Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The New Yorker - 02 08 2021
The New Yorker - 02 08 2021
The New Yorker - 02 08 2021
DRAWINGS Sofia Warren, P. C. Vey, Liza Donnelly, Brendan Loper, David Borchart,
Suerynn Lee, Elisabeth McNair, Will McPhail, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, William Haefeli, Roz Chast,
Hartley Lin, Maggie Larson, Michael Crawford, Amy Hwang SPOTS Daniel Salmieri
PROMOTION
CONTRIBUTORS
Nicholas Lemann (“The Diversity Ver- Louisa Thomas (“Queenside,” p. 28) is
dict,” p. 34), a staff writer, teaches at a staff writer and the author of three
Columbia University’s Graduate School books. She co-edited the anthology
of Journalism. His latest book is “Losers.”
“Transaction Man.”
Matthew Pillsbury (“Going Public,”
Ann Patchett (“Flight Plan,” p. 20) will p. 46) was the recipient of a 2014 Gug-
publish “These Precious Days” in No- genheim Fellowship. His photo book
vember. She is a co-owner of Parnassus “City Stages” came out in 2013.
Books, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Kate Baer (Poem, p. 65), the author of
Zach Helfand (“Going Public,” p. 46 ) the poetry collection “What Kind of
is a member of The New Yorker’s edi- Woman,” will publish “I Hope This
torial staff. Finds You Well” in November.
Diana Ejaita (Cover), an illustrator and Erik Agard (Puzzles & Games Dept.)
a textile designer, is based in Berlin and co-founded the Crossword Puzzle
Lagos. Collaboration Directory, a resource
for aspiring puzzle-makers from un-
Arthur Sze (Poem, p. 42) won the 2021 derrepresented groups.
Shelley Memorial Award from the Po-
etry Society of America. His most re- Tessa Hadley (Fiction, p. 60) has con-
cent book is “The Glass Constellation.” tributed short stories to The New Yorker
since 2002. Her new novel, “Free Love,”
Sheila Yasmin Marikar (The Talk of the will be out next year.
Town, p. 18) has been contributing to
the magazine since 2016. Her début Hua Hsu (Books, p. 69), a staff writer
novel, “The Goddess Effect,” is forth- since 2017, is the author of “A Floating
coming. Chinaman.”
Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
THE MAIL
OUT OF TIME ROCK-A-BYE BABY
Rachel Syme, in her piece about dead- In Sam Knight’s piece about the pros
lines, focusses on how they affect writ- and cons of engineering infant sleep, one
ers’ productivity (“Clock’s Ticking,” factor that went unmentioned was the
July 5th). Deadlines have also proved role of breast-feeding (“Dream Weaver,”
critical to the effective negotiation and June 28th). Having been a lactation con-
resolution of disputes. As a lawyer spe- sultant for decades, I can affirm that
cializing in mediation and alternative breast-feeding and babies’ sleep are closely
dispute resolution, I know this first- linked. Newborns are not generally able
hand. I was the administrator of the to sleep twelve hours at a time: breast
September 11th Victim Compensation milk is digested quickly, and babies’ small
Fund, through which more than five stomachs mean that they need to be fed
thousand victims and surviving fam- every few hours as newborns and at least
ily members received more than seven once or twice during the night for the
billion dollars in compensation. The first six months. Sleep trainers, often con-
fund required claimants to file within cerned with helping weary parents, don’t
thirty-three months to receive com- always realize that when a baby’s milk
pensation, which often amounted to supply is compromised the resultant stress
millions of dollars for a single claim— for the child is significant.
yet some two-thirds of the claimants Gabrielle Hathaway
waited until the last ninety days to file. West Brookfield, Mass.
In addition, deadlines are important
in “getting to yes” for adversaries locked I’m a clinical psychologist and the mother
in trial combat; otherwise, both sides of a four-month-old. I wish that Knight’s
will procrastinate. The ticking clock article, which gives much attention to the
frequently determines whether settle- possible consequences of sleep-training
ments will succeed or fail. one’s baby, had covered the benefits that
Kenneth R. Feinberg sleep training can have for the health of
Bethesda, Md. parents—especially mothers, who often
bear the brunt of nocturnal child care.
Syme touches on a key aspect of mod- Sleep deprivation is linked to suicidal ide-
ern life: the need to make your routines ation in mothers with postpartum de-
known. Anyone on social media is prob- pression, and poor maternal sleep is related
ably familiar with the “rise and grind” to symptoms of depression in both par-
types—the people who post about their ents. By not discussing the health prob-
5 A.M. boxing classes and their late nights lems that sleep-deprived parents can
at work, with no sign of a life in be- experience, the article inadvertently en-
tween, all while raising several kids and courages skepticism toward safe, evi-
running a startup. But lies, or at least dence-based sleep-training practices. Until
gross exaggerations, are the secret to we have more comprehensive parental- THE NEW YORKER
many of these life styles. As someone
who has founded startups in the past,
leave policies and more affordable child-
care options, I will sleep-train my child. RADIO HOUR
I have seen conference halls full of ide- By prioritizing my sleep, and my health,
alistic entrepreneurs touting productiv- I can be the best parent possible.
ity routines that border on the physi- Jasmine Mote
cally impossible. Unfortunately, the Somerville, Mass.
glorification of such extreme regimens
perpetuates the myth that one has to •
live that way to be successful. We’d all Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
be better off speaking more frankly about address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
our #productivity. themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
Nick Donald any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
Brooklyn, N.Y. of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
Throughout the two-thousands, the indie-rock band Bright Eyes recorded diaristic folk music that
eventually expanded into pop. Last year, the band emerged from hiatus with a new album called “Down
in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was,” its first since “The People’s Key,” from 2011. On July 31, its
multi-instrumentalists (including Conor Oberst, Miwi La Lupa, and Mike Mogis, pictured above) bring
their music to Forest Hills Stadium on their first tour in a decade; Lucy Dacus and Waxahatchee open.
PHOTOGRAPH BY WALKER PICKERING
1
ART
red drapes—includes the recriminating phrase
“These Are the First Curtains You’ve Bought
Church. The same year, she began a series of
twenty-nine screen prints, titled “Heroes and
That I’ve Liked.” Elsewhere, the artist insets Sheroes” (completed in 1969), now on view at
small, framed pictures into large ones, includ- the Kreps gallery. The compositions, which in-
Igshaan Adams ing an image of a woman in white, holding a corporate found imagery and texts, have the
Igshaan Adams has a tremendous gift for deli- baby, embedded in a dark field of flowers. This electricity and graphic immediacy of Warhol’s
cacy and a poet’s understanding of time, of how style of juxtaposition owes a debt to the work silk screens, but Kent used her mass-media ap-
it can erode and mark our daily lives. The queer of Deana Lawson, but Cadet’s vivid sense of propriation to more earnest ends. There is plenty
South African artist was raised in Bonteheuwel, place and lambent protagonists are distinctly of Pop art’s visual ebullience but none of its cool
a former segregated township in Cape Town, her own.—Johanna Fateman (deligallery.com) detachment in her chronicles of such subjects as
and his intricate, handwoven tapestries rely the Vietnam War’s devastation and the assassi-
on the materials of that world—plastic, beads, nations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther
rope, shells, the patterns of linoleum floors—to Corita Kent King, Jr. One print reproduces, in lurid red and
evoke a sense of home, and of the faith that he Once known as Sister Mary Corita, Kent left green, a Newsweek cover announcing its “Profile
found there. (Adams is a practicing Muslim.) the religious order of the Immaculate Heart of the Viet Cong,” which she augments with an
In his current show at the Casey Kaplan gallery, of Mary in 1968—the prolific artist faced re- abolitionist diagram of a slave ship and—for a
the artist pairs his textiles with tumbleweeds sistance to her radical views from the Catholic glimmer of spiritual reprieve—a poem by Walt
of wire, a physical manifestation of apartheid,
in a series titled “Getuie (Witness).” South
Africa’s history informs the melancholy tone AT THE GALLERIES
of Adams’s exhibition, but he has us look up at
the stars, too, in such supremely beautiful works
as the blue, worn, and iridescent “Veld Wen,”
which gives the exhibition its name.—Hilton
Als (caseykaplangallery.com)
Nikolai Astrup
Have you ever heard of this Norwegian artist,
a younger contemporary of Edvard Munch?
If so, you’re either a rare bird or Norwegian.
An enchanting Astrup exhibition—the first in
North America—at the Clark Art Institute, in
Williamstown, Massachusetts, startled me with
densely composed, brilliantly colored paintings
and wizardly woodcuts, mostly landscapes of
mountains, forests, bodies of water, humble farm
buildings, and gardens (among other things, the
artist was a passionate amateur horticulturalist),
with occasional inklings of mysticism relating
to native folklore. A receding row of grain poles
could be a sinister parade of trolls, and the shape
of a pollarded tree in winter evokes a writhing,
unhappy supernatural being. Astrup is, argu-
ably, the most popular artist in Norway—ahead
of Munch, who, I’ve been told, makes school-
children sad—but is largely unknown beyond
its borders. How could that happen? Astrup’s
case has me wondering about alternative in-
stances of reputations, ones that are caught in
obscure eddies of the art-historical mainstream,
relating sideways rather than centrally to hege-
monic movements. We are too habituated to the
canonical march of modernist progress and a re- The American artist Lee Lozano is best known for what she chose not
flex of deeming anything marginal to it “minor.” to do. She stopped painting in 1970—the same year that the Whitney
An exploration of hinterlands elsewhere might
well foster a category of similarly prepossessing Museum devoted a solo show to her paintings. More drastically, in
© ESTATE OF LEE LOZANO / COURTESY HAUSER & WIRTH AND KARMA
misfits. For a name, consider Astrupism. With 1972, Lozano left New York City and cut all art-world ties until shortly
apologies to proprietary Norwegians, Nikolai before her death, in 1999, at the age of sixty-eight. (The details are com-
Astrup belongs to all of us now.—Peter Schjeldahl
(clarkart.edu) plicated, as is the fact that, in 1969, she stopped speaking to women.)
For Lozano, these were not passive, Bartleby-like refusals—they were
Widline Cadet pointed works of Conceptualism, titled “General Strike” and “Dropout
Intimate stillness and fragmentary near-nar- Piece,” respectively. As the art world has grown increasingly careerist
ratives are hallmarks of this Haitian-born and market-obsessed, Lozano has attained cult-hero status for her
photographer’s promising solo début, which commitment to absence. Now an astonishing selection of two hundred
inaugurates the new Tribeca location of the Deli
gallery. Titled “Se Sou Ou Mwen Mete Espwa m of her early drawings, made from 1959 to 1964, arrives as a jolting
(I Put All My Hopes on You),” the show explores reminder of her ferocious way with materials. (The show inaugurates
intergenerational dynamics and identity in a Karma’s new space, in the East Village, and is on view until Aug. 13.)
Black immigrant family. Direct-address titles
illuminate the complex relationships behind Lozano blazes through subjects, from the X-ray intensity of charcoal
Cadet’s enigmatic pictures, which include both self-portraits, made during her student years, to cartoonish near-Pop
snapshot-like color images and black-and-white (such as the untitled 1961 work pictured here), absurdly priapic gags, and
portraits and domestic vignettes. The long title
of a seemingly unstaged still-life—an enormous muscular renditions of hardware and tools that strain at the edges of the
arrangement of artificial flowers in front of paper on which they’re drawn, as if to say, Screw this.—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 5
Starr, and staged in Gowanus, at the Mer-
ROVING THEATRE cury Store. It opens in a white-walled gallery
space displaying a selection of recent work
by ten artists—paintings, photographs, video
art—curated by White, like a mood board for
a show-to-be. The remaining hour is more
like a demo tape; through headphones, and in
several different rooms, the audience listens
to an audio iteration of what’s described as
an upcoming musical by White, which tells
the story of a young Black woman who visits
an exhibition of René Magritte paintings at
the urging of her therapist, and responds to
one piece so strongly that even the therapist
is freaked out. The narrative is inchoate, but
White’s songs, a head-nodding assortment
of muscular R. & B., are strong.—Rollo Romig
(Through Aug. 1; thebushwickstarr.org.)
1
depth of her never-abandoned, undoctrinaire sance in dances created, and often consumed, devised and designed by different artists,
faith.—J.F. (andrewkreps.com) on cell phones and iPads. This newish genre throughout the Pershing Square Signature
is the subject of the 92nd Street Y’s Mobile Center, on West Forty-second Street. Split
Dance Film Festival, now in its fourth year. into small groups, audience members wander
The festival—which is being held in person, at through hallways and dressing rooms, and
DANCE the Y, on July 31, but can also be viewed online, onto each of the center’s three stages, discov-
July 31-Aug. 15—comprises thirty-six films, ering projections, soundscapes, sculptures,
subdivided into three programs, plus a session and recorded texts as they go. Too much of
Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival dedicated to student films. The offerings are the material skews gauzy and vague, with
A father of the House of Ninja, Archie Burnett is excitingly varied, and include pieces made in pseudo-poetic rhetoric that can feel New Agey,
a sought-after elder of underground club dance, a Nigeria (“A Lucky Generation,” by Oluwaseun but specific details ground the writing in the
master of voguing, waacking, and house. Burnett Usman), Chile (“Aislamiento 1,” by Sebastián production’s standout works: Matt Barbot and
shares his wisdom and his biography in a new Mieres Herrera), and New York City (“Soon,” Amith Chandrashaker’s ode to summer in the
1
show, “Life Encounters,” running July 28-Aug. by Miro Magloire).—Marina Harss (92y.org/ city, “Spray Cap” (performed by the wonderful
1. (Video of the production will also be available, dance/mobile-dance-film-festival) Liza Colón-Zayas), and the short film “Wings
free, on the Jacob’s Pillow Web site, Aug. 12-26.) and Rings,” in which Ryan J. Haddad remi-
1
Joined by a multi-style, intergenerational crew of nisces about not learning to swim.—Elisabeth
ILLUSTRATION BY ZHENYA OLIINYK
dancers that includes Princess Lockeroo, Abdiel Vincentelli (Through Aug. 8.)
Jacobsen, and Ephrat Asherie, Burnett narrates THE THEATRE
a portrait of the artist as a young man in a series
of humorous dance vignettes. The message is
love.—Brian Seibert (jacobspillow.org) Definition MUSIC
Pandemic restrictions have inspired a boom
of experiments with theatrical form, includ-
Mobile Dance Film Festival ing this imaginatively presented musical Caramoor Festival
The pandemic year may be remembered as the piece created by the director and musician CLASSICALFor some years now, the adventur-
moment that dance on film came into its own, Whitney White, produced by the Bushwick ous Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto and the
What About Me
Rachel Amodeo wrote, directed, and stars in
this stark quasi-documentary drama, from 1993,
about a young woman facing the dangers of East
Village life. It’s set in motion with a touch of
cosmic humor that leads from the country to the
suburbs to the city, where an orphaned and un-
employed young woman named Lisa (Amodeo)
lives in a grungy apartment. She is raped and left
Film Forum’s ongoing Humphrey Bogart series includes the idiosyn- homeless, spends a night at a flophouse (the desk
cratic 1951 film noir “The Enforcer” (which is also streaming on many clerk is played by the poet Gregory Corso), and
gets by with the help of Nick (Richard Edson),
services). The credited director, Bretaigne Windust, took sick a few days a bighearted but damaged and abusive Vietnam
into production and was replaced by the daringly inventive Raoul Walsh, veteran; Tom (Nick Zedd), a cynical art punk;
who endows the film’s deadly violence with stylishly macabre flourishes. and Paul (Richard Hell), a compassionate bo-
hemian. Throughout, she endures a calvary of
Yet the movie’s originality is mainly in its script, by Martin Rackin. It gives miseries as she descends from bright promise to
Bogart the role of a district attorney named Ferguson who—hours before flailing desperation. Amodeo films the neighbor-
Mendoza (Everett Sloane), the head of a murder ring, is set to be released hood with unflinching curiosity, and includes
real-life residents who talk tough, tussle, joke,
without charges—searches his investigation files for overlooked evidence. and tell stories. As Lisa confronts the cold power
As Ferguson’s interrogations of garish underworld characters are shown of the police, the violence of the streets, and,
in flashbacks, the action that they relate is seen in flashbacks within those above all, the deranging, identity-rending rav-
ages of physical and emotional trauma, Amodeo
1
flashbacks. The intricate structure lays bare a tentacular network of killers exalts her agonies with tender, transcendent
for hire whose members are driven literally mad with fear of Mendoza, but passion.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon.)
the movie’s frenzied psychology is also historically fascinating: Mendoza’s
chilling and cunning criminal enterprise is presented as an innovation—as For more reviews, visit
are the terms “contract” for a killing and “hit” for a victim.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town
1
flavor I’ll never try again. Though I found must syrup), Red Flag (sweet cream with
it eerily accurate, in the spirit of Willy strawberry jam and graham crunch), and
Wonka’s three-course-dinner chewing a wonderfully velvety, unexpectedly pink
TABLES FOR TWO gum, I’d sooner have a bowl of actual mac White Peach Sorbet.
and cheese followed by Van Leeuwen’s There are pints to take home, too;
We All Scream for Ice Cream perfect Sicilian Pistachio (scoops from availing myself of an insulated bag out-
$5.50; pints $12). I’ll pass, as well, on the fitted with ice packs ($7), I toted several
Denizens of the Internet will have re- Everything Bagel flavor released to great on the subway, including Panna Strac-
cently become familiar with, if not tired fanfare by Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams ciatella, flecked with dark-chocolate
of, the phrase “nature is healing,” often (scoops from $5.25; pints $12), out of shards, and Somebody Scoop Phil, the
applied archly to our slow return to Ohio, earlier this year, and I felt vaguely brainchild of the sitcom producer turned
pre-pandemic habits. I admit that the affronted by the pint of Bacon, Egg, and food personality Phil Rosenthal, featur-
PHOTOGRAPH BY SHAWN MICHAEL JONES FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
words crossed my mind the other day as a Cheese (a “mildly cheesy” base with a ing a lightly salted malted milk-choco-
stranger approached me in Union Square. runny-yolk swirl, candied bacon, and late base, dense with chunks of Twix and
A friend and I were strolling through the poppy seeds) that I found in the freezer candied peanuts, plus swirls of fudge
Greenmarket carrying paper ice-cream at Danny Meyer’s café Daily Provisions. and panna caramel that oozed obscenely
cups, which a keen observer—as this Ice cream is joyful, but it’s no joke! when I peeled off the lid.
stranger was—might have noticed were The B.E.C. was a special left over I added these to my freezer stash
the exact bright-blue shade of a box of from Father’s Day and made by Caffè from Bad Habit, a small operation run
Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. Indeed, the Panna, a Roman-inspired coffee bar and by Jesse and Javier Zuniga, a Bushwick-
cold confection within was the unmistak- ice-cream shop—opened, in late 2019, based couple who have worked at
able hue of powdered orange Cheddar. by Meyer’s daughter Hallie—where the restaurants including Lilia, Contra,
We’d got our complimentary mac- flavors tend toward playful but rarely and Llama Inn. Their seasonal pints
and-cheese-flavored scoops from a truck stoop to stunt (scoops $5.50; pints $13). ($15) have been available for pickup
parked on Seventeenth Street, a promo As befits the family name, Hallie’s is a and delivery since March, and are car-
for an unlikely collaboration between the serious, and seriously good, enterprise. ried by specialty shops in Manhattan,
boutique New York ice-cream brand Van The panna—“cream,” in Italian—is im- Brooklyn, and Great Barrington, Mas-
Leeuwen and the Kraft Heinz Company. ported from Piemonte and is not only sachusetts. The Roasted Banana with
“How is it?” the stranger asked. “Listen, mixed into many of the ice-cream bases, Coffee Caramel is as good as it sounds,
you’re going to save me the trouble of which are churned on-site weekly, with a surging with dark reduced sugars, but
waiting in line,” she went on. She removed rotating array of local and Italian ingre- the flavor that made my eyes widen was
a miniature Swiss Army knife from her dients as mix-ins, but also whipped and the Coconut & Lime, somehow even
purse, extracted the blade, and swiped a dolloped atop any order upon request, more tropical than the sum of its parts,
melty glob. What could we do but laugh? free of charge. One recent afternoon, at once gloriously rich and refreshing.
My instant pal—an attractively coiffed perched on a stool at an outdoor counter, —Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 9
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT for all Apple’s claims that iPhones are watch and harass troublesome journal-
THE SPYWARE THREAT secure, and for all the efforts of report- ists and dissidents.
ers and activists to use encrypted chan- Forbidden Stories says that its inves-
hadija Ismayilova, an investigative nels to thwart hostile governments, “un- tigation found evidence that Pegasus may
K reporter from Azerbaijan, is an icon
among the subtribe of journalists who
less you lock yourself in [an] iron tent,
there is no way” to defeat unscrupulous
have been used in attempts to compro-
mise the phones of at least a hundred
work to expose cross-border financial spyware users, Ismayilova told Forbid- and eighty journalists; eighty-five human-
corruption. She has broken big stories den Stories. rights activists; and many politicians, in-
about money laundering and dodgy bank- In this gathering age of digital au- cluding President Emmanuel Macron.
ing, despite being targeted by President tocracy, it is hard to avoid the impres- Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general
Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarian regime. Op- sion that the dictators are winning. of Amnesty International, said the inves-
eratives planted cameras in her home in A decade ago, the Arab Spring fos- tigation showed that the spyware “facil-
Baku and, in 2012, released a video of tered hopeful visions of social-media- itates systemic abuse.” NSO and its law-
her having sex with her boyfriend. In enabled people-power movements top- yers said that the journalists’ findings were
2014, she was arrested on trumped-up pling anachronistic strongmen from based on “false claims,” factual errors, and
charges that included tax evasion; a court Beijing to Riyadh and Caracas. Face- “uncorroborated theories” about the sig-
sentenced her to seven and a half years book, Twitter, and other messaging plat- nificance of a leaked list of fifty thou-
in prison.The human-rights lawyer Amal forms remain transformative tools for sand phone numbers that sparked the in-
Clooney, among others, took up Ismay- mobilization in many countries, yet au- vestigation. The company maintains that
ilova’s cause, and she was released after tocratic regimes have fought back ruth- it restricts its clients’ use of Pegasus to
eighteen months, but the government lessly by unleashing legions of loyalist such purposes as counterterrorism and
prohibited her from leaving the country censors, bots, and trolls to control on- fighting organized crime, and that it has
for five years. line discourse, and by using spyware to dropped government clients following a
In May, Ismayilova learned from col- human-rights audit. Israel’s Defense Min-
leagues that her iPhone had been in- istry oversees NSO’s exports; the chair
fected by spyware known as Pegasus, of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and De-
made by NSO Group, an Israeli com- fense Committee said last week that it
pany, which has reportedly worked with would conduct a review.
Azerbaijan’s government. The product NSO says that Pegasus is not designed
can access contact lists and activate a to function with phones registered in the
phone’s microphone to record conver- United States. But there is a lot of other
sations. Last week, an investigation pub- spyware around, and, in any event, the
lished by Forbidden Stories, a journal- Justice Department has for years legally
ism nonprofit based in Paris, in collab- collected the phone and e-mail records
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
THE SIGHTS, THE SMELLS able planet? Or another sign of the end? ceiling, forty feet overhead, is hung with
LEMONLAND Citrovia is the name of the installa- billowing fabric, onto which spotlights
tion in the plaza across from the Ninth project soft blues and pinks. “Bright
Avenue entrance to the new Moynihan blue sky, almost shadowless light. It’s
Train Hall. It is a temporary solution to always sunny in Citrovia. Even in Feb-
a temporary problem: Brookfield Prop- ruary. Everyone in Citrovia will look
erties is erecting another skyscraper there, good in photographs.”
as part of its ongoing Manhattan West The absence of actual sun meant no
he sky was hazy, and the sun was project, and so has had to put up a sprawl- actual plants. “So how do we bring in
T red. Last week, smoke from wild-
fires in Oregon, California, Manitoba, and
ing construction shed that will blot out
sunlight in the plaza for at least two years.
flora?” Schechtman continued. The an-
swer was: channel Willy Wonka, Dr.
Ontario invaded the Eastern Seaboard’s Brookfield brought in a team to de- Seuss, psychedelics, and Amalfi lemon
airspace and our tristate-area lungs; on sign a space to mitigate the gloom be- groves. “We needed it to be otherworldly.”
Tuesday, the presence of PM2.5, nasty neath the scaffolding, if not the general The result is a park, a little less than an
microscopic particulate matter, was nine bummer of more office towers. The chief acre in size, full of giant fibre-reinforced
times higher than the World Health Or- conceivers of Citrovia were Evan Schecht- plastic lemons, one of them six feet in
ganization recommends. That same day, man, the founder of the Cuttlefish, a com- diameter; lemon slices the size of large
the world’s richest man ascended out of pany that specializes in immersive envi- pizza pies; and lemon trees with trunks
the smoke, and into space, aboard a giant ronments, and Warren Adcock, the creative of steel that have been sprayed with foam,
penis-rocket. Floods, fires, farce. Mood: director of Midnight Theatre, which will then shaped by machete and painted
apocalypse nigh. open in the fall, in Manhattan West. purple and blue. Each leaf, of polycar-
And yet there is a whisper on the “We love parameters, we enjoy lim- bonate plastic, was baked in an oven, like
wind. Can you hear it? Citrovia. Per- itations,” Schechtman said the other day. a kale chip, and then hand-molded.There
haps you have detected a lemony-fresh He and Adcock, leading a tour, pro- are almost four thousand of them. No
scent or a proliferation of odd citrus- jected mischievous delight, as though one is like another.
inflected selfies in your feeds. Or you they’d got away with something. “This “This stuff was so made by hand,”
might even have found yourself in a is an active construction site. And it’s a Schechtman said. The fabricators were
plasticine sanctuary of tangerine lem- massive throughway with people mak- Adirondack Studios, a hive of artists and
ons and Teletubby trees, a contrived oasis ing a beeline for the other buildings.” artisans outside Saratoga Springs, who
where the lemons are yellow and the sky “It’s also a wind tunnel,” Adcock said. work with big theme parks, including Dis-
is always blue. Citrovia. Is this a haven “We thought, How do we bring the ney and Universal. “There were over four
on an otherwise soon-to-be-uninhabit- sky back?” Schechtman said. The shed’s hundred of them working on this. That’s
12 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
We keep more
people safe online
than anyone else
in the world.
who the money went to. Not just one ‘art- deck, new name—also resulted in a
ist’ making obscure postmodern refer- homecoming of one of the N.Y.P.L.’s
ences.” (They wouldn’t reveal the budget.) underknown marvels. That marvel, the
The idea is that, once the tower is fin- Picture Collection, is an archive of more
ished and the scaffolding comes down, than a million loose, printed images, or-
Brookfield can dismantle the installation ganized in folders alphabetized from
and take it on the road. But for now it Abacus to Zoology, which are available
aspires to become one of those insta- (and for visitors—immigrants, historians, il-
Insta-) icons of its ever-evolving home lustrators, set designers, and beyond—
town, like the CowParade sculptures or to sift through and check out, like books.
Barry Diller’s Little Island. A pit stop and For many years, beginning in 1915, the
photo op for tourists and locals, a meet- collection was in Room 100 of the Fifth
ing spot for the crowds pouring through Avenue research library; now, after
Penn Station and Madison Square Gar- decades at Mid-Manhattan, it’s there
den. Schechtman said, “We wanted it to again. On a recent Wednesday, the head
be beautiful and delicate and yet robust of the library’s art division, Joshua
enough to last. It’s New Yorker proof. Chuang, met up there with the photo-
‘Please get out of the planter, sir. It is not grapher Arnold Hinton and the artist Taryn Simon and Arnold Hinton
a urinal. I know the Rangers lost, but no.’” Taryn Simon. Simon researched the Pic-
Adcock said, “We test everything by ture Collection for nine years; in the lection,” and its accompanying exhibi-
pulling on it and yelling about New York course of that, she met Hinton, who tions at Gagosian and the N.Y.P.L., revel
sports teams. ‘Grrr, Knicks!’” worked at the library in the fifties and in the collection’s intricacies and history,
They had commissioned a custom sixties. Hinton, eighty-one, wore a shirt as well as in Javitz’s outsized role in dis-
scent. “Citrovia,” Schechtman whispered. with a print of bright-yellow lemons and tinguishing it. (Simon is making a short
“Citrovia. It’s a gender-neutral vegan co- leaned on a wheeled walker. He looked film about Javitz.) Holding Simon’s book,
logne. If we did an ad for it, it would be around with a keen expression. “This Chuang turned to photographs that Si-
all in black and white, except for the area held where we worked: tearing, cut- mon took at the Warhol Museum ar-
lemon.” He pointed out one of five cam- ting, snipping, putting the pictures in chives: collages that Warhol made from
ouflaged diffusers, which emit Citrovia folders,” he said. “There were gray bins ads for Dr. Scholl’s, Coca-Cola, and Camp-
into Citrovia on a timer. “It looks like I’m about this high. People were supposed bell’s soup. “You see, there’s a stamp here
making meth, but it’s one of our scent- to take things out and work at a sitting that says ‘New York Public Library Pic-
making machines.” It brought to mind area. But most people, including Andy ture Collection,’” Chuang said.
the old seventies perfume Love’s Fresh Warhol, would just stand at the bins and “They correspond to the paintings,
Lemon, from Love Cosmetics (“The sub- pick what they wanted.” and the dates line up,” Simon said. She
tle way to get fresh with him”), the jan- Of all the famous artists who used was double-masked (“I have kids”) and
gly tang of Mello Yello (“There’s nothing the Picture Collection in the twentieth wore a green pinafore dress over a green
mellow about it”), and smoke-concealment century—Diego Rivera, Walker Evans, shirt. “There’s a painting called ‘Dr.
strategies of yore. Dorothea Lange, Joseph Cornell, Art Scholl’s Corns’ that is directly from this.”
“It’s a total coincidence that one of Spiegelman—Warhol is perhaps the most “You’re also looking at this layer of
this year’s Pantone colors is lemon yel- notorious. “People would steal things,” interpretation,” Chuang said. He flipped
low,” Schechtman said. “It’s the optimism Hinton said. “Andy Warhol would take through a folder. “I love this: classified
of emerging from the pandemic.” Opti- the pictures and not return them.” War- as ‘Accident.’ Here’s a horse accident.
mism: the notion brightened the air, like hol was a regular. “I guess the biggest Here’s a candlestick accident.” Librari-
1
a Citrovia mist. thing that I remember of Andy Warhol ans noted patrons’ requests. “People were
—Nick Paumgarten was handing him stuff,” Hinton went asking for things that you’d never thought
on. “And Romana, she always thought about: ‘Milking a cow without a stool,’
PUBLIC IMAGES DEPT. he was a joke.” Romana Javitz was the or whatever,” Hinton said. In a hand-
COLLECTION collection’s influential longtime curator. written logbook dated 1917-25, many re-
“People say, ‘Well, what did you think of quests had been fulfilled (“airships,”“tele-
him?’ We were both young, and I was graph,” “harvest”); some hadn’t (“Hop o’
too busy thinking about myself as op- my thumb,” “bootblack in the act,” “Alex
posed to whoever he was. He was just the Gt. cutting the Gordian knot”).
this thin guy with blond hair, is basically On the third floor, in the elegant Prints
what he was.” and Photography Study Room, the three
he majestic renovation of the New Simon, a lifelong New Yorker, was fas- sat at a polished table and looked through
T York Public Library’s Mid-Man-
hattan branch, now known as the Stav-
cinated by the Picture Collection as a
child, and her art often focusses on sys-
valuable prints—Evans, Lange, Weegee,
Brassaï—that were eventually culled from
ros Niarchos Foundation Library—new tems of organization; her new book, “The the circulating-images collection. “They
atrium, new children’s room, new roof Color of a Flea’s Eye: The Picture Col- were afraid of someone like Andy Warhol
14 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
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secure by default, private by design, and put you in control.
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checking them out,” Chuang said. He sharing her apartment with Bill, a taci- story, new director. I always feel com-
opened a box. “So, Arnold, the way we turn roughneck from Oklahoma. The pletely like a beginner.”
found you was through this box,” he said. movie is set in Marseille. Bill’s daughter Cottin spoke with a light British ac-
“Do you recognize this?” He handed him is in prison, having been convicted of cent, a legacy of living in London as a
a photograph of a double-Dutch scene murder during a student-exchange pro- teen-ager. After high school, she stud-
in Harlem in 1963, featuring a man jump- gram, and he is trying to exonerate her, ied American and English literature at
ing rope in a suit. despite a minimal command of French the Sorbonne; her thesis was on “Harry
“Wow,” Hinton said, peering at it. and of his emotions. Cottin and Damon Potter.” She also taught English to teen-
“That’s what I said,” Chuang said. met for the first time during rehears- agers. “I was terrible,” she said. “I had all
“ ‘Wow! Who is this Arnold Hinton?’” als. “It was funny, because the first scene the seventeen-year-olds who were com-
Hinton, who grew up in Harlem, stud- I’m, like, ‘Blurbluhblurbluhblurrrrhl,’ I’m pletely high on pot, so no one would ever
ied at the Pratt Institute and the New answer any of my questions. It was like
School, with Lisette Model; he found forty red-eyed rabbits just staring at me.”
success as a photographer after leaving She added, “I didn’t want to say if I didn’t
the library, with Javitz’s encouragement. know something, because I would lose
“A lot of my photographs are done from my credibility, so I started inventing
waist high,” Hinton said. “I don’t look in words. One day, a girl says, ‘How do we
the camera. Lisette would always ask me, say chirurgie esthétique?’ ” Cottin was
‘How did you do that?’ A lot of it dealt stumped. “So I go, ‘Surgical aestheti-
with being in environments where it was cism.’ ” She went home and looked it up
physically harmful, or in a country where in the dictionary, and the next day said
I was the only one that looked like I to the student, “What I told you is the
looked.” Hinton is Black. “I have had American way, but the English way is
guns put to my head, film taken, been ‘plastic surgery.’ ”
locked up for being a photographer,” he One of the attractions of “Stillwater,”
said. They passed around more early-six- in addition to a tightly wound plot and
ties Hintons: “Black & white spectators,” a dazzling backdrop, is its transposition
“Girl skipping manhole,” “2 Black na- of some obvious American political di-
tionalists.” “That young lady was with lemmas to a foreign setting. Bill in Mar-
Muhammad Ali at a Black Muslim rally, seille is a more vulnerable character than
and I photographed her,” Hinton said. Camille Cottin Bill in Stillwater. “I think the movie is
Then: a double take. “Jesus,” he said. It about opening up to each other,” Cottin
was a closeup portrait of a woman in a chatterbox,” Cottin recalled. “And he said. “It was rewritten under Trump,” and
Mexico, from 1963. “I have been looking only says, ‘Yeah, man.’ And the way he it reflects the fact that “there’s two Amer-
for this,” he said. “This is the photograph said, ‘Yeah, man,’ I was, like, ‘Wowww- icas which are completely split.”
that Romana saw that made her realize www, there’s so much there.’ And I was, She poured tea from a pot, and the
that I was a photographer.” How his like, ‘Why do I have all the text? He’s conversation turned to the #MeToo move-
work ended up in the Picture Collec- fucking Matt Damon!’” ment in France. At last year’s Césars—
1
tion, he didn’t know. In France, after years of work in the France’s Academy Awards—Adèle Haenel
—Sarah Larson theatre, Cottin became famous for “Con- walked out of the room when Roman Po-
nasse” (“Asshole,” approximately), a “Bo- lanski received an award, yelling, “Bravo,
PARIS POSTCARD rat”-style series in which she played a le pédophile!” Cottin said, “I was watching
FROM ZERO magisterially self-involved Parisienne at a friend’s house, and I was, like, ‘This
whose exploits—like causing a traffic is so punk.’ I love that she didn’t care. I
jam on her bicycle as she reapplies her think it’s something to defy codes and to
lipstick in a car’s side mirror—were cap- let the organic anger erupt.” Cottin’s fledg-
tured on candid camera. In America, ling production company, founded with
she’s best known as Hélène on “Killing her friend Shirley Kohn, is named Malmö,
Eve,” and, especially, as Andréa Martel, in tribute to Kohn’s Swedish heritage and
“ I t’sfootball
like you’re playing in your little
club, in your little city, and
the hard-charging but bighearted boss
woman on “Call My Agent!” At the café,
the Swedish emphasis on gender equality.
At the café, the tea was drunk and the
suddenly somebody is, like, ‘Heyyyy, allez, she was wearing white sneakers, jeans, bill was paid, and Cottin headed back
viens jouer! ’ ” the French actress Camille and a gray sweater, and had an air of to her apartment, in the Ninth Arron-
Cottin was saying the other afternoon, modesty that camouflaged her celebrity dissement, on foot. As she walked, Cot-
at a Paris café. She was talking about get- as effectively as any baseball cap. “It’s tin chatted about neighborhood banali-
ting the call to star opposite Matt Damon funny with this job,” she said, occasion- ties. She stopped in a little shopping street.
in “Stillwater,” a new film by Tom Mc- ally braiding a handful of hair as she “Have you had the Brillat-Savarin with
Carthy, in which she plays Virginie, a spoke. “You start from zero all the time, truffles?” she said, steering her companion
free-spirited single mother who ends up right? New characters, new partner, new into a cheesemonger’s. The cheesemonger
16 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
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Biden campaign and now participates in
occasional calls with White House ad-
visers. “I wrote a lot of angry speeches,”
he said. “To get on a Zoom and see two
hundred A.A.P.I. volunteers, I was, like,
‘Oh, my God,’” he said. “Maybe I’m ste-
reotyping, but it takes a lot to get the
Asian volunteer out.”
Last summer, COVID scuttled Kwan’s
plans to go to Capri, a place he’s visited
more than ten times, to celebrate the re-
lease of “Sex and Vanity.”To see whether
a visit this summer might be feasible,
he called Holly Star, a friend on the
ground there.
“The vibe is a lot brighter,” Star said,
on a video call, dangly earrings tinkling.
But, she said, people are still wearing
masks, and “we have a curfew at 11 p.m.”
“11 p.m. is not going to cut it,” Kwan
said. “I mean, people have dinner at
• • eleven.” He then talked about the night,
in 2016, that he ate dinner at Michel’an-
gelo, the restaurant Star used to man-
said, “Bonjour.” Cottin, the anti-connasse, surprised him. “They could have hopped age with her husband, and heard the
replied in kind, asking after the cheese- on their planes, but didn’t,” he said. “They story of how she ended up living on the
monger’s family. There was no camera in really adhered to the guidelines.” island. “It’s a six-hundred-million block-
1
sight, candid or otherwise. Kwan is good at finding mensches buster rom-com,” he said.
—Lauren Collins among millionaires. Born into wealth Scene: the piazza of Capri, 2013.
in Singapore, Kwan, who is forty-seven, Enter: a single Aussie girl on holiday,
CRAZY RICH DEPT. befriended a fellow rich kid when he map askew. She nervously dines solo at
FANTASY ISLAND was an intern at Interview magazine, in her hotel, until the bartender urges her
New York, in the late nineties. She in- to see the town and makes a reservation
vited him to her family’s house on Long at a restaurant for her.
Island. “I had a fantasy of the Hamp- “I was alone,” Star said. “I had my
tons,” he said. “This was so not it.” The book and my phone placed strategically
family had a nineteenth-century barn so I had an escape if someone wanted
with canoes and kayaks hanging from to talk.” When she asked for the check,
arly in Kevin Kwan’s latest novel, “Sex the rafters. The cushions were thread- the owner brought a torta caprese al lim-
E and Vanity,” a guest at a crazy, rich,
partially Asian wedding on the island of
bare, the Danish furniture cracked.
He felt at home. “What fascinated
one. Then he brought a limoncello. Using
Google Translate on their phones, they
Capri observes, “Everybody with money me was how similar her parents were to conversed until 5 A.M. (Important ques-
has become so cookie-cutter—they dress people that I grew up with in Singapore,” tions, such as “Do you have a wife?”)
the same, collect the same ten artists, stay he said. “It’s about driving that dilapi- “We were married within a year,” Star
at the same hotels.” She adds, “They all dated S.U.V. with the dog hair on the said. Her Australian friends were shocked.
want to be miserable and dissatisfied in blanket, old wicker, ancestral portraits “Since then we’ve had two children,” she
the same place”—which, for some of of, like, the clipper ships that previous went on. “I’m very realistic. People might
Kwan’s muses during the pandemic, generations had. It was a revelation to believe my story is romantic, but every-
meant wherever the masks were off. meet people who were snobby in the body knows that, after children, life is
“People were partying in Santorini, same way.” not so exciting.”
going to Tulum,” Kwan, who wore a navy Kwan started a creative consultancy “A lot of people have a fantasy of Ca-
polo and round glasses, said the other and co-wrote “Luck: The Essential pri,” Kwan said. “You had no preconceived
day, at a rooftop restaurant in West Hol- Guide,” before he broke out with the notion. That’s what made it possible.”
lywood. “A whole population of the crazy novel “Crazy Rich Asians.” Recently, he’s “You could come here and write a
rich moved to Hawaii.” But Kwan stayed spent some time in the milieu of Am- book,” she said. “I’ve been trying to get
put in L.A., scrolling until his thumb hurt. trak Joe: through Mathew Littman, a Kevin to move here. Come on, Kevin.”
“It got to the point where I had to turn my former Biden speechwriter who corrals “Trying,” Kwan said. “My lottery num-
phone off,” he said. He did have a number Hollywood types for political causes, bers haven’t come up yet.”
of one-per-center friends, though, who Kwan served as a surrogate during the —Sheila Yasmin Marikar
18 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
“
— Divia Thani
FLIGHT PLAN
took us even deeper into nowhere, the
idea being that special fish congregated
in secret locations far from civilization.
When a marriage is up in the air. But there was no civilization, and there
were plentiful fish in the lake in front
BY ANN PATCHETT of the lodge. Taking a plane to a boat
to find an obscure fishing spot seemed
to be a bit of Alaskan theatre. After
we reached whatever pebbly shoal the
guide had in mind for the day, we ar-
ranged our flies and waded hip-deep
into the freezing water to cast for trout.
Despite the significant majesty of the
place, wading around in a river for eight
hours wasn’t my idea of a good time.
Bears prevented me from wandering
off. Rain prevented me from reading
on the shore. Mosquitoes prevented
everything else.
So when, on the fifth day, Karl sug-
gested that we skip the fishing and pay
extra to spend the day flying instead, I
was in. Flying was what he’d come for,
anyway: the early-morning flight out
to the fish and the afternoon flight back
to the lodge. Karl liked talking to the
pilots—who put him in the right seat
and let him wear the headset—and they
liked talking to him, because he was a
doctor, and free medical advice is hard
to come by. Karl and I were less than
a year into our relationship when we
went to Alaska, and I didn’t yet fully
understand the centrality of airplanes
in his life. After Alaska, I got it.
When the talk of war was done, the
pilot asked Karl if he’d ever flown a
he three of us were in a 1957 de Karl and I were spending a week Beaver, if he’d had the experience of
T Havilland Beaver, floating in the
middle of a crater lake in the south-
fishing at a fly-out lodge outside Il-
iamna, by which I mean nowhere near
taking off from the water and landing
on the water. Karl said no, he had not.
west quadrant of Alaska. The pilot was Iliamna but closer to Iliamna than to Even though Karl had been flying since
recounting the toll that the Vietnam anywhere else. Each morning, we and he was a boy, at forty-seven he still
War had taken on him, while, over the dozen or so other guests gathered didn’t have his pilot’s license. He was
in the right seat, my boyfriend, Karl, up our neoprene waders and were di- honest about this—he was honest
listened. Thanks to proximity, I was vided into groups of three or four or about everything, which should not be
listening as well, though chances are five. Along with thermoses and sand- confused with being thoughtful about
they’d forgotten I was there. Outside, wiches and tackle boxes and a guide, everything.
water sloshed against the pontoons, we were loaded into a string of war- “You have to tip the nose up when
rocking the plane gently from side to horse floatplanes bobbing at the dock. you land,” the pilot said. “That’s the
side. No one had asked this man to tell The pilots who flew for the lodge struck mistake people make. It’s hard to get
his story in a long time, but Karl had me as men who would have had a hard the depth perception because of the
asked, and so the pilot put the plane time finding work elsewhere. After a glare, so you wind up hitting with the
down on the lake, turned off the igni- flight of twenty or thirty minutes, we nose. Then you flip. You want to try?”
tion, and began. would land on a river or a lake, then He was so grateful to Karl, and this
was the only gift he had to give. The
We were ten feet off the ground, twenty feet. It goes very fast—planes, life. day was bright with puffs of cloud and
20 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY SAM ALDEN
low winds. Karl and his new friend put not caring about how seriously un-
on their headsets. pleasant this might be for someone
I was no stranger to the single-engine. who did not live to fly. But, despite the
My stepfather Mike had rented planes rage and the nausea pulsing in the back
when I was growing up, and, with my of my throat, I wasn’t afraid. Consid-
mother, flew to some of the medical ering that about half of all small-craft
conferences where he gave lectures. accidents occur during either takeoff
Sometimes I was in the back with the or landing; considering that taking off
luggage. My mother had taken enough and landing was all we were doing;
f lying lessons to know how to land, considering that the plane was rusted
should she be called on to do so. When and the pilot had struggled with the
we moved to a farm outside Nashville, aftereffects of Agent Orange and my
Mike bought a tiny red helicopter, which boyfriend had never landed a plane on
he flew for years. water before; considering that this lake
After a demonstration—up, around, was somewhere far from Iliamna and
down again—the pilot turned over the no one knew we were there in the first
controls. This was not Lake Michigan. place; considering that if the plane
Getting up to speed required circling, flipped, as it had been established these
but you had to take off straight toward planes could do, I would probably not
a fixed point on the horizon and into be able to swim through the freezing
the wind. Karl took off toward the shore, water in my sack of neoprene (which
and then we lifted off the lake, flew I had stupidly worn against the cold),
past the mountains, through the clouds, and that, if I did make it to the shore,
around the blue sky, back through the my chances of surviving whatever came
clouds and past the mountains, then next were probably zero—I should have
nose up, plane down, smack into the been afraid.
lake. The pilot was right; it was hard But Karl and I were together, and
to see it coming. I reminded myself he was the person slamming the plane
to relax my jaw. The pilot offered Karl onto the lake, so I was not.
some pointers, some praise. There was
a quick discussion of how the land-
ing could be improved, and then we
“K arl flies?” people ask me. “Have
you ever flown with him?”
were off again, a tighter circle, greater I fly with him all the time, and when
speed, straight up, lake-mountain- we’re together in the plane I’m never
cloud-blue-cloud-mountain-lake, the concerned, not about black clouds or
nose up as we came down. The jolt lightning, not about turbulence that
was harder this time—I felt it in my could knock the fillings from your teeth.
spine—but before I could fully regis- The times I’m afraid are the times when
ter my relief we were up again: a car- I’m not in the plane, and by “afraid” I
nival ride for which no one bothered mean an emotion closer to terror. Take,
to take the tickets. for example (there are so many exam-
I wasn’t prone to airsickness or sea- ples), the time Karl flew a Cessna to
sickness, but the combination of air Kingston, Ontario, to look at a boat,
and water in rapid succession was some- and on the way home had to land on
thing new. I turned away from the win- an airstrip somewhere in Ohio because
dow to contemplate the floor, stamped the weather was so bad. The tiny air-
metal rusted at the edges, like a ser- port office was locked, and he stood
vice elevator in a hospital. I stared at under the wing of the plane to call and
it while Karl took off, turned above the let me know he’d be late. He called
lake, then dropped back down onto again two hours later, from Bowling
the surface. Repetition was the key to Green, Kentucky, to say that he had
learning. The only thing on hand to landed a second time because the tran-
throw up in were the pilot’s waders, sponder was out, which meant that the
which seemed better (better?) than plane couldn’t be tracked. The weather
throwing up on the stamped-metal was still bad.
floor. I held down my breakfast through “Stay there,” I said. “I’ll drive up and
sheer force of will. I was angry at both get you.” Bowling Green was an hour
men—especially the one I was shar- away by car.
ing a bed with back at the lodge—for He said no. He said, “Let’s wait and
see.” Maybe he could fix it, or find He might as well have said, “I when they were together because the
someone to fix it. It was nine o’clock, thought you were sleeping, because I plane was so easy—tricycle landing,
and the weather was bad, but the flight have no idea who you are, or who any no rudder pedals, and it steered like a
was so short. normal person is.” car. Not only had Frank bought a plane
Two hours later, there was still no I stayed awake for what was left of without telling his wife; he let their
call, and still no answer when I tried the night to watch him, just to make eight-year-old son fly it.
his cell phone. Around midnight, the sure he was really there, and in the Meridian, Mississippi, where Karl
clock and I had a conversation. I told morning I asked whom I was supposed grew up, has its own page in aviation
the clock that I wanted to wait fif- to call. Whom do I call after midnight history. In 1935, the Key brothers, Fred
teen minutes before my new life began, to try to find you? and Al, who had developed a method
the life in which Karl had been killed Karl sat with the question for a while of aerial refuelling in which they con-
in a plane crash. I requested fifteen before answering. For the first time, he nected to a second plane midair, set
more minutes in this world—which seemed to grasp my sadness: past, pres- the world record for endurance flying
I was quickly coming to see as the ent, future. “They’ll call you,” he said. by circling the town in a Curtiss Robin
past—before figuring out whom to “Who will call me?” for twenty-seven days without land-
call, whom to wake up. You’ll remem- “ There’s something called the ing. The flight was a stunt to save their
ber this feeling when the phone rings, E.L.T., the emergency locator trans- local airfield, and it worked: the air-
I told myself. You’ll remember how mitter. If the E.L.T. is activated, then field, later named Key Field, wasn’t
scared you were when he calls to tell someone will call you. You’re my emer- closed. After the Second World War,
you he’s fine. And it was true. As many gency contact.” Fred and Al opened Key Brothers Fly-
times as I’ve been in exactly this sit- “How is it activated?” ing Service. When Karl was ten, Fred
uation, I never forget it, and it never “Either manually or on impact.” gave him a job after school sweeping
fails to shock me, the flood of adren- I hadn’t considered that scenario, out hangars, cleaning spark plugs, and,
aline that does not serve for fight or the one in which the phone finally rings eventually, driving the fuel truck out
flight but drowns me. At twelve-thirty, and it isn’t him. to gas up the planes. He was always
I shifted my perspective again, from hanging around the airfield anyway.
wondering what it would be like if aybe this story starts with Lind- When someone needed a ride to New
he were dead to understanding that
he was dead, and I decided that I could
M bergh, who flew to Paris when
Karl’s father, Frank, was ten. Frank
Orleans to pick up a plane, Karl would
go along with Fred to fly co-pilot on
wait another fifteen minutes. He would was one of a whole country of chil- the way home.
be dead forever, so what difference dren, an entire world of children, who “Co-pilot?” I asked. “And you were
did it make if I gave myself a little could now look up and imagine them- what, twelve?” Tales grow tall in Mis-
more time? I still had no idea what I selves in the sky. Frank became an sissippi, a by-product of the humidity
was supposed to do. oral surgeon. He married Jo, and they and heat. Was it possible that a twelve-
After I had extended the final cut- had three children, Karl, Nancy, and year-old was f lying planes? I have
off two more times, he walked in the Michael. Frank started taking flying learned to ask the same questions mul-
door. That’s how these stories always lessons in a Tri-Pacer, with Karl in tiple times.
end, of course, except for the one time “All you had to do was keep the al-
when they don’t. I saw the headlights titude steady. Most of the planes only
against the garage door and went out- went eighty-five or ninety miles an
side in the rain to meet him with my hour.” The joke was that “I.F.R.” didn’t
love and my rage and my sick relief. I stand for “instrument flight rules” but
wanted to kill him because he had not for “I fly railroads.” Karl said that if
been killed. I wanted to step into his he flew over the track for the South-
open jacket and stay there for the rest erner it would take him straight back
of my life, for the rest of his life. How to Meridian.
had he not called? This gave Fred Key a chance to eat
“I did call. I called you from Kentucky.” the back seat. A few weeks after Mi- his sandwich.
“But you never told me you’d left chael was born, Frank bought his first Around the time when Karl started
Kentucky.” plane, a 1946 Ercoupe. He asked the f lying right seat with Fred Key, he
“It took a long time to get the tran- family’s minister to come to the house rode his bike to the airfield early one
sponder fixed.” after dinner, when Karl and Nancy summer Saturday morning. There was
“Then why didn’t you call to say were in bed. Jo was in her pajamas, a Piper Super Cub near the hangar
you’d landed?” the new baby in her lap. The minis- that hadn’t been there the day before.
“It was too late.” In the house, he ter sat on the couch between them The Cubs were all the same; the peo-
went to the refrigerator and poured while Frank told his wife that he’d ple around Key Field used to say you
himself a glass of orange juice. He was bought a plane. could get it in yellow or you couldn’t
dead tired but not dead. “I didn’t want The Ercoupe was big enough for get it. But this Cub was white with
to wake you up.” two small people. Frank let Karl fly it red stripes, which should have been
22 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
a tipoff. Super Cubs didn’t have igni-
tion keys. All that was required to
start one was the turn of a switch and
the push of a button. Karl left his bike
in the grass alongside the runway, un-
tied the wings and the tail, pulled off
the chocks. The cockpit smelled new.
He turned the switch and pushed the
button. He had never soloed before,
and this seemed like the day to do it.
“It wasn’t like I was flying to Mex-
ico,” Karl said, after I pointed out that
this had been a stupendously bad idea.
“I taxied out, took off, made one turn
around the pattern. The whole thing
took ten minutes, and I probably wasn’t
more than six hundred feet off the
ground. It would have been fine, ex-
cept that the engine quit.”
The engine quit?
“I had to land it in the field. I came
down maybe twenty feet short of
the runway.”
Over time, you come to know the “I don’t know what he’s going to do when he runs out of nails.”
seminal stories of the person you live
with. I knew this story, and, when I
pressed hard against it, Karl came up
• •
with every detail he could remember:
It was muddy. He pushed the plane “Those planes can glide a long way.” bought a Cessna 150. After he died,
back to where it had been. It wasn’t We stared at each other—one per- of head and neck cancer, in 1988, the
heavy; there was a handle on the side, son who flew planes, one person who family sold the Cessna 150. Frank’s
and he leaned against the fuselage to believed that there was an emotional Ercoupe crashed in 2008, killing the
direct it. It was still early, and there narrative to flying planes. The two lines pilot. Karl got his first pilot’s logbook
was no one else at the airfield. He did not intersect. “You weren’t scared?” when he was twelve. By the time he
washed the plane and tied it down, re- Karl thought about it. “It was a long went to college, he had logged almost
placed the chocks, then rode his bicy- time ago.” two hundred hours. He hadn’t real-
cle home to tell his father what he’d “I know.” ized that the hours didn’t count be-
done. It was Mr. Tony’s plane, and “Well, then, not that I remember.” cause he hadn’t taken a flight physi-
Frank sent Karl to Mr. Tony to apol- After Karl borrowed Mr. Tony’s cal, but he didn’t mind. The logbook
ogize. Mr. Tony listened, and then plane, his father let him solo in the Er- made him feel like a real pilot. In the
asked Karl if he’d switched the gas coupe, maybe so that he would get over next twenty years, during which he
tank when the engine quit. No hor- any bad associations he had about so- got a B.A. and a master’s degree in
ror, no recrimination, just “Did you loing, or maybe because the kid had philosophy and theology, went to med-
switch the gas tank?” The Piper Cub already proved that he could do it in ical school, got married, and had two
had a single tank, but this was a Super someone else’s plane, so why not? children, he never f lew a plane. In
Cub. Mr. Tony’s Super Cub had two I wondered what I’d say were I 1984, Karl and his family were living
tanks, and you had to switch them over pressed to remember how I felt the in Nashville, and he and his next-door
manually. Sixty years after the fact, first time I drove a car by myself, or neighbor bought a 1971 Beechcraft
Karl pulled up diagrams of a Piper the first time a car I was driving ran Baron. The neighbor used the plane
Cub and a Super Cub on his phone out of gas. If there were actual feel- during the week, to go to business
to show me where the tanks were ings associated with those events, I meetings, and Karl used it on week-
placed. I didn’t care where the tanks had no access to them, because it was ends, to go back to Mississippi. They
were placed. just a car. hired the same pilot, and Karl started
“What were you thinking?”I asked him. Which was how Karl felt about flying right seat again. After they sold
“About what?” planes. that plane, he bought a part interest
“About taking a plane, about fly- Karl went to college on a scholar- in a Cessna 421. He later sold that
ing by yourself, about the engine quit- ship. Frank sold the Ercoupe and plane to a friend of his, who ran out
ting. What did you think when the bought a Luscombe Silvaire. Years of fuel and crashed it in a cornfield
engine quit?” later, he sold the Luscombe and in Indiana on Thanksgiving. “He
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 23
fly a tail-wheel plane. When I am in
the plane with Karl, I read, I study the
clouds, I sleep an untroubled sleep, my
head against the window.
Karl could go for years without a
plane. These intervals usually came
after something had happened. Once,
the governor on the propeller went out,
making it difficult to control the pro-
peller speed; another time, the landing
gear wouldn’t come up. He would tell
me about each incident weeks after the
fact, a confession of a close call that I
had missed entirely. Then he’d sell the
plane, as if to punish it. “I’m done fly-
ing,” he’d tell me. “I did it, and I’m glad,
but it’s out of my system now.” Then
he would take to bed with a copy of
Trade-A-Plane to see what was for sale.
During one plane-less stretch, be-
fore we were married, Karl arrived at
“I see it’s shorts weather.” my house for dinner, and when I met
him at the door and kissed him I stepped
back. I had never encountered anything
• • as cold as his face. “How cold is it out
there?” I asked. I thought of a line from
crashed it upside down,” Karl told me. The 175 needed a new propeller. The the Thornton Wilder play “The Skin
“Everyone lived.” Bonanza needed new gas tanks, which of Our Teeth”: “It’s simply freezing; the
“How did he crash it upside down?” meant that the wings had to be taken dogs are sticking to the sidewalks!” It
“Well, the weather was terrible, and apart. The new gas tanks and the wing- was December. I remember, because it
one of the engines went out, so the plane panel removal and replacement cost as was the day after my birthday—Karl
would have been listing to begin with.” much as he’d paid for the plane. Then had waited until after my birthday to
it also needed a new engine. tell me he’d bought a motorcycle.
hen Karl and I met, in 1994, he Half of these planes Karl owned I understood that he wasn’t inter-
W was divorced and had a 1976
Beechcraft Bonanza, a model commonly
without having a license. He could fly
by himself or he could fly with a pas-
ested in baking bread, that there would
be no Scrabble or yoga in our future
referred to as “the doctor killer” because senger so long as he had an instructor as a couple, but couldn’t there be a hobby
the plane was so streamlined that it was along. It meant that, for the first ten in which death was not a likely out-
hard to control. “Doctors have enough years of our relationship, there was come? I told him I was going to start
money to buy them,” Karl said. “But someone else in the plane whenever I smoking again.
they aren’t good enough pilots to fly was with him, but Karl was always the “What?”
them.”Thanks to the Key Brothers Fly- one flying. He flew alone all the time, “You asked me to quit, and I quit.
ing Service, Karl was a good enough mostly to Meridian to see his mother. I’m starting again.”
pilot. The Bonanza he bought had been He would say that he put off getting He left after that—no dinner—and
on the cover of American Bonanza So- his license because he didn’t have enough rode home. He lived three blocks away.
ciety Magazine, he’d been told. He loved time to study for the written exam, but While trying to get the garage-door
that plane, then loved it less, then sold in fact he studied for it ceaselessly. He opener out of his pocket, he slipped on
it. Later, he bought a 1962 Piper Co- put off getting his license because he the ice and the bike fell on top of him.
manche (loved, loved less, sold), fol- wanted to be sure he’d get a perfect He was able to dig out his cell phone
lowed by a 1982 Beechcraft Sundowner, score. He got his license (missing only and call his son for help. The next day,
and then a 1959 Cessna 175—each one one question) in 2004, the year before he sold the motorcycle to the execu-
a gorgeous piece of junk. They were the we married. After that, it was just the tive director of the clinic for half of
kinds of planes that compelled other two of us in the plane. He took more what he’d paid for it two days before.
pilots to stride across the tarmac and courses. He got his unusual-attitudes Eventually, the director who had pur-
offer their congratulations. The planes certification, which teaches pilots what chased Karl’s bike cut the price again
Karl had were the planes that other to do if they inadvertently get upside and sold it to someone else, at the be-
men wanted. They would have been down, how to come out of spins, how hest of his wife.
real bargains, too, except that the Co- to think fast. He got his tail-wheel en- Eventually, Karl was going to die.
manche needed a whole new engine. dorsement, which meant that he could Eventually, we were all going to die. I
24 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
understood this, but I wanted him to times a year. I enjoyed the five-hour joke. At his worst, Karl was like a sad
give me the luxury of forgetting it. I drive, but Karl didn’t. “If I had a plane,” parakeet sitting on a swing in a cage
wanted not to have to contemplate his he said, “I’d go to see my mother once year after year. It was unnatural.
loss so vividly while he was still here. I a week for lunch.” When I told him to get another
would take a plane over a motorcycle Jo was eighty-seven when we started plane, he said the matter deserved more
any day, maybe because planes were having this conversation. Karl was sixty- thought. He gave it a few more years.
what I was used to and because Karl one. He felt as though the time for an- His choices narrowed, then shifted. He
had cut his permanent teeth in an air- other plane had passed, and then he felt reorganized his priorities.
plane. Boats seemed safer than planes, as though there was still a chance. He While Karl pondered his options, I
until they didn’t. In 2003, Karl was part would say that he was finally free of his thought about what could and could
of a sixteen-person team that raced an desire, and then that desire would come not be controlled. In flying, three fac-
eighty-foot yacht from Rhode Island over him again, like a sort of malarial tors obtain: the skill of the pilot, the
to Germany. When the boat sailed away, fever. He showed me pictures of the reliability of the equipment, and the X
I stood on the dock in Newport and planes he wanted, including a home- factor—the lightning, the flock of star-
cried, with good reason. In the two weeks built plane called a STOL CH750, which lings sucked into the engine. Because
that they were gone, they were hit by looked like a sixth-grade art project writ Karl’s skills as a pilot were impeccable,
eighty-foot waves in eighty-knot winds. large. Over time, I learned to offer no and there wasn’t a damn thing I could
There was an electrical fire on the boat. resistance. “Pretty,” I would say, when do about birds, that left the plane as
At one point, a rogue wave smashed he showed me the picture. I didn’t want the one thing I could control.
into the hull, and Karl, standing at the to be the reason he didn’t have a plane, “A Cirrus,” I said. “But not a used
helm and tied to a line, was knocked the reason he was gripped by fits of mis- Cirrus. A new Cirrus. A Cirrus right off
against the cockpit. For three days, he ery specific to a man who wants to be the showroom floor.” The Cirrus lacked
couldn’t stand. For six months after com- in the sky and is stuck on the ground. the guy factor, but it was one of the saf-
ing home, he had a hematoma on his At some point, I’d had a revelation: it est and most reliable planes on the mar-
hip that looked as though someone had would be better for him to die in a plane ket—the Toyota Corolla of aviation.
worked a grapefruit under his skin. than to keep talking about whether or Karl was genuinely horrified by my
He decided he wanted to fly again. not to get a plane. This isn’t exactly a suggestion. He was tormented by the
He bought the Sundowner and then
got rid of it. Two years later, he bought
the Cessna 175, then got rid of that. He
said it was time to stop flying. He was
done with planes.
I like to tell people that Karl would
be the perfect person to be stranded
with on a desert island: he tells a good
story, can fly a plane and sail a boat,
and could take out my appendix if he
had to. He could entertain me, save my
life, get me off the island. What could
be better than that? I wanted him to
be the brave and adventuresome per-
son he was. He worked so hard at a job
that was often relentless and depress-
ing, and, if this was his pleasure, who
was I to say it should be otherwise?
I tried not to say it.
The years went on. Karl bought an
old lobster boat. He got it cheap be-
cause it was impossible to steer. He’d
go out after work and take it a mile
down the river and a mile back. He
liked the quiet. He said he wished that
there could be one more plane.
RADICAL THERAPEUTIC
TREATMENTS
MONOTONAL ANTIBODY: Ninety minutes
of Laura Ingraham commentary, ad-
ministered twice daily through Purell-
coated earbuds.
QUEENSIDE
the world, just thirty-eight are women.
Much of this gap stems from how many
women compete, versus the number of
Hou Yifan and the wait for a female chess champion. men who do: around sixteen per cent
of tournament players identify as fe-
BY LOUISA THOMAS male, and most of them are children.
As a purely statistical matter, you would
expect few, if any, women at the ex-
tremes of the rankings. Still, this ap-
pears to be an incomplete explanation
of the disparity at the top of the game,
about which Hou is blunt. “You can-
not deny it, you cannot pretend it doesn’t
happen,” she told me, of the absence of
women from chess’s highest echelon.
For years, she has been the only one who
stood a chance.
Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a
small city near China’s coast. As a child,
she spotted a chess set in a shopwindow,
and liked the shapes of the pieces: the
sturdy pawns and slender-necked bish-
ops, the castellated rooks and horse-
headed knights. When she was five, she
started playing the game with other
kids at the home of a chess teacher, and
showed enough talent that her parents
enrolled her a year early in the local
school, which had a chess program. She
and her classmates would consult a large
chess dictionary and write out the first
few moves of famous openings—the
Scotch, the Ruy Lopez—on a sheet of
paper. Then they’d set up their boards,
dutifully execute their copied instruc-
tions, and launch their wild attacks.
Hou liked calculating how one move
ven by the standards of chess prod- taught me that as a girl you should do would provoke another, and started
E igies, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t
so much the way she played the game—
this or that,” she said. “Teachers never
shaped my views in that way.” These
thinking in terms of sequences. She de-
veloped a sense of where to push and
dynamically but not dazzlingly, with an days, her hair falls to her shoulders, and when to defend. Her coach at school
aggressive but flexible style. It was that black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. could take her only so far, but, at a tour-
she was a girl. Thirteen years after she She speaks English quickly and pre- nament, she met an International Master
became a Grandmaster, at the age of cisely; she spent a year at Oxford as a and former national champion named
fourteen, people still mention the two Rhodes Scholar, studying public policy. Tong Yuanming, who taught chess in
big barrettes that used to pin back her She is the only woman among the hun- Shandong Province, a few hours north.
bobbed hair. “I never felt restrictions or dred best chess players in the world, Tong said that he would consider taking
limitations,” she told me recently, from at No. 82. The second-ranked woman, her on. He sat Hou at a board and had
her home in Shenzhen, China, where Aleksandra Goryachkina, a Russian in her face his top pupils, all boys. They
she is a professor at Shenzhen Univer- her early twenties, is outside the top had studied chess theory; they knew
sity’s Faculty of Physical Education. two hundred. how to checkmate with only, say, a
(Last year, at twenty-six, she became Chess is not like basketball or soc- bishop and a knight. Hou did not know
the youngest full professor in the uni- cer. Men and women face one another endgames, but she beat most of them
versity’s history.) “My parents never on equal terms, and no one can tell the anyway. She was seven years old.
She moved to Shandong with her
Hou has been the highest-rated active female chess player for the past six years. mother and attended chess classes. Two
28 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY AMIKO LI
years later, she joined the national team, When Hou was fourteen, she shared studying chess for up to six hours a day.
and her family moved to Beijing. Her third place in the open section of the There was also a twenty-minute period
parents told her that she could “go back World Junior Chess Championship, in dedicated to telling jokes.
to normal life” whenever she wanted, Turkey, and became the fifteenth-young- In 1950, FIDE had regularized the ti-
but she was not a normal talent. She est person, to that point, to achieve the tles applied to the best chess players,
won the girls’ under-ten championship rank of Grandmaster. Later that year, and created one title just for women:
in 2003, and, the next year, finished the she reached the finals of the Women’s Woman International Master. The bar
boys’ under-ten tournament tied for World Chess Championship, and fin- was set two hundred rating points lower
first, placing third after tiebreaks. In ished second. She developed a reputa- than that for a standard International
2005, she was the youngest player on tion on tour for kindness, and for men- Master, the title below Grandmaster.
the one female squad at the World Team tal strength. In 2010, she returned to the Twenty-six years later, FIDE introduced
Chess Championship, in Israel. She lost finals, and came into her fourth game the title of Woman Grandmaster, and
her first two games, and, while sulking, needing just a draw to win—and lost. placed that title, too, at a threshold lower
got thrashed in the third, despite start- It was one of the rare occasions when than not only Grandmaster but also In-
ing with the white pieces. (The player a game got to her. That night, she walked ternational Master. Polgár wanted to
with the white pieces always moves first, with her mother and her coach around insulate his daughters from the dam-
giving her a slight advantage.) The ex- the garden of their hotel until she was aging effects of low expectations: the
perience hardened her mind-set, mak- calm. The next day, in tiebreaks, she sisters sought titles available to men,
ing her more disciplined and profes- overwhelmed her opponent and com- and, with a few exceptions, they avoided
sional. She was eleven. patriot Ruan Lufei. At sixteen, Hou was women’s tournaments.
Hou’s competitors started taking note the youngest-ever women’s world cham- Some of the men they played wouldn’t
not just of her performances but of her pion, and among the world’s best teen- shake their hands. One, after losing to
disposition. Irina Bulmaga, a contem- age players. It was possible to imagine Susan, threw pieces in her direction. In
porary of Hou’s who lives in Romania, other summits that she might climb. 1986, when Susan was seventeen, she
said, “My parents and coaches were al- But Hou had her own ambitions. should have qualified for a regional tour-
ways telling me, ‘Look how focussed nament for the World Chess Champi-
she is during the games.’” Bulmaga, like he most famous female chess player onship, based on her result at the Hun-
most young players, struggled to con-
tain her emotions and to concentrate
T in the world doesn’t exist. Beth Har-
mon, the protagonist of “The Queen’s
garian national championship, but the
Hungarian federation, angry about her
throughout games that could last for Gambit,” is a fictional character, invented insistence on playing men, refused to
five hours and were sometimes played by the novelist Walter Tevis, in 1983, and send her. FIDE eventually intervened, of-
back-to-back. Hou was stoic. “My per- lately given new life in a Netflix mini- ficially opening future world champion-
sonality wouldn’t push me to an ex- series. Harmon conquers the chess world ships to female competitors. Susan be-
treme,” she told me. It is not that she of the nineteen-fifties and sixties and came the third woman to earn the title
never got emotional or distracted, or faces only the mildest sexism along the of Grandmaster. Sofia, who, at the age
didn’t feel pressure. It is that these ex- way. The Hollywood version of her story, of fourteen, won a tournament against
periences were so rare that she can cite though fanciful in many respects, evokes respected Grandmasters in spectacular
each time they happened. the glamour of Lisa Lane, who became fashion, reached the level of Interna-
In some respects, China was a good a media sensation in the early sixties tional Master. Judit eclipsed them both.
place for a girl to pursue chess. The In- but quit the game in 1966, unhappy with A diminutive girl with long red hair
ternational Chess Federation—known the focus on her looks and her love life, and arresting gray eyes, Judit, by thir-
by its French acronym, FIDE—has over- and unable to make a comfortable liv- teen, had a shot at Bobby Fischer’s rec-
seen a world championship for women ing as a pro. Lane became the national ord for youngest-ever Grandmaster, and
since 1927. For years, it was dominated women’s champion twice, but never beat Sports Illustrated ran a story about her.
by the Soviets. Then, in 1991, a young the best women in the world, let alone “It’s inevitable that nature will work
Chinese player named Xie Jun quali- the top men. (Tevis seems also to have against her, and very soon,” the world
fied for the finals against Maia Chibur- been inspired by Bobby Fischer, the ec- champion Garry Kasparov told the mag-
danidze, of Georgia, who had held the centric American champion, who was azine. He added, “She has fantastic chess
title since 1978. China had never had a a notorious chauvinist.) talent, but she is, after all, a woman.”
championship contender, and Xie’s prep- Shortly after Tevis’s novel was pub- Polgár beat Fischer’s record; two years
aration became a collective project. The lished, three women emerged whose later, she beat Boris Spassky, a former
country’s top male players helped coach stories rivalled Harmon’s. They were world champion. The first time she
her. She won, becoming a source of na- sisters, from Hungary: Susan (née Zsu- played Kasparov, in 1994, he changed his
tional pride and establishing a path fol- zsa), the oldest; Sofia (née Zsófia); and mind about moving a piece after lifting
lowed by other women’s chess champi- Judit, the baby of the family. Their fa- his hand, breaking the rules; Polgár
ons. For a long time, the top Chinese ther, László Polgár, believed that ge- looked questioningly at the arbiter, who
men and women trained together in niuses are made, not born, and set out seemed to see the infraction but did
Beijing—though that has changed since to prove it. He kept his daughters on a nothing. Kasparov won that match and,
China got two men into the top twenty. strict educational schedule that included for seven years, every other game they
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 29
played, except for a handful of draws. of women at the top has nothing to do and the heir to Polgár. Suddenly, she
Then, in 2002, at a tournament in Mos- with innate ability. It has to do, she said, carried tremendous symbolic weight
cow, she faced him in a game of rapid with how rarely girls dedicate them- every time she sat down at the board.
chess. The format gave each player about selves to chess at the expense of everything In some ways, the lack of a female
half an hour to complete their moves. else. For every Polgár sister, of course, world champion is more troubling to
By then, Polgár was ranked No. 19 in there are countless young players who people outside the game than it is to
the world. Kasparov was still No. 1. Play- have burned out, pushed too hard by those within it. In the popular imagi-
ing with the black pieces, he deployed ambitious parents and coaches. Still, Pol- nation, chess is nearly synonymous with
a defense that was unusual for him, and gár is firm about what it takes to become intelligence, but professional players
Polgár, an aggressive and psychologically a top player—and when one must begin. know that the game is a highly special-
astute player, noted that he had opted “You have to be, really, a kid to get in- ized activity. László Polgár’s attitude
for a line that his rival Vladimir Kram- volved,” she said, “so that it goes simply toward women’s titles and tournaments
nik had once used against him. Seeing under your skin.” is not typical; most female players see
what was coming, Polgár seized control. these tournaments as opportunities for
With her rooks doubled on the seventh n 2012, Hou Yifan became the first finding camaraderie in a male-domi-
rank and hunting the Russian’s exposed
king, Kasparov resigned.
I female player to beat Judit Polgár in
a classical game in twenty-two years.
nated arena. The trans writer Charlotte
Clymer, an avid amateur player, de-
Polgár later said that she would have She did it at a tournament in Gibraltar, scribed women’s tournaments to me as
preferred a more brilliant win, strength in a field that included some of the world’s “a reprieve from worrying about the
against strength. Still, it was a historic top Grandmasters. FIDE ranks players palpable discomfort that some men have
occasion: the best woman had defeated using the so-called Elo system: winners with trans women.” Crucially, the tour-
the best man. Kasparov now regrets his take points from losers, and the discrep- naments also provide financial and spon-
chauvinism toward female chess play- ancy in their ratings coming into a match sorship support. “I think it’s really im-
ers, and Polgár in particular, he told me. determines the number of points won portant for women to have their own
“There was no epiphany,” he explained and lost. The Elo system is also used to competitions, their own titles,” Anna
in an e-mail. “I just got older and wiser, calculate performance ratings achieved Muzychuk, a Ukrainian Grandmaster,
and can only apologize that it took as at specific events; Hou’s rating for the told me. “It motivates them to work, to
long as it did!” He has since become an tournament in Gibraltar was an aston- become stronger. We can see that it can
outspoken supporter of women in the ishing 2872. She tied for first place with be our profession.” Success in women’s
game. (He served as a consultant on the British Grandmaster Nigel Short, and girls’ tournaments, though, can be
“The Queen’s Gambit.”) Polgár, who re- once the No. 3 player in the world. Short a “trap,” the chess writer Mig Green-
tired in 2014, having peaked in the rank- won the title in tiebreaks, but Hou gard told me. While Greengard believes
ings at No. 8, told me that the absence emerged as the star of the tournament that girls-only tournaments are posi-
tive social experiences for female play-
ers, he worries that the best, like Hou,
aren’t routinely challenged in the way
that the boys are. “The way you get bet-
ter is by having your ass kicked hard
and often by better players,” he said.
There is something disquieting about
a system that uses the word “woman”
to devalue a title—and sexism in the
chess world unquestionably persists.
Jennifer Shahade, a Woman Grand-
master, is the director of U.S. Chess
Women, an initiative of the United
States Chess Federation that orga-
nizes and funds programs for girls and
women. (Shahade is also a friend of
mine.) A few years ago, she and her
husband created an art installation ti-
tled “Not Particularly Beautiful,” an in-
teractive chessboard filled with misog-
ynistic insults that she and other female
chess players have received. Anna Ru-
dolf, an International Master who has
become a popular chess streamer on
Twitch and a commentator for matches,
“We say ‘Thar she blows’—not ‘Ooh, look, whales.’” told me that when she played on a team
in Hungary’s top club league the ven- in men’s and women’s relative ability to “Of course, she can still play great chess,
ues often had no women’s bathrooms, rotate 3-D objects in their minds, which even improve her chess, possibly. But to
or left them locked. Rudolf was once might have a bearing on proficiency at get in the top ten in the world, compete
falsely accused, on no evidence other chess—but that skill is teachable, and with the top male players in the world,
than her strong performance during a other studies have shown that experi- who are completely dedicated profession-
tournament, of hiding a microcomputer ence and training can overcome average als, I don’t think it’s possible.” Hou was at
in her lip balm. differences between the sexes. What’s peace with her decision. “I did not want
Some men resent that there are prizes more, emphasizing biological differ- to spend my life wholly on chess,” she
available just to women, and bristle at ences may, in itself, discourage women told me. She played wonderfully while in
the idea that women who are rated lower from pursuing certain ac- college nonetheless, climb-
than many men can make a living from tivities, a possibility that has ing to her peak rating, 2683—
chess, while the vast majority of those been explored in research just below the 2700 thresh-
men can’t. Shahade told me, “In chats on the gender discrepancies old of the so-called super
online, people will ask, ‘Why are there in STEM fields. Grandmasters, players who
Woman Grandmaster titles?’ They know Talking to women in are generally considered
the answer, but they want to bring up chess, I found it striking possible contenders for the
female inferiority. Then someone will how many seem comfort- world championship. She
bring up the greater-male-variability able with the presumption thrived at school, too, em-
hypothesis”—the idea, going back to that men have inherent ad- bracing campus life and tak-
Darwin, that men exhibit more natu- vantages. Eva Repková, a ing a wide range of courses
ral variation than women, and so are Woman Grandmaster from outside her international-
more likely to appear at the extremes, Slovakia, is the chair of FIDE’s Com- relations major: geology, anatomy, Japa-
both positive and negative, of human mission for Women’s Chess, which pro- nese art and culture.
ability. “It always goes the same way,” motes gender equality in the game. Last Hou won the Women’s World
Shahade went on. “It’s not really done October, in an interview with a news- Championship again in 2013 and in
in good faith.” paper in India, she was quoted as say- 2016, as she was finishing her senior
Hou has nothing but good things to ing that “it’s more natural for men to year in college. She had never been par-
say about her interactions with male pick chess as an interest or women to ticularly outspoken, but, after winning
opponents, but remarks like those which maybe pick music or arranging flow- her fourth championship, she declared
Shahade described aren’t made only on ers,” and that women lacked men’s “phys- that she would not play for the title
Twitter. Nigel Short, a few years after ical endurance” and “fighting spirit.” She again unless the format was changed to
beating Hou in tiebreaks, claimed that insisted to me that her remarks were be more like that of the World Chess
men were “hard-wired” to be better than taken out of context: “I totally believe Championship, which takes place every
women at the game. “I don’t have the in gender equality,” she said. But Muzy- other year and uses a “challenger” sys-
slightest problem in acknowledging that chuk, the Ukrainian Grandmaster, made tem: candidates compete for the right
my wife possesses a much higher de- similar points to me about endurance to face the sitting champion. The wom-
gree of emotional intelligence than I and competitiveness. Even Hou, in an en’s title was being held every year, and
do,” he said. “Likewise, she doesn’t feel interview a couple of years ago, brought alternated between the challenger sys-
embarrassed in asking me to maneuver up endurance as a possible male advan- tem and a knockout tournament, in
the car out of our narrow garage. One tage, though she played it down, and which sixty-four competitors, includ-
is not better than the other, we just have pointed out that girls are discouraged ing the defending champion, were placed
different skills.” When Short’s remarks from having high ambitions. “Most girls in a bracket and faced single elimina-
were condemned, he claimed that he are told at an early age that there’s a tion. Knockouts favor upsets and chaos,
was speaking in terms of general pop- kind of gender distinction, and they which lend them a degree of excite-
ulations, and that the existence of ex- should just try their best in the girls’ ment—and may help attract sponsors—
ceptions proved nothing. “Men and section and be happy with that,” she but they undermine the format’s abil-
women do have different brains. This said. “So, without the motivation to chase ity to determine who is truly the best.
is a biological fact,” he responded to higher goals, it’s harder for some girls (FIDE, in 2019, adopted a version of the
one critic on Twitter. Short is now a to improve as fast as boys as they grow changes that Hou had proposed.)
vice-president of FIDE. up.” Many girls drop away from the It wasn’t the only stand she took. In
In truth, the science on the subject more competitive tracks of the game 2017, in Gibraltar, Hou showed up thirty
is far from settled. There are measur- when they reach high school. minutes late to her final round and re-
able differences between men’s brains In 2012, after Hou beat Polgár, she signed after five moves. Afterward, she
and women’s, on average, but it is not stunned the chess world again by an- explained that she was protesting being
entirely clear what those differences nouncing that she would be attending Pe- paired against women in seven of her
mean, and there is enough variation king University as a full-time student. Few ten matches. (Men far outnumbered
within the sexes to lessen any explana- of the current top players went to college, women at the event.) Tournament offi-
tory power the differences might have. and some didn’t finish high school. Pol- cials said the pairings were an unlikely
Several studies have found disparities gár told me that, at the time, she thought, but statistically possible accident. Hou’s
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 31
“At the age of four, he could sit for six
hours, building Lego,” Henrik said. “And
when he went to bed his eyes were still
swimming with Legos.” When Mag-
nus and Ellen began playing chess, they
made the same amount of progress for
a while, and then Ellen turned her mind
to other things. Magnus, bored with his
schoolwork, started carrying a chess-
board around and reading chess books.
He wanted to go to every tournament
he could.
The family spent six months driving
around Europe, ferrying Magnus to com-
petitions and sightseeing. Ellen started
playing again, and their younger sister
Ingrid began playing, too. Ellen became
a strong club player, with a peak rating
of 1939. “Some of my best friends are girls
and boys from the chess world,” she told
“I’d really hoped my friends would have warmed up to you by now.” me. But she tired of the attention that
came with being one of the few women
in chess, and one with the last name
• • Carlsen. It made her anxious, she said,
to see the best players in a hall gathered
resignation sparked an unusually heated on the queenside, weakening his center around her board, studying her moves.
debate in the typically staid chess world. of the board, and Hou found the per- She didn’t feel her intelligence was being
When I asked her about the protest, fect rook move to punish him. Suddenly, judged, she noted. “I don’t think I have
she described it as a thing of the past, it was a two-outcome game: Hou would ever felt intellectually inferior to any of
and said she’d rather look forward. almost certainly either win or draw. She the guys I played against,” she said, add-
looked serene; Carlsen did not. Against ing, “I think to most people it is clear
ome of the excitement around Hou’s someone else, she likely would have kept that your chess rating is not identical to
S potential grew from her adaptable
style, and from the sense that her abil-
applying pressure. Facing Carlsen, she
traded pieces to simplify the position,
your intellectual abilities.” Her brother
became a Grandmaster at thirteen, and
ities were instinctive as much as learned. and settled for the draw. She knew how world champion a decade later. Ellen be-
“This very natural feeling of the game many players had seen their fortunes came a doctor.
is hard to describe,” Vladimir Kramnik improbably reverse against Carlsen, how
told ESPN the Magazine, in a piece many had watched him wring water n 2017, after Hou beat Caruana and
about Hou. “She doesn’t need to calcu-
late, to come logically to a certain good
from what looked like stone.
Carlsen learned how to play chess
I drew Carlsen, the chess world began
buzzing again about her prospects. It
move—she just feels it. That’s a sign of alongside his sister Ellen. Their father, had been an up-and-down year. There
big talent. I experienced something sim- Henrik, decided to teach them the game was the match in Gibraltar that she’d
ilar when I played Magnus Carlsen for when she was six and he was five, but thrown in protest; she’d also had a dis-
the first time.” they lost interest after a few months. mal showing at a tournament in Ge-
Carlsen, a thirty-year-old from Nor- He tried again the following year, with neva. In August, she won the Biel In-
way, has been the top player in the world similar results. A few years later, he tried ternational Chess Festival, in Switzer-
for nearly all of Hou’s career. She has a third time, and then, some months land, with a performance rating of 2810.
never beaten him in an official game, later, a fourth; finally, it stuck. Both chil- She said that it “showed I could com-
though she has come close. In the spring dren now liked the game. Magnus liked pete at the top.” But she had applied
of 2017, she faced him at the Grenke it more. for and was accepted into a master’s
Chess Classic, in Baden-Baden, Ger- I asked Henrik recently what he program at the University of Chicago.
many. She was coming off a spectacu- would have done if it had been Ellen, She’d deferred the admission and, in-
lar win against the No. 3 player in the not Magnus, who showed great prom- stead, while in Geneva, she’d interviewed
world, the American Fabiano Caruana. ise. He said that he hoped he would for the Rhodes Scholarship. In Decem-
Carlsen, unfazed, chose a riskier open- have encouraged her the same way, but ber, she announced that she was headed
ing than he normally selects: he was that it wasn’t really the right question. to Oxford. She got less pushback for
playing for the win. The game was more If anything, Ellen picked up the game this decision, she told me, than she had
or less even through twenty-two moves, more easily. But Magnus had a single- for going to college.
then Carlsen carelessly advanced a pawn mindedness that his sister didn’t share. I’ve spoken to a number of people
32 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
who are convinced that Hou would have emy, even though it would complicate races or cultures. Talent is equally dis-
risen higher if she’d made the game her her participation in chess tournaments. tributed, but opportunity is not.”
singular focus. “I believe she could have “Obviously, it wasn’t great for my chess In June, Hou competed in her first
been top twenty,” Irina Bulmaga told life,” she told me. “But I wouldn’t change major tournament of 2021, the Women’s
me. Bulmaga admitted that a part of her what I did.” Speed Chess Championship. She hadn’t
was disappointed that Hou hadn’t done Hou has been thinking lately about been training, she said; she made a few
so. “The more you see, the more you be- the impact that chess has had on her uncharacteristic blunders but won the
lieve maybe you could achieve it, too,” life—the chances it gave her to travel tournament anyway. Simultaneously, she
she said. Hou, though, speaks without and to develop her mind. At Shenzhen became the first woman to compete in
regrets. Enkhtuul Altan-Ulzii, a Woman University, along with helping with the the Meltwater tour. In the third game
Grandmaster from Mongolia who is one school’s chess team, she is looking for of the second round, she faced Carlsen.
of Hou’s closest friends, told me, “She other ways to use the game. She has The match was streamed on the Web
is not actually results oriented. She plays begun commentating at tournaments, site Chess24, and Carlsen, in a white
for fun and enjoyment.” and is advising on a Chinese translation of shirt emblazoned with the logos of var-
Hou remained a popular invite for “The Queen’s Gambit.” There is some- ious sponsors, looked sharp, his thick
tournaments, including those featuring thing to be said for using chess to en- caramel hair swept upward. Hou leaned
the world’s top players. Quiet, fashion- rich one’s life instead of using one’s life in as she concentrated, such that her head
ably dressed, sometimes with a pot of to master chess. Jennifer Shahade told was often cut off at the chin, and the light-
tea nearby, she was often the only woman me, “I think there’s too much empha- ing appeared to blur her face. Carlsen
in the room. Last year, during the pan- sis on being the highest rank.” Women played opening moves that were clearly
demic, Carlsen organized an online chess have begun to thrive in other parts of aimed at stopping Hou from taking the
tour, with five events and a million dol- the chess world, such as online stream- initiative. He guided the match into its
lars in total prize money. (He won.) ing, which exploded in popularity on endgame, keeping the upper hand. He
Now called the Meltwater Champions Twitch and YouTube during the pan- got his pieces onto active squares, and
Chess Tour, it expanded in 2021, this demic. Two charismatic sisters from Hou’s light-squared bishop became stuck
time with an accompanying challeng- Canada, Alexandra and Andrea Botez, in a corner. Carlsen’s passed pawn moved
ers’ competition, designed to encourage have nearly a million followers on the up the board, and Hou knew that the
gender equality. The challengers include former; Alexandra is outside the top game was lost. She tilted her head to rest
ten of the top girls and women under twenty-five thousand in the FIDE rank- it on her hand.
the age of twenty-four, and ten of their ings, but in an interview with CNBC It was an uneven tournament for Hou.
male counterparts. They are divided into she estimated that she will make “at She suffered a series of losses against the
two mixed-gender teams, one captained least mid six figures” through stream- weaker part of the field, but, against Wes-
by Vladimir Kramnik and the other by ing and sponsorships this year. Shahade ley So, Anish Giri, Levon Aronian, and
Judit Polgár. Hou is a coach for Kram- said that, in the past couple of years, Ding Liren—four of the best players in
nik’s team. The point, Polgár told me, more girls are playing in schools and the world—she managed draws. Against
isn’t to show that the girls can compete local clubs. The U.S. Chess Women ini- Ding, her countryman and the world’s
with the boys—for one thing, the rat- tiative has a robust—and growing— third-ranked classical player, she clamped
ings of the boys, almost to a person, are down in a so-called hedgehog structure,
higher, and the standings so far have re- the black pawns forming a row of tight
flected that. “They are not worse than little spikes, and waited for her chance
boys because they are girls,” Polgár said. to counter. When it came, she took con-
“They are worse because they are not trol, until the position simplified into a
playing the same amount of time, with draw. It was the kind of performance
the same focus and dedication.” that inspires some chess fans to think
One of the participants is Carissa about what might have been.
Yip, who, at ten, became the youngest But that’s not what’s on Hou’s mind.
girl to defeat a Grandmaster, and now, “I’m sure that my future life will have
at seventeen, is the highest-rated Amer- girls’ club program on Zoom. The FIDE a connection with chess, maybe a deep
ican woman. She loves chess—“every Commission for Women’s Chess, led connection,” she said. “This connection
single game is different,” she told me, by Repková, is trying to expand the num- is there all the time.” She has been work-
like “art”—but she has not made every ber of female arbiters and tournament ing with a group of psychologists and
decision in her life with an eye toward officials in addition to female players. statisticians on a paper exploring why
her chess career. A few years ago, when Addressing the gender disparity at the there are so few women in chess at all
choosing between the public high school top “comes from addressing the dispar- levels. The insights she contributes are
near her home, in Andover, Massachu- ity at the bottom, at the base of the pyr- gleaned from her own career. Whether
setts, or the prestigious prep school in amid,” Kasparov told me. “You can have or not there is an “innate difference”
town, Phillips Academy, which strictly a similar conversation about why there between men and women, she said,
limits the number of classes that stu- aren’t more Grandmasters from differ- what interests her is the way “society
dents can miss, she chose Phillips Acad- ent parts of the world, or of different shapes you.”
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 33
ANNALS OF JUSTICE
1. THE HISTORY In his view, the University of Texas, one-vote margin, in favor of keeping a
once the target of a civil-rights lawsuit soft-edged kind of affirmative action
n June, 2016, Justice Samuel Alito charging it with discriminating against that relies on the judgment of an ad-
ability of higher education to influence not just an admissions policy. Pomona 4. THE INTEGRATIONIST
racial justice is the ability to produce has to “be able to overcome an extraor-
policy and research. It’s unlikely that a dinarily broad range of kinds of disad- ichelle Adams grew up in Detroit
nondiverse group will prioritize these
issues. The perspectives don’t exist. Not
vantage and can help students climb the
hills that they have been born at the
M in the nineteen-sixties and sev-
enties, a child of the Black upper mid-
out of bad intent.” bottom of—and if they haven’t been dle class. Her life story has a threading-
Between the 1984 and the 2020 Pres- born at the bottom they slide down the-needle quality. She was raised in an
idential elections, at least one of the faster than other people do.” She was integrated neighborhood, she told me,
major-party nominees had a degree optimistic, telling me that a number of but only because her parents had paid a
from either Harvard or Yale, and usu- special programs at Pomona have helped handsome fee to a white proxy who acted
ally both nominees did. Joe Biden at- the school “all but erase differential grad- as the official buyer of their house. She
tended the University of Delaware and uation rates.” One provides grants for went to an integrated school, but only
Syracuse University, but, according to assistance in science, technology, and because it was private and unusually pro-
Politico, more than forty per cent of his math. Another used a different set of gressive. (It was founded by refugees
senior and mid-level staff have Ivy teaching strategies in biology classes, from Nazi Germany.) She remembers a
League degrees. The White House is which produced better results for these racially comfortable upbringing, sur-
just an unusually prominent example students. Starr believes that such pro- rounded by whites who weren’t pre-
of a whole range of influential institu- grams, at Pomona and elsewhere, have judiced and Black professionals, her
tions that pay close attention to élite unfortunately received far less attention parents’ friends, for whom American so-
educational backgrounds. Having Black at most universities than affirmative ac- ciety seemed to be working well.
people in the room, regardless of which tion in admissions. “Everybody we knew was like the
class within Black America they come I asked Starr how universities will Obamas,” she told me. One could say
from, brings a different perspective and react if the Supreme Court takes the that she exemplifies the color-blind
makes a difference in how and what Harvard case and issues a decision that ideal cherished by the Supreme Court’s
decisions are made. As Starr pointed bans universities from applying any conservative Justices, except that her
out, affirmative action is more than a consideration of race in admissions. She life was wildly exceptional. In the De-
racially representative apportionment said, “Colleges and universities will have troit of her childhood, neighborhoods,
of élite admissions slots. It is linked to to say, ‘What ways remain to us to be schools, and workplaces were largely
a larger mission in race relations and true to our missions without falling on segregated. As Black people arrived
for Black America. the wrong side of the highest court of in the city, white people left. Not far
Starr emphasized that she sees affir- the land?’ I think that what we will see from where Adams lived, a white real-
mative action as an educational policy, are changes in recruitment to make sure estate developer had built a six-foot,
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 43
half-mile-long concrete wall to separate low different rules from high schools? public schools, real-estate practices,
a Black neighborhood from a white one. Adams is pessimistic. “I have to be hon- and job markets. The Biden Admin-
In Black America, nationalism and est,” she said. “I think there’s a very high istration is more vocally concerned
integrationism have always coexisted, chance of the Court overturning the about these problems than any recent
sometimes as opposing ideas in tension higher-education cases.” Administration has been. People in
with each other, but often as elements As the Supreme Court has moved the conversation don’t always agree.
within the same person’s consciousness. in the direction of what its conserva- Sheryll Cashin, a former Clinton Ad-
Adams has written a book, to be pub- tive members consider color blindness, ministration official and a law profes-
lished in 2023, about the 1974 landmark real life, at least for Black people who sor at Georgetown, calls, in her 2014
Supreme Court case Milliken v. Brad- are poor or close to it, has remained book, “Place, Not Race,” for “jettison-
ley. The Court, in a 5–4 decision, re- highly color-conscious—maybe increas- ing race-based affirmative action,” even
jected an argument by the local branch ingly so. Blacks are much more likely though she considers herself “a pas-
of the N.A.A.C.P. that Detroit public- than whites, Latinos, or Asian Ameri- sionate advocate for integration.” In-
school students should be bused be- cans to live in ethnically segregated stead, she proposes conferring advan-
tween the city and the suburbs in order neighborhoods. Black students are much tages based on whether one lives in a
to achieve integration. One of the he- more likely than white students to at- disadvantaged neighborhood.
roes of Adams’s book is the national- tend segregated schools and schools Cashin is a reluctant convert to op-
ist minister Albert Cleage, who founded with a high percentage of students from posing race-based affirmative action.
a church called the Shrine of the Black poor families, even though Black stu- Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at
Madonna. Cleage was one of the first dents perform better, on average, in in- the Century Foundation, has always
prominent leaders to call attention to tegrated schools—largely because those been critical of it. So I was surprised to
the segregation and the underfunding schools usually have better resources. see that in a recent report published by
of the Detroit public schools. Adams Black neighborhoods have far less ac- the foundation, of which he was a prin-
told me that she has come to see na- cess to employment. They are often less cipal author, he endorsed the racial in-
tionalism and integrationism as a dia- safe, and subject to police violence. Be- tegration of public schools as a delib-
lectic about how to deal with white su- cause homeownership is the main asset erate government policy. I asked him
premacy. “You might draw on different for most Americans and real-estate val- how he could oppose race conscious-
weapons in your arsenal at different ues in Black neighborhoods are low, res- ness in one place and favor it in another.
times,” she said. “Cleage was a brilliant idential segregation is a major factor in He said that he is concerned by the use
guy. I have a lot of respect for him. You the substantial Black-white wealth gap. of race in admissions because it is being
use different approaches, depending.” These interrelated realities, all of used to bestow a reward: “The selective
Adams is now a professor at the Car- which rest on a foundation of laws and institution is conferring substantial ben-
dozo School of Law. She became es- policies, are what people mean when efits by putting some students on a dif-
pecially interested in the Milliken case they talk about structural racism. They ferent life trajectory. And admitted stu-
in 2006, when, as a new member of the apply far more strikingly to Blacks than dents often interpret admission as:
Supreme Court bar, she sat in the au- to members of other ethnic groups. ‘You’re a winner in a meritocracy. You
dience and heard the arguments in Par- In Black America, segregation mostly deserve this.’” Kahlenberg isn’t endors-
ents Involved in Community Schools ing the world as it is, but he walks a
v. Seattle School District No. 1. White careful line—race exists as a powerful
parents were suing because they ob- category in American life, and it makes
jected to Seattle’s use of race as a fac- most Black people’s lives harder. Gov-
tor in assigning students to high schools, ernment policy can help. His mission
in order to make them more integrated. is to achieve racial integration in uni-
In yet another split decision, the versities without using racial criteria.
Court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor. Kahlenberg’s idea of affirmative ac-
Chief Justice Roberts wrote the deci- tion based on class rather than on race
sion, which contained the line “The violates both the principle of meritoc-
way to stop discrimination on the basis hasn’t worked, and integration mostly racy and the idea that each applicant
of race is to stop discriminating on the has worked. That’s why it is so perilous should be treated as an individual, not
basis of race.”The Seattle school district for the Court to decree that any policy as a member of a category. Probably
had argued that the previous Supreme aimed at increasing integration—in edu- any reward system that considers itself
Court decisions about affirmative action cation, in housing, in people’s economic a meritocracy, certainly the one we have
in university admissions indicated that lives—is unconstitutional. now, is going to favor people from eco-
its policy of intentionally integrating nomically, educationally, and culturally
schools was constitutional. Roberts dams is part of an important and fortunate backgrounds. They will, on
stated that the Court’s decisions about
higher education didn’t apply to high
A underpublicized conversation
about race, the law, and government
average, be more qualified by standard
academic criteria than people who are
schools. Will it now maintain the po- policy that focusses heavily on a set of admitted partly because they come from
sition that higher education can fol- issues affecting most Black people: disadvantaged backgrounds. Because
44 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
so much of the debate about affirma-
tive action revolves around what kinds
of preferences there should be, not
whether there should be preferences at
all, the question of racial affirmative
action really comes down to how of-
fended you are by the idea of an ad-
missions preference for, say, the child
of a Black doctor. Do you consider ra-
cial preferences to be so wrong that
policies that were created to end dis-
crimination against Black people must
now be applied to exclude them? Élite
universities routinely tip the scales in
favor of athletes, alumni children, and
so on. Nobody in the Harvard case is
challenging the constitutionality of
those practices. Only race would be
eliminated as a preferred category.
Elise Boddie, a former litigation
director at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal De-
fense and Educational Fund who now
teaches at Rutgers Law School, told
me that she thinks the best over-all
solution is to increase the racially in-
tegrated spaces in American society.
“For government to express a racially “I’m making a list of all the friends we’ve learned we can live without.”
inclusive purpose—is that unconstitu-
tional?” she said. “I’d say no. We should
value having Black people of different
• •
kinds of experience. Then you see that
Black people are complex, so we can is a daily reality shaping one’s life— the culture and to change the society.”
see the richness of our experience. For often experienced as a barrier. A legal The term D.E.I., meaning diver-
the Court to issue a decision that de- ban on explicit considerations of race sity, equity, and inclusion, has become
clares it unconstitutional to be race- makes it more difficult to address the ubiquitous, at least in mainstream, rel-
conscious would be catastrophic.” She problem head on, but explicit race atively liberal institutions. One should
pointed out, “You’re constitutionaliz- consciousness engenders resentment. not assume that the abbreviation is a
ing a racial caste system. There is a Adams, after many years of thinking sign of general acceptance. Diversity
consistent impulse to return to mas- about all this, hasn’t landed yet on a has its roots in a more than forty-year-
sive racial exclusion.” definite position about how much one old Supreme Court decision written
Michelle Adams is exploring a range gains politically by insisting that pol- by a Justice who was looking for a com-
of ideas in education and housing that icies aimed at making life better for promise. The same decision banned
are meant to bring to an end the phe- Black Americans be officially presented what most people today mean by eq-
nomenon of poor all-Black neighbor- as race-neutral. uity—the explicit goal of a racially
hoods. I asked her whether these would I asked her why, if the central goal equivalent outcome. Nearly sixty years
be color-conscious or color-blind. She is helping Black people who are in after the great victories of the civil-
replied, “The answer is, I don’t care real need, affirmative action in admis- rights movement, the country is still
about that. The Supreme Court cares. sions to élite universities is so impor- far from insuring that people on both
I personally don’t care.” She went on, tant. “The answer is, you get people sides of the racial divide can thrive in
“Where I think about interventions, like me. I assume I’m a beneficiary of the same space. And diversity in ad-
I think lowering barriers to entry so affirmative action, and the school made missions is one Supreme Court deci-
that people who have lower incomes a good bet on me.” She noted that sion away from being prohibited in the
can move into areas where folks have white supremacy is operating in many context of race. If America is indeed
higher incomes and have access to re- ways simultaneously. “Why would undergoing a racial awakening, it will
sources.” She believes that many kinds you want to attack just one piece of have true meaning when it has changed
of interventions will be necessary. “But it? You try to bring more diversity into lives as well as attitudes. That will re-
this is going to be hard. Because, when public schools, as you do into more quire laws and policies that are no-
folks have stuff, they want to hang on selective institutions. You do all those where near established—that, indeed,
to it.” For most Black Americans, race things simultaneously, to try to change are threatened.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 45
DEPT. OF RETURNS
GOING
PUBLIC
A city finds itself again.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
MATTHEW PILLSBURY
BOOKS
BY HUA HSU
n the mid-seventies, Ted Ngoy was around, and in the next few years he King, and he claimed a vast empire.
I working the late shift at a gas station acquired more stores in the area. He He had come to Southern Califor-
PHOTOGRAPH: GABY QUINTANA
in Orange County when he tasted his is said to have popularized the pink nia as part of a wave of refugees from
first doughnut. Ngoy, then in his thirties, box for to-go orders, which became Cambodia, which was being ravaged by
was instantly hooked. He trained to be- a key part of doughnut iconography. the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge
come a manager at Winchell’s Donuts, By 1980, he owned twenty Christy’s had emerged in the fifties and sixties
a popular chain, before purchasing Donuts throughout Southern Califor- as a Communist opposition force be-
Christy’s Donuts, a struggling shop nia, and he kept expanding. He even- fore assuming control of the nation, in
in La Habra. Ngoy turned Christy’s tually became known as the Donut 1975. In the next four years, the paranoid,
The son of Cambodian refugees, So conjures conversations in which anything could be a trigger.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 69
authoritarian regime killed as much as where. They pass the time by swapping December, from an accidental drug
a quarter of the nation’s population. inside jokes and recollections about their overdose, cutting short a literary career
Ngoy hired employees from among father, and wondering if their worka- of extraordinary achievement and im-
the growing numbers of Cambodian ref- holic mother should start smoking, if mense promise.
ugees in Southern California. He taught only so she would take breaks. Tevy is The history of Asian American lit-
them how to make doughnuts and leased taking a philosophy class at the local erature is one driven by a hunger for
them shops of their own. In the nine- community college, and she tries to do language. Classics of immigrant story-
ties, Dunkin’ Donuts had trouble crack- her homework at the shop. Every few telling can often feel sparse and sol-
ing the California market because of the nights, a handsome, mysterious man emn, as characters grasp for phrases
dominance of Cambodian Americans, they presume to be Cambodian comes and expressions to capture the para-
who, at that time, owned and operated in by himself and orders an apple frit- doxes that define their lives. So seems
eighty per cent of the state’s doughnut ter. “His face wears an expression full of conscious that his work will be slotted
shops, despite constituting less than one those mixed-up emotions that only adults into this broader tradition—in one story,
per cent of the state’s population. Nearly must feel,” Kayley thinks. All he does is a character holds a diversity fellowship
all these doughnut-makers could trace sit there and stare out the window, into named after Frank Chin, the pioneer-
their livelihoods back to Ngoy. the darkness, leaving his apple fritter un- ing Chinese American playwright and
Asian Americans are acutely con- touched. Maybe he’s looking at them in author—even if Cambodians are often
scious of how new immigrants get in the window’s reflection. He is almost marginalized as “the off-brand Asians
wherever they fit in—there are the jokey generically withholding, precisely the with dark skin.” (On Twitter, So jok-
stereotypes about the Chinese and their kind of withdrawn, quietly scarred char- ingly referred to himself as “tall and
takeout spots, the Vietnamese monop- acter one expects in a story about refu- tan ocean vuong.”) The most success-
oly on nail salons, the ubiquity of the gees who fled terror on the scale of that ful Cambodian American books have
Korean-owned corner store. These busi- inflicted by the Khmer Rouge. been memoirs, like Haing Ngor’s “A
nesses drive economic opportunity. For As he sits, the sisters project onto him Cambodian Odyssey” and Loung Ung’s
the first-generation immigrants who their sense of the world, formed by Tevy’s “First They Killed My Father,” both of
own and operate them, they’re signif- philosophy textbooks, memories of their which emphasize the harshness of their
icant only insofar as they insure survival. father, whom this man vaguely resem- shared history. Ung’s book, published
They are rarely seen, by those who spend bles, and all the well-worn tales of geno- in 2000, was later adapted for film by
endless hours working there, as places cide. Chuck’s is their family business, Angelina Jolie, whose adopted son
with stories worth telling. and perhaps they will inherit it. But the Maddox may be the most famous Cam-
In “Three Women of Chuck’s Do- birthright of the second generation is bodian American ever.
nut,” the first story in the remarkable that they can tell stories. As befits someone whose Twitter
début collection “Afterparties,” Anthony handle was @fakemaddoxjolie, So is
Veasna So introduces us to sixteen-year- nthony Veasna So’s parents fled hardly given to stoic silences. The young
old Tevy and her twelve-year-old sis-
ter, Kayley. (The story appeared in this
A Cambodia as teen-agers, eventu-
ally settling in Stockton, in California’s
people in “Afterparties” spill forth with
language. His stories are chatty and crass,
magazine last year.) Their mother, Sothy, Central Valley. So was born there in as characters incessantly tease one an-
occasionally thinks of the genocide as 1992. His father ran an auto shop, and other, make jokes about fellating Pol
she’s rolling out dough at the family’s his mother worked for the Social Se- Pot, talk back, and talk trash, so much
doughnut shop, and she regards the so that at the beginning of one story
“healthy and stubborn” Americanness two characters have been kicked out of
of her kids with a reluctant pride. Tevy the house by “the grandmas” because
and Kayley have been enlisted to help one of them “would not shut the fuck
their mom work the overnight shift. up.” So comes from a generation that
Their father is only an occasional part has enough distance from his commu-
of their lives. Mostly he exists as a lin- nity’s originating trauma that he can
gering set of pontifications that his recognize coping mechanisms for what
daughters dissect, like the one equat- they are. The reason the man visits
ing Khmer identity with “the smell of Chuck’s Donut is far more mundane
fish sauce and fried dough.” (The Khmer curity Administration. In a 2016 essay, than Tevy and Kayley imagine. By the
people make up the largest ethnic group So reflected on how his family “prior- end of the story, they realize that they’ve
in Cambodia.) itized English over Khmer, their na- been wasting their time reading his face
There is no Chuck—it was merely a tive language, in an effort to ensure the for pain and penitence.
name that Sothy felt sounded “American academic futures of my cousins and The characters navigate complexity,
enough to draw customers.” The sisters me,” surrounding them with books and as all young people must do. But the
aren’t ashamed of Chuck’s, which has letting them binge-watch “Frasier.” stories rarely follow the predictable logic
weathered the economic decline of their He attended Stanford University and one might expect from an insular, faith-
California Delta town. It’s just a place worked as a teacher before pursuing driven, immigrant enclave. A gay twenty-
where nothing happens. Life is else- his M.F.A. at Syracuse. He died last something is confronted by his father’s
70 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
friend, but not about his sexuality. “I
am not saying you cannot be gay,” she
clarifies. She’s just disappointed that
he won’t consider a green-card marriage,
in which a rich Cambodian woman
pays him a small fortune to help her
come to the U.S. “Your life will be es-
tablished. You can be as gay as you want
after your life is established. That is
the plan.”
So’s young people, many of whom
are queer, are growing up without role
models or even a sense of guardrails. The
adults in their world are often too tired
to acclimate themselves to the norms
and hierarchies of their adopted home.
All parental advice comes across like a
recurring bit about how much worse
things were back when. So skillfully con-
jures the rhythm of conversations in
which anything might become a trig-
ger. A teen-ager sips a glass of ice water, “I just said ‘Nice socks’ in a sarcastic tone.”
prompting her father to observe, “There
were no ice cubes in the genocide!” A • •
college graduate, grousing about a pun-
gent piece of fruit, is told, “You think
every meal we had during Khmer Rouge the children of “Afterparties” seek some- “The first time we called ourselves num-
was smelling right?” The younger gen- thing different. As one young man tells ber one at anything.”
eration scoffs at the way their parents his father, “You gotta stop using the To the rest of the world, though,
seem fatally, comically stuck in the past; genocide to win arguments.” It feels Son is just “the goddamn grocery-store
the adults rue the fickle softness of their transgressive that “Afterparties” is so boy.” One day, a “college-bound city
children. And neither side quite under- funny, so irreverent, concerning the kid” named Justin, who seems “too good
stands how to turn the old traumas, and previous generation’s tragedy. Trauma for our team, our school, our commu-
the survival instincts they engendered, is on the edges of each story, an ac- nity of Cambos,” arrives. He doesn’t
into a meaningful American future. knowledgment of why the adults are understand why the teammates look
In “The Shop,” an auto shop squeaks so messed up and why, in the words of up to their coach, and he delights in
by with help from the owner’s son, a one character, “this place is so fucked.” challenging his authority, leading prac-
recent college graduate who has re- In the moment, though, the youth are tices in Son’s absence and taking ev-
turned from a faraway land (the Mid- too busy worrying about sex or college eryone out for fast food afterward. But
west), until, one day, an employee ac- to give it much thought. Teen-agers Son seems more deeply affronted by
cidentally loses a car. The staff’s efforts ignore their parents’ history lessons the effortlessness of Justin’s existence
to recover it lack the requisite urgency. and explain why it’s more important than by the impertinence of his man-
“What is wrong with you boys?” a local to comprehend the Singularity. They ner. “Man, that dumbass kid doesn’t
busybody asks. She’s less concerned wield terms like the “model minority know shit about working hard,” Son
about the missing car than about the myth” to point out the false conscious- explains. “Which means he doesn’t
generational decline it symbolizes: “Not ness driving the adult world’s achieve- know shit about badminton, because
one Cambodian man since my hus- ment-oriented dreams. And they look badminton takes work—real work!”
band, Doctor Heng, has become a doc- to one another, not their elders, for His outburst confuses the students.
tor here in America, not even those role models. “Weren’t we supposed to aspire to the
born with citizenship! My generation In “Superking Son Scores Again!,” status of Justin’s family? Weren’t we
came here with nothing. We escaped the members of a high-school badmin- supposed to attend college and become
the Communists. So what are boys like ton team worship their coach, Super- pharmacists? Wasn’t that what our par-
you doing?” king Son, a nineties legend of their ents had been working for? Why our
“Cambo hood.” It’s rumored that he was ancestors had freaking died?”
mmigrant stories often traffic in so good in his prime that he could van- So once remarked that he was raised
I themes of sacrifice and intergener-
ational strife, where the past is mean-
quish any challenger while eating a Big
Mac with his free hand. His unortho-
on stories of genocide “that would often,
somehow, end on a joke.” In his stories,
ingful only as an obligation, or a set of dox, aphoristic coaching style results in the structure is inverted. His sentences
traumas, to be silently shouldered. But their winning the local championship: are brusque and punchy, and there’s an
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 71
outrageous, slapstick quality to his Khmer Rouge concentration camps, and his friend, who is described as
scenes. But the stories often end on a sought to “marry for skills,” pairing up “a half Iraqi Chaldean poet,” loved
haunting note, resonating with the out of pragmatism, not love: “He said discussing José Muñoz’s notion of
broader consequences of leaving or marriage is like the show Survivor, where “queer futurity” and listening to the
staying. Son and Justin eventually set- you make alliances in order to live lon- indie-rock band Pavement, which
tle their differences with an epic bad- ger. He thought Survivor was actually also escaped Stockton. They won-
minton session, and the teammates the most Khmer thing possible, and dered if they would do something
begin to recognize the tragically static he would definitely win it, because meaningful and great, despite com-
contours of Son’s life. What they fear, the genocide was the best training he ing from ethnic backgrounds where
just as much as violence or poverty, is could’ve got.” that seemed impossible and, more im-
that they will inherit the passive, fa- For other characters, the vision of a portant, impractical. It’s one of the
talistic relationship to the past that so workable future involves a frictionless, most discerning essays I’ve ever read
many around them possess. tech-assisted grafting of old and new. about friendship, and it contains a clue
In “Maly, Maly, Maly,” two teen- In the story “Human Development,” a for understanding all of So’s work, as
age cousins, Ves and Maly, hang out romantic Stanford graduate named An- he swoons over Pavement’s ability to
and get stoned in the hours leading thony teaches high school, a choice make music that was simultaneously
up to a party of sorts—the celebration that differentiates him from his college “jaded yet big-hearted, doubtful yet
of Maly’s deceased mother’s spiritual buddies, all of whom dream about angel sentimental,” qualities he couldn’t find
rebirth in the body of their second investors and seed capital. He meets in literature.
cousin’s baby. Reincarnation might be Ben, a fellow Cambodian American, Yet even his fascination with this
a pillar of Cambodian Buddhist be- on a hookup app, and they begin dat- band, with which he has little in common,
lief, Ves reflects, yet it’s all a bit ridic- ing. Ben is an entrepreneur who wants is tinged with reminders of his own
ulous. He contemplates “driving off to to create an almost utopian app that alterity. He realizes that one of Pave-
college right now, leaving behind my will let users find the “safe space” of ment’s best songs, “Box Elder,” was re-
worthless possessions, my secondhand like-minded people that they seek. On corded in Stockton on January 17, 1989.
clothes—all of it. I could finally start the side, Ben has perfected healthy ver- That very day, probably no more than
my life, with a blank slate.” But he feels sions of the fatty dishes from their a few miles away, a deranged white
responsible for Maly, whose mother homeland: “One of my aspirations is man, aggrieved by the growing num-
took her own life after looking “to the to disrupt the Khmer food industry bers of Cambodian and Vietnamese
next day, and the day after that, only with organic modifications.” Anthony people in the city, entered Cleveland
to see more suffering.” It’s not quite begrudgingly loves Ben’s cooking, com- Elementary School and began firing.
survivor’s guilt, like that experienced plimenting him in the only terms leg- He killed five schoolchildren, all of
by their parents and grandparents. Still, ible to the entrepreneur: “I’d pay twenty them Southeast Asian, and wounded
Ves and Maly are “outsiders who can bucks for this.” thirty-two others. It was the most fatal
see through the bullshit,” and the Anthony is cool and guarded, whereas school shooting of the eighties and re-
thought of leaving her behind saddens Ben seems a bit of a Silicon Valley buf- mains among the nation’s most hor-
him. As they sit together, blowing off foon, propelled by a dream that tech- rific incidents of targeted anti-Asian
her mom’s reincarnation with weed nology might “offer people a sense of violence. So’s mother was a bilingual
and porn, he tenderly imagines Ma- fulfillment,” even “rush them to shore, aide at the school that year.
ly’s future, wondering whether she will secure everyone to land.” Their unlikely “Afterparties” is a collection of short
ever leave home and be reborn some- relationship unfolds into something stories, yet names and settings recur,
where else. steady and comfortable. But never too offering a sense of how intimate the
comfortable: along with a sense of un- characters’ world can feel. Nearly all
ed Ngoy, the real-life Donut King, ease, Anthony totes around a copy of the protagonists of “Afterparties” re-
T burned through his fortune. A
lavish home and jet-setting vacations
“Moby-Dick,” which he’s thinking
about assigning to his students the
semble one another, the “jaded yet big-
hearted” young men and women who
weren’t enough for him. He became an following year. He realizes that what yearn for history to take them beyond
avid gambler, imperilling both his fam- ultimately turns him off about Ben is the Central Valley. The references to
ily and his leaseholders. If the Amer- his fixation on efficiency and his ob- reincarnation give the book a cyclical
ican Dream couldn’t satisfy Ngoy, how session with solutions. Anthony wants feel, as though new bodies are always
could the steady, dutiful ethos of im- a future that is as “stupid and vast” returning to old scars, hoping to fig-
migrant life be sufficient for the youth as the novel, maybe even as futile as ure out where they came from.
of “Afterparties”? Ahab’s quest. The swaggering idealism and bit-
In “Three Women of Chuck’s Donut,” ter humor found throughout “After-
Tevy and Kayley wonder if their par- arlier this year, the journal n+1 parties” are what make the more som-
ents’ failed relationship offers any clues
about what makes life meaningful. They
E published “Baby Yeah,” a moving
essay So wrote as a tribute to a friend
bre final story, “Generational Differ-
ences,” utterly devastating. It is told
discuss their estranged father’s explana- who took his own life. When they from the perspective of a Cambodian
tion that Cambodians, upon leaving the were in graduate school together, So woman who, like So’s mother, worked
72 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
at Cleveland Elementary. She is set-
ting down an account of her life for
her son, and has reached the last sec- BRIEFLY NOTED
tion, about the day of the mass shoot-
ing, which she witnessed from inside Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura (Riverhead). The cool, dispas-
a classroom. It’s a strange conceit for sionate narrator of this novel, set just before the Brexit refer-
a story, and she is impossibly composed endum, has recently moved to The Hague, and works as a trans-
and lyrical as she tells him about the lator for a former West African President on trial for war crimes.
shooter, who had acted “to defend his “Interpretation can be profoundly disorienting,” she says, ex-
home, his dreams, against the threat plaining that the demands of translation often crowd out the
of us, a horde of refugees, who had moral import of what is said. Away from work, too, she is trou-
come here because we had no other bled by the mutability of identities, her own included; she gets
dreams left.” involved with a married man, and is fascinated by a mugging
Writing literature is one way that in a friend’s neighborhood. “I could understand anything, under
immigrants “humanize” themselves the right circumstances and for the right person,” she observes.
to their uncomprehending hosts, but “It was both a strength and a weakness.”
in “Generational Differences” So re-
fuses to appeal to a reader’s liberal A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam (Hogarth). Abandon-
sympathies. The mother recounts the ing a graduate degree in Delhi to return home to Sri Lanka,
day she told her then nine-year-old the protagonist of this novel encounters the aftermath of the
son about the shooting, and how he government’s war with Tamil separatists. On a train for the
asked her to show him the classroom war-torn northeast, to attend a funeral, he reflects on the Tamil
where she’d hidden, so he could make Tigers, on Hindu and Buddhist texts, and on the dissolution
sure it would be safe if another at- of his romance with an Indian activist. The novel quietly builds
tacker came. She took him to the into a meditation on the nature of bereavement and remem-
school, where they ran into a white brance, showing how even the most traumatic incident can
colleague of his mother’s, “whose recede from memory—“always so forceful and vivid and over-
Blond hair appeared combative, as if whelming that as soon as one of its elements disappears we
forcing me to register its abundance.” forget it ever existed.”
The white woman, seeing the boy,
began crying over the “memories of Until Proven Safe, by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley (Far-
dead children” and the senselessness rar, Straus & Giroux). When the authors of this history of
of it all. His mother was incensed. “I quarantine began their research, years before covid-19 hit,
wanted her to stop filtering the world the idea that the practice “still had modern relevance was oc-
through her own tears,” she later writes casionally met with disbelief.” Touring former quarantine
to her son. “I almost slapped her.” structures such as the lazarettos of Dubrovnik and Venice,
As the mother completes her nar- they explain how a medieval invention has become indis-
rative, she urges her son to resist the pensable once again. Noting that the implementation, with
temptation, when he grows older, to its constraints on personal freedom, has always raised ques-
gather the raw materials of their Amer- tions of “philosophical uncertainty, ethical risk, and the po-
ican lives and twine them into a co- tential abuse of political power,” they make a compelling case
herent story. “When you think about that we must continue to refine the use of quarantine, bal-
my history, I don’t need you to see ev- ancing the needs of public health with those of human rights.
erything at once,” she writes. “I don’t
need you to recall the details of those The Invention of Sicily, by Jamie Mackay (Verso). This his-
tragedies that were dropped into my tory of the Mediterranean’s largest island emphasizes its long
world.” She’s not saying that the sto- past as a geopolitical frontier of Europe, North Africa, and
ries are insignificant, or that they paint the Middle East. Since around the eighth century B.C., when
the community in a harsh light. Her Greeks and Phoenicians settled in Sicily, competition among
point is that it’s an impossible task, and regional powers has shaped life there, leaving a legacy of mul-
she wants to free him from the obli- ticultural co-existence, albeit a sometimes fraught one. Arab
gation of pursuing it: “Honestly, you rulers from the ninth to the eleventh century tolerated Jew-
don’t even have to try. What is nuance ish and Christian worship; after the Normans took over, Arab
in the face of all that we’ve experienced? infrastructure was preserved. The relationship to mainland
But for me, your mother, just remem- Italy has been similarly complicated; Sicilians were ambiva-
ber that, for better or worse, we can be lent toward the nationalism of the Risorgimento and, later,
described as survivors. Okay? Know toward that of Mussolini. A spirit of borderland indepen-
that we’ve always kept on living. What dence, Mackay suggests, may inform the island’s support for
else could we have done?” recent waves of refugees there.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 73
its purposelessness. (The TV show “Mis-
A CRITIC AT LARGE sion: Impossible” débuted in 1966.) After
1973, and at the urging of the manage-
MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
ment guru Peter Drucker, businesses
started writing mission statements as part
of the process of “strategic planning,” an-
How Facebook’s vow to bring the world together wound up pulling us apart. other expression Drucker borrowed from
the military. Before long, as higher edu-
BY JILL LEPORE cation was becoming corporatized, mis-
sion statements crept into university life.
“We are on the verge of mission mad-
ness,” the Chronicle of Higher Education
reported in 1979. A decade later, a man-
agement journal announced, “Develop-
ing a mission statement is an important
first step in the strategic planning pro-
cess.” But by the nineteen-nineties cor-
porate mission statements had moved
from the realm of strategic planning to
public relations. That’s a big part of why
they’re bullshit. One study from 2002 re-
ported that most managers don’t believe
their own companies’ mission statements.
Research surveys suggest a rule of thumb:
the more ethically dubious the business,
the more grandiose and sanctimonious
its mission statement.
Facebook’s stated mission amounts
to the salvation of humanity. In truth,
the purpose of Facebook, a multinational
corporation with headquarters in Cali-
fornia, is to make money for its inves-
tors. Facebook is an advertising agency:
it collects data and sells ads. Founded in
2004, it now has a market value of close
to a trillion dollars. Since 2006, with the
launch of its News Feed, Facebook has
also been a media company, one that now
employs fifteen thousand “content mod-
erators.” (In the U.S., about a third of
acebook has a save-the-world mis- The word “mission” comes from the the population routinely get their news
F sion statement—“to give people the
power to build community and bring the
Latin for “send.” In English, historically,
a mission is Christian, and means send-
from Facebook. In other parts of the
world, as many as two-thirds do.) Since
world closer together”—that sounds like ing the Holy Spirit out into the world 2016, Facebook has become interested in
a better fit for a church, and not some to spread the Word of God: a mission election integrity here and elsewhere; the
little wood-steepled, white-clapboarded, involves saving souls. In the seventeenth company has thirty-five thousand secu-
side-of-the-road number but a castle- century, when “mission” first conveyed rity specialists in total, many of whom
in-a-parking-lot megachurch, a big-as- something secular, it meant diplomacy: function almost like a U.N. team of elec-
a-city-block cathedral, or, honestly, the emissaries undertake missions. Scien- tions observers. But its early mantra,
Vatican. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s tific and military missions—and the ex- “Company over country,” still resonates.
C.E.O., announced this mission the sum- pression “mission accomplished”—date The company is, in important respects,
mer after the 2016 U.S. Presidential elec- to about the First World War. In 1962, larger than any country. Facebook pos-
tion, replacing the company’s earlier and J.F.K. called going to the moon an “un- sesses the personal data of more than a
no less lofty purpose: “to give people the tried mission.” “Mission statements” quarter of the world’s people, 2.8 billion
power to share and make the world more date to the Vietnam War, when the Joint out of 7.9 billion, and governs the flow
open and connected.” Both versions, like Chiefs of Staff began drafting ever- of information among them. The num-
most mission statements, are baloney. changing objectives for a war known for ber of Facebook users is about the size
of the populations of China and India
Facebook’s mission statements invoke the power of connection but not its perils. combined. In some corners of the globe,
74 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY GIACOMO BAGNARA
including more than half of African na- (Blue Rider), by the Wired editor Ste- chief operating officer—a protégée of
tions, Facebook provides free basic data ven Levy, declined to talk to them. Lawrence Summers’s and a former Goo-
services, positioning itself as a privately Zuckerberg started the company in gle vice-president—established an am-
owned utility. 2004, when he was a Harvard sopho- bitious growth model. But, Frenkel and
“An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s more, with this mission statement: “The- Kang argue, “as Facebook entered new
Battle for Domination” (Harper), by facebook is an online directory that con- nations, no one was charged with mon-
Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, takes nects people through social networks at itoring the rollouts with an eye toward
its title from a memo written by a Face- colleges.” The record of an online chat the complex political and cultural dy-
book executive in 2016 and leaked to is a good reminder that he was, at the namics within those countries. No one
BuzzFeed News. Andrew Bosworth, who time, a teen-ager: was considering how the platform might
created Facebook’s News Feed, appar- ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures,
be abused in a nation like Myanmar, or
ently wrote the memo in response to addresses, sns asking if they had enough content mod-
employees’ repeated pleas for a change FRIEND: what?! how’d you manage that one? erators to review the hundreds of new
in the service, which, during the U.S. ZUCK: people just submitted it languages in which Facebook users across
Presidential election that year, they knew ZUCK: i don’t know why the planet would be posting.” Facebook,
ZUCK: they “trust me”
to be prioritizing fake news, like a story ZUCK: dumb fucks
inadvertently, inflamed the conflict; its
that Hillary Clinton was in a coma. Some algorithms reward emotion, the more
employees suspected that a lot of these Zuckerberg dropped out of college, heated the better. Eventually, the United
stories were being posted by fake users, moved to California, and raised a great Nations concluded that social media
and even by foreign actors (which was deal of venture capital. The network got played a “determining role” in the geno-
later discovered to be the case). Bos- better, and bigger. Zuckerberg would cide and humanitarian crisis in Myan-
worth wrote: end meetings by pumping his fist and mar—with some twenty-four thousand
shouting, “Domination!” New features Rohingya being killed, and seven hun-
So we connect more people. That can be
bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a were rolled out as fast as possible, for dred thousand becoming refugees. “We
life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe the sake of fuelling growth. “Fuck it, need to do more,” Zuckerberg and Sand-
someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated ship it” became a company catchphrase. berg would say, again, and again, and
on our tools. And still we connect people. The Facebook announced a new mission in again. “We need to do better.”
ugly truth is that we believe in connecting peo- 2006, the year it introduced the News In 2015, by which time anyone pay-
ple so deeply that anything that allows us to
connect more people more often is de facto Feed: “Facebook is a social utility that ing attention could see that the News
good. . . . That’s why all the work we do in connects you with the people around Feed was wreaking havoc on journalism,
growth is justified. All the questionable con- you.” Growth in the number of users especially local news reporting, a new
tact importing practices. All the subtle lan- mattered, but so did another measure- hire named Andrew Anker proposed
guage that helps people stay searchable by ment: the amount of time a user spent adding a paywall option to a feature called
friends. All of the work we do to bring more
communication in. on the site. The point of the News Feed “Instant Articles.” “That meant that in
was to drive that second metric. order to keep viewing stories on a pub-
Bosworth argued that his memo was “Facebook was the world’s biggest lication, readers would have to be sub-
meant to provoke debate, not to be taken testing lab, with a quarter of the plan- scribers,” Levy writes. “Publishers had
literally, but plainly it spoke to views et’s population as its test subjects,” Fren- been begging for something like that to
held within the company. That’s the kel and Kang write. Zuckerberg was monetize their stories on Facebook.” But,
downside of a delusional sense of mis- particularly obsessed with regular sur- Levy reports, when Anker pitched the
sion: the loss of all ethical bearings. veys that asked users whether Facebook idea to Zuckerberg, the C.E.O. cut him
is “good for the world” (a tally abbrevi- off. “Facebook’s mission is to make the
“A nteen
Ugly Truth” is the result of fif-
years of reporting. Frenkel
ated as GFW). When Facebook im-
plemented such changes as demoting
world more open and connected,” Zuck-
erberg said. “I don’t understand how sub-
and Kang, award-winning journalists lies in the News Feed, the GFW went scription would make the world either
for the Times, conducted interviews with up, but the time users spent on Face- more open or connected.”
more than four hundred people, mostly book went down. Zuckerberg decided By the next year, more than half of
Facebook employees, past and present, to reverse the changes. all Americans were getting their news
for more than a thousand hours. Many Meanwhile, he talked, more and more, from social media. During the 2016 Pres-
people who spoke with them were vi- about his sense of mission, each new user idential election, many were wildly mis-
olating nondisclosure agreements. Fren- another saved soul. He toured the world informed. Russian hackers set up hun-
kel and Kang relied, too, on a very leaky promoting the idea. “For almost ten years, dreds of fake Facebook accounts. They
spigot of “never-reported emails, memos, Facebook has been on a mission to make bought political ads. “I don’t want any-
and white papers involving or approved the world more open and connected,” one to use our tools to undermine de-
by top executives.” They did speak to Zuckerberg wrote in 2013, in a Facebook mocracy,” Zuckerberg said. “That’s not
Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl post called “Is Connectivity a Human what we stand for.” But, as Frenkel and
Sandberg, off the record, but Zucker- Right?” It reads something like a papal Kang observe, “Trump and the Russian
berg, who had coöperated with a 2020 encyclical. Zuckerberg was abroad when hackers had separately come to the same
book, “Facebook: The Inside Story” Sandberg, newly appointed Facebook’s conclusion: they could exploit Facebook’s
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 75
algorithms to work in their favor.” It to get the goods, too. In 1881, the Chi- ing, disgruntled competitors and em-
didn’t matter if a user, or a post, or an cago Tribune reporter Henry Demarest ployees went on sending her letters and
article approved or disapproved of some- Lloyd wrote an article for The Atlantic memos. As the Boston Globe put it, she
thing Trump said or did; reacting to it, called “The Story of a Great Monop- was “writing unfinished history.”
in any way, elevated its ranking, and the oly.” Lloyd accused the oil trust of brib- On the subject of John D. Rockefel-
more intense the reaction, the higher ing politicians, having, for instance, “done ler, Tarbell proved scathing. “ ‘The most
the ranking. Trump became inescapable. everything with the Pennsylvania legis- important man in the world,’ a great and
The News Feed became a Trump Feed. lature except refine it.” He concluded: serious newspaper passionately devoted
In 2017, Zuckerberg went on a lis- “America has the proud satisfaction of to democracy calls him, and unquestion-
tening tour of the United States. “My having furnished the world with the ably this is the popular measure of him,”
work is about connecting the world and greatest, wisest and meanest monopoly she wrote. “His importance lies not so
giving everyone a voice,” he announced, known to history.” much in the fact that he is the richest
messianically. “I want to personally hear Lloyd wrote something between an individual in the world. . . . It lies in the
more of those voices this year.” He gave essay and a polemic. Tarbell took a dif- fact that his wealth, and the power spring-
motivational speeches. “We have to build ferent tack, drawing on research skills ing from it, appeal to the most univer-
a world where every single person has she’d acquired as a biographer of Lin- sal and powerful passion in this coun-
a sense of purpose and community— coln. “Neither Standard Oil and Rocke- try—the passion for money.” In sum,
that’s how we’ll bring the world closer feller nor any powerful American insti- “our national life is on every side dis-
together,” he told a crowd of Facebook- tution had ever encountered a journalist tinctly poorer, uglier, meaner for the kind
group administrators. “I know we can like Tarbell,” Weinberg writes. She also, of influence he exercises.”
do this!” And he came up with a new in something of a first, revealed her On reading the series, Lloyd wrote to
mission statement. sources to readers, explaining that she her, “When you get through with ‘John-
had gone to state and federal legisla- nie,’ I don’t think there will be very much
“A nraking,
Ugly Truth” is a work of muck-
a form of investigative
tures and courthouses and got the rec-
ords of all those lawsuits and inves-
left of him except something resembling
one of his own grease spots.” Critics ac-
journalism perfected by Ida Tarbell in tigations and even all those private cused Tarbell of being mean-spirited. A
a series of essays published in McClure’s lawsuits, “the testimony of which,” she review in The Nation claimed, “To stir
between 1902 and 1904 about John D. wrote, “is still in manuscript in the files up envy, to arouse prejudice, to inflame
Rockefeller’s company, Standard Oil. of the courts where the suits were tried.” passion, to appeal to ignorance, to mag-
When Samuel McClure decided to as- She dug up old newspaper stories (quite nify evils, to charge corruption—these
sign a big piece on monopolies, Tar- difficult to obtain in those days) and seem to be the methods in favor with
bell suggested the sugar trust, but, as wrote to Standard Oil’s competitors, too many writers who profess a desire
Steve Weinberg reported in his 2008 asking them to send any correspondence to reform society.” In 1906, Theodore
book, “Taking on the Trust,” McClure that might cast light on Rockefeller’s Roosevelt coined the term “muckraking”
wanted her to write about Standard anti-competitive practices. She tried, as a slur. “There is in America today a
Oil. That was partly because it was such too, to talk to executives at Standard distinct prejudice in favor of those who
a good story, and partly because of Tar- Oil, but, she wrote, “I had been met with make the accusations,” Walter Lippmann
bell’s family history: she’d that formulated chatter used observed, of Tarbell’s form of journal-
grown up near an oil field, by those who have accepted ism, admitting that “if business and pol-
and Rockefeller had more a creed.” Finally, she found itics really served American need, you
or less put her father out a source inside the company, could never induce people to believe so
of business. Henry Rogers, who had many accusations against them.” Few
Standard Oil, founded known of her father. As could dispute Tarbell’s evidence, espe-
in 1870, had, like Facebook, Stephanie Gorton writes in cially after she published the series of ar-
faced scrutiny of its busi- her recent book, “Citizen ticles as a book of four hundred and six
ness practices from the start. Reporters,” Tarbell “went pages, with thirty-six appendices stretch-
In 1872 and 1876, it had been to the Standard Oil offices ing across a hundred and forty pages.
the subject of congressional at 26 Broadway regularly Tarbell hadn’t enjoyed taking down
hearings; in 1879, Rockefel- for two years. Each time, Standard Oil. “It was just one of those
ler was called to hearings before com- she entered the imposing colonnaded things that had to be done,” she wrote.
mittees in Pennsylvania, New York, and building and was immediately whisked “I trust that it has not been useless.” It
Ohio; Standard Oil executives were re- by an assistant from the lobby via a cir- had not been useless. In 1911, the U.S.
peatedly summoned by the Interstate cuitous and private route to Rogers’s of- Supreme Court ordered the dissolution
Commerce Commission after its estab- fice, kept out of sight from Standard of Standard Oil.
lishment, in 1887; the company was in- Oil employees who might recognize her, The year McClure’s published the final
vestigated by Congress again in 1888, and spoken to by no one but Rogers installment of Tarbell’s series, Rockefel-
and by Ohio for more than a decade, and his secretary.” Because McClure’s ler’s son, John, Jr., on the threshold of
and was the subject of a vast number of published the work serially, the evidence inheriting one of the world’s greatest
private suits. Earlier reporters had tried kept coming; even as Tarbell was writ- fortunes, suffered a nervous breakdown.
76 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
Shortly before the breakup of his father’s
company, Rockefeller, Jr., a devout and
earnest Christian, stepped away from
any role in Standard Oil or its successor
firms; he turned his attention to philan-
thropy, guided, in part, by Ivy Lee, his
father’s public-relations manager. In 1920,
at Madison Avenue Baptist Church, be-
fore an audience of twelve hundred cler-
gymen, he announced that he had found
a new calling, as a booster and chief un-
derwriter of a utopian, ecumenical Prot-
estant organization called the Interchurch
World Movement. “When a vast mul-
titude of people come together earnestly
and prayerfully,” he told the crowd, “there
must be developed an outpouring of
spiritual power such as this land has
never before known.” In a letter to his
father, asking him for tens of millions of
dollars to give to the cause, the younger
Rockefeller wrote, “I do not think we
can overestimate the importance of this
Movement. As I see it, it is capable of
having a much more far-reaching in-
• •
fluence than the League of Nations in
bringing about peace, contentment, good- least in the way Facebook does it, makes really advanced tools to fight election
will, and prosperity among the people it easier for them to hurt one another. interference.” During the next year’s
of the earth.” The Interchurch World Facebook wouldn’t be so successful if Presidential election, Frenkel and Kang
Movement, in short, aimed to give peo- people didn’t love using it, sharing fam- report, “Trump was the single-largest
ple the power to build community and ily photographs, joining groups, reading spender on political ads on Facebook.”
bring the world closer together. It failed. curated news, and even running small His Facebook page was busier than those
Rockefeller repurposed its funds for businesses. But studies have consistently of the major networks, BuzzFeed, the
Christian missions. shown that the more time people spend Washington Post, and the New York
on Facebook the worse their mental Times taken together. Over the protests
“O urpower
mission is to give people the
to build community and
health becomes; Facebooking is also cor-
related with increased sedentariness, a
of many Facebook employees, Zucker-
berg had adopted, and stuck to, a pol-
bring the world closer together” is a state- diminishment of meaningful face-to- icy of not subjecting any political ad-
ment to be found in Facebook’s Terms face relationships, and a decline in real- vertisements to fact-checking. Refusing
of Service; everyone who uses Facebook world social activities. Efforts to call to be “an arbiter of truth,” Facebook in-
implicitly consents to this mission. Dur- Zuckerberg and Sandberg to account stead established itself as a dissemina-
ing the years of the company’s ascent, and get the company to stop doing harm tor of misinformation.
the world has witnessed a loneliness have nearly all ended in failure. Employ- On January 27, 2021, three weeks af-
epidemic, the growth of political extrem- ees and executives have tried in vain to ter the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol,
ism and political violence, widening po- change the company’s policies and, es- Zuckerberg, having suspended Trump’s
litical polarization, the rise of authori- pecially, its algorithms. Congress has held account, renewed Facebook’s commit-
tarianism, the decline of democracy, a hearings. Trustbusters have tried to break ments: “We’re going to continue to focus
catastrophic crisis in journalism, and an the company up. Regulators have at- on helping millions more people par-
unprecedented rise in propaganda, fake tempted to impose rules on it. And jour- ticipate in healthy communities, and
news, and misinformation. By no means nalists have written exposés. But, given we’re going to focus even more on being
is Facebook responsible for these calam- how profoundly Facebook itself has un- a force for bringing people closer to-
ities, but evidence implicates the com- dermined journalism, it’s hard to see how gether.” Neither a record-setting five-
pany as a contributor to each of them. Frenkel and Kang’s work, or anyone else’s, billion-dollar penalty for privacy vio-
In July, President Biden said that mis- could have a Tarbell-size effect. lations nor the latest antitrust efforts
information about covid-19 on Face- “If what you care about is democ- have managed to check one of the
book “is killing people.” racy and elections,” Mark Zuckerberg world’s most dangerous monopolies.
Collecting data and selling ads does said in 2019, “then you want a company Billions of people remain, instead, in
not build community, and it turns out like us to be able to invest billions of the tightfisted, mechanical grip of its
that bringing people closer together, at dollars a year, like we are, in building soul-saving mission.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 77
bills itself as “a leftist’s guide to the
PODCAST DEPT. conservative movement”—released a
bonus episode called “Keeping Up with
FIRING LINE
the Bozells.”
“It’s a fastball right down the mid-
dle for us,” Sam Adler-Bell, one of the
“Know Your Enemy,” “Chapo Trap House,” and the voice of the left. hosts, said. The other host, Matthew
Sitman, added, “This is really a great
BY ANDREW MARANTZ opportunity for us to dive into some
deep-cut conservative lore.” It was less
than two minutes into the episode,
and already he had made a self-con-
sciously erudite joke about Leo Strauss,
and another about the Carlist move-
ment in postwar Spain. “Look, when
there’s Brent Bozells in the news,”
Adler-Bell continued, “you want to
hear ‘Know Your Enemy’ break it down
for you.”
If “Know Your Enemy” were like
most podcasts, then an episode of this
kind—pegged to the news, available
only to subscribers—might have con-
sisted of an hour or two of aimless
riffing, a few apocryphal anecdotes,
and some easy punch lines about how
the mighty have fallen. Content pro-
duction is a high-volume business,
and professional talkers, especially
political ones, almost always offer up
old whines in new bottles. Sitman and
Adler-Bell hawk a more artisanal
product. To prepare for the episode,
Adler-Bell had watched—“for you,
the listeners, and for my sins”—hours
of speeches by Brent III, including a
histrionic 2015 appearance in which
he compared the Obama Administra-
tion to the Stasi. Sitman drew on sev-
eral articles and books by and about
n the evening of January 6th, while titanic figure in the history of modern the Bozells, quoting most extensively
O National Guard troops were still
trying to remove an insurrectionist
American conservatism, his influence
arguably second only to that of his
from “Living on Fire,” a biography of
Brent, Jr., published by a small con-
mob from the Capitol, the right-wing co-author, brother-in-law, and former servative press. (Listening to “Know
activist L. Brent Bozell III appeared college-debate partner, William F. Your Enemy” can feel like visiting a
as a guest on Fox Business. “They be- Buckley. What viewers would not have semi-reclusive friend whose apartment
lieve this election was stolen,” he said, known—what even Brent III did not is crammed with out-of-print books,
of the rioters. “I agree with them. They yet know, apparently—was that his but who always keeps a stash of good
are furious about the deep state. . . . I son, also named L. Brent Bozell, was bourbon on hand.) The hosts sum-
agree with them.” He offered a limp part of the insurrectionist mob. In fact, marized the life of Brent, Sr., an adman
concession or two—“You cannot coun- Brent IV, who goes by Zeek, was one in interwar Omaha, before devoting
tenance our national Capitol being of the few invaders to make it all the the bulk of the episode to Brent, Jr.,
breached”—but spent most of the seg- way to the Senate chamber. who ghostwrote Barry Goldwater’s
ment zigzagging across the thin line In February, Zeek was charged with 1960 best-seller, “The Conscience of
between explanation and excuse. As three federal crimes. A week and a half a Conservative”; founded the Catho-
many viewers would have known, Bo- later, the two hosts of “Know Your En- lic magazine Triumph; and spent the
zell’s father, L. Brent Bozell, Jr., was a emy”—a podcast, founded in 2019, that end of his life advocating for an Amer-
ican brand of theocracy. The two liv-
Two shows harness a progressive energy, but they differ sharply in affect. ing Brents were deemed less worthy
78 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL PORLAN
adversaries. “For us,” Adler-Bell said, better than any of these guys.” More thought was gonna happen in this elec-
the figures worth scrutinizing “are often, though, he speaks with the guilt tion.” Later, when Sanders dropped
these weirdos who had a lot of idio- of a Catholic, the humility of a con- out, the fact that he had come so close
syncratic, terrible, dangerous, Fascist- flict-averse introvert, and the circum- to eking out a victory made his defeat
sympathetic ideas, but nonetheless spection of someone who actually all the more painful. Many of his ad-
were interesting.” knows and loves working-class Repub- mirers—especially the young, angry,
Sitman and Adler-Bell are serious, licans (and expects at least a few of and very online ones—wanted to hear
in other words, about the “know” part them to tune in). In the “Keeping Up their outrage reflected back at them,
of their title. They seem more ambiv- with the Bozells” episode, Sitman con- not in temperate op-eds or both-sides
alent about the “enemy” part. It’s not trasted Brent III with his more illus- TV punditry but through hyper-specific
that they’re squishy about their poli- trious father: “What a letdown.” Then, satire, historically literate left-wing
tics: they have discussed at length what in the next breath, he apologized for analysis, and gleefully ad-hominem
their socialist utopia would look like, the insult. jokes about how John Podesta and Deb-
and their only sustained disagreement At times, this reflexive solicitous- bie Wasserman Schultz were neolib-
during the 2020 primaries came in ness can itself be a bit of a letdown. eral ghouls. “I can’t wait to watch the
the form of Sitman, a die-hard Bernie (Imagine Jesus, before squaring off with debates this fall, when Donald Trump
Sanders fan, gently ribbing Adler-Bell a Pharisee, promising “a conversation, is accusing Hillary Clinton of murder
for even entertaining the idea of sup- not a debate.”) Still, if forced to choose and of looking like a frump, which are
porting Elizabeth Warren. Their hes- between not enough light and not equally horrible crimes in his mind,
itancy has more to do with tempera- enough heat, I’ll take the latter every and she’s gesturing to the moderator,
ment. Last year, they interviewed the time. Sitman is a writer and an editor being, like, ‘This is just outrageous,’ ”
conservative Times columnist Ross at Commonweal; Adler-Bell is a free- one of the hosts said, in the second ep-
Douthat, who has drawn leftists’ ire lance writer whose work appears in isode. This was oddly prescient, but it
for several of his pieces, including The New Republic, Jewish Currents, wasn’t a prediction you were likely to
one called “The Necessity of Stephen and elsewhere. Like many coastal media hear on MSNBC.
Miller.” None of those columns came types, they constantly mock themselves, At the time, the co-hosts were Men-
up. Even Douthat seemed to find the often on Twitter, for spending too much aker and two other young(ish) bearded
hosts’ questions suspiciously magnan- time on Twitter. But they haven’t al- white guys, Felix Biederman and Matt
imous. (“You’re just softening me up, lowed their personalities (or, at least, Christman. (“Chapo,” like the main-
right?”) In an introduction recorded the personas they perform on the show) stream media it critiques, has shown
after the interview, the hosts warned to be subsumed by the deadening col- only belated and fitful interest in di-
listeners that what followed would be lective affect of social media. “What versifying itself.) Christman, the one
“a conversation, not a debate.” “He’s do you do if you’re not a hot-take art- host with any red-state cred, was then
a nice guy,” Sitman said, of Douthat. ist?” Sitman asked, during an episode living in Cincinnati. Biederman, orig-
Adler-Bell agreed: “It’s annoying how about Christopher Hitchens. (The ep- inally from an affluent neighborhood
nice he is.” isode, “Sympathy for the Hitch,” was in Chicago, and Menaker, whose par-
Sitman grew up in a white work- another instance of the show treating ents met while working at this maga-
ing-class family in central Pennsylva- its ideological opponents with grudg- zine, lived in Brooklyn and were try-
nia. His parents were self-described ing respect.) His answer, which he ad- ing to start careers in publishing. To
Christian fundamentalists and straight- mitted was “a little, maybe, self-serving”: this day, when people opine about
ticket Republicans—“God-and-guns “I do find some of the complexity com- “Bernie bros,” it’s uncanny how often
voters,” he called them, in a 2016 essay ing out in podcasts.” If the currency of they seem to be talking, directly or in-
in Dissent—and, in college, he was, too. Twitter consists of eye-rolling quote- directly, about these three individuals.
During his twenties, as a graduate stu- tweets, drive-by insults, and tortuously Their banter could be stunted and sour,
dent in political theory at Georgetown, recursive in-jokes, then “Know Your with an endless deployment of dick
he started to doubt the axioms of con- Enemy” is, blessedly, in the online world jokes and personal insults, but it was
servatism; by his mid-thirties, he was but not of it. often undeniably trenchant, and some-
a Catholic, and a democratic socialist. times laugh-out-loud funny. (You won’t
(Adler-Bell, who was reared in Con- hen the podcast “Chapo Trap find a better parody debate between
necticut by secular leftists, didn’t have
to defect from much of anything.) Oc-
W House” began, in March of 2016,
it served a real need. Millions of vot-
Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek, if
you’re into that sort of thing.) For a
casionally, Sitman speaks with the zeal ers, disaffected and politically home- while, the show was doing something
of a convert. Once, while complaining less, saw in Bernie Sanders an obvious genuinely new.
about “shitheads on the right” who solution to an array of systemic prob- “Chapo” came to exemplify an on-
claim to be “all Second Amendment” lems. “Bernie won Michigan on Tues- line subculture that called itself the
but don’t actually know how to shoot, day,” Will Menaker, one of the co- dirtbag left. Although its flagship prod-
he said, “I was born with a King James hosts, said on the show’s first episode. ucts were podcasts (“Chapo,” “Street
Bible in one hand and a gun in the “I’m not being facetious here . . . it Fight Radio,”“Cum Town”), the dirtbag
other, and I still know them both has really kinda upset a lot of what I left derived its sensibility from niche
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 79
Twitter, heightening the attributes graphic little pamphlets” distributed niversary of Sanders’s victory in the
that make social media both alluring before the French Revolution—and 2020 Nevada caucus, which turned out
(the specificity, the absurdity) and toxic concluded, “Rudeness can be extremely to be the peak of his campaign. At the
(the nihilism, the narcissism, the ca- politically useful.” beginning of the episode, the co-hosts
sual sexism). Jon Stewart, who ended It’s also good business. “Chapo” is reminisced about that day, which they
his “Daily Show” run in 2015, had now the second most lucrative project had spent in Las Vegas, canvassing for
adopted a pose of evenhanded popu- on Patreon, grossing about two million Sanders, then gathering to watch the
list anti-politics (The system doesn’t dollars a year. With time, though, its returns come in. “Bernie had just given
work because of the bozos in charge); style has hardened into shtick. During his victory speech, and we were at
“Chapo” was more frankly anti-capi- the 2020 primaries, the hosts were even a back-yard bar,” Menaker recalled.
talist, and more terminally jaded (This more zealously Bernie-or-bust than “Mingling, having drinks together,
is how the system was designed to work). they had been in 2016, and they now smoking cigarettes . . . that feeling was
Years before the advent of audio-only had a big enough audience to make probably the last good thing that’s ever
apps like Clubhouse, dirtbag-left a difference. (In the crucial weeks be- gonna happen.”
podcasts brought the infinite scroll fore Super Tuesday, the dirtbag left de- They tried to segue to the news of
to life, transforming the solitary habit voted much of its energy to strafing the day. Neera Tanden, a moderate
of Twitter-lurking into a parasocial Elizabeth Warren’s supporters, an ap- Democrat and one of the dirtbag left’s
experience. proach that may have helped cost San- long-standing nemeses, had been nom-
Some listeners compared the “Chapo” ders Warren’s endorsement.) But, after inated to be Biden’s budget director,
hosts to earlier shock jocks like Don Sanders’s loss, “Chapo” seemed to have but her Senate confirmation hearing
Imus and Rush Limbaugh. As a mat- nothing left to say. Instead of progress- was being derailed by questions about
ter of substance, this was a false equiv- ing through the five stages of grief, the controversial past tweets. (Her nomi-
alence. On a purely affective level, co-hosts wallowed in denial—“It is still nation was later withdrawn.) Menaker
though, there was something to it. “Ci- virtually tied,” Menaker said, after mentioned that he had been gloating
vility is destructive because it perpet- Biden’s decisive victory on Super Tues- about Tanden’s demise, and that he’d
uates falsehoods, while vulgarity can day—before settling, apparently for- received pushback from people argu-
keep us honest,” Amber A’Lee Frost, ever, in the second stage. Elisabeth ing that Tanden’s replacement would
who later became a co-host, argued in Kübler-Ross called this stage anger, likely be more conservative than she
a 2016 Current Affairs essay called “The but in “Chapo”’s case it’s closer to ni- was. “Who cares?” Menaker said, on
Necessity of Political Vulgarity.” She hilistic despair. the podcast. “I don’t give a shit who
gave some examples—“Fuck tha Po- The show’s five-hundredth episode Biden appoints to his Cabinet.”
lice,” by N.W.A.; a series of “porno- was recorded this February, on the an- “You think any of these people were
gonna be good?” Biederman said. “No.
They were all gonna fucking suck.”
On a human level, some of this in-
spires actual pathos. As entertainment,
or ideological analysis, it’s not partic-
ularly revelatory. Many people—Ber-
nie Sanders, for example—have ar-
gued that the Biden Administration
is too conservative. It’s certainly pos-
sible to rail against Biden’s policies in
Gaza, or at the Mexican border. But
blanket fatalism is lazy and, perhaps
more to the point, it’s boring. Why
keep tuning in if the angle is always
the same?
Trump’s “vulgarity is appealing precisely vulgar, and not because the observa-
because it exposes political truths.” She tions were unfounded, but because none .646.6466
and the other “Chapo” hosts didn’t of it seemed to matter. It was like watch-
defend Trump’s policies after he was ing the Harlem Globetrotters trounce
elected, but they didn’t pearl-clutch, ei- the Washington Generals: the dunks
ther. Instead, they talked about how were spectacular precisely because the
funny Trump was, or how weird his stakes were so low. A DV ERTISE ME NT
tweets were, or how hypocritical his Back when “Chapo” had a near-
most overwrought opponents sounded. monopoly on socialist podcasting, there
This was politics as enter- was a common miscon-
tainment, politics as signi- ception that the only way
fier—politics as anything to be a proper radical, at
but politics. least online, was to mimic
These days, the hosts the temperament of the WHAT’S THE
often dispense with poli-
tics altogether, riffing about
dirtbag left. Ideological
preferences were conflated BIG IDEA?
nineties films or quirky with affective ones; people Small space has big rewards.
animal facts. “Chapo” is who objected to “Chapo”
hardly the only podcast to on aesthetic grounds were
indulge in frivolous tan- sometimes suspected of
gents. Even the bookish being insufficiently com-
“Know Your Enemy” has its prurient mitted to the cause. This presupposed
interests—speculating about the sexu- that American politics consists of a TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159
ality of William F. Buckley, say—and single spectrum, on which Nazi-punch- jgenet@zmedia-inc.com
yet its obsessions seem organic, consis- ing is to the left of civil disobedience
tent with a sincere and sustained at- and insults are to the left of arguments.
tempt to understand the right. On a re- But there isn’t just one spectrum; at
cent episode, the hosts analyzed a “truly the very least, there’s a quadrant grid,
awful conservative movie” called “Christ- with policy goals on one axis and tem-
mas Cars,” mocking the film but also perament on the other. The x-axis
smuggling in salient observations about ranges from a fully planned economy
Lost Cause mythmaking and culture- to anarcho-capitalism; the y-axis
war grift. I learn something each time ranges from solicitous Socratic dia-
I listen, which is more than I can say logue to misanthropic bullying. They
about nearly everything else I do with vary independently. Wear our new
my phone. In April, on Twitter, a fan of “Know official hat to show
Your Enemy” wrote, “I love this nerdy
The interests of “Chapo,” by con-
trast, seem increasingly arbitrary, the shit,” referring to that show and to four
your love.
latest targets of the Twitter hive mind. broadly similar ones (“Time to Say
The show’s aesthetic has become in- Goodbye,”“Left Anchor,”“Death Panel,”
distinguishable from the extremely on- and “The Dig”). If “Chapo” and its ilk
line aesthetic, which evinced at least a make up the dirtbag left, the fan won-
glimmer of potential in 2016 but has dered, then what should this newer
since only soured. At its worst, it de- subgenre of podcasts be called? Adler-
rides any attempt at sincerity as try- Bell tweeted two self-deprecating op-
hard, or cringe; better simply to shit- tions: “the ‘not funny or cool’ left” and
post and await our climate-induced “the ‘your parents might like it’ left.”
collapse. Recently, the “Chapo” hosts Others commented below, proposing
spent the entirety of an eighty-one- alternatives: the dorkbag left, the Nor-
minute episode making fun of “Stars ton Critical Edition left, the “joy to
and Strife,” a documentary directed by have in class” left, the earnest left. 100% cotton twill.
an investment banker named David Adler-Bell objected to the last of these, Available in white, navy, and black.
Smick. They described various parts of writing, “You get a reputation for being
the movie as “unadulterated drivel” and earnest around here”—Twitter, that
“one of the most evil things I’ve ever is—“you’re in trouble.” It was, appro-
newyorkerstore.com/hats
seen”; several times, they made jokes priately enough, a glib way of making
that involved likening Smick’s head to a sincere point.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 81
soul. (That it’s beautiful amplifies the
THE ART WORLD shock.) Luce let Bourke-White do that.
Liberal sentiment was no hindrance to
ANOTHER EYE
his avidity for sensation. Lange and Lev-
itt did as well or better as social docu-
mentarians, with the former’s empathetic
“The New Woman Behind the Camera” at the Met. coverage of sufferers from the Depres-
sion and the latter’s breathtakingly af-
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL fecting shots of slum children. Levitt’s
“New York” (circa 1942) catches three
rapscallion boys joyously play-fighting
in a rubble-strewn lot. Two of them wield
sticks and the other, the smallest, hefts
an immense tree branch. The work is a
miracle of observation and timing, as one
of the smiling stick-holders takes off at
a dead run. For me, the over-all image
encapsulates a violent happiness, or a hap-
piness in violence, that resonates with mil-
lennia of human experience. I can still
see it with my eyes closed.
But here I am singling out classics from
a show that, nonjudgmental to a willing
fault, blurs discriminations of fame and
even of originality. The array, installed by
the Met’s Mia Fineman, tantalizes to the
point of possibly maddening some view-
ers, with perhaps one or very few prints
by photographers who rouse in us a yen
to see more of them. In truth, that’s a
payoff for Nelson, who imposes no uni-
fying aesthetic beyond a general concor-
dance with modernism. She advances
just one, foggy thematic idea: “the New
“Self-Portrait with Leica” (1931), by the German photographer Ilse Bing. Woman,” a phrase, or slogan, that was
coined by two European writers in the
“ L IFE’S BOURKE-WHITE GOES
BOMBING,” reads the headline of
by the head curator, Andrea Nelson, an
associate at the National Gallery of Art,
late nineteenth century for rebels against
Victorian conformity. I think most of us
an article in Life from March 1, 1943, the show builds a case for the historic associate it with bobbed-haired partyers
with pictures of an airborne B-17 and of contributions of women to a field that, in the twenties and the wisecracking her-
the eponymous photographer, Margaret until very recently, was monotonously oines of Hollywood comedies in the thir-
Bourke-White, somehow making a pad- dominated by men. Most of the artists ties. Its vagueness serves Nelson’s intent
ded flight suit look snazzy as she became are unknown to me. Nearly all did tip- of equalizing all types of photography,
the first woman to be allowed on an Air top work in genres that include report- without observing a distinction between
Force combat mission. The breakthrough age, ethnography, fashion, advertising, art and commerce. She and five essayists
was bound to be hers. She was made a and determinedly avant-garde experi- in the show’s catalogue are at pains to
national celebrity by Henry Luce as the mentation. Widely recognized names— avoid essentializing femininity. There’s
premier photographer for Fortune, start- the Americans Berenice Abbott, Doro- reference, but only slight, to our present-
ing in 1929, and then for the newly thea Lange, and Helen Levitt among day preoccupation with gender identity.
founded Life, in 1936. Her skill and cha- them—are few. Only Bourke-White re- The essayists do little opining; one gives
risma are among the things that stand ally towered in her time. a glancing disapprobation of “colonialism”
out in “The New Woman Behind the The irony of Bourke-White’s “Flood among European and American photog-
Camera,” a monumental show, at the Relief, Louisville, Kentucky” (1937), which raphers in Africa, most of whom are
Metropolitan Museum, of a hundred shows Black victims of a devastating from the thirties—easy to judge now but
and eighty-five works by a hundred and Ohio River flood lined up for aid in front opaque back then. Only a division of bod-
© ILSE BING ESTATE
twenty female professionals from more of a huge billboard of a happy (white, of ies of work by category suggests a criti-
than twenty countries which were made course) family in a car, with the scripted cal criterion. The show is less a survey
between the nineteen-twenties and the assurance “There’s no way like the Amer- than an index. The effect of heteroge-
fifties. Crowning years of heroic research ican Way,” bites so hard as to scar the neous images in flashing sequence diz-
82 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021
zies—physically so, in my case. At cer- Abbott of her friends Jean Cocteau, aim-
tain points, having heedlessly given ing a pistol at the viewer, and Janet Flan-
myself over to too many compelling items, ner, the contributor to this magazine of
I had to sit down. the Letter from Paris column, who main-
tains a regal mien despite wearing a funny
elson’s catholicity obliges her to in- tall hat with masks attached to it. The
N clude, in a section entitled “Mod-
ern Bodies,” a spectacular high-angled
show’s chief instance of outright femi-
nist agitation is a shot, by Lola Álvarez
view of young Germans doing coördi- Bravo, the great Mexican visual poet of
nated pushups, by Leni Riefenstahl, in her nation, of a melancholy woman lean-
1936. Countering that totalitarian mys- ing out a window and gridded with shad-
Commemorative
tique are horrific shots of recently liber- ows: “In Her Own Prison” (circa 1950).
ated concentration camps by Bourke- An uprising of such inmates was a few
Cover Reprints
White and Lee Miller, who, formerly a short years away. Search our extensive
protégée of Man Ray’s, was, like Bourke- A mood of buoyancy reigns in a section
White, embedded with American forces. called “Fashion and Advertising.” Mar-
archive of weekly
Exposing the hell of the camps consti- keting and magazine content targeting covers dating back to
tuted photography’s greatest service to female consumers gave women photog- 1925 and commemorate
collective memory. Miller’s capture of a raphers license and authority. The mod- a milestone with a
leather-coated, handsome S.S. guard, dead els’ postures took on kinetic vivacity, and
and adrift under water, grimly satisfies. jokes became permissible. I only gradu- New Yorker cover reprint.
(Miller went on to be pictured—not in ally realized that the pert young woman newyorkerstore.com/covers
the show—taking a bath in Hitler’s tub in a 1931 German ad for a hair-styling
at his apartment in Munich.) A terrific cream is, in fact, a cunningly made-up
combat photograph by the Russian Ga- mannequin dressed in an old-fashioned
lina Sanko, of two running Soviet sol- blouse. The hand that it appears to extend,
diers in the act of hurling grenades, raises presenting the product, is human. Many PRICE $8.99 OCT. 24, 2016
doubts. Was it staged? Who has the sang- Weimar fashion photographers were Jew-
froid to perfectly frame an assault on ish, finding ways to enter society and to
armed enemies who are near enough to make a living with independent flair. Like
throw things at? Sanko, perhaps. Another every other photographer in the show—
photograph by her, of German prisoners however fiercely individualistic—they
being hauled across snow on a sled at are implicitly enlisted in a common, ret-
Stalingrad, affirms her grit. It is reported roactive struggle for simple justice.
that she was injured twice during the war. Now for something that brought tears
Many of the show’s motifs—of archi- to my eyes: five shots of an incredible Jap-
tectural subjects and street scenes, for ex- anese actress, Yasue Yamamoto, that were
ample—could imaginably have been taken taken clandestinely, around 1943 and 1944,
by talented men. This serves the point of after her theatre company was banned by
establishing an equality, at least, of pro- Japan’s wartime government. Wearing a
fessional achievement. Femaleness be- kimono, and either seated or kneeling,
comes germane intermittently, as in por- Yamamoto enacts moments from a play
traiture and self-portraiture of women at entitled “Elegy for a Woman,” with tiny
work with their cameras and in a few shifts of facial expression—mouth closed
stabs at Surrealism, a movement that was or slightly open, eyes raised a bit or down-
all but defined by poisoned-sugar male cast—that speak or, really, sing of muted
treatments of womanhood. A tour de emotions that are no less moving for being
force from 1938, by the German-born Ar- unidentifiable. The performance was a
gentine Annemarie Heinrich in league collaboration with a pioneering Japanese
with her sister Ursula, finds the two re- photographer, Eiko Yamazawa.Their com-
flected in a mirrored orb. In the back- plementary artistry, exercised in secret
ground—from our point of view—Anne- under humble circumstances (a paper
marie grins as she snaps the shutter of a screen has holes in it), pierces the heart.
standing camera; Ursula looms giganti- The style is flatly vernacular, with nothing
cally and wildly distorted as she leans fancy or overtly dramatizing about it. The
forward to grasp the sphere. It takes time, results, feeling timelessly here-and-now
enjoyably, to puzzle out the picture’s ver- across a span of sixty-eight years, didn’t
tiginous structure. Other works that ap- so much blow my mind as take it away
peal to me include portraits by Berenice and begin to replace it with a better one.
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 83
an examination of what happens when
ON TELEVISION the veneer of conventional sociability dis-
solves and the power struggles stoked by
ALMOST PARADISE
race, class, and gender erupt from beneath
the surface of everyday life.
In the first of six episodes, Armond
“The White Lotus,” on HBO. tells Lani to make each guest feel like
the “special chosen baby child of the
BY NAOMI FRY hotel.” These baby children include the
Mossbacher family: Nicole (Connie Brit-
ton), a Sheryl Sandberg-like tech C.F.O.;
her beta husband, Mark (Steve Zahn);
their porn-addicted sixteen-year-old
son, Quinn (Fred Hechinger); and their
daughter, Olivia (“Euphoria” ’s Sydney
Sweeney, once again playing a parent’s
nightmare), a bitchy, performatively woke
college sophomore, who has brought
along a friend, Paula (Brittany O’Grady).
There is the obligatory newlywed cou-
ple—Shane ( Jake Lacy), a real-estate
scion in a Cornell baseball cap, and his
wife, Rachel (Alexandra Daddario), a
clickbait journalist who, hours into her
honeymoon, is starting to have second
thoughts. There is also Tanya ( Jennifer
Coolidge), a lonely alcoholic who car-
ries around her dead mother’s ashes in
an ornate gilt box. The chief coddlers are
Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), a soothing,
long-suffering spa manager, who is per-
haps the only truly likable character on
the show, and Armond, a mustachioed
dandy and a recovering addict whose so-
briety is tested by his stressful job.
The White Lotus is a breeding ground
for conflict, not unlike the Hell masquer-
ading as Heaven in “The Good Place.”
Nicole, who complains that her suite
doesn’t provide “nice feng-shui” for her
boat ferrying a gaggle of rich Amer- masks,” he says. “It’s tropical Kabuki!” “Zoom with China,” feels attacked by
A ican tourists makes its way toward
a Hawaiian luxury resort. At the shore,
Welcome to “Upstairs, Downstairs,”
Aloha State edition. The series, called
her daughter’s mocking of her Hillary-
style feminism, and insulted by Rachel,
the resort’s decidedly less wealthy, more “The White Lotus,” named for the fic- who once wrote a profile of her insinu-
ethnically diverse staff waits to greet tional resort where the action takes place, ating that she had capitalized on the
the guests. The groups face each other, is a near-note-perfect tragicomedy, cre- #MeToo movement to climb the corpo-
as if they were equal expressions on ated by Mike White for HBO. White rate ladder. (Rachel’s defense: “I was just
two sides of a mathematical equation, has written mass-market Hollywood fare basically repurposing the profile of you
but the equivalence is just an illusion. like “School of Rock,” but he is better from the Post.”) Shane, who becomes in-
“Wave like you mean it,” the resort’s known for his work on small-screen com- creasingly consumed by his belief that
manager, Armond (the Australian actor edies such as “Freaks and Geeks” and, Armond is cheating him out of the top-
Murray Bartlett), instructs Lani ( Jolene more recently, “Enlightened,” a short- rate suite his mother paid for, feels that
Purdy), a native-Hawaiian trainee. Ar- lived cult favorite, also on HBO. Much he is being unfairly persecuted for his
mond explains that the guests expect a like the latter series, in which Laura Dern privilege. “People have been coming for
kind of pleasant blandness, or an “im- plays an executive who tries to make a me my whole life,” he says. “I’m just play-
pression of vagueness,” from the staff. comeback after suffering a public ner- ing the hand I was dealt!” The guests’
“We are asked to disappear behind our vous breakdown, “The White Lotus” is awful behavior is a vehicle for satire.
“My mother told me I would never be
Mike White has an affection for his characters, who never feel like caricatures. a ballerina, and that was when I was
84 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 2, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY HALEY TIPPMAN
skinny,” Tanya says, while attempting to taining human remains is loaded onto to participate in a game of abstinence.
scatter her mom’s ashes in the ocean. But the plane. Someone has died, but who? The character of Tanya, in Coolidge’s
White has an affection for his characters, We are then hurtled, backward in time, hands, is as heartrending and unbear-
who never feel like caricatures. When to the beginning of the vacation. This able as any Bravo housewife. And owing
Tanya murmurs,“Oh, my mother, mother, makes the show one of many recent to a slew of rivalries, and a foreboding,
mother,” we hear the call of a soul in HBO series to use nonlinear storytelling tribal-drum-heavy score, composed by
true distress. (“Sharp Objects,” “I Know This Much Cristobal Tapia de Veer, White’s show
White’s greatest sympathy lies with Is True,” “Made for Love”). It is also yet also has ample tinges of “Survivor.” After
those who have a more tenuous con- another series on the network that seeks duking it out for a week on an island,
nection to power and money. One ex- to unravel a mysterious death (“Big Lit- who will come out alive?
ample is Belinda, who not only tends tle Lies,”“The Undoing,”“Mare of East- “Is this like a kamikaze situation?
to Tanya in the spa but also tucks the town,” “Sharp Objects” again). Are you gonna take me down with you?”
grieving woman into bed when she And one would be remiss not to men- Dillon (Lukas Gage), an employee, asks
is blackout drunk. Belinda hopes that tion “Succession,” given White’s focus on Armond, who—spoilers ahead—has
Tanya will pay for her to open up her the wealthy ruling class. But, unlike that broken his sobriety and is in full fuck-
own wellness center. Rachel, meanwhile, show, which relies on crowded plots and it-mask-off mode. “What do you care?”
is adjusting to the idea that being wed multiple locations to sketch out the lives his boss answers. “You make shit money.
to Shane means being rich—a blessing of its characters, “The White Lotus” was They exploit me, I exploit you.” (The ac-
and a curse. When she is offered a re- shot in one place, the Four Seasons in tors are excellent across the board, but
porting assignment during their honey- Maui. The focus on a single site—apart Bartlett, whose practiced amiability turns
moon, he tells her, “Whatever they’re from making filming easier during the progressively feral throughout the se-
paying you, I’ll double it.” Paula, one pandemic—gives the show a Pinteresque ries, is a revelation.) Later on, Armond,
of the only nonwhite guests at the re- airlessness. The guests and the employ- in a drugged haze, enters Shane’s room,
sort, has a fling with a native-Hawai- ees crouch and circle one another like drops his trousers, and squats, straining
ian employee, and is perturbed watch- animals in a cage. Sometimes the char- out a memento in his rival’s suitcase.
ing him do a traditional dance for the acters have difficulty escaping White’s Watching this hilarious, horrifying
guests. “Obviously, imperialism was bad,” gaze. At breakfast, Rachel tries to talk to moment, I thought of Jamaica Kincaid’s
Mark tells her. “But it’s humanity. Wel- Shane about her career, and he abruptly “A Small Place,” in which she derides the
come to history. Welcome to America.” leaves the table to chase down Armond. tourists who come to her native Antigua
One thing that White captures, through In a later scene, of the Mossbacher family in search of a scenic vacation. “You must
Paula, is what it’s like to be on vacation fighting at breakfast, we catch a glimpse not wonder what exactly happened to
with your friend’s family—a tiresome of Rachel, still alone at the table, staring the contents of your lavatory when you
experience of being dragged into ten- down at her plate. flushed it,” Kincaid writes. “The contents
sions that are not your own and still White is obsessed with reality tele- of your lavatory might, just might, graze
being expected to perform gratitude, vision; he has even been a contestant on gently against your ankle as you wade
which ultimately ends with you despis- “The Amazing Race” and “Survivor.” carefree in the water, for you see, in An-
ing everyone, including your friend. Perhaps this is why “The White Lotus” tigua, there is no proper sewage-disposal
is the most reality-TV-like scripted se- system.”Staying at the White Lotus might
“ T he White Lotus” is largely a char-
acter and relationship study, but
ries I’ve seen in a long time. The naïvely
blissful guests on the boat reminded me
seem like the most wonderful thing in
the world, but don’t be surprised if, by
it does have a plot. The series opens with of the horny contestants on “Too Hot the end of the vacation, you end up with
an ending: Shane, sans Rachel, waits to to Handle” docking at Turks and Cai- shit in your luggage. You’ve more than
board a flight back home as a box con- cos, not yet knowing that they’ve agreed likely done something to deserve it.
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2021 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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“ ”
..........................................................................................................................
“So, when did the ‘check mustard’ light come on?” “He says making lemonade is not an option.”
Mark Lehrman, Wyckoff, N.J. Suzan Stodder, Madison, Wis.
THE 17 18
CROSSWORD 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26
A moderately challenging puzzle.
27 28 29 30 31
BY ERIK AGARD
32 33 34 35
36
ACROSS
1 Built up 37
8 “If you’re hungry, girl, I got ___”: Silk
Sonic 38 39 40
19 Level of a cake
58 59
20 Earth, in French
22 “At Last” singer James 60 61
23 Moves carefully
25 “Whoops!” 60 New Jersey city where Halsey was born 37 “Go away”
26 App that’s been called “a little bit eBay 61 Like some parking 42 Fertile spot in a desert
and a little bit Instagram” 44 Basics
DOWN
27 Son of Beyoncé and Jay-Z 45 ___-scarum
1 Subside
29 Chaand Raat, e.g. 2 Party game with secret roles 47 Postpone
31 Verb that sounds like a letter 3 Parts of farms 48 Renée ___ Goldsberry
32 Category for Serena Williams and 4 Vacation destination with lifts 49 “There, it should work now”
Naomi Osaka Thick noodle
5 Cul de ___ 51
36 First Black woman awarded a Michelin 6 Coup d’___ 52 Descriptor for some lipsticks
star
7 Took a meal 55 Lead-in to friendly or conscious
37 Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, e.g.
8 Deal with head on 57 Housemate who never does the dishes
38 Direction opposite WNW
9 Neighbor of Ore.
39 Key in the upper-left corner 10 Anti-flooding measure
40 Middle of some 24-Down 11 Day-of-election forecasting tools Solution to the previous puzzle:
41 “I like my baby heir with baby hair and 12 Kitchen cloth B L E S S M E A N G L I C
___”: Beyoncé 13 Chair-against-floor sounds
L A V A P I T S C O R O N A
I C E D A N C E S T A N D S
43 “Screaming!” 15 Root vegetable also known as cocoyam P E N C O H A B I N G O T
46 N.Y.C.-based trans-rights org. 21 Monkey that sounds like a candy brand L E S T I A D I N O
Life, in Italian B O T O X B A T C O P T E R
50 24 Comparative figures of speech
A N E W B I C U R I O U S
51 City-related 26 Most wall-to-wall R E T I N A S M E L O D I C
53 Adding “sh” to its end forms an adjective 28 Surname that’s Spanish for “kings” P E N A L T I E S B E A U
that might describe its offerings 30 Scenic view S L A T H E R O N H A S N T
L U T E D O M A A H
54 Wiped from the whiteboard 32 Boat that might be hailed
I S E R E S O O T S S P A
56 Symbol of Christianity 33 Sports org. headquartered in Daytona D O T E L L T W I S T T O P
Beach
58 Its first state alphabetically is I N E S S E H E L L H O L E
Aguascalientes 34 ___ Lanka N E S T E D S T E E P E D