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 October 25, 2020

7 Screenland Don’t Cry By Charles Homans / 12 The Ethicist Should a Sperm Donor’s Child Know Her Siblings? By Kwame Anthony Appiah /
14 Studies Show A Real-Life Covid Experiment By Kim Tingley / 18 Letter of Recommendation Rocking in Bed By David Aloi /
20 Eat Julia Child’s Tuna Sandwich By Dorie Greenspan

22 The Fed-Up Chef 26 The All-Seeing Eye 32 Kamala, My Mother and Me

By Sheila Marikar / Gaggan Anand turned his
Indian restaurant in Bangkok into a pilgrimage
site for globe-hopping foodies. So why, even
before the pandemic hit, was he willing to
give it up?
By Michael Steinberger / Palantir became
a tech giant by helping governments and
law enforcement decipher vast amounts
of data. Is it dangerous to let this software
know so much?
By Reginald Dwayne Betts / Many progressives
mistrust Kamala Harris for her past as a
prosecutor. As an ex-convict and the son
of a crime victim, I can tell you it’s not
that simple.

Gaggan Anand, owner of Gaggan Anand

Restaurant in Bangkok, singing while making
truffle omelets. Page 22.
Photograph by Amanda Mustard for The New York Times

4 Contributors / 5 The Thread / 10 Poem / 12 Judge John Hodgman / 19 Tip / 44, 45, 46 Puzzles / 45 Puzzle Answers

Behind the Cover Gail Bichler, creative director: ‘‘This week’s cover story is about Palantir, a software company that specializes in data integration and
helps governments, law-enforcement agencies and other clients decipher vast amounts of information. At first, the cover looks like a collection of complex data
in the shape of an eye, but soon the headline emerges, alluding to the process of sorting data.’’ Typography by Nikita Iziev.

Copyright © 2020 The New York Times 3

Contributors

Reginald Dwayne ‘‘Kamala, My Mother Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. Editor in Chief JAKE SILVERSTEIN
Betts and Me,’’ He created the Million Book Project, an initiative Deputy Editors JESSICA LUSTIG,
Page 32 BILL WASIK
to curate libraries and install them in prisons Managing Editor ERIKA SOMMER
across the country. His latest collection of Creative Director GAIL BICHLER
Director of Photography KATHY RYAN
poetry, ‘‘Felon,’’ explores the post-incarceration Art Director BEN GRANDGENETT
experience. In 2019, he won a National Magazine Features Editor ILENA SILVERMAN
Politics Editor CHARLES HOMANS
Award in Essays and Criticism for his article in Culture Editor SASHA WEISS
the magazine about his journey from teenage Digital Director BLAKE WILSON
Story Editors NITSUH ABEBE,
carjacker to aspiring lawyer. In this issue, he
SHEILA GLASER,
writes about the senator and vice-presidential CLAIRE GUTIERREZ,
candidate Kamala Harris and her work as a LUKE MITCHELL,
DEAN ROBINSON,
prosecutor. ‘‘In order to reimagine our system WILLY STALEY
of incarceration, we, as a country, must take At War Editor LAUREN KATZENBERG
Assistant Managing Editor JEANNIE CHOI
seriously how to address crime and violence,’’ Associate Editors IVA DIXIT,
Betts said. ‘‘But a part of me understands our KYLE LIGMAN
Poetry Editor NAOMI SHIHAB NYE
reluctance: Prison hides society’s problems so
Staff Writers SAM ANDERSON,
effectively that many of us choose to believe it EMILY BAZELON,
solves them.’’ RONEN BERGMAN,
TAFFY BRODESSER-AKNER,
C. J. CHIVERS,
Dorie Greenspan Eat, Dorie Greenspan is an Eat columnist for the PAMELA COLLOFF,
Page 20 magazine. She has won five James Beard
NICHOLAS CONFESSORE,
SUSAN DOMINUS,
Awards for her cookbooks and writing. Her latest MAUREEN DOWD,
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES,
cookbook is ‘‘Everyday Dorie: The Way I Cook.’’
JAZMINE HUGHES,
JENEEN INTERLANDI,
MARK LEIBOVICH,
JONATHAN MAHLER,
Charles Homans Screenland, Charles Homans is the magazine’s politics editor. DAVID MARCHESE,
Page 7 He last wrote about the accidental pandemic WESLEY MORRIS,
JENNA WORTHAM
commentary of the TV mini-series ‘‘Waco.’’ At War Reporter JOHN ISMAY
Digital Art Director KATE L A RUE
Designers CLAUDIA RUBÍN,
RACHEL WILLEY
Deputy Director of Photography JESSICA DIMSON
Sheila Marikar ‘‘The Fed-Up Chef,’’ Sheila Marikar, a writer based in Los Angeles, Senior Photo Editor AMY KELLNER
Photo Editor KRISTEN GEISLER
Page 22 is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Contributing Photo Editor DAVID CARTHAS
The New Yorker and other publications. She is Photo Assistant PIA PETERSON
Copy Chief ROB HOERBURGER
currently at work on her first novel. Copy Editors HARVEY DICKSON,
DANIEL FROMSON,
MARGARET PREBULA,
ANDREW WILLETT
Michael Steinberger ‘‘The All-Seeing Eye,’’ Michael Steinberger is a regular contributor Head of Research NANDI RODRIGO
Page 26 to the magazine. His last feature was about Research Editors RILEY BLANTON,
ALEX CARP,
the resiliency of the stock market despite the CYNTHIA COTTS,
global pandemic. JAMIE FISHER,
LU FONG,
TIM HODLER,
ROBERT LIGUORI,
LIA MILLER,

Dear Reader: Whom Do You Lie to the Most? STEVEN STERN,

MARK VAN DE WALLE,
The magazine publishes the results of a study conducted online in March BILL VOURVOULIAS
Production Chief ANICK PLEVEN
2020 by The New York Times’s research-and-analytics department, Production Editors PATTY RUSH,
reflecting the opinions of 2,250 subscribers who chose to participate. HILARY SHANAHAN
Managing Director, MARILYN McCAULEY
Specialty Printing
Manager, Magazine Layout THOMAS GILLESPIE
Editorial Assistant ALEXANDER SAMAHA

LIE
NYT FOR KIDS

Editorial Director CAITLIN ROPER

Art Director DEB BISHOP

LIE
Editor AMBER WILLIAMS

LIE
Staff Editor MOLLY BENNET
LIE LIE Associate Editor
Designer
LOVIA GYARKYE
NAJEEBAH AL-GHADBAN
54% Myself 19% My co-workers 12% My family 5% My kids 10% Did not answer Social Editor ALEXA DÍAZ

4 10.25.20
 The Thread
Readers respond to The Culture Issue.
RE: BAD BUNNY
Carina del Valle Schorske profiled the Puerto
Rican reggaetonero.
Carina is a genius and a poet and woke
beyond compare, the good kind. Discus-
sions on race relations and latinidad are
absolutely necessary, and this captured all
the truths. This is one of the best pieces
I’ve read on Bad Bunny, my favorite artist.
Bad Bunny is so well spoken, humble and
a genius in his own right — this article
highlights how truly intricate and fasci-
nating his work is and he is.
Sorangel, New York
This is so beautifully written. I needed
this, and I didn’t know it. Thank you for
discussing the matter of colorism and the
erasure of Black reggaeton artists but also
painting such a beautiful picture of our
Boricua culture.
Indra, New York
Wow, I have chills. This is so good.
Brava to the author and photographer,
and thank you for The New York Times
for letting Boricuas tell their own story.
Exceptional writing.
Stephen, New York
Congrats on this insightful article. As a
68-year-old senior who immediately con-
nected to Bad Bunny when I first saw him
wearing the Puerto Rican national base-
Photograph by Mara Corsino
ball team jersey and enjoyed his lyrics
with J Balvin and Cardi B in the video ‘‘I
Like It,’’ I knew little about him until now.
Great writing, and glad to read another
Boricua on the pages of The New York
Times Magazine.
Julio Pabón, the South Bronx
Truly enjoyed listening to this article.
The photos were set up in a very unusual
and spectacular way. I am 68 years old
and not a fan of Bad Bunny. But now that
I have enjoyed this article, I am curious
about his music and will be venturing out
of my comfort zone.
Graciela, Puerto Rico THE STORY,
ON TWITTER
Excellent article and photography! I gave
I LOVED this
Benito the ‘‘benefit of the doubt’’ when he article/interview!!!!
joined the ‘‘Ricky Renuncia’’ movement. Benito forever.
That’s when he somewhat earned my @stephy_825
respect (especially after he canceled con-
certs to join the local demonstrations),
but even though I still think some of his
lyrics seem to oppose his apparent views
on women and equality, this article has
opened my mind even more on seeing
Benito in a different light. Thank you!
Mariosa, Puerto Rico
Wow. What a beautifully written essay.
I appreciate not only the context, which
as an avid reader/consumer of all things
Benito, el movimiento (música urbana) and
Latin American politics was mostly not
new to me but was presented in a new
and important light. I also particular-
ly appreciated the personal anecdotes
about the author’s experience of listen-
ing to B.B. All music (and all else, for that
matter) is experienced through each of
us as individuals, but we often don’t hear
about what role the artist has played in
the author’s life, and this piece in partic-
ular delved into the question of individ-
ual-collective in the artist, the music and
the listeners. I, too, hear Bad Bunny on my
earphones riding my bike through a U.S.
metropolis, and thumping through my
apartment windows via the subwoofer in
the car driving by. Perhaps the last time I
listened to him in a group, dancing, was
‘This article
has opened
my mind even
more on seeing
Benito in a
different light.’
Illustrations by Giacomo Gambineri
New Year’s Eve in Managua. The audio
recording was excellent as well.
Kate, Boston
RE: ‘THE GOOD LORD BIRD’
Carvell Wallace wrote about the challenges of
the TV adaptation of James McBride’s novel.
This is a powerful and deeply thoughtful
piece, Mr. Wallace. I used to read your par-
enting columns at Slate, and I’m thrilled to
now read your writing here at The New
York Times. I read ‘‘The Good Lord Bird’’
back in 2014, on a trip to northeastern
Brazil. It is magnificent, alternately funny
and moving. Reading it while also learning
about Brazil’s own history of slavery there
in Salvador I think helped me, as a white
woman, think more deeply about both
histories and the people who lived them.
Megan, Nevada
Thanks for this really great piece. I’m
grappling with assigning the book, and
possibly showing excerpts from the show,
in my U.S. history class next semester.
As a white professor at a college whose
student body is overwhelmingly white, I
know it is likely that the racial makeup of
the class is going to be something along
the lines of 28 white students from small
rural towns and one, two or three Afri-
can-American students from cities. What
do my white students need to understand
about the history of slavery? And what
do my African-American students need
from this course? Can the two objectives
be reconciled? What liabilities and lim-
itations do I carry into the classroom? I
don’t see easy answers to these questions.
William, Ohio
Send your thoughts to magazine@nytimes.com.
5
Screenland

Don’t Cry
There’s a thin line between authoritarianism and
show business. ⬤ By Charles Homans ⬤ The theater
of politics works only when the politician does
not acknowledge that it is theater. This paradox
has bedeviled Donald Trump, a businessman who
simultaneously played a more successful version
of himself on TV and now struggles to do the same
thing with being president. ¶ Never, arguably, has
10.25.20 7
Screenland
this been more true than during the Oct. 5
episode that Tim Miller, a consultant from
the Republican Party’s diminutive Never
Trump faction, correctly described as
‘‘the weirdest 90 seconds in presidential
history.’’ After his discharge from Walter
Reed National Military Medical Center
following his hospitalization for Covid-
19, Trump returned to the White House
aboard Marine One, walked with visible
difficulty across the South Lawn and then,
later that evening, emerged on the White
House’s elevated South Portico. He dra-
matically removed his surgical mask, said
something inaudible to someone off-mic,
stood around for a bit for the cameras
and then saluted vaguely — at America,
maybe? — before going inside.
8 10.25.20
‘‘The American Mussolini,’’ declared
Anthony Scaramucci, the Trump White
House short-timer turned apostate, on
CNN. Miller wrote that Trump saluted
‘‘with D-list caudillo energy, channeling an
aging Pinochet or Trujillo in their last gasps
of power.’’ But there was something curi-
ously incomplete about Trump’s strongman
turn; it was as if he were not really making
a discrete appearance but rather going
through a shot list. And indeed, an hour
or so later, a video appeared on Trump’s
Twitter feed, complete with a tumescent
orchestral score, cinematically recapping
the helicopter’s descent and culminating
triumphantly with Trump’s salute.
The video drew the responses that
you would imagine and that you would
Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban
‘I must have imagine Trump imagined; one former
BBC and NBC executive even tweeted a
via Getty Images; screen grabs from Twitter. Opening page: Screen
seen ‘‘Evita’’ at shot-for-shot comparison with the Nazi
Above (source photographs): Ken Cedeno/Polaris/Bloomberg,
least six times.’ propaganda film ‘‘Triumph of the Will.’’ But
this comparison, in its self-evident silliness
— the two films have little more in com-
mon than an aircraft and a balcony-style
staging, in Trump’s case one that Franklin
D. Roosevelt used for his fourth inaugural
address — was perversely reassuring: You
watch the footage side by side, and you
realize how hard it is to imagine a Leni
Riefenstahl, or even a Jerry Bruckheimer,
bothering with Trump. There’s a poignan-
grab from Twitter.
cy, even, to Trump’s video. It’s a trailer for
a movie no one will ever make.
This isn’t just because Hollywood most-
ly hates Trump. It’s because you can’t make
 an unironic blockbuster about someone
who already seems to be acting in his own
mental version of an unironic blockbuster
about his presidency. You can only make
a very dark comedy — like ‘‘Covita,’’ a
video that Trump’s antagonists at the Lin-
coln Project released the next day. Over a
montage of the president’s South Portico
appearance and other post-Walter Reed
proof-of-life videos, winsome brass intro-
duce ‘‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina,’’ from
the musical ‘‘Evita,’’ with new lyrics: ‘‘Don’t
cry for me, White House staffers/The truth
is/I will infect you.’’
Like most Lincoln Project videos,
‘‘Covita’’ is clearly less concerned with
changing voters’ minds than with nee-
dling Trump’s very specific insecurities.
g
It’s well known that ‘‘Evita,’’ Andrew
Lloyd Webber’s and Tim Rice’s musical
about the Argentine authoritarian power
couple Juan and Eva Perón, is Trump’s
favorite musical. ‘‘I must have seen
‘Evita’ at least six times,’’ he told the the-
ater magazine Show People in 2004. ‘‘It
completely involved me on several levels
at once.’’ He praised Patti LuPone’s Eva
Perón, in the show’s 1979 Broadway run,
as ‘‘one of the great stage performances
of all time.’’ (After his apparent homage,
LuPone tweeted: ‘‘I still have the lung
power and I wore less makeup. This
revival is closing November 3rd.’’) Trump
has more than once reportedly invoked
Perón in offering praise — grudging-
ly, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and
‘The last time I was effusively, to Kimberly Guilfoyle, his
there’ at Eva Perón’s campaign adviser and his son Donald
tomb, the lyricist
Tim Rice once told Jr.’s girlfriend, after her Republican
The Guardian, ‘a National Convention performance.
woman was standing One imagines Webber regarding this
in front of the tomb
with some ambivalence. (The composer
singing the song.’
once owned a condo in Trump Tower, but
his lawyers recently ordered Trump to stop
using ‘‘Memories,’’ from ‘‘Cats,’’ in his rally
playlist.) ‘‘Evita’’ was intended as a critical
autopsy of fame and demagogue politics.
Its narrator, a fictionalized Che Guevara,
delivers sardonic judgments on Eva Perón’s
uses and abuses of her immense populari-
ty. ‘‘Instead of government,’’ he spits in his
opening number, ‘‘we had a stage.’’
But the critique of personality-cult
politics in ‘‘Evita’’ is overshadowed by its
9
Screenland

pitch-perfect demonstration of their Populism is impossibly dark punchline offered by who was sweating along to the disco
power. Most people know the show the Broadway-caudillo drag of Trump’s cover of ‘‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’’
purely as a delivery device for its nucle- not really about latest phase is that the United States, the at Studio 54.
ar warhead of a hit, ‘‘Don’t Cry for Me, communing world’s most powerful democracy, did Instead of government, we had a
Argentina,’’ which Perón sings to the with the people not even get a real Perón. The author- stage. Regardless of what happens next
adoring masses from the balcony of the itarian style arrives in America not in month, this is the thing we know now
Casa Rosada shortly after her husband’s but about being the form of a general or an intelligence- and can never unlearn. The truth is he’ll
electoral victory. The song deftly evokes seen by them. agency thug, but in the form of a guy never leave us.
a charismatic leader’s calculated flattery
and performative fragility (‘‘I still need
your love after all that I’ve done’’) and,
in its soaring sentimentality, the ease Poem Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye
with which such appeals make an end
run around the brain on their way to the Rachel Eliza Griffiths’s profoundly moving ‘‘Seeing the Body’’ is a journey of deepest attention
heart. Webber recalled Margaret Thatch- and care. A collection dedicated to her mother, risen from infinite tenderness examining
er once suggesting — maybe jokingly, her mother’s life and death, these poems remind us again how impossible certain departures
maybe not — that he should write her or absences feel. There is always more to know. Comfort comes through closest attention.
something similar for entrance music. Gone ones are still here in every relic of memory, every changed thought. ‘‘The world insists . . .’’
The number’s balcony staging, like but what do we do with the ‘‘everything else’’ that remains? Some portion of us departs
Trump’s, can be read as a sly reminder with our beloved ones, but more of us continues to contain them.
that populism is not really about com-
muning with the people but about being
seen by them. The song’s emotional pay-
load and commercial success, though,
capture the convergence of populist
authoritarianism and populist art, the
way the latter can resemble and even
advance the former. Eva Perón, an
actress and radio personality before
she met Juan, was a pioneer in trying to
convert celebrity into political influence;
leaders from Ronald Reagan to Imran
Khan owe her a debt.
So does Trump, of course — but there
is an odd circularity that sets him apart
from the others. His ambitions still seem
to revolve around clinging to the apex Good Deeds
of the country’s attention; he seems By Rachel Eliza Griffiths
surreally unaware that this fame is an
automatic byproduct of being president Then think of every song of love hurled at you & yours.
of the United States, a thing he doesn’t Recall how battered you were by sheer understanding
have to strive for anymore. The per- so that you might surrender. Not her being gone
sistent smallness of his apparent aspi-
but everything else. The world insists
rations is the core of the comic aspect
of his presidency: the extra scoop of ice
you return. You go along with the house rules,
cream, the ratings obsession, even the what the passage of sunlight means, a warmth
military parades. that is bold enough to burn the world alive.
But the comedy never quite tran- I say I can’t remember how to be the same. I say
scends the tragedy, the compounding I can’t pretend to be that woman, the world,
cruelties and incompetencies, the grand or the love song you left behind your eyes.
tragedy that overshadows all of them. I say that I am beginning to understand
‘‘Countries don’t really recover from the way my friends sing alone inside of walls.
being taken over by unstable authori-
tarian nationalists of any political bent,
left or right — not by Peróns or Castros
or Putins or Francos or Lenins,’’ the New
Yorker writer Adam Gopnik warned in Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her most recent
book is ‘‘Everything Comes Next’’ (Greenwillow Books). Rachel Eliza Griffiths lives in New York City. Her
2016. The institutional and social frail- literary and visual work has appeared widely, and her fifth collection of poems, ‘‘Seeing the Body’’ (W. W. Norton,
ties they expose outlive them. And the 2020), also contains a moving sequence of her photographs.

10 10.25.20 Illustration by R. O. Blechman

The Ethicist By Kwame Anthony Appiah
I Used a Sperm Donor to Have
a Baby. Should I Put Her in
Touch With Others Who Share
Her Donor Dad?
I am a single mother by choice.
My baby, now 10 months old, was
conceived using an ‘‘open ID’’ donor
from a sperm bank, which means that
when my daughter turns 18, she can
contact the donor via the sperm bank.
Right now, however, we can be in
touch with other families who conceived
using the same donor, through the
sperm bank’s private online-connection
platform, other donor sibling registries or
both. I am questioning whether it’s fair
to my child to introduce her there. I do
not post about her on social media and
believe in protecting her privacy. But I
believe strongly that she needs to know
her origin story and understand, from
an early age, that she has some 15 to
20 donor half siblings. Still, part of me
feels that she — not I — should decide
what interaction she should have with her
donor half siblings and their families.
It feels like an invasion of privacy to
share her information with the donor
half siblings’ families (or others), even if
12 10.25.20
isn’t old enough to do so for herself. You
are or are not raising her as a member
of a particular religious tradition; as a
vegan, vegetarian or omnivore; as a pia-
nist, dancer or soccer player. You cannot
be confident what her view will be of all
these choices when she later looks back.
Indeed, to be a parent these days is to
await, perhaps with some unease, a tri-
bunal that will not be convened for many
Bonus Advice
From Judge
years. In the meantime, you simply must
use your best judgment. It’s only if you
make these choices irresponsibly that
John Hodgman
We live in New
England, and my wife
your daughter will have a just basis for likes to take the air-
complaint later. conditioner out of the
It’s true that choices involving priva- window at the first
cy, in particular, are very hard to reverse. sign of fall. This bugs
me, especially as I
Once those other biological half siblings now often work from
and their parents know she is there, your home. She took out
daughter can’t very easily disappear the A.C. today, but
this week it’s going
from their awareness. But the opposite to be 85 degrees.
choice will have consequences that are Please order my wife
hard to reverse, too: Because growing not to remove the
up in touch with someone often estab- A.C. unit so early.
————
lishes a very special kind of relationship, As many know
not growing up in touch with someone (except, apparently,
deprives you permanently of that expe- you), moving A.C.
units in and out of
rience. Yes, these ties are optional, in a
windows is terrifying.
way that’s not obviously the case with They are anvil-heavy
nondonor kinspeople, while perhaps and knife-edged,
fraught with the expectations that can and as they teeter
on that windowsill,
come of shared ancestry. But, as with you face two,
your other relatives, there’s no way to equally plausible,
know in advance whether these ties will life-warping paths:
these sites are private and seem an unlikely prove rewarding and welcome. And the murdering someone
below or ending
hacking target. But it’s hard to know at maxim ‘‘better safe than sorry’’ provides your shins forever.
what age I should consider her ‘‘competent’’ little guidance. It’s no use deciding to I get why she wants
to decide for herself about making contact. err on the side of safety when it’s utterly to get it over with
A.S.A.P., even if it’s
Furthermore, I imagine that it would unclear which side that is. too soon. But that’s
be much easier to normalize the unusual We’re sometimes too preoccupied your punishment for
situation of having so many biological nowadays with the question of epistemic not doing it yourself.
half siblings with whom she has no other privacy — with preventing others from By now I’m sure
it’s autumnal enough
familial connection if she grows up knowing having access to facts about us. Plenty not to matter, but I
at least some of them as actual people, of people will inevitably end up know- hope you spent a few
even if solely via photos, emails and video ing plenty about your daughter as she hot days suffering.
As you live in New
chats. While I would probably benefit from grows up; her kindergarten teacher, her England, you
connecting with the other donor families, schoolmates and their parents will cer- should already know
many of whom are also single mothers tainly know just the sorts of facts that that you do not
by choice, my primary concern is what’s you might be contemplating sharing deserve comfort.
Illustration by Louise Zergaeng Pomeroy
best for my daughter. What are the with her biological half siblings. You ask
ethical considerations of sharing her identity about the ethics of sharing ‘‘her identi- To submit a query:
and some personal information with ty and some personal information.’’ But Send an email to
‘‘strangers’’ who are also the families of her what — aside from the fact that she is ethicist@nytimes
.com; or send mail
genetic ‘‘relatives’’ before she can have a say? the child of a sperm donor — does that to The Ethicist, The
really mean? Her name, her age, the state New York Times
Name Withheld where she resides? How does someone Magazine, 620
Eighth Avenue, New
knowing those things pose a threat to
York, N.Y. 10018.
As a parent, you’re responsible for mak- her that she might reasonably complain (Include a daytime
ing all sorts of choices for a child who about later? phone number.)
Illustration by Tomi Um
 And remember, while your child I can’t see any good reason for your son It’s no use clear and simple enough to allow ordinary
remains young, you’ll be determining not to not continue to seek the money he people to understand and comply with
just these contacts but all her contacts. She ought to have received. Unemployment deciding them. They should not require excessive
will have play dates with other children benefits are basically a form of social to err on the side documentation or elaborate calculation.
only if you permit it. So one test for pass- insurance. They soften the fi nancial of safety when There are sound reasons, then, that your
ing on information is: Would I tell this to blow when you are, so to speak, side- son’s happy situation didn’t make him
the parent of a child whom my child was swiped by losing your job. Not taking it’s utterly ineligible for benefits.
going to go on regular play dates with? the payments would be like refusing an unclear which You worry that if he takes this money,
You mention one other consideration insurance payment you’re entitled to side that is. the system will be depleted to the point
in passing: These contacts might help because you can afford to pay the cost where people who are in real need won’t
you in your life as a single mother. This of a covered loss yourself. be able to get support. I doubt that’s
interest, you seem to suggest, might be Now, these payments could have been true; the size of the payment in question,
in conflict with what’s in your daugh- designed to take account of all the assets as a fraction of the system’s total cost, is
ter’s interests. But having a flourishing available to the unemployed worker — minuscule. If it were true, though, this
mother is going to be in her interest, too. like your son’s savings — but that would would be a flaw in the system’s design,
You’re right to give these issues serious have at least two major disadvantages. or a failure of the authorities who were
consideration. As a general rule, howev- One is that it would discourage exactly responsible for managing it. Your son
er, the well-being of parents is aligned the sort of careful husbanding of resourc- has followed the rules; the Department
with the well-being of their children. es that your son has engaged in. Another of Labor should, too.
is that it would require more complexity
My son was temporarily laid off from in filing: You would have to make some
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy
his job in April, within a few weeks of sort of declaration of assets. Government
at N.Y.U. His books include ‘‘Cosmopolitanism,’’
starting. His employer helped him and his systems of support for those in times of ‘‘The Honor Code’’ and ‘‘The Lies That Bind:
co-workers sign up for unemployment need should be written with rules that are Rethinking Identity.’’
benefits, and he started receiving those
checks within a few weeks. He lives in a
rental apartment alone, so like most of
us, he has bills to pay, but he has always
been very careful with his finances and
has money saved for a rainy day. For a
25-year-old, he is doing OK financially.
About two months into receiving
his benefits, he got a letter from the
Department of Labor stating that it had
reason to believe that he was getting
benefits while still being paid at his job,
and so the department stopped paying
his benefits while it investigated. I have
no doubt that this is an error, given
that my son filled out his paperwork
with my and his employer’s help.
Shortly after his benefits were cut off, he
was contacted by his employer and told to
come back and is now at work full time. Is
it ethical for my son to continue to pursue
the investigation with the Department
of Labor to get the benefits he should have
received? On the one hand, he’s going to
be financially fine now that he’s working
again, and if he takes the benefits, he could
be taking money from people who are
still out of jobs. On the other hand, it is
money that is legally his, and altogether
it’s a couple of thousand dollars. We
haven’t heard anything from the Labor
Department, and I’m thinking that if we
don’t pursue it, the department won’t either.

Name Withheld
Studies Show By Kim Tingley
What a fishing voyage — and other
‘real-life’ experiments — can tell
us about Covid-19 in the absence of
randomized controlled trials.
14 10.25.20
American Dynasty, a commercial trawl-
er, departed Seattle one day in May to
fish for hake off the Washington coast.
Before leaving, its 122 crew members
were screened for the coronavirus using
the highly accurate polymerase chain
reaction (P.C.R.) method, and all the
results came back negative. But because
those tests are ‘‘good but not perfect,’’ in
the words of Jesse Bloom, a professor at
the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research
Institute in Seattle, they missed at least
one case: Somehow SARS-CoV-2 found
its way on board.
When a crew member fell seriously ill,
the vessel returned to port, and almost
everyone was tested for the virus again.
The before-and-after results for 120 of the
crew members were made available to
Bloom and colleagues, who published a
study about them in The Journal of Clini-
cal Microbiology in August. In addition to
the P.C.R. tests, the pre-voyage screenings
also looked for neutralizing antibodies, or
proteins generated by the immune sys-
tem after exposure to the virus, which
suggest that a person has been infect-
ed previously. Three crew members, it
turned out, had those antibodies at the
start of the trip. Of the 117 crew members
who did not, 103 tested positive for the
virus when they got back to shore — an
88 percent infection rate. If you were to
randomly select three names from the
ship’s manifest, the odds that all three
would have tested negative are about 0.2
percent. Yet all three sailors with antibod-
ies were spared.
The finding is believed to be the first
direct evidence that antibodies protect
against SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans,
and it offers clues about what sort of con-
centrations might be needed to confer
immunity. The amounts of antibodies
present in the three sailors are ‘‘pretty
attainable by the vaccines’’ in develop-
ment, says Alex Greninger, a virologist at
the University of Washington School of
Medicine and the study’s senior author.
He says that data makes him ‘‘more opti-
mistic’’ that these vaccines might work.
In a commentary on the study, Danny
Altmann, a professor of immunology
at Imperial College London, called it ‘‘a
remarkable, real-life, human experiment.’’
When researchers examine past events
in order to understand why some things
happen to certain people and not oth-
ers, they are conducting ‘‘observational
Illustration by Ori Toor
Studies Show
studies.’’ These are often the only way to
assess what behavioral and policy mea-
sures prevent the spread of the coronavi-
rus. Unfortunately, they can’t prove cause
and effect. Unlike randomized controlled
trials, in which subjects are assigned by
chance to ‘‘experimental’’ and ‘‘control’’
groups, ensuring the only difference
between them is the intervention under
investigation, observational studies
always include the possibility that other
factors are influencing the outcomes.
Greninger points out that he can’t prove
that everyone on American Dynasty was
exposed to the virus; perhaps the three
with antibodies, along with their 14 unin-
fected colleagues, never encountered it.
Or maybe, says Anupam B. Jena, a pro-
fessor of health care and policy at Har-
vard Medical School, they were younger
and less susceptible to infection. (The
researchers weren’t privy to information
about the crew members beyond their
samples.) To prove that the antibodies
protected them, Jena says, ‘‘you have to
show that the people who had the anti-
bodies were similar in every other way to
the people who didn’t have antibodies.’’
The threat posed by the virus, though,
has made randomized trials extremely
difficult to do. While researchers have
randomly assigned macaque monkeys
to receive either a vaccine or a placebo
and then exposed them to the virus (those
with vaccine-produced antibodies were
less likely to become infected), it would
be unethical to perform this experiment
on humans, given the risk of severe ill-
ness and death. Instead, vaccine trials are
enrolling thousands of people, randomly
giving them a vaccine or a placebo and
waiting months until, in the normal course
of their lives, a small percentage of them
become infected; at that point, they’ll learn
which group they were in. This process
is much less efficient and provides less
detailed information about the circum-
stances and biology of each infection than
an experiment in which participants are
closely monitored in a controlled setting.
That makes cases like the Dynasty’s,
where a high percentage of people under
fairly uniform conditions were infected
with the virus while others weren’t, poten-
tially very useful. Testing during an out-
break that infected some 700 people on the
Diamond Princess cruise ship in February
helped reveal that many infections never
produced noticeable symptoms. ‘‘We’re
16 10.25.20
trying to learn with limited evidence,’’ says
Emily Oster, an economist at Brown Uni-
versity. ‘‘Digging into, What are the partic-
ular details of an incident that we can learn
from? I think there’s a lot of value there.’’
Such digging can help generate
hypotheses. The classic example is the
study by John Snow, an English physician,
of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854.
Plotting cases of the disease on a map
and interviewing residents — ‘‘It’s like
the original contact tracing,’’ Oster says
— Snow began to suspect that a pump,
where many of those getting sick got their
water, was the culprit. But Snow had also
tested his theory, that cholera was water-
borne, by getting maps of households
that were (randomly) served by one of
two rival water companies, with differ-
ent water sources, and noting which of
them experienced cholera deaths. When
the death rate for one company proved
much higher than the other, it was clear
that its water was the cause. (Sewage con-
tamination was to blame.)
Such ‘‘natural experiments,’’ in which
some event or factor has randomized par-
ticipants into experimental and control
groups, have been especially hard to find
during the pandemic. The urgent need to
stop the spread of the virus has led pol-
icymakers to change many variables at
once — school and business closures and
Kim Tingley
is a contributing writer reopenings, mask ordinances. This makes
for the magazine. it difficult to separate their effects. To find
Illustration by Ori Toor
out if closing schools lowered community
infection rates early in the outbreak, for
example, you might look at demograph-
ically similar areas where schools closed
either in mid-March or early April and
compare their infection rates in early
May. ‘‘But the places that have been hit
the hardest might be the ones that are
pulling the trigger earlier,’’ says Joseph
Doyle, an economist at the M.I.T. Sloan
School of Management — which can
make it seem that closing schools leads
to high infection rates, when actually
an anticipated rise in infections caused
the schools to close. Randomizing them
would mean finding ones that closed for
reasons ‘‘unrelated to anything about the
health of the community,’’ Doyle says.
For instance, several schools in Tennes-
see were hit by tornadoes in March and
shuttered early, while neighboring ones
stayed open. Comparing their commu-
nity infection rates weeks later could
approximate a randomized trial — if the
storms didn’t meaningfully affect other
local interactions.
Ideal randomization is rarely possi-
ble. ‘‘Sometimes if you need answers,
you go with natural experiments that
aren’t potentially as super clean, but we
can learn from them,’’ Doyle says. ‘‘And
then you back them up with theory.’’ On
American Dynasty, for instance, antibody
distribution wasn’t governed by chance
weather. But there is previous evidence to
support the theory that antibodies protect
against infection — making it more plau-
sible that they, as opposed to some other
shared factor, protected the three sailors.
In a sense, all of us have been generat-
ing pandemic data for six months: follow-
ing the policies enacted by local officials
or not, sending our children to school or
not. Most positive cases are not being
rigorously investigated, which means we
have a poor understanding of how often
(for example) certain behaviors result in
infection. Natural experiments can’t fix
that problem. But looking for them could
let us collect data or use what we do have
to arrive more efficiently at answers to
questions as they arise: To what extent
do steps like requiring masks prevent the
virus from spreading in schools? Does a
new drug improve Covid-19 outcomes?
What kinds of messages motivate people
to get vaccinated? What vaccine works
best and for whom? ‘‘These natural exper-
iments — they’re there,’’ Jena says.
Letter of Recommendation
Rocking in Bed
By David Aloi
I’ve taken the deep breaths, the warm
baths, the Xanax. I’ve tried candles and
crystals and sitting cross-legged. But noth-
ing can calm me quite like rocking. Here’s
what that looks like: An adult man, mid-
30s, finishes work and climbs into bed. It’s
early evening still, the shades are drawn, he
has yet to cook dinner. The day has been
hectic — deadlines, dog to the vet, a leak
beneath the sink — but that’s all behind him
now, a soft quiet settling in. His head rolls
on the pillow, with intention and control,
from side to side, each ear touching down
18 10.25.20
like the taps of a metronome. Tap. Tap. Tap.
His hips follow suit, and soon his whole
body is in one smooth kinesis. He feels his
pulse slow and his breaths even out. He’s
free, dreaming of other worlds, worlds with
many moons, with humming tides. Twenty
minutes pass, and something brings him
back to Earth — a car alarm, or his part-
ner asking from another room what he’s
making for dinner. He climbs out of bed,
lighter, less burdened. Spaghetti, he thinks.
To the American Academy of Sleep
Medicine, this scene might ring a bell,
Photograph by Matthew Pillsbury
That sweet, sweet summoning a term that sounds like
rhythmic ‘‘me time.’’
something you may see at a remarkably
boring jazz show: ‘‘sleep-related rhythmic
movements,’’ or SRRMs. Characterized by
repetitive and rhythmic motor behaviors,
these movements occur mostly during
quiet wakefulness or the early stages of
sleep. For me, they include head and body
rocking and rolling, but other movements
are possible as well. And if they go so far as
to disturb one’s sleep or daytime function
in a profound way, or even cause an inju-
ry, a disorder diagnosis is made. SRRMs
are typical in infants and children, and
become less prevalent with increasing age,
usually disappearing spontaneously before
adolescence. Rarely are they seen in adults
— but somehow here I am, approaching
40, still rocking to the beat.
My earliest memory is as a 3-year-old,
when I graduated from crib to training
bed. My parents tucked those guard-
rail bumpers beneath both sides of my
mattress — a drowsy toddler in a stalled
spaceship. I would rock up on my hands
and knees, and then somehow fall awk-
wardly onto my back and into a sound
sleep. My parents never thought of it as
worrisome or something that needed
fixing. ‘‘You were such a cute Martian in
there,’’ my mother said to me once.
As I grew up, I finessed my technique
and began to rock solely in a supine posi-
tion, head rolling side to side. I gained
more and more control over it — from
compulsion to volition — and I recog-
nized benefits beyond the sleep-induc-
ing. Rocking had a soothing effect. In one
study published in the journal Current
Biology, it is posited that ‘‘the sensory
stimulation associated with a swinging
motion exerts a synchronizing action
in the brain that reinforces endogenous
sleep rhythms,’’ which may explain why
rocking induces that relaxed feeling.
For me, it’s a shortcut to Chill Town. It
makes me less anxious, more present.
And beyond all that, it just feels good.
Rocking eventually became its own
end, my own personal form of medita-
tion. In high school, I could put a day’s
worth of typical teen angst behind me
and rock in my water bed to Ani DiFranco
or Jewel on repeat, dreaming of a future
as a folk singer, of crisscrossing the coun-
try in my VW van, the first boy to headline
Lilith Fair. In college, I would spend time
honing the practice when my roommate
was in class or out drinking. I would even
turn on his black-light lava lamp to really
curate a mood. When he joined a frat, I
was overjoyed at the idea of his scarcity
— that sweet, sweet rhythmic ‘‘me time.’’
It was something to look forward to, and
still is. The gentle to-and-fro lowers my
heart rate, my muscles loosen, the clouds
part. It puts me in a trancelike state, a
place of freedom where the body shifts
into autopilot and the spirit can wander
to a distant place, safely and without fear.
David Sedaris wrote of his experience
rocking in bed as a kid in his 1997 collection
My parents ‘‘Naked’’: ‘‘The perpetual movement freed
my mind, allowing me to mull things over
never thought of and construct elaborately detailed fanta-
it as worrisome sies. Toss in a radio, and I was content to
or something rock until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning,
listening to the hit parade and discovering
that needed that each and every song was about me.’’ It
fixing. ‘You was revelatory to read that essay: I wasn’t
were such the only Martian out there.
That said, it isn’t the first thing I bring
a cute Martian up with people at a party (not that I go
in there,’ to many of those these days): ‘‘Hi, I’m
my mother said David. That’s such a cool tank top. Rock-
ing is how I meditate. Ooh, are those
to me once. crab cakes?’’ My close friends who know
about it use words like ‘‘quirky’’ and ‘‘so
you’’ on the off chance it comes up. And
I suppose it’s true that rocking is not for
everyone, especially those who dizzy
easily. It takes time to master. But the
Tip By Malia Wollan
How to Scatter
Cremated Remains
‘‘Keep your back to the wind,’’ says Gail
Rubin, a death educator in Albuquerque.
You want the ashes to disperse out onto
the land or water rather than blow back
in your face. If you’re unsure of the wind
direction, throw a pinch of dirt or sand
into the air first and watch which way it
goes. The average cremated adult will
produce about five pounds of pulverized
bone fragments, a coarse powder that is
sterile and safe to touch, even if the per-
son died of a communicable disease. Try
to scatter, not dump. ‘‘It helps to have a
trowel or a spoon or ladle or something
to scoop with,’’ Rubin says.
Last year in the United States, over half
David Aloi
is a fiction writer living of those who died were cremated. In some
in Los Angeles. states, like Nevada, that number is closer
Illustration by Radio
day is long, and the rhythm is out there.
In some ways, these movements are
whispering to you already. I’ve seen you.
The way your head sways to that one song,
your eyes close and the universe presents
itself. The way your body bounces on a
rattling train home, to such a perfect beat
that you’re sent swiftly into a daydream.
You’ve sought solace in a porch swing. A
sense of balance in a hammock. Reprieve
in a rocking chair. All steppingstones to
the good stuff.
Later in his essay, Sedaris wrote:
‘‘What, I wondered, was an average per-
son expected to do while stretched out in a
darkened room? It felt pointless to lie there
motionless and imagine a brighter life.’’
What better way to re-center than with
a little rhythm. What better way to find
stillness than to move.
to 80 percent. Often the deceased will not
leave behind specific directions for where
to put their ashes. If you decide to take
them out into the world, choose a place the
person loved. Research local, state, tribal
and federal regulations. For example, the
National Park Service issues permits for
ash-scattering in parks like Yosemite so
long as it is: done out of public view; at
least 100 yards from any waterway; and
no marker is left behind. On land, Rubin
suggests finding a discrete and distinctive
landmark, like a large boulder, that you’ll
remember and can revisit. Note the loca-
tion with GPS coordinates. At sea, human
remains, including ashes, must be thrown
at least three nautical miles from land.
Rubin once surreptitiously dropped a
biodegradable bag of her brother-in-law’s
ashes off the side of a cruise ship crossing
the Bermuda Triangle. ‘‘There are no cre-
mation police,’’ she says. Still, be decent.
Rubin thinks the people who drop cre-
mains off the rides at Disneyland, causing
regular ride closures, have gone too far.
Start and end with some kind of ritu-
al. Say a prayer, a poem, a remembrance.
Scatter with intention. ‘‘Because people
are afraid of death, they’re afraid of the
ceremonies around death,’’ Rubin says. It’s
OK if your hands get dirty. Don’t worry
if the ashes fall on your shoes. Don’t fret
if the wind shifts and dusts your skin in
the powdery calcium phosphate of bones.
‘‘It won’t kill you,’’ Rubin says, ‘‘but it’ll
probably make you cough.’’
19
Eat By Dorie Greenspan

A Julia Child-Approved Lunch: This tuna-salad

sandwich was the comfort food the famous cookbook
author craved.

20 10.25.20 Photograph by Heami Lee Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Rebecca Bartoshesky.
While it might not It was early days in the ‘‘Baking With Julia’’
project. Julia was the beloved cookbook
seem like much author and television pioneer Julia Child,
of a job, I was and the project was a television series
cutting celery for and cookbook. Writing the book was my
job, and I was headed to Julia’s house in
Julia Child, Cambridge, Mass., to sort out recipes and
and I was going chapters. I walked in through the side door
to do it right. — in the months I worked at her home,
I don’t think anyone ever came through
the front entrance — and up the steps to
the kitchen. I’d been inside a few times,
but walking into the big, cheery room
and knowing that I’d soon see Julia was
still a happy moment for me. A couple of
the walls were covered in pegboard with
hooks and outlines of the pots and pans
Julia hung on them. The cupboards were
pale green, the color of the milky glass
dishes my grandmother used. The count-
ers were topped with well-worn butcher
block. And the stove was her treasured
Garland, which she bought in 1956 and
said she would take to her grave. (It’s in the
Smithsonian now.) It was black and rough
and had six burners, and on the day I’m
thinking of, half of them were fired up and
tended by Stephanie Hersh, Julia’s assistant
from 1989 until 2004, when Julia died.
That day, now 25 years ago, Stephanie
looked as though she were coaching a
track team — she had a notepad, a pencil
and three timers ticking away; all she was
missing was a whistle around her neck.
Three pots of boiling water were burbling
on the stove, and Stephanie was making
batches of hard-boiled eggs in a quest to
see which variables, time being one of
them, produced perfection. Exercises like
this were commonplace in Julia’s house.
We were working around the kitch-
en table when Julia declared, ‘‘Dorie,
let’s make lunch.’’ I saw Stephanie smile
— clearly, she knew what was coming
— and then I was at the counter with
Julia, doing as I was told, which was
cutting celery. While it might not seem
like much of a job, I was cutting celery
for Julia Child, and I was going to do it
right: I trimmed the celery, I peeled it
(because I learned to do that in Paris, I
thought it was important to do it for the
woman who wrote ‘‘Mastering the Art
of French Cooking’’) and I cut the cel-
ery into minuscule cubes that were all
the same size. I’m only exaggerating a
smidge when I say it took me so long that
when I put down my knife, Julia had fin-
ished everything else, and we were ready
to sit down to one of her favorite lunches:
tuna salad on an English muffin.
A few weeks ago, when I talked to Steph-
anie, who has since moved to New Zealand
and become a culinary instructor for Oce-
ania Cruise Lines, we had a good giggle
over the sandwich. Tuna-salad sandwiches
were, indeed, among Julia’s favorites, but it
turns out that she served them to guests for
reasons that went beyond her liking them.
For decades, Julia would be on the road
almost as much as she was at home, and
on tour, everyone wanted to show her their
best — and often their richest and most
complicated — dishes. The woman who
famously said, ‘‘If you don’t have butter, use
cream,’’ loved good food and was always
touched that someone wanted to cook for
her, but when she got home, she craved
simple food and seized what opportunities
she had to enjoy it. Although she knew that
visitors often expected something posh,
even she, a gracious and energetic host,
wasn’t likely to make a fancy lunch, so she
cleverly turned the tuna sandwich into her
midday signature. As Stephanie said, ‘‘It set
just the relaxed tone she liked.’’
And it was a great sandwich, full of
unexpected flavors. There was sharpness
from lemon juice and kick from salty
capers and cornichons, those tiny French
pickles packed in a brine that goes strong
on vinegar. There was crunch from onion
and (beautifully) chopped celery. Chez
Julia, the tuna was packed in oil, and the
mayonnaise was always Hellmann’s. There
was salt and pepper, freshly ground and
preferably white — Julia held that when
the color of the food was light, the pepper
should be white. There was always lettuce,
usually a soft lettuce, rounds of tomato and
sometimes more onion (Vidalia was her
first choice). Closed sandwiches were on
Pepperidge Farm white bread; open-faced
on Bays English muffins.
I went over each element of the sand-
wich with Stephanie on our call, wanting
to get it just the way Julia did it, and when
we did, I thought, as I often do when I’m
working on recipes, W.W.J.D.: What Would
Julia Do? Julia was a stickler for writing the
perfect recipe, for testing it until it was
foolproof — the best thing you could tell
Julia was her recipe worked. But the tuna
sandwich? Would she ever have had a real
recipe for that? ‘‘Oh, that sandwich was
pure comfort for her,’’ Stephanie said. ‘‘As
long as the tuna and mayo were good, the
rest was up for grabs.’’ All these years later,
when I fix a tuna-salad sandwich for my
own working lunch, I think back to the fun
of being with Julia in her kitchen, to the joy
of sharing something simple with her and
to my foolish worry about the celery. These
days, I do what Julia would do: I never leave
the celery out, but I never fuss over it either.
Tuna-Salad Sandwich, Julia Child Style
Time: 10 minutes
For the tuna salad:
1 (5-ounce) can tuna packed in oil, drained
3-4 tablespoons mayonnaise, preferably
Hellmann’s, plus more for spreading
3 tablespoons finely chopped celery
2-3 tablespoons finely chopped onion,
preferably Vidalia
3-4 cornichons, finely chopped
1 tablespoon capers, rinsed,
patted dry and chopped if large,
or 5 olives, pitted and chopped
Fresh lemon juice
Salt
Freshly ground pepper, preferably white
1-2 tablespoons minced chives or
parsley (optional)
For assembly:
2 toasted English muffins (preferably Bays)
or 4 untoasted slices white bread
4 soft lettuce leaves, such as Boston
4 tomato slices
4 thin slices onion (optional)
1. Prepare the tuna salad: Using a fork, mash
the tuna with 3 tablespoons mayonnaise.
Add the celery, as much onion and chopped
cornichons as you’d like and the capers
or olives, tossing to combine. Add a squirt of
lemon juice, some salt (go easy at first) and
pepper. See if you’d like more mayo, onions
or cornichons, then add more lemon juice,
salt and pepper to taste. Stir in the chives or
parsley, if you’re using either. (Makes 1½ cups.)
2. The tuna salad is good to go as soon as
it’s made, but I think it’s even better after it’s
had a couple of hours in the fridge.
3. When you’re ready to serve, spread
the muffins or bread with a little mayonnaise.
If you’re using English muffins, do what Julia
did: Make open-faced sandwiches. Put a leaf
of lettuce on each muffin half, top with tuna
salad and finish with tomato and onion.
If you’re using sliced bread, prepare traditional
sandwiches: Top each of 2 slices of bread
with 1 piece lettuce, tomato and onion, then
spread over the tuna and finish with remaining
onion, tomato, lettuce and bread.
Yield: 2 sandwiches.
21
Gaggan Anand turned
his IIndian
ndian restaurant in
Bangkok into a pilgrimage
site
site for
for globe-hopping
globe-hopping
foodies So why,
foodies. why even
before the pandemic hit,
hit
was he willing to give it up??
The Fed-Up Chef By Sheila
Marikar// Photograph by
Marikar
Amanda Mustard

23
The meal cost $400 and
came with rules. No. 1: No using cellphones, except to document the dinner
and the chefs preparing it. ‘‘Please do the Instagram, the Facebook, the
Twitter; give me the fame, I need the fame,’’ said Gaggan Anand, whose
restaurant bore the same name. Clad in black, with a booming voice that
suited his hulking figure, he stalked between a vast kitchen island and an
L-shaped table for 14. ‘‘Those of you with good cameras, if you can take a
photo of me scratching my ass, you get a bottle of Champagne.’’
Rule No. 2: ‘‘If this is on your ‘Things to Do in Bangkok’ list, you’re in the
wrong restaurant.’’ Anand wore his hair in a messy bun; he sounded like
a principal scolding a group of wayward adolescents. ‘‘If you are here to
judge me, you are in the superwrong restaurant, because we are [expletive]
judging you.’’ He went on: ‘‘This is not a, what do you call it?’’ — his fingers
curled into air quotes — ‘‘ ‘fine-dining experience.’ ’’
More rules preceded each dish. (There would be 25.) No smoke breaks.
‘‘I’m not antismoking,’’ he said, ‘‘but my nose is very particular, and your
smoke will change my nose.’’ Limits on trips to the bathroom. ‘‘The first
hour is all belted in,’’ he said. ‘‘After that, we will not give toilet breaks’’ — the
meal would last the usual five hours — ‘‘but if you have to, just go quickly
and come back. Think of this as a nonsmoking flight with no Wi-Fi, no
network, and it’s an Indian airline, so nothing works and it’s very turbulent.
You might be crashing soon, so you’d better enjoy.’’
Anand says it was around this point in his customary spiel that one
evening last fall, a woman got up and walked out. But on the night I visited
the restaurant last December, there were only nods of ascent and ripples
of nervous laughter.
Anand, the most famous Indian chef in the world, delights in subversion.
‘‘Lick it up,’’ one of his staple dishes, looks like spray paint but tastes like
India, a schmear of pulverized herbs and spices that, indeed, he demands
you lick directly off the plate. Scallop ‘‘curry’’ comes ice-cold, sans gravy,
with puffs of curry-infused ice cream. ‘‘Asteroid,’’ a charcoal-dusted morsel
of sea bass with a molten core of roe, is his version of the fish cutlets he
saw a woman frying in a charcoal-fired wok, on the street in the rain, the
last time he visited India. Even his menu is outré: For years, it has been
composed of only emoji, no text.
Last August, after receiving two Michelin stars and landing the fourth
spot on the 2019 World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, Anand did something
remarkable: Fed up with being micromanaged by his financial backers, he
left the restaurant that made him famous, called Gaggan, and started over
with the new one, Gaggan Anand. (His financiers had the rights to his first
name but not the last.) ‘‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’’ says David Gelb,
the creator of the Netflix documentary series ‘‘Chef’s Table.’’ ‘‘Traditionally,
when you have a star chef, as investors, you support them.’’ Gelb’s show, in
2016, is what turned Anand from relative obscurity — an Indian chef in the
middle of Thailand — into an emblem of defiance and a food-world antihero.
More twists followed. In February, Anand, who is 42, divorced his wife
of seven years. (They have a 4-year-old daughter.) March brought the coro-
navirus and subsequent lockdown. Then on June 1, Anand reopened his
restaurant with a new protocol for sanitization and social distancing; by
mid-July, owing to Thailand’s relative success in responding to the pan-
demic, he was able to take down the plexiglass shields between seats.
These days, he helms the chef’s table six nights a week, unmasked. ‘‘I ask
the guests’ permission,’’ he told me in September, ‘‘but they’re also not
wearing masks, so.’’
Around the world, Anand’s peers have responded to the pandemic’s pri-
vations by dabbling in lower-cost, higher-volume spinoffs to make up for lost
revenue. In Copenhagen, for example, René Redzepi transformed Noma,
which formerly charged close to $400 for a tasting menu of gastronomic
curiosities like edible soil, into a wine-and-burger bar. (The cheeseburger
goes for about $18.) While Anand experimented with cheaper offerings,
24 10.25.20
seeing others push comfort food intensified his commitment to haute
cuisine. ‘‘I would love to open a fried-chicken restaurant or some stupid
[expletive] like that and kind of survive,’’ he says, ‘‘but I don’t want to give
up fine dining.’’
He fired no one. He hired 10 new employees. ‘‘I’m still able to pay my
staff,’’ he says. ‘‘We are not sinking, yet.’’
Reality looms. Michelin devotees with money to burn and airline miles to
accrue made up a significant portion of Anand’s customer base. Before the
pandemic, 80 percent of his business came from international tourists; now,
because Thailand requires foreigners to quarantine for 14 days, almost all
of his customers are locals, and he has changed his business model accord-
ingly, slashing prices by 40 percent, adding a $50 lunch and subtracting 90
minutes from the chef’s-table experience (‘‘locally, they have less patience’’).
‘‘That brought in people who thought we were unapproachable,’’ Anand
says. But this month, he raised prices ‘‘because it’s not sustainable.’’ (Lunch
now costs $100.) Fine dining the world over faces the same problem. Inter-
national travel is severely limited, as William Drew, a director of World’s
50 Best Restaurants, points out — and it ‘‘will be for the foreseeable future.’’
On that evening last December, Anand served crumbles of cumin
and tamarind that looked like Pop Rocks. He made each guest at the
chef’s table use a middle finger to eat a savory miniature doughnut; he
described a dish of pork vindaloo as ‘‘a little Portuguese, a little Indian,
and none of either.’’ ‘‘If you tell me to make a chicken curry and naan,
I will tell you to get the [expletive] out of here,’’ he said. He poked; he
prodded. In order to get a reservation at the chef’s table, you had to
have filled out a questionnaire that included prompts like ‘‘Tell us about
an embarrassing moment in your life’’ and pick one of five songs you’d
sing with abandon if asked to do so (among the options: ‘‘I Want It That
Way,’’ by the Backstreet Boys, and ‘‘Chop Suey,’’ by System of a Down).
‘‘You’re a gastroenterologist?’’ Anand asked one diner. ‘‘Can you tell me
why my sous-chef farts so much?’’ On one wall, hot-pink tubes of neon
spelled out Anand’s axiom: ‘‘Be a rebel.’’
Toward the end of Hour 4, it was time to sing. The group consensus:
‘‘I Want It That Way.’’ Anand gave everyone the side-eye but obliged. A
minute in, he switched to ‘‘Chop Suey,’’ turned up the volume and started
playing air guitar.
I
f you are an Indian who lives outside of India, you get used to
people casually disparaging your food: ‘‘too smelly,’’ ‘‘too spicy,’’
‘‘too heavy.’’ Compliments are generally reserved for chicken
tikka masala, a dish believed by some to have been invented
by a Bangladeshi chef in Glasgow sometime in the ’70s. You get
used to seeing your food in chafing trays and foam containers. You get
used to eating one thing at home and something completely different at
a restaurant, which probably charges $9.99 for its lunch buffet ($12.99 on
Saturdays and Sundays), because what kind of person — Indians included
— would deign to pay much more than that for Indian food?
At least, that was how it was for me, a first-generation Indian-American
growing up in New Jersey in the ’90s. According to Khushbu Shah, the restau-
rant editor of Food & Wine, in the last decade, Indian restaurant food has
undergone a renaissance, thanks largely to the Indian diaspora and the inter-
net, which enabled the access to new sources of inspiration. At Melbourne’s
Don’t Tell Aunty, Jessi Singh serves sea urchin biryani, a marriage of coastal
Australia and his native Punjab; at Los Angeles’s Badmaash, the brothers
Nakul and Arjun Mahendro offer chicken tikka poutine, a nod to their Toronto
hometown, where their dad, Pawan, ran an Indian restaurant of his own.
Chefs in India have also evolved. In 2008, Manish Mehrotra persuaded
the head of the hospitality firm for which he worked to let him do a tasting
menu at a new space in New Delhi. ‘‘At least two guests a night would read
the menu and walk out, saying, ‘We don’t understand, and you don’t have
butter chicken on the menu,’ ’’ Mehrotra told me in 2015. Last year, World’s
50 Best named Mehrotra’s Indian Accent the best restaurant in India. Indian
Accent also has an outpost in New York, where a $125, 10-course tasting
menu might include blue cheese-stuffed naan.
Anand, however, does more than mash-up Indian standards and Western
ingredients. He creates dishes that defy easy categorization, like his mango-
infused pâté of foie gras dressed with Japanese oak leaves. ‘‘You don’t see
Indian food the way that he does it,’’ Shah says. ‘‘You talk to any wealthy
South Asian in that hemisphere of the world, it becomes a priority to get
to his restaurant. Gaggan is one of the few that made it in the fine-dining
world. There are really not that many.’’
Anand grew up in poverty outside Kolkata. ‘‘That scene in ‘Slumdog
Millionaire’ where the guy would [expletive] on top and it would fall on
the next guy’s head? That’s why I have dandruff,’’ he says. He watched his
mother prepare simple dishes, like fish fry and chicken masala (without
the cream found in chicken tikka masala). ‘‘My mom could have taken a
cart and made money,’’ he says, ‘‘but women in India back then were not
supposed to work, or she didn’t have the confidence to do it.’’
He went to hotel-management school — culinary institutes are relatively
new in India — and from there to jobs in hotel kitchens. He married, started
a catering company that quickly flopped and spent a year delivering food on
a bicycle, making 25 cents an hour, before his brother finagled a job for him
in 2003, running the cafeteria of a telecom company’s office in Kolkata. ‘‘I
learned how to use $1 to make a meal that will satisfy a person,’’ Anand says.
In 2009, he spent two months at Ferran Adrià’s Alícia Foundation in
Spain. By this point, Anand had divorced his first wife and moved to Bang-
kok to do some consulting for an Indian restaurant there. That job led to
his first fan, Rajesh Kewalramani, whom Anand says encouraged him to
open his own place and offered to help finance it. Gaggan opened in 2010.
His stint in Spain inspired him to reimagine the humble food of his roots.
He learned how to manipulate liquid nitrogen and carbon dioxide, how sodi-
um alginate and calcium chloride could turn olive juice into an opalescent
olive sphere. ‘‘If Ferran could do that with an olive,’’ Anand says, ‘‘I figured I
could change yogurt.’’ What the olive is to Spain, yogurt is to India: emblemat-
ic, iconic, a thing not to be messed with. The dish Anand came up with is now
a mainstay on his menu: the ‘‘yogurt explosion,’’ a seemingly normal dollop
of yogurt on a spoon that explodes in your mouth, a flavor bomb of cumin
and dried mango powder contained by a layer of diaphanously thin gelatin.
Anand characterizes his food not as Indian but as ‘‘Gaggan Anand.’’ ‘‘If
you’re from India,’’ he says, ‘‘you will feel either disgraced, like, ‘Why are
you touching my cuisine?’ or you will say, ‘Wow, you really changed my
food forever.’ ’’ Just as Mehrotra does, he thinks Indian cuisine has an image
problem. ‘‘Indians have let their food be defined by what the world wants
from them: chicken tikka masala because of the British, Goan fish curry
because of the Portuguese,’’ Anand says. ‘‘As a chef, it’s a disgrace that I sit
with Japanese, French and Italian chefs, and they talk about fine dining, and
I’m like a donkey, just sitting there. They will always value a French dish more
than an Indian dish. They don’t care what techniques you use. I get so angry.’’
After seeing Anand’s ‘‘Chef’s Table’’ episode in 2016, I went to dine at
Gaggan, which occupied a 19th-century townhouse about four miles from
his new restaurant, a modern building draped with greenery. Sitting in
the main dining room, I could not see Anand holding court at the chef’s
table, but I could hear him (until he turned up a Foo Fighters song). At the
end of the night, I saw him by the door and asked for a selfie; he obliged. I
had come expecting the best Indian meal of my life, and it was moving to
see the food of my ethnicity executed with such finesse. But more than the
food, Anand himself left me in awe, an Indian chef with swagger, chutzpah
and enough star power to warrant an 8,000-mile journey.
While the pandemic precludes this sort of pilgrimage, it has strengthened
the pull of chef-performers like Anand, who, on Instagram, toggles between
stylized photos of his greatest hits and unvarnished videos that show him
making, say, a burger from refrigerator odds and ends. He has figured out
how to be at once relatable and bucket list-y. ‘‘People still have a huge appetite,
perhaps even more of an appetite, for special experiences,’’ says Drew, from
World’s 50 Best. ‘‘It may take a while before they travel the distances that
they may have in the past. They may be more discerning. But I don’t think
they’re going to stop eating.’’
For a certain type of gourmet, getting a reservation at a place like Gaggan
Anand will always justify the cost of a trip. Last year, Truong Mai, an invest-
ment banker I met at Gaggan Anand, traveled from his home in Maryland
to Michelin-starred restaurants in Hong Kong, Singapore, San Sebastián,
New York, Belgium, Paris, the Netherlands and, of course, Bangkok. He’s
eaten at Anand restaurants 20 times. ‘‘My first truly world-class meal was
Gaggan in 2012,’’ Mai told me. ‘‘That’s why I hold him so dear.’’
he second time I met Anand, in Los Angeles in May 2019, he had
T soured on Gaggan. For two years, he had been talking publicly
about his plans to close it in 2020 and open a new one in Japan.
(This plan has since been abandoned.) He felt he had to churn
out the same dishes over and over again, to appease the Yelp-
ers, selfie seekers and critics. ‘‘At my new restaurant,’’ he said, ‘‘there will
be a sign: ‘We don’t make food for tires.’ ’’ He said he had no respect for
Michelin and its rankings. ‘‘They will always send a French or a Brit to my
restaurant who might have spent time in India but would not know India
like an Indian would, and they will never give me a fair judgment.’’ Because
of the Eurocentric palates of the reviewers, he said, ‘‘it’s impossible for me
to convince them how good I am.’’ He claimed he no longer wanted the
fame. ‘‘If this is what being a celebrity means,’’ he said, ‘‘I want [expletive]
none of it. I’m tired.’’
He was in town to headline the Los Angeles Food Bowl, a monthlong
festival. Five hundred people came to the Wiltern Theater to hear him
speak. On Memorial Day, he took over an outdoor bar in the arts district
and posted an invitation on his Instagram account: ‘‘whole world welcome.’’
He and his staff had prepared enough pulled pork vindaloo and papri chaat
nachos to feed 600 people, but two hours into the six-hour event, most of
their supplies were gone. Anand emerged from the kitchen to address a
line that wrapped around two blocks. ‘‘I [expletive] love you all for waiting!’’
he hollered. His fans hollered back, angling for selfies. He seemed to love
it. It was hard to believe that he didn’t want this anymore.
Then came the rupture last July, when Kewalramani and his two financial
partners apparently tried to oust him from Gaggan while he was vacationing
in Austria. Once Vladimir Kojic, Anand’s head sommelier, informed him of
the investors’ plans — ‘‘They called a town-hall meeting, like they’re Google,’’
Kojic told me — Anand gave his staff of 71 an ultimatum: Walk with me, and
we start over, or stick with the suits. All but five went with Anand, effectively
shuttering the restaurant. Anand says his investors objected to his practice of
hiring top talent from abroad, which required costly work visas. ‘‘I’m from
Serbia,’’ Kojic says. ‘‘We have chefs from Chile, Brazil, the U.S. Why did they
come to Thailand? It’s not for the money. It’s for Gaggan.’’ Anand’s former
partners did not respond to my repeated requests for comment.
‘‘It’s not an easy thing to do, to leave your partners,’’ says Massimo Bottu-
ra, Anand’s friend and the chef of Osteria Francescana (three Michelin stars).
But Bottura says he probably would have done the same thing. ‘‘My chefs
are like my brothers and sisters. The team is more important than anything.’’
The past seven months have given Anand an opportunity to immerse
himself in a local market he took for granted. ‘‘We ignored our immediate
50 kilometers for a decade because we were in the fame run,’’ he says. ‘‘Our
reservations were full; we didn’t give a [expletive]. We are now more con-
nected to the community, to foodies who may not have been able to afford
us. I’m looking for more Thai products and more local farmers.’’
But he refuses to steer away from fine dining, no matter how unsettled
the environment. Last December, he offered to drive me to the airport. He
showed up an hour late. Though Bangkok thrummed with traffic, he ignored
Waze. ‘‘It’s a calculated risk,’’ he said, adding that if that bet proved wrong,
I’d see his ‘‘dark side.’’ I made my flight.
The New York Times Magazine 25
26
 THE ALL-SEEING EYE

PALANTIR BECAME A TECH

GIANT BY HELPING GOVERNMENTS
AND LAW ENFORCEMENT DECIPHER
VAST AMOUNTS OF DATA.
IS IT DANGEROUS TO LET
THIS SOFTWARE KNOW SO MUCH?

BY MICHAEL STEINBERGER
TYPOGRAPHY BY NIKITA IZIEV
 ON
A ien, described their mission as ‘‘saving the shire.’’
BRIGHT
TUESDAY
afternoon in Paris last fall, Alex Karp was doing
tai chi in the Luxembourg Gardens. He wore
blue Nike sweatpants, a blue polo shirt, orange
socks, charcoal-gray sneakers and white-
framed sunglasses with red accents that inev-
itably drew attention to his most distinctive
feature, a tangle of salt-and-pepper hair rising
skyward from his head.
Under a canopy of chestnut trees, Karp exe-
cuted a series of elegant tai chi and qigong
moves, shifting the pebbles and dirt gently
under his feet as he twisted and turned. A group
of teenagers watched in amusement. After 10
minutes or so, Karp walked to a nearby bench,
where one of his bodyguards had placed a cool-
er and what looked like an instrument case. The
cooler held several bottles of the nonalcoholic
German beer that Karp drinks (he would crack
one open on the way out of the park). The case
contained a wooden sword, which he needed
for the next part of his routine. ‘‘I brought a
real sword the last time I was here, but the
police stopped me,’’ he said matter of factly
as he began slashing the air with the sword.
Those gendarmes evidently didn’t know
that Karp, far from being a public menace, was
the chief executive of an American company
whose software has been deployed on behalf of
public safety in France. The company, Palantir
Technologies, is named after the seeing stones
in J. R. R. Tolkien’s ‘‘The Lord of the Rings.’’ Its
two primary software programs, Gotham and
Foundry, gather and process vast quantities of
data in order to identify connections, patterns
and trends that might elude human analysts. The
stated goal of all this ‘‘data integration’’ is to help
organizations make better decisions, and many
of Palantir’s customers consider its technolo-
gy to be transformative. Karp claims a loftier
28 10.25.20
ambition, however. ‘‘We built our company to
support the West,’’ he says. To that end, Palantir
says it does not do business in countries that it
considers adversarial to the U.S. and its allies,
namely China and Russia. In the company’s
early days, Palantir employees, invoking Tolk-
The brainchild of Karp’s friend and law-
school classmate Peter Thiel, Palantir was
founded in 2003. It was seeded in part by In-Q-
Tel, the C.I.A.’s venture-capital arm, and the
C.I.A. remains a client. Palantir’s technology
is rumored to have been used to track down
Osama bin Laden — a claim that has never been
verified but one that has conferred an enduring
mystique on the company. These days, Palan-
tir is used for counterterrorism by a number
of Western governments. French intelligence
turned to Palantir following the November 2015
terror attacks in Paris. Karp claims that Palan-
tir has helped thwart several attacks, including
one or two that he says could have had seismic
political consequences. ‘‘I believe that Western
civilization has rested on our somewhat small
shoulders a couple of times in the last 15 years,’’
he told me in Paris, where he was hosting a con-
ference for Palantir’s corporate clients.
A few months later, the world was being
menaced by a novel coronavirus, and Palantir
quickly joined that battle against Covid-19: By
April, according to the company, approximate-
ly a dozen countries were using its technolo-
gy to track and contain the virus. The speed
with which Palantir transitioned to pandemic
response ostensibly underscores the flexibility
of its software, which can be put to any number
of tasks. The U.S. Army uses it for logistics,
among other things. The investment bank
Credit Suisse uses it to guard against money
laundering. The pharmaceutical company
Merck, in Germany, uses it to expedite the
development of new drugs. Ferrari Scuderia
uses it to try to make its Formula 1 cars faster.
To Palantirians, as some call themselves, these
myriad applications are just further proof that
many problems are data-integration problems.
Yet Palantir’s work on the coronavirus has
also highlighted the mistrust that trails the
company. In Europe, it is viewed with sus-
picion because of the C.I.A. connection. But
the main source of apprehension is simply
the nature of Palantir’s work. Although Palan-
tir claims it does not store or sell client data
and has incorporated into its software what it
insists are robust privacy controls, those who
worry about the sanctity of personal informa-
tion see Palantir as a particularly malignant
avatar of the Big Data revolution. Karp himself
doesn’t deny the risk. ‘‘Every technology is
dangerous,’’ he says, ‘‘including ours.’’ The fact
that the health records of millions of people
are now being funneled through Palantir’s
software has only added to the unease.
Photograph by Antoine d’Agata/Magnum Photos for The New York Times
ALEX KARP, THE CHIEF
EXECUTIVE OF PALANTIR.
That’s especially true in the United States,
where the Department of Health and Human
Services is using Palantir’s software to analyze
virus-related data. Palantir’s work with H.H.S.
has become bound up in the biggest contro-
versy that the company has faced, over its
relationship with United States Immigration
and Customs Enforcement. Progressive activ-
ists and members of Congress have expressed
fear that the information collected by H.H.S.
could be used by the Trump administration to
expand its immigration crackdown, in which
Palantir’s technology has played a part. And
the fact that Palantir was awarded a pair of
no-bid contracts valued at nearly $25 million
by H.H.S. has amplified concerns that it has
benefited from Thiel’s support of President
Trump. Thiel was one of his most prominent
backers in 2016, even speaking at the Repub-
lican National Convention.
Palantir’s perceived links to the president
have made it an object of suspicion among
liberals, which frustrates Karp. In contrast to
Thiel, the 53-year-old Karp is a self-described
‘‘progressive warrior’’ who says he voted for
Hillary Clinton and who has expressed antipa-
thy for Trump. His greatest fear, he says, is the
rise of fascism. Although Karp’s political views
are widely shared in Silicon Valley, he is one of
the tech industry’s unlikeliest chief executives.
He co-founded Palantir with no background
in computer science or business. Instead, he
holds a law degree from Stanford University
and a doctorate in social theory from Goethe
University in Frankfurt, where for a time his
thesis adviser was Jürgen Habermas, possibly
Europe’s most celebrated living social philos-
opher. On the corporate scene, Karp is a sui
generis figure, a fact vividly on display that
autumn afternoon in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Until recently, it could be argued that his
intellectual pedigree and political leanings
were a kind of shield for Palantir, deflecting
criticism of its work — or at least keeping
critics off balance. But fairly or not, Palantir
has come to be regarded as an enabler and
prime beneficiary of Trump’s presidency,
which has rendered the company toxic in the
eyes of many progressives. In response to the
criticism of Palantir’s relationship with ICE,
Karp has attacked the tech industry over what
he sees as its insufficient patriotism. Palantir
recently relocated its headquarters from Palo
Alto to Denver, a move that seemed partly
rooted in the contempt that Karp and Thiel
have for Silicon Valley. The company, which
has yet to turn a profit, went public last month
amid concerns that its prospects in Wash-
ington could be diminished under a Biden
29
administration. Palantir says that its software
solves ‘‘the world’s hardest problems.’’ Remov-
ing the stain of Trumpism may prove to be an
especially hard one.
SPEAKING
AT
TECH
conference in 2010, Eric Schmidt, Google’s
chief executive at the time, made a startling
observation. ‘‘There were five exabytes of infor-
mation created by the entire world between
the dawn of civilization and 2003. Now that
same amount of information is created every
two days,’’ he said. (An exabyte is equivalent
to one billion gigabytes.) It was perhaps a
slightly exaggerated claim in the service of an
indisputable fact: Humanity is now awash in
data. The premise of Big Data is that all of this
information can yield powerful insights. But
the difficulty is harnessing the data, which is
where Palantir comes in. Although Palantir has
glamorous clients and offices in upscale locales
(the Marais in Paris, Soho Square in London,
the Georgetown section of Washington), in
tech circles, data integration is not considered
particularly sexy. ‘‘It’s plumbing work, basical-
ly,’’ Louis Mosley, who runs Palantir’s London
office, told me with a smile.
He was being modest. What Palantir does is
a little more complex than unclogging a toilet.
Essentially, Palantir’s software synthesizes the
data that an organization collects. It could be
five or six types of data; it could be hundreds.
The challenge is that each type of informa-
tion — phone numbers, trading records, tax
returns, photos, text messages — is often for-
matted differently from the others and siloed in
separate databases. Building virtual pipelines,
30 10.25.20
KARP, STANDING, WITH PALANTIR EMPLOYEES DAVE GLAZER, SARA
PELETZ AND MAYER SCHEIN. THE PORTRAIT ON THE WALL IS MICHEL
FOUCAULT, THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER.
Palantir engineers merge all the information
into a single platform. They work quickly.
According to Jose Arrieta, who was H.H.S.’s
chief information officer until two months
ago, Palantir merged around two billion data
elements related to the Covid-19 outbreak in
less than three weeks. Once the data has been
integrated, it can be presented in the form
of tables, graphs, timelines, heat maps, arti-
ficial-intelligence models, histograms, spider
diagrams and geospatial analysis. It is a digi-
tal panopticon, and having sat through several
Palantir demos, I can report that the interface
is impressive — the search results are strikingly
elegant and easy to understand.
Those appealing visuals were conceived in
order to hunt and kill terrorists. In 1998, Thiel
co-founded PayPal, then served as its chief
executive from 2000 until it was acquired by
eBay in 2002. Not long after 9/11 — Thiel can’t
recall exactly when — it occurred to him that
PayPal’s anti-fraud algorithms could possibly
help the U.S. government combat terrorism. In
2003, Thiel asked a trio of software engineers,
including two from PayPal, to create a proto-
type. His intuition plus their coding gave rise
to Palantir. While Thiel provided most of the
early money, the start-up secured an estimated
$2 million from In-Q-Tel, a venture-capital firm
that finances the development of technologies
that can help the C.I.A.
Karp says the real value of the In-Q-Tel
investment was that it gave Palantir access to
the C.I.A. analysts who were its intended clients.
According to Palantir, every two weeks, Aki Jain,
one of the first engineers hired by Thiel, and
Stephen Cohen, an engineer who had worked
at Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarion Capital Part-
ners, traveled from Palo Alto to Langley with
an updated version of the software program.
(Cohen recalls the C.I.A. guys’ referring to him
as ‘‘Two Weeks.’’) The C.I.A. analysts would test
it out and offer feedback, and then Cohen and
Jain would fly back to California to tweak it.
Jain estimates that from 2005 to 2009, he and
Cohen made around 200 trips to Virginia. The
iterative approach became standard practice
for Palantir — even now, it embeds what it calls
‘‘forward-deployed engineers’’ with clients to
customize the software to their needs, which has
led some observers to conclude that Palantir is
as much a consultancy as it is a software maker.
Although Palantir is often depicted as a kind
Agate Credit Only by Name Surname
of omnipotent force, it is actually quite small,
with around 2,400 employees. By contrast,
Facebook, which seems to vie with Palantir for
the worst headlines these days, has more than
50,000. (Thiel was the first outside investor in
Facebook and remains a member of its board.)
And while Palantir’s reach feels tentacular, the
prospectus that it filed with the Securities and
Exchange Commission before going public
 revealed that it has just 125 customers, a number
that surprised some observers and raised ques-
tions about the company’s growth prospects. In
mid-October, Palantir stock was trading around
$10 per share, and its market capitalization was
nearly $16 billion.
Palantir is pricey — customers pay $10 mil-
lion to $100 million annually — and not every-
one is enamored of the product. Home Depot,
Hershey, Coca-Cola and American Express all
dropped Palantir after using it. Even within the
intelligence community, there seem to be mixed
opinions. Three years ago, BuzzFeed obtained
a leaked video in which Karp told Palantir
employees that the company’s relationship with
the National Security Agency had ended. Several
former C.I.A. analysts told me that they and their
colleagues were underwhelmed by Palantir. But
the C.I.A. is a big place, and others who worked
there extolled it.
Some clients seem to believe Palantir’s soft-
ware is essential. One is the aerospace manu-
facturer Airbus, which hired Palantir in 2016
when it was ramping up production of its new
A350 jet. Marc Fontaine, who until recently was
Airbus’s digital-transformation officer, told me
that when you go from a single plane on the
assembly line to 10, ‘‘the complexity increases
exponentially, and it kills you.’’ Missing parts,
faulty parts, production mistakes, communica-
tions glitches — those and other problems inevi-
tably slow down the assembly process and cause
millions of dollars in cost overruns. They can
also result in penalties and damages that have
to be paid to airlines awaiting delivery.
In 2016, five Palantir engineers embedded in
the Airbus factory in Toulouse, France. Using
Foundry, Palantir’s commercial application —
Gotham, its other flagship software program, is
for national security and defense — they merged
25 data silos related to production of the A350
and integrated more than 400 sets of data. Palan-
tir produced results immediately. Before it came
on board, Fontaine says, it took an average of 24
days to fix production mistakes; Palantir helped
cut that to 17. Airbus realized several hundred
million dollars in cost savings.
These days, around 15,000 Airbus employees
use Palantir, and its software has essentially
wired the entire Airbus ecosystem through a
venture called Skywise, which collects and ana-
lyzes data from around 130 airlines worldwide.
The information is used for everything from
improving on-time performance to preven-
Agate Credit Only by Name Surname
tive maintenance. Fontaine says that Airbus
was always open to using other data-analytics
tools, but ‘‘we didn’t find anything equivalent
at the time to Palantir.’’ Its software, he says,
‘‘has unique capability.’’ His former boss, Tom
Enders, who was Airbus’s chief executive from
2012 to 2019, echoes that praise. He calls bring-
ing in Palantir ‘‘one of the best decisions of
my career.’’
Photograph by Antoine d’Agata/Magnum Photos for The New York Times
‘I
STILL
CAN’T
BELIEVE
I haven’t been shot and pushed out the win-
dow,’’ Karp told me. We were in Palantir’s
New York office, located in the Meatpacking
district. He wasn’t being literal, despite the
office’s bulletproof windows and the body-
guards hovering nearby. Rather, he meant the
feeling of inevitable doom that has plagued
him since childhood. Karp grew up in the
Philadelphia area. His parents are Dr. Robert
Karp, a clinical pediatrician, and Leah Jaynes
Karp, an artist. His father is Jewish; his moth-
er is African-American. (Karp has a brother
and two stepsiblings.) He told me that his par-
ents were ‘‘hippies’’ and that he spent a lot of
time as a kid at political protests. He intuited
from a young age that his background made
him vulnerable, he said. ‘‘You’re a racially
amorphous, far-left Jewish kid who’s also
dyslexic — would you not come up with the
idea that you’re [expletive]?’’ Although he was
now the head of a major corporation, neither
time nor success had diminished the anxiety.
If the far right came to power, he said, he
would certainly be among its victims. ‘‘Who’s
the first person who is going to get hung? You
make a list, and I will show you who they get
first. It’s me. There’s not a box I don’t check.’’
His fear, he said, ‘‘propels a lot of the deci-
sions for this company.’’
Given the political milieu in which he was
raised, Haverford College, a school with
Quaker roots near Philadelphia with a robust
tradition of dissent (it was a hive of antiwar
activity in the 1960s and 1970s), was a nat-
ural fit for Karp. We happened to be class-
mates there, but despite the college’s small
size (currently around 1,200 students), he
and I somehow never exchanged a word in
four years. Karp was, by his own admission,
somewhat introverted and also very studious.
The library didn’t see much of me, which may
go some way to explaining why he ended up a
billionaire and I did not. Over conversations
in New York, Washington, Paris and Vermont,
we found that we had a lot to talk about,
although I can’t say it is regrettable that we
never connected at Haverford; I am not sure
that 20-year-old me would have fully appre-
ciated his bracing intelligence, and I suspect
that my talent for procuring beer and organiz-
ing Roman-themed parties would have been
of little use to him.
After graduating, Karp went to Stanford
Law School, which he hated — ‘‘the worst
three years of my adult life.’’ He says he knew
within a week of enrolling that he had made a
mistake. In his view, Stanford was just a glori-
fied trade school; his classmates were mainly
animated by a desire to land prestigious jobs,
and the intellectual discourse was ‘‘highly per-
formative,’’ as he puts it. What made Stan-
ford bearable was his unlikely friendship with
Thiel, a classmate. They bonded over their
shared disdain for law school and a love of
political debate. Thiel had already achieved
some prominence for his libertarian views —
as a Stanford undergraduate, he had helped
found the right-leaning Stanford Review —
and he and Karp spent much of their free
time interrogating each other’s positions.
‘‘We argued like feral animals,’’ Karp recalled.
According to Thiel, their conversations gener-
ally took place late at night in the law-school
dorm. ‘‘It sounds too self-aggrandizing, but I
think we were both genuinely interested in
ideas,’’ he says. ‘‘He was more the socialist, I
was more the capitalist. He was always talking
about Marxist theories of alienated labor and
how this was true of all the people around us.’’
Karp didn’t even stick around for his Stan-
ford graduation: As soon as classes ended, he
left for Frankfurt to begin studying German.
His aim was to earn a doctorate in Germany, an
ambition kindled mainly by the fact that most
of the writers and thinkers he was drawn to
were German. After six months, he had mas-
tered enough of the language — despite his dys-
lexia — to gain admission to Goethe University
in Frankfurt. Having Jürgen Habermas as his
Ph.D. thesis adviser was a big deal. Habermas
was affiliated with the university’s Institute
for Social Research, which had given rise to
the so-called Frankfurt School, a neo-Marxist
movement renowned for its critique of cap-
italism and culture. In Karp’s words, ‘‘If you
can get Habermas to work with you for even
two minutes, you can be a tenured professor
at Columbia.’’
But Karp says he had a falling out with
Habermas over his dissertation topic and
ended up switching advisers. When I first
asked him to describe (Continued on Page 38)
The New York Times Magazine 31
KAMALA, MY
MOTHER AND
Many progressives mistrust
Kamala Harris for her past as a prosecutor.

ME
As an ex-convict and the son of a crime
victim, I can tell you it’s not that simple.
By Reginald Dwayne Betts
Photo illustrations by Joan Wong
32
BECAUSE SENATOR
KAMALA HARRIS IS
a prosecutor and I am a felon, I have been fol-
lowing her political rise, with the same focus
that my younger son tracks Steph Curry threes.
Before it was in vogue to criticize prosecutors,
my friends and I were exchanging tales of being
railroaded by them. Shackled in oversized green
jail scrubs, I listened to a prosecutor in a Fairfax
County, Va., courtroom tell a judge that in one
night I’d single-handedly changed suburban
shopping forever. Everything the prosecutor
said I did was true — I carried a pistol, carjacked
a man, tried to rob two women. ‘‘He needs a long
penitentiary sentence,’’ the prosecutor told the
judge. I faced life in prison for carjacking the
man. I pleaded guilty to that, to having a gun, to
an attempted robbery. I was 16 years old. The old
heads in prison would call me lucky for walking
away with only a nine-year sentence.
I’d been locked up for about 15 months when
I entered Virginia’s Southampton Correctional
Center in 1998, the year I should have graduat-
ed from high school. In that prison, there were
probably about a dozen other teenagers. Most
of us had lengthy sentences — 30, 40, 50 years
— all for violent felonies. Public talk of mass
incarceration has centered on the war on drugs,
wrongful convictions and Kafkaesque sentences
for nonviolent charges, while circumventing the
robberies, home invasions, murders and rape
cases that brought us to prison.
The most difficult discussion to have about
criminal-justice reform has always been about
violence and accountability. You could release
everyone from prison who currently has a drug
offense and the United States would still out-
pace nearly every other country when it comes
to incarceration. According to the Prison Pol-
icy Institute, of the nearly 1.3 million people
incarcerated in state prisons, 183,000 are incar-
cerated for murder; 17,000 for manslaughter;
165,000 for sexual assault; 169,000 for robbery;
and 136,000 for assault. That’s more than half of
the state prison population.
34 10.25.20
When Harris decided to run for president, I
thought the country might take the opportunity
to grapple with the injustice of mass incarceration
in a way that didn’t lose sight of what violence,
and the sorrow it creates, does to families and
communities. Instead, many progressives tried to
turn the basic fact of Harris’s profession into an
indictment against her. Shorthand for her career
became: ‘‘She’s a cop,’’ meaning, her allegiance
was with a system that conspires, through prison
and policing, to harm Black people in America.
In the past decade or so, we have certainly
seen ample evidence of how corrupt the system
can be: Michelle Alexander’s best-selling book,
‘‘The New Jim Crow,’’ which argues that the war
on drugs marked the return of America’s racist
system of segregation and legal discrimination;
Ava DuVernay’s ‘‘When They See Us,’’ a series
about the wrongful convictions of the Central
Park Five, and her documentary ‘‘13th,’’ which
delves into mass incarceration more broadly;
and ‘‘Just Mercy,’’ a book by Bryan Stevenson, a
public interest lawyer, that has also been made
into a film, chronicling his pursuit of justice for
a man on death row, who is eventually exonerat-
ed. All of these describe the destructive force of
prosecutors, giving a lot of run to the belief that
anyone who works within a system responsible
for such carnage warrants public shame.
My mother had an experience that gave her a
different perspective on prosecutors — though
I didn’t know about it until I came home from
prison on March 4, 2005, when I was 24. That
day, she sat me down and said, ‘‘I need to tell
you something.’’ We were in her bedroom in the
townhouse in Suitland, Md., that had been my
childhood home, where as a kid she’d call me to
bring her a glass of water. I expected her to tell
me that despite my years in prison, everything
was good now. But instead she told me about
something that happened nearly a decade earlier,
just weeks after my arrest. She left for work before
the sun rose, as she always did, heading to the
federal agency that had employed her my entire
life. She stood at a bus stop 100 feet from my high
school, awaiting the bus that would take her to
the train that would take her to a stop near her
job in the nation’s capital. But on that morning,
a man yanked her into a secluded space, placed
Opening pages: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images (Harris); iStock/Getty Images (flag); Getty Images (gavel); Martin Barth/EyeEm, via Getty Images (fence).
a gun to her head and raped her. When she could
escape, she ran wildly into the 6 a.m. traffic.
My mother’s words turned me into a mum-
bling and incoherent mess, unable to grasp how
this could have happened to her. I knew she kept
this secret to protect me. I turned to Google and
searched the word ‘‘rape’’ along with my home-
town and was wrecked by the violence against
women that I found. My mother told me her
rapist was a Black man. And I thought he should
spend the rest of his years staring at the pock-
marked walls of prison cells that I knew so well.
The prosecutor’s job, unlike the defense attor-
ney’s or judge’s, is to do justice. What does that
mean when you are asked by some to dole out ret-
ribution measured in years served, but blamed by
others for the damage incarceration can do? The
outrage at this country’s criminal-justice system
is loud today, but it hasn’t led us to develop bet-
ter ways of confronting my mother’s world from
nearly a quarter-century ago: weekends visiting
her son in a prison in Virginia; weekdays attend-
ing the trial of the man who sexually assaulted her.
We said goodbye to my grandmother in the same
Baptist church that, in June 2019, Senator Kamala
Harris, still pursuing the Democratic nomination
for president, went to give a major speech about
why she became a prosecutor. I hadn’t been
inside Brookland Baptist Church for a decade,
and returning reminded me of Grandma Mary
and the eight years of letters she mailed to me
in prison. The occasion for Harris’s speech was
the annual Freedom Fund dinner of the South
Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P. The
evening began with the Black national anthem,
‘‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’’ and at the opening
chord nearly everyone in the room stood. There
to write about the senator, I had been standing
already and mouthed the words of the first verse
before realizing I’d never sung any further.
Each table in the banquet hall was filled
with folks dressed in their Sunday best. Serv-
ers brought plates of food and pitchers of iced
tea to the tables. Nearly everyone was Black.
The room was too loud for me to do more than
crouch beside guests at their tables and scribble
notes about why they attended. Speakers talked
about the chapter’s long history in the civil rights
movement. One called for the current generation
of young rappers to tell a different story about
sacrifice. The youngest speaker of the night said
he just wanted to be safe. I didn’t hear anyone
mention mass incarceration. And I knew in a
different decade, my grandmother might have
been in that audience, taking in the same argu-
ments about personal agency and responsibility,
all the while wondering why her grandbaby was
still locked away. If Harris couldn’t persuade that
audience that her experiences as a Black woman
in America justified her decision to become a
prosecutor, I knew there were few people in this
country who could be moved.
Describing her upbringing in a family of civil
rights activists, Harris argued that the ongoing
struggle for equality needed to include both pros-
ecuting criminal defendants who had victimized
Black people and protecting the rights of Black
criminal defendants. ‘‘I was cleareyed that pros-
ecutors were largely not people who looked like
me,’’ she said. This mattered for Harris because
of the ‘‘prosecutors that refused to seat Black
jurors, refused to prosecute lynchings, dispro-
portionately condemned young Black men to
death row and looked the other way in the face
of police brutality.’’ When she became a prose-
cutor in 1990, she was one of only a handful of
Black people in her office. When she was elected
district attorney of San Francisco in 2003, she
recalled, she was one of just three Black D.A.s
nationwide. And when she was elected California
attorney general in 2010, there were no other
Black attorneys general in the country. At these
words, the crowd around me clapped. ‘‘I knew
the unilateral power that prosecutors had with
the stroke of a pen to make a decision about
someone else’s life or death,” she said.
Harris offered a pair of stories as evidence
of the importance of a Black woman’s doing
this work. Once, ear hustling, she listened to
colleagues discussing ways to prove criminal
defendants were gang-affiliated. If a racial-pro-
filing manual existed, their signals would cer-
tainly be included: baggy pants, the place of
arrest and the rap music blaring from vehicles.
She said that she’d told her colleagues: ‘‘So,
you know that neighborhood you were talking
about? Well, I got family members and friends
who live in that neighborhood. You know the way
you were talking about how folks were dressed?
Well, that’s actually stylish in my community.’’
She continued: ‘‘You know that music you were
talking about? Well, I got a tape of that music in
my car right now.’’
The second example was about the mothers of
murdered children. She told the audience about
the women who had come to her office when she
was San Francisco’s D.A. — women who want-
ed to speak with her, and her alone, about their
sons. ‘‘The mothers came, I believe, because
they knew I would see them,’’ Harris said. ‘‘And I
mean literally see them. See their grief. See their
anguish.’’ They complained to Harris that the
police were not investigating. ‘‘My son is being
treated like a statistic,’’ they would say. Everyone
in that Southern Baptist church knew that the
mothers and their dead sons were Black. Harris
outlined the classic dilemma of Black people in
this country: being simultaneously overpoliced
and underprotected. Harris told the audience
that all communities deserved to be safe.
HARRIS OUTLINED
THE CLASSIC
DILEMMA OF BLACK
PEOPLE IN THIS
COUNTRY: BEING
SIMULTANEOUSLY
OVERPOLICED AND
UNDERPROTECTED.
Among the guests in the room that night whom
I talked to, no one had an issue with her work as a
prosecutor. A lot of them seemed to believe that
only people doing dirt had issues with prosecu-
tors. I thought of myself and my friends who have
served long terms, knowing that in a way, Harris
was talking about Black people’s needing protec-
tion from us — from the violence we perpetrated
to earn those years in a series of cells.
Harris came up as a prosecutor in the 1990s,
when both the political culture and popular
culture were developing a story about crime
and violence that made incarceration feel like a
moral response. Back then, films by Black direc-
tors — ‘‘New Jack City,’’ ‘‘Menace II Society,’’
‘‘Boyz n the Hood’’ — turned Black violence into
a genre where murder and crack-dealing were as
ever-present as Black fathers were absent. Those
were the years when Representative Charlie
Rangel, a Democrat, argued that ‘‘we should not
allow people to distribute this poison without
fear that they might be arrested’’ and ‘‘go to jail
for the rest of their natural life.’’ Those were the
years when President Clinton signed legislation
that ended federal parole for people with three
violent crime convictions and encouraged states
to essentially eliminate parole; made it more
difficult for defendants to challenge their con-
victions in court; and made it nearly impossible
to challenge prison conditions.
Back then, it felt like I was just one of an entire
generation of young Black men learning the logic
of count time and lockdown. With me were Antho-
ny Winn and Terell Kelly and a dozen others, all
lost to prison during those years. Terell was sen-
tenced to 33 years for murdering a man when
he was 17 — a neighborhood beef turned deadly.
Home from college for two weeks, a 19-year-old
Anthony robbed four convenience stores — he’d
been carrying a pistol during three. After he was
sentenced by four judges, he had a total of 36 years.
Most of us came into those cells with trauma,
having witnessed or experienced brutality before
committing our own. Prison, a factory of violence
and despair, introduced us to more of the same.
And though there were organizations working to
get rid of the death penalty, end mandatory min-
imums, bring back parole and even abolish pris-
ons, there were few ways for us to know that they
existed. We suffered. And we felt alone. Because
of this, sometimes I reduce my friends’ stories
to the cruelty of doing time. I forget that Terell
and I walked prison yards as teenagers, discuss-
ing Malcolm X and searching for mentors in the
men around us. I forget that Anthony and I talked
about the poetry of Sonia Sanchez the way others
praised DMX. He taught me the meaning of the
word ‘‘patina’’ and introduced me to the music
of Bill Withers. There were Luke and Fats; and
Juvie, who could give you the sharpest edge-up
in America with just a razor and comb.
When I left prison in 2005, they all had decades
left. Then I went to law school and believed I
owed it to them to work on their cases and help
them get out. I’ve persuaded lawyers to represent
friends pro bono. Put together parole packets —
basically job applications for freedom: letters of
recommendation and support from family and
friends; copies of certificates attesting to voca-
tional training; the record of college credits. We
always return to the crimes to provide expla-
nation and context. We argue that today each
one little resembles the teenager who pulled a
gun. And I write a letter — which is less from
The New York Times Magazine 35
a lawyer and more from a man remembering
what it means to want to go home to his mother.
I write, struggling to condense decades of life in
prison into a 10-page case for freedom. Then I
find my way to the parole board’s office in Rich-
mond, Va., and try to persuade the members to
let my friends see a sunrise for the first time.
Juvie and Luke have made parole; Fats, repre-
sented by the Innocence Project at the Universi-
ty of Virginia School of Law, was granted a con-
ditional pardon by Virginia’s governor, Ralph
Northam. All three are home now, released
just as a pandemic would come to threaten the
lives of so many others still inside. Now free,
they’ve sent me text messages with videos of
themselves hugging their mothers for the first
time in decades, casting fishing lines from boats
drifting along rivers they didn’t expect to see
again, enjoying a cold beer that isn’t contraband.
In February, after 25 years, Virginia passed a
bill making people incarcerated for at least 20
years for crimes they committed before their 18th
birthdays eligible for parole. Men who imagined
they would die in prison now may see daylight.
Terell will be eligible. These years later, he’s the
mentor we searched for, helping to organize,
from the inside, community events for children,
and he’s spoken publicly about learning to view
his crimes through the eyes of his victim’s family.
My man Anthony was 19 when he committed
his crime. In the last few years, he’s organized
poetry readings, book clubs and fatherhood
classes. When Gregory Fairchild, a professor at
the Darden School of Business at the University
of Virginia, began an entrepreneurship program
at Dillwyn Correctional Center, Anthony was
among the graduates, earning all three of the
certificates that it offered. He worked to have me
invited as the commencement speaker, and what
I remember most is watching him share a meal
with his parents for the first time since his arrest.
But he must pray that the governor grants him a
conditional pardon, as he did for Fats.
I tell myself that my friends are unique, that
I wouldn’t fight so hard for just anybody. But
maybe there is little particularly distinct about
any of us — beyond that we’d served enough
time in prison. There was a skinny light-skinned
15-year-old kid who came into prison during the
years that we were there. The rumor was that he’d
broken into the house of an older woman and
sexually assaulted her. We all knew he had three
life sentences. Someone stole his shoes. People
threatened him. He’d had to break a man’s jaw
with a lock in a sock to prove he’d fight if pushed.
As a teenager, he was experiencing the worst of
prison. And I know that had he been my cellmate,
had I known him the way I know my friends, if he
reached out to me today, I’d probably be arguing
that he should be free.
But I know that on the other end of our prison
sentences was always someone weeping. During
36 10.25.20
the middle of Harris’s presidential campaign,
a friend referred me to a woman with a story
about Senator Harris that she felt I needed to
hear. Years ago, this woman’s sister had been
missing for days, and the police had done little.
Happenstance gave this woman an audience
with then-Attorney General Harris. A coordi-
nated multicity search followed. The sister had
been murdered; her body was found in a ravine.
The woman told me that ‘‘Kamala understands
the politics of victimization as well as anyone
who has been in the system, which is that this
kind of case — a 50-year-old Black woman gone
missing or found dead — ordinarily does not get
any resources put toward it.’’ They caught the
man who murdered her sister, and he was sen-
tenced to 131 years. I think about the man who
assaulted my mother, a serial rapist, because
his case makes me struggle with questions of
violence and vengeance and justice. And I stop
thinking about it. I am inconsistent. I want my
friends out, but I know there is no one who can
convince me that this man shouldn’t spend the
rest of his life in prison.
PRISON,
A FACTORY OF
VIOLENCE
AND DESPAIR,
INTRODUCED US
TO MORE
OF THE SAME.
My mother purchased her first single-family
home just before I was released from prison. One
version of this story is that she purchased the
house so that I wouldn’t spend a single night
more than necessary in the childhood home I
walked away from in handcuffs. A truer account
is that by leaving Suitland, my mother meant to
burn the place from memory.
I imagined that I had singularly introduced my
mother to the pain of the courts. I was wrong.
The first time she missed work to attend court
proceedings was to witness the prosecution of
a kid the same age as I was when I robbed a
man. He was probably from Suitland, and he’d
attempted to rob my mother at gunpoint. The
second time, my mother attended a series of
court dates involving me, dressed in her best
work clothes to remind the prosecutor and judge
and those in the courtroom that the child facing
a life sentence had a mother who loved him. The
third time, my mother took off days from work
to go to court alone and witness the trial of the
man who raped her and two other women. A
prosecutor’s subpoena forced her to testify, and
her solace came from knowing that prison would
prevent him from attacking others.
After my mother told me what had happened
to her, we didn’t mention it to each other again
for more than a decade. But then in 2018, she
and I were interviewed on the podcast ‘‘Death,
Sex & Money.’’ The host asked my mother
about going to court for her son’s trial when
he was facing life. ‘‘I was raped by gunpoint,’’
my mother said. ‘‘It happened just before he
was sentenced. So when I was going to court
for Dwayne, I was also going for a court trial
for myself.’’ I hadn’t forgotten what happened,
but having my mother say it aloud to a stranger
made it far more devastating.
On the last day of the trial of the man who
raped her, my mother told me, the judge accept-
ed his guilty plea. She remembers only that he
didn’t get enough time. She says her nose began
to bleed. When I asked her what she would have
wanted to happen to her attacker, she replied,
‘‘That I’d taken the deputy’s gun and shot him.’’
Harris has studied crime-scene and autopsy
photos of the dead. She has confronted men in
court who have sexually assaulted their children,
sexually assaulted the elderly, scalped their lov-
ers. In her 2009 book, ‘‘Smart on Crime,’’ Harris
praised the work of Sunny Schwartz — creator
of the Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, the
first restorative-justice program in the country
to offer services to offenders and victims, which
began at a jail in San Francisco. It aims to help
inmates who have committed violent crimes by
giving them tools to de-escalate confrontations.
Harris wrote a bill with a state senator to ensure
that children who witness violence can receive
mental health treatment. And she argued that
safety is a civil right, and that a 60-year sen-
tence for a series of restaurant armed robber-
ies, where some victims were bound or locked
in freezers, ‘‘should tell anyone considering
viciously preying on citizens and businesses
that they will be caught, convicted and sent to
prison — for a very long time.’’
Politicians and the public acknowledge mass
incarceration is a problem, but the lengthy pris-
on sentences of men and women incarcerated
during the 1990s have largely not been revisited.
While the evidence of any prosecutor doing
Photo illustration by Joan Wong for The New York Times

Richard Vogel/Associated Press (Harris); iStock/Getty Images (flag); Paper Boat Creative, via Getty Images (hands); Martin Barth/EyeEm, via Getty Images (fence).
work on this front is slim, as a politician arguing
for basic systemic reforms, Harris has noted
the need to ‘‘unravel the decades-long effort
to make sentencing guidelines excessively
harsh, to the point of being inhumane’’; criti-
cized the bail system; and called for an end to
private prisons and criticized the companies
that charge absurd rates for phone calls and
electronic-monitoring services.
In June, months into the Covid-19 pandemic,
and before she was tapped as the vice-presiden-
tial nominee, I had the opportunity to interview
Harris by phone. A police officer’s knee on the
neck of George Floyd, choking the life out of him
as he called for help, had been captured on video.
Each night, thousands around the world protest-
ed. During our conversation, Harris told me that
as the only Black woman in the United States Sen-
ate ‘‘in the midst of the killing of George Floyd
and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery,’’ count-
less people had asked for stories about her expe-
riences with racism. Harris said that she was not
about to start telling them ‘‘about my world for a
number of reasons, including you should know
about the issue that affects this country as part of
the greatest stain on this country.’’ Exhausted, she
no longer answered the questions. I imagined she
believes, as Toni Morrison once said, that ‘‘the
very serious function of racism’’ is ‘‘distraction.
It keeps you from doing your work.’’
But these days, even in the conversations that I
hear my children having, race suffuses so much. I
tell Harris that my 12-year-old son, Micah, told his
classmates and teachers: ‘‘As you all know, my dad
went to jail. Shouldn’t the police who killed Floyd
go to jail?’’ My son wanted to know why prison
seemed to be reserved for Black people and won-
dered whose violence demanded a prison cell.
‘‘In the criminal-justice system,’’ Harris
replied, ‘‘the irony, and, frankly, the hypocrisy is
that whenever we use the words ‘accountability’
and ‘consequence,’ it’s always about the individ-
ual who was arrested.’’ Again, she began to make
a case that would be familiar to any progressive
about the need to make the system accountable.
And while I found myself agreeing, I began to
fear that the point was just to find ways to treat
officers in the same brutal way that we treat
everyone else. I thought about the men I’d rep-
resented in parole hearings — and the friends I’d
be representing soon. And wondered out loud to
Harris: How do we get to their freedom?
‘‘We need to reimagine what public safety looks
like,’’ the senator told me, noting that she would
talk about a public health model. ‘‘Are we looking
at the fact that if you focus on issues like education
and preventive things, then you don’t have a
system that’s reactive?’’ The list of those things
becomes long: affordable housing, job-skills devel-
opment, education funding, homeownership. She
remembered how during the early 2000s, when
she was the San Francisco district attorney and
started Back on Track (a re-entry program that
sought to reduce future incarceration by building
the skills of the men facing drug charges), many
people were critical. ‘‘ ‘You’re a D.A. You’re sup-
posed to be putting people in jail, not letting them
out,’ ’’ she said people told her.
It always returns to this for me — who should
be in prison, and for how long? I know that
American prisons do little to address violence.
If anything, they exacerbate it. If my friends
walk out of prison changed from the boys who
walked in, it will be because they’ve fought with
the system — with themselves and sometimes
with the men around them — to be different.
Most violent crimes go unsolved, and the pain
they cause is nearly always unresolved. And
those who are convicted — many, maybe all —
do far too much time in prison.
And yet, I imagine what I would do if the
Maryland Parole Commission contacted my
mother, informing her that the man who assault-
ed her is eligible for parole. I’m certain I’d write
a letter explaining how one morning my mother
didn’t go to work because she was in a hospital;
tell the board that the memory of a gun pointed
at her head has never left; explain how when I
came home, my mother told me the story. Some
violence changes everything.
The thing that makes you suited for a conver-
sation in America might be the very thing that
precludes you from having it. Terell, Anthony,
Fats, Luke and Juvie have taught me that the best
indicator of whether I believe they should be free
is our friendship. Learning that a Black man in
the city I called home raped my mother taught
me that the pain and anger for a family member
can be unfathomable. It makes me wonder if
parole agencies should contact me at all — if they
should ever contact victims and their families.
Perhaps if Harris becomes the vice president
we can have a national conversation about our
contradictory impulses around crime and pun-
ishment. For three decades, as a line prosecutor,
a district attorney, an attorney general and now
a senator, her work has allowed her to witness
many of them. Prosecutors make a convenient
target. But if the system is broken, it is because
our flaws more than our virtues animate it.
Confronting why so many of us believe prisons
must exist may force us to admit that we have
no adequate response to some violence. Still, I
hope that Harris reminds the country that simply
acknowledging the problem of mass incarcera-
tion does not address it — any more than keeping
my friends in prison is a solution to the violence
and trauma that landed them there.
The New York Times Magazine 37
Palantir
(Continued from Page 31)
his thesis, which he wrote in German, he said
that it ‘‘rebuilt the Parsonian framework to
account for the somewhat irrational philosophy
of Adorno, basically.’’ When I later asked for an
explanation that I could perhaps understand,
he told me that it was about the German writ-
er Martin Walser’s controversial 1998 speech
on the limits of wartime guilt and ‘‘a parochial
form of fascism that occurs by purposely saying
things that are incorrect in speech.’’ (‘‘Parso-
nian’’ is a reference to the American sociolo-
gist Talcott Parsons; Theodor W. Adorno was a
German philosopher and sociologist.) Karp said
that although his collaboration with Habermas
ended prematurely, it was clarifying. He real-
ized that, however gifted a scholar he might
have been, he could never attain the stature of
Habermas. ‘‘Working with Habermas showed
me that I couldn’t be him and didn’t want to
be him,’’ he says.
While his second advanced degree also failed to
yield a career path, it had an unexpected dividend:
He developed a deep affinity for Germany. ‘‘I went
for intellectual reasons,’’ he says. ‘‘The reason I
stayed was emotional.’’ He found that he was good
at what he calls ‘‘German conceptual thinking’’ but
also felt a sense of belonging in Germany — that
he fit in even as he recognized that his Jewishness
would always set him apart. He still feels that way.
‘‘I have a second home, and it’s called Germany
and the German-speaking world,’’ he told me. ‘‘I’m
more naturally accepted there than anywhere else
in the world.’’ The years that he spent in Germany
are the touchstone of his life. ‘‘I only made two
good decisions as an adult: going to Germany
and starting Palantir,’’ he said. ‘‘Everything else
was, I wouldn’t call it a mistake, but it was either
preparation for these two decisions or a mistake.’’
After finishing his dissertation, Karp found-
ed a money-management firm. His goal was to
accumulate a $250,000 nest egg and to settle in
Berlin, where he planned to live as a highbrow
dilettante, combining intellectual pursuits with
various ‘‘forms of debauchery.’’ But then Thiel
reached out to him. Thiel thought that Palantir
might be a tough sell to potential clients, at least
initially — there would be skepticism about the
software, as well as bureaucratic resistance — and
that the fledgling company needed a persuasive
frontman with a sophisticated mind. ‘‘I am not
sure that Alex was the perfect person for it, but he
was by far the best person I knew,’’ Thiel told me.
‘‘You needed someone who was smart, scrappy,
who — I think he has a terrific sense for people. I
think he’s incredibly tenacious.’’
Still, Karp was not an obvious choice to run a
tech firm or any company, for that matter. Even
though he has now been Palantir’s chief executive
for 17 years and is a celebrity at Davos and other
elite gatherings, in some ways he still seems ill
38 10.25.20
suited to the task, a point he readily concedes.
He is a lifelong bachelor who is drawn to solitary
pursuits — his chief pastime is cross-country ski-
ing (he will do 40 to 60 kilometers a day when
time and weather permit). He doesn’t like to give
speeches or do interviews, and you will never see
him prowling a stage in the way that, say, Steve
Jobs once did. Backslapping and small talk are
not his thing, either. ‘‘Most businesspeople have
a slight politician inside them,’’ Karp said. ‘‘I don’t
have that inside me.’’
He said it would be helpful to Palantir if he were
more ‘‘norm-conforming.’’ I asked what norm-con-
forming looked like. ‘‘The way I see your life,’’ he
said. (I had filled him in on the details during a
previous conversation.) I was a little disappoint-
ed to learn that my conventionality — wife, kids,
dog — was so obvious, but I kept that to myself
and asked if he thought he could eventually marry.
Karp shook his head. ‘‘I fantasized about being
norm-conforming, but I don’t know how to do
that,’’ he said. ‘‘I just don’t know to do that, I don’t
know how it works, I wouldn’t know how to be
not transgressive. I try. I try really hard, really I do
. . . but it’s not working out.’’ (He did tell me later
that he had a girlfriend in Germany.) I suggest-
ed that his idiosyncratic personality didn’t seem
to be hurting Palantir. He disagreed. ‘‘We are an
enterprise company with enterprise clients,’’ he
said. ‘‘You think it is helpful having a fluorescent
praying mantis coming into their office, telling
them about German philosophy? Do you think
that’s helpful? I can tell you, it’s not helpful.’’
On the other hand, Karp had no doubt that he
was the right person to lead Palantir internally.
‘‘Once I stumbled on it,’’ he said, ‘‘it turned out
that I was built for certain things that are really
valuable, like managing very complex, sometimes
difficult — highly in many cases — technical soft-
ware engineers. There are just very few people
in the world built for that.’’ Among Palantirians,
‘‘Dr. Karp,’’ as he is known, commands something
approaching reverence. He appears to be a loyal
and generous boss. I also had the impression that
his employees serve a loco familia function for
him, which may go some way to explaining why,
before the pandemic, he spent roughly 300 days a
year on the road, circulating among Palantir’s 22
offices. And if, as he insists, his distinctive manner
is off-putting to clients, Karp believes it is crucial
to his ability to lead Palantir. ‘‘I manage the most
eclectic, creative group of 2,400 people perhaps
in the world,’’ he told me. ‘‘You need a way you
can bond, and my eccentric, nonstandard char-
acter is the bonding mechanism.’’
Karp and Thiel say they had two overarching
ambitions for Palantir early on. The first was to
make software that could help keep the country
safe from terrorism. The second was to prove
that there was a technological solution to the
challenge of balancing public safety and civil
liberties — a ‘‘Hegelian’’ aspiration, as Karp puts
it. Although political opposites, they both feared
that personal privacy would be a casualty of the
war on terrorism. When I met with Thiel at his
Los Angeles office, in a conference room with a
commanding view of the Hollywood Hills, he
used a whiteboard to illustrate those concerns.
With a black marker, he drew a graph. At the
end of one axis he wrote ‘‘Dick Cheney’’ and at
the other end he wrote ‘‘A.C.L.U.’’ Cheney, he
explained, represented ‘‘lots of security and no
privacy’’ while the A.C.L.U. was ‘‘lots of priva-
cy but little security.’’ Post 9/11, Thiel said, it
seemed inevitable that the Cheney view would
prevail. He then drew another axis, this one with
‘‘low-tech’’ at one end and ‘‘high-tech’’ at the
other. ‘‘Low-tech’’ was a catchall for crude, high-
ly intrusive technology. ‘‘High-tech,’’ he said,
was more effective but also less invasive. Thiel’s
fear was that we would end up with a combi-
nation of low-tech and Cheney, in which case
civil liberties would likely be crushed. He said
that he and Karp wanted to make software that
could help save lives but also preserve privacy.
‘‘Maybe there were still trade-offs, but they were
at a very different level,’’ he said.
To that end, Palantir’s software was created
with two primary security features: Users are able
to access only information they are authorized
to view, and the software generates an audit trail
that, among other things, indicates if someone
has tried to obtain material off-limits to them.
But the data, which is stored in various cloud ser-
vices or on clients’ premises, is controlled by the
customer, and Palantir says it does not police the
use of its products. Nor are the privacy controls
foolproof; it is up to the customers to decide who
gets to see what and how vigilant they wish to
be. The potential for abuse seems vast, especially
in the United States, where digital-privacy laws
are not nearly as stringent as in Europe. In 2018,
Bloomberg Businessweek broke the story of a
rogue JP Morgan Chase employee who had used
Palantir’s software to spy on colleagues, read-
ing their emails and tracking their movements.
Even some of the bank’s senior executives were
unknowingly surveilled.
Over the years, Palantir has been embroiled
in several controversies that have raised doubts
about its own trustworthiness. In 2011, the hacker
collective Anonymous released emails it had taken
from a third party showing that Palantir employ-
ees were involved in a proposed misinformation
campaign to discredit WikiLeaks and to smear
some of its supporters, notably Glenn Green-
wald. Though no one was fired, Karp personally
apologized to Greenwald. (When I asked Karp
about the episode, he chalked it up to ‘‘growing
pains.’’) Palantir was also implicated in the Cam-
bridge Analytica scandal. Christopher Wylie, the
former Cambridge Analytica employee-turned-
whistle-blower, claimed that Palantir helped the
firm harvest Facebook data that was then used
on behalf of the Trump campaign. Palantir, which
has a policy of not working on elections, said the
matter involved just one employee in its London
office and that the person was fired.
For those made nervous by Palantir, the com-
pany’s work with police departments has been
a source of particular worry. Of all the ways that
Big Data can be used, perhaps none generates
greater attention than predictive policing, in
which quantitative analyses are used to identify
places that seem especially prone to crime and
individuals who are likely to commit or fall vic-
tim to a crime. To critics, data-driven policing
encourages overly aggressive tactics and rein-
forces racial biases that have long plagued the
criminal-justice system. Palantir’s effort to market
its software to police departments can also be
regarded as an example of how weapons original-
ly meant for the war on terrorism are now being
deployed on American streets. ‘‘This is a tool
designed to enhance government surveillance
now being redirected on the domestic popula-
tion,’’ says Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor
of law at American University who has written
extensively about policing and technology.
That said, Palantir has struggled to drum up
business from police departments. The New York
Police Department stopped using Palantir a few
years ago, as did the New Orleans Police Depart-
ment. Not long before, concerns had been raised
about how the N.O.P.D. was using the data. These
days, the only major metropolitan force using
Palantir is the Los Angeles Police Department.
Before traveling to Los Angeles last December,
I reached out to the L.A.P.D., asking to interview
officials about Palantir. My request was turned
down. But Sarah Brayne, now an assistant pro-
fessor of sociology at the University of Texas at
Austin, had better luck.
In 2013, when Brayne was a doctoral candi-
date at Princeton researching the use of data in
policing, members of the L.A.P.D. allowed her
to study their deployment of new technologies.
Over the next two years, she enjoyed consid-
erable access to the department, interviewing
dozens of officers and going on ride-alongs in
patrol cars. It became apparent to her that Palan-
tir’s software was having a significant impact. For
instance, Palantir’s network analysis — its ability
to identify a person’s friends, relatives, colleagues
and other relations — was pulling people into
the L.A.P.D.’s surveillance system who otherwise
wouldn’t have been.
Brayne’s findings will be included in a book
coming out next month called ‘‘Predict and
Surveil.’’ In it, she quotes one L.A.P.D. captain
who inadvertently confirmed the worst suspi-
cions about the use of data analytics in policing.
‘‘Let’s say I have something going on with the
medical-marijuana clinics where they’re getting
robbed,’’ he told Brayne. ‘‘I can put in an alert to
Palantir that says anything that has to do with med-
ical marijuana plus robbery, plus male, Black, six
foot. I like throwing the net out there, you know?’’
Racial profiling was just one obvious risk. Among
the many data streams available to the L.A.P.D. via
Palantir were automatic license-plate readers, and
it was easy enough to conjure nightmare scenar-
ios. A detective could conceivably use that infor-
mation to squeeze a reluctant witness — say, by
finding out he was having an affair. Someone in the
L.A.P.D. could possibly keep tabs on his ex-wife’s
comings and goings. Brayne told me that what
most troubled her about the L.A.P.D.’s use of data
was it opaqueness. ‘‘Digital surveillance is invisi-
ble,’’ she said. ‘‘How are you supposed to hold an
institution accountable when you don’t know what
they are doing?’’
A great deal of the controversy that dogs Palan-
tir can also be attributed to Thiel, whose activities
have raised some doubt about his commitment
to democratic society and fair play. In the past,
Thiel has argued that democracy and econom-
ic freedom are incompatible and suggested that
giving women the vote had undermined the latter.
After Gawker reported that he was gay, he secretly
financed the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that bankrupt-
ed the website. Last year, The Wall Street Journal
reported that Thiel had been urging Mark Zuck-
erberg not to censor political ads on Facebook.
Thiel’s comments and activities occasionally get
in the way of Palantir’s messaging. Karp gave a
talk in Washington in September last year in which
he said that the only justifiable use of facial-rec-
ognition technology by law enforcement was to
exonerate people. A few months later, The Times
reported that Thiel had helped finance a start-up
called Clearview AI, whose facial-recognition app
was being used by police departments around the
country to charge individuals with crimes. Thiel’s
investment in Clearview seemed to contradict
Karp’s position and also raised questions about
the sincerity of the views he had expressed regard-
ing civil liberties and privacy.
When I asked Thiel about the risk of abuse
with Palantir, he answered by referring to the
company’s literary roots. ‘‘The Palantir device in
the Tolkien books was a very ambiguous device in
some ways,’’ he said. ‘‘There were a lot of people
who looked into it and saw more than they should
see, and things went badly wrong when they did.’’
But that didn’t mean the Palantir itself was flawed.
‘‘The Tolkien point I always make is that at the end
of the day, it was actually a good device that was
critical to the plot of the whole story. The way it
worked was that Aragorn looked into the Palantir,
and he showed Sauron the sword with which the
One Ring had been cut off Sauron’s fingers at the
end of the Second Age. This convinced Sauron that
Aragorn had the One Ring and caused Sauron to
launch a premature attack that emptied out Mor-
dor and enabled the hobbits to sneak in to destroy
the One Ring.’’ He continued: ‘‘The plot action was
driven by the Palantir being used for good, not
for evil. This reflected Tolkien’s cosmology that
something that was made by the good elves would
ultimately be used for good.’’
A moment later, he added: ‘‘That’s roughly how
I see it, that it is ultimately good and still very dan-
gerous. In some ways, I think that was reflected in
the choice of the name.’’
In the late aughts, Palantir began pitching its
technology to the U.S. military. The Army had
equipped its troops with a battlefield-intelligence
platform that was doing a poor job of protecting
them, but it had sunk billions of dollars into the
system and was unreceptive to Palantir. So Palantir
started offering its software directly to individual
battalions in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the end of
2011, about three dozen units across the military
were using Palantir, and some were raving about
its ability to steer them clear of ambushes and
roadside bombs. According to Fortune magazine,
a few senior military figures had become fans, too,
among them Gen. James Mattis, Lt. Gen. H. R.
McMaster and Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn.
In 2012, the Army commissioned an assessment
of Palantir. According to a draft of the report that
Palantir produced during litigation, 96 percent
of military personnel surveyed deemed Palantir’s
software to be effective. But rather than embracing
Palantir, officials appeared to ignore the report.
Two years later, the Army finally conceded that the
intelligence system it was providing to troops was
inoperable and began soliciting bids to develop a
replacement. It refused, however, to allow Palantir
to take part because its software was an off-the-
shelf product, and the Army was only willing to
entertain proposals for building a new system
from scratch. In June 2016, Palantir sued the Army,
and three months later, a federal court ruled in its
favor. The judge said the Army had acted in ‘‘an
arbitrary and capricious manner’’ and ordered it
to open up the competition to Palantir.
The protracted battle with the Army is now
corporate lore at Palantir, a story that encapsu-
lates how the company sees itself — the scrappy
outsider, dedicated to ensuring that good software
triumphs over bad. In truth, the saga was slightly
more complicated than that. For one thing, Palan-
tir hired lawyers and lobbyists to plead its case and
cultivated some prominent allies, such as Senator
John McCain. Jonathan Wong, a former Marine
and now a policy researcher at the RAND Cor-
poration, says that the Army wasn’t necessarily
acting out of malice toward Palantir. It wanted
a more comprehensive battlefield-intelligence
system than Palantir was offering at the time, one
that could be used against ‘‘what we are fighting
today and what we will be facing tomorrow,’’ as
he puts it. But Wong, whose dissertation at RAND
focused in part on the early relationship between
Palantir and the Pentagon, says that Palantir’s soft-
ware was better for the counterinsurgency and
counterterrorism challenges that the military was
facing at the time.
The federal court’s decision was handed down
eight days before Trump was elected president.
Depending on how you see it, the timing was
The New York Times Magazine 39
either merely coincidental or portentous. With
Trump’s victory, Palantir was suddenly among
the best-connected companies in Washington.
Thiel had been one of Trump’s most prominent
supporters, and Mattis, McMaster and Flynn all
ended up with senior positions in the new admin-
istration. The Trump years have been a bonanza
for Palantir. Since Trump took office, it has won
military contracts worth billions, including an
$800 million contract to build the replacement
battlefield-intelligence system. Palantir also
has contracts with a number of civilian depart-
ments and agencies, among them the I.R.S., the
S.E.C. and the C.D.C. The U.S. government now
accounts for around half its business.
There appear to have been no allegations of
impropriety around the military contracts that
Palantir has won under Trump. But the military
procurement process has not been immune to
the ethical concerns that have swirled around
his presidency. Last year, Amazon filed a lawsuit
claiming that it had been passed over for a $10
billion defense contract because the Pentagon had
yielded to pressure from Trump, who had repeat-
edly attacked the company’s founder and chief
executive, Jeff Bezos, and who had also publicly
stated that he did not want Amazon to get the deal.
Karp told me the idea that Palantir had benefit-
ed from Thiel’s support of Trump was ‘‘complete-
ly ludicrous,’’ and he bemoaned ‘‘the unfairness
it creates toward us.’’ Whatever good will Thiel
enjoyed with Trump, he said, was offset by his own
opposition. ‘‘I think they already know my views
at the White House,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s true Peter is
chairman, [but] I’m running the company, I don’t
have close ties with the Trump administration.’’
Still, he acknowledged that he was worried about
‘‘the guilt by association thing’’ — the possibility
that Palantir could be tarnished by its perceived
links to Trump. Even so, he refused to back away
from the most damaging connection, Palantir’s
work with ICE.
Palantir’s client relationships are sometimes
born in moments of crisis. That was true with
French intelligence, and it was also the case with
ICE, which sought Palantir’s assistance after one
of its agents was assassinated by a Mexican drug
cartel. According to the company, it took Palantir’s
engineers 11 hours to merge all of the relevant data,
and within two weeks the killers were identified
and arrested. ICE subsequently awarded Palantir
a contract to help manage the data of Homeland
Security Investigations, or H.S.I., the ICE subdivi-
sion that handles drug smuggling, human traffick-
ing, financial crimes and cybercrimes. Palantir’s
relationship with ICE attracted little notice before
Trump’s presidency. But it became deeply con-
troversial as Trump made good on his campaign
pledge to curb illegal immigration.
Initially, Palantir tried to deflect criticism by
pointing out that its contracts were with H.S.I., not
Enforcement and Removal Operations, or E.R.O.,
the subdivision that was spearheading Trump’s
40 10.25.20
policy. ‘‘We do not work for E.R.O,’’ the company
said in a statement to The Times in 2018. That may
have been technically true, but it wrongly implied
that Palantir was playing no part in the crackdown.
In the years before, H.S.I. had supported E.R.O.
in a continuing operation to arrest and possibly
deport family members of undocumented chil-
dren who were caught trying to cross the border.
And last year, H.S.I. led a raid on food-processing
plants in Mississippi in which nearly 700 people
were arrested. Interviewed by CNBC at Davos in
January, Karp appeared to concede that Palantir’s
previous disavowals were no longer operative.
‘‘It’s a de minimis part of our work, finding people
in our country who are undocumented,’’ he said.
But Jacinta González of the advocacy group
Mijente contends that even that comment was
‘‘totally false’’ and that Palantir’s software has
played an integral role. She notes that ICE itself
describes Palantir’s software as ‘‘mission critical,’’
underscoring its importance to the government
agency. She claims that in recent years, ICE
raids on undocumented individuals became
much more targeted — agents seem to know
exactly whom they are looking for and where to
find them, which had not always been the case.
González says it was clear to her and her col-
leagues that ICE had somehow obtained access
to a wealth of personal information about those
individuals and had also acquired data-analytics
capabilities that allowed it to operate with great-
er precision. With the help of a research firm
that examined government documents, Mijente
concluded that Palantir’s software was helping
to power ICE’s crackdown. ‘‘[Palantir] created
something tailor-made for ICE to be able to run
the kind of raids it wants,’’ González says. ‘‘To
say that they are not included in enforcement is
kind of laughable.’’
Last year, Mijente and other groups held pro-
tests outside Palantir’s offices in New York and
Palo Alto, as well as outside Karp’s Palo Alto home
(Mijente also organized demonstrations in the
lead-up to Palantir’s recent public listing). Stu-
dent organizations at colleges and universities
across the country also spoke out against Palantir.
For years, the company had sponsored a con-
ference on privacy law held at the University of
California, Berkeley. But the organizers dropped
Palantir after participants pressured them to cut
ties to the firm. There was also dissent within
Palantir: More than 200 employees sent a letter to
Karp expressing their concern over ICE. Thiel’s
political activities weren’t helping. On one of the
days that I was with Karp in Paris, Thiel co-host-
ed a fund-raiser for a former Kansas secretary
of state, Kris Kobach, known for his hard-line
anti-immigration position.
A few weeks after I saw Karp in Paris, I visited him
at a home that he owns in Vermont. When I drove
up the dirt road leading to the cabin-style house, a
couple of bodyguards greeted me. Karp’s personal
assistant then came out and took me into the
house, where Karp was waiting at the dining-room
table. Suitcases were lined up against a wall. Karp
had spent the morning roller skiing. He arrived
the night before, and I assumed he was staying
for the weekend. But he was going to Boston later
that afternoon for a meeting and then heading to
Europe. After lunch, we spent a couple of hours
hiking. Two of Karp’s bodyguards trailed us by a
few feet while two others waited in the parking
lot. We talked at length about ICE. He noted that
other tech companies had contracts with ICE, yet
activists seemed to be directing most of their ire at
Palantir, which he took as a backhanded compli-
ment. ‘‘People understand we have these powerful
platforms and that the platforms actually work,’’
he said, adding that maybe the protesters were
ignoring the other companies because their tech-
nology was ‘‘not as effectual.’’
Karp made clear that he was opposed to Trump’s
immigration policies: ‘‘There are lots of reasons
I don’t support the president; this is actually also
one of them.’’ He told me that he was ‘‘personally
very OK with changing the demographics of our
country’’ but that a secure border was something
that progressives should embrace. ‘‘I’ve been a
progressive my whole life,’’ he said. ‘‘My family’s
progressive, and we were never in favor of open
borders.’’ He said borders ‘‘ensure that wages
increase. It’s a progressive position.’’ When the
left refuses to seriously address border security
and immigration, he said, the right inevitably wins.
To the extent that Palantir was helping to preserve
public order, it was ‘‘empirically keeping the West
more center-left.’’
But he claimed that if ICE had sought Palantir’s
services after Trump took office, he probably would
have balked. ‘‘I’m not sure I would feel strongly
about doing it,’’ he said. ‘‘We probably wouldn’t do
the contract. But that’s different than pulling the
plug.’’ Karp said that Palantir couldn’t break with
ICE because doing so would mark it as an unreli-
able partner in the eyes of the military. If Palantir
walked away from ICE, he said, it would send a
horrible message to soldiers who depend on Palan-
tir’s software. ‘‘Why would a war fighter believe you
aren’t going to do the same thing to them when
they’re in the middle of a battle?’’ he asked.
He told me that Palantir has rejected some
potential clients because it was worried about
how they might use its software. It had spurned a
lucrative offer from the Saudi government because
of Riyadh’s human rights record, he said, and had
likewise turned down a major tobacco company.
Karp said that he found it hard personally to see
Palantir accused of facilitating racism. But he told
me that he had been reluctant to talk about his
mother because ‘‘I don’t want to instrumentalize
her’’ and also because ‘‘I don’t think the emotional
argument is as persuasive as people think.’’
Instead, Karp was trying to initiate a broad-
er debate about Silicon Valley and U.S. nation-
al security. He had a convenient cudgel at his
disposal: In 2018, Google withdrew from Proj-
ect Maven, the Pentagon’s artificial-intelligence
program, after facing resistance from some
employees, who didn’t think the company should
be involved in the development of potentially
lethal weapons. Karp had elsewhere criticized
Google’s decision as ‘‘borderline craven’’ and had
sarcastically called the Google employees ‘‘super-
woke engineers.’’ In his view, Project Maven was
nothing less than the Manhattan Project of the
21st century, and, as with the atomic bomb, the
country that gained a military edge with artificial
intelligence would ‘‘determine the world order
tomorrow.’’ What he didn’t say publicly was that
Palantir had replaced Google on parts of the proj-
ect. (Karp couldn’t confirm that, but I confirmed
it, and it has been reported elsewhere.)
Karp insisted that Palantir was more in step
with public opinion in the United States than Goo-
gle and other Silicon Valley giants were. ‘‘We’re
making Western institutions strong and, in some
cases, dominant,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s our narrative.
Now, that’s probably not a popular narrative in the
Valley. It’s a very popular narrative in the rest of
America. What’s Google’s narrative? ‘We destroy
the media, we divide the country, we take away
your job, we get rich, and by the way, when the
country needs you, we’re nowhere to be found.’ ’’
He added that if the ‘‘Google standard takes hold,
the single biggest strategic asset America has,
which is our ability to produce software platforms,
will be taken out of the hands of our war fighters.
And that de facto means our adversaries are in a
much stronger position.’’
But if Karp’s broadsides against Google were
meant to ease public pressure on Palantir, it didn’t
seem to work. When it was announced in April
that Palantir had been awarded the H.H.S. con-
tracts, a backlash ensued. Progressive groups,
human rights organizations and members of
Congress criticized the deals. The main con-
cern was that the Trump administration might
use information collected by H.H.S. to target
immigrants. In a six-page letter sent in July to
the H.H.S. secretary, Alex Azar, Senator Elizabeth
Warren and 15 other congressional Democrats
cited the immigration issue and said that their res-
ervations about the deal were ‘‘compounded by
the fact that Palantir has a history of contracting
with ICE.’’ (An H.H.S. spokesperson says that the
data it collects as part of its Covid response does
not include personally identifiable information
and is not being shared with ICE.) Last month,
Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and
Jesús García, pointing to Palantir’s contracts with
H.H.S. and other aspects of its business, asked the
S.E.C. to investigate the company before allowing
it to go public. Their request evidently had no
effect, but it was an indication of how Palantir has
come to be viewed in progressive circles.
Palantir is not without Democratic allies. James
Carville is an informal adviser to the company,
and Palantir’s technology was used extensively by
42 10.25.20
the Obama administration. When Senator Kama-
la Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nom-
inee, was California’s attorney general, her office
turned to Palantir for help creating a statewide
law-enforcement database. But living down the
controversy over ICE may not be easy. Perhaps
an interesting analogue, raised in a column last
year by the Times writer Kevin Roose, is Dow
Chemical, which produced the napalm that the
U.S. military used in Vietnam — a fact that would
gut its reputation for decades to come. Even if
Palantir’s business ultimately doesn’t suffer, its
image has unquestionably been harmed.
In June, Palantir filed to go public, and its stock
debuted on Sept. 30. The company eschewed an
initial public offering in favor of a direct listing,
in which no new shares were created or issued. In
the prospectus that it submitted to the Securities
and Exchange Commission, Palantir announced
that it had moved its headquarters from Palo
Alto to Denver, formalizing its break from Sil-
icon Valley. Karp used his introductory letter
to drive home the point. He slammed what he
called ‘‘the engineering elite of Silicon Valley,’’
said that Palantir had found itself increasingly
alienated from the values of the tech industry
and reaffirmed the company’s commitment to
working with the U.S. military and to defending
the West. ‘‘We have chosen sides,’’ Karp wrote, a
comment that seemed to imply that Silicon Valley
had chosen the opposite side.
The decision to go public represented an
about-face for a company that had resisted
doing so even as it was being hyped as a next-
generation Silicon Valley unicorn. Just before I
saw Karp in Paris, he had announced to employ-
ees that the company would be remaining private
for awhile longer. Karp told me that Palantir had
never had trouble raising money and that he wor-
ried about the effect a public listing might have
on its culture. Thiel just didn’t think that the time
was right. He said that ‘‘it still feels to me like
we’re nowhere near the point where this is the
kind of ubiquitous platform’’ that would, in his
view, have justified taking Palantir public.
A few days after Palantir’s stock debuted, I
spoke to Karp via video link. He was in Switzer-
land. He had spent the first few months of the
pandemic at a house he owns in New Hampshire,
not far from his place in Vermont, before leaving
for Europe in July. He was in good spirits, as you
would expect of someone who had officially just
become a billionaire (he owns at least 6 percent
of Palantir). He said that, as an introvert, the
lockdown had been no great burden for him. He
missed, however, seeing his parents (both reside
in the Philadelphia area) and his colleagues.
Some observers had suggested that Palantir’s
decision to go public had been driven in part by
the prospect of a Trump loss; it was cashing in
while its government business was still flourish-
ing. But Karp insisted the election had nothing to
do with it — federal contracts, he said, were large-
ly apolitical, and a change in the White House
was unlikely to affect Palantir. He also noted
that he was supporting Biden and was about to
make a donation to his campaign. He told me
that Palantir had gone public because its busi-
ness had matured to the point that it now made
sense. Despite the pandemic, he said, the com-
pany’s revenue had been up 49 percent during
the first six months of the year. More import-
ant, he added, Palantir had tweaked its Foundry
software so that it could now be installed and
updated remotely, which would make it easier
to win new business. ‘‘Out of nowhere,’’ he said,
‘‘the company was in a technical and financial
position’’ to go public.
Investors weren’t so sure. In its prospectus,
Palantir reported that it was still losing hundreds
of millions of dollars: $580 million in 2019, follow-
ing a similar loss the year before. It also disclosed
that just three customers accounted for roughly
30 percent of its revenue. (Palantir’s governance
structure was another concern: Karp, Thiel and
Stephen Cohen will retain just under 50 percent
of the voting power, as long as their holdings of
securities meet a certain minimum.) For years,
Palantir had often been portrayed as a colos-
sus. But its financials appeared to tell a different
story, and some critics went so far as to suggest
that Palantir was barely a viable business. The
day before the company’s stock started trading,
CNBC interviewed Scott Galloway, a professor
at New York University’s Stern School of Busi-
ness, who was caustic. Palantir, he said, was ‘‘crap
being flung at tourists to the unicorn zoo.’’
To Galloway, Palantir is just more Silicon Val-
ley smoke and mirrors (even if it is no longer
based in the valley). To Karp, Palantir is nothing
less than a bulwark of liberal democracy — and
maybe all that stands between him and the real-
ization of his worst fear, a world succumbing to
fascism. To Ben Wizner, the director of the Amer-
ican Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and
Technology project, Palantir’s business model
is predicated on an assumption that its clients
should have ‘‘legitimate access to every detail
of our lives,’’ and the company’s software is a
mechanism by which the government can keep
an ever closer watch on us. To Airbus, Palantir is
a tool that enhances efficiency and profitability.
To Mijente, Palantir is an accessory to human
rights violations. To the United Nations World
Food Program, which earlier this month was
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its work on
Covid-19 relief, Palantir’s technology has played
a key role in its effort to get food and supplies
distributed amid the pandemic.
What Palantir does is complicated and myste-
rious. As with the magical stones for which it is
named, people seem to see in it what they want
to see. I thought Karp put it pretty nicely. ‘‘Palan-
tir,’’ he said, ‘‘is the convergence of software and
difficult positions.’’
Puzzles

SPELLING BEE FREEWHEELING YIN-YANG

By Frank Longo
How many common words of 5 or more letters can
you spell using the letters in the hive? Every answer
must use the center letter at least once. Letters may
be reused in a word. At least one word will use all 7
letters. Proper names and hyphenated words are not
allowed. Score 1 point for each answer, and 3 points
for a word that uses all 7 letters.
Rating: 6 = good; 12 = excellent; 18 = genius
C Business where employees are constantly running off?
By Patrick Berry By Wei-Hwa Huang
Wheel answers are six letters long and circle their Put a white or dark circle in each cell so that all the white
correspondingly numbered hexagons, starting in one circles are connected along their edges in an unbroken
of the six adjoining spaces and reading clockwise or chain and all the dark circles are connected along their
counterclockwise. Rim answers read clockwise around edges in an unbroken chain. No two-by-two set of cells
the grid’s shaded perimeter, one after the other, can be all white or all dark.
starting in the circled space.
Ex.
WHEELS
1. Corporate bigwig 2. “Peanuts” pooch 3. Draw
in 4. A-lister’s opposite (hyph.) 5. Response to a well-
placed zinger (2 wds.) 6. Come together as a
>
group (2 wds.) 7. Mollycoddle
RIM
(2 wds.) • Ill ___ (infamy) • Metropolis

W D
O 1 2
U N
3 4 5
T
6 7

Our list of words, worth 20 points, appears with last week’s answers.

ACROSTIC
1 K 2 A 3 X 4 N 5 E 6 W 7 S 8 B 9 M 10 Z 11 V 12 C 13 D 14 G 15 J 16 P 17 L 18 X 19 Q 20 U

21 H 22 Y 23 R 24 W 25 O 26 N 27 F 28 C 29 A 30 V 31 L 32 B 33 K 34 T 35 G 36 I 37 D 38 O 39 R 40 Y 41 J

By Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon 42 Q 43 P 44 C 45 E 46 X 47 L 48 H 49 N 50 W 51 V 52 Z 53 D 54 A 55 F 56 P 57 U 58 S 59 O 60 I 61 B 62 K

Guess the words defined below 63 Z 64 C 65 R 66 H 67 E 68 Q 69 G 70 V 71 U 72 X 73 B 74 P 75 T 76 A 77 J 78 S 79 W 80 M 81 H 82 Y 83 E 84 L

and write them over their numbered
dashes. Then transfer each letter to 85 N 86 D 87 Q 88 B 89 Z 90 V 91 G 92 P 93 T 94 O 95 J 96 E 97 X 98 C 99 N 100 U 101 M 102 I 103 Q 104 S 105 F
the correspondingly numbered square
in the pattern. Black squares indicate 106 R 107 V 108 G 109 K 110 C 111 O 112 A 113 N 114 E 115 B 116 L 117 T 118 Y 119 W 120 Z 121 U 122 P 123 Q 124 V 125 G 126 R 127 M 128 O

word endings. The filled pattern will

129 C 130 D 131 L 132 J 133 Z 134 A 135 U 136 B 137 S 138 I 139 W 140 V 141 R 142 Y 143 M 144 D 145 C 146 Z 147 F 148 Q 149 K
contain a quotation reading from left
to right. The first letters of the guessed
150 G 151 B 152 E 153 H 154 T 155 X 156 L 157 N 158 W 159 J 160 R 161 M 162 Y 163 G 164 A 165 Q 166 P 167 E 168 C 169 T 170 V 171 I
words will form an acrostic giving the
author’s name and the title of the work.

A. Pet’s plaything (2 wds.) H. Home of the Shoshone-Bannock N. Creatures with wings and pincers U. Tribe of the Lake Superior region
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Tribes ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
29 54 164 76 134 2 112 ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 85 4 99 26 49 157 113 57 71 121 100 20 135
B. School with an emphasis on spelling? 66 153 81 48 21 O. Discarded computers, e.g. (hyph.) V. Stories of Pecos Bill or the Pied
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ I. Pandora’s box and the 12 labors of ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ Piper (2 wds.)
115 61 73 8 88 136 32 151 Hercules, e.g. 25 38 111 94 128 59
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
C. Enhancer of many a gothic ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ P. Cuts for some punky trick-or- 51 70 30 170 140 11 124 90 107
Halloween character (2 wds.) 60 171 102 36 138 treaters W. Roster of those worth rostering
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ J. Enemy of the heroine in Madeline ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ (2 wds.)
16 92 74 166 56 43 122
44 168 98 28 145 64 12 129 110 Miller’s “Circe” ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
Q. Ghost, illusion; figment of the
D. Bad egg ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 79 24 139 50 119 158 6
imagination
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 15 159 95 132 41 77 X. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
53 13 130 144 37 86 K. Butler to the Addams family ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ author
148 103 19 165 123 42 68 87
E. Flipped over ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ R. Iranian city once Persia’s capital ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 109 149 1 62 33 72 155 97 46 18 3
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
96 67 167 152 5 114 83 45 L. Knight who rode to rescue an 160 65 23 39 141 106 126 Y. Vampire played by Tom Cruise
F. Mother goddess in “Avatar” accused witch S. Wiles of a trickster ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ 22 118 40 162 142 82
55 147 105 27 156 84 17 47 131 31 116 58 7 137 104 78 Z. Wonderland’s owner of the Cheshire
G. Anathema to vampires M. What futile efforts come to T. Darkness personified Cat, with “the”
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
35 108 91 150 125 14 163 69 161 9 101 127 80 143 75 117 34 154 93 169 89 52 63 120 146 10 133

44
 Answers to puzzles of 10.18.20
TITLE BASIN’
Y O S H I M A U D E T O A S T
A S T O N S L U G F E S T S E L B O W
L S A T S L I F E O F P I E A D O R E
L O R D D E A F I C E D C U T E
T E N D E R I S T H E K N I G H T
I N A S N A P N U K E S I D E A T E S
M O N K E Y S N O M T O E P I C K
A R E C A N D I E D M R I
Y A W N S O R L Y N U I T T E E U P
O H S T O P R O O M E D
I N S E A R C H O F L O S T T H Y M E
A D O E G O A W R A P E V E O O F
R O V E R S N I D E E L E N A
F L A X G A P I L L A V A E T S Y
T H E L I T T L E P R I N T S
S W E A R S T O H E A D S L A P
H E A R S T S P E E D O S S H I R A Z
E N S N A R E G O T O N S C I E N C E
I S A J U L I U S S E E S H E R O K S
D E B O D E O N S P E N T L E T
I I I B E A N A L E S D R Y

KENKEN

DIAGRAMLESS
T R I C K S H O T
B E A T L E M A N I A
A C C E L E R O M E T E R
N B C L A R K S R E M
A A S T I E P A N
B T U M G S E C O
O A R A A H L A V
U S D A O R N O T E L B A
T H E S T O R K P O S T M A R K
A S T H M A W A H I N E
T R E A T L I K E D I R T
C R E A M A L E S
O L A S P Y A D A
L I S P S R O G E T

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
D E
N A P O L
B U T A N T

H A L
E O N
L O W E
E B A
I
E N
I
L
I
L

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.
CRAZY EIGHTS YIN-YANG
A B M A
C E O B
O R T H O D O X
A Q U A R I U M
C L A V I C L E
C U L I N A R Y
L O G T
Y R S E

S D G E
H U E Y
C H I M N E Y S
Z E P P E L I N
J O Y S T I C K
P L A T I N U M
R E C E
D R S R

Answers to puzzle on Page 52

the beehive, feel free to include them in your score.
wound. If you found other legitimate dictionary words in
downtown, dunno, outdo, unwound, wonton, woodcut,
condo, conduct, cotton, cottonwood, count, cutout, donut,
Countdown (3 points). Also: Coconut, cocoon, concoct,
SPELLING BEE

KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. © 2020 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved. 45
Puzzles Edited by Will Shortz

AT THE HALLOWEEN PLAY . . . 1

18
2 3 4 5

19
6

20
7 8

21
9 10 11 12

22
13 14 15 16 17

By Peter A. Collins
23 24 25

Peter A. Collins is the chairman of the math department 26 27 28 29

at Huron High School, in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he has taught
for 40 years. He has been married for 33 years and has four 30 31 32 33 34 35

adult daughters, all still in the Ann Arbor area. The genesis of
36 37 38 39 40 41 42
this puzzle was hearing about an actor who had [answer at
48-Across]. That made him think of Frankenstein, and an idea 43 44 45 46 47
was born. This is Peter’s 114th crossword for The Times. — W.S.
48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59
ACROSS 78 Vocal critics
1 Reposed 81 Hooded jacket 60 61 62 63 64 65
6 Ruler divisions: Abbr. 84 Great Lake name
66 67 68 69 70 71
9 Objective 85 . . . the ghost had ____
12 Source of stress for a 88 Amazon, for one 72 73 74 75
returning vacationer 90 Old-timey title
76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83
18 Homes staffed with 91 No-go area, in brief
butlers, say
92 . . . the vampire never ____ 84 85 86 87
20 Heartburn-relief brand
99 ‘‘Evil Woman’’ group, for 88 89 90 91
22 Snapple competitor short
23 At the Halloween play, when 100 Most common English 92 93 94 95 96 97 98
the black cat appeared, the letter, in Morse code
____ 99 100 101 102 103 104 105
101 Joyce Carol with two
25 Really bother O. Henry Awards 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114
26 Sound of a candy wrapper 102 Slumps
27 Collectibles-like ticket 106 Send emojis, say 115 116 117 118
stubs and matchbooks
108 Southern shade trees 119 120 121
29 Glassy square?

30 ‘‘Critique of Pure Reason’’
philosopher
31 Enemy of Bowser in video
games
33 Music producer Gotti
35 Fr. religious title
36 . . . the skeleton gave a ____
43 Belle of a ball
46 Bradley or Patton: Abbr.
47 Citrus fruit with a
portmanteau name
48 . . . Frankenstein had ____
53 One of the kids on
‘‘Stranger Things’’
57 Most common U.S. street
name, surprisingly
58 Scarecrow portrayer
59 Blanket that’s worn
60 Follow closely, as the curb
61 Pitcher Satchel in the
Baseball Hall of Fame
63 Chow
65 ‘‘Of course I remember
you!’’ often
66 Glasses, in slang
68 . . . the critics loved the
witch’s performance, ____
71 Tickled
72 Dragon-roll ingredient
73 Friendly
74 Prepare, as mushrooms
75 Vexation
76 Cassandra, for one
112 It gained its independence
from Ethiopia in 1991
115 Source of some tweets
117 . . . the mummy was a hit ____
119 Try to make out
120 Tot’s spot in a lot
121 Certain Bach compositions
122 Fitting anagram of
ANGER + E
123 In the style of
124 G.I.’s chow
125 Artoo-____
DOWN
1 Kiss
2 Oscar winner Dern
3 Finish with
4 Final destination, perhaps
5 Long haul
6 Title for Emma Bovary:
Abbr.
7 Appreciative cry
8 Arrive unnoticed
9 ‘‘As I Lay Dying’’ father
10 Two of Us?
11 Fashioned
12 Them’s fighting words!
13 ‘‘It’s Raining ____’’
14 ‘‘This minute!’’
15 Formal admission
16 Simple shelter
17 Glossy gown fabric
10/25/20
122 123 124 125
19 ‘‘30 Rock’’ was inspired by 61 Good thing to make or 89 Superfan
it, for short break 92 Do another take of
21 Apt thing to wear during 62 One of two for a tee
93 Number of sides on a
allergy season? 64 It might be pale or amber hendecagon
24 Mortar = sand + water + ____ 66 Late-night host Meyers 94 More crafty
28 Gymnastics event 67 Indiana city that’s 100
95 ____ ark
32 With skill miles west of Lima, Ohio
96 ____ Jeffries, chair of the
34 French towns 68 Pale
House Democratic Caucus
37 What you’re doing at every 69 Quaint ‘‘not’’
97 Them’s fighting words!
moment 70 Tidy up . . . or make less
tidy 98 Will matter
38 Bassoon attachment
71 Produce on a farm 103 Stop, in France
39 Buck
73 Poster heading 104 Reach
40 Like royal flushes
75 Spy’s collection 105 Have the final word
41 Beg
77 Billy in the Rock and Roll
42 Museum offering 107 ‘‘United States of ____,’’
Hall of Fame show for which Toni
43 Article of Cologne?
79 Not up Collette won an Emmy
44 She raised Cain
80 Fatty tuna, in Japanese 109 Cow, in Cádiz
45 Hit ABC dating show, with cuisine
‘‘The’’ 110 Bibliography abbr.
81 Lead-in to phobia
49 Component of béchamel 111 ____ vez (again, in Spanish)
82 Common sight at a cash-
sauce only bar 113 Record speed, for short
50 Celebration of a life, for 83 AM radio abbr. 114 Gadget that once came
short with a click wheel
85 Capone contemporary
51 Clouds (up) 116 Rip (on)
86 Bone: Prefix
52 Tickled
87 Like some Coast Guard 118 It might start with ‘‘I-’’:
54 Spam filter, of a sort rescues Abbr.
55 Capital of Samoa
Puzzles Online Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles:
56 Lentil, e.g. nytimes.com/crosswords ($39.95 a year). For the daily puzzle
59 Card’s place: Abbr. commentary: nytimes.com/wordplay.

46