The New Yorker 11.8.2021

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NOVEMBER 8, 2021
4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Amy Davidson Sorkin on why January 6th still matters;
prank posters for the mayoral race; the Fearless Girl fight;
digitizing a musical trove; a blooming business.
DEPT. OF SCIENCE
Nick Paumgarten 18 What a Feeling
How to have more energy.
POPULAR CHRONICLES
Kelefa Sanneh 25 Punching Down
What Jake Paul’s influencer past brings to boxing.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Sarah Stillman 32 Storm Chasers
The exploited workers cleaning up after climate change.
LIFE AND LETTERS
Benjamin Anastas 44 The Paper Tomb
An obsessive diarist’s strange pursuit of greatness.
FICTION
Jamil Jan Kochai 56 “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Gideon Lewis-Kraus 62 Prehistoric anarchists and the birth of hierarchy.
Casey Cep 68 Anne Carson’s “H of H Playbook.”
71 Briefly Noted
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Julian Lucas 72 What the “Foundation” TV series misses about Asimov.
DANCING
Jennifer Homans 74 New work from New York City Ballet and Bill T. Jones.
THE THEATRE
Alexandra Schwartz 76 “Caroline, or Change,” “The Mother.”
ON TELEVISION
Naomi Fry 78 “Succession.”
POEMS
Eileen Myles 38 “pencil & pen”
David Baker 52 “Can You Say It”
COVER
Kim DeMarco “Season’s Turn”
DRAWINGS Edward Steed, Benjamin Schwartz, Zoe Si, Mick Stevens, Christopher Weyant, Roz Chast, Emily Bernstein,
Liana Finck, Pat Achilles, Victoria Roberts, David Ostow and Dan Salomon, Jimmy Craig, Mike Twohy SPOTS Rina Kushnir
CONTRIBUTORS
Benjamin Anastas (“The Paper Tomb,” Sarah Stillman (“Storm Chasers,” p. 32),
p. 44) teaches literature and writing at a staff writer, won the 2019 National
Bennington College. His books include Magazine Award for public interest.
the novel “An Underachiever’s Diary” She was named a MacArthur Fellow
and the memoir “Too Good to Be True.” in 2016.
Kim DeMarco (Cover) began contrib- Kelefa Sanneh (“Punching Down,” p. 25)
uting covers to the magazine in 2006. has been a staff writer since 2008. He
recently published “Major Labels: A
Nick Paumgarten (The Talk of the Town, History of Popular Music in Seven
p. 16; “What a Feeling,” p. 18), a staff Genres.”
writer, has contributed to The New
Yorker since 2000. Casey Cep (Books, p. 68), a staff writer,
is the author of “Furious Hours: Mur-
Eileen Myles (Poem, p. 38) has published der, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper
numerous books, including “Evolution” Lee.”
and “For Now.”
Patrick Berry (Puzzles & Games Dept.)
Jamil Jan Kochai (Fiction, p. 56), a re- has been constructing puzzles since
cipient of an O. Henry Award, is the 1993. He lives in Athens, Georgia.
author of “99 Nights in Logar” and “The
Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Naomi Fry (On Television, p. 78) became
Stories,” which will be out next year. a staff writer in 2018 and writes about
culture for The New Yorker.
Jennifer Homans (Dancing, p. 74), the
magazine’s dance critic, directs the David Baker (Poem, p. 52) teaches at
Center for Ballet and the Arts, at N.Y.U. Denison University. He will publish a
She is the author of “Apollo’s Angels: new poetry collection, “Whale Fall,”
A History of Ballet.” in July.
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
THE NEW YORKER

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LEFT: CINDY ECHEVARRIA; RIGHT: JOCELYN LEE
KITCHEN NOTES PHOTO BOOTH

Mayukh Sen on the chef and food Margaret Talbot writes about the
writer Julie Sahni, an underappreciated subtle defiance of Jocelyn Lee’s nude
trailblazer of Indian cooking. portraits of aging women.
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2 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021
THE MAIL PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.
The New Yorker

THE LONG-COVID I participated in The New Yorker’s piece
CONUNDRUM on Long COVID, sharing the extremely Crossword Puzzle
personal and painful story of the sui
The New Yorker’s article on Long COVID, cide of my wife, Heidi Ferrer, which
in which I was a central subject, was a was caused by the excruciating phys
profound affront to everyone suffering ical symptoms that she suffered dur
the longterm sequelae of even mild ing a thirteenmonthlong battle with
and asymptomatic cases of COVID19 the disease. I thought that The New
(“The Damage Done,” September Yorker, above all other publications,
27th). The piece included no interviews would handle her story with grace
with doctors or scientists directly in and sensitivity. But the article caused
vestigating Long COVID, and no in my family and me great pain. It got
terviews with patients battling the dis a crucial detail of the event wrong:
ease. I participated in the article with my son did not find his mother’s body,
the understanding that it would be a as the article implied, because, in one
profile of me and of Survivor Corps— of my proudest moments as a parent,
the world’s largest grassroots COVID I shut the door instantly, before he
movement, which I founded—but it could see it. Much more insidious was
proved to be something entirely dif the article’s feckless assertion that
ferent. It depicted my organization as “others, pointing out that Ferrer never
antiscience, even though we have re tested positive for the virus, have ques
invented what it means to be citizen tioned whether COVID is to blame for
scientists by coauthoring scientific pa her death.” Who, I have asked, are
pers and creating a system in which these “others”? The answer has never
patients and researchers partner to ad been revealed to me. If I had known
vance science in line with patients’ that the magazine was going to call
needs. Your writer laments a gulf be into question the cause of my wife’s
tween activists and scientists. He doesn’t death, I wouldn’t have coöperated with
do enough to show how our work the story.
bridges the divide. My wife fought the bravest battle
The article was also wrong to dis I have ever witnessed against a virus
pute the extent to which the symp that robbed her of everything, includ
toms of Long COVID can be tied to ing her ability to sleep, in a process
the coronavirus. In 2005, Oliver Sacks that began with tremors and internal 1. Plot device sometimes
coauthored an oped in the Times vibrations that struck her—in a detail used in thrillers.
warning that a novel flu virus could that The New Yorker chose to omit— 2. Bad stuff to microwave.
cause a shadow pandemic of neuro weeks after getting the Moderna vac
logical complications similar to the cine. The publication’s engagement in 3. N.Y.C. club said to
encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping “whataboutism” regarding Long have catalyzed the punk
sickness, that followed the 1918 influ COVID is harmful, and an insult to movement.
enza epidemic. Such postviral dis those who are suffering from this sin 4. Apt to snoop.
eases, he wrote, have been recorded ister disease, many of whom are being
“since the time of Hippocrates.” Con gaslit by the medical community every
trary to the article’s disappointing day. They deserve better. Find a new crossword
bothsides approach, it is wrong to Nick Güthe every Monday, Wednesday,
dispute the lived experience of those Senior Adviser to Survivor Corps and Friday, and a cryptic
every Sunday, at
suffering from Long COVID and the Marina del Rey, Calif. newyorker.com/crossword
physiological basis of their symptoms.
In doing so, the piece fell grievously •
short of The New Yorker’s standard for Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
medical reporting. address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
Diana Berrent themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
Founder, Survivor Corps any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
Chevy Chase, Md. of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 3

As New York City venues reopen, it’s advisable to confirm in advance the requirements for in-person attendance.
NOVEMBER 3 – 9, 2021
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
In 1857, Seneca Village, a community of predominantly Black Americans, was destroyed to build Central
Park. Beginning Nov. 5, the Met imagines an alternate world, one in which the village still thrives, with “Before
Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” combining historic and contemporary art and
décor. Its visionary lead curator, Hannah Beachler—who won an Oscar for her production design on “Black
Panther”—is pictured here, with wallpaper by the Nigerian American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GIONCARLO VALENTINE
1
THE THEATRE
eleven months, the project culminated in a live
one-act play at Ars Nova—which turned out
the troupe’s choreographic associate, looks
at King Kong through a lens of decoloniza-
to be not a reunion but a gallery installation, tion.—B.S. (joyce.org)
by Ona, looking backward and forward at this
Dana H. revealing, once hopeful friendship. The letters
In the late nineties, when the playwright and the performance are now available digi- “Other Places of Being”
1
Lucas Hnath was a college student at N.Y.U., tally at arsnovanyc.com.—Michael Schulman One constructive side effect of the pandemic
his mother, Dana Higginbotham, was kid- (Through Nov. 6.) was how it moved artists to reach out to one
napped by a man she had met while work- another virtually. Collaborations that would
ing as a psych-ward chaplain at a hospital have been logistically and financially impos-
in Florida. She spent five terrifying months sible in person became possible via screens.
as his captive, hustled back and forth across DANCE One such collaboration resulted in a duet
state lines. Nearly twenty years later, as a between Sooraj Subramaniam and January
playwright, Hnath asked a friend, the direc- Low, Indian classical dancers living thou-
tor and writer Steve Cosson, to tape a series Stefanie Batten Bland sands of miles apart, in Belgium and Malay-
of interviews with his mother about her or- The title of Stefanie Batten Bland’s 2019 work sia, respectively. The two trained together,
deal. In Hnath’s play, directed by Les Waters “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner” alludes to in Malaysia, as kids. Each has gone on to a
(in repertory with “Is This a Room,” at the the similarly named 1967 film, in which a white distinguished solo career in the eastern Indian
Lyceum), the role of Dana is performed by couple, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine form Odissi. Here, in a twenty-four-minute
Deirdre O’Connell, who pulls off a titanic feat Hepburn, find their liberal values strained dance film, “Other Places of Being,” they find
of emotional and technical prowess. Although when Sidney Poitier shows up as a potential a common dance language, bound together
she is the only actor onstage, O’Connell takes son-in-law. Yet although Batten Bland’s dance by text and music developed in tandem. The
part in a collaboration: sitting in an armchair, borrows, archly, some music and dialogue film, commissioned by the Baryshnikov Arts
she lip-synchs to the real Dana’s recorded from the film, it is set discontentedly in the Center for its digital fall season, is available
voice. What audiences witness is an act of present. Around a banquet table, seven danc- for free through Nov. 15 on the company’s
possession, and ultimately of catharsis, de- ers enact false decorum, and explode with the Web site.—Marina Harss (bacnyc.org)
liverance, and release.—Alexandra Schwartz emotions such decorum represses. The show
(Reviewed in our issue of 11/1/21.) (Through comes to Peak Performances in Montclair,
Nov. 13.) New Jersey, Nov. 4-7.—Brian Seibert (Alexander Trisha Brown Dance Company
Kasser Theatre.) A marvel of cool, perpetual motion that
activates underused edges of stage space
Is This a Room with rippling currents, Trisha Brown’s “Set
Conceived and directed by Tina Satter, Gibney Company and Reset,” from 1983, is among her most
this play—in the Vineyard Theatre’s stel- This company, recently doubled in size, cherished and enduring works. On Nov. 6,
lar Broadway staging, at the Lyceum—takes makes its Joyce Theatre début, Nov. 2-7, with at the Mark Morris Dance Center, a studio
as its text the transcript of the F.B.I.’s visit three premières. Sonya Tayeh, who won a performance of the piece is enriched with
to the home of the whistle-blower Reality Tony Award for her work on “Moulin Rouge! a lecture-demonstration-style elucidation
Winner, on June 3, 2017. The production The Musical,” presents a moody piece with of some of the hidden structures that orga-
pounces on its found script with perverse, live music by the folk-rock duo and creators nize the dance’s flow. Trisha Brown Dance
bravura precision. Reality Winner (Emily of brooding autobiographical theatre the Company’s associate artistic director, Car-
Davis) was a twenty-five-year-old former Bengsons. The Norwegian choreographer olyn Lucas, and the company alumni Shel-
Air Force language analyst who had been Alan Lucien Øyen applies his acclaimed ley Senter and Stacy Matthew Spence draw
working as a Farsi translator for a military method of drawing from dance, theatre, and insights from their own experiences and
contractor when the F.B.I. agents Garrick film to the Gibney dancers in his first work from newly available archival material.—B.S.
(Pete Simpson) and Taylor (Will Cobbs) performed in New York. And Rena Butler, (trishabrowncompany.org)
came to interrogate her at her house, in
Augusta, Georgia. The naturalism de-
manded by the script—all that fumbling ON BROADWAY
and crosstalk—requires razor-sharp timing,
and Simpson and Davis have honed theirs
to metronomic precision. It is startling, The actress Uzo Aduba broke out in
while watching these two formidable actors
match each other beat for beat, to realize the the Netflix series “Orange Is the New
extent to which the actual Reality Winner Black,” playing an eccentric prison in-
accepted the conventions of the genre she mate called Crazy Eyes. It’s a credit
found herself trapped in. Deflection, denial,
confession, motive: they are all there.—A.S. to the show, and to Aduba’s force of
(10/25/21) (Through Nov. 14.) humanity, that viewers came to know
the character as Suzanne, a mentally
P.S. ill woman full of offbeat humor and
Last November, as the pandemic was moth- wisdom. (She’s the only actress to have
ering invention for all kinds of stage artists, won a comedy and a drama Emmy for
Teddy Bergman, Sam Chanse, and Amina
Henry created what might be a new genre— the same character.) Aduba comes to
pen-pal theatre. At-home audience members Broadway in “Clyde’s,” by the two-
received epistolary installments by mail, time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Not-
prying into the correspondence between two
former schoolmates: Bea, a searching, sad tage, as the proprietor of a truck-stop
Black vegan-café proprietor still stuck in sandwich shop staffed by the formerly
ILLUSTRATION BY NHUNG LÊ
the young women’s fictitious home town of incarcerated. Kate Whoriskey, who
Moody, Oregon, and Ona, an Asian Ameri-
can artist who escaped to Brooklyn. During staged Nottage’s “Ruined” and “Sweat,”
the months that followed, we learned from directs the Second Stage production,
their long, heartfelt letters that Ona left her which also stars Ron Cephas Jones.
controlling boyfriend, and Bea abandoned
Moody to join a Michigan farming commu- It starts previews on Nov. 3, at the
nity that seemed curiously like a cult. After Hayes.—Michael Schulman
ject of the writer and oral historian Svetlana
AT THE GALLERIES Kitto’s elegant volume is the artist-designer
and downtown doyenne Sara Penn, the vision-
ary proprietor of the multiethnic gallery-bou-
tique Knobkerry. From the nineteen-sixties
through the nineties, Knobkerry displayed
imported textiles, baskets, and masks, as
well as Penn’s influential pan-Africanist-
inspired couture. In conversations, a range
of the entrepreneurial designer’s friends and
contemporaries, the artist David Hammons
among them, describe the space as a magnet
for celebrities and fashion-forward hippies,
while also underscoring the importance of
the shop as a Black-owned business and a site
for impromptu avant-garde gatherings. (The
book is available, free of charge, in the show.)
It’s unclear how this historical investigation
connects to the contemporary art works on
view, but Thornton’s sculptures (which in-
clude Virgil Abloh x IKEA shopping bags,
filled with petroleum jelly, and high-concept
dresses made of tinfoil, tangled wire, and
jingle bells) and Emamifar’s engagement
with SculptureCenter’s past (she contributes
a building proposal, an architectural model,
and a full-scale woodshop) are an intriguing
pairing, nonetheless.—J.F. (sculpture-center.org)
This photograph of “Holes,” a new show by Elizabeth Jaeger, is keeping
a secret, and so are the sculptures themselves. From a distance, the exhi- “Surrealism Beyond Borders”
bition—which inaugurates Jack Hanley’s new Tribeca gallery and is on This huge, deliriously entertaining show, at the
Met, surveys the transnational spread of Sur-
view through Nov. 20—appears to be an austere arrangement of a dozen realism, a movement that was codified by the
black ceramic vessels. But approach, and you’ll discover that each one poet and polemicist André Breton in 1924, in
hides a small world, ranging in mood from Orwellian (the regimented Paris. (It had roots in Dada, which emerged in
Zurich, in 1916, in infuriated, tactically clown-
desk-dwellers of “Office”) to romantic (the nude couple embracing in ish reaction to the pointlessly murderous First
“Midnight”) and surreal (the tiny figure clutching its tinier doppelgänger World War.) Most of the show’s hundreds of
in “Zoom Zoom”). Jaeger heightens the air of surprise with unexpected works—and nearly all of the best—date from
the next twenty or so years. As you would
shifts in scale: not all of her characters are Lilliputian. Those midnight expect, there’s the lobster-topped telephone
lovers embrace in a three-inch-wide bowl, but the two-foot-wide container by Salvador Dalí and the locomotive emerging
of “Catnap” conceals a life-size clay feline. (There are no mice in these from a fireplace by René Magritte, both from
1938 and crowd-pleasers to this day. But the
scenarios, but you may think of Stuart Little; at times, Jaeger’s winsome show’s superb curators, Stephanie D’Alessan-
figuration suggests a Garth Williams illustration in three dimensions.) Of dro and Matthew Gale, prove that the craze
course, the isolation of the past pandemic months is a touchstone, but so is for Surrealism surged like a prairie fire inde-
pendently in individuals and groups in some
the interiority of mental states, whether waking or dreaming. The contem- forty-five countries around the world. The
plative mood continues in “Gutted,” an exhibition, on view through Dec. 1, tinder was an insurrectionary spirit, disgusted
of Jaeger’s piscine blown-glass sculptures (inspired by Roman lachrymatory with establishments. Painting and photography
dominate, though magazines, texts, and films
bottles) at Mister Fahrenheit, an intriguing new project space, in the West explore certain scenes. The variety of discov-
1
Village, tucked into a secret garden behind a green gate.—Andrea K. Scott eries, detailed with exceptional scholarship
in a ravishing keeper of a catalogue, defeat
generalization, with such tonic shocks as “The
Sea” (1929), a fantasia by the Japanese Koga
the tactility of his paintings’ linen and burlap Harue that displays, among other things, a
ART surfaces. The works vary in scale, and the bathing beauty, a zeppelin, swimming fish, and
largest evoke theatrical sets. Among the most a flayed submarine; and “Untitled” (1967), a
enchanting pieces on view is “The Toucan weaponized throng of human and animal faces
JJ Manford
1
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND JACK HANLEY GALLERY
Vase,” rendered in a palette recalling that of and figures, by the Mozambican Malangatana
There is a beguiling stillness reminiscent van Gogh’s “The Bedroom.” Nearly eight feet Ngwenya.—Peter Schjeldahl (metmuseum.org)
of the bedtime book “Goodnight Moon” in tall, it places viewers at the base of a grand
this New York painter’s domestic scenes— red staircase, as if extending an invitation to
and, in fact, there is at least one lunar orb climb it.—Johanna Fateman (derekeller.com)
to be found in most of the vibrant canvases MUSIC
in Manford’s new show, at the Derek Eller
gallery. (“Interior with Giraffe Sculpture and “Niloufar Emamifar, SoiL
Calder Print,” from 2021, with its patio view Thornton, and an Oral History Bill Callahan
and candy-colored sky, is a sunny exception.) ROCK “Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest,” Bill
These beautifully, and sometimes bizarrely, of Knobkerry” Callahan’s charming album from 2019, re-
decorated rooms are devoid of people, but Three tenuously related projects—one won- introduced this historically aloof singer as
they’re occupied by a menagerie of animals. derful nonfiction book and installations by a tenderhearted family man, reorienting his
Textiles are another prominent presence, their two artists—are united in this rather cryptic perspective without altering the music’s es-
rich textures echoing Manford’s process: his exhibition, on view in the SculptureCenter’s sence or presentation. “Gold Record,” his 2020
use of layered color and scumbling accentuates catacombs-like basement. The fascinating sub- follow-up, is less personal. Its head-turning

opening line—“Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”—is in grooves. The group completed most of its cu- dition to join him for an evening of uncon-
keeping with Callahan’s uniquely deadpan vein rious new album, “Sympathy for Life,” before ventional fusion. The trumpeter and vocalist
of songwriter humor, but it also hints at the quarantine; its themes, of isolation and a civ- Bria Skonberg, herself a Canadian expatriate,
shifting narrators who lie ahead. In “Protest ilization in free fall, were prescient. “Walking unites with other far-flung idiomatic musi-
Song,” a reactionary kvetches about an idealist at a Downtown Pace” is, in part, about finding cians to interpret Django-associated tunes
he catches singing on TV. “I’d vote for Satan,” existential comfort in La Monte Young and tinged with Creole spices, and New Orleans
the crank notes, “if he said it was wrong.” But, Marian Zazeela’s long-running sound-and-light classics soaked in Romany flavors.—Steve Fut-
even at a remove, the newly softened Callahan installation, Dream House, but the song also terman (Dizzy’s Club; Nov. 4-7 at 7:30 and 9:30.)
continually pokes through, whether he’s revis- ponders a dreadful future in which the cherished
iting a decades-old song from a matured van- avant-garde landmark no longer exists. The
tage (“Let’s Move to the Country”) or giving dubby “Marathon of Anger” was inspired by the Sweeping Promises
voice to a limousine driver dispensing wisdom Black Lives Matter movement, and other songs PUNK In late 2019, the then Boston-based post-
to newlyweds (“Pigeons”). He performs at skewer the tyranny of a tech-optimized culture. punk musicians Lira Mondal and Caufield
Le Poisson Rouge, playing unaccompanied “Earth’s shut down, and space is so passé,” Austin Schnug descended into a cavernous cement
and in the round.—Jay Ruttenberg (Nov. 8-9.) Brown sings on “Zoom Out.” Sympathy for life room with a single microphone. There they
requires a ruthless critique.—Jenn Pelly recorded “Hunger for a Way Out,” the elec-
trifying début album by their band, Sweeping
Clinic: “Fantasy Island” Promises. Though written pre-pandemic, the
INDIE ROCK The British band Clinic’s record- Stephane Wrembel’s “Django record’s anthemic title song became a timely
ings, full of snappy tunes and needling organs, underground hit last year, bursting at its
are likely not the first thing that comes to New Orleans” own taut edges. Conjuring the warm ana-
mind when considering psychedelic rock, but JAZZ Though no recordings document the log minimalism and catchy bass lines of yore
its music has always had an otherworldly hue, meeting of the Big Easy genius Louis Arm- while maintaining an unshakable presence, it
equally reminiscent of dub reggae and mid-six- strong and the Gallic guitar whiz Django Re- is a song about itching to escape, to remove
ties mod rock. On “Fantasy Island,” the group inhardt, it was alleged that they jammed, in oneself from the hamster wheel of work and
adds a surprising amount of jauntiness to the the nineteen-thirties, during a visit by the star rent—New Wave for a new age of labor con-
mix. It’s the most overtly playful Clinic album trumpeter to the City of Light. Now the Par- sciousness. Mondal, the bassist and a classi-
yet. Sometimes it’s almost silly—e.g., an ef- is-New Orleans connection is reborn, as the cally trained singer, is a live wire, evoking the
fects-laden cover of Ann Peebles’s soul classic Django-obsessed guitarist Stephane Wrembel B-52s as much as propulsive pop with her clear,
“I Can’t Stand the Rain”—but the bandleader invites players steeped in the Southern tra- soaring vocals. She met multi-instrumentalist
Ade Blackburn’s foggy croon and kaleidoscopic
arrangements are too rich and too diverting to
settle for mere kitsch.—Michaelangelo Matos
AMBIENT
Leonidas Kavakos and Yuja Wang
CLASSICAL After a year and a half of social dis-
tancing and cancelled performances, Leon-
idas Kavakos decided to design his three-part
“Perspectives” series, at Carnegie Hall, around
collaboration. For his first concert, the Greek
violinist partners with the pianist Yuja Wang—
who opened Carnegie’s season last month with
a marvellous account of Shostakovich’s Piano
Concerto No. 2—on works by Bach, Busoni, and
Shostakovich. The latter two composers were
big fans of Bach: Busoni’s Violin Sonata No. 2
in E Minor, Op. 36a, and Shostakovich’s Violin
Sonata, Op. 134, look to forms that the Baroque
master used—the chorale and the passacaglia,
respectively—amid their own modern har-
monic invention.—Oussama Zahr (Nov. 4 at 8.)
New York Philharmonic

CLASSICAL In January, the San Francisco Sym-
phony and its music-director laureate, Mi-
chael Tilson Thomas, issued a superb album
of works by Alban Berg, crowned with a mov-
ing account of the composer’s sublime Violin
Concerto, featuring Gil Shaham as the soloist.
Now leading the New York Philharmonic for Since 2005, the spectral musician Liz Harris has expanded the scope of her
the first time in a decade (and only months diffusive sound to include brushes of folk, the suspension of drone music, and
after surgery to remove a brain tumor), Tilson
Thomas once again collaborates with Shaham the euphony and tunefulness of pop. In her prolific career as Grouper, she has
in the Berg concerto. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s explored atmospheric intensity—the density of the deepest reaches of the
ILLUSTRATION BY CAMILLE DESCHIENS
Andante for Strings opens the program, and ocean, the vacancy of vacuums in space, the shadows of meaning generated
Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony provides a
rousing conclusion.—Steve Smith (Alice Tully from projections on a landscape—but her songs, despite such ambiguity, never
Hall; Nov. 4 at 7:30 and Nov. 5-7 at 2.) sacrifice their emotionality. Her vaporous new album, “Shade,” is among her
most lucid works; it is lyrics-focussed and transparent, even at its least audible.
Parquet Courts: “Sympathy for Life” The project, which gathers acoustic tracks from the past fifteen years, jells
INDIE ROCK Since emerging a decade ago, the into a threadbare collection of faint love songs, woven carefully and delicately
sonic identity of the post-punks Parquet Courts around Harris’s voice. The fog that normally hangs over her albums has lifted,
has reflected the clatter and the hum of New
York City streets as much as it has guitars, bass, only to reveal new mysteries. This is ambient music that refuses to simply
drums, and, more recently, liberatory electronic wash over the listener; it’s a riptide dragging you under.—Sheldon Pearce
Schnug, currently a Ph.D. candidate at Har- schemes. The ever-cool Mitchum radiates heat nant, dreams of a better life for her child; her
vard, more than a decade ago, in Arkansas. without warmth, and Simmons blends violent layabout boyfriend, Homer (Homer Nish),
They ascend the creaky stairs to the Bushwick and erotic passions in a blank, abyssal gaze, an abandons her at the movies while he goes
1
venue Market Hotel, with the locals Vanity emotional black hole. In this drama of swift, gambling. And Tommy (Tommy Reynolds), a
and Pleaser.—J.P. (Nov. 5 at 9.) inevitable moral downfall resulting from one playboy, drinks himself into trouble, likening
false move, Preminger, always a master of am- his life to “doing time on the outside.” The
biguity, pushes his coldly balanced style to an minutely incremental action unfolds in richly
extreme of mixed and unexpressed motives. In textured black-and-white images teeming
MOVIES a pressing array of closeups, he captures Diane with nuances of the city’s turbulent night life
in still, silent, and diabolical calculation; her and augmented by the characters’ poignant,
wide-eyed, psychopathic stare dominates the confessional voice-overs. As much an impres-
Angel Face film without ever yielding her secrets.—Richard sionistic gallery of urban landscapes as a set
In Otto Preminger’s tersely furious 1953 film Brody (Streaming on the Criterion Channel.) of candid portraits, the film joins an ardent
noir, Robert Mitchum brings a wounded con- sense of place with the subtle flux of inner
fusion to the role of Frank Jessup, an ambulance life.—R.B. (Streaming from Milestone Films
driver for the Beverly Hills Fire Department The Exiles and on the Criterion Channel.)
who dreams of opening a high-end auto-repair For this miraculous independent film, made
shop. Responding to a suspicious gas leak at a between 1958 and 1961, the director, Kent
hilltop mansion, Frank encounters a headstrong Mackenzie, worked with young Native Amer- Happy Hour
young woman, Diane Tremayne (Jean Sim- icans in the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los The grand five-hour span of this melodrama
mons), who lives with her beloved, henpecked Angeles to dramatize events from their lives. by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, from 2015, follows
father (Herbert Marshall) and her hated (and The movie, which follows three characters four friends, thirty-seven-year-old Japanese
wealthy) stepmother (Mona Freeman). Lured through a night of urban loneliness and dis- women living in Kobe, who are planning an
by Diane’s money and unable to resist her lust sipation, has an epic span and a monumental overnight trip to a nearby spa town. With this
for him, Frank—who’s engaged to another intimacy that belie its mere seventy-two min- slender thread of action, Hamaguchi interlaces
woman—gets caught in her web of depraved utes. Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), who is preg- a wide range of experiences, linking friendship
and work to romantic love and political power.
Sakurako is a stay-at-home mother married to
an overworked bureaucrat. Fumi, an arts ad-
ON THE BIG SCREEN ministrator, is married to an editor who’s work-
ing perhaps too closely with a young female
writer. Akari, a tough-minded and plainspoken
nurse, is divorced and lonely. The unemployed
Jun has left her husband, and their hearing in
divorce court is a brilliant set piece of emo-
tional manipulation and confrontational agony.
Hamaguchi turns the pugnacious dialogue into
powerful drama that’s sustained by a precise
visual architecture. He tethers the details of
daily life to vast social structures, depicting a
land where ideas and feelings are dominated
by law and tradition. The movie’s core is the
women’s struggle to forge their identities and
their destinies in the face of these implacable
forces.—R.B. (Streaming on Pluto, Amazon, and
the Criterion Channel.)
Senna
In the late nineteen-eighties, a Brazilian lad
named Ayrton Senna was set to venture into
Formula 1 racing, a prospect that perturbed
his mother deeply: “May God protect him,”
she said. Her prayer was answered, though
not forever, and Senna went on to become
world champion three times. He had all that
was required for beatification in the sport: not
Rebecca Hall’s first feature, “Passing,” which she both wrote and directed, just the nerveless charisma, the looks, and the
is based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel of the same title, and it’s one of the easeful love of speed but, more important, a
rival—the Frenchman Alain Prost, dour by
rare adaptations that catches the essence of literary style in its images and its comparison, with whom Senna would clash
tones. (It’s currently in theatres, and coming to Netflix Nov. 10.) The story, wheels more than once. Asif Kapadia’s 2011
set in the late twenties—during Prohibition and just before the Depres- documentary, which should reward the atten-
tion even of those who would never dream
sion—is centered on two women of about thirty, Irene (Tessa Thompson) of watching cars on a track, is filmed as an
and Clare (Ruth Negga), friends from high school who meet by chance in a homage to velocity—it’s stripped of narration,
New York café. Both are light-skinned Black women; Irene is married to a talking heads, and anything else that might
threaten to slow it down. What remains is a
Black doctor (André Holland) and lives in Harlem, whereas Clare is married self-propelling drama, and the abiding image
to a white banker (Alexander Skarsgård) and is passing as white—but the of Senna’s oil-dark eyes, gleaming through the
rekindled friendship reignites Clare’s longing for participation in Black life, letter box of his helmet. “I saw God,” he said,
after notching up a championship. “I just feel
1
for living as she knows herself to be, without fear or shame. Like the novel,
COURTESY NETFLIX
peace.”—Anthony Lane (Streaming on Amazon,

the movie follows the action from Irene’s perspective, which Hall evokes in YouTube, and other services.)
finely textured, tensely poised black-and-white images, filmed and edited
rhythmically, with an intense focus on Irene’s stunned and pained gaze For more reviews, visit
at events she’s involved in as they career toward tragedy.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

On the varied menu, bún chả , a opted a vegan diet some years ago,
traditional barbecue-pork dish from Ton became determined to make a
Hanoi that features the meat prepared decent vegetable-only banh mi and
three ways, is a good place to start. A pho. The solution to the vegan banh
1
recent visit began with skewers of pork mi turned out to be basil pesto, pea-
belly, steeped in a house marinade and nut sauce for a silken texture, and
smoked over charcoal. Then there were smoked oyster mushrooms seasoned
TABLES FOR TWO medallions of ground pork wrapped in in soy sauce. Though a tad bland—one
betel leaf and submerged in a small bowl might wish for a squirt of hoisin sauce
Bánh of fish sauce made faintly wine-like with and a few jalapeños—the pleasingly
942 Amsterdam Ave. rice vinegar and orange and lime juice. charred mushrooms lend the sandwich
The most memorable of the three were a woody, umami edge.
As a little girl growing up in Viet- the spring rolls; stuffed with pork, taro, Could pho ever be satisfyingly
nam, Nhu Ton—the chef at Bánh, a and wood-ear mushrooms, the golden- meat-free? With a vegan friend, I or-
Vietnamese restaurant that opened in brown parcels were encased in rice dered the dry-style vegan pho with
January, on the Upper West Side— wrappers so diaphanous that their crispy trepidation. The accompanying platter
was surrounded by the scent of spices. crunch was like a wondrous sleight of of pumpkin, Brussels sprouts, tofu, and
Ton’s family worked and lived in a vast hand: I heard the crackle, but my teeth bok choy was colorful, but we both
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE LINGEMAN FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
open-air market, and in the mornings didn’t sink into anything but pork. knew it would come down to the side
her nose frequently awoke to adults Ton remarked that, as a child, of broth. When it arrived, my com-
shelving bags of cinnamon, coriander, cooking didn’t appeal to her because panion took a single slurp, wrinkled
and lemongrass. “When I think about it seemed time-consuming: no matter his brow, and said, “Are you sure this
my childhood, I smell it first,” Ton told how busy Ton’s mother was with the is vegan? This tastes too good to be
me. The long aromatic tails that the shop, she cooked three times a day. Two vegan.” When it was my turn to slurp,
spices left on her memory now make decades on, Ton told me that she con- I understood his doubt immediately:
their mark on Bánh’s menu. “I wanted siders patience a necessary ingredient instead of being watery and flat, this
to create the flavors that I craved,” Ton in most of her recipes. When I took my flavorful soup belonged to the same
said. “Things that taste like the partic- first spoonful of the pho at Bánh, I felt family as Bánh’s traditional pho—lay-
ular place where I grew up.” my senses come to attention; there was ered and complex in a way that makes
One of those things is good Vietnam- a vividness to the broth that could only you want to keep sipping on a cold
ese coffee. Buôn Ma Thuô·t, Ton’s home have been coaxed into being through autumn evening. How had Ton done
town, is the capital of java in Vietnam, long hours of simmering and a timely it? She said that it probably had to do
and the source of Bánh’s coffee beans. If deployment of star anise, cloves, and with the white pepper, the sesame oil,
you are wary of a bold brew, this is likely cardamom. “I need to get it to exactly and the countless hours spent in the
not the drink for you. But if you, like me, the flavor I loved as a kid,” Ton told me. kitchen experimenting with a host
are a caffeine fiend with a taste for the rich “So it’s always a process.” of spices. Also, she knew not to stop
and creamy, you will appreciate the but- For all her fidelity to the palate working until her mother approved.
tery-sweet marriage of thick swirls of con- of her youth, Ton still rises to new (Dishes $10-$17.)
densed milk to the dark, pungent roast. challenges. When her mother ad- —Jiayang Fan
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THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT tended a meeting with Trump and Pence touch. On social media and in a pod-
STILL ON JANUARY 6TH in the Oval Office on January 4th. (East- cast he has launched, he steadily re-
man says that he ultimately advised Pence peats the phrase “Trump-Pence Ad-
fter Donald Trump lost the Pres- to delay the count, not to stage a coup.) ministration”—linking his name with
A idential election last year, a law
professor named John Eastman drafted,
An area of inquiry for the committee is
how much pressure Trump put on Pence
that of a man who was ready to aban-
don him to a mob.
for Trump’s use, a two-page manual for to help him overturn the election. (A Pence’s position is intriguing on a
unlawfully throwing out the electoral lot, it seems.) human level, but it is significant in po-
votes of certain states as they were being But one person who doesn’t appear litical terms, too, because it captures so
tallied in Congress, on January 6th. eager to dwell on that question, at least much about the state of the G.O.P.,
The name he mentions most often in not publicly, is Pence himself, who has where the 2024 Presidential race is
the memo is that of Vice-President been biding his time giving speeches headed, and how much the contest over
Mike Pence. It appears in such state- and setting up an organization called the legacy of January 6th matters in set-
ments as “Pence then gavels President Advancing American Freedom. Last ting that course. Trump seems to real-
Trump as re-elected” and, regarding month, in an interview with Sean Han- ize that as much as anybody. After Pence
disrupting the count, “The main thing nity, on Fox News, he said that the me- appeared on Fox News, Trump put out
here is that Pence should do this with- dia is trying to use January 6th to dis- a statement saying that the interview
out asking for permission.” Eastman tract from President Biden’s “failed “very much destroys and discredits the
also spoke at Trump’s January 6th rally, agenda” and to “demean the character Unselect Committees Witch Hunt on
where he said that what “we are de- and intentions” of people who voted the events of January 6th.” The inter-
manding of Vice-President Pence” is for Trump. He assured Hannity that view does not do that, of course. But
that he intervene in the electoral count. he and Trump had “parted amicably” the Trump-Pence dance underscores
Trump, speaking shortly afterward, after leaving office, and had stayed in how high the stakes are for the com-
cited Eastman’s authority when he said, mittee. Trump, in trying to obstruct the
“If Mike Pence does the right thing, investigation into January 6th—with
we win the election.” spurious claims of executive privilege,
Soon afterward, the assault on the for example—is fighting not only to
Capitol began, and, once it became clear impose his view of the past but to in-
that the Vice-President was not going sure his political future.
to do what Trump and his allies de- A simple explanation for Pence’s
manded, a group of insurrectionists complacency is that he wants to run for
chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” Members President himself, and can’t afford to
of the Pence family were also in the Cap- alienate Trump if he is to have any hope
itol, and in danger. Eastman is expected of making it through the primaries. Ac-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
to be subpoenaed in the coming days by cording to a recent poll, Trump’s favor-

the House select committee investigat- ability rating among Republicans is
ing the events surrounding January 6th. eighty-six per cent. His Save America
In addition to writing that memo, and PAC, the new Make America Great
a revised, more detailed one—in which Again, Again! super PAC, and ancillary
he declares that letting the results stand political funds have raised more than a
would mean that Americans were no hundred million dollars. But Trump may
longer “a self-governing people”—he at- not want to help anyone but Trump. In
September, when asked by Fox News if Trump may be right. Nikki Haley, the election. (The Senate Judiciary Com-
he would run, he said, “It is getting to the former governor of South Carolina, mittee reported last month on his at-
a point where we really have no choice.” criticized him in straightforward terms tempts to enlist officials in the Depart-
It’s hard to know whom he means by after January 6th; in February, she told ment of Justice in that cause.) There’s
“we.” In a Morning Consult/Politico Politico that the Party had been wrong no shortage of reminders that he hasn’t
poll that asked Republicans whom they to follow him. A few weeks ago, she moved on. Last week, the Wall Street
would support out of more than fifteen told the Wall Street Journal, “We need Journal published a lengthy letter to the
potential candidates for 2024, forty-seven him in the Republican Party.” She also editor from Trump, full of baseless claims
per cent chose Trump. Pence came next, said that, if “there’s a place for me” in that the vote count in Pennsylvania was
with just thirteen per cent. Close be- the 2024 race, “I would talk to him and wrong. “The election was rigged, which
hind Pence was Ron DeSantis, the gov- see what his plans are. . . . We would you, unfortunately, still haven’t figured
ernor of Florida and a Trump ally, with work on it together.” Perhaps she was out,” he informed the Journal. In a state-
twelve per cent. (Six per cent chose Don- hinting at the Vice-Presidential spot; ment a week earlier, he spoke in even
ald Trump, Jr.—twice as many as picked it’s extraordinary to think that there are more strident terms: “The insurrection
Senators Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.) people who would like to be the next took place on November 3, Election Day.
When Trump was asked recently, in an Mike Pence. One wonders if candidates January 6 was the Protest!”
interview with Yahoo Finance, what he for the job would be given copies of There can hardly be a better example
thought of DeSantis’s Presidential pros- Eastman’s memos and asked to check of why a clear accounting of the events
pects, he said, “If I faced him, I’d beat off the unconstitutional moves that they leading up to the assault on the Capi-
him like I would beat everyone else.” would be willing to make. tol is so crucial. According to Trump,
But Trump didn’t believe it would come Far from being a witch hunt, the in- the real insurrection was never put down.
to that. He said he thought that, if he vestigations into January 6th have con- January 6th, in that sense, is a long way
ran, “most people would drop out, I think tinued to uncover unsettling material from over.
he would drop out.” concerning Trump’s efforts to overturn —Amy Davidson Sorkin
UNDERGROUND NEWS moron?” Dennard Dayle said the other and how that’s sort of a creative thing
FAKEOUT day. Dayle is a writer from Bay Ridge— unto itself,” he said. A month ago, for
thirty, slightly nerdish—who sidelines instance, Sliwa orchestrated a photo op
in acts of civic disgruntlement. Recent in which he crawled under a car and
pranks include fake posters for the M.T.A. claimed, falsely, to have found a murder
(A-train-service-change notice: “Please weapon. Adams blamed missing tax fil-
let me die”); an M.F.T., or Marx Fungi- ings on an intermittently homeless ac-
ble Token, a digital painting of Karl Marx countant whom he charitably kept in his
few months ago, a series of may- that sold for a hundred and ten dollars; employ. “Creatively, you could say they
A oral campaign posters started ap-
pearing in New York subway cars and
and a made-up Covid-denier conven-
tion called SpreadCon, featuring choco-
come from a very similar place as me,”
Dayle said. “I would say that I’m better
taped to lampposts. Something about late-coated doorknobs and a sneezing at it than Sliwa, and I’m very worried
the ads seemed off (one for Brooklyn contest. (Dayle recently quit his job writ- that Adams might be better than me.”
Borough President Eric Adams prom- ing ad copy after selling a book of satire One day last week, Dayle designed
ised: “I Was Beaten by Cops. Now You called “Everything Abridged.” He has a fresh batch of posters and hit the sub-
Can Be Too”), but, then, so has the cam- been published in this magazine as well.) ways. He wore all black and posted his
paign. The Republican candidate, the During the primary, he was inun- work with practiced nonchalance.
Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, dated by candidate mailers. “I got one Would riders know hoax from real-
once evoked the image of himself as that said, ‘Beaten by cops, I became one,’ ” ity? Once, as a train left the station, a
“a hemorrhoid in a red beret.” As for he said—from the Adams campaign. “I construction worker studied a fake Sliwa
Adams, the Democratic nominee, no was, like, O.K., I can’t not do this.”After poster. Big letters read “THE FALSE IDOL
one is sure where he lives; he is said to his Adams parody, he kept going: IS BROKEN.” Under that: “The Weaver
pad around Borough Hall, where he Ray McGuire: “Black? White? of Lies wove his lies, and I unwove
keeps a mattress, in his socks. Fake You’re Still Poor. Shut the them. . . . Now our city wears truth’s
news, real news—who can keep track? Fuck Up.” beret.” The man nodded vigorously. “I
A paper in the Bronx pegged the strange Dianne Morales: “For Every Vote I like the way he talks!” he said.
posters as a Sliwa guerrilla operation. Lose, an Intern Dies. Your Choice.” On the L train, a rider approved of
One of the ersatz Sliwa ads: “Marxist- He printed thousands of copies and another fake Sliwa ad that read “Don’t
Democrat voles want the light in your plastered them across the city. He no- give up. Don’t let them win. (‘Them’
teeth. . . . Vote for me.” Maybe. Or possi- ticed parallels between his work and the is the Blacks.)” The rider said, cryp-
bly the work of Putin operatives? Dark- mayoral race—tall tales spun, personas tically, “They want to confuse you.” A
money disinformation? manufactured. “I’m very interested in woman skimmed an ad with the tagline
“It’s more like, what if Banksy was a people that can pull off large-scale hoaxes, “It’s time to fight for a larger, safer, and
THE REAL STORY IS NO JOKE.
more diverse portfolio for every Eric demonstration of whatever power com heels that occasionally wobbled on the
1
Adams. Together.” “I like this,” she said. edy does and does not have.” street’s seventeenthcentury cobblestones.
“It tells me he’s an everyman.” She leaned —Zach Helfand The statue, she said, had provoked “one
in closer, squinting: “Wait . . .” media storm after another.” An artist had
Dayle exited for some air. In Union DEPT. OF SYMBOLS placed a statue called “Pissing Pug” next
Square, he handed several posters to a STATUE LIMITATIONS to Fearless Girl’s leg (the artist described
stranger wearing a smileyface tie. The “Fearless Girl” as “corporate nonsense”);
man tore up the Adams ad and a de Bla and then the creator of the “Charging
sio valedictory poster (“I’m Free! Look Bull” statue, Arturo Di Modica, com
at the sun, it’s beautiful”). “I’ll keep plained publicly about “Fearless Girl,”
that one,” he said, tenderly, of the Sliwa calling the piece “an advertising trick.” In
ad. Dayle thanked him for the feedback. 2018, Fearless Girl was moved to her cur
A few minutes later, the man flagged
Dayle down. “Can I take this test again?”
“ T he pose—there’s something re
ally empowering about it,” the
rent position facing the stock exchange.
Visbal made twentyfive editions of
he said. “This is fucking genius!” artist Kristen Visbal said. She was stand “Fearless Girl” and two artist’s proofs.
Dayle perked up. The man planned ing behind her most famous work, the She sold eight replicas, for up to two
to vote for Sliwa, but the Sliwa parody “Fearless Girl” statue on Broad Street, hundred and fifty thousand dollars, in
(“ ‘Them’ is the Blacks”) was giving him in front of the New York Stock Ex cluding one to the law firm Maurice
pause. He wanted to hear what Dayle, change. Visbal planted her fists on her Blackburn, in Melbourne, Australia, and
who is Black, thought. hips and jutted her chin forward, im one to an investor in Oslo, who put the
“My longterm impression: the itating the defiant stance of the child statue in front of the city’s Grand Hotel,
Guardian Angels create these racetinged in the sculpture. “You cannot help but be which he owns. Visbal also sold more
crime stories,” Dayle said. “But I’m glad strong if you assume that pose,” she said. than a hundred miniature versions for
you liked the art.” “Fearless Girl” was installed on about six thousand dollars each, and took
“I was a B.L.M. guy before they lost March 7, 2017, the day before Interna a resin copy to the Women’s March in
their fucking minds—I was walking tional Women’s Day, in front of the Los Angeles in January, 2019. A month
around with a Kaepernick jersey,” the “Charging Bull” statue. It was commis later, State Street sued Visbal, accusing
man replied. “My best friend’s a Black sioned by an ad agency for the asset her of breach of contract, and of causing
dude, and he’s very educational to me management firm State Street Global “substantial and irreparable harm” to Fear
on race in America . . . but—how do I Advisors, intended as a critique of the lack less Girl and to State Street by selling
say this? I think we’ve won the race bat of women in high corporate positions, copies. Visbal filed a counterclaim, alleg
tle in New York. I think that in other and as a marketing stunt to promote ing that State Street was hampering her
parts of the country it’s a problem.” He State Street’s genderdiversity index fund. ability to spread Fearless Girl’s message
went on, “In New York, maybe there’s The statue was an instant sensation; tour of gender equality.
still racism with the cops? But B.L.M. ists flocked to it to pose for pictures. Vis “I have not sold a casting since the
did such a number on the cops.” bal said, “I do feel she is an unofficial lawsuit was filed against me,” Visbal said.
The man offered a hug. Dayle sug symbol for the women’s movement. We “Which is so sad, because I want to see
gested a fist bump. “That was nuts,” needed a symbol.That’s why she took off.” her in India, in China, in Japan—every
he said, when the man left. “That’s a Visbal wore a striped suit and high where. I’ve had so many inquiries, but,
with an open lawsuit, people are afraid.”
She plans to release a set of nonfungi
ble tokens, or N.F.T.s, based on Fearless
Girl next month, in part to raise money
for her legal fees, which she says have ex
ceeded three million dollars.
Visbal started out in hotel market
ing; in 1995, she went to study lostwax
casting at the Johnson Atelier, in Mer
cerville, New Jersey. She now works out
of a studio in the middle of a vineyard
in Lewes, Delaware. She modelled Fear
less Girl partly on a girl named Ellie,
the daughter of a friend. “She had a lot
of attitude,” Visbal said. “I did seven dif
ferent hair styles.” (She settled on a pony
tail.) A clay model was created, and then
it was cast in bronze at a foundry in Bal
timore. “When I walked away from the
“ You call that a banana-mobile?” unveiling, I said, ‘Well, people are either
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going to love her or they’re going to hate in Australia, he instructed Starfinder
her,’ ” Visbal recalled. and Redbird to preserve them.
As she talked, a woman in a leop- Bear left behind thirteen hundred
ard-print top posed with her arm around reels of live soundboard recordings, of
the statue, followed by three men speak- eighty artists. Some quick math deter-
ing Spanish. Then a gang of people in mined that it would take two engineers
business suits surrounded the statue. It more than two years, working full time,
was a group of entrepreneurs from At- to digitize them. This was more than
lanta visiting the stock exchange. “Prior the Stanleys could afford, and so Star-
to this, we indulged in some blow-dries finder and Hawk, along with a Prince-
for the women, and shaves for the men, ton friend of Hawk’s named Peter Bell
and we walked out onto the floor, all and Bear’s widow, Sheilah, launched the
in an effort to kind of motivate, and Owsley Stanley Foundation, to finance
benchmark the dreams that we have for the transfer and eventual release of the
our own companies,” David Aferiat, the material. “It was essential that we pre-
group’s co-leader, who wore oversized serve this pivotal point in American mu-
sunglasses, said. sical history, where all this explosive cre-
Genevieve Bos, a tech entrepreneur ativity was happening,” Hawk, now a
who wore several crystal necklaces, ges- Johnny Cash and Owsley Stanley lawyer in Pittsburgh, said.
tured toward the statue. “It’s about the They have since got through almost
fearlessness of the female spirit,” she chemist. Bear and Hawk, discovering a nine hundred reels and released eight
said. “Especially when you juxtapose it shared obsession with fitness and diet performances, including rarities from Doc
against this bastion of . . .” She groped (since the sixties, Bear had eaten noth- and Merle Watson (1974), Commander
for words. “Um, male financial power. ing but rare meat), became Dead-tour Cody (1970), Tim Buckley (1968), and
And, to me, it represents women start- weight-lifting pals, with matching mem- Ali Akbar Khan (1970). On hearing the
ing to embrace that, you know?” bership cards to Gold’s Gym. The fol- Watson, Jimmy Carter sent a note prais-
Visbal wants to write a children’s book lowing spring, at a concert in Albany, ing it as “a welcome addition to my col-
and develop an educational program Bear introduced Hawk to his son, Star- lection.” He added that he and Rosalynn
based on Fearless Girl, but, until the finder Stanley, a wrestler, too, and a stu- “look forward to your Allman Brothers
lawsuit is resolved, she is only working dent at Cornell. Hawk and Starfinder release.” The foundation obliged: “Fill-
on her N.F.T. project. She stroked the became fast friends. more East 1970.”
statue’s head. “She needs a wash and a Starfinder was born on a solstice in Last week, the foundation released a
1
wax,” Visbal said. “She’s like my baby.” 1970 (hence the name) while his father, true jackalope, the “otoro of this tuna,”
—Sheelah Kolhatkar who’d been busted for distributing LSD, as Bell put it: “Johnny Cash at the Car-
was in prison (hence the bodybuilding). ousel Ballroom, April 24, 1968.” At that
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS DEPT. Starfinder’s half sister Redbird was born time, the Carousel, operated by the Dead,
BEAR CASH three weeks later. “We’re hippie twins,” the Jefferson Airplane, and others, was
he said. “My dad had four kids with a psychedelic dance hall and, effectively,
four moms and didn’t raise any of us.” Bear’s sonic laboratory. Whoever passed
Starfinder grew up in the Bronx and in through got journaled, and dosed.
Westchester County, but he and Red- Cash was in the early stages of a res-
bird, as kids, attended a circus camp urrection. The year before, he’d crawled
among the California redwoods. “I re- into a cave near Chattanooga to die:
n the summer of 1990, Bill Semins, sisted psychedelics until I was in col- drugs, drink, divorce. Now newly re-
I who goes by Hawk, was a wrestler
who’d just finished his first year at Prince-
lege,” Starfinder said. “My father prac-
tically had to pry my jaws open and stuff
married, to June Carter Cash, off the
pills, a few days from dropping his
ton. He was also a Deadhead. One night, it down my throat. I was wound a lit- career-reviving live album from Fol-
at a Grateful Dead concert in Raleigh, tle tight.” Now Starfinder is a veterinar- som Prison, he showed up on a Wednes-
North Carolina, while dancing (sober) ian in Northern California. day night with his band, the Tennessee
out in the concourse, he came across a Starting out with the Dead in 1966, Three, and, before a scattering of be-
table promoting the Rainforest Action Bear was a mad scientist of amplified mused hippies and aficionados (capac-
Network and encountered a well put- music, pioneering sound systems and, ity was three thousand; turnout, seven
together middle-aged man with an all- later, recording techniques. For years, he hundred), snapped through twenty-one
access backstage pass on a lanyard. Hawk made reel-to-reel tapes of virtually every songs. Among them were a couple of
grabbed the laminate and said, “You must show he engineered, no matter the art- Dylan covers. June also sat in for a half-
be someone really important.” The back ist, to assess the sound of the room and dozen numbers, including a rip-snort-
of the pass read “Bear.” Bear was Ows- the effects of his unorthodox methods. ing rendition of “Tall Lover Man” that
ley—né Augustus Owsley Stanley III— He called these his Sonic Journals. Just cuts out at the climax; Bear had been
the near-mythic soundman and LSD before he died, in 2011, in a car accident slow to change reels.
The release’s opener is a number Harris, who had on fuchsia loafers a second P.P.P. loan. “I found the support
called “Cocaine Blues.” Cash says, “Here’s and a shirt printed with neon swirls, grew really strange,” Harris said. “It felt very
another song from a show we did at up in the San Joaquin Valley, with a grand- performative. We had to reëvaluate how
Folsom Prison. It’s in the album that’s mother who arranged artificial flowers we did everything to keep up with the
out this week.” No one had any idea and a mother who sewed. “I was always volume,” which, after a few weeks, plum-
that, in a little more than a year, Cash trying to negotiate a way to be creative meted. “We got support when it was
would have his own prime-time TV but have a sustainable life,” he said. “I trendy to support Black businesses. We’re
program, or that rock and country mu- didn’t want to be poor.” An early notion: in a time when people think that a dou-
sicians would begin (again) to borrow “Maybe I’ll just become the next Oprah.” ble tap, a share, and a visit solves the prob-
and steal from one another, to the ben- Then: “Maybe I’ll work at the Gap.” He lem, when, No. It’s still pretty systemic.”
efit (more or less) of both. ended up studying fine art at Otis Col- The shop now serves around seventy-
“Country music hadn’t yet captured lege of Art and Design, and then worked five customers a day and is a hundred
the hippies’ imagination,” Hawk said. doing window displays for Barneys and and seventy-five thousand dollars in
“Outlaw country was still five years away. Juicy Couture. Having discovered the debt. Moses walked through the door,
And yet, by October of that year, Buck downtown L.A. flower market, he be- for a meeting about cost cutting.
Owens was selling out the same hall.” came the go-to guy for office-party ar- “About our matcha,” Moses said, open-
Did Bear, as was his wont, spike Cash’s rangements. “I was doing flowers for a ing his laptop. “Our current provider, he’s
Coke? “My dad used to pull tapes and co-worker’s baby shower, and I was just
tell stories,” Starfinder said. “The music humming like the birds that dress Cin-
set off his memories. Like the time he derella,” he recalled. “I had this out-of-
dosed with Jimi Hendrix, and so on. But body experience: ‘Oh, my God, you’re re-
I never did get the story of the time ally enjoying yourself right now.’ ” He
1
Johnny Cash came to town.” realized, “I want to do this more.”
—Nick Paumgarten In 2010, he opened Bloom & Plume
on the east side of L.A. The Cinderella
L.A. POSTCARD birds have since scattered. “People often
SMELLING THE ROSES romanticize what I do,” he said. “Flow-
ers are gross. They stink. It’s a lot of haul-
ing shit around. It’s a lot of logistics. Like,
twenty per cent of it is pretty; the rest is
just annoying.”
The same could be said of Hollywood.
In 2019, Harris sold a TV series called
o what you love and you’ll never “Centerpiece,” in which he interviews
D work a day in your life, or so Mark
Twain and assorted influencers would
Black creative types (Rashida Jones, Maya
Rudolph), to Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s
have you believe. “That is fucking bull- short-form video service. “I told them, Maurice Harris
shit,” Maurice Harris, the L.A. florist, ‘Black people are dying at the hands of
said the other day. “I do something I the police, and you’re putting up a black a lunatic.” Moses had found a shop down
love, and I hate it, because it’s work any- square that says nothing,’ ” Harris said. the street that sourced matcha at three
time money gets exchanged. It takes “ ‘Why don’t you put more money into cents less a gram. “If you extrapolate that
away the purity.” Harris was seated at a this show about Black joy, this show that’s per gram per year, that’s two thousand
table inside Bloom & Plume, his flower not trauma porn?’ ” Executives told him dollars we’d be saving.”
shop in Echo Park. His clients include to make it shorter. Quibi folded in Octo- “Margin Moses over here,” Harris said.
Beyoncé, Louis Vuitton, and the Row, ber; “Centerpiece” is now on Roku. “It’s like when you were trying to save
the fashion label owned by Mary-Kate In 2019, Harris and his brother Moses, on oat milk” and switched to a new brand,
and Ashley Olsen. wanting to provide an aesthetically pleas- which Harris found watery. “It’s about
“They have a lot of rules,” he said of ing place for the people in their com- taste,” he said.
the Row, which displays his arrange- munity to gather, opened a coffee shop Harris is more optimistic about
ments at its West Hollywood boutique. next to the flower studio. “We wanted MasterClass, for which he recently filmed
“White and green—they don’t like a lot it to be a space for queer people, trans a course on flower arranging (“I got com-
of color,” he said. people, Black people,” Harris said. But pensated really, really well,” he said), and
An employee trimming alliums added, retail was tough. Yelpers were unhappy. “Full Bloom,” a reality competition series
“Nothing too tropical.” A staff exodus followed. shown on HBO Max.
“They complain about things drop- By 2020, the shop had found its feet. “I would never do a flower compe-
ping on the floor,” Harris said. “We reopened right before George Floyd,” tition,” he said. “Hell no.” But being a
“They like something that looks frag- Harris said. “We went from thirty cus- judge “is my favorite thing on the planet.
ile, but that lasts,” the employee said. tomers a day to three hundred.” The store’s I love judging people. It’s so awful.”
“You’ve got to talk to God about that!” success prevented it from qualifying for —Sheila Yasmin Marikar
Covid? Lyme? Diabetes? Cancer? It’s
DEPT. OF SCIENCE no HIPAA violation to reveal that, as
various checkups determined, none of
WHAT A FEELING
those pertained. So, embrace it. A re-
cent headline in the Guardian: “Extrav-
agant eye bags: How extreme exhaus-
Energy, and how to get it. tion became this year’s hottest look.”
It was just a question of energy. The
BY NICK PAUMGARTEN endurance athlete, running perilously
low on fuel, is said to hit the wall, or
bonk. Cyclists call this feeling “the
man with the hammer.” Applying the
parlance to the Sitzfleisch life, I told
myself that I was bonking. At hour
five in the desk chair, the document
onscreen looked like a winding road
toward a mountain pass. The man in
the sweatpants had met the man with
the mattress.
All of us, except for the superheroes
and the ultra-sloths, know people who
have more energy than we do, and plenty
who have less. We may admire or envy
or even pity the tireless project jugglers,
the ravenous multidisciplinarians, the
serial circulators of rooms, the confer-
ence hoppers, the calendar maximizers,
the predawn cross-trainers and kick-
boxers. How does she do it? On the flip
side, there are the oversleepers, the
homebodies, the spurners of invitations
and opportunities, the dispensers of ex-
cuses. Come on, man! It’s hard to measure
success, if you want to avoid making it
about money or power or credentials,
but, as one stumbles through the land-
scape of careers and outputs and repu-
tations, one sees, again and again, that
the standouts tend to be the people who
possess seemingly boundless reserves
or months, during the main pan- unfamiliar. Even back in the office years, of mental and physical fuel. Entrepre-
F demic stretch, I’d get inexplicably
tired in the afternoon, as though vital
with editors on the prowl, I learned to
sneak the occasional catnap under my
neurs, athletes, artists, politicians: it can
seem that energy, more than talent or
organs and muscles had turned to Sty- desk, alert as a zebra to the telltale foot- luck, results in extraordinary outcomes.
rofoam. Just sitting in front of a com- fall of a consequential approach. At Why do some people have it and oth-
puter screen, in sweatpants and socks, home, though, you could power all the ers not? What does one have to do to
left me drained. It seemed ridiculous way down. get more?
to be grumbling about fatigue when so Still, the ebb, lately, had become acute, Energy is both biochemical and psy-
many people were suffering through so and hard to account for. By the stan- chophysical, vaguely delineated, widely
much more. But we feel how we feel. dards of my younger years, I was burn- misunderstood, elusive as grace. You
Nuke a cup of cold coffee, take a ing the candle at neither end. Could know it when you got it, and even more
walk around the block: the standard one attribute it to the wine the night when you don’t. This is the enthusiasm
tactics usually did the trick. But one ad- before, the cookies, the fitful and ab- and vigor you feel inside yourself, the
vantage, or disadvantage, of working breviated sleep, the boomerang effect kind you might call chi, after the an-
from home is the proximity of a bed. of the morning’s caffeine and carbs, a cient Chinese life force or the pro-
Now and then, you surrender. These sedentary profession, middle age? That nouncements of the storefront acupunc-
midafternoon doldrums weren’t entirely will be a yes. And yet the mind roamed: turist. The kind you seek to instill by
drinking Red Bull or Monster, plung-
The tireless project jugglers, the calendar maximizers: how do they do it? ing into an ice bath, or taking psycho-
18 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY NOLAN PELLETIER
stimulants, like Ritalin or Adderall or the ingested bacterium’s capacity for A lean Montrealer, with a gentle yet
Provigil. Nootropics. Smart pills. feeding on oxygen managed to increase, poised intensity that one might classify
CDP-choline, L-theanine, creatine by an order of magnitude, the amount as medium-energy, Picard came at the
monohydrate, Bacopa monnieri, huper- of energy available to its anaerobic host. question of vim and vigor from a
zine A, vinpocetine. Acetyl-CoA, lipoic This accidental collaboration made pos- near-cosmic vantage. His office, high
acid, arginine, ashwagandha, B com- sible the proliferation of multicellular above the Heights, had a commanding
plex, carnitine, CoQ10, iodine, iron, life-forms and, eventually, tool-wield- view down the Hudson, a receding sun-
magnesium, niacin, riboflavin, ribose, ing hominids who would come to com- blanched shorescape of skyscrapers and
thiamin, Vitamins C, E, and K. Bio- plain that they feel tired all the time. tidal swirl that lent his pronouncements
hackers microdose psychedelics, stick According to what is known as the an oracular air. In a mostly sincere at-
ozone tubes up their butts, or pay fif- endosymbiotic theory of biological com- tempt to convey how little we know
teen hundred dollars for a seven- plexity, this chocolate-meets-peanut- about the workings of consciousness,
hundred-and-fifty-milligram dose of butter moment, this big mush, is the he said, “We have yet to disprove that
NAD IV. Energy is why we’ve made a reason we exist. That aerobic bacterium our brains aren’t merely antennas, that
virtual religion of 1, 3, 7-trimethylxan- evolved into what we call mitochon- all of our ‘thoughts’ and ‘memories’ don’t
thine, otherwise known as caffeine. dria, the organelles that fuel living crea- just come from out there”—he pointed
“Society has progressively increased tures: the powerhouses of the cell, as out the window—“and that we’re not
its demands on us, and with that, there- every schoolkid learns. (It’s about all I just ‘streaming’ everything.” Glancing
fore, our expectations of what we can retain from high-school bio, anyway, behind him at the river’s eddying cur-
or should do,” Maurizio Fava, the chief save for Mr. Burns’s relishing his coin- rent, I half expected to catch a glitch in
of the department of psychiatry at age of the phrase “a smidgen of lip- the matrix.
Mass General, told me. “This has led ids.”) Each of us has hundreds—if not “The main distinguishing charac-
to a quest for greater ‘energy.’ ‘How thousands—of trillions of mitochon- teristic between a cadaver and a living,
can I do more? Doctor, what can you dria. They convert glucose and oxygen thinking, feeling individual is the flow
give me?’” into adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, of energy through the body,” he said.
“Energy,” though, is a misnomer, or the primary cellular fuel. They also “The cells are the same, but without
at least an elision. What we commonly help produce the essential hormones— the energy flow it’s just an inert blob.”
call energy is actually our perception of among them estrogen, testosterone, Mitochondria transform chemical
the body metabolizing carbohydrates and cortisol—and regulate cellular pro- energy into electrical energy, Piccard
or fat as energy. Energy isn’t energy. It’s liferation and death. explained. “Communication and energy
our experience of burning energy, con- It’s not inconceivable that the rest go together,” he said. “The organs and
verting it to work. It’s a metabolic mood. of the body (brain, hands, heart, lungs, cells can’t communicate without energy.
As Richard Maurer, a doctor in Maine digestive tract) is merely an elaborate Cells talk to each other. The mitochon-
who specializes in metabolic recovery, and sometimes clumsy apparatus for dria, which used to be bacteria, talk to
and who encountered me one day last the nourishment of the mitochondria— the gut microbiome. They are like cous-
summer as I mumbled about a short- that it is the mitochondria, and not ins. Cells choose to do one thing or an-
age of it, told me, “‘Energy’ is a useless Homo sapiens, who rule and foul the other, based on the energy available.
term. It is not the perception of stim- earth. Our cardiovascular system, that Energy for cells is like emotions for a
ulation. It is just the capacity to gener- fantastic and vulnerable machine, is es- human. It causes them to make deci-
ate work. I think of it as only relating sentially a delivery system for the oxy- sions that may not seem rational.”
to potential. If a patient says, ‘I want gen they require. The mitochondrion Picard took me around the lab. He
more energy,’ maybe the doctor should is the creature and we are merely its opened a cryo-storage tank—ice vapor
just write a scrip for methamphetamine. husk, its fleshy chrysalis. A newborn’s wafting out—which contained cells of
But that’s false chi.” first breath? That’s the mitochondria, patients with mitochondrial disease, ge-
The precise workings of the meta- calling the shots. netic defects that afflict at least one in
bolic system, its nuances and contin- “That, anyway, is the mitocentric five thousand humans. He pointed out
gencies, are, in many respects, an en- perspective,” Martin Picard said, on a other machines. Fluorometer, respirom-
during mystery. You’d think we’d have recent afternoon in his office, in Wash- eter, real-time-PCR instrument, plate
figured out by now how our cells go ington Heights. Picard, a partisan of reader, Halo robot, a cellular-energy-
about their business, this being the most that perspective, is a professor of be- consumption analyzer called a Seahorse.
fundamental element of our existence, havioral medicine at Columbia Univer- “This is our way to get to know the
but they may as well be in deep space sity Irving Medical Center, where he mitochondria, to challenge them and
or the Mariana Trench. directs a lab of about a dozen research- poke them,” he said. “It’s our way to
ers. His work straddles the departments ask them questions.”
ne and a half billion years ago, of psychiatry and neurology. His spe- A handful of doctoral candidates
O the planet’s only life-forms were
single-celled. Fermentation ruled the
cialty is mitochondrial psychobiology.
“We try to understand the connection
were at work. A research assistant was
trying to determine whether women
earth. Then an anaerobic bacterium en- between the mind and mitochondria,” and men have different mitochondria.
gulfed an aerobic bacterium. In time, he said. “We think about energy a lot.” Mitochondrial DNA seems to be passed
down from generation to generation with the mitochondria, people feel concert. B. and M. were both married.
exclusively by the mother; sperm con- shitty,” Picard said. “I love your energy!” B. told M. Every-
tributes nothing. As a result, genealo- It can work the other way, too. A one laughed: such cheese. The next day,
gists have been able to trace a matri- few years ago, Picard’s lab did a study he called me and asked for her num-
lineal line from all living humans in which ninety-one women reported ber. Such trouble. M. began referring
back to a woman in East Africa, our their mood levels and submitted to mi- to him, when discussing him with oth-
so-called Mitochondrial Eve, born an tochondrial tests for seven days. The ers, as “Energy”; she liked his, too. Their
estimated two hundred thousand years study suggested that mood has a di- marriages didn’t survive the radiative
ago. (Picard did his postdoctoral work, rect effect on mitochondrial health. flux, and B. and M. now live together,
at the University of Pennsylvania, with Chin up! in a gravitational field of their own, oth-
Douglas Wallace, the evolutionary bi- By this point, I’d heard and read a erwise known as Essex County, New
ologist who discovered that mitochon- lot about mitochondria—“the coolest Jersey. (When I told M. recently that I
dria are matrilineal and that mutations independent contractors on the planet,” was writing about energy, the kind you
in mitochondrial DNA are a signifi- as Maurer called them. In “The Energy feel, she said, “Talk about how annoy-
cant cause of disease. “He put mito- Paradox: What to Do When Your Get- ing it is that everyone says they are tired.
chondria on the map,” Picard said.) Up-and-Go Has Got Up and Gone,” Tired is universal. We are exhausted
“The human body is a social net- Steven Gundry, the well-known Cali- until we die.”)
work,” Picard said. He compared it to fornia cardiologist, describes “mitochon- B. and M.’s energy is of a different,
an ant colony, in which every ant has drial gridlock,” the overwhelming of albeit related, category—the kind you
the same genome but serves a different these organelles with too much to do— project, or perceive in others. This one
purpose, much in the way the organs too much junk. Gundry enumerates has something to do with vigor as well,
do for a human being. “My working seven “deadly” energy disrupters: anti- but also charisma, aura, and tempera-
hypothesis is that mitochondria do a biotics, glyphosate (the main active in- ment. It has a spiritual dimension, to
lot of the sensing and perceiving and gredient in the weed killer Roundup), those who perceive or credit such phe-
integrating of signals. That they are the other environmental chemicals, over- nomena, and a social one. In some cir-
cellular antenna, or little brains that re- used pharmaceuticals, fructose, bad light, cumstances, good energy may just be a
ceive, process, and integrate information.” and electromagnetic fields. Thinking matter of radiance, of good skin, teeth,
A student was filling plates with skin about all the inputs, their ubiquity, and hair, posture, which are in many respects
cells; each plate had ninety-six wells the the myriad unmappable consequences themselves functions of robust health.
size of apple seeds, and each of these of their interactions, one may just sigh Or it may comprise kindness, attentive-
contained twenty thousand cells. She and reach for the Red Bull. Fake chi ness, optimism, humor—the ability to
was exposing healthy cells and compro- until you make chi. make other people feel good about
mised ones to stress, in the form of a Picard’s purview was perhaps more themselves. There may be intangibles
synthetic version of cortisol. “A whole descriptive than prescriptive. “Energetic at play. Pheromones, assurance, electro-
human life span, but in a dish,” Picard constraints, energetic flow, and the forces magnetics, pixies.
said. “Cells age faster if you expose them that drive energetic flow—these ques- To the extent that there is an over-
to stress. They burn energy faster. It’s tions aren’t taken into account as much lap between the kind of energy you feel
as though cellular anxiety causes cells as they should be,” he said. “The way and the kind you project—a three-part
to breathe faster. They consume more of the future is understanding person- Venn diagram of bio, mojo, and woo-
oxygen. They’re wasting energy, and we alized energy flows. The last ten years woo—the concept has an array of an-
don’t know why.” of personalized medicine has been taken cient antecedents. In the Upanishads,
People with mitochondrial disorders over by genomics. The premise is that prana, Sanskrit for “breath,” is the vital
struggle to transform energy into ATP. if you can sequence it you’ll know breath that animates body and soul, and
“What they experience subjectively is whether you’ll get sick or stay healthy. all of existence, much like chi. Posido-
constant tiredness and fatigue,” Picard That’s where all the money goes. It’s a nius, the Stoic, proposed the existence
said. “They don’t have the mojo. Fa- lucrative hypothesis, but it’s doomed to of a life force that emanates from the
tigue is the No. 1 symptom—they feel yield incomplete answers. The genome sun. (Picard, the mitocentric, also cites
tired all the time. And it’s a long diag- is static. Health is so dynamic.” the sun: it initiates a life cycle—pho-
nostic odyssey. So, yes, it seems people tosynthesis, glucose, oxygen, ATP—
can sense when their intercellular en-
ergy state is low.” Another bit of cir-
“ P eople are somewhat gorgeous col-
lections of chemical fires, aren’t
that happens to have mitochondria as
its linchpin.)
cumstantial evidence: Amytal, or amo- they?” Harold Brodkey wrote, in the Many of the variations on such ideas
barbital, an active ingredient in truth story “Angel.” “We are towers of kinds are pseudoscientific, the purview of
serums developed in the United States of fires, down to the tiniest constituen- quacks and crazies, or of spiritual ad-
in the thirties, essentially inhibits mi- cies of ourselves, whatever those are.” epts who may have been mistaken
tochondrial respiration, supposedly ren- Some years ago, without thinking, I in- for them. Esotericism encompasses a
dering subjects too worn out to lie. troduced two friends of mine, B. and variety of impossible-to-substantiate
Amytal is also what Picard’s lab has M., to each other, in a loose crew of phenomena that persist best, in our
used in some of its assays. “If you mess people meeting up in a bar before a quasi-scientific era, as metaphors or ab-
stractions. In the eighteenth century, An empowe ing pictu e ook f om
SENATOR
Franz Mesmer introduced his concept
of mesmerism, or animal magnetism,
involving a universal vital f luid that
ELIZABETH WARREN
passes in and out through our pores.
Baron Carl von Reichenbach, some de-
cades later, described an electromag-
netic substance he named the Odic
force, after the Norse god Odin, which
sensitive souls could perceive emanat-
ing from others’ foreheads. Early in the
twentieth century, the French philos-
opher Henry Bergson identified an
“élan vital,” which impels conscious-
ness and evolution. Schopenhauer had
his “will to live,” and, of course, for
Freud, the source of the oomph within
was the libido. Freud got some of his
ideas from the work of the American
neurologist George Miller Beard, who,
in the years after the Civil War, had
identified a condition called neurasthe-
nia, arising out of the exhaustion of the
nervous system. Headaches, fatigue,
and impotence were the symptoms of
what Beard called “American nervous-
ness.” The cause, he proposed, was the
stress of modern civilization, the most
salient manifestations being “steam-
power, the periodical press, the tele-
graph, the sciences, and the mental ac-
tivity of women.”
And then there was orgone, discov-
ered, or imagined, by Wilhelm Reich,
the Austrian psychoanalyst and fallen
Freudian. Reich—who fled Germany
in 1933 and pursued his experiments in
Norway and New York before settling
in rural Maine, where he could keep
an eye out for U.F.O.s—sought to find
physiological proof of the libido. In the
lab, he hooked his subjects up to an os-
cillograph (one of them was a young
Willy Brandt, the future West German
Chancellor) and, with a microscope,
discerned pulsating particles he called
“bions,” which he claimed were the the ta .”
source of a mysterious life force called
orgone. Orgone, he said, was blue, and
was responsible for the color of the sky.
Later, he invented a device called the
orgone accumulator, an insulated shed
the size of an outhouse, lined with metal
panels. Among other things, it was said
to enhance orgasms; the subject, pref-
erably naked, would sit inside and
accumulate orgone. It accumulated ad-
herents, anyway—including Norman
Mailer, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, and
after a keen night out, for example, or
a bout of hard work—was instead my
body struggling to process the poison
I’d put into it. The time in bed was more
The Oura emphasized the concept

of “readiness”—a measure of recuper-
ation. The relevant data point was
heart-rate variability, or H.R.V. Your
heart rate, like most of the body’s in-
the autonomic nervous system, which

has two components: the sympathetic
nervous system and the parasympa-
thetic one. The former fires the fight-
or-flight impulse; it activates when you
experience stress, or excitement, or over-
indulgence. The latter is the restorative
impulse: “rest and digest,” “feed and
breed.” The sympathetic system stim-
ulates adrenaline, which dilates your
pupils, raises your pulse, opens your
airways, and interferes with signals to
people to piss themselves.) The para-

“The apes accepted you, but my sister’s a whole other story.” sympathetic does the opposite—it set-
tles you down. Ideally, these two sys-
• • tems achieve balance. You rev up, you
calm down. You push, you heal. H.R.V.
supposedly measures this state of con-
Sean Connery—despite there being no bers behind the brownout afternoons. cord. Counterintuitively, higher vari-
legitimate evidence of orgone’s exis- The Oura motivated me to get out ability is said to reflect greater balance,
tence or benefits. Reich’s machine in- and move—steps, miles, calories. I took and better health. Low H.R.V. cor-
spired the Orgasmatron, in Woody long, aimless walks that I imagined relates to a range of diseases and to
Allen’s “Sleeper,” and Dr. Durand Du- would add weeks to my life, like injury earlier mortality. My H.R.V., especially
rand’s Excessive Machine, in “Bar- time in a soccer match. (It would take after I’d had a few, was very low.
barella.” The federal government, sus- a lot of injury time to make up for the “You can only manage what you mea-
picious of Reich’s free-love evangelism hot dogs, if, as a recent study suggested, sure,” Will Ahmed, the founder of
and his associations with Communists, each one shortens the life span by Whoop, another tracking device, told
hounded him for years, and eventually thirty-six minutes.) Harder work, not me last month. By now, I had on three
jailed him for shipping orgone accu- surprisingly, yielded higher scores. Jog, wearables: the Oura ring, a Whoop
mulators across state lines. He died of or bike, or run stairs, then excitedly band on my left wrist, and a Levels glu-
a heart attack in 1957, at Lewisburg check the app. The lure of better num- cose monitor behind my left triceps. I’d
Federal Penitentiary. bers, more carrot than stick, was ener- heard about Whoop from a doctor and
gizing in itself, even if the ring’s crite- journalist named Bob Arnot, a stand-
year ago, my wife gave me, as a gift, ria seemed kind of arbitrary, maybe up-paddleboard masters world cham-
A an Oura ring, my first so-called
wearable. A hint, perhaps. I slipped
overgenerous. The instrument is blunt,
but it will cut.
pion and competitive ski-mountaineer-
ing racer, and the author of the recent
it on next to the wedding ring, and The ring also conditioned me to book “Flip the Youth Switch.” Dr. Bob,
it began feeding data about my exer- begin each morning with a Christ- who is seventy-three, is a high-energy
cise and sleep to an app on my phone. mas-stocking jolt of anticipation. Oh guy—maybe a freak.
Yes, people have been using technol- boy, new data. “How’d you sleep?” my Clearly, despite our best efforts, en-
ogy to track their steps and heart rates wife would ask, as one does. ergy is not evenly distributed, whether
for a long time now—Fitbit, Apple “Don’t know yet.” because of genetics or fate, nature or
Watch—but I’d considered such devices Most days, the numbers weren’t good: nurture. People blessed with it may as-
dorky, and vaguely sinister. Self-im- Santa leaves a lump of coal. My sleep cribe it to their own virtue, persever-
provement can grate; data tracking can patterns were lousy and seemed to augur ance, or self-discipline, and will some-
infringe. But maybe I needed a shove, an early demise. It turned out that what times wield the descriptor “low-energy”
and I was curious to see some num- might feel like restorative slumber— as a slight, as though Eeyores are con-
tagious. The idea that you can train, known as the Iceman), and uses black- crash doesn’t always bear out, to go by
will, or even medicate yourself into a out shades and an eye mask, aiming for the overlay of verve and blood sugar.
permanent state of pep, charisma, and more than five hours of rem and deep Once you have high levels of glucose
accomplishment lends an atmosphere sleep a night. “I have never met some- in your system, the more you add, the
of piety to the energy-assessment dance. one who gets that much who isn’t lead- less energy you feel; your cognitive-pro-
It’s all a matter of attitude, they say, as ing a great life,” he said. cessing speed declines. The advantage
though attitude were not itself deter- “Totally,” I said. of the glucose monitor, she said, is that
mined by energy. Think positive! It takes A Whoop representative had told it can reduce the misattribution of our
energy to change habits and alter cir- me about Levels, which sent me a kit subjective experiences—that habit we
cumstances. One can adjust certain with a disk to stick in my arm for a cou- all have of telling ourselves, or espe-
knobs, but it can feel like a chore to de- ple of weeks. I began taking blood-sugar cially other people, what might be caus-
duce which knobs do what. readings with my phone. Soon after- ing certain symptoms or feelings.
“I fundamentally believe this is some- ward, Casey Means, Levels’s co-founder (“You’re just dehydrated.”) The wear-
thing you have control over,” Arnot said, and chief medical officer, checked in ables can help you tinker with the vari-
when I called him. He credited his ap- on me. Means, who is thirty-four, is a ables. It’s not so much the rush and the
parently prodigious mental energy to graduate of Stanford’s medical school crash. It’s the roller coaster itself. Glu-
what he called “associative thinking.” and a self-proclaimed “recovering sur- cose excursions, or glycemic variability,
Lately, he’d been composing a trumpet geon.” She cited a University of North which Means called “spikiness,” lead to
concerto and studying Python, calcu- Carolina study that found that eighty- oxidative stress (an imbalance between
lus, machine learning, Arabic, and Swa- eight per cent of Americans suffer from free radicals and antioxidants), which
hili. “I don’t sleep much. I’ve always some metabolic malfunction. “That over time damages the mitochondria.
been a hopeless overachiever. Whatever means that roughly one in ten of us (It’s the opposite of H.R.V., where spik-
I do is the opposite of what I call ru- is able to process energy the way our iness is the goal, in a way.) And that,
minating.” Whoop, he said, had helped bodies are designed to,” she said. “It’s more than the sensation of the caffeine
him maximize his workouts and his an epidemic. Our fundamental path- or the fructose wearing off, seems to be
downtime. His H.R.V. readings got ways have been hijacked by the West- the true culprit, a leading cause of what
better each month (H.R.V. typically ern diet and life style. Disordered blood Mark Hyman, the doctor and wellness
worsens as you get older), and he reck- sugar is a big driver of most inflam- celebrity, calls F.L.C. Syndrome—Feel
oned that his biological age was much mation and chronic disease. It’s not Like Crap. “What’s happening in our
lower than his chronological one. just diabetes.” cells is what’s happening in our bod-
Arnot connected me with Ahmed, The Levels app revealed that even a ies,” Means said.
a former Harvard squash captain, who banana or a piece of toast raised my By Means’s reckoning—and, ad-
told me that it was in deep sleep that blood sugar by an alarming amount. mittedly, her perspective is not a rare
you generate ninety-five per cent of The flat line of the morning’s fast, once one, in our desperate, fallen world—
your growth hormones: “That’s when broken, would bend into the red. The we are suffering from our own, twenty-
you’re repairing the muscles you break app would post an excla- first-century incarnation
down in the gym.” The gym. Right. mation point next to the of George Miller Beard’s
For cognitive repair, it was REM sleep, spike on the graph and ask, “American nervousness,”
the dream state that cleanses the brain. “Did something happen?” with less misogyny. We ex-
“Chess players focus on REM,” Ahmed Yeah, jerkface, I had break- pect too much of ourselves,
said. According to both Oura and fast. Then, two hours later, and then handicap our at-
Whoop, my REM and deep-sleep num- the numbers would begin tempts to meet our expec-
bers weren’t great. I was killing it, to ebb. But it wasn’t as tations. There’s a contra-
though, on light sleep, and not sleep- though I was feeling jacked diction: we need energy to
ing. Search “Orgone accumulators on the way up and then do more, but to get it we
near me.” whacked by the crash. It need to do less, or at least
“Energy is a real thing, and your felt like not much. Until less of the things we are
perception of your energy can affect around 3:23 P.M.—the attack of the doing. This particular energy crisis, to
your levels,” Ahmed said. Ahmed him- yawns. Following the instructions of the extent that it is more metabolic than
self always eats early and avoids sugar Levels, I experimented, and soon dis- imagined, may be as apt an indicator
and alcohol in the evening. He wears covered that fat and fibre—a slab of of ill health, on a mass scale, as, say, ad-
blue-light-blocking glasses when, as he bacon, chia, some fucking kale—mod- diction or disease.
must, he uses his phone late (the light ified the surge, and the bonk. Egg good,
wavelengths from our screens, as we are
often warned, disrupt our circadian
juice bad? O.K., then.
“Glucose variability can correlate
“ W escious
like to think we have con-
control over our behav-
rhythms), takes a cold shower and does with a variability in your subjective ex- ior, but the more we learn, the more we
breathing exercises before bed (favor- perience of mood,” Means said, though know that that’s not entirely true,” Kevin
ite prescriptions of Wim Hof, the Dutch not in the way you’d think. The tradi- Hall, who runs a clinical-nutrition lab
extreme athlete and life-style guru tional notion of the sugar high, sugar at the National Institutes of Health, in
Bethesda, told me. “We’re less in con- been hoarding for other functions. “In toast or evening whiskey. I sought the
trol than we’d like.” some ways, the bonk is a perception,” Whoop’s approval, if not that of its
Hall has been trying to understand Maurer said. other evangelists. “I’ll invite you to
how different sources of energy in our join our group and help coach you,”
diet affect metabolism—what hap- n September, Sai Krupa Das, a sci- Arnot wrote. “What’s your Whoop
pens, for example, when we restrict
carbs or fat. “The body makes huge
I entist at the Jean Mayer U.S.D.A.
Human Nutrition Research Center on
name?” Not telling. The Whoop’s ver-
sion of what the Oura called “readi-
shifts to accommodate calories in dif- Aging and a professor of nutrition at ness” was “recovery,” also H.R.V.-based.
ferent forms. You’re on a low-carb diet? Tufts, sent me a Rand Corp. survey she For exercise, it emphasized “strain,” a
The fat in your blood—triglycerides— and other clinicians use to get a sense more robust version of the Oura’s “ac-
stimulates the uptake and blocks the of psychobiological energy. In one sec- tivity” category. It rewarded a high
release of fat. Low-fat, high-starch? tion, you are supposed to rate, on a scale heartbeat and a hard workout, and ba-
Insulin plays that role. The human of one to six, from “all of the time” to sically turned up its nose at long walks.
body is like a vehicle that burns dif- “none of the time,” your experience of It preferred sweat to steps.
ferent fuels. It’s an incredible engi- the past four weeks: And yet. The other day, an old friend
neering challenge. The metabolism is passed through town from the Bay
a miraculous flex-fuel engine. Diesel, Did you feel full of pep? Area. We’d grown up across the street
Have you been a very nervous person?
ethanol, doesn’t matter in the short Have you felt so down in the dumps that from each other and, in our fifth-grade
term. It will adapt.” nothing could cheer you up? production of “Alice in Wonderland,”
A recent study published in the jour- Have you felt calm and peaceful? had played Tweedledum and Twee-
nal Current Biology determined that the Did you have a lot of energy? dledee. We met up in Central Park,
body seems to adjust to higher burn Have you felt downhearted and blue? walked and talked for an hour—no
Did you feel worn out?
rate by becoming more efficient, espe- Have you been a happy person? secrets, at this age—and then said our
cially with exercise. This is called “en- Did you feel tired? fond farewells. I returned to the desk
ergy compensation” and is not yet well chair, energized.
understood. Generally, when your body All of the above? Is variability of That evening, I checked the data.
burns through energy less efficiently, mood more like H.R.V. or like blood The Oura ring, generous to a fault,
you are likely to die earlier and have a sugar? It was hard to imagine a more gave me credit for burning two hun-
greater risk of disease. An inefficient subjective exercise. Das also sent me a dred and twenty-four calories. Ball
metabolic system is like a car engine link to the Web site of something called don’t lie. The Whoop, though, had
you rev too high: it wears out faster. the Human Performance Institute, at captured something else entirely. The
Richard Maurer comes from a fam- Johnson & Johnson, which offered a readout from our meander suggested
ily of long-distance runners. In col- survey that was a kind of screening for that I’d undergone my most gruelling
lege, he was obsessed with calories— the “corporate athlete.” Who doesn’t love physical trial not only since I got the
what was and wasn’t working when he a self-evaluation? I aimed to be honest. device but in many years, possibly de-
ran. The simple equation of calories The J. & J. verdict was that I was “dis- cades. It had me at nearly fifty min-
in and out, the default presumption, engaged”: “This suggests that signifi- utes with an average heart rate above
didn’t actually seem to measure up. At cant obstacles stand in the way of fully a hundred and fifty, plus twelve min-
the time, in the eighties, it was hard igniting your talent and skill. To become utes above one-sixty-seven, with a
to find medical schools that taught nu- an extraordinary performer, you must high of one-eighty-five. Basically, ac-
trition (“Except the one in Loma Linda, build significantly stronger energy man- cording to the Whoop, I’d won the
and that was run by Seventh-day Ad- agement skills.” The corporate Olym- Tour de France and was now dead.
ventists,” he said), so he wound up at pics would have to go on without me. Or the Whoop, for once, was mis-
the National College for Naturopathic Das didn’t have a test for the other taken: a glitch not in the matrix but
Medicine, in Portland, Oregon. What kind of energy, the kind that one pro- in the watch.
was then fringe is now tacking sharply jects. “This kind of energy does exist, Then there was a third possibility.
to mainstream. and people who have it generally do My friend and I had had an excellent
“Every day we learn one thing less,” have that aura about them,” she said. rapport on our stroll—a surge of groovy
Maurer said. He cited a study of élite “But it is certainly hard to measure. This vibes and hearty laughter. Could this
cyclists. They rode hard on a station- energy is in large part physiological, too. energy, the kind that is projected, per-
ary bike and, when their muscles were There’s a genetic component, and a bi- ceived, and exchanged, yet purport-
spent, were given water on one occa- ological underpinning for cellular health edly impossible to measure, have some-
sion and a sweet drink like Gatorade that reflects in tissue health.” how spun the monitor’s compass, like
on another, both of which they spit a poltergeist or a solar flare? Was my
out without swallowing. The water ach day, I fixated on the data from Whoop a spiritist? A line of Twee-
spitters lagged behind, in terms of sub-
sequent wattage produced. The taste
E my wearables, even as my resis-
tance to change rendered them moot.
dledee’s came to mind: “Contrariwise,
if it was so, it might be; and if it were
of sugar had apparently tricked the I was more interested in adding exer- so, it would be: but as it isn’t, it ain’t.
brain into releasing energy that it had cise than in giving up my morning That’s logic.” 
athlete, although until quite recently he
POPULAR CHRONICLES seemed unlikely to become a professional
one. Instead, since he was fifteen, he had
PUNCHING DOWN
been working alongside his big brother,
Logan Paul, to earn the enmity of a sig-
nificant chunk of the global population,
A polarizing social-media star seeks an unlikely second act in boxing. as a prankster and instigator on Vine, the
short-lived video-sharing network, and
BY KELEFA SANNEH on YouTube, its long-lived rival. Con-
noisseurs can easily tell the brothers
apart—Logan is taller, shaggier, and per-
haps more in tune with the absurdity of
the lives they have built for themselves.
But everyone else tends to lump them
together, conflating both their occasional
triumphs and their frequent debacles,
such as the time, in 2017, when Logan
Paul visited a Japanese forest, reputed to
be a place people went to commit sui-
cide, and filmed his encounter with a
corpse, sparking outrage that threatened
to end his YouTube career. So when the
brothers announced, a few months later,
that they would be facing two of their
fellow social-media stars in a boxing
match, it looked like merely their latest
misadventure, bound to be supplanted by
whatever came next.
And yet the Paul brothers ended up
devoting far more time to boxing than
anyone might have predicted. Logan Paul
somehow wound up in the ring with Floyd
Mayweather, Jr., and Jake Paul reeled off
a string of victories, fighting increasingly
credible opponents as he grew increas-
ingly intent on training. Now Jake Paul
was preparing to face Tyron Woodley, a
muscular and rather solemn collegiate
wrestler and former U.F.C. champion.
Paul and Woodley had come to Sun Val-
ike many executives, Jake Paul pays M.M.A. champion turned commenta- ley to produce a television ad for their
L close attention to the fluctuating
prospects of the business he runs, which
tor, also took note of Paul’s arrival, and
explained his reaction to viewers at home:
fight—Woodley’s first professional box-
ing match, and Paul’s first match against
in his case is the business of being Jake “I pointed at him and I said, ‘Don’t play a guy who could punch. They were film-
Paul. One hot afternoon in Sun Valley, with me,’ because I’ll smack him in the ing their parts separately, to eliminate the
California, he had some encouraging face.”) At a subsequent U.F.C. event, possibility of unremunerated violence.
news to report. “I think the narrative is held in July in Las Vegas, the television The setting, a soundstage, was large
changing from ‘Fuck Jake Paul’ to ‘We producers did not put Paul on camera. enough to keep the two men well apart,
love Jake Paul,’” he said. As evidence, he But, Paul observed, the fans were not but Paul was visited in his dressing room
adduced some recent data collected from quite as unremittingly hostile. “It was ac- by Woodley’s mother, Deborah, an ex-
American sports arenas. In April, Paul tually a sophisticated crowd,” he said, by pressive and charismatic woman widely
had travelled to Jacksonville, Florida, for which he appeared to mean that it was known as Mama Woodley.
a night of fights sponsored by the U.F.C., a crowd sophisticated enough to toler- “We’re out here doing business,” Paul
the preëminent organization in mixed ate his presence. told her, almost apologetically. “Selling
martial arts. As he made his way to his Paul is twenty-four and blond, with a pay-per-views.”
seat, the attendees did, indeed, chant, confident smirk that is softened, slightly, She beamed. “You and Tyron gon’
“Fuck Jake Paul!” (Daniel Cormier, an by feathery eyelashes. He is a lifelong get out there and beat each other’s ass,”
she said.
Jake Paul’s notoriety has helped make him one of the world’s top-grossing fighters. She departed, and Paul was left alone
PHOTOGRAPH BY AMY LOMBARD THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 25
with his entourage, which included at idiots teargassed me—I ain’t doing shit,” But he is already one of the top-grossing
least two videographers and his girl- Paul explained on Instagram, gesturing fighters in the world.
friend, Julia Rose, a social-media star to a row of officers. (The F.B.I. searched In general, the public tends to respect
with a similarly prankish sensibility. his home but has not pursued a federal boxers for the same reason it tends not
(During the 2019 World Series, Rose case; he is facing misdemeanor charges to respect social-media influencers: the
positioned herself near home plate and of trespassing and unlawful assembly.) boxers seem to be toiling and suffering,
flashed the television camera; earlier this Earlier this year, he was accused of sex- and the influencers do not. Paul’s strange
year, she claimed to have helped change ual assault by two women. One of them journey from one world to the other re-
the Hollywood sign to read, brief ly, filmed a disturbing YouTube video, de- flects his hunger for attention. It also re-
“HOLLYBOOB.”) Paul was explaining his scribing a night with Paul in 2019 during flects the hunger of the boxing industry,
plan to knock Woodley unconscious. which he forced her to perform oral sex which has lately been invaded by celeb-
“It’s a bit bittersweet now, with Tyron’s on him; she recently told the Times that rities and old-timers, who often get big
mom,” he said, his bravado fading for a she planned to file charges. The other checks for novelty fights that sometimes
moment. “I’m going to try and forget told the Times that Paul had groped her scarcely seem like fights at all; Mike
that we talked.” during an encounter in 2017. Paul denied Tyson, who fought a high-profile exhi-
Paul’s bad reputation is not hard to both accusations, and suggested that his bition match last year at the age of fifty-
understand if you have seen the videos accusers had fabricated them. four, remains vastly more popular than
on his YouTube channel, which have By the time the assault allegations most of his successors. Boxing has spent
drawn more than seven billion views; were made public, this past April, Paul decades trying, and generally failing, to
that figure, which approaches the pop- was so widely disliked that it seemed im- transform its top athletes into big celeb-
ulation of this planet, does not account possible for his reputation to get much rities. Now comes a mediagenic villain
for the innumerable videos that summa- worse. In any case, he had already em- with a quixotic plan: to achieve that trans-
rize or criticize the ones that Paul has barked on his new career in professional formation in reverse.
posted. His body of work is filled with boxing, a world in which good behavior
dubious stunts, such as the time he cov-
ered half of his brother’s room in duct
tends not to be a job requirement. “One
thing that is great about being a fighter J ake and Logan Paul became boxers
on a whim. In 2018, a British You-
tape, and with mind-numbing repetition is, like, you can’t get cancelled,” Paul told Tuber and rapper named KSI chal-
of the word “bro.” He has also faced some me. In fact, boxing can be a way to mon- lenged them to fight, and they agreed,
serious allegations. In May, 2020, during etize a bad reputation: people who would without knowing quite what they were
the disorder that followed the murder of never dream of buying a Jake Paul T-shirt signing up for. The next day, they hired
George Floyd, he filmed himself tres- might nevertheless pay to watch some- trainers, and soon they were running,
passing in an Arizona mall, alongside one try to punch him in the face. Paul jumping rope, and pounding away at a
looters; at one point, he seemed to be is not a great boxer, and it is by no means heavy bag. Jake Paul remembers think-
holding a bottle of vodka. “These fuckin’ obvious that he will ever become one. ing, “Bro, this is the hardest thing we’ve
ever fuckin’ done.”
Logan Paul earned a draw in his fight
against KSI, and then lost a rematch,
but he kept talking about his boxing
prowess. Eventually, Mayweather—a
boxing virtuoso who had retired a few
years earlier, but remained a shrewd an-
alyst of risk and reward—agreed to an
exhibition fight, which reportedly in-
spired something like a million people
to pay fifty dollars to watch it. Jake Paul
has taken a different path. He won his
first fight, against KSI’s younger brother,
Deji, and then he kept winning.
As Jake Paul became more obsessed
with boxing, he moved to Big Bear Lake,
a town in the San Bernardino Moun-
tains known as a high-altitude training
destination, and then to Las Vegas, a city
lousy with trainers and sparring partners,
and finally to Puerto Rico—far away, he
says, from the Los Angeles night life in
which he was once immersed. One day
“Who’s got excellent kidney function, according to this in August, he was sitting on a low couch
most recent round of tests? You do! Yes, you do!” in a house in a lush gated community in
Dorado, where the residents’ golf carts Flores has been hanging around box- sarily any more skilled at boxing than
are expected to obey signs that say, in ing gyms since he was four—his father Paul was, combined with an army of fans
English, “Keep it slow.” Paul liked the was a trainer. Paul was a wrestler in high who might be willing to pay for the op-
fact that, except for himself and his school, but he didn’t take up boxing until portunity to see their sport vindicated.
brother, who lives across the road, the the age of twenty-one, which means he Who says M.M.A. fighters can’t punch?
area seemed to be free of social-media is trying to compress decades of experi- Paul’s first M.M.A. opponent, Ben
stars. “Everyone here, they’re all crypto ence into a few years. In the ring, he went Askren, was a laid-back wrestling spe-
people,” he said. two rounds with Denis Grachev, a Rus- cialist; he strolled to the ring and, less
It was less than three weeks until the sian journeyman who has lost fourteen than two minutes later, found that he
fight with Woodley, and Paul was gaz- of his last twenty-two fights. had been knocked out by
ing at a wall covered with exhortatory Paul tried to jab enough to a YouTuber. Dana White,
handwritten placards, one for each week keep Grachev at a distance, the voluble president of
of preparation. (The current week’s slo- and when Grachev pushed the U.F.C., was one of many
gans included “EXECUTE,” “KILL MODE,” him against the ropes he people who was surprised.
and “THE MOST IMPORTANT 20 DAYS ducked away, pivoting out of Beforehand, he had said, of
OF MY LIFE.”) The “Moneyball” revolu- danger. He was thinking, Paul, “I’ll bet a million dol-
tion has not yet come to boxing: the sport, which is better than not lars that he loses this fuckin’
largely untouched by advances in statis- thinking, though not as good fight”; afterward, he has-
tics and science, relies instead on folk as not having to think. tened to explain that he had
wisdom. Hard work is valued almost for Football fans don’t have made no such bet. (When
its own sake, and there is an abhorrence to worry that a bunch of Paul was booed at the U.F.C.
of anything deemed distracting. Paul pranksters will put on pads, rent a sta- event in Jacksonville, he was wearing a
claims to like the simplicity of a fighter’s dium, and declare themselves Super Bowl T-shirt that said “WHERE IS MY MONEY
life, especially compared with the chaos contenders. But boxing is an entrepre- DANA?”) The Askren knockout popu-
of social-media stardom. As he and some neurial sport, governed, to the extent that larized the idea that Paul might be a
members of his team climbed into a jeep it is governed at all, by an interlocking natural: an Internet loudmouth who
to head to a training session, he explained network of promoters, managers, broad- just happened to be blessed with pro-
that one of his coaches had recently pre- casters, local government officials, and fessional-grade punching power. And
vailed upon him to send his girlfriend so-called sanctioning bodies, which crown so Paul and Bidarian chose to take a
back to the mainland—a traditional box- male and female champions in seventeen calculated risk by selecting Woodley as
ing tactic, although not one that has been weight classes. Despite this proliferation the next opponent.
substantiated by any double-blind stud- of championship belts, the idea that Paul Woodley was known as a much bet-
ies. “He wants me to be mad,” Paul said. would win any of them seemed ludicrous ter striker than Askren, having won the
The Paul brothers had leased a local back in 2018, when he spent five rounds U.F.C. welterweight championship by
warehouse, which they were converting staggering around a ring with Deji, who knockout in 2016. But his career had
into a gym and a production studio. On looked even less prepared for a prizefight mysteriously collapsed when, beginning
this day, it was still mainly empty, an than Paul was. But in his next fights he in 2019, he lost four fights in a row, some-
expanse of concrete floor and corrugated beat another YouTuber, and then an ath- times looking rather listless. The Paul
roofing with a boxing ring set up on lete: Nate Robinson, a former N.B.A. fight was a chance for him to earn a
one side and televisions showing fight player who was known for his toughness, measure of redemption. It was also a
highlights along a wall. As Paul began until Paul sent him crashing to the can- chance for him to earn some money:
a complicated stretching routine, a hand- vas in the second round. It was time for according to disclosure documents, his
ful of boxing veterans assumed posi- Paul to face a real fighter—though not pay was at least two million dollars.
tions near the ring. There was B. J. Flores, necessarily a real boxer. The match had been set in motion
Paul’s head coach, a soft-spoken scholar Paul has been guided in his new ca- by an encounter in Paul’s locker room
of the sport who, at forty-two, is only reer by Nakisa Bidarian, a former chief before the Askren fight; Woodley, who
three years removed from his own fairly financial officer of the U.F.C. To a mixed- had trained with Askren for years, was
successful career as a cruiserweight. martial-arts fan, boxing might seem dull: there to watch as Paul’s hands were
(Flores is well preserved, but he told me an ancient sport in which two people wrapped. (This is a venerable boxing
that he’ll never fight again. “I don’t even merely stand and hit each other, follow- tradition, meant to insure that no one
think about it anymore,” he said, as if ing rules that haven’t much changed since sneaks a weapon into his glove, besides
he were trying not to recall a bad habit.) they were set down in nineteenth-century his fist.) Friendly trash talk escalated
His advice to Paul tended to be simple London. And to a boxing fan M.M.A. into something slightly less friendly. “I
and precise—for instance, he wanted might seem inelegant: a mishmash that know he gon’ win,” Woodley said, refer-
Paul to fluster Woodley by jabbing twice occasionally resembles a bar fight, with ring to Askren.
instead of once. “He’s gonna block the combatants trading haymakers and then “Let’s make a bet,” Paul replied. “We’ll
first one, but the second one’s gonna hit collapsing onto the mat to roll around. match whatever number you want to
him every time,” Flores said. “And it’ll In M.M.A., Paul and Bidarian found a put up.”
make him think.” supply of fighters who were not neces- “I don’t play games,” Woodley said,
looking down at Paul, who was sitting a cliff you’d jump off, too?” Cut to the but I really was doing it to create a busi-
backward on a folding chair. brothers jumping off a cliff, screaming.) ness.” If anything, Paul seems to under-
“Sounds like you playing right now,” On Vine, the Pauls often found them- state just how bad an idea it was: some
Paul said, and his lips began to curl mis- selves shirtless or dancing or both: they of the participants were minors, and the
chievously. “You just said your boy’s were essentially a non-singing boy band, atmosphere evoked an out-of-control
gonna win, but you won’t bet on it.” attracting an audience that was evidently freshman dorm. (A report on “Inside
The exchange sparked mockery on- huge and seemingly hugely female. The Edition” described his neighbors’ anger
line: many viewers noted the gulf be- brothers moved from Ohio to Los An- at the chaos, and showed him roasting
tween Woodley, who seems destined for geles in their late teens, and Jake Paul marshmallows over a burning mattress
the U.F.C. Hall of Fame, and Paul, whom was soon cast on a Disney Channel se- and driving a dirt bike into the swim-
one commenter compared to a young ries called “Bizaardvark,” alongside the ming pool. Inevitably, the segment went
Justin Bieber. Then again, Paul’s pop- future pop star Olivia Rodrigo, playing viral on YouTube.) The group disbanded
star-like fan base is what makes him a a good-natured, dim-witted showoff who not long after, and a number of the mem-
force in boxing. And by challenging would do anything on a dare. bers have described Paul as an immature
Woodley to a fight he was also propos- Vine effectively shut down in 2016, bully, constantly pressuring them to per-
ing a limited partnership: for a few which obliged Paul to focus his consid- form dangerous or degrading stunts; Paul
months, Woodley could join the lucra- erable energy on YouTube, where his denies all of it.
tive Jake Paul business. videos were often twenty minutes long, The world of YouTubers thrives on
with a new one posted every day. “Being endless reaction—a dizzying cascade of
oodley comes from Ferguson, an influencer was almost harder than claims and counterclaims. But the ac-
W Missouri, the eleventh of thir-
teen children, and recalls growing up as
being a boxer,” he says now. “You wake
up in the morning and you’re, like, Damn,
cusations of sexual assault raise the pos-
sibility that Paul was not just a jerk but
a gang member and a habitual scrapper: I have to create fifteen minutes of amaz- a predator. Earlier this year, a performer
“fighting in the streets, fighting in the ing content, and I have twelve hours of named Railey Lollie told the Times that
house for the remote control, fighting sunlight.” Needless to say, “amazing” is she had begun working with Paul when
because my friends were fighting.” Wres- a subjective term, but Paul was fluent in she was seventeen, and that he often re-
tling helped him escape the neighbor- the language of YouTube, where he came ferred to her as “jailbait.” She also said
hood for the University of Missouri, across as a familiar type: the high-school that he had once groped her; in the pa-
where he earned a bachelor’s degree and jock, popular and gregarious, with a proper’s account, “She forcefully told him
a pair of All-American distinctions. pensity for jokes that remind people of to stop, and he ran out of the room.”
When he was offered his first M.M.A. their place in the social hierarchy. (One Justine Paradise, a social-media person-
contract, in 2009, he nearly cried. “I was day, he covered the floor with vegetable ality, told a more detailed story in a video
sleeping on my mom’s couch,” he told oil and then challenged his friends to a posted to YouTube. She said that she
me. “I was thirty, forty thousand dollars race, promising the winner a hundred was friendly with Paul and that one
in debt.” Within a decade, he was being dollars; footage of the resulting bumps night he took her to his bedroom, where
flown around the country, accompanied and scrapes formed the basis of one of they danced and then began kissing. In
by a gleaming U.F.C. championship belt. his more popular videos.) He provided her account, Paul “tried to put his hands
It is a familiar story, and a familiar de- running updates on various romances places that I didn’t want,” and she moved
fense of combat sports, which provide and rivalries, and a good look at his in- them away, but Paul ignored this rejec-
many athletes with a path out of pov- creasingly glamorous life, which seemed tion. “He undid his pants and grabbed
erty and away from violence—some to revolve around swimming pools and my face and started fucking my face,”
forms of violence, anyhow. expensive vehicles. she said. Afterward, he brusquely told
Paul’s story is less inspiring and maybe “I’m not a saint,” Paul told me one her that he wanted to rejoin his friends
more puzzling. He and his brother had night. “I’m also not a bad guy, but I can elsewhere in the house.
rather normal boyhoods in a Cleveland very easily play the role.” In 2017, he re- Paul has called both of these allega-
suburb: their mother worked as a nurse, leased a charmless hip-hop track, “It’s tions false. He told me he never would
and their father was a real-estate agent Everyday Bro,” accompanied by a charm- have called Lollie “jailbait” or groped
and a commercial roofer. Late one night less video, which earned more than three her. And he said, of Paradise, “I didn’t
in Puerto Rico, Paul recalled that his fa- million thumbs-up votes and more than even have any sort of a run-in with this
ther pushed him to win at whatever he five million thumbs-downs. But Paul girl.” More than once, he characterized
did. With this encouragement, Paul told me that he paid less attention to the women’s accounts as “a cry for atten-
turned out to be a pretty good wrestler likes and dislikes than to total view tion,” which might sound mean-spirited
and a very good content creator: in high counts—in this case, about two hun- even to people who are inclined to be-
school, he started posting skits to Vine, dred and eighty-seven million. lieve his side of the story. He knows,
which imposed a six-second limit and To leverage his popularity, he founded though, that many people will not be-
therefore rewarded quick punch lines Team 10, a crew of young content cre- lieve him, partly because plenty of other
and goofy stunts. (In one video, a guy ators who stayed together in a rented observers are on record saying that Paul
wearing a wig says, in a motherly voice, house. “It was a nightmare,” he says now. could be boorish and cruel, especially
“Are you telling me if Jake jumped off “I wanted to be cool and everyone’s friend, in those days.
Given his line of work, Paul doesn’t Paul tried to frame their encounter as Paul names both as inspirations. (Tyson
necessarily need people to believe him. a cosmic struggle for justice: he said that recently praised Paul as a “white boy
The fact that he has been accused of he was on a mission to reform boxing, with balls,” although he added that he
sexual violence does not make him par- advocating for higher pay and better could still knock him out.) But, to gauge
ticularly unusual in the boxing world. medical care. Somehow Woodley, a hard- Paul’s place in the sport, it may be help-
Mike Tyson, after all, served three years working athlete but a less flamboyant ful to consider a different precursor:
in prison for rape, then resumed fight- and marketable figure, was cast as the Mark Gastineau, the former football
ing, more or less as popular as ever. May- enemy of progress. player, who in 1991 began a new career
weather, an ostentatious character who Late one night, Paul grew philo- in professional boxing—“fighting for
is probably the highest-paid fighter of sophical. “What I will do with this plat- respect,” as the Los Angeles Times put
all time (he reportedly made something form, this following, this attention is it. Like Paul, Gastineau was a famous
like two hundred million dollars for his far more impactful than what Tyron white guy, strong but untutored, and,
2015 match against Manny Pacquiao), Woodley would do if he would win,” like Paul, he seemed sure that hard work
has faced a number of accusations of he told me, as rain-forest sounds bur- and determination could make up for
violence against women; in 2012, he bled from his iPhone. (He had been missed decades of training. His success,
spent two months in jail after a vicious sitting in an ice bath earlier, and hadn’t if he achieved it, would debunk the
altercation with the mother of three of bothered to turn off the meditative old-fashioned idea that champions are
his children. But, as long as he was not music he likes to listen to.) “I think the formed through years of patient gym
incarcerated, Mayweather was allowed higher powers, or God, or whatever you work, but it would also affirm the idea
to fight, and indeed was well incentiv- want to call it or whatever it is—maybe that every boxing match is a test of wills,
ized to do so. there’s nothing there, maybe it’s just, and that an unusually willful man might
One difference, of course, is Paul’s like, a placebo, and just thinking there’s therefore triumph against the odds. He
background. While virtually all of the something that is guiding me, which won his début bout, against a fighter
top American boxers are Black or His- then gives me the ultimate confidence named Derrick Dukes, by knockout.
panic, Paul is a white guy from a middle- to go and win, so I don’t even question Gastineau’s boxing story was compli-
class neighborhood; for him, boxing was it—but I do think that the earth would cated by the broadcast, in 1994, of a “60
an escape not from poverty but from the rather me win than him.” Minutes” investigation in which Dukes
seemingly luxurious world of social- revealed that the fight had been “totally
media stardom. One of his training part- very boxer with dreams of glory fixed.” Dukes, a former pro wrestler,
ners is J’Leon Love, a boxing veteran
from Inkster, Michigan. As Love was
E seems to cite the same two anteced-
ents: Muhammad Ali, the epitome of
gave a demonstration: he asked Steve
Kroft to throw an imaginary punch, and
rising to prominence, his older brother grace and courage, and Mike Tyson, the dropped at once to the ground, imagi-
was shot and killed in Inkster, leaving epitome of ferocity. This is a reflection narily knocked out. Gastineau denied
behind a wife and children. Watching of the extraordinary impression that cheating, but by then the fantasy that he
the workout in Puerto Rico, Love con- these men made; it is also a reflection was a boxing savant had already been
sidered the unusual path that Paul had of the sport’s failure, in the post-Tyson dispelled, by a journeyman named Tim
chosen. “He could be on a yacht, he could years, to produce figures who made a (Doc) Anderson, who beat him easily
be on a jet, all kinds of women,” he said, similar claim on the public imagination. in a five-round decision. There was a
admiringly. “But he’s here.” And he of-
fered Paul some measured but seem-
ingly earnest praise: “Kid can fight.”
When Paul talks about what he’s up
to, he often sounds, as many popular
and polarizing people do, by turns
self-pitying and self-aggrandizing. He
has started a foundation, Boxing Bul-
lies, on behalf of which he delivers fre-
quent testimonials. “I’ve been a bully
when I was a kid, and it was because I
was insecure,” he said one afternoon,
adding that he shared Tupac Shakur’s
ambition to “spark the brain that will
change the world.” During the run-up
to the fight, Woodley mocked Paul as
a troll and a wannabe, a suburban kid
who had watched too many “rap vid-
eos.” Paul scoffed that Woodley was not
passionate about boxing, and was fight-
ing “mostly for a paycheck.” Sometimes
rematch, which Gastineau won, although seriously, that doesn’t mean boxing is a fighter preparing for battle, even this
apparently not without some help: An- obliged to take him seriously. Lou Di- fighter, has a certain gravitas. He pre-
derson later said that the fight’s promoter, Bella is a promoter known for strong dicted a knockout in the second or third
Rick (Elvis) Parker, offered him half a opinions and an inability to keep them round. But he had also been spending
million dollars to throw the first fight to himself. Last year, when Paul was some time in the woods behind his moth-
and, on the night of the second fight, se- gearing up to fight Nate Robinson, er’s house, and he had some non-fight-
cretly poisoned him. Years later, during DiBella told an interviewer, “The idea related questions on his mind. “What
a confrontation over the alleged poison- that I gotta watch Jake Paul or some of do the mosquitoes do when there’s no
ing, Anderson shot and killed Parker. these other numbnuts fighting ex-pro- humans?” he said. “Like, what do they
Boxing has always been a bit of a car- fessional football players and shit like suck blood out of ?” He sounded a lot
nival, and sometimes a bit of a con, which that—who the fuck wants to see that?” like a guy who once made his living by
explains why so many boxing fans and This year, on Twitter, he was less dis- generating talky content on YouTube—
professionals have been disinclined to missive. “There’s a reason @jakepaul has which is to say, a guy who has learned
celebrate the arrival of the Paul brothers; star power,” he wrote. “He’s smart and how to convince viewers, often against
in the sport’s endless quest for legitimacy, he’s a master button pusher. And when their better judgment, that they want to
the Pauls are unreliable allies. But in box- it comes to #boxing, he shows more re- see whatever will happen next.
ing, as on social media, the Pauls are part spect for the sport (and its potential) Paul often frames his foray into box-
of a cultural shift. Just as YouTubers once than most others in it.” By then, DiBella ing as a quest for respect, although he
encroached on boy bands’ traditional turf, and Paul were doing business together. does not always act as if that is his top
celebrity boxing matches have recently One of DiBella’s boxers was fighting on priority. The previous month, he had
threatened to upstage championship the same card as Paul vs. Woodley: proposed that the loser get a tattoo saying
fights; at least during the pandemic, view- Amanda Serrano, a Puerto Rican cham- “I LOVE [the winner],” a bet that Wood-
ers who typically ignore professional box- pion who is widely viewed as one of the ley had warily accepted. To create more
ing have seemed to enjoy the novelty of best boxers in the world, and who was of a spectacle, Paul had hired a tattoo
watching famous people punch each other. hoping that an association with Paul artist to attend the fight, so that the bet
When Tyson was lured back into the ring might provide a mutually advantageous could be settled immediately.
last year, he faced another legendary for- exchange of credibility and visibility.
mer boxer, Roy Jones, Jr., in a spirited but As a YouTube star, Paul earned be- t was striking, on fight night, to see
friendly eight-round exhibition that was
one of the year’s highest-profile fights.
tween one and four dollars for every thou-
sand times his videos were streamed.
I how many people would come out to
watch Jake Paul fight, and how relatively
A series of matches have featured so- Those dollars added up, but only as long few of them would root for him, even
cial-media stars—most of whom do not as YouTube didn’t find his content too in his home town. Whenever his pic-
appear to have spent years (or in some objectionable to include in its advertis- ture came onscreen, there seemed to be
cases even weeks) in training. ing program. As a professional fighter, more boos than cheers. The arena was
Logan Paul’s fight against May- he aims to earn more money from fewer full of fans, including more teen-agers
weather, earlier this year, seemed at first viewers: his fight against Woodley, which and preteens, and more women and girls,
like a fiasco. At a press con- was distributed on pay-per- than typically attend boxing matches.
ference, Jake Paul grabbed view by Showtime, was One Ohio celebrity, Dave Chappelle,
Mayweather’s hat and was priced at sixty dollars. The was a conspicuous presence near the
subsequently chased and venue was the Rocket Mort- ring, waving and hollering. Another Ohio
roughed up by Mayweather gage FieldHouse, in Cleve- celebrity, LeBron James, sent his regrets
and his team, an event that land, where the Cavaliers via Twitter: “CLEVELAND IS JUMPING!!
Paul commemorated by play, and the event was billed Should have flew back to the crib.” Box-
getting his leg tattooed with as a homecoming for Paul, ing crowds often ignore or skip the open-
a picture of a hat and the who had grown up watching fights, but these fans seemed un-
phrase “gotcha hat.” The ing LeBron James there. He aware of that convention, and they gave
fight itself, officially an exhi- spent the week of the fight Amanda Serrano one of the biggest ova-
bition, was less absurd: Lo- at his mother’s house in the tions of her career, as she spent ten rounds
gan Paul lasted eight unscored rounds, suburbs, heading into the city for pro- taking apart a Mexican champion named
though many thought that Mayweather motional appearances. By the weigh-in, Yamileth Mercado. Serrano said later
was taking it easy. Afterward, Paul cel- he was growing notably more reserved. that she was “surprised” by the applause,
ebrated with exaggerated bravado. On “Jake’s definitely way more serious, bro,” and a few weeks after that she announced
his podcast, “Impaulsive,” he declared, Logan Paul told me, backstage. “Before that she was leaving DiBella to work ex-
“I’m the best boxer on the planet.” Floyd, bro, we were, like, making Tik- clusively with Paul, who had launched
His co-host, Mike Majlak, roared Toks and shit,” he said. “He’s not like a boxing-promotion company.
with laughter, and reminded him that that. He’s big on mental visualization.” The most surreal part of Paul’s fight
he had never actually beaten anyone. Jake Paul emerged from his dressing was his introduction. Jimmy Lennon, Jr.,
“Zero fuckin’ wins!” he said. room, and the collection of friends and the announcer, called him “the popular
Although Jake Paul takes boxing more media members nearby suddenly hushed; media sensation, the acclaimed content
creator, and undefeated fighter known as
the Problem Child,” which must make
Paul the first fighter to have his boxing
credentials listed third in his biography.
He may also have become the first to
compete while wearing trunks with em-
bedded digital screens, which were flash-
ing his name when the bell f inally
sounded. As he and Woodley stalked and
pawed each other, the veteran boxing
broadcaster Al Bernstein described Paul
as “a pretty good combination puncher,”
and then added a caveat: “You know, you
temper that with the fact that he hasn’t
yet fought a pro boxer.” Paul had won his
previous fights while taking very little
punishment, but the ability—and the
willingness—to withstand punches is es-
sential to boxing, to the sport’s mystique.
It is harder to hate a person when you
have watched him get hurt.
It happened near the end of the fourth
round: Paul ducked his head, and Wood-
ley hit him with an overhand right, send- “Still, it’s nice to just get away.”
ing him back with such force that he had
to grab the ropes to stay on his feet. (A
different referee might have ruled this an
• •
official knockdown.) The Ohio crowd
was cheering for a Missouri guy, and ple bought the fight.) Paul suggested one—a historic encounter from which
Woodley waved his right fist triumphantly that he would grant a rematch if Wood- neither man may ever fully recover.
even as he kept pressing forward, hunt- ley got the tattoo he had agreed to, and Paul says that he plans to keep box-
ing Paul. What followed was both anti- a month later Woodley posted proof on ing for three or four more years, working
climactic and impressive: Paul refused to Instagram: the words “i LOVE Jake Paul” to build a new business and to shed, or
fade, and in fact looked somewhat re- inscribed, seemingly permanently, on the partially shed, an old reputation. Having
vived in the later rounds, while Wood- inside of his middle finger. By then, Paul succeeded in the chaotic new world of
ley let himself be outpunched. When the had moved on. “I’m leaving Tyron in the social media, he seems happy, for now, to
scores were read, Paul won a split deci- past,” he said—thinking, perhaps, of that retreat into the chaotic old world of box-
sion, which most observers agreed he de- perilous fourth round. ing, adopting a business model—pay-per-
served; he had survived, and kept his un- The Woodley fight made Paul seem view—that was state of the art when Mu-
defeated record intact. less like a phenomenon or a fraud, and hammad Ali fought Joe Frazier on HBO,
Before the fight, Paul had talked about more like an ordinary boxer, albeit one in 1975. Paul will probably never give us
his eagerness to return immediately to with plenty of work to do on his foot- anything like Fury-Wilder III, although
Puerto Rico and continue his training. work and punch mechanics. A Web site he recently announced that in Decem-
But in the ring after the fight he took a called BoxRec uses a mathematical for- ber he will fight Fury’s little brother,
more ambivalent tone. “I’ve barely got mula to rank every active professional, Tommy Fury, a nominally professional
my hair cut in, like, two years, my teeth and it recently listed Paul as the five- boxer who is still learning on the job. If
are all crooked, my nose is crooked, I’ve hundred-and-eighty-third-best cruiser- Paul is defeated, he may suddenly be-
dedicated my past eighteen months to weight in the world, out of nine hun- come much less marketable, because his
this,” he said. “I think I might need to dred and twenty-eight. That doesn’t seem career is less suspenseful: the thing ev-
chill out for a second, figure out who I wrong. But boxing is entertainment, and eryone is waiting for will have happened.
am. I’m only twenty-four.” so far Paul’s fights have entertained. In the meantime, he can keep doing what
Woodley was in no mood to talk about Maybe some of the viewers were inspired boxers are expected to do: risk his body
time off—he wanted a rematch. “Me and to buy the recent heavyweight-champi- and mind to thrill paying customers—
Jake need to run that back,” he said, and onship fight between Tyson Fury and including the many who are rooting
then he addressed Paul not as an oppo- Deontay Wilder, who fought at the high- against him. The appeal of boxing, for
nent but as a business partner. “Nobody est level, trading punches and knock- fans and fighters alike, is inseparable from
gon’ sell a pay-per-view like we did.” downs until Wilder collapsed onto the the extraordinary toll it takes. Each fight
(Exact figures are kept secret, but reports ropes and slumped to the canvas. It was is transformative. You don’t come out ex-
indicate that about half a million peo- a thrilling fight, and also a terrifying actly the way you went in. 
A REPORTER AT LARGE
STORM CHASERS
A migrant workforce trails climate disasters, rebuilding in their wake.
BY SARAH STILLMAN
ellaliz Gonzalez had never heard workforce, made up largely of immigrants,
B of Midland, Michigan, before a

white van dropped her off there
in late May, 2020. The journey from her
many undocumented, who follow climate
disasters around the country the way ag-
ricultural workers follow crops, helping
home in Miami, with twelve colleagues, communities rebuild. She’d addressed
had taken around twenty-two hours. damage inf licted by hurricanes, fires,
She arrived to a region devastated by a floods, and tornadoes across seven states,
recent flood: cracked roads, collapsed scrubbing mildew blooms and clearing
bridges. Gonzalez, a fifty-four-year-old pools of toxic sludge from universities,
asylum seeker from Venezuela, with neatly factories, and airports. The work seemed
coiffed auburn hair, prided herself on re- meaningful and occasionally made her
maining calm in dangerous situations. feel like a lucky tourist: she sometimes
In Venezuela, she had worked as an en- stayed in the shambles of beachside re-
vironmental engineer and run several of sorts she couldn’t otherwise afford. But
the country’s national parks. But for the it felt risky, too. In 2019, in Santa Rosa
past three years, living in the U.S., she Beach, Florida, after Hurricane Michael,
had turned to manual labor to make she gutted the insulation of a home with-
money. Earlier that week, she had been out proper protective gear and felt little
recruited to work with a franchise of a pieces of fibreglass cutting her skin. The
disaster-restoration company called Serv- same year, in the aftermath of Hurricane
pro, to help Midland recover. She car- Florence, she helped demolish a serpen-
ried her go bag, which contained steel- tarium in North Carolina; the former
toed boots, thick jeans, and gold hoop owner, an eccentric herpetologist, had
earrings that helped her feel elegant while been murdered by his wife in the adjoin-
doing backbreaking work. At the job site, ing apartment. On the walls of the ex-
she received a neon-yellow vest that fea- hibits, placards had warned visitors of
tured Servpro’s name on the back, and the effects of snake venom: “The bitten
the words “Safety Starts with You.” extremity swells to massive proportions . . .
Gonzalez and her colleagues had and your eyes weep blood.” Now the threat
rushed to Midland after a torrential was the foul-smelling dust kicked up by
downpour—the effects of Tropical the demolition, which left her coughing
Storm Arthur—had burst through two and wheezing.
hydroelectric dams. Governor Gretchen Gonzalez and her seventeen-year-old
Whitmer described the damage as “un- daughter, Angelica, lived in Florida with
like anything we’ve seen in five hun- Gonzalez’s sister, Enilsa. For months,
dred years.” Eighteen inches of water Enilsa had been begging her to quit chas-
flooded the local courthouse; vehicles ing catastrophes, and, after the pandemic
from a nearby vintage-car museum es- began, she got a job at a McDonald’s.
caped, belly-up, from the destroyed But the work was tedious, and paid poorly.
showroom. Whitmer declared that re- Gonzalez and her daughter slept on twin
storing the region would be a “hercu- couches in Enilsa’s living room. Angel-
lean undertaking.” Some twenty-five ica, a senior in high school and an aspir-
hundred buildings needed repairs. Par- ing graphic designer, hoped to go to col-
ticularly urgent, given the surging pan- lege, but Gonzalez wasn’t sure she could
demic, were conditions at a hospital in afford it. In May, 2020, working an all-
the city, MidMichigan Medical Center– night shift, Gonzalez burned her fore-
Midland, where one of the I.C.U.s had arm baking apple pies, and took it as a
lost power. sign. Soon after, she saw a WhatsApp
Gonzalez is part of a new transitory message from a group of Venezuelan One seasoned laborer observed that news
cameras descend when a storm or a wildfire arrives but move on before the work of recovery—often its own disaster—begins.
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIANO PONZI THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 33
storm workers noting a job offer from a to a room, two to a bed. Gonzalez and Later, she felt a pounding headache.
small disaster-recovery labor broker called others would be cleaning floodwater and On Saturday night, Gonzalez and
Back to New, based in Houston, that damaged goods out of the Midland hos- several other workers decided to call Saket
provided “on-demand workers, nation- pital, including its morgue. Workers said Soni, an organizer whom Gonzalez had
wide, 24/7.” It had a contract with a Serv- that daily meetings were held indoors met a few years earlier. Soni runs a non-
pro franchise and put out an urgent call and were crowded, as was the group’s profit, called Resilience Force, that ad-
for workers. The opportunity, the com- work area; they were given inadequate vocates for the fast-growing group of
pany promised, was “COVID-19 ready.” protective gear that quickly ran out. (Back disaster-restoration laborers. As the work-
Back to New sent more than a hun- to New denied any wrongdoing during ers follow storms, the organization fol-
dred workers to Midland from Florida the project.) At the end of Gonzalez’s lows them, trying to fight wage theft,
and Texas, most of them Venezuelans. shift, she and Yanes would scour the avert injury, and generally prevent the
Many were experienced disaster work- ground for discarded latex gloves to wash kinds of disasters-within-disasters that
ers, but some had recently been pushed and reuse. Reinaldo Quintero, a broad- pervade the industry. Soni is forty-three,
into the work by pandemic debts. Leyda shouldered worker from Maracaibo, the with dark hair and owlish glasses, and
Yanes, a former attorney from Caracas, city where Gonzalez grew up, belted gaita an air of intense curiosity. That night, he
had worked at a bakery in Miami until music, a regional genre, and recruited was at his apartment in Washington,
it closed during the lockdowns. She had Delgado to sing along. D.C., cooking an elaborate meal of oc-
seen an ad from Back to New, and per- Still, Gonzalez couldn’t let go of her topus vindaloo. When he answered the
suaded her husband, Jesús Delgado, an worries. She asked a supervisor why they phone, a group of workers clamored on
Uber driver, and their extended family weren’t having the temperature checks the other end. Then Gonzalez came on
to go to Midland. Workers told me that they’d been guaranteed. “The thermom- the line. “Saket, it’s bad,” she said. “I think
they had not been tested for covid or eter’s broken,” the woman replied, shrug- we’re contaminados.”
made to wear a mask. Gonzalez wore ging. One day, around 6 A.M., Gonza-
one, and, in the van, a young woman lez and other workers climbed into vans pocalyptic weather has pushed many
scolded her: “Don’t you know that you’re
breathing your own air in that thing?
bound for the hospital. “Where’s Rei-
naldo?” Delgado asked. Someone re-
A Americans into a belated recogni-
tion of the climate emergency. In the Pa-
You’ll cause permanent lung damage.” plied, “He’s not feeling well.” Gon- cific Northwest, temperatures surged past
In Midland, the group found condi- zalez’s bedmate was also ill. “Maybe a hundred and ten degrees in June, kill-
tions that were far from “COVID-19 ready.” it’s just the changing weather?” Gonza- ing more than two hundred people. In
They were taken to a local hotel, where lez suggested. She soon learned that the Southwest, a “megadrought” dropped
they learned that they’d be sleeping four Quintero had been tested for COVID-19. water levels to a once-in-a-millennium
low. This past summer, Hurricane Ida
sent Biblical rains through the roofs of
homes across the Gulf Coast, then pushed
north, killing at least eleven people in
flooded basement apartments in New
York City. But, even as awareness grows
about what President Joe Biden calls our
“code red” extreme-weather threat, most
Americans know little about the labor
crisis tucked within it.
The work of disaster recovery has al-
ways been gruelling. When the most le-
thal storm in U.S. history hit Galveston,
Texas, in 1900, as Al Roker describes it
in his book “The Storm of the Century,”
“white soldiers forced Black men at gun-
point to the front lines of the most hor-
rifying labor that any city could ever face,”
which included loading hundreds of
corpses onto a barge to be dumped at
sea. After the Great Okeechobee Hur-
ricane struck southern Florida, in 1928,
three-fourths of those killed were mi-
grant agricultural workers, most of them
Black. Local officials conscripted the sur-
vivors to bury the dead in mass graves—
pine coffins were primarily reserved for
white victims—and, when some refused,
they were denied food, or shot dead. can Securities, a Manhattan-based firm, storm survivors, advocates, and climate-
Today, the structure of the industry acquired Belfor. If you run a local fix- change experts, and reviewed thousands
has radically transformed. For much of ’em-up firm, you can now attend a work- of pages of Department of Labor records,
the twentieth century, many disaster-res- shop in Las Vegas called “Why, How, death-and-injury reports, and documents
toration businesses were mom-and-pop and When to Sell Your Restoration Busi- emerging from worker-mistreatment lit-
shops; they earned mostly modest rev- ness,” which promises “the only sure bet igation. All told, I found more than two
enues for repairing mostly modest prob- in Vegas—you will come away a winner.” thousand credible claims of harm to work-
lems (a house burned down by a stray Chasing disasters requires a labor ers, including instances of fatal or inju-
cigarette, a chimney felled in a storm), force that is open to arduous work and rious working conditions, stolen wages,
and occasionally got windfalls when an is instantly mobile. Servpro promises assaults, and labor trafficking. I often
outsized catastrophe struck. The work to furnish workers to cri- thought of a worry that pre-
was done mainly by local laborers. In sis sites within days, or even occupied Gonzalez in Mid-
recent years, though, according to the hours; one of its slogans is land: that news cameras de-
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate “Faster to any size disas- scend when a storm or a fire
Change, greenhouse-gas emissions from ter.” To marshal this force, arrives but move on before
human activities have made extreme many companies turn to the work of recovery—often
weather more common and more in- an ill-regulated group of its own disaster—begins.
tense. The National Oceanic and At- subcontractors and labor
mospheric Administration noted a new brokers, which, in turn, cul- aket Soni first encoun-
U.S. record in 2020: a total of twenty-two
“billion-dollar disasters.” Insurance com-
tivate social networks of
migrants and other people
S tered this nascent work-
force in 2005, after Hur-
panies paid out at least seventy-six bil- seeking economic oppor- ricane Katrina. He had
lion dollars for repairs that year, and the tunity. As demand has grown, many of grown up in New Delhi, and studied
government paid more than a hundred these workers have come to travel a yearly English literature and theatre at the
billion. “We’re going to spare no ex- catastrophe circuit. University of Chicago. He graduated
pense,” Biden told the Federal Emer- Sergio Chávez, a sociologist at Rice in 2000, on the eve of 9/11 and the sub-
gency Management Agency this past University, has surveyed more than three sequent creation of Immigration and
May, announcing that he would double hundred roofers from Mexico in the Customs Enforcement. He bungled his
its funds to prepare for extreme weather. course of the past nine years. “At one immigration paperwork, an error that
As money poured in, companies con- point, they were all local roofers, sta- he thought would be “a minor thing,
solidated, and began to chase extreme tioned in Houston or Austin or San like an overdue library book.” Instead,
weather across the country, competing Antonio,” he told me. “Now they’re na- he became undocumented, and was
for insurance payouts and government tional storm chasers.” Some men see dropped from his job and evicted. “I
contracts. Quality Awning & Construc- hurricane jobs as a life-transforming lost my foothold on normal life,” he
tion was founded in 1946 in Dearborn, boon. “But the work is devastating on said. He assumed the alias Aram on of-
Michigan, to handle small fix-up jobs the body,” Chávez said. “The majority ficial paperwork, a name he borrowed
around town. By 1989, the firm had of these guys don’t have access to health from a book of short stories that fea-
changed its name, and the brothers who insurance or paid leave.” When they’re tures migrant watermelon harvesters.
ran it began sending caravans of work- hurt or sick, he continued, “they have Eventually, he got his visa issues re-
ers to storms in other states. In 2001, informal mechanisms to recover. They’ll solved and found work as a community
the firm was sold for an estimated two pool their resources and give an injured organizer. When Katrina hit, he moved
hundred million dollars to Belfor USA colleague as much money as possible.” to New Orleans and fought on behalf of
Group, an emerging industry heavy- The life style is also isolating: “One of Black residents who’d been displaced—
weight then run by Mark Davis and Jeff my guys, a storm chaser named Juanito, many of them living in FEMA trailers—
Johnson. Today, the company does up- died of a heart attack in his mid-thir- arguing for their right to return to their
ward of two billion dollars in business ties, from substance abuse. He was with- neighborhoods.
annually. As Forbes put it, “Climate out his wife, following storms, and he At the same time, Soni got to know
change is good for Belfor.” Servpro, sim- was so lonely.” Existing laws to protect the workers who were helping to re-
ilarly, was founded as a family-owned these workers are widely under-enforced. build the region. In City Park, hundreds
painting business in 1967, and now has “After a disaster, the contractors will of migrant laborers were sleeping in
nineteen hundred locations across the owe thirty thousand dollars by the time tents beneath the oak trees. One of them,
U.S. and Canada. the last paycheck is due,” Chávez said. Mariano Alvarado, had been a shrimper
In the past five years, private-equity “Instead of paying, they’ll call ICE or back in Honduras, until droughts tied
firms have acquired dozens of disaster-res- the police.” to climate change made his livelihood
toration companies. In 2019, Blackstone, In the past year, I followed Resilience untenable; in New Orleans, he spent
one of the world’s largest private-equity Force through more than twenty disas- his days clearing spoiled food from a
firms, acquired a majority stake in Serv- ter recoveries during one of the fiercest storm-ravaged elementary school and
pro Industries, reportedly for more than periods of extreme weather on record. I dealing with wage theft and verbal lash-
a billion dollars. The same year, Ameri- spoke with more than a hundred workers, ings from bosses. At a boutique hotel,
Soni met Daniel Castellanos, a tall Pe- rebuilding New Orleans. “I realized a she signed on with a fly-by-night labor
ruvian, who had paid four thousand dol- new identity was forming among these broker that supplied low-wage workers
lars to a labor broker on the promise of workers, who regarded themselves not to Cotton Commercial USA, a behe-
a well-paid post-Katrina construction just as day laborers, but as people moth disaster-restoration firm.The labor
job. When he arrived in the city, he was who repair after disasters,” Soni said. broker drove her to the country’s south-
pressed into cleaning hotel toilets and He started calling them “resilience ernmost tip, where a sign read:
floors for paltry wages, and sleeping on workers,” and conducted a series of in-
END OF THE RAINBOW
a cot alongside rats in the hotel’s base- depth interviews for a document he ti- UNLIMITED OPPORTUNITIES
ment. “We mortgaged our homes, sold tled “A Taxonomy of Jobs at the End TROPICAL VACATIONLAND
property, and plunged our families into of the World.”
debt to pay the fees,” Castellanos said. Around the country, advocates were When Gonzalez arrived at the bat-
“When I first got here, others told me, noticing new links between climate tered hotel, she was put to work strip-
‘Welcome to the United Slaves of Amer- change and labor exploitation. Nadia ping soggy carpets and carrying bro-
ica.’ And, for me, it was true.” Marin-Molina, who co-directs the Na- ken fans out of mold-ridden rooms. She
Soni soon got a call from an Indian tional Day Laborer Organizing Net- was euphoric when she received her
pipe fitter. The man said that he had work, told me, “After Katrina, we real- first check, but her second bounced, as
been promised a lucrative gig for a com- ized that we needed to reach out and did her third. She also wasn’t paid for
pany called Signal International: he support immigrant workers during di- overtime, a considerable portion of her
would receive a green card and tempo- saster recovery, and also to create longer- earnings. Other workers were being
rary housing in comfortable quarters term structures across the country, like cheated, too; when colleagues texted to
while he worked to repair Gulf Coast local workers’ centers.” The workers complain, they later alleged, their boss
oil rigs damaged by the storm. He’d lacked a shared shop floor or a consis- responded, “I am American,” and “I owe
paid a labor broker more than ten thou- tent employer, but Soni, too, believed you nothing ok stop bothering [me] or
sand dollars for the opportunity. When that they needed to be organized. He immigration will come to your house.”
he arrived, he found himself with a came to see their fates as entwined with When Castellanos got in touch,
guest-worker visa, living with twenty- those of the people disproportionately Gonzalez thought, “The last thing I’d
three other men in a labor camp, a affected by disasters, including low-in- want is for immigration to come and
squalid space the size of a double-wide come survivors of hurricanes and wild- put me in prison.” But her mother had
trailer, paying more than a thousand fires. He started to advocate for those always told her, “If a man treats you
dollars a month for the privilege. Soni people as well. In the fall of 2017, Soni, poorly, speak up.” That week, she began
and other organizers soon discovered Castellanos, and others formed Resil- gathering evidence, turning over faulty
that recruiters had ensnared hundreds ience Force. checks and time stamps to Resilience
of Indian laborers in a similar scheme. Force. The team filed a class-action suit
If the men protested, they were threat- ver the next few years, Soni and against Cotton and its subcontractors,
ened with deportation; three of the
group’s leaders were held under the
O Castellanos hopscotched between
disaster zones, slipping onto job sites to
and the workers received fifty thousand
dollars plus legal fees in a settlement
watch of armed guards. Soni helped the speak to workers and hand out flyers, with Cotton. (A spokesperson for Cot-
workers travel to the White House and bottled water, and beef jerky. (Often, ton said that it conceded no wrongdo-
stage a hunger strike. Eventually, a broad Castellanos carried a Bible in his bag, ing and had paid the labor broker for
coalition, including the American Civil so that, if challenged by management, the work, adding that the company
Liberties Union and the Southern Pov- he and Soni could pretend to be Sev- “believes workers are entitled to just
erty Law Center, sued, and secured one enth-day Adventists.) After Hurricane compensation and has a more than
of the largest human-trafficking settle- Irma hit the Florida Keys, in 2017, a tip twenty-year history partnering with
ments in U.S. history: twenty million led them to Gonzalez. third-party labor providers.” The labor
dollars, plus a formal apology from Sig- In Venezuela, Gonzalez had balanced broker could not be reached for com-
nal International, which declared bank- her job as a conservationist with life as ment.) Gonzalez told me, “After that,
ruptcy. “Signal was wrong in failing to a single mother. She often brought An- I stopped being afraid that we didn’t
ensure that the guest workers were gelica with her into open fields to plant have papers, and started realizing that
treated with the respect and dignity they mahogany trees—“the lungs of the we could organize together.”
deserved,” the company admitted. earth,” she called them. But in early 2017 Members of Resilience Force often
Soni thought that, as the Gulf Coast she got into a series of clashes at work, noticed tensions between residents and
recovered from Katrina, the calls might including when she fought against the the workers coming to rebuild their
fade. Instead, panicked workers dialled deforestation of a bird sanctuary. She towns. In 2018, after Hurricane Michael
his number after f looding in Baton faced threats of violence, and fled to hit the Florida Panhandle, undocu-
Rouge, in 2016, and after Hurricane Miami. A friend soon told her about a mented workers fixed the homes of Don-
Harvey hit Texas, in 2017. He noticed disaster-restoration opportunity at the ald Trump supporters who wished to
that, following Katrina, many workers Hyatt Residence Club Key West, Wind- see them deported; Confederate flags
had begun to live on the road, making ward Pointe. “I’ve been an office worker sometimes flew out front. “We wanted
use of the skills they’d acquired while my whole life,” Gonzalez protested. But to build relationships between the work-
ers and the beneficiaries of their labor,”
Soni said. The team canvassed residents
and found that many felt left behind by
FEMA. A white father of three told Soni
about being evicted from government
housing for storm survivors and having
to move his family into a tent outside
a church, saying, “It feels like we went
through a hurricane twice.”
Resilience Force began recruiting
workers to rebuild the homes of local
residents in need, without charge, after
which they’d share a big dinner and
talk. Soni recalled that, after one such
meal, which Gonzalez attended, a
white mortician who’d hung a sign read-
ing “Strangers Will Be Shot” on his
door quietly took it down. “It’s not in-
evitable that the traumatic experience
of a disaster will lead to more solidar-
ity between political adversaries,” Soni
said. “But at the micro level it creates
an opening.”
In the days after the storm, law en-
forcement had tacitly accepted the pres-
ence of undocumented workers. As the
Panhandle regained its footing, though,
Soni saw a change. A task force, includ-
ing the Bay County Sheriff ’s Office,
staged a series of undercover sting op-
erations: when workers came to fix
houses with damaged roofs, and quoted
a price, the “homeowners” arrested them
for “contracting without a license”—a
felony during a state of emergency—
then, if they were undocumented, turned
them over to ICE for deportation. (A Gonzalez worked several disasters last year, including hurricanes, floods, and fires.
spokesperson for the sheriff ’s office
wrote to me, “It was NEVER about im- ternoon, a man named Gustavo, in a he had no insurance coverage. For days,
migration. It was about non-licensed, panic, told Soni about a co-worker with he was unable to talk or walk. To Soni,
substandard work on the homes of our whom he had been fixing a nearby roof. it was “an instant, horrible vindication
residents already suffering the loss of Their boss had urged them to continue of why Resilience Force was on the
their property.” Unscrupulous contrac- through a rainstorm without safety har- right track.”
tors have, in some cases, preyed on storm nesses, and the colleague had slipped In the years that followed, Soni and
PHOTOGRAPH BY ROSE MARIE CROMWELL FOR THE NEW YORKER
survivors.) Workers, prepped by Resil- and fallen fifteen feet to the driveway his colleagues met some five thousand
ience Force, testified at county-com- beneath. “Blood was coming from his disaster workers. They recruited many,
mission meetings against the crackdown mouth like a faucet,” Gustavo said. including Gonzalez, to be informal
and spoke with local officials to con- Looking at a picture, Soni instantly rec- member-advocates—what Soni called
vince them that they were vital to the ognized the man: it was Mariano Al- “our eyes and ears on the ground”—
region’s economic recovery. varado, the Honduran shrimper he had sharing screenshots of job advertise-
The physical perils of resilience work met in New Orleans after Katrina. He ments, sending updates about their
became increasingly evident to Soni. A and Castellanos rushed to the hospi- work-site conditions, and reminding
forty-three-year-old roofer stepped on tal, where they found Alvarado in a co-workers of their rights. Soni bought
a skylight and fell to his death; three coma; when he finally woke up, two a corkboard map of the United States
utility workers were struck and killed days later, he learned that he’d ruptured for charting workers’ journeys, and de-
by a pickup truck while repairing power a disk in his back, lost thirty per cent voted a red pushpin to Gonzalez. When
lines. Resilience Force often encoun- of his vision, and developed blood clots the pandemic began, he learned that
tered the same people doing danger- in his brain. Doctors later removed the she and dozens of other Venezuelans
ous tasks in storm after storm. One af- clots, an expensive procedure for which were heading to Michigan, the site of
one of the first major pandemic-era cli-
mate disasters, and worried about how
the two crises might collide. PENCIL & PEN
y the time Gonzalez called Resil- A minute is so

B ience Force from her hotel room in
Midland, she had a fever and a painful
long
on my birthday
ache spreading up her spine. She and snow feasts
the other workers demanded COVID on the open
tests, but the county health department air and she
was closed during their off-hours, and bought me flowers
workers told me that Back to New made in my color
it difficult for them to go during the which is
workday. When some of the workers orange
did manage to make the trip, twenty- my color is orange
two tested positive. One of Back to you don’t know
New’s co-owners was asked to convey your color is
the Governor’s order that they quaran- orange. I do
tine for fourteen days. Instead, workers but it is such
said, he told many of them that they a gift
were fired. He was sending them back Myra had snow
to Florida and Texas, workers said, cram- I said
ming the sick together with the healthy I want that
for the journey. and now it
Gonzalez had once helped Resil- has come
ience Force to craft a comic-book-style 71 is a birthday
manual that they handed out in disas- of tiny
ter zones, teaching laborers how to doc- gifts
ument job-site abuses. (“Get the terms crafts and tinkers
of your employment in writing.” “Take just like
pictures of license plates of your em- this
ployers if you are able.”) Now she tried
to put this advice into practice. That —Eileen Myles
Sunday morning, hardly able to move,
she was thrown out of her hotel with
her colleagues. Standing in the park- and the couple soon fell ill, as did their were sent back to Florida. This past
ing lot, she filmed a dispatch on her grandchildren. Yanes recovered quickly, April, Resilience Force was dealt a blow.
cell phone. “My name is Bellaliz Gon- but Delgado had to be hospitalized. In a hearing, Servpro Industries’ law-
zalez, and I’m fifty-four years old,” she On oxygen in the emergency room, he yer argued that the company “did not
said. “Here, they treated us like ani- hallucinated that he was stuck in a sing- employ any of these Plaintiffs,” because
mals.” She panned across a parking lot, ing contest, just as Quintero had en- its franchisees and their subcontractors
filming her sick colleagues, who were couraged him to perform at the Mid- are independently owned and operated.
being put into vans in defiance of the land morgue. In order to stay alive, he A week later, the judge agreed, dismiss-
Governor’s orders. (Some were taken had to prod himself and say, “Keep singing the claims against Servpro Indus-
to Indiana, to work another disaster for ing! Keep singing!” He eventually re- tries and allowing only the claims
Back to New.) “They didn’t care about turned home and began driving an Uber against the smaller entities to continue.
our lives,” she said. again, with an oxygen tank in the pas- (A spokesperson for Servpro Industries
Resilience Force forwarded Gonza- senger seat. said that the company was “not in any
lez’s footage to authorities and the local Soni and his team drafted a legal way involved in the provision of these
press. The organization took up the job strategy. They documented accounts services.” The local franchisees could
of contact tracing and rented Airbnbs from dozens of workers and tallied a not be reached for comment. The co-
so that workers could quarantine once series of alleged legal violations by Serv- owner of Back to New wrote, in a state-
they reached home. Gonzalez holed up pro Industries, their franchisees, and ment, “We deny the specific allegations
alone and shook with fever, not telling Back to New. All told, they said, it of wrongdoing.”) Servpro continued to
Enilsa or Angelica; Cynthia Hernan- amounted to “highly unsafe and life- make millions during the pandemic;
dez, a Resilience Force organizer who’d threatening conditions during the course vans travelled around the country em-
grown close to Gonzalez, brought her of disaster recovery work.” They alleged blazoned with another of its corporate
soup. She slowly recovered. Help that in Indiana, as in Midland, a mass slogans, “Like It Never Even Hap-
reached Yanes and Delgado too late, infection occurred and many workers pened.” More than ever, Soni felt that
Resilience Force’s fight wouldn’t be won ican women sold hot tamales from plas- flanked by bags of onions. As laborers
by suing one company at a time; a larger tic coolers; an Afro-Honduran woman took their seats, Alvarado polled the
intervention was needed. ladled Garifuna stew into disposable group’s storm “résumés”: “Who worked
bowls. Soni enthusiastically devoured a Hurricane Harvey?” Four of them had.
n a chilly Thursday in October, chicken foot, saying, “Duty calls!” Michael? Five. The Baton Rouge floods?
O 2020, I met Soni in New Orleans,
and we set out for Lake Charles, Loui-
At least half a dozen people recog-
nized Soni and Castellanos from pre-
Twelve. The early part of the event cen-
tered around identity building. “Your
siana. Hurricane Laura, a Category 4 vious storms. Some showed them fresh work is honorable!” Soni told the group.
storm, had just hit, damaging more than injuries they’d got on the job. An un- “If you don’t fix the homes and the schools
five hundred thousand houses and other documented worker from Honduras and the banks, how will people in Lake
properties. The region was full of oil re- had an oozing wound in his foot but Charles get back to living?”
fineries and chemical manufacturers, and, hadn’t gone to the hospital, because he Teatro described Resilience Force’s
after the storm, black plumes of chlorine didn’t have insurance. Omar, an undoc- political vision. Locally, it was lobbying
gas wafted over town. Right away, hun- umented roofer, said, “Look at my community leaders to recognize the value
dreds of resilience workers rushed in. hands”; they glowed red with friction of protecting rebuilders’ rights. Nation-
(Gonzalez helped to clear debris from burns from shovelling toxic silt out of ally, it was pushing for a pathway to cit-
an airport before leaving to work in an- a local home without proper gloves. izenship for undocumented resilience
other part of the region.) Omar said, “I’m forty-five, and it’s too workers. A Honduran man called out,
Soni was accompanied on the trip by hard to keep sleeping in a car.” “It’ll never happen.” An older worker re-
Stephanie Teatro, an organizer with red- Some workers lacked even a car to torted, “I came here in the nineties, and
fringed bangs, and Osman, a roofer who bed down in. Soni approached a man I’m legal now. It takes time, but we have
moonlights as a preacher. Osman had named George, a white worker with a to dream big.” Osman asked the audi-
been arrested in a sting operation in the scruffy beard, and asked, “Where are you ence to share their struggles. One said,
Florida Panhandle, and was now await- sleeping?” The man pointed to a patch “Yesterday, cops came here targeting peo-
ing deportation proceedings. Soni also of pavement in front of a PetSmart. He ple with our color skin, as if we were
introduced me to one of his newest hires, had no tent, pillow, blanket, or tools. trash.” Soni responded, “You won’t be
Mariano Alvarado, the Honduran man He’d recently got out of jail and hitched safe and secure on your own—the cops
who had fallen from the roof in Florida. a ride to town, hearing that he might are organized, ICE is organized.” He
“He’s a Job-like figure,” Soni said. Al- find work there even during the pan- added, “If you want to enter a common
varado still had nerve pain, poor balance, demic. Soni bought him two sausages fight, I ask you to stand.” Almost every-
and post-traumatic stress, but his work from a food truck. “Here’s my cell-phone one did. Osman closed the meeting by
with Resilience Force gave him a sense number,” he said, handing the man a lifting his arms. “Let’s pray,” he said. “Pro-
of purpose. “I think God made this hap- card. “What you’re doing here is an im- tect us from accidents, protect us from
pen,” he told me, “because people need portant public service.” police. Thank you, Jesus. Amen.”
to know our stories.” Resilience Force was offering free
When a storm descends on a town, laminated I.D.s for workers who lacked hen getting an education in the
many resilience workers converge on the
parking lot of the nearest Home De-
government identification. Castellanos
carried a portable I.D.-maker in a can-
W lives of disaster-recovery work-
ers, you encounter a diverse array of cri-
pot—a spot they call the Corner—where vas bag, taking names and personal in- ses. Some of the most striking allega-
some live out of their cars for weeks or tions I heard were of outright labor
months while hustling for jobs. (The Re- trafficking. David Gautreaux, a forty-
silience Force crew often sleeps in the four-year-old roofer, told me that, in 2017,
parking lot, too.) As we pulled into the he got excited about a job offer from a
Lake Charles Home Depot lot at dawn, North Carolina company fixing roofs
Soni tallied at least fifty workers. Many in the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurri-
had driven from Texas, Alabama, or Flor- cane Irma. He said that he was prom-
ida, and most spoke Spanish. Some had ised twenty-two hundred dollars a week.
affixed hand-painted signs to their cars But, when he arrived, his employer put
(“HANDYMAN”) or stencilled ads onto him in a remote hotel without access to
their vans (“Hot Patch/Holes in Walls/ formation. Though the I.D.s offered no potable water or transportation. He and
Give us a call, we do it all”). In the early- legal protection, cops sometimes left some of his colleagues worked for nearly
morning hours, prospective employers workers alone if they flashed their blue- a month without pay, according to a law-
often arrived in flatbed trucks, shouting and-yellow Resilience Force badge. suit filed by eight workers last year. “Soon,
out job offers: did anyone want to gather Just before sundown, the Resilience I’d done gone through all the money I
bushels of shattered glass from a local Force crew gathered in the parking lot had,” Gautreaux told me. “I’m ashamed
business, for three hundred dollars a for a worker meeting. Castellanos cre- to say it, but one day, sitting there with
bucket? Food trucks follow workers to ated a semicircle of folding chairs, and nothing to eat, I stole pork chops to cook.”
storm sites, serving traditional meals from Soni used bales of hay to build a stair- Workers told me that one of Gau-
their home countries. A group of Mex- case to a stage: the back of a pickup truck treaux’s group got a splinter of sheet metal
Work sites are full of preventable dan-
gers. Consulting with Matt Nadel of the
Yale Investigative Reporting Lab, I tal-
lied more than forty resilience workers’
deaths over the past ten years. They died
of heatstroke, flesh-eating bacteria, falls,
electrocution. Many more deaths have
likely never been acknowledged. “There’s
a total undercounting of the true num-
ber of injuries from disaster cleanups,”
Debbie Berkowitz, who during the
Obama years worked at the Occupa-
tional Safety and Health Administra-
tion protecting disaster-recovery work-
ers, told me. “It’s an industry with an
incredibly vulnerable workforce made up
of many workers of color and immigrant
workers who have very high rates of un-
derreporting when they get hurt.”
Wage theft may be the most perva-
sive problem faced by resilience work-
ers—an economic crime that law en-
forcement rarely chooses to prosecute.
In a study for the National Day Laborer
Organizing Network and the Fe y Jus-
ticia Worker Center, Nik Theodore, a
professor at the University of Illinois
Chicago, found that more than three-
quarters of day laborers in Houston had
experienced wage theft, and more than
a quarter had been victimized in the
month after Hurricane Harvey. Soni dis-
likes the term “wage theft,” because he
believes that it fails to capture the full
harm. “In a disaster zone, wage theft isn’t
really just wage theft—it’s an index of
Soni’s group follows workers as they follow storms, trying to prevent job-site abuses. forced labor,” he told me. If your em-
ployer owes you money, you’re paradox-
implanted in his eye and was told to walk physical, verbal, and sexual. In Grand ically more, not less, likely to keep show-
to the hospital. When members of the Isle, Louisiana, a white businessman ing up to the job, holding out hope of
group spoke up about their conditions, struck two Black women on a hurricane being granted what you’re owed. After
according to the legal complaint, their repair crew while shouting racist epi- a major storm or fire, your only access
bosses “threatened Plaintiffs with death thets. (He later pleaded guilty to federal to safe drinking water and food may
or serious bodily injury, and coerced civil-rights violations.) Last summer, come through your employer. “The fear
Plaintiffs to continue working or else after hailstorms struck Loveland, Colo- of retaliation is strong, and, if you sit
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNIE FLANAGAN FOR THE NEW YORKER
they would never be paid.” Jeremy San- rado, two men assessing damaged roofs down to strike, you’ll be fired and lose
tos, a foreman from Puerto Rico, told were reportedly held at gunpoint by a all of your pay,” he said. “In these disas-
me, “Instead of sending the money back man in fatigues, who described them to ter environments, housing is often pro-
to our wives, our wives are the ones send- police as “antifa guys.” A worker who vided by the employer, and if you’re not
ing money to us, and we’re having to tell cleaned out incinerated hotels and office paid you have nowhere else to go. You
them to pawn our tools back home to buildings after a recent fire in Califor- have no gas money, no car, no choice.”
keep the lights on.” He added, “This is nia told me that the bosses on the proj- Biden has spoken often of the jobs
a federal project of the U.S. government— ect had sexually harassed several women that can be created by investing in cli-
this is FEMA money! And yet, they say workers, called the men “wetbacks,” and mate resilience but has said little about
no one is aware of this abuse?” (An at- failed to pay them as promised. “Many how to safeguard this workforce from
torney for the companies in the case said of the guys had already just lost their abuse, which pervades many FEMA-
that they deny the allegations, and the homes in the fire, and they were sleep- funded projects. The Trump Adminis-
suit has been ordered into arbitration.) ing in their cars, just trying to survive,” tration gutted OSHA, an already poorly
Another widespread threat is assault— he said. “And then, to be cheated?” funded agency, and it now has fewer
compliance officers than at almost any would train a skilled resilience work- what the wages were.” The spokesper-
point in its history. “There’s no army of force—a Resilience Corps, as he imag- son also acknowledged that there were
OSHA inspectors that can be deployed ines it—modelled on the Works Prog- some “payment discrepancies,” and said
after a hurricane or other disaster to make ress Administration of the New Deal. that a process was eventually set up for
sure that the workers involved in the Last year, Resilience Force launched a “payment resolution.”)
cleanup are safe,” Berkowitz told me. “If pilot program in New Orleans for work- Signal represents the new model of
the federal government doesn’t step in ers such as barbers, bartenders, and mas- American disaster restoration. The com-
and think about how to keep cleanup sage therapists who had lost their jobs pany had begun in 1972 as a sleepy res-
workers protected, we’ll see a whole lot during the pandemic, retraining them as idential-repair company, but, in 2012, it
of workers get really, really sick, and die, aid workers supporting storm evacuees. was bought by Mark Davis, the entre-
from all kinds of safety hazards.” Un- preneur who had run Belfor USA Group,
documented laborers are often reluctant few minutes after the meeting in and his partner, Frank Torre. “Before,
to bring claims forward. “The legal pro-
tections these workers have from retali-
A Lake Charles ended, the mood
turned. Castellano’s phone was buzzing
this business was volatile and had an
unpredictable revenue line—the big
ation are almost nil,” Berkowitz said. with texts warning of an altercation in storms weren’t happening that regu-
Soni and his team have enumerated a nearby Walmart parking lot. We drove larly,” Davis told me. “But, with the in-
more than a dozen changes that could over and found more than fifty workers crease in frequency and severity of nat-
help safeguard workers. As a starting scattered across the lot, distressed and ural disasters, the big storms are now a
point, he said, “We want the Adminis- outraged. About twenty had surrounded safe bet.” Today, the company travels to
tration to insure that worker housing is a car and were smacking the windshield all corners of the country with huge
a right,” noting that FEMA already pro- as a young man—a manager from Con- white trucks, carting an arsenal of spe-
vides shelter and food for some emer- tractor Support Group, a Texas-based cialized equipment (air scrubbers, mois-
gency-response personnel. The federal company that delivers thousands of ture meters), and relies on subcontrac-
government, he argues, should also en- workers to disaster-repair firms—cow- tors and manpower agencies to find
courage raising labor standards by grant- ered inside and tried to drive away. general laborers.
ing contracts to companies with better “That bitch is gonna pay!” a young In the parking lot, a man from Jean-
wages and working conditions. Marin- woman shouted at the vehicle. erette, Louisiana, told me that he and
Molina, from the National Day Laborer “Give us what you owe us!” yelled his wife had been shovelling mud and
Organizing Network, suggested that another. other detritus out of a local elementary
Biden offer deferred action for undoc- The people in the lot had been work- school for a month, and hadn’t been
umented whistle-blowers: “What if ing on a project run by Signal Re- paid. “We drive two and a half hours
workers who came forward to report ex- storation Services, a Michigan-based every day for this job—it’s like we’re
ploitation at work—like being exposed company. (It has no relation to Signal practically paying them!” he said. Misty
to electrical and chemical hazards, or International, the corporation that traf- Zeledon, a chain-smoking woman with
being forced to work on a roof without ficked Indian workers after Katrina.) glittery eye shadow, told me that she
proper equipment—could get protec- Signal had landed a large deal to repair had been keeping a journal document-
tion from deportation?” Resilience Force the Isle of Capri casino, whose gaming verbal abuse, improper protective
is also teaming up with members of Con- bling barge had broken free during the equipment, a lack of promised food, and
gress, including Pramila Jayapal and Joa- storm and hit a bridge, and another to withheld paychecks. “Me? I don’t work
quin Castro, to create an on-ramp to cit- clean up more than a hundred build- for free,” she said. (The C.S.G. spokes-
izenship for resilience workers. ings for the parish school district. Some person claimed that protective gear and
Soni envisages a variety of farther- of the workers had found the job through food were provided for the workers.) A
reaching efforts to make our approach Facebook; when they arrived, they were twenty-three-year-old local named Brian
to climate disasters more equitable. He given Signal safety vests. But, weeks into Williams had escaped his mobile home
has urged FEMA to revamp existing aid the work, many complained that they when the hurricane descended, and was
programs for storm survivors, which often still hadn’t been paid their full salaries, living in a hotel hours away with his fi-
give greater support to homeowners than if they’d been paid at all. For days, rep- ancée and infant daughter. For a month,
to renters, compounding economic and resentatives from Contractor Support he had been cleaning out insulation,
racial inequalities. Some proposals are Group had told the workers to show up which gave him hives, and said he still
state-specific: in a report called “A Peo- at various locations—an abandoned hadn’t been paid. “My baby is down to
ple’s Framework for Disaster Response,” movie theatre, a parking lot, a school— three cans of canned milk,” he said. (The
Resilience Force criticizes Florida’s gov- with the promise of payments, which, C.S.G. spokesperson said that the com-
ernor, Ron DeSantis, for responding to workers said, largely failed to material- pany had not received a medical com-
disasters by “slashing benefits such as un- ize. (A C.S.G. spokesperson claimed plaint about Williams’s hives.)
employment insurance and creating bar- that some workers were misled about The manager in the car had contacted
riers to disaster food assistance, making how much they would be paid by false 911 for help, and local police rolled up.
it more difficult—not less—for people information that someone posted on Williams helped defuse the situation,
to recover.” Soni has also drafted a plan Facebook, and added that, when work- and the crowd agreed to disperse in
for a national public-jobs program that ers showed up, “we were very clear about accordance with a local curfew. Soni,
impressed, took down Williams’s num- Castellanos approached. “You look sur- school board in the parish where Signal
ber as a potential organizing ally. prised,” he said. “This happens every- was contracted, asking that it not be paid
The next night, the tension escalated where we go. Always.” until the wage-theft allegations were re-
at a Signal command center, just out- solved. Davis believed that his company
side the Isle of Capri casino. Castella- oni spent the next few months at was providing a vital service to a com-
nos, Soni, and I ducked past security
guards and into an area that looked like
S home, gathering evidence against Sig-
nal. He tapped at a computer on his stand-
munity in urgent need. Disaster work,
he told me, is “very similar to a military
a military encampment. Large trailers ing desk facing an enormous bookcase operation, but without the budget the
had been converted into sleeping quar- filled with labor and climate-change lit- federal government brings to a war.” It
ters where a largely white, mostly male erature, a whole shelf devoted to John requires ingenuity just to recruit suffi-
managerial class bedded down each Steinbeck. Nearby, he had a black go bag, cient labor. “You can’t predict where a
night. (Many laborers were commuting stuffed with audio devices, a coffeemaker, storm will hit, or when, or on what scale,
from hours away, sleeping in cars, or a wireless hot spot, some cash, and a small so how do you prepare?” he asked.
paying for rooms in distant hotels, some container of cumin, his “survival spice” The two men agreed to meet on
sharing beds.) About eighty workers for bland hotel food. Just before last Zoom. On the call, Soni told Davis
rallied outside their bosses’ trailers, de- Thanksgiving, Soni faxed Davis, the Sig- about a migrant worker named Veron-
manding their pay. One manager ad- nal C.E.O., a copy of Resilience Force’s ica who’d driven seven hours from South
dressed the crowd: “I’ve got five min- lawsuits against Cotton and Servpro. Texas to seek her unpaid wages, a trip
utes before I call the police on people.” When Davis first heard Soni’s name, that had cost her seven hundred dollars
When he spotted me taking notes, he he was at his home in Florida, icing a in transportation and hotel costs; she’d
told a colleague, “There’s a journalist groin injury he had sustained in Lake been selling apples on the street to cover
here. Call the police.” Another boss said, Charles while overseeing company work; it. (Her supervisor on the job had al-
between swigs of a bottle, “This is giv- a trusted manager had called to report legedly told her that she was “pretty but
ing me erectile dysfunction.” When I unrest among the workers, telling Davis, dumb.”) Eight subcontracted workers
asked his name, he replied, “Right now, “It’s a mob mentality—this could be a from out of town, Davis learned, were
no hablo English.” A third supervisor powder keg,” and attributing the pro- lodged in the same hotel room at one
urged the protesters to go to the latest tests to Resilience Force. Davis read up of his sites, sharing beds. (“That is against
address that Contractor Support Group on the group feeling irked, thinking, our hotel policy,” the C.S.G. spokesper-
had issued, the parking lot of a second These guys are all stick and no carrot. son said. “Company policy is two peo-
Walmart, for payment. “No more ad- His frustration escalated a few weeks ple per room.”)
dresses!” someone shouted. “Give us our later, when he received a copy of a let- To Davis, the scale of the problem
money!” I spoke to a dozen workers until ter Soni had sent to the head of the looked clear. He had already heard of
such issues, and told Soni that he had
begun to address them. “When I was
nine years old, working the milo fields,
I expected to get paid,” he said. “Hav-
ing someone do a job and not get paid
for it? I can’t wrap my arms around it.”
His company relied on subcontractors,
which he saw as a necessity, but he con-
ceded that it left him little visibility into
workers’ conditions. “When the sub hires
a sub, that’s when it gets out of control,”
he said. He asked Soni, “Who’s doing
this better?” Soni replied, “But that’s the
point. There’s no one.” Soni told Davis
that he’d like to partner with him to cre-
ate a new set of industry-wide standards
for disaster work that would build ac-
countability into the field’s supply chain.
In early May, Davis invited the Re-
silience Force team to join him at the
headquarters of his and Torre’s newest
business acquisition, PuroClean, in Tam-
arac, Florida. The franchise specializes
in fires and floods, and also cleans up
meth labs, the homes of hoarders, and
murder scenes, advertising a service for
“Do you ever feel like there’s nothing left to curse?” “deodorizing locations where traumatic
events have occurred.” Davis showed Soni uated from high school and is heading anti-immigrant families in Florida. “Yes,
its Flood House, a fully furnished home to a community college next year. When in the Panhandle, the white people
that his colleagues routinely doused with I arrived, Gonzalez was watching a church changed their opinion of us,” Gonzalez
tens of thousands of gallons of water to service on a flat-screen TV—one of three said. Still, she worried about the long-
teach students the science of home res- pieces of furniture in her living room, term toll of the job. Soni often argued
toration. Afterward, the teams sat down along with a couch and a special stool that resilience workers were “like the
around a boardroom table and addressed for displaying her Bible. She lit a small early coal miners, the ones who got black
four key issues affecting workers: wages, coconut candle and turned on the ring lung disease—they knew they were
housing, safety, and food. At one point, light that Angelica had purchased to im- breathing stuff that was bad for them,
Soni mentioned Gonzalez, who lived prove her Instagram posts. but they weren’t sure what
nearby. “She worked for eleven dollars an I’d last seen Gonzalez it was, and Congress hadn’t
hour,” he said. “Do you think these work- this past fall, in Pensacola, yet acted to protect them.”
ers are more valuable than that?” Florida, where she had been Gonzalez had become
Davis’s competitors, when con- working twelve-hour days fixated on what she could
fronted by Resilience Force, had dodged rebuilding a hotel hit by do to make people pay at-
and deflected. But Davis came to see Hurricane Sally. Pensacola tention to workers like her.
basic labor protections as both fair and was her seventh disaster One night, she drafted a
feasible. “Quite frankly, the insurance scene of the year, and she’d proposal. “Let’s just think
industry allows for the minimum stan- hardly been sleeping. Even what would happen with-
dards these workers deserve—the over- her usual rituals—drinking out the presence of immi-
time, the travel pay, the food, the safety chocolate Ensure, taking grants in restoration work,”
training,” he said, “and there’s no rea- collagen, and applying goji-berry eye she wrote. “We risk our lives more, and
son not to meet them.” By June, the cream—weren’t bringing relief. Enilsa yet, we are the ones who get the least
two sides had a deal. Davis agreed to a had told her that Angelica was trying well paid.” She had ideas about what
fifteen-dollar floor wage for all “gen- to think of a fake emergency to trick her workers deserve: access to hygienic bath-
eral laborers.” Crucially, Signal would mother into coming home. rooms, nutritious food, better wages.
pay dues into a labor-rights fund, which In Pensacola, Gonzalez had helped The people at the top, making the most
would include money for enforcement. recruit more than twenty storm workers money, she thought, ought to be ac-
In return, it would reap a range of ben- for an organizing dinner with Resilience countable for what happens down the
efits, including training sessions to build Force. Many had survived the COVID supply chain. “They’re responsible,” she
the skills of laborers for their projects. outbreak in Midland. Reinaldo Quin- said. “I hope we can set a precedent to
Seasoned worker-experts, like Gonza- tero sang a ballad. Soni asked the group teach these companies about respect—
lez, could get certified to inspect Sig- a leading question: “If you could have like how to see us as more than just ma-
nal’s sites and to lead the training. total stability, and guaranteed fair wages, chines for our labor.”
This fall, as disaster season acceler- would you make a career out of resilience Gonzalez also hoped more people
ated, Davis and Soni recruited other com- work?” Most nodded, but Gonzalez said, would realize how lonely disaster work
panies to adopt the standards. Right away, “This work, it’s difficult—it means being could be. She had begun writing poetry
some of the industry’s largest players far from my daughter. Honestly, if I could infused with hurricane metaphors. (In
agreed to talk. Soni hopes to cajole a find some other way, I would.” one, “Imaginary Winds,” she writes of
dozen or more to sign on, leaning on the Two days later, another hurricane ap- how “the subtle breeze of a great love
private-equity firms that own them. He proached Pensacola, and, after my phone dissolves,” replaced by gusts of “pain
doesn’t see his work with disaster-resto- buzzed with an evacuation order, I left deep within the heart.”)
ration C.E.O.s like Davis as a contra- town at 6 A.M. Gonzalez stayed for a As we spoke, Gonzalez’s phone pinged.
diction. Large-scale rebuilding titans, he while (storm workers are exempt from “Are you going to this year’s hurricane
believes, aren’t going away, and we’ve mandatory evacuations), then went to season?” a friend she’d met in Pensacola
come to require their services. This sum- Colorado to help rebuild a town after texted. She paused. “Not this year,” she
mer, flash floods struck Soni’s neighbor- a wildfire. She’d been assigned to re- wrote back, then turned to me, conflicted.
hood in D.C., causing a leak in his build- store a home but sat down on the own- “My mother’s heart feels good,” she said,
ing; a neighbor called Servpro, unaware er’s couch at lunch to eat a sandwich “but my adventurer’s heart aches.” Gon-
that Soni was fighting it in court. “All of and was instantly fired and made to pay zalez has been talking to Soni about be-
us now depend on these companies to her own way back to Florida. coming a trainer for resilience workers.
survive,” he said. In Miami, we went out to eat at an In the meantime, she’s found temporary
Olive Garden. Angelica sat with us, work in the pharmaceutical industry,
ecently, I visited Gonzalez in Miami. scrolling through her phone and eaves- which allows her to live at home. I asked
R With her savings from disaster work,
she had moved into her own apartment,
dropping. She said, “O.K., Mom, I’m
actually learning about your life.” She
her whether she was sure that she’d never
return to a storm job. “In Venezuela, there’s
a second-floor one-bedroom, where An- told me, “I’m not, like, ‘Save the trees’— a saying,” she told me. “Don’t ever say, ‘I
gelica did her homework by the window, that’s my mom’s thing.” But she was im- won’t drink that water.’ You never know
overlooking palm fronds. She had grad- pressed that her mother had confronted how thirsty you’ll get.” 
LIFE AND LETTERS
THE PAPER TOMB

A Bennington professor’s diary, kept for eight decades, is one of the longest—and oddest—texts ever written.
BY BENJAMIN ANASTAS
he most prophetic literary crit- literary work. Moreover, because the candidate to have his archive preserved
T icism that I’ve read in recent

years is a twenty-four-page
chapbook published by an obscure pri-
author doesn’t know while writing how
his dilemmas will be resolved, the re-
sulting narrative captures better than a
at an institution as prominent as the
Getty, which is best known for collect-
ing the papers of such avant-garde
vate foundation in Vermont. The au- novel “how complex experience actu- artists as Man Ray and Robert Map-
thor is Claude Fredericks, a printer, ally is.” Fredericks goes on, “What I’d plethorpe. Fredericks had published
playwright, amateur poet, and classics like to propose is that . . . we now are almost none of his writing when the
professor, who died in 2013. He is largely no longer content with the conventions Getty made its acquisition: six poems,
unknown outside a small circle of for- of fiction, that the whole idea of char- in 1944; one play, in a “New American
mer students and colleagues at Ben- acter and plot . . . no longer seems to Plays” anthology from 1965; two pieces
nington College—unknown, at least, be true.” Three decades before the rise in the Times Book Review; a small ex-
by his own name. But readers of Donna of autofiction—novels that appear to cerpt of his notebooks in Parenthèse, a
Tartt’s 1992 novel, “The Secret History,” hew to an author’s lived experience, literary journal, in 1979. “Is there not
will have a sense of Fredericks through largely dispensing with the artifices of achievement in remaining so completely
his fictionalized alter ego, Julian Mor- fiction—Fredericks is calling for some- unpublished?” he wrote, with a touch
row, a magnetic classics professor whose thing similar. of self-loathing, as he was nearing forty.
tutelage in ancient Dionysiac rites so Fredericks’s lecture, in fact, proposes Small theatre companies in New York
enthralls his students that they com- dropping the illusions of fiction alto- produced his plays—among them a
mit—or are complicit in—two mur- gether. He makes a case for immersing pacifist political allegory called “The
ders. I learned about the real Freder- readers in a subjective record of an in- Idiot King”—but they received poor
icks only after joining Bennington’s dividual’s experience, in “real time,” com- reviews and had brief runs. More sig-
faculty, in 2012. His chapbook is titled plete with all the errors, vagueness, lies, nificant is Fredericks’s work for the
“How to Read a Journal,” and the main and mystifications that we engage in Banyan Press, a small letterpress pub-
text is adapted from a talk that he de- when we try to justify ourselves to our- lisher that he operated, with interrup-
livered on campus in 1988. By that time, selves. A journal is a “living thing,” he tions, from 1946 until the late seven-
he had taught at Bennington for twenty- says; a novel is a “taxidermist’s replica.” ties. Banyan published writing by
seven years, and was the longest-stand- Fredericks, as he points out in his Gertrude Stein, André Gide, Stephen
ing member of its Literature and Lan- lecture, was uniquely qualified to ex- Spender, James Merrill, and others, in
guages faculty, which over the decades plore the formal virtues of the journal. limited-run editions that were made
had included Bernard Malamud, How- Beginning at the age of eight, in 1932, with an almost spiritual sense of pre-
ard Nemerov, and Camille Paglia. and lasting until a few weeks before cision and care. Fredericks, who dropped
The talk was held in the communal his death, at eighty-nine, Fredericks out of Harvard in his sophomore year,
living room of one of the white clap- was producing what he liked to call wasn’t a scholar in any professional
board student houses built in 1932, when “one of the longest books about a sin- sense; he published no academic pa-
the college was founded. It was in such gle hero ever written.” All told, his jour- pers on the Greek, Italian, and Japa-
living rooms, which often had working nal stretches past sixty-five thousand nese literature that he taught for thirty
fireplaces, that Fredericks liked to hold pages. (This is an estimate made by the years. He dedicated himself instead to
his classes: on Pindar and Aeschylus, Claude Fredericks Foundation, a not- a life of self-directed study, and to a
on Japanese literature of the Heian pe- for-profit entity that Fredericks incor- relentless pursuit of love and beauty—
riod, on Augustine’s “Confessions” and porated, in 1978, to preserve and even- an ambition that he connected to ideas
other religious texts. (The narrator of tually publish his journal in its entirety.) espoused in Plato’s Symposium, which,
“The Secret History” notes Julian’s be- In 1990, when this epic narrative ex- Fredericks wrote in the early eighties,
lief that “pupils learned better in a pleas- periment was still under way, the Getty was “the only holy book I truly know.”
ant, non-scholastic atmosphere.”) In Research Institute acquired Freder- The Getty catalogue estimates that
the lecture, Fredericks extolls the jour- icks’s papers, for an undisclosed sum. the portion of the journal ending in
nal as a special form. Because its au- The purchase included the first part of 1988 runs to fifty thousand pages. This
thor can reflect solely on what’s already the journal, documenting the years from manuscript and Fredericks’s personal
happened, the narrative is perpetually 1932 to 1988. letters—some twenty thousand pages—
in medias res—a “peculiar quality” in a Fredericks might seem an unlikely fill twenty-seven archival boxes. The
Claude Fredericks, circa 1950. He knew Anaïs Nin, James Merrill, and Donna Tartt, but writes, “I never met my equal.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY GRANT CORNETT THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 45
rest of the journal, covering 1989 to 2012, importance if anything in this world Toward the end of Fredericks’s life,
was acquired by the Getty in 2018, and endures long enough to be called per Hammer said, he came to know Fred
has yet to be processed. On an inven manent or important.” During the past ericks well, and received a “guided tour”
tory sheet, this section of the manu two years, I have been reading as much of the journal while conducting re
script is described as being “many 1000s of the journal as I can manageably di search for a 2015 biography of Merrill,
of pages.” If and when Fredericks’s jour gest, from the original manuscript stored who was a significant lover of Freder
nal is precisely catalogued, it may well at the Getty Center, in Los Angeles, icks’s. “Claude wanted to honor the
prove to be the longest continuous rec and from photocopies lent to me by the original, imperfect form,” Hammer
ord of an American life on paper—in estate. At once more addictively en said. “The text at its moment of cre
any case, it’s certainly among the lon grossing and fatally tedious than any ation.” Fredericks, who resigned from
gest. Other hypertrophied thing else I have read, it is Bennington in 1993, after a male stu
diaries exist, but those have the strange chronicle of a dent accused him of sexual harassment,
generally gained renown “great” man whose genius wasn’t concerned that there might be
as works of outsider art. is recognized almost exclu ugliness in his diary. According to his
Robert Shields, a minister, sively by the chronicler him theory of the journal as a “total” work
a highschool teacher, and self. It is Nabokov’s “Pale of literature, a diaristic account should
a hobby poet in Dayton, Fire” but set in Vermont, be proudly unsanitized, including the
Washington, documented with Fredericks playing the prejudices and delusions that may re
his every activity, at five roles both of Charles Kin veal us to be monsters in our hearts.
minute intervals, for twenty bote, the fawning critic on Indeed, when Fredericks gave his chap
five years, leaving behind a the edge of mania, and of book lecture, he told the audience that
diary estimated to contain John Shade, the eminent such an exposure is inevitable, “if we
some thirtyseven million words. An but mediocre poet. “I accept no author are honest.”
other Sunday poet, Arthur Crew In ities,” Fredericks writes, in the fifties.
man—a wealthy eccentric who lived as “And I . . . never met my equal, at least he earliest published mention of
a shutin in Boston’s Back Bay, and hired
workingclass “talkers” to sit for inter
among my contemporaries.”
The journal is also a candid record
T Fredericks’s journal that I’ve found
is from 1948. Appropriately enough,
views in his bedroom, so that he could of the homosexual underground in the citation comes from one of the
subject them to analysis—compiled a midcentury New York City, and the most famous journals of the twentieth
diary of seventeen million words. memoirs of a young gadfly’s encoun century: the diaries of the Cuban
In the final years of Fredericks’s life, ters with such figures as Marcel Du FrenchAmerican writer Anaïs Nin.
he and a former student, Marc Har champ, Alice B. Toklas, and Gore Vidal. She notes, of Fredericks, “He was a
rington, began transcribing his journal (“False values, pomposities, vanities,” friend with whom one could exchange
and printing serial volumes of it. They Fredericks spews after one encounter confidences. He writes a diary. I read
made it only to 1943, using the print with Vidal.) It ripens into a portrait of some pages of it. His descriptions of
ondemand platform Xlibris to selfpub a worldly man’s deepening solitude as sexuality are very specific and he may
lish the first four thousand pages in six he ages. not be able to publish it.”
uniform, bluesleeved volumes. These The journal sometimes overwhelms Fredericks was drawn into Nin’s
begin with Claude’s childhood, in Fredericks with its outlandish scale: he bohemian circle in New York in 1945,
Springfield, Missouri, where his dot expresses frustration with the respon when he was in his early twenties and
PREVIOUS SPREAD: SOURCE PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE ESTATE OF JAMES MERRILL

ing mother nourishes his desire to see sibility of writing future entries, and he she was in her early forties. Nin had
Tallulah Bankhead movies and listen can seem demoralized by sitting down just published a collection of short sto
AT WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS, COURTESY MARC HARRINGTON
on the Victrola to Toscanini conduct every day to confront the same life. At ries, “Under a Glass Bell,” and crossed
ing Brahms; Claude comes to loathe one point in 1982, Fredericks writes, paths with Fredericks when they were
his father, a regional manager at an oil “I’ve lost the thread again. This page, both pursuing Marshall Barer, an il
andgas company, calling him neglect these pages, these volumes are a laby lustrator at Esquire who went on to be
ful and a “vulgar drunk.” When he is rinth I cannot find my way out of. I come a success on Broadway. (He wrote
sixteen, his parents separate. He muses, have wasted a life in writing them. They the lyrics for “Once Upon a Mattress.”)
“It was Mother’s babying and . . . Dad are without value. And yet they’ve Fredericks had a preternatural gift for
dy’s not being a father that made me a helped keep me sane.” placing himself alongside people des
homosexual, je pense.” The volumes go Langdon Hammer, a biographer tined for acclaim. When he was at Har
on to chronicle his year and a half at and an English professor at Yale, told vard, Fredericks had grown close to the
Harvard, where he studies Greek, and me, “I think Claude very honorably poet May Sarton, whose father was on
end as he prepares to depart for war had an idea about the journal, related the faculty, and he joined the Cam
time Manhattan—a new life of con to his homosexuality and to his early bridge literary set that orbited Del
certs, galleries, and cruising for sailors reading of Freud. He wanted to priv more Schwartz (“very ugly but the most
in Central Park. ilege exactly what we edit out and com sensitive looking person I know”) and
In 1972, Fredericks writes, “I know press and shape as writers—the self ’s John Berryman (“so advanced and yet
that this journal is a work of permanent own repetitiveness and falsifications.” so retarded that I got a terrific despair
for poetry”). Later, in New York, at a per is a passive receiver of the foot, after change they had in 1946, at a birthday
restaurant in Greenwich Village, Fred- all. And what artist wants to be the party that she threw for him. He describes
ericks picked up a pretty young painter “shock absorber”? Nonetheless, they her turning to him suddenly and saying,
who was reading Lorca—her name was clearly shared a devotion to the diary “You will be a very great and famous writer,
Frances Brando—and soon found him- form, and, like Fredericks, Nin was de- Claude. . . . You are the only one of all
self at a party, deep in drunken con- termined to chronicle her “reality and the group that I am absolutely sure of.”
versation with her younger brother, a truth” with unflinching honesty. Her di- As a present, Nin tells him, she is chron-
brooding, charismatic actor. Fredericks aries documented not only her volatile icling her thoughts about some diary
writes, “Marlin and I sat on the couch, affairs with Henry Miller and Antonin pages of his: a journal of reading his jour-
and I was tempted to take advantage Artaud but also her incestuous relation- nal. The notion, he writes, “enchants me.”
of his drunkenness, but did not.” When ship, as an adult, with her father. (If Nin did compose such a document, it
the two met again, months later, fol- Crucially, it was Nin who first sug- appears not to have survived.)
lowing the actor’s Broadway début, in gested to Fredericks that the diary had In 1954, while the two writers were
“I Remember Mama,” Fredericks still a special literary status. She also made living in the Village, Nin reconsidered
referred to Marlon Brando as Marlin. him aware of the perils of editing such the idea of editing her journal. She pro-
During this New York period, Fred- texts. During the same period in which posed publishing selections from her
ericks portrays himself as a figure of Fredericks makes his appearance in Nin’s and Fredericks’s diaries in the same vol-
fierce but thwarted ambition: “I thrive diary as “the invisible man,” she recounts ume. Both would use pseudonyms, given
on praise, I thrive on solitude, I thrive an episode from Paris in the thirties: that many of the entries would be con-
on love; I have none now. I need love the famed editor Maxwell Perkins sug- sidered scandalous. Her agent was on
badly.” Living on an allowance from his gested that she stitch selections from board, she reported. But Fredericks—
mother—who had parlayed her own- her diary into a manuscript, but when not one to share the stage—resisted,
ership of a Missouri service station into she did so Perkins was “disturbed” by and the idea languished. “I felt very de-
a small-business empire—he was work- the results, and declared that her diary fensive with her, and I did not want to
ing on poetry, fiction, and plays, and “should be published in its entirety or see her again,” he writes, comparing her
trying without success to publish some- not at all.” Nin concludes that, if her to a clinging vine.
thing. He was also living as much of “novels are symbolic and composites, Nin began publishing her diary, to
an openly gay life as he could under the diary must at least be intact.” acclaim and condemnation, in 1966. Not
the law. “No homosexual can be alive,” Nin helped Fredericks feel that his long after the volume with the descrip-
Fredericks observes during this period. ritualistic approach to life-writing had tion of Fredericks was published, in 1974,
“Half-alive in art—but more? In our great promise. His journal records an ex- he extracted a small measure of revenge
culture, not more I think. If he is ‘him-
self ’ he is destroyed.”
Nin, who had bought a letterpress
machine and founded the Gemor Press
with one of her lovers, Gonzalo More,
advised Fredericks to learn the print-
ing trade. He apprenticed with the cou-
ple for a few months before buying his
own letterpress—he nicknamed it Dor-
othea, meaning “God’s gift” in Greek—
and starting the Banyan Press with Mil-
ton Saul, an aspiring fiction writer who
had recently become his lover.
In Nin’s diary, Fredericks is intro-
duced almost as an afterthought: “Claude
Fredericks I never had time to describe.
He was the born confidant, the shad-
owy friend, the evasive supporter. What
you assert he does not deny. . . . He is
the felt in the bedroom slipper, the storm
strips on the wintry windows . . . the in-
terlining in conversations, the shock ab-
sorber on the springs of cars, the light-
ning conductor. He is the invisible man.”
It’s difficult to imagine Fredericks
being flattered by Nin’s portrayal of him,
with its tinge of condescension about
his sexuality—the felt in a bedroom slip- “And remember, it’s real silver—so you can never, ever get rid of it.”
offered. . . . The journal he’d been keeping al-
most since mastering the alphabet served him
as both judge and guardian angel, for even the
wasted day bore fruit, once confessed to at due
analytical length. During seasons of solitude
and introspection Claude thought nothing of
leaving a party early or a concert at the inter-
mission; by staying on he would merely have
encountered more raw experience than his jour-
nal could process without fudging.
Fredericks’s journal, in turn, marvels

at Merrill’s discipline as a poet: “He
works, without stopping, for hours, writ-
ing hundreds of phrases in his note-
book, reading the dictionary hour after
hour, dragging each word out of his un-
conscious.” Over time, their affair cur-
dles, in part because Merrill makes Fred-
ericks insecure. “You make me feel I
am worthless,” Fredericks writes to him.
When Fredericks made his initial
sale to the Getty, in 1990, Merrill was
still alive. (He died five years later.)
From the start, access to Fredericks’s
journal has been highly restricted—a
condition that he imposed and that ex-
tended to most of the archive until re-
cently. Periods of limited access are stan-
dard practice with archival materials
that likely contain sensitive informa-
tion about living people. Select por-
tions of Susan Sontag’s journal, housed
at U.C.L.A., were published a decade
ago; the rest will be off limits to re-
searchers until 2029, twenty-five years
after her death. With Fredericks’s jour-
nal, the restrictions are scheduled to be
lifted in 2028. There is an obvious dif-
Fredericks kept his diary in bank safes. His papers are now at the Getty, in L.A. ference, though: Sontag is a venerated
critic, novelist, philosopher, and cultural
in his journal. He describes spending a They made plans to meet in the South celebrity, and her journal has intrinsic
rainy day in bed with a Bennington stu- of France that summer; Merrill would value for scholars of her work. With
dent; after making love, the student sail for Europe first, and Fredericks would Fredericks, the journal is the work, and
turns to him and jokes, “Anaïs didn’t follow once he had extracted himself from the other materials at the Getty, includ-
know everything about you, did she?” his relationship with Milton Saul, and ing the Banyan Press archive, are the
after he and Saul had finished printing supporting documents.
redericks makes a more extended ap- the first edition of Gertrude Stein’s les- Today, a visitor to the Getty can
F pearance in James Merrill’s 1993 mem-
oir, “A Different Person.” Merrill’s ele-
bian-themed novella “Q.E.D.,” under the
title “Things as They Are.”
examine virtually all of Fredericks’s
unpublished poems and the drafts of
gantly structured book uses a trip to “How had Claude learned to love?” his plays, along with thirty years’ worth
Europe in 1950 to mark the beginning of Merrill asks in wonder. By this, he of his teaching notes and syllabi. This
his transformation from a novitiate au- means loving another man so intensely material—filling eighty-five boxes—
thor into a poet. That January, Merrill and unapologetically. As he describes includes everything from his juvenilia
writes, he and Fredericks—by then an it, Fredericks’s emotional capacities (Boxes 1 and 2) to the alternate versions
accomplished printer—had “caught sight were strengthened by a daily regimen of his “Complete Poems” (Boxes 10
of each other” at a book party for a mu- of self-education—Plato, Augustine, and 11) and cassette recordings that he
tual friend and felt a magnetic attraction. St. Francis, Freud. Merrill then writes: secretly made of his classes between
Fredericks, at the top of the first journal More to the point, Claude had learned how to 1981 and 1988. Fredericks took candid
page describing their meeting, scrawled, live. He rose impatiently above boredom and snapshots at elaborate dinners that he
“Here commences the vita nuova of C.F.” unhappiness, the better to grasp what the world prepared at the Vermont farmhouse
where he lived as a member of the Ben- playing art. The family room “became I have heard, Fredericks’s voice is archly
nington faculty, and at drinking parties a reception room in which private peo- theatrical; he sounds like an impish
that he hosted for his students. All these ple gather to become a public.” wizard who is equally fond of casting
images are available for perusal. Fred- By all accounts, Fredericks turned spells and telling dirty jokes. On cam-
ericks’s written evaluations of his stu- his farmhouse, in the village of Pawlet, pus, he dressed impeccably, in clothes
dents’ work have also been housed at into a dazzling reception room. He over- from Brooks Brothers and J. Press. At
the Getty (Boxes 26 to 32). They are saw the slow transformation of the prop- home, he wore a fraying yukata, or un-
sealed until 2063, yet I wondered: Had erty from an unheated ruin without in- lined kimono, while doing daily med-
he received permission from his stu- door plumbing into something out of itation or playing the shakuhachi—a
dents to place these evaluations in the a shelter magazine. The interior had the Japanese flute.
archive? I felt a bit like Richard Papen, immaculate, minimalist aesthetic of a The diary was a central part of Fred-
the narrator of “The Secret History,” monk’s retreat, albeit with modern con- ericks’s mystique. His student Ann
who, on accidentally seeing Julian Mor- veniences like a Xerox machine, for copy- Goldstein, the translator of Elena Fer-
row grasping a student’s hands, asks ing diary pages as soon as they emerged rante, Primo Levi, and other Italian
himself, “What the hell is going on?” from his typewriter. Lavish multicourse writers, and a former head of the copy
I had a similar reaction whenever I dinners were regularly served, and Fred- department at this magazine, told me,
left the reading room of the Special Col- ericks had a select library of fine edi- “We all knew about the journal.” She
lections library after spending a day im- tions. Merrill, in his memoir, praises the studied Dante with Fredericks, taking
mersed in Fredericks’s obsessively doc- collection for its “breathtaking high- the same class twice because the sub-
umented world. There was a journal mindedness,” and he writes with equal ject—and his emphasis on close read-
inside that almost nobody had ever read admiration of the old letterpress, which ing—so appealed to her. For a while,
or even seen, yet was being preserved, was painted dark red and “stood five she said, “Claude was my obsession.”
under ideal conditions of humidity and feet high, a presence challenging and Goldstein kept a diary, too: “Claude
temperature, in the expectation that inscrutable as any samurai in full armor.” talked about the diary as a work of lit-
readers would one day come. And, like But the house’s most dramatic element erature, a form that gives the writer per-
the map the size of an empire in Jorge was Fredericks’s diary: he stored the mission to take herself seriously.”
Luis Borges’s paragraph-long story “On original journal volumes in the base- Peter Golub, a composer who is the
Exactitude in Science,” Fredericks’s ar- ment, in an enormous Mosler bank safe. longtime director of the Sundance In-
chive seemed to contain an artifact—a Katharine Holabird, the author of the stitute’s film-music program, and a lec-
printed program, a receipt, a collection children’s-book series “Angelina Balle- turer at U.C.L.A., was a student of Fred-
notice—from virtually everything he rina” and a student of Fredericks’s in the ericks’s in the seventies, studying Greek
had ever done. Hallmark cards from his sixties, remembers being awestruck by for two years and poring over each line
mother, newspaper clippings on the the farmhouse: “I had never seen any- of the Iliad and the Odyssey with him.
health benefits of eating fibre: it was an thing like it. Everything was arranged “Claude made the Greek world tangi-
archive nearly as long, and as excruci- so sparely and intentionally. Each object ble,” Golub told me, in a conversation
ating, as a human life. in the house had meaning.” Fredericks at his studio, not far from the Getty. “It
had a garden where he grew a dizzying wasn’t a distant theoretical thing when
he German philosopher Jürgen variety of vegetables; he nicknamed a we read the Odyssey together. The char-
T Habermas coined a phrase that
captures Fredericks to the core: “the
towering pine tree on the property Zeus.
For many of his students, Fredericks’s
acters were real to me.”
Fredericks’s journal contains many
cultivated personality.” It is introduced gatherings were not unlike the sympo- dilations on classical texts, but it is an-
in Habermas’s 1962 book, “The Struc- siums of Plato’s time: the farmhouse is imated almost from the start by his search
tural Transformation of the Public where they first learned about gourmet for love. Once he enters his fifties, he
Sphere,” which describes the advent of cooking, the right wine to drink, which gives this quest a peculiar philosophical
the European bourgeois, and the in- composers to worship. Todd O’Neal, a cast. He writes that he is trying to find
vention of modern subjectivity, in eigh- former student, told me that to be in “the solution of a problem—to that cen-
teenth-century Europe. During this Fredericks’s presence was “almost like tral problem, to how I can find my being
period, the journal and the personal Gestalt therapy,” adding, “It would shake always, how I can find eternal life.” He
letter exploded in popularity, as indi- something loose in your soul.” increasingly surrounds himself with
viduals increasingly decided that their I heard similar refrains from other young men—many of whom, like Golub,
intimate thoughts were worth memo- former students who fell under Fred- are heterosexual. In the archive, I had
rializing. “The first-person narrative ericks’s spell. He was not an inherently come across a series of snapshots of
became a conversation with one’s self,” charismatic man. Although Merrill por- Golub: he is standing outside Fredericks’s
Habermas wrote. As the spread of cap- trays Fredericks as one of his main cre- farmhouse in a scarf and a winter coat,
italism created wealth outside the ar- ative catalysts in “A Different Person,” snowflakes collecting in his hair. I showed
istocracy, and print culture made read- he gives only a vague physical descrip- Golub these images on my phone, and
ing a common leisure activity, many tion: “a round, fair-skinned face, by turns he swiped through them with a grin.
middle-class homes held salons for dis- elfin and exalted, under thinning brown- “Claude was a dear friend,” he told me.
cussing books, playing music, and dis- gold hair.” In the recorded lectures that “I was not one of his followers. There
were students who adopted his manners reo—and such atmospherics have too chain of social obligation Cambridge
and imitated his penmanship. They be- often served as a way to seduce stu- is.” In April of 1943—six days away from
came Claude, in a way. But that wasn’t dents. Yet, from the start, I took the his induction appointment—he writes,
for me.” diary project seriously. It wasn’t just that “I am filled with real terror right now.”
Golub was one of the few male stu- eminent writers as various as Merrill But, in the frenetic tumble of events
dents of Fredericks’s who talked with me and Nin had read passages from the that follow, each of which is given equal
on the record. His warmth for Freder- diary and admired them: there was weight, this terror is simply dropped.
icks didn’t surprise me. In the early nine- something thrilling about a document Instead, we get tedious descriptions of
ties, Golub returned to Bennington to whose life span was longer than that Fredericks’s dreams, and dreary recita-
teach, and he acted as Fredericks’s fac- of most humans. The very idea of the tions of meals he cooks with a lover.
ulty advocate during a hearing about the journal was a titanic act of imagination. Later in 1943, after he has left Har-
sexual-harassment accusation. Freder- And so I committed myself to ex- vard and is spending the summer in
icks denied any impropriety, but, accord- ploring its pages. I read most of the Maine, teaching himself Greek, writ-
ing to the Rutland Herald, Bennington passages in the self-published volumes, ing poetry, and falling hard for the teen-
administrators informed him that, if he which chronicle Fredericks’s youth until age son of his neighbors, he interrupts
wanted to continue teaching and attain 1943, and then continued with decades- a breathless, scattered passage with an
emeritus status, he had to move his of- old photocopies from Fredericks’s es- aside: “I can’t write English, I really don’t
fice—which was in a secluded warren of tate, which included a set of bleaker give a damn, do try to understand, I
the Commons building—closer to those entries from the early eighties. All told, have to write this, I don’t care how—it
of other faculty, and he could no longer I’ve read more than five thousand pages must be gotten out, and quickly, and
lead private tutorials. Unwilling to ac- closely, and a few thousand more have then I will do something else.” In an-
cept such constraints, Fredericks resigned. passed under my eyes. other entry from that year, he resolves
“It devastated him,” Golub recalled. “I This experience generated a pro- to streamline his effort on the journal:
don’t think Claude ever got over it.” found dissonance. For all the effort that “I want to write each day in telegraphic
When I informed Golub that Fred- Fredericks put into completing his jour- fashion, 150 words say, and then amplify
ericks’s journal contains graphic de- nal project—and promoting it to oth- various points in paragraphs below until
pictions of his sexual relationships, in- ers—an essential element is missing: he I am tired, thus eliminating daily de-
cluding those with students, he was was not a good writer. He did not in- tail.” At such moments, Fredericks’s the-
unsurprised. After all, during his own stinctively make judicious choices on ories about the narrative complexity of
years as an undergraduate, male profes- the page, whether recounting a dra- the journal run aground: if a diarist skims
sors often slept with female students. matic episode or offering a lengthy evo- over the details of his life for the sake
“That was more accepted then,” he said, cation of the pleasures of gardening in of efficiency, how can the resulting de-
adding, “We were all supposed to be Vermont at the height of summer. His piction be more truthful or meaningful
open-minded.” That is true, but, given prose rarely displays the ingrained sense than fiction?
the obvious power imbalances, Freder- of control that true writers have even Even stranger, as the years pass the
icks’s depictions can make for discom- when jotting off a postcard. (I am not journal increasingly adopts a tone of
fiting reading today. (His accuser made alone in feeling this way. In 1943, Fred- stiff indifference. After Fredericks
his complaint anonymously, and I was ericks laments, “Berryman said my po- spends time at a Buddhist monastery
not able to identify him.) etry had no technique behind it.”) in Kyoto, Japan, in 1966, his exploration
In his studio, Golub showed me a With Fredericks, it appears that the of Buddhism deepens, and his daily en-
pair of bound scores—for Alban Berg’s practice of keeping a journal was less tries harden to the world, growing for-
operas, “Wozzeck” and “Lulu”—that about cataloguing acute observations, malized and solipsistic. A passage from
Fredericks had bought and inscribed or about capturing a milieu, or about 1982: “I feel that perfect equilibrium
for him, in the mid-nineties. At a me- imposing a literary sensibility on quo- that comes after sitting deeply. I will
morial service for Fredericks, in 2013, tidian moments, than it was about the say here what I have to say, neither more
Golub told mourners that his former fact of having written. For such a grand nor less. There is all the time I need to
professor had a “deep spiritual and in- and self-serious project, it is curiously say it. What remains unsaid poses no
tellectual connection” to music, and re- slapdash. Even though Fredericks came problem. It is simple.” More than once,
called spending long hours with him in to view the journal as “unwittingly the the journal devolves into a pornography
the farmhouse listening to the Bach masterpiece I’ve been longing . . . to of isolation:
cantatas. “Claude was truly an aesthete,” write,” a reader develops the sense that
Last night it suddenly turned cool and cleared,
he added. Fredericks had “created him- many of its pages came clattering out and I felt today would be beautiful. It is. Just
self, and his life, as an act of beauty.” of his typewriter in a hurry. now I walked out into the day, looking at morn-
In the Harvard years of the journal, ing glories, at vegetables, at the beautiful Jap-
s an outsider to the Fredericks cult, the young Fredericks is confronting a anese gourds in delicate flower, at the ripen-
A I sometimes took a skeptical view
of his strenuously constructed persona.
profound dilemma: with America at
war and the draft universal, he will face
ing tomatoes, the crisp beans, the stiff onions . . .
and walked softly back here to the house. Sud-
denly I was overcome and sank into a chair
Mastering Dante doesn’t require a bot- conscription if he proceeds with his plan first and then onto the marble—yes, the mar-
tle of wine and Palestrina on the ste- to drop out and “escape from the tight ble slab—that lies on the coffee table there

now. Opening my kimono I pleasured myself,
melting into sun and day beyond thought—
needing suddenly just that melting into being
I had not known now in so long.
Langdon Hammer, the Yale profes-
sor, made significant use of the journal
pages about the months that Fredericks
and Merrill spent together in Europe for
“James Merrill: Life and Art.” He told
me that he’d expected one kind of re-
source—“a diary that’s going to tell me
what Merrill did on specific days”—and
discovered something very different. “I
got a whole lot of Claude,” he said. “More
than I needed. There’s a prevalence of
logorrheic, unfashioned writing. It was
often confusing to wade through.” There
are regular periods when Fredericks didn’t
write entries every day, yet he still felt
the need to account for the missing time:
“Maybe he hasn’t written in the journal
since Wednesday afternoon, and now it’s
Sunday. So he skims through the calen-
dar and mentions what’s important to
him, summarizes events without any de-
scription. That’s not so convenient for
the biographer.”
Or for the reader, I said.
To Hammer, it’s not just sloppiness
that accounts for the journal’s unwieldy
nature. “His grandiose ambition for the
journal and his immediate need to pro- “Mom’s currently in a meeting—will she know
duce its pages were related,” he said. “The what this is in reference to?”
journal was part of producing himself.”
This performance was strong enough
to bewitch some formidable minds, at
• •
least temporarily. In 1971, Fredericks de-
livered the first twenty-two volumes of nescent and changeable moods, things that sends journals from 1966 and 1967,
his journal to Robert Giroux, the editor would never have been caught on paper if you which chronicle his time at the Bud-
at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in a panier, had not reached the status of veteran diarist dhist monastery in Kyoto and a failed
in your early teens.
a large French basket. “It is really amaz- relationship with a Japanese man who
ing that anyone can have so fully docu- Giroux didn’t end up offering Fred- joins him back in Vermont. Months
mented a record of his life,” Giroux wrote ericks a book deal. But they kept in go by without word from Giroux. But
to Fredericks that March. “It’s even phys- touch. In 1973, Fredericks writes that in January of 1981 Fredericks visits New
ically interesting to read such a record— he has proposed to Giroux a new pub- York, where he stays in an Upper East
for example, the change of handwriting, lishing scheme: documenting a single Side apartment belonging to Merrill.
all of a sudden, is phenomenal.” He com- year of his life, in three parts. The first He has an appointment to meet Gi-
pliments Fredericks on his “decidedly would be a selection of the most inter- roux for lunch at the Players club:
sophisticate” taste in classical music as esting letters he had received that year; “Monday a little after eleven, the 19th.
a teen-ager. Giroux signs off by noting, the second would be a selection of the It could be one of the more important
“I can see that your journals will present letters he had written; the third would days in my life. Certainly whatever I
a fantastic editing job, in sheer bulk be “the most subjective part, the jour- have been moving towards finds its
alone.” A week later, he follows up with nal itself.” Giroux is cool on the idea. happy fulfilment.”
another letter, suggesting a date for lunch “Tricks aren’t necessary,” he says. The “happy fulfilment” is not just
so that they can confer, and he can be In 1980, one of Fredericks’s closest about Giroux and the journal: Freder-
given another batch of volumes: colleagues at Bennington, Bernard Mal- icks has met an attractive waiter at a
There’s no question but that the diary gets bet- amud, offers to act as an intermediary French restaurant, and he has bought
ter as your life gets more interesting. Yet I’m with F.S.G., which publishes Mala- tickets for them to attend a new pro-
continually amazed at its catching such eva- mud’s novels. This time, Fredericks duction of “Un Ballo in Maschera,” at
the Met. For once, the haste of a jour-
nal entry makes perfect dramatic sense.
When Fredericks sits down to write CAN YOU SAY IT
again the following day, his mood has
changed drastically: 1.
Whatever little order I had has swiftly crum-
bled, and a random paragraph or two here is There was a busyness. Yes, in the apple tree.
all I can manage. I’m not really sure what hap- The first light. You could say it was a busyness—
pened yesterday. How can I? And how could like a hive of movements, indistinct as haze
I possibly have thought there would be any
simple and clearcut gesture? I hardly expected caught up in strings of light. Low sunlight, among webs.
to come home with a contract under either
arm—and yet . . . what did happen? And along the strands those slender brown fingerlings,
the leaves, hovered, just there, in the breeze.
The lunch with Giroux has been ami-
able enough, but his message about the 2.
journal and its prospects is confusing.
“He began first by saying it really couldn’t What I meant to say is the morning was heavy.
be published until after I was dead,” Was it our sorrow. The tree was at the window.
Fredericks reports, because passages con- Before we could see the webs, the dew, the thousand
cerning “the lives and the intimacies of
others” pose legal difficulties. There is little apples, we saw the end of it only. The night, yes—
also the problem of some anti-Semitic the end of it. There is always something else to say.
remarks—everyone has thoughts that No, I mean the first light. There’s far too much to say.
other people would find offensive, Gi-
roux explains, but you “simply can’t say 3.
those things in print and get away with
it.” But these aren’t the only issues: “It Low sunlight. Yes, in the apple tree, coming up.
was too long as it was. It repeated many Every day is the anniversary of a terror.
things—even the obsessively constant But there you are. A sorrow. And something
concern with sexual adventure—too
often. . . . There were too many names
and incidents that everywhere needed . . . privileged access to a life as it unfolds. dressed elegantly for a party, and offers
footnoting and the knowledge of other The author is both narrator and protag- her extra blankets, begging her to come
volumes of the journal.” onist of a story so palpable—so “true,” home. It’s a potent image: the young
Most bewildering, Fredericks writes, to use one of Fredericks’s favored words— writer, marooned with her family for
is the fact that Giroux—even as he of- that it feels like we’re there. And we the holidays, taking refuge where she
fers no compliments on the writing— sympathize with him as both a literary first learned to invent. It’s a boon to
speaks “as if it were inevitable” that the figure and a human being. Tartt’s future biographers, especially as
journal will eventually be published it brings to mind a line of Julian Mor-
and admired, “as if he himself took its t Christmastime, 1983, Donna row’s in “The Secret History” which was
importance and value as something so
obvious one did not even mention it.”
A Tartt was home from Bennington
with her family, in Mississippi, working
almost surely uttered first by Fredericks.
When Richard Papen, the student nar-
Any book fashioned from the journal on her fiction and studying Latin and rator, makes the mistake of referring to
should be marketed as fiction, Giroux French. In one of several letters to Fred- classroom assignments in Greek as
advises. Fredericks writes: ericks archived at the Getty, she describes “work,” Julian issues a grandiloquent
a household “aflutter with telegrams and correction: “I should call it the most glo-
Puzzled by how specific he was and yet how
entirely lacking in praise or enthusiasm, I phone calls and parties and presents and rious kind of play.”
asked—in saying I trusted his judgment more flowers”—her sister is about to have her In response to fact-checking inqui-
than anyone’s—Is it really worth doing, reduc- débutante ball, and seamstresses are going ries, Tartt replied, “In public, and when-
ing these pages to a novel. Yes, he said quite in and out. Tartt tells Fredericks that she ever I have been asked about it through
briskly and then almost tenderly, of course it’s has insulated herself from the excite- my career, I have denied that the char-
worth doing.
ment by moving into a playhouse in the acter of Julian Morrow is based on the
This is one of the few passages I have back yard where she spent time as a lit- Claude Fredericks I knew and loved—
found in the archive where Fredericks tle girl; it’s quite small, she writes, but except in the most superficial respects.
actually fulfills his stated ideals about so is she. Tartt finds it comforting to live To me, this confusion is both tragic and
the journal as a “living thing.” We ea- “amidst all the tea sets and stuffed ani- unfair to the memory of Claude. As a
gerly follow the protagonist into a se- mals and rag rugs” she grew up with. student at Bennington, I was struck by
ries of dramatic events that he can’t fore- Her family, however, is upset. Each night, how students and literature faculty alike
see, and feel that we have been granted her mother comes out to the playhouse, loved to gossip and spin tales and em-
come to appear disquieting to Richard:
“His voice chilled me to the bone. . . .
The twinkle in Julian’s eye, as I looked
at him now, was mechanical and dead.
caught there dazzling in the haze, just the same. Yes. It was as if the charming theatrical cur-
And of this moment closer to you than I can say. tain had dropped away and I saw him
There was busyness in the apple tree. for the first time as he really was: not
the benign old sage, the indulgent and
4. protective good-parent of my dreams,
but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose
First I thought it just a slim leaf, hanging beguiling trappings concealed a being
to the screen. On the door. The night was settled. watchful, capricious, and heartless.”
Darkness inside, darkness out. Then the wings This dramatic reappraisal of Julian
may have occurred entirely in the play-
half-closed like hands, or a clasp. I mean, of a jewel. house of Tartt’s imagination. Or per-
Dust of a moth, half a palm wide, and the crickets haps she just looked with a merciless
a busy tide at the seashore, when this was a sea. eye at the professor who inspired her
character—a man whose dark complex-
5. ities served her pursuit of art.
In the morning, the moth was gone. Or was it silence. n January of 1973, Fredericks writes,
Every day the image at the window—us, each other,
wings on the door. Yes, can you say it now.
I “I awoke this morning thinking per-
haps that I had after all squandered my
life—pursuing dreams that could not
Before the webs we saw first light, a breath of haze— be realised, pursuing one infatuation
then leaves, floating there. In the window, yes. We saw after another. Others were famous or
ourselves. Then we saw ourselves with shadows. rich. Others had families. Had I not
squandered all those extraordinary tal-
—David Baker ents I had as a writer?” Self-recrimina-
tion is a familiar trope in Fredericks’s
journal, but the sombre tone is new. He
broider anecdotes and invent rumors gift for characterization, and she nim- is middle-aged and beset by bills and
about Claude that invariably cast him bly conveys her family’s bustle in a sin- debts; the seemingly effortless life of
as a sinister, ridiculously wealthy, and gle atmospheric paragraph. (In fact, the sensual indulgence that he has shared
larger-than-life personage that he was Salingeresque glamour may be con- so freely with others has not come cheap.
not, a tradition that unfortunately, and fected: a new podcast, “Once Upon a His closest friend, the wealthy and well-
insidiously, persists. It was these erro- Time . . . at Bennington College,” sug- travelled Merrill, has been publishing
neous and larger-than-life fictions that gests that Tartt’s family origins are hum- steadily, with increasing recognition
caught my imagination as a young writer bler than she depicts.) that he is a great poet. In earlier en-
and went into the formation of the fic- She exerts similar skill in transform- tries, Fredericks has remarked how
tional character of Julian Morrow rather ing Fredericks into a fictional charac- strange it was to have his two closest
than the kind and generous person of ter: to heighten the sense that Julian is friends, Merrill and Malamud, each win
Claude himself, and when the novel was a figure of mysterious allure, Tartt ini- a National Book Award in 1967. He
published, in 1992, I was horrified when tially gives the reader only tantalizing feels left behind, and a bit bored, and
journalists in Europe and America pre- glimpses of him, as when he is seen the journal reflects his enervation.
sumed to state flatly that the character peeking through a cracked door, “as if Meanwhile, Bennington, originally
of Julian Morrow was Claude, treating there were something wonderful in his a school for women, has turned coed.
their surmise as established truth, a prob- office that needed guarding.” When one Before long, almost half the students
lem that continues to this day. But un- of the student characters has to com- signed up for Fredericks’s Religious Ex-
fortunately, now as then, people prefer plete an evaluation form about Julian’s perience class are male. His journal is
to see fiction as fact.” teaching, he leaves the comments sec- reshaped by this change: the diaristic
Tartt and Fredericks were close. In tion blank, asking how he can “possibly entries of past years start being replaced
letters that she sent to him while still make the Dean of Studies understand by copies of notes or letters written to
his student—she calls him magister, a that there is a divinity in our midst?” students. It isn’t clear if the versions re-
Latin form of address to scholars—she If Julian is a divinity in “The Secret corded in the journal are first drafts or
clearly craves his respect and tries to History,” he is a deeply ambiguous one. later transcriptions. Sometimes he is
meet him as an equal. But Tartt is al- By the end of the novel, his aestheti- pursuing four or five young men simul-
ready the superior writer. The letter cism and his “cheery, Socratic indiffer- taneously, and for months at a stretch
about the playhouse shows a precocious ence to matters of life and death” have the letters supplant any other kind of
has too many obligations, he will be tak-
ing over. “I’ll be in my office at seven if
you’d like to stop by,” he writes. “We
might then, if you’d like to see me reg-
ularly, find a time that suits us both.”
Within a few months, the notes to
Will become plaintive, lofty, and strik-
ingly unguarded: “Must the cost of inti-
macy be distance? We’d never been so
close to each other as we were on Sun-
day, nor, I think, so far from one another—
and for no reason I can understand—as
last night. Even distance, though, is a
kind of intimacy, too, and has, having to
do with you, something sweet about it as
well as something bitter and painful.”
At its height, the relationship sends
Fredericks—who remains Will’s ad-
viser—into florid spirals:
Dearest, what rapturous moments those were,
“Eating out in a restaurant again is exciting enough—you the macrocosm of any given moment with you,
don’t have to order everything flambé.” the microcosm of a lifetime, or of several, with
you—separated & together & at the very last
moment unexpectedly separated only to be
• • united again, entering our destination—heaven,
of course, in the allegorical reading, love, and
a life together.
entry. Reading the pages from this pe- when they reached the end of the Dante
riod, at the Getty, I began to wonder if tutorial, with a joint reading of Purgato- When I came to this passage, I had the
they constituted a journal at all. rio. Sternau said, of Fredericks, “He was eerie sense, and not for the first time,
Robert Sternau was one of Freder- like my Virgil—he took me as far as Par- that Fredericks had entered uncharted
icks’s students in the seventies, at the adise. Claude could be quite dramatic.” literary terrain: a journal with a narrator
time when Peter Golub was an under- Sternau realized that Fredericks, despite who is unreliable, and quite possibly a
graduate at Bennington, and he has sim- his talk of chastity, had developed an fantasist. He is no longer confessing his
ilar memories of tutorials at the Pawlet abiding sexual interest in him. “He asked experience “at due analytical length,” as
farmhouse—in his case, on Dante’s Com- me if I would be the executor of his jour- Merrill had observed in his memoir. Fred-
media. Once a week, Fredericks would nal,” Sternau recalled. “Being eighteen or ericks is writing sentimental fiction.
read a canto aloud in Dante’s Italian, and nineteen at the time, it was somewhat “Claude was very romantic,” Todd
Sternau would read it aloud in English frightening. I think it was his way of try- O’Neal, the former student, told me.
translation. “Then we would discuss it,” ing to commit to me. I’d been shown “That’s why he always used to teach
he recalled. “It was just an unbelievable about thirty-five thousand pages of it, ‘Madame Bovary.’ He was Emma.”
opportunity to have someone who knew and I knew it was a massive opus. Not In these sections of the journal from
the material that well, and who devoted something that I wanted to commit to.” the seventies, Fredericks, following the
that kind of one-on-one time to me.” Fredericks, he said, accepted his demur- classical Greek tradition as described
Sternau helped out in the yard and went ral. (“You assured me so stubbornly that by Plato in the Symposium, places him-
for walks with Fredericks along the it was my friendship and not my love you self in the role of the Lover: a citizen
wooded edges of the property to post wanted,” Fredericks complains to Ster- of high birth who abases himself after
“no trespassing” signs. They cooked nau, in a letter preserved in the journal. becoming infatuated with a boy whose
with vegetables from the garden; Fred- “But when indeed I did just that, offering beauty is an earthly reflection of the di-
ericks showed Sternau how the letter- you friendship instead of love, you seemed vine. As the Lover woos the Beloved,
press worked, and they collaborated on somehow disappointed and distant.”) he educates him in philosophy, in the
some printing projects. “He tutored me I spoke to another student of Fred- law, in the arts, and in public speaking,
on shakuhachi flute,” Sternau recalled. ericks’s from this period, who didn’t want thus preparing the student to further
“Claude was quite adept. He did every- to be identified. In the journal pages that the ideals of the city-state. Fredericks,
thing with perfection.” Sternau sensed I read, this person, whom I will call Will, throughout the journal, celebrates the
from the start that Fredericks was at- is portrayed not as a student but as a re- Symposium as a literary masterpiece,
tracted to him, but, he said, “I think I sistant lover—at least, at the outset. Fred- but by this stage his alliance with Plato
was a bit naïve—at that point in his life, ericks, in his first note to Will, informs has become fundamentalist. It’s a de-
he told me, he was trying to be chaste.” him that, since his assigned counsellor— pressingly literal—and superficial—way
The turn in their relationship came the equivalent of an academic adviser— to approach the ideas in Plato’s dia-
logue, akin to a college student who nal, does, I wanted someone to live in and carrying the originals down the
joins the Libertarian Club immediately my house and to use the things I have basement stairs to his bank safe—the
after reading “The Fountainhead.” gathered about me but even more I entries themselves were full of private
I asked Will for his version of these wished someone to think the thoughts details: conversations with colleagues
events. He said that when Fredericks I think and live the life I’ve so slowly and students, phone calls with his
took over as his adviser he initially felt worked for. This is the true transmis- mother, personal notes that he sent to
flattered and fortunate: “I mean, this sion of the lamp.” friends and lovers, accounts of sexual
guy was why I was here. I wanted to encounters that he had with live-in part-
learn about Japanese literature, about n a rousing scene in “The Secret His- ners and with relative strangers. In the
Buddhism, about meditation, and all
the classics.” He’d heard rumors about
I tory,” the debauched students in Ju-
lian Morrow’s Greek class retreat to a
lecture, he doesn’t acknowledge a dia-
rist’s responsibility to the people he is
Fredericks’s interest in male students, country house and invite their teacher writing about; in the journal, he almost
but he was overwhelmed by the inten- to dinner. A multicourse meal is pre- always uses actual names. Nor does he
sity of their entanglement. He was soon pared. There’s a fire in the fireplace, and, address the ethics of writing about in-
taking all his classes with Fredericks Tartt writes, “the whoosh of the flames timate experiences with other people
except for one—a schedule similar to was like a flock of birds, trapped and and making it your “work”—and your
Richard Papen’s in “The Secret His- beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling.” claim on literary immortality.
tory.” Will recalled to me that he even Julian makes a toast: “Live forever.” The James Merrill, despite his praise of
began meditating in Fredericks’s office students repeat the phrase and clink their Fredericks’s journal, had reservations
every morning. It was as if Fredericks glasses across the table “like an army reg- about its contents. Fredericks, in a pas-
were not just his professor but also his iment crossing sabres.” sage from July of 1975, recalls a night
“spiritual adviser.” Finally, after months Claude Fredericks has achieved a on an East Hampton beach more than
of fending off advances from Fredericks, startling measure of the immortality he twenty years earlier, when the two were
Will slept with him. He was twenty- sought for his journal—his mammoth still involved. Merrill had stripped off
one. He felt liberated afterward, he told manuscript will presumably be housed his clothing, and Fredericks, feeling
me, and ended the relationship, switch- at the Getty in perpetuity. Yet it re- “wild with desire,” dropped to his knees
ing to another counsellor. mains to be seen how many people will before Merrill in the sand. Merrill knew
Years later, at a psychologist’s sug- ever read any of it. As Fredericks asked, that a record of this moment would
gestion, Will contacted Fredericks and in an entry from 1951, “Who will ever wind up in the journal, so he waited
asked if he would join him in some wade through these million pages? How for Fredericks to write an account—
therapy sessions, so that they could talk will the jewels (and there ARE jewels) and then he stole the pages. In 1975,
through their time together. “He kind be found? What pig will truff le my Fredericks wonders ruefully, “Does he
of bowed out,” Will told me. “He re- woods?” Yet even if no further volumes have them still—like some fading pho-
ally took no responsibility.” Will, who are published, by the estate or by an- tograph an aging beauty keeps?”
is now a professor himself, told Fred- other publisher, many readers will As usual, Fredericks is flattering his
ericks that he had come to view the discover Fredericks—in reimagined older self by missing the point. It’s likely
older man’s behavior toward him as a form—as Julian Morrow, an indelible that Merrill stole the pages about the
form of abuse. Fredericks’s reply, he night on the beach to protect himself: it
said, was eerily detached: “Don’t you was the nineteen-fifties, and sex between
do that to your own students?” men was then illegal. Merrill could have
In the diaries documenting the pe- been blackmailed by an opportunist—
riod after Will breaks off the relation- his father was one of the founders of the
ship, Fredericks stews in his loneliness, investment firm Merrill Lynch—or even
and for comfort he turns back to his prosecuted. Fredericks understood this
“holy” books. The solipsism of these danger, too. He stored his manuscript in
entries is astonishing. Will, he writes, a bank safe in the basement, after all.
“sought in a way no one ever ever dared And, as the Mosler filled up with jour-
to become me. That was his complaint character in a novel that, three decades nal pages, he installed another one.
on the phone. But that is the very thing after its publication, continues to at- Having spent so many frustrated hours
he wished and I wished. We each tract avid new readers. with Fredericks’s journal, I sometimes
wished . . . a true other—as Augustine For all the insights in Fredericks’s wonder if it would have been better had
calls his friend, as Montaigne calls his lecture “How to Read a Journal,” there the vaults never been opened. He is right
friend . . . and we wished true parent- is a troubling omission. Calling the jour- that some stray “jewels” were hidden in-
age & progeny.” He goes on, “Is it pos- nal a “private” form, he notes that his side them, but in the main his millions
sible that all these years, in some deep first diary had a lock, and that he car- of words are a monumental disappoint-
biological need, I have indeed sought ried the key with him. Even after his ment. Even so, I still find it captivating
a son? I wanted to reproduce myself in journal became a known part of his life— to think of the pages slowly piling up—a
something that lived even more than when he sometimes performed in front tomb of paper. It may be Fredericks’s
my books, than the pages of this jour- of others the ritual of copying fresh pages most successful act of beauty. 
FICTION
56 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY RAPHAELLE MACARON

ou don’t know why, exactly, tle burbling of her oxygen tank, and to Lily, the youngest, sneaks into the
Y you’ve been assigned to this

particular family, in this par-
ticular home, in West Sacramento, Cal-
the constant thrumming of the house,
and she reports back all that she hears
to her only living brother, in Afghan-
kitchen and asks her mother which
dishes have been prepared without meat.
Lily has recently, and secretly, be-
ifornia. It’s not your job to wonder why. istan. Thanks to Bibi’s keen ear for come a vegetarian. Two weeks earlier,
Nonetheless, after a few days, you begin even the most minute details, her calls she came home weeping to her mother
to speculate that the suspect at the are thorough and uncompromising. after having witnessed the vehicular
heart of your assignment is the father, She knows when her grandchildren maiming of a duck that was crossing
code-named Hajji, even though you are constipated. She knows when her the street with a line of her ducklings.
have no reason to believe that he has son and his wife are secretly fighting. Lily had cradled the duck in her death
ever actually completed the hajj pil- She knows who is peeing too loudly throes, surrounded by her little duck-
grimage to Mecca. In fact, Hajji hardly or cheating on exams or missing prayers. lings—which, Lily swore, were crying
leaves home at all. He spends hours at Through Bibi’s many reports to her out for their mother. Together, Habibi
a time wandering around his house or brother, you begin to gather snippets and Lily wept for the little orphaned
his yard, searching for things to re- of Hajji’s history: his former life as a ducklings. Later that day, Lily informed
pair—rotted planks of wood, missing mujahid in Afghanistan; his trek from her mother that she could not bring
shingles, burned-out bulbs, broken Logar to Peshawar to Karachi to Cal- herself to eat the chicken korma she
mowers, shattered windows, unhinged ifornia; his wedding; the births of each had prepared, and Habibi decided not
doors—until his old injuries act up, of his children; the children’s gradual to scold her (a decision she would come
and he is forced to lie down wherever loss of Pashto; their gradual increase to regret). At first, it was only chicken,
he is working, and if he happens to be in insolence; the trucking accident that but then Lily confessed to her mother
in the attic or the basement, or in some destroyed the nerves in Hajji’s neck that she could no longer stomach beef
other secluded area of the house, away and shoulder; the court cases that led or lamb, the rest of the culinary trin-
from his wife and his mother and his to nothing; the betrayal he felt when ity of Hajji’s household. Habibi made
four children, sometimes he will allow his second-eldest son, code-named an effort to explain to her daughter
himself to quietly mutter verses from Karl, decided to become a Marxist that vegetarianism was a slippery slope
the Quran, invocations to Allah, until while studying at Berkeley; his depres- toward feminism, Marxism, Commu-
his ache seems to ebb and he returns sion; his total disillusionment with the nism, atheism, hedonism, and, even-
to work. American justice system; his anger; his tually, cannibalism. “Animals are ani-
When Hajji has exhausted himself, rage; his softly bubbling fury. mals,” her mother explained, deftly,
he often retires to the living room, In another life, you think, Bibi might “and humans are humans, and when
where he watches murder mysteries or have been a spy. you begin mixing up the two you will
foreign coverage of conflicts in Islamic Hajji’s eldest son, Mo, gets home find yourself kissing chickens and eat-
countries. If his wife, code-named from his job at Zafar’s butcher shop in ing children.”
Habibi, is in the kitchen, and if she the evening. He wears a blood-splat- Lily swore that it was a matter not
isn’t already chatting with one of her tered smock, an Arabic thobe, and a of ethics but of physical repulsion, and
many friends, most of whom you know heavy beard. Every night, Mo’s mother that with time, Inshallah, she would be
Hajji despises, he will request a cup of scolds him for not having washed his able to eat all her favorite dishes again.
tea and ask about his mother’s health, smock, which smells like a massacre, Habibi relented, and for a few days the
which is never very good, but Hajji’s and every night Hajji defends his son, secret remained solely between mother
wife doesn’t tell him this, because his who smells, he says, like a man. Mo and daughter, until Mary, Hajji’s elder
mother, code-named Bibi, is sitting begs his mother’s forgiveness with a daughter, turned toward her sister one
just a few feet away, and though she laugh and sits beside his father. In En- afternoon, in the room they had shared
doesn’t acknowledge her son’s presence, glish, Mo asks Hajji about the current since Lily’s infancy, and asked her how
Bibi is always listening. condition of the ummah, which trans- much weight she had lost.
From early dawn, when she wakes lates roughly to “community,” but which “None,” she said, too quickly, laugh-
to pray, until late at night, before she actually refers to a supranational col- ing. “I’m as chunky as ever.”
falls into a fitful sleep, Bibi nests in a lective of Islamic peoples. But she had lost weight. Two pounds.
corner of the living room, on the far- “They hope to destroy our ummah,” “Then why do you look so pale and
thest edge of the second couch, and you record Hajji saying, in English, be- self-righteous?” Mary asked, continu-
listens to the television at an incredi- fore he gives a recap of all the bomb- ing her interrogation. Sharp, uncom-
bly low volume, listens to her son and ings, massacres, war crimes, protests, promising, and with an excellent eye
his wife in the kitchen, to her grand- shootings, kidnappings, and assassina- for weakness—a trait that, you assume,
children on their phones, to the Quran tions that have occurred in the past she inherited from her grandmother—
on an old radio that she smuggled out twenty-four hours. Mo listens quietly, Mary has many talents (deception, in-
of Afghanistan forty years ago, to the only occasionally asking a question or trospection, manipulation, a high pain
flushing of the toilets in the house, to muttering a vengeful prayer. threshold, and embroidering) that are
the wind in the trees that her son The rest of Hajji’s children arrive wasted in Hajji’s household, where the
planted near her window, to the gen- as dinner begins. girls are allowed to go only to school
or to the mosque and then must come ments, in the hope that they won’t downstairs with his laptop, and, as soon
straight home. figure out whom, exactly, they are in- as he does, Marvin climbs out of his
It’s really a tragedy, you think. She terpreting. Habibi’s relentless chatter, own bed, performs wudhu, and begins
could have been a fine spy. however, is not completely useless. to make up all the prayers he missed
In the end, Lily confessed her sin Every night, before bed, she calls her throughout the day. Though Marvin
to Mary, who immediately mocked her. family in Afghanistan, some of whom has earned a 3.8 G.P.A. in his first semes-
“Idiot,” she said. “You’re short enough still live in a small village in Logar ter at U.C. Davis, though he works part
as it is. How do you expect to get taller Province, which, according to your time and donates money to Afghanistan,
without protein?” research, is currently under the con- his parents often scold him for not pray-
“I’ll eat beans.” trol of the Taliban. ing, not reading the Quran, and Mar-
“Beans? How many beans? This The word comes up sometimes amid vin never utters a word in self-defense.
room isn’t ventilated enough for you Habibi’s barrage of Pashto and Farsi. And yet here he is, in the middle of the
to be eating beans all day.” Her “baleh”s and “bachem”s and “cheeka”s night, praying in secrecy, away from the
“Please,” Lily said. “Don’t tell.” and “keer”s. approving eyes of his mother and fa-
Mary laughed and promised to “Taliban,” she will whisper into her ther and brother and grandmother, re-
snitch as soon as she could, which was phone, as if she knows you are listening. citing verse after verse from the Quran,
a lie, of course, because Mary wasn’t Just the sound of it makes your in a voice so soft and melodic that it
the sort. heart race. almost brings tears to your eyes.
During dinner, Lily is always care- Downstairs, Mo descends into fo-
ful to serve herself a heaping portion fter dinner, Marvin and the girls rums. Swaddled in his father’s wool-
of chicken or kebab or kofta, but while
she eats her rice and fried vegetables,
A rush off to their rooms while Mo,
his parents, and Bibi drink tea in the
len shawl—the very same shawl that
Hajji used to wear in the days of his
Mary, an avowed carnivore, noncha- living room. Inevitably, the conversa- long-ago jihad—Mo watches clips of
lantly clears away Lily’s meat. Hajji, tion turns to Mo’s prospects for mar- American bombs falling on Iraqi cit-
fortunately, never notices. He eats with riage. Habibi has a niece in Kabul, a ies, Afghans bearing witness to isaf
perfect focus. In total silence. And with midwife and a beauty, who speaks En- executions, Muslim boys being burned
his fingers. glish, Pashto, Farsi, and Urdu. “She is alive in Gujarat. He watches these clips
Habibi, on the other hand, hardly almost too good for you,” Habibi says, for hours, his head bobbing, his eyes
eats. She is all questions and stories. laughing. Hajji has a niece in Logar, bleary, until his beloved, mercifully, no-
She wants to know about Mo’s butch- only sixteen, wholesome, holy. She has tices that he is online and commands
ering, Mary’s studying, Lily’s friends, memorized half the Quran, and her him to go to sleep. Upstairs, Mary is
and even Marvin’s gaming. In re- father is a respected mullah in the vil- reading Mo’s messages. She has hacked
sponse, the children tease her, which, lage. What Mo’s parents don’t know is into his Facebook account and watches
at times, upsets Hajji, but Habibi al- that Mo is already in love with a girl his conversation play out in real time.
ways takes it in stride. She is—in your at Sac State. They are constantly mes- She is a ghost on his profile, always
professional estimation—the beating saging, conversing, and Snapchatting. careful to read only what he has al-
heart of the household. Not only does Mo writes her secret love poems on ready read and to leave everything else
she take on most of the chores; she untouched. Such potential, you think,
also actively organizes the entire so- such a pity. Lily, in the bed next to
cial life of the family—dinners and Mary, is sketching pictures of ducks
parties and showers and gatherings and ducklings and ponds and ducks
and even the occasional communal crying into ponds and ponds expand-
prayer. Seemingly at war with the hun- ing into oceans and ducks in flight and
dred silences that fill her small house, ducks walking and ducks dying, and
she is almost always on the brink of she takes pictures of these charcoal
shouting in Pashto or Farsi or En- portraits and posts them to a private
glish or sometimes Urdu. She chats Instagram account, which Mary can
so much on the phone, outside in the his laptop. Horrendous verses that he also, secretly, access. In the room adja-
yard, inside in the kitchen, with her is rightfully embarrassed by. Some- cent to the girls, Hajji and his wife
gloomy husband, her spiteful mother- times, when he thinks he’s alone, he have a quiet argument about his wife’s
in-law, her eclectic children, and her recites his poems quietly. brothers. You recognize their names
many, many friends, that you end up His love, you hope, will save him. and suspect it has something to do
spending half your time at the office At night, Hajji and his wife are the with the fact that they were employed
skimming through hours and hours first to go to bed. The next morning, as interpreters for the U.S. military in
of Habibi’s gossip, translated from they will wake up at dawn—Hajji be- Afghanistan. Hajji, you know, consid-
your audio recordings by an officially cause of his pain, and Habibi because ers these men to be traitors. Eventu-
sanctioned team of Afghan Ameri- of Hajji’s pain. Both Marvin and Mo ally, Habibi turns away from her hus-
can interpreters, who are only ever pretend to fall asleep, but when Mo band, mutters something under her
provided with fragments of her state- thinks Marvin has passed out he sneaks breath, and cries herself softly to sleep.
Hajji does nothing to comfort her. He
sits up in bed, wheezing with pain or
regret, and stares out the window at
the dark street, where Mo is now shad
owboxing beneath a street light. Tucked
away in her corner of the house, Bibi
sits up at the same moment, in the
same manner, and stares out her win
dow at the same street light. She, too,
watches Mo strike at invisible enemies.
When the family finally sleeps, you
listen to them dream.
n the course of the next few weeks,

I you search for clues, signs, evidence
of evil intentions. But to no avail. Life
merely goes on.
Hajji repairs a window he broke
while attempting to repaint his moth
er’s room.
Cold floods the house.
Bibi moves into the boys’ room, and
the boys sleep in the living room. No
longer able to sneak away from each
other, they carry out long conversa
tions before falling asleep. They dis
cuss their family’s finances, their sus
picion that their father is hiding bills
from them. They plan to confront him
but never go through with it. “There’s no way he’ll notice, right? I mean, all turtles look the same.”
When they sleep, both of the boys
snore, Marvin whistling and Mo sort
of growling, and the girls, whose bed
• •
room is closest to the living room, com
plain to each other all night. The tim missing. He goes from room to room, why take the risk?” he argues. An hour
ing of the boys’ snoring is uncanny. calling her name. For the first time in later, Hajji and Lily return home from
There is a certain rhythm to it. When weeks, Bibi speaks to her son, inform the hospital, and Hajji informs his wife
Mo murmurs, Marvin bursts, and, when ing him that his motherinlaw is sick. that Lily has become a vegetarian. He
Marvin quiets, Mo roars. The girls refer Tech workers from the Bay Area asks her to keep it a secret. “For now,”
to it as “the symphony.” Eventually, have moved into the neighborhood. Hajji says, “she doesn’t want anyone
though, the girls fall asleep and you Property taxes are rising. Bills stack else to know.” Habibi promises not to
become the sole listener. up. Hajji needs help but won’t tell his tell a soul.
Mo notices blood in his stool but sons, because he doesn’t want them to One afternoon, while her father
doesn’t go to a doctor. take on more work. He borrows money sleeps and her mother cooks, Mary
Mary earns a 4.3 G.P.A. for the se and credit. He buries the bills at night shuffles through Hajji’s mail and dis
mester, and Hajji buys doughnuts for like corpses. covers pastdue bills, three or four from
the whole family. They all sit in the Habibi receives another call from the same creditor. She picks a few of
living room, eating doughnuts and her parents. There will be an opera the most urgent (electricity and Inter
drinking tea, and Bibi jokes that now tion. It’s the heart, of all things. Habibi net) and rushes upstairs. On Posh
they won’t have to sell Mary for a pair tells only Hajji, but Bibi, of course, mark.com, she sells her own lightly
of goats. The whole family laughs as finds out. used sweaters and jeans and Tshirts,
though in a scene in a sitcom. In a moment of weakness, Lily eats which she has embroidered with char
While Habibi’s husband is out buy a Slim Jim that she shoplifted from a acters from popular animes—Sailor
ing supplies from a hardware store, she gas station near her school. At home, Moon and Totoro and Naruto—and,
receives a call from her parents, in Kabul, she vomits the processed meat for sev in the course of a week, pays her fa
and discovers that her mother is seri eral minutes. Though everyone assures ther’s bills online.
ously ill. She tells no one and leaves to Hajji that Lily will be fine, Hajji in Habibi tells Marvin about his grand
visit her brothers across town. Soon af sists on taking her to the emergency mother’s upcoming surgery. “Do you
terward, Hajji returns home to find her room. “As long as we have MediCal, think she will forgive me for abandoning
her in that city?” she asks him. Marvin quietly pray for their sick mother. In the spot where he lies on the floor, unmov-
pretends to pause his video game, even morning, the news is good, and you can- ing, and that he will have no other choice
though he is playing online, in real time. not help sighing with relief. but to drag himself there and call for
He sets his controller aside and listens help. And yet he doesn’t move. You lis-
to his mother’s fears without respond- ix months into your assignment, you ten for his breath and hear him rasp-
ing. He is killed over and over again.
The stack of bills lightens, but Hajji
S begin to doubt your purpose. Hajji
is falling apart. His doctor has advised
ing. Water drips from the trapdoor to
the attic, and Hajji lifts his hands and
hardly notices. him to undergo spinal surgery that may washes his face and his arms and his
When her husband is out, Habibi leave him paralyzed. In another era, in hair as if he were performing his ablu-
calls Karl in Berkeley. They chat about a different body, perhaps Hajji could tions. It’s at this point that both you and
his stomach, his rent, his studies, his have been dangerous. But here, now, Hajji notice the small puddle of blood
protests, and his prayers until Habibi debilitated by pain and trauma, the old forming under his head.
begs him, once again, to renounce man is no threat at all. Hajji pleads to God, and you hear
Communism and come home. Karl ar- You should update your superiors. him, and you answer.
gues that his father, more than anyone You should advise them to abort the The ambulance arrives shortly
else, should be sympathetic to his cause. operation. But you won’t. Not now. Not afterward.
Habibi begins to weep and Karl mut- when Mary is about to apply to col- The next day, as soon as he returns
ters an excuse and hangs up. You won- leges, not when Mo is planning to pro- home from the hospital, Hajji purchases
der which of your colleagues is surveil- pose, not when Marvin is making new a phone recorder on Amazon and, when
ling Karl. friends on campus, not when Habibi’s it arrives, has Marvin hook it up to the
While Hajji watches Al Jazeera— parents are applying for a visa to the landline. No one questions him. No one
video footage of a young Afghan farmer States, not when Hajji is deciding argues. He listens to hours and hours
being executed by an Australian sol- whether or not he will go through with of recordings in his bedroom, alone or
dier plays on the screen—Mary curls the surgery, not when Bibi is losing touch with Habibi, and during awkward mo-
up next to him and picks at the flakes with her brother, not when Lily is on ments of silence, pauses in conversa-
of dried skin in his beard as she did the brink of an artistic breakthrough. tions, he stops and rewinds and listens
when she was four years old. Accord- There’s too much left to learn. again. “Do you hear it?” he whispers to
ing to Habibi, this was her special rit- But then, on a cold summer night, Habibi in Pashto. “The breathing?”
ual before sleep. Now Mary has a bot- when the rest of the family has driven She waits and listens again and nods
tle of olive oil in hand, a tiny dollop of down to an aunt’s house in Fremont, her head.
which she pours into her palm and Hajji heads up to the attic to fix a pipe. You know this is impossible. You know
runs through her father’s beard. The You watch him prepare his tools and there is no way for them to hear you, and
execution is played again. After being climb his ladder and enter his soaking yet, when you are listening to a conver-
mauled by a dog, the farmer, Dad Mo- attic, and, in a fine mist of leaking water, sation, and there is a pause, a silence, you
hammad, lies on his back in the mid- Hajji fidgets with the pipe until he mut- find yourself holding your breath.
dle of a field. His knees are drawn up ters “Shit” in Pashto. He crawls back Hajji becomes relentless.
to his chest, and he is clutching red through the water, but on his way down He searches for you on the phone, in
prayer beads. A soldier stands over him he slips off the highest rung of the lad- the streets, in unmarked white vans, in
with a rifle. “You want me to drop this der and falls onto the hard tile beneath the faces of policemen, detectives in street
cunt?” he asks. There is the sound of a him. Though the fall must have been clothes, military personnel, and his own
shot, and the footage cuts to black. only ten feet or so, Hajji has landed neighbors. He searches for you at the
When Mary is gone and the news seg- awkwardly and broken his leg. He lies hospital, at the bank, on his computer,
ment is finished, Hajji sits alone in the on the floor, on his back, staring up at his sons’ laptops, in Webcams, phone
living room with the TV turned off. the attic from which he fell. You know cameras, and on the television. He
He runs his fingers through the moist- for a fact that Hajji has broken this leg searches for you in the curtains and in
ened strands of his beard and seems once before, during the Soviet occupa- the drawers of the kitchen and in the
surprised by its softness. tion, when a Kalashnikov round pierced trees in his back yard, in the electrical
On the night before Habibi’s moth- his fibula and forced him off the bat- sockets, the locks of the door handles,
er’s surgery, one of Habibi’s brothers vis- tlefield for six months, during the heavi- and in the filaments of the light bulbs.
its for the first time in months. Mary is est period of fighting in Logar, and that And, even as his family protests, Hajji
the only one who doesn’t acknowledge this injury probably saved his life, and searches for you in shattered glass, in bro-
him. In their shared room, Lily attempts that his living—while his brother died, ken tile, in the strips of his wallpaper, the
to persuade her sister to forgive their while his sister died, while his cousins splinters of his doors, his tattered flesh,
uncle for his many insults, attacks, jokes, and friends and neighbors all died— his warped nerves, and in his own beat-
attacks disguised as jokes, and threats. has haunted him his whole life. ing heart, where, through it all, the voice
But Mary refuses. “Mom will under- A minute passes. Two. You know that whispering that he is loved is yours. 
stand,” Mary says, but you’re not so sure. Hajji always forgets his cell phone in
That night, Habibi and her brother sleep the kitchen and that the kitchen is ap- NEWYORKER.COM
on a red toshak in the living room and proximately twenty yards away from the Jamil Jan Kochai on Americans’ fear of Islam.

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Is it time to rethink everything we’ve been taught about the origins of “civilization”?
BY GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS
oments of sociopolitical tu- from the grand accession of civiliza- profuse and antic account of how we
M mult have a way of generat-

ing all-encompassing explan-
atory histories. These chronicles either
tion. Their arcs of irrevocable decline
or compulsory progress are variations
on themes that were given their most
came to take that old narrative for
granted and why we might be better
off if we let it go.
indulge a sense of decline or applaud recognizable modern elaborations by
our advances. The appetite for such sto- Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques he consensus version of the story
ries seems indiscriminate—tales of de-
terioration and tales of improvement
Rousseau. Pinker takes up the Hobbes-
ian notion that early human existence
T begins with the appearance of the
first anatomically modern humans, about
are frequently consumed by the same was a brutish war of all against all. Ha- two hundred thousand years ago. For
people. Two of Bill Gates’s favorite soup- rari takes rather literally Rousseau’s approximately a hundred and ninety
to-nuts books of the past decade, for thought experiment that we were born thousand years, or about ninety-five per
example, are Steven Pinker’s “The Bet- free and rushed headlong into our cent of our existence as a species, we
ter Angels of Our Nature” and Yuval chains. (“There is no way out of the lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers,
Noah Harari’s “Sapiens.” The first as- imagined order,” Harari writes. “When following migratory herds and foraging
serts that everything has been on the we break down our prison walls and for wild nuts and berries. These cohorts
upswing since the Enlightenment, when run towards freedom, we are in fact were small enough, and the demands
we learned that rational argument was running into the more spacious exer- of resource procurement and allocation
preferable to religious superstition and cise yard of a bigger prison.”) In both were sufficiently minor, that decisions
wanton cudgelling. The second con- accounts, guilelessness and egalitarian- were face-to-face affairs among inti-
cludes that everything was more or less ism are exchanged for knowledge and mates. Despite the lurking menace of
O.K. until about twelve thousand years subordination; the only real difference large cats, these early hunter-gatherers
ago, when we first beat our swords into lies in the cost-benefit assessments of didn’t have to work particularly hard to
plowshares; this innocent decision, that trade. fulfill their caloric needs, and they passed
which must have seemed a good idea About a decade ago, the anthropol- their ample leisure hours cavorting like
at the time, heralded an era of admin- ogist and activist David Graeber, who primates. The order of the day was an
istrative hierarchy, state-sanctioned vi- died suddenly last year, at the age of easy egalitarianism, mostly for want of
olence, and the unchecked proliferation fifty-nine, and the archeologist David other options.
of carbohydrates. Perhaps what readers Wengrow began to consider, in the wake Twelve thousand years ago, give or
like Gates find valuable in these books of Occupy Wall Street, how they might take, the static pleasures of this long, un-
has less to do with the purported shape contribute to the burgeoning literature differentiated epoch gave way to history
and direction of history than with the on inequality. Not inequality of income proper. The hunter-gatherer bands lucky
broad assurance that history has a shape or wealth but inequality of power: why enough to find themselves on the flanks
and a direction. so many people obey the orders of so of the Zagros Mountains, or the eastern
Both stories, after all, adhere to a few. The two scholars came to see, how- shores of the Mediterranean, began herd-
model of history that’s at once teleo- ever, that to inquire after the “origins” ing and farming. The rise of agriculture
logical (driven by specific forces to ar- of inequality was to defer to one of two allowed for permanent settlements,
rive at the foreordained present) and myths—roughly, Hobbes’s or Rous- which, growing dense, became cities.
ABOVE: LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
discontinuous (such magical things as seau’s—based on a deeply ingrained Urban commerce demanded division of
farming and rationality emerged from and deeply misleading fantasy of the labor, professional specialization, and bu-
the woodwork, unlocking successive human career. The product of their ex- reaucratic oversight. Because wheat, un-
stages of developmental maturity). They tended collaboration, “The Dawn of like wild berries or the hindquarters of
generally agree that the crucial rupture Everything: A New History of Hu- an aurochs, was a storable, countable
divided some original state of nature manity” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a good that appeared on a routine schedule,
“The Dawn of Everything” aims to expand our political imagination by exploring how human beings once lived together.
ILLUSTRATION BY ROB SATO THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 63
thing, the requirements of hunting and
gathering could support only some triv-
ial fraction of the earth’s current popu-
lation. A life under government control
now seems inescapable.
“The Dawn of Everything” is a lively,
and often very funny, anarchist project
that aspires to enlarge our political imag-
ination by revitalizing the possibilities
of the distant past. Superficially, it re-
sembles other exhaustive, synoptic his-
tories—it’s encyclopedic in scope, with
sections introduced by comically ba-
roque intertitles—but it disavows the
intellectual trappings of a knowable arc,
a linear structure, and internal necessity.
As a stab at grandeur stripped of gran-
diosity, the book rejects the logic of tech-
nological or ecological determinism,
structuring its narrative around our an-
cestors’ improvisatory responses to the
“I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. Release the bees.” challenges of happenstance. The result
is an almost hallucinatory vision of the
• • human epic as a series of idiosyncratic
digressions. It is the story of how we
made it up as we went along—of how
the selfish administrators of inchoate gued that their “primitive” ways were things could have been different and,
kingdoms could easily collect taxes, or not only freer and more egalitarian than perhaps, still might be.
tributes. Writing, which first emerged the “later” stages of human development Drawing on new archeological find-
in the service of accounting, abetted the but also healthier and more fun. Agri- ings, and revisiting old ones, Graeber
sort of control and surveillance upon culture required much longer and duller and Wengrow argue that the granaries-
which primitive racketeers came to de- working hours; dense settlements and to-overlords tale simply isn’t true. Rather,
pend. Where hunter-gatherers had the proximity of livestock, as well as mo- it’s a function of an extremely low-
hunted and gathered only enough to notonous diets of cereal staples, encour- resolution approach to time. Viewed
meet the demands of the day, agricul- aged malnutrition and disease. The poi- closely, the course of human history
tural communities created history’s first soned fruit of grain cultivation had, in resists our favored schemata. Hunter-
surpluses, and the extraction of tributes this telling, led to a cycle of population gatherer communities seem to have
propped up rent-seeking élites and the growth and more grain cultivation. Ag- experimented with various forms of
managerial pyramids—not to mention riculture was a trap. Rousseau’s thought farming as side projects thousands
standing armies—necessary to maintain experiment, long written off by conser- of years before we have any evidence of
their privilege. The rise of the arts, tech- vative critics as romantic nostalgia for cities. Even after urban centers devel-
nology, and monumental architecture the “noble savage,” was resuscitated, in oped, there was nothing like an ineluc-
was the upside of the creation and im- modern, scientific form. It might have table relationship between cities, tech-
miseration of a peasant class. taken three or four decades for these in- nology, and domination.
From roughly the Enlightenment sights to make their way to TED stages, The large town of Çatalhöyük, for
through the middle of the twentieth cen- but the paleo diet became a fundamen- example, on the Konya Plain in present-
tury, these developments—which came tal requirement of any self-respecting day Turkey, was settled around 7400 B.C.
to be known as the Neolithic Revolu- Silicon Valley founder. and seems to have been occupied for
tion—were seen as generally good things. approximately fifteen hundred years—
Societies were categorized by evolution- or Graeber and Wengrow, this basic which, the authors note, is “roughly the
ary stage on the basis of their mode of
food production and economic organi-
F story, whether relayed in a trium-
phal or a defeatist register, is itself a trap.
same period of time that separates us
from Amalafrida, Queen of the Vandals,
zation, with full-fledged states taken to If we accept that the rise of agriculture who reached the height of her influence
be the pinnacle of progress. meant the rise of the state—of political around AD 523.” The settlement was
But it was also possible to think that élites and intricate structures of power— home to about five thousand people, but
the Neolithic Revolution was, all in all, then all we can do is tinker around the it had neither an obvious center nor any
a bad thing. In the late nineteen-sixties, edges. Even if we regard the Paleolithic communal facilities. There weren’t even
ethnographers studying present-day era as a garden paradise, we know that streets: households were densely packed
hunter-gatherers in southern Africa ar- our reëntry is forever barred. For one together and accessed via roof ladders.
The residents’ living areas were marked ishly furnished with aurochs horns or factors played crucial roles. They arose
by a “distinctly macabre sense of inte- prized obsidian (which was brought in from our own choices and actions.
rior design,” with narrow rooms outfit- from Cappadocia, more than a hundred Graeber and Wengrow point to mo-
ted with aurochs skulls and horns, along miles away), but there is no sign of élite ments in the distant past in which they
with raised platforms that encased the neighborhoods or marks of caste con- see instances of deliberate refusal: com-
remains of up to sixty of the households’ solidation. Different forms of social or- munities that weighed the advantages
dead ancestors. It was, as far as we know, ganization likely prevailed at different and disadvantages of one ostensibly evo-
one of the first large settlements to have times of year, with greater division of lutionary step or another (pastoralism,
practiced agriculture: the citizens de- labor necessary for cultivation and hunt- royal domination) and decided that they
rived most of their nutrition from cere- ing in the summer and fall, followed by liked their current odds just fine. The
als and beans they grew, as well as from something more equitable—and, per- communities that built Stonehenge had
domesticated sheep and goats. For a long haps, matriarchal—during the winter. once adopted ways of cultivating cereal
time, all of this was taken together as a Çatalhöyük isn’t the only site that from Continental Europe, but recent
key example of the “agricultural revolu- calls into question the presumption that research suggests that they returned to
tion” in action, and the material rem- the Neolithic era was patterned on a sin- hazelnut collection around 3300 B.C.
nants were interpreted to support the gle civilizational kit. Graeber and Wen- Various ecological theories have been
old story. Corpulent female figurines, grow report that some cities thrived long floated to explain the sudden collapse,
assumed to be part of fertility rituals, before they showed signs of hierarchi- around 1350 A.D., of the brutal dynasty
were found in what were understood to cal systems—such as temples and pal- of Cahokia (in present-day Illinois),
be proto-religious shrines of some sort— aces—and some never developed them then the largest city in the Americas
the first indications of organized cul- at all. “In others, centralized power seems north of Mexico, but Graeber and Wen-
tural systems. to appear and then disappear,” they write. grow propose that the proto-empire’s
In the past three decades, however, “It would seem that the mere fact of subjects—who lived under constant sur-
new archeological methods have dis- urban life does not, necessarily, imply veillance and the threat of mass execu-
turbed many of these long-standing as- any form of political organization.” tions—simply defected en masse. Land
sumptions. The “shrines” were, Graeber If cities didn’t lead to states, what wasn’t scarce, and they just walked away.
and Wengrow tell us, just regular houses; did? Not any singular arrow of history, Where some groups adopted and
the female figurines could be the dis- according to Graeber and Wengrow, abandoned different arrangements over
carded Barbie dolls of the Anatolian Neo- but, rather, the gradual and dismal co- time, others maintained a repertoire of
lithic, but they could also be a way of alescence of otherwise unrelated, par- assorted practices to suit fluctuating pur-
honoring female elders. The community allel processes. In particular, they think poses. Modern ethnographic treatments
seems to have supported itself for a thou- it involved the extension of patriarchal of Indigenous communities describe an
sand years with various forms of agricul- domination from the home to society astonishing level of social plasticity (avail-
ture—floodplain farming and animal hus- at large. Their account of how house- able to us, perhaps, in the highly etio-
bandry—without ever having committed hold structures were transformed into lated form of Burning Man and other
itself to new forms of social or cultural despotic regimes requires some uncon- “temporary autonomous zones”). In a
organization. From what we can derive vincing hand-waving, but throughout 1903 essay, the anthropologists Marcel
from wall murals and other expressive Mauss and Henri Beuchat described the
residues, Graeber and Wengrow say, “the routine organizational reversals in Inuit
cultural life of the community remained communities. These groups spent their
stubbornly oriented around the worlds summers fishing and hunting in small
of hunting and foraging.” cohorts under the possessive—and co-
So what was actually going on in ercive—authority of a single male elder.
Çatalhöyük? Graeber and Wengrow in- Graeber and Wengrow describe how
terpret the evidence to propose that the then, as the winter brought an influx of
town’s inhabitants managed their affairs walruses and seals to the shore, “the Inuit
perfectly well without the sort of ad- gathered together to build great meet-
ministrative structures, royal or priestly, they emphasize that any given process ing houses of wood, whale rib and stone,”
that were supposedly part of the agri- can be historically contingent without where “virtues of equality, altruism and
cultural package. “Despite the consid- being simply inexplicable. The guiding collective life prevailed. Wealth was
erable size and density of the built-up principle of “The Dawn of Everything” shared, and husbands and wives ex-
area, there is no evidence for central au- is that our remote ancestors—not to changed partners.” It’s impossible to say
thority,” the authors maintain. “Each mention certain present-day Indige- whether such practices were designed or
household appears more or less a world nous groups long dismissed as living preserved to diminish the threat of per-
unto itself—a discrete locus of storage, relics of superannuated barbarians— manent domination, but that was one of
production and consumption. Each also must be viewed as self-conscious polit- their effects.
seems to have held a significant degree ical actors. Historical ruptures cannot Such groups weren’t ignorant of
of control over its own rituals.” Some be reduced to technological novelties whatever else was on offer; they were
houses appear to have been more lav- or geographical constraints, even if those frequently in contact with other societies,
took stock of their habits, and sought population, regardless of wealth or sta- in an introductory course in anthropol-
to define themselves in contrarian ways, tus.” They accomplished all of this with- ogy or archeology is that pat appeals to
in a rather underexplored process that, out wheeled vehicles, sailing ships, ani- cultural evolution are retrograde and silly.
following the anthropologist Gregory mal-powered traction, or advanced met- Critiques of grand narratives have been
Bateson, Graeber and Wengrow call allurgy. Perhaps most important was that, important to the modern self-image of
“schismogenesis.” In the Pacific North- although they were in contact with the these fields—in part as penance for hav-
west, men of rank among the Kwak- monarchical Mayan societies nearby, the ing once been happy to serve the prior-
iutl held lavish, greasy potlatches and people of Teotihuacan flourished for ities of empire, peddling “civilization” as
took war captives as slaves; their neigh- some three centuries without submitting a gift to the “primitives.” One consequence,
bors to the south of the Klamath River, to the rule of anything like a king. however, is that wholesale synthetic ac-
the Yurok, prized restraint and self- Except, we learn in passing, some ar- counts of human history tend to be writ-
denial, and committed themselves to cheologists believe that they did. (The ten in the extravagantly roughshod mode
modes of subsistence that rendered scholarly debate on the matter turns in of Harari’s “Sapiens” or Jared Diamond’s
slavery, which they found morally re- part on the interpretation of a few inscrip- “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” (Graeber and
pugnant, unnecessary. tions in the Mayan city of Tikal.) Though Wengrow neglect to mention their stron-
When divergences in cultural values Graeber and Wengrow have marshalled gest rivals: the science fictions of writers
occurred within societies rather than be- a vast amount of archeological evidence, such as Kim Stanley Robinson.)
tween them, the result could take the they acknowledge that much of what any- At the same time, Graeber and Wen-
form of revolutionary sentiment. Con- one has to say about ancient societies is grow know better than to limit “The
sider the city of Teotihuacan, which was speculative. Their hope is that, even if Dawn of Everything” to a litany of coun-
founded around 100 B.C.—more than some of their examples remain dubious, terexamples. In the late nineteen-sixties,
a thousand years before the rise of the the accumulated weight of recent find- the anthropologist Clifford Geertz wor-
Aztecs—and was almost certainly the ings—and the more inventive assortment ried that his discipline had gained a rep-
largest city in the pre-colonial Ameri- of political organization they imply—es- utation for simple negation—a message
cas. The metropolis was first constructed tablishes the glib tendentiousness of Big encapsulated in the phrase “Not on Eas-
on a monumental scale, with the kind of History. As they put it, “We are at least ter Island.” In other words, there were
pyramids and palaces that indicate so- trying to see what happens when we drop holes in every story: you could always
cial hierarchy. At a certain point, how- the teleological habit of thought.” puncture some “high-wrought” theory
ever, the people of Teotihuacan decided with a shard of anomalous data from the
against investing in more fancy villas. In- ig History, to be sure, has long been remote place where you did your field-
stead, Graeber and Wengrow write, “the
citizens embarked on a remarkable proj-
B out of favor in academic circles. Al-
though Graeber and Wengrow can be a
work. Yet when anthropology was re-
duced to “spiteful ethnography,” Geertz
ect of urban renewal, supplying high- little self-congratulatory, they do point argued, it put itself in the business of “dis-
quality apartments for nearly all the city’s out that one of the first things you learn approving of intellectual constructions
but not of creating, or perhaps even of
understanding, any.” Graeber and Wen-
grow seem to agree. It’s all well and good,
they might think, to murmur “Not on
Easter Island” when a popularizer gets
too expansive or confident, but they worry
that if people aren’t offered an alternative
framework they will still default to some
version of the pernicious cultural-evolu-
tion myth—and accept that the familiar
hierarchies of governance are simply the
price of sophistication.
Consider the widespread assump-
tion, which Graeber long contested, that
larger human societies can’t resolve col-
lective-action problems without top-
down authority. In 2014, he and the tech
investor Peter Thiel debated the issue
onstage. Thiel argued that modern life
is much too convoluted for truly dem-
ocratic participation, which is why his
model for innovation was the minia-
ture suzerainty of the startup. As a quasi-
libertarian, he admitted some sympa-
thy for Graeber’s political anarchism,
but he didn’t see how it could ever work: their drainage ditches.” About eight perhaps it began to go wrong precisely
“Could you build the Manhattan Proj- thousand years ago, the villagers of when people started losing that free-
ect, could you build Apollo, could you Tell Sabi Abyad, in present-day Syria, dom to imagine and enact other forms
get someone to the moon in a radically saw to a variety of complex tasks— of social existence.”
decentralized chaotic system? Or do pasturing the flocks; sowing, harvest- This wasn’t a matter of sheer for-
you need coördination and planning?” ing, and threshing grain; weaving flax; getfulness, they say. It was by design.
Curiously, there are moments in “The making beads; and carving stones—that At least some of the Indigenous inhab-
Dawn of Everything” in which Grae- presumably required extensive inter- itants of the Americas, they tell us, were
ber and Wengrow seem to yield to this household coöperation, yet everyone bewildered and appalled by the strange
way of thinking; they suggest, at one lived in uniform dwellings. European custom of giv-
point, that we pay less attention to Though writing wasn’t in- ing and taking orders. Their
Egypt’s heroic pyramid-building Old vented for another three judgments were widely cir-
and Middle Kingdoms and more to its thousand years, a scheme culated in the Europe of
apparently helter-skelter “intermediate” of geometric tokens, stored the early Enlightenment,
periods, during which masterpieces and archived in a central if where Indigenous people
might have gone unbuilt but people did nondescript depot, had been were often featured in di-
not have to fear being summarily en- put in place to monitor re- alogues meant to criticize
slaved or buried alive as part of a fu- source administration. The the status quo. At the time,
neral entourage. Still, it’s by contend- archeological remains of the they were typically dis-
ing at length with the prejudices of village, remarkably pre- missed as the rhetorical
scale—the expectation that there is some served by a catastrophic fire sock-puppetry of canny
natural upper bound on the number of that baked its structures of mud and European heretics. For how could “Na-
people who can live and work together clay, show no signs of caste division or tives” credibly engage with political
without significant coördination from a presiding authority. constitutions or deliberate over conse-
above—that the book signals its broader Graeber and Wengrow hope that, quential decisions?
ambitions. “In the standard, textbook once we grasp how ancient mega-sites “The Dawn of Everything” makes
version of human history, scale is cru- (in Ukraine or in Jomon-era Japan) could a persuasive case that what was passed
cial,” the authors write. “The tiny bands grow large and manifold without a lit- off as Indigenous criticism of European
of foragers in which humans were erate bureaucracy, or the way early lit- political thinking was, in fact, Indige-
thought to have spent most of their erate societies (Uruk, in Mesopotamia) nous criticism of European political
evolutionary history could be relatively might have managed the trick of par- thinking. These Indigenous objections
democratic and egalitarian precisely be- ticipatory self-governance, we might could be safely deflected only if they
cause they were small.” We therefore renew and expand our own cramped were seen as European ventriloquism,
persuade ourselves that, given the prob- notions of what’s politically tenable. We not ideas from another adult commu-
lem of strangers, we need “such things could come to detach progress from nity with alternative values. “Portray-
as urban planners, social workers, tax obedience. As they put it, “Humans may ing history as a story of material prog-
auditors and police.” not have begun their history in a state ress, that framework recast indigenous
Yet pre-agricultural people erected of primordial innocence, but they do critics as innocent children of nature,
great testaments to their ways of life in appear to have begun it with a self-con- whose views on freedom were a mere
the absence of those structural sup- scious aversion to being told what to side effect of their uncultivated way of
ports—at Göbekli Tepe, also in Turkey, do. If this is so, we can at least refine life and could not possibly offer a seri-
as well as on the Ukrainian steppe and our initial question: the real puzzle is ous challenge to contemporary social
in the Mississippi Delta. And post- not when chiefs, or even kings and thought,” Graeber and Wengrow write.
agricultural societies could maintain queens, first appeared, but rather when The whole symbolic apparatus of
systematic achievements without ad- it was no longer possible to simply laugh cultural evolution aimed to make free-
ministrators to run them. “It turns out them out of court.” dom—which they define as the free-
that farmers are perfectly capable of co- dom to move, the freedom to disobey
ordinating very complicated irrigation raeber and Wengrow’s dearest as- orders, and the freedom to imagine less
systems all by themselves,” Graeber and
Wengrow say. “Urban populations seem
G piration is to quicken that laugh-
ter once again. “Nowadays, most of
hierarchical ways of organizing our-
selves—seem archaic and perilous.
to have a remarkable capacity for self- us find it increasingly difficult even to When we speak of the onset of social
governance in ways which, while usu- picture what an alternative economic inequality, we’re accepting the idea that
ally not quite ‘egalitarian,’ were likely a or social order would be like,” they write. real freedom is the plaything of chil-
good deal more participatory than al- “Our distant ancestors seem, by con- dren. The species grew up, and grew
most any urban government today.” An- trast, to have moved regularly back and out of it. Peter Thiel wonders why we
cient emperors mostly “saw little rea- forth between them. If something did don’t yet live in the future of our dreams.
son to interfere, as they simply didn’t go terribly wrong in human history— Graeber and Wengrow think the first
care very much about how their sub- and given the current state of the world, step forward is a reminder of the past
jects cleaned the streets or maintained it’s hard to deny something did—then we deserve. 
mythical figure. Neither the children’s
BOOKS film nor any of the other pop-culture
depictions of Herakles mentions what
SAD BUT GREAT

he was famous for among the ancient
Greeks: murdering his wife, Megara, a
Theban princess, and their sons.
Anne Carson’s obsession with Herakles. Almost everyone believed that the
gods made Herakles kill his family, but
BY CASEY CEP exactly when he did so was the subject
of some disagreement. Many people
thought that his labors were punishment
for his crimes, feats of strength by which
the fallen hero could propitiate the gods;
others claimed the labors preceded the
massacre, suggesting that violence always
begets violence. That’s how Euripides
told the story in “Herakles,” which was
first performed some twenty-four hun-
dred years ago and which has recently
been reimagined by the poet Anne Car-
son, in “H of H Playbook.”
Like Herakles, Carson gets away with
everything in this strange and surpris-
ingly timely book. A cross between a
dramaturge’s dream journal and a mad-
man’s diary, it features Carson’s trans-
formed version of the Euripides play,
rendered in handwritten lines and blocky
paragraphs of pasted word-processor text,
alongside original illustrations: marked-up
maps, smears of blood-red paint, haunt-
ing sketches of human figures and tor-
tured faces, pencil and eraser stains that
resemble heaps of ash, plus the occa-
sional glacier and lion. A facsimile of
Carson’s own personal playbook, “H of H”
is a performance of thought, one that
speaks not only to the heroic past but to
the tragic present.
o woman could get away with it. three-headed dog Cerberus from Hades. nly a few dozen of the Greek trag-
N Murdering her children is all she
would ever be known for—ask Medea.
Those dozen labors have inspired
countless playwrights, poets, and philos-
O edies remain, among them works
by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Yet Herakles, often called by his Roman ophers throughout the centuries, not to These plays were the rock concerts of
name, Hercules, is known for everything mention Walt Disney Pictures. In the their era, staged not by candlelight in-
else: slaying the man-eating birds of the cartoon version of the tale, from 1997, side small rooms but in grand theatres
Stymphalian marsh, the multiheaded Hercules’ hardscrabble climb from the in the bright light of day before some
Lernaean Hydra, and the Nemean lion, lowly farms outside Thebes where he ten thousand people. For a play like “Her-
with its Kevlar-strength fur; capturing was raised to his rightful place atop Mt. akles,” a large chorus would sing and
the wild Erymanthian boar, the golden- Olympus beside Zeus—who, in the myth, dance in a circular orchestra space near
antlered deer of Artemis, and the Mi- fathered Herakles with a mortal, Alc- the audience, at the edge of the stage.
notaur’s father; stealing the girdle of Hip- mene, the wife of a Theban general, Am- Meanwhile, on the stage itself, a troupe
polyta, the golden apples from the garden phitryon—seems like a mashup of “Sur- of three actors performed all the roles:
of the Hesperides, the flesh-eating mares vivor” and “American Idol.” “Person of the hero, his wife, his father, his friend,
of Diomedes, and the red cattle of the the week in every Greek opinion poll,” and the usurper of his throne.
giant Geryon; mucking the Augean sta- Disney’s Motown-style muses sing, cap- Without playbills, the audience relied
bles in a single day; and kidnapping the turing the contemporary image of the on dialogue to know who was who, and
discerned the plot partly through conven-
“H of H Playbook” imagines a demigod who wears overalls and steals a Corvette. tions of staging and posture. Take the
68 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY LILLI CARRÉ
opening lines of “Herakles,” which Car- own beloveds.” Then, setting up the play’s in which the monster Geryon, of cattle-
son first translated fifteen years ago, pub- second cliffhanger, he adds, “Shall I not stealing fame, is a Heidegger-reading
lishing it along with three other plays by be their avenger too?” twink whose torturous love affair with
Euripides in a volume called “Grief Les- A family rescued only to be ruined, Herakles takes him inside a Peruvian vol-
sons.” The lines are spoken by a man sit- a hero resurrected only to threaten sui- cano. Her “translation” of Catullus be-
ting beside an altar, surrounded by a cide: “Herakles” hinges on such reversals came the Slinky-like “Nox,” an unusual
younger woman and her children: “Who of fate. The rest of the play considers text-in-a-box with pages that literally
does not know the man who shared his whether a man who sentences himself unfold one after another, linking an an-
marriage bed / with Zeus?” Even if an to death can be saved, and, if so, by whom. cient elegy to Carson’s own elegy for her
audience member was too far away to Ultimately, it is his friend Theseus, whom brother. The independent press New Di-
catch every word of that question, the ac- Herakles has recently rescued from rections published that beautiful volume
tor’s low-to-the-stage position would Hades, who comes to his aid. Seeing “the and this new one; Knopf published
convey his humble situation, and the next ground covered in corpses” and learning, “Float,” a collection of loose chapbooks
bit makes clear that it is the cuckold Am- from Amphitryon, that Herakles is re- drifting in an aquarium-like case.
phitryon speaking: “son of Alkaios,/grand- sponsible, he concludes, “This agony It’s not an accident that Carson often
son of Perseus,/father of Herakles,/me!” comes from Hera.” Like Herakles, The- produces work in forms that cannot quite
Amphitryon’s sixty lines of woe are seus has both divine and mortal parent- be called books. Books are an anachro-
followed by another twenty-five or so age, and he argues that just as the gods nism in the imaginative realm she calls
from his daughter-in-law, Megara. Her- transgress against one another, so, too, home, which lies somewhat closer to an-
akles has left them alone, vulnerable to do they transgress against humanity— cient Greece than to modern Canada,
the whims of the new king of Thebes, but just as the gods are allowed to live where she was born, or contemporary
Lykos, who has sentenced the hero’s fam- despite those transgressions, so should Michigan, where she lives. She is drawn
ily to death. They have taken refuge at demigods and humans be allowed to live to papyrus and codex, fragment and play.
the altar of Zeus, not because he is Her- even if they sin. But books can seem like anachronisms
akles’ father but because any mortal at But Theseus cannot convince his to us, too, in the age of e-readers and
the altar is to be spared harm, though friend of this truth. “I don’t believe gods smartphones, when information is im-
Lykos announces that he is willing to commit adultery,” says the agonized Her- mediate and ethereal and pleasure so
burn the altar down if that’s what it takes akles, as inconsolable as Job. “I don’t be- often lacks a body of any kind. What
to kill them. Herakles is off laboring; as lieve gods throw gods in chains / or tyr- Carson does again and again in her non-
best as anyone knows, he’s still down in annize one another. / Never did believe books is return us—jarringly, brazenly,
the underworld playing dogcatcher with it, never shall. / God must, if God is truly delightfully—to that which predates the
Cerberus. And so these lines establish God, / lack nothing. / All the rest is mis- material culture of the book and which
the play’s first cliffhanger: Will he re- erable poets’ lies.” will persist if we ever move beyond it:
turn in time to rescue his family? Although this debate occurs near the the concentrated effort to externalize a
But Euripides is interested not so end of the tragedy, it is in some ways mind and its thoughts. Whatever “H of
much in heroic acts as in the origins and where the play really begins: one demi- H” might mean—it isn’t clear—the book
limits of heroism. Herakles soon arrives, god insists on a conventional theology is really “H of C,” “Herakles of Carson,”
reassuring his family that he will save of many gods who behave badly, while a version that only this one bizarre and
them, and when Lykos comes to kill them the other reasons his way to an existen- brilliant brain could produce.
Herakles kills Lykos instead. As always tialist view of life. Herakles maintains That bizarre and brilliant brain is no-
in Greek tragedy, the violence takes place that if the gods are real they must be tably obsessed with Herakles. In addi-
offstage; the audience learns of the mur- without sin; thus, having sinned, he can- tion to “Grief Lessons” and “H of H,”
der from the distant cries of the King, not be a god. But the more troubling im- Carson has told his story on at least two
and from the celebratory song of the cho- plication of his logic is that there are no other occasions, in “Autobiography of
rus: “The once great tyrant / turns his gods at all—that the entire Olympic pan- Red” and its sequel of sorts, “Red Doc>,”
life toward death!” Then Iris, a messen- theon is merely an imaginary embodi- in which Herakles is known as Sad But
ger of the gods, and Lyssa, the goddess ment of all the awful and wonderful Great, or Sad, for short. “H of H” opens
of madness, appear, supposedly at the be- things humans can do. This is the radi- on Amphitryon exiting an Airstream
hest of Hera, Zeus’ wife, who is still sore calism of “Herakles” and, ultimately, why trailer, and the Theban general delivers
at her husband over the affair that pro- it is so fascinating to Carson: a play os- a monologue that makes plain right away
duced Herakles. Together, Iris and Lyssa tensibly about the gods is really about that we aren’t in Athens anymore: “By a
drive Herakles mad, prompting him to the causes and the consequences of our thread hangs our fate. / H of H is late. /
kill the family he has just protected. Those own deeply troubling behavior. We are suppliants at an altar / being
murders take place offstage, too, in a con- hounded by the totalitarian cracker /
fusion of violence that the chorus can n “H of H,” Carson doesn’t merely who’s seized power.” The rest of his lines
hardly describe. (Carson calls it a “ber-
serker furor.”) When Amphitryon orders
I translate Euripides; merely translating
isn’t really her thing. She “translated” the
spill across a few pages, tiny scraps of
pasted text that seem to slow down, as
his son to look at the bodies, Herakles work of the Greek poet Stesichoros into if the words were pacing the way the
says, “I’ve become the murderer of my “Autobiography of Red,” a novel in verse actor might onstage. “What’s it like to
wear an eternal Olympian overall” ap- starving, and neither Amphitryon nor “So we go,” Theseus tells H of H, who
pears on the verso side; “held up by the the old men of the chorus can do any- replies, “Go.” Theseus says, “Forward
burning straps of ” on the recto side; then, thing to protect them. Harassed by bor- only,” and H of H assents by repeating
on the next set of pages, a handwritten der goons, they soon meet Lykos; in Car- the campy phrase: “Forward only.”
question—“mortal shortfall?” This ap- son’s drawing of him, the tyrannical King It’s a touching bit of conversation,
pears opposite a drawing of a pair of looks like a mix of Dr. Strangelove and gorgeously assembled on a single page,
denim overalls, charming in its rough Blofeld. Death arrives in many more forms streaks of daylight breaking through a
simplicity and incongruous against the in this version of the myth—not only fire cloudy background, more plausible and
meta text beside it: “Dumb rhyme / for and swords but also melting glaciers and more plaintive to modern ears and eyes
a complexity more sublime / than the nuclear catastrophes. Madness comes than the original. To be mortal is to go
self can ordinarily bear.” roller-skating into the plot, leaving be- only forward, and both demigods go that
The language sounds more Carsonian hind “coal flowers” that fall from ears, and way together, walking out of mythology
with every syllable, both in its wit and in brain crystals that drop from Herakles’ into mortality. Hope is not a solitary vir-
the way it ignores eras as easily as genres, head like crumbs from a mouth. Carson’s tue, and the two of them head toward a
as if recognizing that the whole of his- illustrations are indebted to the German new life as a pair, leaving the bodies of
tory exists in our minds simultaneously artist Anselm Kiefer, whom she quotes the dead behind for Amphitryon to bury,
with whatever happened yesterday and as saying, “I think there is no such thing and leaving madness behind as well. Al-
what we think might happen tomorrow. as an innocent landscape.” though in “H of H” Carson mostly ab-
That is why Herakles wears overalls— When Theseus finally arrives, he breviates the words of Euripides, she
OshKosh B’gods, basically. His divinity sounds alternately like Harold Bloom slightly elaborates on the lines of the
is draped over him protectively but not and Andy Warhol, quoting Melville on chorus that close the play. What is ren-
entirely, a provocation reminding us that the sperm whale and then trying to con- dered in her earlier translation as “We
the problem of Herakles is the same as vince Herakles that his penance can take go in pity, we go in tears. / For we have
the central problem of Christology: Is he the form of a lion-print T-shirt: “You lost our greatest friend” becomes, on an
fully man, fully divine, or fully both? But wear it, you shoot yourself, I sell it, say otherwise blank page, as if the entire
he also wears overalls because the pres- Sotheby’s, bullet hole and all.” No mod- myth had vanished, “We go in grief. /
ent and the past intermingle freely here; ern interpreter has better understood We go in tears. / So many swift and dirty
the ancient hero steals a Corvette, mis- Herakles’ role in his culture, or has of- years. / We’ve lost a man of greatest
quotes Percy Bysshe Shelley, and uses a fered a more striking rendition of the merit, / truly a devil of spirit, / our great-
G.P.S. to navigate both the world and enduring problem of fame. (To the cre- est, our most legendary friend.”
the underworld. ative minds at Disney, fame is less of a
Too often, modernizations like these problem.) The play’s eloquent final di- n the preface to “Grief Lessons,” Car-
can seem gimmicky—reflexive attempts
to make old plays relevant to new audi-
alogue comes fast and fragmentary, some-
times expressed as single words or soli-
I son writes, “There is a theory that
watching unbearable stories about other
ences. But Carson’s work never reads that tary phrases taking over full-page spreads, people lost in grief and rage is good for
way. This is partly because, unusually, the as if they were text messages between you.” Plays like “Herakles” allow you to
flow of time in her writing feels bidirec- demigods, more gay than grandiose. exercise rage without having to kill and
tional; it is not clear if old heroes are being “Don’t go all tearful on me now,” The- to experience grief without losing those
swept into the present, if current readers seus jests, only to have Herakles reply, you love; such performances “may
are being swept into the past, or if all of “Who saved your ass in hell? Who was cleanse you of your darkness,” Carson
us are simply aswirl in time together. But tearful then?” Meanwhile, Theseus teases argues. But, as she well knows, to read
it is also because her work is unfailingly his filicidal friend by calling him Daddio. “Herakles” simply as a private tragedy
emotionally astute, the references, like Eventually, even existentialism gets is to miss its political dimensions, which
those overalls, resonant rather than arbi- a makeover. “I don’t call them gods,” no audience member in ancient Greece
trary. “I’m walking backward into my own Herakles says. “If god exists, god is a would have done.
myth,” the stumbling, P.T.S.D.-stricken perfect thing, not some hooligan from Euripides wrote “Herakles” in the mid-
hero of “H of H” says, struggling even bad daytime TV.” In “Grief Lessons,” dle of the Peloponnesian War. Actors
before he murders his family. “I was try- Carson translates the speech following might pantomime murder for our ben-
ing to walk out.” He is bored with his that confession like this: efit, but soldiers actually commit murder
reputation and annoyed at having to re- So I, a man utterly wrecked and utterly
on our behalf, and the playwright used
count all twelve of his labors, breezing shamed, the example of Herakles, who had in-
through most of them before jumping to shall follow Theseus spired a widespread cult, to admonish his
the end: “Kind of an embarrassment now like a little boat being towed along. audience for so uncritically admiring the
but oh, at the time they were grand. And Whoever values wealth or strength putative hero. Carson admonishes, too,
more than friends
they fitted into the way people lived, the is mad.
revealing how villainous supposed men
things they believed, like a good war does.” of virtue can be. “Heroism likes to go
While Herakles contends with his In “H of H,” Herakles calls Theseus his berserk,” she has the chorus sing of Her-
inner war, his family faces the trials of “tugboat,” and this time their last ex- akles. “By the penultimate /Labour he’s
the home front. Megara and her sons are change is both homoerotic and hopeful. raving./Too bad if it leaves him/outsize
and outside/the civilization he’s saving.”
In “H of H,” Herakles is not a super-
hero but a soldier, and Carson doesn’t BRIEFLY NOTED
have to set the action in Afghanistan to
restore the play’s moral force. Our for- The Morning Star, by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the
ever wars are always on her mind, here Norwegian by Martin Aitken (Penguin Press). In his first work
and elsewhere. In her poem “Clive Song,” of fiction since the six volumes of “My Struggle,” Knausgaard
the underworld that is Guantánamo Bay trades his bracingly autobiographical mode for a ravishing form
seems to have its own pitiless Hades and of theologically infused fabulism. A mysterious celestial body
bureaucratic Cerberus. The old heroes appears in the late-August sky, accompanied by Biblical omens,
killed monsters, but we use monsters to hallucinations, and increasingly uncanny events in the natural
kill, like the drones in her prose poem world. Tracing the lives of nine interconnected characters,
“Fate, Federal Court, Moon,” which me- Knausgaard sets these enigmatic phenomena against the mi-
morializes the murder of a Yemeni en- nutiae of everyday life. This combination of the universal and
gineer’s family. That engineer, Faisal bin the intimate enables the novel to approach weighty subjects—
Ali Jaber, lost a nephew and a brother- death and dying, belief and despair—with both the thrust of
in-law to a drone strike, and Carson un- a suspense narrative and the depth of a philosophical inquiry.
leashes an avalanche of grief and anger
that suffocates any attempt at moral eva- Imminence, by Mariana Dimópulos, translated from the Span-
sion. “The fate of the earth. The fate of ish by Alice Whitmore (Transit). “I’m not a lady,” Irina, the
me. The fate of you. The fate of Faisal,” protagonist of this unsettling novella, which unfolds during
she begins, burying us in sentence after a single tense evening in Buenos Aires, tells a love interest.
sentence of avoidable suffering. “The fate “I’m not a woman, either.” Irina’s sense of alienation—from
of his family, the ones still alive, back in family, friends, lovers, and the social expectations of wom-
Yemen and the fate of the bridal couple, anhood—suffuses her stream-of-consciousness narration.
still alive, whose wedding was the target After a life-threatening postpartum infection, she is haunted
of the drone pilot (a mistake). The fate by memories: of a close friend who died tragically young; of
of the others, not still alive (a mistake).” a long-term boyfriend with whom things ended badly; of a
That repeated word, “fate,” is both sinister relative, the Cousin, who pursues her across time
an indictment and an ironic invocation. and space. Recurring themes and images from her relation-
Carson understands that life still fol- ships set up a morally ambiguous ending, tinged with vio-
lows the patterns of the old myths. Fam- lence, within the domestic sphere.
ilies live or die depending on the whims
of far-off figures who press buttons or Things I Have Withheld, by Kei Miller (Grove Press). In four-
pass laws or give refuge or don’t; our teen dynamic essays, encompassing memoir, reportage, and
wars, however distant, follow us home, open letters, the author, who is Jamaican, examines personal
in the form of madness or redress or re- and professional moments in which silence revealed a truth
venge. Those imposing forces, whether about race and oppression. Miller parses stories “overheard
or not we call them gods, are what shape when the aunts thought you were not listening,” white col-
the action of our lives. leagues’ assumptions about his homeland, a painful debate
Yet we can act, too. That is why Her- with friends about the friction between #MeToo and racist
akles is unwilling to cede responsibility carceral justice, his grandmother’s revelation of an explosive
for his crimes to Iris or Lyssa or Hera. family secret. Miller admits to apprehension about voicing
It is that ability to act, however con- his private judgments but explains that “each of these essays
strained and imperfect our actions may is an act of faith, an attempt to put my trust in words again.”
be, which makes us interesting and un-
predictable. Although “H of H” at times Orwell’s Roses, by Rebecca Solnit (Viking). “In the spring of
seems impossibly bleak, it is the story of 1936, a writer planted roses,” Solnit writes, after a visit to
a man who decides to live despite fear- George Orwell’s former garden in England, where she is as-
ing that he deserves to die—a man, that tonished to find flowers that have long outlived the man who
is, who chooses to believe he will some- planted them. What follows is a far-reaching meditation on
day have an identity beyond that of the Orwell’s life and on the cultural significance of roses. In a
murderer of his own wife and children. particularly Orwellian episode, Solnit visits a rose “factory”
Carson is writing not only about the per- in Bogotá, where working conditions are poor and the flow-
sistence of violence but about the possi- ers appear “luridly unnatural.” Most affecting is the surpris-
bility of redemption, and in this respect ing hopefulness implicit in a political writer’s passion for na-
“H of H” isn’t just a playbook for the ture: “Orwell did not believe in permanent happiness or the
past. It is also, in the other sense of the politics that tried to realize it, but he did believe devoutly in
word, a playbook for the future.  moments of delight, even rapture.”
ages, Asimov fans have waited decades
A CRITIC AT LARGE for their own epic.
Now David S. Goyer—who’s best
LOST IN SPACE
known for co-writing “The Dark
Knight” with Christopher Nolan—has
not only adapted Asimov’s saga but
In the TV version of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” saga, addition is subtraction. overhauled it. Planned for eight sea-
sons, and just renewed for a second,
BY JULIAN LUCAS “Foundation” gathers the original’s far-
f lung strands into an action-packed
morality play about agency and legacy,
freedom and fate. The series attempts
to rescue the novels from their atomic-
age limitations but largely squanders its
material on a clone of every other block-
buster fantasy quest. Though sprinkled
with timely allusions, its hero-centered
narrative obscures Asimov’s most press-
ing question for an era of political and
ecological precarity: What does it mean
to engage in a survival struggle that lasts
far longer than any individual life?
he TV series has three arcs, each

T dramatizing an orientation toward
the future. The first centers on Salvor
Hardin (Leah Harvey), the Warden of
Terminus, who defends its f ledgling
settlement from invasion. She’s agnos-
tic about the plan (“Seldon’s gone. When
are you all going to start thinking for
A n innocent viewer of the new Apple

TV+ series “Foundation”—a lavish
production complete with clone emper-
perial revanchists, and shadowy tele-
paths who elude psychohistory’s grasp.
The novels conspicuously lack aliens,
yourselves?”). But her uncanny visions—
linked to a portentous diamond-shaped
“vault”—unwittingly advance its tra-
ors, a haunted starship, and a killer an- mysticism, and other space-opera stand- jectory. A few decades earlier: Hari Sel-
droid who tears off her own face—might bys, not least battle scenes. (“I was so don ( Jared Harris) enlists Gaal Dor-
be surprised to learn that the novels it’s sorry afterward I had not counted the nick (Lou Llobell), a math prodigy
based on inspired Paul Krugman to be- number of spaceships that had exploded,” from a backwater world, to work on
come an economist. Isaac Asimov’s clas- Asimov wrote in a withering review of psychohistory, and then, by a cunning
sic saga revolves around the dismal sci- the 1978 movie “Battlestar Galactica.”) stratagem, arranges for their exile to
ence of “psychohistory,” a hybrid of math Their appeal is subtler, relying on the Terminus. The gambit opens Asimov’s
and psychology that can predict the fu- tension between Seldon’s plan and the novel, but in the series it sparks a season-
ture. Its inventor, Hari Seldon, lives in individuals caught in its weave. They are long argument. Gaal lambastes Seldon’s
a twelve-thousand-year-old galactic em- ordinary scholars, traders, politicians, and deterministic saviorism, shouting, “You
pire, which, his equations reveal, is about scientists: the tale spans light-years and didn’t care what we wanted, as long as
to collapse. “Interstellar wars will be end- millennia, but never forgets its human your plan was safe!”
less,” he warns. “The storm-blast whis- proportions. A third narrative unfolds at the im-
tles through the branches of the Em- This is no invitation to cinematic ex- perial palace on the city-world of Tran-
pire even now.” travagance. Asimov’s saga has been enor- tor, a galactic capital where a “genetic
His followers establish a Foundation mously popular since the publication dynasty” of clones has reigned for nearly
on the frontier world of Terminus—a of its first trilogy—“Foundation” (1951), four centuries. If Gaal, Hari, and Sal-
colony tasked with conserving all human “Foundation and Empire” (1952), and vor enact an uneasy dance between
knowledge—where they spend the next “Second Foundation” (1953)—which sold progress and freedom, the emperors, all
millennium fulfilling “Seldon’s plan” to millions of copies. (Asimov kept writing named Cleon, stand for unyielding con-
reunite the galaxy. Left ignorant of its prequels and sequels until his death, in tinuity. They are a royal family of three,
details (such knowledge would play 1992.) Yet the series’ onscreen presence each at a different stage of life: Brother
havoc with prediction), each generation has been restricted to its influence on Dawn, a boy, who learns; Brother Day,
must solve its own crises. The Founda- other science-fiction sagas, especially an adult, who rules; and Brother Dusk,
tion confronts barbarian kingdoms, im- “Star Wars.” Zealously noting these hom- a retiree, who, naturally, paints, docu-
72 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY NICHOLAS LAW
menting the dynasty’s exploits by adding don is a bland thought leader who inal role of a crafty pol, instead of as
them to a vast mural. (Its grainy, ever- delivers speeches that wouldn’t feel out another wide-eyed underdog who grows
shifting surface exemplifies the show’s of place at a political convention. In into an action figure?
distinctively particulate aesthetic—an one scene, he shows up to praise star-
Ozymandias of nanobots.) Even at the struck laundry workers on the colony he larger problem is that Goyer’s
dinner table, the clones mirror one an-
other, synchronizing their every gesture
ship. “Your names will be memorial-
ized,” he says, as “believers who threw
T “Foundation” seems bored with its
source material. The plot is carefully tai-
with neurotic precision. their lot in with an eccentric, that pinned lored to Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s
Lee Pace, with a dulcet voice and a the fate of the galaxy on the back of a Journey,” with many of its fantasy em-
conspicuous chest, gives a mesmerizing theorem so abstract, well, it might as bellishments cribbed from better-known
performance as Brother Day, whose fal- well have been a prayer.” You can al- sagas. There are transhuman starship
tering serenity suggests a man begin- most see the yard signs on Terminus: pilots à la “Dune.” Math plays a feeble
ning to lose his erection as he bestrides “In this house, we believe that psycho- cousin of the Force; Jared Harris’s Sel-
worlds. Day spends his time berating history is real.” don looks like Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan
Dusk, molding Dawn in his image, and Gaal and Salvor, who are men in the Kenobi, and Gaal, the young outworlder
tyrannizing Eto Demerzel, his robot Asimov saga, are both portrayed by evading her destiny, is an updated Luke
adviser-mother-wife-slave. Played with Black women actors—a welcome revi- Skywalker. Everyone seems to have a spe-
cunning and world-weariness by Laura sion of the original’s first installment, cial ability, and, where Asimov’s protag-
Birn, Demerzel has tended Cleon egos in which exclusively male principals onists drew urgency from the brevity of
for centuries. But her ministrations aren’t smoke long cigars of “Vegan tobacco.” their lives, Goyer’s cheat their way across
quite enough to salve the imperial in- Yet Gaal, portrayed by Lou Llobell the centuries with clones, cryogenic cap-
securities, as unrest threatens to unravel with precocious gravity, is burdened sules, and “uploaded consciousness.” They
man and state. with a strangely racialized origin story: are supersized heroes gallivanting through
Trantor suffers its 9/11 moment when Synnax, her home world, seems to be a diminished galaxy.
terrorists attack the Star Bridge, a co- populated by dark-skinned people who What’s lost is Asimov’s talent for con-
lossal spire that serves as its umbilical reject the empire and science with neo- veying our fragility in the cosmos. His
connection to the larger galaxy; its fall primitivist ardor. (The planet’s Atlan- first novel, “Pebble in the Sky,” takes place
destroys a swath of the densely popu- tean vistas combine a reference to our on a colonized, irradiated Earth, where
lated planet. Brother Day retaliates by climate crisis with an opportunistic sea- imperial soldiers mock the local belief
publicly executing dignitaries from the soning of off-brand Afrofuturism.) She that the planet is humanity’s world of or-
suspects’ home worlds; in a mashup of defies tradition for psychohistory and igin. “Nightfall,” his most celebrated story,
Caesar’s thumbs-down in “Gladiator” Seldon, as if she were born to claim the is set on a world with multiple suns, where
and the Death Star’s annihilation of Al- mantle and correct the blind spots of a an eclipse makes the stars visible for
deraan in “Star Wars,” a crowd jeers at problematic white male genius. It’s a the first time in millennia, and creates a
the blubbering emissaries as he nukes winking allusion to the show’s own planet-wide existential crisis. The “Foun-
their planets with a two-finger flick of self-consciously diverse update of Asi- dation” saga achieves a yet larger sense of
the wrist. mov—and exactly the kind of earth- scale through its episodic structure: Tran-
Asimov’s saga has no such clone- bound pigeonholing that limits Black tor, a sprawling city-planet that dazzles
emperor theatrics. The empire’s death actors in imaginary realms. Gaal in the opening volume, returns in
agonies are dispersed among more oblique A more martial update is foisted on the next as a world of farmers who sell
episodes—a loss of contact with the inner Salvor, played by Harvey with a strik- scrap metal from the endless ruins.
worlds; a superstitious “tech-man” guarding flattop, a black jumpsuit, and an The Apple TV+ series could have tried
ing an ancient nuclear plant—which unremitting attitude of frowning con- to craft a new template to encompass
gather momentum over chapters and cen- centration. She’s an anxious loner who these constellations. Instead, it falls back
turies. Still, the Brothers Cleon are among emerges as a sort of gunslinging sher- on a sturdily familiar one: a ragtag band
Goyer’s more effective innovations, giv- iff. In Asimov’s novel, by contrast, Sal- facing down a mighty empire, with the
ing the original theme of imperial iner- vor is a savvy mayor, who overthrows fate of the universe pivoting on the ac-
tia three all too human avatars. In what the Foundation’s pedantic director and tions of a gifted few. It’s an approach that
may be the season’s most compelling ep- forestalls an invasion through shrewd would have appealed to Asimov’s Lord
isode, Brother Day endures a trial by or- demagoguery. The original Salvor’s Dorwin, a dilettantish dignitary obsessed
deal to refute a charismatic priestess, motto is that “violence is the last ref- with identifying humanity’s original solar
Zephyr Halima (T’Nia Miller), who uge of the incompetent”; the TV show system. Rather than search for it him-
preaches that the emperors have no soul. gives the line to her father, and has Sal- self, though, Dorwin relies on the find-
vor march into the Terminus armory to ings of long-dead archeologists. When
“F oundation” is much clumsier, alas,
when it comes to the Foundation;
“see what violence we can muster.” It’s
a characteristic revision for the series,
Salvor suggests that he do his own field
work, Dorwin is incredulous: Why blun-
Goyer dilutes psychohistory from a de- which strategically bundles amped-up der about in far-flung solar systems when
tective story about the future to a cot- diversity with amped-up action. But the old masters have covered the ground so
tony utopian ideal. Jared Harris’s Sel- why not cast a Black woman in the orig- much better than we could ever hope to? 
many lonely months. But things were
DANCING much the same with the other major
work on the program, “Symphony in
FINDING OUR FEET

C,” to Bizet. This ballet is fiercely de-
manding, and it builds to a spectacular
finale with some fifty dancers onstage.
Dance resumes in a new era. It is so technically difficult that it par-
adoxically requires abandon—think too
BY JENNIFER HOMANS much and you will falter. But, again,
tentative precision held sway. Even the
y the time New York City Ballet has since become a signature ballet for heart-stopping passage in the Adagio
B opened its fall season, a few weeks
ago, at the Koch Theatre, at Lincoln
the company, and it seems to contain the
full arc of life, from its simple opening
when the ballerina risks a dive into a
deep arabesque was executed with aca-
Center, it had been more than eighteen pose to its dances of fate, love, and death. demic caution.
months since the company performed Human frailty and improvisation are As I watched the dancers trade vul-
there. I imagined the dancers pent up written into its very construction. (There’s nerability for perfection, I wondered if
and ready to dance their hearts out. They a moment in the middle where a woman there wasn’t a more crucial fact that the
had worked hard in preparation for the falls to the floor—something that came long absence was laying bare. Balanchine,
reëntry, and the house was packed with from an accidental fall during rehearsals, it seems, has become orthodox: classi-
a fully masked audience eager to wel- back in 1934, which Balanchine wove into cal, beautiful, the radical edges zipped
come them home. the dance.) But, instead of giving them- up and smoothed. This is not the danc-
The program opened with “Serenade,” selves over to the ballet’s off-balance rush ers’ fault, nor is it something anyone can
George Balanchine’s gloriously flowing of movement, the current company de- undo. Balanchine made his dances
dance to Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for livered a spine-straight and strictly clas- around the personalities of the dancers
Strings,” a perfect choice for the post-pan- sical performance, as if they were living he had—“these dancers, this music, here,
demic start. Made in 1934, “Serenade” was in the corseted world of the Russian Im- now,” as he liked to say—and today’s
Balanchine’s first American dance, and perial ballet. dancers have different personalities and
it was designed to teach his young danc- Maybe they were nervous, I thought, values. When they perform his work,
ers how to move—more, bigger, freer. It or adjusting to a live audience after too they seem mainly interested in the me-
City Ballet dancers in Balanchine’s “Serenade,” the work with which the company began its first post-lockdown season.
74 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN J. WEE
chanics of symmetry and physical vir- walked, for example, body falling askew, as if he were always ahead of himself.
tuosity—in a kind of crystalline purity, gait not quite holding. There was a pol- His shoulders tip forward, seeming to
no fragility or spontaneity in sight. They itics at play, but it was subtle: three Black hold his life’s burden, and his arms swing
are living in an imagined and conser- dancers appeared briefly together and with studied rhythmic precision. It is
vative past. But what about their now? seemed to pause, as if to remind us that the carriage of a man who has lived
As if on cue, a week after this open- this is still a rare sight in a company purposefully and with direction. Noth-
ing, the company premièred two new whose ninety-six dancers include only ing is left to chance, not even his own
works by women, Sidra Bell’s “Sus- eleven who identify as Black. But Bell’s step. It is a body without cracks, cared
pended Animation” and Andrea Mill- primary interest is aesthetic, and, to- for and artfully designed—admirable,
er’s “Sky to Hold.” Both were commis- ward the end, a woman in bright green, noble, but fortress-like. He doesn’t eas-
sioned some two years ago, by Wendy sitting on the floor center stage, her back ily let us see inside.
Whelan, the first woman to hold an to the audience, gradually unfurled her Sometimes Jones walked in a dark-
artistic-leadership role at City Ballet, spine, until she sat tall, a priestess of ened circle, as if his shadow had en-
as part of an effort to promote female beauty with no face. gulfed him, and then stepped out of it,
choreographers. Bell and Miller, who leaving the darkness behind—one of
both run contemporary-dance troupes, cross town, at the Park Avenue Ar- several astonishing lighting effects in
brought influences far from the world
of traditional ballet. Although neither
A mory, Bill T. Jones, one of Amer-
ica’s most trenchant political artists,
the “visual environment” designed by
the architect Elizabeth Diller, her firm
work was a total triumph, both pro- brought a very different experience. Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Peter
duced flashes of engaged dancing. We “Deep Blue Sea” is an extraordinary and Nigrini. At another moment, dancers
saw, if not a full solution to N.Y.C.B.’s maddening social-justice extravaganza, made shiplike patterns at one end of
lack of strong contemporary choreog- with a cast of a hundred, led by Jones the stage, which, through a kind of un-
raphy, at least a hint of a spirit and a himself, in his first stage appearance in canny shadow play, appeared at the
range that these dancers are no longer fifteen years. Extraordinary because other end as a ghostly kaleidoscope of
finding for themselves in Balanchine. Jones is as charismatic and ambitious abstract forms. Later, out of nowhere,
Miller came up with some truly arrest- as ever, and because the production de- the stage suddenly cleared and a glo-
ing movement for the terrific dancer sign was highly original. Maddening rious sea—a figment made entirely of
Taylor Stanley, which had him balanc- because Jones used the stage as his pul- light—spread out before us, deep and
ing on his hips, no hands, and then flip- pit, complete with choir, and his ser- blue, with gentle white waves. Some
ping like a fish, twisting across the floor, mon was long and didactic. It ranged black monoliths rose from the depths
producing the bravura of an air jump from postmodern word scramble (“ring and turned into ships floating in front
without ever leaving the ground. freedom let”) to Jones’s childhood mem- of us, before collapsing and sinking
Bell’s piece was N.Y.C.B.’s first-ever ories of school and reading “Moby- into the surrounding walls. It was a
commission from a Black woman. Bell Dick,” and then to his reflections on fantastical vision, more striking than
has a history degree from Yale, and has W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, anything else that night.
trained widely in ballet (Dance Theatre Jr., Kendrick Lamar, and the history of The show pulled to a close, after
of Harlem), modern dance (Martha Gra- race in America. The show was punc- nearly two hours, with testimony by
ham, Alvin Ailey), and improvisational tuated with unremarkable dances, by eighty-nine “community participants,”
techniques. At City Ballet, she commis- Jones and his colleague Janet Wong and who joined Jones and his dancers on-
sioned costumes from Christopher John the dancers, but what seemed to mat- stage. Each stood in a single spotlight—
Rogers, a Black, Louisiana-born wun- ter most was walking—just walking. another memorable image. In turn, they
derkind of the fashion world, still only In the Armory’s cavernous space, walked to microphones placed center
twenty-seven, and set her dances to com- made into an amphitheatre with bleach- stage and proclaimed, “I know,” followed
positions by Nicholas Britell, Oliver ers around the edge, walking blurred by something they know to be true—
Davis, and Dosia McKay. life and art even before the performance often about social justice. Conformity
Together, Bell and her colleagues began. Members of the audience walked set in; this chorus even began to walk
managed to disarm these tense and tech- across the stage to reach their seats, like Jones. Finally, they gathered at the
nical dancers. The lyrical score, elabo- passing Jones and other cast members, far end of the space and charged for-
rate costumes, and slow, sinuous move- who were walking and posing in their ward, a revolutionary force that also
ment—no bravura—turned the cast into midst. We saw the post-lockdown splits into a police line, and a struggle
almost otherworldly creatures, defined slouches of ordinary people against the ensued. No peace without justice, no
by the ruffles and tulle, and by the elec- flexible ease of the dancers’ trained bod- justice without peace, we were reminded.
tric blues, fluorescent greens, mauves, ies. But it was Jones who stood out. As Everything that was said no doubt
pinks, and sparkles that clothed them. he talked, he walked—and walked and needs to be said over and over in poli-
There was even a touch of Baptist con- walked. He is nearly seventy now. His tics, but, as I left the theatre, Jones’s words
gregations in the cut and flow of a dress body is aging and his gait is deliberate, disappeared from my mind, and all I
or a lampshade hat. The movement had but his shoulders have not folded, as could think about was him walking, just
striking moments of vulnerability—a most people’s do, and he stands tall, walking, and the beauty of that unfath-
dancer sank quietly into her hip as she with his rib cage a bit forward in space, omable deep blue sea. 
former crowned in a halo of bubbles, the
THE THEATRE latter imagined as a Motown girl group
with antennas sprouting from their heads.
PROTEST SONGS
(Fly Davis did the superb costume design
and set.) The appliances’ job is to make
Caroline’s life easier, and they do their
Two musicals look at politics, motherhood, and capitalism. best, serenading her with ecstatic song.
But they’re not above passing pointed
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ judgment. “Thirty-nine and divorcée,”
the radio sings. “How on earth she gonna
thrive /when her life bury her alive?”
Caroline is angry: at life, which has
trapped her in other people’s basements
for twenty-two years while she struggles
to keep a roof over the heads of her own
four kids, and at herself, for failing to rise
above her regrets. And she’s ashamed—
of her illiteracy, of having lost a husband
she loved in spite of his violence and
drunkenness. Her bitterness explains her
terse, forbidding manner, but lonely eight-
year-old Noah Gellman (performed, on
the night that I saw the show, by Jaden
Myles Waldman) isn’t deterred. Caro-
line is the center of his universe, the
woman “who runs everything” and seems,
to him, even “stronger than my dad.” It’s
a special treat for him to light her daily
cigarette. Noah’s mother used to smoke,
too. Then cancer killed her, and his fa-
ther ( John Cariani), an emotionally dis-
tant clarinettist, got remarried, to Rose
Stopnik (Caissie Levy), a New Yorker
who feels painfully out of place in this
sad family and this strange Southern
town. Rose can’t seem to get anyone to
warm to her. Caroline doesn’t want her
leftover stuffed cabbage, and Noah won’t
let her tuck him in at night. But Rose is
a woman of action, and if she can’t in-
ou never quite know what you’re test of time; it has grown into the pres- spire love she’ll settle for wielding au-
Y going to get with a revival of a lesser-
seen work, one that had the mixed bless-
ent—or maybe the present has grown to
meet it. Either way, this production, di-
thority. When Noah keeps leaving coins
in his pockets like some careless rich kid,
ing to be considered ahead of its time. rected by Michael Longhurst, should she devises a policy: Caroline can sup-
Have the moths got to it over the years? confirm it as a contemporary classic. plement her paltry salary with any change
Does it now fit the way it was supposed The show opens in November, 1963. she finds in the laundry.
to? When Tony Kushner and Jeanine Te- We’re in the Lake Charles, Louisiana, This is one form of change that the
sori’s musical, “Caroline, or Change,” home of the Gellmans, a Jewish family musical deals with, and it sets off a cri-
premièred on Broadway, in 2004, it re- of sufficient, if stretched, means. Caroline sis. Caroline is humiliated by Rose’s good
ceived an uneven critical response, ran Thibodeaux, the Gellmans’ Black maid intentions, but she can’t afford to refuse,
for less than four months, and hasn’t been (“Negro” is the term of the era, and the even if it means taking “pennies from a
staged here since. Now “Caroline” is back one Caroline herself prefers), toils in the baby.” The other kind of change is no
(in a Roundabout Theatre Company pro- basement, doing the laundry. For company, less fraught. The world is shifting be-
duction, at Studio 54), with the English she has the washing machine (Arica Jack- neath Caroline’s tired feet. Her friend
star Sharon D Clarke making her soul- son) and the radio (Harper Miles, Nya, Dotty (Tamika Lawrence), also a maid,
shattering Broadway début in the title and Nasia Thomas), both of which are has begun to attend night school in the
role. The musical hasn’t just stood the personified as fellow Black women, the hope of making a better life for herself;
her fun-loving teen-age daughter, Emmie
This staging of “Caroline, or Change” should confirm it as a contemporary classic. (the radiant Samantha Williams), is de-
76 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY AMRITA MARINO
veloping a political consciousness that addressed to no one but God; Clarke, as
Caroline fears will lead to disappoint- powerful a performer as you’re likely to
ment, or worse. In Dallas, the President see, unleashes her character’s dissatisfac-
has just been shot dead. Then, there’s tion and heartache, and brings down the
the statue of a Confederate soldier that house. Caroline isn’t who her daughter
stands downtown, and onstage, at the wishes her to be. She isn’t who she wanted
start of Act I. By the time the second to become. But she is singularly herself,
act begins, only its legs are left. The rest and, as Clarke shows us, that’s enough.
has been dismantled under the cover of A DV ERTISE ME NT
night and tossed into the bayou. nother musical about politics and
Kushner grew up the son of a clari-
nettist in nineteen-sixties Lake Charles;
A motherhood under the strain of
capitalism is in revival at the Wooster
he dedicated “Caroline” to his family’s Group’s Performing Garage: Bertolt
own maid, Maudie Lee Davis. So Noah Brecht’s “The Mother” (directed by Eliz-
is an avatar of sorts for Kushner’s boyhood abeth LeCompte). Brecht, who based
self, but, in this work rooted in autobiog- this 1932 work on a Maxim Gorky novel, WHAT’S THE
raphy, Kushner does something rare: he
invites his curiosity about others to dis-
intended it to be a Lehrstück, or learning
play. “About 15,000 Berlin working-class BIG IDEA?
lodge his own point of view. Carried women saw the play, which was a demon- Small space has big rewards.
along by Tesori’s music, which mashes stration of methods of illegal revolution-
klezmer, spirituals, sixties pop, and half ary struggle,” he later wrote. The Per-
a dozen other genres to create one irre- forming Garage holds about seventy-five
pressible American sound, we see the people, who appeared, on the evening
story simultaneously through a child’s that I attended the show, to be members
hopeful eyes and through a grown wom- of New York’s literati. The Marxist rev- TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159
an’s jaded ones. Are their perspectives olution may yet be fomented on TikTok, jgenet@zmedia-inc.com
so different? Both kids and adults, in but it seems safe to say that the down-
this play that grapples with the burdens town New York stage is not the insur-
of reality, are granted gorgeous flights rectionary platform for the masses that
of fantasy; both yearn for life to go back Brecht might have hoped for.
to the way it once was. Still, there’s an The mother in “The Mother” is Pele-
asymmetry: Caroline is a mainstay in gea Vlasov (Kate Valk), an illiterate fac-
Noah’s world, while Noah can only dream tory worker in pre-Revolutionary Russia.
of making a place for himself in Caro- Once she is introduced to Communist
line’s. He longs to stake the same claim politics by her son, Pavel (Gareth Hobbs),
to her imagination that she has to his. she devotes herself to the cause, wrapping
Isn’t that what we all want—to figure in pickles in radical leaflets to distribute to
one another’s stories? workers and smuggling a printing press
That question is political, too. Kush- into her apartment. It is not hard to grasp
ner comically nails the sincere yet com- Brecht’s lessons: workers are exploited,
placent side of so much American Jew- factory owners are greedy, union reps
ish liberalism in his depiction of Noah’s will screw everyone, and common men
grandparents ( Joy Hermalyn and Stu- and women must band together. And
art Zagnit), who eulogize J.F.K. as being there’s another, more curious message:
as much of a “friend to the colored” as that a parent can be converted to her
he was a “friend to the Jew.” Nice thought, child’s beliefs through mere exposure. It’s Raining
but not quite the truth. At the Gellmans’ Inspired by a diverse array of sources, in-
Hanukkah party, Emmie, whom Caro- cluding Slavoj Žižek’s YouTube videos, Cats and Dogs
line has brought with her to help serve “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” and Radiolab, the Featuring George Booth’s
the latkes, sparks a debate about the bur- Wooster Group takes an explainer ap- irascible cats and dogs,
geoning civil-rights movement with proach to Brecht’s text, breaking up the the collapsible New Yorker
Rose’s old-school socialist father (Chip action with amiable lectures on his the- umbrella is the perfect
Zien). Caroline is furious with her in- atrical methods; this cerebral production companion for a rainy day.
subordinate daughter, and Emmie is in- pleasurably tickles the intellect while
censed by Caroline’s meekness. When leaving the emotions untouched. Brecht
will her mother dare to stand up for her- may have thought that one could func-
self—and for her people? tion without the other, but no revolu- To order, please visit
When Caroline finally does speak her tion has yet managed to sever the mind newyorkerstore.com
mind, she sings it, in an explosive aria from the heart. 
Murdoch-like mogul who closes roughly
ON TELEVISION seventy per cent of his interactions with
the epithet “Fuck off!” Although Ken-
BOSS BABIES
dall is initially presented as the heir ap-
parent, it soon becomes clear that he is
not cut out for the job, and that neither
Season 3 of “Succession,” on HBO. are his equally power-hungry siblings:
Shiv (Sarah Snook), a shrewd political
BY NAOMI FRY operator; Roman (Kieran Culkin), a
squirrelly nihilist; and Connor (Alan
Ruck), a nincompoop libertarian. There
are other candidates, including Tom
Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen),
Shiv’s sycophantic, tortured husband,
who also works at Waystar, and Gerri
Kellman ( J. Smith-Cameron), a gen-
eral counsel with a naughty side. The
underdog pick is Cousin Greg (Nich-
olas Braun), an ingenuous arriviste who,
long-limbed and blunder-prone, pro-
vides much of the show’s comic relief.
For two seasons, these characters cir-
cled the meaty morsel of the C.E.O.
role like Cartier Tank-wearing vultures.
But Logan held fast to his power, even
after falling ill, and took a gladiatorial
pleasure in keeping his children champ-
ing at the bit, undercutting one another
and exchanging inventively snippy ver-
bal bitch slaps in their fight to be Daddy’s
No. 1. It was all very “Buddenbrooks,”
by way of “Veep.”
The end of the second season seemed
to signal a potential sea change. A con-
gressional investigation into a coverup
of sexual assaults at Waystar had ne-
cessitated a fall guy. “The Incans, in
times of terrible crises, would sacrifice
a child to the sun,” Logan told Ken-
dall, who agreed to assume culpability
hen the third season of “Succes- scene is a far cry from the actual open- for the scandals in order to stabilize the
W sion” premièred, a couple of
weeks ago, some viewers watching on
ing of Season 3, which begins where
Season 2 left off, with Kendall collect-
company. But, when it came time to do
so, Kendall ditched his prepared re-
HBO Max experienced a glitch: in- ing himself after a press conference in marks and announced that his father
stead of being brought to the first ep- which he has effectively declared war was a “malignant presence,” fully re-
isode of the new season, they found against his father. And yet Kendall was sponsible for the ample wrongdoing at
themselves rewatching the first episode able to get through several bars of the Waystar. It was time for heroic earnest-
of the entire series. The pilot opens Beastie Boys’ “An Open Letter to NYC” ness, clean hands, corporate oversight.
with Kendall Roy ( Jeremy Strong) rap- before viewers realized the mistake. Was the boy, at long last, becoming a
ping in a town car belonging to Way- The confusion was understandable. man? Was Logan, as Shiv wonders to
star Royco, the right-wing media con- Despite all its minute twists and turns, Roman, “toast”?
glomerate run by his father, Logan “Succession” is surprisingly static. The As if. Season 3 might not open with
(Brian Cox). It is Logan’s eightieth series, a brilliant tragedy-satire of the Kendall rapping, but, in many ways,
birthday, and Kendall is certain that his corporate élite, created by the British we’re right back at the beginning. His
father is going to name him C.E.O. of comedy writer Jesse Armstrong, is Judas moment made for a great cliff-
the company. (“You’re the man, Mr. centered on the question of who will hanger, but he doesn’t have a real plan
Roy!” Kendall’s driver tells him.) The succeed Logan, a fearsome Rupert for overthrowing Logan that wouldn’t
also result in the Roys losing the com-
The Roys continue to circle the C.E.O. role like Cartier Tank-wearing vultures. pany altogether. The first few episodes
78 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY JAVI AZNAREZ
take place in the days leading up to a demur only when they realize that Ken- a reading.” The hapless sidekick checks
shareholders’ meeting, which will de- dall, just like Logan, won’t give up the Twitter and notes that Kendall is “the
termine whether Waystar is to remain prize of being C.E.O. No. 1 trending topic, ahead of Tater Tots.”
in family hands. (This mirrors Season 1, Later, Shiv, whom Logan appoints as
whose first half worked toward a board n the hands of less able custodians, Waystar’s president, gives a speech at a
meeting foretelling a potential company
upset.) The prospect of a D.O.J. inves-
I this kind of narrative rehashing would
become bland, but as I watched the new
company town hall to reassure employ-
ees that a new chapter of corporate re-
tigation looms. Still, not an awful lot season it felt as if “Succession” were sponsibility has begun. “I’m here to tell
happens. Logan, who is holed up in Sa- becoming more pleasurably itself with you: we get it,” she says, as we watch a
rajevo in order to guard against extra- every episode, drilling down even deeper company flack in the audience mouth the
dition, continues to shuffle his underlings into its core as a study of the human words along with her. As Shiv goes on,
like cards, picking one and then another thirst for domination. With its sweep- her voice is drowned out by Nirvana’s
as potential successors and also as posing canvas and cinematic feel, the series “Rape Me,” emerging from a speaker that
sible prison-bound scapegoats. The oft- has all the trappings of an HBO drama, Kendall has placed above the auditorium.
whispered question “Is it me?” might and it is often compared to “The Sopra- The Gen X grunge anthem is intended
refer to either role, and though the for- nos,” another show that documented as a righteous signal of alliance with the
mer is obviously better, the latter has its seasons-long power struggles. The more women who’d suffered at the hands of
advantages. In one amazing moment, apt comparison, however, might be a sit- Waystar, but it comes off as a cheap gim-
when Tom suggests to Shiv that he com. There are times when the series mick, an act of solidarity that is just as
should offer himself as the fall guy, his feels almost Seinfeldian in its cyclical ef- canned as Shiv’s largely decorative role.
wife calls the idea “punchy,” saying that forts to capture a group of eccentric, petty (As Kendall tells her, “Girls count dou-
it will “bank gold” with Logan. characters as they try, again and again, ble now, didn’t you know? It’s only your
Kendall lands a couple of victories, to one-up one another. teats that give you any value.”)
including securing the star defense at- What makes any good sitcom work “Succession” doesn’t offer any true
torney Lisa Arthur (Sanaa Lathan), is an ability to repeat itself with small dif- liberal alternatives to the conservative
whom Logan is vying for, too. (Her ferences. Kendall is still a wimp who monolith that is Waystar. All attempts
choice is a bad omen for Logan: ac- swings between self-satisfaction and an to undermine Logan’s empire are tooth-
cording to Shiv, Lisa “fucking loves insatiable hunger for reassurance, and less, whether they take the form of rote
winning, and she loves money.”) But Strong is fantastic in his portrayal of this jokes served on a late-night show called
even as Lisa urges Kendall to focus on back-and-forth. But in Season 3 he fash- “The Disruption” (the host is played by
getting his story straight in order to ions himself as a woke warrior, which the comedian Ziwe) or the vision of the
avoid indictment, he is much more in- opens up new satirical avenues for the company’s future that Kendall outlines
terested in politicking with his siblings, show. “Fuck the patriarchy,” this patriarch to his siblings. (“Detoxify our brand and
the only people, besides his father, whose manqué shouts at the press on his way we can go supersonic.”) Even Shiv, who
opinions he truly cares about. (It is as into a charity gala. “Another life is possible, in previous seasons was portrayed as the
if all his ideas about staging a corpo- brother,” he tells Tom, urging him to leave progressive Roy, is easily enveloped in
rate takeover stem from having watched Logan’s camp. (“Fuck you, plastic Jesus,” the company’s embrace. In “Succession,”
a TV show like “Succession.”) During Shiv tells Kendall at one point, hitting ideological differences don’t matter. Argu-
a secret meeting, which, in a nice, in- the nail on the head.) He is also obsessed ably the biggest threat to Logan’s regime
fantilizing touch, takes place in Ken- with tracking the public’s response to his this season is a Noah Baumbach-vibes
dall’s tween daughter’s bedroom, he newfound reputation as a whistle-blower, shareholder (Adrien Brody), who puts
nearly persuades his siblings to team asking Greg to “slide the sociopolitical the C.E.O. to the test simply by taking
up with him against their father. They thermometer up the nation’s ass and take him on an idyllic stroll. 
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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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 Mick Stevens,
must be received by Sunday, November 7th. The finalists in the October 25th contest appear below. We
will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the November 22nd 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
“ Yeah, and you never took a pen home from the office?”
Gary Reisine, West Hartford, Conn.
“It works fine—we’re just no longer a nuclear family.” “Can’t believe we’re opening for Genesis.”
Jake Warr, Portland, Ore. Ryan Spiers, San Francisco, Calif.
“A minivan just makes more sense for us right now.”

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

15 16
THE 17 18
CROSSWORD 19 20
21 22
A challenging puzzle.
23 24 25 26
BY PATRICK BERRY
27 28 29 30
31 32 33
ACROSS
1 Winter amenities for outdoor dining
34 35 36 37 38
10 Hellion
15 Nonprofit organization that develops 39 40 41 42
P.S.A.s
16 Make use of the premises? 43 44
17 Anne Brontë novel based on her own
experiences as a governess 45 46 47 48 49
18 Game most players don’t win
19 Makes sure something gets done 50 51
20 Elizabeth ___, pseudonymous author of

the Amelia Peabody mysteries 52 53
21 Flavorful addition
54 55
22 Alias of Norma McCorvey
23 Building with many eaves
26 Service whose logo is a telephone 3 What salicylic acid might be used to 36 God who fathered Harmonia with
handset inside a speech balloon treat Aphrodite
27 Zoning unit 4 They keep digits separate 37 New York river that feeds Lake
28 The King’s expressions Champlain
5 Committed a sin
30 “___ Good” (dancehall-influenced Drake 40 ___ Madikizela-Mandela (political figure
6 Wool sources that were the subject of a played by 35-Across in a 2013 bio-pic)
single featuring Rihanna)
2013 PETA exposé 42 Substantially change
31 College team whose mascot is a red-
tailed hawk named Swoop 7 Intermittently available fast-food 44 1974 family film whose title character
sandwich was played by Higgins
32 Musical discernment
8 Modernist Mondrian 46 Buildup in a bed
33 Trickery 47 Lisa who launched a line of eyeglasses
34 Fabulist’s creation 9 Calculating
48 Occasion to serve kalua pua’a
35 “Moonlight” actress Naomie 10 Roaring Twenties entertainment 49 Leave gasping
38 Radiate 11 Franklins 51 Took place
39 Scrabble bluffs 12 In due course
41 James who played Marshal Dillon on TV 1927 film with a robot on its poster
13 Solution to the previous puzzle:
43 Their performance is improved by fans
14 Some Beat Generation writers C R A B A S P S G R A Y
44 1985 World Series M.V.P. Saberhagen
20 Carson’s predecessor on the “Tonight R O I L S S H O O R A C E
45 Indulges in self-pity, in a way Show” O W N U P M A L L S A N T A
46 Sound barriers? W A T E R B A L L O O N S
22 ___ curl (hair style popular in the
50 Labor leader George who was the first eighties) G E O D E S I C D O M E
president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. Q U R A N T S K M I X
23 Oscar-winning actor whose wife was an
51 Remove all instances of D U P E D S T E T S W A P
Oscar-winning actress
52 Golfer Palmer, familiarly R I T E E W E R S T A T A
24 Cruise, for one I N O N B I A S B O R A T
53 Singer who won Grammy Awards in
25 Brand with a fifty-five-foot-tall statue of L O W D E N M O R E S
three different categories (jazz, pop, and
R. & B.) its mascot in Blue Earth, Minnesota L A N D I N G P A R T Y
F O R E V E R S T A M P S
54 Known to many 26 Slowly deteriorates
F A U L T Z O N E O R I O N
55 One with a glazed look 29 “Be nice to ___. You may end up D I N E E T N A M C C O O
DOWN working for them”: Charles J. Sykes A R K S R E E S S E R B
1 Tennis champ Tommy 33 Didn’t proceed according to plan

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PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

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