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APRIL 6, 2015

5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Steve Coll on Obama and the Iran talks; Charles Grodin; Jersey bikes; Hilary Mantel; James Surowiecki on Puerto Rico’s troubles.

ELif Batuman 24 ELECTRIFIED A mysterious new brain therapy. HallIe cantor 33 COUPLE’S FIRST DINNER PARTY, SERVES SIX Stephen Rodrick 34 THE NERD HUNTER A casting director’s influential comic taste. Evan Osnos 42 BORN RED Where is China heading under Xi Jinping? JOnathan Franzen 56 CARBON CAPTURE Environmentalism vs. conservation.

FICTION Kamel Daoud 66 “MUSA”

THE CRITICS POP MUSIC Kelefa Sanneh 74 Katie Crutchfield and Waxahatchee. BOOKS Adam Kirsch 77 Two new histories of Nazi concentration camps. 81 Briefly Noted Alice Gregory 82 Sarah Manguso’s memoir of a diary.

POEMS John Koethe 26 “Covers Band in a Small Bar” Mark Doty 60 “Deep Lane”

Carter Goodrich COVER “Everybody Who’s Anybody”

DRAWINGS Paul Noth, Kim Warp, David Sipress, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Frank Cotham, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Farley Katz, Edward Steed, Edward Koren, William Haefeli, Tom Chitty, Danny Shanahan, Michael Shaw, Harry Bliss, Victoria Roberts, Emily Flake, Zachary Kanin, Mike Twohy, Kaamran Hafeez SPOTS Christoph Abbrederis THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 1 CONTRIBUTORS evan osnos (“BORN RED,” P. 42) won the 2014 National Book Award for Nonfic- tion for “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China.”

steve coll (COMMENT, P. 17), the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ghost Wars.”

betsy morais (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 20) is a member of the magazine’s editorial staff.

elif batuman (“ELECTRIFIED,” P. 24) is the Sidney Harman Writer in Residence at Baruch College.

John Koethe (POEM, P. 26) is the author of, most recently, “ROTC Kills.” His new book, “The Swimmer,” is due out next year.

hallie cantor (SHOUTS & MURMURS, P. 33) wrote for the third season of Comedy Central’s “Inside Amy Schumer.” She lives in Brooklyn.

stephen rodrick (“THE NERD HUNTER,” P. 34), the author of the memoir “The Magical Stranger,” is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and for Men’s Journal.

jonathan franzen (“CARBON CAPTURE,” P. 56) has written for the magazine since 1994. “Purity,” his fifth novel, will be published in September.

kamel daoud (FICTION, P. 66) is an Algerian journalist based in Oran. His first novel, “The Meursault Investigation,” was published in France last year, and won several awards. It comes out in English in June.

adam kirsch (BOOKS, P. 77) directs the master’s degree in Jewish studies at Columbia University and is a columnist for Tablet.

carter goodrich (COVER) is a writer, illustrator, and character designer for feature animation. His new children’s book, “We Forgot Brock!,” will be published in August.

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

ALSO: DAILY COMMENT / CULTURAL COMMENT: PODCASTS: On the Political Scene, Opinions and analysis by Michael David Remnick and Nathan Thrall talk Specter, Elif Batuman, and others. with Dorothy Wickenden about Israel and the two-state solution. Plus, Amy PAGE-TURNER: An excerpt from Karl Davidson, Patrick Radden Keefe, and Ove Knausgaard’s next book, with an Philip Gourevitch on Out Loud. introduction by Cressida Leyshon. FICTION: The monthly fiction podcast, VIDEO: The latest episode of “Comma with Deborah Treisman and Thomas Mc- Queen,” with Mary Norris. Plus, a video Guane. by Matt Black and Sky Dylan-Robbins about the forty-three missing stu- JOHN CASSIDY: Coverage of politics, dents of Guerrero, Mexico. economics, and more.

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2 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 THE MAIL

DRAMA AT THE MET amount equal to the concessions offered by unions. The unions made conces- We were disheartened to read James sions by taking pay cuts. The Met saved Stewart’s piece about the Metropoli- money not by limiting the number of tan Opera, which presents a one-sided, expensive new productions but by firing negative view of what is, in fact, a thriv- and laying off twenty-two employees. ing, vital organization that is essential The board has failed to rein in Gelb’s to the cultural life of New York, and out-of-control spending, and the re- of the world (“A Fight at the Opera,” lationship between Gelb and Met em- March 23rd). The article emphasizes ployees continues to be antagonistic. the challenging economics of grand A union-driven efficiency committee, opera and the difficulties of the Met’s a partnership between the singers and recent union negotiations without pro- the orchestra, keeps track of—and pro- viding a balanced perspective on a com- tests—the waste and extravagance that pany that is at the height of its artis- are still the order of the day at the Met. tic powers. Today, the Met is at the Alan Gordon fore, making opera globally accessible Executive Director, American Guild of through our game-changing, live, Musical Artists, A.F.L.-C.I.O. high-definition transmissions, which New York City have been seen by millions of people, in seventy countries. We’re certainly As a longtime opera buff and a sub- not suggesting that sustaining the Met scriber to the Met, I was stunned to is an easy task, but, under the watch- learn the extent of the institution’s ful eye of the energetic Peter Gelb, his financial problems. The Met’s oper- management team, and our dedicated ating deficits are so immense that its board, it is a mission that is being ac- assets must be pledged to fund them. complished. There is plenty of drama Gelb’s new “brilliant directors,” as he at the Met, both onstage and off, but has called them, have resulted in con- not as Stewart told it. troversial productions, unhappy opera- Kevin Kennedy, President goers, and a decline in attendance. Ann Ziff, Chairman Opera is primarily a musical genre, William C. Morris, Executive and the art form as we know it today Committee Chairman is the product of composers like Mo- Judith-Ann Corrente, Secretary zart, Verdi, and Wagner, who had keen Metropolitan Opera theatrical sensibilities. Productions by New York City directors who do not understand the scores, and who seek to reinterpret As the principal union representative the story lines, may get good press of solo singers and choristers at the coverage but do not age well. For a Met, I was disappointed by Stewart’s repertory company like the Met, the story about Gelb’s leadership and the goal should be to put on productions battle over contracts. A chorister’s day that enhance the musical experience might start at 10 A.M. and end around rather than detract from it. I hope midnight. During this summer’s con- that Gelb goes before the Chagall tract negotiations, much attention was murals do. focussed on principal artists, and in Franklin Bloomer particular on the plight of the mezzo- Riverside, Conn. soprano Wendy White, who expe- rienced a career-ending injury after • falling from a platform. Eugene Kei- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail lin, an independent financial expert, to [email protected]. Letters may be advised us on what we had to do to edited for length and clarity, and may be pub- lished in any medium. We regret that owing to “save the Met,” and he recommended the volume of correspondence we cannot reply that the Met management save a dollar to every letter or return letters.

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

APRIL WEDNESDAY • THURSDAY • FRIDAY • SATURDAY • SUNDAY • MONDAY • TUESDAY 2015 1ST 2ND 3RD 4TH 5TH 6TH 7TH

The cartoonist Alison Bechdel grew up in a funeral home in Pennsylvania, before launching THE THEATRE | NIGHT LIFE the countercultural comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” in 1983. Her 2006 graphic memoir, “Fun Home,” traced a tragic irony of her past: even as the adolescent Alison was coming into her classical music lesbianism, her mercurial, possibly suicidal father was suppressing his gay identity. The playwright movies | art | DANCE Lisa Kron and the composer Jeanine Tesori adapted the book into an openhearted musical, which ABOVE & BEYOND ran at the Public last season and has just transferred to the Circle in the Square, under the direction FOOD & DRINK of Sam Gold. Pictured above, Beth Malone plays the adult Alison, who watches the action unfold with a pad and pencil; Michael Cerveris and Judy Kuhn play her anguished parents. photograph by Christaan Felber Openings and Previews (Bryce Pinkham) and a wheeler-dealer On the Twentieth Century Airline Highway called Scoop Rosenbaum (Jason Kristin Chenoweth has an energy level Manhattan Theatre Club presents a Biggs). Heidi doesn’t complain that goes beyond anything you find play by Lisa D’Amour, directed by about the unsatisfying nature of in nature, and what she does with Joe Mantello, in which a group of either relationship; together, the it in the Roundabout’s production, oddballs gather in a motel parking men form a kind of whole. Still, directed by Scott Ellis, is far more lot to celebrate the life of a burlesque her greatest affection is reserved for compelling than the musical itself. performer. In previews. (Samuel J. other independent women, alive or The show has a book and lyrics by Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212- dead. Heidi, who attended a women’s Betty Comden and Adolph Green 239-6200.) college in the sixties, took the era’s and a score by Cy Coleman. Given consciousness-raising to heart. But the talents involved, it’s odd how little the Ghosts how does that ideology fit in with of the music stays with you, and how Almeida Theatre’s production of the eighties women who surround little inspiration any of it provides. the Henrik Ibsen play, adapted and her now, chasing celebrity in their Chen oweth, as a self-absorbed star THEATRE directed by Richard Eyre. Lesley power suits? Wasserstein wanted who tries her best to stay that way, Manville stars, as a woman anguished a hit with “Heidi,” and she got it, does all the stuff you’d expect her to by the moral deceptions of her late mostly by making the humor too do—she sings, she mugs, she climbs husband. Previews begin April 5. broad. (Reviewed in our issue of over furniture and climbs over men also notable (BAM’s Harvey Theatre, 651 Fulton 3/30/15.) (Music Box, 239 W. 45th who tower above her. But she can’t An American in Paris St., Brooklyn. 718-636-4100.) St. 212-239-6200.) bring to life a musical whose lack of Palace relevance ends up being its prime The Audience Grounded I’m Looking for Helen source of interest and “entertainment.” Schoenfeld Anne Hathaway stars in a play by Twelvetrees (3/30/15) (American Airlines Theatre, George Brant, about a fighter pilot In the early days of the talkies, Helen 227 W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300.) Buzzer Public reassigned to flying drones. Julie Twelvetrees appeared in pictures Taymor directs. Previews begin for Fox and RKO, before subsiding Placebo Clinton the Musical April 7. (Public, 425 Lafayette St. into obscurity, then overdosing on In Melissa James Gibson’s new play, New World Stages 212-967-7555.) sedatives. The playwright and actor the authoritative Carrie Coon plays Cry, Trojans! David Greenspan effects a resurrec- a scientist named Louise. Louise’s St. Ann’s Warehouse Iowa tion. Inspired by a wistful publicity mother is dying, and Louise is at work The Curious Incident Ken Rus Schmoll directs the world still and a report that Helen played on a drug that’s meant to stimulate of the Dog in the Night-Time première of a new musical play by Blanche DuBois in summer stock, he female sexual arousal—a necessary part Ethel Barrymore Jenny Schwartz, with music by Todd imagines a young man (Greenspan) of life, since life begins in women. Almond and lyrics by Schwartz and hopping a Greyhound bus in search Living unhappily in what looks like Doctor Zhivago Broadway Theatre Almond, in which a girl must move of the faded star (Brooke Bloom). student housing with her boyfriend, to the Midwest after her mother falls The script also limns Helen’s rela- Jonathan (William Jackson Harper), Finding Neverland in love with someone on Facebook. tionships with her husbands (Keith who’s studying to be a classicist and Lunt-Fontanne In previews. (Playwrights Horizons, Nobbs plays the first; Greenspan can’t give up smoking—it’s one of Fish in the Dark 416 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200.) the others) and some of Greenspan’s the things they talk about way too Cort own story. A sequentially scrambled much—Louise finds herself drifting, Fun Home Living on Love bioplay becomes a meditation on the emotionally, toward another man, Circle in the Square Renée Fleming, Anna Chlumsky, past—evanescent, irrecoverable. At Tom (the gifted Alex Hurt), who pays Gigi Jerry O’Connell, and Douglas Sills times, Greenspan seems besotted attention to her in ways that Jonathan Neil Simon star in Joe DiPietro’s comedy, in with his own gifts, but those gifts cannot. Under the direction of Daniel Hamilton which a famous opera singer hires are ample, and the director Leigh Aukin, the actors are better than the Public a handsome young man to write her Silverman uses them tenderly and script, and what’s more painful than Hamlet autobiography. Kathleen Marshall astutely. Perhaps the play itself watching actors try to make up for Classic Stage Company directs. In previews. (Longacre, 220 seems too slight, too ephemeral, a playwright’s failings? (3/30/15) Hand to God W. 48th St. 212-239-6200.) but, as Helen says, “We’re all for- (Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd Booth gotten—soon enough.” (Abrons Arts St. 212-279-4200. Through April 5.) Hedwig and the Angry Skylight Center, 466 Grand St. 212-352-3101. Inch Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy re- Through April 4.) Small Mouth Sounds Belasco prise their roles in the play by David In Bess Wohl’s nearly noiseless comedy, Honeymoon in Vegas Hare, after a run in London last year. Josephine and I six urbanites gather upstate for a silent Nederlander Stephen Daldry directs the drama, The British actress and writer Cush retreat, keeping their lips zipped and Into the Woods in which a young teacher is visited Jumbo performs her passionate and their minds quiet with mixed success. Laura Pels by her former lover, a restaurateur essayistic version of the life and times Laura Jellinek’s set is a strip of blond whose wife has just died. In previews. of Josephine Baker, in an intermis- floor bisecting the audience, on which It Shoulda Been You Brooks Atkinson Opens April 2. (Golden, 252 W. 45th sionless monologue directed, with the actors (Jessica Almasy, Marcia St. 212-239-6200.) care, by Phyllida Lloyd. Sometimes DeBonis, Brad Heberlee, Sakina It’s Only a Play the autobiographical elements of the Jaffrey, Erik Lochtefeld, and Babak Jacobs Wolf Hall: Parts One & Two show are amusing: Jumbo juxtaposes Tafti) indulge in plenty of physical The King and I The Royal Shakespeare Company’s her frantic worry with Baker’s frantic comedy and clever pantomime. Still, Vivian Beaumont productions of Hilary Mantel’s success. She is very much enamored there’s a visible vein of melancholy The Mystery of books “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up of Baker the performance artist, a lying just below the surface jokes, Love & Sex the Bodies” come to Broadway. In creature who became an amalgamation underneath the hiking pants. Poignant Mitzi E. Newhouse previews. (Winter Garden, Broadway of many different ways of being. It’s and droll, this is a play about the On the Town at 50th St. 212-239-6200.) unfortunate that, toward the end of difficulty of communication, verbal Lyric 3 the show, Jumbo makes a plea for or otherwise, and, like Wohl’s earlier Posterity audience sympathy that feels wrong, works (“American Hero,” “Pretty Atlantic Theatre Company. Now Playing like stock melodrama. There’s no Filthy”), the unlikeliness of ever Through April 5. The Heidi Chronicles need: she has us the minute we see actually changing your life. Under Soldier X Wendy Wasserstein’s 1988 play, which those wide-set eyes and those long Rachel Chavkin’s direction, the actors HERE won the Pulitzer Prize, tells the story legs, running hither and yon, beating offer lucid, generous performances, Something Rotten! of an art historian, Heidi Holland out time on a small stage that’s made as does Jojo Gonzalez, as the disem- St. James (Elisabeth Moss), who is in love with infinite by her charm and exertions. bodied voice of the flu-stricken Zen The Visit two essentially unavailable men: a (3/30/15) (Public, 425 Lafayette St. master. (Ars Nova, 511 W. 54th St. Lyceum gay doctor named Peter Patrone 212-967-7555. Through April 5.) 212-352-3101.) 6 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015

NIGHT LIFE

drumming was “the most amazing drum sound I’ve ever heard.” Their songs have been recorded by Bruce Springsteen, the Fall, and the Flaming Lips, and the Ramones and the White Stripes have cited them as an influence. During the garage- rock revival of the early aughts, the Sonics were rediscovered by a new group of listeners, and they reunited in 2007. This week, the band releases “This Is the Sonics,” its first still psycho album of new material in nearly half a century, one of the longest Fifty years after they released their début album, the Sonics are on their first major U.S. tour. intervals between recordings in rock history. The new work garage rock, the genre that flourished in the nineteen-sixties, doesn’t exactly demand has the same primal intensity innovation. Songs should be crunchy and upbeat, and if they focus on girls, or cars, or girls in cars, of its previous records, thanks they’ll pretty much do the trick. Early on, the Sonics intuitively understood this—but they also in no small part to the producer played harder, faster, and with more grim aggression than anyone in Tacoma, Washington, had ever Jim Diamond, who has worked thought to play. Morbid hits—now cult favorites—like “Psycho” and “The Witch” sounded angrier with the White Stripes, the and more abrasive than any form of rock and roll that had come before. On “Strychnine,” the vocalist Mooney Suzuki, and a slew Jerry Roslie menacingly intones, “Some folks like water, some folks like wine / But I like the taste of of other contemporary acts straight strychnine.” who owe a debt to the Sonics. At the time, Tacoma was the working-class Liverpool to Seattle’s swingin’ London. “My dad Diamond recorded the band in ran a crane on the waterfront,” the saxophonist Rob Lind said recently. “There were great musicians mono, to capture the spirit of in Seattle, but the music was jazzy and swingy. We were blue-collar guys—we wanted to rock.” the sixties output. Their formula—straight, pounding beats, bellowing or screeched vocals, pre-stomp-box distortion Lind quit his day job, and he achieved by maxing out their amps’ volume—presaged the volatile energy of punk rock. It also and the Sonics have embarked built them a fan base in the Northwest “teen club” scene, where bored youth drank in the parking on a tour of the U.S., with a lots of halls with names like the Red Carpet and the Lake Hills roller rink. But a lack of national stop at Irving Plaza on April 8. distribution prevented them from reaching a wider audience. The Sonics never toured extensively, With the band members in their and hit their peak opening for groups like the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and the Kinks in Seattle. seventies, will the live show still Roslie left, Lind was drafted into Vietnam in 1967, and the band evaporated, its five members pack a punch? Lind chuckled. spending the next forty years building families and careers as car salesmen, teachers, and, in Lind’s “It’s the most fun I can have case, an airline pilot. without getting in trouble with But the Sonics made a deep impression. A snaky cover of “Strychnine” found its way onto the the cops.” Cramps’ début album, from 1980. In 1994, Kurt Cobain said that Bob Bennett’s machine-gun —Benjamin Shapiro ILLUSTRATION BY JASHAR AWAN THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 7 Rock and Pop can contain them. (66 N. 6th St., Brooklyn. Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated 718-486-5400. March 31-April 1.) lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. “Jim White vs. the Packway Handle Band” This project is a fruitful collaboration between The Decemberists White—a mystical, expressive singer-songwriter It’s been four years since the release of the whose experiences include stints in the worlds Portland, Oregon, band’s last album, “The King of theology, boxing, fashion, and N.Y.C. cab- Is Dead,” an outstanding contribution to the driving—and the Packway Handle Band, a modern American folk-rock tradition. In the intervening bluegrass quintet out of Athens, Georgia. The years, the lead singer and songwriter, Colin Packways asked White to produce a record, and Meloy, successfully exercised his epic-narrative he was so taken with their approach that he de- muscles by collaborating with his wife, the cided to join their band. As it happened, White illustrator Carson Ellis, on the best-selling had an old collection of bluegrass tunes that “Wildwood” trilogy of kids’ books. On the he wanted to try out, and the group had some band’s new record, “What a Terrible World, originals of their own that fit White’s voice. So What a Beautiful World,” Meloy reaffirms his they got together for a fine new album, “Take It mastery of concise pop expression. Free-form Like a Man,” and a tour. (Le Poisson Rouge, 158 d.j.s should be scrambling to put the album’s Bleecker St. 212-505-3474. April 2.) first single, “Make You Better,” in a set with 3 a couple of other pretty good rock songs, the Kinks’ “Better Things” and the Beatles’ “Getting Jazz and Standards Better.” (Beacon Theatre, Broadway at 74th St. Tom Harrell 212-465-6500. April 6.) A player obviously drawn to challenges, the formidable post-bop trumpeter Harrell invites The Kennedys Ambrose Akinmusire, an abundantly gifted fel- Pete and Maura Kennedy spent several years low-trumpeter half his age, to join the leader as playing in Nanci Griffith’s band before releasing his second horn. Harrell has also shaken things a sparkling début, “River of Fallen Stars,” in up in his quintet’s rhythm section by replacing 1995. They’ve since put out more than a dozen the customary pianist with the guitarist Charles records, and they’ve been married for twenty Altura. (Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Ave. S., at years. Now the Kennedys are celebrating the 11th St. 212-255-4037. March 31-April 5.) release of their latest album, “West,” an inspired collection of sixties-flecked folk rock full of broad Sheila Jordan with the Steve Kuhn Trio vistas. They each have solo projects coming up, An acolyte and friend of Charlie Parker, the too. Maura’s “Villanelle,” a collaboration with singer Jordan absorbed bebop from the source, the poet B. D. Love, is set to come out at the but she’s also a committed modernist whose end of April, and Pete’s “Heart of Gotham,” a style has evolved with the ensuing decades. One song cycle about their home town, is due later of the key collaborators who assisted Jordan this year. (Rockwood Music Hall, 196 Allen St. in her artistic growth is the equally inventive 212-477-4155. April 3.) pianist Kuhn, who leads the trio supporting her at Birdland this week. (315 W. 44th St. 212-581- London Souls 3080. March 31-April 4.) Shortly after the band recorded its second album, “Here Come the Girls,” in 2012, its guitarist and Bucky Pizzarelli / Ed Laub lead songwriter, Tash Neal, was the victim of a The grace, profundity, and wit that attend the play- horrendous hit-and-run accident, when the cab ing of the eighty-nine-year-old guitarist Pizzarelli he was in was struck by a drag-racing BMW are an outgrowth of the literally thousands of gigs near the corner of Bleecker and Broadway. His and recording sessions he’s participated in. This survival, much less his music career, hung in the acknowledged dean of mainstream jazz has developed balance. As anyone who attended the group’s brief a fine rapport with the guitarist Laub, a familiar showcase performance at Rockwood Music Hall duet partner. Between the two of them, they have in February can attest, Neal has made a terrific fourteen strings for making exquisite music, as each recovery. This two-man band—Chris St. Hilaire plays an atypical seven-string guitar. (Jazz at Kitano, is the drummer and second singer—gives you 66 Park Ave., at 38th St. 212-885-7119. April 4.) everything you could ask of a rock group: great songs, powerful, dynamic playing and singing, and Sara Serpa a true sense of joy and brotherhood. Their April 7 This singer doesn’t have an overpowering voice, gig at the Bowery Ballroom is a homecoming but her subtlety and sureness command serious celebration for the delayed release of the new attention. Her City Fragments ensemble, at the record. (6 Delancey St. 212-533-2111.) Cornelia Street Café on April 4, unites her with two other singers, Sofia Rei and Aubrey Johnson, Twin Shadow who are backed by a notable instrumental trio of George Lewis, Jr., who records and performs the guitarist André Matos, the bassist Thomas under this name, was born in the Dominican Morgan, and the drummer Tyshawn Sorey. (29 Republic, raised in Florida, and is now based Cornelia St. 212-989-9319.) in L.A., after spending time in Brooklyn. His musical history is similarly spread out; he’s Randy Weston worked as a composer for a touring dance The Brooklyn-born pianist, composer, and band- company and fronted a punk band, Mad Man leader, who celebrates his eighty-ninth birthday Films. But under his current moniker, he’s this month, has had African culture on his mind found his calling as an electro-pop artist with a throughout his lengthy career, directly referencing knack for big hooks, high drama, and an eighties the primal roots music of jazz in his compositions New Wave style. On his third LP and first and ambitious large-scale projects. His long-standing major-label release, “Eclipse,” the singer takes African Rhythms band includes the frenetic bassist his performances to the next level, delivering Alex Blake, the saxophonist T. K. Blue, and the seismic anthems—it will be a wonder if a venue marvellously adaptable drummer Lewis Nash. (Jazz the size of the Music Hall of Williamsburg Standard, 116 E. 27th St. 212-576-2232. April 2-5.) 8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ on the Lincoln Center. April 6 at 6. For information Cross.” The listening experience will be enhanced about free tickets, see lincolncenter.org.) by “Seven Words,” a simultaneous video presen- tation by Ofri Cnaani arranged in collaboration Cutting Edge Concerts: with the ensemble’s musicians. (Fifth Ave. at American Modern Ensemble 82nd St. 212-570-3949. April 2 at 7.) The enduring new-music series, curated every spring by the composer-conductor Victoria Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Bond, has moved from Symphony Space to Center: “New Music in the Kaplan the stylish downtown music club SubCulture. Penthouse” The first concert is offered by Robert Pater- cLASSical The latest concert in an important and consis- son’s outstanding contemporary group, which tently engaging series in the Society’s schedule will mark its tenth anniversary by performing brings a collection of sterling young performers the New York premières of pieces by Nicolas MUSIC (including the pianist Gilles Vonsattel and the Scherzinger and Mark Winges, along with music violinist James Ehnes) together with works by by Bond and Paterson (the world première of established mid-career composers such as Derek “Shards”). (45 Bleecker St. subculturenewyork. Bermel (the New York première of “Death with com. April 6 at 8.) Interruptions,” a piano trio), Aaron Jay Kernis Opera (a recent piece, “Two Movements with Bells”), Raphaël Sévère Metropolitan Opera Jukka Tiensuu, and Jörg Widmann. In addition, The young clarinettist, winner of the First Prize in Like some of his later masterworks, Verdi’s there’s music by a vaunted modernist, the late the prestigious Young Concert Artists International early-period melodrama “Ernani” relies upon Leon Kirchner (the Piano Trio No. 1). (Rose Bldg., Auditions, takes the stage at Merkin Concert Hall farfetched plot twists to test the characters’ Lincoln Center. 212-875-5788. April 2 at 7:30.) to perform sonatas by Brahms and Poulenc as well mettle and whip up a terrific sense of urgency as Pierre Boulez’s “Domaines” and Stravinsky’s in the music. Fortunately, the company’s music Joy in Singing: Stephen Paulus Memorial Suite from “The Soldier’s Tale” (with the pianist director, James Levine, knows how to capitalize Concert Paul Montag and the violinist Paul Huang). (129 on the abundance of propulsive rhythms and Paulus, who died last fall, from complications of a W. 67th St. 212-307-6656. April 7 at 7:30.) soaring melodies to unleash the brash vitality stroke, spent more than three decades producing of the young Verdi’s music. Singing the role operatic, orchestral, and vocal music of impeccable “Before Bach”: L’Arpeggiata of Elvira with a big, clear voice, the soprano technique and well-honed audience appeal. He Christina Pluhar’s acclaimed period ensemble Angela Meade anchors a cast that includes was also a staunch advocate for contemporary kicks off Carnegie Hall’s extensive series of Francesco Meli (a thrillingly ardent Ernani), composers, a number of whom will certainly spring concerts devoted to the music of the late Dmitry Belosselskiy (a grave, forbidding Silva), show up to pay tribute to him in a concert that Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Her programs and the septuagenarian tenor superstar Plácido includes the song cycles “A Heartland Portrait” celebrate two geniuses of florid music for voices Domingo, whose typically lustrous timbre fails to (with poems by Ted Kooser) and “Artsongs” and instruments: Francesco Cavalli, on the first register in the baritone role of Don Carlo. (April (settings of poems about art by Rilke, Wilbur, night, and Henry Purcell, on the second. (Zankel 4 at 1.) • Also playing: Originally seen in 2007, O’Hara, and others). (Bruno Walter Auditorium, Hall. 212-247-7800. April 7-8 at 7:30.) this revival of Mary Zimmerman’s Victorian-era production of “Lucia di Lammermoor” features Albina Shagimuratova in the title role, with the honey-voiced tenor Joseph Calleja, as her beloved, and Luca Salsi, as her disapproving brother; Maurizio Benini conducts. (April 1 and April 7 at 7:30 and April 4 at 8.) • Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” arguably the grandest of his grand operas, portrays the palace intrigue in King Philip II’s court during the Spanish Inquisition. With half a dozen finely drawn characters, a few love triangles, and one mildly incestuous love affair that threatens the welfare of at least three nations, there is enough drama—and magnificent music—for two Verdi operas. The Met’s cast includes Yonghoon Lee, Barbara Frittoli, Ekaterina Gubanova, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Ferruccio Furlanetto (a Philip II of legendary stature), and James Morris; Yan- nick Nézet-Séguin. (April 2 and April 6 at 7.) (Metropolitan Opera House. 212-362-6000.) 3

Recitals Murray Perahia After more than forty years before the public, this pianist’s playing may not offer fireworks, but it reveals a burnished authority and a probing mind. His program at Carnegie Hall gently links the German and French schools: there are not only sonatas by Haydn and Beethoven (in E-Flat Major, “Les Adieux”) and Bach’s French Suite No. 6 in E Major but also works by two Parisian composers who revered them, Franck (the stately Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue) and Chopin (the dazzling Scherzo No. 1 in B Minor). (212-247-7800. April 1 at 8.)

Attacca Quartet: “Seven Words” The Metropolitan Museum’s string quartet-in- residence completes a stimulating season with one of the grandest of Christian sacred works, THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 9

MOVIES

Setting much of the taciturn, delicately choreographed action amid the city’s bustle, the director fuses a rigorously stylized vision with incisive documentary observation; Tsai is one of the great sardonic observers of urban spaces, with a keen eye for both the alien chill of gleaming towers and the poetic allure of decrepitude. In “Vive l’Amour,” Tsai displays fetishes and fascinations that, since then, he has elevated into a personal cinematic mythology: real-estate machinations and leaky roofs, dripping water and lost keys, takeout food and lonely teardrops, melons (which he treats as erotic objects) and bathrooms (ditto). His vision of pop culture is radically sexualized; he treats movie theatres as both artistic The actor Lee Kang-Sheng and a watermelon both play major roles in “Vive l’Amour.” havens and pickup joints, as in “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” (screening April 26), and, in sex and the city “The Wayward Cloud” (April 12), he works popular songs The director Tsai Ming-Liang eroticizes Asian cinema. into comical, and sometimes pornographic, production the surge in artistic filmmaking from East Asia in the nineteen-eighties and numbers. nineties yielded one director of an uncompromisingly daring aestheticism, Tsai Ming-Liang, Over the course of his who was born in Malaysia but has long been based in Taiwan. The upcoming retrospective of his career, Tsai, who has said that work at the Museum of the Moving Image (April 10–26) is a long-needed overview of his vast his 2014 feature, “Stray Dogs,” and distinctive achievements. may be his last, has developed The opening-night offering, “Vive l’Amour,” from 1994, is a wryly comic drama about a a subtly comprehensive view romantic triangle as well as the story of a luxurious and empty Taipei apartment where a suicidal of modern life; he reveals salesman of cremation urns (Lee Kang-Sheng) lives as a squatter. When a real-estate agent economic inequity and rotting (Yang Kuei-Mei) brings her lover (Chen Chao-Jung), a street vender, there, Tsai stages the infrastructure behind luxurious trio’s erotic comings and goings with an incremental screwball precision, as if Jacques Tati had façades, and shows physical given free rein to his sexual fantasies. But the filmmaker grounds the irony in quietly flamboyant needs and emotional desires melodramatic moods, as in a scene where the agent waits alone in bed with an operatic pout that surging through the city’s order calls to mind grand Technicolor tearjerkers. The center of Tsai’s singular universe is the slight, and fracturing it, illuminating angular, puckish Lee, who stars in all of Tsai’s features and lends them the soulful yearnings of it, humanizing it. silent-comedy luminaries as well as an uninhibited carnality, both homosexual and heterosexual. —Richard Brody PICTURE CORPORATION CENTRAL MOTION COURTESY 10 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 Now Playing The Devil Is a Woman Veronica Roth), it takes a month of Chappie For his last film with Marlene exposition for the action to kick in, but Neill Blomkamp’s new film returns Dietrich, from 1935, the director when it does it offers a special-effects him to Johannesburg, where his Josef von Sternberg—working as spectacle that’s something to see. It’s Opening 5 to 7 first—and his most incisive—feature, his own cinematographer—streaked set in a future American dystopia Victor Levin directed this “District 9,” took place. The power of and slashed the screen with shadows that’s divided into personality-based romantic comedy, about that movie derived, in part, from the and highlights, clotted it with lace “factions” oppressed by a government a young writer (Anton sardonic glance that it cast on racial and foliage, to match the serpentine headed by the tyrannical Jeanine (Kate Yelchin) who has an affair divisions, but those are barely touched extravagance of his wily heroine’s Winslet). Tris (Shailene Woodley) with a diplomat’s wife upon here; if he holds anything up to schemes. The surprise is in the is among the “divergent”—those (Bérénice Marlohe). scrutiny now (and you can’t always tell, politics: as the Spanish Civil War with too much moxie for any one Co-starring Olivia Thirlby and amid the sound and fury), it is the was heating up, von Sternberg set the slot, who are considered enemies Frank Langella. Opening unregulated craze for law and order. action in turn-of-the-century Spain, of the state. Facing arrest, Tris, her April 3. (In limited release.) Gun-toting police drones are already where Antonio (Cesar Romero), a boyfriend, Four (Theo James), and Furious 7 on the streets, but a young computer dashing young revolutionary, returns her brother, Caleb (Ansel Elgort), A new installment in the “Fast and Furious” series, expert (Dev Patel) seeks something from Parisian exile amid the turmoil escape to urban ruins, where Jeanine about a battling crew more refined: a robot that can think of carnival week and encounters the catches her and subjects her to a of street racers, starring and feel for itself. The result is Chappie bewitching songstress Concha Perez series of “sims”—death-defying A.I. Paul Walker (in his last (voiced by Sharlto Copley), who is no (Dietrich). Antonio’s friend Don adventures that test character along film appearance), Vin sooner created than he is hijacked by Pasqual (Lionel Atwill), one of her with survival skills, in order to open Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, hoodlums and taught to dress, talk, victims, tries his best to warn him, a mystic box of secrets that will save Michelle Rodriguez, and and fight like a gang member. But telling his own tale of woe (seen in Jeanine’s decadent and shaky regime. Jason Statham. Directed by will he obey only those instructions, extended flashbacks), but the romantic These imaginary adventures—which James Wan. Opening or somehow become a wiser and more adventurer is not to be deterred, even can truly get Tris killed—are the core April 3. (In wide release.) delicate droid? And does the world at the risk of his mission and his of the film, and they’re wild rides, That Guy Dick Miller really need artificially intelligent life. Despite his evident sympathies starting with the snakelike cables A documentary about the character actor, directed poets, anyway? These questions are for the daring freethinker Antonio, that connect and suspend Tris. Many by Elijah Drenner. Opening thrown away as the movie accelerates von Sternberg finds a lurid erotic of her acrobatic ordeals take place April 3. (Anthology Film into brashness, urged on by a phalanx charge in the cruelty and the con- high above the ravaged skyline, and Archives.) of poor performances—the prime straints of church-bound despotism they’re not for acrophobes; the disso- Lambert & Stamp offenders being Ninja and Yo-Landi and a heightened thrill in a femme lution of her simulated victims into A documentary, directed Visser, from the South African rap-rave fatale who may prove truly fatal. digital detritus is among the film’s by James D. Cooper, outfit Die Antwoord. Hugh Jackman, —Richard Brody (MOMA; April 1-5.) more memorable gimmicks. There’s about two underground dressed as a big-game hunter in shorts little substance and little depth, but filmmakers who discovered and boots, and armed with a haircut Imitation of Life Woodley, with her preternatural poise, and managed the Who. that could stop a rhino, plays the evil For his last Hollywood film, released offers a worthy simulation of drama. Opening April 3. (In limited maker of another robot—a tank-style in 1959, the German director Douglas Directed by Robert Schwentke; release.) destroyer, clearly borrowed from the Sirk unleashed a melodramatic torrent co-starring Miles Teller.—R.B. (In Ned Rifle set of “RoboCop.” The principal charm of rage at the corrupt core of American wide release.) Hal Hartley directed this of the film arises from Chappie’s ears, life—the unholy trinity of racism, drama, about a young man It Follows (Liam Aiken) who plans to which prick up and droop like those commercialism, and puritanism. The kill his father. Co-starring of a titanium rabbit.—Anthony Lane story starts in 1948, when two widowed The setting of David Robert Mitchell’s Parker Posey. Opening (In wide release.) mothers of young daughters meet at film is Detroit, and he makes full April 1. (IFC Center and Coney Island: Lora Meredith (Lana use of its contrasts: placid suburban video on demand.) Cinderella Turner), an aspiring actress, who is neighborhoods give way to the un- Woman in Gold The true believer, not the smart-ass, is white, and Annie Johnson (Juanita tenanted and the derelict. When the A drama, based on the true the target of this new live-action telling Moore), a homeless and unemployed surface of life is so easily cracked, story of Maria Altmann, a of the fairy tale. The writer, Chris Weitz, woman, who is black. The Johnsons it comes as no surprise that horror, Jewish woman who fled and the director, Kenneth Branagh, allow move in with the Merediths; Annie like disease, can worm its way in. So Nazi-occupied Austria and no knowing winks to obscure our view keeps house while Lora auditions. it is that a teen-age girl named Jay later sued to recover her of the story: Cinderella (Lily James) A decade later, Lora is the toast (Maika Monroe) inherits a nameless family’s art works. Directed by Simon Curtis; starring suffers first the death of her mother of Broadway, and Annie (who still plague. After sex in a car, she finds Helen Mirren. Opening (Hayley Atwell) and then the marriage calls her Miss Lora) continues to herself stalked by one remorseless April 1. (In wide release.) of her doting father (Ben Chaplin) maintain the house. Meanwhile, figure after another; she alone can to Lady Tremaine (Cate Blanchett), Lora endures troubled relationships see them, but they will wipe her out revivals and festivals Titles in bold are reviewed. whose dreadful daughters (Holliday with a playwright (Dan O’Herlihy), unless she can pass the curse on to Grainger and Sophie McShera) come an adman (John Gavin), and her somebody else, by carnal means. Anthology Film as part of the package. We are granted, daughter (Sandra Dee); and Annie’s How you interpret this doomy Archives as required, a fairy godmother (Helena light-skinned, teen-age daughter, state of affairs will depend on your The films of Dick Miller. Bonham Carter), a golden coach sprung Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), is working response to Mitchell’s narrative April 4 at 5: “Sorority from a pumpkin, a ball, a slipper, and as a bump-and-grind showgirl and rhythms; in between the frights that Girl” (1957, Roger a prince (Richard Madden). The whole passing as white, even as whites pass jump out at irregular intervals, he Corman). • April 4 at 9:15: “Gremlins” (1984, movie, despite its chest of digital tricks, as happy and Annie exhausts herself lets the action slide into anomie, as Joe Dante), with a cast is almost heroically old-fashioned; the mastering her anger and maintaining the heroine and her friends, one of effect is to confirm the irrepressible her self-control. For Sirk, the grand whom keeps quoting Dostoyevsky, force of the Cinderella myth and finale is a funeral for the prevailing drift through their bored and all but the archetypes that it enfolds. Assis- order, a trumpet blast against social adultless days. Violent extinction, in tance is given, in rapturous style, by façades and walls of silence. The such a light, becomes just one of Sandy Powell’s costumes and by the price of success, in his view, may be those things. With Keir Gilchrist, production design of Dante Ferretti. the death of the soul, but its wages as a fine-boned boy who would die But did nobody at Disney think of afford retirement, withdrawal, and for the love of Jay.—A.L. (3/16/15) asking another Italian master, Ennio contemplation—and, upon completing (In limited release.) Morricone, to bestow his gifts? The the film, that’s what Sirk did.—R.B. score, by Patrick Doyle, is efficiently (Film Forum; April 3-9.) Jauja movie OF THE WEEK grand, but a myth as memorable as The Argentine director Lisandro A video discussion of Eliza this demands a theme to match.—A.L. Insurgent Alonso refracts John Ford’s classic Hittman’s “It Felt Like Love,” (Reviewed in our issue of 3/16/15.) (In In the second film in the “Divergent” Western “The Searchers” into a from 2013, in our digital edition EVERETT wide release.) trilogy (based on the novels by modernist blend of myth, politics, and online. THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 11 and existential adventure. Viggo Goffredo to Rome with Alexandre Ferrara films with plain, wide-eyed Mortensen stars as Gunnar Dinesen, so that she can stay with Lavinia terror, are bitterly revelatory about reunion including Miller, a Danish officer who works with Ar- in the lakeside splendor of Stresa. sex, marriage, and ambition. Ferrara gentine forces in Patagonia, in a war Green films architectural treasures has repudiated this R-rated cut made Zach Galligan, and Phoebe Cates. • April 5 at 9:15: against the indigenous people—and is with analytical wonder; his richly by the film’s producers, but he needn’t “Gremlins 2: The New accompanied by his fourteen-year-old textured images fuse with the story to worry: the movie packs a singular, Batch” (1990, Dante). • daughter, Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Malling evoke the essence of humane urbanity agonized vision that seems entirely April 6 at 9: “Hollywood Agger). When Ingeborg runs off with and the relationships that it fosters, the director’s own. In English and Boulevard” (1976, Dante and an Argentinean soldier, Dinesen gets whether educational, familial, or French.—R.B. (IFC Center and video Allan Arkush). on his horse and heads off alone to find erotic. In Italian and French.—R.B. on demand.) BAM Cinématek her. Alonso frames the action in long (In limited release.) “Overdue: James B. Harris.” takes that reveal the landscape’s range While We’re Young April 1 at 7:30: “Some Call It Loving” (1973). • April 2 of colors and textures. He captures Serena In Noah Baumbach’s new film, Ben at 4:30, 7, and 9:30: “Fast- crucial details at great distances, as if Susanne Bier’s new film, set in 1929, Stiller and Naomi Watts play Josh and Walking” (1982). • infinitesimally, forcing the viewer to marks the third pairing of Bradley Cornelia, a married and childless couple April 3 at 2, 4:30, and 9:30: share Dinesen’s concentrated, agitated Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, who live in New York and worry that “The Bedford Incident” gaze. As the story veers into mytho- after “Silver Linings Playbook” and their life together, though comfortable, (1965). • April 4 at 2 and poetic wonders, some of its tropes get “American Hustle.” He plays George is no fun. Enter a younger couple, 6:30: “Cop” (1988). • heavy-handed, but Alonso’s leaps of Pemberton, who runs a logging Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and April 5 at 2, 7:15, and 9:15 time, his view of the wiles of combat business in the Smoky Mountains; Amanda Seyfried), who take them up and April 6 at 4:30 and 9:30: “The Killing” (1956, and the rigors of survival, and his she plays his wife, Serena, an unusual and teach them the error, or the frozen Stanley Kubrick). • reflection of present-day splendors mixture of nature-loving wild child timidity, of their ways. The movie is April 5 at 4: “Lolita” in past plunder lend the visually and platinum blonde, who gazes upon at its simplest—and its best—when (1962, Kubrick). • April 6 sumptuous experience a haunting him and declares, “Our love began the setting the tired style of the older at 7: “Telefon” (1977, Don depth. In Spanish and Danish.—R.B. day we met.” Both actors, gracefully folk against the pretensions of the Siegel). • “Afrofuturism on (In limited release.) dressed and lightly anguished, draw hipsters. (Jamie makes a great show, Film.” April 3 at 7: “Beat deep on their professional aplomb for instance, of refusing to Google, This!: A Hip Hop History” Late Spring in a bid to keep a straight face; the declaring that he would prefer just (1984, Dick Fontaine). Noriko (Setsuko Hara), a widowed credible, bulked-up pain that Cooper not to know.) Needless to say, that Film Forum professor’s grown daughter, loves brought to “American Sniper” seems insouciance begins to fall apart; In revival. April 3-9 (call for the scholarly Hattori (Jun Usami), a world away. The plot, adapted from we get a fussy plot, woven around showtimes): “Imitation of Life.” who is already engaged. Her father the novel by Ron Rash, whisks us the fact that both men make docu- (Chishu Ryu) and her meddling aunt from detailed worries about bank mentaries, as does Cornelia’s father Film Society of Lincoln Center (Haruko Sugimura) arrange a suitable loans to the symbolic predations of (Charles Grodin), and that Jamie is The films of Walerian but loveless match for her, which she eagles and panthers; if the result not quite the Zen-tinted joy-bringer Borowczyk. April 2 at 2:45 would refuse, if only she could find a hangs together at all, it’s thanks to that he seemed. The movie is tilted and 7: “The Strange Case socially acceptable excuse. In Yasujiro Morten Søborg, the cinematogra- too far toward the male side of the of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Ozu’s 1949 film, rigid formality leaves pher, who worked with Bier on the generational clash; Seyfried is often Osbourne” (1981). • April 3 much unsaid, but Ozu reveals the fine films she made in her native confined to the wings of the action, at 5 and 9:15: “The Beast” hidden depths of ordinary life with a Denmark, and who draws out the and, when Watts is given space on (1975). • April 4 at 9:30: quiet astonishment and observes his surreal contrast between Serena’s center stage, she leaves us craving “The Streetwalker” (1976), introduced by the characters with an exacting subtlety silks and the wood and iron of her more. The film feels more blithe than cinematographer Sean of expression. He views the artifacts surroundings. With Rhys Ifans, as a earlier Baumbach projects, yet it’s also Price Williams. • April 5 at of Occupation with irony—between hunter who sees visions, and David his most restless rumination on the 4:30 and 9:30: “Immoral exultant images of Noriko’s romantic Dencik, as George’s right-hand man theme of age; between the zinging Tales” (1974), introduced by bicycle ride with Hattori, Ozu wryly and hilariously jealous admirer.—A.L. jokes and the customary sprees of Williams. shows a roadside Coca-Cola sign—but (In limited release.) music, you can hear the ominous pulse Japan Society films the serenity of a tea ceremony of passing time.—A.L. (3/30/15) (In “The Most Beautiful.” with reverence. By the end, Noriko’s Welcome to New York limited release.) April 3 at 7: “No Regrets open and forthright smile becomes a This drama by the director Abel for Our Youth” (1946, Akira rictus of pain, and neither Japanese Ferrara is loosely based on the French White God Kurosawa). • April 4 at 4: tradition nor American-style freedom politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s Kornél Mundruczó’s film is set in “Late Spring.” • April 4 at 7: “House of Bamboo” (1955, offers her any relief from the tyranny arrest, in 2011, on charges of sexual Budapest, where Lili (Zsófia Psotta), Samuel Fuller). of love. In Japanese.—R.B. (Japan assault. But Ferrara departs from the age thirteen, is left in the care of her Museum of Modern Art Society; April 4.) specifics to ferocious effect. Gérard harassed father. Her closest companion The films of Joel McCrea. Depardieu, massively Falstaffian, stars is a dog—Hagen, a doting crossbreed April 1-3 at 1:30: “The La Sapienza as the statesman Devereaux, who checks whose forehead wrinkles in perplexity More the Merrier” (1942, This stylized philosophical romance into the Carlton Hotel, where, after as his fortunes turn. He is cast out, George Stevens). • In ponders European culture with the a night with prostitutes, he presses forced to make his way on the streets, revival. April 1-5 (call unencumbered awe that only an himself naked on a chambermaid then captured and trained to fight, for showtimes): “The American expat can muster. The (Pamela Afesi) and, later that day, is with newly sharpened teeth. In the Devil Is a Woman.” • director, Eugène Green, a native New arrested. As in real life, the charges process, we are compelled to ask not “Recent Acquisitions.” Yorker who has been living in France are ultimately dismissed—but legal just whether he has been brutalized April 2 at 4:30: “A Film Unfinished” (2010, Yael since the nineteen-sixties, focusses on guilt isn’t Ferrara’s subject. Rather, he beyond redemption but, even more Hersonski). • April 4 a Parisian couple, Alexandre (Fabrizio reveals the terrors of the penal system, uncomfortably, to what degree and at 1:30: “Beyond the Rongione), an architect with mystical a living inferno hidden behind the city’s depth we can ever fathom the nature Beyond” (2008, Lourdes yearnings, and Aliénor (Christelle façades and from which its respectable of a brute. Meanwhile, as Lili searches Portillo). • April 6 at 4:30: Prot Landman), a sociologist with burghers are unduly shielded. While for her lost pet, her own breed of “Pegasus” (2010, Mohamed spiritual inclinations, who head for under house arrest in a Tribeca town innocence likewise begins to slip away. Mouftakir). Italy so that Alexandre can complete house, Devereaux is cooped up with The film is too long, and it could use a Museum of the Moving his studies of the baroque architect his wife, Simone (Jacqueline Bisset), good shearing, but when Hagen joins Image Borromini. There, they encounter an heiress who has been grooming together with other mutts to wreak “Required Viewing: ‘Mad another couple, of sorts—Lavinia him to run for President of France. revenge on their oppressors—almost Men’ ’s Movie Influences.” April 4-5 at 4: “Patterns” (Arianna Nastro), a frail young In a spectacular sequence, he cynically everyone, it seems—this strange (1956, Fielder Cook). • student, and her brother, Goffredo contemplates the vanity of power and fable, rife with political menace, April 4-5 at 7: “Dear Heart” (Ludovico Succio), a teen-age archi- then confronts her in a flaying battle demonstrates both dreaminess and (1964, Delbert Mann). tect-in-training. Aliénor, detecting of mismatched lovers bound together bite. In Hungarian.—A.L. (3/30/15) crisscrossed affinities, dispatches in a death grip. These scenes, which (In limited release.) 12 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 Museums and Libraries both create abstractions from repeated Landscapes and nature studies, Metropolitan Museum folds; Abraham Cruzvillegas paints often reduced to dense patterns, “Captain Linnaeus Tripe: hundreds of found papers of various are Joo’s primary focus and the Photographer of India and sizes a unifying gold. One section exhibition’s highlight. His images Burma, 1852-1860” combines twenty-eight skullcaps, of trees, reeds, and tiny blossoms Like many of the great nineteenth- from an intricate Ottoman version are almost impenetrably dark, with century travel photographers, Tripe, in red velvet to Cary Leibowitz’s just enough light to glow like dying the British officer whose sepia-toned “Stonewall Yarmulke,” in silks of embers when seen at close range. The landscapes are gathered here, was pink, white, and blue. Some of effect is both subtle and seductive, both an artist and a colonialist. The the contemporary projects are un- conveying a command of dark tones pictures he took while a member derwhelming (Koo Jeong-a’s stacks reminiscent of the master of photo- ART of the East India Company’s army of magnets), but on the whole the graphic blackness, Roy DeCarava. were a way of staking claim to show succeeds, again and again. Through April 18. (Yoshinaga, 547 landmarks and wonders in the Through Aug. 9. W. 27th St. 212-268-7132.) expanding British Empire and 3 conveying the exotic details to Nick Mauss Museums Short List Galleries—Chelsea Metropolitan Museum the people back home. Tripe did The lingering touch of a lover’s “The Plains Indians: Artists of his job doggedly, producing some Jonathas de Andrade embrace, the social intimacies of Earth and Sky.” Through May 10. twenty-five thousand prints in For several years, the young Bra- a drawing room, and the rambling Museum of Modern Art eight years, but also beautifully. zilian artist has been producing freedom of a walk in the country “Jean Dubuffet: Soul of the The images here, of temples, fiction al ads for the very real Mu- combine in this New York native’s Underground.” Through April 5. tombs, monumental statuary, and seum of the Man of the Northeast, lovely new show, which is as charged MOMA PS1 intricately carved façades, are serene an anthropological institution in with feeling as it is formally deft. “Simon Denny: The Innovator’s and skillful. Faced with so much Andrade’s home town of Recife, A steel-and-enamel railing—a line Dilemma.” Opens April 3. sheer magnificence, Tripe wasn’t which takes a romantic view of that meanders through space—rises Guggenheim Museum awestruck; he was respectful and racial harmony. Andrade’s posters slowly up from the entrance, guiding “Monir Shahroudy prepared. Through May 25. of working-class black Brazilians, viewers into a room airily filled with Farmanfarmaian: Infinite some with their shirts off, can mirrored surfaces marked (through a Possibility.” Through June 3. Jewish Museum veer close to prurience, but they reverse-painting process) with loosely Brooklyn Museum “Repetition and Difference” do have the virtue of puncturing limned figures, twining leaves, and “Basquiat: The Unknown To play up their theme of change Brazil’s democracia racial: the myth scribblings that suggest the play Notebooks.” Opens April 3. through recurrence in this millennia- that the country has somehow of light on water. As winter hung Frick Collection spanning showcase of Judaica and con- remained free of discrimination. on well into March, here was the “Coypel’s Don Quixote temporary art, the curators Susan L. Through April 11. (Alexander and promise of spring. Through April Tapestries.” Through May 17. Braunstein and Jens Hoffmann Bonin, 132 Tenth Ave., at 18th St. 11. (303 Gallery, 507 W. 24th St. Museum of Arts and Design rewrote their introductory text four 212-367-7474.) 212-255-1121.) “Richard Estes: Painting New times, in registers that range from York City.” Through Sept. 20. cheery P.R. to artspeak. Forgoing Joo Myung Duck “Joseph Beuys Multiples” New Museum any Platonic distinction between For his U.S. solo début, the Korean The German social sculptor looks “Surround Audience: 2015 original and copy, the curators place photographer shows handsome less hermetic than usual, thanks Triennial.” Through May 15. dozens of fertility goddesses, ancient black-and-white pictures made over to the show’s emphasis on his Studio Museum in Harlem shekels, mezuzahs, and intricate floral the past fifty years, the oldest of political activities, notably his “Trenton Doyle Hancock: ketubahs from Isfahan alongside which is a 1965 series of tender but Organization for Direct Democracy, Skin and Bones, 20 Years of similarly iterative contemporary unsentimental portraits taken at a which advocated decision-making Drawings.” Through June 28. projects. N. Dash and John Houck home for mixed-race war orphans. via citizen referenda. (“Conquer the dictatorship of the parties!” he scrawled on a photograph of himself wielding a silver broom.) Beuys designed the German Green Party’s campaign poster in 1979 (he was also one of its losing candi- dates). It shows a giant hare, one of the artist’s favorite symbols, facing down an infantryman—its title is “The Invincible.” Through April 18. (Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 W. 26th St. 212-744-7400.)

“System and Vision” This dense exhibition of what we still call “outsider art” dives deep into the occult, the obsessive, the erogenous. Morton Bartlett’s photo- graphs and drawings of dolls of his own design and William Crawford’s orgiastic illustrations on the backs of prison rosters have an erotic THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART / LICENSED BY SCALA / ART RESOURCE, NY / ART SCALA / LICENSED BY THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

© intensity that rivals anything by Hans Bellmer or Pierre Klossowski. Yet unlike those established French artists these little-known outsiders worked in total obscurity. Craw- ford’s drawings, for example, were found in an abandoned house in In 1941, when he was twenty-three, the Harlem-based painter Jacob Lawrence completed a sixty-panel series Oakland; nothing is known about about the Great Migration. (Panel 52, pictured, is captioned “One of the largest race riots occurred in East him except his name. Through St. Louis.”) MOMA exhibits the entire series for the first time in two decades in “One Way Ticket: Jacob April 18. (Zwirner, 533 W. 19th 2015 THE JACOB AND GWENDOLYN KNIGHT LAWRENCE FOUNDATION, SEATTLE / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY / ARTISTS SEATTLE FOUNDATION, KNIGHT LAWRENCE AND GWENDOLYN THE JACOB 2015 (ARS), NEW YORK. DIGITAL IMAGE IMAGE DIGITAL NEW YORK. (ARS), © Lawrence’s Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North,” opening April 3. St. 212-727-2070.) THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 13 and power. Behind them, a bank of “Sila Djiguiba: Path of Hope” urban, rural, and indie. Only in the panels glows with shifting shades of Dancers from the Maimouna Keita solos of Dorrance and her co-stars, light, suggesting morphing weather African Dance Company, based Derick K. Grant and especially patterns. The effect is both stirring in Brooklyn, perform an evening Dormeshia Sumbry- Edwards, does and mysterious. (Joyce Theatre, 175 of traditional African dance fused the high virtuosity reach deeper into Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. with urban forms like house and blues emotions. (Joyce Theatre, 175 March 31-April 2.) voguing, accompanied by a djembe Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242- drum ensemble. The dances are built 0800. April 4-5.) Rashaun Mitchell around the story of a young African Mitchell is an extraordinary dancer, performer who travels to New York Noche Flamenca / “Cambio de DANCE combining an animal grace with a to experience the wider world of Tercio” calmly searching intelligence. He dance, despite parental disapproval. Flamenco comes in many shapes gained renown as a standout member (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th and sizes, but the night club, in of the final troupe of Merce Cun- St. 212-864-5400. April 4.) many ways, is its natural habitat. Liz Gerring Dance Company / ningham, and the handful of works Sitting up close to the tiny stage at “Glacier” he has choreographed since then Dorrance Dance Joe’s Pub, one can see the unfiltered First performed at Montclair in 2013, have all been intriguing, succeeding Michelle Dorrance is the most original force of Soledad Barrio’s dancing this spare, elegant work now receives and failing in interesting ways. He choreographer in tap dancing today, and the daunting physical effort a much deserved New York run. In- has described his new piece “Light but much of her “Blues Project,” behind it. (Such proximity adds to, spired by the sound and atmosphere Years” in the language of evolution which débuted at Jacob’s Pillow in rather than diminishes, the dance’s of Glacier Lake in Colorado—as and cosmology. The participation of 2013, is rather conventional. The over-all effect.) Juan Ogalla, Bar- rendered by the composer Michael J. his former Cunningham colleagues conventions are pleasing: first- rio’s alter ego, provides a welcome Schumacher—Gerring’s dance is Silas Riener and Melissa Toogood rate traditional tap mixed with a foil, playful, showy, grandiloquent. as evocative and mercurial as the should insure physical excitement touch of Appalachian clogging and Noche Flamenca’s excellent musical weather. The dancers are under- that isn’t just theoretical. (New York Lindy Hop, set to a score by Toshi trio completes the experience. (425 stated but bracingly athletic; they Live Arts, 219 W. 19th St. 212-924- Reagon (who plays live with her Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. April 4-7. move with a mixture of precision 0077. April 1-4.) band) that ranges across blues Through April 10.)

set of percussive jazz written and decades. Then, in the evening, the the Statue of Liberty. (York Ave. at performed by the Grammy-winning house holds an eccentric sale of New 72nd St. 212-606-7000.) • Phillips drummer Antonio Sánchez. His York-related objects, everything from offers two days of photographs on music, which was not eligible for a a diamond-encrusted bracelet inspired April 1-2, including works by Arbus, Best Original Score Oscar (the film by the design of the Chrysler Building Penn, Sherman, and Man Ray, among also features more than a half hour to a nine-foot-tall bronze replica of others. (450 Park Ave. 212-940-1200.) above of non-original classical material), flutters in fits and starts across a Readings and Talks beyond traditional trap set, with each char- acter granted a recurring rhythmic “Book Cooks” theme. While the soundtrack does This new food-related series, organized by Greenlight Bookstore and the stand on its own, it soars underneath dining emporium Berg’n, starts with the brothers Max and Eli Sussman, Michael Keaton and Ed Norton’s authors of “Classic Recipes for Modern People,” in conversation with Eric NYC / CUNY Chapbook spontaneous, feverish performances, Demby, a founder of the Brooklyn Flea. (Berg’n, 899 Bergen St., Crown Festival and this week Sánchez comes to the Heights, Brooklyn. greenlightbookstore.com/bookcooks. April 2 at 7:30.) This seventh annual festival, recog- Upper West Side for a rare perfor- nizing the affordable and portable mance of his score while the film Jay Wright format’s importance for emerging is screened. (New York Society for The seventy-nine-year-old poet, who last read from his work in New York writers and alternative publishers Ethical Culture, 2 W. 64th St. April City in 2004, visits the 92nd Street Y. (Lexington Ave at 92nd St. 212- in today’s increasingly paperless 4 at 8. wordlessmusic.org.) 415-5500. April 2 at 8:15.) world, includes workshops on hand bookbinding and letterpress printing, Auctions and Antiques Housing Works Bookstore Café a tour of the New York Public Li- Generations of pop nostalgists have The actress and poet Amber Tamblyn’s new book, “Dark Sparkler,” was brary’s chapbook collection, a book pondered the inscrutable lyrics to inspired by the tragic deaths of such actresses as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne fair, readings, and talks. Highlights Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Mansfield and includes art work by David Lynch, Marilyn Manson, and include the opening of an exhibition On April 7, Mr. McLean puts the Marcel Dzama. On April 6 at 7, she reads from it, in an event featuring of work by Edward Sanders, “Seeking original manuscript—sixteen pages the indie-rock group Yo La Tengo. The poet Dorothea Lasky is the host. the Glyph,” which includes a talk by in all, some handwritten and some (126 Crosby St. 212-334-3324.) Sanders; celebrations of five years of typed—up for auction at Christie’s Lost & Found, a chapbook publishing as a single lot, to the delight of “Open Books” project by CUNY’s Graduate Center, good ol’ boys everywhere. (20 Theatre for a New Audience’s ongoing literary series presents the New with appearances by Dorothy Wang, Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St. 212- Yorker contributor and former theatre critic John Lahr, who will talk about Thurston Moore, Anne Waldman, 636-2000.) • Among the top lots at his most recent biography, “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the and others; and the Poetry Society Swann’s sale of African-American Flesh.” (Polonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. tfana. of America Chapbook Fellowship art—an area of particular strength at org/openbooks. April 6 at 7.) Award Ceremony, featuring readings this auction house—are a Corot-like by this year’s winners, as well as by landscape by Henry Ossawa Tanner Renata Adler the poet-judges Elizabeth Alexander, and the über-cool “Steve,” a portrait The journalist discusses her latest book, “After the Tall Timber: Collected Forrest Gander, Marilyn Hacker, and of a handsome young man wearing Nonfiction.” (McNally Jackson Books, 52 Prince St. No tickets necessary. Jean Valentine. (chapbookfestival. a white trenchcoat and mirrored April 7 at 7.) org. March 31-April 2.) sunglasses, by Barkley L. Hendricks (April 2). (104 E. 25th St. 212-254- Barnes & Noble “Birdman” 4710.) • On April 1, Sotheby’s starts Gretchen Rubin, the author of “The Happiness Project,” discusses her There’s plenty to love in Alejan- the day off with a sale of photographs new book, “Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday dro González Iñárritu’s Academy that includes a full set of Nicholas Lives,” with the writer Arianna Huffington, who will also share insights Award-winning black comedy Nixon’s “Brown Sisters,” a series of about her latest book, “Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success “Birdman,” not least of which is the portraits of four Connecticut sisters and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder.” (Broadway at original score, a visceral, improvised taken yearly over the course of four 82nd St. No tickets necessary. April 7 at 7.) 14 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015

FOOD& DRINK

BAR TAB Butter & Scotch 818 Franklin Ave., Brooklyn (347-350-8899) Baking is a pursuit for the precise; a teaspoon is not a teaspoonish. Expert drinkers can be just as finicky—the Tables for Two mixologist brandishing an atomizer, or Winston Churchill, gazing upon Javelina a closed bottle of vermouth while making his Martini. But one gets the 119 E. 18th St. (212-539-0202) sense that the duo behind Brooklyn’s self-professed “first dessert and just as new yorkers like craft cocktail bar” is less uptight. to complain that it’s impossible to get a good bagel The owners, Keavy Blueher (of outside the five boroughs, Texans enjoy lamenting the lack of decent Tex-Mex outside Smorgasburg’s Kumquat Cupcakery) the Lone Star State. It seems especially egregious in a city so full of both places to eat and and Allison Kave (of First Prize Pies), displaced Texans. So word spread quickly about Javelina, a restaurant near Union Square are straight out of your indie-movie claiming to offer “true Tex-Mex,” as advertised by a green neon sign that casts an eerie dreams—drunken pixie dream ladies glow over a row of tall cacti just inside the door. Within days of opening, reservations serving up s’mores pie and jello shots. On a recent evening, what one visitor were already hard to come by, with wait times creeping up to two hours. called “shouty oldies” (“Tutti Frutti,” The people wanted their enchiladas and their fajitas, but, more than anything, they “Susie Q”) blasted, cupcake wrappers wanted their queso. Queso is the generic Spanish word for “cheese,” but Texan queso, also cast off by the tipsy were crushed known as chile con queso, is a very specific dish, taken very seriously, and, naturally, a source underfoot in lieu of peanut shells, and of great debate, down to pronunciation: “keh-so” not “kay-so,” according to Texas Monthly. a buttery smell seemed to be piped Opinions and recipes vary, but it seems generally agreed upon that the cheese should be in, like oxygen at a casino. The scene mild and melted to a Velveeta-like consistency, mixed with chiles, then scooped up with was spiked Classic American Diner by way of Epcot. A patron compared tortilla chips—preferably of the sturdy, crunchy, salt-flecked, golden variety, like the ones that her Union Street Collins (vodka, come in a basket, still hot from the fryer, at Javelina. These are complimentary, along with a hibiscus-clove simple syrup, lemon, sweet, smoky salsa; the queso is compulsory, but must be ordered separately. There are two bitters, seltzer) not unfavorably to kinds: yellow and white, the former slightly runnier, with a distinct subtle tang and chopped Now and Laters. Couples locked tomatillo and serrano, the latter a bit more creamy, offset by jalapeño and roasted poblano. eyes over other dehydratingly sweet Both get a dollop of pico de gallo, can be further jazzed up with a variety of toppings— beverages, but even the soothing guacamole, chorizo, ground beef—and wash down well with an avocado-cilantro margarita power of a hot buttered Scotch and possibly the best birthday cake or a Smoky Negroni, made with habanero bitters and mezcal instead of gin. ever couldn’t allay one fight. “I’m It’s hard to imagine eating anything else after all that melted cheese, especially because not a child!” yelled a man drinking at it’s hard not to eat all of that melted cheese. In its early days, the kitchen at Javelina seemed a place that deals in pink icing and like it was still getting its footing beyond the queso. The avocado in the avocado tacos rainbow sprinkles. A nearby neon sign turned out to be fried in a flavor-diminishing floury coating. The chicken-fried steak lost suggested, “Eat pie.” any crispness it once had under the weight of a creamy gravy. The parrillada mixta, or mixed —Emma Allen grill, on the other hand, was a sight to behold: a cast-iron contraption piled with fajita-style sliced chicken and steak, shreds of carnitas, peppery jalapeño sausage, bacon-wrapped shrimp, and plump drumsticks of barbecued quail, sticky with a honey glaze. With an assortment of accoutrements, including a stack of tortillas and a softball-size scoop of sour cream, it could happily feed a family of six. “Serves 1-2,” says the menu. Texas portions. —Hannah Goldfield

ILLUSTRATION BY JEANNIE PHAN BY ILLUSTRATION Open daily for dinner. Entrées $17-$38. PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES POMERANTZ THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 15

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT A CALCULATED RISK

n 1974, the Ford Administration conducted nuclear talks cheat successfully, as it has before. Between 2004 and 2009, I with Iran. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, heir to the Pea- it built a huge centrifuge facility under a mountain south of cock Throne and an American ally, had asserted his country’s Tehran before Western intelligence agencies found out about right to build nuclear power plants. Henry Kissinger and Brent the deception. According to the International Atomic Energy Scowcroft sought a deal to reduce the risk that Iran could ever Agency, Iran still hasn’t come clean about its long history of make an atomic bomb. They had to manage a restive Con- secret weapons work. Yet Republican fear-mongering is over- gress. A secret White House memo summarizing the prob- blown. The technology for detecting secret nuclear activity lem noted that “special safeguards [that] might be satisfactory through atmospheric and water sampling, among other meth- to Congress . . . are proving unacceptable to Iran.” ods, isn’t foolproof, but it is very good. Large-scale cheating of Ford’s talks failed, as did negotiations undertaken by the the sort necessary to finish a bomb, which would require en- Carter Administration. In 1979, the Shah fell to the Iranian riching uranium isotopes, would carry a significant risk of de- Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini, believing that nuclear weap- tection. If caught, Iran would likely face harsher economic ons were un-Islamic, initially put Iran’s program on ice. After sanctions, if not war. Khomeini’s death, in 1989, his successors bargained, smug- A greater dilemma is that, by easing economic sanctions, gled, and dissembled, and by 2009 they had installed enough a deal might empower Iran at a time when collapsing oil prices equipment to make a bomb within a few years. This was Pres- could reduce its ability to fund violent militias around the ident Obama’s inheritance. After six years of diplomacy, capped Middle East. The latest chapter of the Sunni-Shiite conflict by energetic negotiations led by Secretary of State John Kerry— is descending into a Thirty Years’ War of grotesquery—mass who seems on some days to be the only man in Washington abductions, sexual slavery, tweeted beheadings. There are few enjoying his job—the Administration may at last have a deal innocents under arms, but Iran’s aggression is catalytic. in sight, judging from recent statements made by Kerry and The Revolutionary Guards have trained Hezbollah’s fighters by his Iranian counterparts. in Lebanon and Syria and provided the group with hundreds The precise details of Obama’s offer are unknown. Broadly, of millions of dollars. There is evidence that officers from Iran’s Iran would freeze its program in such a Quds Force, the hardcore Special Forces way that, if it broke the agreement, it of the Guards, are fighting alongside the would need at least another year to make barrel-bombing military of Syrian Pres- a bomb, and it would accept special in- ident Bashar al-Assad. Iran’s proxy vio- spections. In return, the U.S., the Euro- lence does not cut entirely against Amer- pean Union, Russia, and China would ican interests. Some of its enemies are agree to the lifting of economic sanc- also American enemies: the Islamic State tions. Republicans positioning them- and Al Qaeda. But many more Iranian selves for 2016 have denounced any deal. foes are American allies, including Israel. Their opportunism, abetted by Israeli Last week, a fragmented Yemen saw its Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s civil war deepen further as Saudi Ara- divisive address to Congress earlier this bian warplanes intervened to bomb Shi- month, has made it hard for Obama to ite rebels backed by Iran. clarify his argument: the bargain may These days, however, Iran looks over- carry risks, but it is better than any prac- extended. Sanctions have cut the coun- tical alternative. try’s oil exports by half, and the economy ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL TOM BY ILLUSTRATIONS One risk of any deal is that Iran will is contracting. The apparent willingness THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 17 of the radical wing of Tehran’s regime to consider the nuclear Hussein gassed Iranian positions, the head of the Revolution- freeze offered by the Obama Administration—a deal similar ary Guards wrote to Khomeini suggesting that, if Iran wanted to ones that have failed previously—might be explained by the to prevail, it needed nukes.) The Bush Administration in- need to replenish the Revolutionary Guards’ sectarian war chest. vaded Iraq to topple Saddam, only to reignite sectarian fight- How would lifting sanctions not simply revitalize Iran’s ing and, while disenfranchising Sunnis, open a pathway for expansionism? If the Administration doesn’t have a plan, it Iranian aggression. should devise one. Last week, in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s One aim of Kerry’s dealmaking in Switzerland is to help home town, American warplanes, in tacit alliance with Iranian- stabilize the region by reducing the chance that Iran’s bomb backed Shiite militias, bombed Islamic State positions, only program could set off a local atomic arms race. That is an ob- to have several of the militias withdraw in protest. Obama has jective worthy of considerable risk-taking. But a deal might committed the U.S. to what looks to be a long war in Iraq, achieve more stability—and go down better in Congress—if with Iran’s help; an attack on the large city of Mosul is due it was accompanied by a broader political strategy designed soon. The Islamic State has thrived because it has captured to separate Shiite and Sunni fighters, promote autonomy and the grievances and bitter desperation of Iraq’s Sunni minority. self-governance for Sunnis opposed to the Islamic State, re- Attacking the Sunnis with Shiite fighters is like trying to put duce violence, and stop Iran from intervening in Syria, Yemen, out a fire with gasoline. If Iran’s proxies in Iraq gain more ac- Lebanon, Bahrain, and Gaza. cess to guns and money because of a nuclear deal with the For four decades, American Presidents of both parties have West, that may only make things worse. recognized that it is unacceptable for Iran to acquire a nuclear The record of Washington’s interventions in the sectarian bomb, and that the only rational way to prevent this is to ne- landscape of Iran and Iraq is so abysmal that the case for re- gotiate. After six years in office, and after repeatedly following straint should be obvious. The Reagan Administration car- the advice of his generals, only to see their predictions fail, ried out a morally debased effort to foster mutual destruction Obama is choosing the risks of nuclear diplomacy over yet more between the two countries during the war that they fought war. It is the best of bad options, but it could be better still. from 1980 to 1988. (At the war’s inconclusive end, as Saddam —Steve Coll

TAKE TWO greeted him as “Mr. G.”; the hits of elephant or a dog—it was me doing FIBREGLASS MENAGERIE the Carpenters, including “Top of the different dialects. Like the buffalo has a World,” played on the sound system. Yiddish dialect. And the elephant is an Grodin—baseball cap, zip-up corduroy upper-class English.” Impersonating his jacket, wan smile—said that he hadn’t elephant, he said, “ ‘Have you been been out to the movies in fifteen years. talking to Bob the buffalo?’ ” Each ani- When he is offered work, “I never say, mal has only one short recorded speech. ‘How much?’ I say, ‘Where?’ ” He praised The loudspeakers are hidden in the n the mid-nineteen-nineties, Charles Louis C.K. for getting him home at a undergrowth. Referring to the over-all I Grodin retired from acting and with- reasonable hour. Grodin then described effect, Grodin said, “It’s a good idea. I drew to Connecticut, to spend more his first day on “While We’re Young,” activate them with a remote control from time with his wife, Elissa, his young son, Noah Baumbach’s new comedy, in which a golf cart. I wouldn’t do it for myself; and a collection of life-size fibreglass he plays Ben Stiller’s father-in-law. you’d only do it for somebody who’s never animals—including a buffalo—that he Baumbach spent perhaps two hours installed in his back yard. He wrote books shooting a brief scene in which Grodin filled with lightly curmudgeonly anec- has his bow tie adjusted by Naomi Watts. dotes and began recording one-minute Quoting a remark made by the actor Joe syndicated commentaries, about this and Bologna during a visit to the Universal that, for CBS Radio, sometimes ending Studios theme park, Grodin asked with the words “Oh, boy.” Baum bach, “Who do you have to fuck But, a few years ago, when Grodin to get off this tour?” was in his mid-seventies, he began to Grodin ordered a turkey club sand- act again: demand for his representa- wich and described his garden animals. tions of pained, wincing men somehow “I’m kind of on hold for a cow right overpowered his wish never to leave Wil- now,” he said. He started his collection ton. For example, Grodin played a re- after a visit to United House Wrecking, curring character—an unsolicitous, if in- in Stamford. “I decided—I don’t know sightful, doctor—in the fourth season why—that I was going to get a number of “Louie.” of these. My wife looked at me. She calls At eleven-thirty on a recent morn- it Chuck’s World.” ing, Grodin was not far from his home, He went on, “That’s O.K., but then in the Red Barn restaurant, in the shadow I wired them for sound. And it wasn’t of the Merritt Parkway. Staff members the sound of a horse or a buffalo or an Charles Grodin 18 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 heard it. Here’s the horse: he goes, ‘Mr. in “The Heartbreak Kid,” had mentioned mile swim, a hundred and twelve miles Ed, Francis the Talking Mule, and I all in a memoir that they had once slept on the bike, and then a marathon,” studied with Strasberg. Fran is actually together. “I said, ‘Why would you put he said. “Now I do the half Ironman. In a talking horse, but he calls himself a that in a book?’ She said, ‘You should be the mornings, I train.” This involves a talking mule. That’s his humor. Go grateful I included you.’ ” 5:40 A.M. bike ride: twenty-five miles, figure.’ ” Grodin claimed that even the The men’s section in Marshalls dis- up to the George Washington Bridge elephant is full-size, but then thought appointed him. “This is all lightweight,” and back. Fulop, who is thirty-eight, has for a moment: “Well, I’m sure there are Grodin said. “I don’t see anything flan- posted on Twitter and Facebook about bigger elephants.” nel.” Walking across to Staples, he de- his athletic pursuits, his encounters with Grodin, widely admired for his dis- scribed his exercise regimen: “I used to tapas chefs and local artists, and a free obliging performances on late-night talk have a treadmill that I would look at.” heart checkup with Dr. Oz. He moved shows, once had dinner with Johnny A young woman was wearing a red Sta- to Jersey City in 2000, and, after stints Carson, who asked if he’d join him on ples uniform and a red Staples name tag. in the Marine Corps and at Goldman an African safari. “He was serious. I have “You work here, right?” he asked her, and Sachs, he was sworn in as mayor in 2013. a place in Manhattan—I barely go there. she laughed and pointed the way to the “We’re not yet at the forefront of top- I said, ‘Being in a tent with wild animals ink-and-toner wall. tier midsize cities,” he said. “Starting to trying to get in at us?’ ” Grodin told Car- —Ian Parker do things like bike-share systems is how son, on the air, about growing up within 1 we’re going to get there.” earshot of the Pittsburgh Zoo: Grodin SECOND CITY DEPT. In January, Fulop announced that Jer- would lie in bed, tell himself a joke, and IRON MAYOR sey City will start a program that con- wait for the hyenas to laugh. “Elissa saw nects to Citibike, in New York, allowing that, and got an assignment from Amer- a person to hop on a bike, ride it to the ican Film to interview me, and within PATH station, turn in the first bike, and thirty minutes of the tape recorder being pick up a new one on the other side of on I asked her to shut it off, and at the the river. He envisages the program at- end of the next thirty minutes I was dis- tracting New Yorkers who want to spend cussing marriage with her, and now we’ve teven Fulop, the mayor of Jersey City, the day in Jersey City. “The views of been married thirty-three years.” S has a Kuota K-Factor bike with Manhattan are second to none,” he said. His wife had asked him to buy some- Mavic Cosmic Carbone SLS wheels. He strolled toward Grove Street Plaza, thing for her printer. He also needed “It’s for triathletes,” he said, as he walked which during the summer, he said, is “lit- corduroy pants. After leaving the Red out of City Hall and along the bike lane erally filled, filled, filled with bikes, so Barn—“So long, Mr. G.”—Grodin drove on Grove Street. He wore a long brown this is an ideal place for one of the larger to a mall in Norwalk. In the car, he re- coat and a blue-and-red tie. “I did an docking stations.” He looked around. called that Cybill Shepherd, his co-star Ironman—that’s with a two-and-a-half- Behind him was an Asian fusion place and a Duane Reade. He added, “There was nothing here. It was empty. In the past four years it’s been on steroids.” A few bikes were chained to sign poles. “We started off with a program that was going to be Hoboken, Jersey City, and Weehawken together on the bike shares,” he said. But Fulop dropped out. “There became a difference of opin- ion,” he explained. “The other two towns were more conscious of the price, be- cause the system to integrate with New York is more expensive.” Fulop has raised about two and a half million dollars from sponsors, enough to pay for the first order of bikes—three hundred and fifty of them, at five thousand dollars each, to be de- livered in late summer. (As with Citi- bike, the color scheme goes to the high- est corporate bidder.) He broke the news to the other New Jersey mayors gently. “It wasn’t the best of conversa- tions,” he said. Dawn Zimmer, the mayor of Hoboken, said, “My priority was city-wide, and his priority was connec- Nelson Shanks (past subjects: Princess bein thought of More, but presumably tion to New York City.” The bikes in Diana, Pope John Paul II) divulged he liked him,” Salomon said. the program she is running with Wee- that his painting of Bill Clinton, cur- “He lived with him. He spent a lot hawken will cost less than a third of rently hanging in the National Por- of time with him,” Galassi said. what Fulop’s cost. trait Gallery, contains a hidden image: “But living with someone doesn’t Some people refer to Jersey City as a shadow across the Oval Office man- mean you necessarily like them,” Sa- New York’s sixth borough. “We’d be fool- tel was painted in the shape of Mon- lomon countered. ish if we didn’t try to capitalize on the ica Lewinsky’s blue dress. Clinton, Mantel, who was in town from Lon- proximity,” Fulop said. When his office Shanks told the Philadelphia Daily don with her husband, the geologist approached Mayor de Blasio’s people News, was “probably the most famous Gerald McEwen, peered up at the por- about the program, he said, “they were liar of all time,” and the shadow has traits. “More was so image conscious. supportive but relatively indifferent.” He both literal and symbolic meaning. The He was such a great self-publicist. You continued, “They have their own chal- “Da Vinci Code” sequel writes itself. imagine him taking considerable sol- lenges there. They weren’t really thinking Days earlier, in California, an- emn pleasure in sitting for his portrait. about what’s happening across the river.” other portrait of a chastened spouse Cromwell was always on the move.” Fulop popped into Grove Street Bi- made news when facial-recognition While Holbein’s More seems relaxed, cycles, where he buys parts for his Kuota. technology revealed that a sixteenth- Cromwell looks agitated, his eyes dart- The proprietor, Rodney Morweiser, century painting commonly thought ing off to the side. “His favorite words greeted him with a “Sup.” He had a long to be of Jane Seymour, the third wife are ‘speed,’ ‘haste,’ ‘please accelerate goatee and wore a mechanic’s shirt. He of Henry VIII, more likely depicts her this,’ ” Mantel continued. “On the up- pulled out a bicycle that resembled a predecessor Anne Boleyn, who was side of his letters, he writes, ‘With Manhattan Citibike. “Something like beheaded on charges of treason, incest, speed.’ It can’t be easy to catch some- this is more casual, unisex,” Morweiser and adultery. Both wives feature in one like that to sit for a portrait.” said. “The handlebars are higher rise, so Hilary Mantel’s novels “Wolf Hall” “He looks annoyed,” Ben Miles, it’s more comfortable. This is perfect and “Bring Up the Bodies”; the Royal who plays Cromwell, said, chewing for just knockin’ around town.” Shakespeare Company’s stage adapta- gum. “He wants to be somewhere else.” Fulop gravitated toward another bike, tion opens next week on Broadway, in Nathaniel Parker, who plays King near the front of the store, with wheels a two-part epic with a cast of twenty- Henry, asked, “What did Frick use this almost as thick as truck tires. “Maybe I three. In London, the actors made room for? Just hanging out with the should ride the fat bike,” he said. several field trips, including a ten- paintings?” Morweiser shook his head.“That’s ex- mile boat ride to Hampton Court— “This was a sitting room,” Salomon treme,” he said. “You can ride on sand, as Thomas Cromwell might have made said, “where he would look at pictures you can ride on snow. Imagine—three, when summoned by King Henry after after dinner and invite his friends.” four inches of snow, just flyin’ around in hours—and a visit to England’s Na- “I probably missed this bit of in- the park. It’s a blast. Ultimate in traction.” tional Portrait Gallery, where they saw formation—how did Frick make his Fulop lingered for a moment, and a likeness of Henry by Hans Holbein money?” Lucy Briers, who plays Kath- then returned to the knockin’-around the Younger. erine of Aragon, asked. (Answer: coke bike and rolled it out the door. The There are bits of the House of Tudor and steel.) cashier ran to bring the Mayor a hel- to be found in New York as well. Two John Ramm, who plays More, stud- met. Fulop started pedalling on the side- days after the R.S.C. actors arrived, ied the portrait of his character. “He’s walk. Then he said, “Don’t ride on the they set off for the Frick Collection, someone who doesn’t necessarily take sidewalk!” He swerved over to the street. on the Upper East Side. They crowded care of himself. You can see the reli- “I wouldn’t mind using it to get to a rib- into the Living Hall, an oak-panelled gious fervor in his eyes. But he’s so bon cutting,” he said. room with roped-off antique furniture. proud of his chain, his costume, his —Betsy Morais Flanking a stone fireplace were Hol- velvet.” Salomon pointed out More’s 1 bein’s portraits of Thomas More and five-o’clock shadow, which was flecked THE BOARDS Thomas Cromwell, both major char- with white. “Oh, my God, yes!” Ramm LIKENESSES acters in the plays. “It’s obvious that said, leaning closer. Frick thought of them as a couple,” a Nearby, Parker and Miles dissected curator named Xavier Salomon said, Cromwell. “He’s got a big thumb, of the Gilded Age industrialist who doesn’t he?” Miles said, holding up his filled his mansion with art. own for comparison. “An ill-fated couple,” another cura- Parker eyed Cromwell’s fur collar: tor, Susan Galassi, added. Cromwell “You just want to scrunch it.” odern politicians are relentlessly investigated More for treason, which As Miles walked out past the Crom- M photographed, but Beltway pa- resulted in More’s beheading. (Imag- well, he said, “It’s as close as you get parazzi shots don’t hold a candle to oil ine a Ken Starr portrait next to the to meeting the guy.” He looked around. on canvas when it comes to revealing Clinton.) “Some house, eh?” character. Recently, the portrait artist “We don’t really know what Hol- —Michael Schulman THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 21 THE FINANCIAL PAGE half. Last year, the island’s Secretary of Economic Develop- THE PUERTO RICAN PROBLEM ment, Alberto Bacó Bagué, said that, once the island’s tax exemption expired, “we kind of disappeared from the map.” This has left Puerto Rico scrambling to come up with a new economic strategy, and there are plans for the island to “reinvent” itself—plans replete with buzzwords of the mo- n 1958, Laurance Rockefeller threw an inaugural party for ment, such as “cloud computing,” “the app economy,” and “in- I Dorado Beach, his luxury resort on the northern coast of novative entrepreneurship.” There’s nothing wrong with any Puerto Rico. The guests included millionaires, politicians, and of these ideas—entrepreneurship is great. But what’s missing movie stars. In the years that followed, Dorado became the is a focus on a simple question: what can Puerto Rico offer most glamorous resort in the Caribbean, attracting everyone that other locations can’t? As Guillén puts it, in a world where from Ava Gardner to John F. Kennedy. But, as time passed, capital hopscotches freely from place to place, “countries need resorts on other islands lured high-end travellers away, and to capitalize on their distinctive advantages.” Dorado eventually became a charming relic. In 2006, it closed. As it happens, Puerto Rico has plenty of those: political History had passed it by. stability, participation in the U.S. legal and economic systems, Puerto Ricans could have been forgiven for thinking the an educated and skilled workforce. But it needs to do a bet- same was true of the island generally. It had been one of the ter job of exploiting and advertising those advantages. Heidie great postwar economic-development success stories, turn- Calero, a consultant based in Puerto Rico, told me, “One of ing itself from a poor, largely rural soci- our main problems is that not many peo- ety into a manufacturing powerhouse ple in the U.S. or the world know that with a thriving middle class. But by the Puerto Rico exists under the U.S. flag nineteen-nineties the economy had and with the U.S. dollar as its currency.” slowed, and then it went off the rails. More important, Puerto Rico should Puerto Rico has been in and out of re- pluck its low-hanging fruit. Take tour- cession since 2006. Its unemployment ism. Puerto Rico has glorious beaches, rate is around fourteen per cent; forty- tremendous weather, and wonderfully five per cent of the population lives below varied topography. Americans can get the federal poverty line; and there’s a there easily and without a passport. En- fiscal crisis—a scramble to restructure glish is spoken almost everywhere. It debts of seventy-three billion dollars. should be a tourist mecca. Yet policy- Last year, the new governor, Alejandro makers neglected tourism for decades, Padilla, said, “We’ve proved that Puerto while other Caribbean countries aggres- Rico is not Detroit and not Greece.” As sively wooed hotel chains and bolstered boasts go, that’s hardly encouraging. infrastructure. (In the past forty years, Puerto Rico’s difficulties are rooted, the number of hotel rooms in the Do- in part, in its earlier success. Its path to minican Republic went from three thou- industrialization was paved with corpo- sand to more than seventy thousand, rate tax breaks. The most important one was Section 936 of while the number of hotel rooms in Puerto Rico rose by just the U.S. tax code. (Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory.) This went seven thousand.) As a result, Puerto Rico has been eclipsed. into effect in 1976, and exempted the profits earned by Amer- In 1980, according to a study by Calero’s company, it accounted ican companies from federal taxes. Mauro Guillén, a man- for more than a quarter of all the tourist revenue in the Ca- agement professor at Wharton and an expert in emerging ribbean. By 2012, that number was down to fifteen per cent. markets, told me, “Puerto Rico became, by a wide margin, And tourism accounted for less than five per cent of Puerto the most attractive locale in the world for American com- Rico’s G.D.P. panies to operate in.” Between 1970 and 1980, manufactur- Tourism isn’t a panacea. And it’s not as buzzy or cool as ing’s share of the G.N.P. nearly doubled, as firms, especially the app economy. But if you want to reinvent the Puerto Rican pharmaceutical companies, opened plants across the island. economy it’s a good place to start. This won’t be an easy task: (I lived there for four years starting in the late seventies, when when you neglect an industry for years, it erodes the skill and my dad ran a plant for Loctite.) At one point, Guillén says, knowledge base of workers and managers alike. But Puerto more than half the drugs sold in the U.S. were manufactured Rico is increasing its marketing push and improving its in- in Puerto Rico. frastructure. The main airport is in the middle of a huge make- The problem was that the growth depended on that cru- over, and there’s been a mini-boom in luxury hotels. Dorado cial tax break, and in 1996 Congress began phasing it out. It Beach is once again the site of an opulent resort, an ultra- expired completely a decade later, and, as the subsidies disap- luxury Ritz-Carlton property that cost more than three hundred peared, so did many factories, relocating to places where labor million dollars to build. Puerto Rico seems to be reappearing was cheaper and regulation lighter. Between 1996 and 2014, on the map. The question is whether this time it can stay there. the number of manufacturing jobs on the island fell by almost —James Surowiecki CHRISTOPH NIEMANN CHRISTOPH 22 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015

cranial direct-current stimulation, or ANNALS OF THE MIND tDCS—a portable, cheap, low-tech pro- cedure that involves sending a low elec- tric current (up to two milliamps) to the ELECTRIFIED brain. Research into tDCS is in its early stages. A number of studies suggest that Adventures in transcranial direct-current stimulation. it may improve learning, vigilance, intel- ligence, and working memory, as well as BY ELIF BATUMAN relieve chronic pain and the symptoms of depression, fibromyalgia, Parkinson’s, and schizophrenia. However, the stud- ies have been so small and heterogeneous that meta-analyses have failed to prove any conclusive effects, and long-term risks have not been established. The treat- ment has yet to receive F.D.A. approval, although a few hospitals, including Beth Israel, in New York, and Beth Israel Dea- coness, in Boston, have used it to treat chronic pain and depression. “What’s the plan now?” Clark asked, unhooking the electrodes. I could see he was ready to answer more questions. But, as warned, I felt almost completely un- able to speak. It wasn’t like grasping for words; it was like no longer knowing what words were good for. Clark offered to drive me back to my hotel. Everything was mesmerizing: a dumpster in the rear-view camera, the wide roads, the Route 66 signs, the Land of Enchantment license plates. After some effort, I managed to ask about a paper I’d read regarding the use of tDCS to treat tinnitus. My father has tinnitus; the ringing in his ears is so loud it wakes him up at night. I had heard that some people with tinnitus were helped by earplugs, but my father wasn’t, so where in the head was tinnitus, and “ hat does this part of the brain window, a tree stood black against the were there different kinds? Wdo, again?” I asked, pointing to deepening sky. “There are different kinds,” Clark said. the electrode on my right temple. “Verbal people tend to get really quiet,” “Sometimes, there’s a real noise. It’s rare, “That’s the right inferior frontal cor- Clark said softly. “That’s one effect we but it happens with dogs.” He told me tex,” said Vince Clark, the director of the noticed. And it can do funny things with a story about a dog with this rare afflic- University of New Mexico Psychology your perception of time.” tion. When a microphone was placed in Clinical Neuroscience Center, in Albu- The device administering the current its ear, everyone could hear a ringing querque. “It does a lot of things. It eval- started to beep, and I saw that twenty tone—the result, it turned out, of an uates rules. People get thrown in jail when minutes had passed. As the current re- oversensitive tympanic membrane. “The it’s impaired. It might help solve math turned to zero, I felt a slight burning poor dog,” he said. problems. You can’t really isolate what it under the electrodes—both the one on We drove the rest of the way in silence. does. It has emotional components.” my right temple and another, on my left It was early December, and night was arm. Clark pressed some buttons, trying rowing up in Detroit, Clark was falling, though it was barely five. The to get the beeping to stop. Finally, he G interested in philosophy and shadows were getting longer in the lab. popped out the battery, the nine-volt thought he would study it in college. But, My legs felt unusually calm. Something rectangular kind. after realizing that all the questions that somewhere was buzzing. Outside the This was my first experience of trans- interested him came down to percep- tion and the brain, he majored in psy- The new therapy aims to stimulate the brain with small currents applied to the scalp. chobiology, at U.C.L.A. This was in the 24 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL nineteen- eighties. “By luck, I picked a 2007, shortly after being named scien- field that was about to explode,” he said. tific director of the Mind Research Net- As an undergraduate, Clark took a work at the University of New Mexico. job at a hospital, building electrodes for Funded by DARPA, the research division insertion into the brains of epileptics of the Department of Defense, his first during surgery, to locate the epileptic re- study determined that tDCS can help gions of the brain and the regions nec- subjects learn to detect hidden threats essary for cognitive function. The pa- in complex images. The researchers used tient’s head would be sawed open under images from DARWARS, a video game local anesthetic. Fully conscious, the pa- designed to familiarize Army recruits tient would be shown flashcards with with the desert roads, derelict apartment words or pictures while the electrodes blocks, and abandoned fruit markets that recorded which regions responded to the are apparently typical of the Middle East- stimuli. Clark was deeply impressed by ern landscape. For most people, the con- how localized neuronal responses were. cealed threats—an explosive device hid- Sometimes, a picture of a particular ce- den behind an oil drum; the shadow of lebrity would cause a single neuron to a sniper’s rifle protruding over a roof- become especially active. Similar obser- top—can be identified only with train- vations led scientists in a later study to ing and practice. At the beginning of the posit the existence in one patient of a study, subjects’ brains were scanned by “Halle Berry neuron.” fMRI while they received training, to Just before Clark got his Ph.D., the show which regions were active during fMRI machine was developed—a huge learning. These areas were then targeted moment for neuroscience. The technol- by electrodes in a new group of subjects ogy measures brain activity in real time, as they performed the same task. Half by monitoring blood flow. Scientists today of them received active tDCS; the other can look at an fMRI and see what hap- half, the control group, received “sham pens in the brain of a pianist playing tDCS”—a negligibly low dose. Bartók, a Carmelite nun having a reli- To Clark’s disbelief, the subjects who gious experience, a depressed person con- received tDCS learned the same mate- templating suicide, or a schizophrenic rial twice as quickly as the control group. hearing voices. As a professor at the Uni- The study was replicated by other labs, versity of Connecticut Health Center, with similar results. The Air Force found Clark began working on an addiction that tDCS made airmen twice as accu- study, using fMRI to look at the brains rate at identifying tanks and missile of recovering addicts. To his surprise, he launchers in radar scans. noticed that the fMRI could show which “It’s a huge, huge effect,” Eric Claus, of the recovered addicts were likely to a neuroscientist at the Mind Research relapse in six months. Clark believes that Network, told me of the original results. it may be possible to stimulate a relaps- “As cognitive neuroscientists, we rarely er’s brain with tDCS to make it look and see effects that large.” act more like a non-relapser’s. On hearing of Clark’s findings, Claus The precise physical mechanism of decided to incorporate tDCS into his tDCS remains mysterious. The elec- own work: the treatment of alcoholism tric current used is too low to cause using cognitive exercises. He is currently resting neurons to fire. Instead, it seems replicating a study in which alcoholics to make neurons more or less likely to were found to drink less after repeat- fire, by changing the electrical poten- edly using a joystick to push away im- tial of nerve-cell membranes. In other ages of beverages. Claus scans the brains words, although tDCS can’t create new of alcoholics while they perform the neural activity, it can enhance or re- joystick task; he then uses tDCS to duce existing activity. The procedure stimulate the active regions on a new uses direct current, so it has positive group of alcoholics. Two members of and negative electrodes and can have the tDCS group have gone from drink- both inhibitory and excitatory effects: ing a fifth of liquor a day to not drink- in general, positive current stimulates ing at all. neural activity while negative current Few claims about tDCS are free from inhibits it. controversy. In the past few months, Clark began working on tDCS in Jared Horvath, a fourth-year doctoral THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 25 student at the University of Melbourne, published two meta-analyses of hun- dreds of studies, in which he claims to COVERS BAND IN A SMALL BAR have found no evidence of either phys- iological changes to the brain or of cog- They make it feel like yesterday, nitive effects from tDCS. In aggregate, Which is the whole idea: another dateless Horvath says, the claims of different Saturday in the basement of Charter Club, researchers tend to “cancel each other Drinking beer and listening to a Trenton covers band out.” For instance, four studies looked Play Four Tops songs: “Sugar Pie Honey Bunch,” at whether tDCS increased glucose me- “It’s the Same Old Song.” They occupied my mind tabolism in the brain: two found that In 1966 through dinner with Robbie at Del Pezzo, later it did; two found that it didn’t. “It’s in- In the Vassar Club and on a cruise around Manhattan credibly difficult to differentiate these For Peter Mahony’s parents’ wedding anniversary. effects from random chance,” Horvath My tastes “evolved”: more Stax, less Motown, told me. Then the Velvet Underground and I.Q. rock— Horvath spent his first two years of God, I was a snob. And now Lou Reed is dead graduate school trying unsuccessfully to And I’m sitting in the Art Bar in Milwaukee, get meaningful results from tDCS. “It Long past my usual bedtime—I don’t stay out late, didn’t matter what device I used, what Don’t care to go / I’m home about eight, just me paradigm I used—I just never found And my radio—listening to my favorite songs again, anything,” he said. The original purpose Hearing them as though for the first time? Not at all: of his meta-analyses was simply to iden- They’re too familiar, I’m too preoccupied with them, tify a reliable tDCS effect to use as a Even though the flesh is still willing—swaying dissertation topic. Though skeptical, Slightly at the table, nodding up and down Horvath isn’t saying that research should To the memory of “Pale Blue Eyes.” be abandoned. Rather, he argues that the focus must shift from documenting —John Koethe various individual effects to establishing the reliability of a baseline effect through large randomized studies with standard- a band of elastic netting around my ful feeling, I ran out of time and was ized protocols—a view shared by most head, and I held it in place with one unable to answer two questions. researchers. hand. Throughout the study, I could Afterward, I learned the point of the feel the band oozily creeping up the study. Previously the experimenters had n my second day in Albuquerque, back of my skull, like an ill-fitting grad- found that tDCS improved performance O I met with three of Clark’s re- uation cap. on the n-back test. Now they were try- searchers to try tDCS again, with a cog- With the current off, I took two ing to determine whether the benefit nitive task. This time, the current would memory-related tests. In the first, the was “transferrable” to a different memory- stimulate “location F4,” an area of the n-back test, a series of letters flashed related test once the current was switched scalp that lies over a part of the brain as- on a screen, and I was told to decide off. In my case, the answer was no: I got sociated with working memory. Two stu- whether each letter was the same one exactly the same score—three out of dents measured my head with a tape that flashed three letters ago. Next was nine—both times. The students didn’t measure and fed the information into a a “progressive matrices” test, which in- seem that surprised. They hadn’t been software program, which told them how volved choosing a visual pattern that getting great results. “You shouldn’t feel to find F4 relative to my ears. As they matched a matrix of other patterns. bad,” one of them said, handing me a were annotating my head with colored After I had completed the tests, both tissue to wipe the gel off my hair. “Some stickers, I noticed a white ceramic phre- of which I found difficult and annoy- people don’t get any of them right.” nological bust standing on the desk. Its ing, the students turned on the tDCS. face wore a vacant yet weary expression, I felt a burning on F4 as the current he next morning, I returned to the and its cranium was mapped with what ramped up. (A burning or tingling sen- Tpsychology department to try tDCS phrenologists had considered to be the sation or a metallic taste in the mouth a third time. I met with Katie Witkie- most basic human propensities: Won- is a common side effect, though some witz, a U.N.M. psychologist, who re- der, Parental Love, Calculation, Secre- people don’t feel anything at all.) I took cently began incorporating tDCS into tiveness. I tried to gauge the place cor- the n-back test a second time. It was her work on addiction, meditation, and responding to F4, on the top right part slightly less annoying and seemed to mindfulness. In earlier studies, Witkie- of the head. It seemed to be near Sub- go by a bit faster. Then they turned the witz and her colleagues found Vipassana, limity, or Hope. current off, and I took the matrices test a Buddhist meditation practice, to be There was some trouble getting the again. It seemed a little bit easier than more effective at preventing drug relapse gel-saturated sponge electrode to stay the first time, and I felt more peace- than either cognitive behavioral therapy put on my hair. The students wrapped ful, but, perhaps as a result of the peace- or twelve-step programs. She is now 26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 embarking on research to determine if quantitative test to measure the depth The authors’ study of special skills tDCS can make a meditative state deeper, of a meditative state, I felt that my thoughts displayed by patients with autism and easier to achieve, and longer-lasting— were, for a few hours afterward, calmer, brain damage hints at one area of con- an attractive prospect for those who, like more manageable, more countable—like cern regarding tDCS: with brain func- me, find meditation too boring and frus- a few sheep standing in a pasture instead tion, as with most things, you rarely get trating to practice with any regularity. of some demented sheep convention. My something for nothing. As Roi Cohen Witkie witz put an anode over my mind felt quieter, as if an inner voice had Kadosh, a neuroscientist at Oxford Uni- right temple. In a trancelike tone, she gone silent—the voice that usually says, versity, puts it, “Enhancing one cogni- instructed me to think about my breath, “This is stupid, it’s a waste of time, why tive ability can happen at the expense of to imagine a balloon slowly filling in isn’t it over?” another ability.” Cohen Kadosh, the ed- the empty space behind my eyes, to focus Some tDCS studies have involved itor of a textbook called “The Stimu- all my attention on the area directly “quieting” a part of the brain by inhib- lated Brain,” has found that applying above my head. She told me to watch iting neural activity. An Australian group, tDCS to one part of the brain helped my thoughts come and go. In previous writing in Scientific American, claims subjects learn a math-related task but attempts at meditation, I had always that using tDCS to inhibit left-hemi- impeded their ability to recall what they found this the hardest instruction to sphere brain activity improves perfor- had learned. follow. My feeling was that either I was mance on certain logic problems. The Heidi Schambra, a Columbia Uni- thinking my thoughts or I wasn’t. If I authors were inspired by the “savant versity neurologist who uses tDCS in was thinking them, I wasn’t watching skills” that sometimes accompany brain her research with stroke patients, cau- them. If I was watching them, I wasn’t damage—as in the case of a boy who, tions against the view of tDCS as “a thinking them. having been shot in the head, lost the ‘thinking cap’ where you just put it on This time, I noticed that I thought, ability to read and write but became and everything becomes easier.” Some If there were really a balloon in my head, able “to dismantle and reassemble multi- stroke patients recover motor function you, neuroscientist, would be out of a gear bicycles without instruction,” rais- more quickly when tDCS is adminis- job. And then, as instructed, I let the ing the possibility that extraordinary tered during physical therapy—but with- thought drift away. Although there is no skills may be “latent in us all.” out physical therapy tDCS doesn’t seem

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 27 to have any effect, and even with the used galvanization to treat hysteria, men- Hans Berger, an enigmatic figure who therapy the effects aren’t huge. “We’re strual pain, depression, and psychosis. may later have coöperated with the Nazi not seeing a tripling or quadrupling,” Machines for electrotherapy were sold government, and who hanged himself in Schambra said. “It’s a few points of sta- in London department stores and leased 1941. The EEG, which measures elec- tistical difference.” at seaside resorts. An 1871 electrother- trical discharge from the brain, was the apy textbook outlines treatments for hun- first in a series of technologies to show he human drive to zap one’s head dreds of conditions, such as alcoholism, that the brain physically changes de- Twith electricity goes back at least to paralysis, dyspepsia, mutism, and “neur- pending on what we do, think, and feel, antiquity, and was originally satisfied by and that the brains of the mentally ill means of electric fish. “Headache even function differently from those of the if it is chronic and unbearable is taken healthy. away and remedied forever by a live tor- Berger’s innovation had its roots in pedo placed under the spot that is in his interest in psychic phenomena. As a pain,” the first-century physician Scri- young man in the Prussian Army, Berger bonius Largus wrote. He also used the once fell off a horse and was almost run torpedo, a species of ray native to the over by an artillery gun. The previous Mediterranean, to treat hemorrhoids. In night, his sister, to whom he was very the eleventh century, the Islamic poly- close, had dreamed that he fell off a horse math Avicenna reportedly recommended and broke his leg. The sister was so the placement of an electric catfish on asthenia”—a form of nervous exhaus- alarmed by the dream that she had their the brow to counteract epilepsy. As late tion that later came to be known as Amer- father send Berger a telegram; it reached as 1762, a Dutch colonist in Guyana icanitis. Many of the case histories in the Berger immediately after his accident. wrote that “when a slave complains of a book involve a procedure that sounds Berger was convinced that his brain had bad headache” he should put one hand much like tDCS: direct current is ap- sent electrical signals to his sister. And on his head and another on a South plied by sponge electrodes, with a com- he was right, almost: the brain does gen- American electric eel and “will be helped mon side effect of “intense redness and erate electrical impulses, and they change immediately, without exception.” an acute burning sensation.” After such depending on your mental state. Though The invention, in 1745, of the Ley- “galvanization,” patients often “find that too weak to travel through the air, they den jar—a device to store static electric- they can read with closer attention and may be recorded by electrodes placed on ity—enabled many new experiments in with greater zest; that they can pursue the scalp. Your brain can’t tell your far- electrotherapy, not all of them deliber- connected thought without fatigue, and away sister that you’re about to fall off a ate. In 1783, Jan Ingenhousz, a Dutch endure mental toil and anxiety that was horse, but it can tell an EEG machine scientist, accidentally picked up a charged once intolerable.” that you’re frightened or having a sei- Leyden jar, causing an explosion that In the twentieth century, electrother- zure or asleep. made him temporarily lose his memory, apy gradually fell from favor. Freud, who The resurgence of interest in electri- judgment, and ability to read and write. studied it with the neurologist Jean- cal brain stimulation began in 2000, after Having found his way home with great Martin Charcot in Paris, abandoned it scientists in Göttingen proved that difficulty, he went to sleep. He woke to in favor of the “talking cure,” after re- low-current “galvanization,” the proce- find that his mental faculties had not turning to Vienna. During the First dure now known as tDCS, could change only returned but had sharpened: “I saw World War, electricity was used to treat brain function. This discovery coincided much clearer the difficulties of every paralysis, epilepsy, and shell shock, often with a wave of interest in neuroplasti- thing,” he wrote in a letter to Benjamin with disastrous results. In Louis-Ferdi- city—the brain’s capacity for change— Franklin. “What did formerly seem to nand Céline’s “Journey to the End of the and with the rise of increasingly sophis- me difficult to comprehend, was now be- Night” (1932), the hero receives a diag- ticated imaging tools, like fMRI. The come of an easy solution.” nosis of low patriotism and is sent to a number of tDCS studies has risen steadily Around the same time, Luigi Gal- military psychiatric hospital, where, he since 2000, with more than four hun- vani’s experiments with electricity and recalls, “they pumped us full of shocks.” dred studies published last year. dead frogs led to the discovery of bio- Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which electrical impulses. Galvani’s nephew uses a far higher current than tDCS to erhaps the most dramatic clinical Giovanni Aldini was the first to apply trigger a full-brain seizure, gained in pop- Puse of tDCS has been in the treat- galvanic current to humans; in this way ularity by the nineteen-forties, but was ment of auditory hallucinations. In he seemingly reanimated the corpses of generally considered a last resort for only Albuquerque, Clark introduced me beheaded felons. One such demonstra- the most serious cases. After the Second to Jaime Campbell, a forty-year-old tion, at London’s Royal College of Sur- World War, interest shifted to antide- woman who has been hearing voices geons, may have inspired Mary Shelley’s pressants and other psychotropic drugs. since she was fifteen, and who recently invention of Frankenstein’s monster. The decline of electrotherapy coin- participated in a study at U.N.M. Electrotherapy on living people gained cided with the rise of brain imaging. The Heavyset, with a placid and cheerful popularity in the nineteenth century. By first milestone was the invention, in 1924, demeanor, she was carrying a crochet 1850, European and American asylums of the electroencephalograph (EEG) by project in a tote bag labelled “Bible 28 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 Bag.” The first voice she had ever heard, all belong to men, with the exception of For the past twenty years, Campbell she said, was the voice of God. She one “non-gendered voice” that used to has been in treatment with medications had been sitting at a computer table talk about her in the third person. “She’s and with ECT, which helped with her at the time, and God said she would stupid,” it would say. “No, she’s not stu- depression but didn’t silence the voices. go to South Africa and die a martyr. pid—she’s ugly. She’s not ugly—she hates Last summer, she began an experimen- At sixteen, Campbell began to be fol- people. She doesn’t hate people—they tal treatment offered by Clark and Rob- lowed by the man she called “the chap- hate her.” Once, the voices said that any- ert Thoma, a U.N.M. psychologist who eron.” He walked six feet behind her, one she spoke to would explode. She specializes in schizophrenia. The trial and would rape and kill her if she did didn’t speak a word for three days and is based on a randomized study done anything wrong. “I didn’t cuss. I didn’t nights, to keep everyone safe. in France in 2012, in which thirty lie. I didn’t cheat. I didn’t even say the Campbell’s other symptoms have in- schizophrenics were given tDCS for word ‘sex,’ ” Campbell recalled. “I was cluded visual hallucinations and delu- five days. The treatment decreased au- a very well- behaved teen.” sions of persecution. Once, she saw four ditory hallucinations by thirty-one per At nineteen, Campbell was given a demons—red misshapen creatures with cent, and the benefits lasted, and in diagnosis of schizophrenia. People asked tails—hanging up near the ceiling in the some cases grew, over the next three her then why she had never mentioned four corners of the room, watching her. months. the chaperon. “Because it was normal,” Campbell was raised in a nondenomi- Campbell received two twenty-min- she said. “Every sixteen-year-old has a national charismatic church, and reli- ute tDCS sessions a day for five days. chaperon.” gion is still extremely important to her. After the very first session, she felt a re- An estimated seventy-five per cent of She believes that she’s more in touch duction in the “tea party”: an ambient schizophrenics hear voices, and twenty- with the spiritual world than most peo- murmuring and clinking that she al- five to thirty per cent of those cases don’t ple and that the visions and voices come ways heard in the background. Gradu- respond to medication. The majority of to her from God. But she also believes ally, particular voices went mute. By the voices are nasty, telling subjects that that her mind “twists things,” that it midweek, Campbell says, her head was they are worthless or should commit sui- causes her suffering beyond what’s or- completely quiet. cide. Campbell told me that her voices dinary or bearable. “I never had a response like tDCS,”

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 29 Campbell says. “Even with the ECT, feels better than she did before the study. switch to a different drug—neither pro- even with the best medication combina- But every time she hears a voice she cess can be repeated indefinitely with- tions that we’ve come up with, I’ve never feels terrified that “they’re going to out the risk of liver or kidney damage. had something that does as complete a come back full-fledged.” So although my symptoms are under job.” Unlike ECT, which lost effective- control for now, I worry, depressively, ness over repeated treatments, tDCS efore tDCS can be approved by the about what will happen when I exhaust seemed to help more and more, even B F.D.A. and enter widespread use, the meds. As I was researching this piece, after the study had ended. For weeks, there have to be large randomized con- my attention was caught by a number Campbell didn’t hear any voices at all. trolled trials. Protocols must be standard- of randomized controlled trials show- Everything became easier: thinking, gro- ized—the placement of the electrodes, ing a benefit from tDCS for depression. cery shopping, driving a car. The most the amount of current, and the duration, (The data are insufficient to allow defini- revolutionary thing, she says, was “to not frequency, and number of sessions. In tive conclusions, but larger trials are in have someone constantly telling me that the meantime, there is a device called progress.) I was almost embarrassed by I’m a horrible person.” People used to ActivaDose, which has been cleared by how excited I felt. What if it was pos- tell her that she was a good person, but the F.D.A. for another purpose (admin- sible to feel less sad—to escape the de- she never believed them, because the istering drugs transdermally), and which terministic cycle of sadness? What if voices said the opposite—and didn’t they can also administer tDCS; physicians you could do the treatment yourself, at know her best? When they finally shut may legally prescribe it “off label,” which home, without the humiliation and ex- up, she said that she felt like a woman is how some hospitals can offer the ther- pense of doctors’ visits? I asked Vince who had been rescued from an abusive apy. Several Internet companies sell tDCS Clark whether any private physicians husband. kits for nonmedical uses, such as boost- use tDCS outside of a research setting. Clark and Thoma will eventually ing cognition or enhancing video-game He knew of only one: James Fugedy, replicate the randomized controls of performance. There is a tDCS subred- a Yale-trained anesthesiologist who the French experiment, but so far dit, a do-it-yourself tDCS blog and pod- practices in Atlanta. I spoke with Fugedy Campbell is one of only two people cast, and a certain amount of YouTube on the phone and learned that, since to have completed the study, and the footage showing young men with little 2007, he has treated between three hun- fluctuating nature of schizophrenia scientific background zapping their brains dred and four hundred patients with symptoms makes it dangerous to infer in the hope of learning German or play- tDCS, principally for chronic pain and too much from her experience. When ing better chess. depression. Most of his patients self-ad- I met her, four months had passed since It is the rare human who doesn’t wish minister tDCS at home: Fugedy charges her last tDCS session. The voices had to change something about his or her twenty-six hundred dollars for a pack- started to return, though only sporad- brain. In my case, it’s depression, which age including the device, a diagnostic ically. Over the weekend, she had heard runs on both sides of my family. I’ve and training session, and follow-up con- a voice at Walmart telling her she was been taking antidepressants for almost sultations in person or over Skype. a bad person and that people were going twenty years, and they help a lot. But Early this year, I took a plane to At- to blow her up. But when she left every couple of years the effects wear lanta. Fugedy’s practice is in a medical Walmart the voice went quiet. She still off, and I have to either up the dose or park about half an hour from the airport. The sign on the suite door—“Brain Stim- ulation Clinic”—seemed to suggest a large staff, but the only people there were Fugedy and a dreadlocked office man- ager in scrubs. Fugedy, a sixty-five-year-old New Jer- sey transplant, combines a soft-spoken demeanor with boundless energy. He told me that he first learned about tDCS from a 2006 study on fibromyalgia, pub- lished by scientists at Harvard. He men- tioned the paper to a patient, saying he hoped that the F.D.A. would approve the technology soon. “I’m old,” she re- plied. “Why can’t we do it now?” Fugedy practiced tDCS a few times on himself and then began to treat his fibromyalgia patient. After five sessions, she experienced a greater reduction in pain than she had on any other treat- ment. Fugedy went on to use the tDCS “Happy?” with other chronic-pain patients. In 2008, he got a call from a chronically tic case about the size of a desk dictio- leave you in peace,” he concluded even- depressed electrical engineer in south- nary. Inside were two electrodes with ca- tually, handing me a brass handbell and ern Georgia. His doctor had prescribed bles and sponges, a nine-volt battery, a leaving the room. ECT, but he was worried about possi- Velcro headband, and an ActivaDose. Sun shone in a halo around the cor- ble memory loss; he had heard of tDCS, He showed me how to wet the sponges, ner of the window blinds. On the wall and wanted to try it first. Fugedy agreed, fit them into the frames, and connect hung a picture of a woman cradling a and the engineer began commuting to the electrodes to the stimulator. naked infant; a pair of white wings Atlanta five days a week. After four Fugedy thinks that the electrodes sprouted from the child’s tiny shoul- weeks, his mood had improved, and he move around less if you lie down, so I ders. A cursive caption read “Hope stopped the treatment. Three months lay on the examination table and slipped Cherishing Love.” I felt obscurely trou- later, when the symptoms returned, the electrodes underneath the Velcro bled by the caption. Wasn’t it love that Fugedy got him his own stimulator and headband. The anode went just over my cherished hope, rather than the other showed him how to use it. left eye, to stimulate the left dorsolateral way round? Wasn’t hope the thing with Fugedy’s recent patients include a bi- prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain feathers? The longer I thought about polar pregnant woman who couldn’t take that may be underactive in depressed it, the more the words resisted under- her medications during pregnancy and people—and the cathode over the standing and shifted places, again and a thirty-year-old schizophrenic man who visual cortex, on the back of my head. again, like markers on a game board. had been unable to tolerate antipsychot- Then I set the timer for twenty minutes My thoughts turned to the many pa- ics. After starting tDCS, Fugedy told and the current to two milliamps, and tients who must have lain on this same me, the man was able to get his first job turned the dial to start the flow of elec- white table and held this same brass and enroll in college. Fugedy, who has tricity. As the current ramped up, I felt bell, and how appropriate the image of had depressive episodes himself, has been the familiar burning on my forehead and hope was, because surely nobody would self-administering tDCS on and off for general wordlessness. be here if he hadn’t tried a lot of other eight years. For a short time, Fugedy kept up his things first. After we had been talking for an hour end of a conversation we had been hav- I felt peaceful in the cab back to the or two, Fugedy handed me a black plas- ing about neuroimaging. “Well, I’ll just airport. The T.S.A. didn’t try to confiscate

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 31 the nine-volt battery. On the plane, I was just sitting there. Heidi Schambra, the seated beside a small girl who was play- neurologist who works with stroke pa- ing a game called Office Jerk on her iPad. tients, has a fascinating theory about this. The game involved throwing a stapler She believes that, at the moment of re- at the head of an office worker. “Who’s ceiving tDCS, a person in emotional or the jerk, him or you?” the girl’s mother physical pain is engaged, wittingly or un- asked. I wondered if I should offer to wittingly, in a cognitive task: namely, the improve the girl’s performance with a activation of the placebo response. little stimulation to the right inferior We’re not used to viewing placebo—a frontal cortex, but she didn’t appear to positive response to a sham treatment— need it. as a “task,” but there are many cognitive The next day, I tried tDCS at home. factors involved, including Pavlovian con- I felt some burning again and tightened ditioning, the patient-clinician relation- the strap; Fugedy had said this might ship, and positive expectation. Decep- improve the electrode connection. It’s tion, Schambra points out, may not be possible that I overdid it with the tight- required: sugar pills have been shown to ening, because at the end of twenty reduce the symptoms of irritable bowel minutes I had a pink electrode-shaped syndrome, even in patients who were ex- square on my forehead. In the shower plicitly told that they were receiving a afterward, I felt my forehead sting under placebo. the hot water, as if sunburned. A head- The implication of placebo is ex- ache that had come on at some point tremely powerful: What if the body during Office Jerk was now insistently knows, in some sense, how to heal itself, throbbing behind my left eyebrow. Yet, and it’s just a matter of triggering that whether because of the tDCS or for knowledge? Schambra suspects tDCS some other reason, I was in excellent may not merely trigger the placebo effect, spirits the rest of the day, and indeed as all treatments do, but actually amplify all week. (The pink square went away it. In other words, in a controlled tDCS within minutes; the headache lingered study, both active and sham groups get for days.) The fact that I might have a placebo effect, but the active group may suffered a mild burn on my forehead get a bigger effect. Schambra empha- because of a brain-zapping machine I sizes that her theory is just speculation had bought in Atlanta seemed hilari- for now. She got the idea from a study ous. It was a new year, fresh snow had that found expectancy to be an import- fallen, the holidays were finally over. ant factor in how well people responded New York looked beautiful. to depression treatment: the patients who My plan to try tDCS for two weeks, felt better were the ones who expected to see if it made a difference in my de- to feel better—not necessarily the ones pression, fell through for an unexpected who got the active versus the placebo reason: I didn’t feel depressed enough. It treatment. was a reminder, if I needed one, of how After we hung up, I found myself difficult it is to extract scientific facts thinking about what neurologists call from human experience. Even when you “positive expectancy” and what the phre- isolate one variable and test it in a lab nologists called hope. The phrenologists with control subjects, it’s difficult to know already knew that hope was situated in why you’re seeing what you see; and in the prefrontal cortex: “in front of con- the messiness of everyday life, where scientiousness, and behind marvelous- there are any number of reasons that your ness, being elongated in the direction of mood might change from one week to the ears.” Phrenologists were unable to the next, it’s virtually impossible to gauge detect hope in animals; in criminals, they the effects of applying subthreshold elec- said, it was diminished. Hope inspires tricity to your own head. and dupes us in turn, eternally promis- ing happiness in this world and the next. ne of the mysteries of tDCS is why In a lecture on phrenology, the French O some uses require a cognitive task physician Broussais once produced a par- and others don’t. The therapy makes peo- tial mold of Napoleon’s head. You couldn’t ple better at math only if it’s paired with see everything, he said. But you could a math task. But it seems to make de- see enough of the organ of hope to con- pressed people feel better even if they’re clude that it was very well developed.  32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 flavor of competition to the mélange. SHOUTS & MURMURS Each guest should, at some point, look around and offer a lukewarm comment about how “grownup” it is COUPLE’S FIRST DINNER to be having a dinner party. Congrat- ulate one another on the genius of “just PARTY, SERVES SIX hanging out with friends without hav- ing to go to a noisy expensive bar,” as BY HALLIE CANTOR though you’ve personally invented the concept of home entertaining. Garnish with more compliments about the chicken, which there is nowhere near enough of. Next, embroil the guests in a “the- oretical” discussion of the merits of non-monogamous relationships. Add- ing more wine every few minutes, re- duce to a simmering fight between the on-again, off-again couple about “what constitutes human nature.” Before long, the couple’s words will begin to turn dark and brittle. Be sure not to crowd them, so that bystanders don’t get burned. Lighten the mood by allowing the single guest to offer a terrible story INGREDIENTS vealed themselves to be off-again through about her dating life. Let everyone 1 eager young hostess who wants to a tense disagreement about which else steep in pity for this person, be- prove to her friends that she and her one is responsible for their lateness. fore deglazing. new boyfriend are a serious couple by Separate the couple and set aside to Blend several imperceptibly differ- having a dinner party chill. ent opinions on an issue that everyone 1 half of a couple who is always run- Meanwhile, allow the single guest in attendance basically agrees upon. By ning late to marinate in her insecurity about this point, wine will have loosened up 1 couple who are constantly break- being the only unattached person there. the guests enough for one of them to ing up and getting back together When all the guests have arrived, say something stupid in an attempt to 1 single friend whisk the conversation about the neigh- be provocative. Expose him to the low borhood into a frothy lament of gen- flame of the other guests’ judgment DIRECTIONS trification. Skim over the fact that the until he begins to turn slightly pink. In a small kitchen, mix together the party’s attendees all live in condos built Then let him blanch as he frantically half of the guests who have arrived on in the past year. defends his stupid position further, in- time despite the fact that no one is sure Add wine. sisting that he’s only “playing devil’s whether “7:30” means “arrive at 7:30” Heap a large quantity of praise on advocate.” or “arrive an hour late,” like it did in the host’s cooking. When she worries Bring the argument to a boil, then college. Let stand for one hour, until aloud that the chicken isn’t fully cooked, remove the devil’s advocate from the guests are very hungry and slightly vigorously massage her ego by reassur- heat by letting him storm out to “have irritable. ing her that it is. (You may have to re- a cigarette.” The remaining mixture Slowly incorporate the remainder peat this step more times than you think of guests should bubble into nervous of the guests, pausing after the addi- are necessary.) laughter. After several minutes of un- tion of each one for the same grating Let the guy whose girlfriend is still comfortable silence, you should begin conversation about how easy or hard running late mince his words while to hear sighing, yawning, and perfunc- it was to find the host’s apartment from pontificating on a relatively esoteric tory offers to help with the dishes. the subway and what an up-and-com- current-events issue. Listen until it be- Once each couple has been sifted ing neighborhood this is. Gently fold comes clear that he made it through out of the apartment, they will cool off the host’s new boyfriend into a discus- only one relevant “longread” on his by affectionately bad-mouthing the sion about people whom everyone else lunch hour. Grill him about specifics other guests on the train ride home. in attendance used to work with and until he is unable to clarify his point whom he’s never met. and is rendered speechless. Mean- Yields one large headache and the de- At this point, the on-again, off-again while, sprinkle each couple’s speech sire to abstain from socializing for sev-  LUCI GUTIÉRREZ LUCI couple should be stewing, having re- with “we” statements, adding a subtle eral weeks. THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 33 brought in a real one, which suggested ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS to Jones that they were trying a little too hard. Early in the day, a young man came in wearing suspenders over a Stan- THE NERD HUNTER ford T-shirt and with military ribbons taped to his chest. When he pulled a The casting director Allison Jones is reshaping American comedy, one misfit at a time. banana out of his pocket, Jones quietly sighed. A few moments later, it popped BY STEPHEN RODRICK out of its peel and landed at Jones’s feet. This was nothing, she later told me; he first scene of “Other Space,” a Angeles. The rooms of the house are once, during an emotional table read, Tnew sci-fi sitcom by Paul Feig, airy and filled with mementos of her an actress accidentally punched her in which streams on Yahoo on April 14th, thirty-year-long career in Hollywood: the face. begins with one of the show’s central bobble-heads of characters from “The In the early days of Hollywood, cast- characters, a hapless spaceship captain Office,” which Jones cast; a bulletin board ing directors had little decision-making named Stewart Lipinski, navigating the collaged with head shots. In the wait- power. Most working actors were signed ship through an asteroid shower while ing room, next to the sign-in sheet, a to individual studios, and casting mainly eating a hot dog. On a Saturday last bowl of candies and bubble gum greets involved matching individuals to roles August, however, on the first day of cast- nervous actors. The audition room is based on the actor’s availability and type.

“Allison doesn’t just find us actors; she finds us people we want to work with the rest of our lives,” the director Judd Apatow said. ing, the script was in flux and the hot austere, with no windows and just two In the nineteen-sixties, as the studio dog was still written as a banana. Alli- chairs. Jones hates asking her staff to system broke down, the influence of son Jones, the casting director, was read- work on weekends—“They don’t make casting directors grew. Heavyweights ing the scene with actors trying out for enough money,” she said—so she was like Marion Dougherty discovered young the Stewart role, who faced a decision: alone, with a video camera mounted on talent on Broadway and persuaded audition with a real banana, or just pre- a tripod, reading lines as one aspiring directors to hire such unknowns as Al tend to eat one? Stewart after another passed through, Pacino, Paul Newman, and Robert Du- Jones works out of a bungalow in the four minutes apart. Most of the actors vall. Jones began her career with the quaint Larchmont neighborhood of Los pretended to eat a banana, but some had two-beats-and-a-punch-line sitcoms of 34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 PHOTOGRAPH BY DOLLY FAIBYSHEV the nineteen-eighties, but, in working porting cast assembled by Jones; already with Feig and the director Judd Apa- it’s the most highly anticipated comedy tow, she was required to try something of 2016. revolutionary: find comedic actors who, Jones is in her fifties, and nearly six more than just delivering jokes, could feet tall, with unruly curly hair. In jeans improvise and riff on their lines, creat- and blouses from Liberty, she comes ing something altogether different from across as someone’s favorite aunt. She what was on the page. met Feig more than twenty-five years In the process, Jones has helped give ago, when he was a struggling actor, and rise to a new kind of American com- their professional relationship deepened edy. In 1999, she cast Seth Rogen, James through their collaboration on “Freaks Franco, and Jason Segel in the critically and Geeks.” In 2013, Feig reacquired acclaimed, poorly watched teen series “Other Space” from Twentieth Century “Freaks and Geeks.” The show, created Fox Television, where it had been stuck and written by Feig and produced by for years. Feig once described the show Apatow, was a coming-of-age story set in the Times as a sci-fi version of “The in the suburban Michigan of Feig’s Office.” The lead character, Stewart Li- youth. Jones won the show’s only Emmy, pinski, is a dorky twentysomething space for her casting. Several years later, she commander. He is assisted by Karen, met with a young, sweaty Jonah Hill, his sister, and Michael, his best friend, who was desperate for an introduction both of whom are miffed at having been to Apatow. She told Apatow that Hill passed over for the position. The other was weird and hilarious. That sufficed; crew members are Kent, a wealthy hu- Apatow expanded a cameo part for Hill manoid who has wakened from a chem- in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” as an odd ical bath; Tina, Stewart’s ditzy love in- but lovable eBay customer. Two years terest; and Natasha, a Spock-like virtual later, Hill was cast with Michael Cera sexbot and the ship’s operating system, in “Superbad,” a raunchy teen comedy who appears on a computer screen. that Apatow produced. It was left to By the time Jones finishes reading a Jones to find their nerdier-than-thou script, she already has ideas about which friend McLovin. Jones posted notices actors might be right for the roles—and seeking high-school students in L.A. who can handle the pressure of con- After seeing thousands of candidates, stantly improvising during the eighty- she caught a glimpse of a camera-phone hour workweek that shooting a televi- head shot sent in by a sixteen-year-old sion comedy often requires. But she also named Christopher Mintz-Plasse. She likes the surprise of the unknown, and called the director, Greg Mottola, and on the first day of casting she was wad- excitedly said, “I think I found McLovin; ing through fifty or so candidates cho- he’s like Dill from ‘To Kill a Mocking- sen from some nine thousand who bird.’ ” Jones told me, “You could tell he had appealed to her in online head shots. was a kid who probably had seen the She was looking in particular for “Paul inside of a locker.” Since then, Mintz- Feig types,” well-meaning nerds who Plasse has starred in six movies. are endearing in their benevolent odd- “Allison doesn’t just find us actors; ness. “She finds people that your heart she finds us people we want to work can break for,” the actor Paul Rudd told with the rest of our lives,” Apatow said. me. By lunchtime, however, Jones hadn’t “That’s good, because the older you get seen anyone worth showing to Feig. you don’t want to see tons of people. I “They’re forcing it,” she said. “It’s not real. know if Allison sends two they will both You’re either a nerd or you’re not.” be great.” Feig said, “Years from now, Between auditions, to lift her spirits, she will be recognized as having changed Jones watched an old “Saturday Night the face of comedy as much as any com- Live” sketch of Will Ferrell spoofing edy filmmaker. All the best comedy peo- James Lipton. At one point, she whis- ple have come through her or from her.” pered, “I’m going to hit the ladies’ room Jones did the casting for Apatow’s 2007 and blow my brains out.” But she caught film, “Knocked Up,” and for Feig’s 2011 a glimpse of someone interesting in the comedy, “Bridesmaids.” This summer, waiting room, and when she came back Feig will direct a remake of “Ghost- her eyes were alight. busters,” with all-female stars and a sup- “Wait till you see the next guy! He’s THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 35 a real goober. He’s the real thing. I just For Jones, the definition of “nerd” is said. “I didn’t want to make any adult hope he can talk.” broad enough to include every Jack pissed off. I’m still terrified of fucking Nick Azarian was a mountain of hair Lemmon role, Elaine May in her 1971 up, because the business is a little bit nesting on a tiny, teen-age face. He car- film “A New Leaf,” and Cecil Vyse, the of that same mentality—who do you ried a binder and wore a turtleneck with benign but misguided character played blame for something that’s a failure? a space-camp sticker. As he walked in, by Daniel Day-Lewis in the Merchant Gotta blame casting.” a wide smile broke across Jones’s face. Ivory adaptation of “A Room with a Jones credits her brothers with shap- According to his IMDb résumé, Azarian, View.” ing her comedic tastes. One brother and who is from Charlotte, was a “full-out The category might also include his friends made up stories called “Christ- power geek.” He told Jones that he’d Jones. When I told Apatow that I was mas Tragedies,” for which they invented found the shirt at Goodwill and printed writing about her, he asked, “What does and recited straight-faced accounts of the sticker himself. she do outside of work? What are her misery—Jones fondly recalled a bit in “God bless you!” Jones said. hobbies? Please tell me, because I don’t which a plane full of pregnant nuns Azarian read the part. When his four know.” Jones is single and enjoys sew- crashes into an orphanage. “I admired minutes were up, he left the room but ing. Sometimes she visits nephews and so much how the boys could tell each then returned, blushing—he’d forgot- nieces on the Eastern Seaboard. Mostly, other to fuck off without anyone get- ten his binder. He wasn’t right for the she works. “I’m the person that people ting mad,” she said. “The girls I knew lead, but he had jolted Jones awake. forget they met,” she said. She lives in got so sensitive. My brothers were not “See? That’s the face we’re looking a modest house not far from her office, prim and proper.” for,” she said. “A real face. You can’t fake but she preferred not to show it. Instead, She enjoyed watching a “real but that face. I’ll show him to Paul; he’ll on the Saturday after the first day of weird” local program called “Commu- find something for him.” She sighed casting, she offered a tour of her storage nity Auditions,” a low-budget precur- dreamily. “That face!” space, in Studio City. We drove there sor to “American Idol,” in which ama- in her black Audi S.U.V. She opened a teurs would sing and perform, sometimes “ don’t know why I’m drawn to nerds,” rattling, white sliding door to her space, backed by a lumbering orchestra. Later, I Jones told me recently over a burger revealing thirty years of boxes, files, and at Pomona College, in California, she at the Astro Burger, a restaurant near memorabilia. and her friends watched the first epi- her office. Her face brightened and she Jones grew up in Needham, Mas- sodes of “Saturday Night Live.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose. She sachusetts, outside Boston, the second loved comedy, but it seemed impracti- admitted that on Valentine’s Day she youngest of six children. Her father, cal; she earned an M.B.A. at U.C.L.A. had stayed up till 3 A.M. watching the an executive at John Hancock, loved and endured a year at a New York ad- Weather Channel, mesmerized by Jim Walter Matthau and hated John F. vertising firm, working on the Stroh’s Cantore’s dancing reaction to thunder- Kennedy; her mother managed the beer account. She recalled a moment at snow. “I mean, why am I obsessed with kids. Growing up, Jones watched qui- business school when she froze just be- the people on the Weather Channel? etly as her parents and her older sib- fore she was due to give a presentation. Because they’re so pure, nice, and nerdy. lings battled over Vietnam and long “I just couldn’t do it,” Jones told me. There’s nothing cynical about them.” hair. “I was the fifth of six kids,” Jones “I got massive stagefright and started shaking. The next presentation, I did it from a humorous point of view, and then I could do it.” Jones returned to California and en- rolled in the producer program at the American Film Institute. One of her early assignments was to cast another student’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “The Potato Elf.” She showed me a file containing head shots and film memos from the project. “I rejected An- jelica Huston,” Jones said. “At that time, she was John Huston’s daughter, Jack Nicholson’s girlfriend, and a model. That was her claim to fame. Thirty years later, I still don’t know what I’m doing.” Jones confessed that she passed on Ryan Gos- ling for a pilot and chose not to bring Kristen Wiig back for a second audi- tion for “The Office.” Her first significant job out of school was as a casting assistant on “Family Ties.” She soon realized the extent to Phyllis Smith, who was not trained as a box and sealed it up. “I’m still really which casting could make or break a an actor; for several years she had worked terrified, but not as afraid as I used to be.” show. There were spirited battles inter- as Jones’s casting associate. In 2013, The files she turned up from “Freaks nally over whether Michael J. Fox was Jones cast Joe Lo Truglio, a nebbish co- and Geeks” had a Dead Sea Scrolls feel right for the role of the teen-age con- median, as a detective alongside Andy about them—modern comedy at Year servative Alex P. Keaton, with some ex- Samberg on the police comedy “Brook- One. The show’s plot centered on three ecutives arguing that he was too short lyn Nine-Nine.” Lo Truglio had audi- nerds and five burnouts; Apatow and and not charismatic enough. (Fox be- tioned for Jones dozens of times in the Feig told Jones to find the kids that never came the breakout star of the show.) In past two decades. “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” get cast. Jones and her team saw hun- her downtime, she watched films and won a Golden Globe Award for best dreds of prospects in Los Angeles, New TV shows and, when the credits rolled, comedy series during its first season. York, Vancouver, and Chicago. Feig and wrote down the names of promising co- In Studio City, Jones was still open- Apatow saw Rogen on tape and invited medians and actors. She showed me a him to an open call in Vancouver, peg- tiny, tattered notebook that read, “Car- ging him to play Ken, a sarcastic burn- son: 11/28/86 Ellen?” It was Ellen De- out. She spotted Segel, a handsome high- Generes’s first appearance on the “To- school basketball player, and cast him as night Show.” (The next line read, Nick, a vulnerable drummer with a Rush “Ordered two salads from Mr. Pizza.”) obsession and a jackass dad. She remem- Jones found regular work on “Fam- bered Franco from “1973,” a failed pilot ily Ties” and “The Fresh Prince of Bel- that she had cast that year, and slotted Air,” but she was also casting sitcom pi- him as Daniel Desario, a handsome but lots. In one, a short-lived TV show called insecure James Dean wannabe. “Grand,” she had to cast the role of “wolf “When Jones found Jason, I didn’t boy,” a teen-ager who was raised in the ing boxes and sifting through artifacts: know what to do with him,” Feig told forest by wolves. The applicants included green “Family Ties” coffee cups, a pub- me. “He wasn’t what I was looking a young Leonardo DiCaprio. But Jones licity photo of an adolescent Will Smith for. Judd said the beauty is we can re- often chafed at working for the net- leaning between pillars, clippings from write to fit these great people that works. One writer complained that Di- old TV Guides. I caught sight of a dusty Allison’s found.” Caprio and the other kids “looked too spec script from the early nineteen-nine- In late 1998, at a Los Angeles cast- well-fed.” She brought in Jim Carrey ties that had the words “Seinfeld” and ing call, Jones met the ultimate Feig for another project, but his mouth was “Allison Jones” on it. I asked if she had type: a gangly, freckle-faced kid named deemed to be too big. Producers would written a script for “Seinfeld.” Jones tried Martin Starr. “When Martin walked insist that Jones call agents late at night to change the subject, then claimed that in, I remember thinking, Please, please and inform them that their client need she could remember only the subplot, be able to talk,” Jones said. He was cast not show up in the morning. She has which turned on the idea that in 1985 as one of three freshman geeks trying had to fire Dane Cook and Pauly Shore. Kramer had been aboard the Achille to make it through the day without “Other Space” is part of Yahoo’s first Lauro when Palestinian terrorists seized being humiliated. (He now stars on wave of original programming, and its the cruise ship. It was Kramer, not the HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”) Later, Jones budget is a sliver of what “Ghostbusters” terrorists, who (accidentally) pushed went on to cast Shia LaBeouf as a ter- will spend. But, for Jones, part of the Leon Klinghoffer overboard. rified school mascot and Lizzy Caplan appeal is that it’s not a network show. Jeff Garlin, a principal actor on “Curb as Segel’s disco-loving girlfriend. She “The networks micromanage so Your Enthusiasm” and a longtime friend spent weeks trying to get a script to a much that it just makes me fucking ber- of Jones’s, later told me that he’d read teen-age Scarlett Johansson. A very serk,” she told me. “So I can’t do it. I’m the script. “It was hilarious,” he said, and young Shailene Woodley auditioned, just cranky all the time, and I hate being added that she was instrumental in help- and Jones scrawled “very talkative” next that way.” ing him write his 2006 comedy, “I Want to her name. The cast didn’t meet as a Someone to Eat Cheese With.” “I al- whole until the first table read, to go n the nineteen-eighties, even smart ways try to get her to write more. She through the pilot script together. Feig, I comedies like “WKRP in Cincin- is so talented.” Apatow, and Jones saw the glimmers nati” featured misfits who were none- Jones had shown the script to a cou- of a more realistic comedy, in which theless gorgeous. Through her casting, ple of agents, one of whom told her, the laughs come from the human foi- Jones has introduced actors who more incorrectly, that she had misspelled bles of the nerds and burnouts who closely resemble people in real life. She “George Constanza.” “They had some make up the cast. Feig has called it found Andy Buckley, Michael Scott’s stupid comments and I got discour- “pushed reality.” boss on “The Office,” at a farmers’ mar- aged, like an idiot,” she said. She once “It’s a sensibility,” he told me over ket in L.A., several years after Buckley wrote spec scripts for “Family Ties” and breakfast one morning. “I don’t want had given up acting to become a stock- “Murphy Brown,” but those also went anybody ever doing things where they broker. The “Office” character Phyllis, a nowhere, and she is no longer writing. feel fake, because that’s a kind of nine- feisty, heavyset saleswoman, is played by She put the “Seinfeld” script back into ties style of comedy—‘Look how funny THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 37 I am!’ ” He mentioned Dwight Schrute, four times more than Ron Shelton on cleavage was a really nice touch.” the scheming but harmless salesman shot in making the 1988 classic “Bull Jones laughed along during Vayn- played by Rainn Wilson, on “The Durham.”) It has also made Jones’s abil- trub’s four minutes, nodding encourag- Office.” ity to find prodigies more important, ingly. Jones paused for a moment be- “Dwight’s a really crazy character,” since so much of the film’s comedy fore the next audition. “I love her so Feig said. “But he so believes it, he’s so emerges in post-production. much,” she said. “She has that energy.” grounded, and he’s not winking at us. The Karen role was challenging: the But she thought Vayntrub was better That’s what makes you go, ‘That’s hi- character has been passed over for com- for the role of Tina, Stewart’s love in- larious.’ The key is finding people who mand in favor of Stewart, so she must terest, and arranged for her to come have a natural governor. I can push them be both crabby and funny. Jones had al- back and read for that part. and push them and they won’t go into ready seen half a dozen actresses when The competition for Tina was al- cartoon land.” Wilson was the first actor Milana Vayntrub sat down in the wait- ready fierce. Earlier in the week, Jones Jones saw when she was casting the ing room, wearing glasses and a prim had brought in a Korean-American ac- show’s pilot. “Everyone is obsessed with plaid dress with a white collar. To break tress named Susan Park, whom she no- ‘heat,’ who’s hot,” Jeff Garlin said. “But the tension in crowded audition rooms, ticed in a small part in the recent tele- Allison has never cared about who’s Vayntrub told me, she likes to slurp vision version of “Fargo.” Park was born hot, and she’s never changed what she water loudly from a cup, see who laughs, in Los Angeles to Korean immigrants. thought was funny.” and befriend them. She was waiting Her parents were supportive but doubt- Jones’s collaboration with Apatow alone for Jones, so she repeated a man- ful of her career choice until her mother has given rise to a brand of “dude hu- tra from her acting coach: “I release and watched her in “Fargo.” Jones was eager mor”—bumbling young guys who be- destroy my need to get this part. I am for inside news about the show. have badly but have hearts of plated just here to tickle myself and play in “So they’re going to do a second sea- gold. “It’s a little strange, since they’re these circumstances. This is not a scene; son with a totally different cast?” she so much younger than me and talk so I am just going to behave as though it’s asked. “That’s so interesting.” much about vaginas,” Jones said at one really happening.” In the scene that Park was reading, point. In the past couple of years, crit- Vayntrub was born in Uzbekistan Stewart tells Tina to chart a course into ics of Apatow have suggested that his and grew up in a Russian enclave of a new galaxy. Park played it spacey at work is misogynistic. Jones said that it West Hollywood. Jones first saw her in first—she skipped a navigation class, just reminded her of her older brothers. 2014, at an audition for the Billy Crys- she said, because the professor was a Still, she looked forward to casting tal sitcom “The Comedians.” creep. Then she recalled that her boy- “Ghostbusters.” “Milana Vayntrub, how are you?” friend, Ted, had called the professor “It’s nice to get a break from the tes- Jones asked. Commander Grabber, and she slowly tosterone every once in a while,” she Vayntrub’s face scrunched up; Robin dissolved into tears at how much she said. “I was thrilled to do ‘Bridesmaids’— Williams had died the day before. “I’m missed Ted. After a pause, Park spoke it was a true ensemble of odd charac- kinda shitty, kinda sad,” she said. again, with mock gravity: “Hold on, ters, all of whom I had observed in real “I know, it’s just the most awful thing,” something’s not right. Ted’s not my life. There wasn’t one scene that called Jones said. “Just awful.” boyfriend.” Her chin began to quiver, for a push-up bra. Most female descrip- then she blurted, “He’s my fiancé.” Her tions in screenplays and TV scripts— face took on a dreamy aspect. “I love and I am not kidding—are basically ‘as- that word.” tonishingly beautiful, even without Jones had Park do another scene. makeup,’ and ‘brilliant.’ Never just beau- Auditions require an actor to switch tiful, always astonishingly so.” moods far faster than is called for during actual filming. In the second few days after the first audition, scene, Park played Tina as a smart-ass; A Jones conducted another, for the in one exchange, she asks permission part of Karen, Stewart’s sister in “Other to wear a sweatshirt so that the male Space”; she set up her video camera while That set Vayntrub at ease, she later crewmen won’t gawk at her. Karen, her assistant, Ben Harris, took a seat told me: “I knew I could say that to her Stewart’s sister, replies that she has no and prepared to read with the actresses. and that she was connected to me as a sweatshirts. Park looked incredulous: As the film industry has turned dig- person and not just like a number.” She “So you don’t have any ratty old con- ital, the technical process of editing has stumbled early in Karen’s monologue, diment-stained sweatshirts? This is become far less painful, but it has cre- when she tells Stewart that she feels stunning to me.” Park shouted, with a ated more work. Many of the directors that he’s always upstaging her. But she head wag, “I know you go baggy. Don’t who collaborate with Jones shoot expo- found her rhythm, pointing out that act like you don’t.” nentially more film than a comedy in Stewart even won the part of Juliet over Jones laughed—she seemed genu- the nineteen-nineties might have. (For her in drama club, then improvised: “You inely entertained. Park said goodbye. “Knocked Up,” Apatow shot the equiv- were beautiful. For the record, you looked Jones popped a piece of chocolate from alent of more than a million feet of film, really great in the Juliet corset. The painted- the waiting room into her mouth. 38 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 “Susan Park just gets it,” she said. the twenty-second century, improvised “I’ve never seen someone play it so quiet his own line: “Really? Holla? That line and then be so fun. Actors think they is, like, a hundred and fifty years old.” have to play it big. Quiet works, too.” Soni played along: “They’re into the past—it’s a whole movement. Hip- ones worked on “Other Space” for a sters never die. . . . Did you see the new J month; at the time, she was also casting iPhone 26? Apple does it again!” the fourth season of “Veep,” with Julia “That’s hilarious,” Feig said. Louis-Dreyfus. After a month, Jones had He had Soni do three scenes with whittled a list of hundreds of actors different shadings. “See what his inter- down to fewer than two dozen. Jessie pretation is when he’s being super cool Henderson, Feig’s producing partner, and smooth,” Feig said at one point. and Owen Ellickson, the showrunner of Soni complied. He told a crew mem- “Other Space,” had begun watching ber about his crush on Tina and took during the middle rounds, and Feig sat the scripted line “The vibe between me in on the finals. Feig is gangly and tall, and her is getting intense” and added, with boxy glasses; he arrived on a week- “I don’t usually sweat, but I sweat around day afternoon in an English tailored her. She’s giving off the heat.” The crew suit with a Ralph Lauren tie and a pocket member tires of his monologue; Soni square. “The secret of life in the big city riffed an apology: “What’s up with you? is wear a suit, because you can take a Have you been tanning? You look good.” shit anywhere,” he said. “Folks are, like, As Soni left, Feig shook his hand ‘Hello, sir, welcome back!’ ” and told him that he was fantastic. A Extra chairs were brought into the few seconds later, everyone exploded audition room. Feig clicked off his phone with laughter. and looked at Jones. Feig got up to take a break and gave “O.K., Jonesie, show me what Jones a thumbs-up on the way out. you’ve got.” “Good find, Jones.” One of the first actors to see Feig was Karan Soni, a young Indian-American ome casting directors have been actor whom Jones had met through S known to curse a director for not another of her finds, Aubrey Plaza, a following a suggestion. Jones is less di- star of “Parks and Recreation.” Soni rect. “She doesn’t do it in a confronta- was from New Delhi; in his first at- tional way,” Greg Daniels, who devel- tempt at acting, at the international oped “The Office” and co-created “Parks prep school he attended, the instruc- and Recreation,” told me. “She does it tor screamed at him that his robotic with a lot of blinks and facial expres- line reading in Molière’s “Tartuffe” was sions.” Jones pushes actors for shows ruining it for everybody. Soni moved even if the part starts out small. Until to Los Angeles and graduated from Chris Pratt met with Jones, he was the University of Southern California. known only as eye candy on teen shows He had played a regular on “Betas,” a like “Everwood” and “The O.C.,” but quickly cancelled Amazon show, and in a meeting Jones saw an untapped a large role in “Safety Not Guaran- comic side. She took him to Daniels for teed,” an indie film. “Parks and Recreation.” Soni walked into the audition room “He was so good in the audition we wearing a button-down shirt. There had to rethink everything,” Daniels said. were a lot of lines; to put him at ease, “The character”—the layabout Andy Feig told him that he could use his script. Dwyer—“was meant to be a complete “No, I can never feel comfortable,” asshole who was only around for a few Soni said. “It’s not a good thing. Always episodes, so we had to rewrite all sea- better to be terrified.” son long to take advantage of him.” He read with Ben Harris, who was Jones can be sneaky. She had long punchy from having recited the same been a fan of the Chicago actor Nick lines so many times. At one point, Soni, Offerman and was impressed with his as Stewart, gets on the intercom and progress as a comedian. She brought tells the crew members to “holla if you him into the “Parks and Recreation” hear me.” casting process early, but the producers Harris, noting that the show is set in were undecided. Jones waited a few THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 39 weeks, then remarked, “Your instincts Society,” as the mother of a boy in a about Nick Offerman were good. Let’s coma. Her taped auditions with Jones bring him back.” The producers agreed, would have to suffice. and Offerman went on to become the Vayntrub was called back so that government-hating bureaucrat Ron Feig could have her read again for Swanson, an anchor of the show. Karen and for the third female part, “They forget that shit, they see so Natasha, the ship’s bombshell and op- many people,” Jones said. “I do that all erating system. (Natasha worked pre- the time.” viously on the Hooters casino space Jones doesn’t share in a film’s profits; shuttle.) For the latter role, Vayntrub instead, she receives a flat fee of up to shook out her hair and wore a more ninety thousand dollars. She cast “The revealing dress. She ably delivered a Office” pilot for forty thousand dollars, series of lines in which Natasha coyly and received a fraction of that for each begs for free will, but she didn’t seem episode, but receives nothing from re- quite right for the part. She exited, and runs or digital sales of any of her shows. Feig looked confused. In the past, she has offered to take no “I thought she was going to read for money up front and just a tiny percent- Tina,” he said to Jones. age of profit if a show does well, but Jones’s face reddened and she shot an producers have never taken her up on e-mail to Vayntrub’s agent. The next day, the deal. She noted that there’s still no Vayntrub came back, a mock pout on Academy Award for casting. “Believe her face. Her hair was swept to the side, me, it’s sad for me that I have to still and her dress was a compromise between get a J. Crew shirt instead of a shirt from her uptight Karen look and the sultri- Barneys when I know that Jonah Hill ness of Natasha. In the scene, Tina is is worth millions of dollars,” she said. being thrown a girls’-night-out party to “It’s not a bitter thing, but it’s just, like, help her get over her missing boyfriend, ‘Ah shit, I’m doing something wrong.’ ” but she is uninterested. Vayntrub’s Tina perks up at the possibility of giving Karen fter six weeks and several hundred a makeover, and then pauses. A auditions, it was time for Jones “Her face is so lopsided. I can’t make and Feig to finalize the cast for “Other her face my problem.” Space.” The male leads began to settle Feig laughed but asked Vayntrub to into place. Soni was set for Stewart, be more subtle. “Try the first scene, and Eugene Cordero, a Filipino sketch and make her stronger,” he said. “She comedian, for Michael, Stewart’s boy- tries to cover up her disdain and sad- hood friend and downtrodden third- ness. She’s trying to be strong but clearly in-command. Neil Casey, a former is not.” “S.N.L.” writer, won the part of Kent, Vayntrub nodded and tried again, who has awakened from a deep saline improvising: “When I’m around you bath, where he was kept in order to guys, I often feel very lonely. I’m bored. provide organs for his brother. Things that interest you make me want Narrowing down the three women to nap. I feel allergic to you guys.” was a bigger challenge—an indication, Feig appeared to love the bit. As Jones said, of how much the opportu- Vayntrub left the room, he gave her a nities for women comics have improved wink. Initially, the casting of Soni had in the past decade. “There have always raised the question of whether Karen been funny women—I mean truly funny, should resemble her brother, Stewart, not fake funny. But now they are sought but that concern had been put aside. after, written for, and valued, not just as “The show is set in the twenty-second sidekicks or wise-cracking receptionists. century; it can be explained,” Jones said. Joan Rivers, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, “Let’s just go for the funniest people.” Melissa McCarthy are now truly cul- Another dozen or so women audi- turally important.” tioned. Feig was enchanted by a woman Feig came back for a second day. Jones named Conor Leslie. “She’s really good, was pushing Vayntrub and Park for the and beautiful,” he said to Jones. By parts of both Karen and Tina. But Park two-thirty, he was done. He, Ellickson, had just been cast in a Fox medical drama and Jones adjourned to another room that was filming in Atlanta, “Red Band to deliberate, and a few minutes later 40 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 he said that he’d settled on the finalists: had been asked to return to audition for “Neil Casey for Kent. Maybe we’ll have the producers. “They said, ‘For this call- Milana read with some people. Conor back, they really want you, they love Leslie is literally good for any role. Karan what you did. They just want you to be Soni . . .” sexier, dress a little sexier.’ I didn’t listen Jones chimed in, “And Susan Park!” to that and wore exactly what I wore to Feig wrote down the name. the first audition. So I go, and it’s twelve men,” Vayntrub said. She joked, “And I hat Saturday, Feig e-mailed Ellick- was, like, no wonder you shits wanted Tson and Jones with his choices: Soni me to wear a short skirt while I stand as Stewart, Cordero as Michael, and here in front of you.” Casey as Kent; Leslie as Karen, Vayn- Susan Park didn’t get a call, but when trub as Natasha, and a latecomer named I told her that she’d been a finalist her Katherine Cunningham as Tina. Jones eyes widened. “Just to know they think and Ellickson felt that Leslie would be I’m good is amazing,” she said. “I mean, hard to buy as the put-upon sister and Allison Jones thinks I’m good. That persuaded Feig to switch her for Nata- means everything.” sha and Vayntrub for Tina. Cunning- ham seemed too classically beautiful for n the Saturday after the casting the Karen role, so Feig switched to Rosa O for “Other Space” had been final- Salazar, a close friend of Vayntrub’s. Jones ized, Jones was back at work, audition- pressed for Susan Park as Tina, but Feig ing a long line of six- and seven-year- was unpersuaded. old girls for “Daddy’s Home,” an “I just thought the way she under- upcoming film with Will Ferrell. The played Tina—she had this kind of weird day was hot, and the office air-condi- delivery,” Feig told me later. “It was hys- tioning was broken. For hours, the shiny, terical, but it just wasn’t quite the dy- sweaty kids sat in grownup chairs, legs namic we needed for the Tina charac- dangling, and delivered the same line: ter, and it wasn’t quite right for the “I think it’s cute that he’s crying like a Natasha character. For this project, she little bitch.” fell kind of in the cracks.” Between girls, Jones made notes. “You Jones said, “You never get every- can tell the ones who have been coached body. Paul will bring her back for a by their parents,” she said. “They’re the three-minute bit in his next movie. I’ll ones making the dramatic gestures and make sure.” moving out of the frame.” All that was left was to make the Some of the girls looked terrified. To deals. Usually, this fell to network law- ease the tension, Jones began asking yers, but, because this was one of Ya- them what they planned to be for Hal- hoo’s first ventures into original pro- loween. “I’m going as Corpse Bride,” gramming, Jones was involved in the one said. “I’m a big fan of Tim Burton.” negotiating. At first, Yahoo budgeted Toward the end of the session, a set ten thousand dollars per actor per ep- of twins came in and gave charming but isode for eight episodes, and added a stilted readings. Jones thought she rec- clause prohibiting them from audi- ognized their last name. tioning for other pilots until after “Is your dad an actor?” she asked. Yahoo had decided whether to renew “We don’t have a dad,” the first girl “Other Space” for a second season. “I said. told them they’re going to end up with “Our mom married one, but then he community players from Long Beach decided to leave ’cause he thought Mom at that rate,” Jones said. was being mean to him,” the other said. Eventually, the rate went up to be- “But he was yelling at her,” the first tween twenty thousand and thirty thou- said. sand dollars per episode for the main “Oh . . .” actors. Salazar had signed a movie deal “Then he went to jail,” the second with a studio, so Jones brought in Bess girl said. Rous, another of her favorites, for the Jones said, “But you know what? role of Karen. Finally, the calls went out. You guys did great!” After they’d left, When Vayntrub got the news, she was she sighed. “Jesus, I didn’t see that on a callback for a network comedy. She coming.” ♦ THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 41 PROFILES BORN RED

How Xi Jinping, an unremarkable provincial administrator, became China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao.

BY EVAN OSNOS

n anticipation of New Year’s Eve, 2014, tesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, pede ensued. In all, thirty-six people suffo- I Xi Jinping, the President of China Saint-Simon, Fourier, Sartre, and twelve cated or were trampled to death. and the General Secretary of the Chi- others. In his New Year’s remarks, Xi The disaster occurred in one of Chi- nese Communist Party, permitted a cam- oscillated between socialist slogans na’s most modern and prosperous places, era crew to come into his office and re- (“Wave high the sword against corrup- and the public was appalled. In the days cord a message to the people. As a tion”) and catchphrases from Chinese that followed, the Shanghai government teen-ager, Xi had been sent to work on social media (“I would like to click the held a memorial for the victims, and a farm; he was so delicate that other la- thumbs-up button for our great peo- encouraged people to move on; Inter- borers rated him a six on a ten-point ple”). He vowed to fight poverty, im- net censors struck down discussion of scale, “not even as high as the women,” prove the rule of law, and hold fast to who was responsible; police interrogated he said later, with some embarrassment. history. When he listed the achievements Web users who posted criticisms of the Now, at sixty-one, Xi was five feet eleven, of the past year, he praised the creation state. When relatives of the victims vis- taller than any Chinese leader in nearly of a holiday dedicated to the Second ited the site of the stampede, police four decades, with a rich baritone and a World War: “Victory Day of the Chi- watched them closely, and then erected confident heft. When he received a guest, nese People’s War of Resistance Against metal barriers to render it unreachable. he stood still, long arms slack, hair po- Japanese Aggression.” Caixin, an investigative media organi- maded, a portrait of take-it-or-leave-it Xi is the sixth man to rule the Peo- zation, revealed that, during the stam- composure that induced his visitor to ple’s Republic of China, and the first pede, local officials in charge of the cross the room in pursuit of a handshake. who was born after the revolution, in neighborhood were enjoying a banquet Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, read his 1949. He sits atop a pyramid of eighty- of sushi and sake, at the government’s annual New Year’s greeting from a lec- seven million members of the Commu- expense, in a private room at the Empty tern in an antiseptic reception hall. Xi, nist Party, an organization larger than Cicada, a luxury restaurant nearby. This who took office in November, 2012, has the population of Germany. The Party was awkward news, because one of the associated himself with an earthier gen- no longer reaches into every corner of President’s first diktats had been “Eight eration of Communists, a military caste Chinese life, as it did in the nineteen- Rules” for public servants, to eliminate that emphasized “hard work and plain seventies, but Xi nevertheless presides extravagance and corruption. Among living.” He delivered his New Year’s mes- over an economy that, by one measure, other things, the campaign called on sage at his desk. Behind him, bookshelves recently surpassed the American econ- officials to confine themselves to “four held photographs that depicted him as omy in size; he holds ultimate author- dishes and one soup.” (Eventually, eleven Commander-in-Chief and family man. ity over every general, judge, editor, and officials were punished for misusing In one picture, he was wearing Army state- company C.E.O. As Lenin or- funds and for failing to prevent a risk fatigues and a fur hat, visiting soldiers dained, in 1902, “For the center . . . to to the public.) in a snowfield; in another, he was stroll- actually direct the orchestra, it needs to A few weeks after the incident in ing with his wife and daughter, and es- know who plays violin and where, who Shanghai, I paid a call on a longtime ed- corting his father, Xi Zhongxun, a hal- plays a false note and why.” itor in Beijing, whose job gives him a lowed revolutionary, in a wheelchair. The Xi’s New Year’s message was broad- view into the workings of the Party. When shelves also held matching sets of books. cast on state television and radio chan- I arrived at his apartment, his kids were Xi’s classroom education was interrupted nels at 6:30 P.M., just before the evening in raucous control of the living room, so for nearly a decade by the Cultural Rev- news. A few hours later, the news veered we retreated to his bedroom to talk. When olution, and he has the autodidact’s habit sharply out of his control. In Shanghai, I asked him how President Xi was doing, of announcing his literary credentials. a large holiday crowd had gathered to he mentioned the banquet at the Empty He often quotes from Chinese classics, celebrate on the Bund, the promenade Cicada. He thought it pointed to a prob- and in an interview with the Russian beside the Huangpu River, with splen- lem that is much deeper than a few press last year he volunteered that he did views of the skyline. The crowd was high-living bureaucrats. “The central had read Krylov, Pushkin, Gogol, Ler- growing faster than the space could han- government issued an order absolutely montov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Nekra- dle. Around 11:30 P.M., the police sent forbidding them to dine out on public sov, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, hundreds of extra officers to keep order, funds. And they did it anyway!” he said. and Sholokhov. When he visited France, but it was too late; a stairway was jammed, “What this tells you is that local officials he mentioned that he had read Mon- and people shouted and pushed. A stam- are finding their ways of responding to 42 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015

When Xi was fourteen, Red Guards warned,“We can execute you a hundred times.” He joined the Communist Party at twenty. ILLUSTRATION BY TAVIS COBURN THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 43 eign trip (to Moscow), he was accompa- nied by his wife, a celebrity soprano named Peng Liyuan, who inspired lavish cover- age of China’s first modern Presidential couple. Peng soon appeared on Vanity Fair’s Best-Dressed List. After Mao, China encouraged the image of a “collective Presidency” over the importance of individual leaders. Xi has revised that approach, and his gov- ernment, using old and new tools, has enlarged his image. In the spirit of Mao’s Little Red Book, publishers have pro- duced eight volumes of Xi’s speeches and writings; the most recent, titled “The Remarks of Xi Jinping,” dissects his utterances, ranks his favorite phrases, and explains his cultural references. A study of the People’s Daily found that, by his second anniversary in office, Xi “I’m sure she’ll be back soon. She’s just somewhere was appearing in the paper more than integrating awareness about something.” twice as often as his predecessor at the same point. He stars in a series of car- •• toons aimed at young people, beginning with “How to Make a Leader,” which describes him, despite his family pedi- change. There is a saying: ‘When a rule man Mao. In the name of protection gree, as a symbol of meritocracy—“one is imposed up high, there is a way to get and purity, he has investigated tens of of the secrets of the China miracle.” The around it below.’ ” The struggle between thousands of his countrymen, on charges state news agency has taken the unprec- an emperor and his bureaucracy follows ranging from corruption to leaking state edented step of adopting a nickname a classic pattern in Chinese politics, and secrets and inciting the overthrow of the for the General Secretary: Xi Dada— it rarely ends well for the emperor. But state. He has acquired or created ten ti- roughly, Big Uncle Xi. In January, the the editor was betting on Xi. “He’s not tles for himself, including not only head Ministry of Defense released oil paint- afraid of Heaven or Earth. And he is, as of state and head of the military but also ings depicting him in heroic poses; thou- we say, round on the outside and square leader of the Party’s most powerful com- sands of art students applying to the on the inside; he looks flexible, but in- mittees—on foreign policy, Taiwan, and Beijing University of Technology had side he is very hard.” the economy. He has installed himself been judged on their ability to sketch as the head of new bodies overseeing his likeness. The Beijing Evening News efore Xi took power, he was described, the Internet, government restructuring, reported that one applicant admired the B in China and abroad, as an unre- national security, and military reform, President so much that “she had to work markable provincial administrator, a fan and he has effectively taken over the hard to stop her hands from trembling.” of American pop culture (“The Godfa- courts, the police, and the secret police. To outsiders, Xi has been a fitful sub- ther,” “Saving Private Ryan”) who cared “He’s at the center of everything,” Gary ject. Bookstores in Hong Kong, which more about business than about politics, Locke, the former American Ambassa- are insulated from mainland control, offer and was selected mainly because he had dor to Beijing, told me. portraits of varying quality—the most alienated fewer peers than his competi- In the Chinese Communist Party, you reliable include “The New Biography of tors. It was an incomplete portrait. He campaign after you get the job, not be- Xi Jinping,” by Liang Jian, and “China’s had spent more than three decades in fore, and in building public support and Future,” by Wu Ming—but most are writ- public life, but Chinese politics had ex- honing a message Xi has revealed a pow- ten at a remove, under pseudonyms. The posed him to limited scrutiny. At a press erful desire for transformation. He calls clearest account of Xi’s life and influences conference, a local reporter once asked on China to pursue the Chinese Dream: comes from his own words and decisions, Xi to rate his performance: “Would you the “great rejuvenation of the nation,” a scattered throughout a long climb to give yourself a score of a hundred—or a mixture of prosperity, unity, and strength. power. score of ninety?” (Neither, Xi said; a high He has proposed at least sixty social and Kevin Rudd, the former Prime Min- number would look “boastful,” and a low economic changes, ranging from relax- ister of Australia, a Mandarin speaker number would reflect “low self-esteem.”) ing the one-child policy to eliminating who has talked with Xi at length over But, a quarter of the way through his camps for “reëducation through labor” the years, told me, “What he says is what ten-year term, he has emerged as the and curtailing state monopolies. He has he thinks. My experience of him is that most authoritarian leader since Chair- sought prestige abroad; on his first for- there’s not a lot of artifice.” 44 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 In a leadership known for grooming the West speculated that he wanted to dren. His father, Xi Zhongxun, China’s colorless apparatchiks, Xi projects an silence hard-line critics, and would open propaganda minister at the time, had image of manly vigor. He mocks “egg- up later, perhaps in his second term, been fomenting revolution since the age heads” and praises the “team spirit of a which begins in 2017. That view has of fourteen, when he and his classmates group of dogs eating a lion.” In a meet- largely disappeared. Henry Paulson, the tried to poison a teacher whom they con- ing in March, 2013, he told the Rus- former Treasury Secretary, whose up- sidered a counterrevolutionary. He was sian President, Vladimir Putin, “We are coming book, “Dealing with China,” de- sent to jail, where he joined the Com- similar in character,” though Xi is less scribes a decade of contact with Xi, told munist Party, and eventually he became inclined toward bare-chested machismo. me, “He has been very forthright and a high-ranking commander, which Xi admires Song Jiang, a fictional out- candid—privately and publicly—about plunged him into the Party’s internal law from “Water Margin,” a fourteenth- the fact that the Chinese are rejecting feuds. In 1935, a rival faction accused Xi century Chinese classic, for his ability Western values and multiparty democ- of disloyalty and ordered him to be bur- to “unite capable people.” Neither bril- racy.” He added, “To Westerners, it seems ied alive, but Mao defused the crisis. At liant nor handsome, Song Jiang led a very incongruous to be, on the one hand, a Party meeting in February, 1952, Mao band of heroic rebels. In a famous pas- so committed to fostering more com- stated that the “suppression of counter- sage, he speaks of the Xunyang River: petition and market-driven flexibility in revolutionaries” required, on average, the “I shall have my revenge some day / And the economy and, on the other hand, to execution of one person for every one dye red with blood the Xunyang’s flow.” be seeking more control in the political thousand to two thousand citizens. Xi Xi describes his essential project as a sphere, the media, and the Internet. But Zhongxun endorsed “severe suppression rescue: he must save the People’s Repub- that’s the key: he sees a strong Party as and punishment,” but in his area “killing lic and the Communist Party before they essential to stability, and the only insti- was relatively lower,” according to his are swamped by corruption; environmen- tution that’s strong enough to help him official biography. tal pollution; unrest in Hong Kong, Xin- accomplish his other goals.” Xi Jinping grew up with his father’s jiang, and other regions; and the pres- In his determination to gain control stories. “He talked about how he joined sures imposed by an economy that is and protect the Party, Xi may have gen- the revolution, and he’d say, ‘You will cer- growing more slowly than at any time erated a different kind of threat: he has tainly make revolution in the future,’ ” Xi since 1990 (though still at about seven pried apart internal fault lines and shaken recalled in a 2004 interview with the per cent, the fastest pace of any major the equilibrium that for a generation Xi’an Evening News, a state-run paper. country). “The tasks our Party faces in marked the nation’s rise. Before Xi took “He’d explain what revolution is. We heard reform, development, and stability are power, top officials presumed that they so much of this that our ears got calluses.” more onerous than ever, and the conflicts, were protected. Yu Hua, the novelist, told In six decades of politics, his father had dangers, and challenges are more numer- me, “As China grew, what really came to seen or deployed every tactic. At dinner ous than ever,” Xi told the Politburo, in matter were the ‘unwritten rules.’ When with the elder Xi in 1980, David Lamp- October. In 2014, the government ar- the real rules weren’t specific enough or ton, a China specialist at the School of rested nearly a thousand members of civil clear enough, when policies and laws Advanced International Studies at Johns society, more than in any year since the lagged behind reality, you always relied Hopkins, marvelled that he could toast mid-nineteen-nineties, following the Ti- on the unwritten rules.” They dictated dozens of guests, over glasses of Maotai, ananmen Square massacre, according to with no visible effects. “It became appar- Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a ent that he was drinking water,” Lamp- Hong Kong-based advocacy group. ton said. Xi unambiguously opposes American When Xi Jinping was five, his father democratic notions. In 2011 and 2012, was promoted to Vice-Premier, and the he spent several days with Vice-Presi- son often visited him at Zhongnanhai, dent Joe Biden, his official counterpart the secluded compound for top leaders. at the time, in China and the United Xi was admitted to the exclusive Au- States. Biden told me that Xi asked him gust 1st School, named for the date of why the U.S. put “so much emphasis on a famous Communist victory. The human rights.” Biden replied to Xi, “No everything from how much to tip a sur- school, which occupied the former pal- President of the United States could rep- geon to how far an N.G.O. could go be- ace of a Qing Dynasty prince, was nick- resent the United States were he not fore it was suppressed. “The unwritten named the lingxiu yaolan—the “cradle committed to human rights,” and went rules have been broken,” Yu said. “This of leaders.” The students formed a small, on, “If you don’t understand this, you can’t is how it should be, of course, but laws close-knit élite; they lived in the same deal with us. President Barack Obama haven’t arrived yet.” compounds, summered at the same re- would not be able to stay in power if he treats, and shared a sense of noblesse did not speak of it. So look at it as a po- he Communist Party dedicated it- oblige. For centuries before the People’s litical imperative. It doesn’t make us bet- Tself to a classless society but orga- Republic, an evolving list of élite clans ter or worse. It’s who we are. You make nized itself in a rigid hierarchy, and Xi combined wealth and politics. Some your decisions. We’ll make ours.” started life near the top. He was born in sons handled business; others pursued In Xi’s early months, supporters in Beijing in 1953, the third of four chil- high office. Winners changed over time, THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 45 and, when Communist leaders prevailed, nine hundred historical sites were dam- together, getting into street fights and in 1949, they acquired the mantle. “The aged or destroyed, according to Yiching swiping books from shuttered libraries. common language used to describe this Wu, the author of “The Cultural Rev- Later, Xi described that period as a dys- was that they had ‘won over tianxia’—‘all olution at the Margins.” topian collapse of control. He was de- under Heaven,’ ” Yang Guobin, a sociol- But Xi Jinping did not fit cleanly into tained “three or four times” by groups ogist at the University of Pennsylvania, the role of either aggressor or victim. In of Red Guards, and forced to denounce told me. “They believed they had a nat- 1962, his father was accused of support- his father. In 2000, he told the journal- ural claim to leadership. They owned it. ing a novel that Mao opposed, and was ist Yang Xiaohuai about being captured And their children thought, naturally, sent to work in a factory; his mother, Qi by a group loyal to the wife of the head they themselves would be, and should Xin, was assigned to hard labor on a of China’s secret police: be, the future owners.” As the historian farm. In January, 1967, after Mao en- I was only fourteen. The Red Guards Mi Hedu observes in his 1993 book, couraged students to target “class ene- asked, “How serious do you yourself think “The Red Guard Generation,” students mies,” a group of young people dragged your crimes are?” at the August 1st School “compared one Xi Zhongxun before a crowd. Among “You can estimate it yourselves. Is it enough to execute me?” another on the basis of whose father other charges, he was accused of having “We can execute you a hundred times.” had a higher rank, whose father rode in gazed at West Berlin through binocu- To my mind there was no difference be- a better car. Some would say, ‘Obey who- lars during a visit to East Germany years tween being executed a hundred times or once, so why be afraid of a hundred times? ever’s father has the highest position.’ ” earlier. He was detained in a military The Red Guards wanted to scare me, saying When the Cultural Revolution began, garrison, where he passed the years by that now I was to feel the democratic dicta- in 1966, Beijing students who were zi- walking in circles, he said later—ten torship of the people, and that I only had five minutes left. But in the end, they told me, in- laihong (“born red”) promoted a slogan: thousand laps, and then ten thousand stead, to read quotations from Chairman “If the father is a hero, the son is also a walking backward. The son was too Mao every day until late at night. hero; if the father is a reactionary, the young to be an official Red Guard, and son is a bastard.” Red Guards sought to his father’s status made him undesirable. In December, 1968, in a bid to regain cleanse the capital of opposition, to make Moreover, being born red was becom- control, Mao ordered the Red Guards it “as pure and clean as crystal,” they ing a liability. Élite academies were ac- and other students to the countryside, to said. From late August to late Septem- cused of being xiao baota—“little trea- be “reëducated by the poor and lower- ber, 1966, nearly two thousand people sure pagodas”—and shut down. Xi and middle-class peasants.” Élite families sent were killed in Beijing, and at least forty- the sons of other targeted officials stayed their children to regions that had allies or family, and Xi went to his father’s old stronghold in Shaanxi. He was assigned to Liangjiahe, a village flanked by yellow cliffs. “The intensity of the labor shocked me,” Xi recalled in a 2004 television in- terview. To avoid work, he took up smok- ing—nobody bothered a man smoking— and lingered in the bathroom. After three months, he fled to Beijing, but he was arrested and returned to the village. In what later became the centerpiece of his official narrative, Xi was reborn. A recent state-news-service article offers the my- thology: “Xi lived in a cave dwelling with villagers, slept on a kang, a traditional Chinese bed made of bricks and clay, en- dured flea bites, carried manure, built dams and repaired roads.” It leaves out some brutal details. At one point, he re- ceived a letter informing him that his older half-sister Xi Heping had died. The Australian journalist John Garnaut, the author of an upcoming book on the rise of Xi and his cohort, said, “It was suicide. Close associates have said to me, on the record, that after a decade of persecution she hanged herself from a shower rail.” Xi chose to join the Communist Par- ty’s Youth League. Because of his father’s “The first time we see the sun in months, and it explodes.” status, his application was rejected seven times, by his count. After Xi befriended relationships. I understand politics on a leged offspring from Party headquarters a local official, he was accepted. In Jan- deeper level.” The Cultural Revolution and made Xi the No. 2. It was the Chi- uary, 1974, he gained full Party member- and his years in Yan’an, the region where nese equivalent of trading an executive ship and became secretary of the village. he was sent as a teen-ager, had created suite at the Pentagon for a mid-level post His drive to join the Party baffled some him. “Yan’an is the starting point of my in rural Virginia. of his peers. A longtime friend who be- life,” he said in 2007. “Many of the fun- Within a year, though, Xi was pro- came a professor later told an American damental ideas and qualities I have today moted, and he honed his political skills. diplomat that he felt “betrayed” by Xi’s were formed in Yan’an.” Rudd, the for- He gave perks to retired cadres who could ambition to “join the system.” Accord- mer Australian Prime Minister, told me, shape his reputation; he arranged for ing to a U.S. diplomatic cable recount- “The bottom line in any understanding them to receive priority at doctors’ offices; ing his views, many in Xi’s élite cohort of who Xi Jinping is must begin with his when he bought the county’s first im- were desperate to escape politics; they ported car, he donated it to the “veteran- dated, drank, and read Western litera- cadre office,” and used an old jeep for ture. They were “trying to catch up for himself. He retained his green Army- lost years by having fun,” the professor issue trousers to convey humility, and he said. He eventually concluded that Xi learned the value of political theatrics: if, was “exceptionally ambitious,” and knew at times, “you don’t bang on the table, it’s that he would “not be special” outside not frightening enough, and people won’t China, so he “chose to survive by becom- take it seriously,” he told a Chinese in- ing redder than the red.” After all, Yang terviewer in 2003. He experimented with Guobin told me, referring to the sons of dedication to the Party as an institution— market economics, by allowing farmers the former leaders, “the sense of owner- despite the fact that through his personal to use more land for raising animals in- ship did not die. A sense of pride and su- life, and his political life, he has experi- stead of growing grain for the state, and periority persisted, and there was some enced the best of the Party and the worst he pushed splashy local projects, includ- confidence that their fathers’ adversity of the Party.” ing the construction of a television stu- would be temporary and sooner or later dio based on the classic novel “A Dream they would make a comeback. That’s ex- i’s siblings scattered: his brother and of Red Mansions.” actly what happened.” X a sister went into business in Hong In 1985, he spent two weeks in Iowa The following year, Xi enrolled at Kong, the other sister reportedly settled as part of an agricultural delegation. In Tsinghua University as a “worker-peasant- in Canada. But Xi stayed and, year by the town of Muscatine, he stayed with soldier” student (applicants who were year, invested more deeply in the Party. Eleanor and Thomas Dvorchak. “The admitted on the basis of political merit After graduating, in 1979, he took a cov- boys had gone off to college, so there rather than test scores). That spring, Xi eted job as an aide to Geng Biao, a se- were some spare bedrooms,” Eleanor told Zhongxun was rehabilitated, after six- nior defense official whom Xi’s father me. Xi slept in a room with football- teen years of persecution. When the fam- called “my closest comrade-in-arms” from themed wallpaper and “Star Trek” action ily reunited, he could not recognize his the revolution. Xi wore a military uni- figures. “He was looking out the window, grown sons. His faith never wavered. In form and made valuable connections at and it seemed like he was saying, ‘Oh, November, 1976, he wrote to Hua Party headquarters. Not long after col- my God,’ and I thought, What’s so un- Guofeng, the head of the Party, asking lege, he married Ke Xiaoming, the cos- usual? It’s just a split-level,” she said. Xi for reassignment, in order to “devote the mopolitan daughter of China’s Ambas- did not introduce himself as a Commu- rest of my life to the Party and strive to sador to Britain. But they fought “almost nist Party secretary; his business card do more for the people.” He signed it, every day,” according to the professor, identified him as the head of the Shi- “Xi Zhongxun, a Follower of Chairman who lived across the hall. He told the jiazhuang Feed Association. In 2012, on Mao and a Party Member Who Has Not diplomat that the couple divorced when a trip to the U.S. before becoming top Regained Admission to Regular Party Ke decided to move to England and Xi leader, he returned to Muscatine, to see Activities.” stayed behind. Dvorchak and others, trailed by the world Xi Jinping’s pedigree had exposed him China’s revolutionaries were aging, press. She said, “No one in their right to a brutal politics—purges, retribution, and the Party needed to groom new lead- mind would ever think that that guy who rehabilitation—and he drew blunt les- ers. Xi told the professor that going to stayed in my house would become the sons from it. In a 2000 interview with the provinces was the “only path to cen- President. I don’t care what country you’re the journalist Chen Peng, of the Beijing- tral power.” Staying at Party headquar- talking about.” based Chinese Times, Xi said, “People who ters in Beijing would narrow his network By 1985, Xi was ready for another have little experience with power, those and invite resentment from lesser-born promotion, but the provincial Party head who have been far away from it, tend to peers. In 1982, shortly before Xi turned blocked him again, so he moved to the regard these things as mysterious and thirty, he asked to be sent back to the southern province of Fujian, where one novel. But I look past the superficial countryside, and was assigned to a horse- of his father’s friends was the Party sec- things: the power and the flowers and cart county in Hebei Province. He wanted retary, and could help him. Not long after the glory and the applause. I see the de- to be the county secretary—the boss— he arrived, he met Liao Wanlong, a Tai- tention houses, the fickleness of human but the provincial chief resented privi- wanese businessman, who recalled, “He THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 47 cording to Richard Baum’s 1994 chron- icle of élite politics, “Burying Mao.” But Xi lost and was stripped of power for the last time. He was allowed to live in com- fortable obscurity until his death, in 2002, and is remembered fondly as “a man of principle, not of strategy,” as the editor in Beijing put it to me. His son avoided overly controversial reforms as he rose through the ranks. “My approach is to heat a pot with a small, continuous fire, pouring in cold water to keep it from boiling over,” he said. In 1989, a local propaganda official, Kang Yanping, submitted a proposal for a TV miniseries promoting political re- form, but Xi replied with skepticism. Ac- “Wait! Maybe they aren’t just awesome bunk beds with cheese pillows!” cording to “China’s Future,” he asked, “Is there a source for the opinion? Is it a rea- •• sonable point?” The show, which Xi pre- dicted would leave people “discouraged,” was not produced. He also paid special was tall and stocky, and he looked a down on student demonstrators, Peng attention to cultivating local military units; little dopey.” Liao, who has visited Xi was among the military singers who were he upgraded equipment, raised subsidies repeatedly in the decades since, told sent to Tiananmen Square to serenade for soldiers’ living expenses, and found me, “He appeared to be guileless, hon- the troops. (Images of that scene, along jobs for retiring officers. He liked to say, est. He came from the north and he with information about Peng’s private “To meet the Army’s needs, nothing didn’t understand the south well.” Liao life and her commercial dealings, have is excessive.” went on, “He would speak only if he re- been largely expunged from the Web.) ally had something to say, and he didn’t In 1992, they had a daughter. As it be- i prosecuted corruption at some mo- make casual promises. He would think came clear that Xi would be a top leader, X ments and ignored it at others. A everything through before opening his Peng gave up the diva gowns and elab- Chinese executive told the U.S. Embassy mouth. He rarely talked about his fam- orate hairdos in favor of pants suits and in Beijing that Xi was considered “Mr. ily, because he had a difficult past and a the occasional military uniform. Fans still Clean” for turning down a bribe, and yet, disappointing marriage.” Xi didn’t have mobbed her, while he stood patiently to for the many years that Xi worked in Fu- a questing mind, but he excelled at man- the side, but for the most part she stopped jian, the Yuanhua Group, one of China’s aging his image and his relationships; he performing and turned her attention to largest corrupt enterprises, continued was now meeting foreign investors, so activism around H.I.V., tobacco control, smuggling billions of dollars’ worth of he stopped wearing Army fatigues and and women’s education. For years, Xi and oil, cars, cigarettes, and appliances into adopted a wardrobe of Western suits. Peng spent most of their time apart. But, China, with the help of the Fujian mil- Liao said, “Not everyone could get an in the flurry of attention around Big Uncle itary and police. Xi also found a way to audience with him; he would screen those Xi, the state-run media has promoted a live with Chen Kai, a local tycoon who who wanted to meet him. He was a good pop song entitled “Xi Dada Loves Peng ran casinos and brothels in the center of judge of people.” Mama,” which includes the line “Men town, protected by the police chief. Later, The following year, when Xi was should learn from Xi and women should Chen was arrested, tried, and sentenced thirty- three, a friend introduced him to learn from Peng.” to death, and fifty government officials Peng Liyuan, who, at twenty-four, was The posting to the south put Xi closer were prosecuted for accepting bribes from already one of China’s most famous opera to his father. Since 1978, his father had him. Xi was never linked to the cases, but and folk singers. Xi told her that he didn’t served in neighboring Guangdong, home they left a stain on his tenure. “Some- watch television, she recalled in a 2007 to China’s experiments with the free mar- times I have posted colleagues wrongly,” interview. “What kind of songs do you ket, and the elder Xi had become a zeal- he said in 2000. “Some were posted sing?” he asked. Peng thought that he ous believer in economic reform as the wrongly because I thought they were bet- looked “uncultured and much older than answer to poverty. It was a risky position: ter than they actually were, others be- his age,” but he asked her questions about at a Politburo meeting in 1987, the Old cause I thought they were worse than singing technique, which she took as a Guard attacked the liberal standard-bearer, they actually were.” sign of intelligence. Xi later said that he Hu Yaobang. Xi’s father was the only se- Xi proved adept at navigating inter- decided within forty minutes to ask her nior official who spoke in his defense. nal feuds and alliances. After he took to marry him. They married the follow- “What are you guys doing here? Don’t over the economically vibrant province ing year, and in 1989, after the crack- repeat what Mao did to us,” he said, ac- of Zhejiang, in 2002, he created policies 48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 intended to promote private businesses. February, Wang Lijun, a former police Xi, in effect, went on strike; he wanted He encouraged taxi services to buy from chief, tried to defect to the U.S. and ac- to install key allies, and remove oppo- Geely, the car company that later bought cused the family of his former patron, Bo nents, before taking power, but Party el- Volvo. He soothed conservatives, in part Xilai, the Party secretary of Chongqing, ders ordered him to wait. A former in- by reciting socialist incantations. “The of murder and embezzlement. Party lead- telligence official told me, “Xi basically private economy has become an exotic ers feared that Bo might protect himself says, ‘O.K., fuck you, let’s see you find flower in the garden of socialism with with the security services at his com- someone else for this job. I’m going to Chinese characteristics,” he declared. In mand, disrupt the transition of power, disappear for two weeks and miss the 2007, he encountered a prime opportunity and tear the Party apart. In September, Secretary of State.’ And that’s what he to show his political skills: a corruption Ling Jihua, the chief of staff of the out- did. It caused a stir, and they went run- scandal in Shanghai was implicating going President, was abruptly demoted, ning and said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa.’ ” associates of Jiang Zemin, the power- and he was later accused of trying to The handoff went ahead as planned. On ful former President, who served from cover up the death of his son, who had November 15, 2012, Xi became Gen- 1989 to 2002. Xi was sent to Shanghai crashed a black Ferrari while accompa- eral Secretary. to take over. He projected toughness to nied by two women. the public without alienating Jiang. He Beset by crises, Xi suddenly disap- i headed a Politburo Standing Com- rejected the villa that had been arranged peared. On September 4, 2012, he can- X mittee of seven men: four were con- for him, announcing that it would be bet- celled a meeting with Secretary of State sidered princelings by birth or marriage, ter used as a retirement home for veteran Hillary Clinton and visits with other a larger ratio than in any Politburo in the comrades. dignitaries. As the days passed, lurid ru- history of the People’s Republic. West- His timing was fortunate: a few mors emerged, ranging from a grave ill- ern politicians often note that Xi has the months later, senior Party officials ness to an assassination attempt. When habits of a retail pol: comfort on the rope were choosing the next generation of he reappeared, on September 19th, he line, gentle questions for every visitor, top leaders. Xi was expected to lose to told American officials that he had -in homey anecdotes. On a trip to Los An- Li Keqiang, a comrade who had no rev- jured his back. Analysts of Chinese pol- geles, he told students that he likes to olutionary family pedigree, and had post- itics still raise the subject of Xi’s disap- swim, read, and watch sports on televi- graduate degrees in law and economics pearance in the belief that a fuller sion, but rarely has time. “To borrow a from Peking University. Since 2002, the explanation of why he vanished might title from an American film, it’s like ‘Mis- highest ranks of Chinese politics had illuminate the depth, or fragility, of his sion: Impossible,’ ” he said. But Chinese been dominated by men who elbowed support. In dozens of conversations this observers tend to mention something their way in on the basis of academic winter, scholars, officials, journalists, and else: his guizuqi, or “air of nobility.” It can or technocratic merit. President Hu’s executives told me that they suspect he come off as a reassuring link to the past father ran a tea shop, and the Premier, did have a health problem, and also rea- or, at times, as a distance from his peers. Wen Jiabao, was the son of a teacher, sons to exploit it. They speculate that In a meeting at the Great Hall of the but Chen Yun, the late economic czar, had advised his peers that born reds, now known as “second-generation reds,” or princelings, would make more reli- able stewards of the Party’s future. One princeling told a Western diplomat, “The feeling among us is: ‘Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, your fathers were selling shoe- laces while our fathers were dying for this revolution.’ ” In private, some prince- lings referred to the President and the Premier as huoji—“hired hands.” In Oc- tober, 2007, Xi was unveiled as the likely heir apparent. It was not entirely a com- pliment. “Party leaders prefer weak suc- cessors, so they can rule behind the scenes,” Ho Pin, the founder of Ming- jing News, an overseas Chinese site, said. Xi’s rise had been so abrupt, in the eyes of the general public, that people joked, “Who is Xi Jinping? He’s Peng Liyu- an’s husband.” Xi was tested by a pageant of dysfunc- tion that erupted in the run-up to his début as General Secretary, in 2012. In “In this scene, imagine you’re sentient and know what feelings are.” People last year, Party officials were chat- rested China’s security chief, Zhou Yong- the paper, the guy cited a joke: Brezh- ting and glad-handing during a lengthy kang, a former oil baron with the jowls nev brings his mother to Moscow. He break, but Xi never budged. “It went on of an Easter Island statue, who had built proudly shows her the state apartments for hours, and he sat there, staring straight the police and military into a personal at the Kremlin, his Zil limousine, and ahead,” a foreign attendee told me. “He kingdom that received more funding each the life of luxury he now lives. ‘Well, never wandered down from the podium year for domestic spying and policing what do you think, Mama,’ says Brezh- to say, ‘How’s it going in Ningxia?’ ” than it did for foreign defense. They nev. ‘You’ll never have to worry about a Xi believed that there was a grave reached into the ranks of the military, thing, ever again.’ ‘I’m so proud of you, threat to China from within. According where flamboyant corruption was not only Leonid Ilyich,’ says Mama, ‘but what to U.S. diplomats, Xi’s friend the professor upsetting the public—pedestrians had happens if the Communists find out?’ described Xi as “repulsed by the all- learned to watch out for luxury sedans Xi loved the story.” Xi reserved special encompassing commercialization of Chi- with military license plates, which ca- scorn for Gorbachev, for failing to de- nese society, with its attendant nouveaux reered around Beijing with impunity— fend the Party against its opponents, and riches, official corruption, loss of values, but also undermining China’s national told his colleagues, “Nobody was man dignity, and self-respect, and such ‘moral defense. When police searched homes enough to stand up and resist.” evils’ as drugs and prostitution.” If he ever belonging to the family of Lieutenant The year after Xi took office, cadres became China’s top leader, the professor General Gu Junshan, a senior logistics were required to watch a six-part docu- had predicted, “he would likely aggres- chief, they removed four truckloads of mentary on the Soviet Union’s collapse, sively attempt to address these evils, per- wine, art, cash, and other luxuries. Ac- which showed violent scenes of unrest haps at the expense of the new moneyed cording to a diplomat in Beijing, Gu’s and described an American conspiracy class.” Though princelings and their sib- furnishings included a gold replica of Chi- to topple Communism through “peace- lings had profited comfortably from Chi- na’s first aircraft carrier. “When ques- ful evolution”: the steady infiltration of na’s rise (Xi’s sister Qi Qiaoqiao is reported tioned about it, he said it was a sign of subversive Western political ideas. Ever to have large corporate and real- estate as- patriotism,” the diplomat said. since the early aughts, when “color rev- sets), the revolutionary families considered By the end of 2014, the Party had an- olutions” erupted in the former Soviet their gains appropriate, and they blamed nounced the punishment of more than a bloc, Chinese Communists have cited the hired hands for allowing corruption hundred thousand officials on corruption the risk of contagion as a reason to con- and extravagance, which stirred up public charges. Many foreign observers asked if strict political life. That fear was height- rage and threatened the Party’s future. Xi’s crusade was truly intended to stamp ened by a surge of unrest in Tibet in 2008, The first step to a solution was to out corruption or if it was a tool to attack in Xinjiang in 2009, and across the Arab reëstablish control. The “collective Pres- his enemies. It was not simply one or the world in 2011. Last September, when idency,” which spread power across the other: corruption had become so threat- pro-democracy protests erupted in Hong Standing Committee, had constrained ening to the Party’s legitimacy that only Kong, an opinion piece in the Global Hu Jintao so thoroughly that he was the most isolated leader could have avoided Times, a state-run daily, accused the Na- nick named the Woman with Bound Feet. forcing it back to a more manageable level, tional Endowment for Democracy and Xi surrounded himself with a shadow but railing against corruption was also a the C.I.A. of being “black hands” behind cabinet that was defined less by a single proven instrument for political consoli- the unrest, intent on “stimulating Tai- ideology than by school ties and politi- dation, and at the highest levels Xi has wanese independence, Xinjiang indepen- cal reliability. Members included Liu He, deployed it largely against his opponents. dence, and Tibetan independence.” (The a childhood playmate who had become Geremie Barme, the historian who heads U.S. denied involvement.) a reform-minded economist, and Liu the Australian Centre on China in the Xi’s government has no place for loyal Yuan, a hawkish general and the son of World, analyzed the forty-eight most high- opposition. When he launched the anti- former President Liu Shaoqi. The most profile arrests, and discovered that none corruption campaign, activists—such as important was Wang Qishan, a friend of them were second-generation reds. “I the lawyer Xu Zhiyong, who had served for decades, who was placed in charge of don’t call it an anticorruption campaign,” as a local legislator in Beijing—joined in, the Central Commission on Discipline a Western diplomat told me. “This is calling on officials to disclose their in- and Inspection, the agency that launched grinding trench warfare.” comes. But Xu and many others were ar- the vast anticorruption campaign. rested. (He was later sentenced to four The Party had long cultivated an image hortly after taking over, Xi asked, years in prison for “gathering crowds to of virtuous unanimity. But, during the S “Why did the Soviet Communist disrupt public order.”) One of Xu’s for- next two years, Wang’s investigators, who Party collapse?” and declared, “It’s a pro- mer colleagues, Teng Biao, told me, “For were granted broad powers to detain and found lesson for us.” Chinese scholars the government, ‘peaceful evolution’ was interrogate, attacked agencies that might had studied that puzzle from dozens of not just a slogan. It was real. The influence counter Xi’s authority, accusing them of angles, but Xi wanted more. “In 2009, of Western states was becoming more ob- conspiracies and abuses. They brought he commissioned a long study of the vious and more powerful.” Teng was at a corruption charges against officials at the Soviet Union from somebody who works conference in Germany soon after Xu state-planning and state-assets commis- in the policy-research office,” the diplo- and another colleague were arrested. “Peo- sions, which protect the privileges of large mat in Beijing told me. “It concluded ple advised me not to return to China, or government-run monopolies. They ar- that the rot started under Brezhnev. In I’d be arrested, too,” Teng said. He is now 50 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School. A prominent editor in Beijing told me that Chinese philanthropists have been warned, “You can’t give money to this N.G.O. or that N.G.O.—basically all N.G.O.s.” In December, the Com- mittee to Protect Journalists counted forty- four reporters in Chinese jails, more than in any other country. Well-known human-rights lawyers—Pu Zhiqiang, Ding Jiaxi, Xia Lin—have been jailed. Earlier this month, Human Rights Watch called this the harshest suppression of dissent in a decade. Although Vladimir Putin has suffo- cated Russian civil society and neutered the press, Moscow stores still carry books that are critical of him, and a few long- suffering blogs still find ways to attack him. Xi is less tolerant. In February, 2014, Yiu Mantin, a seventy-nine-year-old ed- itor at Hong Kong’s Morning Bell Press, who had planned to release a biography critical of Xi, by the exiled writer Yu Jie, was arrested during a visit to the mainland. He had received a phone call warning him not to proceed with publication. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, on charges of smuggling seven cans of paint. For years, Chinese intellectuals distin- guished between words and actions: West- ern political ideas could be discussed in China as long as nobody tried to enact them. In 2011, China’s education minis- ter, Yuan Guiren, extolled the benefits of exchanges with foreign countries. “Whether they’re rich or poor, socialist or capitalist, as long as they’re beneficial to our development we can learn from all of them,” he told the Jinghua Times, a state newspaper. But in January Yuan told a conference, “Young teachers and stu- dents are key targets of infiltration by enemy forces.” He said, “We must, by no means, allow into our classrooms mate- rial that propagates Western values.” An article on the Web site of Seeking Truth, an official Party journal, warned against professors who “blacken China’s name,” and it singled out the law professor He Weifang by name. When I spoke to He, a few days later, he said, “I’ve always been unpopular with conservatives, but recently the situation has become more serious. The political standpoint of this new slate of leaders isn’t like that of the Hu or Jiang era. They’re more restraining. They’re not as willing to permit an active discussion.” Sealing China off from Western ideas “Kinda makes you feel insignificant and incredibly hot, doesn’t it?” at the College of Europe, in Bruges, last spring. Adopting an alternative, he said, “might even lead to catastrophic conse- quences.” On his watch, state-run media have accentuated the threat of “peaceful evolution,” and have accused American companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, and Intel, of being “warriors” for the U.S. government. As for a broad diplomatic vision, Chi- nese leaders since Deng Xiaoping have adhered to a principle known as “Hide your strength, bide your time.” Xi has effectively replaced that concept with declarations of China’s arrival. In Paris last year, he invoked Napoleon’s remark that China was “a sleeping lion,” and said that the lion “has already awakened, but this is a peaceful, pleasant, and civilized lion.” He told the Politburo in Decem- ber that he intends to “make China’s voice heard, and inject more Chinese el- ements into international rules.” As al- ternatives to the Washington-based World Bank and International Mone- tary Fund, Xi’s government has estab- lished the New Development Bank, the Silk Road infrastructure fund, and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which, together, intend to amass two hundred and forty billion dollars in cap- ital. Xi has been far bolder than his pre- decessors in asserting Chinese control over airspace and land, sending an oil rig into contested waters, and erecting build- “You give me permission to laugh.” ings, helipads, and other facilities on reefs that are claimed by multiple nations. He •• has also taken advantage of Putin’s grow- ing economic isolation; Xi has met with Putin more than with any other foreign poses some practical problems. The Party to the law.” Echoing Mao, he added, leader, and, last May, as Russia faced new has announced “rule of law” reforms in- “Insure that the handle of the knife is sanctions over the annexation of Crimea, tended to strengthen top-down control firmly in the hand of the Party and the Xi and Putin agreed on a four-hundred- over the legal system and shield courts people.” billion-dollar deal to supply gas to China from local interference. The professor at rates that favor Beijing. According to said, “Many colleagues working on civil i’s wariness of Western influence is the prominent editor, Xi has told peo- law and that sort of thing have a large X reflected in his foreign policy. On ple that he was impressed by Putin’s sei- portion of their lectures about German a personal level, he expresses warm mem- zure of Crimea—“He got a large piece law or French law. So, if you want to ories of Iowa, and he sent his daughter, of land and resources” and boosted his stop Western values from spreading in Xi Mingze, to Harvard. (She graduated poll numbers at home. But, as war in Chinese universities, one thing you’d last year, under a pseudonym, and has re- Ukraine has dragged on, Xi has become have to do is close down the law schools turned to China.) But Xi has also ex- less complimentary of Putin. and make sure they never exist again.” pressed an essentialist view of national No diplomatic relationship matters Xi, for his part, sees no contradiction, characteristics such that, in his telling, more to China’s future than its dealings because preservation of the Party comes China’s history and social makeup ren- with the United States, and Xi has urged before preservation of the law. In Jan- der it unfit for multiparty democracy or the U.S. to adopt a “new type of great- uary, he said that China must “nurture a monarchy or any other non- Communist power relationship”—to regard China as a legal corps loyal to the Party, loyal to system. “We considered them, tried them, an equal and to acknowledge its claims the country, loyal to the people, and loyal but none worked,” he told an audience to contested islands and other interests. 52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 (The Obama Administration has de- four, he defies the usual rumpled stereo- are blocked in China. The risks seemed clined to adopt the phrase.) Xi and type of the liberal intelligentsia; he is manageable; most Chinese users had less Obama have met, at length, five times. tall, with elegant hints of gray hair, and interest in politics than in reaching a ce- American officials describe the relation- he wore a black mandarin-collar jacket lebrity’s Instagram feed (Instagram, like ship as occasionally candid but not close. and a winter cap covered in smooth black Facebook, Twitter, Bloomberg, Reuters, They have “brutally frank exchanges on fur. Zhang grew up around politics; his and the Times, is blocked). Keeping them difficult issues, and it doesn’t upset the father, a banker before the revolution, open, the theory went, allowed sophis- apple cart,” a senior Administration offi- served as a minister in the early years of ticated users to get what they wanted or cial told me. “So it’s different from the Mao’s government. I asked him what needed—for instance, researchers access- era of Hu Jintao, where there was very message Xi hoped to promote from ing Google Scholar, or businesses do- little exchange.” Hu almost never de- China around the world. He said, “Ever ing transactions—while preventing the parted from his notes, and American since Mao’s day, and the beginning of masses from employing technology that counterparts wondered how much he be- reform and opening up, we all talk about worries the Party. But on January 23rd, lieved his talking points. “Xi is reading a ‘crisis of faith,’ ” the sense that rapid while I was in Beijing, the government what I’m confident Xi believes,” the offi- growth and political turmoil have cut abruptly blocked the V.P.N.s, and state cial said, though their engagements re- China off from its moral history. “He is media reiterated that they were illegal. main stilted: “There’s still a cadence that trying to solve that problem, so that there Overnight, it became radically more diffi- is very difficult to extract yourself from can be another new ideology.” cult to reach anything on the Internet in these exchanges. . . . We want to have Zhang writes about politics, and he outside China. Before the comments a conversation.” is occasionally visited by police who re- were shut down on the Web site Com- For years, American military leaders mind him to avoid sensitive subjects. puter News, twelve thousand people left worried that there was a growing risk of “Sometimes, they will pass by and say it their views. “What are you afraid of?” an accidental clash between China and through the closed front door,” Zhang one asked. “Big step toward becoming a the U.S., in part because Beijing protested said. He commented, “They tried to stop new North Korea,” another wrote. An- U.S. policies by declining meetings be- me from coming today. They followed other wrote: “One more advertisement tween senior commanders. In 2011, Mike me here.” He indicated a slim young man for emigration.” Mullen, then the Chairman of the Joint in a windbreaker, watching us from a A decade ago, the Chinese Internet Chiefs, visited Xi in Beijing, and appealed nearby table. In remote areas, where po- was alive with debate, confession, hu- to his military experience, telling him, as lice are unaccustomed to the presence of mor, and discovery. Month by month, it he recalled to me, “I just need you to stop foreigners, authorities often try to pre- is becoming more sterilized and self- cutting off military relationships as step vent people from meeting reporters. But, contained. To the degree that China’s one, every time you get ticked off.” That in a decade of writing about China, this connection to the outside world mat- has improved. In Beijing last November, was the first time I’d encountered that ters, the digital links are deteriorating. Xi and Obama spent five hours at din- situation in the capital. I suggested we Voice- over-Internet calls, viral videos, ner and meetings and announced coöper- postpone our discussion. He shook his podcasts—the minor accessories of con- ation on climate change, a high-tech free- temporary digital life—are less reachable trade deal that China had previously abroad than they were a year ago. It’s an resisted, and two military agreements to astonishing thing to observe in a rising encourage communication between forces superpower. How many countries in 2015 operating near each other in the South have an Internet connection to the world China and East China Seas. Mullen, who that is worse than it was a year ago? has met Xi again since their initial en- counter, is encouraged: “They still get he General Secretary, in his capac- ticked off, they take steps, but they don’t Tity as Big Uncle Xi, has taken to cut it off.” offering advice on nonpolitical matters: head. In a stage whisper, he said, “What last fall, he lamented an overly “sensual” s China ejects Western ideas, Xi is I say and what I write are the same. trend in society. (In response, Chinese A trying to fill that void with an There’s no difference.” auto executives stopped having lightly affirmative set of ideas to offer at home clad models lounge around vehicles at and abroad. Recently, I rode the No. 1 he most surprising thing about the car shows.) In January, he urged people subway line eastbound, beneath the Tera of Xi Jinping is the decision to to get more sleep, “however enthusiastic Ave nue of Eternal Peace—under Party close off the margins—those minor mu- you may be about the job,” saying that headquarters, the Central Propaganda tinies and indulgences that used to be he goes to bed before midnight. Online, Department, and the Ministries of Com- tolerated as a way to avoid driving Chi- people joked that it seemed implausible: merce and Public Security—and got off na’s most prosperous and well-educated since taking office, Xi has acquired heavy the train at the Second Ring Road, where citizens abroad. For years, the govern- bags under his eyes and a look of near- the old City Wall once stood. Near the ment tacitly allowed people to gain ac- constant irritation. station, at a Starbucks, I met Zhang cess to virtual private networks, or V.P.N.s, For a generation, the Communist Lifan, a well-known historian. At sixty- which allow users to reach Web sites that Party forged a political consensus built on THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 53 economic growth and legal ambiguity. trillion dollars in foreign-exchange re- tries (because of the one-child policy), Liberal activists and corrupt bureaucrats serves (a sum equivalent to the world’s and businesses are borrowing money more learned to skirt (or flout) legal boundar- fourth-largest economy). In November, rapidly than they are earning it. David ies, because the Party objected only in- 2013, the Party announced plans to re- Kelly, a co-founder of China Policy, a termittently. Today, Xi has indicated that invigorate competition by expanding Beijing-based research and advisory firm, consensus, beyond the Party élite, is su- the role of private banks, allowing the said, “The turning point in the economy perfluous—or, at least, less reliable than market (instead of bureaucrats) to decide really was about four, five years ago, and a hard boundary between enemies and where water, oil, and other precious re- now you see the classical problem of the friends. sources are directed, and forcing state declining productivity of capital. For every It is difficult to know precisely how firms to give up larger dividends and dollar you invest, you’re getting far less much support Xi enjoys. Private pollsters compete with private businesses. Last bang for your buck.” The growth of de- are not allowed to explicitly measure his spring, China abolished registered- mand for energy and raw materials has public support, but Victor Yuan, the pres- capital and other requirements for new slowed, more houses and malls are empty, ident of Horizon Research Consultancy companies, and in November it allowed and nervous Chinese savers are sending Group, a Beijing polling firm, told me, foreign investors to trade shares directly money overseas, to protect it in the event “We’ve done some indirect research, and on the Shanghai stock market for the of a crisis. Some factories have not paid his support seems to be around eighty first time. “A fair judgment is that Xi’s wages, and in the last quarter of 2014 per cent. It comes from two areas: one is government has achieved more progress, workers held strikes, or other forms of the anticorruption policy and the other in more areas, in the past eighteen months protest, at three times the rate of the same is foreign policy. The area where it’s un- than the Hu government did in its en- period a year earlier. clear is the economy. People say they’ll tire second term,” Arthur Kroeber, a long- Xi’s ability to avoid an economic cri- have to wait and see.” time Beijing-based economist at Gavekal sis depends partly on whether he has the China’s economy is likely to be Xi’s Dragonomics, a research firm, told me. political strength to prevail over state greatest obstacle. After economic growth And yet, Kroeber added, “my confidence firms, local governments, and other pow- of, on average, nearly ten per cent a year, level is only slightly above fifty per cent” erful interests. In his meetings with Rudd, for more than three decades, the Party that the reforms will be enough to head the former Australian Prime Minister, expected growth to slow to a sustainable off a recession. Xi mentioned his father’s frustrated at- pace of around seven per cent, but it could The risks to China’s economy have tempts to achieve market-oriented re- fall more sharply. China remains the rarely been more visible. The workforce forms. “Xi Jinping is legitimately proud world’s largest manufacturer, with four is aging more quickly than in other coun- of his father,” Rudd said, adding, “His fa- ther had a record of real achievement and was, frankly, a person who paid a huge political and personal price for being a dedicated Party man and a dedicated eco- nomic reformer.” Historically, the Party has never per- ceived a contradiction between political crackdown and economic reform. In 2005, Premier Wen Jiabao met with a delega- tion from the U.S. Congress, and one member, citing a professor who had re- cently been fired for political reasons, asked the Premier why. Wen was baffled by the inquiry; the professor was a “small problem,” he said. “I don’t know the per- son you spoke of, but as Premier I have 1.3 billion people on my mind.” To maintain economic growth, China is straining to promote innovation, but by enforcing a political chill on Chinese campuses Xi risks suppressing precisely the disruptive thinking that the coun- try needs for the future. At times, poli- tics prevails over rational calculations. In 2014, after China had spent years investing in science and technology, the share of its economy devoted to research and development surpassed “I’ll have what she’s having when she decides what she’s having.” Europe’s. But, when the government announced the recipients of grants for social- science research, seven of the top ten projects were dedicated to analyz- ing Xi’s speeches (officially known as “General Secretary Xi’s Series of Im- portant Speeches”) or his signature slo- gan: the Chinese Dream.

he era of Xi Jinping has defied the Tassumption that China’s fitful open- ing to the world is too critical and pro- ductive to stall. The Party today perceives an array of threats that, in the view of He Weifang, the law professor, will only increase in the years ahead. Before the Web, the professor said, “there really weren’t very many people who were able to access information from outside, so in Deng Xiaoping’s era the Party could afford to be a lot more open.” But now, if the Internet were unrestricted, “I believe it would bring in things that the leaders “You don’t have to do the quotes every time, Brian—we would consider very dangerous.” know you’re not Shakespeare.” Like many others I met this winter, He Weifang worries that the Party is •• narrowing the range of acceptable ad- aptation to the point that it risks un- controllable change. I asked him what trol and the complexity of Chinese so- ful companies and agencies had rendered he thinks the Party will be like in ten ciety. For years, the government had them incapable of protecting public health. or fifteen years. “I think, as intellectu- downplayed the severity of environmen- In spirit, the film was consistent with the als, we must do everything we can to tal pollution, describing it as an unavoid- official “war on corruption,” and state- promote a peaceful transformation of able cost of growth. But, year by year, run media responded with a coördinated the Party—to encourage it to become the middle class was becoming less ac- array of flattering coverage. a ‘leftist party’ in the European sense, commodating; in polls, urban citizens The film raced across social media, a kind of social- democratic party.” That, described pollution as their leading con- and by the end of the first week it he said, would help its members better cern, and, using smartphones, they had been viewed two hundred million respect a true system of law and polit- compared daily pollution levels to the times—a level usually reserved for ical competition, including freedom of standards set by the World Health Or- pop-music videos rather than dense, two- the press and freedom of thought. “If ganization. After a surge of smog in hour documentaries. The following week- they refuse even these basic changes, 2013, the government intensified efforts end, the authorities ordered video sites then I believe China will undergo an- to consolidate power plants, close small to withdraw the film, and news organi- other revolution.” polluters, and tighten state control. Last zations took down their coverage. As It is a dramatic prediction—and an year, it declared a “war against pollu- quickly as it had appeared, the film van- oddly commonplace one these days. tion,” but conceded that Beijing will not ished from the Chinese Web—a phe- Zhang Lifan, the historian I saw at Star- likely achieve healthy air before 2030. nomenon undone. bucks, said, in full view of his minder, “In In a moment of candor, the mayor pro- In the era of Xi Jinping, the public front of a lot of princeling friends, I’ve nounced the city “unlivable.” had proved, again, to be an unpredict- said that, if the Communist Party can’t In February, Chinese video sites posted able partner. It was a lesson that Xi ab- take sufficient political reform in five or a privately funded documentary, titled sorbed long ago. “The people elevated ten years, it could miss the chance en- “Under the Dome,” in which Chai Jing, me to this position so that I’d listen to tirely. As scholars, we always say it’s bet- a former state-television reporter, de- them and benefit them,” he said in 2000. ter to have reform than revolution, but scribed her growing alarm at the risks “But, in the face of all these opinions in Chinese history this cycle repeats it- that air pollution poses to her infant and comments, I had to learn to enjoy self. Mao said we have to get rid of the daughter. It was a sophisticated produc- having my errors pointed out to me, but cycle, but right now we’re still in it. This tion: Chai, in fashionable faded jeans and not to be swayed too much by that. Just is very worrying.” a white blouse, delivered a fast-paced, because so-and-so says something, I’m Two months after the events of New TED-style talk to a rapt studio audience, not going to start weighing every cost Year’s Eve, the Party again confronted unspooling grim statistics and scenes in and benefit. I’m not going to lose my a collision between its instinct for con- which bureaucrats admitted that power- appetite over it.”  THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 55 DEPT. OF THE ENVIRONMENT CARBON CAPTURE

Has climate change made it harder for people to care about conservation?

BY JONATHAN FRANZEN

ast September, as someone who talism and New England Puritanism. wind turbines compared with the im- L cares more about birds than the Both belief systems are haunted by pact of rising sea levels on poor na- next man, I was following the story of the feeling that simply to be human tions? What were the endemic cloud- the new stadium that the Twin Cit- is to be guilty. In the case of environ- forest birds of the Andes compared ies are building for their football Vi- mentalism, the feeling is grounded in with the atmospheric benefits of An- kings. The stadium’s glass walls were scientific fact. Whether it’s prehistoric dean hydroelectric projects? expected to kill thousands of birds North Americans hunting the mas- A hundred years ago, the National every year, and local bird-lovers had todon to extinction, Maori wiping out Audubon Society was an activist orga- asked its sponsors to use a specially the megafauna of New Zealand, or nization, campaigning against wan- patterned glass to reduce collisions; modern civilization deforesting the ton bird slaughter and the harvesting the glass would have raised the stadi- planet and emptying the oceans, of herons for their feathers, but its spirit um’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, human beings are universal killers of has since become gentler. In recent de- and the sponsors had balked. Around the natural world. And now climate cades, it’s been better known for its the same time, the National Audubon change has given us an eschatology holiday cards and its plush-toy cardi- Society issued a press release declar- for reckoning with our guilt: coming nals and bluebirds, which sing when ing climate change “the greatest threat” soon, some hellishly overheated to- you squeeze them. When the organi- to American birds and warning that morrow, is Judgment Day. Unless we zation shifted into Jonathan Edwards “nearly half ” of North America’s bird repent and mend our ways, we’ll all mode, last September, I wondered what species were at risk of losing their hab- be sinners in the hands of an angry was going on. itats by 2080. Audubon’s announce- Earth. In rolling out its climate-change ment was credulously retransmitted I’m still susceptible to this sort of initiative, Audubon alluded to the “cit- by national and local media, includ- puritanism. Rarely do I board an air- izen science data” it had mobilized, and ing the Minneapolis Star Tribune, plane or drive to the grocery store with- to a “report,” prepared by its own sci- whose blogger on bird-related sub- out considering my carbon footprint entists, that justified its dire predic- jects, Jim Williams, drew the inevita- and feeling guilty about it. But when tions. Visitors to its updated Web site ble inference: Why argue about sta- I started watching birds, and worry- were treated to images of climate- dium glass when the real threat to ing about their welfare, I became at- imperilled species, such as the bald birds was climate change? In compar- tracted to a countervailing strain of eagle, and asked to “take the pledge” ison, Williams said, a few thousand Christianity, inspired by St. Francis of to help save them. The actions that bird deaths would be “nothing.” Assisi’s example of loving what’s con- Audubon suggested to pledge-takers I was in Santa Cruz, California, and crete and vulnerable and right in front were gentle stuff—tell your stories, cre- already not in a good mood. The day of us. I gave my support to the fo- ate a bird-friendly yard—but the Web I saw the Williams quote was the two cussed work of the American Bird site also offered a “Climate Action hundred and fifty-fourth of a year in Conservancy and local Audubon so- Pledge,” which was long and detailed which, so far, sixteen had qualified as cieties. Even the most ominously de- and included things like replacing your rainy. To the injury of a brutal drought graded landscape could make me happy incandescent light bulbs with lower- came the daily insult of radio forecast- if it had birds in it. wattage alternatives. ers describing the weather as beauti- And so I came to feel miserably The climate-change report was not ful. It wasn’t that I didn’t share Wil- conflicted about climate change. I ac- immediately available, but from the liams’s anxiety about the future. What cepted its supremacy as the environ- Web site’s graphics, which included upset me was how a dire prophecy like mental issue of our time, but I felt bul- range maps of various bird species, it Audubon’s could lead to indifference lied by its dominance. Not only did it was possible to deduce that the report’s toward birds in the present. make every grocery-store run a guilt method involved a comparison of a Maybe it’s because I was raised as trip; it made me feel selfish for caring species’ present range with its predicted a Protestant and became an environ- more about birds in the present than range in a climate-altered future. When mentalist, but I’ve long been struck by about people in the future. What were there was broad overlap between the the spiritual kinship of environmen- the eagles and the condors killed by two ranges, it was assumed that the To slow global warming, we could blight every landscape with biofuel crops and wind turbines. But what about wildlife today? 56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015

ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 57 species would survive. When there was seriously. Besides being a ready-made that are decimating North American little or no overlap, it was assumed that meme, it’s usefully imponderable: while bird populations, and invest in large- the species would be caught between peer-reviewed scientific estimates put scale, intelligently conceived conserva- an old range that had grown inhospi- the annual American death toll of birds tion efforts, particularly those designed table to it and a new range in which from collisions and from outdoor cats to allow for climate change. These the habitat was wrong, and would be at more than three billion, no individ- aren’t the only things that people who at risk of disappearing. ual bird death can be definitively at- care about birds should be doing. But This kind of modelling can be use- tributed to climate change (since local it only makes sense not to do them if ful, but it’s fraught with uncertainties. and short-term weather patterns have the problem of global warming de- A species may currently breed in a nonlinear causes). Although you could mands the full resources of every sin- habitat with a particular average tem- demonstrably save the lives of the birds gle nature-loving group. perature, but this doesn’t mean that it now colliding with your windows or couldn’t tolerate a higher temperature, being killed by your cats, reducing your little tragicomedy of climate ac- or that it couldn’t adapt to a slightly carbon footprint even to zero saves A tivism is its shifting of goalposts. different habitat farther north, or that nothing. Declaring climate change bad Ten years ago, we were told that we the more northerly habitat won’t for birds is therefore the opposite of had ten years to take the kind of dras- change as temperatures rise. North controversial. To demand a ban on lead tic actions needed to prevent global American species in general, having ammunition (lead poisoning is the fore- temperatures from rising more than contended with blazing July days and most cause of California condor deaths) two degrees Celsius in this century. frosty September nights as they would alienate hunters. To take an ag- Today we hear, from some of the very evolved, are much more tolerant of gressive stand against the overharvest- same activists, that we still have ten temperature fluctuations than tropi- ing of horseshoe crabs (the real reason years. In reality, our actions now would cal species are. Although, in any given that the red knot, a shorebird, had to need to be even more drastic than they place, some familiar back-yard birds be put on the list of threatened U.S. would have ten years ago, because fur- may have disappeared by 2080, spe- species this winter) might embarrass ther gigatons of carbon have accumu- cies from farther south are likely to the Obama Administration, whose di- lated in the atmosphere. At the rate have moved in to take their place. North rector of the Fish and Wildlife Ser- we’re going, we’ll use up our entire emis- America’s avifauna may well become vice, in announcing the listing, laid the sions allowance for the century before more diverse. blame for the red knot’s decline pri- we’re even halfway through it. Mean- The bald eagle was an especially marily on “climate change,” a politi- while, the actions that many govern- odd choice of poster bird for Audu- cally more palatable culprit. Climate ments now propose are less drastic than bon’s initiative. The species nearly be- change is everyone’s fault—in other what they proposed ten years ago. came extinct fifty years ago, before words, no one’s. We can all feel good A book that does justice to the full DDT was banned. The only reason we about deploring it. tragedy and weird comedy of climate can worry about its future today is that There’s no doubt that the coming change is “Reason in a Dark Time,” by the public—led by the then energetic century will be a tough one for wild the philosopher Dale Jamieson. Ordi- Audubon—rallied around an immedi- animals. But, for countless species, in- narily, I avoid books on the subject, but ate threat to it. The eagle’s plight was cluding almost all of North America’s a friend recommended it to me last a primary impetus for the Endangered birds, the threat is not direct. The re- summer, and I was intrigued by its sub- Species Act of 1973, and the eagle is sponses of birds to acute climatic stress title, “Why the Struggle Against Cli- one of the act’s great success stories. are not well studied, but birds have mate Change Failed—And What It Once its eggs were no longer weak- been adapting to such stresses for tens Means for Our Future”; by the word ened by DDT, its population and range of millions of years, and they’re sur- “failed” in particular, the past tense of expanded so dramatically that it was prising us all the time—emperor pen- it. I started reading and couldn’t stop. removed from the endangered-species guins relocating their breeding grounds Jamieson, an observer and partici- list in 2007. The eagle rebounded be- as the Antarctic ice melts, tundra swans pant at climate conferences since the cause it’s a resilient and resourceful leaving the water and learning to glean early nineties, begins with an overview bird, a generalist hunter and scaven- grains from agricultural fields. Not every of humanity’s response to the largest ger, capable of travelling large distances species will manage to adapt. But the collective-action problem it has ever to colonize new territory. It’s hard to larger and healthier and more diverse faced. In the twenty-three years since think of a species less liable to be our bird populations are, the greater the Rio Earth Summit, at which hopes trapped by geography. Even if global the chances that many species will sur- for a global agreement ran high, not warming squeezes it entirely out of its vive, even thrive. To prevent extinctions only have carbon emissions not de- current summer and winter ranges, the in the future, it’s not enough to curb creased; they’ve increased steeply. In melting of ice in Alaska and Canada our carbon emissions. We also have to Copenhagen, in 2009, President Obama may actually result in a larger new keep a whole lot of wild birds alive right was merely ratifying a fait accompli range. now. We need to combat the extinc- when he declined to commit the United But climate change is seductive to tions that are threatened in the pres- States to binding targets for reductions. organizations that want to be taken ent, work to reduce the many hazards Unlike Bill Clinton, Obama was frank 58 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 about how much action the American political system could deliver on cli- mate change: none. Without the United States, which is the world’s second- largest emitter of greenhouse gases, a global agreement isn’t global, and other countries have little incentive to sign it. Basically, America has veto power, and we’ve exercised it again and again. The reason the American political system can’t deliver action isn’t simply that fossil-fuel corporations sponsor denialists and buy elections, as many progressives suppose. Even for people who accept the fact of global warming, the problem can be framed in many different ways—a crisis in global gov- ernance, a market failure, a technolog- ical challenge, a matter of social jus- tice, and so on—each of which argues for a different expensive solution. A problem like this (a “wicked problem” “Sorry, Josh, but I need to stay in and work on my is the technical term) will frustrate al- Theory of Everything but Josh.” most any country, and particularly the United States, where government is •• designed to be both weak and respon- sive to its citizens. Unlike the progres- sives who see a democracy perverted dispersed in time and space that no cry for our brains.) The great hope of by moneyed interests, Jamieson sug- specific instance of harm could ever the Enlightenment—that human ra- gests that America’s inaction on cli- be traced back to my 0.0000001-per- tionality would enable us to transcend mate change is the result of democracy. cent contribution to emissions. I may our evolutionary limitations—has taken A good democracy, after all, acts in the abstractly fault myself for emitting way a beating from wars and genocides, but interests of its citizens, and it’s pre- more than the global per-capita aver- only now, on the problem of climate cisely the citizens of the major carbon- age. But if I calculate the average an- change, has it foundered altogether. emitting democracies who benefit nual quota required to limit global I’d expected to be depressed by “Rea- from cheap gasoline and global trade, warming to two degrees this century son in a Dark Time,” but I wasn’t. Part while the main costs of our polluting I find that simply maintaining a typ- of what’s mesmerizing about climate are borne by those who have no vote: ical American single-family home ex- change is its vastness across both space poorer countries, future generations, ceeds it in two weeks. Absent any in- and time. Jamieson, by elucidating our other species. The American elector- dication of direct harm, what makes past failures and casting doubt on ate, in other words, is rationally self- intuitive moral sense is to live the life whether we’ll ever do any better, situ- interested. According to a survey cited I was given, be a good citizen, be kind ates it within a humanely scaled con- by Jamieson, more than sixty per cent to the people near me, and conserve text. “We are constantly told that we of Americans believe that climate as well as I reasonably can. stand at a unique moment in human change will harm other species and Jamieson’s larger contention is that history and that this is the last chance future generations, while only thirty-two climate change is different in category to make a difference,” he writes in his per cent believe that it will harm them from any other problem the world has introduction. “But every point in human personally. ever faced. For one thing, it deeply con- history is unique, and it is always the Shouldn’t our responsibility to other fuses the human brain, which evolved last chance to make some particular people, both living and not yet born, to focus on the present, not the far fu- difference.” compel us to take radical action on cli- ture, and on readily perceivable move- This was the context in which the mate change? The problem here is that ments, not slow and probabilistic de- word “nothing,” applied to the differ- it makes no difference to the climate velopments. (When Jamieson notes ence that some Minnesotan bird-lov- whether any individual, myself in- that “against the background of a warm- ers were trying to make, so upset me. cluded, drives to work or rides a bike. ing world, a winter that would not have It’s not that we shouldn’t care whether The scale of greenhouse-gas emissions been seen as anomalous in the past is global temperatures rise two degrees is so vast, the mechanisms by which viewed as unusually cold, thus as evi- or four this century, or whether the these emissions affect the climate so dence that a warming is not occurring,” oceans rise twenty inches or twenty feet; nonlinear, and the effects so widely you don’t know whether to laugh or to the differences matter immensely. Nor THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 59 should we fault any promising effort, by foundations or N.G.O.s or govern- ments, to mitigate global warming or DEEP LANE adapt to it. The question is whether everyone who cares about the environ- November and this road’s tunnel ment is obliged to make climate the of soft fire draws you forward, as it descends, overriding priority. Does it make any as if you were moving toward— practical or moral sense, when the lives and the livelihoods of millions of peo- radical completion, ple are at risk, to care about a few thou- some encompassment? Dark kindness sand warblers colliding with a stadium? woven in the fabric of the afternoon. To answer the question, it’s import- ant to acknowledge that drastic plan- And because you’ve held within your own veins etary overheating is a done deal. Even another passage of fire—obliterating mercy— in the nations most threatened by flood- not these lit-up leaf clouds ing or drought, even in the countries most virtuously committed to alterna- but a hot wire stealing into tive energy sources, no head of state the deepest chambers of the night— has ever made a commitment to leav- you love the way the asphalt lifts ing any carbon in the ground. With- out such a commitment, “alternative” then hurries down toward Deep Lane. merely means “additional”—postpone- The fire road inside ment of human catastrophe, not pre- is only that road once; vention. The Earth as we now know it resembles a patient whose terminal though desire sends you back there again cancer we can choose to treat either and again, it won’t be that one you’re on, with disfiguring aggression or with pal- and thus you want all the harder. liation and sympathy. We can dam every river and blight every landscape with So let this road take you, biofuel agriculture, solar farms, and autumn’s enchanted boy wind turbines, to buy some extra years lifted into the wet-yellow lamps of the maples; of moderated warming. Or we can set- tle for a shorter life of higher quality, taken up by that fleeting light, protecting the areas where wild ani- let your trophies fall to the rain, mals and plants are hanging on, at the let the lean of the motorbike cost of slightly hastening the human catastrophe. One advantage of the lat- ter approach is that, if a miracle cure by our forebears, and we’ll bequeath a ing birds from the world? The dangers like fusion energy should come along, world of different goods and bads to of carbon pollution today are far greater there might still be some intact eco- our descendants. We’ve always been than those of DDT, and climate change systems for it to save. not only universal despoilers but bril- may indeed be, as the National Audu- Choosing to preserve nature at po- liant adapters; climate change is just bon Society says, the foremost long- tential human expense would be mor- the same old story writ larger. The only term threat to birds. But I already know ally more unsettling if nature still had self-inflicted existential threat to our that we can’t prevent global warming the upper hand. But we live in the An- species is nuclear war. by changing our light bulbs. I still want thropocene now—in a world ever more The story that is genuinely new is to do something. of our own making. Near the end of that we’re causing mass extinctions. In “Annie Hall,” when the young Jamieson’s chapter on ethics, he poses Not everyone cares about wild animals, Alvy Singer stopped doing his home- the question of whether it’s a good but the people who consider them an work, his mother took him to a psy- thing or a bad thing that the arcadian irreplaceable, non-monetizable good chiatrist. It turned out that Alvy had Manhattan of 1630, lushly forested have a positive ethical argument to read that the universe is expanding, and teeming with fish and birds, be- make on their behalf. It’s the same ar- which would surely lead to its break- came the modern Manhattan of the gument that Rachel Carson made in ing apart some day, and to him this High Line and the Metropolitan Mu- “Silent Spring,” the book that ignited was an argument for not doing his seum. People will give different an- the modern environmental movement. homework: “What’s the point?” Under swers. The point is that the change oc- Carson did warn of the dangers of pol- the shadow of vast global problems and curred and can’t be undone, as global lution to human beings, but the moral vast global remedies, smaller-scale ac- warming can’t be undone. We were be- center of her book was implicit in its tions on behalf of nature can seem sim- queathed a world of goods and bads title: Are we really O.K. with eliminat- ilarly meaningless. But Alvy’s mother 60 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 to be profitable. In an old and dusty and dirt-floored building, women from the community served me a lunch of tarwi stew and dense, sweet tarwi carry you down the moraine, bread. After lunch, in a neighboring across the rising chill from the fields, on into town: courtyard, I toured a nursery of na- warm light, voices, a meal in the tavern’s golden cave. tive tree saplings that the community will hand-plant on steep slopes, to You won’t be riding that other road much again, fight erosion and improve local water but this one: the kind man’s dark leather back quality. I then visited a nearby com- in front of you, the cycle’s center of gravity munity that has pledged to leave its forested land intact and is operating sinking lower, the delicious clay-cold of the field an experimental organic farm. The between here and home rising up, scent of hay, scale of the farm is small, but to the of animals and ruin. He knows community it means clear streams and self-sustenance, and to Amazon Con- you would just as soon stay, servation it represents a model for but lucky he’s not here for that. other communities. The regional and He ferries you home, maybe every night of your life. municipal governments have money from petroleum and mining royalties, Or that’s what you wish he could do, and could spend it revitalizing the though you know it’s you leaning against him highlands according to the model. that makes your mutual direction. “We’re not jealous,” Amazon Conser- vation’s Peruvian director, Daniela Po- Every night a little like the one he came home late, gliani, told me. “If the government happy, from the leather bar, and you in your welling up wants to take our ideas and take the out of sleep said, I have a lake in me, credit, we have no problem with it.” In an era of globalism of every sort, and he looked at you closely, with a generous, a good conservation project has to meet unflinching scrutiny, undeceived, loving, as clear a gaze new criteria. The project has to be large, as anyone had ever brought to you, and he said, You do. because biodiversity won’t survive in a habitat fragmented by palm-oil plan- —Mark Doty tations or gas drilling. The project has to respect and accommodate the peo- ple already living in and around it. (Car- bon emissions have rendered meaning- less the ideal of a wilderness untouched was having none of it. “You’re here in almost as simple as “Markets are by man; the new ideal is “wildness,” Brooklyn!” she said. “Brooklyn is not efficient.” The story can be told in fewer which is measured not by isolation from expanding!” It all depends on what we than a hundred and forty characters: disturbance but by the diversity of or- mean by meaning. We’re taking carbon that used to be ganisms that can complete their life sequestered and putting it in the at- cycles.) And the project needs to be limate change shares many attri- mosphere, and unless we stop we’re resilient with respect to climate change, C butes of the economic system fucked. either by virtue of its size or by incor- that’s accelerating it. Like capitalism, Conservation work, in contrast, is porating altitudinal gradients or mul- it is transnational, unpredictably dis- novelistic. No two places are alike, and tiple microclimates. ruptive, self-compounding, and ines- no narrative is simple. When I trav- The highlands are important to the capable. It defies individual resistance, elled to Peru last November to see the Amazon because they’re a source of creates big winners and big losers, and work of a Peruvian-American part- its water and because, as the planet tends toward global monoculture—the nership, the Amazon Conservation heats up, lower-elevation species will extinction of difference at the species Association, my first stop was at a shift their ranges upslope. The focal level, a monoculture of agenda at the small indigenous community in the point for Amazon Conservation is Pe- institutional level. It also meshes nicely highlands east of Cuzco. With Am- ru’s Manú National Park, a swath of with the tech industry, by fostering the azon Conservation’s help, the com- lower-elevation rain forest larger than idea that only tech, whether through munity is reforesting Andean slopes, Connecticut. The park, which is home the efficiencies of Uber or some mas- suppressing forest fires, and develop- to indigenous groups that shun con- terstroke of geoengineering, can solve ing a business in a local legume called tact with the outside world, has full the problem of greenhouse-gas emis- tarwi, which can thrive on degraded legal protection from encroachment, sions. As a narrative, climate change is land and is popular enough in Cuzco but illegal encroachment is endemic in THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 61 who live in it alternatives to cutting it down. At the indigenous village of Santa Rosa de Huacaria, near Villa Car- men, the community’s cacique, Don Alberto, gave me a tour of the fish farm and fish hatchery that Amazon Conservation has helped it develop. Large-scale fish farming is ecologi- cally problematic in other parts of the world, but smaller-scale operations in the Amazon, using native fish spe- cies, are among the most sustainable and least destructive sources of ani- mal protein. Huacaria’s operation pro- vides meat for its thirty-nine fami- lies and surplus fish that it can sell for cash. Over lunch—farmed paco fire-roasted with yucca inside seg- ments of bamboo, with heliconia-leaf plugs at each end—Don Alberto held FPO forth movingly on the effects of cli- mate change that he’d seen in his life- time. The sun felt hotter now, he ONLY— said. Some of his people had devel- oped skin cancer, unheard of in the past, and the larvae of a palm-tree A18957 parasite, which the community had traditionally eaten to control diabe- tes and stimulate their immune sys- tems, had vanished. Nevertheless, he “O.K., now—on three, I’m going to toss a second job in there!” was committed to the forest. Ama- zon Conservation is helping the com- munity expand its land title and de- •• velop its own partnership with the national park. Don Alberto told me the parks of tropical countries. What coca traffickers. The road bottoms out that a natural-medicine company had Amazon Conservation is attempting near Villa Carmen, a former hacienda offered him a retainer and a jet in to do for Manú, besides expanding its that now has an educational center, a which to fly around the world and upslope potential and protecting its lodge for ecotourists, and an experi- lecture on traditional healing, and watershed, is to strengthen the buffer mental farm where a substance called that he’d turned it down. on the flanks of the park, which are biochar is being tested. Biochar, which The most striking thing about Am- threatened by logging, slash-and-burn is manufactured by kiln-burning azon Conservation’s work is the small- farming, and a boom in wildcat gold woody refuse and pulverizing the ness of its constituent parts. There are mining in the region of Madre de charred result, allows carbon to be se- the eight female paco from which a Dios. The project aspires to be a pro- questered in farm fields and is a low- season’s worth of eggs are taken, the tective belt of small reserves, self- cost way to enrich poor soil. It offers humbleness of the plastic tanks in sustaining community lands, and larger local farmers an alternative to slash- which the hatchlings live. There are conservation “concessions” on state- and-burn agriculture, wherein forest the conical piles of dirt that highland owned land. is destroyed for cropland, the soil is women sit beside and fill short plas- On the fifty-five-mile road down quickly exhausted, and more forest has tic tubes in which to plant tree seed- from the highlands, it’s possible to see to be destroyed. Even a wealthy coun- lings. There are the simple wooden nearly six hundred species of bird. The try like Norway, seeking to offset its sheds that Amazon Conservation road follows an ancient track once carbon emissions and to assuage its builds for indigenous Brazil-nut har- used to transport coca leaves from the guilt, can’t save a rain forest simply by vesters to shelter the nuts from rain, lowlands to pre-Columbian highland buying up land and putting a fence and that can make the difference be- civilizations. On trails near the road, around it, because no fence is strong tween earning a living income and Amazon Conservation researchers enough to resist social forces. The way having to cut or leave the forest. And peaceably coexist with modern-day to save a forest is to give the people there is the method for taking a bird 62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 census in a lowland forest: you walk a six-year-old tropical biologist, Daniel ranchland covered with Africanized hundred metres, stopping to look and Janzen, who has spent nearly half his grasses. Using money raised with the listen, and then walk another hundred life doing just that. Janzen and his help of the Nature Conservancy and metres. At every turn, the smallness wife, Winnie Hallwachs, are the ar- the Swedish and Costa Rican govern- contrasts with the vastness of climate- chitects of perhaps the most audacious ments, and from passing a hat after change projects—the mammoth wind and successful conservation project in his lectures in America, Janzen was turbines, the horizon-reaching solar the New World tropics, the Área Conser- able to buy up huge chunks of pasture farms, the globe-encircling clouds of vación de Guanacaste (A.C.G.). Janzen and damaged forest between the two reflective particles that geoengineers and Hallwachs began working on the existing national parks. After the cat- envision. The difference in scale cre- project, in 1985, with many advan- tle were removed, wildfires became ates a difference in the kind of mean- tages. Costa Rica was a stable democ- the main threat to the project. Janzen ing that actions have for the people racy whose system of parks and re- experimented with planting seedlings performing them. The meaning of serves comprised one quarter of its of native tree species, but he quickly climate-related actions, because they land area and was internationally ad- concluded that natural reforestation, produce no discernible result, is nec- mired; the northern dry-forest region with seeds carried by wind and ani- essarily eschatological; they refer to a of Guanacaste, the site of the project, mal droppings, worked better. Once Judgment Day we’re hoping to post- was remote, sparsely populated, and the new forest took hold, and the fire pone. The mode of meaning of con- unattractive to agribusiness. That Jan- risk diminished, he developed a more servation in the Amazon is Francis- zen and Hallwachs created a reserve ambitious mission for the A.C.G.’s can: you’re helping something you love, that meets the new criteria—it is huge, employees: creating a complete inven- something right in front of you, and has good relations with surrounding tory of the estimated three hundred you can see the results. communities, and encompasses a ma- and seventy-five thousand plant and rine reserve, the dry slopes of a volca- animal species that occur within its n much the way that developed na- nic cordillera, and Caribbean rain for- boundaries. I tions, having long contributed dis- est—is nonetheless remarkable, because Borrowing from the term “parale- proportionately to carbon emissions, they were two unwealthy scientists gal,” Janzen coined the word “paratax- now expect developing nations to share and the politics never ceased to be onomist” for the Guanacasteans he the burden of reducing them, the rich complicated. hired. They lack university degrees, but biotically poor countries of Eu- Costa Rica famously has no army, but after a period of intensive train- rope and North America need trop- but its park administration has been ing they’re able to do real scientific ical countries to do the work of safe- organized like one. Headquartered in work. They walk the dry Pacific-slope guarding global biodiversity. Many of the capital, San José, it freely rotates forest and the wet Caribbean forest, these countries are still recovering its guards and other personnel through- collect specimens, and mount them from colonialism, however, and have out the system, with the parks func- and take tissue samples for DNA anal- more urgent troubles. Very little of tioning essentially as territories to ysis. There are currently thirty-four the deforestation of the Brazilian Am- be defended from armies of potential parataxonomists, whom Janzen is able azon, for example, is being done by encroachers. Janzen and some far- to pay respectable salaries with grant wealthy people. The deforesters are sighted Costa Rican policymakers money, interest from a small endow- poor families displaced from more fe- recognized that, in a country where ment, and dogged fund-raising. Janzen cund regions where capital-intensive economic opportunities were limited, told me that the parataxonomists are agribusinesses grow soybeans for Chi- the amount of protected land enor- as highly motivated and eager to learn nese tofu and eucalyptus pulp for mous, and funding for protection as his best graduate students. (He American disposable diapers. The strictly finite, defending parks filled teaches biology at the University of gold-mining boom in Madre de Dios with timber and game and minerals Pennsylvania.) I saw one team early is not only an ecological catastrophe was like defending mansions in a on a Saturday morning collecting an but a human disaster, with widespread ghetto. The A.C.G. experimented assortment of leaves for the caterpil- reports of mercury poisoning and with a new approach: the national lars it was raising in plastic bags, an- human trafficking, but Peruvian state parks and the reserves within it were other team setting out on a Sunday and federal governments have yet to exempted from the park administra- morning to scour the woods. put an end to it, because the miners tion’s policy of rotation, which al- Of the three new criteria for suc- make much better money than they lowed their personnel to put down cessful conservation projects, integra- could in the impoverished regions roots and develop allegiance to the tion with surrounding communities from which they’ve emigrated. Be- land and the conservation concept, is the most difficult to meet. Janzen’s sides tailoring its work to the needs and all employees, including the po- taxonomy endeavor serves this goal in and capacities of local people, a group lice, were expected to do meaning- several ways. Most basically, for Costa like Amazon Conservation has to ne- ful conservation or scientific work. Ricans to care about biodiversity— gotiate an extremely complicated po- In the early years, this work often their country, which covers 0.03 per litical landscape. consisted of fighting fires. Much of cent of the Earth’s land surface, con- In Costa Rica, I met a seventy- the present-day A.C.G. was once tains four per cent of its species—they THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 63 have to know what it consists of. Bio- a porcupine and a pygmy owl as res- with a knife—would you throw it away?” diversity is an abstraction, but the hun- cue pets; Janzen remarked to me wist- My visit coincided with the news dreds of drawers of pinned and named fully that he wished it were possible to of a breakthrough in technology for Guanacastean moth specimens, in an have a pet rattlesnake. White-bearded making ethanol from cellulose. From air-conditioned room at Santa Rosa and shirtless, wearing only sneakers a climate perspective, the lure of effi- National Park, are not. Hands-on sci- and dirty green cotton pants, he looks cient biofuel production is irresistible, ence, the specific story that each toxic as though he had walked out of a Con- but to Janzen it looks like another di- plant and each parasitic wasp has to rad novel. Hallwachs, who is a tropi- saster. The richest land in Costa Rica tell, also provides a focus for the Gua- cal ecologist, is younger, more emol- is already given over to monocultural nacastean schoolchildren whom the lient, and skilled at converting Janzen’s agribusiness. What would happen to A.C.G. has been hosting for thirty scientific rationality into conventional the country if second-growth forest years. If you spent a week in the dry social currency. could fuel its cars? As long as miti- forest as a child, examining chrysali- The forest in Santa Rosa seemed gating climate change trumps all other des and ocelot droppings, you might, desperately dry to me, even for a dry environmental concerns, no landscape as an adult, see the forest as some- forest in the dry season. Hallwachs on earth is safe. Like globalism, cli- thing other than a purely economic pointed to the cloud cover on the vol- matism alienates. Americans today live resource. Finally, and perhaps most canoes and said that during the past far from the ecological damage that important, the parataxonomists cre- fifteen years it has steadily moved up- their consumption habits cause, and ate a sense of local ownership. Some slope, a harbinger of climate change. even if future consumers are more en- of them are husband- and-wife teams, “I used to win cases of beer betting lightened about carbon footprints, and and many live at the research stations on the date the rains would come,” fill their tanks with certified green fuel, that dot the A.C.G., where they exert Janzen said. “It was always May 15th, they’ll still be alienated. Only an ap- a more powerful protective influence and now you don’t know when they’re preciation of nature as a collection of than armed guards ever could, because going to come.” He added that insect specific threatened habitats, rather their neighbors are their friends and populations in Guanacaste had col- than as an abstract thing that is “dying,” family. During my days at Guanacaste, lapsed in the four decades he’d been can avert the complete denaturing of I passed the station at the entrance to studying them, and that he’d thought the world. Santa Rosa many times and never saw of describing the collapse in a paper, Guanacaste is already the last signifi- a guard. By Janzen’s account, poach- but what would be the point? It would cant expanse of Pacific dry forest in ing and illegal logging are much rarer only depress people. The loss of in- Central America. To preserve even in the A.C.G. than in other, tradition- sect species is already harming the some of the species unique to it, the ally guarded Costa Rican parks. birds that eat them and the plants that reserve has to last forever. “It’s like ter- Janzen and Hallwachs spend half need pollination, and the losses will rorism,” Janzen said. “We have to suc- the year in a tiny, cluttered hut near surely continue as the planet warms. ceed every day, the terrorists have to Santa Rosa’s headquarters. Deer, agou- But to Janzen the warming doesn’t succeed only once.” The questions that tis, magpie-jays, wasps, and monkeys obviate the A.C.G. “If you had the he and Hallwachs ask about the fu- frequent the bowls of water in front of only Rembrandt in the world,” he said, ture have little to do with global warm- their hut. Over the years, they’ve kept “and somebody came and slashed it ing. They wonder how to make the A.C.G. financially self-sustaining, and how to root its mission permanently in Costa Rican society, and how to in- sure that its water resources aren’t all drawn off to irrigate cropland, and how to prepare for future Costa Rican pol- iticians who want to level it for cellu- losic ethanol. The question that most foreign vis- itors to Guanacaste ask is how its model can be applied to other centers of biodiversity in the tropics. The an- swer is that it can’t be. Our economic system encourages monocultural think- ing: there exists an optimal solution, a best conservation product, and once we identify it we can scale it up and sell it universally. As the contrast be- tween Amazon Conservation and the A.C.G. suggests, preserving biologi- “I’m just hoping to make it to the Final Four.” cal diversity requires a corresponding diversity of approach. Good programs— the Carr Foundation’s Gor ongosa Res- toration Project in Mozambique, Is- land Conservation’s re-wilding of is- lands in the Pacific and the Caribbean, WildEarth Guardians’ fight to save the sagelands of the American West, EuroNatur’s blending of cultural and biological conservation in southeast- ern Europe, to name a few—not only act locally but, by necessity, think lo- cally as well. During my time with Janzen, he rarely mentioned other projects. What concerns him is what he loves con- cretely: the specific dry-forest hunt- ing grounds that he uses as a tropical field biologist, the unprivileged Costa Ricans who work for the A.C.G. and live near its borders. Sitting in a chair outside his forest hut, he was an un- stoppable font of story. There was the story of Oliver North’s airstrip for the contras, on the Santa Elena penin- sula, and how Santa Elena became part of the A.C.G. The story of Jan- zen’s discovery that dry-forest moth species spend part of their life cycle in humid forest, and how this led him and Hallwachs to expand the scope of their already ambitious project. •• And the story of the thousand truck- loads of orange peel that the A.C.G. ognized civil-service position in the From a global perspective, it can took off the hands of an orange-juice Ministry of Environment, Energy, and seem that the future holds not only plant in exchange for fourteen hun- Telecommunications. my own death but a second, larger dred hectares of prime forest, and how In 1985, when Janzen and Hall- death of the familiar world. Across a mischief-making environmentalist wachs set out to create the A.C.G., the river from the lowest-lying of then sued the juice company for ille- with no training or experience in con- Amazon Conservation’s research sta- gally dumping the peels on public land, servation work, they couldn’t have imag- tions, Los Amigos, are miles and miles even though, by the time the suit was ined any of these stories. Guanacaste of forest ripped apart by gold min- settled, they’d decayed into a rich, re- became the thing that happened to ers. The A.C.G. is surrounded by agri- forestation-promoting loam. The story them, the life they chose to live. It may business and coastal development of how Janzen and Hallwachs learned be true, of course, that “where there’s that its existence has served to con- to do business with multiple land- life there’s death,” as Janzen is fond of solidate. But within Los Amigos are owners simultaneously, making all- saying, and I did wonder if the vision quetzals, tinamous, trumpeters, and or-nothing offers for bundles of prop- of a climate-denatured planet, a world everything else that their ongoing erties, to avoid being taken hostage of switchgrass fields and eucalyptus presence represents. Within the A.C.G. by an individual holdout. The story plantations, is secretly appealing to is a forest that didn’t exist thirty of the landowner who invested the human beings, because, having so much years ago, with hundred-foot trees proceeds of his sale of ranchland in less life in it, it would have so much and five species of large cat, sea tur- irrigation for sugarcane production less death. Certainly there was death tles digging their nests by the ocean, outside the A.C.G.—an example of all around me in the forest, palpably and flocks of parakeets sociably feast- conservation’s reversal of geographi- more death than in a suburb or a farm ing on the seeds of fruiting trees. The cal entropy, its sorting of mixed-used field—jaguars killing deer, deer killing animals may not be able to thank us land into areas of stringent protec- saplings, wasps killing caterpillars, boas for allowing them to live, and they tion and intensive exploitation. The killing birds, and birds killing every- certainly wouldn’t do the same thing story of the A.C.G.’s redesignation thing imaginable, according to their for us if our positions were reversed. of its schoolteachers as “secretaries,” specialty. But this was because it was But it’s we, not they, who need life because “schoolteacher” wasn’t a rec- a living forest. to have meaning.  THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 65 FICTION

GLEN LUFF/EYEEM/GETTY 66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 usa was my older brother. His reason, my brother held a grudge against we were short on food, when it was cold, M head seemed to strike the clouds. Mama, and she defended herself in a way and, maybe, when Mama felt even more He was quite tall, yes, and his body was that was even more obscure. Those were like a widow than usual. Oh, stories die, thin and knotty from hunger and the unsettling days and nights, filled with you know, and I can’t remember exactly strength that comes from anger. He had anger, and I lived in fear at the idea that what the poor woman told me, but she an angular face, big hands that protected Musa might leave us, too. But he’d al- knew how to summon up unlikely things, me, and hard eyes, because our ancestors ways return at dawn, drunk, oddly proud tales of hand-to-hand combat between had lost their land. But when I think of his rebellion, seemingly endowed with Musa, the invisible giant, and the gaouri, about it I believe that he already loved renewed vigor. Then he’d sober up and the roumi, the big fat Frenchman, the us then the way the dead do, with no fade away. All he wanted to do was sleep, obese thief of sweat and land. And so, in useless words and a look in his eyes that and in this way my mother would get our imaginations, my brother Musa was came from the hereafter. I have only a him under her control again. commissioned to perform different tasks: few pictures of him in my head, but I I have some pictures in my head— repay a blow, avenge an insult, recover a want to describe them to you carefully. they’re all I can offer you. A cup of coffee, piece of confiscated land, collect a pay- For example, the day he came home early some cigarette butts, his espadrilles, check. All of a sudden, this legendary from the neighborhood market, or maybe Mama crying and then recovering quickly Musa acquired a horse and a sword and from the port, where he worked as a to smile at a neighbor who’d come to the aura of a spirit come back from the handyman and a porter, toting, dragging, borrow some tea or spices, moving from dead to redress injustice. And, well, you lifting, sweating. Anyway, that day he distress to courtesy so fast that it made know how it goes. When he was alive, came upon me while I was playing with me doubt her sincerity, as young as I was. he had a reputation as a quick-tempered an old tire, and he put me on his shoul- Everything revolved around Musa, and man with a fondness for impromptu box- ders and told me to hold on to his ears, Musa revolved around our father, whom ing matches. Most of Mama’s tales, how- as if his head were a steering wheel. I re- I never knew and who left me nothing ever, were chronicles of Musa’s last day, member the joy I felt as he rolled the but our family name. Do you know what which was also, in a way, the first day of tire along and made a sound like a motor. we were called in those days? Uled el- his immortality. Mama could narrate the His smell comes back to me, too, a per- assas, the sons of the guardian. Of the events of that day in such staggering de- sistent mingling of rotten vegetables, watchman, to be more precise. My fa- tail that they almost came to life. She sweat, and breath. Another picture in my ther had worked as a night watchman never described a murder and a death; memory is from the day of Eid one year. in a factory where they made I don’t instead, she’d evoke a fantastic transfor- Musa had given me a hiding the day be- know what. One night, he disappeared. mation, one that turned a simple young fore for some stupid thing I’d done, and And that’s all. That’s the story I was told. man from one of the poorer quarters of now we were both embarrassed. It was It happened in the nineteen-thirties, Algiers into an invincible, long-awaited a day of forgiveness and he was supposed right after I was born. hero, a kind of savior. The details would to kiss me, but I didn’t want him to lose So Musa was a god for me, a simple change. In some versions of the story, face and lower himself by apologizing to god of few words. His thick beard and Musa had left the house a little earlier me, not even in God’s name. I also re- powerful arms made him seem like a than usual, awakened by a prophetic member his gift for immobility, the way giant who could have wrung the neck of dream or a terrifying voice that had pro- he could stand stock still on the thresh- any soldier in an ancient Pharaoh’s army. nounced his name. In others, he’d an- old of our house, facing the neighbors’ Which was why, on the day we learned swered the call of some friends—uled el- wall, holding a cigarette and the cup of of his death and the circumstances sur- huma, sons of the neighborhood—idle black coffee our mother brought him. rounding it, I didn’t feel sad or angry at young men interested in skirts, cigarettes, Our father had disappeared long ago first; instead, I felt disappointed and and scars. An obscure discussion ensued and existed now in fragments in the ru- offended, as if someone had insulted me. and resulted in Musa’s death. I’m not mors we heard from people who claimed My brother was capable of parting the sure: Mama had a thousand and one sto- to have run into him in France. Only sea, and yet he died in insignificance, like ries, and the truth meant little to me at Musa could hear his voice. He’d give a bit player, on a beach that is no longer that age. What was most important at Musa commands in his dreams, and Musa there, beside the waves that should have those moments was my almost sensual would relay them to us. My brother had made him famous forever. closeness with Mama, our silent recon- seen our father just once since he left, ciliation during the night to come. The and from such a distance that he wasn’t s a child, I was allowed to hear only next morning, everything was always even sure it was him. As a child, I learned A one story at night, only one decep- back in its place, my mother in one world how to distinguish the days with rumors tively wonderful tale. It was the story of and me in another. from the days without. When Musa heard Musa, my murdered brother, which took What can I tell you, Mr. Investigator, people talking about my father, he’d come a different form each time, according to about a crime committed in a book? I home all feverish gestures and burning my mother’s mood. In my memory, those don’t know what happened on that par- eyes, and then he and Mama would have nights are associated with rainy winters, ticular day, in that gruesome summer, be- long, whispered conversations that ended with the dim light of the oil lamp in our tween six o’clock in the morning and two in heated arguments. I was excluded from hovel, and with Mama’s murmuring voice. in the afternoon, the hour of Musa’s death. those, but I got the gist: for some obscure Such nights didn’t come often, only when And, in any case, after Musa was killed THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 67 looked at us—other women’s offspring— that made us giggle nervously. We were just a little collection of lice on the back of the huge geological animal that was the city, with its thousand alleys. So, on that particular day, nothing un- usual. Even Mama, who loved omens and was sensitive to spirits, failed to de- tect anything abnormal. A routine day, in short—women calling to one another, laundry hung out on the terraces, street venders. No one could have heard a gun- shot from so far away, a shot fired down- town, on the beach. Not even at the dev- il’s hour, two o’clock on a summer afternoon—the siesta hour. So, I repeat, nothing unusual. Later, of course, I thought about it and, little by little, I concluded that there had to be—among the thousand versions Mama offered, among her memory fragments and her still vivid intuitions—there had to be one version that was truer than the others. By telling me so many implausible tales and outright lies, Mama eventually aroused my suspicions and put my own intuitions in order. I reconstructed the whole thing. Musa’s frequent binges during that period, the scent floating in the air, his proud smile when he ran into his friends, their overserious, almost com- ical confabs, the way my brother had of playing with his knife and showing me his tattoos: Echedda fi Allah, “God is my support.” “March or die” on his right shoulder. “Be quiet” on his left forearm, “When is it ever the right time to ask for a divorce?” under a drawing of a broken heart. This was the only book that Musa wrote. •• Shorter than a last sigh, just three sen- tences inscribed on the oldest paper in the world, his own skin. I remember his nobody came around to question us. There ogy, not because he’d made the trip to tattoos the way most people remember was no serious investigation. I have a hard Mecca. El-Hadj was just his given name. their first picture book. Other details? time remembering what I myself did that He, too, was the silent type. His main oc- Oh, I don’t know, his overalls, his espa- day. In the morning, the usual neighbor- cupations seemed to be striking his mother drilles, his prophet’s beard, his big hands, hood characters were awake and on the and eying his neighbors with a perma- which tried to hold on to our father’s street. Down at one end, we had Tawi nent air of defiance. On the near corner ghost, and his history with a nameless, and his sons. Tawi was a heavyset fellow. of the adjacent alley, a Moroccan had a honorless woman. Dragged his bad left leg, had a nagging café called El-Blidi. His sons were liars Ah! The mystery woman! Provided cough, smoked a lot. And, early each and petty thieves, capable of stealing all that she existed at all. I know only her morning, it was his habit to step outside the fruit off every tree. They’d invented a first name; at least, I presume it was hers. and pee on a wall, as blithely as you please. game: they would throw matches into the My brother had spoken it in his sleep Everybody knew him, because his ritual sidewalk gutters, where the wastewater that night, the night before his death: was so unvarying that he served as a clock; ran, and then follow the course of those Zubida. A sign? Maybe. In any case, the the broken cadence of his footsteps and matches. They never tired of doing that. day Mama and I left the neighborhood his cough were the first signs that the I also remember an old woman, Taï bia, forever—Mama had decided to get away new day had arrived on our street. Far- big, fat, childless, and very temperamen- from Algiers and the sea—I’m sure I saw ther up on the right, there was El-Hadj, tal. There was something unsettling and a woman staring at us. A very intense “the pilgrim”—which he was by geneal- even a little voracious in the way she stare. She was wearing a short skirt and 68 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 tacky stockings, and she’d done her hair then, all of a sudden, I heard this long, My father left on a December 1st, and the way the movie stars did in those days: low moan, swelling until it became im- since then that date has been a reference although she was quite obviously a bru- mense, a huge mass of sound that de- point for measuring the temperature of nette, her hair was dyed blond. “Zubida stroyed our furniture and blew apart our the heart, so to speak. forever,” ha-ha! Perhaps my brother had walls and then the whole neighborhood You want the truth? I rarely go to see those words tattooed somewhere on his and left me all alone. I remember start- my mother nowadays. She lives in a house body as well—I don’t know for sure. But ing to cry for no reason, just because ev- under a sky where a dead man and a I am sure that it was her that day. eryone was looking at me. Mama had lemon tree loiter. She spends her days It was early in the morning. We were disappeared, and I was shoved outside, sweeping every corner of that house in setting out, Mama and I, leaving the house ejected by something more important Hadjout, formerly known as Marengo, for good, and there she was, holding a than me, absorbed into some kind of seventy kilometres from the capital. That little red purse, staring at us from some collective disaster. Strange, don’t you was where I spent the second half of my distance away. I can still see her lips and think? I told myself, confusedly, that childhood and part of my youth, before her huge eyes, which seemed to be ask- this probably had to do with my father, going to Algiers to learn a profession ing us for something. I’m almost certain that he was definitely dead this time, (government land administration) and that it was her. At the time, I wanted it which made me sob twice as hard. It then returning to Hadjout to practice it. to be her, and I decided that it was, be- was a long night; nobody slept. A con- We—my mother and I—had put as much cause that added something to the tale stant stream of people came to offer distance as possible between us and the of my brother’s demise somehow. I needed their condolences. The grownups spoke sound of breaking waves. Musa to have had an excuse, a reason. to me solemnly. When I couldn’t un- Let’s take up the chronology again. Without realizing it, I rejected the ab- derstand what they were telling me, I We left Algiers—on that famous day surdity of his death; I needed a story to contented myself with looking at their when I was sure I’d spotted Zubida— give him a shroud. Well, then. I pulled hard eyes, their shaking hands, and their and went to stay with an uncle and his Mama by her haik, so that she wouldn’t shabby shoes. By the time dawn came, family, who barely tolerated us. We lived see the woman. But she must have sensed I was very hungry, and I fell asleep I in a hovel before being kicked out by something, because she made a horrible don’t know where. No matter how much the very people who’d taken us in. Then face and spat out a prodigiously vulgar I dig around in my memory, I have no we lived in a little shed on the thresh- insult. I turned around, but the woman recollection at all of that day and the ing floor of a colonial farm, where we had disappeared. And then we left. next, except of the smell of couscous. both had jobs, Mama as a maid and I I remember the road to our new home, The days blurred into an interminable as an errand boy. The boss was this obese in the village of Hadjout, the fields whose single day, like a broad, deep valley I guy from Alsace who ended up smoth- crops weren’t destined for us, the naked meandered through. The last day of a ered in his own fat, I believe. People said sun, the other travellers on the dusty bus. man’s life doesn’t exist. Outside of sto- that he used to torture slackers by sit- The oil fumes nauseated me, but I loved rybooks, there’s no hope, nothing but ting on their chests. They also said that the virile, almost comforting roar of the soap bubbles bursting. That’s the best he had a protruding Adam’s apple be- engine, like a kind of father that was proof of our absurd existence, my dear cause the body of an Arab he’d swal- snatching us, my mother and me, out of friend: no one is granted a final day, only lowed was lodged in his throat. I still an enormous labyrinth of buildings, an accidental interruption of life. have memories from that period: an old downtrodden people, shantytowns, dirty priest who sometimes brought us food, urchins, aggressive cops, and beaches fatal hese days, my mother’s so old she the jute sack my mother made into a to Arabs. For the two of us, the city would Tlooks like her own mother, or maybe kind of smock for me, the semolina always be the scene of the crime, the her great-grandmother, or even her great- dishes we’d eat on special occasions. I place where something pure and ancient great-grandmother. Once we reach a cer- don’t want to tell you about our trou- was lost. Yes, Algiers, in my memory, is tain age, time gives us the features of all bles, because at that time they were a a dirty, corrupt creature, a dark, treach- our ancestors, combined in a soft jum- matter only of hunger, not of injustice. erous man-stealer. ble of reincarnations. And maybe that’s In the evening, we kids would play mar- what the next world is—an endless cor- bles, and if one of us didn’t show up the et’s see, let me try to remember ex- ridor where all your ancestors are lined following day that would mean that he L actly. . . . How did we first learn of up, one after another. They turn toward was dead—and we’d keep on playing. Musa’s death? I remember a kind of in- their living descendant and simply wait, It was a period of epidemics and fam- visible cloud hovering over our street, without words, without movement, their ines. Rural life was hard. It revealed what and angry grownups talking loudly and patient eyes fixed on a date. I don’t know the cities kept hidden—namely, that the gesticulating. At first, Mama told me my mother’s age, just as she has no idea country was starving to death. I was that a gaouri had killed one of our neigh- how old I am. Before Independence, peo- afraid, especially at night, of hearing the bor’s sons while he was trying to defend ple did without exact dates; the rhythms bleak sound of men’s footsteps, men an Arab woman and her honor. But, of life were marked by births, epidem- who knew that Mama had no protec- during the night, anxiety got inside our ics, food shortages, and so on. My grand- tor. Those were nights of waking and house, and I think Mama began to re- mother died of typhus, an episode that watchfulness, which I spent glued to her alize the truth. So did I, probably. And by itself served to establish a calendar. side. I was well and truly the uld el-assas, THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 69 the night watchman’s son and heir. work in other people’s houses, sell spices, talent for idle chatter, and her mourning Strangely, we gravitated around Ha- and do housework, without running the period evolved into a surprising comedy, djout and the vicinity for years before risk of being judged. Her femininity had a marvellous act she put on and refined we were able to settle down behind solid died and, with it, men’s suspicions. I saw until it became a masterpiece. Virtually walls. Who knows how much cunning little of her during that time. I’d spend widowed for the second time, she turned and patience it cost Mama to find us a entire days waiting for her while she her personal drama into a kind of busi- house, the one she still lives in today? I walked all over the city, conducting her ness that required all who came near her don’t. In any case, she figured out what investigation into Musa’s death, ques- to make an effort of compassion. She in- the right move was: she got herself hired tioning people who knew him, recog- vented a range of illnesses in order to as a housekeeper and waited, with me nized him, or had crossed his path for gather the whole tribe of female neigh- perched on her back, for Independence. the last time in the course of that year, bors around her whenever she had so The truth of the matter is that the house 1942. Some neighbor ladies kept me fed, much as a migraine headache. She often had belonged to a family of settlers who pointed a finger at me as if I were an or- left in a hurry, and we ended up taking phan, and she withdrew her affection it over during the first days of Indepen- from me very quickly, replacing it with dence. It’s a three-room house with wall- the narrowed eyes of suspicion and the papered walls, and in the courtyard a hard gaze of admonition. Oddly enough, dwarf lemon tree that stares at the sky. I was treated like the dead brother, and There are two little sheds beside the Musa like a survivor whose coffee was house, and a wooden doorframe. I re- prepared fresh at the end of the day, whose member the vine that provided shade and the other children in the neighbor- bed was made for him, and whose foot- along the walls, and the strident peep- hood showed me the respect you give to steps were listened for, even when he was ing of the birds. Before we moved into seriously ill or broken people. I found coming from very far away, from down- the main house, Mama and I resided in my status—as “the dead man’s brother”— town Algiers and the neighborhoods that an adjacent shack, which a neighbor uses almost agreeable; in fact, I didn’t begin were closed to us at the time. I was con- as a grocery store today. You know, I don’t to suffer from it until I was approaching demned to a secondary role because I like to remember that period. It’s as if I adulthood, when I learned to read and had nothing in particular to offer. I felt were forced to beg for pity. realized what an unjust fate had befallen guilty for being alive but also responsi- When I was fifteen, I found a job as my brother, who died in a book. ble for a life that wasn’t my own. I was a farm laborer. Work was rare, and the After his passing, the way my time the guardian, the assas, like my father, nearest farm was three kilometres from was structured changed. I lived my life watching over another body. the village. Do you know how I got the in absolute freedom for exactly forty days. I also remember that weird fu n er al: job? I’m going to confess: one day I got The funeral didn’t take place until then, crowds of people; discussions lasting well up before dawn and I let the air out of you see. The neighborhood imam must into the night; us children, attracted by another worker’s bicycle tires so that I have found the whole thing disturbing. the light bulbs and the many candles; could show up earlier than he did and For Musa’s body was never found, and and then an empty grave and a prayer take his place. Yes, indeed, that’s hunger missing persons rarely have funerals. . . . for the departed. After the religious wait- for you! I don’t want to play the victim, My mother looked for my brother ev- ing period of forty days, Musa had been but it took us years to cross the dozen erywhere—in the morgue, at the police declared dead—swept away by the sea— or so metres that separated our hovel station in Belcourt—and she knocked and therefore, absurdly, the service that from the settlers’ house, years of tiny, fet- on every door. To no avail. Musa had Islam prescribes for the drowned was tered steps, as if we were slogging through vanished; he was absolutely, perfectly, in- performed. Then everyone left, except mud or quicksand in a nightmare. I be- comprehensibly dead. There had been my mother and me. lieve more than ten years passed before two of them in that place of sand and It was morning. I was cold even under we finally got our hands on that house salt, him and his killer only. Of the mur- the blanket, shivering. Musa had been and declared it liberated: our property! derer we knew almost nothing. He was dead for weeks. I heard the outside Yes, yes, we acted like everybody else el-roumi, the foreigner, “the stranger.” sounds—a passing bicycle, old Tawi’s during the first days of freedom: we broke People in the neighborhood showed my coughing, the squeaking of chairs, the down the door, took the tableware and mother his picture in the newspaper, but raising of iron shutters. In my head, every the candlesticks. But where was I? It’s a for us he was just like all the other col- voice corresponded to a woman, a time long story, and I’m getting a bit lost. onists who’d grown fat on so many sto- of life, a concern, a mood, or even to the len harvests. There was nothing special kind of wash that was going to be hung fter Musa’s murder, while we were about him, except for the cigarette stuck out that day. There was a knock at our A still living in Algiers, my mother in the corner of his mouth; his features door. Some women had come to visit converted her anger into a long, spectac- were instantly forgotten, confused with Mama. I knew the script by heart: a si- ular period of mourning that won her those of his people. lence, followed by sobs, then hugs and the sympathy of the neighbor women My mother visited cemeteries, pes- kisses; still more tears; then one of and a kind of legitimacy that allowed her tered my brother’s former comrades. Her the women would lift the curtain that to go out on the street, mingle with men, efforts were in vain, but they revealed her divided the room, look at me, smile 70 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 distractedly, and grab the coffee jar or the idea of closing my eyes and falling I clues. One day, Mama finally got a frag- something else. The scene continued don’t know where without my name to ile lead she could follow: someone had until sometime around noon. Only in anchor me. Mama gave me her fears, and given her an address. Now Algiers seemed the afternoon, after the ritual of the scarf Musa his corpse. What could a teen-ager a frightening labyrinth whenever we ven- soaked in orange-flower water and do, trapped like that between death and tured outside our perimeter, but Mama wrapped around her head, after some in- his mother? walked without stopping, passing a cem- terminable moaning and a long, very I remember the rare days when I ac- etery and a covered market and some long silence, would Mama remember me companied my mother as she walked the cafés, through a jungle of stares and cries and take me in her arms. But I knew streets of Algiers in search of informa- and car horns, until she finally stopped that it was Musa she wanted to find there, tion about my vanished brother. She short and gazed at a house across the not me. And I let her do it. would set a brisk pace and I’d follow, my street from us. It was a fine day, and I eyes fixed on her haik so as not to lose was lagging behind her, panting, because s I said, Musa’s body was never her. And thus an amusing intimacy was she’d been walking very fast. All along A found. created, the source of a brief period of the way, I’d heard her muttering insults Consequently, my mother imposed tenderness between us. With her wid- and threats, praying to God and her an- on me a strict duty of reincarnation. For ow’s language and her calculated whim- cestors, or maybe to the ancestors of God instance, as soon as I had grown a little, pering, Mama collected clues and mixed himself, who knows. I resented her ex- she made me wear my dead brother’s genuine information with scraps from citement a little, without knowing ex- clothes—his undershirts, his dress shirts, the previous night’s dream. I can still see actly why. It was a two-story house, and his shoes—even though they were still her with one of Musa’s friends, clinging the windows were closed—nothing else too big for me, and that went on until I fearfully to his arm as we passed through to report. The roumis in the street were wore them out. I was forbidden to wan- French neighborhoods, where we were eying us with great distrust. der away from her, to walk by myself, to considered intruders. We remained there in silence for a sleep in unknown places, and, before we Yes, we made an odd couple, roam- long time. An hour, maybe two, and then left Algiers, to venture anywhere near ing the streets of the capital like that! Mama, without so much as a glance at the beach. The sea was off-limits. Mama Much later, after the story of Musa’s me, crossed the street and knocked res- taught me to fear its mildest suction— death had become a famous book and olutely on the door. An old Frenchwoman so effectively that even today, when I’m departed the country, leaving my mother opened it. The light behind Mama made walking along the shore, where the waves and me in oblivion—even though we it hard for the lady to see her, but she die, the sensation of the sand giving way were the ones who had suffered the loss put her hand over her brow like a visor under my feet feels like the beginning of the book’s sacrificial victim—I often and examined her visitor carefully, and of drowning. Deep down, Mama wanted went back in memory to the Belcourt I watched uneasiness, incomprehension, to believe that the water was the culprit, neighborhood and our investigations, re- and finally terror come over her face. She that the water had carried off her son’s membering how we’d scrutinize win- turned red, fear rose in her eyes, and she body. My body, therefore, became the dows and building façades, looking for seemed about to scream. Then I realized only visible trace of her dead son, which likely explained my physical cowardice— which I, of course, compensated for with a restless but, to be frank, ambitionless intelligence. I was sick a lot. And through- out every illness she’d watch over my body with an almost sinful attention, with a concern tainted by a vague un- dercurrent of incest. She’d reproach me for getting the smallest scratch, as if I had wounded Musa himself. And so I was deprived of the healthy joys of youth, the awakening of the senses, the clandestine eroticism of adolescence. I grew silent and ashamed. I avoided hammams and playing with others, and in the winter I wore djellabahs that hid me from people’s eyes. It took me years to become reconciled with my body, with myself. In fact, to this day I don’t know if I have. I’ve always had a stiffness in my bearing, owing to my guilt at being alive. Like a true night watchman’s son, I sleep very little, and badly—I panic at that Mama was reeling off the longest to our tragedy. Long after Independence, heavy white clouds. I started picking up string of curses she’d ever uttered. Agi- a new tenant opened the shutters and things that were lying on the sand: sea- tated, the lady at the door tried to push eliminated the last possibility of a mys- shells, glass shards, bottle caps, clumps of Mama away. I was afraid for Mama; I tery. This is all to tell you that no one we dark seaweed. The sea told us nothing, was afraid for us. All of a sudden, the met was ever able to say that he’d crossed and Mama remained motionless on the Frenchwoman collapsed unconscious on the murderer’s path or looked into his shore, like someone bending over a grave. her doorstep. People had stopped to eyes or understood his motives. Mama Finally, she stood up straight, looked at- watch. I could make out their shadows questioned a great many people, so many tentively right and left, and said, in a hoarse behind me—little groups had formed that I eventually felt ashamed for her, as voice, “God’s curse be upon you!” Then here and there—and then someone if she were begging for money and not she took me by the hand and led me away shouted the word “Police!” A woman clues. Her investigations served as a rit- from the sand, as she’d done so often be- cried out in Arabic, telling Mama to ual to lessen her pain, and her comings fore. I followed her. hurry, to get away fast. That was when and goings in the French part of the city One more memory: the visits to the Mama turned around and shouted, as if turned, however incongruously, into op- hereafter, on Fridays, at the summit of she were addressing all the roumis in the portunities for extended walks. Bab-el-Oued. I’m talking about the world, “The sea will swallow you all!” I recall the day when we finally arrived El-Kettar Cemetery, otherwise known Then she grabbed me, and we took off at the sea. The sky was gray, and a few as “the Perfumery,” because of the for- running, like a pair of maniacs. Once we metres away from me was our family’s mer jasmine distillery situated nearby. had got back home, she barricaded her- huge and mighty adversary, the thief of Every other Friday, we’d go to the cem- self behind a wall of silence. We went to Arabs, the killer of young men in over- etery to visit Musa’s empty grave. Mama bed without supper. Later, she would ex- alls. It was indeed the last witness on Ma- would whimper, which I found uncalled plain to the neighbors that she had found ma’s list. As soon as we got there, she pro- for and ridiculous, because there was noth- the house where the murderer grew up nounced Sidi Abderrahman’s name and ing in that hole. I remember the mint and had insulted his grandmother, maybe, then, several times, the name of God, or- that grew in the cemetery, the trees, the and then she’d add, “Or one of his rela- dered me to stay away from the water, sat winding aisles, Mama’s white haik against tives, or at least a roumia like him.” down, and massaged her aching ankles. I the too blue sky. Everybody in the neigh- The murderer had lived somewhere stood behind her, a child facing the im- borhood knew that the hole was empty, in a neighborhood not far from the sea. mensity of both the crime and the hori- knew that Mama filled it with her prayers There was a building with a vaguely sag- zon. What did I feel? Nothing except the and her inventions. That cemetery was ging upper story above a café, poorly pro- wind on my skin—it was autumn, the au- the place where I awakened to life. It was tected by a few trees, but its windows tumn after the murder. I tasted the salt. where I became aware that I had a right were always closed in those days, so I I saw the dense gray waves. That’s all. The to the fire of my presence in the world— think Mama had insulted an anonymous sea was like a wall with soft, moving edges. yes, I had a right to it!—despite the ab- old Frenchwoman with no connection Far off, up in the sky, there were some surdity of my condition, which consisted of pushing a corpse to the top of a hill be- fore it rolled back down, endlessly. Those days, the cemetery days, were the first days when I turned to pray not toward Mecca but toward the world. Nowadays, I’m working on better versions of those prayers. But back then I had discovered, in some obscure way, a form of sensual- ity. How can I explain it to you? The angle of the light, the vigorous blue of the sky, and the wind woke in me some- thing more disturbing than the simple satisfaction you feel after a need has been met. Remember, I wasn’t quite ten years old, and therefore still clinging to my mother’s breast. That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me. My mother never guessed that it was there that I definitively buried Musa one day, mutely shouting at him to leave me alone. Precisely there, in El-Kettar, an Arab cemetery. Today, it’s a dirty place, inhab- ited by fugitives and drunks. I’m told that “In this company, Simmons, we hold our hands steady marble is stolen from the tombs each and in the middle and shake our bodies.” every night. You want to go and see it? It’ll be a waste of time—you won’t find anyone there, and you especially won’t find a trace of that grave, which was dug like the prophet Yusuf ’s well. If the body’s not in it, you can’t prove anything. Mama wasn’t entitled to anything. Not to apol- ogies before Independence, not to a pen- sion afterward.

fter Musa died, my mother turned A fierce, in a way. Try to imagine the woman: snatched away from her tribe, given in marriage to a husband who didn’t know her and who hastened to get away from her, the mother of two sons, one dead and one a child too silent to give her the proper cues, a woman who lost two men and was forced to work for roumis in order to survive. She developed a taste for her martyrdom. Did I love her? Of course. For us, a mother is half the world. But I’ve never forgiven her for the way she treated me. She resented me for a death she felt I had somehow refused to undergo, and so she punished me. I don’t know—I had a lot of resis- tance in me, and she could sense that, in a confused sort of way. Mama knew the art of making ghosts live and, conversely, was very good at an- “The Ugly Duckling didn’t know why he was so attracted to swan culture.” nihilating those close to her, drowning them in the monstrous torrents of her •• made-up tales. She can’t read, but I prom- ise you, my friend, she would have told you the story of our family and my brother ous mourners, and cried out against the tify the hours I’d wasted not sharpening better than I can. She lied not out of a double outrage that had consumed her the knife of our family’s vengeance. In desire to deceive but in order to correct life: a husband swallowed up by air, a the neighborhood, our shack was con- reality and to mitigate the absurdity that son by water. I had to learn a different sidered a sinister place. The other chil- had struck her world and mine. Musa’s language. To survive. After my presumed dren referred to me as “the widow’s son.” passing destroyed her, but, paradoxically, fifteenth birthday, when we withdrew People were afraid of Mama, but they it also introduced her to the morbid plea- to Hadjout, I became a stern and seri- also suspected her of having committed sure of a never-ending mourning. For a ous scholar. Books gradually enabled me a crime, a bizarre crime—otherwise, why long time, not a year passed without my to name things, to organize the world leave the city to come here and wash mother swearing that she’d found Mu- with my own words. dishes for the roumis? We must have pre- sa’s body, heard his breathing or his foot- In Hadjout, I also discovered trees sented a peculiar spectacle when we ar- steps, recognized the imprint of his shoes. and a sky that I could almost reach. Even- rived in Hadjout: a mother hiding her And, for a long time, this made me feel tually I was admitted to a school where carefully folded newspaper clippings in impossibly ashamed of her—and, later, there were a few other little natives like her bosom, a teen-ager with his eyes on it pushed me to learn a language that me. That helped to distract me from his bare feet, and some raggedy baggage. could serve as a barrier between her fren- Mama and her disturbing way of watch- Right around that time, the murderer zies and me. Yes, the language. The one ing me eat and grow, as if she were fat- was climbing the last steps of his fame. I read, the one I speak today, the one tening me up for a sacrifice. Those were It was the nineteen-fifties; the French- that’s not hers. Hers is rich, full of im- strange years. I felt alive when I was on women wore short, flowered dresses, and agery, vitality, sudden jolts, and impro- the street, in school, or at the farms where the sun bit at their breasts. ♦ visations, but not too big on precision. I worked, but going home meant step- (Translated, from the French, by John Cullen.) Mama’s grief lasted so long that she ping into a grave or, at least, falling ill. needed a new idiom in which to ex- Mama and Musa were both waiting for press it. In her language, she spoke like me, each in a different way, and I was al- newyorker.com a prophetess, recruited extemporane- most obliged to explain myself, to jus- Kamel Daoud on “Musa.” THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 73 chored by a stately organ line, and enriched THE CRITICS by the warm harmony of Crutchfield’s voice, overdubbed: You take what you want, you call me back I’m not trying to be yours You indulge me, I indulge you But I’m not trying to have it all To have it all. The steadiness of that voice makes her sound fearless, and underscores a subtly defiant sensibility that separates POP MUSIC her from any number of quietly confes- sional singer-songwriters. Like many of her songs, this one seems to be about FIRST-PERSON SINGULAR an uneasy relationship, but it also hints at a broader, more political form of Waxahatchee’s unadulterated songs. dissatisfaction. When Crutchfield talks about other BY KELEFA SANNEH musicians, she can still sound like an eager young fan. She once tweeted, “i lmost exactly a year ago, Katie weeklong burst of solitary writing and am constantly going to bat for fiona A Crutchfield sent a message to her recording. The follow-up, “Cerulean Salt,” apple like she’s my best friend.” Then, Twitter followers: “wrote a 4 minute came out the next year. In putting the less than a minute later: “maybe she IS long song for the first time in my life.” album on its “Best New Music” list, the my best friend.” She has tattoos on her She was twenty-five years old, and al- music Web site Pitchfork called it “blaz- arms inspired by two bands that inspired though her tweet could have been mis- ingly honest,” not because Crutchfield’s her, Rilo Kiley and Hop Along. When taken for the triumphant cry of a nov- songs necessarily reflect her life—how she was fourteen, Crutchfield sounded ice songwriter, Crutchfield was not in could we know for sure?—but because older than she was, but the passage of any sense a beginner. Since she was four- she sings them as if they did, and be- time has made it easier to perceive her teen, she has released dozens of albums, cause she writes the kind of lyrics that youthful spirit. Mish Way, the leader of singles, cassettes, and digital downloads, can make listeners feel like eavesdrop- a barbed indie band called White Lung, working alone or with bandmates, a cat- pers. Crutchfield began to accumulate wrote that “Cerulean Salt” was “the rec- egory that has often included her twin the trappings of indie celebrity—a Twit- ord my sixteen-year-old self would have sister, Allison. What began as an extra- ter endorsement from Lena Dunham aspired to write.” This appeared to be a curricular activity has become a career, (“@k_crutchfield You make me feel like backhanded compliment, until the next as more people have discovered the a natural woman”), an appearance at sentence arrived: “It’s the record I would sneaky power of Crutchfield’s short Coachella—alongside some less expected write now if I weren’t so afraid.” Crutch- songs, which aren’t nearly as sketchy as ones. In an episode from Season 4 of field’s favorite singers share a willing- they first seem. A typical composition “The Walking Dead,” Beth Greene, a ness to deliver the kind of impassioned, requires only a couple of minutes, not thoughtful teen-ager, sat down at a piano seemingly confessional lyrics that some many more chords, and a fistful of acute and began singing to herself, murmur- teen-agers adore and some grownups— lyrics delivered in the first person, pres- ing about youthful excess: “We’ll buy unwisely—disdain. Along the way, ent tense. Often, Crutchfield seems to beer to shotgun / And we’ll lay in the Crutchfield has become a favorite singer, be reliving a decisive moment between lawn / And we’ll be good.” One of too, and undoubtedly the object of more indecisive people: I do this, you do that, Crutchfield’s most finely wrought songs than a few imaginary friendships. This we do something else. Her voice is achy had been reborn as a plot point in a tele- year, as she goes on tour to play her new but unembellished, except for the lung- vision show about zombies. songs, she shouldn’t be surprised if she fuls of air that escape along with the The new Waxahatchee album, “Ivy is approached by shy young fans who words: when you hear her sing, you are Tripp,” marks another step in Crutch- proffer arms or legs so that Crutchfield also hearing her breathe. field’s ascendance: it was released by can see her own face looking back, drawn For the past few years, Crutchfield’s Merge Records, which puts her on the in permanent ink. main concern has been Waxahatchee, a same label—although not in the same band that is also, more or less, a solo proj- league—as Arcade Fire. It opens with rutchfield grew up in Birmingham, ect: she writes all the songs, makes all “Breathless,” the song that Crutchfield C Alabama, which had a do-it-your- the consequential decisions, and man- described in that exuberant tweet. (It is self music scene centered on an all-ages ages the fluctuating lineup. The first full- not actually her first song longer than performance space called Cave9. She length Waxahatchee album, “American four minutes, as one of her fans reminded was inspired by the punk ethos of that Weekend,” appeared in 2012, the quiet her in response.) “Breathless” lasts for community, even though the forms it and unnervingly intense product of a four minutes and forty-six seconds, an- took were sometimes off-putting. In an FRANÇOIS AVRIL ABOVE: 74 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015

Katie Crutchfield, of Waxahatchee, is the most celebrated musician in a burgeoning Philadelphia scene. PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREAS LASZLO KONRATH THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 75 essay that she later wrote for a fanzine, once seemed irreverent can now seem radical band in this cohort. Girlpool’s Crutchfield remembered a scene full highly reverent: part of what listeners music can be playful or confrontational, of “gym-shorts-wearing, ex-girlfriend- loved about those early Waxahatchee re- and the lyrics occasionally swing from cursing, sexist” bands, and imagined cordings was the way they evoked a cer- personal narrative to political protest. warning her younger self not to trust tain strain of emotionally direct indie rock, (“I don’t really care about the clothes I every guy who claimed to like her music. thereby refreshing it. wear / I don’t really care to brush my At fifteen, she was the lead singer of the hair / I go to work every day / Just to be Ackleys, a proficient and precocious al- hen P.S. Eliot first started at- slut-shamed one day.”) Finally, there is ternative-rock band whose brisk, tune- Wtracting attention, the Crutch- Allison Crutchfield, who has her own ful songs sometimes seemed to be at war fields’ youth seemed less surprising than band, Swearin’, which is faster and fuzz- with her knotty lyrics. The Ackleys re- their geographical location, in a region ier than Waxahatchee, and scarcely less leased an album and an EP, and found that has never counted indie rock among appealing—it would be odd to love one a place on the 2006 Warped tour. A its chief exports. The sisters left Ala- without at least liking the other. Katie short documentary on the band captures bama in 2011, settling first in Brook- Crutchfield’s next project is her sister’s her sister Allison, who played keyboards, lyn—by then well established as the solo début, which she has agreed to wistfully voicing a hope common to Nashville of indie—and then, the next produce. members of high-school bands: “I see it year, in Philadelphia, because it was Fans who have been following these going forever.” When it didn’t, the cheaper and smaller, with a do-it-your- developments, and who have also no- Crutchfields formed P.S. Eliot, which self scene that resembled a more inclu- ticed the changing emotional tempera- was a bit more ramshackle and a lot bet- sive version of the one they had left be- ture of the Waxahatchee albums, might ter, as they discovered all the rock-and- hind in Birmingham. Katie Crutchfield wonder whether the two phenomena roll commandments—including the spent much of 2014 living on Long Is- are related. Modern listeners have been imperative to sound “tight”—that they land, near Ronkonkoma, where most of taught never to conflate a singer with could happily ignore. “Ivy Tripp” was recorded. She is back her protagonists, but Crutchfield can P.S. Eliot played its last show in 2011, now in Philadelphia, which has become make it difficult to obey this injunction. and with her next project, Waxahatchee, the musical home that she never really “American Weekend” chronicled addic- Katie Crutchfield eliminated nearly ev- had. Waxahatchee remains essentially a tion and despair, and contained at least erything from her music except herself. solo project, but it is no longer a soli- one song—“Rose, 1956,” about an ail- The first Waxahatchee release was a tary one—in Philadelphia, Crutchfield ing and aging loved one who is taking cassette collaboration with Chris Clavin, is only the most celebrated member of “short and urgent” breaths—so fraught a folk-punk firebrand from Indiana. On a cozy musical community, home to a that she had to remove it from her set one side of the cassette, Clavin warbled number of startlingly good bands that list. And the words on “Cerulean Salt” a militant ode to John Hinckley, Jr., an- share her commitment to acute song- suggested a bleak and bleary landscape nouncing, not necessarily in jest, that writing and unpretentious playing. (one verse mentioned “silver spoons over “there ain’t nothing wrong with trying Last year, when Waxahatchee came fire”), transformed by the flickering pos- to kill the President.” On the other side, to play a show at the Mercury Lounge, sibility of love. Crutchfield’s voice can Crutchfield sang words so forthright, on the Lower East Side, Crutchfield make anything sound sad, but the new through a microphone so crude, that brought along an invigorating Philadel- album slowly reveals itself to be haunted she could have been talking on the tele- phia pop-punk band called Cayetana, by an unlikely spectre: contentment. “I phone: “You spell it out, how I mis- led by the singer and guitarist Augusta know I feel more than you do,” Crutchfield treated you / And I’m silent—you know Koch, who delivers the lyrics in an ad- sings, in a tidy song called “La Loose,” I treat myself badly, too.” dictive yelp. The bands first played to- which is powered by a rudimentary In the nineteen-nineties, when singer- gether when Crutchfield invited Cay- rhythm from a drum machine. “I selfishly songwriters like Robert Pollard, of etana to take part in the “Cerulean Salt” want you here to stick to.” This is Guided by Voices, and Liz Phair exper- record-release concert, and Koch de- Crutchfield’s version of a pop record, imented with homemade recordings, or scribes her as a kind of mentor. (“To though perhaps you would have to know with songs that ended before the second have a female that we really respect that her earlier work to know that. Through- chorus, they were marking their distance didn’t know us have faith in us was re- out the album, her voice is the only one from the musical mainstream. At the ally important,” she once said.) Another you hear, often singing along with her- time, many indie bands were trying to Philadelphia band, Radiator Hospital, self, as if filling in for her absent twin. reckon with the potentially destructive is led by Crutchfield’s former room- But she sounds less lonely than she ever power of the major-label music industry. mate; both sisters contributed backing has, no matter how sparse the songs re- One way to disengage was to record songs vocals to “Torch Song,” an upbeat but main. One of the sparsest, “Summer of that were accessible, even hummable, bittersweet album that Rolling Stone Love,” was recorded outside, with a sin- without being at all marketable. But time called “superb.” gle microphone, and it is bookended by and critical acclaim have combined to Crutchfield’s current roommate is an unexpected sound: the barking of a create an indie-rock canon—it is no lon- Cleo Tucker, an eighteen-year-old Los dog, which evidently had the good sense ger a contradiction in terms to talk about Angeles native who plays in a drum- to keep quiet—as most audiences do— classic indie rock. And so gestures that merless duo called Girlpool, the most while Crutchfield was singing.  76 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 by Allied forces after the liberation BOOKS of other German camps. There have been many atrocities committed be- fore and since, yet to this day, thanks THE SYSTEM to those images, the Nazi concentra- tion camp stands as the ultimate sym- Two new histories show how the Nazi concentration camps worked. bol of evil. The very names of the camps—Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Bu- BY ADAM KIRSCH chenwald, Auschwitz—have the sound of a malevolent incantation. They have ceased to be ordinary place names— Buchenwald, after all, means simply “beech wood”—and become portals to a terrible other dimension. To write the history of such an in- stitution, as Nikolaus Wachsmann sets out to do in another new book, “KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), might seem impossible, like writing the his- tory of Hell. And, certainly, both his book and Helm’s are full of the kind of details that ordinarily appear only in Dantesque visions. Helm devotes a chap- ter to Ravensbrück’s Kinderzimmer, or “children’s room,” where inmates who came to the camp pregnant were forced to abandon their babies; the newborns were left to die of starvation or be eaten alive by rats. Wachsmann quotes a pris- oner at Dachau who saw a transport of men afflicted by dysentery arrive at the camp: “We saw dozens . . . with excre- ment running out of their trousers. Their hands, too, were full of excrement and they screamed and rubbed their dirty hands across their faces.” These sights, like the truck full of bodies, are not beyond belief—we know that they were true—but they are, in ne night in the autumn of 1944, in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for some sense, beyond imagination. It is O two Frenchwomen—Loulou Le Women” (Doubleday), recounts the very hard, maybe impossible, to imag- Porz, a doctor, and Violette Lecoq, a stories of dozens of the camp’s inmates, ine being one of those men, still less one nurse—watched as a truck drove in Le Porz says that her reaction was sim- of those infants. And such sights raise through the main gates of Ravensbrück, ple disbelief. The sight of a truck full of the question of why, exactly, we read the Nazi concentration camp for women. dead bodies was so outrageous, so out about the camps. If it is merely to revel “There was a lorry,” Le Porz recalled, of scale with ordinary experience, that in the grotesque, then learning about “that suddenly arrives and it turns around “if we recount that one day, we said to this evil is itself a species of evil, a fur- and reverses towards us. And it lifts up each other, nobody would believe us.” ther exploitation of the dead. If it is to and it tips out a whole pile of corpses.” The only way to make the scene cred- exercise sympathy or pay a debt to mem- These were the bodies of Ravensbrück ible would be to record it: “If one day ory, then it quickly becomes clear that inmates who had died doing slave labor someone makes a film they must film the exercise is hopeless, the debt over- in the many satellite camps, and they this scene. This night. This moment.” whelming: there is no way to feel as were now being returned for cremation. Le Porz’s remark was prophetic. much, remember as much, imagine as Talking, decades later, to the historian The true extent of Nazi barbarity be- much as the dead justly demand. What and journalist Sarah Helm, whose new came known to the world in part remains as a justification is the future: book, “Ravensbrück: Life and Death through the documentary films made the determination never again to allow something like the Nazi camps to exist. AKG-IMAGES Prisoners break up clay for the brickworks at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg, in 1939. And for that purpose it is necessary THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 77 not to think of the camps simply as a its twelve years of existence, included killing of prisoners was referred to as hellscape. Reading Wachsmann’s deeply twenty-seven main camps and more Sonderbehandlung, “special treatment.”) researched, groundbreaking history of than a thousand subcamps. At its peak, During the next two months, some the entire camp system makes clear that in early 1945, it housed more than seven fifty thousand people were arrested on Dachau and Buchenwald were the prod- hundred thousand inmates. In addi- this basis, in what turned into a “frenzy” ucts of institutional and ideological tion to being a major penal and eco- of political purges and score-settling. In forces that we can understand, perhaps nomic institution, it was a central sym- the legal murk of the early Nazi regime, all too well. Indeed, it’s possible to think bol of Hitler’s rule. Yet Hitler plays it was unclear who had the power to of the camps as what happens when you almost no role in Wachsmann’s book, make such arrests, and so it was claimed cross three disciplinary institutions that and Wachsmann writes that Hitler was by everyone: national, state, and local all societies possess—the prison, the never seen to visit a camp. It was Hein- officials, police and civilians, Party lead- army, and the factory. Over the several rich Himmler, the head of the S.S., ers. “Everybody is arresting everybody,” phases of their existence, the Nazi camps who was in charge of the camp system, a Nazi official complained in the sum- took on the aspects of all of these, so and its growth was due in part to his mer of 1933. “Everybody threatens ev- that prisoners were treated simultane- ambition to make the S.S. the most erybody with Dachau.” As this suggests, ously as inmates to be corrected, ene- powerful force in Germany. it was already clear that the most noto- mies to be combatted, and workers to Long before the Nazis took power, rious and frightening destination for be exploited. When these forms of de- concentration camps had featured in political detainees was the concentra- humanization were combined, and am- their imagination. Wachsmann finds tion camp built by Himmler at Dachau, plified to the maximum by ideology Hitler threatening to put Jews in camps in Bavaria. The prisoners were origi- and war, the result was the Konzentra- as early as 1921. But there were no de- nally housed in an old munitions fac- tionlager, or K.L. tailed plans for building such camps tory, but soon Himmler constructed a when Hitler was named Chancellor of “model camp,” the architecture and or- hough we tend to think of Hit- Germany, in January, 1933. A few weeks ganization of which provided the pat- Tler’s Germany as a highly regi- later, on February 27th, he seized on the tern for most of the later K.L. The camp mented dictatorship, in practice Nazi burning of the Reichstag—by Commu- was guarded not by police but by mem- rule was chaotic and improvisatory. nists, he alleged—to launch a full-scale bers of the S.S.—a Nazi Party entity Rival power bases in the Party and the crackdown on his political opponents. rather than a state force. German state competed to carry out The next day, he implemented a decree, These guards were the core of what what they believed to be Hitler’s wishes. “For the Protection of People and State,” became, a few years later, the much feared This system of “working towards the that authorized the government to place Death’s-Head S.S. The name, along with Fuhrer,” as it was called by Hitler’s bi- just about anyone in “protective cus- the skull-and-crossbones insignia, was ographer Ian Kershaw, was clearly in tody,” a euphemism for indefinite de- meant to reinforce the idea that the men evidence when it came to the concen- tention. (Euphemism, too, was to be a who bore it were not mere prison guards tration camps. The K.L. system, during durable feature of the K.L. universe: the but front-line soldiers in the Nazi war against enemies of the people. Himmler declared, “No other service is more dev- astating and strenuous for the troops than just that of guarding villains and criminals.” The ideology of combat had been part of the DNA of Nazism from its origin, as a movement of First World War veterans, through the years of street battles against Communists, which es- tablished the Party’s reputation for vi- olence. Now, in the years before actual war came, the K.L. was imagined as the site of virtual combat—against Com- munists, criminals, dissidents, homo- sexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews, all forces working to undermine the German nation. The metaphor of war encouraged the inhumanity of the S.S. officers, which they called toughness; licensed physical violence against prisoners; and accounted for the military discipline that made “And, as you drive, it will also use all the negative everyday life in the K.L. unbearable. energy from your arguments.” Particularly hated was the roll call, or Appell, which forced inmates to wake seem to foretell the Nazi regime. dissent or illicit sexual relations with an before dawn and stand outside, in all Even the distinction between guard Aryan. Once there, however, they found weather, to be counted and recounted. and prisoner could become blurred. From themselves subject to special torments, The process could go on for hours, early on, the S.S. delegated much of the ranging from running a gantlet of trun- Wachsmann writes, during which the day-to-day control of camp life to cho- cheons to heavy labor, like rock-break- S.S. guards were constantly on the move, sen prisoners known as Kapos. This sys- ing. As the chief enemies in the Nazi punishing “infractions such as poor pos- tem spared the S.S. the need to inter- imagination, Jews were also the natural ture and dirty shoes.” act too closely with prisoners, whom targets for spontaneous S.S. violence— The K.L. was defined from the be- they regarded as bearers of filth and dis- blows, kicks, attacks by savage dogs. ginning by its legal ambiguity. The ease, and also helped to divide the in- The systematic extermination of camps were outside ordinary law, an- mate population against Jews, however, took place swerable not to judges and courts but itself. Helm shows that, largely outside the con- to the S.S. and Himmler. At the same in Ravensbrück, where centration camps. The time, they were governed by an exten- the term “Blockova” was death camps, in which sive set of regulations, which covered used, rather than Kapo, more than one and a everything from their layout (includ- power struggles took half million Jews were ing decorative flower beds) to the whip- place among prisoner gassed—at Belzec, So- ping of prisoners, which in theory had factions over who would bibór, and Treblinka— to be approved on a case-by-case basis occupy the Blockova po- were never officially part by Himmler personally. Yet these reg- sition in each barrack. of the K.L. system. They ulations were often ignored by the camp Political prisoners fa- had almost no inmates, S.S.—physical violence, for instance, vored fellow-activists over criminals and since the Jews sent there seldom lived was endemic, and the idea that a guard “asocials”—a category that included the longer than a few hours. By contrast, would have to ask permission before homeless, the mentally ill, and prosti- Auschwitz, whose name has become beating or even killing a prisoner was tutes—whom they regarded as practi- practically a synonym for the Holocaust, laughable. Strangely, however, it was cally subhuman. In some cases, Kapos was an official K.L., set up in June, 1940, possible, in the prewar years, at least, became almost as privileged, as violent, to house Polish prisoners. The first peo- for a guard to be prosecuted for such and as hated as the S.S. officers. In Ra- ple to be gassed there, in September, 1941, a killing. In 1937, Paul Zeidler was vensbrück, the most feared Blockova were invalids and Soviet prisoners of among a group of guards who stran- was the Swiss ex-spy Carmen Mory, war. It became the central site for the gled a prisoner who had been a prom- who was known as the Black Angel. deportation and murder of European inent churchman and judge; when the She was in charge of the infirmary, where, Jews in 1943, after other camps closed. case attracted publicity, the S.S. allowed Helm writes, she “would lash out at the The vast majority of Jews brought to Zeidler to be charged and convicted. sick with the whip or her fists.” After Auschwitz never experienced the camp (He was sentenced to a year in jail.) the war, she was one of the defendants as prisoners; more than eight hundred In “Ravensbrück,” Helm gives a fur- tried for crimes at Ravensbrück, along thousand of them were gassed upon ar- ther example of the erratic way the Nazis with S.S. leaders and doctors. Mory was rival, in the vast extension of the orig- treated their own regulations, even late sentenced to death but managed to com- inal camp known as Birkenau. Only in the war. In 1943, Himmler agreed mit suicide first. those picked as capable of slave labor to allow the Red Cross to deliver food lived long enough to see Auschwitz from parcels to some prisoners in the camps. t the bottom of the K.L. hierarchy, the inside. To send a parcel, however, the Red Cross A even below the criminals, were the Many of the horrors associated with had to mark it with the name, number, Jews. Today, the words “concentration Auschwitz—gas chambers, medical ex- and camp location of the recipient; re- camp” immediately summon up the idea periments, working prisoners to death— quests for these details were always re- of the Holocaust, the genocide of Eu- had been pioneered in earlier concen- fused, so that there was no way to get ropean Jews by the Nazis; and we tend tration camps. In the late thirties, driven desperately needed supplies into the to think of the camps as the primary largely by Himmler’s ambition to make camps. Yet when Wanda Hjort, a young sites of that genocide. In fact, as Wachs- the S.S. an independent economic and Norwegian woman living in Germany, mann writes, as late as 1942 “Jews made military power within the state, the K.L. got hold of some prisoners’ names and up fewer than five thousand of the eighty began a transformation from a site of numbers—thanks to inmates who smug - thousand KL inmates.” There had been punishment to a site of production. The gled the information to her when she a temporary spike in the Jewish inmate two missions were connected: the “work- visited the camp at Sachsenhausen— population in November, 1938, after shy” and other unproductive elements she was able to pass them on to the Kristallnacht, when the Nazis rounded were seen as “useless mouths,” and forced Norwegian Red Cross, whose packages up tens of thousands of Jewish men. labor was a way of making them con- were duly delivered. This game of hide- But, for most of the camps’ first decade, tribute to the community. Oswald Pohl, and-seek with the rules, this combina- Jewish prisoners had usually been sent the S.S. bureaucrat in charge of eco- tion of hyper-regimentation and anar- there not for their religion, per se, but nomic affairs, had gained control of the chy, is what makes Kafka’s “The Trial” for specific offenses, such as political camps by 1938, and began a series of THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 79 grandiose building projects. The most Sachsenhausen, a young French pris- obsolete, as the scale of death in the ambitious was the construction of a oner was battered to death in 1941 by camps increased. Now the killing of brick factory near Sachsenhausen, which an SS block leader for taking two car- weak and sick prisoners was carried out was intended to produce a hundred and rots from a sheep pen.” Starvation was by guards or camp doctors, sometimes fifty million bricks a year, using cut- endemic and rendered prisoners easy in gas chambers built on site. Those ting-edge equipment and camp labor. prey for typhus and dysentery. At the who were still able to work were in- The failure of the factory, as Wachs- same time, the need to keep control of creasingly auctioned off to private in- mann describes it, was indicative of the so many prisoners made the S.S. even dustry for use as slave labor, in the many incompetence of the S.S. and the in- more brutal, and sadistic new punish- subcamps that began to spring up consistency of its vision for the camps. ments were invented. The “standing com- around the main K.L. At Ravensbrück, To turn prisoners into effective labor- mando” forced prisoners to stand abso- the Siemens corporation established a ers would have required giving them lutely still for eight hours at a time; any factory where six hundred women adequate food and rest, not to mention movement or noise was punished by worked twelve-hour shifts building training and equipment. It would have beatings. The murder of prisoners by electrical components. The work was meant treating them like employees guards, formerly an exceptional event in brutally demanding, especially for rather than like enemies. But the ideo- the camps, now became unremarkable. women who were sick, starved, and ex- logical momentum of the camps made But individual deaths, by sickness or hausted. Helm writes that “Siemens this inconceivable. Labor was seen as a violence, were not enough to keep the women suffered severely from boils, punishment and a weapon, which meant number of prisoners within manage- swollen legs, diarrhea and TB,” and also that it had to be extorted under the able limits. Accordingly, in early 1941 from an epidemic of nervous twitch- worst possible circumstances. Prisoners Himmler decided to begin the mass ing. When a worker reached the end were made to build the factory in the murder of prisoners in gas chambers, of her usefulness, she was sent back to depths of winter, with no coats or gloves, building on a program that the Nazis the camp, most likely to be killed. It and no tools. “Inmates carried piles of had developed earlier for euthanizing was in this phase of the camp’s life that sand in their uniforms,” Wachsmann the disabled. Here, again, the camps’ sights like the one Loulou Le Porz saw writes, while others “moved large mounds sinister combination of bureaucratic ra- at Ravensbrück—a truck full of pris- of earth on rickety wooden stretchers tionalism and anarchic violence was on oners’ corpses—became commonplace. or shifted sacks of cement on their shoul- display. During the following months, By the end of the war, the number ders.” Four hundred and twenty-nine teams of S.S. doctors visited the major of people who had died in the concen- prisoners died and countless more were camps in turn, inspecting prisoners in tration camps, from all causes—starva- injured, yet in the end not a single brick order to select the “infirm” for gassing. tion, sickness, exhaustion, beating, shoot- was produced. Everything was done with an appear- ing, gassing—was more than eight This debacle did not discourage ance of medical rigor. The doctors filled hundred thousand. The figure does not Himmler and Pohl. On the contrary, out a form for each inmate, with head- include the hundreds of thousands of with the coming of war, in 1939, S.S. ings for “Diagnosis” and “Incurable Jews gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. If ambitions for the camps grew rapidly, Physical Ailments.” But it was all mere the K.L. were indeed a battlefront, as along with their prisoner population. theatre. Helm’s description of the visit the Death’s-Head S.S. liked to believe, On the eve of the war, the entire K.L. of Dr. Friedrich Mennecke to Ravens- the deaths, in the course of twelve years, system contained only about twenty-one brück, in November, 1941, shows that roughly equalled the casualties sustained thousand prisoners; three years later, the inspections of prisoners—whom he re- by the Axis during the Battle of Stal- number had grown to a hundred and ferred to in letters home as “forms” or ingrad, among the deadliest actual en- ten thousand, and by January, 1945, it “portions”—were cursory at best, with gagements of the war. But in the camps was more than seven hundred thousand. the victims parading naked in front of the Nazis fought against helpless ene- New camps were built to accommodate the doctors at a distance of twenty feet. mies. Considered as prisons, too, the the influx of prisoners from conquered ( Jewish prisoners were automatically K.L. were paradoxical: it was impossi- countries and then the tens of thou- “selected,” without an examination.) In ble to correct or rehabilitate people sands of Red Army soldiers taken pris- one letter, Mennecke brags of hav- whose very nature, according to Nazi oner in the first months after Opera- ing disposed of fifty-six “forms” before propaganda, was criminal or sick. And tion Barbarossa, the German invasion noon. Those selected were taken to an as economic institutions they were ut- of the U.S.S.R. undisclosed location for gassing; their terly counterproductive, wasting huge The enormous expansion of the fate became clear to the remaining Ra- numbers of lives even as the need for camps resulted in an exponential in- vensbrück prisoners when the dead workers in Germany became more and crease in the misery of the prisoners. women’s clothes and personal effects more acute. Food rations, always meagre, were cut arrived back at the camp by truck. to less than minimal: a bowl of rutabaga Under this extermination program, he concentration camps make soup and some ersatz bread would have known to S.S. bureaucrats by the code Tsense only if they are understood to sustain a prisoner doing heavy labor. Action 14f13, some sixty-five hundred as products not of reason but of ideol- The result was desperate black market- prisoners were killed in the course of ogy, which is to say, of fantasy. Nazism ing and theft. Wachsmann writes, “In a year. By early 1942, it had become taught the Germans to see themselves 80 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 as a beleaguered nation, constantly set upon by enemies external and inter- nal. Metaphors of infection and dis- BRIEFLY NOTED ease, of betrayal and stabs in the back, were central to Nazi discourse. ROOSEVELT AND STALIN, by Susan Butler (Knopf ). This painstak- The concentration camp became the ing examination of Roosevelt and Stalin’s complicated relation- place where those metaphorical evils ship centers on two face-to-face meetings—in Tehran in 1943 could be rendered concrete and vis- and in Yalta in 1945—as they argued over wartime strategy ible. Here, behind barbed wire, were and postwar planning. Butler relays entertaining details (when the traitors, Bolsheviks, parasites, and Stalin doodled, he drew Siberian wolves), and emphasizes Roo- Jews who were intent on destroying sevelt’s unwavering resolve to keep Stalin “inside the tent,” in the Fatherland. order to establish the United Nations. Particularly compelling is And if existence was a struggle, a war, her account of F.D.R.’s death. Averell Harriman, the Ambas- then it made no sense to show mercy sador to the Soviet Union, said that although Stalin “was never to the enemy. Like many Nazi institu- known for any display of emotion,” he was “deeply shaken and tions, the K.L. embodied conflicting more disturbed than I had ever seen him.” Mourning flags impulses: to reform the criminal, to ex- were displayed at all government agencies in Moscow. tort labor from the unproductive, to quarantine the contagious. But most EMPIRE OF COTTON, by Sven Beckert (Knopf ). Cotton produc- fundamental was the impulse to dehu- tion provides a lens through which to view the history of cap- manize the enemy, which ended up con- italism in this exhaustively researched book. The crop emerged founding and overriding all the others. more than five thousand years ago, in the Indus Valley, and Once a prisoner ceased to be human, medieval Europeans knew of it only from travellers’ accounts he could be brutalized, enslaved, exper- (it was sometimes called “vegetable lamb”). The rise of colo- imented on, or gassed at will, because nialism, followed by the Industrial Revolution, made it “the he was no longer a being with a soul or first globally integrated manufacturing industry.” Now cotton a self but a biological machine. The is everywhere—in banknotes, coffee filters, and even gunpow- Muselmänner, the living dead of the der. Beckert cogently charts this transformation and connects camps, stripped of any capacity to think seemingly disparate events to his theme. He argues persua- or feel, were the true product of the sively that cotton’s profitability explains Britain’s takeover of K.L., the ultimate expression of the Nazi Egypt, Walmart’s success, the endless worldwide search for world view. cheaper labor. The impulse to separate some groups of people from the category of the MUNICH AIRPORT, by Greg Baxter (Twelve). The airport is a sym- human is, however, a universal one. The bol of dislocation in this novel about an unnamed American enemies we kill in war, the convicted living in London. A weary, divorced, mid-level marketing pro- prisoners we lock up for life, even the fessional, he exists in reduced circumstances (small flat, free- distant workers who manufacture our lance consultancy gigs). When he hears that his sister has been clothes and toys—how could any soci- found dead in her apartment in Germany, he and his father ety function if the full humanity of all set out to fly the body to America for burial. (As the novel these were taken into account? In a de- opens, he is waiting in a departure lounge.) Grief and connec- cent society, there are laws to resist such tion with the people who knew his sister remain closed to him. dehumanization, and institutional and The book uses the essence of modern air travel—the slow pas- moral forces to protest it. When guards sage through colorless places of delay, helplessness, and frus- at Rikers Island beat a prisoner to tration—to evoke an enigmatic sense of emptiness. death, or when workers in China mak- ing iPhones begin to commit suicide WEST OF SUNSET, by Stewart O’Nan (Viking). This novel of out of despair, we regard these as intol- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years tracks him as he hacks away at erable evils that must be cured. It is Hollywood screenplays, perpetually menaced by poor health, when a society decides that some peo- poor finances, and a sense of his rusting legacy. Drowning in ple deserve to be treated this way— memories of a world “all promise and sweet fumbling,” Scott that it is not just inevitable but right struggles not to disappoint his teen-age daughter, falls for a to deprive whole categories of people mysterious gossip columnist, and visits the institutionalized, of their humanity—that a crime on the tragically unstable Zelda. The narration wanders between wist- scale of the K.L. becomes a possibil- ful elegy and snappy one-liners delivered by, among others, ity. It is a crime that has been repeated Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, and Shirley Temple. too many times, in too many places, for O’Nan’s adroitness with atmosphere and period detail makes us to dismiss it with the simple prom- Fitzgerald’s dreams of creating worthy work, even with his ise of never again.  best days behind him, absorbing and poignant. THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 81 aggerating them. But she seems genu- BOOKS inely not proud of the diary. “There’s no reason to continue writing other than that I started writing at some DEAR DIARY, I HATE YOU point—and that, at some other point, I’ll stop,” she writes. Looking back at Reflections on journals in an age of overshare. entries fills her with embarrassment and occasionally even indifference. She BY ALICE GREGORY reports that, after finding that she’d re- corded “nothing of consequence” in 1996, she “threw the year away.” In her memoir, Manguso makes the striking decision never to quote the diary itself. As she started to look through the old journals, she writes, she became convinced that it was im- possible to pull the “best bits” from their context without distorting the sense of the whole: “I decided that the only way to represent the diary in this book would be either to include the entire thing untouched—which would have required an additional eight thou- sand pages—or to include none of it.” The diary, she observes, is the mem- oir’s “dark matter,” everywhere but in- visible, and the book revolves around a center that is absent. “I envisioned a book without a single quote, a book about pure states of being,” she writes. “It sounded almost religious when I put it that way.” Manguso, whose previous books in- clude two other memoirs and two books of poetry, grew up outside Boston. Now in her early forties, she teaches writ- ing in Los Angeles, at Otis College of Sarah Manguso Art and Design. But for most of the book we come away with only the suspect that many people who don’t amulet against the passage of time, has sketchiest outline of Manguso’s life. I keep a diary worry that they ought grown to overwhelming proportions. She’s married, with a son. Her son is to, and that, for some, the failure to do “I started keeping a diary twenty-five young; her husband is from Hawaii; so is a source of fathomless self-loath- years ago,” Manguso writes. “It’s eight she was once very ill. (Her illness was ing. What could be more worth remem- hundred thousand words long.” And the subject of her remarkable first mem- bering than one’s own life? Is there a the memoir, a kind of meta-diary, is her oir, “The Two Kinds of Decay.”) The good excuse for forgetting even a sin- attempt to interrogate her obsessive individual memories she chooses to gle day? Something like this anxiety drive to maintain a record of her exis- share often don’t link up to produce a seems to have prompted the poet and tence. Careful to preëmpt criticism that continuous narrative. We get Manguso, essayist Sarah Manguso, on the cusp her project is fey or vainglorious, she at fourteen, looking through a tele- of adulthood, to begin writing a jour- characterizes her diary habit as “a vice,” scope for a comet, failing to see it, and nal, which she has kept ever since. “I and points out that it has taken the not caring; Manguso, in 1992, writing wrote so I could say I was truly paying place of “exercise, performing remuner- mostly about hating her mother; Man- attention,” she tells us early in her mem- ative work, or volunteering my time to guso, in college, discovering that a boy- oir “Ongoingness” (Graywolf ). “Expe- the unlucky.” Of all the psychological friend has read her diary, including rience in itself wasn’t enough. The diary conditions to be burdened with, gra- some dismaying reflections on his sex- was my defense against waking up at phomania is hardly the worst, and Man- ual performance; Manguso, in her late the end of my life and realizing I’d guso doesn’t quite succeed in dispelling thirties, drinking raspberry-leaf tea in missed it.” the suspicion that she is a little proud an attempt to trigger early labor, hop- The journal, first envisioned as an of her eccentricities, perhaps even ex- ing that her husband can be present RYAN REFERENCE: ANDY 82 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 6, 2015 ILLUSTRATION BY MONTSE BERNAL for both the birth of his son and, an pearances” and “make it real by putting fulness. Another meaning lurks, too: ocean away, the death of his mother. it into words.” It’s hard to think of a Why does one keep a diary at all? As The memoir, rather than being a more perilous way to write. she looks back on the colossal project, synopsis of the life recorded by the she feels its futility. Although her method diary, is mostly a set of meditations on he great feat of the book is that it was to write down everything, her abid- the fact of the diary’s existence. The Tsucceeds in not feeling abstract, ing sense is that “I failed to record so tone is matter-of-fact, and the con- even though it frequently eschews much.” Rather than a protection against trolled, even staid sentences seem de- specificity. There is, in fact, a narrative time, the diary becomes a cruelly accu- liberately to reject the manic, melodra- here, albeit one that functions without rate gauge of time’s passage. She finds matic quality of a diary. The book the normal signposts of life-writing. that she is afraid to read it and to face proceeds in sparse, aphoristic fragments, Instead, it is a narrative about the grad- “the artifact of the person I was in 1992 almost like prose poems. None are lon- ual shift, as Manguso gets older, in her and 1997 and 2003 and so on.” ger than a page, and some are just a relationship to time. It is telling that One could argue that reading mem- single sentence: motherhood receives the most atten- oirs comes more naturally to us now tion. “Then I became a mother,” she than ever before. Our critical faculties I started keeping the diary in earnest when I started finding myself in moments writes. “I began to inhabit time differ- and emotional voyeurism are primed that were too full. ently.” She knows that this is some- as they’ve never been. Social media bar- At an art opening in the late eighties, I thing all parents discover—“this has rage us daily with fragmented first-per- held a plastic cup of wine and stood in front all been said before”—but the con- son accounts of people’s lives. We have of a painting next to a friend I loved. It was sequences are nonetheless immense. become finely tuned instruments of se- all too much. “Nursing an infant creates so much lost, miotic analysis, capable of decoding at I stayed partly contained in the moment empty time,” she writes. “The mother a glance the false enthusiasm of friends, until that night, when I wrote down every- thing that had happened and everything I becomes the background against which the connotations of geotags, the tan- remembered thinking while it happened and the baby lives, becomes time.” The rapid gle of opinions that lie embedded in a everything I thought while recording what I growth of a young child creates a new single turn of phrase. Continuously remembered had happened… kind of time scale: she dreams of her providing updates on life for others can There should be extra days, buffer days, son’s teeth “beating time in months, in encourage a person to hone a sense of between the real days. years, his full jaws a pink-and-white humor and check a sense of privilege. Manguso seldom divulges any par- timepiece.” It can keep friendships alive that might ticularly sensitive information, and As Manguso’s sense of time dissolves, otherwise fall victim to entropy. But yet her material is, in a sense, vastly so does her devotion to the diary. In her what constantly self-reporting your more intimate than what we usually twenties, she wrote down her experi- own life does not seem to enable a per- think of as private. She picks at the ences constantly and in minute detail. son to do—at least, not yet—is to com- places where language butts up against In her thirties, the diary became more municate to others a private sense of the inexpressible. Her currency is the of a log: “The rhapsodies of the previ- what it feels like to be you. With “On- “henid,” the philosopher Otto Wei- ous decade thinned out.” As she entered goingness,” Manguso has achieved this. ninger’s term for the half-formed her forties, “reflection disappeared al- In her almost psychedelic musings on thought. Her impressions, while lucid, most completely.” Manguso doesn’t say time and what it means to preserve are true to the gauziness of mental life that she intends to stop keeping her one’s own life, she has managed to tran- as we experience it. “Ongoingness” is an diary, but the subtitle of the mem- scribe an entirely interior world. She attempt to take, as Virginia Woolf wrote, oir—“The End of a Diary”—implies has written the memoir we didn’t re- “a token of some real thing behind ap- that the habit may have outlived its use- alize we needed. 

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THE WINNING CAPTION

THE FINALISTS

“Is it weird that we have a pet?” Flannery Mack, Salt Lake City, Utah

“Be careful—the bald spot is slippery.” “Never, ever put me in assisted living.” Lev Borisov, Princeton, N.J. David Wilkner, Pawtucket, R.I.

“He was deemed a flight risk.” Julia Bindler, Mamaroneck, N.Y.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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