РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.

COM/WSNWS
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

LOS ANGELES | SAN FRANCISCO | CHICAGO | NEW YORK

PARAC H U T E H O ME. C OM
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

June 9, 2019

7 Screenland Dark Horse By Namwali Serpell / 11 Talk Stephen Colbert By David Marchese / 14 Diagnosis Agony By Lisa Sanders, M.D. /
16 The Ethicist Charitable Intentions By Kwame Anthony Appiah / 18 Letter of Recommendation Washing Dishes By Mike Powell /
20 Eat The Root of All Deliciousness By Tejal Rao

22 Why Is Mike Gravel Running for 28 Madonna at 60 36 Neither/Nor

President? (And Is He?) By Vanessa Grigoriadis / The next frontier for By Daniel Bergner / The struggles of
By Jamie Lauren Keiles / This spring, two the original queen of pop. rejecting the gender binary in a world that
teenagers asked an aging former senator for wants to box everyone in.
his Twitter password and permission to start
a presidential campaign in his name.
It might be a stunt — or the bizarre future
of post-Trump politics.

Behind the Cover Kathy Ryan, director of photography: ‘‘For our cover story about Madonna at 60, the French artist JR photographed the pop icon interacting with famous
photographs of her younger self. The original portraits he worked with are below: JR printed them at enormous sizes, and Madonna started playing around with them. For the
cover, we liked an image of her peering through a slit cut into the eye of an enlarged detail of the portrait by Meisel — it seemed to underscore the savvy ways in which Madonna
has built her image over the decades. The silver tone emphasizes the surreal juxtaposition of the current Madonna, in color, peeking through the classic black-and-white portrait
of an earlier Madonna.’’ Photograph by JR for The New York Times. Stylist: Eyob Yohannes; hair: Nicola Clarke; makeup: Isamaya Ffrench.
Middle: Trunk Archive

Kate Simon, 1983 Herb Ritts, 1986 Steven Meisel, 1991

4 Contributors / 5 The Thread / 10 Poem / 16 Judge John Hodgman / 19 Tip / 46, 48, 50 Puzzles / 46 Puzzle Answers

Copyright © 2019 The New York Times 3

 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Contributors

JR ‘‘Madonna at 60,’’ Editor in Chief JAKE SILVERSTEIN

Cover and Page 28 Deputy Editors JESSICA LUSTIG,
BILL WASIK
Managing Editor ERIKA SOMMER
Design Director GAIL BICHLER
JR is a French artist, based in New York, who Director of Photography KATHY RYAN
exhibits his large-format photographs in Art Director MATT WILLEY
Features Editor ILENA SILVERMAN
streets around the world. His recent projects Politics Editor CHARLES HOMANS
include a mural of more than 1,000 people Culture Editor SASHA WEISS
Digital Director BLAKE WILSON
for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Story Editors NITSUH ABEBE,
an optical illusion using 2,000 sheets of paper MICHAEL BENOIST,
SHEILA GLASER,
at the Louvre, an Academy Award-nominated CLAIRE GUTIERREZ,
feature documentary co-directed with Agnès JAZMINE HUGHES,
LUKE MITCHELL,
Varda, installations at the 2016 Rio Olympics DEAN ROBINSON,
and a project at the U.S.-Mexico border. WILLY STALEY
At War Editor LAUREN KATZENBERG
For this week’s cover story, JR photographed Assistant Managing Editor JEANNIE CHOI
Madonna interacting with archival images Associate Editors IVA DIXIT,
KYLE LIGMAN
of herself. ‘‘I love walking into a room with no Poetry Editor RITA DOVE
idea of what will come out of it,’’ JR says. Staff Writers SAM ANDERSON,
EMILY BAZELON,
Photographed by Kathy Ryan in Paris on ‘‘With Madonna, who knows what you’ll get?’’ RONEN BERGMAN,
April 3, 2019, at 5:44 p.m. TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER,
C. J. CHIVERS,
PAMELA COLLOFF,
NICHOLAS CONFESSORE,
Daniel Bergner ‘‘Neither/Nor,’’ Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer and
SUSAN DOMINUS,
Page 36 the author of ‘‘Sing for Your Life.’’ He last wrote MAUREEN DOWD,
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES,
for the magazine about an American
JENEEN INTERLANDI,
aid worker who was abducted in Pakistan. MARK LEIBOVICH,
JONATHAN MAHLER,
DAVID MARCHESE,
Vanessa Grigoriadis ‘‘Madonna at 60,’’ Vanessa Grigoriadis is a contributing writer WESLEY MORRIS,
Page 28 for the magazine and the author of ‘‘Blurred Lines: JENNA WORTHAM
At War Reporter JOHN ISMAY
Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Deputy Art Director BEN GRANDGENETT
Designers CLAUDIA RUBÍN,
Campus.’’ She last wrote about the Nxivm group. RACHEL WILLEY
Deputy Director of Photography JESSICA DIMSON
Associate Photo Editors STACEY BAKER,
Jamie Lauren Keiles ‘‘Why Is Mike Gravel Jamie Lauren Keiles is a writer who AMY KELLNER
Running for President? lives in Ridgewood, Queens, and last Photo Assistant PIA PETERSON
(And Is He?)’’ Copy Chief ROB HOERBURGER
wrote for the magazine about
Page 22 Copy Editors HARVEY DICKSON,
the sword swallower Betty Bloomerz. DANIEL FROMSON,
MARGARET PREBULA,
ANDREW WILLETT
Namwali Serpell Screenland, Namwali Serpell is a Zambian writer Head of Research NANDI RODRIGO
Page 7 Research Editors ALEX CARP,
who teaches at the University of California, CYNTHIA COTTS,
Berkeley. Her first novel, ‘‘The JAMIE FISHER,
LU FONG,
Old Drift,’’ was published in March. TIM HODLER,
ROBERT LIGUORI,
LIA MILLER,

Dear Reader: Should we STEVEN STERN,

MARK VAN DE WALLE,

be customizing human Production Chief

Production Editors
BILL VOURVOULIAS
ANICK PLEVEN
PATTY RUSH,

genes for personal preference? Editorial Administrator

HILARY SHANAHAN
LIZ GERECITANO BRINN
Editorial Assistant ASTHA RAJVANSHI
Every week the magazine publishes the results
87% No
of a study conducted online in July 2018 by
The New York Times’s research-and-analytics NYT MAG LABS

department, reflecting the opinions of Editorial Director CAITLIN ROPER

4,151 subscribers who chose to participate. Art Director DEB BISHOP
NYT for Kids Editor AMBER WILLIAMS

13% Yes Associate Editor

Designer
LOVIA GYARKYE
NAJEEBAH AL-GHADBAN

Managing Director, The New York Times Magazine and Vice President, Media: MAGGIE KISELICK Vice Presidents, Media: ELIZABETH WEBBE LUNNY and LAURA SONNENFELD Executive Directors:
JULIAN AHYE (Advocacy, Health Care, Media and Travel) ⬤ MICHAEL GILBRIDE (Fashion, Luxury and Beauty) ⬤ GUY GRIGGS (Auto, Tech and Finance) ⬤ ADAM HARGIS (Home, CPG, Spirits and Real
Estate) ⬤ SHARI KAPLAN (Live Entertainment and N.Y. Studios) ⬤ NANCY KARPF (Fine Arts, Books and Education) ⬤ BRENDAN WALSH (Story X Partnerships) National Sales Office Executive Directors:
LAUREN FUNKE (Florida/Southeast) ⬤ DANIELLE D’ANGELO (Detroit) ⬤ LINDSAY HOWARD (San Francisco/Los Angeles) ⬤ JIMMY SAUNDERS (Chicago/Midwest/Southwest) ⬤ ROBERT SCUDDER
(Boston/Washington) ⬤ KAREN FARINA (Magazine Advertising Manager) ⬤ EMMA PULITZER (Ad Product Marketing Manager) ⬤ MARILYN MCCAULEY (Managing Director, Specialty Printing) ⬤ THOMAS
GILLESPIE (Manager, Magazine Layout). To advertise, email karen.farina@nytimes.com. ⬤ ⬤ Senior Vice President, General Manager, Media: LISA RYAN HOWARD Senior Vice President, Story X
Partnerships: ANDY WRIGHT Global Head of Advertising and Marketing Solutions: SEBASTIAN TOMICH

4 6.9.19

The Thread
Readers respond to the 5.26.2019 issue.
RE: GERMANY’S NEW ANTI-SEMITISM
James Angelos wrote about how new forms
of old hatreds are stoking fears among Jews
who live in Germany.
This is a beautiful and important article,
and having lived in Berlin and been at all
the landmarks pictured, it was a welcome
return trip for me. I was stunned, although
not surprised, by the negative comments
on the article that critique it as if it were
saying Germany is a terrible place. That
is not what the article is discussing. It is
discussing the experiences of Jews in
present-day Germany and how they are
‘‘othered’’ in a variety of ways for being
Jewish. It demonstrates that systemic big-
otry takes a very, very long time to correct
in a culture. This is good information for
Americans who live in a country where big-
otry and intolerance of all types are openly
demonstrated more and more. Germany
has faced, and continues to face, its past.
Americans take heed: Even if we face our
history and present of torturing and kill-
ing people for their race and gender, it will
take our culture hundreds and hundreds of
years to become healthy. We do not face
this history and reality at our peril.
Dorothy Potter Snyder, Hillsborough, N.C.
Thank you for this article. It’s been a long
time since I lived in Berlin (as a gradu-
ate student in 1985-86; two months in
East Berlin, 10 months in West Berlin).
I attended the Fraenkelufer synagogue
Photograph by Gillian Laub
weekly for those 10 months. The barbed
wire fence was there then as well, and
the customary police guard. It was a
small but friendly congregation. Thank
you for the picture. The current level
of anti-Semitism is very disappointing.
Even back then there was a swastika in
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
the elevator of my apartment building in
Kreuzberg that covered the entire ceiling
of the elevator.
Jeanne Swack, Madison, Wis.
I am the daughter and granddaugh-
ter of German-Jewish refugees as well
as a sociologist who recently spent a THE STORY,
six-month sabbatical at the Center for ON TWITTER
Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin.
I LOVE “The View”
Ironically, I firmly believe that it is safer and watch daily.
to be a Jew in Germany today than in Now, the Times has
the U.S. In Germany, thousands have pro- declared it “the
tested against the neo-Nazi movement most important
political TV
and the government speaks out loudly show in America.”
and clearly against it. By contrast, Pres- @amirushes
ident Trump felt that there were ‘‘very
fine people’’ on both sides of the Char-
lottesville neo-Nazi rally. Furthermore,
very few Germans own guns. Of course,
there should be more training for edu-
cators and police about anti-Semitism
and other forms of racism, but suggest-
ing that Germany is unsafe for Jews is a
gross exaggeration.
Diane L. Wolf, professor of sociology, Uni-
versity of California, Davis
RE: AT WAR
Alia Malek reported about a Syrian mother
facing an impossible choice.
Thank you for bringing readers Alia
Malek’s nuanced and insightful first
installment of her series reporting on a
Syrian refugee family forging a new life in
Europe. It serves as an important remind-
er that while the U.S. military interven-
tion in Iraq helped destabilize the region
and led to the rise of ISIS, other countries
are doing far more to help refugees. In
fiscal year 2018, the U.S. took in only
62 refugees from Syria — down from
‘Many Americans
feel emotionally
distant from
the tragedies our
country helped
birth and know
little of the lives
of those affected.’
Illustrations by Giacomo Gambineri
more than 12,000 in fiscal year 2016. As
Ms. Malek writes, many Americans feel
emotionally distant from the tragedies
our country helped birth and know little
of the lives of those affected. Thank you
for your important work.
Luke Broadwater, Baltimore
Readers respond to the 5.19.2019 issue.
RE: HOSPICE CARE FOR CHILDREN
Helen Ouyang wrote about pediatric hospice
centers that provide care and comfort for
dying children and their families.
I can’t tell you how much it meant to
many of us here in Toronto to read an
extremely well written article on hospic-
es for children. It is so important to get
the word out about how truly amazing
these homes are in providing the absolute
best alternative to families in the abso-
lute worst circumstances. It was also very
eye-opening to me on the financial prob-
lems faced by such homes in the United
States without a centralized government
health care system. There are several
such homes in Canada. In Toronto, we
have Emily’s House, where I have volun-
teered for the past four years. It is named
after the daughter of a U.S. diplomat. She
(Emily) fell ill while he was on assign-
ment in China, and the family then came
to Canada. I have distributed so many
copies of this article to staff at Emily’s
House — to the founder, nurses, doctors
and social workers — and everyone has
been just so amazed at the beauty of it
and its importance to society’s dialogue
on understanding the needs of families
who are going through the impossible.
Daniel Quigley, Toronto
Send your thoughts to magazine@nytimes.com.
5
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Screenland

Dark Horse

How social-media meme-makers rescued ‘Game of

Thrones’ from itself. ⬤ By Namwali Serpell ⬤ In the
final week of the eight-season run of ‘‘Game of
Thrones,’’ even as the HBO series devolved into a
torment of gaffes — a Starbucks cup and plastic
bottles in view, overwrought yet hollow symbols, a
series of spectacular continuity errors — we were
still trying to salvage meaning. We clung to the
6.9.19 7

Screenland
cliffhanger ending of the penultimate
episode: Arya Stark wanders a city of cin-
ders, trying to save innocent women and
children from being doused with dragon
flame from above. Struck by tumbling
rocks and epiphanies — murder is bad,
monarchy loves murder — the ash-covered
Arya staggers to her feet, looks over and
sees a lone white horse, mane wafting.
Slowly, she approaches it, calms it and
rides away on it as the credits roll.
Fans churned out a flurry of interpreta-
tions of the scene on Twitter: about how
the horse got there, what it foreshad-
owed, previous horses it echoed, who
was inside it (was it Trojan?), where Arya
was going. None of it mattered: In the
finale, Arya comes striding through the
8 6.9.19
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
rubble on foot, horse lost to the winds of
plot closure. But out of this most trivial of
the show’s blunders, a meme was born: a
33-second clip of Arya’s equine encoun-
ter soundtracked with the remix of ‘‘Old
Town Road,’’ the viral earworm released
in December by Lil Nas X.
As Arya walks among the flames toward
her steed, we hear the twangy notes of
Nine Inch Nails’s ‘‘34 Ghosts IV,’’ the sam-
ple that grounds the song, then Billy Ray
Cyrus’s raspy croon: ‘‘Yeah, I’m gonna
take my horse to the old town road/I’m
gonna ride ’til I can’t no more. . . .’’ The
beat drops, in sync with the horse’s gal-
lop, as Arya rides off and Lil Nas X begins
to rap: ‘‘I got the horses in the back. . . .’’
The effect is a melancholy rise in tension,
Photo illustration by Cristiana Couceiro
The Arya’s then a pivotal break: momentum, free-
Horse, hat: Getty Images. Sword: Shutterstock. Previous page: Screen
dom, the triumph of the decision to ride.
horse/‘Old Town In paleontology, sometimes a very
Road’ meme is thin layer in a rock formation can signal
a kind of artifact a profound break in time, like the K-T
boundary that marks the extinction of
of a great the dinosaurs and divides the Mesozoic
media shift. and Cenozoic eras. The Arya’s horse/‘‘Old
Town Road’’ meme is a kind of artifact of
a great media shift, marking a transition
between a passing away of certain visual
forms, like prestige television, and a new
flourishing of online forms like the meme.
This particular meme captures the spirit
grab from HBO.
of the hashtag #DemThrones, which was
created in 2012 — its exact provenance is
the subject of debate — as a space for black
fans to deliberate and commiserate about

the show. It soon exceeded its scrappy
hashtag and became a phenomenon.
HBO even advertised its final season using
#DemThrones — a cynical co-optation,
given how the show treated anyone with
dark skin (as exotic savage, white-savior
dependent, sexual object, cannon fod-
der). But the beauty of #DemThrones was
how black viewers both excoriated and
embraced ‘‘Game of Thrones,’’ reading it
for filth while lovingly adopting its minor-
ity characters as heroes — like Daenerys
Targaryen’s commander Grey Worm and
her adviser and handmaiden, Missandei.
How did fantasy, this whitest of literary
genres, plagued by a history of eugenicist
and racist ideas, produce this unlikely,
fierce standom? Perhaps for the same
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
reasons that ‘‘Old Town Road,’’ which Lil
Nas X describes as a ‘‘country trap’’ song,
climbed to the top of the charts. For one,
artistic gravity is shifting from creation
to reception and from sole authorship to
crowdsourcing. A meme is a collective
form. Its indexes of value are speed, pop-
ularity and wit rather than originality in any
sense. #DemThrones cares neither for indi-
vidual genius nor for fidelity to a ‘‘master
text.’’ And Lil Nas X is a genius of splicing
and circulating forms, not inventing them.
A 20-year-old musician from Geor-
gia who used to run a Nicki Minaj fan
account on Twitter, Lil Nas X promoted
‘‘Old Town Road’’ with what he calls ‘‘iron-
ically hilarious’’ memes like the ‘‘Yeehaw
Challenge,’’ which soon went viral on the
Viewers of the social-media platform TikTok. In short
final episode of
videos, TikTokkers lip-sync to the song’s
‘‘Game of Thrones’’
when it aired on opening bars in their regular clothes and
May 19: 19.3 million. jump up in the air, then land on their feet
as the beat hits, magically decked out in
Nationwide streams
of Lil Nas X’s ‘‘Old cowboy gear. Lil Nas X appealed to the
Town Road country star Billy Ray Cyrus on Twitter
(Remix)’’ that week: to help sell the track. And when the song
130.7 million.
was pulled from the Billboard Hot Country
Songs chart, on the putative grounds that
it did ‘‘not embrace enough elements of
today’s country music,’’ Cyrus hopped on
a remix to add ‘‘authenticity’’ — whistling
and whiteness, basically. It isn’t back on the
country charts, but it has been No. 1 on the
Billboard Hot 100 for weeks.
We’ve seen the inverse with ‘‘Game of
Thrones.’’ When George R. R. Martin failed
9
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Screenland

to deliver on his vision for the show fast The idea of Poem Selected by Rita Dove
enough and David Benioff and D. B. Weiss
took over writing it, the idea of authorial authorial You don’t have to be a baseball enthusiast to feel the spritz of hope, luck and determination
intention went out the window quick as intention went our national pastime engenders in E. Ethelbert Miller, who has written a book’s worth of
Bran Stark. The maddening king of fantasy out the window poems in honor of the game. For the autograph-seeking black kids in this poem, life is still a
was deposed; the oligarchy of the writers’ line drive, and all ball players are created equal; ninth-inning defeats and freedom
room presided. But the curtain lifted for quick as riders are yet to come. Their mothers, knowing better, offer what haven they can — and
fans, too: Now we know the show is less the Bran Stark. The tuck a note of caution into their stories of uplift.
product of a grand creative plan and more maddening
a matter of production schedules, haggling
screenwriters and celebrity influence. king of fantasy
If there’s no ultimate authority, then was deposed.
a fan can TikTok his way into becoming
a star, and we, the viewers, can start a
Change.org petition demanding that
HBO remake the final season of ‘‘Game
of Thrones.’’ Many laughed at this petition
— pah, millennials! — by challenging its The Boys of Summer
1.6 million signatories to make a better
By E. Ethelbert Miller
work of art themselves. But you might say
some fans already did, and it was called
#DemThrones: a messy, smart, popular
vote that many enjoyed more than the Carlton, Patrick and I
show. And so, midway through the final
season, the filmmaker Barry Jenkins are waiting for autographs
tweeted: ‘‘The satisfaction of finishing the
episode and loading up #DemThrones.’’ outside Yankee Stadium. The summer
And so, shortly after the finale aired, Arya
Stark herself, the actress Maisie Williams, of 1960 and Mazeroski has not hit
tweeted: ‘‘just here for the memes.’’
We assume that completion is to art the home run which will break our
as death is to life: You can see what it all
meant only when it’s over. Incompleteness hearts. We are years away from
was key to #DemThrones, however. When
‘‘Game of Thrones’’ was still running, each memories of our wives and our children.
episode could potentially coincide with
anything: with the Portland Trail Blazers’ On this day we see Mickey Mantle coming
defeat of the Oklahoma City Thunder, with
the 2020 presidential race, with a country to work, his uniform of stripes waiting
trap song. Now that the show has aired in
full, this random, hilarious meme machine inside. We run to catch ‘‘The Mick’’ to
has been superseded by an older, creakier
interpretive machine that can make sense have him sign his name on whatever we
of, say, the visual echoes of its opening and
closing episodes. Paid cultural gatekeepers own. Our lives sheltered from segregation.
are already carving the epitaphs.
All around us, meanwhile, new media Our mothers talking about Jackie Robinson
forms like the Arya’s horse/‘‘Old Town
Road’’ mash-up continue to break formal and how Willie Mays learned to catch a ball
ground. They may lack the duration and
durability of classic works of art — they while turning his back, running full speed
may be harder to Google or revisit — but
they’re the more telling artifacts of our as if he were Emmett Till.
zeitgeist. ‘‘Game of Thrones’’ thought it
knew what was good, but #DemThrones
gave us the freedom to wonder, along with
Rita Dove is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a former poet laureate of the United States. She edited ‘‘The Penguin
Jon Snow: ‘‘What about everyone else?
Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry,’’ and her ‘‘Collected Poems: 1974-2004’’ was published in 2016.
All the other people who think they know E. Ethelbert Miller is a poet, teacher and literary activist based in Washington. He is the author of two memoirs
what’s good?’’ and several collections of poetry, most recently ‘‘If God Invented Baseball,’’ published by City Point Press in 2018.

10 6.9.19 Illustration by R. O. Blechman

 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Talk By David Marchese

Stephen Colbert on the political targets of satire.

‘Not everybody is as mockable as everybody else, and
some mockability doesn’t have consequences.’

Photograph by Mamadi Doumbouya 11

 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Talk

Even though it has been a few years they’ve been thinking about all day. So if Below: Donald a moral component, then your jokes will
Trump discussing
since Stephen Colbert stepped out of the news has been Orange Thanos, then have a moral component. In other words,
his presidential
the blowhard conservative-pundit role I’m not going to change that. I’m going campaign on ‘‘The you don’t choose the flavor. The flavor is
that he played for nearly a decade on to do my best to stand in the teeth of Late Show With chosen by politics itself.
‘‘The Colbert Report’’ and into the role that particular [expletive] hurricane and Stephen Colbert’’ That’s sort of a general answer about
in September 2015.
of, well, himself, as host of ‘‘The Late make jokes about how we’re all being Bottom (from left): the default moral nature of political
Show’’ on CBS, the 55-year-old’s popu- lied to. For my own heart’s ease, I’m not Colbert, Ed Helms, satire. I was asking more specifically
larity only continues to grow. His show, going to pretend that Trump is not lying Jon Stewart, about whether or not you personally
Rob Corddry and
already No. 1 in late night, took over the to me. The alternative is to stick your feel any sense of moral obligation about
Samantha Bee of
top spot among viewers ages 18 to 49 head in the sand. ‘‘The Daily Show your work. No. I mean, I have a moral-
earlier this year, a demographic that had That thing about not wanting to let With Jon Stewart.’’ ity. I suppose it’s related to my Catho-
long been owned by Jimmy Fallon and Trump get away with a lie — is it fair Opposite page licity. I was raised in a devout Catholic
(from left): Steve
‘‘The Tonight Show.’’ As it turns out, what to say that you feel a moral imperative Carell, Paul Dinello,
home and bottle-fed Robert Bolt’s ‘‘A
Colbert and his show offer — an ‘‘explica- behind your work? Well, when you make Colbert and David Man for All Seasons,’’ 2 which is about
tive deconstruction of the day’s news,’’ as jokes about politicians, there’s what they Razowsky performing how it’s important that you not let the
he puts it — is exactly what many people say and what they do. It’s hard to make in ‘‘Take Me Out tide of history sweep you along if you
to the Balkans’’ at
want. ‘‘It’s so confusing today,’’ said Col- jokes about someone who says something Second City in don’t actually agree with it. And William
bert, who is also an executive producer and then kind of does it. But with a guy Chicago in 1993. Buckley said he ‘‘stands athwart history,
on Showtime’s animated comedy ‘‘Our who points east with his words and west yelling stop.’’ I think we, with the show,
Cartoon President.’’ ‘‘And that confusion with his action, that’s where all the jokes stand athwart history and say: ‘‘That’s
David Marchese
leads to anxiety, and the anxiety makes live. Now, what are the things he’s lying is the magazine’s Talk dumb. What a load of [expletive] that
the audience want the jokes.’’ Which, about? If the things he’s lying about have columnist. is.’’ Is that moral? I don’t know. I know
Colbert added, is ‘‘the same reason we
want to do them.’’
‘‘The Late Show’’ is doing very well,
and there are obvious explanations you
could point to: You’ve had a few years
to learn how to do the job. You’re ben-
efiting from a Trump bump. But what’s
your own hunch about why the show
is resonating? By the spring of 2016,
we had figured out how I want to do a
monologue: We never do setup, punch,
setup, punch. Instead, it’s always, I’m
going to tell back to you what happened
today. When the presidential campaign
came around in 2016, that helped focus
us on the things that we most enjoyed,
which is the news of the day. But you
say ‘‘doing very well,’’ and I know you
mean numerically.1 This is a long pream-
ble to the real answer to your question:
It’s almost as if the president is trying
to cast a spell to confuse people so they
cannot know the true nature of reality,
and what we do is pick apart the way in
which the [expletive] was sold to you. I
think that’s why it’s going well. Our job
is to identify the [expletive], and there’s
never been more.
Is President Trump good for comedy?
How do you come up with a fresh joke
about him? I make no claim that we do.
Sometimes it’s the same joke. But some-
times there’s still meat left on that chick-
en. Trump consumes the news cycle,
and our mandate, as we’ve established
for ourselves, is that I want to inform
the audience of my opinion about what

12 6.9.19

that public lies that you are impelled to
believe are worse than private ones. But
I’m not Erin Brockovich.3 I’m sure as hell
not Howard Beale.4 A fair amount of the
time, I’m making poop jokes. Matter of
fact, Jon Stewart,5 when it looked like
‘‘The Colbert Report’’ had come out of
the box fully assembled and was going
to happen, he said to me, ‘‘When your
children go up to get their diplomas at
whatever college they end up going to, I
want you to whisper to yourself quietly as
they get the sheepskin, ‘I paid for some
of this with poop jokes.’ ’’
When you were doing ‘‘The Colbert
Report,’’ there was a huge amount of
projection happening on the part of the
audience about who you really were and
what you really thought.6 Since you’ve
switched to ‘‘The Late Show’’ and
stopped playing a character, what’s
been the most interesting or weirdest
idea you’ve noticed people projecting
onto you? That I want to be a political
force. That’s the weirdest thing. I said
to Jon, back in the day: ‘‘You and I are
like Frodo and Samwise. We’re trying to
throw the damn ring in the volcano. It
doesn’t occur to them that we don’t want
to use it.’’ Our way of throwing the ring
Left, top: Jeffrey R. Staab/CBS, via Getty Images. Left, bottom: Comedy Central/Photofest. This page: From Second City.
in the volcano is to make fun of politi-
cal behavior. But people got mad at me.
‘‘Oh, now he’s fashioning himself as a
player.’’ And I’m like, you could not be
more wrong. If you think I want that, you
know nothing about me. I just want to
make jokes. I care about what happens in
the news. I have an audience that seems
to care, too. We mesh on the jokes. It’s
not complicated.
The other day your monologue was
about the de facto Alabama abortion
ban. Yeah, I had avoided making jokes
about it, because you can’t win making
jokes about abortion. Half of the peo-
ple are just going to be mad at you.
But Alabama was an unavoidable one.
The reason we did it was because that
was about, I thought, a very cynical,
purposeful overreach. Even the people
who were writing the law said they don’t
want that law.
Because it’s about getting the law kicked
up to the Supreme Court? Right. But I
don’t understand why the governor
would sign that law. That seemed like
a real misuse of legislation. Write the
law you want, and then see whether the
Supreme Court supports you. Don’t write
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
1 After a relatively
slow start, ‘‘The
Late Show’’ became
late night’s overall
ratings leader
in February 2017.
2 The classic play
based on the life
of Sir Thomas More.
It was later made
into an Academy
Award-winning
film starring Paul
Scofield as More.
3 The crusading
activist who helped
bring a 1993 lawsuit
against Pacific Gas &
Electric that accused
the company of
having contaminated
the area around
Hinkley, Calif.
4 The mad-as-hell
television news the law you don’t want just so it will go them, which is good. But not everybody
anchor played by to the Supreme Court. The whole thing is as mockable as everybody else, and
Peter Finch in seems so contemptible to me. But that some mockability doesn’t have conse-
the classic 1976 film
satire ‘‘Network.’’ had such a larger political perspective to quences. Now, maybe Andrew Yang will
it that it seemed as though not talking be president — I don’t know [expletive]
5 Colbert worked about it would have been an odd break- about politics; I only know about human
under Stewart as a
ing of my own rule: We talk about what behavior — but his running on no cir-
correspondent on
‘‘The Daily Show’’ people are talking about. cumcision, free money and legalized
Your monologue did make me wonder pot 7 is of no consequence compared
from 1999 to 2004.
where you stand on the legal right to an with Donald Trump. So in terms of bal-
6 Researchers at
Ohio State University
abortion. I doubt I’ll ever need to get one. ance, I don’t really care. I care about
even conducted a Well, can I ask, then, if you support a being honest about what people talked
study about political woman’s legal right to an abortion? I about today.
bias and perceptions support a woman’s legal right to exert all As far as the larger conversation we’re
of ‘‘The Colbert
Report.’’ They noted, her rights. One of her rights, presently, is all having, do you think there’s a way in
‘‘Conservatives to have an abortion. I am not in favor of which, intentionally or not, your show
were more likely to the judges who have been appointed who functions as part of the political pundit-
report that Colbert
might likely overturn that. I respect the sphere we seem to be mired in, where it
only pretends to be
joking and genuinely women I know and their opinion on the feels as if we’re all mad at one another
meant what he subject. I believe that abortion is a wom- all the time? You’re describing a divisive
said while liberals an’s choice. I also know and love many atmosphere, and when you say ‘‘function,’’
were more likely
to report that people who feel differently. I think you mean, ‘‘Does it feed that?’’
Colbert used satire So to return to the idea that people incor- Yes. It might. The behavior I’m exhibiting
and was not serious rectly might think that you want to be a fits my genre, which is not supposed to
when offering
political player. Which is understand- have respectability. There’s a reason it’s
political statements.’’
able, because a reality star is president. not a central part of polite society. But
7 The Democratic Do you consider the balance of whom there’s supposed to be a polite society
presidential you’re making jokes about? Sure. That’s out there! It’s not my fault there isn’t one
candidate has
proposed giving a
going to be helped now because there anymore. I feel completely secure encour-
monthly payment are Democrats to talk about. When Joe aging laughter at the behavior of people
of $1,000 to every Biden got heat for sniffi ng women’s who I think are doing a terrible job and
American over heads, we did an act that he was doing claiming that they’re doing it all for our
the age of 18. He
has also expressed A.S.M.R. We make jokes about Beto benefit or being mendacious. So am I part
his disagreement O’Rourke. We make jokes about Eliz- of the problem? That is not for me to say.
with circumcision as abeth Warren. We make jokes about I just think I’m doing my job.
a standard medical
Andrew Yang. We make jokes about
procedure and has
promised to legalize Pete Buttigieg. What I’m happy about This interview has been edited and condensed
marijuana if elected. is that my audience is laughing at all of for clarity from two conversations.
13
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Diagnosis By Lisa Sanders, M.D.

It seemed likely that the older man As the physician prepared to leave the
exam room, the patient’s wife spoke up:
‘‘Doctor, my husband won’t tell you this,

had a particular disease seen in but he is suffering,’’ the woman said, her
voice cracking. Dr. Timothy Quan, a rheu-
matologist in central Connecticut, looked
those over 50. But the test results at the 69-year-old man he’d been caring
for over the past several months. The man

didn’t add up. gave a brisk nod. It was true. The past few
weeks had been a nightmare of pain.
Six months earlier, the patient woke
up with a sore, swollen right hand. He
figured he must have injured it a few days
before when he cleared out a pile of wood
in his backyard. He mentioned it to his
primary-care physician a couple of weeks
later when he went in for a routine exam.
The doctor prescribed some ibuprofen
and suggested that maybe he was too old
for that kind of heavy labor.
The ibuprofen helped but didn’t stop
the pain from spreading to both shoul-
ders and down his hips and legs. By the
time he went back to his doctor a few days
later, every muscle, every ligament, every
bone in his body seemed to ache. It was
worse in the morning, when he was so
stiff he could hardly get out of bed.
The patient lived in rural Connecticut, so
his physician figured it was probably Lyme
disease. He sent him to be tested but felt
confident enough in the diagnosis to start
him on doxycycline, the antibiotic used to
treat most of the infections carried by ticks.
The antibiotic didn’t help — he was still
in a lot of pain. So his doctor called in a
week of prednisone. The aches almost dis-
appeared with the very first pill. They came
back with a vengeance, though, when the
prescription ended. He tried to tough it
out, but the pain worsened every day.

↓
A Likely Diagnosis
The Lyme test was negative, but some of
the other tests the doctor sent, looking
for inflammatory causes of the pain, were
sky-high. So when the patient limped in
for a follow-up appointment three weeks
later, the doctor referred him to Quan, the
rheumatologist. By the day of the appoint-
ment, the patient had excruciating pain in
his shoulders and hips. They ached con-
stantly. He had to sleep in a chair. Even
then he hurt too much for any real sleep.
He felt like a zombie. His hips ached with
every step, limiting his walk to a shuffle.
This man was never a big talker, but pain
reduced him to near silence.

14 6.9.19 Photo illustrations by Ina Jang


Given the location of the pain, the ele-
vated inflammatory markers and the sig-
nificant response to steroids, Quan thought
the man probably had something called
polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR). PMR is a
poorly understood disease seen predom-
inantly in those over 50. It’s an inflamma-
tory disorder affecting the soft tissue of
the shoulder and hip joints. Diagnosis is
based on the clinical presentation because
there’s no definitive diagnostic test. Symp-
toms suggestive of PMR include pain in the
shoulders and hips, morning stiffness that
lasts over an hour and a rapid response to
even low doses of steroids. This patient had
all of them, Quan explained to the patient
and his wife. While the mechanisms of the
disease aren’t well understood, symptoms
can be managed using steroids, usually
prednisone. Once the pain is controlled,
the dose of the medication must be low-
ered slowly. If decreased too rapidly, the
joints can flare and the pain can return.
↓ was still worth living.
The Miracle of Steroids
Quan gave the patient a shot of a steroid
and started him on prednisone, and
almost immediately the pain receded.
He was still stiff in the morning, but by
lunch he almost felt like himself again.
He was doing so well that when he went
back the following month, Quan started
to slowly taper the prednisone.
Perhaps it wasn’t slowly enough. Weeks
later, when the patient saw Quan again, he
was in agony. He didn’t say anything to
the doctor — he didn’t like to complain.
So his wife had to. It broke her heart to see
him like this, she told Quan. Sometimes
he was in so much pain, he cried.
Before each appointment, the patient
went to the lab so that Quan could moni-
tor the inflammatory markers. As the pain
lessened, the numbers improved. But
the patient was now in terrible pain. His
inflammatory markers should have been
high as well — but they weren’t. And that
was odd. Which prompted Quan to won-
der: Was this really PMR? When a disease
doesn’t behave the way you expect it to,
you have to at least consider the possibil-
ity that maybe it’s not the right diagnosis.
But if it wasn’t PMR, what was it?
↓ the fungus. Once the bugs were gone, and
New, Scarier Possibilities
Right at the top of Quan’s list was malig-
nancy. There are some rare disorders that
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
look very much like PMR that have been
associated with cancers. Was the patient
up to date on his colonoscopies? He was.
He smoked when he was younger — had
he had the screening chest CT that is rec-
ommended for those who’d smoked? No.
Quan sent him to get an X-ray. He also
ordered additional blood tests to look for
other possible causes of this kind of pain
and other types of cancer.
The chest X-ray wasn’t normal. A CT
scan revealed a crop of nodules, barely
the size of apple seeds, in the upper lobe
of the right lung and a sprinkle in the base
as well. The radiologist thought this was
probably pneumonia but said that it could
also be cancer. He recommended repeat-
ing the study in three months.
Time can be an important diagnostic
test, providing key information about a
disease. But it can be brutal for those who
are doing the waiting. Between the fear of
cancer and the pain in his shoulders and
hips, the man started to wonder if his life
Lisa Sanders, M.D.,
is a contributing writer ↓ soil, often near water. Spores from both
for the magazine Things Seem Bleaker
and the author of ‘‘Every The second CT scan confirmed the
Patient Tells a Story:
Medical Mysteries and couple’s worst fears. There were more
the Art of Diagnosis.’’ nodules, many more. The radiologist
If you have a solved still thought it could be an infection, but
case to share with Dr.
cancer was also a real possibility. They
Sanders, write her
at Lisa.Sandersmd@ couldn’t get in to see a lung specialist
gmail.com. for weeks but couldn’t bear to wait any
longer. Quan called a surgeon he knew,
and the doctor agreed to see the man the
same day. After reviewing the imaging
and examining the patient, the surgeon
told the couple that the only way to know
for certain what was in the lung was to
remove the tissue and examine it. He
scheduled the man for surgery the fol-
lowing week.
After the operation, a new doctor, a
specialist in infectious diseases, brought
the results. I have good news and bad
news, he told them. The good news —
it’s definitely not cancer. The bad news
is that we still don’t know what it is. For
the patient, whatever it turned out to be,
it couldn’t be as bad as cancer.
↓
Some Unexpected Closure
A few days later, the doctor conveyed
something closer to a final diagnosis. It
was a fungus, though the lab still wasn’t
sure which one. It was either Blastomy-
cosis or Cryptococcus. Both are found
in the environment, usually in moist
fungi can be inhaled, often after soil is
disturbed — as it may have been when
the patient moved the woodpile in his
yard. Cryptococcus is found throughout
the United States but rarely causes symp-
tomatic lung infections. Blastomycosis
is not as widespread; it’s most common
in the states on the Great Lakes or the
Mississippi Valley, though it can be found
farther east as well. When the spores
are inhaled, it is more likely to cause an
infection. Three months of an antifungal
medication would take care of either one,
if there were any bugs left after surgery.
The man’s doctors didn’t make an
immediate connection between the infec-
tion in his lungs and the terrible pain in
his joints. But as soon as the infected tissue
was out of the man’s body, his pain disap-
peared, and for the patient and his wife,
that was all the proof that was needed.
As a rheumatologist, Quan regular-
ly confronts the complex relationship
between the body and its own immune
system. As he sees it, this man’s immune
system, activated by infection in his lungs,
mistakenly began attacking the man’s
muscles, along with properly going after
his immune system went back to normal,
the attack, and thus the pain, stopped,
probably forever.
15

The Ethicist By Kwame Anthony Appiah
Can I Tell My Friend I
Planned to Donate a Kidney
To Her But Couldn’t?
I am in my 50s, the mother of grown
children and in generally good health.
A friend of mine has been on dialysis
for two years and is desperately seeking
a kidney donor. Without telling anyone,
I decided to start the process to see if
I could donate and went through a
variety of tests, which I would not have
done otherwise. As a result of the tests,
I discovered I have high cholesterol and
am considered prediabetic, so obviously
I am not a good candidate for kidney
donation. Should I tell my friend that
I wanted to donate and that because
of the tests I am now taking better care
of my health? I want her to know she
is not alone and that because of her
I am now more health conscious. On the
other hand, am I seeking self-glorification
without any of the actual pain, and
would it be preferable to keep silent?
Name Withheld
The way that esteem functions as a means
of social regulation entails that people can
16 6.9.19
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
it. That she has a friend who was willing
to make this sacrifice should be consol-
ing for her in a difficult time. She might
even find consolation, as you suggest,
in knowing that something positive for
your health came of it. Those would be
positive outcomes, and not just for you. I
appreciate your suspicion of esteem. But
the results of our actions matter more
than the purity of our souls.
Bonus Advice
From Judge
John Hodgman
I volunteer several days a week at a store
that is part of an organization that Kendall writes: My
husband feeds our
builds homes for families that qualify daughters offensive
for such assistance. The store is filled meals: peanut butter
with merchandise that has been donated, and tuna fish, hard-
either by individuals or corporations. boiled eggs and
strawberries, P.B.&J.
These sales fund the building of those on cold tortillas.
homes. The model is very successful. He says the meals
Our customers are generally minorities are healthy. I say
they’re gross. Please
or recent immigrants. On the other hand, make him stop.
we do get decorators, realtors who are ————
staging homes or individuals who really What your husband
don’t need to shop in our store but is doing is disgusting,
and he is clearly
are looking for bargains. One of the signs picking a fight with
in the store says ‘‘no negotiating on prices,’’ you (and maybe
which is our policy. Lately I have noticed civilization). This
court, however, rules
that the better-heeled customers are
in his favor. One
going to certain paid staff members and great consolation
getting them to create new, lower price of ceding your life
tags. This is something that neither the to your children’s
is the chance to force
minorities nor recent-immigrant customers on them the music,
receive, even though they may ask for a movies and morals
end up doing the right thing not because price reduction. In my view, this is clearly that you value. But
it is right but simply because it wins them discriminatory, even though management when it comes to
food, most parents
praise. We can feel that such people are participates in this practice, as do tremor before their
gaming the honor code. That’s one rea- paid staff members. I feel obliged to talk kids and submit
son we often raise an eyebrow at acts of to management but am unsure how to to the bland tyranny
of the nugget. You
conspicuous supererogation — acts that do so. Am I justified in raising this issue? should be proud
showily exceed the moral minimum. that yours are open
Indeed, the Jewish scholar Maimonides, Name Withheld to your husband’s
in the 12th century, established a famous experiments: They
are honing a sense
hierarchy of charity, tzedakah, in which I suspect that most donors to your store of adventure that will
giving anonymously ranked higher than — including people like you who donate serve them long after
giving face to face. The anonymous donor their time — would share your view that their hot-dog-and-
mackerel-salad days
couldn’t be faulted for seeking to bask in something is wrong here. And yes, there’s
are behind them.
the recipient’s gratitude, or engaging in also something chintzy about bargaining You don’t have to eat
generosity in order to earn a reputation down prices at a store where the merchan- that stuff, though.
for generosity. dise was donated to support a good cause. You’re a grown-up.
Illustration by Louise Zergaeng Pomeroy
Here, your care in not telling your Let’s stipulate that the managers
friend of your intentions suggests that might have calculated that these price To submit a query:
you weren’t looking to draw attention reductions will keep them well supplied Send an email to
to your own charity. But you now have with paying customers. Perhaps the loss ethicist@nytimes
.com; or send mail
good reasons for telling your friend. You of money from the discounts is made to The Ethicist,
want her to know that you were prepared up for by an increase in the number of The New York Times
to undergo major surgery for her and bargain-hunting decorators and the like, Magazine, 620
Eighth Avenue, New
that you didn’t do so not because you thereby increasing turnover and the
York, N.Y. 10018.
didn’t care about her but because your total volume of sales. If that were the (Include a daytime
own health prevented you from doing goal, though, a better way of achieving phone number.)
Illustration by Tomi Um

it would be to offer discounts to all cus-
tomers who make a sufficiently large
volume of purchases. This would avoid
the appearance (or the reality) of racial
or ethnic discrimination.
But it’s just as likely that this is one of the
many occasions in our society where caste
privileges are so routine that they don’t
even strike the management as wrong. At
the very least, it’s dishonest to say you don’t
negotiate and then to do so with favored
customers. Charities receive special tax
treatment because they serve the public
good, but it comes with stricter standards
for how they behave. How to tell the man-
agers? Why not send them this answer?
My son came to me with what he termed
a moral dilemma. He had been doing
business with a large company ordering
equipment for his freelance jobs. He came
to find out that said business was accused
of discriminating against women and
minorities. He has since found out that they
have settled a lawsuit and paid a fine.
His dilemma is whether to still do business
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
with them. If they hadn’t settled and paid
a fine, he wouldn’t use them. But is it
ethical to use them now? After all, they
probably wouldn’t have changed
their practices if they hadn’t been sued.
Name Withheld
It’s a fine principle to avoid doing busi-
ness with a company that discriminates
against its workers. But the company is
ostensibly no longer doing so, having
been caught, punished and forced into a
settlement that prohibits further discrimi-
nation. So the concern is that the business
would have kept sinning if it hadn’t been
caught. The issue is not its practices but
its character.
The lowest rung on Maimonides’s lad-
der of tzedakah was giving unwillingly.
And certainly the mere compliance with
a legal obligation, like paying a fine,
will win no admiration. Let me suggest,
though, that a business, although it cer-
tainly has practices, doesn’t really have a
moral character. It’s individual men and
People can end women who have characters. Presum-
ably, then, the character of the managers
up doing the is what worries your son. But the principle
right thing not that you won’t do business with a com-
because it is pany that is run by people of bad charac-
ter is hard to apply: You often know little
right but simply about the character of people with whom
because it you do business. If your son adopted the
wins them praise. principle that he won’t do business with
people he happens to know have bad
characters, he may simply transfer his
dealings to people whose only advantage
is that he knows less about them.
I’m not sure that standing on this prin-
ciple — and punishing a company that
seems to have mended its ways — is a
good idea, especially if finding an alterna-
tive supplier is going to be burdensome.
The discrimination may have been the
work of a few, and what matters most is
that they’re no longer discriminating.
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy
at N.Y.U. His books include ‘‘Cosmopolitanism,’’
‘‘The Honor Code’’ and ‘‘The Lies That Bind:
Rethinking Identity.’’

Letter of Recommendation
Washing Dishes
By Mike Powell
I’ve often said that the best job I ever
had was washing dishes at a small Ital-
ian restaurant just after college. I say I
washed dishes. I also bussed tables and
prepped food and, at the end of the night,
would blow into the state-mandated
breathalyzer on the owner’s car so he
could drive home drunk.
It wasn’t the easiest place to work. The
owner was mercurial, the atmosphere
disorganized. But no matter what else
happened during a given shift, I’d find
myself in the back room washing dishes.
18 6.9.19
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
We had one of those commercial units, a
giant silver box whose hood raised and
lowered with the whisk of a magician’s
hat. Pull the lever on a pile of dirty dishes
and — voilà — a pile of clean dishes would
emerge from a cloud of steam.
As much as I liked the machine, I often
took the time to do the job by hand. It
became a welcome ritual, a ballast against
the chaos of the everyday. And like any
worthwhile practice — marriage, creativ-
ity, compassion — it engendered the kind
of patience that lets you see how life is
Photograph by Hannah Whitaker
Cutting through something to be managed, not conquered.
the clutter, in life and
the kitchen sink.
You might finish a load, but you’ll almost
always have another one coming.
A few years ago, my wife and I decided
to buy a dishwasher of our own. As par-
ents (we had a 1-year-old son and another
Prop stylist: Amy Elise Wilson
child on the way), we’d surrendered to
convenience, bending witlessly toward
any purchase that could give us more time
or space. But lately I’ve been wondering
what that time and space is for. Implied in
the quest for convenience is a distinction
between the life we deem worth living

and the life we have to endure in order to
get there. One is a possibility, the other
an obligation; one is a means, the other
an end. Look at dishwasher ads from the
1950s, when the appliance became com-
monplace, and you see narratives of a life
reclaimed, an escape from the purgatory
of work into the freedom of leisure. Life
hacks, multitasking, the ruthless compres-
sion of our daily routine: We still frame
the ordinary as something that exists only
for the thing beyond it, as a hazard to be
optimized away instead of an organism to
be nurtured and interacted with.
It’s not that I begrudge people their
phones or their Prime accounts or their
housecleaners. If anything, I empathize:
The simpler the moment in front of me,
the more anxious I become. I could be
doing something, I should be doing some-
thing. But a life under constant threat of
novelty isn’t a life; it’s exhaustion.
Washing dishes by hand, I give myself
the chance to remember that this is wrong
— that most of life is ordinary; that ordi-
nary isn’t the enemy but instead something
nourishing and unavoidable, the bedrock
upon which the rest of experience ebbs and
flows. Embrace this — the warm water, the
pruned hands, the prismatic gleam of the
bubbles and the steady passage from dish
to dish to dish — and feel, however briefly,
the breath of actual time, a reality that lies
dormant and plausible under all the clutter
we pile on top of it. A bird makes its indeci-
pherable call to another bird, a song from a
passing car warps in the Doppler effect and
I’m reminded, if only for a moment, that I
need a lot less than I think I do and that
I don’t have to leave my kitchen to get it.
I’m not advocating the twee harmo-
ny of a perfect kitchen, of things being
spick-and-span or just so. Dirty dishes
mean people have been eating; that peo-
ple have been eating means bowels will
be emptied; that bowels will be emptied
means we are not and will never be the
sweatless caricatures marketed to us by
the wellness industry.
Instead, we will continue to be what we
are: people, together, making a mess. An
anxious kid, I spent a lot of parties hiding
under the table; as an adult, I head to the
kitchen, where I can slip the interpersonal
glare of conversation while still enjoying
the miracle of company I love, of empty
stomachs now filled.
Look at dishes this way and washing
up isn’t the shouldering of a burden but
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
Washing dishes, a renewal of the conditions by which all
this — the talking, the eating, the commu-
I give myself nion — can happen again. (Your closest
the chance to friends already know this; what more con-
remember that crete expression of intimacy is there than
a friend elbow deep in dirty dishwater,
ordinary isn’t long after everyone else has gone home?)
the enemy but As a religious person without a religious
the bedrock affiliation, handling a dirty sink isn’t work;
it’s a sweeping of the altar.
upon which Not that I think about all this when
the rest of I’m washing dishes. When I’m washing
experience ebbs dishes, I usually think about a million
other things. But if I’m lucky, for a few
and flows. seconds here and there, I’m just wash-
ing dishes.
Tip By Malia Wollan
How to Attract
Butterflies
‘‘If you plant it, they will come,’’ says
Catherine Werner, sustainability director
for the city of St. Louis, Mo., referring to
the milkweed on which female monarch
butterflies lay their eggs and the result-
ing caterpillars hatch and feed. Since
2014, Werner has led the Milkweeds for
Monarchs program, which now includes
a 30-acre pollinator pathway along the
Mississippi River and more than 400
milkweed and nectar-flower gardens in
backyards, front yards, schoolyards and
rooftops across the city.
To appeal to monarchs and other but-
terflies, plant a nine-square-foot plot in
a sunny location with a mix of nectar
plants and milkweed, a wildflower. Use
at least three different milkweed variet-
ies native to your area (look for regional
guides online). ‘‘Don’t plant tropical milk-
Mike Powell lives in weed,’’ Werner says; it isn’t native and can
Tucson, Arizona. harbor monarch parasites. And to avoid
Illustration by Radio
A few months ago, I went to New Orle-
ans to visit friends — one of those period-
ic breaks my wife and I give each other
as investments in mutual well-being. One
night, after a meal at home, I stayed back
to clean while my friends went out. When
I worked at the restaurant after college,
I was 21: I had everywhere and nowhere
to be at the same time. At 36, I face the
same truth: There’s always less to do than
I pretend. I know this, but I forget it; it
rustles around in the curtains behind
my life like an apparition. I rolled up my
sleeves and got to work. At some point
it started to rain, spattering the window
before sliding away.
disrupting the reproductive cycle of
Western monarchs, don’t plant any kind
of milkweed if you live within five miles
of the California coast.
Old-timers in St. Louis remember the
sky being darkened by delicate orange
and black wings. In more recent decades,
though, the number of monarchs has
plummeted by some 80 percent in the
East and 99 percent in the West. Next
year, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is
expected to decide whether to include
the butterfly on the endangered species
list. Entomologists think the decline in
the Eastern monarch population, which
flies through St. Louis on its annual
migration thousands of miles from Mex-
ico to Canada and back again, may be
due in part to farmers’ in the Midwest
increasingly planting herbicide-toler-
ant corn and soybeans. The herbicides
sprayed on these crops kill milkweed in
agricultural regions, where female but-
terflies are especially prone to lay their
eggs. ‘‘Don’t use pesticides or any other
chemicals if you’re trying to attract but-
terflies,’’ Werner says.
With as few as nine plants and an hour
or so of spadework, you can grow a sanc-
tuary. Werner planted milkweed plots in
both her front yard and backyard; she
recently counted more than 30 monarchs
flying by the city’s Gateway Arch in just
five minutes; someone snapped photos
of a monarch caterpillar on milkweed
in front of city hall; and the number of
butterfly gardens is already about double
the program’s goal. ‘‘You can make a real
difference for these ethereal creatures,’’
she says. 
19
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Eat By Tejal Rao

The Root of All Deliciousness: A dip to let the beet’s

mild earthiness and vegetal sweetness shine.

20 6.9.19 Photograph by Bobby Doherty Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Margaret MacMillan Jones.
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

If love is a kind of deep knowledge, then
Beets flood the
it’s possible no one loves beets more
farmers’ markets than Irwin Goldman, a professor of hor-
in spring, when ticulture at the University of Wisconsin,
Los Angeles owned by an old friend and
her business partner, who cleverly whiz
beets into a thick, satisfying dip. This
would keep the beets raw, preserving
½ cup extra-virgin olive oil,
plus more for garnish
Freshly ground black pepper
1 cup labneh, for serving

you can find Madison. He once spent about 15 years
developing a beet variety that was rain-
them bundled bow-hued and crunchy and sweet, like
with their a carrot. ‘‘I’d been working with yellow
tender greens. beets and found them incredibly beauti-
ful,’’ Goldman told me. ‘‘So my first goal
was to make a beet with both colors,
red and yellow.’’ But breeding beets is
slow work. Goldman spent a decade
on colors, reducing reddishness and
increasing yellowishness, until the pig-
ments alternated inside the beet, within
the plant tissue itself, like a miniature
archery target.
Though the beets grown in ancient
Greece — long and slender, red or white
— were so mild they were often eaten raw,
cooks today tend to boil or roast the beet,
as if to temper its powerful flavor. ‘‘Beets
have an earthiness,’’ as Goldman put it,
‘‘that tastes like dirt to some people.’’ That
earthiness comes from geosmin, a mole-
cule that reminds me of wet mud, of a lush
garden after a heavy rain. I like it in small
doses. It can also have an abrasive quality,
a kind of scratchiness in the mouth, which
comes from oxalic acid. And too much of
this is objectively unpleasant. ‘‘To make
the beet more palatable, I selected for low
levels of it,’’ Goldman said. Over the years,
he produced a sweet beet he called Bad-
ger Flame, one so gentle he could give it
to his kids to snack on raw.
When seeds finally went on sale, Gold-
man’s beet joined a number of highly
sought-after specialty beet varieties, like
the sugary Candy Stripe, with its hot pink
swirls. And the pale, Creamsicle-colored
golden beet, with its spinachy tang.
Cute beets flood the farmers’ markets
in spring, when you can find them bun-
dled with their tender greens, sold by
the bunch, and I find them 100 percent
irresistible. After speaking with Gold-
man, I’d been waiting more intently for
all of the fancy beets, wondering how
best to enjoy them. Roasted, I figured.
Glossy and quartered and dressed up
with a pile of greens. But the beets were
their color and flavor. Torn pita, for serving
The dip is a vivid shade of purple. 3 Persian cucumbers, quartered,
It could be a snack, before something for serving
bigger, as it’s served at the restaurant,
but I find it’s a perfect meal with a dol- 1. Put the beets, whole walnuts, lemon
lop of labneh, some Persian cucumbers juice, pomegranate molasses, chile flakes,
and lots of warm pita when I’m feeling garlic and salt into a food processor or
blender. Purée on high until beets and nuts
lazy and don’t want to turn on the stove. are finely chopped. Scrape down the
To make it, peel the beets, chop them sides, and blend again, until the mixture gets
roughly and toss them in a blender (with slightly smoother. Add the olive oil, and
gloves on if you’re working with red blend again, scraping down the sides, until
mixture forms a coarse purée. Taste,
beets, and you don’t want your finger-
and adjust seasoning with salt, pepper and
tips stained). Everything else can go in additional lemon juice, if desired.
at the same time: a juicy lemon’s worth
of juice, a glug of syrupy pomegranate 2. Spoon labneh into a bowl, smoothing it,
molasses to sweeten it and lots of olive then heap the beet dip on top. Top with
a generous drizzle of olive oil and chopped
oil and walnuts to mellow out the dip
walnuts; grate some lemon zest on top.
and add texture. It takes a little more salt Serve with pita and cucumbers for dipping.
than you think it needs, some pepper,
chile flakes and a small clove of garlic. Yield: 4-6 servings.
And blending, lots of blending.
Adapted from Heather Sperling and Emily Fiffer
Beets are tough work on a blender
of Botanica, in Los Angeles.
and take some time to break down. This
means you need to stop a few times to
scrape down the sides and just help out
the machine. The result is worth it. The
beets are pulverized and softened and
totally rebalanced in the process, with
acidity and fat and something close to
winelike tannins. All their best quali-
ties — that mild earthiness, that vegetal
sugar — shine.
And while it’s great made with a hand-
ful of fancy beets, the best part about the
dip came as a surprise when I was testing
it at home, over and over again, with dif-
ferent varieties: It works especially well
with nothing fancy at all, just a big, lumpy,
nameless beet from the supermarket.
Beet Dip With Labneh
Time: 10 minutes
1 medium beet or 1 bunch small beets
(about ½ pound),
peeled and roughly chopped
1 cup whole walnuts, toasted,
plus chopped walnuts for garnish

so pretty, and so sweet, and I remem-
bered our conversation. By the time
tiny beets came to the farmers’ market,
I knew exactly what I wanted to make —
an adaptation of a dish I’d tried at Botan-
ica, a vegetable-obsessed restaurant in
1 lemon, juiced, plus additional, for
zesting and juicing
1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses
1 teaspoon chile flakes, such as Urfa
1 garlic clove, peeled
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste

21
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

THIS SPRING, TWO TEENAGERS ASKED AN AGING FORMER SENATOR FOR HIS TWITTER PASSWORD AND P
START A PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IN HIS NAME. IT MIGHT BE A STUNT — OR THE BIZARRE FUTURE OF POST -T

BY JAMIE LAUREN KEILES PHOTOGRAPH BY TINA TYRELL

22
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

WHY IS

MIKE
GRAVEL
RUNNING FOR

D PERMISSION TO
PRESIDENT?
T -TRUMP POLITICS.
(AND IS HE?)

23
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
ZACH MONTELLARO, A POLITICO REPORTER,
reads the Federal Election Commission website
like a tabloid. He not only trawls the big, dry
database in which presidential candidates reg-
ister to run; he also reads several smaller after-
market ones that reformat the filings from the
first. On Twitter, he follows F.E.C. bots that tweet
out campaign filings as they post. On the night of
March 19, he was up late when one such tweet,
from @CATargetBot, crossed his feed: ‘‘NEW
FEC F1 #POTUS Mike Gravel for President
Exploratory Committee.’’
At first, Montellaro wasn’t sure if the filing
was real. He remembered Gravel from the 2008
Democratic primary. The former Alaska sena-
tor, once well known for helping disseminate
the Pentagon Papers, was 77 then. His run, when
it’s remembered at all, is recounted as a kind
of Dada diversion that began with a silent art-
house film of the candidate throwing a rock into
a lake and peaked in the primary debates, with
Gravel pointing fingers, castigating war hawks,
roasting Joe Biden, embarrassing himself and
asking future President Obama, ‘‘Barack, who
do you want to nuke?’’
As these escapades returned to mind, Mon-
tellaro surmised that a second Gravel run didn’t
seem totally out of the question. He tweeted a
comment on the senator’s age, but soon some
other Twitter users observed that the contact
address on the F.E.C. form belonged to a teenage
boy in New York. Recalling a prank from 2016,
involving a fake filing for the candidate ‘‘Deez
Nuts,’’ Montellaro deleted his first tweet and pub-
lished a correction: ‘‘It appears we’re all being
trolled by a couple of high school kids.’’
A few minutes later, @MikeGravel tweeted
back: ‘‘Zach, you aren’t being ‘trolled.’ ’’
By then it was just past midnight in Washing-
ton. Montellaro found Gravel’s phone number on
an old F.E.C. filing and decided to call. Although
it was late, the former senator answered and said
that yes, he was running — but he was running to
lose. Two 18-year-old kids from New York, David
Oks and Henry Williams, had talked him into try-
ing to qualify for the Democratic primary debate
by gaming the updated D.N.C. rules, which now
allowed candidates to qualify by persuading just
65,000 people to donate. Of those who crossed
this threshold, only the top 20 would actually
appear on the stage, which meant that Gravel
would also need to edge out other low-ranked
P R E V I O U S P H OTO G R A P H :
H E N RY W I L L I A M S ( L E F T ) A N D DAV I D O KS
V I D EO C H AT T I N G W I T H M I K E G R AV E L I N O KS ’ S
C H I L D H O O D B E D RO O M I N A R D S L E Y, N .Y.
24 6.9.19
contenders like Eric Swalwell and Marianne
Williamson. If the now-89-year-old could gain
enough support, he said he would use his spot on
the debate stage to steer the conversation further
left, or at the very least to make other candidates
speak frankly. It wasn’t exactly a bid for the pres-
idency, but neither was it really a prank.
‘‘Deez Nuts wasn’t real,’’ Montellaro concluded.
‘‘But Mike Gravel is.’’
Of course, today’s definition of ‘‘real’’ is more
expansive than ever. In the days after Montellaro
broke the news, Gravel made zero public appear-
ances, beyond his usual personal errands. Mean-
while, on Twitter, @MikeGravel was prolific,
issuing up to a dozen tweets a day, sometimes
while Gravel himself was sleeping. The D.N.C.
deadline for donations was June 12, just 85 days
away. Williams and Oks, now known online as the
Gravel Teens, set out to persuade at least 65,000
people to donate a single dollar or more.
Their plan was to trade the standard Demo-
cratic playbook for the equally peculiar norms
of far-left Twitter. They angled for donors with
tweets like, ‘‘The neoliberal dream is someone who
is smooth and cool and looks dignified in all the
official photos and also crushes Arabs’ skulls on the
weekend,’’ or, ‘‘Pete Buttigieg is what you get when
Patrick Bateman decides to pursue politics instead
of banking.’’ Where most politicians were likely
to sense danger, the Teens saw only retweets and
likes. When one detractor suggested that people
donate to him instead of to Mike Gravel, the Teens
sent him $20 of their own money via PayPal. (He
was freaked out, but onlookers loved it.) When
another skeptic joked, ‘‘I’m going to get Mike
Gravel to post ‘Trans Rights uwu,’ ’’ @MikeGravel
replied, ‘‘Trans Rights uwu.’’ The extent to which
the octogenarian appreciated ‘‘uwu’’ — an emoti-
con signifying superprecious joy — was unclear. In
any case, it received more than 3,500 likes.
Through this kind of haphazard interaction,
@MikeGravel began to find fans. Beyond the
comic incongruity of an old man’s tweeting
like a teenager, fans seemed to revel in the
overarching strangeness of a candidate’s com-
menting directly on an issue, or a candidate’s
replying to any tweet at all. Followers named
themselves #GravelGang or #Gravelanche —
a portmanteau that relies on mispronouncing
the candidate’s name, which rhymes with lapel,
not gavel. (Gravel himself prefers #Gravelistas.)
Out of this new constituency, Williams and Oks
assembled a volunteer campaign staff. Some
of these staff members, who now number 80,
work from their day jobs, sending out campaign
missives on the clock with a free version of the
email service MailChimp.
Gravel’s platform, the most detailed of any
Democratic candidate’s, includes a vast slate of
issues that poll well with young voters: immigra-
tion reform, student-debt forgiveness, a Green
New Deal, military-spending cuts, a policy of non-
aggression abroad. Oks and Williams call Gravel
a few times a week to approve any additions to
the slate. Because Gravel isn’t really trying to be
president, he can also afford to openly support
reparations, the decriminalization of sex work
and the end of ‘‘Israeli apartheid’’ — policies con-
sidered urgent on the far left but largely ignored
or rejected by the Democratic Party. His website,
MikeGravel.org, hosts discrete pages for 47 issues.
Pete Buttigieg, by contrast, introduced his own
website with zero. (Buttigieg has since added his
own issues page.) On Instagram, the Mike Gravel
page taunted, ‘‘Good morning @pete.buttigieg
did you finish your policy page yet it’s due today
you can copy mine dude just hurry.’’
Broadly speaking, the Mike Gravel campaign is
part of the same Democratic Socialist moment
that elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018
and nearly nominated Bernie Sanders in 2016. If
Gravel seemed like a sideshow in 2008, then today
— post-recession, post-Occupy, post-Trump — his
campaign represents the most absurd form of a
legitimate movement on the left that feels little
obligation to the Democratic Party. Among this
young, emergent class of leftists, change is enact-
ed through local organizing efforts, and discourse
tends to play out on Twitter, where news, and the
organizations that produce it, are subject to daily
systemic critique. The rise of leftist discourse on
Twitter has helped to hone a new political humor
that undergirds the @MikeGravel campaign. The
target of this humor is not President Trump but
rather what the far left sees as a defeatist and
servile center-left that values compromise over
belief and denigrates the social reforms beloved
by the very same voters it seeks.
These values are ingrained in the center-left’s
own humor, exemplified by late-night hosts’ trying
to outreason Trump by fact-checking his tweets or
calling him names like a lying orange Cheeto. If
center-left humor says that Trump can be outwit-
ted — despite what the overwhelming evidence
suggests — then far-left humor is much more con-
cerned with mocking the kind of political system
that says you have to argue with someone like him
at all. Williams describes this strain of humor as ‘‘a
kind of postmodern ironic detachment, coupled
with real earnestness.’’ Often this particular ear-
nestness is vulgar, using bluntness as an antidote to
self-regard. When I asked one #Gravelanche sup-
porter what he thought of the candidate Kamala
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
Harris, a former attorney general of California, he
suggested that she ‘‘would be a good secret-police
chief.’’ When I asked him what he thought of older
voters, he said: ‘‘Older people are going to be dead
in 10 years, so they just want their tax money and
[expletive] to buy kangaroo-skin dildos.’’
The left-wing humor podcast ‘‘Chapo Trap
House’’ — formed from a klatch of leftist Twitter
personalities — is so closely tied to this sensibility
that its name is now used as a near-synonym.
‘‘ ‘Chapo Trap House’ is great catharsis,’’ Williams
says. ‘‘But it doesn’t make me happy. It doesn’t
make me feel like anything can change.’’
Williams says one of the Gravel campaign’s
goals is linking catharsis to efficacy. Leftists were
just as traumatized by the 2016 election as centrist
Democrats were, but each group came away from
the experience with different lessons. From the
perspective of left-wing Twitter, Hillary Clinton
was a uniquely awful candidate whose failures
stemmed as much from her policies (bland cen-
trism) as from her style. She ran her campaign on
the old-fashioned myth that a politician should
try to seem real, despite all the P.R. pros behind
the scenes. This resulted in constant, folksy
gaffes, some of which have become comedic
touchstones on lefty Twitter — ‘‘Pokémon Go
to the polls!’’; implausible comparisons to ‘‘your
abuela’’; a video in which she boasted, ‘‘I’m just
chillin’ in Cedar Rapids.’’ She came off as a cynical
opportunist, and she lost.
As offensive as leftists found Trump’s policies,
his style was arguably better suited to the age.
Unconcerned with authenticity, he ran his cam-
paign from an infinite present, declaring himself
a really rich guy, who was also somehow a regular
guy, who was also somehow a powerful guy, who
was also somehow a foe to the elites. Like Twitter,
‘TRUMP WAS THE FIRST
POSTMODERN POLITICIAN.
I LIKE TO THINK GRAVEL IS THE SECOND.’
his campaign was nimble and stupid — rejecting
coherence in favor of noise. His frequent and fla-
grant transgressions of truth seemed sort of like
a joke you could be in on. Williams and Oks were
depressed that he won, but they had to admit that
his new type of lie seemed somehow more com-
pelling than Clinton’s endless marketing exercise.
If establishment politicians are all phony, and
Twitter discourse is a compelling fantasy, then
perhaps the main success of @MikeGravel is
merging these two false conceits into one real
one. In an online world where everything is under-
stood to be a performance, @MikeGravel looks us
squarely in the eye and admits, ‘‘Every politician
is just a bunch of kids in a trench coat — so why
not make them actual kids?’’ Instead of pretending
a politician is a person, with verifiable personal
beliefs, @MikeGravel reveals the kids inside the
coat, enumerates them, suggests that we become
one by donating a dollar. Instead of being gamed
by the system, we are invited to game it ourselves.
Mike Gravel, the man, is not a pawn — he has
his own reasons for agreeing to this scheme —
but he is a somewhat inert rallying point. In a
moment when a politician’s own history can
also be his greatest liability, Gravel provides a
compelling bare minimum — just 12 good years
in the Senate, followed by 38 years of righteous
near-obscurity. He has firm beliefs, and he hasn’t
had a real chance to contradict himself since the
Carter administration (literally). In some ways,
this makes him a perfect receptacle for the idea
of integrity — a Bernie more Bernie than Bernie
could be. When this unbesmirched reputation is
channeled through the online voice of his Teens,
the effect is, somehow, a more honest kind of lie.
‘‘Trump was the first postmodern politician,’’
Williams says. ‘‘I like to think Gravel is the second.’’
I first met the Gravel Teens on April 27, 46 days
before the D.N.C. deadline. By then, they had
attracted 27,000 donors, mainly through a 4/20
fund-raising push that featured Pentagon Papers
rolling papers. (The typical donation was $4.20.)
Williams, a freshman at Columbia University, was
just getting ready to begin final exams. Oks, an
Oxford-bound high school senior, had taken a
medical leave from school, which conveniently
allowed to him to work full time on the campaign.
We all sat down for brunch at Tom’s Restaurant,
a neon-sign diner near Williams’s dorm best known
as the exterior of Monk’s Cafe on ‘‘Seinfeld.’’ The
Teens were born half a presidential term after the
show went off the air; they told me they had seen it
in syndication. We talked through the strangeness
of a real restaurant being cast as the outside of an
imaginary one. A waitress came to take our order.
‘‘Could I just get chocolate-chip pancakes?’’
Williams asked.
‘‘Wait,’’ Oks said. ‘‘They have chocolate pan-
cakes?’’ The waitress nodded. ‘‘Do you have gren-
adine? No? Oh, darn it. Do you guys have Cherry
Coke?’’ She frowned. ‘‘O.K. I’ll just have regular
Coca-Cola and chocolate-chip pancakes.’’
Oks said he was a frequent Shirley Temple
drinker and denied that this was a youthful quirk
affected for my journalistic entertainment. As
evidence of a longstanding habit, he offered the
anecdotal statistic that only 45 percent of restau-
rants stock grenadine. On the ‘‘Seinfeld’’ axis, Oks
is a Kramer, if Kramer were born just before Sept.
11 and wrote papers on the moral philosopher
John Rawls in his spare time. Williams is a Jerry,
with the charm of an Elaine and the political intu-
ition of a Roger Stone. At 14, he started drinking
four coffees a day.
‘‘David and I met when I was a sophomore
and he was a freshman,’’ Williams said. That
was almost four years ago, at the private Mas-
ters School in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. They first got
acquainted at model United Nations, then later
in debate club, where they discovered a mutual
love for the 1985 Cormac McCarthy anti-western
‘‘Blood Meridian.’’ Soon they formed a group chat
to discuss the 2016 primary. They obsessed over
news in the particular way that teenagers without
jobs can afford to obsess.
Williams was raised by an Australian-immigrant
father and a politically active Democrat mother.
(‘‘She’s like a ‘Pod Save America’ person,’’ Oks
qualified.) His earliest political memory dates
back to 2012, when he would argue with conser-
vative kids about Obamacare and ‘‘death panels.’’
Oks’s parents are Argentine-Jewish immigrants.
His father dropped out of the picture. His mother,
whose politics he describes as former socialist or
left-wing anti-Peronist, ‘‘or whatever,’’ raised him
on a steady drip of Howard Zinn. Oks applied
to the Masters School in secret; he got to go
only because he received financial aid. His four
brothers made up a local public school wrestling
dynasty. ‘‘He’s entirely unlike any of his brothers,’’
Williams explained. ‘‘We’ve got meathead wres-
tler, meathead wrestler, meathead wrestler and
then David Oks, whose room is 85 percent books.’’
During the run-up to 2016, Williams and Oks
decided to get involved. Neither was old enough
to vote, but Williams phone-banked for Bernie
Sanders until he lost the primary. ‘‘I would have
voted for Clinton,’’ he conceded, but he added
that he wouldn’t have liked it at all. ‘‘To me, you
do your protesting, you fight your fight as much
as you possibly can, but when it comes down to it,
Hillary Clinton doesn’t appoint Brett Kavanaugh.’’
‘‘I voted illegally,’’ Oks joked, ordering a sec-
ond Coca-Cola, plus a refill on the first one. ‘‘I
was just that passionate.’’
When Trump won, the Teens felt overwhelmed
by guilt that they had followed the election so
closely without really doing anything. As pen-
ance, they decided that Oks should run for mayor
of his hometown, Ardsley, N.Y., a hyperquaint
Westchester County suburb. They collected
enough signatures to get him on the ballot, and
what followed was the plot of a small-town farce:
The Teens put up lawn signs, so the opposition
The New York Times Magazine 25
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

put up lawn signs; the establishment got ner- and we’re a lot younger than you. We were barely ‘‘He’s definitely of the memo era,’’ Williams said,
vous; someone challenged the validity of the sig- conscious when you were running in 2008, but claiming he first heard the word on ‘‘The West
natures, which kept Oks’s name off the ballot. He what you said then, on that debate stage, you got Wing.’’ ‘‘He asked us if we could fax it to him!’’
ended up running as a write-in and losing. no respect. You barely polled above 1 percent. After Gravel read the memo, he agreed. The
Oks took a sip of Coke and shook his fist. ‘‘The Today, that is where the left is.’’ Teens registered with the F.E.C., and once the
Ardsley Democratic machine!’’ They told him about Democratic Socialism and filing hit the web, the bots started tweeting and
This led Oks and Williams to a shared epiphany. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the leftist energy the journalists came calling.
Everyone who claimed to be running things — the on Twitter. They told him about podcasts and Oks placed a frenzied call to Gravel. ‘‘Can I
think-tankers, the bloviating centrists, the Pete ‘‘Chapo Trap House.’’ By then, there was thunder have your Twitter account right now?’’
Buttigiegs, the ‘‘Pod Save America’’ people — these and lightning outside; the Saw Mill Parkway was Gravel handed over his login credentials.
were just grown-up model U.N. kids, overfull with flooded. Oks recalled telling Gravel: ‘‘You don’t ‘‘Don’t tweet anything I wouldn’t say.’’
ego and hot air. Their politics boiled down to a have to decide to run, but let us make an explor-
desire to be in politics. ‘‘Everybody is just a larger atory committee for you. Let us go online and On the day I went to meet Gravel last month,
child,’’ Williams said, finishing his chocolate-chip start going at it, and see if people like it.’’ the campaign was roughly halfway to its goal,
pancakes. ‘‘We put so much faith in people that we Gravel remained skeptical — very, very skep- having attracted 30,334 online donations. The
should put no faith in at all.’’ He pointed to what tical — but bit by bit, they could sense that he Teens had 36 days left. By then they had declared
he calls ‘‘the Elizabeth Warren critique,’’ which might cave. ‘‘Eventually we wrote him a memo,’’ that Gravel was ‘‘running to win,’’ if only as a ploy
posits that poverty, mass incarceration and the Oks said, taking a sip of his fourth and final Coke. for more serious coverage. They had fared well in
broken health care system are just functions of
the system’s not working correctly. This no longer
made sense. ‘‘Capitalism works perfectly, right? It
serves exactly who it’s supposed to.’’
And so the brainstorming effort resumed. Oks
and Williams first began to consider Mike Gravel
on March 11 of this year, after Gravel was men-
tioned on ‘‘Chapo Trap House.’’ They remembered
Gravel from ‘‘Nixonland,’’ Rick Perlstein’s 896-
page history of Richard Nixon’s career, in which
the senator appears briefly as part of the Penta-
gon Papers episode. On June 29, 1971, Gravel, then
41, called an emergency two-man session of the
Senate Subcommittee on Public Buildings and
Grounds, which dealt with federal buildings like
post offices and other Richard Scarry-level con-
cerns. To get the Pentagon Papers, which were
classified, into the Congressional Record — and
thereby into the public domain — he read aloud
for three hours, recounting American wrongdoing
in the Vietnam War until he broke down sobbing.
‘‘Gravel was willing to torch everything,’’
Williams said.
Oks nodded. ‘‘He’s like, a weird combination
of cunning and just totally reckless.’’
Normally, such awe would not be cause to
Svengali an ancient politician into running for
president. But Williams and Oks are not normal
people, and talking to them makes the world feel
very small, as if any old putz could stick out a
foot and trip up the whole political process. At
various points in our conversations, I thought of
their outlook as teenage naïveté, or democratic
optimism, or elite white male delusion. Some-
times it seemed that it might be all three things
at once. In any case, Oks sent an email to Gravel.
Three hours later, the former senator called
back: ‘‘Absolutely not,’’ he said. ‘‘Do you know
how old I am?’’
Undeterred, the Teens kept calling for a week.
On the night they finally persuaded him, it was
raining, Williams said. They got Gravel on the S E N ATO R M I K E G R AV E L I N J U N E 1 9 7 2 , A Y E A R A F T E R R E A D I N G T H E P E N TAG O N PA P E R S
phone and said something like, ‘‘Look, Mr. A LO U D O N T H E F LO O R O F T H E S E N AT E TO M A K E T H E M AVA I L A B L E TO T H E P U B L I C .
Gravel, you have not been in politics for a while,

26 6.9.19
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
one poll, too. Among members of the Democracy
for America political action group, Gravel placed
sixth, well ahead of the centrist golden children
Beto O’Rourke and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Gravel lives in Seaside, Calif., a breezy coastal
town south of the Bay Area. That morning, before I
went over to his house, I sat in a coffee shop, read-
ing some chapters of his coming book, ‘‘Human
Governance,’’ which he had sent in a Word docu-
ment from his personal email. After his recitation
of the Pentagon Papers, Gravel pretty much dis-
appeared from the news, surfacing once in a failed
bid for vice president, once in a successful effort
to rename Mount McKinley and once in a sup-
posed sex-for-votes scandal involving an escort, a
houseboat and a parking-garage project. (‘‘I asked
about it once on a phone call,’’ Oks told me. ‘‘He
said that he was having a one-night stand but it
was unrelated to a vote.’’)
In 1980, Gravel lost the Senate primary to
Clark Gruening, the grandson of the incumbent
he initially ousted. (Gruening went on to lose to
Frank Murkowski, father of Senator Lisa Mur-
kowski of Alaska.) His return to civilian life was
erratic, or ‘‘disillusioned,’’ as his daughter Lynne
described it. Gravel and his wife divorced; he
remarried; he learned to code; he forgot how
to code. Eventually he found a new calling in
direct democracy, the subject of this new book,
and obliquely the subject of two previous books,
identically titled ‘‘Citizen Power.’’
The new book contains a comprehensive plan
for adding a fourth branch to government, called
the Legislature of the People, which would allow
voters to pass new laws directly. Gravel has been
working on this plan for 30 years and has thought
through every facet of its existence, from its source
of authority (James Madison’s comments in the
Constitutional Convention of 1787) to its legis-
lative procedures (too involved for a parenthet-
ical). Gravel believes firmly in his own campaign
platform — Green New Deal, single-payer health
care, etc. — but he does not believe it can ever be
accomplished until we develop a check on the Sen-
ate, which he views as inherently corrupt. Later
that day, when I met him at his house, he worked
very hard to persuade me that he was right.
‘‘What you need to have, and what I seem to
have, is unreserved faith in the people,’’ he said,
pushing his walker toward the dining-room table.
‘‘There’s nothing else. And you can say: ‘Well, boy.
That’s a stretch!’ You know what? The alternative
is minority rule by the elites of society.’’
Gravel is single-minded about the Legislature of
the People. He sees everyone from journalists to his
own children as potential converts, and he dislikes
the campaign’s prevailing media narrative, which
tends to ignore this pet issue in favor of his views
on Sept. 11 (‘‘inside job’’) and his advanced age.
He laughed when I suggested that Williams and
Oks might be taking advantage of him or other-
wise enacting some kind of ‘‘Weekend at Bernie’s’’
Photograph By Duane Howell/The Denver Post, via Getty Images
scenario. ‘‘There’s no question they’re using me,’’
he said, but he insisted that he was using them
right back. ‘‘They came to me flashing Legislature
of the People, because they were smart enough to
recognize that that’s what floats my boat.’’
The seven hours I spent with Gravel unfolded
as a kind of enjoyable war, with me angling for
pithy anecdotes and him redirecting my lines of
inquiry back toward the subject of direct democ-
‘EVERYBODY IS JUST A LARGER CHILD.
WE PUT SO MUCH FAITH IN PEOPLE
THAT WE SHOULD PUT NO FAITH IN AT ALL.’
racy. I’d estimate he won more than half the time,
but he struggled to shrink his grand vision into
sound bites. When I worried that this might limit
its appeal, he told me to read his book chapters
again. When I suggested that it might hold him
back in the debate, he seemed more concerned
about whether the D.N.C. would allow him to
bring a chair onstage.
In the moments when I was winning the war,
I learned that Gravel has led an interesting life,
rife with the sort of inspired anecdotes that most
politicians would package and brand. Born in
Massachusetts to French Canadian immigrants,
Gravel didn’t learn English until he was 7. He
struggled with dyslexia, and because his teach-
ers thought he was so dumb, they threw him a
‘‘Most Charming Person’’ award. This credential
landed him his first job in politics: handing out
pamphlets for a local politician.
After a stint in Army counterintelligence — sta-
tioned in West Germany during the Korean War —
and then a couple of years at Columbia University,
Gravel knew for sure that he wanted to run for
office. His home state, in 1956, was overrun with
Kennedys, so he scoured the map for opportunity
and narrowed his options down to New Mexico
and the Territory of Alaska, still three years away
from statehood. He settled on Alaska because he
didn’t like warm weather, and he drove there in
a Ford station wagon with, among other things,
a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a .30-
06 rifle. When he was pulled over for speeding in
Washington State, the sheriff made him come to
the station and told him he had to pay a $100 fine.
‘‘I didn’t have enough money,’’ Gravel recalled.
‘‘So he said, ‘Well, you’ll have to stay in jail.’ ’’
At that point, they both remembered the gun.
The sheriff, like a policeman from a children’s
cartoon, had a change of heart and sent Gravel to
the nearest pawnshop to sell it. Gravel drove 60
miles, pawned the gun, drove 60 miles back and
paid the sheriff his fine. When I asked him why
he didn’t drive away, Gravel simply explained,
‘‘That’s not the way I am.’’
To me, this seemed like a ludicrous story. Pol-
iticians speak in parables, and the squeaky-clean
details of the pawnshop tale — the friendly cop,
the gun that never fires — felt comically estranged
from Gravel’s progressive platform. On the other
hand, maybe symbolism didn’t matter. @Mike-
Gravel had already established that Mike Gravel
was not just an individual but also a kind of group
project. Strangely enough, this had opened up a
loophole that allowed him to talk like an actual
person — and somehow it seemed as if this per-
son mattered least. I found myself imagining a
candidateless campaign — fronted by a hologram
of George Washington, or ‘‘freedom,’’ or Apple
— when suddenly my thinking was cut short by
what seemed to be the world’s loudest rendition
of the theme to ‘‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.’’
Gravel put the call on speaker. ‘‘Hi, David!’’
Oks was calling to remind Gravel of a few inter-
views and to ask his opinion on some possible
endorsements. ‘‘The president of Catalonia, the
breakaway region of Spain, he’s interested in hav-
ing a phone call and possibly doing an endorse-
ment. Would this be something you’re up for?’’
‘‘The president of Catalonia?!’’ Gravel asked.
‘‘In Spain?’’
‘‘Yeah.’’
‘‘I don’t want to get myself enmeshed in the
political contest within Spain. What you can do
is tell him I appreciate the endorsement and I
really admire Spain. It’s on my list to go visit.’’
Then there were endorsements from the
mayor of ‘‘Renoir,’’ France, and the governor of
the U.S. Virgin Islands.
‘‘What’s the community called? Renoir? Renoir
is an artist.’’
Oks’s mistake; the city was Grenoble.
‘‘I’ve made a speech in Grenoble!’’ Gravel
said. Endorsement approved. What about the
U.S. Virgin Islands? It would count as a domes-
tic endorsement, Oks said. Did Gravel want him
to set up a call?
‘‘I have no problem with calling him,’’ Gravel
said. ‘‘Maybe we could get somebody like that
interested in the Legislature of the People.’’
The New York Times Magazine 27
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

The next
frontier for the
orinal
queen of pop.

By Vanessea
Grigoriadis

Photographs by JR
РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

29
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

T E NI HT
before the Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas in May, Madonna was a Madonna song; at the all-inclusive Mexican resort I visited over spring
sitting in the arena attached to the MGM Grand hotel, staring at a double break, the poolside aerobics teacher played the song as a warm-up). Teen-
of herself. The double, who was standing on the stage many yards away, agers have always dominated pop, but now that most new music in the
was younger and looked Asian but wore a similar lace minidress and a wig United States is streamed, how many times a song is listened to by one
in Madonna’s current hairstyle, a ’30s movie star’s crimped blond waves. person counts much more than how many people listen to a song — and
‘‘It’s always the second person with the wig — she wants to see it,’’ a stage kids simply have more time to stream music than adults. When I checked
designer said, adding that when she makes a decision, she is definitive. the charts after the show, rappers born after President Bill Clinton’s election
‘‘Madonna wants 10 options, but when she says it’s the one, it’s the one.’’ were in the top slots (Lil Nas X, Lil Skies, Lil Baby, Lil Uzi Vert). Older musi-
Madonna was observing Madonna to make sure Madonna was doing cians had to pander to the teenage demographic or even younger; Swift’s
everything perfectly. Up on the stage set of a funky urban street with lamp- new single, ‘‘ME!’’ sounded like a Kidz Bop version of a Taylor Swift single
posts and a tiled bar, the double hit her marks and held a fist up to her and actually featured her shouting, during the bridge, ‘‘Spelling is fun!’’
mouth like a faux microphone for a rendition of ‘‘Medellín,’’ the on-trend, Backstage, Madonna posed for a candid photo with BTS; later, people
Latin-inflected song that Madonna would be singing. Madonna looked at left comments like ‘‘LEGENDS MEET LEGENDS’’ under the photo on
a TV and assessed the augmented-reality part of the show, in which four Twitter. Finding out that there were indeed people who believed that a
additional virtual Madonnas, one playing an accordion and another dressed K-pop band of 20-somethings was equal in legendary status to Madonna,
like a bride, would materialize in the televised awards performance out of not only the highest-charting female musician and highest-grossing female
thin air. Nearby, guys bowed heads and said cryptic things like ‘‘Where’s touring musician in history but also an artist who changed the pop-culture
the digital key?’’ and ‘‘I need the alpha channel’’ to one another, tensely. game forever, made me gag, to use a phrase from her heyday. Among my
All the fake Madonnas ran through the song a few times before Madon- middle-aged peers — my female and gay male peers, mostly — she was
na skipped enthusiastically to the stage. The sex bomb at 60 was slightly still an object of fascination. My friends in the fashion business who used
less than bionic and wore a Swarovski-crystal-encrusted to take cues from her liked her new hats but not her jewelry
patch over her left eye (‘‘It’s fashion, darling,’’ an onlooker and the eye patch. My old crusty punk friends, including an
OPE N I NG PAG E S :
explained when I asked why she chose to wear it). Afterward, ex-dominatrix who now owned a restaurant, said: ‘‘Madonna’s
MADONNA WITH
Madonna mused about something being off, and the next A 1986 PHOTOGRAPH
hard-core! I want to know what she thinks about menopause.
time she messed up the part where she stood on a table and BY HERB RITTS.
We need her back in New York.’’ And everyone wanted to argue
gyrated her legs in and out in a move called ‘‘the butterfly’’ about her claiming a seat at the contemporary-pop banquet
while popping her head in each direction. But by the third past her 60th year — was it really all that significant, if Bob
run-through she seemed ecstatic. ‘‘It’s so nice to see her smile,’’ Megan Dylan and the Rolling Stones played stadiums past her age, David Byrne
Lawson, a choreographer, said from under a black bolero hat, ‘‘and have was regularly performing across America and Bruce Springsteen was still at
it be a genuine smile.’’ the controls of Bruce Inc.? Or was it a superhuman feat, particularly when
The AR part of Madonna’s performance was a feat, devised by some set against her two closest contemporaries, Michael Jackson and Prince,
of the people who worked on this year’s Super Bowl, and the next night each of whom exploded with her at the rise of video culture in the early
at the awards show she danced boldly despite the eye patch, which had 1980s and each of whom died early, and ignominiously?
to be difficult, peripheral-vision-speaking. But she wasn’t incorporat- It was depressing that the younger generation didn’t seem to have
ing fireworks, a marching band and flying backup dancers, as Taylor an understanding of the way Madonna had used her iron will to forge a
Swift did; she didn’t hand out special bracelets to every person in the particular type of highly autobiographical, uber-empowered, hypersex-
audience, then activate them to beam a thousand points of light, as ualized female pop star who became the dominant model of femininity
the Jonas Brothers did; she wasn’t in a leotard and rolling around on across the nation. Without Madonna, we don’t have Britney Spears, Lady
the floor simulating a lesbian make-out session, as Halsey did, though Gaga and maybe even Janelle Monae. The doubles she played with during
the reason Halsey did that has a lot to do with Madonna doing it first. each of her transformations — not only the religious Madonna but the
When the people in the audience lost their minds that night, they lost virgin, boy-toy, material girl, dominatrix, dancing queen, mom, yoga
them almost exclusively for the K-pop band BTS, whose smooth hip- mom, adopting mom and, now, sexagenarian claiming her space among
hop moves have birthed a million memes. For Madonna, they rose to artists two generations younger — were fun-house representations of
their feet and took their phones out to commemorate ‘‘the time they conventional femininity. They refracted and reflected a future most of
saw Madonna’’ but seemed to scream loudest for the gyrating butterfly us didn’t know was coming before she showed it to us.
part, which was a little skanky, and that pleased them.
The pop-music world around Madonna has expanded in such shockingly Just a week before the Billboard Awards, I went to Madonna’s embassy-
strange new ways in the past couple of years that her precisely executed size home on a soundless street in central London for an afternoon. The
performance almost seemed too delicate (‘‘Medellín’’ is down-tempo for tan Georgian facade, absent of ornament, gave away no secrets. In the

30 6.9.19
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

foyer that day, reflecting upon her renowned impatience with fools (her of Sintra, Portugal, where her son David Banda, 13, attended a top soccer
former publicist once explained, ‘‘She smells fear like a dog’’), I found academy and she became perhaps the world’s most famous globe-trotting
myself asking the woman who answered the door, ‘‘Should I take off my soccer mom. She told me she wasn’t yet over the release of her last album,
jacket, or should I just wear it?’’ ‘‘Rebel Heart,’’ in 2015, which sold less than her others. The songs had leaked
Then a figure descended a nearby set of stairs. I saw the nude leather heels online several months early, far from perfection. ‘‘There are no words to
first, her feet transformed into a fleshy weapon, then the whole person, who describe how devastated I was,’’ she said. ‘‘It took me a while to recover,
was extending her hand to shake mine. Despite unforgiving paparazzi shots and put such a bad taste in my mouth I wasn’t really interested in making
of the work on her face, she was shockingly beautiful up close. Her face was music.’’ She added, ‘‘I felt raped.’’ It didn’t feel right to explain that women
heart-shaped, with her blue eyes set wide apart and a chin that still jutted these days were trying not to use that word metaphorically.
out like Elvis’s. A slightly off-the-shoulder, full-skirted Marni dress showed In Portugal, she said, she was lonely. I asked if she felt that way because
off her ivory skin; she was like one of those porcelain figurines of a rural she was living in a castle, which seemed like the most appropriate descrip-
lady in her Saturday best that people used to keep in glass cabinets. The look tion of the 16,000-square-foot Moorish revival mansion I read she bought,
was far from the wisecracking, gum-snapping, thick-eyebrowed girl of the but she shot back: ‘‘Let’s not get carried away. I wasn’t in any castle.’’ She
1980s who didn’t shave her armpits, but it was effective: It announced that said about Lisbon, ‘‘It’s quite medieval and feels like a place where time
she was still Madge, the British lady of stopped in a way, and it feels very
the manor — except when she crossed 1982 closed,’’ adding, ‘‘There’s a cool vibe
her legs, she had the old punk-rock there, but where I was living with my
black fishnet stockings under her skirt. kids, I felt very cut off from a lot.’’ She
She greeted me with a wide, tooth- summed up her days: ‘‘It was FIFA and
showing smile that seemed genuine my kids’ school and that’s it. I’m fight-
— we had met once before, about ing with the plumber.’’ For a moment,
five years ago in a boardroom at her she almost looked shy. ‘‘I really want-
record label that I thought at the time ed to make friends,’’ she said.
had the most flattering conference- One night, she visited a French-
room lighting on planet earth. She man’s crumbling home on the sea
announced back then that if I asked a for an improv session, mostly of fado
stupid question, I had to take a drink musicians. ‘‘There was a vibration
of tequila, but if I had a smart one, she there that was magical and palpa-
would drink. At one point, I wondered ble, and suddenly musicians started
if she planned to fall in love and marry playing,’’ she said. They rose from
again. ‘‘Wait, what does romance have couches to sing, from chairs to pluck
to do with getting married?’’ she said. a guitar. Listening to the variety of
‘‘Stupid question! Down it.’’ Only later musicians, from Brazilian samba
1982: Peter Noble/Redferns/Getty Images. 1990: Frans Schellekens/Redferns/Getty Images. Opening pages: Trunk Archive.

did I realize she had created a distrac- players and jazz quartets to a singer
tion and avoided the question. from Guinea-Bissau performing in
Now she took a seat on a hard Mandinka, she fell into a trance.
bench that gave her a few inches of I listened to her describe how
height over my low-slung leather this scene had wormholed her back
chair. This time the room was dim. She to her younger self, particularly the
had a director’s appreciation for the one that emerged in New York City
nuances of lighting. The night before, in golden early-’80s downtown Man-
she was at a photo shoot until 3 a.m., hattan. Studio 54 was over, punk
and unwinding took two hours more. rock had come and gone and D.J.s
She has had insomnia for decades. In like Afrika Bambaataa were figuring
the late hours, she read books like out how to mash up disco, seminal
Carson McCullers’s ‘‘The Heart Is a hip-hop albums and electro bands
Lonely Hunter’’ or Joan Didion’s ‘‘The like Kraftwerk before sampling tech-
Year of Magical Thinking’’; she liked nology had been invented. She was
1990
learning authors’ back stories and the Italian-American dropout from
admired those with mettle. the University of Michigan, given the
She drank alcohol but drew the line at sleeping pills — ‘‘That’s a slip- name Madonna at birth; now, she remade herself as a sexy, lovesick street
pery slide to get on,’’ she told me, pulling a crossed leg toward herself urchin in pre-gentrification Alphabet City, surviving by checking coats at
and massaging her taut calf. ‘‘I’ve been doing back-to-back video shoots the Russian Tea Room and modeling in the nude for art classes.
all night, standing in the freezing cold, for the past couple weeks,’’ she At night, Madonna slipped cassettes of her songs to D.J.s at Dan-
explained. I seized the opening to ask how she felt in her body these ceteria and the Fun House. She mixed it up on the dance floor with
days. ‘‘You’re my doctor,’’ she said in a not particularly playful tone of South Bronx b-boys and graffiti-artist-musician-painters like her new
voice. ‘‘I just feel tired.’’ boyfriend Jean-Michel Basquiat (she claimed when they broke up that
She was a single mom of six now. Her second husband, Guy Ritchie, was he took back the art he had given her and painted the canvases black).
gone, along with what her spokeswoman at the time said was $75 million Cindy Sherman was showing in galleries around town, spurring interest
of her money — immortalized in her song ‘‘I Don’t Give A’’ with the lines in self-invention with her photographs. ‘‘I felt she was doing some kind
‘‘lawyers, suck it up/didn’t have a prenup.’’ The removal of this amount may of parallel kind of work to what I was doing,’’ Madonna said. ‘‘I could
have made the Jenga tower of her fortune shiver but not fall down. For relate to her. Becoming other people but still herself with a sense of
the past few years, she has been in London less than in the hilltop village irony, making social commentary.’’ Jim Jarmusch was tooling around

The New York Times Magazine 31

 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

W I T H A 1 9 8 3 P H O T O G R A P H B Y K AT E S I M O N .

32 6.9.19
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Manhattan with his 16-millimeter camera and playing in a no-wave band. be shaking all the time’’ — though she had an editing facility for videos
The Beastie Boys were devising a tongue-in-cheek marriage of heavy and film. ‘‘That’s good because I can drop in for an hour and then go back
metal and hip-hop rhymes and recording their first record. AIDS hadn’t to see my kids, or go back to my other life, and not have to get into a car
spread widely yet. When people talk about what New York used to be and go somewhere,’’ she said. ‘‘But it’s also nice to get into a car and go
like, that’s what it was like. somewhere and get out of your house. Otherwise I would never get out of
The conventional wisdom is that Madonna became more famous than my house.’’ In her professional life, a small group of assistants, managers
everyone else because she was dying to become famous. What set her and dancers orbited her like moons. Though they liked to refer to her as
apart was her bottomless maw of ambition. And over the years, her ‘‘M,’’ thus expanding her domain over one of the alphabet’s 26 letters, this
statements — ‘‘I want to rule the world’’ — supported this theory. Today entourage, always the most honest reflection of a star, struck me as witty,
she put it this way: ‘‘First of all, I wanted to make a living. I was tired of sensible and self-possessed. They were pros who had learned not to fear
being broke. But second of all, all I wanted was a song to get played on her, or how to disguise that feeling.
the radio. That’s all I was praying for. One song.’’ In Portugal, she felt The entourage helped accomplish her infinite professional goals, and she
like a girl without that desperate desire, less brittle than she had been acted as a de facto cultural consigliere, taking them to museum shows and
— playful, interactive, open to diverse influences, as she was in the past. recommending books to read. I heard them say ‘‘She’s plugged into a dif-
‘‘When I was living on the Lower ferent frequency’’ a couple of times.
East Side and I didn’t see many con- Madonna believed in following her
certs, I knew about Debbie Harry intuition. I heard her describe meet-
and Chrissie Hynde and the Talking ing her collaborators as ‘‘the universe
Heads and David Bowie, but there conspires to bring us together.’’ Guy
was no pressure for me to be any- Oseary, her charismatic manager of
thing specifically, to sound a cer- many years, said that once she com-
tain way, to look a certain way,’’ she pletes an artistic vision, she moves on
recalled. ‘‘That’s an important thing, fully. ‘‘Every time we finish a project,
because it allowed me to develop as ‘A woman fearlessly it’s a clean slate,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t
an artist and to be pure, without any expressing herself know what happens next.’’
influences. What I try to do now is and saying, To hear the album, I walked
to remember that girl.’’ ‘‘I’m encourang all of you through dark-walled rooms with full
Not letting the past interfere with to be independent, bookcases and shrub-sized flower
the future might be as difficult for her arrangements in divine red-pink-
to speak your mind,
as anyone who rose to a high level in a purple and down the stairs to her
profession. I asked how she felt about
to express your home screening room. Everything
her old hits. ‘‘If I’m in a car or I go sexuality freely without was perfect. The phone cords looked
into a restaurant, I’m out somewhere, shame, to not allow as if a sailor had coiled them. A sil-
and one of my songs starts playing, men to objectify you, ver teapot shined so brightly that I
I just go, ‘Ugh,’ ’’ she said, ‘‘probably to objectify yourself’’ saw my reflection. The small square
because I’ve had to hear it five billion — I don’t know. screening room, on the same floor
times already, and I want to escape as her gym, was like a Tiffany &
All of those things
that.’’ Ambition was certainly part Co. jewel box, but navy rather than
of what kept her going, but it didn’t seemed like the natural robin-egg blue. Every surface was
seem to be all of it. When I asked her way of where velvet. Footprints covered the car-
Stylist (left and opening pages): Eyob Yohannes. Hair: Nicola Clarke. Makeup: Isamaya Ffrench.

how much longer she thought she we should be going.’ pet like brush strokes on a canvas; I
would make music and where she imagined Madonna whirling around,
thought she would end up, she said, stretching, dancing. A set of weights
‘‘Straight to the moon.’’ rested in a corner.
The art was even more striking.
Madonna’s catalog is primarily com- Madonna spent her first major pay-
posed of declarative anthems, mini checks on paintings. She had collect-
pop arias and songs about longing ed Frida Kahlo since the ’80s, mes-
or lies or mental disconnection. merized by the artist’s cool gaze, as
In her love songs, she celebrated well as geometric Art Deco nudes
her object of affection, often described as an angel or celestial being; by Tamara de Lempicka and works by Francis Bacon and Salvador Dalí.
for someone so raunchy and blasphemous, sanctified tropes always Near the screening room, a print of John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics to
seemed to find their way into the tunes. ‘‘Madame X,’’ her new album, ‘‘Imagine’’ hung over the toilet — an intentionally hilarious location — and
her 14th, is darker than usual, though it also includes fanciful summer large portraits lined the halls, not only of Lennon and Bob Marley but also
love songs. She experimented with musical genres like dance, fado, Alfred Hitchcock pretending to strangle himself with a tie.
rap and Cape Verdean batuque and explored her anger over world Madonna is short, and the art was hung low, for her own appreciation.
leaders like Donald Trump ‘‘who seemed to be systematically removing She wanted to be face to face. ‘‘Confrontational — they’re hung in a con-
all of our personal freedoms,’’ she told me. She visualized herself as a frontational way,’’ she told me. In the study, while we talked, she pointed to
freedom fighter traveling the world to spread the gospel of love and a photo portrait of East African warriors taken by a friend on their trip to
anti-discrimination — fighting misogyny, homophobia, racism, guns, Kenya’s Rift Valley. ‘‘The girls on the right are the bead girls, and it’s kind
the rise of authoritarianism. of like a mating ritual, and they’re singing. The girls are holding sticks up
Some of ‘‘Madame X’’ was recorded in London, but she didn’t build a in front of the men, and they have to jump really high, and while they jump,
recording studio at home — ‘‘Horrible idea,’’ she told me, ‘‘my house would they have to tell a story.’’ She continued: ‘‘But here’s the sad thing. When the

Photograph by JR for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 33
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

boy turns a certain age, he has to leave his bead girl behind, and his wife all of you to be independent, to speak your mind, to express your sexuality
is chosen for him.’’ She let me absorb this, then smiled mischievously. ‘‘I freely without shame, to not allow men to objectify you, to objectify your-
imagine there’s probably a few people who don’t follow the rules.’’ self’ — I don’t know,’’ she said. ‘‘All of those things seemed like the natural
It wasn’t hard to make the mental leap from Madonna regarding way of where we should be going. And strangely, a lot of feminists criticized
her museum-quality art collection as household icons to the manner me for it, and I got no support from that group. They thought, Well, you
in which many fans, including me, regarded her. In the 1970s, when can’t use your sexuality to empower yourself as a female, which I think is
Madonna moved to Manhattan, my mother, a pattern-and-decoration rubbish, because that’s part of who I am and part of me as a female and a
painter, took me on the graffiti-drenched subway each month to Amer- human being, my sexuality. That’s not the only thing, that wasn’t my only
ica’s first nonprofit cooperative women’s art gallery, A.I.R., which she weapon and that wasn’t the only thing I was talking about.’’
helped found in SoHo in 1972. There, she and her peers introduced me For someone who gave liftoff to third-wave feminism and has spoken out
to their vision of femininity — their deconstruction of the warping effect against the patriarchy for years, Madonna hasn’t always toed the feminist
of womanhood. Some of the artists were political, like Nancy Spero with party line, or stood in solidarity with women simply because they’re women.
her paintings of phallic-shaped bombs and scrolls of archetypal femi- I was curious about her thoughts on the Hollywood movement Time’s
nine heroes, and Ana Mendieta, the performance artist whose sculptor Up — did she think an anti-sexual-assault movement would move into
husband, Carl Andre, was accused of the mainstream in her lifetime? ‘‘No,
pushing her to her death from their that was pretty surprising,’’ she said.
apartment in Greenwich Village (he Miramax, the company Harvey Wein-
was acquitted); today, in the #MeToo stein owned with his brother, distrib-
moment, young women have made uted ‘‘Truth or Dare,’’ Madonna’s 1991
her their own cult icon. cinéma vérité documentary that was
I first heard Madonna when I was perceived as prurient and ickily voy-
11. She was the opposite of what I euristic at the time but prefigured
had learned so far about what it was the rise of reality TV (on camera, she
to be a woman. She was sensual and called her boyfriend, Warren Beatty, a
playful, and I loved the way she tied ‘‘pussy man’’ and later demonstrated
her tights in her hair to make a bow oral sex on an Evian bottle).
‘It’s good to be strong,
on top. She was Cyndi Lauper with ‘‘Harvey crossed lines and bound-
sex, Duran Duran with New York but again, it’s always aries and was incredibly sexually flir-
grittiness. And suddenly everyone about, where’s that tatious and forward with me when we
looked like her — everyone want- strength coming from? were working together; he was mar-
ed to be her. My friends and I were What are your intentions? ried at the time, and I certainly wasn’t
virgins singing along to ‘‘Like a Vir- What is the context interested,’’ she said. She added: ‘‘I
gin’’ without understanding what was aware that he did the same with
that you’re using your
the word meant. At one of her 1985 a lot of other women that I knew in
concerts at Madison Square Garden, strength in? Are you the business. And we were all, ‘Har-
she wrapped herself in a white wed- abusing your power? vey gets to do that because he’s got so
ding veil and lay down on the stage, Women can also much power and he’s so successful and
breathily whispering ‘‘it feels so good abuse their power.’ his movies do so well and everybody
inside’’ into a hand-held mike, before wants to work with him, so you have to
hundreds of balloons fell from the put up with it.’ So that was it. So when
ceiling. It was like being present at the it happened, I was really like, ‘Final-
big bang of girl-power pop stars. Girls ly.’ I wasn’t cheering from the rafters
didn’t feel the same way about Janis because I’m never going to cheer for
Joplin — they might have wanted to someone’s demise. I don’t think that’s
be her, even lusted for her, but they good karma anyway. But it was good
didn’t scream as if she were Elvis. that somebody who had been abusing
Madonna might not have initially his power for so many years was called
wanted little girls as fans, but at first out and held accountable.’’
she seemed to cater to the demo just She said it was not true that she had
like the performers at the Billboard ever asked Donald Trump for a date,
Awards, though she attracted a lot of criticism about corrupting little girls’ as one ‘‘John Miller,’’ Trump’s publicist, who Trump swears wasn’t him, told
souls or encouraging teenage pregnancy with ‘‘Papa Don’t Preach.’’ When People magazine in 1991: ‘‘She called and wanted to go out with him, that
I told Madonna that I was at that concert, she wanted to know how old I I can tell you.’’ What she remembered was talking to him on the phone in
was then and said, ‘‘Wow, that’s young.’’ There was a pause, so I asked how Florida. ‘‘I did a Versace campaign with Steven Meisel at his house in Palm
it made her feel when she heard people reminisce as I had — if she was Beach,’’ she said. He kept calling to talk to her. ‘‘He kept going: ‘Hey, is
proud or was unmoved because she had heard the same thing a million everything O.K.? Finding yourself comfortable? Are the beds comfortable?
times before. ‘‘It depends on context,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m happy to hear I was a Is everything good? Are you happy?’ ’’
part of the beginning of your being woke as a female. That’s cool.’’ When She said that Trump had a weak character but that this wasn’t a surprise
she thought about it now, she didn’t think the concert was groundbreaking. for an alpha male. ‘‘They’re overcompensating for how insecure they
‘‘I mean, my belly button was showing,’’ she continued. ‘‘If I look back on feel — a man who is secure with himself, a human who is secure with
it, I don’t see it as a scandalous concert at all.’’ themselves, doesn’t have to go around bullying people all the time.’’ What
That was her first reaction, to diminish her impact, but she soon reversed about alpha women, I asked? ‘‘It’s the same,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s good to be
herself. ‘‘A woman fearlessly expressing herself and saying, ‘I’m encouraging strong, but again, it’s always about, where’s that strength coming from?

34 6.9.19
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

What are your intentions? What is the context that you’re using your to do it all despite the challenge of constant messiness and too little
strength in? Are you abusing your power? Women can also abuse their time (and with the benefit of hired help). She said: ‘‘I couldn’t survive
power. And if that’s also backed up by a lack of intelligence, emotional if I couldn’t be creative as an artist, but in the back of my mind, I’m
or intellectual, a lack of life experience, a lack of compassion, then it’s always thinking, O.K., what is my son doing right now? What is my
really a bad mixture.’’ daughter doing right now? I haven’t spoken to David yet. I’ve got to be
there for them. When is her show? I’ve got to make sure I don’t have
The great, unexpected part of Madonna’s career came during her seam- things planned. My head is in a whirl.’’ More professional women were
less movement from selfish girlhood to selfless motherhood, from sexy choosing similarly — sow oats early, build a career, have kids as late or
punk simmering with barely concealed rage to earth goddess. In the later than nature intended — but mothering six kids at 60 and, you know,
mid-’90s, she was a star who seemed to fall in love and have sex the way being Madonna, took the trend to an extreme. She liked hanging out
most of us grab coffee (she once explained, ‘‘My pussy is the temple of with other moms who had little kids, like her friend of 30 years, Rosie
learning,’’ and took lovers including Tupac Shakur and Dennis Rodman). O’Donnell, who also has a 6-year-old. ‘‘She’s much, much, much more
By the late ’90s, she was not only a devoted mother but an ecstatic one, strict than I am,’’ O’Donnell said. ‘‘They could really be nightmares, and
regarding the birth of her daughter Lourdes as a window on transcen- her kids are lovely, wonderful, beautiful kids.’’
dence. ‘‘I feel like when my daughter Madonna was determined to be the
was born, I was born again,’’ she told 2015 best mother she could be, but because
Oprah in 1998. She wore her hair she was Madonna, sometimes she
loose, eschewed makeup, went to could be hard-core about it. She took
therapy, did ashtanga yoga, joined the responsibility seriously — it was
the Kabbalah Center. ‘‘Ray of Light,’’ almost a matter of reversing the his-
the electronic record she gestated torical record, making good on the
at the time, sold 16 million copies. promise of her own mother before
Not everyone loved her later she was snatched away. Madonna’s
phases, like her 2012 hard dance album mother, also named Madonna, died
‘‘MDNA,’’ probably best experienced from breast cancer when she was 5,
at a foam party on Ibiza, but as a mid- sparking her survivor instinct and
dle-aged mother who liked shaking fathomless ambition. In her songs, she
off the week in the club from time returns again and again to the loss. I
to time, I remained by her side. And noticed that on the cover of ‘‘Madame
she poured deep emotion into those X,’’ she resembled Frida Kahlo, with
songs too, whether she was in love or arched eyebrows and a thin smile,
angrily out of it. Relationships proved and the title was written over her lips
hard for her. ‘‘I found myself as a wife, in black handwriting. The writing
in both of my marriages, being as I looked like stitches, and reminded
think everybody is: You try to please me of an indelible autobiographical
another person, and sometimes you image from a 1989 Madonna video:
find you are not being who you really a little girl attending a funeral and
are,’’ she told me. ‘‘That’s the struggle, walking up to her mother’s corpse,
I suppose, of being in a marriage or then realizing that the mortuary had
a relationship, especially as a woman. stitched her lips together — a ghoulish
We often think we have to play down final silencing.
our accomplishments or make our- In ‘‘Truth or Dare,’’ Madon-
selves smaller, so we don’t make other na lay on her mother’s grave and
people feel intimidated or less than.’’ swooned for the camera; she was
As she grew older, she had young later attacked for exploiting the
lovers, sometimes 30 years her junior. death. Today she talked about own-
She experienced joy and wild aban- ing a particular Kahlo painting, ‘‘My
don with her children. But she had Birth,’’ which was hanging upstairs.
2017 (WITH HER SIX CHILDREN)
two biological children and adopted Kahlo was being born to a mother
2015: Kevin Winter/Getty Images. 2017: From Instagram.

four from Malawi, one of Africa’s from whom she felt disconnected,
poorest countries, amid a media frenzy; the country’s rules required foreign and you could see Kahlo’s face coming out of the birth canal while her
parents to live there for a year, which she had not (the country’s Supreme mother threw a white blanket over her own face to avoid bearing witness
Court decided in her favor). Her youngest two children are 6-year-old to her daughter’s birth. Kahlo made the painting after her mother died
girls, whom she adopted in 2017. She was aware of the doubling effect of breast cancer, too. ‘‘I love it,’’ Madonna told me. ‘‘I love how honest it
of children, the way they reflect back your strengths and deficiencies. ‘‘If is.’’ She liked showing it to guests. It helped her push some of them away.
somebody said, ‘O.K., you’ve got to give one thing up,’ I would say, ‘O.K.,
I’ll stop working,’ ’’ she said. ‘‘But they like that I work. They love to come The truth was that talking to Madonna, in this dim room, about topics
visit me and watch me work. My older children, my son, he’s a painter, other than her family became increasingly difficult. In recent years, she
and my daughter’s a dancer and choreographer — I can see how my work had zoomed to the realm of demigods hellbent on doing good, like Bono,
has influenced them, though they probably wouldn’t like to say so. I like and, combined with the continued devotion to kabbalah, she had become
it. It makes me proud.’’ preachy. The onetime fallen Catholic whose video was condemned by the
This was a pleasant conversation, a moment of bonding. We were Vatican was now religious. I respected her charity work in Africa, and I
both older mothers devoted to our very young children, and managing was interested in her deep concern about the spread (Continued on Page 46)

The New York Times Magazine 35

 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

The struggles of rejecting

the gender binary in a world

that wants to box everyone in.

By Daniel Bergner

Photographs by Jessica Dimmock

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

37
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
‘Why didn’t you wear makeup today?’
Jan Tate asked her client during a therapy session
in May of last year.
‘‘I didn’t feel the need to.’’
‘‘Would today be the day to begin using Salem
instead of Hannah?’’
There was a long pause and a hushed reply:
‘‘Yeah. But it would hurt a lot worse to start asking
people to call me Salem and have them not do it
than not to ask them.’’
Tate is a psychotherapist at the Carolina Part-
ners clinic in Durham, N.C. She specializes in
clients who are pushing against the bounds of
gender. Salem is 20 and was born male, or in
the phrase Salem prefers, was assigned male at
birth, with a more clearly masculine name — that
it is a ‘‘deadname’’ is all Salem will say about it.
Salem uses gender-neutral they/them pronouns.
They’d failed, so far, to get their parents, their
sister or their two remaining friends to under-
stand and accept that they were neither a man
nor a woman, that they were nonbinary, gender
fluid, gender expansive. They’d chosen the name
Salem to fit with their identity, but they’d almost
never asked anyone to call them by it. It was easi-
er — definitely not easy, but easier — to let them-
self be considered conventionally transgender,
male to female, and go by the name Hannah.
Tate, who is 31, suggested that Salem practice
the request now, in the safety of her office. Sit-
ting across from the therapist, they could hardly
manage it — ‘‘Can you call me Salem?’’ — and as
soon as they did, they turned their face away.
Their brown hair fell with a loose curl just past
their slim shoulders. Unlike two days before,
when Salem arrived for therapy with their full
lips in dark red lipstick and a dash of blush across
each cheekbone, and with their long fingernails
painted a bright lavender, this afternoon there
was only the nail polish.
38 6.9.19
They wore a gray V-neck T-shirt and jeans.
With an ankle crossed over the other knee, they
picked at the rubber rim of one of their sneakers,
picking, picking. The pain of being nonbinary
was ‘‘excruciating,’’ they told me later, a torment
mixing disconnection from themself and isola-
tion from everyone else. Tate said to me that ‘‘I
often find myself gut-knotted after sessions with
Salem, because of the things they don’t say’’ —
because of the feelings Salem kept locked away,
even from her, for fear that their experience was
inexpressible, incomprehensible. She imagined
Salem in an ‘‘abyss,’’ undergoing a torture that
was the emotional equivalent of ‘‘taking a saw
blade and cutting into the skin of an arm.’’
Tate was raised Southern Baptist on a small
tobacco-and-cattle farm in a town not far from
Salem’s. She is cisgender — the gender she was
assigned at birth and her sense of identity match
up. But she’s gay, and as a teenager, when she was
struggling with her sexuality, she found solace in
talks with the father of a close friend, a former
deacon at her church, a middle-aged doctor who
was making a full transition from male to female
and was barred from the congregation and kicked
out of her medical practice. Ever since, Tate has
felt keenly for anyone pitted against gender con-
formity. She’s especially invested in the battles of
people like Salem, who yearn not to go from one
category to the other but to escape altogether. And
philosophically, she’s electrified by the profound
challenge that people like Salem put up against
dominant preconceptions. What if our most fun-
damental means of perceiving and classifying one
another is illusory and can be swept away?
As Tate worked with Salem, she had, at home,
a pet tortoise; whenever she mentioned it in con-
versation, she used ‘‘they’’ and ‘‘them.’’ With a
freckled, impish face, she relishes small acts of
defiance. The windowsills in her office were lined
with flowers she’d pilfered from various spots
around the city. In her first session with Salem,
months earlier, when Salem clung to silence, she
coaxed them into speech by asking which was
their favorite of the flowers and plants on the
sills and floor. They chose a dwarfish plant with
twisted stems.
Except for therapy, Salem rarely left the house
where they live with their family, in a town that’s
a half-hour’s drive outside Durham, amid farm-
land and forest. The town center consists of a
little gun shop, a squat brick Post Office and an
old stone church.
Tate, who wore a floral dress and brown
wingtips, asked whether Salem could ‘‘imagine
a world where the binary does not exist.’’ She
went on: ‘‘We all police one another. Women
police women, men police men. If the policing
didn’t exist, what would things be like for you?”
But Salem couldn’t envision such a fantasy.
They looked increasingly distressed, face rigid
and eyes glazed.
Tate switched the subject to the hormones
Salem had been taking for two months: a low
dose of spironolactone, a testosterone blocker,
and estradiol, a type of estrogen. Salem felt driv-
en to feminize their body, to lessen their con-
stant alienation from their own anatomy — and
their self-revulsion — but wasn’t at all sure what
the right combination of feminine and mascu-
line would be. Different days brought different
answers. From the hormones, their breasts
were buds. ‘‘I could foresee breasts bothering
me,’’ Salem told Tate, though they believed they
wanted them. ‘‘I just have to hope the hormones
don’t make too big of a problem.’’
Even so, Tate commented tentatively that
Salem seemed more confident since starting
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
Above: Laura Jacobs, 49, a therapist who identifies as nonbinary. Page 37: Salem, a nonbinary 20-year-old in North Carolina.
the hormones, that Salem seemed to be making
progress in accepting themself.
‘‘While I’m presenting myself as more com-
fortable,’’ Salem mumbled, head bowed, ‘‘the
feeling I have is that I hate myself.’’ They some-
times called themself a monster. Tate has another
nonbinary client who cut themself relentlessly
across their shoulders, leaving ‘‘scars on scars on
scars’’ that the client asked Tate to touch. Weeks
before this session, Salem stripped naked in their
bedroom and, with a marker, scrawled ‘‘tranny’’
and ‘‘faggot’’ all over their body, slurs that were
inaccurate but screamed their self-disgust.
For the next minutes, Salem tried to criticize
Tate, to lash out at her, for failing to help them
enough, and Tate encouraged the effort. But
quickly Salem fell mute. Body utterly still, they
withdrew further and further, the glaze of their
eyes clouding, until Tate felt that her client was
in a state of dissociation, totally detached from
their own surroundings, absent from the room,
from themself, gone.
Photograph by Jessica Dimmock for The New York Times
Tate grabbed a bunch of blossoms and put
them in Salem’s hands: purple irises, blue bach-
elor buttons. The colors and smells — the imme-
diacy of sensation — were a way to rescue them,
to bring them back. She took a blank index card
from her desk and asked Salem to dictate to her
some personal facts, another method of making
her client reinhabit themself.
‘‘I play video games,’’ they said tonelessly. Then
a retreat: ‘‘My name is Hannah.’’
Tate wrote these things out and gave Salem
the card. Hunched over, shoulders curled inward,
Salem clutched the card and the flowers.
Just in the last few years, nonbinary identity has
been slowly seeping into societal consciousness.
A nonbinary actor, Asia Kate Dillon, has starred
since 2017 as a nonbinary character on the Show-
time series ‘‘Billions.’’ A raft of new nonbinary
models are featured in fashion spreads, and
a Coke ad, aired during the 2018 Super Bowl,
paired an androgynous face with a pointed
gender-neutral pronoun. ‘‘There’s a Coke,’’ the
voice-over said, ‘‘for he and she and her and me
and them.’’ Nonbinary as a category has even
slipped into state laws. In 2016, an Oregon court
granted a plaintiff the right to label themself
nonbinary on their driver’s license, and by now,
though the Trump administration proclaims that
gender is a simple matter of biology, some dozen
states, from New York to Utah, offer some form
of Oregon’s flexibility. Yet the nation’s glimmers
of tolerance don’t necessarily mean much — even
in New York, let alone in rural North Carolina
— when you’re living in opposition to our most
basic way of seeing and sorting and compre-
hending one another.
It’s impossible to say how many Salems, how
many nonbinary people, there are across the
United States. Surveys have yet to deal with
this reliably. And any researcher who takes on
the question will run into a problem with ter-
minology. An abundance of labels, with subtle
distinctions, are in play. Neutrois and gender
The New York Times Magazine 39
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
nonconforming and demiboy and demigirl and
pangender and genderqueer are among the array
of closely related identities that could confound
any demographer. Another complication is that
many nonbinary people also call themselves
transgender or trans — not, as Salem has, to avoid
explaining themselves, but as an umbrella term,
encompassing all kinds of self-definition, all sorts
of physical transformation and transgression of
the norms of F and M.
‘‘Data are scarce, and the research gaps are
vast,’’ Jody Herman, a public-policy scholar at
the U.C.L.A. School of Law’s Williams Institute,
a think tank devoted to issues of gender and sex-
ual orientation, told me, cautioning against any
estimate of the country’s nonbinary population.
That said, she pointed to an analysis of two fed-
eral public-health surveys, conducted by phone
in 2014 and 2015, on which 19 states included a
brief optional section about gender identity. The
results suggest — tenuously — that the total of
all transgender-identified adults in the United
40 6.9.19
D’hana Perry, 41, an artist in Brooklyn.
States is in the neighborhood of 1.4 million. The
optional section had a lone follow-up question
seeking more specificity: ‘‘Do you consider
yourself to be male-to-female, female-to-male
or gender nonconforming?’’ Around one-fifth
of those who identified as trans chose noncon-
forming. Yet at the very outset of the section,
any interview subject asking for clarification
about the meaning of transgender was given
a traditional binary definition along with an
example of someone born male but living as
female. So anyone who rejected both male and
female classifications was potentially excluded.
All told, the results didn’t provide much insight
into nonbinary numbers; instead, the surveys
were a reminder of the confusion and ignorance
surrounding the topic.
For anyone interested in nonbinary demo-
graphics, the surveys had another shortcoming.
They excluded anyone under age 18, and accord-
ing to clinicians who specialize in gender, it’s
among the young that nonbinary identity is
Photograph by Jessica Dimmock for The New York Times
taking hold most rapidly. ‘‘It’s growing expo-
nentially,’’ Linda Hawkins, co-director of the
Gender and Sexuality Development Clinic at
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told me
about the number of kids and youth in her prac-
tice — from ages 6 to 21 — who identify as non-
binary. Hawkins, who was a clinical professor
of Tate’s, has been working in the field for two
decades. She talked about the importance, for
young children, of recent picture books about
fluidity, and of education programs for pedia-
tricians, who are taught to respond with calm
understanding when parents report that their
children say they are ‘‘in the middle.’’ At least,
she added with a rueful laugh, pediatricians
are taught this in places like Philadelphia. For
older kids, the internet has delivered ‘‘a surge
of nonbinary information, of nuances in gender
expression, in the last five years,’’ she said. ‘‘It
has connected kids to supportive communities.
Looking back, there were always nonbinary
kids, but it’s only in the last few years that there
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
has been the language — language to not feel
alone, to have a flag.’’
Laura A. Jacobs, a therapist in New York who
focuses on L.G.B.T. clients, has seen some of
the same nonbinary momentum. Jacobs is 49
and nonbinary (they prefer ‘‘genderqueer’’), but
Jacobs is a rarity; the identity, they said, is the
province mainly of people under 30. Its under-
ground beginnings, they explained, can be traced
well back in time, but one iteration emerged in
the 1990s, with theorists like Judith Butler, who
wrote about gender as a culturally scripted per-
formance, based in social norms rather than
biology, imposed much more than innate; and
with activists like Kate Bornstein, who fully sur-
gically transitioned from male to female in the
mid-1980s, only to write in her 1994 manifesto,
‘‘Gender Outlaw’’: ‘‘I know I’m not a man . . . and
I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m probably
not a woman. . . . The trouble is, we’re living in
a world that insists we be one or the other. . . .
All my life, my nontraditional gender identity
had been my biggest secret, my deepest shame.’’
With their long hair in a ponytail, and wear-
ing thick leather boots and a button-down shirt
and tie, Jacobs said that over the last several
years, some psychiatric and medical providers
have started to let go of binary assumptions and
the idea that hormones and surgery should be
offered only to those who suffer an agonizing
need to remake the body as completely as pos-
sible from female to male or male to female. It
may not be easy, but nowadays people who wish
to exist somewhere other than these two end-
points, and who feel they can’t get far enough by
nonmedical means — clothing choices; a name
change; chest binding; penis tucking and tap-
ing — can find endocrinologists and surgeons
to treat them. Still, the goal of treatment is often
unclear to the patient themself; the prevailing
binary paradigm doesn’t apply. The need is to
get beyond, but how?
‘‘Think of getting out of the shower and stand-
ing in front of a mirror,’’ Jacobs said. ‘‘For most
people, cis people, it’s easy to see those body
parts as belonging to us, even if we might rather
they be smaller or bigger or more muscular or
whatnot. Now imagine that the mirror is a little
blurry, streaky with steam. And let’s say you’re a
binary trans person who hasn’t yet transitioned.
Around the edges of the blurriness, between the
streaks, you can at least imagine the reflection
you want; you know what it is. But the nonbinary
person may not have an image; even with the
help of the foggy mirror, they may not be able
to find themself.’’
Jacobs heard themself straining to communi-
cate the dilemma they hoped to describe. Trying
to evoke nonbinary experience for binary people,
in a world where nearly everyone is raised with an
either-or concept of gender, can feel liberating,
but also futile: wearying, dispiriting, sometimes
devastating. Whether in culturally conservative or
liberal America, the subjective divide can feel too
wide to bridge. This was something I heard again
and again during countless conversations span-
ning eight states. And being nonbinary can feel
inexplicable to yourself; the longings for physical
alteration can feel both indefinite and indefen-
sible. The harshest doubt can come from within.
‘‘I am reconstructing sea level during Marine
Isotope Stage 5a,’’ Kai Morsink, a Colum-
bia University senior, told a roomful of
earth-and-environmental-sciences students as
the class gave presentations last November. Kai
is 21, was assigned female at birth, uses masculine
pronouns and is nonbinary. In a dress shirt, a
black-and-white vest and black chinos, with his
dark hair clipped short and parted boyishly on
the side, he stood at the lectern, speaking at high
speed and clicking through graphs and images
of fossilized coral. He sounded nothing less than
thrilled as he described his study site on Barba-
dos, detailed its tectonic history, discussed the
density of information his reef contained, elabo-
rated on its relevance to climate change and
announced, as his 10 minutes came to a close,
‘‘My future holds a lot of data collection!’’
A classmate, responding to Kai’s exuberance,
raised a hand and asked how he’d found such a
perfect project. And indeed, to spend time with
Kai is to be entranced by his expressiveness on
topics ranging from paleoceanography to gender
theory, from classical singing to his own sense
of inescapable difference. ‘‘It’s like standing right
beside a hanging punching bag,’’ he said, as we
talked one afternoon at a cafe near the Columbia
campus. ‘‘You push it away, and it swings back
to hit you. You push it away farther, and it hits
you harder. You push it again — farther — and it
clobbers you.’’
Kai talked about having long identified with
‘‘effeminate, foppish’’ males in literature, from
Romeo to recurrent types in romance novels,
and about adoring Julie Andrews as a gen-
der-pretzeling nightclub performer in ‘‘Victor/
Victoria.’’ He wore, that day, another dress shirt
and vest — blue and red, floral-patterned, flashy.
Underneath, as always, he wore a binder. He
said he’d decided on top surgery, the removal
of his breasts, as a next step, to be taken soon
after graduation.
But he was still debating hormones, whose
effects are unpredictable — frighteningly so for
Kai. There would be facial hair, sparse or thick.
His voice would drop to an unknown degree.
His wish was to be perceived as more mascu-
line yet not male, feminine yet not female. What
precisely he desired, physically, was a puzzle he
was forever trying to solve. And he treasured
singing as a mezzo-soprano; he dreaded that
loss. But when I asked about the first time he
felt the heavy punching bag swinging back to
strike him, or any hint that he couldn’t fit into
conventional notions of gender, Kai replied with
resolution. ‘‘There are ways I could speak retro-
spectively,’’ he said. ‘‘The way I was terrified of
getting my ears pierced and fled the mall when
I was 11. The way I freaked out over my period.
There’s a temptation to shape a narrative about
how it’s inherent in me to be nonbinary. But I
want to go the other way and say, we’re all born
nonbinary. We learn gender. And at some point,
some of us can’t stand it anymore.’’
Kai grew up in the Maryland suburbs outside
Washington; both his parents are economists.
He came out to them as genderqueer a year and
a half ago, and they, as he put it, were willing ‘‘to
step through the door’’ he held wide for them,
the door into his way of seeing himself. They
read a piece of creative writing he gave them, a
meditation using Dadaism to explicate the non-
sense of either-or. His mother asked if she could
buy him new clothes. ‘‘Shopping for clothes was
something we’d always done,’’ he said. ‘‘It was
her way of saying, ‘I want to keep being part
of your life.’ That was really stepping through
the door. And then, all the nerve-rackingness of
shopping in the men’s section of a department
store and trying on pants and worrying about
how people are looking at you and reading your
gender, it would have been really hard to do
on my own. But my mother was there. Just like
when we’d shopped together before. And that
made it normal.’’
Not everyone in Kai’s world, though, has been
so willing. Coming out requires preparation,
putting on emotional armor. On a road trip
The New York Times Magazine 41
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
through Pennsylvania, he confided recently in
one of his closest childhood friends, hoping for
the intimacy of the sleepovers they’d once had.
The woman listened. She wasn’t critical. But as
they drove, and as Kai invited her repeatedly
to ask questions, she remained disengaged.
Recounting his friend’s resistance, pain caught
at Kai’s quick words, making him pause. The
pain came both from without, from the friend’s
refusal, and from within. ‘‘One of the hardest
things for me,’’ he said, ‘‘is to say to myself,
Yes, I’m real.’’ His voice trembled. ‘‘I don’t
make sense. I have this theoretical framework
which I think is better for the world, a frame-
work where we have different bodies but where
gender is almost entirely socially constructed,
where people can articulate whatever they want
about their gender. But if the theory is right,
then I wouldn’t care at all about transitioning’’
to some undetermined physiological midpoint.
Logically and philosophically, for Kai, bod-
ies signified nothing; physiology was without
meaning. ‘‘But I do — I care, very much,’’ he said.
Logic and longing were irreconcilable. And for
someone as smart and scientific as Kai, this was
barely endurable. The contradiction between
anatomical irrelevance and anatomical yearning
was an existential challenge. ‘‘What I’m feeling
is that there’s this internal, eternal thing that
is always going to be saying, ‘You as you exist
are not real.’ ’’
He was on the brink of tears. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ he
said. ‘‘I didn’t mean to get all dramatic on you.’’
When Salem was 8, their family moved from
Plaistow, N.H., to Indian Land, S.C. Sometime
before then, they recalled, their sister was
learning to paint her fingernails and asked to do
Salem’s. They let their sister use only clear polish,
for fear that they would like the colors too well. In
South Carolina, they endured almost a decade of
bullying — for being ‘‘borderline obese from big
stress eating,’’ Salem told me (since then Salem
has slimmed down by running late at night, when
the roads around their town are empty), for their
good grades (until, in high school, anxiety kept
them home so often that their grades bottomed
out and they barely graduated) and maybe, they
can’t be sure, because other kids detected a dif-
ference that Salem wasn’t yet admitting to them-
self. Salem was called porky and brown-noser
and faggot and punched in the chest and hit in
the groin with footballs and dodge balls and a
makeshift ball and chain wielded at high velocity
by a boy they considered a friend.
Salem withdrew to a mostly online existence,
in which friendships — with three classmates,
counting the bully with the ball and chain — con-
sisted of playing video games, each kid in a sepa-
rate, solo space at home but communing over
shared screens, gunning and grenading enemy
42 6.9.19
fighters. Salem invested so much time in the war-
fare of one game that they eventually rose past
two million other players, they said, murmuring
with enough modesty to be believed, and were
fleetingly ranked first on the game’s leader board.
‘‘I was very angry at that time, really miser-
able,’’ they said. Online, they and their friends
lured solitary, hapless players into the front seat
of their armored vehicle with promises of safe-
ty. Salem, sitting behind, shot them in the back
of the head. In the mirror, Salem despised their
new facial hair; they tried to overcome the repul-
sion by growing mutton chops and a scraggly
beard. They spent uncountable hours on YouTube
channels that espoused white nationalism and
denounced, as one alt-right ranter declared, the
‘‘feminization’’ and ‘‘mass, uncontrolled third-
world immigration’’ that was destroying Western
civilization. They steered their three friends to
these channels: ‘‘I was spreading my awful views.’’
With these friends, Salem mocked binary trans
people and cracked jokes about nonbinary gen-
der and gender fluidity, saying there was no such
thing. But they didn’t let themself think too much
about the terms they scorned, ‘‘because,’’ they
told me, ‘‘I guess my self was trying to protect
itself. If I had thought about gender for any length
of time, I might have come to some uncomfort-
able conclusions.’’
For Salem, as for so many, the internet wound
up being an inadvertent route to self-recognition.
In the late summer of 2016 — soon after Salem
finished high school and their family moved to
North Carolina, where their father had a new
job managing an auto-repair shop in Raleigh
— they first stared at manga featuring femi-
nine men having sex with women. Salem was
attracted to the women, while finding themself
wishing they looked like those men. Before that,
something else had happened online. Despite
their alt-right allegiance, they were drawn to the
economic ideas of Bernie Sanders’s presidential
campaign. After the November election, Salem’s
new politics took them to anarchist sites and
from there to videos posted by people announc-
ing themselves as nonbinary. They were taken
with the caustic style of a video called ‘‘I Am Gen-
derqueer and Wtf That Means’’ by a YouTuber
named ContraPoints.
Yet self-recognition, for Salem, wasn’t liber-
ating; it was the opposite. It required secrecy. It
deepened Salem’s hiding, their isolation. The pain
of self-concealment accumulated for months,
until, Salem said, ‘‘I would rather have gotten
kicked out of the house and become homeless
and died than go on the way I was living.’’
They decided to tell their sister, who is two
years older, before telling their parents. The talk,
in the summer of 2017, did not go well. Their
sister, in Salem’s memory, was bewildered and
dismissive: ‘‘I explained to her that I planned to
present myself as more feminine and change my
name to something more feminine, and she was
like, Well, if you don’t feel like you’re a woman,
why would you want to do any of that?’’ Salem
had no coherent answer. Language eluded them.
She later told them it must be a phase, that Salem
would get over it, all of which, for Salem, felt like
a drubbing of their reality.
Their sister remembered this conversation
somewhat differently, when I spoke with her by
phone, with Salem on the line. ‘‘I was confused
about what they were telling me,’’ she said. ‘‘I
think I reacted fairly positively.’’
Later in the summer, Salem steeled themself
to come out to two of their three South Carolina
friends. (Salem chose to wait on saying anything
to the bully.) It was 3 in the morning. Playing a
Vietnam War game online, Salem and one of the
friends were North Vietnamese soldiers defending
a hilltop, with a napalmed landscape separating
them from the American infantry lower down on
the hill. The second friend was just listening; all
three had an audio link. Sporadically the Ameri-
cans gave up their jungle cover and tried to rush
near enough to take out the North Vietnamese, but
Salem, in the role of an N.V.A. squad commander,
gunned them down with a light, low-recoil assault
rifle that was ideal for the situation. During a lull,
Salem figured it was time. But given their failure
with their sister, they elided the truth and took a
more comprehensible tack. Via audio, they said
they were a trans woman.
‘‘You’re [expletive] with me,’’ Salem recounted
their friends saying over and over. Convincing
the two took some doing, because of Salem’s alt-
right history. With scattered Americans lurching
forward to take potshots across a field of charred
trees and bomb craters, Salem aimed swiftly and
killed enemy grunts and told their two friends
they were serious, adding, with all the hope they
could muster, ‘‘I’m still the same person, so not
much has changed.’’
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
JP Hyzy, in their mid-20s, first encountered the word ‘‘nonbinary’’ online, having earlier believed they might be a trans woman.
JP Hyzy has a discreet tattoo of the pronoun
‘‘them’’ on one arm. They’re in their mid-20s,
are in training to become a massage therapist
and recalled going to the bathroom at a concert
in Carrboro, a town outside Chapel Hill, after
the passage of North Carolina’s House Bill 2.
The state’s so-called ‘‘bathroom bill’’ won over-
whelming approval in the legislature in 2016,
mandating that in publicly-owned buildings
people had to use the restroom correspond-
ing to their biological sex as signified on their
birth certificate. Hyzy, who takes hormones and
has breasts, said they were followed into the
men’s room by someone who then pounded on
Hyzy’s stall door. Nothing more happened, but
the moment was terrifying. After threats of boy-
cotts by national companies and the N.C.A.A.,
the law has since been repealed, but it’s the
source of continuing legislative and legal bat-
tles; for Hyzy, neither the fear nor the feeling
of denigration has dissipated. ‘‘I am this thing,’’
they said, ‘‘that isn’t allowed.’’
Photograph by Jessica Dimmock for The New York Times
Like Salem, Hyzy first encountered the word
‘‘nonbinary’’ online. Shortly before that, three years
ago, they thought they might be a trans woman.
They took the step of going to a voice clinic with the
paradoxical hope of learning to pitch their voice
higher but not of having a more feminine voice,
not exactly. The intake questions of the clinic staff,
who assumed Hyzy was embarking on a binary
transition — ‘‘When are you getting the surgery?’’
— helped Hyzy to realize that wasn’t the goal.
Yet what set of alterations would bring peace,
a feeling that the physical is in sync with the
psychological, is uncertain. Maybe, Hyzy said,
it will be elusive forever. One thing, though, is
achingly plain: ‘‘It’s hard to get people to under-
stand that nonbinary isn’t made up.’’ Three prac-
titioners Hyzy has turned to in Chapel Hill — a
therapist, a psychiatrist and another therapist
with a professed specialty in gender — have
responded with bafflement.
H.B. 2 turned out to be a harbinger of a broad-
er political strategy on the American right. The
effort has featured the Trump administration’s
decrees that gender should be legally defined,
immutably, by biology at birth, and the argu-
ments made by Roger Severino, Trump’s director
of the Office for Civil Rights at the Department
of Health and Human Services, that positions
taken by the Obama administration — including
letting openly trans people serve in the military
— amounted to a ‘‘radical new gender ideolo-
gy’’ and must be rolled back. For the nonbinary,
though, negation can even come from within
the L.G.B.T. community. David Baker-Hargrove
is a therapist and the founding president and
co-chief executive of Two Spirit Health, which
provides medical and mental health care to
L.G.B.T. clients throughout Central Florida. He’s
gay and has been working with binary trans peo-
ple for more than two decades, yet he remem-
bered that with his initial nonbinary cases three
or four years ago, he had to ‘‘really explore the
oppressive in my own thinking about gender
norms’’ and felt, at first, ‘‘I can’t get there.’’ He
The New York Times Magazine 43
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
added: ‘‘It took me a while. Our brains fight flu-
idity. We like this or that. Nonbinary presents a
lot of challenges.’’ And not only cis people resist
the concept. ‘‘Transgender people can react with
‘Pick a side’ or ‘Nonbinary is an insult to my
experience — it’s crap.’ ’’ Baker-Hargrove has
recently begun identifying as nonbinary.
To make the doubt and dismissal faced by
nonbinary people worse, some physicians and
surgeons who are committed to treating bina-
ry trans patients with hormones and surgery
are wary of doing the same for the nonbinary,
questioning whether the interventions are psy-
chiatrically, and therefore medically, necessary.
The bible of psychiatric diagnosis, the D.S.M.,
gives meager help; its criteria for the condition
of ‘‘gender dysphoria’’ are essentially binary.
And insurers sometimes refuse to pay for care
that isn’t couched in a binary narrative. So the
nonbinary can be forced to dissemble, to erase
their own truths and fabricate a familiar trans-
male or transfemale tale, in order to get the treat-
ment — the hormones and breast removals, the
Adam’s-apple reductions and facial recontour-
ings — they seek.
In their sun-filled apartment in Bed-
ford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, D’hana Perry
worked one morning last winter on an installa-
tion for an exhibit at the New Museum. Perry, a
nonbinary video artist and D.J. and a program
manager at an L.G.B.T. health center, sat before
laptops and a MIDI controller as they contem-
plated a piece that would pay homage to the role
of three trans activists in the Stonewall riots of
1969, an event widely recognized as pivotal in
gay history but scarcely known as being part-
ly driven by — and being crucial for — trans
people. Perry was designing video projections
of the three leaders, Marsha P. Johnson, Miss
Major Griffin-Gracy and Sylvia Rivera, and
talked about how their work contributed to
the relative freedom Perry feels today. As an
African-American, Perry also wanted to honor
them; all three are people of color.
Perry, who is 41 and was assigned female at
birth, had top surgery at 33 and has been taking
hormones for 4 years. Their voice is high, but
their beard is heavy. Dressed, this morning, in
a red-and-black-checked lumberjack shirt, with
their hair in dreads, they looked ‘‘like a straight
guy,’’ they said, quoting their friends. This char-
acterization didn’t sit well with Perry. ‘‘Straight
guy’’ was not how they felt. But Perry has been
wearing thick flannels and hoodies as a non-
binary person since before the hormones and
beard, when their round face was smooth and
the masculine clothes signaled complication, and
Perry wasn’t going to change styles now. They
were tired of worrying about how they were
perceived. They weren’t going to fret over their
44 6.9.19
wardrobe. There was art to be made, history and
progress to be commemorated.
Perry exuded a comfort with themself that
was hard won. They grew up in Cleveland; their
father was a preacher at an A.M.E. Zionist church
where their mother was the music director;
Perry was forbidden to attend health classes at
school when the topic was sex education. Their
father died before Perry identified as nonbinary;
with their mother, Perry attempted a delicate,
incremental coming out, spread over more than
a decade, with mentions of being trans and of
‘‘breast reduction’’ surgery. Their mother, Perry
told me, refused to listen. She said she would
rather be lied to. Perry still wasn’t sure whether
she fully acknowledged to herself that Perry is
nonbinary, but a year ago there was a break-
through: She traveled to Brooklyn and joined
Perry and their nonbinary partner, along with
two cis queer friends and one of their mothers,
for Thanksgiving dinner. ‘‘My mother misgen-
dered me all night,’’ Perry said, ‘‘calling me ‘she’
and ‘girl,’ and it drove my friends crazy, but I told
them, ‘You don’t know the way it used to be.’ ’’
Perry’s comfort seemed to come in part from
age, from having lived longer than most outside
the presumptive boundaries. The same seemed
true for Laura Jacobs, the 49-year-old nonbinary
therapist who spoke to me about the foggy mir-
ror. As a boy in the 1970s, at around age 6, Jacobs
remembered, they were enthralled by the way
ailing characters on ‘‘Star Trek’’ were cured on
a high-tech bed with a device that encased a
portion of the body. On the playroom floor in
the family’s suburban house, Jacobs lay on their
back with a chair over them, imagining that this
version of the Trekkian contraption would cure
their unhappiness by turning them into a girl.
They were in their late 20s before they sum-
moned the courage to raise their yearnings with
their therapist, who had no relevant expertise,
and in their early 30s when they started taking
hormones, developed breasts and underwent
genital surgery. But the straightforward wish of
their childhood had, by then, grown complicated
in ways they couldn’t find words for. ‘‘I remember
wondering during those years’’ — the late ’90s,
the early 2000s — ‘‘if a middle path was possible,
but I had no idea what a middle path would be. I
didn’t hear ‘genderqueer’ till years after my sur-
gery. I thought gender was a binary choice, so I
made the choice to switch sides.’’
In addition to their work as a therapist,
Jacobs is a speaker at medical schools and trans
conferences, a champion for both nonbinary
and binary trans people and co-author of a book
called ‘‘ ‘You’re in the Wrong Bathroom!’ And 20
Other Myths and Misconceptions About Trans-
gender and Gender Non-Conforming People.’’
Jacobs is also something of a visionary, out-
lining a future when technology that’s already
near — sensate prostheses; virtual reality that’s
thoroughly immersive — will make our rela-
tionships to our bodies ‘‘artistic, the results of
acts of creation. We won’t have to stick with
two arms and two legs, and our genitalia won’t
necessarily look male or female, with merely a
penis or a vagina.‘‘
They thought back, during one of our many
conversations, to the aftermath of their own
decision to have a vagina surgically constructed,
a decision made in the absence of the language
and intricate self-understanding that defines
their life now. They’ve always been sexually
attracted to women and ‘‘femme-leaning’’ peo-
ple. ‘‘I was having sex with women,’’ they said,
‘‘and a lot of women who have sex with women
use strap-ons. I refused to even consider it. I
couldn’t reconcile having made the choice to get
rid of the real thing with using a plastic replica.
The idea put me into shock; I would dissociate,
become a deer in headlights. Wearing a strap-
on symbolized a massive mistake. I felt that
exploring it would lead to massive regret. But
as the years went on, I started to dabble. It was
hot, fun.’’
Our talk shifted again from the past to the
future. Jacobs spoke about foreseeing a time
when people passing each other on the street
wouldn’t immediately, unconsciously sort one
another into male or female, which even Jacobs
reflexively does. ‘‘I don’t know what genders are
going to look like four generations from now,’’
they added, allowing that they might sound uto-
pian, naïve. ‘‘I think we’re going to perceive each
other as people. The classifications we live under
will fall by the wayside.’’
Among the voices of the young, there are
echoes and amplifications of Jacobs’s opti-
mism, along with the stories of private struggle.
‘‘There are as many genders as there are peo-
ple,’’ Emmy Johnson, a nonbinary employee at
Jan Tate’s clinic, told me with earnest authority.
Johnson was about to sign up for a new dating
app that caters to the genderqueer. ‘‘Sex is dif-
ferent as a nonbinary person,’’ they said. ‘‘You’re
free of gender roles, and the farther you can get
from those scripts, the better sex is going to be.’’
Their tone was more triumphal: the better life is
going to be. ‘‘The gender boxes are exploding,’’
they declared.
A New Jersey-based therapist in her 50s,
who describes herself as a butch lesbian and
who has worked with nearly two dozen non-
binary high school and college students, is
more circumspect. She guessed that many of
her assigned-female nonbinary clients would
once have lived as butch or — a subcategory —
stone butch lesbians. ‘‘Are we just being faddish
in the wish for more and more individualized
identities?’’ she asked. And what percentage
of the nonbinary kids now coming to her will
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
be calling themselves nonbinary 10 or 15 years
in the future? ‘‘To tell you the truth, I can’t be
sure.’’ But despite her skepticism, her sense is
that something urgent is going on, that new and
necessary territory is being delineated. She’s not,
at base, at odds with Jacobs, who wonders if we
will all gradually question whether ‘‘the gender
binary is inherent to human experience.’’
In the months after Salem confided, on the Viet-
namese hillside, that they were a trans woman,
their two South Carolina friends went on ridicul-
ing trans people, but the friends still played war
games with them and slowly cut back on their
jokes. Next, Salem informed their third South
Carolina friend. He later replied, they said, with
‘‘a transphobic tirade — he called me a tranny
and a faggot and told me to kill myself.’’
Within Salem’s family, too, there was the
good and the not-so-good. When, in late August
2017, they told their parents about being a trans
woman and about naming themself Hannah, they
weren’t kicked out of the house. Their mother
helped Salem find a therapist — Tate. And their
father helped them paint their bedroom in light
blue, white and pink stripes, the colors of the
trans flag, though he also had counseled Salem
not to consider themself transgender until they’d
had sex, as if Salem’s first romp with a girl would
fix everything.
Their father got them a job keeping inventory
within the chain of auto-repair shops where he
worked, advising Salem to use their deadname
and hide who they’d become. (About this, and the
suggestion that Salem not settle on being trans
until they’d lost their virginity, Salem’s father told
me alternately that he hadn’t said these things,
that he might have implied something about the
effect of having sex for the first time and that too
much time had passed; I should ‘‘write what-
ever Salem remembers,’’ he said.) Salem lasted
through two days of training, anxiety spiking
over what might happen if they were found out
and depression deepening because they were
making themself invisible, concealing Hannah
and, beneath that, doubly burying their non-
binary self. ‘‘The salary was a good deal,’’ Salem
said, but on the day they were supposed to turn
in their paperwork and join the staff, ‘‘I just lay
in bed.’’ They returned to being housebound. ‘‘I
just couldn’t get out of bed.’’
Salem had an inkling that there were other
places, beyond their hometown, beyond North
Carolina, where they might not feel quite so alien
and alone. Tate had mentioned Philadelphia,
where she’d trained, or Brooklyn. In therapy
one day last spring, Salem talked about the main
character in ‘‘Into the Wild’’: a young man, cut off
in the Alaskan wilderness, who starves to death
because he’s unaware that there’s a spot, a half mile
from where he’s wasting away, where he could
cross the swollen river that entraps him. On the
other side, he could soon get food. ‘‘People say the
dude was an idiot,’’ Salem said to Tate, ‘‘because he
could have lived if he realized there was a cross-
ing nearby. But I can understand him. To me, he’s
relatable.’’ It was as if Salem both knew and didn’t
know that other places existed.
After the session, Salem drove northward on
the state highway, toward the exit for their town.
They passed the turnoff and kept going in the
direction of the Virginia line. They’d never done
anything like this before. They drove, they told
me the next day, with their town behind them,
for an hour before they turned around.
When I spent more time with them last sum-
mer, Salem had just noted their hormone treat-
ment in a chat among players during an online
game. Someone let loose with slurs, Salem fired
back and another player piped up that she was
a trans woman. This was a minor godsend amid
the plundering and killing onscreen. Right away,
the trans woman, who said she was 19, became
Salem’s close friend, at a distance of hundreds
of miles. They talked privately online every day
and night; Salem listened to her troubles with
her father, and she gave Salem the courage to
try buying their first bra.
Salem’s breasts had grown. The plan was to
buy a sports bra both for exercising and ‘‘to
compress, because sometimes’’ — though the
hormones seemed a success on most days —
‘‘I’m not a fan of my breasts.’’ Salem drove to
Chapel Hill, the most liberal community in the
area, and sat paralyzed in a shopping-center
parking lot with the trans woman coaching
them by phone. At last, they ventured into
Target. They scouted the store, angling into
the women’s section. They fled without touch-
ing an item, searching for a place where they
could delay, bypassing electronics because a
salesperson was sure to approach, and the last
thing Salem wanted, in this state of mortifica-
tion over bra shopping and over their mix of
jeans, Vans, T-shirt, nail polish, mascara and
small but noticeable breasts, was to interact
with anyone. An aisle of groceries gave refuge.
They stared at varieties of pasta. They got their
new friend on the phone again and headed back
to women’s clothing, figuring that this way it
would seem they were shopping for someone
else; they plucked two sports bras from a rack
and made it through self-checkout.
To Tate, the friendship was reassuring prog-
ress, especially after Salem and the trans woman
communicated by live video chat, proving that
the friend was who she claimed to be. There
was progress, too, in all the colors Salem had
begun using on successive fingernails — green-
ish-yellow, pink, white, orange, purple, blue.
Salem had by then finally explained to their
parents that they weren’t actually a trans
woman, that in fact they were nonbinary, but
their parents, in Salem’s telling, were unrespon-
sive, almost as if they couldn’t hear. (Salem’s
mother had a different version: ‘‘We were just
so open about everything,’’ she told me.) During
therapy sessions, Salem still sometimes lapsed
into despair, yet by this winter, online, they
made some friends from Durham and Raleigh,
an eclectic bunch, sexually queer, genderqueer,
and started going out with them in public. Early
this spring Salem took part in an Internation-
al Transgender Day of Visibility, having their
picture taken, in an orange dress and combat
boots, with 10 or so binary trans and nonbinary
people on a street in downtown Raleigh. The
housebound Salem seemed to be in the past.
This May, pairing a rose-colored dress with
their combat boots, Salem walked the paths on
the campus of a Durham community college,
where they had just enrolled, and began their
required classes. Their plan is to transfer eventu-
ally to a four-year program far from home. Salem
has always loved history; when we first met, our
discussions detoured into World War II histo-
riography. Lately, after reading, on their own,
Peter Kropotkin’s ‘‘The Conquest of Bread’’ and
listening to Slavoj Zizek’s lectures online, they
imagine someday being a professor, teaching
economic history and sparking social change. I
asked, a few weeks ago, whether they ever envi-
sion teaching about gender.
‘‘Obviously, talking about gender is something
I can do, because I’ve been doing it for a year
with you,’’ they said. ‘‘But I don’t want to make a
career out of it.’’ They thought, then, about stand-
ing before a lecture hall filled with students. ‘‘As
a nonbinary person, existing in front of people
is a political statement. I will be there, existing
in front of them.’’
The New York Times Magazine 45
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Answers to puzzles of 6.2.19 Madonna magazines that wrote about her in her home. On
STONERS’ FILM FESTIVAL (Continued from Page 35) occasion, she would discover she was involved in
A L O F T A T T N T V P G W A F T S
a scandal when she pulled into her driveway to
S O F I A T A R O H E R O E L L I E of misogyny, fundamentalism and homophobia, find 30 paparazzi stationed outside instead of the
P U F F P I E C E S A X E D B O O N E but she lost me when she spoke over and over usual three. Oseary had dinner with her when he
C I T E L A T E R O N P O T S H O T S
A S H E L M G A W K F R I A R
about paradoxes. was a young A.&R. man at her label in the early
V E R D E U T E S A L I T M I A She quoted one of the Kabbalah Center’s ’90s, turning her on to Hole and Rage Against the
H I G H D R A M A S M O K E B O M B teachings — ‘‘Wherever there’s the greatest Machine. ‘‘Someone told me something about
E L R O Y G E R M I H A V E E D I E
amount of light, there’s the greatest amount of her, and I remember saying, ‘Hey, I heard that you
E L I S L A N D O M A T E S T E N T
L E D S E I S D U P L E S C O L D S darkness’’ — and explained the more she learned . . . ’ and she was like, ‘Whoa, before you ask me
J O I N T R E S O L U T I O N on her humanitarian travels, the more complex the question, think about who told you,’ ’’ he said.
C A S A B A E A S E S R U N T T C U she realized the world was. ‘‘The funny thing is, ‘‘ ‘If that person is someone you trust or you find
L L A M A K N I T E M I T S R O O K
A L I A K E N N Y D O S E G U I D E
the more you know, the more passionate you is solid, then ask me. You thought of the person?’
R O L L I N G I N T H E A I S L E S feel about life, and the more joy you feel, and I go, ‘Yeah.’ She goes, ‘Do you want to ask me the
A T M D I S S A F R O F L E E S the more inspired you feel, but then also the question?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ ’’
A L I S T P E A R O L D T W A
B A K E D H A M C H I C A N A C R I T
more disgusted you are with humanity,’’ she said, Now, in the social-media era, the Greek
A V I A N N O A H D I R E C T H I T S calling it part of ‘‘the paradox of life.’’ chorus she had blocked out was seeping in,
M O N D O D O P E E T T A N I E C E The carapace of fame often conceals insecu- saying she was too old, washed up, out of ideas,
A N G S T S T E M D Y E D T A S H A
rity, so I tried to turn the conversation toward finished. ‘‘It’s not that I engage with it, but it
her grand influence, but she was like a cactus ends up going in front of your eyes, and then
KENKEN
with spikes protecting her from anyone getting when it goes in front of your eyes, it’s inside
too close, particularly journalists. For years, your head,’’ she said. ‘‘It comes up in your feed,
she put boundaries between herself and the and then you get pulled into it whether you
media — she had to in the pre-internet days, like it or not. So it’s a challenge to rise above
when people didn’t have the option of follow- it, to not be affected by it, to not get frustrated,
ing her online, so they just waited outside her to not compare, to not feel judged, to not be
building. ‘‘It was like living in a golden pris- hurt. You know, it’s a test. Yeah.’’ She added, ‘‘I
on,’’ O’Donnell said about Madonna in the ’90s. preferred life before phone.’’
‘‘There were bodyguards everywhere we went, The immediacy of the criticism, that she
and people would have no qualms about telling held it as a tangible thing in her hand, seemed
her to her face what they felt about her black as though it had made her nearly paranoid. I
CRYPTIC hair, and she would usually go, ‘[Expletive] you.’ realized I couldn’t ask her about anything as
R
E
E D
E
G
N
I
ACROSS: 1. Red + Giants
A N
A
T S
E
C
L
A C
A
H E
R
Nobody can imagine what it’s like to have that personal as menopause, but I had to broach
N O T E D 6. homophone cash 9. no Ted
T A R P A U L I N
much energy coming at you all the time when- the topic of aging: If I had followed her this
O E E U G R L I
V E R T E 10. tar + Paul + in 11. rev. ear +
B R A E I R A T E
A M D
bet + rev 12. Pirate – P 13.
E A N ever you’re in public.’’ She added, ‘‘She keeps long, where were we going next? The fact was
T A I L A N C E S T O R
E
S P
N
E C
L
I
homophone tale 14. hidden
M
D
E N
T T
O M
O
E
A
N
herself grounded by her charity and by her that statements like ‘‘I’m going straight to the
T romance story 19. anag. mince
S E M C G
children, and that’s the only way to stay sane moon,’’ while inspirational, were not enough.
L A T T E C O N C O U R S E
I E R pies – I 20. 0 men 23. latter – r
E T H U L
in the world of fame.’’ I admired her for shaking off prejudice about
C O N T A
25. co. + n(co.)urse 26. anag. ore
I N E R A K I T A
I
T I
E
T H
T
E
T
S P
E
E A
I

tin can 27. a + kit + a 28. ti + the

R H
S
E A
N
D
There were times, Guy Oseary said, when what an older woman could be, for being cre-
29. s(pear + he)ad DOWN: 1. anag. near stove 2. deter + Madonna didn’t want to have newspapers and ative, provocative and sexual over 60 — ‘‘It’s
mine 3. I + n(d)eed 4. na + ture (rev. an; anag. true)
5. serge + ant 6. clari(N.)et (anag. article) 7. call + a 8. ern
+ i.e. 15. tomcru(I.)se (anag. costumer) 16. R + angel +
and 17. Lite + rate 18. de-scents 21. en + tree 22. hidden in
even letters smooth rapier 23. solicit – so 24. palindrome
KENKEN
Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each heavily outlined
box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or division, as indicated in the box.
A 5x5 grid will use the digits 1–5. A 7x7 grid will use 1–7.
FOR STARTERS GOING HALFWAY

D Z A S P
W E E V I L
C A N I N E
G L I D E D
J E T L A G
M R H Y D E

Answers to puzzle on Page 48

in the beehive, feel free to include them in your score.
logical. If you found other legitimate dictionary words
goggle, googol, igloo, illegal, illogical, legal, liege, logic,
elegiac, gaggle, geologic, giggle, gigolo, glacial, goalie,
Also: Agile, algae, allege, collage, college, eagle, ecologic,
Collegial, ecological, geological (3 points each).
SPELLING BEE

46 KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. © 2019 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS
almost like a crime,’’ was the way she charac-
terized it. She might have been doing all this
for the younger generation, so that when Miley
Cyrus was 60, no one would bat an eyelash if
she twerked on stage. She had always been a
pioneer. She told me she had sympathy for the
way middle-aged women are confused by social
media, unsure of how to project an appealing
image without relying on the shortcut of youth-
ful beauty. ‘‘You can’t win,’’ she said. ‘‘An ass
shot will get you more followers, but it will also
get you more detractors and criticism. You’re
in that funny place.’’
But I didn’t want to put an ass shot on social
media, and I wanted more from her as an artist
than I did from Cyrus. The political thrust of
‘‘Madame X’’ was inspirational, and I appre-
ciated the way she used the record to beg for
mercy from God. But I didn’t feel I was hearing
enough of her real thoughts about her real life.
And when I delved into Madonna’s promotion-
al videos for her skin-care line, MDNA Skin,
named after the album, I felt further from her
than ever. In one infomercial, she put on the
old wedding veil and announced that we should
‘‘marry’’ our skin. In another, she sensually drew
a Beauty Roller, a black contraption resembling
a sex toy, over her body — it was her old public-
masturbation trick, but this time fantasizing
about cellular rejuvenation. She sat on a panel
about the beauty industry with Kim Kardashian
West in which they discussed Madonna’s new
mist made from damask roses and proselytized
about the benefit of good lighting. Kardashian
West said campily but also seriously, ‘‘I should
just never go out in daylight.’’
When we talked about aging, I was surprised
when she turned the issue back on me. ‘‘I think
you think about growing old too much,’’ she said
later. ‘‘I think you think about age too much. I
think you should just stop thinking about it.’’ She
went on: ‘‘Stop thinking, just live your life and
don’t be influenced by society trying to make
you feel some type of way about your age or
what it is you’re supposed to be doing.’’ I told
her that’s hard to do, and she agreed. ‘‘We are a
marginalized group, women. And just because it’s
hard doesn’t mean you stop fighting against it or
defying it or refusing to be pigeonholed or put
in a box or labeled or told you can and can’t do
things.’’ I felt a little foolish for thinking that she
would want to talk to me about my own concern
about aging, like an older sister. She was an icon,
not a shoulder to lean on.
Fans love aging musicians not only because
they are time-travel machines — they love them
for those musicians’ defects, for the way that as
long as they’re still creative, they hold a mirror
up to our own aging and offer clues to where
we are going. And if they’re your heroes and
you’ve traveled a long way with them, you know
you have the same defects. When Madonna
literally controlled the light around her, when
she applied her massive intelligence to beauty
products, it was part of her way of maintain-
ing control, of hovering above. But even if I
had the same defects, of wanting to always be
in control, I wasn’t Madonna — I can’t con-
trol the light around me, I probably wouldn’t
attract young lovers, I didn’t want to rule the
world. I was an old mom in the playground with
Go-Gurt on her shirt.
Madonna was up in the sky most of the spring,
moving between London, Portugal, Los Ange-
les, Israel and New York, where she stayed at
her apartment on the Upper West Side, though
she lost a lawsuit with her co-op over letting
her adult children stay there without her. In
early May, she did not attend the Met Gala,
as she always does; when the cameras caught
her at Kennedy Airport on the way to Tel Aviv,
she placed what looked like a scarf completely
over her head like a mask, then perched her
sunglasses on top of the scarf, having a little
fun with the moment.
Two nights before, she arrived at the Mid-
town Hilton to receive an award from Glaad,
the nonprofit that advocates L.G.B.T. acceptance
in the media. A screen flashed an inspirational
hashtag for those maturing with H.I.V., #Age-
Positively. Men in tuxedos, including one with
a pin on his lapel reading (Continued on Page 49)
The New York Times Magazine 47
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Puzzles

SPELLING BEE SNAKE CHARMER GOING HALFWAY

By Frank Longo By Patrick Berry By Thinh Van Duc Lai

How many common words of 5 or more letters can Each answer begins in the correspondingly numbered Draw a line from each circled number that goes the
you spell using the letters in the hive? Every answer space and proceeds clockwise around the S, ending same number of squares as that number — and whose
must use the center letter at least once. Letters may in the space before the next consecutive number. end is an arrow pointing to a spot that’s that many
be reused in a word. At least one word will use all 7 The chain of 12 answers will snake its way around the squares farther away. Every line points to a different
letters. Proper names and hyphenated words are not grid twice. spot. No lines touch, and no arrow can point through
allowed. Score 1 point for each answer, and 3 points another arrow, line, number or spot.
for a word that uses all 7 letters. 7 1
8
Ex. 1 3 1 3
Rating: 10 = good; 19 = excellent; 28 = genius 9 2
1 1

3 3
> 3
1 3 1 3

A 6
12

O C 5
11
10

G 4

Clues
L E 1. First performance 2. Rope that restricts 3. Get
payback for 4. Nincompoop 5. Causes someone

I to react more strongly than intended (3 wds.) 6. Male

Our list of words, worth 32 points, appears with last week’s answers.
bodybuilders (hyph.) 7. Relinquish 8. Montana
city whose name is a geographical formation 9. Poe
poem that begins “Once upon a midnight dreary”
(2 wds.) 10. “Pay attention to what’s happening!”
(3 wds.) 11. More rational 12. Fierce intensity

ACROSTIC
1 H 2 K 3 J 4 O 5 G 6 C 7 D 8 F 9 N 10 S 11 M 12 E 13 R 14 I 15 H 16 K 17 U 18 P 19 A 20 T 21 C 22 N 23 M

24 Q 25 R 26 G 27 I 28 B 29 O 30 L 31 S 32 H 33 F 34 C 35 J 36 A 37 N 38 M 39 Q 40 P 41 I 42 O 43 K 44 U 45 T

By Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon 46 H 47 R 48 B 49 D 50 G 51 L 52 M 53 Q 54 N 55 O 56 P 57 S 58 A 59 I 60 F 61 C 62 U 63 K 64 R 65 E 66 T 67 M

Guess the words defined below and 68 Q 69 D 70 G 71 H 72 P 73 I 74 A 75 S 76 L 77 N 78 F 79 K 80 B 81 C 82 M 83 G 84 H 85 E 86 U 87 D 88 O 89 J

write them over their numbered
dashes. Then transfer each letter to 90 P 91 S 92 T 93 A 94 K 95 F 96 H 97 G 98 R 99 Q 100 C 101 O 102 N 103 D 104 J 105 L 106 P 107 H 108 S 109 F 110 I 111 T
the correspondingly numbered square
in the pattern. Black squares indicate 112 R 113 B 114 Q 115 U 116 M 117 K 118 L 119 G 120 P 121 C 122 H 123 S 124 N 125 I 126 J 127 Q 128 A 129 E 130 B 131 F 132 L 133 G

word endings. The filled pattern will

134 R 135 S 136 M 137 C 138 K 139 J 140 Q 141 D 142 B 143 T 144 E 145 I 146 H 147 P 148 O 149 S 150 G 151 U 152 N 153 R 154 L 155 B 156 K
contain a quotation reading from left
to right. The first letters of the guessed
157 M 158 D 159 I 160 P 161 J 162 O 163 C 164 F 165 N 166 L 167 Q 168 H 169 E 170 B 171 K 172 R 173 T 174 D 175 J 176 P 177 M
words will form an acrostic giving the
author’s name and the title of the work.

A. Ovoidal : egg :: lingulate : ____ G. Overt, glaring, flagrant L. “What did you say again?” (2 wds.) Q. Action taken by two running mates?
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
74 19 36 128 93 58
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
50 5 133 97 150 70 119 83 26 132 154 76 118 51 30 166 105 39 167 53 99 114 24 140 127 68
B. Catastrophizing sort H. Fear of the dark M. Study of a certain ancient R. “Piece of cake” (2 wds.)
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ civilization
142 48 80 113 170 28 155 130 ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
C. What Russia’s Camp Barneo
84 122 71 32 107 96 168 146 1 ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 172 134 112 13 98 64 47 25 153
is near (2 wds.) 67 136 11 38 116 23 157 82 177 52
____ ____ S. Process of unfolding
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 46 15 N. Reason for a neighbor’s
complaint (2 wds.)
121 163 81 21 137 61 34 100 6 I. How gameplay often proceeds ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
D. Target in a 1979 arcade game ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 91 57 75 10 135 108 31 123 149
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 110 59 145 125 159 27 41 73 14 152 77 54 102 165 124 37 9 22 T. Crayola choice for a
7 49 87 174 69 103 158 141 O. Together (2 wds.) cloudless landscape (2 wds.)
J. Subject of Kamehameha the Great
E. Having grooves or ridges
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 148 162 29 42 4 55 101 88 92 45 143 173 66 20 111
139 126 35 89 3 175 161 104
12 144 169 65 129 85
K. Speak frankly or bluntly (2 wds.) P. The opposite of bowlegged (hyph.) U. Cuarenta winks
F. Device relevant to Ohm’s law
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
78 95 33 109 8 131 60 164 138 171 43 16 156 63 94 79 2 117 147 106 120 40 72 90 176 56 160 18 44 86 17 62 115 151

48
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Madonna the deepening of your own understanding. At specialists, who monitored news outlets’ light-
(Continued from Page 47) one point, she said to me rhetorically: ‘‘What ing apparatuses for shadows and bathed her in
is the truth? Your truth when you’re 18 is not pure white light. Doing a little shuffle in her
‘‘Shoot Loads Not Guns,’’ chatted over a stereo going to be your truth when you’re 28 or when pointy red heels, she jammed herself between
blasting ‘‘Get Together,’’ her club hit about love you’re 38. Life is not black and white. It’s gray, Mykki Blanco, an H.I.V.-positive rapper, and
on the dance floor. Anderson Cooper, one of and one minute you’re going to feel so strongly O’Donnell, declaring, ‘‘I want to be in the
three people who presented her award, said: ‘‘As and believe in something so strongly, and then middle!’’
a gay teen in New York City in the early 1980s, maybe you won’t in five years.’’ Women from ‘‘Entertainment Tonight’’ and
there were a lot of times that I couldn’t see a At home, when she gazed at Frida Kahlo’s other TV shows circled, waiting their turn.
future for myself. I was scared and confused and mesmerizing stare, and at Madonna’s concerts, ‘‘I’m hanging out backstage at the Glaad Media
often felt alone.’’ He added: ‘‘Through her, I saw when I stared at her, we were each doing the Awards,’’ one said, ‘‘with none other than the pop
that there was a community out there for me. things that humans do, creating our story by empress herself, Madonna. How are you feeling
There was a life waiting for me, for all of us — a looking to another. Other women might see tonight?’’
life full of rays of light and full of love. And you themselves in Cindy Sherman or Ana Mendieta. I hoped she might say something provocative
know what? She was right.’’ And the fact that she continued to make art, that and sexy, as she used to, but she told the truth:
Madonna arrived, swishing through the crowd she couldn’t do anything but be a pop artist, that ‘I’m tired,’ ’’ she said.
in a pair of red sunglasses. She took the stage as she was committed to making meaning rather ‘‘You have spent your whole career using your
the goddess that everyone in this room expected than giving herself over to old-lady nihilism, platform to not only uplift but help marginalized
her to be — a survivor — working in some comic was enough. She had been reading Mary Oliver people, and now you are being honored today,
relief by saying she wrote her speech after mid- lately and told me to look up a poem with these and it was amazing to see you in your moment.
night with a Red Bull and cracking a bratty joke lines: ‘‘When it’s over, I want to say: all my life/I How are you feeling?’’
at the expense of the Bravo star Andy Cohen, was a bride married to amazement./I was the Madonna reckoned with the tortured gram-
who was also receiving an award. ‘‘Andy, you’re bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.’’ mar but wasn’t snippy. ‘‘You know when you have
legendary,’’ she drawled. ‘‘I can’t say why.’’ After her speech, Madonna made her way a good cry?’’ she said. ‘‘You feel good but also
While she was becoming a ‘‘creamy smooth to a modified red carpet, set up just for her drained at the same time.’’
pop icon goddess,’’ she said, she lost many in a private room. Her dedicated social media ‘‘We are all so excited for your album. What
friends to AIDS, including her ballet teacher photographer documented everything, and her would you say is the inspiration?’’
from Michigan and the artist Keith Haring. She personal hair and makeup folks bowed over She looked at the floor for a moment before
described the disease destroying her locals-only her like art conservators touching up a price- raising her eyes to the camera. ‘‘To thine own self
scene in Lower Manhattan. ‘‘I saw people start- less painting. She even had her own lighting be true,’’ she said.
ing to behave differently toward people who
were H.I.V.-positive or who had AIDS — not
wanting to shake their hands or eat chips out
of the same bowl or touch the same doorknob,’’
she said. ‘‘It made me sad. It made me feel sick.
It made me want to kick everybody’s ass.’’
Then she started talking about Malawi, where
more than 70,000 children were living with H.I.V.
I had never heard her make an overt connection
between being unable to save her friends in the
early days and the philanthropy she has done in
Malawi, as well as adopting four of her kids, but
now she made the link clear. She quoted lines
from a new song on her record: ‘‘Life is a circle.
Death and loss brought me new life. Brought me
to life. Brought me to love.’’
It was a little dramatic, but as she spoke, I
realized what set Madonna apart: Her career
had not only been about ambition, or ratcheting
up achievement. It had been one long process
of meaning-making, of understanding herself
through her art. Some of it wasn’t for public
consumption anymore; she might not tell us as
much about herself as she used to. But she was
always crafting a narrative, whether the story was
about young women’s empowerment or biblical
salvation, being reborn in sweat on the dance
floor or in motherhood.
Most of us realized, as we aged, that we
couldn’t make the puzzle pieces of our lives fit
and made peace with that. Madonna kept reach-
ing into the past to discover more and more
about herself. There was no one truth, only
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

Puzzles Edited by Will Shortz

DON’T QUOTE ME 1

20
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

21
10 11 12 13 14 15 16

22
17 18 19

By Seth A. Abel
23 24 25

Seth A. Abel is a lawyer based in Columbus, Ohio, who 26 27 28 29

works in commercial and industrial real estate. He has been
making crosswords since 2003, often with themes involving 30 31 32 33 34 35

gags. He thought of this one in 2008 and kept tweaking it

36 37 38 39 40 41
over the years — ‘‘which has to be a record for incubation
time for me,’’ he says. The title (above) was his starting point. 42 43 44 45 46 47
This is Seth’s 13th crossword for The Times. — W.S.
48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
ACROSS 81 Washer/dryer unit
1 Exaggerated virility 83 Commander who 64 65 66 67 68 69
9 Effortless assimilation never said 36-Across
16 Alternatives 86 Former Mississippi 70 71 72 73 74

to H.S. diplomas senator Trent

75 76 77 78 79 80
20 Surgical removal 87 The first recorded
procedure one was noted by the 81 82 83 84 85 86
Greek scientist
21 What might raise the roof ?
Hipparchus in 134 B.C. 87 88 89 90 91 92
22 Come down, in a way
89 2014 hit film featuring
23 Line never Oprah Winfrey
93 94 95 96 97

said by 58-Across
90 Announcement 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105
25 Columnist Bombeck from a band
26 Birth-control 92 Colorful fish 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113
option, briefly
93 Surveillance aid 114 115 116 117 118 119
27 “Please hold the line”
95 Word before check or drop
28 Shopping center? 120 121 122 123 124
96 Overnighter
29 Excerpt
98 Chinese principle 125 126 127
30 Subjects of expertise
99 TV detective who

6/9/19
33 Lay an egg, say never said 121-Across
128 129 130

34 Targets on “chest day” 106 Exercise done while sitting

35 Hollers
36 Line never
said by 83-Across
41 Lobster ____ diavolo
42 Official language
of a U.S. territory
45 Medical research org.
46 “Gotcha, man!”
48 Dec. 31, e.g.
49 Diminutive for Theresa
52 Takes the plunge
55 Will who played Grandpa
Walton on “The Waltons”
56 Big name in applesauce
58 Film villain who never
said 23-Across, with “the”
61 Some purchasers
of expensive gowns
64 Manhattan’s ____ Stadium
66 The “E” in Q.E.D.
67 Noses out?
69 Counterpart of pitch
70 Prefix with -lepsy
71 Title for two Beatles
72 ____-Locka, Fla.
73 Try, in a way
75 Woodworker’s tool
76 Digital-image format
79 3:00
80 Willowy
108 Wax holders
109 What a plus
sign may indicate
110 Belief of
Benjamin Franklin
114 Already: Fr.
115 Lhasa ____
116 May ordeal for
some H.S. students
119 N.Y. engineering sch.
120 Pop singer Jason
121 Line never said
by 99-Across
125 Last of the Stuarts
126 Thoroughly
enjoyed something
127 Birth
128 Obstinate responses
129 “Oh, lordy!”
130 Corporations and
partnerships, e.g.
DOWN
1 Secret society
2 Moving too quickly
to be seen clearly
3 Half of an old crime duo
4 Croque-monsieur
ingredient
5 Plural suffix?
6 Drinks in moderation 44 Line never said 88 Rubin ____ (classic illusion)
by 17-Down
7 Post-____ 91 Try for a part
47 Iraq War danger, for short
8 Difficult kind of push-up 93 ____ Graham, Oprah’s
9 German artist Dix 50 Rest of the afternoon longtime beau
51 Economizes
10 “____ Love” 94 Former Penn
(Cole Porter song) 53 Common landscaping State football coach
tree with acorns 97 Go green, say
11 G.I. grub
54 Puts the kibosh
100 Standing
12 Without a buyer lined up
on something
13 Seattle-based 101 Hilarious joke, in slang
57 Active ingredient
insurance giant 102 Titillating
in marijuana
14 Least productive 103 Feudal estate
59 Sport making its Olympic
104 Cyrano de Bergerac’s love
15 Some beans debut in Tokyo in 2020
16 ____-Roman wrestling 60 Number of Spanish 105 How paint is usually sold
17 British noble who kings named Carlos 107 Stuns
never said 44-Down 62 Small boat, maybe 111 Shiraz native
18 Anastasia’s love in 63 Angel 112 #, to a proofreader
Disney’s “Anastasia” 65 Head, slangily
113 Performers in old-
19 Irritably answers 68 Home to the Eads Bridge fashioned dumb shows
24 Purchase for a lorry over the Mississippi: Abbr. 115 Stuck, after “in”
74 Suffer
31 Blood-typing letters 116 Buzzing
32 Politician’s goal 77 Part of Caesar’s boast 117 Stinky Le Pew
34 Impatient dismissals 78 Las ____, Canary Islands 118 ____ Helens
35 London’s ____ Park 79 Opposite of kill 122 Communication
37 All over again 82 Elmer, to Bugs syst. for the deaf
38 Not yet rented 84 “Sounds good to me!” 123 Comp ____ (coll. major)
39 Varicolored 85 Many a northern Iraqi 124 Crossed
40 Like BFFs
Puzzles Online Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles:
42 Formative nytimes.com/crosswords ($39.95 a year). For the daily puzzle
43 Shade of green commentary: nytimes.com/wordplay.

50
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

The New York Times Bestseller

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
N OW AVA I L A B L E I N PA P E R B AC K

“An ingeniously structured narrative that branches and canopies

like the trees at the core of the story whose wonder and connectivity echo those
of the humans living amongst them.” — CITATION FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE IN FIC TION

“A gigantic fable “One of the

of genuine truths.” best novels, period.”
— BARBAR A KINGSOLVER , —ANN PATCHET T
genuine truths.”
The New York Times Book Review A gigantic fable of
“Monumental. . . . k Times Book Review
(cover review) New Yor
GS OLVER, The Ne
—BA RBARA KIN “Remarkable....
WINNER Soars up through the canopy
“Gorgeously written.... of the of American literature.”
Genuinely new.” PULITZER
— MICHAEL POLL AN
The PRIZE
— RON CHARLE S ,
The Washington Post

“A rousing,
full-throated hymn.”
Overstory “The best novels
change the way you see.
— DAN CRYER , A N o v el
Richard Powers’
San Francisco Chronicle
The Overstory does this.”
“Beyond special.... Richard — GER ALDINE BROOKS

A kind of breakthrough in
the ways we think about and Powers “Dazzlingly written....
Powers is as brilliant on trees
understand the world around
and arborescence as he has
us, at a moment when that is
been in past novels on music,
desperately needed.” ELLER
BESTS
TIMES AI and neuroscience.”
— BILL MCKIBBEN NEW YORK
— ROBERT MACFARL ANE ,
The Guardian

Also available

LER
MES BESTSEL
NEW YORK TI

A Best Book of the Year A NOVE

L

New York Times • Washington Post • O, The Oprah Magazine • NPR

New York Public Library • Amazon • Hudson Booksellers
KER
HO MA
HO O FF
O RR O
THE EC
AU
A U TT H
RD
K AWA
AL BOO
H EE
O FF TT H
N AT I O N
NN
W II N
W N EE RR O

Times
Los Angeles
L I N , The

B W. W. Norton & Company • Independent Publishers Since 1923 • www.wwnorton.com • www.richardpowers.net

—D A AVID U
and moving.”
“Magnificent
 РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS

IF YOU NEED
ROBOTIC-ASSISTED
SURGERY,
CONSIDER WHOM
THE ROBOT
IS ASSISTING.
Mount Sinai pioneered robotic-assisted surgery for head and neck
cancer in New York. And today we lead the largest robotic surgery
team in the United States. Our expertise and experience result in
minimal scarring, less post-operative discomfort, shorter hospital
stays, and, above all, better outcomes. Which hospital you choose
can make all the difference in the world. mountsinai.org