INNOVATION & TECH

APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

13 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Jeannie Suk Gersen on state-level anti-abortion moves;
the subway and the shooting; the theatre of exile;
Ukrainians in Brussels; Wikipedia and zenzizenzizenzic.
ANNALS OF INNOVATION
Matthew Hutson 20 Potential Energy
The rush to develop renewable storage.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Simon Rich 26 Mario
OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS
Kelefa Sanneh 30 Tough Business
Fivio Foreign and the fortunes of drill music.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Ronan Farrow 36 The Surveillance States
Inside the global spyware arms race.
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Rebecca Mead 48 Norwegian Wood
Timber skyscrapers for a greener future.
FICTION
Elif Batuman 56 “The Repugnant Conclusion”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Lauren Michele Jackson 66 The journals of Alice Walker.
Keith Gessen 71 Andrey Kurkov’s “Grey Bees.”
73 Briefly Noted
POP MUSIC
Amanda Petrusich 74 Arcade Fire’s “WE.”
THE THEATRE
Alexandra Schwartz 76 “Cyrano de Bergerac,” “Birthday Candles.”
ON TELEVISION
Naomi Fry 78 “Severance.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 80 “The Duke,” “The Northman.”
POEMS
Elisa Gonzalez 40 “After My Brother’s Death, I Reflect on the Iliad”
Alex Dimitrov 51 “The Years”
COVER
Christoph Niemann “Virtual Reality”

DRAWINGS Farley Katz, William Haefeli, Adam Douglas Thompson, Carolita Johnson, Drew Dernavich,
Becky Barnicoat, Elisabeth McNair, Tim Hamilton, Frank Cotham, Suerynn Lee, Adam Sacks, Asher Perlman and
Reuven Perlman, Liana Finck, Ellis Rosen, Hartley Lin, Matt Reuter, Justin Sheen SPOTS Matt Blease
 CONTRIBUTORS
Ronan Farrow (“The Surveillance States,” Rebecca Mead (“Norwegian Wood,”
p. 36), a contributing writer at the mag- p. 48) has been a staff writer since 1997.
azine, is the author of “Catch and Kill” “Home/Land: A Memoir of Depar-
and “War on Peace.” His reporting for ture and Return” is her latest book.
The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer
Prize for public service. Matthew Hutson (“Potential Energy,”
p. 20), a science writer, is the author of
Kelefa Sanneh (“Tough Business,” p. 30), “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking.”
a staff writer since 2008, recently pub-
lished his first book, “Major Labels: Lauren Michele Jackson (Books, p. 66),
A History of Popular Music in Seven a contributing writer at The New Yorker,
Genres.” is an assistant professor of English at
Northwestern University. Her essay
Elif Batuman (Fiction, p. 56) became a collection, “White Negroes,” came out
staff writer in 2010. Her new novel, in 2019.
“Either/Or,” will come out in May.
Christoph Niemann (Cover) most re-
Keith Gessen (Books, p. 71) is the author cently published “Zoo,” a collection of
of the novel “A Terrible Country.” He linocuts and drawings of animals at
teaches at Columbia Journalism School. two Berlin zoos.

Elisa Gonzalez (Poem, p. 40), the recip- Annie Hylton (The Talk of the Town,
ient of a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation p. 18), a freelance investigative journal-
Writers’ Award, is at work on her first ist, is an associate professor at Sciences
book. Po, in Paris.

Naaman Zhou (The Talk of the Town, Alex Dimitrov (Poem, p. 51) is the author
p. 19) is a member of the magazine’s of three poetry collections, including
editorial staff. “Love and Other Poems.”

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

LEFT: STEPHEN MANGIAT; RIGHT: MATTHEW LEIFHEIT

ELEMENTS PHOTO BOOTH

The biologist Jeffrey Marlow on the Matthew Leifheit captures gay life on
laser technology that is illuminating New York’s Fire Island in his series
the ocean’s most delicate creatures. “To Die Alive.”

Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
 “A MAGNIFICENT NE W OPER A .
 ”

THE MAIL
—TH E TIMES (OF LON DON)

BUFFETT’S MIGRATIONS Russian politics when he notes that “the

human population” in Chukotka “was
As an aficionado of Jimmy Buffett tunes, meagre, and struggling with poverty
I enjoyed Nick Paumgarten’s report from and alcoholism.” Those conditions were
the singer’s Latitude Margaritaville re- produced by Boris Yeltsin’s privatiza-
tirement communities (“Five O’Clock tion program, which brought about so-
Everywhere,” March 28th). His vivid de- cial and economic disaster. Everyday
scriptions of some of the Parrotheads Russians have come to rely on the pocket
who have flocked to these developments change of Vladimir Putin’s puppets for
elucidate Americans’ growing fascina- material improvements—hence the im-
tion with unconventional retirement sce- miseration of Russia that we see today.

1
narios. Yet Paumgarten missed a chance Patty A. Gray
to point out that Latitude Margarita- Citrus Heights, Calif.
ville defies a view of retirement that Buf-
fett himself once expressed—in, for ex- ART IN A TIME OF WAR
ample, his 1974 ballad “Migration”: “Most
of the people who retire in Florida / Are I’m grateful to Peter Schjeldahl for in-
wrinkled and they lean on a crutch / cluding, in his review of a show at the
And mobile homes are smotherin’ my Clark Art Institute about artists witness-
Keys / I hate those bastards so much.” ing war, a sensitive discussion of “The
Many of Buffett’s songs and stories con- Disasters of War,” Francisco Goya’s se-
vey environmental themes that no lon- ries of gruesome intaglio prints (The Art
ger ring so true, considering the fact that World, March 21st). About the twelfth
a third Latitude Margaritaville complex plate, Schjeldahl writes that the primary
will be carved out of Florida’s vanish- figure “could be anyone civilized . . . who COMPOSED BY BRE T T DE AN
ing wilderness. I wonder: Do Buffett’s comes upon carnage.” In my mind, this LIBRE T TO BY MAT THE W JOCELYN

HAMLET
seemingly changed attitudes toward image could depict Goya himself—in his
community and nature reflect a person’s compassion for the heaped corpses but
shifting priorities as he ages, or did he also in his disgust at what he sees, and at
abandon the ideas that formed his pub- what he reveals in the other plates. Plenty
lic persona in order to take advantage of artists seem to have revelled in war- ON STAGE MAY 13 – JUNE 9
of financial opportunities? fare, though. I think of the graphic As-

1
Trevor Prouty syrian bas-relief battle scenes held by the
Goose Creek, S.C. British Museum. They are as fresh and
terrifying as they must have been when
PUTIN’S POOR they were created, more than twenty-five Acclaimed composer Brett Dean’s
hundred years ago—showing, for instance, riveting new masterpiece has its Met
Patrick Radden Keefe’s piece about Lon- soldiers tossing severed enemy heads back premiere in a powerful staging by
don’s Russian oligarchs is a gripping, and forth. Unlike Goya, the sculptors in Neil Armfield. Tenor Allan Clayton
relevant read (Books, March 28th). In the Assyrian courts employed these im- stars in his breakthrough portrayal of
the opening anecdote, about Roman ages, alongside inscriptions, to trumpet
Shakespeare’s tormented Dane.
Abramovich’s run, in 2000, for the gov- the power of their monarchs and to in-
ernorship of the remote region of Chu- spire fear in their enemies. Given the
kotka, Keefe describes “his closest chal- state of the world, it’s worth considering metopera.org 212.362.6000
lenger being a local man who herded how artists ought to portray today’s wars. Tickets start at $25
reindeer.” That man was Vladimir Ety- Lee Gaillard
lin, a Chukchi activist who has also Eugene, Ore.
served in the federal legislature. I worked
alongside Etylin when I lived in Chu- •
kotka as an anthropologist, and he is Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
featured in my book about the region’s address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
indigenous movement. On the basis of themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
my experiences there, I believe that Keefe any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
could have made a broader point about of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
© RICHARD HUBERT SMITH / GLYNDEBOURNE PRODUCTIONS LTD
 APRIL 20 – MAY 3, 2022

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

The singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza has rapidly evolved into one of indie rock’s most versatile young voices.
After débuting, in 2018, with “I Love My Mom,” an endearing, albeit crude, grunge-pop revelation, her second
album, “Any Shape You Take,” from 2021, brought breadth to her songs of unsustainable love, smoothing
out her sound and refining her lyrics, even as she extended into new territory sonically and emotionally.
On April 24, De Souza brings her bracing, catharsis-driven breakthrough to Music Hall of Williamsburg.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SOPHIA WILSON
 As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements tive, intimately collaborative curators David the COVID pandemic and, by chance, the re-

1 1
in advance and to check the requirements for Breslin and Adrienne Edwards ignore rather morseless current carnage in Ukraine.—Peter
in-person attendance. than oppose pressures of the ever-romping art Schjeldahl (Whitney Museum; through Sept. 5.)
market, which can see to itself. Delayed for
a year by COVID-19, the show consolidates
a trend that many of us hadn’t suspected: a
ART sort of fortuitously shared conceptual sensi- DANCE
bility that suggests an in-group but is open
to all who care about art’s relations to the
Morgan Bassichis wide world. My favorite work in the show New York City Ballet
This gifted New York performance artist’s is the indelibly disturbing and enthralling The company begins its six-week spring season
first solo gallery show is a spare but inviting “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty Word” (2021), (April 19-May 29) with a première from the
installation of videos, handwritten to-do lists, by the veteran Cuban American artist and newly hot experimental choreographer Pam
and colorful pamphlets offering a series of singularly plainspoken social activist Coco Tanowitz (April 22) and ends with a week of
“Questions to Ask Before” such potentially Fusco—a gorgeous twelve-minute video ex- Balanchine’s magical “A Midsummer Night’s
nerve-racking situations as “Beginning a ploration of Hart Island, New York’s potter’s Dream” (May 21-29). In the middle is a two-
New Friendship” and “Spending Time with field, for unidentified or unclaimed corpses. week festival (May 3-15) devoted to the music
a Niece.” Bassichis—whose approach blends Shots of the artist laboring in a rowboat along of Stravinsky. In addition to Tanowitz’s new
queer cabaret with an informal style of moti- its shores alternate with drone overviews of a ballet “Law of Mosaics,” which is set to a
vational speaking, laced with commiseration really quite lovely place where rows of small score by the California-based composer Ted
and self-doubt—has a gentle charisma and a stone markers perfunctorily memorialize in- Hearne, the company has also acquired Ta-
preternatural ability to spin any experience numerable lost lives. Beauty stands in for nowitz’s “Gustave le Gray No. 1,” a quartet,
into a song. One video finds the artist in the unconsummated mourning. The work can created in 2019, for which two dancers from
tub, accompanied by an electronic keyboard, seem to invoke both the cascading fatalities of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Anthony Santos
extolling the limitless uses of the bathroom as
a creative space. In the video series “Pitchy,”
unrelenting stream of consciousness becomes
a new genre of musical theatre. A piano and AT THE GALLERIES
an empty “stage,” in the form of a carpet,
establish a mood of absence—and of antici-
pation. On April 22, at 7:30, Bassichis, with
their light touch and multilayered humor,
goes live, performing their new piece “Ques-
tions to Ask Beforehand.” (Reservations, via
bridgetdonahue.nyc, are required.)—Johanna
Fateman (Donahue; through May 14.)

André Cadere
Cadere, who was born in Poland, in 1934, and
raised in Romania, moved to Paris in the nine-
teen-sixties—and his mischievous presence on
the conceptual-art scene was similarly inter-
national. In the decades since the artist died
of cancer, in 1978, he has become a cult figure,
best known for sneaking his colorful, rodlike
sculptures into other artists’ shows, from
London to Manhattan. In this marvellous
exhibition of works made between 1965 and
1978, a grid of photographs, taken in New York
City, in 1975, documents one such sculpture
in a host of urban vignettes: leaning casually
against a utility pole, a subway seat, and a
basketball court’s chain-link fence. A number
of physical examples of the sculptures—their
hand-carved cylindrical segments based on
mathematical sequences—appear in the ex- Most of New York City’s galleries are clustered in districts. (See the
hibition, too, propped against or mounted lately ballooning scene in Tribeca.) But some spaces are destinations in
on walls. But, visually speaking, these playful themselves. Two decades ago, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neigh-
interventions pale beside the structured de-
lirium of Cadere’s lesser-known paintings, in borhood, the insightful Ivy Jones opened Welancora, a Black-owned
which biomorphic shapes in jewel tones and gallery anchored by the work of Black artists, long before every big-
pastel hues join kaleidoscopic geometries in box gallery in town began jumping on the diversity bandwagon. In the
a seductive strain of Op art, an unexpectedly
COURTESY THE ARTIST / WELANCORA GALLERY

lush precursor to the provocations that fol- airy parlor floor of a brownstone at 33 Herkimer Street, Welancora
lowed.—J.F. (Ortuzar Projects; through May 7.) is showing (through May 7) the abstractions of Carl E. Hazlewood, a
Guyanese-born American artist, who is also an accomplished curator
“Whitney Biennial 2022: and writer. In Hazlewood’s hands, simple means—plastic mesh, cut
Quiet as It’s Kept” paper, pushpins, fabric, metallic string—assume formally and intellec-
tually complex dimensions. Slipping between painting, installation, and
This startlingly coherent and bold exhibition
is a material manifesto of late-pandemic in- drawing, he introduces ideas of the African diasporic experience (the
stitutional culture. Long on installations and Middle Passage, Afro-Caribbean folktales) in layered compositions that
videos and short on painting, conventional are buoyant but searing. The shape-shifting trickster Anansi is one re-
sculpture, and straight photography, it is
exciting without being especially pleasur- curring motif (as seen in “BlackHead Anansi Ensnares the Sun,” pictured
able—geared toward thought. The innova- above), a proxy, perhaps, for the ingenious artist himself.—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 5
and Alexandra Hutchinson, join two from the winds of change in his show “¡Viva!” Bach solo “Chaconne,” with a different guest
City Ballet (April 22-24). The company also (April 22), in which seven male dancers, in- dancer each night. The second week’s pro-
brings back Jerome Robbins’s “The Goldberg cluding Liñán, don the long dresses, fringed gram includes a première of its own—“Migrant
Variations” (April 19-21, April 23, and April shawls, and elaborate hair styles usually asso- Mother,” a celebration of Indigenous culture,
26), an hour-long exploration of Bach’s work, ciated with female bailaoras. The show, both by the Mexican choreographer Raúl Tamez—
one of the choreographer’s most experimental joyful and transformative, has been a huge along with Limón’s final work, “Waldstein
ballets.—Marina Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; hit in Spain. “Gala Flamenca” (April 23-24) Sonata,” and a reconstruction of one of his
through May 29.) is an evening of solos and group numbers, first, “Danzas Mexicanas.”—B.S. (Joyce Theatre;
performed to live music, by a trio of extraor- April 19-May 1.)
dinary dancers—Mercedes Ruiz, Eduardo
David Dorfman Guerrero, and María Moreno. María Terre-
Dorfman’s new piece “(A) Way Out of My moto, the twenty-two-year-old singer with Sasha Waltz & Guests
Body” frets and wallows in the predicament of whom they share the stage, is a force in her The seductive premise of Sasha Waltz’s “In C”
having a body and the desire to escape it. To a own right.—M.H. (City Center; April 22-24.) is that it is infinitely mutable, its structure
tuneful score played by the singer-songwriter open but orderly, allowing for variation. The
Elizabeth de Lise and a house band, the chore- piece is based on, and follows similar rules
ography, for a cast of seven, stays in Dorfman’s Limón Dance Company to, the composer Terry Riley’s seminal Min-
signature mode of sincere self-hurling and Seventy-six years after its founding and fifty imalist work, from 1964: as Riley did for his
tender support. The choreographer, now in his since the death of its namesake choreographer, musicians, Waltz gives her dancers a series
sixties, throws himself around while talking José Limón’s company endures. Its two-week of instructions, a structure to create dance
about his mother and multiple sclerosis.—Brian season at the Joyce kicks off with the première phrases, which they execute as often as they
Seibert (N.Y.U. Skirball; April 22-23.) of “Only One Will Rise,” by the accomplished choose, while remaining aware of the others
Burkinabé-born choreographer Olivier Tar- onstage. Freedom combined with rules creates
paga, but it also reaches back to “Air for the a flexible but harmonious system, a kind of
Flamenco Festival G String,” a 1928 work by Limón’s mentor dance heaven, bathed in Olaf Danilsen’s jewel-
After an absence of two years, this showcase of and the troupe’s first artistic director, Doris tone lighting. Waltz’s Berlin-based company
new and vibrant flamenco returns. The dancer Humphrey. Limón’s majestic “Psalm” returns performs the piece at BAM.—M.H. (Howard
and choreographer Manuel Liñán channels with its original score restored, as does his Gilman Opera House; April 28-30.)

Mufutau Yusuf
ON TELEVISION
When Mufutau Yusuf was nine, he and his
family emigrated from Nigeria to Ireland.
Nine years later, he made his professional
début with Irish Modern Dance Theatre, and
in the following decade his reputation as a
standout performer has grown. In “Òwe,” a
cryptic fifty-minute solo, he investigates his
in-between identity. Alone onstage with an
audiovisual archive that mixes family photos
and found footage of Nigerian history, he
searches the archive that is his body—shaking,

1
exploding, molding experience into art.—B.S.
(Irish Arts Center; April 21-24.)

THE THEATRE

The Little Prince

Co-directed by the French choreographer
Anne Tournié, this interpretation of the well-
loved book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is,
above all, a showcase of dance and aerial acro-
batics, performed by a virtuosic international
ensemble. The show is led, in the title role,
by Lionel Zalachas, who enters the stage, im-
There are so many shows featuring ripped-from-the-headlines stories that pressively, balanced on a large rolling ball
that serves as his home planet. An onstage
it’s a wonder there are any headlines left from which to rip. Thus, it can narrator (Chris Mouron, who adapted the
be difficult to tell what you should inhale, and what you should ignore. script and co-directed) recites much of the
“The Girl from Plainville,” now streaming on Hulu, falls somewhere in book’s text verbatim, but because the selection
emphasizes the most sentimental lines, rather
the muddled middle. The sensational 2015 court case that inspired the than the wryly faux-naïve flights of philosophy
show is juicy and thorny, to be sure: Michelle Carter, a teen-age girl from that make it unique, the story’s wisdom often
Massachusetts, sent text messages encouraging her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, gets lost amid the dancing, dazzling though
ILLUSTRATION BY JOVANA MUGOŠA

it is. And it’s disappointing in a production

to kill himself, and he did. Does this make her a criminal? The story formed of this scale that video projections (by Marie
the basis for an HBO documentary and countless think pieces, and yet Jumelin), attractive though they are, substi-
the creators of the Hulu series, Liz Hannah and Patrick Macmanus, have tute for physical sets.—Rollo Romig (Broadway
Theatre; through Aug. 14.)
done a valiant job injecting new life and nuance into it. Elle Fanning gives
a chilling performance as Michelle, as does Colton Ryan as Conrad, and
the supporting cast (Chloë Sevigny, Aya Cash, Cara Buono) is a dynamic
Paradise Square
Sentimental syrup has been liberally spooned
bunch. But, even with artful camera angles and gauzy dream sequences, over this new musical (with a book by Christina
the story ends up feeling more tabloid than tactful.—Rachel Syme Anderson, Craig Lucas, and Larry Kirwan),

6 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022

 CO LLE CT IO N

N E W YOR K · 6 9 7 FI FT H AVE N U E B E T WE E N 5 4 TH & 5 5 TH S T RE E T · 21 2 3 9 6 1 73 5

LA S VE GA S · TH E FOR U M S H OP S AT CA E SA RS PA LA C E · 7 02 36 9 1 73 5
 ian and Leonard Cohenian, he cultivates an air
R. & B. of inscrutability and depth—and often seems to
be up to something dirty.—Jay Ruttenberg (Music
Hall of Williamsburg; April 27-28.)
As the front person of the progressive
funk band the Internet, the singer-song-
Joyce DiDonato
writer Syd has led the group’s eclectic
CLASSICAL Joyce DiDonato’s new album, “Eden,”
charge into experimental music. Her solo rejoices in the glories of Mother Nature, but its
work is something else entirely—vibrant ambitious scope, however admirable, leads it
R. & B. that honors the genre’s history. astray. The set opens with Charles Ives’s iconic
instrumental piece “The Unanswered Question,”
Her 2019 début, “Fin,” revelled in the and DiDonato sings the trumpet part—a usur-
freedom afforded by independence, diving pation that injects human knowledge into Ives’s
deeper into her player persona. Syd’s sec- carefully cultivated atmosphere of mystery. The
thematic cohesion of the texts doesn’t ameliorate
ond album, “Broken Hearts Club,” is the the hodgepodge of styles: the opening sequence
first music, solo or otherwise, to find her moves from Ives to Rachel Portman (a cinematic
vulnerable and smitten, using her quiet commission entitled “The First Morning of the
World”), Mahler, and obscure figures from the
voice to mimic the life cycle of head-over- Italian Baroque and Classical periods. The one
heels infatuation. It is lilting, lovelorn alt- constant is DiDonato’s polished singing—she
blues that carefully traces the arc of a tryst has a way of winnowing her sound down to a
thread, slender yet tensile, as she circumnavi-
gone sour, and in her new role as monog- gates an inspiring world. The orchestra Il Pomo
amist she has never been more transpar- d’Oro, led by Maxim Emelyanychev, plays with
ent. Here, Syd achieves a novel sharp- crackling intensity, and it joins the mezzo-so-
prano at Carnegie Hall for a staging of the
ness as a writer, scripting honeymoon album.—Oussama Zahr (Carnegie Hall; April 23.)
romance and “what are we” entangle-
ment with equal acuity.—Sheldon Pearce Jawbreaker
PUNK The punk trio Jawbreaker released four
albums in the nineties, all of them featuring
which uses the New York Draft Riots as the Are we laughing at “The Patsy,” the century-old catchy songs, filled with ache and acuity, that
backdrop to a tale of—what else?—resilience play, or at Greenspan’s affectionate mockery of still hit like winter blues beginning to thaw

1
and love. It’s 1863, and in Manhattan’s slummy “The Patsy”? The answer, usually, is both at in spring. The band’s poetic lyrics, written by
Five Points neighborhood Nelly O’Brien (Joa- once.—R.R. (Abrons Arts Center; through April 30.) Blake Schwarzenbach, were a form of pop-punk
quina Kalukango) runs Paradise Square, a tav- literary compression. “I have a picture of you
ern where Irish and Black neighbors gather to and me in Brooklyn / On a porch, it was raining
quaff ale as one. Nelly’s own family is merrily / Hey, I remember that day,” goes a highlight
blended: she’s a Black woman married to an MUSIC from Jawbreaker’s classic 1994 record, “24 Hour
Irishman; her feisty Irish stereotype of a sister- Revenge Therapy,” called “Do You Still Hate
in-law, Annie (Chilina Kennedy), is wedded to a Me?” To that query, subsequent generations of
Black reverend (Nathaniel Stampley). Personal A-Trak: “10 Seconds Vol. 1” rock and emo musicians have offered a resound-
and political tensions flare when Annie’s nephew ELECTRONIC The Montreal native Alain Mack- ing no—including emerging punk heroes such
(A. J. Shively) arrives from the old country to lovitch, who spins and produces records as as the teen-aged Linda Lindas, who opens for
find himself threatened with Lincoln’s draft; A-Trak, approaches both d.j.’ing and beat-mak- Jawbreaker this week, and a young New York
meanwhile, Nelly, antagonized by a bigoted ing with a straightforward effervescence that band that, a decade ago, named itself Jawbreaker
uptown party boss (John Dossett), risks every- allows him to play for any crowd—be it at a Reunion. Jawbreaker’s actual reunion tour fo-
thing by harboring an enslaved man on the run Kanye West arena show (A-Trak once served cusses on the group’s final album, the glossier
(Sidney DuPont). The dancing (choreographed as a d.j. for the rapper) or in a tiny club full of major-label jump “Dear You,” once vexed, now
by Bill T. Jones), which puts Irish step dancing owlish techno nerds. “10 Seconds Vol. 1,” his cherished.—Jenn Pelly (Irving Plaza; April 27-30.)
into dialogue with African American stepping, is new EP, was made with an old E-mu SP1200,
superb; the voices sublime; the music (by Jason a late-eighties drum machine, sequencer, and
Howland) and lyrics (by Nathan Tysen and Masi digital sampler, and the end result has the The Jazz at Lincoln Center
Asare) as broad as the maudlin story. What warmth, vibrancy, and choppiness of turn-of-
stays in the mind is Kalukango, who explodes the-nineties New York house, made with the Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis
through the schlock with cataclysmic force; she E-mu or similar systems, by the likes of Mas- JAZZ The Apollonian sheen of the Jazz at Lin-
deserves better than this show, and she’ll get ters at Work and Todd Terry.—Michaelangelo coln Center Orchestra may seem to go against
it.—Alexandra Schwartz (Barrymore; open run.) Matos (Streaming on select platforms.) the grain of the Dionysian vitality of Charles
Mingus’s music, but the bandleader Wynton
Marsalis and his spit-and-polish crew have the
The Patsy Altin Gün and Sessa requisite stamina and enthusiasm to honor the
Is there anything more adorable on a New York INTERNATIONAL This canny bill pairs the band great man’s centennial in style. Mingus’s work
stage than David Greenspan flirting with him- Altin Gün with the singer and guitarist Sessa— revelled in small-group interplay as well as or-
self? Jack Cummings III directs this revival, for fellow-travellers in the global rock underground, chestral complexity; Marsalis himself has crossed
ILLUSTRATION BY SIMONE NORONHA

Transport Group, of Greenspan’s fleet-footed though they are musically and geographically re- similar territory throughout his career, and he
feat from 2011, in which one inexhaustible actor moved. Altin Gün presents a cultural scramble, should bring considerable insight into making
plays all eight characters in a creaky, charming, with Turkish, Indonesian, and Dutch members Mingus’s inimitable music come alive.—Steve
long-forgotten romantic comedy by Barry Con- psychedelicizing Turkish folk from their perch Futterman (Rose Theatre; April 22-23.)
ners, which débuted on Broadway in 1925. Green- in Amsterdam. The sextet’s third album, “Yol,”
span—ricocheting all over Dane Laffrey’s smart, invokes the sensation of entering a foreign club
lilac-wallpapered cube of a set, without a single while in a jet-lagged daze, with dance songs LONG PLAY
costume change and little more than a telephone that seem suspended between eras and borders. CLASSICAL Since 1987, Bang on a Can—a com-
for a prop—builds what feels like a lunatic stunt Sessa, a São Paulo native, purrs sinuous ballads posers’ collective founded by David Lang,
into a style that might be called precision camp. that evaporate immediately into the ether. Like Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon—has been
As the audience surrenders, a question arises: his singer-songwriter touchstones, both Brazil- curating marathon-style contemporary-music

8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022

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W R I N K L E R E S U LT S I N O N E W E E K * *

FOR PEOPLE WITH SKIN TM

concerts that run for twelve hours or more. (The clandestinely to the border so that the elder son, 1971 drama, as a pair of drug addicts drifting
twentieth-anniversary edition took more than Farid (Amin Simiar), who’s about twenty, can through Manhattan’s horror holes in a state
a day to perform.) The title of B.O.A.C.’s new illegally emigrate. The dangers of the journey are of mutual self-destruction. The overheated
festival, LONG PLAY, indicates a new level marked by the family’s evasive maneuvers—leav- Bobby (Pacino), a crook since childhood, is a
of enterprise, with more than sixty concerts ing cell phones behind, stopping suddenly in fear bundle of jitters and motormouthed sass from
across three days, in venues around Brooklyn of being followed, communicating in code with the city streets. He cools down with the heroin
(Roulette, Public Records, BAM, and Littlefield, a designated contact—and the extreme expense that his girlfriend, Helen (Winn), a torpid
among others). The program reflects a healthy that the family has incurred. Yet the action high- artist from Indiana, uses to thaw her emotional
appreciation for pioneers of the recent past: lights their sharp, contentious, intensely loving core (frozen solid by an illegal abortion). The
there’s Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Stimmung,” relationships. The unnamed mother (Pantea city seems rotted by the schemes of hustlers in
Terry Riley’s “In C,” and, for the festival’s finale, Panahiha) struggles to suppress her anguish at need of a fix and by the law’s corrupting force
a reimagining of Ornette Coleman’s 1959 album the impending separation; the cynical and disillu- (embodied by Alan Vint, as a soft-spoken,
“The Shape of Jazz to Come.” A number of ex- sioned father (Hassan Madjooni) carps with for- hard-nosed detective). Schatzberg doesn’t ro-
perimental composer-performers, including the lorn humor from the back seat; and the purpose manticize the addicts’ troubles; with a tender
electronicist Phong Tran, the free-jazz bassist of the trip is concealed from the antically imag- but unsparing eye, he spins visual variations

1
Brandon Lopez, and the vocalist Pamela Z, give inative and wildly impulsive young son (Rayan on shambling degradation and on fleeting
concerts as well.—O.Z. (Various; April 29-May 1.) Sarlak). The story opens wider dimensions in relief, and makes the sudden lurch of moods,
chance encounters with an ambitious bike racer ranging from bad to worse, his subject. Briskly
and with the families of other émigrés; Panahi’s panning telephoto shots, with their tremulous
spare, controlled style unites intimate conflicts mysteries, reveal a city within a city, a second
MOVIES and vast landscapes in framings as wry as they are world of experience that shows through New
rhapsodic.—Richard Brody (In theatrical release.) York’s abraded surfaces.—R.B. (Playing on
TCM April 20.)
Hit the Road
The jaunty title of the Iranian director Panah The Panic in Needle Park
Panahi’s first feature belies the passionately In their first major movie roles, Al Pacino Petite Maman
sombre story of a family of four that’s travelling and Kitty Winn star in Jerry Schatzberg’s Céline Sciamma’s latest film is her most con-
cise, running a lean seventy-two minutes, and
featuring a bare handful of characters and lo-
ON THE BIG SCREEN cations. Yet nothing about it feels small. Nelly
(Joséphine Sanz), aged eight, goes with her
parents to stay in the house of her late grand-
mother, in the French countryside. There, in
the woods, she meets and befriends Marion
(Gabrielle Sanz), who is not only her exact
double but who will, as both girls gradually re-
alize, grow up to become Nelly’s mother (Nina
Meurisse). In other words, this is a time-travel
movie, though it bears none of the traditional
trappings of science fiction. What it investi-
gates, with wistfulness and wit, is the theme
of the lonely childhood, as well as our childish
fascination with what our parents must have
been like—who they were—when they were
young. For good measure, we also get a suitably
messy pancake-making scene.—Anthony Lane
(In theatrical release.)

Saturday Fiction
This frenetic and paranoid thriller, by the
Chinese director Lou Ye, is set in Japanese-
occupied Shanghai at the time of the Pearl
Harbor attack. With irony seething in his
kinetic camerawork and silky black-and-white
tones, Lou uses historical drama to expose
the corruption and the terror of a modern
One of the highlights of this year’s edition of New Directors/New Films, surveillance state. Gong Li plays Jean Yu, a
running April 20-May 1 at MOMA and Film at Lincoln Center, is “Father’s famous actress who returns to the city—where
British and French zones remain protected—
Day,” the fourth fiction feature by the Rwandan director Kivu Ruhorahoza, to perform in a play, but she has an ulterior
which interweaves the lives of half a dozen main characters. Their stories, motive: to inquire about her ex-husband, a
as the title suggests, are centered on paternity and its power: the cruelty and captive of Japanese forces. There, she also
meets a manipulative French diplomat from
arrogance of Karara (Yves Kijyana), a petty thief who is mentoring his young her past (Pascal Greggory) and a mysterious
son in a life of crime; the despair of Zaninka (Médiatrice Kayitesi), a masseuse young fan (Huang Xiangli). The high-stakes
who is grieving for her son while fending off both a male client’s advances deceptions of espionage threaten romantic and
professional relationships alike. Binoculars,
and her ne’er-do-well husband’s financial demands; and the quiet rage of
COURTESY IYUGI PRODUCTIONS

two-way mirrors, hidden microphones, and

Mukobwa (Aline Amike), who discovers that her elderly father took part encrypted messages add suspense to secret
in the genocidal massacres of 1994. Ruhorahoza’s drama reveals the hidden encounters; conflicting plots of collaboration
and resistance spark public violence and turn

1
connections among his many characters and the underlying social conflicts the opening of a play into a political act of in-
that they confront. One man’s sexual abuse of a woman breeds the wanton ternational import.—R.B. (In theatrical release.)
violence of another man, a self-proclaimed protector; the COVID pandemic
threatens livelihoods, but as Zaninka tells a friend, it “only shakes things For more reviews, visit
that were not solid to begin with.”—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

10 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022

 focaccia-adjacent Tuscan bread. (Schiac- menu. La Favolosa features Tuscan salami
ciata means “squished,” as in with finger- and soft cubes of spicy marinated egg-
tips.) I ate it, both hands required, on a plant, plus Pecorino and artichoke creams.
doorstep across the cobblestoned street La Schiacciata del Boss encases Tuscan

1
from the shop, drinking cold wine out of prosciutto, sliced Pecorino, and a gener-
a plastic cup. I saw, in vivid colors, what ous smear of inky black-truffle cream.
all the fuss was about. There are plenty of sandwiches for
TABLES FOR TWO Eighth Avenue is no Via dei Neri. vegetarians. Steer clear of La Caprese
The Florence shop is a two-minute walk outside of tomato season, unless you
All’Antico Vinaio from the Palazzo Vecchio, home to the don’t mind a pale, mealy beefsteak; try,
729 Eighth Avenue famous copy of Michelangelo’s David. instead, La Broadway, loaded, like La
The New York shop is a six-minute Paradiso, with stracciatella, pistachio
I won’t take a side in the battle over walk from the Times Square M&M’s cream, and, in place of mortadella, sun-
whether the city’s office workers should World. But their interiors are mostly dried tomatoes, cubed zucchini, and a
be expected to return to their desks as we indistinguishable, and in New York handful of arugula. The L.A. Fade Away,
shift with an ever-evolving pandemic. I there’s a small horseshoe-shaped seat- which comprises those vegetables plus
will note that anyone with a desk in or ing area, wooden counters, and a few eggplant and Gorgonzola, is satisfying
near Midtown West might be incentiv- stools, all flooded with sunlight one as well, though I’m not sure what it has
PHOTOGRAPH BY COLE WILSON FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

ized by the promise of a superlative lunch. recent afternoon. It was a pleasure to to do with L.A. (The New Yorker is
Last November, All’Antico Vinaio, an observe the work of a small team of ex- made with roast beef and onion-porcini
extraordinarily popular sandwich shop pert sandwich-makers—artists, really, to cream; there’s turkey and avocado in
that originated in Florence, Italy, before borrow a term from Subway—including the Venice Beach.) Vegans will have a
expanding to Milan and Rome, opened one who had been transferred, indefi- harder time, as did the woman behind
its first U.S. outpost, in New York. I’ve nitely, from Florence. me in line who announced that she liked
been to Florence just once, for barely a Towering stacks of schiacciata emerged cheese but not “cold cheese.” If you eat
day some summers ago, and what I did from the basement at regular intervals, pork, to skip the meats—the salame,
with that day, other than speed through shiny with olive oil and sparkling with the prosciutto, the capocollo, the por-
the Uffizi, was optimize for eating. Lunch coarse salt, releasing clouds of steam from chetta, the ’nduja—is to do yourself a
was at All’Antico Vinaio. a dense landscape of air bubbles as the grave disservice.
I ordered La Paradiso, tripling down loaves were sliced horizontally, ends sliv- My two favorite All’Antico sand-
on my favorite nut: thin coins of pista- ered off and passed to patiently waiting wiches exalt the Tuscan art of salumi
chio were spangled, like leopard spots, customers. Each slab was piled with irre- by including only meat and cheese, the
throughout floppy folds of mortadella sistible combinations of freshly cut meats, saltiness of each sharpened by a drizzle of
that had been layered with an oily, pesto- cheeses, flavored creams, and vegetables. truffle honey. La Toscana marries salame
like “pistachio cream” and stretchy strac- It can be hard to choose from the sixteen and Pecorino. The Dolcezze d’Autunno
ciatella (made from mozzarella curds options, especially given an overlap in pairs Gorgonzola with lardo, cutting
mixed with cream) dusted in crushed ingredients. A tiny chalkboard placard through the figurative fat by homing in
pistachio, stacked between enormous on the counter helpfully lists the two on the purest stuff. (Sandwiches $10-$18.)
rectangles of freshly baked schiacciata, a best-sellers, which also sit at the top of the —Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 11
 S PR IN G 2 2
—
Opens April 19

GLOBAL SPONSOR
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT weeks of pregnancy, in violation of prec- abortion after about six weeks, and al-
BEYOND ROE edents establishing that abortion can- lows family members (including a rap-
not be banned before “viability,” at around ist’s relatives) of the “preborn child” to
n 2003, when the Supreme Court held, twenty-four weeks. (On Friday, Florida sue a provider who performs an abortion.
I in Lawrence v. Texas, that criminalizing
gay sex was unconstitutional, it insisted
became the most recent.) Some of the
laws have been blocked by the courts,
The law was passed last month, but Ida-
ho’s Supreme Court has temporarily
that the decision had nothing to do with but, if Mississippi prevails, the states ex- blocked it from taking effect. Missouri
marriage equality. In a scathing dissent, pect to be free to enforce these bans. has introduced a bill that allows private
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “Do not Among the more restrictive bills cur- citizens to sue an out-of-state abortion
believe it.”Then, in 2013, when the Court rently under consideration across the provider, or even someone who helps
struck down the federal Defense of Mar- country, more than a dozen emulate transport a person across state lines for
riage Act’s definition of marriage as being the Texas “heartbeat” law, which bans an abortion. Wyoming has passed a law
between a man and a woman, emphasiz- abortion after six weeks of pregnancy that bans most abortions, which will be
ing the tradition of letting the states de- and allows only private citizens, not state triggered if the Supreme Court overturns
fine marriage, Scalia issued another warn- officials, to enforce the ban. That pro- Roe. The boldest effort thus far, though,
ing, saying that “no one should be fooled” vision insulates the law from being chal- has been in Oklahoma, a destination for
into thinking that the Court would leave lenged as unconstitutional in federal Texans seeking abortions. Two weeks ago,
states free to exclude gay couples from court. The Supreme Court repeatedly Oklahoma’s legislature made it a felony
that definition. He was finally proved declined to block the Texas ban, but did punishable by ten years in prison to per-
right two years later, when the reasoning leave open a possible avenue to chal- form an abortion except to save a wom-
on dignity and equality developed in those lenge it. In March, the Texas Supreme an’s life in a medical emergency. The gov-
earlier rulings led to the Court’s holding Court closed that avenue. ernor signed the bill last Tuesday; the law
that the Constitution requires all states Idaho became the first state to enact is set to go into effect in August.
to recognize same-sex marriage. a Texas-inspired law. Idaho’s law bans Overturning Roe would be the cul-
Just as rights can unfold and expand, mination of a half-century-long legal
however, they can also retract and con- campaign singularly focussed on that
strict in breathtaking ways, pursuing a outcome. And there are signs that, far
particular strain of logic one case at a from being an end in itself, it would
time. In the forthcoming decision in launch even more ambitious agendas. In
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Or- the Dobbs litigation, Mississippi denied
ganization, the Court is widely expected that doing away with Roe would cast
to overturn or severely undermine its doubt on other precedents, set between
abortion-rights cases, Roe v. Wade and 1965 and 2015, on which Roe rested or
Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In fact, which relied on Roe. This series of de-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

following the comments of the six con- cisions held that states cannot ban con-
servative Justices at the oral arguments traceptives, criminalize gay sex, or refuse
in December, the strength of this expec- to recognize same-sex marriage. The
tation has spurred state legislative ef- state told the Court that those cases are
forts to proceed as if Roe were already not like Dobbs, because “none of them
gone. A handful of states have passed involve the purposeful termination of a
laws, like the Mississippi law at issue in human life.” But all of them involve the
Dobbs, that ban abortion after fifteen question of whether states should be able
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 13
to make laws that affect some of the most not believe it” warning. Although the that was previously held to provide the
intimate aspects of people’s lives. In re- legal arguments against Roe have fo- right to abortion, the Fourteenth Amend-
cent weeks, in anticipation of the Dobbs cussed on returning the issue to the states, ment, which prohibits states from de-
decision, various Republican senators for five decades the core moral belief priving “any person of life, liberty, or prop-
have questioned Griswold v. Connecti- against the ruling has been that abor- erty without due process of law.” Fetuses
cut, which struck down a state ban on tion is the termination of a human life. are currently not considered to be per-
contraceptives; Obergefell v. Hodges, Last week, a twenty-six-year-old Texas sons. But Mississippi’s brief repeatedly
which required states to recognize same- woman was arrested on murder charges, notes the human attributes of the fetus,
sex marriage; and even Loving v. Vir- for “intentionally and knowingly caus- in utero, and it may be a precursor to fu-
ginia, which invalidated a state anti-mis- ing the death of an individual by self- ture constitutional arguments to the effect
cegenation law. Overturning Roe would induced abortion.” The prosecutor dis- that fetal personhood prohibits abortion.
almost certainly fuel the broader fight to missed the case, saying that the Texas In the face of such a push, liberals
get fundamental moral issues out of the law did not apply to it. But the incident may one day find themselves advocat-
realm of federal constitutional rights and suggested a possible post-Dobbs future, ing for leaving the matter to the states,
under the control of the states. in which states pursue criminal charges and perhaps even seeking novel meth-
A Supreme Court decision overturn- against people who have abortions as ods—like the one Texas concocted—to
ing Roe would seek to justify itself on well as against those who provide them. circumvent federal-court review of state
the ground that it allows states to re- It may also be only a matter of time, laws protecting abortion access. Whether
solve the issue of abortion for them- if Mississippi prevails, before pro-life legal or not it would take another fifty years
selves, through democratic processes, efforts turn toward getting the Supreme or more for a fetal right to unfold, the
rather than by having a resolution im- Court to recognize the constitutional pro-life legal movement has demon-
posed on them. At that point, it will be rights of the fetus. These efforts would strated its ability to fight the long fight.
tempting to echo Justice Scalia’s “Do focus on the same part of the Constitution —Jeannie Suk Gersen

UNDERGROUND ing of stinky food, no clipping of finger- kid, the man breathing too close. Where
CIVIL INATTENTION nails, no hogging the pole. No eye con- does bubble end and community begin?
tact. Passengers keep to themselves. They A week before the shooting, a 7 train
have been known to ignore, for instance, hit a hunk of metal in the tunnel under
the presence of sharks (dead) and snakes the East River and got stuck for more
(live), so long as the sharks and snakes than two hours. As the wait dragged on,
also ignore them. When violations occur, “you could kind of feel the tension, but
they can feel unusually disturbing. Sub- no one said anything,” Aissa Diop, a twen-
ne of the more surreal parts of last way disasters, as opposed to, say, car ty-four-year-old marketing professional,
O week’s shooting on the N train was
a strange circularity. Here was an alleged
crashes, traumatize because they remind
us of the fragility of this deal. What un-
who was among the stranded, said the
other day. Diop is not a bubble person
perpetrator of monstrous subway violence settled people about the alleged shoot- (“I’m the weird New Yorker who smiles
who was attuned to, and dabbled in, our er’s videos was that he seemed deeply at people,” she said), but it was Rama-
civic arguments over subway violence. unbalanced and filled with hate—and dan, and she was hungry. She stuck to
“Eric Adams, what are you doing, brother?” not unlike the recent array of subway her iPhone. Then a man burst into the
he said in one YouTube rant. “Every car menaces that have invoked the old Fear car and ran out through the opposite door.
I went to was loaded with homeless peo- City days: he knew the rules, and he de- “He was saying, ‘Oh, no, I am outta here!’”
ple.” He added, of the Mayor, “He can’t clared them broken. Diop said. Suddenly, everything felt up
stop no crime in no subways.” People who study this kind of thing for grabs. Diop ventured an icebreaker,
Nobody doubted the ease of commit- call the subway social compact “civil in- something along the lines of: Where are
ting any crimes in any subways. The list attention.” We build personal bubbles to the “Showti-i-ime” guys when you need
of recent track-shovings, muggings, and survive in the throng. The social psychol- them? Soon, she was leading the subway
hate crimes caused by untreated mental ogist Stanley Milgram once sent his grad- car in a sing-along. “In Hindi, I think,”
illness is long and troubling. The won- uate students into the subway with the she said. Immobilized strangers swapped
der is that we’re able to keep a subway task of asking strangers to give up their stories. After the train moved again, they
running at all. We pack people of all ages, seats. The results—most of the strangers stuck around for a while and hugged.
sizes, dispositions, tax brackets, and acquiesced—were less shocking than the For others, the pull of oblivion is
crankiness levels into a metal can in a process: the students found the asking to all-powerful. Reflecting after the shoot-
hole in the ground, and send them off, be torturous. Some nearly vomited. One ing, Lieutenant Mark Torre, the com-
bound only by a nebulous social contract. of the students reflected later, “That study mander of the N.Y.P.D. bomb squad, said
We doff our backpacks, tuck in our feet, showed how much the rules are saving that, during a bomb threat, most people
and even, occasionally, unspread our legs. us from chaos.” But every day presents flee, but not all. “You’ll have a bomb tech-
We bear the sweaty armpit at nose level, its own challenges: the escalating argu- nician in this eighty-pound, essentially,
the errant elbow. There should be no eat- ment, the mother being rough with her suit of armor that’s going down to deal
14 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
with this package, and somebody some- try not to think of it as this huge, epic Faragallah plays a university porter, Ad-
how slips past the police line, and they’ll thing, because it puts too much pressure ham’s brother-in-law, and, in this scene,
walk right by them,” he said. “This is just on it,” she said the other day. The play a white British professor. “It started out
the New York attitude, you know? They was supposed to open soon, at the Pub- as an economic thing,” Mansour said.
see this guy in a suit of armor who’s ad- lic Theatre. Then again, the first time “Plays with smaller casts are way more
dressing this thing—clearly something the production went into tech rehears- likely to get produced. But then some-
is amiss here! But they’ll walk by like it’s als, in early 2020, it was supposed to open thing interesting started to happen with
just somebody cleaning up dog waste.” on April 1st, and everyone knows what the Middle Eastern actors playing white
The day after the shooting, the dis- happened next. “The joke, among peo- characters.”The professor, Jenkin, wants
cussion among some commuters was, ple who spend time in the Arab-speak- Adham to emphasize his “outsider per-
subway or Uber? “I have patients ask- ing world, is that everything is ‘Inshallah,’” spective”—to read Wordsworth more
ing themselves if they feel comfortable Mansour said. “You ask the cabdriver, like a Palestinian, basically—but he can’t
on the subway,” Ellen Vora, a psychia- ‘Can you get me to the airport?’‘Inshallah.’ quite come out and say it. ( Jenkin: “Your
trist in the Village, said. She often treats I wasn’t raised Muslim, but that attitude work might be more interesting to us
people with subway anxieties; usually, feels appropriate right now.” if you could be more . . . you.”) “Part of
it’s the enclosed space, the crowds, or, Mansour’s father grew up in a Chris- the joke is just that Jenkin is so stiff-
recently, the coronavirus. Citing statis- tian family in southern Lebanon, in a upper-lip that Adham literally doesn’t
tics, Vora reassures them that the sub- village near two Palestinian refugee understand what he’s getting at,” Man-
way is safe. Avoidance only feeds anxi- camps. In 1958, with Lebanon about to sour said. “But there’s another layer
ety. “I don’t mean to trivialize the descend into civil war, he left; he met
shooting—it was horrifying—but I’ve Mansour’s mother, a Norwegian Amer-
found myself encouraging people to go ican, in Seattle, then settled in San Diego
anyway. We are still more in danger every and, ostensibly, never looked back. “I’m
time we get into a car. And there’s some- not his psychologist, but there was some-
thing life-affirming about being packed thing in me that, whenever he said, ‘I
in with other humans.” don’t miss it,’ never quite believed him,”
The gunman was apprehended later Mansour said.
that day, with the help, in part, of a twenty- The impossible choices faced by ci-
one-year-old Syrian immigrant named vilians in Lebanon in 1958 mirror those
Zack, who’d been installing security cam- faced by citizens of Syria in 2011, or
eras at a bodega. He’d spotted the sus- Ukraine in 2022: stay, risking your life,
pect and began frantically warning pass- or go, possibly forever? Instead of ex-
ersby. He recalled thinking, “Everybody ploring these questions via a fictional
has headphones, everybody wants music, Lebanese family like her father’s, Man-
nobody cares about anybody, but we have sour thought of the refugee camps up
to care about this thing!” Zack became a the road. Her play became a “conditional
local hero, hamming it up at a press con- trilogy” about a Palestinian Wordsworth
ference, commandeering the mike to in- scholar named Adham. “Conditional,”
terview other witnesses. But he also rec- meaning that it splits, “Sliding Doors”- Mona Mansour
ognized that, in his excited warnings, he’d style: in the first act, set in 1967, Adham
transgressed. He’d broken the bubble. So is in London for a Romantic-literature added to it when it’s Ramsey, whose ac-
he offered an explanation. “Many people conference when war breaks out at home. tual father was forced out of Palestine
think I am on drugs,” he said. “But I am The second act, set in 1982, shows a ver- in 1948, saying these gently racist things.”

1
not. I am fasting.” sion of his life in which he stayed in En- At one point, Jenkin gets up to make
—Zach Helfand gland. The third act, set in the early tea. “It’s a tea bag, is it?” Faragallah said.
two-thousands, imagines that he went “It wouldn’t be loose?”
THE BOARDS home, or tried to. “Let’s say it’s a bag, and nobody bring
STAY OR GO? The other day, at the Public’s rehearsal up that it otherwise wouldn’t be,” Sarah
space on Lafayette Street, Mansour sat Blush, the associate director, said.
behind a folding table, occasionally slid- “I love the way you think,” Faragallah
ing a black mask aside to sip tea from said. He stood, crossed stage left, and
a Baseball Hall of Fame mug. Two of practiced steeping and stirring. Tabbal
the cast, Hadi Tabbal and Ramsey Fara- sat, working through his British “ah”s (“Is
gallah, were doing a scene in which it preventing me from advahncement?”).
n a sense, the playwright Mona Man- Adham, now a faculty member at a Brit- There was a quiet hubbub behind the
I sour has been working on “The Va-
grant Trilogy” for fifteen years; in an-
ish university, asks a more established
colleague for career advice. The play fea-
folding table. Caroline Englander, the
production stage manager, looked con-
other sense, she’s been working up to it tures six actors in nineteen roles. Tab- cerned. Finally, she spoke up: “Mark
her whole life. It’s that kind of play. “You bal plays Adham all the way through; would never believe a tea bag.” That’s
16 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA 6:57 AM

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Mark Wing-Davey, the director—the Kyiv in their mid-thirties, had spent a managed to evacuate Tasheva’s cat.
only member of the cast or the crew who long day in meetings with European dip- “We’re I.D.P.s,” Tomak said—inter-
actually is a British white guy—who was lomats. They’d been advocating for an nally displaced persons. “It’s a really
out of the room. “I’m just trying to prevent E.U. ban on Russian fossil fuels, a seven- bad feeling, although I understand that
a big tea disaster down the line,” she said. hundred-million-dollar-a-day habit that I am lucky indeed.”
On April 1, 2020, the original open- helps fund Russia’s war on Ukraine. They “I met Tamila back in 2014,” Papuash-
ing night, Mansour and the cast gath- also wanted to remind people that vili said, at the table. He’d been on a
ered on Zoom, drinking wine and read- Crimea—a territory that Russia illegally fact-finding mission in Ukraine, after the
ing some poems aloud. They kept annexed in 2014—is serving as a base for annexation of Crimea.
meeting, every Friday night, until they Vladimir Putin’s efforts to erase Ukrainian “I met Simon a bit later, in Donbas,”
reunited in the flesh. “One person in identity. “We didn’t have too much hope,” Tomak said, referring to the home of two
the cast lost a family member during Tomak said, adding that their efforts breakaway regions, Donetsk and Luhansk,
that time,” Mansour said. “Another one were unlikely to be “game-changing.” occupied for years now by pro-Russian
had a baby. My marriage ended, and She had on a black turtleneck and Cal- separatist groups.
Hadi”—the actor who plays Ad- vin Klein sneakers. “In the war zone,” Papuashvili said.
ham—“went with me to sign the di- The host, Simon Papuashvili, a Now the two women work for the Mis-
vorce papers. It’s been a long two years.” human-rights lawyer from Georgia, sion of the President of Ukraine in the
“The Vagrant Trilogy” had its first per- began the meal with a toast of rosé. “For Autonomous Republic of Crimea. For-
formance, Mashallah, earlier this month. peace,” he said. mer human-rights activists, they also vol-
The Jenkin scene went over great. Even “And for victory,” Tomak added. unteer as fixers for international journal-

1
the tea-stirring got a laugh. Tasheva, who wore a gray blazer ists in Ukraine.
—Andrew Marantz with a pearl brooch on the lapel, is an Tomak talked about the historical
exiled Crimean Tatar, from a Turkic origins of the war. “I think that this con-
BRUSSELS POSTCARD ethnic group indigenous to Crimea versation has not yet started, interna-
RESPITE which Stalin deported en masse in 1944. tionally, about the legacy of the Russian
Authorities have warned her not to re- Empire, and then the U.S.S.R. We’re
turn to Crimea. (“Our security forces representing three peoples that suffered
say to me, ‘You could be arrested im- from Russia: Crimean Tatars, Geor-
mediately,’” she said.) Brussels was the gians, Ukrainians.” She added, “There
pair’s last stop on a long journey from was no tribunal over Stalin’s crimes and
Lviv, the Ukrainian city near the Pol- the U.S.S.R.’s crimes, as there was for
wo tired Ukrainian officials who ish border. Tomak and Tasheva were the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis.”
T work in President Volodymyr Ze-
lensky’s administration arrived the other
on a work trip there when Russia in-
vaded Ukraine, in February. They had
“Truth was never established,” Pa-
puashvili said. He had helped coördinate
night at a dinner party in their honor, in not been home to Kyiv since. Tomak’s the women’s trip from Lviv. First, they
a leafy district of Brussels. Maria Tomak father was still there, but her pregnant travelled by car to the Polish border and
and Tamila Tasheva, both residents of sister had made it to Lviv. Friends had exited along a humanitarian corridor.
“Psychologically, it’s very hard,” Ta-
sheva said. “Because when you go through
these corridors, you see the U.N.H.C.R.
tents for refugees.”
“You’re f leeing your own country,”
Tomak said. “It’s not a good feeling.”
They then took a bus to a registration
point, where Papuashvili met them in a
car. First stop: meeting with U.S. diplo-
mats who had been relocated from Kyiv
to a town in Poland; then a four-hour
drive to Warsaw. From there, a flight to
Brussels, and then to a hotel.
Papuashvili’s wife, Lucia Mascia,
served a squid pasta dish and arugula-
and-citrus salad, and Papuashvili poured
white wine. Conversation shifted be-
tween English, French, Italian, Russian,
Ukrainian, and a little bit of Georgian,
as the hosts’ two daughters performed
gymnastics in the next room. Brigitte
“Tonight’s main event—Man vs. Nature!” Dufour, a French Canadian lawyer
who directs the Brussels-based Inter- turn Wikipedia into a tight ninety-min-
national Partnership for Human Rights, ute show, to take place in downtown
called out, “Bravo, les filles,” and clapped Manhattan, the following Friday. Three
her hands. were local comedians; the fourth was
Taking a break from backflips, Pa- Annie Rauwerda, a University of Mich-
puashvili’s ten-year-old handed Tomak igan senior, studying neuroscience, who
some drawings she’d made: a Ukrainian is the founder of the popular Instagram
f lag, captioned “Aller Ukraine” (“Go, account @DepthsofWikipedia.
Ukraine”), and a Ukrainian woman in Rauwerda, twenty-two, is a year older
a traditional blouse and a beribboned than Wikipedia itself. For @Depthsof-
flower crown. Wikipedia, she ferrets out and posts the
“Wow, beautiful,” Tomak said. “Can I most esoteric extracts from the Web
keep them?” site—which is to say, from the collec-
Dufour’s dog had got into the choc- tive sum of human knowledge. Some
olate cake she’d brought (“I hope he’ll be recent articles posted: “Timeline of the
alive when I get back”), but there were far future”; “Unknot,” a mathematical
backup desserts, and plenty of spray-can concept of the least-knotted possible
whipped cream. knot; “Judaism in Rugrats.”
Tomak explained that, although resi- The Instagram account has more than Annie Rauwerda
dents of Kyiv and Lviv now have use of eight hundred thousand followers, in-
supermarkets and cafés, those in areas cluding John Mayer, Neil Gaiman, and mentioning that, you know, x to the eighth
under the most intense Russian siege are Julia Fox. Grimes follows on TikTok. In power is called zenzizenzizenzic?”
cut off. “They have no access to basic March, the account went mildly viral for Kavner said, “Cool reveal.”
foods, water, nothing,” she said. She looked spotlighting the earliest-known bar joke, They discussed a game in which au-
at the table, laden with delicacies, includ- in ancient Sumerian. “A dog walked into dience members guess which article is
ing mini fondant cakes. “Eating and drink- a tavern and said, ‘I can’t see a thing. I’ll longer: “List of fictional worms” or “List
ing like this feels strange. Especially after open this one.’” (“The humor of it,” the of sexually active popes.”The answer was
yesterday’s shocking photos from Bucha,” Wikipedia entry read, “is probably re- worms. Kavner suggested offering bonus
she said. “It’s just another feeling when lated to the Sumer way of life and has points to anyone who could name a fic-
you see all those dead bodies.” been lost.”) tional worm or a sexually active pope.
Despite the rumors of chemical war- The other day, after Rauwerda fin- Rauwerda asked Kavner whether he
fare, Tasheva said that she was glad they’d ished a class in which she dissected the had the names of the hundred and thir-
be going back the next day. brain of a fly, she joined the Google Meet ty-odd people who had bought tickets.
“This is a psychological rest,” Tomak call, with her cat, to discuss “Depths of “I’m just curious if any, like, big-league
said. “But you also feel guilty. Not only Wikipedia LIVE!,” the first in-person event Wikipedians are there,” she said. “If I
being here . . .” for this inherently online community. say something that’s kind of jokey . . .”
Tasheva finished the sentence: “But Tickets sold out; she was nervous. Reas- She paused. “I just don’t want, at any

1
because you’re alive.” suring words came from Reed Kavner, point, to encourage vandalism”—insert-
—Annie Hylton who hosts a PowerPoint-based comedy ing fake facts into articles—“or to dis-
show. In the other squares were Ena Da parage the very impressive democracy
DEPT. OF KNOWLEDGE and Juan Nicolón, from Uruguay. The that happens on Wikipedia all the time.”
WIKIPEDIAN plan was to mix comic presentations with “Everyone knows you’re coming at
games of audience interaction. Rauwerda this in good faith,” Kavner said. Some-
would m.c.; Nicolón was down to do a one brought up a meme from a “Simpsons”
ten-minute set drawing on the Wikipe- episode in which Lisa has a dream about
dia article “List of soups.” Rauwerda, being in a band of losers—“Garfunkel,
scrolling, said, “I just opened it. Guess Messina, Oates, and Lisa!”—who get
what I landed on? Tiger-penis soup!” booed every time they go onstage. Then
here are more than 6.4 million En- “This is why you’re good at this, she wakes up: “Why would they come
T glish-language articles on Wikipe-
dia, covering knowledge as useful as
Annie,” Kavner said.
Other events: Wikipedia racing, where
to our concert just to boo us?” she asks.
Backstage, on the night of the event,
“Bee removal” and as specific as “List contestants start on one page and race to Rauwerda, in white high-heeled boots,
of people who have lived in airports.” If another via hyperlinks, and a game called said that she was still thinking about
compressed, the entire online encyclo- Citation Needed. Rauwerda ran through the “Simpsons” meme. “Why would they
pedia would take up only twenty giga- her opening remarks, which included come to our show just to boo us?” she
bytes. (Source for this claim? The Wiki- slides on “Polar bear jail,” “Breast-shaped said, nervously. A few minutes later, she
pedia article “Size of Wikipedia.”) On hill,” and “Unrequited love.” “I might de- went onstage and opened with the
a recent Tuesday, four friends gathered lete this?” she said, pausing on a slide Sumerian dog joke; it killed.
via Google Meet to work out a way to called “Zenzizenzizenzic.” “I just felt like —Naaman Zhou
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 19
 lithium-ion, or Li-ion, after the chem-
ANNALS OF INNOVATION ical process that makes it work. Such
batteries power everything from mo-

POTENTIAL ENERGY
bile phones to electric vehicles; they
are relatively inexpensive to make and
getting cheaper. But typical models ex-
To maximize renewable energy, we’ll need a new technology: renewable storage. haust their stored energy after only
three or four hours of maximum output,
BY MATTHEW HUTSON and—as every iPhone owner knows—
their capacity dwindles, little by little,
with each recharge. It is expensive to
collect enough batteries to cover lon-
ger discharges. And batteries can catch
fire—sites in South Korea have ignited
dozens of times in the past few years.
Venkat Srinivasan, a scientist who
directs the Argonne Collaborative Cen-
ter for Energy Storage Science (AC-
CESS), at the Argonne National Labo-
ratory, in Illinois, told me that one of
the biggest problems with Li-ion bat-
teries is their supply chain. The batter-
ies depend on lithium and cobalt. In
2020, some seventy per cent of the
world’s cobalt came from the Demo-
cratic Republic of the Congo. “Unless
we have diversity, we’re going to be in
trouble,” Srinivasan said. Any disrup-
tion to the supply chain can strongly
affect prices and availability. Moreover,
a lot of water and energy are required
for mining the metals, which can cause
environmental damage, and some co-
balt-mining operations involve child
labor. Experts doubt that Li-ion prices
will drop more than thirty per cent
below their current levels without sig-
nificant technological advancements—a
drop that is still too small, according
to the Department of Energy. We need
he German word Dunkelflaute means ual storms or windless nights but for to expand our capacity; by one estimate,
T “dark doldrums.” It chills the hearts
of renewable-energy engineers, who use
Dunkelflaute that stretch for days or
longer. Last year, Europe experienced
we’ll require at least a hundred times
more storage by 2040 if we want to shift
it to refer to the lulls when solar panels a weeks-long “wind drought,” and in largely to renewables and avoid climate
and wind turbines are thwarted by clouds, 2006 Hawaii endured six weeks of con- catastrophe. We may somehow find
night, or still air. On a bright, cloudless secutive rainy days. On a smaller scale, clean and reliable ways to mine, dis-
day, a solar farm can generate prodigious factories, data centers, and remote com- tribute, and recycle the ingredients for
amounts of electricity; when it’s gusty, munities that want to go all-renewable Li-ion batteries. And yet that seems
wind turbines whoosh neighborhoods need to fill the gaps. Germany is de- unlikely. Although we usually think
to life. But at night solar cells do little, commissioning its nuclear power plants about renewable energy in terms of its
and in calm air turbines sit useless. These and working hard to embrace renew- sources, such as wind turbines and solar
renewable energy sources stop renewing ables, but, because of the problem of panels, that’s only half the picture. Ide-
until the weather, or the planet, turns. “intermittency” in its renewable power ally, we’d pair renewable energy with
The dark doldrums make it diffi- supply, it remains dependent on fossil renewable storage.
cult for an electrical grid to rely totally fuels—including imported Russian gas. We already have one kind of renew-
on renewable energy. Power compa- The obvious solution is batteries. able energy storage: more than ninety
nies need to plan not just for individ- The most widespread variety is called per cent of the world’s energy-storage
capacity is in reservoirs, as part of a re-
Decarbonization would be easier if we could bank clean energy for later. markable but unsung technology called
20 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY HUDSON CHRISTIE
pumped-storage hydropower. Among 2021, when a winter storm shut down ciples are ones you might recall from
other things, “pumped hydro” is used to gas plants for several days and left mil- high-school physics. If you put effort
smooth out spikes in electricity demand. lions without power. More than two into lifting an object, it stores potential
Motors pump water uphill from a river hundred people died.The crisis had many energy; if you then let that object fall,
or a reservoir to a higher reservoir; when causes, including the fact that Texas is its potential energy becomes kinetic en-
the water is released downhill, it spins the only state whose power grid isn’t ergy, which is capable of powering a gen-
a turbine, generating power again. A connected to grids in other states. “We erator and creating electricity. The same
pumped-hydro installation is like a giant, were pulling buckets of water out of the holds for many physical actions. In ad-
permanent battery, charged when water neighbor’s pool to get toilets to flush,” dition to lifting weights, energy-storage
is pumped uphill and depleted as it flows Wright said. “It definitely screams for companies are compressing air or water,
down.The facilities can be awe-inspiring: some way to store power to lessen the or making objects spin, or heating them
the Bath County Pumped Storage Sta- burden on the grid in times like that.” up. If you use clean energy to do the ini-
tion, in Virginia, consists of two sprawl- The artificial underground reservoirs tial work and find a green way to store
ing lakes, about a quarter of a mile apart created by companies like Quidnet are and release it, you’ve created an ecolog-
in elevation, among tree-covered slopes; known to engineers as “lenses,” because ically responsible battery alternative.
at times of high demand, thirteen mil- of their shape. (“I say whoopee cushion “I’m kind of surprised and encour-
lion gallons of water can flow every min- and people don’t like it,” Craig said.) Ini- aged that the solutions to the long-
ute through the system, which supplies tially, Quidnet encountered skepticism duration-energy-storage problem could
power to hundreds of thousands of about its ability to form lenses of the be the caveman stuff,” Craig said. Bat-
homes. Some countries are expanding right size and shape. By the time I vis- teries depend on “pretty sophisticated
their use of pumped hydro, but the con- ited, however, it had successfully com- electrochemistry that quickly gets out-
struction of new facilities in the United pleted multiple pumping cycles in Texas, side of what I understand. And yet the
States peaked decades ago. The right Ohio, and Alberta. The company has re- solutions may be picking up heavy stuff
geography is hard to find, permits are ceived thirty-eight million dollars in pri- with cranes, picking up the earth with
difficult to obtain, and construction is vate and government funding, including a hydraulic jack. I think there’s some
slow and expensive. The hunt is on for contributions from Breakthrough En- fellas in Nevada that are putting rocks
new approaches to energy storage. ergy Ventures, established by Bill Gates. in a train and rolling it uphill, then they
Quidnet has benefitted from an en- come back down. Like, Fred Flintstone

Q isuidnet, a Houston-based startup,

one of many companies explor-
ergy-storage gold rush. In 2018, the De-
partment of Energy awarded thirty mil-
would be comfortable with most of this
stuff. It could be the way.”
ing the possibilities. Last month, I sat lion dollars in funding to ten groups, We pulled into the farm’s long drive.
in an F-150 King Ranch pickup with including Quidnet, through a program A kettle of vultures circled overhead.
Scott Wright, its vice-president of op- called Duration Addition to electricitY “You know what that means?” Craig
erations, and Jason Craig, its C.O.O., Storage, or DAYS. Before leaving office, asked.
as we drove to one of its test sites, on a President Donald Trump signed into “The last reporter who came out
farm west of San Antonio. Fields and law the Energy Act of 2020, which in- here?” I said.
billboards whizzed by as Craig explained, cluded the bipartisan Better Energy They laughed. “That’s right. Too
from the back seat, that Quidnet had Storage Technology (BEST) Act, autho- many bad questions.”
patented a new kind of pumped hydro. rizing a billion dollars to be spent over I already had one in mind. Was I
Instead of pumping water uphill, the five years on the “research, development, about to see part of the future of green
company’s system sends it underground and demonstration” of new energy-stor- energy, or a curious and short-lived ex-
through a pipe reaching at least a thou- age technology. Many states are now periment in rural Texas?
sand feet down. Later, the system lets setting storage-capacity targets, and in
the Earth squeeze the water back up 2018 the Federal Energy Regulatory ntil recently, we didn’t have to think
under pressure, using it to drive gener-
ators. Wright and Craig are veterans of
Commission issued Order 841, which
integrates stored energy into the whole-
U much about new ways to store our
energy. Fossil fuels are a prehistoric en-
the oil and gas industry, and Quidnet’s sale electricity market. “There’s been a ergy repository, and we could unlock
technology is like a green riff on frack- recognition that this is a technology their energy by burning them and driv-
ing. In that technique, fluid is injected whose time has come,” Jason Burwen, ing generators. There was always more
underground, where it builds up pres- of the American Clean Power Associ- fuel to burn. “Almost all electricity in
sure that fractures rocks, releasing nat- ation, told me. But a vast distance sep- the world is used as it’s made,” Bill Gross,
ural gas. Quidnet uses some of the same arates an engineer’s whiteboard from a longtime investor in solar power and
equipment and expertise, but with a dif- reality. Many renewable-storage tech- a co-founder of Energy Vault, one of
ferent goal: the water is meant to be nologies receiving funding will turn out the most highly capitalized new energy-
sandwiched between layers of rock, to be too impractical, expensive, or in- storage companies, told me. Most power
forming underground reservoirs that efficient for widespread adoption. that isn’t consumed immediately is lost.
can be released on demand. As we approached the farm, Craig The problem is that, with many tech-
As we drove, I asked about the black- mused on the raw physicality of many nologies, “it actually costs more to store
outs Texas experienced in February of companies’ approaches. The basic prin- electricity than to make it,” he said. In
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 21
many cases, solar and wind have become pleted in 1978, in Germany; such sys- with violent force.” It has built a proto-
less expensive than coal and gas. But tems can store and release vast amounts type liquid-air system and is developing
add the cost of storage, and renewables of energy. But, like pumped hydro, com- commercial plants in England and Spain.
can lose to fossil fuels. pressed-air facilities require the right Quidnet, too, is producing a refine-
Energy is stored all around us, in all geography and are expensive to build. ment of pressure-based technology. At
sorts of ways. A bottle of fizzy water in They are also inefficient—typically, only the company’s test site, we were greeted
your fridge holds energy under pressure; half the energy put into pressurizing by Jacob and Sadie Schweers, the farm’s
a tower of books contains energy, which the gas can be retrieved. owners. About a year earlier, Quidnet had
is released when it falls. On a larger scale, Engineers are trying to improve den- dispatched a drilling rig—a seventy-foot
volcanic eruptions and avalanches release sity and efficiency. A Toronto-based com- mast attached to a truck—to their prop-
stored energy. But energy storage is most pany called Hydrostor has received more erty. Now a blue wellhead stood about
useful when it is predictable, convenient, than three hundred million dollars in ten feet tall, near a pump house the size
and dense, packing lots of power into a funding and is developing projects in of a shipping container, several yellow
small space. Climate change notwith- California, Australia, and other places, tanks, and a bunch of hoses. Water could
standing, fossil fuels meet all these re- to be brought online in the next five years. be pumped from the tanks into the well,
quirements: by burning just a gallon of It stores compressed air in tanks, and where it would be stored under pressure;
easily transported gasoline, you can re- holds on to the heat released during the then it could be released back to the tanks.
lease enough energy to move thousands air-compression process, which it then Last month, Quidnet announced a pilot
of gallons of water from the bottom of reapplies to the air during expansion, su- program to provide stored-energy tech-
a pumped-hydro station to the top. percharging its ability to drive a turbine nology to a utility in San Antonio.
Today’s Li-ion batteries are low- and generate electricity. A British com- We stepped inside the pump house
density by comparison, and renewable- pany, Highview Power, is taking a more to admire the pistons, the flywheel, and
storage systems also struggle to achieve extreme tack, cooling air to more than something called a pulsation dampener.
density, convenience, and scale. The three hundred degrees below zero, at A yellow five-hundred-horsepower die-
basic technology behind compressed- which point it becomes a liquid. Liquid sel engine sat quietly in the back, ready
air energy storage goes back decades, air is dense, and when Highview warms to run the pump. “I love big machines
and can involve pumping air into under- it, it gasifies rapidly, spinning turbine and loud things and the smell of oil,”
ground caverns, natural or artificial, then blades. Colin Roy, Highview’s executive Wright said. In a commercial version
letting it out again. The first under- chairman, told me that, when the com- of the system, an electric motor, ideally
ground compressed-air facility was com- pany opens its tanks, air “explodes out powered by clean energy, would pump
the water, and act as a generator when
the water returned.
As we walked back outside, into the
hot sun, Wright gestured toward ten sep-
arate PVC pipes sticking out of the
ground. They indicated the subterranean
presence of tiltmeters, instruments for
assessing the size and character of the
lens by tracking the displacement of the
rock; they can even sense the tidal tug-
ging of the moon. We stood and chat-
ted, and Craig said that the tanks would
eventually be replaced by an attractive
pond. Sadie Schweers told us that she
likes to picture the whole farm running
on solar panels and a Quidnet well.
People who work in energy often
speak of the grid as if it had its own hun-
gers and quirks. “The grid wants a di-
versity of assets,” Mateo Jaramillo, the
C.E.O. of Form Energy, which makes
“iron-air” batteries, told me. (The tech-
nology, which stores energy by rusting
and un-rusting metal in a cycle, is one
of a number of theoretical alternatives
to Li-ion.) There’s room for many kinds
of solutions in the clean grid to come;
“One of these days, Jensen will come to understand that at the same time, the landscape is hyper-
hiding under the table only works for so long.” competitive. “Everyone’s competing
against pumped-storage hydro and
lithium-ion,” Scott Litzelman, the di-
rector of DAYS, the Department of En-
ergy program, told me. “Lithium-ion is
just so dominant, given that there’s such
a significant supply chain and manufac-
turing base.” Referring to the non-battery
startups, he said, “You have these other
nascent technologies that could be more
competitive if they can get to scale. That’s
the challenge across the industry. Every-
one’s trying to get to that point to prove,
first, the technical viability and the cost
potential, and then prove this not in the
laboratory, but at a massive field site.”
Shirley Meng, a materials scientist
and engineer at the University of Chi-
cago, told me that the world needs “a
whole suite of storage methods.” Not all
methods will find a niche, but, she said,
“I think we are way, way underinvested.
Because we are really imagining trying
to rebuild the entire grid system.” Na-
than Ratledge, a clean-energy researcher
at Stanford, told me that energy storage
could play an especially important role
in places where power grids are still being
• •
built. Many countries in the developing
world have a chance to leapfrog fossil companies. He wondered if he could servers running at data centers. Gross
fuels altogether, heading straight to re- construct a system based on the same and Pedretti founded Energy Vault in
newable power, which is cheaper and principles as pumped hydro, but with 2017, with Robert Piconi, the compa-
less polluting. But a grid with a larger solids instead of liquids. Rather than ny’s C.E.O. It has offices in Los An-
proportion of wind and solar requires pumping water uphill and releasing it geles and Switzerland.
more storage capacity to overcome in- downhill, could you stack weights using Energy Vault’s first attempt at a sys-
termittency. Renewable storage is “a win- clean energy, then generate power by tem was EV1, a looming, Transformer-
win-win for the Global South,” Ratledge using pulleys to lower them? “I wanted like tower crane with six arms. The idea
said. “It’s basically allowing people to to make a sort of virtual mountain,” he was that such a crane would stack blocks
jump really fast into the twenty-first cen- told me. in a wall around itself, then unstack
tury without dealing with all the out- Gross and a civil engineer, Andrea them. Observers on the Internet had a
dated junk we built in the seventies and Pedretti, started looking at options. field day pointing out what they per-
eighties and nineties.” They wanted to “build height cheaply,” ceived to be the system’s impracticality.
Driving back in Wright’s truck, I Gross said. Steel was expensive. So was (A YouTube video titled “The Energy
thought about how things might look concrete, and producing it emitted car- Vault Is a Dumb Idea, Here’s Why” has
if Quidnet’s wells make headway. To- bon. They began working with a com- been viewed two million times.) In any
day’s pumped-hydro plants form pictur- pany called Cemex on the use of a “su- case, the company moved on to a new,
esque lakes on the Earth’s surface, but perplasticizer”—a polymer capable of enclosed design, called EVx. In render-
approaches like Quidnet’s would create holding dirt together, often used to ings, it resembles a boxy automated ware-
reservoirs of pressurized energy beneath build roads in low-income countries. house forty stories tall. Elevators will
it. The company envisions terrain dot- Mix superplasticizer with local dirt, use clean power to lift blocks weighing
ted with wellheads about half a mile water, and a bit of cement, and you can as much as thirty tons and put them on
apart, and a pond for every four. Wind make cheap blocks on site. “So we can trolleys, which will move them toward
turbines might rise skyward. The Earth basically make a mountain out of dirt,” the middle of the structure. When en-
itself would be a kind of giant battery. Gross said. “And we can make that ergy is needed, the blocks will be moved
mountain every day, and unbuild that back to the elevators. As they descend,
ill Gross, the Energy Vault co- mountain every day.” Matching pumped the elevators will power generators, pro-
B founder, began looking into energy
storage after a long career in West Coast
hydro in scale would be ambitious. But
even midsize mountains might be able
ducing new electricity. Energy Vault
claims that the system will have a high
tech, during which he started a string to stash energy made at co-located solar round-trip efficiency, regenerating a great
of successful dot-coms and solar-power farms or nuclear plants, or keep the deal of the electricity it consumes. Yet
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 23
 chestrate the motions of elevators and
trolleys to keep power consistent as
blocks accelerate, decelerate, and are
lifted and lowered.
Energy Vault’s lead mechanical en-
gineer, Al Sokhanvari, came over. He’d
spent thirty years completing aerospace
projects for NASA and the Defense Ad-
vanced Research Projects Agency, and
had helped build the fountain at the
Bellagio, in Las Vegas. (“But this is the
coolest, you have to admit,” Piconi said.)
In a sense, an EVx building would be
like a fountain, but with blocks of earth
circulating instead of water. When it
was storing a lot of power, the ware-
house would be top-heavy, with many
tons of blocks on its upper floors; the
blocks would f low to the bottom as
power was withdrawn. “So you have to
make it something that is actually
breathing with weights in and out,”
Sokhanvari said. Such a building would
“We can’t leave her with my parents! Do be like “a living thing.”
you want her to turn out like me?”
eveloping energy storage is risky.
• • D Unlike Quidnet, Energy Vault is
publicly traded; it has a market cap of
more than a billion dollars, but its fu-
even so EVx will have to move thou- ney. Previously, Tybor had been the ture is uncertain. The technology is still
sands of heavy blocks to store and re- principal engineer for launch and land- in its early stages, and it can be hard to
lease significant amounts of energy. Or- ing pads at SpaceX. (Sydney had “been tell how much of the excitement about
dinarily, our energy use is an abstraction; in enough rocket control rooms that if the company reflects salesmanship, as
Energy Vault’s approach reveals it in you count backwards from ten to zero opposed to viable engineering. No one
stark, physical terms. and nothing happens she gets upset,” has built a facility like EVx before, and
The EVx demo is being developed Tybor said.) Energy Vault was similar the system contains moving parts that
in a bucolic Swiss mountain valley in to SpaceX, he told me, in that “it seems might break down more than expected.
the shadow of EV1. In March, Piconi large and industrial, but the secret sauce Venkat Srinivasan, the ACCESS direc-
gave me the sales pitch. After donning is how we make it all work robustly.” tor, noted that lithium-ion batteries
hard hats, vests, and eye protection, we On a big screen, we saw a car-size block are portable and, crucially, reliable. “If
stopped by the block-making machine, trundling back and forth on a trolley you’re operating on the grid, reliability
a big blue steel box. It compresses the as sensors gathered data about wear is No. 1, 2, and 3, right?” he said. Utili-
blocks’ ingredients using seven thousand and tear. ties want products and companies that
tons of force, then flips them upright, Outside, Piconi and I went to find have a decade’s worth of data behind
making a new one every fifteen min- the trolley we’d seen on the screen. We them. Investors are putting a lot of
utes. “You don’t go buy this at Walmart,” walked past tall blocks of various com- money into new energy firms, but “some
Piconi said. positions, as though we were at a con- of these bets won’t go the way we think,”
Nearby, we saw two of the trolleys struction site for the pyramids, before he said. “There’ll be multiple reasons
that will carry the blocks to and from coming upon Vahe Gabuchian, the test for it. Some of it could be technologi-
EVx’s elevators. I placed my hand on engineer who was controlling the trol- cal, but it’s also execution.”
one of the hard plastic wheels. The ley. He had studied fracture mechanics Li-ion batteries, despite their flaws,
company was still experimenting with at Caltech, and wanted to know if any are a known quantity. The method being
trolley materials, Piconi said: “A lot of of the components would crack during developed by Energy Vault isn’t. Still,
what we do is material science.” We thousands of miles of rolling and vibra- the company isn’t alone in pursuing
headed to the control room, which tion. Nearby, a four-story structure made what’s known as “gravity storage.” Grav-
turned out to be a trailer fitted with of I-beams offered a tiny preview of itricity, based in Scotland, recently con-
computers, where Frank Tybor, Energy what a final EVx might look like. The cluded a demonstration that involved
Vault’s vice-president of engineering, warehouse, if it works, will be a mov- hefting a fifty-ton block up a tower, two
sat with his Australian shepherd, Syd- ing puzzle. Software will need to or- stories at a time; it now plans to raise
24 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
and lower single, thousand-ton blocks down, retrieving their energy. (“The that give enormous amounts to the Re-
inside disused mine shafts. Two other grid loves spinning metal,” one engi- publican Party,” Stokes said. “This is
companies, Gravity Power, in Califor- neer told me.) not some kind of ideological cleavage.
nia, and Gravity Storage GmbH, in Litzelman believes that energy-stor- It’s fundamentally a material issue.” For
Hamburg, aim to place a massive weight age systems will eventually bring down the time being, storage policy exists in
at the bottom of a shaft and then pump the over-all cost of decarbonization, what Stokes calls the “fog of enact-
water underneath to lift it. To withdraw but acknowledged that they might not ment,” where technologies are so new
energy, they’ll let the weight push the be an easy sell. “The grid, in quotation that we can’t yet identify their greatest
water down into a pipe and through a marks, is not a customer,” one of his beneficiaries. Inevitably, there will be
turbine. RheEnergise, based in Mon- colleagues likes to say. Real customers some losers, even if as a society—and
treal, has come up with yet another take are independent power producers, util- a planet—we come out ahead.
on pumped hydro, centered on a fluid ities, and companies that run factories
that the company invented called R-19, or data centers. One challenge is fig- he grid as a whole may never be
which is two and a half times as dense
as water; its system will move the fluid
uring out who pays for what. It also
matters how well a solution meshes
T perfected. We may never be able
to get away from technologies with un-
between tanks at the top and bottom with the grid—and that depends on desirable by-products; we may always
of an incline. The work is still at the many factors. Jaramillo, of Form, the rely in part on fossil fuels and nuclear
crowdfunding stage. iron-air-battery company, said, “You power, backed up by Li-ion batteries
Just as you can store potential en- cannot look at one spec sheet and com- and natural-gas “peaker” plants, used at
ergy by lifting a block in the air, you pare it to another spec sheet and say, times of high demand. But it’s equally
can store it thermally, by heating things ‘Ah, better round-trip efficiency, this possible to envision a future in which
up. Companies are banking heat in mol- one’s better.’ ” His company has used some of the technology works out, and
ten salt, volcanic rocks, and other mate- computer models that draw on data the globe is reshaped by a combination
rials. Giant batteries, based on renew- about weather and markets to figure of renewable energy and renewable stor-
able chemical processes, are also workable. out how its technologies might fit. Ja- age. In such a world, wind turbines and
In so-called flow batteries, tanks can be ramillo happens to have a master’s in solar farms will spread over fields and
used to manage electrolytes, which hold theology—a discipline that he said was coastlines, while geothermal plants draw
a charge. In hydrogen storage, electrol- surprisingly useful in understanding power from below. Meanwhile, in caves
ysis is used to separate hydrogen from energy-storage systems. “All storage and tanks, hydrogen and compressed
oxygen in water; the hydrogen is then systems have trade-offs,” he said. “It’s air will flow back and forth. In indus-
cached underground, or in aboveground not so different from humans. I am far trial areas, energy warehouses will thrum
tanks, as gas or liquid or part of ammo- from perfect. I’m very happily married with the movement of mass. In rural
nia. When it’s recombined with oxygen only because my wife tends to not care places, water will be driven belowground
in a fuel cell, it forms water again and as much about my flaws as somebody and then will gush back up. When the
releases electricity. else might.”The important thing is that sun comes out and the wind rises, the
Srinivasan told me that he often everything fits together. grid will inhale, and electricity will get
looks at new proposals and thinks, “Hey, It’s partly because storage strength- saved. During the doldrums, the grid
that could be part of the solution.” Lit- ens the whole grid that it has found will exhale, driving energy to factories,
zelman, of the Department of Energy, broad political support. Energy-stor- homes, offices, and devices. Instead of
said that the range of ideas being pur- burning dead things, in the form of fos-
sued “suggests that no one has found sil fuels, we’ll create and store energy
a combination that hits every single dynamically, in a living system.
requirement—very low cost, produc- When I got back from Switzerland,
tion at scale, high performance.” In one I took a walk. The sun warmed my face,
likely scenario, many technologies will and I blinked in the breeze. Twenty years
proliferate, each solving a different prob- ago, it seemed inconceivable to many
lem. Some will ameliorate Dunkelflaute. people that sunlight and wind could
Others will help the grid avoid conges- provide enough energy to meet our
tion, or hold energy so that it can be needs. Slowly, our intuitions shifted to
bought and sold. Still others will assure age technologies “are neutral as to the accommodate renewable energy. A sim-
“power quality,” smoothing out sec- fuel source,” Leah Stokes, a political ilar revision could come for renewable
ond-to-second electrical fluctuations. scientist at the University of Califor- storage. Looking up, I saw clouds hang-
One smoothing technology currently nia, Santa Barbara, told me. They “can ing in the sky, on the verge of rain; they
in use is the flywheel: in advanced ver- store any kind of power—clean or dirty.” were a bank of potential energy. Below
sions, masses of metal weighing a ton Storage may become a partisan issue if my feet, I imagined the ground dipping
or more levitate in vacuums by means it begins clearly helping renewable en- ever so slightly under the city’s weight,
of magnets, as electric motors rotate ergy to threaten fossil fuels. “The po- ready to spring back. Nature can help
them tens of thousands of times per liticization of climate and energy pol- us generate power. Maybe it can help
minute. Generators then slow them icy comes from fossil-fuel companies us hold on to it, too. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 25
 my life, but the sick thing is that I’m-a
SHOUTS & MURMURS grateful. That’s-a how fucked up my back
is. I’m-a crying from agony and thank-
ing him at the same time, because I know
this shot, it’s-a going to at least give me
a few days of relief. And he says, “We
need-a to schedule the surgery, Mario.
The one we’ve been-a talking about. To
fuse-a your spine. Recovery’s-a going to
be brutal, but the alternative is you
could-a end up in a wheelchair. You could
lose-a your ability to walk.” And he gives
me his card and writes down his cell-
phone number on it, and I’m-a think-
ing, Mamma mia, it must be serious if
he’s-a giving me his private line. And I
walk out of his office, and I’m-a staring
at his card, and I’m-a just, like, “I can’t
face this.” So I stick it under the shell of
a passing beetle and give him a kick, and
he slides across the bricks, just skidding
off into oblivion.
So then I check-a my phone and
there’s-a, like, twenty missed calls from
the Princess. And I just sigh, like, “Here
we go.” And I call her back and she’s-a,

MARIO
like, “Who’s calling?” And I’m-a, like,
“It’s-a me, Mario. Who the hell else
would it be?” And she’s-a, like, “I’m sorry.
BY SIMON RICH I guess I didn’t know if you were going
to call me back or not, because lately it’s
t’s-a me, Mario! I was-a working as way to explain it is-a to start from the like you’re not even a part of my life.”
I a plumber in New York when I fell-a
down a pipe and landed in the Mush-
beginning of last week, which is when
shit really started to get-a, like, super
And then she just starts-a going off on
me for being out of touch all day, and
room Kingdom. Pretty soon, I was-a fucked up. when I tell her I was at the doctor she
having all kinds of super-fun adven- Here we go . . . accuses me of lying to her, because at
tures, crushing Koopas, dodging ham- this point in our relationship there’s-a,
mers, and jumping through castle after o basically one day I wake up, and like, zero trust. And I’m about to hang
castle. It’s-a like my whole life was a
game. I’d-a wake up each morning shout-
S it’s-a like I can’t-a move my back.
Like, at all. So I go to Dr. Mario (no re-
up, when she tells me she’s-a been kid-
napped by a Koopa.
ing, “Wahoo! Yiiiiippeee! Here we go!” lation), and he’s-a, like, “Mario, when’s-a And I know I’m-a not supposed to
That feels like a really long time ago. the last time that you had a physical?” say this, but lately I’ve started to think
I was-a born in 1981, which means, if And I’m-a, like, “Can’t you just look at she’s been getting kidnapped by Koopas
you do-a the math, I’m-a forty years old. my back like-a normal?” And he’s-a, like, on purpose. The first few times it hap-
I wasn’t-a really thinking about it much “No, because I’m-a starting to think there pened, I was-a, like, “O.K., that’s a weird
until last summer. Just another birthday, might-a be underlying problems.” So coincidence.” But then it happened again,
right? Then it’s-a like the reality of the I’m-a in this tiny room for hours, doing and again, and, like, literally thousands
thing just hit me. Like, “Mamma mia, all kinds of tests that I’ve-a never done more times. And recently I said to her,
I’m-a going to be middle-aged.” It’s-a before, and finally Dr. Mario comes back “If you know that the Koopas are after
like one of those fireballs that moves-a holding some X-rays, and he says that, the Princess, why do you walk around
so slowly you forget it’s even coming, between the jumping and the running wearing a crown?” And she was, like, “Oh,
until it’s-a right in your face. and the smashing the bricks with my so you’re saying I was asking for it? Be-
The thing that’s so hard about turn- head, I’ve-a basically given myself arthri- cause of the way that I was dressed?” And
ing forty is it forces you to take-a stock tis. So I ask for a cortisone shot, and I was, like, “You know what? If you want
of how you’re doing. And, to be honest, he’s-a, like, “It’s-a too soon since the last to get-a me cancelled, go ahead!” Be-
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

I’m-a not doing so great. These days, one.” And I’m-a, like, “Come on, it’s-a cause, honestly, sometimes I fantasize
my life, it’s-a fucked up. Like, there’s me, Mario.” So he sighs and gives me about that shit, since it would give me
just a lot of super-heavy shit that I’m-a one, right in the spine, and it’s-a, like, an excuse to stop. I wouldn’t even do an
dealing with right now. I guess the best literally the most painful experience of apology, I’d-a just go off the grid, like
26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
Zelda after that N-word thing, because named after him. But still, when you’ve-a lighted your experience with plumbing.”
at this point I’m-a so goddam tired, I’d known someone forever, and he’s always And Luigi rattles off the dates of my last
just be, like, “Great, I’m out! Wahoo! just-a smiling and laughing and, like, plumbing job, and Kwame types them
Yiiiiippeee!” You know? Like, fuck it. making little cooing sounds, you never in, and then he’s-a, like, “We need a strat-
So anyway, she texts-a me the ad- think, This guy’s-a fucking me. egy for how to explain the gap.” And
dress of this castle she’s trapped in, and So anyway, the Princess is-a waiting I’m-a, like, “What gap?” And he’s-a, like,
it’s-a, like, seven worlds away, with doz- for me, and I can’t-a do shit until I get “You know, this multi-decade period
ens of levels in between, plus mini games. this spine belt, and that means there’s-a where you were out of the workforce.”
And my back, it’s-a already starting to only one move I can make. I’ve-a got no And I’m-a, like, “It’s not like I was just
tingle, which means the cortisone’s-a choice but to take the bus out to the sub- sitting on a cloud all day. I was-a travel-
wearing off. I have at most, like, two urbs and go see my brother. ling from world to world, going on
days of mobility left before it’s like I’m-a So, look, here’s-a the deal with Luigi. quests.” And he’s-a, like, “Right, but a
basically going to be paralyzed. And so I’m-a glad he got sober, because, you plumbing executive won’t necessarily in-
I tell her, you know, “I’m-a sorry, but I know, he was-a going to die. And now terpret it that way.” And he writes up
can’t save you this time. Even jacked up he does four hours of yoga every day, and this cover letter that’s-a designed to turn
on stars and hauling ass, there’s-a no he and his husband, Kwame, they seem-a “the negative into a positive”:
way I can make it.” genuinely happy, and I’m-a happy for
So she’s-a, like, “Guess I’ll call Devon.” them. It’s-a great. Wahoo, yippee. At the Dear prospective employer,
And Devon, he’s-a this d.j. who’s, like, same time, I’m-a not going to pretend I am writing to apply for the position
twenty-two at most, and he’s-a got that like it’s a blast hanging out with them of journeyman plumber at your company
whole Machine Gun Kelly look, like and all their dogs. or business. Plumbing is a lifelong passion
super tall and thin, with the face tattoos. So I walk up to their fancy gate and of mine. After beginning my career in New
And I don’t even think she’s-a actually ring the stupid intercom and say, “It’s-a York City, I took a multiyear hiatus to the
into this guy, but it doesn’t matter. Be- me, Mario.” And Kwame’s, like, “Mario, Mushroom Kingdom in order to improve
cause it’s-a like she has this power over what a pleasant surprise!” And this guy, my knowledge of pipes. Now I am ready
me, like, when she wants to hurt me, she he’s-a nice, but he’s-a more boring than to jump back in the game and pick up where
can hurt-a me. Still, after all these years. World 1, Level 1, on Easy. He reads self- I left off. I am confident that I am the right
So I say, “Hey, come on, baby. Relax. help business books for fun, and I’ve-a person to help you achieve success.
It’s-a me, Mario.” And her voice gets known him for three years and I still Sincerely,
soft, and she asks if I’m-a coming to save have no clue what he does. But I guess Mario Mario
her or not. And I say, “Of course. Just that he’s-a loaded, because Luigi is es-
wait on your floating block over the fire. sentially a professional sunbather now, And Luigi’s, like, “Wow, that’s-a per-
I’ll-a think of something.” and their driveway, it’s-a, like, Tesla, fect!” And I’m-a just reading it over and
So that night I’m-a frantically search- Tesla, Tesla. over again, like, Really? All my adven-
ing through these message boards about So they buzz me in and I tell-a them tures, the entirety of my adult life, it all
back pain, and I see there’s this miracle my whole fucked-up situation—how the boils down to a “hiatus”? And it feels
device from Europe that’s, like, an elec- Princess is-a trapped, and I need to buy like I’ve walked into a spike and gone
tronic belt that takes-a all the pressure this spine belt, but I’ve-a got no money— from big to small, and all the mushrooms
off your spine. And I make some calls, and they say they’re-a going to help me. in the world can’t make me big again.
and there’s a guy downtown who’s got And I’m-a super relieved. But, instead And by this point the Princess, she’s-a
one of these things, but it’s-a going to of writing me a check, Kwame says, texting me non-stop, like, “Where. The.
cost ten thousand dollars. And I’ve-a got, “Mario, are you familiar with the con- Fuck. Are you.” So I turn to Luigi and say,
like, five coins in my checking account. cept of a career pivot?” And I’m-a, like, “Listen, I really appreciate all this great
And I know what you’re-a thinking: “What?” And he hands-a me this book life advice, but today the main thing is
“How does Super Mario go broke? You called “What Color Is Your Parachute?” I need-a to borrow some money, so I can
collected entire rooms of coins! What hap- And then he’s-a, like, “Hey, you know buy this spine belt and save the Princess
pened?” And the answer is-a simple: I what might be fun? If we made you a from the Koopa.” And there’s-a this long
trusted a close personal friend to man- new résumé right now!” And Luigi gives silence, and eventually Kwame squeezes
age-a my money. And I can’t say too much me a big thumbs-up, like I’ve-a just won Luigi’s hand, and Luigi takes a deep
about what happened, because the law- a fucking extra life. breath, and I’m-a just rolling my eyes,
suit is-a ongoing, but essentially, all those So Kwame takes out his laptop, and like, “Here we go.” And Luigi takes off
years I thought that I was riding Yoshi, he’s-a, like, “O.K., what would you say his hat and launches into this speech,
it was the other way around. That dino- is your most marketable skill?” And I’ve-a which is obviously super rehearsed. And
saur, he was-a fucking me from moment got no choice but to play along, because he’s-a, like, “Mario, we want to help you,
one. And I know I deserve-a some of the I still have to hit them up for money. So but we don’t-a think we’ve-a been help-
blame for not catching on, because by I’m-a, like, “I don’t know, I guess fight- ing you in the right way. And that’s-a
the end he had his own island, and sa- ing Koopas?” And Kwame’s, like, “We why, for your sake and ours, we have-a
fari, and there was even Yoshi’s World. I could focus on your combat skills. But I decided to put up some financial bound-
mean, this guy had his own private world, think it might widen the net if we high- aries.” And that’s-a when I kind of lose
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 27
my cool and start running around shoot- minute, who is this?” And he says, “It’s-a ter of time before the whole list ran-
ing fireballs. And Luigi’s, like, “Mario, me, Wario,” and it turns out the whole domly resets for no reason.
don’t-a do this.” But I’m-a so angry now, thing was a scam. And it’s-a basically And then I started to think about my
it’s-a like I’m just in battle mode. And the emotional low point of my entire life. relationship with the Princess. Did I re-
Luigi runs at me, and I shoot him a look, I’m-a just crying on the sidewalk, you ally want to be with her? Or was her love
like, “Let’s-a go!” But even though I can know? Like, Game Over. just another form of points? Another
usually take him, my back, it’s-a so messed And just when things-a can’t get any currency for me to amass to prove-a to
up that he manages to jump on my head, worse I see something skidding toward myself that I had worth, and that, de-
which makes me motionless. And these me. And I realize it’s-a the beetle that I spite my immigrant background and
giant block letters appear over our heads, kicked outside of Dr. Mario’s the day be- high-pitched voice and learning differ-
saying, “LUIGI WIN!” And he’s, like, “I’m-a fore. It must’ve bounced off a pipe or a ences, I was-a still deserving of love? I’d-a
sorry, Mario.” And I’m-a, like, “Fuck you.” brick, and now, instead of sliding away been with the Princess for decades, but
And as I’m-a hobbling out of their from me, it’s-a sliding right at me. And it’s not like we’d-a ever actually con-
dumb gate I pass-a this pile of Amazon this thing’s-a getting closer and closer, nected. I barely even saw her, except for
packages. And I can tell it’s all nice stuff, and I’m-a getting ready to jump over it, a few seconds after each rescue, and even
like P-Wings and POW blocks, and I re- when all of a sudden time pauses. You then it’s-a not like we had deep conver-
member how Amazon, they’ve-a got this know how that happens sometimes? Like, sations—we just stood next to each other,
policy where if something goes missing you’ll be jumping or flying, and then, out staring straight ahead, while some text
they just reimburse you, no questions of nowhere, everything in the world will scrolled anticlimactically over our heads,
asked. And I’m-a thinking, you know, Is freeze? Not seeing a lot of nods. Well, followed by Japanese names.
it really a crime if nobody gets hurt? So anyway, time pauses for me in this mo- And as I’m-a having this realization
I grab a few packages, and as I’m-a walk- ment, and all these thoughts start-a swirl- the world unpauses and the beetle con-
ing to the bus stop I hear-a this voice in ing through my head. tinues sliding toward me. And, instead
my head, like, “You-a just robbed your And the first is this memory of the of jumping over it, I decide to jump on
own brother.” But at this point it’s-a like last quest I went on with Luigi. It was top of it, which makes it motionless. And
I’m just on autopilot, almost like I’m-a after he got out of rehab, but before he I reach under its orange turtle shell, pull
being controlled by someone else. (And and Kwame started dating, although I out Dr. Mario’s card, and call-a his per-
obviously I know that sounds-a crazy, think they were-a maybe hooking up sonal number and say, “It’s-a me, Mario,
but that’s-a how I’m feeling.) by then. So anyway, we were-a swim- and I need help.”
So anyway, I pawn all this crap and ming underwater, dodging jellyfish, and And within thirty minutes I’m-a in
call-a the guy who’s got the spine belt. I notice he’s-a kind of hanging back. So his office signing consent forms for “an-
And he’s-a, like, “It’s yours for 20K.” And I’m-a, like, “Let’s-a go!” And Luigi says, terial lumbar fusion.” And he’s-a, like,
I’m-a, like, “Hey, you said ten!” And he “What’s-a the hurry?” And I’m-a, like, “You’re going to need someone to wash
just laughs, because I guess he can hear “What are you talking about? We’re-a your body and help-a you use-a the
the desperation in my voice. So I tell him being timed, and the faster we go the bathroom, because for the first twelve
the truth, which is that I’ve only got fif- more points we get.” And he’s-a, like, weeks of recovery you’re-a going to have
teen, and he says he’ll take it, but for zero mobility. Do you have-a a partner
some reason I have to throw in some who can help you?” And by now the
garlic. And I’m-a, like, “Huh, that’s-a Princess has straight-up blocked my
weird.” But, honestly, at this point, I’m-a number, and I guess she did end up call-
not even thinking straight, because I’m ing Devon, because she’s-a posting all
in so much pain. And I know I’ve-a de- these pictures of him on social media,
scribed how much my back hurts, like a tagged, like, #realhero and #waybetter-
few different times already, and I don’t thanmario. So I’m-a, like, “Is there some
want to get repetitive, but the cortisone kind of sponge on a stick that I can use
shot has almost completely worn off, and to clean my ass?” And Dr. Mario, he’s-a
there’s-a, like, starting to be this new pain “Yeah, but what are the points for?” And walking me through the different stick
that’s deep inside my balls. And it’s-a at the time I just laughed, like, you know, options when Luigi jumps through the
terrifying, because this pain, it’s-a some- That’s-a just Luigi being silly. window. And then Kwame comes in a
thing I’ve never experienced before. And But now, as I’m-a standing paused second later, through the door (because
it makes me feel-a truly panicked. Be- before this beetle, this thing he said comes he took-a the elevator).
cause it’s-a like, you know, what the fuck rushing back to me. “What are the points And it turns out someone from
is this now? for?” And I realize that he’s-a kind of Dr. Mario’s office called them up, be-
So I PayPal-a this guy all the money, right. Because the truth is, the points, cause they were-a listed as my emer-
and send him some garlic on Postmates. they don’t-a really get you anything. You gency contacts. And they tell Dr. Mario
And after it goes through I ask where I can’t-a trade them in for prizes. Best- that they’re-a going to help me recuper-
should meet him to pick up my belt. And case scenario, your tally ends up on a ate, and they’ve already converted Lui-
he just laughs again, even louder than high-score list, next to a word like “PEE” gi’s solarium into my recovery room. And
before. And finally I’m-a, like, “Wait a or “DIC,” and even then it’s only a mat- I’m-a feeling super guilty because there’s
28 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
no way they’d-a make this kind of offer miracle he was able to say a name at all.
if they knew that I’d-a stolen from them. And I was-a doing the math with
And so I start to confess about the Am- Luigi, and it turns out that the day I’m-a
azon boxes, and Luigi says, “Mario, we scheduled to be discharged from the hos-
know. We saw you pick them up and pital happens to be my forty-first birth-
shout ‘Wahoo.’ That’s-a why we’re here. day. And I joked to him, “I should throw
We didn’t-a realize how desperate things a party.” But then once I’d-a said it I re-
had gotten, and how much pain you’ve alized, “Wait a minute, that’s exactly what
been in. And we’re-a sorry about the ré- I should-a do.” And so we’re-a really
sumé thing before. We both realized even going to do it, a party in my recovery
as we were-a doing it that it was a ter- room, and I’m-a inviting everyone I know,
rible idea, and from now on we’re-a going including Dr. Mario and even the Prin-
to try to be less prescriptive, and the main cess and Devon, because why not? I mean,
thing is we love you, and we’re-a with I don’t expect them to come, but even if
you for the long haul, no matter what it they did I think I’d-a be cool with it.
takes.” And Kwame’s, like, “We mean it. When we got together, we were super
We want you to stay with us until you’re young, and everything was at least as
back on your feet.” And I’m-a looking much my fault as hers. And I don’t think
up at these guys, and I don’t-a know what we’ll ever be the kind of exes who go out
to say, because I’ve-a been playing the for lunch or whatever, but when all’s said
game for forty years, but this is the first and done I’m-a genuinely rooting for
time that it’s-a me who’s being rescued. her happiness.
And I was-a going through the hos-
o now it’s-a the night before the sur- pital checklist with Luigi, like do we have
S gery, and I’m-a fasting at Luigi and slippers and sweaters, and “Lilyhammer”

BE A
Kwame’s, and it’s-a gonna be a long time downloaded on the iPad, and I started
before I can jump or even walk. And the to feel a familiar sensation. And I real-

FORCE
truth is, I’m-a never going to be “super ized that it was the way I used to feel
Mario” again. When I come out the other between levels. Tomorrow at 5:30 A.M.
side of this, I’m-a going to just be plain, (I know), Dr. Mario’s going to hit me
regular Mario, a middle-aged guy with
a slight limp.
But I’ve also been starting to think
with that gas mask, and it’ll be like going
through a pipe from one world to an-
other. And maybe I’ll have to learn some
FOR GOOD
that maybe getting older’s not all bad. new moves once I get there, but so what?
Like, for example, this is a little embar- I’m-a ready for the challenge. Like, for Your name can live on
rassing to admit, but my whole life I’ve-a example, I really want to do a podcast,
struggled with body stuff, like things and this morning I pitched the idea to as champion of the
about my weight and how I look-a naked. Luigi and Kwame, and they said they
It’s-a why I wear the overalls even when would help me, and we even came up
causes, communities,
it makes no sense for what I’m doing. with a name for it (“The Next Level and places dear to
But now that I’m-a in my forties I don’t with Mario”). And Luigi’s going to read-a
really think about my body anymore, and the commercials, and Kwame’s-a going you...for generations
when I do it’s-a to focus on the parts to be my first guest, because it turns out
that I’m-a proud of, like my thick mus- his job is actually pretty interesting, it’s-a
to come.
tache and my big strong ass. And, hon- this thing involving currency prices, I
estly, I can’t tell you how liberating it is think, or something about bonds. Any-
just to allow myself to feel-a sexy. Like, way, we’re-a going to be talking about it
why can’t a short fat guy be sexy? I feel-a for two hours. And maybe we’ll-a get a
sexy, and I’m not afraid to say I feel-a lot of listeners, but even if we don’t it’ll
sexy. Like, hey, it’s-a me, Mario, and I’ve still be a learning experience.
got a big, strong, super-hairy ass and These past forty years, I’ve-a had all
I’m-a sexy. Deal-a with it. kinds of ups and downs. I’ve-a won and
I’ve-a also noticed that the older I lost, flown and fallen, jumped and been
get, the less angry I am at my dad. I jumped on. I’m-a covered in scars and Kickstart your charitable legacy
mean, it’s-a weird he named me Mario soon I’ll have some more. But I’m-a not with NYC’s community foundation.
when his last name was-a Mario, so scared. I’m-a ready. Someday, I’ll-a run giving@nyct-cfi.org
that my name’s-a Mario Mario. But he out of continues, but in the meantime (212) 686-0010 x363
was a really serious alcoholic, like, red I’ve-a got plenty of lives left.
wine for breakfast, so it’s-a kind of a Here we go . . .  giveto.nyc
 “Pop,” as just about every listener
OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS would have known, was Pop Smoke,
an ally and friend of Fivio who was ap-

TOUGH BUSINESS
proaching mainstream stardom when
he was murdered, in February, 2020; his
first album, released posthumously,
The rapper Fivio Foreign survived a gang war. Can he go mainstream? made its début at No. 1 on the Billboard
chart. Pop Smoke was about a decade
BY KELEFA SANNEH younger than Fivio Foreign, who just
turned thirty-two. But he got famous
first, and took a fraternal interest in
Fivio’s career: he tried, unsuccessfully,
to get the label that signed him to sign
Fivio, too, and when he travelled to the
Hot 97 studios for an interview, in 2019,
he included Fivio in his entourage.
Nowadays, it is Fivio who has an en-
tourage, and one evening this spring he
paid a visit to Funkmaster Flex with a
few friends in tow. Flex was prerecording
segments in a nondescript Chelsea of-
fice building; Fivio and friends were
shown to a rather desolate hospitality
room, which was full of Cîroc vodka
decorations yet surprisingly bereft of
the product itself. Someone procured a
bottle of champagne, but Fivio was not
particularly interested—he prides him-
self on professionalism, and, although
he has rapped enthusiastically about in-
toxicants ranging from Hennessy to Per-
cocet, he says that he is more focussed
on success these days.
The spelling of “Fivio” is slightly
misleading: the name derives from an
old nickname, Fabio, bestowed by a
friend who noticed that women found
Fivio says, “I don’t miss nothing from my old life,” but it still permeates his lyrics. him charming, and so it is pronounced
“Favio,” though people who know him
“ T like
his is what New York City feel
and sound like,” Funkmas-
eos. Now he is emerging as the kind
of reliable hip-hop star that New York,
tend to drop the last letter or two. He
is more than six feet tall and lanky, and
ter Flex exclaimed, one recent night not too long ago, seemed to have he was wearing a red nylon windbreaker
on Hot 97. For thirty years, Flex has stopped producing. by the French fashion house Celine,
been New York’s most prominent hip- “City of Gods” had a chorus by Ali- with matching jeans, and enough jew-
hop radio d.j., tasked with figuring out cia Keys, singing, “New York City, please elry to make it clear which of the guys
what might be popular and then tell- go easy on this heart of mine.” It had milling around was the star. Funkmas-
ing people what should be popular— a newsworthy verse, in which Ye, for- ter Flex greeted him with a friendly
turning audience research into a series merly known as Kanye West, threat- scowl and then, before the interview
of definitive statements, delivered so ened the “Saturday Night Live” star began, delivered a brief update on “City
volubly and so frequently that he some- Pete Davidson, who was dating his ex, of Gods.”
times drowns out the music. On this Kim Kardashian: “This afternoon / A “It’s picking up in the club,” Flex
night, Flex was drowning out a new hundred goons / Pulling up to ‘S.N.L.’” said, conspiratorially, as if he were shar-
track, “City of Gods,” which seemed Most important, it had Fivio Foreign, ing classified information.
sure to become a local favorite. “Fivio, who staged a self-coronation in the “That’s what we need,” Fivio re-
I see you,” Flex said, calling out the track’s opening lines: plied. “We need that club.”
rapper behind the track. A few years Fivio’s music can sound as if it were
Nigga, this my shit
ago, Fivio Foreign was just one more Welcome to the city of gods purpose-built for club sound systems:
guy from Brooklyn mean-mugging into Pop was the king of New York it is up-tempo, with tricky drum pro-
the camera in a bunch of YouTube vid- Now I’m the nigga in charge. gramming, bass lines that zoom unpre-
30 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY LELANIE FOSTER
dictably from note to note, and plenty gas always talking about what’s going cident last year in New Jersey, when he
of shouted interjections. But Fivio’s on in the hood, or what they’re going was approached by police and fled. He
form of hip-hop is less closely associ- through in their life,” Fivio told Flex, was caught and, after a scuffle, arrested;
ated with clubs than with the streets of when asked about the summit. “That’s police found a loaded gun with a de-
Brooklyn, where he shot a number of what’s gon’ happen, regardless.” faced serial number. But he says that he
his early videos, and with YouTube, In recent years, many hip-hop hits has learned the importance of staying
where those videos often went viral. have been druggy and escapist. (In out of trouble: for someone like him,
(“Viral” is one of his favorite words.) the chorus of “Lemonade,” one of the that means hiring professional security
The style that made Fivio a star is most popular tracks of 2020, the rap- guards and steering clear of Brooklyn.
known as drill music, which even more per and singer Don Toliver howled “I don’t miss nothing from my old life,”
than other forms of hip-hop has been about getting high and buying a con- he told me. But he can’t afford to stop
linked to gangs and violence. Pop Smoke vertible: “Off the juice, codeine got me rapping about it—not yet.
and Fivio Foreign were on the same trippin’/ Copped the coupe—woke up,
side in a kind of civil war that turned roof is missin’.”) Fivio belongs to a less was raised the right way,” Fivio says.
the dizzying patchwork of Brooklyn fanciful tradition, and his success may
“ I He grew up, as Maxie Ryles III, in
street gangs into a murderously simple mean that the hip-hop pendulum is a neighborhood known as the Nine: a
rivalry between two confederations. Pop swinging back, as it periodically does, slanted rectangle of blocks (including
Smoke’s killing was apparently unre- toward tougher, scrappier characters. In Ninety-f irst through Ninety-sixth
lated to this war; he was the victim of hip-hop, street credibility can be an im- Streets) affixed to the northeast corner
a botched robbery during a trip to Los portant narrative asset—a way of con- of East Flatbush, dotted with Carib-
Angeles. (It seems that the invaders vincing listeners that the stories they’re bean storefronts and neat little apart-
found Pop by zooming in on an ad- hearing aren’t just stories. ment buildings that are worth signifi-
dress label in a video that he posted, Like any successful rapper, though, cantly more now than they were when
showing off a delivery from Amiri, Fivio is using hip-hop not just to chron- Fivio was a boy. His father was a mil-
which sells expensive jeans that are icle his surroundings but also to change itary veteran who remained married to
popular among New York rappers.) But them. He has moved, with his three his mother, a special-education aide,
his career was tightly connected to the children, to an undisclosed location on until her death, from a stroke, in 2016,
war: the first Pop Smoke mixtape was the far side of the Hudson River, and which Fivio describes as the defining
called “Meet the Woo”—a reference to his rhymes have grown a bit less blood- tragedy of his life. Despite his stable
one of the two confederations. Simi- thirsty and a lot more ruminative. Ear- upbringing, he was intrigued by high-
larly, Fivio’s breakthrough track was lier this month, he released his first school classmates who disappeared for
“Blixky Inna Box.” A “blicky” is a gun, proper album, “B.I.B.L.E.,” for which long stretches and then reappeared with
but “Blixky”—the “x” is silent—is the Ye served as the executive producer, and better clothes than he could afford. And
name of a crew that was on the other which aims to convert listeners who do so he disappeared, too. (He eventually
side of the divide; the track functioned not spend their free time trying to de- earned his diploma through a summer
as an extended provocation. code the intricacies of New York gang program.) “I was outside,” he says. “Mak-
Earlier this year, a pair of high- alliances. Pop Smoke was a gnomic fig- ing some money here and there.” As he
profile shootings focussed political at- ure with a rich, booming voice; Fivio remembers it, gang membership liter-
tention on this world. In January, a rap- is less enigmatic but more entertain- ally came with the territory. “It was no
per named Nas Blixky survived being ing, a charismatic and sometimes witty question of affiliation,” he says. “You’re
shot in the Brooklyn neighborhood of host who wants to keep everyone happy. from here? This is what it is.”
Prospect-Lefferts Gardens. The next “This shit sound like growth,” he ex- When Fivio says that he avoids
week, TDott Woo, who was known for claims, near the beginning of the album, Brooklyn, he means the Brooklyn where
his dance moves in videos by Pop which strikes an effective balance be- he grew up; he had no problem travel-
Smoke and Fivio Foreign, was killed tween thoughtfulness and recklessness. ling, with his security detail, to an Epis-
in Canarsie. Soon afterward, Mayor “Don’t mistake me for a different nigga,” copal church in Park Slope, six con-
Eric Adams held a press conference in he raps. “If I tell ’em to work, they’ll sequential stops on the 3 train from his
which he called drill music “alarming,” clip a nigga / If I take me a Perc, I’ll for- old neighborhood. His record label, Co-
and suggested that certain violent music get the nigga.” lumbia, had rented the church to shoot
videos be removed from social media Twice in the past two years, Fivio’s a promotional video for “B.I.B.L.E.”
in the name of public safety, much as rise has been interrupted by allegations (Fivio’s family was Pentecostal, but he
President Donald Trump had been re- of criminal behavior. In 2020, he was says that his album is Biblical only in-
moved from Twitter. Adams convened arrested for assault, after an altercation sofar as it offers stories—ostensibly true
a summit with a number of the city’s with a woman he was dating, who was ones—that listeners can learn from.)
leading rappers, including Fivio, who pregnant with his third child. She later At a long table in the sacristy, he posed
sat at the Mayor’s right elbow, and who announced that she didn’t want Fivio with a chalice of cranberry juice, and
apparently made no promises—he is to be prosecuted, and he claimed that then, after changing into Gucci track
obligated, he says, to do no more and the encounter was merely a loud argu- pants and a matching shirt, he found
no less than talk about his life. “Nig- ment. He still faces charges for an in- a place in the dusty church kitchen,
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 31
where he was supplied with a legal pad hip-hop forebears, none more impor- nothing to lose: “Playing both sides,
and a pencil. Fivio adopted a thought- tant than the Notorious B.I.G. and shit that I don’t like / Wartime, spark
ful expression and, for the benefit of Jay-Z, who enacted their own succes- broad day, all night.” The track was
the cameras, did something he almost sion drama a quarter of a century ago. claustrophobic, but pleasurably so, and
never does: he wrote down some of his They were both from Bedford-Stuyve- it became a sensation: Kanye West or-
lyrics. “I ain’t even realize I was in sant, friends and friendly rivals. After ganized a remix, and major labels
Brooklyn,” he said later. the 1997 murder of B.I.G., who was signed Keef and several other Chicago
When the shoot was over, Fivio’s one of the most beloved rappers in rappers. Something about the music
ride—an S.U.V. with L.E.D. lights in New York’s history, Jay-Z replaced him captured the attention, too, of young
the ceiling, which fans may recognize as the biggest name in town, rapping, people around the world. In the South
from his Instagram videos—was wait- “I’m the focal point, like Biggie in his London neighborhood of Brixton Hill,
ing outside, and he moved quickly to prime / On the low, though—shhh!— a crew of rappers called 67 began mak-
get in. Not quickly enough, though, the city is mine.” ing low-budget drill videos of their
to escape the attention of a woman in By the time Fivio got serious about own, livening up the Chicago tem-
the next car, with multicolored finger- rapping, in the twenty-tens, Atlanta plate with skippy rhythms and sliding
nails and an embarrassed smile. “I love was establishing itself as the new hip- bass lines.
you, Fivio,” she told him. hop capital, and New York rappers The pioneers of Brooklyn drill
As she recorded on her phone, Fivio sometimes struggled to keep pace with tended not to be scholars of British
leaned in through the window and asked Southern styles. New York’s hip-hop musical history: by all accounts, they
her favorite song. renaissance began, indirectly, in Chi- typed “drill beats” into YouTube and
“Right now, it gotta be ‘Self Made,’” cago, where a generation of teen-age rapped over whatever they found. A
she said, naming a track that has more performers created a startlingly unfil- producer known as AXL was a teen-
than ten million views on YouTube but tered subgenre that came to be known ager in London when he noticed that
has never been released to streaming as drill music. Chief Keef was only six- Brooklynites were using the work he
services, let alone radio stations. teen when he released, in 2012, a trans- posted, and sometimes drawing digi-
“Boom!” Fivio said, firing an imag- fixing video for a track called “I Don’t tal crowds. “It was a shock,” AXL told
inary gun at the phone. “Good choice.” Like.” Keef and his friends crowded me. “I’m all the way in London, and
Once Fivio had left, the woman began into an unfurnished apartment, wav- they’re hopping on my beats!” Some of
to cry. “Oh, shit,” she said, covering her ing guns in time to an ominous, chim- the rappers had no idea that AXL was
mouth with her hand and still record- ing beat fit for a funeral procession. British until they called to invite him
ing. “Where the fuck he just came from?” Chief Keef reeled off threats and com- to the studio.
Fivio Foreign has many Brooklyn plaints, sounding like a teen-ager with One drill convert was a boyish, ver-
bose Flatbush rapper named 22Gz, who
turned one of AXL’s compositions into
an incendiary track called “Suburban.”
The title described not 22Gz’s surround-
ings but, rather, his preferred getaway
vehicle: “Pull up in all-black Subur-
bans/If he ain’t dead, we reversin’/Blixky
gang, know we gon’ murk him.” Fivio,
too, began using beats by AXL and other
British drill producers. He had been
rapping for a few years, releasing rather
generic home-town hip-hop, to little
notice, but the new beats made him
sound somehow both more serious and
more playful. AXL, working from across
the Atlantic, has since produced some
of Fivio’s best-known records.
Brooklyn drill, like hip-hop itself,
was often mistaken for a passing fad,
and some of the rough-and-tumble
Brooklyn rappers who proliferated in
the twenty-tens sought to assure lis-
teners that they weren’t merely drill
rappers. Pop Smoke took the opposite
approach: encouraged by Steven Vic-
tor, the executive who signed him, he
“Under my credit score, it merely says ‘credit participation trophy.’” released two mixtapes filled with beats
by 808 Melo, another U.K. drill pro- probably unaware that in 1993, shortly
ducer, intending to make himself the before the release of his début album,
face of the movement before branch- he was arrested for the murder of a
ing out. Pop Smoke did not live long man reputed to be a member of a rival
enough to see this plan to completion, gang. (He was later acquitted.) Snoop’s
but Fivio has adopted a similar strat- rhymes, full of sex and violence, in-
egy, becoming the obvious choice for spired broad condemnation; C. De-
musicians seeking an infusion of drill Lores Tucker, a civil-rights advocate,
energy. He appears on recent releases became a news fixture for leading pro-
by Drake and Mary J. Blige, and on a tests against him and other objection-
current single by Nicki able r appers. But his
Minaj, who did more than threats were generally of
anyone else to boost New the vague, “don’t make me
York hip-hop during the have to grab my strap” va-
fallow years. After Ye heard riety, and in those early
some Fivio tracks that he years he alluded only
liked, he texted Fivio to obliquely to his affiliation
see if he could call, and with a local Crip gang.
then started rapping over The drill generation
the phone, asking Fivio his tended to be more forth-
opinion. Fivio wasn’t sure right, partly because social
what to think, but Ye fol- media enabled rappers to
lowed up by sending a jet to bring him communicate more directly with both
to Mercedes-Benz Stadium, in At- their allies and their enemies, whom
lanta, where he was finishing his 2021 they refer to as “opps.” Not long after
album, “Donda.” (The resulting col- “I Don’t Like” was released, a rapper
laboration, “Off the Grid,” was one of named Lil JoJo posted a track insult-
the album’s highlights.) Fivio is con- ing Chief Keef ’s crew. A few months
vinced, not unreasonably, that the fear- later, he was shot to death, and a sar-
some sound of drill is more versatile castic eulogy was posted on Keef ’s
than people think it is: his new album Twitter: “Its Sad Cuz Dat Nigga Jojo
includes a lighthearted drill love song Wanted To Be Jus Like Us #LMAO.”
based on a snippet of “Say My Name,” (Keef later claimed that he had been
by Destiny’s Child. Instead of leaving hacked, and no one has been charged
drill behind on his journey toward in JoJo’s death.) In the years that fol-
mainstream success, Fivio is trying to lowed, something like a dozen Chi-
take it with him. cago drill rappers were killed, a figure
that ref lected both the astonishing
rill, in the hip-hop sense, is not level of violence on the city’s streets
D just a genre name but also a verb.
“Since a young’un, I been drillin’,” Pop
and the democratizing nature of the
music—it sometimes seemed as if every
Smoke announced, in “Welcome to the streetwise young person in Chicago
Party,” the 2019 track that made him a were a rapper.
star, and you could almost picture him Fivio says that he wasn’t in a partic-
wielding his weapon like a power tool. ularly angry frame of mind when he re-
A close association with violence has corded “Blixky Inna Box.” He was just
always been part of drill music’s appeal: following the traditional logic of hip-
like the so-called gangsta rappers of the hop. “They”—the Blixkys—“was diss-
nineteen-nineties, these performers offer ing the hood, dissing people I know,” he
listeners the thrill of immersion in a said. So he responded the way any rap-
violent world, without promising to per would: “twice as hard, twice as dis-
make things better—and frequently respectful, twice as fire.” The video, shot
promising to make things worse. by a drill auteur known as Flowtastic,
It’s easy to forget how controver- shows Fivio and his allies in a spartan
sial gangsta rap once was. Snoop Dogg building lobby and on an empty play-
is now widely regarded as a lovable ground; there are no visible guns but
uncle, and many of the people who plenty of gang signs. The exuberant cho-
enjoyed his whimsical Olympic-high- rus puns on “Blixky,” pairing it with an-
lights show with Kevin Hart were other synonym for a firearm: “Got a brand
new chop / That’s a Blixky inna box.” of the N-word, along with references at his arraignment in March, he is more
There were other, overlapping gang to violence and drugs. This system is popular than ever. He recently collab-
identifiers. Some of Fivio’s enemies were now so familiar that listeners barely orated with the borough’s biggest hip-
affiliated with the Gangster Disciples, seem to notice. The radio version of hop star, Cardi B, making her drill
who originated in Chicago and spread “Big Drip,” one of Fivio’s biggest tracks, début—though she had to shoot the
nationwide, so Fivio identified himself features the line “Crip sh[obscured]/She music video without him. Earlier this
as “G.D.K.,” which stands for “Gang- wanna suck on a [obscured].” month, the Bronx District Attorney
ster Disciple killer.” And he mentioned, But it’s hard to imagine that this indicted the rapper Lee Drilly and nine-
offhandedly, that he and his confeder- sort of censorship makes much differ- teen others, on charges linked to a se-
ates were the “flyest Crips in the game, ence, especially since impressionable ries of murders and assaults; the office
flag tied around the leg,” pointing to a young listeners have so many options noted that the defendants were “prom-
blue bandanna above his left knee. As besides terrestrial radio. Censoring rap- inent in the Drill rap scene.”
the video went viral, he thought that pers on social media, as Mayor Adams The pastor Louis Straker is a mem-
he saw an uptick in the number of young suggested, would be difficult and con- ber of the 67th Precinct Clergy Coun-
men in Brooklyn wearing the same troversial. After the killing of Fivio’s cil, also known as the God Squad, which
bandanna in the same way. friend TDott Woo, a Brooklyn drill pi- aims to quell gun violence in East Flat-
Fivio has mixed feelings about the oneer named Rowdy Rebel vowed, in bush and the surrounding area. He is
complicated role that gangs have played a YouTube video, “I ain’t posting up no taken aback by what he calls the “spirit
in his life. His new album includes “Left pictures of my bro TDott /’Til a body of lawlessness” in the neighborhood,
Side,” a coded oath of allegiance to the drop—spin, go get your G-lock.” And and by the sanguinary music that it has
Crips, recorded with the like-minded 22Gz, who is on the other side of the produced, although he acknowledges
Los Angeles rapper Blueface. But one great divide, released a track in which that it is hard to establish correlation,
day, sprawled on a couch in a Colum- he celebrated the death of an unnamed let alone causation. (According to po-
bia Records conference room, sur- foe: “Sniper Blixky, I’m a gremlin: get lice statistics, the precinct’s homicide
rounded by photographs of Billy Joel a rush, my opps die / He was dissin’ on rate is less than half of what it was in
and Bruce Springsteen, he told me— the dead—now he the one on Fox 5.” the early nineties, even as the city’s
using the kind of hypothetical language But Fivio’s response has been notably total shootings have risen in the past
favored by people with reason to avoid restrained, and he suggested that re- few years.) No doubt, anyone who loves
unequivocal admissions—that the re- venge was not the best way to honor this music would happily give it up if
ality of gang life was often miserable. slain friends like TDott. He thought, that would end the killing. The trag-
“Somebody might get in a situation, “What would my dog want me to do? edy of drill music is not that there is a
and you don’t know nothing about it, How would my dog want me living?” market for it but that there is a con-
but you’ve got to deal with it,” he said. By the time the Mayor called his text for it. In the meantime, perhaps it
“It gives you no soul, almost. ’Cause summit, in February, Brooklyn drill is possible to hear drill music as proof
you not fighting for nothing you be- had spawned a new variant: Bronx drill, of the stubborn persistence not just of
lieve in.” By the time “Blixky Inna Box” in which the stars were younger, the violence but of poetry, too. A half cen-
took off, in 2018, he had two daughters rapping shoutier, and the filmed prov- tury after hip-hop was born, young
and no fixed address, and he is aware people in some of the country’s rough-
of the irony: the track that helped him est neighborhoods still feel moved to
escape old neighborhood beefs also write and deliver rhymes about what’s
made his name synonymous with neigh- on their minds.
borhood beefs. In the aftermath of the
killings earlier this year, a Hot 97 host ne of Fivio’s managers is Jerry
named DJ Drewski made an announce-
ment on Instagram: “I will not support
O Reefer, a well-connected guy who
spent his boyhood in Trinidad and in
or play anymore Diss/Gang records on Jamaica, and who didn’t realize the sig-
the radio! We r losing too many young nificance of his surname until he ar-
men and women to the streets!” He ocations more brazen. One of the most rived in Queens and people began to
later explained that he would continue notorious figures is Kay Flock, eigh- snicker. Reefer met Fivio through a
to support drill music, just not tracks teen, who last summer released a thrill- friend who was locked up with a friend
in which rappers taunted their opps. ing, raw-throated statement of purpose of Fivio’s, and he agreed to fund and
This, more or less, is how the music called “Is Ya Ready” (twenty-four mil- guide Fivio’s career partly as a lark—
industry responded to gangsta rap some lion views and counting). Kay Flock hoping, he told me, to help Fivio earn
thirty years ago. Radio stations, video was also known for videos in which he a hundred thousand dollars. Now Reefer
networks, and record labels adopted a drove into enemy territory, daring the and his partner, known as Bless, are in
system of soft censorship: guns were opps to confront him. He was arrested charge of Fivio’s complicated evolution
blurred out of music videos, and soon in December and charged with killing from local celebrity to actual celebrity.
omitted altogether; “radio versions” of a man after a brief altercation on the (A planned recent appearance at a strip
songs were stripped of curse words and sidewalk, but, after pleading not guilty club in Queens was cancelled, at the
34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
last minute, because police warned the
club that Fivio might attract an un-
manageable crowd.)
“What studio we going to?” Fivio
asked Reefer one afternoon, as they set
off in the S.U.V. to tweak his new album.
When Reefer named a place in New
Jersey, Fivio groaned. “I’m bigger than
that,” he said.
Reefer just laughed. “You got kicked
out of every studio in Manhattan,”
he said.
The driver punched an address into
his phone and took off, trailed by Fiv-
io’s security detail. As the vehicle crossed
into New Jersey, Fivio seemed to relax
slightly. He told the driver to stop at
Target, where he led an expedition to
the menswear section, in pursuit of a
white thermal top that he felt would im-
prove his outfit. One of his friends, a
rapper known as Ether da Connect, in-
spected a Tupac Shakur T-shirt. “Mad
dead people got merch in Target,” Ether
observed. “You can’t be alive and get a
deal with them niggas!”
In the parking lot, Fivio was way-
laid by a couple of Nigerian American
doctors, who didn’t quite know who he • •
was but knew that their kids would
want a picture of him. Afterward, the
group stopped at a Chinese restaurant gest drill success story is “To the Moon,” he can’t quite decide whether he wants
and then a pizza restaurant, where Fivio a dreamy track by a previously unknown to celebrate his old life or disavow it:
tried with diminishing success to stick British model turned rapper named
Boy, I shoulda been careful
to a no-carb diet. In early interviews, Jnr Choi. He found the beat online, But I ain’t really care to
Fivio seemed self-conscious about his and his creation gathered momentum I was young, dumb and unfearful
advanced age. Asked how old he was via TikTok, surpassing a hundred mil- Two, three drillers jumping in the vehicle
when his mother died, he began a long lion plays on Spotify before anyone If the sirens loud enough, that scares you
nonanswer by saying, “What year is this really knew who he was. If you talking to that gun, it hears you
Tell him to shoot and he didn’t come near you
now? 2020?” But his relative maturity Fivio’s album, by contrast, leaves You better do it, if them niggas dare you.
surely enabled his rise to the top of the nothing to chance, being carefully di-
New York drill hierarchy, and he is vided between tough-guy tracks and At the studio, Fivio asked an engineer
known among fans for outworking the ladies’-man tracks. Describing one of to play a beat, and then, as a casual party
competition. (A comment posted below the more flirtatious efforts, he told me, continued outside, he disappeared into
one of his recent tracks: “Fivio has defi- “Bitches gon’ be getting dressed to this the unlit recording booth. Fivio doesn’t
nitely gotten better.”) song.” Fivio is not generally regarded as write his tracks so much as build them,
Fivio attended the Grammys this a hip-hop virtuoso, but he has a fond- coming up with couplets and adding them
year, and he is about to embark on his ness for good punch lines (as a boy, he to what he’s already got. Having spent
first real tour, playing theatres. These loved watching rap battles) and an abil- years developing his style, he finds that
are signs of success for a drill rapper, ity to keep the energy high without he can now crank out new lyrics effi-
but not proof that he has conquered shouting, often rapping in cheerful dac- ciently. “I’m a make them niggas hear
the music industry. The world of hip- tyls. The first verse on “B.I.B.L.E.” be- and feel me,” he rapped. Then he matched
hop can be frustratingly—or thrill- gins “Still got my bitches from back in that plain line with a more ornate and
ingly—unpredictable. For all the star the day.”The primary theme is customer unexpected one, alluding to a drug bust:
power of “City of Gods,” and despite service, with collaborations designed to “Undercovers want to paraphernal’ me.”
a chorus, swiped from the pop duo the gratify a wide variety of tastes, and he He didn’t pause to celebrate. “Save that,”
Chainsmokers, that seemed engineered even attempts to popularize a dubious he told the engineer. The beat stopped
for crossover appeal, the song has so far new pickup line: “Baby, you viral.” But for a second, and then resumed, so that
been only a modest hit. The year’s big- the secondary theme is regret, because Fivio could think of the next rhyme. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 35
 A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE SURVEILLANCE STATES

As democratic governments worry about sophisticated hacking software, they increasingly rely on it.
BY RONAN FARROW

he parliament of Catalonia, the ware to search for spyware designed tims are three members of the Euro-

T autonomous region in Spain, sits

on the edge of Barcelona’s Old
City, in the remains of a fortified citadel
to operate invisibly. As they waited,
Campo looked through the phone for
evidence of attacks that take varied forms:
pean Parliament, including Solé. Cat-
alan politicians believe that the likely
perpetrators of the hacking campaign
constructed by King Philip V to moni- some arrive through WhatsApp or as are Spanish officials, and the Citizen
tor the restive local population. The cit- S.M.S. messages that seem to come from Lab’s analysis suggests that the Span-
adel was built with forced labor from known contacts; some require a click on ish government has used Pegasus. A
hundreds of Catalans, and its remaining a link, and others operate with no action former NSO employee confirmed that
structures and gardens are for many a from the user. Campo identified an ap- the company has an account in Spain.
reminder of oppression. Today, a major- parent notification from the Spanish gov- (Government agencies did not respond
ity of Catalan parliamentarians support ernment’s social-security agency which to requests for comment.) The results
independence for the region, which the used the same format as links to mal- of the Citizen Lab’s investigation are
Spanish government has deemed uncon- ware that the Citizen Lab had found on being disclosed for the first time in this
stitutional. In 2017, as Catalonia prepared other phones. “With this message, we article. I spoke with more than forty of
for a referendum on independence, Span- have the proof that at some point you the targeted individuals, and the con-
ish police arrested at least twelve sepa- were attacked,” Campo explained. Soon, versations revealed an atmosphere of
ratist politicians. On the day of the ref- Solé’s phone vibrated. “This phone tested paranoia and mistrust. Solé said, “That
erendum, which received the support of positive,” the screen read. Campo told kind of surveillance in democratic coun-
ninety per cent of voters despite low Solé, “There’s two confirmed infections,” tries and democratic states—I mean,
turnout, police raids of polling stations from June, 2020. “In those days, your de- it’s unbelievable.”
injured hundreds of civilians. Leaders of vice was infected—they took control of Commercial spyware has grown into
the independence movement, some of it and were on it probably for some hours. an industry estimated to be worth
whom live in exile across Europe, now Downloading, listening, recording.” twelve billion dollars. It is largely un-
meet in private and communicate through Solé’s phone had been infected with regulated and increasingly controver-
encrypted messaging platforms. Pegasus, a spyware technology designed sial. In recent years, investigations by
One afternoon last month, Jordi by NSO Group, an Israeli firm, which the Citizen Lab and Amnesty Inter-
Solé, a pro-independence member of can extract the contents of a phone, giv- national have revealed the presence of
the European Parliament, met a digital- ing access to its texts and photographs, Pegasus on the phones of politicians,
security researcher, Elies Campo, in or activate its camera and microphone activists, and dissidents under repres-
one of the Catalan parliament’s ornate to provide real-time surveillance—ex- sive regimes. An analysis by Forensic
chambers. Solé, who is forty-five and posing, say, confidential meetings. Peg- Architecture, a research group at the
wore a loose-fitting suit, handed over asus is useful for law enforcement seek- University of London, has linked Peg-
his cell phone, a silver iPhone 8 Plus. ing criminals, or for authoritarians asus to three hundred acts of physical
He had been getting suspicious texts looking to quash dissent. Solé had been violence. It has been used to target
and wanted to have the device analyzed. hacked in the weeks before he joined members of Rwanda’s opposition party
Campo, a soft-spoken thirty-eight-year- the European Parliament, replacing a and journalists exposing corruption in
old with tousled dark hair, was born and colleague who had been imprisoned for El Salvador. In Mexico, it appeared on
raised in Catalonia and supports inde- pro-independence activities. “There’s the phones of several people close to
pendence. He spent years working for been a clear political and judicial per- the reporter Javier Valdez Cárdenas,
WhatsApp and Telegram in San Fran- secution of people and elected repre- who was murdered after investigating
cisco, but recently moved home. “I feel sentatives,” Solé told me, “by using these drug cartels. Around the time that
in a way it’s a kind of duty,” Campo told dirty things, these dirty methodologies.” Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi
me. He now works as a fellow at the In Catalonia, more than sixty Arabia approved the murder of the
Citizen Lab, a research group based at phones—owned by Catalan politicians, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime
the University of Toronto that focusses lawyers, and activists in Spain and across critic, Pegasus was allegedly used to
on high-tech human-rights abuses. Europe—have been targeted using Peg- monitor phones belonging to Khashog-
Campo collected records of Solé’s asus. This is the largest forensically doc- gi’s associates, possibly facilitating the
phone’s activity, including crashes it had umented cluster of such attacks and killing, in 2018. (Bin Salman has de-
experienced, then ran specialized soft- infections on record. Among the vic- nied involvement, and NSO said, in a
36 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
NSO Group’s software has been linked to repressive regimes, but now “all types of governments” use it, an observer said.
ILLUSTRATION BY TIMO LENZEN THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 37
 would be so successful.” He paused.
“And I never imagined that it would be
so controversial.”

ulio, who is forty, has a lumbering

H gait and pudgy features. He typ-
ically wears loose T-shirts and jeans,
with his hair in a utilitarian buzz cut.
Last month, I visited him at his duplex
in a luxury high-rise in Park Tzameret,
the fanciest neighborhood in Tel Aviv.
He lives with his three small children
and his wife, Avital, who is expecting a
fourth. There’s a pool on the upper level
of Hulio’s apartment, and downstairs,
in the double-height living room, is a
custom arcade cabinet stocked with retro
games and bearing a cartoon portrait of
him, wearing shades, next to the word
“Hulio” in large eight-bit font. Avital
attends to the children, frequent reno-
vations, and an ever-shifting array of
pets: rabbits remain, a parrot does not.
“ Your résumé looks terrific, but I’m just not The family has a teacup poodle named
sure we can deal with the shedding.” Marshmallow Rainbow Sprinkle.
Hulio, Omri Lavie, and Niv Karmi
founded NSO Group in 2010, creating
• • its name from the first letters of their
names and renting space in a converted
statement, “Our technology was not vestigations—NSO claims that Pega- chicken coop on a kibbutz. The company
associated in any way with the heinous sus is sold only to law-enforcement and now has some eight hundred employees,
murder.”) Further reporting through a intelligence agencies—but also of the and its technology has become a leading
collaboration of news outlets known as illicit thrill of compromising technol- tool of state-sponsored hacking, instru-
the Pegasus Project has reinforced the ogy platforms. The company has been mental in the fight among great powers.
links between NSO Group and anti- valued at more than a billion dollars. The Citizen Lab’s researchers con-
democratic states. But there is evidence But now it is contending with debt, cluded that, on July 7, 2020, Pegasus was
that Pegasus is being used in at least battling an array of corporate backers, used to infect a device connected to the
forty-five countries, and it and similar and, according to industry observers, network at 10 Downing Street, the of-
tools have been purchased by law- faltering in its long-standing efforts to fice of Boris Johnson, the Prime Minis-
enforcement agencies in the United sell its products to U.S. law enforce- ter of the United Kingdom. A govern-
States and across Europe. Cristin Flynn ment, in part through an American ment official confirmed to me that the
Goodwin, a Microsoft executive who branch, Westbridge Technologies. It network was compromised, without spec-
has led the company’s efforts to fight also faces numerous lawsuits in many ifying the spyware used. “When we found
spyware, told me, “The big, dirty secret countries, brought by Meta (formerly the No. 10 case, my jaw dropped,” John
is that governments are buying this Facebook), by Apple, and by individu- Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the
stuff—not just authoritarian govern- als who have been hacked by NSO. The Citizen Lab, recalled. “We suspect this
ments but all types of governments.” company said in its statement that it included the exfiltration of data,” Bill
NSO Group is perhaps the most had been “targeted by a number of po- Marczak, another senior researcher there,
successful, controversial, and influential litically motivated advocacy organiza- added. The official told me that the Na-
firm in a generation of Israeli startups tions, many with well-known anti-Israel tional Cyber Security Centre, a branch
that have made the country the center biases,” and added that “we have repeat- of British intelligence, tested several
of the spyware industry. I first inter- edly cooperated with governmental in- phones at Downing Street, including
viewed Shalev Hulio, NSO Group’s vestigations, where credible allegations Johnson’s. It was difficult to conduct a
C.E.O., in 2019, and since then I have merit, and have learned from each of thorough search of phones—“It’s a bloody
had access to NSO Group’s staff, of- these findings and reports, and improved hard job,” the official said—and the
fices, and technology. The company is the safeguards in our technologies.” agency was unable to locate the infected
in a state of contradiction and crisis. Its Hulio told me, “I never imagined in my device. The nature of any data that may
programmers speak with pride about life that this company would be so fa- have been taken was never determined.
the use of their software in criminal in- mous. . . . I never imagined that we The Citizen Lab suspects, based on
38 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
the servers to which the data were trans- Elsewhere in Europe, Pegasus has about the incident, the company “im-
mitted, that the United Arab Emirates filled a need for law-enforcement agen- mediately shut down all the customers
was likely behind the hack. “I’d thought cies that previously had limited cyber- potentially relevant to this case, due to
that the U.S., U.K., and other top-tier intelligence capacity. “Almost all gov- the severity of the allegations, and even
cyber powers were moving slowly on ernments in Europe are using our tools,” before we began the investigation.” The
Pegasus because it wasn’t a direct threat Hulio told me. A former senior Israeli Biden Administration is investigating
to their national security,” Scott-Railton intelligence official added, “NSO has a additional targeting of U.S. officials, and
said. “I realized I was mistaken: even the monopoly in Europe.” German, Polish, has launched a review of the threats
U.K. was underestimating the threat from and Hungarian authorities have admit- posed by foreign commercial hacking
Pegasus, and had just been spectacularly ted to using Pegasus. Belgian law en- tools. Administration officials told me
burned.” The U.A.E. did not respond to forcement uses it, too, though it won’t that they now plan to take new, aggres-
multiple requests for comment, and NSO admit it. (A spokesperson for the Bel- sive steps. The most significant is “a ban
employees told me that the company was gian federal police said that it respects on U.S. government purchase or use of
unaware of the hack. One of them said, “a legal framework as to the use of in- foreign commercial spyware that poses
“We hear about every, every phone call trusive methods in private life.”) A se- counterintelligence and security risks
that is being hacked over the globe, we nior European law-enforcement offi- for the U.S. government or has been
get a report immediately”—a statement cial whose agency uses Pegasus said that improperly used abroad,” Adrienne Wat-
that contradicts the company’s frequent it gave an inside look at criminal orga- son, a White House spokesperson, said.
arguments that it has little insight into nizations: “When do they want to store In November, the Commerce De-
its customers’ activities. In its statement, the gas, to go to the place, to put the partment added NSO Group, along
the company added, “Information raised explosive?” He said that his agency uses with several other spyware makers, to a
in the inquiry indicates that these alle- Pegasus only as a last resort, with court list of entities blocked from purchasing
gations are, yet again, false and could not approval, but conceded, “It’s like a technology from American companies
be related to NSO products for techno- weapon. . . . It can always occur that an without a license.
logical and contractual reasons.” individual uses it in the wrong way.” I was with Hulio in New York
According to an analysis by the Cit- The United States has been both the next day. NSO could no longer le-
izen Lab, phones connected to the For- a consumer and a victim of this tech- gally buy Windows operating systems,
eign Office were hacked using Pegasus nology. Although the National Security iPhones, Amazon cloud servers—the
on at least five occasions, from July, 2020, Agency and the C.I.A. have their own kinds of products it uses to run its busi-
through June, 2021. The government of- surveillance technology, other govern- ness and build its spyware. “It’s out-
ficial confirmed that indications of hack- ment offices, including in the military rageous,” he told me.“We never sold to
ing had been uncovered. According to and in the Department of Justice, have any country which is not an ally with
the Citizen Lab, the destination servers bought spyware from private companies, the U.S., or an ally of Israel. We’ve never
suggested that the attacks were initiated according to people involved in those sold to any country the U.S. doesn’t do
by states including the U.A.E., India, and transactions. The Times has reported business with.” Deals with foreign cli-
Cyprus. (Officials in India and Cyprus that the F.B.I. purchased and tested a ents require “direct written approval from
did not respond to requests for com- Pegasus system in 2019, but the agency the government of Israel,” Hulio said.
ment.) About a year after the Downing denied deploying the technology. “I think that it is not well understood
Street hack, a British court revealed that Establishing strict rules about who by American leaders,” Eva Galperin, the
the U.A.E. had used Pegasus to spy on can use commercial spyware is com- director of cybersecurity at the watchdog
Princess Haya, the ex-wife of Sheikh plicated by the fact that such technol- group Electronic Frontier Foundation,
Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, ogy is offered as a tool of diplomacy. The told me. “They keep expecting that the
the ruler of Dubai, one of the Emirates. results can be chaotic. The Times has re- Israeli government will crack down on
Maktoum was engaged in a custody dis- ported that the C.I.A. paid for Djibouti NSO for this, whereas, in fact, they’re
pute with Haya, who had fled with their to acquire Pegasus, as a way to fight ter- doing the Israeli government’s bidding.”
two children to the U.K. Her attorneys, rorism. According to a previously unre- Last month, the Washington Post re-
who are British, were also targeted. A ported investigation by WhatsApp, the ported that Israel had blocked Ukraine
source directly involved told me that a technology was also used against mem- from purchasing Pegasus, not wanting to
whistle-blower contacted NSO to alert bers of Djibouti’s own government, in- alienate Russia. “Everything that we are
it to the cyberattack on Haya. The com- cluding its Prime Minister, Abdoulkadar doing, we got the permission from the
pany enlisted Cherie Blair, the wife of Kamil Mohamed, and its Minister of government of Israel,” Hulio told me.
former Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Interior, Hassan Omar. “The entire mechanism of regulation in
an adviser to NSO, to notify Haya’s at- Last year, as the Washington Post re- Israel was built by the Americans.”
torneys. “We alerted everyone in time,” ported and Apple disclosed in a legal
Hulio told me. Soon afterward, the U.A.E. filing, the iPhones of eleven people SO sees itself as a type of arms
shut down its Pegasus system, and NSO
announced that it would prevent its soft-
working for the U.S. government abroad,
many of them at its embassy in Uganda,
N dealer, operating in a field without
established norms. Hulio said, “There
ware from targeting U.K. phone num- were hacked using Pegasus. NSO Group is the Geneva Conventions for the use
bers, as it has long done for U.S. numbers. said that, “following a media inquiry” of a weapon. I truly believe that there
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 39
should be a convention of countries that
should agree between themselves on the
proper use of such tools” for cyber war- AFTER MY BROTHER’S DEATH, I REFLECT ON THE ILIAD
fare. In the absence of international reg-
ulation, a battle is taking place between The water cuts out while shampoo still clogs my hair.
private companies: on one side, firms The nurse who swabs my nose hopes I don’t have the virus, it’s a bitch.
like NSO; on the other, the major tech- The building across from the cemetery calls itself LIFE STORAGE.
nology platforms through which such
firms implement their spyware. My little brother was shot, I tell the barista who asks how things have been,
On Thursday, May 2, 2019, Claudiu and tip extra for her inconvenience. We speak only
Dan Gheorghe, a software engineer, to the dead, someone tells me—to comfort, I assume, or inspire,
was working at Building 10 on Face-
book’s campus in Menlo Park, where but I take it literally, as I am wont: even my shut up and fuck
he managed a team of seven people re- and let’s cook tonight,
sponsible for WhatsApp’s voice- and those are for you, Stephen. You won’t come to me in my dreams,
video-calling infrastructure. Gheorghe, so I must communicate by other avenues.
who was born in Romania, is thirty-
five, with a slight frame and dark, close- A friend sends an image from Cy Twombly’s “Fifty Days at Iliam”
cropped hair. In a photograph he used —a red bloom, the words “like a fire that consumes all before it”—
as a professional head shot during his and asks: Have you seen this? It’s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
nine years at Facebook, he wears a
black hoodie and looks a little like El- If I have, I can’t remember, though I did visit
liot Alderson, the protagonist of the with you, when you were eleven or twelve, when you tripped
hacking drama “Mr. Robot.” Building 10 silent alarm after silent alarm, skating out of each room
is a two-story structure with open-plan
workspaces, brightly colored accent as guards jostled in, and I—though charged with keeping you
walls, and whiteboards. Engineers, most from trouble—joined the game, and the whole time we never laughed,
of them in their twenties and thirties, not till we were released into the grand air we couldn’t touch and could.
hunch over keyboards. The word “focus”
is written on a wall and stamped on You are dead at twenty-two. As I rinse dishes, fumble for my keys,
magnets scattered around the office. “It buy kale and radishes,
often felt like a church,” Gheorghe re- in my ear Priam repeats, I have kissed the hand of the man
called. WhatsApp, which Facebook who killed my son.
bought for nineteen billion dollars in Would I do that? I ask as I pass the store labelled SIGNS SIGNS.
2014, is the world’s most popular mes-
saging application, with about two bil- I’ve studied the mug shot of the man who killed you; I can imagine
lion monthly users. his hands.
Facebook had presented the plat- Of course I would. Each finger, even.
form, which uses end-to-end encryp- To hold your body again. And to resurrect you? Who knows what
tion, as ideal for sensitive communica- I am capable of.
tions; now the company’s security team
was more than two years into an effort
to reinforce the security of its products. international offices awoke and began Apple, compared the concept to a heist
One task entailed looking at “signalling to scrutinize the code, they grew con- scene in the film “Ocean’s Twelve,” in
messages” automatically sent by Whats- cerned. Otto Ebeling, who worked on which a character dances through a
App users to the company’s servers, in Facebook’s security team in London, hall filled with lasers that trigger alarms.
order to initiate calls. That evening, told me that the code seemed “pol- “In that scene, the vulnerability is that
Gheorghe was alerted to an unusual ished, slick, which was alarming.” Early there exists a path through all the la-
signalling message. A piece of code that on the morning after the message was sers, where it’s possible to get across
was intended to dictate the ringtone discovered, Joaquin Moreno Garijo, the room,” Krstić said. “But the exploit
contained, instead, code with strange another member of the London secu- is that somebody had to be a precise
instructions for the recipient’s phone. rity team, wrote on the company’s in- enough dancer to actually be able to
In a system as vast as Facebook’s, ternal messaging system that, owing to do that dance.”
anomalies were routine, and usually in- how sophisticated the code was, “we By late Sunday, a group of engineers
nocuous. Unfamiliar code can stem believe that attacker may have found working on the problem had become
from an older version of the software, a vulnerability.” Programmers who work convinced that the code was an active
or it can be a stress test by Facebook’s on security issues often describe their exploit, one that was attacking vulner-
Red Team, which conducts simulated work in terms of vulnerabilities and abilities in their infrastructure as they
attacks. But, as engineers in Facebook’s exploits. Ivan Krstić, an engineer at watched. They could see that data were
40 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
 ers. “There’s a risk of—you might go to
someone who’s a customer,” he told me.
(Their concerns were valid: weeks later,
the Times has reported, the F.B.I. hosted
If I were. Nights, I replay news footage: your blood on asphalt, sheen NSO engineers at a facility in New Jer-
behind caution tape. sey, where the agency tested the Pega-
Homer’s similes, I’ve been told, are holes cut in the cloth between sus software it had purchased.) Cath-
the world of war cart alerted Mark Zuckerberg, who
and another, more peaceful world. On rereading, I find even there, a man considered the problem “horrific,” Cath-
kills his neighbor. cart recalled, and pressed the team to
work quickly. For Gheorghe, “it was a
“Let Achilles cut me down, / as soon as I have taken my son into my arms terrifying Monday. I woke up at like 6
and have satisfied my desire for grief ”—this, my mind’s new refrain A.M., and then I worked until I couldn’t
in the pharmacy queue, in the train’s rattling frame. stay awake anymore.”

The same friend and I discuss a line by Zbigniew Herbert SO’s headquarters are in a glass-
“where a distant fire is burning / like a page of the Iliad.”
It’s nearly an ontological question, my friend says, the instability
N and-steel office building in Her-
zliya, a suburb outside Tel Aviv. The
of reference: area is home to a cluster of technology
firms from Israel’s thriving startup sec-
The fires in the pages of the poem, the literal page set afire. tor. The beach is a twenty-minute walk
We see double. away. The world’s most notorious com-
You are the boy in the museum. You are the body consumed, ash. mercial hacking enterprise is remark-
ably unprotected: at times, a single se-
Alone in a London museum, I saw a watercolor of twin flames, one black, curity guard waved me through.
one a gauzy red, On the building’s fourteenth floor,
only to learn the title is “Boats at Sea.” It’s like how sometimes I forget programmers wearing hoodies gather
you’re gone. in a cafeteria outfitted with an espresso
But it’s not like that, is it? Not at all. When in this world, similes machine and an orange juicer, or sit on
carry us nowhere. a terrace with views of the Mediterra-
nean. A poster reads “Life was much
And now I see again the boy pelting through those galleries, easier when Apple and Black-
a boy not you, a flash of red, red, chasing, or being chased— Berry were just fruits.” Stairs de-
Or did I invent him? Mischief companion. Brother. Listen to me scend to the various programming
groups, each of which has its own rec-
plead for your life though even in the dream I know you’re already dead. reational space, with couches and Play-
How do I insure my desire for grief is never satisfied? Was Priam’s ever? Station 5s. The Pegasus team likes to
I tell my friend, I want the page itself to burn. play Electronic Arts’ football game, fifa.
Employees told me that the company
—Elisa Gonzalez keeps its technology covert through an
information-security department with
several dozen experts. “There is a very
being copied from users’ phones. “It was WhatsApp security engineer, wrote, in large department in the company which
scary,” Gheorghe recalled. “Like the an internal message, “because we don’t is in charge of whitewashing, I would
world is sort of shaking under you, be- understand the root cause the impact say, all connection, all network connec-
cause you built this thing, and it’s used for users and other possible attacker tion between the client back to NSO,”
by so many people, but it has this mas- numbers / techniques.” a former employee said. “They are pur-
sive flaw in it.” On Monday, at crisis meetings with chasing servers, V.P.N. servers around
The engineers quickly identified WhatsApp’s top executive, Will Cath- the world. They have, like, this whole
ways to block the offending code, but cart, and Facebook’s head of security, infrastructure set up so none of the com-
they debated whether to do so. Block- the company told its engineers around munication can be traced.”
ing access would tip off the attackers, the world that they had forty-eight hours Despite these precautions, WhatsApp
and perhaps allow them to erase their to investigate the problem. “What would engineers managed to trace data from
tracks before the engineers could make the scale of the victims be?” Cathcart the hack to I.P. addresses tied to proper-
sure that any solution closed all possi- recalled worrying. “I mean, how many ties and Web services used by NSO. “We
ble avenues of attack. “That would be people were hit by this?” The compa- now knew that one of the biggest threat
like chasing ghosts,” Ebeling said. ny’s leadership decided not to notify actors in the world has a live exploit
“Made a decision to not roll out the law enforcement immediately, fearing against WhatsApp,” Gheorghe recalled.
server-side fix,” Andrey Labunets, a that U.S. officials might tip off the hack- “I mean, it was exciting, because it’s very
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 41
rare to catch some of these things. But, Core Research Group, made up of sev- of Justice, which is developing a case
at the same time, it was also extremely eral dozen software developers. “You’re against NSO. Then the company up-
scary.” A picture of the victims began looking for a silver bullet, a simple ex- dated its servers to block the malicious
to emerge. “Likely there are journalists ploit that can cover as much mobile de- code. “Ready to roll,” Gheorghe wrote
human rights activists and others on the vices around the world,” Omer told me. on the internal messaging service that
list,” Labunets, the security engineer, wrote Gheorghe said, “A lot of people, you afternoon. The fix was constructed to
on the company’s messaging system. know, would think about the hackers look like routine server maintenance,
(Eventually, the team identified some as being, like, just one person in a dark so that NSO might continue to at-
fourteen hundred WhatsApp users who room, like, typing on a keyboard, right? tempt attacks, providing Facebook with
had been targeted.) That’s not the reality—these people are more data.
By midweek, about thirty people were just, like, another tech company.” It is The next day, WhatsApp engineers
working on the problem, operating in common for tech companies to hire said, NSO began to send what looked
a twenty-four-hour relay, people with backgrounds like decoy data packets, which they spec-
with one group going to in hacking, and to offer ulated were a way to determine whether
sleep as another came on- bounties to outside pro- NSO’s activities were being watched.
line. Facebook extended the grammers who identify vul- “In one of the malicious packets, they
team’s deadline, and they nerabilities in their systems. actually sent a YouTube link,” Gheor-
began to reverse engineer Facebook’s headquarters ghe told me. “We were all laughing like
the malicious code. “To be have the vanity address crazy when we saw what it was.” The
honest, it’s brilliant. I mean, 1 Hacker Way. At both NSO link was to the music video for the Rick
when you look at it, it feels and WhatsApp, the engi- Astley song “Never Gonna Give You
like magic,” Gheorghe said. neers closest to the coding Up,” from 1987. Ambushing people with
“These people are very are often described by col- a link to the song is a popular trolling
smart,” he added. “I don’t leagues as quirky introverts, tactic known as Rickrolling. Otto Ebe-
agree with what they do, but, man, that resembling the hacker archetypes of fic- ling recalled, “Rickrolling is, I don’t
is a very complicated thing they built.” tion. “They are special people. Not all of know, something my colleague might
The exploit triggered two video calls in them can communicate clearly with other do to me, not some sort of semi-state-
close succession, one joining the other, human beings,” Omer said, of the pro- sponsored people.” Cathcart told me,
with the malicious code hidden in their grammers who work on Pegasus. “Some “There was a message in it. They were
settings. The process took only a few of them don’t sleep for two days. They saying, We know what you did, we see
seconds, and deleted any notifications get crazy when they don’t sleep.” you.” (Hulio and other NSO employ-
immediately afterward. The code used ees said they could not recall Rickroll-
a technique known as a “buffer over- ate in the week, Facebook’s secu- ing WhatsApp.)
flow,” in which an area of memory on
a device is overloaded with more data
L rity team devised an act of subter-
fuge: they would simulate an infected
In the months that followed,
WhatsApp began notifying users who
than it can accommodate. “It’s like you’re device, to get NSO’s servers to send had been targeted. The list included nu-
writing on a piece of paper and you go them a copy of the code. “But their soft- merous government officials, including
beyond the bounds,” Gheorghe ex- ware was smart enough to basically not at least one French ambassador and the
plained. “You start writing on whatever be tricked by this,” Gheorghe said. “We Djiboutian Prime Minister. “There
the surface is, right? You start writing never really were able to get our hands wasn’t, you know, overlap between this
on the desk.” The overflow allows the on that.” list and, like, legitimate law-enforce-
software to overwrite surrounding sec- Omer told me, “It’s a cat-and-mouse ment outreach,” Cathcart said. “You
tions of memory freely. “You can make game.” Although NSO says that its cus- could see, wow, there’s a lot of countries
it do whatever you want.” tomers control the use of Pegasus, it all around the world. This isn’t just one
I spoke with a vice-president for does not dispute its direct role in these agency or organization in one country
product development at NSO, whom exchanges. “Every day, things are being targeting people.” WhatsApp also began
the firm requested I identify only by his patched,” Hulio said. “This is the rou- working with the Citizen Lab, which
first name, Omer—citing, without ap- tine work here.” warned victims of the risk that they
parent irony, privacy concerns. “You find At times, WhatsApp users received might be hacked again, and helped them
the nooks and crannies enabling you to repeated missed calls, but the malware secure their devices. John Scott-Railton
do something that the product designer wasn’t successfully installed. Once the said, “It really was interesting how many
didn’t intend,” Omer told me. Once in engineers learned about these incidents, people were upset and saddened, but in
control, the exploit loaded more soft- they were able to study what it looked a deep way not surprised, almost re-
ware, allowing the attacker to extract like when Pegasus failed. Toward the lieved, as if they were getting a diagno-
data or activate a camera or a micro- end of the week, Gheorghe told me, sis for a mystery ailment they had suf-
phone. The entire process was “zero “we said, O.K., we don’t have a full un- fered for many years.”
click,” requiring no action from the derstanding at this point, but I think Five people in the initial group iden-
phone’s owner. we captured enough.” On Friday morn- tified by WhatsApp were Catalans,
The software was designed by NSO’s ing, Facebook notified the Department including elected lawmakers and an
42 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
activist. Campo, the Catalan security that engages in combat with hackers. were allegedly targeted by NSO, Apple
researcher, realized that the cases “were Although Pegasus is not designed to filed its own lawsuit. NSO has filed a
probably just the tip of the iceberg.” He target users through Microsoft plat- motion to dismiss. “Apple is a company
added, “That’s when I found myself in forms, at least four people in Catalo- that does not believe in theatrical law-
the intersection of technology—a prod- nia running Microsoft Windows on suits,” Ivan Krstić, the engineer, told me.
uct that I contributed to building—and their computers have been attacked by “We have this entire time been waiting
my home country.” spyware made by Candiru, a startup for a smoking gun that would let us go
WhatsApp continued sharing in- founded by former NSO employees. file a suit that is winnable.”
formation with the Department of Jus- (A spokesperson for Candiru said that Apple created a threat-intelligence
tice, and, that fall, the company sued it requires its products to be used for team nearly four years ago. Two Apple
NSO in federal court. NSO Group the “sole purpose of preventing crime employees involved in the work told me
“breached our systems, damaged us,” and terror.”) In February, 2021, the Cit- that it was a response to the spread of
Cathcart told me. “I mean, do you just izen Lab identified evidence of an ac- spyware, exemplified by NSO Group.
do nothing about that? No. There have tive infection—a rarity for spyware of “NSO is a big pain point,” one of the
to be consequences.” this calibre—on a laptop belonging to employees told me. “Even before the
Hulio said, “I just remember that one Joan Matamala, an activist closely con- stuff that hit the news, we had disrupted
day the lawsuit happened, and they shut nected to separatist politicians. Campo NSO a number of times.” In 2020, with
down the Facebook account of our em- called Matamala and instructed him to the launch of its iOS 14 software, Apple
ployees, which was a very bully move wrap the laptop in aluminum foil, a had introduced a system called Blast-
for them to do.” He added, referring to makeshift way of blocking the malware Door, which moved the processing of
scandals about Facebook’s role in soci- from communicating with servers. The iMessages—including any potentially
ety, “I think it’s a big hypocrisy.” NSO Citizen Lab was able to extract a copy malicious code—into a chamber con-
has pushed for the suit to be dismissed, of the spyware, which Microsoft dubbed nected to the rest of the operating sys-
arguing that the company’s work on be- DevilsTongue. Several months later, tem by only a single, narrow pipeline of
half of governments should grant it the Microsoft released updates blocking data. But Omer, the NSO V.P., told me
same immunity from lawsuits that those DevilsTongue and preventing future that “newer features usually have some
governments have. So far, the U.S. courts attacks. By then, the list of activists and holes in their armor,” making them
have rejected this argument. journalists targeted “made the hairs on “more easy to target.” Krstić conceded
the back of our neck stand on end,” that there was “a sort of an eye of a nee-
hatsApp’s aggressive posture was Goodwin said. Matamala has been tar- dle of an opening still left.”
W unusual among big technology
companies, which are often reluctant to
geted more than sixteen times. “I still
have the aluminum paper stored here,
In March, 2021, Apple’s security team
received a tip that a hacker had success-
call attention to instances in which their in case we ever have a suspicion of fully threaded that needle. Even cyber
systems have been compromised. The having another infection,” he told me. warfare has double agents. A person
lawsuit signalled a shift. The tech com- Last November, after iPhone users familiar with Apple’s threat-intelligence
panies were now openly aligned against
the spyware venders. Gheorghe de-
scribed it as “the moment the whole
thing just exploded.”
Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and oth-
ers filed a legal brief in support of
WhatsApp’s suit. Goodwin, the Mic-
rosoft executive, helped to assemble the
coalition of companies. “We could not
let NSO Group prevail with an argu-
ment that, simply because a government
is using your products and services, you
get sovereign immunity,” she told me.
“The ripple effect of that would have
been so dangerous.” Hulio argues that
when governments use Pegasus they’re
less likely to lean on platform holders
for wider “back door” access to users’
data. He expressed exasperation with
the lawsuit. “Instead of them, like, ac-
tually saying, ‘O.K., thank you,’” he told
me, “they are going to sue us. Fine, so
let’s meet in court.”
Microsoft, too, has a security team
capabilities said that the company’s team Krstić told me that this was “a massive stage,” the former employee said. “This
sometimes receives tips from informants point of pride” for the team. But Omer was one of the major events that I think
connected to spyware enterprises: “We’ve told me, “We saw it coming. We just caused many of the employees to, like,
spent a long time and a lot of effort in counted the days until it happened.” He wake up and understand what’s going
trying to get to a place where we can and others at the company said the next on.” In the past few years, the depar-
actually learn something about what’s exploit is an inevitability. “There might tures have been “like a snowball.” Hulio,
going on deeply behind the scenes at be some gaps. It could take two weeks in response to questions about the com-
some of these companies.” (An Apple to come up with a mitigation on our pany’s problems, said, “What worries
spokesperson said that Apple does not side, some work-around.” me is the vibes of the employees.”
“run sources” within spyware compa- In 2019, NSO was saddled with hun-
nies.) The spyware venders, too, rely on uring interviews in NSO’s offices dreds of millions of dollars in debt
intelligence gathering, such as securing
pre-release versions of software, which
D last month, employees exchanged
nervous glances with hovering pub-
as part of a leveraged-buyout deal in
which a London-based private-equity
they use to design their next attacks. lic-relations staffers as they answered firm, Novalpina, acquired a seventy-
“We follow the publications, we follow questions about morale in the midst of per-cent stake. Recently, Moody’s, the
the beta versions of whatever apps we’re the scandals, lawsuits, and blacklisting. financial-services firm, downgraded
targeting,” Omer told me. “To be honest, not every time the mood NSO’s credit rating to “poor,” and
That month, researchers from the is actually good,” Omer said. Others Bloomberg described it as a distressed
Citizen Lab contacted Apple: the phone claimed loyalty to the company and be- asset, shunned by Wall Street traders.
of a Saudi women’s-rights activist, Lou- lief in the power of its tools to catch Two top NSO executives have left, and
jain al-Hathloul, had been hacked criminals. “The company has a very relations between the company and its
through iMessage. Later, the Citizen strong narrative that it tries to sell in- backers have deteriorated. Infighting
Lab was able to send Apple a copy of ternally to the employees,” the former among Novalpina’s partners led to the
an exploit, which the researcher Bill employee told me. “You’re either with transfer of control of its assets, includ-
Marczak discovered after months of them or against them.” ing NSO, to a consulting firm, Berke-
scrutinizing Hathloul’s phone, buried in Israel has become the world’s most ley Research Group, which pledged to
an image file. The person familiar with significant source of private surveillance increase oversight. But a BRG execu-
Apple’s threat-intelligence capabilities technology in part because of the qual- tive recently claimed that coöperation
said that receiving the file, through an ity of talent and expertise produced by with Hulio had become “virtually
encrypted digital channel, was “sort of its military. “Because of the compulsory non-existent.” Agence France-Presse
like getting a thing handed to you in a service, we can recruit the best of the has reported that tensions emerged be-
biohazard bag, which says, ‘Do not open best,” the former senior intelligence of- cause NSO’s creditors have pressed for
except in a Biosafety Level 4 lab.’” ficial told me. “The American dream is continued sales to countries with du-
Apple’s investigation took a week going from M.I.T. to Google. The Is- bious human-rights records, while BRG
and involved several dozen engineers raeli dream is to go to 8200,” the Israeli has sought to pause them. “We indeed
based in the United States and Europe. military-intelligence unit from which have some disputes with them,” Hulio
The company concluded that NSO had spyware venders often recruit. (Hulio, said, of BRG. “It’s about how to run
injected malicious code into files in Ado- the business.”
be’s PDF format. It then tricked a sys- NSO’s troubles have complicated its
tem in iMessage into accepting and pro- close alliance with the Israeli state. The
cessing the PDFs outside BlastDoor. former senior intelligence official re-
“It’s borderline science fiction,” the per- called that, in the past, when his unit
son familiar with Apple’s threat-intel- turned down European countries seek-
ligence capabilities said. “When you ing intelligence collaboration, “Mos-
read the analysis, it’s hard to believe.” sad said, Here’s the next best thing,
Google’s security-research team, Proj- NSO Group.” Several people familiar
ect Zero, also studied a copy of the ex- with those deals said that Israeli au-
ploit, and later wrote in a blog post, “We who describes himself as a mediocre thorities provided little ethical guid-
assess this to be one of the most tech- student whose upbringing was “noth- ance or restraint. The former official
nically sophisticated exploits we’ve ever ing fancy,” often emphasizes that he did added, “Israeli export control was not
seen, further demonstrating that the ca- not serve in Unit 8200.) NSO has his- dealing with ethics. It was dealing with
pabilities NSO provides rival those pre- torically been regarded as an appealing two things. One, Israeli national inter-
viously thought to be accessible to only job prospect for young veterans. But the est. Two, reputation.” The former NSO
a handful of nation states.” In the NSO former NSO employee, who quit after employee said that the state “was well
offices, programmers in the Core Re- becoming concerned that Pegasus had aware of the misuse, and even using it
search Group printed a copy of the post facilitated Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, as part of its own diplomatic relation-
and hung it on the wall. told me that others had become disil- ships.” (Israel’s Ministry of Defense
Apple shipped updates for its plat- lusioned, too. “Many of my colleagues said in a statement that “each licens-
forms that rendered the exploit useless. decided to leave the company at that ing assessment is made in light of var-
44 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
ious considerations including the se-
curity clearance of the product and
assessment of the country toward which
the product will be marketed. Human
rights, policy, and security issues are all
taken into consideration.”) After the
blacklisting of NSO, Hulio sought to
enlist Israeli officials, including Prime
Minister Naftali Bennett and Defense
Minister Benny Gantz. “I sent a let-
ter,” he told me. “I said that as a regu-
lated company, you know, everything
that we have ever asked was with the
permission, and with the authority, of
the government of Israel.” But a senior
Biden Administration official said that
the Israelis raised only “pretty mild
complaints” about the blacklisting.
“They didn’t like it, but we didn’t have
a standoff.”
In Israel’s legislature, Arab politi- “ You still have to choose which chef you want to prepare your food.”
cians are leading a modest movement
to examine the state’s relationship with
NSO. The Arab party leader Sami Abou
• •
Shahadeh told me, “We tried to discuss
this in the Knesset twice . . . to tell the But such claims are difficult to verify. system then runs with only limited con-
Israeli politicians, You are selling death “NSO wanted Western Europe mainly nection to NSO in Israel.
to very weak societies that are in con- so they can tell guys like you, Here’s a But NSO engineers concede that
flict, and you’ve been doing this for too European example,” the former Israeli there is some real-time monitoring of
long.” He added, “It never worked, be- intelligence official, who now works in systems to prevent unauthorized tam-
cause, first and morally, they don’t see the spyware sector, said. “But most of pering with or theft of their technol-
any problem with that.” Last fall, an in- their business is subsidized by the Saudi ogy. And the former employee said, of
vestigation by the watchdog group Front Arabias of the world.” The former em- Hulio’s assurances that NSO is techni-
Line Defenders identified Pegasus in- ployee, who had knowledge of NSO’s cally prevented from overseeing the sys-
fections on the phones of six Palestin- sales efforts, said, “For a European coun- tem, “That’s a lie.”The former employee
ian activists—including one whose Je- try, they would charge ten million dol- recalled support and maintenance ef-
rusalem residency status had been lars. And for a country in the Middle forts that involved remote access by
revoked. Abou Shahadeh argued that East they could charge, like, two hun- NSO, with the customer’s permission
the history of Israel’s spyware technol- dred and fifty million for the same prod- and live oversight. “There is remote ac-
ogy is tied to the surveillance of Pales- uct.” This seemed to create perverse in- cess,” the former employee added. “They
tinian communities in the West Bank, centives: “When they understood that can see everything that goes on. They
East Jerusalem, and Gaza. “They have they had misuse in those countries that have access to the database, they have
a huge laboratory,” he told me. “When they sold to for enormous amounts of access to all of the data.”The senior Eu-
they were using all the same tools for a money, then the decision to shut down ropean law-enforcement official told
long time to spy on Palestinian citizens, the service for that specific country be- me, “They can have remote access to
nobody cared.” Asked about the target- came much, much harder.” the system when we authorize them to
ing of Palestinians, Hulio said, “If Is- Asked about the extreme abuses as- access the system.”
rael is using our tools to fight crime and cribed to his technology, Hulio invoked NSO executives argue that, in an un-
terror, I would be very proud of it.” an argument that is at the heart of his regulated field, they are attempting to
company’s defense against WhatsApp construct guardrails. They have touted
“ Iknow there have been misuses,”
Hulio said. “It’s hard for me to live
and Apple. “We have no access to the
data on the system,” he told me. “We
their appointment of a compliance com-
mittee, and told me that they now main-
with that. And I obviously feel sorry for don’t take part in the operation, we don’t tain a list of countries ranked by risk of
that. Really, I’m not just saying that. I see what the customers are doing. We misuse, based on human-rights indica-
never said it, but I’m saying it now.” have no way of monitoring it.” When tors from Freedom House and other
Hulio said that the company has turned a client buys Pegasus, company officials groups. (They declined to share the list.)
down ninety customers and hundreds said, an NSO team travels to install two NSO also says that customers’ Pegasus
of millions of dollars of business out of racks, one devoted to storage and an- systems maintain a file that records which
concern about the potential for abuse. other for operating the software. The numbers were targeted; customers are
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 45
contractually obligated to surrender the like the one in Catalonia, often use tools which was founded in 2018 by former
file if NSO starts an investigation. “We from a number of companies, several Israeli intelligence officials and includes
have never had a customer say no,” Hulio founded by NSO alumni. Candiru was former Prime Minister Ehud Barak on
told me. The company says that it can started in 2014, by the former NSO its board, markets its technology to of-
terminate systems remotely, and has done employees Eran Shorer and Yaakov fices within the U.S. government. Par-
so seven times in the past few years. Weizman. It was allegedly linked to re- agon’s core technology focusses not on
The competition, Hulio argued, is cent attacks on Web sites in the U.K. seizing complete control of phones but
far more frightening. “Companies found and the Middle East (Candiru denies on hacking encrypted messaging sys-
themselves in Singapore, in Cyprus, in the connection), and its software has tems like Telegram and Signal. An ex-
other places that don’t have real regu- been identified on the devices of Turk- ecutive told me that it has committed
lation,” he told me. “And they can sell ish and Palestinian citizens. Candiru to sell only to a narrow list of countries
to whoever they want.” The spyware has no Web site. The firm shares its with relatively uncontroversial human-
industry is also full of rogue hackers name with a parasitic fish, native to the rights records: “Our strategy is to have
willing to crack devices for anyone who Amazon River basin, that drains the values, which is interesting to the Amer-
will pay. “They will take your comput- blood of larger fish. ican market.”
ers, they will take your phone, your QuaDream was founded two years
Gmail,” Hulio said. “It’s obviously ille- later, by a group including two other n Catalonia, Gonzalo Boye, an attor-
gal. But it’s very common now. It’s not
that expensive.” Some of the technol-
former NSO employees, Guy Geva
and Nimrod Reznik. Like NSO, it fo-
I ney representing nineteen people tar-
geted by Pegasus, is preparing criminal
ogy that NSO competes with, he says, cusses on smartphones. Earlier this complaints to courts in Spain and other
comes from state actors, including year, Reuters reported that QuaDream European countries, accusing NSO, as
China and Russia. “I can tell you that had exploited the same vulnerability well as Hulio and his co-founders, of
today in China, today in Africa, you see that NSO used to gain access to Ap- breaking national and E.U. laws. Boye
the Chinese government giving capa- ple’s iMessage. QuaDream, whose of- has represented Catalan politicians in
bilities almost similar to NSO.” Ac- fices are behind an unmarked door in exile, including the former President
cording to a report from the Carnegie the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, ap- Carles Puigdemont. Between March
Endowment for International Peace, pears to share with many of its com- and October of 2020, analysis by the
China supplies surveillance tools to petitors a reliance on regulation ha- Citizen Lab found, Boye was targeted
sixty-three countries, often through pri- vens: its f lagship malware, Reign, is eighteen times with text messages mas-
vate firms enmeshed with the Chinese reportedly owned by a Cyprus-based querading as updates from Twitter and
state. “NSO will not exist tomorrow, entity, InReach. According to Haaretz, news sites. At least one attempt resulted
let’s say,” Hulio told me. “There’s not the firm is among those now employed in a successful Pegasus infection. Boye
going to be a vacuum. What do you by Saudi Arabia. (QuaDream could says that he now spends as much time
think will happen?” not be reached for comment.) as possible outside Spain. In a recent
NSO is also competing with Israeli Other Israeli firms pitch themselves interview, he wondered, “How can I de-
firms. Large-scale hacking campaigns, as less reputationally fraught. Paragon, fend someone, if the other side knows
exactly everything I’ve said to my cli-
ent?” Hulio declined to identify specific
customers but suggested that Spain’s
use of the technology was legitimate.
“Spain definitely has a rule of law,” he
told me. “And if everything was legal,
with the approval of the Supreme Court,
or with the approval of all the lawful
mechanisms, then it can’t be misused.”
Pere Aragonès, the current President of
Catalonia, told me, “We are not crim-
inals.” He is one of three people who
have served in that role whose phones
have been infected with Pegasus. “What
we want from the Spanish authorities
is transparency.”
Last month, the European Parlia-
ment formed a committee to look into
the use of Pegasus in Europe. Last week,
Reuters reported that senior officials at
the European Commission had been
“If you win, the game is rigged, but if I win targeted by NSO spyware. The inves-
it’s flawless and beyond critique.” tigative committee, whose members in-
clude Puigdemont, will convene for its The tactics were similar to those ships and schedules, and alerts law en-
first session on April 19th. Puigdemont used by the private intelligence com- forcement to variations of routine that
called NSO’s activities “a threat not only pany Black Cube, which is run largely might be harbingers of crime. “I’m sure
for the credibility of Spanish democ- by former officers of Mossad and other this will be the next big thing coming
racy, but for the credibility of European Israeli intelligence agencies, and is out of NSO,” Leoz Michaelson, one of
democracy itself.” known for using operatives with false its designers, told me. “Turning every
NSO Group also faces legal conse- identities. The firm worked on behalf life pattern into a mathematical vector.”
quences in the U.K.: three activists re- of the producer Harvey Weinstein to The product is already used by a
cently notified the company, as well as track women who had accused him of handful of countries, and Hulio said
the governments of Saudi Arabia and sexual abuse, and last month three of that it had contributed to an arrest, after
the U.A.E., that they plan to sue over its officials received sus- a suspect in a terrorism in-
alleged abuses of Pegasus. (The com- pended prison sentences vestigation subtly altered
pany responded that there was “no basis” for hacking and intimidat- his routine. The company
for their claims.) ing Romania’s chief anti- seemed to have given little
NSO continues to defend itself in corruption prosecutor. consideration to the idea
the WhatsApp suit. This month, it filed Black Cube has been that this tool, too, might
an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. linked to at least one other spur controversy. When I
“If we need to go and fight, we will,” case involving NSO Group. asked what would happen
Shmuel Sunray, NSO’s general coun- In February, 2019, the A.P. if law enforcement arrested
sel, told me. Lawyers for WhatsApp reported that Black Cube someone based on, say, an
said that, in their fight with NSO, they agents had targeted three innocent trip to the store
have encountered underhanded tactics, attorneys involved in an- in the middle of the night,
including an apparent campaign of pri- other suit against NSO Group, as Michaelson said, “There could be false
vate espionage. well as a London-based journalist cov- positives.” But, he added, “this guy that
On December 20, 2019, Joe Mornin, ering the case. The lawyers—Mazen is going to buy milk in the middle of
an associate at Cooley L.L.P., a Palo Masri, Alaa Mahajna, and Christiana the night is in the system for a reason.”
Alto law firm that was representing Markou—who represented hacked Yet the risk to bystanders is not an
WhatsApp in its suit against NSO, re- journalists and activists, had sued NSO abstraction. Last week, Elies Campo
ceived an e-mail from a woman who and an affiliated entity in Israel and decided to check the phones of his
identified herself as Linnea Nilsson, a Cyprus. In late 2018, all three received parents, scientists who are not involved
producer at a Stockholm-based com- messages from people who claimed to in political activities, for spyware. He
pany developing a documentary series be associated with a rich firm or indi- found that both had been infected with
on cybersecurity. Nilsson was cagey vidual, repeatedly suggesting meetings Pegasus when he visited them during
about her identity but so eager to meet in London. NSO Group has denied the Christmas holiday in 2019. Campo
Mornin that she bought him a first- hiring Black Cube to target opponents. told me, “The idea that anyone could
class plane ticket from San Francisco However, Hulio acknowledged the con- be at risk from Pegasus wasn’t just a
to New York. The ticket was paid for nection to me, saying, “For the lawsuit concept anymore—it was my parents
in cash, through World Express Travel, in Cyprus, there was one involvement sitting across the table from me.” On
an agency that specialized in trips to of Black Cube,” because the lawsuit his mother’s phone, which had been
Israel. Mornin never used the ticket. A “came from nowhere, and I want to hacked eight times, the researchers
Web site for the documentary company, understand.” He said that he had not found a new kind of zero-click exploit,
populated with photos from elsewhere hired Black Cube for other lawsuits. which attacked iMessage and iOS’s
on the Internet, soon disappeared. So Black Cube said that it would not com- Web-browsing engine. There is no ev-
did a LinkedIn profile for Nilsson. ment on the cases, though a source fa- idence that iPhones are still vulnera-
Several months later, a woman miliar with the company denied that ble to the exploit, which the Citizen
claiming to be Anastasia Chistyakova, it had targeted Cooley lawyers. Lab has given the working name Hom-
a Moscow-based trustee for a wealthy age. When the evidence was found,
individual, contacted Travis LeBlanc,
a Cooley partner working on the
“ P eople can survive and can adapt
to almost any situation,” Hulio
Scott-Railton told Campo, “You’re not
going to believe this, but your mother
WhatsApp case, seeking legal advice. once told me. NSO Group must now is patient zero for a previously undis-
The woman sent voice-mail, e-mail, adapt to a situation in which its flag- covered exploit.”
Facebook, and LinkedIn messages. ship product has become a symbol of During a recent visit to NSO’s of-
Mornin identified her voice as belong- oppression. “I don’t know if we’ll win, fices, windows and whiteboards across
ing to Nilsson, and the law firm later but we will fight,” he said. One solu- the space were dense with flowcharts
concluded that her e-mail had come tion was to expand the product line. and graphics, in Hebrew and English
from the same block of I.P. addresses The company demonstrated for me an text, chronicling ideas for products and
as those sent by Nilsson. The lawyers artificial-intelligence tool, called Mae- exploits. On one whiteboard, scrawled
reported the incidents to the Depart- stro, that scrutinizes surveillance data, in large red Hebrew characters and firmly
ment of Justice. builds models of individuals’ relation- underlined, was a single word: “War!” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 47
 ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS

NORWEGIAN WOOD
In Scandinavia, ecologically minded architects are building skyscrapers with pillars of pine and spruce.
BY REBECCA MEAD

rumunddal, a small municipal- cious gesture and a proof of concept. net’s sheer façade is clad in panels of

B ity on the northeastern shore

of Lake Mjøsa, in Norway, has
for most of its history had little to rec-
It depends for its strength and stabil-
ity not on steel and concrete but on
giant wooden beams of glulam—short
orange-brown knotty timber, whose
dark vertical lines of wood grain lure
the eye upward. By the entrance, an
ommend it to the passing visitor. There for “glued laminated timber”—an en- English-language sign attests that a
are no picturesque streets with cafés gineered product in which pieces of group called the Council on Tall Build-
and boutiques, as there are in the ski lumber are bound together with water- ings and Urban Habitat has certified
resort of Lillehammer, some thirty resistant adhesives. Glulam is manu- the tower’s record-breaking status. Pass-
miles to the north. Industrial build- factured at industrial scale from the ing through a revolving door, I smelled
ings, mostly for the lumber industry, spruce and pine forests that cover about the enticing scent of pine—though its
occupy the area closest to the lake, and a third of Norway’s landmass, includ- source, I realized, to my mild disap-
the waterfront is cut off by a highway. ing the slopes around Brumunddal, pointment, was a Christmas tree.
The town, which has a population of from which the timber for Mjøstårnet The material from which the tower
eleven thousand, was until recently best was harvested. had been built was evident, though, in
known to Norwegians for a series of I went to see the building in mid- the airy ground-floor lobby and restau-
attacks on immigrant residents three December, arriving by a train from rant, where wooden dining tables and
decades ago, which led to street clashes Oslo that passed through farmland and chairs were arrayed on bare wooden
between anti-racism protesters and woodland before reaching the edge of f loorboards, wooden pendant lamp-
supporters of the far right. Since 2019, Lake Mjøsa, which is Norway’s big- shades dangled on long cords, and large
however, Brumunddal has achieved a gest. The steely waters lapped a shore- bamboo palms in pots were clustered
more welcome identity: as the site of line of charcoal-colored rock, on which at the base of a curved wooden stair-
Mjøstårnet, the tallest all-timber build- traces of the previous weekend’s snow case that rose to a mezzanine. Large
ing in the world. remained. The forested bank opposite, columns supporting the building, as
Mjøstårnet—the name means “Tower when it emerged from clouds of fog, well as angled braces cutting across the
of Mjøsa”—stands at two hundred and was dark green against the pallid sky. restaurant’s walls of windows, were
eighty feet and consists of eighteen The journey north from the capital formed from massive glulam blocks,
floors, combining office space, residen- takes about an hour and a half, but I the thickest of which were almost five
tial units, and a seventy-two-room hotel didn’t need a watch to tell me when I feet by two feet, like pieces from a mon-
that has become a destination for visi- had arrived at Brumunddal—the in- strous Jenga set. Riding a glass-walled
tors curious about the future of sustain- congruous sight of a tower block ris- elevator to my room, on the eleventh
able architecture and of novel achieve- ing from the water’s edge was a suffi- floor, I noticed that the elevator shaft
ments in structural engineering. It’s the cient signpost. Descending from the was built from similar chunky blocks.
third-tallest tower in Norway, a coun- train, I wheeled my suitcase for fifteen I had been assigned a corner room
try whose buildings rarely extend above minutes across town—past the park- with two huge picture windows. One
ten stories. Although Mjøstårnet dom- ing lot of the local McDonald’s and faced southwest, across the lake, where
inates the Brumunddal skyline, it is a across the highway, which was nearly the view was obscured by fog; the other
tenth the height of the world’s tallest empty. As I walked, Mjøstårnet loomed faced southeast, along the waterfront,
structure, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai. in the mist, resembling from a distance offering a painterly sweep of gray skies
Its scale is similar to that of New York’s a box of matches. On the roof, there and water, the shoreline clustered with
Flatiron Building, which, when com- was an angled wooden canopy that denuded deciduous birches and ever-
pleted in 1902, topped out at just over might have been fashioned from a green spruces. An enormous glulam
three hundred feet. (Three years later, handful of matches taken from the pillar between the windows held up
it was capped with a penthouse.) box’s drawer. the corner of the building. Its surface
Like the Flatiron Building—one The tower is flanked by two other had been treated with a translucent
of the earliest steel-frame skyscrapers, all-timber structures: on one side, a low white-tinted wax, but otherwise it was
which defied public skepticism about building that houses the municipal recognizably derived from the forests
the sturdiness of a building that tapers swimming pool; on the other, an office through which I’d passed on the jour-
to the extreme angle of about twenty- building. Some low-rise wooden apart- ney from Oslo. I rapped my knuckles
five degrees—Mjøstårnet is an auda- ment buildings edge the lake. Mjøstår- on the glulam: it was smooth, resonant,
48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
Mjøstårnet, the world’s tallest all-timber tower, rises two hundred and eighty feet—about the height of the Flatiron Building.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL S. AMUNDSEN THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 49
and much less cold than a metal pillar scaping—is hard to justify in purely of London destroyed in excess of thir-
would have been. economic terms. teen thousand houses—and more than
I put my bag down on a blond-wood Engineered wood products such as eighty churches—the city passed leg-
coffee table by the window, and settled glulam and cross-laminated timber—a islation mandating construction in brick
into a low swivel chair, its comfortable close relative in which flat boards are or stone. In the wake of the Great Chi-
backrest fashioned from bent-wood glued in perpendicular layers—offer an cago Fire of 1871, in which more than
strips. In December, Brumunddal en- alternative model for the construction seventeen thousand buildings were de-
joys less than six hours of daylight; had industry. Lumber pillars, given their stroyed and nearly a hundred thousand
I sat there long enough, I could have earlier incarnation as trees, retain car- people left homeless, local officials ex-
watched the sun rise and set with only bon dioxide captured from the atmo- panded requirements to use fireproof
the barest swivel to adjust my line of sphere. One cubic metre of glulam tim- materials in the downtown area. In Nor-
sight. The room was quiet and, despite ber stores about seven hundred kilograms way, timber structures were outlawed
the lowering skies, it was light. With of carbon dioxide. About eighteen thou- in urban contexts in 1904, after the town
its minimal, tasteful furnishings—a nar- sand trees were required to produce the of Ålesund was ravaged by fire. (That
row blond-wood desk; a double bed wood products used in the construc- law has since been rescinded.)
made up with white linens and a crim- tion of Mjøstårnet and the adjoining Architects and engineers who spe-
son blanket—it had the virtuous feel pool. In aggregate, those trees seques- cialize in mass-timber buildings say that
of a spa. I had no desire to go elsewhere, ter more than two thousand tons of car- fears of fire are misplaced. I met with
and, given the town’s lack of other at- bon dioxide. (Norwegian law requires Martin Lunke, a project manager for
tractions, that was just as well. Between harvested acres to be replanted.) Hent, the contractor responsible for the
the heft of the wooden building and Many municipalities and nations are wooden complex in Brumunddal, and
the evanescence of the fog encircling embracing the environmental advan- he told me that some locals initially re-
it, the atmosphere was seductively calm- tages of building with timber. In 2020, ferred to Mjøstårnet as “the world’s big-
ing—as long as my mind did not lin- the housing minister of France stated gest torch.” Lunke explained that the
ger on the metaphor of the matchbox. that new public buildings should in- kind of laminated wooden blocks used
corporate wood or other biological ma- in Mjøstårnet exceed modern fire stan-
uildings are among the worst terials such as hempcrete—a compos- dards. Unlike wood planks or beams
B contributors to greenhouse gases.
The Global Alliance for Buildings and
ite of hemp, water, and lime. The city
government in Amsterdam has decreed
cut from individual trees, the massive
blocks of engineered timber used in
Construction has reported that twenty- that, starting in 2025, a fifth of all new large-scale construction projects do not
eight per cent of global emissions are buildings must be constructed mainly burn through: they char only on the
generated by building operations—heat, with bio-based materials. Other coun- surface, to a depth of one or two cen-
lighting, and so on. An additional eleven tries have taken a different tack: in the timetres, much the way a large log placed
per cent comes from the manufacture United Kingdom, recent legislation has in a fireplace will the next morning be
of materials and from the construction banned the use of combustible materi- blackened but not incinerated. At least,
process. A 2019 report by Chatham als, including wood, on the exterior of that’s what has been demonstrated in
House, a British think tank, estimated residential buildings more than sixty tests: Lunke, like others in the indus-
that the four billion tons of cement that try with whom I spoke, could not cite
are produced annually worldwide ac- any fires in the real world which in-
count for eight per cent of emissions; volved mass-timber buildings. A recent
carbon is released into the atmosphere architectural competition in Oslo pro-
by the combustion required for the man- vided an oblique endorsement of the
ufacture of cement, and by the chemi- material’s safety: the city’s fire depart-
cal processes involved. (By contrast, the ment elicited proposals for a new sta-
aviation industry contributes just under tion and elected a firm that had designed
two per cent of emissions.) Buildings a two-story structure built from wood
have an environmental cost when they and clad in panels of scorched timber.
go up and when they come down: con- feet tall. This ruling was introduced
crete waste usually ends up as landfill, after the Grenfell Tower fire, in 2017, ngineering wood to make it stron-
especially in countries whose econo-
mies are still emerging. Even in places
when a twenty-four-story housing block
burned like a terrible beacon over West
E ger and more adaptable is not a re-
cent innovation: plywood, in which thin
where technologies for recycling the London, killing seventy-two people. strips of lumber are glued together, with
material have been developed, the pro- The fire was exacerbated by the build- the grain running in alternating direc-
cess is complex, since structural con- ing’s cladding, which was made not tions, has been used as a building ma-
crete is threaded unpredictably with from timber but from aluminum and terial since the early twentieth century.
rebar, which is difficult to remove. Be- highly flammable polyethylene. Histor- Glulam and cross-laminated timber,
cause of the relatively low cost of man- ically, cities have restricted the use of which are more recent innovations, are
ufacturing concrete, recycling it—into timber in buildings after deadly con- manufactured according to similar prin-
gravel, say, or fill-in material for land- flagrations. In 1667, after the Great Fire ciples. Large planks of sawn timber are
50 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
 down. Rune Abrahamsen, the C.E.O.
of Moelven Limtre AS, the Norwegian
THE YEARS company that provided the timber el-
ements for Mjøstårnet, explained to me
All the parties you spent that, otherwise, although the tower
watching the room would have been structurally sound, the
from a balcony wind that blows off the lake would have
where someone joined you caused it to sway so much that some
to smoke then returned. occupants would have become nause-
And how it turns out no one ated, “as when you’re on a boat.”
had the childhood they wanted, Other developers are now making
and how they’d tell you this plans to build hybrid timber buildings
a little drunk, a little slant that are even taller than Mjøstårnet—
in less time than it took and their designs break from the geo-
to finish a cigarette metric simplicity of the Brumunddal
because sad things tower. The architectural firm Penda has
can’t be explained. designed a jagged eighteen-story apart-
Behind the glass and inside, ment building whose modular struc-
all your friends buzzed. ture will have large jutting balconies
You could feel the shape that can accommodate fully grown trees.
of their voices. You could Vancouver will soon become home to
tell from their eyes they were several innovative timber buildings,
in some other place. 1999 including the Earth Tower, a forty-
or 2008 or last June. story apartment block that incorpo-
Of course, it’s important rates shared winter gardens for resi-
to go to parties. To make dents and a rooftop greenhouse. A new
life a dress or a drink home for the Vancouver Art Gallery,
or suede shoes someone wears designed by Herzog & de Meuron,
in the rain. On the way home, combines structural-timber elements
in the car back, the night sky with a woven-copper façade. The New
played its old tricks. The stars York architectural firm SHoP, which
arranged themselves quietly. recently completed the skinniest sky-
The person you thought of drove scraper in the world—Steinway Tower,
under them. Away from the party, in midtown Manhattan—has designed
(just like you) into the years. a forty-story wooden tower, in Sydney,
for the tech company Atlassian. An in-
—Alex Dimitrov ternal-timber structure is to be wrapped
with a curvy exoskeleton of steel and
glass; solar panels will adorn the façade,
dried in a kiln—a process that can take ful forests of harvestable, renewable and indoor terraces will have naturally
weeks—then glued together and com- trees—Germany, Austria, Canada— ventilated gardens.
pressed. Computer imaging allows others lack a ready supply of wood to Mass-timber materials encourage ar-
pieces of engineered wood to be cut turn into engineered timber. Despite chitects to try something different from
precisely to size before they’re trans- Dubai’s appetite for architectural inno- the cool, shimmery blue-glass towers
ported to a building site, producing less vation, it wouldn’t be a sensible loca- omnipresent in large cities. Structural-
waste than conventional construction tion for a timber tower: the ecological timber designs have an inherent warmth:
methods. (Unlike steel, timber elements cost of shipping the wood would can- for the headquarters of SR Bank, in
don’t clang, so less noise is generated cel out its green credentials. Stavanger, Norway, the architecture
by the raising of a timber building.) Building towers with wood poses firms saaha and Helen & Hard cre-
Because building with glulam and certain design challenges: the support- ated a stunning wood building whose
cross-laminated timber is still in its in- ing columns in a timber office tower soaring atrium features interlacing stair-
fancy, it can be more expensive than must be thicker than those in steel-and- cases and walkways that resemble a giant
conventional construction: the Mjøstår- concrete towers, causing precious me- marble run. Øystein Elgsaas, an archi-
net development cost approximately a tres of rentable floor space to be lost. tect based in Trondheim, Norway, whose
hundred and thirteen million dollars, The inherent lightness of wood can also firm, Voll, was responsible for Mjøstår-
about eleven per cent more than an prove tricky for architects. The engi- net, told me that he saw no reason that
equivalent development would have neers of Mjøstårnet determined that wooden buildings should look mark-
cost in concrete and steel. Although the upper levels needed to be equipped edly different from those made of steel
some regions of the world have plenti- with concrete floors to weigh the tower and concrete: rather, a design should be
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 51
suited to its particular setting. “Mjøstår- tectural offices, tabletops showcase scale wood furnishings, and floor-to-ceiling
net has wooden cladding, but I believe models of prospective buildings—with windows partly obscured by massive
that should not be the rule—we need f lawless concrete contours rendered trusses made with blocks of glulam,
more colors in our environment, and not in paper, and tiny figurines walking I could see a wooden-architecture ver-
only brown or gray façades,” he told me. across a paper plaza. But the office nacular emerging: airy spaces formed
“But, if we look at some concepts for of Oslotre’s founding partner, Jørgen by pale wood beams and columns that
new wooden designs, they do feel a bit Tycho, displays an enormous chunk of had visibly been slotted and joined
more organic. If you use glass on the wood: two precisely cut pieces of cross- together. The wooden surfaces had
façade, you can show the wooden con- laminated timber that were slotted to- been treated only minimally, to pre-
struction inside and make passersby gether at a right angle, then secured vent the kind of yellowing that Nor-
understand that it is a wooden build- with wooden dowels. The dowels, wegians associate with old-timey coun-
ing.” Many wooden buildings, he noted, Tycho explained, were made from beech try cabins—the “Norwegian wood”
evoke “something growing up from the wood, rather than the spruce from of the Beatles song. Instead, the pal-
ground—rooted in the earth and reach- which the cross-laminated timber was ette was a globally fashionable greige
ing for the skies, like a tree.” fashioned. The wood for the joined and cream.
On the outskirts of Copenhagen, blocks had been dried down to a mois- Tycho also showed me around some
ground will soon be broken on an all- ture content of twelve per cent, to match co-working spaces at Valle Wood, and
wood housing development, Fælledby, the humidity of the air in the office: if cited an Austrian study indicating that
by the design studio Henning Larsen, the levels are not calibrated, the wood schoolchildren who attend class in a
with eighty-odd buildings that include will absorb ambient moisture, causing room with wooden walls and furni-
wooden balconies, expansive glass win- swelling, or it will dry out, causing ture have lower heart rates than those
dows, and nooks for bird’s nests inte- shrinking and cracking. The beech for who occupy conventional classrooms.
grated into the façades; the structures the dowel had been dried down to six (Such studies tend to be underwrit-
will be connected by plank paths that per cent. After it was introduced into ten by the forestry or the lumber in-
lead pedestrians through wetlands. a hole bored through the cross-lami- dustry, although that does not inval-
Signe Kongebro, the firm’s global de- nated timber, Tycho explained, the idate their claims.) The stairwells had
sign director for urbanism, believes that dowel absorbed atmospheric moisture been equipped with durable flooring
the growing use of timber is likely to and expanded, creating a tight fit that made from wood blocks cut against
encourage lower-rise, denser districts, obviated the need for metal screws. the grain, so that tree rings formed
with more room for nature. “In a way, The technique was both old and new. beautiful patterns underfoot, like el-
we are returning to our roots,” she told Oslotre had been experimenting with egant Italian tiles. Tycho flinched with
me, in an e-mail. “Timber is one of the it while designing an office building, annoyance at a wall that had been
oldest building materials we have—it for Save the Children, that should be painted black; along the seams, the
has been used for thousands of years.” completed by the end of the year. “We pallor of the original timber had be-
She noted that various cultures have can see this technology in Japanese come exposed. “We tried to tell the
developed distinct timber idioms: in and Chinese architecture that goes interior architects that if it is going to
Japan, traditional wooden buildings are back hundreds of years, but we are also be painted black it needs to be done
often detailed and highly tactile; the relying on more modern calculations,” in the wintertime!” he said. “This was
American tradition of the frontier log he told me. “This is super-strong. This done in the summertime. When you
cabin is far more functional. Scandina- won’t go anywhere.” heat up the building, it takes away a
via’s mass-timber movement highlights Tycho took me to see Valle Wood, lot of the moisture, and the wood is
wood’s unique qualities while also using a seven-story timber office building in always adapting to the climate it’s in.
it in much the same way that steel and Oslo that Oslotre had worked on; it It shrinks.” Cracks in the beams had
concrete are used. Kongebro thinks that opened in 2019, in a development ad- similarly been caused by seasonal
architects will eventually embrace “the jacent to a soccer stadium. It was a changes, he said; in summer, the beams
aesthetic experimentation with wood damp, misty day, and when viewed from would expand, rendering the surfaces
that happens at the level of products— a remove the building’s cladding— smooth again. In this building, and in
for example, innovation in laminated warm reddish-brown wood—looked others that Oslotre has worked on,
wood led by the Eameses in the mid- like rusted steel, though up close I could the use of wood walls helps regulate
twentieth century.” Such boldness, she see that thin horizontal strips of pine the level of moisture indoors, reduc-
said, “could generate an architectural had been arranged in angled modern- ing the need for mechanically bal-
language for timber that we have never ist patterns. The exterior was naturally anced ventilation.
seen before.” water-resistant, thanks to resins in the Next, we drove to one of Oslotre’s
wood. The cladding will turn gray with current projects: two private homes
n Oslo, I visited the practice of Os- time; the south side, which is exposed that were nearing completion in what
I lotre, an architecture firm that works
exclusively in timber. Its offices are
to more direct sunlight, will transform
more quickly than the north.
had once been the yard of a larger prop-
erty. The houses, both modernist in
on the ground floor of a nineteenth- The tower’s base was occupied by style, were perched on a hillside with
century stone building. In most archi- a cafeteria. In its concrete floor, blond- near-flat roofs and walls of windows
52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
The timber for Mjøstårnet was harvested from the forests that blanket about a third of Norway’s landmass.

opening onto outdoor living areas; way has not always been as densely planted in the immediate postwar years
Tycho assured me that on fog-free days tree-covered as it is now. From the are now ripe for industrial use—all the
the houses had views overlooking both nineteenth century until the middle of more reason to harvest them as tim-
forests and a fjord. The exteriors were the twentieth century, the country’s ber, in which carbon dioxide remains
clad in wood, with curved corners. The forests were severely degraded, its trees trapped, rather than allowing them to
interiors had wood ceilings, floors, and having been chopped down and used die and decay, releasing the gas back
walls, and attractive laminate kitchen in the boatbuilding and mining indus- into the atmosphere.
cabinets. In a bedroom, Tycho showed tries or exported as construction ma- Norway’s nineteenth-century ex-
me a wall panel that came with a hole terial—often to the U.K., which lacked perience demonstrated the dangers
for electrical cables already cut in its sufficient timber of its own. of deforestation, and a related objec-
predetermined spot: very little drilling Today’s extensive forestation is the tion is sometimes mounted against
had to be done on site, which meant result of a program, instituted by the using timber in large-scale construc-
less dust and noise. Norwegian government after the Sec- tion projects: why cut down a healthy
Our final visit was to a timber music ond World War, in which schoolchil- tree to sequester carbon in a building
school that had opened only weeks dren planted trees as part of their cur- when the tree is doing a perfectly good
earlier, in the town of Rakkestad, an riculum. The resulting forests, it was job of sequestering carbon in the for-
hour’s drive south of Oslo. Much of thought, would spur economic growth est? Advocates of timber-based ar-
the formative work of Oslotre’s prac- through the expansion of wood-based chitecture stress that the industry’s
tice was in designing and building industries, including paper manufac- viability depends on sustainable for-
wooden public schools. Tycho not only turing. But, starting at the end of the estry methods, and argue that, given
believed that timber interiors improved nineteen-sixties, a more lucrative nat- the environmental damage caused by
the well-being of students and staff; ural resource presented itself when giant conventional construction methods,
his designs also provided a way of using oil deposits were identified beneath we have no choice but to explore al-
up an excess of available timber in Nor- the North Sea. That discovery meant ternative materials, including wood
way. Despite the country’s reputation that Norway’s forests grew to an un- and other bio-based products. (Myce-
for being blanketed with forests, Nor- planned maturity. Spruce and pine lium—networks of fungi—and straw,
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 53
for example, can be used as insula- When we walked into a loftlike 7 a.m., it was so loud that I groggily
tion.) As Tycho drove us through the practice-and-performance studio, reached for my own phone.
Norwegian countryside, he said, “In it felt almost as if we were inside a Later that morning, I had coffee in
the short term, the building industry musical instrument ourselves. Here, the hotel restaurant with Arthur Bu-
has to do things differently. And then, the director admitted, there had been chardt, the developer behind the build-
maybe in the long term, we will have a slight problem with the acoustics. ing of Mjøstårnet. He said that timber
other technologies for carbon seques- He clapped his hands, and the sound architects will have to learn how to bet-
tration, and green energy, and other bounced off the walls with an ugly, ter quell the sound-transmitting qual-
ways of solving it. But at the moment unintended reverberation. Tycho ities of wood. “The material is very po-
we don’t do enough fast enough.” looked closely at the wall: it appeared rous, especially when you walk on it,”
We arrived at the music school as that someone had forgotten to place he said, rapping on the tabletop to
daylight was fading. Set in a plaza, the a layer of sound-absorbing material demonstrate. In many rooms of the
two-story building was warmly lit from behind the wood panelling. It wouldn’t tower, he noted, interior walls had been
inside. Rain and snow had left damp be too hard to remedy, he said. In covered with painted plasterboard for
patches on the exterior cladding, which this respect, an all-timber building is sound insulation—resulting in an un-
still had the scent of the sawmill. The just like a conventional one: the con- fortunate reduction of the promised
school’s principal gave us a tour, taking struction process is likely to include health-giving benefits of exposed wood.
evident pleasure in his new professional a few missteps. Buchardt, who is seventy-three, grew
home. In one large room, a terrazzo up in a small town near Oslo, but he
floor and heavy burnt-umber curtains slept well in my corner hotel room spent his later teens in Brumunddal,
fit harmoniously with the wood walls
and ceiling; in a small practice studio,
I at Mjøstårnet, though I cannot re-
port any measurable lowering of my
where his father worked for a timber
company. Buchardt’s professional break-
the bars of a wooden xylophone were heart rate from one night’s exposure through came when he built a hotel in
visually echoed by the strips of wood to its wooden components. I can, how- Lillehammer in time for the 1994 Win-
covering the walls and the ceiling. ever, attest to the resonance of its wood ter Olympics; since then, he has built
As luthiers and piano-makers can walls; when a chiming iPhone alarm twenty-three hotels in Nordic coun-
attest, wood is a resonant material. went off in a neighboring room at tries. Mjøstårnet was a labor of love,
he told me: an idea conceived on a
restaurant napkin, to demonstrate the
possibilities that wood could deliver.
“This is not a smart place to build this
building,” he noted. “If I had built it in
Oslo, the cost would have been almost
the same, and the value would have
been double.” But the tower had been
good for Brumunddal’s economy, and
for improving the town’s reputation:
“Some things you do for economic rea-
sons, and some you do for enthusiasm.”
Originally, the tower was designed to
be two hundred and sixty-five feet tall,
but when word spread of a rival proj-
ect under construction in Austria—the
two-hundred-and-seventy-five-foot
HoHo Hotel, in Vienna—the archi-
tect stretched the top of Mjøstårnet by
a further four or five metres, securing
its world-record status. The building
showed what the future of sustainable
architecture might look like, Buchardt
told me. “Norway is an oil nation, but
the oil will end,” he said. “All the pol-
iticians talk about ‘green change’—we
must do something else that must be
environmentally friendly, and we must
use local resources. I thought I could
build something like this, as an answer.”
At the moment, assessments of the
“Please fall asleep so I can go to bed and look at photos of you being quiet.” construction cost of a building do not
generally take carbon emissions into tall.” Pulling out his phone, he showed teen-hundreds, by the Society for the
account. Buchardt feels that such a pen- me photographs of one of his other Preservation of Ancient Norwegian
alty is inevitable, at least in Scandina- homes: a log cottage in Hafjell, where Monuments, and presented to King
via. If developers have to weigh the the Olympic competition for slalom Oscar II, whose collection of antique
environmental costs of building as a skiing was held in 1994. It, too, looked Norwegian buildings forms the basis
matter of hard cash, engineered timber like a very pleasant place in which to of the museum’s holdings. The church
will start to look particularly appealing. spend one’s retirement, or just to spend dates to approximately 1200, and, al-
After our coffee, Buchardt and I the weekend. “The building is twenty though it has repeatedly been restored
rode the elevator to the top of Mjøstår- years old,” he said. “But since then, it preserves the
net, where there is a viewing platform the timber is two hundred characteristics of what is
beneath the wood frame that tops the years old.” known as stave construc-
building. Buchardt called the structure tion: an all-wood method
a pergola, though it would be a fool- hen I returned to of building in which load-
ish gardener who tried to trail ivy along
its massive, windswept struts. Before
W Oslo, I went to see
a group of buildings made
bearing posts allowed for
the raising of towering
visiting Brumunddal, I had read about from even older timber. At structures whose walls were
the rooftop space, and had entertained the open-air Norsk Folke- made of vertical boards.
visions of rustic Scandi outdoor seat- museum, a hundred and Stave churches usually had
ing—accessorized, perhaps, with sheep- sixty historical buildings steep, tiered wooden roofs,
skins, and equipped with a cabin serv- from around Norway have and were often decorated
ing gløgg in turned-wood mugs. Such been gathered in hilly, wooded park- with fantastically shaped carvings. They
notions swiftly evaporated as I climbed land. It was a bright, cold morning, and used to be widespread in northern Eu-
an icy metal staircase to the upper ter- there were few other visitors—it was rope, but only a few remain, almost all
race, which was blasted by a chill wind too late in the season for school groups. of them in Norway.
and covered with crunchy remnants of There were eleven zones, each ded- The church was on a hill, ap-
the most recent snowfall. Above our icated to a different geographical part proached along wooded pathways. Sil-
heads, the pillars and struts of the per- of the country. There was a school- houetted against the sky, the pine-tar-
gola looked like the masts of a gigan- house with a turf roof from western treated timbers of the façade looked
tic ship—their edges rounded, like huge Norway. Built in the eighteen-sixties, stark and black—almost threatening.
pencils, to diminish the force of winds it had a wood ceiling and floor, and Close up, the building was less fear-
that can pummel the tower. wooden benches and desks that had some. Walking along a raised, covered
Another late revision to the build- been installed with no thought of their gallery that surrounded the church’s
ing’s blueprints was a penthouse apart- effect on the students’ well-being. A core, I could hear my footfall ringing
ment for Buchardt, like the one atop farmhouse from Telemark had sur- on the plank flooring with a familiar,
the Flatiron Building. Some packing vived from the first half of the eigh- reassuring resonance. The main door-
boxes remained by the front door, but teenth century. The largest room was way was richly carved with interlock-
the place was well on its way to being illuminated by leaded windows and ing floral patterns. The gate to the in-
a spectacular cabin in the sky, with an furnished with a long dining table terior was locked, but when I peered
elegant dove-gray couch positioned that could easily have seated twenty. inside I could see—warmly illuminated
with a view across the lake, handsome About fifty yards away, I came across by concealed electric lighting—reli-
Flos lighting, and a gas fireplace in a a storehouse that consisted of a turf- gious paintings that dated from the
pillar of gray stone. Buchardt sat in an roofed cabin raised up on a log base. mid-seventeenth century.
armchair and explained that he travels It looked almost animate, like Howl’s Daylight fell on the polished floor-
a hundred days out of the year. In a de- moving castle, and appeared alarm- boards from concealed peepholes in
cade or so, though, he hoped to slow ingly off balance, though it had pre- the highest parts of the roof. Despite
down, and this seemed a congenial sumably stood without collapsing the chill of the day, the interior of the
place in which to do so. since it was first constructed, in about church seemed cozy and welcoming,
The clouds had lifted, and low sun- 1300. The museum offered a reminder the kind of space that promises to
light bounced off the lake and filled the that, not so long ago, the skills re- hold you safe, like an ark. After a few
room with replenishing warmth. Feel- quired to build enduring buildings minutes, I descended the path, turn-
ing that it would be hard not to have with wood—taking into account how ing around to look at the building
one’s spirits lifted by these surround- the substance was affected by mois- again from a distance. It was an ex-
ings, I asked Buchardt if he believed ture and temperature, and how it can traordinary architectural gesture: ris-
that being in a wood environment was be bent and torqued to meet differ- ing on the hilltop like a ship lifted by
conducive to better mental health. ent needs—were common. waves, towering above the clusters of
“Yes, because it’s warm, and the The most prized building in the mu- pine trees surrounding it. Once, I
surfaces are not so hard,” he replied. seum is a church that originated in the thought, this must have been the tall-
He went on, “Most of us already live village of Gol, in the interior of Nor- est building that anyone who laid eyes
in wooden buildings—only not so way. It was acquired in the late eigh- on it had ever seen. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 55
 FICTION

56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY ROE ETHRIDGE
 vetlana got back to Harvard the direction I pushed the applicator, or and-dad dress-up. Or did I feel that way

S day after me, though it felt like

years. I had already slept the
night in my new room, eaten break-
how methodically I tried the different
angles, the result was blinding, elec-
tric pain. I kept rereading the instruc-
only because my parents were divorced?
•
fast and lunch in the cafeteria, and tions. Where was I going wrong? It Svetlana and I were reading the course
made numerous trips to the storage was worrisome, especially since I was catalogue. It was like the book of all
facility, having the same conversation pretty sure that a guy—that Ivan— human possibilities. I thought there was
over and over with people whose ex- would be bigger than a tampon. At something wrong with the way it was or-
istence I had forgotten. “How was your that point my brain stopped being ganized. Why were the different branches
summer?” “How was your summer?” able to entertain the idea; it became of literature categorized by geography
“How was Hungary?” unthinkable. and language, while sciences were cate-
“So, how was Hungary? Did any- Svetlana had said I had better think gorized by the level of abstraction, or by
thing happen?” Lakshmi asked, with a about it. “You wouldn’t want to end the size of the object of study? Why wasn’t
conspiratorial sparkle. Lakshmi was up in that situation and not have literature classified by length? Why wasn’t
one of the people I remembered: last thought about it,” she said, reasonably. science classified by country? Why did
year, when we were freshmen, we had And yet it turned out that there wasn’t religion have its own program, instead of
exchanged confidences; we had both much to think about. If Ivan tried to falling under philosophy or anthropol-
been in love with older guys. There have sex with me, it was obvious that ogy? What made something a religion
had been certain similarities between I would let him. Maybe he would be and not a philosophy? Why was the his-
our situations, between Ivan and Noor. able to tell me what I had been doing tory of nonindustrial people anthropol-
And, notwithstanding my feeling that wrong, and it wouldn’t be as terrible ogy and not history?
a lot of things had happened, I an- as trying to put in a tampon. “Well, of course they’re arbitrary cat-
swered the question truthfully, in the egories,” Svetlana said, “but it’s because
sense that I knew Lakshmi intended • they’re historical, not formal.” She said
it. Nothing had happened. Meaning, Svetlana’s trip to Belgrade—her first that you couldn’t actually separate the
nothing had happened with Ivan. since the war—had gone well. There subject from the history of how it had
Meaning, we hadn’t had sex. had been only one moment, at the store been conceived since ancient Greece.
downstairs from her grandmother’s Personally, I thought we should be try-
• apartment, when she dropped a coin ing to think of a better way to orga-
The last time Svetlana and I had spo- and bent to pick it up, and had sud- nize knowledge than whichever one we
ken, she was at her grandmother’s denly remembered with horror how a happened to have inherited.
apartment in Belgrade, and I was at milk bottle had smashed on those par-
a phone booth in a Hungarian vil- ticular tiles. That was all there was: a •
lage, where Ivan, who had just grad- six-year-old image of splintering glass, Under Comparative Literature, I came
uated, had found me a summer job the blob of milk spreading over the to a listing for a class called Chance.
teaching English. dingy tiles like a diabolical hand. “Topics include the flâneur and the
“Did anything happen?” Svetlana I wanted to hear more about the random walk as the paradigmatic site
asked. diabolical hand, but Svetlana only of urban experience,” I read. Chance
“Well, like, that one thing didn’t hap- wanted to talk about the wilderness, was what Ivan had gone to California
pen,” I said. where she had just been a co-leader to study—his thesis had been about
• on one of the freshman-orientation random walks. And f lâneurs were
programs. She described the sublim- something that literature people talked
When Ivan first told me about the ity of nature, and the intense relation- about, and literature was what I was
teaching job, he said I should take my ships that she had formed with bor- going to study. Could the flâneurs and
time to think about it, because he didn’t ing-sounding freshmen, through trust the random walks help me understand
want to force me into anything. Svet- exercises and games that had been de- what had happened with Ivan?
lana said that, if I agreed to go, he was vised, over the years, for just this pur- The course description mentioned
going to try to have sex with me. It pose. She didn’t seem disturbed, as I André Breton’s “Nadja,” a book I’d
was a possibility I had never previ- would have been, by the idea that the noticed once in Svetlana’s room, when
ously considered. I daydreamed about experience had been designed for her, I was waiting for her to get ready to
Ivan all the time, imagining different to make her feel a certain way. go running.
conversations we might have, how he An increasingly large role was played “Is this good?” I asked.
might look at me, touch my hair, kiss in her narration by her co-leader, Matt. “I don’t know if you would like it.
me. But I never thought about hav- Each group had two leaders, a guy and You can borrow it if you want.”
ing sex. Nothing I knew about hav- a girl. I understood why it would have I turned to the last page. It said,
ing sex corresponded to anything I been exciting to have a shared mission “Beauty will be convulsive or will not
thought about or wanted. with a guy. At the same time, there was be at all.”
I had tried, on multiple occasions, something sinister about everyone being “Maybe another time,” I said.
to put in a tampon. No matter what so into this camping-themed mom- Months later, Ivan had written me
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 57
 French novel titled “Against Nature”—
about the degenerate scion of a noble
family who devoted himself to “deca-
dent” projects, like growing orchids
that resembled meat. In the end, I didn’t
think much of what that guy had ac-
complished. Still, I found the idea of
an aesthetic life tremendously com-
pelling. It was the first time I had heard
of anyone having an organizing prin-
ciple or goal for life, other than just
trying to make money and have kids.
People never openly said that that was
their organizing principle, but I had
often noticed, when I was growing up,
the way adults acted as though trying
to go anywhere or achieve anything
was a frivolous dream, a luxury, com-
pared with the real work of having kids
and making money.
Nobody ever explained what was
admirable about having kids, or why
it was the default course of action for
every human being. If you ever asked
why any particular person had had a
kid, or what good a particular kid was,
people treated it as blasphemy—as if
you were saying that they should be
“It’s expensive and difficult, but at least if you win dead, or the kid should be dead. It was
you get to take home a huge piece of garbage.” as if there was no way to ask what the
plan had been without implying that
someone should be dead.
• •
•
a long e-mail about Fellini and clowns, unwieldy textbooks give way to nor- One day, early in our friendship, Svet-
and the last line was “Beauty, Breton mal-sized books that looked as if a lana had told me that she thought I
says, will be convulsive or will not be person might actually read them just was trying to live an aesthetic life, and
at all.” I had resolved to look at “Nadja” in the course of life. But the Chance it was a major difference between us,
again, the next time I was in Svetla- books had an off-putting minimalism, because she was trying to live an eth-
na’s room, to see if there were any con- with slim bindings and wide margins. ical life. I wasn’t sure why the two had
text clues that might help with the The books I usually liked were thicker, to be opposed, and worried for a mo-
clowns. But the year had somehow less expensive, less visibly cool. That ment that she thought that I thought
ended without my ever again waiting was how you knew they would con- that it was O.K. to cheat or steal. But
for Svetlana in her room, looking at tain long descriptions of furniture and it turned out she meant something
her books. people falling in love. else: that I took more risks than she
Now we lived in different buildings, Just then, my eye was caught by a did and cared more about “style,” while
and eventually we would live far apart, fat Penguin Classics volume with a she cared about history and traditions.
and I would never hang out in her bed- poorly reproduced nineteenth-century When it came to choosing classes,
room. How brief and magical it was painting on the cover: “Either/Or,” by Svetlana liked taking introductions
that we lived so close to each other Søren Kierkegaard. I opened it to a and surveys, “mastering” basics before
and our most important job was to random page and read, “Either, then, moving to the next level. I had a ter-
solve mysteries. The temporariness one is to live aesthetically or one is to ror of being bored, so I preferred to
made it all the more important to fol- live ethically.” My heart was pound- take highly specific classes with inter-
low the right leads. ing. There was a book about this? esting titles, even when I hadn’t taken
the prerequisites and had no idea what
• • was going on.
It was exciting to turn the corner in I had first heard the phrase “aesthetic According to the back of “Either/
the bookstore from Computer Science life” last year, in a class called Con- Or,” the first half of the book was about
to Comparative Literature—to see the structed Worlds. We were reading a the aesthetic life, and included a no-
58 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
vella called “The Seducer’s Diary,” while had said of “Either/Or” that you had having the self‐control to not get her
the second half was about the ethical to either read the whole book or just pregnant or abandon her at the altar.
life, and consisted of some letters from not read it at all. Kierkegaard was It meant no spectators, no proof.
a judge about marriage. So the ethical funny! Nonetheless, I, too, flipped for-
life was related to getting married: I ward to “The Seducer’s Diary.” •
had suspected as much. It was some- “The Seducer’s Diary” started with For Russian class, I had to read a short
how implicit in my friendship with a description of Johannes, the seducer, story called “Rudolfio.” It was about a
Svetlana that she wanted to be in “a and how he was able, using his “men- sixteen-year-old girl named Io, who
stable relationship” and to someday be tal gifts,” to make a girl fall in love was in love with a twenty-eight-year-
a mother, while I wanted to have in- with him, “without caring to possess old married man. Io, who was whim-
teresting experiences that would help her in any stricter sense.” When I read sical, maintained that, when she and
me be a writer. that, I almost threw up. Wasn’t that this man Rudolf were together, they
Unsurprisingly, the back of “Either/ what had happened to me? Hadn’t I formed a single entity: Rudolfio. Ru-
Or” didn’t tell you which way of living been brought to the point where I dolf laughed and said that Io was funny.
was right. All it said was “Does Kier- would sacrifice everything—only for One day, when Rudolf ’s wife was
kegaard mean us to prefer one of the Ivan to leave off without the slightest out, Io showed up at his house. Her
alternatives? Or are we thrown back advance? Because he never had tried breasts resembled “little nests built by
on the existentialist idea of radical to have sex with me, and all the nights unknown birds to hatch their nest-
choice?” That had probably been writ- we sat up till dawn all we did was talk. lings.” Rudolf lent Io a copy of “The
ten by a professor. I recognized the The diary was about how this guy Little Prince,” which he, a grown man,
professor’s characteristic delight at not saw some random seventeen-year-old had for some reason.
imparting information. girl on the street, and decided he would Io and Rudolf took a walk in a va-
not spare her, and slowly, over the cant lot full of garbage. Io asked Ru-
• course of weeks and even months, he dolf to kiss her. Rudolf kissed her on
Lakshmi had come to the bookstore insinuated himself into her life, into the cheek, and said, “Only the closest
with me, but she never actually bought her family circle, presenting himself as people kiss on the lips.” Io slapped
anything. She always just browsed the an honorable suitor. When he pro- him in the face and ran away, through
post-colonial and critical theory, and posed, he did it as confusingly as pos- the garbage.
later scrounged up whatever books she sible, so she would have no idea what Io didn’t go home that night. She
decided she needed from Noor and his she had agreed to. “If she can predict turned up only the next afternoon. Ru-
scary friends. That was a difference anything, then I have gone wrong and dolf rushed over and found her sitting
between us: I had barely met Ivan’s the whole relationship loses its mean- on her bed, facing the wall. She wouldn’t
friends, but Lakshmi spent most of ing,” he wrote. This was just how I had say anything about where she had been,
her time with Noor’s circle. felt when Ivan told me about the Hun- and only told Rudolf to go to Hell.
It had taken me months to realize gary program. Then Rudolf nodded, picked up his
that Lakshmi wasn’t rich. Her clothes Once they were engaged, Johannes raincoat, and went to Hell.
came from invitation-only sales in New put on a huge campaign to convince
York that she went to with Noor’s her that engagements were dumb, and •
friend Isabel, or from some kind of got her to break it off. Then he tricked In class, Irina Nikolaevna asked us
consignment store where rich women whether Rudolf had loved Io. Every-
and teens off-loaded barely worn cou- one agreed that he hadn’t.
ture items, using the proceeds to buy “Maybe he loved her a little bit,”
one another’s anxiety and A.D.H.D. Julia said.
medications. I had never heard of such “He didn’t love her,” Andrei said.
goings on, which Lakshmi spoke of as “He was playing games.”
routine. Lakshmi had grown up in pa- “I don’t personally consider it love,
latial residences in Dubai and Copen- and maybe, after all, he wasn’t capa-
hagen, because her father was an am- ble,” Svetlana, who spoke Russian a
bassador. Her parents had hosted lavish billion times better than the rest of
parties, attended by a large staff, with- her into having sex with him . . . and us, said.
out actually owning any of the things then he disappeared forever, because We discussed the difference between
in their house. that was his M.O. Afterward, the girl kissing on the cheek (accusative sin-
scarcely knew what, if anything, had gular) and on the lips (accusative plu-
• happened to her—whether it had been ral). Irina Nikolaevna asked each of us
According to the introduction to “Ei- real. “As soon as she wanted to speak to describe the first time we kissed
ther/Or,” lots of people skipped the of it to another,” Kierkegaard wrote, anyone on the lips.
“ethical” half, and even most of the “it was nothing.” The extent to which Julia said she had kissed a boy in a
“aesthetic” half, and just read “The Se- the seducer left a girl with nothing was playground when she was nine. An-
ducer’s Diary.” Kierkegaard himself the very mark of his artistry. It meant drei said he had kissed his girlfriend
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 59
at a Christmas party when he was one. I was wondering what I would was complicated, because if you improved
eleven. Svetlana said she had kissed have said. Then I suddenly felt wor- the present quality of life, then more peo-
her cousin’s boyfriend at the zoo when ried about you, because I know you ple would have children—meaning that
she was thirteen. never had a boyfriend, either. I actu- the people you were potentially harm-
I said, untruthfully, that I had kissed ally almost turned around and told ing in the future were people who might
a boy at summer camp when I was you, ‘Selin, for once in your life, just not otherwise have been born, so maybe
fifteen. don’t tell the truth, O.K.?’ But then you had done them a favor.
“Fifteen? Are you sure?” Irina Ni- you had mandolin boy up your sleeve! In general, a lot of ethical questions
kolaevna wrote “15” on the board. It I was so relieved!” were related to causing people to be
turned out that she thought I had to “Mandolin boy saved the day,” I born. Was it morally wrong not to have
have been younger. She asked, then, agreed, looking in the mirror. My hair a child if you knew she would be happy?
what the boy had been like. I said he resembled the nest of an unknown bird What if you knew that most of her life
played the mandolin, inviting follow-up prepared to hatch its nestlings. would be happy but the last five years
questions about how and where he had would be extremely unhappy? I didn’t
played the mandolin. • get why the extremely unhappy per-
“He played the mandolin every- I started auditing an ethics seminar son wasn’t allowed to kill herself be-
where—incessantly,” I said. taught by a philosopher from Oxford. fore she messed up her average.
He used a lot of overhead transparen- The ethics seminar always left me
• cies, usually putting them on upside feeling dissatisfied and anxious. That
“Russian is so weird,” Svetlana said down or backward. The transparencies offhand way of invoking “the quality of
afterward, in the bathroom. “I don’t were charts and graphs, about the qual- life,” as if we could measure it. I wished
think when you learn other languages ity of life for different populations. there was a class where you learned what
you have to talk about your sexual his- One question we talked about in the it actually was: the quality of life.
tory. It’s funny—back when I was thir- seminar was how to weigh the benefit
teen, I felt so bad about kissing my of a slight improvement in the present •
cousin’s boyfriend. But it really came quality of life for millions of people Lakshmi said it was weird that I wasn’t
in handy today, because if it wasn’t for against a risk of great harm to millions on the literary magazine, like every-
that I would never have kissed any- of people who hadn’t been born yet. It one else who wanted to be a writer, or
like Lakshmi herself, who “wasn’t a
writer” but cared about writing. I didn’t
get what Lakshmi meant when she
said she wasn’t a writer.
“I’m rubbish at it,” she said.
“Well, none of us are good.”
“No, it’s different. I used to write po-
ems. . . .” Horror flickered across her face.
For the application to work on the
literary magazine, you had to read a
short story, describe its strengths and
weaknesses, and say what revisions you
would ask for if you were going to pub-
lish it. The story they gave you was
about a plumber who had sex with a
housewife whose toilet he was fixing.
I wrote down some ways that I thought
the story could be less dumb. I got
onto the fiction board. Lakshmi was
voted to be the person in charge of
parties, an area in which her expertise
was widely recognized.
•
A recurring problem in the ethics sem-
inar was how to avoid ending up at
something called “the Repugnant Con-
clusion.” The Repugnant Conclusion
said that it was possible to justify de-
creasing a population’s quality of life if
you made the population bigger. It was
really hard not to get there. Even if you
said something inoffensive­sounding,
like, “I think we should do the most
good for the most people.” That meant
that, if there were a million people
whose lives were “well worth living,”
and you had the opportunity to trans­
form them into a billion people whose
lives were “barely worth living,” you
would be morally obligated to do it,
and there you were at the Repugnant
Conclusion. The phrase “barely worth
living” made a knot form in my stom­
ach. In what country was it happening?
•
One afternoon, when I stopped by
Svetlana’s room to pick her up to go
running, she came to the door wear­
ing just leggings and a sports bra.
“I hooked up with Matt,” she said,
indicating some red marks on her chest
and shoulders. Was that hives? Did “Beer here! Get your beer here! We could get a beer and hang! No pressure!”
some action have to be taken? Who
was Matt? Not that camping guy? I
felt relieved when Svetlana zipped up
• •
her fleece. Maybe things would go back
to normal. noticed that Matt wasn’t fully capable Jon was that eventually he was going
Nothing went back to normal. Matt of meaningful discourse!—followed by to want to have sex. I didn’t get why
was now Svetlana’s boyfriend. I felt sinking horror: Svetlana had always it was a problem, since she thought he
surprised by my own emotions—not known, and she didn’t care. was so good­looking and smart.
by the resentment and the jealousy but “But I’m going to be a virgin when
by the relief, guilt, and disappointment. • I get married,” Lakshmi said.
Insofar as Svetlana and I had been in Lakshmi still loved Noor but had I was stunned. “But what about
competition over whose world view started dating Jon, a senior who wrote Noor?” I asked, though it wasn’t the
was better . . . that was over. She would fiction and had a short story in almost right question.
never again be what she had been, not every issue of the literary magazine. I “Nothing ever happened with Noor,”
in my life, and not in her own. This had never successfully read any of his she said.
boyfriend, or his successor, would re­ stories. Lakshmi said that Jon was too I frowned, trying to think of how to
strict her activities, her thoughts. In a good­looking and smart for her. “I formulate what it was I wanted to know.
way, I had won, but it felt like defeat. should probably dump him,” she said. It was something about what rules she
How could she drop out of the race “If I wait too long, I’ll get dumped.” was following, and with what expecta­
when we had only just started? Jon, who lived off­campus, had tions, and how she had come up with
cooked dinner for her. the rules and the expectations. “So you
• “Was it good?” I asked. don’t think you have to know you’re
It became impossible to have a real “It was fine.” She dispassionately sexually compatible with someone be­
conversation with Svetlana. The min­ described the mushroom risotto, the fore you decide to get married?” I said.
ute you tried to talk about anything sauvignon blanc, the candles, and the “But I’m having an arranged mar­
interesting, Matt would swiftly, good­ pitcher of chrysanthemums. riage,” Lakshmi said, seeming as sur­
naturedly, inexorably change the sub­ I said it sounded as if he liked her. prised by my reaction as I was by this
ject back to one of the only three things “No, it’s part of his whole thing.” new information. She said it wasn’t
he ever talked about. “What thing?” new. “You knew about my sister,” she
Once, when Matt was travelling “Like, he stares into my eyes and pointed out, accurately. But almost the
with his a­cappella group, and Svet­ says I’m a mysterious exotic beauty, first thing Lakshmi had ever told me
lana and I were talking the way we and he can’t decipher me. It’s Orien­ about her sister was that she “wasn’t
used to, Svetlana surprised me by say­ talist bullshit.” She tilted up her chin an intellectual.” It wasn’t the same as
ing, “This is the kind of conversation in a way that made her cheekbones not being intelligent—she was bril­
we can’t have when Matt is around.” I stand out. liant at entertaining, decorating, and
felt unutterable relief—finally, she had Lakshmi said that the problem with fashion—but she didn’t care about
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 61
books. To me, it made sense that some- off the rest of you, too. Lakshmi’s fa- was greeting people at the door, smil-
one who cared more about entertain- ther sometimes joked about women ing dazzlingly through fake eyelashes.
ing than about books might have an who made love matches: how highly “You came!” She kissed my cheek
arranged marriage. But Lakshmi said they must value themselves, to think and touched my skirt. “What’s this?
that it wasn’t related to your interests. they were fascinating enough, with- Finally you’re wearing something that
Everyone in her extended family had out the institution of family, to keep shows your body.”
had an arranged marriage. Marriage a man faithful to old age. My aunt had bought me the skirt
was arranged marriage. and matching top from the DKNY
“What if you don’t want to get • section at Bloomingdale’s. They were
married?” “It finally happened,” Svetlana said at made of some velvety, drapey material.
“But I do want to. I think living lunch one day. “I had sex with Matt. The way the skirt hung looked inten-
alone is really difficult, especially for Afterward I thought, Today, this really tional, almost sentient. The cost for
a woman. I admire peo- important step in my life the two items—more than three hun-
ple who do it, but it’s not has taken place. But how is dred dollars—had struck me as ob-
for me. Anyway, I want it physically different than scene. How was a person allowed to
children.” if I had just jammed in a have something like that?
Fe e l i n g o b s c u r e l y banana?” Making my way through the crowd
wounded, I found myself The dining hall seemed upstairs, I was surprised to spot Şahin,
asking whether she didn’t to have got a shipment the president of the Turkish Students
want to be free to choose of particularly large and Club. He was standing near a window,
her own husband. underripe bananas. Rigid talking to a fair-haired guy.
As I heard myself speak, and green-tinged, they “Oh, so I actually know a literature
I felt childish and dumb, were sharply curved at one person,” Şahin said, when I approached.
in a particularly Ameri- end and less curved at the “This isn’t really my scene.” He had
can way. What was it about Ameri- other, which gave them a smirky, jaw- to lean over for me to hear him. I had
canness that made a person feel so like aspect. never stood so close to him before,
childish, so unaesthetic? When I was “It’s literally the same thing,” Svet- and hadn’t realized how tall he was.
growing up, I was the only American lana said, holding a banana. I esti- His friend, too, was over six feet. It
and the only child in my family, and mated its girth at about six times that was pleasant to stand beside them, to
there was no clear distinction between of a tampon. And yet Svetlana wasn’t feel like the smallest and most deli-
my Americanness and my childish- the kind of person who used “literally” cate person. They were drinking to
ness: the way my parents had to carry to mean “figuratively.” Şahin’s getting a grant to study Ant-
my peanut butter and Flintstones vi- “It turns out that Matt has a really arctic seabirds. Şahin brought me a
tamins with us to Ankara, and my cous- big one,” she said. plastic cup of wine.
ins had to be warned not to make fun “But, like . . .” I glanced—eloquently, “What’s new with birds?” I asked.
of me for not knowing about things. I felt—at the banana. Şahin said that somebody had dis-
But it wasn’t just my family; didn’t ev- “I know—I was so surprised. It’s covered that dinosaurs had had feath-
eryone in the world think that Amer- weird how you can’t tell what size a ers. This was true not just of avian di-
ican people were babies—with their guy is going to be.” nosaurs but of some other dinosaurs
innocence, their Disney, their inabil- “But how did you . . . How did it . . .” as well.
ity to drive a stick shift? “Well, it was excruciatingly painful, That reminded me of a Woody
Lakshmi said that dating and ro- especially the first time. But after two Allen line, about how “the thing with
mance were fun when you were young, or three times it basically goes in. You feathers” wasn’t hope but was actually
but that freedom of choice in love was don’t feel like it’s possible, but obvi- his—Woody Allen’s—nephew. I didn’t
an illusion. It had something to do ously your body’s capacity is greater have positive feelings about Woody
with Sartre and how freedom meant than your awareness of it. I mean, the Allen, whose movies often included
you were condemned to constant flux circumference of a baby’s head is thirty- scenes of men my father’s age having
and potential annihilation. Anyway, five centimetres.” remedial conversations about “free will,”
when it came to choice, Lakshmi had I felt a wave of despair. or dating catatonic-seeming teen-agers.
always been her father’s favorite, and Svetlana asked if I thought she Yet I now found it hilarious that his
she knew that he would demand more looked different. In fact, her face seemed nephew, like the non-avian dinosaurs,
for her than she could ever demand softer, rounder. She was wearing a white had feathers.
for herself. Furthermore, an arranged cardigan I didn’t recognize, and the Şahin’s friend refilled my cup. Was
marriage meant that the husband was white seemed to hold a different mean- it wine that helped a person appreci-
committing not to you personally but ing than it would have before. ate things uncritically? How easy and
to thousands of years of tradition— pleasant it was to stand there with those
to his whole family, as well as to yours. • guys, saying whatever random, irrele-
That took a lot of pressure off your I went to a party that Lakshmi had vant stuff came to mind. It turned out
looks, which wouldn’t last forever, and organized at the literary magazine. She that I could ask whatever questions I
62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
thought of, and they would answer. I walked right up to me, looked down wear, then under it. I felt a wave of
asked the friend where his accent was at my face with a speculative, almost panic and pushed lightly with the hand
from, and he said Poland. I asked about affectionate expression, leaned over, on his chest. Right away, he took his
the public transportation in Warsaw. and kissed me. It felt slow and easy hand out of my underwear—just like
He said you could ride a tram for free and endless and immediate. For some- Seventeen magazine had implied that
if you had fought in the Warsaw Up- thing that had seemed so impossible he would. How amazing that it was
rising, or if your mother had given for so long to happen so effortlessly, possible to communicate like that. He
birth to you on a tram. like a row of cards falling over, and touched my face, tilted my chin up,
falling, and falling . . . and the angle of the kiss changed and
• I remembered an article I had read got deeper.
At some point, we were at another in Seventeen about what to do with “Shall we get out of here?” he said
party. Why did all parties sound and your hands under these precise circum- in a suave, euphemistic-sounding tone.
smell the same, even when the com- stances. It said to put one hand on his I nodded. I always wanted to get out
ponent people were different? It was neck and the other on his chest. The of here, and nobody ever asked.
as if all the different individuals came hand on the chest let you feel how
together and formed the eternal en- strong and sexy he was but also gave •
tity Party Person. This reminded me you “control.” The cold was breathtaking. Our hands
of “Voltron,” a cartoon about five space I put one hand on his chest, to feel brushed against each other, and then
pilots who were supposed to defend how strong and sexy he was. With the he took my hand in his, which was
the universe. In every episode, they got other hand, I tentatively felt the place warm and smooth. Why wasn’t it pos-
into a terrible predicament, where the where his buzz cut started. It felt ten- sible to hold hands all the time? I sud-
one who was a girl was always about der and dear—so full of life. What an denly remembered that, in grade
to be forced to become a sex slave and amazing thing a neck was, the way all school, my friend Leora and I would
carry fruit on her head. At the last min- the blood in a human body had to pass routinely walk down the hallway hold-
ute, they would remember to merge through it, and how easy that made it ing hands. When had that stopped
their five rockets, thereby forming Vol- to kill someone. seeming normal?
tron: a giant invincible robot-man with He slid his hand under the waist- Now he was slowing down in front
rocket arms and legs. It was unclear band of my skirt, first over my under- of some random iron gate. “Here’s
why they didn’t become Voltron sooner.
“It’s probably their selfish Ameri-
can individualism,” Şahin said.
I was impressed by this evidence that
he had been following my long story
about “Voltron.” On the other hand, I
was pretty sure that “Voltron” wasn’t an
American show. Then again, maybe
that was why the people’s selfish indi-
vidualism didn’t get better results.
•
I asked whether there was anything in
a gin-and-tonic besides gin and tonic.
Şahin’s friend said that the beauty of
a gin-and-tonic lay precisely in its
simplicity. The conversation turned
to quinine. Şahin said that malaria
sometimes affected native Hawaiian
songbirds.
“So get a grant to go to Hawaii and
make them tiny gin-and-tonics,” Şa-
hin’s friend said, handing out another
round.
•

In the mirror, my eyes looked big and

especially bright. Tea lights twinkled
on the edge of the bathtub. The bath-
room door opened and Şahin’s friend
came in. I started to leave, but he “I didn’t want to tell you in front of the boys, but it’s ‘yee-haw,’ not ‘yahoo.’”
where I live,” he murmured. It hadn’t thinking about my period. “Over here,” close: grayish-blue with hazel flecks. He
occurred to me that we were going to I said. He seemed slightly annoyed, as slid his hand into my underwear again.
where he lived. if it was unfair of me to expect him to “Ah, Jesus.” His voice had some kind
In one movement, he unlocked and guess that I would do something like of regret in it, as if something was going
opened the door of his suite and flicked sit on the sofa. But maybe I had imag- to get him in trouble. The feeling of
on a sallow overhead light. When he ined it, because then he was saying, being able to get him in trouble was
leaned in to kiss me, it was like slid- again in the suave voice, “I was afraid breathtaking.
ing back into the water on one of those I had lost you.” I was struggling to process both the
long days at the beach, where you get • external developments and the possi-
out just so you can go back in again. bilities for action.
At some point, he said he would be In the bedroom, the bottom bunk had I knew that the first time you had
right back, and disappeared into the been removed to make a loft bed, but sex was supposed to be with some-
bathroom. I remained standing, con- there was no desk or dresser under- one special who cared about you. And,
templating a pile of outdoor equip- neath—just empty space. With noth- even if you’d had sex before, you
ment that was leaning against the wall. ing there to step on, it was unclear how weren’t supposed to do it on a first
After I had looked at it for a while, I to get into the bed. date. Since I had never had sex be-
walked around the room. There was “I like this fabric,” he said, finger- fore, and hadn’t been on even one date
nothing else in it but a sofa. The sofa, ing my top for a moment before pull- with this guy, indications were that I
when I sat on it, had an organic, swamp- ing it over my head: something I hadn’t should not let him have sex with me,
like quality. experienced since age six. How strange if that was what he was trying to do,
Şahin’s friend came out of the bath- that this was like that—that the most on this, our zero date.
room, went over to where we had been adult thing was, in some way, like being On the other hand, Svetlana had
standing, and seemed surprised that I a child. He found the hidden zipper done everything the way you were sup-
wasn’t there. His eyes swept the room and the skirt fell to the floor with a posed to, and none of it had sounded
without seeing me. In his bemused yet soft whoosh. appealing. Svetlana herself hadn’t
tolerant expression, I felt that I could It turned out that the way you got seemed that enthused. And even if I
see his whole attitude toward girls. into the bed was by climbing on the did want to follow that route—who
They could be anywhere! He actually desk and sort of jumping. Why would knew when the opportunity would
opened the closet and looked inside, a person choose to live this way? arise? Special, caring guys, the kind
like maybe I would be sitting in there I had never seen eyes that color up who were always talking about re-
specting women, never did seem in-
terested in me. Frankly, I wasn’t their
No. 1 fan, either.
Insofar as this guy didn’t seem to
think I was special—it felt euphoric
and freeing, it was one of the most ex-
citing things that had ever happened
to me.
Then he moved his hand farther
back and did something that made me
freeze in pain and terror, and I real-
ized that, as often happened, all my
thinking had been beside the point. I
couldn’t “decide” to let him do it, any
more than I could decide to bend my
elbow in the opposite direction.
“I’m not very experienced,” I blurted.
“That’s fine,” he said, and with-
drew his hand. It was weird how some
things I said seemed to have no mean-
ing to him, while others had a recog-
nized meaning that he immediately
responded to.
“I’ll show you what you can do,” he
said in the suave voice.
•
Planes and satellites blinked inscru-
tably against the gray glowing sky,
and the moon hung low and full over at compartmentalizing. On an im- When some days had passed and I
the river. I could hear everything, and pulse, I had asked if she ever thought hadn’t heard anything, I got his name
smell everything: the twigs in the cur- our lives would be simpler if we could from Şahin myself, and sent a care-
rent, the rain from half an hour ago, just date girls. fully composed e-mail, asking if he
the cars’ tires on the wet asphalt. I Svetlana didn’t reply right away. “I wanted to get a coffee. He replied
understood that this was it: this was find most lesbians intimidating,” she immediately: “To be honest, I don’t
the quality of life, and I wouldn’t have said finally. “I don’t think I’d fit in. really drink coffee.”
access to it forever. I had to think Especially since I’m always lusting
through everything now, while the after boys.” •
window was still open. That was something I, too, had con- It turned out there was always a party
How did a person live an aesthetic sidered: the physical response I had felt somewhere. You didn’t have to know
life? In “Either/Or,” it involved seduc- to Ivan, the dull electric jolt, like the the people whose room it was in. At
ing and abandoning young girls, mak- starting up of some heavy, slow machin- one party, I ran into Ham, a guy from
ing them go crazy, and writing a book ery. But was that feeling enough to my Constructed Worlds class. His hair
about it. But what did you do if you counterbalance all the disadvantages? was longer now, and green. He seemed
were a young girl? Did you have to be “But girls are so beautiful,” I said. pleased to see me. I walked around
seduced and abandoned? Maybe the “And easier to negotiate with.” the room, drinking warm beer from a
challenge then was to not go crazy, so Again, Svetlana didn’t answer right Solo cup. Everyone was obsessively
you could write the book yourself. Yes, away. “I would feel squeamish with drinking this beer, which came out of
writing a book was key—that was the anything beyond kissing and playing a keg. I had never seen a keg before.
most important part for me. That was with each other’s breasts,” she said. It looked comically literal. I went back
what I needed the aesthetic life for: if I realized that I, too, had been think- to where Ham was standing and stood
you lived your life as if it were a novel, ing only about kissing and playing nearby. Within two minutes, he had
then at some point you just had to with each other’s breasts. What else put his arm around me and asked if I
write everything down. did lesbians even do? Other than oral wanted to get out of there. Had it al-
In Russian, the word they used for sex, which was apparently horrible. The ways been this easy?
“novel,” roman, was also used for “love way people talked about it on sitcoms: Armies of tiny painted lead fig-
affair.” Everything that had happened “Does he like . . . deep‐sea diving?” You ures, belonging to different tribes or
with Ivan: had it been a roman, or had to be altruistic to do it—a gener- races, were stationed on every surface
hadn’t it? At the time, I had thought ous lover. of his dorm room. The dresser draw-
so. But didn’t a “love affair” imply sex? “Do you not feel squeamish when ers were pulled out to varying extents
Was that where I had made my mis- you think about boys?” I asked. and covered with green felt boards,
calculation: somewhere between “I do,” she said, “but it still feels ex- to make terraces, and a war was hap-
“being in love” and sex? From age citing. The idea of being penetrated pening on the terraces. Clearing a pla-
twelve, I had known that it was re- and dominated.” toon of militarized trolls from the
lated to “being in love” that my un- I recognized that the idea of being bed, Ham talked about his girlfriend
derwear would get wet, that I wanted penetrated and dominated was excit- in Anchorage, who had an eating dis-
to look up “orgasm” in a dictionary. ing to me, too, even if the mechanics, order, and said that he had always
But I hadn’t thought about it any fur- as well as the implications, were un- been attracted to me. I told him that
ther—because I always had more clear and troubling. Svetlana was right: I had never had sex before. He said
pressing problems, like the problem love wasn’t a slumber party with your there were lots of other things we
of escape—and because what had been best friend. Love was dangerous, vio- could do.
the point of thinking about it, when lent, with an element of something re- •
nobody had showed any signs of want- pulsive. Love had death in it, and mad-
ing to have sex with me? ness. To try to escape those things was I e-mailed Şahin’s friend again. “O.K.,
Now multiple variables had changed. childish and anti‐novelistic. forget the coffee,” I wrote. “There’s this
I had escaped; the pressing problem was other thing I need you to help me out
how to become a writer. And that guy— • with.” I wasn’t sure how good of a reader
Şahin’s friend—hadn’t he wanted to Inconveniently, I seemed not to have he was, so I tried to explain it really
have sex with me? I went over the in- retained Şahin’s friend’s name. Şahin clearly: how the situation I had been
teraction again in my mind, and couldn’t had introduced us, but we both had in when we met I needed to not be in
think of any other interpretation. foreign names, the kind you needed to anymore; how I needed his help.
hear a couple of times. In retrospect, After I hit Send, I went back to
• it didn’t seem auspicious that he hadn’t doing my Russian homework. I had
I found myself remembering a con- asked me to repeat my name. On the finished only three exercises when the
versation I had had once with Svet- other hand, maybe he had just missed phone started to ring. 
lana, about whether women were more the right moment, and had planned to
affected by heartache than men were, ask Şahin later, and I would hear from NEWYORKER.COM
or whether they just weren’t as good him soon. Elif Batuman on choosing an aesthetic life.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 65

 THE CRITICS

BOOKS

AMERICAN HUNGER
The journals of Alice Walker.

BY LAUREN MICHELE JACKSON

he Color Purple” is a novel and Spielberg were able to connect a familial arrangement fixed by its his-
“T about women, but one man
takes up precious room. For
(owing in part, as she puts it, to the “nasty
hoarding of the single lobby telephone
torical background. Throughout her life,
Walker’s parents, Willie Lee and Min-
much of the book, Celie, the narrator, by our receptionist”). And then: nie Lou, worked on and around the land,
refers to the epistolary novel’s princi- in and around white people’s homes—
Alice, he says, how is it that Nettie knows
pal patriarch (aside from the God to Albert’s name? he asks. Everyone knows his
legacies of that postbellum enterprise
whom she addresses her letters) only as name, I reply. Even Celie. She doesn’t write sharecropping, “which so resembles slav-
“Mr. _____.” She has passed from one it on her letters out of fear. That’s what I ery,” Walker later reflected. The Walkers
man’s domain to another’s, handed off thought, he says. But we were wishing you were proud that they could pay the mid-
by the only father she knows to live were here because some folks felt differently. wife who brought Walker into the world,
Anyhow, we shot it that way.
with Mr. _____ in wedlock, though her What are you doing in London?
but her mother was returned to the fields
sister, Nettie, is the one he really wanted. Readings. not long after giving birth. As the last of
Yet, in a world ruled by men, Celie pro- eight children, Walker was adored and
vides our perspective; even their speech The exchange appears in “Gathering also distanced from her older siblings,
must f low through her pen. And so Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of many of whom were her part-time care-
she at least sets the tone. We hear breath- Alice Walker, 1965–2000” (Simon & takers. Then, at the age of eight, a shot
lessness, for example, when she learns Schuster), edited by the late Valerie Boyd. from a brother’s BB gun struck her right
that “Shug Avery is coming to town!” I am struck by the entry’s final lines. The eye. She lost vision in the eye and the in-
That Shug Avery—the sharp and sing- last word sags with fatigue, or maybe a jury left behind a crust of scar tissue that
ing Queen Honeybee—knows exactly certain pragmatism, pulling Albert and Walker began lowering her head to hide.
who she is. Shug knows Celie’s husband, Celie and Steven back down to earth. As she later wrote, “It was great fun being
too, but not as Mr. anything. In the nov- “What are you doing in London?” the cute. But then, one day, it ended.”
el’s twenty-third letter, Shug lies abed in director asks. “Readings,” the writer an- She withdrew into her room and into
his home, barking orders at someone swers—no more, no less. novels, scribbled poems, and thought
called Albert, a name Celie doesn’t rec- about suicide. She conceived of herself
ognize. “Then I remember,” she writes. alker knew that her words, even as an unsightly, blighted person; only
Albert is Mr. _____. The name is not a
secret; Celie has always known it.
W the most diaristic, could well be
destined for a public audience, and she
when she was fourteen did the surgical
assistance of a kindly ophthalmologist
It was the fall of 1985, and Alice Walker knew this even before a word of hers help her regain the sense that she might
was in London when she received an was ever published. This conviction be beautiful. “It was during those six years
“urgent call from Steven.” She had spent seems a precondition for a writing ca- that much new feeling was born within
much of the past summer on Steven reer, the kind of vanity without which me,” Walker ref lects in a 1977 entry.
Spielberg’s set, in North Carolina, as a one writes in vain. The pages of the jour- “Those six years that made me a human
consultant and as an awed bystander nal leave a record of both the pulsing being. Those six years—so unbelievably
amid the wounding process of adapting epiphanies and the irritations of daily painful—that made me a writer.” Still,
ABOVE: PHILIPPE PETIT-ROULET

her novel to film. The novel itself had existence, and chart, for a dimly per- she adds, “Knowing all this, I ask my-
taken on the aura of stardom, having ceived intimate reader, the progress of a self, Would you be willing to go through
won both the National Book Award and literary pilgrim. Pain, joy, spells of de- those 6 years again? And I answer, No.”
the Pulitzer Prize, and surpassed a mil- pression, unease, engagement, even dis- After two years at Spelman College,
lion copies in sales. But filmmaking has affection—all are material. They’ll feed she transferred to Sarah Lawrence, bent
its own exigencies, and that fall, to her the writings; they’ll sustain the readings. on becoming a writer. Walker then re-
annoyance, two days elapsed before she Born in 1944, Walker grew up within versed her great migration and arrived
66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
“It has dawned on me lately that insecurity is one of the biggest killers of art,” Walker wrote in October, 1977.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 67
in Jackson, Mississippi, invigorated by ward whites. Walker wrote a letter to the woman wisdom (“since we were beyond
Dr. King’s cause. There she met another Saturday Review and sent copies of it to discussing why this question is never
civil-rights activist named Melvyn Lev- several close associates (including Mu- asked artists who are men”), and revis-
enthal, a New York University law stu- riel Rukeyser) and new book-tour ac- ited the issues that Virginia Woolf had
dent interning with the N.A.A.C.P. quaintances ( Jesse Jackson, Studs Ter- broached half a century earlier concern-
Legal Defense Fund. She didn’t think kel), with the following note: “Let me ing writing’s material requirements. Black
much of white people in the movement, put it this way, all my heroes died during women especially, Walker observed, live
but she was paired with the intern on the last ten years, and they did not die out the marginality of the domestic, in
the task of taking depositions from for me or my people to continue to be their homes and those of others. “Prog-
cheated sharecroppers. Their mutual vul- insulted by people who apparently spent ress affects few,” she writes. “Only revo-
nerability nurtured familiarity, a Black the last decade reading Updike.” lution can affect many.”
woman and a Jewish man driving around In 1971, Walker was granted a fellow- Walker’s journals become a place for
hostile territory, dodging racist threats ship at the Radcliffe Institute, at Har- accounting, often literally, tallying earn-
by day which kept them up at night. At vard, which allowed the work of writing ings from teaching, advances, honoraria.
a motel, the two read aloud from the to continue. She finished a second man- At times, the financial receipts are inter-
Song of Songs while awaiting the cloaked uscript of poems, “Revolutionary Petu- spersed among a more general inventory.
wrath of a sundown town. nias,” which became a finalist for the Na- In an entry from 1974, when she and her
Leventhal was neither the first white tional Book Award for poetry. Perhaps husband moved to New York, she notes,
boy Walker ever messed with nor the first best known for the incantatory poem “Be “We are leaving Jackson. . . . My father
she dared bring home, but he was the Nobody’s Darling” (“Be an outcast./Take is dead. . . . My novel is between 1st and
one she married, in 1967. Walker’s entries the contradictions / Of your life / And 2nd drafts. . . . I have accepted a job as
as a newlywed glow with a passion forged wrap around/You like a shawl”), the vol- an editor of Ms. For $700.00 a month
in an atmosphere of righteousness. Yet ume, inspired by her mother’s green plus $750 per article. . . . In Love & Trou-
the confluence of Mississippi and mar- thumb, exalts the moxie of that flower, ble was the editor’s choice of The New
riage proved suffocating. After the birth cut and resurrected into beauty. The York Times last week. . . . Revolutionary
of their daughter, Rebecca, Jackson was flower, as the final poem has it, is now Petunias was nominated for a National
no longer a city of burgeoning love but “Blooming/For Deserving Eyes./Bloom- Book Award.” She adds, “It will be in-
an enclosure bounded by bigotry and ing Gloriously/For its Self.” teresting to see if my depressions con-
small-mindedness on both sides of the The next year, Walker returned to the tinue, after all this.”
color line. Leventhal, working with the Radcliffe Institute “alone,” as she writes Reality is one way of accounting for
Legal Defense Fund full time, kept long in her journal—Rebecca had been left Walker’s accounting. Such caution was
hours, eroding Walker’s time to write in her father’s care—in order to write necessary for a writer who is not only
and her pride in the nobility of her hus- fiction. Reflecting on her newfound sol- a writer but Black and a woman and
band’s profession. “Mel wants to stay itude, which offered what Walker called single to boot; she and Leventhal split
here til he makes his mark—am I to stay a “much needed sense of freedom and up in 1976. In an entry from the follow-
here til Mississippi makes its mark on possibility,” she left behind a beatific re- ing year:
me?” she writes. minder: “Don’t forget that during this After taxes my Ms salary is 8,400. My rent
Three days before her daughter was period you wrote 3 stories & began the is 3,600.00
born, Walker completed the manuscript 2nd novel!” “In Love & Trouble,” thir- $4,800.00 is what’s left for food, clothing,
for her début novel, “The Third Life of teen short stories about thirteen Black Rebecca.
Grange Copeland” (1970). The title char- women, appeared in 1973; “Meridian,” a If I could add another $10,000 each year
from lectures & royalties—we’d be okay. More
acter is a Black sharecropper made mean novel about a student of that name who than okay really.
by the emasculating, embittering circum- becomes a civil-rights activist, came out MANUSCRIPT, ARCHIVES, AND RARE BOOK LIBRARY, EMORY UNIVERSITY
stances of his time, race, and class; his in 1976. Between those books, Walker Then she writes, “Risk makes my back
PREVIOUS PAGE: SARA KRULWICH / COURTESY THE STUART A. ROSE

“third life” comes with the epiphany of travelled to Eatonville, Florida, in search ache.”
personal responsibility for his violence. of the resting place of an author “who The plain math belies an insistent
“Nobody’s as powerful as we make them had guts & soul & a loud mouth!” That apprehension that extends beyond bills.
out to be,” he tells his son at the end of was Zora Neale Hurston, the nearly for- Tracking the business of being a writer
the novel. “We got our own souls, don’t gotten author of “Their Eyes Were serves the dual function of recording
we?” Reviews were mostly complimentary, Watching God.” growing renown, honoraria, and advances
but Jet played up the supposed hypocrisy tucked beside notices of reviews and
that a novelist who espoused racial pride hen Walker was asked whether awards. “More than okay,” for Walker,
married a white man—a sidelong cri-
tique of Walker’s political fitness that
W she thought artists should have
children, she responded (in her own re-
won’t be secured by an added zero or
two. In an entry from 1978, little punc-
followed her throughout her career. A counting), “They should have children— tuation separated financial and emo-
woman who had published a study of assuming this is of interest to them— tional needs:
Flannery O’Connor, writing in the Sat- but only one.” In a 1979 essay titled “One If worse comes to worse the IRS can wait,
urday Review, was scandalized by Cope- Child of One’s Own,” she elaborated on or I can even take out a loan.
land’s seemingly redemptive violence to- her peculiar twist on such woman-to- I am in need of love. And loving.

68 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022

At this point, she was with Robert Allen,
a longtime editor of The Black Scholar
and someone she’d known from her Spel-
man days. She was as worried about fall-
ing out of love with him as she was about
loving him at her own expense. The pre-
carities of love matched those of money.
Walker’s permanent departure from
the South and her further freedom of
movement—toward New York, then to-
ward San Francisco—accompanied her
rising profile. Not that she was univer-
sally adored; her mixed feelings about
movement work didn’t go unnoticed. Like
Hurston before her, she was viewed within
certain literary circles as someone who “ You don’t mind staying home to watch the TV while I’m gone, do you?”
had opportunely endeared herself to white
women. Gloria Steinem was a friend, and
Walker became a regular contributor to
• •
Ms., which published such essays of hers
as “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” It was New Year’s Day, 1978. lover in it, but perhaps there is. I hope
and “One Child of One’s Own,” both of Even after such careful, consoling in- so. I know I couldn’t stand Princeton
which later appeared in a collection that ventory, though, peace can be easily for a day.”
defined “womanism,” the Black-woman- dashed, perhaps by an article in the paper Walker’s preoccupation with finances
loving ethos that Walker had named. about a writer you know. The next year, seems to increase in proportion to her
Skeptics such as Sonia Sanchez and Ish- reading a profile of Toni Morrison in resources. A series of 1981 entries affix
mael Reed suggested that Walker had the Times Magazine, Walker snags on the completion of her third novel—“I in-
somehow sold out Black folks in order the fact that the paperback rights to tend to call it: . . . The Color Purple . . .
to get in good with white feminism. But “Song of Solomon” sold for more than Or Purple . . . I think the first”—to the
Walker was ambivalent toward Ms., and three hundred thousand dollars: prospect of land acquisition in Men-
not just because of the “starvation wages” I’ve been looking inside myself to see how
docino, in Northern California: “I offered
she was paid. A draft of a letter from the I feel about this. A little jealous? A little en- 90,000. The place haunts me a little still.
eighties that she sent to two editors at vious? Probably. But on the other hand, it helps Though in order to afford it I would have
the publication discloses the paternalism that she writes so beautifully—even if I feel to raise my offer at least 10,000. . . . How
she experienced at the office: “Whenever her characters never go anywhere. They are could I do it?” She does the math again,
created, I feel, so they might legitimately exist.
I spoke there was a curiously respectful And that’s art, for sure, but not inspiration,
and it works out; the following year, she
silence punctuated by even more respect- direction, struggle. purchases “20 acres of very hilly but beau-
ful chuckles. Then the business of the . . . I resent the little flashes of dis-ease tiful Mendocino land.”
magazine continued.” when I hear the loud hosannas & the large $ “Looking back over this diary I see
If such experiences felt diminishing, figures. I have everything I need. Why do I I’m concerned about money,” she wor-
feel—when hearing of others’ riches—it is not
the recurring tallies—bills of literary enough?
ries at one point. “It has dawned on
health—were evidently restorative: me lately that insecurity is one of the
Later, after a dinner with Morri- biggest killers of art. Somehow the
I have completed another volume of poems. son, Walker reports on a remark of novel, or the next collection of stories,
I am finishing a collection of my essays. I have Quincy Jones’s: “Anyone would expect is seen as happening only when I’m in
compiled a Zora Neale Hurston Reader. I have you to be enemies.” She balks at the my own house, and managing things
taught Advanced Fiction a semester at Yale. I
have continued in pleasant fashion at Ms. I notion, albeit in a way that undermines okay.” As much as she insists on her
have been invited to read and have accepted, the avowed magnanimity: “Even when detachment from material things, her
all over the United States. I have given bene- I’ve felt bad about something Toni al- journaled inventories reveal a rich per-
fit readings. I have left my husband & have legedly said or did against me—for in- son’s penchant for collecting homes.
been mutually and amicably divorced. I have stance, keeping Bob Gottlieb from tak- (“Just sold ‘Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll
moved into my own apartment where I have
now lived a full year and a month. I have had ing me on at Knopf when I was trying See You in the Morning’ to Dial for
my failing ear improved by surgery. I have re- to leave Harcourt—I’ve always felt that $2,500 advance—that will pay for the
placed my front teeth. I have made new friends if I did my work things would be okay.” bathroom! Fantastic.”) Yet the share-
& many new kinds of love. I have contem- Noting that Morrison has been offered cropper’s eighth child always saw her-
plated suicide seriously only twice—or per- a “substantial position” at Princeton, self as a tourist in the realm of afflu-
haps 3 times. I have resolved not to be a sui-
cide because I love life which I know, better she adds, “I feel glad for her success. ence, even with cash on hand.
than death which I don’t, and which I suspect It isn’t my kind of success. There doesn’t It’s possible to divine a connection
is the ultimate bore. seem much laying up for days with her between a habit of acquisition that
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 69
seems compulsive, if only for the appar­ a thought: “Sexual and strong and not petite of ambition isn’t to be slaked. To
ent discomfort she feels about it, and always heterosexual.” The “daughters of be full is an achievable condition; to
the intense, erratic bouts of depression bilitis,” as she refers to them in the entry, stay full is not.
that choke her ability to write. Walker in sidelong reference to the historic ac­
never knows what triggers them—men­ tivist organization, were never far from he journal entries selected for
strual hormones, she surmises, or “deep
loneliness.” She puts her faith in the
Walker’s world, as a student at Sarah
Lawrence and as a woman writer of the
T “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire”
conclude eight days into the year 2000,
usual measures: a healthier diet, less nineteen­seventies. Her time with Rob­ but Walker has maintained a blog since
weed, and lots and lots of meditation. ert and with male crushes like Quincy 2008. Her posts are more hortatory than
By the time the writing returns, the ep­ Jones coincide with nights out at the her journal entries, but not necessarily
isodes are in the rearview mirror. “The lesbian bar La Femme and spent with more disciplined. In 2012, she wrote her
point is, I am all better now,” she writes other lovers—we encounter the names first post on David Icke, whose “free­
on one occasion. “Enjoying being alive.” Bertina, Mercedes. dom of mind,” she writes, “reminds me
In later years, with the guidance of a But Walker remains cautious about very much of Malcolm X.” She recom­
therapist, Walker speculates about why naming herself as late as the nineties, mended a video for those who “haven’t
she finds herself managing so many even as she suspects that her sexuality been exposed to his thinking.” Icke’s
rooms of her own: “I buy houses be­ might be “a case of everyone knowing thinking includes the theory that man­
cause I need places to run to.” I’m a lesbian but me.” A 1992 entry men­ kind has unwittingly been ruled by an
tions dinner with the musician Tracy intergalactic race of reptilians since an­
n the spring of 1983, the news that Chapman, who comes “in jeans & boots, tiquity. In an interview four years ago
I “The Color Purple” had won the Pu­
litzer Prize for fiction—Walker was the
and carrying a coffee cake she baked
herself ” and arrives like an exhalation,
for the Times Book Review, Walker
praised Icke’s 1995 book, “And the Truth
first Black woman to receive it—ap­ at last. “I consider it a gift from the uni­ Shall Set You Free,” which promotes
pears in an entry warmed by a lover’s verse—at last the figure I’ve walked anti­Semitic crackpottery about who
body heat. “I just had to take him in my behind has turned around! And she is runs the world. Walker, a proper boomer,
arms & have our way with him,” she a woman! And she is black! And she is seems also to have been diving deep into
writes of Robert. The relationship, per­ a singer! Only the first fact, that she is the brackish waters of YouTube.
haps because it dates to their youth, isn’t a woman, kept me afraid of wanting Is this a late­life aberration, or can
untouched by the loves­me­nots of ad­ this to happen before.” The journals the tropism be traced to a deeper angst
olescent drama. From a previous inven­ offer an intimate view of a relationship that was missed in its time? “Gathering
tory: “I love the way his body feels. His that was kept as quiet as it could be at Blossoms Under Fire” does not contain
skin. His chest. I love his touch. . . . I the time. Yet Chapman, like other part­ the totality of the journals (sixty­some
love the dumb way he holds me, as an ners, becomes something of an emo­ volumes in their entirety repose in the
animal would hold me, loving but with­ tional lifeline as well. Walker speculates Rare Book Library at Emory Univer­
out words.” One month Walker giddily that this is the end of her real­estate sity, embargoed until 2040), but what’s
exhales her ardor, and the next she begs habit: “Houses no longer mean love to here exposes no sinister taproot. Rather,
for another kind of release, from love me. Love means love.” its entries accumulate to tell a story about
itself, and then it starts all over again. “Bisexuality,” a word favored by her accumulation—of pages, prizes, lovers,
A true romantic, she is both sustained longtime friend June Jordan, doesn’t real estate, renown—and about the per­
and crushed by the exquisite agony of suit her. “Of course I am bi­sexual, if petual inadequacy of accumulation. Per­
love’s repetitions. by that is meant I find both women and haps it’s significant, though, that Walker
Against the occasional pose of a men sexually & spiritually attractive,” remains best known for a book of let­
jaded intellectual, Walker’s infatuations she writes in 1995, a journaled draft of ters by a young woman for whom writ­
exhibit the unabashed pleasures of being a talk for an upcoming Black gay and ing is a register of emancipation and
charmed. Her trepidation at Steven lesbian conference: self­discovery, but also of fear, tattooed
Spielberg’s plans is alleviated over a on the page by an elided name that ev­
And I have occasionally used the term.
dinner: “After a moment of near I don’t However, knowing I’d soon be coming to see
eryone knows but that cannot be spelled
know what, uneasiness, he came in & you, and being, as many of you know, picky out. Having grown up in a place where
sat down & started right in showing about words, I decided that the word that I pre- conspiracies, racial and sexual, were daily
how closely he has read the book. . . . ferred to be “out” with you as was one that did realities to be reckoned with, Walker
Quincy & Steven & I got slightly tipsy not make me feel cut in half, as bi-sexual does, may have developed a belated hunger
but instead makes me feel whole, even holy, a
and energetic in our thoughts of a movie woman of all my spiritual & sexual parts. . . .
for more. “And, of course, there will be
about Celie & Shug & Nettie.” The The word is full. a volume two,” she writes in a 2021 post­
rapturous sense of creative intimacy script to the selection of journals. We
that hangs in the air is a kind of ro­ The word that Walker chooses for like stories that take us from yearning
mance, too. herself is a purple womanism meant to to fulfillment, from blinkered parochi­
Something else has long hung in the capture the boundless f lush of ec­ alism to high­hearted enlightenment,
air. One Veterans Day, when she’s in her stasy and good sex and good company but, as her journeys attest, the traffic on
twenties, the haze of cannabis unlocks evidenced in her journals. But the ap­ such routes moves in both directions. 
70 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
 country, in Kyiv, where nothing had ever
BOOKS been quite right. It broke so badly that
painful cracks ran along the country, as

DEMILITARIZED
if along a sheet of glass, and then blood
began to seep through these cracks.”
The village cleared out slowly, then
The novelist Andrey Kurkov writes of a Ukrainian beekeeper at war with war. all at once.
The first shell hit the church, and the very
BY KEITH GESSEN next morning people began to leave Little
Starhorodivka. First, fathers bundled their
wives and children off to safety, wherever they
had relatives: Russia, Odessa, Mykolayiv. Then
the fathers themselves left, some becoming
“separatists,” others refugees. The last to be
taken away were the old men and women. They
were dragged off weeping and cursing. The
noise was awful. And then, one day, things grew
so quiet that Sergeyich stepped out onto Lenin
Street and was nearly deafened by the silence.

As it turned out, one other person,

Pashka, an old schoolmate with whom
Sergeyich had never been friendly, had
also remained behind. When the book
begins, it is 2017, and Sergeyich and
Pashka have been alone in the village
for almost three years. By Sergeyich’s ac-
count, they are keeping the village alive:
“If every last person took off, no-one
would return.” This way, perhaps, they
would. Sergeyich’s house, on Lenin
Street, looks out onto the Ukrainian
lines, though he can’t quite see them;
Pashka’s, on Shevchenko Street, is closer
to the separatists. In ways congruent
with this accident of geography, the two
have slightly different sympathies.
The book, which was published in
Ukraine four years ago, opens in a kind
of stasis; the reader wonders whether it
will be a twenty-first-century “Robin-
son Crusoe,” in which the two men try
he incremental Russian invasion of one side and Russian-backed troops on to outdo each other in their ability to
T Ukraine in 2014—which began with
the seizure of Crimea and continued as
the other, with about nineteen miles be-
tween them. For more than seven years,
survive without the comforts of civiliza-
tion. But soon the gears of the plot start
a hybrid operation, capitalizing on anti- with ebbs and flows in their frequency churning. Pashka shows up at Sergeyich’s
Kyiv sentiment in eastern Ukraine and and intensity, the conflict featured sniper house with a charged cell phone. How
backed by an information war, merce- fire and shelling and even, toward the could Pashka possibly have charged it,
naries, and, ultimately, tanks and rock- end, armed drones, which the Ukrainian Sergeyich wonders, when the electricity
ets—was eventually halted by Ukrainian government had procured from Turkey. has been out for years? Pashka explains
forces, that summer, about fifty miles Andrey Kurkov’s novel “Grey Bees” that the electricity came on in the mid-
from the Russian border. A shaky cease- (Deep Vellum) takes place in the area, dle of the night; Sergeyich must have
fire was signed in Minsk, and a so-called known as the “gray zone,” between the slept through it. Impossible, Sergeyich
“line of contact” emerged. It ran for three two armed camps. Sergey Sergeyich is a says. He keeps all his light switches in
hundred miles and separated Ukrainian retired mine-safety inspector turned bee- the on position—the lights would have
government-controlled territory from keeper who is one of only two people woken him. Pashka holds his ground.
the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lu- left in the village of Little Starhorodivka. The mystery of the cell phone lingers.
hansk People’s Republics. Along this line As Sergeyich recalls the beginning of Before long, Sergeyich also has a
of contact, Ukrainian troops dug in on the fighting, “Something broke in the chance to charge his phone. He receives
a surprise visit from a young Ukrainian
In “Grey Bees,” life in Ukraine’s gray zone has elements of the post-apocalyptic. soldier; because Sergeyich’s yard faces
ILLUSTRATION BY ANNA IVANENKO THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 71
the Ukrainian lines, and because he is the Donetsk region, and they are sus- or even Russian occupation. The sub-
often working in it and tending to his picious of him. Eventually, he is forced tle gradations relating to conversations
bees, the Ukrainian soldier, who intro- to take his bees and leave. Recalling a about citizenship and belonging also
duces himself as Petro, has been watch- friend he once met at a beekeepers’ con- seem the product of an earlier time. Ser-
ing Sergeyich. They talk about the war vention, he decides to head for Crimea. geyich, when he first meets the soldier
and the state of things in Ukraine. Ser- If, in the gray zone, people get along Petro, has an exchange with him about
geyich has no access to television or the and help one another despite inhabiting names. Petro is the Ukrainian version
news, and the soldier tells him that peo- a denuded, post-apocalyptic landscape, of Peter, and Sergeyich asks if Peter is
ple on TV are always arguing, that in Crimea turns out to be the opposite. It the soldier’s real name. The soldier says
the country at large place-names are is literally a land of honey—Sergeyich’s no, Petro is his name:
being changed but otherwise everything bees thrive there—but the threat of the
“Says so in my passport.”
is the same. As a gift to Sergeyich, he state hangs over everything. Sergeyich’s “Well, my passport says I’m Serhiy Serhi-
offers to charge his phone; in return he friend, whom he had hoped to visit, is yovych—but I say I’m Sergey Sergeyich. That’s
asks only that Sergeyich let him know a Crimean Tatar, and through his fam- the difference.”
if he ever needs help. When Sergeyich ily Sergeyich learns how the Russian “You probably don’t agree with your pass-
gets his phone back, he is left with the occupiers—Crimea, as a border guard port,” Petro said.
“No, I agree with my passport, just not with
dilemma of whom to call. reminds him, is part of Russia now— what it chooses to call me.”
deal with people they find inconvenient. “Well, I agree both with my passport and
ergeyich is an eastern Ukrainian Ev- They use violence, coercion, enticements.
S eryman. He is supremely practical.
In loving detail, Kurkov describes Ser-
Sergeyich behaves honorably, but during
every interaction with the authorities
with what it chooses to call me,” the guest said
with a smile. It was an easy smile, even dis-
arming—although a rifle hung on the back of
his chair.
geyich’s care for his bees, his nighttime he experiences a kind of fear that he
preparations, his careful rationing of his hadn’t known even in the gray zone: “It Petro is entirely at home in Ukraine,
limited provisions. Sergeyich has found was a strange, almost inexplicable fear, whereas Sergeyich, while accepting
himself in a war zone but does not think in that it was purely physical, paralys- that he is a Ukrainian citizen, wants to
about politics. He wants nothing to do ing his facial muscles but giving rise to retain his Russian-language identity:
with the government, and doesn’t even no thoughts whatsoever.” Sergeyich Sergey, rather than Serhiy.
bother to arrange for the delivery of his “tried to find words that might better This is also, as it happens, Kurkov’s
pension. Gradually, though, he is pulled explain his fear” of the powers that be, dilemma as an author. Kurkov is a
into politics despite himself. He learns “and not just the powers that be, but the Ukrainian novelist who was born in
that Pashka has been hanging out with Russian powers that be”—but he finds St. Petersburg, grew up in Kyiv, and
separatists and their Russian backers; it impossible. It is an “inarticulate fear,” writes his fiction in Russian, at a time
Sergeyich disapproves. Meanwhile, his “a skin-freezing fear.” In the end, Ser- when Ukrainian-language literature is
relationship with Petro deepens; when geyich escapes their clutches, but only enjoying a post-Soviet renaissance. He
the Ukrainian lines are shelled, Serge- barely, and not totally intact. The Rus- is the president of the Ukrainian branch
yich uses his cell phone to send the sol- sian security service confiscates one of of PEN and a frequent commentator on
dier a text. “Alive?” he asks him. “Alive,” his beehives, for “inspection,” and re- Ukraine in the international media, and
Petro texts back. In an attempt to keep turns the bees in an altered state. They he has spoken in favor of a multilingual
their small village up with the times, seem sickly to Sergeyich, and gray— or hybrid identity for Ukraine. But he
Sergeyich renames Pashka’s street Lenin, hence the book’s title—and the healthy has also been sensitive to the unavoid-
and his own Shevchenko. Pashka, who bees kick them out of their hives. able valences of Russian in times of
never liked living on a street named for trouble. Russian is “the language of the
the national poet of Ukraine, is delighted.
When the shelling becomes too
“G rey Bees,” although grounded
deeply in the disturbing reality
aggressor,” he said, back in 2014, and re-
turning to the question more recently,
much for Sergeyich’s bees (and maybe of war, sometimes has the feeling of a in this magazine, he wrote that, for
for Sergeyich), he decides to take them fable. When it was published, it joined the moment, it didn’t matter what com-
on a journey. The book becomes a kind a small shelf of books about the war by pelling arguments you could make for
of odyssey, with Sergeyich, driving his Ukrainian writers such as Artem Cha- the Russian language—that many of
trusty old Lada, in the role of a Ukrainian peye, Yevgenia Belorusets, Serhiy Zha- Ukraine’s defenders spoke it; that count-
Odysseus. First, he navigates various dan, and Artem Chekh. “Grey Bees” is less other people dying and fighting and
checkpoints and ends up in Ukraine a gentle, sometimes ambivalent book f leeing from the east of the country
proper. Then he sets up camp in a peace- about a conflict that had its share of spoke it; that Vladimir Putin could not
ful, wooded spot and lets his bees fly moral complexity. Reading about it now, lay sole claim to it—because such ar-
about and refresh themselves. He even one feels transported to a more inno- guments were beside the point. Hybrid
meets a woman, a friendly and practi- cent time. Place-names that in “Grey identity was fine during times of hy-
cal-minded shopkeeper named Galya, Bees” connote safety and freedom—the brid war; when the missiles started fly-
and begins to settle down. port city of Mykolaiv, or the town of ing, everyone became simply Ukrainian.
The war follows him. People can tell Vesele, near where Sergeyich meets War resolves old questions and raises
from his license plate that he is from Galya—are now under Russian attack new ones. But mostly it destroys—lives,
72 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022
homes, memories, families. A cult of
war can take root only in a place that
has forgotten what war is, or maybe BRIEFLY NOTED
never knew in the first place. Ukrainian
historians will tell you that, as much as Whole Earth, by John Markoff (Penguin Press). This biogra-
Russia suffered during the German on- phy of Stewart Brand, the creator of the “Whole Earth Cat-
slaught of the Second World War—in alog,” explores the varied career of a “quixotic intellectual
Leningrad, Smolensk, Stalingrad— troubadour.” An early techno-utopian—he coined the phrase
Ukraine suffered, proportionally, even “information wants to be free” and was the first journalist to
more. And now, once again, Ukraine is use the term “personal computer”—Brand also organized
in flames. Nobody can say whether, at parties for Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and helped spark
the end of this conflagration, Ukraine the environmental movement, befriending such luminaries
will regain control of its territory, or as Marlon Brando, Brian Eno, and the California governor
whether a new gray zone will be formed. Jerry Brown along the way. What emerges is a view of an in-
In the Donbas, at least, where Russia sistently holistic thinker unafraid to pursue idiosyncratic ideas
has begun a new, large-scale offensive, and possessing “an uncanny sixth sense for being in the right
there is not a lot of basis for optimism. place at the right time.”
There is a touching moment in “Grey
Bees” when Sergeyich and his bees have The Genesis Machine, by Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel (Public­
settled temporarily in the Ukrainian Affairs). Predicting that technologies for editing and program-
heartland. Galya, the shopkeeper, comes ming DNA will bring a “great transformation” in our concep-
to their campsite three evenings in a tion of life, the authors of this introduction to “synthetic
row with food she has prepared for Ser- biology” set out a road map for navigating the field’s oppor-
geyich. On the third night, she says that tunities and perils. If harnessed responsibly, these technolo-
the next day she will be unable to come. gies may help humankind secure its food supply, combat cli-
Sergeyich assumes she is busy, but it mate change, and eradicate disease. Conversely, what will
turns out she cannot bring the food be- happen if, say, technology that’s intended to study and fight
cause the dish she is preparing is borscht. viruses is instead used to unleash them as bioweapons, or if
He will need to come to her place to wealthy people begin genetically “enhancing” their offspring?
eat it. Sergeyich agrees. Answering these and other difficult questions will require ro-
The eating of the borscht, in Boris bust public dialogues, which this book seeks to initiate now.
Dralyuk’s deft translation, is described
with immense pleasure: Woman, Eating, by Claire Kohda (HarperVia). The chief trait
Galya’s borscht slayed Sergeyich. There were
that Lydia, the protagonist of this artful vampire novel, shares
dried porcini mushrooms swimming in it, and with monsters of old is hunger. A “Buffy”-watching, British
beans, and pieces of veal. He ate it steadily, un- Japanese Malaysian performance artist interning in London’s
hurriedly, occasionally gazing up at her; this gallery scene, she is anxious and overwhelmed, torn between
was, after all, the first time they had dined to- vampiric urges and human scruples. Most traditional lore
gether—not like their evenings by the fire, when
she had fed him without eating herself.
doesn’t apply; Lydia won’t be destroyed by the sight of a cross
There was a bottle of shop-bought vodka or combust in direct sunlight (acute sunburn notwithstand-
on the table, to accompany the meal. Serge- ing). But her vampire mother has taught her that their kind
yich and Galya drank without toasting, half a are “unnatural, disgusting, and ugly.” As Lydia encounters
shot glass at a sip. Galya had also peeled sev- new people, including a pleasant artist turned property man-
eral cloves of garlic, which lay on a saucer be-
side the bottle and a dish of salt. They ate these
ager, and a new boss, a man with more influence than de-
cloves in turn—first he would take one, dip it cency, she comes to understand what it is to become some-
in the salt and place it in his mouth, then she. thing “that is neither demon nor human.”
No conversation arose; there was no need
for talk. After the third bowl, Sergeyich real- Mercy Street, by Jennifer Haigh (Ecco). Dedicated “to the one
ised he had had enough, although, at the same
time, he felt he could have overcome a fourth.
in four” American women who has had an abortion, this novel
revolves around a counsellor at an abortion clinic, a protester,
It is a scene of total contentment. But and a would-be domestic terrorist who rants that abortion is
this is not a contented book. Bees make theft as well as murder, because “there was a second, invisible
honey and a pleasant buzzing sound, yet victim, a man robbed of his progeny.” The novel’s central fig-
they can also sting. Sergeyich must soon ure, the counsellor, is the most fully realized, experiencing her
flee from this refuge, as he must from the own path to motherhood while remaining devoted to her work.
next. Finally, he returns to his village, to Musing on the way that anti-abortion arguments turn people
his home, because someone needs to keep into vessels for the production of babies, she asks, “What was
the place going, just in case the war ends, the point of making yet another person, when the woman her-
and people decide to come back.  self—a person who already existed—counted for so little?”
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 73
 diohead asked many of the same ques-
POP MUSIC tions on “Kid A,” which was released
in 2000.) Most people know instinc-

REVIVAL
tively that staring at Instagram for hours
on end, dead-eyed and increasingly em-
bittered, is less meaningful than spend-
The rousing sounds of Arcade Fire. ing time with family and friends. The
tepid critical reception of “Everything
BY AMANDA PETRUSICH Now” presaged, in a way, a change in
our collective tolerance for art that feels
too expressly didactic. These days, no-
body wants to be taught a lesson, espe-
cially by the rich and famous. (I thought
of “Everything Now” when, at the start
of the pandemic, the actor Gal Gadot
released a bizarre montage of celebri-
ties singing bits of John Lennon’s “Imag-
ine,” a video so unnecessary and ill-met
that Slate later called it “one of the worst
things to have ever happened.”)
“WE,” which was produced by But-
ler, Chassagne, and Nigel Godrich, is
less obvious and more compassionate,
and makes better use of the band’s mu-
sical assets: Butler’s tender, reaching voice
(he has become one of the great rock
vocalists of his generation), the group’s
love of Haitian rara (a heavily percus-
sive, often mesmeric parade music), and
its knack for writing rousing, propulsive
anthems that make you feel as if you’re
climbing a hill, throwing your fist in the
air, and cartwheeling down the other
side. The band is expert at building ten-
sion by creating a simple but potent mel-
ody—Chassagne is especially dexterous
on a synthesizer—escalating the volume,
tamping up the rhythm, and facilitating
a sudden, noisy release. This is not a new
t’s evident within the opening min- other moment in which this sweaty, trick, but, when it hits, boy, does it hit.
I ute of “The Lightning I, II,” a vigor-
ous, urging single from Arcade Fire’s ex-
hyper-intimate brand of absolution
might be more welcome. n 2020, there was some fretting over
cellent sixth album, “WE,” that the band
has returned—prodigally, ardently—to
Yet, for a brief while, Arcade Fire—
which was formed in Montreal, in 2001,
I what sort of creative work might ap-
pear in the wake of the Covid-19 pan-
the hard-charging sound that once made and is fronted by the married duo of demic. “WE” was recorded between
its live shows resemble tent revivals. If Win Butler and Régine Chassagne, February, 2020, and mid-2021, in New
you’ve ever driven a little too fast on the with Richard Reed Parry, Tim Kings- Orleans, El Paso, and Maine’s Mount
highway—all your earthly belongings bury, Jeremy Gara, and, until recently, Desert Island, during one of the most
wedged into the trunk, cheap sunglasses Win’s brother, Will Butler—veered away spiritually and politically tumultuous
on, hair blowing everywhere, booking it from grandeur in favor of a more cere- eras in recent memory. Maybe more
from somewhere to somewhere else— bral and lightly scolding approach. The than any other album released since,
you likely have a sense of the gasping band’s previous record, 2017’s “Every- “WE” feels like a thorough and dynamic
exhilaration Arcade Fire specializes in. thing Now,” was an indictment of dig- document of that time, a Pandemic Rec-
It’s tough to think of another band that’s ital culture and our hunger for “infinite ord in the truest sense; it’s frantic, ex-
as formally concerned with (or as pre- content”—worthy adversaries, certainly, hausted, sorrowful, and, on occasion,
ternaturally adept at) enabling full-body except that, by then, the toxicity of those overloaded with hope and joy. The first
catharsis, and it’s tough to imagine an- forces already felt like old news. (Ra- half, “I,” is about the ways in which hu-
mans tend to suffer and droop in iso-
The band’s pandemic record is exhausted, sorrowful, and loaded with hope. lation; the back half, “We,” honors the
74 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY TRACY CHAHWAN
 sullivan + associates
A R C H I T E C T S
ecstasy and the absolution of sustained grandmother read me a book when I
connection. Butler and Chassagne, who was a little kid that had the word ‘WE’
co-wrote these songs, have a tendency stamped into its cover in broken 1920s
toward “The Family of Man”-style ob- gold leaf.” It got him thinking about what
martha’s vineyard
servations, and with lesser singers the unites us as human beings. “It is the ‘ONE’
ideas might feel limp or platitudinous. of Marley, the Buddha, and Abraham,”
Here they feel exciting. In the video for he wrote. “It’s the lightning strike / of OUR
“The Lightning I, II,” Butler plays an our magic mutual creation / it’s the root.” BROU HT TO IF
acoustic guitar with “Call Your Mom” Butler has also said that he has spent FAMILY CREST RINGS
painted in black letters on the front. I decades mulling over Lawrence Ferlin- Research Included

JOHN- HRISTI N. OM
suspect I’m not the only one who soon ghetti’s poem “I Am Waiting,” from the
Or call (888) 646-6466
found herself grasping for the phone. best-selling 1958 collection “A Coney Is-
Sometimes Butler’s language grows land of the Mind.” Butler borrows the
more abstract and playful, as on “Age phrase “Age of Anxiety” from one of the
of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)”: poem’s stanzas (“and I am waiting / for AD VE RT I S EM EN T
the Age of Anxiety / to drop dead”),
Hardy har har using it to title two tracks on “WE.” It
Chinese throwing star
Lamborghini Countach is easy to see Ferlinghetti as a spiritual
forefather for Butler—both are inter- WHAT’S THE
BIG IDEA?
Maserati sports car
ested in what Ferlinghetti calls the “re-
The verse feels equally indebted to David birth of wonder,” the bold and insistent Small space has big rewards.
Byrne, Beck, and the country singer reclamation of our humanity in the face
Billy Ray Cyrus, who also sings the of capitalism, technology, and our own
oddly mellif luous phrase “Maserati vanity and fear. Butler’s rebelliousness TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT

sports car” in his remix of Lil Nas X’s can flit from funny (“We unsubscribe / JILLIAN GENET
“Old Town Road.” In 2022, is it ballsy Fuck season five,” he sings on “End of 305.520.5159
jgenet@zmedia-inc.com
to take a skittering, eighties-inflected the Empire I-IV,” a multipart epic that
synthesizer jam featuring Peter Gabriel recalls the scope and vigor of Radiohead’s
and title it “Unconditional II (Race and “Paranoid Android”) to grave (“We can
Religion),” as Arcade Fire does here? make it, baby, please don’t quit on me,”
(Race Street and Religious Street in- he implores on “The Lightning I”).
tersect in New Orleans, where Butler Before his death last year, at a hun-
and Chassagne bought a house in 2014.) dred and one, Ferlinghetti was filmed
“I’ll be your race and religion, you be reading his poem “The World Is a Beau-
Caring for

©2020 KENDAL
my race and religion,” Chassagne sings tiful Place” in a back office at City Lights,
in a high, round voice over congas, the bookstore and publishing house he the earth.
djembe, and agogô bells. I never imag- co-founded in San Francisco in 1953. Fer-
ined I’d be idly humming the phrase linghetti’s slight, singsongy cadence gives Discover a retirement community with
“race and religion” to myself while toss- the poem a playful saunter. He writes of an emphasis on sustainability where
the pure beauty of nature is nurtured.
ing groceries into my shopping cart. life’s thrills (“and walking around / look-
“This love is no superstition,” Chas- ing at everything / and smelling flowers /
sagne adds. “United body and soul.” and goosing statues / and even thinking 1.800.548.9469 EQUAL HOUSING
OPPORTUNITY

At this point, Arcade Fire’s musical / and kissing people and / making babies kao.kendal.org/environment
influences are well parsed: the band has and wearing pants”) and their inevitable
gleaned drama and strategic restraint interruption (“Yes / but then right in the
from artists such as David Bowie, U2, middle of it / comes the smiling / mor- Experience Pennswood!
and Bruce Springsteen. But it also relies tician”). Arcade Fire is also interested in
heavily on themes culled from literature. how momentary and evanescent our lives
Butler has said that “WE” was inspired are, and in what we can do before we die.
in part by “We,” a dystopian science- “WE” culminates in a pleading coda.
fiction novel by the Russian writer Yev- “When everything ends / Can we do it
geny Zamyatin, first published in En- again?” Butler asks, his voice soft. Know- In Beautiful Bucks County, PA
glish in 1924. “We” is often thought to be ing the answer might not be enough to Pennswood Village is a Friendly & Welcoming
the model for George Orwell’s “1984” and untether us from our cursed devices, or Continuing Care Retirement Community,
Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” to make us more responsible stewards of Guided by Quaker Principles Since 1980.
also books in which gutsy individuals our planet, but it is nonetheless a useful For Your FREE Guide,
challenge the control of a heartless state. reminder. The mortician, she always Call 855-944-0673
In a note that Butler shared with fans smiles. Or, as Butler puts it, “Heaven is In-Person & Virtual Tours Available.
before the album’s release, he wrote, “My so cold / I don’t wanna go.”  www.pennswood.org

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 75

 set for his 2019 production of Harold
THE THEATRE Pinter’s “Betrayal” basically consisted of
two chairs. Now he has blasted away

FIGHTING WORDS
“Cyrano”’s damask-draped tropes, and
what’s left is little more than a bare stage
lit by harsh white fluorescents, a fitting
A minimalist “Cyrano de Bergerac” trades rapiers for rappers. backdrop for a strictly formalist mise en
scène, all lines and triangles. We’re still
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ nominally in the sixteen-forties, but the
costume designer Soutra Gilmour (she’s
also responsible for the set) has put the
cast in contemporary street clothes—
joggers, jumpsuits, Adidas slides. The
actors sound contemporary, too, thanks
to the playwright Martin Crimp, who,
in his capacity as “translator-adaptor,”
has radically reworked Rostand’s text.
It’s good to be suspicious of the urge to
remake classics in our own image, but
Crimp’s interventions profoundly ener-
gize the soul of the play. He understands
that rhyme doesn’t have to be treated as
a clopping, powdered-wig contrivance.
It’s the lifeblood of hip-hop, the most
flexible of modern forms and one with
its own battle conventions. Instead of
rapiers, Lloyd and Crimp give us rap-
pers. Puns before guns, words before
swords: it may sound silly on paper, but
it’s dynamite onstage.
First up to the mike is Ligniere (Nima
Taleghani), a strutting young poet who
presides as m.c., warming up the crowd
with some home-town boasts. “The Pa-
risian isn’t superior/just everyone else is
inferior,” he brags, adding, “Just never
mention Algeria.” (The play’s playful
anachronisms delight rather than ran-
kle.) He’s preening for the benefit of
Christian (Eben Figueiredo), a provin-
confession, and a sheepish one for sion. Wright, who cast Peter Dinklage cial soldier who has just arrived in the
A a Francophile to make: my heart
does not thrill to the prospect of sit-
in the title role, traded a big schnoz for
small stature as his hero’s signature weak-
capital to enlist as a cadet. This being
France, Christian has already fallen in
ting through “Cyrano de Bergerac.” ness, a fine idea, but not enough to make love at first sight, with Roxane (the won-
This may be the fault of my Anglophone up for the general corniness. derful Evelyn Miller), a lovely university
ear, which is too clumsy to pick up the I offer such prejudice as an overture student with brains to match. Christian,
rapid-fire panache of Edmond Ro- to praise for the English director Jamie alas, is a handsome dummy. How will he
stand’s rhyming Alexandrine couplets Lloyd’s dazzling, feral take on “Cyrano,” manage to pry such a lady from the
as they fly by in the original, and En- which has finally arrived at BAM, after clutches of her sinister admirer, the Count
glish translations have a way of starch- a celebrated pre-pandemic run in Lon- de Guiche (Tom Edden)?
ing the esprit right out of the language. don. This is not Lloyd’s first Rostand Enter Cyrano, Roxane’s trusted cousin
Fairly or not, I have come to associate rodeo. In 2012, he directed a production and the popular leader of Christian’s
the play with an aura of whipped-cream of the play on Broadway—a traditional new regiment—well, first enter Cyrano’s
foppishness, heavy on swordplay, swish- affair of boots, bodices, and feathered friends’ description of him as the “Mad-
ing capes, and swelling bosoms, like the hats. The balcony scene had a balcony; man. Soldier. Writer,” whom they talk up
ones in Joe Wright’s recent film adap- verisimilitude carried the day. Since then, like prizefighter promoters before slic-
tation of Erica Schmidt’s musical ver- Lloyd has converted to minimalism. The ing him down to size. “The enormity /
of his nose is a deformity /. . . They say
The mania and melancholy of James McAvoy’s Cyrano disguise a desperate rage. when he came through his mother’s va-
76 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY MATT WILLIAMS
gina/the nose poked out first as a pain- ality sets in. There’s a lot here about male
ful reminder/of all the agony to come.” competition, male bonding, the male
Ouch. Yet, when Cyrano does appear, he gaze, toxic masculinity, the works—in-
takes the divinely proportioned form of evitably, homoeroticism is part of the
James McAvoy, clad in tight black jeans deal, though it’s treated too obviously for
and form-fitting puffer jacket, with noth- my taste, and has the unfortunate effect
ing but a smattering of beard adorning of sidelining Roxane. One compensa-
his famous face. If that’s agony, sign me tion for all this male stuff is the trans-
up for a world of pain. formation of Rostand’s Ragueneau, a
Hold on. Here we have one of cine- jolly pastry cook and poets’ patron, into
ma’s most gorgeous leading men play- a woman (Michele Austin), who moth-
ing theatre’s ugliest. Is this a joke? A ers Cyrano and Roxane alike, though she
gimmick? Maybe. But isn’t a bulbous can’t save them from an ending even
prosthetic a gimmick, too? If you can get darker than Rostand’s. The truth will
on board with the emperor’s-new-clothes out, but it sets no one free.
nature of Lloyd’s illusion—and, thanks
to McAvoy’s smoldering, ferocious bar-
rage of a performance, it doesn’t take
“C yrano” is obsessed with theatre.
The play, in fact, opens at a play,
long—the unaugmented nose proves less a horrible take on“Hamlet” that Cyrano
an obstacle to accepting the play’s con- interrupts and rips to pieces. He’s an aes-
ceit than a key to unlocking its deeper thete with a vengeance, who can’t toler-
levels. Here is a man so affected by the ate such “fly-paper for mediocrity.” How
notion of his deformity that he refuses I wish that he had been at the Round-
to risk the ultimate humiliation of self- about’s American Airlines Theatre the
exposure; his block is mental, and thus other day to rescue the audience from
impossible to surmount. Noah Haidle’s dreadful misfire, “Birth-
Cyrano, too, has a passion for Roxane; day Candles.”
while Christian merely appreciates her Talk about gimmicks. The show starts
face, Cyrano adores her beautiful mind. on the seventeenth birthday of its pro-
A great strength of this production is its tagonist, Ernestine (Debra Messing).
depiction of Roxane as a formidable in- She’s making a cake with her mother, a
tellectual force. Her insistence that Chris- tradition that she will carry on, alone or
tian woo her with wit isn’t a coquette’s in company, every birthday, for the rest
trick of putting her beau through the rit- of her endless life. The passage of time
ualized paces of courtly love but a smart is signalled by a bell: ding, Ernestine is
woman’s search for a partner, a worthy eighteen, then in her thirties, her fifties,
match. When Cyrano agrees to help his and on and on for something like a cen-
rival by writing love letters to Roxane and tury. What happens over the decades?
signing Christian’s name, the deception Merely every cliché you can think of,
allows him to give voice to his own feel- from infidelity to divorce to mental ill-
ings, of course—but that’s not the only ness, enacted by cardboard cutouts in-
reason he suggests it. McAvoy’s sadboi stead of characters, who speak in a lan-
Cyrano gets off on self-expression and guage of mind-numbing tweeness and
self-abasement, and he can’t always dis- banality. “The world is so big,” Ernestine
tinguish between the two. In the scene says, with her arms spread wide—and yet
in which a concealed Cyrano pretends to not big enough for the two of us.
be Christian while speaking to Roxane, The incoherent direction, by Vivi-
McAvoy is so steady, so relentlessly pur- enne Benesch, left me with a number of
poseful in his passion, that his Scottish questions. When does the action take
whisper scorches your ears. Cyrano is place? What kind of adolescent plays pin
often played as a man of unfettered bril- the tail on the donkey? On Ernestine’s
liance who has learned to be a buffoon thirty-ninth birthday, her daughter is a
as a matter of self-preservation. McAvoy’s college senior—was Ernestine pregnant
Cyrano likes to clown around, too, but when she went to the prom? How come
make no mistake: his mania and melan- Messing slides into an English accent
choly disguise a desperate rage. when Ernestine gets old? Why did any-
In the play’s second act, de Guiche one produce this dreck? If sentimental-
sends Christian, Cyrano, and the rest of ity is a lie about life, “Birthday Candles”
the cadets off to war, and a grimmer re- is the whopper of them all. 
 Recreation.”) Mark is a former univer­
ON TELEVISION sity professor who began working at
Lumon after his wife died in a car ac­

WORK-LIFE BALANCE
cident. “Forgetting about her for eight
hours a day isn’t the same as healing,”
his sister, Devon ( Jen Tullock), tells
“Severance,” on Apple TV+. him, but Mark’s outie thinks that he’s
made the right choice. “It’s helped me,”
BY NAOMI FRY he insists later. At night, he sits at home
alone brooding and drinking whiskey;
at work, the tragedy lifts, and he im­
merses himself in senseless tasks.
Mark works in the department of
Macrodata Refinement (M.D.R.). It’s
a four­person team: in addition to Mark,
there’s Petey K. (Yul Vazquez), the de­
partment chief and Mark’s best work
pal; Irving B. ( John Turturro), a soul­
ful, courtly figure and a stickler for
company policy; and Dylan G. (Zach
Cherry), a wisecracking pragmatist
who is competitive about earning the
corporate perks that Lumon doles out.
“Being refiner of the quarter gets you
a waffle party,” he explains. (Cherry is
as delightful here as he was in the sec­
ond season of “Succession,” in which
he played a Waystar Royco trainee, in
a not dissimilar role.) For the most part,
these innies seem untroubled by their
split existence. “I like to imagine my
outie’s love­made with a MILF or two,
which is obviously bad­ass, but I do pity
the husbands,” Dylan tells his colleagues.
Atop their desks, they each keep a
framed group photo of the department.
But not all is hunky­dory. One
day, Mark arrives at work to discover
that Petey has disappeared. In his ab­
sence, Mark is tasked with training a
here’s an old episode of “Seinfeld” in so­called severance floor at Lumon In­ newly severed employee, Helly R. (Britt
T which Jerry, in his opening mono­
logue, riffs on office workers who keep
dustries—a shadowy megacorporation—
know nothing of their lives outside the
Lower). Helly’s innie struggles to ad­
just to her reality; she simply can’t be­
family photographs at their desks. “Do office. They have chosen to undergo a lieve that her outie would elect to be
they forget that they’re married?” he asks. surgical procedure in which their con­ severed. She makes numerous attempts
“They go, ‘All right, it’s five o’clock, time sciousness is bifurcated between work to quit her job, even though her col­
to hit the bars and pick up some hookers. and home. Their two selves—referred leagues warn her that doing so would
Hold it a second . . . I’ve got a wife and to as their “innie” and their “outie”— be tantamount to death: should Helly
three kids! I’d better head home!’” This know of each other, but otherwise lead leave Lumon, her innie would cease to
scenario—temporarily forgetting your separate existences. exist. As it turns out, Helly’s innie
home life while at work—is the premise Our protagonist is Mark Scout, or doesn’t have much choice in the mat­
of the gripping dystopian drama “Sever­ Mark S., as he is known at Lumon. ter; despite her best efforts, she cannot
ance,” which just completed its first sea­ (He is played by Adam Scott, who has get her outie to accept her resignation,
son on Apple TV+. In the series, which made his mark in comedies that tease and I couldn’t take my eyes off Lower,
was created by Dan Erickson and di­ out the existential malaise of the con­ who is excellent in portraying her char­
rected by Ben Stiller and Aoife Mc­ temporary workplace, such as Starz’s acter’s increasingly desperate resistance.
Ardle, the employees who work on the “Party Down” and NBC’s “Parks and “Severance” is a visually gorgeous
show. The look of Lumon HQ is mid­
Adam Scott plays an office worker with a split consciousness. century brutalism meets Apple: endless,
78 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY XIAO HUA YANG
spotless hallways and clean angles, all Lumon in, anyway? One benefit of the Ricken’s book sparks a revolt, and
figured in shades of white and gray and severance process is that employers can the M.D.R. employees begin to rebel,
blue and green. The hypercontrolled presumably trust their workers with first in small ways, such as exploring
aesthetics—Helly’s pencil skirts, the confidential information, but the em- Lumon’s labyrinthine basement, and
company’s space-age décor—suggest an ployees of M.D.R. are kept in the dark. later by devising a plan to wake up their
environment on the verge of upheaval, All day, they sort out a grid of numbers innies while out in the world. But al-
its smooth surfaces thrumming with the that float on their monitor screens, but though “Severance” focusses on a group
strain of repression. Easy-listening tunes they have no idea what the numbers of workers becoming radicalized, it
score the scenes, but nothing at Lumon represent, or what purpose their work would be a stretch to characterize the
is truly easy. There is, for one, Ms. Cobel serves. (“What if the goats are the num- show itself as radical: the central char-
(Patricia Arquette), Mark’s silver-haired bers?” Helly asks.) This is a question of acters, as far as we can tell, have cho-
boss, a thrashing and threatening pres- plot, but it is also an ethical query with sen to undergo the severance procedure
ence. Like the other senior employees contemporary implications. Outside the for personal reasons, rather than out of
at Lumon, Cobel is not severed; in an office, Mark is sought out by Petey, who a need to make ends meet. As we learn
early twist, she is also revealed to be explains that he fled Lumon in order in the finale—spoilers ahead—Helly’s
Mark’s nosy next-door neighbor, the to try to reverse his severance. “What outie is a Lumon heiress who agreed
seemingly innocent Mrs. Selvig. Cobel if . . . you’re murdering people eight to be severed in order to help the fam-
is cultishly devoted to the teachings of hours a day and don’t know it?” Petey ily business; her goal is to assuage the
Lumon’s mysterious founder, Kier Ea- asks. “Am I?” Mark wonders, recalling public’s doubts about the procedure.
gan—a kind of nineteenth-century the plight of so many of us whose labor, When her innie wakes up outside the
L. Ron Hubbard—whose koans the as well as our leisure, is alienated from office, she finds herself at a Lumon gala,
employees are trained to accept as gos- its potential moral cost. The fact that where she sees a promotional video in
pel. She is the overtly punishing coun- “Severance” streams on Apple, and that which her outie sings the praises of sev-
terpart to Lumon’s more covertly disci- its aesthetic is pointedly Jobsian, is a erance. “I took a severed job because it
plinary protocol. “Your friends are gonna relevant irony. We love our iPhones, but sounds freaking awesome,” she says in
suffer!” she hisses at a mutinous Helly, we’d rather not think about what it takes the clip. “I don’t think severance divides
in one especially chilling moment. (Ar- to make them. us. I think it brings us together.”
quette pours it on a bit thick in the role, This is clearly P.R. speak, but Helly’s
but it’s hard not to be spooked.) When en Stiller, who directed six of the outie isn’t entirely wrong. Under the
employees misbehave, she sends them
to a place called the break room, where
B show’s nine episodes, is emerging
as a preëminent television auteur. In
pressure of severance, she and her fel-
low-employees form genuine bonds,
they are made to ask for forgiveness, 2018, he directed “Escape at Dannemora,” and I found the most affecting mo-
again and again, as a polygraph-like ma- a Showtime miniseries about a prison ments in the show to be those in which
chine tests their sincerity. break, which, much like “Severance,” solidarity trumps self-interest: Irving’s
The world of “Severance” put me in with its downbeat pacing, long silences, hand secretly touching Burt’s; Helly
mind of a slew of cultural precursors: and drab, monochromatic palette, show- and Mark’s cautiously developing close-
the endless surveillance of George Or- cased his ability to confidently take his ness; Dylan volunteering, at his own
well’s “1984,” the deadening sameness of time when telling a story. Thematically, peril, to stay behind at Lumon in order
office life in Billy Wilder’s “The Apart- too, both shows investigate the notion to trigger the mechanism that wakes
ment,” the lambs-to-slaughter march of of freedom in environments suffused the other innies up. “Severance” is po-
factory laborers in Fritz Lang’s “Me- with power, brute or soft. In “Sever- litical in spite of itself—the employees’
tropolis,” the despair of Harold Pinter’s ance,” the employees of M.D.R. come dawning realization of their mutual op-
“The Dumb Waiter.” But the show, at across a contraband copy of a self-help pression makes them accidental prole-
its core, is a mystery—a piquant riddle book, “The You You Are,” which in- tariat. And yet it is almost impossible
for Mark and the viewers to solve. What forms their growing anti-Lumon con- to watch the show and not think of
is the purpose of the department that sciousness. “Your so-called boss may real-life parallels to the situation at
Mark and Helly stumble upon in the own the clock that taunts you from the Lumon. Three days after workers at an
basement, which is full of baby goats? wall, but, my friends, the hour is yours,” Amazon fulfillment center in Staten
Does it have anything to do with the Mark reads aloud to the group. “Page Island became the first at the company
watering cans that are inexplicably pro- 197 slaps,” Dylan responds. What none to successfully unionize, the Intercept
duced at the department of Optics and of these innies know is that the book’s reported that Amazon had been devel-
Design, headed by the elegant Burt G. author is Mark’s brother-in-law, Ricken oping an internal messaging app for its
(Christopher Walken)? Burt, who is also (Michael Chernus), a wannabe guru employees that would block certain
severed, becomes Irving’s love interest, who, although mostly harmless, is also words—among them “union,” “slave
despite the company’s attempts to sep- self-serving and buffoonish. “Our job labor,” and “pay raise”—in what the ar-
arate them, and this raises another ques- is to taste free air,” Mark reads from the ticle described as an effort to enhance
tion: why is Lumon so desperate to keep book, but the outside world, although “happiness” and “productivity” among
its various departments isolated? not as Gulag-like as the severance floor, workers. “As Kier said,” Irving reminds
More important, what business is is still thick with faulty ideology. his colleagues, “ ‘Be ever merry.’” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 79
 gled to Newcastle, and stashed in a ward-
THE CURRENT CINEMA robe. Ransom notes are sent to the au-
thorities, who announce that the theft

MEN ON A MISSION
was clearly carried out by a “trained
commando,” on the orders of an “inter-
national criminal gang.” In fact, the only
“The Duke” and “The Northman.” other person involved is one of the Bun-
tons’ sons, Jackie (Fionn Whitehead),
BY ANTHONY LANE and what he and his father dread most
is not the heavy hand of the law but the
he British film director Roger Mi- He is fired from a local taxi firm, in part thought that Dorothy might find out.
T chell died last year. His death was
sudden and premature: he was only
for being constitutionally unable to leave
his passengers in peace, and then from
Which, of course, she does. Bunton re-
turns the picture to the gallery, explain-
sixty-five. By all accounts a kindly soul, a bakery, for defending an Asian col- ing that he had merely borrowed it. He
full of wise counsel, he has been much league from a racist superior. In his spare is arrested, charged, and put on trial.
mourned; according to Kate Winslet, time, of which there is plenty, Kemp- The nation, whose love of an underdog
who worked with him on “Blackbird” ton writes plays and dispatches them, is stronger by far than its taste for nine-
(2019), he was “the master of no fuss.” in vain, to the BBC. He also takes a teenth-century Spanish art, awaits.
“The Duke,” one of his most genial stand (sometimes sitting down in the “The Duke” is as funny and as im-
plausible as Michell’s “Notting Hill”
(1999), the slight difference being that
the ludicrous events in the new film
happen to be true. There really was a
Kempton Bunton, and he was indeed
tried, in a tumult of publicity, for pinch-
ing the Goya. A satisfying courtroom
scene is rarer than you might suppose,
and the one that forms the climax of
“The Duke” has a comic concision de-
nied to the drawn-out shenanigans of,
say, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” (2020).
There’s something other than swift-
ness, though, to Michell’s method. He
and his screenwriters, Richard Bean
and Clive Coleman, are tapping into
the kinship—explored by Dickens, and
then by Gilbert and Sullivan—between
legal and theatrical practice.
Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren star in Roger Michell’s film. Exhibit A: Jeremy Hutchinson, the
barrister who defends Kempton (and
features, turned out to be his last. No- rain) against the license fee that all tele- who was married, as the movie reminds
body who saw it, as I did, at a festival vision viewers, including pensioners, us, to the great Shakespearean actress
in the fall of 2020 imagined that it would must pay. Kempton himself refuses to Dame Peggy Ashcroft). He is played
be kept from public view for so long buy a license, and is sent to prison for by Matthew Goode, an actor whose
by the global pandemic, still less that, his pains. In short, he is so bristling with sleek demeanor can seem like a pro-
by a cheerless irony, Michell would not principles that his wife, Dorothy (Helen tective shell. Here, however, that very
live to see “The Duke” released. Now, Mirren), is in despair. When he invokes suavity becomes a weapon, gracefully
at last, it’s here. “the greater good of mankind,” she re- wielded in tandem with his client’s
Despite the title, this is not a cos- torts, “Mankind? What about your own cussedness. When Hutchinson sits
tume drama, set in the loftier reaches kind?” Charity stops at home. down, having made his final pitch to
of the aristocracy. Most of the story, Enter the duke. The Duke of Wel- the jury, the prosecutor—his opposite
until we arrive at the final stretch, takes lington, that is, whose portrait, by Goya, number—looks across at him and
place in Newcastle upon Tyne, in north- has recently been acquired by the Na- smiles, as if to say, “Beautifully done,
east England, in 1961. Here, in an ill-lit tional Gallery, for a sizable sum that you bastard.” If this is Goode’s best
house, dwells Kempton Bunton ( Jim Bunton believes should have been spent performance to date, it’s because he
Broadbent). What lord could boast a on more honorable causes. Thus, a plan conveys the conscious delight with
name more sonorous? Kempton is a is hatched. Bunton goes to London. which his character, bewigged and
working-class hero, or, at any rate, he The painting—“It’s not very good, is robed, is performing a starring role.
would be if he could hold down a job. it?” he says—is stolen overnight, smug- Like Hutchinson, Kempton rises to
80 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY ILYA MILSTEIN
the rhetorical occasion, flush with the men and women Roger Michell might Northman.” Amleth comes upon Fjöl-
pride of the autodidact. “I’d just finished have brought to the screen, as he rip- nir, his target, less than halfway through
reading Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Dark- ened with age. Now we shall never know. the film, and you think, Now might he
ness’ and I felt a need to explore Sun- do it pat. One swing of an axe and his
derland,” he tells the court. Alternately lood, mud, iron, fire, decapitated retribution would be complete. Instead,
beaming and doleful, his face is that of
a Mr. Punch who, in his own mind, has
B horses, and more blood: such are
the main components of “The North-
we have an hour’s delay, or more, in
which Amleth—whose mind, if he has
taken more blows from the world than man,” a new movie from Robert Eggers. one, is never going to be wracked with
he has dealt. In other words, we are It’s a gutsy piece of work, not only in the footling indecisions that hamper
squarely in Broadbent territory, where the reach of its ambition but also in its Hamlet—embarks on an earthy dalli-
the stubborn abuts the crumpled, and willingness to show us actual guts. We ance with Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy), a fel-
it’s hard to conceive of anyone else in the are in the era of the Vikings, one of whom low-slave, and plays a game of what ap-
part of Kempton. The result can be rel- is our hero. He is a man—or, rather, as pears to be homicidal Quidditch.
ished as a companion piece to Michell’s somebody says, “a beast, cloaked in man- “The Northman” is at once over-
“Le Week-End” (2013), in which Broad- flesh”—called Amleth (Alexander Skars- whelming and curiously uninvolving. It
bent portrayed a man less plumped-up gård), who gets to pillage a village, roar- lacks the momentum of Eggers’s “The
with confidence, yet equally stuck in a ing and baying as he glories in the rout, Witch” (2015), which was set among Pu-
stalled marriage. and thinks nothing of using his brow as ritan settlers in New England. You felt
On second viewing, “The Duke” loses a battering ram to crush the head of his the shudders of their spiritual dread, as
some of its capering gusto and takes on foe. I couldn’t help wondering what it drove the story onward, whereas the
a surprising hue of sadness. I hadn’t re- Kempton Bunton would make of him. mystical visions that punctuate the new
alized, at first, how often we hear about “Steady on, son,” he’d say, laying a friendly movie—a floating tree, say, hung with
the Buntons’ teen-age daughter, who hand on Amleth’s shoulder. “How about bodies—tend to slow the action down.
died in an accident, and how much gen- a nice cup of tea?” Yet the period detail is unstinting; schol-
uine grievance lurks in Dorothy’s de- As a boy, Amleth sees his father, King ars of Old Norse who were unconvinced
feated air. The film confirms that one Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), slain by the by Tony Curtis’s miniskirt, banded with
of Michell’s enduring themes was ex- foul-hearted Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who chevrons, in “The Vikings” (1958), will be
asperation—an unglamorous emotion, is Amleth’s uncle. Just to compound the reassured by Eggers’s dedication. And, to
familiar to us all but, unlike rage, sel- transgression, Fjölnir carries off the dead be fair, few directors can draw with such
dom given its cinematic due. Hence, man’s widow, Queen Gudrún (Nicole zeal from the deep well of the uncanny.
perhaps, his interest in autumnal char- Kidman), and marries her. Amleth’s mis- We see a proud king abase himself, on
acters; facing and fearing a wintry fu- sion, should he choose to accept it, is to all fours, to lap from a bowl of gore; an
ture, they take stock of what they have avenge this treachery. In short, as his name unkindness of ravens, kindly pecking the
done thus far, or frustratingly failed to suggests, he is the ur-Hamlet, though captive Amleth free from the ropes that
do. Look at Kempton, grabbing a spot not in every particular; I doubt that he bind him; and, at the climax, two naked
in the limelight before it’s too late; at was ever a freshman at Wittenberg, for warriors scything each other with swords
the widow in “The Mother” (2003), who instance, though he might have enjoyed beside rivers of flaming lava. Do you find
asks out loud, “Why shouldn’t I be dif- the hazing. In an unprincely twist, Am- this world of brainless savagery so dis-
ficult?,” and takes a younger lover; and, leth becomes a rogue and peasant slave, tant from our own as to be beyond be-
above all, at the peppery Peter O’Toole, like Maximus in “Gladiator” (2000)— lief? Try watching the news. 
in “Venus” (2006), slapping himself three biding his time, and awaiting a grand
times on the cheek and growling, “Come stage on which to deal the fateful blow. NEWYORKER.COM
on, old man!” What a harvest of old The biding is a problem for “The Richard Brody blogs about movies.

THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2022 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

VOLUME XCVIII, NO. 10, April 25 & May 2, 2022. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for four planned combined issues, as indicated on the issue’s cover, and other
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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 25 & MAY 2, 2022 81

 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 Tom Toro,
must be received by Sunday, May 1st. The finalists in the April 11th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the May 16th 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

“Don’t worry, you’ll be running in no time.”

Tony Bittner, McMurray, Pa.

“That’s gonna cost you an arm and a leg.” “Turns out they only check to see if you return the shoes.”
Susan Gale Wickes, Richmond, Ind. Jonathan Carter, Fredericksburg, Va.

“Good news—your car troubles are over.”

Steve Korba, Jeffersonville, N.Y.
 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

14 15 16

THE 17 18

CROSSWORD 19 20

21 22 23
A lightly challenging puzzle.
24 25 26 27 28 29

BY PATRICK BERRY
30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39
ACROSS
1 Site of an 1836 battle 40 41 42 43 44
6 Ming-dynasty antique
10 Come up with 45 46 47 48

14 Reward for getting a new credit card,

perhaps 49 50 51

16 Car-collecting comedian
52 53 54 55 56 57 58
17 “Quit it!”
18 Person to emulate 59 60

19 Joint where you might buy a round?

61 62
20 “Dibs!”
21 Moreover 63 64 65
22 Colorful Navajo creations
24 Unlikely fan of white zinfandel
DOWN 41 Brand once owned by the
29 Plot drivers in some farces
1 Basic knowledge Studebaker Corporation
30 Lovelace with a namesake
2 Boor 43 Held tightly
programming language
31 Animated character who exclaims, 3 Pot addition 45 Boats with two oars per rower
“By the power of Grayskull!” 4 Change at the genetic level 46 Becomes established
33 Pakistani living abroad, e.g. 5 Wisconsin town once dubbed the 48 Gas with the chemical formula C₂H₆
34 Hard row to hoe Sawdust Capital of the World for its 50 Flying alternative to a Technocrane
lumber industry
36 Longtime Toyota hatchback 54 “Would that it were so!”
6 ___ Corleone (Oscar-winning role for
38 ___ Scott v. Sandford (1857 decision Marlon Brando) 55 Paint quantities on a palette
widely regarded as one of the worst in How many watch the Olympics
7 Multigenerational baseball surname 56
the history of the Supreme Court)
8 Geisel’s nom de plume 57 “Dead Poets Society” director Peter
40 Birds that hatch from dark-green eggs
9 Respect 58 Vanquish, as a dragon
42 Discovery in an ancient shrine
10 Hit a dramatic high
44 Dashboard light that signals fuel-
efficient driving 11 Play that ends with the hero blinding Solution to the previous puzzle:
himself
45 Periods of service H O T M I C P L A N B S
12 Unharmed, so to speak A K E R M A N P E A C O A T
47 Ability to react quickly
13 To boot S E X T A P E E N G A R D E
49 Chewed noisily
15 “Frasier” actor John P E T C O U P O N S M B A
51 Work of art that can’t be resold, in brief F E R S T I N E B A U M
23 Unburden
52 Stellar animal? E D I T R N S C A R N E
24 “As I ___ saying . . .” B R O O K P O L A N D
53 Big business meetings 25 Warning that’s safe to ignore U N C A N N Y V A L L E Y
59 Disclosure from an inside source 26 Tennis player who wrote the 2021 Time S N E A D S R A T I O
60 Green thing on a roof? article “It’s O.K. to Not Be O.K.” O F A G E P I C N O U N

Reggaetón musician Don M O R E P I N U P N R A

61 Water-skiing venue 27
M L S L A N G U O R B T S
62 How busy honorees might receive their 28 Less fully stocked, as shelves
E L I D I N G M W A H A H A
awards 32 “The lifeblood of Egypt” R O D E N T S S E M I N A R
63 Take the lead? 35 Browning or Colt, e.g. S W E A T S R I P E N S
64 Noun-forming suffix 37 Hand-cranked kitchen gadgets
Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
65 For-profit university since 1931 39 MS-___ (early PC platform) newyorker.com/crossword
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