The New Yorker - December 06, 2021

DECEMBER 6, 2021
6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Jill Lepore on the Lorax and banning books;
bidding on the Constitution; Kathleen Turner;
Jet Ski dreams; Steven Yeun’s pandemic.
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Rachel Syme 22 Growing Pains
The women behind “ PEN15.”
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Larry David 28 Notes for My Biographer
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY
James Somers 30 Head Space
How brain scans can read your mind.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Ian Urbina 36 The Invisible Wall
The brutal Libyan prisons that stop migrants to the E.U.
PROFILES
Sheelah Kolhatkar 48 The Enforcer
Will the F.T.C.’s new head try to break up Big Tech?
FICTION
Kate Walbert 58 “Marriage Quarantine”
THE CRITICS
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 63 “Licorice Pizza,” “The Hand of God.”
BOOKS
Jerome Groopman 66 Electricity and the body.
Pankaj Mishra 70 Frantz Fanon’s legacy.
73 Briefly Noted
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 74 Sophie Taeuber-Arp at MOMA.
THE THEATRE
Vinson Cunningham 76 “Clyde’s,” “Trouble in Mind.”
POP MUSIC
Carrie Battan 78 The surprises of Adele’s “30.”
POEMS
Hala Alyan 52 “Topography”
Robert Pinsky 60 “Culture”
COVER
Mark Ulriksen “Ever Giving”
DRAWINGS Julia Suits, Brooke Bourgeois, Liana Finck, Liza Donnelly, Zachary Kanin,
David Sipress, E. S. Glenn, Mick Stevens, Frank Cotham, Liam Francis Walsh, Elisabeth McNair,
Roz Chast, Ed Himelblau, Matthew Diffee SPOTS Antonio Giovanni Pinna
CONTRIBUTORS
Ian Urbina (“The Invisible Wall,” p. 36) Sheelah Kolhatkar (“ The Enforcer,”
is an investigative journalist based in p. 48), a staff writer, is the author of
Washington, D.C. This piece was pub- “Black Edge.”
lished in collaboration with The Out-
Commemorative law Ocean Project, a nonprofit news
organization that reports on environ-
Robert Pinsky (Poem, p. 60) edited the
anthology “The Book of Poetry for
Cover Reprints mental and human-rights issues at sea. Hard Times.” His latest poetry collec-
tion is “At the Foundling Hospital.”
Search our extensive Rachel Syme (The Talk of the Town,
p. 19;“Growing Pains,” p. 22), a staff writer, Kate Walbert (Fiction, p. 58) has pub-
archive of weekly
has covered style and culture for The lished seven works of fiction, including,
covers dating back to New Yorker since 2012. most recently, the short-story collection
1925 and commemorate “She Was Like That.”
a milestone with a James Somers (“Head Space,” p. 30) is a
writer and a programmer based in New Mark Ulriksen (Cover), an artist and an
New Yorker cover reprint. York City. illustrator, has contributed more than
newyorkerstore.com/covers sixty covers to the magazine since 1994.
Hala Alyan (Poem, p. 52), a clinical psy-
chologist, is the author of six books. Aimee Lucido (Puzzles & Games Dept.)
Her latest novel is “The Arsonists’ City.” has written the children’s books “Emmy
in the Key of Code,” which won a
PRICE $8.99 OCT. 24, 2016 Pankaj Mishra (Books, p. 70) most re- Northern California Book Award, and
cently published “Bland Fanatics: Lib- “Recipe for Disaster.”
erals, Race, and Empire.” His novel
“Run and Hide” will be out next year. Jerome Groopman (Books, p. 66), the
Recanati Professor at Harvard Univer-
Carrie Battan (Pop Music, p. 78) began sity, is a staff writer. His most recent
contributing to the magazine in 2015, book is “Your Medical Mind,” written
and became a staff writer in 2018. with Dr. Pamela Hartzband.
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
LEFT: FRANCESCO MUZZI; RIGHT: GARETH SMIT
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4 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021
THE MAIL
DANCING AGAIN the wonderful satirical novel by George
Gissing, in which the character Jasper
Jennifer Homans, in her review of the Milvain both scorns pandering to an
New York City Ballet’s long-awaited audience and cynically pursues the fi-
return to the stage, notes that today’s nancial upside of doing so. The growth
dancers approach the now classic George of K.D.P. has, for all its problems, helped
Balanchine repertoire, which has defined to rectify another issue that Gissing
the company’s identity and aesthetics raised in his novel: nepotism in the
since its beginning, with “spine-straight” writing and publishing industries. Al-
rigidity and orthodoxy (Dancing, No- though literary fiction, thanks to its
vember 8th). There is “no fragility or many gatekeepers, is still dominated
spontaneity in sight”; the dancers have by those with the right connections
traded “vulnerability for perfection.” and background, the fiction that most
Homans laments that the company’s people actually read is being produced
zipped-up approach to the founding by a more diverse set of writers than
choreographer’s ballets is not “some- ever. If we could find a way to get that
thing anyone can undo.” But, to the sort of levelling of the playing field in
contrary, much could be done if the the so-called high-end-fiction sector,
keepers of the George Balanchine Trust we’d be rewarded with richer stories
opened his works to new interpreta- that would shape the literary world for
tions by dancers and choreographers. the better.
1
Balanchine himself remade dozens of Sandeep Sandhu
his dances during his long career— London, England
notably, “Serenade,” a ballet set to Tchai-
kovsky’s “Serenade for Strings”—alter- BOXED IN
ing the sets, the costumes, and even the
steps themselves. If today’s artists were Kelefa Sanneh, in his excellent piece
given license to update Balanchine’s about the social-media star Jake Paul’s
ballets for our present moment, the move into professional boxing, shows
spontaneity and danger that Homans how Paul’s unexpected career trajectory
wishes for in City Ballet’s dancing could has taken him away from a “seemingly
be regained. Ironically, such interven- luxurious” life as an influencer with an
tions might allow the audience to ex- infamous reputation (“Punching Down,”
perience Balanchine’s ballets more as November 8th). Never in my life as a
they first appeared in the choreogra- Black and gay man did I think that Paul,
pher’s imagination. a white YouTube prankster, could open
1
James Steichen my eyes. Whether or not I like the way
San Francisco, Calif. he found success in his boxing career, I
can’t help but admire it. How do you
ONE CHEER FOR KINDLE take privilege and expand on it? In trad-
ing yachts and jets for the boxing ring,
I agree with Parul Sehgal, who, in an Paul has found a life full of thrills that
essay about how Amazon is changing I, along with many people who look
book publishing, says that the com- like me, wish we could have. There’s
pany’s capitalistic practices have led to power in his success story.
a deluge of formulaic content that is Malik Clinton
driven by audiences’ preferences (Books, Philadelphia, Pa.
November 1st). As a preamble to her
discussion of Kindle Direct Publish- •
ing (K.D.P.), the arm of Amazon that Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
allows writers to self-publish for free address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
and that algorithmically encourages [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
them to prioritize quantity over qual- any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
ity, Sehgal invokes “New Grub Street,” of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
As New York City venues reopen, it’s advisable to confirm in advance the requirements for in-person attendance.
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
In 2014, the Venezuelan singer and producer Alejandra Ghersi, who records as Arca, emerged as a
forward-thinking electronic artist with an inventive, almost alien sensibility. In 2020, her focus shifted
and she released the album “kick i,” the first in a series that moves toward a more pop sound, featuring
art-pop progressives such as Björk and Rosalía. On Dec. 3, Arca completes the anthology, sharing the
remaining three installments of the project, each carrying on an extended metaphor of individuation.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID HAUSER
1
ART
reer-spanning use of patterned compositions and
glyphlike silhouettes. The most prominent motif
for stylistic detours. Avalon Emerson leans
toward bold, anthemic selections that are also
is a female torso that is reminiscent of ancient highly playful—her live mixes tend to shine
statuary, a goddess, perhaps, her arms merged at with repeated, at-home listens. The Londoner
Vasily Kandinsky the wrists to form a cradling U shape. (Rocca’s Ben UFO’s d.j. sets are similarly head-turn-
Some eighty paintings, drawings, and wood- gently unsettling imagery has clearly influenced ing: his tastes tend to be more abstract than
cuts by Kandinsky, the Russian hierophant a new neo-Surrealist generation of painters, Emerson’s, but his approach to sequencing
of abstraction, line the upper three-fifths of most notably Caitlin Keogh.) In these pale-sage, and pacing exerts a strong narrative pull of
the Guggenheim’s ramp, in the retrospective pink, and storm-gray canvases, cropped figures its own. The two alternate on the decks from
“Around the Circle.” The show’s curator, Megan often serve as strange containers for drifting open to close on Friday, Dec. 3, at Knockdown
Fontanella, recommends starting at the bottom, hands, clouds, chairs, and beds. Symbols of Center.—Michaelangelo Matos
with the overwrought works of the artist’s final domesticity have always populated the painter’s
phase, and proceeding upward, back to the sim- inimitable world. In these lovely last works,
1
pler Expressionist landscapes and horsemen of Rocca strikes a balance between agitation and Ray Charles: “True Genius:
his early career. This course is canny in terms of somnambulant bliss.—J.F. (matthewmarks.com)
your enjoyment, which increases as you go. The Sides of Ray”
teeming complexities that make Kandinsky’s JAZZ When it came to music-making, Ray
late phase are numbingly hermetic. A middle Charles could do anything. Even a basic
range, from about 1910 to the early twenties, MUSIC sampler such as the double-vinyl compila-
seethes with the artist’s excitement as he aban- tion “True Genius: Sides of Ray” features his
dons figuration to let spontaneously symphonic multitudinous range. How could one artist
forms, intended as visual equivalents of music, Avalon Emerson x Ben UFO so embody American music in all its unruly
enthrall on their own. Finally, we are engulfed ELECTRONIC This smart pairing brings together diversity—blues, jazz, R. & B., country, gospel,
in cadenzas of hue that may be the strongest art two dance-music d.j.s who’ve shown a schol- mainstream pop—and then synthesize it into a
of their kind and their time, relatively crude arly attention to set planning and a penchant wholly personal amalgam of sound, essentially
but more vigorous than the contemporaneous
feats of Matisse, Derain, Braque, and other
Parisians whose Fauvism anchors standard
accounts of modernism. The mining heir Sol- AT THE GALLERIES
omon R. Guggenheim met Kandinsky in 1930
and began collecting him in bulk, advised by
the enthusiastic German baroness Hilla Rebay,
who also recommended Frank Lloyd Wright
as the architect of the museum’s hypermodern
whorl, which opened in 1959. Kandinsky lin-
gers in the ancestral DNA of the museum and
his equivocal majesty haunts every visit to a
building that cannot cease to amaze.—Peter
Schjeldahl (guggenheim.org)
Rene Ricard
Perhaps best known as a poet, Ricard, who died
in 2014, came to prominence as an art critic, in
the nineteen-eighties. In “A Girl of the Zeit-
geist,” Janet Malcolm’s 1986 New Yorker Profile
of the twenty-seven-year-old Artforum editor
Ingrid Sischy, he appears as a flamboyant, recal-
citrant character with undeniable Baudelairean
appeal. (“He dominates the conversation, but,
unlike most people who are nakedly interested
in themselves, he is also aware of what is going
on with others, though in a specialized way.”)
Sometimes Ricard wrote in paint, as a beguiling,
if motley, selection of works on view at the Vito
Schnabel gallery attests. The show, which spans
more than three decades, includes one scratchily There is no doubt that Catherine Murphy is one of America’s greatest
rendered picture from 1989—a thrift-store ship- living realist painters, but I wonder if that superlative might rub her the
at-sea scene effaced with gold pastel and embla- wrong way. Grandiosity is antithetical to Murphy’s attentive approach.
zoned with the phrase “Mal de Fin.” Another
melancholic angle to Ricard’s punk romanticism The observational gifts that the artist has been honing for fifty years—she
is seen in the eight-foot-tall “Growing Up in paints from life, not from photographs, and can spend years at work on
America,” from 2007-08, in which three cars are one picture—uncover epiphanies in the mundane. Under her brush, the
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND PETER FREEMAN, INC.
partly obscured by a pink cursive text alluding to

queer childhood, love, and longing, and to “the intricate play of light on clear trash bags may call to mind the work of
long highway we all hitch-hike alone.”—Johanna the seventeenth-century French painter Chardin, another adept of the
Fateman (vitoschnabel.com) modest sublime. Murphy is also having an ongoing dialogue with mod-
ernist abstraction. One quietly dazzling triumph in her new exhibition, at
Suellen Rocca the Peter Freeman gallery (on view through Jan. 8), is the six-foot-square
This Chicago Imagist first emerged in the “Canopy” (pictured above), in which colorful plastic buckets of water reflect
mid-nineteen-sixties, as a member of the
Hairy Who, a coterie of artists known for their the trees under which they’ve been placed. Yes, the canvas intertwines
hands-on, syncretic approach to Pop art. Rocca still-life and landscape, but it’s also a riff on the repetitive strategies and
died in 2020, and, as revealed in a posthumous industrial materials of Minimalism, and even a sly evocation of Abstract
exhibition at the Matthew Marks gallery, she
worked until the end of her life. Her formidable Expressionism and the question posed by Barnett Newman, in his famous
output from her final year alone reflects a ca- 1966-70 series, “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?”—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 7
inventing what we recognize today as soul is particularly enticing. For all its maniacal superpower; Teasdale’s voice refuses to betray
music? “Sides of Ray,” a meat-and-potatoes humor, this act grew out of rage stirred by even a smidgen of emotion. When smiles poke
roundup, breaks little new ground, as so many America’s bungling of the AIDS crisis. Christ- through the façade during live performances
of its songs paved the way for modern music, mas loopiness sits in their wheelhouse—so, observed online, one longs to stuff the grins
but if you haven’t already experienced the sonic too, do devastation and ire.—Jay Ruttenberg back in the can. This week, Wet Leg greets its
epiphanies of “Hit the Road Jack,” “You Are (BAM; Dec. 1-4.) first American audiences, at Mercury Lounge
My Sunshine,” and “Georgia on My Mind,” (Dec. 7), Union Pool (Dec. 8), and Baby’s All
you can only be envied.—Steve Futterman Right (Dec. 9).—J.R.
Tasha
FOLK The Chicago-based indie singer-song-
“A Goyishe Christmas to You!” writer Tasha has likened her art to “bed songs,” Young People’s Chorus of
CLASSICAL In the 2008 television special “A sites to restore and heal oneself—in order
Colbert Christmas,” Jon Stewart tries to sell to then face and reimagine the world. Her New York City
Stephen Colbert on the Festival of Lights in lovely second album, “Tell Me What You Miss CLASSICAL Prevented from performing together
the duet “Can I Interest You in Hanukkah?” the Most,” from November, is accordingly in person during quarantine, the prodigiously
Stewart throws everything he has at it—eight pitched toward a gentle intimacy, one befit- gifted vocalists of the Young People’s Chorus
days of presents, latkes, dreidels—but Colbert ting the Ridgewood venue Trans-Pecos. The of New York City instead set out to create a
remains unswayed. The set piece appears as a tactility of fingers sliding on guitar strings, unique project reflecting the pandemic’s effects
comedic counterpoint in New York Festival and her starkly soulful singing, conjures an on children and young adults. “AloneTogether,”
of Song’s annual concert of Yuletide classics atmosphere of wintry composure. Tasha re- a free mixed-media installation, includes con-
written by Jewish composers, who, conversely, corded and co-produced the record’s exquisite tributions from a striking array of grownup
were very much able to muster some Christ- ambient folk with the late Eric Littman, at his composers, songwriters, conductors, poets,
mas spirit, with songs such as “Winter Won- home studio. Every note is both grounded and and filmmakers. Live performances are scat-
derland,” “Silver Bells,” “White Christmas,” buoyant, evoking the refinements of Feist and tered throughout the exhibition’s run; events
and more.—Oussama Zahr (Kaufman Music Lianne La Havas, embracing softness while this week feature music by and with Yuka C.
Center; Dec. 6 at 7.) staring us in the eye. “If I could, I would stay Honda, Thomas Cabaniss, Elizabeth Nuñez,
1
here in this bed all day long / But I quite like Michael Harrison, and Derek Bermel.—Steve
the way pretty girls sway to my songs,” Tasha Smith (High Line Nine Gallery; through Dec. 19.)
Kiki and Herb sings, a compelling case for connection.—Jenn
CABARET By now, the public has been briefed on Pelly (Dec. 7 at 8.)
the quarantine experiences of many luminar-
ies. But there’s been one holdout of particular THE THEATRE
interest: Kiki DuRane, the beloved alter ego of Wet Leg
the singer and raconteur Justin Vivian Bond, INDIE ROCK With post-punk leanings and a
who holds court in the berserk cabaret duo buzzy air, Wet Leg seems a familiar stock Assassins
Kiki and Herb. In the holiday show “SLEIGH character: the hysterically hyped English There is a giddy and deep pleasure to be had
at BAM,” the forever-deranged Kiki finally guitar band. Yet this young duo’s songs re- from this stripped-down revival of Stephen
greets the deranged current era—armed, as veal a refreshingly offbeat act whose sense Sondheim’s musical, directed by John Doyle,
always, with the crackerjack pianist Herb of humor may prove of greater consequence about the desperate and the deluded, people
(Kenny Mellman). Two decades ago, the than the guitars. Hailing from the bucolic Isle who were stepped on until they decided that
duo epitomized a kind of ironic debauch- of Wight and having kicked into gear during their only recourse was to grab a gun and point
ery that enlivened downtown. These days, quarantine, Wet Leg—co-starring Rhian Teas- it at the President. (The show’s book is by John
performances are scarce, and the prospect of dale and Hester Chambers—seems to sparkle Weidman, based on a great, perverse idea by
hearing exactly how Kiki, absent from stages with a madness born of isolation. In a pair Charles Gilbert, Jr.) Try not to hum along as
since 2016, fared during COVID and Trump of loopy music videos, deadpan becomes a John Wilkes Booth (Steven Pasquale), John
Hinckley, Jr. (Adam Chanler-Berat), Lynette
(Squeaky) Fromme (Tavi Gevinson), Sara Jane
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC Moore (Judy Kuhn), and the rest of this band
of murderous misfits serenade you with their
conviction that, per Thomas Jefferson, “every-
The London-based multidisciplinary art- body’s got the right to be happy.” The Balladeer
(the appealing Ethan Slater) guides us with
ist Duval Timothy astounded listeners optimistic sanity through the tales of each,
with his 2020 album, “Help,” and its loose, from the anarchist Leon Czolgosz (Brandon
minimal music about emotional decon- Uranowitz), a factory worker whose furious
analysis of capitalist oppression is spot on—
struction and healing. Last year, the Brit- though his assassination of William McKinley
ish singer Rosie Lowe joined Timothy to doesn’t do much to change things—to Charles
finish a sonic experiment—one examining Guiteau (Will Swenson, electric with comic
charisma), an unhinged self-promoter who
choral music and the manipulation of the cakewalks his way to the gallows after he
human voice by “using layered vocals as offs James Garfield for refusing to name him
an instrument following piano harmony, Ambassador to France. This pitch-dark show,
which deals with the slimy underbelly of Amer-
arrangement and sampling.”The resulting ican dreams, couldn’t be more upbeat, and
nine-track, twenty-minute album, “Son,” that’s what gives it its eerie power.—Alexandra
is far more auditory than lyrical, homing in Schwartz (Reviewed in our issue of 11/29/21.)
ILLUSTRATION BY CARMEN CASADO
(Classic Stage Company; through Jan. 8.)

on the tonal properties of voice. The raw,
lovely music tells the story of a mother and
her child, and of how, in order to properly
Diana: The Musical
The accomplishment of this lustreless mu-
parent him, she learns to rid herself of the sical—directed by Christopher Ashley, with
toxicity she internalized while young. The music and lyrics by David Bryan and addi-
duo treated the songs like field record- tional lyrics by Joe DiPietro, who wrote the
book—is to make you wish, after two hours of
ings, allowing surrounding sounds to add power-pop crooning, that the poor Princess
texture to the chorus.—Sheldon Pearce of Wales (Jeanna de Waal) had been allowed

We keep more
people safe online
than anyone else
in the world.
taking part in this year’s “Nutcracker” are
OFF BROADWAY twelve, old enough to have been vaccinated
when rehearsals began in the fall. Besides that,
the production, which premièred in 1954, is
comfortingly unchanged, with its gargantuan
tree, travelling bed, and pretty pastel shepherd-
esses. So, too, are the rotating casts, which in-
clude the crisp, quick-footed Megan Fairchild,
the high-flying Tiler Peck, and the dramatic
Sara Mearns (among others), dancing the roles
of the Sugarplum Fairy and Dewdrop.—Marina
Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; through Jan. 2.)
Alvin Ailey American

Dance Theatre
This season is the tenth since the choreographer
Robert Battle took over the company from the
larger-than-life Judith Jamison. (Running Dec.
1-19, it’s a bit shorter this year, three weeks rather
than five.) Battle has brought greater variety to
the repertoire and, more recently, found a new
choreographer-in-residence, the übertalented
Jamar Roberts. Both Battle and Roberts have
created a new work for Ailey’s City Center run,
to be unveiled on Dec. 3. That program closes,
as do so many of this company’s programs, with
Ailey’s great masterpiece “Revelations.” The
The plight of the Afghan civilians who helped U.S. forces during the past Dec. 7 performance, a celebration of Battle’s
two decades—and were repaid with life-endangering apathy—dominated tenure, is an all-Battle evening that includes
the headlines all too briefly earlier this year, as many Afghans scrambled “Mass,” from 2004; Ella, from 2008; and the new
“For Four.”—M.H. (Through Dec. 19.)
to escape the country amid the war’s turbulent end. But Americans should
have paid more attention all along—and we still should. “Selling Kabul,”
in previews at Playwrights Horizons, is a tense drama by Sylvia Khoury, a Raja Feather Kelly
A distinguishing feature of the bank-robbery
New York-born playwright of French and Lebanese descent. Set during the film “Dog Day Afternoon,” from 1975, was the
military drawdown in 2013, the play follows Taroon (Dario Ladani Sanchez), motive for the crime—paying for gender-con-
a former interpreter for the U.S. military who is hiding from the Taliban at firmation transition. In “Wednesday,” Raja
Feather Kelly and his company, the feath3r the-
his sister’s apartment, as his relatives and neighbors cover for him and his ory, investigate the real-life story that inspired
wife is about to give birth. Tyne Rafaeli’s production, which originated at the film and address questions of representa-
the Williamstown Theatre Festival, opens on Dec. 6.—Michael Schulman tion in a piece that’s part dance-theatre, part
live theatre-vérité documentary. Postponed
from last year, it glams up New York Live
Arts—the culmination of Kelly’s tenure as the
theatre’s resident commissioned artist.—Brian
to keep some last shred of her mystery and the plight, and the mind, of the Girl, played Seibert (Dec. 1-4 and Dec. 8-10.)
celebrated glamour. When, in the first act, by Jenn Murray. She may be the only actor
Diana considers ditching her wedding, it’s too onstage, but the Girl is not the show’s sole
late; her name and image, as one character says, character. In a challenging monologue, Murray Jordan Demetrius Lloyd
are already being used to sell tea towels and voices both sides of conversations between the Like all the entries in Baryshnikov Arts Cen-
mugs. Now they’re being used to sell tickets Girl and her mother, her brother, her uncle, her ter’s fall season, “Trip Gloss” is digital. But
on Broadway. One odd new perspective that grandfather—and a number of other figures the emerging choreographer Jordan Demetrius
this show has to offer is its take on victimhood. in her young, troubled life—and it demands a Lloyd’s short film, available for free on the
Diana is presented as a victim of circumstance, good deal of one’s attention to keep the speak- center’s Web site through Dec. 13, is uncom-
naturally, but so are Prince Charles (Roe Har- ers straight. Annie Ryan’s adaptation of Eimear monly preoccupied with that fact, even angry
trampf) and, weirdly, Queen Elizabeth (Judy McBride’s book, directed by Nicola Murphy, about it. It’s a collage of rehearsal footage that’s
Kaye), who is given an eleventh-hour number is a tough, dark exploration of abuse—sexual chopped up and interrupted and plastered with
in which she gets to feel sad about abandon- and psychological, sadistic and self-inflicted. text pointing out how it isn’t live dance. Fortu-
ment issues in her own marriage. The show’s The Girl doesn’t actually beat her head against nately, “Williamson,” another short film that
villains are the paparazzi, who are dressed like those rock-hard walls, but descriptions of head Lloyd made this year, is also discoverable, at
Inspector Gadget and do some twirly dances injuries crop up again and again, forming a jordandlloyd.com. Shot and edited simply, it
(choreographed by Kelly Devine) involving painful theme. The language is vivid, harsh, reveals an artist of unsettling beauty.—B.S.
ILLUSTRATION BY LEONARDO SANTAMARIA
1
flashbulbs and flaring trenchcoats, and Ca- and unsparing.—Ken Marks (Irish Repertory (bacnyc.org)
milla Parker Bowles (Erin Davie, bringing Theatre; through Dec. 12.)
subtle feeling to the bland proceedings), who
manages to once again upstage Diana by being “Nutcracker Rouge”
infinitely more interesting.—A.S. (11/29/21) Opulent, hyper-decorative, and naughty, Com-
(Longacre; open run.) DANCE pany XIV’s “Nutcracker Rouge” reinterprets
the classic holiday story as a voyage of sexual
awakening for a young ingénue, Marie-Claire.
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing New York City Ballet It does this with style and skill, integrating
The set of this one-act play, designed by Chen- If the angels in Act II of “George Balanchine’s elements of burlesque, circus arts, drag, and
Wei Liao, is made up of hard, gray walls, with The Nutcracker” look a little taller this year, ballet, culminating in an acrobatic pas de deux
no visible way in or out; it is an impenetrable, fear not—your eyes do not deceive you. For that leaves little to the imagination.—M.H.
inescapable dungeon. It’s a fitting metaphor for everyone’s safety, the youngest ballet students (Théâtre XIV; through Jan. 30.)

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MOVIES
cynicism emerges in characters who seem like
present-day people planted ludicrously in a
why has this old cinematic habit not been laid
to rest? The movie, though executed with
miserable past. The Church’s political games— Scott’s habitual panache, is ominously long,
involving the Reverend Mother (Charlotte and Gaga, in particular, is impeded from giv-
Benedetta Rampling), the Provost (Olivier Rabourdin), ing it the comic flourish that it badly needs,
Paul Verhoeven’s violent, erotic, and hollow and the Papal Nuncio (Lambert Wilson)—are and which she seems ever ready to supply.
historical drama depicts religion as a tool given short shrift to make way for copious The plot has less to do with fashion than with
of political power, a method for controlling sex and horrific violence, which Verhoeven fiscal irregularities; it’s a relief when Tom
women’s sexuality, and a fiction skillfully ma- appears to enjoy equally. In French.—Richard Ford (Reeve Carney) shows up and makes
nipulated by nonbelievers. His skepticism, Brody (In theatrical release.) something happen on the catwalk.—Anthony
however justified, is dramatically flip. The Lane (In theatrical release.)
action, set in the seventeenth century and
based on a true story, is centered on an Italian House of Gucci
convent to which a girl named Benedetta is The new Ridley Scott film, springing from The Humans
consigned. The adult Benedetta (Virginie real-life scandals, stars Lady Gaga as Patri- Stephen Karam, for his directorial début,
Efira) proves smart, independent, and desper- zia Reggiani, whose father owns a trucking adapts his own play of the same title. It’s set
ate for power. She convincingly forges mir- business. Aiming high, she marries Maurizio in a rundown duplex apartment in China-
acles of which she’s the star, and she rescues Gucci (Adam Driver) and gets snarled up town, where a thirtysomething couple—Brigid
a young peasant woman named Bartolomea in the tangled affairs of the Gucci dynasty. (Beanie Feldstein), a composer, and Richard
(Daphné Patakia), who soon makes sexual Prominent honchos of the clan are played (Steven Yeun), a social-work student—have
advances toward Benedetta. Her initial resis- by Jeremy Irons, Al Pacino, and Jared Leto, just moved in. It’s Thanksgiving, and with
tance (with its hilarious visions of deliverance and connoisseurs of luxury ham will have scant furniture they welcome Brigid’s family—
from lust by a sword-wielding Jesus) gives a delicious time trying to judge who gives her sister, Aimee (Amy Schumer), a lawyer
way to a passionate, reckless romance that the saltiest performance. Almost everyone from Philadelphia, and her parents, Deirdre
inevitably comes to grief. Verhoeven’s cheap converses in rich Italian (or “Italian”) accents; (Jayne Houdyshell), an office manager, and
Erik (Richard Jenkins), a longtime school
custodian, who’ve come in from Scranton and
brought Brigid’s grandmother (June Squibb),
WHAT TO STREAM who’s disabled and has Alzheimer’s disease.
The family is enduring long-silenced woes
that they voice in the course of the day, involv-
ing money, work, physical and mental health,
frustrated ambitions, and secret betrayals.
Though Karam’s presentation is vastly empa-
thetic, most of their troubles have a political
basis that both he and the characters ignore;
there isn’t a word of politics, or much sense
of a world outside. His mainly stage-bound
direction offers one attention-grabbing trope
of little dramatic import: an obsession with
infrastructure, with leaks and pipes, circuit
breakers and machines that go bump day and
night.—R.B. (In theatrical release and streaming
on Showtime.)
Strange Victory
Filming in 1947 and 1948, Leo Hurwitz uses
newsreel images of the Second World War
in his quest to uncover the source of the fear
seen in the faces of urban passersby, who, he
says, seem “haunted in broad daylight.” The
premise of this extraordinary documentary
essay (featuring journalistic research, archi-
val footage, and fictional reconstructions)
resembles that of a film noir, but Hurwitz,
Irony has never sounded as sweet as it does in the director Penny Lane’s with his audacious editing and blunt com-
“Listening to Kenny G,” in which the sentimental saxophonist eagerly mentary, infuses it with a substance far more
and earnestly takes part in a work of pop-star portraiture that quickly radical and harrowing than anything Holly-
wood could produce. The horrors of a world
morphs into a sharp-minded exploration of the sociology of aesthetics in which extermination camps went unchal-
and the philosophy of taste. (It’s streaming on HBO Max starting lenged are shown to have a pathological par-
Dec. 2.) The movie tells the straightforward story of how Kenny allel in American prejudice—anti-Semitism,
anti-Catholicism, and especially racism in all
Gorelick, a teen-age virtuoso in Seattle in the early nineteen-seventies, its forms, from job and housing discrimina-
became the best-selling instrumental artist of all time. (Hint: the tion to lynching, the victims of which Hur-
record executive Clive Davis had something to do with it and, on witz calls “the casualties of a war.” Hurwitz,
considering Hitler’s rise and fall, is shocked
camera, explains how.) It also unstintingly parses the hostility that to find “the ideas of the loser still active in
the musician has long faced from critics, scholars, and others whom the land of the winner.” The film is a kind
Gorelick derides as the “jazz police.” (Some of his detractors appear of collective psychoanalysis of a segregated
and prejudiced nation; its findings are yet to
1
in talking-head interviews that prove both self-questioning and be worked through. Released in 1948.—R.B.
COURTESY HBO
illuminating.) But, above all, Lane lets Kenny G do the talking, and (Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)
the playing, and the displaying of his creative process onstage, at
home, and in the studio, which comes off as the authentic expression For more reviews, visit
of a distinctive personality—for better or for worse.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

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several hours, Goodman starfished on chilies and lemon zest, presented with
the ground, fading in and out of con- delectably briny sea beans, and potatoes
sciousness beside a pit of hot stones. boiled in seaweed stock. Then came pork
“I thought I might die,” he recalled, cheeks braised in Cognac, sherry vinegar,
1
smiling. His refined-caveman diet in- and mushroom bouillon and dressed in
forms his vision for Bathhouse, too; a chunky parsley oil—a triumph. Lastly,
since 2010, he has abstained from grains a perfect cut of duck arrived—which
TABLES FOR TWO and processed sugar. His mission, ac- Sousa had aged for a week, rubbed down
cording to his LinkedIn profile, is to with a black-garlic and sherry glaze, then
Bathhouse Kitchen “keep all you peak performers out there roasted—atop a bed of foraged moun-
103 N. 10th St., Brooklyn fully optimized”; the spa’s Instagram tain huckleberries.
page is a shrine to chiselled abs and The vegetable accompaniment was
Bathhouse, a ten-thousand-square-foot callipygian curves. For the restaurant, just as satisfying. It would never have oc-
restaurant and underground spa that Bathhouse Kitchen (where, on a heated curred to me to order cabbage, and I was
opened in Williamsburg in 2019, is not patio, you can eat without purchasing glad to be in the safekeeping of Sousa’s
a Turkish hammam, a Russian banya, entry to the spa), Goodman hired the good taste: he steamed whole heads of
or a Korean jjimjilbang, though it in- chef Anthony Sousa, a veteran of Chez caraflex cabbage, gave them a hard char,
tegrates elements from all three. Jason Ma Tante and Eleven Madison Park, and flavored them with miso, lemon, gar-
PHOTOGRAPH BY TONJE THILESEN FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
Goodman, one of its founders, wanted and instructed him to design a menu lic, chives, smoked Pecorino, and onion
to create a bath complex unconstrained that would leave eaters feeling “alive.” jam. For the lovely butternut-squash
by any particular tradition. He sought There was a practical consideration as salad, Sousa served the squash raw, thinly
something more universal, transcendent, well. “We omitted anything known to sliced, and tossed with golden raisins,
and atavistic—a cosmopolitan spiritual massively spike your insulin and make pecans, onion, tarragon, and blue cheese.
sanatorium offering what he calls “an you crash,” Goodman said. “We didn’t It was easily the funkiest dish I’ve ever
uncomplicated borderline-primal human want people passing out.” consumed in a bathrobe.
experience.” He once encountered, in On a recent visit, I didn’t pass out, The four-course meal was whimsical
National Geographic, a photograph of but after a two-hour “journey”—alter- and excellent. There was a faint smell of
droopy-eyed snow monkeys lolling about nating between the dry sauna (190°F), ayahuasca in the air; the house incense is
in hot springs and felt an instant affin- the cold-plunge pool (52°F), and the made, in part, from resin left over after
ity with them. “They were all in there steam room (115°F)—I did show signs psychedelic religious ceremonies. Nine-
together, and they were grooming each of what the regulars call “spa brain,” a teen-seventies British funk flowed from
other,” he told me recently. “That’s who state of such deep relaxation that basic speakers hidden amid tropical plants. By
we really are.” executive functions seem positively ar- dessert, a pear sorbet with a pecan-and-
Goodman’s earliest foray into ritual- duous. Rather than select from a menu, coconut crumble, my spa-brain buzz had
ized perspiration occurred twenty-five I went for the Chef ’s Tasting, leaving all reached its apex. It was enough to make
years ago, in the mountains of north decisions to Sousa. one feel primal—alive—like a well-fed
Georgia, when he was invited by a My first course featured Nantucket snow monkey in a hot spring. (Dishes
friend of Cherokee heritage to partic- Bay scallops—sweet, warm jewels glazed $8-$37. Chef ’s Tasting $85.)
ipate in a sweat-lodge ceremony. For in a compound butter with Calabrian —David Kortava
$
ORDER TODAY!
To receive this special price and free shipping use offer code: LUSTER327
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·
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT that same year, in a Supreme Court dis- sary of “The Lorax,” an occasion that
THE FOREST FOR THE TREES sent, and helped galvanize the environ- passed with little fanfare, Dr. Seuss
mental movement. himself having been made into some-
n 1989, the year that Iran’s Ayatollah “I drew a Lorax and he was obviously thing of a thneed in the latest round of
I Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa
calling for the death of Salman Rush-
a Lorax,” Geisel said. “Doesn’t he look
like a Lorax to you?” But, in 1989, to Bill
book battles. Earlier this year, on Gei-
sel’s birthday, his estate announced that
die, for writing “The Satanic Verses,” and Judith Bailey, the founders of a log- it would no longer publish six of his
American parents in Laytonville, a small ging-equipment business in Laytonville, lesser-known books, in the wake of crit-
town in Northern California, demanded the Lorax looked like an environmental icism that they contain racist carica-
that their children’s elementary school activist. “Papa, we can’t cut trees down,” tures. Books go out of print all the time,
take Dr. Seuss’s 1971 book, “The Lorax,” their eight-year-old son, Sammy, said and this decision wouldn’t have been
off its list of required reading for second after reading the book, in which a “Su- especially notable except that it began
graders. The book is “Silent Spring” for per-Axe-Hacker” whacks “four Truffula trending on Twitter. “Buying all the
the under-ten set. “I speak for the trees,” Trees at one smacker.”Townspeople were Dr. Seuss volumes for the kids before
the Lorax says, attempting to defend a caught up in the so-called “timber wars,” the woke book burners can get to them
soon to be blighted forest, its tufted Truf- when environmentalists camped out in all,” the conservative commentator Ben
fula trees chopped down and knit into trees and loggers wore T-shirts that read Shapiro tweeted. Senator Ted Cruz
hideous thneeds—“a Fine-Something- “Spotted Owl Tastes Like Chicken.” sought campaign donations: “Stand with
That-All-People-Need”—until there is Logging families took out ads in the Ted & Dr. Seuss against the cancel cul-
nothing left but one single seed. local newspaper. One said, “To teach our ture mob to claim your signed copy of
Like the long-ago banning of E. B. children that harvesting redwood trees Green Eggs and Ham! ”
White’s “Stuart Little,” by the New York is bad is not the education we need.” Meanwhile, groups of parents, not
Public Library, the rumpus about “The This year marks the fiftieth anniver- to say cancel-culture mobs, have been
Lorax” is at first bewildering. Dr. Seuss— assembling at school-board meetings
Theodor Geisel—deemed it his best to demand the removal of books from
book. Schools across the country as- classrooms and school libraries, often
signed it. Mrs. Pate’s class at the Pep- in districts that have been battling over
per Pike School, in Ohio, sent the au- mask and vaccination mandates. Book-
thor new endings. “I planted that seed,/It banning crusaders, waving the flag of
was so very dry,” Robby Price, a third “parental rights,” have particularly de-
grader, wrote. “Then all of a sudden,/ It cried books about American history and
grew 8 miles high.” racial injustice, and books that include
There were other Loraxes, too. In lesbian, gay, and trans characters. In at
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
1972, Christopher D. Stone, a law pro- least seven states, they’ve objected to
fessor at the University of Southern Cal- Maia Kobabe’s 2019 book, “Gender
ifornia, argued for granting trees a legal Queer: A Memoir.” Schools in Mis-
voice. “I am quite seriously proposing souri have pulled Alison Bechdel’s “Fun
that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, Home.” Glenn Youngkin’s campaign
rivers and other so-called ‘natural ob- for governor of Virginia believed this
jects,’” he wrote, in “Should Trees Have to be a winning issue. “When my son
Standing?,” an article that was cited, showed me his reading assignment, my
heart sunk,” a fretful mother says in a Our Daughters,” a much admired deputy ness of banning books, disagreeing only
Youngkin campaign ad, after discover director of the A.C.L.U. tweeted sup on which books to ban. In the year of
ing that her son, a highschool senior, port on his personal account for “stop the fatwa, the fuss over “The Lorax”
was reading the Pulitzer Prizewinning ping the circulation of this book and played out differently. The Laytonville
novel “Beloved,” by the Nobel laureate these ideas.” (He later deleted the tweet.) Unified School District convened a
Toni Morrison, in an A.P. English class. This summer, the American Booksell committee to consider the Baileys’ com
Progressive legislators, parents, and ers Association, a longtime sponsor of plaint. It voted to keep the book on the
school boards, too, have called for the Banned Books Week, whose theme this requiredreading list, with the superin
removal of books, including “The Ad year is “Books Unite Us, Censorship Di tendent arguing that the book isn’t about
ventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “To vides Us,” sent copies of Shrier’s book to the timber industry but about “greed
Kill a Mockingbird.” seven hundred and fifty bookstores, and and the depletion of a finite resource.”
No book has a right to be on a read then apologized: “This is a serious, vio Then the school board said that, if a
ing list. Teachers frequently change what lent incident that goes against ABA’s parent really had a problem with a read
they teach. Parents are likely to take an ends policies, values, and everything we ing assignment, that parent could fig
interest in what their children are read believe and support.”The apology proved ure out a substitute. “No one ever sug
ing. Booksellers decide what books to insufficient to many booksellers. “We’re gested that the book be banned,” Bill
sell. And pious attacks on books are very dealing with a historically white, cis or Bailey said. And Geisel told the Asso
often absurd. What’s new is that lately ganization in a white supremacist soci ciated Press that he didn’t believe that
some senior staff of organizations founded ety,” a member of the A.B.A.’s diversity no one should ever harvest a tree. “I live
on a commitment to freedom of the press equityandinclusion committee told in a wooden house,” he said. “I’m sitting
and freedom of expression appear to be Publishers Weekly. in a wooden chair.” His book was also
wavering on upholding those principles. The bookban battle isn’t about to printed on paper made from trees. And
Last year, when Target briefly stopped end anytime soon. And it’s a battle that so far, at least, it has resisted the Super
selling Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Dam conservatives will win if progressives AxeHacker.
age: The Transgender Craze Seducing agree with them about the righteous —Jill Lepore
CROWD-SOURCING DEPT. than thirtythree million (median con eby’s representative said, in a film dis
PARCHMENT tribution: $206.26). “I feel like I’m part tributed to prospective bidders.
of an organism!” a twentyeightyear On the third f loor, several of the
old contributor wearing a green fur group’s “core contributors”—the leaders
coat and leather sandals said, excitedly, of the leaderless organization, who prom
in the Sotheby’s lobby. “It’s fucking ised to return everyone’s money if the
awesome.” Nearby, a man named Sean group didn’t win—had assembled in a
Murray, dressed in a military jacket, climatecontrolled gallery to inspect the
dozen or so friends from the In white breeches, and a tricorne hat, held document, which was encased in glass.
A ternet gathered recently at Soth
eby’s in Manhattan to buy a first print
up a homemade sign reading “I’M BUY
ING THE CONSTITUTION.”
“It doesn’t look like whatever million
dollars it’s gonna go for. It’s just a piece
ing of the U.S. Constitution (estimated Another man walked up to Murray of parchment!” a software developer from
value: fifteen to twenty million dol and introduced himself: “I was wonder Brooklyn said. He wore a Fat Albert
lars). The group, who called themselves ing if anyone else would show up!” Mur buttondown and rainbow Pumas.
ConstitutionDAO, had just spent a ray looked down at his getup and said, “The letter ‘S’—it looks like an ‘F,’ ”
week raising millions of dollars on Twit “I gotta be different, right?” He laughed. a man in a tan hoodie said. “ ‘Blessings’
ter, TikTok, and Discord from anony “I’m glad it’s a reallife thing. You don’t looks like ‘Bluff ings!’”
mous screen names: recent immigrants, want to come out here and figure out it Across the room, Liliana Pinochet,
college dropouts, the greatgreatgreat was Twitter bots the whole time.” a seventyfiveyearold woman who had
greatgreatgreatgreatgrandson of The item the D.A.O. planned to bid just finished a cancer treatment at a
someone who fought in the American on that evening was one of only thirteen nearby hospital, asked the group what
Revolution. (The “DAO” in “Consti surviving first printings of the U.S. Con they would do with the Constitution.
tutionDAO” stands for “decentralized stitution. It belonged to Dorothy Gold “We’re talking to museums about
autonomous organization”—a leader man, whose late husband purchased it, where would be best to host it,” Nicole
less corporate structure that resembles in 1988, for a hundred and sixtyfive thou Ruiz, who wore a long plaid coat, said.
an online chat room with a bank ac sand dollars. The document—Sotheby’s She explained that the donors wouldn’t
count.) They raised four million in the Lot No. 1787—was typeset by David actually own the document, but would
first twentyfour hours. Then some Claypoole and John Dunlap, in Phila help determine its future. “The whole
one pitched in another four million, in delphia, on September 17, 1787. (Dunlap group gets to vote!” she said.
Ethereum’s currency. By the next eve also typeset the first printings of the “I’m glad it’s not going to private
ning, the project had gone viral: seven Declaration of Independence.) “It was hands,” Pinochet said. “It’s a pity when
teen thousand donors had given more a very laborintensive process,” a Soth things go to the banks.”
Upstairs, the group filed into the sale-
room, where, in a few hours, a Sotheby’s
1
THE BOARDS
“We did ‘Gemini’ together, playing
brother and sister,” Birney said.
PERFECT PITCH
rep would bid on their behalf by phone. “1978,” Turner added.
“To have access like this is insane,” Mac- “We’re still here,” Birney said.
Kenzie Burnett, a twenty-eight-year- “We’re still here, honey,” Turner said.
old tech C.E.O., said. “Still workin’. We did good.”
“It’s really funny to think about,” As she prepared to leave for the the-
Theo Bleier, a high-school student, said. atre, for a walk-through to check light-
“None of us are independently extremely ing, she reflected on several things that
wealthy—like, auction wealthy.” athleen Turner has one of the most annoy her: when a movie star like Meryl
At six, about thirteen thousand screen
names gathered online to watch the auc-
K recognizable voices in show busi-
ness: deep, booming, gallivanting be-
Streep steps into a stage actor’s signa-
ture part for a film (“I think Meryl’s great,
tion; another sixty or so assembled at a tween American and British pronunci- but I do mind that she takes roles,” she
co-working space in midtown for an ations, raspy as a cheese grater. When it said of Streep’s film “Doubt.” “Cherry
I.R.L. watch party. Robbie Heeger, the comes to singing, her stentorian timbre Jones should have had that film”), young
group’s designated representative, who technically makes her a baritone. “By agents (“I flew out to L.A. and sat in a
had never participated in a big auction, the time I got to high school,” she said room full of twentysomethings telling
scribbled, “W.G.B.T.C.”—“We’re gonna one recent Tuesday afternoon, holding me how wonderful I am, and one guy
buy the Constitution”—on a whiteboard. court at a back table at Joe Allen, in the says, ‘By the way, what have you done?’”),
“Hello? Hello?” he barked into his iPhone. theatre district, “the musical director put and people who try to butt into her act
The call with the Sotheby’s rep had just me in with the boys, which was fantas- (“One night when we were at the Car-
dropped. “What?” someone yelled. “Are tic.” The sixty-seven-year-old actress had
you fucking kidding me?” ventured to midtown—begrudgingly—
Two minutes later, Heeger’s phone from her roost in Tribeca to grab lunch
rang. “Let’s fucking do this!” he said. before heading to Town Hall, where, on
“Huzzah!” December 16th, she will put on a one-
The auctioneer started the bidding night-only command performance of
at ten million; within seconds, a Soth- her cabaret act, “Finding My Voice.” In
eby’s employee holding a black telephone the show, Turner croons such standards
receiver, who represented the hedge- as “I’d Rather Be Sailing” and “Sweet
fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, raised Kentucky Ham,” and recounts bawdy,
it to thirty million. (Griffin is said to behind-the-scrim stories from a life on
hate cryptocurrency.) the stage. Sometimes she’ll even throw
“Wait a minute,” Heeger wailed, flum- in a curse word—or ten.
moxed. “O.K., do thirty-one!” Turner—who was in head-to-toe
Griffin countered with thirty-two black, including New Balance sneakers—
million. A bidding war ensued: thirty- is the sort of woman who dresses simply
four million dollars . . . thirty-seven mil- but accessorizes with decadent bling. Her
lion dollars . . . thirty-eight million . . . milky-blue jade ring and gleaming ear- Kathleen Turner
“Get the fuck out of here!” Heeger rings were the work of the jewelry de-
shouted. “O.K., let’s make it seem like signer Helen Woodhull, who died in 2005. lyle, this guy in the audience started sing-
we’re thinking about it. At the last min- “I collect her,” Turner said. “For three of ing right along with me. The next one
ute, go for thirty-nine.” He paused. “No, my Broadway plays—‘Cat on a Hot Tin was coming up, and I said, ‘Excuse me,
forty!” He looked around the room apol- Roof ’ and ‘Indiscretions’ and ‘Who’s sir, do you know this one?’ He went, ‘No.’
ogetically. “I think we’re totally maxed.” Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’—we designed And I went . . . ‘Good ’ ”).
The auctioneer said, “We can bring pins for the original cast. And then we’d A person who does not annoy Turner:
the hammer up!” Heeger said, “Just let break the mold so no one else could ever her hairdresser of forty-some years, Jo-
it go!” Another fifty seconds passed be- have it again. That was when I was rich.” seph Piazza. “He now lives in New Jer-
fore Griffin placed the highest bid ever Turner poked at her chopped salad. sey, so I take the ferry to see him,” she
for a historic document: forty-one mil- “The most reliable thing here is the said. Piazza is the reason she started sing-
lion dollars, or roughly one-fifth of one burger,” she said. “But, well, you know.” ing professionally. He also cuts the hair
per cent of his net worth. As she was about to try another fork- of her director, Andy Gale. A few years
Heeger hung up the phone. Down- ful, the actor Reed Birney, also sixty- back, Piazza and Gale discussed Gale’s
stairs, a security guard asked what hap- seven, with a downy puff of silver hair, collaborating with Turner on a musical
pened. Someone said that their bid was swanned over. “Kathleen!” he cried. “How project. “I happen to have perfect pitch,”
about a million dollars short. “Next time, are you?” Turner said.
you gotta call me,” the guard said. “I “Reed and I did our first Broadway At Town Hall, Turner joined Gale,
could’ve loaned you that.” show together,” Turner said, extending a compact man in gray chinos with
—Adam Iscoe her hand. a short white beard and wire-framed
glasses. “How do we get onstage?” she most of the shoreline without a special said. His name was Binh, and he told
bellowed, eventually finding her way. As permit. But Orazem has been talking Orazem that he’d unsuccessfully applied
the two stood on the edge of the stage, with legislators in New Jersey about up- for a job at his company. (“I liked Binh,”
Gale said, “This place was built in 1921 dating its laws, and he hopes to convince Orazem said later. “He’s definitely going
by suffragists, and Margaret Sanger was New York, too. One warmish Saturday, to work for me.”)
on this stage at the beginning of what Orazem jumped on a Jet Ski at one of Orazem bought his first Jet Ski in
became Planned Parenthood.” He ex- the rental shops he owns, on the Hud- 2016, when he was living on Staten Is-
plained that the suffragists had wanted son River in Jersey City, to begin his own land, where he grew up, and was dating
no box seats. commute: he would be zipping around a dental technician who worked in Chel-
“If women ran the world, I swear to the city’s waterways to scout potential sea. The Ski, he found, offered a solu-
God it would be better,” Turner said. places where he could establish boat slips. tion to the unbridgeable distances of in-
Gale said, “You’re running this!” “Once you have that liberty on a Ski, it’s terborough relationships. He instructed
Turner didn’t care for the position- so enthralling,” he said. “Who wouldn’t his girlfriend to hop over a fence at Chel-
ing of the spotlight. “It’s a very severe want to transport themselves like that?” sea Piers after her shift. “I would throw
angle,” she said. “I wonder if we could First stop was North Cove Marina, up a waterproof bag, she would put all
put a spot down the center?” She moved at Brookfield Place, in the financial dis- her stuff in it, I’d throw her a life jacket,
around, marking out the positions of trict—a mile as the crow flies, two min- she’d hop down, and we would blast right
the grand piano, the bass player, and her utes and fifty seconds as the jet skis. No back,” he said. (They split up a year later.)
guitarist. On the night of the show, she need for coffee on this commute. The On to Brooklyn. Orazem rounded
will wear a “midnight-blue tunic and Hudson slapping your face will suffice. the tip of Manhattan. A Staten Island
flowing pants” (she had first asked her Orazem puttered into the marina. ferry honked authoritatively. Sea levels
designer for “heavy, heavy silk pajamas”) “Easy as that,” he said. “You’re at the rose. He reached Wallabout Channel,
and sing near a vase of red roses. front door of the World Trade Center.” near Williamsburg, and pointed to bar-
“It’s really a classy show,” Gale said. Two security guards on the promenade
The roses, Turner said, are a nod to began yelling at him; he swept noisily
one of her most beloved traditions. out. Next stop: Pier 25 Marina, in Tri-
“When you open in a show, your dress- beca, a three-minute ride. At the pier,
ing room looks like a funeral parlor,” she Orazem poked around, fantasizing about
said. “So many bouquets. By two weeks, the changes he would introduce. He ex-
they’re all dead. I like having roses. Al- plained how it would work: before em-
ways. So every week I have a standing barking, commuters would zip them-
order for two dozen roses for my dress- selves into “dry suits,” large rubber one-
ing room. Because I have seen no reason sies that scuba divers—ever the vanguard
1
to wait for someone to give me some.” of fashion—sometimes use. “You can
—Rachel Syme wear your work clothes underneath and
pop the neckpiece on,” he said, referring
HERE TO THERE DEPT. to a rubber collar. Special boots come
SPLASH with the suit. Gloves are optional. Wa-
terproof backpacks would protect brief-
cases and purses. Upon landing, a com-
muter could walk to work in the dry suit
or change at, say, a gym. “Better yet, a lot
of the times, marinas have showers,” Ora- Corey Orazem
zem said. “In the true capitalistic world,
uses move at a glacial pace, empty you keep all your work clothes there.” ren banks along the water. “This whole
B taxis are an endangered species,
Ubers cost a million bucks, biking is
Annual membership for use of a slip and
a changing facility: How about two or
canal is literally perfect,” he said. He no-
ticed buses nearby with Hebrew letter-
like wheeled circus combat, and the sub- three thousand dollars a year? ing. Orazem runs Jet Ski tours, and he
way turns into a water park when it A young man in a dinghy approached has many Hasidic clients. “I’ve never met
rains. Maybe private aquatic travel isn’t Orazem and told him that the marina people who are more motivated to come
so crazy? Corey Orazem, the thirty- was privately owned. “Over the sum- out in groups and go Jet-Skiing than
year-old owner of Jersey Jet Ski, thinks mer, we had a lot of people on Jet Skis the Hasids,” he said. “Sometimes I have
the future is a world in which office from New Jersey jumping over the fence,” to pull a yarmulke out of a Jet Ski pro-
workers Jet-Ski to their jobs. Say good- he said. peller, but it’s no problem.”
bye to gridlock and road rage (and per- Orazem seized the opportunity: “Do He pushed north, to Greenpoint.
haps to a general sense of environmen- you think that if there were slips here Fresh ideas were percolating. Jet Ski
tal responsibility). for people to keep Jet Skis, something taxis. A courier service. He whizzed off
Currently, New York City regulations organized—” and said, “Forget Uber Eats.”
make it illegal to park a Jet Ski along “That’s what I was thinking,” the man —Danyoung Kim
1
THE PICTURES
FAMILY DRAMAS
week after wrapping “Minari,” the

A movie that would cement his lead-
ing-man status, the actor Steven Yeun
found himself in New York, to film a
different family drama. “Minari” had
been shot in the wide-open spaces of
Oklahoma—a stand-in for Arkansas,
where Yeun’s character, a Korean immi- “Honestly, we were hoping for solitude up here
grant, attempts to establish a new, agri- after an eternity of solitude down there.”
cultural life for his young family. For
“The Humans,” an adaptation of Ste-
phen Karam’s Tony-winning play of the • •
same name, he would spend twenty-eight
days inside a grotty Chinatown duplex, the shit out of it.” In rehearsal for “The “The Walking Dead,” a ratings jugger-
reconstructed on a Brooklyn soundstage. Humans,” he and Feldstein discussed naut in which he would star for six sea-
“The dripping paint, the water stains, “the things that they find attractive about sons. After his departure, in 2016, he
just the patina of the place—we were each other, the things that they need began to attract critical attention for his
gawking at it the whole first week,” he from each other,” and the gulf between work with such auteurs as Bong Joon-ho,
recalled the other day. “The apartment their characters in terms of age, race, and Boots Riley, and Lee Chang-dong.
itself is obviously its own character.” class. “Minari” and “The Humans” are “Minari,” the culmination of that run,
In the film, Richard and Brigid (Yeun both about families on the brink—one premièred in January, 2020. “We got back
and Beanie Feldstein) have just moved struggling to gain a foothold in Amer- from Sundance, and then the world just
into the dank and under-furnished pre- ica, the other beginning to lose its grip— broke,” Yeun said. The film had won a
war, where flickering lights and omi- and Yeun was struck by “playing the pa- Grand Jury Prize, and would receive six
nous noises from upstairs add to the triarch in one and then the outsider in Oscar nominations, including one for
anxieties of Thanksgiving with Brigid’s the other.” Richard, a grad student with Yeun, as Best Actor. “All that happened
parents and sister. (The mother, visiting a trust fund, is the newcomer to whom under the cover of night,” he said. “The
from Scranton, frets about the view of old grievances and in-jokes are explained, Oscars were, like, this thing that I had
a dingy alleyway; Brigid, versed in the but his fresh eyes give him insight into to do while the pandemic was happen-
patois of city real estate, dubs it an “in- unspoken dynamics. ing.” His focus was on fatherhood: one
terior courtyard.”) “The Humans”—a Yeun was born in Seoul and raised child had remote learning to contend
study in cramped quarters, failing health, primarily in Michigan, where his own with, the other was still a toddler.
and financial precarity—was shot in late experience of the holiday was less fraught. He has also begun producing, in the
2019, but, when it premièred at the To- “I’m chillin’ during Thanksgiving,” he hope of opening the door to unknown
ronto film festival this fall, it was hailed said with a grin, noting that the dishes actors and directors from marginalized
as a Covid-era horror story. at his parents’ table ranged from cran- backgrounds. “The Walking Dead” re-
Yeun, who had on half-rim glasses berry sauce to kimchi. “Korean Ameri- mains the most-watched scripted show
and a gray sweater, was Zooming from can Thanksgiving is the best one!” He on cable, but Yeun has noticed a grow-
his house in Pasadena—a locale reas- came to acting after catching an improv ing openness to eclectic material. “It
suringly free from sweating walls and show in college, and found sketch com- feels nice that you can watch ‘Dragon
sickly lighting. Early in the pandemic, edy unexpectedly liberating: “That’s the Ball Z’ and then a P. T. Anderson film
he had turned a corner of his bedroom medium where physical limitations aren’t in the same day,” he said. Last month,
into a makeshift office, with books as big of a deal, you know? If you’re an he wrapped his first live-action project
stacked high on a desk and plants on a Asian American actor, you can play any- since the pandemic, a horror movie di-
windowsill; the closet doubles as a re- one.” At twenty-three, he moved to Chi- rected by Jordan Peele. The partnership,
cording studio for voice-over work. He cago and auditioned for Second City, he said, was “kismet.” He’d seen the same
has an easy charisma, apparent in his with an old Steve Carell sketch. He per- quality in Peele’s script as he had in
portrayal of loyal boyfriends and dis- formed with the company for a few years Karam’s: “I’m looking for the ones that
arming sociopaths alike. His approach (including a stint on a Norwegian cruise are speaking human.”
to character, he said, is always to “talk liner), moved to L.A., and was cast in —Alex Barasch
impossible for her to eat or drink. It’s
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS painful, but so is being thirteen.
All other middle schoolers on “PEN15”
GROWING PAINS
are played by adolescents: the popular
girls, the other outcasts, the unrequited
crushes. Erskine and Konkle don’t con-
The women behind the thirteen-year-olds of “PEN15.” vincingly pass among them, but that is
the point. Their junior-high burlesque
RACHEL SYME is a sight gag as well as the heart of the
series; more literally than most teen pa-
riahs, Maya and Anna have trouble fit-
ting in. The women were preparing to
shoot an episode from the show’s third
season in which their younger avatars
attend a popular girl’s bat-mitzvah party
at a country club. At about 11 A.M., they
entered a banquet hall inside the Pacific
Palms, where the party had been staged
in period-specific teenybopper style. A
camera crew was filming B-roll footage
of a d.j. playing the 1998 techno-pop
song “Blue (Da Ba Dee)” as a triad of
sequin-clad hype dancers did the Run-
ning Man on a laminate dance floor.
Teen-age extras and white-haired el-
ders in yarmulkes checked out a station
for making airbrushed T-shirts. The
women took their places, in a buffet line,
and the episode’s director, Dan Lon-
gino, called “Action.” Erskine, as Maya
(short, hyperactive, impish), jiggled her
body to the beat. Konkle, as Anna (tall,
laconic, slouched), stood behind her,
glowering, in the throes of a fatalistic
mood brought on, earlier in the episode,
by a lesson on the Holocaust.
“Oh, my God, this party is amazing,”
Erskine said.
“Who are these people, and why are
they here?” Konkle muttered.
t was a sizzling August morning in “I was made fun of for being hairy—I “I dunno, it’s Becca’s bat mitzvah,”
I 2021, but inside a hair-and-makeup
trailer parked at the Pacific Palms Re-
had a deep insecurity about that,” Er-
skine told me. Beside her, a hair styl-
Erskine replied.
“No, I mean, like, on Earth,” Kon-
sort, an hour east of Hollywood, Maya ist twisted strands of Konkle’s fine kle said.
Erskine and Anna Konkle were return- blond hair around the neck of a tiny “Oh, my God. Dippin’ Dots! Dip-
ing to the year 2000. The women, who curling iron, creating bouncy cork- pin’ Dots!” Erskine exclaimed suddenly,
are both thirty-four, are co-creators screws. The women then moved to an eying a station offering ice-cream pel-
and co-stars of “PEN15,” a Hulu series adjacent costume trailer to complete lets. Then she got the giggles and had
in which they play versions of them- their “PEN15” looks: for Maya, a black to stop. “Sorry, this is so bad,” she said.
selves as teen-agers, the thirteen-year- bowl-cut wig that resembles a giant She took a breath and regained her com-
old best friends and misfits Maya Ishii- porcini mushroom, similar to Erskine’s posure. “Na, Dippin’ Dots! Oh, my God.
Peters and Anna Kone. In the makeup haircut in fifth grade; for Anna, a set Oh, my God. O.K., I need that.” (To
trailer, Erskine sat in front of a vanity of protruding pop-in braces that mimic each other, Maya and Anna are Mai
mirror as a stylist wearing a face shield the ones Konkle had to wear—twice. and Na.) Erskine turned to look at Kon-
used a felt-tip pen to paint hundreds (“My orthodontist made a mistake,” kle, but then she broke again. Konkle,
of tiny strokes onto her upper lip, cre- she said.) The mouthpiece cuts into staying in character, said, “What? I’m
ating the illusion of a faint mustache. Konkle’s gums and makes it nearly glad you’re enjoying life.”
“PEN15” premièred in 2019 and be-
In their Hulu series, Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle relive seventh grade. came a cult hit. Erskine and Konkle made
22 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY ILONA SZWARC
the show with the writer and director junior-high mortifications come rush- plained, “Anna started crying, and then
Sam Zvibleman, who inspired the de- ing back: the time a boy pretended to members of the crew started crying. It
piction of Maya and Anna’s sweetly dopey ask me to a school dance as a cruel joke, opened up this flood of everyone sharing
male classmate Sam (Taj Cross). They or when a blond mean girl urged class- stories. That was a light-bulb moment.
are not the first TV creators to put their mates to hide the ketchup from me at We realized, Oh, this is what this show
characters through the trials of early ad- lunch, or when a friend announced that is.” Their young co-stars grew emotional,
olescence, but their show has little in I should really learn how to shave the too. Sami Rappoport, who plays Becca
common with upbeat nostalgia vehicles backs of my knees. Yet “PEN15” doesn’t (the scene’s Baby Spice), told me, “Film-
like “The Wonder Years” (1988-93) or appeal only to one demographic. When ing that was really hard. They didn’t ex-
even “Freaks and Geeks” (1999-2000), the show premièred, a few critics sniffed pect for it to hit as deep as it did.”
Judd Apatow’s beloved series about a that it seemed thin or gimmicky; Tim
pack of winsome nerds. Several show- Goodman, of the Hollywood Reporter, n “PEN15,” pubescence is a purgatory.
runners of the streaming era, freed from
the constraints of network television,
lamented “the repetitive sketch feel of
the whole thing.” But the majority were
I “The conceit of the show was that
they think they’re in seventh grade for-
have mined the raunchier side of tween- won over. Season 1 got an Emmy nom- ever,” Erskine told me. “It is this ex-
dom. The Netflix animated series “Big ination, and Season 2 got three more, in- treme microscope. It’s, you know, inter-
Mouth” rivals “PEN15” in its gloriously cluding for Outstanding Comedy Se- minable Hell.” The one solace Maya
candid approach to the arrival of puberty. ries. James Poniewozik, the Times Gen X and Anna have is that they are not stuck
But, where “Big Mouth” is characterized television critic, told me, “ ‘PEN15’ sounds there alone. At the end of the first sea-
by raucous, Technicolor flights of fancy like itself and nothing else—the mark son, a boy treats both girls to a brief,
(including memorably foulmouthed “hor- of great TV.” above-the-clothes trip to second base
mone monsters”), “PEN15” favors a pun- When I suggested to Erskine and inside a storage closet during a school
ishing, slightly off-kilter realism. Erskine Konkle that they were making a “cringe dance. (As with other scenes that re-
and Konkle told me that they were in- comedy,” Erskine said, “We don’t really quire intimacy between the women and
fluenced by such films as Todd Solondz’s write jokes,” adding, “Someone once their teen castmates, this was accom-
1995 black comedy, “Welcome to the called it a ‘traumedy,’ and that’s proba- plished using an adult stand-in and care-
Dollhouse,” about a seventh-grade girl bly the closest way to describe it.” In- ful camera angles.) At the beginning of
who endures, among many other cruel- stead, the creators and a small team of the next season, Maya and Anna learn
ties, the sobriquet Wiener Dog. The writers pore over their yearbooks and that the whole school is gossiping about
name “PEN15” comes from a schoolkid their juvenile correspondence. They trade their “threesome.” “So we’re desperate
prank that begins with a question: Do real-life tales of scarring first kisses and sluts, great,” Maya says.
you want to join the PEN15 Club? The frantic masturbation attempts. The more In real life, Erskine and Konkle didn’t
suckers who say yes get the word Sharp- painful the old bruises, the more inclined know each other in middle school. Er-
ied on their hands in such a way that it they are to apply pressure. Gabe Lied- skine grew up in Los Angeles and Kon-
looks like “PENIS.” “It felt appropriate to man, a co-showrunner for Season 1, told kle in Massachusetts. They first met in
name our show after the thing that re- me about one of the early scenes they the summer of 2008, when they were
jects get branded,” Erskine said. shot, in which Maya, Anna, and three N.Y.U. undergraduates studying abroad,
If you, like me, are a millennial and a of their classmates film a Spice Girls-in- in Amsterdam, as part of an experimen-
recovering social reject, watching Erskine spired video for a homework assignment. tal-theatre workshop. The curriculum
and Konkle relive seventh grade can feel The group decides that Maya, who is was intensive and eccentric—postmod-
alternately wistful and triggering. The half Japanese, should play Scary Spice ern dance, commedia dell’arte, mask
series’ title sequence is a rapid-fire slide (the only group member of color), and work. Erskine said that one of her early
show, set to Bikini Kill, of real snapshots that she should also be the other girls’ encounters with Konkle took place in a
from Erskine’s and Konkle’s youths. Each “servant”—“because you’re, like, tan,” bathroom before a “Brechtian fairy-tale
half-hour episode follows Maya and one girl explains. Maya plays along, storytelling” showcase. “We were both
Anna through pool parties, athletics, adopting an exaggerated accent and freaking out,” Erskine said. “I had diar-
school plays. The show pays loving and hunching over like Quasimodo to ex- rhea. We bonded over our I.B.S. issues.”
amusing attention to Y2K-era teen ob- tract a laugh from her more popular In Amsterdam, and then back at
sessions: choker necklaces, Sarah Mi- peers. During the shoot, Erskine did a N.Y.U., the pair became inseparable.
chelle Gellar, “Wild Things,” AOL In- few takes of the scene and then broke They discovered pleasing parallels in
stant Messenger. It also unsparingly down crying. “It scared the shit out of their biographies—both had fathers
depicts the psychosocial dynamics of ad- me,” Liedman said. “There were these named Peter and older half brothers;
olescence, when cliques and cattiness can literal twelve-year-old girls in Spice Girls both were the only children of their
whittle away at kids’—and especially costumes who have never heard of the mothers’ second marriages—and a shared
girls’—self-esteem. Watching the pilot Spice Girls, and it’s a heat wave, and attraction to telling, as Konkle put it,
episode, in which Maya learns that her Maya is heaving sobbing. I was, like, is “the most vulnerable stories, that most
name is scrawled on the wall of the boys’ it my responsibility, as a manager here, people would not tell at a party.” They
bathroom beneath the acronym UGIS— to shut down this set?” thought about collaborating on a proj-
Ugliest Girl in School—I felt my own But Erskine forged ahead. She ex- ect, but after college Konkle stayed in
New York, where she worked as a server and the brain.” At some point, Erskine thong, which Anna and Maya take turns
at Prune, the acclaimed Manhattan told me, Zvibleman said, “ ‘Forget pre- wearing to school. Konkle merely spent
restaurant, and Erskine eventually moved tending to be kids. Just be thirteen.’ ” as much time as possible away from
back to L.A., signing with a small tal- home, often at the house of her best
ent agency. She was landing auditions onkle’s most vivid experience of friend, Courtney. On “PEN15,” just be-
only every three months or so, she said,
adding, “And it was for, like, Chinese
K being thirteen was witnessing the
dissolution of her parents’ marriage. Her
fore Anna’s parents announce their di-
vorce, she spends two nights at the
Waitress No. 2.” mother and father had fought bitterly Ishii-Peterses’. At first, the girls run
By late 2012, Konkle was thinking throughout her childhood. In 2000, they through the house stuffed into the same
about applying to graduate school in art announced that they would divorce, but giant T-shirt, and chant, “We. Are. Sis-
therapy. On a whim, she took the negotiations took three ters.” But Maya soon grows weary of
a small role in a friend’s Web years in court. During that sharing her family and starts acting out.
series and then called Er- time, Peter, Konkle’s father, In one scene, Maya’s mother, Yuki, ten-
skine, convincing her that refused to move out of the derly combs Anna’s hair in the living
the time to make something family home.The house was room, ignoring her daughter’s petulance.
together was now or never. divided into two hostile ter- The part of Yuki is played by Er-
Then she drove to L.A. and ritories, with Konkle often skine’s mother, Mutsuko, whom I met
crashed on Erskine’s couch playing peacemaker. Her one morning this past summer at the
while they wrote, filmed, and mother, Janet Ryan, a re- family home, a nineteen-thirties bun-
starred in a Web series of tired nurse with a hippie- galow on a sleepy side street in Santa
their own.The project, which ish vibe, recalled that her Monica. When I entered, Peter, Maya’s
they funded through Kick- daughter seemed mature father, who is a dead ringer for Rob
starter, was a reality-TV spoof called beyond her years. One winter, the fam- Reiner, invited me to remove my shoes.
“MANA.” Few people saw it, but it resulted ily cat killed Konkle’s beloved hamster, On a shelf in the family room sat bob-
in three life-changing developments: the Chucky. “I collapsed on the carpet sob- blehead dolls of Erskine and Konkle—a
pair landed representation with the top bing,” Ryan said. “And then Anna comes gift from Erskine’s half brother, Taichi,
comedy talent agency Gersh, Konkle down the stairs and comforts me. She who is an editor on “PEN15.” Mutsuko,
moved to L.A. permanently, and they said, ‘It’s O.K., Mommy.’” Konkle told who goes by Mutsy, had never acted
found a third collaborator in Zvibleman, me, “I was so angry with my parents. before appearing on the show. Origi-
who had studied filmmaking at U.S.C. My mom would be, like, ‘But for you nally from the Tokyo suburbs, she first
and did set work on the Web series. wasn’t it nice having the family together?’ met Peter, a drummer in the renowned
Around then, another pair of best And I’m, like, ‘Um, no, are you insane?’” jazz-fusion band Weather Report, while
friends, Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, After years of estrangement, Konkle re- working as a translator for American
débuted their stoner comedy “Broad City,” connected with her father when he was artists touring Japan. Mutsy later mar-
on Comedy Central, and it became a run- given a diagnosis of lung cancer, in 2019. ried another man and had Taichi. When
away success. Suddenly, TV executives She became his caretaker during the that relationship ended, she moved with
were looking for the next big female duo. final months of his life. Taichi to the U.S., and they settled with
Konkle and Erskine landed several “gen- Anna’s parents’ divorce is in “PEN15,” Peter in California just before Erskine
eral meetings,” an industry term for open- at the end of Season 1, but the process was born.
ended pitch sessions. One of the ideas is nowhere near as long or as acrimo- As a mixed-race, middle-class fam-
they batted around was a sitcom called nious as the one Konkle experienced. ily, the Erskines stood out in Santa Mon-
“Fosters,” in which they’d play former For the scene in which Anna’s parents ica. From kindergarten through ninth
cult members hiding out by posing as break the news that they’re splitting up, grade, Erskine attended Crossroads, an
teen-agers in a foster family. (“This was though, Konkle adhered to the details élite private school known for educat-
before ‘Kimmy Schmidt’ came out,” Er- as she recalled them. She was sitting ing the children of the rich and famous.
skine said, referring to the Netflix com- cross-legged on the bedroom floor, fold- She did not quite qualify for a need-
edy that also follows a cult escapee.) In ing clothes. Her parents rapped gently based scholarship, and Peter often toured
order to generate plotlines for the show, on the door. They delivered the news a hundred and eighty days a year in
they would sit with Zvibleman and re- gingerly while her mom, named Kathy order to afford the tuition. By seventh
count tales from their own adolescence. in the show and played by Melora Wal- grade, Erskine told me, she was no lon-
“Maya talked about hiding her period ters, fidgeted with the rings on her finger close with her elementary-school
for a year, and Anna talked about shav- gers. “ ‘My parents told me they are get- friends: “I realized I’m not as rich as
ing her legs,” he recalled. “It was a mile ting a divorce’ is a trope, or it can sound them. I would beg my mom, ‘I need a
a minute, and their connection is so in- blunt and obvious,” Konkle said. “I Kate Spade bag.’” In the bat-mitzvah
tense. I said, ‘These stories are beyond wanted to show exactly what it felt like, episode of “PEN15,” Maya pleads with
fascinating to me.’” At N.Y.U., Erskine looked like, from my P.O.V.” her parents to buy a Swarovski neck-
and Konkle had studied the Grotowski Konkle’s avatar rebels against her lace as a gift for Becca. The same thing
method, which Konkle described as “the parents, smoking cigarettes and getting happened in real life, except the neck-
idea that physicality can inform feelings drunk and stealing another girl’s pink lace was from Tiffany. “My mom was,
like, ‘Let’s just give the traditional eigh- ing before a school dance while listen- Anna, Rappoport would apologize to
teen-dollar check.’ And I was, like, ‘You ing to Christina Aguilera’s “What a Girl Erskine and Konkle. (“She told us she
will fucking ruin my life if we give that.’” Wants.” In early 2016, they sent the video was in an anti-bullying club at school,”
Mutsy told me that when Erskine was to HBO, Showtime, FX, and Hulu, Konkle said.) At first, Konkle, Erskine,
about thirteen she started feuding reg- along with a pitch packet that looked and Zvibleman dreamed of featuring
ularly with her brother and her mother. like a fake yearbook. On the cover page guest stars like Eric André or Amy Se-
“Taichi said it was unbearable to be of their master copy, Konkle typed a daris playing the parts of other teen-
here,” Mutsy said. “Peter was often away, joke about pubescent nipples and a manage characters. In the end, they decided
and we’d be having these arguments. tra: “The thirteen year old inside me that the effect would be most powerful
Even the next-door boys said, ‘Shut up!’” lives at all times.” if Anna and Maya were the only kids
Mutsy and Peter walked me through FX told the women’s agent that the in school with wrinkles. “It just further
the family room to Erskine’s childhood show was “too millennial.” HBO was made us like aliens,” Konkle said.
bedroom, which is now a guest room interested, but only if the team would Erskine and Konkle starred in every
with soothing turquoise walls. In the keep making “short form” content. In a episode, wrote the majority of the scripts,
hallway outside hung a photograph of meeting with Showtime, Erskine pre- and were minutely involved in post-
Mutsy and a young Erskine in a hot sented a male executive with an old snap- production. Their closeness animated the
spring in the Japanese town of Hakone. shot of her with her father and joked series, but it also led to arguments and
During Erskine’s youth, the family went that she had masturbated right before hurt feelings. Every decision felt acutely
back to Japan about once a year, and in it was taken. “He was, like, ‘I’m starting personal. “I remember editing till three
their bathroom in Los Angeles Peter and to get nauseous,’” she told me, adding, in the morning, and we had to, like, lose
Mutsy installed a Japanese-style soak- “It was the worst pitch of all time for a second to make air,” Zvibleman said.
ing tub. It is roomy and pale blue, with me.” Hulu ultimately committed to a “And we would fight to the death over
a foldable top made of hinoki wood. As one-season contract, with a budget that which frame to take out.” They adopted
an adolescent who longed to fit in, Er- Zvibleman kiddingly described as language to soften how they communi-
skine struggled with her Japanese iden- “maybe the lowest you can make a show cated—instead of “bugging me,” Erskine
tity. “I think I had this belief that not for and still have a union crew.” would say “bumping me.” At one point,
being white or looking like other peo- After two years of development, cast- she sought advice from Rob McElhen-
ple around me made me wrong,” she told ing began in 2018. The team sought out ney, who writes and stars in the sitcom
me. But bathing with her mother in the young co-stars who projected natural- “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” with
Japanese tradition was a source of com- ism—“non-Disney, non-Nickelodeon,” his longtime friends Charlie Day and
fort. “We would have a really heated ar- as Liedman, the Season 1 showrunner, Glenn Howerton. McElhenney told her
gument, like her screaming ‘I hate you!,’ put it. Sami Rappoport was fourteen that he and his partners had resolved dis-
and Maya would say, ‘Mom, let’s just take and had never acted professionally be- putes with a simple, majority-wins voting
a bath,’” Mutsy recalled. Erskine included fore. Between takes of scenes in which system. For the “PEN15” team, the method
that ritual in “PEN15,” and in the upcom- Becca had to be mean to Maya and didn’t stick, though. “So we came up with
ing season she wrote and directed an ep-
isode that tells Yuki’s backstory. “Maya
kept calling me Mom on set,” Mutsy
joked. “I did not like that. ‘Mom, put
your hands here. Mom, do this dance.’ I
am a professional!” She added, chuck-
ling, “Even now, she reverts.”
n 2014, Erskine, Konkle, and Zvible-

I man wrote a sprawling, sixty-page
script for the first episode of “PEN15,”
which Konkle affectionately described
as “the pilot that went in the trash.”
Still, it piqued the interest of an exec-
utive at Party Over Here, a production
company created by the comedy collec-
tive the Lonely Island. At the time, Party
Over Here had a development deal with
Fox to sign new talent and fund short
proof-of-concept shoots. With a bud-
get of a hundred and fifty thousand dol-
lars, Erskine, Konkle, and Zvibleman
shot a fifteen-minute “PEN15” episode,
which featured Maya and Anna primp- “He’s leaving. It’s every man for himself!”
another rule: What’s your passion level?” In the summer of 2020, Erskine told agreed upon. Erskine was at her home
Erskine told me. “But then everyone Konkle that she and Angarano were in the Hollywood Hills, wearing a green
would say, ‘My passion level is a ten.’” trying for a baby. Konkle and her part- T-shirt and large over-the-ear head-
Konkle attributed much of the stress to ner, Alex Anfanger, had no immediate phones. Konkle, in a nearby office space,
the dynamics of working as a threesome: plans to start a family, but just a few was fiddling with a plastic tooth flosser,
“Someone was always on an island.” weeks later Konkle discovered that she but otherwise the mood of the proceed-
The team’s creative tensions seeped was pregnant. (Erskine’s son, Leon, and ings was businesslike. The women and
into Maya and Anna’s story lines, some- Konkle’s daughter, Essie, were born a the finale’s editor, Matt McBrayer, each
times to comedic effect. At the end of few months apart, in early 2021.) The occupied a small box at the top of the
Season 2, the girls prepare for a school creators had always envisaged “PEN15” screen. A larger box at the center held
production of an original, Tennessee ending after three seasons—at some the queued-up footage. McBrayer
Williams-esque play written by their point, they would all have to move past clicked a Play button, and they all
pompous drama teacher, who is played seventh grade—but COVID and its at- watched in silence. In the show’s final
by Erskine’s real-life partner, Michael tendant difficulties cemented their de- minutes, Maya and Anna are sitting on
Angarano. Maya is the star of the show cision. Zvibleman, meanwhile, decided the floor of Anna’s bedroom, gushing
and Anna is the stage manager, and they that he would leave the show. Erskine over their own baby photos. The scene
spend rehearsals jockeying for power. and Konkle would complete the final sticks to the year 2000 while making
“You guys are doing tech and we’re, like, season alone. (On the subject of Zvible- room for the girls’ future selves. When
doing art,” Maya tells her. “Tech is art,” man’s departure, the women assumed a it finished, a plunky tune from the
Anna snaps back. (Erskine told me, tone of cautious diplomacy. “We’re for- “PEN15” score played.
“Anna and I would improv how we ever grateful for how much Sam gave “I think this music’s so beautiful,”
would passive-aggressively give each of himself to the show,” they wrote in Erskine said. “ ’Cause it is so Maya
other notes, and it would make us crack a joint statement.) and Anna, but it feels so . . . full.” She
up.”) In a pivotal scene on the play’s In Season 3 (Hulu is calling it Sea- made a dramatic sweeping motion.
opening night, Maya forgets her lines son 2, Part 2; it premières on Decem- The others murmured in agreement.
and freezes. Anna makes a split-second ber 3rd), Maya and Anna are still a unit, Then Erskine brought up a lingering
decision to sprinkle glitter from the raf- but some of their most intense experi- editing quibble.
ters in order to feed her a cue. Suddenly, ences are taking place independently. “It’s the continuity of emotion from
as if in a dream, the teen actors and Maya’s cousin comes from Japan to stay the wide to Maya’s closeups that I feel
stagehands all begin to perform a bal- with the Erskines and is a hit with the like don’t quite match,” she said. “That’s
let in unison, with the audience sway- kids at school. “Why is being Japanese what it is that’s bumping me. I’m sort
ing along. Erskine and Zvibleman tend special on her but not on me?” Maya of getting emotional in the wide and
to favor cinematic flourishes, while Kon- asks. Anna’s grandmother moves into then when we cut to me I’m, like—”
kle prefers to preserve a more grounded the family home but soon dies, and She made a goofy face.
vérité feel. Many debates ended with Anna struggles with her grief. Maya McBrayer played the frames in ques-
Konkle “on an island.” But Zvibleman starts taking medication for A.D.D., tion again, and Konkle peered at the
said that he had lobbied both women and Anna gets a boyfriend, Steve (Chau screen.
to include this fantasy sequence of Long). Eventually, the girls decide to “It’s so slight to me,” she said, pinch-
coöperative harmony. “Our hypersensi- run away from home together but— ing her fingers to indicate something
tivity to each other is what makes the spoiler—they don’t even make it out of very small. “I hear you. I think the per-
process hard,” Erskine said of Konkle. town. At first, Erskine and Konkle had formance tracks. But you should ob-
“But it’s also what lends itself to our different ideas for how to end the se- viously try anything you want.” Her
chemistry. We alchemize it in a way that ries. Erskine proposed that in the final supportiveness sounded the slightest
is the soul of the show.” scene they smash-cut ahead twenty bit effortful.
years, to a houseparty that Maya and Erskine and McBrayer consulted. Were
hen the pandemic arrived, the Anna are attending. They are adults there any other frames to choose from?
W trio were in the process of shoot-
ing Season 2. Production shut down,
now—no more bowl cut, no more braces.
“And you don’t hear anything, it’s just
While they went back and forth, Kon-
kle stood up and disappeared from view.
and they converted one episode—the music,” Erskine said. “Anna looks and “Guys, I’m so sorry to do this,” she said a
story of a girls’ trip to Florida with An- she sees Maya across the room, and they few seconds later, reëntering the frame.
na’s dad—into an animated special that have this shared connection. And you “But Essie is tired, and she needs milk.”
Konkle directed remotely. They also don’t know, did they come together?” “All right. Well, let’s call it,” Erskine
pursued their own projects. Konkle sold Erskine couldn’t sell Konkle on the said. “I mean, it’s a beautiful last scene.”
a memoir to Random House about her scene’s ambiguity. “Anna hated the idea Konkle put her chin in her palm and
parents’ divorce, tentatively titled “The of them growing apart,” Erskine said. pushed her face close to the screen. “Yeah,
Sane One.” Erskine shot a small role In October, Erskine and Konkle al- it kills me,” she said, and her eyes darted
in an upcoming “Star Wars” series and lowed me to observe them at work in off to the side.
booked a few bigger acting jobs that a virtual screening room as they wrapped After a second, Erskine said, “It kills
she is “not yet at liberty to talk about.” up the final scene that they ultimately me, too.” 
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club in droves, asking if Killer was going
SHOUTS & MURMURS on. It wasn’t bad for my social life, ei-
ther. No sooner would I finish a set than
there would be half a dozen women at
the bar, trying to talk to me. “Kill me!
Kill me!” they would pant. I would
choose two and off we’d go. One par-
ticular night, the husbands showed up.
(I had no idea they were married—
swear to God!) Fortunately, my father
taught me how to box when I was a
kid, and there’s no doubt I could’ve
turned professional if comedy hadn’t
called me. In any case, I was not to be
trifled with. I calmly explained this to
both husbands, but they were not im-
pressed. Two minutes later, they were
lying flat out on the sidewalk, where-
upon their wives and I hopped into a
cab and I did another set across town.
When it was over, I bought a round of
drinks for everyone, even though I didn’t
have a penny to my name. (Interesting
stuff, right? Hope it’s useful. Either way,
I’m good—your call.)
There wasn’t much money to be
made in standup back then, so I sup-
ported my fledgling comedy career by
working as a tour guide at the Central
Park Zoo during the day. I’ve always
had a deep connection with animals
and I thought that would be the per-
fect job for me.
And it was, until some kid was ad-
NOTES FOR MY BIOGRAPHER

miring the polar bear and decided to
jump the railing to get a closer look. I
was in the middle of giving a tour when
BY LARRY DAVID I heard screams coming from the kid’s
parents and raced over there. The boy
here are many things about me that Not sure how much time should be was on the ground in a state of shock,
T I’m sure might be of interest to read-
ers. Things I’ve never really told anyone.
given to my standup years, but I’ve
thought of a few stories that might be
as the polar bear hovered over him, about
to attack. As luck would have it, a few
I’ve always been a private person, but I worth mentioning. There was one night months prior I’d attended a lecture at
wanted to make sure I got a few things at the Improv when I made a woman the New School by one of the world’s
down in writing, just in case anything sitting in the front row laugh so hard foremost Ursus authorities, Dr. Meyer
happens to me—or before I forget! that she went into convulsions and Dusenberry, who explained that if we
Like, here’s something: People might eventually lost consciousness. An am- were ever face to face with a bear we
be surprised to learn that I’m a speed bulance had to be called, and she was should create a cacophony. Without a
reader. I took a course when I was a kid, taken to Roosevelt Hospital. It was second to lose, I grabbed the lid of a
and one would be hard pressed to name touch and go there for a while, but hot-dog pot from a nearby Sabrett’s
a book I haven’t read. Books are my thankfully she pulled through. I visited cart, leaped over the fence, and franti-
constant companions. Like, last year, I her the next day with the best bouquet cally rattled the lid against the bars until
went to Turks and Caicos over Christ- of flowers that New York had to offer the bear retreated. Then I slung the kid
mas and read “The Count of Monte and humbly stood by while she told over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry
Cristo” on the way there and “Anna the nurse how “damn funny” I was. (learned from my years as a volunteer
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
Karenina” on the way back. I’m glad I Pretty embarrassing, but what choice with the F.D.N.Y.) and returned the
read them in that order. It might have did I have? youngster to his grateful parents. They
ruined my vacation otherwise! So, you From that point on, everyone started offered me a huge reward, but I de-
know, stuff like that. calling me Killer. People came to the clined, saying that my reward was see-
ing their happy faces. No amount of distance of the leader, I couldn’t ignore ADVERTISEMENT
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money in the world could top that! what was taking place. I made a sharp
I kept in touch with the boy through- detour to my right and slithered through
out his youth, and, after his parents lost the crowd. When I arrived at the store, FIND OUT MORE ABOUT NEW PRODUCTS AND
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all their money in a Ponzi scheme, I the robber was brandishing a gun at the
put him through college and medical terrified jeweller while emptying the
school. Today, he’s on the verge of a contents of the case into a cloth sack. I
monumental cancer-research break- proceeded to sneak up behind the thief,
through and is slated to appear on an karate-chop his arm, and render him
upcoming cover of Time. I told him I unconscious with a sleeper hold that I
preferred to remain anonymous in the picked up from watching Chief Jay
article. (You don’t have to include this Strongbow in a wrestling match on TV.
in the book, but, if you want to, I guess Then I handed the gun to the jeweller,
there’s nothing I can do about it.) told him to call the police, and added
People always ask me what I would’ve that, if the robber were to wake up, he
MAKE 2021 THE YEAR YOU STOP
done had I not become a comedian. should shoot him if he made a move. STRUGGLING WITH ADDICTION
Besides the aforementioned stints at Mission accomplished, I made my way
At McLean, you’ll learn healthy coping
prizefighting and animal husbandry, back to the race and still managed to skills and address underlying challenges,
I was also a child prodigy at the piano. finish twentieth. There was no doubt in such as depression or anxiety.
By the time I was eight, I was play- anyone’s mind that, had I not foiled the 877.313.2241
ing Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” So- robbery, I would’ve easily placed in the MCLEAN.ORG
nata No. 29 in B-Flat Major flawlessly. top five, or maybe even won. (Life’s funny.
There’s no telling how far I could’ve Bought a new watch today and was re-
gone, but my budding career as a vir- minded of that story for the first time
tuoso ended when my “friend” Frenchie in years. Can’t think of any reason that
dropped a bowling ball on my foot. It you wouldn’t use it, unless you don’t want
broke my third and fifth metatarsal people to know the truth. News flash!
bones. I lost all proficiency with the There’s more to me than just jokes!)
pedals, and my tone was never the same. I entered the marathon again the
As I look back on that incident, what’s following year and thought for sure that
most galling to me is that I was only this time I’d sweep the chips, but two WSJWINE
two strikes away from a perfect game days before the race I was contacted by Thousands rely on WSJwine to drink
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years later, I ran into Frenchie at Yan- available in Romania, and she was mine yourself and save $125: Uncork our
kee Stadium and accidentally dropped if I could get there in twenty-four hours. Top 12 Holiday Wines for $69.99
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But the universe works in mysteri- thon, I couldn’t pass up this amazing CODE: ACCG015
ous ways, because the day after my bowl- opportunity. For years, I’d longed to
ing-lane encounter with Frenchie I at- adopt a child. I had so much to give, so
tended a podiatry convention (by then much knowledge to impart. That night,
I’d become obsessed with the intricate I was off to Romania. When I returned
bone structure of the human foot), where home, it was with a beautiful, sightless
I met a doctor who told me that the little girl named Natasha, whom I re-
simple act of running might be the best named Jill. She was six years old and
thing for my injury. Soon I was pound- didn’t speak a word of English, but, given
ing the pavement nearly thirty miles a my proficiency with languages, I was
week, and, before long, not only was I fluent in Romanian within five weeks. CAMP BALLIBAY
playing the piano again but I had signed Tragically, after a few months, Jill’s birth A summer haven for young artists
up for the New York City Marathon. mother showed up and begged to take and different-thinking kids since 1964.
It was my first race, but clearly I had a her child back. How could I deprive a Safe, inclusive, and diverse.
No phones or social media.
gift for distance running, because, after mother of her little girl? And so, as dif-
570.746.3223.
eighteen miles, I found myself in fifth ficult as it was, I gave Jill up. I still write
THE-ARTS-CAMP.COM
place, only an eighth of a mile behind to her every day in Braille and make
the leader. the trek to Bucharest annually. She’s the
We were approaching the Queens- love of my life.
boro Bridge when, for some reason, I So these are just a few memories—
turned to my right and, behind the crowd, yours to use as you see fit. Just know @NEWYORKERPROMO
I noticed a holdup of a jewelry store in that there’s certainly a lot more where
progress. Even though I was in striking they came from! 
thinking about walking around his
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY house. In the scanner control room, a
monitor displayed a cross-section of Pa-
HEAD SPACE
tient 23’s brain. As different areas con-
sumed blood oxygen, they shimmered
red, then bright orange. Monti knew
Researchers are pursuing an age-old question: What is a thought? where to look to spot the yes and the
no signals.
BY JAMES SOMERS He switched on the intercom and ex-
plained the system to Patient 23. Then
ne night in October, 2009, a young maps of brain activity. Picking out signs he asked the first question: “Is your fa-
O man lay in an fMRI scanner in
Liège, Belgium. Five years earlier, he’d
of consciousness amid the swirl seemed
nearly impossible. But, through trial and
ther’s name Alexander?”
The man’s premotor cortex lit up. He
suffered a head trauma in a motorcycle error, Owen’s group had devised a clever was thinking about tennis—yes.
accident, and since then he hadn’t spo- protocol. They’d discovered that if a per- “Is your father’s name Thomas?”
ken. He was said to be in a “vegetative son imagined walking around her house Activity in the parahippocampal gy-
state.” A neuroscientist named Martin there was a spike of activity in her par- rus. He was imagining walking around
Monti sat in the next room, along with ahippocampal gyrus—a finger-shaped his house—no.
a few other researchers. For years, Monti area buried deep in the temporal lobe. “Do you have any brothers?”
and his postdoctoral adviser, Adrian Imagining playing tennis, by contrast, Tennis—yes.
Owen, had been studying vegetative pa- activated the premotor cortex, which sits “Do you have any sisters?”
tients, and they had developed two con- on a ridge near the skull. The activity House—no.
It isn’t so much that brain scans have improved—it’s that we’ve got better at reading them.
troversial hypotheses. First, they believed was clear enough to be seen in real time “Before your injury, was your last va-
that someone could lose the ability to with an fMRI machine. In a 2006 study cation in the United States?”
move or even blink while still being con- published in the journal Science, the re- Tennis—yes.
scious; second, they thought that they searchers reported that they had asked The answers were correct. Aston-
had devised a method for communicat- a locked-in person to think about ten- ished, Monti called Owen, who was
ing with such “locked-in” people by de- nis, and seen, on her brain scan, that she away at a conference. Owen thought
tecting their unspoken thoughts. had done so. that they should ask more questions.
In a sense, their strategy was simple. With the young man, known as Pa- The group ran through some possibil-
Neurons use oxygen, which is carried tient 23, Monti and Owen were taking ities. “Do you like pizza?” was dismissed
through the bloodstream inside mole- a further step: attempting to have a con- as being too imprecise. They decided to
cules of hemoglobin. Hemoglobin conversation. They would pose a question probe more deeply. Monti turned the
tains iron, and, by tracking the iron, the and tell him that he could signal “yes” intercom back on.
magnets in fMRI machines can build by imagining playing tennis, or “no” by “Do you want to die?” he asked.
30 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY LAURA EDELBACHER
For the first time that night, there coding. Norman works at the Princeton see how these points were interrelated
was no clear answer. Neuroscience Institute, which is housed and encoded by neurons. By cracking the
That winter, the results of the study in a glass structure, constructed in 2013, code, they were beginning to produce an
were published in The New England Jour- that spills over a low hill on the south inventory of the mind. “The space of pos-
nal of Medicine. The paper caused a sen- side of campus. P.N.I. was conceived as sible thoughts that people can think is
sation. The Los Angeles Times wrote a a center where psychologists, neurosci- big—but it’s not infinitely big,” Norman
story about it, with the headline “Brains entists, and computer scientists could said. A detailed map of the concepts in
of Vegetative Patients Show Life.” blend their approaches to studying the our minds might soon be within reach.
Owen eventually estimated that twenty mind; M.I.T. and Stanford have invested
per cent of patients who were presumed in similar cross-disciplinary institutes. At orman invited me to watch an ex-
to be vegetative were actually awake. This
was a discovery of enormous practical
P.N.I., undergraduates still participate in
old-school psych experiments involving
N periment in thought decoding. A
postdoctoral student named Manoj
consequence: in subsequent years, through surveys and flash cards. But upstairs, in Kumar led us into a locked basement
painstaking fMRI sessions, Owen’s group a lab that studies child development, tod- lab at P.N.I., where a young woman was
found many patients who could interact dlers wear tiny hats outfitted with infra- lying in the tube of an fMRI scanner. A
with loved ones and answer questions red brain scanners, and in the basement screen mounted a few inches above her
about their own care. The conversations the skulls of genetically engineered mice face played a slide show of stock images:
improved their odds of recovery. Still, are sliced open, allowing individual neu- an empty beach, a cave, a forest.
from a purely scientific perspective, there rons to be controlled with lasers. A server “We want to get the brain patterns
was something unsatisfying about the room with its own high-performance that are associated with different sub-
method that Monti and Owen had de- computing cluster analyzes the data gen- classes of scenes,” Norman said.
veloped with Patient 23. Although they erated from these experiments. As the woman watched the slide show,
had used the words “tennis” and “house” Norman, whose jovial intelligence and the scanner tracked patterns of activa-
in communicating with him, they’d had unruly beard give him the air of a high- tion among her neurons. These patterns
no way of knowing for sure that he was school science teacher, occupies an of- would be analyzed in terms of “voxels”—
thinking about those specific things. They fice on the ground floor, with a view of areas of activation that are roughly a
had been able to say only that, in response a grassy field. The bookshelves behind cubic millimetre in size. In some ways,
to those prompts, thinking was happen- his desk contain the intellectual DNA the fMRI data was extremely coarse:
ing in the associated brain areas. “Whether of the institute, with William James next each voxel represented the oxygen con-
the person was imagining playing ten- to texts on machine learning. Norman sumption of about a million neurons,
nis, football, hockey, swimming—we don’t explained that fMRI machines hadn’t and could be updated only every few sec-
know,” Monti told me recently. advanced that much; instead, artificial onds, significantly more slowly than neu-
During the past few decades, the state intelligence had transformed how scien- rons fire. But, Norman said, “it turned
of neuroscientific mind reading has ad- tists read neural data. This had helped out that that information was in the data
vanced substantially. Cognitive psychol- shed light on an ancient philosophical we were collecting—we just weren’t being
ogists armed with an fMRI machine can mystery. For centuries, scientists had as smart as we possibly could about how
tell whether a person is having depres- dreamed of locating thought inside the we’d churn through that data.”The break-
sive thoughts; they can see which con- head but had run up against the vexing through came when researchers figured
cepts a student has mastered by compar- question of what it means for thoughts out how to track patterns playing out
ing his brain patterns with those of his to exist in physical space. When Erasis- across tens of thousands of voxels at a
teacher. By analyzing brain scans, a com- tratus, an ancient Greek anatomist, dis- time, as though each were a key on a
puter system can edit together crude sected the brain, he suspected that its piano, and thoughts were chords.
reconstructions of movie clips you’ve many folds were the key to intelligence, The origins of this approach, I learned,
watched. One research group has used but he could not say how thoughts were dated back nearly seventy years, to the
similar technology to accurately describe packed into the convoluted mass. In the work of a psychologist named Charles
the dreams of sleeping subjects. In an- seventeenth century, Descartes suggested Osgood. When he was a kid, Osgood re-
other lab, scientists have scanned the that mental life arose in the pineal gland, ceived a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus as a
brains of people who are reading the J. D. but he didn’t have a good theory of what gift. Poring over the book, Osgood re-
Salinger short story “Pretty Mouth and might be found there. Our mental worlds called, he formed a “vivid image of words
Green My Eyes,” in which it is unclear contain everything from the taste of bad as clusters of starlike points in an immense
until the end whether or not a character wine to the idea of bad taste. How can space.” In his postgraduate days, when
is having an affair. From brain scans alone, so many thoughts nestle within a few his colleagues were debating how cogni-
the researchers can tell which interpre- pounds of tissue? tion could be shaped by culture, Osgood
tation readers are leaning toward, and Now, Norman explained, researchers thought back on this image. He won-
watch as they change their minds. had developed a mathematical way of un- dered if, using the idea of “semantic space,”
I first heard about these studies from derstanding thoughts. Drawing on in- it might be possible to map the differ-
Ken Norman, the fifty-year-old chair of sights from machine learning, they con- ences among various styles of thinking.
the psychology department at Princeton ceived of thoughts as collections of points Osgood conducted an experiment. He
University and an expert on thought de- in a dense “meaning space.” They could asked people to rate twenty concepts on
People tend to employ lots of names for
the same thing. This was an obstacle for
computer users, who accessed programs
by typing words on a command line.
George Furnas, who worked in the or-
ganization’s human-computer-interac-
tion group, described using the compa-
ny’s internal phone book. “You’re in your
office, at Bell Labs, and someone has
stolen your calculator,” he said. “You start
putting in ‘police,’ or ‘support,’ or ‘theft,’
and it doesn’t give you what you want.
Finally, you put in ‘security,’ and it gives
you that. But it actually gives you two
things: something about the Bell Sav-
ings and Security Plan, and also the thing
you’re looking for.” Furnas’s group wanted
to automate the finding of synonyms for
commands and search terms.
They updated Osgood’s approach. In-
stead of surveying undergraduates, they
used computers to analyze the words in
about two thousand technical reports.
The reports themselves—on topics rang-
ing from graph theory to user-interface
• • design—suggested the dimensions of the
space; when multiple reports used sim-
ilar groups of words, their dimensions
fifty different scales. The concepts ranged situated in what was known as high- could be combined. In the end, the Bell
widely: BOULDER, ME, TORNADO, dimensional space. Many concepts had Labs researchers made a space that was
MOTHER. So did the scales, which were similar locations on multiple axes: kind- more complex than Osgood’s. It had a
defined by opposites: fair-unfair, hot-cold, cruel and honest-dishonest, for instance. few hundred dimensions. Many of these
fragrant-foul. Some ratings were diffi- Osgood combined these dimensions. dimensions described abstract or “latent”
cult: is a TORNADO fragrant or foul? But Then he looked for new similarities, and qualities that the words had in com-
the idea was that the method would re- combined dimensions again, in a pro- mon—connections that wouldn’t be ap-
veal fine and even elusive shades of sim- cess called “factor analysis.” parent to most English speakers. The re-
ilarity and difference among concepts. When you reduce a sauce, you meld searchers called their technique “latent
“Most English-speaking Americans feel and deepen the essential flavors. Osgood semantic analysis,” or L.S.A.
that there is a difference, somehow, be- did something similar with factor anal- At first, Bell Labs used L.S.A. to cre-
tween ‘good’ and ‘nice’ but find it diffi- ysis. Eventually, he was able to map all ate a better internal search engine. Then,
cult to explain,” Osgood wrote. His sur- the concepts onto a space with just three in 1997, Susan Dumais, one of Furnas’s
veys found that, at least for nineteen-fif- dimensions. The first dimension was colleagues, collaborated with a Bell Labs
ties college students, the two concepts “evaluative”—a blend of scales like good- cognitive scientist, Thomas Landauer, to
overlapped much of the time. They di- bad, beautiful-ugly, and kind-cruel. The develop an A.I. system based on it. After
verged for nouns that had a male or fe- second had to do with “potency”: it con- processing Grolier’s American Academic
male slant. MOTHER might be rated nice solidated scales like large-small and Encyclopedia, a work intended for young
but not good, and COP vice versa. Os- strong-weak. The third measured how students, the A.I. scored respectably on
good concluded that “good” was “some- “active” or “passive” a concept was. Os- the multiple-choice Test of English as a
what stronger, rougher, more angular, and good could use these three key factors Foreign Language. That year, the two re-
larger” than “nice.” to locate any concept in an abstract space. searchers co-wrote a paper that addressed
Osgood became known not for the Ideas with similar coördinates, he ar- the question “How do people know as
results of his surveys but for the method gued, were neighbors in meaning. much as they do with as little informa-
he invented to analyze them. He began tion as they get?” They suggested that
by arranging his data in an imaginary or decades, Osgood’s technique found our minds might use something like
space with fifty dimensions—one for
fair-unfair, a second for hot-cold, a third
F modest use in a kind of personality
test. Its true potential didn’t emerge until
L.S.A., making sense of the world by re-
ducing it to its most important differ-
for fragrant-foul, and so on. Any given the nineteen-eighties, when researchers ences and similarities, and employing this
concept, like TORNADO, had a rating on at Bell Labs were trying to solve what distilled knowledge to understand new
each dimension—and, therefore, was they called the “vocabulary problem.” things. Watching a Disney movie, for in-
stance, I immediately identify a charac- At the Princeton lab, the young woman Norman showed the class a series of
ter as “the bad guy”: Scar, from “The Lion watched the slide show in the scanner. slides. One described a 2017 study by
King,” and Jafar, from “Aladdin,” just seem With each new image—beach, cave, for- Christopher Baldassano, one of his post-
close together. Perhaps my brain uses fac- est—her neurons fired in a new pattern. docs, in which people watched an epi-
tor analysis to distill thousands of attri- These patterns would be recorded as vox- sode of the BBC show “Sherlock” while
butes—height, fashion sense, tone of els, then processed by software and trans- in an fMRI scanner. Baldassano’s guess
voice—into a single point in an abstract formed into vectors. The images had been going into the study was that some voxel
space. The perception of bad-guy-ness chosen because their vectors would end patterns would be in constant flux as the
becomes a matter of proximity. up far apart from one another: they were video streamed—for instance, the ones
In the following years, scientists ap- good landmarks for making a map. involved in color processing. Others
plied L.S.A. to ever-larger data sets. In Watching the images, my mind was tak- would be more stable, such as those rep-
2013, researchers at Google unleashed a ing a trip through thought space, too. resenting a character in the show. The
descendant of it onto the text of the whole study confirmed these predictions. But
World Wide Web. Google’s algorithm he larger goal of thought decoding Baldassano also found groups of voxels
turned each word into a “vector,” or point,
in high-dimensional space. The vectors
T is to understand how our brains
mirror the world. To this end, research-
that held a stable pattern throughout
each scene, then switched when it was
generated by the researchers’ program, ers have sought to watch as the same ex- over. He concluded that these consti-
word2vec, are eerily accurate: if you take periences affect many people’s minds si- tuted the scenes’ voxel “signatures.”
the vector for “king” and subtract the vec- multaneously. Norman told me that his Norman described another study, by
tor for “man,” then add the vector for Princeton colleague Uri Hasson has Asieh Zadbood, in which subjects were
“woman,” the closest nearby vector is found movies especially useful in this re- asked to narrate “Sherlock” scenes—
“queen.” Word vectors became the basis gard. They “pull people’s brains through which they had watched earlier—aloud.
of a much improved Google Translate, thought space in synch,” Norman said. The audio was played to a second group,
and enabled the auto-completion of sen- “What makes Alfred Hitchcock the mas- who’d never seen the show. It turned out
tences in Gmail. Other companies, inter of suspense is that all the people who that no matter whether someone watched
cluding Apple and Amazon, built simi- are watching the movie are having their a scene, described it, or heard about it,
lar systems. Eventually, researchers realized brains yanked in unison. It’s like mind the same voxel patterns recurred. The
that the “vectorization” made popular by control in the literal sense.” scenes existed independently of the show,
L.S.A. and word2vec could be used to One afternoon, I sat in on Norman’s as concepts in people’s minds.
map all sorts of things. Today’s facial-rec- undergraduate class “fMRI Decoding: Through decades of experimental
ognition systems have dimensions that Reading Minds Using Brain Scans.” As work, Norman told me later, psychologists
represent the length of the nose and the students filed into the auditorium, setting have established the importance of scripts
curl of the lips, and faces are described their laptops and water bottles on tables, and scenes to our intelligence. Walking
using a string of coördinates in “face Norman entered wearing tortoiseshell into a room, you might forget why you
space.” Chess A.I.s use a similar trick to glasses and earphones, his hair dishevelled. came in; this happens, researchers say, be-
“vectorize” positions on the board. The He had the class watch a clip from cause passing through the doorway brings
technique has become so central to the “Seinfeld” in which George, Susan (an one mental scene to a close and opens
field of artificial intelligence that, in 2017, another. Conversely, while navigating a
a new, hundred-and-thirty-five-million- new airport, a “getting to the plane” script
dollar A.I. research center in Toronto was knits different scenes together: first the
named the Vector Institute. Matthew ticket counter, then the security line, then
Botvinick, a professor at Princeton whose the gate, then the aisle, then your seat.
lab was across the hall from Norman’s, And yet, until recently, it wasn’t clear what
and who is now the head of neuroscience you’d find if you went looking for “scripts”
at DeepMind, Alphabet’s A.I. subsidiary, and “scenes” in the brain.
told me that distilling relevant similarities In a recent P.N.I. study, Norman said,
and differences into vectors was “the secret people in an fMRI scanner watched var-
sauce underlying all of these A.I. advances.” N.B.C. executive he is courting), and ious movie clips of characters in airports.
In 2001, a scientist named Jim Haxby Kramer are hanging out with Jerry in his No matter the particulars of each clip,
brought machine learning to brain im- apartment. The phone rings, and Jerry the subjects’ brains all shimmered through
aging: he realized that voxels of neural answers: it’s a telemarketer. Jerry hangs the same series of events, in keeping with
activity could serve as dimensions in a up, to cheers from the studio audience. boundary-defining moments that any of
kind of thought space. Haxby went on “Where was the event boundary in us would recognize. The scripts and the
to work at Princeton, where he collabo- the clip?” Norman asked. The students scenes were real—it was possible to de-
rated with Norman. The two scientists, yelled out in chorus, “When the phone tect them with a machine. What most
together with other researchers, concluded rang!” Psychologists have long known interests Norman now is how they are
that just a few hundred dimensions were that our minds divide experiences into learned in the first place. How do we
sufficient to capture the shades of simi- segments; in this case, it was the phone identify the scenes in a story? When we
larity and difference in most fMRI data. call that caused the division. enter a strange airport, how do we know
intuitively where to look for the security what Norman described: a system that struct video montages from brain scans—
line? The extraordinary difficulty of such could decode novel sentences that sub- as you watch a video in the scanner, the
feats is obscured by how easy they feel— jects read silently to themselves. The sys- system pulls up frames from similar You-
it’s rare to be confused about how to make tem learned which brain patterns were Tube clips, based only on your voxel pat-
sense of the world. But at some point ev- evoked by certain words, and used that terns—suggested that one group of peo-
erything was new. When I was a toddler, knowledge to guess which words were im- ple interested in decoding were Silicon
my parents must have taken me to the plied by the new patterns it encountered. Valley investors. “A future technology
supermarket for the first time; the fact The work at Princeton was funded by would be a portable hat—like a thinking
that, today, all supermarkets are some- iARPA, an R. & D. organization that’s hat,” he said. He imagined a company
how familiar dims the strangeness of that run by the Office of the Director of Na- paying people thirty thousand dollars a
experience. When I was learning to drive, tional Intelligence. Brandon Minnery, year to wear the thinking hat, along with
it was overwhelming: each intersection the iARPA project manager for the video-recording eyeglasses and other sen-
and lane change seemed chaotic in its Knowledge Representation in Neural sors, allowing the system to record ev-
own way. Now I hardly have to think Systems program at the time, told me erything they see, hear, and think, ulti-
about them. My mind instantly factors that he had some applications in mind. mately creating an exhaustive inventory
out all but the important differences. If you knew how knowledge was repre- of the mind. Wearing the thinking hat,
Norman clicked through the last of sented in the brain, you might be able to you could ask your computer a question
his slides. Afterward, a few students wan- distinguish between novice and expert just by imagining the words. Instantaneous
dered over to the lectern, hoping for an intelligence agents. You might learn how translation might be possible. In theory,
audience with him. For the rest of us, the to teach languages more effectively by a pair of wearers could skip language
scene was over. We packed up, climbed the seeing how closely a student’s mental altogether, conversing directly, mind to
stairs, and walked into the afternoon sun. representation of a word matches that of mind. Perhaps we could even communi-
a native speaker. Minnery’s most fanci- cate across species. Among the challenges
ike Monti and Owen with Patient ful idea—“Never an official focus of the the designers of such a system would
L 23, today’s thought-decoding re-
searchers mostly look for specific thoughts
program,” he said—was to change how
databases are indexed. Instead of label-
face, of course, is the fact that today’s
fMRI machines can weigh more than
that have been defined in advance. But a ling items by hand, you could show an twenty thousand pounds. There are ef-
“general-purpose thought decoder,” Nor- item to someone sitting in an fMRI scan- forts under way to make powerful mini-
man told me, is the next logical step for ner—the person’s brain state could be the ature imaging devices, using lasers, ultra-
the research. Such a device could speak label. Later, to query the database, some- sound, or even microwaves. “It’s going
aloud a person’s thoughts, even if those one else could sit in the scanner and sim- to require some sort of punctuated-equi-
thoughts have never been observed in an ply think of whatever she wanted. The librium technology revolution,” Gallant
fMRI machine. In 2018, Botvinick, Nor- software could compare the searcher’s said. Still, the conceptual foundation,
man’s hall mate, co-wrote a paper in the brain state with the indexer’s. It would which goes back to the nineteen-fifties,
journal Nature Communications titled “To- be the ultimate solution to the vocabu- has been laid.
ward a Universal Decoder of Linguistic lary problem. Recently, I asked Owen what the new
Meaning from Brain Activation.” Botvi- Jack Gallant, a professor at Berkeley thought-decoding technology meant for
nick’s team had built a primitive form of who has used thought decoding to recon- locked-in patients. Were they close to
having fluent conversations using some-
thing like the general-purpose thought
decoder? “Most of that stuff is group
studies in healthy participants,” Owen
told me. “The really tricky problem is
doing it in a single person. Can you get
robust enough data?” Their bare-bones
protocol—thinking about tennis equals
yes; thinking about walking around the
house equals no—relied on straightfor-
ward signals that were statistically robust.
It turns out that the same protocol, com-
bined with a series of yes-or-no ques-
tions (“Is the pain in the lower half of
your body? On the left side?”), still works
best. “Even if you could do it, it would
take longer to decode them saying ‘it is
in my right foot’ than to go through a
simple series of yes-or-no questions,”
Owen said. “For the most part, I’m qui-
“I’d love a pet right now, but I travel too much.” etly sitting and waiting. I have no doubt
that, some point down the line, we will now, a waiter was going to interrupt po- rience that has been distilled along the
be able to read minds. People will be able litely to ask if we were ready to order. dimensions that matter. Norman’s re-
to articulate, ‘My name is Adrian, and “You have to carve the world at its search group has used fMRI technol-
I’m British,’ and we’ll be able to decode joints, and figure out: what are the sit- ogy to find voxel patterns in the cortex
that from their brain. I don’t think it’s uations that exist, and how do these that are reflected in the hippocampus.
going to happen in probably less than situations work?” Norman said, while Perhaps the brain is like a hiker com-
twenty years.” jazz played in the background. “And paring the map with the territory.
In some ways, the story of thought that’s a very complicated problem. It’s In the past few years, Norman told
decoding is reminiscent of the history not like you’re instructed that the world me, artificial neural networks that in-
of our understanding of the gene. For has fifteen different ways of being, and cluded basic models of both brain re-
about a hundred years after the publi- here they are!” He laughed. gions had proved surpris-
cation of Charles Darwin’s “On the Or- “When you’re out in the ingly powerful. There was a
igin of Species,” in 1859, the gene was an world, you have to try to feedback loop between the
abstraction, understood only as some- infer what situation you’re study of A.I. and the study
thing through which traits passed from in.” We were in the lunch- of the real human mind, and
parent to child. As late as the nine- at-a-Japanese-restaurant sit- it was getting faster. Theo-
teen-fifties, biologists were still asking uation. I had never been to ries about human memory
what, exactly, a gene was made of. When this particular restaurant, but were informing new designs
James Watson and Francis Crick finally nothing about it surprised for A.I. systems, and those
found the double helix, in 1953, it be- me. This, it turns out, might systems, in turn, were sug-
came clear how genes took physical form. be one of the highest ac- gesting ideas about what
Fifty years later, we could sequence the complishments in nature. to look for in real human
human genome; today, we can edit it. Norman told me that a former stu- brains. “It’s kind of amazing to have got-
Thoughts have been an abstraction dent of his, Sam Gershman, likes using ten to this point,” he said.
for far longer. But now we know what the terms “lumping” and “splitting” to On the walk back to campus, Norman
they really are: patterns of neural activa- describe how the mind’s meaning space pointed out the Princeton University Art
tion that correspond to points in mean- evolves. When you encounter a new Museum. It was a treasure, he told me.
ing space. The mind—the only truly pri- stimulus, do you lump it with a concept “What’s in there?” I asked.
vate place—has become inspectable from that’s familiar, or do you split off a new “Great art!” he said
the outside. In the future, a therapist, concept? When navigating a new air- After we parted ways, I returned to
wanting to understand how your rela- port, we lump its metal detector with the museum. I went to the downstairs
tionships run awry, might examine the those we’ve seen before, even if this one gallery, which contains artifacts from the
dimensions of the patterns your brain is a different model, color, and size. By ancient world. Nothing in particular
falls into. Some epileptic patients about contrast, the first time we raised our grabbed me until I saw a West African
to undergo surgery have intracranial hands inside a millimetre-wave scan- hunter’s tunic. It was made of cotton
probes put into their brains; researchers ner—the device that has replaced the dyed the color of dark leather. There were
can now use these probes to help steer walk-through metal detector—we split teeth hanging from it, and claws, and a
the patients’ neural patterns away from off a new category. turtle shell—talismans from past kills. It
those associated with depression. With Norman turned to how thought de- struck me, and I lingered for a moment
more fine-grained control, a mind could coding fit into the larger story of the before moving on.
be driven wherever one liked. (The imag- study of the mind. “I think we’re at a Six months later, I went with some
ination reels at the possibilities, for both point in cognitive neuroscience where friends to a small house in upstate New
good and ill.) Of course, we already do we understand a lot of the pieces of the York. On the wall, out of the corner of
this by thinking, reading, watching, puzzle,” he said. The cerebral cortex—a my eye, I noticed what looked like a blan-
talking—actions that, after I’d learned crumply sheet laid atop the rest of the ket—a kind of fringed, hanging decora-
about thought decoding, struck me as brain—warps and compresses experi- tion made of wool and feathers. It had
oddly concrete. I could picture the pat- ence, emphasizing what’s important. It’s an odd shape; it seemed to pull toward
terns of my thoughts flickering inside in constant communication with other something I’d seen before. I stared at it
my mind. Versions of them are now flick- brain areas, including the hippocampus, blankly. Then came a moment of recog-
ering in yours. a seahorse-shaped structure in the inner nition, along dimensions I couldn’t ar-
part of the temporal lobe. For years, the ticulate—more active than passive, part-
n one of my last visits to Prince- hippocampus was known only as the way between alive and dead. There, the
O ton, Norman and I had lunch at a
Japanese restaurant called Ajiten. We
seat of memory; patients who’d had theirs
removed lived in a perpetual present.
chest. There, the shoulders. The blanket
and the tunic were distinct in every way,
sat at a counter and went through the Now we were seeing that the hippocam- but somehow still neighbors. My mind
familiar script. The menus arrived; we pus stores summaries provided to it by had split, then lumped. Some voxels had
looked them over. Norman noticed a the cortex: the sauce after it’s been re- shimmered. In the vast meaning space
dish he hadn’t seen before—“a new point duced. We cope with reality by building inside my head, a tiny piece of the world
in ramen space,” he said. Any minute a vast library of experience—but expe- was finding its proper place. 
A REPORTER AT LARGE
THE INVISIBLE WALL

Inside the secretive Libyan prisons that keep migrants out of Europe.
BY IAN URBINA
collection of makeshift ware- with a crime or allowed to speak to a Saharan Africa, has created a shadow
A houses sits along the highway

in Ghout al-Shaal, a worn neigh-
borhood of auto-repair shops and scrap
lawyer, and he was given no indication
of how long he’d be detained. In his
first days there, he kept mostly to him-
immigration system that stops them be-
fore they reach Europe. It has equipped
and trained the Libyan Coast Guard,
yards in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. For- self, submitting to the grim routines of a quasi-military organization linked to
merly a storage depot for cement, the the place. The prison is controlled by militias in the country, to patrol the
site was reopened in January, 2021, its a militia that euphemistically calls it- Mediterranean, sabotaging humani-
outer walls heightened and topped with self the Public Security Agency, and its tarian rescue operations and captur-
barbed wire. Men in black-and-blue cam- gunmen patrolled the hallways. About ing migrants. The migrants are then
ouflage uniforms, armed with Kalash- fifteen hundred migrants were held detained indefinitely in a network of
nikov rifles, stand guard around a blue there, in eight cells, segregated by gen- profit-making prisons run by the mi-
shipping container that passes for an of- der. There was only one toilet for every litias. In September of this year, around
fice. On the gate, a sign reads “Director- hundred people, and Candé often had six thousand migrants were being held,
ate for Combatting Illegal Migration.” to urinate in a water bottle or defecate many of them in Al Mabani. Interna-
The facility is a secretive prison for mi- in the shower. Migrants slept on thin tional aid agencies have documented
grants. Its name, in Arabic, is Al Mabani— floor pads; there weren’t enough to go an array of abuses: detainees tortured
The Buildings. around, so people took turns—one lay with electric shocks, children raped by
At 3 a.m. on February 5, 2021, Aliou down during the day, the other at night. guards, families extorted for ransom,
Candé, a sturdy, shy twenty-eight-year- Detainees fought over who got to sleep men and women sold into forced labor.
old migrant from Guinea-Bissau, ar- in the shower, which had better venti- “The E.U. did something they care-
rived at the prison. He had left home lation. Twice a day, they were marched, fully considered and planned for many
a year and a half earlier, because his single file, into the courtyard, where years,” Salah Marghani, Libya’s Min-
family’s farm was failing, and had set they were forbidden to look up at the ister of Justice from 2012 to 2014, told
out to join two brothers in Europe. But, sky or talk. Guards, like zookeepers, put me. “Create a hellhole in Libya, with
as he attempted to cross the Mediter- communal bowls of food on the ground, the idea of deterring people from head-
ranean Sea on a rubber dinghy, with and migrants gathered in circles to eat. ing to Europe.”
more than a hundred other migrants, The guards struck prisoners who Three weeks after Candé arrived at
the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted disobeyed orders with whatever was Al Mabani, a group of detainees de-
them and took them to Al Mabani. handy: a shovel, a hose, a cable, a tree vised an escape plan. Moussa Karouma,
They were pushed inside Cell No. 4, branch. “They would beat anyone for a migrant from Ivory Coast, and sev-
where some two hundred others were no reason at all,” Tokam Martin Lu- eral others defecated into a waste bin
being held. There was hardly anywhere ther, an older Cameroonian man who and left it in their cell for two days, until
to sit in the crush of bodies, and those slept on a mat next to Candé’s, told me. the stench became overpowering. “It
on the floor slid over to avoid being Detainees speculated that, when some- was my first time in prison,” Karouma
trampled. Overhead were fluorescent one died, the body was dumped behind told me. “I was terrified.” When guards
lights that stayed on all night. A small one of the compound’s outer walls, near opened the cell door, nineteen migrants
grille in the door, about a foot wide, a pile of brick and plaster rubble. The burst past them. They climbed on top
was the only source of natural light. guards offered migrants their freedom of a bathroom roof, dropped fifteen feet
Birds nested in the rafters, their feath- for a fee of twenty-five hundred Lib- over an outer wall, and disappeared into
ers and droppings falling from above. yan dinars—about five hundred dol- a warren of alleys near the prison. For
On the walls, migrants had scrawled lars. During meals, the guards walked those who remained, the consequences
notes of determination: “A soldier never around with cell phones, allowing de- were bloody. The guards called in rein-
retreats,” and “With our eyes closed, we tainees to call relatives who could pay. forcements, who sprayed bullets into
advance.” Candé crowded into a far cor- But Candé’s family couldn’t afford such the cells, then beat the inmates. “There
ner and began to panic. “What should a ransom. Luther told me, “If you don’t was one guy in my ward that they beat
we do?” he asked a cellmate. have anybody to call, you just sit down.” with a gun on his head, until he fainted
No one in the world beyond Al In the past six years, the European and started shaking,” a migrant later
Mabani’s walls knew that Candé had Union, weary of the financial and polit- told Amnesty International. “They didn’t
been captured. He hadn’t been charged ical costs of receiving migrants from sub- call an ambulance to come get him that
PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY JACARIA CANDÉ; THE OUTLAW OCEAN PROJECT / PIERRE KATTAR; SEA-WATCH
“ You can do anything to them, you just can’t kill them,” the director of Al Mabani, a migrant prison, told his guards.
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 37
beaches, increasingly unpoliced, have
been swamped with migrants headed
for Europe.
One of the first major tragedies of
the migrant crisis occurred in 2013, when
a dinghy carrying more than five hun-
dred migrants, most of them Eritrean,
caught fire and sank in the Mediterra-
nean, killing three hundred and sixty
people. They were less than half a mile
from Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost
island. At first, European leaders re-
sponded with compassion. “We can do
this!” Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chan-
cellor, said, promising a permissive ap-
proach to immigration. In early 2014,
Matteo Renzi, at thirty-nine, was elected
Prime Minister of Italy, the youngest
in its history. A telegenic centrist lib-
eral in the model of Bill Clinton, Renzi
was predicted to dominate the coun-
try’s politics for the next decade. Like
Merkel, he welcomed migrants, saying
“He finally agreed to take me dancing, and then we both realized we that, if Europe was willing to turn its
have no idea where you’d go to do that or what it even means.” back on “dead bodies in the sea,” it could
not call itself “civilized.” He supported
an ambitious search-and-rescue pro-
• • gram called Operation Mare Nostrum,
or Our Sea, which insured the safe pas-
night. . . . He was still breathing but he terranean Sea to Italy—a distance of sage of some hundred and fifty thou-
was not able to talk. . . . I don’t know less than two hundred miles. sand migrants, and Italy provided legal
what happened to him. . . . I don’t Europe had long pressed Libya to assistance for asylum claims.
know what he had done.” help curb such migration. Muammar As the number of migrants rose, Eu-
In the weeks that followed, Candé Qaddafi, Libya’s leader, had once em- ropean ambivalence turned to recalci-
tried to stay out of trouble and clung to braced Pan-Africanism and encouraged trance. Migrants needed medical care,
a hopeful rumor: the guards planned to sub-Saharan Africans to serve in the jobs, and schooling, which strained re-
release the migrants in his cell in honor country’s oil fields. But in 2008 he signed sources. James F. Hollifield, a migra-
of Ramadan, two months away. “The a “friendship treaty” with Silvio Ber- tion expert at the French Institutes for
lord is miraculous,” Luther wrote in a lusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, that Advanced Studies, told me, “We in the
journal he kept. “May his grace con- committed him to implementing strict liberal West are in a conundrum. We
tinue to protect all migrants around the controls. Qaddafi sometimes used this have to find a way to secure borders
world and especially those in Libya.” as a bargaining chip: he threatened, in and manage migration without under-
2010, that if the E.U. did not send him mining the social contract and the lib-
hat came to be called the mi- more than six billion dollars a year in eral state itself.” Nationalist parties such
W grant crisis began around 2010,
when people fleeing violence, poverty,
aid money he would “turn Europe
Black.” In 2011, Qaddafi was toppled
as the Alternative for Germany and
France’s National Rally exploited the
and the effects of climate change in the and killed in an insurrection sparked situation, fostering xenophobia. In 2015,
Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa by the Arab Spring and supported by men from North Africa sexually as-
started f looding into Europe. The a U.S.-led invasion. Afterward, Libya saulted women in Cologne, Germany,
World Bank predicts that, in the next descended into chaos. Today, two gov- fuelling alarm; the next year, an asylum
fifty years, droughts, crop failures, ris- ernments compete for legitimacy: the seeker from Tunisia drove a truck into
ing seas, and desertification will dis- U.N.-recognized Government of Na- a Christmas market in Berlin, killing
place a hundred and fifty million more tional Unity, and an administration twelve. Merkel, under pressure, even-
people, mostly from the Global South, based in Tobruk and backed by Russia tually insisted that migrants assimilate
accelerating migration to Europe and and the self-proclaimed Libyan Na- and supported a ban on burqas.
elsewhere. In 2015 alone, a million peo- tional Army. Both rely on shifting, cyn- Renzi’s Mare Nostrum program had
ple came to Europe from the Middle ical alliances with armed militias that cost a hundred and fifteen million euros,
East and Africa. A popular route went have tribal allegiances and control large and Italy, which was struggling to stave
through Libya, then across the Medi- portions of the country. Libya’s remote off its third recession in six years, could
not sustain the undertaking. Efforts in its Parliament. (A spokesperson for the vini, then the leader of Italy’s North-
Italy and Greece to relocate migrants Trust Fund told me, “Our programs are ern League, a nationalist party, said.
floundered. Poland and Hungary, both intended to save lives, protect those in “Now, finally, everyone seems to un-
run by far-right leaders, accepted no need, and fight trafficking in human derstand we were right.”
migrants at all. Officials in Austria beings and migrant smuggling.”)
talked of building a wall on its Italian Minniti looked to Libya—by then liou Candé grew up on a farm
border. Italy’s hard-right politicians
mocked and denounced Renzi, and
a failed state—to become Europe’s pri-
mary partner in stopping the flow of
A near the village of Sintchan
Demba Gaira. It has no cell reception,
their poll numbers skyrocketed. In De- migrants. In 2017, he travelled to Trip- paved roads, plumbing, or electricity.
cember, 2016, Renzi resigned, and his oli and struck deals with the govern- As an adult, he worked the farm with
party eventually rolled back his poli- ment recognized in the country at the his family, and lived in a clay house,
cies. He, too, retreated from his initial time and with the most powerful mi- painted yellow and blue, with his wife,
generosity. “We need to free ourselves litias. Italy, backed by E.U. funds, signed Hava, and their two young sons. He
from a sense of guilt,” he said. “We do a Memorandum of Understanding with listened to foreign musicians and fol-
not have the moral duty to welcome to Libya, affirming “the resolute determi- lowed European soccer clubs; he spoke
Italy people who are worse off than nation to coöperate in identifying ur- English and French, and was teaching
ourselves.” gent solutions to the issue of clandes- himself Portuguese, hoping one day to
During the next several years, Eu- tine migrants crossing Libya to reach live in Portugal. Jacaria, one of Can-
rope embarked on a different approach, Europe by sea.” The Trust Fund has di- dé’s three brothers, told me, “Aliou was
led by Marco Minniti, who became It- rected half a billion dollars to Libya’s a very lovely boy—never in any trou-
aly’s Minister of the Interior in 2016. assault on migration. Marghani, the ble. He was a hard worker. People re-
Minniti, a onetime ally of Renzi’s, was former justice minister, told me that spected him.”
frank about his colleague’s miscalcula- the goal of the program is clear: “Make Candé’s farm produced cassava, man-
tion. “We did not respond to two feel- Libya the bad guy. Make Libya the dis- goes, and cashews—a crop that accounts
ings that were very strong,” he said. guise for their policies while the good for around ninety per cent of Guinea-
“Anger and fear.” Italy stopped con- humans of Europe say they are offer- Bissau’s exports. But local weather pat-
ducting search-and-rescue operations ing money to help make this hellish terns had begun to shift, likely as a re-
beyond thirty miles from its shores. system safer.” sult of climate change. “We don’t feel
Italy, Greece, Spain, and Malta began Minniti has said that the European the cold during the cold season any-
turning away humanitarian boats car- fear of unchecked migration is a “le- more, and the heat comes earlier than
rying rescued migrants, and Italy even gitimate feeling—one democracy needs it should,” Jacaria said. Heavy rains left
charged the captains of such boats with to listen to.” His policies have resulted the farm accessible only by canoe for
aiding human trafficking. Minniti soon in a stark drop in migrants. In the first much of the year; dry spells seemed to
became known as the “Minister of Fear.” half of this year, fewer than twenty-one last longer than they had a generation
In 2015, the E.U. created the Emer- thousand people made it to Europe by earlier. Candé had four skinny cows
gency Trust Fund for Africa, which has crossing the Mediterranean. Minniti that produced little milk. There were
since spent nearly six billion dollars. told the press in 2017, “What Italy did more mosquitoes, which spread disease.
Proponents argue that the program of- When one of Candé’s sons came down
fers aid money to developing countries, with malaria, the journey to the hospi-
paying for COVID-19 relief in Sudan tal took a day, and he almost died.
and green-energy job training in Ghana. Candé, a pious Muslim, worried that
But much of its work involves pressur- he was failing before God to provide
ing African nations to adopt tougher for his family. “He felt guilty and en-
immigration restrictions and funding vious,” Bobo, another of Candé’s broth-
the agencies that enforce them. In 2018, ers, told me. Jacaria had immigrated to
officials in Niger allegedly sent “shop- Spain, and Denbas, the third brother,
ping lists” requesting gifts of cars, planes, to Italy. Both sent money and photo-
and helicopters in exchange for their in Libya is a model to deal with mi- graphs of fancy restaurants. Candé’s fa-
help in pushing anti-immigrant poli- grant flows without erecting borders ther, Samba, told me, “Whoever goes
cies. The program has also supported or barbed wire barriers.” (Minniti has abroad brings fortune at home.” Hava
repressive state agencies, by financing since left government and now heads was eight months pregnant, but Can-
the creation of an intelligence center the Med-Or Foundation, an organi- dé’s family encouraged him to go to
for Sudan’s secret police, and by allow- zation founded by an Italian defense Europe, too, promising that they would
ing the E.U. to give the personal data contractor; he did not respond to re- look after his children. “All the people
of Ethiopian nationals to their coun- quests for comment for this piece.) It- of his generation went abroad and suc-
try’s intelligence service. The money is aly’s right wing, which helped unseat ceeded,” his mother, Aminatta, said.
doled out at the discretion of the E.U.’s Renzi, applauded Minniti’s work. “So why not him?” On the morning of
executive branch, the European Com- “When we proposed such measures, September 13, 2019, Candé set out for
mission, and not subject to scrutiny by we were labelled as racist,” Matteo Sal- Europe carrying a Quran, a leather
diary, two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, ment buildings, and schools. Armed a budget of more than half a billion
and six hundred euros. “I don’t know men in fatigues stood at every inter- euros and its own uniformed service,
how long this will take,” he told his section. Almost no Western journalists which it can deploy in operations be-
wife that morning. “But I love you, and are permitted to enter Libya, but, with yond the E.U.’s borders. The agency
I’ll be back.” the help of an international aid group, maintains a near-constant surveillance
Candé worked his way across Cen- we were granted visas. Shortly after we of the Mediterranean through drones
tral Africa, hitching rides in cars or arrived, I gave my team tracking de- and privately chartered aircraft. When
stowing away on buses until he reached vices and encouraged them to put pho- it detects a migrant boat, it sends pho-
Agadez, Niger, once called the Gate- tocopies of their passports inside their tographs and location information to
way to the Sahara. Historically, the bor- shoes. We were placed in a hotel near local government agencies and other
ders of many Central African countries the city center and assigned a small se- partners in the region—ostensibly to
have been open, as in the E.U., though curity detail. assist with rescues—but does not typ-
the arrangement was less formalized. The Libyan Coast Guard’s name ically inform humanitarian vessels.
In 2015, however, E.U. officials pres- makes it sound like an official military A spokesperson for Frontex told me
sured Niger to adopt a statute called organization, but it has no unified com- that the agency “has never engaged in
Law 36: overnight, bus drivers and mand; it is made up of local patrols that any direct cooperation with Libyan au-
guides, who for many years had carried the U.N. has accused of having links to thorities.” But an investigation by a co-
migrants north, were declared human militias. (Humanitarian workers call it alition of European news organizations,
traffickers and subject to thirty-year the “so-called Libyan Coast Guard.”) including Lighthouse Reports, Der Spie-
prison sentences. Migrants were forced Minniti told the press, in 2017, that build- gel, Libération, and A.R.D., documented
to consider more perilous routes. Candé, ing up the patrols would be a difficult twenty instances in which, after Fron-
along with a half-dozen others, struck undertaking: “When we said we had to tex surveilled migrants, their boats were
out through the Sahara, sometimes relaunch the Libyan Coast Guard, it intercepted by the Coast Guard. The
sleeping in the sand on the side of the seemed like a daydream.” The E.U.’s investigation also found evidence that
road. “Heat and dust, it’s terrible here,” Trust Fund has since spent tens of mil- Frontex sometimes sends the locations
Candé told Jacaria, by phone. He lions of dollars to turn the Coast Guard of the migrant boats directly to the
sneaked through a portion of Algeria into a formidable proxy force. Coast Guard. In a WhatsApp exchange
controlled by bandits. “They will cap- In 2018, the Italian government, with earlier this year, for example, a Frontex
ture you and beat you until you’re re- the E.U.’s blessing, helped the Coast official wrote to someone identifying
leased,” he told his family. “That’s all Guard get approval from the U.N. to himself as a “captain” in the Libyan
that’s there.” extend its jurisdiction nearly a hun- Coast Guard, saying, “Good morning
In January, 2020, he arrived in Mo- dred miles off Libya’s coast—far into sir. We have a boat adrift [coördinates].
rocco, and learned that passage to Spain international waters, and more than People poring water. Please acknowl-
cost three thousand euros. Jacaria urged halfway to Italian shores. The E.U. sup- edge this message.” Legal experts argue
him to turn back, but Candé said, “You plied six speedboats, thirty Toyota Land that these actions violate international
have worked hard in Europe. You sent Cruisers, radios, satellite phones, in- laws against refoulement, or the return
money to the family. Now it’s my turn.” flatable dinghies, and five hundred uni- of migrants to unsafe places. Frontex
He heard that, in Libya, he could book forms. It spent close to a million dol- officials recently sent me the results of
a cheaper boat to Italy. He arrived in lars last year to build command centers an open-records request I made, which
Tripoli last December, and stayed in a for the Coast Guard, and provides train- indicate that from February 1st to Feb-
migrant slum called Gargaresh. His ing to officers. In a ceremony in Oc- ruary 5th, around the time that Candé
great-uncle Demba Balde, a forty-year- tober, 2020, E.U. officials and Libyan was at sea, the agency exchanged thirty-
old former tailor, had lived undocu- commanders unveiled two state-of- seven e-mails with the Coast Guard.
mented in Libya for years, doing var- the-art cutters that had been built in (Frontex refused to release the content
ious jobs. Balde found Candé work Italy and upgraded with Trust Fund of the e-mails, saying that it would “put
painting houses and pressed him to money. “The refitting of these two ves- the lives of migrants in danger.”)
abandon his plan to cross the Medi- sels has been a prime example of the A senior official at Frontex, who re-
terranean. “That’s the route of death,” constructive coöperation between the quested anonymity out of fear of re-
Balde told him. European Union; an E.U. member state, taliation, told me that the agency also
Italy; and Libya,” Jose Sabadell, the streams its surveillance footage to the
his past May, I travelled to Trip- E.U.’s Ambassador to Libya, said in a Italian Coast Guard and Italy’s Mari-
T oli to investigate the system of mi-
grant detention. I had recently started
press release.
Perhaps the most valuable help
time Rescue Coördination Center,
which, the official believes, notify the
a nonprofit called the Outlaw Ocean comes from the E.U.’s border agency, Libyan Coast Guard. (The Italian agen-
Project, which reports on human-rights Frontex, founded in 2004, partly to cies did not respond to requests for
and environmental issues at sea, and I guard Europe’s border with Russia. In comment.) The official argued that this
brought along a three-person research 2015, Frontex began spearheading what indirect method didn’t insulate the
team. In Tripoli, the coastline was dot- it called a “systematic effort to capture” agency from responsibility: “You pro-
ted with half-built offices, hotels, apart- migrants crossing the sea. Today, it has vide that information. You don’t im-
plement the action, but it is the infor-
mation that provokes the refoulement.”
The official had repeatedly urged su-
periors to stop any activity that could
result in migrants being returned to
Libya. “It didn’t matter what you told
them,” the official said. “They were not
willing to understand.” (A Frontex
spokesperson told me, “In any poten-
tial search and rescue, the priority for
Frontex is to save lives.”)
Once the Coast Guard has the coör-
dinates, it races to the boats, trying to
capture the migrants before rescue ves-
sels arrive. Sometimes it fires on the
migrant boats or directs warning shots
at humanitarian ships. In the past four
years, according to the U.N.’s Interna-
tional Organization for Migration
(I.O.M.), the Coast Guard and other
Libyan authorities have intercepted
more than eighty thousand migrants.
In 2017, a ship from the aid group Sea-
Watch responded to distress calls from
a sinking migrant boat. As Sea-Watch
deployed two rescue rafts, a Libyan Candé was in international waters when he was captured and taken back to Libya.
Coast Guard cutter, called the Ras
Jadir, arrived at high speed, its swells more money. This past April, authori- to conduct rescues only in international
causing some of the migrants to fall ties released him, citing a lack of evi- waters, but threats from the Coast
overboard. Coast Guard officers then dence. The Coast Guard, which did Guard crackled over the radio. “Get
pulled the migrants out of the water, not respond to requests for comment away from the target,” an officer said.
beating them as they climbed aboard. for this piece, has often pointed to its “Don’t enter Libyan waters. Otherwise,
Johannes Bayer, the head of the Sea- success in limiting migration to Eu- I’ll deal with you, and we resort to other
Watch mission, later said, “We had a rope, and argued that humanitarian measures.” After one successful rescue,
feeling the Coast Guard were only in- groups hinder its efforts to combat several Sudanese migrants spoke about
terested in pulling back as many peo- human trafficking. “Why do they de- what they had seen in Libya. One said
ple to Libya as possible, without car- clare war on us?” a spokesman told the that he had been beaten and tortured
ing that people were drowning.” One Italian media. “They should instead by the Coast Guard when he was cap-
migrant jumped overboard and clung coöperate with us if they actually want tured on an earlier voyage. Another
to the Ras Jadir as it accelerated away, to work in the interest of the migrants.” had watched detainees shot to death
dragging him through the water. Ac- The spokesperson for the Trust Fund in a Libyan detention center. A third
cording to Sea-Watch, at least twenty said that the E.U.’s work with the Coast migrant wore a homemade T-shirt that
people died, including a two-year-old Guard is intended “to save the lives of read “Fuck to Libya.”
boy. A migrant told Amnesty Interna- those making dangerous journeys by
tional that this past February a Coast sea or land.” round 10 p.m. on February 3, 2021,
Guard ship damaged a migrant boat
while officers filmed with their cell
This past May, a documentarian
from my team, Ed Ou, spent several
A a smuggler led Candé and a hun-
dred and thirty others to the Libyan
phones; five people drowned. weeks aboard a Doctors Without Bor- coast, and launched them from shore
The Coast Guard appears to oper- ders vessel, filming its attempts to resin an inflatable rubber dinghy. Some
ate with impunity. In October, 2020, cue migrants in the Mediterranean. of the migrants, excited by the depar-
Abdel-Rahman al-Milad, the com- The organization located migrant boats ture, broke into song. Roughly two
mander of a Coast Guard unit based in with the help of radar and volunteer hours later, the boat entered interna-
Zawiya, who had been added to the U.N. planes, but in many cases the Coast tional waters. Candé, straddling the
MAP BY FRANCESCO MUZZI
Security Council’s sanctions list for being Guard beat them there and captured side of the dinghy, felt hopeful. He told
“directly involved in the sinking of mi- the migrants. Occasionally, aid work- others on board that he was thinking
grant boats using firearms,” was arrested ers saw a Frontex drone—an I.A.I. about bringing his wife and children
by Libyan authorities. Milad had at- Heron, capable of operating continu- to join him.
tended meetings with Italian officials ously for up to forty-five hours—cir- The trafficker had put three migrants
in Rome and Sicily in 2017, to request cling overhead. Their ship was careful in charge. A “bussolier” guided the
dinghy along its route using a compass. their heads, saying, ‘Shit, it’s Libyan.’ ” killed during an escape attempt this past
A “captain” manned the motor and han- The boat, a Vittoria P350 made of February. “Death in Libya, it’s normal:
dled the satellite phone; once they were steel, fibreglass, and Kevlar, was one of no one will look for you, and no one will
far enough from Libya, he was supposed the cutters unveiled by the E.U. It find you,” a migrant there told Amnesty
to call Alarm Phone, a migration activ- rammed the dinghy three times, then investigators. Diana Eltahawy, who works
ist group, and request a rescue. A “com- Coast Guard officers ordered the mi- on North African issues at Amnesty In-
mander” kept order and made sure no grants to climb aboard. “Move!” they ternational, declared in July, “The entire
one touched the plug that, if pulled, yelled. One hit several of the migrants network of Libyan migration detention
would deflate the vessel. Soon, the seas with the butt of his rif le; another centres is rotten to its core.”
grew rough, making nearly everyone Migrants captured by the Coast
sick and turning the pooling water at Guard are loaded onto buses, many sup-
their feet into a soup of vomit, feces, plied by the E.U., and brought to the
candy wrappers, and baguette crumbs. detention centers; sometimes Coast
Several migrants tried to bail out the Guard units sell them to the centers.
boat using plastic water bottles cut in But some migrants never make it there.
half. A fight erupted, and someone In the first seven months of 2021, ac-
threatened to slash the dinghy with a cording to the I.O.M., more than fif-
knife before he was subdued. Mohamed teen thousand migrants were captured
David Soumahoro, who befriended by the Libyan Coast Guard and other
Candé on the boat, recalled, “Everyone whipped them with a rope. The mi- authorities, but by the end of that pe-
started calling out for their God—one grants were taken back to land, loaded riod only about six thousand were being
for Allah, the other calling Jesus, an- into buses and trucks, and driven to held in designated facilities. Federico
other calls this one and another that Al Mabani. Soda, the I.O.M.’s chief of mission in
one. Women began crying, and once Libya, believes that migrants are disap-
they saw people panicking the babies hen I got to Libya, government pearing into “unofficial” facilities run by
began crying, too.”
At dawn, the waters calmed, and the
W officials told me that I would be
allowed to tour Al Mabani. But after
traffickers and militias, where aid groups
have no access. “The numbers simply
migrants, deciding that they were far several days it became clear that this don’t add up,” he said.
enough from Libya, called Alarm Phone would not happen. Late one afternoon, Al Mabani was created early this
for help. A volunteer told them that my team and I went to an alley and year under the supervision of Emad al-
there was a merchant vessel not far launched a small video drone, flying Tarabulsi, a senior leader in the Public
away. This sparked jubilation. “Bosa, it high enough over the prison so that Security Agency militia. The group has
free, bosa, free,” the migrants chanted, it would not be noticed by the guards. links to the Zintan tribe, which helped
using a celebratory Fula expression. On the monitor, I saw them prepar- overthrow Qaddafi and held his son
Candé turned to Soumahoro, his eyes ing to march the migrants from the Seif prisoner for years. Today, the mi-
lighting up, and said, “Inshallah, we’re courtyard back into their cells. Roughly litia is aligned with the National Unity
going to make it! Italy!” But when the sixty-five detainees sat in a corner, un- government, and Tarabulsi briefly served
merchant vessel arrived the captain an- moving, heads down, legs folded, each as its deputy head of intelligence. He
nounced that he had no lifeboats and man’s hands touching the back of the built the prison in a corner of the city
quickly steered away. man in front of him. When one man controlled by the militia and selected
By now, Candé’s boat was seventy glanced to the side, a guard struck him Noureddine al-Ghreetly, a soft-spoken
miles from Tripoli, out of Libyan wa- on the head. commander, to run it. (Tarabulsi could
ters but still within the Coast Guard’s Under Libyan law, unauthorized for- not be reached for comment.)
expanded jurisdiction. Around 5 P.M. eigners—including economic migrants, Previously, Ghreetly oversaw a mi-
on February 4th, the migrants noticed asylum seekers, and the victims of ille- grant prison called Tajoura, near a mil-
an airplane overhead, which circled gal trafficking—can be detained indefi- itary base on the eastern outskirts of
for fifteen minutes, then flew away. nitely, with no access to a lawyer. There Tripoli. In a 2019 Human Rights Watch
Data from the ADS-B Exchange, an are currently some fifteen recognized de- report, six detainees there, including
organization that tracks aviation traf- tention centers in the country, of which two sixteen-year-old boys, described
fic, show that the plane was the Eagle1, Al Mabani is the largest. An I.O.M. of- being severely beaten, and one woman
a white Beech King Air 350 surveil- ficial told me that tens of thousands of said that she’d been repeatedly sexually
lance aircraft leased by Frontex. (The migrants have been held in the deten- assaulted. The report’s authors recounted
agency declined to comment on its tion centers since 2017. Earlier this year, seeing a female detainee attempting to
role in the capture.) About three hours six women who had been held at a cen- hang herself. Prisoners were forced to
later, a boat appeared on the horizon. ter called Shara’ al-Zawiya told investi- do labor at the facility, including clean-
“The closer it came, the clearer we gators from Amnesty International that ing weapons, storing ammunition, and
saw it—and saw the black and green women there had been raped or sub- offloading military shipments, accord-
lines of the flag,” Soumahoro told me. jected to other forms of sexual violence. ing to U.N. investigators. In July, 2019,
“Everyone started crying and holding At Abu Salim, at least two migrants were during the latest outbreak of civil war,
a bomb struck the detention center, lev- these efforts make the prisons more hu- In 2017, CNN broadcast footage of a
elling a hangar where the migrants were mane, but, taken together, they also help slave market in Libya, at which mi-
held. More than fifty were killed, in- sustain a brutal system, which exists grants were sold for agricultural labor;
cluding six children. Most of the sur- largely because of E.U. policies that send bidding started at four hundred dinars,
vivors wound up at Al Mabani. migrants back to Libya. or about eighty-eight dollars, per per-
The E.U. concedes that the migrant Militias also employ a variety of meth- son. This year, more than a dozen mi-
prisons are brutal. The Trust Fund ods to make a profit from the facilities, grants from detention centers, some as
spokesperson told me, by e-mail, “The such as siphoning off money and goods young as fourteen, told Amnesty Inter-
situation in these centres is unaccept- sent for migrants by humanitarian groups national that they had been forced to
able. The current arbitrary detention sys- and government agencies—a scheme work on farms and in private homes,
tem must end.” Last year, Josep Borrell, known as “aid diversion.” The director and to clean and load weaponry at
a vice-president of the European Com- of a detention center in Misrata told military encampments during active
mission, said, “The decision to arbitrarily Human Rights Watch that militia-linked hostilities. Perhaps the most common
detain migrants rests under the sole re- catering companies that serviced the fa- money-making scheme is extortion. At
sponsibility” of the Libyan government. cility pocketed some eighty-five per cent the detention facilities, everything has
In its initial agreement with Libya, Italy of the money sent to supply meals. A a price: protection, food, medicine, and,
promised to help finance and make safe study financed by the Trust Fund in April, the most expensive, freedom. But pay-
the operation of migrant detention. 2019, found that much of the money that ing a ransom doesn’t guarantee release;
Today, European officials insist that they it sent through humanitarian groups some migrants are simply resold to an-
do not directly fund the sites. The Trust ended up going to militias. “Most of the other detention center. “Unfortunately,
Fund’s spending is opaque, but its spokes- time, it is a profit-making exercise,” the as a result of the high number of cen-
person told me that it sends money only study reads. tres and the commodification of mi-
to provide “lifesaving support to mi- Qaddafi-era laws allow unautho- grants, many are detained by another
grants and refugees in detention,” in- rized foreigners, regardless of age, to group after their release, leading to
cluding through U.N. agencies and in- be forced to work in the country with- them having to make multiple ransom
ternational N.G.O.s that offer “health out pay. A Libyan national can pick up payments,” the Trust Fund-financed
care, psycho-social support, cash assis- migrants from a prison for a fee, be- study reads.
tance and non-food items.” Tineke Strik, come their “guardian,” and oversee pri- In a meeting with the German Am-
a member of the European Parliament, vate work for a fixed amount of time. bassador to Libya, earlier this year,
told me that this doesn’t relieve Europe
of responsibility: “If the E.U. did not fi-
nance the Libyan Coast Guard and its
assets, there would be no interception,
and there would be no referral to these
horrific detention centers.”
She also pointed out that the E.U.
sends funds to the National Unity gov-
ernment, whose Directorate for Com-
batting Illegal Migration oversees the
sites. She argued that, even if the E.U.
doesn’t pay for the construction of fa-
cilities or the salaries of their gunmen,
its money indirectly supports much of
their operation. The Trust Fund pays
for the boats that capture migrants, the
buses that bring them to prisons, and
the S.U.V.s that hunt them down on
land. E.U.-funded U.N. agencies built
the showers and bathrooms at several
facilities, and pay for the blankets,
clothes, and toiletries migrants receive
when they arrive. The Trust Fund has
committed to buying ambulances that
will take detainees to the hospital when
they are sick. And E.U. money pays for
the body bags they’re put in when they
die, and for the training of Libyan au-
thorities in how to handle corpses in a
religiously respectful manner. Some of “Never worry about what other people think—except me.”
General Al-Mabrouk Abdel-Hafiz, ghy was intercepted, met me on the “They hang you like a piece of cloth-
who runs the Directorate for Combat- main road and whisked me into a win- ing,” he said.
ting Illegal Migration, portrayed him- dowless room occupied by two other Several former detainees I spoke
self, and his country, as being tasked migrants. Over a meal of chana ma- with in Tripoli said that they had wit-
with an impossible job. “Libya is no sala, he told me of his time in prison. nessed sexual abuse. Adjara Keita, a
longer a transit country, but rather a “Talking about this is really hard for thirty-six-year-old migrant from Ivory
victim left alone to face a crisis that the me,” he said. Coast, who was held at Al Mabani for
countries of the world failed,” he said. Migrants in Al Mabani were beaten two months, told me that women were
(Abdel-Hafiz declined to comment for for whispering to one another, speak- frequently taken from their cells to be
this piece.) When I called Ghreetly, the ing in their native tongues, or laugh- raped by the guards. “The women
director of Al Mabani, and asked about ing. Troublemakers were held for days would come back in tears,” she said.
allegations of mistreatment there, he in the “isolation room,” an abandoned After two women escaped from Al
replied, “Abuse does not happen,” and gas station behind the women’s cell with Mabani, guards took Keita to a nearby
quickly ended the call. a Shell Fuel sign hanging out front. office and beat her, in an apparently
The isolation room had no bathroom, random act of retribution.
everal days after I arrived in Libya, so prisoners had to defecate in a cor- The guards also engaged migrants
S I travelled to Gargaresh, the mi-
grant slum where Candé briefly stayed,
ner; the smell was so bad that guards
wore masks when they visited. Guards
as collaborators, a tactic that kept them
divided. Mohamed Soumah, a twenty-
to speak to former detainees. During tied the hands of detainees to a rope three-year-old from the Republic of
the Second World War, the Italian and suspended from a steel ceiling beam Guinea, sometimes called Guinea Con-
German militaries used the area, then and beat them. “It’s not so bad seeing akry, volunteered to help with daily
called Campo 59 or Feldpost 12545, as a friend or a man yelling as he’s being tasks and was soon pumped for infor-
a prisoner-of-war camp. Today, it is a tortured,” Soumahoro said. “But seeing mation: Which migrants hated each
honeycomb of alleys and narrow streets, a six-foot-tall man beating a woman other? Who were the agitators? The
surrounded by fast-food restaurants with a whip . . .” In March, Soumahoro arrangement became more formal, and
and cell-phone stores. Raids carried out organized a hunger strike to protest vi- Soumah began handling ransom ne-
by militiamen are part of daily life. Can- olence by the guards, and was taken to gotiations. As a reward, he was allowed
dé’s friend Soumahoro, who was taken the isolation room, where he was strung to sleep across the street from the prison
to Al Mabani with him when their din- upside down and repeatedly beaten. in the cooks’ quarters. At one point, as
a gift for his loyalty, the guards let him
pick several migrants to be freed. He
could even leave the compound, though
he never went far. “I knew they’d find
me and beat me if I tried to go away,”
he told me.
One international aid organization
visited the prison twice a week and
found that detainees were covered in
bruises and cuts, avoided eye contact,
and recoiled at loud noises. Sometimes
migrants slipped the aid workers notes
of desperation written on the backs of
torn COVID-safety pamphlets. Many
told the workers that they felt “disap-
peared” and asked that someone inform
their families that they were alive.
During one visit, the workers couldn’t
enter Candé’s cell because it was so
packed, and estimated that there were
three detainees per square metre. They
met with migrants in the courtyard.
The overcrowding was intense, and tu-
berculosis and COVID-19 have since
been detected. During another visit, the
workers were told of beatings from the
night before, and they catalogued frac-
tures, cuts, abrasions, and blunt trau-
“I’d like to get my withdrawal in either mas; one child was so badly injured that
cryptocurrency or social-media exposure.” he couldn’t walk.
In the weeks after Candé’s arrival,
members of another aid group brought
water and blankets that the facility had
requested. But, after discovering that
guards had kept some of the supplies
for themselves, they decided that they
would no longer assist Al Mabani. Near
the end of March, Cherif Khalil, a con-
sular off icer from the Embassy of
Guinea Conakry, visited the prison.
Candé, pretending to be from Guinea
Conakry, asked if the Embassy could
help him, but Khalil was powerless.
“He was desperate,” Khalil told me.
Halfway through my meal with Sou-
mahoro, my phone rang. It was a po-
lice officer. “You are not allowed to be
talking to migrants,” he screamed at
me. “You cannot be in Gargaresh.” He
told me that if I didn’t leave immedi-
ately I would be arrested. When I re-
• •
turned to my car, the police officer was
standing there. He said that if I spoke to be patient to enjoy our freedom.” to the ground, blood gushing from his
to any more migrants I would be thrown But Candé seemed increasingly des- head. The groups began pelting each
out of the country. After that, my team perate. When he was first taken into other with shoes, buckets, shampoo bot-
and I weren’t allowed to venture far custody, the Coast Guard had some- tles, and pieces of plasterboard. Candé
from our hotel. how failed to confiscate his cell phone. told Soumahoro, “I’m not going to fight.
He had kept it hidden, fearing that he I’m the hope of my entire family.” The
s Candé sat in his cell, waiting for would be severely punished if caught brawling lasted for three and a half
A Ramadan, he and Luther passed
the time by playing dominoes. Luther
with it. After the Ramadan rumor was
dispelled, however, he sent a voice mes-
hours. Some migrants shouted for as-
sistance, yelling, “Open the door!” In-
wrote in his journal of a protest by fe- sage to his brothers over WhatsApp, stead, the guards laughed and cheered,
male inmates: “They are in underwear attempting to explain the situation: filming the fight with their phones
and sitting on the floor because they “We were trying to get to Italy by water. through the grille. “Keep fighting,” one
also demand to be released.” He and They caught us and brought us back. said, passing in water bottles to keep
Candé called the guards nicknames Now we are locked in prison. . . . You the brawlers hydrated. “If you can kill
based on the orders they barked. One can’t keep the phone on too long here.” them, do it.”
was known as Khamsa Khamsa, Ara- He begged them, “Find a way to call But at 5:30 A.M. the guards left and
bic for “five, five,” which he yelled during our father.” Then he waited, hoping came back with semi-automatic rifles.
meals to remind migrants that five peo- that they would scrape together the Without warning, they fired into the
ple had to share each bowl. Another ransom. cell through the bathroom window for
guard, called Gamis, or “sit down,” in- At 2 a.m. on April 8th, Candé awoke ten minutes. “It sounded like a battle-
sured that no one stood. Keep Quiet to a noise: several Sudanese detainees field,” Soumahoro told me. Two teen-
policed the chatter. At one point, Candé were trying to pry open the door of Cell agers from Guinea Conakry, Ismail
and Luther cared for a migrant who No. 4 and escape. Candé, worried that Doumbouya and Ayouba Fofana, were
had sustained a blow to the head during all the inmates would be punished, asked hit in the leg. Candé, who had been
a beating and seemed to be suffering a Soumahoro what to do. Soumahoro hiding in the shower during the fight,
mental break, thrashing and scream- went with a dozen others to confront was struck in the neck. He staggered
ing. “He was so mad,” Luther wrote, the Sudanese. “We’ve tried to break out along the wall, streaking blood, then
that they had to restrain him “so that several times before,” Soumahoro told fell to the ground. Soumahoro tried to
we could sleep in peace.” Eventually, them. “It never worked. We were just slow the bleeding with a piece of cloth.
the guards took the detainee to a hos- beaten.” The Sudanese wouldn’t listen, Candé died within minutes.
pital, but a few weeks later he returned, and Soumahoro told another detainee Ghreetly arrived several hours later
as disturbed as ever. “Unbelievable sit- to alert the guards, who backed a sand and shouted at the guards, “What have
uation,” Luther wrote. truck up against the cell door. you done? You can do anything to
Near the end of March, the migrants The Sudanese yanked iron pipes from them, you just can’t kill them!” The
learned that they would not be freed the bathroom wall and began swinging migrants refused to hand over Can-
during Ramadan. Luther wrote, “This them at those who had intervened. One dé’s body, and the panicked guards
is how life is in Libya. We will still have migrant was hit in the eye; another fell summoned Soumah, the collaborator,
interrogation room at a black site,
where I was punched again in the head
and ribs. Still hooded, I could hear
the men menacing the others. “You
are a dog!” one yelled at our photog-
rapher, Pierre Kattar, striking him
across the face. They whispered sex-
ual threats to the female member of
our team, Mea Dols de Jong, a Dutch
filmmaker, saying, “Do you want a
Libyan boyfriend?” After a few hours,
they removed our belts and jewelry
and placed us in cells.
I’ve since discovered—by compar-
ing satellite imagery with the little we
glimpsed of the surrounding area—
that we were held at a secret jail sev-
eral hundred yards from the Italian
Embassy. Our captors told us that they
were part of the Libyan Intelligence
Service, nominally an agency of the
National Unity government, which
also oversees Al Mabani, though it has
ties to a militia called the Al-Nawasi
Brigade. Our interrogators bragged
that they had worked together under
Qaddafi. One, who spoke conversa-
tional English, claimed that he had
spent time in Colorado at a U.S.-
government-run training program for
prison administration.
“ You’ll build another bug collection in no time.” I was placed in an isolation cell,
which contained a toilet, a shower, a
foam mattress, and a ceiling-mounted
• • camera. Guards passed me yellow rice
and bottles of water through a slot in
to negotiate. Eventually, the militia ing our movements to the authorities. the door. Every day, I was questioned
agreed to free the migrants in exchange On Sunday, May 23rd, shortly be- in an interrogation room for hours at
for the body. Soumah told them, “I, fore 8 p.m., I was sitting in my hotel a time. “We know you work for the
Soumah, will open this door and you room, on the phone with my wife, C.I.A.,” a man kept telling me. “Here
guys will get out. I will be in front of when there was a knock on the door. in Libya, spying is punished by death.”
you, running with you until the exit.” As I opened it, a dozen armed men Sometimes he put a gun on the table
Just before 9 a.m., guards took up po- burst in. One held a gun to my fore- or pointed it at my head. To my cap-
sitions near the gate, guns raised. Sou- head and yelled, “Get on the floor!” tors, the steps I had taken to safeguard
mah opened the cell door and told the They placed a hood over my head, my team became proof of my guilt.
three hundred migrants to follow him kicked and punched me, and stepped Why would we wear tracking devices
out of the prison, single file, without on my face, leaving me with two bro- and carry copies of our passports in
talking. Morning commuters slowed ken ribs, blood in my urine, and dam- our shoes? Why did I have two “se-
to gawk at the migrants as they left age to my kidneys. Then they dragged cret recording devices” in my back-
the compound and dispersed through me from the room. pack (an Apple Watch and a GoPro),
the streets of Tripoli. My research team was on their way along with a packet of papers titled
to dinner near the hotel; their driver “Secret Document” (a list of emer-
y my eighth day in Tripoli, my spotted cars following them and turned gency contacts that was actually la-
B team and I were piecing together
the details of Candé’s death. We had
back. Several cars blocked the road,
and armed men in masks leaped out.
belled “Security Document”)?
The fact that I was a journalist was
interviewed dozens of migrants, offi- They took my team’s driver from the less a defense than a secondary crime.
cials, and aid workers. I had the distinct van and pistol-whipped him, then My captors told me that it was ille-
impression that the hotel staff and our blindfolded my colleagues and drove gal to interview migrants about abuses
private security guards were report- them away. We were all taken to an at Al Mabani. “Why are you trying
to embarrass Libya?” they asked. They nity leader (who asked to remain anon- Libya at the time, said, “The persistent
repeatedly told me, “You people killed ymous out of fear of retaliation in pattern of violent incidents and seri-
George Floyd.” Hoping to break out, Libya) went with Balde, Candé’s ous harm to refugees and migrants, as
I took apart some of the toilet’s plumb- great-uncle, to the police station, where well as the risk to the safety of our
ing and searched for a piece of metal they were given a copy of the autopsy staff, has reached a level that we are no
to unscrew the bars on the window. I report. It said that Candé’s name was longer able to accept.” It resumed its
tapped on the wall of my cell and heard unknown, and wrongly stated that he activities after receiving assurances that,
Kattar, the photographer, tap back, was from Guinea Conakry. The au- among other things, officials would
which I somehow found reassuring. thorities suggested that he had died prevent further violence in the prison.
My wife had overheard the begin- in a fight, which angered the commu- But in October Libyan authorities, in-
ning of my kidnapping and had alerted nity leader. “It wasn’t a fight,” he told cluding members of the militia that
the State Department. Along with the me. “It was a bullet.” Later, the pair controls Al Mabani, rounded up more
Dutch foreign service, the agency began went to the local hospital to identify than five thousand migrants in and
lobbying the National Unity govern- Candé’s body; he was wheeled out on around Gargaresh and sent many to
ment for our release. At one point, we a metal gurney, wrapped in a gauzy the prison. Days later, guards opened
were taken from our cells to record a white cloth partially undone to reveal fire on prisoners attempting to escape,
“proof of life” video. Our jailers told his face. In the next several days, they killing at least six.
me to wash the blood and dirt off my travelled around Tripoli paying off After Candé’s death, Sabadell, the
face, and we all sat around a table cov- Candé’s debts, all incurred after his E.U. Ambassador, called for a formal
ered with sodas and pastries. “Smile,” death: a hundred and eighty-nine dol- investigation, but it appears never to
they said, and instructed us to say to lars for the hospital stay, nineteen for have taken place. (An E.U. spokes-
the camera that we were being treated the white shroud and burial clothes, person said, “The assurances from the
humanely. “Talk. Look normal.” We two hundred and twenty-two for the Libyan authorities that these events
were required to sign “confession” doc- coming burial. will be investigated and that the ap-
uments written in Arabic on letter- Candé’s family learned of his death propriate judicial action will be car-
head of the “Department for Combat- two days after it occurred. Samba, his ried out need to be translated into
ting Hostile Activity,” and bearing the father, told me that he could barely practice. Perpetrators must be held
name of Major General Hussein Mu- sleep or eat: “Sadness weighs heavily accountable. There can be no impu-
hammad al-A’ib. When I asked what on me.” Hava had given birth to a nity for such crimes.”) Europe’s com-
the documents said, our captors daughter named Cadjato, who is now mitment to anti-migrant programs in
laughed. They kept our computers, two, and told me that she would not Libya remains unshaken. Last year,
phones, and cash, plus thirty thousand remarry until she finished mourning. Italy renewed its Memorandum of
dollars’ worth of filming equipment “My heart is broken,” she said. Jacaria Understanding with Libya. Since this
and my wedding ring. had little hope that the police would past May, with support from the E.U.,
The experience—deeply frighten- arrest his brother’s killers. “So, he is it has spent at least $3.9 million on
ing but mercifully short—offered a gone,” he said. “Gone in every way.” the Coast Guard. The European
glimpse into the world of indefinite Conditions on the farm have wors- Commission recently committed to
detention in Libya. I often thought of building the Coast Guard a new and
Candé’s months-long incarceration, improved “maritime rescue coördina-
and its terrible outcome. Soon after- tion center” and to buying it three
ward, my team and I were released more ships.
from our cells and escorted toward On April 30th, shortly after 5 p.m.
the door. As we approached, an inter- prayers, Balde and some twenty other
rogator put his hand on my chest. men gathered at the Bir al-Osta Milad
“Guys, you can go,” he told the oth- cemetery for Candé’s funeral. The cem-
ers on my team. “Ian will be staying etery occupies an eight-acre plot be-
here.” Everyone stared. Then he burst tween an electrical substation and two
out laughing, and said he was just kid- ened, with heavy rainfall flooding the large warehouses. Many of Libya’s dead
ding. After a total of six days in cap- fields. Bobo, Candé’s youngest brother, migrants are buried there, and it has
tivity, we were taken to a plane and will likely soon try to make the jour- an estimated ten thousand graves,
flown to Tunisia—expelled from the ney to Europe himself. “What else can many of them unmarked. The men
country, we were told, for “reporting I do?” he said. prayed aloud as Candé’s body was low-
on migrants.” Ghreetly was suspended from Al ered into a hole dug in sand, no more
Mabani after Candé’s death, but was than a foot and a half deep. They
fter the detainees in Cell No. 4 later reinstated. For almost three topped it with rectangular stones and
A were released, word of Candé’s
death spread quickly through Tripoli,
months, Doctors Without Borders,
which assists migrants in detention
poured a layer of concrete. The men
said, in unison, “God is great.” Then
eventually reaching a community centers, refused to enter the prison; one of them, using a stick, scrawled
leader among migrants. The commu- Beatrice Lau, its head of mission in Candé’s name into the wet concrete. 
PROFILES
THE ENFORCER
Lina Khan’s battle to rein in Big Tech.
BY SHEELAH KOLHATKAR
n the spring of 2011, a recent Wil- you’re doing this work. There will the retail price of e-books. The publish-
I liams College graduate named Lina

Khan interviewed for a job at the
Open Markets Program, in Washing-
be things that you discover here that
will outrage you.” Khan took the job.
Open Markets studied industries
ers saw Amazon’s power as potentially
leading to a decline in the free exchange
of ideas and as a crisis for democracy.
ton, D.C. Open Markets, which was ranging from banking to agriculture. In Increasingly, so did Khan. Her work
part of the New America think tank, case after case, Lynn found, the number helped provide the basis for a piece that
was dedicated to the study of monop- of companies in each market had been Lynn published in Harper’s, in Febru-
olies and the ways in which concentra- reduced to a few big entities that had ary, 2012, called “Killing the Competi-
tion in the American economy was sup- bought up their competitors, giving them tion.” Today, he wrote, “a single private
pressing innovation, depressing wages, a disproportionate amount of power. company has captured the ability to dic-
and fuelling inequality. The program Consumers had the impression of vast tate terms to the people who publish
had been founded the previous year by choices among brands, but this was often our books, and hence to the people who
Barry Lynn, who believed that monop- misleading: many of the biggest furni- write and read our books.”
olies posed a threat to democracy, and ture stores were owned by one company; Khan told me that she started to see
that policymakers and much of the pub- a large percentage of the dozens of laun- the world differently. “It’s incredible,
lic were blind to this threat. Unlike the dry detergents in most supermarkets were once you start studying industry struc-
practice at other think tanks, which pub- made by two corporations. After consol- ture and see how much consolidation
lish research reports and white papers, idation, it became easier for furniture there has been across industries—in air-
Lynn, a former reporter and editor, dis- sellers and detergent manufacturers to lines, contact-lens solution, funeral cas-
seminated the program’s findings di- raise prices, compromise the quality of kets,” she said. “Every nook and cranny
rectly to the public, through newspaper their products, or treat employees poorly, of our economy has consolidated. I was
and magazine articles. because consumers and workers had few discovering this new world.” At one
The study of antitrust law was far other places to go. It also became much point, she investigated the candy mar-
from fashionable; since the nineteen- more difficult for entrepreneurs to break ket, identifying nearly forty brands in
eighties, the field had been dominated into the marketplace, because compet- her local store that were made by Her-
by a world view that favored corporate ing with these giants was almost impos- shey, Mars, or Nestlé. In another proj-
conglomeration, which was acceptable, sible. As huge companies became even ect, about the raising of poultry, she
mainstream experts believed, as long as bigger, much of the American middle found that most farmers had to pur-
consumer prices didn’t rise. Lynn was class struggled with stagnant wages. In chase chicks and feed from the giant
seeking a researcher without any formal Lynn’s view, the issues were connected. poultry processor that bought their full-
economics training, who would come to Khan began researching book pub- grown chickens, which, because it had
the subject with fresh eyes. Khan had lishing. “There was a sense that this inno local competitors, could dictate the
studied the 2008 financial crisis and was dustry was in crisis,” she recalled. Pub- price it paid for them.
interested in the effects of power dis- lishers had come under pressure, first Lynn and Khan couldn’t seem to get
parities in the economy. She checked from chain stores like Barnes & Noble, lawmakers to pay attention. “It defi-
out Lynn’s book, “Cornered: The New and then from Amazon, which sold nitely felt like we were on the margins
Monopoly Capitalism and the Econom- electronic books by pricing them at a of the policy conversation,” Khan said.
ics of Destruction,” from the library and loss, in order to encourage consumers One afternoon, she looked up from an
skimmed it the night before her inter- to buy its Kindle e-book readers. Am- article she was reading on her computer.
view. “When she walked in that door, azon eventually controlled more than Lynn recalls her saying, “Barry, I think
she had no idea what this entailed or seventy per cent of the e-book market, I’m starting to feel angry.”
what she would become,” Lynn told me. a dominance that gave it the ability to On June 15, 2021, Khan was sworn in
“She was just a fantastically smart per- force publishers to accept its terms, un- as the chair of the Federal Trade Com-
son who was very curious.” dermining the business model they had mission, the agency responsible for con-
During the interview, Lynn recalled, long used to subsidize the creation of a sumer protection and for enforcing the
he asked Khan, “Do you ever get angry? wide variety of books. When publish- branch of law that regulates monopo-
Does anything make you outraged?” ers tried to band together to fight Am- lies. At the age of thirty-two, she is the
She replied, “No, not really.” Lynn said, azon, the Justice Department sued them, youngest person ever to head the F.T.C.
“I think you’ll become angry while fearing that their action would increase Matt Stoller, the director of research at
An antitrust lawyer who studied the monopolistic power of Amazon and other large companies, Khan is now head of the F.T.C.
ILLUSTRATION BY IBRAHIM RAYINTAKATH THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 49
the anti-monopoly think tank the Amer- that are made, that determine these outdid work for Alphabet, or Alphabet
ican Economic Liberties Project, de- comes,” she said. “This is a really historic itself. When Obama left office, many
scribed Khan’s ascent as “earth-shatter- moment, and we’re trying to do every- of his top aides took jobs at tech com-
ing.” The appointment represents the thing we can to meet it.” panies: Jay Carney, Obama’s former
triumph of ideas advocated by people press secretary, joined Amazon; David
like Khan and Lynn that had been sup- mazon taught a generation of Plouffe, his campaign manager, and
pressed or ignored for decades. “She un-
derstands profoundly what monopoly
A consumers that they could order
anything online, from packs of mints
Tony West, a high-ranking official at
the Department of Justice, joined Uber;
power means for workers and for con- to swimming pools, and expect it to be and Lisa Jackson, the former head of
sumers and for innovation,” said David delivered almost overnight. According the Environmental Protection Agency,
Cicilline, a Democratic congressman to some estimates, the company con- went to Apple.
from Rhode Island and the chair of the trols close to fifty per cent of all e-com- The ascent of Donald Trump spurred
House Committee on the Judiciary’s merce retail sales in the U.S. and occu- activists across the political spectrum to
Subcommittee on Antitrust, pies roughly two hundred become interested in the new power of
Commercial, and Adminis- and twenty-eight million tech companies, upending many tradi-
trative Law. “She will use square feet of warehouse tional partisan differences. The role that
the full power of the F.T.C. space. It makes movies and Facebook played in the 2016 election,
to promote competition, publishes books; delivers and the enormous influence that the
which I think is good for groceries; provides home- company had over the information that
our economy, good for work- security systems and the people were seeing, was an electrifying
ers, and good for consum- cloud-computing services moment. In fact, many of the major
ers and businesses.” that many other companies tech companies were accused of play-
After years spent pub- rely on. Amazon’s founder, ing a role in the conditions that led vot-
lishing research about how Jeff Bezos, wants to colo- ers to choose Trump and his populist
a more just world could be nize the moon. During the message: Uber and Lyft, with their gig-
achieved through a sweeping reimag- Presidency of Barack Obama, Ama- economy jobs, were blamed for under-
ining of anti-monopoly laws, Khan now zon’s relentless expansion was largely mining labor unions and the middle
has a much more difficult task: testing encouraged by the government. The class; Amazon had helped drive Main
her theories—in an arena of lobbyists, country was emerging from a devastat- Street businesses into bankruptcy; Face-
partisan division, and the federal court ing recession, and Obama saw entre- book was the site of Russian disinfor-
system—as one of the most powerful preneurs like Bezos as sources of inno- mation campaigns and a platform of
regulators of American business. “There’s vation and jobs. In 2013, in a speech choice for figures from the far right;
no doubt that the latitude one has as a given at an Amazon warehouse in Chat- Apple made most of its luxury devices
scholar, critiquing certain approaches, tanooga, Tennessee, Obama described in factories in China, reaping enormous
is very different from being in the po- the company’s role in bolstering the fi- profits while creating relatively few jobs
sition of actually executing,” Khan told nancial security of the middle class and in the U.S.; Google, through its subsid-
me. But she added that she intends to creating stable, well-paying work. He iary YouTube, hosted hate speech.
steer the agency to choose consequen- spoke with near-awe of how, during As a result, antitrust policy, espe-
tial cases, with less emphasis on the out- the previous Christmas rush, Amazon cially as it pertains to big technology
comes, and to generally be more pro- had sold more than three hundred items firms, has emerged as one of the stark-
active. “Even in cases where you’re not per second. Obama was also close with est differences between the Biden Pres-
going to have a slam-dunk theory or a Eric Schmidt, the former executive idency and the Obama one. Stacy Mitch-
slam-dunk case, or there’s risk involved, chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent ell, a co-director of the Institute for
what do you do?” she said. “Do you turn company. An analysis by the Intercept Local Self-Reliance, an anti-monopoly
away? Or do you think that these are found that employees and lobbyists think tank, described the contrast as
moments when we need to stand strong from Alphabet visited the White House “night and day.” Obama’s politics were
and move forward? I think for those more than those from any other com- “very much in the center of the road,
types of questions we’re certainly at a pany, and White House staff turned to in terms of the dominant thought
moment where we take the latter path. Google technologists to troubleshoot of the last several decades,” Mitchell
“There’s a growing recognition that the Affordable Care Act Web site and told me. She noted that evidence of
the way our economy has been struc- other projects. Between 2010 and 2016, this world view could be seen early in
tured has not always been to serve peo- Amazon, Google, and other tech gi- Obama’s tenure, when his Admini-
ple,” Khan went on. “Frankly, I think this ants bought up hundreds of competi- stration declined to break up the big
is a generational issue as well.” She noted tors, and the government, for the most banks that had helped cause the 2008
that coming of age during the financial part, did not object. The analysis also financial crisis, and, instead, allowed
crisis had helped people understand that found that nearly two hundred and fifty them to become even larger and more
the way the economy functions is not people moved between government po- powerful, while millions of people lost
just the result of metaphysical forces. “It’s sitions and companies controlled by their homes to foreclosure. “Because of
very concrete policy and legal choices Schmidt, law and lobbying firms that his identity as someone who was very
progressive on a lot of other issues, I been under a work-from-home order York City, where Khan and her two
don’t think people saw that very clearly,” since March, 2020, but Khan goes in brothers attended public school.
she said. whenever she can. (She lives in New After working at Open Markets for
Through a series of appointments to York City, where her husband, Shah three years, Khan applied to law school
regulatory and legal positions, the Biden Ali, a cardiologist, works.) On a recent and to several journalism jobs. She was
Administration has indicated that it afternoon, I visited her in her third- accepted at Yale, and the Wall Street
wants to reshape the role that major floor office, where she was preparing Journal offered her a position as a re-
technology companies play in the econ- for a meeting with members of a for- porter covering commodities, in part
omy and in our lives. On March 5th, eign law-enforcement agency. “Com- because editors there had seen work she
Biden named Tim Wu, a Columbia ing in, I was aware that this is poten- had published for Open Markets on
Law School professor and an anti- tially a historic moment,” she said. “If the manipulation of commodities mar-
monopoly advocate who has argued that there are ventilator shortages after a kets by firms such as Goldman Sachs.
Facebook should be broken up, to the merger we approved—these are all “It was a real ‘choose the path’ moment,”
newly created position of head of com- problems tied up in policy decisions.” Khan told me. She chose Yale, which
petition policy at the National Eco- When I asked when she first became has been home to some of the most
nomic Council, which advises the Pres- aware of the concept of injustice, she prominent antitrust legal scholars in
ident on economic-policy matters. On said, “Most kids are aware of bullies, the country, albeit ones who subscribe
March 22nd, Biden nominated Khan and of who has power and who doesn’t to a view that Khan finds outdated.
to her current role. And, in July, he se- have power.” In his compact yet far-reaching book
lected Jonathan Kanter to head the Khan, who has dark eyes, angular “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in
antitrust division of the Department features, and dark-brown hair that’s the New Gilded Age,” Wu traces the
of Justice. Kanter left the law firm Paul, often tied in a loose bun, was born in history of the idea that the govern-
Weiss in 2020 because his work repre- London to parents from Pakistan. ment should restrain companies that
senting companies making antitrust When she was eleven, the family moved become extremely powerful. He de-
claims against Big Tech firms posed a to the U.S., where her father was a man- scribes the more than two thousand
conflict for the firm’s work for Apple, agement consultant and her mother manufacturing mergers that occurred
among others. Wu, Khan, Kanter, and worked at Thomson Reuters. They set- between 1895 and 1904 as a “monopo-
a handful of other anti-monopoly ad- tled in Mamaroneck, a suburb of New lization movement,” when business
vocates have been referred to as mem-
bers of a “New Brandeis movement,”
after the Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis, whose decisions limited the
power of big business. Because of Khan’s
youth, she has also been called the leader
of the “hipster antitrust” faction, but
this doesn’t capture the seriousness of
her intentions. On August 19th, she re-
filed an aggressive antitrust complaint
that the F.T.C. had initiated in 2020,
seeking to break up Facebook. In Sep-
tember, the agency published a report
analyzing hundreds of acquisitions
made by the biggest tech companies
which were never submitted for gov-
ernment review. Although the report
didn’t call for any specific action, it was
a sign that Khan intends to look far
deeper into Big Tech’s business than
her predecessors did.
he F.T.C.’s headquarters, in Wash-

T ington, D.C., occupies a limestone
building from 1938 whose hulking pro-
portions were meant to convey the
steadiness of the federal government.
The lobby is lined with black-and-
white portraits of former F.T.C. chair-
men and commissioners, almost all de-
picting white men. The agency has “Isn’t it nice to exchange good old-fashioned germs again?”
moguls argued openly that too much
competition among companies was bad
for the country. By the early twentieth TOPOGRAPHY
century, most major industries were
controlled, or soon would be, by one The land is a crick in the neck. An orange grove burns
giant firm. These conglomerates were and it’s sour when you burp. Whose voice is that?
called trusts, for the complicated legal There’s a fable. There’s a key. Every Ramadan,
structures that sometimes obscured their the artery suffers first. A diet of heavy lamb
ownership. Among the most famous and checkpoint papers. Indigestion like a nightmare.
were those operated by John D. Rocke- The Taurus sun burns your forehead. I mean the land.
feller, whose Standard Oil came to own The land looks white on the MRI images:
more than ninety per cent of the do- you call your grandfather. He’s been finding the land
mestic oil-refining market, and by John in his stool. His body contours the mattress like a coffin.
Pierpont Morgan, who controlled an His hand trembles. When he drinks the land,
empire of steel manufacturing, railroads, the urine comes out rose-colored.
shipping, and communications net- The land sears the esophagus. No more lemons,
works. The first antitrust law, the Sher- the doctor says. Two pillows at least. In July,
man Act, passed in 1890, outlawed col- you lived inside your grandfather like a settlement.
lusion or mergers among businesses You ate currant sorbet from the same cup.
that would lead to control of a partic- Did you inherit the land in your arthritic wrist?
ular market. The intention was to pro- It makes knitting hell. On the telephone,
tect fair competition, but its terms were your grandfather tells you the land is coating his eyes.
vague, and the new law was not strongly He tells you it is worth being alive just to see that blue.
enforced until at least a decade later. He dies and they harness his body to the dirt.
Louis Brandeis, who was born and He dies and the sun is out all week.
raised in Louisville, Kentucky, gradu-
ated from Harvard Law School in 1877 —Hala Alyan
and practiced law in St. Louis and Bos-
ton. He believed that, when individu-
als or corporations amassed too much a group of economists and legal schol- monopolies,” Stoller, of the Economic
economic power, they could exert pres- ars with ties to the University of Chi- Liberties Project, told me. “These are
sure on the political system to favor cago and the economists Gary S. Becker creatures of law and policy.” As an
their interests, undermining democ- and Milton Friedman began to argue illustration, he pointed to the growth
racy. He worked on cases that fought that markets could regulate themselves, of Walmart, which in 1970 became a
Morgan’s railroad monopoly and de- providing a check against government publicly traded company and had ap-
fended labor laws. In 1901, President overreach and, potentially, against to- proximately forty-four million dollars
Theodore Roosevelt began a campaign talitarianism. In 1978, the jurist Robert in annual sales; in 1980, it reached
to break up the trusts, filing lawsuits Bork published “The Antitrust Para- more than a billion dollars. By 2010,
seeking to dismantle Standard Oil and dox,” which applied the Chicago School’s the company was reporting annual
Morgan’s railroad conglomerate, the arguments to competition policy. Bork sales of four hundred billion dollars.
Northern Securities Company. He ini- wrote that antitrust law was not in- “I went into law school knowing
tiated lawsuits against more than forty tended to maintain fairness in an ab- that we were at this moment where we
major corporations during his tenure, stract sense; harm to consumers was the needed to rehabilitate our antitrust laws,”
while expanding the federal govern- only metric that mattered. If the price Khan said. The main antitrust course
ment’s ability to investigate private en- that people were paying for a product at Yale was taught by George L. Priest,
terprise. Roosevelt’s successor, Wood- did not rise dramatically, Bork argued, who had worked as a consultant for
row Wilson, appointed Brandeis to the then there was no antitrust violation, Microsoft in the early two-thousands,
Supreme Court in 1916. regardless of a company’s size or mar- after the Justice Department filed an
Brandeis helped popularize the be- ket share. This came to be known as anti-competitive-behavior suit against
lief that the government had a duty to the consumer-welfare standard. the company. Priest was a friend of
prevent any single entity from becom- During the Reagan Presidency, the Bork’s, and Bork had been a professor
ing too dominant, and thus to insure Chicago School’s theories took over at Yale’s law school when President Ron-
competitive markets. This idea influ- mainstream economics. Lynn described ald Reagan nominated him, in 1987, to
enced public policy for decades. “Anti- this shift as “the most radical change the Supreme Court. (He was rejected
trust through the nineteen-seventies in thinking about power in the United by the Senate after a bitter nomination
was Brandeisian,” Lynn said. “Anti- States since the country’s founding.” battle.) Priest encouraged his students
monopolism is the extension of the basic “Once the enforcement of our mo- to read “The Antitrust Paradox” before
concept of checks and balances into the nopoly laws was weakened, you saw the class started.
political economy.” In the mid-seventies, explosive growth of these dominant Benjamin Woodring, who worked
with Khan on the Yale Journal on Reg- Khan started writing a paper argu- wrote rebuttals to her arguments, say-
ulation, said that she seemed more so- ing that the consumer-welfare standard ing that she had not demonstrated that
phisticated than the typical law student. was outdated, using Amazon as a case consumers were being harmed by Am-
“She understood the political dimen- study. Amazon had avoided antitrust azon’s size. Neil Chilson, a former act-
sion of regulation and the lawmaking scrutiny so far, Khan wrote, because of ing chief technologist for the F.T.C.
process,” Woodring told me. “It’s so easy the fixation on consumer prices. There who’s now a senior research fellow for
for law students, especially relatively was no question that consumers loved the Charles Koch Institute, told me
green ones coming straight from col- the convenience of being able to order that Khan had taken a very aggressive
lege, to just treat the study of law as this almost anything on Amazon, and of position that was “out of step” with
disembodied language in a vacuum. But, the free and expedited shipping in- mainstream antitrust thinking. “Many
in reality, especially with things like cluded in an Amazon Prime member- of the ideas in it were not new,” Chil-
antitrust and civil rights, it is very much ship. Khan believed that the low costs son said. “That paper added a new ap-
a political struggle, a complicated jour- to consumers were a short-term bene- plication to a very old set of ideas that
ney that involves all three branches. She fit that failed to account for the harm had been debated and, I would say, in
was comfortable with the nuts and bolts the company’s size and practices posed many cases, undermined over the past
of how that process worked.” to the economy. She highlighted the century.” Bruce Hoffman, the director
In early 2016, when Khan was in her company’s willingness to operate with of the competition bureau at the F.T.C.
second year, she was invited, along with billions of dollars in losses for years at from 2017 until 2019, said, “The tech
Lynn, Kanter, and Teddy Downey, the a time, often by pricing products below companies are very big. That could be
executive editor of the Capitol Forum, what it cost to make and deliver them. because of anti-competitive behavior,
which researches antitrust issues, to din- This strategy has helped Amazon crush but it could also be because they’re bet-
ner with Senator Elizabeth Warren in its competitors in so many markets that ter at what they do than anyone else.”
her Senate office. Warren, who had pre- the company now provides critical in- Jason Furman, a former Obama ad-
viously taught at Harvard Law School, frastructure to other businesses, which viser who’s currently a professor at Har-
where she studied the erosion of the fi- rely on it to get their own products to vard, pointed out the limitations of
nancial security of the middle class, was market. It also has access to sensitive antitrust law to deal with bad corpo-
trying to better understand the relation- data about most of its competitors, who rate behavior. “I think that there’s some
ship of monopoly to inequality. Lynn must use Amazon’s platform in order conflation of the idea that these are
recalls that, at dinner, Warren’s eyes to survive. Khan proposed two ways to monopolies with the idea that these
gleamed as she listened to them talk address the problem: One would be to companies are causing lots of prob-
about the threat that economic concen- return to the old idea of antitrust law, lems, and thinking that if you solve the
tration posed to a free and equal soci- which focussed on preserving healthy monopoly it will solve all the other
ety. “Having had dozens of these kinds competition rather than on the prices problems,” he said. “If what you don’t
of conversations with experts and policy- consumers paid. The second would be like is that there’s genocides being
makers all around the world, this was to treat Amazon and similar compa- organized on platforms, or child por-
one of just a few where you start to talk nies like public utilities, and to regu- nography on platforms, or they’re hurt-
to someone and they get it immedi- late them aggressively, including by re- ing democracy as you see it—the rea-
ately,” Lynn said. Several months later, quiring that their competitors be given son they’re doing many of those things”
at an event hosted by Open Markets, access to their platforms on more fa- is that such an approach is profitable,
Warren gave a speech on the subject of vorable terms. a problem that antitrust policy can’t
competition in the U.S. economy. War- David Singh Grewal, a law profes- necessarily fix.
ren was known as a critic of Wall Street, sor at Berkeley who was then Khan’s Grewal disagrees. “Lina’s a visible
and as the creator of the Consumer Fi- faculty adviser at Yale, was impressed symbol of a younger generation that
nancial Protection Bureau; the speech by Khan’s unabashed attack. She could really understands tech, understands
announced that she planned to target have behaved like a “typical playing- its problems, and she has done the work
the major tech companies in a similar it-safe law-school kid trying to advance to understand that this is not a new
way. “Google, Apple, and Amazon have in the world,” he said, by proposing problem,” Grewal said. “Our grand-
created disruptive technologies that slight changes, thus avoiding offend- parents’ generation developed the tools
changed the world, and every day they ing her professors. “She didn’t do that,” to deal with this. In effect, what she’s
deliver enormous value,” she said. “They Grewal said. “She went for the intel- doing is saying, ‘It’s time to rediscover
deserve to be highly profitable and highly lectual jugular.” those.’ The reason these people are so
successful. But the opportunity to com- Khan’s ninety-three-page paper, scared of Lina is she’s saying, ‘The em-
pete must remain open for new entrants cheekily titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Par- peror has no clothes.’”
and smaller competitors who want their adox,” for Bork’s book, was published
chance to change the world.” It was the in the January, 2017, issue of the Yale fter graduation from law school,
first time that such a high-profile po-
litical figure had publicly embraced the
Law Journal. By legal-writing standards,
it went viral, leading to dozens of fol-
A Khan returned to Open Markets
to resume her anti-monopoly work,
ideas that Khan, Lynn, and other activ- low-up articles, including in the Times. this time as a legal expert. Soon after-
ists were advocating. Several mainstream antitrust experts ward, the European Union announced
that it was fining Google $2.7 billion most never held accountable; most ticle recommending that the F.T.C. re-
for antitrust violations, accusing the claims were resolved by fining the com- imagine the way it approaches antitrust
company, in its shopping services, of panies, and the fines were paid by share- enforcement by focussing on design-
ranking its own products higher in its holders. When President Trump ap- ing new rules to address violations
search results than those of its com- pointed Chopra to one of the two seats rather than on costly and risky litiga-
petitors. Lynn posted a statement on reserved for the minority party on the tion. Chopra told me that Khan had
Open Markets’ Web site calling on five-person commission, he accepted shaped the way he thinks about big
F.T.C. and Justice Department officials the job knowing that his inf luence technology firms’ influence over com-
to follow Europe’s lead. Over two de- would be limited. Still, he arrived de- merce and public opinion. “Her work
cades, Google and Eric Schmidt had termined to push the agency to rethink was very meaningful in terms of how
provided some twenty million dollars its role in the economy. “I had a strong we start to think about some of these
in funding to New America, and view that the F.T.C. was a backwater problems,” he said. “Both as threats to
Schmidt had served on New Ameri- and essentially a failed agency,” Chopra families and the economy and as con-
ca’s board. Two days after the Web post, told me. tributors to social division and under-
New America’s C.E.O., Anne-Marie Soon after he arrived, he issued a mining national security.”
Slaughter, told Lynn that Open Mar- memo on the subject of “repeat offend- In the fall of 2018, Khan started
kets could no longer be affiliated with ers,” companies that violated agree- a teaching fellowship at Columbia
the think tank. Lynn thinks that his ments they had made with their reg- Law School, where Tim Wu was a pro-
group’s ejection was in direct response ulators multiple times. One of the most fessor. In November, the Democrats
to pressure from Schmidt, but Slaugh- flagrant examples was Facebook, which, won control of the House of Represen-
ter told me that Lynn and Open Mar- in 2011, had reached a settlement with tatives, and, the following June, the
kets had been critical of Google for the F.T.C. over user-privacy violations. House Judiciary Subcommittee on An-
years. “This was an internal matter with Facebook promised to obtain its users’ titrust opened an investigation into Am-
Barry about playing by our rules and consent before sharing their data with azon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The
communicating with colleagues appro- outside companies. A few years later, investigation was led by David Cicil-
priately, and it was never about the a whistle-blower revealed that the data- line’s antitrust subcommittee, but it had
work,” she said. Schmidt said that Lynn’s analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, strong support from Republicans, in-
speculation that he was involved was which counted Robert Mercer as a key cluding F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., from
false and that he had always liked the investor, a Trump supporter, and a Wisconsin, one of the authors of the
fact that New America published things hedge-fund billionaire, had accessed Patriot Act. Both the Democrats and
he disagreed with. millions of Facebook user profiles and the Republicans found themselves di-
Lynn reëstablished Open Markets used them to try to disseminate polit- vided between more pro-corporate and
as an independent nonprofit, moving ical propaganda and influence voting more populist factions, with some Dem-
with Khan and the rest of the staff decisions. “F.T.C. orders are not sug- ocrats expressing concern that tech com-
to a co-working space nearby. In the gestions,” Chopra wrote. “Maintain- panies were stifling small businesses and
spring of 2018, Khan received an e-mail ing our credibility as public interest keeping wages from rising, and some
from Rohit Chopra, a commissioner law enforcers requires that order vio- Republicans venting angrily about con-
at the F.T.C., asking her to act as his servative views being censored on social-
legal adviser. In 2010, Chopra joined media platforms. One congressional
the newly created Consumer Finan- staffer involved in the investigation com-
cial Protection Bureau, where he worked plained that several Republicans “only
under Warren, serving as the agency’s cared about the hyper-partisan messag-
assistant director and student-loan om- ing apps that are important to Trump
budsman and becoming an outspo- supporters.”
ken critic of the student-loan indus- Khan was one of the first people
try. Like many others who worked at whom Cicilline and his chief legal
the C.F.P.B. in its early days, Chopra counsel on the Judiciary Subcommit-
had come to see the influence of cor- lations be remedied and, when appro- tee, Slade Bond, recruited. “She’s in-
porations on regulation and public pol- priate, penalized.” The memo was an credibly thoughtful, brilliant, and a real
icy as increasingly corrupt. The F.T.C., attack on the work of the agency’s staff scholar in terms of antitrust,” Cicilline
in Chopra’s view, was part of the prob- in the previous years. “I knew that it said. He told her, “This investigation
lem: its commissioners generally de- would ruffle feathers, which always is will be an opportunity to take all that
ferred to large corporations, and, even important when you’re trying to change experience and help Congress develop
when the agency confronted compa- agencies that have become stagnant,” a road map to fix this problem.”
nies over rule violations, it tended to Chopra told me. Khan was splitting her time be-
resolve the claims through settlements Khan worked with Chopra at the tween Dallas, where her husband was
and empty promises from the compa- commission for about three months. completing a medical fellowship, and
nies that they would change their be- They published several research reports, New York City. She immediately
havior. Individual executives were al- including an influential law-review ar- agreed to join the subcommittee. She
had studied the role Congress had
played during earlier eras, when there
were crackdowns on corporate mal-
feasance. “They would bring in the
C.E.O.s and produce these multi-
volume records,” she told me. “It played
an important function in keeping both
members of Congress and the broader
public educated about how these in-
dustries were operating.”
In July, 2019, the F.T.C., led by a
Trump appointee named Joseph Si-
mons, announced that it had fined
Facebook five billion dollars and im-
posed new restrictions on the com-
pany for violating the 2012 settlement
it had signed with the commission
over privacy violations. The new pen-
alty was in part a response to the Cam-
bridge Analytica scandal, and it was
designed to make headlines. The fine
was the largest in the F.T.C.’s record,
and a press release conveyed the agen- “I can’t tell whether you’ve had too much or not enough.”
cy’s satisfaction with what it had ac-
complished: “If you’ve ever wondered
what a paradigm shift looks like, you’re
• •
witnessing one today.” To critics of
Big Tech, however, the fine only un- more about how they behaved. Inde- in the past, the hearings of congres-
derscored what they had come to pendent businesses tended to be reli- sional committees were typically “asym-
regard as the F.T.C.’s failure to penal- ant on Google, Amazon, Facebook, and metrical warfare.” The staffer said, “The
ize bad behavior. Once again, no in- Apple, in order to communicate with witnesses were prepped literally every
dividuals at the company were pun- their customers and sell their products. day for a month before the hearing.
ished. The F.T.C.’s three Republican Cicilline’s team described the big four You’d ruin their summer, and the
commissioners had voted to approve as “gatekeepers” that dictated how other members would show up and just ask
the settlement, while the two Dem- firms could operate. They discovered the questions prepared for them by
ocratic commissioners, Chopra and that leaders of companies were afraid their staff.”
Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, voted against of speaking out against any of the dom- When Zuckerberg testified in 2018,
it. Chopra issued a blistering dissent; inant tech firms, especially Amazon, in the aftermath of the Cambridge An-
Facebook had likely generated more and worried that their coöperation with alytica scandal, several members of Con-
than five billion dollars in revenue the investigation would become pub- gress demonstrated complete ignorance
from the misconduct, and the agree- lic. The companies understood that of how Facebook worked. Senator Orrin
ment included immunity for Face- Amazon could block them from doing Hatch, of Utah, asked how the com-
book executives for all “known” and business on its site, a tactic that Ama- pany made money without charging its
“unknown” violations. “Facebook’s fla- zon had used in 2014, during the users any fees. Zuckerberg smiled and
grant violations were a direct result e-book-pricing dispute, when it re- replied, “Senator, we run ads.”
of their business model of mass sur- moved books published by Hachette The 2020 hearing was different.
veillance and manipulation, and this from its Web site. Khan and her colleagues had spent sev-
action blesses this model,” he wrote During the next year, the subcom- eral months assembling research and
in a tweet. “The settlement does not mittee held a series of hearings on in- interviewing witnesses for the House
fix this problem.” novation, privacy, and how the major members on the Judiciary Subcommit-
Two months later, Cicilline’s sub- technology platforms had affected the tee who would be questioning the
committee started asking for internal news media. The most high-profile C.E.O.s. They had internal e-mails
data from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, hearing was scheduled for July, 2020, and chat logs from Facebook, includ-
and Alphabet about how the compa- when Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Tim ing a discussion among executives about
nies operated their profits and expenses, Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg, the buying Instagram in order to eliminate
internal company correspondence about C.E.O.s, respectively, of Amazon, Al- it as a competitor.
acquisitions, and other information. phabet, Apple, and Facebook, were in- Cicilline opened the proceedings
It also sent requests to firms that had vited to testify. A congressional staffer from the congressional hearing room.
done business with the big four, to learn involved in the investigation said that, Before the pandemic, he noted, the
businessfriendly. On October 6th, the
Democratic members published their
version. “To put it simply, companies
that once were scrappy, underdog start
ups that challenged the status quo have
become the kinds of monopolies we
last saw in the era of oil barons and
railroad tycoons,” the introduction read.
“Although these firms have delivered
clear benefits to society, the dominance
of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Goo
gle has come at a price.”
The report was more than four hun
dred pages, and included some of the
most damning evidence the subcom
mittee had gathered. In reviewing the
report for ProMarket, a publication
of the University of Chicago’s Booth
School of Business, the legal scholar
Shaoul Sussman wrote, “Upon careful
reading, it becomes abundantly clear
just how much this strong, unapolo
getic call for Congressional action owes
to the sagacious intellectual finger
prints of Lina Khan.”
han returned to Columbia Law

K School, where she began teaching
• • a seminar about the history of anti
monopoly law and policy. A few weeks
later, Joe Biden was elected President,
companies in question were already count of Donald Trump, Jr., “was taken and lobbyists, activists, and donors
“titans in our economy.” Since then, down for a period of time,” and Zucker started pushing candidates for posi
they had grown even more powerful, berg politely responded that “what you tions in the incoming government. The
while locally owned businesses faced might be referring to happened on two most important jobs in antitrust
an economic crisis. “Open markets are Twitter.” Representative Jim Jordan, of are the chair of the F.T.C. and the head
predicated on the idea that, if a com Ohio, accused the companies of being of the antitrust division at the Depart
pany harms people, consumers, work “out to get conservatives,” while Matt ment of Justice. Warren, among oth
ers, and business partners will choose Gaetz, from Florida, wondered if they ers, made it known to Biden and those
another option. That choice is no lon embraced American values and accused around him, including his chief of staff,
ger possible,” he said. “Concentrated Alphabet of supporting the Chinese Ron Klain, that Khan should be con
economic power leads to concentrated military, which Pichai denied. sidered for the F.T.C.
political power. This investigation goes Stoller said that, these distractions Most of the names mentioned in
to the heart of whether we as a peo aside, the tenor of the exchanges re the press, however, were longtime cor
ple govern ourselves, or let ourselves minded him of the 1994 tobacco hear porate lawyers who had cycled in and
be governed by private monopolies.” ings, when Representative Henry A. out of government. Karen Dunn, a
Khan sat beside him, in a pastel blazer Waxman summoned seven Big To partner at Paul, Weiss who had served
and a mask. bacco company C.E.O.s to interrogate as White House counsel under Obama,
The C.E.O.s appeared remotely. All them about whether nicotine was ad and as a senior adviser and commu
four made opening statements high dictive. “I would describe it as a time nications director to Senator Hillary
lighting their entrepreneurial back machine,” Stoller told me. “Congress Clinton, was rumored to be under
stories, emphasizing the millions of used to do these hearings on corporate consideration for a position in the Jus
new jobs their companies had created. power all the time. There’d be a lot of tice Department. Dunn had repre
The hearing lasted for six hours. Re investigation and real work.” sented Uber and Apple, and advised
publicans also asked aggressive ques As the subcommittee prepared to Bezos during his antitrust subcom
tions, typically focussed on socialmedia release a final report, the Republican mittee hearing. Renata Hesse, a Sul
bias and other concerns of Trump and members split off and published their livan & Cromwell partner and former
his supporters; at one point, Sensen own reports, which included recom Obama Justice Department official
brenner asked Zuckerberg why the ac mendations that they said were more who had worked for Google and ad
vised Amazon on its 2017 purchase of to assume that everyone simply saw it merce, told the Journal, “It feels to the
Whole Foods Market, was said to be that way. business community that the F.T.C.
a leading candidate for the Assistant The setback revealed some of the has gone to war against us, and we have
Attorney General for Antitrust posi- limits of trying to use antitrust as a to go to war back.” But Khan disputes
tion. Susan M. Davies, a corporate mechanism for addressing bad corpo- that she is anti-business. “I think anti-
lawyer who had worked for Facebook, rate behavior. “There is relatively little trust and anti-monopoly and fair com-
was rumored to be Attorney General that Lina Khan can do,” Jason Furman, petition are enormously pro-business,”
Merrick Garland’s first choice for the of Harvard Law School, told me. “I she said. “Monopolistic business prac-
antitrust job. Left-leaning news out- think she’s going to face very big chal- tices are not conducive to a robust and
lets published harshly critical articles lenges, because the courts decide.” thriving economy.” She noted that she
about the pro-corporate direction Khan told me that her vision for the had started her career by looking closely
Biden’s Administration seemed to be F.T.C. takes these challenges into ac- at the poultry industry, which was struc-
taking. On January 28th, a piece ran count. “Antitrust needs to be on the tured like an hourglass. “You have mil-
in the American Prospect with the head- table, but we need to have a whole host lions of consumers on one end, mil-
line “Merrick Garland Wants of other tools on the table as well,” she lions of farmers on the other end, and
Former Facebook Lawyer to Top said. On September 22nd, she issued a they’re connected by a very small num-
Antitrust Division.” memo outlining her priorities. One of ber of intermediaries,” she said. “I think
Then, in March, Biden announced them, she told me, was to address the those types of markets where you have
that he was nominating Khan to a seat merger boom that’s under way; during deep asymmetries of power, sometimes
on the F.T.C. Khan said that she was the first eight months of 2021, $1.8 tril- on multiple sides of the market, can
surprised when, a few months later, she lion in mergers and takeovers was an- lead to all sorts of business practices
was named chair. On July 9th, Biden nounced. Some of the largest corpora- that are harmful.”
issued an executive order instructing tions were set to become even bigger: In addition to managing political
more than a dozen regulatory agencies Amazon announced a proposed acqui- pressure, running the F.T.C. involves
to take aggressive steps to promote sition of M-G-M studios; United- overseeing hundreds of people, some-
competition in the economy. Health Group proposed to buy Change thing Khan has never had to do before,
One of the F.T.C.’s last moves under HealthCare; A.T. & T. wants to merge and during a pandemic. “You know, his-
Donald Trump was to file, in Decem- WarnerMedia, which it owns, with Dis- torically you would just have an ice-
ber, 2020, a sweeping antitrust case covery. “There’s a very real risk that the cream social and the whole team would
against Facebook, alleging that it held economy emerging post-COVID could come in and you’d be able to see every-
a monopoly position in social media be even more concentrated and con- body,” she said. “Now that looks like a
and seeking to force it to sell Insta- solidated than the one leading up to thousand-person Zoom, and Zoom
gram and WhatsApp. The suit under- it,” Khan said. “That is what you wake crashes, and half the people can’t get
scored the stakes for Biden’s new anti- up thinking about: the merger surge, on. . . . There’s a level of clumsiness that
trust authorities, who would inherit and what we’re going to do about it.” comes with just doing these types of
the case, along with investigations of During her f irst few months at transitions during the pandemic.”
Google and Amazon. Twelve days after the F.T.C., Khan took advantage of In a sense, the real work of Khan’s
Khan started her new job, a judge dis- its Democratic majority—which in- antitrust fight will be about chang-
missed the Facebook lawsuit, issuing cluded Rohit Chopra, ing minds over time—first
a harsh critique of how Khan’s prede- who had been nominated those of consumers, and then
cessors had written their complaint. by Biden to become head those of judges and legisla-
When Facebook purchased Instagram of the C.F.P.B. but hadn’t tors, who must reshape the
and WhatsApp, in 2012 and 2014, moves yet been confirmed—to legal framework to ref lect
that were approved by the F.T.C., it gain easy approval of pol- a new world view. Khan
eliminated two of its most promising icy changes. Several of seems to understand this.
competitors. Proponents of broader those policies make it Still, some longtime staffers
antitrust enforcement argue that this more difficult for compa- at the F.T.C. worry that she
left Facebook free to violate its users’ nies to get mergers ap- is underestimating the risks
trust and publish lies and propaganda proved, and some expand of pushing ahead with ag-
because it faced so little competition. Khan’s own authority at gressive cases that are likely
(WhatsApp had been popular in part the commission. The Wall Street Jour- to fail, and of insulating herself from
because of its strong privacy controls.) nal editorial page, which has published views that don’t align with hers. “Do
Making Facebook sell both companies at least six critical pieces about Khan you want an F.T.C. chair who’s going
would force it to compete with them. since she started, described her as to win cases?” a person who has done
When the judge dismissed the F.T.C.’s “Icarus,” and said that her “power grab extensive work in antitrust policy said.
case, he argued that the agency had at the F.T.C. will end with her wings “Or do you want an F.T.C. chair who’s
provided no proof for its assertion that melting in the courts.” going to have glorious, spectacular
Facebook held a monopoly position in Suzanne Clark, the president and losses that so enrage people that the
social networking, but, instead, seemed C.E.O. of the U.S. Chamber of Com- system gets fixed?” 
FICTION
58 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY BÉNÉDICTE MULLER

ary Jane follows her hus- never been longer, not even in law ther told it, Gertrude had bought the
M band, Daniel, from room

to room, words pouring out
of her, yammering. Or hammering, as
school, stretching the elastic band
around the mass of it, looping once,
then twice. To her recent question of
sofa with the paltry allowance she re-
ceived from her no-good husband, its
sturdy ornate frame—cherry—and
he has said, as if she must hit every whether he likes it gray, Daniel had silk upholstery as grand as the par-
nail on the head. What does he mean answered, Depends. lors and drawing rooms it had passed
by that, she wanted to know. What do you think? she’s asking through. If that sofa could talk, Ger-
What do you mean by that? she now. trude used to say, and it was true, it
had asked, but Daniel shrugged. Is it a good idea or a so-so idea or looked as if it had a few stories to tell,
No idea, he said. a terrible idea or what? although now it sat next to the rick-
She follows Daniel into the living I can’t decide, she says. ety metal stool and the makeshift
room, where he sits in the big blue I mean, I vacillate, or fluctuate—I worktable, silent. Something about
chair he likes to relax in after dinner, can never tell which word is right— Gertrude’s death had taken the spunk
watching home-improvement shows about the whole thing, but the ques- out of it, according to Daniel’s father,
on his device. Mary Jane has her own tion is, would you? and so he let it be as he puttered in
device, though she is slightly less cap- I mean, what do you think? Do the basement, re-caning a rocking
tivated by its offerings—the games you have thoughts? she says. chair, the Victorian sofa, flecked with
and apps and streaming services— mold, having somehow lost a claw,
which is not to say she is above it, she o his credit, Daniel did not jump forgotten.
is def initely not above it, no, just
slightly less captivated. She often
T into the whole home-improve-
ment fad when everyone else did
Given Daniel’s father’s hobby, you
might think that Daniel had learned
checks the weather. In several cities. during the past year. It’s been a more the names of all the complicated hard-
But where was she? gradual thing. And for a long time he ware in his father’s toolbox during the
Living room. Blue chair. Daniel. hopped around from show to show, hours the two spent together in the
Has he put in his earbuds? They dis- never quite deciding if it was a waste basement, but Daniel’s father pre-
appear into his ears, so she’s never of time or if he was learning some- ferred his hobbies solo, switching on
sure until she spies the tiny white tube thing useful, something he might the light outside the basement door
of plastic—stem of plastic?—bisect- eventually apply to his own life. after dinner and then descending,
ing the earlobe. There was the time His father had been a hobbyist, alone, the f limsy stairs, dangerous
in law school when Daniel decided which is to say, his father had had given the shaky bannister and the
to pierce his earlobe with some- many hobbies, including refurbishing concrete f loor below. Daniel had
thing—a safety pin? She hasn’t old furniture from junk shops—chairs learned the names much later, long
thought of that in years. and dressers and the occasional table. after his father had passed on.
Daniel looks up as if not quite re- Daniel remembers the basement. His Sometimes, as a child, Daniel had
membering Mary Jane, or maybe he father kept his complicated hardware imagined flicking off the switch out-
did not register her following him there in a fishing-tackle box; when side the basement door, throwing his
into the living room in the first place. you opened the box, the drawers father into total darkness; then his fa-
Regardless, here she is, or there she popped up and out in three tiers, and ther might be devoured, or at least
is, a bad penny, an aching back, an er- all its contents—tangles of coiled cop- momentarily terrified, by the wet toads
rand to run. She wears what she al- per wire, pins and dowels, drilling that lived in the rain gutters just out-
ways wears these days: her fuzzy screws and machine screws, hex nuts, side the basement windows. They
sweater and leggings meant for yoga; flat nuts, washers, caps, carriage and were hard to see, but Daniel knew
her hair is pulled into a ponytail, toggle bolts—were suddenly, majesti- they were always there, camouflaged
though that sounds considered. She cally, revealed. in the brown decaying leaves that no
most likely has not brushed her hair The fishing-tackle box sat on the one ever bothered to clean out.
at all. She most likely has grabbed the hollow-core door that sat on the saw-
shank in one hand and stretched an horses that served as his father’s work- ary Jane has no interest in home
elastic band around it. This she most
likely has done first thing in the morn-
table. His father sat on a metal stool
he had salvaged from a dump, three-
M improvement. She has other
fish to fry. Big fish. She wants answers
ing, after splashing cold water on her legged and rickety. Next to the work- to life’s questions, or at least discus-
face and brushing her teeth, noticing table and the rickety metal stool was sions about them. If these questions
the dank smell of the formerly soft the broken-down Victorian sofa that can’t be debated now, when time has
white towel in their bathroom and had belonged to his father’s mother, slowed to a standstill, what does that
commenting on how that happened a woman Daniel had never met. say about all of it? What does that
so quickly—has he noticed as well? Her name was Gertrude, and by say about everything?
And didn’t she just do the wash yes- all accounts she had been a beautiful Besides, the children are far away
terday? These are the things she may woman with a certain flair. The bro- and no longer children. Every few
consider as she grabs the shank of her ken-down Victorian sofa was a tes- weeks, she sees one or the other in a
hair and comments on how it has tament to this: the way Daniel’s fa- kitchen or against a dark window
somewhere—the ref lection from a
desk lamp exploding like a dead star.
During the calls, she tries not to look CULTURE
at her own face, her long hair, her
eyes through the smudged lenses of They say paratroopers still yell Geronimo when they jump
her glasses, the crepey skin of her Because of a movie the first ones saw the one with Geronimo
neck—how vain! Or Daniel wander-
ing around behind her as if it isn’t Played by Chief Thundercloud the first Tonto real name
much his business: communication, Victor Daniels not the one with him played by Chuck Connors
children.
Did he get that from his father? Who played for the Dodgers and later played the Rifleman
It would have been a reasonable ques- Which became a nickname of Flemmi a mob killer in Boston
tion to ask, a thing to discuss: genet-
ics, epigenetics, heredity, personality. In real life he came home to find soldiers had killed his aged
Moving on to energy, the extraordi- Mother his young wife and his children that not in the movie
nariness of light, quantum mechan-
ics, the whole wave-and-particle Somewhere sometime someone must have yelled Geronimo
thing she’s never understood though When committing atrocities or about to or some such redolent
she’s trying, something about collaps-
ing electrons, neutrons. Entangle- Word or phrase that too a kind of poetry even official jargon
ment, et cetera. A kind of poetry Bless comedy for an opposite rude poetry
But the point is, did he get that
from his father? They told me Germans murdered our cousins so I was mean
Law school. Chicago. 1973. Around To a younger boy Leander his German parents Nana’s tenants
the time they first met, Daniel had
told Mary Jane how toward the end Good pitching beats good hitting and vice versa I never
of his parents’ lives—Daniel a late ad- Said half of what I said Bless Yogi Berra leaving it knotted
dition—his mother and father spoke
only through the dog. Bless all things that are more than one thing and all people
Mom would say, “Tell Carl yada For our unwitting and witting witless improvised mixtures
yada,” and then Dad would say, “Tell
Barb I’m aware of that, but I thought Bless truth Bless things never known to be true or not true for
we’d first yada yada yada yada.” Showing me my impurity in proportions unknowable and vital
Six yadas. That must have been
some conversation.
You get the idea.
What breed? high meadows in search of lepidop- decided to knock out a few walls and
This isn’t about the dog. tera. Daniel had ordered the cheese- to reconfigure the attic to accommo-
But if it were a basset hound or cake with the canned, viscous red date their growing family. Unlike so
something, with those ears, I could cherries lumped on top, the gooey many others, this show is not about
picture it, an ear like a walkie-talkie. cherry sauce. He ate it with a plastic the speed of the renovation but about
That would have been funny. fork. She drank coffee. Black coffee quality and structural integrity. The
It wasn’t funny. from a Styrofoam cup. She remem- young couple, thumbing through vol-
Sorry. bers best the look of Daniel’s hands. umes as heavy as the O.E.D., have
She was a mutt. Regular ears. Beautiful hands. Surgeon’s hands. learned that the attic was originally a
A hound mutt? Hand-model hands. His nails filed third floor before being converted in
Newfie mutt. Curly black hair. A or just naturally rounded smooth. the very early twentieth century to an
little white on her chest. Never mind, Why does it matter? The look of attic, or what was then called a ghost
Daniel said, and went back to his Daniel’s hands? The look of the cher- floor. Given the number of children
cheesecake. ries on top of the cheesecake? But who did not make it past infancy, and
Where had they been? The stu- Mary Jane would say of first loving accounting for the devastation of the
dent union. A booth. This after the her husband: plastic fork, cheesecake, influenza epidemic at the close of the
class with the professor who had stud- viscous cherries. First World War, these ghost floors al-
ied with Nabokov at Cornell, the two lowed parents to literally push daily re-
of them laughing at the idea of the his particular episode, if Mary Jane minders of past lives from their minds,
professor, lost in Cornell winters, tee-
tering on the icy edge of the gorge,
T were to ask Daniel, features a cou-
ple from Ontario interested in expand-
allowed the house itself to annex the
space and leave it empty. On the ghost
then, once the weather cleared, join- ing their brood. As young profession- f loor, the quiet had dimension and
ing Professor N. to bound through als leading very busy lives, they have weight, an unspeakable presence.
birthdays and other special occasions:
a ritual. And as a child she’d travelled
through Oklahoma with a magician,
long story.
Bless Nana my grandmother for her Southern accent in English She had a half sister and a half brother,
And her Romanian accent in Yiddish that I echo still unwitting and together the two made a whole sib-
ling, mercurial and far away, living with
Bless respectful misquotations innocent mistakes well meaning a hippie mother in Elk, California. Only
That may correct scholars or governors his name not Geronimo once had she gone with her father all
that way to see them. She remembered
I was not a chief he said never was a chief but because I was how they ate chocolate and walked along
More deeply wronged than others the title was conferred on me the broken edge of the coast. Seals had
been promised, but the seals were under
Berra in Hebrew means a good person in Arabic a truth-teller the white-capped and furious waves; the
Or is it a town in Ferrara or a hut dweller or Spanish berrear waves broke against the rocks where the
seals were supposed to be and then fiz-
In a gym in shorts Larry wearing a towel or he sat some way zled out into the far ocean, the foam
They said looked like a Yogi these things fit or stick Leander drawn back as if it were a curtain on a
dark stage; she couldn’t see a thing.
In torn sneakers so foot skin showed I stomped it like one of Where are the seals? she’d barked at
The jerks Harvey Korman’s character hires in “Blazing Saddles” her father and the other two, but no one
seemed to hear her. She shouted against
Let them go says Brooks in warpaint on horseback in Yiddish the whip of the wind and felt dry strands
Jay Silverheels mainly played Tonto a true Mohawk an athlete of hair in her mouth, itchy, annoying.
No one heard her. No one ever heard
He got to say the punchline he fired me when he found out what her. That’s what she remembered, she
Kemosabe means the joke maybe obsolete but for me it plays told Daniel. And please—Mary Jane?
I’ll never forgive them.
In the sacred field of the unknown with meanings abounding She had asked him to call her M.J.
The title was conferred on me he said and I resolved to honor it on their first date: at the student union,
or maybe later while they smoked cig-
arettes and stood around the quad, too
—Robert Pinsky cold in the brutal wind off the lake. By
the bicycle rack she teased, Is this a
girl’s bike? She was not someone who
knew anything about flirting.
The husband explains all this to have cleared and Mary Jane has moved Yard sale, he said. He knew nothing
the wife, who sits beside him but seems to the patio; she looks to be dead- about flirting, either.
not to have absorbed the same infor- heading the daisies. They walked along the lakefront de-
mation from the heavy book. spite the cold, and he pushed his bike
She nods, a sad look on her face. here did you come from? Who as she told him how she had travelled
So interesting, she says.
I’m not spooked! the husband says.
W are you, even? Daniel had wanted
to ask. This soon after they eloped—1975,
across Oklahoma with a magician, a
friend of the family who was really just
Daniel has never heard the term and there were too many other things a creep who needed someone to saw in
“ghost floor.” He’d like to mention it going on. The bar exam. A baby. Some- half, hold the dove, and wear the out-
to Mary Jane—perhaps she’s aware— one’s campaign for local office. Besides, fit. You know, she said, the leotard, and
and discuss his own ideas regarding it seemed to be the wrong question, or in the wind her long red hair blew cra-
structural integrity, things unseen but questions, for obvious reasons. Still, at zily around her face as if it were a thing
present, the unaddressed. He’s been certain moments, it felt like Mary Jane on its own, and he stopped and reached
hatching a plan, he’d like to tell her, was an introduction that had gone by out, instinct, to push it from her face
to open the walls on the second floor too quickly, the kind that left you pre- so that he could see her, and she said,
and verify what he suspects may be tending you remembered a name even Thank you. She stopped and said, Thank
balloon framing. Are the joists dowel- years afterward. you. This part he remembers best.
pegged? Hand-hewed or band-sawed? She was raised in Greenville, Dela-
It’s really quite exciting—but when ware, she had told him. Her mother he daisies, purchased and planted
he looks up from his device, his vi-
sion speckled and hazy as if he’d just
and father lively retirees who played
racquet sports on weekends with a cir-
T at the height of all this, have mi-
raculously survived the winter in their
emerged from a double feature at cle of friends and canoed down the big clay pots and are now sprouting,
noon, he sees that the evening clouds Brandywine River, loaded, to celebrate blooming, and dying again. It all feels
important. Profound. Life. The green pinkie fingers. Ginger lifted her fin- their roots a tangled mass, dormant.
of their new leaves, the small, white gers and wiggled them. Trauma? You’re wrong, he had said to her.
buds, the bright-yellow eyes, even the What did Ginger mean, trauma? She’d walked out of the bathroom,
dried brown chrysalises she pinched Hadn’t Mary Jane been speaking of looking for something. It was that
with her shears. other things, of her childhood, of the long when I met you.
She never much liked the flower, vacation she took with her father to Oh, her hair, he means. Yes, she
but it is useful, dependable, resilient. Elk, the half sister and half brother said. I suppose.
A friend. What does she even mean cavorting with him ahead on that You used to wear it wrapped up
by this? she thinks as she clips. She walk, the fury she had felt? What on the top of your head, or covered
cannot keep her own thoughts, her would happen if she flung herself off with that bandanna.
questions, straight, and random sen- those cliffs in Northern California, I remember, she said.
tences, odd sentences, float around bounced to her death, dashed on the The pink one.
and sometimes surface, like the vague rocks below, the jagged boulders that Yes, yes, yes, she said.
answers to what she used to ask her did not hold even an inkling of a seal Couldn’t he see she had things to
Magic 8-Ball alone in her bedroom or the suggestion that a seal had ever do? My sources say no.
in Greenville, with its orange shag been there before—her father might I liked it when you wore it loose.
carpet and wallpapered walls, bright- as well have promised mermaids, Talk, talk, talk. You could not shut
yellow daisies. Daisies! or sirens—the rocks black as pitch the man up.
Will I be married? It is decidedly so. and as furious as the ocean, the tu- But that was then, in the bad
Will I be famous? Don’t count on it. mult of clouds? weather, before the storm cleared and
Will I have a girl and a boy? Can- She had told Ginger only this: how the sun broke, rainbows undoubtedly
not predict now. she had stopped to look at the frenzy somewhere, before this purple late-
She remembers Greenville as a of weather, to stare hard, forgetting spring sunset. Now she’s come in,
long hallway leading to her bedroom everything and forgotten when she again; he’s looked up and she’s here,
with the daisies on the walls, and turned around and saw her father again, waiting, his wife, Mary Jane,
empty afternoons watching soap moving on with his other children, a M.J. for a time until they both grew
operas, eating snacks. Her parents al- grown boy and a grown girl who bored of it, or simply forgot why M.J.
ways elsewhere. looked nothing like her. had ever felt dangerous and slightly
Did they talk through a dog? Gin- Trauma? Mary Jane had said to sophisticated, the two of them kids
ger Stanhope, her therapist, had re- Ginger. It’s just a story. in front of that judge in Chicago,
cently asked. Mary Jane barely showing in a mini-
We had cats, she said. A joke, but ary Jane and Daniel awoke to skirt, heels, her beautiful arms bare,
Ginger hadn’t laughed, Ginger not
exactly the laughing type.
M rain this morning, rain that
lashed the trees and pelted the win-
her red hair past her shoulders, loose,
a crown of dandelions on her head,
She sees Ginger on Tuesday morn- dows, flattened the tulips and daffo- stitched earlier during the picnic
ings, sitting in her son’s room, better dils, knocked the gutters. Everything they’d shared in Grant Park before
light, waiting to be let into Ginger’s rearranged. Angry. Mary Jane even- heading on a lark to the courthouse.
space, or face, as it were; Ginger a tually found her muck boots and an It had all seemed a lark: the judge,
younger woman with a habit of tilt- oilskin jacket in the back of the hall- marriage, forever. Now she stands
ing her head and squinting as if the way closet. If one knew nothing about here waiting, shears in hand. She
words, Mary Jane’s words, were ex- her, it would not have been unrea- has said something to him, a request
ploding particles—waves? pockets?— sonable to imagine that she was on or a demand, a question. Daniel tries
of light. her way to the stables, or to grab a to remember.
Ginger’s off ice is God knows wicker basket and her favorite fly rod. I mean, I’m asking, she says.
where—this is all very new—an or- She had always had that way about What do you think? Do you have
chid strategically placed on a low con- her, Daniel thought, watching: wind- thoughts? she says.
sole behind her, a door leading out. swept, rushed, a cup of black coffee Were they barefoot before that
Occasionally, a child’s voice can be in a Styrofoam cup. judge? It was a bright summer day,
heard in the distance, or someone W here are you off to in this and someone, a clerk, had tucked a
playing the cello. Mary Jane suspects weather? He might have asked, but white carnation in the lapel of his
that Ginger’s claim to the title of ther- he knew better; he knew the answer. Goodwill suit, its smell rank and
apist may be a bit tenuous, an under- Lately, she has a vision of what can sweet.
graduate degree in sociology or a year be accomplished in a morning: she Yes, he says. I do, he says, then the
of study at Teachers College, but at digs holes for annuals, moves stones judge concludes the script from which
this point, eight months in, it would from here to there, crawls on hands he’s been reading and waits for the
be rude to ask. and knees to divide the perenni- newlyweds to embrace. 
We all hold trauma, Ginger had als—the lilies and the irises, which
said last week. Every one of us. In are so packed in, she’s complained, NEWYORKER.COM
our bodies, in our knees, our toes, our they rarely f lower or even sprout, Kate Walbert on entanglement and separation.

THE CRITICS
THE CURRENT CINEMA
BEFORE TIMES
“Licorice Pizza” and “The Hand of God.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
he running time of the new Paul same urgency, even when they have no- And, at the climax, they both run—
T Thomas Anderson movie, “Lico-
rice Pizza,” is a hundred and thirty-three
where special to go. The hero of “Lic-
orice Pizza,” Gary Valentine (Cooper
Alana going from right to left across
the screen, and Gary going in the other
minutes, and much of that time is oc- Hoffman), races toward a gas station, direction, equal and opposite. Wait for
cupied with running. Think of Shirley past a line of idling vehicles, to the sound the meet and greet.
MacLaine, haring along at the end of of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” For Anderson’s characters have taken to
“The Apartment” (1960), with her head her part, the heroine, Alana Kane (Alana their heels before. Remember the ex-
thrown back, then imagine a whole film Haim), sprints to a police station, after plosive scene in “The Master” (2015),
in which people dash around with the Gary has been inexplicably arrested. when Joaquin Phoenix burst through a
Set in 1973, in the San Fernando Valley, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film stars Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman.
ILLUSTRATION BY NADA HAYEK THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 63
door and set off across a plowed and and Alana was the minor? As we now man and by Anderson himself, misses
misty field, at full tilt, with the camera react, perhaps, to a half-forgotten movie nothing. And still it hungers for more.
hurrying to keep up. Such speed, how- of 1973, Clint Eastwood’s “Breezy,” which Busy and thronging, rammed with
ever, sprang from desperation, whereas chronicles the alliance of a young hip- cameos and comic turns, and sewn to-
“Licorice Pizza” is bent upon the pur- pie (Kay Lenz) and a wrinkled divorcé gether with songs (does anything shout
suit of happiness. It is, indeed, Ander- (William Holden). Anderson, I’m sure, 1973 quite like “Let Me Roll It,” by Paul
son’s happiest creation to date—blithe, is alive to this potential awkwardness, McCartney and Wings?), “Licorice Pizza”
easy-breathing, and expansive. The odd and that’s why the new film is mas- nonetheless hangs on the rapport—more
thing is that, in terms of space and time, sively—and, by his standards, scandal- than a friendship, less than a love story,
it’s what Bowie would have called a ously—bereft of sex. Given that the San and sometimes a power struggle—be-
god-awful small affair. Aside from a Fernando Valley rang to the phony tween Gary and Alana. Cooper Hoff-
short trip to New York, it clings to the moans of porno stars, in “Boogie Nights” man, the son of Philip Seymour Hoff-
San Fernando Valley, and we’re firmly (1997), and to the tumescent dictums of man, who for so long was a stalwart of
stuck in the early nineteen-seventies. a motivational speaker, in “Magnolia” Anderson’s work, is never less than en-
Those cars are lined up because of a (1999), it’s both a shock and a relief to dearing, and allows us to believe in Gary’s
global fuel emergency, and Richard find that, by and large, “Licorice Pizza” belief in himself. “You don’t even know
Nixon is glimpsed on TV, in Novem- keeps the carnal peace. One evening, as what’s going on in the world,” Alana tells
ber, 1973, beseeching Americans to trim Gary and Alana lie beside one another him, but he knows what’s going on in
their gas consumption. It was quite a on a water bed, their little fingers touch, his world, and that’s what counts.
speech, in fact, and some directors might in silhouette. We could be watching Finally, though, the movie belongs
point up its ironic pertinence to the en- cutout puppets. Gary’s hand hovers to Alana Haim. She made her name as
vironmental crisis of today. Not Ander- brief ly over Alana’s breast, and then one-third of Haim, the group in which
son. His mind’s eye is fixed on the past, withdraws. No boogie tonight. she performs with her sisters Este and
and “Licorice Pizza” isn’t just planted There isn’t much of a plot to this Danielle—both of whom appear in “Lic-
there, like a flag; it dreams of being the movie. Rather, it’s shaggy with happen- orice Pizza,” as do their real parents. (I
kind of movie that was made back then. ings—with the weird, one-off events needed more of them.) Anderson has
Gary first encounters Alana at school. that tend to crop up during adolescence, directed many music videos for Haim’s
He’s in the tenth grade, and she’s a vis- and to grow funnier, and taller, in the songs, and their snap and buoyancy per-
itor, working for a photographer who telling. Hence the presence of Bradley sist in Alana Kane, with her lyrical smile
takes head shots for the yearbook. Alana Cooper as Jon Peters, Barbra Streisand’s and, conversely, her caustic charm. “Fuck
is twenty-f ive, although she seems beau du jour, who dresses in angelic off, teen-agers!” she cries, to those who
younger, and Gary is fifteen, although white and behaves like a dirty devil. block her path as she runs, and, on her
he, if not his volcanic complexion, looks (“You like peanut-butter sandwiches?” first date with Gary, she commands him
a little older. He certainly acts older— is his sticky pickup line, which he tries to stop looking at her. Without such
instantly asking her out and, when she out, pathetically, on two women walk- candor, the film wouldn’t spill over with
shows up, ordering dinner and plying ing by.) We also get Sean Penn in nicely life as freely as it does, and nothing is
her with questions such as “What are self-mocking form as Jack Holden, a fiercer or fonder than the insult that
your plans? What’s your future look like?” she flings at one of her sisters: “You’re
He sounds like a patriarch, interviewing always thinking things, you thinker.”
a prospective daughter-in-law. (Of Gary’s There’s no answer to that.
father we see and hear nothing: all part
of the generational jumble in which An- f you had to pick a partner for “Lic-
derson delights.) As for his own expec-
tations, Gary declares, “I’m a showman.
I orice Pizza,” on a double bill, Paolo
Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God” would
It’s my calling.” Strange to say, as Alana be the ideal choice. It has a protagonist,
comes to realize, the kid’s not kidding. Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti), who’s
He’s been a child star for some while, about the same age as Gary Valentine.
and, as that career wanes, he smoothly Hollywood idol marooned in the mem- I can picture the two of them hanging
upgrades to the next one, selling water ory of his old hits, who cozies up to out, maybe bouncing on one of Gary’s
beds to all the funky souls who don’t Alana, à la “Breezy.” Craggier yet is Tom water beds, though Fabietto is dream-
mind feeling seasick as they sleep. Later, Waits as an aging director, his puff of ier and less decisive. Moreover, like An-
he becomes a wizard of the pinball trade. cigarette smoke lit with a ghostly bril- derson’s movie, “The Hand of God”
Whether and how a teen-ager can set liance, and best of all is Harriet San- seeks to capture a period that seems
up legitimate businesses in the state of som Harris, who has one magisterial both recent and distant. It’s set in the
California is not a subject of concern for scene as a casting agent, most of it spent nineteen-eighties—starting, specifically,
this movie. The subject, rather, is the on the phone (“love to Tatum”) and at the point in 1984 when Diego Ma-
comedy of hope. framed in so extreme a closeup that radona, widely worshipped as the best
How would we react to “Licorice even her orthodontist will be impressed. soccer player on Earth, is poised to sign
Pizza” if the main roles were reversed, The camera, wielded by Michael Bau- for S.S.C. Napoli, the premier team of
Naples. “He’d never leave Barcelona for
this shithole,” somebody says. Yet the
miracle comes to pass.
No less wondrous is our realization
that, by the end, we don’t want to leave
the shithole. There’s a long alfresco se-
quence of a crowded lunch, groaning
with good food and gossip, that will cause
most moviegoers to whimper with envy
and yearning. One of the curious side
effects of the coronavirus pandemic has
been to refresh our wanderlust, and to
restore one of cinema’s basic and most
venerable functions; namely, to make us
wish to be where we are not. That’s how
it was for the earliest audiences, before
the epoch of mass travel, and that’s how
it feels again now. The heavenly shots of
Naples, viewed from the bay and glitter-
ing in the sun, are impossible to resist,
and, when Fabietto’s aunt Patrizia (Luisa
Ranieri), whom he adores, turns and
looks at him, in silence, framed by olive
trees and lulled in late-afternoon light,
we know that this moment of epiphany
is one he will not forget. Same here.
While “Licorice Pizza” supplies its
hero with plenty of pals and workmates
but only a couple of relations, “The Hand
of God” is the other way around. It’s
startling to hear Fabietto, on his birth- “We sent you a secure access code! Do not share this code with
day, say, “I don’t have friends,” but it’s anyone! Your access code will expire in ten minutes!”
true. What he has instead is an extended
family—tense and internecine, yet never
less than sustaining. Besides Patrizia,
• •
we meet Fabietto’s brother, an aspiring
actor named Marchino (Marlon Jou- Great Beauty” (2013), his sumptuous piercing the family’s heart, but also in
bert), with whom he still shares a room panegyric to Rome. Naples, though, is stretches of languor. Look at Fabietto’s
as if they were little boys, and their par- his birthplace and his cradle, whereas father, jabbing the buttons on the TV
ents, Saverio (Toni Servillo) and Maria Rome is more equivocally referred to, with a stick and announcing, “I’m a
(Teresa Saponangelo), who are so at- in the new movie, as “the great decep- Communist,” as if that excused his lazy
tuned to one another that they can com- tion”—the magnet to which outsiders reluctance to buy a remote; or strolling
municate by whistling, like blackbirds. like Fabietto are inescapably lured— through the nineteenth-century ele-
(The film wells with particular sounds; as if all the beauty were a lie. The per- gance of the Galleria Umberto, and
one fellow, a cheerful miscreant who son who sensed that attraction most murmuring, “See that column? I spent
winds up in prison, describes with rap- keenly, of course, was Fellini, and that the entire war leaning against it.” That’s
ture the “tuff, tuff, tuff” that you hear as is why “The Hand of God” wrestles my favorite line of dialogue this year,
a speedboat slaps the waves.) Also part with his legacy; Marchino auditions and it links Sorrentino’s film to the ev-
of the clan: a tetchy uncle who asks, for a Fellini production, surrounded by eryday joys of “Licorice Pizza.” As win-
“When did you all become such disap- exotic hopefuls, and the sight of a huge ter impends, we are lucky to have this
pointments?,” plus a foulmouthed elder chandelier, its blaze undimmed, lying pair of balmy tales. They strike me as
who wears a fur coat in summer and aslant on the floor of a half-deserted tender, in both senses, being at once
holds a dripping burrata in her hands, house would have suited “La Dolce benign in mood and painfully sensitive
munching it like a peach. Later, though, Vita” (1960). With pride, Fabietto re- to the touch, and they suggest that the
even she is gently redeemed, as she cites one of the Maestro’s maxims: “Re- remembrance of things past may be
quotes consoling lines of Dante at a fu- ality is lousy.” more inf lamed than soothed by the
neral. No one disappoints, beneath the Yet “The Hand of God” is most af- flow of time. “I don’t know if I can be
film’s forgiving gaze. fecting when reality does intrude—not happy,” Fabietto says. Only one way to
Sorrentino is best known for “The only when fate takes a terrible hand, find out. 
over my nostrils, and perform an elec-
BOOKS trocardiogram. She said the problem
appeared to be something called an
LIVING THE LIFE ELECTRIC

atrioventricular nodal reëntrant tachy-
cardia. I knew what that meant. Our
heartbeat starts with an electrical im-
Why “the spark of life” is more than just a phrase. pulse originating in the atria, the upper
chambers of the heart, and then pass-
BY JEROME GROOPMAN ing to the ventricles, causing them to
contract. In a normal heart, there is a
delay before the next heartbeat starts;
in my heart, electrical impulses were
circling back immediately via a rogue
pathway. My ventricles were receiving
constant signals to contract, giving
scant time for blood to enter them and
be pumped out to my tissues.
Despite this, my blood pressure
hadn’t yet plummeted to an alarming
level. So the first attempt to slow my
heart involved having me clench my
abdominal muscles, in a so-called Val-
salva maneuver, which can help con-
trol irregular heartbeats by stimulating
the vagus nerve. But several tries made
no difference, and my breathing was
becoming more labored. The attend-
ing physician then explained that she
would give me, via my I.V., a dose of
adenosine, a drug that arrests the flow
of electrical signals in the heart. My
heart would completely stop beating.
Hopefully, she said, it would re-start
on its own, at a normal pace. Of course,
the adenosine might fail to work. She
didn’t elaborate, but I knew: the next
step would be to try to reboot my heart
with electroshock paddles.
One dose of adenosine did noth-
ing. But shortly after a second dose
n the early hours of Independence the effect of the coffee. But the symp- the cardiac monitor suddenly fell si-
I Day, 2018, I found myself awake. I
put it down to jet lag: I’d just returned
toms were getting worse, and I broke
out in a sweat. I woke my wife, who
lent, and I glanced at the display: a
flat line. My heart had stopped. I had
from South Africa, where my wife— took my pulse and called an ambu- an eerie sense of doom, a visceral feel-
like me, a physician—and I were work- lance. As I lay in the ambulance, the ing that something awful would hap-
ing with a medical charity. I decided siren blaring above me, I prayed that pen. But then there was a kind of thud,
to get up, and drank a cup of strong I would not die before making it to as if I had been kicked in the chest.
coffee. Within minutes, my heart was the emergency room. My heart started to beat—slowly,
racing. I attributed this to the caffeine, The first days of July are said to be forcefully. Within a few minutes, the
but my heart rate went on rapidly a perilous time to be in the hospital, rate and rhythm returned to normal.
accelerating. I counted beats on my because that’s when new residents The electrically driven pump in my
watch: a hundred and eighty a min- begin their training. But, despite the chest was again supplying blood to
ute, three times my resting rate. My early hour, there was a senior E.R. doc- my body.
chest tightened and my breathing be- tor in attendance, who quickly in-
came labored. I tried to be calm, tell- structed the medical team to place in- imothy J. Jorgensen, a professor
ing myself no, it wasn’t a heart attack,
merely the exhaustion of the trip and
travenous catheters in my arms, take
blood for testing, strap oxygen prongs
T of radiation medicine at George-
town University, writes in his new
book, “Spark” (Princeton), that “life
Attempts to use electricity in medicine go back thousands of years. is nothing if not electrical.” In our
66 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID JIEN
daily lives, seeing lightning in the the same time.) The Leyden jar made litical philosopher William Godwin,
sky or plugging our appliances into it possible to accumulate charge from who knew many electrical research-
wall sockets, we tend to neglect this static electricity and then release it as ers. Godwin was the father of Mary
fact. Jorgensen’s aim, in this chatty, electric current, and Jorgensen does Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein”
wide-ranging tour of electricity’s role not skimp on relating the bizarre ex- (1818), which eventually gave us the
in biology and medicine, is to show periments that ensued. In 1747, a image of Boris Karloff as the monster
us that every experience we have of French cleric named Jean-Antoine with electrodes sticking out from his
our selves—from the senses of sight, Nollet demonstrated the effect of elec- neck. That image is pure Hollywood
smell, and sound to our movements tricity on the human body for King invention—Shelley’s monster doesn’t
and our thoughts—depends on elec- Louis XV: run on electricity—but the book men-
trical impulses. He had 180 men from the king’s Royal tions galvanism elsewhere and it is
He starts with amber, the material Guard stand in line holding hands. He then likely that the popular, bastardized
with which humans probably first at- had the soldier at one end of the line use his version of the tale brings out some-
tempted to harness electricity for med- free hand to touch the top of a fully electri- thing latent in the original.
ical uses. Amber is the fossilized resin fied Leyden jar. Instantly, all 180 men in line As interest in electricity spread,
reeled from the strong shock they felt. The
of prehistoric trees; when rubbed, it be- king was impressed. there was a medical craze for electri-
comes charged with static electricity. It cal treatments, to address anything
can attract small bits of matter, such as For his next experiment, Nollet outdid from headaches to bad thoughts or
fluff, and emit shocks, and these prop- himself, performing the same proce- sexual difficulties. Jorgensen tries out
erties made it seem magical. Amber dure with a chain of seven hundred the Toepler Influence Machine, a de-
pendants have been found dating back Carthusian monks. vice dating from around 1900, not
to 12,000 B.C., and Jorgensen writes The discovery that electricity not long before the Pure Food and Drug
that such jewelry would have been val- only shocks the body but is part of Act of 1906 brought a colorful era of
ued for much more than its beauty. In what powers it came in the seven- electro-quackery to an end. The ma-
the era of recorded history, accounts of teen-eighties, when the Italian scien- chine generates electricity with a set
amber’s use abound. The ancient Greeks tist Luigi Galvani conducted a series of spinning glass disks, operated by
massaged the ailing with it, believing, of experiments in which electric cur- a hand crank, to produce what was
Jorgensen writes, that its “attractive rent produced movement in severed termed “static breeze” therapy. The
forces would pull the pain out of their legs of frogs. Galvani attributed this electrotherapist operating the ma-
bodies,” and it is the Greek word for discovery to what he called “animal chine gauges the voltage by moving
amber—elektron—that gives us an en- electricity,” and for a while the study two brass balls closer together as
tire vocabulary for electrical properties. of such phenomena was known as gal- sparks fly between them. Then, with
In first-century Rome, Pliny the Elder vanism. (Meanwhile, a sometime rival the flip of a switch, the electricity is
wrote that wearing amber around the of Galvani’s, Alessandro Volta, invented directed to Jorgensen’s head:
neck could prevent throat diseases and the battery, giving his name to the
even mental illness. The Romans also volt.) Perhaps the most famous gal- I brace myself to be shocked. But I feel no
shock. Instead, I feel a cool breeze coming
used non-static electricity from tor- vanic demonstration was conducted down from above, the skin of my scalp and
pedo fish, a name for various species by Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini, face begins to tingle, and my shirt clings to my
of electric ray, to deliver shocks to pain January, 1803, in London. In front chest. In a word, it feels pleasant.
tients with maladies including head- of an audience, he applied electrodes
aches and hemorrhoids. to the corpse of a man, George Fos- It certainly sounds more pleasant
As late as the sixteenth century, ter, who had just been hanged at New- than the devices described by Dr. Wil-
the eminent Swiss physician Paracel- gate Prison for the murder of his wife liam Harvey King, in his 1901 textbook,
sus called amber “a noble medicine and child. Jorgensen quotes a report “Electricity in Medicine and Surgery.”
for the head, stomach, intestines and from the Newgate Calendar, a popular King recommended treating gyneco-
other sinews complaints.” Not long publication that relayed grisly details logical disorders by placing an electrode
afterward, the English scientist Wil- of executions: in the vagina and one in the rectum
liam Gilbert found that other sub- On the first application of the process to and then delivering a jolt of electricity.
stances, such as wax and glass, could the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal For men with urogenital complaints,
generate charge if you rubbed them, began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles he advised inserting a slender electrode
and a German named Otto von Gue- were horribly contorted, and one eye was ac- up the penis, with a second electrode
ricke created a crude electrostatic gen- tually opened. In the subsequent part of the in the rectum or on the testicles. If ad-
process, the right hand was raised and clenched,
erator. But there was no reliable way and the legs and thighs were set in motion. ministering current to swaying testi-
of studying electricity until the in- cles proved a challenge, King offered a
vention of the Leyden jar, in 1745. (The Some of the onlookers thought that Rube Goldberg approach, with the tes-
jar takes its name from the city where Aldini was trying to bring Foster back ticles dunked into a gravy boat filled
a Dutch scientist developed it, though to life, Jorgensen writes. He goes on with saline solution, which was then
a German scientist achieved the same to note that Aldini’s work drew the electrified via a copper plate.
breakthrough independently around interest of the English writer and po- Don’t try this at home. But there
son is surprisingly small. A current of
as little as 0.01 amps can disrupt the
electrical signals f lowing from our
nerves to the muscles of the chest and
diaphragm, causing asphyxiation. Am-
perage ten times higher can stop the
heart outright. What makes lightning
seem “so capricious,” as Jorgensen puts
it, is that some people are killed by
low amperage while others survive di-
rect strikes. The reason is a phenom-
enon called flashover, in which elec-
tric current flows over the surface of
the body and largely bypasses the in-
ternal organs. Flashover occurs when
the surface of the body is more con-
ductive than the inside—for instance,
if the skin is covered in sweat. The
path that the current takes is crucial.
A Danish study of electrocution deaths
found that the current passed through
the victim’s heart in seventy-eight per
cent of cases. Furthermore, in eighty-
one per cent of the victims there was
no observable change to the pathol-
ogy of the internal organs; in other
words, death occurred not because any
tissue was destroyed but because the
current had interfered with the nor-
mal electrical function of the heart’s
“We’ll have the breakfast served all day.” cardiac cells, nodal tissues, and con-
duction tracts.
With higher currents, tissue dam-
• • age does occur, and the grimmest
chapter in Jorgensen’s book deals with
were plenty of electrotherapy devices the unintended consequence was that electrocution as a means of execution.
designed for home use and mailed di- bell ringers ended up in harm’s way. The electric chair was the brainchild
rectly—and confidentially—to consum- In France, between 1753 and 1786, more of Alfred P. Southwick, a dentist in
ers. Pulvermacher’s Electric Belt, for ex- than a hundred bell ringers died of Buffalo, who, one day in 1881, hap-
ample, was worn around the waist, with electrocution. pened to see a drunk man stumble
batteries providing a steady electric cur- Why are some people injured or and grab an electrical generator.
rent to the skin. A pouch attached to killed by lightning and others not? Jor- Southwick ran to the man, but the
the front of the belt held the testicles, gensen offers an educational vignette. man was dead. The speed of death
like a jockstrap. This allegedly enhanced While on a guided camping trip in the made him think that electricity could
“sexual vitality,” which, Jorgensen ex- Blue Ridge Mountains in North Car- provide a quicker, less painful end
plains, was a euphemism for treating olina, he was caught in a lightning than hanging. He based the design
erectile dysfunction. storm. The guide made the group “stand for an electric chair on the chair that
on our backpacks in a crouched fetal his dental patients sat in. After South-
lectric shocks more often bring position, legs held tightly together, with wick had experimented with a vari-
E death than enhance vitality, and
people naturally feared lightning bolts
our heads down and our rain ponchos
draped over ourselves.” Deaths from
ety of stray animals, a state commis-
sion assessed thirty-four methods of
hurled by any number of gods—Greek, lightning occur in various ways—a di- execution and decided that electro-
Nordic, Hindu, Maori—long before rect strike, say, or a current from a strike cution was the most humane. The re-
they had any notion of electricity. Some nearby that flows through the ground ality has proved otherwise, and the
medieval bells bear the Latin inscrip- and up into the body. Crouching down first use of the electric chair, in 1890,
tion Fulgura frango (“I break the light- while standing on a backpack made of gave a preview of many ugly scenes
ning”), a testament to a belief that a nonconductive material lessens both in the following century. William
ringing church bells could offer pro- kinds of risk. Kemmler, a businessman convicted of
tection against lightning. Of course, The amperage needed to kill a per- killing his girlfriend with a hatchet,
was executed at New York’s Auburn cess not merely to an artificial limb Jorgensen notes that the technology
Prison. A report in the New York Her- but to a neuroprosthesis—a device owes its success largely to the inven-
ald described the condemned man that links the human nervous system tion of a commercially viable transis-
thrashing about for minutes, “until to an electronic mechanism. This kind tor, in 1948, which made possible the
the room was filled with the odor of of brain-machine interface captures miniaturization of electronics. Today,
burning flesh and strong men fainted nerve signals from the brain and trans- some three million Americans are es-
and fell like logs upon the floor.” lates them into electrical signals that timated to have a cardiac pacemaker,
are relayed to a computer-controlled and the device has become a model
n the mid-nineteenth century, a electronic device. The translation is for a newer invention, the “breathing
I schoolboy in northern Spain named
Santiago Ramón y Cajal saw a local
possible because nerve signals, like
digital ones, are binary.
pacemaker,” to treat sleep apnea.
“When breathing stops, it sends an
priest who’d been lethally struck by When healthy, our nerves conduct electrical impulse to an electrode in
lightning while ringing his church’s electricity in a tightly controlled way, the throat that shocks the relaxed tis-
bell. Years later, after Ramón y Cajal in order to transmit information to all sues into contracting, thus reopening
had become known as the father of parts of the body. In this sense, illness the airway,” Jorgensen writes.
neuroscience, an achievement that won can sometimes be synonymous with
him a Nobel Prize, he recalled the uncontrolled electricity. Jorgensen de- n my case, there would have to have
event in his autobiography: scribes epilepsy, for instance, as being
like “an electrical storm in the brain.”
I been a serious complication during
treatment for a pacemaker to be nec-
There, beneath the bell, enveloped in dense
smoke, his head hanging over the wall lifeless,
Recent research suggests that mi- essary. Eventually, I was discharged
lay the poor priest who had thought that he graines, too, may have a genesis resem- from the emergency room with a beta-
would be able to ward off the threatening dan- bling a seizure, with electrical activity blocker prescription, to suppress the
ger by the imprudent tolling of the bell. Sev- in the brain stem releasing proteins runaway electricity in my heart. But
eral men climbed up to help him and found that trigger pain. (Anti-epileptic med- the side effects proved intolerable; even
him with his clothes on fire and with a terri-
ble wound on his neck from which he died a
ications such as topiramate are used at low doses, my heart rate slowed so
few days later. The bolt had passed through to prevent migraines.) much that I could not climb a flight
him, mutilating him horribly. Shocking the brain with electric- of stairs without stopping and gasp-
ity under highly controlled circum- ing for air.
Jorgensen relates that Ramón y Cajal stances can be effective in treating I consulted a cardiologist at my own
regarded this incident as a watershed major depressive disorders, even hospital, Peter Zimetbaum, who is an
in his life and speculates that his great though the precise mechanism isn’t expert in arrhythmias, and he per-
scientific achievements—deciphering fully understood. A more selective formed an ablation to eradicate the er-
the basic structure of the nervous sys- and recently developed neurological rant pathway. Zimetbaum threaded
tem and discovering the neuron—may application of electricity is deep brain catheters into the right and left fem-
have their origin in a “transformative” stimulation, or DBS, which is used to oral vessels in my groin and up into
encounter with lightning. treat Parkinson’s disease and other my heart. He injected small doses of
Ramón y Cajal’s establishment of motor disorders. Electrodes are im- isoproterenol, an adrenaline-like drug,
the neuron as the fundamental unit planted in the area of the brain to be which artificially induced the tachy-
of the nervous system led to decades cardia that had landed me in the hos-
of research investigating how it works; pital. Then he mapped the pathways
he found that neurons propagate elec- conducting electricity in my heart—
trical impulses that are controlled by the one that would carry normal im-
the passage of ions, specifically so- pulses and the aberrant one that caused
dium or potassium. Jorgensen pro- the heartbeat of a hundred and eighty.
vides an elegant description of the After he pinpointed the aberration,
process and of recent attempts to ex- he destroyed it with heat from high-
ploit this knowledge by developing frequency radio waves. I was awake
high-tech devices to compensate for throughout the procedure, with just
sensory deficits: cochlear implants electrically stimulated and wired up low doses of a painkiller, so that I could
for deafness, electrodes in the retina to a controller housed in the chest. report whether what I experienced re-
or in the visual cortex of the brain DBS is sometimes described as a capitulated that July morning.
for blindness. pacemaker for the brain. Electrical After Zimetbaum had finished per-
He relates the case of a woman, stimulation of the heart has a longer forming the ablation, he tried to trig-
Melissa Loomis, whose right fore- history, the first pacemaker having ger my tachycardia again, but my heart
arm was amputated after an infection been implanted in 1958. An electrode stayed steady. Electricity gone awry
from a raccoon bite. Each year, a mil- is threaded inside the heart which could have ended my life. Electricity in
lion or so people across the world un- gives small shocks at a rate of about expert hands identified the defect in
dergo an amputation, but Loomis was sixty per minute, in order to stimu- my heart and eliminated it. Now I was
comparatively fortunate, receiving ac- late the muscle to pump normally. again a healthy body electric. 
now emerges as a strikingly ambiva-
BOOKS lent account of decolonization.
Hannah Arendt criticized Sartre’s
THE INITIATIVE OF HISTORY

preface at length in her essay “On Vio-
lence” (1970), but she mostly ignored
Fanon’s text, with its many pages on the
Frantz Fanon’s enduring legacy. degeneration of anti-colonial movements
and its case notes about psychiatric pa-
BY PANKAJ MISHRA tients in Algeria. In 1966, a writer in these
pages claimed that Fanon’s “arguments
for violence” are “spreading amongst the
young Negroes in American slums.” A
reporter for the Times worried about
their effect on “young radical Negro lead-
ers.” Indeed, Stokely Carmichael de-
scribed Fanon as a mentor, and the found-
ers of the Black Panther Party regarded
“The Wretched of the Earth” as essen-
tial reading. Those delighting in, or
alarmed by, the spectre of armed Black
men on American streets barely noticed
the specific context of Fanon’s book—
his experience of a ferocious Western re-
sistance to decolonization that by the
early nineteen-sixties had consumed hun-
dreds of thousands of lives.
In 1954, when France normalized mas-
sacre and torture in its Algerian colony,
Fanon was working as a psychiatrist in a
hospital in Algiers. Confronted in his day
job with both French police torturers and
their Algerian victims, he became con-
vinced that psychiatric treatment could
not work without the destruction of co-
lonialism—an “absolute evil.” He joined
the Algerian rebels, with most of whom
he shared neither a language nor a reli-
gion, and, while moving from country to
country in Africa, wrote a series of works
on the necessity, the means, and the scope
“ K illing a European is killing two
birds with one stone,” Jean-Paul
Sartre wrote these incendiary words
in a preface to “The Wretched of the
of a revolt by what W. E. B. Du Bois, in
1915, called the “darker nations.”
Sartre wrote in 1961, seven years into Earth,” an anti-colonial treatise by the Fanon’s basic assumption—that co-
France’s brutal suppression of the Al- French and West Indian political phi- lonialism is a machine of “naked vio-
gerian independence movement. After losopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. lence,” which “only gives in when con-
all, such a killing eliminates “in one go Fanon, who had spent years in Alge- fronted with greater violence”—had
oppressor and oppressed: leaving one ria agitating for its liberation, was, at become uncontroversial across Asia and
man dead and the other man free.” Sar- the time of the book’s publication, lit- Africa wherever armed mutinies erupted
tre, despised in France for his solidarity tle known and dying from leukemia. against Western colonialists. In 1959, in
with Algerian anti-colonialists, wanted He was thirty-six years old. Sartre’s Guinea, the killing of striking dockwork-
to goad people into seeing the “strip- celebrity brought Fanon’s work wide- ers by Portuguese police had persuaded
tease of our humanism.” He wrote, “You spread attention but also colored its the poet and activist Amilcar Cabral to
who are so liberal, so humane, who take initial Western reception. For the book’s abandon diplomatic negotiation and em-
the love of culture to the point of affec- sixtieth anniversary, it has been reis- brace guerrilla warfare. A year later, Nel-
tation, you pretend to forget that you sued, by Grove, with a new introduc- son Mandela, a disciple of Gandhi, led
have colonies where massacres are com- tion by Cornel West and a previously the African National Congress into
mitted in your name.” published one by Homi K. Bhabha. It armed struggle in response to a massa-
EVERETT
cre of Black South Africans in Sharpe-

Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” appeared just before his death, in 1961. ville. “Government violence can do only
one thing and that is to breed counter- As Western imperialists ended their quite simply to be a man among men,”
violence,” Mandela said. Fanon presented long occupation of Asia and Africa, Fanon wrote, but the “white gaze, the
counterviolence as a kind of therapy for Fanon became obsessed with the “curse only valid one,” had “fixed” him, forcing
dehumanized natives: “As you and your of independence”: the possibility that him to become shamefully aware of his
fellow men are cut down like dogs,” he nationhood in the Global South, though Black body, and of debasing white as-
wrote, “there is no other solution but to inevitable, could become an “empty sumptions about his history, defined by
use every means available to reestablish shell,” a receptacle for ethnic and tribal “cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism,
your weight as a human being.” antagonisms, ultranationalism, chauvin- racial stigmas, slave traders.”
In Fanon’s view, the Western bour- ism, and racism. Certainly, writers of Although Fanon understood the po-
geoisie was “fundamentally racist” and the sixties inspired by “The Wretched litical and economic realities that reduced
its “bourgeois ideology” of equality and of the Earth”—the African novelists Black men to “crushing objecthood,” his
dignity was merely a cover for capital- Nadine Gordimer, Ayi Kwei Armah, psychiatric training made him sensitive
ist-imperialist rapacity. In this, he antic- and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Caribbean to the psychological power of the im-
ipated the contemporary critique, fre- poet Édouard Glissant, the Guyanese ages imposed by enslavers on the en-
quently derided as “woke,” that holds critic Walter Rodney—saw in the book slaved. Fanon knew that Black men who
that the West’s material and ideological not an incitement to kill white people internalized these images would find it
foundations lie in white supremacy. Eu- but a chillingly acute diagnosis of the impossible to escape their colonized selves
ropean imperialists had, he charged, “be- post-colonial condition: how the West in a world made by and for white men.
haved like real war criminals in the un- would seek to maintain the iniquitous White men had not merely conquered
derdeveloped world” for centuries, using international order that had made it rich vast territories, radically reorganizing so-
“deportation, massacres, forced labor, and and powerful, and how new ruling classes cieties and exploiting populations. They
slavery” to accumulate wealth. Among in post-colonial nations would fail to also claimed to represent a humane civ-
their “most heinous” crimes were the rup- devise a viable system of their own. One ilization devoted to personal liberty and
turing of the Black man’s identity, the measure of Fanon’s clairvoyance—and equipped with the superior tools of sci-
destruction of his culture and commu- the glacial pace of progress—is that, in ence, reason, and individual enterprise.
nity, and the poisoning of his inner life its sixtieth year, “The Wretched of the “The Europeans wanted gold and slaves,
with a sense of inferiority. European Earth” remains a vital guide both to the like everybody else,” the African narra-
thought, Fanon wrote, was marked by “a tenacity of white supremacy in the West tor of V. S. Naipaul’s novel “A Bend in
permanent dialogue with itself, an in- and to the moral and intellectual fail- the River” remarks. “But at the same time
creasingly obnoxious narcissism.” ures of the “darker nations.” they wanted statues put up to themselves
At the same time, Fanon urged the as people who had done good things for
colonized to “stop accusing” their white anon’s suspicions about the Global the slaves.” Naturally, “they got both the
masters, and to do what the latter had
so conspicuously failed to do: start a
F South’s élites came from his own
tormented experience as a Westernized
slaves and the statues.”
Fanon wrote about how the Black
“new history of man” that advanced “uni- Black man who grew up oblivious of man, cowed by the colonists’ unprece-
versalizing values.” In his view, anti- his Blackness. Born into a middle-class dented mixture of greed, righteousness,
colonial nationalism was only the first family in Martinique in 1925, Fanon had and military efficacy, tended to internal-
step toward a new radical humanism “for been a proud citizen of the French Re- ize the demoralizing judgment delivered
Europe, for ourselves and for humanity.” public. He grew up reading Montes- on him by the white gaze. “I start suf-
He had already distanced himself from quieu and Voltaire, and, like many Black fering from not being a white man,”
claims to a racially defined identity and men from French colonies, fought with Fanon wrote. “So I will try quite simply
culture. The “great white error” of racial the Allied forces during the Second to make myself white.” But mimicry
arrogance, he had written, ought not to World War. Wounded in Alsace, he was could be a cure worse than the disease,
be replaced by the “great black mirage.” awarded the Croix de Guerre. since it reinforced the existing racial hi-
“In no way do I have to dedicate myself It was only in postwar France, where erarchy, thereby further devastating the
to reviving a black civilization unjustly he went, in 1946, to study psychiatry, that Black man’s self-esteem. Inspired by Sar-
ignored,” he wrote in his first book, he discovered he was little more than a tre, who had argued that the anti-Sem-
“Black Skin, White Masks” (1952). “I will “dirty nigger” in the eyes of whites—a ite’s gaze created the Jew, Fanon con-
not make myself the man of any past.” “savage” of the kind he had previously cluded that Blackness was another
He also saw no point in trying to shame assumed lived only in Africa. In “Black constructed and imposed identity. “The
people through exposure to the grisly Skin, White Masks,” he narrates his ex- black man is not,” he wrote in the clos-
facts of slavery and imperialism. “Am I perience of a formative trauma common ing pages of “Black Skin, White Masks.”
going to ask today’s white men to answer to many anti-colonial leaders and think- “No more than the white man.”
for the slave traders of the seventeenth ers. In his case, it was a little girl in Lyon This argument also underpins the po-
century?” he asked. In “The Wretched exclaiming, “Maman, look, a Negro; I’m litical programs that Fanon proposes in
of the Earth,” he warned the dispos- scared!” Being “overdetermined from “The Wretched of the Earth,” in which
sessed against adopting a “psychology without,” as he described it, shocked him he argues that, because colonialism is “a
dominated by an exaggerated sensibil- out of any complacent assumptions about systematized negation of the other,” it
ity, sensitivity, and susceptibility.” equality, liberty, and fraternity. “I wanted “forces the colonized to constantly ask
the question: Who am I in reality?” By udice. Renouncing their white masks, Oddly, “The Wretched of the Earth,”
the time he wrote the book, however, his their failed attempts at mimicry, they published during this partial transfer of
focus had shifted. “The misfortune of the took it upon themselves to rouse and mo- power from white to Black and brown
colonized African masses, exploited, sub- bilize their destitute and illiterate com- hands, barely mentions Asia or much
jugated, is first of a vital, material order,” patriots, who had passively suffered the of Africa, and has nothing at all to say
he wrote, against which the grievances depredations and insults of white colo- about the Middle East. Fanon appears
of educated Black men like him did not nialists. As members of a tiny privileged not to have intimately known any of the
appear as urgent. In a withering review, élite, they saw it as their duty to devise societies he travelled through, not even
published in 1959, of Richard Wright’s non-exploitative economic and social sys- Algeria. Yet, by reflecting scrupulously
“White Man, Listen” (1957), Fanon wrote tems for their people, and foster a cul- on his experience as a powerless Black
that “the drama of consciousness of a ture in which alienating imitation of the man in exile, he was able to see through
westernized Black, torn between his white powerful white man gives way to pride the Cold War’s moralizing rhetoric to
culture and his negritude,” while painful, and confidence in local traditions. the insidious new modes of social and
does not “kill anyone.” It was Fanon’s broader experience of political coercion. It was probably during
For much of “The Wretched of the the colonial world in the nineteen-fif- his time in Nkrumah’s Ghana that he
Earth,” Fanon raises an issue that he ties that refined his political conscious- developed his view of single-party rule:
thought Wright, obsessed with the ex- ness. In 1954, a year after moving to Al- “the modern form of the bourgeois dic-
istential crises of literary intellectuals, geria to take up a psychiatric residency, tatorship stripped of mask, makeup, and
had ignored: how “to give back to the he witnessed the beginning of the Al- scruples, cynical in every aspect.” The
peoples of Africa the initiative of their gerian revolution. Within a couple of formulation has, in the past six decades,
history, and by which means.” Distrust- years, his opposition to the colonial accurately described the political sys-
ful of the “Westernized” intelligentsia crackdown got him thrown out of the tems in Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia, Sri
and urban working classes in the na- country. He joined the revolutionary Lanka, and many other countries.
tionalist movements fighting for liber- movement, the Front de Libération Na- Fanon also presciently described the
ation, he saw the African peasantry as tionale, and, from a new base, in Tunis, politically explosive gap between urban
the true wretched of the earth, and the travelled across Africa—Ghana, Ethi- prosperity and rural poverty, and the
main actor in the drama of decoloniza- opia, Mali, Guinea, Congo—as a rep- toxic consequences of inequitable de-
tion. According to Fanon, “In colonial resentative of the F.L.N. and its provi- velopment, even in countries he never
countries only the peasantry is revolu- sional government-in-exile. visited. Those bemused by the specta-
tionary,” since “it has nothing to lose and By this time, Africa and Asia had cle of an educated middle class and a
everything to gain” and, unlike bourgeois manifested a range of ideological alter- globalized business élite devoted to In-
leaders, brooks “no compromise, no pos- natives to racial capitalism and imperi- dia’s Narendra Modi, a far-right auto-
sibility of concession.” alism: the peasant Communism of Mao crat, can find a broad outline of this sit-
Zedong, in China; in Indonesia, Sukar- uation in “The Wretched of the Earth”:
anon did not seem to realize that he no’s brand of Islam-inflected socialism,
F shared the indignities of racism and
his self-appointed tasks with many anti-
Pancasila; Kwame Nkrumah’s Positive
Action protests, in Ghana. Meanwhile,
The national bourgeoisie increasingly turns
its back on the interior, on the realities of a
country gone to waste, and looks toward the
colonial leaders and thinkers. Gandhi, the Cold War was drastically curtailing former metropolis and the foreign capitalists
after all, had once been as loyal to the the autonomy of newly liberated na- who secure its services. Since it has no inten-
British Empire as Fanon was to the tions. To protect their interests, West- tion of sharing its profits with the people, it
discovers the need for a popular leader whose
French, and, while working as a lawyer ern powers were replacing costly phys- dual role will be to stabilize the regime and to
in South Africa in the late nineteenth ical occupations with military and perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie.
century, had likewise been racially hu- economic bullying. They cast about for
miliated into a lasting distrust of the collaborators among élites and some- he defects and omissions in Fanon’s
identity politics of whiteness. So, too,
did Gandhi’s vision of political self-de-
times overthrew and murdered less trac-
table leaders. One of the most promi-
T book are also revealing. His relent-
lessly male perspective reduced libera-
termination draw on a need to heal the nent victims of a Western assassination tion from colonialism to the frustrations
wounds inflicted by white-supremacist plot was a friend and an exact contem- and desires of men like him. Proposing
arrogance. His concept of nonviolence porary of Fanon: Patrice Lumumba, the that the native’s virility and will to power
fashioned a new way of thinking and first elected Prime Minister of Congo, could counter the violence of the colo-
feeling, one in which human good would who was killed in 1961. Political and eco- nialist, he reinforced a hypermasculin-
not be defined only by Western males. nomic incapacity in many fledgling na- ist discourse of domination. Not sur-
Many other Asian and African lead- tion-states also forced their leaders to prisingly, politics remained a vicious
ers of decolonization had a similar intel- seek help from their former overlords. affair in Algeria for decades after the
lectual and political awakening. Educated A few months after Kenya, Uganda, and French departed.
in Western-style institutions and inhab- Tanganyika gained independence from As an heir to the secular French En-
iting the white man’s world, these men Britain, their leaders sought the British lightenment, and seemingly unaware of
were often the first in their countries to Army’s help in suppressing mutinies non-Francophone cultural traditions,
be directly exposed to crude racial prej- over low pay. Fanon was blind to the creative possi-
bilities of the past—those deployed, say,
by Indigenous peoples in Canada and
Australia, in their battles for survival BRIEFLY NOTED
against logging and mining corporations.
Conversely, his theory about the revolu- Born in Blackness, by Howard W. French (Liveright). Reach-
tionary potential of African peasants now ing as far back as 1324, when King Mansa Musa, of Mali,
seems all too clearly the romantic fan- embarked on a pilgrimage to Mecca, this revisionist chron-
tasy of an uprooted, self-distrusting in- icle sets out to depict Africans and people of African descent
tellectual. In Africa, the urban working as the “prime movers in every stage” of global history. Chal-
classes turned out to be far more import- lenging the common view that the West rose because of some
ant to decolonization than the peasantry. inherent superiority, French emphasizes that it could not
Countries in which peasants proved have become what it did without Africa’s resources, noting,
crucial to national liberation, such as for instance, the centrality of the continent’s gold and its
China and Vietnam, came no closer to labor to the development of European societies. Weaving to-
starting a new history of man. Contrary gether previous scholarship on the subject with new archi-
to what Fanon ardently hoped, even the val research and eye-opening descriptions of historic sites,
strongest post-colonial nations, such as French makes an engaging, persuasive case for reconsider-
India and China, are “obsessed with ing Africa’s place in world history.
catching up” with their historical tor-
mentors, and have engendered, in this Twelve Caesars, by Mary Beard (Princeton). Ever since Au-
imitative process, their own rhetoric of gustus assumed the role of princeps (roughly, “first citizen”),
obnoxious narcissism. in 27 B.C., the Western world has been saturated with depic-
Still, Fanon’s misgivings about de- tions of Roman emperors. This thoroughgoing survey exam-
colonization and his insights into the ines the relationship between ancient imperial imagery and
connections between psychic and so- the modern visual imagination. The face on a bust thought
cioeconomic change have never seemed to portray the Emperor Vitellius, who reigned briefly in 69
more prophetic and salutary than in to- A.D., becomes, in the Renaissance, “one of the most repli-
day’s racially charged climate. Nonwhite cated ancient images in art,” appearing, for example, in Ve-
people’s growing demands for dignity, ronese’s “Last Supper,” and often used as a symbol of glut-
together with China’s ascendancy, have tonous immorality. With handsome illustrations of coins,
destabilized a Western self-image con- canvases, frescoes, and teacups, Beard brings the prestige and
structed during decades when white power of these emperors’ half-invented faces into tighter focus.
men alone seemed to make the mod-
ern world. This weakening of imperi- The Sentence, by Louise Erdrich (Harper). This is a pandemic
al-era authority has resulted in a pro- novel, but COVID-19 is just one element in the life of its busy
liferation of existential anxieties, marked narrator, an Ojibwe bookseller named Tookie, living in Min-
by a heightened exploitation of culture- neapolis. As the virus haunts, she sees streets burning during
war talking points in politics and the Black Lives Matter protests, the ghost of a deceased “wan-
media. Thus, attempts to reckon with nabe”-Native customer lingering in her store, and remind-
the long-neglected legacies of slavery ers of her recent incarceration for an unwitting offense. Tookie
and imperialism collide with cults of recommends books to her loyal customers throughout the
Churchill and the Confederacy, and crit- novel, which ends with lists of Indigenous poetry, “short per-
ical race theory becomes an electorally fect novels,” and “pandemic reading” dear to its gentle fic-
potent bogeyman for the right. Mean- tional narrator. The story is, perhaps above all, about the
while, as Éric Zemmour, a demagogue peace available to us in books like this.
of Algerian Jewish ancestry, raises the
banner of white supremacy and Islam- A Time Outside This Time, by Amitava Kumar (Knopf ). Satya,
ophobia in France, and Taliban fanat- the protagonist of this novel, is, like its author, an Indian
ics inherit a devastated Afghanistan American writer and literature professor. Early in 2020, during
from retreating Western powers, decol- a “cushy fellowship” at an Italian villa, he finds his imagina-
onization seems far from being trium- tion overwhelmed by events in the real world and decides to
phantly concluded. Rather, it resembles make fiction out of them. In a work in progress, “Enemies
the bleakly ambiguous and open-ended of the People,” he blends together lies, fake news, misinfor-
transition depicted by Fanon. Sixty years mation, and Trump tweets. His writing triggers emotional
after its publication, “The Wretched of flashbacks to events from his boyhood in a small town in
the Earth” reads increasingly like a dying India, where the state usurped individual liberties, political
Black man’s admission of a genuine im- conflicts threatened his family, and “even milkmen carried
possibility: of moving beyond the world swords.” As Satya uncovers the “truth of fiction,” Kumar pro-
made by white men.  vides a shimmering assault on the Zeitgeist.
noticed before: a minuscule, eccentric
THE ART WORLD off-colored shape in a brown field; an al-
most imperceptible checkerboard pattern
A WOMAN’S WORK
of alternating horizontal and vertical
stitches in a black area (prophetic of the
black-on-black paintings of Ad Rein-
Sophie Taeuber-Arp at MOMA. hardt); and a small lump of congested
yarn that would seem to be a flaw if it
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL did not so candidly emphasize the work’s
tactility. No matter how committed she
could be to geometric order, Taeuber-
Arp communicated her freedom.
Sophie Taeuber was the fourth child
of a pharmacist father and a mother who
ran a linen-goods store in Davos. After
her father died, of tuberculosis, when
she was two, her mother boarded stu-
dents at their home in the mostly Ger-
man-speaking town of Trogen. Taeuber
studied fine and applied art at schools
in Switzerland and Germany. In 1915, at
an art show in Zurich, she met the Al-
satian sculptor and poet Arp, who used
Jean as his first name in France and Hans
everywhere else. They were among the
early members of Dada, which centered
on a night club in the city, the Cabaret
Voltaire, and convened artists and writ-
ers in revolt against anything that could
be associated with the obscenity of the
First World War. Others on the galvanic
scene included the Romanian poet
Tristan Tzara and the German Hugo
Ball. The multitalented, routinely dar-
ing Taeuber fit right in.
The Dadaists, deprecating museum-
worthy art, devoted their self-defining
energies to evenings marked by such high
jinks as improvisations of willfully in-
y first-ever solid take on Sophie for her. That the medium was “woman’s comprehensible poetry. They conceived
M Taeuber-Arp, the subject of a won-
derful retrospective at the Museum of
work” by the standards of the time added
to my startlement, upending the lazy pe-
of their activities as the termination—a
sardonic swan song—of a disgraced
Modern Art, occurred nine years ago, by jorative. No doubt feminism’s revaluing Western civilization. Taeuber, elaborately
way of a survey, also at MOMA, of the of historic values had sensitized me. Good costumed, would dance in a manner that,
genesis of abstract art, circa 1910-25. Until is good whether accomplished with a in 1917, Ball described as “full of spikes
© FONDAZIONE MARGUERITE ARP, LOCARNO, SWITZERLAND
then, I had regarded the Swiss virtuoso brush or with a needle. and fishbones.” Only one blurry photo-
of many crafts lightly. But on that occa- Now here the embroidery is again, graph documents that phase. Also scant-
sion, which featured such heavy hitters like an old friend, in “Sophie Taeuber-Arp: ily recorded, with set designs and a few
of the aesthetic revolution as Kandinsky, Living Abstraction.” The show tracks the photographs, is her hectic three-act mar-
Mondrian, and Malevich, I kept com- artist’s multifarious achievements, under ionette show of 1918, an adaptation of an
ing back to a smallish wool embroidery the radar of ruling styles, until her death, eighteenth-century commedia-dell’arte
of rectangular forms, “Vertical-Horizon- in 1943, when she was fifty-three years old. play, “King Stag.” The production closed
tal Composition” (1916), by Taeuber-Arp. The work’s nubbly, asymmetrically struc- after three performances, amid the per-
Beautiful, utterly assured, and ineffably tured bars and swatches in white, black, ils of that year’s deadly flu pandemic.
heartfelt, it made the artist’s associates, red, blue, gray, and two browns generate The marionettes survived and are on
nearly all male, seem relative louts, worked a seemingly effortless majesty. The exe- view at MOMA—astonishingly inventive
up about innovations that were a breeze cution secretes bits of fun that I hadn’t human, animal, and fantastical figures,
such as a several-sword-wielding whirl-
Taeuber-Arp’s “Vertical-Horizontal Composition,” from 1916, is utterly assured. ing dervish of a gizmo—in brightly
painted, metal-hinged wood. Clips from Whatever she did, including incursions A LA VIEILLE RUSSIE
a speculative re-creation, which was in stained glass and designs for architec- Es b sh d 1851
filmed in 1993, stir a longing in the viewer ture and interior-decoration projects, ac- A qu J w s d F b rgé
to have attended the original show. You quired mystique from how she did it.
don’t have to have been there, but what In 1940, Taeuber-Arp and Arp fled
bliss if you were. their home, outside Paris, for the Unoc-
Largely inspired by Taeuber’s tours cupied Zone of southern France, shortly
de force of design, experiments in non- before German troops entered the city.
figurative art took hold in the Dada cir- The couple contemplated but stalled a
cle. Further embroideries and gouaches possible immigration to the United States
of hers, also entitled “Vertical-Horizon- (they had visas) before taking refuge back
tal Composition,” develop a language of in neutral Switzerland. In January of
form so fluent that she could seem to 1943, Taeuber-Arp spent a night at a
have been born to it: intricately balanced, friend’s house. She lit a woodstove in the
invariably surprising. She extended the guest room but, having inexplicably ne-
mode to involve triangles and then cur- glected to open the flue, died in her sleep
vilinear or patchy, scattered shapes, all of carbon-monoxide poisoning. The ca-
vivacious and, such is the intimacy of lamity persists as a rankling hurt.
her surfaces, begging to be touched. She A friend has suggested to me that
often detoured from two dimensions, the Taeuber-Arp show exemplifies what
painting wooden heads with irrational he calls “the MOMA apology tour.” Hav-
abstract patterns, as if cogitating some ing promulgated a canon of modernist
superior realm of the psyche. Asked by masters and movements since its earli-
Tzara in 1920 to supply a photograph of est days, under the direction of Alfred H.
her face, she had several taken in which
she peeks out, smiling, from behind one
Barr, Jr., in recent years the museum has
taken to celebrating past talents and phe-
745 F f h Av u
of the “Dada Heads.” nomena that it once consigned, when (B w 57 & 58 S r
h h
s, 4 h F r)
considering them at all, to marginal sta- ALVR.com • 212.752.1727
aeuber and Arp married in 1922, tus. A concurrent show at the museum,
T and she joined his name to her
own. They travelled widely among the
“Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw,” pre-
sents works by a Chicagoan outsider
hot spots of the European avant-garde artist who died in 1972. Yoakum began
before settling in France, in 1929. Her painting at the age of seventy-one, to-
repertoire included some staggeringly ward the end of an obscure, knockabout
labor-intensive beading, which she de- life, and was warmly embraced by a co-
ployed in jewelry and small purses that hort of wackily figurative Chicago art-
she could sell commercially. She also ists who, flipping off New York influ- Wear our new
made delicately woven tablecloths that ences, dubbed themselves the Hairy official hat to show
you wouldn’t dream of setting a coffee
cup on. Her devotion to crafts can seem
Who; they have lately been coming in
for recuperative justice themselves. Yoa-
your love.
strategic, allowing her to evade com- kum’s landscapes of sensuously swollen
parison with the big-time fine-art styles forms, seething with visceral imagina-
of the era—in which, nonetheless, she tion, fill one blank in MOMA’s narrative
was fully versed. An inveterate joiner, of twentieth-century art.
she enhanced group shows of numer- But Taeuber-Arp’s case goes beyond
ous tendencies, including Surrealism. a gesture of belated catholicity. Her el-
People liked having her around. evation revises what is understood as
Starting in 1930, Taeuber-Arp con- “major” in modern art. Far from inci-
centrated on oil painting. She proved a dental in her epoch, she was integral to
topnotch contributor to the movements the wholesale expansion of what art
Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Créa- could be and how it could alter the world
tion—both of which were organized to at large. The show recasts assumptions
promote geometric abstraction—at a cer- of value that were long held hostage to 100% cotton twill.
tain loss of charisma. Another painter. hierarchies of medium and that were Available in white, navy, and black.
But look closely. She exercised such tech- dominated, with rare exceptions, by men.
nical subtleties as building up what ap- The story it tells liberates thinking about
pear to be freehand flurries of curling what has mattered—and still does, and
newyorkerstore.com/hats
lines with tiny, almost undetectable strokes henceforth will—in our cultural annals
to give them subliminal physical mass. of consequential genius. 
threats. She always wants the sand-
THE THEATRE wiches to come out faster, and she has
no patience for the culinary ambition
CHARACTER LIMITS
that’s growing in the kitchen under her
nose. She wants the basics, nothing more.
Sometimes she shows up with odd gifts
The search for justification in plays by Lynn Nottage and Alice Childress. that might or might not be ill-gotten,
the kind of stuff that euphemistically
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM “falls off the back of a truck”—some
olive oil from Central Europe, an inex-
plicable mess of wilted chard, a plastic
bag full of sea bass in greenish liquid.
“The fish smells rank,” somebody
says, to which Clyde replies, “You know
my policy. If it ain’t brown or gray, it
can be fried.” Fire up the skillet. A free
beer for anybody who gets sick. That’s
the kind of place this is.
Clyde is an ex-convict, and so are
the people who work for her, a fact that
she hangs over their heads like rain in
a cloud at every opportunity—nobody
else is going to hire them, so they’d
better submit to her whims, however
brutal. Tish (Kara Young, who spins
great performances out of straw in every
show I see her in) is a single mom sad-
dled by a trifling, untrustworthy co-
parent. Rafael (Reza Salazar) fum-
blingly pines for her. Jason (Edmund
Donovan) is the new guy, initially quiet
and sullen, marked up with white-su-
premacist tattoos. They’re all under the
thrall of the sagelike Montrellous (Ron
Cephas Jones), a kind of sandwich guru,
who wants to jazz up the place with
new recipes and more tender attention
to ingredients. He leads the group in
sessions of visualization and conjec-
ture—what kind of sandwich can your
verybody’s entitled to a little pri- Helen Hayes), about the staff of a run- mind conjure up?
E vacy. Character development in
drama is similar to a growing friend-
down sandwich joint at a truck stop,
takes a stark either-or stance regarding
Often, the sessions lead to bouts of
confession—all the employees give up
ship—a process of gradual divulgence. the lives of its characters. They spill their the goods on why they did time, even,
The puzzle of someone’s bearing and guts without much prompting, and, in eventually, Jason. This is supposed to
outward presentation gives way to the the spilling, court intimacy—or, in the deepen the bonds among them, and,
collection of secrets and fears and fam- frustrating case of the title character, perhaps, to offer a well of complexity
ily history that make up—and, over give nothing at all. Both approaches not often granted to working-class peo-
time, help to explain—that person. Still, render surfaces rather than spirit. ple chewed up by the system and given
the most interesting people, onstage Clyde (Uzo Aduba) is the badass, a harsh set of choices: eat shit, starve,
and in our lives, hold on to a whiff of shit-talking, intermittently horny, some- or go back in. But the life stories come
mystery. There’s something alien and times violent proprietor of the roadside between slapstick riffs on sandwich-
ineffable about them that can’t be re- shop. She wears formfitting clothes that making and kitchen etiquette—a bunch
duced to mere facts, or be rationalized highlight her curves and pedestal her of well-performed gags—and as a re-
by psychology. Call it soul. décolletage. Sex has something to do sult the play has trouble finding its
Lynn Nottage’s new play, “Clyde’s,” with her power—the passes she makes tone. It’s hard to figure out how seri-
directed by Kate Whoriskey (at the at her employees register as vague ously to take the putatively tough mo-
ments in “Clyde’s,” or what to do with
In “Clyde’s,” Uzo Aduba plays the formerly incarcerated owner of a sandwich shop. the biographies we’re offered. (Clyde’s
76 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTIAN HAMMERSTAD
own answer to anybody else’s suffering about Theatre Company, at the Amer- ADVERTISEMENT
SHOWCASE
is to dismiss it. “I don’t do pity,” she ican Airlines Theatre)—slowly unrav-
says.) The lighting, by Christopher Ak- els an aging actress named Wiletta
erlind, tries to indicate emotion—when (LaChanze), who is reluctantly ex- FIND OUT MORE ABOUT NEW PRODUCTS AND
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Montrellous is rhapsodizing, he gets a posed to an acting approach that asks
fuchsia glow—but nothing that any her to find emotions to support the
character says steers the play in a new actions of her character. Her director,
direction. Sad tales are divots for us to Al Manners (Michael Zegen), fancies
navigate between laughs. himself a social and artistic progres-
Much of the problem lies with Clyde sive. The play they’re rehearsing, slated
herself. In an early private moment, for Broadway, is about small-town
Clyde and Montrellous—who have a Black folks who, because they want
history that remains shrouded through- the right to vote, get threatened—and
out the play—are arguing about the worse—by a gathering lynch mob. LIFE PLAN COMMUNITY
future of the shop. Montrellous lets Manners, who is white, thinks the 130 acres of beautifully wooded
slip that Clyde has fallen into “gam- play is on the cutting edge of race re- landscape, Montgomery County, Pa
bling debt,” and that the shop is some- lations—at least, as close to that edge FOULKEWAYS.ORG
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how mixed up in the trouble. That’s as the theatre’s commercial impera-
the only thing we ever really learn— tives will allow. He pokes and prods
or, at least, think we learn—about Wiletta, expressing dissatisfaction
Clyde. She rings a bell when new or- with her performance as a mother
ders come in, appearing at the window whose son is in big trouble, asking
to the kitchen all of a sudden, like a her to “justify” her character’s deci-
poltergeist at the climax of a horror sions, not merely to act them out with
flick. She rages through the kitchen, rote professionalism. He’s trying to
spewing just enough bile to get the ob- make high art out of a play he doesn’t
jects of her tyranny complaining again, know is offensive trash. The problem
but she’s never subjected to the kind is that Wiletta’s got a real artist in-
of scrutiny that makes watching a char- side her—“I want to be an actress!” JOHN CHRISTIAN
acter worthwhile. she says in the middle of a reverie— The Numeros Collection combines
Uzo Aduba is one of my favorite and she learns the new method a bit num, from the Latin word for
televisual performers of recent years— too well. She begins asking questions number, and eros, the Greek word for
as Suzanne (Crazy Eyes) Warren in that the script, and her director, just romantic love. Convert your
special date to classic Roman numerals.
Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black,” can’t answer. Order by 12/22 for the holidays.
and as the therapist Brooke Taylor in Wiletta starts out as a jaded vet-
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JOHN-CHRISTIAN.COM
ment”—largely because she holds at the director’s jokes and tell little
within her characters, and gradually lies to pad his résumé. She’s not the
reveals, many layers of tenderness and only cynical one: her castmate Mil-
brokenness, irrationality and explosive lie (the very funny Jessica Frances
pain. At her best, her eyes, deep with Dukes) is in a wry fury about how
feeling, are like bowls left out in the poorly she’s served by the roles she’s
rain, steadily filling up with the liquid made to play. “Last show I was in, I
stuff of personality. Here, those skills wouldn’t even tell my relatives,” Mil-
are tossed aside. Clyde toys with angry lie says. “All I did was shout ‘Lord,
fear when her troubles come up, but have mercy!’ for almost two hours
she never revisits it. She’s like an un- every night.” It’s a representational CHILTON
generous sketch-comedy depiction of lament that sounds stale until you re-
Chilton Furniture, a Maine company,
a woman we want to meet, whom alize that the play was written more offers American-made furniture
Aduba could, I think, play well: wrath- than sixty-five years ago. celebrating the warmth, texture, and
ful and dangerous, yes, but welling up “Trouble in Mind” is pessimistic natural beauty of wood. Request a
complimentary catalogue at:
and bubbling over with a past—and about the structures that underpin the
some drastic action—to justify it. entertainment industry, but it is bull- CHILTONS.COM
ish about the possibilities of earnest

peaking of justification, “Trouble artistic pursuit. Even a schmuck like
S in Mind”—the 1955 play by Alice
Childress, now making its much be-
Manners can read some Stanislavsky,
bring it clumsily into rehearsals, and, @NEWYORKERPROMO
lated début on Broadway (directed by unwittingly, spark the beginnings of
Charles Randolph-Wright for Round- a revolution. 
to tradition. Strictly concerned with
POP MUSIC matters of the heart and committed to
the unshowy principles of songwriting
IMPERFECT UNION
and musicianship, she’s a modern star
who feels eternal, and also maternal—
reliable, steady, and nurturing. She was
Adele finds inspiration in the throes of divorce. only a teen-ager when she broke out,
but womanly dignity was the bedrock
BY CARRIE BATTAN of her work from the get-go.
And yet to sum up Adele’s music as
“for moms” is to understate just how
wide-reaching her impact has been.
Adele is not only the highest-selling
pop star in history but also the most
institutionally acclaimed. She makes
music that everyone can feel good
about, in particular the voters of the
Recording Academy, who have given
her fifteen Grammy Awards over the
years, most of them in major catego-
ries. Even if you don’t seek out Adele’s
music, you absorb most of it; her cat-
alogue of thundering torch songs has
become part of the atmosphere. Adele
does not participate in most customs
of contemporary celebrity, and often
recedes from the public eye, leaving
only the songs behind. These songs are
missives from her personal experiences
with love and heartbreak, but they are
designed to be universal. At times, it
feels as if her music were a utility that
belongs to everyone and no one, like
electricity or running water.
“30,” which was released earlier this
month, is the first record that sounds
as if it belonged to her alone. Born
Adele Adkins—although she is so de-
serving of a mononym that to see her
surname in print is disconcerting—
hen Adele set out to finish her is one of the few figures in entertain- and raised mostly in North London,
W new album, “30,” her record label
wondered how to make it resonate
ment with the authority and the gravi-
tas to brush off such misguided sug-
she studied at the same performing-arts
academy that Amy Winehouse had
with a younger crowd. Adele is a vocal gestions, and her solution was defiantly dropped out of, several years before.
powerhouse with an out-of-time sen- simple. “They’ve all got moms, and Like Winehouse, and like many other
sibility, and she takes long hiatuses be- they’ve definitely been listening to my British women in her wake, Adele was
tween albums. It has been six years music, these fourteen-year-olds,” she primarily interested in the traditions
since her previous record, “25,” and told the label. of Black American music, including
much has changed in the world of One reductive description that has blues, Motown, roots, and gospel. But
popular music, whose pace Adele has been used to characterize Adele’s music she also had a knack for modern pop
long been proudly out of synch with. and her cultural imprint is that she is balladry, and the vocal talent to exe-
“The conversation of TikTok came up “for moms.” Since her career took off, cute it. Adele’s catalogue is a longitu-
a lot,” the singer told the radio per- in 2011, with her sophomore album, dinal study of her life, each album fo-
sonality Zane Lowe, in a recent inter- “21,” a potent breakup record that grad- cussed on a specific age. Her début
view. “They were, like, ‘We’ve really ually became canon, Adele’s contem- recording, “19,” was a scattered and
gotta make sure that these fourteen- porary take on soul, blues, and gospel plucky but accomplished musical port-
year-olds know who you are.’ ” Adele has been appreciated as a monument folio of sorts. Its smash follow-up, “21,”
zeroed in on a particularly tumultu-
The album is gratifyingly uneven—an authentic chronicle of personal turbulence. ous breakup, harnessing and refining
78 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY CECILIA CARLSTEDT
Adele’s sense of scorn. “She is half your sonal. It makes her first three albums Out.” The song is Motown-lite, made
age, but I’m guessing that’s the reason sound a bit clinical. jauntier with the swing of reggae gui-
that you strayed,” she spewed on “Ru- We’re used to hearing Adele belt, tar and handclapping, and it points to
mour Has It.” but on this album she prefers to chat, a newfound stylistic elasticity. An ear-
Adele eventually married an entre- whisper, coo, crow, or grunt and groan. lier version of Adele might have dis-
preneur named Simon Konecki, and On one track, “My Little Love”—an tilled all the emotional vagaries of di-
in 2012 they had a son named Angelo. exchange with her son that serves as vorce into something reassuring in its
On “25,” she cleared the bitterness that the album’s emotional centerpiece— grandeur, but “30” is uneven in the
lingered in the air after “21,” and reck- she uses samples of voice notes she re- most gratifying way, which is to say
oned with the passage of time. It was corded in the period after leaving that it is an authentic chronicle of per-
her most musically conservative album, Konecki. “Mummy’s been having a lot sonal turbulence.
polished and hearty but painted with of big feelings lately,” she tells her son. Adele has never concerned herself
broad strokes and performed in a style “Like how?” he asks. It’s a moment with the trends of contemporary music,
that sometimes teetered on the brink that could seem treacly if it did not and that is a huge part of her appeal.
of schlock. It was a blockbuster none- sound so candid, and so uncomfort- “30” is no different, and she reaches
theless. Around this time, Adele con- able. Later in the song, Adele breaks even farther into the past for musical
sidered leaving music altogether. Maybe into tears during a spoken-word con- inspiration. She opens the record with
quotidian sentimentality and nostalgia fession: “I just feel very lonely. . . . I “Strangers by Nature,” an ornate song
didn’t make for the most inspired art. feel frightened that I might feel like inspired by Judy Garland’s vaudevil-
But, in 2019, Adele divorced Konecki, this at all.” This album does something lian performances. One of Adele’s clos-
and found a new muse in her post- vanishingly rare in the attention- est collaborators is the record producer
breakup loneliness and confusion. deficient streaming era by stringing and jazz pianist Greg Kurstin, and the
together a tracklist that charts an jazz influence infiltrates the album as
here is perhaps no artistic feat emotional trajectory. It begins with well—one song, “All Night Parking,”
T better suited to Adele than a di-
vorce album, but “30” takes some un-
rumination and despair, discovers li-
bidinal release (“Can I Get It”), and
samples the jazz-piano balladeer Er-
roll Garner and transforms Adele into
expected turns. Rather than focus on then graduates to resolution, self- a coquettish lounge singer in the thrall
conjugal despair and dissolution, Adele knowledge, and catharsis. Each of its of new love. The last part of the album
allows herself to linger in the discom- final three tracks stretches past six min- has a strong gospel influence. And yet
fiting yet exhilarating aftermath of her utes, including “To Be Loved,” a bal- “30” is Adele’s most modern-sounding
split. (If you want a pop record that lad in which she extends her voice to record yet, perhaps because of how flu-
faces divorce more squarely, seek out its breaking point and then keeps push- idly and casually she slips between these
Kacey Musgraves’s “Star-Crossed,” ing. “Let it be known that I… trieeeeed,” modes, and because of how unafraid
from this year.) On “30,” Adele takes she gasps, hoarse, as if attempting to she is to let the seams show—to let
a hard look in the mirror. “It’s about insure that she’s exhausted her emo- her voice crack while hitting a high
time that I face myself,” she announces tional reserves. note. So many young artists aspire,
on “To Be Loved,” an almost seven- When she is not addressing her above all, to this kind of ease and ver-
minute ballad that builds up the same young son on “30,” Adele is often ad- satility. “I hope I learn to get over my-
epic potential energy that Whitney dressing herself, giving a pep talk or a self, and stop trying to be somebody
Houston did on “I Will Always Love reproach. “Cry your heart out, it’ll clean else,” Adele pledges on a song called
You.” Adele has removed the distance your face / When you’re in doubt, go “I Drink Wine.” It’s a jarring state-
between her music and her inner life, at your own pace,” she advises on a ment from somebody who sounds so
and “30” is diaristic and intensely per- playful song called “Cry Your Heart much like herself. 
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2021 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY THE NEW YORKER IN WRITING.

CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST
Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Lonnie Millsap,
must be received by Sunday, December 5th. The finalists in the November 22nd contest appear below.
We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the December 20th issue. Anyone age
thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.
THIS WEEK’S CONTEST
“ ”
..........................................................................................................................
THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION
“I so rarely meet a person of your calibre.”

Bruce Nufer, Menasha, Wis.
“Will I see you again?” “Technically, the fish is still in the bowl.”
Steve Heller, Brooklyn, N.Y. Rick Farber, West New York, N.J.
“Please text me to let me know you got home O.K.”

Jason Nicholas, New York City
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

13 14
THE 15 16
CROSSWORD 17 18 19 20
21 22 23 24
A moderately challenging puzzle.
25 26 27 28
BY AIMEE LUCIDO
29 30 31
32 33
ACROSS
1 One of seven in a Kurosawa film 34 35 36 37 38
8 Trilogy of graphic memoirs co-written
by John Lewis 39 40 41 42
13 In general
43 44 45 46 47
14 Christmas cheer?
15 Ingredient in some acne creams 48 49 50 51
16 Quadriceps exercise that can be done
almost anywhere 52 53 54 55
17 “Here Come the Warm Jets” musician

Brian 56 57
18 Motivate
58 59
20 Sit out in the sun
21 Tiniest puppy
DOWN 37 Mr. Tumnus, in “The Lion, the Witch
23 Country rocker Steve and the Wardrobe,” for one
1 More likely to groan, perhaps
24 Descartes who wrote “Meditations on 38 Vatican City or San Marino, e.g.
2 Monopoly buy
First Philosophy”
3 Hollywood, for the U.S. film industry 42 Sense of orientation?
25 “Jane ___” (book originally published as 44 Mlles. after marriage
4 Ocean State sch.
an autobiography edited by Currer Bell)
5 Hindu queen 45 Weapon for Wile E. Coyote
27 Tenth Hebrew letter Millennia on end
6 ___ time (opportunity to recharge one’s 47
28 Bar game batteries) 49 Avian sprinters
29 Coming-of-age drama? 7 “For the umpteenth time . . .” 50 Morrison who was born Chloe Ardelia
32 Huff 8 Unit written out as 6.022 × 1023 Wofford
9 Org. whose champion is awarded the 53 Weapon for Wile E. Coyote
33 Kick out of the group chat, say
Calder Cup 55 Video-game series created by Sid Meier,
34 Swear words? 10 Team lists for short
39 Suits, briefly 11 Wine famously paired with liver in a line
40 Wander (about) from a 1991 film
12 What chili peppers might indicate on a Solution to the previous puzzle:
41 ___ Gang (political fan base) menu W E S T I E W A D U P
43 Expectorated 14 Rabbit relative B I G T E N T M A N A N A
44 Tierney of “ER” 16 Taylor Swift power ballad with the lyrics Z A I L A A V A N T G A R D E
46 March Madness org. “He’s so tall and handsome as hell / He’s E L M I S T I I A N K I A

so bad, but he does it so well” S L O S H N S C E L L E N
48 “Waterfalls” trio 19 Lecture giver, casually T O T E H O M E F R I E S
49 Illustrious 22 Split with two cuts, maybe S U E D O V E T A I L S
H E R E T O D A Y
51 Cleaning compound 24 Best Picture Oscar winner inspired by
C A M E R A M E N T B S
52 Underlings in a castle the life of Kim Peek
C A R A B I N E R T R U E
26 Best and Ferber
54 Green ingredient in a rainbow roll P A R E N T A E G E O R G
28 ___ Lane (where the Muffin Man lives) E R R D I A T A N L I N E
56 Planet that orbits the sun on its side 30 Exciting, slangily A N A K I N S K Y W A L K E R
57 Odyssey, e.g. 31 Michael of “S.N.L.” R A R I N G G O E S M A D
58 Pulitzer-winning playwright Tracy with 34 Like good sleep S L A N G B U S H E S
roles in “The Post” and “Lady Bird” Research
35
Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
59 Small pieces 36 Double-breasted outerwear newyorker.com/crossword

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What are some of the main articles discussed in the issue?

What are some of the main articles discussed in the issue?

Which writer has a book review?

Which writer has a book review?

DECEMBER 6, 2021

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

LEFT: FRANCESCO MUZZI; RIGHT: GARETH SMIT

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

partly obscured by a pink cursive text alluding to

(Classic Stage Company; through Jan. 8.)

8 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021

Alvin Ailey American

10 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021

out of your inbox.

12 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021

week after wrapping “Minari,” the

n 2014, Erskine, Konkle, and Zvible-

Stay up to 100% leak-free

Get a sample at Depend.com

THE ONLY THING STRONGER THAN US, IS YOU.™

NOTES FOR MY BIOGRAPHER

THE INVISIBLE WALL

A houses sits along the highway

I liams College graduate named Lina

he F.T.C.’s headquarters, in Wash-

han returned to Columbia Law

58 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY BÉNÉDICTE MULLER

M band, Daniel, from room

62 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021

THE CURRENT CINEMA

LIVING THE LIFE ELECTRIC

THE INITIATIVE OF HISTORY

cre of Black South Africans in Sharpe-

ish about the possibilities of earnest

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 6, 2021 79

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“I so rarely meet a person of your calibre.”

“Please text me to let me know you got home O.K.”

Order by 12/22 for Christmas!

Order by12/22 for the Holidays!

TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

17 “Here Come the Warm Jets” musician

46 March Madness org. “He’s so tall and handsome as hell / He’s E L M I S T I I A N K I A

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