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JUNE 28, 2021
6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
David Remnick on Putin’s amoralism;
hospital turned gallery; cop or anti-cop;
“Girls5eva”; Janet Malcolm remembered.
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
Nick Paumgarten 20 Pet Projects
Why are we so crazy about our animals?
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Will Stephen 27 People of Earth: Hello
FAMILY LIFE
Sam Knight 28 Dream Weaver
The art of putting your baby to bed.
SKETCHBOOK
Barry Blitt 33 “Lifeguard”
Dr. Fauci is in, all year round.
PROFILES
Evan Osnos 34 Undecided Voter
In a split Senate, Joe Manchin reigns.
ANNALS OF RELIGION
Margaret Talbot 46 Women on the Verge
Who is, and isn’t, allowed to be a priest.
FICTION
Camille Bordas 56 “Offside Constantly”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Adam Gopnik 64 Tycoons who built big.
69 Briefly Noted
MUSICAL EVENTS
Alex Ross 70 Returning to the opera house.
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 72 The Cézanne effect.
ON TELEVISION
Doreen St. Félix 74 Ziwe’s one-woman show.
POEMS
Anne Carson 42 “Life”
Paul Tran 61 “Bioluminescence”
COVER
Nicole Rifkin “Pride and Joy”
DRAWINGS Paul Noth, Amy Hwang, Charlie Hankin, Tom Toro, Pat Byrnes, Roz Chast, Elisabeth McNair,
Teresa Burns Parkhurst, Will McPhail, Joe Dator, William Haefeli, Rachel Ang SPOTS Christoph Abbrederis

Ruben Santiago-Hudson Mary-Louise Parker Phylicia Rashad Edie Falco
Dominique Morisseau David Morse David Cromer Anchuli Felicia King

PROMOTION
CONTRIBUTORS
Evan Osnos (“Undecided Voter,” p. 34) Margaret Talbot (“Women on the Verge,”
writes about politics and foreign af- p. 46) has been a staff writer since 2004.
fairs for the magazine. His new book, She is the author, with David Talbot,
“Wildland: The Making of America’s of “By the Light of Burning Dreams:
Fury,” will be out in September. The Triumphs and Tragedies of the
Second American Revolution.”
Anne Carson (Poem, p. 42) recently
published, with the artist Rosanna Nick Paumgarten (“Pet Projects,” p. 20),
Bruno, a comic-book adaptation of a staff writer, began contributing to
Euripides’ “The Trojan Women.” The New Yorker in 2000.
Sam Knight (“Dream Weaver,” p. 28), Paul Tran (Poem, p. 61) is a Wallace
a staff writer since 2018, is a frequent Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
contributor to the column Letter from Their début poetry collection, “All the
the U.K., on newyorker.com. Flowers Kneeling,” is due out in 2022.
Camille Bordas (Fiction, p. 56) teaches Doreen St. Félix (On Television, p. 74),
creative writing at the University of a staff writer since 2017, is the maga-
Florida. She is the author of the novel zine’s television critic.
“How to Behave in a Crowd.”
Natan Last (Puzzles & Games Dept.)
Barry Blitt (Sketchbook, p. 33) won the researches and writes about refugee and
2020 Pulitzer Prize for editorial car- immigration issues. He is also a poet
tooning, for work that appeared in this and the author of “Word.”
magazine. His latest book is “Blitt,” a
compendium of his illustrations. Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 72),
The New Yorker’s art critic since 1998,
Nicole Rifkin (Cover), a cartoonist and published “Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light”
an illustrator, lives in Brooklyn. in 2019.
THIS SUMMER ON NEWYORKER.COM
TOMI UM
DEPT. OF RETURNS
As vaccination rates climb, we are entering something like the world we left
behind. Visit newyorker.com/returns for stories about the revival of public life.
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
A HOSPITAL’S LEGACY plication that patients therefore received
substandard care—because why would
Chris Pomorski did an extraordinary poor people deserve anything better?
job of describing how the investor-led, As I am fortunate enough to be fully
misguided leadership of Hahnemann insured, I could have gone to any hos-
University Hospital hastened its shut- pital in the city, but I chose Hahnemann,
down and disrupted the lives of pa- because I was confident that I would be
tients, staff, medical residents, and stu- taken care of.
1
dents (“Death of a Hospital,” June 7th). Mary Jeanne Welsh
As Pomorski highlights, hospitals— Philadelphia, Pa.
even those with nonprofit status—have
become businesses. The demise of Hah- THE MODERN NIETZSCHE
nemann thus illuminates a larger issue:
the patchwork approach to delivering Merve Emre, in her review of Mieko
health care in the U.S. is inadequate. Kawakami’s “Heaven,” claims that “the
All developed countries face challenges Nietzschean literary tradition has largely
in paying for health care, but most have retreated in the past half century”
made access to it a right, and have in- (Books, June 7th). Among recent En-
stituted systemic approaches to fund- glish-language writers, no novelist has
ing and managing it in order to insure savaged the “ ‘moralistic mendacious-
that access. Hahnemann failed, in part, ness’ that Nietzsche attacked”—as Emre
because the majority of its patients were puts it—more than Philip Roth. The
enrolled in Medicaid and Medicare, title character of “Sabbath’s Theater,”
which pay less than private insurers. often considered one of Roth’s greatest
Should hospitals and doctors suffer be- novels, works on a puppet adaptation
cause they serve government-sponsored of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil.”
patients? Hahnemann is just one of many One critic described the protagonist as
cases in which the primary payment a “Dionysian artist, a seminal provoca-
system has contributed to a hospital’s teur/philosopher, a Nietzschean figure
downfall; without changes, there will beyond good and evil.” Later, a reviewer
be more to come. of Claudia Roth Pierpont’s “Roth Un-
Having recently retired after more than bound: A Writer and His Books” saw
fifty years of working in health care—
including thirteen months as Hahne-
mann’s director—I know the struggles
in her study of Roth an “American Zar-
athustra”—a reasonable comparison, as
Roth claimed as influences both Thomas
Now
that cash-strapped institutions face. I
hope that we can learn from the tragedy
Mann and Louis-Ferdinand Céline,
two European writers whom Emre as-
hear this.
of Hahnemann and create a more ratio- sociates with the Nietzschean literary
nal approach to funding health care. tradition. We can debate whether or Narrated stories,
Lou Giancola not this tradition has advanced in re-
Providence, R.I. cent decades, but, thanks to Roth and along with podcasts,
those he influenced, it hasn’t retreated. are now available in
I was pleased that Pomorski wrote about James D. Bloom
the quality of care at Hahnemann, where Professor of English and the New Yorker app.
I had three surgeries over the years. On American Studies
one occasion, in 2019, my husband rushed Muhlenberg College Download it at
me to the hospital. I was diagnosed as Bethlehem, Pa. newyorker.com/app
having a subdural hematoma, the result
of a traumatic brain injury, and I spent •
eight days there. I could not have wished Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
for more talented surgical teams or a address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
more caring nursing staff. Too often, I [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
have heard people dismiss Hahnemann any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
as a poor people’s hospital, with the im- of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 5

In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many New York City venues are closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found
around town, as well as online and streaming; as ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.
JUNE 23 – 29, 2021
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
With a nearly four-decade career, Angélique Kidjo is a towering figure of cross-cultural music. Her work,
which extends from Afrobeat and jazz to Afro-pop and world fusion, grows only more inclusive and cu-
rious with time. On her new album, “Mother Nature,” created during the pandemic, she teams up with
younger pop stars from West Africa and the African diaspora—Burna Boy, Mr. Eazi, EarthGang, Sampa
the Great—to promote messages of unity and healing, unpacking complex realities with cheer and aplomb.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SOFIA SANCHEZ AND MAURO MONGIELLO
1
TELEVISION
of Easttown” explores the repression of the
American male of a certain class and race, with
cautious optimism. Free on Ailey’s Web site,
July 24-26, the program includes new works by
little fetishizing. Between Mare and her crabby the company members Ghrai DeVore-Stokes,
mother, Helen (Jean Smart, who always has a Chalvar Monteiro, and Kanji Segawa. Ailey’s
Bo Burnham’s “Inside” wisecrack), it is the women who manage the artistic director, Robert Battle, offers his own
One of the leading auteurs of the mediated masculine tempers in their neighborhood. Why première, set to a Wynton Marsalis recording.
mind—a brain broken into shards by a steady won’t Richard Ryan (Guy Pearce), a handsome, And a tribute to the civil-rights hero John
stream of social media, open tabs, and reality washed-up novelist, leave Mare to her official Lewis features a dance film by its resident
television—the comedian Bo Burnham cap- police business? What’s up with Colin Zabel, the choreographer, Jamar Roberts.—Brian Seibert
tures, with frenzied and dexterous clarity, the county detective sent to micromanage Mare as (alvinailey.org)
unmoored, wired, euphoric, listless feeling of she investigates the murder? Can a shifty-eyed
being very online during the pandemic. The deacon, recently transferred to the local church,
The Chocolate Factory Theatre
1
ninety-minute Netflix special, which Burnham be trusted? Probably not, but, on the other
wrote and directed, is not a traditional comedy hand, can anyone?—D.S.F. (5/10/21) It never produced chocolate—the small rented
special but, rather, a virtuosic one-man musical space in Long Island City where Brian Rogers
extravaganza, and also an experimental film and Sheila Lewandowski presented experi-
about cracking up via Wi-Fi while trying to mental performance pieces, starting in 2004.
make said extravaganza. Burnham never ex- DANCE With its awkward shape and unpolished look,
plicitly mentions the pandemic, a purposeful it was clearly a makeshift theatre, run by art-
omission that allows the show’s title to take on ists for artists, and cherished for that reason.
multiple meanings. He leaps among visual and Alvin Ailey That the organization is now moving to a much
musical references with swaggering fluency, larger facility nearby, owned debt-free, is cause
and, as the special goes on, it gets sadder and
American Dance Theatre for celebration, but the old site, at 5-49 49th
stranger. During filming, he turned thirty; Looking on the bright side is the compa- Avenue, deserves a goodbye. On June 26-27,
he celebrates by watching a clock tick to mid- ny’s preferred posture, but the themes of its it gets one, with free performances on the
night and then performing a pop song about virtual spring gala—hope, promise, and the street outside the old theatre by Anna Sperber,
existential panic, in his underwear. “Inside” future—are both perennial and timely for Heather Kravas, Jon Kinzel, and Silas Riener,
is about feeling wayward and alone, but it’s the affluent stage troupe in this moment of among others.—B.S. (chocolatefactorytheater.org)
also a record of a pandemic year spent put-
ting extreme, electrifying effort into making
something.—Rachel Syme
ON TELEVISION
Made for Love
This show on HBO Max, based on Alissa
Nutting’s 2017 novel of the same name, is a
melancholic story nested in the shiny, protec-
tive shell of a tech satire. Hazel Green (Cris-
tin Milioti) is in a bad marriage with Byron
(Billy Magnussen), a billionaire C.E.O. who’s
developing a product called Made for Love,
a brain-melding technology that, via micro-
chips, eternally connects the minds of a couple.
The head scientist, Fiffany Hodeck (Noma
Dumezweni), tells Byron that the product
isn’t ready for human testing, but, eager to
start using it, Byron has a chip implanted in
Hazel’s brain without her consent, effectively
ridding her of all privacy and making her his
User One. Much of the story is told through
flashbacks; Hazel seeks refuge at the home of
her estranged father, Herbert (Ray Romano),
who, in the years since Hazel’s mother died,
has taken up with a sex doll named Diane.
Perhaps marriage, as an institution and as
old technology, is the real monster. With or
without the chip, Hazel is bound to Byron—a
solid metaphor for the interminable contract Any woman who is old enough to remember the nineteen-eighties knows
between us and the Internet.—Doreen St. Félix that it was a decade of extreme contradictions. The “me generation” was
(Reviewed in our issue of 5/10/21.)
all about self-improvement shortcuts—butt-blasting workouts, low-cal
diets, chemical hair perms—that often proved to be more punishing than
Mare of Easttown empowering. There was a bitter undercurrent running beneath so much of
The first episode of this crime drama, on
HBO Max, ends with a slow pan over a blud- the era’s perky media aimed at women: you’re not good enough, not by half.
geoned, half-naked body—belonging to Erin This is the subtle, violent message that animates “Physical,” a new comedy,
McMenamin, a devoted teen mother—draped on Apple TV+, from Annie Weisman (the creator of “Almost Family” and
over rocks in a Pennsylvania forest. By the
second episode, it seems clear that an ordi- a longtime writer on “Desperate Housewives”), starring Rose Byrne as
ILLUSTRATION BY SUA BALAC
nary man, driven by ordinary rage, killed her. Sheila, a big-haired housewife who gets her groove back by pioneering the
Kate Winslet plays our hero, Mare Sheehan— aerobics-VHS industry. Byrne gives an unsparing performance in neon
grandmother, divorcée, former high-school
basketball legend, and the detective assigned spandex, her delivery dripping with self-loathing and ruthless ambition.
to Erin’s murder. The relationships among The show can be pretty grim—this is not a bubblegum fantasy of the pe-
the characters feel lived-in; the generational riod but a merciless glimpse at how “fitness” messed with women’s heads—
tension between a group of layabout teens,
pulling inhumane pranks in the woods, and yet a bouncy synth-pop soundtrack keeps things buoyant, as does Byrne’s
their pained parents is especially vivid. “Mare ability to alternate seamlessly between preening and despair.—Rachel Syme

Kyle Marshall five-minute film “Animals & Angels”—which pieces from English clay, using a slow and me-
is available for free, June 21-July 18, on the ticulous process that she learned, in the early
The retractable roof of the Shed’s McCourt Joyce Theatre’s Web site—is a velvet revolu- seventies, from Nigerian women potters. Each
space, in Hudson Yards, is well suited to this tion, a gentle charmer of a kind that should be vase and urn is constructed from coils; the
period of transition from social distancing to more common. To a folk-pop love song by Joy object is then smoothed and burnished when
a full return to live performance. On June 25- Oladokun, two Black queer ballerinas, the ra- it’s semi-dry, giving its surface an uncommon
26, Kyle Marshall, a young choreographer who diant Audrey Malek and Cortney Taylor Key, glow. Odundo achieves her gracefully patchy
spent several years as a dancer with the Trisha dressed in casual clothes and pointe shoes, cloud-formation effects, in a palette of oranges
1
Brown Dance Company, fills the McCourt with dance the first steps of intimacy. It looks like or licorice blacks, through multiple firings.
“Rise,” his first live ensemble work since the the start of something good.—B.S. (joyce.org) Some of the works here (all of which are unti-
start of the pandemic. The piece, Marshall says, tled) have wide, trumpet-shaped mouths and
is about release and uplift, and the joy of moving tiny handles; more markedly asymmetrical
together to a pulse, provided by a house-music pieces have narrow orifices; many of the vessels
score. This is dancing as an expression of happi- ART feature small, nipplelike protrusions. There is
ness and ascension.—Marina Harss (theshed.org) a time-travelling—not to mention globe-span-
ning—quality to this series, which draws on
Magdalene A. N. Odundo D.B.E. an array of ancient techniques and silhouettes,
#QueertheBallet This British ceramicist, who hasn’t exhibited but Odundo’s singular gift and formal vocab-
Led by the choreographer Adriana Pierce, in New York City in thirty years, shows ten ulary mark her beautiful objects as distinctly
#QueertheBallet is an initiative focussed on earthy yet otherworldly vessels at Salon 94. contemporary.—Johanna Fateman (salon94.com)
expanding the representation of queer women Odundo, who was born in Nairobi in 1950 and
and nonbinary dancers in ballet. Pierce’s raised in India, makes her supple biomorphic
“Safe/Haven: Gay Life
in 1950s Cherry Grove”
IN THE MUSEUMS The nineteen-fifties may have been a but-
toned-up era in general, but in the summer-
time the queer enclave of Fire Island’s Cherry
Grove was a liberated zone, with a camp gentility
and a beachy dishabille (not unlike it is today,
albeit a lot more white and a lot more male). In
the courtyard of the New-York Historical Soci-
ety, this delightful outdoor exhibition includes
some seventy images from the Cherry Grove
Archives Collection, dating as far back as 1909.
(Admission to the exhibition is free, but visitors
must reserve a timed-entry ticket.) Pictures
of people in drag are a highlight, including an
image of young men wearing matching rag-doll
wigs and diapers, and the portrait “Ed Burke
in Ethel Merman’s Mermaid Costume, One
Hundred Club Party,” whose impressively cos-
tumed subject is seen lounging in an Adirondack
deck chair. A decidedly bohemian destination,
Cherry Grove attracted such well-known figures
as Truman Capote and Patricia Highsmith, and
it is still home to the nation’s oldest continu-
ally operating L.G.B.T. summer theatre. This
transporting show conveys the community’s
uninhibited, sophisticated culture and shares
the sunny moments of public affection and so-
cial refuge that Cherry Grove offered same-sex
couples—both a ferry ride and a world away
The Museum of Arts and Design’s spirited exhibition “Carrie Moyer and from the McCarthyism and homophobia of the
Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times,” on view through Feb. 13, era.—J.F. (nyhistory.org)
celebrates the formal vision and feminist politics of two abstract artists who
share an interest in glitchy beauty, vibrant color, and craft-store materials— Terry Winters
as well as a life. Moyer, a painter, and Pepe, a sculptor, have been a couple In 1914, Marcel Duchamp wrote a note to him-
self: “Make a painting of frequency.” More
for a quarter century. Married since 2015, they met at Skowhegan, an art than a century later, a superb new exhibition
residency in Maine. (The show originated at the Portland Museum of Art.) by Winters, at the Matthew Marks gallery, is
Moyer’s glitter-and-acrylic canvases—mandala-like translucencies that on the same wavelength. Duchamp, a champion
of “anti-retinal” art, might seem like an odd
COURTESY THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN
have earned justifiable comparisons to Helen Frankenthaler and Georgia touchstone for a painter as optically (not to
O’Keeffe—look as rapturous as ever, at once aqueous and pyrotechnic. In mention haptically) all in as Winters, but the
Pepe’s rhizomatic networks of yarn, rope, hardware, and cord, the domestic Brooklyn native has been reinvigorating ab-
straction by casting his mind’s eye on scientific
art of crochet becomes a sculptural superpower. If the show’s highlights systems, from astronomy to physics, for forty
are its individual works, think of the couple’s collaborations as generous years. How to express spatial sequences—orbits,
hosts throwing a party; the proverbial lampshade is worn by a gamely oscillations, perception itself—while carrying
on a tradition whose lineage stretches (at least)
goofy homage to the nonagenarian trailblazer Lee Bontecou, whose aim from the New York School to the Aboriginal
for her art was “no barriers—no boundaries—all freedom in every sense.” Australian master Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri?
The unfettered centerpiece here is “Parlor for the People,” from 2019, a Winters provides vibratory answers in the seven
oil, wax, and resin paintings here. Each one is
hybrid of lounge and sanctuary, outfitted with textiles and furniture, be- more than seven feet tall, making viewing them
neath an extravagant, genre-defying canopy of clouds.—Andrea K. Scott a full-body experience. Winters, who came of
8 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021

BEAUTY IS A POWERFUL FORCE THAT MOVES US.
Beauty gives us confidence in who we are, who we want to be,
and in our relationships with others.
HIP-HOP Yonatan Gat: Visuæls
ALTERNATIVE ROCK Onstage, Yonatan Gat likes to
point his instrument skyward, as if saluting the
guitar gods who watch over him, then dramati-
cally lower the instrument as noise erupts. The
Israeli-born New Yorker is the rare experimental
artist with a colorful flair for showmanship. By
all musical evidence, Gat is also something of
a madman: his former group, Monotonix, is
blacklisted at clubs throughout Israel—one of
the less controversial decrees to come out of
the nation, considering the band’s uncorked
concerts. Gat’s solo work is less confrontational
but more adventurous, by turns exploratory, ex-
plosive, and, increasingly, collaborative. With the
monthly residency Visuæls, at the Sultan Room
at the Turk’s Inn, Gat spotlights musicians of
far-flung traditions. The June edition includes
the Guinean griot guitarist Mamady Kouyaté
and the trumpeter Jaimie Branch, but the show’s
focus is on the dazzling Moroccan sintir player
Hassan Ben Jaafar and his band, Innov Gnawa.
Upping the night’s heady jumble is its venerable
opener, the free-jazz bassist William Parker.—Jay
Ruttenberg (June 26 at 9; thesultanroom.com.)
Jonathan Kaspar:
The once trendsetting rappers of Migos return with “Culture III,” “Connecting the Dots”
the final installment in their trilogy, an album that finds its purpose ELECTRONIC Since 1999, the Cologne, Germany,
in preserving the group’s reputation and reiterating the impact of its dance-music label Kompakt has issued a volumi-
nous, supple catalogue, which it has not been shy
music. The record is an obvious bid to get back something that’s been about repurposing. A new mix series, “Connect-
lost. There is nothing novel happening here—not a progression of the ing the Dots,” consists of d.j. sets by Kompakt
Migos sound nor any sort of tactical reëvaluation or attempt at refine- artists, containing Kompakt-released tracks. The
latest volume, by Jonathan Kaspar, is rooted in
ment, much less a cultural breakthrough—but the music is occasionally the label’s mature phase, although the tracks go
emboldened by a resolve to, at the very least, measure the crew’s cultural back to 2000, with Closer Musik’s classic “One
footprint for posterity. At times, the sheer dizzying maneuvers and Two Three (No Gravity).” But, in the midst
of the great reopening, it’s the plangent synth
configurations of the verses are still enough to dazzle. The album’s funky pads of Terranova’s “I Want to Go Out,” from
opener, “Avalanche,” is a feat of tumbling momentum and balance. Over 2011, that resonate most.—Michaelangelo Matos
the wheezing horns of “Jane,” the trio is, by turns, nimble, shifty, and
smooth. But, as Migos pushes to assert its status for the third time, it Harold Land: “Westward Bound!”
illustrates how little it’s actually moved in five years. —Sheldon Pearce JAZZ The late Harold Land is known primarily
as an early member of one of the most imposing
bands of the late bop era—the Max Roach-Clif-
ford Brown Quintet. Sandwiched between those
age as an artist in the nineteen-seventies, bor- liams, Irving Berlin, Pete Seeger). Brancy’s vul- two titans, Land might understandably be over-
rows Minimalism’s strategies of repetition, nerability to the material delivers on a promise of looked, despite his plentiful ideas, sure phras-
but his works are anything but formulaic. Just originality. Time seems to stand still as he traces ing, and the warm tone of his tenor saxophone.
when you think you’ve grasped the rules of his gorgeous, sustained lines in “Youth and Love,” Yet he sustained a lasting career long past that
game—say, containing compositions within hor- from Vaughan Williams’s “Songs of Travel,” and memorable alliance; his early albums as a leader,
izontal bands at the top and the bottom—you elsewhere his vocalism—robust yet clean, mascu- including “Harold in the Land of Jazz” and “The
encounter an outlier like “Thyreos,” a bristling line yet capable of softness—responds vividly to Fox” (which features an appearance by the elu-
1
pink oval pulsing on a field of blue.—Andrea K. moments of hope and yearning.—Oussama Zahr sive trumpeter Dupree Bolton), are well worth
Scott (matthewmarks.com) savoring. “Westward Bound!,” a newly unearthed
recording documenting all-star live appearances
Caramoor Festival from 1962, 1964, and 1965—with such hard-bop
CLASSICAL The summer music season takes a stalwarts as the drummer Philly Joe Jones, the
MUSIC welcome stride toward normalcy with the re- pianist Hampton Hawes, and the trumpeter
turn of the Caramoor Festival, whose verdant Carmell Jones—provides further evidence that
setting in Katonah, N.Y., has long been a most Land’s gifts deserve to be relished by more than
John Brancy: “The Journey Home” agreeable destination. First up in an enticing just devoted aficionados.—Steve Futterman
John Brancy’s new album, “The Jour- season is PUBLIQuartet, with a program called
ILLUSTRATION BY LIAM EISENBERG
CLASSICAL
ney Home,” captures a live concert, from 2018, “What Is American?,” which features music by
that marked the centennial of Armistice Day. Jessie Montgomery and Vijay Iyer alongside MET Orchestra Spotlight Series
The baritone and his recital partner, the respon- improvisations spun from Dvořák and Ornette CLASSICAL In March, 2020, the Metropolitan
sive pianist Peter Dugan, assembled a program Coleman. The eloquent pianist Richard Goode Opera cancelled its regular schedule of produc-
that builds a cohesive narrative from disparate presents a solo recital on Friday, the Guinean tions, and the members of its orchestra went
sources. There are contemporary settings of singer-songwriter Natu Camara performs on without pay for nearly a year. To fill the void, the
famous wartime poems (“In Flanders Fields” and Saturday, and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s caps a musicians started their own digital series, and
“I Have a Rendezvous with Death”) alongside fanfare-heavy Sunday matinée with a première stars such as Angela Gheorghiu, Eric Owens,
pieces by those who served in the First World by Valerie Coleman.—Steve Smith (June 24 at 7, Frederica von Stade, and Susan Graham volun-
War or in other conflicts (Ralph Vaughan Wil- June 25-26 at 8, and June 27 at 4; caramoor.org.) teered to host or sing in chamber concerts that

WE BELIEVE IN BEAUTY FOR ALL.
In 2018 we were among the first companies to sign the Unit
United Nations
LGBTI Standards of Conduct for Business to combat all forms of discrimination.
are available as fourteen-day rentals. The perfor- spots Christian at a café and follows him out; world figure Vogel (Gian Maria Volonte), who’s
mances, filmed in donated spaces around New while spying on him, François meets Lucie under arrest, manages to escape and teams up
York and often introduced by the players them- (Anne-Laure Meury), who is inquisitive, insight- with Corey—and the sharpshooter Jansen (Yves
selves, have a touchingly makeshift spirit that ful, flirtatious—and fifteen, ten years younger Montand), a former cop—on the heist, with both
keeps the focus on exceptional music-making. than Anne, a fact that he doesn’t omit when he a police inspector (André Bourvil) and Corey’s
A concert shot in early June is now available to challenges Anne on her presumed infidelity. gangland enemies in hot pursuit. Melville films
stream, with the mezzo-soprano Tamara Mum- Rohmer builds long scenes of erotically jousting this suspenseful and violent story with tight-
ford joining the musicians for Debussy’s “Chan- dialectic into radiant dramatic action. François lipped precision—he’s fascinated by the balletic
1
sons de Bilitis,” and for arias by Rossini and is caught between two women, one of them too grace of these life-and-death combatants, and by
Bizet.—O.Z. (spotlight.metorchestramusicians.org) warm for him and the other too cold, and the plot the depth of hard-won knowledge on which their
pivots on the question of who chooses whom— deadly power depends. Delicate maneuvers at
and whether anyone really has a choice. In as- a billiard table are matched by the heavy metal
tutely parsed jaunts through streets and parks, of the French gangsters’ huge American sedans
MOVIES Rohmer constructs an exquisite web of coinci- prowling the landscape with a feline finesse;
dences that he elevates into a vision of destiny. In the silent exchange of glances that seals the deal
French.—Richard Brody (Streaming at Metrograph.) between Corey and Vogel is a high point of tragic
The Aviator’s Wife bromance.—R.B. (Screening at Film Forum and
The protagonist of Éric Rohmer’s wickedly streaming on Amazon and other services.)
ironic romance, from 1981, is François (Philippe Le Cercle Rouge
Marlaud), a twenty-year-old law student in Paris, The title of Jean-Pierre Melville’s grimly elegant
but the real star is the green-eyed monster. It 1970 crime drama refers to the ring of fate that Hot Fuzz
strikes early one morning when François, who unites gangsters, police officers, and other den- Edgar Wright’s 2007 comedy is a worthy suc-
works nights sorting mail, sees his girlfriend, izens of the night in its relentless grip. While cessor to “Shaun of the Dead,” which dealt
Anne (Marie Rivière), leaving her apartment being released from prison, Corey (Alain Delon) with zombies in London; this, even more for-
building with her ex, Christian (Mathieu Car- is tipped off by a guard about a Paris jeweller biddingly, deals with the British rural classes,
rière), a pilot. Later that day, the jealous François that’s ripe for robbery. Meanwhile, the under- hellbent on preserving their way of life. Simon
Pegg (who co-wrote the script) stars as Nicholas
Angel, an ambitious policeman consigned, for his
own good, to a blameless country town, where he
WHAT TO STREAM pairs up with an overweight local officer, Danny
Butterman (Nick Frost), to chase shoplifters and
swans. Needless to say, there are darker crimes
to come, and the partners are finally drawn into
deafening shoot-outs and high-speed chases—all
the paraphernalia of the American cop movies
to which Danny is so devoted. The movie, gen-
erous with its gags, doesn’t so much spoof the
action-thriller genre as pay it prolonged homage,
in the most inappropriate of settings; along the
way, it finds time to anatomize the peculiar lusts
and lunacies of modern England—or, at least,
that part of it which tries to wish modernity
away. With Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton, Bil-
lie Whitelaw, and Edward Woodward.—Anthony
Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 4/30/07.) (Streaming
on Amazon, Hulu, and other services.)
Talk to Me
Don Cheadle brings sharp humor and deep pas-
sion to his portrayal of the Washington, D.C.,
disk jockey and talk-show host Petey Greene in
this historically vital and acute bio-pic, from
2007, directed by Kasi Lemmons. The action
begins with Petey in prison, in 1966, where he
hones his skills on the public-address system and
gets released with a bold ploy. He then pressures
With independent filmmaking slowed and theatrical releases only trick- Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the only
ling in, because of the pandemic, this year’s edition of BAMcinemaFest, Black executive at a radio station catering to
Black audiences, to hire him; with his political
the city’s leading showcase for independent films, is running online, frankness, personal candor, and scathing wit,
June 23-29, with just six features and four short-film programs, but the Petey becomes an instant celebrity. His political
offerings are no less worthy than usual. They include the world première commitment, as well as his civic devotion, is
severely tested in the aftermath of the assassi-
of Ougie Pak’s second feature, “Clytaemnestra,” a drama of a Korean nation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Then, in the
theatre troupe—six young actresses, one young actor, and a celebrated seventies, Dewey attempts to expand Petey’s fan
but tyrannical older male director—that gathers in a house in Greece to base to television and to white viewers, putting
their friendship—and Petey’s sense of self—at
rehearse a production of Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon.” When the director risk. Lemmons incisively dramatizes the massive
brings in yet another actress, a famous one, from Korea, her presence upsets media machinery that elides the painful experi-
the group’s chemistry and her star attitude sparks conflict. Meanwhile, the ences of Black Americans—and the high price of
COURTESY OUGIE PAK
resistance to it. With Taraji P. Henson, as Petey’s
1
director’s abusive behavior toward his less acclaimed performers gives rise impulsive and insightful longtime partner.—R.B.
to a parallel track of personal tragedy. Pak, working with a minimal crew, (Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, and other services.)
deftly sketches both the intimate passions and the perversions of power
that emerge in the theatrical hothouse—even as he thrills to the actors’ For more reviews, visit
grandly stylized classicism amid their daily banalities.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

Side restaurant, and who, in recent years, Kay, a former Gramercy Tavern chef,
had turned his talents to doughnuts— who started his home pizza business in
discovered a forgotten pizza oven in his January. If you can’t make it when your
basement. For months, he geeked out number is up, he’ll offer you another time.
1
on it; a year later, he decided to share his Kay produces just twelve ten-inch pies
R. & D. with the world. a night, at a maximum of two per cus-
Dufresne’s crust, made from dough tomer, twice a week, and also sells his own
TABLES FOR TWO flecked with whole wheat and cold-fer- cream soda (seasoned with vanilla and
mented for seventy-two hours, is notably cocoa nibs) and cookies from Best Damn
tangy, and satisfyingly chewy beneath Cookies, the pandemic project of another
Waiting for Pizza
its crackly exterior. It makes an excel- chef, who happens to be Kay’s roommate.
The other night, as I prepared to venture lent base for each of the four pies (plus My pizzas—one red, with mozzarella,
outside, the sky took on the ominous tone one calzone) available, including the soppressata, and pickled peppers, the
of gunmetal, and my phone lit up with a Classic New York, with tomato sauce other white, with mozzarella, caramel-
warning: severe thunderstorm approach- and shredded low-moisture mozza- ized onion, thinly sliced potatoes, roast-
ing, flash floods and hail likely, seek cover. rella, and my favorite: the Everything, ed-garlic cream, and capers, both bearing
All of my instincts told me to retreat, and topped with cream cheese, poppy and beautifully bubbled crusts—were faultless,
PHOTOGRAPH BY ZACHARY ZAVISLAK FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
yet I had an appointment that I simply sesame seeds, dried garlic, and salt, and the cream soda and cookies (dark-choco-
could not miss, come hell or literal high finished with fresh chives—a toasted late chunk, made with brown butter and
water. I’d finally been granted the chance bagel with melty schmear, in pizza form. coconut sugar) each an argument for its
to order from Stretch Pizza, a pop-up Still, I can’t exactly recommend the form. Being ushered knowingly toward
by the chef Wylie Dufresne, tucked into byzantine process it takes to obtain the elevator by a man eating nachos in
Breads Bakery, just off Union Square. Dufresne’s pies, weather notwithstand- the lobby felt like a rite of passage.
Perhaps this sounds like the ravings of ing. Tuesday through Thursday nights, In May, 2020, Gabriele Lamonaca,
a madwoman; maybe you’re wondering Stretch offers a limited number of reserva- a native of Rome who lives in Harlem,
if any pizza could be worth it. But what’s tion-only time slots for pickup, which sell began bartering homemade square piz-
a little tempest, really? It felt strangely out fast. Nothing came of adding myself zas—including his signature Burrapizza,
refreshing to experience such heightened to the online wait list for various dates. for which each slice is topped with an
drama around something as low stakes When, after weeks of randomly check- entire ball of burrata—via Instagram. For
as pizza. I headed for the subway. By ing the Web site, I finally snatched up a year, he met strangers on street corners,
the time I arrived at Fourteenth Street, an opening, I had to both preorder and swapping for anything from caviar to gui-
the storm had passed, and it was barely prepay, days in advance. tar lessons. Last month, he opened Unreg-
drizzling. At the top of the station stairs, The month prior, when I’d made it ular Pizza, a slice shop not far from Breads.
a woman hawked umbrellas with a com- off the much friendlier rolling wait list Accepted tender is mostly traditional, but
fortingly familiar rhythm: “Five-dollar, for Pies Upstairs—a similar if scrappier you can still add yourself to the list for his
five-dollar, five-dollar!” operation that, frankly, I’d forgotten I’d single daily trade. (Stretch pizzas $19. Pies
Early in the pandemic, Dufresne— signed up for—it felt more like winning Upstairs pizzas $13-$16. Unregular Pizza
who made his name with wd-50, his the lottery. “Upstairs” refers to the fifth- slices $4.50-$12.)
lightheartedly avant-garde Lower East floor Crown Heights apartment of David —Hannah Goldfield
A Place Where Pride Thrives.
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THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT responsible for the dissolution of the So- Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace
MORALITY PLAYS viet Union as its last General Secretary Prize, in 1975, he was not allowed to
and President, Mikhail Gorbachev. The leave the country to accept his medal.
he lives of the saints do not alter moral pressure that Sakharov exerted on “It is clear now that he deserved it,”
T the fate of nations—except when
they do. In 1953, a young physicist named
Gorbachev was no less consequential
than the pressure that Martin Luther
Gorbachev said.
For many years after Sakharov’s death,
Andrei Sakharov was working at a se- King, Jr., exerted on Lyndon Johnson. the post-Soviet Russian leadership, even
cret research site in Kazakhstan. The fa- In 1989, when Gorbachev sanctioned an as it grew increasingly authoritarian, did
cility was near a forced-labor camp, one unprecedented degree of open debate at not feel it necessary to dispute the dis-
of countless outposts of the Gulag Ar- a new parliament, the Congress of Peo- sident’s moral prestige. No longer. The
chipelago. Every morning, Sakharov ple’s Deputies, Sakharov took the po- state-controlled media gave the cente-
watched lines of prisoners marching in dium to call for an end to the Commu- nary of his birth minimal attention and
the dust, guard dogs barking at their nist Party’s monopoly on power. Gor- kept the focus on his contributions to
heels. Yet when the news arrived, early bachev, whiplashed by his conscience science and defense. When Moscow’s
that March, that Joseph Stalin had died, and the disdain of the hard-liners sur- Sakharov Center, which is devoted to
Sakharov did not connect the fallen gen- rounding him, wavered between letting human rights, planned a photographic
eralissimo with the misery near his door. Sakharov speak and cutting off his mi- exhibit in his honor, city officials pro-
“I am under the influence of a great man’s crophone. It was an unforgettable mo- hibited it, explaining, “The content was
death,” he wrote to his first wife. “I am rality play that was broadcast live across not authorized.”
thinking of his humanity.” a shattering imperium. Writing in the Washington Post, the
Five months later, Sakharov donned In December, 1989, Sakharov died in pro-democracy campaigner Vladimir
a pair of protective goggles and watched his Moscow apartment. Gorbachev came Kara-Murza deemed that decision “quite
the detonation of his horrific creation, to the funeral. A nervy reporter stepped appropriate” to the political moment.
the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon: up to remind the Soviet leader that when And so it is. President Putin’s policy on
“We saw a flash, and then a swiftly ex- political dissent is not so distant from
panding white ball lit up the whole hori- the seventies-era strictures under Leo-
zon.” For his contribution to the defense nid Brezhnev. Putin has insured that
of the motherland, Sakharov received the parliamentary opposition is tooth-
the Hero of Socialist Labor award and less, and has all but crushed any popu-
a comfortable place in the scientific lar opposition; his attitude toward dem-
élite. But, with time, Sakharov—like his ocratic debate is illustrated by the at-
American counterpart, J. Robert Op- tempted murder of the anti-corruption
penheimer—could not bear the thought activist and opposition leader Alexei
of what he had helped to produce. He Navalny, who is now languishing in a
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
rebelled first against apocalyptic weap- prison camp. Kara-Murza is hardly an

onry, and then against the totalitarian alarmist. He was an adviser to Boris
system. By 1968, he was the moral cen- Nemtsov, a former Deputy Prime Min-
ter of a small group of Soviet dissidents ister and an opponent of Putin, who
who were willing to risk everything to was murdered six years ago, near the
confront the dictatorship. Kremlin. Kara-Murza himself has sur-
Sakharov, who was born in Moscow vived two poisonings.
a hundred years ago, may have been as Last week, at the summit meeting
with President Biden in Geneva, Putin Donald Trump; he is no less shameless. 2018, at which he appeared to side with
made it plain once again that he is noth- In a week of summiteering, Biden Putinism over his own government. But,
ing at all like Gorbachev, who took po- did his level best to reassert a sense of although Trump has left the White
sitions based on considerations broader common cause with NATO allies and to House, his legacy persists. The leader-
than political survival and, at critical promote a foreign policy that seeks a ship of the Republican Party supports
moments, consulted the more complex foundation in values as well as in raw voter suppression, coddles conspiracy
demands of morality articulated by such interests. “Human rights is gonna al- theorists, demotes dissenters, downplays
figures of conscience as Andrei Sakharov. ways be on the table,” Biden said he told the dangers of climate change, and re-
Amoralism is Putin’s reflexive posture. Putin. “It’s about who we are.” It was a fuses to investigate an insurrection in-
Pressed on any question, he reverts to relief to hear an American President spired by a sitting President.
the now familiar rhetorical maneuver speak up for human rights again, but it In 1968, a year in which the Kremlin
of “whataboutism.” Asked at a press will take a great deal more to exert moral sent tanks into Prague to crack down
conference about his treatment of Na- suasion in Russia or anywhere else. U.S. on dissent, Sakharov wrote that “free-
valny, Putin equated that appalling in- history is hardly saintly: that “shining dom of thought is the only guarantee
justice with the prosecutions of the in- city upon a hill” is, at best, a destination. against an infection of people by mass
surrectionists who stormed the U.S. Shallow talk of American exceptional- myths, which, in the hands of treacher-
Capitol, on January 6th. With the great- ism has, over the years, allowed Putin ous hypocrites and demagogues, can be
est of ease, in private and in public, he to call us hypocrites, and to declare, as transformed into bloody dictatorship.”
can flip the subject from Russia’s take- he told the Financial Times two years It will fall to Russians, not outsiders, to
over of Crimea or its interference in the ago, that the liberal ideal has “outlived make Russia more free when Putin passes
2016 U.S. Presidential election to Amer- its purpose.” from the scene. But the only way the
ican racism, mass shootings, or brutal- Biden went to Geneva in large mea- United States can hope to set an exam-
ity in Guantánamo. Putin is a smarter sure to reverse the spectacle of Trump’s ple is by setting itself right.
and more skilled authoritarian than famous press conference in Helsinki, in —David Remnick
BEST MEDICINE as the “Women Who Dared” art collec- elevator, which took them up to the Multi-
UPLIFTING tion. “We bought ’em, we brought ’em Faith Chapel, a narrow room with sev-
home, we dressed them up. But we al- eral rows of stackable chairs and a Maya
ways knew they needed to do something Angelou quote painted on the wall (“Open
else. What we felt was ‘They need to be your eyes to the beauty around you!”).
seen!’” Bill grinned, and Sandi, who wore Three of the couple’s favorite pictures
a white blazer, and sunglasses atop her had just been hung there.
streaked-blond head, went on, “I say it’s “She was in the South Gallery!” Sandi
Y.U. Langone Hospital commis- time for these girls to go to work. They said, pointing to Fu Shangyuan’s “Mums
N. sioned a three-story-tall plexiglass
sculpture of a Dalmatian balancing a yel-
can’t sit on their laurels.”
Bill—a tall, taciturn, bald man—and
Before Frost.” “And she”—Alice Rahon’s
“Untitled (Cityscape)”—“was in the Blue
low taxi on its nose. A branch of NewYork- Sandi owe their art-buying fund pri- Bedroom! Or was it the Chinese Bed-
Presbyterian recently bought around three marily to the eight years he spent as Am- room?” Bill nodded. “And Reva”—Sandi
hundred blue-chip art works, including way’s chief operating officer. (Amway, gestured to Reva Jackman’s “Ventura
a Kehinde Wiley painting. Executives the eight-and-a-half-billion-dollar, defi- River,” a Cézanne-ish landscape near
at Northwell Health, the state’s largest nitely-not-a-pyramid-scheme market- some empty cabinets—“Reva was down-
health-care provider, realized that the ing company, sells, among other prod- stairs, in our Office Gallery, right?”
drab landscapes and still-lifes of flowers ucts, energy drinks, anti-aging creams, Bill nodded: “There’s a lot of wall
adorning its waiting rooms weren’t cut- air purifiers, and toothpaste in more than space.”
ting it anymore. a hundred countries and territories.) The Upstairs, in the maternity ward, Elois
Northwell’s problem was solved not Nicholsons started their Lenox Hill tour Jenssen’s “Fashion Sketch (Lucille Ball),”
long ago when it received an unprece- near the main-entrance desk, with a 1931 from 1954, had been mounted alongside
dented loan from a wealthy Houston oil painting by Lyla Harcoff titled “Flo- a Purell dispenser and a QR code, which
couple, Sandi and Bill Nicholson: four renze,” which was encased in plexiglass. linked to an audio recording of Katy
hundred and four paintings and sculp- “Look at that!” Sandi said. “I have chill Perry describing the work: “It’s fun to
tures composing a never-before-exhib- bumps all over me!” A nurse rushed by imagine Lucille Ball twirling around in
ited collection of women artists, span- with a newborn wrapped in a blanket, this glamorous yellow dress!” Perry is a
ning twenty-five hundred years and seven and a hospital executive, who was hold- neighbor of the Nicholsons’ in Santa
continents. “We lived with these girls for ing Sandi’s purse, exclaimed, “The young- Barbara, where they own a house. “Al-
twenty years,” Sandi explained the other est pair of eyes to see it!” most everybody in town knows Katy,”
day, while touring Lenox Hill Hospital, The donors shuff led past doctors, Sandi said. “She was invited to our house,
on the Upper East Side. Twelve of the nurses, and wheezing patients, and walked and she saw the collection, and we sort
works had just been installed there, billed down a corridor and into a just-sanitized of bonded on the idea.” Same story with
Carol Burnett, another Santa Barbara-
ite, who recorded the description of an
Elaine de Kooning portrait of J.F.K. that
will be hung later this year. “Carol has
been to see the art over many years at
the house,” Sandi said. Bill came up with
the idea of creating the QR codes, which
Sandi calls “the silent docents.”
A few feet away, a nurse with wavy
hair and an Apple Watch said, “I didn’t
even know it was Lucille Ball. I just liked
it because of the yellow-green color. For
babies, this color is good!” She peered at
another picture, Lydia Cooley Freeman’s
“Portrait of a Black Woman.” “And this
one, she’s so beautiful,” the nurse said.
“It just shows the ethnicness of the world.
Am I right?”
Sandi replied, “Yes, definitely!”
On the tenth floor, in a crowded sur-
gical waiting room, the Nicholsons stood
admiring two paintings of flowers in gilt
frames. Sandi took in Florence Lund-
borg’s “Bowl of Color” (circa 1910), which “Now visualize those three days a year you wear
was hanging above a chair in which a a swimsuit being slightly less awkward.”
man sat holding his head in his hands.
“Joy, absolute happiness and pleasure,”
she said. Across the room, a woman
• •
wearing an “MTA” face mask waited in
an armchair while a team of surgeons rators, but Raymond, who is running (“Crime + Punishment”) and Creole
operated on her daughter. A young man for a seat on the City Council, has an (“Krim Ak Pinisyon”). The documen-
in an “Anti-Social Social Club” T-shirt unusual biography: at a moment of stark tary, released in 2018, follows a dozen
nibbled a Rice Krispies treat, then sobbed opposition between police officers and N.Y.P.D. officers, including Raymond,
quietly into his left arm. “We want to radical critics of policing, he is both. He who became whistle-blowers, furtively
bring an uplifting message. We want to made his way from table to table, dis- recording their bosses with concealed
support all of the nurses, and the doc- pensing familial greetings (a hand on microphones and camera pens. The of-
tors, and the families,” Sandi said. the shoulder, a pleasantry in English or ficers, known as the N.Y.P.D. 12, sued
After the Nicholsons left the ward, Haitian Creole) to those he knew, and the department in federal court, alleg-
a visitor asked the man sitting under- a grip-and-grin to those he didn’t. A ing that supervisors instituted monthly
neath the Lundborg painting what he loudspeaker played Sinatra—“New York, arrest and summons quotas and encour-
thought about it. “I haven’t looked at it,” New York,” “My Way.” aged officers to meet those quotas by
he said. “I got a lot of other things on Celeste Saint-Jean, eating alone but targeting people of color. “The reality
1
my mind right now.” not guarding her solitude, struck up a is, law enforcement uses Black bodies
—Adam Iscoe conversation about the mayoral race. “I to generate revenue,” Raymond says in
like the guy with the business approach,” the film. Such quotas are illegal, and the
SELF-NARRATION DEPT. she said. “Wang?” N.Y.P.D. denies that they exist. This de-
POLICING THE POLICE “Yang,” Raymond corrected her. nial is harder to believe when one hears
“I like Eric Adams, too, because he the undercover recordings. (Raymond,
was a cop,” she continued. after allegedly being retaliated against
“I’m a police lieutenant, actually, and for making too few arrests: “What’s the
I fought against corruption in the de- issue with me? Just activity? Just the
partment,” Raymond said, handing her quota?” Supervisor: “That’s what it is.”)
a campaign flyer. “I’m also a candidate.” Raymond is running to represent Dis-
ast week, Edwin Raymond—thirty- Saint-Jean’s eyes widened. “Well, trict 40, which has one of the country’s
L five, fit, not tall, long dreadlocks—
walked into Kaché, a Haitian restaurant
excusez-moi,” she said.
Outside, it was a bright spring after-
highest concentrations of Haitian-Amer-
icans. “When I meet people on the street
in the Marine Park section of Brook- noon. Inside, the lights were dimmed who want to know, ‘Are you pro-cop
lyn, ready, as always, to tell his story. All for a film screening. Off went the Sin- or anti-cop?,’ I go, ‘You kind of have to
political candidates are serial self-nar- atra; up came a title card in English watch the documentary to understand,’”
he said. But many of these voters do not come was a reporter from the Haitian the hit Peacock sitcom about a Spice
speak English as a first language. So, this Times. The paper had just released its Girls-era pop group that reunites two
past winter, Raymond dubbed the movie endorsements, and Raymond had ranked decades after its prime. Pell plays the
into Creole. First, he painstakingly tran- fourth out of four. The article alluded member least suited to middle-aged fame,
scribed it. (“When I told the director, he to his relative lack of political experi- a divorced lesbian dentist. In reality, Pell,
went, ‘We already had a transcript, you ence. “Man, we need people in politics at fifty-eight, is on a hot streak. After
just had to ask for it,’” he said. “I went, who aren’t caught up in that system,” eighteen years writing for “Saturday
‘I really wish you hadn’t told me that.’”) Raymond told the reporter. “I’ve put Night Live,” where she had a hand in
Raymond sent his transcript to a cousin my life on the line for my people. That’s creating such characters as the Spartan
1
in Puerto Rico, who translated it into Cre- on another level.” cheerleaders and the omelette mascot
ole; then Raymond assembled a group —Andrew Marantz played by Justin Timberlake, she’s been
of friends, many of them community ac- gaining recognition onscreen—often
tivists or Instagram influencers with some SECOND WIND DEPT. alongside her more famous “S.N.L.” col-
fluency in Creole, and they spent several DEADPAN leagues, including Tina Fey, an executive
nights at a music studio in Queens, re- producer of “Girls5eva,” and Amy Poeh-
cording a dubbed version. “It took way ler, who directed her in “Wine Country.”
longer than I anticipated,” Raymond said. “I’m so used to writing and then watch-
He played a couple of minor characters, ing someone else do my funny,” she said,
and himself. cradling a Chihuahua-dachshund mix
A few months ago, Raymond took a named Ernie.
leave of absence from the N.Y.P.D. to wo weeks after the comedy writer Pell wore a blue shift and hot-pink
focus on his campaign. “I wake up hap-
pier every morning,” he said. “I didn’t
T and performer Paula Pell moved to
the Hudson Valley, last month, along with
clogs, her silver hair in pigtails. Letting
in a visitor, she apologized for the boxes,
realize the toll it was taking, constantly her wife, four dogs, and a cat, she heard and the barking, and the lack of grocer-
putting on that mental armor.” He was a crash out back. “Five minutes later, there ies. Her wife, Janine Brito, who is also
referring not to his normal police du- is a bleeding man on our front porch in a comedy writer (for the Ted Danson
ties (“Breaking up fights, robberies—I swim trunks,” she recalled recently. “Sec- sitcom “Mr. Mayor”), stirred mac and
have no fear about those situations”) but ond fucking week, and this guy is bleed- cheese. The two met on Twitter and got
to working alongside his fellow-cops, ing all over our porch, saying, ‘I got dis- together after Pell, depressed in West
many of whom, since the film and the oriented on the trail.’ And he was so lying. Hollywood after a divorce, took herself
lawsuit, have called him a snitch, a rat, He had broken into the guesthouse and on a retreat to Joshua Tree. Brito was
or worse. After he voiced public sup- cut himself.” Pell called the paramedics, also depressed and in Joshua Tree. Pell
port for Colin Kaepernick, Raymond and the guy was arrested.“But the beautiful sent her a direct message: “Would you
received anonymous death threats and thing about it is that then we met all the like to be my friend on the playground?
racist messages. “The department of- neighbors,” she went on. “They were all I’m really good at kickball, and I think
fered me security, but I didn’t trust it,” coming over, going, ‘I’m vaccinated! Can boys are gross.” They’d been planning a
he said. (The N.Y.P.D. did not respond I hug you? Don’t be scared!’” big wedding when the pandemic hit,
to a request for comment.) “I’m good The move was already chaotic, coin- and they decided to hunker down in
in Brooklyn—people know me, I’ve lived ciding with the première of “Girls5eva,” Asheville. “We got a motor home and
here all my life. But I’ve been told, ‘If thought it would be a real fun lesbian
you go to Long Island, or upstate, you’d activity to bring all our animals to North
better bring your gun.’” Carolina, and it was a living nightmare,”
The N.Y.P.D. 12 lawsuit remains un- Pell said. “Think of the most turbulence
resolved, and Mayor Bill de Blasio has you have ever experienced in a plane
not taken up their cause. “If you’re sup- and multiply it—that’s how it was the
posed to be progressive, and you have entire four days.”
whistle-blowers risking their lives to ex- They got married in November, at
pose wrongdoing, how do you not sup- Asheville’s city hall. By then, their quiet
port us?” Raymond said. “If we don’t pandemic plans had been upended; Pell
make some real changes, fast, then all had been called to New York to film
the increased tensions we’ve seen since “Girls5eva” and then to Los Angeles for
George Floyd—cops getting ambushed, “A.P. Bio,” on which she plays a tactless
vans being set on fire—it’s only going school administrator. (Her specialty is
to keep getting worse.” deadpan, winded, and guilelessly coarse.)
Most people stayed after the film Before “S.N.L.,” Pell had acted at theme
ended, and Raymond worked the crowd, parks, and now she’s become nostalgic
chatting with a rapper, a TikTok come- for other things she did in her twenties,
dian, and a former Miss Teen Haiti. like playing piano and wearing Eliza-
The only person who got a mixed wel- Paula Pell beth Taylor Passion. “I even bought weed
again!” she said. She pulled out three most five and her sister, Marie, was two of subjects. Her growth as a writer re-
shoeboxes of photos. “This is a place I and a half. Starting kindergarten with sembles a bildungsroman just on its
worked called Adventurers Club,” she very little English, she had to guess at own; readers wondered, on the edge of
said, holding a shot from the eighties. what was going on; every day, at the end their seats, what her next piece would
“It was at Pleasure Island, a nighttime of class, the teacher would say, “Good- be. From a regular column about do-
complex at Disney World.” This was bye, children.” She knew what “good- mestic interiors and design, About the
during a brief phase she called “going bye” meant but thought “children” must House, which she wrote for more than
down Penis Avenue.” Next: “This was a be the name of one of her classmates, five years, she moved to Profiles and
Dutch boyfriend I had a massive crush and she hoped that one day the teacher long, multipart pieces, essays on pho-
on. He looked like a tall lesbian. Don’t would choose her, and say, “Goodbye, tography, and works of reporting whose
tell him that.” Janet.” Her father, Joseph, who changed titles became famous: “The Journalist
In 1995, she was acting in a “Murder, his name from Wiener to Winn, was a and the Murderer,” “The Purloined
She Wrote” stage show at Universal Stu- psychiatrist and a neurologist; she later Clinic,” and “Iphigenia in Forest Hills,”
dios Florida, when someone at “S.N.L.” described him as “the gentlest of men.” among many others. In recent years, she
saw a pilot that she had appeared in. She Joan, his wife, worked at Voice of Amer- published pieces based on old family
was flown to New York; the show was ica and other jobs and ran the house. photographs. She didn’t want to label
looking for a female writer. “I said, ‘I Janet acquired the language in no the form as memoir, so they remain out-
don’t know how to use a computer. I’m time, not knowing how she did it. For side of any category. Their simplicity
not your man!’” Her acting life went dor- the rest of her life, she spoke in an un- comes from a life of devotion to her art,
mant while she helped other people shine, showy New York accent, like a quieter, and from some hard blows—the too-
as with Rachel Dratch and her signature non-gangster Bogart. As a teen-ager, she young death of Donald, a decade-long
character, Debbie Downer. Pell said, “It sometimes fooled around with it, pull- libel case that she finally won—and
was based on people at our workplace ing out the stops on the vowels, going when the pieces come out as a book
who would come in with bad news: ‘Did into full dems-and-dose mode, just to we’ll look at them and look at them
you guys hear what happened in China?’” see people’s surprise—at this slim and again and never figure out how such
The pandemic, she observed, has been elegant girl suddenly becoming as loud wonders were wrought.
a boom time for Debbies: “They’re, like, as a “Guys and Dolls” showstopper. She Janet’s second husband, Gardner
‘Did you guys hear about the variant?’” accepted her own brilliance as no big Botsford, who had gone ashore on
Womp-womp. deal. The precision with which she saw Omaha Beach on D Day, and who ed-
Fey had told Pell about “Girls5eva” the world must have kept the grownups ited her work at the magazine for many
when the show was in development, but on their toes. She went to the High years, died in 2004. He was a brave man
she didn’t imagine she’d be in it. “Be- School of Music & Art and then to the and she was as brave as he was. Janet
cause I know that they always get on University of Michigan, where she ed- and I were friends for the last twelve
the phone with the agents, who are, like, ited Gargoyle, the college humor maga- years of her life. She did more kind-
‘It has to be Melissa McCarthy, or some- zine. She appears at the top of its mast- nesses for me than I can name. Some-
one that has a name.’ ” Now that she head as “Managing Editor: J. W. Mal- times we went on adventures in the city.
has a name, she’s embracing small-town colm.”She had married Donald Malcolm, She liked to look for beach glass, and I
anonymity. “We love meeting people a fellow U. of M. student two years older used to drive us to a beach on Staten
here who are, like, ‘What do you do?’ than she was. The magazine’s articles Island where we could do that. We got
And we’re, like, ‘We are both archi- often ran without bylines. An anony- a flat tire on the Major Deegan Ex-
tects.’” She added, in a stage whisper, mous piece in the “anti-arts issue” titled pressway in the Bronx one Sunday and
1
“ ‘Of laughter.’ ” “The Bobsey Twins Meet Ezra Pound” a man on his way home from church
—Michael Schulman shows equal familiarity with the girl- with his family stopped and changed
detective mystery genre and early mod- the tire. It’s one of those things which
POSTSCRIPT ernist poetry. Like Chekhov, Janet started stay with you—the kind fellow taking
JANET MALCOLM out writing humor. off his suit jacket and tucking his tie be-
She and Donald moved to New York tween the middle buttons of his shirt
in 1957 and he began to write book re- before he set to work. Janet sometimes
views for William Shawn, then The New quoted a line from “Charlotte’s Web,”
Yorker’s editor, who treasured his con- the one that Wilbur, the pig, thinks
tributions. The couple had a daughter, about Charlotte, the spider who saved
Anne. Janet’s first piece in the magazine his life by writing a message in the
J anet Malcolm, who wrote for this

magazine for fifty-eight years, died
was a poem, “Thoughts on Living in a
Shaker House,” which appeared in 1963.
strands of her web: “It is not often that
someone comes along who is a true
last week in New York City, just a half No other poetry followed in the mag- friend and a good writer.” Janet was a
mile or so from the building on East azine, but she went on to publish hun- true friend and a great writer—a com-
Seventy-second Street where she spent dreds of thousands of words of prose— bination that must be rarer still. God
most of her childhood. Her family came amazing prose, of the highest literary bless you, and goodbye, Janet.
from Prague in 1939, when she was al- aspiration and attainment, on a range —Ian Frazier
mer solstice, is no longer sanctioned by
AMERICAN CHRONICLES the local government, but it hasn’t been
shut down. In recent years, the festival
PET PROJECTS
has attracted a migration of animal-
rights activists, among them Beri and
N.D.L.B., who identify slaughterhouses
During the pandemic, we turned to animals for companionship. Now what? and, with or without the help of the
authorities, attempt to take the dogs.
BY NICK PAUMGARTEN They also intercept trucks loaded with
dogs, which are often crammed, sev-
eral at a time, into chicken cages. Filthy,
malnourished, traumatized, and dis-
eased, the dogs have been picked up
on the street or bought or stolen from
their owners. As a result, the traffick-
ers usually lack the required paperwork
and are obliged to surrender the dogs
to the police, who have nowhere to
place them, and often would just as
soon not deal with them. The situation
gives the activists the pretext to take
the dogs and transfer them to shelters
they have established around the coun-
try, where they can, at least in theory,
treat, vaccinate, and sterilize them, be-
fore seeking new homes for them in
China or overseas.
The dog rescuers, in their promotional
videos, depict their operations as com-
mando raids. Beri deploys a security de-
tail, burner phones, and decoy trucks, and
owing to his intensity both of feeling and
of activity—climbing a tree to jury-rig
tarps, ignoring bite wounds and scratches,
directing a clandestine nighttime truck-
stop transfer of confiscated cargo—he
has come to be known, by his Chinese
counterparts, as the General; other ac-
tivists call him Dog Rambo Jesus.
No Dogs Left Behind, in its com-
J effrey Beri arrived in Guangzhou near

the end of April and spent two weeks
Beri, a fifty-six-year-old former jewelry
designer, is a co-founder of an organization
munications, cultivates an atmosphere
of emergency and apocalyptic canicide.
quarantined in a hotel. A few times a called No Dogs Left Behind, which res- In May, it circulated a call to arms on
day, officials in hazmat suits came to cues dogs in East Asia and arranges for social media (“We fight the fight on the
check on him. He watched television their adoption in North America. In 2014, front lines!”) with the word “Yulin” in
news and stewed over what he perceived after watching an anti-animal-agriculture red and an image of a bloody carving
to be Communist Party propaganda and documentary called “Cowspiracy,” he sold knife. Videos of horrors make the rounds:
a crackdown that China was launching his jewelry company and dedicated his dogs being tortured, or blowtorched, or
on pet dogs. life to animal welfare. In the spring of boiled alive.These drum up international
“You just want to throat-punch ev- 2016, he went to China and had his first rage, and donations.
eryone on TV,” he told me by phone, encounters with the dog-meat trade and Ten years ago, the journal Anthro-
half whispering, certain that the room the rescue game. zoös published a study of sixty societies.
was bugged. “You feel like a caged ani- Each year, in the city of Yulin, in In fewer than half were dogs consid-
mal, watching your kids get slaughtered.” Guangxi, scores of dogs are killed for ered pets, and even pet dogs were, in
By kids, he meant dogs, the ones he food, in what Westerners call the Yulin most cultures, kept around for practi-
couldn’t save from the Chinese meat mar- Dog Meat Festival. This spectacle, cal reasons: guarding, herding, hunting.
ket while he languished in quarantine. which lasts ten days, around the sum- In only seven were dogs fed and shel-
tered inside the home, and in only three
No creature on the planet kills or coddles other species the way humans do. did people play with their dogs. “Cul-
20 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY MIN HEO
tural differences and historical changes Our fraught relationship with the beasts plaining about the whole ‘I’m sad show
in patterns of pet-keeping . . . do not under our dominion may make us the me your pets’ routine . . . and this made
support the idea that love for animals most exotic animal of all. me sad so . . . I’m afraid . . . I need to
is a hard-wired human trait,” Harold see . . . your pets!”
Herzog, a psychology professor at West- o matter how you run the num- Fashionable breeds, their value ris-
ern Carolina University, concluded, seven
years ago, in the journal Animal Behav-
N bers, pet adoption became an ob-
session in the time of Covid. A story
ing amid sudden demand, turned up in
the crime blotter. In December, a man
ior and Cognition. line emerged that people, confined to from Cameroon was arrested in Roma-
By most accounts, dogs in China are their homes, deprived of contact with nia for catfishing Americans out of thou-
not cultivated strictly for food, though the outside world, and often suffering sands of dollars for phantom miniature
there are still dog-meat restaurants in emotional or psychological distress, were dachshunds and teacup Chihuahuas.
many cities. In Wuhan, dog-meat soup adopting more pets than usual—an- The prosecutor, a U.S. Attorney in Penn-
is said to ward off disease. There is no other boom, along with sourdough bak- sylvania, felt compelled to state, “The
law protecting the rights of domestic ing and butt implants. desire for companionship [is] higher
animals or prohibiting the sale of dog Doodles bounded in. Veterinarians than ever.” In February, on a quiet res-
meat. Household dogs and cats tend to were slammed. The vet network Blue- idential street in Hollywood, three men
roam freely, without having been fixed. Pearl, which is owned by Mars (whose stole two French bulldogs belonging to
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao pet-care business dwarfs its candy busi- Lady Gaga, and shot the dog-walker.
disdained dogs as a bourgeois indul- ness), reported that visits were up more Gaga offered half a million dollars for
gence, and even in 2014 the People’s Daily than twenty per cent in 2020—and that their safe return, and soon enough a
was calling dog ownership a harbinger more than half of them were from new woman came forward, claiming to have
of “the Western wind.” Still, West- patients. Vets, eager for more space, be- found them, only to be charged not long
ern-style pet ownership is on the rise, came an unlikely engine in the sputter- afterward as the thieves’ accessory—
especially with the younger generations, ing commercial-real-estate market. companionship of another kind.
who are driving much of the activism Kate Perry, a trainer and the co-au- The numbers only sometimes sup-
against animal cruelty. Peter Li, a pro- thor of “Training for Both Ends of the port the narrative. Although dognap-
fessor at the University of Houston- Leash,” said, “In my world, it’s puppies, ping appears to be up, pet adoption is
Downtown, who researches animal puppies, rescues, rescues, more puppies. not, according to animal-welfare groups.
rights in China, told me, “The bond Everyone was desperate at the same time.” The pandemic pet boom seems mainly
between humans and dogs is transcul- Petco’s sales rose by eleven per cent, to be one of increasing attention—and
tural. It’s false that Chinese don’t like Chewy’s by forty-seven per cent, and perhaps a deficit in other social and
dogs. My family had a dog before I was Morgan Stanley has predicted that the cultural pursuits. Andrew Rowan, a for-
born. We were in a rural area. One day, pet-care industry will almost triple in size mer president of Humane Society In-
the dog disappeared. This was during in the next decade. (It should surprise no ternational and now the head of Well-
famine in the early sixties. Later, I one that private equity is horning in.) A Being International, an animal-advocacy
begged my mother for a puppy. She al- recent survey found that three out of four group outside Washington, D.C., has
ways said no. The family was trauma- American millennials own a pet, a fash- been on a one-man mission to set hu-
tized once, and didn’t want to go through ionable generalization being that since mans straight. In a thousand shelters
it again.” they can’t afford to buy homes and don’t and rescues nationwide (representing a
A recent outrage of the pandemic want kids, they are nesting instead with fifth of all animals handled), adoptions
era (and a new instance of West con- their “fur babies.” Little dogs in bags and actually dropped by about twenty per
demning East) involves the so-called strollers, on laps at restaurants, in funny cent in 2020. It’s possible, but unlikely,
blind-box craze, in which e-commerce hats and sweaters. A bull terrier blows by that people compensated for that de-
customers in China have been receiv- in an Adidas tracksuit: Spuds gone chav. crease by getting more dogs from breed-
ing, as a surprise, gifts of puppies, kit- Some people seem to privilege pets over ers, or from pet shops, which are sup-
tens, or hamsters in the mail—many of spawn. Perry said she was teaching courses plied by puppy mills. (The Amish noto-
them dead on arrival. in “how to detach from your dog and pri- riously maintain big operations that
Some dead animals we eat, others oritize your baby.” essentially raise dogs as livestock.)
we mourn. No creature on the planet Social feeds, doom aside, became a So where did this idea of a pet boom
kills or coddles other species the way balmy menagerie of influencer pugs and come from? The number of dogs ad-
humans do. The scenario of a global let’s-all-make-one-another-feel-better mitted to shelters declined by more than
pandemic erupting from a wet market— terriers and mutts. Some people were the outflow did. It became harder to get
from exotic carcasses in dubious circum- using their animals as magnets for likes a dog, or at least the dog you wanted.
stances—clarifies the mind, no matter or even as entrepreneurial fodder. Others The shelters thinned out; the waiting
the viability of the lab-leak hypothesis. just wanted to spread the cute. Bunny, lists filled up. “The dog supply is very
Animals, or, really, our mishandling of the talking sheepadoodle, has 6.7 mil- tight,” Rowan said. “Even in the shel-
them, may well have got us into this lion followers on TikTok. Happiness is ters in the South, the supply is drop-
mess, and in many ways we have been a warm JPEG. A tweet, from the writer ping. Virginia has gone from being a
relying on them to get us through it. Sarah Miller: “Someone was just com- net exporter of dogs to a net importer,
in the last four years. What you’ll likely ing of the hour-to-hour mood swings. Who knows what Kiekko was think-
see is puppy prices increasing.” “Usually when you’re at work, you ing? We often tried to imagine it by
Rowan calculates that there are ap- don’t see what your dog does all day,” anthropomorphizing, pooch-talking,
proximately eighty million dogs in the Perry said. “Now it’s ‘I didn’t know you speech-bubbling. Kate Perry, the trainer,
U.S., a number that goes up by about a did that all day.’” Scratch, whine, howl: classifies four “canine-ality” types: the
million every year. The number of strays “A big thing is the triggered barking. workaholic, the sensitive artist, the me-
is only about one per cent of the total. In The sliding of boxes across a hallway thodical thinker, and the party animal.
2019, before the pandemic, shelters took floor, in apartment buildings. The dis- It seemed to us that Kiekko could be
in four million dogs. More than half a tribution of the packages. The UPS guy.” any or all, as of course could we. We
million were euthanized. We used to have There’s a lot of talk of a looming sep- bathed and brushed him, plied him with
fewer dogs and kill a lot more of them. aration-anxiety crisis, as unsocialized, rawhide and Greenies, invited him onto
In 1973, when the dog population was spoiled hounds encounter a new era, in our bed, and also occasionally called
less than half what it is today, seven mil- which the humans go through the door him a crackhead, for his single-minded
lion dogs were euthanized. 1973, as it hap- thing to earn the bread that pays for the huffing for scraps. Such hunger. You’d
pens, was a year of pet crisis. With New kibble. Andrea Tu is a behavior veteri- think we weren’t feeding him. When
York City a turd minefield, the media narian in Manhattan, which makes her neighbors, making elevator talk, re-
took up the theme of overpopulation. the equivalent of a psychiatrist: she can marked that he looked heavier, we took
“Thousands of unwanted pets roam the prescribe medications, including, but not offense. It’s the undercoat. Our younger
countryside, feeding on small farm ani- limited to, popular S.S.R.I.s such as Rec- son, a mischievous live wire, had been
mals and wildlife,” the Times reported. oncile (doggy Prozac), sertraline, and getting in some trouble at school, and
“They inhabit the empty lots of cities, paroxetine, as well as a range of fast-act- the dog mellowed him out: petamor-
coming out of abandoned buildings to ing basics like trazodone, gabapentin, phosis. But Kiekko was himself a bit of
pick through heaps of garbage. . . . Fright- clonidine, and various common benzo- a shit-stirrer. He menaced people car-
ened residents, particularly in slum areas, diazepines. “We’re looking at three- rying tools, men with odd gaits or hats
report packs of wild dogs terrorizing their month waits,” she said. “We’re seeing a or uniforms or floppy shoes. He stole
children.” The American Society for the ton of cases where people are in over sandwiches out of the hands of small
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the their heads. Now they can’t leave the children. One Thanksgiving, a thud
Humane Society, and other groups re- dog alone for ten minutes, much less for from the kitchen announced that he’d
sponded by pushing harder for steriliza- ten hours.” Many vets are concerned that wrestled a carved turkey to the floor.
tion—a “planned parenthood for pets.” shelters may begin filling up again. We walk him at the north end of Cen-
In 1970 in Los Angeles, for example, just Cats, meanwhile, are often disturbed tral Park. Before we adopted him, I had
ten per cent of licensed dogs were ster- by not being left alone. “They’re not used considered the dog people in the Park to
ilized. By 1975, it was fifty per cent. Now to having to share space with people all be kind of nuts. Once we had him, I got
that share is more than ninety-five per the time,” Tu said. “We’re seeing a lot to know how. Before 9 a.m., in parts of
cent. Micky Niego, a behavior counsellor of stress-induced cystitis—cats getting the Park, dogs are allowed off leash—a
in Rockland County, helped transform U.T.I.s, basically, when they’re stressed.” nice libertarian touch, in a jaywalking
the animal-adoption apparatus in New town. There are a lot of dogs out there
York City in the early eighties, as a kind ’m a dog person. My childhood diary, in the morning, doing dog things, while
of matchmaker. “The A.S.P.C.A. was a
kill shelter,” she said. “They had the con-
I abandoned after a few weeks, was a
chronicle of the family Norfolk terrier,
their humans do their dog-human things:
the scofflaws, the hall monitors, the la-
tract. It was the garbage can of New York who had one testicle and the soul of a dies with the slobber-stained pockets full
City.” She facilitated adoptions by get- poet. Eight years ago, my wife, my sons, of treats, the shambling elders in dog-
ting a clearer profile of dogs and of hu- and I adopted a mutt allegedly from Tus- safari vests stocked with accoutrements.
mans. She says that shelters have got caloosa, Alabama—mostly black, long- The dogless must doggedly pick their
much better at finding homes for dogs haired, about fifty pounds, a herder with way through. We fell in with a group who
and at treating them humanely, but then a retriever’s webbed paws. The boys, who got dogs around the same time we did.
again, she told me, “maybe there’s no hope were ten and eight at the time, chose him Behavioral noninterventionists, mostly,
for dogs, because look at what people do from an ever-shifting array on Petfinder, we congregated around a bench that now
to their children and their wives.” and changed his name from Zayn (the bears a small plaque with the names of
shelter apparently employed a One Di- an older couple who own a collie-husky
andemic life has shrunk our hori- rection stan) to Kiekko (which, accord- mix that, for a while anyway, Kiekko, a
P zons, narrowed our focus. For many,
the cat was the only companion, and
ing to their research, is Finnish for “puck”).
He came north in a truck that was bound
gelding since Alabama, felt compelled to
mount. For a few years, we all talked about
the dog walk, if you even bothered, be- for a shelter in New Hampshire and dis- having dinner together sometime, but by
came the only trip outside, the rare en- embarked at the Vince Lombardi Ser- now it’s obvious that we won’t. As it
counter with strangers. Home alone with vice Area, on the New Jersey Turnpike. stands, we see one another more often—
their animals, people paid them closer We took him home to our apartment and tell one another more about our-
attention. Helicopter petting: they fix- and surrendered very quickly to the prem- selves—than we do anyone else.
ate on every lump or limp, to say noth- ise that he was a member of the family. Over the years, I’ve had some run-
ins. There was the unhappy gent, a ringer some rhetorical twirls, of questionable saw a woman chide a doodle for sprawl-
for Van Morrison, who often stood near sincerity, in order to equate pet owner- ing on its back in the dirt, legs splayed:
the 103rd Street transverse, with what ship with incest, bestiality, and cannibal- “That’s not very ladylike!” Nor is allow-
seemed to be a dire wolf on a rope, and ism, and to call attention to the peerless ing an animal to lick your face; no one,
yelled at anyone who allowed an un- anthropocentrism of Christianity: “If one or let’s say few, would tolerate such a
leashed dog to come near. One fine April wishes to avoid or sublimate both literal thing from a fellow-human.
morning, by the Park’s mulch depot, bestiality and literal incest—as who does “We added dogs to our lives before
Kiekko wandered over, and Van Morri- not?—one way to do so would be to seek we figured out how to get the food we
son barked at my wife, “Fuck you!” She out a ‘snugglepup.’” The word “puppy” need and what to do with all the shit we
blurted back, “Happy Easter!” There was may derive from poupée, the French word produce ourselves,” Alexandra Horowitz,
also the aardvark of a man with a pair for a doll (from the Latin pupa); it made a senior research fellow at Barnard who
of enviable dachshunds who, after Kiekko the leap to canines in their incarnations studies dog cognition, told me. “It’s like
had run up on him too aggressively, as lap accessories for the women of the we didn’t think ahead.”
shouted at me, from six feet away, “You’re aristocracy. “Puppy” sounds playful Legally and practically, as Horowitz
an asshole!” He might have been onto enough, but, in light of its origin, also a observes in her 2019 book, “Our Dogs,
something. Or else he was projecting. little creepy, suggesting that the pet re- Ourselves,” pets are property. Humans
Happy Easter. mains in some respects inanimate in the buy them, collar and leash them, cut off
A pet, you could say, is an animal that absence of its owner’s projections. their tails and ears, govern their sex lives,
lives in the home and has a name, and With the right kind of distance— yet consider them family members. We
that you don’t eat. People dine on rab- a brain on science fiction, or a sativa buy them beds and toys, and forgive them
bit but generally not on the pet rabbit. gummy—one can start to feel a little their trespasses, even as we grumble about
One of the earliest uses of the term “pet,” queasy about the leashes and collars, the other people’s dogs—O.P.D.s—the way
five centuries ago, described a lamb that tugging and heeling, the sudden bursts we do about other people’s children. Dog
was raised by hand and kept as a favor- of anger and reproach. This institution owners will sometimes tell you they love
ite; it’s hard to imagine that such a crea- of cuddliness contains a trace of tyr- their Maxes and Bellas (the most pop-
ture didn’t become food, and that some- anny. Out of nowhere, a Park Avenue ular dog names nationwide, according
one in the household didn’t become sad. matron woofs an angry “No!” like Cae- to one survey, though it’s Murphy in Ver-
Over time, sentiment evolved. A Uni- sar in “Planet of the Apes.” The other mont and Sadie in Delaware) more than
versity of Denver history professor named day, I saw a middle-aged man sling a the people in their lives. Some humans
Ingrid Tague did a survey of pet elegies leashed corgi toward the curb and grab evince discomfort with the arrangement;
in eighteenth-century England, finding it by the scruff, the dog squealing as the they won’t call themselves “owners.” Petco
the incidence, even then, of deep mourn- man roared; apparently, the dog had got opts for “parents.” In Boulder, Colorado,
ing, snickering double-entendre, and to- hold of a bread crust or a tasty turd. it’s “guardians.”
temic carpe diem, such as “On a Favou- Why you so mad? If it had been a son, “We like the dogs that look like us,
rite Thrush,That Was Killed by Accident” I might have called child services. I also or our conception of ourselves,” Horowitz
and “On the Premature Death of Cloe
Snappum, a Lady’s Favourite Lap-Dog,”
whose fur, postmortem, was apparently
converted into a muff:
Now Clo’s soft skin—dear, precious stuff!
Adorns fair Delia’s fav’rite muff:
Still glistens while ’tis gently press’d,
And fondly by the nymph caress’d;
...
But stop—methinks I’ve said enough—
Oh, happy-happy-happy muff!
The rise of dog breeding, in nine-

teenth-century England—with its em-
phasis on purity over purpose, and its
echo of eugenics—ushered in a more
intentional age. Here was something we
could design, rather than merely tame
and train.
The Harvard literature professor Marc
Shell, in a 1986 essay titled “The Family
Pet,” explored the exceptional status of
the pet, as something half man and half
beast. Gesturing to Genesis, the Eucha-
rist, Freud, and Penthouse, he performs “It’s been a while since I’ve felt the breeze in my hair.”
was, like, ‘I can’t believe this shit!’ I offered
to take over the operation from there.”
Pagano refers to himself as N.D.L.B.’s
director of global logistics. He’s a licensed
pilot (“I can fly jets, but I don’t fly the
big tin”), and has connections at the car-
riers (“American Airlines loves me”) and
the airports (“I’m tight with one of the
union reps for the airport police at LAX”),
and so has been instrumental in getting
pallets of Chinese rescue dogs to the U.S.
“The dogs fly in my name,” Pagano said.
“I’m on the A.W.B.—the master air way-
bill. I’m there on the loading dock at the
cargo terminal. I’m the one handling the
dogs, and they are a constant reminder
why we give a shit.”
One morning, shortly before Beri left
for his latest trip to China, Pagano and
• • I drove out to Jersey City to meet him.
He was holed up at N.D.L.B.’s new “base
station,” as Pagano called it, in a mod-
said. “It’s so easy for people now to get airplane hangar on Long Island, to be est vinyl-sided house in the Heights sec-
the dog with the specs and features they deployed in the event of the destruction owned by an activist who helps di-
want. It’s weird that you can shop for tion of the one in Manhattan. Plugged rect N.D.L.B.’s operations. Pagano called
an animal by plugging in your variables in with New York Republicans, Pagano Beri on his phone to tell him we’d ar-
and then just clicking on the dog. It’s has countless stories of his wranglings rived. “I’m still in bed,” Beri said.
pretty dystopian—for animals.” with the city’s power brokers. One, about “He works through the night,” Pagano
“Shelter” dogs have become “rescue” a big-deal lawyer, begins, “That indi- explained. “China is twelve hours ahead.”
dogs, perhaps the better to signal the vidual that fucked me . . .” We waited outside for Beri to shower
hound’s plight, and the human’s virtue. Pagano’s wife’s family is from Puerto and dress. A tall young man named Ian
“The way our parents dealt with dogs Rico. Visiting the island, he noticed all McMath joined us on the porch. He
is different from the way we do, and I the “sato” dogs, the stray mutts that wan- had on black jeans and a black jean jacket
suspect it will be different for our kids,” der the streets and beaches. There are emblazoned with N.D.L.B. slogans.
Horowitz said. “Maybe ownership will some five hundred thousand strays in McMath, a rock musician and a film-
be regulated, or forbidden, a remnant of Puerto Rico. Pagano owns a logistics maker from Arkansas, had been living
a bygone idea.” We are already creating company, called Globalink Worldwide for years in Beijing when a friend re-
breeds of dogs that can be left inside, Express, and he started arranging to pick cruited him to do some work on behalf
engineered for the wee-wee pad, segre- up sato rescues who were arriving on of the animal rescuer Marc Ching, who,
gated from the natural world, like suc- flights from the Caribbean to New York according to McMath, wanted incrim-
culents on a windowsill. One imagines City. At times, there were dogs coming inating footage of Beri, in order to dis-
robot dogs, like ’Lectronimo in “The in every night. He fostered some himself credit him. “Jeff has a lot of adversar-
Jetsons,” or shareable pets—Zipcat. “It’s and tapped into other foster and adop- ies,” McMath said. “There are a lot of
entirely possible that in a hundred and tion networks. Engine 14, the fire sta- competitive and egocentric operators.”
fifty years we won’t be owning dogs at tion down the street from his apartment, Ching, who had solicited the support
all,” Horowitz said. near Union Square, adopted a pit bull, of Hollywood figures such as Matt
but Pagano, having fallen in love with it, Damon and Joaquin Phoenix, has been
ony Pagano, who is fifty-eight, took it back—a so-called foster fail. accused by the Los Angeles Times of,
T grew up on an apple farm in Ul-
ster County, surrounded by huskies and
In 2017, a staff member from No Dogs
Left Behind, familiar with Pagano’s
among other things, paying butchers in
Indonesia to blowtorch a dog to death
strays; when he was a teen-ager, his fa- Puerto Rico work, asked him for logistical on camera—effectively perpetrating the
ther, who ran a construction union, got help. Pagano went out to J.F.K. to meet horrors he was purporting to protest.
him work on big demolition jobs. For Jeff Beri, who was arriving on an Aero- Ching denied these charges, blaming
decades, he has had his own construc- flot flight from Moscow with nine dogs. them on rival rescuers, and told the Times
tion company and has built out law At the time, Beri was flying dogs as excess that “groups slander each other con-
firms, restaurants, the headquarters of baggage. “Here comes this guy passing stantly.” (Ching is also facing criminal
the N.B.A. and the N.H.L., and, after out twenty-dollar bills to the skycaps like charges for making fraudulent claims
September 11th, a replica of the New it’s candy,” Pagano said, of Beri. “He had about a pet-products business he runs,
York Mercantile Exchange, in a defunct nine dogs. Each one had its own cart. I the Petstaurant. Pretrial hearings are
this week.) He didn’t respond to re- in Nanning, about two hours from Yulin. Earth—that, whether this coronavirus
quests for comment. Beri, citing a legal rift and a subse- emerged from a wet market or a lab, our
“He’s a very nefarious individual,” quent agreement, wouldn’t talk about meat-procurement habits have doomed
Pagano said. “He was using Yulin to Ching, and instead told a winding tale: us to pollution, climate change, and dis-
get famous.” some hundred rescued dogs sequestered ease. Dogs are just the most emotion-
“That guy hired my friend, who sent in a monastery in Guangxi, where they ally turbulent example. Americans, after
me out to do a hit on Jeff,” McMath said. began to perish in droves, under the indif- all, have their own annual festival of an-
After seeing Beri in action, he switched ferent custody of the monks. Beri moved imal carnage, called Thanksgiving. “We
sides, and became his primary videogra- many of the dogs to a boarding facility believe the reckless slaughtering of an-
pher: “I’m like a propaganda lieutenant.” on top of a mountain, and arranged for imals must come to an end,” he said. “It’s
Beri greeted us at the top of the stairs. the keeper to be paid. When the money the cause of this pandemic.”
Thickset, with dark hair and some stub- was slow to arrive, he became, in his words, Anticipating some danger on his im-
ble, sockless in gym slides, he was “a hostage.” He eventually escaped, with pending trip to China, he had prepared
dressed, like McMath, in N.D.L.B. two dogs, fleeing what he called “a posse a will, and handed off the reins of
merch. His T-shirt bore the dates and of thugs” armed with knives. N.D.L.B. to a retired health-care law-
locations of rescue operations in China, “That was my introduction to rescue yer on Long Island, Jacqueline Finnegan,
as though recounting a concert tour. in China,” he said. In 2017, he and a jew- who had been volunteering for Beri for
(His Budokan: June, 2019, Guangzhou, elry executive and animal activist on a couple of years. “I have no choice but
thirteen hundred dogs.) The house had Long Island, Candy Udell, set up their to go back,” he said. Owing to Covid
been freshly renovated. There was one own organization, with some allies in and political tension, it would be weeks
room for six dogs, carpeted with fake China and in the U.S. “We believe in before he’d be allowed into the country.
turf, another for computer servers and building armies, not bringing armies,”
film equipment, and a bedroom for pass- Beri said. “The Chinese have to fight eter Li, the professor at the Univer-
ers-through like Beri. In a conference
room, with four analog clocks on the
their battles. I’m one white man.”
He estimated that No Dogs Left Be-
P sity of Houston-Downtown, has
been researching the dog-meat indus-
wall set to different time zones, a giant hind had saved “tens of thousands of try for twenty years. “The dog-meat
TV was tuned to Bloomberg News, on dogs, directly and indirectly.” And per- trade, as it is today, emerged in the early
mute, and classic rock played loud. Mc- haps some other animals, too: N.D.L.B. eighties, amid the strategy of economic
Math seemed to be filming us. converts its rescues to a meatless diet. modernization,” he told me. “Dog-meat
Beri began enumerating canine hor- “We don’t believe in rescuing dogs and consumption is supply-driven, not con-
rors, amid a confusion of places and then killing animals to feed them,” Beri sumer-driven. The traders make their
dates. I mentioned that I’d been deeply said. A U.C.L.A. study estimated that claims: it boosts your sex drive, improves
upset by a video that Pagano had shown dogs and cats account for more than a your complexion and general health, and
me of a golden retriever being blow- quarter of the environmental impact of so on. They started the Yulin festival.”
torched alive. “I hate people,” Beri said. the meat consumption in this country. According to Li, the government,
“It’s hard for me to be in public. I suf- Jiminy’s, a pet-food startup that uses while not outlawing the dog-meat trade,
fer panic attacks, anxiety.” crickets and grubs, has an eco-calcula- has thwarted it. You can’t sell dog meat
Beri was born in Rego Park, Queens, tor that estimates a pet’s “carbon paw- unless the dog has vaccination records.
and grew up on Long Island. His par- print.” Switching Kiekko to bugs would You can’t process a sick or dying or dead
ents, from Hungary, were Holocaust sur- animal for food. When an animal is trans-
vivors. They always had dogs. Beri stud- ported, it must have its own health cer-
ied jewelry design and engineering in tificate, from a vet in its place of origin.
Budapest and then became a master jew- A truck with five hundred dogs is sup-
eller. For a decade, he was the director posed to have five hundred certificates:
of product manufacturing and quality good luck with that.
control at David Yurman. (“He’s a force As a result of such measures, along
of nature,” Yurman told me. “He’s like with the work of activists and the rais-
Robin Hood. Sometimes he doesn’t know ing of awareness among the younger
when enough’s enough. ‘Jeff is manic’ is generations, the dog-meat market is in
‘the sky is blue.’”) Beri had been man- save more than half a million gallons of decline. “Maybe it is better to let it die
ufacturing jewelry in China for decades water a year, and five acres of arable land. naturally,” Li said. “I did a survey in
but didn’t speak Mandarin or Canton- It would also double our dog-food bill. Guangzhou. Ten years ago, there were
ese. His first dog trip to China was in Now and then, Beri smacked my shoe, two thousand dog-meat restaurants.
the spring of 2016, with Marc Ching, to emphasize a point. He was drinking Five years ago, we found only thirty-six.”
with the avowed goal of rescuing ten a Monster energy drink and getting Li admires the passion of activists
thousand dogs before the annual Yulin sweaty. His overarching message was like Beri, but said, “You can never adopt
spectacle. But Ching had nowhere to that the mass killing of animals, be they all the dogs to the West. Better to try
kennel the dogs in China. Beri built out dogs, or chickens, or cattle, is the big- to foster a local adoption culture.”
a couple of what he called safe houses gest threat to humankind’s survival on Last month, the Chinese government
issued a new decree that any animals and that couldn’t make it out. N.D.L.B.’s Pixie, whom they had renamed Tuzi—
to be exported by rescue organizations sanctuaries in China were full.The adop- Mandarin for “rabbit”—and had got
must first be remanded to a government tion fee had more than doubled. A large her a dog seat, for the drive back to
“breeding facility” for six months. “No dog now cost three thousand dollars. Cambridge. “Oh, God, it’s a real dog,”
reputable rescue would do that,” Jackie Then, last week, the Centers for Dis- Polansky said to herself. “This isn’t a
Finnegan, of N.D.L.B., told me. “So, in ease Control and Prevention, citing the video game anymore.”
effect, China has stopped the exporta- risk of rabies, announced a temporary Six months later, Polansky has mis-
tion of dogs.” The talk among some in ban, beginning July 14th, on the import givings about N.D.L.B.—“The mili-
the community was that Beri, with his of dogs from more than a hundred coun- tary symbolism and the videos, it all
visibility, wasn’t helping. “Foreign rescu- tries, including China. “It’s a death sen- has a cultlike feel”—but not about the
ers in China don’t like him,” an Ameri- tence to our dogs if we can’t get them dog. “I look at Tuzi and, if it weren’t
can animal activist who has spent time out in time,” Pagano said. for them, she would have starved to
in Wuhan said, of Beri. “He goes to the Meanwhile, on his way to Yulin, Beri death. It’s undeniable that they’re sav-
media, makes a big drama, and it back- visited Wuhan, to look in on the wet mar- ing so many dogs.”
fires in China.” kets. “It’s a ghost town,” he said. “I’m see- Another dog aboard the Air China
“A Caucasian should avoid appear- ing clothes hanging from the meat hooks. flight was bound for Canada. Taylor
ing on the scene at Yulin,” Peter Li said. There are no signs of reckless slaughter. Vincent, a dog groomer in her twenties,
“Even I, a Chinese-American, would I expected to see cats and dogs and meat had learned about No Dogs Left Be-
not appear on the scene. The presence flying all over the place, but there’s zero.” hind through a corgi Facebook group.
of foreign intervention will be used by She loved corgis, always had, and by co-
the traders against the animal-rights n March, before I’d heard of No Dogs incidence so did her boyfriend, Jack.
movement. The dog-meat industry is
already ugly. No need to make it uglier
I Left Behind, a colleague told me that
an airplane full of dogs from China had
Their house, in Brantford, Ontario, is
cluttered with corgi statues and fixtures.
with false claims.” For example, the al- arrived late last year at J.F.K. I immedi- They had a corgi who had epilepsy and
legation, which I’d heard repeated by ately pictured a passenger cabin with wanted a companion for him. Also, her
Pagano, Beri, and others, that the slaugh- purebreds in first class, mutts in the back, family’s Labrador had recently died.
terhouses sometimes torture the animals a service Lab rolling a cart of treats down “This was and still is one of the hard-
to make the meat taste better. “All this the aisle. One of the adopters at J.F.K. est days of my life,” she said.
stuff about torching and flaying and boil- that day was Mia Polansky, a doctoral Last April, they adopted a long-haired
ing alive,” Li said. “I have been in the candidate in electrical engineering at Pembroke corgi named Faye. Seven
movement for twenty years, and I’ve Harvard. Early in 2020, she and her part- months later, Faye arrived at J.F.K., and
never seen those things. I can’t rule it ner, finally in an apartment that allowed then two days later, via transport, in On-
out entirely, but these are not standard pets, started looking for a dog. To get tario. Vincent had paid thirty-five hun-
industry practices.” pole position on a shelter database, she dred dollars. “We were told she was saved
“The powers that be cannot stand wrote a script on Python that automat- from an illegal Chinese puppy mill and
him,” Finnegan said, of Beri. “He op- ically refreshed the screen. Then a post was being sold for meat,” Vincent said.
erates under cover of darkness. He was on Facebook directed her to N.D.L.B.’s “I asked that Jeff Beri guy, who said she’d
called in recently by the police for an page, where she came upon videos of a been rescued from a slaughterhouse truck.
interrogation.” Beri, on the move, talked three-or-so-year-old mini poodle named But there’s no video of it.”
to her almost every day, from one of his Pixie, at one of the organization’s shel- Vincent said she’d heard stories from
phones, and appeared in daily videos, ters in Gongyi. “She was destined for other adopters that had soured her on
on social media, pleading for aid. Some slaughter and our brave activists saved N.D.L.B. “I’ve got a few friends who
depicted him amid a tumult of rescues; her,” the video’s caption read. She was have adopted from there,” she said.
others featured slaughterhouse scenes. looking for “her forever home.” “All of them had bad experiences get-
“THE DOGS IN THE CAGES KNOW THEY Polansky paid the adoption fee of ting them here, so I felt kind of bad.” A
WILL DIE! THEY SEE THE DEAD DOGS nine hundred and seventy-five dollars. pug arrived “heavily pregnant” in spite
BELOW THEM. THEY HEAR THE It was June, 2020, and no one, man or of assurances that the dogs had all been
SCREAMS. THE CHOPPING.” beast, was going anywhere. In October, spayed. One dog had a dislocated hip.
Finnegan was back on Long Island, she paid an additional twelve hundred Another had a deformed leg requiring
trying to shore up the finances. Last dollars, to account for the higher cost expensive surgery. Another was eleven
year, N.D.L.B. took in $1.4 million, but of pandemic transport. A month later, years old, rather than three, with tumors
this past year the cargo shutdown and on the day after Thanksgiving, Pixie ar- and dental problems. “They love the
the cost of caring for the marooned res- rived on an Air China flight from Bei- dog, but . . . ,” she said.
cues in China had emptied the coffers. jing. At Building 151, Pagano and a crew In November, when Faye finally ar-
She was also busy reassuring adopters unloaded cages of rattled and dirty dogs rived, by van, Vincent and her boyfriend
amid their dwindling hopes. Pagano stacked on pallets. There were eighty- cried. “I would die for this dog,” she
had been stymied in attempts to line one dogs aboard. Seven had died days said. They had decided never to have
up a flight out of China. There were before the trip. Polansky and her part- children. “We think of our corgis as our
ninety-five dogs that had been adopted ner were out on the tarmac to greet kids, but not in a crazy way.” 
share our knowledge and alleviate your
SHOUTS & MURMURS pain. But, honestly, that Tucker weirdo
kinda makes us want to turn around
and go home. I mean, good Lord, what
a pill. Just. So. Much. Complaining.
Dude, stop acting like you didn’t take
the vaccine! You know we can see you,
right? And now you refer to the way
anti-vaxxers are treated as “medical Jim
Crow”?! Yeesh. Chill, bro! Take a yoga
class! It’s gonna be O.K.!
Look, we really liked the pyramids.
Those were cool, and we’d love to see
more of that kind of thing. But please
ditch this guy. It isn’t worth it. He just
sucks, and, in the context of the uni-
verse as a whole, you look goofy as hell
right now.
Truly, when we tell you how to fix
the whole climate-change thing, you’re
going to be, like, Wow. O.K., we are
officially dumb. And guess what? You
kind of are. But maybe the first step
toward changing that is not hanging
on every word from a sweaty rich prick
with a ski-goggle tan.
Also, side note: the concept of rac-
ism is hilarious to us. What a waste
of everyone’s time. Skin color? Really?
I mean, it’s not funny, but it’s kind of
funny, you know what I mean? Also,
Tuck, come on. It’s, like, Buddy, look
PEOPLE OF EARTH: HELLO

in the mirror. White people aren’t ex-
actly special. You have, like, hot dogs,
the Beatles, and that’s kind of it. That’s
BY WILL STEPHEN the culture you’re trying to protect?
We say this with love: Let it go. You
e have been observing you for vision, we understand that. But he is guys peaked like eighty years ago. Trust
W millennia, from a great distance.
Your development, your cultures, your
far from your most intelligent or most
capable human. By, like, a long shot.
us. It gets better.
I guess what we’re saying is, you
wars. Your ways fascinate us. Recently, He seems very upset, all the time, about beings seem pretty chill as a whole,
you have seen our crafts in your air- things that basically don’t exist. And but, all things being equal, you can
space. Yes, we are real. And, yes, we this is coming from aliens. miss us with the Tucker bullshit. I
are ready to initiate contact. So why him? Your planet is suffer- mean, we regularly travel billions of
In earthly terms, we have progressed ing, its extinction is imminent. And light-years to visit you, but that dude
beyond the concepts of nations, divi- yet this asshole is talking about An- is exhausting. We don’t even believe
sion, and conflict. We are a peaceful tifa. It’s, like, dude. Zoom out. in the concept of good and bad, but
civilization, built on coöperation, tech- He does realize Antifa isn’t a thing, he’s for sure bad.
nological progress, and the power of right? I mean, we have technology Anyway, talk soon. Keep calm. You
thought. beyond the scope of human compre- got this. And, if things get truly out
We have gathered from our obser- hension, and even we cannot find a of hand, don’t sweat. We’ll just incin-
vations that currently the most pow- shred of evidence that an organiza- erate you all in a nanosecond.
erful Thought Leader in your most tion called Antifa exists, let alone poses
powerful nation is a human known as any actual threat to your “suburbs.” Love and kisses,
Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson. Is So some Nazis get punched every The Aliens
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
that correct? once in a while. No offense, but who

Because, frankly, this . . . confuses gives a shit? P.S. Are y’all just gonna let the Ep-
us. What is his deal, exactly? Your world is melting, its people are stein thing slide? That felt like kind
He is decent at speaking on tele- more divided than ever. We want to of a big deal, no? 
the directness of her methods. A few
FAMILY LIFE years ago, Hart was hired by Sal Bett,
the mother of an eight-week-old boy,
DREAM WEAVER
Raphael, who was waking every twenty
minutes. Bett laughed when Hart ex-
plained that from now on her son would
A sleep trainer is for babies, but the hard lessons are for parents. wake just twice—at exactly 11 P.M. and
2:15 A.M.—and then sleep until 7 A.M.
BY SAM KNIGHT Raphael complied that night, to the min-
ute. “I remember it so well,” Bett recalled.
“I said, ‘Oh, my God, are you a witch?’”
My first encounter with Hart was
with her shoes. A pair of brown, low-
heeled pumps with sturdy bows were
sitting on the stairs of our house. I hadn’t
seen shoes like that since my grand-
mother died. Another mother who hired
Hart likened her to a Roald Dahl char-
acter. “The big buckled shoe comes in
the door,” the client recalled. “She’s not
Mary Poppins. She’s, like, the opposite.
She doesn’t come all, you know, sweet
and singing.”
Hart, who is sixty-one, with shoulder-
length, graying hair, was perched on the
corner of our stained white sofa, inspect-
ing our four-month-old twins, who were
staring back at her. It was a warm Sep-
tember day. John and Arthur were born
last May, just past the initial peak of the
pandemic in London. My wife and I had
been bearing up, more or less (we have
two daughters, aged seven and four, so
these things are relative), but the situa-
tion had really begun to fall apart a cou-
ple of weeks earlier, when the boys’ sleep
had deteriorated. Starting at 11 P.M., while
one of us slept in another room, my wife
or I battled through until dawn, feeding
and rocking the boys, falling into a bed
here is a telephone number that is happen to meet by the swings and in next to their cot when they had settled,
T passed among the parents of ba-
bies and young children in London who
whose eyes they recognize a dull and
glassy look.
only to rise again when one of them
stirred. We were getting an hour or two
have reached the limits of their strug- Hart’s number comes with a warn- of sleep a night. When I heard our
gle with sleep deprivation. The number ing: she is a matron of the old school. younger daughter bounce merrily out of
belongs to Brenda Hart, who is a sleep “She doesn’t fuck around,” one client told her bed at 5:55 A.M., alert and brimming
trainer. Hart’s Web site advertises other me. Hart’s aura encourages speculation with schemes for the day ahead, all I felt
services, too: she can help with fussy about her past. People say that she has was fear.
eaters, potty training, and newborns. been employed as a governess in Dubai Hart materialized at our house, driv-
But sleep is her overwhelming source and that she has a twin. Others talk about ing an Audi. Her standard service in-
of business. Hart claims to be the most her time in Bogotá; or mention her pet volves a three- or four-hour consulta-
effective sleep trainer in the city, and the tortoise, George; or claim that she once tion, during which she talks, you listen,
bliss of unbroken nights is the reason worked, by night, as a nanny for a Prime she watches you put your baby down
that parents who have used her services Minister, slipping through the gates of for a nap, and then she tells you, for the
speak of her with wonder and bewil- Downing Street after dark. Nearly all most part, what you are doing wrong.
derment and recommend her to friends, these rumors are true, but they fail to She likes to handle babies soon after
relations, and near-strangers whom they account for Hart’s effectiveness, or for she walks in the door, to get to know
them and to help them realize that there
If sleep training were architecture, we would be living in the High Baroque. is a new sheriff in town. “I’ve got that
28 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY ELENA XAUSA
demeanor that says, ‘Excuse me. But for seven minutes and that was that. marketplace range from psychologists
you’re not going to pull the wool over She has slept well ever since. Our youn- with fancy sleep laboratories to side-
my eyes,’” Hart told me recently. “I’m ger daughter is different, a more fiery job hustlers, while the buyers are drunk
quite strong. They can feel that energy person altogether. We trod more gin- with fatigue and usually deranged by
in me. This is being human. They feel . . . gerly around her. She still has broken feelings of guilt and failure. Sleep train-
They just know there is change.” Hart nights, but it’s also who she is, or at least ers tend to look at their clients with a
grew up in North Wales, and her voice who I think she is. With the twins, we mixture of pity and parent-like dismay.
has a lilting, occasionally melodramatic didn’t feel that we had a choice. We “I can stand at a baby fair and all the
quality. “I’ve got your number,” is how didn’t see how we could be present as parents who are expecting will not want
she greets a strapping six-month-old parents to our other children, or as peo- to see me,” Lucy Wolfe, a popular sleep
boy. Our twins were shy as they gazed ple in our own lives, unless they slept trainer in Ireland, told me. “Six months
at Hart from their bouncers. “Yeehaw,” and we slept. later, the same parents at the fair, they
she said. “She could have said anything to me would queue for two hours.”
Hart promises results within forty- and I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid, Few people dispute that sleep train-
eight hours. Her method is of her own because I was just desperate for help,” ing is effective. In 2006, Jodi Mindell, a
devising. She’s not Gina Ford, a Scottish another of Hart’s clients told me. This psychology professor at Saint Joseph’s
former maternity nurse who became a is the realm where the sleep trainer op- University, who also works in the Sleep
sensation in the late nineties with a erates: she meets you in a crisis and she Center at the Children’s Hospital of Phil-
rigid, minute-by-minute schedule for offers you oblivion. We put the babies adelphia, led a review of fifty-two sleep-
mothers and babies, but she is not far to bed at 7 P.M., as instructed, and closed training studies and found that forty-nine
off. Hart believes that babies should the door. We comforted ourselves by of them produced “clinically significant
feed and rest by the clock, with a lim- saying that they had each other. They reductions in bedtime resistance and
ited amount of napping during the day cried when they went to sleep and they night wakings.” More than eighty per
in order to consolidate longer stretches cried again when they woke up in the cent of the twenty-five hundred babies
of sleep during the night. Starting at night. At one point during that long and children involved in the studies slept
the age of three months, babies should first night, I woke up and my wife was more because of the interventions. Sim-
sleep soundly until the next morning. no longer beside me. Torn between the ilar, more recent reviews have supported
“They can sleep seven to seven,” Hart instinct to go to her sons and the need Mindell’s findings. “What we know is
said. When it comes to bedtime, she to rest, she had become stranded, half- that sleep training works,” she told me.
offers no frills and no tricks. You swad- way between our room and the babies’ “But it’s the mechanism that works; it’s
dle the baby. You put her in the cot. You room, and was weeping on the stairs. not the mechanics. The mechanism is
turn out the light and you walk out the You will not escape the cry. that golden moment of a baby being able
door. You don’t go back. In sleep-train- to fall asleep independently. The me-
ing circles, the method that Hart advo- f sleep training were architecture, chanics of how you get there is really
cates is known as extinction.
Hart doesn’t have much time for ri-
I we would be living in the High Ba-
roque—a fantasia of remedies. Open
based on a parent’s tolerance and the
child’s temperament.”
vals or best-selling parenting books that Instagram and behold an endless feed Sleep trainers dwell in the mechan-
suggest more intricate or sensitive ways of perfect, zonked-out babies, lulled to ics. They sell books and apps and courses
to encourage babies to fall asleep on sleep by endless, foolproof methods de- built on the difference between self-
their own. “It makes me laugh. Do they signed by endless, fairly expensive sleep soothing, which has become unfashion-
have some special language or some- coaches. You might opt for the elastic- able, and sleepability, which is the same
thing?” Hart asked. “Ridiculous. ‘Ho- band technique (leaving and coming thing, but renamed. “People who really
listic.’ This is what I hate: holistic sleep back into the room, a.k.a. controlled cry- work in this area—primarily behavior-
training. ‘We found the special way.’ Oh, ing, a.k.a. controlled checking, a.k.a. ally trained psychologists—we work
my God, get a life.” Crying happens. modified extinction, a.k.a. Ferberization). with every family one on one,” Mindell
“You will not escape the cry. You won’t Or maybe you’re more of a camping- said. “There is no right answer.” When
escape it,” Hart said. “It might only be out (a.k.a. stay-and-support) kind of our elder daughter was five months old,
five minutes of crying. It might be half parent? But have you considered a faded she fell asleep effortlessly as I walked
an hour of crying, but you’re not going bedtime, which is not to be confused down a set of shallow steps in a friend’s
to escape it.” She spends most of her with a faded positive routine? Or the garden. Ever since, when I am putting
visit building up to the question “Are chair method? What about a good old- a baby to bed, I take two steps forward
you ready to leave your baby tonight?” fashioned sleep shuffle? and then step down on the third. You
We weren’t novices. By the time Hart The sleep-training business is an un- can try that if you like. Or you might
entered our lives, we had done about governed space. Experts self-certify. In want to think about moving the last
two thousand bedtimes with our young 2016, a survey of a hundred and two feed of the day to before bath time, rather
children. When our elder daughter was sleep coaches in the United States found than after; or panicking about the blue
six months old, a relative advised us to that seventy per cent had no previous light emitted by your child’s night-light;
leave her to cry herself to sleep. I watched health-care experience. (One had an or playing the same song on repeat in
the stopwatch on my phone. She cried M.B.A.) The sellers in the infant-sleep her room all night; or blowing through
the bars of the cot when she cries; or seeking ways to instill self-reliance and doesn’t take much, in a sleep-shot mind,
spending fourteen hundred and ninety- independence in infants who were not to draw a line from the unheeded cry-
five dollars on a SNOO, an electric cot yet a year old. In the dystopian man- ing of a baby on the other side of the
that you plug into the wall and that will ual “Psychological Care of Infant and bedroom door to the social and cogni-
automatically vibrate your newborn back Child,” from 1928, John B. Watson de- tive impairment suffered by children
to sleep, like a chick in an incubator. spaired of the concept of home: “Even who grew up in Romanian orphanages.
The mechanics of conventional sleep though it is proven unsuccessful, we “We know that there’s this thing called
training, which usually involves leaving shall always have it.” Watson’s bedtime learned helplessness,” Ockwell-Smith
a child to cry for at least a few minutes, routine is a classic of the genre: “A pat said. “What we effectively end up doing
are also what alarm its many critics. “We on the head; a quiet good night; lights is teaching them there’s no point in
have to think about why it works and out and door closed. If he howls, let crying out, because we won’t meet your
what actually happens,” Sarah Ockwell- him howl.” need.” Parenting books in Germany in
Smith, the author of “The Gentle Sleep “Extinction” is a behaviorist term. In the thirties frequently warned that a
Book,” said. “You have to then ask your- 1958, Carl Williams, a psychologist at coddled child would turn into a Haus
self, ‘Am I O.K. with why this is work- the University of Miami, reported on tyrann, or house tyrant. Photographs
ing?’” European and American pediatri- the treatment of S, a twenty-one-month- of crying babies were captioned “This
cians began recommending strict night- old boy who refused to fall asleep on is how he tries to soften stones.” In
time routines and separate rooms for ba- his own. “Behavior that is not reinforced 2019, Scientific American reported on
bies in the last years of the nineteenth will be extinguished,” Williams reported. the work of German sociologists who
century. In 1894, Luther Emmett Holt, The first time S was shut in his room set out to interview childhood survi-
the medical director of the Babies’ Hos- alone, he cried for forty-five minutes vors of bombing raids during the Sec-
pital, on Lexington Avenue, published before falling asleep. “By the tenth oc- ond World War only to find it neces-
“The Care and Feeding of Children,” a casion, S no longer whimpered, fussed, sary to expand their study to take in
catechism based on his lectures to moth- or cried when the parent left the room. the traumatizing effects of Nazi par-
ers and nurses. It contained the most fa- Rather, he smiled as they left.” Extinc- enting guidelines.
mous three words in sleep training. “How tion had occurred. It would probably be impossible to
is an infant to be managed that cries But what else is being extinguished? design a scientific study that could iso-
from temper, habit, or to be indulged?” Mindell acknowledges that sleep train- late the psychological consequences of
he wrote. “It should simply be allowed ing is not appropriate for children who a short burst of sleep training in a life-
to ‘cry it out.’” have been in foster care or infants with time of parenting mishaps. And peo-
By the late twenties, guided by Pav- any history of trauma. “We don’t want ple would be unlikely to accept the
lovian conditioning, behavioral psychol- to add any more stress on those babies findings, either way. In 2011, Wendy
ogists on both sides of the Atlantic were in terms of responsivity,” she said. It Middlemiss, a psychologist at the Uni-
versity of North Texas, led a study of
twenty-five babies who underwent a
five-day course of extinction sleep train-
ing at a clinic in New Zealand. At the
start of the course, the levels of corti-
sol, a stress hormone, in the babies and
their mothers were in synch. By the
end, cortisol levels had fallen in the
mothers but remained “elevated” among
the infants, even though they were no
longer crying in the night. The Mid-
dlemiss paper helped fuel an already
vigorous online movement against sleep
training, and prompted a backlash from
other psychologists in the field, who
questioned its methodology. In 2016,
Michael Gradisar, an expert in child
sleep disorders at Flinders University,
in Adelaide, Australia, carried out a
similar study on forty-three infants and
found that their cortisol levels went
down as their sleep improved. Gradi-
sar’s findings were presented in the
Australian media in late May. Less than
two hours later, he logged on to Face-
“I don’t know the lyrics, either, so I just hum along.” book to gauge the reaction and received
a death threat. “When that’s in your Glasgow for the night. She had driven an ideal foil. “She can take it,” the mother
home town, and you’ve got a very iden- up from London to sleep-train a baby, said. “She’s hard-core.”
tifiable surname . . . ,” Gradisar recalled. and drove back to her house, in Kew Hart’s favorite word is “practical.”
“You know, it’s something I didn’t want Gardens, the following day. “Distance When I asked if her twin sister, Lou-
my kids to be aware of.” will not stop me,” she said. The pan- ise, was identical, she replied, “Not iden-
Ockwell-Smith’s “The Gentle Sleep demic has been good for business, be- tical. But very practical.” (Hart also has
Book” was first published in 2015. She cause parents have been cooped up with a younger sister; all three have worked
substantially rewrote the second edi- their children. “The dads are the ones as nannies.) Hart grew up in Prestatyn,
tion, which was published last year, be- I don’t have to work on,” Hart said. “Oc- on the north coast of Wales, where her
cause many parents found it too tough. father was the food-and-drink manager
“I didn’t want to make them feel guilty,” at a holiday camp. She left home at sev-
she said. “But, equally, I feel an awful enteen to train in a nursery in Liver-
lot of sleep training is very unethical pool. In the eighties, Hart worked as a
and very misleading as well.” She takes nanny in Chelsea, in a high-end day-
on a few families with sleep problems, care center in the City, and in the kin-
but finds the work exhausting. “I listen dergarten of a private school in Putney.
to people, and we talk about their feel- She spent a few years at a nursery school
ings and we talk about their upbring- in Riyadh. She loved Saudi Arabia, but
ings and we talk about their relation- there was nothing to do. Later, she took
ships,” Ockwell-Smith said. “It’s really casionally, I will have a soft dad, but a job at a maternity hospital in Abu
deep.” She steers clear of twins. that’s not that often.” When I asked Dhabi. For three years, she worked
Hart to explain the growth of the sleep- nights in a neonatal intensive-care ward.
eely Layfield found Brenda Hart training industry, she said the main rea- She carried out observations, assisted
K by chance one night, while she was
holding her baby with one arm and
son was the pressure on mothers to re-
turn to work. But competition among
doctors, and held babies that weighed
one or two pounds.
Googling for sleep advice with the other. parents was a factor, too. “They want In 1999, Hart gave birth to a son,
When Layfield’s daughter, Ada, was six their little Johnny to be doing better Jack. Her husband, Adrian, was an oil
weeks old, she had been diagnosed as than Freddy down the road,” she said. engineer. He was often overseas and
having a hip condition and put in a “I think a lot of it is about image.” Hart looked after the baby alone. She
brace. Now almost three months old, Hart understands that, for many par- breast-fed Jack until he was thirteen
she had only ever slept in her parents’ ents, she is there to play the role of an months old. He would wake in the night
arms. Layfield filled out the contact authority figure, and she dramatizes her and end up in her bed. “I had fifteen
form on Hart’s Web site at around 4 performance accordingly: “The fami- months of wakings. I had a sleep prob-
A.M. Hart replied by 7:30 A.M. When lies tell me this. They say, ‘Brenda, we lem,” she said. “And if I look back now,
she arrived at Layfield’s house, in Kent, know what to do. But we need you to this is just me, there was no way I needed
two mornings later, Layfield was up- tell us.’ That’s what they say because to put up with that.” Hart would leave
stairs, changing Ada’s nappy. Hart did they’re mixed up with it, with the emo- Jack to cry one night and then relent a
not wait for directions from Layfield’s tion.” She added, “They like the idea of few days later. “I just got all sloppy,” she
husband, who had opened the door. “I’ll having somebody who has nothing to said. “Because I didn’t have a sleep trainer
find them,” she said. do with their family coming in and tell- to help me.”
Hart picked Ada up from the changing them what to do. Because then ev- When Jack was four, Hart answered
ing mat. “I remember being a bit taken erybody will listen, even the granny.” In an ad to work for Night Nannies, an
aback, thinking, I don’t really know you,” 1928, Watson sought to prepare children agency for night nurses based in Ful-
Layfield said. “This is my baby, my most for conquering the world. Hart prom- ham, in West London. Anastasia Baker,
precious little being.” By the end of the ises more or less the same. “Sleep train- a former BBC journalist, founded the
morning, Ada was asleep in her cot for ing is the basis for being independent agency after the birth of her son, when
the first time in her life. “My husband later in life, from going to nursery to she was struggling with her job and her
and I just looked at each other, like, school to having a job. It’s the ground- broken sleep. Baker currently employs
What has happened?” Layfield said. work for that,” she said. “It’s like a lan- some six hundred night nurses in south-
Hart worked with four hundred and guage. The earlier they do it, the better ern England, of whom fifteen are “élite”
ten families last year. She estimates her they’re going to be at it, the better they sleep trainers. In 2003, when Hart began
success rate at ninety-two per cent. She are going to be as human beings.” working for the agency, the designa-
charges four hundred and thirty-five One mother who used Hart put it tion did not exist. She had no formal
pounds for her standard service and more succinctly: “You basically pay training in infant sleep. “Taught my-
more for overnight stays. She doesn’t someone to tell you that it’s O.K. to let self,” she said. “End of the day, it’s com-
like to take on more than about twenty your child cry it out. Because it’s such mon sense.” Hart quickly developed an
clients at a time, because she prefers to a horrible thing, you sort of always want appetite for what were known as trou-
make visits in person. When my wife to blame it on someone.” Hart’s persona, ble-shooting jobs, where a baby’s sleep
contacted Hart, last year, she was in her enthusiasm for the task, makes her had gone haywire, for which she earned
an extra ten pounds a night. After four has come to be seen as a problem in get no maternity leave and they can’t
years, Hart left to go solo. Baker remem need of a solution. These places are survive otherwise.”
bered her well. “Brenda is hugely tal sometimes summarized in the litera Ball accepts that it is unlikely that
ented. She has to be—just look at her ture as Western, educated, industrial anyone will ever prove the absolute mer
record,” she said. “But, of course, some ized, rich, and democratic, or WEIRD. its or harms of oldfashioned sleep train
people are going to love it and some Most everywhere else and through ing. “I’m agnostic, I suppose, about
people are going to find it, you know, out human evolution, babies have slept, whether there are any longterm con
not for them.” whenever possible, with their mothers, sequences,” she said. I asked her what
It took three nights to sleeptrain for warmth, safety, and food. In “The she thought we had done to our sons.
our twins. On the fourth night, they Afterlife Is Where We Come From,” a “On a very basic level, I suppose you
went to bed at 7 P.M., and John slept 2004 study of infancy and child rear have operantconditioned them,” Ball
until 6:30 A.M., without a murmur. Ar ing among the Beng people of Côte replied. “It’s like ringing the bell and
thur needed a pat a couple of hours ear d’Ivoire, Alma Gottlieb, an anthropol the dog salivating.” I countered that at
lier, but that was it. On the fifth night, ogist at the University of Illinois, found least the babies were now getting a good
the boys didn’t stir until 7:50 A.M. Hart that mothers didn’t keep track of how night’s sleep and must be feeling the
texted two clappinghands emojis and many times their babies woke in the benefits of that. “They’re quiet,” Ball
a purple heart. Sleep rushed back into night. Children were thought to come corrected. “They’re quiet.”
our lives. We lost our dread of the night. from the wrugbe, or spirit world, and it
We felt more confident, as if we might was important to encourage them to en days before Christmas, John
now stand a chance of being good
enough parents to our four children.
stick around. It was what it was. “If
mothers do not expect their babies to
T developed a hollow, rasping cough
that we recognized as croup. The ba
The thrill of altering your babies’ basic sleep at predictable times or for pre bies were seven months old and had
behavior so dramatically in the space of dictable durations, the mothers will do been sleeping steadily at night since
a few days is offset only by the realiza nothing to try to bring about such an Hart’s visit. Now John was wheezing
tion of how vulnerable they must be to eventuality,” Gottlieb wrote. In Japan, deeply and couldn’t settle for more than
your crappy alterations all the time. where parents often sleep in the same an hour. When we took off his sleep
bed as their baby or child, the arrange suit, we could see his ribs rising with
nthropologists point out that none ment is known as kawa no ji. Kawa re effort. We called the National Health
A of this is normal. Infant sleep is
a mess. It always has been. A recent
fers to the character for “river,” denoted
by three vertical strokes, which can also
Service’s nonemergency number and
an ambulance came. John was taken to
study of thirteen hundred Finnish eight look like three people in a bed. Snug the hospital. My wife went with him
montholds found that they woke in gling down this way, and making the while I stayed at home with our other
the night between zero and twentyone best of it, can give rise to anshinkan—a children. Two days later, John tested
times. In 2011, Helen Ball, an anthro feeling of safety and reassurance for ev positive for Covid19.
pology professor at Durham University, eryone involved. When he came home, we couldn’t
created the Infant Sleep Info Source, a The WEIRD approach to infant sleep bear for him to cry. We listened to his
Web site to describe the reality of what has burdened families with unnecessary wheezing through the wall. Arthur be
she calls “biologically normal infant emotional stress and unrealistic hopes. came sick, too—not nearly as bad, but
sleep”—a nightmare, in other words. “I feel for all the parents. I wouldn’t they were both awake a lot in the night.
When she set up ISIS (the name has blame parents for anything that they’re We found ourselves back in the old rou
since changed to BASIS), Ball was pri doing with sleep, because it is such a tine, albeit with new mechanics. We stood
marily worried about spurious claims difficult terrain to navigate,” Cecilia To in the bathroom, running the shower
from formula companies, which mar mori, a publichealth researcher at the with the lights off, so the steam would
ket products that promise to make ba Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, said. ease their breathing. Christmas came
bies sleep longer. The rise of the sleep “You’re up against an entire cultural sys and went. John was in our bed most of
training industry, and its many detractors, tem.” In 2019, Ball, Tomori, and James the time. It was easier for him to sleep
has further baffled parents. Capitalism McKenna, an anthropologist at the upright. One night, so my wife could
and biologically normal infant sleep are University of Notre Dame, who stud have a moment of rest, I put John in
not what you would call bedfellows. ies cosleeping and the risk of sudden a sling and paced around the kitchen
“The fact that the culture of nighttime infant death syndrome, published a from 4 A.M. to 5 A.M., watching the dig
infant care has changed rapidly over the paper arguing for a “paradigm shift in ital clock on the stove move through the
course of the last century or so doesn’t infant sleep science” that would be more hour. The mystery of infant sleep only
mean that our babies have changed,” tolerant to new families. “Given that deepens when you observe it. Babies don’t
Ball told me. “What babies need and we’ve gotten ourselves into this corner, care about time, but time slowly grows
what parents think that they’re going the best that we can do is recognize in them. After three weeks, John’s smile
to need, or want them to need, are quite what babies expect and try to be re came back. He was better and we were
mismatched now.” sponsive to that,” Ball said. “In the U.S., in pieces. We knew what to do. And we
Ball and her colleagues argue that it mothers have to sleeptrain their ba didn’t know what to do. We texted Hart.
is only in specific places that infant sleep bies at six weeks of age, because they She replied within an hour. 
SKETCHBOOK BY BARRY BLITT

n a frosty night in February,
O Joe Manchin III, the senior

senator from West Virginia,
invited a few colleagues over for din-
ner aboard the houseboat he docks on
the Potomac. In the past, opponents
have sought to highlight the vessel for
political effect; a 2018 advertisement by
the National Republican Senatorial
Committee called it a “$700,000 D.C.
luxury yacht.” (In response, Manchin’s
office reported that he bought it, used,
for two hundred and twenty thousand
dollars.) The boat—which he named
Almost Heaven, after John Denver’s
description of West Virginia in “Take
Me Home, Country Roads”—resem-
bles a small ferry; it is sixty-five feet
long and boxy, with tinted windows. It
serves as a residence on the nights he
is in Washington, but also as a politi-
cal prop. For voters who dislike the gov-
ernment, it allows Manchin, a seventy-
three-year-old Democrat in his third
term, to say that he could weigh anchor
and escape anytime; for friends in pol-
itics, it provides an offshore venue for
the kind of casual evening that Man-
chin considers vital to politics.
On this occasion, Manchin and his
wife, Gayle, were joined by Senators
Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, and
Susan Collins, Republican of Maine—
who, along with Manchin, occupy a
small island of centrists in a fiercely di-
vided Congress. Collins told me re-
cently, “It’s increasingly a lonely place
to be.” Hours earlier, in the impeach-
ment trial of former President Donald
Trump, for inciting the insurrection at
the Capitol on January 6th, Collins had
been one of seven Republicans who
joined Democrats in pronouncing him
guilty. But the final tally was 57-43, ten
votes short of conviction. To those who
had hoped that the defiling of the Cap-
itol and the assault on police would at
last break Trump’s grip on his party, the
result was dismal.
On board, Manchin’s guests ate
Gayle’s spaghetti and meatballs, while
he fixed the drinks. After a few hours,
Tester started making his way home to
his apartment across town, but as he
went down the gangplank he found
that it had become coated with ice. “My
feet go to the ceiling,” he recalled re-
cently. Manchin reached out to grab
him, at which point he also fell. Both With Congress viciously divided, Manchin insists on comity, even at the expense of his
PROFILES
UNDECIDED VOTER
Will Joe Manchin’s search for common ground wreck the Democrats’ agenda?
BY EVAN OSNOS
party’s goals. “They want me to change. To agree,” he says. “I say, No, I’m not going to change.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY PHILIP MONTGOMERY THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 35
years. In Biden’s first few months, he
talked or met with Manchin at least
half a dozen times. Biden took to call-
ing him Jo-Jo, Manchin said, adding,
“I don’t know where he came up with
that.” But he appreciated that the Pres-
ident was not pressuring him much to
adhere to the party line: “He’ll say, ‘Lis-
ten, I’ll never ask you to vote against
your conviction.’ I said, ‘I know that,
and I appreciate it.’ He just said, ‘If you
can help me, help me,’ and I said, ‘I’ll
help you where I can,’ and I said, ‘When
I can’t . . . ’ ” Manchin changed tack.
“I’m begging him, ‘We’ve got to start
doing some things bipartisan.’”
iden and Manchin have obvious

B points in common—two white,
Catholic Joes, in their seventies, both
former football players who take pride
in their working-class roots, long after
becoming wealthy. More deeply, each
“The real question is, where’d you get all these pictures of my mother?” has less regard for ideology than for
the hands-on horse-trading of Con-
gress. In Biden’s 2017 book, “Promise
• • Me, Dad,” he wrote, “At bottom, pol-
itics depends on trust, and unless you
men started sliding. Tester’s foot hit the in a Covid-relief bill. Over and over, can establish a personal relationship,
water. “I was looking for anything to Manchin said that he was driven by a it’s awfully hard to build trust.” Man-
grab,” he said. “I finally got a piece of fundamental faith in bipartisanship, a chin, too, is a heavy schmoozer, even
metal and stopped. Joe did, too.” Tes- belief that Democrats could and must by the standards of his profession.
ter was bleeding from his left hand; he find Republican support for their leg- Hoppy Kercheval, the host of an influ-
asked Manchin if he was all right. “He islation—a posture so at odds with the ential political radio show in West Vir-
says, ‘I think I broke my thumb.’” (Doc- present hostilities in Washington that ginia, told me, “I’ve talked to him a
tors put Manchin in a brace, but he it evoked a man hoisting his glass for thousand times, and there have been
took it off after a few weeks.) a toast while his guests lunged at one times where I think, I’ve got to get off
In another year, the prospect of los- another with steak knives. the phone. He’s wearing me out.” Man-
ing two Democratic senators overboard Manchin’s sudden clout, after an un- chin has distributed his personal cell-
in an ice storm might be greeted with remarkable decade in national politics, phone number so widely that his staff
a certain wry resignation among Wash- has made him the subject of almost lu- has pleaded with him to get a new one.
ington’s political class. This year, it in- dicrous attention. He is stalked by the (He refuses.)
spires panic, at least among Democrats: political press, his comments are parsed To many on the left, Manchin is an
in a 50-50 Senate, the Party’s agenda is for subtle variations, and he is courted impediment to history, spouting bro-
only one vote—or one heartbeat—from by powerful figures on both the right mides about patience and tradition at
oblivion. Manchin, in particular, holds and the left. On another recent evening a moment when partisan attempts to
extraordinary power. As perhaps the aboard the boat, he was dining with curtail access to voting could under-
Senate’s most conservative Democrat, Ron Klain, the White House chief of mine the legitimacy of free elections.
he often breaks from the Party, which staff, when President Biden called. “He (In May, a column in Esquire was head-
gives him a de-facto veto over a large says, ‘When are you inviting me out lined “In the Fight to Save Democracy,
swath of the Administration’s agenda. there?’” Manchin told me. “I said, ‘We’re Joe Manchin Is Neville Chamberlain.”)
In the first months of Joe Biden’s Pres- figuring out how to get you in by water. Adam Jentleson, a progressive political
idency, Manchin tanked the nomina- They’ll never know you came.’” strategist and a former Senate staffer,
tion of Neera Tanden as budget direc- Biden and his advisers were engaged told me, “It’s like there’s a brain rot that
tor (he disapproved of her tweets), in a transparent campaign to win Man- senators get that comes from too many
opposed raising the corporate tax rate chin’s support. The last time Demo- Sunday shows, too many conversations
to twenty-eight per cent (he preferred crats held the White House, he was with comfortable people who think
twenty-five per cent), and single-hand- not much of a priority; President Barack they’re living in a ‘West Wing’ episode.”
edly narrowed unemployment benefits Obama called him three times in eight He continued, “Manchin cutting a deal
with Susan Collins is not going to bring Republican Party, he sees, almost liter- distrust of government helped fuel rad-
people together. The end result will ac- ally, his neighbors and friends. Since ical conservatism. In that sense, Man-
tually be that we pass much weaker 2000, the congressional delegation of chin’s innate conservatism also sets
solutions than we could if he was more West Virginia has gone from all Dem- boundaries around the Party’s instincts,
realistic about the world he lived in.” In ocrats to all Republicans—except for forestalling transformative changes that
June, Manchin rendered the most con- him. The state has voted for a Repub- could drive away moderate voters in
troversial decision of his career: he vowed lican in each of the past six Presidential 2022 and 2024.
to oppose the Democrats’ signature elec- elections, and in 2014 the state legisla- In the awkward marriage between
tion-reform bill, the For the People Act, ture flipped to Republican control for Manchin and the Democratic Party, nei-
because it lacked Republican support, the first time since 1931. On January 6th, ther side hides its ambivalence. In April,
and he refused to modify the filibuster when word circulated on the Senate floor on “The Daily Show,” Trevor Noah lik-
rule, the sixty-vote threshold that would that Trump supporters had stormed the ened Manchin to “that annoying kid on
prevent his party from passing it alone. Capitol, Manchin did not initially as- your block who had a pool. Yeah, he
The Reverend Dr. William Barber II, sume the worst. “I’ve always been for a hogged all the noodles and wouldn’t let
the civil-rights activist and co-chair of good protest,” he recalled. “My instinct anyone use the diving board, but with-
the Poor People’s Campaign, immedi- was, Let them in! They’re raising all out him there’s no pool party.” The re-
ately announced plans for a Moral kinds of hell and hollering. Let them in! lationship rests on a basic fact of polit-
March on Manchin in Charleston, the Let’s talk!” Soon, he glimpsed the hor- ical arithmetic: in a state that Biden lost
state capitol, and tweeted that Man- ror of it—“Never in my wildest dreams by thirty-nine points, Manchin has won
chin’s position was “wrong, constitu- did I imagine our form of government six straight elections. As much as pro-
tionally inconsistent, historically inac- being attacked,” he said—and, during gressives condemn his resistance, he is
curate, morally indefensible, economically the impeachment trial, he voted to con- all that stands between them and a Re-
insane, and politically unacceptable.” vict. But Manchin never broke faith with publican Senate majority. On June 1st,
Manchin’s feud with progressive the Republican Party, and he was deter- even as Manchin was digging in against
Democrats centers on a basic difference mined to work with it again. many of his party’s priorities, Richard
in their assessment of the Republican If politics is the art of the possible, Durbin, of Illinois, the second-ranked
Party. To many of his colleagues, the Manchin’s likes and dislikes may deter- Democrat in the Senate, told a reporter,
G.O.P. has become an overt enemy of mine what is possible for the Demo- “I say a prayer every morning and eve-
democracy, by perpetuating Trump’s lies crats—on police reform, gun safety, ex- ning for Joe Manchin.”
about his loss in 2020 and rewriting pansions of labor and L.G.B.T.Q. rights,
state laws in ways that could allow them and legalization of millions of undoc- s a Democrat often surrounded by
to overturn future elections. Senate Mi-
nority Leader Mitch McConnell has
umented immigrants—in the two cru-
cial years before the midterm elections,
A conservatives, Manchin leans hard
on the stagecraft of patriotism. When
stated plainly, “One hundred percent of when they risk losing control of Con- I stopped by his office on Capitol Hill
our focus is on stopping this new ad- gress. Whether or not his peers like it, not long ago, he was flanked by desk-
ministration,” an echo of his comment, his unease with some key elements of top statues of eagles in flight, accom-
in 2010, that “the single most import- the progressive agenda reflects the views panied by two brass lamps adorned with
ant thing we want to achieve is for Pres- more eagles. While we talked, he illus-
ident Obama to be a one-term Presi- trated a point by producing a tiny copy
dent.” McConnell, in that view, will of the Constitution from the breast
never coöperate, because doing so could pocket of his suit coat.
allow Democrats to win the next elec- Up close, Manchin could be mis-
tions by claiming policy achievements taken for a high-priced football coach.
and a breakthrough in partisan grid- He is six feet three, with an aquiline
lock. Harry Reid, a senator from Ne- nose, a silver pompadour, and a meaty
vada for three decades and the Demo- handshake. Before entering government
cratic Senate Majority Leader from full time, he worked mostly as a sales-
2007 to 2015, told me that Manchin un- of millions of Americans, not only peo- man—furniture and carpets, then coal—
derestimates the change in D.C. cul- ple like him—what we might call and you can feel it in his enthusiasm
ture. “We’ve never had it like this be- Tommy Bahama Democrats, the pros- for retail politics. Kercheval, the radio
fore,” he said. “When Lyndon Johnson perous boomers who look askance at host, told me, “He is very good in crowds.
was Majority Leader for six years, he Trump-supporting friends but have no He’s very good one-on-one. It’s Clin-
overcame two filibusters. In my first six plans to stop inviting them for dinner— tonesque. When he’s talking to you, you
years as Leader, I had to face and over- but also rural voters who feel estranged feel like you’re the only one in the world.
come more than a hundred filibusters. from the Democratic Party. Manchin’s And I think, frankly, a lot of it is sin-
I think that you cannot expect the Sen- power is forcing Democrats to expand cere. When he is talking to some little
ate to be a place where it’s kind of ‘Kum- their focus on systemic inequities to en- old lady somewhere, I think he is gen-
baya,’ where you hold hands and sing.” compass places like West Virginia, where uinely interested in what her prob-
But, when Manchin looks at today’s substandard schools, high poverty, and lems are.” Manchin attributes his social
appetite to growing up in a big Italian toward the other party.” She went on, Manchin declined to help her campaign.
Appalachian family. “If I didn’t hug and “Having said all that, he wanted to get In his votes and his comments, Man-
kiss you, I’d get slapped,” he told me. “I on my committee, and I stopped it cold. chin avoids the appearance of being in
didn’t give a shit who you were, I didn’t He was coming there to help coal coun- the full embrace of either party. In late
care what color you were, I’m going to try, and I was there to help get pollution January, hounded by reporters for a
hug and kiss you first, and then find out and carbon out of the air.” Manchin didn’t clearer signal of whether he would agree
if we’re related.” Even when Manchin let the slight affect their relationship, she to push through a stimulus plan with-
disagrees with people, they generally said: “You would think we would have out Republicans, he said, repeatedly,
find him personable. Cecil Roberts, the been at fisticuffs because of that, but he “We’re going to make Joe Biden suc-
head of the United Mine Workers of never had a bad word to say.” cessful.” He eventually agreed to ad-
America, told me, “He can give you bad The more divided Congress has be- vance that bill with no Republicans, but
news, and, for a few minutes, you think come, the more Manchin has professed in the following months he repeatedly
he gave you good news.” his faith in the power of collegiality. Re- questioned parts of Biden’s agenda. “If
During his early years in Washing- viving a long-forgotten Senate tradi- he senses that the Democrats are all
ton, his fellow-Democrats marvelled at tion, he has vowed never to campaign doing one thing, and the Republicans
his ability to win in a conservative state. against an incumbent senator of either are going to be aligned on the other
“I thought, I have to see this miracle,” party, no matter how much they differ side, he doesn’t want to seem like an
Barbara Boxer, who represented Cali- personally or ideologically. He and Mc- easy sell,” Brian Fallon, a former aide to
fornia in the Senate from 1993 to 2017, Connell have feuded for years, but when Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton,
told me. “It takes a very special person- McConnell faced a strong Democratic told me. Torpedoing Tanden’s nomina-
ality to overcome the innate negativity opponent in Amy McGrath, last year, tion, in March, was a natural Manchin
move: independent enough to earn ap-
proving coverage in conservative media,
but not so grave that it would cause a
rupture with Democratic leaders.
His constant triangulation makes him
mercurial. “What he stands up and says
from one caucus lunch to the next doesn’t
match up,” a Democratic strategist said,
“and he’s not the type of guy that’s going
to go home and read a fifty-page brief-
ing book.” In March, Manchin raised
the prospect of making the filibuster “a
little bit more painful,” by reviving the
requirement for the marathon speeches
known as the talking filibuster. Progres-
sives rejoiced, but soon he expressed res-
ervations about the idea. “If you have a
talking filibuster, basically, you can just
wait that one out,” he told me. “It doesn’t
really achieve anything.”
In his office, I told him that much
of Washington was asking a version of
the same question: What does Joe Man-
chin really want? He flashed an irri-
tated smile. “Can you believe that? It’s
like I came here to hold people hos-
tage,” he said. He repeated the ques-
tion back to me. “What does Joe Man-
chin want? Son of a bitch—they think
that they can spend a billion dollars or
a hundred million dollars and that’ll
take care of making it right?” He went
on, “They want me to change. To agree.
I say, No, I’m not going to change.”
Manchin often speaks of remaining
true to the terrain that produced him—
the town of Farmington, West Virginia
(population: 325). “You are who you are
because of where you’re raised and how Kay—raised five kids and kept every- ily’s convertible. Manchin took note of
you’re raised and who raised you,” he one close to home. By the time Joe III the Kennedys’ powers of image man-
told me. “Farmington is why I haven’t was growing up, the Manchins had risen agement. “They knew how to come
changed.” in the small-town hierarchy. His father across as real people,” he said. “Hubert
expanded the family business from gro- was probably more of a real person and
n 1978, the political scientist Richard ceries into furniture and carpets, and had more of a real life than any of them.
I Fenno, of the University of Roches-
ter, published a landmark study titled
turned their home from a two-bedroom
apartment above a garage into a six-bed-
It didn’t come across as well.”
In 1965, Manchin went to West Vir-
“Home Style,” based on observations room house. Marion County, where ginia University, as a quarterback on a
of eighteen members of the House as they lived, was small, dependent on coal, football scholarship. In his freshman
they returned to their districts. The book and ninety-five per cent white. year, he met Gayle Conelly; they mar-
investigated a contradiction that came Manchin first encountered politics ried in 1967, while still in school, and later
to be known as Fenno’s paradox: Amer- beyond Farmington through the flam- had three children, Heather, Joseph,
icans often hate Congress but keep boyant figure he called Uncle Jimmy. and Brooke. The following year, the
reëlecting their local Congress mem- A. James Manchin, as constituents knew Manchins’ life in Farmington changed
bers. The explanation, he concluded, him, spent half a century in state gov- abruptly: a fire destroyed the family store
was that successful politicians develop ernment, honing a knack for generating and killed a salesclerk and three custom-
a “home style”—a set of behaviors that attention. He once arranged for a cho- ers, including a child. Manchin left school
allow them to code-switch, accruing rus of twelve trumpeters to dignify the for most of a year to help rebuild. Nine
power in Washington while retaining opening of a sewage-treatment plant. days after the fire, a series of explosions
trust back home. These days, Demo- (Years later, Jimmy said, “There’s still a ripped through a nearby coal mine, kill-
crats in red states face extra pressure to lot of people in this state that think of ing seventy-eight men, including his
attend to their home style. Tester, of A. James Manchin every time they flush mother’s younger brother. The mines
Montana, told me, “Instead of going their commodes.”) After he became sec- withered, and so did the town. Manchin’s
home every month, you go home every retary of state, in 1977, he endeared him- sister Paula Llaneza, who still lives in
week. People want to see you. They want self to constituents by defending West Farmington, told me, “We started los-
to make sure you haven’t ‘gone D.C.’” Virginia against hillbilly stereotypes ing people. No one came back.”
A certain prickly independence runs portrayed on “The Love Boat,” and he In 1982, while selling carpets in the
deep in West Virginia. Long before it handed out hundreds of thousands of family business, Manchin was elected
was a state, the mountains of north- honorary certificates and trinkets with to the state legislature and started mov-
western Virginia attracted small farm- the state seal on them. When critics coming up as a conservative Democrat. He
ers who resented the power and pride plained that he used his office for self-pro- became a national officer of the Amer-
of plantation owners in the east. The motion, he said, “Sure, I’m a showboat, ican Legislative Exchange Council, a
two sides of the state clashed over taxes, a ham. Well, I’m in government!” Later, conservative policy group that drafted
slavery, and respect. In an open letter serving as West Virginia’s treasurer, he model bills for state lawmakers. He op-
written in 1861, after Virginia voted to narrowly avoided a career-ending dis- posed abortion, appealed to all “able-
secede, politicians in the western coun- grace: in 1987, the state lost nearly three bodied” recipients of welfare to find
ties questioned why they should put up hundred million dollars on Wall Street work, and, according to the Wall Street
with the “haughty arrogance and wicked investments. He was impeached, but he Journal, voted to reduce awards in the
machinations of would-be Eastern Des- resigned before he could be pushed out; workers’-compensation system. In 1996,
pots.” They broke away from the Con- after he spent a decade away from pol- he ran in the primary for the guberna-
federacy, joining the Union as a state itics, his home county elected him to the torial race. The coal-miners’ union dis-
in 1863, and later adopted the motto state legislature. On his desk in Wash- tributed T-shirts with his name crossed
“Montani semper liberi”—mountaineers ington, Joe Manchin keeps a photo of out. Cecil Roberts, the head of the union,
are always free. Uncle Jimmy beside his keyboard. told me, “It wasn’t that he didn’t care
Joe Manchin’s grandfather was born Jimmy exposed his nephew to an- about unions. It was just that he was
Giuseppe Mancini, in the southern-Ital- other influence: during the Democratic more of a pro-business Democrat in
ian region of Calabria. In 1904, when primary of 1960, John F. Kennedy, run- those days. He says that we cost him
he was three years old, his family im- ning against Hubert Humphrey, spent the election, which is probably true.”
migrated to Farmington, a hill town weeks crisscrossing West Virginia, in After he lost the primary, to a progres-
that straddles the narrow waters of Buf- the hope of demonstrating that a Cath- sive rival named Charlotte Pritt, Man-
falo Creek, a couple of hours’ drive from olic candidate could win in a predom- chin did not throw his support behind
Charleston. He started working with inantly Protestant state. His campaign the Party’s new candidate; on the con-
his father in a coal mine at eleven, and recruited Uncle Jimmy to stump for trary, he sent letters to influential Dem-
later opened the Manchin Grocery Kennedy and introduce him at rallies. ocrats accusing her of ignoring the con-
Store, while serving, at various points, Joe, who was twelve, met Bobby and cerns of more conservative members of
as fire chief, constable, justice of the Teddy Kennedy in his parents’ kitchen, the Party. She lost the race.
peace, and mayor. He and his wife, Kath- over a dinner of spaghetti. His father If Manchin wanted to win, it seemed,
leen—the matriarch known as Mama drove Jack Kennedy around in the fam- he would need to expand his base of
support beyond the business commu- lot. It’s a nod to local history, in a state People had their disagreements, of
nity. Out of government, he had be- that puts a high premium on nostalgia. course, but they had to figure them out
come a successful coal broker, running Robert Rupp, a political-science pro- eventually—because, she said, “that
a firm called Enersystems. (In his most fessor at West Virginia Wesleyan Col- other person is going to be in the pew
recent Senate disclosures, he and Gayle lege, told me, “We’ve lived in our house beside you in church on Sunday.”
reported a net worth of between four for thirty-one years, but it used to be- In the most recent election, more
million and thirteen million dollars.) long to a Mrs. Taylor. And when I die than two-thirds of the voters in Man-
In 2001, he became the secretary of they’re going to say, ‘Robert Rupp lived chin’s home town went for Trump, but,
state, and, alongside his alliance with in Mrs. Taylor’s house.’” unlike in much of the country, people
businesses, he courted organized labor, People in West Virginia have reason in a tiny town don’t have the luxury of
declaring that he could find common to savor the past. It’s the only state that avoiding one another. “I’m a Democrat
ground between them. When he ran has fewer people than it had seventy years married to a Republican,” Cummons
for governor again, in 2004, he was en- ago. In April, the Census Bureau reported said, and laughed. “This was not dis-
dorsed by the miners’ union, the A.F.L.- that West Virginia’s population had closed to me at the point of our en-
C.I.O., and the West Virginia Educa- dropped another three per cent in the gagement—there was just blind love—
tion Association. Manchin won. Roberts past decade, extending a decline that but we don’t discuss politics. That is not
believed that he had learned a lesson. began in the nineteen-fifties. The loss of wise for our marriage.”
“He included labor in everything that population means a loss of federal fund- Others in Farmington are more out-
he did,” he said. ing and political power. In 1950, West spoken about their politics. In a blue
As Republicans gained influence in Virginia had six seats in the U.S. House farmhouse at the edge of town, Steven
West Virginia, Manchin leaned ever of Representatives; next year, it will be Torman, a former truck driver who iden-
harder on his self-narrative as a unifier. down to two. The gaps in local infra- tified himself as being of Cherokee de-
After he was elected governor, a local structure are profound. Jamie Greene, a scent, recently augmented the American
paper reported that one of his favorite teacher at North Marion High School, flag on his porch with three Confeder-
movies was “Dave,” a Washington fairy told me that the pandemic had exposed ate flags, hung so that they face the road.
tale in which an ordinary guy is thrust the scale of residents’ needs. “I had kids “It’s my history,”Torman said. “I’m a free
into the Presidency and ends up healing who took an A.P. exam last spring in a American, and I’m getting tired of being
a divided nation. But, twenty-five years McDonald’s parking lot, because that was pushed around by the government.”
after he turned his back on the 1996 Dem- the closest place for them to connect to When I asked him about Manchin, he
ocratic nominee, some in his party still the Internet,” she said. “They took the said, “You’re going to find that most of
consider the move a defining reflection test in their car, with their mom sitting the people in Farmington, and that in-
of his priorities. Walt Auvil, a member next to them. We’ve been talking about cludes the coal miners, don’t believe in
of the West Virginia Democrats’ execu- extending broadband Internet in West Joe Manchin no more. He goes with the
tive committee, who has tussled with Virginia for years, and it hasn’t happened.” side that he thinks is winning.” I talked
Manchin over the years, said, “The state Auvil, the member of the Demo- to Torman for a while, and he shared his
Democrats never recovered. The state cratic executive committee, told me, thoughts on Trump (“Still my Presi-
was heading in a Republican direction “We’re fiftieth in the country in per- dent”), Covid (“man-made”), and the
anyway, but Joe rode that train very ea- centage of college graduates. We’re one vaccine (“They’re not chipping me”). Fi-
gerly. He didn’t have a principle that says, of the oldest states in the country, and nally, I asked what he wanted to see
This is bad, so I should act accordingly.” we’re the whitest state in the country. Washington achieve for people in Farm-
In the view of Stephen Smith, a co- I’ve lived here my whole life, and I love ington. He thought for a long moment,
founder of WV Can’t Wait, a grassroots the state. I love the people here. My and said, “Bring back our school system,
progressive group, Manchin represents family lives here. But those demographic our education. Bring it back into what
the “wealthy good-old-boys’ club,” a gen- facts are huge problems.” it used to be. Bring prayer back in the
eration of Democrats and Republicans At its best, the local sense of his- schools. Salute our flag.”
who thrived as the economy and the tory reminds people of their interde- When Manchin says Farmington is
social fabric frayed. “He’s been the most pendence. Stephanie Cummons, a thir- the reason that he hasn’t changed, he’s
powerful lawmaker in West Virginia for ty-eight-year-old mother of two, who offering a selective reading of his own
twenty years,” Smith said. “And his game lives down the block from where Man- terrain. If Washington were abiding by
is to do what all establishment politi- chin grew up, writes a column about the inclusive logic of Stephanie Cum-
cians do—namely, what’s best for him.” her town for the Times West Virginian, mons, his vision of collaboration would
a nearby paper. “We’ve been hit with make sense. But, with few exceptions,
armington, today, is less than half a lot of tragedy—mine collapses and the Republicans he faces in Congress
F the size it was when Manchin was
growing up. The family store, like most
explosions and f loods and different
things,” she told me. “But we always
are more nearly aligned with Steven
Torman. Auvil told me, “Joe loves that
of the shops downtown, has been gone take care of our own. And that’s some- image of bipartisanship, but the ques-
for years, but its big, bright sign, adver- thing that you’re taught when you’re a tion is, bipartisanship to what end? We
tising Papa Joe’s Famous Meats, still child here. Whoever’s house you were had bipartisanship that got us into an
hangs on a brick wall beside an empty in at suppertime, that’s where you ate.” Iraq war that cost us two trillion dol-
lars and thousands of American lives
and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.”
He added, “If you’re dealing with a party
committed to a lie as its core tenet, why
do you have to be bipartisan with that?”
n June, 2010, Robert C. Byrd, of West

I Virginia, the longest-serving senator
in U.S. history, died in office. Manchin,
who had easily won reëlection for gov-
ernor, entered the race to succeed him.
Republicans coveted that seat in Con-
gress, but Manchin had a strategy. He
played up his roots as a coal-country
centrist and deployed a publicity stunt
that would have impressed his uncle
Jimmy. In an advertisement that be-
came famous, he took on climate-change
legislation that Obama had endorsed.
“I sued E.P.A., and I’ll take dead aim
at the cap-and-trade bill, because it’s
bad for West Virginia,” he said, as he
pointed a hunting rifle at a copy of the
bill and fired. That fall, he won with
fifty-three per cent of the vote.
In the Senate, Manchin made a point
of cultivating allies from both parties,
arranging private meetings with every “Once we’re all vaccinated, will you still want
senator he could. In 2013, after twenty to spend every waking moment together?”
children and six educators were massa-
cred in Newtown, Connecticut, he and
Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylva-
• •
nia, introduced legislation to strengthen
background checks on gun sales. The Obama’s actions, including his nomina- that,” Reid said. (A McConnell spokes-
initiative failed, but Manchin showed tions for Defense Secretary and for the man denied this.) Reid stands by his
an acute understanding of his constit- U.S. Court of Appeals. Reid, the Sen- decision to scale back the filibuster. Not
uents: West Virginians were fierce sup- ate Democratic leader, invoked the so- doing so, he said, risked “Obama’s Pres-
porters of the Second Amendment, yet called “nuclear option”: he lowered the idency being an asterisk.”
polls showed that they would not ob- threshold of votes for Presidential nom- As the 2016 election approached,
ject to stricter background checks. inees (except those to the Supreme Court) Manchin endorsed Hillary Clinton, but,
As Manchin sought common ground, from sixty votes to fifty-one. Manchin after Trump dominated the state, Man-
the relationship between the parties was one of three Democrats who voted chin tacked toward him. During the
was collapsing. The Obama Adminis- against it. “I said, ‘Harry, you’re going to transition, he was considered for Sec-
tration had negotiated with Republi- rue the day you do this,’” Manchin told retary of Energy, and he visited Trump
cans for months, seeking support for me. The Democrats’ problem, he sug- Tower. “I’ve had more personal time
health-care reform. (Paul Krugman, the gested, was that they’d lost touch with with Trump in two months than I had
Times columnist, called the effort a Republican leaders. “I said, ‘When’s the with Obama in eight years,” he said at
“quest for bipartisanship gone stark rav- last time you had a cup of coffee? When’s the time. The Cabinet post went to Rick
ing mad.”) In the end, the bill received the last time you had dinner? Do you Perry, but Manchin stayed close to
only one Republican vote, and many know how many children or grandchil- Trump; his Senate Web page boasted
Democrats concluded that the talks dren So-and-So has?’” that he “voted with the Trump Admin-
had been a mistake. As if to prove the Reid told me recently that he has no istration 74% of the time,” and noted,
point, Senator Mike Enzi, one of the memory of such an exchange, but he “No Senator (Democrat or Republican)
Republican negotiators, boasted to a did remember trying to get McCon- has split with their party more often.”
home crowd in Wyoming that, were it nell to eat with him. “The other Re- On the most important votes, Man-
not for the protracted talks, “you would publican leaders I’ve dealt with—all of chin remained largely faithful to Dem-
already have national health care.” them—were happy to sit down and talk ocrats; in 2017, he voted against Trump’s
By 2013, Senate Republicans were at- about things over lunch or in the of- tax cuts and against efforts to repeal
tempting to filibuster a broad range of fice, but McConnell didn’t want to do Obamacare. When possible, it seemed,
he found ways to generate stagecraft
that would satisfy both sides: though
he voted for many of Trump’s nomi- LIFE
nees, he never cast a deciding vote. Most
notably, he broke with his party to back Bright as boatwash
Brett Kavanaugh, for the Supreme Court. we head for Montreal,
But he did so only after Collins, the to Will’s house.
Republican, had insured that Kavanaugh Will’s birthday.
had enough votes to be confirmed. Man- Here’s Will!
chin’s behavior irked progressives, but New green sofa,
they had little leverage over him. In 2017,
under pressure from both Democrats glass of Malbec,
and Republicans to take a side, he re- roughhousing with the dog on the rug.
sponded with irritation. “I don’t give I love the rug.
a shit, you understand?” he told the It’s blue like a swimming pool.
Charleston Gazette-Mail. “Don’t care Will gives us T-shirts from Japan.
if I get elected, don’t care if I get de- We give him bath bombs.
feated, how about that? If they think Ruben and Ed show up from Buenos Aires.
because I’m up for election, that I can We set off for Parc X.
be wrangled into voting for shit that I
don’t like and can’t explain, they’re all Get lost.
crazy.” Every politician likes to dismiss Find Parc X.
critics, but Manchin had real reasons Sit at outdoor tables.
not to care what his peers said about Waiter draws a breath of horror
him: he was seventy years old and pros- when I put an ice cube in my wine
perous, and he’d already held every job but then, discovering
he was likely to get. it’s Will’s birthday,
In his race the following year, Man-
chin won by just three percentage points. brings us course after course
It was his smallest margin of victory in including an octopus flavored with pine.
decades, and yet, given the Republicans’ Dinner goes on and on.
ascendancy in West Virginia, it was a Birthday gâteau to finish and all the waiters
remarkable testament to his reputation. standing round to sing, handing out Calvados.
Rupp, the political scientist, said, “The It rains.
most important saying in West Vir-
ginia politics is that everything in this
state is political except politics, which record. Though John Adams famously the more you need that human interac-
is personal. This is why Joe does so well, dreaded a “division of the republic into tion,” he told me. He often cites the leg-
because he has checked every box.” two great parties,” some of history’s acy of his predecessor, Robert Byrd, who
Manchin’s box-checking has raised most significant breakthroughs occurred rose from an impoverished childhood
his profile and attracted money. In 2017, despite widespread disagreement. In in the coalfields to become the unoffi-
he and Collins were named honorary 1870, when Congress passed the Fif- cial historian of the Senate and the keeper
co-chairs of the business-friendly cen- teenth Amendment, which extended of its traditions. But Byrd never regarded
trist group No Labels. In his election the electoral franchise to African-Amer- the filibuster as inviolable. He engineered
the next year, longtime Republican do- ican men, not a single Democrat voted a series of revisions to Senate institu-
nors to groups associated with No La- for it. C. Vann Woodward, in his 1955 tions; in 1974, he led the creation of a
bels—including the hedge-fund man- book, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” fast-track “budget reconciliation” pro-
ager Louis Bacon and the Chicago described the way that hymns to co- cess, which was not subject to the fili-
Bulls’ owner, Jerry Reinsdorf—gave to mity and healing accompanied the in- buster. In 1979, while arguing for further
a pro-Manchin super PAC called Duty & justices created in the post-Reconstruc- revision, he said, “Certain rules that were
Country. While he was co-chair of No tion South: “Just as the Negro gained necessary in the 19th century and in the
Labels, liberals criticized the group for his emancipation and new rights through early decades of this century must be
spending almost twice as much to a falling out between white men, he changed to ref lect changed circum-
reëlect Republicans as it did for Dem- now stood to lose his rights through stances.” Byrd was a canny legislator who
ocrats, and for considering a plan to the reconciliation of white men.” brought home billions of dollars’ worth
attack the House Democratic leader, When Manchin talks about his faith of highways, dams, and other improve-
Nancy Pelosi. in compromise, he doesn’t mention elec- ments to what he called “one of the rock
For all of Manchin’s reverence for toral pressures; he presents it as a shib- bottomest of states.”
bipartisanship, the concept has a mixed boleth of rural life. “The less you have, Ira Shapiro, a Senate staffer from
call from Biden to break the impasse.
Manchin got his changes and signed
off on the bill.
The final result, considerably more
But we are under an awning. modest than the original plan, was nev-
That seems perfect. ertheless a landmark piece of legisla-
Drive Ruben and Ed to their hotel. tion, which included a tax credit for
Everyone hugs everyone. Americans with children, constituting
Back at Will’s the largest antipoverty effort in a gen-
Will says best birthday since 1968. eration. Manchin told me that he agreed
I have some reservations but they are narcissist: to give up the hunt for Republican votes
because Biden appealed to him person-
once again too cold to wear my smashing orange dress, ally: “I said, ‘Sir, as your friend and my
for example. President, if you’re asking me to do it,
I always say this but it’s true, there are I’ll do it, against my better judgment.’”
so many things But he had also left Biden with a warn-
I don’t understand, ing: he was not going to pass other bills
I don’t mean steak tartare, without Republicans. “I said, ‘I can’t
continue. I don’t believe it’s good for
I mean irony, corpses, how to not our country.’ ”
see yourself everywhere in comparison. The spectacle of a Democrat from
How to see instead what’s there. one of America’s neediest states la-
Recently having learned to recognize the type of tree called sycamore, boring to reduce federal assistance in-
I see them in any forest— furiated many of his colleagues. “I
the ones that look harrowed, in shreds, but think the man is utterly full of shit
go also and not even good at it,” a Democratic
straight up into life, aide told me. “I’m not the only frus-
trated Democrat, but no one can piss
like Will’s dog who, although old and may not last the year, off Manchin right now.” Manchin
I saw soar across the swimming pool on no feet. talked constantly about negotiating,
but, when progressives offered concrete
benefits that West Virginians clearly
needed, he did not budge. “Manchin
—Anne Carson could say, ‘This is a hostage-taking:
give me roads, bridges, broadband, and
I will give you my vote.’ And we would
1975 to 1987, and a former counsel to through reconciliation—though not do it!,” Faiz Shakir, a political adviser
Byrd, told me, “The nightmare scenario before Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Re- to Bernie Sanders, said. “We could
for Byrd was the paralyzed Senate. He publican, made a show of resistance by make your legacy amazing. You could
valued bipartisanship, he valued ex- forcing Senate clerks to read the en- lower prescription-drug costs for West
tended debate, but when that was not tire six-hundred-and-twenty-eight- Virginians. You could expand health
possible he reacted to it, and I don’t be- page bill aloud. It took ten hours and insurance. You could have ‘Joe Man-
lieve Byrd would have stood by and forty-four minutes. chin highways’ all over the place, ‘Joe
watched McConnell destroy the Sen- Then Manchin stunned his col- Manchin water facilities.’ Instead, he
ate.” Shapiro continued, “If you’ve got leagues by returning the proceedings to says, ‘No, let’s tweak on the margins,
somebody whose simple goal is to make a standstill; among various demands, in ways that only some Republicans
the President a failure, which is exactly he insisted on restricting the length and can support.’”
what McConnell’s goal is, then you have the scope of unemployment benefits. Manchin is convinced that some
to recalculate.” Democrats had planned to give a tax progressive objectives, such as a fifteen-
break on up to ten thousand two hun- dollar minimum wage, would harm
fter all the campaigning and the dred dollars of unemployment pay- West Virginia’s economy. “I can’t lose
A posturing, the houseboat dinners
and the flattery, the first real test of
ments; Manchin would not allow the
break to go to households that had
one job. I don’t have one to spare,” he
told me. “I know where it’s going to
dealmaking in the Biden era arrived earned more than a hundred and fifty hit the hardest: rural America.” He has
on March 4th, when the Senate began thousand dollars. Hours ticked by, as proposed a compromise at eleven dol-
its f inal debate on the President’s Chuck Schumer, the Majority Leader, lars an hour. “I looked at my Demo-
$1.9-trillion plan for Covid relief. Re- and Ron Klain, the White House chief crat friends and I said, ‘You’re going to
publicans had already vowed to oppose of staff, took turns lobbying Manchin, let the perfect be the enemy of the
it, so Democrats would have to pass it to no avail. In the end, it took a direct good,’” he added. “When do you expect
me, “I think there’s going to come a time
when Joe’s going to say, ‘I’ve given it all
this time. I’ve tried to be bipartisan. We
can’t take it anymore.’ ”
The pressure on Manchin was ris-
ing on the right, too. In March, as Con-
gress moved toward showdowns over
voting rights and infrastructure, the ad-
vocacy group Americans for Prosper-
ity, which was founded by the Koch
brothers, the conservative oil magnates,
bought advertisements on West Vir-
ginia radio, urging Manchin to “reject
a partisan agenda that will hold West
Virginians back from reaching their full
potential.” The group also created a
Web site to generate public demands
for Manchin to stop “harmful parti-
san policy.” A coalition of conservative
groups bused activists in to Charleston
to stage a rally at the capitol, calling on
Manchin to protect the filibuster.
They got what they wanted. On
June 6th, in an op-ed in the Charleston
Gazette-Mail, Manchin wrote that he
would not alter the filibuster or advance
a voting-rights bill with no Republican
support. “I believe that partisan voting
legislation will destroy the already weak-
ening binds of our democracy,” he wrote.
The voting-rights bill, which Senate
Democrats had declared their top pri-
ority, was effectively dead. Manchin was
“Now get out there and dance like everyone is looking at their phones.” not the only Democrat with reserva-
tions about the bill—“I think he is one
person who speaks for many,” McEl-
• • wee said—but he was the most outspo-
ken, and some members of his party no
to get a hundred per cent of everything ing that will combat climate change; longer hid their contempt. Mondaire
you want?” talk about jobs. “Too often, when we Jones, a progressive congressman from
Even as many Democrats complain have something in mind like tax cred- New York, tweeted, “Manchin’s op-ed
about Manchin, they have been quietly its for electric vehicles, the batteries are might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote
composing a playbook for winning his not even American-made,” he said. to preserve Jim Crow.’”
coöperation. “Whatever you want the Manchin has been wary of proposals
ultimate resolution to be, you need to to create a clean-energy standard. But, obody who knows Manchin well
propose something that’s two or three
ticks to the left of that, so that Man-
McElwee said, “I think he is gettable
on a clean-energy standard if it can
N was surprised by his decision. “I
would bet a year of my salary that he
chin can look like he dragged you to- create jobs, because he understands that would not agree to change the filibus-
ward the middle,” the Democratic strat- West Virginia needs a part of that.” In ter,” Jonathan Kott, a former senior ad-
egist said. But Sean McElwee, a pro- March, Biden nominated Gayle Man- viser to Manchin, had told me. “He
gressive activist who heads the polling chin to be the federal co-chair of the would quit the Senate before he does
firm Data for Progress, advised a dif- Appalachian Regional Commission, a that.” There was little that Democrats
ferent approach: “If you’re talking about development agency launched by J.F.K. could do to persuade him. They could
this stuff in the way that you would to address the poverty that he had ob- threaten to take away his position as
talk about it with your liberal friends, served during the 1960 campaign. chairman of the Energy and Natural
you’re almost certainly fucking up.” Some Democrats suspected that Resources Committee, but that would
McElwee wanted Democrats to take Manchin would agree to change the fil- only improve his reputation with con-
a vocabulary lesson from Manchin: ibuster after he saw obvious cases of Re- servatives at home. Progressives could
Don’t talk about infrastructure spend- publican obstruction. Reid predicted to challenge him in a primary, but, if they
lost the general election, they would I can go to, and they’ll tell me exactly her enough.’ ” She credited Manchin
likely end up with a Republican along what makes me feel good.’ So we got with launching her into politics.
the lines of the state’s junior senator, ourselves in this situation.” But, over time, she had grown un-
Shelley Moore Capito, who has voted In Manchin’s laments about radi- comfortable with his conservatism. To
to repeal the Affordable Care Act, de- cal politics and the pace of change, one earn extra money, she worked at K.F.C.,
fund Planned Parenthood, block the could hear the protests of a man stand- for eight dollars and seventy-five cents
Covid-relief bill, and acquit Trump, ing athwart history, not quite yelling an hour. “The typical trope is ‘Oh, there’s
twice. If Democrats want to feel less “Stop,” but certainly yelling “Whoa.” If just teen-agers working there,’ ” she said.
captive to Manchin, they need to fig- Republicans regain the majority in 2022, “But that’s just not true, and if they don’t
ure out how to elect more Democrats his moment of prominence will be over have enough to live on they have to re-
in places like West Virginia. as abruptly as it arrived. What he does sort to welfare services, to put food on
One morning in May, I followed until then will determine if the Dem- their table.” She did not understand
Manchin to an event in Fairmont, the ocratic Party, to which he devoted his Manchin’s arguments for limiting the
seat of Marion County, near his home career, remembers him as a hero who minimum wage to eleven dollars an hour.
town. Before it started, he spoke to a advanced its goals or as the man who “It’s not livable, even here in West Vir-
group of reporters about the For the obstructed them. For all of Manchin’s ginia,” she said. “National media would
People Act, nimbly switching between hesitations, politics is changing fast, even have you believe ‘Oh, we’re very conser-
the vocabularies of the right and the left. in the terrain he calls home. vative. We don’t want the government
“I understand the states’ rights,” he said, giving us stimulus checks.’ But people
and mentioned the Tenth Amendment— ot far from where Manchin spoke really, really appreciated that! Where I
catnip for conservatives. “But, on the
other hand, every election should be ac-
N to the local grandees, I had coffee
with Aryanna Islam, a senior at Man-
worked, people were, like, ‘I need this to
pay rent, or get food for the week.’ ”
cessible.” Voter access—that would play chin’s alma mater, West Virginia Uni- Islam ran for the state legislature last
well with Democrats. “We should know versity, who had recently been elected year, and lost, but she’ll run again. She’s
who you are.” Voter I.D.—back to the president of the College Democrats of twenty-one years old, and like most of
right again. “But now you’ve got some West Virginia. Islam grew up in Fair- her friends she sees herself as a thor-
states going off the rails, trying to make mont. She told me that her father, Pinto, oughgoing progressive. She said, “A lot
it almost difficult, because they don’t like had moved from Bangladesh in 1992, of people around here see government
the outcome of the election”—once more and found work at Cracker Barrel, where as a force for bad, and I want to see that
to the left. (A few weeks later, Manchin he fell in love with his boss, a white West change. I think it’s important to bring
circulated a memo to colleagues in Con- Virginian named Kathy Long. “They a voice like mine, as someone who’s
gress, suggesting that he’d support the had to date secretly until he quit,” Islam young, who’s a person of color here in
bill if it included a similarly mixed set said. She grew up in the public schools West Virginia, especially. I’d bring a
of provisions. If common ground does in Marion County, which were over- whole new perspective to things. I want
not exist in Washington, Manchin was whelmingly white. “I was the diversity,” to get that into our political system.”
going to try to will it into being.) she said. In 2008, when she was eight Democrats in Washington tend to
After finishing with the reporters, years old, she read a kids’ biography of assume that places like West Virginia
Manchin stepped to the front of an au- Obama and learned about his biracial will never be pulled back from the grip
ditorium full of local officials, includ- background. “I said, ‘Wait a minute— of the conservative movement. But, in
ing leaders of small towns and cities recent years, a liberal backlash to the
nearby. He talked to them first about political establishment has gained force
the thing they had come to hear—how there. In the 2016 Democratic primary,
they could tap into Covid-relief funds— Bernie Sanders won all fifty-five coun-
and then about what was on his mind. ties in the state. This February, a poll
“We have been radicalized,” he said. “I commissioned by workers’ advocates
never had a cell phone growing up. I found that sixty-three per cent of West
started so long ago, it was four-digit Virginians support a fifteen-dollar min-
numbers.” That got a laugh. “I didn’t imum wage—a level comparable to the
have a computer. I never had access to state’s support for Trump. Islam has
all this information around. I didn’t that’s me, too!’ That really affected me.” heard enough about bipartisanship.
know how to process it. None of us did, When she was seventeen, she got a job “Senator Manchin is waiting for some-
in our age group. You know how we through Manchin’s office as a page in thing that’s just never going to happen,”
processed it? We went to our comfort the U.S. Senate. Two years later, she re- she said. “It’s just holding up action that
zone. If you’re leaning a little bit left, if turned to intern in his office, answer- can be taken. He’s worried about what
you’re a little bit more progressive or ing phones and jotting down consti- Republicans in West Virginia will say
liberal, ‘I got to find somebody who’s tuents’ comments. “There were a lot of about him, but they’re going to trash
talking to me.’ If you’re a little bit right angry phone calls. You’ll have one that’s, him no matter what. So he might as
and very conservative, ‘I got another like, ‘He’s working with A.O.C.!’ And well get us something in the process.
network over here. I’ve got a cable news the other is, like, ‘He’s not working with He has the power now.” 
ANNALS OF RELIGION
WOMEN ON THE VERGE

They feel drawn by God to the priesthood. Will the Vatican ever let them in?
BY MARGARET TALBOT
oline Humbert was a seventeen- on her own. Now she wondered if she a religious newsletter dropped through
S year-old studying history and pol-

itics at Trinity College in Dublin
when she first felt a calling to enter the
was losing her mind. She saw a psychi-
atrist, then confided in a chaplain, who
laughed at the idea. Finally, she began
the mail slot. Humbert grabbed it to read
on the long ferry ride across the Bay of
Biscay. That evening, she opened it up
priesthood. She did not welcome it. A to pray: “Do not call me—your Church to an article about the nineteenth-century
cradle Catholic who was born and raised doesn’t want me.” saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a Carmelite nun
in France, Humbert knew that in the Humbert tried to put her sense of vo- sometimes called the Little Flower of
Roman Catholic Church only men could cation behind her. She graduated from Jesus. Humbert knew quite a bit about
be priests—it was an indisputable rule college, earned an M.B.A. and a mas- her, but she hadn’t been aware that
anchored in official teachings and tradi- ter’s degree in theology, and got married Thérèse had also felt a powerful calling
tions. This was in the early nineteen-sev- and had two sons. She worked as a man- to the priesthood. Thérèse’s sisters had
enties, and in other religions, and in so- agement consultant and volunteered at given testimony at her beatification pro-
ciety at large, women’s roles were being her local diocese, as a marriage counsel- ceedings that she had asked them to
recast under the influence of second-wave lor. Then, one day in 1990, the yearning shave the top of her head so that she
feminism. Most of the major Protestant came back, like a dormant volcano that would have a tonsure—an emblem of
denominations had already either recog- resumes rumbling. She was happy with priestly devotion. Thérèse had written
nized the ordination of women or were her husband, Colm Holmes, a business- in her diary, “I feel in me the vocation
moving toward it. Reform Judaism had man who had a warm, twinkly manner of a PRIEST,” and she had declared that
just ordained its first female rabbi. But and easygoing, egalitarian convictions— she would die at the age of twenty-four,
the Catholic Church, so ingrained with he’d grown up on stories of his great- because that is the age at which she would
symbols, held fast to the notion that a aunt, a suffragist. Their boys, eight and have been ordained—and God would
priest must bear a physical resemblance six, were flourishing. There was nothing surely spare her the pain of not being
to Christ in order to stand in persona outwardly, or even inwardly, wrong with able to exercise her calling. Thérèse died
Christi. Vatican authorities often noted her life, except for her enormous long- at twenty-four, of tuberculosis.
that Jesus chose only men as his twelve ing to serve God by preaching the Gos- Humbert read deep into the night. It
apostles—the model for the priesthood pel, hearing confessions, and blessing the struck her that she had not known this
and for the foundation of his church. bread and wine of the Eucharist. She thrilling information about Thérèse be-
Moreover, his omission of the Virgin went to tell the archbishop of Dublin, cause the Church was embarrassed by
Mary from those ranks meant that thinking that, given the dwindling sup- it: she had been taught about Thérèse’s
women could be revered without being ply of priests, he might be glad to know sweet simplicity, but not about her fierce
ordained. Other Christian traditions that God was calling women. Humbert calling. When the ferry landed in France,
found countervailing inspiration in the recalls, “He told me, ‘Why do you want the family made a pilgrimage to the town
knowledge that Christ picked Mary to be a priest? You could be a saint.’ And of Lisieux, in Normandy, where a basil-
Magdalene to witness and proclaim the I said, ‘Well, I could be a priest and a ica commemorates Thérèse. In subse-
Resurrection—and in Catholic theology saint. Men can be both.’ ” quent years, Humbert returned nearly a
she was sometimes known as the apos- For months, Humbert wept at the dozen times.
tle of the apostles. But the Vatican did thought that her deepest sense of herself In 1994, Pope John Paul II issued a
not see that story, or stories of Christ’s would never be realized. “If you are an stern official letter that seemed to pre-
openness to women, as justification for acorn, you are meant to be an oak, not a clude even speaking about women’s or-
allowing them into the priesthood. pine tree or a cactus,” she told me. She dination. He lamented that, despite the
Humbert told me that the sudden was moved when a nun friend gave her “constant and universal Tradition of the
conviction that came over her was pro- the unexpected gift of a chalice and a Church,” the possibility of women priests
foundly dislocating. It felt like “a delusion Communion plate, telling her, “The Cath- was “considered still open to debate” in
rooted in pride, or in a rejection of my olic Church is not ready, but you are.” some parts of the world. John Paul went
female nature and of God.” She was a The years went by, but her desire did on, “I declare that the Church has no
capable, grounded person: she had weath- not fade. One summer, Humbert and her authority whatsoever to confer priestly
ered the death of her beloved mother husband decided to drive with their boys ordination on women and that this judg-
from cancer, when she was twelve, and from Dublin to France, to visit her fam- ment is to be definitively held by all the
she had moved from France to Ireland ily. As they were about to leave the house, Church’s faithful.” Humbert told me
Anne Tropeano hopes to build a social-justice-oriented parish: “I will strive to be a completely kick-ass priest.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD RENALDI THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 47
tors—roles in which laypeople read from
the Bible and assist with such tasks as
lighting candles and setting up the altar.
At the discretion of local bishops, women
had been fulfilling these duties for years,
especially in parts of Latin America where
priests and male lay ministers were in
short supply. Traditionalist Catholics
found these reforms objectionable, too.
At first, Brown told Father Bob that
she simply couldn’t deliver a homily. Then
she went home and, as she was vacuum-
ing her living room, she felt a tug on her
shirt. She went upstairs to her bedroom,
dropped to her knees, and prayed. She
heard a voice say, “Yes, I’m calling you to
preach, and teach my Word.” Brown told
“I’ll tell you when I’ve had enough!” me, “I thought, You’ve got to be kidding
me. And I started to argue with God. I
said, ‘I’m Black, I’m Catholic, and I’m a
• • woman.They don’t do that in my church!’”
She told Father Bob yes.
that the Pope’s words were devastating: neighbors and with Brown’s older sister,
“It’s hard to describe how sort of vio- who had converted to Catholicism. ill the Roman Catholic Church
lent, spiritually violent, that felt to me,
because, after all, it’s a document. But
Brown fell in love with the rituals, the
music, and the fervent way the priest
W ever ordain priests who are not
men? Plenty of women feel that they
it felt like it was intended to put an end talked about Jesus. As an African-Amer- have a priestly vocation, and many Cath-
to people like me—to any woman who ican, she liked that St. Bridget’s had a olics support them: according to a survey
had that sense of vocation. It felt like it significant number of Black parishioners, from the Pew Research Center, roughly
was trying to kill what was most alive and incorporated gospel singing into its six in ten Catholics in the United States
in us, what was bound up with the di- services. Brown was a good speaker and say that the Church should allow women
vine.” Humbert believed that a true vo- a beautiful singer. Yet in 1992, when she to become priests (and priests to marry).
cation—whether religious or artistic was twenty-four, she was taken aback by The figure is fifty-five per cent for His-
or scientific—would always be cours- an invitation from the priest, Father Bob panic Catholics, the Church’s fastest-
ing through you. If you were born to do Werth, to preach a homily sometime. growing demographic. In Brazil, the
something, she said, “you resist it at your Official Catholic teaching kept women Latin-American country with the larg-
own peril.” away from the altar as well as from the est Catholic population, nearly eight in
priesthood. It wasn’t until 1994 that the ten Catholics surveyed by Pew endorse
nlike Humbert, Myra Brown was Vatican permitted altar girls, and even the idea of women priests.
U not born into a Catholic family. Her
parents were Southern Baptists who left
today there are priests who balk at the
idea. One of the leaders of the flourish-
The Pew survey also indicated that
American Catholicism is suffering “a
that church after moving from Arkan- ing conservative-Catholic movement in greater net loss” than any other faith tra-
sas to Albion, New York, as migrant farm the United States, Cardinal Raymond dition. If you Google the word “lapsed,”
laborers, in the early sixties. A few years Leo Burke, the former archbishop of the word “Catholic” comes right up. By
later, her father got a job at a steel mill, St. Louis, has attributed young men’s de- some accounts, in the past few years
and the family relocated to Rochester. clining interest in the priesthood partly women—long the backbone of the
When Brown, the youngest of eight chil- to the presence of altar girls. “Young boys Church—have been withdrawing from
dren, was a teen-ager, her father died of don’t want to do things with girls—it’s active involvement in greater numbers
hypothermia, after being mugged. The just natural,” he told a Web site pun- than men. Many people peel away be-
family was poor, but her mother kept ningly titled the New Emangelization cause they can no longer abide teachings
them all fed with government assistance, Project, in 2015. “The girls were also very that refuse to recognize same-sex mar-
an abundant vegetable garden, and work good at altar service. So many boys drifted riage, endorse contraception, allow di-
cleaning other people’s houses. Brown away over time.” Youthful altar service vorced and remarried people to take Com-
and her siblings were allowed to go to was a proving ground for the priesthood, munion without obtaining annulments,
church with whoever would take them Burke contended, and it required “a cer- or permit women to be priests. “My grown
on a given Sunday. They went to a Bap- tain manly discipline.” sons are not churchgoers,” Soline Hum-
tist church with their grandmother, to a It was only this past January that Pope bert told me. “I’m not surprised. When
Pentecostal church with friends, and to Francis amended canon law to officially they were young boys, we sat in church
a Catholic church, St. Bridget’s, with recognize women as acolytes and lec- during those homilies about the great,
terrible sin of sexuality, and of childbirth girl energy; her increasingly serious spir- but also signs of a solitary, solemn inten-
out of wedlock, and how it fell particu- itual yearnings wigged them out a little. sity. Hennessy sometimes went by the
larly on women and girls—homilies all One Sunday, she went alone to Mass at church in the middle of the day and saw
delivered by people who would never get St. Ignatius, a Jesuit parish in Southeast Tropeano praying alone, kneeling at a
pregnant in their lives. I thought, I hope Portland. When the opening rites began, pew as watery light streamed through
my boys aren’t listening. As soon as they she noticed the priest, Tom Royce, at the the stained-glass windows of the dark-
were old enough, they relieved me of that back of the procession. He was in his ened church.
worry by never going back.” early eighties, white-haired and hunched In 2014, when Tropeano was forty,
But, even if many Catholics would over. Tropeano said to herself, “This guy she enrolled in a Jesuit divinity school
welcome women’s ordination, the pros- is, like, a million years old—what’s he in Berkeley, California, where most of
pect seems as distant as ever. The Roman gonna do?” She was surprised, and deeply the other students were men preparing
Catholic Church is not a democracy, as moved, when he got to the altar and de- for the priesthood. A friend thought that
its traditionalists are forever reminding livered “the most joy-filled, authentic Tropeano herself seemed very much like
its would-be reformers. Its governance homily about filial fear and the appro- a priest in the making. Tropeano “worked
is elaborately and rigidly hierarchical. priate way to ‘fear’ God—not to fear God so hard to wrestle with everything from
And successive Popes have made a point as a punisher but to have a respect-filled liturgy to Scripture to Vatican II,” she
of issuing fresh pronouncements on the awe for this majestic Creator who loved recalled. “And she seemed so prepared
incompatibility of women with the priest- us into being.” to lead a church community.” (The friend
hood. They have also punished priests Tropeano kept returning to St. Igna- asked not to be named, because she
who have publicly expressed support for tius, a plain white structure on a busy teaches at a Catholic school, and believes
women’s ordination, sometimes going so street near a bus stop. Homeless people that speaking about Tropeano’s calling
far as to defrock or excommunicate them. rolled out sleeping bags in the doorway. could get her into trouble.)
In early June, the Vatican published a Inside, tiles sometimes fell from the ceil- Hennessy thought that in the past,
revision of its canon laws codifying au- ing, and parishioners regularly mopped when even the idea of becoming a woman
tomatic excommunication for “both a up puddles of water that seeped through priest would have been beyond her imag-
person who attempts to confer a sacred the floor. But the pews were packed, and ining, Tropeano might have joined an
order on a woman, and the woman who Tropeano found the congregation to be order of nuns. But many of those orders
attempts to receive the sacred order.” unusually diverse. There was a signifi- were dying off. When Tropeano con-
Some progressive Catholics have sug- cant Vietnamese and Filipino member- fided that she felt called to the priest-
gested that revelations in recent decades ship, along with families whose Croa- hood, it made sense to Hennessy, who
about clerical sex abuse—and the unflat- tian and Italian ancestors had filled the told me, “With her fervor and zeal, Anne
tering light that the scandal cast on the congregation in its early decades; there needed to have a priestly role within the
all-male leadership, which covered up were a number of parishioners with dis- faith community and perform all parts
misconduct for so long—have bolstered abilities. Tropeano, whose years of spir- of the Mass.” Tropeano’s dilemma re-
the case for permitting women priests. itual questing had included New Age minded Hennessy of the Biblical para-
But, at the top levels of the Vatican, the and Buddhist interludes, found that the ble of the talents, in which a man going
scandals do not seem to have influenced “Jesuit flavor of spirituality”—“the see- on a long trip entrusts his servants with
views on gender roles in the Church. In ing God in all things, the commitment some money. Two make investments,
2010, the Vatican, under Pope Benedict to social justice and serving people on generating a profit, but a third buries his
XVI, issued new rules making it easier share in the ground, for fear of losing it.
to discipline pedophile priests, but the The story is often interpreted as an ex-
same document classified the “attempted hortation not to let timidity get in the
sacred ordination of a woman” as a grav- way of acting on one’s God-granted gifts.
iora delicta—a category of offense that Hennessy told me that the Church “was
includes pedophilia. burying talent out of fear.”
t wasn’t until 2007, when Anne Tro- ope Francis, for all his populism,
I peano was in her thirties, that she
found a church to reanimate the wan
P warmth, and commitment to social
justice, has expressed no more interest
Catholicism of her childhood. She had the margins, and the intellectual acu- in seeing women ordained than his pre-
a background in marketing and commu- men”—was precisely what she had been decessors did. At a 2015 press conference,
nications, and had been managing a rock seeking. She threw herself into the life he referred to John Paul II’s 1994 Ordi-
band called TapWater, living with the of the parish, and helped attract hun- natio Sacerdotalis, the proclamation that
musicians on a lavender farm outside dreds of new worshippers to the Novena had so distressed Soline Humbert, say-
Portland, Oregon. She was slim, with of Grace, an annual nine days of prayer. ing, “Women priests, that cannot be done.
long hair parted in the middle and a ret- Katie Hennessy, a palliative-care social Pope St. John Paul II, after long, long,
ro-cool seventies vibe. The people she worker who is active in the St. Ignatius intense discussions—long reflections—
hung out with, including her boyfriend, community, noticed unusual qualities of said so clearly.” When a Swedish jour-
were secular types who loved her fun- charisma and compassion in Tropeano, nalist asked Francis about it again, in
2016, he reiterated his fealty to John Paul’s Moreover, whatever Francis’s own Massimo Faggioli, a professor of his-
line on the matter. sympathies might be, there is a limit to torical theology at Villanova, told me,
That year, Pope Francis appointed a what he can change when so much of “Of the main issues on which Pope Fran-
commission to study the question of his hierarchy remains intransigent. In cis has been a hero to liberal Catholics,
women serving as deacons. In the Roman March, he surprised some people who the most disappointing to them is the
Catholic Church, deacons are ordained had noticed his benign attitude toward issue of women. He is less conservative
ministers who perform baptisms, wed- same-sex unions by signing a decree, than some former Popes in saying that
dings, and funerals, among other min- from the Vatican’s Congregation for the women should work, but he is still close
isterial duties, but cannot celebrate Mass, Doctrine of the Faith, saying that priests to the traditional narrative of separate
hear confessions, or consecrate the bread could not bless such unions. The liberal and complementary—not equal—spheres.
and wine of the Eucharist. People who National Catholic Reporter called it “an- In that way, he is a typical cleric born
wanted to see women enter the diacon- other tricky move in Francis’ tightrope in the nineteen-thirties.” There are cer-
ate—and perhaps, eventually, the priest- walk of upholding Church teaching while tainly Catholics, women among them,
hood—were hopeful. Among those ap- also trying to extend a warmer welcome who respond to such language and even
pointed to the commission was Phyllis to L.G.B.T.Q. persons.” wish that Francis would go further. Last
Zagano, an outspoken scholar at Hof- When Francis talks publicly about year, in an essay for the conservative
stra University who has devoted years of women, his words often echo traditional Catholic magazine Crisis, Constance T.
research to making the case that women Catholic teaching about the comple- Hull wrote that, if women in the Cath-
did serve as deacons in the early centuries mentarity of men’s and women’s roles. olic Church have a proper calling, it is
of the Church. (The apostle Paul refers He lauds women’s special virtues as wives not to become priests but “to love priests
to the first-century Christian woman and mothers, their inherent dignity, their with the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
Phoebe as a deacon.) But Francis was self less service to their parishes. He which means a selfless love that seeks
not keen to take action. Saying that the speaks about the Church as the bride of their ultimate good, that is, their sanc-
commission’s findings were too dispa- Jesus Christ. In 2015, he told reporters tification.” Hull added, “To be a spiri-
rate—“toads from different wells,” as he that women should be consoled and up- tual mother is to die to self, just like nat-
put it—he appointed a second one, with lifted by the knowledge that the Church ural motherhood.”
all new members, in 2020. It has yet to is feminine and that “the Madonna is Francis has taken some novel steps
issue any deliberations. When he offi- more important than popes and bish- toward involving women in decision-
cially permitted women to serve as ac- ops and priests.” For that reason, he im- making and Church leadership. He has
olytes and lectors, he took care to em- plied, they shouldn’t need—or want— appointed women to roles in Vatican
phasize that these are lay ministries the authority that comes with ordination. governance which they had never be-
“fundamentally distinct from the or- Last year, in a papal document titled fore occupied—including the director-
dained ministry that is received through “Querida Amazonia,” he wrote that it ship of the Vatican Museums and the
the Sacrament of Holy Orders.” would be a grave mistake to assume that council that oversees Vatican finances.
Perhaps surprisingly, Francis has been women could be “granted a greater sta- In February, he chose Sister Nathalie
more accommodating on L.G.B.T.Q. tus and participation in the Church only Becquart to be the first woman to serve
matters—at least, in off-the-cuff remarks. if they were admitted to Holy Orders.” as an under-secretary in the Synod of
At a press conference in 2013, he said of Ordaining women as priests would “sub- Bishops, an influential committee that
gay people, “If they accept the Lord and tly” undermine the “indispensable” roles advises the Pope.
have good will, who am I to judge them? they currently play: “Women make their Such concessions might seem mea-
They shouldn’t be marginalized.” A re- contribution to the Church in a way that gre: Mary McAleese, a former President
cent documentary about him, “Fran- is properly theirs, by making present the of Ireland and a leading Catholic fem-
cesco,” contained a news-making scene tender strength of Mary, the Mother.” inist, has called the change in canon law
in which he spoke in support of civil Natalia Imperatori-Lee, a professor formalizing women’s roles as acolytes
unions. Miriam Duignan, a campaigner of religious studies at Manhattan Col- and lectors “the polar opposite of earth-
for women’s ordination who is the di- lege and a Catholic, finds the Pope in- shattering.” But in the Catholic Church
rector of communications for the Wijn- spiring when he talks about poverty or even the tiniest tectonic shift can set off
gaards Institute for Catholic Research, ecological devastation, but is unhappy a temblor. News outlets around the world
outside London, suggested to me that with his rhetoric about women: “A lot covered the acolytes-and-lectors decree.
the Pope’s “softening tone about same- of what he says is so wrapped up in fem- The small but vocal set of conservative
sex relationships is based on his personal ininity as beauty and enhancement, as Catholics who have arrayed themselves
conversations with many gay men whom uniquely spiritual and safeguarding the against Francis were agitated once more.
he may encounter within the Vatican morality of the world. He does speak out There wasn’t much objection when he
walls.” She went on, “They may be per- against violence against women—but elevated the July 22nd memorial of Mary
sonally lobbying him, helping him to un- often it’s couched in ‘don’t-sully-this- Magdalene to a feast day on the litur-
derstand that that teaching is cruel. But precious-flower’ language. It’s really prob- gical calendar. But, when he issued a de-
has he ever had an encounter with a lematic for women who just want to be cree saying that women could have their
woman who has a vocation to the priest- seen as human beings with the capacity feet washed in an Easter Week ritual
hood? I don’t think so.” for self-determination.” previously reserved for men, some of his
traditionalist critics denounced the pros-
pect as indecent.
It’s possible that Francis is playing a
long game, making incremental changes
that will one day allow a future Pope to
go as far as admitting women to the priest-
hood. This may not be what Francis per-
sonally wants, but he trusts the Jesuit
concept of discernment—the examina-
tion of personal conscience as a way for
the Church to find its way forward—
and he values the voices of laypeople.
And if some future Church, having ac-
customed itself to more women occupy-
ing leadership roles and standing at par-
ish altars as acolytes and lectors, were to
ordain women as priests, Francis’s ac-
tions will be seen as having contributed
to that outcome. Imperatori-Lee told
me she thought that the sight of women
acolytes at the altar, in cassocks and
sashes, might occasion in some Catho-
lics “an imaginative shift, one toward see-
ing the priesthood as something open
to all people of God.” She pointed out,
“There’s a reason why we use stained
glass as catechesis—the images you’re
presented with form your understand-
ing of the possible.”
here is at least one scholarly prece-

T dent that some softened-up Church
of the future could dust off to justify the
presence of female priests. In 1976, the
Pontifical Biblical Commission, a body
established by Pope Leo XIII, voted in
favor of the position that nothing in Scrip-
ture alone prevents the ordination of
women, and that it would not necessar-
ily violate Christ’s intentions were the Kori Pacyniak, raised Catholic, resolved “to stay and fix my church.”
Church to do so. Campaigners for wom-
en’s ordination also know that they have part of what made the widespread cler- pire, however, eroded the faith’s early
certain demographic realities on their ical abuse of children possible. Erin Con- egalitarianism, and medieval theologians
side: the clerical population is aging, and way, a former Catholic-school teacher enshrined the idea of women as infe-
fewer young men want to enter the priest- who recently graduated from the Jesuit rior, impure, and unfit for ministerial
hood. But the movement to ordain women School of Theology in Berkeley, told service. (Aquinas: “Woman is naturally
does not tend to rely on practical argu- me, “There’s this theological argument subject to man.”) Deborah Rose-Mila-
ments. It focusses instead on a moral idea: against women—that the priest is in vec, the co-director of FutureChurch, a
that barring people from Holy Orders persona Christi, and that since Jesus was Roman Catholic church-reform orga-
because they aren’t biological males en- a man you can’t be a priest if you’re not nization, told me, “There is nothing more
forces misogynist values that have harmed a man. But I come back to the idea that radicalizing than to realize that the early
both women and the faith. God is bigger than that. It just seems Church looked very different from the
I recently spoke with the novelist too limiting to say God only wants half Church you grew up with.” Mary Mag-
Alice McDermott, a lifelong Catholic of the population to be priests. I want dalene, for example, was long seen “only
and an advocate of women’s ordination. a God who isn’t worried about your as a repentant prostitute, when really
She invoked “the damage that’s been anatomy but is interested in your call.” she was this crucial, powerful figure.”
done by confining an entire group of Advocates for female ordination point A network of church-reform organi-
people to a lower caste.” McDermott out that Jesus welcomed women into zations around the world have been push-
believes that the exclusion of women is his community. The Holy Roman Em- ing for women’s ordination for decades,
and in recent years they have become Vatican: Braschi had broken with the by the canonical Church. There are doz-
feistier. The Women’s Ordination Con- Church in the nineteen-seventies, over ens of other womenpriests leading their
ference, which was founded in the mid- what he saw as its inadequate response own worship communities. They often
seventies, has been headed since 2017 by to Argentina’s Dirty War, and he had or- meet in church spaces rented to them
an energetic thirty-five-year-old Amer- dained Regelsberger himself, just a month by other denominations, and appeal to
ican, Kate McElwee, who is based in before the Danube ceremony.) Less than Catholics who have been alienated by
Rome. She has organized protests at the two weeks later, the Vatican’s Congrega- the Church’s teachings on gender and
gates of the Vatican—a bold move, given tion for the Doctrine of the Faith warned sexuality but are still drawn to its ritu-
that the police take security around the the women that they would be excom- als, its liturgy, and its tradition of ser-
Holy City seriously. McElwee told me, municated if they did not “acknowledge vice to the poor. In 2005, Via and her
“I figure, the biggest threat to the Vati- the nullity” of their ordination and ask friend Rod Stephens—a priest who had
can is a woman’s body and voice, so let’s voluntarily resigned his orders because
use our bodies and our voices.” She was he is gay and wanted to live with the
delighted when, in 2018, Pope Benedict’s man he loved—founded a parish in San
personal secretary told the press, “I am Diego, the Mary Magdalene Apostle
of course aware that there is a noisy move- Catholic Community. Via wanted it to
ment which has as its main ideological serve “disenfranchised Catholics: driven-
goal the fight for the female priesthood.” away Catholics, like my husband; fall-
McElwee told herself, “That’s us—let’s en-away Catholics, like my children;
be a noisy movement!” divorced-and-remarried-without-annul-
In Germany, where laypeople have ment Catholics, like my colleagues in
played significant roles in running the “forgiveness for the scandal caused to the my office; L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics; and
Church, a grassroots movement for faithful.” They did not, and the Church people like me, who have no place in
women’s ordination has been particu- expelled them. the Catholic Church to worship with
larly influential. In December, Georg In 2005, four more women were integrity anymore.”
Bätzing, the head of the German Bish- ordained as priests (and five as deacons) Joe Stewart, who is retired from a job
ops’ Conference, told a journalist that in a boat at the mouth of the St. Law- in printing services for the Navy and the
“there are well-developed arguments in rence Seaway, off the coast of Canada; Department of Defense, has been at-
theology in favor of opening up the sac- the next year, ordinations took place on tending Mary Magdalene from the start.
ramental ministry to women.” The Cath- the Bodensee, between Austria, Germany, He and his wife, Margie, liked the idea
olic Church in Germany is such an out- and Switzerland, and at the convergence of ordaining women, but soon found
lier on the issue that some think it could of rivers in Pittsburgh. There are now other things to appreciate about Mary
split off, triggering what the Vatican most about two hundred women priests, many Magdalene. Previously, they had attended
dreads: a schism. “Could Germany break of them in the United States. They call a Black Catholic church in San Diego
away?” Massimo Faggioli said. “That’s themselves Roman Catholic Women- where the entire congregation joined the
the one-million-dollar question. The priests. After a while, the Vatican stopped priest in saying the words consecrating
Catholic Church there is very powerful. bothering with individual warning let- the bread and wine—a practice that he
It enjoys the status of an established ters to women, given that womenpriests and Margie found moving. Then their
church. It gives a lot of money to the are automatically excommunicated at the priest told them that he’d had a visit from
Vatican, to Latin America and Africa.” moment of the ceremony. As many in the bishop, who warned him that the
Yet it has a “tradition of theologians and the Church hierarchy seemed to see it, congregants were not allowed to do such
entire academic institutions that are fully an ordination, like a plant in inauspi- things, and the practice ceased. At Mary
behind women’s ordination.” cious soil, would essentially not take hold Magdalene, the congregation spoke the
in a woman’s body; it could not be real, blessing along with the priest, and no-
ome women who want to be priests only a presumptuous charade. body worried about breaking the rule—
S have not waited for permission. On
June 29, 2002, on a rented boat in the
Jane Via, a former theology profes-
sor and a retired deputy district attorney
they’d already broken a bigger one.
Danube River, near Passau, Germany, for San Diego, was ordained as a priest oline Humbert is now sixty-four, with
seven women took Holy Orders contra
legem—in knowing defiance of canon
in the Bodensee ceremony. She told me
that the ensuing excommunication was
S shoulder-length hair that is mostly
silver. She has an emotional seriousness
law. The river is considered an interna- painful; it saddened her that she wouldn’t that is lightened by bursts of merriment.
tional waterway, and so no diocese could be buried in a Catholic cemetery. One Humbert considered becoming a Roman
be blamed for having allowed the cere- of her teen-age sons tried to reassure her Catholic womanpriest, but in the end it
mony to occur. The Danube Seven, as by saying that if she agreed to be cre- did not feel like the path for her. Instead,
the women became known, had asked mated he’d put her ashes in his pocket, she began informally celebrating the Eu-
Bishops Rómulo Braschi, of Argentina, cut a hole in it, and walk through a Cath- charist in her home, a bungalow built in
and Ferdinand Regelsberger, of Austria, olic cemetery. the nineteen-sixties in Blackrock, a quiet
to help perform the service. (Neither of Via went on, though, to lead a thriv- suburb on the coast outside Dublin. At
the men was in good standing with the ing congregation that is not recognized the first such ceremony, on the Feast of the
Epiphany, in 1996, there were only three Corpus Christi. Gradually, she told me, tor and Callan as her associate. The
others present, all of them men: Colm she had begun to feel “like the ministry Catholic Church claimed that, in doing
Holmes, her husband; a Catholic priest was following me.” She went on, “It didn’t so, they and their flock had excommuni-
friend; and a man who had once trained just happen to me in churches. My life cated themselves. Today, Spiritus Christi
for the priesthood. They all sat around was being flooded with it. I’d go to a gro- holds services at a red-sandstone Presby-
the rosewood dining-room table she and cery store to shop, and ninety per cent terian church in downtown Rochester.
Holmes had bought soon after getting of the time somebody would come up In 2017, at a ceremony presided over by
married. Despite the reassuring familiar- to me and say hello, and I’d say hello, one of the Danube Seven, Brown was
ity of the surroundings, the act felt mo- and it would end up being some kind of ordained, contra legem, as a Roman Cath-
mentous and defiant and a little frighten- aisle confession. And I would walk away olic woman priest. At Spiritus, she now
ing. Humbert went out to the garage to saying to myself, ‘That person just told heads a congregation that is fifteen hun-
find some wine that could be consecrated, me their whole life.’” She’d go shopping dred strong.
and smiled when she realized that the at a mall, or to a restaurant, or to a gas Spiritus has a gospel choir, and Brown
bottle she’d grabbed at random from the station, and have the same sort of en- preaches wearing a stole that is embroi-
cupboard was a Château Sainte-Marie— counter, often culminating in people ask- dered with the words “Black Lives Mat-
St. Mary’s wine. To lift the chalice and ing her to pray for them. “I was aware ter.” At the altar, she talks about racism
the bread above the makeshift altar where that those experiences kept following “as the worst invention of human effort,”
they’d eaten so many family meals, and me, but I didn’t know what that meant.” but one that can be dismantled because
to utter the familiar words of blessing The priest at Corpus Christi, Father “we created it.”
that she had heard male priests say all Jim Callan, was progressive, and he al- In divinity school, Anne Tropeano
her life, Humbert had to push through lowed a female associate pastor, Mary found herself increasingly convinced that
a paralyzing fear of succumbing to hubris. Ramerman, to lift the Communion cup the “tight grip the institutional Church
But once she overcame this feeling, she and say prayers at Mass. The congrega- is keeping on the priesthood is choking
told me, “I was not playing a role, not tion also recognized same-sex unions, the life out of the entire Church.” Pri-
acting—instead, I was giving expression and invited everyone to take Commu- vately, she believed that she would be
to something very much within me.” nion—not just Catholics in good stand- a “phenomenal pastor of a parish,” and
Holmes has also become deeply ining. In 1998, the local diocese fired the it filled her with despair to know that
volved in the movement for women’s staff. The next year, a congregation of a the Vatican would not allow it. So she
equality in the Church. He is one of the thousand Corpus Christi parishioners decided to pursue ordination with the
two heads of the reform group We Are reconstituted itself as Spiritus Christi, Roman Catholic womenpriests move-
Church Ireland, and he does Zoom in- with Ramerman as their founding pas- ment. The ceremony is scheduled to take
terviews in front of a large painting, which
he commissioned, showing women at the
Last Supper. Irish television reported on
the couple’s activities, and some of the
reactions were harsh: Humbert received
letters accusing her of being unstable,
hysterical, power-hungry, and in urgent
need of more children. Her sense of call-
ing has lasted through five Popes, and
she does not think she will see it officially
sanctioned in her lifetime. When people
cheer such reforms as the recognition of
female acolytes and lectors, she told me,
she feels that they are being placated by
“crumbs from the patriarchal system that
will not satisfy the hunger, the God-given
hunger, for equality and dignity.” Still,
the house Eucharists have brought Hum-
bert a deep sense of satisfaction. Since
the pandemic began, the Dublin group
has been meeting on Zoom, and to her
wonderment people have listened to her
homilies from Pakistan, the United States,
South Africa, Australia, Brazil, and all
over Europe.
For many years, Myra Brown worked
as a nurse while heading the hospitality “Oh, hey, I’m you from three days ago. Just gonna grab
ministry at a church in Rochester called a ripe avocado and I’ll be out of your way.”
Once, during prayer, Myra Brown heard a voice say, “I’m calling you to preach, and teach my Word.”
place in October. For now, she is work- trauma. At all three institutions, they en- and one of its church musicians. Berbe-
ing at a nonprofit in Albuquerque, but countered friendly people from the Epis- ret is a lesbian, and she and her partner
she hopes to become a full-time priest copal Church—the perpetual tempta- have a fifteen-year-old daughter. Berbe-
and build, from the ground up, a big, tion of liberal Catholics fed up with the ret told me that she would have ceased
busy, social-justice-oriented parish. Most Church’s teachings on gender and sex- being a practicing Catholic long ago if
Roman Catholic womenpriests are mar- uality. But Pacyniak felt Catholic to their it weren’t for Mary Magdalene: “I would
ried, and many have children and grand- bones. They happily went to chapel with never have been able to participate in
children, but Tropeano, who is now forty- their new friends, but, as Pacyniak put church life like this, never have been able
six, has decided that celibacy will be part it to me, “I was, like, ‘I’m not going to to have my daughter, with her two moms,
of her vocation and that she will wear become an Episcopalian just because baptized.” Later, I asked her if she thought
the Roman collar. (Many women in the they ordain women.’” They did not want the official Church would ever recognize
movement do not.) She recently started to be driven away and leave Catholicism the callings of people like Jane Via and
a blog called “Becoming Father Anne,” to what they saw as antediluvian forces. Kori Pacyniak. “It may choose not to,”
and likes to call herself a “Vatican reject.” They thought, “I’m going to stay and fix she said. “And, if so, it will continue to
In an e-mail, she explained that she aims my church somehow.” fall into irrelevancy. The Church may die
to “challenge and mock the absurdity On February 1, 2020, in San Diego, I because it won’t change.” But, she added,
and narrow-mindedness of this idea that attended the ordination of Pacyniak, who “we will continue to create our own spaces
women cannot live out the role of priest would soon become the leader of the that meet our needs. Because that’s what
within the Catholic Church.” She went Mary Magdalene Apostle Catholic Com- humans do.”
on, “You say women can’t be priests? munity. Womenpriests are no longer or- In the past year, people from else-
Watch me. I will strive to be a completely dained by men on international waters: where have been attending Mass at Mary
kick-ass priest.” enough of them have become bishops in Magdalene by Zoom. Among them are
the movement that they can perform Pacyniak’s parents. They had always wor-
ori Pacyniak was eight when they such rituals themselves, without involv- shipped at a mainstream Catholic church,
K told their grandmother they wanted
to become a priest. (Pacyniak, who is
ing male bishops, and, since the Vatican
automatically excommunicates women-
but it wasn’t just Pacyniak’s preaching
that attracted them to Mary Magdalene.
nonbinary and uses the pronouns “they” priests, local dioceses can generally escape Basia Pacyniak told me that the partic-
and “them,” grew up as a girl.) “Only any suspicion of being linked to them ipatory elements, and the church’s obvi-
boys can be priests,” Pacyniak’s grand- (and, indeed, try to ignore them com- ous respect for laypeople, made her think
mother replied. Pacyniak recalls saying, pletely). The Vatican’s teachings on transit was more like “what I imagine the
“ ‘Fine—when I grow up I want to be a gender people are no more progressive original Church was like.” She went on,
boy.’ That’s just how my eight-year-old than its stance on women priests, but the “What was it that Christ said—‘Where
mind worked.” Pacyniak’s parents, a jour- Mary Magdalene community was warmly two or three are gathered in my name, I
nalist and a public-school administrator, welcoming to Pacyniak, the first known am there’?” Basia began to cry. “It’s ba-
had immigrated to the U.S. from Poland, transgender and nonbinary person to be sically saying we are all the Church.”
and the family’s devout Catholicism was ordained within the Roman Catholic At Pacyniak’s ordination, sunlight
inextricably bound up with its Polish womenpriest movement. shone through the stained-glass windows,
identity. Pacyniak was brought up in Chi- A local Episcopal cathedral, St. Paul’s, illuminating a blue streak in their hair. I
cago, and went to Polish Scouts and Pol- had lent itself out for the occasion, and thought about what a religious-studies
ish folk-dancing classes along with Mass, the pews were mostly filled. Pacyniak’s scholar, Jill Peterfeso, had written not
and at home they burrowed into the lives parents, Basia and Bernard, were there, long ago—that the ceremonies involving
of the saints. “I loved martyrs,” Pacyniak as were their brother, Gabriel, a law pro- womenpriests are transgressive because
recalls. “I loved Joan of Arc. I was, like, fessor, and his wife and their two young they are traditional. Aside from the fact
‘Slaying dragons is a job description? Ex- children. So was the woman Pacyniak that women and a transgender person
cellent, I’m there.’” In high school, Pa- describes as their “platonic life partner,” were wearing long white robes and crim-
cyniak played competitive soccer—and an illustrator named Jessica. Before the son vestments at the front of the church,
in their spare time read Thomas Mer- service, people called out greetings and and that the ceremonial language had
ton and Thérèse of Lisieux. One day, Pa- hugged in the aisles. An elegantly dressed been rendered inclusive, the occasion
cyniak wrote to an order of Carmelite woman in front of me asked her com- looked and sounded a lot like a traditional
nuns in Baltimore and to an order of panion if he had any Kleenex: she knew Catholic service. Pacyniak knelt before
Poor Clares in the Netherlands, asking that she was going to cry. two women bishops, Jane Via and Su-
how to join a convent. To Pacyniak’s dis- At a reception afterward, in the church zanne Avison Thiel, for the laying on of
appointment, the nuns told them to go hall, there were fairy lights and a long hands. Via, the first to do so, placed her
to college before making such an inquiry. table laden with food. Pacyniak and their hands gently on Pacyniak’s bowed head.
Pacyniak studied religion and Portu- brother spun around the room doing a People walked silently down the aisle to
guese at Smith College in the early two- traditional Polish folk dance that they’d do the same. “Loving God,” Thiel said
thousands, got a master’s in divinity from learned as kids. I talked with a woman during the Prayer of Consecration, “shower
Harvard, and then went to Boston Uni- named Heather Berberet, a psychologist Kori, your servant, with grace. Bless them
versity, for a master’s in theology and who is a Mary Magdalene parishioner anew with the spirit of holiness.” 
FICTION
56 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMA CÓRDOVA

read a lot about famous people and chill had it. It’ll be forever at funny-dis- have a name for the behavior, or they
I how they died. Or just what dis-

eases they had. I started with ac-
tors and writers, but now I’m down to
ease level. Unless someone very hip
gets it soon.
•
can’t find it in their books, and, because
the symptoms aren’t too worrisome,
they just send you home to keep on
congressmen. Painters, too, I read a lot living, telling you only to come back if
about, but only because my brother has I went to a third neurologist on Mon- things get worse. That’s what they’d
so many books about them. (Is it “has” day. He gave me a sheet of paper with been doing with me.
or “had”? The brother is gone, but the a perfect circle in the middle. He asked I thought I might have a fake dis-
books are still here.) My brother loved me to draw a clock inside it, showing ease, one I’d developed only to get my
painters, paintings. Me, I don’t really the time of my choosing. These things, parents’ minds off my brother. That
know what to do with a painting, how you always think there’s a trick, so I would’ve been shitty of me, worrying
long I’m supposed to look at it. I pre- asked if there was a trick, but he said them for nothing, but I couldn’t ig-
fer movies. Before I watch a movie, I no, no trick, just draw a clock. I won- nore the possibility. I’d read on the In-
check how long it will last. dered what time would make me the ternet that sometimes when a child
My brother was always going to die most interesting case. I made a mark died a sibling became mysteriously ill,
young (he had cystic fibrosis), but still for every minute and drew a clock that in order to give the parents a goal, a
he thought maybe he’d last long enough said eight-twenty-five, but then I re- reason to live. (Save the remaining
to study art history at the Sorbonne, alized that both hands hanging down child!) I didn’t want to be that person.
and then some more at the École du in the lower half of the circle might be I wanted what I had to be real but
Louvre after that, and then maybe have interpreted by the doctor as indicating treatable. Or manageable, at least. I
his own gallery in Paris one day. He depression, so I added a second hand wanted something with some cachet.
painted a little bit himself, Thomas, pointing up to twelve, for hope. De- Like, nothing intestinal.
but he wasn’t very good at it. That’s pression is not one of the mental ill- Heart conditions have cachet. Mar-
what he said, at least. I liked his stuff, nesses that get you a lot of cred. The fan syndrome is respectable, because
I think, but mostly because I liked him doctor barely glanced at the drawing. they think Lincoln had it. Lupus has
a lot. When it comes to art, I can’t re- cachet, too, but I don’t know if that has
ally tell what’s good and what isn’t. • to do with who had it (though people
What’s easier to tell apart than Good Later, in the parking lot, I asked my like Flannery O’Connor had it, and
Art and Bad Art, though, is a prestige mother what she thought the clock test maybe J Dilla) as much as with what
illness from a regular one. It’s not up was about. it evokes. It’s hard to argue against a
for debate that mental illnesses have “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll look it disease that has so much metaphori-
had the most cachet, historically. Manic up online when we get home. Do you cal weight, what with the idea of your
depression, schizophrenia, anorexia remember what time you drew?” own body attacking itself. If you’re not
nervosa—anyone who was anyone had I nodded, then she nodded. When- terrified by that, then you’re not alive.
one of those. Then come certain ever possible, she liked to double-check Also, the name itself. Lupus. Whoever
S.T.D.s, like syphilis, or AIDS, but it my results against the Internet. named lupus “lupus” knew what they
seems odd to me that S.T.D.s should “The first two neurologists didn’t were doing.
have cachet, and I wonder why some ask me to draw any clocks,” I said. •
of them do and others don’t (herpes My mother seemed to believe that
doesn’t get you any points, for instance, this meant the one we’d just seen was I’m not interested only in old diseases.
even though you can die from it), but a better physician, that he’d know what Every Tuesday, I read the obituaries
I guess it’s not worth thinking about was wrong with me. Francine Eliot writes for Inventaire.
S.T.D.s too much, since there’s no way She always came with me to these It’s important to stay in touch with
I have one of those, or ever will, if things appointments. I was fourteen, still a what your contemporaries die of, I
keep going at the rate they’re going, child, sort of, so I thought that it had think, and to keep up with new ill-
dating-wise. to be that way, that she had to come nesses, too. Medical mysteries. A few
We’re trying to figure out what’s to ask the doctors the right questions, months ago, for example, on the radio,
wrong with me. Everyone says prob- but when she’d sent me to the first I heard about a wave of babies born
ably narcolepsy, but they can’t really shrink, and then the second, they’d both without arms in the Southeast. They
confirm unless they do a spinal tap, asked to see me alone, and she’d seemed were just starting to look into it. I won-
and my mother is against that. She’s to understand. dered what had spurred the investiga-
scared a spinal tap will be too painful • tion—when exactly one armless new-
or leave me paralyzed. What fright- born had become one armless newborn
ens me about it isn’t so much that it I was afraid sometimes that there was too many. But that’s neither here nor
will hurt as that it might confirm nar- nothing wrong with me. Something there. One thing we know for sure is
colepsy. I don’t want narcolepsy. Nar- was going on, for sure, what with the that I have all my limbs.
colepsy is one that people make fun absences at dinner and the sleeping fits My father gets Inventaire in the mail
of. It isn’t even mental. It doesn’t mat- during the day, but sometimes the body every week, has since forever, for the
ter that Nastassja Kinski and Chur- does weird things, and doctors don’t international-politics section. Every
but I still cross my fingers every week
that it will be him on the last page of
the magazine.
•
My mom explained later what the

clock-drawing was all about: “It’s to
see if you have dementia. It’s routine,
but they still have to check.”
She said that it didn’t matter where
I’d drawn the hands of the clock, be-
cause all that the doctors were inter-
ested in was whether I’d drawn them
and the numbers they pointed at within
the circle.
“So at least I don’t have that,” I said.
“I don’t have dementia.”
We’d ruled out a number of things
by now. MRIs were clear. I wasn’t hav-
ing mini strokes. It wasn’t epilepsy. I
was sad, yes, but not depressed, the
psychiatrists had concluded. Blood
tests showed nothing other than a lit-
tle anemia.
“Maybe I’m transgender,” I told my
mother.
“I swear if you met me in real life you’d find me more three-dimensional.” It was something I’d been thinking
about. Maybe the reason I slept so much
during the day was that I couldn’t stand
• • being in my body.
“Why would you say that?” my
time we move (we move every year pened the following summer, with Sam mother said. “Do you feel you’re a boy?
or so, for his job), it’s a conversation, a Shepard and Jeanne Moreau. ( Jeanne A man?”
worry: will the mail be forwarded to Moreau made it to Inventaire’s last page “I wouldn’t mind being one some-
our new address seamlessly? Will there that week, not Shepard, which was at times.”
be a lag in his delivery of Inventaire? the root of an explosive argument be- She seemed relieved to hear this.
My mother reads it after him. Her fa- tween my parents.) A guy named Eric She took a deep breath and said that
vorite part is the books section. Thomas Schweblin used to write the page, but wishing to be a man was just a normal
only ever looked at the last page, the he died, too, and the lady who wrote part of being a woman.
obituary of someone who’d “left us” his obituary got his job. Francine Eliot “Wanting to be a man is different
that week. He’s the one who got me was younger, more in touch with the from feeling like you’re a man,” she
hooked on it. Growing up, because of times. She started writing more and added.
that page, I’d believed that only one per- more obituaries for nobodies, for the “Is it? How do you tell the differ-
son died per week, that a paper shrine regular people who died in terrorist at- ence between a feeling and something
in Inventaire was what awaited us all tacks, for example, or for this or that else?”
at the end of this. It was only when early victim of the Covid pandemic. She took a shortcut then. She’d been
Debbie Reynolds died just one day Thomas liked when it was a nobody taking these more and more, lately,
after her daughter during Christmas week in Inventaire’s obit, but I didn’t but they were always shortcuts to what
Blues 2016 (Christmas Blues = deaths see the point in learning facts about she wanted to say, not to where I’d
occurring right after Christmas) that people who would be remembered only been going.
I’d realized people died all the time, for dying tragically, not for something “We don’t want another boy,” she
everywhere, every second. After that, they’d accomplished during their life- said. “We don’t want to replace your
I started seeing death everywhere. It time. It was too depressing. brother. We’re very happy with our lit-
was like when you’re taught what “off- When Thomas died, though, I sent tle Johanna.”
side” means in soccer: once you under- his photo and a few details to Fran- •
stand the rule, you see it non-stop and cine Eliot, to see if she would write
call offside constantly. That January, about him. She never responded, and The next day, Inventaire came in the
John Hurt and Emmanuelle Riva died it’s been seven months now, almost, mail. Francine Eliot had written a no-
a couple of days apart. Same thing hap- so I know it’s not going to happen, body obit, the first one since Thomas
died. I read it over breakfast, before I averaged three attacks a day. Most empty rooms, looking at what everyone
school. The nobody had been blue- of them lasted between ten and twelve had left behind.
eyed. He’d done nothing with his life; minutes, but they’d been getting lon- “Is it your first time throwing a party
he was being celebrated only for hav- ger lately, and I was waking up more or what?” I asked Victoria.
ing lived, for having had dreams. The and more slowly. Even once I was awake, “What?”
biggest of these dreams had been to it had begun to take a minute or two “It shouldn’t be that hard to know
publish poetry, but, because life had before I could start moving my body who you want to have at your party.”
denied him that satisfaction, Francine again. I’m guessing that everyone has Victoria looked surprised that I
Eliot was giving it to him in death, by had those nightmares in which they’re could speak. Surprised and suspicious.
publishing a sonnet he’d written in his conscious of an imminent danger but “I know how to throw a party, thank
old age. can’t save themselves because they can’t you very much,” she said. “I’ve seen
Fuck that, I thought. move. I’d always thought that the scary movies.”
Why did he deserve the space? part was the specific danger of the “So?”
Thomas hadn’t got what he wanted nightmare—the killers coming for you, “So, there’s always a party.”
from life, either. I wrote an e-mail to the monsters, whatever—but it turns We hadn’t seen the same movies.
Francine Eliot right away, via the mag- out it’s the paralysis that gives you the My favorite ones were “Léon (The Pro-
azine’s contact page. My first impulse cold sweats. You could see your happi- fessional)” and “My Girl,” with Anna
was to let it all out, the anger, the dis- est memory play again and again, or a Chlumsky.
appointment, to tell her everything that young Paul Newman walking toward I asked Victoria if she didn’t have a
was wrong with the nobody’s poem you with a bunch of roses: if you can’t class to get to.
(rhyming amour with toujours), how move, you’ll want to scream. Which “It’s P.E. now,” she said. “You don’t
much more interesting my brother had was what I wanted to do now, when I need to be on time for that.”
been, but then I became sleepy and took woke up and couldn’t move. The thing That was the silver lining of my
a short nap on the desk. When I woke was, though, I couldn’t really scream, mysterious illness: I hadn’t had to suf-
up, I was in a completely different frame either, so I made these embarrassing fer the indignities of phys ed in about
of mind, bordering on suicidal, and I sounds instead, throaty mm-m-ms that six months. I’d jumped at the chance
deleted what I’d written. I replaced it were a bit sexual, I guess, and made ev- to get a medical dispensation. The peo-
with a lie. I told Francine Eliot that I eryone laugh. ple I understand the least in life are
was myself dying, and that my only I tried not to attempt screaming that those who insist on participating in
wish before I died was to read my big day, in French class, when I woke up phys ed even when they have a good
brother’s obituary as written by her. I to the sight of my neighbor, Victoria, reason not to. There was a girl like that
didn’t want her to write mine when the writing a list of people to invite to her in my previous school—she had six
time came, I just wanted to “see him birthday party. (I wasn’t on it.) million ulcers or something, a rare con-
alive again in [her] words.” There was a column for girls and dition, but she still went every week,
one for boys, and her issue seemed to and we had to watch her pain, the con-
• lie with the girls. She kept going over tortions in her face when she caught a
At school, they didn’t mind the sleep the girl column like she was compos- ball, and we had to pretend it was all
attacks anymore. By they, I mean the ing a poem and there was a perfect right, she was strong, she asked for the
teachers, of course—who the hell ball. She threw up after every practice.
knows what the kids were thinking. The film she had to be playing in her
As I said, we moved every year, so, in head to endure this, I can’t relate to at
general, there was no sense trying to all. I don’t want to be the freak that I
make friends, but particularly not here. am, but there are still limits to what
Big brother dying three weeks into I’ll do to fit in.
the school year, and now the sleep- “I think it’s going to go away,” Vic-
ing—who wants to hang out with the toria said to me, out of nowhere. “Your
new girl? Anyway, the teachers were falling asleep like that. I think it’s just
nice. They’d all liked Thomas, the lit- the way your body goes through the
tle they’d got to know him, so they rhyme she wasn’t seeing, her right trauma for now, but then it will all fall
were keen to give me a break. I’m as- hand running her pencil eraser along into place. One day it will stop, and
suming they’d all read the first few re- her neck. you won’t even realize it. It will be like
sults of a narcolepsy search on Goo- By the end of class, I could move the last hiccup in a hiccupping fit. You
gle by now, too, and had been reassured freely again, but Victoria was still stuck never know it’s the last.”
by the following statement: “While with her list. Everyone left the room “I think I’ll know,” I said, but she
scary, the episodes are not dangerous but us. I always stayed in classrooms went on with more examples. “It’s like
as long as the individual finds a safe during breaks and recesses. People how your parents don’t remember the
place in which to collapse.” In their thought I did that because of the nar- last time they tucked you in, or read
classrooms, there was always a table colepsy, and I think they felt sorry for you a bedtime story. Ask them, you’ll
my head could fall onto. me, but really I liked the silence, the see. They don’t remember the last story
they read you. One day, they just stopped list, so that couldn’t be the only cri- onds, like the Facebook guy at the end
doing it.” terion. I’d never had thoughts or fan- of the Facebook movie, I thought, but
She coughed twice after she said all tasies about committing violence. I really like anyone anywhere at all times.
this, turned away from her list to face wondered if I would ever have to re- The mundanity and the drama con-
me as she did, like she thought it was sort to violence in my life, physical tained in such a small action. A flick
worth seeing. Her eyes didn’t narrow violence. I wondered if not preparing of the thumb, not even, and you could
as she coughed. myself for the option would make me give yourself a little heart attack wait-
“The list I’m making,” she said, “it’s more or less likely to succeed at it. ing for a new message to appear in
not for a party. It’s just a list of people Maybe you have to surprise yourself bold. Every time I refreshed, I thought
I’ve had violent thoughts toward.” with your violence, I thought, if you that this would be it, that Francine
“How violent?” want it to work. Eliot had been hitting Send the mo-
“I have an anger issue,” she said. “I’m “When did it start?” I asked. “When ment I’d hit Refresh, and I could al-
working on it.” did you start having the violent thoughts?” most see her name appear in my in-
I’d thought it was short for a birth- She couldn’t tell exactly. box, faintly superimposed over the last
day-party guest list, but now, knowing “It was progressive,” she said. “Un- e-mail I’d received (Caran d’Ache: New
what it was, it seemed rather extensive. like your condition. It’s not like one colors available!), but it was always an
“How violent are the thoughts?” I day I was fine and the next I started illusion. I wondered if anyone had ever
asked again. daydreaming about murdering people.” died while refreshing their in-box, and
“Pretty violent. And it’s not just “My thing was progressive, too.” thought how interesting that would be
thoughts. Sometimes I have dreams so “Well, not really. I was there when for Francine Eliot to write about. I al-
violent and gory I have to close my it started. That German class? You didn’t most e-mailed her again to suggest she
eyes in them. You ever closed your eyes half fall asleep.” look for that person.
in a dream?” “Fair enough.” I wasn’t supposed to wander too far
I had, in fact, twice. The two times I think she was trying to convince from school, but I walked five blocks
I’d dreamed of Thomas since he’d died. me that what she had was worse than to buy cigarettes anyway. I’d smoked a
“Last week,” V ictoria said, “I what I had, which I guess is what teen- few with Thomas before, in secret of
dreamed I was crushing Miss Barbette’s agers do. When it comes to suffering, course. He wasn’t supposed to smoke
skull against a kitchen counter, over they always want the upper hand. with the cystic fibrosis, and he didn’t
and over and over again. I couldn’t Me, I know it’s not a contest, because really, just thought he had to live a lit-
watch, and I told myself, in my dream, Thomas always said “It’s not a contest” tle, if he was going to die young. When
even though I knew I was dreaming, when I tried to rank Francine Eliot’s he died, he’d had the same pack for
to close my eyes. The sounds were spot obituaries from best to worst life lived. five months. I’d finished it after the fu-
on, though. It’s really fucked up, what I kept all of Inventaire’s last pages and neral, thinking they would be the last
your brain can come up with, in terms organized them from best to worst in smokes I’d smoke, but that hadn’t quite
of sensory details.” a binder. My favorite life Francine Eliot worked out.
“What did Miss Barbette ever do had written about so far was Tom Pet- The guy at the counter of the cor-
to you?” ty’s. Michel Serres’s was second. Fa- ner tabac, where they didn’t ask you to
“Nothing, really. That’s why dreams vorite didn’t mean I thought these men show I.D., told me I looked all mel-
don’t count as much. The people you hadn’t suffered (I know everyone suf- ancholy, and I responded that melan-
see in them, they’re stand-ins for other fers), just that they’d had a lot of good choly was the happiness of being sad
people.” times. The worst life in the binder so (Victor Hugo), and that I was pres-
“Who was she a stand-in for?” far—I won’t name names, because I ently feeling no form of happiness
Victoria shrugged. don’t want to cause more pain to the whatsoever.
She’d never actually been violent, family, but it’s a woman, though the “Ouh la,” he said. “I don’t actually
she explained. She only ever had the person just above her is a guy, and I care! Maybe go write a song about it?”
thoughts, but the thoughts were be- keep hesitating between the two, and He wasn’t mean, though, kind of
coming bothersome. They encroached I keep the woman last only because of just admitting that he couldn’t do any-
on her concentration, messed with her gender. I wondered who Francine thing for me, which I appreciated—
her grades. Eliot was going to eulogize next week, the honesty. So I gave it a shot. I didn’t
“That’s why I’m making the list,” if she knew it already. Would she con- write a song, because I know nothing
she said, tapping the eraser against the sider Thomas at all? about music, but I tried a poem:
piece of paper. “I need to get to the I asked Victoria what her favorite This is my first poem,
bottom of what it is that makes me movies were, but she said she didn’t No matter what happens
think violent thoughts about these peo- really watch movies anymore, only Over the course of the next few lines
ple in particular, so I can fix it.” TV shows. Never will I write
A first poem again.
I looked at the list. The only thing •
the people on it had in common was I thought it wasn’t too bad for a
that they were idiots, but then some Lunchtime I spent mostly on my phone, start, but it ended up putting a lot of
other idiots hadn’t made it onto the refreshing my in-box every few sec- pressure on whatever followed. The
you.” I’d asked my mom if we could fix
them into being just regular teeth—
BIOLUMINESCENCE the way Joy changes her name to Hulga
in “Good Country People” because
There’s a dark so deep beneath the sea the creatures beget their own Hulga reflects her personality better—
light. This feat, this fact of adaptation, I could say, is beautiful but she’d said no. I told her smoking
kept me awake.
though the creatures are hideous. Lanternfish. Hatchetfish. Viperfish. My father had mentioned a few
I, not unlike them, forfeited beauty to glimpse the world hidden weeks earlier that my issues could be
related to my inner ear, and so we were
by eternal darkness. I subsisted on falling matter, unaware on our way to an E.N.T. now. I could
from where or why matter fell, and on weaker creatures beguiled tell that my mother thought it was a
bit of a waste of time, but it was the
by my luminosity. My hideous face opening, suddenly, to take them first time my father had actually sug-
into a darkness darker and more eternal than this underworld gested something, so I think she wanted
to reward him for participating.
underwater. I swam and swam toward nowhere and nothing. The E.N.T. seemed to have no idea
I, after so much isolation, so much indifference, kept going why we would want his opinion, given
my set of symptoms. We were in and
even if going meant only waiting, hovering in place. So far below, so far out in fifteen minutes. While we were
away from the rest of life, the terrestrial made possible by and thereby in there, Francine Eliot responded. She
was sorry for my loss, and to hear that
dependent upon light, I did what I had to do. I stalked. I killed. I was dying, blah blah blah, but she
I wanted to feel in my body my body at work, working to stay was under strict contractual obligation
to eulogize only the newly dead (this
alive. I swam. I kept going. I waited. I found myself without meaning week’s or last), and so she couldn’t write
to, without contriving meaning at the time, in time, in the company about Thomas, who’d been “gone” (I
hated that she used the word) for a few
of creatures who, hideous like me, had to be their own illumination. months already.
Their own god. Their own genesis. Often we feuded. Often we fused I thought about Victoria, how
I would’ve reacted to the e-mail if
like anglerfish. Blood to blood. Desire to desire. We were wild. Bewildered. I’d been her. I tried to have violent
Beautiful in our wilderness and wildness. In the most extreme conditions thoughts toward Francine Eliot. I
imagined her in her office, respond-
we proved that life can exist. I exist. I am my life, I thought, approaching ing to my e-mail. “Inventaire is a
at last the bottom of the sea. It wasn’t the bottom. It wasn’t the sea. time-sensitive publication.” I imag-
ined slamming her face into her key-
—Paul Tran board, slamming and slamming until
the squares imprinted on her skin, but
I couldn’t get into it. I fell asleep in
nobody from Francine Eliot’s latest her (she was beautiful and no bullshit), the car on the way home.
obituary didn’t seem like such a loser but then, as years went by, I understood
anymore. that it wasn’t the teeth that made her •
• beautiful but something from within, At dinner, my mother pretended that
and that I didn’t have that something, my father’s idea hadn’t been too bad,
When my mother picked me up that only the teeth. that at least we’d ruled something out.
afternoon, she made a comment about “Vanessa Paradis is a smoker,” I told I don’t know why she insisted that he
the cigarette smell. “You don’t want to my mother. feel included in our quest. He was re-
ruin your teeth,” she said. “You have “Well, she has the means to whiten treating more and more into himself,
such a beautiful smile.” her teeth all the time, I guess.” like fathers in the movies. He was
I had that big gap between top mid- “We do, too,” I said. just barely there. He was some sort of
dle incisors, les dents du bonheur, as they We kept talking about it like that, crisis-solver for big-time companies,
call it, “happiness teeth,” like Vanessa like the main issues with smoking were was good at it apparently, at observing
Paradis. Because of my teeth, I’d known cost and cosmetic side effects, and like in detail and spotting what the prob-
who Vanessa Paradis was before I’d happiness teeth were something to take lems were, and he was supposed to, I
learned the name of our President or special care of, even though I just think, know a thing or two about per-
anyone else famous. It was nice for a wanted normal teeth, because I wasn’t severance and resilience, but he never
while, to hear all the “How cute! Just happy, and having happiness teeth when shared his knowledge with us about
like Vanessa Paradis!,” because I loved you weren’t happy was a cosmic “fuck what made people happier or more
effective. I guess we didn’t ask, but still. cried a bit, not for him, but because of 98 of some show. I couldn’t deal with
I asked my parents if they remem- his blue eyes, because they reminded TV shows anymore, they were be-
bered the last time they’d tucked me me of the Michel Pastoureau lec- coming too long, and you never knew
in or read me a bedtime story. My tures about color that Thomas and I in advance how many seasons they
mother said of course not, but my fa- had listened to on the radio during would be renewed for. I like books
ther had a clear recollection of the exact the first Covid lockdown, in March, better, movies, too, because you know
moment when he’d realized it had be- 2020. In the one about the color blue, when they’ll end. Especially books,
come ridiculous. Pastoureau had said that blue eyes though. You hold the remaining pages
“I remember,” he said. “You had a had been seen as ridiculous in an- in your right hand, you pinch them,
zit on your forehead, a real red-and- cient Rome, the eye color of fools flip through them. You get a sense of
white one with pus, and I thought, and idiots. Pastoureau didn’t say this, your progression.
Maybe she’s getting too old for this.” but this was how Thomas had inter- “That was a good one,” I heard my
“A zit?” I said. “How old was I?” preted his words: being blue-eyed in mother tell my dad. They couldn’t see
“I don’t know . . . five? Six?” ancient Rome was kind of like having me, as I was in the darkness of our
“And I had a zit?” a mullet today, he’d said. I’d laughed hallway.
“It was just one zit.” at that for a long time. Thomas hadn’t “Watch another?” my dad said, and
“Even babies can get acne,” my quite understood why. “What’s so after launching a new episode he
mother said, before she took another funny?” he’d said. “You’re funny,” I’d wrapped his arm around her.
one of her shortcuts and displayed a said. “Blue eyes in ancient Rome were I didn’t think they were getting
new way in which she’d misunderstood the mullets of today! That’s hilarious!” over Thomas. I didn’t think they ever
me. “Do you think if we went back to Sometimes I was too nice to him. I’d would. But it still made my intestines
tucking you in at night, that would remember he would die before me turn to stone when I saw them act
solve your issue?” she said. and pretend he was funnier than he normal.
I asked if they remembered the last was, or smarter, but this wasn’t one •
time they’d read a bedtime story to of those times.
Thomas, but neither of them did. • The next day, after French, I asked Vic-
toria if maybe she thought her anger
• I went to the kitchen for water and issues could be solved by engaging in
In bed, I read that week’s obituary saw my parents dumb in the purple some actual violence.
again, the blue-eyed failed poet’s. I TV glow. They were on, like, Episode “You mean, if I did beat the shit out
of these people?” she said, fanning her
list of enemies under my nose. She’d
been working on it some more.
“Yeah. Like, maybe you wouldn’t
like it. Maybe beating them up would
make the whole fantasy of beating them
up disappear.”
“Or I might like it a lot.”
“Wouldn’t you want to know?”
I told her she could beat the shit
out of me if she wanted to. “As a test,”
I said.
She said I was crazy.
“I won’t tell it was you,” I said.
She repeated that I was crazy.
“Maybe we can help each other
out. Maybe if you beat my face in,
break my teeth and all, that will wake
me up for good. And maybe it will
make you realize you actually don’t
want to be violent, that actual blood
is gross.”
“Your teeth are cute.”
“I didn’t ask what you thought of
my teeth.”
“Makes you unique.”
“I wouldn’t mind new ones.”
It took some more convincing, but
Victoria ended up accepting my offer.
“Tomorrow after class,” she said. I spent four weeks in the hospital, for myself. When I asked her what I
“I’ll bash your face in.” the first one mostly unconscious. While should measure myself against, she
I was under for some other thing, they said fictional characters, that charac-
• did a spinal tap and concluded that ters in books were less flaky than real
The following morning, I smiled at my- what I had wasn’t narcolepsy. They re- people. Then she sort of spaced out
self in the mirror, to see my teeth one built my teeth, gap and all, which I and said that she missed her mother,
last time before Victoria broke them, was pretty pissed about, but my mother that she couldn’t quite remember her
make sure I wouldn’t miss them. We said I’d specifically asked for them to face. No one visited her the whole
didn’t talk to each other the whole day. be reset exactly the way they’d been. time she was there. At eight-twenty
I didn’t fall asleep at all, not even in I was on a lot of meds, though, and I every night, she watched the stupid-
German class. I was afraid of the pain don’t remember it. est show I’ve ever seen, some cheaply
that she would inflict later on. I kept When the police asked who’d done made soap whose scenes we were sup-
on wondering how serious it would be. it, I pretended not to remember. I saw posed to believe had taken place that
When we met behind the school at very day, a show where the characters’
five, like we’d planned, I told Victoria concerns were supposed to mirror
that maybe we ought to keep it that those of regular French people. The
way: the threat of her beating me up show had been airing every weekday
had kept me from falling asleep, it for eighteen years, longer than Thomas
seemed, and maybe it had provided had lived.
her with comfort throughout the day? Victoria visited me once, but our
Maybe this was the solution to both mothers stayed in the room the whole
our problems—to make a date every time, so I couldn’t ask if she thought
day for her to beat me up without ac- beating me up had solved her prob-
tually having to go through with it? a new neurologist for the “amnesia” lem. She gave me the latest on school
She said no, that she wanted to beat and had to draw another clock in an life, like it concerned me, like I’d been
me up right now. empty circle. I placed the hands at part of it before. When she left, my
It seems to me that I lost conscious- eleven-ten this time, which I’d read mother said she was happy I’d made
ness immediately, so I can’t say whether on the Internet was what most peo- a friend.
Victoria enjoyed hitting me or not. ple did. •
Being knocked out was different from •
the sleeping fits. The images I saw there At night, the old lady with diverticu-
were more slide show than movie, stills For a week or so, in the middle of my litis pretended to be fed up with my
superimposed and morphing into one hospital stay, I shared a room with an stories (I regained energy around nine,
another without apparent logic. Rain- old woman with diverticulitis. She long after visiting hours, and told her
bows became dollar bills at the center talked about the Holocaust a lot. I everything that crossed my mind about
of which Vanessa Paradis’s smiling face don’t exactly remember what she said. Thomas, how close we’d been, each
suddenly erupted, and then more rain- I must have talked to her about Va- other’s only friends, really, what with
bows turning to dollars. Which was nessa Paradis, because what I remem- the moving and changing schools all
weird, because I’d only ever seen Amer- ber is her saying that Vanessa Paradis the time), but I think deep down she
ican money in American movies, had wasn’t happy all the time, and that I liked listening to me. I never stopped
never held a dollar bill myself. I half should get over myself. The way she talking until I was sure she was asleep
remembered my head hitting the said it made it sound like she knew it for the night. She was discharged ten
ground only because it broke the cycle for a fact, like maybe she’d been Va- days before me, and I kept watching
of rainbows/dollar bills/Paradis. When nessa Paradis’s therapist or something. her stupid show even after she left. I
my head hit, the image that appeared A friend. didn’t change my mind about it, it was
and stuck was that of an Inventaire My mother brought me the new is- no “Léon” or “My Girl,” but maybe I
obituary page with my name on it. I sues of Inventaire as they came, but I had to accept that nothing was, really.
distinctly saw it. Not a photo of me, didn’t open them. I didn’t want to know Even “Léon” wasn’t really the “Léon”
not a glimpse of what Francine Eliot who’d died that week, where they’d fit I’d seen as a child. I didn’t like the scenes
would say about my short life, but my in the binder. they’d added in the new cut. And I had
name. How did she find her nobod- • to forget they’d made “My Girl 2,” if I
ies? Did she just scan obituaries in local wanted to enjoy “My Girl” again the
newspapers? And pick the dead per- Another thing the diverticulitis lady way I had the first time I’d seen it. I
son whose set of dates told a story? said was that I should stop compar- didn’t like it when they added stuff, or
Would she recognize my name from ing myself to others. That others made a sequel just because. But I guess
my e-mail to her? Were the names a should never be the measure by which they had to. 
factor when she decided which nobody I determined my own worth, because
to memorialize? Johanna Sahlins. Was that pool was shit, other people were NEWYORKER.COM
it a good name? shit, and so it was setting a low bar Camille Bordas on death and doppelgängers.

THE CRITICS
BOOKS
TIED TO THE TRACKS

The mad, bad business of building a Western railroad.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
more discouraging word in tories impart not the expected moral of reading while travelling was a gift
A American English than “in-

frastructure” would be hard to
find. And yet it’s one not seldom but
that we once were good at something
that now flummoxes us—yes, it took
New York longer to build three stops
of the railroad. Carriages shook too
much to read on.
The book has so many outlandish
often heard; to be home on the range, for the Second Avenue subway than characters—tycoons who fall in love
we have to get from the range to home, it did for the nineteenth-century rail- with women named Queenie and
and using “infrastructure” of some sort, road barons to get from Chicago to Baby Doe; murder among the Wall
whether steel rails or asphalt road, is Los Angeles, with silver mines found Street predators—that it seems to de-
how we do that. But calling it “infra- and opera houses hatched along the mand a big-screen treatment, some-
structure” doesn’t make it sound the way, like improbable vulture eggs— thing like a Cinerama “How the West
way we want it to sound. The word, but, rather, that it’s hard to say what Was Won,” complete with a Robert
of military origin, is meant to encom- exactly it was that we were good at. Morley cameo as Oscar Wilde. But
pass all the conveyances that enable us Is the story of the great American that would be putting an Alfred New-
to go and do our work, yet it some- railways about the application of will man score to a Bertolt Brecht screen-
how reduces projects of great audac- and energy? The brutal exploitation play. Beneath its adventurous surface,
ity and scale—the Erie Canal, the trans- of (often) Chinese labor to build on Sedgwick’s account is of hair-raising,
continental railroad, the great tunnels (often) Native land? Was finance cap- ethics-free capitalism. Basically, his
that run beneath the Hudson—to mat- italism responsible for putting big tale is about the competition between
ters of thrifty, dull foresight. Although sums of money in the hands of peo- two men to get their railroads from
we’ve coined wonderful words in pol- ple with big things to build (and then one side of the continent to the other,
itics (“spin doctor,” “boycott,” and “po- threatening to snatch back the things following a southwestern route par-
litically correct” are by now univer- once built)? Or were these projects allel to an earlier railroad, completed
sals, offered as readily in Danish or in just easier to build in a less cluttered in the decade after the Civil War, that
French as in English), we have a sur- country with less watchfully demo- stretched from Sacramento to Coun-
prisingly pallid vocabulary for engi- cratic cities? cil Bluffs, Iowa.
neering. David McCullough’s books John Sedgwick’s new book bears Work on that line, the first trans-
on the Brooklyn Bridge and the Pan- the slightly unfortunate title “From continental railroad, began during the
ama Canal, a generation ago, were the River to the Sea” (Avid Reader), a war and, as Sedgwick makes clear, was
among the last popular works about phrase that, what with the language of largely a government project, from start
the heroism of romantic engineering, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, may to finish. Throughout American his-
and neither, tellingly, ever once used have a different valence than intended. tory, there has never been a true free-
the I-word. The book’s subtitle does the real work: market solution to advancing commu-
But at a moment when arguing “The Untold Story of the Railroad War nication or conveyance technology. In
about infrastructure is the rage, it may That Made the West.” Sedgwick, the 1862, President Lincoln, a onetime “rail-
be useful to have a reminder that there author of “Blood Moon” (2018), a novel- road lawyer,” as modern biographers
was a time when the word was non- istic account of the rifts among the remind us, had authorized Congress
ABOVE: MIGUEL PORLAN
existent but the thing it refers to was Cherokee before and after the Trail of to fund the first transnational railroad.
burgeoning. Americans, it seems, were Tears, has produced a book perfectly (The Civil War had been in effect a
once good at building big things that suited, in its manageable length and railroad war: Grant and Sherman’s
changed lives. And right on cue comes rich incidental detail, for the return of ability to move men efficiently to bat-
a series of books about the building mass air and rail travel. Fittingly, one tle depended on their access to more
of the American railroads. These his- of the things he argues is that the idea trains and faster rails than Lee could
Two companies set out to build the second transcontinental railroad, with thousands of workers and minimal planning.
ILLUSTRATION BY MAAIKE CANNE THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 65
ever dream of.) Lincoln had envisioned was one of those surprisingly effective sible things. A hugely powerful and
a transcontinental railway since his early men who are distinguished by their dangerous steam engine is attached to
days in Illinois, and his plan was or- single-mindedness. “His answer to ev- fixed cars, which are linked together
derly. The Union Pacific, specially cre- ery business question was to lay down and pulled along like a toy. A train can
ated by the government, would build track, and then to lay on more,” Sedg- run only on fixed rails, which have to
tracks from east to west, and the Cen- wick tells us. be nailed down ahead of it for every
tral Pacific from west to east. This Along the way, the two men’s tale inch of its transit. The idea is so bizarre
route, in a way not unfamiliar to skep- intersects with most of the big forces that it came to seem natural. It is hard
tics of government planning, took an and trends of the period. The silver- for us to credit the ingenuity and me-
awkward path, bypassing big towns and-gold-currency controversy, the chanical doggedness that attended
and weather-friendly terrain; the ter- Bitcoin debate of its day, turns out to the construction of the railroad over
minal points, Sacramento and Coun- be central to the story, as, of course, gulch and desert canyon. At one es-
cil Bluffs, as improbable then as now, does the larger question of the impe- pecially perilous spot on the border
were chosen for political as well as rial conquest of the West. Sedgwick between Colorado and New Mexico,
business reasons. is particularly good on the perceptual the Raton Pass, Palmer’s engineers em-
The second transcontinental-rail- and psychological transformations that ployed a “shoo fly” method of switch-
road project ignited in the eighteen- the railroads wrought. He has revela- backs—zigzagging the track over a
seventies and continued into the next tory pages on the way that the speed steep mountainside.
decade, making it very much a prod- of trains altered the understanding of An oddity that fills Sedgwick’s book
uct of the Gilded Age. It would allow American space, and on the way that is Americans’ enormous deference to-
two rival railway companies to seek out the view from trains—the near dis- ward the legal system, alongside their
a southern route past the Rockies, with tance racing past, the farther distance readiness to resort to violence to defy
one eventually ending in the little set- proceeding in spacious slowness— that system. Again and again, the con-
tlement of Los Angeles. Astonishingly, became a poetic obsession. Equally testants in the story go to court, meekly
it really was a flat-out competition be- revelatory is his discussion of the re- accept a possibly rigged verdict, and
tween two railroad companies—the lation between the railroads’ need for then go right back into armed con-
Denver & Rio Grande on one side and straight tracks and the geometrical frontation. Then they go back to court.
the Atchison, Topeka, & Santa Fe on design of the settlements built near, At one point, Palmer appealed to Judge
the other. Each sent thousands of engi- and shaped by, the tracks. The great Moses Hallett, who, as Sedgwick writes,
neers, workmen, and, occasionally, gun- Frederick Law Olmsted was once thought he had “the perfect Solomonic
slingers to get a few days’ lead over the asked by one of the railroad compa- solution” to a dispute between the ty-
other side, with planning largely left nies to design a plan for Tacoma, Wash- coons: “Where there wasn’t room for
unplanned. It was a race to be first, jun- ington, only to have it rejected as un- two separate lines of track, Hallett com-
gle engineering—and jungle capital- duly curvilinear, lacking business- pelled them to add a third.” Dickens,
ism—at its worst, or its finest. “To a friendly corner lots. in his American novel, “Martin Chuz-
railroad man, the greatest terror of all Yet Sedgwick’s story is hard to zlewit,” saw this plainly—that ours
was another train coming into territory follow in places, simply because it was at once a wildly litigious and a
he’d thought was his alone,” Sedgwick gets so crazily complicated. Court or- uniquely violent society. Palmer and
writes. It sounds like no way to build, ders follow showy confrontations fol- Strong could have divided and con-
or run, a railroad, but that’s the way low more court orders follow Wall quered the West together, but societies
it happened. Street schemes. At one point, Palmer rooted in conflict will turn with equal
is forced to hand over his railroad enthusiasm to courts and to revolvers.
he two principals in Sedgwick’s to Strong, but manages to regain it (This is why professional wrestling is
T account are General William
Palmer, who owned, or seemed to own,
shortly afterward as part of a fan-
tastically intricate stock manipula-
the most American of sports: an ob-
vious pin gets rewarded, and when it
the Rio Grande, and William Strong, tion crafted by the legendary “spider doesn’t you hit someone over the head
the president of the Santa Fe railway. of Wall Street,” the small, malignant with a chair.)
The real money and power, though, Jay Gould. Eventually, the railroad, pulled along
were back East in New York and Bos- Throughout the book, one simple by both of its rapidly changing own-
ton; as Palmer and Strong built their lesson emerges: building big is hard ers, worked its way to Los Angeles.
tracks and intruded on each other’s because something unexpected always Explaining Los Angeles is a kind of
territory, the real strings were being happens that extends the time it takes perpetual American enterprise, since its
pulled on Wall Street. Not that Palmer to get the big thing built. Some of the existence—it has little by way of water,
and Strong were in any sense negligi- impediments that Sedgwick describes or harbor, or history—is apparently so
ble. Palmer was a genuine hero of the were matters of engineering. Like the inexplicable. The railroad-based story
Civil War, a Quaker general who had telephone, which ultimately required is that Palmer and Strong, having lost
bravely gone on a behind-enemy-lines cable to be strung from every house the northern California route, drove to-
mission and narrowly escaped being in America to every other house in ward the nearest southern one, creating
hanged by the Confederacy; Strong America, trains are inherently implau- an entirely unexpected circumstance in
Watch our next
live event.
Join us for
“Words of Desire.”
As summer heats up, the authors
Emma Cline (“Daddy,” “The Girls”),
Garth Greenwell (“Cleanness,”
“What Belongs to You”), and
Ottessa Moshfegh (“My Year of
Rest and Relaxation,” “Eileen”)
will discuss the fiction and politics
of passion with the New Yorker staff
writer Alexandra Schwartz.
Monday, June 28th, at 7 P.M. E.T.
Only at newyorker.com/live
EXCLUSIVE SUBSCRIBER BENEFIT

which San Francisco, the state’s nat for a song, while his wife fled to Lon House, was directly tied to the south
ural metropolis, receded into second don with their daughter, Elsie. (The western crossing.)
ary importance while the illsituated spectralbeautiful Elsie was painted One can even argue that the trains
southern city boomed. One suspects by John Singer Sargent in a model themselves became models of Amer
that, as with all explanations of Los portrait of the expatriate emaciated by ican community, quickly made and
Angeles, this one, too, is merely par expatriation.) Later rendered quadri quickly lost, but significant while they
tial. L.A. just somehow is. plegic in a riding accident, Palmer was lasted. Trains were objects of roman
Who won the race? Neither man, shown, in the last photograph of him, tic nostalgia almost before they were
really. Palmer’s railway got stuck in entrapped in the back of an automo up and running, and that romance
Mexico, where he had planned a kind bile. Every conveyance—horse, train, still shines, in songs and movies alike.
of end run around Strong but soon and car—carries with it its own kind Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon over
found himself mired in international of fatality. nighting in a sleeping car with an all
red tape, inadequate financing (at one girl band, in “Some Like It Hot,” is
point, he had to resort to borrowing edgwick’s insistence on the central an image of how desire is curbed by
money from a Mexican bank that was
actually a recently converted pawnshop
S ity of his two heroes to what hap
pened is, in some respects, overdrawn.
community rather than spurred by
opportunity of the kind that the front
and predictably went broke), and the The transcontinental railroads would seat offers.
recalcitrant nature of the terrains that have come into existence no matter The pleasures of driving, so often
his railroad had to traverse. Sedgwick who was in charge. The paradox of all sung in the American imagination, are
tells us about “countless switchbacks, such progress is that it is both driven not to be sneezed at: there is the con
tunnels, ridgecuts and bridges, all of by a visionary figure and, in the nature fessionallike isolation, with family se
them timeconsuming, expensive, and of things, impersonal in its advance. crets more happily spilled behind the
maddeningly difficult to construct.” Alexander Graham Bell invented the wheel than in the living room. Cars
Strong got caught in a competition telephone, but someone else would have may be, in Bruce Springsteen’s meta
with the California tycoon Collis P. if he hadn’t. Had Jeff Bezos not gone phor, “suicide machines,” but they are
Huntington, who frustrated his schemes warily into the Amazon of Internet first of all a means of personal auton
to build in the state by building south shopping, someone else would have. omy. Bruce and his girlfriend would
from San Francisco himself. That he did so as he did is important not have hopped on a train to make
Eventually, Strong did get his train for our shopping habits, and for the their getaway, as the Beatles did in
to Los Angeles, mainly by buying out Bezos family, but he did not make the Britain, waiting patiently for the one
already existing track, and on May 31, Internet, or Internet commerce, any after 9:09. Although trains might have
1887, a Santa Fe train pulled into the more than Palmer and Strong “made been blindingly fast, the illusion of
City of Angels. But he was soon em the West.” The most they did was in stately progress has made us associate
broiled in a price war with Hunting flect it a little. them with slowness: the unwinding of
ton that resembles the ridehailing Indeed, in another recent history a road, the melancholy sound of the
battles of today, with rates being ag of the building of the railroads, “Iron whistle. “Everybody loves the sound
gressively lowered in an effort to mo Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, of a train in the distance,” Paul Simon
nopolize the traffic. Strong found him and the Making of Modern Amer sang, in his best lyric.
self offering passage from Chicago to ica” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)—a Trains are, and have always been,
L.A. for a dollar. It was, in any case, a sort of Union Pacific alternative to a representation of the best of liberal
pyrrhic victory. Owning the most track, Sedgwick’s more nimbly scenic Rio institutions: open to all and accessi
he also had the most track to pay for, Grande line—the Pulitzer Prizewin ble at a reasonable price, and a way to
and ended up grumbling, in a quar ning historian Michael Hiltzik does escape from stifling clan order and
terly report in 1888, “Your Directors not so much as mention either man. smalltown life. In Britain, almost
could not know in advance that any Instead, he devotes the book to the every postwar memoir is lit up by the
of these unfavorable conditions would fiendishly complex efforts of Gould train, running from Manchester or
have to be met—much less that they and the rest of the Wall Street crew Leeds or Liverpool to London. Cars,
would all have to be met, at one and to empty the public purse and take in the poetic imagination, let us es
the same time.” Less than two years the proceeds of the trains for them cape from nowhere in particular to
after getting the trains to California, selves. But if Palmer and Strong weren’t nowhere in particular; trains run right
Strong was forced out of his own com indispensable conductors, they were to the center of the next big town.
pany. The financiers won, as that Brecht the engines pulling communities along Certainly, none of the infrastruc
screenplay would have insisted: Gould behind them. These communities in ture of the past was ever built pri
and Vanderbilt, in New York, ended cluded the planned towns and acci vately; both Sedgwick and Hiltzik
up with fortunes that today would be dental Babylons, like Los Angeles, make apparent how permeable the
counted in the billions, while Strong that the trains brought about, but also boundaries are between public bene
ended up in a bungalow near Mac the hotels and restaurant chains en faction and private profit. Would ra
Arthur Park, in Los Angeles. Palmer, abled by the railways. (One of the first tional planning and fully public fi
for his part, was forced to sell his stock great American chains, the Harvey nancing have made for a better system,
though? Doubtless they would have
made for a better country, but the sheer
absurdity and frequent wastefulness of BRIEFLY NOTED
the railroads’ construction should not
be a damper on their unique civic value. Journey to the Edge of Reason, by Stephen Budiansky (Nor-
A surprising number of big construction ton). This expansive biography of the mathematician and lo-
projects are out of date by the time gician Kurt Gödel places his achievements in their social and
they’re completed. The Erie Canal’s political context. Born in 1906, Gödel witnessed the flour-
success was short-lived. The St. Law- ishing of logical empiricism as a member of the Vienna Cir-
rence Seaway, first proposed in the cle before joining a wave of brilliant European mathemati-
eighteen-nineties but not operational cians who fled to universities in the United States. Budiansky
until 1959—J.F.K. almost sacrificed his evokes the protectiveness of Gödel’s colleagues in mordant
political career by supporting the le- detail (the logician Gerald Sacks said that speaking to Gödel
thargic project, and outraging the Bos- was like talking to “a very bright eleven-year-old”). This com-
ton Harbor people—was, according to munity buoyed him in his later years, as he succumbed to
one expert, “obsolete the moment it the debilitating paranoia that had shadowed him for much
was opened.” of his life.
Yet the destruction of passenger-
train travel in the past sixty years seems Projections, by Karl Deisseroth (Random House). This hybrid
less than inevitable. We are told that memoir, by an emergency-room psychiatrist and professor
this is the result of the U.S. being a big of psychiatry and bioengineering, probes the evolutionary
country, and yet Canada, an even big- origins of human emotions. Focussing on mental disorders
ger one, still has an efficient passenger- such as mania, schizophrenia, and dementia, Deisseroth com-
train system. We are told that, in a com- bines stories of his patients’ plights with insights from opto-
petitive field with cars and jets, trains genetics, a technique he pioneered that involves inserting
could not win—and yet they have them light-sensitive genes from bacteria and algae into mammals
in Europe, connecting similar spaces. to stimulate specific parts of the brain. In its attempt to ex-
Indeed, if time saved is what we’re plore the nature of subjective experience, the book alternates
counting, once you add the necessary between scientific detail and fiction. “It’s not simple to fuse
two hours to get on a plane and then these disparate perspectives,” Deisseroth writes, “but it is no
the extra hour getting from the airport more easy to be human, or to become humanity.”
into a city, a three-hour flight is more
like a six-hour detour, easy for a fast Palace of the Drowned, by Christine Mangan (Flatiron). Set
train to compete with. (These advan- in Venice during the historic flood of 1966, this neo-gothic
tages are already budgeted, so to speak, mystery follows a novelist living in London who escapes to
into the success of Amtrak’s Acela, the Italy in the wake of a bruising book review that sparked a
last remaining boom train in the U.S., public meltdown and writer’s block. She takes up residence
and it would seem reproducible on the in a friend’s palazzo—a “crumbling testimony to bygone dec-
West Coast and in many other areas.) adence”—and encounters strange presences: a hovering house-
One need not credit conspiracy theo- keeper, an enigmatic neighbor, and a passionate fan who be-
ries in which the car companies and gins to stalk her. Mangan’s taut plot consists of more satis-
the oil monopolies set out to destroy fying turns than there are calli and campi in the impermanent,
train travel throughout the twentieth unknowable City of Bridges itself.
century to see that choices were made
from largely irrational motives, and The Fugitivities, by Jesse McCarthy (Melville House). Jonah,
made badly. the protagonist of this début novel, is a young Black teacher
The final irony to take away from living in Brooklyn. A surprise inheritance and a profound
the haphazard story of how American encounter with a former N.B.A. player send Jonah on a voy-
railroads were built is that rarely in age of self-discovery. He follows an aimless friend to Rio de
history has narrow interest produced Janeiro, where his wanderings impress upon him the nuances
so much common space. If building of being Black in South America. In the novel’s final act he
railroads is a story of selfishness, hav- travels to Paris, spurred by memories of a young woman he
ing trains is an aid to community. Be- met there during his adolescence. McCarthy’s prose is sen-
tween those two truths lies the mys- sitive and sharp, particularly when he appraises the hypoc-
terious night passage of the overseeing risies of cultural gatekeepers: “With the right glasses (those
state and the entrepreneurial imagina- being naturally the correct accessory),” Jonah “might pull off
tion, mournfully blowing its whistle. a move like his father had in the art world—propping him-
One might almost call it the tragedy self up on the stepladder of white guilt and taking the jour-
of infrastructure.  ney for all it was worth.”
in childhood: the National Symphony
MUSICAL EVENTS playing Mahler, the New York Philhar-
monic playing Richard Strauss. This
SING IT LOUD
loudness is also fullness: Niagara indoors.
James Conlon, L.A. Opera’s long-
time music director, and Christopher
Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” makes a mighty noise indoors at L.A. Opera. Koelsch, the company’s C.E.O. and pres-
ident, were wise to return to the theatre
BY ALEX ROSS with something other than a repertory
chestnut. “Oedipus” is grand, but it is not
grand opera, or even opera in the strict-
est sense. Stravinsky called it an “opera-
oratorio,” and its not very frequent re-
vivals often assume oratorio form. L.A.
Opera’s performance was essentially a
concert version, although the projection
of shadow-puppet animations, by the
Manual Cinema collective, added a stark
visual allure. In some ways, we don’t need
to see the Oedipus drama played out on-
stage: thanks to Sophocles and Freud, it
is already in our subconscious.
No matter how “Oedipus” is per-
formed, its score is richly stocked with
operatic allusions—so much so that some
early critics dismissed it as pastiche.
Leonard Bernstein once proposed that
Stravinsky had derived that introduc-
tory motif from Verdi’s “Aida.”The Stra-
vinsky biographer Stephen Walsh hears
echoes of Puccini’s “Turandot,” which
had its posthumous première in 1926,
while Stravinsky was working on his
score. Indeed, the Messenger’s announce-
ment of Jocasta’s death strongly recalls,
in both harmony and rhythm, the riddle-
solving scene in Puccini’s opera. Such
citations have an ironic tinge; Stravinsky,
in his neoclassical period, tended to treat
aedit nos pestis: “The plague falls fury. Stravinsky wrote “Oedipus” in the older music as found objects for quasi-
C upon us.”The dire opening of Stra-
vinsky’s “Oedipus Rex” should have had
nineteen-twenties, in the wake of the
twin disasters of the First World War
Cubist collages. Yet the jumble of ma-
terial in “Oedipus” is subjected to enor-
a chilling effect when L.A. Opera pre- and the flu pandemic of 1918. It sounds mous expressive pressure: in the late
sented the work at the Dorothy Chan- no less fearsome a century on. twenties, the composer was emerging
dler Pavilion, on June 6th. The chorus My immediate reaction, though, was from a period of spiritual crisis, and in
sings of the Plague of Thebes over five one of joy—and I felt a similar stir of communicating Oedipus’ desperate plight
darkly screaming chords in the key of pleasure in the crowd around me. Few he broke his façade of cool mastery.
B-flat minor, with an obdurate bass line of us could have heard unamplified music Conlon, in spoken remarks before
grating against the upper harmonies. in more than a year. No big-budget the performance, highlighted other
Flutes and trumpets slide from the first American opera house had given a full- haunting resonances. In times of plague,
chord to the second in an anguished scale indoor performance since March he said, people always look for malefac-
whoop. L.A. Opera’s orchestra and cho- of 2020. We had missed a particular kind tors, agents of destruction. I thought of
rus executed a series of impeccable at- of loudness, one that is the direct sum René Girard’s 1982 study, “The Scape-
tacks, each sonority landing with a of human work, without technological goat,” which recounts the persecution
splendid thud. This is the sound of an enhancements. To hear such big sound of Jews during the Black Death. For
inescapable catastrophe, one that leaves after long silence brought me back to Girard, the Oedipus story was an ele-
its human victims in a state of fear and my first encounters with full orchestras mental case of the scapegoating ritual,
told from the persecutor’s point of view:
Shadow-puppet animations added visual allure to “Oedipus Rex.” the patricidal, incestuous king must be
70 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY LIA LIAO
expelled for the plague to end. At first dancers to mirror the four singing roles.
glance, Stravinsky and his librettist, Jean The staging was by the young direc- Your Anniversary
Cocteau, follow the ancient sources in tor James Darrah, who recently took over Immortalized
in Roman Numerals
casting Oedipus’ downfall as the neces- as Long Beach’s artistic leader. The com- 3-Day Rush Available!
Crafted from Gold and Platinum
sary outcome of fate. But there is wrench- pany has an extraordinary record of sup-
JOHN-CHRISTIAN.COM
ing sympathy in the music for Oedipus, porting contemporary work—Anthony OR .646.6466
particularly at the end, as a reprise of Davis’s “The Central Park Five,” which
the monumental opening gives way to Long Beach introduced in 2019, went on
a gentle, murmuring farewell. The Man- to win the Pulitzer Prize for music—and
AD VE RT IS E MENT
ual Cinema team found a beautiful vi- Darrah appears poised to extend that
sual counterpart: an image of a human legacy. He staged “Enfants” on the top
hand outstretched to the blinded, limp- level of a parking garage in a Long Beach
ing shadow-puppet king. shopping center. Spectators drove in,
L.A. Opera fielded a superb cast for parked their cars, and watched the ac-
the occasion. The tenor Russell Thomas tion unfold, either from their cars or on
WHAT’S THE
rendered the title role with the same dis- portable chairs.This conception was rem-
ciplined, nuanced passion that he has iniscent of “Twilight: Gods,” Yuval Sha-
lately brought to performances of Ver-
di’s Otello. The mezzo-soprano J’Nai
ron’s astounding drive-through Wagner
production, which was seen at Michi-
BIG IDEA?
Bridges made for an unusually youth- gan Opera Theatre last fall and at the Small space has big rewards.
ful, vulnerable, fresh-voiced Jocasta. The Lyric Opera of Chicago this spring. As
bass Morris Robinson gave wounded it happens, Sharon had been Long Beach’s
dignity to Tiresias; the bass John Rel- interim artistic adviser before he moved
yea lent marbled authority to the roles on to the Michigan company.
of Creon and the Messenger. The tenor Even if “Twilight: Gods” is destined
TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
Robert Stahley was a soulful Shepherd. to remain the chief masterwork of the cu- JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159
The actor and author Stephen Fry, re- rious pandemic-era genre of the parking- [email protected]
corded on video in England, gave wry garage opera, Darrah found his own way
depth to Cocteau’s often coy narration. to theatricalize a dead-seeming space.
The chorus and the orchestra delivered He strapped on a Steadicam and followed
unremitting intensity from the first bars the performers as they moved around
to the last. An audience of six hundred the garage: we could watch the results
and seventy-five people relished the on various screens, and at times the ac-
sound of their own exuberant applause. tion took place right in front of our cars.
The imagery was arresting throughout:
he arch-aesthete Cocteau seems an Chris Emile, the choreographer, kept
T unlikely source of solace in times of both singers and dancers in swirling mo- Wear our new
global crisis, but he lay behind another tion, and Camille Assaf, the costume official hat to show
production that has recently nourished
opera-starved audiences in Southern
designer, enlivened the cement backdrop
with splashes of vibrant color. The miss-
your love.
California: Long Beach Opera’s presen- ing element—perhaps unattainable in
tation of Philip Glass’s “Les Enfants Ter- this format—was a deeper engagement
ribles” (1996), based on Cocteau’s novel with the hothouse psychology of Coc-
and film script of that title. This is the teau’s story. The fact that the siblings
last of Glass’s three operas in homage to Paul and Elisabeth wound up dead felt
Cocteau, the others being “Orphée” and like an unfortunate accident rather than
“La Belle et la Bête.”The cycle is a high- the doing of fate.
light of Glass’s sprawling and uneven The best part of the show was the vi-
operatic output—an intimate counter- tality exuded by the young cast. The bari-
part to the monumental trilogy of “Ein- tone Edward Nelson gave a spectacularly
stein on the Beach,” “Satyagraha,” and lithe performance as Paul, and the so-
“Akhnaten.” The neon buzz of Glassian prano Anna Schubert captured Elisa-
style proves a good match for Cocteau’s beth’s seductive manipulativeness; Sarah 100% cotton twill.
sly renovations of mythic motifs. “Les Beaty and Orson Van Gay II gave warm Available in white, navy, and black.
Enfants Terribles,” a tale of self-obsessed, musicality to the supporting roles. The
semi-incestuous siblings, is scored for an conductor Christopher Rountree elicited
ever-bustling trio of pianos—shades of a clear, driving performance from vocal-
newyorkerstore.com/hats
the four-piano barrage of Stravinsky’s ists and piano ensemble alike. The honks
“Les Noces”—and calls for a quartet of of appreciation were loud and long. 
He revolutionized visual art, chang-
THE ART WORLD ing a practice of rendering illusions
to one of aggregating marks that co-
DRAWING CONCLUSIONS
here in the mind rather than in the
eye of a viewer.
You don’t look at a Cézanne, some
Cézanne at MOMA. ravishing late works excepted. You study
it, registering how it’s done—in the
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL drawings, with tangles of line and, often,
patches of watercolor. Each detail con-
ome of us don’t like the inargu- theological for both believers and skep- veys the artist’s direct gaze at a subject
S ably great artist Paul Cézanne as
much as we know we are supposed
tics, akin to a creation story, a Gene-
sis, of modernism.
but is rarely at pains to serve an inte-
grated composition. Cézanne was sav-
to. I, for one, have struggled with him It’s a return to roots for MOMA, agely sincere in his ways of looking,
all my art-loving life. Others, as I’ve which initiated its narrative of mod- true to what he called his “little sensa-
confirmed in recent conversations with ern painting in 1929 with a show that tion” in how things, bit by bit, met his
Cézanne devotees, are astonished and included van Gogh, Seurat, and Gau- regard. He made pictorial vision the
appalled to hear anything with even guin as well as Cézanne, whose bro- exercise of an artist’s concerted will and
a trace of negativity said about him. ken forms made the others look com- a challenge to a viewer’s understand-
“Cézanne Drawing,” at the Museum paratively conservative as composers ing. The show looks at first glance like
of Modern Art, with some two hun- of pictures. He stood out then, as he an overwhelming ordeal, with its pro-
dred and eighty works on paper (too does now, for an asperity of expression fusion of so many works, mostly small,
many? Not really, because quantity in- that is analytical in form and indif- for you to shuffle around peering at.
tensifies the works’ qualities), has a ferent to style. The appearance of his They seem much the same—as in a
cumulative impact that is practically works is an effect, not a fulfillment. real way they are, but with a consistent
COURTESY THE HENRY AND ROSE PEARLMAN COLLECTION / ART RESOURCE, NY
Cézanne’s “Still Life with Carafe, Bottle, and Fruit,” from 1906. Thingness magnetized the artist.
intensity that refreshes itself from piece ical shift, scorning both verisimilitude tence. He couldn’t help depicting them,
to piece. As big as the show is, it can and imagination. because they couldn’t help but be. He
be taken as a mere sampler of prodi Cézanne was fearless of error. You seems to have been impervious to bore
gious creativity. I usually disdain wall see that in his figure drawings from dom. His interest in the visible world
texts, but those here, written by the cu sculpture. If a contour isn’t quite right, was unquenchable. The payoff reminds
rators Jodi Hauptman and Samantha he doesn’t correct it (the one drafting me of an adage from William Blake:
Friedman, are soundly spot on and in tool that he seems never to have em “If the fool would persist in his folly
formative. Sanctifying or not, the occa ployed is the eraser): he multiplies it, he would become wise.” Cézanne’s
sion is richly educational. with lines on top of lines. (There’s ac scattershot approach triumphed in his
Cézanne was personally shy, to the curacy in there somewhere.) His auda conf lations of surface with depth,
point of being asocial. He was viewed cious independence was enabled by will which abolished perspective by locat
by some in Paris, including Édouard ful isolation, at his family’s AixenPro ing the near and the relatively distant
Manet, as something of an uncouth vence estate, far from the competitive with shading and color, perceived all
hayseed from the South of France, milieu of Paris, where even the most at once in increasingly perfect equi
though he was the scion of a welltodo adventurous of his contemporaries had poise. All that remained for Cubism
family. His often clumsy and weird early to subsist on sales. He attained a degree to introduce was the geometric frag
works, mostly from the eighteensixties of fame among fellowartists and bold mentation of subjects in abstracted,
and seventies, when he was in his twen collectors, while being repeatedly sub shallow space: a decorative function
ties and thirties, seethe with violent ject to public ridicule. The full import departing from Cézanne’s unshakable
imaginings of rape and murder. A man of his mature art burst upon the world loyalty to facts.
stabs another person on a rural road. in a retrospective exhibition in 1907, a So what’s my problem? Partly it’s an
An elegant dude evinces surprise upon year after his death, from pneumonia, impatience with Cézanne’s demands
entering a room heaped with corpses. at the age of sixtyseven. It may be too for strenuous looking. I tire of being
Naked women figure as objects of hy much to say that he changed every made to feel smart rather than pleased.
perbolic sensuality, at times enthroned thing in the course of art history. But (Here I quite favor the optical nour
among lusting male worshippers. He he was bound to make artists whom he ishments of van Gogh, Gauguin, and
was plainly bent on forcing notice, with didn’t directly influence more than a Seurat.) But my discontent is insepa
out much success outside a circle that little nervous. rable from Cézanne’s significance as a
included his best friend since child revolutionary. How good an idea was
hood, Émile Zola. ézanne drew nearly every day, re modernism, all in all? It disintegrated,
What ensued next was a remark
able sublimation of unruly emotion
C hearsing the timeless purpose—
and the impossibility—of pictorial art:
circa 1960, amid a plurality of new modes
while remaining, yes, an art of the mu
into an austere ambition to, as Cézanne to reduce three dimensions to two. His seum. It came to emblematize upto
formulated it later, “make of Impres greatest works, from late in his life, date sophisticated taste, spawning va
sionism something as solid and dura partly reconstitute visual drama, nota rieties of abstraction that circle back to
ble as the art of the museums.” The bly in scenes of bathers in Arcadian Cézanne’s innovative interrelations of
catalyst of the change was Camille settings and (my favorites) stilllifes figure and ground. It also fuelled a yen
Pissarro, nine years his senior, who of fruit and domestic objects which in some to change the world for the
mentored him in Impressionist tech yield a sense of seeing, or, somehow, of more intelligent, if not always for the
niques and remained a close friend until feeling, around the summarily repre better. The world took only specialized
they were estranged by the Dreyfus sented masses. Apples stay delicious notice. Modernism’s initially enfevered
affair, in which Cézanne passively sided while acquiring the density of cannon optimism could not survive the slaugh
with the outrightly antiSemitic Renoir balls. The effect holds for portraits of terhouse of the First World War and
and Degas. Pissarro was the subtlest his wife, Hortense, and of his gardener— the political apocalypse of the Russian
of the leading Impressionists, devising themselves effectively domestic objects, Revolution, which ate away at myths
ways of giving distinctive presence to for all that Cézanne cared about them of progress that had seemed to valorize
each part of a painting, by, for exam as living souls. To my eye, the show’s aesthetic change. Dedicated newness
ple, defining the edges of objects with only portrait heads that suggest per in art devolved from a propelling cause
the paint that surrounded them. For sonhood are a couple of his son, Paul, into a rote effect. Lost, to my mind, is
him, an edge was a place where paint pictured sleeping. the strangeness—which I strive to re
didn’t stop but only changed color. Thingness magnetized him, in tire imagine—that had to have affected
Cézanne, compulsively copying mo lessly repetitive renderings of, for ex Cézanne’s first viewers, as he began to
tifs from classical painting and sculp ample, the nearby Mont SainteVic upend traditions that had been more
ture, gradually forsook Pissarro’s fic toire, eight barely varying versions of or less continuous since the Renais
tive unities within the pictorial rect which are in the show. Thereness, too, sance. I have felt this retrospective dis
angle in favor of notating rather than reigned. You rarely feel any passion comfort in other contexts. It peaks for
reproducing observed reality. His draw ate attraction on Cézanne’s part to his me in “Cézanne Drawing,” even as I
ings are as likely to leave backgrounds subjects, but, rather, a stubborn, even join fellowcongregants in genuflect
blank as to fill them in. It was a rad obsessive responsiveness to their exis ing before the artist’s genius. 
she believes, whether she will admit
ON TELEVISION it or not, that her reputation is hinged
on a kind of obeisance.
THE HOST
Last year, “Baited” moved to Insta-
gram Live. Its new home, where poli-
tics are all about appearance, seemed
“Ziwe,” on Showtime. appropriate; Ziwe questioned the le-
gitimacy of the white ally’s existential
BY DOREEN ST. FÉLIX crisis during our summer of quote-
unquote racial reckoning. What is it
that possesses white people to agree to
speak to Ziwe? Wanting to look good?
The fear of becoming irrelevant? The
desire to participate in a phenomenon
that they understand to be culturally
Black, even at the promise of humil-
iation? Last year’s guests were often
public figures who had said or done
something offensive, something that
threatened their social capital. And
Ziwe, instead of giving them the stern
but loving reprimand that decades of
“Oprah” taught them was their due,
used them for her personal project. The
asymmetry was there even in the split-
screen presentation of the show: the
sombre interviewee, hair often pulled
back, respectfully distanced from the
iPhone camera; Ziwe looking like a
glammed-up madam, with pastel eye-
liner or full-length gloves, nosing up
to the camera so that we are staring
down the caverns of her nostrils, her
brandished gums.
The Instagram series has been ex-
panded into “Ziwe,” a carnivalesque
variety-style talk show, produced by
A24 and airing on Showtime. Van-
guard talent such as Cole Escola,
Bowen Yang, Patti Harrison, Sydnee
t would not be in Oprah’s nature to an interview series that débuted on Washington, Julio Torres, and Jeremy
I pick an heir. But this is of no mat- YouTube, in 2017, is enjoyable to watch, O. Harris drop in, letting us know that
ter to Ziwe, the mononymous twenty- and that’s the point. On “Baited,” Ziwe we’re in the hottest company. Ziwe,
nine-year-old Nigerian-American per- subjects non-Black people to inter- dressed in gorgeous high-femme out-
former who is in the midst of becom- views about race that quickly become fits that verge on the parodic, is our
ing our national inquirer’s unauthorized inquisitions. It is a fantasy comedy of demented girl boss, our anchor, which
spawn. Everything that the pleasant- entrapment in which the Black woman means we are always a bit seasick. The
ness of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” tosses white naïveté down the hatch aesthetic is aesthetic—most of the set
made invisible—the theatrical artifice while playfully hoarding the lock and is shaded in pink or its derivatives, in-
of the interview structure; the host’s key. There is no right answer, say, to cluding potted plants on the stage.
interest in a gendered performance art; Ziwe’s demand of a white woman guest, There are framed photographs of Mi-
the flirtatious conflation of journal- a famous cook, to “name five Black chelle Obama and Oprah on the walls,
ism and narcissism; the over-all rag- people off the top of your head,” be- and gigantic storybooks on the floor—a
ing camp of the daytime enterprise— cause Ziwe is not asking a question. wink at the spirit of faux intellectual-
is easy to see when watching the media And yet the guest works hard to an- ism. Formally, “Ziwe” descends from
that Ziwe produces. swer in good faith, to look racially hip the news-satire model of “The Late
I cannot say that “Baited with Ziwe,” in the face of the ludicrous, because Show with Stephen Colbert”—Ziwe,
an accomplished television writer, once
The point of the talk show is to watch the guests squirm, not to hear them speak. interned for Colbert—but her show
74 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY JORDAN MOSS
aspires to more than being a vaunted Lebowitz speaks, her words are bleeped power of antiracist enlightenment. It’s
“challenge” to whitemaledominated out. The chyron: “We will not be air possible that “Ziwe” has a gloriously
latenight TV. The début season—six ing this because we want to go to the retributive bent, that it is satire that does
episodes, full of absurd games, musical Roc Nation Brunch.” not serve a higher purpose, that it sim
skits, and more of those uncomfortable Here is the profoundly inventive ply delights in letting the jab sit and
interviews—ends up amounting to a element of “Ziwe”: the sendup of the sting. The point is to watch people
creeping selfportrait of its namesake, Black grifter, the personality who ex squirm, not to hear them speak. Al
rendered through f lashy critiques of ploits a desire for reconciliation, and though the six episodes cover different
race and the media. The soul of the ingeniously twists the fetish of Black topics—immigration, beauty standards,
Ziwe persona was not really accessi female moral authority, for her own wealth inequality—“Ziwe” returns re
ble via “Baited,” or through her heav gain. Anytime a guest dares to question peatedly to the hypocrisies of liberal
ily layered Internet character—possi Ziwe—at one point, Bowen Yang, in saints and stooges. In one segment,
bly because she is still sorting out the on the joke, meekly asks the host about Ziwe visits a plasticsurgery office, and
particulars for herself. In the finale of her wealth—she contorts her beautiful gets an affable white surgeon to sug
the Showtime series, a repeated visual face, as if accusing the guest of disre gest that her nose could be more re
motif is of Ziwe, baring her teeth, as spect. No one gets to come for the mad fined. She gets Andrew Yang to em
she grabs at the edges of an oldfash queen. Curiously, the show, not ready barrass himself more than he already
ioned television set. Despite all the fun to skewer its host head on, opts to do has. She makes Gloria Steinem listen
and games, “Ziwe” is a onewoman show, so through other bits, as in a fake com to her recite the lyrics to Cardi B and
a babypink ouroboros, an endless loop mercial for an “Imperial Wives” doll Megan Thee Stallion’s “W.A.P.” It’s
out of which Ziwe the person is try named Tina, who “uses socialjustice like a kink.
ing to escape. language for profit.” I found myself most interested in
“Ziwe” often relies heavily on the “Ziwe” when the host was in the pres
prefab obsessions of the liberal intel
ligentsia. The first episode of the show
“ Z iwe” is trapped in an interminable
dance with whiteness, its muse.
ence of other Black women—in other
words, when the Ziwe persona was put
is called “55%,” a reference to both the In a skit called “Karens,” from the first to the test. In a recurring segment called
estimated percentage of white women episode, Ziwe ensnares a focus group “Behind the Writers Studio,” Ziwe baits
who voted for Trump and the discourse of white women in a number of racial her own writers, deriding them for their
that has exploded around that fact. The faux pas. But because the participants participation in the sketches that she
most viral segment of the pilot was Zi are aware of their own shortcomings, herself commissioned. In the finale,
we’s sitdown with the humorist Fran the joke cannot land. The segment also she brings out Michelle Davis, who
Lebowitz. There was the sexy juxtapo feels dated, strangled by the unimagi has written, and performed in, a faux
sition, generational and racial, and the native neologism of the fraught sum mercial in which Harriet Tubman hawks
clash of egos. Early on, Lebowitz, legs mer that preceded it. sports bras. Ziwe tells Davis, “I think
crossed, warns Ziwe that she doesn’t We know what Ziwe wants to the lesson here is that you can be Black
play games, a caution that the host sum dismantle. But what does this self and antiBlack.”This is the show’s tricky
marily ignores. Lebowitz, to prove her described “agent of chaos” want to cre apotheosis. Davis turns the tables on
progressive bona fides, begins to cri ate? In interviews, Ziwe, a maven of the host, insisting that she isn’t anti
tique Barack Obama, and a chyron selfpromotion, claims that she sees Black, and launches into a rendition of
reads “White Woman Has Opinion on her form of caustic satire as the con the Black national anthem, “Lift Ev’ry
Obama.” (The editors of “Ziwe” are as duit to a confrontational education. Voice and Sing.” Ziwe, oneupped at
much responsible for the queasiness of And yet “Ziwe” the show is pessimis the game of oneupping, can do noth
the interviews as Ziwe is herself.) As tic about the American belief in the ing but giggle and sing along. 
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2021 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST
Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Sam Hurt,
must be received by Sunday, June 27th. The finalists in the June 14th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the July 12th & 19th issue. Anyone age
thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.
THIS WEEK’S CONTEST
“ ”
..........................................................................................................................
THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION
“They call it kitsch and release.”

Nicole Chrolavicius, Burlington, Ont.
“I guess it could be worse. Larry got breaded and fried.” “Don’t worry, it’s just a front.”
John Butler, Austin, Texas Brandon D. Lawniczak, Mill Valley, Calif.
“I’m a throwback.”
Beth Lawler, Montclair, N.J.
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

14 15 16
THE 17 18
CROSSWORD 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27
A challenging puzzle.
28 29 30 31 32 33
BY NATAN LAST
34 35
36
ACROSS
1 “Absolutely!”
37 38
4 New Orleans’s Dirty Dozen ___ Band
9 “Go on, then!” 39 40 41 42 43
14 Draw
16 Dinner invitation? 44 45 46 47 48
17 Phenomenon whose unusual color comes
from refraction of the sun’s rays through 49 50 51 52 53 54
Earth’s atmosphere
18 Prop for Groucho Marx 55 56 57 58
19 Nickname for the Basketball Hall of
Famer Oscar Robertson 59 60
20 Typewriter component
22 Phife ___ (founding member of A Tribe 61 62 63
Called Quest)
23 Mushroom in ramen, often
DOWN 38 Shoulder condition for many a pitcher,
25 Snare
1 Like much anime watched outside Japan colloquially
27 Jemison who was the first Black woman
in space 2 Not away, in a way 41 “The ponytail’s hipster cousin,” per GQ
28 ___ of iniquity 3 Equiangular figure 42 “Major” and “minor” parts of a tarot deck
29 “___ me?” 4 Foundation 43 Shadows that have grown long?
32 Person whose works were catalogued 5 Only N.F.L. team to win championships 46 Areas for some kneelers
chronologically by Ludwig von Köchel for three different cities 48 Jaunty greeting
34 Poetic licenses? Squeal
6 On 50
36 Ones who are likely to go in to labor
early 7 Chats 52 Jazz pianist Hines
37 “Diving Into the Wreck” poet and coiner 8 “El ___ Presidente” (Miguel Ángel 53 Wee bit of whiskey
of the term “compulsory heterosexuality” Asturias novel about a dictatorship) 56 Date
39 Cause 9 ___ fly 58 Filing expert, for short
40 Émile Zola’s “La ___ Humaine” 10 Like the central planet in “Dune”
41 Fairy queen whose chariot is an empty 11 Places to check your balance
hazelnut, per Mercutio, in “Romeo and Solution to the previous puzzle:
Juliet” 12 “You don’t have to tell me that”
D I B S L O A M B A B E
44 Word with wealth or achievement 13 Butts
I D E A I N L A L A L A N D
45 Symbol in the middle of the flags of 15 Left or right, say S C A N M E L L O Y E L L O
Ghana and Senegal 21 Like the streets of Victorian London C A R D I B K I S S L A O
47 Cut 24 Eastern hospices O R C S O N I C S T E R M
49 Cut or clip D U E L O D E M E R G E
26 Regulates, as grammar B R A P A D L A P S E D
51 Clip
30 Tangled O N T H I N I C E
54 Worshipper of Inti
31 Clifford of “Fleabag” A T O D D S N E P H E W
55 Taxi figures R I C E S E G O I S A Y
57 Field of inquiry? 33 “Between Two Ferns” comic Galifianakis
L E T S A L A N O N Y E T
59 “Recognize!” 34 Empty I R A D U E S M E T T L E
60 “In a Station of the Metro” poet 35 Old S A G E A D V I C E H O L A
61 Much 36 “We gotta be outta here in five, so . . .” S C O T T I E D O G A G E S

K N E E N E N A T O N E
62 City that’s home to the National Voting 37 African nation in which the Universal
Rights Museum and Institute Declaration of the Rights of Peoples was Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
63 “Hip Hop Is Dead” rapper proclaimed on July 4, 1976 newyorker.com/crossword

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99 JUNE 28, 202 1

CH Alliance ICU Sync

Brown rice 8/3-5

WCK: August Inventory

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Learn more at workspace.google.com

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Ruben Santiago-Hudson Mary-Louise Parker Phylicia Rashad Edie Falco

Dominique Morisseau David Morse David Cromer Anchuli Felicia King

THIS SUMMER ON NEWYORKER.COM

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 5

JUNE 23 – 29, 2021

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 7

8 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021

10 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021

resistance to it. With Taraji P. Henson, as Petey’s

12 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021

We’re proud to support our LGBTQIA+ associates and their families.

Inclusion Respect Support

rebelled first against apocalyptic weap- prison camp. Kara-Murza is hardly an

J anet Malcolm, who wrote for this

J effrey Beri arrived in Guangzhou near

The rise of dog breeding, in nine-

PEOPLE OF EARTH: HELLO

that correct? once in a while. No offense, but who

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 33

O Joe Manchin III, the senior

iden and Manchin have obvious

n June, 2010, Robert C. Byrd, of West

WOMEN ON THE VERGE

S year-old studying history and pol-

here is at least one scholarly prece-

56 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMA CÓRDOVA

I how they died. Or just what dis-

My mom explained later what the

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 28, 2021 63

TIED TO THE TRACKS

A American English than “in-

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61 Much 36 “We gotta be outta here in five, so . . .” S C O T T I E D O G A G E S

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