchestra’s new “Big Band Holidays” billing suggests a growing, and fitting, sense of Lockwood’s sound, which often features Aramaic album features some heavy-hitting vocalists, in- responsibility: Miller invited greener, underrated lyrics, Afro-beat-tinged horn lines, and a blues cluding Cécile McLorin Salvant, the ensemble’s names like EarthGang and Michael Christmas patina. The group’s affecting new EP, “You Will seasonal concert this year welcomes the worthy to open the evening, an apt use of his glow. (610 Love No One but Me,” strays a bit from its previous up-and-coming singers Denzal Sinclaire and Au- W. 56th St. 212-582-6600. Dec. 16.) output, with more pop-oriented songs delivered drey Shakir. Expect fervent swing and good spirits in English, but the sound remains defined by the aplenty. (Rose Theatre, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 1-800-Dinosaur potent grooves of the drummer John Bollinger. Broadway at 60th St. 212-721-6500. Dec. 17-19.) “And in the naked light I saw / ten thousand people, (The Knitting Factory, 361 Metropolitan Ave., maybe more,” James Blake sang, this October, on Brooklyn. 347-529-6696. Dec. 16.) Steve Nelson Trio London’s BBC 1, where he enjoys a residency as a 3 Nelson, standing on the shoulders of such modern member of this Brixton music collective. “People masters as Gary Burton and Bobby Hutcherson, has talking without speaking / people hearing without Jazz and Standards reasserted the role of the vibraphone in jazz through listening.” Blake’s cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s Kenny Barron rousing work with Dave Holland and others. His “The Sound of Silence,” dedicated to a friend who “The Art of Conversation,” one of last year’s best compact trio features the pianist Rick Germanson died on New Year’s Eve, encapsulates how frigid jazz recordings, spotlighted the inspired partnership and the veteran bassist Calvin Hill. (Mezzrow, 163 the electronic producer and singer-songwriter between two eminent jazz figures, the bassist Dave W. 10th St. mezzrow.com. Dec. 25-26.)

24 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY STANLEY CHOW Mark Morris Dance Group / Center season come opportunities match groupings of three or four each “The Hard Nut” (on Dec. 17, 19, 22, and 26) to catch day, juxtaposes the traditional with In 1991, Mark Morris created a “Nut- up with this year’s new works: Ron- the contemporary, the shamanistic cracker” that was as brash and American ald K. Brown’s “Open Door,” Kyle with the up-to-date. “I Go,” a spare as he could make it. The production, Abraham’s “Untitled America: First trio by the troupe Goblin Party, is whose designs are inspired by the Movement,” and “Awakening,” the among the more modern-looking comics of Charles Burns, opens at a first piece that Robert Battle has selections, but it is a poetically DANCE suburban mid-century Christmas party. choreographed for the troupe since melancholic meditation on the most A Yule log crackles on the TV set, the becoming its artistic director, in time-worn of subjects: death. (92nd guests’ dances are pure “Soul Train,” 2011. In several programs devoted to Street Y, Lexington Ave. at 92nd St. and everybody drinks way too much the choreography of the company’s 212-415-5500. Dec. 18-20.) New York City Ballet / “The punch. (There’s a bit of hanky-panky founder (Dec. 16, 19, and 20), the Nutcracker” as well.) Then, after a battle between Brawner Brothers band brings the American Dance Machine for Once again, Marie will save the an army of G.I. Joes and mechanized gutbucket sounds of “Blues Suite” the 21st Century day with her little white slipper, rats, things get weird. Morris draws on to vibrant life. (131 W. 55th St. 212- When musicals are revived on the tree will grow through the roof, the original Hoffman version of the 581-1212. Dec. 16-20, Dec. 22-24, Dec. Broadway, the original choreography and the wooden nutcracker will “Nutcracker” story, which is darker, and 26-27, and Dec. 29. Through Jan. 3.) is often dumped. People think of magically transform into a valiant, stranger, than the one we’re used to. these dances as expendable, even albeit miniature, prince. Together, But, worry not, all’s well in the end. Noche Flamenca / though they’re often the best the two will travel to the land of The production returns to BAM, after “Antigona” part of the show. Since 2012, this sweets, where they will be regaled an absence of several years, with a cast Soledad Barrio, the star of this New initiative has worked to create a with an assortment of dances, under that features many veterans, including York-based flamenco troupe, takes “living archive” of Broadway dance the benevolent eye of the Sugarplum Morris himself, as Dr. Stahlbaum; the role of Sophocles’ Antigone, in an numbers, bringing in former cast Fairy. The George Balanchine produc- John Heginbotham, as his sweet and adaptation by her husband, Martín members (including Robert LaFosse tion, which made this ballet popular rather befuddled consort; and Kraig Santangelo, which turns the Greek and Gemze de Lappe) to teach the in the U.S. more than sixty years Patterson, as the sassy French maid. drama into a kind of flamenco opera. steps and top-notch dancers from ago, offers a well-calibrated mix of (BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, (West Park Presbyterian Church, all over town to perform them. This charm, grandeur, and real, undiluted 30 Lafayette Ave., Brooklyn. 718-636- 165 W. 86th St. 212-868-4444. Dec. year’s lineup includes selections from dancing. It’s also a great place to 4100. Dec. 16-20.) 16-19, Dec. 21-23, Dec. 26, and Dec. “Singin’ in the Rain” and “West see promising young dancers cut 28-29. Through Jan. 23.) Side Story,” as well as the dream their teeth on their first big roles. Alvin Ailey American ballet from “Oklahoma!” (Joyce (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. Dance Theatre “Dancing Korea” Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th 212-496-0600. Dec. 16-24 and Dec. Amid the rotating repertory of the This mini-festival of Korean dance, St. 212-242-0800. Dec. 21-24, Dec. 26-29. Through Jan. 3.) third and fourth weeks of the City featuring eight companies in mix-and- 26-27, and Dec. 29. Through Jan. 3.)

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 25 MOVIES

Madison (Ann Sheridan), escapes and flees to a distant outpost, where she resumes her song-and-dance career under the florid name of Vermillion O’Toole. Her theatre, owned by the brassy yet sentimental Rose (Lee Patrick), becomes the target of local moralists, led by the starchy reformer Edna Stofer (Phyllis Stanley), who is about to become stepmother to a trio of boys with plans of their own. Sirk’s direction of the boys is among his loopiest comic inventions, but he uses the full Technicolor palette to display Vermillion and Rose in deep shadow and lurid streaks, conjuring vast depths of feeling and funds of wisdom arising from tawdry circumstances.

In the 1953 melodrama “All I Desire,” Barbara Stanwyck plays an actress who returns to her home town. Sirk is famous for his melodramas, starting with his 1954 version of “Magnificent Step Right Up Obsession” (Dec. 24-25), which launched Rock Hudson The rowdy American acting tradition, as seen by Douglas Sirk. into stardom. “All I Desire” (Dec. 31), starring Barbara a decade into his hollywood career, the German émigré director Douglas Sirk—the Stanwyck, is among his very subject of a rarity-filled retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Dec. 23-Jan. 6—became best. Stanwyck plays Naomi a master of Americana. In 1953, Sirk delivered a trio of historical films that ofer a big-hearted, Murdoch, a vaudevillian who furiously energetic, and sombrely ironic view of his adopted country. All three are about motherless left her husband and young children and surrogate families; their protagonists are itinerant performers who challenge local children in order to pursue moralizers and come of as the young nation’ s hidden source of progressive thought and social her acting career. Summoned cohesion. back to her native Wisconsin In the comedy “Meet Me at the Fair” (Jan. 4), Dan Dailey stars as Doc Tilbee, who travels town by a daughter making her the country in his caravan along with his associate and friend, Enoch Jones (Scatman Crothers, own stage début, Naomi—the in his first major movie role). They hawk Doc’s homemade high-proof tonic with flamboyant object of public hatred and showmanship—Enoch is a gifted comic singer in the style of Fats Waller, and Doc is a raconteur the embodiment of intimate who tells tall tales (shown in antic faux flashbacks). Upon picking up an injured runaway boy, Tad desires—unearths fault lines Bayliss (Chet Allen), Doc and Enoch become targets of the law: the hellish orphanage from which in the community and the Tad fled is the object of political patronage during a local election. family alike. Sirk’s story of The wandering artists meet an ardent young reformer, Zerelda Wing (Diana Lynn), whose the agonizing struggles of a philanthropy has been hijacked by corrupt oicials. Sirk depicts the brazen ploys of the colorful life in art suggests his own rascals with a sardonic glee and looks admiringly at the freewheeling tumult of electoral campaigns. ambivalence about the world Doc turns theatrical performance into a journalistic tool; he’s a defrocked intellectual who keeps his of movies—from which he high culture to himself, only to flash it like a trick card—as did Sirk, a former student of philosophy retired, in 1959, at the height and art history, who lends the tale a deft Shakespearean flourish. of his career.

“Take Me to Town” (Dec. 31), a Western, begins with an act of violent revolt, as a prisoner, Mae —Richard Brody PHOTOFEST

26 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 Now Playing remains is a production of clean and frictionless phanes. Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris) is the modern The Big Short beauty, down to the last, strokable inch of clothing counterpart of her namesake in ancient Athens. Years before the financial crisis of 2008, early and skin. Yet Haynes and his stars, for all their Lee’s heroine is protesting the gang violence of rumblings are detected by Michael Burry (Chris- stylish restraint, know that elegance alone will not modern Chicago and the ubiquity of firearms, tian Bale), whose investment skills are in sharp suffice. Inside the showcase is a storm of feeling. whereas the Greek one sought to end the war contrast to his social unease. Unlike most of his With Sarah Paulson, as Carol’s best friend.—A.L. with Sparta, but their method is the same: a show peers, he spies the cracks in the housing market (11/23/15) (In limited release.) of defiance and denial, gathering the womenfolk and wagers that, before too long, it will all come together and refusing to have sex with the men. tumbling down. Word of his gamble inspires a Celine and Julie Go Boating It’s a spirited conceit, and the cause could scarcely few more players to take the plunge, including Jacques Rivette’s fable-like 1974 comedy refracts be more urgent, yet the resulting film never a miserable hedge-fund manager (Steve Carell), experience through illusion to ponder the very quite lands the punches that you hope for. The a pair of greenhorns from out of town (John Magaro essence of cinematic imagination. Celine (Juliet rhetoric is thunderous enough, and John Cusack and Finn Wittrock), and our sly narrator (Ryan Berto), a cabaret magician and a mythomaniac, holds nothing back in his role as a neighborhood Gosling), who works at Deutsche Bank. These are moves in with Julie (Dominique Labourier), preacher, using the funeral of an innocent young- just some of the unlovely figures who pace back and a lonely librarian studying magic, then edges ster, caught in the crossfire, to inveigh against forth through Adam McKay’s new film, based on into her private life and joins her on a series of the ethnic prejudice and the economic hardship the nonfiction book by Michael Lewis. The movie quasi-psychedelic trips through the city and the that stoked the crisis. But the movie wanders as pops and fizzes with invention, and even takes time mind. An abandoned mansion reveals Julie’s early much as it inflames, and you end up feeling not so out, now and then, to educate—screeching to a halt life in the form of a gothic mystery, and psycho- much persuaded as hectored; as for the dialogue, and summoning a celebrity (Selena Gomez, say, or tropic lozenges insert the pair into a glossy movie rendered largely in verse, it stumbles as often Margot Robbie) to steer us through the economic melodrama (starring Bulle Ogier and Marie-France as it flows. Still, there are joys to be had along verbiage. Everything you always wanted to know Pisier). The loosely guided performances are often the way, not least from Samuel L. Jackson, who about credit default swaps but were afraid to ask: slack, and the thin depiction of daily life lessens assumes the role of the chorus, and who brings it’s all here. So winning are these tactics, and so the power of fantasy, yet Rivette’s fretful view of us bad news with his customary panache.—A.L. cheerfully headlong is the mood, that we’re hardly the dangers of stories is, in effect, a self-portrait (12/14/15) (In wide release.) aware of rooting for a bunch of utter cynics who are as a cinephile on the verge of hallucination. The poised to make tens of millions of dollars from the two women’s lust for real-world companionship, Creed misfortunes of others.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in their need for vicarious heroism, and their trip This stirring, heartfelt, rough-grained reboot our issue of 12/14/15.) (In wide release.) through the labyrinths of repressed memories of the “Rocky” series is the brainchild of come across as the director’s job description. In Ryan Coogler, who directed, wrote the story, Brooklyn French.—Richard Brody (Film Society of Lincoln and co-wrote the script with Aaron Coving- Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) lives in a small Irish town Center; Dec. 19 and Dec. 21.) ton. It starts in a juvenile-detention center with her mother (Jane Brennan) and sister (Fiona in Los Angeles, where young Adonis Johnson is Glascott). The time is the nineteen-fifties, and Eilis Chi-Raq confined. He’s soon adopted by Mary Anne Creed is leaving for America—not in any spirit of rebellion, The new Spike Lee film, reaching boldly back (Phylicia Rashad), Apollo’s widow, who informs since she is a mild and uncomplaining soul, but across the millennia, finds inspiration in Aristo- him that the boxer (who died before Adonis’s because the Church has organized the move. John Crowley’s movie follows her across the sea and into a brave new world, yet her life in Brooklyn is as plain and regular as the one she knew at home. She works in a department store, lives in a respectable boarding house (the motherly landlady is played by Julie Walters), and falls for a local Italian plumber (Emory Cohen). Circumstances send her back to Ireland, and there she meets another young man (Domhnall Gleeson), who courts her with no less politeness than was shown by his counterpart in New York. But which should she choose? And why does that choice not feel like more of a wrench? Nick Hornby’s screenplay is poised and acute, but, in adapting Colm Tóibín’s novel, he is stuck with a dangerously undramatic tale, and Crowley’s direc- tion is sedate to a fault. While the leads, especially Cohen, acquit themselves with grace, the smaller performances stay with you—Eva Birthistle, as a brassy shipmate, and Jessica Paré, as Eilis’s elegant boss.—A.L. (In limited release.)

Carol One day in the nineteen-fifties, Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett), a wife and mother, is shopping for Christmas presents at a department store in Manhattan. She comes across a salesgirl, Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), and they fall in love, right there. (How long has it been, you ask yourself, since a movie delivered a proper coup de foudre?) Todd Haynes’s film then follows the women as they meet for lunch, hang out at Carol’s home, embark on an aimless journey, and go to bed—conscious, all the while, of what they are risking, flouting, or leaving behind. Therese has a boyfriend (Jake Lacy), and Carol has a husband (Kyle Chandler) and a child, although the maternal instinct gets short dramatic shrift. That feels true to Patricia Highsmith, whose 1952 novel, “The Price of Salt,” is the foundation of the film. The fine screenplay is by Phyllis Nagy, who drains away the sourness of the book; what

birth) was his father. As an adult, wig, and a range of elegant dresses, the Bible; he displays his findings and Island who’s in a rut. Smart, creative, Adonis (played with focussed heat by he enters society in the guise of Lili sells his books in American churches. and handy, she works at an airport Michael B. Jordan) pursues a boxing Elbe, supposedly the cousin of his With his business failing, Don seeks counter and copes with her divorced career, moving to Philadelphia to be wife, Gerda (Alicia Vikander). Yet this a spectacular treasure. Aided by his parents (Virginia Madsen and Robert trained by Rocky Balboa (Sylvester deception proves insufficient, and the unscrupulous Israeli Jewish handler, De Niro), her father’s new girlfriend Stallone), his father’s rival. The burly story, which begins in Copenhagen Boaz (Jemaine Clement), he returns (Isabella Rossellini), her bitter half-sis- backstory doesn’t stall the drama but and moves to Paris, concludes in to the United States and pulls off ter (Elisabeth Röhm), her ex-husband provides its fuel. Coogler—aided by Dresden, with transgender surgery. a huge hoax, which sucks the two (Édgar Ramirez), and her supportive the cinematographer Maryse Alberti’s Not that we witness, or learn much men deep into a web of crime. The but ailing grandmother (Diane Ladd). urgent long takes—links the physical about, the pains of that procedure; loopy, comic complications involve a Overwhelmed by a Cinderella-like sacrifices of boxing and acting alike. in line with the ruthlessly good taste mercantile preacher (Danny McBride), burden of chores, Joy designs a new Adonis also finds romance with the that governs the whole film, it is his ex-Satanist competitor (Will kind of mop, finds an investor, and rising singer Bianca (Tessa Thompson), the ineffable pallor of Redmayne’s Forte), and Don’s steadfast assistant is thrust into the predatory world who has physical struggles of her face that bears the burden of the (Amy Ryan). Everyone betrays the of attorneys and executives. Russell, own. Coogler ingeniously inverts the agony. The skill with which the film faith—whether with greed or with who wrote the script and co-wrote myth of bootstrap-tugging exertions: negotiates the pitfalls of the theme science—and the slippery slope of the story with Annie Mumolo, without family and connections, the could not be bettered. Does that worldly religion is subjected to a captures the magical moment when new star of the boxing ring wouldn’t very surfeit of propriety, however, radical Kierkegaardian purge. But, Joy’s private inspiration finds public stand a fighting chance.—R.B. (In not risk smothering the life of the tellingly, no one comes off as beyond expression; the movie’s best scene wide release.) drama? With Matthias Schoenaerts, redemption except Boaz, who sinks features Bradley Cooper, as a TV as Einar’s boyhood crush, now an art ever further into a bog of depravity. executive who shows Joy the ropes. The Danish Girl dealer, and Sebastian Koch, as the Boaz isn’t merely a Jewish villain; his The core of the film is Joy’s mastery A welcome return to the smaller surgical pioneer.—A.L. (11/30/15) villainy is his Judaism. The carica- of the killer instinct, her deft plotting scale for the director Tom Hooper, (In limited release.) ture, though deployed in the service of bold confrontations. But Russell’s who seems more at home with the of a sacred cause, is nonetheless portrait of Joy is mainly a public one, intimacy of “The King’s Speech” than Don Verdean repellent.—R.B. (In limited release.) stinting on intimacy in favor of the with the sprawl of “Les Misérables.” No one is spared the righteous comic business-school case study. With This movie, based on historical events, wrath of the director Jared Hess, in Joy Dascha Polanco, as Joy’s best friend is set in the nineteen- twenties. Eddie this wild satire about the exploitation Painful personal overtones resonate in and savior.—R.B. (In wide release.) Redmayne, deploying the full arsenal of of Christian faith by Christians and David O. Russell’s boisterous comic his charm, plays Einar Wegener, who others. The title character (played view—based on a true story—of an Macbeth is himself invested, and then engulfed, by Sam Rockwell) is an archeologist entrepreneur’s conflict-riddled rise The Scottish play bewitches once in the act of performance. With the whose illegal excavations in Israel are to success. Jennifer Lawrence stars again; Justin Kurzel is hardly the aid of makeup, expert mimicry, a meant to prove the historical truth of as a divorced young mother on Long first movie director to be lured into its mists. This new adaptation stars be thornier: the uncovering, by an imaginative energy. It’s set in the Youth Michael Fassbender, at his moodiest investigative team at the Boston eighteen-eighties, in the world of Most of the new Paolo Sorrentino and most hard-bitten, as the title Globe, of widespread sexual abuse Kabuki theatre, where Kikunosuke, film is set in a peaceable spa, where character, with Marion Cotillard as his by Catholic priests. The victims a callow young actor, defies his Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine), a wife. The film begins and ends on the were children, but we meet them as family to marry Otoku, a servant famous British composer, is taking it battlefield, as if that were Macbeth’s adults, when they tell their stories. who wants to help him refine his easy. He has largely given up work, natural hunting ground; everything The movie, scripted by McCarthy art. The disinherited Kikunosuke whereas his old friend Mick Boyle in between has the quality of a bad and Josh Singer, resists any temp- is determined to succeed on his (Harvey Keitel)—a movie director, and agonizing dream. (Could Lady tation to reconstruct the original own, but Mizoguchi—evoking the trailed by a screenwriter and other Macbeth, perhaps, be sleepwalking crimes, and the sole focus is on the modern-day film business—depicts hangers-on—is still entrapped in through the whole thing?) King progress of the journalistic task. The Kabuki impresarios as timid, the the coils of creative endeavor. Also Duncan (David Thewlis) is knifed result is restrained but never dull, public as fickle. Only the steadfast present are Miss Universe (Madalina not in a castle but in a tent, and and, barring a couple of overheated Otoku can help Kikunosuke, and Diana Ghenea), a discontented film Shakespeare’s verse is muttered, moments, when a character shouts her agonized self-sacrifice is the star (Paul Dano), and a lackey from spat, and moaned without a gleam of in closeup, we don’t feel harried core of the drama. The movie’s Buckingham Palace who begs Fred rhetorical flourish. Nothing, in short, or hectored. The film becomes a quasi-operatic crescendo owes as to fulfill a royal request. Sorrentino speaks of grandeur in this depleted study in togetherness, both bad much to Mizoguchi’s exalted style circles these various figures with his land, and there’s something crazed, and fruitful; on one hand, we get as to his dramatic sense. In balletic usual suavity, compiling a collective and almost ridiculous, about fighting the creepy sense of a community long takes, he choreographs the actors meditation on the woes of old age and killing for the chance to govern closing ranks, while on the other in unison with the camera, which and the frustrations of art. (If his last it. Fassbender seems more at ease there is the old-school pleasure of glides, pivots, and plunges to pursue movie, “The Great Beauty,” bowed with a blade in his hand than with watching an ensemble in full spate. the action to its emotional breaking to “La Dolce Vita,” the tribute paid a mouthful of poetry, while Sean The reporters are played by Michael point. His painterly framings have here to “8 1/2” is more flagrant still.) Harris makes a vehement Macduff. Keaton, Brian d’Arcy James, Mark a teeming simplicity, entangling the The result feels both sumptuous Kurzel adds children throughout, Ruffalo, and Rachel McAdams; their characters in a web of conflicting and aimless, as if we were leafing to great effect: one to the trio of superiors, by John Slattery and Liev forces. Tense and spectacular idly through an album of delectable witches, and one—a corpse—to the Schreiber; and the lawyers, by Billy scenes of Kabuki performance are sights—of sounds, too, as when opening scene, lamented by Macbeth. Crudup and Stanley Tucci, who, as a thrilling tribute to its expressive Fred gathers the natural noises of a The movie brims, quite rightly, with usual, calmly pockets every scene in power, as well as a revelation of valley into a tone poem of his own blood and flame; the screen, by the which he appears.—A.L. (11/9/15) the real-world pain—of women, imagining. Three women lend the close, is a terrible sea of red.—A.L. (In limited release.) offstage—that fuels it. Throughout film fire: Rachel Weisz, as Fred’s (12/7/15) (In limited release.) his career, Mizoguchi depicted the grievance-driven daughter; Jane The Story of the Last moral crisis of Japan’s subjugation Fonda, as an indestructible diva; Spotlight Chrysanthemum of women; here, he raises it to the and Paloma Faith, as a pop star in a There are many ways in which the Kenji Mizoguchi’s ample, angry most exalted realms of tragedy.—R.B. funny pastiche of a music video—the new Tom McCarthy film could have drama, from 1939, is one of the (Film Society of Lincoln Center; energetic hot spot of the film.—A.L. gone wrong. The subject could hardly cinema’s great outpourings of Dec. 25-Jan. 7.) (12/7/15) (In limited release.)

ABOVE BEYOND

Good Riddance Day including a group of chic early- nude—from a New York collection. stall fashioned by Le Corbusier for a Look around your apartment, dig twentieth-century French pieces by (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. dorm room at the Maison du Brésil, through your desk, flip through Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Alberto and 212-636-2000.) • Phillips, too, offers a residence hall for Brazilian students your wallet—it shouldn’t take too Diego Giacometti, and Jean-Michel design pieces (Dec. 15), including a at the Cité Universitaire, in Paris. long to find a physical relic of 2015 Frank. This is followed by a sale of rather forbidding aluminum shower (450 Park Ave. 212-940-1200.) you’d like to leave behind. In a truly jewel-like Tiffany lamps and vases cunning instance of self-promotion, later the same day; Israeli artworks, Readings and Talks the information-destruction servicer including naïf paintings by Reuven McNally Jackson Shred-It is offering New Yorkers the Rubin and abstractions by Mordecai This year’s final installment of the bookstore’s talks series will feature the chance to purge their unwelcome Ardon, go under the gavel on Dec. 17. playwright Annie Baker, the novelist Lynne Tillman, and the T Magazine artifacts before the ball drops by A Judaica sale on Dec. 22 is devoted editor Emily Stokes. Baker’s 2015 play, “John,” set during Christmastime handing them over to be permanently to books and manuscripts from the and running more than three hours, serves as the evening’s inspiration—the and securely shredded in the middle Valmadonna Trust Library, the property trio will read excerpts from the script, as well as from works by Nabokov, of Times Square. The remains will of a London diamond dealer; among Von Kleist, and Rilke. (52 Prince St. 212-274-1160. Dec. 17 at 8.) be recycled, unlike the año viejos other prize lots, it includes the first dummies of Latin America, whose complete printed edition of the Zinc Bar annual stuffing and burning are the Talmud, published in Venice in the The Segue Poetry Series has hosted experimental readings at this Greenwich inspiration for this event. (Broadway early sixteenth century. (York Ave. Village bar for twenty-five years, and still gathers together exciting young Plaza, between 46th and 47th Sts. at 72nd St. 212-606-7000.) • Chris- poets eager for a platform. Both the South London twenty-two-year-old timessquarenyc.org. Dec. 28 at noon.) tie’s devotes two days (Dec. 17-18) Harry Burke and the New York-based twenty-seven-year-old Juliana Hux- to the sale of design objects, with table engage with the Internet, as a medium to utilize and a subject to be Auctions and Antiques a session of Art Deco pieces and broached: the Serpentine curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist has praised Burke’s The auction houses close out the another filled with twentieth-century avant-garde blend of visual art and poetry, much like Huxtable’s all-caps season with a medley of sales. items—including a Ruhlmann desk screeds that explode across colorful inkjet canvases. Burke will read from Sotheby’s kicks off with an offer- and a fetching wall panel by Jean his new book, “City of God,” and Huxtable from her upcoming “Mucous ing of design objects on Dec. 16, Dunand depicting a reclining female in My Pineal Gland.” (82 W. 3rd St. 212-477-9462. Dec. 19.)

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 31 F D & DRINK

BAR TAB bar goto 245 Eldridge St. (212-475-4411) One recent blustery evening at this Lower East Side bar, a slight man in a white T-shirt came to the rescue of a woman battling a wind-jammed door—he ushered her in, pulled out a stool, and caressed the crease out of her menu. The man was Kenta Goto, who spent seven years buttoned up in vest and tie, shaking cocktails Tables for Two at the ritzy Pegu Club. Now in his own cozy, chic establishment, he Oiji attends to everything: he ferried okonomiyaki—savory pancakes stuffed 119 First Ave. (646-767-9050) with things like pork belly, octopus, or mushrooms—and other snacks to diners; as final drops of drink (Yuzu- small plates, and small-batch sou, are what’s on ofer at Oiji, a new Korean Calpico Fizz, with fermented milk restaurant in the East Village. The biggest of the small plates, in terms of food-world soda) after glorious drink (Sakura hype, are the hot honey-butter chips, a rif on a Korean craze from last year. They are Martini, with gin, sake, maraschino wok-glazed, cayenne-spiced, and positioned, coyly, in a category of their own on the liqueur, and a brined cherry blossom) menu: in other words, you could have them as an appetizer or as a dessert, or, more vanished, there he was, tableside. A likely, you will wind up doing both. The chips are the only anarchic touch in a dining twenty-fifth-birthday party convened experience that might otherwise have you longing for the chaos of Koreatown, on beneath a framed silk obi (Goto’s grandmother’s), and a friend of the Thirty-second Street—as well as for the abundance and variety of banchan, the little celebrant noted, “You’re literally not dishes served alongside rice in more traditional Korean cuisine. any different than you were yesterday.” At Oiji, kimchi must be ordered separately. The focus is on precise, beautiful Goto’s mother ran an okonomiyaki compositions of acid and fat, not on the fireworks of fermentation. Chil-jeol-pan, which restaurant in Chiba. He moved to the is a deconstructed bibimbap, is described only as “seven flavors”; “trust us,” the chefs, States in 1997, when he was twenty- Brian Kim and Tae Kyung Ku, who were raised in Seoul, seem to be saying. The dish is three, to attend the Fashion Institute. a clock face of julienned vegetables, shredded beef, and egg. Delicate red and green rice It took him two years to confess to his parents that he’d switched to crêpes, for wrapping makeshift tacos, sit in the center. The efect is stunning, and the bartending. They will visit in the spring, flavors extremely delicate. The fried chicken might be the most subtle incarnation of for his wedding, and see his hospitality its kind. Tapioca flour creates a lace-like skin on a dark chicken cutlet, and the filigreed philosophy—omotenashi—in action. He surface is all the better for soaking up the gentle heat of a soy-based dipping sauce. There tried to define it: “Let’s say that you is no dousing of anything here; a mackerel filet, smoked in pine leaves, comes with a have a birthday girl. Sure, you can buy little brush for patting the fish with a citrus dressing. It looks like a broomstick in a doll’s her a round of tequila shots, but it’d house. be even nicer and more memorable if you gave her a small cake.” Deep into the meaty part of the menu come the first truly bold flavors, as in the —Emma Allen slow-cooked oxtail, which has a lingering sweetness, and no need for a knife. Jang-jo- rim, a soy-braised beef, is overshadowed by exquisitely buttery rice. There’s a soft-boiled egg, too, but no gochujang, the spicy miso-and-red-chili paste that must surely be the world’s cleverest condiment. In short, the food whispers, to varying efect, and so do the patrons, as the subdued end of the Beatles catalogue plays softly. The best dish is the most comforting: cold buckwheat noodles and preserved spring ramps, in a broth like silk which makes you almost forget that winter is coming. —Amelia Lester

Open Tuesdays through Sundays for dinner. Plates $7-$38. MIKEY BURTON BY ILLUSTRATION

32 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES POMERANTZ

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT BAD COPS, GOOD COPS

n early November, 2014, Craig Futterman, a law profes- knife away. No one is seen ofering first aid. Last week, the I sor at the University of Chicago, got a call from some- Justice Department announced that it is opening a wide-rang- one who worked in law enforcement in that city. The caller ing investigation into the policies and practices of the Chi- told Futterman about a squad-car dashboard-camera video cago police. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who resisted making the from a few weeks earlier, which showed a police oicer video public, and who criticized the Justice Department in- shooting to death a seventeen-year-old boy named Laquan vestigation as “misguided,” said last Wednesday that he now McDonald. According to the source, the video was at strik- welcomes it, and apologized for McDonald’s death. ing odds with the version of the incident that the Chicago This is not the first time that Futterman has received an Police Department had presented. In that account, the inside tip about police abuse. He believes that the whistle- oicer, Jason Van Dyke, acted in self-defense: McDonald blowers represent “the majority of Chicago cops,” who are was out of control and menacing him with a knife, so he doing their jobs “just as you would want them to.” Those shot him once, in the chest. But the source, describing the oicers “hate this stuf ” as much as anyone, because “it cre- video frame by frame, evoked what sounded to Futterman ates hostility to the police, and steals the honor of those who like “an execution.” are doing things right.” Yet even the best-intentioned oicers Fifteen years ago, Futterman founded a legal clinic at the have to cope with a code of silence—the mirror image of the university focussed on civil rights and police accountability. criminals’ code against snitching. He and his frequent collaborator, Jamie Kalven, who runs a In the McDonald case, the first oicers on the scene, re- nonprofit journalism project called the Invisible Institute, in- sponding to a call about a young man acting erratically and terviewed witnesses, and they corroborated what the caller breaking into trucks, were doing things right. McDonald ap- had said. Last December, Futterman and Kalven called on parently did have a knife, and, according to the autopsy, he the C.P.D. to release the video. Soon afterward, Kalven, had PCP in his system. Futterman said that those oicers through a Freedom of Information Act request, obtained were careful. They “needed to arrest him, take him to the the autopsy report. It showed that hospital,” and “they called for backup, for McDonald, a ward of the state who had someone with a taser.” Then Van Dyke “Good Son” tattooed on one hand, had arrived and instantly fired sixteen shots. been shot sixteen times. In reports to internal investigators, the For months, the C.P.D. refused to re- other oicers either corroborated his story lease the video. There were protests. Then, or said that they hadn’t seen what hap- last summer, Brandon Smith, a freelance pened. One said that she had been look- journalist, sued the department to make ing down and missed the whole thing. the footage public, and a judge ruled in his The code of silence has protected some favor. On November 24th, the day Oicer particularly reprehensible behavior in the Van Dyke was charged with first-degree C.P.D., much of it directed at the city’s murder, and thirteen months after the black population. Perhaps the most egre- shooting, the police department finally gious was that of Jon Burge, a comman- released the video. It shows McDonald der who, in the nineteen-seventies and trotting briskly away from oicers as they eighties, headed a group of oicers that approach, not menacing them. When Van he called the Midnight Crew. To extract Dyke’s first shots hit him, he spins and confessions, the crew tortured dozens of

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL TOM BY ILLUSTRATIONS drops to the ground. An oicer kicks a men, most of them African-American, using

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 35 electric shock, sufocation, and Russian roulette. Last May, investigation represent progress, but the real hope is for an the city agreed to a reparations agreement that included end to the code of silence. Oicers who come forward have $5.5 million for the victims and an obligation to teach the to be able to do so without fear of losing their jobs, or episode in the public-school curriculum. According to the worse—in 2011, a cop named Jerome Finnigan pleaded Better Government Association, between 2010 and 2014 guilty to plotting to kill a fellow-oicer who he suspected there were seventy fatal shootings by the Chicago police, would testify against him. Lifting that fear will require the a higher number than in any other large city. (Phoenix, department and the city to first accept the transparency that Philadelphia, and Dallas had a higher number per capita.) they have often resisted. Between 2004 and 2014, the city spent $521 million de- Thanks to the eforts of Futterman and Kalven, among fending the department and settling lawsuits claiming others, anyone can now search an online database called the excessive force. Citizens Police Data Project. It shows that, before Finnigan Last March, after a seven-year legal battle, waged by Fut- and Van Dyke were charged with serious crimes, there were terman, Kalven, and two Chicago law firms—Loevy & sixty-eight complaints against Finnigan and eighteen against Loevy and the People’s Law Oice—to obtain records of Van Dyke. (Neither was disciplined.) Meanwhile, the Frater- police oicers who had accumulated repeated citizen com- nal Order of Police has sued to block the release of more data, plaints, an Illinois appeals-court judge ordered the records citing a stipulation in its contract that calls for destroying any released. They show that, of nearly twenty-nine thousand disciplinary records older than five years. Among the records allegations of misconduct filed between 2011 and 2015, are those of some of Burge’s crew; there are still torture cases only two per cent resulted in any discipline—and, of those pending against them. For the citizens of a community to which did, the vast majority took the form of reprimands or trust the police, they have to know that they aren’t being sys- suspensions of less than a week. Moreover, while African- tematically lied to. It’s a simple lesson that activists around Americans filed most of the complaints, those lodged by the country have been reminding us of, but the Chicago whites were more likely to be upheld. police seem to have to learn it over and over again. Emanuel’s belated apology and the Justice Department —Margaret Talbot

TRUMPLANDIA POSTCARD press release said that the hammams were wearing an overcoat monogrammed with RUBDOWN “inspired by Ivanka Trump’s travels in “T.P.,” for Trump Place, stood in front Istanbul,” which is not in Morocco. Four of one of them, at 120 Riverside Boule- days later, Ivanka’s father, Donald, un- vard. “We used to say the name with leashed an Islamophobic tirade that in- pride, but now he’s way out of line,” he spired J. K. Rowling to compare him un- said. “Two hundred and seventy people favorably to Voldemort. live in this building—all kinds of back- Rowling wasn’t alone. Ibrahim Hoop er, grounds, and everyone gets along. For ive times a day, devout Muslims per- from the Council on American-Islamic him to say awful things about Muslims, Fform wudu, a purification ritual. Relations, said, “That’s Donald Trump about Mexican people? Guys work here (From the Koran, Sura 5:6: “When you for you: he attacks something and pro- who are from Mexico, from Colombia. rise up to prayer, wash your faces and fits from it at the same time. It’s a good I can only imagine what they’re saying your hands as far as the elbows, and wipe shtick if you can pull it of, I guess.” Asked among themselves.” He went on, “Some- your heads and your feet to the ankles.”) about the roots of the hammam tradi- times the kids ask me if I’m going to In Moroccan cities, the ritual is often tion, a Trump Spa employee said, “It’s vote for him. I say, ‘You know, I think performed at bathhouses called ham- an exfoliation treatment. A traditional Hillary is a better choice.’ ” mams. People with more upmarket tastes Moroccan thing. It’s not necessarily Mus- Some of the buildings’ rear entrances might visit “the first authentic luxury lim. I wouldn’t know anything about are on a short stretch of new pavement hammam in New York City,” on the sev- that.” called Freedom Place. At the southern enth floor of the Trump SoHo Hotel, In search of clarification, one had to end, at the New York Cat Hospital, a on Spring Street. The hotel’s spa ofers look elsewhere in the Trump universe. veterinarian said, “A lot of these apart- facials, pedicures, and massages, but About seventy blocks uptown, wedged ments are owned by foreign business- “the hammam is sort of what we’re between West End Avenue and the West men. Perhaps, in foreign countries, it’s known for,” an attendant said last week. Side Highway, is a strip of landfill that believed that the Trump brand is a sign “We’ve had several Middle Eastern might as well be called Trumplandia: it’s of class. Most New Yorkers would feel guests tell us that ours is as good as the home to seven mirrored high-rise apart- otherwise.” ones in Morocco.” ment buildings facing the Hudson, each A block north, Trump Place banners The Spa at Trump SoHo announced emblazoned with the words “TRUMP hung outside a grocery store. Bibek Pou- recently that it would ofer, for two hun- PLACE” in big gold or silver letters. Al- del, a nineteen-year-old wearing a beanie, dred and thirty dollars, a special treat: though the Trump Organization sold works as a cashier there. A year ago, he the Moroccan Ritual, “a sixty-minute most of the properties years ago, the came from Kathmandu on a student visa. experience designed to leave guests buildings still bear the Presidential can- “I heard something about this Trump,” drenched in head-to-toe hydration.” A didate’s name. A doorman named James, Poudel said. “He is wrong. Just because

36 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 a few people are bad, you can’t blame Center, the oldest mosque in the city. As ‘Bad Mother,’ ” Waldman said. “It’s—it’s their religion for that.” night fell, a man in a Yankees jacket en- what it sounds like.” Inside the Dwight Preschool, a teacher tered the mosque. He took of his shoes, Just then, Martin Scorsese stepped with a soul patch was alone in a class- performed wudu, knelt, and began to pray. out of a chartreuse-walled elevator. “That’s room, blowing bubbles. “A lot of people —Andrew Marantz a green-screen elevator!” he cracked. will live in these Trump buildings and 1 He was the evening’s other headliner. think nothing of it, and yet they’ll con- MELTING POT DEPT. Wearing a blue Battistoni suit, he seemed sider themselves liberals,” he said. “Is this POST-CODE tickled to be in the neighborhood. “I even politics anymore? It’s more like the grew up a block from here, on Elizabeth movie ‘Network.’ ” A taxi-driver from Street,” he said. “Both of my parents were Syria, who was stopped at a red light, born there.” He crossed the room with said, “Trump is a jerk. Low class.” Did his wife, Helen, a former book editor, he care to elaborate? “Not worth my time.” who is taller and less wound-up than he “He runs a nice building, a luxurious is, and greeted the Miranda group. building, and at my age I deserve it,” a “ his is the most Kubrickian room,” “Do you realize where we are?” Scor- woman with a walker said as she stood TLin-Manuel Miranda said the sese asked. “Sammy’s Bowery Follies outside 220 Riverside Boulevard. “If he other night, sweeping into the seventh was right here. The Last of the Red wins, God bless him, and God help the floor of the New Museum, on the Bow- Hot Mamas sang here. Dwarfs sang American people.” Nearby, an Israeli ery. The room was long, very white, with here. Once upon a time, a guy named woman named Rivka said, “Because he’s two glass walls, facing south and east, Chuck Connors ran this area. They called a rich guy, we call him eccentric. If he and in a corner was a curved white leather him the mayor of Chinatown. He was was poor, we would say—you know the couch, to which Miranda led his party. popular with the cops, because he word meshuggener?” Miranda, the creator and star of “Ham- threw them big dinners, called ‘rackets.’ “Trump is not stupid,” Alen Sabovic, a ilton” and “In the Heights,” asked for He’d bring tour buses in from uptown handyman, said. “He’s a businessman.” cofee—very sweet, very light, por favor. to phony opium dens.” Miranda had Sabovic moved from Montenegro nine He is a sleep-deprived new parent, and his head cocked, listening. New York years ago. “My kids are born here. I’m gonna he was about to perform for the Mac- City history is one of his obsessions. be a citizen soon. I’m Muslim myself. Dowell Colony’s Chairman’s Evening, Scorsese went on, “Wallace Beery played I’m not very political, but this worries me, in the museum’s basement theatre. Connors in a film called ‘The Bowery.’ judging people based on religion. In my As he drank his cofee, Miranda George Raft. Jackie Cooper. Beautiful country, we haven’t had that kind of prob- showed, on his phone, a video of his film. Irish-knockabout style.” lem since Milosevic. I just hope we don’t baby son to the evening’s host, the nov- “Pre-Code?” Miranda asked. keep going like this, because America is elist Michael Chabon, and his wife, the “Pre-Code. Extremely frank about the greatest country in the world.” writer Ayelet Waldman, who have four the racial dynamics. Starts with a shot Around the corner from Trumplandia, kids. Waldman asked about child care. of a saloon called Nigger Joe’s, which at 1 Riverside Drive, is a five-story town Plenty of help from his parents and in- was a real place, and goes downhill house. In contrast to the shiny gold of laws, Miranda said—the whole clan lives from there.” Trump Place, its gables are painted green, in Washington Heights, with his in-laws “No Latinos in the picture then, the color associated with the Prophet Mu- just three doors away. His wife is an lucky for us.” hammad. This is the Islamic Cultural attorney. “Let me send her my book Scorsese talked about Elizabeth Street. “It was a Sicilian village,” he said. “Bob De Niro hung out a few blocks over. That was a Neapolitan village. A diferent world.” Somebody asked him if he remem- bered CBGB. “Are you kidding?” he said, laughing. “I’m talking about 1949. That was the seventies. By then, I was living in California.” He recently finished mixing a tele- vision pilot about the music business in the seventies. The series, “Vinyl,” will début in February, on HBO. “Nobody appreciates the impact of Carole King’s ‘Tapestry,’ least of all Carole King,” he said. Scorsese is now editing a film, “Si- lence,” based on a novel by Shusaku Endo, about Portuguese Jesuit priests in seventeenth-century Japan. “We shot What, then, might a Shakespeare scholar Charles is going to be a terrible king. He mostly in Taiwan, doubling for Kyushu, make of Bartlett’s efort? Enter James reminds me a lot of King James, who southern Japan,” he said. “We were up Shapiro—the Larry Miller Professor of followed the first Queen Elizabeth: re- in the mountains. I don’t usually shoot English, at Columbia University, and ally smart, waited forever to get the En- that much landscape. It was very muddy. the author of “The Year of Lear: Shake- glish Crown, and then was wrong-footed They gave me these big boots, which speare in 1606”—who was invited to at- almost immediately.” stuck in the mud. I couldn’t get to the tend a recent performance. Act II: Lydia Wilson as the Duch- actors. I’d step right out of the boots.” “My first impression was to consider ess of Cambridge addressing her hus- Scorsese asked Miranda to explain what’s Shakespearean about it, and I band in Lady Macbeth mode (“You must the finer points of masculine politesse started reading it the wrong way,” Sha- then focus ’pon the public eye / You dress that, in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century piro, who had read the play earlier, con- your best. And so, of course, shall I”); New York, could lead to a duel like the fessed, as he advanced down the aisle. “I Parliament in lockdown; and an increas- one that ended in Alexander Hamilton’s was scanning the lines to see whether ingly unmoored Charles, hair awry. At death. Miranda broke it down for him— they follow the same metrical rules as the play’s end, Shapiro, after applaud- the escalating slights, the intolerable in- Shakespeare—the ba-dump, ba-dump, ing warmly, ascended to Piggott-Smith’s sult, the excruciating calculation of “sat- ba-dump. And that is not what this script dressing room, where a dresser with isfaction.” Duelling, he said, “was legal is about. Yeah, it’s iambic pentameter— in New Jersey.” Then he added,“Kind but it turned out to be Shakespearean of like pot is legal in Central Park.” in much more unexpected and hard-to- “I wanted to be a Hollywood stunt- capture ways.” He looked at the Playbill man when I grew up,” Miranda said. cover—it features a picture of Charles “But then I realized that I didn’t like to with his mouth taped. “It is a great suc- get hurt or go fast. So the only thing left cession play,” he went on. “From the be- was musical theatre.” He mentioned that ginning of his career, up until ‘Hamlet,’ he had worked on a recent “West Side Shakespeare made a living writing suc- Story” revival, writing Spanish versions cession plays. It’s tougher to do than you of all the Puerto Rican characters’ lines think. Especially with a play like ‘Rich- and lyrics. The play was important to ard III,’ where everybody knows how it his own family’s history. “My dad saw ends, there have to be twists. With this the movie when he was young, in Puerto play, you kind of know which way it is Rico, and when Tony was killed at the heading, but you can’t figure out how end he cried, of course. But other peo- it’s going to get there.” Tim Piggott-Smith ple in the theatre cheered, because they The house lights dimmed. There was were for the Sharks, the Puerto Ricans. Tim Piggott-Smith, a veteran of the cold cream was cleansing the royal brow. And that’s when my dad said, ‘This town Royal Shakespeare Company, as Charles, “Have you ever played Richard II? is too small. I gotta get the fuck out of twisting his signet ring in emulation of You just did,” Shapiro said. here.’ And he moved to New York.” royal habit, and soliloquizing—“My life “No, but I did a bit of Lear there, —William Finnegan has been a ling’ring for the throne”—in too,” Piggott-Smith replied. There were 1 a voice more pleasingly mellifluous than mutual congratulations—Shapiro signed THE BOARDS the real Prince’s regal lockjaw. Shapiro a copy of “The Year of Lear,” a gift to FUTURE HISTORY snorted with laughter at some lines Piggott-Smith from his wife on open- (“Shall I be Mother?” asks Charles, when ing night. Shapiro asked whether the pouring tea for his Prime Minister), and real Prince Charles had seen the play. nodded at others, including a scene in No, though a palace spy seems to have which Richard Goulding as Prince Harry, attended a performance. “We received disconsolate in his role as “a ginger joke,” a note at the Almeida”—where the show encounters a kebab seller who compares originated, last year—“to the efect that “ ing Charles III,” which is currently the state of the nation to the shaved meat Charles doesn’t wear his wedding ring.” K playing at the Music Box The- on his spit: “When does Britain get so Piggott-Smith added that he has met atre, imagines the state of Britain and cut down that it’s not Britain anymore?” Charles only once, at the Royal Shake- of the British monarchy shortly after the “There is always one speech about speare Company. “He was very charm- death of Queen Elizabeth II. The play, what England is—‘this sceptr’d isle,’ in ing,” he said. “I found myself standing by the thirty-five-year-old British play- ‘Richard II’—where Shakespeare stops next to him, and there was a little break wright Mike Bartlett, is rife with Shake- and tells you what this nation is about,” in the conversation. He leaned forward spearean references: aptly billed as a “fu- Shapiro said, during intermission. “I am to me and said”—for the first time that ture history play” and written in blank seeing how deep the anxiety is, not just evening, Piggott-Smith slipped into a verse, it features an unsteady monarch, about the monarchy but about England, precise impersonation of the future King a scheming Duchess, and an exhorta- in this play. All the institutions are threat- of England—“ ‘Any work about?’ ” tory ghost who sows familial discord. ening to unravel. The other thing is that —Rebecca Mead

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 39 THE FINANCIAL PAGE global problems. As the economist William Nordhaus has IN DEFENSE OF PHILANTHROCAPITALISM written, there is “no mechanism by which global citizens can make binding collective decisions.” Coöperation is al- ways fragile and vulnerable to free riding. Think of how hard it’s been for countries to reach agreement on reduc- hen Mark Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. of Facebook, ing carbon emissions. W announced that he would be donating ninety-nine Projects like eradicating malaria or providing universal per cent of his Facebook stock to a new nonprofit organi- Internet access (one of Zuckerberg’s ambitions) also re- zation, he got his share of positive headlines. But the move quire investment that may not produce results for decades was also dismissed as a tax-avoidance scheme, a public- to come. Politicians have to worry about being reëlected relations gambit, a way to boost Facebook’s profits under every few years. And global problems are inherently dis- the guise of doing good, and the latest expression of the tant from the life of the average voter. The U.S. govern- “white savior industrial complex.” The economist Thomas ment spends less on aid to the world’s poor every year than Piketty, the author of “Capital,” said simply that the do- Americans spend on candy. Even when the U.S. clearly nation “looks like a big joke.” bears much responsibility for a global problem, like cli- The backlash is no surprise. The sheer size of Zucker- mate change, it’s hard to get Congress to pay up. berg’s grant, currently valued at forty-five billion dollars, Philanthropies, by contrast, have far-reaching time hori- shows just how concentrated wealth has become, and the zons and almost no one they have to please. This can lead earnest rhetoric of his mission state- them to pour money into controver- ment, couched as a public letter to his sial causes, as Zuckerberg has with ed- baby daughter, reinforced a sense of ucation reform. But it also enables them Silicon Valley’s overweening confi- to make big bets on global public goods. dence in its ability to fix the world. There is a long history of this: the Hostility toward philanthropy is noth- Rockefeller Foundation funded the re- ing new; when John D. Rockefeller search that produced a vaccine for yel- established his eponymous foundation, low fever. The Gates Foundation, since he was attacked for reasserting “the its founding, in 2000, has put billions old reign of aristocracy under the new of dollars into global health programs, names of philanthropy and science.” and now spends more on health issues And Zuckerberg’s move comes at a than the W.H.O. time of anxiety about the rise of so- It’s been suggested that if we just called philanthrocapitalism. Founda- taxed billionaires more there’d be more tions have great influence over social money for promoting social projects policy but are independent of demo- globally. But it’s far likelier that those cratic control. Why should unelected projects would just go underfunded. billionaires get to exercise their neo- Though in the past decade the U.S. missionary impulses across the globe? sharply increased spending on fighting In an ideal world, big foundations might be superfluous. infectious diseases like malaria, it did so only after the Gates But in the real world they are vital, because they are adept Foundation put them back on the global public-health agenda. at targeting problems that both the private sector and the All public-goods spending is precarious, especially foreign government often neglect. The classic mission of nonprofits aid, and never more so than with Republicans in charge of is investing in what economists call public goods—things Congress. In inflation-adjusted terms, the budget for the Na- that have benefits for everyone, even people who haven’t tional Institutes of Health is lower now than it was a decade paid for them. Public health is a prime example: we would ago, and late last year Senator Lindsey Graham warned that all benefit from the eradication of malaria and tuberculo- budget pressures could put anti-malaria funding “at risk.” sis (diseases that Bill Gates’s foundation has spent billions Yet philanthropic investment in global projects contin- fighting). But, since the benefits of public goods are widely ues to increase. Anne Petersen, the president of the Global enjoyed, it’s hard to get anyone in particular to foot the bill. Philanthropy Alliance, told me, “American philanthropy Corporations almost invariably underinvest in public used to be all about giving locally. But there’s been a dra- goods, because they can capture only a small fraction of matic trend toward international giving, and that’s only the rewards. That’s especially evident when the main benefi- going to continue.” It’s reasonable to lament the fact that ciaries are poor: out of more than fifteen hundred drugs a small number of billionaires have so much power over that were approved for sale between 1975 and 2004, just which problems get dealt with and which do not. But they twenty-one targeted tropical diseases or tuberculosis. Gov- have that power precisely because they are spending so ernments do better at providing public goods (defense, say, much of their money to solve global problems. We, as a or education), but private agendas often derail the public country, are not. interest, and governments are far less efective at tackling —James Surowiecki CHRISTOPH NIEMANN CHRISTOPH

40 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

of the car, a woman rushed over. She LETTER FROM FLORIDA asked if he worked for the city. He said he did not, an answer that seemed to disappoint but not deter her. She ges- THE SIEGE OF MIAMI tured at a palm tree that was sticking out of the drowned grass. As temperatures climb, so, too, will sea levels. “Look at our yard, at the landscap- ing,” she said. “That palm tree was super- BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT expensive.” She went on, “It’s crazy— this is saltwater.” “Welcome to rising sea levels,” Wan- less told her. According to the Intergovernmen- tal Panel on Climate Change, sea levels could rise by more than three feet by the end of this century. The United States Army Corps of Engineers projects that they could rise by as much as five feet; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts up to six and a half feet. According to Wanless, all these projections are probably low. In his oice, Wanless keeps a jar of melt- water he collected from the Greenland ice sheet. He likes to point out that there is plenty more where that came from. “Many geologists, we’re looking at the possibility of a ten-to-thirty-foot range by the end of the century,” he told me. We got back into the car. Driving with one hand, Wanless shot pictures out the window with the other. “Look at that,” he said. “Oh, my gosh!” We’d come to a neighborhood of multi- million-dollar homes where the water was creeping under the security gates and up the driveways. Porsches and Mercedeses sat flooded up to their In the Miami area, the daily high-water mark has been rising almost an inch a year. chassis. “This is today, you know,” Wanless he city of Miami Beach floods on not far from Wanless’s oice, then set said. “This isn’t with two feet of sea- Tsuch a predictable basis that if, out of across the MacArthur Causeway. level rise.” He wanted to get better pho- of curiosity or sheer perversity, a per- (Out-of-towners often assume that tos, and pulled over onto another side son wants to she can plan a visit to co- Miami Beach is part of Miami, but it’s street. He handed me the camera so incide with an inundation. Knowing situated on a separate island, a few miles that I could take a picture of him stand- the tides would be high around the of the coast.) It was a hot, breathless ing in the middle of the submerged time of the “super blood moon,” in late day, with a brilliant blue sky. Wanless road. Wanless stretched out his arms, September, I arranged to meet up with turned onto a side street, and soon we like a magician who’d just conjured a Hal Wanless, the chairman of the Uni- were confronting a pond-sized puddle. rabbit. Some workmen came bouncing versity of Miami’s geological-sciences Water gushed down the road and into along in the back of a pickup. Every few department. Wanless, who is seventy- an underground garage. We stopped feet, they stuck a depth gauge into the three, has spent nearly half a century in front of a four-story apartment build- water. A truck from the Miami Beach studying how South Florida came into ing, which was surrounded by a groomed Public Works Department pulled up. being. From this, he’s concluded that lawn. Water seemed to be bubbling out The driver asked if we had called City much of the region may have less than of the turf. Wanless took of his shoes Hall. Apparently, one of the residents half a century more to go. and socks and pulled on a pair of poly- of the street had mistaken the high tide We had breakfast at a greasy spoon propylene booties. As he stepped out for a water-main break. As we were

42 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY JACOB ESCOBEDO chatting with him, an elderly woman most probably, the result of ice-sheet leaning on a walker rounded the cor- collapse. One after another, the enor- ner. She looked at the lake the street mous glaciers disintegrated and dumped had become and wailed, “What am I their contents into the oceans. It’s been supposed to do?” The men in the pickup speculated—though the evidence is truck agreed to take her home. They sketchy—that a sudden flooding of the folded up her walker and hoisted her Black Sea toward the end of meltwa- into the cab. ter pulse 1C, around seventy-five hun- To cope with its recurrent flood- dred years ago, inspired the deluge story ing, Miami Beach has already spent in Genesis. something like a hundred million As temperatures climb again, so, too, dollars. It is planning on spending will sea levels. One reason for this is several hundred million more. Such that water, as it heats up, expands. The eforts are, in Wanless’s view, so much process of thermal expansion follows money down the drain. Sooner or well-known physical laws, and its im- later—and probably sooner—the city pact is relatively easy to calculate. It is will have too much water to deal with. more diicult to predict how the earth’s Even before that happens, Wanless remaining ice sheets will behave, and believes, insurers will stop selling pol- this diiculty accounts for the wide icies on the luxury condos that line range in projections. Biscayne Bay. Banks will stop writ- Low-end forecasts, like the I.P.C.C.’s, ing mortgages. assume that the contribution from the “If we don’t plan for this,” he told ice sheets will remain relatively stable me, once we were in the car again, driv- through the end of the century. High- ing toward the Fontainebleau hotel, end projections, like NOAA’s, assume “these are the new Okies.” I tried to that ice-melt will accelerate as the earth imagine Ma and Pa Joad heading north, warms (as, under any remotely plausi- their golf bags and espresso machine ble scenario, the planet will continue strapped to the Range Rover. to do at least through the end of this century, and probably beyond). Recent he amount of water on the planet observations, meanwhile, tend to sup- Tis fixed (and has been for billions port the most worrisome scenarios. of years). Its distribution, however, is The latest data from the Arctic, subject to all sorts of rearrangements. gathered by a pair of exquisitely sen- In the coldest part of the last ice age, sitive satellites, show that in the past about twenty thousand years ago, so decade Greenland has been losing much water was tied up in ice sheets more ice each year. In August, NASA that sea levels were almost four hun- announced that, to supplement the dred feet lower than they are today. At satellites, it was launching a new that point, Miami Beach, instead of monitoring program called—pro- being an island, was fifteen miles from vo catively—Oceans Melting Green- the Atlantic Coast. Sarasota was a hun- land, or O.M.G. In November, re- dred miles inland from the Gulf of searchers reported that, owing to the Mexico, and the outline of the Sun- loss of an ice shelf of northeastern shine State looked less like a skinny Greenland, a new “floodgate” on the finger than like a plump heel. ice sheet had opened. All told, Green- As the ice age ended and the planet land’s ice holds enough water to raise warmed, the world’s coastlines assumed global sea levels by twenty feet. their present configuration. There’s a At the opposite end of the earth, good deal of evidence—much of it now two groups of researchers—one from submerged—that this process did not NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and the other take place slowly and steadily but, from the University of Washington— rather, in fits and starts. Beginning concluded last year that a segment of the around 12,500 B.C., during an event West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into known as meltwater pulse 1A, sea lev- “irreversible decline.” The segment, els rose by roughly fifty feet in three known as the Amundsen Sea sector, or four centuries, a rate of more than contains enough water to raise global a foot per decade. Meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels by four feet, and its melting along with pulses 1B, 1C, and 1D, was, could destabilize other parts of the ice

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 43 sheet, which hold enough ice to add paring to paddle home from work in “Down the road, this is just a Band- ten more feet. While the “decline” could a kayak. Aid,” Morales said. take centuries, it’s also possible that it “Some people get swept into oice,” “I believe in human innovation,” could be accomplished a lot sooner. Levine joked when it was his turn at Levine responded. “If, thirty or forty NASA is already planning for the day the mike. “I always say I got floated years ago, I’d told you that you were when parts of the Kennedy Space Cen- in.” He described the steps his admin- going to be able to communicate with ter, on Florida’s Cape Canaveral, will istration was taking to combat the your friends around the world by look- be underwater. efects of rising seas. These include in- ing at your watch or with an iPad or stalling enormous underground pumps an iPhone, you would think I was out he day I toured Miami Beach with that will suck water of the streets and of my mind.” Thirty or forty years from THal Wanless, I also attended a dump it into Biscayne Bay. Six pumps now, he said, “We’re going to have in- panel discussion at the city’s Conven- have been completed, and fifty-four novative solutions to fight back against tion Center titled “Eyes on the Rise.” more are planned. “We had to raise sea-level rise that we cannot even imag- The discussion was hosted by the people’s storm-water fees to be able to ine today.” French government, as part of the pay for the first hundred-million-dollar lead-up to the climate convention in tranche,” Levine said. “So picture this: any of the world’s largest cities Paris, at that point two months away. you get elected to oice and the first M sit along a coast, and all of them Among the members of the panel was thing you tell people is ‘By the way, I’m are, to one degree or another, threat- a French scientist named Eric Rignot, going to raise your rates.’ ” ened by rising seas. Entire countries a professor at the University of Cali- He went on, “When you are doing are endangered—the Maldives, for in- fornia, Irvine. Rignot is one of the this, there’s no textbooks, there’s no stance, and the Marshall Islands. Glob- researchers on O.M.G., and in a con- ‘How to Protect Your City from Sea ally, it’s estimated that a hundred mil- ference call with reporters during the Level Rise,’ go to Chapter 4.” So the lion people live within three feet of summer he said he was “in awe” of how city would have to write its own. “We mean high tide and another hundred fast the Greenland ice sheet was chang- have a team that’s going to get it done, million or so live within six feet of it. ing. I ran into him just as he was about that’s going to protect this city,” the Hundreds of millions more live in areas to go onstage. Mayor said. “We can’t let investor confi- likely to be afected by increasingly de- “I’m going to scare people out of dence, resident confidence, confidence structive storm surges. this room,” he told me. His fellow- in our economy start to fall away.” Against this backdrop, South Flor- panelists were a French geophysicist, John Morales, the chief meteorol- ida still stands out. The region has been a climate scientist from the University ogist at NBC’s South Florida ailiate, called “ground zero when it comes to of Miami, and Miami Beach’s mayor, was moderating the discussion. He sea-level rise.” It has also been described Philip Levine. Levine was elected in challenged the Mayor, ofering a ver- as “the poster child for the impacts 2013, after airing a commercial that sion of the argument I’d heard from of climate change,” the “epicenter for tapped into voters’ frustration with the Wanless—that today’s pumps will be studying the efects of sea-level rise,” continual flooding. It showed him pre- submerged by the seas of tomorrow. a “disaster scenario,” and “the New At- lantis.” Of all the world’s cities, Miami ranks second in terms of assets vulner- able to rising seas—No. 1 is Guang- zhou—and in terms of population it ranks fourth, after Guangzhou, Mum- bai, and Shanghai. A recent report on storm surges in the United States listed four Florida cities among the eight most at risk. (On that list, Tampa came in at No. 1.) For the past several years, the daily high-water mark in the Miami area has been racing up at the rate of almost an inch a year, nearly ten times the rate of average global sea-level rise. It’s unclear exactly why this is happen- ing, but it’s been speculated that it has to do with changes in ocean currents which are causing water to pile up along the coast. Talking about climate change in the Everglades this past Earth Day, President Obama said, “Nowhere is it going to have a bigger impact than here “Cherish this moment, because clearly our parents are getting a divorce.” in South Florida.” The region’s troubles start with its no one has a basement—the water with Nicole Hernandez Hammer, an topography. Driving across South table is too high.) environmental-studies researcher who Florida is like driving across central When the system was designed— works for the Union of Concerned Kansas, except that South Florida is redesigned, really—in the nineteen- Scientists. Hammer had looked over greener and a whole lot lower. In Mi- fifties, the water level in the canals could elevation maps and decided that Shore- ami-Dade County, the average eleva- be maintained at least a foot and a half crest, about five miles north of down- tion is just six feet above sea level. The higher than the level of high tide. town Miami, was a neighborhood county’s highest point, aside from man- Thanks to this diference in elevation, where we were likely to find flooding. made structures, is only about twenty- water flowed of the land toward the It was another hot, blue morning, and five feet, and no one seems entirely sea. At the same time, there was enough as we drove along, in Hammer’s Honda, sure where it is. (The humorist Dave freshwater pushing out to prevent at first it seemed that she’d miscalcu- Barry once set out to climb Miami- saltwater from pressing in. lated. Then, all of a sud- Dade’s tallest mountain, and ended up Owing in part to sea-level den, we arrived at a major atop a local garbage dump nicknamed rise, the gap has since been intersection that was sub- Mt. Trashmore.) Broward County, cut by about eight inches, merged. We parked and which includes Fort Lauderdale, is and the region faces the made our way onto a side equally flat and low, and Monroe discomfiting prospect that, street, also submerged. We County, which includes the Florida during storms, it will be in- were standing in front of Keys, is even more so. undated not just along the a low-slung apartment But South Florida’s problems also coasts but also inland, by building, debating what to run deeper. The whole region—indeed, rainwater that has nowhere do next, when one of the most of the state—consists of limestone to go. Researchers at Flor- residents came by. that was laid down over the millions of ida Atlantic University have found that “I’ve been trying to figure out: years Florida sat at the bottom of a with just six more inches of sea-level Where is the water coming from?” he shallow sea. The limestone is filled with rise the district will lose almost half said. “It’ll be drying up and then it’ll holes, and the holes are, for the most its flood-control capacity. Meanwhile, be just like this again.” He had com- part, filled with water. (Near the sur- what’s known as the saltwater front is plained to the building’s superinten- face, this is generally freshwater, which advancing. One city—Hallandale Beach, dent. “I told him, ‘Something needs to has a lower density than saltwater.) just north of Miami—has already had be done about this water, man.’ He says Until the eighteen-eighties, when to close most of its drinking wells, be- he’ll try to do something.” A cable- the first channels were cut through the cause the water is too salty. Many other repair truck trailing a large wake rolled region by steam-powered dredges, South cities are worried that they will have by and then stalled out. Florida was one continuous wetland— to do the same. The water on the street was so deep the Everglades. Early eforts to drain the Jayantha Obeysekera is the Water that it was, indeed, hard to tell where area were only half successful; Northern- Management District’s chief modeller, it was coming from. Hammer ex- ers lured by turn-of-the- century real- which means it’s his job to foresee plained that it was emerging from the estate scams found the supposedly rich South Florida’s future. One morning, storm drains. Instead of funnelling farmland they’d purchased was more I caught up with him at a flood- control rainwater into the bay, as they were suitable for swimming. structure known as S13, which sits on designed to do, the drains were direct- “I have bought land by the acre, and a canal known as C11, west of Fort ing water from the bay onto the streets. I have bought land by the foot; but, by Lauderdale. “The infrastructure we have is built God, I have never before bought land “We have a triple whammy,” he said. for a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” by the gallon,” one arrival from Iowa “One whammy is sea-level rise. An- she said. complained. other whammy is the water table comes Neither of us was wearing boots, a Even today, with the Everglades re- up higher, too. And in this area the fact that, as we picked our way along, duced to half its former size, water in higher the water table, the less space we agreed we regretted. I couldn’t help the region is constantly being shunted you have to absorb storm water. The recalling stories I’d heard about Mi- around. The South Florida Water Man- third whammy is if the rainfall extremes ami’s antiquated sewer system, which agement District, a state agency, claims change, and become more extreme. leaks so much raw waste that it’s the that it operates the “world’s largest water There are other whammies probably subject of frequent lawsuits. (To settle control system,” which includes twenty- that I haven’t mentioned. Someone said a suit brought by the federal govern- three hundred miles of canals, sixty-one the other day, ‘The water comes from ment, the county recently agreed to pump stations, and more than two thou- six sides in Florida.’ ” spend $1.6 billion to upgrade the sys- sand “water control structures.” Flo- tem, though many question whether ridians south of Orlando depend on month after the super blood the planned repairs adequately account this system to prevent their lawns from A moon, South Florida experienced for sea-level rise.) Across the soaked drowning and their front steps from another series of very high tides— intersection, in front of a single-family becoming docks. (Basement flooding “king tides,” as Miamians call them. home, a middle-aged man was unload- isn’t an issue in South Florida, because This time, I went out to see the efects ing groceries from his car. He, too, told

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 45 posed to speak, instead, of “nuisance flooding.” Scott denied having imposed any such Orwellian restrictions, but I met several people who told me they’d bumped up against them. One was Hammer, who, a few years ago, worked on a report to the state about threats to Florida’s transportation system. She said that she was instructed to remove all climate-change references from it. “In some places, it was impossible,” she recalled. “Like when we talked about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate “Every day I live in fear that our jobs will be replaced by pillows.” Change, which has ‘climate change’ in the title.” •• Scientists who study climate change (and the reporters who cover them) often speculate about when the partisan de- us he didn’t know where the water was “I have called the city of Miami,” bate on the issue will end. If Florida coming from. the first sister said. “And they said it’s is a guide, the answer seems to be never. “I heard on the news it’s because just the moon. But I don’t think it’s the During September’s series of king tides, the moon turned red,” he said. “I don’t moon anymore.” former Vice-President Al Gore spent have that much detail about it.” During After a couple of minutes, their a morning sloshing through the flooded the past month, he added, “it’s hap- mother came out. Hammer, who was streets of Miami Beach with Mayor pened very often.” (In an ominous de- born in Guatemala, began chatting Levine, a Democrat. I met up with Gore velopment, Miami this past fall expe- with her in Spanish. “Oh,” I heard the the following day, and he told me that rienced several very high tides at times mother exclaim. “Dios mío! El cambio the boots he’d worn had turned out to of the month when, astronomically climático! ” be too low; the water had poured in speaking, it shouldn’t have.) over the top. “Honestly, sometimes, when I’m arco Rubio, Florida’s junior sen- “When the governor of the state is talking to people, I think, Oh, I wish M ator, who has been running third a full-out climate denier, the irony is I had taken more psychology courses,” in Republican primary polls, grew up just excruciatingly painful,” Gore ob- Hammer told me. A lot of her job in- not far from Shorecrest, in West Miami, served. He said that he thought Flor- volves visiting low-lying neighborhoods which sounds like it’s a neighborhood ida ought to “join with the Maldives like Shorecrest, helping people under- but is actually its own city. For several and some of the small island states stand what they’re seeing. She shows years, he served in Florida’s House of that are urging the world to adopt them elevation maps and climate-change Representatives, and his district in- stronger restrictions on global-warm- projections, and explains that the sit- cluded Miami’s flood-vulnerable air- ing pollution.” uation is only going to get worse. Often, port. Appearing this past spring on Instead, the state is doing the op- Hammer said, she feels like a doctor: “Face the Nation,” Rubio was asked to posite. In October, Florida filed suit “You hear that they’re trying to teach explain a statement he had made about against the Environmental Protection these skills in medical schools, to en- climate change. He ofered the follow- Agency, seeking to block new rules courage them to have a better bedside ing: “What I said is, humans are not aimed at limiting warming by reduc- manner. I think I might try to get that responsible for climate change in the ing power-plant emissions. (Two kind of training, because it’s really hard way some of these people out there are dozen states are participating in the to break bad news.” trying to make us believe, for the fol- lawsuit.) It was garbage-collection day, and lowing reason: I believe that climate “The level of disconnect from real- in front of one house county-issued is changing because there’s never been ity is pretty profound,” Jef Goodell, a trash bins bobbed in a stretch of water a moment where the climate is not journalist who’s working on a book on streaked with oil. Two young women changing.” the impacts of sea-level rise, told me. were surveying the scene from the Around the same time, it was re- “We’re sort of used to that in the cli- driveway, as if from a pier. vealed that aides to Florida’s governor, mate world. But in Florida there are “It’s horrible,” one of them said to Rick Scott, also a Republican, had in- real consequences. The water is rising us. “Sometimes the water actually structed state workers not to discuss right now.” smells.” They were sisters, originally climate change, or even to use the term. Meanwhile, people continue to from Colombia. They wanted to sell The Scott administration, according flock to South Florida. Miami’s met- the house, but, as the other sister ob- to the Florida Center for Investigative ropolitan area, which includes Fort served, “No one’s going to want to buy Reporting, also tried to ban talk of sea- Lauderdale, has been one of the fast- it like this.” level rise; state employees were sup- est growing in the country; from 2013

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© 2015 Starkey Hearing Technologies. All Rights Reserved. to 2014, in absolute terms it added “I live opposite a park,” Philip Stod- tinue exactly the way they are today,” more residents than San Francisco dard, the mayor of South Miami—also Ruvin told me. “But what we will evolve and, proportionally speaking, it out- a city in its own right—told me. “And to may be better.” did Los Angeles and New York. Cur- there’s a low area in it that fills up when rently, in downtown Miami there are it rains. I was out there this morning “ keep telling people, ‘This is my more than twenty-five thousand new walking my dog, and I saw fish in it. I patient,’ ” Bruce Mowry, Miami condominium units either proposed Where the heck did the fish come from? Beach’s city engineer, was saying. “I or under construction. Much of the They came from underground. We have can’t lose my patient. If I don’t do any- boom is being financed by “flight cap- fish that travel underground! thing, Miami Beach may not be here.” ital” from countries like Argentina “What that means is, there’s no It was yet another day of bright-blue and Venezuela; something like half of keeping the water out,” he went on. skies and “nuisance flooding,” and I recent home sales in Miami were paid “So ultimately this area has to depop- was walking with Mowry through one for in cash. ulate. What I want to work toward is of Miami Beach’s lowest neighbor- And just about everyone who can a slow and graceful depopulation, rather hoods, Sunset Harbour. aford to buys near the water. Not long than a sudden and catastrophic one.” If Miami Beach is on a gurney, then ago, Kenneth Griin, a hedge-fund More often, I heard echoes of Mayor Mowry might be said to be thumping billionaire, bought a penthouse in Levine’s Apple Watch line. Who knows its chest. It’s his job to keep the city vi- Miami Beach for sixty million dol- what amazing breakthroughs the fu- able, and since no one has yet come up lars, the highest amount ever paid for ture will bring? with a smart-watch-like breakthrough, a single-family residence in Miami- “I think people are underestimating he’s been forced to rely on more prim- Dade County (and ten million dollars the incredible innovative imagination itive means, like pumps and asphalt. more than the original asking price). in the world of adaptive design,” Har- We rounded a corner and came to a The penthouse, in a new building vey Ruvin, the Clerk of the Courts of set of stairs, which led down to some called Faena House, ofers eight bed- Miami-Dade County and the chair- restaurants and shops. Until recently, rooms and a seventy-foot rooftop pool. man of the county’s Sea Level Rise Mowry explained, the shops and the When I read about the sale, I plugged Task Force, said when I went to visit street had been at the same level. But the building’s address into a handy him in his oice. A quote from Buck- the street had recently been raised. It program called the Sea Level Rise minster Fuller hung on the wall: “We was now almost a yard higher than the Toolbox, created by students and pro- are all passengers on Spaceship Earth.” sidewalk. fessors at Florida International Uni- Ruvin became friendly with Fuller in “I call this my five-step program,” he versity. According to the program, the nineteen-sixties, after reading about said. “What are the five steps?” He with a little more than one foot of rise a plan Fuller had drawn up for a float- counted of the stairs as we descended: the roads around the building will fre- ing city in Tokyo Bay. “One, two, three, four, five.” Some restau- quently flood. With two feet, most of “I would agree that things can’t con- rants had set up tables at the bottom, the streets will be underwater, and with three it seems that, if Faena House is still habitable, it will be ac- cessible only by boat.

asked everyone I met in South Flor- I ida who seemed at all concerned about sea-level rise the same question: What could be done? More than a quarter of the Netherlands is below sea level and those areas are home to mil- lions of people, so low-elevation living is certainly possible. But the geology of South Florida is peculiarly intrac- table. Building a dike on porous lime- stone is like putting a fence on top of a tunnel: it alters the route of travel, but not necessarily the amount. “You can’t build levees on the coast and stop the water” is the way Jayan- tha Obeysekera put it. “The water would just come underground.” Some people told me that they thought the only realistic response for South Florida was retreat. “You the guy who donated his body to science?” next to what used to be a curb but now, We headed back toward Mowry’s miles north of Miami, to Florida Bay, with the elevation of the road, is a three- oice around the time of maximum about forty miles to the south of the foot wall. Cars whizzed by at the din- high tide. The elevated streets were still city, in one wide, slow-moving sheet. ers’ eye level. I found the arrangement dry, but on the way to City Hall we Now much of the water is diverted, disconcerting, as if I’d suddenly shrunk. came to an unreconstructed stretch of and the water that does make it to the Mowry told me that some of the busi- road that was flooding. Evidently, this wetlands gets impounded, so the once ness owners, who had been unhappy situation had been anticipated, because continuous “sheet flow” is no more. when the street flooded, now were un- two mobile pumps, the size and shape There’s a comprehensive Everglades happy because they had no direct ac- of ice-cream trucks, were parked near restoration plan, which goes by the ac- cess to the road: “It’s, like, can you win?” the quickly expanding pool. Neither ronym CERP, but this has got hung up Several nearby streets had also been was operating. After making a couple on one political snag after another, and raised, by about a foot. The elevated of phone calls, Mowry decided that he climate change adds yet one more ob- roadbeds were higher than the drive- would try to switch them on himself. stacle. The Everglades is a freshwater ways, which now all sloped down. The As he fiddled with the controls, I re- ecosystem; already, at the southern parking lot of a car-rental agency sat alized that we were standing not far margin of Everglades National Park, in a kind of hollow. from the drowned palm tree I’d seen the water is becoming salty. The saw- I asked about the limestone prob- on my first day in Miami Beach, and grass is in retreat, and mangroves are lem. “That is the one that scares us that it was once again underwater. moving in. In coming decades, there’s more than anything,” Mowry said. “New likely to be more and more demand Orleans, the Netherlands—everybody bout a dozen miles due west of for the freshwater that remains. As understands putting in barriers, perim- A Miami, the land gives out, and McVoy put it, “You’ve got a big chunk eter levees, pumps. Very few people un- what’s left of the Everglades begins. of agriculture, a big chunk of people, derstand: What do you do when the The best way to get around in this part and a big chunk of nature reserve all water’s coming up through the ground? of Florida is by airboat, and on a gray competing for the same resources.” “What I’d really like to do is pick morning I set out in one with a hy- The best that can be hoped for with the whole city up, spray on a mem- drologist named Christopher McVoy. the restoration project is that it will pro- brane, and drop it back down,” he went We rented the boat from a concession long the life of the wetland and, with on. I thought of Calvino’s “Invisible run by members of the Miccosukee that, of Miami’s drinking-water system. Cities,” where such fantastical engi- tribe, which, before the Europeans ar- But you can’t get around geophysics. neering schemes are the norm. rived, occupied large swaths of Geor- Send the ice sheets into “irreversible Mowry said he was intrigued by the gia and Tennessee. The colonists decline,” as it seems increasingly likely possibility of finding some kind of resin hounded the Miccosukee ever farther we have done, and there’s no going back. that could be injected into the lime- south, until, eventually, they ended up Eventually, the Everglades, along with stone. The resin would fill the holes, with a few hundred mostly flooded Shorecrest and Miami Beach and much then set to form a seal. Or, he sug- square miles between Miami and Na- of the rest of South Florida, will be in- gested, perhaps one day the city would ples. On a fence in front of the dock, undated. And, if Hal Wanless is right, require that builders, before construct- a sign read, “Beware: Wild alligators eventually isn’t very far of. ing a house, lay a waterproof shield un- are dangerous. Do not feed or tease.” To me, the gunmetal expanse of derneath it, the way a camper spreads Our guide, Betty Osceola, handed out water and grass appeared utterly with- a tarp under a tent. Or maybe some headsets to block the noise of the ro- out markers, but Osceola, who could sort of clay could be pumped into the tors, and we zipped of. read the subtlest of ridges, knew ex- ground that would ooze out and fill The Everglades is often referred to actly where we were at every moment. the interstices. as a “river of grass,” but it might just We stopped to have sandwiches on an “Will it hold?” Mowry said of the as accurately be described as a prairie island with enough dry land for a tiny clay. “I doubt it. But these are things of water. Where the airboats had made farm, and stopped again at a research we’re exploring.” It was hard to tell how a track, the water was open, but mostly site that McVoy had set up in the muck. seriously he took any of these ideas; it was patchy—interrupted by clumps There was a box of electrical equip- even if one of them turned out to be of sawgrass and an occasional tree is- ment on stilts, and a solar panel to pro- workable, the efort required to, in efect, land. We hadn’t been out very long vide power. McVoy dropped out of the caulk the entire island seemed stagger- when it started to pour. As the boat boat to collect some samples in empty ing. At one point, Mowry declared, “If sped into the rain, it felt as if we were water-cooler bottles. The rain let up, we can put a man on the moon, then driving through a sandstorm. and then started again.  we can figure out a way to keep Miami The same features that now make 1 Beach dry.” At another, he mused about South Florida so vulnerable—its flat- O Pioneers Department the city’s reverting to “what it came ness, its high water table, its heavy From the Oak Harbor (Wash.) Whidbey News- from,” which was largely mangrove rains—are the features that brought Times. swamp: “I’m sure if we had poets, they’d the Everglades into being. Before the At 6:34 p.m., a Tee Place resident re- be writing about the swallowing of drainage canals were dug, water flowed ported that a tortoise was missing. It re- Miami Beach by the sea.” from Lake Okeechobee, about seventy sponds to “Dexter.”

50 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

but also of Islam, the state religion in A REPORTER AT LARGE Sunni-majority Bangladesh. “He was an addabaaj,” his father said. He used the word to mean “gossip,” but it also hinted THE HIT LIST at his son’s love of argument. Mukto Mona’s comments section The Islamist war on secular bloggers in Bangladesh. often drew irate Islamists, and Roy waded into earnest debates with them. He could BY SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN seem as inflexible as the people he bick- ered with, refusing to acknowledge any grace or meaning that religion might grant its faithful. When one commenter claimed that the Koran was a repository of scientific wisdom, Roy asked why the Islamic world was “so behind in science and technology?,” and added, “Even Is- rael has more scientists than all the Mus- lim countries nowadays.” His father warned him that he was “too passion- ate.” On Facebook, one extremist wrote, “Avijit Roy lives in America, so it’s not possible to kill him right now. But he will be killed when he comes back.” When Roy told his parents that he planned to visit in February, his father tried to dissuade him. “Dhaka is now not a very good place. The law-and-order situation is worsening day by day,” Ajoy Roy said. “I pointed out, ‘You’re a tar- geted person. Your name has been pub- licized as an atheist.’ ” Roy and Ahmed went anyway, stay- ing at her family’s house, not far from the city center. After finishing his col- umn, Roy wanted to visit the Ekushey Book Fair, where hundreds of booksell- ers and publishers gather every Febru- ary to celebrate Bengali literature. Ahmed and Roy attended an event hosted by Roy’s publisher before browsing through n the afternoon of February 26th, and impelling them into conflict. He a section of children’s books. A photo- OAvijit Roy was in Dhaka, finishing once wrote, “The vaccine against reli- graph on Facebook shows them sitting a column for BDNews24, a Bangladeshi gion is to build up a scientific approach.” on the ground. Roy, wearing a red kurta, Web site of news and commentary. Its Roy and his wife, Rafida Ahmed, an is looking down; next to him, Ahmed title, in Bengali, was “Why Is There executive at a credit-rating agency, lived reaches into a paper bag for a snack. Something Rather Than Nothing?,” and in Atlanta. They had fallen in love from At around 8 P. M ., as they walked to- it adapted ideas from his new book, a afar: in 2001, Roy started a collective ward their rented car, a young boy asked primer on cosmology. For Roy, who was blog called Mukto Mona, or Free Roy for a handout. He gave the boy a forty-two, science trumped religion. He Thinker, and Ahmed wrote to him after hundred takas—a little more than a dol- took after his father, Ajoy, an emeritus reading one of his posts, agreeing with lar—and an admonition to go home. physics professor at Dhaka University his dismissal of religion as “fairy tales.” Ahmed doesn’t recall the men who rushed and an ardent rationalist. “I don’t bother In 2006, Roy moved to Atlanta, where at Roy and hacked at him with machetes, about whether God exists,” Ajoy Roy he worked as a software architect. But and she doesn’t recall trying to stop them. told me. “Let him do his business, and his real interests emerged in his blog She received several wounds to her head let me do my business.” Avijit, even more posts, and in several books in which and another that severed her left thumb. vocal than his father, liked to compare he dismantled the dogmas of religious Later, in photographs of the attack, she faith to a virus—infecting human beings belief—of his own Hindu background, noticed that there had been policemen standing nearby; they did nothing to in- A list of eighty-four bloggers was sent to newspapers in 2013. Four are now dead. tervene. Roy fell to the sidewalk, face

52 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HERSEY down; his attackers dropped their weap- Udyan, where, in March, 1971, a politi- of multiple murders and of the rape of ons and ran away. By the time his father cian named Mujibur Rahman urged an an eleven-year-old girl, received a life reached the Dhaka Medical College Hos- audience of two million to embrace civil sentence. Kowshik Ahmed, who writes pital, Roy was dead. disobedience and turn East Pakistan into for a Web site called Somewhere In Blog, Roy’s murder was claimed by a Twit- an independent Bangladesh. The speech, and whose name was on the hit list, told ter account belonging to the Ansarullah an electric moment in Bangladesh’s his- me that anything short of capital pun- Bangla Team, an Islamic militant group. tory, is depicted in posters that still hang ishment seemed to be a concession. “Peo- He was an American citizen, the tweets in many living rooms in Dhaka. ple thought the Awami League took noted, and his death avenged the actions The ensuing “liberation war,” as Ban- money” in return for a gentler verdict, of the United States against ISIS. A Ban- gladeshis call it, is commemorated in a he said. In protest, a few dozen bloggers gladeshi police oicial called the group museum in the park, a half-buried, bru- and student organizers occupied Shah- the “closest relative” of Al Qaeda on the talist gallery whose raw-concrete shell bag, an intersection near the northern Indian subcontinent, and it has been staves of Dhaka’s soggy heat. Photo- corner of Suhrawardy Udyan. Shahbag linked to the murders of at least five other graphs of corpses, alone or in great piles, became a symbol for the bloggers, a tes- secular voices—the first in 2013, but the often charred, run along one wall. Some tament to their power to organize. By others since Roy’s death, at the rate of estimates suggest that Pakistan’s armed the middle of February, the crowd had roughly one every other month. In Oc- forces killed half a million people in grown to more than a hundred thousand tober, when I visited Dhaka, there had the nine-month war, but most Bangla- people, calling for the abolition of the been no attacks for eleven weeks, and deshis—in particular, those from the Jamaat and for more death penalties. the writers I met seemed to be steeling Awami League, the political party that Kowshik, as he is called, is a stocky, themselves for bad news. Three days after Rahman once led—say that the toll was bald forty-one-year-old. When I met I left, Roy’s publisher was killed in his closer to three million; they also call it him, at a cofee shop a few miles from oice, and, elsewhere in the city, another a genocide. Early in December, 1971, Shahbag, he was wearing a T-shirt that publisher and two bloggers were attacked. the Indian Army intervened, hastening said, “Everything Will Be Fine.” We were Of the six who have died, four were Pakistan’s defeat. Two weeks later, in joined by his friend Baki Billah, a for- on a list of eighty-four “atheist bloggers,” Suhrawardy Udyan, the commander of mer student leader and a stalwart at the which was sent anonymously to news- Pakistan’s occupying forces surrendered, Shahbag protests. Billah was slim and papers in 2013. In nearly every attack, granting Bangladesh its independence. wore a wispy beard. His English was hes- the weapon has been a machete. Two The war’s violence and the actions of itant, and he stared into the distance as dozen suspects have been arrested, but Bengalis who collaborated with Paki- he talked, trying to hoist phrases out of so much doubt persists over the kill- stani forces remain the source of many his memory. Kowshik and Billah were ings—and over the government’s han- of Bangladesh’s political questions. The competitive conversationalists, pitting dling of them—that Dhaka is rife with word razakar, or “volunteer,” once used their recollections of events against each conspiracy theories. Some of the blog- to describe members of pro-Pakistan mi- other. Sometimes they veered into Ben- gers who number among the eighty-four litias, has entered colloquial Bengali as gali to confirm facts before presenting revealed suspicions that the state’s secu- a scathing pejorative. them to me. rity agencies ordered the hits. In 2008, an Awami League govern- I told them that it seemed odd that Ahmed and Roy hadn’t anticipated ment was elected on the promise of es- Shahbag’s liberal protesters were de- Bangladesh’s lurch into murderous ex- tablishing a war-crimes tribunal. Initially, manding the death penalty. “The death tremism. “I don’t think we missed it be- the European Union, Human Rights penalty wasn’t actually our goal,” Kow- cause we were away,” Ahmed told me. Watch, and the United Nations gave the shik said. Then, with pretzel-shaped logic, “I think this is a sudden shift, but it has trials their blessing, but before long ob- he added, “We were demanding the high- been cooking for a while.” A few days servers began to suspect that the gov- est punishment possible.” before his death, Ahmed said, Roy had ernment was using them to punish op- Billah jumped in. “If the highest pun- given her a tour of the places where he position parties. In 2011, Human Rights ishment possible was life imprisonment, grew up. “We walked around the uni- Watch noted that state oicials were ha- we would have demanded that,” he said. versity campus. He showed me where rassing defense lawyers and witnesses. “Since the liberation war, these people, he lived when he was little. He showed The tribunal’s three-judge panels handed these war criminals, have lived in Ban- me his elementary school. He used to out death sentences and lengthy prison gladesh like kings. Our anger towards say, ‘Who will touch me in my own terms to members of the Bangladesh them was very high.” neighborhood?’ ” National Party, the main opposition party, Kowshik started blogging in 2006, and of the Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamist well before Somewhere In Blog became n Dhaka, conversations about the kill- party and a B.N.P. ally that, in 1971, had the largest community of Bengali blog- I ings inevitably circle back to 1971, opposed the independence movement. gers, with more than a hundred thou- when Bangladesh broke away from Pa- Even so, in early 2013 a contrary sand contributors. Facebook had not yet kistan, whose strict Islamic pieties and fear—that the Awami League had se- arrived in Bangladesh, so blogs func- Urdu culture encroached on Bengali lib- cretly agreed to be lenient toward the Ja- tioned as a social medium, connecting eralism. The Ekushey Book Fair occu- maat—began to find purchase in Ban- members who were scattered across the pies a sprawling park called Suhrawardy gladesh. One Jamaat member, convicted country or living overseas. Kowshik’s

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 53 family came from Barisal, in the south. His father worked for the government, and they moved every three years. After THE ROBOTS studying literature at a Barisal college, Kowshik went to Dhaka to find work. When they choose to take material form they will resemble He wrote poetry and maintained a jour- Dragonflies, not machines. Their wings will shimmer. nal, but he found no readers until he dis- covered blogging, like many other young, Like the chorus of Greek drama they will speak secular urbanites. “For everyone, this was As many, but in the first person singular. new,” Kowshik said. “There was a feel- ing of free space. People who were crit- Their colors in the sky will canopy the surface of the earth. ical of religion could express themselves In varying unison and diapason they will dance the forgotten. without any hesitation, without any re- strictions.” In one post, Kowshik sati- Their judgment in its pure accuracy will resemble grace and in rized the thoughts of an Islamic funda- Their circuits the one form of action will be understanding. mentalist: “The people outside my community are lower than dogs. My war Their exquisite sensors will comprehend our very dust is against those who are not my broth- And re-create the best and the worst of us, as though in art. ers. So I look for any wrongdoing by non-Muslims. . . . Allah . . . made us for- —Robert Pinsky tunate enough to put such people to the sword.” When the assaults on bloggers began, Kowshik deleted the post. his name was on it. The list wasn’t well been totally confined at home.” He meets The comments sections on most of thought out, he found. It included Haid- few friends, and he never takes his chil- Bangladesh’s political blogs tend to de- er’s name, even though he was dead, and dren out; his relatives keep their distance. volve into ad-hominem attacks. On one many duplications, mentioning blog- “Now they all know I’m an atheist, be- post from Somewhere In Blog, on Islam gers by their names and again by their cause my name has appeared in the pa- and terrorism, angry readers contend handles. But its provenance was the big- pers,” he said. “So they do not like me.” that the author knows nothing about ger mystery. Newspaper reports were He has stopped blogging—or even post- Islam, that he is part of a conspiracy unable to determine whether it was com- ing on Facebook—about current events. against the religion, that his audacity will piled by Hefazat, as part of the demand Occasionally, he writes about cinema, earn him a quick death. The trolls and for the executions of the bloggers, or by but, he said, “If I can’t write about poli- the counter-trolls—the standard side the government, in an initiative to pros- tics and religion, I feel I have nothing to efects of the Internet—would be risible ecute bloggers who were critical of Islam. write.” And he changed his footwear. were the consequences not so tragic. No one has yet claimed authorship of I looked at his feet, clad in gray Power The first hint that the rancor had the list. sneakers with banana-yellow laces. “So spilled into the physical world came a In April, the police arrested four blog- that you can run?” month before the Shahbag protests, in gers, under a vague law criminalizing “So that I can run.” January, 2013, when a blogger named electronic publications that might ofend Asif Mohiuddin was attacked by three the followers of any religion, disturb law he details of the bloggers’ lives and men armed with knives and machetes. and order, or “deprave and corrupt” read- Tdeaths seem to constitute a morbid Mohiuddin, an atheist who, on Some- ers. To many, the arrests appeared to be parable about the turbulent novelty of where In Blog, had called God “Almighty an attempt to appease Islamic conserva- social media. “It’s the speed at which only in name but impotent in reality,” tives. Sara Hossain, a prominent hu- these pieces are disseminated online,” survived a deep gash to his neck. Then, man-rights lawyer, told me, “There’s a Tahmina Rahman, the director of the in February, as Shahbag gained momen- general climate of fear that the police Bangladesh chapter of Article 19, a tum, another blogger, Ahmed Rajib can come after you at any time. The fact nonprofit that defends free speech, told Haider, was murdered near his home by is the state isn’t robust enough to pro- me. “Sometimes these pieces aren’t very five young Ansarullah recruits. The night tect you, or perhaps even interested in well thought out, so when they contain before the murder, they had played cricket protecting you.” provocative material in a language that in front of Haider’s house, in order to Kowshik, learning that the police were borders on abusive they reach their read- scope out the terrain. looking for him, fled to Nepal, return- ers in a raw fashion.” Like the majority In the spring of 2013, a conservative ing only after the other bloggers had of Bangladesh’s Muslims, Rahman dis- group, Hefazat-e-Islam, staged two large been released on bail, a month later. “Over approved of the most outrageous of the rallies in Dhaka, demanding capital pun- the next couple of months, nothing hap- pieces. Still, she criticized the govern- ishment for every “atheist blogger.” pened,” Kowshik said. “And nothing hap- ment for its “lukewarm and apologetic” When the list of eighty-four bloggers pened in 2014 also.” Then Roy was killed, response, and for its readiness to freeze began circulating in newspapers and on and Kowshik grew fearful again. Besides speech. In mid-November, the govern- social media, Kowshik discovered that going to work every day, he said, “I’ve ment executed two war criminals—a

54 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 Jamaat member and a B.N.P. leader. An- some allegiance to Al Qaeda, they ticipating protests, it blocked access have nothing to do with ISIS, whose to Facebook, WhatsApp, and Viber claims for various attacks remain un- for more than two weeks. For seventy- verified. But in a November issue of five minutes, the Internet was shut down ISIS’s English-language periodical, altogether. Dabiq, an article titled “The Revival of One afternoon, I visited Hasanul Jihad in Bengal” described fighters in Haq Inu, Bangladesh’s information min- Bangladesh “busy preparing for further ister. He sat at a vast desk, across from a attack.” A crisply recorded audio file on wall hung with six small televisions on SoundCloud exhorted listeners, in sing- mute and a large one broadcasting the song Bengali, to commence jihad and news at a low grumble. During the lib- join the caliphate. eration war, Inu trained ten thousand It is likely that ISIS is asserting own- guerrillas. In the late seventies, after being ership of local Islamist terror groups. found guilty of revolting against the mil- Whether the activities of these groups itary junta that governed Bangladesh, he suggest a rise in religiosity in Bangla- spent five years in prison. Now he heads desh is diicult to say, Hossain, the hu- a Socialist party allied with the Awami man-rights lawyer, told me. But, she League. He is a large, calm man with a added, “Anecdotally, I see more hijabs, polite manner; when he learned that I more beards, more people in their twen- had a British passport, he expressed re- ties doing their prayers than when I was gret that one of the suspects in Roy’s in my twenties.” Amena Mohsin, a pro- murder was a British citizen of Bangla- fessor of international relations at Dhaka deshi origin. University, was more certain. “People go When I arrived in Dhaka, two men, to the Middle East and come back think- one Italian and the other Japanese, had ing a certain way,” she said. “There’s recently been murdered, their deaths Wahhabi money flowing in.” Mohsin claimed by ISIS as a warning to “citizens told me that her maid had recently of the crusader coalition.” Cesare Ta- gone home to her village and returned vella, an aid worker, was shot while jog- wearing a burka. “It gives her an in- ging in Dhaka’s diplomatic enclave; Kunio creased status,” Mohsin said. “In that Hoshi, an agronomist who had been in area, near Chittagong, by and large the country for five months, was shot in everyone supports the Hefazat.” In the countryside far to the north. Mid- the past, the politicians of the Awami way through my stay, heavy security for League had sounded such grave alarms a Shia procession in Dhaka failed to stop about fundamentalist Islam that, Mohsin three homemade bombs from explod- said, “the religious have come to think ing, killing two people and that Islam is under attack.” injuring more than a hun- I asked Inu if the gov- dred. ISIS claimed this at- ernment had drawn up the tack as well. list of bloggers. “The oi- Inu ascribed the mur- cial position is that there is ders to religious fanatics and no such oicial list,” he said, linked them to the Jamaat but he admitted that secu- party. The Jamaat had co- rity agencies might keep a vert operatives, he said: roster of provocative writ- “Around seven thousand, ers. He also denied that the eight thousand Jamaat Hefazat-e-Islam had given members were sent to Afghanistan when the government the list, as part of a de- bin Laden was there, have been trained, mand for the execution of atheists. “Our and have come back.” (These assertions, position vis-à-vis Hefazat is very tough,” often advanced by government oicials, he said. “There is no oicial dialogue have never been substantiated.) Other with Hefazat.” At the same time, he groups, too, were preparing for a Sunni said, the state had a duty to prosecute revolution, he said. “The hell with Shi- those who ofended the sentiments of ism. The hell with Hinduism. That’s the faithful. Some bloggers were guilty what they’re propagating.” “of using very filthy language against The government insists that, al- Prophet Muhammad.” though the local terror groups may owe Inu argued that the government had

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 55 responded eiciently to the murders, and are walking a fine line here. We don’t tion. She’d received many threats online, his oice later sent me an update on the want to be seen as atheists.” Another and one day, late in August, two men investigations: seven people arrested for government adviser told me, “If we al- followed her as she walked to the mar- Roy’s death, eighteen out of fifty-five lowed bloggers to write shit about ket to buy vegetables. “I took a detour hearings completed in the trial of six Prophet Muhammad, the people would into a shopping mall on the way, and men for killing Haider, and so on. But reject us.” He added, “They’d think we they came in there, too,” she said. She Rafida Ahmed said that no one from the started all this with our secularism busi- bumped into a friend, who surreptitiously police oice had taken her statement. ness. That’s the reality. This isn’t Lon- took a photograph of the men. Haq The wife of another blogger, who wit- don or New York. This is Dhaka.” showed the photograph to the police, nessed her husband’s murder at their who placed her under protection. “The home in August, told me that the police n September, the security forces ar- policemen are here even now,” she said. had paraded four arrested men before I rested Mohammad Abul Bashar, call- “But I’m not allowed to point them out.” her. She recognized none of them. ing him the acting leader of the Ansa- Her friend Niloy Chatterjee, a forty- It appears that the government is con- rullah Bangla Team. His older brother, year-old blogger who founded an asso- stantly calibrating its position on the mur- who founded Ansarullah, was arrested ciation of rationalists, had been on the ders. In 2013, when Haider was killed, in 2013 for Haider’s murder, so Bashar original hit list. In mid-May, heading Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called him had run the group in his absence. Ansa- home from a rally protesting another a martyr. Hasina, the daughter of Mu- rullah denied that Bashar was its leader, blogger’s murder, Chatterjee found that jibur Rahman, has styled the Awami calling the government’s claims “pitiful.” he was being trailed by two men. When League as the guardian of the country’s Two weeks later, the organization re- he tried to lodge a complaint with the minorities and of its liberal values, but leased its own hit list, of twenty writers police, he wrote on Facebook, he was she remains mindful that she governs a who live overseas, their names printed told to “leave the country as soon as pos- predominantly Muslim nation. Secular- under a logo resembling the black flag sible.” Through the summer, Chatterjee ism was enshrined as one of the four prin- of ISIS. Rafida Ahmed is on the list; so lay low, even staying in his parents’ vil- ciples of Bangladesh’s constitution, but in are several bloggers who have moved lage for two weeks. Not long after he re- 1977 it was removed, and the Koranic abroad since 2013. Others are making turned to Dhaka, on a lazy Friday after- phrase “Bismillah-ar-Rahman-ar Rahim” plans to emigrate. Late one evening, I noon, he was in his apartment with his was added. In 2010, under Hasina’s ad- met Kowshik’s friend Shammi Haq, a wife, Ashamone, and her sister when ministration, the Supreme Court restored twenty-two-year-old woman who has four men with machetes broke in. Be- secularism to the constitution, but her law written critically about the dominance fore killing Chatterjee, they pushed the minister admitted that the document’s of men in Islam and other religions, and sisters onto the balcony, Ashamone told Koranic phrase would remain. who was hoping to leave Bangladesh in me. When she was able to get back into More recently, Hasina has advised the coming weeks. the living room, she said, “the place was writers to refrain from distorting reli- Haq was waiflike and nervous. She flooded with blood.” One of the killers gious beliefs. When she did not publicly had to take a sleeping pill every night, had pulled a fresh shirt out of his bag condemn Roy’s murder, her son and ad- she said, and, while we talked, she kept and discarded his bloodstained one near viser, Sajeeb Wazed, told Reuters, “We looking out the window with trepida- the apartment gate before joining the others in a waiting auto rickshaw. Ashamone was temporarily staying in a spare room at the oice of an N.G.O. A dufelbag lay half packed on a cot. Ashamone, perched on a plastic chair, wore a trace of pink lipstick that matched the color of her shalwar kameez. With her left hand, she picked at a scab form- ing over a scratch on her right thumb. “I cut myself yesterday, and it pained so much,” she said. “Then I thought, How much pain Niloy must have gone through. “Niloy used to think our house was safe,” Ashamone continued. “But now I can’t imagine any place is safe.” She wanted to flee Bangladesh, but she didn’t like the idea of being a refugee. “And if we, the freethinkers, don’t stay we leave the country in the hands of the funda- mentalists. Those people will rule here. They will win. Why should we leave it “‘Meetingpalooza’ sounded better in the brochure.” all to them?”  open, like a four-year-old? This white- SHOUTS & MURMURS noise app cuts out seventy-two per cent of disgusting smacky eating noises. Set- tings include Banana, Mac and Cheese, APPS TO DOWNLOAD Movie Popcorn, and Fingernails!

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THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 57 man, he found even wilder specimens, ANNALS OF SCIENCE which “bent their body into curves.” Leeuwenhoek had revealed a world that few of his contemporaries were willing THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS to believe existed. As he lamented to another microscopist in 1680, “I sufer Can a cheap, portable microscope revolutionize global health? many contradictions, and oft-times hear it said that I do but tell fairy-tales about BY CAROLYN KORMANN the little animals.” In September, a biophysicist named Manu Prakash examined some of his own plaque, at high magnification, in honor of the anniversary of Leeuwen- hoek’s letter. Prakash, who is thirty-five, is slightly built, with curly brown hair, a beard, and a birthmark like a child’s thumbprint over the bridge of his nose. He doesn’t floss, and perhaps for that reason he found that his plaque con- tained spirochetes, bacteria that bend their bodies into curves when they move—what Leeuwenhoek observed in the old man. Prakash has his own laboratory in Stanford University’s bio- engineering department, and he is best known for having invented a micro- scope, which was inspired by Leeu- wenhoek’s. He has a passion for what he calls the “microcosmos,” meaning all things infinitesimal. “It’s not good enough to read about it,” he told me. “You have to experience it.” One major diference between the two microscopes is that Prakash’s is made almost entirely from a sheet of paper. He calls it the Foldscope, and it comes in a kit. (Mine arrived in a nine-by- twelve-inch envelope.) The paper is printed with botanical illustrations and perforated with several shapes, which ntoni van Leeuwenhoek wrote a had already examined eels’ blood, dogs’ can be punched out and, with a series A letter to the Royal Society of Lon- sperm, and the bile of elderly rabbits, of origami-style folds, woven together don, in 1683, announcing the discov- among other substances. Now he had into a single unit. The end result is about ery of something extraordinary in his turned his attention to dental plaque. the size of a bookmark. The lens—a mouth. He was a haberdasher by trade, Leeuwenhoek had an intensive rou- speck of plastic, situated in the center— in the Dutch city of Delft, but he was tine of oral prophylaxis, which involved provides a hundred and forty times mag- known for his enthusiastic work with rubbing salt on his teeth each morning nification. The kit includes a second microscopes, which he made himself. and buing his molars with a cloth after lens, of higher magnification, and a set By modern standards, Leeuwenhoek’s meals. Nevertheless, he wrote, the plaque of stick-on magnets, which can be used devices were rudimentary, and fickle in lay “thick as if ’twere batter.” He scraped to attach the Foldscope to a smartphone, their operation. They were nearly flat, some of, mixed it with rainwater, de- allowing for easy recording of a sample consisting of a tiny magnifying glass posited a droplet on one of his micro- with the phone’s camera. I put my kit sandwiched between metal plates, with scopes, and held it up to the light. The together in fifteen minutes, and when an adjustable spit to hold the sample sample was teeming with “many very I popped the lens into place it was with being viewed. But they could be efec- little living animalcules, very prettily the satisfaction of spreading the wings tive, particularly when an unsqueamish a-moving.” When he reproduced the of a paper crane. eye was at the peephole. Leeuwenhoek experiment with the plaque of an old The Foldscope performs most of the functions of a high-school lab mi- Manu Prakash seeks to bring a minuscule world to the masses. croscope, but its parts cost less than a

58 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTIAN GRALINGEN

strate the instrument to teachers, stu- dents, health-care workers, and forest rangers. (It isn’t yet clear how the Fold- scope will help the rangers, who are mainly concerned with the survival of the one-horned rhinoceros.) “There’s a very deep connection between sci- ence education and global health,” Prakash told me. “Unless you get peo- ple curious about the small-scale world, it’s very hard to change mind-sets about diseases.”

he idea for the Foldscope crystal- Tlized when Prakash was in Thai- land, in 2011. “I found myself at a field station that had a really expensive mi- croscope,” he said. “Everyone was afraid of it. It was worth five times the sal- ary of the person trying to operate it. It just made no sense, out there in the jungle.” Three years later, with a pro- “Don’t fall for it, Dogman!” totype Foldscope in hand, he and Cy- bulski, who was then his student, went •• to Nigeria to conduct studies at a ma- laria research center in Lagos. One day, they drove north from the city to find dollar. Last year, with a grant from gazillion little things” that sprayed a school. The students had just finished Gordon Moore’s philanthropic foun- from his mouth one night during a classes for the day, but Prakash per- dation (Moore co-founded Intel), coughing fit. suaded them to stay so that he could Prakash and some of his graduate stu- One of Prakash’s interests is bio- show them the Foldscope. They caught dents launched an experiment in mass mimicry—understanding how and a mosquito that was feeding on one of microscopy, mailing fifty thousand free why certain organisms work so well, the children and mounted it on a paper Foldscopes to people in more than a and using that knowledge to build slide, which they inserted into the Fold- hundred and thirty countries, who had new tools. “Plants, insects, tiny bugs scope. Prakash passed it to the boy, volunteered to test the devices. At the under the sink, bacteria, day after day, who raised it to his eye and looked same time, they created Foldscope Ex- accomplish things that no scientist through the lens, using a small L.E.D. plore, a Web site where recipients of anywhere in the world knows how to (also included in the kit) as his light the kits can share photos, videos, and do,” he has said. Among insects alone, source. “For the first time, he realized commentary. A plant pathologist in about nine hundred thousand species this was his blood, and this little pro- Rwanda uses the Foldscope to study have been named, but millions more boscis is how it feeds on his blood,” fungi aicting banana crops. Maasai remain to be identified and described. Prakash said. “To make that connec- children in Tanzania examine bovine The Foldscope increases Prakash’s tion—that literally this is where dis- dung for parasites. An entomologist reach. “I now have eyes and ears around ease passes on, with this blood, his in the Peruvian Amazon has happened the world looking at small things,” he blood—was an absolutely astounding upon an unidentified species of mite. told me. moment.” The exercise had its intended One man catalogues pollen; another Prakash’s hope is that those eyes efect. The boy said, “I really should tracks his dog’s menstrual cycle. and ears will make discoveries of their sleep under a bed net.” With my Foldscope, I looked at own. He and his chief collaborator on Prakash sees the Foldscope as his peach flesh, pinkie cuticle, Himalayan the project, Jim Cybulski, plan to make main contribution, so far, to frugal sci- sea salt, and grime from a subway pole. the Foldscope available for purchase ence, the endeavor to create low-cost, (The last of these resembled a Klimt by the summer. Prakash is particularly easy-to-use tools that address serious painting stripped of color.) Prakash keen on getting kits to people who live problems, primarily in the developing likes to abet this sort of observation, without electricity or modern sanita- world. In recent years, an increasing and he engages in it himself, contrib- tion, and who have likely never ob- number of researchers at élite institutions uting to Foldscope Explore frequently, served the microcosmos directly. In have devoted their time to such inven- even though he has seventy thousand October, India committed to rolling tions. Among the more ingenious are unopened e-mails. A video of his teeth out a countrywide Foldscope program. a centrifuge made from a salad spin- scrapings is there, as are photos of “the Prakash is travelling there to demon- ner; a method for turning farm waste

60 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

into charcoal briquettes using an oil fected with latent tuberculosis, like a could buy and distribute in schools. drum; and a solar-powered sterilizer third of the Indian population. Keep- But teachers often didn’t know how for surgical instruments, built from ing costs down, he told me, is espe- to integrate the machines into their pocket mirrors and a pressure cooker. cially impor tant with the Foldscope. lessons, and many struggled with George M. White sides, a chemis- “This one- dollar number is not ran- glitchy software. Studies of the lap- try professor at Harvard, works at the dom,” he said. “When something goes top’s impact in Peru, Nepal, and Uru- more complex end of the frugal- science from one dollar to ten to one hundred, guay (the only country to buy enough spectrum, in microfluidics. He and people will fall of your scale.” An- units for all its primary-school stu- his collaborators have created a series other essential element is cultivating dents) found that it had no efect on of paper-based medical tests, each a sense of ownership among the peo- reading or math skills. The company about the size of a postage stamp. The ple and the organizations using it. “The never succeeded in meeting its price tests are printed with lines of liquid- fact that it’s such a modular tool—you point of a hundred dollars. In 2009, it repellent wax, which separate a single can break it apart, you put it together— cut its staf by half. Prakash noted that drop of blood or saliva into small is very important,” he said. He cited the Foldscope is quite diferent in con- streams. The streams are then drawn the example of the Raspberry Pi, a cept from a cheap computer—simple, across the paper, like red wine on a credit-card-size computer that en- analog, and geared toward experience napkin, and mixed with an array of ables do-it-yourself programming and rather than information—but he chemicals to produce a color-coded costs as little as five dollars. Prakash praised O.L.P.C. for inciting new ways result. One test diagnoses liver toxicity, hopes to scale up his invention using of thinking. As Wayan Vota, the a common side efect of treatment for aspects of what the Raspberry Pi founder of a Web site that tracked the H.I.V., tuberculosis, diabetes, and Foundation has done—“starting small project in the news until last year, has heart disease. Another is being devel- and focussing on the community of said, “The first person charging up the oped to determine whether a patient users, so that they get the best possi- hill always gets gunned down.” has been successfully inoculated against ble experience.” tetanus or measles. This year, a com- It isn’t clear, though, whether his anu Prakash’s grandfather taught pany that Whitesides co-founded reg- dreams for the Foldscope will be real- M him to swim by throwing him istered the liver-toxicity test with the ized. White sides called it “quite a neat into a canal of the Ganges River in U.S. Food and Drug Administration, idea,” with definite promise as an ed- Mawana, the remote sugarcane town and it has recently started shipping ucational tool, but he said that its util- where he was born. “It was not all pic- the test overseas. ity beyond the classroom remained to turesque,” Prakash said. “There were Inventors of frugal-science tools be seen. (While Prakash and Cybul- fields full of trash.” But Mawana was sometimes have trouble anticipating ski were in Lagos, they discovered that where he first fell in love with insects, the problems that they will encounter the Foldscope, as it was then designed, especially aquatic ones. He built his in the developing world. Early on, could not be used to diagnose malaria, first microscope at the age of seven, White sides’s group was obliged to because its lens was too simple to re- using his brother’s glasses. Three years change the protective packaging of veal the telltale horseshoe-shaped par- later, his mother, Sushma, accepted a one of its microfluidics inventions. asite that causes the disease.) Kentaro job teaching political science at a com- The test had been designed for use in Toyama, a professor at the University munity college in Rampur, five hun- an air-conditioned American lab, but of Michigan School of Information dred miles away. (“The town is known the Indian lab in which it was being and the author of “Geek Heresy: Res- for the Rampuri chaku,” Prakash said. implemented was cooled with ceiling cuing Social Change from the Cult of “It’s a kind of knife—what gangsters fans. In 2008, Christopher Charles, a Technology,” was similarly circum- use in Bollywood movies.”) His father, Canadian researcher working in Cam- spect. He noted that the success of a Brij, stayed behind to run a real-estate bodia, met with a similar hurdle. He tool like the Foldscope depends on business, so Sushma rented an apart- had been exploring a way to reduce the how its users implement it, something ment for herself and the two boys. incidence of iron-deficiency anemia, a over which Prakash ultimately will The previous tenant had been a serious local health problem, by plac- have little control. “What allows peo- chemistry teacher. “He was running a ing small iron ingots in cooking pots. ple to earn more—at least, in our cur- science lab in the house, but he didn’t But Charles had trouble persuading rent globalized economy—are skills pay his rent,” Prakash said. “The land- people to use them. When he learned that the market will pay for,” Toyama lord evicted him, confiscated his lab, and that fish are a symbol of good luck in said. “It’s not the innovative tech doing didn’t know what to do with it, so he Cambodia, he redesigned the iron lump the magic; it’s the efort to build human dumped all the equipment in the back.” as a smiling fish. After that, the ingots capacity.” Prakash and his brother developed an were more readily adopted, and the ane- A cautionary tale might be that of interest in combustion; one experiment mia rate fell forty-six per cent. One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit involved building and then blowing Prakash is aware of the diiculties founded in 2005. The company’s goal up a ten-foot-tall wire-mesh eigy of inherent in transforming a lab-proven was to produce a low-cost, low-energy Ravana, the Hindu demon king. Other invention into a practical tool. He grew computer that organizations and the projects were more practical. Xerox up in India and, as a child, was in- governments of developing nations had a plant in Rampur, and sponsored

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 63 an annual model-making contest. manic inventor prodigies—“a place later, in Delhi, he and Dumont got Prakash led teams to victory four years where Manu can be Manu,” as Gersh- married. in a row, bringing home the grand enfeld put it. Prakash made a name Their life is one of constant work, prize—a teapot or a box of fine cut- for himself in the area of microfluidic or constant play, depending on your lery—to Sushma. His entries included bubble logic, by demonstrating that perspective. She is a professor at the a replica of the Exxon Valdez, the oil water droplets could be made to store, University of California, San Fran- tanker that ran aground of the Alas- carry, and process information, as elec- cisco, where she studies the mechan- kan coast in 1989, and an anatomi- trons do in a computer circuit. While ics of cell division. On weekdays, they cally accurate rabbit skeleton made at the center, he met two people whose are both at their labs. On weekends, from the stinking corpses of two rab- work later helped inspire elements of at home, they work on independent bits. (“They have about as many bones the Foldscope. The first was Erik De- research projects. “The kitchen is a lab as a human,” Prakash said.) His class- maine, the youngest professor in now,” Dumont told me. “The dining- mates would approach him a year in M.I.T.’s history, who established the room table is a lab. The bathroom is advance, asking to be on his Xerox field of computational origami. The also a lab. Well, it was always a lab.” team. “I was the boss, even though other was John Bush, a mathemati- They are hard pressed to name un- I was a foot shorter than everyone,” cian, who co-authored several papers scientific forms of leisure. “We don’t he said. with Prakash, including two on the know anything about music,” Prakash At eighteen, Prakash enrolled at the feeding mechanism of the red-necked said one afternoon, over brunch. He Indian Institute of Technology, in Kan- phalarope, an Arctic shorebird. As it was wearing Crocs studded with a lit- pur, where he majored in computer sci- eats, the phalarope moves its beak in tle rubber caterpillar and bumblebees, ence. One day in 2001, Neil Gershen- a rapid tweezing motion, transform- and he had ordered the chili scram- feld, a professor at the Massachusetts ing food-laden droplets of water into ble. “The last concert we went to, Institute of Technology, came to give aspherical shapes that are propelled up which was also the first, was Bon Jovi.” a lecture. Two students buttonholed him, into its mouth. Prakash built an artifi- His wife corrected him: “Not Bon expressing interest in continuing their cial version of the beak, which he is Jovi. Billy Joel!” studies in the United States. Gersh- now developing to mold polymers into Dumont carries ziplock baggies in enfeld discussed their cases with the lenses for the Foldscope. her purse to store the specimens that head of the university. “I thought I was By 2008, he had racked up thou- Prakash recovers—a spittlebug from going to take the charming, eloquent, sands of dollars in late fees at the li- the conifers near their apartment, a articulate one,” Gershenfeld said. “He brary, and M.I.T. refused to grant him winged insect from a chili scramble. advised me to take the other one. That a degree. Nevertheless, he was awarded His constant Foldscoping, she told me, was Manu.” a post at the Harvard Society of Fel- sometimes invites unwanted attention. Prakash arrived at M.I.T. in 2002. lows, where he met Sophie Dumont, On several occasions, he has had to do He did most of his Ph.D. research at a biophysicist from Quebec. She loaned Foldscope demonstrations for airport Gershenfeld’s Center for Bits and him money and her car so that he could security personnel. “At first, when I Atoms, an interdisciplinary program return all the books he could find; said they were microscopes, they were, with generous funding and a stable of M.I.T. gave him his Ph.D. Three years like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ ” he said. “Then, by the end, they were so excited.” Dumont men- tioned other incidents, like the time Prakash was asked to leave a park in San Francisco after someone reported him for suspicious behavior. “In gen- eral, the attitude toward science is not where it needs to be,” he said.

arlier this year, Prakash took a E phone call from his lawyers. He was in his oice, beneath Stanford’s Science and Engineering Quad, an expanse of sandstone and Mexican fan palms on the school’s central campus. Although his lab was brand new, it al- ready looked well used. The black countertops were covered with flot- sam—pliers, tubes, clamps, an aquar- ium filled with light corn syrup. In Prakash’s oice, a dead sea sponge sat on a table, like a big glob of soap foam. The lawyers wanted to know what “Who wants to play soccer?,” and rushed a greater density of bacteria, like, in he was calling the independent com- out the door. The lab’s Friday game had some cases, dental plaque.) At the same pany that would oversee the scaling already started. school, Cybulski noted another prob- up of Foldscope manufacturing and, At the field, I sat on the sidelines lem: the teachers treated the Foldscopes eventually, other frugal-science tools. under a mulberry tree with Jim Cybul- as precious, fragile objects, collecting They also wanted a mission statement. ski, who has done more Foldscope stud- them from students after each class- Prakash floundered. “One sentence ies overseas than any other member of room use—the opposite of what he that explains everything we’re doing!” Prakash’s lab, including Prakash. He and Prakash had intended. he said. looked exhausted. He was defending The sun disappeared behind the In the lab, Laurel Kroo, a mechan- his dissertation, on frugal mountains and the scrim- ical-engineering student, was research- science, in a few weeks, and mage ended. Prakash came ing the compound eyes of fossilized had recently returned from running over, holding some- trilobites, a group of extinct marine Kenya, where he had been thing. “Wait until you see arthropods, in the hope of improving experimenting with a new this,” he said. “Do you have the Foldscope’s lens design. Haripriya Foldscope adapted for di- your Foldscope?” I got Mukundarajan, another mechanical agnostics. He said that there mine out. He placed a tiny engineer, was elbow-deep in a trans- had been problems with the object on one of my slides, lucent box of live mosquitoes. With original Foldscope when inserted it under the lens, Prakash, she is working on an early- he had used it to screen for and handed the device to warning system for disease outbreaks. schistosomiasis in Ghana, me. I held it up to my eye. It uses a postcard that is covered in in 2014. The illness, which afects more “What do you think it is?” he asked. beads of chemical gel, which hungry than two hundred million people world- Unmagnified, it might have been a mosquitoes mistake for human flesh. wide, is caused by parasitic flatworms. grain of sea salt. But, when the illumi- As the insects feed on the gel, they Their eggs are detectable with a Fold- nated circle came into view, so did a leave behind traces of whatever patho- scope, in urine samples, but it had been ghostly, elongated skull, swaddled in a gens they are carrying—malaria, for too diicult to try to prevent contam- bundle of bent, silvery stalks. The word instance, or the dengue virus. “When ination, Cybulski said, and too tiring “unsprung” came to mind. they bite you, they are essentially spit- on the eyes to squint through a pinhole “I’m still looking. I see lots of legs. ting into you,” Mukundarajan said. all day long. The new medical Fold- Is it a spider egg?” Volunteers leave the postcards out- scope, which would cost ten dollars, in- “You’re close,” Prakash said. “It’s defi- doors for a week, then drop them in a cluded a built-in projector, so that a nitely an arthropod. Let’s look at it to- mailbox to send them to a lab. Prakash team of health workers could view a gether.” He attached my Foldscope to and Mukundarajan are planning to slide together, without bringing it near his phone with the magnets, precisely set up the first field study, in Kenya, their faces. Cybulski’s results from the aligned the lenses, and turned on his next year. Kenya test had revealed that fifty-four camera. Another student, George Korir, was children, about half the study group, “There’s something really incred- working on a prototype for a five- were infected with schistosomiasis, but ible here,” he said, as the image came dollar hand-cranked chemistry set. Its he reported this as hopeful news. “With into focus. Cybulski leaned over to base is a Kikkerland music box, which a diagnosis, now they will get treated,” see. Prakash panned slowly across works like a player piano, with songs he said. the creature. “It’s a baby ant,” he said. encoded on perforated rolls of paper. Cybulski is sometimes obliged to “This is where ants come from. That’s In Korir’s adapted version, the perfo- play Sancho Panza to Prakash’s Don the gut. Those are the legs. We can rations tell the box what chemicals to Quixote. Although Prakash likes to watch it develop into a real ant, right dispense—each note prompts a pump rhapsodize about how a Foldscope kit here.” of liquid. Given the right perforations is the best way to teach germ theory, We didn’t wait around. Prakash was and chemicals, it can detect contam- it can be diicult to see anything much late for a date with Dumont. As we ination in water or soil. Korir, who is smaller than two microns in size with made our way back to the lab, he from Kenya and has been at Prakash’s the standard lens, and bacteria often pointed out a parade of ants crossing lab since 2012, is also experimenting measure less than one micron. Last our path. They were most likely not with ways to use the box to test for ma- year, at a school in Tanzania, Cybul- moving house, he said, since none of laria in remote areas. (So far, he hasn’t ski persuaded the director of a sanita- them were carrying larvae in their been successful.) tion-and-hygiene program not to have mouths. He crouched down to study Prakash and the lawyers concluded students use the Foldscope to look for them. Then, remembering that he was their phone call without settling on a microbes on their hands. He worried in a hurry, he stood up and walked on.  name or a mission statement. He began that the children would fail to see any- filling a cardboard box with equipment thing, and that this might lead them for an experiment at home—coils of to conclude that their hands were per- newyorker.com black rubber tubing, a vacuum pump— fectly clean. (This is less of a concern Video: A look at the microscopic world with and then, noticing the time, he called, when the sample is of something with Manu Prakash.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 65 PROFILES NEGOTIATING THE WHIRLWIND

Can Secretary of State John Kerry break through in Syria?

BY DAVID REMNICK

ohn Kerry, the sixty-eighth Secre- Teresa Heinz, have a house on the water She was not quite done. “I knew J tary of State of the United States, and a seventy-six-foot, seven-million- from looking at the . . .” was born to a temperament of wintry dollar sailboat called Isabel. “We were Kerry uses many terms of endear- rectitude. He is descended from the sitting in the bow,” Barnicle recalled, ment for his wife; now he called her by Winthrops, who helped found the Mas- “and we were talking about a bunch of the telegraphic “T.” sachusetts Bay Colony, and the Forbeses, diferent things—about Iran, about what “T, let’s not go . . .” he said gently. a Brahmin clan that made its money the President of Iran was like—and I As she tried to speak again, he shut in railways and in exporting tea, silver, said, ‘Other than not being President, it down. and opium to China. His father was a this is pretty good.’ There was a secu- “T, T, we’re not . . . I didn’t want to diplomat. Kerry attended St. Paul’s and rity boat sailing of to the side of us. spend time there,” he said. “I just con- Yale (where he was in Skull and Bones) Then he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I realize how sciously did not spend time there, and and, as a naval oicer in Vietnam, earned badly Shrum screwed me.’ ” I moved on, and I moved on as rapidly three Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star, A few weeks ago, between Kerry’s as . . . It’s over. It’s behind me. . . . I and the Silver Star. He dated Jacque- trips to Europe and the Middle East, could have done some things a little line Kennedy’s half-sister, sailed with I had dinner with Kerry and Heinz at bit diferently. We didn’t. But I’m not J.F.K., and married twice into substan- their house in Georgetown, a twenty- going to feel regret the rest of my life.” tial fortunes. Despite the codes of his three-room mansion decorated with In early 2013, after twenty-eight class, however, Kerry was never entirely Early American portraits, Dutch still- years in the Senate, Kerry succeeded subtle about his ambitions. When he lifes, and an amiable yellow Labrador Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. was in prep school, his classmates used retriever named Ben. (The Lab has the He is seventy-two, and this is almost to play “Hail to the Chief ” to him on Twitter handle @DiploMutt.) I asked surely his last high-ranking job as a the kazoo. Kerry how long he carried around a public oicial. As he put it to me, “I In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presi- sense of anger and resentment. have fourteen months left on the clock.” dential race to George W. Bush, who is “I didn’t carry it,” he insisted. “I He has already made his historical mark widely considered the worst President didn’t. I didn’t. My wife was mad at by acting as the Obama Administra- of the modern era, he refused to chal- me that I didn’t carry it longer.” tion’s chief negotiator in the nuclear lenge the results, despite his suspicion From across the table, Teresa Heinz talks with Iran. That deal, which is de- that in certain states, particularly Ohio, said, “I’m still carrying it.” signed to prevent Iran from building where the Electoral College count The Secretary of State looked up an atomic weapon and sparking a nu- hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many from his halibut. An ill wind of panic clear arms race throughout the Mid- voting machines. But he could not sufer swept the oblong plain of his face. From dle East, was signed two months ago. the defeat in complete silence. He was the thick thatch of gray hair to the im- But it was never a foregone conclusion. outraged that Bush, who had won a state- probably long and thrusting chin, This time last year, the White House side berth in the Texas Air National Kerry’s visage is immense and, in its was running “Plan B” meetings about Guard during the Vietnam War, used implacable resting expression, resem- what steps to take—deeper sanctions, campaign surrogates, the so-called Swift bles one of the monolithic heads that potential military strikes—if the talks Boat Veterans for Truth, to slime his rise from the loam of Easter Island. failed. military record. He was furious, too, at “Well, I’m not,” Kerry said. His admirers and his critics in the Robert Shrum, his chief strategist, and His gaze turned to his wife, word- diplomatic world describe Kerry in sim- other campaign advisers who had re- lessly imploring her to keep quiet. Heinz ilar terms: tirelessly optimistic, dogged, strained him from hitting back. is seventy-seven, five years older than her rhetorically undisciplined, undaunted “For a long period, after 2004, every husband, and, in 2013, she sufered a sei- by risk, convinced that if he can just get time he even half fell asleep all he saw zure that she has attributed to an earlier “the relevant parties” into “the room” was voting machines in the state of concussion “that was not properly treated he can make a deal. “John Kerry picks Ohio,” Mike Barnicle, a close friend at all.” It’s not easy for her to get around, his battles, and he invests body and of Kerry’s and a former columnist for and she appears infrequently at public soul in tackling conflicts where the the Boston Globe, told me. This sum- events, but she spoke clearly and ardently human consequences are very high,” mer, Barnicle spent time with Kerry on throughout the evening, much as she had Samantha Power, the United States Nantucket, where Kerry and his wife, during the 2004 campaign. Ambassador to the United Nations,

66 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 “His optimism is such that he thinks, We will confront this!” one oicial said of Kerry’s attitude. “There’s got to be a solution.”

ILLUSTRATION BY BARRY BLITT THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 67 told me. “When he engages, he is all in.” a very personal experience: When I breaking down: a blown tire, a leak in an Kerry has shown repeatedly that ran for President of the United States, auxiliary fuel tank, “electronic problems.” he will use any lever as a means of in 2004, against George Bush, in the Kerry is six-four and walks with a diplomatic persuasion—including his end, on Election Day, we had prob- pained roll in his gait. He has had both defeat in 2004. lems in the state of Ohio on how the hips replaced—his ice-hockey days at In July, 2014, Afghanistan faced a votes were taking place. I even went Yale took a toll—and he is still recov- potential civil war as the candidates to to court in America to keep polling ering from an accident last May, in succeed Hamid Karzai as President— places open to make sure my people which he steered his racing bike into a Abdullah Abdullah, a physician and could vote. I knew that even in my curb, crashed to the road, and shattered the former foreign minis- country, the United States, his right femur. He travels in a cabin ter, and Ashraf Ghani, the where we had hundreds of in the front of the plane, where a couch former chancellor of Kabul years of practicing democ- unfolds into a bed, allowing him to University—charged each racy, we still had problems stretch out to read briefing papers and other with trying to steal carrying out that election. to make calls on a secure telephone line the election. A few years The next afternoon, I had to foreign leaders and to the White earlier, Kerry, serving as a meeting with my people, House. He doesn’t sleep much, but Obama’s emissary while still and I told them that I did sometimes he brings along a nylon- in the Senate, had talked not think it appropriate of string guitar and relaxes by playing Beat- Karzai down from reckless me to take the country les songs, Spanish laments, and show decisions by recalling his through three or four tunes. (Argentina will be delighted to own political upheavals; now he needed months of not knowing who the Pres- hear that “Evita” is a favorite.) When to do something similar. ident was. So that afternoon in Bos- he’s on one of his diplomatic “death On July 12th, Abdullah met with ton I conceded to the President and marches” through some rarely visited Kerry, in Kabul, at the American Am- talked about the need to bring the region—recently, it was five Central bassador’s residence. Abdullah’s sup- country together. . . . One of the main Asian nations in two days—he likes to porters in the Northern Alliance and lessons from this is there is a future. bone up with a “crash course.” among various warlords—Ghani had There is a tomorrow.” “I usually Google a country, find an his own warlord constituency—did not Several days later, Abdullah Abdul- interesting article or two, read about it, want him to back down. It was left to lah conceded and joined the Afghan get some history,” he told me. “I want Kerry to argue that, despite what was government. to know where I am. I want to know delicately described as “electoral im- what made this place like it is. What is proprieties,” confrontation had to be erry and Heinz have no shortage it about Samarkand that’s special?” avoided. K of residences; in addition to the In late October, I joined him on one “I ran for President and I lost and houses in Georgetown and on Nan- of the death marches, a Thursday- to- now I’m Secretary of State of the most tucket, they live in an eighteenth- Sunday trip from Andrews Air Force powerful country in the world,” Kerry century five-story pile on Louisburg Base, outside D.C., to Berlin, Vienna, told Abdullah and his entourage, ac- Square, in Beacon Hill; in a family com- Amman, and Riyadh. His job is to give cording to an aide’s contemporaneous pound on Naushon, a private island of strategic advice, help execute White notes. “I know your anger. I know your Cape Cod; in a fifteenth-century En- House policy, tamp down crises, and reach frustration.” He pressed Abdullah not glish farmhouse that was reassembled agreements; to stroke allies, send clear to walk away from politics, lest the on the bank of Big Wood River, in Sun signals to powers considered more prob- country tumble into chaos and “the next Valley; and on a ninety-acre farm called lematic, like Russia, Turkey, Saudi Ara- generation” lose its chance. Rosemont, outside Pittsburgh, where bia, and China; and to forge potential re- The United Nations carried out an Heinz spent time with her first hus- lationships with old enemies like Iran. audit of the election and determined band, H. John Heinz III, the Republi- The Obama Administration, work- that although there had been fraud can senator and condiments scion, ing in the political safe haven of a sec- on both sides, Ghani had won. Ab- who died in 1991. When Kerry ran for ond term, has won two recent, if divi- dullah was still not prepared to yield. President, her fortune was estimated at sive, victories: the deal with Iran and On September 17th, Kerry called Ab- around a billion dollars. Kerry and the opening to Cuba. It also has a “bucket dullah from his oice at the State De- Heinz keep their financial assets sepa- list”: reaching a ceasefire and political partment to persuade him to concede rate, but, had Kerry won in 2004, they settlement in Syria; stepping up an in- and accept the face-saving position would, together, have been the wealth- ternationally coördinated fight against of “chief executive oicer” in Ghani’s iest family ever to occupy the White ISIS; and advancing the fight against government. House. climate change. This trip was designed He asked Abdullah to put his phone As Secretary of State, however, Kerry mainly to get wildly disparate parties on speaker so that his aides could hear. spends much of his life onboard a worse- from the West, Russia, and the Middle After flattering Abdullah for his for-wear government jet, a Boeing 757. East to begin negotiations on Syria. strength and importance in the coun- Both Kerry and Clinton have often had In particular, the trick was to get Iran try, Kerry said, “I will share with you the humbling experience of the plane “in the room” without losing its sworn

68 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 enemies, the Sunni nations of the Gulf. many to see Chancellor Angela Merkel. them.” The mufti was, in fact, anti- Kerry’s persistence and self- assurance, In recent weeks, there had been an Semitic and pro-Nazi, but the notion coupled with excruciating economic alarming uptick in street violence in that he was the ideologist of the Ho- sanctions, is what helped him succeed Jerusalem and the West Bank—stab- locaust was preposterous. with the Iranians. It’s also what led to bings, shootings, rock throwing, face- Although Netanyahu “clarified” his nine months of fruitless, chaotic, and, ofs with troops—and at least some of comments on the mufti before arriving arguably, corrosive negotiations that it was due to rumors that the Israelis in Berlin, Kerry’s circle did not see the broke down last year between the Is- wanted to exert more control over the performance as an aberration. Most raelis and the Palestinians—negotia- Temple Mount, in the Old City, or of the ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet tions that almost no one, not even the what Arabs call the Haram al-Sharif, are on the record opposing a two-state President, believed would lead to a the Noble Sanctuary. Some Israelis on solution. American oicials speak of breakthrough. Kerry argued that the the religious right want to build a Third Netanyahu as myopic, entitled, untrust- hellbound trajectory of events was head- Temple there; some Arabs claim, worthy, routinely disrespectful toward ing toward calamity, and he had to try; wrongly, that the site, now dominated the President, and focussed solely on his critics said that the conditions were by the Al Aqsa Mosque, never had any short-term political tactics to keep his not ripe, and that the efort amounted Jewish historical importance. right-wing constituency in line. Net- to a diplomatic vanity project. Kerry’s Kerry met with Netanyahu with the anyahu seems not to care if he insults Middle East adventure was precisely modest goal of dialling back the rhet- the Administration. Ron Dermer, his the kind of initiative that Hillary Clin- oric about the Temple Mount on both ambassador to the U.S., secretly arranged ton, who was intent on running for sides, getting the Israelis to make it with John Boehner for Netanyahu to President, and who is, by nature, more clear that the complex status quo was speak before Congress without alerting risk averse, was disinclined to take up not going to change. But Netanyahu the White House; Danny Danon, his as Secretary of State. had just infuriated him by giving a envoy to the U.N., blamed Obama’s The President has admired Kerry’s speech suggesting that the grand mufti “lack of leadership” for Turkish and Ira- energy and sense of commitment since of Jerusalem in the thirties was the ideo- nian aggression; and Ran Baratz, whom they worked together on the Senate logical inspiration for the Final Solu- Netanyahu appointed last month as his Foreign Relations Committee, al- tion. “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate media chief, wrote on his Facebook page though, a number of sources told me, the Jews at the time,” Netanyahu told that the President was anti-Semitic and he occasionally ribs Kerry for his more the World Zionist Congress, in late that Kerry had the mental abilities of a headlong eforts. And yet the two have October. “He wanted to expel the Jews.” twelve-year-old. markedly diferent temperaments and Netanyahu said the mufti didn’t want Kerry sometimes speaks vaguely views of what the United States should German Jews to come to Palestine, of trying yet again to forge an Israeli- attempt to achieve, particularly in the so, instead, he advised Hitler to “burn Palestinian settlement—“There are Middle East. Obama sees the region in the throes of historical turmoil— Sunni versus Shia, civil war in Syria, threats to national boundaries drawn by France and Great Britain a century ago, threats to the stability of Leba- non, Jordan, even Saudi Arabia. Hav- ing seen one intervention after another fail, he is determined to act with re- straint. “Kerry, on the other hand, sees no historical trends that can defeat us,” Philip Gordon, a veteran National Security Council oicial and Obama’s principal adviser on the Middle East from 2013 to the spring of 2015, told me. “His optimism is such that he thinks, We will confront this! We will deal with it! There’s got to be a solu- tion. We just need to find it and lead people there.” Gordon does not say this with admiration. We landed at a military airport in Berlin. Kerry got into an Embassy car and headed to a meeting with the Is- raeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Net- anyahu, who happened to be in Ger- Kerry’s special envoy Frank Lowenstein told me that Kerry will “play through the whistle,” and persist with the Israe- lis and the Palestinians until the end of his time in oice, but he added, “The window for a two-state solution is clos- ing, though none of us who’ve worked on it will regret that we tried to save it.” Kerry believes that Israel, along with the occupied territories, is headed to- ward becoming a “unitary state that is an impossible entity to manage.” He is particularly concerned, he said, that the Palestinian Authority could collapse; that, in the event, the P.A.’s thirty thou- sand security oicers would scatter; and that chaos and increasingly violent clashes with Israel would follow. “I understand the passions that are behind all of this—I get it,” Kerry told me. “If it were easy, it would have been done a long time ago. I happen to be- lieve there is a way forward. There’s a solution. It would be good for Israel; it’d be great for the Palestinians; it’d be great for the region. People would make so much money. There’d be so many jobs created. There could be peace. And you “Lately, I feel like the only time I have to myself would be stronger for it. Because nobody is when I’m having sex with Brian.” that I know or have met in the West Bank is anxious to have jihadis come in. •• “The alternative is you sit there and things just get worse,” Kerry went on. “There will be more Hezbollah. There worse things than getting caught try- partment. American oicials are frus- will be more rockets. And they’ll all be ing”—but his last attempt left him badly trated in various ways with the Pales- pointed in one direction. And there will disillusioned. His public comments now tinians as well, but, as the oicial said, be more people on the border. And what make it clear that only if Israel and the “they don’t have any power in this dy- happens then? You’re going to be one Palestinians come knocking will he get namic. The Israelis have all the cards.” big fortress? I mean, that’s not a way to involved in a negotiation. In 2014, as As a diplomat, Kerry is duty-bound live. It seems to me it is far more intel- Kerry shuttled from capital to capital, to describe raw reality in upholstered ligent and far more strategic—which is one Israeli cabinet minister told me, platitudes. And so, after his long ses- an important word here—to have a the- “We are only doing this for you!” Moshe sion in Berlin with Netanyahu, he said, ory of how you are going to preserve Ya’alon, Netanyahu’s defense minister, in a voice that had been rendered a the Jewish state and be a democracy and was quoted in the Israeli press saying, scratchy whisper by too many hours of a beacon to the world that everybody “The only thing that can ‘save us’ is talking, that the meeting left him “cau- envisioned when Israel was created.” for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize tiously encouraged.” He hoped to “re- I asked him if he could imagine an and leave us in peace.” Kerry, Ya’alon solve age-old diferences in a frozen end to the State of Israel. said, “turned up here determined and conflict.” He wanted the “parties” to “No, I don’t believe that’s going acting out of misplaced obsession and “pull back from the precipice” and go to happen,” he said. “It’s just, What messianic fervor.” down a “road that takes people some- is it going to be like, is the question. The relationship further soured when where.” And so on. Will it be a democracy? Will it be a Netanyahu brought his campaign against State Department aides said that Jewish state? Or will it be a unitary the Iran nuclear deal to the floor of the sources of Kerry’s exasperation with Ne- state with two systems, or some draco- U.S. Congress. “The frustration with tanyahu range from the injustice of set- nian treatment of Palestinians, because the Israelis on a lot of issues has been tlement building in the West Bank to to let them vote would be to dilute the sky-high,” one senior U.S. oicial told the way he employs Yitzhak Molcho, Jewish state? I don’t know. I have no me, characterizing the mood at both his lawyer and confidant, to stifle even answer to that. But the problem is, nei- the White House and the State De- the most inconsequential negotiation. ther do they. Neither do the people who

70 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 are supposed to be providing answers rebel outposts, and support from the tervention will work,” a State Depart- to this. It is not an answer to simply Iraqi Shiite militias—has regained its ment oicial told me. Kerry, who sees continue to build in the West Bank and footing and maintains a hold over up that the crisis has threatened the sta- to destroy the homes of the other folks to two-thirds of the population. ISIS is bility of Jordan, Lebanon, and other you’re trying to make peace with and under increasing attack from coalition states in the region and has provided pretend that that’s a solution.” air strikes and Kurdish ground troops, ISIS with a base, in Raqqa and Ramadi, but it has moved the fight abroad. has, the oicial said, “much more faith n the evening, Kerry flew from Ber- The dispiriting reality of American in our ability to avoid a slippery slope.” I lin to Vienna, where, in meetings foreign policy in the twenty-first cen- From the beginning of the civilian with his Russian, Turkish, and Saudi tury has been neatly summarized in Po- uprisings in Syria, in 2011, and the re- counterparts, the focus would turn to litico by Philip Gordon, the former gime’s escalating and bloody reaction, Syria. Some of the reporters on the N.S.C. oicial: “In Iraq, the U.S. inter- many of Obama’s advisers have argued State Department beat recall with nos- vened and occupied, and the result was for a more aggressive policy: arming and talgia a time when Colin Powell and a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. in- funding the “moderate rebels”; air strikes Condoleezza Rice regularly came to tervened and did not occupy, and the on Damascus; taking out Assad’s heli- the back of the plane to brief them, result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the copters and planes, which drop barrel often on the record. Kerry is prone to U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, bombs packed with shrapnel, explosives, senatorial over-talk and the occasional and the result is a costly disaster.” Some and, sometimes, chlorine; the establish- gafe; recently, he had to walk back an foreign-policy experts, from Leon Pa- ment of safe zones and a no-fly zone. infelicitous statement that there was a netta, the former C.I.A. director, to In 2012, the C.I.A. director, David Pe- “rationale” to the murders of the Char- Richard Haass, the president of the traeus; the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, lie Hebdo staf, as opposed to the more Council on Foreign Relations, predict General Martin Dempsey; Secretary of recent attacks in Paris. White House that the conflicts that have emerged Defense Leon Panetta; Samantha Power, oicials have made it clear that his bouts from the Arab uprisings will lead to a who was then a national-security ad- of verbal indiscipline are unwelcome, “Thirty Years’ War,” a protracted, re- viser; and Secretary of State Clinton and his trips to the back of the plane gional bloodletting reminiscent of the pressed Obama to support vetted reb- are less frequent. Recently, at the Saban religious wars in Central Europe that els against the regime. Kerry—who was Forum, a Middle East conference in began with the fragmentation of the influenced by the relatively successful, if Washington, D.C., Martin Indyk, Holy Roman Empire, in 1618. belated, interventions in the Balkans, in Kerry’s former aide, interviewed him The violent swirl of uncertainties the nineties, and also by the calamitous onstage and began by saying, with a brings out the President’s native caution. decision not to intervene in Rwanda in smile, that he would be the only one The most consequential political act of 1994—joined this chorus when he re- asking questions, because Kerry’s stafers Obama’s early career was a brief appear- placed Clinton. But no one could con- “were worried about your answers.” ance, in 2002, at an antiwar demon- vince Obama that deeper involvement The State Department beat is try- stration in Federal Plaza, in downtown would avoid a repetition of the Iraq fiasco. ing. The reporters are sardined into the Chicago, where he declared that the im- Kerry was a critical actor in the most back of the plane for endless flights pending invasion of Iraq was “dumb” and humbling episode of the Syrian drama. and, upon arrival, spend hours waiting would “require a U.S. occupation of un- Obama had warned Assad that he would in hotel and airport holding rooms, determined length, at undetermined cost, be crossing a “red line” if he used chem- interrupted by bursts of stenography. with undetermined consequences.” That ical weapons, saying that such an act While Kerry met with Sergei Lavrov, speech set him apart from both Kerry would “change my calculus.” In August, his Russian counterpart, at the Hotel and Clinton, who, as senators, voted to 2013, a year after the “red line” warning, Imperial, we pecked at the birdseed of give Bush the right to use force in Iraq, Assad’s forces, according to Western in- the pool report, a couple of precisely and it set the ideological template for his telligence services and an independent quoted non-quotes. The pool reporter foreign policy, not least on Syria. Vali U.N. commission, fired rockets armed concluded with this plaintive note: Nasr, a former State Department adviser with sarin on Ghouta, a suburb of Da- “That’s it. My recorder was running for to Hillary Clinton and Richard Hol- mascus, killing hundreds. The U.S. pre- a total of twenty-two seconds.” brooke, told me, “Obama hasn’t changed pared to attack with cruise missiles. In But the talks were of real significance. his position from 2011. He is always con- a speech insisting that Assad give up all Kerry was trying to persuade his inter- cerned that it’s a fool’s errand, a slippery his chemical arms, Kerry referred to the locutors, especially the Saudis, of the slope to another Iraq, pouring blood and “lessons” of the Holocaust and of Rwan- wisdom of including Iran, which has treasure into another conflict.” da. General Dempsey said, “Our finger worked with the Russians to prop up Kerry’s senior aides are not hesitant was on the trigger.” Obama warned of Assad, in future talks. The developments to say that both as chairman of the Sen- an American attack, although Kerry, fol- in Syria were clear enough: at least two ate Foreign Relations Committee and lowing the President’s minimizing lead, hundred thousand dead, four million as Secretary of State he has disagreed allowed that the strike would be “unbe- refugees, millions more displaced. The strongly with Obama on Syria. “Obama lievably small.” Then, without consult- regime—backed by Iranian troops, Hez- prioritizes avoiding any entanglements ing Kerry, Obama stepped back, saying bollah guerrillas, Russian air strikes on where it is uncertain that such an in- that he would have to get congressional

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 71 approval before an attack on Syria. He kind of Syrian-Israeli agreement he March, 2011, when the revolution began had concluded that it was worse to go could help forge. Assad expressed in Syria. As the Syrian regime increased to war than to be seen as weak. concern that the economic isolation of its level of cruelty from month to Obama’s aides say that the debates Syria, and its crippling unemployment, month—beginning with the police tor- over Syria are always over the cost of was building up enormous strain and turing young protesters and moving on an action versus the cost of inaction. that the regime could fall to a funda- to the indiscriminate killing of many Ben Rhodes, a deputy national- security mentalist-led revolt. Walid Muallem, thousands, using barrel bombs—all talk adviser, told me, “The President has Assad’s foreign minister, told one of of the “soft-spoken British-educated spent more time on Syria than on any Kerry’s aides, “If we don’t succeed in ophthalmologist,” of Assad as the re- other issue in the Situation Room, often opening up our economy, you’ll come formist hope of Syria, was eclipsed. testing diferent theories and proposi- back here in ten years and you’ll meet Kerry shook his head at the mem- tions. But no one has ever been able to with Mullah Assad.” ory of it. At dinner in Damascus, Assad answer the second and third questions: Assad told Kerry that, in order to had told Kerry and Heinz about how If you do X, then what? If you were to make peace with Israel, he had to get his mother could no longer go to a local take more assertive military action back the Golan Heights, territory lost mosque dressed in a skirt. He talked against Assad, what happens the day in the 1967 war. For that to be consid- about how female college classmates, after, when Assad is still in place and ered, Kerry replied, Syria would have professional women, were now in hijab. we have not engaged militarily even to cease the transit of arms through “We want to be a secular country,” Assad more robustly? There’s an expectation Syria to Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and said, according to Kerry. “We don’t want to see it through. There is an escalatory to Hamas, in Gaza. to be inundated by this.” logic that leads the U.S. to take respon- “We basically delivered him a pretty Kerry went on, “I had an impression sibility for Syria. He’s open to difer- strong message of, ‘You better stop this that this guy had serious business plans, ent proposals, but where do they lead?” or else,’ ” Kerry told me. “But I also en- growth plans, development plans, When I spoke with President Obama gaged with him, because he wanted to wanted to change.” When I pressed last year, he made a similar point. “It is talk about another subject—a relation- him to describe Assad in terms of his very diicult to imagine a scenario in ship with Israel in the future. I don’t crimes, he backed of. “You know what? which our involvement in Syria would think I’ve ever talked about this pub- I want to try to talk common sense to have led to a better outcome, short of licly, but he was ready to make a deal him through this process, and I do not us being willing to undertake an efort with Israel. And the proof of that is a want to get into any—it’s just the in- in size and scope similar to what we letter I still have that he wrote and appropriate moment for me to . . .” did in Iraq,” he said. “And when I hear signed proposing a structure by which Both Kerry and Heinz said they had people suggesting that somehow if we he was willing to recognize Israel, have heard from their Syrian sources that had just financed and armed the oppo- an embassy there, make peace, deal Assad’s mother or his brother, Maher sition earlier, that somehow Assad would with the Golan, et cetera.” (A repre- al-Assad, the family enforcer figure and be gone by now and we’d have a peace- sentative of the Syrian government de- an Army general who commands the ful transition, it’s magical thinking.” nied that Assad ever wrote such a let- élite Fourth Armored Division and the Nearly everyone I talked to in the Republican Guard, urged Bashar to Administration considered the “red line” crack down hard on the protesters; oth- aftermath to be a diplomatic fiasco. The erwise, the family and the Alawite re- Syrian government did, however, give gime were finished. Kerry thinks of up its main chemical stockpiles when Assad as the toxic product of his fam- its ally Russia stepped in and pressured ily and his political environment, a kind it to do so. Sergei Lavrov, the foreign of rational autocrat who set out to re- minister, worked with Kerry to close form his country but, when faced with the deal. Meanwhile, Assad remains in the prospect of joining the list of de- power. The Administration, which posed Arab dictators, acted in the pre- started out saying that he must step dictably monstrous way of his father, aside, is now willing to see Assad play ter; he also denied that Assad took any who, in 1982, slaughtered twenty thou- a transitional role in a political settle- oppressive measures in 2011.) Syria sand people in the city of Hama to put ment before leaving the stage at an un- asked Kerry for economic assistance, down a Muslim Brotherhood uprising. determined point. As one abashed U.S. including a pipeline to Iraq and aid Assad, Kerry said, “made enormous, oicial told me, “The meaning of ‘Assad for technology and health care. When gigantic mistakes, and I think they are has to go’ has evolved.” Netanyahu was told of the discussions, disqualifying mistakes.” Kerry contin- he was reluctant. “Bibi came to Wash- ues to use bloodless terms like “mis- o has Kerry’s view of Assad. In 2010, ington, and one of the first things out takes” because he hopes he will soon be S before the Arab uprisings, Kerry of his mouth in the Oval Oice was dealing with Assad—either through met several times with Assad in Da- ‘I can’t do this. I’m not going to—I Russia and Iran or through the media, mascus, at Obama’s request. The Ad- just can’t.’ ” or even a negotiating team from Da- ministration wanted Kerry to see what The issue was rendered moot in mascus. Either way, his job, as he sees

72 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 it, is to persuade. The American posi- tion is still that Assad must go, but, in order to keep Russia and Iran in the discussion, Obama and Kerry have fudged the question of when. “I believe Syria can be put back to- gether still,” Kerry told me. “But I think this is the last shot to try to do it. I think that if you can’t do this it could break up into enclaves and Iraq could— I mean, you could see a lot of things happen. This is not the Thirty Years’ War today. But, if allowed to fester unabated by the peace process or by a solution, this could become a kind of Thirty Years’ War, because it could de- velop into a bona-fide, full-fledged Sunni- Shia conflagration.”

ienna is a scene of satisfaction Vfor Kerry. It is where he signed “You’re right—the shipping isn’t free. They’ve folded documents for a nuclear settlement the expense into the cost of the item.” with Mohammed Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister. Obama had ramped •• up economic sanctions and launched cyber attacks against Iran well before Kerry joined the Administration, but of destroying a facility like Fordow. idea of a “moderate” opposition and re- when Kerry was still a senator he was The agreement could, in time, col- fused to accept a specific time line for involved in a series of secret American- lapse if Iran is caught violating it, but Assad to step down. And it would not Iranian meetings, brokered by Sultan Obama and Kerry were making a bet be a party if the Russians did not re- Qaboos bin Said, of Oman, which that they could both prevent a nuclear mind everyone of the chaos created by prepared the way. Iran and empower more modern ele- the American invasion of Iraq. The tension in the negotiating rooms ments in the Iranian élites who may, “I hear it all the time,” Kerry told me. was sometimes unbearable. Opposition after the passing of Ali Khamenei, the “I hear it from Lavrov. I mean, we work to the talks raged from Jerusalem to Supreme Leader, and his hard-line cadre professionally and we go at things in a Capitol Hill, and Zarif made it known, of ayatollahs, liberalize the regime. constructive way, but he doesn’t let me both as a tactic and as a matter of fact, In Vienna, in the gaudy, chande- forget Libya or Egypt or Iraq, and the that he faced immense pressure in Teh- liered haunts of the Imperial, Kerry was ‘color revolutions’ ”—in Ukraine, Geor- ran from hard-liners who wanted to now trying to build on that treaty. After gia, and other states where the Kremlin break of negotiations. “The subtext all a long day, he emerged from his ses- leadership believes the U.S. has fomented along was possible war,” the State De- sions with the Russians, Turks, and Sau- revolt. “I roll with it, but it’s important partment oicial told me. It was dis- dis muttering some diplomatic word to understand it. I mean, if you’re going cussed openly. During one exchange in globules: the meetings were “construc- to try to work something with Russia, Lausanne, when the two sides were ar- tive and productive and succeeded in you need to understand the degree to guing over Fordow, a secret underground surfacing some ideas, which I am not which these things matter.” uranium-enrichment site, Kerry asked, going to share today,” and warm con- The farrago of competing national “Why do you care so much? You have gratulations to Austria on the occasion interests, the legacies of historical blun- facilities elsewhere.” of its national day, and, as for how long ders, the fantastical cast of characters, Zarif said that the Fordow instal- Assad will stay in power, “we can agree the sheer bloodlust, the prospect of re- lation, which was built under a moun- to disagree.” gional if not global conflict—all con- tain near the city of Qom, was an in- The talks were more eventful than spire to make Kerry’s task in Syria surance policy in case Israel or the he let on. As always, some time had to nearly impossible. But now, after years United States attacked Iran’s other sites. be allotted for posturing and venting. of moribund diplomacy in the face of Kerry replied, “I don’t want to be crude Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign min- horrific bloodshed and waves of ter- about it, but that won’t save you.” The ister, repeatedly reminded the room of rified refugees, he seemed to be mak- Americans in the room knew that Kerry Assad’s butchery, referring to him Ho- ing incremental progress. Not only were was referring to a thirty-thousand- merically as “the man who’s killed three he and his negotiating partners talking; pound bomb called the Massive Ord- hundred thousand people.” Lavrov, the they were also heading toward getting nance Penetrator, which is capable Russian foreign minister, scofed at the Iran in the room. “A gathering of a

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 73 do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Kerry said, “Someone has to die so President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, ‘the first President to lose a war.’ ” The Nixon Administra- tion, he said, “has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to dis- own us and the sacrifices we made for this country.” Nixon was repelled and, at some level, impressed. Talking on the phone with his counsel, Charles Colson, he said that Kerry was “sort of a phony, “Oh, those are the lobbyists who get us our government subsidies.” isn’t he?” But even H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staf, told the Presi- •• dent, “He did a superb job on it at the Foreign Relations Committee yester- day. A Kennedy-type guy, he looks like group of unthinkable countries,” Lav- motivation of Putin and the Iranian a Kennedy, and he, he talks exactly like rov called it. leadership in agreeing to send emis- a Kennedy.” Certainly, there was a greater sense saries to talks in Vienna: “Are they there But while Kerry made his name in of urgency in Washington, in Mos- only to prop [Assad] up and forever, or a radical voice, he was always a man of cow, in Europe, and in the Gulf. The are they there helping to try to engi- the establishment. More than any dip- Iran nuclear deal, despite opposition neer something to happen? And so I’ve lomat or politician this side of Bill Clin- in Israel, in Saudi Arabia, and in the been trying to put that to the test.” ton, he has an abiding faith in the value U.S. Congress, boosted the credibility Finally, his voice gave out—I could of personal relationships and of his ca- of American diplomacy, and of Kerry no longer hear him above the engines pacity to persuade. All he has to do is in particular. Vladimir Putin—in order of the jet, and he appeared to be in pain. get the parties in a room and he can’t to prop up the Syrian regime, regain He winced by way of farewell and left lose. Obama, by contrast, has no more leverage in the Middle East, and re- me to return to the back of the plane. cultivated relationships with foreign store a sense of post-Soviet Russia as leaders than he has with Republican a world power—has returned in force hen Kerry was appointed by leaders. Where Obama is skeptical, to the Syrian issue, unleashing war- WObama to head the State De- Kerry is almost sentimental in his op- planes on rebel positions, in the name partment, he made a point of meeting timism. He has even made his peace of the fight against ISIS. With ter- with his predecessors. As a young man, with Henry Kissinger: “I seek his ad- ror attacks abroad and the influx of he’d loathed Henry Kissinger. To him, vice—he’s a brilliant guy.” He recounted hundreds of thousands of refugees, the the Nixon Administration represented a lunch that they had recently, at which Syrian crisis is no longer a “foreign” all that was most cynical about Amer- Kissinger told him, “The diference be- matter for Europe or the United States; ican politics. tween you and me is that I think that it has come to seem a matter of na- Kerry returned from Vietnam a dec- personal relations don’t matter much. I tional security. orated veteran and, as he told the Times, think interests matter.” Kerry replied, Back on the plane, Kerry sat perched “an angry young man.” He became a “I think interests matter, of course, but on the edge of his bed, and told me, leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the I think personal relations can help mat- “We’re trying to break a crazy stale- War, and, with his forthright style of ters—they can be influential.” mate.” There was a weary desperation confession and outrage, he won the ad- No one seems to inspire Kerry’s out- in his expression. He knew that the miration of antiwar leaders. On “Meet rage, including the worst of his nego- Russians and the Iranians could not en- the Press,” Kerry said that he had “com- tiating partners. “I think they want to dorse the idea that Assad was finished— mitted the same kind of atrocities as be valued for who they are and under- even if they believed that, ultimately, thousands of other soldiers have com- stood for where they come from and he was. There could, however, be talks mitted”: shootings in free-fire zones, what their life is about,” he told me. “I about “political transition.” No one, harassment, search-and-destroy mis- think if people have a sense that you Kerry was saying, wanted the govern- sions, the burning of villages. Wearing know what they’re about, they can build ment institutions to “crash,” the way his fatigues and his decorations, Kerry some trust with you. . . . I think if they had in Iraq. “And, if you don’t want testified, in April, 1971, for two hours you can show them that you under- the government to crash, you can’t have before the Senate Foreign Relations stand what their challenge is, how they Assad go boom.” Committee, and asked a question that have to sell it at home or how they have Kerry could not yet know the true was quoted around the world: “How to, what it means, the sacrifice they

74 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 might have to make to do X, Y, or Z.” him “that we can make some terrible practice it very carefully, frankly. If As a senator, Kerry, who grew up mistakes when we don’t think it through people are on a path and making le- worshipping J.F.K., initially sufered right. I can remember being in Vietnam gitimate moves and choices, I’m con- through a vexed relationship with his watching Melvin Laird, Secretary of De- tent to not push the curve beyond its senior partner, Edward Kennedy. The fense, flying over me as we went down ability to bend. And I think we have Kennedy people privately mocked Kerry to do some completely staged ‘invasion’ to be smarter about that.” as stif, pompous, a “show horse,” as Mi- because the original invasion place had Asked whether the idealism of chael Janeway, the former editor of the too many Vietcong. These kinds of things Wood row Wilson was too powerful a Boston Globe, once described Kerry to stick out at you. It’s the reason that Jo- strain in American foreign policy, he his face. The Kerry people resented seph Heller and ‘Catch-22’ have partic- replied, “Yeah, a little bit, probably. I Kennedy for grabbing credit for every ular meaning for a lot of us.” mean, I love Wilson and I love Wilso- joint initiative. But, with time, Kerry What Vietnam did not instill in nian idealism, but it’s very idealistic.” gained respect in the Senate, particu- Kerry is a sense of ideological consis- larly for serious work on issues ranging tency. Campaigning for the Senate in n the next two days, Kerry kept up from forging diplomatic relations with 1984, he declared that he would have I his pace. First, he flew to Amman, Vietnam (along with John McCain) to voted to cancel the B-1 bomber, the where he met with King Abdullah and his investigation into the way the Bank F-15, the Trident missile system, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian of Credit and Commerce International many other weapons systems, only to leader. Neither the Jordanians nor the helped General Manuel Noriega, of say later that such votes would have Palestinians were in any mood to meet Panama, launder his drug money. been “ill-advised,” even “stupid.” He with Netanyahu, but the issue was vi- Sometimes Kerry could play mad- disagreed with the Reagan Adminis- olence in Jerusalem and the West Bank deningly to type. During the 2004 cam- tration’s adventures in Central Amer- and, in Kerryspeak, how to “bring down paign, an interviewer for GQ asked him, ica and George H. W. Bush’s decision the temperature.” The meetings, par- “What’s the best bottle of wine you’ve to build an international coalition and ticularly with the Jordanians, were del- ever had?” A slicker pol might have repel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, in icate—the King needed to show his mentioned a superb Florida Merlot or 1991. But he supported intervention in subjects that he retained influence over an unforgettable Ohio Pinot, but even Kosovo and, in 2002, with tortured logic, the Temple Mount. And the press con- a novice would know to choose a do- voted for George W. Bush’s invasion of ference that Kerry held, alongside the mestic wine, preferably one in a battle- Iraq: “I mean, I supported disarming Jordanian foreign minister, at an air- ground state. “Probably a Latour 1961,” Saddam Hussein, but I was critical of port in Amman, was a neatly choreo- Kerry answered, thus assuring his cam- the Administration and how it did its graphed jig of indirection. At one point, paign the Bordeaux primary. diplomacy and so forth.” Then he voted Kerry, who had done his part to ex- But he is hardly a prep-school car- against the eighty-seven-billion-dollar press excruciating evenhandedness in toon. During the campaign, for exam- appropriation to fund reconstruction, counselling both the Palestinians and ple, the Globe discovered both that Ker- as well as military operations, in Iraq the Israelis to ratchet down the “in- ry’s grandfather was Jewish and that and Afghanistan. citement,” watched with stolid irrita- he committed suicide, two facts that “He always told me he wanted to tion as the Jordanian foreign minister, Kerry had been unaware of. His fam- be informed by Vietnam but never im- Nasser Judeh, staggered of script. Fi- ily came from distinguished lineages prisoned by it,” David Wade, who was nally, Kerry scribbled a note and handed but had little money. Kerry’s first mar- a Senate aide to Kerry and, until re- it to Judeh, who blinked a few times riage was troubled; his wife, Julia cently, his chief of staf at the State and wrapped things up. But not before Thorne, sufered from severe depres- Department, told me. Vietnam, rather, remarking on the obvious: “As always sion and wrote that her mind was “rav- was an emotional touchstone. On trips in this part of the world, things have aged by corroding voices, my body de- with friends to the Vietnam Memo- a tendency to erupt.” feated by bone-rattling panics, I sat on rial, Kerry pointed out the engraved The press conference did not re- the edge of my bed minutes from tak- names of soldiers who died after the veal that Kerry and Judeh had called ing my life.” When he was separated Paris peace talks began. “He would talk Netanyahu and persuaded him to de- from Thorne, Kerry had what Teresa about how people died while they ar- clare publicly that the Israeli govern- would call his “gypsy period,” with no gued over the shape of the negotiating ment had no intention of changing fixed address, hustling to see his two table,” Wade recalled. the status of the Temple Mount— daughters, in Boston, while he was If Iraq and the general failure of which he did in a video on Facebook. working in Washington. (Thorne died the Arab Spring taught Kerry any- But this was only after hours of cajol- of cancer in 2006.) thing, it is a greater wariness of the ing and “flyspecking” statements with One of the governing clichés about idea of democratic crusades. “Having Netanyahu and his aides—a process Kerry is that his four months of com- an election does not make a democ- that caused the State Department oi- bat in Vietnam and his return as a leader racy,” he told me. “We learned that cial to joke that he had “a P.T.S.D. of the antiwar-veterans movement with Hamas not too long ago. And I flashback” from the failed 2013-14 shaped his career as a legislator and a don’t think we’ve always practiced that peace talks. diplomat. Kerry told me the war showed very carefully, and I think we need to Kerry walked to his plane, which

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 75 took of into the darkening sky for Saudi Richard Burton”—the nineteenth- including the foreign minister, the Arabia. We arrived late in the evening, century British explorer —“observed Crown Prince, the deputy Crown which was perfect, because Saudi oi- that he had never seen a fat man in the Prince, the head of intelligence—lis- cials, like moonflowers, bloom at night. desert.” Finally, Kerry met the King, tened intently as the two men talked. The foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, in a smaller room. Salman seemed to leave the question greeted Kerry on the tarmac. “There “I’m happy to see you,” the King said, of Iran a little more open and told Kerry was an appropriately masculine em- through his translator. that he should now meet with the se- brace,” the pool reporter noted. “They “I’m happy to see you,” Kerry replied. curity team. Kerry’s team was hopeful, each grabbed the other’s upper arm. “This is my favorite palace. I love this thinking that Salman had given them And the traditional Arab kiss on each place.” room to maneuver. cheek, though there was no actual skin “This is our original home town,” With the King gone, the Saudi ad- contact. You could say it was more of the King said. visers, despite their ritual expressions an air kiss.” When Kerry became Secretary, the of distaste for Iran, agreed to be in the After talking for a while at the air- Saudis were still angry at the Admin- same room with Zarif at future meet- port, Kerry and Jubeir got in cars and istration for, in their eyes, betraying ings in Vienna. This would not be first- headed to Diriyah Farm, the country a reliable ally-autocrat like Hosni level news around the world, neces- residence of the Saudi king, Salman. Mubarak. What if the House of Saud sarily, and the war went on, and the Salman has been on the throne only came to such a pass? The Saudis were waves of refugees kept arriving in since the death of Abdullah, in Janu- also dismayed by Obama’s reluctance Jordan and Turkey and on the shores ary, but he is seventy-nine and in spotty to attack Syria. Turki al-Faisal, the for- of Lesvos. But, for Kerry, these were health—he reads his talking points of mer director of Saudi intelligence and the kinds of moves—a pawn seizing a an iPad. Intelligence agencies are al- a member of the royal family, said, center square—that just might lead to ready at work trying to sort out who in 2013, that Obama’s failure to fol- an endgame. might succeed him. low through on his “red line” warning Kerry entered an opulent reception “would be funny if it were not so bla- he flight from Riyadh to Andrews area that the pool reporter aptly de- tantly perfidious.” Twas scheduled to take fifteen hours, scribed as a sunken living room the The focus of the meeting, for Kerry, with a refuelling stop in Ireland. At size of “an N.H.L. rink.” Aides in robes was to nail down what had been raised Shannon, the plane pulled up to a de- sat along the walls. “Glance at the in Vienna the day before, persuading serted terminal. Dressed in jeans and a men,” the pooler noted, “and you the King to include Iran in the talks Yale hoodie, Kerry settled down at a know that it has been a long time since on Syria. The King’s security council— table near the bar and ordered a hot toddy and a plate of salmon sandwiches. “Damn, these are good,” he said. The proprietor of the bar, who in- troduced himself as Declan, presented Kerry with a bottle of Irish whiskey and a dram of advice. “My father died when I was just a few years old and my mother didn’t drink,” Declan said, “but whenever I was sick she would take a spoonful of this and put it in hot water. Works like a charm.” Kerry smiled professionally, but he was long past charming anyone. He was exhausted, and there was little left to his voice. Yet he kept talking; as he stole glances at a Manchester United game on the TV above the bar, he ob- sessed about the next week’s trip to Vi- enna, the players at the table, what was possible. As a diplomat, Hillary Clinton wins credit inside the Administration for vis- iting a hundred and twelve countries and helping to transform America’s image in the world after the catastrophic “Frankly, we’re at a loss, so we’re looking for someone Bush years. She led eforts to open young and stupid to tell us what to do.” relations with Burma, brokered a 2012 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in hard stop?”—meaning, when does Kerry he was in Ashgabat, the surreal, peo- Gaza, and drafted economic sanctions have to leave for his next flight? pleless capital of Turkmenistan, a her- on Iran. But she was as restrained in “Not until ten,” the aide said. metic state where the post-Soviet dic- her ambitions as she was disciplined. The foreign minister sighed. The tator renamed the days of the week and Kerry, by contrast, is considered relent- meeting lasted seven hours. devoted a national day to the musk- less, sometimes to a fault. There is no The victories were small. In the com- melon. Kerry had flown to Santiago to concealing his eagerness to make a deal; muniqué, Iran and Saudi Arabia al- take part in a conference to save the to a critic, his style is reminiscent of the lowed themselves to be listed together world’s oceans. Then he was in Paris, customer who sternly tells the sales- as participants—a first. The document in the wake of the terrorist attack at man, “I’m not leaving here until you also carried dog-whistle language about the Bataclan concert hall, to join talks sell me a car.” “transition” in Syria but designed to rescue the earth Ben Rhodes, the deputy national- without a time line for As- from overheating to the security adviser, said that the President sad’s departure. It men- point of global catastrophe. appreciates Kerry’s “willingness to dive tioned the need to preserve “I absolutely love this in without knowing how the story is “the rights of all Syrians,” job,” he told me more than going to end. You’re not going to achieve which was meant to assure once. “It is so much fun.” an Iran deal without that.” Kerry hates the Alawite minority, which Very occasionally, he being cut out of the action. He was, rules Syria, that there would steals away to relax (to go Rhodes admitted, “annoyed” that the be no slaughter if Assad to the gym, to attend opening to Cuba this year had almost gives up power. Any elec- the Harvard-Yale football nothing to do with the State Depart- tion would have to include game) or just to reflect. ment. “That was the only way it was the Syrian diaspora, which would lower When he retires, Kerry said, he’ll write going to get done,” Rhodes said. “That Assad’s odds of winning. a book and stay involved “somehow” was the Cuban preference. They wanted There is every reason to be skepti- in public afairs, particularly environ- to deal with the White House.” cal about the efort. What roles will mental issues. But he doesn’t think But if there is to be any kind of dip- the warring parties in Syria play? How about retirement. The butchery in Syria lomatic progress in Syria it will depend can Russia and Turkey possibly walk goes on, the Middle East is in a state largely on Kerry and his negotiating toward a common goal after the Turks of dissolution. At dinner at his house, partners. A week after prevailing on shot down a Russian bomber? The reb- Kerry was talking yet again about his the Saudis to sit at the same table with els are deeply fractured—what’s in the optimism, the prospect for a ceasefire, Iran, he returned to Vienna. Multilat- talks for them? Who represents them? the end of Assad. I asked what would eral meetings customarily begin with Under what circumstances would come next. There aren’t any Thomas a round of opening statements from Assad, who, thanks to Russia, is now Jefersons waiting to assume power. every party in the room, and Zarif and in a stronger position, step aside? If he “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe Al- Jubeir, the Iranian and Saudi foreign is replaced by another figure in the exander Hamilton is, who knows?” He ministers, laid bare their radically difer- Alawite regime, why would Sunni fac- laughed and said there was no reason ent narratives. In talks with the U.S., tions accept that person? And, if there that someone from the secular edu- Zarif had reminded Kerry of the are elections, what would happen if cated élite could not emerge: “I think C.I.A.’s role in the 1953 overthrow of Assad—the ultimate recruiting tool for the notion that the ophthalmologist Mohammed Mossadegh, the Iranian ISIS—wins? Why would the jihadi mi- from London is somehow the only Prime Minister, and now he reminded litia Jabhat al-Nusra lay down arms? guy who can run Syria is insulting to Jubeir that fifteen of the 9/11 hijack- There will be more meetings in hotel Syrians.” ers were from Saudi Arabia. Jubeir, for conference rooms, as the war contin- On Veterans Day, he went to Ar- his part, had already remarked on Iran’s ues and ISIS makes its plans. But, as lington National Cemetery to visit the role in terrorism in the region. The Kerry’s team was quick to point out, grave of one of the closest friends he Americans might have found all this this had been a completely moribund lost in Vietnam—Richard Pershing, the amusing had it not been reminiscent area of diplomacy for the previous two grandson of General John J. Pershing, of the worst moments of the nuclear years. When the meeting ended and the commander of American forces talks. When the subject shifted to Syria, Kerry read out the language of the com- during the First World War. When he the atmosphere hardly lightened. The muniqué, there was applause. got there, he saw that there was a crowd two blamed each other for fomenting “Not celebratory, exactly, but signifi- around Black Jack Pershing’s grave. fundamentalism and exploiting the cant,” one aide told me. “We’ll see where Rather than attract attention, he ducked chaos everywhere in the region. it goes.” behind a tree and chatted for a while Several times, the American delega- with a military bugler who was there tion wondered if Zarif or Jubeir or n the weeks since, Kerry has remained to play “Taps.” After the crowd dis- both would walk out. As the afternoon I aloft. One day, his plane settled in persed, Kerry walked in his pained, am- wore on, one foreign minister, who was Samarkand, where he patiently endured bling way along the rows of graves, growing exasperated, turned to one of a forty-five-minute lecture from the countless graves, stone after stone mark- Kerry’s aides and said, “When is his dictator of Uzbekistan. The next day, ing war after war. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 77 OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS MEDICAL MOUNTAINEERS

Delivering basic care to the remote Himalayas.

BY REBECCA SOLNIT

o get to Saldang is simple, if not a young lama, and a Nepali nurse born Texactly easy. You walk. The nearest in Saldang; a German acupuncturist; airport, many days away by foot, is a and an amchi, or practitioner of Tibetan rough dirt strip at an altitude of about medicine. There were also a thirty-year- eight thousand feet. It sits on the side old, record-breaking mountaineer named of a Himalayan mountain in the Dolpo Pasang Lhamu Sherpa and her husband, district of northwest Nepal, on the bor- Tora Akita, a physical therapist from der with Tibet. Heading north from the Kathmandu; a number of Westerners; village of Juphal, a labyrinth of small and Nepali mule men, horsemen, cooks, houses on a steep slope, you encounter guides, and translators. a place where fossil fuels are not part of The first day, the caravan travelled daily life. In much of the region, there north through fields where wild hemp are no roads. Horses, mules, and yaks— and pomegranate trees were growing on and men, women, and children—carry a slope that descended to the Tarap River. goods on trails. The second day, we continued through One autumn day, the Nomads Clinic, groves of wild walnuts and small stands a medical-service trip, pilgrimage, and of bamboo. The third day, there were adventure expedition, set of from Ju- apricots hanging on gangly young trees phal with six riding horses, and fifty pack along the hillsides and clifs. The fourth mules laden with a month’s worth of day, the terrain became more arid, and food, cooking equipment, camping gear, the plant species fewer and more sparsely and clothing. Six dufels were stufed distributed. We climbed high above the with medicine and medical equipment— river and then, by a roaring waterfall, asthma inhalers, deworming pills, vita- found the riverbed again. Finally, at an mins, analgesics, antibiotics. Others held altitude of almost twelve thousand feet, hundreds of solar lights, toothbrushes, we arrived at Lake Phoksundo, which sunglasses, and reading glasses, to be is sacred to locals and is the approximate given away. It was the 2015 edition of a turquoise shade of a Las Vegas swim- mobile clinic that Joan Halifax, a seventy- ming pool. (Photographs of it look badly three-year-old American teacher of manipulated.) We were now in upper Zen Buddhism, has been coördinating Dolpo, on the southern rim of the Ti- since the nineteen-eighties, to provide betan plateau, one of the highest, harsh- medical care in places where there is lit- est inhabited areas on earth. tle or none. The trail to the lake passed through This year, after the earthquake in Ringmo, a village of two-story stone Nepal, Halifax contemplated scrapping houses. Men walked down from the plans for the trek to Dolpo. But she con- heights with huge loads of hay on their siders poverty and lack of resources to backs. Along the main path, an old woman be an ongoing disaster in Nepal, and she dug tiny potatoes out of the soil with her decided that there was no reason to ne- hands. Later, we saw men behind wooden glect Dolpo, which is as materially poor plows pulled by yaks, the shaggy, hump- as it is culturally rich. (In the meantime, backed beasts that roam everywhere in she organized Kathmandu-based earth- upper Dolpo, and whose milk is used to quake relief eforts from afar.) Our group make yogurt, cheese, and butter. The included a doctor, four nurses, and a butter is stirred into tea and burned in nurse practitioner from North America; lamps. Women used handmade wooden

Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, a record-breaking climber from northeastern Nepal. She and her husband, a physical therapist, began working with the Nomads Clinic in 2013.

78 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 PHOTOGRAPH BY CHIARA GOIA rakes, and after threshing the barley they One morning, we went to the Bon mon- told us that prayers here had several thou- tossed the results into the wind, letting astery, on a promontory above Lake sand times the power they have else- the chaf blow away and the grain fall Phoksundo, where a smiling, red-clad where. Inside, we saw ranks of butter back into baskets. monk showed us the four-hundred- lamps burning before golden Buddhas Before the Chinese invasion of Tibet, year-old rooms, with murals of lamas on on an altar flanked by gaily painted in 1950, the herds of yaks, horses, sheep, horseback and painted Buddhas in the shelves of sacred texts bound in bright and goats were larger, and people moved lotus position—the colors were blue, silk. Outside, we saw people who had freely between Dolpo and Tibet, where green, yellow, red, and white, like those walked there from fuel-starved Saldang salt mined from the dry bed of an an- of the prayer flags fluttering in the sun- to gather dung from the ample supply cient sea was traded for grain, which shine. Then he apologized for being that passing mules provided. the high plateau lacked. But, as China drunk. The abbot told us that the mon- The abbot welcomed the Nomads clamped down on the border, the Dolpo astery had been built to protect the blue Clinic into the temple, and locals asked population’s longtime use of Tibetan sheep, creatures related to mountain goats the doctor and the nurses to treat winter pastures ended. And the market and ibexes, from hunters who would drive wounds, address pains, listen to stories. for Tibetan salt was undermined by sub- them down the mountains and then herd The first evening, a horseman brought sidized imports from India. them over the bluf to their death. in a comrade, who was too sick to walk. The residents of lower Dolpo, some Occasionally, during the two days we “He was such a beautiful man, and he Hindu and others Buddhist, mostly speak were camped there, we gazed across the was almost dead when I first saw him,” Nepali, and greeted us with “Namaste” blue water at the trail that awaited us on the doctor, who diagnosed a severe kid- (“I bow to you”). Past Ringmo, in upper the steep hillside beyond. It looked as ney infection and treated him with an- Dolpo, the principal language is Tibetan, though someone had casually scratched tibiotics, said. The man, who was in his and the greeting is “Tashi delek,” mean- it with a stick, the way you might draw early forties, had a drawn, sun-darkened ing something like “blessings and good on a map with a pencil, not like some- face, a faint mustache, the high cheek- luck.” Both Buddhism and Bon, a reli- thing you should trust with your life. The bones of most of the Nepalis in the re- gion indigenous to Tibet, are practiced term “trade routes” may summon up vi- gion, and a thick coil of crimson strands there. The landscape is studded with sions of broad paths, but thousand-pound of wool around his braided black hair. gompas, fortresslike structures combin- yaks can traverse faint, canted trails the He wore camo-patterned tennis shoes. ing the functions of library, seminary, width of your outspread hands. The next day, he was back on his feet, and temple. Some date back several hun- From Phoksundo, Saldang was still lingering outside the monastery to make dred years, and many have a pair of seated a week away, over one pass that rose to contact with the doctor and the nurses golden deer on their entry gates. The more than 17,600 feet and another to coming from meditation inside. lama accompanying us said that deer about 16,700 feet. Our sirdar, or head The medical staf treated sixty-five were among the first creatures to listen guide, noted that years ago there was a people in Shey, mostly nomads from the to the Buddha. great deal of ice at the highest pass, but tents on the river plain below the mon- In the course of nearly four weeks, our we found only a retreating mass of snow astery and beyond. They shared their group walked between four and ten hours in a shadowy stretch of the path. We all complaints with smiles and good grace. on the days when clinics were not held. got used to moving steadily along, amid Dolpo residents wandered into camp We followed a steep oval circuit through the scree, the dust, the ruts, the trails throughout the trip: a pregnant woman the mountains, covering about a hundred built to hang out over the abyss, the slip- with infected breasts; a group of chil- and forty miles. A few nurses were sta- pery slabs of rock, the staircases of ir- dren who had impetigo, escorted by their tioned in the towns in Dolpo, but we regular stones, the rickety bridges of logs anxious mothers. Some conditions were heard that they never stayed long, and or old wood patched with flat stones. curable. Some were not. To a man with for most inhabitants the nearest hospi- There was rarely a phone signal in the a broken pelvis and a woman with a bro- tal was too far away. There were five clin- regions where we ventured, though at ken back, we could ofer only painkill- ics, and we treated almost seven hundred one of the high passes the young Ne- ers and advice. The morning after the people, out of an estimated five thousand pali men in our expedition lined up to clinic, we packed up and set out again. residents of the upper Dolpo region. make calls, looking like regulars at a bar three miles high, scoured by wind, with oan Halifax started the Nomads he first clinic was set up at Lake hundred-mile views. JClinic in 1980, and it has grown by TPhoksundo. Patients came in with Between the two passes lay Shey increments in the decades since. She digestive troubles, infections, and, often, Gompa, the ancient monastery of the goes by the Japanese honorific roshi, or strained necks and sore joints from a Crystal Mountain, one of the holiest teacher, and has made annual trips to lifetime of carrying big open baskets full peaks in Tibetan Buddhism. The old Nepal and Tibet for thirty-five years. of apples or firewood or household goods. abbot told us about a predecessor, hun- She has circumambulated the 21,778- Alcoholism is widespread in Dolpo, dreds of years earlier, who had first rec- foot Mt. Kailash, another of the sacred and the few tiny shops we saw ofered ognized that the mountain was sacred, peaks, eight times, and has wandered Chinese liquor among their meagre wares, and about the ability to recognize the far into Tibet and into the mountains though most people drank homemade sacred as a special gift or talent. Tenzin of Nepal, where she learned practical raksi, a hard liquor made from grain. Norbu, the outfitter for our expedition, things, such as how to give a horse an

80 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 The Nomads Clinic spent almost a month trekking through the Himalayas of Nepal, one of the remotest places on earth.

enema. (She oversaw one for a sick geld- robbed of its family gods, sacred statues raided the monastery at Shey Gompa, ing on the 2015 trip.) She has been in- that had been with the household for beating up the caretaker and stealing side many of the region’s monasteries, many generations. Halifax used social several statues.) and she recently visited one treasure media to help track down the figures. “The idea of just tromping around the house in which the ancient skull of the The main statue, a fourteenth-century mountains never appealed to me,” Hal- monastery’s founder lived on as a kapala, Tibetan bronze medicine Buddha—the ifax said. “I’d rather stay home on my or ritual cup. Buddha who presides over spiritual and zafu”—her meditation cushion—“and In Nepal, relics owned by monaster- physical healing—had reportedly been study the dharma.” Halifax’s medium is ies have been stolen, and sold on the on the black market for two hundred psyches, communities, and social systems. black market in Kathmandu, China, and and twenty-five thousand dollars. The Through her many activities—teaching, elsewhere; some Dolpo gompas have taken robbers, known as the Karnali Tigers, bridging cultures with such projects as to burying their treasures. In 2011, the were caught and imprisoned in Humla. the Nomads Clinic, drawing people to household of a friend of Halifax’s—in “I visited the prison,” Halifax told me. social activism and a contemplative life—

MAP BY CARL DETORRES CARL MAP BY Humla, a district west of Dolpo—was “A true hellhole.” (Last month, robbers she can be imagined as a weaver or a

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 81 oporosis, and a fall could be serious, but she’s chosen risk over limits. In many of Dolpo’s holy places, Hal- ifax was received as an honored guest, and although she says that she doesn’t enjoy the attention and the gifts, she ac- cepts them as acknowledgments of the ties between ancient Buddhism and the young Buddhism of the West, and as an honor to a woman in a male- dominated tradition. At each temple, gossamer silk scarves were draped around her neck— white, safron, turquoise, red. Bows of acknowledgment were performed and formal speeches were made. She was seated in state while chants were recited.

alifax was brought up in Coral H Gables, Florida. An illness left her blind from the ages of four to six, and those two years, she said, led her to dis- cover that she had an inner life: “The blessing that comes from catastrophe has been a theme in my life.” She recov- ered, raised a condemnatory eyebrow at débutante balls—her right eyebrow still does a lot of critical work for her— and vowed to escape. Her first step was college in New Orleans, where she participated in sit-ins and civil-rights marches. Afterward, she became a re- search assistant to the musicologist Alan Lomax, at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, at Columbia University. She rode many of the waves of up- heaval of the nineteen-sixties and seven- ties, and had a knack for landing where events were getting interesting. She went to Paris in 1968 to work at the Musée de l’Homme, arriving just in time to wit- ness the student uprising that became a general revolt. She travelled to Algeria at the behest of the Algerian Ambassador to France, who hoped she could figure out why former revolutionaries in one neighborhood had such a high suicide rate. Her conclusion was that, when the •• war was over, “there was no one external to fight,” and the conflict went inward. sculptor, conjuring new forms out of walking, but if you got on a horse in In Algeria, she also met the Black her raw material: people and groups. To that terrain you continually encountered Panthers Stokely Carmichael and El- intervene in individuals’ lives takes confi- the abyss and your own mortality. “I re- dridge Cleaver. “When I saw Eldridge dence, which she has in abundance. mind myself that the horse wants to in Algiers, I was taken aback,” she re- In Dolpo, Halifax wore a black robe live,” Halifax often says. She dismounted called. “I was sitting in a café near the with a white hat, layers of black down during the most treacherous passages, ministry of tourism, and there he was, vests and coats, and a pair of Merrells. with the hovering presence and some- the Black Panthers’ minister of infor- Most of the time, she travelled astride times the firm hand of her longtime at- mation, strolling down the street, a fu- a calm, compact white horse. You could tendant in Nepal, a lean, quiet Humla gitive and free.” Algiers, she told me, consider riding less demanding than man named Buddhi. Halifax has oste- was filled with spies, intrigues, music,

82 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 dance, “and a sense of revolution and also given talks this year in Singapore, Halifax answered, “Be one with nature,” possibility.” A man whose advances she New York, Washington, D.C., San Fran- and Rossetter added sternly, “Push du- rebufed reported her as a spy, and she cisco, and Louisville. A few months after ality in the hole.” did a brief stint in an Algerian jail. the Nepal odyssey, she flew to Bangalore, Halifax keeps in touch with many Most lives have lulls. Hers so far for a conference of the Mind and Life dying people, and also with film stars, hasn’t. “I just lived as though my hair Institute, an organization that blends sci- auent donors, scholars of conscious- were on fire,” she said. Halifax spent entific and contemplative approaches to ness, and monastics in various traditions, much of 1969 among the Dogon tribe the study of the mind (Halifax sits on including the Dalai Lama and her Zen of Mali, whose ritual life made her won- the board). Zen gives her the ability to students. She said that, after years of in- der what new rites might be available be at home anywhere. volvement with medical care, she sees to Westerners—especially the dying, for Halifax was once a great beauty, with “much sufering in the experience of whom “spiritual and psychological is- fierce blue eyes and long chestnut hair. Western clinicians, weighed down by sues leap into sharp focus,” she wrote She shaved the hair of in 1996, and the demands of their institutions—which in her 2008 book, “Being with Dying.” can describe the moment when, in Santa are demands to protect the institutions In 1972, Halifax married the Czech Fe, turning onto Gonzales Road from from being harmed.” She takes the cli- psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and joined Cerro Gordo Road, she realized she’d nicians she recruits “to a place where his experiments in psychedelic drugs as been conditioned to think that “pair cure isn’t necessarily possible but care therapeutic tools for the dying. (They bonding” was an inevitable and neces- is,” and said that the experience of work- divorced five years later.) Sick with hep- sary part of her life. She took up celi- ing with patients on the trips was “a kind atitis, which she contracted in Africa, bacy and independence—but not sol- of grace or blessing.” and generally in crisis, she turned in ear- itude. She calls herself an introvert nest to Buddhism. with a personality, but she responds to n the afternoon of Saturday, April In 1975, Halifax became a student e-mails in a flash and uses social media O 25th, a temblor, as Halifax put it, of Seung Sahn, an innovative Korean constantly. “tore the heart out of Nepal.” It was fol- Zen master based in Providence, Rhode She travels with Noah Rossetter, a lowed by an aftershock in May. Together, Island, whose methods were influenced thirty-year-old Zen priest with a light- they killed an estimated nine thousand by Korean shamanism. She took up the hearted disposition, a knack for technol- people; shut down the tourist industry; tough Korean version of Zen, which in- ogy, and the steadiness to keep the many smashed about half a million homes, volved doing a hundred and eight pros- parts of her life from tangling up. The displacing a population of about three trations (think pushups, with devotion) two amuse each other with banter and million; triggered avalanches that cut of before daily meditation at 5 A.M. During by occasionally singing snatches from high-altitude villages; and, in Kath- her Buddhist training, she was ordained operas. They could be mistaken for a mandu, crumbled many ancient religious by Seung Sahn and then by Thich Nhat comedy team: in camp at Lake Phoksundo, sites. The quake was centered in Gorkha, Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist teacher when someone asked about what to do a district in the middle of Nepal. and antiwar activist. Through Nhat Hanh, with “number one and number two,” When Halifax heard the news, she Halifax said, she was “inspired by the relationship between social action and contemplative life.” Halifax also trained with Bernie Glassman, who taught what is sometimes called “engaged Zen.” Par- ticipants in his “street retreats,” instead of withdrawing into a sanctuary, lived as homeless people. In 1990, Halifax founded the Upaya Zen Center, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a residential community with daily med- itation, weekly talks, and a busy sched- ule of meditation retreats, workshops, and seminars. In the spirit of Glassman, Hal- ifax has trained disciples who work with the homeless, with prisoners, and with the dying. She is still the abbess at Upaya, although she’s away about half the year. In 2015, she has been to Hawaii twice, once to teach about death and dying with Ram Dass, and once to teach about com- passion; to Japan, to lead a program on temples and shrines; to Costa Rica, to conduct a seminar on Buddhism. She has “Am I getting warmer?” GREETINGS, FRIENDS!

BY IAN FRAZIER

This Christmas we are staying in, So they lost, so what, we love ’em! Skyping en masse with all our kin Let pop-ups from the T-shirt gun And friends linked up in cyberspace, Lead cheers for Curtis Granderson, Slipping the surly bonds of place, Harvey, deGrom, and the whole bunch; And traic on the Tappan Zee, Next year they’ll eat the Royals’ lunch. Cross Bronx, and Hutch, and B.Q.E. Leaning back in our recliner, To keep us alert and itchin’, We hear voices, each one finer The brake lights we put in the kitchen Than the preceding. When Adele Are set on Hazard. They look gay, Sings just a single Jingle Bell— Flashing throughout the holiday. Such bliss! When, soon, the snowflakes fall, So—greetings, all! Pull up a screen! She takes the plunge and sings them all. You’re coming through quite well, we mean. Then the skies start getting darker; And we are, too? That rocks! That’s great! With wine docent Robert Parker Hi there, Paul Rudd! No, you’re not late. We raise a toast, and send fond thoughts Pope Francis, too! Pope, Paul; Paul, Pope. To all the staf at Toys for Tots, You will become great friends, we hope. And each Scout and each Obama; And now, with Skype cascades of chimes, Joy to Wilmer Valderrama, More folks stop in to join our rhymes: Misty Copeland, ballet diva, The Zuckerbergs, with daughter Max; Carlos Slim, who plans to leave a Rihanna, from a lounge at LAX; Fortune in somebody’s stocking Masaharu Morimoto (Now, that really will be shocking), (The Iron Chef); Sonia Soto- Madea’s main man Tyler Perry, mayor, our own Bronx-born jurist; Dr. Summers (known as Larry), Rolf, a New York City tourist Benji Madden, Gretchen Mol, (Good thing we’ve got eight screens, or ten, Josh Earnest and Carlotta Gall. The extra-wide kind, in our den); Strong wishes of good hope and cheer Anthony Sadler, Spencer Stone, Pulse electronically from here And Alek Skarlatos, now well-known To Janet Yellen, of the Fed, Winners of the Légion d’Honneur, Possessor of outstanding cred, Heroes of tremendous coeur: Loretta Lynn and Babs Mandrell What you did, guys, outdoes terrific; (Those ladies who know Nashville well), Bravery is always civic. Joaquin Phoenix, Susan Braudy, Applause and praises also for And that daft congressman Trey Gowdy, French Pres. Hollande; we wish him more While our benign designs descend Of all that’s good, and all best luck. On each Dem and Republican; Now warm air hugs to Wolfgang Puck, May hearts unclench and eyes see light, Carter Burwell, ace composer, Just briefly, on this starry night. Selfless Dr. Ian Crozier, Dear friends, the year had ups and downs. Rita Ora, Buck Showalter, A dearth of comfort to be found Charlotte Brown, the blind pole vaulter, In how the world is unreeling Top model Arizona Muse, Can’t deflate a hopeful feeling. San Juan’s Mayor Carmen Cruz, Next year may bring a whole new phase, The D.C. zoo’s new baby panda, A plentitude of better days, And Lin-Manuel Miranda. Grace completely unexpected, If our eyes do not mislead us, Previously undetected, “The Walking Dead” ’s Norman Reedus Perfect breaks we don’t deserve With “Nurse Jackie” ’s Edie Falco And don’t need to; so let’s swerve Stand there waving from the balco- Upward, onward in the crush ny of Slash, their bud and neighbor, Of this season’s crazy rush, With Tom Perez, the Sec. of Labor. Jumping with both feet, not looking,

Hey, look! The Mets are here—all of ’em. On amazing grace depending. MIGUEL PORLAN

84 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 began checking in on Facebook with two phones at once, and he went on the mountain. Her father died when she everyone she knew in the area. Her moun- many of the relief missions that headed was a toddler, her mother when she was taineer friend Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, who out in the middle of the night. Pasang fifteen. By the time she was eighteen, guides climbs of major peaks around the coördinated the eforts of drivers, do- she was training in a male-dominated world, was with a client near Base Camp nors, volunteers, porters, and locals. On Nepali mountaineering school while on Mt. Everest, where the quake prompted the scene, she made sure that supplies supporting her younger sister. Like Hal- an avalanche. Many people fled, but Pa- were distributed equitably, and com- ifax, she was supposed to have one des- sang went toward the avalanche, in the manded village chiefs and truck driv- tiny but made another. In her commu- futile hope of finding survivors; nineteen ers alike. For a Nepali woman, it was nity, she said, women were meant to people died. Pasang dispatched her cli- an unlikely role. Mathew recalled, “She marry young and raise children. “They ent, and got a helicopter ride to Kath- has the authority. She has the voice. It think I’m doing something wrong,” mandu, where she joined her husband, comes from the gut.” she said. Tora Akita. She announced her safe ar- As a high-altitude mountaineer, In August, 2006, she became the rival on Facebook, and on April 30th Pasang had often hired helicopters and first Nepali woman mountaineering in- asked friends and family for support— knew many of the pilots who took climb- structor, and the first woman to ascend manpower, food, blankets, tents—as she ers and adventurers around Nepal. She the 24,117-foot Nangpai Gosum II. and Tora headed into the wreckage. worked with them to deliver supplies. Not long afterward, she was injured A few years ago, one of Pasang’s cli- In a relief efort for Laprak, one of the while climbing, when her handhold ents introduced her to Halifax, and the Gorkha villages that were cut of by land- on a clif crumbled. She swung hard two women took to each other. “What slides, she organized three hundred local on the rope anchored below her, smash- I recognized in Pasang,” Halifax recalls, men as porters to carry food and tarps, ing her hip. The injury made it dii- “is a quality that I had when I was her enlisting them in disaster relief while cult to do the lateral moves that climb- age—incredible drive and this feeling arranging for them to be paid out of ing requires. that we as women were born for a mis- funds that Halifax had raised. An esti- Almost a year later, a Japanese team sion that is compassion-based. I was mated twenty thousand Nepalis a year doing cleanup on Mt. Everest invited meeting a person who had very few con- are traicked, and, in the chaos of the her to climb the mountain from the less- trivances, who had been as a child ex- earthquake’s aftermath, there were more traversed, Chinese side. She scraped to- posed to a lot of sufering, and had be- opportunities to seize victims. Pasang gether the money for boots, crampons, come a role model for women at a global began giving talks in the refugee camps and the rest of the gear, but her injury level.” Pasang and Tora joined Nomads about how to protect oneself. When no got worse. Someone recommended a Clinic trips in 2013 and 2014. one came, she announced that she was Japanese physical therapist in Kath- The husband and wife look a bit alike: giving away sanitary napkins, and deliv- mandu. It was Tora, whose father is Tora has a wing of black hair over his ered her speech when the women arrived. Japanese and whose mother is Nepal- brow, Pasang has dark hair to her waist, On the Nomads trip, during the steep- ese. “He was so young, so handsome,” and both have expressions of self-efac- est passages and at the highest altitudes, Pasang told me. “And he’s, like, ‘You ing kindness. Tora is unusually tall for even those of us who had done some shouldn’t climb.’ I’m, like, ‘No, I want to that part of the world, and is slender in training approached the limits of our climb.’ He treated me four days. Every a way that in a woman might be called capacity. Almost everyone—excluding day three hours, and then—gone, the willowy. Pasang, at five feet seven, is tall, Pasang and the tough young Nepali pain was gone. He kept saying, ‘You too. At first, you notice only that she’s men—found that walking uphill at the shouldn’t go.’ ” She went. beautiful. Later, you realize that her highest elevations left a person panting. When she was on Mt. Everest, her rounded limbs and her torso are tremen- Pasang’s energies remained essentially injury reasserted itself. “I couldn’t climb,” dously powerful. untapped by any challenge—a ten-hour she said. “I had to grab my leg and put After the earthquake, the three be- walk, a five-thousand-foot gain in altitude, it down, grab my leg and put it down.” came the core of a disaster-relief team. a freezing night in a tent, air so dry that She did exercises that Tora had taught Halifax raised a quarter of a million fingers cracked and noses bled. When a her, and made the climb on ibuprofen dollars; Tora was the central coördina- young woman sprained her ankle, Pasang and will power. She returned in dire tor of a shifting, growing group of vol- was the first person on the scene. When need of physical therapy. In gratitude unteers and supplies; and Pasang went dinner was ready, she served it. When the for Tora’s help, Pasang ofered to take deep into the disaster zones. In Kath- women’s clinic was held, she was the trans- him trekking. He asked to see her home mandu, Pasang and Tora worked with lator and the doorkeeper. She carried res- town in the Himalayas. The patient-care- Thomas Mathew, an erudite fifty-year- cue equipment in her big day pack, watch- giver relationship became a friendship, old Indian man, to organize help. With ing over us like a shepherdess. and the friendship became a romance. dozens of volunteers, they directed con- They married in 2010. Mathew remem- voys of trucks, moving forty tons of rice asang was born in 1984 in a village bers that Tora and Pasang wore tradi- at a time; found sources for salt, len- Pabout thirteen thousand feet high, tional Sherpa clothing at the wedding. tils, and cooking oil in volume; and had and grew up in the town of Lukla, often Marriage didn’t interfere with her moun- tarps trucked in from India. Tora was called the gateway to Mt. Everest. As a taineering. She said, “I wanted to show sometimes so busy that he talked on child, she resolved that she would climb and tell people, If you really want it,

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 85 it doesn’t matter if you’re married or ice gully, known as the Bottleneck, is real, like a Transformer toy, but her hel- you’re mothers.” a brutal ordeal. Only fifteen women met and oxygen mask are of, and she Last year, with two other Sherpa had climbed K2, and, despite the num- looks bold and free. women, Pasang organized a Nepali ber of Nepalese Sherpas in high-alti- women’s ascent of K2, the mountain tude mountaineering, no Nepali women welve days after we started, we came in Pakistan that is nine hundred feet had made the ascent until Pasang and Tdown from the second pass, Sela shorter than Mt. Everest but far more her companions did, on July 24, 2014. La, to Saldang. To a visitor, the thirteen- dangerous. About one in ten climbers Pasang told me that everyone had told thousand-foot-high settlement looks dies in the attempt to climb K2. Its vi- her that K2 was a killer, but “I just like a picture from a fairy tale or a vol- olent weather ofers climbers smaller wanted to feel what this mountain is.” ume of “The Arabian Nights”—noth- windows of time to summit, and chunks In a picture taken at the summit, she ing extra, everything emblematic. The of ice fall of the face that climbers wears a red snowsuit and huge boots stone houses, plastered the same color must scale. Getting up its couloir, or that make her appear bulky, a little un- as the dusty slopes, are surrounded by small, terraced barley fields and rough stone walls, sometimes enclosing a horse or a yak or a barking mastif. Their flat roofs, reached by ladders made of logs notched with steps, are fringed with the grayish brush that fuels the sheet-metal stoves inside. White prayer flags snap in the strong afternoon wind, and stupas, three-tiered mud towers to the spirit, rise from the ridges. The clinic was set up in the school. People came dressed in traditional clothing, the women and girls wear- ing ankle-length tunics with kick- pleats, scarves and shawls in rich pur- ples and hot pinks, and necklaces of turquoise and coral disks. Some of the children wore shirts emblazoned with names like Adidas; they must have come from as far away as the ocean coral. Others wore Tibetan-style sashed jackets and tunics. It was as though all the region’s color had been stripped from the eroded hills and deposited on the people. As they waited in line, some of the men swung brass prayer wheels, and some of the women spun woollen thread on drop spindles. Children car- ried smaller children on their backs or played, and everyone chatted. The man with the kidney infection from Shey Gompa was among them, with the same red yarn ornament and the same black braid. He had been near death, and was now able to travel as fast as we were. The clinic was welcomed with a speech from the school principal, in Tibetan and English, and schoolchil- dren danced to scratchy music ema- nating from speakers on stands in the dusty yard, powered by the solar en- ergy system next to the school. There was a traditional Tibetan dance, a Ne- “You won’t believe how many Frisbees are up here!” pali dance, and a theatrical pantomime performed to a mixture of music and the Dalai Lama’s voice, advocating non- violence. The children reënacted the invasion of Tibet; those playing the Chinese carried wooden guns. A girl in a blue blouse gave a stunning per- formance of dying in slow agony. Then the nurse practitioner admin- istered gynecological exams in the only closed room in the clinic, with Pasang guarding the door. Everywhere else, families crowded into the dim school- rooms to watch what the clinicians did, and children poked their heads in the windows, which had brightly painted shutters but no glass. The nurses gave away the last of the pre- natal vitamins, but the children had already been dewormed by a visiting nurse, so they didn’t distribute the de- worming pills. Long lines stretched from wherever the bodyworkers were practicing. The doctor listened to hearts and lungs. He looked at wounds, sores, “I’m sorry, everyone—my e-mail account got eyes, ears, throats, skin, joints. He dis- hacked last night by some alcohol.” pensed what care he could—pain relievers, antibiotics, steroid creams, asthma inhalers, advice to stop drink- •• ing the moonshine and to quit smok- ing cigarettes. (Packets with diseased- we gave them three solar lights. The mountains wear black hats, the world will lung images on both sides littered all next morning, we began our return end,” and interpreted the black hats as the the long-distance trails.) Later, the doc- journey, heading south. peaks without snow and ice. One day, tor told me that when he looked into some of the clear, cold streams and rivers people’s eyes with an ophthalmoscope he suix “-la” is a term of respect and flowing through upper Dolpo might dry he rarely saw a “red reflex”—the red Tafection in Dolpo: Halifax became up for part of the year, or stop entirely. The light bouncing of a healthy retina. In- Roshi-la, Pasang became Pasang-la, and people who never had coal or electricity stead, he saw the opacity of eyes begin- so forth. The syllable also describes a might be forced out of this place where ning to form cataracts from long expo- high-altitude pass. As we descended from the butter lamps are still lit before golden sure to the blazing sun of the high- upper Dolpo, we looked southeast from Buddhas in the old painted gompas, and altitude desert. the last pass—Jyanta La—toward Dhau- where the barley is harvested by hand. There was too much light and yet lagiri, the world’s seventh-highest peak. During the final days of our jour- not enough. The evening after the Sal- In the white mountain ranges above the ney, snow began to dust the hills be- dang clinic, we visited the mother of heights we traversed, snow and glaciers hind us, coming lower and lower, as if Pema Dolma, a young nurse and Sal- feed the streams that flow through these the door were closing for the year on dang native who had moved to Kath- arid, stony places. The same sources water Dolpo. In the first settlement below mandu and come back to trek with us. the barley and the potato fields, the live- Jyanta La, when the tumbling alpine Her mother lived with Pema’s half sis- stock, the farmers, and the nomads of stream had become a gentle river, we ter, who was mute, and a granddaugh- Dolpo, and extend far beyond it. A bil- encountered the first internal-combus- ter in a small, square house with one lion and a half people are nourished by tion engine of the trip, a motorcycle, tiny window in its thick walls. The house water from the Tibetan plateau, which probably brought in by helicopter. Past was feebly illuminated by a slender pours out into the Yangtze, the Yellow the agricultural valley of Dho Tarap, we fluorescent tube hooked up to a roof- River, the Mekong, the Ganges, and the returned to the world of trees: hanging top solar panel. other legendary rivers reaching across Asia. gardens of birches, golden in autumn, I asked Pema Dolma what her The last river we travelled was a tributary high up the gorge of the river; tall pines mother did for light before she got of a tributary of the Ganges. with clusters of blue cones; huge ce- solar, seven years ago. The older woman Throughout the region, the snow and dars; wild fruit trees. Along the canyon brought out a flickering brass butter the glacial ice are withering away. Halifax of the rushing Tarap River, we made lamp. We were served butter tea, and recalled a Tibetan prophecy, “When the our way back to Juphal. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 87 PORTFOLIO HIGH ASPIRATIONS

In an Andean city, an influx of prosperity has brought dozens of buildings that meld deep traditions and futuristic influences.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER GRANSER

he Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre doesn’t have an oice, use a computer, or draw formal blueprints. He sketches This plans on a wall or transmits them orally to his associates. Since 2005, Mamani and his firm have completed sixty projects in El Alto, the world’s highest city, which sits at nearly fourteen thousand feet, on an austere plateau above La Paz. In the past twenty years, the economy there has burgeoned, along with an enterprising, mostly in- digenous population. Mamani earned his fame building mixed-use dream houses for the city’s nouveaux riches. Like most of his clients, and like some 1.6 million of his fellow-cit- izens, Mamani is an Aymara. His people have been subject to succes- sive waves of conquest and dispossession, first by the Inca, then by the Spanish. As a young man, he worked in construction; in his early twen- ties, he earned a degree in civil engineering, against the advice of his family. “It’s a career for the rich,” they told him. Architecture, too, is a career for the rich. But Mamani has made an advantage of his outsider status; he designs in an Aymara vernacular of his own invention. Each of his houses has a futuristic façade, a commercial ground floor with jazzy shop fronts, a baroque party hall on the mezzanine, a story or two of apartments, and an owner’s penthouse. This aerie is some- times called a cholet, a pun on the words “chalet” and “cholo”—a dismis- sive racial epithet that cholos like Mamani have proudly embraced. Mamani’s architecture incorporates circular motifs from Aymara weav- ing and ceramics and the neon colors of Aymara dress, and it alludes to the staggered planes of Andean temples. But it has also been inspired by science fiction, particularly by the Transformer movies. It might be called, like the second film in the saga, “Revenge of the Fallen.”

—Judith Thurman

88 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 El Alto is Bolivia’s newest city, and, Mamani has said, “I am trying to give it an identity based on Aymara culture.”

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 89 Mamani’s buildings are designed for economic self-suiciency. Owners lease out the ground floor to shops, the apartments to members of their

90 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 extended family, and the party hall, on the mezzanine, for gatherings. The initial investment in a building can be recouped in a few years.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 91 The vibrant postmodern façades of Mamani’s buildings (and their imitators) contrast with the raw brick and concrete of El Alto’s ramshackle

92 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 architecture, and with the monochrome landscape. They tend to oend the purists of the architectural establishment in La Paz.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 93 The owner’s quarters, situated on the roof, are designed to be warmed by the sun. Central heating is still an expensive novelty in El Alto.

94 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 Ancient motifs, like the Andean Cross and zoomorphic figures from mythology, are abstracted and merged with futuristic flourishes.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 95 Mamani’s teams create the elaborate embellishments of the party halls using wire frames, plaster, and polystyrene, then paint them vividly.

96 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 The halls accommodate weddings, baptisms, and quinceañeras, which serve as mainstays of the city’s social life.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 97 FICTION DESIGN BY BARBARA DEWILDE BARBARA DESIGN BY

98 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW PILLSBURY onday evening, 10:30. Thomas he is not asleep, but pretends he is, face like to come with her to walk the dog M is sitting on the sofa with his to the wall. for a few minutes, perhaps just around laptop, reading for work. Mary has Friday evening, 7:30. Mary has ar- the block, but he says he’d better check been talking to a friend on Skype. ranged an evening out with her friends his e-mail since there’s an issue with If he is going to work all night, from the dog park. She invites Thomas one of his company’s clients in the I may as well go to bed, Mary de- to come. He would enjoy meeting them, U.S.A. and this is prime time for peo- cides, and goes upstairs without a she says, and they are eager to meet ple e-mailing from the U.S.A. before word. Thomas joins her at midnight, him. Thomas is not convinced. He the end of their workday, and so she when she is sound asleep, face to the doesn’t want to meet her friends from goes out alone. As it happens, there is wall. the dog park; it is not his scene. He no e-mail from the U.S.A. It’s Satur- Tuesday evening, 10:45. Mary de- will take Ricky out, he says, while she day, after all. Thomas sends a few pri- cides that their dog, Ricky, needs a late is at the pub. Mary says their son can vate e-mails and text messages and walk. Thomas, who has been watch- take the dog out, leaving Thomas free waits, expecting Mary to come back, ing a Champions League game in the to come to the pub and meet her but after forty minutes she is still old playroom, wanders back to the sit- friends. He repeats that it really isn’t out. Thomas feels conflicted but he ting room to find it empty. If she is his scene. He has some work to do. In decides that he may as well go to out with the dog, I may as well go to the event, he has a long conversation bed and is, in fact, fast asleep when his bed, he decides. Mary joins him at on Skype with an old friend. So as not wife follows him, half an hour later. midnight, when he is sound asleep, to have to pretend to be asleep again, “Thomas?” she asks, checking to see if face to the wall. which he finds painful, he goes to bed he would perhaps like to talk, but he Wednesday evening, 11:00. Thomas early. Mary joins him at 11:30 and doesn’t respond, face to the wall, snor- is still out playing billiards with his hardly cares whether he is asleep or ing lightly. friend Alan. Mary concludes that she not, since she has nothing to say to a Sunday evenings, Thomas has al- may as well turn in and leads her dog, man who she believes is having an ways taken one or both of his children Ricky, up the stairs to his basket by afair. out for a burger or even to a restau- her side of the bed. “Go to sleep now,” Saturday evening. Mary says there rant, depending on their choice, and she tells him when he puts his cold is a good film on at the local cinema, since his daughter is home today he nose between the sheets. “Bed, Ricky! about ten minutes away by car. She takes the two of them to a burger bar. Bed!” Thomas joins her at 1:30, when asks their daughter, Sally, who is home He and the children ask Mary whether she is sound asleep, face to the wall. from university for the weekend, if she she would like to come, but she says Thursday evening, 9:30. Thomas would like to go, but she wouldn’t. So no, she doesn’t really want to go and and Mary are in the sitting room read- she asks Thomas if he would like to have a burger—they are so fattening. ing, he on the sofa, she at her place go. Thomas asks for some more de- The children suggest that, in that case, at the table. He is reading a novel by tails about the film, which she pro- she could have a salad—why not? And Haruki Murakami, she a book about vides, and he decides that, yes, he would she says that there is no point in going training cocker spaniels. Unusually, like to see this film, so Thomas and out to pay for a salad that she could their son, Mark, comes downstairs. “It’s Mary go to the cinema and watch the perfectly well have at home, so they warmer here,” he says, and proceeds to film, which is called “We Need to Talk say, “Let’s go to a restaurant, then, open his computer to watch a film, About Kevin,” and both of them enjoy maybe Indian or Japanese,” but she with headphones. The boy is fourteen. it, up to a point, and afterward they says, “No, you go.” She doesn’t want to Thomas looks up and says that he’d go to a bar and have a drink and talk go out to eat, and so Thomas takes his like to watch the film, too, if that’s for quite a long time about the film son and daughter to the burger bar, O.K. Mark tells him that he won’t like and about their children and their re- where they chat and joke very merrily, the film, but Thomas says he’ll give it lationship with their children, since eating burgers and drinking Coke, and half an hour, if that’s all right. Mark the film is largely about parents and afterward Thomas persuades them to says, “Fine,” and unplugs the head- the terrible mistakes you can make go to a pub as well, so that he can have phones. Thomas asks Mary if she would with your children, and both of them a beer, and the children discuss music like to watch the film, too. Mary says feel how pleasant it has been to chat and boyfriends and girlfriends and that there isn’t really room for three to together and what a good decision it how not to get fat, despite eating burg- watch a film on their son’s laptop. Mark was to come out together and see a ers and drinking Coke, and Mark, who says that they could go and watch the film. is four years younger than his sister, film on the TV in the playroom. Mary Back home, Mary asks Mark if he worries about school, and Sally wor- says that it’s too cold in the playroom took the dog out and Mark says that ries about university, and they all have to sit through a film and decides to he did, about two hours ago, and Mary a good time laughing at some of the take Ricky for a walk. Thomas finds says that, since they are back much other people in the pub, one of whom, the film dull, stupid, and disturbingly later than she expected, she feels the in particular, has an ofensively loud violent. It’s nice to sit beside his son, dog should be taken out again for an- voice, and in the end they return home but, at 10:30, he bails out and goes to other quick walk and she keeps her around 10:30. Given the early hour, bed. Mary joins him at 11:30, when coat on. She asks Thomas if he would Thomas is surprised to find that Mary

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 99 “I love talking to you about my problems. We should do a podcast.” ••

has already retired to bed. He sits at pulls on her jeans. Thomas watches. his computer to look at some e-mail, He feels he should protest, but doesn’t. while his children go to the playroom Perhaps she is waiting for him to pro- to sit in the cold with a sleeping bag test, but, if she is, she doesn’t make it on their laps and watch a horror film. clear. “Do you really think he needs to He smiles on hearing them giggling go out again?” Thomas eventually asks, in there and decides to go to bed, where but it’s too late, the dog is now racing he finds that his wife is not sleeping around and around the room in inane with her face to the wall but reading canine excitement, and she is saying, a book. “Come on. Come on, darling!” And Thomas is taken aback. “Coincid- she disappears through the door and ing bedtimes,” she says, laughing, and downstairs. there is something of a challenge in Thomas lies on his back. He had a her voice. “A miracle,” Thomas agrees nice evening with his children, but now and he undresses to his underwear he feels drained and lost. He wonders, and T-shirt and lies down beside her. Should he wait up for his wife and Propped up on a pillow, she continues confront her? But in the end it is only to read by the light of the bedside lamp. a passing thought. Surely it’s she who Thomas lies on his side, face toward should confront him. These thoughts her, watching. The air between them are discouraging, and eventually he is tense. Thomas feels that his wife is rolls over toward the wall and falls a good-looking woman. She is aware asleep. Finding him in that position of the pressure of his eyes on her. “How forty minutes later, Mary sheds a tear can you keep reading so many books or two before falling asleep herself. about dogs?” he finally asks. “They’re Another week has gone by. In the play- fascinating,” she replies at once. “Ab- room, the two children are wondering solutely fascinating. Aren’t you, Ricky?” whether there’s anything they can do she addresses the dog, who is dozing about their parents. ♦ in his basket and raises a silky ear. “Speaking of which,” she suddenly says, “he probably needs a last pee. Poor newyorker.com thing.” And she climbs out of bed and Tim Parks on a marriage in stalemate.

100 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015

lence. At times, the psychological scars that Kilgrave leaves on his victims, who THE CRITICS gather in a support group, suggest the result of an extreme political ideology, the sort that might cause a soldier to commit atrocities that would never have occurred in isolation. It’s any mind-set that causes you to do some- thing against your nature—a guilty burden but also, for some, an eerie es- cape from responsibility. Jessica hates ON TELEVISION Kilgrave, so why, when he requests a selfie of her smiling, does she send him one? She has strategic reasons. But to GRAPHIC, NOVEL the world it looks as if she were flirt- ing—and that’s what he keeps telling “Marvel’s Jessica Jones” and the superhero survivor. her, too. It’s a particularly efective form of BY EMILY NUSSBAUM gaslighting, since he has cast her in a popular narrative, one that shows up “ promise that I won’t touch you superhero, Luke Cage (played by Mike in many forms these days, in books I until I get your genuine consent,” Colter, best known as Lemond Bishop and movies, and particularly in stories the sinister Kilgrave (David Tennant) from “The Good Wife”—an actor with aimed at and embraced by female au- announces, on “Marvel’s Jessica Jones,” so much sexual gravity that he could diences. Is it really such a reach for the latest tentacle to emerge from the be his own planet). She tests the loy- Kilgrave to insist that Jessica will suc- Marvel universe. It’s a villain’s line, but alties of her oldest friend, Trish, who cumb to him in the end? Tweak Kil- one that carries a throb of multiple is a talk-show host and a former child grave’s banter, and he’d be a wealthy meanings. It’s Kilgrave’s vow not to star; she also does investigatory gigs vampire who desires Jessica above any hurt a woman he’s already brutalized. for a corporate attorney (a nicely me- other woman, a man who is literally It’s delivered as a romantic seduction. tallic Carrie-Anne Moss) who is going irresistible, as in “Twilight.” Wrench And it seethes with modern ironies, through a bitter divorce from her wife. it again, and they’d be role-playing as if culled from a freshman handbook But Kilgrave still lingers on the fringes “Fifty Shades of Grey.” aimed at preventing sexual assault. of Jessica’s life, wreaking havoc. His “I am new to love,” Kilgrave tells Jessica Jones (played with a trau- crimes are chilling: no matter what Jessica. “But I know what it looks like. matized glare by Krysten Ritter) has, he says, his words get taken literally, I do watch television.” Much of the like her peers, supernatural gifts: ex- as commands, compelling innocent reason that their dynamic works is be- treme strength and the ability to jump people to stab themselves or to aban- cause of Tennant’s sly and layered per- enormous heights. (Her flying abili- don their children, shove their arms formance, which suggests a grotesque ties aren’t quite there yet.) But she’s into whirring blenders or never, ever innocence beneath Kilgrave’s sadism, damaged goods, as the jerks might put blink. But it is always Jessica who is a distorted belief that this is true ro- it, having been scarred by her time in his real target, his crimes intended to mance. It’s the ultimate in entitlement: the good-guy business, when she was send messages to her—a courtship, in he deserves Jessica because he desires coerced into becoming Kilgrave’s girl- his eyes. her, which means that her own desires friend. Using mind control, Kilgrave In early episodes, Jessica is a bit of are just obstacles. (He won’t even take kept Jessica in a state of total submis- a drag: she’s like the self-image of every responsibility for the brainwashing, ar- sion—dressed up like a pretty trophy, brooding brunette, a hot punk Daria guing that his supernatural powers are exploited as a sex toy, continually smil- in shredded Citizens of Humanity actually a burden: “I have to painstak- ing at his command. In the aftermath jeans and red lipstick. But whenever ingly choose every word I say. I once of this nightmare, she’s found a gig the plot snaps her together with her told a man to go screw himself. Can more suited to her jaundiced mind- horrifying ex it springs to life, suggest- you even imagine?”) At times, their set: noir private eye. Holed up in her ing disturbing ambiguities about the relationship reminded me of the Jon- apartment, binge drinking, Jessica is a hangover of abuse. Kilgrave raped Jes- athan Coulton song “Skullcrusher hostile basket case, barely keeping her sica, but since he did so using mind Mountain,” in which a supervillain re- P.T.S.D. in check, while she spends control, rather than physical force, the gards his hostage as a mysteriously re- her nights tracking the ugly adulter- scenario emerges as a plastic, unset- calcitrant date. “I made this half-pony, ies of strangers, confirming her dark tling metaphor, a violation that pro- half-monkey monster to please you,” view of the world. duces a sense of collusion. Mind con- he croons. “But I get the feeling you In this state of nihilistic freefall, she trol is a roofie, but it’s also an addiction. don’t like it. What’s with all the scream-

gets involved with a beautiful fellow- It’s mental illness; it’s domestic vio- ing?. . . Isn’t it enough to know that I JENNIFER DANIEL ABOVE:

102 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 Jessica Jones hates the sinister Kilgrave, so why, when he requests a selfie of her smiling, does she send him one?

ILLUSTRATION BY TOMER HANUKA THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 103 ruined a pony making a gift for you?” less obsessed with pure-cut violent mi- Of course, a modern TV show needs sogyny than with the queasy intersec- to be more than go-girl feminist to be tion of seduction and mind control, any good. (If you doubt that, check out with fantasies about overriding con- the absolute disaster that is the pilot sent and the excuses that abusers make for Amazon’s “Good Girls Revolt.”) for their worst acts. And, truth be told, “Jessica Jones” wasn’t On “Bufy,” this coercion took many entirely my jam. It took five episodes forms, using overlapping occult met- for me to get interested—three too aphors: there was a Bufybot sex doll, many, in these days of television glut. a memory-wipe magic spell, and a su- And only after the seventh and eighth pernatural roofie that Warren designed did the cruel and clever plot twists to turn his ex into his sex slave. The (which include graphic torture) be- kinky, and also mutually abusive, re- come truly gripping. In the early epi- lationship between Bufy and her bad- sodes, the pacing was logy and the ac- boy vampire boyfriend, Spike, kept tion muddy, with several subplots that shifting back and forth in meaning, itched to be trimmed or recast. with coercion and violence, exploita- Still, right away I could tell what tion and role play, combining into a was firing up so many viewers, partic- toxic mess. Many viewers resisted these ularly online: in the world of Marvel plots, finding them of-putting or, as Comics, a female antihero—a female Tumblr might have phrased it had anything—is a step forward. But a rape it existed in 2001, problematic. But, survivor, struggling with P.T.S.D., is in retrospect, that “Bufy” season, in a genuine leap. While the fact that all its gaudy perversity, its willingness “Jessica Jones” is Marvel’s first TV fran- to shock, feels underestimated. On chise starring a superpowered woman— “Bufy,” the truly dangerous people and that it was created by a female were the weak and resentful: that was showrunner, Melissa Rosenberg— the kind of person (often but not al- amounts to a pretty limited sort of ar- ways a man) so ravenous for control tistic progress, the show doesn’t need that he’d embrace evil rather than risk to be perfect in order to deepen the rejection. debate. In a genre format that is often Since “Bufy” aired, more than a reflexively juvenile about sexuality, decade ago, that season has struck me “Jessica Jones” is distinctly adult, an as remarkably prescient, a rare con- allegory that is unafraid of ugliness. frontation with intractable questions of sex and power. Gamergate—the s I watched Jessica and Kilgrave corrosive online cultural movement— A spar, another show kept coming might as well have been founded by to mind: “Bufy the Vampire Slayer,” the Trio. Bill Cosby is nothing if not the comic-book-inflected series that a vampire. The on-campus movement made me into a television critic, and against sexual assault lives on the fault which was airing around the same time line of these stories, with the grayer that the original Jessica Jones comic- area of blackout drinking at the cen- book series, “Alias,” came out. “Bufy” ’s ter of a national debate. Even the re- most divisive season was its sixth, when cent revelations about the “boy-next- the villains weren’t the show’s tradi- door” porn star James Deen feel related. tional “big bads” but extremely little He has been accused both of raping ones: three comic-book-loving nerds, his girlfriend and of manipulating the Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew, who rules of consent on porn sets, enabling began as minor characters, precisely him to abuse women in front of an the type of geeky guys who bicker over audience. It all seems like a replay of the merits of TV adaptations of Mar- the same nightmare scenario: say yes vel comics. Their gang, the Trio, was to anything and you’ve signed away a goofy lark, designed as much to catch your right to ever say no. “I want every- the attention of the superpowered Bufy thing to be my fault,” one female char- as it was to defeat her. Only over time acter says, on “Jessica Jones.” “Means did they slide, in increments, into real I have some control.” When the alter- crimes, attempted rape and murder. native is radical vulnerability, who can And, like “Jessica Jones,” the show was blame her? 

104 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 tury after the Party’s founding, the BOOKS Eighteenth Amendment to the Con- stitution was ratified, banning “the manufacture, sale, or transportation DRUNK WITH POWER of intoxicating liquors.” National pro- hibition, formerly an eccentric obses- What was Prohibition really about? sion, was now enshrined at the center of America’s legal system. In the four- BY KELEFA SANNEH teen years between its adoption and its repeal, in 1933, many Americans— especially those who had conducted personal research into the compatibil- ity of happiness and intoxication— wondered how Prohibition had come to pass. And, in the decades since, not a few historians have wondered the same thing. In the influential assess- ment of Richard Hofstadter, Prohi- bition was a farce, “a means by which the reforming energies of the coun- try were transmuted into mere pee- vishness.” Indeed, Prohibition is re- membered chiefly for its failure to achieve its aims. The Prohibition years were also the roaring twenties, the age of rakish mobsters and glamor- ous speakeasies, “The Great Gatsby” and “The Untouchables” and Bessie Smith singing, “Any bootlegger sure is a pal of mine.” More often than not, when we think about Prohibition, we think about a time when people seemed to drink—and seemed to enjoy it—more than ever. Lisa McGirr believes that this is a mistake. She is a historian who stud- The war on alcohol united Progressives and Protestants, federal agents and Klansmen. ies grassroots political movements in twentieth-century America, and she or much of his life, Gerrit Smith killed his own soul,” Smith said. “The has concluded that our fascination Fwas one of the most prominent literal slave does harm to no one, whilst with the boozy, semi-clandestine abolitionists in America, a distinction the self-made slave of whom we speak world that Prohibition created has he retained until 1865, when the end is a curse to his kindred, a burden led us to ignore its more lasting efects. of the Civil War and the passage of upon all, and, in no small share of the In her view, Prohibition was not a the Thirteenth Amendment, which cases, a terror to all.” In nineteenth-cen- farce but a tragedy, and one that has outlawed slavery, made abolitionists tury America, the temperance speech made a substantial contribution to obsolete. But Smith had other pas- was a common attraction on the lec- our current miseries. In “The War on sions, and four years later he resur- ture circuit. Decades before the Civil Alcohol” (Norton), she urges us to faced in Chicago, insisting that his War, Lincoln had made his own con- put aside our interest in the many life’s work was unfinished. The occa- tribution to the genre, calling for a ways involuntarily temperate citizens sion was the founding of a new po- “temperance revolution.” But Smith sought relief, so that we can consider litical party, and Smith delivered the didn’t think that these “self-made” the federal government’s strenuous keynote speech. “Slavery is gone,” he slaves could free themselves. The party’s attempts to stop them. Her book’s announced. “But drunkenness stays.” main plank was its support for a fed- subtitle is “Prohibition and the Rise He suggested that this continuing eral law to ban any drink that had of the American State,” and by “state” form of bondage might be more mis- “power to intoxicate or madden the she means in particular what she calls erable, and more dangerous, than the drinker.” the “penal state”: the Prohibition Bu- one recently abolished. “No outward The Prohibition Party, as it was reau and its many enforcers, some of advantages can bring happiness to the called, never became a major electoral them drawn from the ranks of the Ku

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS/GETTY DAILY NEW YORK victim of alcohol—to him who has force. But in 1919, exactly half a cen- Klux Klan; the laws and prisons required

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 105 by a federal government newly alarmed dren, battered wives, drunks stag gering skipped and yelled with delight. I have about crime; the reality of a country and dying in the streets. (Research- since thought of that as being a signii- in which addicts were treated not ers were just figuring out the science cant sign. For to smash saloons will save the boy. as victims but as perpetrators. Pro- of liver failure, which bloated and hibition was patchily enforced, and killed so many heavy drinkers.) This was a risky strategy; angry certain groups were more likely to During a visit to Philadelphia, Alexis proprietors and customers sometimes find themselves tossed into the rough de Tocqueville was informed that, returned fire. But it was based on a patches: “Mexicans, poor European although the “lower classes” were shrewd political calculation. The in- immigrants, African-Americans, poor drinking too much cheap liquor, pol- augural smashing took place in Kiowa, whites in the South.” Nearly a cen- iticians didn’t dare ofend their con- Kansas, in 1900, twenty years after tury later, she argues, the legacy of stituents by imposing heavy taxes. the state had adopted a constitutional Prohibition can be seen in our pris- Tocqueville inferred, wryly, “that the amendment banning “intoxicating li- ons, teeming with people convicted drinking population constitutes the quors.” The saloon in Kiowa, like all of violating neo-Prohibitionary drug majority in your country, and that the saloons in Kansas, was violating laws. Many at the time viewed Pro- temperance is somewhat unpopular.” the law, and Carrie Nation realized hibition as an outrage, and, in Mc- In fact, by the time his account was that the police couldn’t arrest her with- Girr’s view, we are missing its true published, in 1835, temperance was out acknowledging their own negli- meaning if we are not outraged, too— growing less unpopular. In Portland, gence. She was angry at the saloons and ready to resist its equally oppres- Maine, a temperance activist named that were, she held, filling up the jails sive descendants. Neal Dow was elected mayor, and, and the morgues, but her real target in 1851, helped pass the so-called was a government that was failing to eople have known since the Stone Maine Law, which made it illegal to do what it had promised. PAge that sugary liquids, given make or sell intoxicating drink. Al- time, have a salutary tendency to fer- though it was repealed within a de- ho were the Prohibitionists? ment, transforming themselves into cade, it became a model for other WMany of the leaders were, as something like beer or wine. Distil- states. McGirr acknowledges, Progressives, lation, a more sophisticated process, The most surprising thing about engaged in a broad and idealistic proj- was perfected only in the past few the nineteenth-century temperance ect of reform. The Woman’s Chris- hundred years, and wherever it went movement is that it seems to have tian Temperance Union, founded in it upended social customs. In “Deliver worked: in the course of the century, 1873, fought for both Prohibition and Us from Evil,” a crisp history pub- hard-liquor consumption plummeted. women’s sufrage. (One early volun- lished in 1976, Norman H. Clark But at the same time the older, weaker teer was Carrie Nation.) Its president, explained that nineteenth-century stuf was making a comeback: new Frances Willard, said that she wanted temperance movements in the U.S. waves of European immigrants were to help women protect themselves, distinguished gin, whiskey, and other turning up in saloons, where the sup- and their homes, against drunkenness distillates from milder beverages, posed harmlessness of beer was stren- and vice. Many supporters of the Eigh- which were considered part of the uously tested. The new drinking cul- teenth Amendment also supported, a common diet. “Many Americans of ture inspired a radical Prohibitionism, year later, the Nineteenth Amend- the New Republic simply did not re- personified by Carrie Nation, who be- ment, an equally controversial mea- gard beers and wines as ‘intoxicating,’ ” came a national celebrity for barging sure, which established women’s right he writes. By contrast, hard liquor was into saloons and destroying them, to vote. The Prohibition movement prohibited in some American terri- often with a hatchet, while singing was also partly a good-government tory even before the country formed: hymns. She published a vivid and movement, and the saloons it targeted in 1733, James Oglethorpe, the found- dreamlike autobiography in which she were associated not only with disor- ing governor of the British province fondly recalled her first saloonicide: derly drunkenness but with big-city of Georgia, banned “the importation corruption—saloons were where the There was quite a young man behind of ardent spirits.” the bar. I said to him: “Young man, come local political bosses held court, doing In the early nineteenth century, from behind that bar, your mother did not private favors with public money. though, the country had a vibrant raise you for such a place.” I threw a brick McGirr has some sympathy for the distilling industry, to supply a de- at the mirror, which was a very heavy one, Progressives, and she imagines an al- mand that scholars have struggled to and it did not break, but the brick fell and ternate history in which these en- broke everything in its way. I began to look quantify, though they agree that it around for something that would break it. lightened Prohibitionists devised “li- was enormous. By one estimate, in I was standing by a billiard table on which quor-control laws more in line with 1810 the average American consumed there was one ball. I said: “Thank God,” the measures introduced by other in- the equivalent of seven gallons of and picked it up, threw it, and it made a dustrializing nations.” In Sweden, the pure alcohol, three times the current hole in the mirror. By this time, the streets government rationed alcohol for de- were crowded with people; most of them level. Nineteenth-century temper- seemed to look puzzled. There was one boy cades; Australia ordered bars to close ance campaigners deployed a famil- about ifteen years old who seemed per- by six o’clock. iar cast of stock figures: starving chil- fectly wild with joy, and he jumped, In the event, Progressives were

106 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 joined and sometimes upstaged by ist leaders expressed an earnest—and in an election that functioned partly a complicated cast of allies, all with characteristically Progressive—desire as a referendum on Smith’s Catholic diferent reasons to believe that ban- to help those who seemed, to them, faith—opponents accused him of sup- ning alcohol would restore the coun- insuiciently progressed. William porting “rum and Romanism.” In try. Prohibition was a profoundly Allen White, a paragon of Progres- many cases, the high-minded Pro- Christian movement, delivering its sivism, stated the movement’s credo gressives and anti-“alien” sloganeers message in the language of revival- memorably, and revealingly: “We be- weren’t merely awkward allies but the ism. But there were Christians on lieved faithfully that if we could only same people. both sides: where many Baptists and change the environment of the under Methodists saw Prohibition as a strike dog, give him a decent kennel, whole- hen federal Prohibition finally against depravity, Catholics perceived some food, regular baths, properly di- Warrived, it was disguised as a it as an attack on their communities, rected exercise, cure his mange and program of wartime austerity. In 1917, not to mention their Communion abolish his fleas, and put him in the as the country entered the First World wine. Southern states were drier than blue-ribbon class, all would be well.” War, Congress banned distillation, in Northeastern ones, middle classes At times, the Prohibitionists per- order to conserve food, and restricted were drier than working classes, and mitted themselves to express their the grain available to brewers, eventu- Americans with deep roots were drier frustration in less conciliatory terms. ally limiting their beer to no more than than recent arrivals. These disparate McGirr quotes Frances Willard, the 2.75 per cent alcohol. These measures factions were held together by a re- W.C.T.U. president, who sometimes helped make Prohibition seem both lentless lobbyist named Wayne Wheeler, described her political opponents as feasible and patriotic, especially since the leader of the Anti-Saloon League, crude invaders. “Alien illiterates rule the brewers who supplied the saloons who realized that politicians’ fear our cities today,” she wrote. “The sa- were largely German-American. No of Prohibitionist anger might out- loon is their place; the toddy stick less important, the Sixteenth Amend- weigh their disinclination to act de- their scepter.” McGirr cites this, per- ment, adopted in 1913, established a cisively on an issue that divided both suasively, as proof that Prohibition national income tax; until then, as parties. was “imbued with a deeply antidem- much as thirty per cent of federal rev- Prohibitionism, with its focus on ocratic impulse.” In the Presidential enue had come from excise taxes on the saloons and the immigrants who campaign of 1928, Al Smith, the anti- alcohol. populated them, was propelled by no Prohibition governor of New York, Woodrow Wilson, the President, small amount of ethnic nationalism. lost in a landslide to Herbert Hoover, was a Democrat, and his party was (McGirr notes that in 1910 more than four in ten residents of New York City were foreign-born—slightly higher even than today.) McGirr is unsparing in her analysis of the pre- occupations that underlay the resis- tance to alcohol. She quotes Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard, who was convinced that “alcoholism threat- ens the destruction of the white race.” Elizabeth Tilton, a wellborn and in- fluential sufragist and Prohibition- ist, was particularly concerned about the price that alcoholism exacted from poor immigrants, who “thought lit- tle but acted rashly.” In Tilton, Mc- Girr diagnoses a barely disguised and mean-spirited status anxiety. She writes that Tilton, and others like her, “sought to buttress their previous easy dominance against an ever more plu- ralist, urban, and proletarian nation.” And it is true that most Prohibition- ists supported the 1924 Immigration Act, which set national quotas de- signed to limit the number of new arrivals judged undesirable—but then so did nearly everybody else. In the meantime, many of the Prohibition- “Are you familiar with the poetry of John Donne?” divided on Prohibition, so he was quor that was weak or poisonous or, given only three thousand employ- not eager to divide it further by taking in the worst case, both. ees, which was a small number rela- a firm stand. Not that it mattered: McGirr wants us to remember that tive to the size of the country but a modifying the Constitution does not these new patterns of consumption big one relative to the size of the fed- require the President’s approval, and emerged only among those who could eral government—at the time, the in some histories the passage of Pro- aford them; according to one study agency that became the Federal Bu- hibition can seem slightly anticlimac- she cites, “drinking among workers reau of Investigation had only six tic. The Eighteenth Amendment was cut by half,” and research sug- hundred employees. Federal Prohi- passed easily in the Senate and the gests that Prohibition did indeed bition agents sometimes increased House, and was soon approved by cause a meaningful decline in alcohol- their ranks by deputizing volunteers, every state except Rhode related deaths and illnesses. including members of the Ku Klux Island. This quick success Many Negro leaders sup- Klan, who found the battle to enforce came as a shock even to ported temperance and, Prohibition consistent with their the Prohibitionists, who to a lesser extent, Prohi- broader mission to purify the nation. were just settling in for a bition, although most of In 1923, in Williamson County, Illi- struggle that might, they them renounced it as they nois, hundreds of enforcers, many of thought, consume the rest discovered what it would them Klansmen, began a series of vi- of their lives. entail. The speakeasies of olent raids on distilleries, bars, and Prohibition took efect Harlem helped spark a private homes, in which several hun- in January, 1920, and, cultural renaissance, but dred people were arrested and more all at once, people really they were viewed more than a dozen were killed. did stop drinking, at least skeptically by many lo- Three Republican Presidents— for a time. In “Last Call,” a witty pop- cals, who resented the way the police Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, ular history of the Prohibition era, allowed their neighborhood to be- and Hoover—held oice during Pro- published in 2010, Daniel Okrent come a locus of lawless fun. An edi- hibition, and all of them were will- chronicled the country’s six-month torial in a black newspaper com- ing, if not eager, to enforce the Eigh- infatuation with nonalcoholic beer, plained that Harlem was now “a teenth Amendment. (During the 1928 and its longer relationships with other modern-day plantation for white Presidential campaign, Hoover issued substitutes. Sales of Coca-Cola in- thrill-seekers.” McGirr argues that an exquisitely equivocal pronounce- creased, and some Protestants took Prohibition showed that the police ment: “Our country has deliberately dry Communion with the aid of a would allow “vice” to flourish in “areas undertaken a great social and eco- new product called Dr. Welch’s Un- of the city without weighty protec- nomic experiment, noble in motive fermented Wine, which would be fa- tors”—the same process by which, in and far-reaching in purpose. It must miliar to any modern toddler. Under- the decades that followed, drug deal- be worked out constructively.”) As standably, though, Okrent spent much ers were allowed to operate in many bootleggers and smugglers took con- of his book chronicling the manifold of the same vulnerable neighborhoods. trol of the alcohol industry, crime and ingenious ways that Americans In the South, raids often targeted Ne- increased, or seemed to—breathless warded of sobriety. In New York, at- groes and poor whites. Using records news reports about brazen gangsters tendance soared at synagogues ofer- from Virginia, McGirr finds some left an exaggerated impression of the ing “Kosher Wine for Sacramental evidence that race played a role in uptick in violence. McGirr notes that Purposes”—the predecessors, perhaps, who was arrested; she also concludes Hoover was the first President to men- of the California medical-marijuana that the government’s heavy-handed tion crime in his Inaugural Address, clinics currently treating a suspiciously tactics alienated many white citizens which helped establish the idea, now hale group of patients. Small boats who weren’t wealthy or lucky enough commonplace, that law enforcement raced across the Detroit River from to be left alone. The Richmond Planet, was a matter of urgent federal con- Canada; big ships hosted revelry a black newspaper in Virginia, noted cern. The response was the construc- ofshore from East Coast cities, be- with some satisfaction that “the same tion of a bigger, more sophisticated, yond the jurisdiction of the Coast treatment that has been accorded to more intrusive federal criminal-jus- Guard. Enterprising vintners sold black citizens for more than a decade tice system. J. Edgar Hoover got the grapes directly to customers and also in the matter of Constitutional rights money and the impunity to build his provided them with grape-crushing and privileges is now being meted to F.B.I.; the government established services, to facilitate home fermenta- white citizens.” a national archive of criminals’ fin- tion. Rural bootleggers and urban The paradox of Prohibition was gerprints; overwhelmed prosecutors speakeasies helped the country adapt, that it required intrusive enforcement learned to use plea bargaining to avoid too; the change of circumstance from a government equipped to de- trials; the Supreme Court ruled that helped convert American drinkers to liver only sporadic interventions; the government agents didn’t need a war- gin, because it was easy to produce, results could be both inefective and rant to conduct wiretaps. McGirr and it also made them more brand- brutal. The Prohibition Unit, a new views these and other developments conscious, in the hope of avoiding li- agency within the U.S. Treasury, was as reactions to the “extreme stress”

108 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 caused by Prohibition, a big task that the Prohibition years, as an anti-drug to whatever new movement seems made the federal government sud- activist. In 1922, Congress passed a silly or futile. Seven years ago, the Los denly seem small. law that banned various narcotics, a Angeles City Council engaged in its This is a provocative thesis, espe- prohibition that endured when the own efort to provide “wholesome cially in the light of what happened other one ended. For McGirr, the war food” to “the under dog,” banning next. In 1932, Hoover, the reluctant on drugs is Prohibition’s true legacy. most new fast-food restaurants from Prohibitionist, was defeated by Frank- Its toll and its continuing persistence opening in South Los Angeles, a lin D. Roosevelt, a reluctant anti- help explain the urgency of her tone: largely Latino and African-Ameri- Prohibitionist; a year later, the country she wants to make us see not just can area that was judged to have poor repealed the Eighteenth Amendment. what we once did but what we are eating habits. (A recent study found Conventional accounts trace the me- doing still, in a misguided efort to that obesity rates kept rising anyway.) tastasis of the federal government not prohibit substances no more eradica- More recently, New York tried to ban to what came before Roosevelt’s elec- ble—and not necessarily more harm- big cups of soda, a law that became tion but to what came after. Roose- ful—than alcohol. Even now, rethink- such a punch line that it seemed al- velt’s New Deal sought to modern- ing the war on drugs typically means most mean-spirited when an appeals ize and enlarge all of government, rethinking marijuana, rather than re- court struck it down. including the F.B.I., which he prom- thinking the general concept of ban- But, of course, Prohibition didn’t ised to make “as efective an instru- ning mood-altering substances. In seem frivolous at the time—if the mentality of crime detection and pun- New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio comparison to abolitionism seems bi- ishment as any of the similar agencies pledged to stop arresting people for zarre today, that should tell us some- in the world.” McGirr wants us to see possessing small amounts of mari- thing about how diicult it is to make Prohibition as a prelude, “helping to juana, but he also signed a new law accurate historical judgments when shape the New Deal order.” This is to criminalize a class of synthetic we are engulfed in debate. Campaign- indisputable, in that any era helps drugs known as K2. ers who talked about death and de- shape the one that follows, but it is One quality that McGirr shares struction weren’t being hyperbolic: also indisputable that Roosevelt was with some of the historians she crit- alcohol kills and destroys. To find a elected by a public that had grown to icizes is a tendency to downplay the contemporary analogue, we should despise mandatory temperance. Some threat posed by alcohol. At times, her look at our most bitter and divisive Prohibition-era innovations surely en- book makes it easy to forget that the political disagreements: the abortion dured in spite of their pedigree, not Prohibitionists had good reason to wars, or—especially recently—the on- because of it. Government programs, associate alcohol with violence and going arguments over gun regula- once established, do not tend to dis- misery and death; one needn’t have tion. The country seems to be living establish themselves, but the growth been a saloon smasher or a xenophobe through a gun-violence epidemic, even and modernization of the federal gov- to conclude that the country would if the statistics are more complicated ernment was probably inevitable. If have been a lot better of if it had than the headlines suggest. (There “extreme stress” was the necessary pre- been a little drier. A hundred years are about thirty thousand gun-related condition, the twentieth century pro- later, news outlets regularly raise the deaths per year in America—and vided no shortage of it. alarm about the K2 craze, or opioid about ninety thousand alcohol- related abuse, or the latest resurgence of crys- deaths.) Now, as then, people are n 1933, the country’s Prohibition- tal methamphetamine—drugs that accused of defending the indefen- I ists had to grapple with a politi- cause a small fraction of the mayhem sible—after all, there is no good ra- cal fate worse than failure: oblivion. that alcohol caused, and continues to tionale for the consumption of whis- Their solution had been tried and cause. The Centers for Disease Con- key, although there are plenty of good rejected, which meant that it could trol estimate that excessive drinking occasions—and people on the other never be tried again. McGirr glee- is implicated in ten per cent of deaths side are accused of misjudging what fully reproduces Elizabeth Tilton’s among working-age people. Alcohol government can and should do. The pronouncement, from her diary: “Civ- is a factor in about a third of all vio- lesson of Prohibition is not that every ilization is undone.” Some of the old lent crimes. And, despite decades of grand crusade is a mistake; it’s that, warriors kept the faith. (The Prohi- public-awareness campaigns and en- from zero feet away, it can be dii- bition Party never disbanded, and forcement eforts, drunk driving still cult to tell the diference between an held its most recent convention in kills dozens of Americans every day. idea as bad as the Eighteenth Amend- July, by conference call; Gerrit Smith Part of the problem with thinking ment and one as good as the Nine- doubtless would have been more im- about Prohibition is that the fact of teenth Amendment—or, as the ex- pressed by the technology than by the its evident unsustainability tends to ample of Gerrit Smith illustrates, the turnout, which was eleven.) Others overwhelm everything else about it; Thirteenth. We can be sure that there found new outlets for their old pas- even McGirr sometimes struggles to are neo-Prohibitionists among us sions. McGirr tells the story of Rich- make her characters seem sensible today, intent on making things bet- mond Hobson, an anti-saloon activ- enough to be taken seriously. The ter by making them worse. But we ist who reinvented himself, during temptation is to compare Prohibition can’t be sure who they are. 

110 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 BRIEFLY NOTED

AVENUEOFMYSTERIES, by John Irving (Simon & Schuster). In Irving’s fourteenth novel, Juan Diego Guerrero, an acclaimed middle-aged writer, takes a trip to the Philippines to honor a promise he made as a child. Guerrero is famous enough to attract a band of well-meaning fans and caretakers through- out his muddled trek; his main diiculty is remembering his medication. The most vivid passages are dreamlike flashbacks to his adolescence in Mexico, as a dump-picker scavenging for books and, later, as part of a ragtag circus. In both time lines, Irving’s characters grapple with faith and with the Cath- olic Church. Guerrero’s sister Lupe asserts, “We are the mir- acle—you and me. Not them. Just us.”

THESECRETCHORD, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking). This retell- ing of the story of the Biblical David, by a Pulitzer Prize-win- ning novelist, follows his rise to power through the eyes of Natan, a seer and royal adviser, who is compiling an account of the King’s life. The picture that emerges is dramatic— midrash meets “Game of Thrones”—and often salacious. (The young David’s relationship with Yonatan, Shaul’s son, is described in sexually explicit terms.) Brooks also misses no opportunity to darken our view of the King of Israel, recast- ing the infatuation with Batsheva as a matter of rape rather than of seduction. She renders David’s character with com- plexity and shows how his flaws and his hard-heartedness nonetheless make him a terrifyingly efective ruler.

LADYBYRONANDHERDAUGHTERS, by Julia Markus (Norton). Although mad, bad Byron remains a rich vein for biogra- phers, the subject of this book is not the poet but his wife, Annabella. Attacked by Byron and demonized by gener- ations of his admirers as “a virtuous monster,” Annabella emerges here as a kind, intelligent, and forceful presence who deftly maneuvered her way out of an abusive mar- riage. She brought up one daughter (the genius mathema- tician Ada), adopted another (Medora, fathered by Byron with his sister), and founded the first “infant” school in England. If the poet’s star sinks as Annabella’s rises, Markus’s account establishes that the reappraisal is long overdue.

QUIXOTE, by Ilan Stavans (Norton). This year marks the four-hundredth anniversary of the second and final vol- ume of Cervantes’s epochal work, “Don Quixote.” In this wide-ranging appreciation, Stavans, a scholar of Latin- American literature, assesses the enduring appeal of a book that has influenced such disparate writers as Dostoyevsky and Mark Twain, as well as non-writers, including George Washington. Stavans examines his own reactions: he ad- mits to early frustrations with the work, but extolls its value as a compendium of fictional technique. Despite the book’s unassailable status today, it was not well appreciated in Cervantes’s era, thanks to its nonsensical structure, ram- bling diction, and multiple exclamations. Stavans points out that these are precisely the features that have made it a handbook for wayward thinkers ever since.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 111 is still in need of a name. Call it the THE ART WORLD Age of Paying Attention, or the No- ticing Years, or the Not So Fast Era. American art underwent convulsive SHADES OF WHITE changes in the late nineteen-fifties and early sixties, following the triumph and A Robert Ryman retrospective. swift decline of Abstract Expression- ism. A vast cohort of young artists and BY PETER SCHJELDAHL intellectuals, many of them academi- cally trained, flooded into formerly pa- trician or bohemian scenes. To qualify as hip, you registered fine distinctions— between a photograph of Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol’s silkscreen of a photograph of her, say, or between Carl Andre’s stack of bricks on a gal- lery floor and a stack of bricks any- where else. Skeptical attitudes, averse to mimesis and metaphor, put a with- ering pressure on painting, including even the simplest abstraction. Barely passing muster were the evenly pen- cilled grids of Agnes Martin, the broody monochromes of Brice Marden, and Ryman’s taciturn brushstrokes. What you saw, while not a lot, stayed seen. The mental toughness that defined sophistication in art back then is rare now. Ryman’s Dia show is a spiritual time capsule. The work isn’t dated, ex- actly; it seems classical. But what’s miss- ing is a confident assumption that there will be an audience eager to put up with it. Ryman came to his vocation indi- rectly. When he arrived in New York, Ryman’s “Arrow” (1976). The Dia show is a spiritual time capsule. in 1952, from his native Tennessee, it was with a saxophone and the ambi- succinct retrospective of twenty- flanges. Always, Ryman invites con- tion to be a professional jazz musician. A two works by Robert Ryman has templation of the light that falls on his (He took lessons from the pianist Len- just opened at the Dia Art Foundation paintings (which when I saw them, on nie Tristano.) At first just to support in Chelsea, and it ofers a tacit reproach a recent cloudy day, was glumly tender himself, and then with a growing fas- to today’s art-world circus. Ryman, now as it filtered through the Dia skylights) cination, he worked as a guard at the eighty-five, has been making all-white and of their formal relation to the rooms Museum of Modern Art, from 1953 abstract paintings, in square formats of that contain them. There’s no savoring to 1960. His co-workers included the diferent sizes, for most of the past six of style, just stark presentation. His future leading minimalists Dan Flavin decades. He appeals more to cogno- work’s economy and quietness may be and Sol LeWitt. He also met and be- scenti than to popular audiences, but pleasing, but its chief attraction is phil- came friends with Roy Lichtenstein. no museum collection of painting since osophical. What is a painting? Are there The earliest of Ryman’s paintings in the nineteen-sixties can be authorita- values inherent in the medium’s fun- the show, made in 1958, are small, awk- tive without an example of his work. damental givens—paint skin, support ward, oddly charming arrangements of His art’s phlegmatic allure involves surface, wall—when they are denied tra- impasto strokes, which have a generic qualities of diferent paint mediums, ditional decorative and illustrative func- look of expressive painting—at a time applied dead smooth or textured by tions? Such questions absorb Ryman. when the swashbuckling style of Wil- brushstrokes, on canvas, board, paper, Do they excite you? Your answer might lem de Kooning was much in fash- aluminum, and other surfaces. At times, betray how old you are. ion—but are as matter-of-fact as cards the main—or, really, only—event is an Ryman is rooted in a phase of ar- laid out for solitaire. Ryman was likely emphasis on the way a work is attached tistic sensibility that was coincident afected by Jasper Johns’s recent, sen- to a wall: by bolts, staples, brackets, or with early minimalism and Pop, and sational “Flags” and “Targets,” in which BILL JACOBSON PHOTOGRAPH: ARS, NY AND THE GREENWICH COLLECTION / RYMAN ROBERT COURTESY

112 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 sensitive-looking touches of thick paint dling “Arista” (1968), a six-foot-square wander like sheep without a shepherd. painting on unstretched linen, which Other artists, too, were mocking Ab- is stapled to the wall and abutted, on stract Expressionism’s painterly rhet- the wall, by ruled lines in blue chalk. oric. Robert Rauschenberg did it The lines suggest a guide to placement, by repeating the same spontaneous- but there they are in place, themselves, looking strokes on twin canvases, “Fac- as the most interesting feature of the tum I” and “Factum II” (1957). work. The particular meaning, if any, But Ryman eschewed imagery and of a Ryman commonly tiptoes just out any apparent irony. There was, as there of mental reach. remains, something monkish about his Back on the philosophical front: submission to austere forms and pro- What is white? As light, it is the appar- cedures. For a while, in the early six- ent no-color that contains all colors ex- ties, he flirted with color and with mildly cept its antithetical no-color, black. But, decorative efects, such as layering as pigmentation, it rarely lacks some whites atop reds and blues. It was as if ghostly tint, and it is never without rel- he were straining against a principled ative tone. (Juxtapose any two whites compunction and toward an indulgence and watch one turn gray.) Ryman gen- in the hedonistic rewards of painting. erally favors cool whites, whispering That stopped in the late sixties, with a of blue. A warm-white painting, “Un- double commitment to whites and to titled” (1973), jumps out in the show treating paintings as self-evident ob- like a sunflower on fire—if, that is, you jects. I well remember the pleasant shock have spent enough time for your per- of his show at Virginia Dwan’s gallery, ception to adjust, like eyes in the dark, on Fifty-seventh Street, in 1971, of to the pitch of excruciating discrimina- identically big, square, white paintings tion that Ryman demands. The exer- on sheets of vinyl, which were held to cise may ofer its own reward, refining the wall by paint that ran over their the viewer’s eye and mind, but it comes edges. (Tiny blank patches showed, with ponderous intellectual baggage. where pieces of masking tape had se- Ryman’s reductions of painting to basic cured the vinyl while the paint dried.) protocols are engaging only to the ex- It was like entering a luminous fog bank tent that you regard painting as an art in which nothing—except everything— that is both inherently important and was palpable. Under its spell, you could circumstantially in crisis. You must buy deem even the most astringent works into an old story, which bears on Ry- of other artists fatally fussy. man’s extreme, peculiarly sacramental The Dia show is a career sampler, standing in the history of taste. which means that it lacks the engulfing Ryman’s is a kind of mute art that, experience of Ryman shows that pre- generating reverent and brainy chatter, sent series of closely related works en puts uninitiated citizens in mind of the masse, with a practically chapel-like air emperor’s new clothes. (I have in hand, of consecration to some mysterious as tinder for such derision, “Robert ideal. I can imagine a devotee of Ryman Ryman: Critical Texts Since 1967,” a visiting Dia twenty-two times, to give thick volume of often gruellingly dense each of the paintings, in turn, an hour essays.) Yet, actually, the populist fable of undistracted communion. As it is, rather befits the serious aims of Ryman you hopscotch themes, with variants and his avant-garde generation, who of tone, including the majestic—as in insisted on something very like full- “Counsel” (1982), a large, densely frontal nudity in artistic intentions. The brushed canvas, held out from the wall emperor—roughly, high-modernist faith by steel fasteners—and the bizarre, as in art’s world-changing mission—could in “Pair Navigation” (1984/2002), which retain fealty only if stripped of fancy incorporates a painting on fibreglass styles and sentimental excuses. That mounted, horizontally, on a table-like, was Ryman’s formative moment. It was wood-and-metal structure that pro- succeeded by a suspicion, now amount- jects from the wall. If I could have one ing to a resigned conviction, that con- work from the show, to satisfy my some- temporary art is an industry producing what equivocal appetite for Ryman- just clothes, with no ruling authority ism, it would be the delicately befud- inside them. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 113 with grief, humor, and loneliness.) As THE THEATRE Kushner’s characters talked about how they met or fell in love, van Hove some- times projected images of a sunset on STATIC Fire Island—a meeting place for so many gay men. The images were shot from a David Bowie and “Lazarus.” distance, like memories, and to those memories he added the nostalgia that BY HILTON ALS came from hearing Bowie’s “Golden Years” or “The Man Who Sold the World”: melancholy white soul music that con- noted good times, and then the end of good times. After that wonder of a show closed, van Hove and Bowie were said to be collaborating on a new work, “Lazarus,” which Bowie had co-written with the Irish playwright Enda Walsh. I, for one, couldn’t wait. I wish I had. The set for “Lazarus” (now at New York Theatre Workshop) has the look of an incubator, with musicians positioned behind two glass panels separated by a video monitor. (The set and the lighting design are by Versweyveld.) At first, we see only static on the screen, then it and the surrounding walls are filled with TV images: politicians pontificating, house- wives and kids smiling, products being Bowie on the set of the 1976 film adaptation of “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” sold. Thomas Newton (Michael C. Hall) is the baby who dominates this controlled grew up, musically speaking, in a fairly work from the outside in—creating stage environment, and gin is his mother’s milk. I segregated world. I didn’t come across pictures that sometimes worked in tan- Watching TV and walking unsteadily “white” music—folk, stadium rock, New dem with the words, sometimes not. For from the sleeping area in his New York Wave, and so on—until I was in my late rock purists, his attention to exteriors di- apartment to the fridge, where he grabs teens, which was when I first heard David minished his credibility and read as dan- another bottle, is all he can manage, that Bowie; one of my sisters had his superb dyism—a lipstick smear on rock’s ma- and occasionally singing Bowie songs, 1976 album, “Station to Station.” Playing chismo. Writing in this magazine, in such as “Lazarus,” that tell us something the record, over and over again, I focussed 1972, the critic Ellen Willis cast a sup- about his ennui: less on Bowie’s famous alienation—the portive but cold eye on the performer: Look up here, I’m in heaven alienation that informed his personae What Bowie offers is not “decadence” I’ve got scars that can’t be seen Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, (sorry, Middle America) but a highly profes- I’ve got drama, can’t be stolen and others—than on his warmth. He sang sional pop surface with a soft core: under that Everybody knows me now . . . beautifully and dramatically about what multicolored Day-Glo frogman’s outit lurks By the time I got to New York a lot of singer-songwriters sing about: love. the soul of a folkie who digs Brel, plays an (am- I was living like a king pliied) acoustic guitar, and sings with a catch in Then I used up all my money . . . Still, Bowie was diferent. Love made him his voice about the downfall of the planet. Ain’t that just like me. feel strange and connected and then noth- ing at all. But so did cocaine, sounds, fast When the director Ivo van Hove used A kind of post-Sondheim protago- cars, words, fame, fashion—all of which several Bowie songs in his staging of Tony nist, Newton is built, it seems, to feel he treated as entities, like people. On his Kushner’s AIDS epic, “Angels in Amer- nothing, or to neutralize everything that best records, you could hear modernism at ica,” at BAM last year, it was the warmth might cause feeling—or interest us. After work. Like Marcel Duchamp, he didn’t and sincerity that Willis notes that shone a while, he is visited by an old associate so much diferentiate between high and through the sadness of the show, which named Michael (the sexy and authorita- low subject matter as play with the de- was extraordinary and left me feeling tive Charlie Pollock), a stif-backed alpha stabilizing force of presentation: he knew wounded, my throat tight with all the male and committed capitalist in a natty that you could get away with anything if goodbyes I managed to say and did not suit. Michael can’t believe that Newton you balanced the weird abrasiveness of say during the years Kushner was writ- would willingly give up his position as a the new with the calm of classicism. ing about. (By stripping the play of all businessman of the first order to become Like an actor (and some of the black its usual gimmickry, the production’s de- a semi-recluse, nursing wounds that come

performers I admired), Bowie seemed to signer, Jan Versweyveld, made a vista filled from—who knows? All we know for a SCHAPIRO AND FAHEY/KLEIN STEVE

114 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 while is that Newton is spiritually dead, Hall is dedicated, too, but, like most a Lazarus who cannot rise to life, let alone actors without the support of a real script, the kind of life the stage demands. he overacts to compensate. Van Hove has After Michael leaves, we listen to a considerable reputation as a theatre art- Newton’s assistant, Elly (Cristin Milioti), ist who “writes” his shows, that is, as some- and her husband, Zach (Bobby Moreno), one whose vision is as important as the who is jealous of Elly’s relationship with text itself, but in this case he allowed the her employer and confronts her about it: production to proceed without a work-

ZACH: Do you think being an assistant will able text. Van Hove has said that Bowie fulill you? is one of his favorite artists, and perhaps ELLY: I know you think my résumé’s been that was intimidating: how can you rein- written by squirrels—while your love of Informa- vent your idol? Instead, he goes along with tion Technology has been handed down from the nonsense that Bowie and Walsh have Moses. Will it “fulill” me? The suggestion is— of course it won’t—well, maybe it will, Zach. halfheartedly dreamed up, including Teen- ZACH: Right, maybe it will—I hope it does. age Girls (Krystina Alabado, Krista Pi- ELLY: And why do you hope that? oppi, Brynn Williams), who sometimes ZACH: Because I want my wife to be wear masks and sing backup for Newton fulilled—obviously not fulilled with Thomas for no reason whatsoever. Then, there’s Fucking Newton. Girl (Sophia Anne Caruso), who has long This is some of the more scintillating blond hair and wears white and represents dialogue in this intermissionless two- purity with a capital “P.” When she’s not hour production, from which the drama onstage, she’s on video, running through has been bled out. Van Hove’s stage is darkness, presumably toward Newton, a void. As the minutes tick on, it be- who dreams of returning to space. comes more and more obvious that we By the time Newton does leave and cannot be actively engaged by Zach and the stage goes black, the theatre is filled Elly, let alone by Newton and Michael, with incomprehension, an unsatisfied because none of them have an inner life: sourness, and the pretentious posturing Bowie and Walsh and van Hove didn’t of those who believe they have grasped imagine one for them. After Zach and the meaning of the play. As a director, Elly’s forced and artificial quarrel, New- van Hove has made an essential interpre- ton beats his fist against a wall and sings tive mistake: he’s gone for the “cold,” “alien” Bowie’s “It’s No Game (Part 1),” a great Bowie of the Roeg film, as opposed to tune, full of aural and emotional disso- Bowie the storyteller, the warm wizard nance. But why Newton sings the song whose songs brought so much not only at this point isn’t clear—unless, of course, to “Angels in America” but to the pop he can plug into Zach and Elly’s argu- world. As a co-author, Bowie has made ment telepathically? the mistake of believing that a theatre The script of “Lazarus” was inspired piece can be as sketchy as a song. Like a by Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel, “The Man number of other rock musicians whose Who Fell to Earth,” about a “human- hits have stopped coming, Bowie perhaps oid alien” who lands in post-Eisenhower thought that he could remake himself as Kentucky in search of the water he needs a playwright—or something. (Green Day, to save his drought-ridden planet. It Sting, and U2 have all tackled Broadway doesn’t take long for Newton’s superior with some degree of success.) He chose intelligence to be discovered in that con- to work with a director who is known for formist milieu, where everyone and ev- his self-conscious avant-gardism—a “real” erything is average. After a while, he artist who defies the conventional. But, becomes the enormously wealthy head by disavowing the conventional so stren- of a technology conglomerate. Even as uously, Bowie, with Walsh and van Hove, he is caught up in the trappings of earthly has made a show that’s actually old-fash- success, though, Newton longs for the ioned at heart, less rock-and-roll rebel- diference he calls home. When Bowie lious than anything he ever did on his played Newton, in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 own. It’s as if he’d forgotten that, as a film adaptation, he gave a creepily bril- younger artist, he made theatre that was liant and precise performance, drawing unlike anyone else’s. His script back then on the alienation that he no doubt felt was his beauty and his warmth and his from his own body: during that period, ability to make us believe any story that he was heavily addicted to cocaine. he felt was worth telling. ♦

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 115 to the editing of action sequences. No THE CURRENT CINEMA longer, it seems, are we required to know who is doing what, and where, at any given point. What matters is that the DEEP AND DARK frenzy of the occasion should be matched by the drubbing of the images, which “In the Heart of the Sea” and “Son of Saul.” must pelt us without pity or interrup- tion. Just to crank up the turmoil, “In BY ANTHONY LANE the Heart of the Sea” can be seen in 3-D, so that masts and braces keep poking you in the nose. Nothing in the hunt is as memorable as the blessed pause that comes in its wake, as the wounded whale sprays blood through its blowhole, and Thomas’s awestruck face is dusted with a rain of red. The camera stays with him, and justly so. You can feel his very boy- hood being washed away. And so, around the Horn, into the kingdom of the white whale—a patched and piebald beast, which has clearly been told by its agent that it can look forward to a long and fabulous career as the world’s largest metaphor. I rel- ished the smack of its humongous tail, which sends a wall of water coursing into the lens, and Chase’s sighting of his prize. “As I live and breathe, he’s Ron Howard’s new movie reimagines the ill-fated voyage of a whaling ship. mine!” he cries, harpoon in hand. If only Chris Hemsworth’s voice were as he new Ron Howard film, “In the is also paid by Melville, who, amply and beefy as his build; for the full efect, THeart of the Sea,” is based not on suf ficiently inspired, goes away to com- we need the rich and prophetic into- “Moby-Dick” but on one of the true pose his book. Easy. nations of Charlton Heston, or the stories on which “Moby-Dick” is based. The meat of the film, then, belongs salt-encrusted growl of Robert Shaw, This sets a worrying trend. If Holly- to the voyage of the Essex. The cap- in “Jaws.” Shaw steered closer to Cap- wood producers decide that, having tain is a tyro named George Pollard tain Ahab than either Hemsworth or exhausted so many major novels, they (Benjamin Walker), who got the job Walker does, and the new film barely can start plundering the source mate- because of his moneyed father. Up grazes the madness, let alone the rhe- rial, we are in for a long haul. A woman against Pollard is the more seasoned torical surge, of “Moby-Dick”—“the named Delphine Delamare is said to Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), the great flood-gates of the wonder-world,” have given rise to Emma Bovary, for first mate, who hails from poor farm- as Ishmael calls them. If you want a instance, but could there be other con- ing stock and is not allowed to forget Ron Howard movie about a man ob- tenders? How many bio-pics of adul- it. Primed by “Moby-Dick,” we brace sessed with a creature from the deep, terous French housewives can we take? ourselves for a clash of sovereign wills, “In the Heart of the Sea,” sadly, is not The movie is touchingly explicit but, as with so much in the movie, the the place to start. Try “Splash.” about how to write an epic novel. If setup peters out. Only once does How- you are Herman Melville (Ben Whi- ard reap a fitting whirlwind, as Pollard, irdsong, and a blur of greenery. shaw), say, you show up one night at displaying poor seamanship and ignor- B That is what we see and hear as the home of Thomas Nickerson (Bren- ing Chase’s advice, leads his vessel into “Son of Saul” begins, and we should dan Gleeson). He is a survivor of the the maw of a storm. treasure the moment while it lasts, be- Essex, a whaling ship that set of from The pacing here is certainly force- cause the rest of the tale—every beat Nantucket in 1819 and never came ful, as it is during the harrying and the of its hundred and seven minutes— back, having been wrecked by a white slaughter of a sperm whale, and yet the eradicates any hint of calmness or peace. whale in the Pacific—more desert than force lacks clarity. This is partly because The release of László Nemes’s dumb- sea, as Nickerson recalls. He was then computer-generated waves never quite founding film in time for the Oscar a boy of fourteen (Tom Holland), and bufet us with the slap of the real thing, nominations makes sense; the fact that the trauma of those events has vexed and also because, in the twenty years it should descend upon us during the him ever since. By recounting them, since Howard made his finest film, festive season, however, is an irony that not only does he assuage the pain; he “Apollo 13,” something has happened sticks in the craw.

116 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY BILL BRAGG The setting is unnamed, although if ing by accident into a German soldier. of Saul” is a début: Nemes has never di- you were to think of it as Auschwitz- Fear of repercussion is a habit. rected a full-length film before. As for Birkenau you would not be wrong. To These continual closeups of Saul Röhrig, he is a poet as well as an actor, be exact, we are in the netherworld of serve a solemn purpose. They reinforce born in Budapest and now living in the the Sonderkommando, those prisoners, the sense that one man’s testimony is Bronx. If neither of them made another mostly Jewish, whose task was to assist enough. There is no way in which the movie, this one would suice. Should with the disposal of other prisoners when film (or a hundred films) could rep- you wish to grapple with its form, you they reached the death camps. This ac- resent the breadth of the communal might suggest that Nemes twines to- tivity was itself performed under sen- sufering in the camp. All we can hope gether too many narrative strands; there tence of death: if you were picked to for is that the experience—the literal is a subplot about an uprising planned participate, you could not refuse, and at viewpoint—of a single witness can be among the Sonderkommando, plus a regular intervals a Sonderkommando added to the record. By homing in on private mission undertaken by Saul, con- squad would be exterminated and re- Saul, and on the range of response in cerning a boy whom he recognizes, in placed by another, not least because its his dark eyes, we are made so aware of the gas chambers, as his son. The father members were Geheimnisträger—“bear- the monstrosities around him that we cares nothing for himself, but his entire ers of secrets,” as Nemes informs us, in do not need to have them spelled out. being is bent on finding a rabbi who will a note, at the beginning. They could not Bare dead bodies are glimpsed, often say Kaddish for the child. All this takes be permitted to reveal, especially to new fleetingly, at the sides of the frame. The place in a mere two days. Could Nemes arrivals, what they knew. newcomers, who are told that hot soup have made the work more spare, choos- The focus of the film is, in every sense, and a shower await them, and who are ing a random day on which nothing oc- on Saul Ausländer (Géza Röhrig), a then stripped and herded toward the curred but the ritual toil of horror, like Hungarian Jew who works in a Sonder- gas chambers, with the help of the the scrubbing of bloody floors? Maybe kommando. He appears in almost every Sonderkommando, are seldom in focus, so, yet the film is designed not simply shot, drawing and compelling our at- and the same is true of the corpses to attest but to protest: to ascribe both tention. When he hefts a corpse, we borne to the furnaces. This strikes me dignity and identity to the living reb- watch the lifter rather than the load. as merciful and right. The question is els, as to the deceased boy, and thereby We grow accustomed to the back of his not one of taste but of imaginative mod- to refute, with a quiet fury, the Germans head, and to the rough red “X” that is esty; to watch most feature films—as who are heard referring to the bodies daubed on the rear of his jacket as a opposed to documentaries—about the of the Jews as “pieces.” Primo Levi, in sign of his duties. Largely, though, what Holocaust, even those as expert as “The Drowned and the Saved,” argues the camera dwells upon is his face— “Schindler’s List,” is to be left with a that the use of the Sonderkommando sharp and stilled, the eyes set deep under lasting moral queasiness about the lim- was the “most demonic crime” of the the eaves of his brow, which wears a its of dramatic reconstruction. Just be- Nazis. He called it “an attempt to shift permanent frown. Note the precise angle cause you can attempt a thorough de- onto others—specifically, the victims— of his gaze, aimed downward at thirty piction of a death camp doesn’t mean the burden of guilt, so that they were degrees from the horizontal, when there that you should; if your audience goes deprived of even the solace of inno- are Nazis present; to meet their gaze away convinced that it now knows what cence.” That is the solace that “Son of would be taken as insolence. No ges- went on at Auschwitz, you’ve done Saul” seeks to restore.  ture in the movie is as telling as the something wrong. That is why I ad- haste with which Saul, during the open- mire the judiciousness of Nemes. He ing scene, snatches of his cap and freezes gives us only shards. newyorker.com to the spot, head lowered, after bump- The remarkable thing is that “Son Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 21 & 28, 2015 117 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 Joe Dator, must be received by Sunday, December 27th. The finalists in the December 7th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the January 11th issue. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Any resident of the United States, Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or over can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THE WINNING CAPTION

THE FINALISTS

“We’ve been struggling to enlist millennials.” James Olson, Seattle, Wash. “Your boss just called. He is sending something to you from the Cloud.” “This is step one. Next, we slip in some ads.” Douglas Andersen, Lexington, Ky. Bert Metter, Greenwich, Conn.

“I just think it sends the wrong message.” Jean-Marie Gard, Lexington, Mass.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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