The Ops

OCTOBER 10, 2022
5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Amy Davidson Sorkin on the new Supreme Court term;
Diane Arbus’s Anderson Cooper; vinyl treasures;
losing the cool card; Leezy’s Virgil Abloh pilgrimage.
ANNALS OF INQUIRY
Joshua Rothman 20 Becoming You
Are you the same person you were as a child?
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Gary Richardson 25 My Flight Delay at J.F.K.
LETTER FROM TEXAS
Rachel Monroe 26 The Bodies in the Cave
When amateur archeologists find Indigenous remains.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
David Kortava 32 In the Filtration Camps
Why are Russian forces detaining Ukrainian civilians?
PROFILES
Ben Taub 42 Close to the Sun
Bertrand Piccard’s mission to fly solar.
FICTION
Thomas McGuane 54 “Take Half, Leave Half ”
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Amy Davidson Sorkin 60 Explaining the many failings of the C.I.A.
BOOKS
65 Briefly Noted
Adam Kirsch 66 Reconciling the faces of John Donne.
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 70 Wolfgang Tillmans at MOMA.
POP MUSIC
Carrie Battan 72 Gayle, and pop in the time of TikTok.
THE THEATRE
Vinson Cunningham 74 “American (tele)visions” and Little Amal.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 76 “Tár.”
POEMS
Natalie Shapero 37 “True Apothecary”
Billy Collins 47 “From ‘Musical Tables’”
COVER
Eric Drooker “Sunset Catch”
DRAWINGS Alice Cheng, Liza Donnelly, Asher Perlman, Frank Cotham,

Rachel Deutsch, Emily Flake, Lars Kenseth, William Haefeli, Eddie Ward, Akeem Roberts, Roz Chast,
Joseph Dottino and Alex Pearson, Edward Koren SPOTS Christoph Niemann
CONTRIBUTORS
Ben Taub (“Close to the Sun,” p. 42), Rachel Monroe (“The Bodies in the Cave,”
a staff writer since 2017, received the p. 26) is a contributing writer for the
2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. magazine. Her first book, “Savage Ap-
petites: Four True Stories of Women,
Natalie Shapero (Poem, p. 37) has pub- Crime, and Obsession,” came out in 2019.
lished three poetry collections, includ-
ing, most recently, “Popular Longing.” Joshua Rothman (“Becoming You,” p. 20)
She teaches at the University of Cal- is the ideas editor of newyorker.com.
ifornia, Irvine.
Billy Collins (Poem, p. 47), a former
David Kortava (“In the Filtration Camps,” U.S. Poet Laureate, is the author of
p. 32) is a member of The New Yorker’s more than a dozen books of poetry,
editorial staff. This piece was supported including “Whale Day.” His latest,
by the Pulitzer Center. “Musical Tables,” is forthcoming in
November.
Carrie Battan (The Talk of the Town,
p. 18; Pop Music, p. 72), who has been Hannah Goldfield (Tables for Two,
contributing to the magazine since 2015, p. 13) is the magazine’s food critic.
became a staff writer in 2018.
Tom Junod (The Talk of the Town,
Thomas McGuane (Fiction, p. 54) began p. 17), a writer for ESPN, has won two
publishing ﬁction in The New Yorker National Magazine Awards. He is at
in 1994. His most recent book is “Cloud- work on a book about his father.
bursts: Collected and New Stories.”
Eric Drooker (Cover) is a painter and
Amy Davidson Sorkin (Comment, p. 15; a graphic novelist whose drawings have
A Critic at Large, p. 60), a staff writer been on display at the Guggenheim
since 2014, is a regular contributor to Museum. He has contributed to The
Comment. New Yorker since 1993.
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
LEFT: GUANG LIM; RIGHT: PIERRE BUTTIN
PERSONAL HISTORY ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY

In a moment of professional and An obscure software system synchro-
private failure, Adam Dalva began nizes our clocks. Who will keep
writing letters to Jeb Bush. it running? Nate Hopper reports.
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and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
THE MAIL
THE CONSERVATIVE COURT a day spent sitting on the asphalt of
the Capitol Hill police parking lot
Margaret Talbot’s thorough and superbly (“Mom Com,” September 5th). Along
written account of Justice Samuel Ali- with me and nearly two dozen others,
to’s grievance tour would have bene- Schumer had been arrested the previ-
fitted from a more nuanced distinction ous day while protesting Brett Kava-
in one spot (“The Last Word,” Septem- naugh’s nomination to the Supreme
ber 5th). Talbot describes Justice Neil Court. We had returned to pay our FEED HOPE .
FEED LOVE .
Gorsuch as “concluding—ostensibly fines, and waited patiently for hours.
through originalist logic—that Title VII Schumer kept us laughing and well fed.
prohibitions on employment discrimi- The laughter later subsided when Sen-
nation applied to gay and transgender ator Susan Collins announced her in-
people.” But, in fact, Gorsuch’s opinion tention to vote for Kavanaugh. In this
can be said to have used the textualist sombre moment, Schumer gave us hugs
method—derived from the plain lan- and provided space for us to express
guage of the statute—rather than orig- our frustration and our sadness.
1
inalism. The decision was criticized by Sarah Newman
the dissenters, including Alito, who in- Washington, D.C.
voked originalism to argue that Con-
gress’s intent in enacting Title VII did CLUB CAPITAL
not include protecting the L.G.B.T.Q.
community against discrimination. The Although the nation’s capital will never
case illustrates that these two judicial claim the same contributions to club-
decision-making methods are not al- land as New York, Chicago, or Detroit,
ways viewed synonymously. Chelsea Manning’s statement, in Na-
Sheryl Snyder than Heller’s article, that the Greater
Louisville, Ky. Washington, D.C., area was “not known
for its electronic dance music” is disap-
Talbot’s portrait of Alito would have pointing (The Talk of the Town, Sep-
been strengthened by more pointed tember 5th). A sampling of D.C.’s con-
references to the centrality of Alito’s tributions includes the trance pioneer
Catholicism to his jurisprudence. Two Brian Transeau, the Grammy Award-
highly placed clerics in the Catholic winning duo Deep Dish, the down-
Church recently asserted the Church’s tempo innovators Thievery Corpora-
prerogative in denying Catholic politi- tion, and the genre moombahton. From
cians Holy Communion should they the nineties to the early two-thousands,
stray from Catholic teachings, especially the Friday-night party Buzz was one
on the issue of abortion. Joe Biden and of the biggest club nights on the East
Nancy Pelosi have both been so denied. Coast. An investigation by a local tele-
It is entirely plausible that the conser- vision station covering Ecstasy use at
vative Catholics on the Supreme Court the club garnered headlines and pre-
might render judgments not simply out ceded the introduction of the RAVE
of agreement with Church teachings but Act, legislation sponsored by then Sen-
equally out of fear of not complying. ator Joe Biden. Not a bad mix for a
How far might this erode the principle supposed dance-music backwater.
of the separation of church and state? Martin Rundle
1
Albion Urdank Washington, D.C.
Los Angeles, Calif.
•
LAST LAUGH Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
Reading Ariel Levy’s profile of Amy [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
Schumer reminded me of a chance any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
encounter that I had with her, during of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
OCTOBER 5 – 11, 2022
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The exhibition “The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England,” opening at the Met on Oct. 10,
concerns five monarchs, from Henry VII to Elizabeth I, whose dynasty ruled for more than a century,
as well as the European artists and artisans who flourished in Britain under their patronage. One of the
greatest was Hans Holbein the Younger, the Swiss German Old Master, whose 1532 portrait—likely
of Hermann von Wedigh III, a London-based German merchant—is seen, mid-installation, above.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROLINE TOMPKINS
1
As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance Finn, also interweave found video footage of wrights Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard.
to confirm engagements. the exacting coaches Béla and Márta Károlyi, Texting, by nature, is a form of dialogue, and
whose deep stamp on American gymnastics is pairing the repartee master Stoppard with the
only now ironing itself out, and a soundscape twentieth century’s preëminent bard of nihil-
that includes testimony by girls and women as- ism is a prime setup for sendup, maybe even
THE THEATRE saulted by Larry Nassar. This latter section is so profundity. But what’s delivered is a mishmash
brutal that the tiny Ai Clancy (who is only nine of cutesiness (including a guess-the-play-based-
years old) wears headphones to shut it out. Clan- on-emoji game) and pseudo-philosophizing (an
Body Through Which the cy’s presence onstage, leafing through a book inquiry into “the meaning of art”). Forget art’s
and wearing a huge headset, emphasizes Kim’s meaning; I’d settle for knowing how Beckett
Dream Flows deeper meaning better than the occasionally and Stoppard got each other’s numbers. And
The teen-age (and younger) gymnasts in Soomi awkward script does—danger surrounds these in what world, including even the most absurd
Kim’s devised-theatre work create a kind of children, and even attempts to further their Beckettian dystopia, would the former ever
Busby Berkeley choreography around Kim her- artistic or acrobatic expression can push them text, “Now, let’s have some fun :),” or the lat-
self, who dances, confesses her doubts about her into waters that adults themselves cannot nav- ter, “FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!”? In format, at least,
life as a coach, relives her time as a youthful igate.—Helen Shaw (The Tank; through Oct. 16.) “Textplay” achieves mimesis; viewers watch
gymnast tortured by body issues, and spots the it on a cell phone or a computer. The running
girls in their increasingly dancerly routines. time is a long thirty-five minutes.—Dan Stahl
She’s generous with her young collaborators, Textplay (nyuskirball.org; through Dec. 3.)
and they introduce themselves (in voice-over) Archer Eland’s digital-theatre piece, produced
as they execute standing tucks and gliding back by N.Y.U. Skirball, offers an enticing conceit:
walkovers. Kim and her co-director, Meghan a text-message conversation between the play- Weightless
The Kilbanes—the husband-and-wife band
of Kate Kilbane and Dan Moses—adapt a
horrifying tale by Ovid into a sister-power
PODCAST DEPT. rock concert, eliding the original story’s can-
nibalistic terror in favor of indie-optimist
effervescence. As in the ancient myth, Phi-
lomela (Lila Blue) and Procne (Kilbane) are
sisters, and, after Procne’s husband, Tereus
(Joshua Pollock), rapes Philomela and cuts
out her tongue, the women turn violent—and
then into birds. The musical softens their
vengeance, centers their bond, and inserts
Iris (Kofy Brown), the goddess of the rainbow,
who loves Philomela but wafts her directly
into Tereus’ path. (Her character is the least
convincing element in a show that includes a
woman who makes wings out of twigs.) Ta-
milla Woodard’s production, for WP Theatre,
imagines that we’re watching a club perfor-
mance, the lead singer styled with fingerless
gloves and combat boots, candles flickering on
Moses’s electronic keyboard. Pollock shreds
on guitar; Blue sings sweetly. But, even for
those who worship at the twin altars of pro-
pulsive drum scores and ancient stories, confu-
sion abides. How are these awful events being
recounted with such giddy, romp-around joy?
1
The music soars, but I could have used more
weight.—H.S. (WP Theatre; through Oct. 16.)
If you’ve been toying with the idea of getting into the glamorous, high-
speed world of Formula 1 racing, there is no better time: you can catch DANCE
a new Grand Prix race almost every weekend until late November.
Newbies looking for a crash course should tune in to the Netflix series New York City Ballet
“Drive to Survive,” but once you catch the F1 bug you’ll find that the This week, the company presents two of the
juiciest programs of the season, both featuring
sport lends itself beautifully to wonky, gossipy podcasts—there are only Stravinsky, the composer with whom George
twenty debonair, champagne-swilling drivers to keep track of during a Balanchine collaborated most closely. The
short season that zooms around to opulent international locales. Of the “All Stravinsky” program (Oct. 6 and Oct. 9)
opens with Balanchine’s earliest extant bal-
dozens of F1 podcasts (with more launching all the time), four to start let, “Apollo,” from 1928, a piece both pure
with are “F1: Beyond the Grid” (the sport’s official podcast, where you and playful, and ends with one of his final
can hear drivers wax philosophical about brakes and chicanes); “Fast works set to Stravinsky, “Symphony in Three
Movements,” from 1972, which taps into the
& Loose,” a new Wondery podcast hosted by the actor Will Arnett (a music’s aggressive, high-spirited, and highly
self-proclaimed F1 fiend) and the driving legend Mika Häkkinen; “Two stylized character. “Classic NYCB I” (Oct. 7)
ILLUSTRATION BY AN CHEN
Girls 1 Formula,” a dishy show hosted by the diehard fans Kate Lizotte starts with another juggernaut, “Stravinsky
Violin Concerto,” with its two contrasting pas
and Nicole Sievers which focusses heavily on intra-driver drama; and de deux, oppositional and needy. But it also
the BBC podcast “Chequered Flag,” which leans into technical analysis includes works by two of the most popular
and cerebral deep dives into chassis design. Before you know it, you, too, ballet choreographers working today, Justin
Peck (“Everywhere We Go”) and Alexei Rat-
will be opining about pit-stop strategy and tire consistency to anyone mansky (“Concerto DSCH”).—Marina Harss
who asks.—Rachel Syme (David H. Koch; through Oct. 16.)
6 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022

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“Timewave Zero,” is a gothic, synthesizer-driven
CLASSICAL suite of ambient drone music; the members
have a professed love for Morbid Angel as well
as for Enya, and they have voiced a desire to
In the New York Philharmonic’s rede- perform their spooky, arpeggiated electronic
signed David Geffen Hall, opening compositions in planetariums. Until that day
this week after extensive renovations, comes, Blood Incantation fills rock clubs with
its high-wire mix of atmospheric abrasion on a
the audience seating wraps around the run of co-headlining dates that also features the
stage on all sides. The orchestra returns grind-metal experimentalists Full of Hell.—Jenn
the embrace with new works that feel Pelly (The Brooklyn Monarch; Oct. 6.)
inclusive in their eclecticism. The jazz
trumpeter Etienne Charles fuses blues, “Chickfactor 30”
calypso, and other genres in “San Juan INDIE POP The nineties birthed innumerable
zines rhapsodizing about countless songs. Chick-
Hill: A New York Story” (Oct. 8). Elec- factor is the rare publication to flip this formula
tronics and lighting figure into Marcos and creep into a subject’s song—namely, Belle
Balter’s “Oyá” (Oct. 12-18), and Caroline and Sebastian’s “Chickfactor,” a misty-eyed New
York postcard that testifies to the magazine’s
Shaw’s “Microfictions, Vol. 3” leverages impact and chatty allure. Founded, in 1992, by
the adventuresome vocalists of Roomful Gail O’Hara and Pam Berry, Chickfactor pivoted
of Teeth (Oct. 20-23). Dialling down the around arch, vaguely feminine indie pop in an
era ruled by harsh guitars and veiled machismo.
experimentation for a two-part gala, the Still extant, albeit marching to a leisurely pub-
Philharmonic hosts a starry affair with lication schedule, the zine toasts its thirtieth
Lin-Manuel Miranda (Oct. 26) and trots anniversary with a pair of concerts. At Frying
Pan, on Chelsea’s waterfront, the high-school
out Beethoven’s Ninth—the ultimate band Girl Scout Handbook joins the veterans
warhorse—alongside a new work by An- the Aluminum Group, Jim Ruiz Set, and Dump;
gélica Negrón (Oct. 28).—Oussama Zahr Stephin Merritt, the Magnetic Fields singer
who serves as the magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman
figure, d.j.s. Two nights later, the party jumps to
Union Pool with a show that includes Artsick,
DorkyPark program, followed by her purported swan song, Seablite, and Jeanines—dashing young acts that,
“Hellzapoppin’: What About the Bees?,” which by all evidence, assembled themselves from
Often demonized and romanticized, the Roma juxtaposes dance with text (her wry musings Chickfactor back issues.—Jay Ruttenberg (Frying
of Eastern Europe rarely get chances to repre- on racial injustice and aging) and film (classic Pan, Oct. 6; Union Pool, Oct. 8.)
sent themselves. In Constanza Macras’s “Open clips of Lindy Hoppers and the raucous French
1
for Everything,” a large cast of Roma perform- schoolchildren of the movie “Zero de Con-
ers tell their own stories, joined by Roma mu- duite”).—B.S. (New York Live Arts; Oct. 5-8.) Denzel Curry
sicians and members of Macras’s Berlin-based HIP-HOP In 2011, the Miami rapper Denzel Curry
company, DorkyPark. It’s a warm show of vi- emerged as a teen-aged member of the Raider
gnettes, monologues, and song that stays light Klan, a boisterous collective indebted to the
even as it touches dark subjects. Stereotypes MUSIC fearsome sounds of the Memphis group Three
are satirized, ordinariness is emphasized, and 6 Mafia. In the decade since, as the collective
everyone dances together.—Brian Seibert (BAM broke apart, Curry has explored not just a wider
Strong Harvey Theatre; Oct. 5-8.) The Avalanches array of sounds but also his own developing
DANCE The Australian electronic group the Av- psyche. After establishing himself as a dynamic
alanches are best known for their trio of dense, performer on “Ta13oo,” from 2018, he released
Malpaso Dance Company starry-eyed, sample-festooned albums, but their “ZUU,” a sonic ode to his home town and its
This small contemporary-dance ensemble, d.j. sets have often been nearly as rich. In recent influence. Curry, a freestyler who is as comfort-
founded in Cuba in 2012, is committed to mixes, they have teased their own best-known able playing the thoughtful lyricist as he is the
commissioning works from an interesting tracks here and there (e.g., the title song of their mosh-inciting thrasher, makes music for both the
cross-section of international choreographers. magisterial record “Since I Left You”). But the brain and the body. His most recent album, “Melt
It also presents works by its directors, Osnel Avalanches mostly stick to satiny seventies My Eyez See Your Future,” stands as the great-
Delgado and Dailedys Carrazana. The current grooves and their outer-space brethren. After est example of this dynamic—its robust, jazz-
program exemplifies this eclecticism with a playing a live show at Terminal 5, the group heads infused, boom-bap sound underscores a political
dance called “woman with water,” by the vet- to Elsewhere for a late-night d.j. set, armed with awakening.—Sheldon Pearce (Terminal 5; Oct. 6.)
eran Swedish ballet-theatre figure Mats Ek, a well-matched opener: Detroit’s Kyle Hall, a
performed alongside “Stillness in Bloom,” by specialist in the kind of funky, burbling techno
the Canadian choreographer Aszure Barton, for which his home town is famous.—Michaelan- Robert Glasper: “Tribute to
who specializes in sensitive character studies, as gelo Matos (Terminal 5 and Elsewhere; Oct. 8.)
well as new works by Robyn Mineko Williams, Herbie Hancock”
of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and a solo JAZZ If there’s one role model that Robert
by Carrazana.—M.H. (Joyce Theatre; Oct. 4-9.) Blood Incantation Glasper can be said to have mirrored his cross-
DEATH METAL On most of its releases, the Colo- over career on, it’s Herbie Hancock. Much
rado death-metal band Blood Incantation works like that renowned keyboardist and composer,
Yvonne Rainer in the appealing crosshairs of skull-crushing riffs, Glasper first gained attention as an inspired
At eighty-seven, Rainer has announced that mind-expanding psychedelia, and forbidding pianist with modernist-jazz roots, then trans-
ILLUSTRATION BY LIA LIAO
her latest dance will be her last. Of course, growls. But risk-taking adventures and delightful formed himself into a plugged-in advocate eager
the arch postmodernist has left dance behind bewilderment are also specialties of this im- to incorporate Black pop and funk into his music.
before, only to return. After redirecting her pressively pummelling group. Its breakthrough Both had significant breakthrough albums: Han-
game-changing nineteen-sixties experimen- album, “Hidden History of the Human Race,” cock’s “Head Hunters,” from 1973, and Glasper’s
tation to avant-garde film, in the seventies concluded with an eighteen-minute odyssey “Black Radio,” which is now celebrating its tenth
and eighties, she started making dances again titled “Awakening from the Dream of Existence anniversary. As part of a monthlong Manhattan
in 2000. A film of her comeback piece, “After to the Multidimensional Nature of Our Reality residency, Glasper pays tribute to the still-vital
Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” opens this (Mirror of the Soul).” The band’s latest release, icon.—Steve Futterman (Blue Note; Oct. 5-6.)

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music, design, fashion, and such hybrid high
AT THE GALLERIES jinks as “happenings.” With Pop art and nascent
Minimalism, New York artists were turning no
end of tables on solemnly histrionic Abstract
Expressionism, which had established the city
as the new wheelhouse of creative origination
worldwide. Instrumental to the moment was a
brilliant critic and curator, Alan Solomon, who,
as the director of the Jewish Museum during the
years bracketed here, consolidated what he called
“The New Art,” mounting the first museum ret-
rospectives of the trailblazers Robert Rauschen-
berg and Jasper Johns and elevating such newbie
Pop phenoms as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein,
and James Rosenquist in tandem with radically
formalist abstract painters like Frank Stella
and Kenneth Noland. The eruptive early sixties
launched many folks on all sorts of trajectories.
Some artists, at the margins of fame, hung fire
for unjustly belated recognition, as demonstrated
here by the achievements of the Spiral Group,
a cadre of stylistically diverse Black artists who
banded together in 1963. Few women at the time
were given their due, which should accrue to
them in retrospect. A garish relief painting, from
1963, by the underknown Marjorie Strider, of a
glamour girl chomping on a huge red radish,
could serve as an icon of Pop glee and sexual
impertinence crossed with proto-feminist vex-
“Inebriate of air – am I,” wrote Emily Dickinson, and the same might be ation.—P.S. (Jewish Museum; through Jan. 8.)
said of Spencer Finch. For the past thirty years, the cerebral American artist
has been translating the evanescent conditions of specific locations—the Alexandra Noel
climate, the color, the light—into exhilarating installations, paintings, This Los Angeles-based artist’s exacting, very
drawings, and photographs that harmonize the systems-based rigor of small paintings (no panel is taller than nine
Minimalism with the unpredictable beauty of the natural world. “Lux inches) evoke the infinite expanses of the
mind’s eye. Noel’s imagery—cylinders, bubbles,
and Lumen: Spencer Finch,” on view at the Hill Art Foundation through alien architecture, bodies of water, a Starlight
March 4, is a whirlwind retrospective of the artist’s career in ten works, mint, a screaming baby—is at once specific and
seen in the company of a magnificent, newly restored Gothic stained-glass cryptic, as if she were attempting to catalogue
the detritus of dreams. The composition of
window, “The Creation and the Expulsion from Paradise,” made in 1533, the characteristically smooth-surfaced “Knife
by Valentin Bousch, for an Alsatian church. (A recent acquisition of the Beam” pairs gleaming cutlery with a laser-like
foundation’s, it once graced the Manhattan apartment of William Ran- stripe and a glossy black capsule; “Titanic Rad-
ish with Butter” shows the vegetable sinking
dolph Hearst.) The window hangs near “Painting Air,” Finch’s dazzling into the sea, suggesting a strange, stranded
meditation (pictured above) on the reflections and refractions of light in a biomorphic monument. In a statement that ac-
secular paradise—Monet’s garden at Giverny—based on his observations companies the exhibition, Noel pushes against
those who would pigeonhole her paintings as
in 2012. The show also includes a lovely ode to Dickinson, from 2018: surreal or symbolic, writing that, instead, “they
seven small color photos, taken through a window above the poet’s desk, are hieroglyphs not of physical things but after-
documenting the passage of an hour at twilight. As night falls, the glass images of afterimages of afterimages,” which
does capture their elusive mood.—Johanna
wanes in transparency, becoming a mirror.—Andrea K. Scott
1
Fateman (Derosia; through Oct. 29.)
Jimmy Wright
Alexander Calder, Jacob Lawrence, and Willem Two weathered-looking, six-foot-square paint-
ART de Kooning. “At the Dawn” samples provincial ings—cropped closeups of decaying flowers—
talents who had plenty of moxie but remained inaugurate the Fierman gallery’s new space, on
shallowly rooted in the dashing radicality with Pike Street, in this spare but powerful show. In
“At the Dawn of a New Age” which Europeans eclipsed embedded traditions. the nineteen-seventies, Wright established him-
Relish the abundance of relatively—and poi- These aspiring Americans thrilled to the explo- self as a chronicler of New York’s gay-night-life
COURTESY THE ARTIST / © HILL ART FOUNDATION
gnantly—dud paintings in this show of early- sion but tended to be hazy on exactly what, in scene, rendering louche tableaux in rich, mischie-
twentieth-century American modernism at prior art history, was being blown up. But their vous detail. But in 1988, when his longtime part-
the Whitney, organized by the curator Barbara frequent ingenuousness tantalizes. It is a fact of ner Ken Nuzzo was diagnosed with H.I.V., the
Haskell. With an emphasis on abstraction, it the art-loving experience that serious but failed artist made a dramatic shift in subject matter and
features a number of rarely exhibited works ambitions teach more about the tenor of their began painting the still-life series “Flowers for
(most owned by the museum), which were made times than contemporaneous successes, which Ken,” which includes the two dramatic pictures
during the learning-curve years—at full tilt by freeze us in particular, awed fascination.—Peter on view. “Sunflower Stem,” from 1989, is a rear
1912—of artists in the U.S. who strove to absorb Schjeldahl (Whitney Museum; through Jan. 29.) view of a drooping bloom, its petals crisping into
revolutionary innovations that had originated in feathery tendrils and its once green stalk gone
Europe. Occupying the museum’s eighth floor, brown. Its companion is the despairing, even
the array provides a sidelight (or prequel) to the “New York: 1962-1964” more time-ravaged “Sunflower Head,” which
Whitney’s long-running installation, one floor This spectacular historical show of art and docu- Wright started in 1989 and completed in 1992, a
below, of touchstone pieces from its collection, mentation addresses an era of season-to-season— year after Nuzzo died. It’s a frontal view of the
which parades feats, dating from 1900 to 1965, at times almost monthly or weekly—advances same flower, the color now completely drained
by such American adepts as Edward Hopper, in painting, sculpture, photography, dance, from its painstakingly textured expanse. Both of

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these elegantly overwrought compositions were junta’s monstrosities. Though the dramatic and poignant emotional tension without stinting
painted on canvases that Wright salvaged from a atmosphere could hardly be denser, it’s also on the particulars of their sex life. Both men
dumpster; their craggy accumulations of pigment pierced by surprising shafts of comedy; there endure professional struggles along with the re-
1
stand as heart-piercing labors of love as well as is courage to be had, Mitre reminds us, in pre- lationship’s inevitable roadblocks (one involving
memento mori.—J.F. (Fierman; through Oct. 23.) serving a lightness of heart. When a voice on Aaron’s sedate family, another rooted in the chal-
the phone warns Strassera that his family will lenge of monogamy). Eichner gleefully unleashes
be harmed if he pursues the case, his wife re- a whirlwind of sharp dialogue with careful atten-
sponds: “Oh, the threat guy? He’s been calling tion to the urgency and the pain underlying it.
MOVIES all day.”—Anthony Lane (In theatrical release.) The hearty romance both embraces and satirizes
the specifics of gay life (as in a side trip to Prov-
incetown) alongside the Hollywood universality
Argentina, 1985 Bros of rom-com clichés. The teeming and vigorous
The outcome of Santiago Mitre’s new film is Billy Eichner’s performance, as a hectic and cast includes Guy Branum, Ts Madison, and
never in doubt. It is a matter of record that, neurotic intellectual with an anti-romantic acer- Bowen Yang.—Richard Brody (In theatrical release.)
in Argentina, after the restoration of democ- bity, endows this romantic comedy with energy
racy, nine leaders of the military junta that that overflows its conventional contours. He
had previously held power in the land were plays Bobby Leiber, a well-known podcaster Losing Ground
brought to trial, and that convictions ensued. who becomes the director of New York’s first Kathleen Collins’s only feature, from 1982,
Yet the movie feels taut with suspense: right L.G.B.T.Q.+ museum. At a party, Bobby meets portrays a Black couple in New York—Sarah
up to the rousing finale, we fear that matters the buff and wry Aaron Shepard (Luke Macfar- (Seret Scott), a young philosophy professor,
could somehow tilt in the wrong direction. The lane), a lawyer whose reserve he mistakes for and Victor (Bill Gunn), an older artist—whose
old-school solidity of the storytelling is proper shallowness. Their mutual attraction nonetheless careers shake the fault lines in their romance.
to the labors of the hero, the prosecutor Julio quickly blossoms into an intense and loving Sarah plans to spend the summer writing about
Strassera (Ricardo Darín), who recruits a team relationship; the script (by Nicholas Stoller, ecstatic experience, but Victor, an abstractionist
of legal greenhorns to gather evidence of the who directed, and Eichner) maintains a clear seeking new inspirations, finds them a country
house in an upstate town, where he recruits
locals as models—especially one young woman,
Celia (Maritza Rivera). Sarah struggles with
WHAT TO STREAM her research while Victor’s art flourishes,
and Celia soon becomes an uneasy presence
in their household. Collins dramatizes crises
of gender and race—as well as of intellectual
pursuit and artistic ambition—with a decisive
and nuanced touch, and her attention to light
and color (as revealed in this new restoration) is
itself painterly; the movie conveys a thrillingly
tactile sense of high-relief surfaces. When Sarah
accepts a role in a student film (an abstract
yet passionate musical) alongside a suave and
sympathetic actor (Duane Jones), the fusion of
cinema and life, of symbol and substance, rises
to a shriek of redemption.—R.B. (Opening Oct.
7 at IFC Center and streaming on the Criterion
Channel, Milestone Films, and other services.)
The Mother and the Whore

The three young lovers at the center of Jean
Eustache’s vast and voracious Parisian romance,
from 1973, make history on the wing. The dan-
dyish Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) spends
his days reading in a café, philosophizing with
friends, and pursuing affairs. He lives with Marie
(Bernadette Lafont), a thirtyish shopkeeper
who finances his verbally torrential idleness; he
picks up Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a sexually
A personal mission fuses with movie history in Ira Deutchman’s 2019 doc- uninhibited nurse, who falls in love with him.
umentary, “Searching for Mr. Rugoff,” which is streaming on the Criterion Eustache, in his tender and passionate depiction
Channel and other services. The titular subject, Donald Rugoff, inherited a of their sharp-edged triangle, delivers nothing
less than a comprehensive vision of France’s
small chain of New York theatres and, from the late nineteen-fifties through
BOB PETERSON / THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION / GETTY /
post-1968 turmoil—and it’s a ferociously con-

the seventies, expanded it into an art-house mini-empire, near Blooming- servative view. He fills the film’s three and a half
dale’s, that he endowed with the upscale cultural allure of modern architecture hours with the loam of collective memory—the
sediment of wartime horrors and compromises,
and design—and he also became the distributor of films that he showed. the unresolved tensions of prewar pop culture.
Rugoff, turbulent and troubled, hiring and firing on a whim (he gave Deutch- He sees radical utopias and libertine dreams
man, a prominent distributor, his start, in 1975), turned his chaotic office shattered by workaday troubles and intimate
COURTESY CRITERION COLLECTION
crises. (Veronika’s agonized climactic soliloquy

into a hive of cinephilic passion. Launching such films as “Z,” “Scenes from a plays like a solo counter-revolution in real time.)
Marriage,” “Marjoe,” “Gimme Shelter,” and “Pumping Iron” into the Zeitgeist The trio’s breezy erotic sophistication masks an
with pinpoint strategies and brazen ballyhoo, Rugoff made New York’s art- urban populism that’s as artistically fertile as it
is politically risky; their domestic disasters have
1
house releases matter to Hollywood (and several garnered Oscars to prove it); the feel and tone of epic clashes.—R.B. (Screening
then he lost control of his company and vanished from the scene. Deutch- Oct. 5-6 at the New York Film Festival.)
man decided to find out what happened; the story—graced by recollections
from Rugoff ’s family and former employees and associates—shows how For more reviews, visit
Rugoff changed the face of the cinema and the city alike.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

at Little Flower than at Dunya, which aushak. Both are drizzled artfully in a thin
Ghiasi co-owns with his father, Basir. tomato sauce and an excellent, tart white
At the back of the spotless, brightly sauce—house-made with yogurt, mayon-
lit dining room, decorated with hand- naise, and dried mint—which the Ghiasis
1
painted murals, a team of cooks in crisp have been wholesaling to food carts for
paper hats bustles around the glassed-in years, and which is also delivered to every
kitchen, scooping from an enormous table in a caddy of condiments.
TABLES FOR TWO rice cooker and steeping black tea with According to Ghiasi, Afghanis eat
cardamom pods in porcelain pots. primarily beef and lamb. Both come in
Dunya Kabab House Before Dunya, the Ghiasis’ restaurant multiple iterations of kebab—ground for
696 Coney Island Ave., Brooklyn portfolio consisted of fast-food counters, long, slender kofta, or sliced into juicy
including several Crown Fried Chicken cubes, then skewered and charred on the
The other night, as I paid my bill at locations. During the pandemic, Mo- grill—as well as in korma, a tomato-based
Dunya Kabab House, a new Afghani hamed grew weary of his gruelling day stew of Indian origin, redolent of gin-
restaurant in Kensington, in Brooklyn’s job, in real-estate finance. He felt frus- ger and garlic. The Uzbeki Qabali pulao
Little Pakistan, the young proprietor, trated, too, by the hold that the Taliban (also known as pilaf ) features an enor-
Mohamed Ghiasi, sized me up. “You has over outsiders’ perceptions of Af- mous, rangy lamb shank, served on the
ever go to Astoria?” he asked. Sure, I said, ghanistan. “I said, ‘Yo, why don’t I open bone (a presentation more common in
once in a while. “I have another restau- an Afghani restaurant?’ There’s none in
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
Uzbekistan than in Afghanistan, Ghiasi

rant there,” he said. “For hipsters. Kind Brooklyn. We’ve been in Brooklyn for explained), over dark, glossy Kabul-style
of playing to the Bushwick crowd, you over thirty years. I told my dad, ‘What’s rice, the firm grains slick with chicken fat,
know?” I laughed, thoroughly pegged. the worst that could happen?’” seasoned with cumin, and topped with
Ghiasi opened Little Flower Cafe, on Little Pakistan, home to a large pop- plump raisins and tender shreds of carrot.
36th Avenue, in Queens, with his friend ulation of immigrants from South Asia, Driven by the Afghani emphasis on
Ali Zaman, who, like Ghiasi, is the Brook- many of them Muslim, seemed like the hospitality, Ghiasi is mindful of Amer-
lyn-born son of an Afghani-born restaura- right neighborhood. Planning the menu ican appetites for chicken and seafood,
teur. (Sami’s Kebab House, an Afghani was intuitive, Ghiasi said: “What do we too, and observant of a growing interest
restaurant, also in Astoria, is owned by, and eat ourselves? What do people from in meatless dishes. Since my last visit,
named for, Zaman’s father.) Little Flower Kabul, from Kandahar, from Mazar-e- I’ve craved the chicken-kofta kebab—
is a fourth-wave coffee shop seamlessly Sharif eat on a daily or weekly basis?” almost neon from turmeric and fragrant
adapted to halal specifications: the beans A basket of mixed bolani, to start, is with saffron—as well as an eggplant dish
are from Sey, perhaps the most anointed non-negotiable: sharp-cornered triangles called borani banjan that’s often eaten for
roaster in New York; the bacon on the soft- of golden fried dough, blistered on the breakfast in Afghanistan, with flatbread.
scrambled-egg sandwich is lamb belly. Pas- outside and stretchy within, stuffed with At Dunya, thick slices of peeled eggplant
tries include a cardamom croissant and a pumpkin purée, slippery scallions, or soft are deep-fried until their edges go golden
Boston-cream-style doughnut filled with potato, onion, and cilantro. Then on to and crisp and their interiors melt: lush,
firni, a rosewater-infused custard. dumplings: supple wrappers are gently slightly sweet, a delightful way to begin
Still, it’s hard to imagine anyone, hip- packed with ground lamb for mantu, and or end a day. (Dishes $4.99-$24.99.)
ster or not, feeling any more at home with leeks and scallions for vegetarian —Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 13
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT Every year since 1972, Gallup has asked to the composition of the Court, with
LEGITIMATE DECISIONS Americans whether they trust “the ju- decisions that seem driven by ideology
dicial branch headed by the U.S. Su- and divorced from legal principles. “It
t a conference in Colorado Springs preme Court.” In the latest survey, re- just doesn’t look like law when, you
A last month, John Roberts, the Chief
Justice of the United States, reflected
leased last week, the portion who do is
at a record low: forty-seven per cent. Just
know, the new judges appointed by a
new President come in and just start
on what he said had been an “unfortu- forty per cent approve of the job that tossing out the old stuff,” she said.
nate” year for the Supreme Court. He the Court itself is doing. An Associated Those new Justices were presumably
hadn’t liked driving to work past “bar- Press/norc Center poll this summer the three nominated by Donald Trump:
ricades,” he said, an allusion to the angry found that two-thirds of Americans Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and
marches and rallies that accompanied think Justices should have term limits Amy Coney Barrett. They form a rad-
a number of the Court’s cases last term. rather than lifetime appointments—a ical-conservative majority with Justices
Many of the protests were directed at measure of discontent with the Court. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito,
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Or- If Roberts is still confused, he could, and a supermajority when Roberts joins
ganization, the decision that overturned for guidance, look to comments that them, as he often does. One of the major
Roe v. Wade. And he didn’t appreciate Justices Sonia Sotomayor and, espe- issues before the Court this term is af-
hearing people say that the Court, with cially, Elena Kagan have made since firmative action; oral arguments in two
its radical right swerve, had in any way the Dobbs ruling. In late September, at related cases, Students for Fair Admis-
undermined its legitimacy. “They are Salve Regina University, in Rhode Is- sions v. Harvard and S.F.F.A. v. Univer-
certainly free to criticize the Supreme land, Kagan noted that people are right sity of North Carolina, will be heard on
Court if they want to,” he said, which to worry about “the whole legal system October 31st. Roberts has opposed af-
is good to know. “But I don’t under- being kind of up for grabs” after a change firmative action in the past. At a mini-
stand the connection between opinions mum, he and the other conservative Jus-
that people disagree with and the le- tices are expected to rule that the current
gitimacy of the Court. If the Court use of race as a factor in college admis-
doesn’t retain its legitimate function of sions is unconstitutional. It seems pos-
interpreting the Constitution, I’m not sible that they will find a way to outlaw
sure who would take up that mantle.” many race-based hiring initiatives at pri-
There’s an element of denialism in vate companies as well. With this Court,
Roberts’s words that does not bode it is difficult to predict how far the de-
well for the Court’s new term, which cisions might go. The rulings will likely
begins on Monday and includes another not come for several months. (Ketanji
set of potential landmark cases. He’s cor- Brown Jackson, the newest Justice, has
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
rect that, in our system, the Court is the recused herself from the Harvard case
institution designed to insure that our because she served on the university’s
laws align with our rights. But the lack Board of Overseers.)
of alternatives just shows how much is Yet there is a feeling that the con-
at stake—we could end up with no ar- servative Justices could make a land-
biter that is seen as legitimate at all. Fears mark ruling out of almost any case. Sack-
about the Court’s direction are not ir- ett v. Environmental Protection Agency,
rational, and they are widely shared. the first case of the term, may seem to
address a narrow question—the defini- abama redrew its congressional districts; The Supreme Court eventually took the
tion of “navigable waters”—but it could the new map, like the old one, has only case and agreed to consider a version of
become a vehicle for dismantling a wide one Black-majority district out of seven, what is known as the “independent state
range of regulations. Haaland v. Brack- in a state that is more than a quarter legislature” theory, which holds that the
een, a challenge to the 1978 Indian Child Black. Local civil-rights groups are chal- power the Constitution grants state leg-
Welfare Act, could upend relations be- lenging the map under the Voting Rights islatures to organize elections cannot be
tween the government and federally rec- Act, but their chances seem dim. In 2013, limited by a state’s judiciary or constitu-
ognized tribes. The Court will also ad- Roberts wrote the majority opinion in tion—or perhaps by much of anything.
judicate a suit, brought by Texas and Shelby County v. Holder, a case that A broad decision in the case could make
Louisiana, claiming that the Biden Ad- significantly weakened the act, and there it far easier for state legislatures to en-
ministration has, in effect, broken the is concern that Merrill may finish it off. gage in gerrymandering or voter sup-
law by focussing its border-enforcement At Salve Regina, Kagan said, of the Jus- pression, or to intervene even more di-
efforts only on certain categories of mi- tices’ mandate to protect voting rights, rectly in the electoral process.
grants, such as those deemed a “threat “I don’t think the Court has done this After the 2020 election, Trump’s team
to public safety.” Notably, some Repub- job particularly well.” tried to pressure state legislators to send
licans have raised the possibility that, if Merrill may be a prelude to a case slates of “alternate” electors to Congress.
the G.O.P. takes control of the House that could be even more destabilizing to In 2024, some legislators may be con-
after the midterms, they may impeach American democracy: Moore v. Harper, vinced that a majority of the Justices have
President Biden on similar grounds. for which the oral arguments have yet given them license to do so. A reprise of
The most explosive cases, however, to be scheduled. Moore also involves January 6th is not so hard to imagine. If
may be the ones in which the Court congressional-district maps—this time Roberts then finds himself, once again,
will rule on how elections work. One of for North Carolina. After the state’s high- driving past barricades, they may be ones
them, Merrill v. Milligan, will be heard est court threw out a gerrymandered that the Court helped to build.
on Tuesday. After the 2020 census, Al- map, Republican legislators appealed. —Amy Davidson Sorkin
UGLY BABIES DEPT. an interesting life. I got a good kick to think I’m in more than just one Arbus
FLASHBACK start.” He looked around. “To be a small print,” Cooper said.
piece of it—it’s cool.” “I have these three letters,” he went
The Zwirner show is a re-creation of on, bringing up images of them on his
the Museum of Modern Art’s Arbus ret- phone, noting that he found them after
rospective of 1972, put on a year after she his mother died, in 2019, when he started
died, by suicide, at forty-eight. Cooper rummaging through her boxes of papers.
doesn’t remember (he was only five in One letter from Arbus to Vanderbilt be-
nderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, 1972), but he figures that he must have gins: “I printed this for you last spring
A walked into the David Zwirner
Gallery, in Chelsea, the other day to see
attended that show. His parents went—
he found the invitation among his moth-
but I forgot about it until I heard about
your new baby.” She was referring to
the retrospective of Diane Arbus pho- er’s papers—and he thinks that they would a picture she’d taken of Cooper’s older
tographs. The first picture one sees upon have taken him and his brother along. brother, Carter. “Also I have something
entering is titled “A Very Young Baby, His parents were the writer Wyatt
N.Y.C.” Cooper was particularly inter- Cooper and the designer Gloria Van-
ested in this picture, for he is that baby. derbilt. “They wanted me and my brother
It’s an intense closeup shot, the baby to be involved in their lives,” Cooper said.
just a few weeks old, fast asleep, his face “There was no kids’ table.” They hosted
filling the frame. “I remember reading the first dinner for Charlie Chaplin when
some critic saying that it resembled a he returned to New York from exile in
Roman death mask,” Cooper said, peer- 1972, and Cooper remembers shaking
ing at the print while hoisting and some- Chaplin’s hand (maybe because the Times
times gently bouncing his own seven- ran a photo of him doing so).
month-old baby, Sebastian. “I didn’t His mother didn’t know Arbus well.
really know much about Roman death The two were introduced by Richard
masks, but I can understand that now.” Avedon, a mutual friend, who had taken
This being an Arbus show, “Very many pictures of Vanderbilt.The women
Young Baby” is surrounded by photo- met in November, 1966, when Arbus
graphs of giants, cross-dressers, circus went to the apartment on the Upper
“freaks,” street people—all sorts of out- East Side to photograph Vanderbilt and
casts and eccentrics. “Which is fine by her husband as they got dressed for Tru-
me,” Cooper said. “They’re all interest- man Capote’s black-and-white ball. “My
ing characters. My goal is always to lead mother was pregnant with me, so I like Anderson Cooper
beautiful to ask you about. I’ve become cupied by people who didn’t throw any- labels of mine.” She had on a loose linen
obsessed with photographing new bathing away. He bumped into a wooden skirt and wore her hair in golden-gray
bies.” Arbus asked if she could photo- box near a chute still piled with coal. A dreadlocks. She’d found the 45s in a
graph baby Anderson. platter on the top of the box began to basement closet, and said that they’d
The image that resulted appeared in spin. The man had no idea what the box belonged to Susan and Lissa Ray, Alice
Harper’s Bazaar. As she often did, Arbus was or why it had started to move, and Fiske’s daughters from her first mar-
selected the most striking and disturb- he yelled for his boss, Donnamarie riage. In 1952, Alice married Andrew
ing image from the session. She sent a Barnes, who is in charge of archiving Fiske, the last lord of the manor, and
print to Vanderbilt, with a letter saying, Sylvester Manor’s vast contents. She became “Lady Ali,” known for driving
“I know this is controversial, but I thought took a look and calmed her charge’s around the island in a white Cadillac
you should have it.” In fact, Cooper said, ectoplasmic jitters. “It’s a Victrola,” she convertible. The family lived year-round
his mother loved the photo. “My mother said. “And it wants to go upstairs.” in the house, which was squeaky with
always had this picture up, my entire life, Barnes moved the Victrola into a age, the peeling paint outside curled like
prominently displayed,” he said. “There parlor dominated by two-hundred- false eyelashes. When the Ray sisters
was a book about Arbus that says my year-old portraits of the manor’s se- lived in Sylvester Manor, their 45s were
mom didn’t want my name used in the vere inhabitants. One afternoon last the most modern things in it. Susan
magazine when the photograph was pub- month, she used it to unveil a more re- was born in 1944, and Elisabeth in 1947,
lished. My mom denied that vigorously.” cent discovery. Ever since Alice Fiske, in East Orange, New Jersey. They were
Cooper now has that photo—the the last lady of the manor, opened the seven and four when they moved into
only signed print of “A Very Young yellow Georgian-style house and its the manor, and in their late teens when
Baby”—under museum glass, along with grounds to archeologists, in 1998, Syl- the British invaded. Both are dead now,
Arbus’s letter, in the stairwell of his Man- vester Manor has yielded evidence of no longer able to tell the story of the
hattan house. “A lot of friends comment, the lives of its occupants, who have in- records that tell a story about them.
‘Wow, you were really a fat baby.’ Or, cluded enslaved people and their en- “A record collection? I can’t even
‘Your lips look exactly the same today.’” slavers, a delegate to the Continental imagine my mom having a record col-
(So do his eyebrows.) He continued, Congress and intimate of the Founding lection,” Susan’s daughter, Marian Vo-
“As I go through my mother’s files and Fathers, and an early feminist who knew nella, said when reached by telephone.
find more letters from Arbus, I hang Henry James. Investigators have found “I imagine their childhoods were a lot
them up, too.” seventeenth-century pottery, horn but- of white gloves and party manners.”
Looking at Arbus’s shots of rich peo- tons, sewing tools, and a brass mouth But there was dancing, too. The Ray
ple dressed up for a party, Cooper turned harp, as well as a burial ground for those girls didn’t play their records on the Vic-
pensive. The picture of his parents isn’t who worked at Sylvester Manor against trola; they had a record player, and the
included, but it might have been. “The their will. “The day after the 2016 Pres- records they played suggest the kinds of
portrayal of the partygoers seems to have idential election, I found a letter from dances they did. Besides the Beatles,
more commentary. There’s mockery in- Aaron Burr,” Barnes said, after greet- there was “Louie, Louie” and “Califor-
volved,” he said, comparing them with ing two guests. “Congress was arguing nia Sun,” and Shirley Ellis’s great 1963
Arbus’s images of the marginalized, for about Thomas Jefferson and his dubi- workout, “The Nitty Gritty.” Vonella
whom she showed more sympathy. A ous moral values.” said that her mother was reserved, par-
fellow gallery-goer quoted a critic who Then she opened the oak doors of tial to choral singing, but on the island
once said that Arbus showed the nor- the Victrola to reveal a stack of 45s from Lissa was known for what a friend called
mality of freakishness and the freakish- the golden age of the American teen- “a wild jitterbug at the golf club.”
ness of normality. “I like that,” Cooper ager. There was “Don’t Worry Baby,” by Vonella had visited the manor grow-
said. “The freakishness of normality—I the Beach Boys, with “I Get Around” ing up. “We climbed the secret stairs to
1
guess that’s my category.” on the flip side. There was “I Got You the attic and tried on ancient ball gowns,”
—Fred Kaplan Babe,” by Sonny and Cher, “Blue Vel- she said. When she and her brother were
vet,” by Bobby Vinton, and singles from spooked by the “creepy ancestors” on the
TIME CAPSULE the British Invasion that was generally walls, her grandmother, Lady Ali, would
MINT considered more innocent than the one cover them with sheets. She particularly
that brought Nathaniel Sylvester to the remembered a portrait of six-year-old
tip of Long Island in 1651: “As Tears Go Cornelia Horsford, who was born in
By,” by Marianne Faithfull, and “I Wanna 1861 and was the lady of the manor until
Hold Your Hand,” still in its original she died, in 1944.
sleeve, the Fab Four smiling in their faux Barnes showed her guests the paint-
Edwardian suits. ing of little Cornelia before she led them
few years ago, a man was helping One of the guests, a helpless vinyl to the basement closet that held the rest
A to clean the basement of Sylvester
Manor, on Shelter Island—a major un-
devotee, pulled the Beatles’ 45 from the
sleeve. “Oh, my God,” he said. “It’s mint.”
of the Ray girls’ stash—Beatles singles
on the Tollie and Vee-Jay labels, all of
dertaking, since the house was built in Barnes, who is sixty-seven, said, “I them mint—and a 33-r.p.m. exercise
1737 and had for generations been oc- used to write ‘Donnie loves John’ on the record, the property of Lady Ali, titled
“Milady, Your Figure!” The vinyl devo- While some of the small-business trivia but weren’t ready to do it publicly.”
tee looked at the little girl from 1867 owners featured in “Nathan for You,” A young woman wearing a hoodie
who had scared other little girls gener- Fielder’s first show, felt like victims of stopped and asked for a selfie. Skeete
ations later. “I wonder if she ever lis- a cruel prank, most of the characters in gamely grinned for the photo. When she
tened to records,” he said. “The Rehearsal” seem to be in on the left, he said, “Williamsburg is one of the
1
Barnes said, “It’s her Victrola.” joke—and open to milking it. They places I can never really be now. Tonight
—Tom Junod have gained a significant fan base. On is the first night that I’ve been to the bar
a recent rainy night in Williamsburg, a for trivia in about three months.” He’d
FIFTEEN MINUTES DEPT. middle-aged trivia enthusiast named spiffed up for the event, choosing a red
TRIVIA QUESTION Kor Skeete prepared for his first pub- zebra-print shirt, a black blazer, and
licized outing since he appeared in a dressy slacks.
July episode of “The Rehearsal.” Fielder Online conspiracy theorists suspect
recruited Skeete to rehearse telling his that Skeete is a professional actor who
trivia buddies that he lied to them about was hired to take part in an elaborate
having a master’s degree, in addition to ruse. But his idiosyncrasies seem too au-
his bachelor’s. thentic to be scripted. A self-described
iral celebrity takes many shapes, “I was chosen over at least several “shy boy from the Bronx” and an adult-
V but it has become especially con-
voluted since the début of “The Re-
hundred people,” Skeete said. “Partially
because I wasn’t on social media. I wasn’t
education teacher, Skeete had been
in a couple of game-show pilots, and
hearsal,” the latest TV project from Na- looking for fame, or acting, or connec- had also auditioned fifty-eight times for
than Fielder. A surrealist reality series tions to Nathan.” But fame had found “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” be-
with flavors of Charlie Kaufman, the him. He was sitting on a stool at Bagel- fore he came into Fielder’s orbit. “Even
show has forced critics to invoke genre smith, a café near Alligator Lounge, a if you get into the levels of the best test-
names, such as “docu-comedy,” and trivia bar that he frequents. In the wake ing, they still pick your name randomly
“reality comedy.” The premise is that of the show, it has become a destination at the end,” he said. “I’m hoping that
life could be more manageable if hu- for Fielder fans. That evening, Skeete maybe a game show can court me now.”
mans were able to rehearse every pos- was scheduled to do a “meet and greet,” He also likes participating in paid
sible outcome of a given scenario be- before a special round of trivia questions focus groups, and one day last year he
fore it happened. To test this theory, he’d written were played. (His special- came across a listing on Craigslist seek-
Fielder created a series of increasingly ties are the Academy Awards, Presiden- ing people who were harboring secrets.
elaborate real-life scenarios, spinning tial history, and classic TV.) “I don’t want After many interviews, he learned that
six episodes out into a web of moral, to be haughty about it,” he said, “but I Fielder was involved. Months of taping
philosophical, and logistical quandaries. feel I’ve made it safe for people who like ensued (he has to be vague, because he
signed an N.D.A.), and he had very lit-
tle sense of what Fielder’s project would
look like until he watched it on HBO.
“Hours after the show aired, one of
my colleagues from trivia posted the
show to his Facebook wall, and within
six hours I was on IMDb,” Skeete said.
He didn’t go outside for four days after
the show débuted, because he was so
overwhelmed by his newfound notori-
ety. Like several other people on “The
Rehearsal,” Skeete is now a regular on
the Cameo app, where fans pay him to
record short videos.
“Sometimes I can’t see why people
are fans,” he said. “I lost my cool card
because I admit I go to trivia. I guess
there’s something relatable about me.”
Over at Alligator Lounge, a long
line was already forming. Inside, Skeete
was mobbed by admirers, and he auto-
graphed an assortment of personal items
(orange-juice cartons, sneakers, and a
photograph of the Burj Khalifa) and
posed for photos. Someone had taken
an Uber from J.F.K. after flying in from
London. A couple of security guards tom lime-green Nike Air Jordans, which no way that I’m busier than you!’ ” Tears
stood by. Abloh had designed. “They’re actually welled. “I think now, looking back, when
Outside, as the meet-and-greet hour part of the exhibition,” the guard said. I read back our conversations, he must’ve
dwindled, the line kept growing until it “Do you know how many of my friends known, and he was just trying to do all
spanned two blocks. Fans continued to have been texting me, asking, ‘Are they the stuff ”—she paused—“as many things
wait outside, even after the trivia game gonna sell the sneakers?’ And I’m, like, as he could do before he left.”
began. Skeete was forced to hand off the ‘No.’ ” Also on display: tote bags and Outside, Leezy, who makes at least
questions he’d prepared to someone else Virgil Abloh T-shirts, which were for two outfit changes per concert, recalled
to read, so that he could take more selfies sale, near a sign that read: her first encounter with Abloh. “I saw
and sign more autographs. Later, he re- that he followed me on Instagram, and
flected on the surreal quality of the eve- Abloh made little distinction between art then I messaged him,” she said. “He was
and commerce . . . the store, where objects dis-
ning. “For a little bit of time, I felt like played can be purchased, is as much a part of one of our first well-known supporters.
Elvis Presley,” he said. “From the show, the exhibition as are the other works on view. He played us in his shows and d.j. sets.
people might assume I’m a little malad- He and Benji B”—the British d.j. and
justed, but when they meet me they In a gallery, fifty-two pairs of sneak- radio personality—“were, like, very into
might say, ‘He’s actually looser and fun- ers and a see-through Rimowa suitcase Khruangbin, and he dressed me very
1
nier than I thought.’ ” filled with neon water guns were ar- early on.” Outfits: silver cowboy boots
—Carrie Battan ranged on plywood tables that Abloh (with “FOR WALKING” printed on the
had designed; a pile of f lyers for d.j. shaft) for a concert in Marfa; a glow-
DAY IN THE LIFE sets with the United Nations emblem in-the-dark lime-green snakeskin dress
INCOGNITO printed on them were displayed along- for a taping at Brooklyn Steel. “Serena
side a framed cease-and-desist letter Williams had worn it in a big photo
from the U.N., to Abloh, dated August 1, shoot for some magazine. It’s one of a
2018. That year, Abloh’s streetwear label kind. I remember being, like, ‘Oh, my
overtook Gucci as what Lyst Index, a God, I’m wearing the same thing that
brand-ranking report, called the “hot- Serena Williams wore!’ ”
test brand in the world,” and he became Leezy headed back home for a quick
he bassist for the band Khruang- the first Black man to be named artis- nap before changing into a bejewelled,
T bin, Laura Lee, who uses the show-
biz moniker Leezy, stepped outside her
tic director at Louis Vuitton; he also de-
signed an IKEA rug, printed with an
black-and-white Markarian dress, to sit
in the front row at the Fashion Week
apartment in Brooklyn. Her pink nails IKEA receipt. And he flew to Stockholm show of her friend Alexandra O’Neill.
matched her eyeshadow and the roses to see Khruangbin in concert. “That’s At three o’clock, she went out to meet
on her flowered shirt, which she wore when we hung out for the first time!” an Uber, and a middle-aged neighbor
with cleanish white Converses, Levi’s, Leezy said. “He messaged me and asked leaning on a walker said, “Beautiful, beau-
and a fifteen-ninety-nine black wig that for my schedule, and I just screen- tiful, you look beautiful.” Leezy waved
she didn’t buy on Amazon. In public, grabbed my year. And he was, like, ‘You’re and hid her keys inside a plastic rock.
Leezy and her bandmate Mark Speer the only person that’s busier than me.’ ” Before the show, which was held at
always wear black wigs to keep their pri- She went on, “And I was, like, ‘There’s the Ukrainian Institute of America,
vate lives private; their third bandmate, Leezy took a selfie with the designer
DJ, who is bald, wears a big hat and sun- Sergio Hudson, and a photographer
glasses. (The trio’s latest album, a col- asked a videographer with fish tattoos
laboration with the Malian singer Vieux on his forearms to get out of her shot.
Farka Touré, dropped last month.) “You The models did their thing, and the
can’t be Beyoncé and go to a festival and audience members did theirs: silent awe,
watch a show. I can!” she said trium- iPhone photos, applause, then a fren-
phantly. “I am a completely anonymous zied rush to the exit, shouldering aside
human. They’ll hit me, ask me for cig- several women with iPads, who were
arettes, step on my toes.” She laughed. soliciting donations for Ukraine. (Total
“Leezy only exists onstage.” number of guests who donated, accord-
Leezy was headed to the Brooklyn ing to an event production staffer: one.)
Museum to check out “Figures of Speech,” After the show, Leezy took off her
a retrospective of the work of her friend, wig, changed clothes, and headed to
the designer Virgil Abloh, who died last Madison Square Garden for a concert.
year from a rare cardiac cancer while “I’m going to see Harry Styles!” Laura
working on the exhibition. “Everything Lee said. Nobody stepped on her toes,
he made was so inspiring,” Leezy said. or even asked for a cigarette, but there
“I feel like what he’s managed to do is were a lot of eleven-year-olds scream-
some of the greatest art of my time.” ing and crying and singing along.
Inside, a security guard had on cus- Laura Lee —Adam Iscoe
four that we will be at twenty-four,
ANNALS OF INQUIRY forty-four, or seventy-four? Or will we
change substantially through time? Is
BECOMING YOU
the fix already in, or will our stories
have surprising twists and turns? Some
people feel that they’ve altered pro-
Are you the same person you were when you were a child? foundly through the years, and to them
the past seems like a foreign country,
BY JOSHUA ROTHMAN characterized by peculiar customs, val-
ues, and tastes. (Those boyfriends! That
music! Those outfits!) But others have
a strong sense of connection with their
younger selves, and for them the past
remains a home. My mother-in-law,
who lives not far from her parents’ house
in the same town where she grew up,
insists that she is the same as she’s al-
ways been, and recalls with fresh indig-
nation her sixth birthday, when she was
promised a pony but didn’t get one. Her
brother holds the opposite view: he
looks back on several distinct epochs
in his life, each with its own set of at-
titudes, circumstances, and friends. “I’ve
walked through many doorways,” he’s
told me. I feel this way, too, although
most people who know me well say that
I’ve been the same person forever.
Try to remember life as you lived
it years ago, on a typical day in the
fall. Back then, you cared deeply about
certain things (a girlfriend? Depeche
Mode?) but were oblivious of others
(your political commitments? your chil-
dren?). Certain key events—college? war?
marriage? Alcoholics Anonymous?—
hadn’t yet occurred. Does the self you
remember feel like you, or like a stranger?
Do you seem to be remembering yes-
terday, or reading a novel about a fic-
have few memories of being four—a haps smuggled into memory from a tional character?
I fact I find disconcerting now that I’m
the father of a four-year-old. My son
photograph. These disconnected im-
ages don’t knit together into a picture
If you have the former feelings, you’re
probably a continuer; if the latter, you’re
and I have great times together; lately, of a life. They also fail to illuminate any probably a divider. You might prefer
we’ve been building Lego versions of inner reality. I have no memories of my being one to the other, but find it hard
familiar places (the coffee shop, the bath- own feelings, thoughts, or personality; to shift your perspective. In the poem
room) and perfecting the “flipperoo,” a I’m told that I was a cheerful, talkative “The Rainbow,” William Wordsworth
move in which I hold his hands while child given to long dinner-table speeches, wrote that “the Child is Father of the
he somersaults backward from my shoul- but don’t remember being so. My son, Man,” and this motto is often quoted
ders to the ground. But how much of who is happy and voluble, is so much as truth. But he couched the idea as an
our joyous life will he remember? What fun to be around that I sometimes aspiration—“And I could wish my days
I recall from when I was four are the mourn, on his behalf, his future inabil- to be / Bound each to each by natural
red-painted nails of a mean babysitter; ity to remember himself. piety”—as if to say that, though it would
the brushed-silver stereo in my parents’ If we could see our childish selves be nice if our childhoods and adult-
apartment; a particular orange-carpeted more clearly, we might have a better hoods were connected like the ends of
hallway; some houseplants in the sun; sense of the course and the character a rainbow, the connection could be an
and a glimpse of my father’s face, per- of our lives. Are we the same people at illusion that depends on where we stand.
One reason to go to a high-school re-
People have strong, divergent opinions about the continuity of their own selves. union is to feel like one’s past self—old
20 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY JUAN BERNABEU
friendships resume, old in-jokes resur- ment, unconcerned with whether his life which is bound to be affected by soil
face, old crushes reignite. But the time forms a whole or a collection of parts. and climate, and might be aided by a
travel ceases when you step out of the Even so, there will be no escaping the little judicious pruning here and there.
gym. It turns out that you’ve changed, paradoxes of mutability, which have a The authors of “The Origins of You”
after all. way of weaving themselves into our lives. offer a more chaotic metaphor. Human
On the other hand, some of us want Thinking of some old shameful act of beings, they suggest, are like storm sys-
to disconnect from our past selves; bur- ours, we tell ourselves, “I’ve changed!” tems. Each individual storm has its own
dened by who we used to be or caged (But have we?) Bored with a friend who’s particular set of traits and dynamics;
by who we are, we wish for multipart obsessed with what happened long ago, meanwhile, its future depends on nu-
lives. In the voluminous autobiograph- we say, “That was another life—you’re a merous elements of atmosphere and
ical novel “My Struggle,” Karl Ove different person now!” (But is she?) Liv- landscape. The fate of any given Har-
Knausgaard—a middle-aged man who ing alongside our friends, spouses, par- vey, Allison, Ike, or Katrina might be
hopes to be better today than he was ents, and children, we wonder if they’re shaped, in part, by “air pressure in an-
as a young man—questions whether it the same people we’ve always known, or other locale,” and by “the time that the
even makes sense to use the same name if they’ve lived through changes we, or hurricane spends out at sea, picking up
over a lifetime. Looking at a photo- they, struggle to see. Even as we work moisture, before making landfall.” Don-
graph of himself as an infant, he won- tirelessly to improve, we find that, wher- ald Trump, in 2014, told a biographer
ders what that little person, with “arms ever we go, there we are (in which case that he was the same person in his six-
and legs spread, and a face distorted what’s the point?). And yet sometimes ties that he’d been as a first grader. In
into a scream,” really has to do with the we recall our former selves with a sense his case, the researchers write, the idea
forty-year-old father and writer he is of wonder, as if remembering a past life. isn’t so hard to believe. Storms, how-
now, or with “the gray, hunched geri- Lives are long, and hard to see. What ever, are shaped by the world and by
atric who in forty years from now might can we learn by asking if we’ve always other storms, and only an egomaniacal
be sitting dribbling and trembling in been who we are? weather system believes in its absolute
an old people’s home.” It might be bet- and unchanging individuality.
ter, he suggests, to adopt a series of he question of our continuity has Efforts to understand human weather—
names: “The fetus might be called Jens
Ove, for example, and the infant Nils
T an empirical side that can be an-
swered scientifically. In the nineteen-
to show, for example, that children who
are abused bear the mark of that abuse
Ove . . . the ten- to twelve-year-old Geir seventies, while working at the Univer- as adults—are predictably inexact. One
Ove, the twelve- to seventeen-year-old sity of Otago, in New Zealand, a psy- problem is that many studies of devel-
Kurt Ove . . . the twenty-three- to thirty- chologist named Phil Silva helped launch opment are “retrospective” in nature: re-
two-year-old Tor Ove, the thirty-two- a study of a thousand and thirty-seven searchers start with how people are doing
to forty-six-year-old Karl Ove—and so children; the subjects, all of whom lived now, then look to the past to find out
on.” In such a scheme, “the first name in or around the city of Dunedin, were how they got that way. But many issues
would represent the distinctiveness of studied at age three, and again at five, trouble such efforts. There’s the fallibil-
the age range, the middle name would seven, nine, eleven, thirteen, fifteen, ity of memory: people often have diffi-
represent continuity, and the last, fam- eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-six, thirty- culty recalling even basic facts about
ily affiliation.” two, thirty-eight, and forty-five, by re- what they lived through decades earlier.
My son’s name is Peter. It unnerves searchers who often interviewed not (Many parents, for instance, can’t accu-
me to think that he could someday be- just the subjects but also their family rately remember whether a child was
come so different as to warrant a new and friends. In 2020, four psychologists diagnosed as having A.D.H.D.; people
name. But he learns and grows each associated with the Dunedin study— even have trouble remembering whether
day; how could he not be always be- Jay Belsky, Avshalom Caspi, Terrie E. their parents were mean or nice.) There’s
coming someone new? I have duelling Moffitt, and Richie Poulton—summa- also the problem of enrollment bias. A
aspirations for him: keep growing; keep rized what’s been learned so far in a retrospective study of anxious adults
being you. As for how he’ll see himself, book called “The Origins of You: How might find that many of them grew up
who knows? The philosopher Galen Childhood Shapes Later Life.” It folds with divorced parents—but what about
Strawson believes that some people are in results from a few related studies the many children of divorce who didn’t
simply more “episodic” than others; conducted in the United States and develop anxiety, and so were never en-
they’re fine living day to day, without the United Kingdom, and so describes rolled in the study? It’s hard for a ret-
regard to the broader plot arc. “I’m somehow about four thousand people have rospective study to establish the true
where down towards the episodic end changed through the decades. import of any single factor. The value
of this spectrum,” Strawson writes in John Stuart Mill once wrote that a of the Dunedin project, therefore,
an essay called “The Sense of the Self.” young person is like “a tree, which re- derives not just from its long duration
“I have no sense of my life as a narra- quires to grow and develop itself on all but also from the fact that it is “pro-
tive with form, and little interest in my sides, according to the tendency of the spective.” It began with a thousand ran-
own past.” inward forces which make it a living dom children, and only later identified
Perhaps Peter will grow up to be an thing.” The image suggests a general- changes as they emerged.
episodic person who lives in the mo- ized spreading out and reaching up, Working prospectively, the Dunedin
researchers began by categorizing their were more likely to get fired from their our own continuity or changeability?
three-year-olds. They met with the chil- jobs and to have gambling problems. That depends on what we mean when
dren for ninety minutes each, rating them Their dispositions were durable. we ask who we are. We are, after all,
on twenty-two aspects of personality— That durability is due, in part, to the more than our dispositions. All of us
restlessness, impulsivity, willfulness, at- social power of temperament, which, fit into any number of categories, but
tentiveness, friendliness, communica- the authors write, is “a machine that those categories don’t fully encompass
tiveness, and so on. They then used their designs another machine, which goes our identities.
results to identify five general types of on to inf luence development.” This There’s an important sense, first of
children. Forty per cent of the kids were second machine is a person’s social en- all, in which who you are is determined
deemed “well-adjusted,” with the usual vironment. Someone who moves against not by what you’re like but by what you
mixture of kid personality traits. An- the world will push others away, and do. Imagine two brothers who grow up
other quarter were found to be “confi- he’ll tend to interpret the actions of sharing a bedroom, and who have sim-
dent”—more than usually comfortable even well-meaning others as pushing ilar personalities—intelligent, tough,
with strangers and new situations. Fif- back; this negative social feedback will commanding, and ambitious. One be-
teen per cent were “reserved,” or stand- deepen his oppositional stance. Mean- comes a state senator and university
offish, at first. About one in ten turned while, he’ll engage in what psycholo- president, while the other becomes a
out to be “inhibited”; the same propor- gists call “niche picking”—the favoring Mob boss. Do their parallel tempera-
tion were identified as “undercontrolled.” of social situations that reinforce one’s ments make them similar people? Those
The inhibited kids were notably shy and disposition. A “well-adjusted” fifth who’ve followed the stories of William
exceptionally slow to warm up; the un- grader might actually “look forward to Bulger and James (Whitey) Bulger—
dercontrolled ones were impulsive and the transition to middle school”; when the Boston brothers who ran the Mas-
ornery. These determinations of person- she gets there, she might even join some sachusetts Senate and the underworld,
ality, arrived at after brief encounters and clubs. Her friend who’s moving away respectively—sometimes suggest that
by strangers, would form the basis for a from the world might prefer to read at they were more alike than different.
half century of further work. lunch. And her brother, who’s moving (“They’re both very tough in their re-
By age eighteen, certain patterns against the world—the group skews spective fields,” a biographer observed.)
were visible. Although the confident, slightly male—will feel most at home But we’d be right to be skeptical of such
reserved, and well-adjusted children in dangerous situations. an outlook, because it requires setting
continued to be that way, those catego- Through such self-development, the aside the wildly different substances of
ries were less distinct. In contrast, the authors write, we curate lives that make the brothers’ lives. At the Pearly Gates,
kids who’d been categorized as inhib- us ever more like ourselves. But there no one will get them confused.
ited or as undercontrolled had stayed are ways to break out of the cycle. One The Bulger brothers are extraordi-
truer to themselves. At age eighteen, way in which people change course is nary; few of us break so bad or good.
the once inhibited kids remained a lit- through their intimate relationships. But we all do surprising things that
tle apart, and were “significantly less The Dunedin study suggests that, if matter. In 1964, the director Michael
forceful and decisive than all the other someone who tends to move against Apted helped make “Seven Up!,” the
children.” The undercontrolled kids, the world marries the right person, or first of a series of documentaries that
meanwhile, “described themselves as would visit the same group of a dozen or
danger seeking and impulsive,” and were so Britons every seven years, starting at
“the least likely of all young adults to age seven; Apted envisioned the proj-
avoid harmful, exciting, and dangerous ect—which was updated most recently
situations or to behave in reflective, cau- in 2019, with “63 Up”—as a socioeco-
tious, careful, or planful ways.” Teen- nomic inquiry “about these kids who
agers in this last group tended to get have it all, and these other kids who
angry more often, and to see themselves have nothing.” But, as the series has
“as mistreated and victimized.” progressed, the chaos of individuality
The researchers saw an opportunity has encroached on the clarity of cate-
to streamline their categories. They finds the right mentor, he might begin gorization. One participant has become
lumped together the large group of teen- to move in a more positive direction. a lay minister and gone into politics;
agers who didn’t seem to be on a set His world will have become a more another has begun helping orphans in
path. Then they focussed on two smaller beneficent co-creation. Even if much Bulgaria; others have done amateur the-
groups that stood out. One group was of the story is written, a rewrite is al- atre, studied nuclear fusion, and started
“moving away from the world,” embrac- ways possible. rock bands. One turned into a docu-
ing a way of life that, though it could be mentarian himself and quit the project.
perfectly rewarding, was also low-key he Dunedin study tells us a lot Real life, irrepressible in its particulars,
and circumspect. And another, similarly
sized group was “moving against the
T about how differences between
children matter over time. But how
has overpowered the schematic inten-
tions of the filmmakers.
world.” In subsequent years, the research- much can this kind of work reveal about Even seemingly unimportant or triv-
ers found that people in the latter group the deeper, more personal question of ial elements can contribute to who we
are. Late this summer, I attended a fam-
ily function with my father and my uncle.
As we sat at an outside table, making
small talk, our conversation turned to
“Star Trek,” the sci-fi TV show that pre-
mièred in 1966. My father and uncle
have both watched various incarnations
of it since childhood, and my dad, in
particular, is a genuine fan. While the
party went on around us, we all recited
from memory the original version’s open-
ing monologue—“Space: the final fron-
tier. These are the voyages of the Starship
Enterprise. . . .”—and applauded our-
selves on our rendition. “Star Trek” is a
through line in my dad’s life. We tend
to downplay these sorts of quirks and
enthusiasms, but they’re important to
who we are. When Leopold Bloom, the
protagonist of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,”
wanders through a Dublin cemetery, he
is unimpressed by the generic inscrip-
tions on the gravestones, and thinks they
should be more specific. “So and So,
wheelwright,” Bloom imagines, or, on a “He’s more interesting poolside.”
stone engraved with a saucepan, “I
cooked good Irish stew.” Asked to de- • •
scribe ourselves, we might tend to talk
in general terms, finding the details of
our lives somehow embarrassing. But a sort of divergence may simply be un- since left to study computer science.
friend delivering a eulogy would do well avoidable. Every life can probably be “I’ve changed more than most peo-
to note that we played guitar, collected viewed from two angles. ple I know,” Tim told me. He shared
antique telephones, and loved Agatha I know two Tims, and they have a vivid memory of a conversation he
Christie and the Mets. Each assemblage opposing intuitions about their own had with his mother, while they sat in
of details is like a fingerprint. Some of continuities. The first Tim, my father- the car outside an auto mechanic’s: “I
us have had the same prints through- in-law, is sure that he’s had the same was thirteen, and we were talking about
out our lives; others have had a few sets. jovially jousting personality from two how people change. And my mom,
Focussing on the actualities of our to seventy-two. He’s also had the same who’s a psychiatrist, told me that peo-
lives might belie our intuitions about interests—reading, the Second World ple tend to stop changing so much when
our own continuity or changeability. War, Ireland, the Wild West, the Yan- they get into their thirties. They start
Galen Strawson, the philosopher who kees—for most of his life. He is one to accept who they are, and to live with
says that he has little sense of his life of the most self-consistent people I themselves as they are. And, maybe be-
“as a narrative,” is best known for the know. The second Tim, my high-school cause I was an unhappy and angry per-
arguments he’s made against the ideas friend, sees his life as radically discon- son at the time, I found that idea of-
of free will and moral responsibility; tinuous, and rightly so. When I first fensive. And I vowed right then that I
he maintains that we don’t have free met him, he was so skinny that he was would never stop changing. And I
will and aren’t ultimately responsible turned away from a blood drive for haven’t stopped.”
for what we do. But his father, Peter being underweight; bullied and pushed Do the two Tims have the whole
Strawson, was also a philosopher, and around by bigger kids, he took solace picture? I’ve known my father-in-law
was famous for, among other things, in the idea that his parents were late for only twenty of his seventy-two years,
defending those concepts. Galen Straw- growers. This notion struck his friends but even in that time he’s changed quite
son can assure us that, from a first- as far-fetched. But after high school a bit, becoming more patient and com-
person perspective, his life feels “epi- Tim suddenly transformed into a tow- passionate; by all accounts, the life he
sodic.” Yet, from the third-person per- ering man with an action-hero phy- lived before I met him had a few chap-
spective of an imagined biographer, he’s sique. He studied physics and philos- ters of its own, too. And there’s a fun-
part of a long plot arc that stretches ophy in college, and then worked in damental sense in which my high-school
across lifetimes. We may feel discon- a neuroscience lab before becoming friend hasn’t changed. For as long as
tinuous on the inside but be continu- an officer in the Marines and going I’ve known him, he’s been committed
ous on the outside, and vice versa. That to Iraq; he entered finance, but has to the idea of becoming different. For
him, true transformation would require In this view, life is full and variable, serting that we’ve always been who we
settling down; endless change is a kind and we all go through adventures that are is that it helps us gloss over the dis-
of consistency. may change who we are. But what mat- ruptive developments that have up-
ters most is that we lived it. The same ended our lives. But it’s good, the book
alen Strawson notes that there’s me, however altered, absorbed it all shows, to acknowledge hard experi-
G a wide range of ways in which
people can relate to time in their lives.
and did it all. This outlook also in-
volves a declaration of independence—
ences and ask how they’ve helped us
grow tougher, kinder, and wiser. More
“Some people live in narrative mode,” independence not from one’s past self generally, if you’ve long answered the
he writes, and others have “no tendency and circumstances but from the power question of continuity one way, you
to see their life as constituting a story of circumstances and the choices we might try answering it another. For a
or development.” But it’s not just a mat- make to give meaning to our lives. Di- change, see yourself as either more con-
ter of being a continuer or a divider. viders tell the story of how they’ve ren- tinuous or less continuous than you’d
Some people live episodically as a form ovated their houses, becoming archi- assumed. Find out what this new per-
of “spiritual discipline,” while others are tects along the way. Continuers tell the spective reveals.
“simply aimless.” Presentism can “be a story of an august property that will There’s a recursive quality to acts
response to economic destitution—a remain itself regardless of what gets of self-narration. I tell myself a story
devastating lack of opportunities—or built. As different as these two views about myself in order to synchronize
vast wealth.” He continues: sound, they have a lot in common. myself with the tale I’m telling; then,
There are lotus-eaters, drifters, lilies of the
Among other things, they aid us in our inevitably, I revise the story as I change.
field, mystics and people who work hard in the self-development. By committing him- The long work of revising might itself
present moment. . . . Some people are creative self to a life of change, my friend Tim be a source of continuity in our lives.
although they lack ambition or long-term aims, might have sped it along. By concen- One of the participants in the “Up” se-
and go from one small thing to the next, or trating on his persistence of character, ries tells Apted, “It’s taken me virtu-
produce large works without planning to, by
accident or accretion. Some people are very
my father-in-law may have nurtured ally sixty years to understand who I
consistent in character, whether or not they and refined his best self. am.” Martin Heidegger, the often im-
know it, a form of steadiness that may under- The passage of time almost de- penetrable German philosopher, ar-
write experience of the self’s continuity. Oth- mands that we tell some sort of story: gued that what distinguishes human
ers are consistent in their inconsistency, and there are certain ways in which we beings is our ability to “take a stand”
feel themselves to be continually puzzling and
piecemeal.
can’t help changing through life, and on what and who we are; in fact, we
we must respond to them. Young bod- have no choice but to ask unceasing
The stories we tell ourselves about ies differ from old ones; possibilities questions about what it means to exist,
whether we’ve changed are bound to multiply in our early decades, and later and about what it all adds up to. The
be simpler than the elusive reality. But fade. When you were seventeen, you asking, and trying out of answers, is
that’s not to say that they’re inert. My practiced the piano for an hour each as fundamental to our personhood as
friend Tim’s story, in which he vows to day, and fell in love for the first time; growing is to a tree.
change forever, shows how such stories now you pay down your credit cards Recently, my son has started to un-
can be laden with value. Whether you and watch Amazon Prime. To say that derstand that he’s changing. He’s no-
perceive stasis or segmentation is al- you are the same person today that ticed that he no longer fits into a fa-
most an ideological question. To be you were decades ago is absurd. A vorite shirt, and he shows me how he
changeable is to be unpredictable and story that neatly divides your past into sleeps somewhat diagonally in his tod-
free; it’s to be not just the protagonist chapters may also be artificial. And dler bed. He’s been caught walking
of your life story but the author of its yet there’s value in imposing order on around the house with real scissors.
plot. In some cases, it means embrac- chaos. It’s not just a matter of self- “I’m a big kid now, and I can use these,”
ing a drama of vulnerability, decision, soothing: the future looms, and we he says. Passing a favorite spot on the
and transformation; it may also involve must decide how to act based on the beach, he tells me, “Remember when
a refusal to accept the finitude that’s past. You can’t continue a story with- we used to play with trucks here? I
the flip side of individuality. out first writing one. loved those times.” By this point, he’s
The alternative perspective—that Sticking with any single account of actually had a few different names: we
you’ve always been who you are—bears your mutability may be limiting. The called him “little guy” after he was born,
values, too. James Fenton captures some stories we’ve told may become too nar- and I now call him “Mr. Man.” His
of them in his poem “The Ideal”: row for our needs. In the book “Life understanding of his own growth is a
A self is a self. Is Hard,” the philosopher Kieran Se- step in his growing, and he is, increas-
It is not a screen. tiya argues that certain bracing chal- ingly, a doubled being—a tree and a
A person should respect lenges—loneliness, failure, ill health, vine. As the tree grows, the vine twines,
What he has been. grief, and so on—are essentially un- finding new holds on the shape that
avoidable; we tend to be educated, supports it. It’s a process that will con-
This is my past
Which I shall not discard. meanwhile, in a broadly redemptive tinue throughout his life. We change,
This is the ideal. tradition that “urges us to focus on the and change our view of that change,
This is hard. best in life.” One of the benefits of as- for as long as we live. 
2:59 Open the door of the office and
SHOUTS & MURMURS have it slammed in my face before I
can slip out. I hear one of the guards
screaming that I’d better sit down and
shut up if I know what’s best for me.
3:07 Buy a button-down from the Boss

Travel Store so that I don’t have to fly
in my blood-and-slobber-covered
T-shirt.
3:22 Sit quietly at my gate and let the

negative energy in that awful place roll
off my back.
3:38 Choose not to lash out at a cou-

ple coughing without covering their
mouths.
3:45 Decide to remain quiet even

though a guy nearby starts a FaceTime
conversation with his children without
wearing headphones.
MY FLIGHT DELAY AT J.F.K. 4:10 Rejoice as my flight to Detroit fi-

nally begins boarding.
BY GARY RICHARDSON
4:18 Insist to the gate agent that my
11:48 A .M . I arrive at Gate B25 expect- 12:56 Argue with some dingus and his flight is today despite her insistence
ing that my flight to Detroit will be dumb-ass wife who tell me that I can’t that my ticket is actually for tomorrow
offering early boarding to military vets, cut the line. I don’t take kindly to bul- at 12:15. Reason will not deter me.
babies, and Titanium members. That lies, so I tell them to shut the hell up
isn’t the case. As I look at the screen and let me do my damn thing. 4:20 Through gritted teeth, inform the
over the gate agent’s shoulder, I see gate agent that her stupid little ma-
that the flight is delayed from 12:15 to 1:23 Wake up in the airport nurse’s of- chine must be broken and that I’m
4:45. I have time to kill. fice and listen, to the best of my abil- getting on the flight whether she likes
ity, while security guards stifle laugh- it or not.
11:50 Grab a Smartwater and a fashion ter and tell me that I was knocked
magazine at Hudson News. out cold by what they call the “karate 5:01 Wake up on the pavement with
couple.” several teens holding cell phones over
11:54 Find a seat near a mostly empty me. They are laughing, but I smile be-
gate, flip through the magazine, sip 1:28 Decide to press charges against the cause I’m the one whose image will go
the water. karate couple. viral, as I’ve somehow been tossed out
of a revolving door.
12:08 Toss the magazine in the garbage 1:30 Repeatedly say “I am” when the
because it had too many words that security guards ask if I’m serious while 5:08 Drive home and sleep in my car
were new to me. Who the hell’s ever they patrol the concourse. so that my ex-wife/current roommate
heard of “haute couture,” “brassiere,” doesn’t call me a dumb-ass for not lis-
or “culottes”? 1:36 After explaining that I don’t let tening to her earlier when she said my
bullies withhold pertinent information, flight was tomorrow.
12:09 Toss the water in the garbage be- no matter their job, I grab one of the
cause it tastes like nothing. Yuck. guards by the collar and demand that 8:30 A .M . Wake up and drive to the air-
she tell me the couple’s names. port, refreshed and excited to travel,
12:35 Join the horribly long line for the even though I will most certainly be
Delta Lounge. 2:53 Wake up in the airport nurse’s of- fired upon landing for lying on my
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
fice to the security guards sweating LinkedIn profile and missing the sur-
12:55 Decide I’ve had enough and storm and pacing, yelling that this time I was gery I was supposed to perform. An-
to the front of the line and demand definitely not knocked out but had other failed attempt at the digital-no-
that I be let in at once. simply fainted. mad life style I so desperately crave. 
spanned a stretch of dramatic canyons
LETTER FROM TEXAS in the Big Bend region of West Texas.
Fort was fascinated by deep time. Ex-
THE BODIES IN THE CAVE

ploring his property, he had found petro-
glyphs carved on boulders, shards of pot-
tery, and more than a hundred rock
Amateur archeologists found Native remains. Whom should they belong to? shelters. “I haven’t found a dinosaur yet,
but I’d like to,” Fort, a rangy, tireless man
BY RACHEL MONROE in his eighties, told me. With Fort’s bless-
ing, Schroeder toured the ranch’s sus-
pension-ruining dirt roads in a pickup
truck, and he accompanied Fort on ten-
mile hikes through washes and along old
game trails. In a number of places, rain-
water had worn away Cretaceous lime-
stone, resulting in rock shelters and caves.
Fort suggested that Schroeder look
at one cave in particular. “He didn’t tell
me how to get there, exactly,” Schroeder
recalled. “He just told me, ‘You’ll see it.’”
The road was too rugged for the truck,
so Schroeder took an A.T.V. Eventu-
ally, he came upon a cave with two tri-
angular openings sitting atop a talus
slope sprinkled with burned rock, the
remnants of ancient agave-baking pits.
The soil around the cave was black from
cooking fires and organic materials. “You
could just tell how long people had lived
at this site,” Schroeder said.
Recent excavations suggest that the
area was the easternmost outpost of
Southwestern Puebloan culture, and
was later inhabited by a number of
semi-nomadic groups, including the
Chisos and the Jumano. By the end of
the eighteenth century, many of these
groups had been wiped out or assimi-
lated by the Apache, some of whom
had migrated south from the Great
hen Bryon Schroeder moved to and history, is affiliated with Sul Ross Plains. A century later, Texas’s Indige-
W Alpine, Texas, in 2016, he was
amazed at how few rules there were.
State University, an agriculture-focussed
school that calls itself “the frontier uni-
nous populations were subjected to a
series of brutal assaults: the systematic
In Texas—unlike in Wyoming, where versity of Texas.” At Sul Ross, Schroe- slaughter of buffalo, incursions by Anglo
he grew up, and in Montana, where he der is the only full-time faculty mem- settlers, and military campaigns with
got a Ph.D. in archeology—if you have ber in the anthropology department, the goal of extermination. By the dawn
permission to dig on someone’s land and he sometimes finds himself teach- of the twentieth century, many Native
“you don’t really have to do any per- ing introductory courses to all of four groups had moved to Oklahoma, re-
mits or anything,” he told me. “Here, people. But living in Alpine gives easy treated to Mexico, or been killed.
you can’t tell landowners not to do stuff. access to craggy limestone country, Schroeder found that the cave’s main
This is Texas, goddammit!” where the history of human occupation entrances opened onto a shallow cham-
Schroeder is thirty-eight, with a tan- dates back at least ten thousand years. ber with a fifteen-foot ceiling; at the
gle of curly hair and a taste for Hawai- More than ninety-five per cent of rear of the chamber, two branching
ian shirts. He came to Alpine to work Texas is privately owned, so nearly all channels stretched back hundreds of
for the Center for Big Bend Studies, digs require coöperation from a land- feet. The ceilings were so low that ex-
which he now runs. The Center, a re- owner. Schroeder met Jeff Fort, who ploring required crawling on hands and
search institute focussed on archeology owned a sixty-thousand-acre ranch that knees. The cave, which was known as
Spirit Eye, for its triangular openings’
“ You could just tell how long people had lived at this site,” a researcher said. resemblance to the Eye of Providence,
26 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY MARCO QUADRI
which is found on the one-dollar bill, they’re loath to acknowledge it: “The she said. “I went to his house, and it
had been extensively dug. Flashbulbs collectors know where stuff is—that’s was just filled with stuff.”
from earlier expeditions littered the why everybody works with them.” Some of the collectors claimed to feel
floor. A previous landowner had run a Digging on federal land has required a “spiritual connection” to the region’s
pay-to-dig operation, allowing local ar- a permit since 1906, when the Antiq- Indigenous inhabitants. “Clearly, you
tifact hunters to keep what they un- uities Act was passed. The law proved have nefarious looters who are pursuing
covered. It seemed to Schroeder that relatively toothless; there were only ten excavations for money. But you also have
everything of archeological value had convictions under it in the following ranchers who see themselves as the care-
long since been removed. Although sixty years. During that time, as ar- takers of the land, the inheritors of the
Schroeder sometimes refers to this ac- cheology became a more established land, and everything that goes with that,”
tivity as “looting,” it was likely legal. In field, professionals came to resent am- Chip Colwell, the author of “Plundered
the U.S., landowners own pretty much ateurs for ruining carefully preserved Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the
anything found on their property. excavation sites, for spurring a black Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Cul-
The Center’s previous directors market for artifacts, and for hoarding ture,” told me. “In this country, we’ve
hadn’t spent a lot of time in Spirit Eye. objects that rightfully belonged to Na- done such a good job of removing Na-
“Everybody else at the Center got pissed tive American tribes. (At the same time, tive Americans from their ancestral lands.
off at how destroyed it was,” Schroeder archeologists’ own practices were also When you don’t have living Native peo-
said. But he had a hard time walking being called into question by activists ples as caretakers and stewards, it’s easy
away from it. He began to research past in the American Indian Movement.) for non-Native people to step in and see
expeditions to the cave, reasoning that, In 1979, Congress passed the Archaeo- themselves in those roles.”
if he could determine who had dug logical Resources Protection Act (arpa), Last month, I accompanied Schroe-
there and what they had removed, he which toughened penalties for illegal der to meet Ken Novak, a barber who
might be able learn the history of the digging on federal or tribal land. Three dug in Spirit Eye in the sixties. Accord-
cave’s prehistoric occupants. decades later, Jennifer Goddard, a re- ing to Schroeder, Novak had a bad rep-
Schroeder found a high-school search scholar, interviewed people in utation around the Center. “He was just
student’s paper detailing artifacts dis- Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Col- known as one of the biggest looters,”
covered in the cave in 1952; a decade orado who were charged with illegal Schroeder said. But when he looked
later, an amateur archeological group artifact excavation. Many of her sub- into the story, he began to question this
had dug there, and Schroeder added its jects saw themselves not as criminals characterization. “He was an easy scape-
typed notes to his file. Many of the but as repositories of local knowledge. goat because he was so visible,” Schroe-
people who’d explored Spirit Eye had “They assumed, and they were proba- der said. “He put everything on display
since died. When Schroeder reached bly right, that they knew the local area in his barbershop.”
out to those he could find who remained, better than most archeologists at the Novak, an affable mustached man in
he found them cagey, evasive. He figured time,” she said. I asked Goddard if her his eighties, cut hair in Alpine for fifty-
out that it was because some of them subjects thought of themselves as loot- four years, and his barbershop was clut-
hadn’t just removed artifacts from the ers. “They thought of themselves as vic- tered with his collection. Novak now
cave—they had removed bodies, too. tims,” she said. lives three hours east, with his wife, Betty,
The sense of persecution was exac- in a house with pristine white carpet-
o piece together the story of Spirit erbated by a sting operation in Bland- ing, rocking chairs on the porch, and a
T Eye, Schroeder has worked exten-
sively with amateur collectors, and pub-
ing, Utah, in 2009, aimed at curbing
the illegal artifact trade. Federal agents
Corvette in the garage. He told me that
he grew up scrounging for arrowheads
licizing this has put him at odds with gave an informant hundreds of thou- and just never stopped. He said that his
many of his colleagues. Schroeder, who sands of dollars to procure artifacts. grandmother was “part Indian,” and that
was the first person in his family to go That June, heavily armed agents ar- he appreciated artifacts because they
to college, has a kind of populist ap- rested sixteen residents of the town, showed “the way people lived way back
preciation for nonprofessionals. “They’re including a local doctor and a grand- in them days, compared to what we live
people that would’ve been archeolo- son of the town’s founder. Two men in today,” he said. “That, you know, we’ve
gists had life taken a different turn,” he who were indicted, as well as the in- come a long way.”
told me. For his dissertation, he worked formant, killed themselves. After the In the late sixties, Novak, his friend
at high-altitude sites in Wyoming that raid, according to a former official with Larry Clabaugh, and a handful of other
were commonly understood to have the Bureau of Land Management, peo- local enthusiasts dug in Spirit Eye on
been unoccupied. He said, “But if you ple started to see looting “almost as a several occasions, setting out for the
went to talk to any horse packer or any revolutionary, if not patriotic, act.” Oth- cave before daylight and not returning
backpacker, they’d be, like, ‘There’s shit ers skirted restrictions by digging on until dusk. Clabaugh had grown up in
all over the mountains. You guys don’t private land. Goddard told me about the Dallas suburbs before moving to
know that?’ Well, no, as a discipline, one of the people she interviewed who’d West Texas to work as a cattle inspec-
we didn’t.” Schroeder said that many been charged with violations of ARPA. tor for the U.S.D.A. He had reinvented
of his peers in the field collaborate with “Once he got arrested, his mother himself as a cowboy, working with a
amateurs in some capacity, even if started buying land for him to dig on,” Colt revolver on his hip and a rifle on
his saddle. “My father was completely of,” Schroeder told Novak. “It’s about gion. In the following weeks, news of
infatuated with Indians,” Clayton Cla- five thousand years old.” the find circulated within the state’s ar-
baugh told me. “He read books on them, “Well, I’ll be darned,” Novak said, cheological community and came to the
he painted them, he made artificial ar- delighted. attention of Leslie Davis, at the El Paso
tifacts. He talked about Indian culture In September, 1968, Novak, the Cla- Archaeological Society. In a letter to a
all the time.” Clayton sometimes went baughs, and several others were digging government employee, Davis described
on his father’s expeditions, including a in Spirit Eye when they uncovered a Novak as a “confirmed cave looter” who
trip to Spirit Eye. The cave was so dusty, woman’s crouched body. “I remember a had “made a find that hurt his conscience.”
and so dank with bat guano, that they yell, everything stopped, and everybody He also pointed out that Novak had at-
all wore respirators from the hardware came with their flashlights to look at it,” tempted to report his finding but had
store. Novak recalls taking a handful Clayton Clabaugh told me. “There was been “a victim of bureaucratic buck-pass-
of trips in the course of two years, and this big flat stone on top of her. I remem- ing and paper shuffling.” Davis recom-
removing all sorts of artifacts from the ber thinking, Did somebody kill her?” mended immediate action: “Our objec-
cave: sandals, fragments of baskets, at- The body had been desiccated by the arid tive is to salvage a valuable archaeological
latls, bone awls, woven mats, cords, environment, and patches of skin and find and to salvage an amateur archae-
corncobs, round quartz balls that had hair still clung to the skeleton. The flat ologist.” But, for unclear reasons, that
unclear, possibly shamanic uses. stone was most likely a metate, or grind- didn’t happen. A group from the Archae-
Schroeder has visited the Novaks a ing stone, placed there as part of a burial ological Society made it to Spirit Eye a
number of times, examining their col- ritual. I asked Novak if he had consid- few months later, but Novak’s involve-
lection of Spirit Eye artifacts and drop- ered leaving the body there, and he seemed ment was limited. He contacted various
ping hints that they should donate the confused by the question. “No,” he said. archeologists several more times, but,
collection to a local museum. Novak “I just thought that this should be un- judging from the records that Schroeder
showed us an upstairs room where some covered, let somebody know, find out has found, no one followed up with
of the objects were stored, in a glass how long these people lived in that area.” Novak about the body.
case, watched over by the taxidermied Novak stashed the body in his ga- Meanwhile, Novak had given it to
head of a sheep. Schroeder carefully rage, to Betty’s consternation. The next Larry Clabaugh, who kept it in a wheel-
lifted out a tightly woven braided frag- day, he wrote to the Texas Archeolog- barrow for a few weeks before passing
ment about four inches across. On a ical Research Laboratory, at the Uni- it along to another local enthusiast,
previous visit, Novak had allowed him versity of Texas at Austin, and asked for Adrian Benke. Novak was under the
to take a small sample for testing. “We guidance. “I thought someone smarter impression that the body had been do-
dated this, and it’s the oldest basket— than me should look into it,” he said. nated to a museum. Instead, Benke held
actually, it’s one of the oldest perish- TARL’s response to Novak said that on to it until 1988, when he placed a
able artifacts—in Texas that we know no one on staff was working in his re- classified ad in the back of a publica-
tion called The Shotgun, advertising a
“museum quality” body: “Approximately
70 percent mummification. Legal.” The
body, priced at forty-five hundred dol-
lars, came with a lighted oak display
case and artifacts including “portions of
sandals . . . polished stones . . . projectile
points, animal bones, small corncobs,
pieces of string, basketry.”
The body was purchased by Bob
Howard, the grandson of Seabiscuit’s
owner Charles Howard. (Howard could
not be reached for comment.) In 1999,
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service re-
ceived a tip that Howard, an avid collector
of exotic taxidermy, owned endangered
species and raided his home in Palm
Springs. In California, unlike in Texas,
it’s illegal to own Indigenous remains.
When law-enforcement officers saw the
body, they called the coroner, who even-
tually arranged to have it sent to TARL.
The Novaks led us to the garage,
where most of Ken’s collection was stored.
“I brought chips and cookies to snack on and baby carrots I’d already heard Schroeder grouse about
to sit unopened on the blanket.” it. “There are about sixty known atlatls
in North America,” he’d said on the car residents told Schroeder, it had been “History starts with the first European
ride over, “and he’s got three pieces just displayed in a car dealership in Marfa. explorer,” he told me wryly. On both
sitting in the house.” Sure enough, the The owner, now an elderly man still liv- occasions that I met him, Nayapiltzin,
wall above the Corvette was hung with ing in Marfa, has declined to speak with a reserved seventy-seven-year-old with
a dozen framed arrangements of arrow- Schroeder. “He’s well known in the area, silver hair, wore a denim shirt tucked
heads and other artifacts. Schroeder asked and he doesn’t feel he needs that kind into denim pants. He didn’t grow up
if he could take one of the framed sets of attention,” Schroeder said. thinking of himself as Native Ameri-
back to Alpine for a few days—he wanted Schroeder traced the other body— can, a term he associated with reserva-
to X-ray an atlatl foreshaft, and to con- that of an adult man, which had been tions and federally recognized tribes,
sult a botanist about the plant material removed from the cave in the early but he knew that his family had lived
in an unusual bracelet. Ken seemed ame- sixties—to a local-history museum in in the Big Bend region for a long time.
nable, but Betty objected. When Ken ul- Pecos, in the Texas oil coun- Much of the family lore
timately overruled her, she took out her try. The museum’s director had been passed down by
phone and photographed Schroeder tak- is a woman named Dorinda his grandmother’s great-
ing the framed set down from the wall— Millan. Arranging to see grandmother, Sebastiana
evidence in case he failed to return it, the body took “months of Carrasco. A local gully was
she said, only half joking. unanswered calls, hours of named Arroyo Sebastiana,
The Novaks were horrified that driving, several visits, cir- memorializing the time her
Benke had sold the remains that Ken cuitous conversations, mul- wagon turned over there,
had removed from the cave. “It’s a body,” tiple missed connections, more than a century before.
Betty said. “You don’t do stuff like that.” and a follow-up detailed As a teen-ager, Naya-
But in the U.S. there is a long tradi- letter explaining the rea- piltzin moved to El Paso,
tion of individuals and institutions own- son for the persistence,” where he now runs a small
ing the bodies of Indigenous people, Schroeder wrote, in a paper published real-estate business, but he returned to
which have been used to justify eu- in Advances in Archaeological Practice. Alpine often. As he grew older, he be-
genic claims, analyzed to understand Schroeder met with Millan and, after came fascinated with tracing his local
the prehistory of North America, and an hour of chitchat, asked her if he could roots. He visited the Family History
displayed as curiosities. see the remains. She reluctantly removed Center, run by the Mormon Church; at
Starting in the nineteen-sixties, Amer- a sepia-toned photograph from a wall, the Sul Ross library, which had church
ican Indian Movement activists staged revealing a hidden latch. When the wall records dating as far back as the late Co-
sit-ins at museums and interrupted ar- swung open, he saw the body, crouched lonial era, he spent hours deciphering
cheological digs. They argued that In- in what looked like a papier-mâché cave centuries-old handwriting. He even got
digenous remains weren’t objects of study with fake pictographs on the walls and his DNA sequenced, a practice that is
belonging to scientists but ancestors perishable artifacts—baskets, corn—scat- controversial among some Native Amer-
whose fates should be controlled by their tered at its feet. “She said, ‘There you go,’ icans, in part because it fails to capture
descendants. In 1990, Congress passed and walked down the hallway,” Schroe- the complex web of relations that de-
the Native American Graves Protection der told me. “And my jaw hit the ground. termines tribal belonging.
and Repatriation Act, which allowed I was just staring—like, what?” Millan Today, Texas has three federally rec-
tribes to claim skeletal remains and sa- agreed to let him take a small sample of ognized tribes—the Alabama-Cous-
cred objects, as long as they could prove the body for DNA testing, and Schroe- hatta, the Tigua, and the Kickapoo—
a “reasonable connection.” But nagpra der pried loose a tooth. totalling fewer than seven thousand
applies only to institutions that receive When I reached Millan later, she said enrolled members. There are also a
federal money. In Texas, individuals can that the body had been donated to the handful of state-recognized tribes, in-
legally own (but not sell) human remains. museum by “one of our old pioneer fam- cluding the Lipan Apache and the Mi-
“This is a pretty common issue, actually,” ilies” many decades earlier. “It’s a sensi- akan-Garza Band. “Usually, when peo-
Tanya Marsh, a professor at the Wake tive subject for us. We feel connected to ple say ‘Native American’ or ‘Indian’
Forest School of Law and an expert in her, because we’ve been her keeper for tribes, they’re pretty much referring to
funeral and cemetery law, told me. “There all these decades,” she told me. (Millan the federally recognized tribes,” Mario
are very few rules that apply to human believed the body to be female; recent Garza, the cultural-preservation offi-
remains which are in private hands, and DNA testing has confirmed that it is cer of the Miakan-Garza Band, told
virtually no rules that require inquiry male.) “We want to keep it private. We me. “A lot of people don’t believe you’re
into the events that led to those remains don’t want to talk about it. Our board Indian unless the white government
being in private hands.” is very protective of her, and I am, too.” says you’re Indian.”
On the drive back to Alpine, Schroe- In response to hostility, many Na-
der told me that at least two other bod- hen Xoxi Nayapiltzin was at- tive people in Texas opted to identify
ies had been removed from Spirit Eye.
One, an infant swaddled in deer hide,
W tending elementary school in
Alpine, in the fifties, he recalled, he
as Mexican American. More recently,
this has begun to shift. In 1970, eigh-
had been removed from the cave in the studied a lot of Texas history, but noth- teen thousand Texans identified as
early nineteen-fifties. For years, local ing about the region’s Indigenous past. American Indian on census forms; by
2020, the number had risen to nearly sultations with tribes about unaffiliated people are reducing this social identity
three hundred thousand. remains. DNA testing was often brought to genetics, as if determining a biolog-
After Schroeder returned from Pecos, up as an option. “It was raised as a ques- ical relationship answers the question
he sent the tooth he’d extracted, as well tion—would it benefit the cultural-af- of social identity. As if biology provides
as a sample from the body Novak re- filiation process?” he said. “No one ever the answer.”
moved, to the molecular-anthropology wanted to do it.” Colwell believes that
lab at the University of Montana. The destructive analysis should happen only n August, Schroeder took Nayapiltzin
lab’s testing revealed that the two bod-
ies were maternally related; one was
with the consent of potential descen-
dants: “Even by trying to do something
I to visit Spirit Eye for the first time,
and I went along. The Center had re-
about seven hundred years old and the right, you could be harming ancestors or cently purchased a new A.T.V., and
other about nine hundred. descendants by making such decisions.” Schroeder drove it with practiced speed
On the day that Schroeder got the Schroeder bristled at the suggestion along the narrow, rocky roads. It had
results, Nayapiltzin happened to be vis- that he’d misstepped. “I don’t own this been a rainy late summer, and the
iting the Center for Big Bend Studies, stuff,” he said. “I submitted my research desert was startlingly green. When we
to discuss petroglyphs with one of design to TARL, and TARL could’ve told reached the cave, Schroeder parked the
Schroeder’s colleagues. When Schroe- me, ‘No, you can’t do it,’ but they told A.T.V. at the bottom of the slope, and
der told him about the DNA test, Nay- me I can do it. So I didn’t do anything we began the scramble up to the open-
apiltzin rattled off his haplotype, a group wrong.” (TARL has since placed a tem- ings. The soil was loose, and flecked
of genetic mutations that is used to trace porary moratorium on destructive anal- with slivers of chert.
maternal lineage: B2a4a1. It was the ysis.) He began to speak more quickly, Nayapiltzin mostly remained out-
same as that of the bodies from the as if voicing an argument that he’d had side the cave, chanting a prayer, while
cave, which meant that Nayapiltzin was in his head many times: “Did I do every- Schroeder and I entered. Schroeder
related. Schroeder was stunned; Nay- thing right? I don’t even know if there turned on his flashlight and led me down
apiltzin was not. “I just thought it was is a right way to do everything. Every- one of the low-branching channels. “I
confirmation of what I already knew,” body’s been, like, ‘Would you still sam- bet this part was way cool before it got
he told me. “It doesn’t surprise me that ple the thing in the closet?’ Probably!” looted to shit,” he said. Although little
my ancestors are here.” Nayapiltzin was equivocal about the of archeological interest remained, digs
methods that had linked him to his an- deeper into the cave had revealed rem-
hen people seek to reclaim skel- cestors in Spirit Eye. He told me that he nants of Ice Age animals: a small horse,
W etal remains, priority is given,
under NAGPRA, to federally recognized
didn’t want to discuss DNA testing. “Let
Bryon talk about that,” he said. He had
an ancient tortoise, a now extinct ground
sloth. The ample amount of preserved
tribes. This has occasionally been a petitioned TARL to get control of the sloth dung, some of it thirty thousand
source of intergroup disputes. (The Mi- body that Novak uncovered, which he years old, suggests that, before humans
akan-Garza Band is currently petition- planned to rebury, but the process was on- occupied Spirit Eye, it had been used
ing TARL for three sets of remains, but going. Because the DNA test had estab- by ground sloths as a birthing cave.
its claim has been blocked by two fed- lished Nayapiltzin as a possible descen- Schroeder told me that he wasn’t sure
erally recognized tribes.) Chip Colwell, dant, his claim was strong, but he was still what would happen to Spirit Eye. When
who used to work at the Denver Mu- nervous. “I don’t want to say too much he embarked on the project, he liked to
seum of Nature and Science, told me until we actually have it,” he told me. think that it would end with him re-
that, when nagpra passed, “there were Annie Riegert Cummings, the NAG- turning the bodies to the cave. “I thought
a lot of doomsday predictions about the PRA coördinator at TARL, told me that I’d learn as much as I could, then seal it
future of museums and archeology.” But Nayapiltzin’s case was the first she was up and walk away,” he said. But it hadn’t
two decades later there were still more aware of in which DNA was used to gone the way he planned. Perhaps it had
than a hundred thousand Native Amer- make a repatriation claim from her in- been an impossible idea anyway—imag-
ican skeletal remains in museum col- stitution. “He has lineal descent—that’s ining that you could put anything so
lections. This is in part because insti- the strongest claim to a set of remains broken back together. “You could put
tutions were unable to determine a tribal you can have,” she said. “It’s quite in- the sediment back in, but people will al-
affiliation for many of the remains. After credible.” But Colwell was more am- ways come and pick around,” he said.
hundreds of years, it can be difficult to bivalent about genetic testing. “It pre- When Schroeder and I emerged, Nay-
prove a connection to a current tribe. sents both an opportunity and a crisis, apiltzin was standing by the mouth, look-
When Schroeder prepared to publish to my mind,” he said. “You have the oping out at the landscape. I tried, briefly,
his work, other anthropologists ques- portunity to draw a very clear biologi- to envision where my ancestors were a
tioned his actions, especially the ex- cal relationship between people in the thousand years ago. The best I could
traction of the tooth. Destructive anal- past and people today. But, under NAG- conjure up was a hazy picture of an East-
ysis, or testing that requires the removal PRA, cultural affiliation is not legally ern European forest, misty and dark.
or destruction of body parts, is a conten- defined as a biological relationship— “There’s still a lot of conflict here,”
tious practice. Colwell told me that, in it’s a social identity,” one that includes Nayapiltzin said. “I thought it would
more than ten years at the Denver mu- oral tradition, language, and kinship af- feel like more. I’m going to have to think
seum, he participated in dozens of con- filiations. “With the power of DNA, about it. I’m not sure what I think.” 
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A REPORTER AT LARGE
IN THE FILTRATION CAMPS

Russian forces claim that they’re rooting out enemy combatants. But their detainees are Ukrainian civilians.
BY DAVID KORTAVA
n the morning of April 13th, listed a different address. Taras tried to men in the bus gazed upon the ruins.
O forty-seven days after Russia

began its siege of the Ukrainian
port city of Mariupol, a man in his
explain that before the siege he had had
an apartment across town. “Outside!”
the soldier shouted. “You must go
After a half hour’s drive northeast,
the bus slowed to a stop in front of
a run-down banquet hall, in a semi-
early twenties whom I’ll call Taras through inspection.” urban settlement called Sartana, on the
heard his dog barking in the front yard. Taras had heard that in some neigh- banks of the Kalmius River. The sol-
Two days earlier, Ukraine’s President, borhoods men were disappearing. He diers collected the men’s I.D.s and
Volodymyr Zelensky, had pronounced asked the soldier nervously, “How long herded them inside. There, a soldier
Mariupol “completely destroyed.” Rus- will it take?” would call out a captive’s name and
sian forces had bombed or otherwise “Two hours.” bring him into an office, a kind of im-
damaged ninety per cent of the build- Taras felt a pang of hunger—he provised interrogation room. When
ings, including dozens of schools and hadn’t eaten anything since the previ- Taras’s name was called, he walked into
a maternity hospital. The mayor esti- ous day. He put on his sneakers, blue- the office and found twelve soldiers sit-
mated that at least twenty-one thou- jeans, and a light jacket. The Russians ting at several tables.
sand residents had been killed. Taras escorted him to an intersection. He “Have you served in the military?”
had spent the better part of the siege was not alone: six of his neighbors, all one of them asked.
with his family in a small basement, men of conscription age, had been “No.”
without electricity or running water. rounded up, and were being guarded “Why not?”
He would surface intermittently to by a group of soldiers. Glancing down “I have a white ticket,” Taras said,
collect buckets of rain to drink or to the block, Taras saw more Russians referring to a government pass denot-
prepare meals of wheat porridge over going from house to house, pulling ing a medical condition that made him
a wood fire. All the cell-phone towers young Ukrainian men into the street. unfit for military service. Taras, who
were down. But Taras had learned Eventually, there were about forty men had boyish features and shaggy blond
through an acquaintance that a close gathered with Taras. hair, had suffered from knee problems
friend in an adjacent neighborhood A white bus pulled up, and Taras after tearing his meniscus playing soc-
was still alive, and he invited his friend and his neighbors were instructed to cer. The exemption was a disappoint-
to come “get drunk and cry a little.” board. After they filed in, and the doors ment; he had thought he would enlist
When Taras heard the dog barking, closed, one of the Russians stood up in the Army, as his father had, and his
he assumed his friend had arrived and and said, “You don’t know us and we father before him. Now he simply said,
rushed out to greet him. don’t know you. We trust you exactly “A sports injury.”
At the door were two men in mili- as much as you trust us.” He issued a “Undress,” another soldier demanded.
tary fatigues, cradling assault rifles. Taras single ground rule: “If you act up, we’ll Taras stripped down to his under-
could tell that they were Russians by the wipe the floor with you. Does every- wear. From their seats, the men exam-
white bands wrapped above their knees one understand?” ined him for tattoos and any markings
and elbows, which the occupying army As the bus pulled away, Taras stared that might indicate that he had recently
used to avoid friendly fire. There were out the window. The colossal Illich seen combat—calluses on the hands,
also distinctions in their accents; the Iron and Steel Works plant, with its chafing around the neck from a flak
men applied a hard “g” where Ukraini- once billowing stacks, rolling conveyor jacket, bruising on the shoulder from a
ans use an airy “h” in words like govori, belts, and raging blast furnaces, got firearm’s recoil.
or “speak.” smaller and smaller. The day before, Baiting him, one of the interrogators
“Who lives here?” one of the soldiers Russia claimed that a thousand and asked, “Where do you plan to serve?”
asked. twenty-six Ukrainian soldiers had sur- “Nowhere.”
“Me and my family,” Taras said. rendered in its shadow. Taras saw large At midday, the captives were brought
The men walked past him and began apartment buildings that had been re- outside. There was snow on the ground.
to search the house, room by room. duced to rubble, houses missing walls The morning had been overcast and now
They took down Taras’s full name. They and ceilings. He saw crudely dug graves it began to rain, compounding the cold.
noted the make and model of his car. in yards and, lying under a bridge, Four more buses arrived, and Taras stood
One of the soldiers studied Taras’s ve- three decomposing human bodies. waiting as about a hundred and fifty
hicle registration, and observed that it There’s nothing left, he thought. The more captives were processed. By the
32 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 THIS PIECE WAS SUPPORTED BY THE PULITZER CENTER.
Whether filtration amounts to normal procedure, or something worse, depends on how it is executed—and to what end.
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE McQUADE THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 33
tification of persons who had been ar-
rested in the zones of combat operations
and their involvement in the combat ac-
tivities.” (In Russia, the term “filtration
point” entered into circulation during
the Second World War, when Soviet au-
thorities began to screen for what Lavren-
tiy Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret po-
lice, called “enemy elements” in territory
liberated from the Germans.) The first
camp in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny,
opened on January 20, 1995. The follow-
ing year, researchers for Human Rights
Watch concluded that Russian forces
were beating and torturing the Chechen
men being held there. Many were sub-
sequently used as “human shields” in
combat and as “hostages to be exchanged
for Russian detainees.”
“I wish all this could be yours someday, son, Three years later, during the Second
but it belongs to a competitor.” Chechen War, the Russian general Vic-
tor Kazantsev expanded filtration, im-
posing an “identity verification regime”
• • in “liberated areas” and calling for the
“toughening of search procedures at
time he got back on the bus, his jacket ball and fell into a restless sleep. He had checkpoints.” Chechen civilians were ar-
and sneakers were soaked through. He not yet heard a term that would soon bitrarily detained in even greater num-
was shivering. become familiar: “filtration camp.” bers; they were often discharged with-
The buses continued northeast, out their identity documents, limiting
crossing into the self-proclaimed Do- iltration, broadly understood as a their freedom of movement and expos-
netsk People’s Republic, a breakaway
region whose independence Ukraine
F process by which a wartime govern-
ment or a non-state actor identifies and
ing them to rearrest at checkpoints. An
H.R.W. report outlined what had be-
did not recognize. They stopped in the sequesters individuals it deems a threat, come a standard strategy: Russian forces
village of Kozatske, which had fallen does not, in itself, violate international would bombard Chechen communities,
to Russian-backed separatists years ago. humanitarian law. A recent report by re- then conduct a “mop-up” whereby sol-
There, in the cafeteria of an old pri- searchers at Yale on Russia’s occupation diers went house to house arresting men,
mary school, each man was given a of eastern Ukraine notes that “occupy- and sometimes women, suspected of hav-
small serving of watery soup. ing powers in international conflicts have ing ties to rebel forces.
As night fell, the captives laid down the right to register persons within their The researchers described the filtra-
tightly spaced rows of thin mats in area of control; the force in control may tion process in Chechnya as a form of
classrooms and corridors. All the de- even detain civilians in certain limited “collective punishment” imposed not
tainees appeared to be civilians from circumstances.” The system can com- only on the disappeared but also on their
Taras’s working-class neighborhood, prise various checkpoints, registration families. One woman, referring to a male
men who had spent the preceding weeks facilities, holding centers, and detention relative who had been taken away, told
preoccupied not with winning battles camps. At a United Nations Security the researchers, “He’s nowhere—not
but with keeping their families alive, Council meeting earlier this month, Rus- among the living, not among the dead.”
day to day, under conditions of extreme sia’s U.N. Ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, The prominent human-rights group
deprivation. Taras himself had already went so far as to describe its filtration Memorial, which Russia’s Supreme
lost more than twenty pounds in less program as “normal military procedure.” Court shut down earlier this year, esti-
than two months under siege, a con- Whether filtration amounts to normal mated that during Russia’s two wars in
spicuous drop from an already willowy procedure, or something worse, depends Chechnya at least seventy thousand ci-
frame. He had developed chronic pain on how it is executed—and to what end. vilians perished and more than two hun-
in his chest, which he assumed was In 1994, Russia launched a full-scale dred thousand Chechens passed through
from breathing stale basement air or military invasion to retake Chechnya, a filtration camps.
sleeping on concrete. separatist enclave that had declared in- In early 2014, Russian forces invaded
Taras dragged his mat into a hallway. dependence three years earlier. The day and annexed Crimea. Several months
His stomach growled, and his clothes after Russian tanks rolled in, Russia’s in- later, a Russian “humanitarian convoy,”
were still damp from the rain. Hungry, terior ministry issued Directive No. 247: ultimately comprising an estimated
cold, and exhausted, he curled up in a “to establish filtration points for the iden- twelve thousand troops, entered the
Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, in support tary.” The stories of arbitrary detention that he believed that Mariupol had been
of the D.P.R. and the socalled Luhansk and disappearances emerging out of Ma flourishing before Russia’s “special op
People’s Republic. The following winter, riupol are a “fabrication,” the statement eration,” and that he’d never met a fas
the Ukrainian parliament commissioned said. It described the filtration camps as cist in his life.
fifteen international and Ukrainian mere “checkpoints for civilians leaving Occasionally, an interrogator, out of
humanrights organizations to prepare the zone of active hostilities,” and main what seemed like either frustration or
a report on places of illegal detention tained that the Russians were “helping boredom, would go off script. And some
in occupied parts of the Donbas. The them stay alive, providing them with times even the seemingly correct answer
report, published in 2015, identified food and medicine.” wasn’t good enough. If a detainee said
seventynine facilities administered by that he didn’t approve of the government
Russian forces and Russianaffiliated aras awoke at dawn to the sound of in Kyiv, his interrogator might insist that
armed groups. Based on extensive tes
timony, the authors found “a widespread
T Russian soldiers ordering everyone
to go outside. That morning, they were
he elaborate on why he didn’t approve.
Taras couldn’t make sense of what was
practice of torture and cruel treatment bused to another camp, in the nearby vil happening. Were these interviews aimed
of illegally detained civilians and mil lage of Bezimenne (Russian for “name at ascertaining reliable information? Or
itary personnel.” less”), where Russian and D.P.R. forces was this whole humiliating procedure a
The survivors presented detailed ac held an additional six hundred or so de kind of ideological screening?
counts of beatings, sleep deprivation, tainees, including some women. Pulling Afterward, a camp official handed
forced labor, compulsory exercise, mock up to the camp, Taras saw a cluster of him a piece of blue paper stamped with
executions, unprovoked shooting at de blue and white tents. The previous month, “F.P. Bezimenne.” F.P. stood for Filtra
tainees’ extremities, and threats to bring the Russian stateowned newspaper Ros- tion Point. Taras assumed that he had
harm to the detainees’ families. One siskaya Gazeta had acknowledged the “passed” filtration and was cleared to re
survivor told the investigators, “They existence of the camp, stating that Ukrai turn home. Instead, the men were dis
touched my head and genitalia with a nians were being funnelled there to stop patched back to the makeshift prison in
metal rod charged with electricity. They them from “infiltrating Russia through Kozatske. The filtration receipts were
hit me with a ramrod. They hung me up the fields or disguised as refugees so that taken from them.
to the ceiling, poured cold water in freez they can avoid punishment.” The following weeks took on a bleak
ing temperatures.” At Bezimenne, each detainee was rhythm. The detainees had only what
The investigators found that the se photographed from four sides, finger clothes they had been wearing on the
verity of punishment that camp guards printed, and subjected to another strip day they were apprehended. Cases of
meted out was contingent upon a num search. Anyone with a mobile phone what appeared to be pneumonia or COVID
ber of variables, including military back had to turn it in and supply the passcode; broke out, but the soldiers provided no
ground and, above all, a detainee’s “polit camp officials scrolled through photo aid or medicine. When one sick detainee
ical views”—specifically, the degree to graphs, text messages, and browsing started to fade away, the others pleaded
which he expressed “support of state sov histories. They connected the devices for an ambulance to be summoned, to
ereignty.” One tactic, referred to as “the to a computer and recorded their fifteen no avail. Several hours later, the man was
elephant,” involved placing a gas mask digit serial numbers. dead. Guards ordered two detainees to
over the detainee’s head and blocking the In a tent, Taras was interrogated by move the body to the gymnasium.
flow of air. Two men were castrated in members of Russia’s Federal Security The guards explained nothing. De
front of other detainees. At one facility, Service, the main successor to the K.G.B. tainees who were overly persistent with
camp guards carved the word “bandera”— their questions were beaten. One espe
for Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nation cially distressed man begged to be re
alist and a Nazi collaborator executed by leased, on account of his mother, who he
the K.G.B. in 1959—on a detainee’s chest, said was paralyzed and home alone. He
before killing him. Tanya Lokshina, a se later learned that she had died, likely of
nior researcher for H.R.W., told me that, starvation. The guards would not per
based on the accounts of Ukrainian ci mit her son to leave the camp to attend
vilians who have been held at fourteen her funeral.
sites during the current conflict, “there One of the men used a piece of chalk
are strong reasons to believe that men are to mark each passing day. Food was
being tortured in similar facilities today.” This time, the questions were more prob served once in the morning and once
On March 21st of this year, the twenty ing. What were his views on the gov in the afternoon. At communal tables
fifth day of the current invasion, the Rus ernment in Kyiv? On the local author meant for children, the men ate rice or
sian Embassy in Washington, D.C., is ities in Mariupol? Did he have family plain macaroni, which one detainee
sued a statement: “We have paid atten members serving in the Ukrainian mil later said “resembled glue.” Wild gar
tion to the claims from the Ukrainian itary? In the volunteer battalions? Did lic grew around the perimeter of the
authorities, which are being circulated he have any acquaintances in Russia? building, and Taras took to eating whole
in the US media, about the alleged cre Taras answered each question tactfully bulbs as he would an apple. Water, which
ation of ‘filtration camps’ by our mili but truthfully. He told his interrogators had to be delivered to the camp, was
distributed every other day. There was “Well, do you have your passport?” for nine of its thirty years in operation,
often not enough to go around. In the the officer asked. and, like the rest of her colleagues, was
classrooms, the detainees used a Soviet- The detainee hesitated. “Yes.” now living and working in exile.
era prison hack to boil and decontam- “You want to know why you’re here?” Over Turkish coffee and local ciga-
inate it, by placing one end of a metal the officer said. “Now you’ll go to a place rettes, Lokshina told me that, on Feb-
wire in a jar of water and inserting the where they’ll explain everything you need ruary 24th—just hours before Vladimir
other into an electrical outlet. Even so, to know.” Putin launched his invasion, when much
diarrhea spread through the camp. Four days later, local police returned of the world still believed he was bluff-
Without working toilets, the de- the man to the camp. The other detaining—she packed a “small suitcase full
tainees relieved themselves in a field. ees plied him with questions. Where had of bathing suits” and boarded a flight
Occasionally, someone would act up or he gone? What did they say? How was for Cancún, a long-planned winter-break
try to make a run for it. As far as Taras he treated? He had no physical marks of trip for her nine-year-old son. When
could tell, none of the escape attempts abuse, but was clearly shaken. Finally, he the plane landed, she turned on her
were successful. Sometimes the soldiers divulged that he’d been taken to a prison phone and learned that Russian tanks
would tackle a man to the ground and somewhere in Donetsk and left in a cell had crossed into Ukraine. The beach
bind his wrists behind his back with with only a single piece of bread. He would have to wait. Lokshina and her
tape. In full view of the others, they’d went silent, refusing to answer any more son flew to Northern California. He
drag him into a car and take him away. questions, and withdrew to his mat. stayed there with relatives, and she spent
Eventually, the guards permitted some More than two weeks after the men the next thirty-six hours travelling to
of the men to leave the camp during had been rounded up, Taras called a Poland to compile testimonials from
the day, to work on nearby farms so D.P.R. missing-persons hotline. Ukrainian refugees. She continued her
that they could buy themselves extra “What is the name of the missing interviews on Moldova’s border with
food and cigarettes at a local shop. At person?” the operator asked. Ukraine. In April, she took a brief trip
night, they always returned; there were Taras gave his own name, date of birth, to Moscow to dismantle the H.R.W.
military checkpoints in every direction, and city of residence. He could hear the bureau, before making her way to Kyiv
and, in the D.P.R., a Ukrainian man operator entering the information. He and Lviv, in western Ukraine, to meet
caught without documentation risked drew a deep breath, the muscles in his with people who had been subjected to
a fate worse than indefinite detention. jaw tensing. filtration in the occupied territories.
Inexplicably, the detainees’ mobile After a minute’s search, the operator After several weeks, she picked up her
phones were returned to them after in- replied, “The individual passed through son and relocated permanently to Tbilisi.
spection. Taras passed the time by look- filtration on April 14th and was returned Lokshina believes that Russia’s
ing through old pictures of better days: to Mariupol.” network of filtration centers serves mul-
selfies with his girlfriend, whom he Taras began to panic, his heart rate tiple, related strategic imperatives—
had met on Instagram two years ear- quickening. He told a fellow-detainee among them, processing civilians for
lier; snapshots of a trip to Paris. There about the call, and the man then made transfer to Russia, screening for com-
was no way to directly contact family an inquiry about himself. The operator batants and saboteurs, gathering mili-
members in Mariupol, which was still informed him that he, too, had passed tary intelligence, soliciting false testi-
without cell service. But the school had filtration and been released. monies of war crimes committed by
Wi-Fi, and the men could follow the Another detainee called. Then an- Ukrainian soldiers, collecting personal
news. Some had connections to the other. In all, half a dozen men called data on the civilian population, and purg-
D.P.R. government. They’d call around the missing-persons hotline and re- ing the occupied territories of residents
to try to get answers. “You’ll be released ceived the same response. They had all insufficiently loyal to Moscow.
soon,” one was told. Another was in- passed filtration on April 14th. They A spokesperson for Russia’s Federal
formed that “they’ll be transferring you had been released from custody and Security Service has stated that filtra-
to Russia,” and another that the D.P.R. returned safely to their communities tion has a narrower intent: to capture
armed forces “will mobilize you and in Mariupol. “fugitives from justice.” The Ministry
send you to the front lines.” One of of Internal Affairs of the D.P.R. said
the captives even placed a call to the n mid-June, at an outdoor café in that “filtration measures” were neces-
D.P.R. authorities. “My passport was
stolen,” Taras overheard the man say.
I Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, I met
Tanya Lokshina, the senior researcher
sary to intercept “persons affiliated with
the security forces of Ukraine, partic-
“They are holding me against my will.” for Human Rights Watch and the last ipants in nationalist battalions, mem-
Several hours passed. A local police car head of its Moscow bureau. Two months bers of sabotage and reconnaissance
arrived. The camp guards summoned earlier, the Russian Ministry of Justice groups, as well as their accomplices.”
the detainee. had “de-registered” the organization. These official justifications are not
“Did you file a complaint?” a police Lokshina, who has radiantly red hair, entirely spurious. In August, the Times
officer asked tranquilly. was wearing an embroidered blouse interviewed several Ukrainian “parti-
“I did,” the detainee replied. and beaded bracelets, giving the im- sans,” combatants who operate in the
A Russian soldier came over and pression of a professor at a liberal-arts occupied territories. In all but name
handed the detainee his passport. college. She had overseen the bureau and attire, they are active-duty soldiers,
nounced on Telegram that the city was
preparing for a referendum. Yevgeny
TRUE APOTHECARY Balitsky, the Russian-installed governor
of Zaporizhzhia, two-thirds of which
Having been a kid amid the release and reception is under Russian control, followed suit.
of the Alanis Morissette song IRONIC, having absorbed the scoffing During a forum called “We Are with
over how some scenarios detailed within Russia,” he declared, “I am signing the
were not in fact IRONIC—this made me shy, order for the Central Election Com-
mission to start preparations for hold-
going forward, to term things IRONIC, in case I was getting it wrong— ing a referendum on the reunification
I even hesitated to attach the label to Romeo of the Zaporizhzhia region with the
ending his life a mere half hour prior to Juliet waking, Russian Federation.” The night before,
though of course that’s ironic— in an address to the nation, President
Zelensky had said, “We will give up
each next day is just getting berated or scraping nothing of what is ours. . . . If the occu-
against what the state won’t fix or aching at the door, and still piers proceed along the path of pseudo-
I wept when you said that to be here is sacred—I wept in agreement— referendums, they will close for them-
selves any chance of talks with Ukraine
and also I wept because each next day is Juliet waking, yet taking her and the free world.”
for dead when she looks so dead—a mistake who wouldn’t be Michael Carpenter, the U.S. Am-
forgiven for making— bassador to the Organization for Se-
curity and Co-operation in Europe,
—Natalie Shapero told me that Russia is attempting to
insure a more “compliant, pliable pop-
ulation” in the territories in the south-
working in clandestine cells that are The exact number of Ukrainians east. “At the Pentagon, there’s a term,
unknown even to one another. In being held in filtration centers in Rus- ‘operational preparation of the environ-
Crimea, partisans helped blow up a sia and the occupied territories is un- ment’—military-speak for creating the
Russian airbase. In Zaporizhzhia, they known. By Russia’s own account, nearly conditions for control,” he said. In Au-
poisoned a group of around fifteen Rus- four million Ukrainians have already gust, the Yale School of Public Health’s
sian soldiers. According to the Times, undergone some form of filtration and Humanitarian Research Lab identified
“the fighters strike stealthily in envi- been “evacuated” to Russia, some as far twenty-one apparent filtration facili-
rons they know intimately, using car east as Vladivostok, near Russia’s bor- ties in Donetsk; this was the most com-
bombs, booby traps and targeted kill- der with North Korea. (The U.S. has prehensive assessment yet of what the
ings with pistols—and then blending estimated the number to be somewhere Yale researchers called a “large-scale
into the local population.” between nine hundred thousand and apparatus of screening and extrajudi-
Still, even if the initial aim of filtra- 1.6 million.) Ilya Nuzov, a Russian-born cial detention.” (Two months earlier,
tion was a limited military objective— lawyer and the head of the Eastern Eu- the U.S. National Intelligence Council
disaggregating civilians and combat- rope and Central Asia division of the had identified eighteen.) Using high-res-
ants—the process quickly mushroomed International Federation for Human olution satellite imagery, they found
into something grotesque. Much of the Rights, has called Russia’s filtration sys- “two distinct areas of disturbed earth
male population in Ukraine’s south- tem “a program to facilitate the forced markings . . . possibly consistent with
east has been interrogated and released, transfer of a large part of the popula- potential individuated or mass graves.”
interned, deported, disappeared, or tion, which could amount to war crimes Detainees who were released from some
killed. According to an assessment by and crimes against humanity.” of the facilities identified by the re-
the U.S. National Intelligence Coun- In May, Andrey Turchak, a senior of- searchers reported “insufficient food
cil, “Those who are deemed non-threat- ficial from Putin’s United Russia Party, and clean water, exposure to the ele-
ening may be issued documentation visited Kherson, a strategic port city by ments, denial of medical care,” and “use
and permitted to remain in Ukraine the Black Sea that had fallen to Rus- of electric shocks, extreme conditions
with certain restrictions. Those deemed sian forces early in the war, and an- of isolation, and physical assault.”
less threatening face forcible depor- nounced that “Russia is here forever. . . . At a recent U.N. Security Council
tation to Russia. Those deemed most There will be no return to the past.” A meeting, Linda Thomas-Greenfield,
threatening probably are detained in few weeks later, a member of the State the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., said
prisons.” Uladzimir Shcherbau, an of- Duma wrote that “the Kherson region’s that Russia’s program of filtration and
ficer with the U.N. Human Rights admission into Russia will be complete— mass transfer was being closely over-
Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, told similar to Crimea.” On June 27th, Kirill seen and coördinated by the Kremlin.
me, “If you have a blue-and-yellow Stremousov, the deputy head of the mil- She also noted that Russia was “im-
background on your phone, you don’t itary-civil administration of Kherson, posing its educational curriculum in
pass filtration, period.” which had been set up by Russia, an- schools, and trying to get Ukrainian
citizens to apply for Russian passports.” sitions he finds defensible, dig in, and named Eduard Burmistrov, who was
She said that the impetus for all these protract the war, betting that his polit- now living in exile in Tbilisi. On May 3rd,
measures was clear: “to prepare for an ical position can survive long-term suf- Taras threw a Hail Mary. Just before
attempted annexation.” Vasily Neben- fering. If U.S. Republicans win in the midnight, he wrote to Burmistrov, “Good
zya, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador, dis- fall and in 2024, he might be right—a evening, I am from Mariupol. After ev-
missed Thomas-Greenfield’s remarks President Trump would quickly aban- erything we have experienced, now we
as a “new milestone in the disinforma- don Ukraine, and a Trumpy Republi- have been taken to some village against
tion campaign unleashed by Ukraine can Congress might abandon them our will and our documents have been
and its Western backers.” before that.” taken away.”
Seven months into the war, Russia’s Whatever the Kremlin’s ultimate Burmistrov had been on the staff of
broader plans for Ukraine are now in objectives, Lokshina, of H.R.W., said TV Rain, Russia’s last independent tele-
more disarray than at any time since that it’s clear that the Russians are vision channel. On March 1st, the Rus-
the start of the invasion. Recently, after sian government blocked the station, for
a protracted stalemate, the Ukrainian broadcasting “false information” about
military recaptured more than a thou- Russia’s special military operation in
sand square miles of territory in the Ukraine. The TV Rain staff, unable to
country’s northeast. “The reality check call the war a “war” without risking long
around Kharkiv makes the situation ex- prison sentences, aired their final broad-
tremely volatile,” Hubertus Jahn, a cast from Russia on YouTube and shut-
scholar of Russian imperial history at tered their offices indefinitely. Most of
the University of Cambridge, told me. the staff fled within days, to Istanbul, to
Last week, Russian-installed adminis- Yerevan, to wherever they could book
trations in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kher- also using filtration and population flights. Burmistrov had flown to Serbia,
son, and Zaporizhzhia proceeded with transfers for propaganda purposes at then Turkey, before arriving in Tbilisi,
referendums. According to Russia’s home: “Their response to seven million which was quickly becoming one of the
Central Election Commission, the re- Ukrainians f leeing to the European largest hubs for exiled Russian dissidents.
sults in favor of joining the Russian Union is, well, we received four million, Burmistrov pressed Taras for more
Federation ranged from eighty-seven so they’re not only running your way, details. Taras wrote, “I ask for anonym-
per cent, in Kherson, to ninety-nine per they’re also running our way.” On Rus- ity, but our situation needs to be made
cent, in Donetsk. sian state television, groups of refugees public.” He began sending photo-
Absent a dramatic change of for- conveyed by train to their assigned des- graphs and short videos from inside
tune on the battlefield, or the deploy- tinations have been greeted with fan- the Kozatske camp. “To put it mildly,
ment of unconventional weapons— fare by large crowds and television the conditions are not for humans. . . .
which could draw NATO forces into crews. In Tula, an industrial city a hun- They feed us just enough so that we
the war—Moscow’s most realistic end- dred and twenty miles south of Mos- don’t die. . . . We sleep on old rolled mat-
game may now be to solidify its hold cow, a local official told state reporters, tresses in classrooms and corridors. . . .
on the gutted regions, some forty thou- “The displaced people will be provided We are guarded by three military po-
sand square miles containing rich farm- with comfortable living conditions and lice with machine guns. . . . Without our
land and immensely valuable mines. At get everything they need.” passports and filtration papers, we are
a recent news conference, Putin said Shcherbau, of the U.N. Human nobody and nothing.”
that this was his “main goal,” making Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Taras sent a flurry of messages to
no mention of “demilitarizing” or “de- cautioned against extrapolating too Burmistrov: “One person had a mini-
Nazifying” the entire country, as he had much from the experiences of survi- stroke. . . . We are all getting sick. . . .
previously declared. The next week, he vors. “We must be wary of survivors’ Everyone is coughing. We go to the
ordered a “partial” mobilization of as bias,” he said. “What is the statistical toilet in the field. We eat with spoons
many as three hundred thousand re- risk of being subjected to torture? What that are no longer being washed. There
servists. On Friday, during a ceremony is the average length of detention? What is no running water. . . . There are no
at the Kremlin, he announced that Rus- happens to the individuals who don’t answers to our questions about why
sia had acquired “four new regions,” pass filtration? We don’t have clear an- we’re being held and when we’ll be
welcoming residents of those territo- swers to these questions. The worst released.” With Taras’s permission,
ries as “compatriots forever.” The four cases are not yet known.” Burmistrov planned to publish aspects
proxy heads were in attendance; at of the account. “This cannot be de-
one point, they huddled together and early three weeks into his captiv- layed,” Taras wrote. “If something hap-
clasped hands with Putin, chanting,
“Russia! Russia!”
N ity, Taras was desperate. He spent
hours each day scrolling Telegram chan-
pens to us, the world should know about
it!!!!!!!” Then, for fear that his phone
Stephen Biddle, a defense analyst at nels dedicated to covering the war, hop- might be inspected, Taras deleted the
Columbia University’s School of Inter- ing for any information that might help entire exchange.
national and Public Affairs, told me, him escape. At one point, he found the A few hours later, Burmistrov con-
“Putin could withdraw to whatever po- page of a Russian opposition journalist tacted two former colleagues from
TV Rain who were broadcasting from attorney, asked Taras for the names of eos to the mayor of Mariupol. The may-
exile in Tbilisi, on a YouTube chan- his fellow-detainees. “We will send a or’s office had posted the videos on Tele-
nel they’d started under their own list of the specific individuals whose gram, with a description: “Footage from
names, Borzunova-Romensky. Under safety we are concerned about to the the middle of a filtration camp. A real
the “About” section on their page, they authorities of Ukraine, Russia, and the ghetto!” Taras texted that the leakers
wrote, “They can shut down all the DPR,” Murygina wrote. “were taken away by the military to an
media, but we still have something “I’m a little worried,” Taras wrote back. unknown location. If someone knocks,
to tell you.” The following morning, “Could it not get worse for us?” that’s it, I may be taken away.”
they posted a short segment featuring “In conditions of war and uncertainty, Researchers for H.R.W. tracked
Taras’s leaked videos and photos, along it is difficult to predict what is the right down and interviewed the wife of one
with an anonymized text message he thing to do,” Murygina responded. “But, of the missing men. “He sent me a copy
had sent recounting his ordeal. from my experience, if the authorities of that video that same day. I did my
Burmistrov asked Taras if it would know that we know who exactly is being best to talk him out of publishing it,”
be O.K. to share his story with a “good held, that lowers the likelihood that some- she told them. “I saw that video on so-
organization run by guys from Russia,” thing terrible will happen.” cial media and it also got picked up by
called Helping to Leave. “They work The next day, Taras sent the names the press. . . . My husband stopped get-
with Ukrainian organizations and help of twenty-two of the nearly two hunting in touch. Our neighbor’s family
refugees get to Georgia,” Burmistrov dred men at the camp. “I’m sure of these,” also stopped hearing from him.” She
wrote. Taras said yes. he wrote. “But collecting more names is later heard that D.P.R. security officials
Helping to Leave had its regional very difficult. People are afraid and don’t had taken the two men to the notori-
headquarters in an office a couple of trust anyone.” ous Olenivka penal colony and that they
blocks off Shota Rustaveli Avenue, Taras began to correspond with a were being accused of making an un-
Tbilisi’s main thoroughfare. When I Helping to Leave volunteer named Anna, authorized recording and spreading false
dropped by one afternoon in June, a a Russian woman who lives in Stock- information about D.P.R. authorities.
half-dozen volunteers, mostly Russian holm. He had learned that two men “Their fate and whereabouts remain un-
exiles in their twenties, were outside from the nearby camp at Bezimenne, confirmed,” the researchers wrote in a
waiting for me. One of the volunteers where he initially underwent filtration, recently published report on the camps
was married to a Ukrainian man who had disappeared after leaking three vid- in the occupied territories. “They should
was delivering humanitarian supplies
to the front lines. She had “NO” tat-
tooed across one eyelid, and “WAR” tat-
tooed across the other; it occurred to
me that showing her face in Russia was
now a crime. It was pouring rain, and
we sat on plastic chairs under the roof ’s
overhang. Everyone smoked.
The volunteers had started the group
on February 24th, the day Russia launched
its invasion. In the past seven months,
they’ve aided or facilitated the safe pas-
sage of tens of thousands of Ukrainians
out of active combat zones and Russian-
controlled territory. Their operators work
around the clock, supplying informa-
tion about evacuation corridors and ar-
ranging housing, medical care, and psy-
chological and legal support for people
hoping to get out. Most of the work is
done remotely, via Telegram, by a net-
work of more than four hundred vetted
and trained volunteers based all over
Europe, as well as in the United States,
Canada, Israel, and Thailand; the orga-
nization also coördinates with sympa-
thizers inside Russia.
After connecting with Taras, the
group got to work on a plan to rescue
him and the other men in the camp.
Polina Murygina, a Helping to Leave “Wow! He’s like totally obsessed with you.”
After weeks of detention, Taras made contact with a Russian opposition journalist. “People are disappearing,” he wrote.
be treated as presumptive victims of en- had been forty-one days since he and aged to reach an acquaintance who had
forced disappearances.” the other detainees had been taken. cell service, who agreed to come pick
At Kozatske, guards started to press Shortly after a breakfast of cold maca- him up. “Within a week I’ll try to get
detainees about the leaks. “Why the fuck roni, they were summoned outside. A out of the country,” he told Anna. “Don’t
are you filming?” Taras heard one guard D.P.R. police officer was standing with write to me for a few days. Just write
shout, to a man who had been pointing a Russian soldier, and Taras and the other O.K. now and I’ll erase everything. I’ll
his cell phone at his food. “You’re only men gathered in a circle around them. be in touch.”
making things worse for yourselves.” “We’ve received an order,” the officer
Taras quickly texted Burmistrov, said. “We are releasing you.” The guards hen Taras was taken away, in April,
“Eduard, please remove the post from
Telegram. I wanted the world to see, but
started calling the men’s names, one after
another, and handing back their pass-
W the trees were bare. Now every-
thing was green, blossoming. After nearly
people are disappearing.” Burmistrov de- ports, along with the filtration receipts. six weeks of captivity, he was reunited
leted his post, but it was too late—the The men were hugging, crying. “Taras!” with his family. They sat in the back yard,
photos were already being shared widely. one of the guards bellowed. over a meal of bread, soup, and fresh
Burmistrov followed up the next day, At 1:03 P.M., Taras texted Anna, green onions. His relatives couldn’t stop
PHOTOGRAPH BY TAKO ROBAKIDZE FOR THE NEW YORKER
texting, “How are you over there?” “They’re letting us go.” He sent a meme crying and poured him round after round
“Men with balaclavas showed up,” of Elon Musk with tears running down of samohon, Ukrainian moonshine. It was
Taras wrote back. “They look like real his cheeks, and wrote, “We don’t be- apparent to all of them that Taras could
thugs. . . . They walked around the pe- lieve it.” Why now? Taras wondered. not stay for long. There was no predict-
rimeter of the school with our pass- Was it on account of his leaks to Burmis- ing when the men in camouflage would
ports,” which were kept in a cardboard trov? A back-channel intervention by return. Three days later, he was on the
box. He added, “I will check in with Helping to Leave? The maneuvering road, driving a car left behind by a friend
you so you are aware of all my move- of a sympathetic local administrator? who was already out of the country.
ments, in case suddenly I disappear The men were being released just as Volunteers at Helping to Leave as-
from communication.” they had been apprehended—without sisted in coördinating Taras’s route. Trav-
Another week went by without any explanation. Six minutes later, Taras elling west wasn’t an option; Russian
news. “I’m still there,”Taras texted Anna. sent Anna a voice note. “They gave back forces had effectively blocked all evacu-
“Sick for several days.” our passports,” he said. “Those who can ation corridors. He remembered how the
When Taras awoke on May 24th, it leave on their own can leave.” He man- roads had looked in March, when every
third car heading in that direction re stairs, in the hotel cafeteria. A light refugees have entered Georgia, but there
turned riddled with bullets. He had ob breakfast had been laid out, but Taras is little work to be found and even less
served one van coming back with all its wasn’t eating. “There’s macaroni here,” government support. On August 1st, the
passengers covering their mouths and he said. “I’m sure it’s good macaroni, Tbilisi municipal government discon
noses. One of the passengers was dead, but I can’t even look at the stuff.” tinued a program, in place since early
shot as they tried to make their exit. The At the border with Georgia, Taras March, that offered free hotel rooms to
Georgian border was more than four said, he had undergone one last round Ukrainian refugees. Many had moved
hundred miles southeast of Mariupol. of hostile questioning by Russian offi on to the European Union. Taras and
To get there, Taras would have to pass cials. Finally, after passing through cus his girlfriend planned to drive to Po
through a sliver of southern Russia. toms, he exhaled deeply. “I just broke land, where they had friends who could
He went through eighteen military down,” he told me. He cried as he drove, help them make a new start.
checkpoints. Even with his filtration feeling a swirl of sorrow and relief and The next time we spoke, by video
receipt, he was questioned and some guilt and gratitude. Occasionally, he’d chat over Telegram, they were in a sub
times made to undress. A drive that in pull over, sit on the hood of the car, and urb a few miles northwest of Gdańsk, a
peacetime takes about fifteen hours took just gaze at the Caucasus Mountains. “In Polish port city on the Baltic Sea. Taras
three times as long. At one point, a Rus the camp and at the military checkpoints, proudly showed me their twobedroom
sian Federal Security Service official ex I had to choose my words with so much rental. He stepped out onto the balcony
amined Taras’s phone, finding nothing caution,” he said. Every utterance was to share a view of the quiet residential
of interest except a photograph of his a risk. “Now I don’t need to filter my street. “It’s very nice,” he said. “There are
girlfriend. He zoomed in and out on thoughts. I don’t need to hide.” areas like this in the U.S., right?” He
her features. “This your girl?” he asked A young woman was eating alone at pointed his phone toward a long, paved
Taras, without looking up. “Yes,” Taras a nearby table. Taras looked over at her driveway. “These crazy parking spaces.”
replied. The official ogled her for a min periodically. I asked him if he knew her. During our conversations, Taras ex
ute or so before handing back the de He smiled. She was his girlfriend from pressed a mixture of resignation about
vice. “Why are you all running away?” Mariupol. Until a week ago, they hadn’t the current situation and hope for the
the official inquired. “Who will defend seen each other for a hundred and one future. He and his girlfriend could now
the motherland?” days. For about half that time, each didn’t access their bank accounts, but their sav
Taras had no rubles, and his Ukrai know if the other was still alive. After ings were meagre; he aimed to find work
nian bank cards didn’t work at any Rus her apartment building was bombed, on soon, in human resources, or cars. “To
sian A.T.M.s, so Helping to Leave ar March 20th, she and her family fled the morrow we will go to the U.N. office,”
ranged two pickups. Taras would arrive city. On his way out, Taras drove past her he said. “Maybe something will work
at a designated location, and someone block. “It’s all destroyed,” he said. “They out.” The air suddenly hummed with
would give him enough cash to fuel up erased her entire street—just rubble ev the sound of a plane flying over Taras’s
and make it to the next stop. This was erywhere, a nightmare.” She first went to new home. He looked up, then let out
a risk to both parties, requiring faith Bulgaria, then came to Tbilisi to be with a brief, nervous laugh. “There’s an air
and trust between complete strangers, Taras. “Last night, we were walking in port right next to the neighborhood,”
citizens of enemy nations, but Taras the old city and we heard two guys walk he said. “I still get this feeling . . . I’m
had no other choice. After the first ex ing behind us speaking Russian,” Taras expecting an explosion.”
change, he stopped for the night at a said. Without any discussion, he and his Two days earlier, Gdańsk city offi
roadside motel, and sent Anna a final girlfriend found themselves walking faster. cials had changed the name of one of
voice note. “Thank you for your help and “It was like a reflex. I know it’s not right. the city’s main plazas to Heroic Mari
moral support,” he said. Lying there in They’re probably normal people who upol. “We will return to our city,” Taras
a clean bed, with a full stomach, he said, themselves are running away from Putin, said, “but only when it is Ukraine again.”
he was overwhelmed with guilt. “I’m eat but right now I can’t help it.” After all the death and destruction he
ing, taking showers, going to sleep on Taras said that they had both been and his girlfriend had witnessed, they
white sheets—living like a human being, having terrible dreams, assailed in their were eager to bring new life into the
while my family is still there. I feel so sleep by visions of armed soldiers, inter world. “Our children will have Ukrainian
guilty for all this. . . . I’m sorry.” rogation rooms, and the wretched ruins names,” he said. “They will be Ukrainian
of their home city. Just about every night, citizens.” He was confident that after
n June, I met Taras at a hotel where he found himself back in the filtration the war the E.U. and the U.S. would
I he was staying, on the outskirts of
Tbilisi. He is tall and gangly, and wore
camp. He’d wake up in a cold sweat, think
ing of the untold number of men still
help rebuild his city.
At times, Taras spoke of Mariupol not
a soccer jersey with the Mariupol Foot being held by Russian forces. “These are as a real place in the world, under tem
ball Club logo, looking less like a recent permanent memories,” he said. “You just porary occupation by the Russian Fed
prisoner of war than like someone’s kid live with them and that’s it. You try to eration, but as a memory or a dream, a
brother. Except for a bit of sunlight en distract yourself, you try to live your life.” phantom city situated somewhere in the
tering through a thin curtain, the room Taras excused himself. He had to distant past. “I would really like to return
was dark. In a corner sat an overstuffed pack the car. Since the start of the war, there, but Mariupol doesn’t exist,” Taras
black suitcase. We found a table down about twentysix thousand Ukrainian said. “There’s nowhere to return to.” 
PROFILES
CLOSE TO THE SUN

The making of Bertrand Piccard’s solar-powered air
journey around the world.
BY BEN TAUB
After Piccard became the first balloonist to circumnavigate the Earth, he decided to repeat the feat using solar energy. “Routine
42 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY YANN GROSS
ach winter morning, in the Swiss
E alpine village of Château-d’Oex,

the first sunlight appears as jag-
ged slivers on the edges of surrounding
peaks. Then light descends into the val-
ley, bathing the ground in radiation. As
the valley warms, the air in the village
begins to rise, creating a circulatory
effect: cold air rushes down the slopes
to replace what has risen, only to be
warmed and lifted up into the sky. At
night, the opposite occurs. It is, accord-
ing to the Swiss aeronaut Bertrand Pic-
card, “as if the mountain is breathing.”
Before dawn, “there is this pause be-
tween breaths,” Piccard continued. “It’s
cold, and there is just no movement in
the air.” One early morning in 1999,
during such a pause, several dozen lo-
cals stood in a field near the church, in
front of an eighteen-thousand-pound
contraption of nylon, aluminum, and
steel—a balloon. The sky was overcast,
the valley full of mist, as technicians
and villagers set about preparing the
craft for launch. By dawn, it was stand-
ing nearly as tall as the Tower of Pisa.
It had nine times the volume of an or-
dinary hot-air balloon, and carried a
pressurized cabin that could bring its
pilots to the cruising altitudes of most
commercial airplanes. The balloon,
which the team called Breitling Or-
biter Three, for its sponsor, the watch
company, was so delicate and unwieldy
that it had never been properly inflated
before; its inaugural test flight would
be an attempted circumnavigation of
the Earth.
At 5 A.M., Piccard climbed out of
bed and joined his co-pilot, a British
aviator named Brian Jones, for a hur-
ried breakfast of muesli and tea. Then
he went back to his room and threw
up. It was his forty-first birthday. He
had made two previous attempts at cir-
cumnavigation; both had ended in fail-
ure, with multimillion-dollar prototype
balloons ditched and destroyed, first in
the Mediterranean, then in Myanmar.
He wasn’t alone in failure—no balloon-
ist had ever managed a lap around the
world, despite a decade of high-profile
efforts. But a rival team was already in
the sky, with several days’ head start.
After dawn, the wind started to blow,
and the balloon began swaying. Wisps
of helium tumbled out of the balloon
is more dangerous than adventure,” Piccard, who is also a psychiatrist, said. envelope, like dry ice, as propane tanks
jangled around the gondola’s external jectory for the circumnavigation. Balloon medals, totems, and tributes: a guest-
frame. Piccard and Jones hurried pilots have no way of steering; they can book signed by Albert Einstein and
through the cabin’s hatch, and Piccard’s change direction only by going up or Amelia Earhart; a Légion d’Honneur.
father, Jacques, wiped the hatch seal down, to inhabit different winds. If Pic- But in Bertrand’s lifetime scientists’
with a handkerchief before bidding card and Jones had any chance at suc- understanding of Earth’s trajectory had
them goodbye. cess, it would be from the weather team’s shifted. His father’s and his grandfa-
Radios on, altimeter set, safety pins careful reading of the jet streams. For ther’s adventures were in the service of
removed, life support activated, gas valve Piccard, who had spent most of his life studying the planet’s systems as they
tested. During pref light checks, the very deliberately choosing his trajec- were; now the great unknown, in at-
gondola, which was tied to a five-ton tory, there was something gratifying in mospheric and oceanographic science,
truck, thrashed about, tossing the pi- surrendering to the conditions of the was how, and with what spiralling con-
lots around. Then a member of the sky. “It’s acceptance versus will,” he told sequences, humans were altering them.
launch team cut the tether with a Swiss me. “But acceptance is a decision you “Because the atmosphere is so thin, the
Army knife, and Piccard and Jones shot take. You accept to go with the wind. activity of 7.7 billion humans can actu-
into the sky. You accept to go into the unknown.” ally make significant changes to the en-
A thousand feet up, cold air from It was not unusual, in the past cen- tire system,” David Crisp, of NASA’s Jet
the valley collided with warmer air from tury of exploration, for a Piccard to go Propulsion Laboratory, has said. Pic-
above, and the balloon slowed its as- into the unknown. In 1931, Bertrand’s card had three young daughters; he was
cent. Jones started dumping sand, to grandfather Auguste travelled higher acutely aware of how little time had
shed weight, and Piccard ignited the into the sky than anyone before; in 1960, passed between the reliable habitabil-
burners. The Orbiter climbed twenty his father, Jacques, piloted an experi- ity of the planet that his father had ex-
thousand feet in little more than an mental submarine to the deepest point plored and the increasing volatility of
hour. Any faster and the envelope might on Earth. the one that his children would inherit.
have burst. Piccard vented excess he- By going up and down, Auguste and Piccard was not a physicist or an at-
lium, to control the rate of climb. Then Jacques glimpsed a cross-section of the mospheric scientist, nor was he an en-
the winds blew the Orbiter south, past planet—a study, at each layer, of what gineer. But he recognized the narrative
the Matterhorn, over Mont Blanc. Jones is dictated in life by physics and what force of his position. If past explorers
took a nap; Piccard sat in silence and so defies the existing scientific under- inspired learning through discovery, the
watched the mountains where he’d standing that it forces us to reconsider Piccard of the moment would have to
grown up skiing file past. our place in the universe. To travel in reframe the role to inspire acts of pres-
Piccard anticipated that the weeks the vertical dimension is to brush against ervation—to make sure that there would
ahead would prove as much an emo- the limits of the possible. By the time still be a world left to explore. But in
tional journey as a test of engineering Bertrand was born, in 1958, the Piccards order to carry out his mission, he would
and will. On land, he worked as a psy- were known for having carried Jules first have to fashion himself into some-
chiatrist, and he encouraged patients to Verne’s fiction into reality. The Belgian one who could command an audience.
embrace dislocations from their every- cartoonist Hergé modelled Professor “What is a psychotherapist doing?
day lives—to build confidence and re- Calculus, from the Tintin series, on Au- Coming up with treatments to over-
frame their priorities through novel ex- come symptoms—in this case, of in-
periences. “Routine is more dangerous efficiency, of energy use, and of con-
than adventure,” he told me. “I don’t sumption,” he told me. He recalled a
like le risque aléatoire”—random, incal- psychological framework that he used
culable risk. “I don’t like Russian rou- to teach patients, to help them confront
lette. But routine is killing us,” dulling seemingly overwhelming challenges.
people’s sense of curiosity and purpose “An adventure is a crisis that you ac-
and wonder, leaving them looking back cept,” he said. “A crisis is a possible ad-
on their lives with regret. He went on venture that you refuse, for fear of los-
to attribute a saying to an early aviator, ing control.”
Jimmy Melrose: “Someone asked him, guste, and the first director of NASA’s
‘Are you not afraid of having an acci- Manned Spacecraft Center credited wenty thousand feet above the
dent?’ And he said, ‘The accident would
be to die in my bed.’”
Auguste’s twin brother with inspiring
a key aspect of spaceship design. In
T Mediterranean, Piccard discovered
that, in order to maintain altitude, he
In the Geneva airport, Piccard’s the eighties, the writers of “Star Trek: had to burn propane for six seconds out
weather team projected the movements The Next Generation” named Captain of every ten. It was a worrying devel-
of atmospheric winds all over the world. Picard as a tribute to the family. The opment; at this rate, he and Jones would
Using models that were based on the Piccards were guests of honor at the run out of fuel in less than seven days.
spread of nuclear fallout over Europe Apollo rocket launches, and artifacts A lap around the world would take
after the Chernobyl disaster, the weath- from their adventures have been on dis- something more like twenty.
ermen, Luc Trullemans and Pierre Eck- play in the Smithsonian. The family As Jones slept, Piccard flew south-
ert, had mapped an approximate tra- home, near Lausanne, was filled with west—the wrong direction, but accord-
ing to plan. The weather team at the
Geneva airport had calculated that pow
erful winds in the skies above Morocco
would carry the Orbiter south and then
east across Mauritania, Mali, and be
yond. The fuel situation stabilized—he
was now burning four seconds out of
every sixteen—but the Chinese govern
ment had refused to grant permission
for the Orbiter team to fly north of the
26th Parallel, near Tibet. Every aspect
of the flight, from the launch date to
the Moroccan diversion, was calculated
by the weather team in order to thread
a needle ten days and roughly eight
thousand miles ahead.
At 4:48 A.M. on day three, Piccard
caught his first glimpse of the Atlas
Mountains. Patches of snow gleamed
on the peaks below, emphasizing the
relief, while the lights of Marrakech
glittered in the distance. He watched
the sun rise in silent astonishment; he
was seeing the planet from a remove,
as if he were not quite part of it.
The air temperature was some fifty
degrees below zero outside the capsule,
and at night the pilots’ breath frosted
the windows. Then the sun warmed the “Oh—I actually do want to log this as a workout.”
balloon, reducing the amount of fuel
that Piccard and Jones were burning.
There were thirtytwo propane cyl
• •
inders, racked along an exterior frame.
On day four, somewhere over the Sa wanted to make it around the world only balloon team still in the race. A
hara, Piccard and Jones descended to he’d have to go slower and lower. “Do storm had brought down their rivals
ten thousand feet and climbed through you want to go very fast in the wrong over the Sea of Japan. A couple of
the hatch. Huge icicles dangled from direction, or slowly in the right direc months earlier, a balloon piloted by
the envelope, like stalactites; Piccard tion?” they asked. Richard Branson had run out of fuel,
went after them with a fire axe, as Jones Southeast, now, at sixtythree knots. forcing him to ditch near Hawaii; in a
fixed an electrical fault and then cut Egypt threatened to scramble fighter previous attempt, Branson’s balloon had
loose some of the empty fuel cylinders. jets when the balloon drifted too close taken off without him. “What we’d like
“Away the tank went, tumbling end over to the Aswan Dam; Sudan didn’t reply is about 100 neat bullet holes through
end, glinting in the sun,” Jones wrote. to contact at all. Even without fuel prob the upper part of the balloon,” Bran
Back in the capsule, he told the team lems, government regulation could end son told the Royal Moroccan Air Force,
in Geneva that he “saw the tanks hit the flight: four years earlier, during an according to the Times. “Enough to let
the sand, so don’t entertain any claim international balloon race, a Belarusian it float down but not to make such a
for personal injury.” military helicopter had shot down a bal mess that we couldn’t patch it up for
Onward, and faster—southern Al loon that had drifted across the border another try in a few weeks.”
geria, then into Libya. Between sleep from Poland, killing both pilots. A burner failed as Piccard and Jones
ing shifts, Piccard and Jones stared at On day nine, as Piccard and Jones approached the Pacific Ocean—nine
the changing shapes and colors of the flew over India, a founder of the annual thousand miles of blue. Large expanses
desert, marvelling at the sight of rocks Châteaud’Oex balloon festival spot of the Pacific see no ship or air traffic,
protruding like the spines on the backs ted the Orbiter from his seat in a com limiting the possibilities of rescue
of dinosaurs. The next morning, Pic mercial plane. Bangladesh, Myanmar, should anything go wrong. Piccard be
card discovered and ascended into a jet China; the weather team had nailed the came so anxious about the crossing that
stream that was moving faster than an trajectory, keeping the Orbiter just south he resorted to selfhypnosis to get to
ticipated. Elated, he reported his ma of the 26th Parallel, in a wind channel sleep. Somewhere near the Mariana
neuver to Geneva, where the exasper that was only three hundred feet tall. Trench, Trullemans, of the weather
ated weather team told him that if he By now, Piccard and Jones were the team, predicted that, in three days’ time,
a fast-moving subtropical jet stream grandfather; he could hardly climb trees his reading and take to the sky. He began
would form southwest of Hawaii. The to pick fruit. Once, he tied a rope to to think of the lower atmosphere above
flight team filed a new plan to catch his house’s balcony and attempted to the Swiss Alps as a vast laboratory of
it, running south of the continental let himself down, but got stuck and solitude, a place where he could study
United States. screamed for his father. his inner world and experience, second
The longer they flew, the more trou- One day, when Bertrand was sixteen, by second, the ways in which his deci-
bles they encountered—storm clouds, he saw a man soaring through the skies sions determined his trajectory. Hang
failing equipment, freezing temperatures, over an alpine village near Lake Geneva, gliding, he wrote, was “a meeting face
lost radio contact, and a critical imbal- attached only to a triangular wing. It to face with the present, almost a way
ance in the levels of carbon dioxide in was the first time he had seen a hang of stopping time.”
the cabin. By the time they reached Mex- glider, and in that moment—against his After college, Piccard recalled, “I
ico, on day sixteen, they were also get- deepest insecurities—he decided that thought, I have to go into psychiatry
ting low on fuel. For Piccard, this was this sport was for him. His father, Jacques, and psychotherapy, because it is where
the moment that transformed a mostly opposed the idea, but Bertrand started I will be able to implement profession-
technical mission into a leap of faith. “A trading antique rifles to buy his own ally what I learned through hang glid-
lot of people don’t take decisions when equipment. Jacques paid only for his ing.” He attended medical school,
they have to take decisions,” he told me. safety gear—his helmet, parachute, and worked in a hospital, and studied Freud,
“And finally they are in situations where pads. During Bertrand’s first flight, he while also performing in air shows. In
they are not happy, and they think, I’m crashed into a chimney. But before long 1985, when he was twenty-seven, he won
failing in life—what happened? Well, he was training in aerobatics—launch- a European hang-gliding aerobatics
sometimes it’s just that they did not take ing his hang glider out of hot-air bal- competition. A few years later, as a prac-
the step into the unknown. loons, performing loops and rolls over ticing psychotherapist, he began study-
“What was the risk?” he continued. the Swiss Alps, chasing eagles between ing hypnosis and incorporating it into
“Ditching in the Atlantic. Just ditching. thermal lifts in the sky. sessions. “In psychoanalysis, people un-
And we had trained for that.” The team When Piccard’s body was cutting derstand where the problem comes from,
in Geneva called to say that it was cal- through the air at seventy miles an hour, but they don’t necessarily feel better,”
culating fuel reserves. “You don’t need his mind was a blank, his fears forgot- he told me. “In hypnosis, you have the
to calculate—we are going for it,” Pic- ten. What mattered was the tensing of exact opposite! After a few sessions, you
card recalled responding. After crossing his muscles, the shifting of his weight, don’t necessarily know why you have
the Caribbean, the Orbiter caught a jet the angles of his joints. He wasn’t dis- the problem, but you feel much better.”
stream travelling toward West Africa at missive of the stakes—he lost friends to For his patients, as in the sky, Pic-
a hundred and forty miles per hour. accidents, and his body, at times, was card sought to consider and manipu-
Halfway through day nineteen, with subject to forces more than four times late the experience of time. He found
the journey’s end in sight, Jacques Pic- that of gravity. But in the sky he felt that his depressed patients were fixated
card spoke to his son from the control fully in the moment, and utterly alive. on the past, and his most anxious ones
room in Geneva. “You still have to land,” “The word ‘vigilance’ takes on a new were consumed by the future. Through
he said. “When you land, you must bend meaning when your life is in your hands,” hypnosis, he sought to re-create the in-
your knees.”They set down in the Egyp- he wrote. “Your own existence takes on termediate space, where patients could
tian desert with one per cent of their a new dimension, it acquires a special heal from past traumas and confront
fuel remaining. But, for Piccard, the ela- flavour when you learn to preserve it their fears. “You have to invent a new
tion of a world first was tempered by personally, when you are in charge of it.” strategy for every patient,” he said. But
the scale of consumption it required. “I After high school, Piccard enrolled certain aphorisms could be universally
made a promise to myself,” he recalled. in the psychiatry department at the applied: “You must overcome the past
“The next time I would fly around the University of Lausanne, where he con- by doing something in the present that
world, it would be with no fuel.” tinued his study of fear and ways to helps you in the future.”
overcome it. He learned to parse its
hen Bertrand was a child, the di- meaning as an irrational projection of n 1992, Piccard attended a dinner at
W rector of NASA’s Marshall Space
Flight Center expressed a hope that
a negative future scenario that, with suf-
ficient focus and training, was unlikely
I the annual balloon festival in Châ-
teau-d’Oex. Then in his mid-thirties,
he would “continue the Piccard family to come about. “This was such a reve- he had a trim, athletic build and pierc-
tradition of exploring both inner and lation for me,” he recalled. “When you ing blue eyes, and he’d developed an in-
outer space.” For as long as he had been are fully in what you do—fully in the tense manner of listening to people that
alive, he had been tagging along to presence of yourself, in your body— left them grasping for his attention the
functions where scientists and astro- there is no space for fear. There is just moment it was withdrawn. He arrived
nauts treated him as the future of their no space for fear! Because you are in- late, and took the only remaining seat,
fields. But, in secret, Bertrand was afraid side yourself, in the present moment, next to Wim Verstraeten, an accom-
that he might not live up to his family and not projecting yourself in the fu- plished Belgian pilot out of whose bal-
name. He was terrified of heights. He ture.” As part of his preparation for loon Piccard had previously jumped
was scared to hike in the Alps with his school exams, Piccard would set aside with his hang glider. During the meal,
is getting heavier . . . like your arms . . .
and your eyelids. . . . ” Verstraeten nod-
FROM “MUSICAL TABLES” ded off. Piccard, who did not yet have a
balloon license, flew over the Atlantic.
3 A.M. The wind carried the balloon east,
toward the Portuguese coast, and Ver-
Only my hand straeten and Piccard won the race. Two
is asleep, other teams completed it, and the rest
but it’s a start. ditched over the ocean.
Back in Switzerland, Piccard returned
to his psychiatry practice, transformed.
FLAUBERT He adopted a new ballooning meta-
phor for his patients—and for the cor-
As he looked for the right word, porate and TED-talk circuits, where he
several wrong words has honed his skills in public speaking.
appeared in his window. “In the balloon, like in life, we go in un-
foreseen directions,” he said. “And as
long as we fight horizontally—against
ELEGY the winds, against what’s happening to
us—life is a nightmare.” The solution,
I have turned over he proposed, was to change altitude,
all fifty-two cards and catch a different wind. “And how
on the kitchen table. do you change altitude? You drop bal-
last.” Identify what is holding you back,
Still, I think and shed the excess, in order to rise. Pi-
you must be hiding oneers, he argued, are those who not
somewhere in the deck. only seek conclusions but live the ques-
tions themselves, unattached to un-
—Billy Collins healthy habits, dogmas, or beliefs. Ex-
ploring the vertical axis, he continued,
“means to explore all the different ways
Verstraeten explained that he was pre- fuel—a jet of flames for a few seconds, to do, all the different ways to behave,
paring to take part in the first ever trans- followed by silence for several more— all the different ways to think, before
atlantic balloon race. The journey would serves as a reminder that you’re in a we find the one that goes in the direc-
last almost a week, he said, and he was wicker basket, kept aloft by the tem- tion we wish.”
searching for a co-pilot. Another din- perature of some air particles.
ner guest suggested Piccard. As a hypno- The pilot has less time to take it all . O. Wilson writes of a Swedish
therapist, she proposed, he could help
Verstraeten alternate smoothly between
in. There are tasks to complete for main-
taining altitude and direction, instru-
E physiologist who was once asked
what he thought of the Pope’s asser-
states of hyper-alertness and rest. Ver- ments to monitor, fuel tanks to swap tion that the Virgin Mary was taken
straeten leaped at the idea; Piccard, who out when empty. As Verstraeten grew bodily into Heaven. He reportedly re-
had never piloted a balloon, agreed. tired, he asked Piccard to help him fall plied that he couldn’t be sure, because
When they took off from Bangor, Maine, into a deep, regenerative sleep. he wasn’t there, but of one thing he was
a few months later, he had completed Piccard instructed Verstraeten to hold certain: she passed out at thirty thou-
only five hours of pilot training. out his thumb and tense his muscles as sand feet.
If not for the visual evidence, a pas- much as possible. “Stretch it above the All human settlements fall within a
senger in a balloon might hardly know skyline,” he said. “There we are . . . that’s tiny band of the lower atmosphere, from
that he had left the ground. You do not fine.” Now relax the muscles. “Your arm the Dead Sea region to La Rinconada,
feel the wind; you simply inhabit it. is stretched . . . and it may become a lit- a Peruvian gold-mining village in the
Sounds from below—children playing, tle heavier . . . perhaps a lot heavier . . . high Andes, three miles up. At that al-
dogs barking—come at a muted remove. like your eyelids . . . which will eventu- titude, half of the atmospheric pressure
For some fliers, the stillness is accom- ally close by themselves.” He matched is gone, and, if you go a little higher,
panied by a sense of negation of the self. his breathing to Verstraeten’s, and spoke the air becomes so thin that your lungs
You are suspended as if living in a post- only as Verstraeten exhaled. Every fif- struggle to inflate. Beyond five miles,
card, or perhaps undergoing the kind teen seconds, Piccard fired up the burn- there isn’t enough oxygen for humans
of out-of-body experience some people ers, to stay aloft. “That noise you can to survive. Hypoxia sets in. Twelve miles
report after brushes with death. Now hear is all right,” he told Verstraeten. up, where there is barely any atmo-
you can stare a mountain peak in the “I’m the one who’s piloting . . . you don’t spheric pressure, your blood would start
face. Only the rhythmic burning of the have to do anything . . . your breathing to boil. No one knows exactly where to
define the limits of the atmosphere; by deaths of stars in the farthest reaches on land. His measurements affirmed
one measure, it extends nearly to the of the universe. Were they to hit us di- Albert Einstein’s general theory of rel-
moon. But the range of what for us is rectly, they would cause damage to every ativity. According to Tom Cheshire’s
habitable is astonishingly small—a mere aspect of our bodies, by breaking the “The Explorer Gene,” from 2013, Ein-
film around the planet, making possi- strands of our DNA. stein—a mentor of Piccard’s, who served
ble the formation of complex life. Perhaps the most audacious study of as one of the examiners for his doctor-
Every planet has an atmosphere, and cosmic rays was carried out in 1931, by ate—wrote him a letter of gratitude.
each, besides our own, is unique in its Auguste Piccard, Bertrand’s grandfa- Piccard postulated that most of the
particular hostility to life. The average ther, an eccentric, bespectacled physi- cosmic rays bombarding the Earth never
wind speed on Neptune is seven hun- cist who wrote several groundbreaking reach it in their original form; thus they
dred miles per hour. Jupiter’s swirling scientific papers and predicted the ex- must collide, at high speed, with the at-
red spot is a multicentury storm. Ve- istence of uranium 235. Six and a half mosphere, shattering into secondary
nus’s surface temperature is nine hun- feet tall, with ill-fitting clothes and un- particles. But the only way to test his
dred degrees. But Earth’s atmosphere— tamed hair, he was known as “the absent- theory would be to measure the preva-
for us, for now—works. It allows for minded professor.” He attended con- lence of cosmic rays at a high altitude—
liquid water in the oceans. It insulates ferences with Max Planck, Niels Bohr, ten miles up, above ninety per cent
the planet from wild fluctuations in sur- and Marie Curie, and he always carried of the atmospheric mass. Unmanned
face temperature between daytime and a slide rule in his pocket. Each morn- weather balloons were inadequate for
night. Its weather, even at its most ex- ing, he strapped on two watches; that the task; the automated instrumenta-
treme, is incredibly mild on a cosmic way, if they didn’t match, he knew he tion of the era was too imprecise. To
scale. Still, it is indifferent to the main- had the wrong time. carry out his experiments, Piccard con-
tenance of our existence. “I don’t think Auguste Piccard was also a licensed cluded, he would have to transport him-
the planet is in danger,” the Italian phys- balloonist; as a young man, he had served self and his instruments into the strato-
icist Giorgio Parisi said, in a recent in- in the Swiss military’s balloon corps, sphere, to “meet the cosmic rays . . . where
terview. “But we are.” which carried out reconnaissance drills their initial properties would not yet
What the atmosphere maintains over the Alps. By his forties, he had have been too modified by collisions
within it is no more important than come to regard the balloon as a kind of with the molecules of our atmosphere,”
what it keeps out; its mass of particles laboratory for the sky. In 1926, he as- he later wrote. “That is why I decided
serves as a defense against constant bom- cended with his instruments to more to ascend myself to 10 miles.”
bardment by cosmic rays—high-energy than fourteen thousand feet, in order Piccard designed a spherical cabin
particles, hurtling toward us at nearly to collect evidence that light travelled for himself and an assistant, consisting
the speed of light, from the births and at the same speed at altitude as it did of two hemispheres welded together—
roughly seven feet in diameter, accom-
modating his exceptional height. It
would contain spare oxygen reserves,
and filters for excess carbon dioxide that
would be generated through breathing.
“Our lives depend upon the airtight-
ness and the strength of this cabin,” Pic-
card wrote. To build it, he hired experts
in the construction of aluminum beer
tanks. It would be the first attempt in
human history to replicate the exact at-
mospheric pressure found at sea level,
no matter the altitude or the depth.
Every inch travelled downward from
sea level adds pressure, and every inch
travelled upward takes it away. A hun-
dred-mile venture across the surface of
the Earth might bring about some
changes in weather and vegetation; a
hundred miles above it puts you firmly
in outer space. For most of human ex-
istence, our vertical range was limited
to the distance between the depth to
which a person could swim in a single
breath and the highest mountain a
“I didn’t come to Washington to compromise. I came here because I was person could climb. Now, as Piccard
bored and rich and I like parking for free at the airport.” worked on his pressurized cabin, other
engineers and physicists considered the they could perceive a delineation be- aluminum sphere had warmed to more
construction impossible, the mission tween the lower and upper atmospheres, than a hundred degrees above. A thick
akin to suicide. But, as Piccard saw it, with the latter blending gently into outer layer of frost, which had formed inside
“the single objection that they were able space. “The beauty of this sky is the the cabin during the morning ascent,
to make to me was that up till then no most poignant thing we have seen,” Pic- snowed down on Piccard and Kipfer.
one had ever done it.” card noted. “It is sombre, dark blue or Having run out of water, they resorted
violet, almost black.” If the air had been to licking droplets of moisture dripping
n the early hours of May 27, 1931, transparent when he looked down, his down the cabin walls. When that sup-
I Auguste Piccard and his assistant, a
twenty-five-year-old physicist named
visual field would have covered an area
larger than that of France. Instead,
ply ran dry, Piccard poured liquid ox-
ygen into an aluminum goblet; after
Paul Kipfer, locked themselves into the with nine-tenths of the at- the oxygen had evaporated,
aluminum capsule, along with four hun- mosphere’s particles be- a layer of frost formed on
dred pounds of scientific instruments. tween him and the planet, the rim. “But it was so cold
A hundred thousand cubic feet of com- the downward view was it burnt to the touch, for
bustible hydrogen filled the envelope marred—“blurred as in a it was formed at -350° F,”
above them, but they were tethered to bad photograph,” he wrote. he wrote.
the ground. At 3:57 A.M., as they were Piccard and Kipfer set For each new crisis, Pic-
carrying out their final preflight prepa- about taking measurements card had some ingenious,
rations, Kipfer looked out the porthole of cosmic rays. But, as Pic- if haphazard, fix. At one
and saw a factory chimney below. No card put it, they made “a point, his and Kipfer’s ears
one had given the launch signal, but very unpleasant discovery: popped, and they discov-
here they were—rapidly going up. the rope which controlled ered that the Vaseline seal
A few minutes later, Piccard noticed the valve was not working.” Unable to had failed. “The struggle for life began
the sound of air rushing out of the cabin, open the valve, they could not vent hy- again,” Piccard noted. He patched the
whistling through a tiny hole. They were drogen and begin the descent. “Instead hole. A barometer broke, spilling liq-
two and a half miles off the ground, and of obeying us, the balloon would go uid mercury all over the cabin f loor.
ascending at an average speed of twenty down only when external conditions Mercury eats through aluminum; Pic-
miles per hour. But the leaky cabin permitted it, that is to say, when it grew card raced to affix a rubber tube to a
was failing to maintain its internal pres- colder at sunset,” Piccard wrote. tap that was connected to the outside.
sure—they may as well have been in a Piccard had told reporters that he The pressure differential created a vac-
wicker basket. The situation was criti- planned to land at midday. At two in uum, ejecting the poisonous element
cal. “If we don’t become airtight imme- the afternoon, he calculated that at into the sky.
diately, we must pull the valve and land, their current rate of descent they would Darkness fell; the balloon acceler-
if we don’t want to suffocate,” Piccard be in the sky for fifteen days. Piccard ated its descent, shrinking the fifteen-
told Kipfer. They went to work, sealing wrote that he and Kipfer had “tried day timeline to a few hours. Finally,
the hole with a mixture of Vaseline and once more to open the valve by turn- when they reached fifteen thousand
a fibre called tow. At last, the whistling ing the windlass winch around which feet, Kipfer assessed that the pressure
stopped. “Never have I appreciated si- the cable was wound, by means of a outside the capsule was roughly equal
lence so much,” Piccard noted. They crank placed inside the cabin. But the to that within it, and so the two des-
had lost at least a third of their atmo- cable broke clean off, which definitely perate scientists wrenched open the
spheric pressure, but the seal now put at an end any hope of controlling hatch and stuck out their heads. Two
worked. Piccard poured some liquid- the balloon. There we were, prisoners nearby clouds lit up with stormy elec-
oxygen reserves onto the floor, and as it of the stratosphere.” tric charges. But the balloon drifted
evaporated the pressure inside the cabin Ten miles down, a panic set in. Two away from the danger, and the men
was restored. airplanes took off from Munich, in an began packing up the heavy instruments
Above the capsule, as the atmospheric attempt to make contact with Piccard, in preparation for landing.
pressure lessened with altitude, the hy- but they couldn’t reach his altitude. “PIC- After slamming into the icy ground,
drogen inside the balloon envelope ex- CARD BALLOON DRIFTS HELPLESSLY they bounced over a glacier—“a maze
panded to fill a volume five times larger ABOVE ALPS,” a headline announced, of crevasses,” as Piccard later described
than it had at launch. Twenty-eight min- in the next morning’s Times. “Savant it—before touching down a second time
utes after departure, the envelope was Unable to Get Back to Earth.” in a more suitable landing zone. Kip-
now fully spherical, achieving its final Piccard and Kipfer, meanwhile, con- fer pulled a cord to rip open the enve-
form. Kipfer took an altitude reading— fronted a series of calamities as they lope, releasing the hydrogen. The cabin
fifty-one thousand two hundred feet. waited for the cool night air to facili- rolled in the snow, then came to rest.
They had breached the stratosphere, tate their descent. The radiance of the For Piccard, the landing was unevent-
going higher than anyone before. Star- sun was twice as intense, at that alti- ful, but Kipfer was buried underneath
ing out the porthole, Piccard and Kip- tude, as it is at ground level; although hundreds of pounds of scientific instru-
fer became the first humans to see the the outside air temperature was more ments and lead ballast. After digging
curvature of the Earth. At the horizon, than a hundred degrees below zero, the him out, Piccard took a nap. Then the
balloon,” he explained. One goes through
water, the other through air, but “the
principle in question is the same.”
The bathyscaphe design, therefore,
mirrored that of his stratospheric bal-
loon. There were extraordinary calcu-
lations and considerations, and any over-
sight would equate to certain death. But
the concept was simple: a strong, wa-
tertight sphere, suspended in the ocean
by an enormous tank filled with gaso-
line—a buoyant substance that would
not compress. To go down, add weight;
to go up, release it.
In the next three decades, Auguste
Piccard developed several iterations of
the submersible, and set records for his
dives and feats of engineering near Cape
Verde, in the Atlantic, and Ponza, an is-
land in the Mediterranean. But he re-
mained a purist, always celebrating in-
stead the implications of these dives for
ocean science. “I am a physicist, not a
record hunter,” he reportedly said. The
aspiration was to observe and study ob-
“I’d love to stay and hash this out, but I have scure fish in the depths where they re-
to go hide behind my work.” side. “It isn’t a boxing match or the Tour
de France.”
During the Second World War, Pic-
• • card’s assistant was reportedly killed
by the Nazis, and so he brought his
two set off on foot, hiking through the sule had a deeper meaning: it would son Jacques, who was in his twenties,
Alps until they ran into a startled search open the oceans, too. “So many ques- into the project, and trained him in all
party whose members had expected to tions, so many mysteries,” Piccard wrote. aspects of submersible piloting and de-
collect only their corpses. “It is only by going down ourselves to sign. Jacques, like his father, was tall
the depths of the sea that we can hope and calculating—but he was less the
n 1933, Auguste Piccard went to Amer- to clear them up.” eccentric physicist and more the image
I ica, where he dined with various lu-
minaries of exploration. Seated next to
Long before assembling the capsule,
Piccard had dreamed of creating a sub-
of an explorer. By 1952, having become
an engineer, he was overseeing every
Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, marine that could travel untethered to aspect of construction for the latest it-
he pulled out his slide rule in order to any depth. But the problem would be eration of the bathyscaphe, at a ship-
convert kilometres into miles. Also pres- the crushing pressure of water against yard in Italy. “Not a detail escaped him,”
ent was William Beebe, who, in a teth- the hull. To go from sea level to space Auguste later wrote of his son. “Not
ered submarine capsule, had descended is to go from one atmosphere of pres- an instrument but had passed through
in the ocean to a depth of three thou- sure—about fourteen and a half pounds his hands; nothing that had not been
sand feet. Beebe asked Piccard what pushing against every square inch—to subject to his personal control. He
he’d seen “up there.” zero. But in water the inverse transition knows the apparatus better than I do.”
“No angels,” Piccard replied. “What takes place every thirty-three feet. At Jacques started wearing two Swiss
did you see?” the deepest point in the deepest ocean, watches, too.
“No mermaids.” the hull would have to survive the pres- In 1958, the year Bertrand was born,
Auguste Piccard’s pressurized cap- sure of eleven hundred atmospheres. the United States Navy purchased the
sule opened the skies in ways that had Now, with the stratospheric balloon Piccards’ bathyscaphe, and developed a
previously seemed impossible. He pre- as his proof of concept, Auguste Pic- secretive project, called Nekton, to send
dicted that in the coming years com- card set about requesting funds to build humans to the deepest spot on Earth.
mercial airplanes with pressurized cab- a deep-ocean submersible, which he By now, Jacques was an accomplished
ins would be able to transport passengers called the bathyscaphe, after the Greek submarine pilot; by default, as the bathy-
through the stratosphere, at speeds of words for “deep” and “boat.” “To under- scaphe’s test diver, he was the world’s
four hundred miles per hour. But, for stand how the bathyscaphe functions, most experienced deep-ocean explorer.
him, the success of the pressurized cap- it is sufficient to compare it to a free As part of the contract, the Navy hired
him to train its pilots, and allowed him exterior lights and peered through the living.” But the political outcome of
the option of taking over any dives that only porthole—a thick cone of glass, the Jacques’s reported sighting at the bot-
presented “special problems.” diameter of a quarter—into the black- tom of the trench “was my father’s great-
On the morning of January 23, 1960, ness. “This was a vast emptiness beyond est pride,” Bertrand later wrote.
Jacques Piccard asserted that right, as all comprehension,” Piccard later wrote. To Jacques, it seemed obvious that
the bathyscaphe, named Trieste, floated Past thirty-five thousand feet, he told if other people could witness the splen-
over the Mariana Trench, near Guam. Walsh that they were nearing the bot- dors of the world underwater they would
In the preceding days, sailors had dropped tom. They dropped more ballast, and prioritize its protection. So he set out
some eight hundred blocks of TNT into the bathyscaphe hit the ocean floor. A to build the world’s first tourist subma-
the water, and counted the seconds that cloud of silt burst forth. Before rising rine, to bring as many passengers as pos-
it took for the echo of each explosion to again, Piccard later reported, he saw a sible to the bottom of Lake Geneva.
reverberate up from the bottom. The flatfish, resembling a sole. “Even as I saw More than thirty thousand people trav-
consensus was about fourteen seconds— him, his two round eyes on top of his elled there in the next decades, but few
seven down, seven up. Given the speed head spied us,” Piccard wrote. “Slowly, were transformed in the manner he had
of sound in water, that would make the extremely slowly, this flatfish swam away. hoped. In the late sixties, Jacques built
dive site almost seven miles deep: the Moving along the bottom, partly in the another submarine and, in the company
deepest trench on Earth. ooze and partly in the water he disap- of U.S. government researchers, drifted
Inside the bathyscaphe, bobbing at peared into his night. Slowly too—per- the length of the Gulf Stream, over thirty
the surface, Jacques waited with his haps everything is slow at the bottom days, to study its characteristics and flow.
co-pilot, a Navy lieutenant named Don of the sea—Walsh and I shook hands.” Soon afterward, Jacques launched a foun-
Walsh, for the signal to dive. Then, on dation for the protection of lakes and
the main ship nearby, a radioman
handed a telegram to Andy Rechnitzer, J seen
acques Piccard’s assertion that he had
a flatfish at the bottom of the
oceans. “His institute aimed to train in
environmental protection a representa-
the director of Project Nekton. It was Mariana Trench was almost certainly a tive of each municipality in Switzerland,”
from his superiors at the naval labora- lie—his description of it swimming away Bertrand later wrote. “But no one came.”
tory in San Diego: “CANCEL DIVING. from the view port does not resemble Jacques’s environmental proposals were
COME HOME.” the movements of the waxy, insect-like shot down by local mayors, his concerns
Rechnitzer went for coffee in the critters that actually reside thirty-five brusquely dismissed by the Pope.
mess hall. He showed the telegram to a thousand feet down. According to re- “It was not in my father’s nature to
colleague. At the time, there was broad cent studies by Paul Yancey and Alan Ja- put himself on the level of the rest of
public debate about the idea of using mieson—a scientist who later descended society, to understand that not every-
deep-ocean trenches as dumping grounds in the same trench as Piccard—the the- one shared his idealistic vision, nor his
for nuclear waste. According to “Open- oretical limit for any kind of fish is some acute sense of abnegation,” Bertrand
ing the Great Depths,” by the naval twenty-six thousand feet. (Beyond that, wrote. As a child, Bertrand resented
historians Norman Polmar and Lee J. their cells implode.) Still, Piccard’s re- that Jacques never allowed the house to
Mathers, Rechnitzer, who hated the idea, port had the desired effect, contributing be warmed above sixty degrees, and that
had urged Walsh and Piccard to find to a worldwide ban on dumping radio- the shower emitted such a light mist
some evidence of life. “Just see one an- active waste in the trenches. that he could barely rinse the shampoo
imal down there,” he said. “That’s all it Piccard’s ecological interest was not from his hair. At the same time, Jacques
takes, just one of anything.” Evidence new; for as long as Piccards have been struggled to procure funding for his
of life, at that depth, would suggest that submarine projects, and eventually his
vertical currents brought oxygen down ecological foundation was shuttered.
from the surface, meaning that those Jacques Piccard died in 2008. Accord-
same currents could transport nuclear ing to Bertrand, “His last years were
waste back up. After a coffee, Rechnitzer imbued with a certain bitterness” to-
went back to the radio room, and ca- ward humanity, for its unceasing eco-
bled San Diego, “TRIESTE NOW PASS- logical depredations.
ING 20,000 FEET.” A few hundred yards When Bertrand completed his cir-
away, Piccard and Walsh were still wait- cumnavigation by balloon, he was acutely
ing for the signal to dive. aware that, statistically, his life was half
Hatch closed, pumps on—down they redefining technical limits, they have over. But he was determined not to live
went, a couple of feet per second, and also been preaching the virtues of con- out the rest of it grasping for relevance
the hours ticked past. Rechnitzer had servation. “The question now is not so in a world that would no longer listen
told them to expect to reach a little more much whether man will be able to go to him, that had acknowledged the rec-
than thirty-three thousand feet. But the even further, and populate other plan- ord and swiftly moved on. Celebrity was
bathyscaphe kept on dropping, and ets,” Auguste said, nearly a hundred instrumental, he thought; if he priori-
Walsh and Piccard began to wonder if years ago. “The question is how to or- tized inspiration over the recitation of
their instruments were broken. Accord- ganize ourselves in such a way as to alarming scientific facts, he might suc-
ing to Walsh, Piccard switched on the make life on Earth more and more worth ceed where his father had not. In March,
1999, there was little scientific uncer- to the vice-president of research at the his pilot’s license. He and Borschberg
tainty that humans were altering the ra- École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lau- tried to write poems and solve math
tios of particles in the atmosphere, and sanne, who offered to sponsor a feasi- problems while in a decompression cham-
by the time Bertrand landed his balloon bility study. He also suggested that Pic- ber, to understand the effects of hypoxia.
he had burned some four thousand ki- card bring on board André Borschberg—a They also trained in a flight simulator,
lograms of fossil fuel. What if he could former Swiss Air Force pilot and entre- forcing themselves to function on only
fly around the world again, he wondered, preneur with a background in engineer- twenty-minute naps for as long as three
powered only by the force of the sun? ing—to assemble a technical team. That consecutive days. They mapped out a
way, Piccard could focus on raising funds multistage route around the world, and
he sun at its zenith—noon, at the for the project, selling it to governments agreed to alternate flights—Borschberg
T equator—generates about enough
power in every square metre that it hits
and companies as a symbol, an idea.
“When Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic,
over the Pacific, Piccard over the Atlan-
tic. Piccard, who declined to take a sal-
to run a hair dryer. Each subsequent the payload was also just sufficient for ary from the project, closed his psychi-
hour lessens the transfer of energy, until one person and some fuel. And twenty atry practice and made his living from
sunset, when there is none. For this rea- years later, there were two hundred peo- lectures—at thirty to fifty thousand dol-
son, the solar-powered plane of Piccard’s ple in every airplane crossing the At- lars a pop. Once, when he was walking
imagination would require the wingspan lantic,” Piccard told an audience at TED- through Zurich, a young woman stopped
of a Boeing 747 but could weigh no more Global. (His numbers were off by a few him on the street. “I lost my boyfriend
than a car. Still, if it could stay aloft decades.) “The success will not come if because of you,” she said. She had been
through the night, it would represent an we just fly around the world in a so- dating the Formula 1 engineer on Borsch-
extraordinary breakthrough in aviation: lar-powered airplane. No, the success berg’s team, and the project had com-
the achievement of perpetual flight. will come if enough people are moti- pletely taken over his life. According to
The head of Boeing told Piccard that vated to do exactly the same in their the young woman, Piccard told her, “If
such a vehicle was impossible to build; daily life—save energy, go to renew- you want to change the world, you must
the head of Airbus didn’t return his call. ables.” Afterward, he noted, “I don’t need make sacrifices.” (Piccard remembers
Piccard was disappointed but unde- to know how the airplane should be it differently.)
terred. “Innovation does not entail hav- built. What matters is that the aircraft
ing new ideas, but rather getting rid of allows me to achieve my goal.” n March 9, 2015, Borschberg took
old beliefs,” he wrote.
Piccard set off to California to meet
Borschberg hired an array of experts
from various fields, including an astro-
O off from Abu Dhabi and landed
thirteen hours later in Muscat, Oman.
with Paul MacCready, a legendary naut and a Formula 1 engineer. The During the next sixteen months, he and
American aeronautical engineer who youngest in the workshop was a sixteen- Piccard piloted Solar Impulse more than
was born in 1925. In the late seventies, year-old intern, the oldest an eighty- twenty-six thousand miles, from Nan-
MacCready fell into debt, and so he de- year-old volunteer. Battery technology jing to Nagoya to Hawaii, New York to
signed a human-pedalled airplane out had improved substantially in recent Seville to Cairo. During the Pacific jour-
of aluminum tubing, Mylar film, and years—enough to solve the problem of ney, Borschberg set a record for the lon-
piano wire, and entered it into a com- the ratio of power to weight. “Econo- gest solo airplane flight in history: four
petition to win fifty thousand British mizing on weight is an obsession and days, twenty-one hours, and fifty-two
pounds. It weighed seventy pounds and it’s now a matter of ounces, not pounds,” minutes; Borschberg used meditative
flew at around ten miles per hour; in Borschberg wrote. practices to remain functional on al-
1979, a test pilot, pedalling at a speed of His team calculated that by day the most no sleep.
seventy-five revolutions per minute, took pilot would have to climb to around Although Solar Impulse consumed
off in MacCready’s next iteration from twenty-eight thousand feet, while the no fuel, the effort to get it around the
England’s south coast and landed nearly sun charged the plane’s batteries. Then world required two conventional air-
three hours later in France. In 1980, Mac- the plane would glide through the dark- planes in tow: one for equipment, an-
Cready designed an experimental solar- ness. “Only after three to four hours of other for the team. But as a symbol—as
powered aircraft; this, too, traversed the descent, once it becomes necessary to much as a technical achievement—Solar
English Channel. But it had no batter- stabilize the plane’s altitude so as to avoid Impulse achieved Piccard’s end. “When
ies—they would have added prohibitive mountains, cloud cover or turbulence, the Wright brothers were starting to fly,
weight—so it could never store energy would battery power be used until sun- there was some scientist who explained
to make it through the night. Now, in a rise,” Borschberg wrote. The cruising that it was impossible to have something
fast-food joint in Pasadena, Piccard laid speed would be about forty miles per heavier than air flying,” he told me. “Now
out his vision, which he came to call hour; the primary limitation would be each time people tell me, ‘It’s impossi-
Solar Impulse, and MacCready sketched the duration that a pilot could function ble to do this, it’s impossible to do that,’
out a gigantic wing on a napkin. without sleep. I say, ‘O.K., please be humble. Just say
Four engines, one pilot, no pressur- Twelve years of development and test- that you don’t know how to do it.’”
ization—any superfluous weight and ing, a hundred and seventy million dol- For Piccard, the Solar Impulse ad-
the aircraft would fail. Back in Switzer- lars, endless regulatory hurdles; Piccard, venture was a proof of concept—that
land, Piccard mentioned Solar Impulse who had never flown a plane, acquired renewable energy can be harnessed to
achieve improbable ends. “My experi-
ence as a psychiatrist is that you have to
speak the language of the people you
want to convince,” he told me. “And the
people who I want to convince are key
decision-makers in the world of poli-
tics, economy, and finance.” By now,
he had launched a foundation, to re-
frame sustainability into the language
of profit and job creation. But in 2016,
when he was in the middle of deliver-
ing an address at the United Nations
Climate Change Conference, he felt an
acute sense of dissociation. “Everybody
was bored, thinking it’s just one more
N.G.O.,” he recalled. “I had to tell them
something that would wake them up.”
His mind drifted to his former psychi-
atry practice, where he helped patients
parse the seemingly insurmountable
problems before them into concrete,
achievable steps. He announced that his
foundation would devise a thousand
profitable solutions to bring about a more
sustainable future. The audience erupted
in applause. Backstage, Piccard’s col-
leagues at the foundation asked when
he had come up with this plan. “Just
now,” he replied.
• •
In the following years, the Solar Im-
pulse Foundation hired scientists and spe- bate with someone he later described as of Gruyère, he ceded the controls to me.
cialists to vet companies’ efforts to achieve a “green fundamentalist,” he said, “You In the late sixties, a French sailor
sustainable goals. It created a framework, try to achieve everything, with the great named Bernard Moitessier entered a race
with external auditing, to assess and even- risk of achieving nothing. I may be try- to circumnavigate the world on a yacht,
tually label corporations as both greener ing to reach only halfway—but I think I solo, with no outside assistance. Just as
and more profitable than alternatives. No will get there.” it looked as if he might finish the fast-
individual company would save the planet, Piccard lacks both his grandfather’s est, he flung a note onto a nearby ship,
Piccard said, but a thousand little steps eccentric purity and his father’s tortured using a slingshot; it explained that he
in the right direction were better than idealism. Instead, he seems to be some- would carry on sailing, without stopping
none. The foundation also crafted a guide one who decided at an early age exactly at the final port, “parce que je suis heureux
for cities, to help them integrate numer- how he wanted to be. At every stage, he en mer, et peut-être aussi pour sauver mon
ous solutions at once. So far, the founda- calculated what the objective was, and âme” (“because I am happy at sea, and
tion has vetted fourteen hundred and which steps and partners were instru- perhaps also to save my soul”).
thirty-two “solutions,” from companies mental for reaching it. When emotions Once, as Piccard and I drove back to
whose products range from optimized were unhelpful, he dispelled them; when Lausanne from an aerodrome in the Alps,
wastewater and HVAC systems to a solar- regulators obstructed him, he flattered I asked him if he wished that his bal-
powered catamaran, an antiparasitic treat- their sensibilities in such a way as to loon had never had to land. “Completely,”
ment for honeybees, and an insect-based make them want to help him succeed. he said. Each dawn of his twenty days
feed for West African tilapia farmers. Where is he most at home? The sky, in the sky during the circumnavigation
(Piccard’s sponsor Breitling also makes I think—in silence, or preferably alone. was seared into his memory. “You have
the list of “efficient solutions,” for a small I flew with him three times last winter— everything black, and then suddenly you
box that “aims to re-invent the way watch first in an electric microlight plane, and have a little white line in the middle,” he
packaging is handled and perceived.”) then twice in a balloon—and had the said. “And then this line becomes wider
The endeavor has received the enthusi- impression that these moments were the and wider, until the sky becomes silver.
astic support of European leaders, from only times in which he was completely Suddenly, the sun arrives, and makes ev-
regional officials to Emmanuel Macron. at ease. His confidence as a pilot was ac- erything red. And then you have a flash,
For Piccard, the goal is to be “more prac- companied by a palpable sense of liber- and color lands on the Earth. For me,
tical, more realistic” in his ecological pur- ation from the rules of the ground; in it was every morning as if I was at the
suits than his father was; in a recent de- the microlight, as we flew over the Lake moment of the creation of the world.” 
FICTION
54 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY KURT MARKUS

n June, Grant drove his project reached for a cinnamon roll to take to than buy it. But he keeps them around
I Mazda with the FFA sticker south,

out of Montana’s spring rain squalls
to Oklahoma, drinking Red Bull and
the barn, but Mr. Blake said, “Don’t
touch that roll, son. It’s the last one.”
He was wide awake again. “Yeah, your
till they can hardly walk. Half them
line shacks is just assisted living. Coy
don’t send them to town unless it’s for
Jolt Cola, grinding his teeth, with his friend Rufus showed up from Mon- memory care.”
saddle in the back seat. Each summer, tana and didn’t know come here from sic Rufus and Grant set up old steer
he took whatever job his friend Rufus ’em. Good enough hand now, but he horns on a sawhorse where they prac-
had found for him. This time it was was hard to train. They might have ticed roping. Rufus caught the horns
on the Coy Blake four-township spread, thought he was a cowboy up North, almost every time. When Grant threw
but he had to meet Mr. Blake first to but we’re old-school down here and we and missed, Rufus said, “Don’t throw
see if the offer was final. “You’ll get it, found him greener than a damn gourd.” it like you’re done with it!” Grant hung
but you got to sit with him and let him In Montana, he added, they spend half his lariat on a nail in disgust, sat on the
talk,” Rufus said. “He’s a lonely old land the year on a tractor raising winter feed. ground, and watched Rufus practice.
hog with one foot in the grave. His And Wyoming is all drunks and child
people been here since the Indians.” molesters. Forget about the Dakotas. rant and Rufus grew up in a cen-
Coy Blake was ninety years old, with
no immediate family, but he had not
The women stay in bed all winter and
the men do the housekeeping.
G sus-designated community not
far from where the Yellowstone emp-
relinquished an inch of his land. Grant walked between the house ties into the Missouri, twenty miles to
Grant stood before him, holding his and the stall barn in the dark. The stars school and six-man football. Apart
hat, too anxious to sit down. Mr. Blake seemed as sharp as tips of grass touch- from agate hunters and dinosaur buffs,
looked him over. The first thing he said ing a windowpane. Rufus’s truck with few outsiders came through. Grant’s
was “You don’t know anything, but at its rif le rack and its bumper stick- forebears had starved out in North Da-
least you don’t have a big ass like the er—“Back Off City Boy”—was parked kota; Rufus’s had been here since Ster-
locals.” He raised one spindly arm above by two stock tanks with rusted-out ling Price dispersed his Rebel soldiers
a spreading torso to point at the head bottoms, a cattle oiler, and a row of and fled to Mexico. Rufus had been
of a longhorn steer hanging high above protein tubs. the only student in their graduating
a dining-room table strewn with the class to wear a cowboy hat, though in
remains of cinnamon rolls, coffee, re- n the tack room, the smell of oats, their parents’ yearbooks all the boys
ceipts, and newspapers. Grant hadn’t
eaten since he had an Egg McMuffin
I manure, and leather was strong. Some
of the saddles on racks clearly hadn’t
wore them, as did some of the girls.
Grant and Rufus met in kindergar-
near Salina, Kansas, and he stared at been on a horse in years—Bob Crosby ten and had been best friends ever since,
the food. Mr. Blake said, “That’s old ropers, worn-out Price McLaughlins, lovers of the outdoors, wild places, fast
Chief. A long time ago, he was my lead and old-time slick forks. Blake had food, and girls. Among the still devel-
steer. Used him for years and years. He cowboys scattered out around the place oping coeds, big busts and no hips or
never got mean, but he got where he in line camps, and this was a sort of vice versa, Rufus appealed to the 4-H
just did what he felt like—walked saddle exchange with stubbed-out cig- girls, while the girls who hoped to get
through things, got out on the railroad arettes in front of the racks where men out of town preferred Grant, in his
track, spoiled my wife’s vegetable gar- couldn’t make up their minds. If they flat-brimmed ball cap and rock-band
den. He was monstrous big, and I had came across Grant and Rufus anywhere T-shirts. Rufus went to great lengths
heck finding someone to kill him. This on the ranch, they walked past with- to ride horses, borrowing them mostly,
feller at Creech said, ‘Bring him over. out seeing them. or getting bucked off ones he’d sneaked
I’ll kill him.’ When they hung him up, Rufus grained his horse through the on in distant pastures. Grant thought
Chief busted the block and tackle. All bars of its stall, pouring oats from a tin Rufus’s bowlegs came from this horse
them steers were red with black noses, scoop into a trough. His hands were habit, but his mother assured him that
like old Chief there.” Grant nodded purple from mixing Kool-Aid mash it was rickets. Grant’s father, a genial,
nervously at these details. for his pig traps. He spoke over his big-chested plumber in suspenders, oc-
Beneath the steer was a portrait of shoulder, careful not to spill the oats. casionally hired one of Rufus’s uncles,
a woman, a handsome weathered face, Eager noses pushed from stall bars all several of whom were named Lloyd
and Mr. Blake reached his cane to it. down the corridor, mounts for other and all of whom were red-lipped and
“Susanna, married sixty years. If she left hands. There were several horses in pigeon-toed, but Grant was discour-
a room, I’d kill time until she was back. the stalls along the far end, but Rufus aged from visiting Rufus at his home,
She was an educated woman and took said most of them were crowbait that a chaos of poverty, malaise, and unfore-
me to Van Cliburn concerts in Fort couldn’t catch a fat man, harmless seen childbearing.
Worth, the same woman who helped mounts for Coy’s town relatives. Rufus Still, Grant ate with the Aikens from
me hand-dig a well, shovel to shovel. I touched each horse on the muzzle. time to time, astonished at the way they
don’t know why I hang around.” Grant “Coy says we grain ’em too much. He’s seized their utensils and wiped their
thought, That must mean she’s dead. tighter than the bark on a tree. His old mouths with open hands. The first time
Mr. Blake was almost asleep. When cowboys complained that he made he ate there, Rufus’s grandmother stared
he seemed to doze off for good, Grant them steal fuel from drip tanks rather at him with unnerving intensity, and
said, “Look what the cat drug in!” He the deer, slung over the side of the tub, blue heron that seemed to want an ex-
would not soon forget an order from its skull atop the television and the gut planation. This evoked a religious mood
Rufus’s father, “Clean your plate!,” said pile on the floor. He forced them out in Rufus, who often began his rumi-
while pointing at it as though Grant to their car, where, sticky with blood, nations with a reference to the earth,
wouldn’t be able to find the plate on they began the long ride back to Utah. which he called “here below.”
his own. The meat was flat and gray; Grant and his family ate the deer, de- “Everything we try, everything we
the salad dressing resembled styling gel. spite all the bullet holes. do here below—”
When the family looked to him for a Grant’s mother tried to build a wall “I don’t know what they’re telling
comment, he bleated, “Hits the spot!” around their small family and made no you around your house,” Grant inter-
Rufus’s dad may have been a Lloyd, effort to include her in-laws, downtrod- rupted. “But ‘here below’ is all there is.”
too, but he was called Spook for his den railroaders from Livingston, about “This land will swallow us, just like
prominent eyes, and his large wife was whom she invented scurrilous anec- it swallowed the Indians. If you never
called Jelly. The joke in town was that dotes. She told Grant that his grand- found an arrowhead, there’d be no rea-
Jelly had matured early, having driven father had weevils in his hairpiece. She son to believe there’d ever been Indi-
a getaway car when she was only fif- also obsessively tracked Rufus’s dan- ans at all.”
teen. Spook had hair growing up the gerous behavior as he grew, falling out “That so? I saw three of them in the
back of his neck and one incisor set of trees, losing part of a finger to fire- I.G.A. yesterday,” Grant said, aware
edgewise. Sometimes he stopped to works, and rolling Spook’s pickup. “Your that he had missed the point.
watch the men in town play horseshoes, friend Rufus,” Grant’s father said, “is After a long pause, Rufus said, “Grant,
or confronted tourists, demanding to as doomed as a dog who chases cars.” I’d like to see you trust your dreams
know where they were from. It was more.” It was a starlit thought, whether
agreed that Spook was just another ne evening, the summer before Grant understood it or not.
smart-ass bumpkin until, when the boys
were in middle school, he was elected
O they started high school, Grant
and Rufus set out at sundown in two
A founding myth in Rufus’s family
was that one of their forebears, a sol-
to the legislature and served two full inner tubes to float the big irrigation dier in the Southern Army, had actu-
terms as a renowned crackpot, in the ditch all the way to town. Hidden by ally died of a dream. He was standing
papers all the time. The Gazette, espe- tall bankside grass, they drifted at a in front of his homestead, near the ham-
cially, wanted to rub the town’s nose in walking pace, so quietly that they were let of Mexico, Missouri, gazing at two
the mess Spook made up in Helena, among the ducks at the moment they calves he thought would grow to be
where he was known as Bananas.Tucked exploded into the air. They nearly a herd once the war passed, when he
away in his disconnected patch of prai- missed a strand of barbed wire at eye fell over dead. His widow’s explana-
rie, he was a public warmonger who level, dipping their heads as it passed tion—“He had a dream and it shot
published a mimeographed end-times over them in the dusk. him”—was accepted as plausible, and
newsletter and had a real following. At the f irst ranch they slipped may well have been why his descen-
He was ever faithful to Jelly. When through there was a yard light above dants believed that dreams were mes-
amorously approached during his Hel- the haymow, so they could see old man sages, perilous to ignore. When fifteen-
ena days, he’d explain, “I got more Bror Edison, who claimed he’d invented year-old Jelly was caught driving the
than I can handle back at the house.” electricity back when there were few getaway car, she told the officer that
Still, he prided himself on his premar- people around to say he hadn’t, sitting she was in the middle of a dream, add-
ital conquests and, to Rufus’s mortifi- with his wife, Gladys, tiny elders holding, “And so are you.” He said, “Get
cation, would point out some aging ing hands, drinking beer, and idly wav- out of the car.”
farm wife with the words “Magic in ing the bugs away. The boys were close All of Rufus’s relatives smoked, and
the back seat” or “Tighter’n a bull’s butt to them as they floated past and felt they were often drunk and craving battle.
in fly season.” something ineffable that kept them Of the seven men, several were habitu-
Grant’s parents were scarcely well- from speaking. Grant would remem- ally in jail, usually for fighting. They were
to-do but they managed decently, the ber that scene a year or two later when useful, hardworking men—mechanics,
plain food they ate was good, they his father told him that Edison had roofers, carpenters, dry-wallers, unli-
mowed the lawn, painted the shutters, parked his flivver on the tracks of what censed plumbers, men who made good
and washed the car. During hunting many still called the Great Northern, wages when they weren’t locked up. They
season, Grant’s mother worked the desk “and kissed all them doctor bills good- owned their own homes and had pretty,
at the motel two nights a week, when bye.” Edison was uncharitably criticized fast-aging wives, who waited faithfully
it was full and had a “No Vacancy” sign for parking in such a way that Gladys’s for them to be paroled. They married
you could see a mile down the high- side would be struck first. “Bror was a for life in a cavalcade of mayhem. An
way. She called home late one night to detail man,” Grant’s father said. “He uncle, Aithel Aiken, was the pastor of
ask her husband for help with some invented electricity.” the cinder-block church on the Da-
unruly hunters who were cleaning a They floated along, the ditch some- kota back road, and it was worth at-
deer in the bathtub. He went to the times little wider than their shoulders, tending one of his services to see him
motel, well armed, and found the drifting into deer, cows drinking, a great go to war with the Devil, stiff-legged
knife-wielding miscreants still skinning horned owl cleaning a vole, and a tall with outreached arms, his voice rising
to a piercing squeal as he left words he communicated a feral signal that told the intermittent thumps of old make-
behind. “If I was Satan,” Rufus said, them they had no idea what would hap- and-break poppin’ johnnies at faraway
“I’d put my ass in overdrive.” pen—often quite a lot—once they went oil wells. Despite all previous claims,
riding in his truck. He always seemed they were now building a fence, and
fter high school, Rufus ran away to have a girl hanging off his arm or Rufus asked Grant if he was supersti-
A to Oklahoma, telling Spook, Jelly,
and all the Lloyds that he didn’t aim to
mashed against him as he drove. Grant’s
acceptable grades and manners served
tious. They’d spent two hours setting
the brace post and were sick of the whole
live on unlucky land. His first job had him less well in this arena. He tried to thing. Coy had sent one of his most dis-
him delivering oxygen to old smokers; change, with daring T-shirt messages agreeable cowboys to compel this work,
after that, he went to work on ranches and crazy haircuts that only baffled the a scrawny old man in a sweat-stained
and feedlots, preg testing, feeding cake, girls he liked, who wondered what, ex- Stetson with a home-rolled hanging
and trapping wild pigs for the organic- actly, it was that he had in mind. Rufus from his lower lip.
food business. “Cowboys fix fence, showed Grant his condoms. “Do you “No. Are you?”
Grant. They don’t build fence. No no even know what these are for, Grant?” “Hell yes.”
no no no,” he told him on the phone. “What?” “Of what?”
“If some rancher tells you he’s got a lit- “Ha-ha, they’re for keeping in your “Black cats, owls, ladders. Redheads
tle fence to build, you just ease on.” He wallet!” and cross-eyed folks. Spiders. I was
liked teaching Grant the saddle-bum raised that way. My family are into hexes.
ways as they disappeared, and he never n Coy Blake’s ranch, they stayed Which is bullshit, sorry to say.”
explained the bed of his truck, filled
with barbed-wire rolls, steel posts, clips,
O in an asbestos-sided bunkhouse
with a wood box, a metal stove, and war-
When the weekend came around and
there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the two
stays, a worn-out Sunflower stretcher, surplus bunks. It had a small porch with sat on the porch of their shack and talked
sucker rods, and an auger: everything two defunct cane chairs separated by a around the dead air-conditioner. They
you’d need for rural shitwork and very long-dead window-mount air-condi- could hear a car coming down the ranch
little of what a cowboy might require. tioner. Next to the porch was a tornado road from the paved two-lane that con-
Grant moved with his parents to cellar with a corrugated-iron covering nected them to town. A seafoam-green
Miles City, where his mother found a and cinder-block steps down to a floor Camry crossed in front of them, two
job at a credit union and his father at- buzzing with snakes. At night, they heard girls with incurious faces looking their
tained enhanced journeyman status as
a plumber licensed for boilers and heat-
ing systems. Grant had the mild roman-
ticism of someone from a happy family
but no great desire to start his life anew.
Instead, he made friends, took a few
classes at the community college, and
fought off his father’s demands that he
join the plumbing business. Every sum-
mer, Rufus found him work, made him
get rid of his Mohawk and his rap tapes,
and their friendship was refreshed. Two
years before Coy Blake’s ranch, Rufus
had got them a job roofing a milking
parlor that was being repurposed as a
guesthouse on a vacation property owned
by Atlantans. Rufus thought installing
cleats to prevent sliding as they worked
was a waste of time. They’d removed
just enough of the old shingles to in-
sure that the roof would always leak be-
fore Rufus lost traction and slid the
whole length of the roof to the ground,
where he examined his hands, which
now lacked fingernails. Pain pushing
through his forced smile, he said, “It’s
always just a matter of time before I do
something stupid.”
Girls still liked Rufus. He was care-
less and good-looking, and, since he’d “I vow to get to the airport three and a half hours
learned so few behavior rules at home, before our flight even though it’s unnecessary.”
gun away from him and shook the bul-
lets onto the ground. He handed the
gun back and said, “You’ll only hurt
yourself.” When he emerged from the
house with an armload of clothes and
a pair of Tony Lamas, Alva made a fu-
tile attempt to catch his sleeve, which
he answered with a point-blank prison
stare. He got into his truck and thanked
his Lord Jesus Christ that he hadn’t got
shot. Alva called out, “I hope you’re sat-
isfied!” Rufus didn’t think she had a
bunch of room to talk.
“Can’t tell you what ever I saw in
her, pard. She wore me like a dirty shirt.”
t first light the following Monday,

A Coy’s rooster stood on an Olds-
mobile Toronado engine block and
began to crow. An uncanny beam from
the Heartland Flyer trembled across
the treetops. Rufus stopped and listened
to the whistle, and said it was getting
day fast. “Need to be gone time you can
tell a cow from a bush.” They threw
their saddles up on two bay geldings
and held bridles against the light in the
doorway to see which bits and curbs
they had, then gave the latigos extra
tugs. Rufus stopped all motion and said
he wished he’d brought his cow dog
Pine. “He’d run down a herd quitter
like a chicken after a June bug, wouldn’t
he?” Only a dream, Grant thought: Pine
was blind. His horse struck sparks from
the concrete floor with its iron shoes.
• • “Andale,” Rufus said in his new cow-
boy Spanish. The two rode straight out
way and stopping by the stall barn. sprang onto them, rode loudly across of the barn and into the near-dark. Grant
Rufus said, “Let’s ease on over there the concrete floor past the boys, and trailed as he learned the unfamiliar
and check this out.” They didn’t wish cantered off. ground. Rufus’s old spurs had wallowed-
to seem in a hurry and spent ten ago- Rufus’s love life had recently taken out axles, and the rowels rang as they
nizing minutes before getting up, re- a turn for the worse. His girlfriend, Alva, jogged toward the low bluish hills.
tucking their shirts, and swatting the had allowed a red-haired upholsterer Grant’s horse made a listless attempt
dust out of the knees of their pants. from Creech to move in with her and to buck, settled into mild treachery, and
Rufus took a moment to put on his roll his dirt bike up on the porch. Rufus, tried to rub him off on a post oak until
spurs, though they had no plans to ride. who once loved her wide eyes and sym- he lifted it with his spurs. This was a
The girls looked like sisters; either metrical face, had now decided that she loaner from Coy, who’d promised that
that or the ponytails, hoop earrings, and looked like “a fucking idiot.” The new the horse was gentler than the burro
ball caps were a uniform for confident boyfriend owned a brindled mutt with Christ rode into Jerusalem. The sum-
young women in Oklahoma. They were a black face, upright ears, and a stubbed mer before, when Grant and Rufus
saddling horses as the two young men tail. It rushed from the house and tried were working on a bankrupt outfit near
stepped in through the cargo doors at to stop Rufus from getting out of his Pawhuska, the big sorrel Grant had to
the end of the barn, noticing immediately truck to retrieve his clothes, but, when use was so rank he’d pissed off its shoul-
that they had been seen but not looked Rufus stepped around it, it merely der to avoid climbing down and get-
at. Grant was amazed at the assurance sniffed his calves. The boyfriend skit- ting cow-kicked. This one at least had
with which the girls could brush, sad- tered down the porch steps and pushed old saddle galls, had been places, and
dle, and bridle a horse. Instead of lead- a gun into Rufus’s midriff. Alva gazed had done some work.
ing the horses out of the barn, they from the doorway as Rufus took the They passed a stock pond, the water
silver in the early light; ink-black reflec- Rufus went on ahead, wending through ward atop Rufus, who cried, “My cig-
tions of invisible horses on the other side. openings in the sagebrush. He wrapped arettes!” Grant spotted the tumbling
The sky began to fill with light as they his reins around the saddle horn, took package and raced toward it, leading
rode alongside a hill-encircled meadow, his feet out of the stirrups, and leaned his horse. As he turned, he saw Rufus’s
first-calf heifers up to their bellies in back to watch the last stars disappear into horse on its feet again, the saddle along
grass, sun glittering on magpie wings. day. A match flared against his face, a its ribs, trembling, then limping down
Grant urged his horse up in a level jog. puff of smoke. Grant felt the steady pulse the hill toward the ranch, throwing its
“Once was a dangerous mean cow of his horse’s gait and the observant tilt head each time it stepped on its drag-
in that field,” Rufus said. “She’d get right of its head toward the cattle. ging reins, and disappearing in a dust
in the feed wagon and try to kill you. The pasture ended at a bluff, and cloud as it hit the lower road. Rufus
Coy had her turned into Sloppy Joes.” atop the bluff the Brangus yearlings was curled up on the ground. Grant
The low clouds were in ledges as they seemed unwilling to join the herd and stood over him, clutching the cigarettes.
gained ground from pasture to sage- gazed indifferently at the departing Rufus was dead.
brush. Grant’s horse pressed Rufus’s cows. “We’ll have to go up and get
bay to pick up the pace, its tail switch- them,” Rufus said. He chewed his ervices were held in the roadside
ing with annoyance.
Except for the crack of shoes on scat-
thumbnail and stared at the rim. “The
only route up is that nasty ravine. We
S church where Aithel Aiken was the
pastor. It was as expected: Rufus was in
tered rocks and the noise of awakening could lead our horses, but that’s so pussy. a better place and Christ was the glue
birds, the land was quiet. “Long story We’re going to cowboy up and ride.” that held the glue together. Grant’s par-
short, I’m shut of that bitch. Alva wanted He reached for the cigarette hanging ents, gazing downward, hands clasped,
kids. I been through that family bull- from his mouth and used it to point worshipped off to one side. Aithel noted
shit. But, no, Grant, I wasn’t that smart. the way. “Hark, yon critters!” these things quietly; there was no real
A man always stays until it gets ugly.” Grant glanced at the steep declivity clash to report, and he wasn’t passionate
Rufus raised and dropped his arms. leading from the plateau up to the grassy about it, since it had long been accepted
Grant thought he could see a line of ledge, rebuked by the yearlings, whose that Rufus would come to a violent end.
Brangus yearlings on the farthest, high- bold faces and ears thrust forward against At the morgue, Grant had seen Rufus’s
est ridge. He interrupted Rufus: “I think the blue sky were a challenge: Grant driver’s license and learned that his name
they made us.” had been through this kind of thing was also Lloyd. Spook gave some clos-
“So what? Never was a cow could with Rufus before, climbing things, sliding remarks (“Never was a horse Rufus
outrun a horse. We got them trapped ing down things, and getting a truck couldn’t ride”—huge pause—“until this
between two oceans.” onto two wheels while exiting a Tulsa one”), while Jelly snivelled in a folding
The cattle were on a grassy table off-ramp. This looked worse. chair among her kin. Spook said that all
and—in accordance with the old graz- It was terrible steep, the footing hard Rufus had ever wanted from back when
ing law, “Take half, leave half, and leave caliche. The horses tried to turn back. he was teeny-tiny was to be a cowboy,
the big half ”—Coy had decreed that The ground gradually changed eleva- and you had to admit that astride some
they had taken their half and ought to tion until they seemed to face into it, old bronc down there in Oklahoma
be moved to another pasture. The old a crown of sky above. Their hooves was the way Rufus would have wanted
cows understood as soon as they saw to go, spurring to the end. At this, the
the horsemen, and faded toward low small group of mourners murmured and
ground following a hornless lead steer, groaned approvingly, while Grant’s fa-
their calves playing behind. But the ther rolled his eyes, then covered his face
yearlings gathered speed along the ridge, with a big rough hand, as though to con-
scattered birds wheeling in the wind. ceal an unruly emotion.
“Look at the sumbitches go,” Rufus Behind the food table, someone had
said, staring at them fondly. “Range- erected a square of particleboard with
land cattle, never been penned, num- what was meant to be an image of Rufus
ber nines in their tails. Sweet!” He blew atop a horse, all four of its feet drawn
a cone of smoke straight up to the sky. slipped, and the riders crawled up over up as it attempted to unload “Rufus,”
“Don’t be passing me, Grant. You don’t their saddles, arms along the horses’ who swung his hat high over his head
know the way.” Grant reined up, ac- necks to help them balance. The weight with insouciant contempt for the worst
cepted Rufus’s pace. “Unfortunately, I on the horses’ forelegs grew lighter, until the horse could do. As Grant held a
still carry a torch for Alva, despite her Grant lost his nerve and shimmied hesitant spoon above a platter of mys-
preference for that sorry red-headed down to lead his gelding on foot. Rufus terious contents, Spook sidled up to
dog. I met her when I was delivering shook his head in disappointment as him and gazed at the picture. He said,
oxygen. I stopped by to pick up the Grant struggled to walk. They pushed “The picture isn’t for you, pard. You
equipment after her dad died. She was on a few more yards to a bank of wild were there.” 
so beautiful I told her how much I roses lying athwart the trail, where Ru-
wanted her. She pointed to the couch fus’s horse sank on its haunches, stared NEWYORKER.COM
and said, ‘Over there O.K.?’” around wild-eyed, and fell over back- Thomas McGuane on long-lasting friendships.

THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
SPOOKED
What’s wrong with the C.I.A.?
BY AMY DAVIDSON SORKIN
n January 4, 1995, Senator Dan- wouldn’t have gone away. The State De- level imaging, or with Space Delta 6, the
O iel Patrick Moynihan, of New

York, introduced a bill called the
Abolition of the Central Intelligence
partment already had its own mini agency,
the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.
The Departments of Energy and Trea-
nation’s newest intelligence agency, which
is attached to the Space Force. Abolish-
ing the C.I.A. might do nothing more
Agency Act. It had been a rough stretch sury each had one, too. The Defense In- than reconfigure the turf wars.
for the C.I.A. The year before, Aldrich telligence Agency conducted clandestine As the senator from New York also
Ames, a longtime officer, had been con- operations; U.S. Army Intelligence, Air knew, a large proportion of the C.I.A.’s
victed of being a longtime mole for So- Force Intelligence, and the Office of Naval resources are devoted not to intelligence
viet (and then Russian) intelligence. De- Intelligence kept themselves busy as well. gathering but to covert operations, some
spite having a reputation among his The National Security Agency was nearly of which look like military operations. In
colleagues as a problem drinker who ap- two decades away from the revelation, “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The His-
peared to live far beyond his means, Ames by Edward Snowden, a contractor and a tory and Future of American Intelligence”
had been given high-level assignments former C.I.A. employee, that it had col- (Princeton)—one of several recent books
with access to the names of American lected information about the phone calls that coincide with the seventy-fifth an-
sources in the U.S.S.R. When the F.B.I. of most Americans, but it was a behe- niversary of the agency’s founding—
finally arrested him, he was in the Jaguar moth even in Moynihan’s time. So was Amy B. Zegart, a political scientist at
he used for commuting to work at Lang- the Federal Bureau of Investigation.There Stanford, writes that it’s “getting harder
ley; by then, he was responsible for the were about a dozen agencies then; now, to know just where the CIA’s role ends
death of at least ten agents. Moynihan after reforms that were supposed to and the military’s role begins.” Yet the
said that the case was such a flamboyant streamline things, there are eighteen, in- agency’s paramilitary pursuits and related
display of incompetence that it might ac- cluding the Office of the Director of Na- covert activities go back decades. They
tually be a distraction from “the most tional Intelligence (O.D.N.I.), a sort of include the botched Bay of Pigs landing,
fundamental defects of the C.I.A.” He meta-C.I.A. that has a couple of thou- the brutal Phoenix Program in Vietnam,
meant that the agency—in what he con- sand employees, and the Department of and a long list of assassination attempts,
sidered to be its “defining failure”—had Homeland Security’s Office of Intelli- coup plots, the mining of a harbor (with
both missed the fact that the Soviet Union gence and Analysis. The Drug Enforce- explosive devices the agency built itself ),
was on the verge of collapse and done lit- ment Administration (which currently and drone strikes. These operations have
tle to hasten its end. has foreign offices in sixty-nine countries) very seldom ended well.
He gave a diagnosis for what had has an Office of National Security Intel- Moynihan’s bill had no more luck
gone wrong. “Secrecy keeps mistakes ligence. Four million people in the United than another that he introduced the same
secret,” he said. “Secrecy is a disease. It States now have security clearances. day, aimed at ending Major League Base-
causes a hardening of the arteries of the It can be hard to sort out which agen- ball’s exemption from antitrust laws. In
mind.” He quoted John le Carré on that cies do what; players in the espionage each case, people understood that there
point, adding that the best information business aren’t always good with bound- was a problem, but both institutions were
actually came from the likes of area spe- aries. Both the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. protected by the sense that there was
ABOVE: PHILIPPE PETIT-ROULET
cialists, diplomats, historians, and journal- make use of satellite resources, including something essential, and perhaps authen-
ists. If the C.I.A. was disbanded, he said, commercial ones, but there is a separate tically American, about them, including
the State Department could pick up the agency in charge of a spy-satellite fleet, their very brokenness. A sudden turn of
intelligence work, and do a better job. the National Reconnaissance Office— events can convince even the C.I.A.’s
Moynihan was, in some respects, being not to be confused with the National most sober critics that the agency will
disingenuous. As he well knew, even if Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which save us all, whether from terrorists or
his bill had passed, spies and spying deals with both space-based and ground- from Donald Trump. But, seventy-five
The paramilitary pursuits of the C.I.A.—including assassination attempts, coup plots, and drone strikes—seldom end well.
ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS DANTHONY THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 61
years in, it’s far from clear whether the tice, what he tried to build, according to like what Moynihan wanted. J. Edgar
C.I.A. is good at its job, or what that job a colleague, was a “private army.” His es- Hoover argued that “World Wide In-
is or should be, or how we could get rid capades often risked too much and gained telligence” should be turned over to the
of the agency if we wanted to. too little. In late 1943, one of his own of- F.B.I., with military intelligence subser-
ficers wrote to him that “the set-up has vient to him. In some alternative history,
ow did we end up with the C.I.A.? been incredibly wasteful in manpower he might have pulled that off; by 1943,
H A familiar explanation is that the
shock of Pearl Harbor made the United
and, except for a few spotty accomplish-
ments, has been a national failure.” And
he was running undercover operations
in twenty Latin American countries. And
States realize it needed more spies; the it had produced “chaos in the field.” Don- so things could have been worse.
Office of Strategic Services was formed ovan’s nickname was Wild Bill, but his Donovan was an adept publicist, but
and jumped into action; and, when the staff called him Seabiscuit, after the thor- what mattered most, in the end, was that
war ended, the O.S.S. evolved seamlessly oughbred, because of his tendency to race he was good, or lucky, when it came to
into the C.I.A., ready to go out and win around, engaging in what was basically hiring people. Despite the “pale, male,
the Cold War. But that narrative isn’t quite war tourism. In the end, though, the O.S.S. and Yale” stereotype, the O.S.S. was some-
right, particularly regarding the relation- made real contributions, including through what more diverse than other units, and
ship between the O.S.S. and the C.I.A. its contacts with the French Resistance. certainly more eclectic. Among its ranks
The United States has always used But Donovan’s complaint about D Day were Ralph Bunche, Herbert Marcuse,
spies of some sort. George Washington was that there was “too much planning.” and Julia Child. Many of its officers moved
had a discretionary espionage budget Counterintelligence and strategic thinking straight to the new C.I.A. Most conse-
for which he didn’t have to turn in re- bored him, and the O.S.S.’s analysis divi- quentially, perhaps, four future directors
ceipts. In the early part of the twentieth sion was seen as secondary to its operations. of the C.I.A. were O.S.S. veterans: Allen
century, the State Department had an When Harry Truman became Pres- Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby,
intelligence-analysis unit, along with a ident, in April, 1945, he took a look at and William Casey. Each seems to have
cryptography group called the Black the O.S.S. and, in September, 1945, abol- had glory-day memories of the O.S.S.,
Chamber, which operated out of a brown- ished it. About two years later, he signed which is to say that each, in various ways,
stone in New York’s Murray Hill until it the National Security Act, which estab- was afflicted with what a general in Army
was shut down, in 1929. The Army and lished the C.I.A. (and the Department intelligence called “the screwball Dono-
the Navy had cryptography and recon- of Defense), but he didn’t want the new van effect.” Casey, who put a picture of
naissance units, too. When the Second agency to be like the group Donovan Donovan on his wall, said of his old boss,
World War began, their operations had run. Instead, it was supposed to do “We all glowed in his presence.” Wild
ramped up dramatically, and, as Nicho- what its name suggested: centralize the Bill lost the bureaucratic fight but won
las Reynolds recounts in “Need to Know: intelligence that various agencies gath- the personnel and mythology wars.
World War II and the Rise of American ered, analyze it, and turn it into something And, of course, the agency found cus-
Intelligence” (Mariner), these units, not the President could use. “It was not in- tomers and collaborators in the White
the O.S.S., handled most of the code- tended as a ‘Cloak and Dagger’ Outfit!,” House. There was no mention of co-
breaking. The problem became the vol- Truman later wrote. He also had to deal vert action in the law that chartered the
ume of raw intelligence. The task of mak- with public apprehensions that he might C.I.A., but Presidents—starting with
ing sense of it and of turning it into Truman—began using it that way. One
something that policymakers could use of the agency’s first operations involved
went to an office within the Army’s mil- meddling in the 1948 Italian election,
itary-intelligence division (or G-2), which, to insure the victory of the Christian
Reynolds says, produced “the country’s Democrats. The subsidies and outright
best strategic intelligence” during the war. bribery of Italian politicians, some of
That office’s work was directed by Al- them on the far, far right, continued into
fred McCormack, a former clerk for Su- the nineteen-seventies.
preme Court Justice Harlan Stone and
a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. lmost from its creation, though, there
Many of the people he brought in were
young corporate lawyers; the theory was
create what a Chicago Tribune headline
called a “Super Gestapo Agency”—which
A was a sense that something about
the C.I.A. was off. The split between co-
that their training in plowing through is why, in its charter, the C.I.A. was vert action and intelligence gathering
mountains of documents made them banned from domestic spying. and analysis was part of it. The director
ideal intelligence analysts. Reynolds’s book is the best of the of the agency was also supposed to be
William J. Donovan, who led and recent batch, and the most readable. It the leader of U.S. intelligence as a whole,
largely conceived of the O.S.S., was also does not retrofit the history of the O.S.S. but, invariably, the person in the job
a Wall Street lawyer, but one with an around the assumption that the C.I.A. seemed more invested in preëminence
aversion to the “legalistic.” What Donovan was the inevitable lead postwar intelligence than in coördination. That setup re-
envisioned was essentially an array of agency. There were other contenders, in- mained in place until the establishment
commando units that would operate cluding a version of McCormack’s office of the O.D.N.I., in 2004, a move that
stealthily and behind enemy lines. In prac- in the State Department—something thus far has mostly continued a tradi-
tion of trying to deal with the C.I.A.’s
dysfunction by setting up ever more agen-
cies, offices, and centers. (The N.S.A.
was established, in 1952, in response to a
series of cryptography-related failures.)
“Legacy of Ashes,” Tim Weiner’s 2008
history of the C.I.A.—and still an in-
valuable overview—takes its title from a
lament by Eisenhower about what he’d
be leaving his successors if the “faulty”
structure of American intelligence wasn’t
changed. Since Weiner’s book was pub-
lished, the ashes, and the agencies, have
only been piling up.
Zegart’s “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms”
aims to bring that history to the pres-
ent. Zegart has served as an adviser to
intelligence agencies, and she provides
a decent guide to our current bureau-
cracy. Throughout, her book is clear and
well organized—maybe a little too well
organized, one feels, after taking in the
“Seven Deadly Biases” of intelligence
analysis, the “Four Main Adversaries” “Do you know how fast you’re going? A weekend
and the “Five Types of Attack” in the upstate after only two dates?”
crypto area, and the “Three Words, Four
Types” that define covert action. (The
covert-action words, incidentally, are “in-
• •
fluence,” “acknowledged,” and “abroad.”)
Not a few paragraphs read like Power- who-knows case. She turns it into a par- C.I.A.’s director, George Tenet, made
Point charts; contradictions are displayed able about the problems with Congress— him more likely to vouch for the faulty
without really being reckoned with. She suggesting that, although the committee intelligence on weapons of mass destruc-
observes that the balance between “hunt- structure may have needed rejiggering, tion used to justify the war. “Social mo-
ing” and “gathering” seems off, but, in the moral compass of those involved in bility so often leads to conformity,” warns
her telling, the fact that Presidents of the program of torture was just fine. Jeffreys-Jones, himself the son of an ac-
both parties regularly turn to the C.I.A. Another new volume, “A Question of ademic historian.
for paramilitary and other covert tasks Standing: A History of the CIA” (Ox- During the Vietnam War, the C.I.A.
constitutes proof that doing so is part ford), by Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, a profes- had discouraging intelligence to offer,
of the order of things. The impression sor emeritus of history at the University and, when successive Administrations
she leaves is that if it all goes wrong, it’s of Edinburgh, offers the insights of a didn’t want to hear it, focussed on being
because some checklist has been missed. more distant observer. He can be astute helpful by providing those supposedly
One of the top priorities of U.S. intel- about how “false memories” of the O.S.S.’s quick fixes. That meant abetting a coup
ligence today, she thinks, should be per- accomplishments have led the C.I.A. in 1963, spying on antiwar protesters,
suading tech companies to get with the astray. Part of his argument is that the and launching the Phoenix Program,
program and help out. She moots the agency has acted as if its influence dean anti-Vietcong campaign marked by
creation of yet another agency, to deal pended on its standing with whoever is torture and by arbitrary executions; in
with OSINT—open-source intelligence. in the White House, thus motivating it total, more than twenty thousand peo-
In one chapter, Zegart provides a list to offer Presidents quick fixes that fix ple were killed under Phoenix’s auspices.
of scandals involving spying within the nothing. The net effect is to reduce its Phoenix was run by William Colby,
U.S. by various intelligence agencies— standing, and that of the U.S., with the the O.S.S. alum, who was soon promoted
notably the N.S.A., the F.B.I., and the public at home and abroad. But Jeffreys- to C.I.A. director. At lower levels, dis-
C.I.A. “All of these activities violated Jones is prone to rash generalizations and content about Vietnam fuelled leaks. In
American law,” she writes. “But that’s the pronouncements. He theorizes that, in December, 1974, the journalist Seymour
point: domestic laws forbid this kind of the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hersh told the agency that he was about
surveillance of Americans.” How is that George W. Bush’s national-security ad- to publish a story in the Times exposing
the point, exactly? She depicts the Sen- viser, Condoleezza Rice, may have been its domestic spying. Whether in a miscal-
ate’s 2014 Torture Report, which detailed susceptible to “war mongering” due to culation or (as Jeffreys-Jones somewhat
profound abuses in the C.I.A.’s so-called her status as “a descendant of slaves,” and breathlessly speculates) as an act of per-
black sites, as a they-said, the-agency-said, that the working-class background of the sonal expiation, Colby gave Hersh partial
confirmation. Amid the scandals and the Holt’s research does turn up evidence spectively, to elevate a shah and a military
Congressional hearings that followed, that Jane Burrell, one of her subjects, was regime. Secret wars tend not to be so se-
Colby angered some of his colleagues, the first C.I.A. officer to die in the line cret in the country where they take place.
and Henry Kissinger, by laying bare even of duty, in a plane crash in France, in It was, no doubt, frustrating for
more. It emerged that, in 1973, Colby’s 1948, a fact that the agency itself appar- Hutchison when, a few years later, her
predecessor had asked senior agency of- ently missed. Holt ends her book with colleagues on the Bay of Pigs task force
ficials to produce a list of things the C.I.A. a call for a star honoring Burrell to be failed to make use of her Spanish-lan-
had done that might have been unlaw- added to the C.I.A.’s memorial wall. Of guage skills. But are we supposed to think
ful. The resulting document, covering the hundred and thirty-seven officers that the whole misconceived enterprise
just the prior fifteen years, was known represented there, she writes, forty-five would have gone off without a hitch were
in-house as “The Family Jewels,” and died accidentally, the majority in plane it not for the C.I.A.’s misogyny? One of
was almost seven hundred pages long. crashes, meaning that Burrell’s case would Holt’s minor themes is that women in
be fairly typical. Burrell was on the return the C.I.A. were seen as more natural an-
he question of how much it mat- leg of a trip to Brussels, where she’d been alysts than operatives—with analysis, in
T ters who works at the C.I.A. is a
perennial one. The influence of Dono-
sent to talk to war-crimes investigators
about a mess the C.I.A. had created by
turn, seen as less manly, and less valuable,
to everybody’s detriment. But she is more
van’s acolytes shows that decisions about relying on an agent who turned out to intent on showing that these women were
whom you recruit can, in a formative have worked with the S.S. and was now also daring. The main point of “Wise
period or at a critical juncture, make a in custody. In that respect, too, Burrell, Gals” is that it’s cool that women were
big difference. But, once an institutional who had personally handled the agent, in the early C.I.A., and therefore that the
culture has become entrenched, it can was typical of the C.I.A. (After Burrell C.I.A. itself was cooler than we’d real-
be easier to see how the institution shapes vouched for him, the man was released.) ized. Holt celebrates a big promotion
the people within it than vice versa. The subject of the C.I.A.’s postwar rela- Page got that afforded her access to the
“Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the tions with former Nazis—some of whom, secret of a safe containing shellfish-
CIA and Changed the Future of Espio- like Reinhard Gehlen, it helped to install derived poison. You don’t have to be pale,
nage” (Putnam), by Nathalia Holt, comes in West Germany’s new intelligence ser- male, and Yale to be complicit in a bun-
at the question from a different angle. It’s vice—and with collaborationist émigré gled assassination plot, or, for that mat-
about five women who worked for the groups is, no doubt, a morass. Holt, alas, ter, a program of rendition and torture.
early C.I.A.; three also worked at the manages to make the story even more
O.S.S., and one, Eloise Page, began her garbled than it has to be. In the end, she hy do so many books about the
career as Bill Donovan’s secretary. Holt
is also the author of “Rise of the Rocket
basically treats the whole sordid episode
as a learning experience for the Gals.
W C.I.A. have trouble getting their
story straight? It can’t just be the secrecy
Girls,” about women in the early years of The problem is that the agency doesn’t of the work itself, at least with regard to
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and “The seem to learn much. Holt credits Mary the earlier years, about which much has
Queens of Animation,” about women at Hutchison with helping to build a net- been declassified. (Much remains under
the Walt Disney Company. Her book work of émigré Ukrainian nationalists. wraps: Moynihan complained that clas-
contains fine material for a beautifully Beginning in 1949, the agency parachuted sification created more than six million
art-directed streaming series, with set some of them (including one whom supposed secrets in 1993; Zegart writes
pieces in postwar Paris, nineteen-fifties Hutchison apparently distrusted) behind that the number in 2016 was fifty-five
Baghdad, and nineteen-seventies Greece, the Soviet border, where they were quickly million—not all of which can possibly
where Page was the C.I.A.’s first woman captured—and repeated the same pro- have been critical.) The aura of secrecy,
station chief. It even has a framing de- cedure for a number of years. “Despite by contrast, probably does distort the
vice in the form of the “Petticoat Panel,” the catastrophe, the Ukraine operation judgment of its chroniclers. And the scope
a working group of C.I.A. women that would serve as a template moving for- of the agency’s work is a challenge: it’s
convened in 1953 to document their un- ward,” Holt writes. “The C.I.A. had more hard to write expertly on places as far-
equal pay and treatment. Holt quotes the success with back-to-back operations in ranging as the Democratic Republic of
transcript of the meeting at which the Iran and Guatemala, where covert ac- Congo (where the agency initially planned
leadership of the agency summarily re- tion was able to deftly oust leaders con- to poison President Patrice Lumumba’s
jected their findings. Helms, the future sidered undesirable.” It’s odd to describe toothpaste, and instead ended up hand-
director, says, “It is just nonsense for these these coups as deft. One of Zegart’s handy ing a quarter of a million dollars to Jo-
gals to come on here and think that the lists is of the “unintended consequences” seph Mobutu, the country’s future dic-
government is going to fall apart because in Iran: “religious extremism, a revolution- tator, who facilitated the assassination)
their brains aren’t going to be used to the ary overthrow, the American hostage cri- and Afghanistan (where the C.I.A. has
maximum.” (In 1977, Helms was convicted sis, severed ties, regional instability, and had forty years of illusory gains and worse
of lying to Congress about the C.I.A.’s today’s rising nuclear dangers.” Guate- losses). But the biggest problem may be
machinations in Chile.) What the book mala is still dealing with the violent leg- the agency’s own pattern of self-decep-
is not, unfortunately, is a coherent his- acy of the coup that the C.I.A. visited tion. Holt, for example, sometimes seems
tory of the C.I.A., of the era it depicts, upon it. Then there’s the question of the to go wrong when, rummaging through
or even of these women’s work. intended consequences, which were, re- the archives, she gives too much credit
to contemporaneous internal assessments
of an agent’s or an operation’s worth.
In truth, the C.I.A. has had a “defining BRIEFLY NOTED
failure” for every decade of its existence—
sometimes more than one. For Moyni- By Hands Now Known, by Margaret A. Burnham (Norton).
han, in the nineteen-nineties, it was the This history of Jim Crow explores “slavery’s afterlife in law”
lack of foresight about the Soviet Union; from the nineteen-twenties to the sixties through the fates
in the two-thousands, it was the phan- of Black Americans whose stories “were not meant to leave
tom weapons of mass destruction, fol- the South.” Some were “abducted from their homes, churches,
lowed by torture and, in still evolving fields, and other workplaces,” others murdered after flouting
ways, by the drone-based program of tar- bus segregation. Burnham illuminates a continuum of white
geted killings, with its high toll of civil- supremacy, dating back to slavery, that depended on the blur-
ian deaths. Barack Obama’s rapport with ring of “formal and mob law” and on an often complicit fed-
John Brennan, the C.I.A.’s director from eral government. “Law needed terror, and terror needed law,”
2013 to 2017, seems to have brought him she writes. She also examines Black Americans’ long-stand-
to accept the view that the killing of ing “practices of dissent and resistance” and describes repa-
American citizens abroad was acceptable, rations as an ethical imperative.
if managed prudently. The overuse of
the agency on the battlefield is due not The Portraitist, by Steven Nadler (Chicago). Little is known
to a military-manpower shortage but to about the Dutch painter Frans Hals: no letters or diaries sur-
wishful thinking about the benefits of vive, and the only contemporary documents are unrevealing.
secrecy and of a lack of accountability. But Nadler manages to construct a satisfying quasi-biography
It’s difficult to know, at this point, what by using the milieu of seventeenth-century Haarlem. The city,
the C.I.A.’s next defining failure—or, if Protestant and republican, had neither church nor monarchy
one tries to be optimistic, its stabilizing to commission art, so artists relied on the patronage of private
success—will be. Donald Trump has had citizens—an advantage for Hals, who excelled at capturing the
a complicated relationship with the in- spirit of locals. His rough brushwork lent an air of improvisa-
telligence community—increasingly caption to his boisterous depictions of soldiers, musicians, and
italized and abbreviated to I.C.—which tavern-goers. Though Hals has long been overshadowed by
is presently conducting a damage assess- his contemporary Rembrandt, Nadler demonstrates why his
ment regarding documents with classified peers held him to be “the modern painter par excellence.”
markings that he kept at Mar-a-Lago,
his Florida home. He might, of course, Barefoot Doctor, by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by
be reëlected, and have the C.I.A.’s tools Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Yale). During the Cultural
at his disposal again. If the C.I.A. isn’t Revolution, minimally trained “barefoot doctors” were sent
the place to turn for an expedient solution to the Chinese countryside, providing basic medical services
to foreign-policy problems, neither is it and folk remedies. The author of this novel was one of them,
bound to be the place to turn for a solu- and she draws on her experiences in the story of Mrs. Yi, a
tion to our democracy’s political problems. village herbalist who gathers her remedies on a nearby moun-
“If you ask intelligence officers what tain. She struggles to find a successor—either the flighty but
misperceptions bother them most, odds kindhearted Gray, who loves herbs but fears patients, or Mia,
are they’ll mention ethics,” Zegart writes. from nearby Deserted Village—and events become increas-
She quotes an official who complains ingly surreal. As the mountain changes shape and ghosts
that “people think we’re lawbreakers, we’re visit the living, mysterious connections between the body
human rights violators.” She insists that and nature emerge.
“officers think about ethics a lot.” She
portrays the agency as being filled with Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions, by Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi
hardworking moms and dads who do a (Amistad). This début novel, formed of interlocking short
great deal of “agonizing.” No doubt she’s stories, follows the lives of four Nigerian women who meet
right. But if the C.I.A. keeps falling down at boarding school in the nineteen-eighties and whose fu-
all the same, something must be tragically tures are drastically altered by a protest that they organize.
amiss in the agency’s structure or culture, The stories move backward and forward in time: we exca-
or both. All the talk of coups and assas- vate nineteenth-century family roots and leap to 2050, when
sination plots, Zegart worries, distracts one character sacrifices herself for her son. Through the
people from understanding the C.I.A.’s years, the four friends face various challenges. One encoun-
more basic intelligence mission. In fact, ters racism in Kraków; another, unhappy as a banker in New
the party most distracted by such activ- York, contemplates the “scalp-searing sun” and the bean pud-
ities—and by the military role it has taken ding of home. Ogunyemi shows how early friendships can
on—seems to be the agency itself.  shape entangled alliances that define women’s lives.
Johnson found them “abstruse.” He
BOOKS bestowed on Donne and his contem-
poraries the label “the metaphysical
SOUL MUSIC
poets,” not intending it as a compli-
ment. Their trouble, he wrote, was
that they were “men of learning, and
John Donne and the purpose of poetry. to show their learning was their whole
endeavour; but, unluckily resolving to
BY ADAM KIRSCH show it in rhyme, instead of writing
poetry they only wrote verses.” Their
ideas, unlike Pope’s, were “seldom nat-
ural”: “The reader, far from wonder-
ing that he missed them, wonders
more frequently by what perverseness
of industry they were ever found.”
This judgment prevailed into the nine-
teenth century. The most popular po-
etry anthology in Victorian England,
Francis Turner Palgrave’s “The Golden
Treasury,” included not a single poem
by Donne.
In contrast, the fifth edition of “The
Norton Anthology of Poetry,” pub-
lished in 2004, includes thirty-one—
more than those by Wordsworth or
Keats, almost as many as those by
Shakespeare. What made the differ-
ence was the revolution of modernism,
and particularly the influence of T. S.
Eliot. In his 1921 essay “The Metaphys-
ical Poets,” Eliot argued that it was ex-
actly Donne’s difficulty and strange-
ness that made him great. “A thought
to Donne was an experience; it mod-
ified his sensibility,” Eliot wrote, and
modernist poets wanted to recover that
union between intellect and feeling. If
the poetry that resulted was obscure,
ne way to chart the development to thy one, all other brains refuse.” Jon- that was not a defect but a proof of au-
O of English poetry over the past
four hundred years is to look at the fluc-
son might have complained about his
friend’s handling of meter—“Donne,
thenticity. “Poets in our civilization, as
it exists at present, must be difficult,”
tuating reputation of John Donne. A for not keeping of accent, deserved he declared.
courtier and priest who was born in hanging,” he reportedly said—but, in Three hundred years earlier, Donne
1572 and lived in London at the same early-seventeenth-century poetry, knot- had felt the same way. In “An Anat-
time as Shakespeare, Donne was highly tiness and braininess were more ad- omy of the World,” he turned an elegy
regarded as a poet in his lifetime, even mired than smoothness and musicality. for a fourteen-year-old girl into a di-
though he never published a book of By the time Samuel Johnson came agnosis of spiritual chaos in a world
poems. The large number of surviving to write his “Lives of the Poets,” in that “Is crumbled out again to his at-
handwritten copies of his work shows 1779-81, tastes had changed. In a neo- omies./’Tis all in pieces, all coherence
that it was eagerly shared by connois- classical era, ideas still had a place in gone.” And he worked this incoherence
seurs, and the first printed editions ap- poetry, but they were supposed to be into the very texture of his poetry. In
peared soon after his death, in 1631. familiar ones, dignified by harmoni- “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” parting
When his friend Ben Jonson, another ous verse—“What oft was thought, lovers cry coins and globes; in “The
leading poet of the age, came to praise but ne’er so well express’d,” in the Comparison,” the sweat of a rival’s mis-
Donne in verse, the quality he singled words of Alexander Pope, the master tress is the “spermatic issue of ripe men-
out was his intellect: “Donne, the de- of the rhyming couplet. By this stan- struous boils.” In “A Nocturnal Upon
light of Phoebus and each Muse,/Who, dard, Donne’s ideas looked weird. St. Lucy’s Day,” Donne annihilates him-
self: “I am rebegot / Of absence, dark-
Donne’s poems, forcefully intimate, were written to be passed hand to hand. ness, death; things which are not.”
66 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN BROADLEY
Katherine Rundell titles her new his lifetime as a priest. As the dean of scribing one of his books, in a letter, as
biography of Donne “Super-Infinite” St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 until his “written by Jack Donne, and not Dr.
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It’s an in- death, he was one of the capital’s most Donne.” The problem for biographers,
genious way of making his difficulty prominent clergymen, a celebrated from Walton to Rundell, is how these
sound exciting as well as formidable. preacher whose performances drew two phases or faces fit together.
“Super-infinite” is a word that would thousands. “Super-Infinite” begins with
be equally at home in a mathematical a description of a 1623 sermon in which undell observes that Donne was
theorem and a comic book. In fact, it
was one of Donne’s many neologisms,
“the extreme press and thronging” of
his audience led to a stampede, in which
R born within sight of the cathedral
where he would later preside—the old
used in a sermon to describe the world “two or three men” were “taken up dead St. Paul’s, which burned down in 1666
that waits for us after death: “an in- for the time”—in other words, proba- and was replaced by Christopher Wren’s
finite, a super-infinite, an unimaginable bly unconscious. When Izaak Walton dome. But he was hardly destined to
space.” For Rundell, it is a perfect ex- wrote the f irst, brief biography of rise in the Church of England. The
ample of Donne’s “absurd, grandilo- Donne, in 1640, his focus was on the Donnes were a Catholic family, who
quent, courageous, hungry” style, the religious evolution that led the poet to kept the old faith at a time when Queen
way he dislocated language in pursuit take holy orders around the time that Elizabeth I was determined to make
of extremes. he turned forty-three. The poetry he England a Protestant realm once and
Rundell is an Oxford scholar whose wrote some twenty years earlier is barely for all. Through his mother, the poet
previous books have mostly been nov- mentioned, except as “the recreations was related to Thomas More, the au-
els for children, and in “Super-Infinite” of his youth.” thor of “Utopia,” who died as a mar-
she writes with both the knowledge Donne the poet and Donne the tyr in 1535 for resisting Henry VIII’s
of an expert and the friendly passion priest were both writers, but they make break with Rome. Half a century later,
of a proselytizer. Donne, she prom- very different impressions. “It’s some- being a Catholic was still a matter of
ises, “is protection against those who times said that the more you read life and death. In 1593, when Donne
would tell you to narrow yourself, to Donne’s verse, the more you love him, was twenty-one, his younger brother
follow fashion in your mode of and the more you read Donne’s prose, Henry was arrested for hiding a Jesuit
thought.” His writing expresses “what the less you can bear him,” Rundell priest in his rooms in London and died
he knew with such precision and flair writes. In fairness, it depends on which in jail of plague. (The priest was hanged,
that we can seize hold of it, and carry prose you read. “Biathanatos,” a trea- drawn, and quartered.)
it with us.” tise on the religious ethics of suicide, Donne’s Catholic background meant
There are many such injunctions is discouragingly long and dense, and that certain doors were closed to him.
and takeaways in the book, as if the “Ignatius His Conclave,” a satire on He attended Oxford as a teen-ager
reader must be convinced that invest- the founder of the Jesuit order, is un- but didn’t take a degree, since doing
ing time in a four-hundred-year-old likely to raise a chuckle today. so required swearing an oath of alle-
poet will bring moral profit as well as But “Devotions Upon Emergent giance to the Church of England. As
aesthetic pleasure. Among the things Occasions,” a series of vivid and search- a young man, however, he converted
Donne can teach us, she writes, are ing reflections on mortality, remains to Anglicanism—whether out of sin-
how “to build our own way of using just as powerful as when Donne wrote cere belief, the desire to get ahead, or
our voice,” and that “there is no such it, in 1623, during a serious illness. Lying (most likely) a combination of both.
thing as safety, while you are alive,” and in bed, he heard church bells toll for Donne was set on a career at court,
that human beings are “capable of . . . the dying and wondered if they were and the right faith was a prerequisite,
genius, but also destruction.” She con- being rung for him. Perhaps “they who along with intelligence, boldness, and
cludes, “Donne’s work had in it a stark are about me, and see my state, may the ability to flatter.
moral imperative: pay attention.” have caused it to toll for me, and I In a system where power was per-
But did Donne think of poetry as a know not that,” he writes. The thought sonal, flowing down from the Queen
form of instruction, a matter of moral led to Donne’s most famous lines, to her favorite noblemen to their
imperatives? Other poets of the sev- though probably few who quote them protégés, a winning appearance was
enteenth century certainly did. Milton know who wrote them and why: “No equally important. A portrait painted
announced that his purpose in “Para- man is an island, entire of itself; every in his early twenties shows Donne as
dise Lost” was “to justify the ways of man is a piece of the continent, a part the perfect courtier; his pencil-thin mus-
God to men,” while Herbert wrote, “A of the main . . . any man’s death di- tache, Rundell writes, reveals “a man
verse may find him, who a sermon flies.” minishes me, because I am involved who understands that even facial hair
With Donne, however, things are never in mankind, and therefore never send has to it an element of performance.”
quite so clear-cut. What drew readers to know for whom the bell tolls; it Writing poetry was another part of
to him in the twentieth century is, tolls for thee.” that performance. In later literary eras,
rather, his very modern baff lement, In his poetry, Donne seduces and the poet came to be thought of as a
which finds its way into even his most mocks; in his sermons and tracts, he solitary figure communing with his
religiously affirmative poems. ponders sickness and sin and death. soul. “I wandered lonely as a cloud/That
Donne was most widely known in He was aware of the dichotomy, de- f loats on high o’er vales and hills,”
Wordsworth wrote. For the Elizabe- These inanimate comparisons are un- write, as if it simply spoke itself. Donne
thans, however, poetry was a social art. deniably weird—the kind of thing amazes us by making it look almost
Gentlemen often wrote poems to win Samuel Johnson had in mind when he impossibly hard.
over a lover or a patron, and a number complained about images “yoked by
of figures known in their lifetimes as violence together.” ven so, his love poems weren’t as
diplomats or soldiers would be sur-
prised to learn that they are remem-
The uncanniness is deliberate. Donne
turns the lovers’ bodies into objects to
E challenging as his actual love life.
After fighting in two naval expeditions
bered solely for their poetry. emphasize that their souls have escaped against the Spanish in the mid-fifteen-
Donne’s poems were written to be and are now merging in the air to cre- nineties, Donne was offered a job as a
passed hand to hand. Manuscript cop- ate a new, joint soul. (“Ecstasy,” he secretary to Thomas Egerton, the Lord
ies from his lifetime are still being dis- counts on the reader to know, comes Keeper, one of the highest-ranked legal
covered. This intimacy helps to ex- from the Greek word ekstasis, which officers in Queen Elizabeth’s court.
plain one of their most recognizable literally means “standing outside one- Donne moved into his employer’s Lon-
features: the casually forceful first lines self.”) As Donne explains: don mansion, where the household in-
that seem to reach out and shake you cluded Egerton’s niece by marriage, Anne
by the shoulder. “For God’s sake hold When love with one another so More. Soon they fell in love. “Some-
Interinanimates two souls,
your tongue and let me love,” Donne That abler soul, which thence doth flow, thing in her face or manner bludgeoned
demands in “The Canonization”; “Busy Defects of loneliness controls. John Donne in the heart,” Rundell writes
old fool, unruly Sun,” he chides in in a typically vigorous metaphor.
“The Sun Rising.” He’s no more po- When lovers come together, in other Anne was around fourteen and
lite toward himself. “I am two fools, words, they form a new being free from Donne was in his late twenties, but
I know / For loving, and for saying “defects” such as maleness and female- that wasn’t why the affair had to be
so / In whining poetry,” begins “The ness. But that isn’t the end of the po- clandestine—such an age difference
Triple Fool.” em’s chain of reasoning. After achiev- wasn’t unusual for the time. A more
Once Donne has your attention, ing this ecstasy, Donne urges, the serious obstacle was the imbalance in
he’s unafraid to make demands on it. lovers should return to their gendered wealth and social status. Anne’s father
Another of his favorite techniques is bodies so they can reënact their spiri- hoped she would marry into a titled
the “conceit,” a complex extended met- tual union on the physical plane. Love family, and would never have consid-
aphor. Ordinarily, poetic comparisons without sex would be invisible, and ered the middle-class Donne as a suitor.
are brief and easy to grasp. “My love therefore incomplete: So the couple presented him with a
is like a red, red rose / That’s newly fait accompli: in 1601, after four years
sprung in June,” Robert Burns wrote. So must pure lovers’ souls descend of courtship, they were secretly mar-
T’affections, and to faculties,
Donne’s classic poem “A Valediction Which sense may reach and apprehend, ried by a priest who was Donne’s friend.
Forbidding Mourning,” in contrast, Else a great prince in prison lies. It was a gambit straight out of “Romeo
takes twelve lines to explain why part- and Juliet,” and, while it didn’t end quite
ing lovers are like the two legs of a “The Ecstasy” can be read as a se- as badly, the lovers paid a high price.
pair of compasses, observing: duction poem that takes a long detour When Anne’s father found out about the
to reach the customary plea—“Sleep marriage, he had Donne fired and thrown
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do. in jail. The poet was soon released and
eventually won his father-in-law’s grudg-
And though it in the center sit, ing acceptance of the marriage, but the
Yet when the other far doth roam, damage to Donne’s professional stand-
It leans and hearkens after it, ing was irreparable. He had betrayed his
And grows erect, as that comes home.
employer’s trust, and no one was willing
Donne’s conceits are often as arti- to take the risk of hiring him again. The
ficial and far-fetched as this. In “The couple moved out of London and en-
Flea,” for instance, he compares an in- dured years of poverty as their family
sect that has bitten both the poet and grew. His career in government was over
his mistress to their “marriage bed,” with me.” It can also be read as a the- before it had really begun.
because their blood mingles inside it. oretical statement about the bisexual- It took Donne a very long time to
But the metaphors aren’t merely vir- ity of the spirit, in the tradition of Pla- reconcile himself to the fact. Not until
tuosic; in elaborating them, he discov- to’s Symposium. Above all, however, 1615 did he finally give up his secular
ers surprising new aspects of his sub- it is the poetic equivalent of a gym- ambitions and take holy orders, at the
ject. “The Ecstasy” begins by likening nast’s floor routine: a demonstration suggestion of King James I and some
the reclining poet and his lover to a of literary agility, as Donne leaps from high-ranking churchmen. The sequence
pillow on a bed, then to a violet droop- idea to image and back without ever of events leaves the distinct impression
ing on a riverbank. Their clasped hands putting a foot wrong. Shakespeare, that, for Donne, the priesthood was less
are cemented together by a balm; their Donne’s contemporary, amazes us by a calling than a consolation prize. Run-
eyes are threaded together on a string. making great verse seem so easy to dell compares the deanship of St. Paul’s
to a piñata: “hit it, and perks and favours
and new connections came pouring out.”
Izaak Walton’s biography worked hard
to combat this mercenary interpretation,
finding precedents for Donne’s reluc-
tance to become a priest in Moses, who
resisted God’s call out of humility, and
St. Augustine, who had to overcome
inner “strifes” before he converted to
Christianity. Once Donne was ordained,
Walton insists, he became a different
man: “Now he had a new calling, new
thoughts, and a new employment for
his wit and eloquence. Now all his earthly
affections were changed into divine love.”
But the intellectual restlessness
and addiction to metaphor that made
Donne a great love poet are just as ev-
ident in his religious verse and his ser-
mons. The continuity comes into sharp
focus in one of his favorite puns—his
own name, which sounds like “done,”
and in an age of variable orthography
could be spelled the same way.
When his secret marriage was dis-
covered and ruin loomed, the poet wrote
to his bride, “John Donne, Anne Donne,
Un-done”—a bit of wordplay that be-
came part of his legend. Because his
poems are mostly undated, it’s impos-
sible to know how many years passed
before he returned to the same pun “Got to go—my mom jeans and dad jeans are here.”
in the refrain of his solemn poem “A
Hymn to God the Father”:
• •
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which
I run,
And do run still, though still I do idea in a society like Renaissance En- corners can only be a figure of speech;
deplore? gland, where so many fundamental be- even Scripture can’t be taken at face value.
When thou hast done, thou hast not liefs were being rewritten. For centu- But, if so, who’s to say that the angels,
done,
For I have more. ries, being a good Christian had meant too, aren’t “imagined,” along with the re-
obeying the Pope; now it meant hat- demption they herald? Donne the priest
Even when God has pardoned the ing him. For even longer, the stars in would never have doubted the existence
poet, He doesn’t “have Donne.” Only the night sky had revolved around the of angels and Judgment Day, but Donne
when Donne remembers Christ’s sac- Earth in harmonious spheres. Now, the poet couldn’t stop himself from rais-
rifice is he convinced that he will be thanks to the discoveries of Coperni- ing the question. As the modernists
saved: “having done that, thou hast cus and Kepler, “The sun is lost, and would find centuries later, once poets
done;/ I fear no more.” th’earth, and no man’s wit / Can well start thinking in language, there’s no
What is the real inspiration for this
poem—the religious belief or the play
on words? It may seem like a minor
question, but it helps to explain the
direct him where to look for it,” Donne
wrote in “The Anatomy of the World.”
This mental vertigo works itself into
Donne’s poems in ways large and small.
1
telling where they might end up. 
From the Bangor (Maine) Daily News.

unsettling power of Donne’s work. His One of his “Holy Sonnets” begins in ar- During his time in the small town of 1,200
wit is a corrosive element; by finding resting fashion: “At the round earth’s outside Bangor, Karun developed a reputation
aggressively new ways to think and imagined corners, blow/Your trumpets, for odd behavior, he had a vacant state that
write about any subject, he raises the angels.” The image is taken from the made some uneasy and he regularly attended
meetings of the town’s select board, residents
suspicion that there are no stable real- Book of Revelation, where, on Judgment and officials said.
ities. Maybe language doesn’t just de- Day, angels stand at “the four corners of
scribe our world but creates it. the earth.” The poem acknowledges that, In these times, doing one’s civic duty is always
There was plenty of support for that since we know the Earth is a sphere, its worthy of suspicion.

ful youths whom he encountered on
THE ART WORLD night-life outings, chiefly in Berlin and
London, before and during his art-
STILLED LIFE
school studies at Bournemouth, in En-
gland. As with Goldin’s unhappy cou-
ples, his party scenes are like panes of
The photography of Wolfgang Tillmans. glass dropped through the middle of
symbioses. Beholding, you are at once
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL viewer and viewed, at instants that are
well served by fast, blurry takes. (Till-
mans employed a 50-mm. S.L.R. until
he went exclusively digital, in 2012.)
His initial body of work put him on
the art-world map, but he has some-
what downplayed it in his choices for
the present show, perhaps from exas-
peration at being lazily identified with
a fleeting Zeitgeist that determined
only the opening gambit for a game
that he has conducted in no end of
other directions.
Tillmans returns now and then, but
glancingly, to themes of social and sex-
ual fluidity. His gayness is a given, not
a battlefront. He has lived with H.I.V.
since 1997, and has been motivated by
gratitude to past pioneers of liberation
who made his freewheeling life and
art possible, rewarding him with near-
incessant exhibitions and speaking gigs
around the globe. I was skeptical of
“Wolfgang Tillmans: A Reader,” a vol-
ume, mainly of interviews, issued by
MOMA along with the show’s dazzling
catalogue, but what do you know? It
yields ur-texts of extraordinary intel-
ligence, responsiveness (he listens!),
and wit.
Tillmans, strikingly even-tempered,
is outspoken in support of liberal causes
“ T omense,
look without fear,” the im-
flabbergastingly installed
varying sizes, mediums, and formats,
which are often mounted from floor
and communities, but with a spirit more
citizenly than activist, as could be seen
retrospective of the German photog- to ceiling, and may less risk than exalt WOLFGANG TILLMANS / COURTESY THE ARTIST / DAVID ZWIRNER / GALERIE
in the pro-E.U. posters and polemics,
rapher Wolfgang Tillmans, at the Mu- banality. Almost violently sociable, the a reflex of his cosmopolitan ideals, that
seum of Modern Art, persuades me work retroactively mainstreams such he produced during the Brexit referen-
that the man is a genius. There’s a precedents as the stark intimacies of dum. He morphed for a spell in those
downside to the concession—it damp- love and loss in photographs by Nan months, he wrote at the time, “from an
ens my quarrels of taste with certain Goldin—though the irrepressibly inherently political, to an overtly polit-
items, among the show’s predominantly positive-minded Tillmans is never as ical person,” spurred by “an understand-
brilliant several hundred, that I do not downbeat as Goldin. ing of Western cultures as sleepwalk-
like. Geniuses alter the basic terms of Fifty-four years old, the third child ers into the abyss.” Usually, he humbly
the fields of art or science which hap- of parents who ran an export business preserves his detachment as an artist,
BUCHHOLZ / MAUREEN PALEY
pen to engage them. Criteria that once in a city near Cologne, Tillmans soared pushing boundaries only when it makes
applied no longer compel. The ground to fame in the early nineties for work immediate sense to him. Intermittent
zero at MOMA is “art photography,” its that he had begun a few years earlier: provocations—genitalia male and fe-
former autonomy diluted in a tsunami an ostensibly scattershot but, in truth, male, the one-off shocker of a guy piss-
of images from Tillmans, in wildly acutely selective documentation of soul- ing onto a cushioned chair, a prevalent
intimation that whatever clothes are
The transformation of daylight in Tillmans’s “window/Caravaggio” (1997). seen may be doffed in the near future—
exemplify phenomena that he addresses the complicated table works, which truly glamorous, because all are so
bravely but sparingly, intent on fact smartly anticipated today’s torrent of downrightly human.
rather than on ideology or sentiment. information via institutional and social I’m amused by one portrait, “Irm
He stoutly shuns the liberal fallacy of media—and its numbing effect. Enough Hermann” (2000), of a red-headed, aging
mistaking hope for reality. of too much induces apathy. And any but invincibly charming collaborator of
one person’s sorting of the data seems the late filmmaker Rainer Werner Fass-
n a critical context, Tillmans oblit- essentially interchangeable with any- binder. To my perception, she over-
I erates Pop dialectics of “high” and
“low” art. He observes no distinction,
one else’s. Nor was I thrilled by Till-
mans’s videos, mainly of rotating disco
comes the gotcha gawkiness of an
averted gaze and an off-kilter smile
in the show’s arrangement, between balls set to techno music that he has with a self-possession that is all and in-
self-generated and commissioned composed, though in this case my re- accessibly her own. (I feel that I must
works, original and appropriated im- sistance may be a blind spot of gener- know her from somewhere.) But even
ages, framed fine prints and taped- or ational sensibility. that picture immortalizes an unrepeat-
pinned-up photocopies, deliberate and But genius. Everything by this art- able nugget of a singular biography.
accidental darkroom misadventures, ist—be it the image of a pair of jeans Then there are the still-lifes of re-
and, in matters of content, the politi- draped on a stair post or a man and a markably unremarkable windowsill
cally committed and the purely aes- woman perched in a tree and model- miscellanies: some random fruit and
thetic. (The show has been organized ling vinyl raincoats while otherwise bits of studio gear transfigured by a
by Roxana Marcoci, MOMA’s senior cu- naked, or fifty-six snapshots taken from happenstance of daylight. A specialty
rator of photography, but Tillmans was urban ground level of the airborne that harvests the abandon of Tillmans’s
closely involved in its production. He Concorde (some minus the plane but partying—in the past and occasionally
spent sixteen days installing the show— persuasively atremble with its roar)— recurrent, by his account—is a series
an engulfing art work in itself—with springs from an idea that, once thought, of unpeopled interiors that are littered
a crew of his own.) He is playful on demands execution. If the upshot is with empty beer bottles and other
principle, to usually exciting but some- boring, so be it. I’m put in mind of morning-after detritus. These photo-
times redundant effect. Looking with- Einstein having to fill in the workaday graphs shouldn’t amount to much, but
out fear entails for him an occasional math relevant to his eurekas. There’s to me they are stunningly lovely and,
resignation to tedium, which viewers an obviousness of a sort that baits the with only trace elements of melancholy,
are free to tolerate or to resent. It does disgruntled: “Nothing new,” they may poetically more telling of communal
pose problems. as much as declare. (“Besides, I thought ecstasy than any shots of the originat-
I am left cold by Tillmans’s cam- of it first.”) Tillmans is drastically— ing events could be. Think about morn-
eraless forays in abstraction, which he and coolly, calmly, and, indeed, fear- ings. They’re when the purest sense
has been making since the nineties, ei- lessly—self-aware. I keep trying to catch of what we are doing, or not doing,
ther by exposing photosensitive paper him not knowing what he’s doing. No with our temporary habitation of the
to colored light or by feeding it through dice yet. Earth sinks in.
faulty copying devices. The results, al- Tillmans’s most powerful images Speaking of planets, Tillmans has
beit often smashingly decorative, feel veer away from kinship with photo- been an enthusiast since boyhood for
painterly but lack the partnership of graphic genres and conventions. Con- sights of night skies and telescopic spec-
mind, eye, and hand—conception, en- sider his portraiture, usually of friends tacles: the ultimate intensification of
visioning, touch—that distinguishes but at times of celebrities appearing as our infinitesimal and brief—and there-
painting. They evoke but pointlessly nobody special, such as the British su- fore to be cherished—share in the uni-
sacrifice strengths of his early heroes permodel Kate Moss, the composer verse. My favorites in this line are fil-
Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, Philip Glass, and the musician Frank tered closeups of the sun looking like
whose jeux d’esprit are anchored in Ocean, for the cover of his 2016 album, a pink balloon, each one bearing a tiny
paint’s materiality. Also dismaying to “Blonde.” Tillmans’s empathetic fig- black spot: a transit of Venus. It feels
me are tabletop montages, however el- ures, often shown standing and some- trivial to call Tillmans a photographer.
egant, of photocopied pages from news- times larger than life, project improb- Rather, he is an artist who uses pho-
papers and magazines, from 2005 on, able conf lations of confidence and tography to the verge of using it up. His
collectively titled “Truth Study Center.” vulnerability. Captured in each is a wheelhouse, a guarantor of his sincer-
A related, wall-mounted assortment, moment—always a moment, present ity, is simple interest and an appetite
“Soldiers: The Nineties” (1999/2022), tense—of disequilibrium between the for surprise. Will he sustain it? That’s
beguiles with its outtakes of young sol- inside and the outside of an individ- to be seen, after the undoubtedly ex-
diers during that relatively pacific de- ual existence. The subjects tend to be hausting self-scrutiny of the MOMA ex-
cade. Tillmans hates war, he has said, attractive. Why gaze at them other- travaganza, a rare consent by him to a
while being mightily attracted to men wise? (Tillmans is a self-admitted retrospective rather than, as is usually
in uniform. The subjects look more like sucker for beauty, which extends to a his policy, an ad-hoc show centered on
lads at a summer camp than appren- color sense that battens on variants of what preoccupies him at any given time.
tices in lethality. complementary red and green or blue But what he has done is already so splen-
I confess to only quickly scanning and yellow.) But none comes off as did a gift to us, come what may. ♦
seem to matter to her fans, who loved it,
POP MUSIC and gave it a minor viral moment. “So
this backfired,” Welch wrote later, in a
EXTREMELY ONLINE
caption. Complaining about the promo-
tional demands of TikTok became, for
a brief time this past spring, an incred-
Gayle, and the rise of meta-pop. ibly effective tool of self-promotion. The
labels themselves couldn’t have engi-
BY CARRIE BATTAN neered a better mechanism for drawing
listeners to these artists’ pages.
A micro-generation is a lifetime in
pop music, and the dispositional differ-
ences between artists like Halsey and
FKA Twigs and their successors are quite
stark. Last summer, an avid TikTok user
and seventeen-year-old singer-song-
writer named Taylor Gayle Rutherford
(stage name: Gayle) sent out a call to
her TikTok followers for song ideas. She
received a request to write “a breakup
song using the alphabet” from a user,
who turned out to be a marketing em-
ployee at Atlantic Records. A few weeks
later, Atlantic released a Gayle track
perfectly tailored to the request, called
“abcdefu.” What at first had seemed like
a wholesome game with fans on TikTok
suddenly seemed more convoluted. (At-
lantic has denied that this was done as
a marketing ploy.) Written with the help
of two Nashville songwriters, the cho-
rus of “abcdefu” makes the childlike ap-
peal of pop songwriting explicit—teen-
age angst by way of nursery rhyme.
“A-B-C-D-E, F-U,” Gayle sings. “And
your mom and your sister and your job . . .
Everybody but your dog, you can all
fuck off.” Though the song was pep-
pered with F-bombs, it seemed easy for
radio programmers to swap in “eff” in
ajor labels often like to boast ing that I can’t release it unless they can censored versions.
M about the creative agency af-
forded to their artists, but earlier this
fake a viral moment on tiktok.” (The
label responded at the time, saying sim-
Bridging the gap sonically between
the lo-fi acoustic covers found on You-
year a number of prominent musicians ply that its belief in Halsey was “total Tube and the anthemic pop rock of radio,
found reason to gripe about the op- and unwavering.”) “abcdefu” became one of the most ubiq-
pressive inf luence of their corporate Florence Welch, of Florence and the uitous songs in the world. And Gayle
overlords. “All record labels ask for are Machine, performed a similar act of meta- became emblematic of a recent evolu-
tiktoks and i got told off today for not resistance by using her TikTok to pro- tion in female pop stardom that might
making enough effort,” the experimen- test her label’s fixation with the platform. be traced back to Lorde’s début, in the
tal pop and R. & B. artist FKA Twigs “The label[s] are begging me for ‘lo fi early twenty-tens. During this period,
told her fans, in May. (She did so on tiktoks’ so here you go,” Welch wrote un- out went the polish and the relentlessly
her TikTok page.) A few days later, the derneath a demo-esque video of herself upbeat femininity; in came acts that were
smoldering pop vocalist Halsey had a singing a cappella, in March. Her vocal bruised, moody, and rough around the
similar complaint about the pervasive was mournful and wobbly, and she ended edges, and more indebted to indie music.
pressure to use the platform. Halsey the video with a smirk, apparently indi- A cornerstone of this anti-pop ethos
had an unreleased song ready to drop, cating that the performance had an as- was a sense of all-encompassing artistic
and wrote, “My record company is say- pect of self-parody. Her intention didn’t agency. Nobody has embraced this ap-
proach to more productive ends than
Gayle’s début EP was confessional and confrontational, bratty and bold. Billie Eilish, whose gothic sensibility and
72 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY ADAMS CARVALHO
darkly fantastical songs helped to re- have used TikTok in her heyday. (If the
define teen pop when her début album, algorithms function as they’re supposed
“When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do to, they should have already surfaced
We Go?,” was released, in 2019. Morissette’s music to artists like Gayle
Cycles of influence and nostalgia move and Leah Kate.)
rapidly, and many newly minted stars In August, Gayle released a new
like to talk about Eilish as if she were an single, “indieedgycool,” which will ap-
elder stateswoman of anti-pop rather pear on her upcoming EP, “a study of Your Anniversary
than a peer. An even more recent exam- the human experience volume two,” due Immortalized
in Roman Numerals
ple is Olivia Rodrigo, the former Dis- out this month. The song is an exagger- 3-Day Rush Available!
ney star who broke through last year with ated take on nineties grunge. On the Crafted from Gold and Platinum
JOHN-CHRISTIAN.COM
her début album, “SOUR,” an impas- track, Gayle outlines all the stylistic traps OR .646.6466
sioned and cheeky breakup record that that young women, flooded with influ-
channelled the energy and the instru- ences and expectations, face in the early
mentation of early-two-thousands pop stages of their music careers. “I think
punk. Heartbreak, in Rodrigo’s hands, I’m original and everyone’s copying
became a route to feeling emboldened me/I’ve been wearing chokers and I’m
rather than diminished. “Good for you, not even born in the nineties / I love
I guess that you’ve been working on your- Tame Impala, I don’t know what that Caring for
©2020 KENDAL
self / I guess that therapist I found for means,” she sings, poking fun at the ahis-
you, she really helped,” Rodrigo utters torical nature of contemporary music the earth.
over a low bass line at the beginning of taste. “Everybody loves a girl who does Discover a retirement community with
“Good 4 U,” sounding as if she were what she wants,” she sings. It’s a clever an emphasis on sustainability where
speaking through gritted teeth. little song that shows how the anti-pop the pure beauty of nature is nurtured.
of five years ago has given way to some-
his flavor of rascally pop punk is thing more like meta-pop, appropriate
T now everywhere. Like “SOUR,”
Gayle’s début EP, “a study of the human
for a culture constantly turning in on it-
self. It suggests an attempt by Gayle and
1.800.548.9469
kao.kendal.org/environment
EQUAL HOUSING
OPPORTUNITY
experience volume one,” released this musicians like her to outrun the notion
past March, lives at the intersection of that their careers have simply been en-
the confessional and the confrontational, gineered by industry forces.
the bratty and the bold, the grungy and Many commentators have been quick
the poppy. “You don’t want to be friends, to point out that, in the early days of
you’re just horny,” she sneers on a song MTV, musicians dismissed the music-
called “ur just horny.” You can hear a video format as a cheap marketing tac-
similar pluckiness in the work of Leah tic. Those early criticisms eventually fell
Kate, another TikTok native, whose con- away as the music video matured into
stant self-promotion has earned admi- an art form of its own. If the TikTok
ration. Marketing was once an unsavory stakeholders have any luck, the same
industry by-product left to the record thing will happen with viral online clips.
labels, but now it’s an essential skill set The generational differences don’t seem
for fresh talent. Alexis Ohanian, the to matter much, either. Complaining
co-founder of Reddit, learned of Leah about TikTok and eagerly using TikTok
Kate’s music through Indify, a music-data both seem to benefit . . . well, TikTok.
startup he’d invested in. He forged a busi- Opting out altogether is the only re-
ness partnership with her, and praised maining form of defiance, albeit a mostly
her propensity for self-promotion. Her futile one. Those who bemoan the hol-
digital-media savvy may have overshad- low predictability of a music career en-
owed her music, which is masterfully gineered on TikTok seem to forget that
catchy. One of her recent singles, “10 human disorder tends to creep in regard-
Things I Hate About You,” is a punchy less. Earlier this year, Gayle announced
and pouty pop-rock nugget that sounds a North American tour called “Avoid-
prefabricated for a teen-romance movie ing College.” Last month, just weeks be-
soundtrack. “Your friends must suck if fore it was set to start, she said that it
they think you’re cool, a sloppy drunk was cancelled. The reasons she cited were
obsessed with his Juul,” she purrs. Two wholesomely candid. “im learning how
of her releases, called “Life Sux” and to be an adult and how best to do this
“What Just Happened?,” might make new life,” she wrote, before adding, “im
you wonder how Alanis Morissette would still definitely not going to college :).” 
I’ve been waiting for you.
THE THEATRE Welcome to the first Wal-Mart in the
entire United States Universe. I’m the voice
of perpetual consumption.
THE OUTSIDERS Projected against the stage’s back wall

is a tall bank of wide-screen TVs. Their
“American (tele)visions” and Little Amal. presence is vaguely sinister; sometimes
one family member wields a video cam-
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM era—no doubt borrowed from the store’s
tech section—and points it at another,
for a forensic view. Faces show up in
wobbly hand-cam candor on the wall,
revealing depths of painful emotion, ac-
companied by rafts of backstory. The
play zooms back and forth in time—per-
haps to mimic jump cuts—with the Wal-
mart as a stage for the family’s memo-
ries and, especially, their sorrows. Erica’s
brother Alejandro is dead, the victim of
a workplace accident.
Besides his family, Alejandro has left
behind his not so secret boyfriend, Jesse.
One actor, the sweetly compelling Clew,
plays both boys: Alejandro in memory
and Jesse in the fluidly moving present.
That twinning adds to the play’s air of
sad mystery. It also introduces a tough
theme—the possibility of replacement.
One consumer good, farmed from the
Walmart shelves, follows the next in
heedless succession, and the family, on
its worst days, is tempted, in various
ways, to try to replace Alejandro, too.
Everybody’s off in their own screen-
based fantasy. Video games with old-
school graphics—the play is set in the
nineties—and amateurish home videos
play on the walls. Bretta Gerecke’s sce-
nic design is an intricate marvel of mod-
ular efficiency. (Gerecke also designed
here are lots of screens onstage of—and constant references to—video the costumes, with Mondo Guerra.) The
T these days. The intrusion of video
into drama can be a nod to the visual
feels absolutely necessary to its story.
It’s about a Mexican immigrant fam-
strangely simple set consists of two stacks
of two big rusted cubes. They look like
culture of surveillance, or to the un- ily who live in a cramped double-wide Richard Serra sculptures lost in limbo,
canny fantasy that our private and pub- trailer, and whose mind-numbing con- but they open up to reveal fragments of
lic lives are somehow being secretly solation is a small TV that casts its the family’s reality—the vivisected inte-
filmed for a later wide release. Often, glow on a modest set of brownish fur- rior of their living room, or the aisle in
though, the gesture is underdeveloped, niture. The mentally absent, rawly the toy section where Erica stares at cars
a wan attempt at multimedia art, per- mourning father, Octavio (Raúl Cas- and action figures and her friend Jeremy
haps the result of insecurity about the tillo), sits in front of it as if in devotion (the very funny Ryan J. Haddad) plays
ever-increasing dominance of TV. Plus, at a shrine. The family lives near a Wal- make-believe with Barbies.
actors can have their cake and eat it, mart that is more of a mythic space The contrast between the mute,
too: they can play big and also get their than a discount store. They spend more modern-art aloofness of Gerecke’s cubes
closeup moments. time in its aisles than they do at home. and the liveliness of the scenes that play
“American (tele)visions,” by Victor I. Early on, in a scene at the store, the inside them fits with a doubleness that
Cazares, at New York Theatre Work- daughter, Erica (Bianca (b) Norwood), characterizes the whole play. The show
shop, is the rare recent show whose use shouts through the P.A. system: is strongest at its most conceptual and
strange. Near the end, Erica’s mother,
A Mexican immigrant family seeks consolation in TV and Walmart. Maria Ximena (Elia Monte-Brown),
74 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY RAKHMAT JAKA PERKASA
slips into the role of Wal-Martina, a grants into boarding planes to liberal-
manic, bar-code-bedecked consumer- coded Martha’s Vineyard—was still
ist oracle who spouts about capitalism tugging acidly at my mind when I went
and the horrors of migration. Antic for- to see Amal in Harlem.
ays like this elevate the material. Things Before Amal arrived, there was a group
get more hackneyed when the script of African drummers and dancers, ex-
settles on melodrama. citing the crowd to welcome her. We
The actors, directed by Rubén Po- were in the plaza outside the State Office
lendo, each seem to be in a slightly Building, on 125th Street and Adam Clay-
different play, which is fine when the ton Powell Jr. Boulevard. I could tell she
characters are addressing the audience, was coming before I saw her—suddenly
but—with the heartening exception of the whole crowd shifted toward the
Erica and Jeremy—less so when they’re northern end of the barren plaza, hail-
shoved into fitful interaction with one ing her with shouts and signs and, yes,
another. Even that flaw, though, might also screens. Everybody had their phones
be understood as an outflow of grief: it ready, taking pictures and videos, shar-
makes us natives of our own interior vi- ing the experience on Instagram Live.
sions and strangers in the outside world. The puppet is operated by three peo-
And maybe that’s the power, too, of the ple—one inside her body and one at ei-
show’s gleeful, jagged, imperfect forays ther arm. Another person leads with a
into video. Here, the split between screen walkie-talkie, like an air-traffic control-
and stage, usually such a leech on a ler. This artifice is naked, but Amal
show’s dynamism, enacts the fractures somehow has a real presence. Some-
between family and commerce, trauma body near me said she had a soul. I
and the future, a new country and a couldn’t help but agree. Amal—we all
country left behind, everlasting love and kept calling her by name, utterly caught
the stubbornness of grief. up in her personhood, identifying by
proxy with those she is meant to sym-
ince last summer, a twelve-foot-tall bolize—danced for a while with the
S puppet named Little Amal, built by
the Handspring Puppet Company, based
drummers, then started walking. When
she turned the corner onto Lenox Av-
in South Africa, has been roaming the enue, Harlem’s great promenade, the
globe. Despite her epic size, Amal—a whole neighborhood looked up at her.
ten-year-old Syrian refugee—is a tender, She peered into a halal truck, genially
instantly moving figure. She rolls and passed a fruit vender, graciously listened
bats her eyes, reaches out to children and to a gospel choir that had come to sing
lets them touch her hands, dances guile- “This Little Light of Mine” for her. All
lessly when there’s music playing nearby, this time she was trailed by a crowd, like
waves to the crowds that come to see her the leader of a parade. The ever-chang-
and bids them to follow her on her jour- ing bazaar of Harlem’s street life—
ney. The simple mission of her travels—a churches, newish bistros, a gleaming
long-running work of theatre, and also a Whole Foods, empty storefronts—was
brilliant, mobile extension of the idea of her set, a suddenly poignant comment
statuary public art—is to remind the on the built environment of great cit-
world, increasingly pinched in its miser- ies. Do they welcome? Do they exclude?
liness toward strangers, of the struggles She took it all in like a polite guest, and
of exiled people in need of simple hos- I, in turn, saw the neighborhood, a sec-
pitality. She’s been greeted by the Pope, ond home to me, utterly afresh.
hugged a blue-and-yellow flag in Ukraine, Amal was met by a New Orleans-style
walked among crowds in The Hague. second line at 120th Street. (Her time
She recently visited New York. The in Harlem, coördinated by the National
appearance was nicely timed; our city is Black Theatre, offered, among other
now host to increasing numbers of mi- things, a quick survey of Black diasporic
grants, bused from Texas, where a heartless artistic and cultural forms.) We danced
state government has decided to exploit our way east, met by a block party near
them as pawns instead of welcoming Marcus Garvey Park.
them as fellow human beings. The stunt “Welcome, Amal!” a woman standing
by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis— on her stoop shouted into a microphone.
who deceived a group of Venezuelan mi- “We thank you for all you represent!” 
Petra (Mila Bogojevic), who is obviously
THE CURRENT CINEMA close to Lydia’s heart. But not that close.
The strongest venting of parental emo-
BATON CHARGE
tion that we witness is not a hug but a
funny and frightening sequence in which
Lydia crosses the school playground, con-
“Tár.” fronts a kid who’s been bullying Petra,
and tells her, mezzo piano, “I’ll get you.”
BY ANTHONY LANE The urge to protect becomes a tigerish
threat. What Blanchett captures so well
hat do you mean, you’ve never with couching her achievement in strictly in Lydia are the moments when deci-
W heard of Lydia Tár? Come on,
you must know her. She was a protégée
feminist terms. Her trail is her own.
Not long afterward, in a less genial
siveness stiffens into ferocity. Her vir-
tues, like her formidable gifts, have claws,
of Bernstein’s. She’s the one who con- scene, Lydia bumps into identity poli- and, as with anyone whose professional
ducted orchestras in Cleveland, Phila- tics head on. During a class that she’s mission is to take command of others,
delphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York giving to would-be conductors at Juil- you can’t help wondering what will be-
before taking charge of the Berlin Phil- liard, one of them claims, “as a BIPOC fall her if, for one reason or another, she
harmonic. She has a Grammy, an Oscar, pangender person,” not to be “into Bach,” loses command of herself.
a Tony, and an Emmy—the royal flush who is very dead and very white and had Here come the reasons. Through
glimpses of e-mails, passing chatter, and
scraps of dreams, we learn of a young
trainee conductor who was fixated on
Lydia (or was it vice versa?), and whose
career Lydia has since attempted to block.
There are hints of a pattern—of other
young women who have slipped under
Lydia’s spell and suffered accordingly.
Her personal assistant, Francesca (Noémie
Merlant), is a guarded and dedicated soul,
who receives scant reward for her devo-
tions; was she, too, once an object of Lyd-
ia’s interest? Rumors abound, a legal de-
position is required, and Lydia is Tárred
and feathered on social media. When
she travels to New York, in the company
of a Russian cellist, Olga (Sophie Kauer),
we see a snap of them, on Twitter, plus
the tagline “TÁR’s fresh meat.”
In Todd Field’s film, Cate Blanchett stars as a conductor beset by scandal. Most of the movie is set in the for-
tress of serious classical music, on the
of accolades. It’s true that she happens the patriarchal nerve to father twenty loftiest levels, where the stars take pri-
to be a fictional character, incarnated children. Lydia strikes back. According vate jets. Your grip, as a viewer, will prob-
by Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s new to taste, you will either cheer her majestic ably be more secure if you know what
movie, “Tár,” but that is a footling de- gutting of twenty-first-century self- free bowing means, and who Thomas
tail. This woman is alive, ominously ar- regard, and her stout defense of high Beecham was, and what DG and MTT
ticulate, crisply styled, and all too pres- aesthetic principles, or agree with the stand for (Deutsche Grammophon and
ent. She burns like a cool flame. student that she’s “a fucking bitch.” But Michael Tilson Thomas, respectively).
When we first meet Lydia, she’s about wait. The battle lines between such op- And for those of us who have never
to be interviewed onstage, in New York, posing points of view, Field suggests, quite understood what an assistant con-
by my colleague Adam Gopnik, who is may not be as clear as all that, and, over ductor does, “Tár” supplies the answer,
persuasively played, in an audacious two hours and forty minutes, the war in the old-school shape of Sebastian
stroke of casting, by himself. (One pre- grows very messy indeed. (Allan Corduner). After a rehearsal of
sumes that Robert Pattinson was un- Lydia, who calls herself “a U-Haul Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which will
available.) Questioned about her art, lesbian,” lives in Berlin with her partner, soon be recorded live, Sebastian pres-
Lydia launches into an impassioned riff Sharon (Nina Hoss), the concertmaster ents Lydia with a highly specific query
on the nature of musical time; asked of the Berlin Philharmonic. In a movie about the clarinets. However niche you
about gender, she names various trail- short on tenderness, it’s a rare joy to watch reckon his job must be, it’s nicher.
blazers who took to the podium before them dance together to Count Basie. Why, then, would I recommend “Tár”
her but seems otherwise unconcerned The couple have an adopted daughter, to friends who couldn’t give a damn about
76 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY TOMA VAGNER
Mahler’s marriage, or Glenn Gould’s pos- room” (2001) and “Little Children” (2006), portrait might well have fallen apart.
ture at the piano—wonderfully mimicked and anyone struck by the sombreness of “Tár” sans Blanchett is no more conceiv-
by Blanchett—or Wilhelm Furtwängler’s those films—by characters driven along able than “Born Yesterday” (1950) with-
relationship with the Nazis, or any of the paths darker than they foresaw—will be out Judy Holliday or “Erin Brockovich”
other arcana that crop up? Because, ready for the shadows in which Lydia, (2000) without Julia Roberts. Nobody
strange to say, this film is not really about especially in her apartment, often dwells. else would fit the frame. We have seen
music. It’s about power. (Likewise, if you Berlin may look enticingly civilized, with Blanchett, in previous roles, being flaky,
stayed away from “Ford v Ferrari,” in 2019, its unhurried café life and the embrac- noble, or mean, but the profusion of
because it was targeted at car geeks, you ing glow of its concert hall, but follow moods and motivations that is demanded
missed an absorbing dramatization of ri- Lydia to a scuzzier district and down of her here is something else. The part
valry and grit.) What matters, in the case into a basement, in pursuit of Olga, and of Lydia is scored for hero, villain, mother,
of Sebastian, is not the fact that Lydia you enter a dripping underworld, where dictator, and fuckup, and Blanchett re-
disagrees about the clarinets but, rather, Lydia whacks her head against stone sponds with perfect pitch. Her eyes are
the merciless manner in which she later steps. Throughout the story, as you’d ex- like spies, missing nothing, and her smile
fires him—or, in her phrase, “rotates” pect, she has been hyper-attentive to is a charmer’s knife. As the conductor is
him—and throws in a character assassi- noise. Now, in dread, she listens to the to the Berlin Philharmonic, so the actress
nation as a cadenza. Conversely, check pattering paws of an unseen dog. is to the audience in the cinema; neither
out the gleam in her gaze at the sight Hounding marks the final movement makes the grave mistake of wishing
and the sound of Olga, who is not only of the film. (It’s the one section that feels merely to be liked. If there is one gesture
hired by the Berlin Philharmonic but rushed. Mind you, Lydia mocks the urge of hers, in “Tár,” that I didn’t entirely
also, thanks to Lydia’s fine-fingered mach- to stretch out the Adagietto of Mahler’s buy, it’s the single act of violence—of
inations, swiftly granted the solo part in Fifth to inordinate length, telling her sacrilege, one might say, for it occurs in
Elgar’s Cello Concerto. The expression players to “forget Visconti,” so maybe a the midst of a performance—with which
on the face of the resident first cellist, touch of haste is no bad thing.) To what Lydia puts herself beyond the pale. Not
who had every right to expect the gig, is extent she is a proven predator; how much so much brutal as brusque, the deed is
a study in decorous disappointment. she deserves to be preyed upon, in turn, too melodramatic for the subtle inflections
Power leaves hope in its wake. by the gluttons of public indignation; that Field applies elsewhere. If you’re
and why, despite everything, she should bent upon maleficence, as Rex Harrison
his is not the first movie about a enjoy our lingering sympathy in a way demonstrated, then do it in style.
T classical conductor to be written,
directed, and produced by an American
that a middle-aged man in her position
would not: such issues will, no doubt, be
I have a practical motion to propose,
arising from Field’s film. An orchestra,
filmmaker. Preston Sturges’s “Unfaith- aired and contested in due course. Field as Lydia points out, is “not a democ-
fully Yours” (1948) also fits the bill. Its is wise enough to reserve judgment. It racy,” but, nonetheless, might it be help-
baton-wielding hero, played with gusto would be dead wrong, though, to con- ful if classical musicians took the word
by Rex Harrison, sported a vocational sider “Tár” as a kind of op-ed made flesh. “maestro” and slung it out of circula-
glee that would be anathema to Lydia. Treat it, instead, as a symphonic portrait, tion? Does the aura that enfolds it not
(“All I do is wave a little wand a little richly suffused with unhappiness; none lie at the rotten root of the story of Lydia
and out comes the music.”) Yet the tale of the people onscreen, aside from the Tár? If you worship a maestro, after all,
was Sturges’s most wicked offering, its headlong Olga, seem content with their don’t be surprised if you wind up as a
farcical theme adorned with grace notes lot, unless and until they are actually slave to the rhythm. 
of murderous intent, and a strain of that making music—without which, as Nietz-
menace finds an echo in “Tár.” It’s only sche said, life would be a mistake. NEWYORKER.COM
Field’s third feature, after “In the Bed- In the hands of a different actress, the Richard Brody blogs about movies.
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2022 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
VOLUME XCVIII, NO. 32, October 10, 2022. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for four planned combined issues, as indicated on the issue’s cover, and other com-
bined or extra issues) by Condé Nast, a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Eric Gillin, chief business
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SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY THE NEW YORKER IN WRITING.

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 P. C. Vey,
must be received by Sunday, October 9th. The finalists in the September 26th contest appear below. We
will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the October 24th 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
“It leaves me feeling empty.”

Jesse Spain, Palo Alto, Calif.
“Leave my mother out of this.” “Your downstairs neighbors sent us.”

Corinne Sills, Clinton, N.J. Steve Helland, Minneapolis, Minn.
“I see a lot of myself in this one.”

Sean Michael Flattery, Charlottesville, Va.
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
A lightly challenging puzzle.
24 25 26 27 28 29
BY PAOLO PASCO
30 31 32 33
34 35 36
ACROSS
1 Shoplifter, e.g.
37 38 39
6 “The Wiz” dog
10 Candy bar that sounds as though it 40 41
should come in packs of twenty?
14 Clock out, say 42 43 44 45
16 “Letter to the Person Who Carved
His Initials Into the Oldest Living 46 47 48 49 50 51
Longleaf ___ in North America”
(Matthew Olzmann poem) 52 53 54
17 Punk band whose members published
the “Riot Grrrl Manifesto” 55 56
18 Binary-code digits
19 Units with four qtrs. 57 58 59
20 Origin of the word “alphabet”

21 Failed to DOWN 38 “___ are not endorsements” (line in
22 “Disco Duck” artist Rick 1 Frozen-dessert-chain initials some Twitter bios)
23 They’re often tossed in the kitchen 2 Wig makeup 42 Material for a bridesmaid dress
24 David ___ Dentist (viral video starring a 3 Types 43 Crafted a think piece, say
kid who’s just had oral surgery) 4 “The Righteous Gemstones” patriarch 45 Clooney who was one of Time’s 2022
27 Esteems 5 Renders letters in sign language Women of the Year
30 Undesirable roommates 6 Stands up for something without 47 It comes between micro- and pico-
31 Nineties hip-hop duo known for wearing standing up? 48 “Ish”
their clothes backward 7 Comic-strip dog once depicted solving a 49 “Dude . . .”
34 Secure, as a bun sudoku, to Jon’s surprise 50 Tilt-a-Whirl or Ferris wheel
35 Silent “I agree” 8 “Don’t ___ to me until I’ve had my 51 Dedicatees of anniversary posts, maybe
coffee” 53 caltechrejects.com redirects to its Web
36 Ventricles’ counterparts
9 Olive ___ (Shelley Duvall’s “Popeye” site
37 House parties, for short? role) 54 @ symbols
39 Fictional island represented by a board 10 Markers surrounding important plot
made up of hexagons points
40 Like the titular falcon of a 1941 film noir Solution to the previous puzzle:
11 “Not exactly . . .”
41 Optimal athletic performance 12 Without stopping H I M B O S K I M P
P O N Y U P A I S L E S
42 Crescendos 13 Practices self-care, in a way
L E T M E B E T E A B A L L
44 Sleazebags 15 Object rolling into frame following an
A L L A Y D R U R Y T A E
46 Bedouins, typically offscreen car crash, in a movie trope
W H I T E S I R K U B I D
47 “I’m innocent!” 21 Social-media aesthetic embodied by
N A P E M A G N E T R O N
“putting on a blazer and reading
49 “Going away for a sec,” in a text Dostoevsky,” per a Vox article S M S B A N G A G O N G
W O R N L A W S
52 Protein in vegan chicken nuggets, 22 Record firsts?
perhaps C A R T E S I A N G U T
23 Certain sib H O N E Y B E A R G E N E
53 Santana hit about a woman who reminds 24 Nile reptiles A B U T P R E D A R N I T
the singer of “a West Side story”
25 Move like a hummingbird R E P M A O R I N O T S O
55 Object 26 “. . . among others” K A L P E N N D U D G E O N
56 Sequestered 28 Releases, as a song M E L O T T I M O G E N
57 “Have you heard the ___?” 29 Region toned by ab workouts D O W S E D A R Y L
58 Betty Rubble or Betty Boop, e.g. 32 Thailand, on an old map Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
59 Incense-stick residue 33 Grounded newyorker.com/crossword
©MIKE PERRY
Hermes.com

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OCTOBER 10, 2022

5 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

DRAWINGS Alice Cheng, Liza Donnelly, Asher Perlman, Frank Cotham,

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

LEFT: GUANG LIM; RIGHT: PIERRE BUTTIN

PERSONAL HISTORY ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

6 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022

Explore how Google is building tools to keep more

8 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022

Our Advanced Protection

Digital attacks against political campaigns, elected officials,

Explore how Google is keeping more Americans safe online

10 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022

The Campaign Security

Targeted online attacks on political campaigns have

Explore how Google is keeping more Americans safe online

The Mother and the Whore

post-1968 turmoil—and it’s a ferociously con-

crises. (Veronika’s agonized climactic soliloquy

12 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022

Uzbekistan than in Afghanistan, Ghiasi

3:07 Buy a button-down from the Boss

3:22 Sit quietly at my gate and let the

3:38 Choose not to lash out at a cou-

3:45 Decide to remain quiet even

MY FLIGHT DELAY AT J.F.K. 4:10 Rejoice as my flight to Detroit fi-

THE BODIES IN THE CAVE

GQ ESSENTIALS, EVERY SEASON

Buy or subscribe now at: GQ.COM/NEWYORKER

IN THE FILTRATION CAMPS

O forty-seven days after Russia

CLOSE TO THE SUN

E alpine village of Château-d’Oex,

54 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY KURT MARKUS

I Mazda with the FFA sticker south,

t first light the following Monday,

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 59

BY AMY DAVIDSON SORKIN

O iel Patrick Moynihan, of New

From the Bangor (Maine) Daily News.

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 69

THE OUTSIDERS Projected against the stage’s back wall

THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 10, 2022 77

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“It leaves me feeling empty.”

“Leave my mother out of this.” “Your downstairs neighbors sent us.”

“I see a lot of myself in this one.”

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

20 Origin of the word “alphabet”

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