PRICE $8.99 MAY 18, 2020

THE INNOVATORS ISSUE

MAY 18, 2020

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Evan Osnos on the Trump-China pandemic fight; voyeurs onscreen; groceries fresh from the back yard; movie marquees; a nurse’s poems; where gloves go.

CORONAVIRUS CHRONICLES James Somers 16 Breathing Room Racing to solve the ventilator crisis.

SHOUTS & MURMURS Libby Gelman-Waxner 23 If You Ask Me: The Last Quarantine Think Piece

ANNALS OF ACTIVISM Jia Tolentino 24 Can I Help You? How the mutual-aid movement promises relief.

A REPORTER AT LARGE Ben Taub 30 Five Oceans, Five Deeps A quest to get to the bottom of the world.

PROFILES Alex Ross 46 The Fearless Pianist Revolutionizing performance in lockdown.

FICTION Jonathan Lethem 54 “The Afterlife”

THE CRITICS BOOKS Thomas Meaney 58 The making of Henry Kissinger. 63 Briefly Noted Hua Hsu 65 What can fungi teach us? Dan Chiasson 68 Wanda Coleman’s many identities.

THE THEATRE Alexandra Schwartz 70 When Zoom becomes a stage.

THE ART WORLD Peter Schjeldahl 72 Dorothea Lange and Félix Fénéon.

POEMS David Biespiel 29 “Men Waiting for a Train” Rae Armantrout 50 “Our Days”

COVER Anita Kunz “Class of 2020”

DRAWINGS David Sipress, Emily Bernstein, Oren Bernstein, Michael Maslin, Maddie Dai, Liana Finck, Frank Cotham, Avi Steinberg, Roz Chast, Kendra Allenby, Charlie Hankin, Mitra Farmand SPOTS Edward Steed PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT. CONTRIBUTORS

Ben Taub (“Five Oceans, Five Deeps,” Jia Tolentino (“Can I Help You?,” p. 24) p. 50), a staff writer, is the recipient of is a staff writer. Her first book, the essay the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature collection “Trick Mirror,” came out writing. His 2018 reporting on Iraq won last year. a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award. Alex Ross (“The Fearless Pianist,” p. 46), The New Yorker the magazine’s music critic since 1996, Crossword: Anita Kunz (Cover) has contributed will publish his third book, “Wagnerism,” covers to The New Yorker since 1995. in September. Introducing Her book “Redux: An Alternative His- tory of Art” is due out next spring. Rae Armantrout (Poem, p. 50) received Partner Mode the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for James Somers (“Breathing Room,” p. 16) her collection “Versed.” Her new book, is a writer and a programmer based in “Conjure,” will be out in October. New York. Thomas Meaney (Books, p. 58) is a fel- Alexandra Schwartz (The Theatre, p. 70), low at the Max Planck Society, in a theatre critic for the magazine, has Göttingen, and at the Quincy Institute been a staff writer since 2016. for Responsible Statecraft.

Jonathan Lethem (Fiction, p. 54) teaches Libby Gelman-Waxner (Shouts & Mur- creative writing at Pomona College. murs, p. 25) is the alter ego of Paul Rud- He will publish a new novel, “The Ar- nick, whose play “Guilty Pleasure” will rest,” in November. be produced at the La Jolla Playhouse.

David Biespiel (Poem, p. 29) is the au- Mark Rozzo (The Talk of the Town, thor of, most recently, the poetry col- p. 14), a former member of the maga- lection “Republic Café” and the forth- zine’s editorial staff, is a contributing You can now solve coming memoir “A Place of Exodus.” editor at Vanity Fair. our online crossword puzzles with a friend who’s across the room THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM or halfway around the world.

Start playing at newyorker.com/crossword

A REPORTER AT LARGE MEDICAL DISPATCH Animated submarine schematics, Eren Orbey on the medical students maps, and crew photos dive deeper who graduated from school early to into Ben Taub’s story from this issue. join the coronavirus fight.

Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,

and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008. YORKER THE NEW FOR JOHNSON KAY TAYLOR RIGHT: BURTON; CARL LEFT:

2 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 18, 2020 PROMOTION

THE MAIL

COFFEEHOUSE CULTURES a conversation. (It was no wonder that King Charles II tried to outlaw coffee- Adam Gopnik fluidly leads us through houses in 1675, or that satirists, who the historical and economic underpin- may have had Royalist leanings, de- nings of coffee drinking to elucidate cried coffee drinkers as impotent and the global web of the bean (Books, overly talkative.) Coffee, which re- April 27th). He observes that the mains a vital social lubricant today, growth of coffee culture in the United undoubtedly propelled late-night ne- States can be measured by the large gotiations in early modern England numbers of epicurean cafés, coffee con- and empowered radical thinkers to noisseurs, and imported espresso beans imagine a world with greater politi- that have entered society since 1989. cal liberty. This notion of an American coffee Stephen B. Dobranski culture implies that the people par- Distinguished University Professor taking in it have become “cultured.” Department of English Yet there are more quotidian coffee Georgia State University cultures in American history worth 1Atlanta, Ga. mentioning. I think back to the do- mestic routines developed in mid- HOW TO FIGHT COVID-19 century America: of the percolator perched on our kitchen counter, of I read with appreciation Amy David- Mrs. Olson saving marriages with son Sorkin’s piece about global efforts Mountain Grown Folger’s, of the ubiq- to contain the coronavirus (Comment, uitous packets of Sanka, of the rotgut April 27th). She points to the talk coffee at truck stops, and of taking about how countries led by women your coffee “white” (with cream). All seem to be faring relatively well in this, from what seems like a lifetime the fight against COVID-19, and rightly ago, was just as much a culture of coffee, notes that these nations are “dispro- and just as integral to the changing portionately small, wealthy, Scandi- history of the brew. navian, and, not incidentally, provid- Maureen Barbara Jackson ers of universal health care.” It occurred Seattle, Wash. to me that there may be other con- tributing social factors as well. These As I was reading Gopnik’s piece on lauded countries with women lead- the link between coffee and capital- ers—including, but not limited to, ism, I was put in mind of the bean’s New Zealand, Taiwan, Germany, Den- arrival in England—an event with mark, Finland, Norway, and Iceland— impressive political and social reper- also tend to accept the legitimacy of cussions. An early English coffee cul- science, and to take a rational ap- ture arose by the mid-seventeenth proach to balancing public health with century, prompting writers to extoll personal freedoms. It is therefore not (and exaggerate) the drink’s alleged surprising that their citizens are more health benefits. (One advertisement, likely to express an open mind at the from 1652, claimed that coffee could polls, about both party leaders and cure gout, aid digestion, and prevent party policies. miscarriages.) Coffee, more than claret Scott K. Ralph or ale, was well suited to democratic Oakville, Ont. discourse. The new drink was espe- cially favored by Parliamentarians after • the English Civil War: coffeehouses Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, eventually became known as “penny address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited universities”—places where men of for length and clarity, and may be published in different classes, opinions, and trades any medium. We regret that owing to the volume could sit around a table and strike up of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 18, In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, New York City museums, galleries, theatres, music venues, and cinemas have closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found online and streaming.

M AY 13 – 19, 2020

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Charli XCX has been making futuristic electro-pop since her 2013 début, “True Romance,” but with her new album, “How I’m Feeling Now,” produced in quarantine at her home in L.A. (where she is pictured), the English singer-songwriter creates music for the present. The singles “Forever” and “Claws” crackle, smolder, and otherwise short-circuit, as though Charli’s electronic devices cannot withstand the intensity of her desire for human connection. “I’ll love you forever,” she sings, “even when we’re not together.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY HUCK KWONG 1 notably in the continuing series “First Look: grayed-out windows parked on the street in A RT New Art Online.” Curious how pixels stack front of the SculptureCenter might have been up to paint? Scroll through the eight-person mistaken for a prop from a sci-fi film shoot. show “Brushes,” which ranges in tone from When the city was ordered to stay home and Kerstin Brätsch airy and calligraphic (Laura Brothers’s “Deux spin its wheels, the ghostly untitled piece by How should a painting be? Given that this dar- Blue”) to memelike and manic (Jacob Ciocci’s Devin Kenny and Andrea Solstad seemed eerily ing German artist, who calls New York home, animated GIFs). Binge-watchers can catch a prescient. The eclectic exhibition (whose illus- received the inaugural Helen Frankenthaler three-part musical episode of Shana Moulton’s trated catalogue is online while the nonprofit Award, in 2019, one simple answer is: abstract surreal pseudo soap opera, “Whispering Pines,” remains temporarily closed) was thoughtfully and colorful, like Brätsch’s extravagantly beau- whose housebound heroine indulges in self-care curated by Kyle Dancewicz, but the title he tiful, if deliriously weird, new series, “Fossil routines that—spoiler alert—turn her into a chose for the show is misleading—its mood, far Psychics for Christa.” But there is nothing goddess.—A.K.S. (rhizome.org) from one of absolute incredulity, is fraught with simple about Brätsch’s convention-defying ap- false starts and second-guessing. One standout is proach. Where Frankenthaler’s stained surfaces the New Orleans-born, New York-based Emilie were whisper-thin, Brätsch pushes pigment to “Total Disbelief” Louise Gossiaux, who became blind as an un- behave with the physical oomph of geologic for- When this fascinating fifteen-person show dergraduate art student and went on to earn an mations—and she doesn’t do it alone. To deflate opened, pre-pandemic, the derelict car with M.F.A. at Yale. The centerpiece of her tenderly the modernist myths of the solitary genius and of the superiority of art over craft, Brätsch col- laborates with artisans on her projects, in this A RT ONLINE case with Valter Cipriani, a Roman specialist in the seventeenth-century Italian technique of stucco marmo. MOMA commissioned the series for its new Terrace Café, an ideal context for an artist who is adamant that art should never be separate from the ordinary pleasures of life. (The museum is temporarily closed, but its Web site has several features on Brätsch, who is also included in a virtual viewing room of the gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.)—Andrea K. Scott (moma.org and gavinbrown.biz)

“Radical Women” The first season of the Getty’s “Recording Art- ists” podcast is hosted by the renowned curator Helen Molesworth, whose enthusiasm for her subjects—six formidable twentieth-century art- ists—is as illuminating as the audio interviews at the heart of the series. In the first episode, Molesworth describes herself as a “fangirl” of the figurative painter Alice Neel, but she’s erudite and critical, too. Lee Krasner, Betye Saar, Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, and Eva Hesse are each the focus of a subsequent epi- sode. Molesworth deftly sets up the archival recordings—conversations conducted by the feminist art historians Cindy Nemser and Bar- bara Rose mostly in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—with lively biographical accounts and commentary from an outstanding group of guests. The artists Catherine Lord and San- ford Biggers have refreshing takes on Ono; the painters Amy Sillman and Lari Pittman are great on Krasner. And it’s a treat, of course, to hear the old recordings. In a memorable moment, Frankenthaler, speaking of a studio visit with Mail art, which requires neither exhibition space nor Zoom conferencing, the critic Clement Greenberg circa 1951, states, is poised for a comeback. The genre emerged, in the nineteen-sixties, as as though it’s a matter of fact, that “to his aston- a challenge to conventional art objects and hidebound institutions. It’s no ishment, I was knocking out paintings that were pretty terrific.” The self-reflective insights and surprise, then, that much of the material in the Smithsonian Archives of smile-provoking swagger in the entire series are American Art’s exhibition “Pushing the Envelope,” winningly curated by pretty terrific, too.—Johanna Fateman (getty.edu) Miriam Kienle (and now on view at aaa.si.edu), comes from the papers of Lucy Lippard, an influential theorist of the movement. One typescript Rhizome flyer, from 1971, was sent to Lippard by the revered late Conceptualist John In 1996, the American artist Mark Tribe rec- Baldessari, whose witty way with text lit a path for so many other artists. ognized that the Internet is more than a vir- tual showroom for conventional work—it’s an Titled “The Best Way to Do Art,” it concludes with the wry observation artistic medium in its own right. He started a that it’s difficult to fit a Cézanne into a mailbox. A more visually dynamic Listserv for like-minded thinkers and named it missive by the collective Les Petites Bon-Bons, sent circa 1970, is adorned Rhizome, a botanical term (then in vogue with semiologists) that describes an unpredictable, with fruit-shaped stickers and asks readers to “please imagine a Gay universe.” always expanding network. Over the years, From the Neo-Dadaist collage works of Ray Johnson to the Uruguayan Rhizome.org has grown from an upstart into artist Clemente Padín’s agitprop, mail art is shown to be a powerful form for a stalwart nonprofit based in New York and af- filiated with the New Museum. It commissions pranks, political dissent, and forging networks outside the gallery system.

LUCY R. LIPPARD PAPERS / ARCHIVES OF ARCHIVES OF / PAPERS R. LIPPARD LUCY SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ART, AMERICAN and preserves digital art, and exhibits it, too, It still can be—as long as the Postal Service hangs on.—Johanna Fateman

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 5 movements by following cues on a pair of audio STREAMING THEATRE tracks). New “Soundstage” episodes, which come out every other Thursday, will include works by Lucas Hnath, Kirsten Childs, and Jeremy1 O. Harris.—E.V. (soundstagepodcast.org) DANCE

New York City Ballet The original “Pulcinella” was premièred by the Ballets Russes in Paris, in 1920, with designs by Picasso and music by Stravinsky. The composer later turned his melodious, refined score into a series of orchestral suites; Justin Peck used one of them for his “Pulcinella Variations,” created for City Ballet in 2017. (It will be broadcast on May 15.) Peck jettisoned the commedia-dell’arte narrative, but, by dressing his dancers in the whimsical costumes of Tsumori Chisato, he kept some of its original witty flavor. Colorful tutus sport giant eyes and daisy petals; tights are dec- orated with checkered or zigzag patterns. The ballet is crisp and bright, playful but rigorously structured. It’s one of Peck’s finest. On May 19, Public Theatre, the company will show Balanchine’s regal and Among the places I wish I could go right now are the elegiac “Diamonds,” set to three movements of downtown theatre’s usually buzzing hub, and its Central Park outpost, Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony. Sara Mearns the Delacorte. Fortunately, the Public has been putting what it can on- and Russell Janzen lead the cast.—Marina Harss line (at publictheater.org). Shakespeare in the Park is cancelled, but last (nycballet.com) summer’s spiky, Georgia-set “Much Ado About Nothing,” starring Dan- ielle Brooks and Grantham Coleman (and featuring a timely “Stacey Alvin Ailey Robert Battle, the director of Alvin Ailey Abrams 2020” sign), is streaming for free, via WNET. Richard Nelson’s American Dance Theatre since 2011, is a cho- plays chronicling two fictional families in Rhinebeck, New York, make reographer of note. His main interest seems for low-key binge-watching. (Nelson recently wrote a pandemic edition to lie in building architectural forms—shapes that shift, expand, and contract with near-math- of his Apple-family plays, which was performed on Zoom.) And Joe’s ematical precision. His 2004 piece “Mass,” Pub, the Public’s in-house cabaret, is sharing live-streamed shows and which the company will broadcast on its Ailey selections from its archives. This week: The composer Samora Pinder- All Access Web page on May 14, was inspired by a performance of Verdi’s Requiem. What hughes, the jazz band the Hot Sardines, and Stephanie Chou’s “Comfort struck Battle was less the music than the way Girl,” a musical study of the Chinese women forced into sexual slavery by that the rows of chorus members entered and the Japanese Army during the Second World War.—Michael Schulman exited, their robes swishing around them. In this dance, he plays with that idea, dissolving and recombining the ensemble—also dressed in robes—creating parallel and intersecting path- witty installation is a display of stoneware arms, terrific cast. Sarah Stiles (“Tootsie”), with ways. The percussion-heavy score is by John legs, chests, and torsos—modelled on those of her customary verve, portrays a lovelorn cel- Mackey.—M.H. (alvinailey.org/ailey-all-access) the artist and her family—marked with tattoos, list, and Marc Kudisch, Rebecca Naomi Jones, which she re-created from memory.—A.K.S. Annie Golden, Taylor Trensch, and Tony Vin- (sculpture-center.org) cent feel so alive that you almost don’t miss JoyceStream: Stephen Petronio 1 seeing them.—Elisabeth Vincentelli The Joyce Theatre’s streaming series continues on YouTube, May 15-21, with Stephen Petronio’s “American Landscapes.” A meditation on the THE THEATRE Soundstage state of the nation, the 2019 work has as its In 2018, Playwrights Horizons started working backdrop a not so subtle slide show of images by on a podcast series titled “Soundstage.” The Robert Longo: flags, soldiers, Rosie the Riveter, Bleeding Love timing turned out to be critical, as we are now kneeling football players, marchers, explosions. You may be forgiven for thinking that the plot exploring new ways to experience theatre—and Much as the score, by Jim Jarmusch and Jozef of “Bleeding Love” is a little on the nose: the rediscovering old ones, as these shows feel like van Wissem, cuts gentle lute with electric book writer Jason Schafer transposed elements radio productions. The first episodes are all grunge, the dance spikes melancholy with anger, of the Oscar Wilde story “The Nightingale over the stylistic map. “PRIME: A Practical the torqued elegance of Petronio’s signature and the Rose” to a future wrecked by climate Breviary” is a meditative ten-song cycle by style expressing both strength and confusion. change, with folks afraid to leave their houses. the rising composer Heather Christian (“An- On May 19, there’s an artist talkback.—Brian Yet the romance-minded musical premièred imal Wisdom”), who conceived it for a collec- Seibert (joyce.org/engage/joycestream) in Denmark in 2015—the post-apocalypse tive 6 A.M. Mass. It’s saying something that 1 never goes out of style. “Bleeding Love” is “PRIME” is the most traditional of the initial now getting wide exposure thanks to an audio three podcasts. “Gather,” written and directed production on the Broadway Podcast Network, by Robert O’Hara (“Bootycandy,” “Barbecue”), MUSIC delivered in three installments of about thirty sets up a thriller atmosphere, then springs the minutes each. The eclectic score (music by Ar- kind of pointed, surreal twist at which he ex- thur Lafrentz Bacon, lyrics by Harris Doran), cels. Jordan Harrison’s “Play for Any Two Peo- Aril Brikha: “Prisma” ranging from Broadway to classical and rock, ple” is exactly that: a show for two listeners to TECHNO The Swedish techno producer Aril

is agreeable enough, but the main draw is the perform together (they speak lines and act out Brikha has long been inspired by the soulful MAX DALTON BY ILLUSTRATION

6 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 approach taken to the genre in its home city fects-laden tone—in view. His trio mates, the boygenius pipes in to reinforce her vocals on of Detroit—his tracks seem to pulsate with Italian bassist Dario Deidda and the celebrated “Roses/Lotus/Violet/Iris.” The album, which feeling as much as with star-chasing synths drummer Gregory Hutchinson, likewise glean has been released in three parts, swings from or swinging hi-hats. Brikha has been espe- inspiration from the durable offerings that their peppy yet pain-filled moments, as on “Dead cially prolific of late: his new album, “Prisma,” forerunners have left them.—Steve Futterman Horse,” to disarming piano balladry. It’s a com- comes only three months after an ambient disk, pendium of varied, strange, jagged pieces, but “Dance of a Trillion Stars.” “Prisma” is aimed eventually a full picture emerges—the clearest for the dance floor, even though its bouncy Opera Philadelphia: of Williams yet.—J.L. disco rhythms and sheeny production have arrived at a time when clubs are off limits—but Digital Festival O its contemplative core rather fits our straitened OPERA For the past several years, Opera Phila- X: “Alphabetland” circumstances.—Michaelangelo Matos delphia has raised its national profile with a fes- PUNK The founding members of the rock quartet tival of new music each September. This month, X quit recording together thirty-five years ago, the company applies its venturesome spirit to a only five years and four releases after their Drake: “Dark Lane Demo Tapes” streaming series, available on its Web site and début album, “Los Angeles,” signalled that HIP-HOP The Canadian rapper Drake has never YouTube channel, to the benefit of operagoers punk had taken up residence in proximity to seemed too concerned about crowding his curious about what it’s been up to. Philip Ven- laid-back Laurel Canyon. The biggest surprise discography. His catalogue has become a res- ables’s “Denis & Katya,” a true-crime opera about their reunion record, “Alphabetland,” is ervoir for studio overflow—full of mixtapes, that rivets without sensationalism, set a high not that its roar has a familiar potency but that EPs, playlists, and even a twenty-five-song bar when it kicked things off, on May 1. There the songwriter-vocalists Exene Cervenka and album. His latest addition, “Dark Lane Demo are still three more productions scheduled for John Doe seem so attuned to the current apoc- Tapes,” is mostly wispy sketches, powered by release: Rossini’s “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” the alyptic moment. Atop the boom and crackle lo-fi beats, that aim for depth without quite series’ one traditional entry; Lembit Beecher’s unleashed by the guitarist Billy Zoom and the achieving it. Even when the sounds are mel- “Sky on Swings,” with Marietta Simpson and drummer D. J. Bonebrake, one topical cho- ancholy, what Drake pulls off is catchiness: Frederica von Stade as Alzheimer’s patients; rus asks, “Who gets passed to the head line? the Billboard No. 1 “Toosie Slide” is addictive and Missy Mazzoli’s devastating “Breaking the Who gets water, who gets wine?” Another, TikTok fodder, and “Pain 1993” glows as an Waves,” with Kiera Duffy, who gave a fearless already exhausted by the year at hand, begs up-tempo exchange with Playboi Carti. But, performance in the piece at New York’s Proto- for mercy: “Please don’t make us cry.” The taken together, the project feels like a stepping type Festival in 2017.—Oussama Zahr (May 15, ruckus is tailor-made for blowing off steam in stone to another studio album—his next is due May 22, and May 29 at 8.) quarantine.—K. Leander Williams out this summer.—Julyssa Lopez 1 Hayley Williams: MOVIES Joan as Police Woman: “Petals for Armor” “Cover Two” INDIE When band musicians make solo work, ROCK An international quarantine, it turns out, their efforts are often fascinated with auton- Cane River is prime time for cover songs. Across the In- omy. But Hayley Williams, who has led the This 1982 drama, long believed lost and re- ternet, young singers have busied themselves pop-punk mainstay Paramore for half her cently rediscovered, is the only feature by interpreting old material; even the “Saturday life, embraces collaboration on her début Horace B. Jenkins, an African-American film- Night Live” musical guests have turned to clas- solo album, “Petals for Armor,” and uses it to maker who died soon after its completion. It’s sic rock as a balm. It raises the question: Why deepen her quiet explorations of self. “Sim- centered on the romance of a young black man, have covers, once central to rock’s lifeblood, so mer,” a seething, synth-filled study of rage, Peter Metoyer (Richard Romain), a recent thoroughly vanished from albums? Joan Wasser, features her bandmate (and the record’s pro- college graduate and a poet who returns to his who performs as Joan as Police Woman, is one ducer) Taylor York, and the indie supergroup family’s farm in rural Louisiana, and a local songwriter who has long devoted attention to voicing the lyrics and melodies of others. Though needlessly walled off from her own work—first on “Cover,” from 2009, and now CLASSICAL LIVE STREAMING on its belated sequel, “Cover Two”—her covers are reliably cherry-picked and fussed over. Like jixiansheng The current pandemic has posed an many such projects, this second volume pops when the singer carves up a song to see what industry-wide crisis for artists and pre- lies inside. From universally male sources as senters, but they have reacted quickly disparate as Gil Scott-Heron, Prince, and the and imaginatively, putting out free digital Strokes, Wasser unearths torrid ballads. The songs belong to others; the trails of smoke in content as a way to share creative work. their wake are her own.—Jay Ruttenberg Now the 92nd Street Y is embracing a two-pronged approach to show how Kurt Rosenwinkel Trio: companies might maintain visibility “Angels Around” while bolstering a badly depleted bot- tom line. This month, it streams concerts JAZZ Improvisation may be the wellspring of jazz, but utilizing a memorable melody as a on its Web site (92y.org) every Tuesday jumping-off point never hurt anybody. On and Thursday, alternating free archival the album “Angels Around,” the guitarist Kurt content with live events that carry an Rosenwinkel, himself an adept composer, mainly opts to mine the work of illustrious admission charge of ten dollars. Next others; in choosing such polished gems as up are a recording, from 2018, of the late Thelonious Monk’s “Ugly Beauty,” Charles magisterial pianist Peter Serkin’s final Mingus’s “Self-Portrait in Three Colors,” and Bill Evans’s “Time Remembered,” he sets a recital at the Y, on May 14, and a live daunting standard for any future variations. To performance by the violinist Jesse Mills his credit, Rosenwinkel remains a high-calibre and the pianist Rieko Aizawa, presenting melodist, and his fleet yet considered solos attest to his commitment to keeping striking works by Schubert, Poulenc, and John —Steve Smith ILLUSTRATION BY JENICE KIM BY ILLUSTRATION phrases—each wrapped in his attractive, ef- Harbison, on May 19.

THEEW N YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 7 tour guide named Maria Mathis (Tommye tale of concealed paternity, they turn Benja- Medel as Mara, an aspiring writer and teacher; Myrick), a twenty-two-year-old black woman min’s recollections into flashbacks that begin she’s working toward a master’s degree while who, desperate to escape small-town life, is with his birth, on November 11, 1918. Pitt’s negotiating a fragile relationship with a soft- about to leave home for college. Maria comes face and head, made up to appear aged, are ware engineer (C. Mason Wells) who’s often from a poor family descended from enslaved digitally grafted onto a child’s body; the result on the road. Yet Mara’s tightest bond is with Africans; Peter comes from a landowning Cre- is an exquisite hyperrealism that floats through Jo (Norma Kuhling), a social worker whose ole family (including mixed-race ancestors who history with the fragile bliss of dreams. In his temperamental ways—and substance-abuse owned slaves), and their relationship is strained youth, Benjamin meets a girl named Daisy, issues—impede Jo’s career and make friend- by the groups’ long-standing social differences. who, as an adult (played by Cate Blanchett), ship an increasingly rough road. Mara and Jo Jenkins’s spare, frank lyricism foregrounds the is the love of his life; she grows older as he see each other through a series of romantic couple’s tense discussions about the traumas becomes ever younger. His sense of being out troubles, with the burden of care landing on of history, the weight of cultural memory, and of synch with his times yields an intensified the more settled Mara’s shoulders; the resulting the pressure of racial injustice; he lends the sense of mortality; his keen, quiet serenity frustrations play out in sharply written, briskly intimate tale a vast and vital resonance.—Rich- is perched on the edge of tears. The movie’s staged, urgently performed sequences that leap ard Brody (Streaming on the Criterion Channel.) framing story, set in a New Orleans hospital daringly ahead in time through the friends’ during Hurricane Katrina, is a grave reminder major life changes and convey the sense of of tragic impermanence.—R.B. (Streaming on days being seized from looming chaos. Medel, The Curious Case of Netflix and other services.) an independent-film mainstay, and Kuhling, a newcomer, hold the screen fiercely, together Benjamin Button and apart.—R.B. (Streaming on Grasshopper Film The director David Fincher and the writers Fourteen and other sites.) Eric Roth and Robin Swicord rework F. Scott The diverging paths and seething conflicts of Fitzgerald’s gentle fantasy, about a man who is two lifelong friends, now young Brooklyn pro- born old and ages in reverse, into a sumptuous fessionals, are explored deeply and poignantly Losing Ground and stirring romantic drama. With the frame- in this deceptively calm melodrama, written Kathleen Collins’s only feature, from 1982, is work of a long-hidden diary and a mysterious and directed by Dan Sallitt. It stars Tallie the story of a middle-class black couple in New York—Sarah (Seret Scott), a young philosophy professor, and Victor (Bill Gunn), an older artist—whose careers shake the fault lines in WHAT TO STREAM their romance. Sarah plans to spend the sum- mer writing an essay on ecstatic experience, but Victor, an abstractionist in search of new inspirations, finds them a country house in an upstate town where he uses the locals as models—especially one young woman, Celia (Maritza Rivera). Sarah struggles with her research while Victor’s art flourishes, and Celia soon becomes an uneasy presence in their home. Collins dramatizes crises of gen- der and race—as well as of intellectual pursuit and artistic ambition—with a decisive and nu- anced touch, and her attentiveness to light and color is itself painterly; the movie conveys a thrillingly tactile sense of high-relief surfaces. When Sarah accepts a role in a student film along with a suave and graying actor (Duane Jones) who offers consolation, the fusion of cinema and life, of symbol and substance, rises to a shriek of redemption.—R.B. (Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

Pain and Glory The latest film from Pedro Almodóvar stars Antonio Banderas as Salvador Mallo, a movie director in late middle age. (Many of the de- tails are autobiographical.) He lives alone in Film at Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema series will offer, starting May 15, Madrid, attended by aches and pains of every a welcome restoration of a modern classic, Nanni Moretti’s “Caro Diario” description; it is only in meeting figures from his past—an actor with whom he once worked; (“Dear Diary”), from 1993. This light-toned but thematically substantial a former lover—that he rediscovers his cre- autofiction is organized like a sequence of diary entries brought to life ative strength. Now and then, we are spirited with Moretti’s wryly confessional voice-overs. The first section, “On My back into that past, and to the happiness that enveloped Salvador, as a boy (played by Asier Vespa,” shows Moretti as a Roman flâneur in fast motion, zipping through Flores), in the company of his mother, Jacinta the city and delighting in familiar sights; it blends sardonic observations (Penélope Cruz). No one is more dexterous with musical fantasies and an awkward chance encounter with Jennifer than Almodóvar at slipping to and fro across time, and never before has he, or the rueful Beals, before concluding with a grand yet graceful memorial tribute to the Banderas, conjured so convincing an air of director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini. The second part, “Islands,” a tale autumnal regret. A lovely performance from of Moretti’s quest for solitude in a vain effort to write a script, becomes a Julieta Serrano, as the elderly Jacinta, is wholly in keeping with the mood. In Spanish.—An- self-satirizing homage to Roberto Rossellini’s first film with Ingrid Berg- thony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 10/14/19.) man, “Stromboli.” The final section, “Doctors,” involving Moretti’s own (Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, and other services.) experience of chemotherapy (which he films) and his subsequent misad- 1 ventures with the Italian medical system, crowns his comedic vision of a For more reviews, visit

way of life, rooted in humane warmth, at risk of being lost.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town / 12 ALAMY PHOTO

8 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 E23G671

a full pivot: all three establishments— of dry goods, including Rancho Gordo and countless others across the city—are beans and Italian pistachio spread, and now effectively functioning as contactless with her expanded offerings she is ful- grocery stores, open one day a week to filling a legacy of sorts: for decades, her fulfill orders placed online. grandparents ran Lipari & Sons Latti- 1 If there’s one thing I’d be happy to cini, a shop in Bushwick that sold gro- retain when shelter-in-place restrictions ceries in addition to fresh mozzarella. TABLES FOR TWO are lifted, it’s the opportunity to buy gro- For safety as much as monetary rea- ceries from neighborhood restaurants. sons, Lipari and Fallon, Campbell, and A Pivot to Groceries Professional chefs excel at knowing not Perkins laid off all their employees in only how to cook but also, equally im- March. If business continues apace— Among my most treasured possessions portant, what to cook, and where to get on a recent weekend, Lipari filled two right now is an imposingly large plastic the best ingredients. The day before, I’d hundred and thirty orders—they’ll be jug containing five litres of olive oil from stood in another line, outside Arche- able to pay their bills, and to rehire staff Spain. I got it at Hart’s, a restaurant in stratus, an exceptional bookstore and café and welcome back diners when it feels Bed-Stuy. On a recent Sunday, in a misty in Greenpoint, for what its owner and wise to do so. But they all seem very rain, I stood in an exceptionally calm chef, Paige Lipari, has dubbed her One- clear-eyed about how uncertain the fu- line of people (all masked, some gloved, Stop Contactless Shop of the Highest ture remains, and open to the idea of a all spaced at least six feet apart) waiting Order. From behind a table just inside new normal. to approach a table just inside the door- the doorway, Lipari passed me a box “To be able to weather other storms way. Behind it, Hart’s three proprietors, laden with a half gallon of grass-fed milk, that come our way,” Fallon told me by Nialls Fallon, Leah Campbell, and Nick a two-pound sack of all-purpose flour, phone, restaurants might need to be Perkins—who also own and operate the and a hulking ham hock from Smoking “a little more diversified, and not just Fly, a few blocks away, and Cervo’s, on Goose, a butcher shop in Indiana, all of dine-in.” He and his partners are finding the Lower East Side—were filling bags which I’d ordered on her Web site sev- gratification in sharing recipes, cooking and boxes with olive oil; produce, eggs, eral days prior. She hoisted, too, a plastic advice, and their favorite cost-effective and meat (including freshly killed, dry- bag stuffed with bouquets of escarole, products with customers. “We’ve always brined chickens, ready to be roasted) rainbow chard, and fava greens from been in the business of providing for our from local farms; tinned seafood; and Bodhitree Farm, in New Jersey. community—providing good food, pro- bottles of wine and liquor. For Lipari, transition comes naturally. viding good wine, helping people have Since early March, the dining rooms Not long after Archestratus opened, in a sense of place,” Perkins said. “In a lot at Hart’s, the Fly, and Cervo’s have been 2015, she began to regularly convert the of ways right now, we’re still doing that. closed. They have never offered takeout, store, which served prepared foods and We just have a different business model.” and the team decided that they weren’t pastries during the day, into an after- Lipari told me, “A lot of people have said going to start now, both because they hours supper club, selling tickets to meals to me, ‘This is better than what I can get don’t feel that their food would travel featuring her family’s Sicilian recipes and when I normally shop, this flour is the well and because they didn’t want to put dinners cooked by guest chefs, often on best flour I’ve ever made bread with.’ So their staff at risk. But what started as a cookbook tours. Before the pandemic, why not keep going with that?”

PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROLINE TOMPKINS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE JOOST BY ILLUSTRATION YORKER; THE NEW FOR TOMPKINS CAROLINE BY PHOTOGRAPH way to off-load excess inventory became she was already stocking a small selection —Hannah Goldfield

THEEW N YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 9

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT For President Xi, containing the dis­ ernment staged a public­relations offen­ BLAMING BEIJING ease, which first emerged in Hubei Prov­ sive, touting China’s exports of medical ince four months ago, has been a race gear to other nations—a tactic dubbed hen an Ebola epidemic erupted against both a public­health and a polit­ “mask diplomacy.” It also suggested, with W in West Africa, in 2014, the ical calamity. After initially silencing doc­ no evidence, that the source of the virus United States and China, the world’s tors who reported the virus, Beijing gained was a delegation from the United States two largest economic powers, responded control of the outbreak by locking down that had participated in the Military in starkly different fashions. The Oba­ Hubei, testing millions of people, and World Games in Wuhan in October. ma Administration dispatched the 101st quarantining suspected cases, even if it The offensive backfired: buyers com­ Airborne and other troops to build treat­ required forcibly removing residents from plained of faulty or undelivered ship­ ment hospitals, and donated more than their homes. By mid­March, China was ments, and U.S. officials accused China half of the $3.9 billion in relief funds col­ reporting nearly no new cases, a claim of using social media to promote divi­ lected from governments worldwide. that outside experts considered doubtful sive and false information. Within six months, the outbreak was but in the neighborhood of truth. The Trump Administration, for its under control, and the U.S.­led effort Shaping the narrative of China’s role part, has cut off funds to the World was hailed as a template for handling in the pandemic will be more difficult. Health Organization and declined to future epidemics. In April, the Associated Press obtained join the European­led fund for vaccine Chinese mining and construction government documents showing that research. Trump’s delusions—that the firms had big businesses in Liberia, leaders in Beijing knew the potential virus would vanish in a “miracle,” that Guinea, and Sierra Leone, but Beijing scale of the threat by January 14th, but an antimalarial drug would shortcut sci­ struggled to mount a humanitarian re­ Xi waited six days before warning the ence, that ingesting disinfectant could sponse. Between August and October of public—a catastrophic interlude of din­ help—have further reduced the Admin­ that year, nearly ten thousand Chinese ners, train rides, and handshakes that istration’s reputation to a baleful farce. nationals fled those countries in a panic. helped unleash the pandemic. The gov­ Last week, Kevin Rudd, the former Prime China, unaccustomed to such missions, Minister of Australia, wrote in Foreign sent medical teams and supplies, but, Affairs that the Administration had “left over all, it contributed less than four per an indelible impression around the world cent of the relief funds. of a country incapable of handling its Six years later, however, neither na­ own crises, let alone anybody else’s.” In tion can claim to have led the way in Rudd’s view, the “uncomfortable truth managing the COVID­19 pandemic, which is that China and the United States are has so far killed more than a quarter of both likely to emerge from this crisis a million people around the world. The significantly diminished.” efforts of both have been marred by de­ The Administration could credibly nial, coverup, and self­deception. Presi­ have criticized China’s early mishan­ dent Donald Trump’s trade war and Pres­ dling of the virus, and its efforts to con­ ident Xi Jinping’s hostility to Western trol international scrutiny of the virus’s influence had already frayed the coun­ origins. Instead, the White House seized tries’ relationship to its most fragile point on a blame­Beijing strategy to under­ in decades. Now, in a bid to deflect crit­ mine China’s growing global power and icism, they are turning against each other shore up Trump’s bid for reëlection. (An

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA JOÃO BY ILLUSTRATIONS in perilous ways. ad from a pro­Trump super pac says,

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 11 “To stop China, you have to stop Joe government’s top expert on infectious most inhospitable diplomatic environ- Biden.”) Unnamed Administration offi- diseases, and General Mark Milley, the ment since the Tiananmen Square mas- cials floated revenge fantasies to report- chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff— sacre. According to Reuters, some mem- ers, such as abandoning U.S. debt ob- have declined to endorse that view. bers of China’s intelligence community ligations to China, an act that, investors Yet Trump and Pompeo’s rhetoric has regard the assessment as a Chinese ver- noted, would gut America’s financial some in the intelligence community con- sion of the Novikov Telegram, a 1946 credibility. As Adam Posen, the presi- cerned that the Administration may try dispatch that the Soviet Ambassador to dent of the Peterson Institute for Inter- to push on the origins of the virus much Washington, Nikolai Novikov, sent to national Economics, told the Washing- the way that, in 2002, Vice-President Moscow, forecasting the advent of the ton Post, “In economic terms, this is worse Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Cold War. than telling people to drink bleach.” Scooter Libby, pressured intelligence To John Gaddis, the dean of Cold In the riskiest line of attack, members agencies to provide material that might War historians, America’s advantage over of the Administration, conservative law- support the theory that Saddam Hus- the Soviet Union hinged less on aggres- makers, including Senator Tom Cotton, sein had weapons of mass destruction. sion than on competent governance. “The and Fox News have promoted an un- Chris Johnson, a former China analyst country can be no stronger in the world verified theory that the coronavirus may at the C.I.A. who now heads the China than it is at home,” he said. “This was have originated in an accidental leak from Strategies Group, said, “If we have a the basis for projecting power onto the a Chinese virology lab. On April 30th, smoking gun, the Administration would world scene. We’ve lost that at home Trump said that he had seen convincing have leaked it. There are specters of Libby right now.” If the Trump Administration evidence of this, but gave no details. Sec- and Cheney, and it worries me.” uses the coronavirus to heighten its retary of State Mike Pompeo followed More worrying, perhaps, this month conflict with China, it will not only have up three days later, claiming simply that in Beijing the Ministry of State Secu- ignored a basic lesson of U.S. history; there was “enormous evidence” to sup- rity presented to Xi and other leaders it will expose America to yet another port the theory. More credible voices— an assessment that reportedly describes crisis for which it is plainly unprepared. including those of Anthony Fauci, the the current hostilities as creating the —Evan Osnos

DEPT. OF SCRUTINY impulses. It’s called Room Rater (@rate- fessional expertise. He once worked as a GLASS HOUSES myskyperoom), and, although often gen- travel photographer, so he tends to “think erous, it has earned a reputation as the in terms of lighting/perspective/compo- pandemic’s Mr. Blackwell. sition. Jessie has good taste. But that’s For instance, when Beto O’Rourke all.” The couple is quarantining apart: did an interview from what looked like Bahrey manages a commercial green- the dank basement in “The Silence of house in British Columbia, and Taylor, the Lambs,” Room Rater gave him a 0 who is based outside Washington, D.C., here was a TV commercial for out of 10, and commented, “Oh, dear runs Mad Dog, a progressive political- TRenuzit air freshener that ran half god. Organizing rescue mission. Blink action committee. (Mad Dog sponsored a century ago and scarred everyone who twice if you can hear me.” When Ann a billboard in Kentucky that dubbed saw it. In the ad, a housewife has invited Coulter streamed herself positioned in Mitch McConnell “PUTIN’S TITCH.”) friends over to play bridge. But, as the front of a large black TV screen in a Taylor admits to naked partisanship— ladies enter her home, they sniff, wrin- room painted a putrid yellow-green, she Room Rater gushed over the “lovely” kle their noses, and make mortifying got a 0, too. The review—“Pretty much view of some unexceptional shrubbery comments along the lines of “Fried fish what you’d expect. Puke and a big TV”— visible through a window in Hillary Clin- last night?” and “I thought George gave received more than ten thousand likes. ton’s study—but, regarding bookshelves, up cigars.” The message was clear: any- Renuzit is no help here. Neither is there is one hard-and-fast rule. “You’re time you allow people to enter your home, sticking a ficus in the corner, although going to get whacked on Room Rater if it—and you—will be ripped to shreds. Samantha Vinograd, a national-security you put more than one of your own books Such pitiless scrutiny is precisely what analyst on CNN, earned Room Rater cover forward,” he said. “A little self-pro- the coronavirus lockdown has forced on bonus points by adding orange tulips to motion is fine, but don’t push it.” America’s media personalities: if they a handsome bookshelf. “She was defi- Welcome advice, since members of want to remain on our screens, they must nitely upping her game,” said Claude the TV-news workforce have been set- invite us, and our judgments, into their Taylor, who launched the feed with his ting up their laptops with no apparent living rooms, bedrooms, and, in some girlfriend, Jessie Bahrey. Taylor started guidance from their bosses. “It’s been cases, bathrooms. News shows are a spe- Room Rater from a place of love, after pretty ad hoc,” William Brangham, a cial problem area, with viewers whip- admiring the wood-panelled den of a sci- correspondent for the “PBS NewsHour,” sawed between Trump said what? and entist he saw on cable news, and also the said. He lives in a tidy-looking house Who thought those sconces were a good idea? depth of field in the scientist’s shot. The and has a knack for using baskets as dec- Fortunately, an authoritative Twitter feed ratings are freely subjective, Taylor ex- orative accents. A “NewsHour” execu- appeared in April to codify our cattier plained, and largely unburdened by pro- tive asked him to send an image of what

12 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 1 a living-room shot would look like: “The course called “Foraging for Edible & Me- SKETCHPAD guy said, ‘Great,’ and that was pretty much dicinal Plants.” Kempson was framed by NOT PLAYING it.” (Room Rater score: a coveted 10.) puffy clouds, blue sky, and a bit of wooden Richard Stengel, an MSNBC contrib- rocking chair. She wore a fuzzy green hat. utor who was an Under-Secretary of “It’s a great time to learn something!” she State for Barack Obama, said that he re- said. Her foraging course is available on ceived no advice “other than a producer HireArtists.org, a site created to help art- telling me to have my computer higher.” ists weather the financial upheaval of (Low angles lead to shots that are dom- COVID-19. There, one can hire artists for inated by ceilings, nostrils, and saggy lessons in, say, the ukulele, Korean, cre- chins, as any Zoom-conference partici- ative coding, or the use of epoxy resin. pant will attest.) Stengel’s main concerns: “We’re all giggers and freelancers,” Kemp- “What books are showing? Where’s the son said. “Stuff got cancelled, and it’s, dog at?” (Room Rater score: 9.) Anne- like, tough cookies.” Cancellation had Marie Green, an anchor for “CBS Morn- happened to her—in German, no less. “I ing News” and CBSN, set up her home was supposed to be in Austria right now, studio in a bland spare bedroom. The directing an Ibsen adaptation that I one eccentric note is a lamp she bought wrote,” she said. She stood up. “Do you on Etsy, the base of which looks like a want to look at some plants?” stack of teapots; if you wanted to be nice, A wild area behind the house was you might say it has an “Alice in Won- coming into spring—green shoots pok- derland” vibe. Green left it in her shot ing through dead leaves. “I’m going to as “a little indication that I’m more than start with one very familiar friend that just a talking head.” (Room Rater, please is all over New York: the white pine,” weigh in here.) she said, in the focussed tone of a pro- Brangham has experienced the highs fessor. (Kempson also teaches theatre at and the lows of viewer intimacy. Two of Sarah Lawrence.) She propped up her his three cats, an orange tabby named phone and presented a cluster of dried Pepper and a tan-and-black tabby named needles to the camera. “These are good Tiki, have become Internet celebrities, for right now: they’ve got a ton of vita- thanks to their appearances napping on min C, many times higher than citrus the couch. His curtains are another story. fruits,” she said. “Just take the leaves right A Times piece on “décor peeping” quoted off and boil them, for a tea.” She found an interior designer named Elaine Griffin some wood-ear mushrooms—gelatinous, berating them. Why, she asked, “does he good for the immune system, and tasty have the $19.99 panels from Bed, Bath & when thrown into a soba-noodle soup— Beyond? Grommet curtains are the drap- and then came across some tufts of wild ery equivalent of a No. 1 with fries.” garlic mustard. She breathed in, appre- Brangham stood his ground, noting that ciatively. “I wish you were here to smell grommet curtains are especially func- it,” she told her pupil. “You’ll find this tional when quick lighting adjustments everywhere—it grows out of the side- are needed on camera. “I didn’t design walks in Manhattan, and in Tompkins my home to be on air,” he added. “But Square Park.” She had once livened up then a pandemic happened.” an Easter turkey breast with wild garlic 1—Bruce Handy mustard and oniongrass: “Everybody went crazy.” She held up a small sprig MOTHER OF INVENTION DEPT. of cleavers, “a little charmer,” good for GIG ECONOMY allergy symptoms, and “in the mint fam- ily, I think.” (It’s in the coffee family.) Kempson, who runs a theatre com- pany she founded, called 7 Daughters of Eve, lived in New York City for many years and now lives in Newburgh; the Catskills house belongs to a friend. “Na- n a recent sunny afternoon, the ture is nonnegotiable for me,” Kempson Oexperimental playwright Sibyl said. She learned foraging a few years Kempson was on a porch in Margaret- ago, at a wilderness-survival-skills course ville, New York, in the Catskills, work- at the Tracker School, in the New Jer- ing a new gig: teaching, via FaceTime, a sey Pine Barrens. “It changed my whole life,” she said. A couple of years later, she similar vein, the Ibsen adaptation that world. (He has not been authorized by studied with “an incredibly knowledge- she’d planned to stage in Austria takes the military to speak to the press.) able guy who goes by the name of Dan a Symbolist approach to “A Doll’s House,” “I am double gloved at all times and De Lion, who drives around the coun- among other plays, exploring “Nora’s or- wear a gown,” he wrote, of his routine. try by the season,” teaching people from igins as a wooden doll that Ibsen carved,” “After I get home, every time I cough his Foragemobile. “He has an apothe- she said. “And before that she was a block I think I have caught the virus. When cary, and he’s constantly making tinc- of wood. And before that she was a tree, I am floor leader, I have to carry a radio tures and salves.” Kempson considers and she had tree consciousness.” in case I need to call security. I always herself a foraging enthusiast, not an ex- Consciousness, in both Kempson’s life want to call just to tell them I am feel- pert: “I never would have presumed to and work, is expansive. She’s been eating ing insecure.” He is bivouacking in a teach it, except for these extraordinary curly-dock seeds—“I’ll just grind them high-rise hotel, the kind of place that circumstances that we are in.” up and put them in my oatmeal”—which, is normally packed with tourists and Kempson’s foraging pupils, likely in she explained, are “said to bring prosper- honeymooners. He and his colleagues extraordinary circumstances of their own, ity.” She looked thoughtful. “I have found are permitted to roam no more than a get a dose of thrifty survivalist scrappi- that, when I eat them regularly, I am less few blocks in any direction. He often ness alongside their medicinal-plant iden- worried about money, for whatever rea- records his observations in verse: tification: foraging can yield not just tinc- son.” She smiled. “Maybe it’s my imagi- New York ture ingredients but food. “The other nation. But whatever’s in our imagina- is a day, I ran out of greens, and it’s, like, wait tion, I think, is part of reality.” ghost town a minute. There’s a supermarket right —Sarah Larson where 1 even the outside,” she said. She held up some roughage: curly dock, then prime for har- DEPT. OF VERSIFYING birds took MEMORANDA the last vesting, when it was “more like spinach, train less like collard greens, and delicious sau- to Jersey téed with olive oil and salt, and a little and garlic, if you have it.” Daylilies have ed- the night ible tubers; Kempson dug into the earth rises blue black as and exposed a gnarled mass of bulbous- an alley ness and roots. “I just wash them off, and cat and I cook them like a little potato,” she said. ot long ago, as the world was half- my combat “Last night, I put them in a cast-iron Nway into week whatever of sus- boots echo frying pan with olive oil. And it was won- pended animation, a man who lives with across Broadway derful.” Kempson loves potatoes: “I wrote his wife and children in the Midwest like gun a whole play about them.” “Potatoes of arrived in New York City. He is a writer shots or August” was part of a trio of Kempson’s and a musician in his early fifties. His a heartbeat “vegetable plays,” in which potatoes, age means that he grew up listening to fading into pumpkins (“Ich, Kürbisgeist”), and as- the Violent Femmes and Jim Carroll, a silence so complete paragus (“Spargel Time!”) gain conscious- reading poems by C. K. Williams and you can ness, and occasionally wreak havoc. In a Galway Kinnell, and writing songs about hear the the limited options available in a small crying city where the interstate keeps people voice of flowing through without stopping. He each and every star. became a career military man, medically trained, who did tours in Afghanistan He wrote about the constant threat and other unenviable places. His latest of losing a patient: deployment was to New York, where his He was expertise could be put to use saving lives too tall and alleviating suffering in a temporary for the facility for coronavirus patients. Army In the days after his arrival, he began hospital bed documenting what he saw. Walt Whit- and had an eagle man, nursing the sick, wounded, and tattooed on dying in the Civil War hospitals of his arm Washington, D.C., famously wrote that he was “the real war will never get in the books.” older than The military man’s notes, jotted down 60 and looked between fourteen-hour shifts, are like a glimpses into the real war currently biker the Sibyl Kempson being fought in hospitals around the kind of

14 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 guy who had vanished from the streets, much as can also disintegrate into smaller pieces, thought he smog had cleared from the skies above which enter the food chain at the very could still New Delhi and Los Angeles. But Mc- bottom; a new species of crustacean, take anybody the kind Kenzie, after seeing a handwritten sign discovered deep in the Mariana Trench, of guy on a lamppost which read “Please in 2014, was named Eurythenes plasti- who loved Don’t Throw Your Gloves In The cus for the contents of its stomach.) to tell Street,” began noticing them: blue “Those gloves will be very tied to this people he and purple disposable gloves dotting moment,” Robin Nagle, an anthropol- wasn’t afraid of anything sidewalks and tree pits, and swirled by ogist-in-residence at the Department so it rain runoff onto sewer grates. Now he of Sanitation, said. “It’s heartbreaking. really shook sees them everywhere. You are deliberately putting off onto me when “I’m an ocean guy,” he said. “I surf. someone else a potentially deadly haz- he spoke This will all wash out to the bays and, ard.” (Researchers are looking into in a voice as in time, be distributed all over the world. whether the coronavirus might spread small as These gloves will be in Greenland.” He through spillovers of untreated sewage.) my daughter’s added that the city’s Department of In Hong Kong, glove-wearing is less asking me Health and Mental Hygiene recom- common, but disposable masks are the if he mends frequent handwashing, not norm. Gary Stokes, a co-founder of was going to die. gloves, to the general public. “People OceansAsia, a marine-conservation or- are so selfish and shortsighted that ganization, began finding discarded med- There are funny bits, too, like his an- they’ll turn a health crisis into an envi- ical masks on beaches about six weeks ecdote about composing a cute text mes- ronmental crisis as well,” he said. “It after COVID-19 alerts were first sounded. sage to one of his kids but accidentally drives me nuts.” In New York, the castoffs are just start- sending it to fifty hospital colleagues in- Photographs of crumpled, discarded ing to appear. Last week, dozens of gloves stead. “I received almost fifty return mes- gloves have been appearing on social and masks were discovered on the shores sages of love,” he wrote. “Hope at least media lately, under the hashtag #The- of Jamaica Bay at Canarsie Pier, Rock- a few actually mean it.” GloveChallenge, which was started by away Community Park, Dubos Point He wonders how long this hitch will Maria Algarra, the founder of a Miami- Wildlife Sanctuary, Floyd Bennett Field, last, and where the virus might take him based organization called Clean This Rockaway Beach, and MacNeil Park, next, as it leaps from city to city. Like Beach Up. Parking lots are particularly and along the banks of the Bronx and Whitman in the eighteen-sixties, he hard hit; drivers doff their gloves before Hackensack Rivers. “These are places thinks about how future generations getting into their cars. Subway exits are no one goes when it’s cold like this, ex- might see us. “When I left home,” he another hot spot. cept for a few birders. So they have to wrote, “I thought about what I would The gloves will wind up in water- be drifting up,” Alex Zablocki, the ex- do when I arrived in New York: treat ways. Judith Enck, a former regional ad- ecutive director of the Jamaica Bay– the sick and pray for the souls of the ministrator for the Environmental Pro- Rockaway Parks Conservancy, said, of dead and wonder about 100 years from tection Agency and the founder of a the debris. now, when all of this is just a fairy tale nonprofit called Beyond Plastics, said, “The city needs to come up with a about death becoming a person who “The gloves may be too flimsy for sew- truly innovative campaign against glove takes the form of a bat to fly across the age-plant screens to catch, and shoot litter,” Enck said. It’s easy for the issue world: the next generations’ story of the right by them,” ending up in riverbeds, to fall through the cracks of city bu- witch that eats children.” and water columns, and on seafloors. Or reaucracy. The Department of Sanita- 1—Mark Rozzo they could wash out to sea directly from tion is responsible for street sweeping, storm drains and sewer overflows. Even but sidewalk cleanup is the purview of SIDE EFFECTS before the pandemic, the city’s sewer the city’s individual business-improve- THE GLOVE CHALLENGE system was spending nineteen million ment districts. With most businesses dollars a year to deal with so-called fat- closed, it’s left to people like McKen- bergs, caused by the buildup of tons of zie to pick up litter. personal-hygiene products, condoms, A pandemic caused by airborne par- and wipes (many marketed as flushable). ticles is not the best time for in-your- When the plastic in vinyl and nitrile face confrontations, but McKenzie is gloves gets in seawater, it becomes coated undaunted. “I haven’t seen someone arehanded on a Citi Bike, Ryan with dimethyl sulfide from algae and throwing gloves in the gutter, but I’d BMcKenzie, the owner of a NoMad bacteria, which smells delectable to some probably be yelling at them if I did,” he bar called Patent Pending, rolled through species of birds, turtles, and marine said, brandishing a new metal grabber his hushed East Village neighborhood mammals. Once ingested, the debris— that he had just bought on First Ave- on cleanup patrol the other afternoon. even biodegradable plant-derived nue. His original was stolen last week, In the early days of the lockdown, many latex—can obstruct these creatures’ di- from the sidewalk in front of his bar. New Yorkers marvelled at how litter gestive tracts and kill them. (Plastics —Erik Baard

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 15 Mechanics: An Inverse Modeling Ap- CORONAVIRUS CHRONICLES proach,” he is one of the world’s fore- most experts on ventilator-induced lung injury, or VILI. Earlier in his career, at BREATHING ROOM McGill University, in Montreal, Bates and his team invented a computer- Engineers take on the ventilator shortage. controlled ventilator for mice that is still used by researchers. By tuning the By James Somers machine’s settings and seeing how a mouse’s lungs react under pressure, scientists can study the physiology of lung disease. They can also explore how different styles of ventilation— in which air is moved into and out of the lungs at various volumes, pres- sures, and rhythms—can help or hurt a damaged lung. The previous Friday, March 13th, Bates had heard from Matt Kinsey, a pulmonologist at the University of Ver- mont medical school. A COVID-19 pa- tient there had been placed on a ven- tilator, and the physician in charge had decided to use a technique known as airway pressure release ventilation, or A.P.R.V., in which the device delivers near-constant air pressure, with an oc- casional quick release. (Try taking a long, slow breath in, then puffing out, quickly but gently; repeat.) Kinsey passed on a text message from the phy- sician: “APRV is da bomb for covid.” Bates said, “I was intrigued by this be- cause I’d been studying A.P.R.V. and trying to figure out how to optimally deliver it.” He suspected that COVID- 19 inflicted more damage when the lungs were swinging between full inflation and full deflation, and had come to be- lieve that A.P.R.V., by avoiding those n Monday, March 9th, Jake Kit- want to do something,” Silver recalled. extremes, was probably the gentlest ven- Otell, a research engineer and ma- The next week, Kittell e-mailed an- tilation strategy for those suffering from chinist who builds scientific equip- other professor at the university, Jason the disease. Now his theory was being ment for the University of Vermont, Bates, with whom they had worked in put to the test. in Burlington, came into work fired the past, and whom they knew to be a The ventilators used in today’s up. Approaching another engineer, lung expert. We have a shop, he wrote. I.C.U.s are expensive, in large part be- Carl Silver, he said, “We gotta build a Can we build a ventilator? cause they are configurable. Newer mod- ventilator.” Well, sure, Bates thought. He’d been els have touch screens that allow clini- “That sounds great,” Silver replied. working on the same problem for the cians to change and track dozens of “What do we know about ventilators?” previous four days. parameters, carefully adjusting how Neither had ever seen one. But the Bates has wispy white hair and speaks breaths are delivered. Bates began won- coronavirus pandemic, once an abstrac- with lucid, cheery confidence. Origi- dering whether it might be possible to tion, had recently made itself felt in Se- nally from England, he is a professor build a pared-down ventilator that did attle, New York, and other American of medicine and of biomedical engi- nothing but provide A.P.R.V., to be cities, and doctors had warned that a neering, and teaches in both the uni- used when the supply of fancier venti- shortage of ventilators could hasten the versity’s engineering department and lators ran out. A typical I.C.U. venti- deaths of thousands. “You feel like you its medical school. The author of “Lung lator costs between twenty-five thou- sand and fifty thousand dollars. Bates Labs have scrambled to design easy-to-build ventilators—all with trade-offs. replied to Kittell’s e-mail with a docu-

16 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID PLUNKERT ment titled “APRV for $10 (okay, maybe tilators. Ford has christened its effort come inflamed and stiffen. As the in- $50 . . . ).” Project Apollo. And yet comparisons to fection spreads, the number of healthy In an included schematic, Bates had the moon landings may understate the air sacs declines, and the exchange of sketched a simple device: a box with complexity of the problem. COVID-19 gases becomes less efficient. A patient three holes in it. Gas under pressure— is a mysterious illness, and ventilators whose lung function degrades in this which many hospitals have available admit to many styles of operation. In way can develop acute respiratory dis- from wall outlets—would flow into one the best case, the machines keep pa- tress syndrome, or ARDS. hole and out another, to the patient. In tients with failing lungs alive, buying When a COVID-19 patient arrives at normal breathing, exhalation typically time for the body to heal. In the worst the hospital with shortness of breath, takes about two to three times as long case, they can aggravate lung damage. physicians use a pulse oximeter, clipped as inhalation; in A.P.R.V., the length In the course of the pandemic, critical- to a finger, to monitor her blood-oxy- of exhalation is reduced from several care specialists have disagreed about gen level, while supplemental oxygen is seconds to about half a second, while how the devices should be operated and delivered. If the oxygen level continues inhalation can take five seconds or more. at what point in a patient’s decline they to decline, doctors bring in a ventilator. To create this modified rhythm, the should be used; mortality rates for A device that looks like an oversized box’s third hole would be blocked by a COVID-19 patients on ventilators have shoehorn is wedged over the patient’s rotating disk that also had a hole in it, ranged widely. Manufacturing a venti- tongue and used to peel back the epi- and that was spun by a motor. When lator is difficult, especially during a pan- glottis. Then a tube is fed down the tra- the holes briefly aligned, the machine demic, when supply lines are unreliable. chea, where a small balloon is inflated would exhale through the opening. Different designs negotiate different to hold it in place. Patients are usually By the next day, Silver had built a bargains between cost and functional- sedated and paralyzed before being in- prototype and sent Bates a video. A ity. Reaching the moon is challenging tubated; people suffering from COVID- rubber glove was attached to the side enough. It’s harder when no one is sure 19 may have to stay on ventilators for of a box with some zip ties. The glove where the moon is. weeks, remaining sedated for the dura- inflated, then deflated, then inflated tion, and they are sometimes paralyzed again. “I saw that and everything he lung is a passive participant in again if their movement makes them changed,” Bates said. Soon, the univer- Tbreathing. It’s the diaphragm, a hard to manage. It is an extreme inter- sity agreed to fund the device. Kittell large muscle that cuts the human body vention that, even when it saves a pa- and Silver were given free rein in the horizontally in half, that does the work. tient’s life, takes a toll on the body. shop; a lung analogue was brought in When you inhale, your diaphragm pulls At the most basic level, a ventilator from the hospital for testing; a regula- down like a piston, creating negative is a pump, no different from the plas- tory expert began preparing an emer- pressure around the lungs, while the tic resuscitator bags that paramedics gency report for the Food and Drug muscles of the chest wall pull up and squeeze to push air into a patient’s lungs, Administration, which had created a out. Air, drawn in through the nose and in lieu of mouth-to-mouth. But, to special approval process for stopgap the mouth, flows through the trachea avoid VILI, the lungs must be venti- ventilators; and several local contract and into the bronchial tree, which fans lated with care. Too little air pressure manufacturers were lined up so that the out into the lungs. There, the breath and the alveoli won’t inflate; too much device, now known as the Vermontila- nestles into hundreds of millions of and they’ll distend and get damaged. tor, could be mass-produced. gossamer sacs called alveoli. Blood, The balance grows harder to maintain Engineering is quiet, methodical meanwhile, has arrived at the rendez- as ARDS progresses. The lung is like a work, not often the stuff of high drama. vous through a network of capillaries, lattice, with each air sac supporting its But for many engineers the coronavirus the smallest vessels in the circulatory neighbors. Damaged alveoli can press has been a call to arms. Not since the system. Under a microscope, the alve- up against one another, spreading weak- space race has the whole world been so oli look like bunches of grapes, and the ness with each breath; strained alveoli invested in problems that are funda- capillaries like the mesh sacks that hold can burst. During exhalation, the in- mentally technical. During the Apollo 13 them. The tissues are so exquisitely thin sides of the alveoli, which get stickier mission, a buildup of carbon dioxide that oxygen and carbon dioxide can as they fill with fluid, touch and cling was slowly poisoning the crew; the na- diffuse across them, between air and together; inflating them again requires tion watched as the astronauts, work- blood. The contact surface between the peeling them apart. In lung-physiol- ing with engineers in Mission Control, two networks, if it were unfolded flat, ogy circles, this is sometimes called the jury-rigged a filter using duct tape and would be more than half the size of a “Velcro effect.” “If you have that Vel- spare parts. In the film “Apollo 13,” from tennis court. cro effect going on with every single 1995, an engineer with a pocket protec- The alveolar flesh is elastic, and del- breath, breath after breath, that’s in- tor explains the situation to his col- icate like fruit pulp. It fares poorly when credibly damaging in a fairly short leagues: “The people upstairs handed infected. The coronavirus multiplies in time,” Bates said. “You get in this us this one, and we gotta come through.” the alveolar cells, tearing them apart as vicious spiral that’s really hard to get Since February, engineers in indus- it escapes; in the resulting chaos, fluid back from.” try and academia have been working can leak into the air sacs, capillaries can With a typical I.C.U. ventilator, a on designs for cheap, easy-to-build ven- constrict or clot, and tissues can be- clinician has a few ways to modulate

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 17 the flow of air. She can adjust the “tidal and Ventec, respectively—to scale up scramble, Johnson said, was “miracu- volume”—the total amount of air to be manufacturing. In mid-March, Ford lous.” Suppliers had to adapt produc- delivered with each breath. She can kicked off Project Apollo, after the com- tion lines to new specifications; they designate a target pressure, in which pany learned about Airon’s design; a had to ask their own suppliers to do case the ventilator delivers whatever personal introduction to representatives the same. The most elusive part, a volume is required to generate it. (Imag- at Ventec led Mary T. Barra, the C.E.O. special DC motor, is being shipped ine filling a bicycle tire: you pump until of G.M., to commit her company to from India, where it is being made in the tire is firm.) She can also select the Project V. a factory that had closed and had to degree of PEEP, or positive end-expi- Ventec’s VOCSN ventilator—the name be reopened. ratory pressure—the amount of pres- stands for “ventilator, oxygen, cough, With the parts secured, a G.M. com- sure that’s left in the lungs at the end suction, and nebulizer”—was designed ponent-manufacturing facility in Ko- of each exhalation. Higher PEEP pre- to perform the functions of five devices komo, Indiana, was retrofitted for ven- vents the air sacs from collapsing. By in one. “We are the first and only mul- tilators. Two hundred and fifty skilled decreasing the duration of exhalation tifunction ventilator,” Chris Brooks, the workers, recruited from within and out- and maintaining higher inspiratory company’s chief strategy officer, told side G.M., began work after a week of pressure, A.P.R.V., Bates’s preferred me. (The VOCSN was approved by the training. A few dozen Ventec engineers ventilation style, does everything pos- F.D.A. in 2017.) For G.M., Ventec has are helping run the operation. At sta- sible to avoid the Velcro effect. created a simplified version, without the tions, each person takes on a sub- The Vermontilator will likely cost cough, suction, and nebulizer functions, assembly task—plugging in a hose, around one or two thousand dollars known as the V+Pro. Even so, Brooks mounting a circuit board with tiny when it ships—more than ten (or fifty) sees it as a fighter jet in a race with prop screws—and then passes a bucket con- dollars, but a fraction of the cost of a planes. “There’s been a lot of conversa- taining the incomplete ventilator to full-fledged I.C.U. ventilator. It’s so in- tion over the past few weeks with the someone else. “Because of the urgency expensive because it’s a minimalist de- shortage, a lot of very well-intentioned and speed, automation was kept down,” vice made from around fifteen parts, individuals and groups and very smart Johnson said. designed specifically for A.P.R.V. If the people, who have said, ‘Hey, we can cre- In mid-April, G.M. produced its Velcro effect is as central to COVID-19 ate a ventilator,’ and ‘Hey, we’ve devel- first five units. Later in the month, the as Bates believes it to be, then this is a oped a ventilator overnight, it’s a hun- Kokomo plant and its trimmed-down sound approach. But clinicians and re- dred-dollar ventilator,’” he said. “There’s ventilator were approved under an searchers are still debating what kind a reason that there are very high-end, F.D.A. Emergency Use Authorization, of lung damage the coronavirus causes; very powerful and precise critical-care and the first shipments were made to they have come to recognize that it I.C.U. ventilators. That truly is what hospitals in Illinois and Indiana, at affects patients in unpredictable ways. these patients need.” around sixteen thousand dollars per “One of our mistakes at the beginning On March 27th, in a tweet, President ventilator. (Ford is expected to begin of this mass-casualty event was fixa- Trump urged G.M. to “START MAK- delivering its first Airon ventilators by tion: you come in with an ING VENTILATORS, early July.) G.M. says that it is on pace idée fixe,” Sharon Einav, an NOW!!!!!!”; in a subse- to produce thirty thousand ventilators I.C.U. specialist in Jerusa- quent tweet, he invoked by the end of August. lem who co-authored a set the Defense Production of well-known guidelines Act to compel the com- etween the parsimonious minimal- for critical-care surges, told pany to do what it had Bism of the Vermontilator and the me. “People knew ARDS. started doing two weeks maximalist ambition of Project Apollo The intensive-care com- earlier. Preparing to man- and Project V, some engineers have munity has been discussing ufacture ten thousand of ended up taking a middle path. In mid- ARDS for the last twenty Ventec’s ventilators per March, at around the same time that years. As time passes, we’re month, as G.M. plans to Bates connected with Kittell and Sil- discovering that this dis- do, has required a crash ver to develop a prototype of the Ver- ease has something more effort. On March 19th, montilator, Scott Cohen, a co-founder to it.” The Vermontilator is a bet on the G.M. flew six engineers to Bothell, of New Lab, a center for researchers nature of the virus that may not pay off. Washington, to study the VOCSN pro- and startups in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, duction process. “We took a lot of began reading up on the global venti- f we could produce more of the pictures and a lot of video,” Gerald lator hackathon. A doctor in Detroit Ihigh-end ventilators already in use Johnson, G.M.’s head of global man- had used a T-tube to split one ventila- in hospitals, doctors could choose their ufacturing, told me. The VOCSN has tor among two or four patients. At the own settings. This is the cause now around seven hundred parts; the V+Pro, University of Florida, engineers were taken up by Ford and General Motors, around four hundred. By e-mailing lists using a sprinkler valve and PVC water which have each collaborated with a of parts to around seventy of its “Tier 1” pipes to drive what looked like a wheezy ventilator-maker—G.E. Healthcare, suppliers, G.M. was able to secure all bellows. At Rice University, a bare- which licenses a design from Airon, of them by the following weekend. The bones ventilator was being built out of

18 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 Help feed NYC’s children and families now.

With the COVID-19 crisis forcing schools and many businesses to close, NYC’s children and their families urgently need help getting food now. You can help keep City Harvest’s trucks on the road and full of food for our city’s youngest New Yorkers and their families.

Donate at cityharvest.org/feednyckids #WeAreCityHarvest tually, the designs “forked,” as often happens in open source. The New Lab team began calling its device the Spiro Wave, after the Latin word meaning “to breathe.” It has two hundred and fifteen parts; to avoid supply-chain problems, the en- gineers sourced as many of them as they could from within the state, and persuaded their suppliers to stay open as essential businesses. Under the vaulted ceilings of New Lab’s converted Navy hangar, and, later, at a manufac- turing facility operated by Boyce Tech- nologies, in Long Island City, a dozen engineers have been working day and night, in twelve-hour shifts, to perfect the design and solve production chal- lenges. The group has received a ten- million-dollar purchase order from New York City: three thousand units, “In light of the current situation, we’ve dispensed at $3,333 each. Regulatory experts were with the weather report.” brought on to help push through an application for an F.D.A. Emergency Use Authorization. The device—still •• essentially a pair of robotic arms that squeeze a bag—has a slick plastic cas- a plastic resuscitator bag and a motor. Westchester Medical Center, in New ing and instructional videos. The Boyce Groups in Ireland and at M.I.T. were York State, who had tested it on a live facility is assembling about a hundred pursuing the same idea—all open pig. By Porcine Study No. 4, the de- units per day. source, with instructions and parts lists vice was said to perform comparably A similar story has unfolded on the posted freely online. Cohen, who is not to a commercial ventilator operated in West Coast. On Wednesday, March an engineer, turned to friends to help a volume-control mode. 11th, David Van Buren, a senior engi- him find a project that New Lab could The M.I.T. team aimed to build a neer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labora- assist with. One wrote back immedi- “reference implementation”—a proto- tory, began wondering if, under the cir- ately and said that M.I.T.’s effort was type that proved the viability of its de- cumstances, the lab was working on the a good bet. sign, which could then be shared for right projects. He wrote an e-mail to The M.I.T. E-Vent, as the school’s anyone to build. Like other open-source colleagues proposing that perhaps they ventilator is known, was based on a ventilator efforts, it had attracted in- should be trying to solve the ventilator prototype that had been created ten terest not just from organizations staffed problem. His idea quickly made its way years earlier, as a student project in a with experts but from amateurs who to the lab’s senior management. “I do class on medical-device design. The might try to build a device of their own. space missions,” Roger Gibbs, the dep- students’ prototype ran on a battery for “I’m not in favor of this open-source—” uty director of the engineering and sci- three and a half hours, and consisted Cohen said, interrupting himself. “It’s ence directorate at J.P.L., told me. “I of a resuscitator bag placed in an en- misleading at a critical time to have build things and we send them to other closure and squeezed by a motor-driven people cowboying devices.” He and his planets.” By Monday, J.P.L. had also de- cam. It had a pressure sensor, and set- friend Marcel Botha, the founder of cided to build a ventilator. tings for tidal volume (squeeze more 10xBeta, a product-design and -devel- At first, the engineers began in the or less air from the bag) and breaths opment firm in New York, wanted to spirit of Apollo 13. “The spark of this per minute (squeeze the bag more or build the ventilators themselves, or to idea was ‘Gee, can we at J.P.L. design less often). The idea had never been oversee their production. For a time, a ventilator that uses parts scrounged developed beyond the class, but it had engineers in New York and Cambridge from a garage, or from a vacuum cleaner, been revived in early March, and was worked together; among other things, or a Home Depot?’” Gibbs said. “That now being worked on by a team of Botha persuaded Bon Ku, an emergen- idea lasted about six hours.” They next alumni, professors, and graduate stu- cy-medicine doctor at Thomas Jeffer- considered developing a reference de- dents from the mechanical-, civil-, elec- son Hospital, in Philadelphia, to loan sign and open-sourcing it for do-it- trical-, and environmental-engineering the M.I.T. engineers one of his hospi- yourselfers. A doctor who had come in departments. The rig had been given tal’s ventilators, so that they could com- to consult waved them off, explaining to Albert Kwon, an anesthesiologist at pare it with their prototypes. But, even- that his hospital would only use a de-

20 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 vice that had been F.D.A.-approved. trators helped design its faceplate. It is features add complexity beyond them- “He dropped a lot of reality on every- expected to cost between one and two selves. If you want your program to have body about the level of engineering we’d thousand dollars, and its approximately both an Equations Editor and Track have to do,” Michelle Easter, a mecha- three hundred parts have been carefully Changes, then you must teach it to track tronics engineer who usually works on chosen to avoid siphoning supplies from changes to equations. Even the Undo actuators for spacecraft, said. The doc- medical-grade ventilator manufactur- function is a complex subprogram wor- tor explained what a ventilator was: he ers. VITAL was tested at the Icahn School thy of several full-time engineers: it told them that, if a patient initiates an of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in New must be able to undo not just typos but inhalation, the ventilator must notice; York, on a specialized lung simulator, table reformattings, image resizings, and that ventilated air must be delivered at and has received an Emergency Use comments that have been added during body temperature; that it should be hu- Authorization from the F.D.A.; J.P.L. a review session. midified; that it has to provide high has begun looking for manufacturers. One wouldn’t want to accuse a ven- concentrations of oxygen. The engi- tilator of feature creep, since each new neers, working from first principles, n software, “feature creep” is the feature has the potential to save lives. peppered him with questions about Iprocess by which an initially simple But a ventilator’s complexity also ex- pressures, volumes, and rates of change. program, through the accretion of en- pands nonlinearly as the number of They decided on a new goal: build the hancements, becomes gargantuan, slow, parts, sensors, and functions grows. The simplest possible easy-to-manufacture and hard to use. Microsoft Word can problem is especially acute because ventilator, made from readily supplied take a long time to load in 2020, even medical devices must clear a high set parts, that was capable of treating all though today’s computers are incredi- of regulatory hurdles. As devices grow but the most complex cases of COVID-19, bly powerful. The program’s core func- more capable, and more complex and and get it approved by the F.D.A. tions haven’t changed since 1983, but expensive, they require more careful The project unfolded in typical NASA there are many new ones, and many regulation. This dynamic, which is fashion—the gathering of “functional requirements,” the building of increas- ingly sophisticated prototypes, the hold- ing of team-wide engineering reviews— except over a period of weeks, not years. The team had to adjust to the fact that its design would be produced at vol- ume. “We’re used to having one of the thing, not thousands of the thing,” Eas- ter said. The project had attracted more than a hundred participants, many of whom had never collaborated before. For almost forty days straight, they worked from sunup to sundown—bru- tal days that were a relief, in their way, from the ennui of lockdown. J.P.L.’s mountain campus, in Pasadena, was mostly empty; on breaks, at picnic tables outside the lab, the engineers watched families of deer graze among wildflowers. J.P.L. worked up two designs in par- allel. One is more portable, and uses an air compressor; it’s in the final stages of testing. The other, like the Vermonti- lator, accepts air from a wall outlet. VITAL, as the device is known, operates in a unique “volume targeted, pressure limited, time limited” mode, invented at J.P.L. A clinician can set tidal vol- ume, inspiration-expiration ratio, PEEP, and breaths per minute. Although it doesn’t have a CO2 sensor or a touch screen, it replicates many of the features of more sophisticated, customizable ventilators; a team of artists and illus- “You can just leave it in that trash can.” acceptable during peacetime, might upgrading or modifying some of the Southern Hemisphere are only just seem counterproductive during war- other breathing devices that they had starting to feel it,” he said. time. And yet the devices must still on hand. In early April, Cohen hosted In Vermont, hospitals have avoided work, sustaining patients, sometimes some I.C.U. doctors at Boyce Technol- becoming overwhelmed, and the curve for weeks, without glitches or failures. ogies, where the Spiro Wave was being has flattened. But Bates and his team, The Vermontilator is as simple a manufactured. “These guys were beat who anticipate receiving F.D.A. ap- ventilator as could be imagined: the first to shit,” Cohen said. “They looked at proval soon, are negotiating with the prototype had seven parts. Even so, most the devices. .. . They were just, like, ‘We state for a purchase order. The team is of the team’s time has been spent add- need this, guys.’ They just looked us all contemplating a “Mark II” Vermonti- ing safety valves, pressure regulators, in the eye. ‘When can we get it?’” Co- lator, which would still deliver A.P.R.V. and alarms—safety features required hen’s team said that the ventilators could but with more customizable settings. for an F.D.A. Emergency Use Autho- be ready in four or five days; in the Bates recently received an e-mail from rization. The M.I.T. E-Vent and the meantime, the engineers would work someone who works with the World Spiro Wave are more complicated. No to polish their design. Bank in the Central African Repub- one working on the problem envies any- By the time the Spiro Wave was ready lic—a country of more than five mil- one else’s chosen point along the com- for production, however, cases in New lion people, with only three ventilators. plexity curve. “That might be O.K. for York had begun to decline. The night- “That opens up a whole new potential a very short-term stopgap measure,” mare scenario—doctors triaging pa- for us,” he said. (In addition to venti- Bates said, of the bag-based models. tients, providing ventilators to some but lators, of course, the country would need “But you could not have, generally not others—never came to pass; on the clinicians with the training to operate speaking, someone with bad COVID lung other hand, many people died outside them.) Whatever the result, he contin- injury on one of those things for hours hospitals, at home or in nursing homes, ued, the Vermontilator project has en- or days, because you would destroy the without ever being put on a ventilator. abled him “to work with people at a lungs.” In turn, M.I.T. engineers, when Officials are still trying to get an accu- level of intensity that would never have hearing about some of the more ama- rate count of deaths caused by COVID-19. been possible without this crisis. And teurish bag-based projects, shake their Almost certainly, when such non-hos- so you find out just what is possible.” heads. Some respiratory experts insist pital deaths are included, the count will The missions have launched, desti- on the value of top-tier ventilators; a jump significantly. nations uncertain. No one can say for doctor might find the CO2 sensor in- sure where or when the ventilators will dispensable, or argue that she’s seen pa- here is a difference between hold- be needed; no one knows which design tients’ respiration improve when they’re Ting on and having enough. The is best or more cost-effective or reli- moved from old, stockpiled ventilators climactic language we have adopted able. Researchers are still trying to figure to newer ones. “We’ve been amused at during the first phase of the pandemic— out how the virus does its damage. “If what people have been inventing as waves, surges, peaks—may be mislead- you don’t understand the illness,” Einav solutions,” Sharon Einav, the I.C.U. ing. The emergency continues. As said, “even the most sophisticated ven- specialist in Jerusalem, said. “It’s like locked-down cities open up, the virus tilator is not going to work.” Doctors someone giving you a Fiat Punto when will likely infect new people, many liv- treating COVID-19 are exploring ways you normally drive a Ferrari. But we’ve ing in places without the health-care to avoid intubating patients for as long not been in a situation where we’ve had resources of big cities like New York as possible, using different equipment to triage patients.” and Seattle. “When I hear New York and techniques to support failing lungs. When the Spiro Wave was first imag- talking about the fact that they are down The month of March—when the offi- ined, in early March, there were fewer the backside of the mountain, I know cial case count began skyrocketing than a thousand confirmed coronavirus they have been through hell,” Michael in New York, and when ventilator cases in New York. By the fourth week Osterholm, the director of the Center projects at the University of Vermont, of March, there were twenty-six thou- for Infectious Disease Research and M.I.T., New Lab, Ford, G.M., and sand. Ventilators were being sought Policy, at the University of Minnesota, NASA began—already seems like the from innumerable sources: Chinese said last month. “But they have to un- distant past. But building quickly, in philanthropists, the governor of Ore- derstand, that’s not the mountain. That advance of a murky future, may be what gon. According to the Times, New York is the foothills. They have mountains we need to do in a pandemic. On Fri- State awarded an eighty-nine-million- to go yet. We have a lot of people to day, March 13th—the same day Bates dollar contract to Yaron Oren-Pines, a get infected before this is over.” G.M. got the text message about A.P.R.V.— Silicon Valley engineer with no appar- and Ford are still aiming to contribute Michael Ryan, the executive director ent ventilator expertise, who claimed to the Strategic National Stockpile, a of health emergencies at the World that he could supply the machines; none bulwark against second waves in major Health Organization, described the were delivered. (State representatives cities and a surge in rural cases. Spiro most important lesson he’d learned said that they were acting on the ad- Wave is turning its attention to global while fighting outbreaks of Ebola. “Be vice of the federal government.) To in- distribution; Cohen and his team have fast. Have no regrets,” he said. “If you sure an adequate supply of ventilators, been talking with leading health-care need to be right before you move, you some hospitals began experimentally professionals in Ethiopia. “Those in the will never win.” 

22 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 3. Never watch Trump’s press briefings. SHOUTS & MURMURS They’re unthinkably dull. Instead, catch the CNN clips of the President losing it, and then check Breitbart for the de- nials of everything he just said on cam- era. For a drinking game, take a sip when- ever Trump calls a female journalist “nasty” or a male journalist “a loser.”And, while it’s fun to track Dr. Deborah Birx’s infinite scarf collection, her masochism is voluntary and deadening. Dr. Anthony Fauci is the only hero here, but I wish, while Trump is blathering, that Fauci would mime silently screaming. 4. Watch your local news. Notice which at-home anchors have plastic orchids on their bookcases filled with paper- IF YOU ASK ME: THE LAST backs from college. Observe, “Oh, he lives in Westchester—that’s why he’s got QUARANTINE THINK PIECE a fire pit out the window, and a framed photo of his first wife and their kids.” By Libby Gelman-Waxner 5. When you put on your mask and gloves to go to Whole Foods, pretend you’re a hat the world needs right now is that your dad relishes from his recliner neurosurgeon. Ask your spouse to assist, Wanother endless musing on stay- and discusses at length over dinner, as to make the first incision, and to close ing at home during the coronavirus pan- if he were a consultant. They might as up the patient. It’s fun to do this in the demic; the C.D.C. has declared these well all be called “Law & Order: Your produce aisle, using a head of lettuce. pieces to be a symptom of COVID-19 Dad.” Dick Wolf is your dad’s Hugh 6. Make no attempt to rediscover the that can be treated only by gentle snor- Hefner. My favorites include “FBI,” in joy of family meals. My perfect daughter, ing. When I am not working at my job which a team of attractive agents solves Jennifer, who’s home from college, just as an associate buyer in juniors’ active- upscale crimes in under an hour, led by told me, “Your generation not only deci- wear, I moonlight as America’s most be- Missy Peregrym, whose hair is yanked mated the planet but has made my future loved film critic. But, with so little fresh back to look professional and yet is high- an economic quagmire. So I need eleven product, even the most esteemed re- lighted because she’s on TV. “FBI: Most hundred dollars for this cute top made viewers, like me, are in a quandary, which Wanted” depicts grimmer crimes in bleak from recycled scrunchies that I saw on is why you’re seeing so many Top Ten suburban neighborhoods with terrible Etsy, and they donate three dollars from lists of foreign sci-fi movies from 1962. lighting. (Bad lighting and cheap flan- every purchase to buy smoothies for peo- So, as a public service, I’d like to pro- nel shirts have been identified as the ple who look sad and thoughtful on Insta- vide the only tips you really need: chief causes of the opioid epidemic.) gram.” My middle schooler, Sean, posted 1. Study Ivanka’s tweets. So far, she’s The Mom versions of these shows a TikTok, wearing my yoga pants and advised us to build living-room forts, are medical soaps. I enjoy “The Resi- Chanel warmup jacket and doing a dance have fun with eighteenth-century shadow dent,” in which an attractive team of At- he calls Spin Mom on a Bender. My hus- puppets, and continually praise her for lanta doctors cures just about everything band, Josh, who’s home because ortho- using the words “jobs,” “empower,” and in forty-five minutes, led by hunky Matt dontics is considered elective medicine, “me.” While I consider myself to be Czuchry in fitted scrubs and a motor- is writing a novel called “Brace Yourself,” proudly useless and self-involved, Ivanka cycle jacket, coupled up with the gor- which he calls “a no-holds-barred thriller puts me to shame. I’ve been monitoring geous Emily VanCamp as ultra-nurse about a rugged midtown orthodontist her hair, which resembles the entire Nic. When this dreamy pair saunter into who saves the world by solving the an- L’Oréal color wheel; her heavy Benja- the E.R., everyone sighs, “Thank God! cient mystery of a pharaoh’s overbite and min Moore-grade makeup; and her al- The hot blonds are here.” “New Am- defeating his modern-day death cult with ways inappropriate wardrobe of Amish sterdam” is a teensy bit grittier, because the help of a gorgeous French dental hy- cocktail dresses. It’s as if her dream were it’s set in New York, and it has an at- gienist.” So we’ve all agreed to pretend to become a society-lady panelist on tractive medical team (including a gay that we’re by ourselves in the apartment, “What’s My Line?” in 1958. When she psychologist), led by Ryan Eggold, who while I scroll through photos of Melania speaks, in her breathy Tweety Bird-at- can remove tumors just by tilting his planting a tree on the White House lawn boarding-school burble, the e9ect is com- head like an adorable puppy. to commemorate Earth Day, wearing a plete. She’s an American Girl doll with Warning: Don’t watch these shows Victoria Beckham trenchcoat and Mano- a trust fund and a Gucci attaché case. with a real doctor, lawyer, or police officer, los, which is her way of declaring, “We’re

LUCI GUTIÉRREZ LUCI 2. Watch Dad TV. These are the shows because they’ll start screaming. all in this together,” if you ask me. 

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 23 ists raised money so that incarcerated ANNALS OF ACTIVISM people could purchase commissary soap. And, in New York City, dozens of groups across all five boroughs signed up vol- CAN I HELP YOU? unteers to provide child care and pet care, deliver medicine and groceries, and The meaning of mutual aid during a pandemic. raise money for food and rent. Relief funds were organized for movie-theatre By Jia Tolentino employees, sex workers, and street vend- ers. Shortly before the city’s restaurants closed, on March 16th, leaving nearly a quarter of a million people out of work, three restaurant employees started the Service Workers Coalition, quickly rais- ing more than twenty-five thousand dollars to distribute as weekly stipends. Similar groups, some of which were or- ganized by restaurant owners, are now active nationwide. As the press reported on this imme- diate outpouring of self-organized vol- untarism, the term applied to these efforts, again and again, was “mutual aid,” which has entered the lexicon of the coronavirus era alongside “social dis- tancing” and “flatten the curve.” It’s not a new term, or a new idea, but it has generally existed outside the mainstream. Informal child-care collectives, trans- gender support groups, and other ad- hoc organizations operate without the top-down leadership or philanthropic funding that most charities depend on. There is no comprehensive directory of such groups, most of which do not seek or receive much attention. But, suddenly, they seemed to be everywhere. On March 17th, I signed up for a new mutual-aid network in my neigh- borhood, in Brooklyn, and used a plat- e are not accustomed to destruc- people throughout the country began form called Leveler to make micropay- Wtion looking, at first, like empti- establishing informal networks to meet ments to out-of-work freelancers. Then ness. The coronavirus pandemic is dis- the new needs of those around them. I trekked to the thirty-five-thousand- orienting in part because it defies our In Aurora, Colorado, a group of librar- square-foot Fairway in Harlem to meet normal cause-and-effect shortcuts to ians started assembling kits of essen- Liam Elkind, a founder of Invisible understanding the world. The source of tials for the elderly and for children who Hands, which was providing free gro- danger is invisible; the most effective wouldn’t be getting their usual meals at cery delivery to the elderly, the ill, and solution involves willing paralysis; we school. Disabled people in the Bay Area the immunocompromised in New York. won’t know the consequences of today’s organized assistance for one another; a Elkind, a junior at Yale, had been at his actions until two weeks have passed. large collective in Seattle set out explic- family’s place, in Morningside Heights, Everything circles a bewildering para- itly to help “Undocumented, LGBTQI, for spring break when the crisis began. dox: other people are both a threat and Black, Indigenous, People of Color, El- Working with his friends Simone Poli- a lifeline. Physical connection could kill derly, and Disabled, folxs who are bear- cano, an artist, and Healy Chait, a busi- us, but civic connection is the only way ing the brunt of this social crisis.” Un- ness major at N.Y.U., he built the group’s to survive. dergrads helped other undergrads who sleek Web site in a day. During the next In March, even before widespread had been barred from dorms and cut ninety-six hours, twelve hundred peo- workplace closures and self-isolation, off from meal plans. Prison abolition- ple volunteered; some of them helped to translate the organization’s flyer into Organizers hope that, after the coronavirus, we’ll expect more of one another. more than a dozen languages and dis-

24 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY NA KIM tributed copies of it to buildings around it’s just on our building floor, even if it’s think of how I can be of service to some- the city. By the time I met him, Elkind just in our neighborhood, even if body,” she told me. “Hopefully, when and his co-founders had spoken to peo- it’s just on our block.” She pointed out we control the virus a little bit more and ple hoping to create Invisible Hands that those in a position to help didn’t get back to regular life, this will have chapters in San Francisco, Los Ange- have to wait “for Congress to pass a bill, been a wake-up call. I think people aren’t les, Boston, and Chicago. The group or the President to do something.” The used to being able to ask for help, and was featured on “Fox & Friends,” in a following week, the Times ran a column people aren’t used to offering.” segment about young people stepping headlined “Feeling Powerless About up in the pandemic; the co-host Brian Coronavirus? Join a Mutual-Aid Net- here’s a certain kind of news story Kilmeade encouraged viewers to send work.” Vox, Teen Vogue, and other out- Tthat is presented as heartwarming in more “inspirational stories and pho- lets also ran explainers and how-tos. but actually evinces the ravages of Amer- tos of people doing great things.” Mutual-aid work thrives on sustained ican inequality under capitalism: the ac- At the Fairway, Elkind, who has dark personal relationships, but the corona- count of an eighth grader who raised hair and a chipper student-body-presi- virus has necessitated that relationships money to eliminate his classmates’ lunch dent demeanor, put on a pair of latex be built online. After meeting Elkind, debt, or the report on a FedEx employee gloves and grabbed a shopping basket, I joined a Zoom call with thirteen stu- who walked twelve miles to and from which he sanitized with a wipe. He was dents at the University of Minnesota work each day until her co-workers took getting groceries for an immunocom- Medical School who had been pulled up a collection to buy her a car. We can promised woman in Harlem. “Scallions from their classes or clinical rotations. be so moved by the way people come are the onion things, right?” he said, as Their mentors and teachers were put- together to overcome hardship that we we wound through the still robust pro- ting in fifteen-hour hospital shifts, then lose sight of the fact that many of these duce section. At the time, those who waiting in long lines to buy diapers be- hardships should not exist at all. In a signed up to volunteer for Invisible fore going home to their kids. The stu- recent article for the journal Social Text, Hands joined a group text; when re- dents had rapidly assembled a group the lawyer and activist Dean Spade cites quests for help came in, texts went out, called the Minnesota CovidSitters, news reports about volunteer boat res- and volunteers claimed them on a first- which matched nearly three hundred cues during Hurricane Harvey which come-first-served basis. They called the volunteers with a hundred and fifty or did not mention the mismanagement recipients to ask what they needed, then so hospital workers—including cus- of government relief efforts, or identify dropped the grocery bags at their door- todians, cooks, and other essential em- the possible climatological causes of steps; the recipients left money under ployees. The students insured that worsening hurricanes, or point out who their mats or in mailboxes. The group volunteers had immunizations and suffers most in the wake of brutal storms. was planning to raise funds to buy gro- background checks; they established Conservative politicians can point to ceries for those who couldn’t afford them, closed rotations of three to five volun- such stories, which ignore the social Elkind told me. While we stood in the teers for each family in need. On the forces that determine the shape of our dairy section trying to decide between Zoom call, everyone was focussed and disasters, and insist that voluntarism is low-fat Greek yogurt and nonfat regu- eager, crisis adrenaline masking their preferable to government programs. lar—the store was out of nonfat Greek— fatigue. One student held a mellow, A decade ago, the writer Rebecca a reporter from “Inside Edition” mate- pink-cheeked infant on his shoulder. Solnit published the book “A Paradise rialized and began snapping photographs. Just a few days before, on Twitter, I Built in Hell,” which argues that during Elkind apologized; he hadn’t meant to had seen a photograph of a handwrit- collective disasters the “suspension of double-book media engagements. “Not ten flyer that a thirty-three-year-old the usual order and the failure of most to be trite, but I feel like this is spread- woman named Maggie Connolly had systems” spur widespread acts of altru- ing faster than the virus,” he said. posted in the Brooklyn neighborhood ism—and these improvisations, Solnit The next day, Representative Alex- of Carroll Gardens, asking elderly neigh- suggests, can lead to lasting civic change. andria Ocasio-Cortez held a public con- bors to get in touch if they needed gro- Among the examples Solnit cites are ference call with the organizer Mariame ceries or other help. Connolly, a hair- tenant groups that formed in Mexico Kaba about how to build a mutual-aid and-makeup artist, was newly out of City after a devastating earthquake, in network. Kaba is the founder of Proj- work, and figured that many older peo- 1985, and later played a role in the city’s ect Nia, a prison-abolitionist organiza- ple might not see aid efforts that were transition to a democratic government. tion that successfully campaigned for being organized online. The picture of Radicalizing moments accumulate; or- the right of Illinois minors to have their the sign got attention on the Internet, ganizing and activism beget more orga- arrest records expunged when they turn and Connolly ended up on the “Today” nizing and activism. As I called indi- eighteen. “There are two ways that this show; soon afterward, she began arrang- viduals around the country who were can go for us,” Ocasio-Cortez said on ing pharmacy runs and wellness checks setting up coronavirus-relief efforts, I the call. “We can buy into the old frame- for her neighbors and getting e-mails kept encountering people who had par- works of, when a disaster hits, it’s every from people around the world who’d ticipated in anti-globalization protests person for themselves. Or we can affir- been inspired to put up flyers of their in the early two-thousands, or joined matively choose a different path. And own. “My mom’s always told me that if the Occupy movement, or organized we can build a different world, even if I feel anxious and depressed I should grassroots campaigns in the aftermath

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 25 of the 2016 Presidential election. In 2017, who now lives in New York and runs the partnered with Ocasio-Cortez, a mem- as wildfires ravaged Northern Califor- blog Prison Culture, describes herself as ber of the federal government, to help nia, a collective of primarily disabled an abolitionist, not as an anarchist. She people learn how to help one another. queer and trans people, who called wants to create a world without prisons (Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, insisted, themselves Mask Oakland, began giv- and policing, and that requires imagin- on Twitter, that organizers and activ- ing out N95 masks to the homeless; in ing other structures of accountability— ists, not politicians, are often the ones March and April, they donated thou- and also of assistance. “I want us to act who “push society forward.”) Still, there sands of masks that they had in reserve as if the state is not a protector, and to is a real tension between statist and an- to local emergency rooms and clinics. be keenly aware of the damage it can archist theories of political change, Kaba Radicalism has been at the heart of do,” she told me. People who are deeply pointed out. In trying to help a com- mutual aid since it was in- committed to mutual aid munity meet its needs, one group of or- troduced as a political idea. think of it as a crucial, ev- ganizers might suggest canvassing for In 1902, the Russian natu- eryday practice, she said, not political candidates who support Medi- ralist and anarcho-commu- as a “program to pull off the care for All. Another might argue that nist Peter Kropotkin—who shelf when shit gets bad.” electoral politics, with its top-down was born a prince in 1842, Historically, in the United structures and its uncertain results, is got sent to prison in his early States, mutual-aid networks the wrong place to direct most of one’s thirties for belonging to a have proliferated mostly in energy—that we should focus instead banned intellectual society, communities that the state on building community co-ops that can and spent the next forty has chosen not to help. The secure health care and opportunities for years as a writer in Europe— peak of such organizing work. But sorting out the conflict be- published the book “Mutual Aid: A Fac- may have come in the late sixties and tween these visions is part of the larger tor of Evolution.” Kropotkin identifies early seventies, when Street Transves- project, Kaba suggested, and a task for solidarity as an essential practice in the tite Action Revolutionaries opened a multiple generations. The day-to-day lives of swallows and marmots and prim- shelter for homeless trans youth, in New practice of mutual aid is simpler. It is a itive hunter-gatherers; coöperation, he York, and the Black Panther Party matter, she said, of “prefiguring the world argues, was what allowed people in me- started a free-breakfast program, which in which you want to live.” dieval villages and nineteenth-century within its first year was feeding twenty farming syndicates to survive. That in- thousand children in nineteen cities y April, as the death toll rose in born solidarity has been undermined, in across the country. J. Edgar Hoover wor- BNew York City, many people I knew his view, by the principle of private prop- ried that the program would threaten in Brooklyn had begun working with a erty and the work of state institutions. “efforts by authorities to neutralize the mutual-aid group called Bed-Stuy Even so, he maintains, mutual aid is “the BPP and destroy what it stands for”; a Strong, which serves the neighborhood necessary foundation of everyday life” in few years later, the federal government of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Once predom- downtrodden communities, and “the formalized its own breakfast program inantly black, the neighborhood has, in best guarantee of a still loftier evolution for public schools. the past few decades, seen an influx of of our race.” Crises can intensify the antagonism white residents. Bed-Stuy Strong was Charitable organizations are typi- between the government and mutual- started by the writer Sarah Thankam cally governed hierarchically, with de- aid workers. Dozens of cities restrict Mathews, whose family moved to the cisions informed by donors and board community efforts to feed the home- United States from Oman when she members. Mutual-aid projects tend to less; in 2019, activists with No More was seventeen. Mathews organized the be shaped by volunteers and the recip- Deaths, a group that leaves water and group on Slack, and it initially consisted ients of services. Both mutual aid and supplies in border-crossing corridors, of the Slack demographic: relatively charity address the effects of inequality, were tried on federal charges, including privileged youngish people familiar with but mutual aid is aimed at root causes— driving in a wilderness area and “aban- the digital workflows of white-collar at the structures that created inequal- doning property.” But disasters can also offices. But volunteers plastered the ity in the first place. A few days after force otherwise opposing sides to work neighborhood with flyers, and word of her conference call with Ocasio-Cor- together. During Hurricane Sandy, the the group started to spread through tez, Mariame Kaba told me that mu- National Guard, in the face of govern- phone calls and text messages. Hun- tual aid couldn’t be divorced from po- ment failure, relied on the help of an dreds of people began joining every day. litical education and activism. “It’s not Occupy Wall Street offshoot, Occupy James Lipscomb, a former computer community service—you’re not doing Sandy, to distribute supplies. programmer in his sixties, who moved service for service’s sake,” she said. “Anarchists are not absolutist,” Spade, to Bed-Stuy from South Carolina when “You’re trying to address real material the lawyer and activist, told me. “We he was a teen-ager, learned about the needs.” If you fail to meet those needs, can believe in a diversity of tactics. I group on Facebook—an acquaintance she added, you also fail to “build the re- spend my life fighting for people to had called the organization’s Google lationships that are needed to push back get welfare benefits, for trans people to Voice number, then written a post won- on the state.” get health-care coverage.” Kaba isn’t dering if the whole thing was a scam. Kaba, a longtime Chicago activist doctrinaire, either; she had, after all, Lipscomb, who survived polio at age four,

26 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 after spending months in an iron lung, hospitalizations and new mutual-aid idency. (A distinctive quality of mutual has limited mobility, and lives alone. He groups. She felt, she said, like the earth aid, in general contrast with charity and had friends who were already sick with was moving beneath her feet. More peo- state services, is the absence of condi- the coronavirus, and he knew that he ple were recognizing that the problems tions for those who wish to receive help.) should stay inside. Not long after he saw Americans were facing weren’t caused Jackson Fratesi, a friend of mine in the Facebook post, a friend phoned him just by the virus but by a health-care the neighborhood who used to oversee and said, “James, call this number. They’ll system that ties insurance to employ- last-mile delivery operations for Walmart get your food.” He left Bed-Stuy Strong ment and a minimum wage so low that stores in New York and now helps run a voice mail, and someone called him essential workers can’t save for the emer- logistics for Bed-Stuy Strong, said, “We back a few hours later. The next day, a gencies through which they will be asked have guesses about what community volunteer arrived in his lobby with three to sustain the rest of the country. She’d needs will be in the future, but we also bags of groceries. “I looked at everything learned, after years of organizing, that, know that some of these needs will and was like a kid at Christmas,” he told in some ways, people are attracted to blindside us, and we’re trying to pre- me. (He described himself as a “halfway crisis—to letting problems escalate until pare for that.” He added, “And—who decent cook,” with special skills in the they’re forced to spring into action. “Pods knows?—maybe one of the things we’ll chili arena.) Lipscomb is a longtime give us the structure to deal with smaller be blindsided by is the government ac- member of the Bed-Stuy chapter of Lions harms,” she said. “And we have to deal tually doing a good job.” Club International, the first black chap- with smaller harms, or this is where we In her book “Good Neighbors: The ter in New York State. He told the club end up.” Democracy of Everyday Life in Amer- members about his experience, and the Mathews told me that Bed-Stuy ica,” the Harvard political scientist club donated two hundred dollars to Strong was trying to plan for coming Nancy L. Rosenblum considers the Bed-Stuy Strong. He also went back to hardships that the government would American fondness for acts of neigh- the person who had written the skepti- also probably fail to adequately address. borly aid and coöperation, both in or- cal Facebook post, he told me. “And I Unemployment would skyrocket in the dinary times, as with the pioneer prac- said, ‘Look, this group is the best-kept neighborhood, and community needs tice of barn raising, and in periods of secret going now!’ ” would evolve. She is committed to the crisis. In Rosenblum’s view, “there is lit- When I first spoke with Mathews, chaos of collective decision-making; the tle evidence that disaster generates an she quickly pointed out that other local group’s discussions about operations and appetite for permanent, energetic civic groups—such as Equality for Flatbush, priorities happen publicly, with input engagement.” On the contrary, “when which organizes against unjust policing from anyone who wants to contribute. government and politics disappear from and housing displacement—had been There are no eligibility criteria for gro- view as they do, we are left with the “doing the work for much longer.” She cery recipients, other than Bed-Stuy res- not-so-innocuous fantasy of ungoverned told me that she didn’t want to raise her hand and say, “Look, we’re new, we’re so shiny, we’re on Slack!” The organi- zation’s strictly local focus reflects a prin- ciple of many mutual-aid groups: that neighbors are best situated to help neigh- bors. Ocasio-Cortez’s team, after the conference call, distributed a guide hashtagged #WeGotOurBlock, with in- structions for building a neighborhood “pod” by starting with groups of five to twenty people, drawing on ideas popu- larized by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. The idea of “pod-map- ping,” according to one of the group’s founders, Mia Mingus, is to build last- ing networks of support, rather than in- dulge in “fantasies of a giant, magical community response, filled with people we only had surface relationships with.” Mingus, a disability activist who was born in Korea and brought up by a white couple in the U.S. Virgin Islands, told me that she’d been spending her days checking in on her pod, dropping off food and supplies for people, and her nights reading articles about layoffs and “You can’t just shout ‘Turn left!’ halfway through the intersection.” reciprocity as the best and fully ade- sources. The group had funnelled do- software, insurance, and legal fees. El- quate society.” She cites the daughter nations—many from health-care work- kind was still in Morningside Heights, of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder ers who wanted to pay their volunteer finishing the semester online. (“I have Lane, who helped her mother craft clas- babysitters—toward homeless shelters not prepared very well for my presen- sic narratives of neighborly kindness and food banks. tation tomorrow on comm law,” he told and became a libertarian who opposed There were some things that the me.) Maggie Connolly, who put up the the New Deal and viewed Social Secu- group could do more easily than the handwritten sign in Carroll Gardens, rity as a Ponzi scheme. state. Families “need a child-care center had started working with Invisible I called Rosenblum to ask what she that operates in traditional M-F fash- Hands, making grocery deliveries in her made of the current wave of ungoverned ion, like school would,” Londyn Robin- neighborhood. “I still love what I do as reciprocity. Disasters like this one, she son, one of the group’s organizers, told a hair-and-makeup artist, and I can’t said, have less to teach us about solidar- me in an e-mail, “and they also need a wait to get back to work,” she said. “But ity among neighbors than about our “need CovidSitter-like option to fill in the this has really made me realize that I for a kind of nationwide solidarity—in cracks.” I had heard as much from Emily would like to shift more time into doing other words, a social safety net.” She went Fitzgerald, a nurse-midwife in Minne- work that serves others.” She had raised on, “If you look at these really big, all- sota who, when the coronavirus first hit money from people she knew who were enveloping things—climate change, a the region, had been frantically running also out of work—photographers, styl- pandemic—and think they will be solved child-care calculations, anticipating her ists, models—to buy food boxes for New by citizen mobilization, it may be nec- team’s change from twelve-hour shifts York hospital staff. essary to consider the possibility that to twenty-four-hour shifts. When she On Day Twenty-two of self-isola- these problems are actually going to be learned about CovidSitters, she told me, tion, I called Fratesi and Mathews, from solved technocratically and politically, she became emotional. “You’re just not Bed-Stuy Strong, on Zoom. The group, from the top down, that what you need expecting to be taken care of in that they said, had signed up twenty-five are experts in government who are going way,” she said. The Sitters were seeking hundred volunteers, a third of whom to say, ‘You just have to do this.’ My own at least three hundred and fifty new vol- were active in the group’s Slack chan- opinion is that you need both top-down unteers to support nearly a hundred un- nel on a daily or near-daily basis, and a and bottom-up.” She continued, “But, matched families. At the end of March, fifth of whom had signed up to shop still, the idea that what we need most, the group became a nonprofit corpora- and make deliveries. Mathews hoped or only, is social solidarity, civic mobili- tion, so that it could apply for state grants. to sustain the network with the small zation, neighborly virtue—it’s not so.” The Sitters had also shared their blue- donations it was getting, most of which Rosenblum, though, told me that she print with more than a hundred and seemed to be coming from Bed-Stuy had noticed a difference between the thirty other med schools, thirty of which residents and people who knew them. mutual-aid groups that were forming had set up operational sister groups. The group’s tech and operations teams in the wake of the coronavirus and the Invisible Hands had also registered had revamped the online system so that sorts of disaster-relief work that she had as a nonprofit, Liam Elkind told me the most urgent requests—from people studied in the past. Because it had been when we spoke again, in mid-April. who’d been waiting the longest or who clear from the beginning that the pan- Lawyers helped the group establish by- had explicitly said that their cupboards demic would last indefinitely, many laws, official titles, and oversight prac- were bare—were continually resurfaced groups had immediately begun think- tices. The group had signed up twelve for delivery volunteers. “Oh, Sarah, what ing about long-term self-management, thousand volunteers and taken about do you think—should we have a sec- building volunteer infrastructures in ond Google Voice number where we order to get ahead of the worst of the just give people a phone tree of other crisis, and thinking about what could resources?” Fratesi asked at one point, work for months rather than for days. thinking through logistics as I inter- “That’s interesting,” she said. “And I viewed them. New York City had an- think it’s new.” nounced a daily free-meal program, and other nonprofits were turning to corona- n Day Twelve of my self-isolation, virus relief. We talked about whether OI checked in with the Minnesota mutual-aid work represented what the CovidSitters. The governor there, Tim state ought to be doing, or what the Walz, a Democrat, had mandated that four thousand requests. It had also raised state could never do properly, or maybe health-care workers have access to free fifty-seven thousand dollars for a sub- both. Three minutes after we finished child care at school facilities, and I sidy program—whereby needy house- our Zoom call, Bernie Sanders an- wanted to see how the government’s holds could receive free weekly food nounced that he was suspending his efforts were changing the group’s work. baskets with staples such as milk, bread, Presidential campaign. “Our best-case The CovidSitters, like Bed-Stuy Strong, and eggs—but it had suspended the scenario is that Biden wins????” Fratesi had been careful to coördinate with program after demand increased, mak- texted me. “DIRECT ACTION IT IS THEN, more established organizations, hoping ing it unsustainable. Money in reserve I GUESS.” By the beginning of May, Bed- to reduce redundancy and share re- is going to administrative costs, such as Stuy Strong had provided at least a

28 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 back on the structures that make those needs so dire. “What happens when MEN WAITING FOR A TRAIN people get together to support one an- other is that people realize that there’s At first they stand, orphaned, like a line of birds, more of us than there is of them,” he First on one foot, then the other, in unison, said. “This moment is a powder keg.” Like any other unnamed someones, as if poised The difficulty of sustaining this more For a firing line, until someone thinks he knows radical vision was also becoming clear. A train is coming in the sparrow-morning light, Bed-Stuy Strong has one week of run- And someone else taps a pack of cigarettes way at a time. When I asked Rebecca Against his gloved hand, not exotic, Solnit about the evidence that disasters But it’s as if he’s slipped into captivity. One have prompted lasting civic changes, Of those corner-of-the-eye, white-sky she pointed me to a number of specific Days, late winter a hammer against the organizations, and described their his- Platform, and gathered above the grave- tories, but she also emphasized some- Line of the gap enough snow thing less tangible, something she “heard To consider the blue clouds floating, over and over again from people,” she Like forgiveness, above us all. Only two said. “They discovered a sense of self Are cresting at this moment, one a show and a sense of connection to the peo- Of hands, an explosion of clapping, the ple and place around them that did not Other a mask of a baptismal face go away, and, though they went back to Failing behind the city’s blood-brown their jobs in a market economy and their Skyline. Whoever screamed just then, homes, that changed perspective stayed Then quieted, then shouted, high, like a crow, with them and maybe manifested in Leaves me filled with absence, listening subtler ways than a project.” She added, For silences, cupping my ears. For “If we think of mutual aid as both a se- A moment, nothing is being celebrated, ries of networks of resource and labor Nothing undone, or measured, nothing distribution and as an orientation, the Moves, or rings, in the air, and in the next former may become less necessary as Moment sirens are continually dying in ‘normal’ returns, but the latter may last.” The distance. In the time it takes the train’s The coronavirus has already ushered Doors to open, and close, and for the train in changes that would have been called To swirl us all off, half in, half out, of impossible in January: evictions have Our own wills, underground, something been suspended, undocumented farm- Like joy pours out of the cloudburst heart, workers have been classified as essen- And whatever feelings each one of us has had tial, the Centers for Disease Control Goes off into the daylight without us. has proclaimed that coronavirus test- ing and treatment will be free. There —David Biespiel are those who will want to return to normal after this crisis, and there are those who will decide that what was re- week’s worth of groceries to more than were already sharpening. Some crisis garded as normal before was itself the thirty-five hundred people in the neigh- volunteers find their work encouragingly crisis. Among the activists I talked to borhood. The group had raised a hun- apolitical: neighbors helping neighbors. in the past several weeks was a thirty- dred and forty thousand dollars and Some are growing even more commit- year-old named Jeff Sorensen, who was spent a hundred and twenty-seven thou- ted to socialist or anarchist ideals. “Com- working with the Washtenaw County sand dollars on food and supplies, such munity itself is not a panacea for op- Mutual Aid group, which was first cre- as medicine. What was left would keep pression,” Kaba told me. “And if you ated to help students affected by the the group operating for another week. think that this work is like program- closure of the University of Michigan. All the organizers I spoke to ex- ming a microwave, where an input leads Some activists in the group had been pressed a version of the hope that, after to immediate output, that’s capitalism involved with an existing mutual-aid we emerge from isolation, much more speaking.” It will be a loss, Spade told network, in Ypsilanti, that was founded will seem possible, that we will expect me, if mutual aid becomes vacated of last year with long-term goals and rad- more of ourselves and of one another, political meaning at the moment that ical principles in mind. Sorensen said that we will be permanently struck by it begins to enter the mainstream—if that he was determined to be hopeful. the way our actions depend on and affect we lose sight of the fundamental prem- “These things that are treated as ridic- people we may never see or know. But ise that, within its framework, we meet ulous ideas,” he told me, “we’ll be able the differences among the many volun- one another’s needs not just to fix things to say, ‘It’s not a ridiculous idea—it’s teer groups that had suddenly sprouted in the moment but to identify and push what we did during that time.’” 

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 29 A REPORTER AT LARGE FIVE OCEANS, FIVE DEEPS The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.

By Ben Taub

ea level—perpetual flux. There is tanks, and a tedious, thirteen-hour as- a micromillimetre on the surface cent, with constant decompression stops, S of the ocean that moves between so that his blood would not be poisoned sea and sky and is simultaneously both and his lungs would not explode. and neither. Every known life-form ex- The submersible dropped at a rate ists in relation to this layer. Above it, of about two and a half feet per second. the world of land, air, sunlight, and lungs. Twenty minutes into the dive, the pilot Below it, the world of water, depth, and reached the midnight zone, where dark pressure. The deeper you go, the darker, waters turn black. The only light is the the more hostile, the less familiar, the dim glow of bioluminescence—from less measured, the less known. electric jellies, camouflaged shrimp, and A splash in the South Pacific, last June, toothy predators with natural lanterns marked a historic breach of that world. to attract unwitting prey. Some fish in A crane lowered a small white submers- these depths have no eyes—what use ible off the back of a ship and plonked are they? There is little to eat. Condi- it in the water. For a moment, it bobbed tions in the midnight zone favor fish quietly on the surface, its buoyancy cal- with slow metabolic rates, weak mus- ibrated to the weight of the pilot, its only cles, and slimy, gelatinous bodies. occupant. Then he flipped a switch, and An hour into the descent, the pilot the submarine emitted a frantic, high- reached ten thousand feet—the begin- pitched whirr. Electric pumps sucked sea- ning of the abyssal zone. The tempera- water into an empty chamber, weighing ture is always a few degrees above freez- the vessel down. The surface frothed as ing, and is unaffected by the weather at the water poured in—then silence, as the the surface. Animals feed on “marine top of the submersible dipped below the snow”: scraps of dead fish and plants waterline, and the ocean absorbed it. from the upper layers, falling gently Most submarines go down several through the water column. The abyssal hundred metres, then across; this one was zone, which extends to twenty thousand designed to sink like a stone. It was the feet, encompasses ninety-seven per cent shape of a bulging briefcase, with a pro- of the ocean floor. truding bulb at the bottom. This was the After two hours in free fall, the pilot pressure hull—a titanium sphere, five feet entered the hadal zone, named for the in diameter, which was sealed off from Greek god of the underworld. It is made the rest of the submersible and housed up of trenches—geological scars at the the pilot and all his controls. Under the edges of the earth’s tectonic plates— passenger seat was a tuna-fish sandwich, and although it composes only a tiny the pilot’s lunch. He gazed out of one of fraction of the ocean floor, it accounts the viewports, into the blue. It would take for nearly fifty per cent of the depth. nearly four hours to reach the bottom. Past twenty-seven thousand feet, the Sunlight cuts through the first thou- pilot had gone beyond the theoretical sand feet of water. This is the epipelagic limit for any kind of fish. (Their cells col- zone, the layer of plankton, kelp, and lapse at greater depths.) After thirty-five reefs. It contains the entire ecosystem of thousand feet, he began releasing a se- marine plants, as well as the mammals ries of weights, to slow his descent. Nearly and the fish that eat them. An Egyptian seven miles of water was pressing on the diver once descended to the limits of this titanium sphere. If there were any im- layer. The feat required a lifetime of train- perfections, it could instantly implode. ing, four years of planning, a team of The submarine touched the silty bot- support divers, an array of specialized air tom, and the pilot, a fifty-three-year-old For more than a year, the team trying to

30 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 reach the deepest point in every ocean faced challenges as timeless as bad weather and as novel as the equipment they invented.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAOLO PELLEGRIN THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 31 Texan named Victor Vescovo, became burned through tens of thousands of gal- up the color, even as his beard turned the first living creature with blood and lons of fuel and alcohol. white. On weekends, he used his private bones to reach the deepest point in the In 1969, when Vescovo was three years jet to shuttle rescue dogs to prospective Tonga Trench. He was piloting the only old, he climbed into the front seat of owners all over the U.S. At sea, accord- submersible that can bring a human to his mother’s car, which was parked on ing to members of his expedition team, that depth: his own. a hill outside their house. He was small he spent hours in his cabin alone, play- For the next hour, he explored the and blond, the precocious, blue-eyed ing Call of Duty and eating microwaved featureless beige sediment, and tried grandson of Italian immigrants who macaroni and cheese. to find and collect a rock sample. Then had come to the United States in the But every age of exploration runs its the lights flickered, and an alarm went late nineteenth century and made a life course. “When Shackleton sailed for the off. Vescovo checked his systems—there selling gelato in the South. Vescovo put Antarctic in 1914, he could still be a hero. was a catastrophic failure in battery one. the car in neutral. It rolled backward When he returned in 1917 he could not,” Water had seeped into the electronics, into a tree, and he spent the next six Fergus Fleming writes, in his introduc- bringing about a less welcome superla- weeks in an intensive-care unit. There tion to “South,” Ernest Shackleton’s tive: the deepest-ever artificial explosion were lasting effects: nerve damage to diary. “The concept of heroism evapo- was taking place a few feet from his head. his right hand, an interest in piloting rated in the trenches of the First World If there were oxygen at that depth, complex vehicles, and the “torturous War.” While Shackleton was missing in there could have been a raging fire. In- compulsion,” he said, to experience ev- Antarctica, a member of his expedition stead, a battery junction box melted, erything he could before he died. cabled for help. Winston Churchill burning a hole through its external shell He grew up reading science fiction, responded, “When all the sick and without ever showing a flame. Any in- and aspired to be an astronaut; he had wounded have been tended, when all stinct to panic was suppressed by the the grades but not the eyesight. As an their impoverished & broken hearted impossibility of rescue. Vescovo would undergraduate, at Stanford, he learned homes have been restored, when every have to come up on his own. to fly planes. Afterward, he went to M.I.T., hospital is gorged with money, & every for a master’s degree in defense-and- charitable subscription is closed, then even miles overhead, a white ship arms-control studies, where he modelled & not till then wd. I concern myself Sbobbed in Polynesian waters. It had decision-making and risk—interests that with these penguins.” been built by the U.S. Navy to hunt So- later converged in overlapping careers as A century later, adventurers tend to viet military submarines, and recently a Reserve Naval Intelligence officer and accumulate ever more meaningless firsts: repurposed to transport and launch Ves- a businessman. Vescovo was deployed as a Snapchat from the top of Mt. Ever- covo’s private one. There were a couple a targeting officer for the NATO bomb- est; in Antarctica, the fastest mile ever of dozen crew members on board, all of ing of Kosovo, and, as a counterterror- travelled on a pogo stick. But to open whom were hired by Vescovo. He was ism officer, he was involved in a hostage the oceans for exploration without midway through an attempt to become rescue in the Philippines. He learned Ar- limit—here was a meaningful record, the first person to reach the deepest abic and became rich through finance Vescovo thought, perhaps the last on point in each ocean, an expedition he and consulting jobs, and, later, through a earth. In 1961, John F. Kennedy said that called the Five Deeps. He had made a private-equity firm, Insight Equity, in the “knowledge of the oceans is more than fortune in private equity, but he could suburbs of Dallas, where he lives. a matter of curiosity. Our very survival not buy success in this—a richer man Vescovo started going on increasingly may hinge upon it.” Yet, in the follow- had tried and failed. When the idea first elaborate mountaineering expeditions, ing decades, the hadal trench nearest to crossed his mind, there was no vehicle and by 2014 he had skied the last hundred the U.S. became a dumping ground for to rent, not even from a government. kilometres to the North and South Poles pharmaceutical waste. No scientist or military had the capac- and summited the highest peak on every In September, 2014, Vescovo sent an ity to go within two miles of the depths continent. He had narrowly survived a inquiry to Triton Submarines, a small he sought to visit. Geologists weren’t rock slide near the top of Mt. Aconcagua, manufacturer in Vero Beach, Florida. even sure where he should dive. in the Argentinean Andes, and had come He noted that he was a jet and helicop- Vescovo’s crew was an unlikely assem- to embrace a philosophy that centered ter pilot familiar with the “procedure- blage—“a proper band of thieves,” as the on calculated risk. Control what you can; driven piloting of complex craft,” and expedition’s chief scientist put it—with be aware of what you cannot. Death, at outlined what became the Five Deeps backgrounds in logistics, engineering, ac- some point, is a given—“You have to ac- Expedition. ademia, and petty crime. Some on board cept it,” he said—and he reasoned that had spent decades at sea; others were the gravest risk a person could take was atrick Lahey, the president of Triton, landlubbers. For more than a year, they to waste time on earth, to reach the end Ptook up scuba diving when he was faced challenges as timeless as bad without having maximally lived. “This thirteen years old, and discovered that he weather and as novel as the equipment is the only way to fight against mortal- felt more at home underwater than he they had invented for the job. They dis- ity,” he said. “My social life was pretty did on land. The muted silence, the slow, covered undersea mountain ranges, col- nonexistent, but it just wasn’t a priority. deep breaths—diving forced him into a lected thousands of biological samples Life was too interesting.” He grew his kind of meditative state. “I love the feel- that revealed scores of new species, and hair down to his shoulders, and touched ing of weightlessness,” he told me. “I love

32 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 Victor Vescovo made a fortune in private equity, but he couldn’t buy success in this—a richer man had tried and failed.

moving around in three dimensions, in- Russian oligarch and a member of a Mid- business decision,” a Triton engineer told stead of two.” Lahey attended commer- dle Eastern royal family. (In the years me. “He wanted to build this. Giving up cial diving school, to learn underwater leading up to the first order, Lahey used was not an option.” Lahey saw Vesco- welding and construction for dams, to be laughed at when he attended boat vo’s mission as a way to develop and test bridges, and oil-and-gas installations. shows; now there are companies that the world’s first unlimited hadal explo- “Just about anything you might do out build support vessels for yachts, to carry ration system—one that could then be of the water you could do underwater,” helicopters, submarines, and other ex- replicated and improved, for scientists. he said. “You bolt things, you cut things, pensive toys.) But his deeper aspiration Vescovo flew to the Bahamas, and you weld things together, you move things, was to make other people comprehend, Lahey took him for a test dive in Triton’s you recover things.” Water conducts elec- as Herman Melville wrote, in “Moby- flagship submersible, which has three tricity, and sometimes, he added, “you can Dick,” that in rivers and oceans we see seats and is rated to a depth of thirty-three feel it fizzing in your teeth.” “the image of the ungraspable phantom hundred feet. The third seat was occu- In 1283, when he was twenty-one, he of life; and this is the key to it all.” After pied by an eccentric British man in his carried out his first submarine dive, to a few dives, many of Lahey’s clients thirties, named John Ramsay, who didn’t fourteen hundred feet, to inspect an oil started allowing their vehicles to be used seem to enjoy the dive; he was preoccu- rig off the coast of Northern California. for science and filming. pied with what he didn’t like about the He was profoundly affected by the ex- Vescovo didn’t care if Lahey sent him submersible—which he had designed. perience—to go deep one hour and sur- to the bottom of the ocean in a window- face the next, with “none of the punitive less steel ball; he just wanted to get there. “ never really had a particular passion decompression,” he said. By the time Ves- But Lahey declined to build anything Ifor submarines,” Ramsay, who is Tri- covo contacted him, Lahey had piloted that didn’t have a passenger seat, for a ton’s chief submarine designer, told me. more than sixty submersibles on several scientist; a manipulator arm, for collect- “I still don’t, really.” What he does love is thousand dives. An expedition leader who ing samples; and viewports, so that the that he gets to design every aspect of each has worked with him for decades told occupants could appreciate the sensation machine, from the central frame to the me that he is, “without question, the best of submergence. Such features would elegant handle on the back of the hatch. submarine pilot in the world.” complicate the build, possibly to the point Car manufacturers have entire teams de- Lahey co-founded Triton in 2007. The of failure. But Lahey has a tendency to sign a seat or a fender, and then produce business model was to build private sub- promise the reality he wants before he’s it at scale. But nearly every Triton sub-

MAGNUM mersibles for billionaires, including a sure how to deliver it. “It wasn’t really a marine is unique; Ramsay determines

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 33 encourage his team. The men who were building the world’s most advanced deep-diving submersible had not at- tended Stanford or M.I.T.; they were former car mechanics, scuba instructors, and underwater welders, hired for their work ethic and their practical experience. The shop foreman used to be a truck driver. The hydraulics expert had a bul- let in his abdomen, from his days run- ning cocaine out of Fort Lauderdale, in the eighties. One of the electricians honed his craft by stealing car radios, as a teen- ager. (“I was really good at it,” he told me.) Lahey, for his part, said that he was named—and later exonerated—by the federal government as an unindicted co- conspirator in a narcotics-trafficking op- eration involving a Soviet military sub- marine and a Colombian cartel. “It sure looks like spring, but I’ll check my hibernation app.” Every major component of Vesco- vo’s submarine had to be developed from scratch. The oil-and-gas industry had •• established a supply chain of compo- nents that are pressure-rated to around how he wants things to be, and a dozen sand pounds of water—an elephant six thousand metres—but that was only or so men in Florida start building. standing on a stiletto heel. half the required depth. Before assem- Ramsay, who works out of a spare Ramsay settled on titanium: mallea- bling the submarine, the Triton team bedroom in the wilds of southwest En- ble and resistant to corrosion, with a high spent months imploding parts in a pres- gland, has never read a book about sub- ratio of strength to density. The pressure sure chamber, and sending feedback to marines. “You would just end up totally hull would weigh nearly eight thousand the manufacturers. “You’re solving prob- tainted in the way you think,” he said. pounds. It would have to be counterbal- lems that have never existed before, with “I just work out what it’s got to do, and anced by syntactic foam, a buoyant filler parts that have never existed before, then come up with a solution to it.” The comprising millions of hollow glass from venders who don’t know how to success or the failure of Vescovo’s mis- spheres. For the submarine to stay up- make them,” Ramsay said. sion would rest largely in his hands. right, the foam would have to go above The rest of the expedition team was “If Victor dies, and it’s your fault, the hull, providing upward lift—like a on a ship docked in the harbor at Vero you’ve got to kill yourself,” he told his hot-air balloon, for water. “As long as the Beach, waiting. Vescovo remained at home wife, Caroline. heavy stuff hangs in balance below the in Dallas, training on a simulator that “Would you, though?” she replied. buoyant stuff, the sub will always stay up- Triton had rigged up in his garage. On “Of course!” right,” Ramsay explained. Lahey’s recommendation, he had hired A submariner thinks of space and The hull required the forging of two Rob McCallum, an expedition leader and materials in terms of pressure, buoyancy, slabs of titanium into perfect hemi- a co-founder of Eyos Expeditions, to in- and weight. Air rises, batteries sink; in spheres. Only one facility in the world ject realism into a project that might oth- order to achieve neutral buoyancy—the had a chamber that was sufficiently large erwise die a dream. ability to remain suspended underwater, and powerful to subject the hull to pres- For every Vescovo who goes to the without rising or falling—each compo- sures equivalent to those found at full South Pole, there is a McCallum making nent must be offset against the others. ocean depth: the Krylov State Research sure he stays alive. (McCallum has been The same is true of fish, which regulate Center, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Lahey to Antarctica a hundred and twenty- their buoyancy through the inflation and attended the pressure test. There was eight times.) “I love it when clients come deflation of swim bladders. no backup hull; an implosion would end through the door and say, ‘I’ve been told Ramsay’s submarines typically cen- the project. “But it worked—it validated this is impossible, but what do you ter on a thick acrylic sphere, essentially what we were doing,” Lahey told me. think?’” he said to me. “Well, I think a bubble; release it underwater and it you’ve just given away your negotiating will pop right up to the surface. But t was the middle of summer, 2018, in position. Let’s have a glass of wine and acrylic was not strong enough for Ves- ISouth Florida, and Triton’s techni- talk about it.” covo’s submersible. At the bottom of cians were working fifteen hours a day, McCallum—who is trim but barrel- the deepest trench, every square inch in a space with no air-conditioning. Lahey chested, with a soft voice and a Kiwi ac- would have to hold back sixteen thou- paced the workshop, sweating, trying to cent—grew up in the tropics of Papua

34 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 New Guinea, and became a polar guide. when Patrick Lahey’s overflowing op- Vescovo named the submarine the He is a trained medic, dive master, fire- timism went from being an incredible, Limiting Factor, for another spaceship fighter, aircraft pilot, and boat operator, endearing personality trait to being a from the “Culture” series. It was secured a former New Zealand park ranger who huge issue,” Stuart Buckle, the Pressure to a custom-built cradle, which could be has served as an adviser to the Norwegian Drop’s captain, said. “Every day, Patrick rolled backward on metal tracks, to lower Navy. He speaks three Neo-Melanesian would say, ‘Oh, yes, it’ll be ready in one the sub into the ocean from the aft deck languages, and can pilot a Zodiac boat or two days.’ And then two days pass, of the ship. During launch operations, standing up, in sixteen-foot waves. He is and he’d say, ‘It’ll be ready in two days.’” the Triton crew attached it to a hook the subject of a “Modern Love” column, The final step in building a subma- that hung down from a crane, known as in the Times. (“My father warned me rine is to put it in a swimming pool or an A-frame, shaped like an enormous about guys like you,” the author recalls in the water at a marina. “You need to hydraulic swing set. Buckle had asked telling him, before marrying him anyway.) know how much it weighs and how much Vescovo to buy a larger A-frame—one McCallum and his associates have dis- it displaces,” Ramsay said, because the that was “man-rated” by a certification covered several high-profile shipwrecks, average density of the craft and its pas- agency, so that they could launch the sub- including Australian and American war- sengers must be equal to that of the water mersible, which weighs around twenty- ships and an Israeli military submarine. in which it is submerged. “You’ve only six thousand pounds, with the pilot A few months ago, he showed me on his calculated the volume of each object inside and the hatch secured. But there computer an object on a sonar scan, which through computer models, which can’t was no time to install one. So the Triton he believes to be Amelia Earhart’s plane. possibly represent the actual thing, with crew lowered the empty submersible into Vescovo asked what McCallum re- all its tolerances. Things are a bit bigger, the water, and the ship’s crew, using a quired from him. “The first thing I need things are a bit smaller, cables are fatter.” different crane, launched a Zodiac boat is for you to triple the budget,” he replied. But there was no time to do this be- over the starboard side. McCallum He also shot down several of Vescovo’s fore loading it onto the ship and set- climbed into the Zodiac, and drove the proposals, from the antiquated (no alcohol ting off for sea trials, in the Bahamas. pilot to the sub as it was being towed or spouses on board) to the insane (install- They left Florida without knowing how behind the ship. ing fake torpedo tubes on the bow; bring- much the submarine displaced. “It had The ship had no means of tracking ing his dog to the deepest point on earth). never even touched the water,” Ramsay the submarine underwater. “Once he left Five oceans, five deeps—a journey said. “It was just ‘Right, off we go. Let’s the surface, I had no idea where he was,” around the world and to both poles. see if it works.’” Buckle said. “All we had at that point McCallum explained that the expedi- was one range.” Buckle could see, for ex- tion would have to be anchored by the SEA TRIALS ample, that the Limiting Factor was five polar dives. The likely dive spot in the hundred metres away, but he didn’t know Arctic Ocean is covered by ice for much “ hen people talk about sea tri- in which direction. “As long as that num- of the year, but there is a two-week dive Wals, they always think about test- ber was getting bigger, that meant he window, beginning in late August. The ing a ship or testing a sub,” McCallum wasn’t surfacing directly under me,” he Antarctic, or Southern Ocean, dive could told me. “But, really, what you’re doing said. “If it just kept getting smaller and be done in February, the height of sum- is you’re testing people. You are testing smaller, I’m in trouble.” mer in that hemisphere. The team would systems, processes, conditions, and teams.” “The thing about driving a ship is have to avoid hurricane season in the Buckle, the captain, dropped anchor that unless you know how to drive a Atlantic, and monsoon season in the near Great Abaco Island, in the Baha- ship you never see the bad stuff,” Mc- Pacific, and otherwise remain flexible, mas, and immediately became alarmed Callum told me. “It’s only when the for when things inevitably went wrong. by the Triton crew’s cavalier approach captain’s going ‘Christ, that was close!’ Lahey persuaded Vescovo to buy the to safety. He had grown up in the Scot- that you go ‘Really? Was it?’” U.S.N.S. Indomitable, a two-hundred- tish Highlands, and gone to sea when Other incidents were unambiguous. and-twenty-foot vessel that he had found he was seventeen years old. “Me and my “I was seeing Triton guys bouncing up at a drydock in Seattle. It was built as guys were trying to adjust from the oil- the ladders without holding the hand- an intelligence-gathering ship, in 1985, and-gas industry, where you need a rails, wanting to jump on top of things and spent much of the next fifteen years signed bit of paper to do anything, and while they were still swinging from the prowling the world’s oceans, towing an to go out on deck you have to have your crane,” Buckle recalled. Ropes failed, undersea listening device. “It was owned overalls, hard hats, goggles, earmuffs, deck equipment snapped under stress. by the Navy but operated by civilians,” and gloves,” Buckle said. “Whereas a lot “One of the big ratchet hooks blew off McCallum told me. He winked. “I didn’t of the Triton guys were used to walking the top of the hangar, and missed Pat- say C.I.A.—I just said civilians.” Ves- around in shorts and flip-flops, like you rick’s head by that much,” McCallum covo renamed it the Pressure Drop, for watch on ‘American Chopper.’ They were said, holding his fingers a couple of a spaceship from the “Culture” series of grinding and drilling and using hydrau- inches apart. “Just missed him. And he science-fiction novels, by Iain M. Banks. lic awls, looking at it, sparks flying ev- wasn’t wearing a helmet, so that would The Arctic-dive window was fast ap- erywhere, not wearing safety glasses or have killed him.” proaching, and it seemed unlikely that anything. To them, if something catches Lahey piloted the sub on its earliest the submersible would be ready. “That’s fire, it’s funny—it’s not an issue.” dives—first to twenty metres, then fifty,

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 35 then a thousand. Electronic systems ies failed. The thrusters could be ejected nobody knew where those points were. failed. The hatch leaked. Emergency if they became entangled; so could the Most maps showing the ocean floor lights malfunctioned, and drop weights batteries, to drop weight and provide in detail are commissioned by people got stuck. Pre-dive checklists labelled buoyancy. The five-hundred-and-fifty- looking to exploit it. The oil-and-gas and several switches “inoperable.” Post-dive pound surfacing weight was attached by deep-sea-mining industries require ex- checklists noted critical components an electromagnet, so that if the sub lost tensive knowledge, and they pay for it. lost and fallen to the seafloor. electricity it would immediately begin its But, with a few exceptions, the charac- “In a sea trial, you’re trying to break ascent. There was also a dead-man switch: teristics of the deepest trenches are largely stuff—you’re trying to work out where an alarm went off if the pilot failed to unknown. As recently as the nineteen- your weakest link is,” McCal- check in with the ship, and sixties, ocean depths were often estimated lum said. “It’s incredibly de- if he failed to acknowledge by throwing explosives over the side of a moralizing. You never feel as the alarm the weights would ship and measuring the time it took for if you’re making any mean- automatically drop. the boom to echo back from the bottom. ingful forward progress.” “Whenever we had any It may appear as if the trenches are Each morning, he delivered significant failure of some mapped—you can see them on Goo- a pre-dive briefing to mem- kind, the only thing that gle Earth. But these images weren’t gen- bers of the ship and subma- mattered was why,” Vescovo erated by scanning the bottom of the rine crews. “Don’t be disheart- said. “If you can identify the ocean; they come from satellites scan- ened by the long list of things problem, and fix it, what are ning the top. The surface of the ocean that broke,” he told them. you going to do? Give up? is not even—it is shaped by the features “Rejoice, because those are Come on. That didn’t even beneath it. Trenches create mild surface things that are not going to fail in the cross my mind. Maybe other people get depressions, while underwater moun- Southern Ocean—and if they did fail freaked out. I’ve heard of that happen- tain ranges raise the surface. The result in the Southern Ocean we’d be fucked.” ing. But if you’re mountain climbing and is a vaguely correct reading—here is a you fall, are you not going to climb again? trench!—with a ludicrous margin of n September 9, 2018, Patrick Lahey No. You learn from it, and keep going.” error. Every pixel is about five hundred Opiloted the Limiting Factor to the By the middle of September, the sea metres wide, and what lies below may bottom of the Abaco Canyon, more trials had given way to “advanced sea be thousands of feet deeper or shallower than three miles down. It was the ninth trials”—a euphemism to cover for the than the satellite projects, and miles time that the submersible had been in fact that nothing was working. The Arc- away from where it appears on the map. the water. Everything worked. The next tic Ocean dive window had already Vescovo would have to buy a multi- day, Lahey repeated the dive, with Ves- passed. Buckle was especially concerned beam echo sounder, an advanced sonar covo as the lead pilot. When they about the launch-and-recovery system. mapping system, to determine precise reached the bottom, Vescovo turned on The cranes were inadequate, and poorly depths and dive locations. He chose the control unit that directs the manip- spaced. One of the support vessels, which the Kongsberg EM-124, which would ulator arm. Something wasn’t right. He had been selected by Triton, was eigh- be housed in a massive gondola under- and Lahey glanced at each other. “Do teen years old, and its rubber perime- neath the ship. No other system could you smell that?” Lahey asked. ter was cracking from years of neglect so precisely map hadal depths. Vescovo’s “Yes.” in the Florida sun. “I was pretty pissed purchase was the very first—serial num- There was a puff of smoke in the off at that point,” Buckle told me. “I ber 001. capsule. Vescovo and Lahey grabbed had put my guys in a difficult situation, That November, Buckle sailed the the “spare air”—scuba regulators, with because they were trying to compen- Pressure Drop to Curaçao, off the coast two-minute compressed-air cannis- sate for structural issues that you couldn’t of Venezuela, to have the EM-124 and ters—so that they wouldn’t pass out really work around. You can only piss a new starboard crane installed. But while preparing the emergency breath- with the dick you’ve been given.” there was still no time to order a man- ing apparatus. A circuit breaker tripped, McCallum redesigned the expedi- rated A-frame—its purchase, delivery, automatically switching off the control tion schedule to begin with the Puerto and installation would require that they unit for the manipulator arm, and the Rico Trench, in the Atlantic Ocean, in miss the Antarctic dive window, add- acrid smell dissipated. Lahey, who was December, followed by Antarctica, in ing a year to the expedition. “He’s a training Vescovo to handle crises un- early February. The adjustment added wealthy dude, but he’s not like Paul Allen derwater, asked what they should do. cost but bought time. or Ray Dalio,” Buckle said of Vescovo. “Abort the dive?” Vescovo said. “He hasn’t got that kind of money. This “Yes.” They were two hours from hen Alan Jamieson, the expe- is a huge commitment of his resources.” the surface. Wdition’s chief scientist, contacted Stewart prepared a list of possible Ramsay and Tom Blades, Triton’s chief Heather Stewart, a marine geologist dive locations, which earned her a spot electrical designer, had devised numer- with the British Geological Survey, on the expedition. For others, partici- ous safety mechanisms. Most systems and told her that Vescovo wanted to pation was largely a matter of luck. were duplicated, and ran on separate elec- dive to the deepest point of each ocean, Shane Eigler had started working at trical circuits, in case one of the batter- she replied that there was a problem: Triton the previous year, after Kelvin

36 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 Magee, the shop foreman, sent him a probably goes into his cabin and screams pagne,” McCallum said. “It was the first Facebook message asking if he’d like to into his pillow after he’s been told the time we’d seen Victor relax. It was the build submarines. They had met in the fifth bit of bad news that day.” (Vescovo first time we’d seen Victor touch alco- two-thousands, after Eigler had saved denies screaming into his pillow.) hol. And from that point we knew we up enough money by growing mari- Lahey pulled his team into the sub- were going to take this around the world.” juana to pay for dive lessons. Magee was marine hangar. “Do you think you can “Puerto Rico was the starting gun,” his instructor. Later, Eigler worked as fix this fucking thing?” he asked. Vescovo told me. “The Southern Ocean a car mechanic. “Building submarines— Blades noted that the loss of the ma- was the forge.” this shit is exactly the same as cars, just nipulator arm had freed up an electri- different components,” Eigler told me. cal junction box, creating an opportu- THE FORGE On December 14th, the Pressure Drop nity to fix nearly everything else that set off for the Puerto Rico Trench, from was wrong with the electronics. “Basi- aves are local—the brushing of the port of San Juan. “Been feeling a lit- cally, Tom Blades hot-wired the sub,” Wthe ocean by the wind. Swells tle queasy ever since we got underway,” Lahey explained. “There was literally a roll for thousands of miles across open Eigler wrote that night, in an e-mail to jumper cable running through the pres- water, unaffected by the weather of his wife. It was his first time at sea. sure hull, tucked behind Victor’s seat.” the moment. On December 19th, Vescovo climbed On January 24, 2019, the Pressure Drop THE STARTING GUN into the Limiting Factor and began his set off from the port of Montevideo, Uru- descent. “The control room was just guay, to dive the South Sandwich Trench, escovo and Lahey went for a test packed, and you could cut the atmosphere the deepest point of the Southern Ocean. Vdive down to a thousand metres. It with a knife the entire way down,” Stew- Buckle and his crew had loaded the ship was Lahey’s last chance to train Ves- art told me. “Patrick was just in his chair, with cold-weather gear, and provisions covo in the Limiting Factor before he ear to the radio, just wringing sweat.” for more than a month. There was a five- would attempt an eight-thousand-metre At 2:55 P.M., Victor Vescovo became thousand-mile journey ahead of them, dive, solo, to the bottom of the Puerto the first person to reach the deepest and the ship could barely go nine knots. Rico Trench. A scientific goal for the point in the Atlantic Ocean, eight thou- “Captain, can I have a word?” Peter expedition was to collect a rock sample sand three hundred and seventy-six Coope, the chief engineer, asked. “Is from the bottom of each trench, so Lahey metres. It was his first solo dive, and it this ship going to be O.K.?” switched on the manipulator arm. was flawless. “Yes,” Buckle replied. “Do you think Seconds later, on the Pressure Drop, That night, “Victor was wandering I would invite on board all the people a transmission came up from below. around, drinking out of a bottle of cham- I like working with most in the world, “Control, this is L.F.,” Lahey said. “We have lost the arm. It has fallen off.” It was December 17th. After surfac- ing, Vescovo and Lahey walked into McCallum’s office, toward the stern of the ship. “Patrick was under immense pressure that would have crushed al- most anybody else I know,” McCallum said. “He had applied a huge amount of his team’s intellectual capital to this project, at the expense of all other proj- ects, and yet things were just not quite where they needed to be.” Vescovo called off the expedition. “I think I’m just going to write this whole thing off as bad debt,” he said. The ma- nipulator arm had cost three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and there was no spare. Lahey begged for more time. “Give my guys one more day,” he said. Vescovo relented, and went up to his cabin. No one saw him for the next thirty-two hours. “The more time I spend with Vic- tor, the more I think he is Vulcan in his decision-making but not in his emo- tions,” Buckle told me. “He’s one of those guys who has a veneer of calm, but then The Pressure Drop, anchored in the Svalbard archipelago. The least-known region of the seafloor lies under the Arctic Ocean. and then sail us all to a certain death?” on planes, but if Victor said, ‘I want to and got them to follow him to bum- But Buckle wasn’t so sure. A year ear- buy a 747,’ I wouldn’t go up and say, ‘Yes, fuck nowhere.” In the evenings, Buckle lier, when he’d first walked up the gang- that one is great—buy that one.’ I’d get and his crew drank beer on the top plank, he wondered why Triton had cho- a pilot or a flight engineer to do it.” deck, and tossed pizza slices to alliga- sen this ship. The Pressure Drop hadn’t Buckle’s first officer recalled, “The ship tors in the bayou. The ship came with been in service in several years. The hull was fucking breaking apart.” no manuals, no electrical charts. “It was watertight, but there were holes in After the purchase, Buckle and a was just a soul-destroying, slow pro- the steel superstructure, and the ship- small crew of mostly Scottish sailors cess,” Buckle said. yard had stripped every functional com- spent two months living near a dock Now Buckle was steering the Pres- ponent. The steering system had been yard in Louisiana, refitting and repair- sure Drop into the Southern Ocean, the wired in reverse; turn one way and the ing the ship. “Stu took a huge risk— site of the most reliably violent seas in ship went the other. “It’s a classic case not only for himself but for all his the world. After a few nights, Erlend of people who have spent a lot of time officers,” McCallum told me. “He Currie, a sailor from the Orkney Islands, on boats thinking they know boats,” handpicked the guys, pulled them off shoved a life jacket under the far side of Buckle told me. “I’ve spent a lot of time of very well-paying oil-and-gas jobs, his bunk, so that the mattress would form

38 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 The Limiting Factor is the only vehicle “that can get to the bottom of any ocean, anytime, anywhere,” Rob McCallum said. a U shape, and he wouldn’t fall out. steamed into the teeth of the area where, laps around the world. She graduated at “You get these nasty systems rolling on the old maps, they used to write, ‘Here sea while mapping Vescovo’s dive loca- through, with just little gaps between Be Monsters,’” Vescovo told me. tion in the Puerto Rico Trench. them,” McCallum told me. McCallum As the head sonar operator, Bongio- has seen waves in the Southern Ocean n the forecastle deck, in the con- vanni had to make perfect decisions crest above ninety feet. He had carefully Otrol room, a cheerful, brown-haired based on imperfect information. “The mapped out a dive window, between Texan named Cassie Bongiovanni sat sound is generated from the EM-124, gales, and brought on board an ice pilot before four large monitors, which had housed inside the giant gondola under and a doctor. “If something goes wrong, been bolted to the table. Bongiovanni, the ship,” she said. “As it goes down, the there’s no port to go to, and there’s no who is twenty-seven years old, was finish- width of each sound beam grows, so one to rescue you,” he said. ing a master’s degree in ocean mapping that in the deepest trenches we’re only Albatross trailed the ship for the at the University of New Hampshire able to pick up one point every seventy- first several days. Soon they disappeared when Rob McCallum called and said five metres or so.” In these trenches, it and the crew began seeing whales and that he needed someone to run a mul- takes at least seven seconds for sound penguins. “Filled with trepidation, we tibeam sonar system for one and a half to reach the bottom, and another seven

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 39 seconds to return. In that gap, the ship bucking in the middle of the South- thirty-three metres. The point had never has moved forward, and has pitched ern Ocean, fumbling with wet ropes, been measured or named. He decided and rolled atop the surface of the sea. fingers numb. Then a Zodiac picked to call it the Factorian Deep. Bongiovanni also had to account for him up and took him back to the Pres- readings of sound speed at each dive sure Drop, where he warmed his hands hat night, Alan Jamieson, the chief site, as it is affected by variations in tem- by an exhaust vent. Vescovo started the Tscientist, stood on the aft deck, perature, salinity, and depth. pumps, and the Limiting Factor began waiting for biological samples to reach The purchase and installation of the its descent. the surface. “Most marine science is EM-124 cost more than the ship itself, Dive protocols required that Ves- gritty as fuck,” he told me. “It’s not just but its software was full of bugs. Each covo check in with the surface every ‘Look at the beautiful animal,’ or ‘Look day, Bongiovanni oscillated between fifteen minutes and announce his depth at the mysteries of the deep.’ It’s all the awe and frustration as she rebooted it, and heading and the status of his weird vessels we end up on, the work adjusted parameters, cleaned up noisy life-support system. But, after forty-five of hauling things in and out of the data, and sent e-mails to Kongsberg, hundred metres, the communications water.” Jamieson, a gruff, forty-two- the maker, to request software patches. system failed. The ship could still re- year-old marine biologist, who grew The expedition wasn’t merely the first ceive Vescovo’s transmissions, but Ves- up in the Scottish Lowlands, is a pio- to dive the South Sandwich Trench but covo couldn’t hear the replies. neer in the construction and use of the first to map it as well. Aphids and krill drifted past the hadal landers—large, unmanned con- Buckle positioned the ship over the viewports. It is customary to abort a traptions with baited traps and cam- dive site. A Triton mechanic named dive thirty minutes after losing com- eras, dropped over the side of a ship. Steve Chappell was assigned the role munications, but Vescovo knew that he In the past two decades, he has carried of “swimmer,” meaning that he would might never have another chance to out hundreds of lander deployments balance atop the Limiting Factor as it reach the bottom of the Southern in the world’s deep spots, and found was lowered into the water, and dis- Ocean, so he kept going. He liked the evidence of fish and critters where none connect the towline before it went sensation of being truly alone. Some- were thought to be. Now, as snow blew down. He wore a dry suit; polar waters times, on the surface, he spoke of human sideways in the darkness and the wind, can rapidly induce involuntary gasping nature as if it were something he had he threw a grappling hook over the and vertigo, and even talented swim- studied from the outside. Another hour South Sandwich Trench and caught a mers can drown within two minutes. passed before he reached the deepest lander thrashing in the waves. For a moment, he lay on a submarine point: seven thousand four hundred and There were five landers on board. Three were equipped with advanced tracking and communications gear, to lend navigational support to the sub underwater. The two others were Jamie- son’s—built with an aluminum frame, disposable weights, and a sapphire win- dow for the camera, to withstand the pressure at depth. Before each dive, he tied a dead mackerel to a metal bar in front of the camera, to draw in hungry hadal fauna. Now, as he studied the footage, he discovered four new spe- cies of fish. Amphipods scuttled across the featureless sediment on the seafloor, and devoured the mackerel down to its bones. They are ancient, insect-like scavengers, whose bodies accommo- date the water—floating organs in a waxy exoskeleton. Their cells have adapted to cope with high pressure, and “they’ve got this ridiculously stretchy gut, so they can eat about three times their body size,” Jamieson explained. Marine biologists classify creatures in the hadal zone as “extremophiles.” The following night, one of Jamie- son’s landers was lost. “Usually, things come back up where you put them, but it just didn’t,” Buckle said. “We worked out what the drift was, and we then became the first person to collect a bi- viously gone unnoticed. It may be a new sailed in that drift direction for another ological sample from the Diamantina rupture in the ocean floor. three or four hours, with all my guys Fracture Zone. Buckle positioned the Pressure Drop on the bridge—searchlights, binocu- over the pool, and turned off the ship’s lars, everyone looking for it. And we PIRATES tracking and communications equipment. just never found it.” McCallum hoisted a pirate flag. The cli- The second one surfaced later that he Java Trench lies in international mate was tropical, eighty-six degrees, the night. But during the recovery it was Twaters, which begin twelve nautical ocean calm, with slow, rolling swells and sucked under the pitching ship and miles from land. But the expedition’s pro- hardly a ripple on the surface. On the went straight through the propeller. By spective dive sites fell within Indonesia’s morning of April 5, 2019, the Triton crew now, there was a blizzard, and the ship Exclusive Economic Zone; according to launched the Limiting Factor without was heaving in eighteen-foot waves. “I U.N. conventions, a coun- incident, and Vescovo dived lost everything—just fucking every- try has special rights to the to the deepest point in the thing—in one night,” Jamieson said. exploration and exploitation Java Trench. Vescovo suggested naming the site of of marine resources, as far Mountaineers stand atop the lost landers the Bitter Deep. as two hundred nautical craggy peaks and look out The Pressure Drop set off east, past miles from the coast. Mc- on the world. Vescovo de- a thirty-mile-long iceberg, for Cape Callum had spent much of scended into blackness, and Town, South Africa, to stop for fuel the previous year applying saw mostly sediment at the and food. Bongiovanni left the sonar for permits and permissions; bottom. The lights on the running, collecting data that would he dealt with fifty-seven Limiting Factor illuminated correct the depths and the locations of government agencies, from only a few feet forward; the key geological features, whose prior more than a dozen coun- acrylic viewports are convex measurements by satellites were off by tries, in order to plan the Five Deeps. and eight inches thick. Whatever the true as much as several miles. (Vescovo is For several months, the Indonesian topography of the rock underneath, hadal making all of the ship’s data available government ignored McCallum’s inqui- trenches appear soft and flat at the deep to Seabed2030, a collaborative project ries. Then he was bounced among ten or spots. Flip a mountain upside down and, to map the world’s oceans in the next more agencies, to which he sent briefing with time, the inverted summit will be ten years.) Meanwhile, Jamieson cob- materials about the submersible, the ship, unreachable; for as long as there has been bled together a new lander out of alu- the crew, and the mission. Between the an ocean, the trenches have been the end minum scraps, spare electronics, and Atlantic and the Antarctic dives, Vescovo points of falling particulate—volcanic dust, some ropes and buoys, and taught Er- flew to Jakarta to deliver a lecture, and sand, pebbles, meteorites, and “the bil- lend Currie, the sailor from the Ork- he offered to bring an Indonesian scien- lions upon billions of tiny shells and skel- ney Islands, to bait it and set the re- tist to the bottom of the trench. But when etons, the limy or silicious remains of all lease timer. Jamieson named the lander the ship arrived in Bali McCallum still the minute creatures that once lived in the the Erlander, then he disembarked and hadn’t received permission to dive. upper waters,” Rachel Carson wrote, in set off for England, to spend time with Officially, this meant that the team “The Sea Around Us,” in 1951. “The sed- his wife and children. It would take could not carry out any scientific work iments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.” several weeks for the ship to reach its in the Java Trench. But the international Vescovo spent three hours at the bot- next port stop, in Perth, where the Tri- law of the sea allows for the testing of tom, and saw a plastic bag through the ton crew would install a new manipu- equipment, and, after Java, the next set viewports. In the Puerto Rico Trench, lator arm. of dives, in the Pacific Ocean, would be one of the Limiting Factor’s cameras had At the time, the deepest point in the deepest of all. “So we tested the sub captured an image of a soda can. Scien- the Indian Ocean was unknown. Most a few times,” McCallum said, smiling. tists estimate that in thirty years the oceans scientists believed that it was in the “We tested the landers, we tested the will hold a greater mass of plastic than Java Trench, near Indonesia. But no- sonar—we tested everything.” of fish. Almost every biological sample body had ever mapped the northern The Java Trench is more than two that Jamieson has dredged up from the part of the Diamantina Fracture Zone, thousand miles long, and the site of vio- hadal zone and tested in a lab has been off the coast of Australia, and readings lent seismic activity. Surveys in the north- contaminated with microplastics. “Does from satellites placed it within Java’s ern part show evidence of landslides, from it harm the ability of these animals to margin of error. the 2004 earthquake that triggered a tsu- feed, to maneuver, to reproduce?” Mc- The Pressure Drop spent three days nami with hundred-foot waves that killed Callum said. “We don’t know, because over the Diamantina; Bongiovanni a quarter of a million people across South- we can’t compare one that’s full of mi- confirmed that it was, in fact, shallower east Asia. Farther south, satellites had de- croplastics with one that’s not. Because than Java, and Currie dropped the Er- tected two deep pools, several hundred there aren’t any.” lander as Jamieson had instructed. miles apart. The Pressure Drop mapped The walls of trenches are filled with When it surfaced, around ten hours both sites, and Bongiovanni discovered life, but they were not Vescovo’s mission. later—the trap filled with amphipods, that, in fact, the deepest point was be- “It’s a little bit like going to the Louvre, including several new species—Currie tween them, in a small pool that had pre- putting your running shoes on, and

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 41 sprinting through it,” Lahey said. “What ning in the cold. “Biology is just smelly 2008. Now Don Walsh, who was eighty- you really want to do is to go there with engineering,” Jamieson said. “When you eight, walked up the gangway of the Pres- someone who can tell you what you’re reverse-engineer a fish from the most sure Drop. It was a short transit to the looking at.” The next day, Vescovo told extreme environments, and compare it Mariana Trench, across warm Pacific wa- Lahey that he could take Jamieson to to its shallow-water counterparts, you ters, over six-foot swells. the bottom of the trench. “I don’t want can see the trade-offs it has made.” Above the Challenger Deep, Vescovo to go to the deepest point, because that’s The wall climb took an hour. When pulled on a fire-retardant jumpsuit, and boring,” Jamieson said. “Let’s go some- the last lander surfaced, Jamieson de- walked out to the aft deck. A gentle where really cool.” tached the camera and found that it had wind blew in from the east. Walsh shook Four and a half miles below the ship, captured footage of a dumbo octopus at Vescovo’s hand. Vescovo climbed into the Australia tectonic plate was being twenty-three thousand feet—the deep- the Limiting Factor, carrying an ice axe slowly and violently subsumed by the est ever recorded, by more than a mile. that he had brought to the summit of Eurasia plate. Bongiovanni had noticed The Pressure Drop set off toward the Mt. Everest. a staircase feature coming out of a fault Pacific Ocean. McCallum lowered the Hatch secured, lift line down, tag lines line, the result of pressure and breakage pirate flag. Seven weeks later, Jamieson released, towline out—pumps on. Ves- on a geological scale. It extended more received a letter from the Indonesian covo wondered, Is the sub able to han- than eight hundred feet up, beyond ver- government, saying that his research-per- dle this? He didn’t think it would im- tical, with an overhang—an outrageously mit application had been rejected, “due plode, but would the electronics survive? difficult dive. Lahey would have to back to national security consideration.” The thrusters? The batteries? Besides up as they ascended, with no clear view Walsh and Piccard, the only other per- of what was above the sub. A DAILY FLIGHT TO THE MOON son to go to the bottom of the Chal- The hatch started leaking during the lenger Deep was the filmmaker James descent, but Lahey told Jamieson to ig- uckle sailed to Guam, with diver- Cameron, in 2012. Multiple systems failed nore it—it would seal with pressure. It Bsions for Bongiovanni to map the at the bottom, and his submersible never kept dripping for more than ninety min- Yap and Palau Trenches. Several new dove deep again. utes, and stopped only at fifteen thou- passengers boarded, one of whom was The depth gauge ticked past ten thou- sand feet. “I fucking told you it would unlike the rest: he had been where they sand nine hundred metres, thirty-six seal,” Lahey said. were going, six decades before. Hadal thousand feet. After four hours, Vescovo The Limiting Factor arrived at the exploration has historically prioritized started dropping variable ballast weights, bottom just after noon. Lahey approached superlatives, and an area of the Mariana to slow his descent. At 12:39 p.m., he the fault-line wall, and headed toward Trench, known as the Challenger Deep, called up to the surface. His message some bulging black masses. From a dis- contains the deepest water on earth. took seven seconds to reach the Pressure tance, they looked to Jamieson like vol- On January 23, 1960, two men climbed Drop: “At bottom.” canic rock, but as Lahey drew closer more into a large pressure sphere, which was Outside the viewports, Vescovo saw colors came into view—brilliant reds, or- suspended below a forty-thousand-gal- amphipods and sea cucumbers. But he anges, yellows, and blues, cloaked in hadal lon tank of gasoline, for buoyancy. One was two miles beyond the limits of fish. darkness. Without the lights of the sub- of them was a Swiss hydronaut named “At a certain point, the conditions are so marine, the colors may never have been Jacques Piccard, whose father, the hot- intense that evolution runs out of op- seen, not even by creatures living among air balloonist Auguste Piccard, had de- tions—there’s not a lot of wiggle room,” them. These were bacterial mats, deriv- signed it. The other was Don Walsh, a Jamieson said. “So a lot of the creatures ing their energy from chemicals emanat- young lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, which down there start to look the same.” ing from the planet’s crust instead of from had bought the vehicle, known as a bathy- Vescovo switched off the lights and sunlight. It was through this process of scaphe, and modified it to attempt a dive turned off the thrusters. He hovered in chemosynthesis that, billions of years ago, in the Challenger Deep. silence, a foot off the sediment bottom, when the earth was “one giant, fucked-up, The bathyscaphe was so large that it drifting gently on a current, nearly thirty- steaming geological mass, being bom- had to be towed behind a ship, and its six thousand feet below the surface. barded with meteorites,” as Jamieson put buoyant gasoline tank was so delicate that That evening, on the Pressure Drop, it, the first complex cell crossed some in- the ship couldn’t travel more than one or Don Walsh shook his hand again. Ves- tangible line that separates the non-liv- two miles per hour. To find the dive site, covo noted that, according to the sonar ing from the living. sailors tossed TNT over the side of the scan, the submarine data, and the read- Lahey began climbing the wall—up ship, and timed the echo reverberating ings from the landers, he had gone deeper on the thrusters, then backward. Jamie- up from the bottom of the trench. There than anyone before. “Yeah, I cried my- son discovered a new species of snailfish, was one viewport, the size of a coin. When self to sleep last night,” Walsh joked. a long, gelatinous creature with soft fins, the bathyscaphe hit the bottom, stirring by looking through a viewport. The pres- up sediment, “it was like looking into a he Triton team took two mainte- sure eliminates the possibility of a swim bowl of milk,” Walsh said. A half century Tnance days, to make sure they didn’t bladder; the lack of food precludes the passed before anyone returned. miss anything. But the Limiting Fac- ossification of bones. Some snailfish have The bathyscaphe never again dived to tor was fine. So Vescovo went down antifreeze proteins, to keep them run- hadal depths. Jacques Piccard died in again to retrieve a rock sample. He found

42 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 By the time the Pressure Drop reached the Arctic, it had completed one and a half laps around the world, to both poles.

some specimens by the northern wall manipulator arm, freeing it from the thousand-dollar lander back,” Ves- of the trench, but they were too big to mud. It shot up to the surface. Struwe— covo said. carry, so he tried to break off a piece by who was now one of only six people “Victor, you have the only vehicle in smashing them with the manipulator who had been to the bottom of the Chal- the world that can get to the bottom of arm—to no avail. “I finally resorted to lenger Deep—certified the Limiting any ocean, anytime, anywhere,” McCal- just burrowing the claw into the muck, Factor’s “maximum permissible diving lum said. The message sank in. Vescovo and just blindly grabbing and seeing if depth” as “unlimited.” had read that the Chinese government anything came out,” he said. No luck. The control room was mostly empty. has dropped acoustic surveillance de- He surfaced. “When Victor first went down, every- vices in and around the Mariana Trench, Hours later, Vescovo walked into the one was there, high-fiving and whoop- apparently to spy on U.S. submarines control room and learned that one of ing and hollering,” Buckle said. “And leaving the naval base in Guam; he could the navigation landers was stuck in the the next day, around lunchtime, every- damage them. A Soviet nuclear subma- silt. He was in despair. The lander’s bat- one went ‘Fuck this, I’ll go for lunch.’ rine sank in the nineteen-eighties, near teries would soon drain, killing all com- Patrick retrieves a piece of equipment the Norwegian coast. Russian and Nor- munications and tracking—another from the deepest point on earth, and wegian scientists have sampled the water expensive item lost on the ocean floor. it’s just me, going, ‘Yay, congratulations, inside, and have found that it is highly “Well, you do have a full-ocean-depth Patrick.’ No one seemed to notice how contaminated. Now Vescovo began to submersible” available to retrieve it, big a deal it is that they had already worry that, before long, non-state actors McCallum said. Lahey had been plan- made this normal—even though it’s might be able to retrieve and repurpose ning to make a descent with Jonathan not. It’s the equivalent of having a daily radioactive materials lying on the seafloor. Struwe, of the marine classification firm flight to the moon.” McCallum, in his “I don’t want to be a Bond villain,” DNV-GL, to certify the Limiting Fac- pre-dive briefings, started listing “com- Vescovo told me. But he noted how easy tor. Now it became a rescue mission. placency” as a hazard. it would be. “You could go around the When Lahey reached the bottom, Vescovo was elated when the lander world with this sub, and put devices on he began moving in a triangular search reached the surface. “Do you know what the bottom that are acoustically trig- pattern. Soon he spotted a faint light this means?” McCallum said to him. gered to cut cables,” he said. “And you

ANUJ SHRESTHA ANUJ from the lander. He nudged it with the “Yeah, we got the three-hundred- short all the stock markets and buy gold,

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 43 before taking leave, she taught Erlend Currie, who had launched Jamieson’s makeshift lander in the Diamantina Frac- ture Zone, how to operate the EM-124. “When you give people more re- sponsibility, they either crumble or they bloom, and he blooms,” Buckle said. In the next month, Currie mapped some six thousand nautical miles of the ocean floor, from the Tonga Trench to the Panama Canal. “Erlend’s doing a good job,” another officer reported to Bon- giovanni. “He’s starting to really talk like a mapper. He just hasn’t quite learned how to drink like one.”

NORWEGIAN CANDY

boarded the Pressure Drop in Ber- I muda, in the middle of July, seven “He’s anxious to resume perpetrating his usual activities.” months into the expedition. The crew had just completed another set of dives in the Puerto Rico Trench, to demon- •• strate the equipment to representatives of the U.S. Navy and to the billionaire all at the same time. Theoretically, that headed south, toward Tonga, in the South and ocean conservationist Ray Dalio. is possible. Theoretically.” Pacific. Bongiovanni kept the sonar run- (Dalio owns two Triton submarines.) After a maintenance day, Lahey ning twenty-four hours a day, and Jamie- Vescovo hoped to sell the hadal explo- offered to take John Ramsay to the bot- son carried out the first-ever lander de- ration system for forty-eight million tom of the trench. Ramsay was conflicted, ployments in the San Cristobal and Santa dollars—slightly more than the total but, he said, “there was this sentiment Cruz Trenches. “The amphipod sam- cost of the expedition. During one of on board that if the designer doesn’t dare ples are mostly for genetic work, track- the demonstrations, a guest engineer get in it then nobody should dare get in ing adaptations,” he told me. The same began outlining all the ways he would it.” He climbed in, and felt uncomfort- critters were showing up in trenches have done it differently. “O.K.,” McCal- able the entire way down. “It wasn’t that thousands of miles apart—but aren’t lum said, smiling. “But you didn’t.” I actually needed to have a shit, it was found in shallower waters, elsewhere on We set off north, through the tur- this irrational fear of what happens if I the ocean floor. “How the fuck are they quoise waters of the Gulf Stream. It do need to have a shit,” he said. going from one to another?” would take roughly three weeks, with- Two days later, Vescovo took Jamie- Bongiovanni mapped the Tonga out stopping, to reach the deepest point son to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Trench. The sonar image showed a forty- in the Arctic Ocean. But the Arctic dive They returned with one of the deepest mile line of fault escarpments, a geolog- window wouldn’t open for five more rock samples ever collected, after Ves- ical feature resulting from the fractur- weeks, and, as Vescovo put it, “the Ti- covo crashed into a boulder and a frag- ing of an oceanic plate. “It’s horrendously tanic is on the way.” For several nights, ment landed in a battery tray. violent, but it’s happening over geolog- I stood on the bow, leaning over the Buckle started sailing back to Guam, ical time,” Jamieson explained. “As one edge, mesmerized, as bioluminescent to drop off Walsh, Vescovo, and the Tri- of the plates is being pushed down, it’s plankton flashed green upon contact ton crew. “It’s quite mind-blowing, when cracking into these ridges, and these with the ship. Above that, blackness, you sit down and think about it, that, ridges are fucking huge”—a mile and a until the horizon, where the millions of from the dawn of time until this Mon- half, vertical. “If they were on land, they’d stars began. Sometimes there was a crack day, there were three people who have be one of the wonders of the world. But, of lightning in the distance, breaking been down there,” he said. “Then, in the because they’re buried under ten thou- through dark clouds. But most nights last ten days, we’ve put five more people sand metres of water, they just look like the shape of the Milky Way was so pro- down there, and it’s not even a big deal.” ripples in the ocean floor.” nounced that in the course of the night Bongiovanni routinely stayed up all you could trace the earth’s rotation. t was early May, and there was only night, debugging the new software and The air turned foggy and cold. Buckle Ione ocean left. But the deepest point surveying dive sites, so that the Limit- steered out of the Gulf Stream and into in the Arctic Ocean was covered by the ing Factor could be launched at dawn. the waters of the North Atlantic, a few polar ice cap, and would remain so for “Day Forever,” she dated one of her jour- hundred miles southeast of the port of several months. The Pressure Drop nal entries. “Sonar fucked itself.” Now, St. John’s, Newfoundland. After mid-

44 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 night, everyone gathered on the top deck the ice. Most of the archipelago is in- were drinking outside, I noticed a stray and downed a shot of whiskey—a toast accessible, except by snowmobile or boat. amphipod dangling from Jamieson’s to the dead. We would reach the site of The population of polar bears outnum- shoelace. “These little guys are all over the Titanic by dawn. At sunrise, we tossed bers that of people, and no one leaves the fucking planet,” he said, kicking it a wreath overboard, and watched it sink. town without a gun. off. “Shallower species don’t have that A few years ago, Peter Coope, Buck- McCallum brought on board two kind of footprint. You’re not going to le’s chief engineer, was working on a Eyos colleagues, including a polar guide see that with a zebra or a giraffe.” commercial vessel that was affixing an who could smell and identify the direc- The earth is not a perfect sphere; it enormous, deepwater anchor to an oil tion of a walrus from a moving ship, is smushed in at the poles. For this rea- rig off the coast of Indonesia. The chain several miles away. By now, McCallum son, Vescovo’s journey to the bottom of slipped over the side, dragging down had adjusted the expedition schedule the Molloy Hole would bring him nine one side of the ship so far that the star- ninety-seven times. The Pressure Drop miles closer to the earth’s core than his board propeller was in the air. Water set off northwest, in the direction of the dives in the Mariana Trench, even poured into the engine room, where Molloy Hole, the site of the deepest though the Molloy is only half the depth Coope worked. It was impossible for point in the Arctic Ocean. The least- from the surface. him to reach the exit. known region of the seafloor lies under On August 29th, Vescovo put on his British ship engineers wear purple the polar ice cap. But scientists have coveralls and walked out to the aft deck. stripes on their epaulets. Many of them found the fossilized remains of tropical The ship and submarine crews had so think of this as a tribute to the engi- plants; in some past age, the climate was perfected the system of launch and re- neers on the Titanic, every one of whom like that of Florida. covery that, even in rough seas, to an stayed in the engine room and went It was the height of Arctic summer, outsider it was like watching an indus- down with the ship. Now Coope, whose and bitterly cold. I stood on the bow, trial ballet. The equipment had not father was also a chief engineer, resolved watching Arctic terns and fulmars play changed since the expedition’s calami- to do the same. “I saw my life blowing in the ship’s draft, and puffins flutter tous beginnings—but the people had. away,” Coope recalled. “People say it spastically, barely smacking themselves “This is not the end,” Vescovo said, flashes in front of you. I was just calm. out of the water. quoting Winston Churchill. “It is not I felt, That’s it—I’ve gone.” The bridge The sun would not set, to disorient- even the beginning of the end. But it is, crew managed to right the ship after he ing effect. When I met John Ramsay, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” had already accepted his fate. he explained, with some urgency, that He climbed inside the Limiting Fac- The next day, Vescovo piloted the the wider, flatter coffee cups contained tor. The swimmer closed the hatch. Ves- Limiting Factor down to the Titanic, a greater volumetric space than the taller, covo turned on the oxygen and the car- with Coope’s epaulets, and those of his skinnier ones—and that this was an im- bon-dioxide scrubbers. “Life support father, in the passenger seat. The debris portant consideration in weighing the engaged,” he said. “Good to go.” field spans more than half a mile, and consumption of caffeine against the po- For the first few hundred feet, he saw is filled with entanglement hazards— tential social costs of pouring a second jellyfish and krill. Then marine snow. loose cables, an overhanging crow’s nest, cup from the galley’s single French press. Then nothing. corroded structures primed to collapse. Ice drifted past; orcas and blue whales, The Triton crew piled into the con- (“What a rusting heap of shit!” Lahey too. Buckle sounded the horn as the trol room. Lahey found a box of lico- said. “I don’t want the sub anywhere ship crossed the eightieth parallel. One rice from Svalbard, took a bite, and near that fucking thing!”) Large rusti- night, the horizon turned white, and passed it around. “Just fucking heinous,” cles flow out from the bow, showing the the polar ice cap slowly came into view. he said, grimacing. “Who the fuck makes directions of undersea currents. Intact Another night, the ice pilot parked the candy like that? Tastes like frozen shit.” cabins have been taken over by corals, bow of the ship on an ice floe. The Pres- There was a blip on the communi- anemones, and fish. sure Drop had completed one and a half cations system. For a moment, the room That evening, Vescovo returned the laps around the world, to both poles. went silent, as Vescovo called in to re- epaulets, along with a photograph of The bow thruster filled the Arctic si- port his heading and depth. Then Kel- him holding them at the site of the lence with a haunting, mechanical groan. vin Magee, the shop foreman, walked wreck. Coope, who is sixty-seven, had Bongiovanni and her sonar assis- into the control room. come out of retirement to join this ex- tants had mapped almost seven hun- “Try it, Kelvin, you bastard!” Lahey pedition—his last. dred thousand square kilometres of the said. “It’s from Svalbard. It’s local. It’s a ocean floor, an area about the size of fucking Norwegian candy.” he Pressure Drop continued north- Texas, most of which had never been “Get it while there’s still some left!” Teast, past Greenland and Iceland, surveyed. Jamieson had carried out a “It’s that ammonium chloride that to a port in Svalbard, an Arctic archi- hundred and three lander deployments, really makes it—and that pork gelatine,” pelago about six hundred miles north in every major hadal ecosystem. The Buckle said. of Norway. Huge glaciers fill the inlets, landers had travelled a combined dis- “Pork genitals?” and where they have melted they have tance of almost eight hundred miles, McCallum stood quietly in the corner, left behind flattop mountains and slopes, vertically, and captured footage of smiling. “Look at these fucking misfits,” crushed and planed by the weight of around forty new species. Once, as we he said. “They just changed the world.” 

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 45 PROFILES THE FEARLESS PIANIST After streaming performances from his Berlin apartment, Igor Levit is asking what a concert can be.

By Alex Ross

n March 10th, the German pi- anything, I know shit about streaming, pean Union. It was no surprise that Lev- anist Igor Levit played Bee- I don’t even know if Twitter allows thirty it’s inaugural live stream attracted at- O thoven’s Third and Fifth Piano minutes of streaming, I have no cam- tention, though I was taken aback when Concertos at the Elbphilharmonie, the era stand. I had a total panic. I was send- the number of viewers climbed into the hulking concert complex in Hamburg. ing messages to friends: ‘Do you know tens of thousands. It was his thirty-third birthday and, it how streaming works?’ And this tweet In the following weeks, as Levit kept turned out, his last public concert for was already out there. It was a catastro- Webcasting each night, a convivial on- many weeks. The next day, Angela phe. I ran to the last electronics store line community formed around him on Merkel, the German Chancellor, deliv- that was still open, and got some stuff Twitter and its Periscope app—a self- ered a dire warning about the scope of for twenty-four euros.” described “Igor Familie.” Periscope in- the looming coronavirus pandemic, and I saw Levit’s tweet and tuned in. The cludes a chat-room sidebar, with hearts performance spaces began closing across setting was familiar, because I had met floating up the screen like bubbles. Most the country. At the time, Levit had a with him there the previous summer. comments were in German, but there full schedule before him. He had re- He lives in a spacious, airy, sparely dec- were salutations from Nairobi, Tokyo, cently issued a boxed-set recording of orated apartment in the Mitte neigh- and Montevideo. Some viewers made Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas, borhood of Berlin, with plate-glass win- musicological points—“New harmonic and was playing Beethoven cycles in dows overlooking a park. His instrument structures become transparent,” one per- several European cities. He was also is a 1923 Steinway B that once belonged son wrote when Levit tackled Brahms’s preparing to tackle an arcane colossus to the great Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer. arrangement of the Bach Chaconne in of the piano literature—the seventy- At 7 p.m., Levit pressed the Record but- D Minor—while others discussed the minute Piano Concerto by the early- ton on his smartphone and trotted in pianist’s facial hair, T-shirts, and foot- twentieth-century composer-virtuoso front of his newly acquired home-Web- wear. “Hard rock fan from Düsseldorf Ferruccio Busoni, a hero of his. casting equipment, dressed casually in is thrilled,” one commenter said. Levit “That next day, the eleventh, was a black-and-gray pullover shirt and black delivered short talks, usually focussed kind of a shock day,” Levit told me re- pants. He gave a brief introduction, in on the music at hand. He never spoke cently, in a video call from his apart- German and English: “It’s a sad time, at the end, though emotion sometimes ment, in Berlin. “On the twelfth, I was it’s a weird time, but acting is better than surfaced. Once, halfway through shopping in a grocery store, and I had doing nothing. Let’s bring the house Schubert’s sublime Sonata in B-flat, he this thought: What if I live-streamed a concert into the twenty-first century.” buried his head in his hands, hiding gig?” He peered into his phone with a He then tore into Beethoven’s “Wald- tears; he did the same after Morton grin. He is a trim young man with sharp stein” Sonata, in a fashion typical of Feldman’s solitary, unearthly “Palais features, a high Mahlerian hairline, and him—precipitate, purposeful, intricately de Mari.” a thin growth of beard. He was wear- nuanced. It was an imposing structure Levit’s Hauskonzerte drew notice in ing a T-shirt that read “Love Music aglow with feeling. high places. For the twenty-second night Hate Racism.” He speaks rapidly and Other pianists of Levit’s generation of the series, he was invited to perform incisively, his English nearly as good as may have achieved wider mass-market in the concert room at Schloss Bellevue, his German. Sometimes he seems more fame—Lang Lang and Yuja Wang come the German Presidential residence. mature than his years, poised and orac- first to mind—but none have compa- Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who holds ular; at others, he comes across as an rable stature as a cultural or even a po- the largely ceremonial office of Presi- antic, restless member of his digital- litical figure. In German-speaking coun- dent, provided an introduction, prais- native generation. tries, Levit is a familiar face not only to ing Levit not just for giving comfort Levit went on, “When I got home, classical-music fans but also to a broader but also for highlighting the fact that I did what I usually do, which is to throw population that shares his leftist, inter- “many artists are in crisis—no perfor- a thought into the public arena with- nationalist world view. He has appeared mance opportunities, no concerts, no out thinking about any consequences. on mainstream German TV shows; par- productions—and, because they are in I went on Twitter and said, ‘O.K., I’m ticipated in political panel discussions; crisis, they need our support.” Levit, going to play for you guys tonight at and attended the annual gathering of this time wearing a black jacket and my place.’ After having tweeted that, I the Green Party, playing Beethoven’s dress shoes, again played the “Wald- realized, Hang on—I’ve never streamed “Ode to Joy,” the anthem of the Euro- stein”—the only time in the series that

46 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 361667513

Concert pianists are often seen as unworldly souls who lose themselves in palaces of sound. Levit is emphatically not a loner.

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA VENTURA THEEW N YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 47 he repeated a piece. When I asked Stein­ me alive. . . . I don’t care if it’s wrong or activities tends to overlook the fact that meier’s office for a comment about Levit, right, whatever B.S. that means, just as music is always churning through his I received a statement extolling the pi­ long as I can actually press down the mind, even when he seems preoccupied anist’s “acute sense of the power of pub­ black and white keys. I’ve never, never with other matters. As I met with him lic life, community and solidarity.” At been freer than now. Never. And I am during the past year, I was most struck a recent press conference, Steffen Sei­ in tears half the day. Very, very dark. by his staggering command of centuries bert, the chief spokesperson for the Mer­ And yet. The existential must of music­ of repertory, whether or not a work is kel government, made mention of “a making really becomes bigger and big­ written for his instrument. Rehearsing pianist’s famous house concerts”—un­ ger by the minute.” Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” before a re­ doubtedly meaning Levit, even if the Concert pianists are often stereo­ cital, he noticed that one passage resem­ name went unsaid. typed as remote souls, apt to lose them­ bled a phrase in Wagner’s “Götterdäm­ On May 4th, Levit streamed his selves in the palaces of sound they merung,” and began playing the opera fifty­second concert—his last, for the summon at the keyboard. Levit is em­ from memory. Another time, he tried time being. “I need to take a break and phatically not a loner. He has a global out a piano piece by the nineteenth­cen­ recalibrate,” he told me. “I mean, I network of friends, and transmits count­ tury French maverick Charles­ Valentin haven’t read a book in four weeks.” This less e­mails, texts, emojis, and GIFs every Alkan, then segued into a sonorous ap­ phase of his career had been disorient­ day. He is a cultural omnivore who is proximation of the Adagio of Bruckner’s ing. He had gained even greater visi­ as likely to quote from Kendrick Lamar Sixth Symphony. He is just as prone to bility, yet he was isolated in his apart­ or “Simpsons” episodes as from Kafka break into Henry Mancini, Nina Si­ ment, fearful of what an extended or James Baldwin. Outfitted in a hoodie, mone, or the Fred Hersch arrangement shutdown will mean for cultural life. a T­shirt, and jeans, he blends in easily of Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes.” He is (He has had several girlfriends, but is with other guys on the streets of Ber­ a completely musical animal, albeit an currently unattached.) Levit went on, lin. His moderately hip image arouses alert and worldly one. “I mean, one journalist said that I was suspicion in conservative corners of the creating ‘fireplace moments for the na­ classical­music world. “Just shut up and evit was born in Nizhny Novgorod, tion.’ For God’s sake! All I wanted to play,” he has heard people say, in several LRussia, in 1987, and moved to Ger­ do was to share something, do some­ languages. From a more radical perch, many with his family when he was eight. thing, instead of just sitting in my apart­ the Berlin­based online magazine VAN His father, Simon, is a construction en­ ment and watching everything crum­ has suggested that Levit is excessively gineer; his mother, Elena, is a pianist ble.” One day, Levit sent me a text saying, self­dramatizing: “In the race for atten­ and a pedagogue, specializing in chil­ “Maybe for the first time do I under­ tion, Levit is a bit like Usain Bolt: he dren’s musical education. The family is stand what it means to speak of music always seems effortlessly ahead.” Jewish, though not particularly religious. as something life­keeping. It really keeps The fixation on Levit’s extramusical “My parents simply wanted a better life—a better education for my sister and for myself, a better perspective for themselves,” Levit told me. They set­ tled in Hannover, the capital of the state of Lower Saxony. He has few memories of Russia. “My first encounter with Germany and the German language was, in a way, so emo­ tional, so enthusiastic, that everything before that disappeared,” Levit told me. “I said that I was going to learn to speak better German than any of my class­ mates. I speak Russian with my parents. But when I went back to Russia re­ cently—for the first time in seventeen years—it felt very touristy.” Germans love to debate the question “What is German?” In 2017, the scholar Dieter Borchmeyer published a best­sell­ ing thousand­page book with that title, arguing that German culture hangs in perpetual tension between expansively cosmopolitan and strictly nationalist definitions of identity. Levit firmly be­ longs to the cosmopolitan camp. On his Web site, he describes himself as “Cit­ izen. European. Pianist.” Not until his Some of Levit’s teachers discouraged ean military dictatorship. Levit, whose early twenties did he feel his right to his voracious musical appetites, but at commitment to leftist politics was deep­ Germanness questioned. At an upper­ the Hochschule he was fortunate to re­ ening, found Rzewski’s e­mail address crust dinner following a concert, he was ceive instruction from the Finnish pia­ on the Internet and wrote him a fan shocked when a middle­aged lawyer nist Matti Raekallio, who let him roam letter. “And then, because I was sixteen, said to him, “You must never forget that free. Raekallio, who now teaches at Juil­ or whatever, I asked him if he would although you grew up in Germany and liard, told me that having Levit as a write a piece for me.” To Levit’s sur­ live in Germany, you belong to a pop­ student was like winning the lottery: prise, Rzewski responded that he would ulation group that was intended not to “The so­called lessons with him were write something, for money. After per­ live here anymore.” Levit was being told, not really lessons, since there was noth­ suading a local new­music group to pay in shockingly racist terms, that some ing one could teach him for the commission, Levit people would always see him as an in­ about piano playing. In­ became the dedicatee of terloper. He knew then that the old stead, they were conversa­ the second book of Rzew­ ghosts of German hyper­nationalism tions—about music, about ski’s “Nanosonatas”—mu­ and anti­Semitism could rise again, as life, about everything. I had sic of nervous brilliance indeed they have. never encountered such a that matched the pianist’s Levit began playing piano at the age natural curiosity, in which emerging personality. of three, under his mother’s tutelage, he had devoured everything An unlikely friendship and made his début a year later, with and then wanted to know developed between the ac­ Beethoven’s “Ecossaise in G.” By his more.” Levit has a formi­ complished young German early teens, he was playing the Grieg dable technique, although and the legendarily con­ Piano Concerto and other entry­level maintaining it is not effort­ trarian older American, virtuoso fare. More atypically, he made less. “Octaves are not really my friends,” who has long railed against the main­ a piano transcription of Beethoven’s he told me after a performance of the stream classical­music business. In 2015, “Missa Solemnis.” He did not, however, Brahms Second Concerto in Vienna, Levit played “The People United” at become a touring prodigy after the fash­ shaking his hands at his sides. He as­ Wigmore Hall, the venerable London ion of Lang Lang, or, in a previous gen­ serts himself through his grasp of mu­ chamber­music venue, where Beetho­ eration, Evgeny Kissin. After earning sical architecture, his differentiation of ven string quartets and Schubert piano second prize at the Arthur Rubinstein moods, his urgency of expression. These sonatas are the more usual fare. Rzew­ International Piano Master Competi­ qualities make him a superlative inter­ ski was in the audience, and afterward tion in Tel Aviv, in 2005, he returned to preter of Beethoven, whose power is al­ he went onstage to congratulate Levit. his studies at the Hochschule für Musik ways cumulative in effect. “He leaned in to hug me and rasped in und Theater, in Hannover. His mother Raekallio also led Levit toward the my ear, ‘You’re a real motherfucker,’ ” has long taught there; he recently joined grand eccentrics in the piano firmament: Levit recalled. “I wasn’t sure how to take the faculty, which means that he can the likes of Alkan, Busoni, Kaikhosru that at first. Eventually, I decided that visit his family more often. Sorabji, and Ronald Stevenson. The last it was the single greatest compliment This relatively slow start allowed Levit two are twentieth­century British cult I’ve ever received.” to develop away from the spotlight, try­ figures who specialized in scores of de­ ing out repertory without facing out­ lirious complexity. As Levit explored evit introduced himself to the in­ sized expectations. He also underwent this esoteric terrain, he developed an in­ Lternational public in an ostensibly a socialization process that many prod­ tense regard for the man who perhaps conventional manner, with a recording igies forgo. He was, in some ways, a nor­ knows it better than anyone alive—the of Beethoven. The Sony Classical label mal high schooler, and, along with many august Canadian pianist Marc­André signed him in 2012, after he had at­ of his German peers, developed a taste Hamelin. “When I was a student, my tracted notice as a member of the BBC’s for American hip­hop. “I went around single greatest hero was Marc,” Levit young­artist program. His first Sony with my Walkman and pretty much says. “Everything he recorded I had to project was nonetheless bold in concept, knew every line of Eminem,” he said. learn. Now we are good friends, and even brazen: where other début pianists “Black Star was also very big for me. My sometimes play together.” might have stuck to the “Moonlight,” first real experience of under­the­skin When Levit was sixteen, he came the “Appassionata,” or the “Waldstein,” politicization was this fearless, border­ across Hamelin’s recording of “The Peo­ Levit offered a two­disk set of Beetho­ less storytelling about yourself.” A little ple United Will Never Be Defeated!,” ven’s final five piano sonatas, including later, he fell in love with the music of an hour­long work from 1975 by the the titanic “Hammerklavier.” Thelonious Monk. “For the longest time, radical­minded American composer To some, the gesture smacked of ar­ I wanted to be Monk, which was, of Frederic Rzewski. By turns convulsively rogance. He told me, “I know there is course, absurd, but it had a big, big in­ modernistic and brashly neo­Roman­ this attitude that you are supposed to fluence on how I play the piano. That tic, it consists of thirty­six variations on wait until you are sixty­five and have naked sound—no, not naked, but ex­ Sergio Ortega’s “El Pueblo Unido Jamás seen life and the world and suffering posed, skeleton­like, oppositional. That Será Vencido,” which became famous before you approach late Beethoven. is also Beethoven, for me.” as a song of protest against the Chil­ But I know thirteen­year­olds who

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 49 know a level of suffering that these full- OUR D AYS of-themselves, elegant mid-sixties art- ists have absolutely no fucking idea 1 about. Give me a break! Anyway, that’s where I started, with late Beethoven. In Chuck’s dream, a strange woman Matti really helped give me that atti- is smoking in our kitchen. tude. He would say, ‘Just go do it. Just be a pianist. I will help you not to be She’s doing her best, she says, an idiot.’ ” exhaling into the oven. When that début recording arrived in the mail, I rolled my eyes, but skep- Then three military men ticism soon gave way to wonder. The burst in without knocking. opening gestures of Opus 111, in C Minor, were almost frightening in their inten- They say they’ve come sity; the inward-searching lyricism of to establish order, the second movement suggested a sage elder who could remember the world but their uniforms are strange. before the wars. When Levit traversed Chuck suspects they’re really salesmen. the entire cycle for Sony, in sessions ex- tending from 2017 to 2019, he consid- Their leader stands too close ered rerecording the late sonatas, but de- as he begins his pitch— cided that his earlier attempts held up. A sleight of hand happens as you make close enough to spread a virus. your way through the set: Beethoven gets older while Levit gets younger. 2 In 2014, Levit made his North Amer- ican début with an all-Beethoven pro- I take a photo of a house gram at the Park Avenue Armory. painted half blue, half pink. Surpassing even the assurance of his recordings, he proved to be no fluke of Why am I drawn the studio. At the same time, I thought to things that make no sense? that his playing tended toward extremes. Between the heaven-storming up- Or is their sense excessive? tempo passages and the cosmic can- tilenas, I yearned for a little more wit You need to decontextualize and whimsy. The good news of the Sony an object set is that it has these qualities in pro- in order to see it, fusion, especially in the less celebrated corners of the canon. In the Andante I once said. of Opus 14, No. 2—a sequence of sub- tly playful variations on a somewhat Last sloth drab theme—Levit teases out under- in a pocket of rain forest; stated comedy in unexpected variations of dynamics, with a perfectly executed exquisite scent fortissimo punch line. In the first move- of hyacinth ment of Opus 78, he finds an easy-flow- ing, Schubertian songfulness in the main wafted theme, which then gives way to mer- on the wingless breeze. curial shifts in mood. Having established himself as an au- —Rae Armantrout thoritative Beethovenian, Levit looked both backward and forward. In 2014, he released a recording of the Bach Parti- mović, whom Levit met through the mosphere that Abramović brought in tas; the following year, he issued a three- impresario Alex Poots, who was in her wake. Although he is generally disk set of three gigantic variation se- charge of the Park Avenue Armory at indifferent to celebrity names of the quences: Bach’s Goldbergs, Beethoven’s the time. Levit found himself playing American type—when I mentioned Diabellis, and Rzewski’s “People United.” the Goldbergs while drifting across the David Geffen Hall, he asked, “There is That effort led to a collaboration with vast Armory space on a rotating plat- a Mr. Geffen?”—he was dazzled when the performance artist Marina Abra- form. He enjoyed the carnivalesque at- Abramović showed up backstage with

50 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 Monica Lewinsky. He told me, his eyes Lucerne, where he was playing a Bee- the Kammerphilharmonie’s longtime still wide in amazement, that Lewinsky thoven recital. During a late-night ride music director, stepped to the podium was “gorgeous, smart, clever, focussed— from the airport, he asked me if I knew and looked around. “Where is Igor?” he the nicest human being.” Rzewski’s 1991 live recording of the asked. He shrugged, smiled, and gave Perhaps the most remarkable of Lev- “Hammerklavier.” I didn’t, and within the downbeat for the grandly ominous it’s recordings is a two-disk album ti- seconds he had summoned up a video orchestral introduction of Brahms’s Con- tled “Life,” which came out in 2018. It of the performance on his iPad. “You certo in D Minor: a fortissimo D in the was a memorial to the German artist will notice that it says one hour, six min- horns, double-basses, violas, and tim- Hannes Malte Mahler, who died in a utes, fifty-two seconds,” he said. “Usu- pani. I sent a text to Levit: “Your con- bicycle accident in 2016. The two men ally, the ‘Hammerklavier’ takes around certo is starting.” After a minute or two, had met in 2011 and immediately be- forty-five minutes. So, why is this? Does he appeared through the side door and came close friends. “Hannes came from he play it very slowly? No! He plays bounded toward the piano, waving his a world very different from mine, this several long cadenzas.” Levit slid his arms in a birdlike motion, as if riding wild world of contemporary art,” Levit finger along the timing bar until he the waves of the music. He arrived on told me. “Accidentally or not, he always found a representative stretch—a key- the bench twenty or so seconds before gave me the feeling that I am allowed board-spanning, avant-Romantic fan- the piano’s stealthy, pensive entrance. to be who I am, without explaining or tasia on the sonata’s thunderous open- The orchestra, apparently accustomed apologizing. I can just be.” Mahler’s ing motif. to such behavior, took no notice. death left Levit in a state of prolonged Levit shook his head in awe as light After the rehearsal, in Levit’s dress- shock. “Aside from the loss, I had this from the computer danced against the ing room, he told me what had been sense that I had to go on even more lenses of his glasses. “Now, this is some- going on. A few weeks earlier, he had with that process of taking away layers, one who has total freedom,” he said. appeared on a political talk show hosted discarding fears, letting myself be who “And it’s probably a very good approx- by the German journalist Maybrit Ill- I am. I really turned into a different per- imation of what Beethoven himself ner, and participated in a discussion of son. No more bullshit.” A painting of sounded like, because everyone said that hate speech. The panel also included Mahler’s, showing a gray village street his improvisations were far crazier than Ralf Schuler, an editor from the right- with a gladiolus suspended above it, whatever he wrote down. But, you know, wing tabloid Bild. Schuler, attempting hangs next to Levit’s piano. only Frederic gets to do that. I have no to show that hate could inflame the left In honor of his friend, Levit fash- idea how I’d go about doing such a thing. as well as the right, brought up a tweet ioned for his disk a centuries-spanning Improvisation is a systematic art you that the pianist had posted in 2015, at montage of styles, eras, and genres: ad- must study for a long time.” the time of the refugee crisis in Ger- aptations of Bach by Brahms and Bu- He fell silent for a moment. “Oh, and many. Levit had written that mem- soni, Liszt’s elaborations on Wagner let me show you this,” he said, brows- bers of the right-wing Alternative für and Meyerbeer, a Rzewski work called ing on his iPad again. “Here!” It was a Deutschland Party, who had waged hate “A Mensch,” Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece.” scene from “The Simpsons,” in which campaigns against the refugees, had “for- Most of these scores involve one com- Homer says, “I have three kids and no feited their humanity”—their Mensch- poser responding to another—a suit- money. Why can’t I have no kids and sein. Wasn’t the tweet itself dehuman- able memorial for a friendship between three money?” izing? Levit responded by saying that artists. This idiosyncratic project made I looked puzzled, and he laughed. he had been brought up to understand Levit even more of an outlier among “O.K., yes, that has nothing do with the the word Mensch in its Yiddish sense: pianists of his generation—a swerve ‘Hammerklavier.’ I just think it’s funny. “A Mensch is a person of honor.” On from the conventional path of carefully ‘Three money’!” that basis, he remained secure in his be- curated concert tours, recordings, and lief that the extremists lacked human- media appearances. Many an agent hen I next saw Levit, in early De- ity, and he took nothing back. would have discouraged such an under- Wcember, his mood had changed. Schuler’s remarks brought Levit to taking, but Kristin Schuster, who has He was in Hamburg, at the outset of a the attention of people on the far right, managed Levit’s career since 2013, sup- brief tour with the Deutsche Kammer- who began attacking him publicly and ported him, as did Sony Classical. “They philharmonie Bremen, playing Brahms’s privately. He was called Judensau, a Jew- were fantastic,” he says. “They knew two piano concertos on separate nights. ish pig, and within a couple of weeks there was this grizzly-bear-like energy His manner was uncharacteristically he had received three death threats— in me, and it had to run its course.” furtive. “Things are strange,” he told me, two on e-mail, one on Instagram. The Rebellious gestures notwithstanding, backstage at the Elbphilharmonie, where messages, which Levit shared with the Levit remains a disciplined artist. He the concert was taking place. “These last police, mentioned two forthcoming is not the kind of interpreter who draws couple of weeks, they have been very events on his schedule: a concert in early attention to himself with outlandish strange.” I waited expectantly. “Very, very December and one in January. The first gestures. Sometimes he wonders whether strange. We will discuss later.” of these dates was in Wiesbaden—the he could do something more radical. Levit went into his dressing room to night after the concert I was about to Last summer, I joined him as he trav- take a phone call while the orchestra see at the Elbphilharmonie. But some elled from Berlin to Zurich and on to gathered onstage to rehearse. Paavo Järvi, ambiguous wording in the threat made

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 51 it seem possible that tonight could be I afraid?” he wrote. “Yes, but not for my- once a transcendent example of the Ro- the target. self.” He linked his experiences to more mantic concerto and a diabolically en- Levit paced his dressing room and serious instances of physical and verbal tertaining satire of the genre—a self- made himself an espresso. “To hell with violence in Germany: a 2017 knife at- conscious exhibition of excess. Levit these people,” he said. “It doesn’t pro- tack on Andreas Hollstein, the mayor played it once when he was eighteen, duce fear, it produces a certain kind of of Altena; the 2019 assassination of the with the Göttingen Symphony. For years, anger, like, a real anger. And it produces Hessian politician Walter Lübcke, who he had been plotting his way back to it, a very energizing feeling of ‘O.K., you supported Merkel’s open-door policy and, with the assistance of the English- try me, you will get more.’ I don’t want toward refugees; the 2019 resignation of Italian conductor Antonio Pappano, had to overprize myself: other people, espe- Martina Angermann, the mayor of Arns- finally conquered the logistical obsta- cially women, receive this kind of thing dorf, in the wake of incessant online ha- cles. The first performance had been on a daily basis. But it does make me rassment. This trend of violence could slated for April 2nd, in Rome, with the very intensely consider who I want to be connected to the spread of hate speech Orchestra and Chorus of the Academy be—what kind of, let’s say, citoyen I want online: “First the speech, then the deed.” of Santa Cecilia. It was cancelled as to be. I am a musician, but I am who I Levit defended his stance as an en- coronavirus deaths in Italy escalated into am. I think about becoming not only gaged musician—his refusal to “shut up the thousands. louder but deepening my actions. I don’t and play.” Music has astonishing pow- I had planned to attend the Rome know yet what that would be. It’s a very ers of communication, he wrote, but it performance; there is no concerto in or interesting time.” Levit told me that he cannot name things: “To be free re- outside the repertory that I love more. has no interest in entering politics, al- quires employing your own senses. To During a video call in April, I asked though it is obvious that the field fas- hear, to see, to feel, to smell. Music al- Levit to talk about the piece, mainly be- cinates him. lows us to feel this kind of freedom. cause I wanted to hear it. After placing I went to my seat in the hall while But music is not a substitute, it cannot a pair of aubergines in the oven, he Levit put on his concert dress. Thirty be a substitute. Not for truth, not for propped his phone on the piano and minutes later, he was launching into politics, not for human understanding launched into the second movement, the Brahms. I felt an unease I had never and sympathy. It cannot be a substitute “Pezzo giocoso.” The piano begins with experienced before in a concert hall. for calling racism racism. It cannot be rapid-fire runs and scalar patterns that Looking around, I wondered whether a substitute for calling misogyny mi- are all the more fiendishly difficult for an attack was actually possible, and sogyny. It can never be a substitute for being muted in dynamics and delicate whether Levit’s performance had ac- being a wakeful, critical, loving, living, in articulation. The orchestra bursts in quired some extra edge of anger and and active citizen.” with a galumphing passage marked defiance. It was difficult to say, since Smoldering beneath this essay was “giovanescamente”—“youthfully.” Levit the first movement of the D-Minor an undiminished fury over the odious mimed it by chanting the dotted rhythm Concerto is angry and defiant from the remark that had been made to Levit at and waving his fists in the air. “Some start. In the second movement, though, that dinner years ago—the insinuation passages in this movement are difficult dire thoughts receded. The piano part that, as a Jew, he could never overcome to the point of total insanity,” he said, of the Adagio begins with a passage his outsider status. He likes to quote plunging into a finger-entangling run marked “molto dolce espressivo,” or “very James Baldwin: “I love America more of thirds and sixths. “Once you get past sweet and expressive.” It is music of al- than any other country in the world, those, you are in the clear. The piece most vertiginous loveliness and loneli- gets wilder and wilder, but also easier, ness—a lullaby remembered in grief. more pianistic. The ending is bananas.” Levit is never more impressive than He attacked the keyboard again, bob- when he loses himself in such lyric idylls. bing his head like a hard-rock guitar- Afterward, I asked Levit what he ist. Then he broke off and looked down. had felt onstage. He said, “Honestly? “It kills me not to be playing it,” he said. Once the music started, I did not think “Six months of work—gone.” He re- about it. For me, the stage becomes the trieved the aubergines from the oven one place of freedom, absolute freedom. and took a bite. A moment later, he was Nobody is bothering me, there are no grinning again. “Oh, I have to show you phone calls, no interruptions. The worst and, exactly for this reason, I insist on this.” He paged through his score, found thing that can happen, the worst thing the right to criticize her perpetually.” a passage in the second movement, and possible, is a wrong note. Also, to hell For Levit, America is Germany. held it up to the phone. It was a swirl with those people.” of scalar runs, next to which the word The police had asked Levit to avoid he main event of Levit’s spring sea- “SEX” had been scrawled, underlined talking about the threats until after the Tson was to have been a string of twice. “That is me at age eighteen. I Hamburg and Wiesbaden concerts. In performances of Busoni’s immense, im- can’t explain it. There is nothing at all late December, he published an essay moderate Piano Concerto, which re- sexy on this page. Maybe it was some on the subject, which appeared in the quires not only a hypervirtuosic pianist other kind of memo to myself.” Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. “ Was but also a male chorus. The work is at Busoni lingers on the edges of the

52 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 repertory but looms large in late-nine- teenth and early-twentieth-century mu- sical history. An Italian who settled in Berlin, an archetype of German cosmo- politanism, Busoni played many roles in the culture of his time: as a composer of multiple styles and selves; as a pianist of mesmerizing powers; as a visionary the- oretician; as a polemicist against reac- tionary trends; and as the guru for a cir- cle of pupils that included Kurt Weill and Edgard Varèse. Matti Raekallio told me, “Busoni showed what the artist can be and should be: composer, performer, artist, citizen. This is something Igor also embodies. Playing the piano is just one way of expressing himself. There is more at stake than just getting the notes right.” That expansive conception of the performer’s role guided Levit’s quaran- tine concert series. Early on, he favored familiar fare, particularly Beethoven, but as the weeks went by he grew more ad- venturous. “My days as the healer of the nation are numbered,” he joked to me in early April. Shortly afterward, he offered a suite of pieces on hard-left themes: Paul Dessau’s “Guernica” (1938), •• inspired by Picasso’s anti-Fascist paint- ing of the previous year; Rzewski’s “Which Side Are You On?,” based on thousand people have listened to the prize of three hundred thousand dol- the mine workers’ song made famous Stevenson. Some were there only for a lars that is given to a concert pianist by Pete Seeger; and Cornelius Cardew’s few minutes, I know, but it proves some- once every four years. Levit says, “Those “Thälmann Variations” (1978), named thing.” (One appreciative listener had of us who are on the fortunate end of for Ernst Thälmann, a German Com- posted, “Without this concert my hori- the profession have to be really, really munist leader who was murdered by the zons would be smaller.”) If Levit were careful about what we say, because so Nazis. Another night, he essayed Ron- giving concerts now, he would be play- many people are suffering. Still, I look ald Stevenson’s “Passacaglia on DSCH” ing programs that he had agreed to back every day at the danger of my whole (1967–63), which declares solidarity with in 2717 or 2718. At home, he could choose world dying. Systemically, we are in Communist ideals and has a passage whatever pieces fit his mood an hour grave, grave danger. And I cannot say marked “with a quasi-Gagarinesque before he turned on his camera. That that music matters less, that it is not ‘es- sense of space.” Levit highlighted such sense of urgency was especially strong sential.’ To me, it is absolutely essential. political contexts in his remarks at the in Stevenson’s “Passacaglia,” in a seeth- It is my reason for being.” piano. When he mentioned violence ing account of Busoni’s “Fantasia Con- Amid the agony of waiting, Levit against immigrants in modern Germany, trappuntistica,” and in a two-and-a-half- ponders how he might apply his recent a troll surfaced in the Periscope chat hour-long traversal of Shostakovich’s experiences to normal musical life, if room, and was chased away. Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues. and when such a thing resumes. “When During our Busoni chat, Levit mused Undermining Levit’s newfound free- I started doing these house concerts,” on what his Hauskonzerte might mean dom was a deep dread for the future of he told me, “I realized that every single for his future career. “Stevenson’s ‘Pas- his art. The classical-music world was problem I had ever had with the per- sacaglia’ is second to none,” he told me. already in a fragile economic state be- forming world suddenly disappeared. I “It encompasses the entire world—Af- fore the coronavirus struck. Now, with never really cared about acoustics. I never rican drums, Scottish bagpipes, outer large gatherings forbidden indefinitely, cared that much about the quality of space, everything. But, most of the time, an apocalypse looms. Levit does not the piano. All I wanted to do was play. if I told a concert hall I wanted to play face the immediate crisis that has over- The important point about these con- it there’d be a polite silence. Here at whelmed so many working musicians: certs is not how they sound but the fact home, if I feel like doing it, I do it. And, he is well paid for his concert appear- that they happened. Everything is get- lo and behold, people are interested.” He ances and recordings, and in 2718 he re- ting reduced to the essential thing of checked the archived video. “Twenty-six ceived the Gilmore Artist Award—a being there and playing.” 

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 53 FICTION

54 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM SIMPSON 1. sisted of a green-gray oatmeal surface A teen-ager, grinning, reached down, applied over a variety of acutely an- and touched the knees of R.’s pants. a sculptor, rode a shuttle bus gled abstract forms. They were sized The gesture was obscure, not necessar- to the afterlife. He had no to stand on the floor, at a height of ily unfriendly. In any case, the teen R., baggage. That the destina- three or four feet, to stand as unthreat- mingled into the bodies and was lost. tion was the afterlife was understood, ening, enigmatic bodies in public space. The crowd, loose at the outset, seemed a given. This fact R. couldn’t have ex- The surface was pebbly and matte, nei- to be growing denser. Was this hap- plained. He didn’t have to. None of the ther exactly fleshlike nor vegetal. It was pening only in the side room he’d en- others on the bus—it was loosely approachable, natural in affect, though tered? Perhaps it had grown crowded packed, perhaps a third of the seats actually consisting of polymers and with those like R., who’d felt curious full—challenged R.’s certainty. They resin. The shapes were derived from to see what it held. It appeared as knew as well. elements of functional objects—com- though at the far end of the side room The facility was large. At a glance, puter stands, electrical outlets, dish it opened to another enormous indoor all he had time for, R. failed to see its racks, etc.—displaced from their con- space, one perhaps as without bound- limits. Wide glass doors slid open, and text and enlarged, so as to become un- ary as the one that R. had just left. Yet R. and his fellow-passengers moved in- recognizable. Sculpture was every- the density of bodies in the current side as if swept, yet willingly. Once they where; it only took his eye to know it, room made it unappealing to attempt were within, the whole matter of the and a few gestures to render it and coat to cross. So R. turned back toward the bus seemed irretrievably distant. (Had it in the green-gray oatmeal concoc- large room from which he’d come, seek- a movie been playing on an overhead tion. His eye was good. His work sold ing free space. screen? Had R. slept? What caused him in bunches. Though things had grown generally to pay so little notice to the scene out- In this place, as anywhere, R.’s eye more crowded, it was looser there, yes. side the windows, the journey that had scouted for uncommonly funky or He felt a little animation at this dis- led him here, to the afterlife?) In fact, graceful design features—bannisters or covery, and a thrill—for the first time? as R. milled about, he soon lost sight handles, sconces or vents, junctures Again?—at the extent of this space, and of the doors by which he’d entered. where piping met ceiling or floor. He all the possible encounters contained The central room, if it could be called indexed these wherever he went, and within it. The smaller room, he saw a room, was almost unimaginably vast. turned the best he found into new sculp- now, had been a mistake, a waste of Atrium? That was a word R. knew. This tures. Here, there were none. time. He resumed energetically mill- wasn’t an atrium, nor was it a hangar. ing. The point was to relish the free- The ceiling, though high, wasn’t so high 3. dom here, to refuse constraint. And as that, or arched. Instead, it was a flat, among these numbers R. felt certain bland grid, translucent panels conceal- R. began to wonder whether he’d find he’d find, if not actual acquaintances, ing the source of light. anyone he knew. Even as he regis- then those like himself—his tribe, his Despite the size, R. was almost im- tered the thought, he understood that type, his people. mediately aware of the presence of side this was a preoccupation among many “I hear—” rooms. Continuing to be swept by the of those roaming the floor. In fact, “Monsters are us—” general imperative of motion that had he saw now that it was this impera- “How long does this go on?” guided their entry, he and the others tive that dictated the general move- “Apropos of nothing—” from the bus—which, he’d begun to ment, the characteristic circular mill- “Everything happens at parties.” feel certain, was only the most recent— ing. All present had seized on it by “Does remembering make you sad?” dispersed and explored. There was room instinct, the urge to sort through the “I said to her, if the future of sex enough. R. turned a corner into one of faces of others, in search of recogni- is bald men with ponytails, I want no the side areas, one relatively unoccu- tion. R. was party to this. More bod- part of it.” pied. Windowless and featureless, in ies had moved into the side room, “—songs sung by ghosts—” other situations it would have been a perhaps feeling a kind of reverse claus- “They quit stocking the minibar—” large room. It was small only in con- trophobia, a terror of the vastness of “Tell me about the time someone trast to the larger area at R.’s back. There the main space. gave you money for something crazy.” were at the start only three or four oth- He grasped instantly that there was “What happens to your shit when ers here, others who, like R., kept mov- no reason to deny strangers acknowl- you’re gone?” ing, circulating across the endless floor, edgment. Or more than acknowledg- “—vicarious holiday weekend—” in some cases exchanging words. There ment—brief, friendly greeting. Yet “I need a date.” seemed to be no prohibition on speech. the hurly-burly militated against “—perfectly good empty apartment doing more. One was driven. There in Bed-Stuy—” 2. might always be a person one knew “Funny? Or stupid? Or in bad taste?” from before, if one only kept looking. The moment R. attuned to speech, R.’s work, his efforts for the past de- Under such circumstances, even the it rose and swirled around him. The cade or more (the work his gallerist briefest acquaintance would signify fragments jostled his ears like the bod- had advertised as his “signature”), con- enormously. ies jostling in this space. If he could

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 55 Such thoughts only confused him. What he found sad was the drab common de- nominator, the franchise film. R. would have liked to discuss something more exalted with the distinguished-looking man. Real cinema, like Welles Orth- man’s “The Munificent Unpersons,” say. Or the choreography of Katrina Rausch. That unforgettable long-ago evening at the Boerum Arts Museum, before Trina Mausch had died. But now this all seemed wrong, the signifiers jumbled, and receding into irrelevancy. Knowing the plot of “Revengers: Spendblame” might be the only social capital broad enough to signify here. Even that might be laughably parochial. Yet R. found himself wishing not to disappoint. “Come, there must be someone.” He offered a hand, drew the man to his feet, back into the game. “Someone must know.” The density of bodies had increased even since R. knelt. Now the obsta- cle to communication was less the ra- pidity with which others moved than the cumbersome nearness of those to whom one spoke. Still, R. worked on the man’s behalf. “Have you—did you happen to see—” R. found that he arrested no one’s attention whatsoever. He tried leading instead with the hook, calling to the “You’re wrong, Ted, this is absolutely the right time ceiling, rather than to anyone in par- to organize three decades of photos.” ticular, “ ‘Avoiders: Shamegame’—any- one know how it turns out?” No reply came, only the rich incom- •• prehensible babble and murmur of other voices, other priorities. When R. turned have written the words down they’d all!” the man said. “Not unless you saw fully around he saw that he’d lost the make epic mediocre poetry, or per- the sequel.” bearded man in the movement of bod- haps lyrics for a post-punk band. Here, “The sequel?” ies. It wasn’t important, after all. He’d now, on the floor, was a man who ap- “ ‘Avengers: Endgame’!” wished only to help, but it was a thing peared to be doing just that, writing that couldn’t be helped. on a scroll-like piece of paper, but 4. A middle-aged woman in a sari ad- when R. knelt beside him he saw that dressed him. In indirect reply to his the page was blank, and what he’d R. understood, barely. The fathomless query? He wasn’t certain. taken for a scribbling pen was only a movie, its fathomless sequel, panoplies “I’m sorry?” he said, cupping his hand moving finger. The man had a beard of superhuman characters dying and to his ear. “Could you ... I missed—” and glasses—he at least resembled being reborn. A passion for those who She smiled, seeming to relish the a poet. Having gained the man’s cared. R. didn’t, or hadn’t. scrap of continuity, an actual exchange. attention by joining him on the floor, “I’m afraid I missed my chance—” “I was just saying how hard this must forming a little haven in the sea “Of course. You’re like me, you haven’t be for Westerners like yourself.” of motion, R. thought to salvage the a clue! I need someone much younger.” “Oh,” R. said. “Yes. Thank you. I encounter. Did the man really mean younger? mean—” “It doesn’t add up to very much, Perhaps, R. thought, he only meant She was gone before he could ask does it?” R. said, with a shrug and someone who’d arrived at this place her to define her terms: what was “this,” a smile. more recently than him. Or had they really? Then again, didn’t R. know what “It doesn’t add up to anything at all arrived here at once? R. couldn’t know. it was? Had his certainty wavered? Yet

56 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 what, precisely, had the woman in the He found himself jostled upward, taken tated that they could have no idea how sari assumed about him? R. was dis- off his feet for an instant. His view of easy it had once been to circulate. tracted from his quibbles by a sudden the plain of milling heads was instruc- At this thought, R. faintly recalled awareness, as if a suppressed frequency tive: the watery trenches were inter- someone, long ago, trying to explain in his range of hearing had been nudged spersed regularly throughout the vast this place to him, the system that pre- open by her suggestion: so many of the concourse. The density of bodies made vailed. Of course, he’d paid no atten- surrounding voices were speaking lan- the gaps unmistakable. Had the floor tion. You don’t care about that kind of guages other than English. He’d been slid open, at some point, to reveal the stuff until you’re forced to, mostly. And filtering. R. felt shame at his own as- pools? Or was it that they’d become why should he have cared to listen then? sumptions, the limits in his own terms noticeable only now? It wouldn’t have done any good. No, be of inquiry. R. was pushed up against a structure where you are. Be there when you get Ahead, in the great stream of bod- that protruded quite unexpectedly into there. And now he was. ies, R. now spotted a kind of island, an his path. Nothing so large as the trenches, area left vacant. He inferred it, as one it had been hidden in bodies until the 7. moving through a landscape might infer last second. A kind of bench or table, it the presence of a distant lake or beach stood at elbow height. No—a minibar, So it came at last, the undistinguished from a break in the tree line. What a thing he’d heard mentioned earlier. thing. R. was certain he’d been warned. formed this airspace? Why should there Several bodies clung to it, like a raft. The teeming reached its limit, and R. be some zone that others here avoided? Here, finally, a thing one might au- found himself toppled with a mass of R. felt compelled toward it. He longed dition as a source for sculpture. Some others down a smooth bank, into one for the elbow room. It really had grown portion of this bar or pedestal might of the trenches. The only space that re- impossible to move without making give formal joy—to R., at least—if he mained. R. had had no idea how near contact with those edging him on every envisioned it isolated from the whole to one he’d been, the instant before. It side, despite how all were invested in configuration and sealed over with his had become impossible to see beyond the imperative of constant motion. distinctive green-gray oatmeal polymer. the heads and shoulders massing so R. moved for the open space. Yet how could he get far enough back tightly, there was no one to blame but— to see it in its entirety? Hopeless. Any- R. managed to arrest this thought. No 5. how, now that he bent to examine its one to blame. It was so obvious. None join to the floor, the object was flagrantly, raised any real protest, despite their The trench was long and wide, the sides remorselessly uninteresting. bodies struggling pointlessly, a residue banked and smooth. It sloped to water, He should quit thinking this way. of instinct. No, the roar of voices seemed perhaps to a depth of four feet at the mainly to emanate from above, from bottom, no more. A handful of people 6. those just discovering their nearness to had chosen—or at least R. preferred to the trench, just losing their foothold at think they’d chosen—to slide down. New people had been continuously ar- the rim. Down here, among the fallen, They now cavorted and splashed there, riving, that was the only possible expla- it was strangely quiet. though it was hardly wide enough at the nation. And R. felt he could judge this The bodies close—he’d grown ac- bottom to qualify as a swimming pool. customed to that. R. found it almost There was no guardrail. R. teetered consoling. When the water reached him, briefly at the edge, trying to see. Were though, he felt puzzled by the physics: those at the bottom truly happy, or were could the weight and the mass have they frantic? displaced the shallow pool upward “Can they get out again?” R. asked through the crevices? Or had more water the person beside him just then, who been piped in now? was too near to distinguish exactly. Maybe so. Then again, maybe not “We’d have to help them.” The speak- important to understand. er’s tone was not uncompassionate. “How?” fact from their posture, from their mur- 8. “Form some kind of human ladder,” mured inquiries, the frisson of excite- the person mused, then squeezed off ment in their tone even as they could R. woke again on the bus. He gathered under a hedge of bodies, duckwalking locate barely an inch of floor to claim himself just as they pulled up again, to make an escape. The suggestion was for themselves. You’ll get over it, R. outside the place, the situation he’d so adept, R. saw, though this level of or- wanted to tell them, but didn’t. He sup- easily recognized, even the first time— ganization seemed unlikely. posed he’d become a kind of veteran of curbside entrance, sliding doors, etc.— The waders had the pool to them- this place, in what felt like little more and allowed himself to be swept, with selves, at least, for now. R., untempted, than an hour. (Time was a ridiculous his cohort, into the afterlife.  pushed away. concept.) Hey, you kids, get off my lawn! R. rode into the swirl, which had be- he almost joked, but it was hardly funny. THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST come almost like a human gear system. He felt both sorry for them and irri- Jonathan Lethem reads “The Afterlife.”

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 57 THE CRITICS

BOOKS THE WAGES OF REALISM Making sense of Henry Kissinger.

By Thomas Meaney

n 1952, at the age of twenty-eight, Confluence by Ernst von Salomon, a one of the 2008 Presidential debates, Henry Kissinger did what enter- far-rightist who had hired a getaway John McCain and Barack Obama each I prising graduate students do when driver for the men who assassinated cited Kissinger as supporting their (op- they want to hedge their academic fu- the Weimar Republic’s foreign minis- posite) postures toward Iran. Saman- ture: he started a magazine. He picked ter. “I have now joined you as a cardi- tha Power, the most celebrated critic an imposing name—Confluence—and nal villain in the liberal demonology,” of the U.S.’s failure to halt genocides, enlisted illustrious contributors: Han- Kissinger told a friend afterward, jok- was not above receiving the Henry A. nah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Lillian ing that the piece was being taken as Kissinger Prize from him. Smith, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Rein- “a symptom of my totalitarian and even Kissinger has proved fertile ground hold Niebuhr. The publisher James Nazi sympathies.” for historians and publishers. There are Laughlin, who was a backer of the mag- For more than sixty years, Henry psychoanalytic studies, tell-alls by for- azine, described the young Kissinger Kissinger’s name has been synony- mer girlfriends, compendiums of his as “a thoroughly sincere person (terri- mous with the foreign-policy doctrine quotations, and business books about bly earnest Germanic type) who is try- called “realism.” In his time as national- his dealmaking. Two of the most sig- ing his hardest to do an idealistic job.” security adviser and Secretary of State nificant recent assessments appeared Like his other early production, the to President Richard Nixon, his will- in 2015: the first volume of Niall Fer- Harvard International Seminar, a sum- ingness to speak frankly about the guson’s authorized biography, which mer program that convened partici- U.S.’s pursuit of power in a chaotic appraised Kissinger sympathetically pants from around the world—Kissin- world brought him both acclaim and from the right, and Greg Grandin’s “Kis- ger gamely volunteered to spy on notoriety. Afterward, the case against singer’s Shadow,” which approached attendees for the F.B.I.—the magazine him built, bolstered by a stream of him critically from the left. From op- opened channels for him not only with declassified documents chronicling ac- posing perspectives, they converged in policymakers in Washington but also tions across the globe. Seymour Hersh, questioning the profundity of Kissin- with an older generation of German in “The Price of Power” (1983), por- ger’s realism. In Ferguson’s account, Jewish thinkers whose political expe- trayed Kissinger as an unhinged para- Kissinger enters as a young idealist who rience had been formed in the early noiac; Christopher Hitchens, in “The follows every postwar foreign-policy thirties, when the Weimar Republic Trial of Henry Kissinger” (2001), styled fashion and repeatedly attaches him- was supplanted by the Nazi regime. his attack as a charge sheet for pros- self to the wrong Presidential candi- For Cold War liberals, who saw the ecuting him as a war criminal. dates, until he finally gets lucky with stirrings of fascism in everything from But Kissinger, now approaching his Nixon. Grandin’s Kissinger, despite McCarthyism to the rise of mass cul- ninety-seventh birthday, no longer in- speaking the language of realists—“cred- ture, Weimar was a cautionary tale, spires such widespread loathing. As ibility,” “linkage,” “balance of power”— conferring a certain authority on those former critics crept toward the politi- has a view of reality so cavalier as to be who had survived. Kissinger cultivated cal center and rose to power them- radically relativist. the Weimar intellectuals, but he was selves, passions cooled. Hillary Clin- Barry Gewen’s new book, “The In- not impressed by their prospects for ton, who, as a law student at Yale, evitability of Tragedy” (Norton), be- influence. Although he later invoked vocally opposed Kissinger’s bombing longs to the neither-revile-him-nor- the memory of Nazism to justify all of Cambodia, has described the “astute revere-him school of Kissingerology. manner of power plays, at this stage he observations” he shared with her when “No one has thought more deeply about was building a reputation as an she was Secretary of State, writing in international affairs,” Gewen writes, all-American maverick. He appalled an effusive review of his most recent and adds, “Kissinger’s thinking runs so the émigrés by running an article in book that “Kissinger is a friend.” During counter to what Americans believe or SERGE BLOCH ABOVE:

58 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 Kissinger in 1972. Recent works in the vast literature on him have questioned fundamental assumptions about his outlook.

PHOTOGRAPH BY YOUSUF KARSH THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 59 wish to believe.” Gewen, an editor at For all the imputations of Kissin­ tion created the possibility of individual the New York Times Book Review, traces ger’s Germanness, the indelible expe­ and collective responsibility, whereas Kissinger’s most momentous foreign­ rience of his youth was serving in the for Kissinger moral indeterminacy was policy decisions to his experience as “a 84th Infantry Division as it swept a condition of human freedom. child of Weimar.” Although Gewen is through Europe. “He was more Amer­ aware of the pitfalls of attributing too ican than I have ever seen any Amer­ n 1951, while pursuing graduate stud­ much to a regime that collapsed be­ ican,” a comrade recalled. The work of Iies, Kissinger worked as a consultant fore his subject’s tenth birthday, he is the U.S. occupation, with its opportu­ with the Army’s Operations Research fascinated by the connections between nities for quickly assuming positions Office, where he became familiar with Kissinger and his émigré elders, whose of authority, thrilled him. In 1945, Kis­ the Defense Department’s penchant experiences of liberal democracy made singer participated in the liberation of for psychological warfare. To Kissin­ them fear democracy’s capacity to un­ the Ahlem concentration camp, out­ ger’s peers at Harvard, tailoring their dermine liberalism. side Hanover, and earned a Bronze Star résumés to the needs of the U.S. se­ for his role in breaking up a Gestapo curity state, his doctoral work—on einz Kissinger was born in 1923 sleeper cell. the Congress of Vienna and its conse­ Hin Fürth, a city in Bavaria. His In 1947, Kissinger enrolled at Har­ quences—seemed whimsically anti­ family fled to New York shortly before vard on the G.I. Bill, intending to quarian. But his published dissertation Kristallnacht, settling in Washington study political science and English invoked thermonuclear weapons in its Heights, a neighborhood with so many literature. He found a second men­ first sentence, and presented readers in German immigrants that it was some­ tor, William Yandell Elliott, a well­ Washington with an unmistakable his­ times known as the Fourth Reich. They connected history professor from the torical analogy: the British and Aus­ spoke English at home, and Heinz be­ Wasp élite, who advised a series of trian Empires’ efforts to contain Na­ came Henry. In his youth, he displayed U.S. Presidents on international affairs. poleon’s France held lessons for dealing few remarkable qualities beyond en­ The young Kissinger was drawn less with the Soviet Union. thusiasm for Italian defensive soccer to the classic exponents of Realpoli­ Kissinger is sometimes called the tactics and a knack for advising his tik, such as Clausewitz and Bismarck, American Metternich, a reference to friends on their amorous exploits. As than to “philosophers of history” like the Austrian statesman who forged the a teen­ager, he worked in a shaving­ Kant and anatomists of civilizational post­Napoleonic peace. But here, brush factory before school, and as­ decay such as Arnold Toynbee and weighing the careers of the men he pired to become an accountant. Oswald Spengler. From these think­ wrote about, he stressed the limitations In 1942, Kissinger was drafted into ers, Kissinger cobbled together his own of Metternich as a model: the U.S. Army. At Camp Claiborne, view of how history operated. It was Lacking in Metternich is the attribute which Louisiana, he befriended Fritz Krae­ not a story of liberal progress, or of has enabled the spirit to transcend an impasse mer, a German­American private fifteen class consciousness, or of cycles of birth, at so many crises of history: the ability to con- years his senior, whom Kissinger would maturity, and decline; rather, it was “a template an abyss, not with the detachment of call “the greatest single influence on my series of meaningless incidents,” fleet­ a scientist, but as a challenge to overcome—or formative years.” A Nietzschean fire­ ingly given shape by the application of perish in the process. ... For men become myths, not by what they know, nor even by brand to the point of human will. As a young in­ what they achieve, but by the tasks they set self­parody—he wore a fantryman, Kissinger had themselves. monocle in his good eye to learned that victors ran­ make his weak eye work sacked history for analo­ Kissinger was taking a swipe at the harder—Kraemer claimed gies to gild their triumphs, bright­eyed social scientists around him, to have spent the late Wei­ while the vanquished sought who thought that the deadly confron­ mar years fighting both out the historical causes of tation of the Cold War could be solved Communists and Nazi their misfortune. with empirical and behavioral models, Brown Shirts in the streets. Ferguson and Grandin rather than with existential swagger. He had doctorates in po­ both seize on one sentence In 1954, Harvard did not offer Kis­ litical science and interna­ in Kissinger’s undergrad­ singer the junior professorship he had tional law, and pursued a uate thesis, titled “The hoped for, but the dean of the faculty, promising career at the League of Na­ Meaning of History”: “The realm of McGeorge Bundy, recommended him tions before fleeing to the U.S., in 1939. freedom and necessity can not be rec­ to the Council on Foreign Relations, He warned Kissinger not to emulate onciled except by an inward experi­ where Kissinger started managing a “cleverling” intellectuals and their blood­ ence.” Such a deeply subjective world study group on nuclear weapons. In less cost­benefit analyses. Believing Kis­ view might seem surprising in Kissin­ Eisenhower­era Washington, a fresh singer to be “musically attuned to his­ ger, but French existentialism had ar­ take on nuclear weapons could make tory,” he told him, “Only if you do not rived at Harvard, and the thesis cited your name. In 1957, Kissinger published ‘calculate’ will you really have the free­ Jean­Paul Sartre. Both Sartre and Kis­ the book that established him as a pub­ dom which distinguishes you from the singer believed that morality was de­ lic figure, “Nuclear Weapons and For­ little people.” termined by action. But for Sartre ac­ eign Policy.” It argued that the Eisen­

60 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 hower Administration needed to steel itself to use tactical nuclear weapons in conventional wars. To reserve nu­ clear weapons only for doomsday sce­ narios left the U.S. unable to respond decisively to incremental Soviet incur­ sions. Kissinger intended his thesis to be provocative, and could not have known that Eisenhower’s Joint Chiefs of Staff had been telling the President much the same thing for years. By the late fifties, Kissinger did not need to choose whether to be an aca­ demic, a public intellectual, a bureau­ crat, or a politician. Each sphere of ac­ tivity enhanced his value in the others. He was a sought­after consultant to Presidential candidates; assuming that America’s Wasp aristocracy offered the likeliest path to power, he spent years tutoring Nelson Rockefeller in foreign policy. In 1961, Bundy, who had become “It says it wants to do a crossword.” President John F. Kennedy’s national­ security adviser, hired Kissinger as a consultant. Kissinger also finally got •• tenure at Harvard. Members of the fac­ ulty objected that his nuclear­weapons lution. Kissinger argued that the U.S. a consultant for the Johnson Adminis­ book was unscholarly, but Bundy needed to better broadcast its ideol­ tration, he was publicly critical of the pushed the appointment through, per­ ogy, and he did so with an evangeli­ Vietnam War, which he believed jeop­ suading the Ford Foundation to put cal fervor that went beyond anything ardized America’s status as a great power, up money for his professorship. Arendt intended. “A capitalist society, and Johnson had him fired. or, what is more interesting to me, a Morgenthau and Kissinger both re­ issinger is hard to place among the free society, is a more revolutionary sisted describing themselves as practi­ Kforeign­policy thinkers of his time. phenomenon than nineteenth­century tioners of Realpolitik—Kissinger re­ Does he belong with America’s most socialism,” Kissinger said, in an inter­ coiled at the term—but Realpolitik has idiosyncratic and brilliant strategists, view with Mike Wallace, in 1958. “I proved a remarkably flexible concept such as George Kennan and Nicholas think we should go on the spiritual ever since it emerged, in nineteenth­ Spykman? Typically, he is categorized offensive.” This was the impulse not century Prussia. Political thinkers grap­ with lesser “defense intellectuals,” such of a critical intellectual but of some­ pling with Prussia’s rise on a continent as Hans Speier and Albert Wohlstet­ one who did not question the Amer­ crowded with competing powers pro­ ter. These men moved fluidly between ican global mission. pounded several strains of strategic lecture halls and RAND Corporation The émigré closer in viewpoint to thought. In an increasingly bourgeois laboratories, where they complained Kissinger was Hans Morgenthau, the society, diplomacy could no longer be about student protesters and gave alarm­ father of modern foreign­policy real­ tailored to the whims and rivalries of ing slide­show presentations about nu­ ism. The two met at Harvard and main­ a royal court; prudent foreign policy clear apocalypse. tained a professional friendship that required marshalling everything at a Gewen prefers to put Kissinger waxed and waned over the decades. state’s disposal—public support, com­ among the more high­minded Wei­ “There was no thinker who meant more merce, law—in order to project the mar émigrés, although the “family re­ to Kissinger than Morgenthau,” Gewen image of power toward its rivals. The semblances” he finds are hard to pin writes. Like Kissinger, Morgenthau had irony is that these doctrines were at down. Arendt never warmed to him, become well known with a popular book root an attempt to codify something but they shared a disappointment about about foreign policy, “Politics Among that their adherents believed Anglo­ the U.S.’s early performance in the Nations” (1948). And he shared Kissin­ American statesmen already did in­ Cold War. In her book “On Revolu­ ger’s belief that foreign policy could not stinctively. “We Germans write fat vol­ tion,” Arendt worried that post­colo­ be left to technocrats with flowcharts umes about Realpolitik but understand nial nations, rather than choosing to and statistics. But, unlike Kissinger, it no better than babies in a nursery,” copy American political institutions, Morgenthau was unwilling to sacrifice the New Republic editor Walter Weyl were following the Communist script his realist principles for political in­ recalled being told by a German pro­ of economic liberation through revo­ fluence. In the mid­sixties, working as fessor during the First World War. “You

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 61 ger, who was there as a consultant, passed information about the negoti- ations to the Nixon campaign, which started to fear that Johnson’s progress toward a settlement would bring the Democrats electoral victory. Nixon’s campaign then used this information in private talks with the South Viet- namese to dissuade them from taking part in the talks. Having won the election promis- ing “an honorable end to the war,” Nixon wanted to appear to be in pur- suit of peace while still inflicting enough damage on North Vietnam to achieve concessions. In March, 1969, he and Kissinger began a secret bomb- ing campaign in Cambodia, which “Someday all this could be yours.” was a staging ground for the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. In four years, the U.S. military dropped more •• bombs on Cambodia than it had in the entire Pacific theatre during the Americans understand it far too well contemporary the political theorist Second World War. The campaign to talk about it.” Sheldon Wolin—another son of Jew- killed an estimated hundred thousand America has never been short of ish émigrés who fought in the war civilians, hastened the rise of Pol Pot, statesmen capable of communicating and studied at Harvard with William and irrevocably ravaged large tracts of their vision of the national interest to Yandell Elliott—to fully dissect Kis- countryside. It also fell so far short the public. If Kissinger was a realist, it singer’s careerist instincts. On the sur- of its strategic aims that more than was in this sense—of making the im- face, Wolin observed, Kissinger would one historian has wondered whether age-management aspect of foreign pol- have appeared a mismatch for the anti- Kissinger—who personally tweaked icy a priority. Morgenthau, though also élitist Nixon. But the pairing was per- the schedules of the bombing runs fixated on the reputation of a state’s fect: Nixon needed someone who could and the allocation of planes—had some power, believed that that reputation elevate his opportunism to a higher other motive. But, as Grandin writes, could not diverge too much from a plane of purpose and make him feel “he had built his own perpetual mo- state’s ability to exercise its power. If like a great figure in the drama of his- tion machine; the purpose of Amer- the U.S. upset this delicate equilib- tory. As Wolin wrote, “What could ican power was to create an awareness rium, as he believed it was doing in have been more comforting to that of American purpose.” Vietnam, other states, more realist in barren and inarticulate soul than to Gewen occasionally defends Kis- their assessment, would take advan- hear the authoritative voice of Dr. Kis- singer’s record more strenuously than tage. The best a realist could do was singer, who spoke so often and know- Kissinger himself has done. He argues adapt to situations, working toward a ingly about the ‘meaning of history.’” that the claims about the need to main- narrowly defined national interest, Later, Kissinger liked to mention his tain “credibility” were rooted in legit- while other nations worked toward qualms about taking the job with imate concerns about securing a U.S.- theirs. Idealistic notions about the ad- Nixon: he’d been so successful at mo- led global order. But, as Morgenthau vancement of humanity had no place bilizing his academic pedigree in saw, Kissinger’s argument rested on a in his scheme. For Morgenthau, Gewen Washington that he might well have disastrous miscalculation of America’s writes, “war was not inevitable in in- been appointed to the same position capacities. How would the credibility ternational affairs,” but “the prepara- even if the Democratic candidate, Hu- of the United States be enhanced by tion for war was.” Wars waged by re- bert Humphrey, had become Presi- dragging out a war against a fourth- alists would be less destructive than dent instead. rate power? How, to paraphrase John ones waged by idealists who believed Kerry, do you ask thirty thousand Amer- themselves to be fighting for univer- s early as 1965, on his first visit to ican soldiers to die so that the thirty sal peace. AVietnam, Kissinger had concluded thousand soldiers before them will not Morgenthau was disappointed that the war there was a lost cause, have died in vain? when Kissinger defended the Viet- and Nixon believed the same. Yet they As it was, each successive Ameri- nam War in public, despite having conspired to prolong it even before can initiative eroded credibility rather privately admitted to him that the U.S. reaching the White House. During than reinforced it. Not even the Christ- could not win. It took Kissinger’s close the Paris peace talks, in 1968, Kissin- mas bombing of North Vietnam, in

62 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 1972, the largest of the war, could con­ vince the North Vietnamese to rene­ gotiate. The young Foreign Service BRIEFLY NOTED officer John Negroponte offered a wry postmortem, which Kissinger never Hell and Other Destinations, by Madeleine Albright (Harper). forgave: “We bombed the North Viet­ This richly detailed memoir by the former Secretary of State namese into accepting our concessions.” covers the period since her departure from government, in 2001. Gewen also defends Kissinger’s idea With clarity and wisdom, Albright recounts moments of pride, that every political event anywhere in like receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012, and the world demands a response some­ acknowledges recent criticisms of her record, including those where else, a view that, in practice, concerning the human cost of the sanctions that the Clinton made every pawn appear to be a threat­ Administration imposed on Iraq. Ultimately, the book pres­ ened queen. When Nixon and Kis­ ents an intricate portrait of a diplomat, and her ardent belief singer backed the Pakistani President in democratic values and human rights, transatlantic partnerships Yahya Khan’s genocidal campaign and arms control, and open economies and sturdy institutions. against East Pakistan, in 1971, they did so to show the Soviets that America Square Haunting, by Francesca Wade (Tim Duggan). In inter­ was “tough.” Four years later, Kissin­ war London, Mecklenburgh Square, in Bloomsbury, attracted ger’s sign­off on the Indonesian Pres­ intellectuals fleeing convention. Many of them were also ident Suharto’s genocidal campaign feminists, who argued that women, like men, should possess in East Timor was meant to signal the “freedom to know.” This powerful collective biography that America would unquestioningly focusses on five women who, at various times, called Meck­ reward those who had decimated lenburgh home: Jane Harrison, a classics don at Cambridge; Communists within their reach. In Eileen Power, an economic historian; and the writers Vir­ retrospect, the notion that everything ginia Woolf, Dorothy L. Sayers, and H.D. Just as Harrison America did would be duly registered and Power rewrote history to include the lives of forgotten and responded to by its opponents women, so Wade reëstablishes the importance of thinkers and friends seems like an expression like Power and H.D., whose legacies have been eclipsed by of geopolitical narcissism. At the time, those of their male contemporaries. the thirty­three­year­old senator Joe Biden accused Kissinger, at a Senate Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the hearing, of trying to promulgate “a Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Europa). “It’s like I’m global Monroe Doctrine.” in there, somewhere inside myself, and the body I’m in keeps Given Gewen’s insistence on Kis­ on changing,” writes one of the main characters in this search­ singer’s realism, it is odd that he does ing, incisive novel, which follows three women in modern not dwell more on the most pragmatic Japan, each facing the possibility of a physical transforma­ episodes in his career—the pursuit of tion. One grapples with the prospect of finding a sperm donor détente with the Soviet Union, the and raising a child on her own. Another obsessively researches opening of relations with China, and breast­augmentation procedures while her daughter, a teen­ the development of “shuttle diplomacy” ager, retreats into silence during puberty. Kawakami, in her to contain the 1973 Arab­Israeli war— first book to be published in English, considers the agency which are still widely celebrated as that women exert over their bodies and charts the emotional major diplomatic achievements. Dé­ underpinnings of physical changes—both intentional and tente required Kissinger to prevail over unbidden—with humor and empathy. hard­liner views of the Soviet leader­ ship as ideologues bent on world dom­ How to Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Lit- ination and to see Leonid Brezhnev’s tle, Brown). In this début collection, fourteen piercing sketches Kremlin as populated by rational ac­ illuminate the workaday routines and the interior lives of tors. Instead, Gewen often seems drawn Laotian refugees. Characters who undertake “the grunt work to defend Kissinger at the points in of the world,” laboring in poultry plants, hog farms, and nail his career where defense is hardest. He salons, also harbor vivid fantasies. Mispronunciations occa­ opens the book with a long chapter on sionally produce brief glimpses of freedom in otherwise U.S. involvement in Chile, which cul­ impenetrable places, as when, for one family, the seemingly minated in a coup, in 1973. When Chile meaningless phrase “trick or treat” becomes a magical key elected the socialist Salvador Allende into an upscale neighborhood. In the titular story, a young as President, in 1970, Nixon and Kis­ girl who accidentally voices the first letter of “knife” moves singer resolved to remove him. The from humiliation into defiance, as she feels herself tempo­ fact that Allende was popularly elected rarily crossing the boundary between “those who were seen, made him only more dangerous in their and those who were not.”

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 63 eyes. “I don’t see why we have to stand before, had rid Guatemala of its dem- tion prior to the Second World War by and watch a country go Commu- ocratically elected President, Jacobo demanded it. nist because of the irresponsibility of Árbenz. Still, the spectacle of Allen- Although Kissinger may not have its own people,” Kissinger observed. de’s removal had one unintended con- originated the precepts for which he Gewen thinks this quip captures the sequence: it lit the wick of one of Kis- is best known, it is hard to find discus- tragic dilemma of Kissinger’s relation- singer’s most durable annoyances, the sions of them that don’t refer to his ship to democracy and power. “The global human-rights movement. career. As Grandin has pointed out, statement looks a lot different if one Vice-President Dick Cheney’s one- has the rise of Adolf Hitler in mind,” n 1972, when the Italian journalist per-cent doctrine—the idea that a state Gewen writes, and suggests that so- IOriana Fallaci asked Kissinger to ex- has to act against enemies if there’s cialist Chile should be grouped with plain his popularity, he said, “The main even the merest chance that they can the Weimar Republic as examples of point arises from the fact that I’ve al- harm it—is thoroughly Kissingerian, a people voting themselves out of a ways acted alone.” Critics and defend- and when Karl Rove reputedly said, democracy. Gewen lists the sins and ers alike tend to accept this self-assess- “We create our own reality,” he was foibles of Allende—including “perni- ment, but his record shows a more echoing words of Kissinger’s from forty cious” wage increases for workers and mundane figure who assimilated pre- years before. In 2010, the Obama Ad- indoctrinating the young in the “val- vailing foreign-policy assumptions. His ministration’s lawyers used the prece- ues of socialist humanism”—but with- most controversial moves have clear dent of Nixon and Kissinger’s incur- holds such scrutiny from his successor, precursors. President Johnson had se- sions into Cambodia as part of their the right-wing dictator General Au- cretly bombed Cambodia, too, and, in argument to establish the legal basis gusto Pinochet, whose power the U.S. 1965, he condoned Suharto’s genocide for drone killings of American terror- helped consolidate, and who, if one in Indonesia, which in scale outstripped ist suspects who were outside the bat- has the rise of Hitler in mind, seems the one Kissinger approved in East tlefield of Afghanistan. A Justice De- rather more germane. Timor. The U.S.-backed interventions partment memo argued that military Similarly questionable is Gewen’s prefiguring Allende’s removal include action in places like Yemen was justified assertion that “what cannot be dis- dozens in Latin America and the Ca- when recognized threats had already missed is the Nixon/Kissinger worry ribbean alone. spread there. The Trump Administra- that Chile under Allende was a paving Since leaving office, too, Kissinger tion’s recent assassination of the Ira- stone on the road to Soviet hegemony.” has rarely challenged consensus, let nian commander Qassem Suleimani, In fact, the Soviet Union had scaled alone offered the kind of inconvenient apparently intended to terrify the Ira- back its rivalry with the U.S. in the de- assessments that characterized the later nians into ceasing Middle East oper- veloping world, where countering China career of George Kennan, who warned ations, conforms to Kissinger’s obses- now diluted its resources. The Cuban President Clinton against NATO ex- sion with “credibility.” missile crisis, in 1962, and a failed at- pansion after the Soviet Union’s col- “Historians could learn a great deal tempt to establish a submarine base in lapse. It is instructive to measure Kis- about the years after World War II Cuba, eight years later, had soured any singer’s instincts against those of a true simply by studying the vicissitudes of hope for developing a true proxy state realist, such as the University of Chi- Kissinger’s celebrity,” Gewen hazards in Latin America. The Kremlin lead- cago political scientist John Mear- toward the end of his book. One could ership was reluctant to increase the pit- sheimer. As the Cold War ended, go further: the main display of Kissin- tance it sent to Chile, knowing that Mearsheimer was so committed to the ger’s “realism” was in the management Allende would spend it on badly needed “balance of power” principle that he of his own fame, his transformation American imports. made the striking suggestion of allow- of a conventional performance into a If Allende did represent a threat, it ing nuclear proliferation in a unified symbol of diplomatic virtuosity. It can was almost certainly less to do with Germany and throughout Eastern Eu- sometimes seem as if there has been any Soviet ambitions than with his rope. Kissinger, unable to see beyond an unconscious compact between Kis- own powerful arguments for a global the horizon of the Cold War, could singer and many of his detractors. If distribution of resources far beyond not imagine any other purpose for all the sins of the U.S. security state anything that Washington was pre- American power than the pursuit of can be loaded onto one man, all par- pared to countenance. Unlike Mor- global supremacy. ties get what they need: Kissinger’s sta- genthau and Kennan, who saw the Although he has criticized the tus as a world-historic figure is assured, non-industrial world as a backwater interventionism of neoconservatives, and his critics can regard his foreign not worth America’s attention, Kis- there is scarcely a U.S. military ad- policy as the exception rather than the singer considered Third World social- venture, from Panama to Iraq, that rule. It would be comforting to believe ism a serious foe, capable of disturb- has not met with his approval. In all that American liberals are capable of ing the U.S.’s delicate face-off with his meditations on world order, he seeing that politics is more than a mat- the Soviet Union. He and Nixon as- has not thought about how contin- ter of personal style, and that the rec- sumed, correctly, that they could back gent and unforeseen America’s rise as ord will prevail, but the enduring cult a coup against Allende with minimal global superpower actually was. Noth- of Kissinger points to a less palatable fuss, just as Eisenhower, two decades ing in the country’s republican tradi- possibility: Kissinger is us. 

64 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 up overnight, hypersensitive to atmo- BOOKS spheric changes. As fungi, they feed on organic matter, and can be seen as ve- hicles of decay. In Wasson’s view, Amer- FUNGUS AMONG US icans, and Anglo-Saxons as a whole, were mycophobic, and “ignorant of the It makes our world possible. Does it offer lessons for how to live here? fungal world.” In his forays against this ignorance, By Hua Hsu Wasson learned of a so-called “divine mushroom” consumed in remote cor- ners of the world. In 1955, he finally found one of these communities, a small town in the mountains of southern Mexico. At the house of a local shaman, Was- son drank chocolate, then spent thirty minutes chewing “acrid” mushrooms. “I could not have been happier: this was the culmination of years of pursuit,” Was- son wrote. For the next few hours, he experienced visions—resplendent mo- tifs and patterns, mythical beasts and grand vistas, streams of brilliant color, constantly morphing and oozing, whether his eyes were open or closed—and he felt connected to everything he saw. “It was as though the walls of our house had dissolved,” he wrote, and his spirit were soaring through the mountains. The fact that Wasson was an other- wise straitlaced, politically conservative bank executive at J. P. Morgan lent this adventure a serious and respectable air. He began to wonder if he had unlocked a mystery uniting all of humanity: “Was it not probable that, long ago, long be- fore the beginnings of written history, our ancestors had worshipped a divine mushroom?” Wasson’s discovery turned, briefly, into a movement. Timothy Leary read about the Wassons and went to ex- n 1957, a man from New York named Reverence might take a variety of forms— perience the mushroom himself, starting IR. Gordon Wasson published an ar- think of Eastern Europe or Russia, where the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Spurred ticle in Life about two trips he had taken, foraging is a pastime. There’s a famous on by evangelists like Leary, young Amer- three decades apart. The first was to scene in “Anna Karenina,” in which a icans turned to drugs (LSD, too, is de- the Catskills, in New York, where his budding romance withers during a mush- rived from a fungus), along with alter- wife, Valentina, took a rambling walk room hunt. Wasson was particularly in- native approaches to agriculture, diet, in the woods and became enamored of terested in societies that venerated the and sustainable living. Within a few some wild mushrooms. “She caressed fungus for spiritual reasons. In Mexico, years, the backlash against psychedelic the toadstools,” Wasson recalled, “sa- wild mushrooms were thought to pos- drugs was in full swing, macrobiotic eat- vored their earthy perfume.” She brought sess “a supernatural aura.” ing was relegated to the fringes, and it them home to cook, and soon he, too, There are any number of reasons seemed that America had returned to was enchanted. They spent the next that one might be mycophobic. Some its generally mycophobic ways. thirty years studying and cataloguing people are put off by mushrooms’ taste various species, searching out literary or texture—supple, with a fleshy resis- ut our attitudes toward the fungal and artistic works about mushrooms. tance—and the fact that they somehow Bkingdom may be evolving, with According to Wasson, the world is resemble both plant and animal. Oth- respect both to pharmacology and to divided into mycophiles and mycophobes. ers are creeped out by the way they pop food. In November, the residents of Or- egon are scheduled to vote on whether A seemingly brainless organism, the fungus is a model of coöperative resilience. to legalize psilocybin, the psychoactive

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDERS NILSEN THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 65 compound found in so-called magic mush- Oregon just beneath the ground, cov- ness of it all. (His father, Rupert, is a rooms, for use in controlled settings. The ering about 3.7 square miles and esti- former research biologist who became effort has been backed by researchers and mated to weigh as much as thirty-five known for his belief in “morphic reso- scientists, and passionately supported thousand tons. If fungus can inspire awe, nance,” which posits a kind of shared by David Bronner, the C.E.O.—in this it can also be a nuisance or worse, from consciousness within nature.) His book case, cosmic engagement officer—of athlete’s foot to the stem rust that afflicts recounts the requisite tales of cham- Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. The ballot wheat and is considered a major threat pion truffle hunters, psychedelic adven- initiative follows clinical trials conducted to global food security. Last year, the turers, his own love of home-brewing at Johns Hopkins, New York University, C.D.C. identified the Candida auris as beer. One of the heroes of “Entangled and U.C.L.A. in the use of mushrooms an emerging public-health concern; it’s Life” is Paul Stamets, a logger turned to treat addiction and depression. Psilo- a sometimes fatal, drug-resistant patho- mycologist and entrepreneur who lives cybin has already been decriminalized in gen that has emerged in hospitals and in Washington State. (Stamets also Santa Cruz, Oakland, and Denver. nursing homes around the world. The steals the show in “Fantastic Fungi,” a Meanwhile, the American diet in- more we learn about fungi, Sheldrake 2019 documentary directed by Louie cludes more mushrooms than it used observes, the less the natural world makes Schwartzberg and narrated, somewhat to—about four pounds per person a sense without them. creepily, by the actress Brie Larson.) In year, a gradual increase from just one Sheldrake was drawn to fungi because 2005, Stamets published “Mycelium in the sixties. The hefty portobello they are humble yet astonishingly versa- Running: How Mushrooms Can Save burger is ubiquitous, and, even before tile organisms, “eating rock, making soil, the World,” an influential work that the current pandemic, there was a grow- digesting pollutants, nourishing and kill- was taken up by fellow fungal enthu- ing interest in the everyday role that ing plants, surviving in space, inducing siasts as a kind of manifesto. A TED fungi play in our lives on a microbial visions, producing food, making medi- talk drawn from the book has been level: “home fermentation” (whether for cines, manipulating animal behavior, and viewed millions of times. sourdough, kombucha, kimchee, or influencing the composition of the earth’s Stamets’s fascination with fungus harder stuff) has become a mainstream atmosphere.” Plants make their own food, began with a world-changing moment hobby. Amateur mycology has flour- converting the world around them into of his own: a psilocybin trip cured him ished on the Internet. There are videos nutrients. Animals must find their food. of a lifelong stutter. Convinced of the about foraging, and how to induce any But fungi essentially acquire theirs by mushroom’s special power—he could mushroom to release its spores onto a secreting digestive enzymes into their talk to girls now!—he began harvest- sheet of paper, leaving a beautiful print environment, and absorbing whatever is ing exotic varieties, building a profitable of its gills. I recently found a Web page nearby: a rotten apple, an old tree trunk, mail-order business that sells grow kits, devoted to pictures of mushrooms that an animal carcass. If you’ve ever looked extracts, cultivation gear, even fungal convincingly resembled human butts. closely at a moldy piece of bread—mold, dog treats (Mutt-rooms). He briefly Fungus, as Merlin Sheldrake writes like yeast, being a type of fungus—what worked with the Department of De- in “Entangled Life: How Fungi Make appears to be a layer of fuzz is actually fense to study the antibacterial and anti- Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and millions of minuscule hyphal tips, bus- viral compounds that fungus had de- Shape Our Futures” (Random House), ily breaking down matter into nutrients. veloped to protect itself in the course is everywhere, yet easy to miss. Mush- The fungus kingdom spreads by way of millions of years. Penicillin had fa- rooms are the most glamorous but pos- of spores. This is where mushrooms, the mously been isolated by accident, in sibly least interesting members of this part of fungus that makes it above 1928, when Alexander Fleming noticed kingdom. Most fungi take the form of ground, show their prowess. The shaggy that his petri-dish colony of staphylo- tiny cylindrical threads, from which hy- inkcap mushroom—soft and tender coccus had been ravaged by an inciden- phal tips branch in all directions, creat- when cooked—can break through as- tal growth of mold. Perhaps our old- ing a meandering, gossamer-like net- phalt and concrete pavement. Each year, growth forests, filled with mycelia that work known as mycelium. Fungus has fungi produce more than fifty mega- had adapted in order to ward off inva- been breaking down organic matter for tons of spores. Some mushrooms are sive bacteria, held the key to prevent- millions of years, transforming it into capable of onetime exertions in which ing future pandemics. Their preserva- soil. A handful of healthy soil might spores are catapulted through the air at tion, Stamets believed, was a matter of contain miles of mycelia, invisible to the speeds of fifty-five miles an hour. But national security. human eye. It’s estimated that there are the contribution that fungi make to the Stamets is an advocate of what he a million and a half species of fungus, larger ecology is fundamental: by turn- calls mycoremediation—the use of fungi though nearly ninety per cent of them ing biomass into soil, they recycle dead to remove toxic substances from the remain undocumented. Before any plants organic matter back into organic life. environment. Fungi have helped clean were taller than three feet, and before up diesel-contaminated soil; they’ve any animal with a backbone had made heldrake is in his early thirties, a bi- broken down pesticide residues, crude it out of the water, the earth was dot- Sologist who holds a Ph.D. from the oil, and plastics. Disposable diapers can ted with two-story-tall, silo-like fungi University of Cambridge. But his evan- linger in a landfill for hundreds of years, called prototaxites. The largest living gelical zeal for the fungal world makes but in 2014 scientists reported that they organism on earth today is a fungus in it plain that he’s drawn to the weird- had grown oyster mushrooms on a sub-

66 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 stance made from used diapers, reduc- Sheldrake also tells us about Toby among the earliest living things to ap- ing their weight and volume by eighty Kiers, an evolutionary biologist who was pear. They seemed to grow on the reac- per cent. (And the mushrooms were taken with Thomas Piketty’s “Capital tor walls, attracted to radioactive “hot” safe to eat.) Mycelium is even capable in the Twenty-First Century” and its particles. In fact, they appeared capable of filtering E. coli or heavy metals from insights on inequality. She wondered of harnessing radiation as a source of polluted water. Sheldrake describes a how mycorrhizal networks, the symbi- energy, as plants do with sunlight. The company in Finland that has adopted otic intertwining of plant systems and first thing to grow from the soil after these mycofiltration techniques to re- mycelium, deal with their own, natural the atomic bomb decimated Hiroshima claim gold from electronic waste. The encounters with inequity. Kiers exposed was, reportedly, a matsutake mushroom. firm Ecovative Designs has developed a single fungus to an unequally distrib- Scientists still don’t understand how mycelium-based packaging that re- uted supply of phosphorus. Somehow fungi coördinate, control, and learn from sembles Styrofoam but biodegrades the fungus “coordinated its trading be- such behaviors, just that they do. “How within thirty days. It also helped de- havior across the network,” best to think about shared vise a mycelium-based alternative to Sheldrake writes, essen- mycorrhizal networks?” leather, which was used in a prototype tially shuttling phosphorus Sheldrake wonders. “Are of a Stella McCartney handbag. to parts of the mycelial we dealing with a super- Stamets’s ardent advocacy inspired a network for trade with the organism? A metropolis? man named Peter McCoy to help start plant system according to a A living Internet? Nursery an organization called Radical Mycol- “buy low, sell high” logic. school for trees? Socialism ogy. McCoy, who is also an anarchist The anthropologist Anna in the soil? Deregulated and a hip-hop artist, has devoted his Lowenhaupt Tsing has ex- markets of late capitalism, life to a radically decentered, fungus- plored the story of global with fungi jostling on the inspired method of sharing information. capitalism through mush- trading floor of a forest He founded an online mycology school rooms. In 2015, she pub- stock exchange? Or maybe and preaches “Liberation Mycology.” lished “The Mushroom at the End of it’s fungal feudalism, with mycorrhizal “Where one Radical Mycologist trains the World: On the Possibility of Life in overlords presiding over the lives of ten,” McCoy says, “those ten can train Capitalist Ruins,” which followed the their plant laborers for their own ulti- a hundred, and from them a thousand— trade in the prized matsutake mushroom mate benefit.” None of these attempts so it is that mycelium spreads.” from a community of Southeast Asian to fit fungi into the logic of our world refugees who are among the top forag- are entirely persuasive. Perhaps it’s the or Wasson, fungus was related to ers in the Pacific Northwest to the auc- other way around, and we’re the ones Fthe transcendent, the realm of wor- tion markets of Japan, where matsutake who should try to fit into the fungus’s ship, of reverence; for Stamets, fungus fetch a thousand dollars a kilogram, and model. A truffle’s funky aroma evolved was an instrument for environmental on to chefs and discriminating diners in to attract insects and small rodents, resilience and restoration. But can fun- the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. which feast on the spores, then spread gus, finally, provide a political vision? There’s a double meaning to Tsing’s them throughout the forest via their What might we learn, Sheldrake asks, title. The mushroom is at the end of the fecal matter. For many, the pleasure of from the “mutualism” and coöperation known world because it’s hard to find, psilocybin is in giving oneself up to the of a seemingly brainless organism? a secret tucked deep in the forest. But weft of a connected world, and making Sheldrake notes that the hyphal tips she’s also hinting at the end of the world peace with one’s smallness. of mycelium seem to communicate with as we know it, given our instinct for ex- Maybe the vision that unites our my- one another, making decisions without tracting as much from the earth as we cophiles, from Wasson to Stamets and a real center. He describes an experi- can. Humanity has never seemed so finely Sheldrake, isn’t so freakish, after all. The ment conducted a couple of years ago calibrated and rationalized: the seam- divine secret is the magic of the mun- by a British computer scientist, An- less journey of a very expensive mush- dane, and one needn’t fly too high to drew Adamatzky, who detected waves room from nature to a dinner plate tells witness it. The composer John Cage of electrical activity in oyster mush- this story. But things have never seemed was an avid forager who supplemented rooms, which spiked sharply when the so precarious, either. During the current his income by selling prized mushrooms mushrooms were exposed to a flame. pandemic, images have circulated which to upscale restaurants. He once per- Adamatzky posited that the mushroom suggest that the earth is better off with suaded administrators at the New School might be a kind of “living circuit board.” many of us staying at home. There have to allow him to teach a course on my- The point isn’t that mushrooms would been fantastical stories of dolphins in cology alongside his music classes. replace silicon chips. But if fungi al- the canals of Venice, penguins saunter- “Often I go in the woods thinking after ready function as sensors, processing ing through an empty aquarium. And, all these years I ought finally to be bored and transmitting information through as industry idled and vehicles went un- with fungi,” Cage confided in his dia- their networks, then what could they driven, there was the rare sight of clear ries. But his sense of revelatory delight potentially tell (or warn) us about the skies in Beijing and Los Angeles. Fol- never faltered. “Supreme good fortune,” state of our ecosystem, were we able to lowing the nuclear blast at Chernobyl, he wrote, as he held a fine specimen in interpret their signals? the industrious, resilient fungi were his hand. “We’re both alive!” 

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 67 weight champion Archie Moore. “They BOOKS beat his/head for decades,” Coleman writes, “until / a tumor rose from the wound and devoured his eyes.” Her par- MAKING BOLD ents’ experiences must have shaped her art’s insistent transparency about what Wanda Coleman’s fearless invention. people do to make enough money. And her choice of an art that barely paid By Dan Chiasson meant that, for much of her life, Cole- man, who had two children and often parented alone, had to get very good at economic improvisation. Throughout her career, she worked as a Peace Corps recruiter, a waitress, a medical secretary, a radio host, a screenwriter, and a uni- versity lecturer—a very L.A. résumé. Coleman won an Emmy, in 1976, for her writing on the daytime soap opera “Days of Our Lives,” and wrote an ep- isode of the much rerun buddy-cop show “Starsky & Hutch.” Soon she devoted herself more fully to her own writing and performing. Her first full-length book of poetry, “Mad Dog Black Lady,” appeared in 1979, and was followed by a dozen or so more, as well as short sto- ries, essays, and a novel. “Mercuro- chrome” (2001), a volume of poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Award. In an interview with the Poetry So- ciety of America, Coleman defined herself as a “Usually Het Interracially Married Los Angeles-based African American Womonist Matrilinear Work- ing Class Poor Pink/White Collar College Drop-out Baby Boomer Earth Mother and Closet Smoker Unmolested- by-her-father.” That checklist is a per- formance, building upon itself; asked a second time, she might have produced “ make one chicken feed five,” Wanda missions of debt: “I borrow from friends.” an entirely new inventory with its own I Coleman wrote in “My Love Brings At a moment when many of us are learn- brilliant, funny, and tragic surprises. Flowers,” a poem from 1983. “Make ing—and teaching one another—how In an early poem, Coleman describes a clothes ten years old fashionable/reju- to make a face mask out of a sock or a police officer appearing at her door at venate one fake sable coat.” Coleman, bra, Coleman’s poetry might be just the 7 A.M. (“Coitus interruptus LAPD is who died in 2013, was one of the great model of inspired, ecstatic thrift we need. a drag.”) She “showed ’em alias #3” menders in American verse: she found A new volume of her selected poems, and, returning to bed, “started fucking the extra wear in old forms like the son- “Wicked Enchantment” (Black Spar- again/but things had changed.” net and rummaged for new forms in row Press), edited by the American poet American poets often insist on aliases everyday material, like aptitude tests, Terrance Hayes, has brought Coleman— and multiple identities: Bob Dylan medical reports, and want ads. Poets who often seemed to relish the position plucked from Whitman’s famous line “I sometimes brag about their fearsome of outsider—into the spotlight. She was am large, I contain multitudes” for the powers of transformation; Coleman, born in Watts, in South Los Angeles, title of his second coronavirus surprise beset by hardship for much of her life, in 1946, and lived most of her life in and single. For Coleman, shape-shifting was kept her boasts closer to the bone. “I around the city. Her mother worked as not an aesthetic virtue but an inevitable scrape bottom,” she wrote, and yet her a housekeeper, sometimes for movie means of survival, and also a lethal risk. poetry drew on deep reserves. Given stars, including Ronald Reagan. Her fa- “I have been known to imagine a situ- Coleman’s almost chaotic originality, it ther, a boxer in his youth, worked as a ation/and then get involved in it,” she is touching to encounter her stark ad- sparring partner for the light-heavy- writes, in “Wanda in Worryland.” She

68 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL J. ELDERMAN has “gone after people/with guns” and makes their improvisations, modelled rocks and fists, but also “with poems”: on American blues and jazz, so com- pelling. “American Sonnet 61” has short i get scared sometimes lines, a jagged right margin, and a tricky and have to go look into the mirror to see if i’m tone, both barbed and passionate: “reach- ing down into my griot bag,” Coleman still here sullivan+ associates finds ancestral license (a griot is a tra- ARCHITECTS Coleman evokes both senses of “going ditional West African poet) but also the after”: confronting fighters but also fol- patronizing expectation that she will lowing, imitating, and learning from writ- pull out “womanish wisdom and wily/so- ers. To stand up to her predecessors was cial commentary.” Instead, she produces martha’s vineyard a form of homage. Coleman often des- “bricks / with which to either recon- ignated her poems as being “after”—not struct/the past or deconstruct a head.” “for”—her mentors, heroes, and friends. The sonnet becomes a poem about sad- There are poems “after June Jordan,” ness and its costs. “Dolor,” she writes: “after Elizabeth Bishop,” “after the song robs me of art’s coin by Herbie Hancock,” and “after Sun Ra.” as i push, for peanuts, to level walls and The range of these dedications implies rebuild the ruins of my poetic promise. the variety of shapes a tribute can take: a poem “after John Berryman” is a spat; That last phrase, like so many of Cole- another “after Coltrane” is a lovefest. man’s, abounds with sarcasm. One of Coleman’s work recoups ground from the greatest poets ever to come out of her idols and rivals, even as it acknowl- L.A., she shaped the city’s literary scene edges their genius. A poem “after Allen like few before her. And yet, even after Ginsberg” modifies his famous poem “A she’d forged her own “infinite alphabet Supermarket in California,” which itself of afroblues/intertwinings,” she still felt is a nod to a master. “What thoughts I that she was measured against the lit- have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,” erary gatekeepers’ idea of her “poetic Ginsberg writes. “What bohunkian im- promise,” now in “ruins.” ages i have of you,” Coleman writes. “I Coleman’s poems present, side by side, sputter/between the confused and the exasperation and joy. They both tally and absurd as i cruise for pudding/and citrus- transcend the difficulties of an often free hand lotion.” Ginsberg’s surrepti- broke black woman, working in perhaps tious queering of the American super- the world’s least remunerative profes- market was one kind of confrontation sion. Cursing her art, she often manages with history; Coleman, without the lux- some of its most memorable language: ury of being furtive, is “detected via cam- poetry is “rood music for the cash be- ADVERTISEMENT era/lens while picking over pepper mills” reft / as titans clash in the space of a and makes her own piqued revision, re- Hollywood toilet.” Yet few poets write turning the experience of grocery shop- so powerfully about the underground ping to quotidian reality. For a black freedoms possible in an economy rigged woman, this reality includes the fear of to defeat them. In “Want Ads,” part of WHAT’S being accused of stealing. “The only Walt a contemporary mini-genre of poems here is Disney,” Coleman writes, trying inspired by personal ads (C. D. Wright’s THE to find cheap, healthy food. “The pork “Personals” is an influential example), chops are killing me.” Coleman cites her daunting odds of find- BIG ing a partner (“a 46% remarriage rate for oleman’s one hundred “American black women contrasted/with 76% for IDEA? CSonnets” are scattered throughout white women”) and mocks the “modest five books: “African Sleeping Sickness” maidenly pubis” of a white bride, her Small space (1990), “Hand Dance” (1993), “Ameri- “tresses” kept “glistening and tangle free.” has big rewards. can Sonnets” (1994), “Bathwater Wine” Such is the “youthful stu8 sonnets/and (1998), and “Mercurochrome.” Sonnets prayers are made of.” Instead of that prim are often at odds with their own brev- and coi8ed material, Coleman o8ers the TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT ity, building into their short span little “kinky snarls” of her own body and of JILLIAN GENET interludes and pauses. Rarely does a poet her poems. You can hear in the title, 305.520.5159 seem to want to take an already brutally “Want Ads,” a brilliant play on her own [email protected] brief form and speed it up. But Cole- first name: in Wanda Coleman’s poems, man’s sonnets are sprints, which is what it’s the want that adds the value. 

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 18, 2020 69 great original play of quarantine, Rich- THE THEATRE ard Nelson’s “What Do We Need to Talk About?,” which was commissioned by the Public, as a benefit performance, NATURE’S MIRROR and streamed on YouTube on the last Wednesday of the month. The play is Richard Nelson’s Apple family and Molière’s misanthrope on Zoom. a surprise addition to Nelson’s “Apple Family” cycle, the accidental child con- By Alexandra Schwartz ceived long after the rest of the kids are grown. Until now, there were four plays about the four Apples, middle-aged siblings based in Rhinebeck, New York. The first one was performed in 2010, the last in 2013, and, as with “The Ga- briels,” Nelson’s subsequent play cycle set in Rhinebeck, each took place, and was performed, during a moment of national significance. Recently, Chan- nel Thirteen made recordings of the earlier Apple plays available to stream, and it was a subversive delight, given the hagiographic mood of the moment, to discover that the first line spoken in the first play, “That Hopey Changey Thing,” is “Fuck you, Andrew Cuomo.” (The play takes place on the day of the 2010 midterms, which happened to also be the date of the governor’s election.) “You see, with Andrew, everything is about politics, celebrity politics. What gets noticed, what makes the impres- sion,” Richard Apple ( Jay O. Sanders), a lawyer in the state attorney general’s office, says. The governor’s current daily press conferences, acts of public service which double as canny pieces of the- atre in their own right, may be the ex- ception that proves the rule. The new play seems to have come as a surprise to Nelson, too. He was here’s been ample time, during the mediate conditions of its creation. Plays working on the second installment of Tpast few endless weeks, for a per- may spend years in development, but, “The Michaels,” his latest Rhinebeck- son who misses theatre to think about in a pinch, a few days will do. Ideally, set cycle, when the coronavirus hit. The what theatre gives us that’s different a play shares a room with its audience, success of fictional characters can be from what we get from other kinds of but, as we’re all discovering, a screen measured by their power to endure in art and performance. We have televi- can work, too. Fabulous effects are nice the mind, the way people do; when sion to entertain us, movies and books if you can get them—there’s a reason Nelson thought about how he might to sustain us. What can plays do? When that the National Theatre’s weekly address the pandemic, the Apples were in doubt, it never hurts to consult Ham- streams of its beautifully filmed pro- right there, waiting to be reanimated let. “The purpose of playing,” the Dan- ductions, with their luscious set and and spoken through. ish prince tells us, “was and is to hold, lighting designs, have become wildly “What Do We Need to Talk About?” as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to popular—but the truth is that all you (directed by Nelson) takes place, inev- show virtue her own feature, scorn her need to make a play work is a human itably, on Zoom, which, for once, isn’t own image, and the very age and body voice or two. an irritating technical compromise but of the time his form and pressure.” Going by Hamlet’s definition of the- an integral plot point. Rather than gath- Theatre can be fleet, spare, and adap- atre as a mirror for the body of our ering around the dining-room table, as tive, reactive to and reflective of the im- times, the end of April brought the first they usually do, the siblings congregate online, to catch up for an hour or so at In Nelson’s new play, Zoom isn’t a technical compromise but an integral plot point. the end of the day. The first to appear

70 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY is Barbara (Maryann Plunkett), who, childlike, delighted spirit, goes first, French Institute Alliance Française as we discover, has just come home from offering a twisty bit of intrigue about and the Prospect Park Alliance, put the hospital, where she managed to re- women authors and identity-swapping on a Zoom production of “The Mis- cover from Covid-19. Richard (San- in the nineteen-fifties; Marian, a sec- anthrope” (in Richard Wilbur’s nim- ders, who, like the rest of the cast, is re- ond-grade teacher who’s working on a ble translation, directed by Lucie prising his role), the lone brother of the book about the family, follows, with a Tiberghien). The performance suffered family, is quarantined with her; the fact clue to an old Apple mystery that she at first from technical difficulties—a that he, and not the domestic-minded discovered in the course of her research; pesky audio-feedback loop sent the Barbara, cooks and serves dinner tells Richard tells a joke about President actors’ words boomeranging back to us how serious her condition must have Franklin Pierce and a yappy dog sent them—which was briefly annoying been. (No actors were harmed, or so- by a visiting Japanese delegation; and and then, suddenly, became wonder- cial-distancing protocols violated, in Tim, who has theatre on the brain, re- ful, as viewers messaged their support the making of this play; Sanders and lates a theory that “The Cherry Or- and waited patiently for the problem Plunkett are married.) chard” is about “the need to heal,” which to be solved. The hiccup made live One by one, new Zoom squares pop might sound like twenty-first-century theatre feel alive, and what could be up onscreen, outlined in marquee neon. self-help babble projected backward better than that? Jane (Sally Murphy), the youngest onto Chekhov, if it weren’t for the cir- The Molière in the Park approach Apple, and Tim (Stephen Kunken), cumstances. In hard times, we look to suggests a simple, satisfying formula her partner, are in different rooms in art to tell us the things we need to hear. for making theatre in the age of the their Rhinebeck apartment, because Barbara’s contribution is a record- lockdown. Choose a classic text— Tim has a mild case of the virus. Mar- ing that she made of the sibling’s late preferably not too long, preferably ian (Laila Robins), the middle sister, uncle Benjamin ( Jon DeVries) recit- funny—get good actors to perform it arrives late, as she always does, nicely ing the Walt Whitman poem “The into their devices, and voilà. It helps dressed and wearing lipstick in an as- Wound-Dresser,” which he did, in the that Molière didn’t much care about sertion of dignity. Apart, together, they second Apple play, to commemorate his plays’ settings; the language is the drink wine, poke fun at one another, the anniversary of September 11th. The thing. This “Misanthrope” takes place briefly squabble, and discuss the ba- poem is narrated by an old man who during quarantine, of course, in an nalities of the day. Cuomo gets grudg- cares for injured Civil War soldiers, and environment of comical, generic lux- ing high marks (“Who would have be- what was sombre and heartrending in ury. (Kris Stone’s Zoom production lieved it?”); there is talk of the risks the earlier play is now freshly piercing. design transposed the actors into what and the rewards of grocery shopping, Another decade, another crisis, this one looked like a West Elm catalogue; in the Zen satisfactions of dish-washing, unending, still unfathomable. Switch one scene, their clothing matched and other aspects of the new normal. the old and the young, the healers and the virtual wallpaper of the virtual All of Nelson’s Rhinebeck plays pull the dying. Barbara—reserved, prag- rooms they were in, a nice touch.) off sneaky feats of verisimilitude. Just matic, and irony-proof, the predictable The misanthrope in question is Al- as things seem almost too ordinary axle around which her siblings rotate— ceste ( Jared McNeill, who has a lovely, and unremarkable to bear depiction— can’t express in words what she feels salted-butter kind of voice), a noble- though how remarkable that the hab- about her own brush with death, so she man revolted by the falsity and the its of quarantine already feel rote—a says it with music: the “Dona nobis folly of the world, except when that startling deepening takes place. In pacem” from Bach’s Mass in B Minor, folly involves Célimène ( Jennifer “What Do We Need to Talk About?,” which she plays through her phone Mudge), his paramour, who flirts as the tone begins to shift when Tim, speaker, an offering to all of us behind she breathes and won’t stop entertain- who is an actor and a restaurateur, rem- our own screens. ing suitors. Much drama ensues (“The inisces about an acquaintance, the real- As the play ends, the siblings sign Real Housewives of Molière!” a mem- life actor Mark Blum, who died in off one by one, leaving those remain- ber of the digital audience aptly com- March, of coronavirus complications, ing to gossip about them in their wake, mented), alternately doused by Al- at the age of sixty-nine. All the actors until Barbara is left alone again. She ceste’s buddy Philinte (Postell Pringle) in the production likely knew Blum, stares at her screen, looking at her own and enflamed by the gossip Arsinoé but their characters didn’t, and watch- face, as if registering that, against the (a bawdy Heidi Armbruster). “I’ve ing them react to the news of the loss odds, she is still here. On the night of made up my mind / to have no fur- of this stranger with muted, abstract the performance, more than five thou- ther commerce with mankind,” Al- sympathy yielded a double-edged grief. sand viewers looked back. We were ceste finally decides, stumping off to A second shift happens when Bar- there, too. join the rest of us in isolation. When bara, who’s a high-school English the cast reappeared to take their Zoom teacher, tells the group that she’s as- heatre is an art of the present, bows, inclining their heads toward signed the Decameron to her students, Twhich makes it prone to error. their computer cameras, they were and suggests, à la Boccaccio, that each On May 2nd, Molière in the Park, an greeted with written “bravo”s and the member of the call tell a story to en- outdoor troupe that had its inaugural sound—joyful to imagine—of many tertain the others. Jane, a writer with a season last year, together with the yellow hand emojis clapping. 

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 71 tion and memory at least as much John THE A RT WORLD Steinbeck’s writing did: with truths to life on a scale of everlasting myth. Lange was born in Hoboken, New OUT OF THE DARK Jersey, in 1895, and went to school on New York’s Lower East Side, a rare Gen- Dorothea Lange and Félix Fénéon at MOMA. tile among thousands of Jewish school- mates at P.S. 66, on Hester Street. Her By Peter Schjeldahl father abandoned the family when she was twelve. A childhood bout of polio left her with a lifelong limp, which, she said, “formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me.” De- termined to become a photographer even before she first used a camera, she as- sisted at studios throughout the city and studied the medium at Columbia Uni- versity. In 1918, would-be world travels with a friend stalled in San Francisco, after the two women were robbed. There Lange found patrons for a studio of her own and became a successful portrait- ist of the city’s élite. (She also married a painter, Maynard Dixon, and had two children.) Her grounding in portraiture seems key to her subsequent singular- ity. With the onset of the Depression, she took to the streets. Her photograph “White Angel Bread Line, San Fran- cisco” (1933), of a dejected man turned aside from a mass of others, became a public sensation. Between 1935 and 1939, she drove the back roads of the West and the South as part of a program that promoted the New Deal by distribut- ing the resulting material to newspapers and magazines. Lange stood out from the start. Her sensitivity to faces individualizes each of her subjects. The encounter is an event wo terrific shows that languish in 1886, the term “Neo-Impressionism,” in that subject’s life—and in Lange’s own. T darkened galleries at the Museum and for his championing of Georges Her images defy generalization. Facts of of Modern Art should not pass uncel- Seurat, he is characterized in the show’s poverty and exhaustion speak for them- ebrated—or unvisited, to the extent that catalogue as “implacable, inscrutable, selves. Lange cuts through them to specific moma’s Web site ameliorates the lock- meticulous, and mysterious.” Lanky and presences, whose thoughts we seem to down. It helps that both shows feature sporting an Uncle Sam-like goatee know, and which she enhanced with ver- a good deal of verbal content and may (Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed nacular quotations that she compiled, well incite Googling of their brilliant him in profile at the Moulin Rouge, ac- with her second husband, the economist subjects: Dorothea Lange, the premier companied by a rotund Oscar Wilde), Paul Taylor, in the book “An American photographer of the human drama of Fénéon merits nothing so much as the Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion,” the Great Depression, and Félix Fénéon, latter-day American honorific “cool.” in 1939. The MOMA show has a subtitle, a shadowy French aesthete and politi- There’s a mystery about Lange, too, “Words and Pictures”—Lange insisted cal anarchist. Fénéon was also a some- which owes to her evasiveness about that photographs complete their mean- time art critic, dealer, collector, and jour- being called an artist, rather than a doc- ing in tandem with verbal information. nal editor, and a legendarily sardonic umentary photographer. In fact, she was That amounts to heresy for a modernist, wit—not an artist but an art-world spark- a supreme artist, whose pictures lodged which Lange intuitively was in formal plug. Best known for having coined, in the Depression in the world’s imagina- discipline, with her masterly composi- tions and eloquent gradations of light.

Lange’s “Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle,” from 1938. Yet she shrugged off the aesthetic appeal MOMA / COURTESY LANGE DOROTHEA

72 THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 of her work, determined not to stand be- giance. Lange’s images show the detained at his office. His defense turned less on tween her subjects and their effects on as regular people who had to cope with evidence than on a stream of witticisms the broadest possible public. an outrageously unjust confinement— that enchanted the Parisian public. Ac- One day in 1936, at a blighted pea and who, in doing so, were buoyed by cused of having “surrounded” himself with field in Nipomo, California, she came being together, at least. Among other two notorious characters, he objected upon the subject of what is perhaps his- strengths, Lange was a poet of the ordi- mildly that it takes at least three people tory’s most famous photograph, “Mi- nary but imperious human need, under to surround anyone. In effect, he won an grant Mother”—a thirty-two-year-old any conditions, for mutual contact. acquittal on grounds of being exasper- Cherokee woman, Florence Owens (later ating. For a time, he edited the avant- Thompson). With three children hud- he first intriguing fact that’s new to garde journal La Revue Blanche. Though dled against her in an open tent, the Tme about the unpredictable Félix not rich, he shrewdly bought and sold art, woman’s mingled anxiety and resilience Fénéon is that he never liked the carni- impervious to imputations of commer- transfix a viewer’s mind and heart. No valesque Pointillist portrait, painted by cialism even as he joined the Commu- sentimental response is possible in the Paul Signac, in 1890, that makes him look nist Party. Little that might pose a prob- evocation of vast, rock-hard realities that like a dandyish magician pulling a lily lem to others troubled Fénéon. He died have come down, for an instant, to one from a hat against a blazing vortex of ab- in 1944, possessed of an immense collec- synoptic point. Publication of the pic- stract patterns. Given the picture by Sig- tion, much of which was sold off three ture in the San Francisco News spurred nac, Fénéon kept it hanging in his home years later, after the death of his widow. a rush of food aid to Nipomo, where until his death, fifty-four years later, but Fénéon’s most startling departure was today a public school is named for Lange. airily pronounced it one of Signac’s weaker to write, as a daily feature in a Parisian It emerged later that Lange had got de- pieces. The Moma show displays it with newspaper, in 1906, more than a thou- tails about her subject wrong. Not a pea works by other of Fénéon’s favorite art- sand unsigned, usually salacious items. picker, Owens had stopped at the field ists—twenty-one by Seurat, several each Titled “Nouvelles en Trois Lignes,” these briefly, awaiting a car repair. She was not by Matisse and Bonnard—as well as ob- were diamond-cut in style, featherweight identified as the image’s subject until jects that reflect his pioneering interest in tone, and exquisitely cruel. In one, he forty-two years later, when she had risen in African, Native American, and Oce- wrote, “Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three to tolerably comfortable circumstances. anic tribal art. Less than enthusiastic times at his wife. Since he missed every This instance of Lange’s faulty report- about Picasso, he greeted “Les Demoi- shot, he decided to aim at his mother- ing suggests to me that her declared def- selles d’Avignon,” in 1907, by advising the in-law and connected.” In another: “Pau- erence to verbal supplementation was a artist to stick to caricature. But he hailed line Rivera, 20, repeatedly stabbed, with a feint, hiding the transcendent artistry of Cubism for its extreme radicalism. hatpin, the face of the inconstant Luthier, her eye in plain sight. Any dramatic change in art might a dishwasher of Chatou, who had un- On a side note, I felt a twinge as I foreshadow a social revolution, by derestimated her.” was looking on my laptop at pictures by Fénéon’s anarchist lights—never mind I’ve found the online Fénéon show a Lange, which include a series taken of if the art was arcane and destined for waterslide into the lore of a staggeringly Japanese-Americans about to be sent to museums. Fénéon generally despised mu- clever man who epitomizes a heyday of internment camps during the Second seums. His life abounded in apparent audacities in pell-mell, modernizing World War—work that was commis- contradictions. He was the chief clerk of Paris. He never wrote a book. He cut a sioned and then suppressed by the fed- France’s Ministry of War when, in 1894, practically invisible figure in public. But, eral government. One of the best known he was arrested on suspicion of conspir- once you’ve made his acquaintance, he is a shot of children, Japanese-Ameri- ing with a cohort of terrorists and stood may pester any thoughts you have of the cans and others, with hands on hearts, trial with twenty-nine others. Bomb- era, like something that is glimpsed and apparently reciting the Pledge of Alle- making materials had been discovered then, when you look, isn’t there. 

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

VOLUME XCVI, NO. 13, May 18, 2020. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for four combined issues: February 17 & 24, June 8 & 15, July 6 & 13, and August 3 & 10) by Condé Nast, a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Eric Gillin, chief business officer; Piper Goodspeed, head of brand revenue strategy; James Guilfoyle, executive director of finance and business operations; Fabio B. Bertoni, general counsel. Condé Nast Global: Roger Lynch, chief executive officer; Wolfgang Blau, chief operating officer and president, international; Pamela Drucker Mann, global chief revenue officer and president, U.S. revenue; Anna Wintour, U.S. artis- tic director and global content advisor; Mike Goss, chief financial officer; Samantha Morgan, chief of staff. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration No. 123242885-RT0001.

POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO THE NEW YORKER, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Write to The New Yorker, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037, call (800) 825-2510, or e-mail [email protected]. Give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent label. Subscribers: If the Post Office alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. If during your subscription term or up to one year after the magazine becomes undeliverable, you are dissatisfied with your subscription, you may receive a full refund on all unmailed issues. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within four weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to The New Yorker, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For advertising inquiries, e-mail [email protected]. For submission guidelines, visit www.newyorker.com. For cover reprints, call (800) 897-8666, or e-mail [email protected]. For permissions and reprint requests, call (212) 630-5656, or e-mail [email protected]. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The New Yorker. The New Yorker’s name and logo, and the various titles and headings herein, are trademarks of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. To subscribe to other Condé Nast magazines, visit www.condenast.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, advise us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037, or call (800) 825-2510.

THE NEW YORKER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ART WORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, ART WORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY THE NEW YORKER IN WRITING.

THE NEW YORKER, M AY 18, 2020 73 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 Julia Suits, must be received by Sunday, May 17th. The finalists in the May 4th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the June 1st issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ” ......

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“I heard dinner needed rescuing.” Nina Preston, Denver, Colo.

“The round table is set.” “Of course—we wait forever, then Scott Campbell, Winnie, Texas two come at the same time.” Elizabeth Novick, Brooklyn, N.Y. “Fine—next time you slay the dragon and I’ll cook.” Ethan Spitalney, Boston, Mass. SWEDISH DESIGN WITH A GREEN SOUL

WITH LOVE FOR CRAFTSMANSHIP Tunic covered with block-printed patterns – handcrafted in organic cotton $118.

SHOP ONLINE • ORDER A CATALOGUE

www.gudrunsjoden.com Stockholm | Est. 1976