Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The New Yorker - May 6, 2024
The New Yorker - May 6, 2024
The New Yorker - May 6, 2024
99 MAY 6, 2024
MISSION TO THE SUN
MISSION TO URANUS
MAY 6, 2024
6 GOINGS ON
9 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Trump’s criminal trial;
Civil War photos; Ramy Youssef ’s Eid banquet;
Putin and Berezovsky in “Patriots”; chess and basketball.
PROFILES
Parul Sehgal 14 The Phantasm
Why Judith Butler has aroused fury around the world.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Bess Kalb 21 Horoscopes Written by My Mother
OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS
D. T. Max 22 Design for Living
Turning office towers into apartment buildings.
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
Casey Cep 28 On Native Grounds
Deb Haaland addresses her federal agency’s cruel past.
ANNALS OF INQUIRY
Nathan Heller 40 The Battle for Attention
How to hold on to what matters in a distracted age.
FICTION
Cynan Jones 50 “Pulse”
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Louis Menand 56 Academic freedom under fire.
BOOKS
59 Briefly Noted
Kelefa Sanneh 61 The animal-rights movement.
POP MUSIC
Amanda Petrusich 66 Taylor Swift’s “Tortured Poets Department.”
THE THEATRE
Helen Shaw 68 “Stereophonic,” “Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Justin Chang 70 “Challengers.”
POEMS
Paul Tran 32 “Second Nature”
Ellen Bass 46 “Laundry”
COVER
Faith Ringgold “Sonny’s Bridge, 1986”
DRAWINGS Jeremy Nguyen, Amy Kurzweil, Barbara Smaller, P. C. Vey, Sofia Warren,
Joe Dator, Tyson Cole, Roz Chast, Michael Maslin, Amy Hwang, Liana Finck, Frank Cotham,
Maddie Dai, Sarah Kempa, Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby SPOTS Rashin Kheiriyeh
celebrate mom
Paul Tran (Poem, p. 32), a Wallace Steg- Louis Menand (A Critic at Large, p. 56),
ner Fellow at Stanford, published their a staff writer since 2001, is a scholar-
début poetry collection, “All the Flow- in-residence at the New York Univer-
ers Kneeling,” in 2022. They teach at sity School of Law. His most recent
the University of Wisconsin-Madison. book is “The Free World.”
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
FLICKERING FLAMES play, “Gas Light.” She does not men-
tion, though, that a British film adap-
Leslie Jamison’s essay on gaslighting tation of the same play, directed by
offered an excellent and comprehensive Thorold Dickinson, was released in
review of the topic (“Crazy-Making,” 1940. (The cast and crew were not well
April 8th). As a longtime practicing known to audiences in the U.S., where
clinical psychologist, I agreed enthusi- the film had a very limited run, under
astically as I read—that is, until I came the title “Angel Street.”) When M-G-M
to Gila Ashtor’s psychoanalytic inter- remade the movie four years later,
pretation of gaslighting as a dynamic with a more prominent director and a
dyad that includes a gaslighter and a cast of stars such as Ingrid Bergman,
second “voluntary” participant, i.e., the Charles Boyer, and Joseph Cotten, stu-
person being gaslit. Patients can feel dio executives attempted to destroy all
deeply recognized when a therapist extant prints of the 1940 version, and
confirms their belief that a parent or a may have hoped to destroy the origi-
partner has been undermining them. nal negative, too. I find it ironic that
Withholding that validation, as Ashtor the story of the making of “Gaslight”
suggests doing, can be tantamount to itself resembles a tale of gaslighting:
remaining silent when a victim of do- an attempt to erase an artistic product
mestic abuse displays her bruises. Some- from the collective consciousness and
times a victim is a victim; a mental-health replace it with a different, ostensibly
professional can provide a potentially “original” version.
life-changing affirmation when she con- Mac Brachman
firms that reality. Chicago, Ill.
Patricia Steckler 1
Bethesda, Md. MIGHTY FINE DINING
I have just one thing to add to Jami- As a gourmand, I found Lauren Col-
son’s finely observed piece. In contem- lins’s piece on the French all-you-can-
porary infant- and child-development eat restaurant Les Grands Buffets both
research, the idea of gaslighting has a educational and incredibly appetizing
parallel in the acquisition of what is (“Feast Mode,” April 8th). As I sali-
known as “epistemic trust”: our capac- vated my way through the article, my
ity to learn new information from peo- thoughts turned to the American equiv-
ple we deem trustworthy. This emerges alent, the chain Golden Corral, which
in caregiver-infant interactions. Our Collins mentions. Having survived
caregivers and families may confuse us COVID, Golden Corral is going strong,
through both verbal and nonverbal com- with an amazing range of comfort foods
munication, and that can contribute, and an abundance of desserts. Many
later in life, to difficulty in reading so- locations also serve breakfast; this boy
cial cues and a tendency to doubt our from Brooklyn particularly loves the
own beliefs. No one is to blame; the biscuits and sausage gravy, with two
point is that our minds begin forming eggs over easy on top. I have no idea
during our earliest social interactions, how the place does it, without reser-
which will shape our ability to process vations and at such reasonable prices.
information for the rest of our lives. Robert Shepard
Miri Abramis Roanoke, Va.
New York City
•
In her article on gaslighting, Jamison Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
cites the 1944 film “Gaslight,” directed address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
by George Cukor, as the source for the themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
term, and points out that the film was any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
based on Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
far-reaching, mind-expanding spiritual jazz,
the saxophonist has only grown more tremen-
GOINGS ON dous, in sound and stature. He was already a
fixture on the L.A. music scene, committing to
MAY 1 – 7, 2024 the jazz collective West Coast Get Down and
working with the experimental label Brain-
feeder, when he played a pivotal role as a key
session musician for Kendrick Lamar’s “To
Pimp a Butterfly.” These days, Washington
is one of the most ambitious bandleaders out
there, and his playing is as forceful as his vi-
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. sion. This show kicks off the release of his
new LP, “Fearless Movement,” which he has
referred to as his “dance album,” shifting focus
Born in Miami, Florida, in 1968, to Cuban parents, Teresita Fernández from celestial bodies to physical ones.—Sheldon
Pearce (Beacon Theatre; May 4.)
incorporates natural resources tied to colonization into work that exam-
ines landscape and place. For the exhibition “Soil Horizon” (at Lehmann CLASSICAL MUSIC | With more than fifty concerts
Maupin, through June 1), she’s dug deep into her own internal life over three days in Brooklyn, this year’s Long Play
Festival, organized by Bang on a Can, celebrates
and returned with something fresh and profound and nourishing. The contemporary music in general and minimalism
fifty-five-year-old artist uses copper panels for the wall sculpture “Soil in particular. The latter includes Steve Reich’s
Horizon 5” (a detail of which is pictured) to describe the earth’s interi- “Music for 18 Musicians,” David Lang’s haunting
“the little match girl passion,” and Philip Glass’s
ority—the layers that make up the ground we stand on (or get buried Piano Études (in new arrangements for accor-
in). Charcoal, volcanic sand, and iron-rich red sand are layered on the dion). The programming honors past path-break-
panels with a naturalness that doesn’t so much interfere with how nature ers while making space for newer ones, such as
the microtonalist Peter Adriaansz and the jazz
arranges itself as show us what it can look like—and yield—when the experimentalist Josh Johnson. The flutist Claire
artist works from her own interior self and imagination.—Hilton Als Chase, who is on a multiyear odyssey stretching
her instrument’s possibilities, elegantly bridges
the two worlds, with excerpts from a new piece
by minimalism’s white-bearded forefather Terry
Riley.—Oussama Zahr (Various venues; May 3-5.)
Benno’s accomplishments hitch his way out of the restaurant, has all the
wagon to an institution like Jean- elegance and romance of heading home
Georges, Vongerichten’s restaurant after a late night at the office. Four
group, where the only marquee name Twenty Five is a restaurant built to
tends to be Vongerichten’s own. The be lunched in. The only downside of
bar menu at Four Twenty Five is an a midday meal there is that you might
album of the restaurant group’s great- be tempted to skip the desserts, which
est hits, including a tuna encrusted would be a mistake. No one looks pow-
with rice crackers from his downtown erful taking a bite of ice cream, no mat-
Perry St., an ur-dish of the Asian-fu- ter how grand the room, or how lofty
sion two-thousands, and petite bites of the skyscraper. That’s probably for the NEWYORKER.COM/NEWSLETTERS
buttered black bread topped with uni best. (Dishes $19-$128.) Get expanded versions of Helen Rosner’s reviews,
that are a signature of Vongerichten’s —Helen Rosner plus Goings On, delivered early in your in-box.
ARCHIVES DEPT. to light and air, have been carefully stored. the time, made by his partner Timothy
WAR STORIES ON FILM One of the very few people who have O’Sullivan, at Gettysburg, after the bat-
come in contact with them during the tle. Gardner titled it “A Harvest of Death,”
past two decades is Billy Wade, the Still and it is fascinating for the way the de-
Picture Branch’s supervisory archivist. tails of the dead are in sharp focus, while
There are roughly nine thousand plates the living are like ghosts. After the war,
from the war and subsequent Western O’Sullivan went West with scientists
surveys, which ended in the eighteen- and soldiers and made what is probably
lex Garland’s new film, “Civil War,” seventies. The cabinets that house the the archive’s most requested survey pho-
A follows two war photographers on
a road trip from New York to Washing-
plates are sky blue. Each shelf holds
about a hundred, all in a NASA-level
tograph—a sand dune, about three miles
long, in Nevada. That picture features
ton, D.C., via the blue highways of Penn- climate-controlled room. Last week, the army ambulance that O’Sullivan
sylvania and West Virginia. The more Wade told a visitor, “The other day, I converted into a travelling darkroom.
experienced photographer, played by was in there, and I thought, I wonder if The photo of the sand dune, creamy and
Kirsten Dunst, uses a Sony digital cam- anybody will ever ask what they look smooth, is an albumen print, made with
era, while her apprentice, played by Cailee like, so I took a picture with my phone.” an antique process that uses egg whites.
Spaeny, shoots a Nikon and makes old- In the image he made, the cabinets have (Photographic journals at the time fea-
school film negatives of a fictional civil a nineteen-sixties computer-lab vibe: tured cheesecake recipes.)
war. A real-life road trip to Washington, the rows of plates in flapped enclosures Among the fourteen million unique
D.C., via I-95, brings you past the Na- could be powerful servers that fuel the analog photos at the Still Picture Branch
tional Archives campus in College Park, national memory bank. are images from every war that has been
Maryland, where the archivists in the “I’ve got some things pulled,” Wade photographed. It is common for veter-
Still Picture Branch manage the actual said. He went away and returned push- ans to visit; the parking lot is often dot-
photos of the actual Civil War and the ing a cart holding prints made by Alex- ted with cars bearing Vietnam War in-
negatives from which they were printed. ander Gardner, a Scottish photographer signia. “We’ve had war photographers
Like Spaeny’s character, actual Civil War who started the war working for the come in here and say they remember
photographers developed images in the better-known Mathew Brady, then went making these pictures,” Wade said.
field, theirs made on glass plates coated out on his own. All the photographs were Recently, Dennis Fisher, a Marine
with collodion, a syrupy chemical com- made for what is often called the first combat photographer now in his sev-
pound that was also used by Civil War- photo book, “Gardner’s Photographic enties, stopped in to see negatives that
era surgeons as a liquid bandage. Sketch Book of the War.” At the center he had developed in Vietnam, in 1967
After a century and a half, the Civil of Gardner’s book is one of the archive’s and 1968. He was assisted by Cecilia
War-era glass-plate negatives, sensitive most frequently requested photos of Figliuolo, an archivist with an interest
10 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
in combat photography, who spoke to prayer room by mistake. Cynthia Nixon
him about the photos he had made hadn’t known what to wear. (The dress
twenty-eight years before she was born. code was a mysterious “semi-formal to
“One of the first things he said to me formal.”) Chatting alongside the actor
was, ‘This is the first time I’ve held these Aasif Mandvi, she said that she’d puz-
negatives since I was 20 or 21,’” she wrote zled out wardrobe choices with her part-
in “The Unwritten Record,” one of the ner, Christine Marinoni. “I made Chris-
archive’s blogs. Sitting with the veteran, tine wear a tie,” she said. Mandvi, a
Figliuolo learned details that the archi- Muslim, was delighted by the diversity
vists could only have guessed at. As of the first-timers: “I’m used to family
Fisher studied a picture of two men fir- members with long beards judging me
ing mortars in May, 1968—part of a U.S. for my career choices.”
operation to clear land south of Da The guest list was packed with im-
Nang—he told Figliuolo that he had practical artistic types: the actors Aman-
brought a tape recorder along on the dla Stenberg and Ilana Glazer, the pho-
mission, to record the sonic chaos. “Did tographer Nan Goldin, the writers Tareq
you take your recorder out with you Baconi and Hala Alyan, the filmmak-
every time?” she asked. ers Linda Goode Bryant and Mira Nair,
“No, I took it out once, and it was Ramy Youssef and the editor of Jewish Currents, Ari-
such a pain in the ass to lug around I elle Angel. Another co-host, Deana Hag-
never took it out again,” he said. This year, Youssef co-hosted an Eid gag, an arts administrator, told the guests
When Fisher returned home from the al-Fitr banquet, the culmination of Ra- that they had been invited because of
archive, he phoned Figliuolo, and played madan, with his friends Hasan Minhaj, their creative roles: “We mold witness-
her the cassette tape, but what she re- Riz Ahmed, and Mona Chalabi, among ing; help make it into a shape that the
membered long after his visit was that, others. (They split the bill for the night.) world can remember.”
when he had stared at the battle scenes The dinner took place at a warehouse During the program for the evening,
in the archive, it was as if that audiotape in Bushwick, but the atmosphere was guests sat at long tables and ate prawns,
were playing in his head. “In that mo- not remotely industrial; guests searched lamb chops, and saffron rice between
ment, I could tell that he could hear it,” for their names on place cards at ele- speakers. Amir Sulaiman roused the
she said. “He remembered everything.” gant tables set with glasses of hibiscus- crowd with a performance of his poem
—Robert Sullivan and-pomegranate juice and decorated “You Will Be Someone’s Ancestor. Act
1 with red poppies (a symbol of Pales- Accordingly.”The actress Debra Winger,
BREAKING BREAD tine). Youssef, wearing a green thobe, who is a grandmother now, said that the
A HEARTS-AND-MINDS EID stood on a chair to address the two hun- number of Gazan children killed had
dred and fifty attendees. He made note been weighing on her. But, she added,
of the refined atmosphere through a “feeling won’t wreck you. Not feeling is
joke about premarital sex. “We put this what wrecks you.”
together in two weeks, Muslim style!” Throughout the event, Youssef made
he said with a smirk. “Two people want his way from table to table. Before en-
to hook up? Let’s do a wedding!” Over tering, guests had been handed black
IartistnJudith
January, the American philosopher
Butler and the South African
William Kentridge took part in a
Butler has regularly required per-
sonal security. In 2012, the city of Frank-
furt awarded them the Theodor W.
like to understand more about your
fear,” Butler said. “You and I both want
to live without fear of violence. We’re
public conversation in Paris about atroc- Adorno Prize for their contributions just trying to arrive at it in a different
ity and its representations. Before an au- to philosophy. (Butler recently adopted way.” The woman started to cry. “We’ll
dience at the École Normale Supérieure, they/them pronouns but doesn’t “po- meet, we’ll meet,” she said. Butler asked
they spoke for nearly two hours, in lull- lice it.”) The general secretary of the for permission to embrace her.
ing abstraction and murmured mutual Central Council of Jews in Germany “I recognized her,” Butler told me
regard: Can we give the image the ben- decried the decision to give the award, later. “She could have been my aunt.
efit of the doubt? What is the role of the named for a philosopher of Jewish de- Her fear had been my own. Sometimes
object in thinking? After the event, a scent who fled the Nazis, to a “well- it is still my own.”
woman—a philosopher herself—ap- known hater of Israel.” A demonstra- Back in Berkeley, where Butler lives
proached Butler. Tight with tension, tion was organized. Butler, a prominent and teaches, I heard them tell the story
she gripped Butler by the arm. critic of Zionism, responded by citing to a few different people, turning it
“Vous menacez mes enfants,” she said, their education in a Jewish ethical tra- over, poking at it. “You didn’t win an
in Butler’s recounting. “You are threat- dition, which compelled them to speak argument,” one friend, the poet Clau-
ening my children.” in the face of injustice. dia Rankine, told them. “There was no
argument!”
As a gender theorist and critic of Zionism, Butler has aroused fury around the world. Butler agreed. “I just tried to go deeper
14 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 PHOTOGRAPH BY JESS T. DUGAN
into that place of enormous stuckness In recent weeks, Butler has been oc- cannot be fully predicted or controlled
and rage, fear, hatred, terror.” cupied not just by book promotion but in advance, and something about my
That place of stuckness, of envel- by handling the furor, from the left and openness is not, strictly speaking, under
oping dread, is the setting of their lat- the right, over their statements follow- my control,” they have said.
est book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” ing the Hamas attacks of October 7th. And Merleau-Ponty’s style—“so ad-
which was published in March. It is Right-wing media resurfaced an old re- jectival!” Butler marvelled. Their hands
unique in Butler’s corpus—not only mark of Butler’s to suggest that they made a quick movement, flowers burst-
because it is their least theoretical work have defended Hamas and Hezbollah. ing into bloom. “Subordinate clause
and their first written for a broad au- A pro-Palestinian student group raised upon subordinate clause.” Butler slid on
dience but because it is their first book concerns about an essay Butler pub- wire-rimmed sunglasses and began re-
that feels written primarily out of a lished in the London Review of Books, versing. “The problem is that he loses
sense of obligation. which chided those who used “the his- the verb, and he just keeps proliferating
“There was no pleasure in the writ- tory of Israeli violence in the region to and twisting. You just have to go with
ing,” Butler said to me. “It felt like a exonerate Hamas.” (Butler responded it, without any expectation that the verb
public service, and a necessary one be- with a clarification and an apology.) will take you somewhere. What’s left is
cause I had absorbed this violence.” Comments of Butler’s, from an event a kind of experience, a kind of ride—
A long-simmering book on Kafka outside Paris, in which they referred to all right, all right, I see you, go ahead, go
was put on hold while Butler became a Hamas’s attacks as “armed resistance” ahead.” Butler squinted into the rear-
student of gender again. “I was naïve,” were circulated as proof of endorsement. view mirror; another driver tried squeez-
they told the British magazine Dazed. (Those who circulated the snippet hur- ing past. “He’s willing to work several
“When I was burned in effigy in Bra- ried past the next part of what Butler metaphors in the same long sentence.”
zil in 2017, I could see people scream- had said: “I did not like that attack. . . . The driver leaned on his horn.
ing about gender, and they understood It was for me anguishing. It was terri- “My proprioceptive body” is how
‘gender’ to mean ‘paedophilia.’ And then ble.”) Butler postponed a set of public Butler refers to their car. “I’m surrounded
I heard people in France describing gen- lectures out of concern for their safety. by this clunky thing, and I feel pro-
der as a Jewish intellectual movement “They have been walking into storms tected,” they’d explained. “I expand. I
imported from the U.S.This book started for a long time,” the psychoanalytic have this carapace.” They laughed. “But
because I had to figure out what gen- writer Jacqueline Rose, an old friend it’s, um, prosthetic.”
der had become. . . . I had no idea that of Butler’s, told me. “The work has Butler and their partner, the politi-
it had become this flash point for right- been canonized through deep respect cal theorist Wendy Brown, live in a white
wing movements throughout the world.” and hatred.” house with blue trim, the Tudor-style
Write what you know, the saying façade webbed with climbing jasmine—
goes. Butler knows what it means to be utler is soft-spoken and gallant, the same house in which they raised
that flash point, or “phantasm,” as they
call it in “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,”
B often sheathed in a trim black blazer
or a leather jacket, but, given the slight-
their son, Isaac, now a musician living
nearby. House sitters are staying there
borrowing a term from psychoanalysis. est encouragement, they turn goofy and while Brown is at the Institute for Ad-
In the book, Butler traces the history sly, almost gratefully. When they were vanced Study, in Princeton, and Butler
of what they describe as a well-financed, twelve years old, they identified two travels between Berkeley and Paris. The
transnational “anti-gender ideology plausible professional paths: philoso- rooms are airy and uncluttered, adorned
movement.” The book took about two pher or clown. In ordinary life, Butler with textile hangings and other totems
years to write; it is dense with journal- incorporates both. of travel. Giraffe figurines stalk the man-
istic detail and shaped by a particular Butler apologized for the mess in tel. When I visited, a freshly unwrapped
credo. “I’m trying to respond to this rash their car, an old BMW, when we went U.K. edition of “Who’s Afraid of Gen-
of hatred, these distortions, and suggest for a drive one day—this amounted to der?” lay on the hall table.
some ways that we can produce a more a few books by the phenomenologist Stairs curve into a lofted study, where
compelling vision of the world that Maurice Merleau-Ponty, strewn around Butler works. The room has a wood-
would counter them,” Butler has said. the back seat. Butler’s marginalia in those stove and two desks, the smaller one,
“I tried to make the book calm, because books are in a precise, hunched hand. for administrative tasks, snowed over
I want people to stay with me.” Merleau-Ponty propounded the idea with paper. Bookshelves line the walls—
“Who’s Afraid of Gender?” was a that the body, not consciousness, is our one bearing only works published by
best-seller upon its release, although the primary instrument for understanding Butler’s former students. There is French
reception was characteristically contra- the world. To be in a body is not to be theory here, a low-slung shelf dedicated
dictory. Fans waxed nostalgic—Butler’s contained but to be exposed to the world; to copies of “Antigone” there, and
breakout book, “Gender Trouble,” has from our first breath, we are in need of Hegel—who has been the trellis around
acquired the sheen of an avant-garde care from other people. Merleau-Ponty which Butler’s work has twined.
cultural object. Old foes got in their is a deep influence; one can feel him Butler draws a great deal from He-
shots. Butler is so angry, one review said. tumbling around in the back seat of gel’s famous master-slave dialectic, pre-
Butler is irresponsibly moderate, an- much of Butler’s thinking. “I am open sented in a passage in “The Phenom-
other lamented. to a world that acts on me in ways that enology of Spirit.” The self finds itself
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 15
only in the eyes of another; the mas- After Hitler came to power, Butler’s up the field of possibility for gender
ter must be recognized by the slave to grandparents returned to the family vil- without dictating which kinds of pos-
fulfill his self-consciousness. Thus, the lage, bearing money and tickets for their sibilities ought to be realized.” Then,
two recognize one another fully at the family to flee. Full of fear and supersti- as if anticipating that this thought might
moment when they grasp their shared tion, most of the family refused, Butler be dismissed as so much jargon, they
ability to annihilate each other. Butler was told. Max’s footage of the villagers pressed the point: “One might wonder
writes, “It is at a moment of funda- survives—they dance together, for the what use ‘opening up possibilities’ fi-
mental vulnerability that recognition camera. A few years later, the news came nally is, but no one who has understood
becomes possible, and need becomes of the family’s obliteration. what it is to live in the social world as
self-conscious. What recognition does As Butler understands it now, from what is ‘impossible,’ illegible, unrealiz-
at such a moment is, to be sure, to hold a story passed along by their mother, able, unreal, and illegitimate is likely to
destruction in check. But what it also pose that question.” The sentence has
means is that the self is not its own, that a curious shape, advancing and with-
it is given over to the Other.” drawing a question, almost as if to cre-
“I recognized her,” Butler had said ate a space for a person who was and
of the woman in Paris. “Her fear had was not there.
been my own.” This wasn’t comfort or Harold was in his sixties when he
condemnation; it was simply inevitable. died. Butler heard from a relative that
In Butler’s reading of Hegel, the pro- Harold had been lucid all those years.
cess of recognition also involves a sur- He was close to his caregiver. “I’m told
render of self—whereupon the self that’s that he received a clean sweater, new
returned to you is never the one you Butler’s grandparents took their teen- pants every year, and a little package,”
started with. age son Harold to Vienna, for a consul- Butler recalled. His brother was said
tation with sexologists there. It was a to have paid him an annual visit, but
he surviving footage is grainy, but matter, Butler thinks, of some anoma- Harold otherwise seemed to have been
T the careful, cultivated glamour is
unmistakable. A young woman stands
lous sexual development. “They sub-
jected him to countless doctors,” they
cut off. “I felt it said something very
deep about the cruelty of this family
on a boat. The camera drifts from her said. “He had to drop his pants and in this history. A family that both suf-
face to her hip, down to her ankle, and allow his genitals to be examined, talked fered cruelty and inflicted it—not the
back up again, to her face and her evi- about, and analyzed.” It was too late, the same, but horrifying, nevertheless.”
dent delight. doctors said. He needed to have been As an adolescent, Butler was increas-
The woman is Butler’s aunt Alice; seen before puberty; there was nothing ingly oppressed by what they describe
the cameraman, Butler’s maternal grand- to be done now. as panicked “gender patrolling.” Their
father, Max. Butler’s grandparents had Back in Cleveland, Harold began father was a dentist; their mother worked
come from a Hungarian village and set- acting out, as if traumatically repeating in fair housing and helped run cam-
tled in Cleveland. Max owned silent- what he had endured. “Maybe he was paigns for Ohio Democrats. Butler
movie theatres. To pass as Americans, searching for a way to tell that story,” was the middle child. Their siblings
the family began emulating the actors Butler said. “Or to express his anger “monopolized the genders—he was
onscreen: “My grandfather became against my grandparents. This was so Mr. Man, and she was this petite dancer
Clark Gable. My grandmother became shameful for my grandmother, who who went to Juilliard. I was—I don’t
Helen Hayes. My mother . . . more Joan thought she was going to overcome know.” There were thunderous argu-
Crawford.” It was, Butler said, “assim- poverty and antisemitism by being ments. “I couldn’t wear a dress. It was
ilation mixed with an absolutely raging Helen Hayes, that she and Max had impossible.”
fear of antisemitism.” Harold shipped away to the Menninger When it emerged that Butler and two
Max filmed his wife, Helen, tanning Foundation, in Kansas.” of their cousins were gay, all three were
by a pool, the straps of her bathing suit One of Butler’s cousins grew up shamed. “I always felt solidarity with
pulled down over her shoulders. But- with a very different impression: Har- Harold,” they said. “We were the queer
ler’s father makes an appearance, teach- old was simply said to be mentally “not revenge. We’re not going to conform to
ing his children to swim. He slicks back right”—maybe he had autism? Butler everybody’s idea of what we should be.”
a child’s hair with pride. recalls being informed as a child that But, they added, “we suffered.”
“Maybe ‘Gender Trouble’ is actually Uncle Harold was a vegetable. What- School was a reprieve, although But-
a theory that emerges from my effort to ever the truth was, Harold ended up in ler was so disruptive in Hebrew school,
make sense of how my family embod- a home for people with developmental so often accused of clowning, that they
ied those Hollywood norms and how disabilities. “I was told that we couldn’t were assigned private tutorials with the
they also didn’t,” Butler said in a docu- visit him,” Butler said. “We couldn’t rabbi. Butler recalls telling him at their
mentary. “Maybe my conclusion was know him.” first meeting that they wanted to focus
that anyone who strives to embody them In “Gender Trouble,” Butler wrote on three questions: “Why was Spinoza
also perhaps fails in some ways that are that the book’s aim was not to prescribe excommunicated from the Jewish com-
more interesting than their successes.” any particular way of life but “to open munity? Could German idealism be
16 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
held accountable for Nazism? And how about climate change and political econ- customary dinner with department
was one to understand existential the- omy, about nonhuman lives that must members wasn’t going to happen. But-
ology, including the work of Martin also be considered grievable. “We joke ler returned to their motel and sat on
Buber?” Butler was fourteen. I’m closer to the animals,” Brown said. the bed, confused. A professor called
Jewish education gave Butler what “Judith is very human.” Every day, But- to apologize: the faculty had been
felt, initially, like an invitation into open ler swims in a nearby pool, and Brown taken aback by Butler’s appearance.
debate and a consideration of what in the bay, year-round. The next day, still stinging, Butler
counts as evidence, what makes an in- The two met in the late eighties. found their way to a women’s faculty
terpretation credible. In high school, Butler had been invited to give a talk meeting, and in walked Wendy Brown,
they travelled twice to Israel, as part of on Sartre at Williams College. It was a political philosopher at Williams, a
a program that was something of a pre- a difficult time. A few years earlier, But- little late.
decessor to Birthright. It was the early ler had completed a philosophy disser- “Williams, you can’t be totally bad,”
seventies; Butler had been witnessing tation at Yale on desire and recognition Butler recalled thinking. “She just came
the civil-rights movement and was dis- in Hegel, filtered through twentieth- in and said hello, and she was so lumi-
turbed by what they saw as the racial century French thought—Alexandre nous. She’s still luminous. She walks
stratifications within Israeli society. Kojève, Sartre, Lacan, Foucault. It be- in and it’s, like, there’s too much light
At home, a sense of isolation grew. came their first book, “Subjects of De- in the room.”
Butler was outed by the parents of a sire” (1987), and advanced a reading Butler, still in search of a tenure-
girlfriend. They began to scratch at of the “Phenomenology” as a journey track job, wrote a draft of “Gender
their arms uncontrollably. Dermatolo- with a singularly blundering and resil- Trouble: Feminism and the Subver-
gists proved to be of no use, and But- ient protagonist, forever failing in his sion of Identity” as a visiting fellow at
ler’s parents eventually sought help from quest for identity but constantly renew- the Institute for Advanced Study, as
the head of psychiatry at a local hos- ing himself—his tragic blindness turn- part of a program on gender run by
pital. He surprised Butler by asking if ing out to be “the comic myopia of Joan W. Scott, who became a lifelong
they were familiar with the concept of Mr. Magoo,” who crashes his car into friend. Though “Gender Trouble” was
the hair shirt, from the Bible—the don- a chicken coop but lands, as always, on written, Butler says, for a few hundred
ning of a scratchy garment to expiate all four wheels. Yet a secure teaching people at best, it has sold more than a
a sense of sin. position proved elusive. hundred thousand copies.
“He was reading the Bible as litera- “I was what we used to call a street One day, Brown was sitting in the
ture,” Butler recalled. “I didn’t know you dyke,” Butler said. “Nobody had taught audience at a conference at Rutgers, lis-
could do that. He was reading a symp- me about haircuts or shirts. I didn’t have tening to Butler speak on a panel, when
tom as a metaphor. He was telling me silk blouses. I had sweatshirts. But I’m she sensed from the atmosphere that
that my body was speaking in a symp- not thinking about how I look. I’m something had changed. “It was early
tom and saying something that I needed thinking about Sartre.” in the star system in academia, so prob-
to understand and could reflect on.” By Butler recalled giving a job talk ably 1992,” she said. “That whole busi-
the end of the conversation, Butler told at Williams, and learning that the ness of celebrity academics—we’re so
him, with wonder, “You’re not trying to
change my object of desire.” And he re-
sponded, “Well, frankly, given where
you come from, you are lucky to love
anyone at all. So let’s affirm your capac-
ity to love.”
Butler has remained a “creature of
psychoanalysis,” they said. “It’s where I
learned how to read. I was given per-
mission to live and to love, which is
what I do in my work. It was a wise
and generous gift, which allowed me
to move forward with my life.”
Conversations
that change
your world.
HOROSCOPES WRITTEN
BY MY MOTHER
BY BESS KALB
ing them into apartments, a useful trick to solving a Rubik’s Cube. rushed through the lobby, looking as
in a city that’s always starved for hous- Since 1997, Berman, through his firm, lonely as a ghost. The entrance was reno-
ing—and newly wary of the five-day-a- Metro Loft Management, has turned vated twenty years ago by the building’s
week office routine. In 2017, he converted eight Manhattan office towers into rental- original owners—the Rudin family, a
443 Greenwich Street, a former ware- apartment complexes, adding some five New York real-estate powerhouse—and
house and book bindery in Tribeca, built thousand units to the city’s housing stock. featured a revolving door, white marble
in 1883, into a luxury condo; among the His company has just signed a contract walls, harsh Kubrickian lighting, and a
celebrities who now own apartments for the largest conversion yet in the United long security credenza. Berman said that
there are Harry Styles and Jake Gyllen- States: Pfizer’s former headquarters, on he would put in a hinged door, lower the
haal. (The building was designed to be East Forty-second Street, will be refash- lighting, cover the walls with wood pan-
“paparazzi-proof,” so it features an under- ioned to house about fifteen hundred elling, add a fireplace and an inviting
ground parking area with a valet.) It’s apartments. Berman has no patience for couch or two, and install wide stairs that
22 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JOSH COCHRAN
flowed down to amenity rooms on the Berman has helped show desperate The result at 55 Broad was a dark
floor below. “Walking into the building office-tower owners a way out. Although curtain-wall tower with windows and
will seem like walking into a lounge that fewer people may want to work in Man- brown panels spaced between thick steel
people are hanging out in,” he told me. hattan, more than enough still want to pinstripes. Deep rectangular floors were
“And you just happen to be one of the live there. The over-all vacancy rate for set back every ten stories, creating a three-
people that lives here.” apartments in the city is now 1.4 per tiered wedding cake. Two renovations
cent—the tightest market in fifty years. followed over the decades, but the build-
mong white-collar workers, the The reasons that the city’s work and res- ing remained what it had always been:
A covid-19 pandemic led to a pro-
found shift: even when it became safe to
idential fortunes have not moved in step
are various. “There is only one New York,”
a dull stack of boxes.
Shortly after the Rudins built the
return to the office, many employees pre- Berman told me. “Culture, diversity, busi- tower, they attracted as its anchor tenant
ferred to work remotely. Nationwide, of- ness, technology, medicine, education— Goldman Sachs, which was then in a
fices are only about fifty per cent full. all in one small island.” New York re- period of wild ascent. Four years after
Since 2019, according to a recent aca- mains a place where many ambitious the building opened, a Times reporter
demic study, downtown street foot traf- young people go to start their careers, if dropped by Goldman and excitedly de-
fic has fallen by an average of twenty-six not to stay, and this demographic is ideal scribed an “assemblage of young men
per cent in America’s fifty-two biggest for the hotel-style conversions for which with longish haircuts and bright colored
cities. Urban theorists describe a phe- office towers are most suitable. More- shirts” on a trading floor that “rips with
nomenon called the “doom loop”: once over, Berman said, “young people are so- action.” Goldman was so successful that
workers stop filling up downtown of- cial—they don’t want to sit in the mid- it eventually built its own building, two
fices, the stores and restaurants that serve dle of a forest on a Zoom call.” blocks south, leaving 55 Broad half empty.
them close, which in turn makes the area Converting offices into apartments In 1985, Drexel Burnham Lambert, the
even emptier. And who wants to work won’t be a panacea for New York’s real- firm that pioneered the junk bond, moved
somewhere with no services? In St. Louis, estate titans: there is simply too much in. Within five years, it had fallen under
whole swaths of the downtown business square footage that is going unused, and indictment and gone bankrupt, forcing
district are vacant. Not long ago, the this will be a problem as long as com- the Rudins to scramble again. The fam-
A.T. & T. Tower, one of the city’s mar- panies continue switching to smaller ily spent millions to make 55 Broad into
quee properties, which was sold for two premises. Berman told me, “If we ulti- a state-of-the-art tech hub, borrowing
hundred and five million dollars in 2006, mately absorb twenty per cent of the of- strategies from “Being Digital,” by the
was off-loaded for $3.6 million. fice space, that would be optimistic.” But, nineties tech guru Nicholas Negroponte.
In New York, the rebound has been he added, conversions will energize neigh- Broadband was installed on every floor,
stronger. On Wall Street, where numer- borhoods that otherwise would be among and for a time the mid-century struc-
ous executives have expressed sharp im- the worst hit, like the financial district. ture was “one of the most wired in the
patience with remote work—David Sol- There, Berman foresees apartments re- world,” according to Forbes. This incar-
omon, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs, placing half the empty offices. nation lasted until the dot-com bust of
has called it an “aberration” that undercuts 2000, when many of 55 Broad’s tenants
the company’s “collaborative apprentice- he tower at 55 Broad Street has spent went under or moved out. In the next
ship culture”—foot traffic has returned
to eighty per cent of its pre-pandemic
T most of its existence as an unlov-
able building in an unlivable neighbor-
decade, terabytes replaced gigabytes, and
the number of servers that a cutting-edge
level. But on Mondays and Fridays many hood. In the Art Deco era, the architec- tech firm needed could have taken up
Manhattan towers become as sparsely tural firm founded by Emery Roth was an entire warehouse. In 2014, plans were
populated as an Edward Hopper paint- an innovator—it designed the San Remo leaked for a proposed fifty-three-story
ing. Some company accountants have and the Beresford apartment buildings, replacement at 55 Broad, but it was never
started to see the rental of large office on Central Park West—but by the late built. A lot of time and money is required
spaces—which in New York can cost nineteen-sixties it was known for maxi- to safely dismantle a thirty-story tower
more than three hundred dollars per mizing rentable office space above all else. on a narrow, busy street.
square foot—as a colossal waste. In lower At 55 Broad, which is right around the Six years later, the pandemic hollowed
Manhattan, major renters such as Spot- corner from the Stock Exchange, two ad- out the city, particularly the business dis-
ify and Meta have begun shrinking their joining ten-story structures came down tricts. By July, 2023, the Rudins had con-
footprints, vacating entire floors that to make way for a much taller new build- cluded that 55 Broad—then only sixty
once bustled with employees. For the ing. It was a time of rapid growth on per cent rented—had no future as an of-
past three years, about twenty-two per Wall Street—between 1958 and 1973, the fice tower. They sold most of their in-
cent of office space in New York has gone amount of office space downtown dou- terest in the building to Berman, keep-
unrented—that’s a hundred million va- bled. The design ethos was “do your own ing a small part so they could observe
cant square feet, the equivalent of nearly thing.” “This is not the Renaissance, or how he handled conversions. (Silverstein
thirty-five Empire State Buildings. For an age of uniform standards of beautiful Properties, which rebuilt the World Trade
the owners of half-empty towers, it’s be- buildings,” a member of the City Plan- Center, also became a partner in the proj-
come increasingly apparent that a new ning Commission explained to the Times ect.) The decision to convert to residen-
financial strategy is needed. in 1973. “No one agrees on anything.” tial was a hard one for the Rudins. “We
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 23
don’t like selling our buildings,” Bill along the ceiling were coated with intu- narrow, smaller floors that divided eas-
Rudin, one of the chairs of the family’s mescent paint, a fire-resistant covering ily into apartments, and because they
company, told me. “That’s kind of a man- that looks like bubbling-hot marshmal- were built before air-conditioning they
tra for us.”The opportunity to learn from low. When I stood at the center of the often had courtyards or ventilation shafts.
Berman was a big factor: “We wanted building, the windows were so far away You therefore didn’t have to create odd
to see the maestro, like a front-row seat that they looked almost like portholes. layouts to give bedrooms some sun. (Nat-
to see Leonard Bernstein.” Berman gave me a detailed tour of ural light tends to peter out about thirty
The sale price for 55 Broad was $172.5 the thirteenth floor. In his business, a feet into a building’s interior.) Prewar
million. The construction loan was set crucial metric for turning a profit is the buildings were also full of setbacks, which
at two hundred and twenty million dol- time lag between borrowing construc- could become private terraces, and they
lars. The total cost of the project—nearly tion money and renting out units. So he had oak-panelled elevators that felt
four hundred million dollars—was con- works fast. Just four months had passed homey. I had recently visited the first
siderable, but replacing the office tower since Berman, Silverstein, and Rudin such building to undergo a major office-
with a new building, Berman told me, had closed their deal, but the thirteenth to-residence conversion in the financial
would have cost “well over six hundred floor already felt like part of a new apart- district, 55 Liberty Street, which long
million.” (Upgrading it in the hope of ment complex. Workers were measur- served as the headquarters of Sinclair
attracting new office tenants, according ing, drilling, staple-gunning. Metal track Oil Corporation. An architect named
to Berman, would have cost roughly had been laid down where new walls Joseph Pell Lombardi had converted the
eighty million dollars.) And, because of would go, and a few drywall panels had building in 1980. I checked out the apart-
zoning reforms, no new building would already been installed—they were cov- ment of one of the first purchasers, on
be allowed to overwhelm a Manhattan ered in a playful-looking purple glaze, the twenty-third floor. The view was
street the way the hulking towers of the to make them resistant to mold. “It’s a magnificent in three directions, the vista
postwar period did. A developer who little bit more expensive,” Berman said. broken only by the gargoyles that the
constructed a tower the same height as “But we don’t want any issues down the original architect, Henry Ives Cobb, had
55 Broad would likely have to sacrifice road.” On one piece of drywall, “Apt. 10” mounted on the Gothic Revival façade.
twenty per cent of the rentable space. was scratched in pen. There was even a Looking down from one window, I saw
Early in the conversion process, Ber- handsome tub in a bathroom without the august Federal Reserve Bank, with
man’s construction team removed the walls, like a guest who’d arrived too early its vaults full of gold bars. The view
fluorescent-tube lighting and the dropped for a party. matched the fantasy we all have of liv-
PVC ceilings. Then workers knocked Renters are now used to the layouts ing in New York. As the architect Rob-
down the drywall that had once delin- of chain hotels, where there’s one win- ert A. M. Stern told the Times in 1996,
eated corner offices, windowless offices, dow by the bed, so Berman’s bathrooms “Who doesn’t want to live in a sky-
rest rooms, mop closets. “We do a very and kitchens didn’t need to be sunny, and scraper? Everybody in movies lives in
thorough gut renovation,” Berman told the kitchens could have a minimal foot- apartments on the top of Manhattan.”
me. “We literally take everything out.” print. “Our demographic doesn’t cook,” But few towers like 55 Liberty remain
At 55 Broad, the result was nearly four he said. He referred to the other rooms available for conversion in the financial
hundred thousand square feet of raw without windows as “home offices.” Now district. What are left are postwar struc-
space, with a potential to generate more that working from home was common, tures—many with deep, dark interiors,
than thirty million dollars in rental in- I observed, such spaces were likely to get low ceilings, and scant visual appeal.
come annually. But Berman still had a a lot of use. He smiled, then said that Berman did what he could to add com-
major puzzle to solve: If no one wanted many would wind up as bedrooms. This fort to such buildings while holding on
to work in a glum, out-of-date building, is technically forbidden, because in New to his wallet. He could repurpose extra
why would anyone want to live there? York City every bedroom must have a elevator shafts as garbage chutes, for
window that can be opened, but it’s a example. In one building, he turned
n the lobby at 55 Broad, Berman widespread practice nonetheless. Berman elevator-shaft spaces into foyers for a
Iingpressed the Up button. “This build-
is way over-elevatored,” he said. Soon,
laid out a rental scenario: “Imagine two
or three Goldman Sachs associates who
line of apartments.
The double-height mechanical floor
five elevators would be torn out. Apart- came to New York just after college and of 55 Broad, which once contained giant
ment buildings, he explained, generally want a little bit more spending money.” heating and cooling systems, would be
need fewer than half the elevators that (In real-estate ads, a one-bedroom with turned into two floors of apartments.
office buildings do. “Residents don’t mind a windowless office is often called a “con- Residents would be provided with com-
waiting twenty seconds more for the el- vertible two-bedroom.”) pact HVAC units under certain windows,
evator,” he said. Berman told me that he could repur- as in a motel. These units required much
A visit to the sixth floor offered a pose any office building to residential if less space than the old systems, and were
bleak sight—it was an empty, dark space the sale price was right. But he acknowl- far more energy-efficient. Berman noted
half the size of a football field, inter- edged that 55 Broad posed special chal- that 55 Broad would be the first all-
rupted only by steel support beams and lenges. Until the mid-twenty-tens, office- electric, emission-free apartment build-
rusted copper waste pipes. The floor was tower conversions in Manhattan mostly ing in Manhattan. This was not only
unsealed concrete, and transverse beams involved prewar buildings. These had environmentally beneficial; it also saved
24 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
him the cost of inserting thousands of
feet of piping into concrete floors. It was
but one example of how Berman’s mon-
etary interest and the common good
conveniently aligned. We looked out a
window at an adjacent nondescript of-
fice building, and he saw prey. “That’s
going to be that way for maybe three to
five more years,” he predicted. “That
building will be converted, too.”
Adaptive reuse is a form of recycling,
a point that Berman often makes. Ac-
cording to a recent paper by the National
Bureau of Economic Research, convert-
ing an out-of-date office building into
an apartment complex can increase its
energy efficiency by as much as eighty
per cent. (In a residential building, not
everyone blasts the air-conditioning 24/7.)
According to a report by the Arup Group,
an engineering firm, converting a Man- “Let me read to you from a recently fictionalized version of the procedure...”
hattan office tower releases, on average,
less than half the carbon that building
one from scratch does.
• •
As expensive as these projects may
seem, the cheaper cost of repurposing an less attention to these things,” he said. top of the building—he gained four floors
old building can allow rental prices to New York renters don’t have much and a roof with a pool. “If I couldn’t have
be set lower than they would be in a new choice, anyway. “We’ve never had this done that, I wouldn’t have had cost-
one. Berman estimated the minimum kind of imbalance between demand efficient units,” he said.
monthly rent for a studio apartment in and supply before,” Berman said, with
a new lower-Manhattan building at well the pleasure of a person who likes his he architects for 55 Broad are John
over four thousand dollars, whereas a odds. The vacancy rate in the five or T Cetra and his spouse and profes-
comparable apartment in 55 Broad will so buildings that he currently owns is sional partner, Nancy J. Ruddy. They are
go for about thirty-five hundred. Al- about one and a half per cent. He es- well respected in the industry, but they
though this is a considerable sum for one timated that all the units at 55 Broad are not starchitects, a type that Berman
person, it’s not especially expensive by would be rented within six months of has no time for. “A young-professional
Manhattan standards, and, as Berman going on the market. renter isn’t going to pay me more money
acknowledged, many of his units will end A few of Berman’s redevelopment because my building was designed by Nor-
up being shared. schemes have been more architecturally man Foster,” he told me. One day, Cetra
He stressed to me that he is not adventurous. In 2017, he worked with and Ruddy met me at 55 Broad. Cetra de-
particularly interested in what goes on Avinash Malhotra to convert 180 Water scribed the back-and-forth that he and
inside the apartments, or in what the Street, also in the financial district. The Berman have on their projects. (55 Broad
tenant experience is like. “A renter is not building, like 55 Broad, was a thick rect- is their sixth.) Berman sketches out a plan
a condominium owner,” he told me sev- angular slab designed by Emery Roth & first, then passes it to Cetra. “He wants
eral times. He isn’t trying to re-create Sons, and had interior spaces more than to make it more efficient,” Cetra said. “I
443 Greenwich Street, his celebrity- seventy feet long. Berman could have want to make it a little better. ‘Nathan,
friendly condo development, with its rented out these extra-long apartments let’s give this foyer a bit more room.’ ”
wine cellar and tiled hammam. “Our pro- as they were, but instead he decided to Whereas Berman focusses on the ar-
file is a young person,” he said. “Maybe remove the core of the building, where chitect Cass Gilbert’s definition of the
twenty-four, twenty-five, who stays one mechanical equipment was taking up skyscraper as a “machine that makes the
or two years, maybe three. They’re not space, thereby creating a courtyard and land pay,” Cetra and Ruddy emphasize
committing.” His clients are in the city- cutting the apartment layouts down to pleasure. Cetra showed me his floor plan
hopping phase of life: “ ‘O.K., next year, normal length. Though such a restruc- for 55 Broad: apartments curled around
the year is up and I’m going because I turing had never been tried before, he apartments like frolicsome seals. He ex-
need to be in Boston, or I need to be in took the risk, at a cost of several million plained that he and Ruddy always sought
Chicago, or I’m going to San Francisco.’” dollars. The result gave tenants more the “wow factor,” adding, “Ideally, in as
Berman had considered improving light, he said, but that was incidental. many apartments as you can, when you
55 Broad’s dated façade, but decided that New York City law permitted him to open the door you see light and you walk
it was money poorly spent. “Renters pay add the removed square footage to the toward light.” Shiny wood floors would
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 25
have heightened this effect, but, Cetra space. It wasn’t square, it wasn’t a rect- they had designed, once disappeared en-
noted a bit sheepishly, the floors at 55 angle, it had all kinds of bizarre edges tirely. “It turned out it was a construc-
Broad would be covered in something and weird corners.”) tion worker who had grown up without
called “vinyl plank flooring.” Wood scuffs One feature would be standard at 55 books,” Ruddy said. “So I replaced them.”
too easily in a building where people are Broad: a washer and dryer. “People do “They’re good books,” Cetra added.
constantly moving in and out, and, Cetra their laundry in their pajamas or their We went to 55 Broad’s roof, where
said, vinyl flooring was getting better. underwear while they’re watching tele- we stood in front of a long, empty con-
“They’re able to create patterns that don’t vision,” Ruddy explained. In the base- crete pit. Ruddy pulled out an iPad to
repeat,” he said. ment, public space that might otherwise show me a rendering of a future pool:
Ruddy said that it was fun to fit be devoted to a large communal laundry eleven by forty-five feet, set off by a
apartment layouts into the constraints room would be aimed at helping tenants dozen deck chairs facing east and a taste-
set by an office tower’s shape—each meet one another. Small apartments make ful border of shrubs to increase, as Ruddy
unit had “the intricacy of a watch.” people want amenities, and amenities said, “connectivity with nature.” There
She recounted a notable success for make people accept small apartments. was what looked to me like a pool house
which they’d won an award. In 2014, The new generation expects post-college but turned out to be “an indoor-out-
while converting the former Flatotel, life to resemble college. “We’re in an door working space.”
on Fifty-second Street, into condos, amenities war,” Ruddy said. All the build- The 55 Broad tower is four hundred
they had reconfigured an old loading ings converted in the financial district feet tall, but in the financial district that
dock—a concrete area where trucks are full of co-working spaces, gyms, and makes it midsize. I pointed out that rem-
parked and dumpsters were stored— plush couches. nant workers in the neighboring towers
into a new mid-block entrance. “We cre- One of Cetra and Ruddy’s signature could easily peek out their office win-
ated this sort of magical lobby out of it,” moves, they told me, is to adorn a pub- dows and observe whatever action was
Ruddy said. “I don’t think anyone had lic space with a modular shelving unit ripping on 55 Broad’s rooftop. Cetra said,
ever converted a loading dock before.” that contains small sculptures and ce- “That’s part of the fun!”
Cetra jabbed at his floor plan for 55 ramics that “feel like they could have
Broad to amplify the point: “If this were been picked up on a trip overseas.” The n the late seventies, my father and
a new building, every one-bedroom would
be exactly the same. But look here. This
architects also include a pile of art books—
“Jazzlife,” “Helmut Newton: Work,” a
Iseparated.
mother, an Upper West Side couple,
My father, a corporate lawyer,
is a one-bedroom, that’s a studio, that’s book of Ai Weiwei’s installations. I ob- had long worked at 77 Water Street, a
a one-bedroom studio, and every one has jected that these seemed like the sorts of steel-and-glass-curtain edifice, designed
different proportions.” (A resident of 20 books people never actually read, but they by Emery Roth, that still functions as an
Broad Street, an earlier project that Cetra disagreed. Tenants did pull them down. office building. A few years later, he
and Ruddy developed with Berman, com- In fact, Cetra and Ruddy told me, the moved into a nearby one-bedroom apart-
plained to Bloomberg News last year books at AVA DoBro, a new apartment ment, in one of the first converted office
about her studio: “It was a very awkward building in downtown Brooklyn that towers. It was a prewar building, and the
impressive lobby made you feel as though
you were heading for an appointment
with Mr. Morgan. For my father, the
short walk to work, after a professional
lifetime of taking the 2 or 3 train up and
down Manhattan’s spine, was a pleasure.
The apartment had a kitchen he didn’t
use, and it was on a high floor. On the
nights I stayed with him, we would look
out at neighboring towers’ brightly illu-
minated interiors, the cleaners slowly ad-
vancing through each floor, emptying the
wastebaskets. He told me that he liked
the feeling of being a lumberjack going
to sleep in the middle of his forest.
Back then, there were no restaurants
or stores open after business hours, not
even a Blimpie. Joseph Pell Lombardi’s
son, Michael, who grew up at 55 Liberty
Street—the building next to the Federal
Reserve—also remembers the streets
being empty at night, with guards mov-
ing pallets of gold bars. “It all seemed
“For the last time—because it’s relaxing and romantic!” incredibly casual,” Michael remembered.
“There was no one around, only me, a ings built before certain years—1977 or a vacuum cleaner, or buy something
kid, imagining how easy it would be just below Murray Street, and 1961 for the you’d run out of: tampons, Tide Pods,
to take one of them.” rest of Manhattan—because they can Doritos. It was a clever way to both jus-
Census figures from 1970 show that be converted without special variances. tify small closets—“Nathan believes in
just eight hundred and thirty-three peo- (Conversions have long been restricted very compact closets,” Ruddy told me—
ple lived south of Chambers Street. By in Manhattan because sudden popu- and monetize how people live now.
the time I began visiting my father’s place, lation surges in residential neighbor- “These people want to snack at night,”
there were more—but not many. “The hoods can crowd schools and over- Berman said.
jury is still out,” Henry Robbins, an ex- whelm public transport.) “Life is short,” Afterward, I walked out into the early
pert on real-estate trends, told the Times he told me. “I don’t want to wait two FiDi night. I turned onto Exchange Place,
in 1996, in an article about living in the or three years for rezoning.” A current where I passed crowds of tourists taking
financial district. “The area dies at night. zoning-change proposal, which Mayor pictures of Kristen Visbal’s “Fearless Girl”
It needs a neighborhood, a community.” Eric Adams supports, would allow any statue. Various restaurants were filling
Thanks in part to Berman, the finan- building in New York built before 1990 up, from beer halls like Trinity Place to
cial district now has enough population to be converted. It would add to the steak houses like the recently renovated
density to feel like a proper New York pool of potential apartments nearly as Delmonico’s. Stone Street was now a
neighborhood. His office at 40 Wall Street much office space as there is in all of sort of food court, and I could have picked
is on the seventeenth floor, and he can Philadelphia. Berman hopes that the up groceries at a Whole Foods just north
see five of his converted towers out the zoning change will become law by the of Exchange Place. (My father would
window. Within just a few blocks of 55 end of the year. have had to go to the Village to get gro-
Broad, he has turned 20 Exchange Place, After we left 55 Broad, Berman took ceries, if he’d wanted any.) The street life
63 Wall Street, 67 Wall Street, 180 Water me on a tour of two of his other prop- died out at Chambers Street, where gov-
Street, and 20 Broad Street into apartment erties. We started down the street, at 20 ernment offices stood dark and empty.
buildings. He is currently working on 25 Broad, once a part of the Stock Exchange. It was as if the original Dutch settle-
Water Street, the former headquarters of We briefly visited an apartment, but the ment had been re-created, back when
J. P. Morgan, which, after the Pfizer build- showpiece was the sub-lobby level. There Wall Street had a wall.
ing, will be the second-largest conversion was a commercial-size gym replete with In a 2022 Glassdoor post, a user called
to date in the United States, with Cetra punching bags, elliptical trainers, free- McKinsey Consultant asked, “Should I
and Ruddy helping him design thirteen weight racks, and rows of treadmills. An- live in FiDi?” The responses included a
hundred units. Crain’s New York Business other room held pool tables, and a third lot of cheering for the rooftop pools and
has called Berman “the king of FiDi.” was a library graced with one of Cetra the great views. But a user called IBM1
He enjoys his stature as a local po- and Ruddy’s modular shelving units. No- advised living somewhere else. “It’s such
tentate. He began his conversion busi- body seemed older than thirty-five. Down a soulless neighborhood,” IBM1 wrote.
ness in the late nineties, after receiving the hall was a vault with heavy iron bars “Don’t be swayed by the ultra luxe build-
an eighty-thousand-dollar loan from his where bonds had once been stored. Rather ings.” It’s true that FiDi remains on the
father-in-law. For a time, Berman was an than pull the huge structure out, Cetra sterile side. It could use some parks, and its
outlier as a developer, focussing on a mar- and Ruddy had set up a co-working space inhabitants seem either new to the island
ket that others found too small or insuffi- in it. (“Tenants sometimes play poker or temporary. All those amenities in the
ciently profitable. Now he is turning away there now.”) As we left, Berman took buildings keep people within their con-
projects. David Marks, the executive at the massive door and swung it on its fines; if you have a Tulu dispensing ma-
Silverstein Properties who is developing massive hinges, eager to show me that chine in your basement, who needs to drop
55 Broad Street with Berman, said, “For it still worked. by a local hardware store or a pharmacy?
many years—and I’m quoting Nathan— We walked down Beaver and Pearl All the same, more than thirty thou-
he was the quirky monster that no one Streets to 180 Water Street, the building sand people now live in FiDi—and at
really understood, and now he’s the pret- from which Berman had removed the core. least some of them have begun to see it
tiest girl on the dance floor and everyone At the entrance, he said, “I will challenge as a permanent home. Berman told me
wants a dance with him.” Berman can you to show me any elements in this in- that, whereas more than half of his rent-
decide almost instantly—just by know- terior where you can point out and say, ers used to be apartment sharers, he ex-
ing the age and the location of a building ‘Gee, that’s really from the office period.’” pected the percentage at 55 Broad Street
and by glancing at Google Earth—if the I couldn’t. He boasted that he’d never lost to be closer to fifteen. This suggested to
place is ripe for conversion. “If the price that bet. In the elevator, we met a young him that families were moving in. He
per pound is right, I say, ‘Let’s go,’” he said. resident. She had a dog and said that she added that he recently ripped out a Ping-
Berman, who was born in Ukraine had been in the building for more than Pong room at 180 Water and turned it
and came to New York at the age of five years. Berman seemed disappointed. into a children’s play space. “We have
fourteen, is the child of a Holocaust sur- On the twelfth floor, near another sixty children in the building!” he said,
vivor, and the niche he occupies in the modular shelving unit, there was a bright- amazed. One was his grandson. His son,
city’s real-estate ecology makes sense for white machine labelled “Tulu: Your Smart who is the No. 2 at the firm, and his
an immigrant with a mistrust of gov- Rental Store.” Using your phone, you daughter-in-law moved in five years ago.
ernment. He focusses only on build- could rent household items like a toaster “They never left,” Berman said.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 27
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
ON NATIVE GROUNDS
Deb Haaland faces the cruel history of the agency she now leads.
BY CASEY CEP
W
hen they would not let their fully realized the error of their evil ways race should be dead. Kill the Indian in
children be taken, they were and evinced in an unmistakable man- him, and save the man.”
taken instead. A hundred ner their determination to cease inter- The boarding-school system affected
and thirty years ago, nineteen men from ference with the plans of the govern- virtually every Indian family in the coun-
the Third Mesa of the Hopi Reserva- ment for the civilization and education try, including that of Deb Haaland, the
tion, in Arizona, were arrested for refus- of its Indian wards.” fifty-fourth Secretary of the Interior and
ing to surrender their sons and daugh- The Hopi were not alone. After an- the first Native American to serve as a
ters to soldiers who came for them armed nihilation and dispossession failed, the Cabinet secretary. Haaland’s grand-
with Hotchkiss guns. For years, the effort to “Americanize” Indians through mother Helen was eight years old when
United States had been trying to make the federal boarding-school system tar- a priest from Mission San José de La-
the Hopi send their children to federal geted every tribe in the country—a vast guna, in New Mexico, gathered children
boarding schools—the children some- family-separation policy that deliber- in the village of Mesita, some fifty miles
times as young as four, the schools some- ately deracinated generations of chil- west of Albuquerque, and put them on
times a thousand miles away. The intent dren. As one Indian school superinten- a train to Santa Fe, more than a hun-
and the effect of those boarding schools dent wrote in a report, “Only by complete dred miles away. In the five years that
was forced assimilation: once there, stu- isolation of the Indian child from his Helen spent at St. Catherine’s Indus-
dents were stripped of their Native names, savage antecedents can he be satisfacto- trial Indian School, a family member
clothing, and language and made to adopt rily educated.” From 1819 to 1969, the was able to visit her only twice—her fa-
Christian names, learn English, and aban- United States took hundreds of thou- ther, who worked as both a farmer and
don their traditional religion and culture. sands of children away from their par- a tribal policeman, left his fields and
Hopi parents had tried placating the ents, sending them to four hundred and flocks, loaded up his horse and wagon,
authorities, saying they would enroll eight schools across thirty-seven states. then rode for three days each way to
their children soon, then hiding them By 1926, more than eighty per cent of check on his young daughter.
whenever the soldiers returned. Indian school-age Indian children had been re- Haaland grew up hearing about St.
agents, meanwhile, had tried withhold- moved from their families. Catherine’s not only from her grand-
ing food and water from Hopi families The schools where those children mother but also from her mother, who
to force their compliance; when that studied were marked, from their found- was sent there as well. Each generation
failed, they turned to physical force in- ing, by reports of disease, physical abuse, had stories of hardship and separation.
stead, sending soldiers onto tribal lands sexual violence, and financial exploita- Now Haaland has made listening to
to round up all the school-age children. tion, as students were forced to work for similar stories a central part of her job.
But some parents continued to resist, neighboring farmers, homesteaders, and In the summer of 2021, just months after
and, in the fall of 1894, the U.S. Army businesses. At least five hundred chil- being sworn in as Secretary of the In-
made the arrests. The nineteen men, dren died while attending the schools, terior, she launched the Federal Indian
who were from Orayvi, one of the old- and at least fifty-three of the schools Boarding School Initiative to investi-
est continuously inhabited settlements have burial sites, filled with the bodies gate the schools—at the time, there was
in North America, were marched, with of children who were never returned to not so much as a comprehensive list of
their hands bound, a hundred and fifty their families. An extensive network of them, let alone a full roster of students—
miles to Fort Wingate, in New Mex- religious institutions also participated and to consult with tribes about how to
ico, then transported by horse, train, and in these travesties: the Catholic Church make amends for the harm that the
ferry to California, where they were im- operated more than a hundred Indian schools caused. After releasing an ini-
prisoned for nearly a year on Alcatraz boarding schools; dozens of others were tial report, in 2022, Haaland decided
Island. In a letter to the Secretary of run by the Society of Friends, the Pres- that archival research and internal in-
the Interior, the Commissioner of In- byterian Church, the United Methodist vestigations were not enough, and began
dian Affairs recommended holding Church, the Unitarian Church, and the convening listening sessions in Native
“those Indian prisoners in confinement Episcopal Church. The founder of the communities around the country so that
at hard labor until such time as in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in survivors and descendants could share
opinion of the said military authorities Pennsylvania, one of the earliest federal testimony. Each session opened with
who might be in charge of them, they institutions, told a conference of social Haaland acknowledging a bitter irony:
should show beyond a doubt, that they reformers, “All the Indian there is in the “My ancestors endured the horrors of
28 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
“When I think about why I am really here,” Haaland says, “it’s like I’m here because the ancestors felt it was necessary.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY THE TYLER TWINS THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 29
stone mesas of the North San Mateo
Mountains, at the tail end of the Colo-
rado Plateau. “You know, when I think
about why I am really here,” she told me
recently, “it’s like I’m here because the
ancestors felt it was necessary. I can’t ex-
plain it any other way.”
“Here” means, among other things,
her office, where we are sitting and talking
one rainy winter afternoon. The office is
enormous: an oak mansion inside the
main Interior building, Federal Public
Works Project No. 4, a seven-story lime-
stone behemoth constructed in 1936. It
takes up two city blocks just a few hun-
dred feet from the White House, its pro-
digiousness and proximity the result of
the politicking and savvy of Harold Ickes,
the head of Interior under Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Ickes not only got himself the
largest office of any Cabinet secretary
but also got the building more than three
dozen New Deal-era murals, the first
radio studio in any government agency,
an entire museum on the first floor, and
air-conditioning. He even finagled an
“Rob, this is not the time to show off your chin-ups.” address to honor his department’s found-
ing: 1849 C Street.
Haaland, affable and unassuming, still
• • seems surprised to find herself occupy-
ing the office that Ickes built. But, in
the Indian boarding-school assimila- try’s relations with its first peoples, al- ways both obvious and subtle, she has
tion policies carried out by the same de- most no federal entity has been more made it her own. Paintings, photographs,
partment that I now lead.” culpable than Interior. Just fifteen years sculptures, and handicrafts that Haaland
Most Americans, if they think about before Haaland’s nomination, a federal chose from the collections of the Bureau
the Department of the Interior at all, judge, who had been appointed by Ron- of Indian Affairs and the Interior Mu-
likely think first of its natural-resource ald Reagan, called the department “the seum fill the otherwise austere room like
agencies: the National Park Service, the morally and culturally oblivious hand- sunlight. “Pretty much every artist in
Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. me-down of a disgracefully racist and here is Native American,” she said. After
Fish and Wildlife Service. But, to Haa- imperialist government that should have brewing tea in the sticker-covered travel
land and the nearly four million other been buried a century ago,” denouncing mug she takes everywhere, and making
Native Americans in this country, it is it as “the last pathetic outpost of the in- sure for the second time that I didn’t
best known for the Bureau of Indian Ed- difference and anglocentrism we thought want any myself, she settled us into a sit-
ucation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, we had left behind.” In taking over the ting area near the fireplace and began
and the Bureau of Trust Funds Admin- department, Haaland, like all her prede- telling me about her family.
istration, which handles the billions of cessors, was tasked with overseeing one Haaland’s maternal grandparents,
dollars the federal government holds in of the most diverse and unruly agencies Helen and Antonio Toya, were from
trust for tribes, a financial arrangement in the federal government, so sprawling nearby pueblos but met at St. Cather-
dating back to some of the earliest ne- that it is sometimes called the Depart- ine’s Industrial Indian School. They were
gotiations of the Committee on Indian ment of Everything Else. She has also married in 1924 and moved into a rail-
Affairs, led by Benjamin Franklin during embraced a possibly impossible chal- road boxcar in Winslow, Arizona, where
the Continental Congress. In 1849, when lenge: not only running the Department the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Rail-
Interior was founded, it took over man- of the Interior but redeeming it. road was offering Laguna Indians em-
agement of those treaty and trust obli- ployment in exchange for the miles of
gations, and it still manages the na- y her own count, Haaland is a thirty- track it had laid on their land. Antonio
tion-to-nation relationships between the
United States and its five hundred and
B fifth generation New Mexican. Her
Laguna ancestors came south into the
went to work as a boxcar painter and
then as a mechanic, and Helen became
seventy-four federally recognized tribes. Rio Grande Valley in the late thirteenth part of a female crew that cleaned die-
In the long, tragic saga of this coun- century, settling along the shale and sand- sel engines during the Second World
30 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
War. Like many Laguna, the family with water they heated on the stove doing this for the rest of my life?’” Hours
briefly left their boxcar for a home that after carrying buckets from the only later, on her lunch break, she called her
was previously occupied by Japanese rail- well in the village, and they sometimes older sister Denise, crying, to ask for help
road workers who were sent away to in- slept together on the floor. Before bed- filling out a college application.
ternment camps, some of which were time, their mother would do last call for
established on reservations. the outhouse. Once they were ready for ore than sixty thousand people
The Toyas had four children. Their
youngest daughter, Mary, Haaland’s
bed, their grandmother would turn out
the only light in the house.
M work for Interior, nearly nine-
teen thousand of them in the National
mother, was a tomboy who kept score When Haaland was fourteen, her Park Service alone. The agency manages
for the Winslow Redskins, a baseball family moved to Albuquerque, where more than twenty per cent of this nation’s
team her father started. (He kept the her mother went to work as a secretary land—all told, more than half a billion
team going for long enough that Haa- for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the acres, plus two and a half billion that are
land remembers fetching foul balls for a children graduated one by one from submerged beneath the oceans on the
nickel apiece as a kid.) After finishing Highland High School. Haaland had outer continental shelves. Sally Jewell, the
high school, in 1954, Mary spent two been academically gifted, but upon fin- Interior Secretary during Barack Obama’s
years at Arizona State College, before ishing school, in 1978, she’d barely given second term, told me that running the
following her older brothers into the mil- a thought to what to do next. She went department was “like studying for a final
itary, enlisting in the U.S. Naval Reserve. to work full time at a local bakery where every night.” Some of the pressures are
While stationed at Treasure Island, in she’d been picking up shifts, for less than external. “There were thirty-five hundred
San Francisco Bay, she met John David two dollars an hour. Most accounts of lawsuits with my name on them,” Jewell
Haaland, the grandson of Norwegian Haaland’s life leave out the sometimes said. But many are internal. The agency
immigrants, who grew up on a farm in difficult, self-destructive years that fol- has eleven bureaus, which have widely
the Upper Midwest.To an outsider, what’s lowed. She tried the patience of the cou- different and sometimes dissonant man-
striking is the chasm between the cou- ple who owned the bakery by showing dates, leading to what Jewell called “mas-
ple’s two cultures, but Haaland finds her up late or not at all; she moved to Los sive conflicts within your own agency.”
way to the bridge: “He was from Min- Angeles, then abruptly returned; she de- By way of example, she cited a clash over
nesota and she was from Winslow—just veloped a drinking problem that resulted the Klamath River involving the Bu-
rural, small-town people who got to- in two D.U.I.s. She watched as her reau of Reclamation, which managed a
gether and realized they had something friends went away to college and her dam at the river’s headwaters; the U.S.
in common.” siblings found their way in the world. Fish and Wildlife Service, which mon-
Mary and John were married in 1958, Her sister Zoe got a nursing degree. Her itored the Chinook-salmon population;
and the third of their four children, brother, Judd, started his own construc- and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which
Debra Anne, was born in 1960, while tion business. Her sister Denise got mar- was attempting to uphold its trust and
her father was stationed in Okinawa. ried and began a family. treaty obligations with tribes including
He went on to earn two Purple Hearts “With my dad’s career, the way I was the Klamath, the Yurok, and the Karuk.
and a Silver Star in Vietnam. During raised, you picked up and moved every Jewell initiated the removal of four other
his deployments and temporary duty couple of years,” Haaland told me. But dams on the river, one of the biggest wa-
assignments, Haaland’s mother would in her twenties that motion turned to ter-restoration efforts in American his-
bring the children back to her parents— tory. “We finally got that over the finish
at first to a house in Arizona, but soon line,” she said. “But definitely it can feel
to her mother’s ancestral homeland, in like losing a battle to win a war.”
Mesita, where they all lived together in Jewell was succeeded by President
a one-room stone dwelling. That house, Donald Trump’s first Interior Secretary,
which is smaller than the office where Ryan Zinke, who reported for duty by rid-
Haaland and I were talking, is one of ing down the National Mall on a horse
the few places she has ever thought of named Tonto, installed a taxidermied griz-
as home. Throughout her extremely zly bear in his office and the arcade game
peripatetic childhood—she attended Big Buck Hunter in the cafeteria, and
thirteen public schools in as many mere drift; like a lot of working people, then set about selling the mining rights
years—she spent summers and other she mostly got by. “You just put one foot to threatened-species habitats, overturn-
long spells getting a different kind of in front of the other,” she said. She got ing a coal-lease moratorium, and shrink-
education from her grandmother on the married, a relationship that would not ing national monuments. Trump’s second
Pueblo of Laguna. She and her siblings last, and watched as her parents’ mar- Interior Secretary, David Bernhardt, was
helped chop firewood, bake bread in a riage fell apart. Things changed one day a former agribusiness and oil-industry
mud oven, cook huge pots of beef posole when she was twenty-eight and putting lobbyist who hollowed out the Bureau of
and deer stew, and pluck worms from on a hairnet in the bathroom at the bak- Land Management by moving its head-
the stalks of corn in the fields during ery. “It was probably six in the morning,” quarters from Washington, D.C., to his
the summertime. Whatever the season, she told me. “And I looked in the mir- home state, Colorado.
they bathed in a galvanized washtub ror, and I was, like, ‘Am I going to be There was no question that change
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 31
would come to Interior if Joe Biden de-
feated Trump, but no one knew how
dramatic that transformation would SECOND NATURE
be. The New Mexico senators Martin
Heinrich and Tom Udall were report- I lived
edly among the leading candidates for An invisible life.
the job. Both are Biden allies, and the Like wisteria
latter is the son of the storied Interior
Secretary Stewart L. Udall, for whom In winter,
the department’s main building is now I grew, broke
named. The elder Udall was nominated Through depths
by John F. Kennedy, and, during his
eight-year term, he fought for the pas- Nobody fathomed.
sage of some of the most significant en- I devoured wind,
vironmental legislation of the twenti- Wicked light
eth century, including the Wilderness
Act and the Clean Air Act. God invented.
When Biden was elected, Haaland I invented drama.
was serving her first term in Congress, Just because
representing New Mexico’s First Dis-
trict. She had endorsed Elizabeth War- Was reason
ren during the Democratic primary. She Enough. To hope
might never have been seriously consid- Against hope
ered for Interior were it not for activists
such as the writer Julian Brave Noise- I became
Cat. In the summer of 2020, NoiseCat— Terrible, terrifying, terrific—
who would later earn accolades for “Sug- By spring
arcane,” his documentary about the abuse
and disappearance of Native children There was
from St. Joseph’s Mission Residential No stopping me.
School, in Canada—was working for a I su1ered
left-wing think tank, which asked him
to put together a list of potential pro-
gressive Cabinet nominees should Biden job but turned it down. Not long after- American population, they are a potent
win. “This was a pie-in-the-sky list,” ward, an article appeared in The Hill voting bloc in some states: more than
NoiseCat told me. He had come to know claiming that Udall had been chosen; it ten per cent of New Mexicans, roughly
Haaland during her congressional cam- was quickly taken down, and NoiseCat, thirteen per cent of Oklahomans, some
paign, and knew she supported the Green realizing that Haaland might still have twenty per cent of Alaskans. Native is-
New Deal and opposed drilling and a chance, ghostwrote a public letter on sues have always been bipartisan—too
fracking on federal lands. “I put Deb’s behalf of progressive groups, asking the far under the radar, for most Americans,
name on for Interior, and we joked it senator to remove himself from consid- to have become particularly polarizing—
was like choosing the Lorax to be E.P.A. eration. The letter contained a line that and, historically, Native voters have not
administrator,” NoiseCat said. may have sealed Udall’s fate and Haa- been strongly aligned with either party.
To his surprise, “Deb for Interior” land’s future: “It would not be right for But in the past two decades a hand-
took o1. After Biden won, environmen- two Udalls to lead the Department of ful of key races have come down to Na-
tal groups, progressive PACs, and Native the Interior, the agency tasked with man- tive voters. Such voters helped Senator
nonprofits mounted social-media cam- aging the nation’s public lands, natural Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, win her 2010
paigns and organized petitions to push resources and trust responsibilities to write-in campaign; reëlected Senator Jon
elected officials to support her nomina- tribes, before a single Native American.” Tester, of Montana, in 2018; and pushed
tion. Meanwhile, Biden’s transition team Biden selected Haaland a week later. Joe Biden over the top in Arizona in
was managing factions within the Party, If Haaland’s rise seemed sudden to 2020. Increased wealth from the gaming
trying to balance the ethnicity, gender, outsiders—from a freshman member of industry has also fuelled tribal political
and geography of all fifteen Cabinet ap- Congress to a Cabinet secretary in less power. In 1988, Indian casinos took in a
pointees to assemble a leadership team than three years—to Native observers it hundred million dollars, mostly from
that the President pledged would “reflect was decades in the making, the result of bingo halls; in 2022, they took in nearly
the country they aim to serve.” In early a steady marshalling of forces that Haa- forty-one billion, from more than five
December, word leaked that Michelle land had not only benefitted from but hundred gaming operations in twen-
Lujan Grisham, the governor of New had helped shape. Although Natives con- ty-nine states. Flush with money to pay
Mexico, had been o1ered the Interior stitute less than three per cent of the for lobbyists and to fund campaigns, In-
32 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
rived in America the same year that her
mother’s grandfather had been sent away
to boarding school, and she was acutely
conscious of being both immigrant and
No fools, Indigenous, Norwegian and Native. She
Except my nature. visited her grandmother in Mesita most
To display weekends, and she wrote many of her
papers about family history. When she
My genius, finished her degree, in six years, she was
I carried on. nine months pregnant; four days after
I transitioned graduation, she had the baby, whom she
named Somah. She swapped the mo-
Every season. torcycle for a minivan, wrote “COLUM-
I was seasoned. BUS WAS LOST” on the back in shoe pol-
How? Because ish, and began looking for work. She
turned some of her college essays into
I’m now freelance articles for New Mexico Mag-
Mystery and clarity: azine, and cobbled together other in-
The candle come by catering and cooking. When
Somah was two, Haaland started her
Flame casting own business: Pueblo Food Specialties.
On the wall “She had this delicious chile recipe she
No shadow used to make for everybody,” her sister
Denise told me. “And she just said, ‘I’m
Yet making going to start canning and selling it.’ She
Everything around it would take Somah with her, and they’d
A shadow. take it to grocery stores.”
The business wasn’t always enough,
though, especially when Haaland tried
going back to school, first to begin a
—Paul Tran graduate degree in American Indian stud-
ies at U.C.L.A. and then, after her grand-
mother got sick and she returned home,
digenous people began fielding more her own story, too. In 1988, Haaland, a law degree at the University of New
candidates than ever, and both parties then twenty-eight and newly sober, en- Mexico. Haaland went on food stamps,
started belatedly, and often awkwardly, rolled in college at the University of and found a preschool that was a co-op,
targeting Native voters. New Mexico. Not long afterward, the where she could clean instead of paying
Muscogee poet Joy Harjo joined the tuition. She could afford only rooms in
his year is the centenary of Native faculty. “She came in carrying a motor- shared apartments, and when she couldn’t
T American enfranchisement. Native
people did not get the right to vote until
cycle helmet, asking if she could get into
my three-hundred-level creative-writ-
make the rent she and Somah would stay
with family or sleep on the couches of
1924, with the passage of the Indian Cit- ing class,” Harjo told me, recalling their accommodating friends. “The majority
izenship Act, and those living on reser- first meeting. “I asked her about the hel- of my formative years were spent living
vations in New Mexico were not allowed met and the motorcycle, and she said it as a guest in other people’s spaces,” Somah,
to vote until 1948. Even after that, the saved fossil fuels.” Haaland was an En- now a twenty-nine-year-old progressive
same voter-suppression techniques that glish major, and Harjo became a men- activist, has written. “We got our own
existed in the Jim Crow South, from lit- tor, hiring her as a research assistant, little place in Albuquerque halfway
eracy tests to poll taxes, kept generations taking her to conferences for Indige- through my junior year, and my mom
of Natives away from the ballot box. One nous writers, and cheering as she pub- wanted me to have the one bedroom
of Haaland’s personal heroes is Miguel lished fiction and poetry. “She wasn’t while she slept in a small room with no
Trujillo, a marine from Isleta Pueblo who actively political then, but she was ded- doors next to the kitchen.”
returned home from the Second World icated,” Harjo said. “She was dedicated Like many mothers, Haaland did
War and sued for his right to vote. She to her studies, and she was dedicated to some of her earliest organizing on be-
often told his story in the early days of a set of ideals that involved care of the half of her child. She went door-to-door
her political activism, when she would land, care of the earth, care of people.” in Santa Monica to preserve funding for
take pots of homemade chile to pueblo While working to pay for school, a community theatre where Somah was
recreational halls and encourage Natives Haaland was also working to forge an enrolled in after-school classes. She ral-
to register. identity that reconciled and honored her lied graduate students to persuade a dean
Soon, she was telling those voters roots. Her father’s grandfather had ar- to start classes later so that parents could
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 33
drop off their children at school before- on her Honda Civic each week, making said. Haaland, she told me, came up and
hand. When U.N.M. informed Haaland the rounds of all thirty-three counties in asked, “What can I do to help you?” Under
that she would be charged out-of-state the state. The Democrats not only lost Haaland’s leadership, the Democrats took
tuition, she fought for a law redefining the race for governor and lieutenant gov- back the state House and helped Hillary
“resident student” to include any en- ernor, they lost control of the state House Clinton carry New Mexico in 2016.
rolled tribal member from the state. In of Representatives for the first time in
2006, Haaland failed the bar exam by sixty years. Yet Haaland saw a path to n the nineteen-fifties, the federal gov-
five points. She decided that, rather than
sit for it again, she would throw herself
future victory, which she believed began
with reforming the state Democratic
Isimilate
ernment, in its attempt to forcibly as-
Native Americans, adopted pol-
into politics—not only local campaigns Party, at the time demoralized and deeply icies of “termination,” whereby the United
but statewide Native organizing. Armed in the red. States ceased to recognize certain tribes,
with a law degree, she began earning She was elected Party chair, and began taking jurisdiction over the land that be-
enough to support her family, first as a aggressively fund-raising to pay down its longed to them, and offering people who
counsellor at a facility for adults with debt. She devoted much of her two-year lived on reservations one-way bus or train
developmental delays, then as a tribal term to recruiting and training new vol- fare to Los Angeles, Chicago, or Den-
administrator and a casino manager for unteers while also attending to longtime ver. The policy was largely carried out
San Felipe Pueblo, and eventually as the ones whose work she felt had been taken by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
first female director of the Laguna De- for granted. She hoped to lift up locals The end of termination, and of the
velopment Corporation, which operates instead of allowing national campaigns federal Indian boarding-school policy,
all the restaurants, hotels, and casinos to parachute in with operatives from came about only because of a rise in Na-
owned by the tribe. other states. “She believes in showing up tive activism, an extension of the civil-
Haaland likes to say that no one ever everywhere,” Trish Ruiz, a high-school rights movement in which Indigenous
asked her to run for office. In 2014, when guidance counsellor and a Democratic people around the country staged dra-
Susana Martinez, a popular Republican volunteer in one of the state’s most con- matic protests for equality. In 1969, a
and the nation’s first Latina governor, servative counties, told me. Ruiz met group called Indians of All Tribes de-
was up for reëlection in New Mexico, Haaland at a back-yard political event. scended on Alcatraz Island—where the
few Democrats wanted to mount an un- “I’m a bilateral amputee and I’m in a nineteen Hopi men had been impris-
derdog campaign for governor, much less wheelchair, so getting into the back yard oned for refusing to give up their chil-
lieutenant governor. Haaland launched was a challenge, and my husband was dren—and stayed for a year and a half,
a bid for the latter. “I just said, ‘Well, there trying to help me figure out how demanding tribal sovereignty. In 1970,
somebody has to do it,’” Haaland told to get in, and there was this whole group on the three-hundred-and-fiftieth an-
me. She put more than a thousand miles of people, but Deb noticed first,” Ruiz niversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at
Plymouth Rock, the American Indian
Movement, a grassroots group founded
in Minneapolis, seized a replica of the
Mayflower near Boston and called for
Thanksgiving to be observed as a na-
tional day of mourning. A year later, AIM
occupied Mt. Rushmore to protest the
theft of the Black Hills from the Sioux
Nation; in 1972, it organized the Trail of
Broken Treaties, bringing caravans of
protesters to Washington, where they
occupied the Department of the Inte-
rior for a week.
Three years later, Congress finally
responded with the Indian Self-Deter-
mination and Education Assistance
Act, and the Nixon Administration
took steps to better honor the U.S.’s
trust and treaty obligations, officially
abandoning termination in favor of
self-determination. Although Indian
boarding schools continued to oper-
ate—and some still do today—many
were taken over by the tribes.
In 2016, as Haaland was helping Dem-
ocrats flip the New Mexico House, a
“I need, like, a million little sticks.” new wave of Native activists was gath-
ering in camps in North Dakota, on the she invoked the overdraft fees that politician. “Deb’s a force of nature,” he
Standing Rock Indian Reservation, to drained her checking account and the said. “A very excellent legislator—inno-
block the Dakota Access Pipeline, a shame of having to return food to gro- vative, active, instinctively bipartisan, al-
twelve-hundred-mile project for trans- cery-store shelves after discovering in though certainly very progressive.”
porting hundreds of thousands of bar- the checkout line that she didn’t have Haaland’s friendships across the aisle
rels of oil every day from the Bakken oil enough money to pay for it. Although were critical after Biden nominated her.
fields in the state’s northwest corner all Haaland is most consistently positioned She was introduced at her confirmation
the way into Illinois. A few water pro- as Native American, she identifies just hearing by the Alaska representative
tectors had first assembled near the con- as strongly as working class. Those iden- Don Young, at the time the longest-
fluence of the Cannonball and Missouri tities often overlap: more than one in serving Republican in the House, who
Rivers, asserting their rights under the four Native Americans live had strong ties to the Na-
Fort Laramie Treaty to protect tribal land below the poverty line, and tive community in his state.
and drinking water. Soon, protesters from the unemployment rate on Haaland opened her own
some two hundred tribes had arrived, some reservations is higher testimony with a greeting
not only founding members of the Amer- than fifty per cent. When in Keres and acknowledged
ican Indian Movement but teen-agers Haaland was elected, she that Congress was in ses-
and even younger children. became one of the poorest sion “on the ancestral home-
Haaland went to Standing Rock for members of Congress— lands of the Nacotchtank,
four days, staying in the camps and pre- she owned no home, had Anacostan, and Piscataway
paring chile and tortillas for the water no savings account or in- people.” A grilling followed,
protectors. When she returned to New vestments of any kind, and with Republicans on the
Mexico, she persuaded Party leaders in was paying down tens of committee attacking her
her state to divest from Wells Fargo, thousands of dollars in student loans. opposition to fossil fuels and her sup-
which was financing the pipeline. A Haaland also became one of the first port for conservation. Senator John Ken-
year later, she called her sister Denise two Native women ever elected to Con- nedy, of Louisiana, denounced Haaland
to say that she was running for Con- gress, along with Sharice Davids, a Ho- as “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin wack
gress. “I never even thought I’d meet a Chunk woman who f lipped Kansas’s job.” (He later apologized for saying
congresswoman,” Denise told me, laugh- Third Congressional District during that “wack job” instead of “extremist.”) Her
ing. “Nothing scares her,” she added. same election cycle. After their swear- confirmation passed by a single vote—a
“That’s what I’ve always admired about ing-in, to which Haaland wore her tra- surprising yes from Senator Murkow-
my little sister.” ditional Pueblo clothes, more than thirty ski, well known for her support of the
In the primary, Haaland defeated five tribes and Indigenous organizations fossil-fuel industry, but less well known
other Democrats, running an unapolo- sponsored a joint celebration at a Wash- as an adopted Tlingit, an honorary mem-
getically progressive campaign in what ington hotel, where a Ho-Chunk drum- ber of one of Alaska’s two hundred and
had become a very liberal district. Like ming group nearly drowned out Speaker twenty-nine federally recognized tribes.
thousands of other women who ran for Nancy Pelosi, who was delivering re- The night before, work by the Apache
office that year, she positioned herself as marks in the ballroom next door. and Chichimeca artist Mer Young had
an antagonist of the Trump Adminis- Pelosi, in an e-mail, praised Haa- been projected onto the main entrance
tration, comparing the family-separation land’s “immense empathy and invalu- of the Udall Building beside the words
policy at the country’s southern border able experience” in addition to her skills “Our Ancestors’ Dreams Come True.”
to what had happened to her own fam- as a manager and an administrator, not-
ily with the boarding schools. “It was ing how quickly she became the chair ny head of an executive agency
shameful and inhumane then to sepa-
rate families, and it’s shameful and in-
of the Subcommittee on National Parks,
Forests, and Public Lands, a rare feat
A needs time to settle in, but Haa-
land took longer than some, trying to
humane now,” she said. She covered the in a first term. Haaland co-sponsored resolve the conflict that her staff framed
First District in “Deb” yard signs with more bills than any other freshman in as “Deb vs. the Secretary.” She was strug-
Zia sun symbols, and used the slogan Congress, and compiled one of the most gling to maintain her personal identity
“Be fierce.” Her interpersonal style, liberal voting records. But she also within a bureaucratic framework and a
though, was notably understated. “They earned a reputation as a pragmatic leg- political context that had historically
didn’t think she could win, because she’s islator with an unusually self-effacing been at odds with it. “Consider the fact
so quiet,” Clara Apodaca, a former First approach, ushering three bills into law. that a former Secretary of the Interior
Lady of New Mexico, told me, of early Tom Cole, a Republican from Okla- once proclaimed it his goal to, quote,
Haaland skeptics in the state. “She never homa and a member of the Chickasaw ‘civilize or exterminate’ us,” she said after
seems to fight, but she always wins.” Nation, told me that he and Haaland her nomination, adding, “I’m a living
When campaigning, Haaland ap- have next to nothing in common po- testament to the failure of that horrific
pealed to voters with stories about the litically (he describes the Green New ideology.” She was also trying to scale
hardships that had defined her life. She Deal as “socialism masking as environ- up her leadership style. The kinds of
talked about being in recovery and how mentalism”) but that she reminds him teams that “Deb” had previously led
difficult it was to be a single mother; of his mother, a pioneering Indigenous were hundreds of times smaller than
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 35
the one that “the Secretary” needed to mental and Indigenous groups that had watched her deliver the opening remarks
manage. Three chiefs of staff shuffled worked to get Haaland appointed were at her third White House Tribal Na-
through the agency in her first year. Ac- unsparing in their criticism. “They use tions Summit, an annual conference
customed to baking cakes for staffers’ people of color for cover on these de- started by Obama, suspended by Trump,
birthdays and celebrating their every cisions,” the Bdewakantunwan and Diné and restored by Biden. Haaland an-
achievement, she had to settle for rec- actor and activist Dallas Goldtooth told nounced that the Administration had
ognizing a single “Rockstar of the Week” the press. already spent a historic forty-five bil-
so that meetings didn’t drag on. Tribes were divided over Willow, lion dollars in Indian country, more than
The Biden Administration’s approach with some fighting for the preservation fifteen years’ worth of the annual bud-
to Interior is largely in keeping with of the entire western Arctic and others get of the B.I.A., including investments
Haaland’s own political compass. She applauding the thousands of jobs and in social services, pandemic response,
has been an integral player in a conser- billions in revenue that the project and child welfare; infrastructure im-
vation plan pushed by Biden, called “30 promised. No two tribes are alike, and provements, such as high-speed Inter-
by 30”—an attempt to conserve thirty tribal politics are complex. Last sum- net; and the kind of long-overdue basic
per cent of the country’s land and water mer, when Haaland went to the Chaco utilities that had eventually improved
by 2030. This has included restoring Culture National Historical Park to cel- her grandmother’s life in Mesita—clean
protections for hundreds of thousands ebrate the implementation of a twen- water, home electrification. “I see her
of acres that Trump slashed from two ty-year ban on new oil and gas leases fingerprints everywhere with the re-
national monuments, Bears Ears and around the World Heritage site, mem- sources being sent to Indian country,”
Grand Staircase-Escalante, lands dot- bers of the Navajo Nation blocked the Chuck Hoskin, Jr., the principal chief
ted with tens of thousands of sacred and road to the park, preventing Haaland of the Cherokee Nation, told me.
significant sites for, among others, the and anyone else from entering. Activ- Haaland also established the Miss-
Hopi tribe, the Navajo Nation, the Ute ists held signs saying “No Trespassing,” ing and Murdered Unit within the
tribes, and Haaland’s own Laguna “VOTE These Tyrants OUT,” and “Go B.I.A., to try to solve the thousands of
Pueblo people. Haaland inevitably faced Home.” Some of the protesters were open cases concerning disappearances
criticism from the right as she tried to allotment owners, worried that their and homicides of American Indians and
move the country away from its focus leasing rights would be curtailed by the Alaska Natives. She created the De-
on extractive industries. Her reception ten-mile buffer zone around the site; rogatory Geographic Names Task Force,
on the left whiplashed between fawn- others alleged that Haaland had a con- which removed offensive language like
ing memes of “Auntie Deb” and insin- flict of interest, since Somah Haaland “squaw” from the names of public lands.
uations that she was a token appointee works for the Pueblo Action Alliance, She pushed for more robust and expe-
lacking real power. which had lobbied for the protections. dient enforcement of the Native Amer-
In March of last year, in what was House Republicans launched an ethics ican Graves Protection and Repatria-
arguably her most public failure, Haa- investigation into the Secretary’s rela- tion Act, which was passed in 1990, and
land announced that the Willow Proj- tionship with P.A.A. which created a legal framework en-
ect, an eight-billion-dollar oil-drilling When Haaland first went to Wash- abling tribes to reclaim sacred objects
venture on the North Slope of Alaska, ington, her mother, Mary, whose work and ancestral remains from any mu-
would be moving forward. Appearing for the Bureau of Indian Affairs had oc- seum or institution that received fed-
in what some supporters called a hos- casionally taken her to D.C., had mixed eral funding. Haaland also helped de-
tage video, she said, “President Biden fend the Indian Child Welfare Act after
and I believe that the climate crisis is plaintiffs and several states sued to
the most urgent issue of our lifetime,” weaken the protections preventing the
before going on to explain that the proj- removal of Indian children from their
ect was “a difficult and complex issue tribes for adoption by non-Indians.
that was inherited” from previous ad- Some of this work could be undone
ministrations. Haaland—who did not by a future Secretary with a different
sign the record of decision approving set of priorities, but the tenor of the
the project, leaving the task to one of department has shifted. “Of all the
her deputies—tried to emphasize how things she could have chosen to try
legally constrained her decision-mak- feelings. “She knew about the bureau- and do, she clearly chose to elevate
ing was, and how much the project had cracy and how things ran,” Denise told tribal governments,” Hoskin told me,
been scaled back from what the energy me, “and she was worried about Deb— arguing that Haaland has “made the
company running it, ConocoPhillips, all the obstacles that would be in her tribes as relevant as the states.” Mark
had first proposed. What she did not way.” But, for reasons both psycholog- Mitchell, the former chair of the All
say was that the Biden Administration ical and pragmatic, Haaland does not Pueblo Council of Governors, which
had determined that a legal fight over dwell on failure. Instead, she has re- represents the twenty Pueblo nations,
retracting the approved drilling leases treated from public controversies and emphasized the effect of Haaland sim-
would have been costly and likely fu- quietly used regulatory authority to ac- ply being in the rooms where decisions
tile. Nonetheless, many of the environ- complish what she can. In December, I about federal money and policy are
36 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
made. “I think her presence alone says
Native people and Indigenous people
are alive and well, not just something
from history,” he said.
O
n a subway train not long ago, elementary-school-age children), and the midtown office of the Dentsu agency.
I had the familiar, unsettling college students increasingly struggle to We were speaking about a new atten-
experience of standing behind get through books, according to their tion market. Slides were projected on
a fellow-passenger and watching every- teachers, many of whom confess to feel- the wall, and bits of conversation rat-
thing that she was doing on her phone. ing the same way. Film pacing has ac- tled like half-melted ice cubes in the
It was a crowded car, rush hour, with celerated, with the average length of a corridor outside. For decades, what was
the dim but unwarm lighting of the old- shot decreasing; in music, the mean length going on between an advertisement and
est New York City trains. The strang- of top-performing pop songs declined its viewers was unclear: there was no
er’s phone was bright, and as I looked by more than a minute between 1990 consensus about what attention was or
on she scrolled through a waterfall of and 2020. A study conducted in 2004 by how to quantify it. “The difference now
videos that other people had filmed in the psychologist Gloria Mark found that is that there’s better tech to measure it,”
their homes. She watched one for four participants kept their attention on a sin- Leong said.
or five seconds, then dispatched it by gle screen for an average of two and a Dentsu is one of the world’s lead-
twitching her thumb. She flicked to a half minutes before turning it elsewhere. ing advertising agencies, running ac-
text message, did nothing with it, and These days, she writes, people can pay counts for Heineken, Hilton, Kraft
flipped back. The figures on her screen, attention to one screen for an average of Heinz, Microsoft, Subway, and other
dressed carefully and mugging at the only forty-seven seconds. global corporations. In 2019, the firm
camera like mimes, seemed desperate “Attention as a category isn’t that sa- began using digital technology to
for something that she could not pro- lient for younger folks,” Jac Mullen, a gather data that showed not only how
vide: her sustained attention. I felt mor- writer and a high-school teacher in New many people attended to its ads but in
tified, not least because I saw on both Haven, told me recently. “It takes a lot what ways they did—information that
sides of the screen symptoms I recog- to show that how you pay attention af- could be applied to derive a quantita-
nized too clearly in myself. fects the outcome—that if you focus your tive unit of attention value. In 1997, the
For years, we have heard a litany of attention on one thing, rather than dis- technology pundit Michael Goldhaber
reasons why our capacity to pay atten- persing it across many things, the one had envisaged a world in which atten-
tion is disturbingly on the wane. Tech- thing you think is hard will become eas- tion supplanted money as a dominant
nology—the buzzing, blinking pageant ier—but that’s a level of instruction I currency. (“If you have enough atten-
on our screens and in our pockets— often find myself giving.” It’s not the stu- tion, you can get anything you want,”
hounds us. Modern life, forever quicker dents’ fault, he thinks; multitasking and he lamented.) Since then, advertising
and more scattered, drives concentration its euphemism, “time management,” has caught up with the trade.
away. For just as long, concerns of this have become goals across the pedagogic “Six years ago, the question was
variety could be put aside. Television was field. The SAT was redesigned this spring around ‘Can this usefully be mea-
described as a force against attention to be forty-five minutes shorter, with sured?’” Leong said. Now it’s a circus.
even in the nineteen-forties. A lot of fo- many reading-comprehension passages “There are companies that use eye
cussed, worthwhile work has taken place trimmed to two or three sentences. Some tracking. There are companies that do
since then. Ivy League professors report being coun- facial coding”—reading emotions
But alarms of late have grown more selled to switch up what they’re doing through micro-expressions. “It’s no
urgent. Last year, the Organization for every ten minutes or so to avoid falling longer a matter of convincing clients
Economic Cooperation and Develop- behind their students’ churn. What ap- that this is something they should lean
ment reported a huge ten-year decline pears at first to be a crisis of attention into—it’s how.”
in reading, math, and science perfor- may be a narrowing of the way we in- There is a long-standing, wide-
mance among fifteen-year-olds globally, terpret its value: an emergency about spread belief that attention carries
a third of whom cited digital distraction where—and with what goal—we look. value. In English, attention is some-
as an issue. Clinical presentations of at- thing that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is
tention problems have climbed (a recent
study of data from the medical-software
“ I ntionmany ways, it’s the oldest ques-
in advertising: how to get at-
“lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves
Citton, whose study of the digital age,
company Epic found an over-all tripling tention,” an executive named Joanne “The Ecology of Attention,” argues
of A.D.H.D. diagnoses between 2010 Leong told me one afternoon, in a con- against reducing attention to eco-
and 2022, with the steepest uptick among ference room on the thirteenth floor of nomic terms, suggested to me that it
40 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
As the market chases our ever-waning focus, a secret society of writers and artists fights back.
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN REA THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 41
was traditionally considered valuable their audiences. “As attention measure- “vigilance studies,” which figured atten-
because it was capable of bestowing ment matures, things will fall by the tion in terms of cognitive alertness, had
value. “By paying attention to some- wayside and we can eliminate some of coincided with the rise of monotonous
thing as if it’s interesting, you make the waste,” she said. control-panel jobs in the years after the
it interesting. By evaluating it, you Second World War. When soldiers began
valorize it,” he said. To treat it as a
mere market currency, he thought,
was to undersell what it could do.
Ithenofeditors,
“Scenes of Attention,” a collection
scholarly essays published last year,
D. Graham Burnett and Jus-
having to deal with multiple directives
over the wire, attention science became
preoccupied with simultaneous inputs.
Advertisers’ interest in attention as tin Smith-Ruiu, challenge the idea that It was a short leap from there to at-
a measure was sharpened with the shortened attention spans came about tention-chasing advertising. Companies
publication of “The At- because of technological ac- that once resigned themselves to using
tention Economy” (2001), celeration alone. True, tools billboards and print ads to appeal to a
by Thomas H. Davenport and lives are faster, they large American public now target us in
and John C. Beck, which write. But claiming innova- private moments. The legal scholar Tim
offered a theory of atten- tion as the original cause is Wu, in his book “The Attention Mer-
tion as a prelude to action: backward: “Human beings chants,” notes, “Without express con-
we pay attention in order make the technologies—and sent, most of us have passively opened
to do (or buy). But there they make them in the con- ourselves up to the commercial exploita-
have long been varied text of other human beings tion of our attention just about anywhere
views. The neuroscientist needing and wanting vari- and any time.” No wonder young peo-
Karl Friston has suggested ous things.” It wasn’t as ple struggle. Burnett, in an opinion piece
that attention is a way of though people, after mil- that he co-wrote in the Times last fall,
prioritizing and tuning sensory data. lennia of head-scratching, suddenly “dis- argued that schools, rather than just ex-
Simone Weil, one of attention’s elo- covered” the steam engine, the spinning pecting students to pay attention, should
quent philosophers, also resisted the jenny, and the telegraph, and modernity teach them how.
idea of attention as subject to eco- unspooled. Rather, people’s priorities un- I visited Burnett one afternoon in
nomic measure. derwent a sea change with the onset of Washington Heights, where he lives with
In the Dentsu office, Leong, who the modern age, turning to efficiency, ob- his partner, the filmmaker Alyssa Loh,
had her hair in a neat ponytail and jective measurement, and other goals that and his two teen-age children. The win-
wore a sweater with wide, simple hor- made such inventions worthwhile. The dows of his living room were open; breezes
izontal stripes, sat beside the compa- acceleration of life isn’t an inevitability, off the Hudson River twirled silver spi-
ny’s head of research and measure- in that sense, but an ideological outcome. ral streamers hanging from the ceiling.
ment, Celeste Castle, an executive Burnett, a historian of science at A sideboard featured a blown ostrich egg,
who oversees the math behind Dent- Princeton, is the author of five books, delicately etched with an image of the
su’s own answer to the question of at- ranging in subject from seventeenth- bird’s skeleton—a gift from a student.
tention’s worth—the “effective atten- century lens-making to New York’s ju- “It’s a perfect mix of scrimshaw
tion cost per a thousand” impressions. dicial system. For the past several years, technique and X-ray of the form of the
The old metrics used in advertising he has been working on a history of the bird,” Burnett commented from an open
were based on an opportunity to see. scientific study of attention. I went one kitchen. He was chopping radishes for
“An ‘impression’ is just a measure that day to the main branch of the New York a salad.
the ad was served,” Leong said. But Public Library to hear him speak at the The rest of the living room was art-
recent data revealed that even most sup- invitation of the New York Institute for ily posed, as if presented for study by
posedly “viewable” ads weren’t being the Humanities. “It was the sciences that visitors. There was a faded dhurrie rug
viewed. “Consumers’ span of attention sliced and diced this nebulous, diffi- and a dining-room table made from a
is now believed to be less than eight cult-to-define feature of our conscious single slab of tree trunk. In one corner,
seconds,” Raja Rajamannar, the chief and sensory life so that the market could a kind of altar had been assembled with
marketing officer of Mastercard, a price it,” Burnett said. peculiar objects: a feather-trimmed bow
Dentsu client, told me. “That is less than As an academic at the lectern, Bur- and arrow from Guyana; a bird skele-
the attention span of a goldfish.” nett cut a curious figure. He was tall, ton; and a short stack of old leather-
At Dentsu, as elsewhere, the aim with a graying backpacker’s beard and bound books, such as the first English
has become to get more from these light-brown hair pulled into a topknot. edition of “L’Oiseau” (“The Bird”), a
shrinking slivers—an endeavor some He wore sixteen silver rings, gunmetal nineteenth-century study of birds by the
outsiders liken to fracking, the process nail polish, and an outfit—T-shirt, V-neck historian Jules Michelet, and “Canaries
used to force lingering pockets of fos- sweater-vest, climbing pants—entirely and Cage-Birds,” by an ornithologist
sil fuels out of the earth. When I asked in shades of light gray. He looked as if named George H. Holden. I opened it.
whether these efforts would dissipate he had arrived from soldering metal in “The lectures on which these chapters
people’s focus further, Castle said that an abandoned loft. Scientific models of are based were appropriately announced
optimizing would result in ads being attention, he argued, had been products as given under the auspices of one of our
even more precisely tailored to entice of their eras’ priorities, too. So-called bird clubs,” the book read, “for the word
42 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
auspices comes from the Latin avis,—a me Knauss was stationed, a young woman had taken place as far afield as Korea, the
bird,—and spicere,—to look at.” in a black T-shirt sat on a bench with Galápagos, and Kansas.
The passage touched a memory for her back to me, staring at a painting. I Knauss eyed some passersby. “The
me. Years earlier, I had heard of some- sat beside her. “Stevie?” I said. first seven-minute phase is known as
thing called the Order of the Third She was wearing wide-legged green Encounter,” she said. “I think of it as en-
Bird—supposedly a secret international Dickies, high-laced leather work boots, tering a party. First, you take a look
fellowship, going back centuries, of art- and dangly asymmetrical earrings. She around the scene.” On arriving at the ac-
ists, authors, booksellers, professors, and turned to regard me, then looked back tion site, the Birds wander. The subject
avant-gardists. Participants in the Order at the painting. of an action is rarely, if ever, identified in
would converge, f lash-mob style, at Knauss identified herself as an emis- advance, but usually it is the most des-
museums, stare intensely at a work of sary affiliated with the Birds, and began perate-looking work in sight. (“In a mu-
art for half an hour, and vanish, their to describe the way their actions worked. seum, it will be, like, the painting next
twee-seeming feat of attention complete. “The practice lasts twenty-eight min- to the bathroom or on the wall opposite
(The Order’s name alluded to a piece of utes—four parts of seven minutes each,” the ‘Mona Lisa,’” Burnett told me.) The
lore about three birds confronting a paint- she said. “The movement from one part work is unnamed because the Birds are
ing by the ancient artist Zeuxis: the first to another is announced by a bell.” supposed to find it by paying attention.
was frightened away, the second ap- Knauss told me that the Birds who Those who don’t can follow the flock.
proached to try to eat painted fruit, and were about to convene might not have Next comes Attending, announced
the third just looked.) I had tried then met before. Actions were called in e-mails by the first bell. “At the party, that’s when
to get in touch with the Order. My ef- from alias accounts—she had heard about you maybe settle into conversation with
forts had led nowhere. “It’s a Fight Club this one from “Wrybill Wrybillius”—with someone,” Knauss explained. The Birds
thing,” someone later explained to me, invitees’ names hidden. Any Bird could line up before the work, side by side, in
with a degree of earnestness that, like call an action; the Order was decentral- what is known as the phalanx. For seven
much about the Order of the Third Bird, ized and ungoverned. Existing Birds in- minutes, they silently give the work their
I struggled to gauge. “The first rule of vited new participants at their discretion, full attention. Three things are discour-
the Birds is you don’t talk about the and, in this way, the Order slowly brought aged during this period, Knauss told me.
Birds.” I’d wondered whether Burnett additional people into local chapters, “One is what we call studium”—analy-
might be involved. known as volées. Nobody was sure how sis from study. Another is interpretation,
Burnett was a longtime Bird, he ad- many Birds were in the world—New and the third is judgment. If Birds find
mitted. The Order’s work was more com- York City alone was home to several volées, a work offensive (or simply bad), they’re
plex than it sounded, he said, and some overlapping to some degree—but there meant to put aside that response. Alyssa
of the Birds, concerned about widespread were believed to be hundreds. Actions Loh, Burnett’s partner, who is also a
loss of attention, were more willing to
discuss their practice than they’d been
in the past. For years, the Order had de-
voted itself to its subject: what attention
was, how to channel it, what it could do.
With Burnett’s help, I sent up a new
flare in Birdland, expecting to hear noth-
ing. That wasn’t what happened at all.
A CRITIC AT LARGE
TOWER IN FLAMES
What kind of right is academic freedom?
BY LOUIS MENAND
T
he congressional appearance that of academic freedom, a right that room or in the public square. The key
last month by Nemat Shafik, derives from the role the university plays event was the founding, in 1915, of the
the president of Columbia Uni- in American life. Professors don’t work American Association of University
versity, was a breathtaking “What was for politicians, they don’t work for trust- Professors, which is, among other things,
she thinking?” episode in the history of ees, and they don’t work for themselves. an academic-freedom watchdog.
academic freedom. It was shocking to They work for the public. Their job is Academic freedom is related to, but
hear her negotiating with a member of to produce scholarship and instruction not the same as, freedom of speech in
Congress over disciplining two mem- that add to society’s store of knowledge. the First Amendment sense. In the pub-
bers of her own faculty, by name, for They commit themselves to doing this lic square, you can say or publish igno-
things they had written or said. The disinterestedly: that is, without regard rant things, hateful things, in many cases
next day, in what appeared to be a sig- to financial, partisan, or personal advan- false things, and the state cannot touch
nal to Congress, Shafik had more than tage. In exchange, society allows them you. Academic freedom doesn’t work
a hundred students, many from Bar- to insulate themselves—and to some that way. Academic discourse is rigor-
nard, arrested by New York City police extent their students—against external ously policed. It’s just that the police
and booked for trespassing—on their interference in their affairs. It builds are professors.
own campus. But Columbia made their them a tower. Faculty members pass judgment on
presence illegal by summarily suspend- The concept originated in Ger- the work that their colleagues produce,
ing the protesters first. If you are a uni- many—the German term is Lehrfreiheit, and they decide whom to hire, whom to
versity official, you never want law- freedom to teach—and it was imported fire, and what to teach. They see that the
enforcement officers on your campus. here in the late nineteenth century, along norms of academic inquiry are observed.
Faculty particularly don’t like it. They with the model, also German, of the re- Those norms derive from the first great
regard the campus as their jurisdiction, search university, an educational insti- battle over academic freedom in the nine-
and they have complained that the Co- tution in which the faculty produce teenth century—science versus religion.
lumbia administration did not consult scholarship and research. Since that time, The model of inquiry in the modern re-
with them before ordering the arrests. it has been understood that academic search university is secular and scientific.
Calling in law enforcement did not freedom is the defining feature of the All views and all hypotheses must be
work at Berkeley in 1967, at Columbia modern research university. fairly tested, and their success depends
in 1968, at Harvard in 1969, or at Kent In nineteenth-century Germany, entirely on their ability to persuade by
State in 1970. where universities were run by the gov- evidence and by rational argument. No
What’s more alarming than the ar- ernment, academic freedom was a right a-priori judgments are permitted, and
rests—after all, the students wanted against the state. It was needed because there is no appeal to a higher authority.
to be arrested—is the matter of their there was no First Amendment-style There are, therefore, all kinds of pro-
suspensions. They had their I.D.s in- right to free speech. Lehrfreiheit pro- fessional constraints on academic ex-
validated, and they have not been per- tected what professors wrote and taught pression. The scholarship that academ-
ABOVE: ANTONIO GIOVANNI PINNA
mitted to attend class, an astonishing inside (although not outside) the acad- ics publish has to be approved by their
disregard of the fact that although the emy. In the United States, where, after peers. The protocols of citation must be
students may have violated university the Civil War, many research universi- observed, ad-hominem arguments are
policy, they are still students, whom Co- ties were built with private money— not tolerated, unsubstantiated claims
lumbia and Barnard are committed to Chicago, Cornell, Hopkins, Stanford— are dismissed, and so on. Although ac-
educating. You can’t educate people who the right was extended to protect ademics regard the word “orthodoxy”
cannot attend classes. professors from being fired for their with horror, there is a lot of tacit ortho-
The right at stake in these events is views, whether expressed in the class- doxy in the university, as there is in any
56 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
Historically, institutions of higher education have policed themselves. On many university campuses, that system is being tested.
ILLUSTRATION BY NASH WEERASEKERA THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 57
business. People who are trained alike Harvard; Dirks was a chancellor of seem to cover these cases (although not
tend to think alike. But, as long as ac- the University of California, Berkeley. everyone would agree). What academic
ademic judgments are made by consen- The general sentiment in these books freedom would not cover is indoctrina-
sus, not by fiat, and by experts, not by is that academic freedom is in peril and tion, a violation of academic norms.
amateurs, it is assumed that the knowl- that it would not take much for univer- What about students? The student
edge machine is operating fairly and ef- sities to lose it. version of academic freedom is Lernfrei-
ficiently.The public can trust the product. Whittington, who says he is “on the heit, the freedom to learn. This rule is
All professions aspire to be self- political right,” is highly protective of a little harder to apply. Students don’t
governing, because their members be- academic freedom. He can see no rea- typically determine the curriculum, and
lieve that only fellow-professionals have son why we would want politicians to they are usually passive subjects of a dis-
the expertise needed to make judgments dictate what can and cannot be stud- ciplinary regime called grading. Origi-
in their fields. But professionals also know ied and taught. It would be like putting nally, “freedom to learn” referred simply
that failures of self-regulation invite out- a syllabus up to a popular vote every to the freedom to choose one’s course
side meddling. In the case of the univer- year. His book is concerned mainly with of study. Now it gets invoked in the
sity, it is in the faculty’s interest to run public colleges and universities (where contexts of classroom speech, where in-
their institution equitably and compe- some seventy per cent of American stu- structors are witnessing a lot of self-
tently. They need to be trusted to oper- dents are enrolled), since their faculties censorship, and campus speech, where
ate independently of public opinion.They are public employees and state legisla- students chant, carry banners, and ex-
need to keep the tower standing. tures control their budgets. This also ercise civil disobedience.
means, however, that their speech is Some students report that they don’t
his is why the phenomenon that protected by the First Amendment. feel free to express their views, because
T goes by the shorthand October 7th
was a crisis for American higher educa-
Florida’s 2022 Individual Freedom Act,
popularly known as the Stop WOKE
what they say might be received as hurt-
ful or offensive by other students, and
tion. The impression that some univer- Act, which prohibits the teaching in instructors find themselves second-
sities were not policing themselves com- public educational institutions of ideas guessing the texts they assign, since stu-
petently, that their campuses were out of that some legislators define as “divisive,” dents may refuse to engage with works
control, provided an opening to parties was struck down, in part, by the Elev- that they find politically objectionable.
looking to affect the kind of knowledge enth Circuit for being what it plainly Instructors worry about being anony-
that universities produce, who is allowed is: viewpoint discrimination, which is mously reported and subjected to an in-
to produce it, and how it is taught—de- barred by the First Amendment. (The stitutional investigation. Instructors and
cisions that are traditionally the prerog- power of states to dictate content in students can also, needless to say, suffer
ative of the faculty. Politicians who want K-12 classrooms, on the other hand, is trial by social media. These are not great
to chill certain kinds of academic expres- fairly well established.) working conditions for the knowledge
sion think that they can do this by threat- The Florida act was one of a hun- business. You may lose the argument in
ening to revoke a university’s tax-exempt dred and forty educational gag orders an academic exchange, but you have to
status or tax its endowment. In the cur- passed by state legislatures in 2022; al- feel free, in the classroom, to have your
rent political climate, it is not hard to most forty per cent of these targeted col- say without sanction.
imagine such things happening. If they leges and universities. The gag-order
did, it would be a straight-up abrogation phenomenon is one of the topics cov- ommentators have blamed this sit-
of the social pact.
But would it be unconstitutional?
ered in “The Right to Learn.” The vol-
ume’s editors argue that efforts such as
C uation on a system of “coddling”
in which people who say that they feel
What kind of right is the right to aca- these are worse than McCarthyism. Mc- “unsafe” just being in a room with some-
demic freedom? Is it a legal right or a Carthyism went after individuals for their one they disagree with are given re-
moral one? This question, long a subject political beliefs; today, the targets are the sources to demand that something be
of scholarly contention, is addressed in curriculum and the classroom, the very done about it. The institutional symbol
not a small number of new books, nota- bones of the educational system. (or scapegoat) for this culture is the
bly, “You Can’t Teach That!” (Polity), by The editors see the defense of aca- campus office of diversity, equity, and
Keith E. Whittington; “The Right to demic freedom as “inextricably linked inclusion (D.E.I.). State legislatures
Learn” (Beacon), edited by Valerie C. to the larger struggle against the racial, have taken steps to ban D.E.I. in pub-
Johnson, Jennifer Ruth, and Ellen gender, and other systems of oppres- lic colleges and universities, and con-
Schrecker; and “All the Campus Law- sion that continue to deform Ameri- servative critics of higher education are
yers” (Hopkins), by Louis H. Guard and can life.” Given that disinterestedness quite explicit that bringing down D.E.I.
Joyce P. Jacobsen. is a central ingredient in the social pact, is a primary goal.
The fate of academic freedom is also this view may not have universal ap- “All the Campus Lawyers” helpfully
a concern in new books by two former peal. But there are disciplines, or sub- shows that the regime of “coddling” and
university administrators: Derek Bok’s fields within disciplines, in which pro- D.E.I. was largely the creation of the
“Attacking the Elites” (Yale) and Nich- fessors (and students) understand their federal government. Together, Title VI
olas B. Dirks’s “City of Intellect” (Cam- academic work as a form of political and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights
bridge). Bok is a former president of engagement. Academic freedom would Act prohibit discrimination on the basis
58 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
of race, color, sex, religion, or national
origin in programs and activities that
receive federal funds, as most universi BRIEFLY NOTED
ties do. The Supreme Court recently
(and somewhat surprisingly) ruled that Knife, by Salman Rushdie (Random House). In August, 2022,
Title VII covers sexual orientation and more than thirty years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
gender identity. Title IX of the Educa issued a fatwa ordering the killing of Salman Rushdie, an assas
tion Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex sin came running at him. The man stabbed Rushdie as he was
based discrimination, including sexual addressing an audience in Chautauqua, New York, and kept on
harassment, in such programs and ac doing so for nearly half a minute. Rushdie’s first thought was
tivities. In 2016, an expanded definition “So it’s you.” His second thought was “Why now?” Rushdie’s
of “disability” was added to the Ameri short masterpiece is a memoir about almost dying, the miracle
cans with Disabilities Act in response, of surviving, and being reconciled to a threat that could not be
in part, to advocacy on behalf of people forgotten or outrun: “Living was my victory. But the meaning the
with A.D.H.D. and learning disabili knife had given my life was my defeat.” Ultimately, his account
ties. The act defines disability as a phys is an inspiration. “After the angel of death, the angel of life.”
ical or mental impairment that substan
tially limits one or more “major life A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages, by Anthony Bale (Norton).
activities,” and “writing” is now included The latemedieval traveller, it was said, always needed two
as a major life activity. bags: one full of money, one of patience. Such wisdom fills the
For universities, these laws provide a pages of this immensely entertaining history, which is con
potential cause of action at every turn. structed around medieval guidebooks and travelogues, and
Students and employees who feel ha highlights dazzling destinations like Constantinople and
rassed, unsafe, or generally uncared for Rhodes under the Knights Hospitaller. Pilgrimage was a com
by virtue of their identities are entitled, mon reason people left home; by 1350, travellers could book a
under federal law, to make a complaint. tour to Jerusalem that included transportation, meals, and cur
The result is what Guard and Jacobsen rency exchange. Yet, as Bale shows, their experience of travel
call the “lawyerization of higher educa was not one we would entirely recognize. As one pilgrim put
tion.” Universities live in constant fear it, in 1384, “No one should travel who does not desire hard
of being taken to court because some ship, trouble, tribulation and the risk of death.”
one was treated differently.
But it’s not the individuals accused of Neighbors and Other Stories, by Diane Oliver (Grove). In 1966,
discriminatory conduct who are being Oliver, an M.F.A. student at the University of Iowa, was killed
sued. The laws do not apply to them. It’s in a motorcycle accident. This book, the first collection of her
the university itself. A group of women work, exhibits a unique delicacy in chronicling Black life in the
who said that they were sexually harassed nineteenfifties and sixties—especially in the South amid the
by the Harvard professor John Coma civilrights movement. In the title story, a girl observes her
roff are not suing Comaroff. They are brother on a tense night before he is to become the first to inte
suing Harvard, for a Title IX violation. grate his school; in another story, a young woman joins a lunch
(Comaroff has denied their allegations.) counter sitin. Oliver delves into subtleties of class, focussing
And when, in January, a group of Jew on characters such as a doctor’s second wife and a daydream
ish students sued Harvard for “enabling ing maid. At their best, the stories let ideas take shape gradu
antisemitism” on campus, they did so ally, making close observation the cornerstone of their politics.
under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The proPalestinian demonstrators Butter, by Asako Yuzuki, translated from the Japanese by Polly
who created the conditions that the Jew Barton (Ecco). In this thriller inspired by true events, a jour
ish students allege are antisemitic are nalist, Rika, becomes obsessed by the case of Manako Kajii, a
immunized by the First Amendment. sometime sex worker convicted of killing several men. Kajii
“From the river to the sea” is a political reportedly seduced the men with her cooking—much to the
slogan, classic protected speech. That is confusion and chagrin of Japanese society, which tends to view
why Congress does not subpoena the Kajii’s “huge” body as an abomination. Rika interviews the
demonstrators but goes after university wily Kajii in charged jailhouse meetings, and, as the two en
presidents instead.The members of Con gage in an increasingly fraught game of cat and mouse, Rika’s
gress who grilled Shafik want universi relationships—with her boyfriend, her colleagues, and even
ties to punish demonstrators precisely her own body—begin to change. The novel cleverly inter
because the government cannot. twines paeans to the pleasures of eating with indictments of
Almost all instructors want open Japan’s standards for women: “Whichever aspect of it you con
and robust discussion of controversial is sidered, Rika thought, the Kajii case was tinged by misogyny
sues in their classrooms and on campus, and the excessive selfpity felt by lonely men.”
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 59
because that is how academic inquiry the implicit understanding that diver- challenge as well. If you are telling stu-
works. No doubt university administra- sity extends beyond race. dents that they were admitted in part
tors want that as well. But the risks are This means that when Harvard’s ad- because of their race, in the interest of
not imaginary, and they arise, paradoxi- missions case came before the Supreme viewpoint diversity, they may feel that
cally, out of Congress’s desire to create a Court, in 2022, Harvard and other uni- they are expected to represent whatever
level playing field. Would you call the versities had been promoting the educa- viewpoints members of their racial group
Civil Rights Act,Title IX, and the A.D.A. tional value of diversity, and preaching are presumed to have. Thinking this way
“coddling”? Probably not if you were it to students and faculty, for forty years. is antithetical to a traditional aim of lib-
Black or trans or had A.D.H.D. Profes- It was a way of preserving race-conscious eral education, which is to get students
sors often complain about bureaucratic admissions. In fact, it was the only way to think outside the box they were born
bloat, but in a big university you need a of preserving race-conscious admissions. in—or, these days, outside the boxes they
large legal and administrative apparatus to And when the Court struck down the checked on their applications. Liberal
insure compliance with the law, and you race-based admissions programs at Har- education is about questioning givens,
need a large student-life bureaucracy to vard and the University of North Caro- not reaffirming them.
instill feelings of, well, equity and inclu- lina, in 2023, it specifically rejected the A university is a community, and ev-
sion. These are the goals that Congress very diversity rationale that it had ini- eryone is there for the same reason—to
envisioned when it passed those laws. tially prescribed and repeatedly approved. learn. The community has every right to
The professoriat did not invent them. The concept of diversity, the Court now bar outside parties and to insist on norms
said, is insufficiently “measurable and of civility and respect, understanding that
s for diversity, that was a concept concrete.” How can universities prove those ideals are not always immediately
A imposed on higher education by
the Supreme Court. In 1978, in the case
that racial diversity has the educational
benefits that they claim it does? As for
attainable. In most universities, physical
confrontations, the targeting of individ-
of Regents of the University of Califor- Powell’s ruling that academic freedom is uals with threats or harassment, and the
nia v. Bakke, the Court ruled that uni- a legal right constitutionally grounded disruption of campus activities are ex-
versities could consider an applicant’s in the First Amendment, the Court’s plicitly proscribed. When the rules are
race as a factor in admissions. The Jus- opinion completely ignored it. violated, the best approach is for the
tice who wrote the opinion, Lewis Pow- community to find ways to police itself.
ell, said that universities had this right
as a matter of academic freedom, which
“ D iversity” is not as straightforward
an educational good as it may
But most forms of expression have to be
tolerated. Tolerance is the price academ-
he said was guaranteed by the First seem. In the nineteen-twenties and thir- ics and students pay for the freedoms so-
Amendment—the first time that the ties, for example, Harvard used “diver- ciety has carved out for them.
concept of academic freedom had been sity” as a method for limiting the num- Still, the fact remains that all the em-
extended to insulate an entire institu- ber of Jews it admitted. At the time, phasis on diversity and inclusion did not
tion, not just individual faculty mem- “diverse” meant geographically diverse, prevent October 7th from becoming a
bers, from outside interference. a student body with more Southerners powder keg. The real problem is that all
However, Powell said, there had to be and Midwesterners and fewer students these issues are playing out in the pub-
a reasonable justification (in legal terms, from New York and New Jersey. It was lic eye, and universities are not skilled
a “compelling state interest”) for consid- affirmative action for Gentiles. at public relations. Since 1964, they have
ering an applicant’s race, which would In other words, diversity can under- been adapting to a legal environment
otherwise be barred by the Fourteenth write many agendas. Today, for exam- created largely by Democratic Congresses
Amendment’s guarantee of “equal pro- ple, there are demands that private uni- and a Supreme Court still marginally
tection.” He rejected the argument that versities be compelled to admit a socio- liberal on racial issues. Now a different
it was justified because it helped remedy economically diverse class or hire an political regime is in the saddle, in Con-
past discrimination or because it would ideologically diverse faculty. The fact gress and on the Court, and there are
be socially desirable to increase the num- that élite universities, like Harvard and few places left to hide.
ber of nonwhite doctors, lawyers, and Columbia, which enroll barely one per Academic freedom is an understand-
chief executives. The only constitution- cent of all college students in the U.S., ing, not a law. It can’t just be invoked. It
ally acceptable justification for race-con- are being asked to fix social problems— has to be asserted and defended. That’s
scious admissions, he said, was diversity. wealth inequality, political polariza- why it’s so disheartening that leaders of
A diverse student body was a legitimate tion—that no one else can seem to fix great universities appear reluctant to
educational goal and universities had a is a chief subject of Bok’s “Attacking the speak up for the rights of independent
First Amendment right to pursue it. Elites.” Bok clearly feels that these de- inquiry and free expression for which
Powell’s opinion was affirmed in 2003, mands are unreasonable; Dirks, in “City Americans have fought. Even after
in the case of Grutter v. Bollinger, and of Intellect,” expresses a similar impa- Shafik offered up faculty sacrifices on
again in 2016, in the case of Fisher v. tience. But both Bok and Dirks think the congressional altar and called in the
University of Texas. Both times, the Su- that it would be unwise for universities N.Y.P.D., Republicans responded by de-
preme Court said that race could be con- to ignore such demands. Bok calls them manding her resignation. If capitulation
sidered in admissions but only for the “the burden of success.” isn’t working, not much is lost by trying
purpose of creating a diverse class, with Diversity presents an educational some defiance.
60 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
Singer wrote, and he wanted to destroy
BOOKS both this ignorance and the industry
behind the abuse. He halfway succeeded.
“Animal Liberation” helped bring new
BEASTLY MATTERS militancy to a cause formerly associated
with decorous humane societies and
Where the logic behind the concern for animal welfare begins and ends. peaceable hippies. The book also helped
inspire the Animal Liberation Front, a
BY KELEFA SANNEH group devoted to direct action against
farms and labs that abused animals. And
it turned Singer into one of the most
prominent philosophers in the world,
especially among non-philosophers.
The movement against cruelty to an-
imals is broadly popular, at least in the-
ory—lots of people are bothered by the
way livestock live and die, although not
bothered enough to stop eating them.
But Singer is a polarizing figure, known
for his willingness to follow his logic to
conclusions that some might find bi-
zarre, or evil. Rejecting what he calls
“speciesism,” Singer has argued that we
ought to treat creatures according to
their cognitive capacities; by this logic,
he concedes, a “chimpanzee, dog, or pig”
might demonstrate “a higher degree of
self-awareness and a greater capacity for
meaningful relations with others than a
severely retarded infant or someone in
a state of advanced senility.” Directly and
indirectly, “Animal Liberation” has in-
spired generations of people who would
never endorse many of the claims made
by the person who wrote it, and it some-
times seems that Singer’s support for
animal liberation is viewed today as the
least objectionable thing about him.
In “Animal Liberation Now”(Harper-
Collins), a revised version of his book,
ne morning, in February of this an inspection. A single cow discovered Singer considers all that has and hasn’t
O year, Zahid Badroodien, who
oversees the Committee on Water and
in such a state might have become a
cause célèbre, but it was harder to rally
changed since 1975. “The media no lon-
ger ridicules animal rights activists;
Sanitation in Cape Town, South Af- around nineteen thousand of them. mostly, it takes them seriously,” he writes.
rica, posted on X that he had been Within a day, the cows were back at He is curious about the prospect of lab-
alerted to “a sewage smell blanketing sea, where virtually no one could know, grown meat, and attentive to research
parts of the city.” He assured residents or smell, their plight. indicating that a scallop is more sen-
that inspectors had been dispatched to There is a name for the cruel, and tient than an oyster, and therefore less
wastewater-treatment facilities, but half correspondingly clandestine, process edible, at least for someone with his
an hour later he announced that a dif- by which many animals become meat: commitments. He also seems slightly
ferent culprit had been identified: a ship “factory farming,” a term that is usually astonished that more people have not
in the harbor that was transporting cat- wielded as an insult, especially since the joined him in opposing the “tyranny”
tle—nineteen thousand in all—from publication, in 1975, of “Animal Liber- of speciesism. “There are now more an-
Brazil to Iraq, with a brief layover in ation,” an incendiary book by the phi- imals suffering in laboratories and fac-
town to replenish their feed. On board, losopher Peter Singer. “In general, we tory farms than ever before,” he writes,
conditions were “awful,” according to a are ignorant of the abuse of living crea- but he remains hopeful that one day
veterinary consultant who conducted tures that lies behind the food we eat,” people will attend to this suffering.
Martha Nussbaum, a fellow-phi-
What might our views about animal suffering imply about human suffering? losopher, is one of many who admire
ILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL PORLAN THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 61
Singer’s animal advocacy without fully been too distracted by climate concerns was through hardcore that I encoun-
endorsing his program. In “Justice for to pay attention to the slaughter of el- tered and, for a few years, adopted the
Animals: Our Collective Responsibility” ephants. “It’s all carbon, all the time,” vegan diet, equally inspired by both the
(Simon & Schuster), Nussbaum praises he writes, “and for all of the movement’s cause and the culture that surrounded
Singer as a “sophisticated” thinker while alarmism on other fronts, somehow the it, or maybe unequally inspired. We are
suggesting that it is wise to consider not end days of the earth’s largest land an- a self-obsessed species, and indeed self-
just the suffering of animals but how imal have gone practically unremarked.” obsession is part of what distinguishes
best to help them live the kinds of lives Debates about animals tend to be us from other species; we are more differ-
they seem to want to live. Most of her less about how to treat them and more ent from, say, chimpanzees than chim-
proposals reflect a left-liberal world view: about how much we should care when panzees are from orangutans. Perhaps
she has great faith in the ability of ex- they are mistreated. (Nearly everyone it should not be a surprise that so many
perts and government officials, work- can probably agree that, in an ideal animal-centric movements spend so
ing together, to better regulate our treat- world, nineteen thousand cattle would much time thinking and talking about
ment of animals. And yet the movement not be crowded onto a ship so fetid that humans instead.
to protect animals need not be a parti- it can’t come near land without alarm-
san cause. This, anyway, is the position ing the authorities.) Historically, advo- any religious traditions take kill-
of Matthew Scully, a Republican speech-
writer who has spent decades arguing
cacy for animals often failed because
the cause was judged unserious. This
M ing an animal to be a grave act,
though not necessarily a gravely wrong
that conservatives ought to care more perception began to change in the late one. One of the first verses in the Bible
about the lives and deaths of animals. nineteenth century, thanks to a hand- is a vegan commandment: “Behold, I
He made his case in “Dominion,” from ful of activists, many of whom were also have given you every herb bearing seed,
2002, which is one of the most bracing involved in other causes: abolition, child which is upon the face of all the earth,
books on the topic since “Animal Lib- protection, temperance. A century later, and every tree, in which is the fruit of
eration,” partly because it pushes so hard animal welfare and temperance were a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be
against Singer’s approach. Scully refines joined again in the punk offshoot known for meat.” But, after the flood, God told
his argument in “Fear Factories”(Arezzo), as hardcore, in which a number of lead- Noah, “Every moving thing that liveth
a new collection of essays that urges ing musicians embraced a “straight edge” shall be meat for you,” balancing this
both right- and left-leaning readers to ethos that was anti-drug and, relatedly, permissive standard with a stern caveat:
reconsider their assumptions. One of anti-meat. (Ian MacKaye, the musician “But flesh with the life thereof, which
them, from 2013, excoriates the “cheap credited with coining the term, has said is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.”
nature worship” of contemporary envi- that he viewed eschewing meat as a The idea of principled and thorough-
ronmentalists, who have, Scully says, “logical extension” of straight edge.) It going veganism seems to have arrived
more recently, at least in the West. In
England, in 1714, a Dutch-born writer
named Bernard Mandeville published
an odd and excellent book called “The
Fable of the Bees,” which opened with
an apian allegory in verse form about
laissez-faire government, but also con-
tained several essays, including one that
framed meat eating as a moral evil. “I
have often thought, if it was not for this
Tyranny which Custom usurps over us,
that Men of any tolerable Good-nature
could never be reconcil’d to the killing
of so many Animals for their daily Food,
as long as the bountiful Earth so plen-
tifully provides them with Varieties of
vegetable Dainties,” Mandeville wrote.
“I question whether ever any body so
much as killed a Chicken without Reluc-
tancy the first time.” When Jeremy Ben-
tham’s “An Introduction to the Principles
of Morals of Legislation” was first
printed, in 1780, he included an extraor-
dinary footnote that proposed a kind
of beastly revolution. “The day may
come, when the rest of the animal cre-
ation may acquire those rights which
never could have been withholden from more far-fetched than “the abolition of where it is due: @McDonald’s have
them but by the hand of tyranny,” Ben- Negro slavery” had recently been. reached their goal of sourcing 100%
tham wrote. “The question is not, Can Despite these decades of foment, the their U.S. egg supply from cage-free
they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can publication of “Animal Liberation,” hens, as they pledged they would,”
they suffer?” By the nineteenth century, roughly a century later, came as a shock. he wrote. “It’s not nearly enough, but
animal-welfare groups were growing in In fearsomely logical prose, Singer ar- it’s a step forward on a long march.”
England, and in 1848 the satirical mag- gued not just that we ought to treat an- Singer acknowledges his debt to Ben-
azine Punch noted the emergence of a imals better but that we had no right tham, whose question is at the heart of
“great Vegetarian movement,” imagin- to treat them any differently than we much of Singer’s work: “Can they suf-
ing a kind of meatless mania. “There treat one another. His radical repudi- fer?” But, as a consequentialist, he real-
are vegetarian missionaries going about ation of speciesism, defined as “a prej- izes that his book will likely do more
the country inculcating the doctrine of udice or attitude of bias toward the in- good if it offends fewer people, and so
peas and potatoes,” the magazine re- terests of members of one’s own species he deëmphasizes his suggestion that
ported, adding that “a silver medal will and against those of members of other infanticide might sometimes be justi-
be awarded to the vegetarian who will species,” forced readers to reconsider a fied, though he doesn’t retract it. He
dispose of one hundred heads of celery range of practices that they had learned has excised his claim that there “seem
with the utmost celerity.” to regard as normal. The power of the to be certain measurable differences be-
In a new history titled “Our Kindred idea lay in its simplicity, which left Singer tween both races and sexes,” and that
Creatures” (Knopf ), Bill Wasik, a jour- free to devote much of the book to con- “we do not yet know how much of these
nalist, and Monica Murphy, a veteri- sidering the practical implications: the differences is really due to the genetic
narian and a writer, show how this intentional horrors of animal-research endowments of the different races and
movement took root in America. They laboratories, and the unintentional—or sexes.” Singer’s point, in 1975, was that
compare the “rise of animal-welfare con- perhaps just unnecessary—horrors of these differences, whether between sexes
sciousness,” in the late nineteenth cen- factory farming, in which animals are or races or species, do not justify dis-
tury, to the rapid growth in support of often crammed together in miserable crimination. Still, he believes that some
same-sex marriage, during the twenty- conditions and subjected to painful op- differences do matter, especially differ-
tens, but they decline to simplify what erations such as “de-beaking,” to pre- ences in sentience, because sentience is
turns out to be a sprawling and rather vent chickens from pecking one another what enables suffering, and suffering is
diffuse story of complicated advocates to death, and “tail-docking,” to prevent what we ought to want to prevent.
and mixed messages. An astonishingly overstressed and understimulated pigs In many ways, this is a generous ap-
confident and well-connected activist from gnawing one another’s tails into proach, one that asks us to search ev-
named Henry Bergh founded the Amer- bloody stumps. erywhere for mistreatment, and redress
ican Society for the Prevention of Cru- Singer followed the chapter on fac- any that we find. Bentham and Sing-
elty to Animals in 1866, and during the tory farming with one about how to er’s alertness to cruelty, when their con-
next year he pushed New York City to become a vegetarian, and he included, temporaries were happy to ignore it, is
make it illegal to “neglect, maliciously at the end, a list of recipes, which prob- part of what can make them seem like
kill, maim, wound, injure, torture or cru- ably introduced more than a few West- visionaries today. But the focus on sen-
elly beat” any animal. (Bergh also be- ern readers to a form of “bean curd, tience and suffering can also seem piti-
moaned the influence of immigrants sometimes called bean cake, or tofu.” In less. Singer’s approach leaves no room
with a taste for bullfighting and other “Animal Liberation Now,” the recipes for speciesism, which means it leaves
“barbarous” practices; formed a compli- have been updated, with more variety no room for the idea that every human
cated alliance with P. T. Barnum, the and no more cheese. Singer has become is valuable because of his humanity—
circus master; and emerged as a lead- what he calls a “flexible vegan” (he has no room for what Christians call grace,
ing critic of vaccination, which he viewed said that he sometimes eats eggs, pro- the sense that all people have some-
as an affront to humans and animals vided they have been taken from free- thing precious and perhaps sacred in
alike.) In Massachusetts, a local chap- range hens), but he doesn’t seem in- common. Singer puts every living crea-
ter of the A.S.P.C.A. launched a pub- clined to worry much about either the ture on the same scale, each with its
lication with a name that was meant as purity or the deliciousness of his diet. own chance to earn, through sentience,
a tribute, though it now sounds like an “Frying the tofu is optional,” he tells the right not to be mistreated. This
insult: Our Dumb Animals. They were, readers, in the new recipe section, add- means that humanity is on the scale,
of course, “dumb” in the original sense ing that “it tastes better, but I don’t like too, and so perhaps are individual hu-
of the word; the magazine pledged to to consume too much oil, so sometimes mans, all of us liable to be judged on
“speak for those that cannot speak for I do it, and sometimes not.” Genera- precisely how sentient we are.
themselves.” An activist named Caro- tions of readers probably learned to
line Earle White, who came from a
family of abolitionists, called in 1887 for
a total ban on medical experiments in-
loathe McDonald’s from reading Singer,
but he himself is too practical-minded
to hold a grudge, and so in February
Sthisinger, to his credit, is motivated by
a desire to solve big problems, but
means that the small lives of ani-
volving animals—an unpopular cause, he startled some of his fans by prais- mals don’t figure much in his book.
but one that was, she maintained, no ing the company, on X. “Let’s give credit Nussbaum, by contrast, views a wide
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 63
spectrum of creatures with both affec- ize, and to have as much or as little con- duties,’” Matthew Scully wrote in Na-
tion and awe; they seem “wonderful” to tact with humans as they choose. She tional Review in 1993. He wanted to as-
her, as to so many of us, and she thinks holds that, because animals generally sure his readers that they could object
we should pay more attention to that “seek maturity as a central goal,” kill- to cruelty without endorsing any weird
intuition. (The book is dedicated to her ing the young is probably harder to jus- metaphysical claims. By the time he pub-
daughter, Rachel, who worked as an at- tify than killing the old. And she writes lished “Dominion,” he was working as
torney for an animal-welfare group, and that virtually all creatures under human a speechwriter for President George W.
died in 2019.) “Wonder suggests to us control should be guaranteed “at least Bush, for whom he helped coin the
that animals matter directly, for their one or two chances at sex and repro- phrase “axis of evil,” and he was already
own sake—not because of some simi- duction.” This means that companion rethinking his skepticism of “animal
larity they have to ourselves,” she writes. animals might permissibly be spayed rights.” Observing that people seemed
What she opposes is not speciesism but or neutered, but only after they have to have little trouble extending compas-
its cousin, anthropocentrism, a world had a chance to find some companion- sion for the weakest in their midst, at
view that puts humans at the center, ship for themselves. least in theory, Scully wondered why an-
and values animals only to the extent But why care about the flourishing imals should be offered less. He defended
that we decide that “they are (almost) only of animals, and not of a coral reef, pets, both the concept and the term. He
like us.” To her, Singer’s view, with its or an ocean, or a forest? Singer’s suffer- remembered reading Singer’s book as a
focus on suffering, misses much of what ing test provides one answer. Nussbaum’s teen-ager and then scrutinizing his own
makes animal life meaningful—mean- answer is complicated, and the more beloved dog. “Try as I might, I could not
ingful, that is, to the animals themselves. she explains it the closer she draws to discern in his furry face any desire at all
Nussbaum is known for developing, the anthropocentrism she says she op- for liberation,” Scully wrote. Indeed, he
with the economist and philosopher poses. In one passage, she points out encouraged his readers to visit a factory
Amartya Sen, a framework called the that a cat can be said to engage in the farm, if they could, and consider the idea
capabilities approach, which focusses “active pursuit of ends.” Elsewhere, she that the cattle confined there were “mor-
on insuring that all people have the abil- notes that a plant “lacks the sort of sit- ally indistinguishable” from the animals
ity to thrive. Now she wants to adapt uational flexibility that makes us con- they loved at home.
that approach to account for the differ- clude that fish are sentient creatures,” Scully took his title from the Book
ent ways that nonhuman animals, too, adding that “a plant is basically a clus- of Genesis, in which, shortly before His
“strive for flourishing,” and are frequently ter entity, a they, rather than an it.” It is vegan commandment, God grants man
blocked. “We are all animals,” she writes, not that the distinctions she makes are “dominion over the fish of the sea, and
“thrown into this world together, striv- indefensible. On the contrary, they are over the fowl of the air, and over the
ing to get the things we need, and often eminently defensible, because they re- cattle, and over all the earth, and over
thwarted in the attempt.” Nussbaum is flect the things (activity, flexibility, sen- every creeping thing that creepeth upon
horrified by factory farming, deeply tience, individuality) that we humans the earth.” Scully wrote not necessarily
moved by the plight of whales, and cau- tend to value in one another, and there- as a Christian (in one early interview,
tiously optimistic about the future pros- fore in the world around us. It is hard he mentioned that he had never been a
pects of pets, which she refers to as “com- to imagine a more anthropocentric view regular churchgoer) but as a thinker who
panion animals,” to remind us that they took the Bible seriously, and who was
exist not merely to please their so-called sure that Biblical “dominion” meant tak-
owners but to flourish in their own ways. ing gentle care of the natural world,
What does flourishing entail? For rather than simply dominating it or,
humans, Nussbaum has developed a list worse, emulating its cruellest attributes.
of entitlements, which may seem sus- Unlike Nussbaum, who endeavors to
piciously well matched to the interests figure out what we are each striving for,
of a humanities professor. (The list in- Scully accepted the mysteriousness of
cludes the ability to experience and pro- life, suggesting that God made all crea-
duce “literary” and other works but not, tures to “serve some purpose beyond our
explicitly, the ability to trade goods.) than one that surveys the natural land- full knowing.” What he wanted for an-
As for animals, the entitlements will scape and sees creditable strivers, sur- imals was not justice but mercy—a kind
depend on both the species and the in- rounded by less consequential organ- of gift, freely given by humans to ani-
dividual. She suggests that we heed “ex- isms and entities that don’t measure up mals. “There is no such thing as a right
perts who have lived closely with a cer- in the striving department. to mercy, not for the animals and not
tain type of animal and studied those even for us,” he wrote.
animals over long periods of time”;
working across national borders, those
experts could help us draft “a legally
Ssharepeciesism is easier to renounce than
it is to abandon, because most of us
a sense that human beings have
This is a poignant formulation, but
one that does not easily lend itself to a
program of social reform. And so “Fear
enforceable constitution” for every kind rights and responsibilities that set us Factories” chronicles how, in the years
of animal. Dolphins, for instance, would apart. “To speak of ‘animal rights’ is, in since “Dominion,” Scully has grown in-
be granted the right to roam, to social- the end, as absurd as to speak of ‘animal creasingly comfortable advocating for
64 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024
the “rights” of animals, as a way of in-
sisting that how they are often treated
is wrong, in ways that demand govern-
ment intervention. In 9868, the editors
of Our Dumb Animals boasted that their
board included “Roman Catholics and
Protestants, Democrats and Republi-
cans, License men and Prohibitory men.”
Scully, by contrast, has found allies vir-
tually nowhere: few politicians in either
party seem eager to crack down on so-
called “canned” hunting—in which the
quarry has essentially no chance to es-
cape—or to tighten regulations on hog
farming. When, in 2000, he told the
strategist Karl Rove that the Republi-
can Party’s platform might add a line
about animal cruelty, Rove’s response
did not rise even to the level of non-
committal. “Hey, man, at least you’re
thinking outside the box,” Rove appar-
ently said. “I like that!” And though
Scully defends his having worked with
Governor Sarah Palin, who backed a “And I don’t think this cable-news panel of experts
government-supported program of ae- is helping in these counselling sessions at all.”
rial wolf hunting, he admits, “The pile
of moose and deer antlers on the cam-
paign plane, gifts bestowed on the can-
• •
didate at every rural stop, did get to be
a little much.” on feminist or prudential grounds, ef- surroundings changed, and I found my-
Scully, in fact, has something impor- forts to force all pregnant women to self wanting to be less of an outlier. I
tant in common with Palin: like many give birth. But it’s strange that the peo- returned to cheese, and then fish, and
of his fellow-Republicans, and vanish- ple most concerned about the fate of then meat, having convinced myself
ingly few animal-rights activists, he is human blastocysts take little interest in that killing an animal is not necessar-
firmly opposed to abortion. This sets the fate of cattle or chimpanzees, and ily an act of cruelty. I’m not eager to be
him apart from Nussbaum, who has ar- that the people who think carefully about at the leading edge of the vegan revo-
gued that “access to abortion” is an es- the nervous systems of crabs take little lution, which may yet succeed, but nei-
sential component of “human dignity.” interest in the nervous system of a human ther would I wish to be at the tail end
And it sets him farther apart still from fetus. Often, the overlap occurs strictly of the meat-eating resistance. And I am
Singer, who has questioned whether at the level of rhetoric. “Voice of the sympathetic to the frustration of advo-
even newborn infants have “an inher- Voiceless,” the title of a 9992 compila- cates who can’t figure out why, nearly
ent right to life.” Scully can’t help but tion of mainly vegan straight-edge bands half a century after “Animal Libera-
see parallels between factory farming which raised money for the Animal Lib- tion,” cattle are still sailing the world
and abortion. “Both industries are blunt, eration Front, is also a phrase used by knee-deep in shit. A weekend with the
practical solutions to hard moral prob- pro-life advocates, who are equally con- work of Singer, Nussbaum, or Scully
lems that the people who advocate them vinced that they are expanding the cir- will likely make your next trip to the
have despaired of dealing with in some cle of human compassion. supermarket significantly more uncom-
gentler way,” he writes. “I have never There is something unsettling about fortable, and probably that’s as it should
heard a single compelling argument for the animal-rights argument, which is be. But these advocates also, in differ-
why the unborn must die or why the partly a matter of scale: the dizzying ent ways, remind us that important
animals must suffer.” Of course, there is numbers involved can make it hard to causes have a way of redrawing ideo-
a powerful movement in America to know where to start, or stop. The use logical lines, turning some of our op-
ban abortion, and no similarly robust and abuse of animals is tightly woven ponents into allies, and some allies into
effort to ban meat. When the pro-life into our world, which is why people opponents. It is not easy to think care-
and the animal-rights causes seem to who think seriously about it so often fully and consistently about what we
be, in many ways, natural allies, why do end up calling for broad changes that do to animals. If the people who try
they continue to belong to such sepa- might seem unwise or even indefensi- often end up endorsing proposals that
rate worlds? It is certainly possible to ble—at least, at first. My own years of make us recoil, this may say as much
oppose abortion while also opposing, veganism ended gradually, as my social about us as about them.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2024 65
This month, Swift released “The
POP MUSIC Tortured Poets Department,” her elev-
enth studio album. She has now reached
a level of virtuosity within her genre
LITTLE OLD HER that feels nearly immutable—she’s too
practiced, too masterly, to swing and
Is Taylor Swift doing too much? really miss. But “The Tortured Poets
Department” suffers from being too
BY AMANDA PETRUSICH long (two hours after it was released,
Swift announced a second disk, bring-
ing the total number of tracks to thirty-
one) and too familiar. Swift co-wrote
most of the record with Jack Antonoff
and with Aaron Dessner. (The two
producers have oppositional melodic
sensibilities: Antonoff sharpens Swift;
Dessner softens her.) The new songs
suggest that, after a decade, her part-
nership with Antonoff has perhaps run
its course. The tracks written with
Dessner are gentler, more tender, and
more surprising. The raw and stirring
“Robin” seems to address a child—ei-
ther a very young Swift (the album
contains several references to her hi-
jacked youth, including “The Manu-
script,” a sombre song about a relation-
ship with an older man), or maybe a
future son or daughter.
“The Tortured Poets Department”
was released following the end of Swift’s
six-year relationship with the actor Joe
Alwyn, and the album is mostly about
the utter unreliability of love—how
bonkers it is that we build our entire
lives around a feeling that can simply
dissipate. “You said I’m the love of your
Swift has become too omnipresent and powerful to make a convincing underdog. life/About a million times,” Swift sings
on “Loml,” a wrenching piano ballad.
n the past several months, Taylor some sort of Rubicon with regard to “You shit-talked me under the table,
Iuitous
Swift has become culturally ubiq-
in a way that feels nearly terri-
our collective sanity. Swift was every-
where, beheld by everyone. She is one
talking rings and talking cradles.”
Shortly after Swift and Alwyn split,
fying. Superstardom tends to turn nor- of the most streamed artists of all time she reportedly had a fling with Matty
mal people into cartoons, projections, on Spotify; Billboard reported that, at Healy, the front man for the British
gods, monsters. Swift has been inch- one point, she accounted for seven per rock band the 1975. (“I took the mira-
ing toward some sort of tipping point cent of all vinyl sales in the U.S. Swift
SOURCE PHOTOGRAPH BY AXELLE/BAUER-GRIFFIN/GETTY
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“We can close the deal with a secret handshake.” “I’ll listen to four pitches and then I’m walking.”
Kara Nagle, Morrisonville, Ill. Susan Murray, Ann Arbor, Mich.
THE 17 18 19
CROSSWORD 20 21 22
23 24 25
A challenging puzzle.
26 27 28 29 30
BY WILL NEDIGER
31 32 33 34 35
36 37
ACROSS
1 Pinch some dough, say
38 39
6 LAX setting
8 Hardly an original observation 40 41 42
14 World capital near the Gulf of Tonkin
15 Music to a massage therapist’s ears 43 44 45 46 47