FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 The New Yorker

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THE NEW YORKER

THE ANNIVERSARY ISSUE FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 21 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Jelani Cobb on voting reform; notes on the Pad Project; Sean Lennon’s cosmos; big chill; a tour of Streisand Land. THE POLITICAL SCENE

Jeffrey Toobin

28

Time in the Barrel Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, and the Mueller investigation. SHOUTS & MURMURS

Patricia Marx

37

You Will Thank Me ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS

Michael Schulman

38

A Living Document Heidi Schreck’s dramatic take on the Constitution. ANNALS OF COVERT ACTION

Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow

44

Deception, Inc. The business of information warfare. SKETCHBOOK

Roz Chast and Patricia Marx

56

“The Rules, Guidelines, Principles, Precepts, Decrees, No-No’s, Yes-Yes’s, and Arbitrary Judgments of Patty’s Mother” LETTER FROM OKLAHOMA

Ian Frazier

58

Pumper’s Corner The woman who makes sure that the oil wells run. PERSONAL HISTORY

Donald Antrim

68

Everywhere and Nowhere A night on the roof and a suicide averted. FICTION

Leïla Slimani

78

“The Confession” THE CRITICS DANCING

Joan Acocella

82

New York City Ballet in the wake of its sex scandals. A CRITIC AT LARGE

Jill Lepore

88

The socialism of Eugene V. Debs. BOOKS

90

Briefly Noted MUSICAL EVENTS

Alex Ross

94

The early-music movement expands its repertoire. THE CURRENT CINEMA

Anthony Lane

96

“Everybody Knows,” “The Lego Movie 2.” POEMS

Marianne Boruch Ilya Kaminsky

48 64

“I Saw a House, a Field” “In a Time of Peace” PUZZLES DEPT.

Natan Last

93

Anniversary Crossword COVER

Kadir Nelson DRAWINGS

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David Sipress, P. C. Vey, Maggie Larson, Karl Stevens, Maddie Dai, George Booth, Lars Kenseth, Benjamin Schwartz, Seth Fleishman, Emily Flake, Carolita Johnson, Edward Steed, Frank Cotham, Harry Bliss, Zachary Kanin, Pia Guerra, Will McPhail, Caitlin Cass, Edward Koren, Drew Dernavich, Amy Hwang, Barbara Smaller SPOTS Christoph Niemann

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CONTRIBUTORS Adam Entous (“Deception, Inc.,” p. 44) is a staff writer. Previously, he was a reporter for the Washington Post, where his team won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Donald Antrim (“Everywhere and Nowhere,” p. 68) has written several books. Most recently, he published “The Emerald Light in the Air,” a collection of stories. Patricia Marx (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 37; Sketchbook, p. 56) is a staff writer. Her new book, “Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It?: A Mother’s Suggestions,” illustrated by Roz Chast, will be published in April. Michael Schulman (“A Living Document,” p. 38) has contributed to the magazine since 2006. He is the author of “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep.” Joan Acocella (Dancing, p. 82) became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998. Ilya Kaminsky (Poem, p. 64) will publish the poetry collection “Deaf Republic” in March.

Ian Frazier (“Pumper’s Corner,” p. 58) most recently published “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces.” Jeffrey Toobin (“Time in the Barrel,” p. 28), a staff writer, is the author of “American Heiress.” Leïla Slimani (Fiction, p. 78) has written several books, including “The Perfect Nanny.” Her novel “Adèle” was published in the U.S. last month. Ronan Farrow (“Deception, Inc.,” p. 44) is the author of “War on Peace.” His reporting for The New Yorker won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service. Kadir Nelson (Cover), an artist, has received Caldecott Honors, a Sibert Medal, and N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards. He is the illustrator of the forthcoming picture book “The Undefeated,” by Kwame Alexander. Jill Lepore (A Critic at Large, p. 88) is a professor of history at Harvard. In September, she published “These Truths: A History of the United States.”

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Deborah Treisman speaks with Haruki Murakami about writing as a response to catastrophe.

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By Stefano Massini Adapted by Ben Power Directed by Sam Mendes

THE MAIL SEPARATE BUT EQUAL

Louis Menand, in his piece on the history of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision that upheld the constitutionality of segregation laws, reminds us that “segregation began in the North, where it was the product not of the practice of slavery but of Negrophobia” (“In the Eye of the Law,” February 4th). It’s important to note that racial separation (i.e., segregation) was embedded and practiced in states above the Mason-Dixon Line long before the Plessy decision. As early as the eighteen-forties, black and white abolitionists in Boston had waged successful campaigns against anti-miscegenation laws and racial separation in public schools. They were met with considerable resistance. In Roberts v. the City of Boston, in 1850, Judge Lemuel Shaw upheld separation in schools, arguing that the principle of equality under the law was a great theoretical concept but impossible to implement when “applied to the actual and various conditions of persons within society.” Thus the separate-but-equal doctrine entered American legal history. A subsequent case in Massachusetts, Pindall v. the City of Boston, led the state legislature, in 1855, to open Boston’s public schools to black children. But, in much of America, racial-separation laws endured for the next century, ending, finally, with Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954. George A. Levesque Professor Emeritus University at Albany Guilderland, N.Y. Menand describes the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as “the most radically democratic clause in the entire Constitution,” because it “decrees that any person born in the United States is a citizen, and that states may not abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens; nor deprive them of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny them the equal

protection of the laws.” This paraphrasing understates just how radical the amendment was: in fact, the clause extends equal protection and due process of law to “any person,” not just to citizens. The equal-protection clause was first invoked by the Supreme Court in 1886, in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, when the Justices ruled unconstitutional a city ordinance that exclusively targeted Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. Although the unanimous decision was an early milestone in anti-discrimination law, it also demonstrated the pitfalls of distinguishing between citizens and non-citizens: after the case, Justice John Marshall Harlan concluded, as Menand notes, that the U.S. should not permit Chinese immigrants to seek citizenship, because they were, in his view, too different from Americans. Swift Edgar New York City Menand argues that, between 1877 and 1965, American race relations were largely shaped by Southern states whose elected leaders “spoke the language of white supremacy.” For many of these leaders, this language was, in part, the result of a cynical political calculus. Plantation owners knew that they were sitting on a human powder keg: they were outnumbered and despised by those they lorded over. Keeping the races apart was a way of preventing African-Americans from gaining the resources and the knowledge that might enable them to rise up against their oppressors and free themselves. A similar type of insecurity and fear characterizes exclusionary racial policies today, against, for example, migrants from Central America. John V. H. Dippel Salisbury, Conn.

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FEBRUARY 13 – 26, 2019

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

All hip-hop swagger and personified funk, Anderson .Paak makes music that radiates with farsighted imagination, unfettered humor, and an astute appreciation for craft. His voice, a gravelly, soul-filled rasp, allows him to transform from quick-witted rapper into smooth-talking Lothario with ease. California cool permeates his albums, but when he and his band, the Free Nationals—.Paak is the lead vocalist and the drummer—take the stage at Hammerstein Ballroom, on Feb. 22, expect a kinetic, one-of-a-kind jam session. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SHAE DETAR

1 THE THEATRE

The American Tradition 13th Street Repertory The title of Ray Yamanouchi’s new play could refer to its subject, slavery, or to this country’s skill at wrestling entertainment out of unlikely topics—in this case, the tale of two nineteenth-century runaways trying to make their way north. The light-skinned Eleanor (Sydney Cole Alexander) crosses racial and gender barriers by passing as a white gentleman, while her husband, Bill (Martin K. Lewis), tags along as the freshly minted dandy’s personal slave. On their journey, they encounter the leader (Alex Herrald) of a movement dubbed Not All Slavers and a woke train conductor (Hunter Canning), who brags, “I’m an ally.” Directed by Axel Avin, Jr., for New Light Theatre Project, the gleefully anachronistic show is admittedly a bit of a mess, but it also has a rambunctious punk-rock energy that’s all too rare on our increasingly sanitized stages.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (Through Feb. 16.)

Colin Quinn: Red State Blue State Minetta Lane Theatre Behind the jokes and one-liners in Colin Quinn’s latest solo outing lurks a despairing State of the Union. The comedian’s thesis is that the American experiment in democracy may well be over, as every single founding principle, from free speech to equality, has been perverted over the decades. “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” Quinn declares. His gruff, no-nonsense persona is perfectly tailored for an evening of evenhanded barbs at both the red and the blue sides. Rest assured, though, that the show, directed by Bobby Moresco (who co-wrote the screenplay for “Crash”), is also among Quinn’s funniest so far. It culminates with an eminently quotable bravura bit, in which he captures each of the fifty states in a single quip. Random sample: “Iowa. If the Midwest was a rom-com, you’d be the unmarried best friend.”—E.V. (Through March 16.)

Eddie and Dave Atlantic Stage 2 The playwright Amy Staats’s teasing tribute to the cock-rock band Van Halen, directed by Margot Bordelon, offers a smart and funny take on a variety of themes: nostalgia, the creative process, rock-star insecurity. But its masterstroke is to cast women as the band members, a choice that effortlessly transforms the play into a vivacious dissertation on the performance of gender. Staats herself is oddly touching as Eddie, an innocent often lost in the wilds of stardom; Adina Verson is hilariously businesslike as his drummer brother, Alex; and, most impressively, Megan Hill nails the restless envy underlying David Lee Roth’s manic, hammy charisma. The costumes and wigs, by Montana Levi Blanco and Cookie Jordan, are appropriately appalling. In a better world, this is what a Broadway jukebox musical would look like.—R.R. (Through Feb. 17.)

Joan HERE In many ways, Joan has led a normal existence: daughter and mother, lover and wife, sister and friend, artist and teacher. She has had

affairs and heartaches, hopes and frustrations. What’s less ordinary is how the playwright Stephen Belber tells her story: in nonchronological vignettes that jump around various points in her life. Johanna Day (“Sweat”) does not inflect her portrayal as her character’s age shifts, suggesting that Joan has always been the same throughout the decades. It’s a daring choice that may turn off some audience members, but it gives Joan a sense of unshakable— bordering on self-centered—integrity. Adam Harrington and Marjan Neshat are marvellous as Joan’s family and friends, and Adrienne Campbell-Holt directs with her usual sensitive touch for the Colt Coeur company. Even when it’s overwritten (which is often), “Joan” is a fractured portrait that holds together.—E.V. (Through Feb. 16.)

Mies Julie Classic Stage Company From its opening moments, this production of Yaël Farber’s 2012 adaptation of August Strindberg’s 1889 play “Miss Julie” (in repertory with “The Dance of Death”), set in the modern-day hinterlands of South Africa and steeped in its twisted racial politics, is supercharged with portent. There’s no chance that

OFF BROADWAY

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The Dance of Death Classic Stage Company Conor McPherson’s fluent, straightforward new version of August Strindberg’s ultimate bad-marriage play, from 1900, crisply directed by Victoria Clark (in repertory with “Mies Julie”), extracts maximum comedy from its grim scenario: over several bruising days in the decommissioned Swedish island prison they call home, Edgar (Richard Topol), an arrogant but blundering military officer, and Alice (Cassie Beck), a thwarted former actress, anticipate their silver wedding anniversary by toying contemptuously with each other, and then with their unfortunate guest, Kurt (Christopher Innvar)—games whose peril only escalates when it appears that Edgar is dying. What is the point of this unrelenting, bitter cynicism? In this production, it’s the pleasure of watching three perfectly cast actors so devilishly embody their roles.—Rollo Romig (Through March 10.)

Earlier this winter, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris seized the attention of the downtown theatre world with “Slave Play,” at New York Theatre Workshop—a kinky, disturbing, and unsparing sendup of the sexual baggage between black and white Americans. Harris, a third-year student at the Yale School of Drama, is poised to make another splash with “ ‘Daddy,’ ” co-presented by the New Group and the Vineyard, at Pershing Square Signature Center (starting previews Feb. 12). In Danya Taymor’s production, Ronald Peet plays Franklin, a young black artist who enters the orbit of a middle-aged white collector (Alan Cumming). Interrupting their poolside reverie is Franklin’s religious mother (Charlayne Woodard), who arrives in Bel Air to rescue her son from ruin. The battle lines seem clearly drawn, but, if “Slave Play” is any indication, they won’t stay that way.—Michael Schulman THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

7

things are going to end well for John (James Udom), a black farmhand, and his white boss’s dangerously impulsive daughter, Julie (Elise Kibler), nor for the strong, stoic Christine (Patrice Johnson Chevannes), who’s been a mother to them both. Directed by Shariffa Ali, the play is so physical that it verges on dance, and deeply sensual—it’s thick with sex, but it’s also constantly attuned to smells, music, heat. The leads are superlative; unfortunately for Vinie Burrows, who appears as a sort of ghostly ancestor named Ukhokho, her role has been pared down to near-pointlessness.—R.R. (Through March 10.)

To Kill a Mockingbird Shubert A new adaptation by Aaron Sorkin of Harper Lee’s classic novel, directed by Bartlett Sher— in which Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe) has been accused, obviously wrongly, of raping Mayella Ewell (Erin Wilhelmi), in Maycomb, Alabama, and the lawyer Atticus Finch (Jeff Daniels) has decided to take on the case—stays mostly faithful to the original, through the use of two reasonably successful theatrical devices. Atticus’s kids, Scout (Celia Keenan-Bolger) and Jem (Will Pullen), serve as narrators, and the drama has been reworked so that the court case against Robinson is the frame for the whole play. Two black characters, Tom and Calpurnia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), Atticus’s beloved maid, have more to say here than in the novel. But Atticus keeps telling his kids that there are good people on both sides, echoing Trump, and, although this is meant to foreground Atticus’s shortcomings, it also pushes him even closer to the center of the play’s concern, making the defendant almost an afterthought. (Reviewed in our issue of 12/24 & 31/18.)—Vinson Cunningham (Open run.)

The Trial of the Catonsville Nine Abrons Arts Center On May 17, 1968, nine Catholic antiwar activists—including two priests, the brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan—took hundreds of Vietnam War draft files from an office in Catonsville, Maryland, and burned them with homemade napalm. A jury found all nine guilty, and shortly thereafter Daniel Berrigan converted the transcript of the trial into an eloquent play: a performance of documents to commemorate the burning of documents in protest of the burning of people. The director Jack Cummings III’s new adaptation brings the story up to date (it includes Daniel Berrigan’s death, in 2016), and pares down the cast to three intense actors—David Huynh, Mia Katigbak, and Eunice Wong—who take turns playing the nine, and many other characters besides. Anchored by Peiyi Wong’s impressive set of tanklike desks scattered with war-era magazine pages, this Transport Group production makes a bracing, persuasive argument for what it means to live with purpose.—R.R. (Through Feb. 23.)

True West American Airlines Theatre In a new revival of Sam Shepard’s acclaimed 1980 play, directed by James Macdonald for 8

Roundabout Theatre Company, Austin (Paul Dano), a screenwriter, is house-sitting for his mother, in suburban Southern California, when his brother, Lee (Ethan Hawke), shows up after three months in the desert, drinking beer in a scuzzy trenchcoat and looking to provoke. Hawke wears the role of Lee like a second skin, and Dano beautifully evinces a character navigating a loved one’s difficult behavior, trying to retain power over his pitch meeting, and his car keys, without causing offense. The ensuing merging and transfiguring of identities—and blotto writer’s-block rage— culminates in shock, but to a contemporary audience the lead-up can feel like squalor for squalor’s sake. Shepard’s writing and his vision are as powerful as ever, but American masculinity has evolved since he wrote “True West”; what’s true for one generation may not be true for the next. (2/4/19)—Sarah Larson (Through March 17.)

1 ART

“Bruce Nauman” Museum of Modern Art This immense retrospective, titled “Disappearing Acts,” which is also at MOMA PS1, in Long Island City, is a discontinuous parade of creative brainstorms that tend toward engulfing installations of sculpture, film, video, neon, and sound, any of which might anchor the whole career of a less restive artist. Nauman began, in the mid-sixties, by testing an idea that anything an artist does in an artist’s studio must be art. He made videos of himself walking in monotonous patterns and sawing on a violin tuned to D, E, A, and D; the tapes are boring on purpose, meant to bring the droning passage of recorded real time into the real time of exhibition spaces. All of Nauman’s works are partly—or largely—ordeals for viewers. He is often humorous to the point of slapstick, but never ironic. You can’t get in on his jokes. (If you think he’s making fun of you, you are flattering yourself.) What does it take to tolerate, much less to esteem, such art? It takes a commitment equalling that of the artist—making of the show an adventure that is as much ethical as it is aesthetic.—Peter Schjeldahl (Through Feb. 18.)

“Epic Abstraction” Metropolitan Museum A desire to shake up received art history is more than admirable today—it’s urgent for a future of pluralist values. But this wishfully canon-expanding show of painting and sculpture from the past eight decades effectively reinforces the old status quo. The first room affects like a mighty organ chord: it contains the Met’s two best paintings by Jackson Pollock: “Pasiphaë” (1943), a quaking compaction of mythological elements, and “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” (1950), a singing orchestration of drips— bluntly material and, inextricably, sublime. The adjective “epic” does little enough to honor Pollock’s mid-century glory, which anchors the standard art-historical saga of Abstract Expressionism as a revolution that

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

stole the former thunder of Paris and set a stratospheric benchmark for subsequent artists. The show takes the old valuation as a given without mentioning its vulnerabilities: rhetorical inflation, often, and macho entitlement, always. This perspective casts artists whose works reacted against or shrugged off Abstract Expressionism as little fish around the Leviathan.—P.S. (Ongoing.)

Lex Brown The Kitchen Have scrolling and swiping replaced thinking and feeling? Is your credit card racist? In “Animal Static,” a hilarious but pointed exhibition of three antic videos and four big text drawings, this young New York artist raises such questions while skewering YouTube makeup tutorials, Big Data, pop-up shops, pop-up windows, and the entertainmentindustrial complex. The videos are triggered by motion sensors, as are the lights on the drawings—whether you control the viewing experience or it controls you is up for debate. Conveying synopses of the dramatic action, delivered in disorienting jump cuts, is as challenging as transcribing a script by Ryan Trecartin, whose videos are clearly an influence. Boots Riley’s 2018 movie, “Sorry to Bother You,” may also come to mind, as absurdist story lines become delivery systems for searing critique. But such comparisons do a disservice to a voice as original as Brown’s, whose tone toggles persuasively between navel-gazing comedy (“When someone is trying to have a conversation with you and you’re just thinking about food”) and sobering truth (“Slavery. It can happen to anyone”).—Andrea K. Scott (Through Feb. 23.) CHELSEA

Doris Guo Bodega Dim lighting establishes a quietly theatrical ambience inside this small gallery, evoking the interiors where Guo’s materials were once at home. In her new suite, the young sculptor uses sliced sections of chairs, which she has carefully framed with stained wooden boxes and mounted on the wall. One trio of works showcases the front legs and halved seats of three distinctly different styles of mass-produced chair. The effect is unsettling, as if a magician had given up in the midst of a vanishing act. A larger sculpture offers the view in reverse: glossy spindles face out, and a pale cushion ends abruptly at the back of a dark recessed cabinet. Guo’s truncated forms have an affinity with Robert Gober’s uncanny domestic objects and body parts, but her coffined furniture achieves a formally astute effect all its own.—Johanna Fateman (Through Feb. 24.) DOWNTOWN

Ulrike Ottinger Donahue DOWNTOWN Ottinger, a German filmmaker and

artist, deserves to be much better known. If you’ve seen her indelible film “Johanna D’Arc of Mongolia,” from 1989, in which documentary and ethnographic modes abut exquisitely staged satire, it will come as no surprise that the stills lining the walls in this welcome

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paintings studded with dolls’ eyes, and her richly textured geometric abstractions that make inventive use of fragments of rubber tire. In a clear bid to establish the self-taught artist’s place amid art-history heavy hitters, Frigeri fills a stairwell with photographs of exhibitions that Rama is known to have seen. The installation shots of works by Francis Bacon, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, and Louise Nevelson don’t do much to enrich the viewing of her work, but the point is a good one. Long dismissed as an outsider—a hysterical woman—Rama knew exactly what she was doing.—J.F. (Through March 23.)

AT THE GALLERIES

“God Made My Face” Zwirner CHELSEA This beautifully calibrated group exhi-

mini-survey are almost stupefyingly beautiful, despite their sometimes dark heart. Dungeon scenes from the carnivalesque “Freak Orlando,” from 1981, echo the most tortured visions of Goya; a shot from the lesbian pirate film “Madame X,” from 1979, sets a human sacrifice on a ship’s prow. Works of a very different tone occupy the center of the gallery: vintage world maps, which are augmented, and also complicated, by postcards. The souvenir images—brutal relics of colonialism, attached with red cord or visible behind flaps cut into continents—convey Ottinger’s critical eye for disrupting hegemony.—J.F. (Through March 3.) 10

Carol Rama Lévy Gorvy UPTOWN The Italian artist, who died in 2015, at the age of ninety-seven, exhibited during her lifetime, but she has become a cult figure posthumously thanks to a provocative lexicon (wagging tongues, phalli, snakes, and shoes) and unexpected materials. For those who missed the New Museum’s excellent retrospective of her work, in 2017, this career-spanning exhibition, curated by Flavia Frigeri, is a fine introduction to her early, tauntingly explicit drawings, her poured and splattered

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

1 CLASSICAL MUSIC

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Carnegie Hall Holland’s prestigious Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra rolls into town with two traditional but vital programs. The first includes Schumann’s “Manfred” Overture—played alongside members of the National Youth Orchestra—and a pair of canonical symphonies: Brahms’s Fourth, and Mozart’s famous No. 40 (you know the tune). The second night opens with “Eiréné”—a new work, named for the Greek word for “peace,” by the lively, spaceobsessed French composer Guillaume Connesson—followed by Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, played by the uncompromising pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Richard Strauss’s lofty tone poem “Ein Heldenleben,” which closes the program, is a record of its composer’s Nietzschean tendencies; Daniel Harding conducts.—Fergus McIntosh (Feb. 14-15 at 8.)

“La Fille du Régiment” Metropolitan Opera House In this production of Donizetti’s elegantly written comedy “La Fille du Régiment,” the

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HIGHER PICTURES

For eighteen years, Janice Guy was best known as the co-proprietor of Murray Guy, the thinking person’s gallery—more Kunsthalle than commercial showcase—that she ran with Margaret Murray, in Chelsea, until 2017. The British-born Guy’s sixth sense for experimentalist talent may be due to a formerly little-known fact: she is a great artist herself. In the nineteen-seventies, she studied photography at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with the matchless German husband-and-wife team Bernd and Hilla Becher. You can see their typological influence in Guy’s untitled, hand-tinted series from 1976 (above), one of the works on view in her solo exhibition “Foot in the Mouth of Art, 1975-1981,” at another reliable source for intelligent art, Higher Pictures, on the Upper East Side (through March 9). If Guy was typologizing any subject, it was the female psyche, replacing the male gaze with her camera. For twenty-five years, her work was on hiatus, stored by a former classmate, the esteemed photographer Thomas Struth. He contributes an essay to a recently published book on these incisive pictures, available at the gallery, which has produced its own scrappier but no less beautiful publication.—Andrea K. Scott

bition, organized by Hilton Als, a staff writer at this magazine, is subtitled “A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin.” The thesis of the stirring visual essay is that Baldwin has become a stock character—a civil-rights prophet—and that this, however powerful, is a diminishment of the man. Als fleshes out his portrait with a daringly eclectic assortment of art works and documents, which shift in tone from rapturous (paintings by Beauford Delaney and Alice Neel) to harrowing (a fever-dream animation about the antebellum South by Kara Walker). Portraits of the writer by his lifelong friend Richard Avedon hang on the walls, along with a stark one of Michael Jackson dwarfed by his shadow, shot by Anthony Barboza—a prescient portrait of a black man subsumed by his legacy. Photographs of buildings in Belle Époque Paris, by Eugene Atget, establish Baldwin the boulevardier; photographs of the piers in Manhattan, taken by Alvin Baltrop during the pre-AIDS heyday of gay liberation, convey carnal desire. Each choice by Als eloquently amplifies the polyphony of Baldwin’s voice.—A.K.S. (Through Feb. 16.)

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“Dido and Aeneas” Willson Theatre, Juilliard School

Trio for Clarinet, Violin, and Piano), as well as a new quintet by the Welsh composer Huw Watkins. Four days later, music by Dvořák and Beethoven bookends Richard Strauss’s “Metamorphosen,” an extraordinary work composed in the final days of the Second World War. Reputedly a lament for the end of German culture (whether Strauss blamed the Nazis or the Allies is regrettably unclear), the piece transcends its origin, speaking in twilit tones of regret and refinement. Written for twenty-three solo strings, it’s played here by seven.—F.M. (Feb. 22 at 7:30; Feb. 26 at 7:30.)

M. Lamar The Cloisters

There’s certainly a precedent for Juilliard Opera’s undertaking of “Dido and Aeneas”: the first known performance of Purcell’s Baroque masterpiece occurred at a girls’ boarding school in London, in the sixteen-eighties. A tragedy in three acts, it contains characterful choruses, charming dances, and disarmingly direct melodies, but its simplicity is almost a feint—it concludes with one of the most haunting arias in opera. Avi Stein conducts the school’s students and its period-instrument ensemble, Juilliard415, in a production by Mary Birnbaum.—O.Z. (Feb. 20 and Feb. 22 at 7:30 and Feb. 24 at 2.)

The theatrical male soprano, pianist, and composer M. Lamar—whose quasi-operatic creations grapple with issues of race, violence, desire, and liberation—collaborates with the San Francisco-based guitar-and-percussion duo the Living Earth Show in a new song cycle, “Lordship and Bondage: The Birth of the Negro Superman.” Almost entirely without words, it is a visceral response to notions drawn from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sun Ra. The music conjures the ghostly plaint of rural blues and gospel singers, Diamanda Galás’s thunderous end-times arias, and the nihilistic menace of Scandinavian black metal—often all at once.—Steve Smith (Feb. 23 at 7.)

“Metamorphosen” Alice Tully Hall

William Basinski St. George’s Episcopal Church

Debussy’s eleven-minute-long Sonata for Cello and Piano may be diminutive, but the headstrong piece still packs a punch. It opens the first of two programs from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, which also features music by Brahms (his Sextet No. 2 in G Major) and Khachaturian (the dreamy

William Basinski, a composer and performer best known for “The Disintegration Loops,” a landmark minimalist work indelibly linked to the horrific events of 9/11, presents a new piece. “On Time Out of Time” is derived from recent recordings of cosmic ripples produced by two black holes colliding more than a bil-

COMPOSER PORTRAITS

“Urban Inventory,” an album released to wide acclaim last year by the feisty Brooklyn label New Focus Records, offers listeners a dizzying but delectable introduction to Wang Lu, a Chinese-born composer and pianist presently serving on the faculty of Brown University. The album features a fistful of admirable ensembles performing modernist works that incorporate both ancient folkloric evocations and thoroughly contemporary field recordings, fashioned with wide-open ears and penetrating wit. Those qualities will also be evident in a Composer Portrait concert at Miller Theatre on Feb. 21, in which two vital New York groups—International Contemporary Ensemble and Yarn/Wire—present a mix of new and recent pieces by Wang Lu, including a world première inspired by a visit to a textile factory near her birthplace.—Steve Smith 12

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

lion years ago. This concert, which also features the Brooklyn electro-acoustic composer Britton Powell, is the first Manhattan event mounted by Ambient Church, a nomadic presenter that matches contemplative music with mesmerizing light shows mapped to each venue’s architecture.—S.S. (Feb. 23 at 8.)

Matthew Polenzani Zankel Hall A lyric tenor with a meticulous sense of musicianship, Matthew Polenzani uses his recital with the pianist Julius Drake to tell the same story in two different ways. The first few sets seem straightforward enough—heartache in the form of songs by Schubert and Beethoven, plus Brahms’s rambunctious homage to Romany life, “Zigeunerlieder.” But then the program takes a perverse turn with Janáček’s “The Diary of One Who Disappeared,” a breathless, fragmented narrative about a young farmer’s infatuation with a Roma girl (sung here by Jennifer Johnson Cano) and how it consumes him.—O.Z. (Feb. 24 at 3.)

1 NIGHT LIFE

Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.

St. Vincent Appel Room The multi-hyphenate artist St. Vincent has earned much praise for her prismatic music, which runs the gamut from intricate chamberand electro-pop to psychedelic rock and retro jazz. But all the extra adornments fall away for this Appel Room performance of “MassEducation,” her acoustic album from last year. She’s accompanied here, as she was on the record, by the pianist and producer Thomas Bartlett (a.k.a. Doveman), a collaboration that she’s described as “two dear friends playing songs together with the kind of secret understanding one can only get through endless nights in New York City.”—Briana Younger (Feb. 14.)

Panda Bear Pioneer Works In an era in which audiences have grown inured to musical textures that bubble and fizz, the watery work of Noah Lennox—the influential Animal Collective member known professionally as Panda Bear—continues to turn heads. “Buoys,” his radiant new album, feels spare but still rich in the unexpected, encouraging listeners to fixate on the tiniest of sounds. Opening for him is the blissfully anarchic Home Blitz, whose every melody seems to emerge from the wreckage of an unusually clamorous industrial accident.—Jay Ruttenberg (Feb. 14-15.)

Dianne Reeves Rose Theatre The vocalist Dianne Reeves is the closest we’ve got to a Sarah Vaughan-like jazz diva—that is,

ILLUSTRATION BY PAIGE VICKERS

French director and costume designer Laurent Pelly taps into the work’s sauciness, turning Marie, an orphan taken in by a military regiment, into a tomboy with a rebellious streak. The current revival stars the bel-canto stalwarts Pretty Yende and Javier Camarena, plus Stephanie Blythe and, in a spoken cameo, the screen star Kathleen Turner; Enrique Mazzola conducts. Also playing: Verdi’s “Rigoletto” (Feb. 16 at 8, Feb. 19 at 7:30, and Feb. 23 at 1) returns in Michael Mayer’s glitzy Las Vegasinspired production.—Oussama Zahr (Feb. 15, Feb. 23, and Feb. 26 at 8, Feb. 18 at 7:30, and March 2 at 1.)

a magisterial singer with an auditorium-filling voice and a knack for populating a cherished standard. Yet Reeves, to her credit, isn’t following the classic rule book: her repertoire also finds room for the work of Marvin Gaye, Ani DiFranco, and Stevie Nicks. The peaks and valleys of romance are the binding themes for these Valentine’s Day-inspired performances.—Steve Futterman (Feb. 15-16.)

He.She.They 99 Scott Individually, each of the four d.j.s playing this event—Maya Jane Coles, Heidi, Kim Ann Foxman, and Lauren Flax—would be a worthwhile headliner. Together, they make the most exciting d.j. bill of the fortnight. All four are, to one degree or another, house-music formalists who restlessly tweak the basics. For example, the Brooklynite Flax has recently begun playing live hardware sets in addition to d.j.’ing; the Londoner Heidi made her debt to early Chicago “jack” tracks explicit by naming her label Jackathon Jams.—Michaelangelo Matos (Feb. 16.)

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Interpol ascended in Manhattan in the early two-thousands, its members looking like characters from a Bret Easton Ellis novel and sounding like depressed Englishmen of the Thatcher era. Now, thanks to nostalgia’s sleight of hand, everything about the band simply evokes New York at the turn of the millennium. In the wake of the craggy album “Marauder,” from last year, Interpol plays alongside its Matador labelmates Snail Mail and Car Seat Headrest. Both openers offer a millennial take on nineties indie rock— give it some time to ossify into the sound of 2019.—J.R. (Feb. 16.)

Phuong-Dan Good Room The Vietnamese-German d.j. Phuong-Dan, who has a long-standing residency at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club, plays techno with a subtle, dark eclecticism. His podcast for XLR8R, from December, repeatedly zigzags from languorous to tense, in part because he sidles into the beat rather than running into it headlong. A playful set for Boiler Room, from Amsterdam’s Dekmantel Festival last year, finds him aiming straight for the floor with an equally hide-and-seek quality.—M.M. (Feb. 16.)

DaniLeigh S.O.B.’s Prince nurtured many female artists throughout his career, and the Dominican-American singer and rapper DaniLeigh was among his last protégées. Following creative impulses gleaned from the late icon, she stacks breezy vocals and staccato rhymes over well-manicured R. & B. and hip-hop beats on her album “The Plan,” from November. The effort is almost too polished, but DaniLeigh’s grit and clear-eyed confidence break out on songs such as the swaggering

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Interpol Madison Square Garden

CLASSIC

GOLDEN ERA

MODERN

CONTEMPORARY

New Yorker Cover Prints newyorkerstore.com Carl Fornaro, March 21, 1925

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

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tone so deep and textured that it transfixes immediately. On his album “Village,” the British-Nigerian vocalist sings of romance like it’s holy and of heartbreak like it’s an affliction. With his old-soul-inspired-bynew-school mien, he makes music that’s as timeless as it is endearing.—B.Y. (Feb. 22.)

JAZZ FUSION

Empress Of Elsewhere As Empress Of, the Honduran-American artist Lorely Rodriguez makes earnest, openhearted synth-pop anthems that feel achingly intimate. Her first album, “Me,” from 2015, was as inward and reflective as its title suggests, but she branched out last October with “Us,” a collection of songs that raises a magnifying glass to the relationships in her life. Even when she’s tackling the intricacies of a doomed love affair—such as on the soaring Spanglish cut “When I’m with Him”—her music never loses its bright effervescence.—J.L. (Feb. 22-23.)

“Lil Bebe,” giving her smoother, feel-good repertoire a razor-sharp edge.—Julyssa Lopez (Feb. 17.)

MNEK Bowery Ballroom MNEK may be only twenty-three, but he has an ear for pop music that allows him to create big hits. The U.K.-born singer-songwriter’s lyrics and melodies—displayed on songs by Madonna, Dua Lipa, and Beyoncé—have earned him much success behind the scenes. But last year he poured his gifts into his own work, with a début album titled “Language”—a glorious project showcasing the breadth of his vocals and emotions.—Lakin Starling (Feb. 19.)

Dayna Stephens Quartet Village Vanguard The riveting post-bop saxophonist Dayna Stephens has already proved his worth on this bandstand as a trusted associate in the ensembles of Kenny Barron and others. For this critical engagement, though, he débuts at the helm of 14

a topnotch quartet, featuring the pianist Aaron Parks, the bassist Ben Street, and the drummer Gregory Hutchinson.—S.F. (Feb. 19-24.)

Buddy / Vince Staples Hammerstein Ballroom The Compton rapper and vocalist Buddy is a preacher’s son who, on his recent album “Harlan & Alondra,” taps into hip-hop’s mellow side with soulful hooks and hopeful verses. The project is an auditory elixir stirred with syncopated guitar solos, 808 drums, and gospel-inspired meditations on faith and the herculean task of lifting himself and his family out of the hood. He opens for Vince Staples, a rapper whose music embodies the vigor and Realpolitik of his own Southern California city, Long Beach.—Natalie Meade (Feb. 21.)

Jacob Banks Brooklyn Steel Jacob Banks’s voice has the intensity of lightning and the force of thunder—a bari-

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

A superman of mainstream jazz piano, the late Canadian-born virtuoso Oscar Peterson could do almost anything with his instrument; attempting to prove just that in the space of any given performance may have been his chief weakness. Prolix though he could be, Peterson remains a lasting keyboard influence. Established piano stylists—including Kenny Barron, Benny Green, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, and Gerald Clayton—along with Peterson’s old rhythm mate, the drummer Jeff Hamilton, celebrate this most popular of postwar jazz artists.—S.F. (Feb. 22-23.)

Hailu Mergia Brooklyn Baazar In the seventies, Hailu Mergia played keyboards in Ethiopia’s Walias Band, whose marathon sets often stretched into daylight to accommodate audiences wary of violating the government’s curfew. Long based in Washington, D.C.—of the city’s taxi-drivers, he must be the funkiest—Mergia recently reëmerged with “Lala Belu,” an album of shadowy, accordion-laden jams that he worked out between fares. He plays the Soul Clap & Dance-Off party, featuring Jonathan Toubin and his celebrated trove of 45s.—J.R. (Feb. 23.)

Jacquees Irving Plaza A product of Internet savviness, Jacquees knows how to play the long game. YouTube videos of the singer’s covers date back at least eight years, but the momentum from his single “B.E.D.,” from 2016, carried him through the release of his début studio album, “4275,” from last year. He’s since become a polarizing figure: he started a pseudo-controversy with his rendition of “Boo’d Up” and ignited a fire across social media upon crowning himself the “king of R. & B.” But his music, which is as much an

ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTI

In 2015, Kendrick Lamar’s acclaimed album “To Pimp a Butterfly” flung open a portal to new jazz for audiences previously unaware of or uninterested in the genre’s offerings. But the bassist and vocalist Thundercat and the saxophonist Kamasi Washington, both of whom appeared on that record, had already long been mainstays of L.A.’s bustling modern-jazz scene and members of the influential collective West Coast Get Down. On the 2017 album “Drunk,” Thundercat injects his sharp and freewheeling musicianship with whimsical flourishes, while “Heaven and Earth,” Washington’s ambitious double release from last year, is a transcendent meditation on jazz music’s past and present. This pair of Brainfeeder labelmates—each brilliant in his own right—are leaders of a charge that is reshaping the genre and triumphantly returning it to mainstream consciousness. Thundercat embarks on a six-night, fourteen-show residency at the Blue Note on Feb. 12; Washington brings his horn and his ten-piece band to the Apollo Theatre on Feb. 23.—Briana Younger

Piano Master Appel Room

homage to the genre’s nineties-era heyday as it is a redress for fans thirsty for R. & B. that is free of hip-hop’s touch, possesses a seductive quality that stretches far beyond its lyrical content.—B.Y. (Feb. 24.)

James Blake Terminal 5 It’s a treasured occasion when James Blake releases music. Three years after his album “The Colour in Anything,” the English singer-songwriter opened 2019 with his heartfelt recording “Assume Form.” A musical polymath, he expanded his sound with contributions from gifted musicians, including the Spanish artist Rosalía and the Atlanta rap producer Metro Boomin. Blake is known for his otherworldly vocals, but it’s his I.Q. in instrumentation that makes for a stunningly visceral listening experience.—L.S. (Feb. 24-25.)

1 DANCE

New York City Ballet David H. Koch If you’re looking for a primer to Petipa’s “Sleeping Beauty,” New York City Ballet’s production (Feb. 13-24) is the thing: swift and to the point. Somehow—mainly by cutting mime scenes—Peter Martins, who first staged the ballet in 1991, managed to squeeze Tchaikovsky’s sumptuous score into two acts, clocking in at about two and a half hours. (Some versions last up to four.) The famous set pieces are still there: Princess Aurora’s Rose Adagio, with its perilous balances on point; George Balanchine’s kaleidoscopic Garland Dance; and the climactic wedding pas de deux, with its grandiose melodies and heart-quickening “fish dives”—a move in which the ballerina spins and then dives precipitously forward, only to be caught, at the very last moment, by her cavalier.—Marina Harss (Through March 3.)

stretch as they spin and tumble. Balancing together in extreme positions, dropping and catching each other, they hint at the desire for union suggested by the title (Latin for “not alone”). Yet the show, beginning behind a plastic sheet that’s like a shower curtain, stays misty, its risk and beauty continually dampened by ponderous pacing and kitschy music. It’s a cabaret act overextended.—B.S. (Feb. 14-16.)

Kathy Westwater New York Live Arts A veteran of the experimental-dance scene, Westwater has, for more than twenty years, been plumbing the very private and elusive subject of the ways in which our bodies process pain and trauma. Research for “Rambler, Worlds Worlds a Part”—a piece for seven dancers, co-presented by Lumberyard— included exploration of the dancers’ own traumatic memories and workshops with individuals experiencing oppression, illness, and social exclusion. The score, which will be played live, is by the post-minimalist American composer Julius Eastman.—M.H. (Feb. 14-16.)

such as a première by Wiles for students from the University of Utah, with a score by the esteemed jazz trumpeter Tom Harrell. But the news is the participation of Amar Ramasar, who made a splash on Broadway last year in “Carousel,” and was fired from New York City Ballet in September, after being accused of texting sexually explicit photos of female dancers. He’ll be dancing Mauro Bigonzetti’s “BachGround” with his former City Ballet colleague Maria Kowroski.—B.S. (Feb. 19-23.)

Complexions Joyce Theatre For most of its twenty-five years of existence, Complexions Contemporary Ballet has endured critical disapproval of its flashy aesthetic and its relentless, all-exclamationpoints preening. And, for most of that time, such complaints have had little to no effect on its loyal, adoring audience. Its silver-anniversary programs at the Joyce include a greatesthits compilation, as well as the premières of the supposedly neoclassical “Bach 25” and the topical “Woke.”—B.S. (Feb. 19-24 and Feb. 26-March 3.)

BalletNext New York Live Arts

Farruquito Town Hall

This season of Michele Wiles’s company features the usual assortment of novelties,

By the time Farruquito was a teen-ager, in the mid-nineties, he was considered heir

IN PRAISE OF PAINTING

Dutch Masterpieces AT THE MET

Gallim Joyce Theatre Last May, as the first choreographer to serve as artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Andrea Miller presented dances that were like anthropological fantasies: sweaty, sculptural, not wholly convincing evocations of early humans. “To Create a World,” her latest piece for her troupe, Gallim, takes those ideas further, expressing the instinct to survive as an impulse to twist, flex, and arch in the Gaga style of Ohad Naharin.—Brian Seibert (Feb. 12-17.)

Recirquel BAM Howard Gilman Opera House This Hungarian troupe specializes in what its director and choreographer, Bence Vági, calls cirque danse. In “Non Solus,” two barely clothed male gymnasts, high above the floor on a rope or a trapeze swing, show off balletic

“How great are the Met’s holdings in the Dutch Golden Age? Very.” —The New Yorker

Now on view

metmuseum.org

#MetDutchMasterpieces

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Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (detail), ca. 1662. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889.

apparent to a flamenco dynasty. His New York appearances in 2016, after a thirteenyear absence that included a prison term, revealed him, in his mid-thirties, to be still a traditionalist, still a heartthrob, still a virtuoso of extraordinary brilliance and shading. For his current production, named after himself, he’s joined by a nine-member ensemble of dancers, singers, and musicians but seldom leaves the stage—he’s composed the music, too. It’s a personal show, reflecting aspects of his biography and flamenco as a way of life.—B.S. (Feb. 22.)

New Shanghai Circus Schimmel Center This troupe from Shanghai has all the circus arts covered: acrobatics, juggling, illusionism, contortions, mind-boggling acts of balance. The feats are exceptional, as are the flexibility and strength of the performers. “How do they do that?” is a question that will cross your mind, not once but a hundred times. The canned music might be hard going, but you can’t have everything.—M.H. (Feb. 24.)

1 MOVIES

Birds of Passage This drama, based on the true story of a drug war that engulfed the indigenous Wayuu people of northern Colombia in the nineteensixties and seventies, is an ethnographic thriller. A poor young man named Rapayet (José Acosta), a low-level coffee dealer, wants to marry a young woman named Zaida (Natalia Reyes), from the respected Pushaina clan; unable to afford the hefty dowry set by her formidable mother (Carmiña Martínez), he begins selling marijuana to American Peace Corps workers. After the wedding, Rapayet’s business expands and his family prospers, but the inevitable violence does more than threaten their well-being: it endangers the intricate, delicate fabric of tradition that defines the Wayuu way of life. The directors, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, examine those traditions with ardent attention; their poised, richly textured images both unfold the action in tense detail and enmesh it in its social context, rescuing cultural mem-

MODERN DANCE

ory from tragic devastation. In Wayuu and Spanish.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)

The Competition The French director Claire Simon considers the state of her country’s film industry in this documentary—which she also shot—about the many-faceted admissions tests for France’s most prestigious film school, La Fémis. She shows prospective students wrestling with a written exam, graders debating one another’s criteria, and professionals grilling candidates about their relevant activities, work samples, experience, and ambitions; aspiring directors are evaluated on a sample scene created on the school’s studio set. Speaking freely after applicants leave, two female examiners derisively acknowledge the administrators’ desire for gender parity and ethnic, racial, geographic, and economic diversity—but, judging from a group portrait of students at the beginning of the new school year, some of these goals remain elusive. Other examiners suspect that the tests filter out idiosyncratic candidates, and recent French films prove the point: the system that Simon analytically probes appears mainly to perpetuate itself. In French.—R.B. (In limited release.)

The Favourite The new Yorgos Lanthimos film is his friendliest to date, though admirers should not fret. The people in the story—best thought of as human animals—are every bit as maleficent as they were in his earlier movies, such as “Dogtooth” (2009) and “The Lobster” (2015). This time, he has dug into the mire of the past and unearthed a little-known episode from the start of the eighteenth century, concerning Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). She is attended by Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), who guides the sovereign’s political thinking and occasionally shares her bed. But a threat soon arrives, in the person of Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), no less Machiavellian than the Duchess and eager to take her place. The movie is at once cool-blooded and outrageous; Lanthimos takes evident pleasure in stripping the past of its decorum, and powerful, foolish men of their importance.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 11/26/18.) (In limited release.)

In this, the centenary year of Merce Cunningham’s birth, discussions of his philosophy and choreography are proliferating like the wild mushrooms that John Cage—Cunningham’s partner in life and art—so loved to harvest and cook. When Cunningham’s company ceased to exist, in 2011, two years after his death, there was reason to worry that his legacy might languish. So it has been heartening to see the determination with which his former dancers continue to spread the word by teaching and staging his works. Silas Riener was one of the troupe’s most striking and daredevil performers in its final years; in a program called “Runs the Gamut: Exploring the Creative Legacy of Merce Cunningham,” at Baryshnikov Arts Center on Feb. 16, Riener leads a group of young dancers from the Ailey School, Juilliard, N.Y.U.’s Tisch, and Harvard in a discussion and a demonstration of Cunningham’s rigorous technique and pathbreaking approach to composition. The composer Tei Blow will provide accompaniment using found objects, microphones, and prepared piano.—Marina Harss 16

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

This melodramatic comedy by the South Korean director Hong Sang-soo is a sharp and bittersweet confrontation with love, art, family, and mortality. It’s set in a seaside resort during the winter off-season and centered on two of its few guests: a young woman (Kim Min-hee) who’s seeking refuge from a bad breakup with a married man, and an elderly man, a renowned poet (Ki Joo-bong), who’s there at the invitation of the resort’s manager, a fan. The woman is visited by a female friend who offers company and consolation; the poet is joined by his grown sons—the younger is a well-known film director, and the elder is jealous of their father’s admiration. The travellers’ paths drolly and poignantly crisscross, and Hong builds a scheme of coincidences into a volatile tangle of misunderstandings, memories, premonitions, fantasies, and dreams. The brisk and lyrical action, filmed in chilly black-and-white tones, is adorned

ILLUSTRATION BY ANA GALVAÑ

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with eccentric, symbolic details; the petty stuff of daily life shudders with stifled conflict and looming calamity. In Korean.—R.B. (In limited release.)

relief from the universal tyranny of love. In Japanese.—R.B. (BAM, Feb. 18, and streaming.)

Late Spring

Growing up in Rockford, Illinois, a decade ago, Bing Liu filmed his friends’ wondrous skateboarding adventures, and his own. Recently, he returned, as a documentary filmmaker, to film his friends’ current lives, but the main subject of his empathetic, wide-ranging, and urgent inquiry is the past. Zack and Keire, high-school dropouts, struggle to get by; both of them, they tell Liu, endured beatings as children—as did Liu. Zack, a new father, is in a troubled relationship with Nina, his child’s mother, who tells Liu that Zack has beaten her. Liu interviews his own mother, Mengyue, about his abuser, his late stepfather. Liu transforms the documentary into a form of cinema therapy, bringing long-silenced traumas to the fore while reconsidering skateboarding as a response to intimate agony. His own ethical risk in discussing private lives is central to the film, too; Liu offers a vision of hardwon progress, a passionate form of political action.—R.B. (In limited release and on Hulu.)

Noriko (Setsuko Hara), a widowed professor’s adult daughter, loves the scholarly Hattori (Jun Usami), who is already engaged. Her father (Chishu Ryu) and her meddling aunt (Haruko Sugimura) arrange a suitable but loveless match for her, which she would refuse, if only she could find a socially acceptable excuse. Rigid formality leaves much unsaid in Yasujiro Ozu’s 1949 film, but the director reveals the hidden depths of ordinary life with a quiet astonishment and observes his characters with an exacting subtlety of expression. Ozu views the artifacts of the U.S. occupation of Japan with irony—between exultant images of Noriko’s romantic bicycle ride with Hattori, he wryly shows a roadside Coca-Cola sign—but films the serenity of a tea ceremony with reverence. By the end, Noriko’s open and forthright smile becomes a rictus of pain, and neither Japanese tradition nor American-style freedom offers her any

Minding the Gap

AT THE MOVIES

Never Look Away Running more than three hours, and spanning decades, the new movie from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is twice as ambitious as the “The Lives of Others” (2006), his début film, though only half as tense. The hero is Kurt Barnert, who is played as a child by the enthralling Cai Cohrs, and as a young man by Tom Schilling. Kurt studies art in East Germany after the Second World War, and then escapes to the West; his travails—and his paintings—are loosely based on those of Gerhard Richter. The trouble is that Kurt pales beside the darker and more corrupted figure of his father-in-law, Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), who prospers under both the Nazi and the Communist regimes. Still, there are passages of grace and urgency, notably in Kurt’s early years, when his beloved aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), afflicted in mind, falls prey to the menace of the times. In German.—A.L. (2/11/19) (In limited release.)

Nothing but a Man Michael Roemer’s bold independent film, from 1964, about the awakening of righteous anger in response to social and institutional racism, stars Ivan Dixon as a black laborer in the South whose relationship with a schoolteacher and minister’s daughter (the singer Abbey Lincoln) is threatened by his rising activism. The movie was co-produced by its cinematographer, Robert Young, and its sound recordist, Robert Rubin, and their contributions add surprising dimensions to the film’s dramatic and political power. The subtly burnished, calmly monumental images put the action in a seeming 3-D relief that lends the magnificent cast (composed mainly of black actors) an intense physical presence, and the soundtrack captures the life-worn grain of their voices with a frank intimacy that pulls viewers up close to the action. The story turns on such urgent matters as labor politics, school integration, the devastating legacies of subjugation and humiliation, and the constant threat of violence, which the drama renders agonizingly personal.—R.B. (BAM, Feb. 16.)

This year’s edition of MOMA’s wide-ranging “Doc Fortnight” series (Feb. 21-28) presents the U.S. première of “Chaos,” the second feature by the Syrian filmmaker Sara Fattahi, who’s one of the most original documentarians working today. Her first, “Coma,” from 2015 (and still unreleased in the U.S.), shows three generations of women in her family confined, by war, to their apartment in her native Damascus. In “Chaos,” Fattahi, who now lives in Vienna, films the war from the perspective of exile, both inner and outer. A woman in Damascus whose son was killed by the regime stays indoors and tends his memory with a ritualistic devotion—and contemplates vengeance with a Shakespearean fury. Another woman, whose brother was killed in Syria, has taken refuge in Sweden; in the depth of her grief, she also contends with mental illness. Doing her own camerawork, Fattahi creates images of an overwhelmingly expressive intimacy; she evokes the soul-shattering traumas of war while finding their cultural reflections in her new life in Europe.—Richard Brody 18

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

A famous, talented, and drunken man meets an unheralded female performer and gives her the break she needs, only to be eclipsed by her success: that old story. Bradley Cooper directs a fresh version of the well-worn tale, and takes the leading role; he plays a rock star named Jackson Maine, who drops into a bar and finds Ally (Lady Gaga) raising the roof. Before long, she is sharing a stage with him, and then a bed, but happiness lies beyond his grasp. The film is intrusive and intense, surveying their rocky relationship and their bonds with other people—Jackson’s brother (Sam Elliott), Ally’s father (Andrew Dice Clay), and the smooth Svengali (Rafi Gavron) who guides her rising career. To follow the example of Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand requires nerve, but Lady Gaga takes possession of the movie, and her singing sets it ablaze.—A.L. (10/8/18) (In wide release.)

1 For more reviews, visit newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

COURTESY LITTLE MAGNET FILMS

A Star Is Born

1 TABLES FOR TWO

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID WILLIAMS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

Barca 44 Navy Pier Ct., Staten Island It’s tempting to underestimate Staten Island, a borough whose main attractions include a public park built on a landfill called Fresh Kills. The other night at Barca, a new Italian seafood restaurant in Stapleton, a neighborhood on the island’s northeastern coast, a server couldn’t resist delivering a self-deprecating, faux-pretentious riff on the local water: “Do you want frizzante, or Staten Island tap? Staten Island tap, it’s a little volcanic!” The water may not have been volcanic, but the wine was. On another evening, I asked for a recommendation—a crisp, mineraly red that would pair well with fish. One of Barca’s owners, Vic Rallo, wearing a camo-print trucker hat, launched into a detailed explanation of the 2017 Tenuta delle Terre Nere Etna Rosso, which originated in the rocky, lava-rich soil of Sicily—among the hardest places on earth to grow grapes, he pointed out. “If you can conquer those places . . . ,” he said, trailing off. Was this a metaphor for opening a restaurant on Staten Island? If anyone is poised to conquer this terrain, it’s Rallo.

He opened Barca with Dave Pasternack, the renowned chef and fisherman behind the midtown seafood mecca Esca, and the pair are also partners in another place, called Surf, with which Barca shares a parking lot. Both are part of Staten Island Urby, a sleek new development, complete with luxury apartments and valet service, not far from the ferry terminal. Barca’s executive chef, Katie O’Donnell—who spent seven years at Esca, commuting from Staten Island (she now, ironically, lives in Coney Island, where she swims with the Polar Bear Club)—is conscious that she’s playing to a different audience here. In a recent interview with the Staten Island Advance, she explained that she planned to start with a relatively “mainstream” menu, with hopes to get a bit bolder as local patrons get more comfortable. As such, Barca, where the décor aims for Hamptons yacht club, offers plenty of well-executed old standbys, including oysters and clams on the half shell, fluke crudo, a pitch-perfect lobster spaghetti, and a whole branzino—plus dishes like mushroom lasagna and a pork chop, for good measure. (A plate of slightly dry yellowfin meatballs in marinara felt too much like pandering, and like a waste of tuna.) But there is a lot here that will appeal to adventurous diners, too. O’Donnell’s insalata di bottarga is as refreshing yet wintry a vegetable dish as I’ve ever encountered, a beautiful, delicate pile of celery leaves, shaved fennel, and radicchio, dressed lightly in a Meyer-lemon

vinaigrette and topped with kumquat and razor-thin slices of salty cured red-mullet roe that melt creamily on your tongue. The broth in her zuppa di pesce, a Sicilian-style fish stew abundant with mussels, clams, shrimp, black sea bass, Castelvetrano olives, and fregola, a pearlshaped pasta, is so appealingly redolent of Pernod that I couldn’t resist sipping the last dregs straight from the lidded crock after my spoon had been cleared. Barca may not yet be the sort of place where raw uni is flying off the menu, which perhaps accounts for why an order of it was surprisingly subpar, marred by a tragically metallic, astringent flavor that suggested it was less than fresh, or contained a preservative. Fortunately, it took only the lightest of complaints to have the item scrubbed from the bill, and dessert—particularly a gelato made with sabayon, the traditional Italian sauce of egg yolk, sugar, and sweet wine—proved a powerful palate cleanser. Another night’s maccheroni alla chitarra with cooked uni and crabmeat, an Esca calling card, offered further redemption. When my dining companions and I mentioned to Rallo that we were fans of Esca, he sent Pasternack over to say hello. “How’s Staten Island treating you?” we asked. He shrugged; it was too soon to tell. “View’s better over here,” someone remarked, gesturing to the uninterrupted panorama of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and Manhattan, twinkling in the distance. He chuckled appreciatively: “No shit!” (Entrées $24-$34.) —Hannah Goldfield

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DRAMA IN EVERY BREATH

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Nadine Sierra as Gilda

THE TALK OF THE TOWN COMMENT HOUSE CLEANING

he crisis of democracy that has attended Donald Trump’s Presidency has visibly manifested itself in challenges to the free press, the judiciary, and the intelligence agencies, but among its more corrosive effects has been the corruption of basic mathematics. Since the 2016 election, Trump has periodically ragetweeted about an alleged three million non-citizens whose ballots delivered the popular-vote majority to Hillary Clinton. His fulminations were a fanciful extension of the Republican Party’s concern, despite all evidence to the contrary, that American elections are riddled with voter fraud. The math does, however, support a different number—one that truthfully points to how American democracy is being undermined. Nearly two million fewer AfricanAmericans voted in the 2016 election than did in 2012. That decline can be attributed, in part, to the fact that it was the first election since 2008 in which Barack Obama was not on the ballot and, in part, to an ambivalence toward Clinton among certain black communities. Civil-rights groups and members of the Congressional Black Caucus point to another factor as well: 2016 was the first Presidential election since the Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision, which eviscerated sections of the Voting Rights Act. Suppressive tactics, some old, some new, ensued— among them, voter-roll purges; discriminatory voter-I.D. rules; fewer polling places and voting machines; and reduc-

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

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tions in early-voting periods. After an election in which some two million Americans went missing, the Administration concluded that three million too many had shown up at the polls. (The equation here is: reality minus delusion equals three million.) Last week, with these events in mind, a hearing on H.R. 1, the For the People Act, took place in the House of Representatives. Elijah Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, the new chair of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, referred to the bill, in his opening remarks, as “one of the boldest reform packages to be considered in the history of this body.” He added, “This sweeping legislation will clean up corruption in government, fight secret money in politics, and make it easier for American citizens across this great country to vote.” That statement was

not partisan hyperbole. The bill is a broad, imaginative, and ambitious set of responses to the most pressing challenges facing American democracy, many of which preceded the 2016 election, but almost all of which were brought into sharper focus by it. Implicit in the choice to take up an electoral-reform bill as the first act of the new Democratic majority in the House was the decision to confront not only these injustices but, more fundamentally, the forces that have allowed them to come into existence. The bill contains provisions to insure access to paper ballots, in order to verify the accuracy of voting results; to establish early voting in all states for federal elections; and to launch independent redistricting commissions, to address the problem of partisan gerrymandering. A federal matching system for smalldollar political contributions would serve as a counterbalance to the sums that wealthy individuals and corporations pour into spending for political elections. Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates would be required to release their tax returns. The bill also includes provisions for mandating transparency in digital-ad spending, strengthening disclosure policies regarding foreign gifts to officeholders, and strictly enforcing the Foreign Agents Registration Act. A section focussing on voting rights is of particular interest. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Shelby essentially held that the Voting Rights Act was outmoded, relying on presumptions about racism, especially in Southern states, which didn’t reflect the progress that had been made

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

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since 1965, when the bill was signed. The Court, however, left open the possibility that Congress might bring it in line with more recent circumstances, if warranted. H.R. 1 could spur the creation of new formulas for determining which states should be subject to federal oversight. It might, for example, be possible to take into account recent votersuppression efforts in Ohio, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and other states, thereby expanding the reach of the Act. For those progressives who were wary of what the Democrats would do with their new majority in the House, H.R. 1 is as reassuring a start as anyone could have hoped for. But the civic fervor behind it has not been entirely welcomed on Capitol Hill. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, denounced H.R. 1 as “a power grab that’s smelling more and more like exactly what it is.” Setting aside the question of what a power grab smells like, McConnell’s

outrage was striking, even in a period as cynical as this one. Taking aim at a provision that would make Election Day a day off for federal employees (with the idea that private companies would follow suit for their employees), McConnell said, “Just what America needs—another paid holiday,” then predicted that federal employees would use the time to volunteer for Democratic campaigns. It’s not uncommon for a single bill to encompass such a wide range of concerns. But the concerns presented in H.R. 1 point to another unanswered question. For the past twenty months, public attention has been focussed on the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election. Intelligence agencies, media outlets, and independent researchers have consistently pointed to Russian intentions to sway the electorate in Trump’s favor. Possi-

ble motivations for these efforts—from belated score-settling for the Cold War to alleviating sanctions—aren’t hard to discern. But we’ve seldom asked about American motivations in creating the conditions that facilitated such meddling. Russian attempts to influence American voters—including ad purchases on social media intended to foment racial division—coexisted with and benefitted from domestic attempts to discourage people from casting a vote. American democracy is threatened by a hydra of vulnerabilities, most of them of our own making, but none of them beyond the notice of our adversaries. H.R. 1 is the most cogent corrective to these matters which we have yet seen. The calculations around it will most certainly be partisan, but it is the best hope for ending the corrosive practices that subtract citizens from the electorate. —Jelani Cobb

TABOO DEPT. CODE RED

of school when they reach puberty, and where the stigma of menstruation is intense. (In the village, whose residents worship a female deity, women are barred from temple during their periods.) The Oakwood students also raised enough to bring on a director and make a short documentary about what happened when the machine arrived in Kathikhera and some of the women, most of whom had never before had money of their own, became entrepreneurs. The film, “Period. End of Sentence,” has been nominated for an Oscar. “Sometimes people think it’s a film about grammar,” Rayka Zehtabchi, the director, who is twenty-five and recently graduated from film school, said. “It’s a nice reveal.” Melissa Berton, an English teacher at Oakwood, is the Pad Project’s faculty adviser and a producer on the film. She is also Yenser’s mom. (Other producers include Lisa Taback, a Hollywood publicist who specializes in campaigning for Oscars, and her daughter, a founding member of the club.) Pad Project alumni, many of them at farflung colleges, keep in touch on Slack. At Oakwood, Berton unlocked an English classroom—funky carpet, handwritten list of Penelope’s attributes tacked to the wall—and pulled the chairs

into a circle. On her desk was a box of pads produced in Kathikhera and a stack of promotional stickers. A chorus went up—“Stickers! We have stickers!”—as the girls began applying them to water bottles. “We all have period swag,” Zehtabchi said. “In India, a lot of the time, if a family discovers their daughter is menstruating they try to bury it, and keep silent about it, because once a woman menstruates she becomes a target for sexual abuse and harassment,” Zehtabchi said. “There’s this giant elephant in the room. Mothers are not talking about it to their daughters, wives are not talking to their husbands, so no one is really very knowledgeable or educated about what this thing is that happens to women’s bodies every month.” For Zehtabchi, the most revealing moment of the project was when she went unannounced into a coed classroom in Kathikhera and asked the teacher to have the students define a period. The teacher called on a teenage girl and asked her to stand. For two and a half excruciating minutes, the girl writhed, unable to answer. “We discovered that, yes, there was a lesson in the textbook about menstruation and the female body, but that the teacher had actually skipped the lesson because she

everal years ago, when Helen Yenser was a senior at Oakwood School, a private K-12 school in North Hollywood, she stood up in front of her class and talked about menstruating. “After I gave my presentation, there was this pause,” she said. “The coolest guy in my grade was, like, ‘Did she just talk about her period? That’s the coolest thing.’” The other week, Yenser was back on campus to attend the weekly meeting of the Pad Project, a school club she launched after learning, on a field trip to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, about the struggles of girls and women in countries with deep taboos around menstruation. In 2016, the club raised money to send a low-tech pad-making machine—comprising a grinder, a block, a press, and an ultraviolet microwave—to Kathikhera, a rural village on the outskirts of New Delhi, where girls don’t have much access to pads or tampons and typically drop out

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was uncomfortable,” Zehtabchi said. At first, the Kathikhera women told their male relations that the pad machine made Huggies. By the film’s end, Sneha, a young woman who is financing her dream of becoming a police officer in New Delhi with proceeds from the pads, has roped a male village elder into making pads with her. Back home, the Pad Project girls noticed their own community evolving, too. Mason Maxam, a sophomore, said, “The way boys in our grade talk about periods has changed a lot. Before, it was, like, ‘Oh, she’s on her shark week or whatever, watch out.’ But now the conversation is more respectful.” In the past year, she said, Oakwood

Zehtabchi and Sneha had made the pads in the ladies’ rooms available for free. “Girls in America do miss school because of their periods,” Yenser said. “New York and California added tampons and pads for free in schools and attendance went up.” “Those machines never work,” Zehtabchi said. “If you don’t have a pad or a tampon, you’re shit out of luck. You gotta ask a sister.” In spite of the strong taboo in India, sanitary napkins have broken through into pop culture. “Pad Man,” a Bollywood musical, tells the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, the inventor of the machine installed in Kathikhera. “I don’t know if the United States would ever do a big Hollywood blockbuster about pads,” Yenser said. “Give it a year,” Zehtabchi said. —Dana Goodyear 24

1 EXCURSIONS SPACE ROCK

n a recent Friday, the musician Sean Lennon, who is forty-three, sat on a striped couch at a studio in downtown Manhattan, in a building where he rehearses, and where his parents, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, once lived and worked. Lennon has a dark beard, long hair, and glasses, and he wore a British military-style hat with a spigotlike protrusion. “I think it’s some kind of dowsing device,” he said, looking pleased. “When I’m doing something Delirium-oriented, I tend to put on a captain’s hat, or Navy attire.” In the past couple of decades, Lennon, a versatile performer and skilled guitarist, has released two solo albums, scored films, started a record label, acted, and appeared on albums by, among others, Marianne Faithfull and Lady Gaga. His prog-rock duo, Claypool Lennon Delirium, with the far-out Primus bassist, Les Claypool, may be his most fully realized artistic effort so far. This month, the band releases “South of Reality,” its second album; both records feature exacting, if not militaristic, deployments of whimsy, with a frisson of psychedelic Beatles. The new one begins with wind chimes—they recorded at Claypool’s Rancho Relaxo studio, in Sonoma County—and segues into Lennon’s friendly guitar and a playful fable, by Claypool, involving pollution. “I love the idea of ‘Mercury makes its way onto the dishes of those who eat little fishes,’” Lennon said, paraphrasing the lyrics. “It sounds Dr. Seussian.” Lennon’s studio is Dr. Seussian, too. A cluster of birch branches, left over from a video shoot by his girlfriend, Charlotte Kemp Muhl, stood atop a staircase. Several fanciful guitars hung on a wall: a Wandré that evoked an absinthe spoon (“influenced by Dali”); an old Vox (“I put these insect and snail stickers all over it”); a bright-red Fender VI bass, which was a gift from Nels Cline, of Wilco. “My dad played a Fender VI on the ‘Let It Be’ record, on bass stuff,” Lennon said. Inside a soundproof room

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THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

with egg-crate walls and eggplant-colored carpeting, the flotsam of creative efforts was scattered around: drums, amps, pedals, a percussion gourd, a disco ball, an eight-foot-tall stuffed giraffe. “I had a giraffe when I was a kid that my dad got me from FAO Schwarz,” Lennon said. “That giraffe eventually disintegrated. This reminded me of the one that I had in my room.” Later in February, Claypool would arrive; they would rehearse there for a performance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Lennon got to know Claypool in 2015, when his band with Muhl opened for Primus. Jamming together, Lennon and Claypool discovered a natural chemistry. As a solo artist, Lennon wrote about his own life; working with Claypool provokes narratives about crickets, genies, phantasms, and, especially, outer space. “Monolith of Phobos,” from their début album of the same name, was inspired by a fervent remark that Buzz Aldrin made on C-SPAN in 2009, about a curious rock in Mars’s orbit. “When I saw Buzz, hero to me that he is, talking about possibly artificial structures on the moon of Mars—‘a potato-shaped moon called Phobos’—I just assumed that I would wake up the next morning and it would be on the front page of every newspaper,” Lennon said. It wasn’t. But Lennon later showed the clip to Claypool, who quickly wrote some music and lyrics: “The Monolith of Phobos / it stares Buzz in the eye/On a tater-shaped moon that’s falling from the sky.” The song “Boriska” is about a Russian boy who “claimed to be a star child, an indigo child, who was a reincarnation of a Martian pilot,” Lennon said. The epic “Blood and Rockets” is about the rocket scientist Jack Parsons, who, as Lennon has put it, was a “Magister Templi in Aleister Crowley’s cult.” It’s a commanding, sunny song, whose mood, enhanced by Lennon’s eerily familiar lead vocals, can unexpectedly provoke sense memories of tangerine trees and marmalade skies. “It is overwhelming, the cosmos,” Lennon said, smiling. “The potentially infinite universe. Especially as things get more complicated and strange on the Earth planet.” This brought to mind Yoko Ono’s album “Approximately Infinite Universe,” from 1973. “I think it’s her best title,” Lennon said. “And she

designed a logo with it.” He pulled up an image of the logo, an elegant cluster of symbols. “This is the sign for ‘approximate’ in science. That’s ‘infinity.’ And, for her, ‘universe’ is yin-yang and female.” Lennon recently rereleased several of Ono’s records on his label, Chimera. “I was very proud to hand her a stack of Yoko vinyls that I’d had remastered,” he said. “She’s not easily touched by stuff, and she got a little tear in her eye. So that made me feel like a good son.” —Sarah Larson

1 ROUNDS SEEKING HEAT

mong the least shocking Trumpfamily revelations of the past year: the New York City Council launched an investigation into Kushner Companies, the firm once run by the President’s son-in-law, for what one council member described as “the weaponization of construction.” Step 1: Buy a building full of rent-stabilized tenants who are paying below market rate.

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Step 2: Bang and drill until they leave. “The Kushners are just one of many, many predatory landlords,” Noelle Francois said recently. It was the Monday after a cold snap, and Francois, who is thirty-one and lives in Bushwick, was in a brick apartment building in East Flatbush, protecting people against another weapon of bad landlords: turning down the heat. City law requires apartments to be at least sixty-eight degrees during the day and sixty-two at night. But heat violations can be tricky to prove. Francois’s nonprofit, Heat Seek, installs temperature sensors inside tenants’ apartments. The sensor takes a reading each hour and stores the data online, for use in lawsuits or in written complaints. N’Jelle Murphy, a tenant living in a rent-stabilized apartment on the fifth floor, said that the building’s manager had been turning down the heat late at night. She’d file 311 complaints from her iPad after midnight, but city inspectors came during the day. “They’d come with their thermostat, like, ‘Oh, the temperature’s fine.’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, because the heat’s on now!’” She went on, “So I said, ‘Let me get Heat Seek, so that I have proof.’” It was forty-four degrees outside. Murphy, a legal secretary, sat on her bed, wearing leg warmers and two sweaters. She has lupus, a disease that

“Astonish me.”

affects her lungs, kidneys, and joints, and the cold aggravates her condition. Francois, who is petite and blondish, sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor fiddling with the sensor, a small black box, like an oversized Lego. “The landlord knew they were coming!” she said. (The city notifies building owners before checking on heat complaints.) “The only way they get caught is if an inspector shows up and the building is currently in violation. And there’s someone to let him in. And he can get into an apartment, not just the lobby. Then he’ll issue a violation—maybe. Or he’ll decide, ‘Eh, it’s sixty-six. Close enough.’” Francois pulled a laptop out of her bag. “You have Wi-Fi, right?” “Yeah,” Murphy said, handing over a Post-it with the log-in credentials. She’d lived in the building for more than twenty years, she said. “I grew up here. This management took over about ten years ago. The old management never had any problems. But now sometimes I’m sleeping in a hat!” Francois stood up and handed Murphy a form. “This is the tenant agreement,” she said. She pointed to a spot by the door. “Should I put it right there? Is that good?” “You could put it a little lower,” Murphy said. Francois mounted the sensor, then applied a strip of shiny tamper tape to its base. “If you rip it off, it leaves a residue,” she explained. “If there’s no residue, we can say we know they didn’t stick it outside, or put it in the freezer, or whatever people think tenants do to make it seem colder.” Francois said goodbye to Murphy and went down the hall to collect a sensor from another Heat Seek customer, an accountant named Cleveland John. (Tenants can buy a sensor for a hundred and thirty-nine dollars or borrow one for free during the cold months.) “How’s it going?” Francois asked when John opened the door, wearing a pinstriped shirt. He said that, like Murphy, he’d been having heat problems since the building’s management changed. (The Flatbush Tenant Coalition filed a lawsuit last year, using data from Heat Seek.) John invited Francois into the living room. “It was awfully cold,” he said, handing over the sensor. “But it’s been better since we started this.”

“Well, if it gets bad again, give me a call,” Francois said. She glanced at the television, where a rerun of “The Office” was playing. “I love this show!” John said that he did, too. “You know, you messed with me. I just missed a good ending!” A wind stirred outside, and John pointed to the window. “You feel a draft coming through here?” He shook his head. “I told super. But I’m an old man now—I stopped fighting. I leave that to the younger folks.” “Unbelievable,” Francois said, of the window. Then she left to catch a bus back to Bushwick. —Jeanie Riess

1 THE PICTURES HELLO, GORGEOUS

he first time the actor Richard E. Grant met Barbra Streisand, they spoke for twenty-two minutes. He recently recalled the encounter, which took place at a house party somewhere “above Sunset Boulevard,” in 1991. She was wearing a black lace dress and a floppy hat. He had arrived in a “cheap rental car.” In order to reach Streisand, Grant had to shove past Winona Ryder, then a young starlet who was busy “blowing smoke up my fundament,” he said. Grant asked Streisand for permission to shake her hand. (“I did touch flesh!”) Streisand asked if he was stoned. He was not stoned. Grant—who is now sixty-one, with a tuft of silver hair and a chiselled, craggy face that he admits can look “sepulchral”—doesn’t drink or use drugs. (His father was an alcoholic.) “I came up with something really cheesy,” he went on. “I said, ‘No, I’m just absolutely off my face with excitement to meet you!’” It was a frigid morning, and Grant— swaddled in a black corduroy blazer and a knotted scarf bearing the colors of the Union Jack—was in the back seat of an S.U.V., zooming through Flatbush, Brooklyn. The destination was 3102 Newkirk Avenue, the housing complex where Streisand grew up. It was the first stop on Grant’s tour of Streisand’s New York—a

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pilgrimage he’d dreamed about since 1969, when he was twelve years old, living in the tiny African nation of Swaziland (now Eswatini). That year, he saw “Funny Girl” and “Hello, Dolly!” and developed a rhapsodic crush. “I was at full hormonal storm at that point,” he said. “I thought that she was just the sexiest thing on the planet.” At fourteen, Grant mailed Streisand a fan letter, offering refuge from Hollywood stardom. “I read in the paper you were feeling very tired and pressurized by your fame and failed romance with Mr. Ryan O’Neal,” he wrote. “I would like to offer you a two-week holiday, or longer, at our house, which is very beautiful with a pool and a magnificent view of the Ezulwini Valley.” Streisand didn’t respond—at least, not for four decades. At home in London, a few weeks ago, Grant learned that he’d earned his first Oscar nomination, for playing a waggish con man in Marielle Heller’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me.” On a social-media blitz, he posted a selfie taken outside Streisand’s home in Malibu. Streisand responded on Twitter: “Dear Richard What a wonderful letter you wrote me when u were 14 ! and look at u now!” The exchange went viral. “I’m just grateful that Barbra Streisand did not have me arrested or sue me for, you know, taking a selfie outside her gates,” Grant said. The Newkirk Avenue building was nondescript, a hunk of brown brick. “Wow, it’s bleak,” Grant said, standing in the courtyard, which was covered in patchy grass. “The contrast between here and Point Dume of Malibu couldn’t be more extreme.” Grant, who has kept a diary for more than fifty years, has published two gossipy volumes littered with boldface names. “Who, and how, and where people come from so informs everything about them,” he said. “So now I’m in actual Streisand Land.” The next stop was the former Erasmus Hall High School, a Gothic building on Flatbush Avenue. Grant was dismayed to find no mention of Streisand on the façade. “She was, like, an Atriple-plus student,” he said. He made his way inside. The school’s fluorescent lighting and worn linoleum were in marked contrast to his own alma mater, a private school on a verdant hillside in Mbabane, Swaziland. “I’m from England!” he chirped, to a security guard monitoring a metal detector. “Am I al-

lowed to have a look?” He was not. Another guard told him, “You have to have permission from the D.O.E.” Grant left and headed to the Village Vanguard, the West Village jazz club where Streisand gave an invite-only performance in 2009. On the way, he reflected on the similarities between their lives. Streisand never liked her looks growing up. “I was told right from the get-go that I looked like a tombstone,” he said. She overcame a tumultuous childhood; he had a fraught relationship with his father. “If you’re told very consistently that you’re not good enough

Barbra Streisand and Richard E. Grant and you’re a piece of shit, then, when you do have wobbles of confidence, that’s the voice that you hear loudest,” he said. Another link: Grant’s wife, the Scottish dialect coach Joan Washington, worked on the accents for “Yentl.” The Vanguard was closed, its lacquered red door padlocked. Grant lamented not getting a ticket to the 2009 show. “My old buddy from ‘L.A. Story,’ Sarah Jessica Parker, was here,” he said. “And Nicole Kidman, whom I’d worked with on ‘Portrait of a Lady.’ The Clintons were here.” He stared at the entrance, seeming underwhelmed. “These places, you have it in your head what they’re going to be like. But, unless the person is there, you go, it’s a door.” He went on, “It’s exactly like what Napoleon said about power: What is a throne? It’s a chair with some velvet.” —Rachel Syme

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TIME IN THE BARREL What did Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi know about the D.N.C. hack? BY JEFFREY TOOBIN

Stone is the progenitor and Corsi the expositor of Trump’s world view. oger Stone’s house, in Fort Lauderdale, is situated between a quiet street and one of the city’s canals, which are the only feature Fort Lauderdale shares with its Italian sister city, Venice. In a small room on the first floor, Stone keeps mementos of a career as a political consultant and provocateur which is now in its fifth decade. There are bumper stickers from Richard Nixon’s campaigns for President and photographs of Stone with candidates for whom he’s worked. There’s one of Arlen Specter, the late senator from Pennsylvania, and several of Stone with Donald Trump, whose political aspirations Stone has championed since the nineteen-eighties. When I visited him, on a quiet afternoon in early January, the room also

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featured a reminder of the crisis that was enveloping him—and his characteristic response to it. In a pair of cardboard boxes, there were dozens of polished rocks, which Stone was autographing and selling: “Roger stones,” to benefit his legal-defense fund. As subsequent developments have demonstrated, he is going to need to sell a lot of them. Shortly before dawn on the morning of January 25th, F.B.I. agents pounded on the door of Stone’s house and arrested him, following an indictment obtained by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. The F.B.I. also searched Stone’s house, his office, and the apartment in Harlem that he used to share with Kristin Davis, the former madam and onetime New York gubernatorial candidate.

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ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT): ALEX WROBLEWSKI/ BLOOMBERG/GETTY; ALBIN LOHR-JONES/CNP/POOL/DPA/ALAMY

THE POLITICAL SCENE

According to Matthew Whitaker, the acting Attorney General, Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election is “close to being completed,” but Mueller has not yet said whether he believes that anyone on the Trump campaign colluded with Russian interests in order to defeat Hillary Clinton. Nor has he said whether he believes that the President obstructed justice by firing James Comey, the former F.B.I. director. Nevertheless, Mueller’s legal filings, which include indictments and sentencing memorandums, have created an almost novelistic narrative, featuring rich portraits of the political and personal motivations of a large cast of characters. Mueller has shown that Russian citizens and companies created a stunning array of fake socialmedia accounts to boost Trump and damage Clinton, and that Russians hacked and released, notably to WikiLeaks, the e-mails of prominent Democrats, including John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chair. Mueller and other prosecutors have also established that certain people around Trump have lied to the authorities about their ties to Russia. This group includes Michael Flynn, the former national-security adviser; Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer; George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign aide; and Roger Stone. The Stone indictment reads like a political black comedy. It stars a pair of mismatched operatives, Stone and the right-wing author Jerome Corsi, who, without formal connections to the Trump campaign, went on a transatlantic quest for dirt. Mueller’s indictment does not charge Stone with any involvement in the hacking, but accuses him of lying to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence about his (and Corsi’s) efforts to pry loose the hacked e-mails from WikiLeaks. Stone is also charged with trying to coerce Randy Credico, a New York media figure and a sometime friend of Stone’s, into joining his efforts to interfere with the work of the House committee. According to the indictment, Stone, in order to prevent Credico from sharing what he knew, sent menacing e-mails to him, including one that said “Prepare to

die,” followed by an expletive. He also threatened to steal Credico’s thirteenyear-old therapy dog, a Coton de Tulear named Bianca. Stone has responded to Mueller’s charges with fevered hyperbole. “Those who think the Mueller investigation will die out with a whimper are dreaming,” he told me on the phone in early February, after his arraignment in federal court in Washington, D.C. “This is a pretext to allow them to remove both Trump and Pence and replace them with Leather Face—I mean, Nancy Pelosi—and then she can appoint Hillary Clinton as V.P. That’s been the agenda from the beginning.” He has vowed to contest the charges at trial. “We’re going to fight them on every piece of evidence, fight them on every witness. We are going to concede nothing.” Corsi has not been charged, but, in December, he sued Mueller for three hundred and fifty million dollars, saying that the special counsel had engaged in prosecutorial misconduct and illegal surveillance, among other misdeeds. In this civil case, which is pending, Corsi is being represented by Larry Klayman, a Washington lawyer and eccentric best known for filing multiple lawsuits against Bill Clinton’s Administration. Also in December, Corsi published an e-book, “Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s ‘Witch Hunt,’ ” which recounts his experiences with Mueller’s team and what he calls being “mentally tortured by Mueller’s Deep State prosecutors.” If Stone and Corsi had not turned up in the Mueller probe, they might have been just a pair of waning satellites in the right-wing solar system. Stone once cut a glamorous figure, with his bodybuilder’s physique and his bespoke suits from London. But, at sixty-six, he is out of shape, he hasn’t played a major role in a campaign in ages, and he scratches out a living by giving speeches, doing a little corporate consulting, and writing for fringe publishers and Web sites. (The house on the canal is rented.) Corsi is seventy-two, and spent most of his life as a marginal academic and a nomadic businessman. In middle age, he began writing books whose con-

ceits—“Swift-boating,” “birtherism”— became shorthand for journalistic irresponsibility. Corsi, who earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1972, stamps “Ph.D.” after his name on the cover of his books as an almost poignant plea for respectability. In appearance and temperament, Stone and Corsi seem to have little in common. Stone, who dyes his hair platinum blond, dropped out of George Washington University to work on Nixon’s reëlection campaign. He calls himself “a libertarian and a libertine” as well as “a trysexual—I’ve tried everything.” Corsi is a long-married suburban burgher who lives in a McMansion in New Jersey. Stone once took me to his favorite sex club in Miami, to show me where he once talked to a prostitute who he said had information on Eliot Spitzer, the former governor. In New York, Corsi took me to the Harvard Club, where he greeted several staff members by name. A jury will resolve the question of Stone’s guilt, and Mueller will decide whether to charge Corsi, but the geriatric bad boy and the literary charlatan have a wider significance. Stone and Corsi are, respectively, the progenitor and the expositor of the world view of the current President of the United States. Stone’s vulgar narcissism and his insistence on claiming victory at all costs anticipated Trump’s. Stone has Richard Nixon’s face tattooed on his back and Nixon’s values imprinted on his soul; the amoral ruthlessness of the thirty-seventh President passed, through Stone, to the forty-fifth. Corsi tells stories the way Trump does, starting with the desired conclusion and then arranging facts to support it. He cultivated Trump’s obsessions, including genetic purity, as reflected in claims that Obama was born in Kenya rather than in Hawaii; contempt for the two-party system and the political élite, particularly the Bush and Clinton families; and fear and suspicion of the American intelligence agencies and their purported involvement in events such as the Kennedy assassination and the decision to invade Iraq. Through the crucible of the Russia investigation, the fates of these men have become linked, and their cases will help de-

termine the outcome of the epic clash between the special counsel and the President. hen I had lunch with Stone in Fort Lauderdale, he was confident that he would not be indicted but weary from the toll of the investigation. He was haunted, too, by the situation of Paul Manafort. The two had been friends, and occasionally partners, for decades. When Stone and I spoke, Manafort was in prison. He now walks with a cane, apparently hobbled by gout, awaiting what may amount to a life sentence, following his conviction last fall in two cases brought by Mueller, for tax evasion and other crimes. Stone first met Manafort when he was a teen-ager and they were both starting out in Republican politics. Stone saw that Manafort had developed a unique field of expertise. “Manafort and I are both from Connecticut, which was the last state in the country that still selects its candidates in statewide conventions,” Stone told me. “And the rules are identical to the national-convention rules, as are the Young Republican National Federation rules, as are the College Republican National Convention rules—so Manafort was very familiar with the rules.” By 1973, when they were in their twenties, Manafort and Stone were helping to run the campaign of a fellow Connecticut native, Terry Dolan, for president of the College Republicans. (Dolan lost to Karl Rove.) Four years later, Manafort managed Stone’s run for president of the Young Republicans. They both worked on Ronald Reagan’s campaign in 1980, and then they joined Charles R. Black, Jr., to form the Washington lobbying firm Black, Manafort, and Stone—which thrived for the better part of the decade, often representing dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, of the Philippines, and Mobutu Sese Seko, of Zaire, as well as other outré clients. After that, they mostly went their separate ways. Manafort continued consulting for foreign leaders, notably for the pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort made many millions and spent lavishly, especially on his own wardrobe, which included a fifteen- thousand-dollar

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ostrich-skin jacket, as Mueller’s prosecutors pointed out during his trial. Stone and Manafort have been in touch only sporadically in recent years, but Stone was among those who suggested to Trump that he hire Manafort as the campaign’s manager for the 2016 Republican Convention. Trump then promoted Manafort to chairman of his campaign, and his tenure there, though brief, is what brought him to Mueller’s attention. Stone acknowledges that he has had nowhere near the financial success that Manafort enjoyed after their partnership ended. “Manafort was rolling at a much higher level than yours truly,” he told me. “I mean, I don’t have any foreign bank accounts, I don’t own any real estate, I don’t own any stocks and bonds.” Stone objected to Manafort’s exotic taste in clothing, but mostly on aesthetic grounds. “It ’s not just that Manafort’s suits were expensive, it’s also that they didn’t fit,” he told me. “I haven’t bought a new suit in twenty years, because, first of all, when you have custom-made suits—which I originally had to do because I had forty-six-inch shoulders and a thirty-two-inch waist; I don’t have the thirty-two-inch waist anymore, but I did—that means you can’t buy anything off the rack, because when it’s altered the pockets would be next to each other in the back of the trousers. But, more importantly,” he said, tailors “put a lot of fabric in the seams, so as you get older and fatter, the clothing can be let out. So if you take care of the garment and it’s well made to begin with, it should last you a lifetime.” In 1979, when Stone was a young fund-raiser for Ronald Reagan, he paid a call on Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer who had been counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and Cohn suggested that Stone recruit his friends Donald and Fred Trump to the Reagan cause. Stone visited Donald Trump, who provided office space to the campaign, and a friendship of sorts was born. As Trump recounted in the 2017 Netflix documentary “Get Me Roger Stone,” “Roy thought Roger was a very tough guy. Roy knew some very tough guys, I will tell you that. But Roy always felt that Roger was not only tough, but a smart guy, and very political.” When Stone opened his lobbying shop, 30

Trump’s airline and casinos (which all later went out of business) were early clients. Stone saw bigger things for Trump. “In the media age, charisma matters. Kennedy, Reagan—Trump has it,” Stone said. “As with Nixon, there’s a twin compulsion there. He doesn’t mind being hated by the ruling two-party élites, but he wants to be appreciated for his accomplishments.” Stone first took Trump to New Hampshire as a potential Presidential candidate in 1987, and he encouraged him to enter the race in almost every subsequent cycle. (Before this past election, Trump came closest to running in 2000 and 2012.) Stone and Trump’s relationship has had its ups and downs. When I profiled Stone for this magazine in 2008, Trump told me, “Roger is a stone-cold loser. He always tries taking credit for things he never did.” But, by the time he was interviewed for the documentary, Trump had softened. “I’ve known him for a long time, and he’s actually a quality guy,” Trump said. “He loves the game, he has fun with it, and he’s good at it.” Stone initially had a role with the Trump campaign, but in August, 2015, he and the candidate had a falling-out, and Stone left. (Trump said he was fired; Stone said he quit.) In an interview earlier this month with CBS, after Stone’s indictment, Trump called Stone “somebody that I’ve always liked” and “a character.” The two

may never have had a conventional alliance, but they had more or less the same enemies. Stone and Trump have long avoided defining themselves by party politics. Indeed, for many years it wasn’t clear which party Trump belonged to, and during his 2000 flirtation with a Presidential run he considered doing it as a third-party candidate. This was in line with Stone’s belief that Trump’s real adversary, both then and now, was

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“the deep state”—a term with a hazy definition. “It’s what Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex,” Stone told me, “but it’s broader than that. It’s the intelligence agencies, the entire national-security apparatus, and it doesn’t change, regardless of who is President.” Stone elaborated on the definition in his foreword to a new book, “The Plot to Destroy Trump: How the Deep State Fabricated the Russian Dossier to Subvert the President,” by Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, an American writer who lives in England. Stone refers to the “two-party duopoly” that brought about “endless wars” in the Middle East and “the erosion of civil liberties” at home. “The Republicans and the Democrats, the elites of both parties, were working together, the Bushes and the Clintons, whose policies and truths were largely indistinguishable,” he writes. Trump represented a rejection of the deep state’s hegemony, and now, according to Stone, the deep state was fighting back: “We are witnessing the beginning of the collapse of an illegitimate effort to reverse what the Deep State could not do in the 2016 election.” Stone has a daily show on the Internet outlet Infowars, which is owned by the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has been banned from Twitter and other social-media sites for his abusive behavior and who has claimed that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in 2012, did not take place. Stone devotes much of his show each day to the perfidies of the deep state. He, too, was banned from Twitter, in 2017, after he posted a series of tweets directed at CNN personalities in which he called Don Lemon an “ignorant lying covscuker.” f Stone helped define Trump’s obsessions, then Corsi, who found his way into Trump’s world through a more circuitous route, justified them. Corsi grew up in East Cleveland, where his father was an official with a railroad union and a fervent Democrat. Corsi’s father often travelled to Washington, and he had an unusual method for dealing with his unfocussed son. As Corsi recalled during our meeting at the Harvard Club, “My father, when I was a kid, a truant from school, used to park me in the Senate

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gallery—that’s where he could babysit me—and he’d say, ‘Jerry, now, your job is to sit here all day and watch it. When I come back, I’m going to ask you about it, and you’ll either get a good grade or a bad grade. So you sit here. You can go to the rest room, but don’t leave. And when I get back I will know what they did and I want to see what you know.’ ” Corsi caught the political bug and became an accomplished debater at Case Western Reserve University. In the late sixties, he started graduate school in government at Harvard, where his adviser was Michael Walzer, the noted left-leaning political theorist. Corsi wrote his dissertation on prior restraint and the right to protest, a hot topic after the Pentagon Papers case. Walzer, who is now based at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, recalls little about Corsi as a student, but he wrote a prescient letter of recommendation for him in 1971, the year before Corsi received his doctorate. “I believe him to be a strong candidate for a job at a good university,” Walzer wrote. “Jerry writes easily and well . . . he will certainly be a prolific scholar. . . . I have been a little overwhelmed by his productivity.” Notwithstanding Walzer’s hopes, Corsi never found a secure home in academia. He bounced around several campuses for about a decade, and began consulting for government agencies, work that seems to have pushed him further to the political right. Under contract with a unit of the Department of Justice, Corsi later wrote, “one of my assignments was to work undercover with the FBI to penetrate the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a vocal organization of anti-war activists whose public figurehead at the time was none other than John Kerry.” Eventually, Corsi concluded, “I could never truly succeed in an academic environment that was beginning to be dominated by leftists.” For the next two decades, Corsi lived at various times in Colorado, Oregon, and New Jersey, and worked in bank marketing. He was a regular at the Plaza Hotel, which at the time was owned by Donald Trump. Corsi told me, “I would say the relationship was pretty typical for the owner of a major prop-

“The only time my muse ever shows up is when I’m on break.”

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erty and I’m a V.I.P. customer, and of course he’s going to be cordial.” The turning point in Corsi’s career came in 2004, when Kerry ran for President. Corsi teamed up with John O’Neill, who served with Kerry in Vietnam, and they rushed out a deeply misleading book, called “Unfit for Command,” which accused Kerry of falsifying and exaggerating his Navy combat record as a commander of a Swift boat. “John Kerry would like many people today to view his service in Vietnam as one of honor and courage,” the authors wrote. “But the real John Kerry of Vietnam was a man who filed false operating reports, who faked Purple Hearts, and who took a fast pass through the combat zones.” As the Kerry campaign temporized about whether to ignore the slurs or respond to them, the book reached No. 1 on the Times best-seller list. Douglas Brinkley, a Presidential historian at Rice University, who wrote “Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War,” told me, “Corsi’s book is filled with falsehoods, a fake history masquerading as some kind of truth. It was an unvetted attack document, a political hit job—but the important point

is that it worked. Kerry never figured out how to respond to it, and he lost. So the book created a niche and fuelled other false narratives, like the birther movement, with Obama.” Corsi has spent the rest of his career filling that niche, becoming a kind of ersatz Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., for the alt-right. With the energy that Walzer recognized decades earlier, Corsi began turning out best-sellers at a pace of nearly one a year. The books had copious details, hundreds of footnotes, and monstrous distortions of key facts. In 2008, Corsi produced another No. 1 best-seller, “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” which claimed that the Democratic nominee “is and always has been a radical on the far left.” (Among Corsi’s bill of particulars was a three-page section headed “Obama Fails to Hold Hand Over Heart During National Anthem.”) Three years later, Corsi published “Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President.” Written with sneering condescension, and featuring racially inflammatory chapter headings such as “The Strange Case of the Obama Mama,” the book never

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came close to proving its thesis—that Obama was born in Kenya. It, too, was a best-seller. As a prominent birther, Corsi became better acquainted with Trump. He travelled to Hawaii with investigators affiliated with Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff who shared Trump’s obsession with Obama’s birthplace. Corsi told me that he spoke to Trump several times regarding his research. “He would call me, or they would e-mail me and say, ‘Mr. Trump would like to speak with you,’ and I would get a time and he would call and he would have some issues on his mind that he wanted to review, and the conversations would typically last ten, fifteen minutes—very polite,” Corsi said. Stone, who was in contact with Trump at this time, responded cautiously to Trump’s embrace of the birther issue in the lead-up to the 2012 election. “Trump asked me what I thought of the controversy regarding Obama’s birth certificate—not because he really wanted to know my opinion, because I think his opinion was already formed,” Stone told me in Fort Lauderdale. “And Trump said, ‘Do you know this guy Jerry Corsi?’ I said, ‘I only know of him. Why?’ He said, ‘Well, because I’ve been looking at his book’—he doesn’t read books— but he said, ‘I’ve been talking to him.’”

Stone observed that the polling on the birther issue was strong among Republicans, but Trump decided against a run in 2012. Corsi remains a birther. In our conversation at the Harvard Club, he told me that Obama’s release of his “longform” birth certificate, which was in part a response to Corsi’s book and Trump’s provocations, did not settle the issue. Arpaio’s “people in forensic analysis,” he said, “were able to prove that it had been forged.” Ben LaBolt, an assistant press secretary in the Obama White House, was responsible for handling “the whole birther issue,” which he called “an attempt to define Obama as ‘the Other’—as un-American.” He told me, “Corsi was the leader of the early birther effort before the 2008 election, and Trump took over for the reëlect.” He went on, “Obama was born in a hospital in Honolulu. There was a birth certificate. There was an announcement in the newspaper. It was just a totally normal situation.” The connective tissue of Corsi’s work is an insistence that the world is not as it appears—that he is revealing secrets that powerful forces want to preserve. Trump was the perfect candidate for a world beset by conspiracies, because, as he put it in his acceptance speech at the Republican

Convention, “nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” This idea is explored in Corsi’s book “Killing the Deep State: The Fight to Save President Trump,” which came out last year. According to Corsi, the four previous Presidents were all “traitorous,” and supported “the Muslim Brotherhood’s penetration of the top levels of the US national security apparatus, including the White House, the National Security Council, and numerous intelligence agencies, including the CIA.” Like Stone, Corsi begins his definition of the deep state with Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, but he winds up lumping virtually everyone opposed to Trump under the same rubric—the federal bureaucracy, Democrats, the news media, and international organizations. There is, he writes, “an extra-Constitutional Deep State willing to use the black political arts of false-flag attacks, funding of mainstream media propaganda, and even assassination of heads of state to dominate US politics by controlling both political parties.” he fear of an enormous conspiracy conjured by Corsi, and more or less embraced by Stone, sounds like an invention of the Internet era, but it actually represents a venerable strain of American political thought. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Bernard Bailyn, a historian at Harvard, upended the study of the American Revolution by revealing the centrality of conspiracy theories for the leading minds of the era. Previously, the primary influences on the Framers were thought to be Enlightenment figures such as Locke and Montesquieu. But, as Bailyn spelled out in his classic “The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,” the colonists were also shaped by the views of the radicals behind the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. This led the Revolutionaries to believe “that they were faced with a deliberate conspiracy.” Bailyn noted that the Declaration of Independence, after its famous opening lines, consists mostly of an “enumeration of conspiratorial efforts” against the American colonies. This preoccupation “serves to link the

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Revolutionary generation to our own in the most intimate way.” Bailyn was writing in the aftermath of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the fulcrum of modern conspiracy theories. Both Stone and Corsi wrote books about the assassination for its fiftieth anniversary, in 2013. Stone blasts out his theory in his title, “The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ.” His book, written with a former journalist named Mike Colapietro, is an extended diatribe against Johnson, but it offers little in the way of proof (because there is none) that he was complicit in his predecessor’s murder. Corsi’s book “Who Really Killed Kennedy?” portrays the assassination as the product of the deep state. He explores the purported roles of the C.I.A. and organized crime in the murder and, in answering the question of “who really killed JFK,” concludes, “all of the above.” Stone told me that he and Corsi first connected when they exchanged e-mails about their Kennedy books and bonded over their mutual disdain for the Bush family. Both strongly supported Trump’s candidacy (notwithstanding Stone’s unceremonious departure from the campaign staff ), and their shared enthusiasm prompted them to meet, in February, 2016. Corsi hosted a dinner at the Harvard Club that appealed to Stone’s Dionysian appetites. “We began with martinis, proceeded to a vintage French Bordeaux, topped off by the Harvard Club’s London-style roast beef,” Corsi wrote in his recent e-book. “By the time the dinner was over, it was clear our complementary skills in politics could be combined to Donald Trump’s benefit.” Corsi was working as a journalist, mostly for right-wing Web sites such as WorldNetDaily, but advocacy for Trump became his predominant interest. He wrote, “I had crossed over from the reporter’s role to work behind the scenes as a political operative, working secretly with Roger Stone to engineer events that would affect the news cycle favorably for the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.” Stone and Corsi saw their opportunity to help Trump in July, when, the week before the Democratic National

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“And, finally, where do you see yourself in five years?”

• Convention, WikiLeaks released thousands of e-mails that had been obtained during a hack of the Democratic National Committee. The e-mails showed that Party officials used their influence to advance the candidacy of Hillary Clinton over that of Bernie Sanders, and this revelation threw the Convention into an uproar. Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had boasted publicly that he had more e-mails that he would release to embarrass the Clinton campaign. Stone and Corsi resolved to find out what else WikiLeaks had and to hasten its delivery into the political bloodstream. The chance to further embarrass the Democratic candidate, especially close to the election, was the kind of dirty trick that Stone had always sought to spring. Stone reached out to his friend Randy Credico, whose peripatetic career included time as a standup comedian, a radio talk-show host, and the director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, named 34

• for the late civil-liberties lawyer. Credico worked for the foundation along with Kunstler’s widow, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, herself a well-known lawyer, who had contact with someone affiliated with WikiLeaks. Over the summer, Credico had Assange as a guest, by telephone, on his New Yorkbased radio show. Stone recalled, “Credico tells me it’s coming in October. He never says what it is, other than that it’s devastating, it’s a bombshell, it ’s dynamite.” (Through a spokeswoman, Kunstler said that she assisted Credico in booking Assange for his radio show but did not pass any information from Assange to Credico.) Stone also pressed Corsi to do his part, e-mailing him on July 25th to ask that he go to Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London “and get the pending [WikiLeaks] emails.” Corsi passed this request to his friend Ted Malloch, the author of the book about the deep state, who was trying to help the Trump campaign from England.

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Corsi asked Malloch to visit Assange at the Embassy—where Assange had taken refuge to escape extradition to Sweden on charges of rape and molestation—and to learn what he could about WikiLeaks’ plans. (The case against Assange was later dropped.) Malloch asserts that he did not speak to Assange and did not give any information to Corsi. Corsi e-mailed Stone on August 2nd, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. . . . Impact planned to be very damaging.” Corsi claimed that he did a “forensic analysis” of the e-mails that WikiLeaks had already released and that, solely by the application of logic, he figured out that Assange was probably going to release John Podesta’s e-mails next: “I started with each e-mail and said, ‘Who sent them and who did they send them to?’ And I mapped these all out, and I started developing a tree—who was contacting who and where the lines of communication were. And suddenly it hit me. There were about ten officials that were handling ninety per cent of these e-mails. And none of them were John Podesta. Now, I knew John Podesta’s e-mails had to be in that server.” While Stone and Corsi were trying to figure out Assange’s plans, Stone’s friend Manafort was facing a crisis. After the Democratic Convention, news reports began linking Manafort to shady dealings as a political consultant. In Fort Lauderdale, Stone recounted the series of events: “Manafort is getting the shit kicked out of him for his business dealings in Ukraine.” Stone said he had read that Podesta had ethics issues of his own. (These allegations have not been substantiated.) Stone took to Twitter to argue that Podesta’s problems would turn out to be worse than Manafort’s. On August 15th, he posted, “@JohnPodesta makes @PaulManafort look like St. Thomas Aquinas.” On August 21st, Stone issued the most scrutinized tweet of the entire Mueller investigation. It read, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel. #CrookedHillary.” Among the unresolved controversies about the tweet is whether, and in what way, “the Podesta’s” was a typo. Did Stone write “the” instead of “be,” meaning it was

going to be Podesta’s time in the barrel? Or was Stone saying “the Podestas’ time,” referring to John and his brother, Tony? Stone said that the August 21st tweet meant both Podestas, but this may be a position he has adopted to make the tweet look less prescient and thus less suspicious. On October 7th, WikiLeaks began releasing an enormous tranche of John Podesta’s e-mails. Coverage of their contents consumed a great deal of the last month of the campaign, and proved highly damaging to Clinton. If the August 21st tweet referred to just John Podesta, Roger Stone had predicted the WikiLeaks disclosure six weeks before it happened. tone and Corsi would seem to be in a position to answer one of the major questions in the Mueller investigation: whether anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign knew more about the WikiLeaks disclosures than has so far been acknowledged. Since the American intelligence agencies have concluded that Russian hackers stole the e-mails and provided them to WikiLeaks, proof of any nexus between WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign might establish collusion, and possibly crimes like conspiracy to defraud the United States. Stone’s August 21st tweet at least suggests that he had some inside knowledge of WikiLeaks’ operation. Stone’s and Corsi’s explanations for the events leading up to Stone’s tweet are highly suspect. Stone insists that he received some vague information from Credico, but Credico interviewed Assange for the first time on his radio program on August 25th, four days after Stone’s “barrel” tweet. Corsi’s explanation—that he logically surmised that Podesta’s e-mails would be released—is equally dubious. There was nothing about the prior disclosures that would give Corsi any basis to predict that Podesta’s e-mails would also be made public. The D.N.C. hack revealed the contents of just seven in-boxes on the group’s internal system, and Podesta did not even work at the D.N.C. Subsequent investigations revealed that Podesta was hacked in another operation, which used a different form of attack. The evidence indicates that someone told Corsi that Podesta’s e-mails were going to be disclosed, rather than that he figured it out on his own. If that’s what happened, it remains unclear who told him.

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Stone’s and Corsi’s accounts of these events have diverged in recent months. Corsi now says that on August 30th Stone asked him to create “an alternative explanation”—that is, a cover story—for how he came to write the August 21st tweet. In his account, Stone was nervous about being accused of having an inside source at WikiLeaks, so, Corsi said, he obliged by writing an e-mail that backed up Stone’s claim. As Corsi described it to me, “My interpretation of it was that I was providing an explanation for Roger’s tweet about Podesta and the barrel. I was giving him an alternative explanation to say, ‘It was really Corsi who had been telling me about all the work that Podesta had been doing in Russia.’ ” When I spoke to Stone, he denied having asked Corsi to come up with a cover story, and said that his explanation for the tweet has been consistent from the beginning—that it was really about the Podestas’ business, not about WikiLeaks. Stone told me last week, of Corsi, “He’s certifiably insane, and

he has told multiple provable lies.” (Last week, Corsi sued Stone for defamation, arguing that Stone’s public statements about him were designed to intimidate him and to coerce him into giving false testimony at Stone’s upcoming criminal trial. Corsi seeks damages “in excess of $25,000,000.”) Corsi has chronicled his dealings with Mueller’s office in his e-book. His most bizarre accusation is that one of the prosecutors, Jeannie Rhee, a prominent Washington lawyer, attempted to intimidate him with her choice of clothing during his grand-jury testimony. “I was shocked to see that Rhee was wearing what appeared to be an expensive, possibly designer-made see-through blouse,” he wrote. “Maybe my seventy-two years were showing but I had never imagined any woman would appear before a grand jury exposing her breasts to public view through a see-through blouse.”The special counsel’s spokesperson declined to comment on this or any other subject. Before Mueller’s prosecutors indicted Stone, they tried to elicit a guilty

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plea from Corsi. Last November, Mueller’s team made its position clear in an unusually specific way, presenting Corsi’s defense lawyer with a draft set of charges against his client, which laid out the series of lies it believed he had told during an interview with the special counsel’s office. (Corsi disclosed the draft to the public when he rejected a plea deal offered by Mueller.) According to the draft, Corsi lied by saying that he had declined Stone’s request to approach WikiLeaks or ask another person to approach WikiLeaks. In fact, the prosecutors stated, Corsi had tried to reach WikiLeaks and had recruited Malloch to help in the process. Notwithstanding the existence of a substantial number of e-mails that appear to undercut Corsi’s statements to prosecutors, he has refused to plead guilty and is, to date, in legal limbo. For a person who is usually categorical in his statements, Stone is cautious when describing Trump’s involvement in the quest for WikiLeaks’ documents during the campaign. “I have no memory of ever talking about WikiLeaks with him,” Stone told me in Fort Lauderdale. Responding to persistent rumors that Mueller has a witness who says he heard Trump and Stone on a speakerphone discussing WikiLeaks, Stone said, “Prove it.” Stone’s indictment speaks of an unnamed person, possibly Trump himself, who “directed” a senior campaign official to tell Stone to find out what was coming from WikiLeaks. In public comments, Trump has denied ever speaking to Stone about the organization. It would not necessarily have been illegal for Trump and Stone to have discussed WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016, but, if it were established that they had, that would prove that the President has been lying to the public about his role. Stone’s legal team plans an aggressive defense. His lead attorney will be Bruce Rogow, a prominent First Amendment lawyer from Florida. “Roger will definitely take the stand in his own defense,” Rogow told me. “It will be key to the case.” Stone said that he plans to call members of the House Intelligence Committee, including Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, to testify. (It’s not 36

clear why their testimony would be relevant, as there is an official transcript of Stone’s statements before the committee.) Stone also said he would argue that any false or mistaken statements he made to the committee were immaterial, because he has not been charged with any underlying illegal conduct. The prospects for a guilty plea from Stone seem remote; it’s unlikely, given Stone’s record of inflammatory and false public statements, that the Mueller office would offer him a plea bargain in exchange for his coöperation and his testimony against others. A Presidential pardon is a possibility, but Trump, in his CBS interview, said that he had not considered pardoning Stone. The most dramatic—and certainly the weirdest—part of Stone’s trial will probably involve the testimony of Randy Credico. Stone and Credico met more than a decade ago, when they were both advocating for marijuana legalization in New York. But the relationship has always been combustible—Credico is a man of the left and was a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016—and Stone and Credico are now estranged. “I don’t know why Roger gave up my name to them as his source about WikiLeaks,” Credico told me recently. “Why did he buckle without even getting a fucking subpoena? He gave up a name. That’s called ratting.” In addition, Credico has found his dealings with Mueller’s office daunting. “Those people are like Columbo and Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot combined, and you can’t fucking lie to them,” he said. “Why would you try? They have all the e-mails. They know what happened.” The indictment states that, on several occasions, Stone told Credico that he should “do a ‘Frank Pentangeli’ ” before the Intelligence Committee “in order to avoid contradicting Stone’s testimony.” As the indictment explains, “Frank Pentangeli is a character in the film ‘The Godfather: Part II,’ who testifies before a congressional committee and falsely claims not to know critical information that he does in fact know.” “But this is all wrong. Randy is an impressionist,” Stone told me, referring to Credico’s days as a

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

comedian. “He does impressions. I was asking him to do his Frank Pentangeli impression. I wasn’t telling Randy to lie.” he statement by the acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, that Mueller’s investigation was winding down drew attention because Mueller himself has been silent about his progress. To date, Mueller’s court filings have created a narrative that, although compelling, is distinctly postmodern in its sensibility. Individual stories often head in different directions and only sometimes intersect. The Russians helped Trump, and the Trump people lied about the Russians. But why did so many people lie to Mueller and the other investigators? Were they lying to cover up crimes—or were they lying simply because they are liars? The Watergate scandal was like Shakespeare—a drama that built to a satisfying climax. The Russia story is more like Beckett—a mystifying tragicomedy that may drift into irresolution. Did Trump collude, and did he obstruct justice? Mueller may never have the answers. Criminal defendants customarily remain silent when they are facing trial, but Stone has used his indictment as another opportunity to defend the President, and himself. ( Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who is presiding in his case, warned Stone not to have any contact with witnesses, but she has yet to impose a gag order, which would bar him from speaking to the news media.) Stone’s pose—hands raised in a “V”-for-victory sign, an homage to his idol Nixon—makes clear that he is relishing the fight. Corsi describes his struggle as spiritual. As he writes in his e-book, “The United States under the Deep State masters has begun to descend into a political Hell that I previously thought could only happen under Hitler’s Gestapo, Stalin’s KGB, or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. My particular Kafkaesque nightmare is nothing more than punishment for the crime of being a vocal supporter of Donald Trump and for having worked with Roger Stone to promote Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.” Corsi concludes with his own version of a serenity prayer: “I am with God. Are you?” 

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SHOUTS & MURMURS

YOU WILL THANK ME BY PATRICIA MARX No one likes to be lectured about how to watch their entertainment, but if you’ll please allow me to do just that: Roma is best experienced on the big screen. —Kyle McGovern, Mic.com. I rarely get evangelical about viewing modalities, but if there’s any way to do so where you live, please get yourself to a real theater to see this. —Dana Stevens, Slate.

f you haven’t seen “Aröma” in a movie theatre yet, you must. Trust me. Have I ever steered you wrong? O.K., that one time. But then didn’t I find you a good divorce lawyer? Yes, I am aware that you can stream it on CineSteal, but, believe me, you want—need—to experience this movie on the big screen. Bigger than that.

LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

I

Louder. Whatever you do, I insist that you go to a theatre that has SurroundScream. There’s a wonderful state-of-the-art Infinityplex in . . . can you fly to Sydney, Australia, tomorrow? King of Prussia Mall? Can’t you visit your mother in the hospital later? “Aröma” is leaving theatres on Wednesday, so this is your only chance—like seeing Halley’s Comet. In the I.C.U.? How long did they give her? The movie’s only seven hours and change. I know your mother would want you to see it. Yes, foreign, but not foreign in that way. None of the characters loses a bicycle, and you don’t have to look at any poor people. Well, what’s so stunning about this director is that he truly understands the universal appeal of the banal. He’s

not afraid to hold the camera on a single detail for twenty minutes—even an invisible one. Did you see “Unloading the Dishwasher”? Same guy. He won Uruguay’s equivalent of the People’s Choice Award for best nudity for “The Shower Grouter.” Couldn’t agree more: reading subtitles is so annoying. That’s what’s great about “Aröma.” There are no subtitles, because there’s no dialogue, because there’s no story. No, no, no! Something happens, I’m pretty sure. It’s just that the important parts take place offscreen, such as in the rest room. Promise me you’ll go to a theatre that’s equipped with odor technology and sit up front, near the misting nozzles. You’ve never smelled smell design like this. Hey, you don’t have to take my word for it. Read the reviews. Wow. It’s so interesting that you interpreted it that way, because when I read “I hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Would rather swim in a toilet bowl,” I took it as a rave. Everyone who’s anyone has seen it. My friend was at the première, and she said that after the first five minutes Dame Judi Dench scooted past and tripped on my friend’s purse and somehow ended up ripping her jacket because she was in such a rush to get out of the theatre. My friend’s so lucky! That reminds me. You must sit in the absolute center of the row, even if you have to make someone move. Oh—and this is important—bring a blanket, because, spoiler alert, there’s this really astounding special effect that involves frostbite. Probably also a good idea to bring a portable oxygen tank, if you have one. I’ve heard that a lot of the concession stands sell out early. I don’t mean to be a bully, but, if you don’t see this movie in a theatre, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Honestly, if you skip it, I’ll respect your decision, but I don’t know how we’ll continue to be friends. You’ll go? Yay! I know for a fact that you’re going to thank me. That is such a kind offer, but I’m going to pass. Movies aren’t my thing. I’m more of an opera person. 

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

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ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS

A LIVING DOCUMENT Heidi Schreck takes the Constitution to Broadway. BY MICHAEL SCHULMAN

hen Heidi Schreck was fourteen, her mother cajoled her into entering the American Legion Oratorical Contest, in which high-school students give speeches on the U.S. Constitution for prize money. This was 1986, in Wenatchee, Washington, a conservative-leaning town dotted with orchards, which calls itself the Apple Capital of the World. Schreck was, as she put it recently, an outgoing nerd—into ballet, self-tanning, Duran Duran, and boys. Her father, Larry, who voted Republican, was a beloved history teacher at her school. Her mother, Sherry, who voted Democratic, was a debate coach and drama teacher at a different school

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and ran a children’s-theatre group called the Short Shakespeareans, of which Heidi was the leading lady. “Between the ages of six and twelve, I played most of the great Shakespearean comedic heroines,” she told me. The American Legion, a century-old veterans’ organization, began the contest, in 1938, to “develop deeper knowledge and appreciation for the U.S. Constitution among high-school students.” Its alumni include the former Republican Presidential candidate Alan Keyes and the conservative pundit Lou Dobbs. Each contestant must give an eightto-ten-minute prepared oration, drawing personal connections between the

“What the Constitution Means to Me” is, Schreck says, “relentlessly anti-theatrical.” 38

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

document and her own life. Then, for three to five minutes, the contestant must speak extemporaneously about an article or an amendment selected from a container. In Schreck’s prepared speech, she compared the Constitution to a crucible, in which rights are “tested and tried” like ingredients in a witch’s cauldron. (The idea came from her mother, who taught a unit on Arthur Miller.) She had anecdotes on hand for every article and amendment. If she drew the First Amendment, for instance, she would recount how the girls in her eighth-grade class had protested a school policy against shorts by wearing them en masse, exercising their right to peaceably assemble. “I really did believe there was no greater democracy on the planet, and that this document was the most genius piece of political writing that had ever been created,” Schreck recalled. She inherited this zeal from her father, who drilled her in the back seat of their Datsun hatchback on the way to competitions, which were held in Legion halls and judged by Legionnaires— typically, Second World War veterans in navy-blue caps and blazers. Schreck, who had braces, shoulder-length blond hair, and bangs that she teased out to look like Madonna’s in the “Lucky Star” video, wore an electric-blue suit with pantyhose and “sensible pumps.” “I remember being very conscious of the fact that my appearance was in contrast to my mind. That felt like my secret weapon, that I would have this blond big hair and lots of makeup and look very traditionally femme—and then debate these boys who were not expecting me to be as smart as I was,” she said. “Later, I realized what a trap that can be.” By tenth grade, Schreck was competing in the regional championships, holding forth in halls smelling of cigar smoke in Spokane and Denver and Billings, like a standup comedian on tour. By eleventh grade, she was winning four-figure checks. When Scott Shinn, from Puyallup, Washington, was a sophomore, he saw Schreck’s picture in the American Legion newsletter after she won the Washington State contest, from which he had been eliminated. The following year, they went head to head in Walla Walla, and PHOTOGRAPH BY MELODY MELAMED

Schreck beat him. As Schreck recalls, “We were intense rivals and also kind of in love with each other.” Her mother, who has saved every scrap of her children’s ephemera, recently recovered a letter in which Shinn wrote to Schreck, “I just want you to know that if you won the whole damn thing, I’m gonna burn your house down O.K.?” “I guess it was a little flirtatious,” Shinn, who is now a computer programmer in Seattle, told me. In 1989, her senior year, Schreck competed in the national semifinals, held in Sacramento, but lost to a girl named Becky, whose speech, as Schreck recalls, compared the Constitution to a patchwork quilt. Schreck, who came in second, won four thousand dollars, which she added to her four years of winnings. By the time she was accepted at the University of Oregon, she had saved enough to pay much of her college tuition. Almost two decades later, in 2007, when Schreck was a thirty-six-yearold stage actress and playwright living in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, with her husband, the theatre director Kip Fagan, she was asked to perform a short piece for an avant-garde variety night at the East Village venue P.S. 122. She was supporting herself teaching English as a second language and acting in “weird downtown theatre.” A mood of weary defiance had enveloped the Off Broadway scene, which responded to the George W. Bush years with antiwar dramas and sardonic performance art about the Patriot Act. Schreck thought back to the oratorical contest and its prompt to talk about how the Constitution related to her own life. She recalls wondering, “What if I did that as an adult woman? What would it actually mean to do one of these contests in a way that wasn’t just about selling the idea of America or buying into American exceptionalism or just trying to win?” The result was a ten-minute piece, directed by Fagan, which Schreck titled “What the Constitution Means to Me.” “For some reason, people really liked it,” she said. The Villager described it as “a wake up call not only about the erosion of liberties in response to fear, but also about the less than glorious history of the myth that is America.”

In 2012, a theatre production company commissioned her to expand it into a full-length play. In 2017, Schreck performed the longer version for ten days, as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks festival, at an eighty-nine-seat theatre in the East Village. In the show, which combined memoir and civics lesson, she interrogated her teen-age reverence for a document that was written by and for white male property owners. At one point, she played an audio recording from the 1965 Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the petitioner, Estelle Griswold, had been arrested for dispensing birth control at a clinic in New Haven. Justice William O. Douglas, in his majority opinion, drew on a number of amendments, including the First and the Ninth, to construe a “right to privacy” between husband and wife which made contraception legal for married couples and set a precedent for the majority decision in Roe v. Wade, eight years later. In the recording, Douglas and Griswold’s lawyer, Thomas I. Emerson, both spend a lot of time coughing in embarrassment. After playing the recording, Schreck told a story from when she was twentyone: Her mother was driving her to Seattle, and Schreck asked her to pull over, so that she could throw up. While starring in a production of “Miss Julie” in Seattle that summer, Schreck had had a fling with the actor playing Jean, the valet, and was pregnant. She and the actor were secretly about to leave for Eugene, Oregon, to go to the Feminist Women’s Health Collective—which, as she recalled, was run by lesbians and was “clearly the best place on the planet to get an abortion.” She told the audience that, after she vomited, her mother was “breathing fast . . . like she’s having a panic attack, and suddenly she opens her mouth and shouts ‘You’d better not be pregnant!’ and I shout back ‘I’M NOT PREGNANT!’ ” The show worked a curious magic. Berkeley Rep booked it for its 2018 spring season. New York Theatre Workshop, the Off Broadway space that helped launch “Rent” and “Peter and the Starcatcher,” scheduled it for the fall. It opened in New York to rave reviews, and drew audience members including Gloria Steinem and Tony Kushner, who

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saw it three times. On Twitter, Hillary Clinton, who attended with Bill and Chelsea, described it as “an empowering call to consider what it means to be a citizen.” In November, the show moved to an encore run in the West Village and played to sold-out houses through the end of the year. Next month, it transfers to the Helen Hayes, on Broadway. Schreck, who is forty-seven, describes “What the Constitution Means to Me” as “relentlessly anti-theatrical.” For much of the play, she stands alone on a set resembling a slightly exaggerated version of an American Legion hall, with a flag on a pole, a lectern, and wood-panelled walls covered in portraits of veterans. Before launching into a reënactment of the contest, she tells the audience, “I’m going to perform the rest of the piece as my fifteenyear-old self, but I am not going to do anything special to achieve that effect.” Schreck has a disarming exuberance, and relates even frustrating events with giddy laughter, her eyes watering as she guffaws. But the show, like Hannah Gadsby’s groundbreaking comedy special, “Nanette,” is less casual than it appears, and reveals its darkness by degrees. “It’s a deliberate decision to begin with the most appealing version of myself, the self that I sort of learned how to be to get by in the world, and to then let that veneer fall away,” Schreck told me. In the script, she wrote herself the stage direction “HEIDI releases any last remnants of the buoyant, performative girlishness that is one of her lifelong coping mechanisms.” Much as “Hamilton” gave America’s founding a progressive cool factor and became the quintessential Obamaera musical, “What the Constitution Means to Me” captures the mood of a time when institutional protections feel shockingly vulnerable and the country is getting an unwelcome crash course in constitutional arcana. (How many Americans knew about the emoluments clause before November, 2016?) The show was still in previews Off Broadway on September 27th, when Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh testified before the Senate—a real-life morality play that pitted a woman’s experience of sexual abuse against the levers of constitutional power. To compound the drama, Kav-

anaugh’s confirmation threatened to put abortion rights in jeopardy. Oliver Butler, the show’s director, recalled that, during the performance the night of the hearing, there was a “low groan of realization” as people grasped the relevance of the stories that Schreck was telling. From the stage, she heard members of the audience “audibly responding with grief.” On Twitter, one viewer called it “a great first stage of therapy for today’s hearings.” The constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, who was Barack Obama’s legal mentor at Harvard Law School, heard about the show from his eleven-yearold granddaughter and went with his family in December. “I thought, This is something that needs a huge audience,” he told me. “When most people—including, I have to say, some of my colleagues and former colleagues—talk about the Constitution, they display a strange ignorance about the way it hangs together, and particular clauses, and what they do and do not mean. There was nothing of that sort here. I assumed that maybe somewhere in her life she had done a deep study of constitutional law, because what she said was extremely on target.” Tribe was particularly impressed by Schreck’s analysis of the Ninth Amendment, which, he said, “a number of contemporary scholars don’t really understand.” It reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” As Schreck explains onstage: This means that just because a certain right is not explicitly written in the Constitution, it doesn’t mean you don’t have that right. The fact is there was no possible way for the framers to put down every single right we have— the right to brush your teeth, sure you’ve got it, but how long do we want this document to be? Here’s an example: When I was a little girl, I had an imaginary friend named Reba McEntire. She was not related to the singer. Just because the Constitution does not proclaim the having of imaginary friends as a right, does not mean I can be thrown in jail for being friends with Reba McEntire.

Schreck told me that she was attracted to the amendment’s poetry: “It’s shrouded in mystery. It’s talked about only in terms of metaphor, and it doesn’t actually mean anything legally, exactly.” In explaining it, Justice William O. Douglas invoked “penumbras” and “emanations.” Justice

Antonin Scalia once admitted, “If my life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you what the Ninth Amendment was.” ne bright afternoon in January, I met Schreck at Café Slavia, an Art Deco coffeehouse in Prague. She was visiting her younger brother, Carl, who moved to the Czech Republic two years ago with his family, to work as a journalist. “Is it too early to get a beer?” Schreck asked. It was two-thirty. She ordered a Budweiser Budvar. In the mid-seventies, Václav Havel and other dissidents met at Café Slavia to discuss Charter 77, their manifesto criticizing the Communist regime for ignoring human rights in the Czechoslovak Constitution and in other official documents. Havel, who was later imprisoned for his political activities, became President in 1989, the year of the Velvet Revolution and, less consequentially, of Schreck’s high-school graduation. “I remember I was so thrilled that a playwright could become President,” she said. “That seemed impossible! Theatre people are always, like, buried outside the city limits.” Schreck had Googled the Constitution of the Czech Republic, written in part by Havel and ratified in 1993, and had found things to envy, including environmental protection and gender equality. “I was very moved by it,” she said. Like South Africa’s Constitution, written in 1994 and described by Ruth Bader Ginsburg as “a great piece of work,” it tends toward so-called positive rights, like the right to education. Older constitutions, such as the United States’, more often guarantee negative rights—say, protection from unreasonable search and seizure. William Araiza, a scholar at Brooklyn Law School, who advised Schreck on the play, told me, “The limitation of negative rights is that they only prevent government action restricting their exercise, rather than promising government assistance in making their exercise possible.” For instance, the Fourteenth Amendment, passed during Reconstruction to insure the citizenship of former slaves, prohibits states from denying any person “equal protection of the laws.” It formed the bedrock of historic Supreme Court decisions including Brown v. Board of Education (outlawing school

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segregation) and Obergefell v. Hodges (allowing same-sex marriage). But, as Schreck recounts in the show, the amendment failed to protect Jessica Gonzales (later Lenahan), a Colorado woman who, in 1999, asked her local police department to enforce a restraining order against her abusive husband. After he killed their three daughters, Gonzales sued the police, and, in 2005, Castle Rock v. Gonzales reached the Supreme Court, where Scalia, in his majority opinion, found no constitutional obligation to enforce the restraining order. (The amendment also makes the Constitution’s only explicit mention of “male citizens,” which drew backlash at the time of its passage from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women’srights advocates.) As Schreck considered the prompt that she had been given as a teen-ager, she reëxamined her own family history. As family lore had it, her maternal greatgreat-grandmother Theressa Finkas emigrated from Germany to Washington State in 1879, as a mail-order bride.

According to her death certificate, she died at the age of thirty-six at Western State Hospital, of “melancholia.” Schreck, who has struggled with depression, always believed that she and her mother inherited Theressa’s condition, but her outlook changed when she discovered records of widespread domestic abuse in the logging town where Theressa lived and began to wonder if her ancestor’s affliction was as much societal as it was chemical. As a girl, Schreck occasionally saw her mother retreat into her room and weep. One day, when Schreck was fifteen, her mother sat her down at the diningroom table. When Sherry was growing up, she told her daughter, her stepfather beat his wife—Heidi’s grandmother— and physically and sexually abused his stepchildren. On one occasion, he threatened the family at gunpoint. Sherry’s mother refused to go to the police, so Sherry and her sister reported him. At fourteen years old, Sherry testified against him, and he was sent to prison for “carnal knowledge.” When I spoke to Sherry

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Major support for Merrily We Roll Along generously provided by Perry and Marty Granoff and The Shen Family Foundation. Partial underwriting support for Merrily We Roll Along contributed by Roger Berlind, Robert Boyett Theatricals, and Gina Maria Leonetti.

by phone, she explained that she had wanted Schreck to “know where I came from. It was not a ‘Leave It to Beaver’ childhood.” Then she quoted “As You Like It”—“Sweet are the uses of adversity/Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,/ Wears yet a precious jewel in its head”—and added, “That’s kind of the approach I’ve taken to life.” In 1995, after college, Schreck spent a year teaching English in a small town in Siberia, then another year working as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times. She returned to the U.S. in 1997, and joined a Seattle theatre company called Printer’s Devil Theatre, which a college friend had started with Fagan. The troupe had a grunge-rock approach to the classics. It staged “Hedda Gabler” in an airplane hangar and mounted a rock-opera version of “El Cid” in a restaurant kitchen. In 2000, the group put on a version of Chekhov’s “The Seagull” in an old ferry boat docked in Lake Union, with Fagan directing and Schreck playing Nina. The two adapted the script together—Schreck, inspired by her love of Russian ballet, had studied Russian in college—and fell in love in the process. “It was one of those horrible theatre-company things, where we were a couple but we weren’t telling anybody,” she said. Schreck had been dabbling in playwriting since she read “Fefu and Her Friends,” by the Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, in college,

and “sobbed with some sense of recognition I couldn’t articulate,” she said. In Seattle, she had a secretarial job at a kidney-transplant center, where, between six and eight in the morning, the office was quiet and she wrote. In 2003, Fagan got a directing fellowship on the East Coast, and the couple relocated to Brooklyn. “I felt it was absurd to move to New York at thirty-two and be an actor,” Schreck said. A TV casting director told her that she was too pretty for character parts but not pretty enough to play leads. When she did audition for television, it was usually for the type of role she calls the Exposition Wife: “You get a chunk of text that’s, like, ‘Oh, honey, I’ll miss you when you go to work at the nuclear reactor in New Mexico, but the kids and I will be waiting for you. And good luck with John, your nemesis! Goodbye!’ ” In 2008, the playwright Annie Baker saw Schreck play a scenery-chewing movie extra in Jordan Harrison’s comedy “Amazons and Their Men.” “She was so specific and strange and beautiful,” Baker told me. Without having met her, Baker wrote Schreck a part in her play “Circle Mirror Transformation,” set in a community drama class in Vermont. It was staged at Playwrights Horizons the following year, with Schreck playing Theresa, a sunny former actress. As Schreck recalls, during an early workshop of “Circle Mirror Transformation,” Baker told her, “You’re

afraid of writing. You need to keep doing it.” Schreck finished a script she had been toying with, about the medieval mystic Margery Kempe, thought to be the first person to write an autobiography in English. The play, “Creature,” opened at the Ohio Theatre, on Wooster Street, while Schreck was acting in Baker’s play uptown. It was followed by “Grand Concourse,” set in a soup kitchen in the Bronx, which Fagan directed at Playwrights Horizons, and which drew praise from the Times for its “fluid, natural dialogue.” In 2013, Schreck co-starred in the play “The Madrid” with Edie Falco, and went on to write for Falco’s Showtime series, “Nurse Jackie.” More TV writing gigs followed: the legal drama “Billions,” Jill Soloway’s “I Love Dick.” These helped pay the bills, but Schreck felt untethered from the theatre. In 2014, Schreck had a “pretty painful” miscarriage, she said, and “went to a dark place.” She had put off her commission to expand “What the Constitution Means to Me” into a full-length play. But now she began listening to Supreme Court arguments on Oyez—a Web site featuring audio of most of the Court’s oral arguments since 1955—and drawing connections: between her mother’s abusive childhood and Castle Rock v. Gonzales; between her greatgreat-grandmother’s “melancholia” and her own reproductive freedom, protected by Roe v. Wade. She said, “All those paths led me back to the Fourteenth Amendment.” Schreck’s teen-age reverence for the Constitution had turned into deep ambivalence: Whom does and doesn’t it protect? What does it mean to live in its blind spots? Should negative rights be replaced with positive ones? She thought about herself at fifteen, and at twentyone. “As sad as I was about not having a biological child of my own, I did not regret my decision to have an abortion,” she told me. “I had this sudden feeling of gratitude for my life, and gratitude for what had been afforded to me that hadn’t been afforded to my female ancestors. It was a very big turning point for me, and I began working on the show with a kind of fever. I suddenly understood what the show was about.” During one of our conversations in Prague, Schreck looked at her phone and gasped. The Supreme Court had

lifted two lower-court injunctions against the Trump Administration’s policy banning most transgender people from serving in the military. This decision meant that the ban could go into effect as challenges made their way through the courts. (A district judge had previously ruled that the ban violated the due-process protections of the Fifth Amendment.) “This is why basic human rights can’t just be left up to interpretation,” Schreck said. In recent years, the right has pushed hard on the rhetoric of originalism— the idea that the Constitution should be followed strictly according to the intentions of its Framers in 1787. During the Obama Administration, the Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann started a constitutional teaching series, in the style of a Bible-study group. Opponents of originalism believe that the Constitution should be treated as a living document, since the Founders had nothing to say about, for instance, transgender rights. During the Trump Administration, many Democrats are reaching for the Constitution to protect the most vulnerable people, but some scholars have argued in favor of scrapping the whole thing and starting over. As Schreck and I talked, I wondered how it felt to directly challenge the view of America that she had inherited from her father. “This is so scary to talk about,” Schreck said. When she and her brother were young, it was a joke that her mother’s and father’s votes “cancelled each other out.” But, when her father voted for Trump, Schreck said, it “felt like an overwhelming betrayal.” The next day, we visited the Václav Havel Library, around the corner from Café Slavia. In the ground-floor gallery, Schreck looked at a display case containing Havel’s childhood drawings and a report card. “His mom is like my mom,” she joked. She asked a librarian for help, and, after a conversation in Russian, the woman walked us to a room in the back, where we found Havel’s old typewriter and a diorama of the set from his 1968 farce, “The Increased Difficulty of Concentration,” in which a philosopher juggles his mistress and his wife. “I have to admit, I was Googling frantically last night to make sure there was not some terrible thing he had done,” Schreck said about Havel—so far, so good. Looking

up at a wall of quotations, she smiled at a line from a speech that he had given in 1991: “Being in power makes me permanently suspicious of myself.” The day before, a driver had told Schreck that he found it sad that America, a beacon of democracy, was sliding into tyranny. “I believe that we’re sliding,” she told me. “But I also believe that our image as the pinnacle of democracy is, in many ways, a lie.” ike the Constitution itself, “What the Constitution Means to Me” is a living document—elements of the play change from night to night. Toward the end of the show, Schreck brings out one of two young female students who currently compete in debating contests. Schreck and the student flip a coin and face off in a semi-improvised debate about whether or not to abolish the Constitution, and an audience member picks the winner. In late January, Schreck visited Washington, D.C., with one of the debaters, Thursday Williams, a seventeen-year-old senior at William Cullen Bryant High School, in Long Island City. Williams, who was born in Jamaica, moved to Queens with her mother when she was nine. She and Schreck were staying at the Watergate Hotel, which Williams had chosen, she said, because “this place is very historical,” and because it had an indoor pool. Over French fries at the hotel, Williams said that her interests included government class, the TV show “How to Get Away with Murder,” and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She became interested in law doing a mock-trial contest the summer before her freshman year. “I was talking and everybody was listening to me, and I felt good,” she said. She now debates constitutional cases through the legal-outreach program at Brooklyn Law School. “The Constitution is something I’ve been trying to understand for a very long time,” she said. Her favorite amendment is the Nineteenth, ratified in 1920, which gave women the right to vote. For professional reasons, she wants to change Article II, Section 1, which says that only natural-born citizens can be President. The two women took an Uber to the

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National Mall, and Williams gazed out at the statues along the way. “All these men on horses,” she said, underwhelmed. “Where’s Rosa? She didn’t get hers?” The night before, in New York, a lawyer had invited Schreck to meet a group of twenty-one plaintiffs, aged eleven to twenty-two, who are suing the Trump Administration on the ground that its inaction on climate change violates their Fifth Amendment right to “freedom from deprivation of life, liberty, and property.” The case is currently before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. “I think it’s a terrific idea,” Schreck said. “There are so many constitutions that have either amendments or articles that address taking care of the environment, and I wish ours had it, too. If we can’t get it into the Constitution, this is a way to at least get it into case law to set a precedent.” Schreck and Williams arrived at the National Archives Museum, newly reopened after the partial government shutdown. In a hushed rotunda, the original founding documents lay under glass, with low light to protect the fading parchment. Murals of the Founding Fathers loomed above. The women leaned over George Washington’s annotated draft of the Constitution, and Williams jabbed a teal-painted pinkie nail at the glass. “Why does ‘Hampshire’ have an ‘f ’ in it?” she asked. “That’s the way an ‘s’ was written back then,” Schreck said. “So cool.” The Constitution was nearly illegible except for its swooping opening words, “We the People.” “It’s definitely displayed like a holy text,” Schreck said, looking at the gold-framed case. “When I look at it, I think of the Bible. I think of the Quran.” She had been reading about Luther Martin, one of the Founding Fathers, who in 1787 refused to sign the Constitution in part because it did not prohibit slavery. “You can’t worship this document, because of the horrific compromises they made—and they called something a ‘compromise’ that’s viewing human beings as property!” She went on, “So I look at it and think, What a magical thing. And what an appalling, appalling document.” 

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ANNALS OF COVERT ACTION

DECEPTION, INC. A group of former Israeli spies wanted to influence American elections. What could go wrong? BY ADAM ENTOUS AND RONAN FARROW

ne evening in 2016, a twentyfive-year-old community-college student named Alex Gutiérrez was waiting tables at La Piazza Ristorante Italiano, an upscale restaurant in Tulare, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Gutiérrez spotted Yorai Benzeevi, a physician who ran the local hospital, sitting at a table with Parmod Kumar, a member of the hospital board. They seemed to be in a celebratory mood, drinking expensive bottles of wine and laughing. This irritated Gutiérrez. The kingpins, he thought with disgust. Gutiérrez had recently joined a Tulare organization called Citizens for Hospital Accountability. The group had accused Benzeevi of enriching himself at the expense of the cash-strapped hospital, which subsequently declared bankruptcy. (Benzeevi’s lawyers said that all his actions were authorized by his company’s contract with the facility.) According to court documents, the contract was extremely lucrative for Benzeevi; in a 2014 e-mail to his accountant, he estimated that his hospital business could generate nine million dollars in annual revenue, on top of his management fee of two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a month. (In Tulare, the median household income was about forty-five thousand dollars a year.) The citizens’ group had drawn up an ambitious plan to get rid of Benzeevi by rooting out his allies on the hospital board. As 2016 came to a close, the group was pushing for a special election to unseat Kumar; if he were voted out, a majority of the board could rescind Benzeevi’s contract. Gutiérrez, a political-science major, was a leader of the Young Democrats Club at the College of the Sequoias, and during the 2016 Presidential campaign he attended a rally for Bernie Sanders. Gutiérrez grew up watching his father, a dairyman, work twelvehour shifts, six days a week, and San-

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ders’s message about corporate greed, income inequality, and the ills of America’s for-profit health-care system resonated with him. Seeing Benzeevi and Kumar enjoying themselves at La Piazza inflamed Gutiérrez’s sense of injustice. He spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s knocking on doors and asking neighbors to sign a petition for a recall vote, which ultimately garnered more than eleven hundred signatures. Gutiérrez later asked his mother, Senovia, if she would run for Kumar’s seat; the citizens’ group thought that Senovia, an immigrant and a social worker, would be an appealing candidate in a community that is around sixty per cent Hispanic. The recall was a clear threat to Benzeevi’s hospital-management business, and he consulted a law firm in Washington, D.C., about mounting a campaign to save Kumar’s seat. An adviser there referred him to Psy-Group, an Israeli private intelligence company. PsyGroup’s slogan was “Shape Reality,” and its techniques included the use of elaborate false identities to manipulate its targets. Psy-Group was part of a new wave of private intelligence firms that recruited from the ranks of Israel’s secret services—self-described “private Mossads.” The most aggressive of these firms seemed willing to do just about anything for their clients. Psy-Group stood out from many of its rivals because it didn’t just gather intelligence; it specialized in covertly spreading messages to influence what people believed and how they behaved. Its operatives took advantage of technological innovations and lax governmental oversight. “Social media allows you to reach virtually anyone and to play with their minds,” Uzi Shaya, a former senior Israeli intelligence officer, said. “You can do whatever you want. You can be whoever you want. It’s a place where wars are fought, elections

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are won, and terror is promoted. There are no regulations. It is a no man’s land.” In recent years, Psy-Group has conceived of a variety of elaborate covert operations. In Amsterdam, the firm prepared a report on a religious sect called the Brunstad Christian Church, whose Norwegian leader, Psy-Group noted, claimed to have written “a more important book than the New Testament.” In Gabon, Psy-Group pitched “Operation Bentley”—an effort to “preserve” President Ali Bongo Ondimba’s hold on power by collecting and disseminating intelligence about his main political rival. (It’s unclear whether or not the operations in Amsterdam and Gabon were carried out. A spokesperson for Brunstad said that it was “plainly ridiculous” that the church considered “any book” to be more important than the Bible. Ondimba’s representatives could not be reached for comment.) In another project, targeting the South African billionaire heirs of an apartheid-era skin-lightening company, Psy-Group secretly recorded family members of the heirs describing them as greedy and, in one case, as a “piece of shit.” In New York, Psy-Group mounted a campaign on behalf of wealthy Jewish-American donors to embarrass and intimidate activists on American college campuses who support a movement to put economic pressure on Israel because of its treatment of the Palestinians. Psy-Group’s larger ambition was to break into the U.S. election market. During the 2016 Presidential race, the company pitched members of Donald Trump’s campaign team on its ability to influence the results. Psy-Group’s owner, Joel Zamel, even asked Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, to offer Zamel’s services to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. The effort to drum up business included brash claims about the company’s skills in online deception. The posturing was intended

Psy-Group offered its avatars for influence campaigns, boasting that they could plant the seeds of thought in people. ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAÉN

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to attract clients—but it also attracted the attention of the F.B.I. Robert Mueller, the special counsel, has been examining the firm’s activities as part of his investigation into Russian election interference and other matters. Psy-Group’s talks with Benzeevi, after the 2016 election, spurred the company to draw up a plan for developing more business at the state and local levels. No election was too small. One company document reported that Psy-Group’s influence services cost, on average, just three hundred and fifty thousand dollars—as little as two hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour. The new strategy called for pitching more than fifty individuals and groups, including the Republican National Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and major super PACs. The firm published a provocative brochure featuring an image of a goldfish with a shark fin tied to its back, below the tagline “Reality is a matter of perception.” Another brochure showed a cat that cast a lion’s shadow and listed “honey traps” among the firm’s services. (In the espionage world, a honey trap often involves deploying a sexually attractive operative to induce a target to provide information.) Psy-Group put together a proposal for Benzeevi, promising “a coordinated intelligence operation and influence campaign” in Tulare to preserve Kumar’s seat on the hospital board. Operatives would use fake identities to “uncover and deliver actionable intelligence” on members of the community who appeared to be leading the recall effort, and would use unattributed Web sites to mount a “negative campaign” targeting “the opposition candidate.” All these activities, the proposal assured, would appear to be part of a “grass roots” movement in Tulare. The operation was code-named Project Mockingjay, a reference to a fictional bird in the “Hunger Games” novels, known for its ability to mimic human sounds. he modern market for private intelligence dates back to the nineteen-seventies, when a former prosecutor named Jules Kroll began hiring police detectives, F.B.I. and Treasury

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agents, and forensic accountants to conduct detective work on behalf of corporations, law and accounting firms, and other clients. The company, which became known as Kroll, Inc., also recruited a small number of former C.I.A. officers, but rarely advertised these hires—Kroll knew that associating too closely with the C.I.A. could endanger employees in countries where the spy agency was viewed with contempt. In the two-thousands, Israeli versions of Kroll entered the market. These companies had a unique advantage: few countries produce more highly trained and war-tested intelligence professionals, as a proportion of the population, than Israel. Conscription in Israel is mandatory for most citizens, and top intelligence units often identify talented recruits while they are in high school. These soldiers undergo intensive training in a range of language and technical skills. After a few years of government service, most are discharged, at which point many finish their educations and enter the civilian job market. Gadi Aviran was one of the pioneers of the private Israeli intelligence industry. “There was this huge pipeline of talent coming out of the military every year,” Aviran, who founded the intelligence firm Terrogence, said. “All a company like mine had to do was stand at the gate and say, ‘You look interesting.’” Aviran was formerly the head of an Israeli military intelligence research team, where he supervised analysts who, looking for terrorist threats, reviewed data vacuumed up from telephone communications and from the Internet. The process, Aviran said, was like “looking at a flowing river and trying to see if there was anything interesting passing by.” The system was generally effective at analyzing attacks after they occurred, but wasn’t as good at providing advance warning. Aviran began to think about a more targeted approach. Spies, private investigators, criminals, and even some journalists have long used false identities to trick people into providing information, a practice known as pretexting. The Internet made pretexting easier. Aviran

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thought that fake online personae, known as avatars, could be used to spy on terrorist groups and to head off planned attacks. In 2004, he started Terrogence, which became the first major Israeli company to demonstrate the effectiveness of avatars in counterterrorism work. When Terrogence launched, many suspected jihadi groups communicated through members-only online forums run by designated administrators. To get past these gatekeepers, Terrogence’s operatives gave their avatars legends, or backstories—often as Arab students at European universities. As the avatars proliferated, their operators joked that the most valuable online chat rooms were now entirely populated by avatars, who were, inadvertently, collecting information from one another. Aviran tried to keep Terrogence focussed on its core mission—counterterrorism—but some government clients offered the company substantial contracts to move in other directions. “It’s a slippery slope,” Aviran said, insisting that it was a path he resisted. “You start with one thing and suddenly you think, Wait, wait, I can do this. Then somebody asks if you can do something else. And you say, ‘Well, it’s risky but the money is good, so let’s give it a try.’” Terrogence’s success spawned imitators, and other former intelligence officers began to open their own firms, many of them less risk-averse than Terrogence. One of the boldest, Black Cube, openly advertised its ties to Israeli spy agencies, including Mossad and Unit 8200, the military’s signalsintelligence corps. Black Cube got its start with the help of Vincent Tchenguiz, an Iranian-born English realestate tycoon who had invested in Terrogence. In March, 2011, Tchenguiz was arrested by a British anti-fraud unit investigating his business dealings. (The office later dropped the investigation and paid him a settlement.) He asked Meir Dagan, who had just stepped down as the director of Mossad, how he could draw on the expertise of former intelligence officers to look into the business rivals he believed had alerted authorities. Dagan’s message to Tchenguiz, a former colleague of Dagan’s said, was: I can find a personal Mossad for you. (Dagan died in 2016.)

Tchenguiz became Black Cube’s first significant client. In some respects, Psy-Group emerged more directly from Terrogence. In 2008, Aviran hired an Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer named Royi Burstien to be the vice-president of business development. Social networks such as Facebook—whose profiles featured photographs and other personal information—were becoming popular, and Terrogence’s avatars had become more sophisticated to avoid detection. Burstien urged Aviran to consider using the avatars in more aggressive ways, and on behalf of a wider range of commercial clients. Aviran was wary. After less than a year at Terrogence, Burstien returned to Israel’s military intelligence, and joined an élite unit that specialized in PsyOps, or psychological operations. In the following years, some of Burstien’s ambitions were being fulfilled elsewhere. Russia’s intelligence services had begun using a variety of tools—including hacking, cyber weapons, online aliases, and Web sites that spread fake news—to conduct information warfare and to sow discord in neighboring countries. In the late two-thousands, the Russians targeted Estonia and Georgia. In 2014, they hit Ukraine. Later that year, Burstien founded Psy-Group, which, like Black Cube, used avatars to conduct intelligence-collection operations. But Burstien also offered his avatars for another purpose: influence campaigns, similar to those mounted by Russia. Burstien boasted that Psy-Group’s socalled “deep” avatars were so convincing that they were capable of planting the seeds of ideas in people’s heads. ulare seemed an unlikely target for an influence campaign. The town took its name from a lake that, in 1773, was christened by a Spanish commandant as Los Tules, for the tule reeds that grew along the shore. The town was later memorialized in a song, “Ghost of Bardsley Road,” about a headless spectre who rode a white Honda motorcycle. Today, the city is home to just over sixty thousand people. The county leads the nation in dairy production. In the summer months, dry winds churn up so much dust that many residents suffer from what’s known as valley fever, a

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fungal infection that causes flulike symptoms. Not long ago, when wildfires were raging across California, winds pushed the smoke into Tulare, leaving an acrid smell in the air. Citizens for Hospital Accountability began as a simple Facebook page. At first, the group’s leaders hoped that Alex Gutiérrez would run for Kumar’s seat, but he was planning to stand for a position on the city council. Senovia was the backup choice. She had grown up as the youngest of twelve children, in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes. Her parents were impoverished farmers who cultivated corn and beans until a drought forced them to abandon their land. She started working full time when she was sixteen; when she was twenty-four, she crossed the border at Tijuana to join her boyfriend, Miguel Gutiérrez, who was living in Los Angeles. They married and, two years later, moved to Tulare, where Senovia raised five boys and supplemented the family’s income by work-

ing part time as a housekeeper. When she was thirty-five, she got her highschool diploma, then attended community college and went on to earn a B.A. at California State University, Fresno. In 2015, she became an American citizen and completed a master’s degree in social work. Alex doubted whether his mother would agree to enter the race. She had never shown much interest in politics. “Growing up as immigrants, parents know what’s happening, but, aside from voting, they don’t really want to get involved,” he said. Over family dinners in Senovia’s three-bedroom home, Alex told her stories about the “corruption and mismanagement” that he said was hurting the hospital. “I will happily do it because you’re so involved,” Senovia told him. Hospital-board races are usually smalltime affairs. One former member of the Tulare board said that her campaign had cost just a hundred and fifty dollars, which she used to buy signs and cards

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that she handed out door-to-door. In the recall, which had been set for July 11, 2017, voter turnout was expected to be fewer than fifteen hundred people. Still, Alex decided to take a break from college and serve as his mother’s campaign manager. He suspected that the race would be bitterly contested, and expensive. He calculated that ten thousand dollars should cover the costs. To help, Citizens for Hospital Accountability hosted a fund-raiser on Cinco de Mayo. The invitation featured a photograph of Senovia in a pink dress, surrounded by her husband and five children, standing in front of a mural depicting the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. Senovia was nervous about her first big campaign event, which was held in an orchard, where guests ate handmade tacos. Tulare County is largely Republican; Trump won it with fifty-three per cent of the vote in 2016, and the district’s representative in the House, Devin Nunes, has spearheaded efforts to counter the Russia investigation. But the hospital board was a crossover issue. One of Senovia’s supporters, a dairyman of Portuguese descent, pulled Alex aside at the fund-raiser to tell him that Senovia’s “classy” appearance and her foreign accent somehow reminded him of Melania Trump, whose husband he had supported in the 2016 election. (Alex, a Bernie Sanders fan, laughed and suggested that this might not be an apt comparison.) After giving a speech, Senovia told Alex that she was pleased that the event had been held on Cinco de Mayo, which commemorates the Mexican Army’s victory over France in the Battle of Puebla. “The French could not believe they were defeated by Mexico,” Senovia told her son. “I am going to beat Kumar, and he won’t be able to believe that a Mexican woman defeated him.” But Benzeevi wasn’t going to let his opponents win without putting up a fight. While Alex and Senovia were soliciting small donations from neighbors, Benzeevi got on a plane to Israel to meet with Psy-Group. sy-Group operated out of a nondescript building in a commercial area about twenty minutes outside Tel Aviv. Its offices were on the fourth floor, behind an unmarked door. Employees used

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Most of the rooms muted by cold, and the furniture there with its human chill under vast drapes of plastic for the season— Because eventually we are an austerity, walking room to room enamored and saddened, all the crazy variations of bed and table, clocks, books on a shelf, foreign harbors etched some yesterday, framed for a wall. And the effrontery of windows assuming how lovely out, a certainty of lawn and woods, distance on a road, voices that in summer drift up and move away. Desire. That continues and continuing is the part loved just as there is emptiness with an occasion in it, clothes to remove before you ease into a bath. Branches and branches scraping is winter. And after midnight, near morning when I stepped out, the moon by half, was it deer I saw? A little one and maybe its mother. Or they were smaller than deer. Or larger. Oh but they were strange, stopped across the snow like that. —Marianne Boruch key cards to enter, and yet, for a private intelligence firm, security was comically lax, particularly between noon and 2 P.M., when men carrying motorcycle helmets raced in and out, delivering lunch. Clients were escorted through a communal room, which had a big-screen TV facing a large, listing couch, where twentysomethings in faded jeans and T-shirts spent their breaks playing Mortal Kombat and FIFA 17. Burstien tried to position Psy-Group as a more responsible alternative to Black Cube, which was known for a willingness to break the rules. “I’m not saying we’re good guys or bad guys,” Burstien said in one meeting. “It’s not black or white. The gray has so many shades.” In 2016, Romanian police arrested two Black Cube operatives for illegal hacking and harassment of the country’s

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leading anticorruption officer. (The pair pleaded guilty and received probation.) Psy-Group tried to capitalize on Black Cube’s legal troubles. Burstien reassured prospective clients that lawyers vetted everything the company’s operatives did. Former company officials said that PsyGroup didn’t hack or appropriate the identities of real people for its avatars. It clandestinely recorded conversations, but never in jurisdictions that required “two-party” consent, which would have made the practice illegal. The company’s claims of legal legitimacy, however, skirted the fact that regulations haven’t kept pace with advances in technology. “What are the regulations? What’s the law?” Tamir Pardo, who was the director of Mossad from 2011 to 2016, said. “There are no laws. There are no regulations. That’s the

main problem. You can do almost whatever you want.” Psy-Group went to great lengths to disguise its activities. Employees were occasionally instructed to go to libraries or Internet cafés, where they could use so-called “white” computers, which could not be traced back to the firm. They created dummy Gmail accounts, often employed for one assignment and then discarded. For particularly sensitive operations, Psy-Group created fake front companies and avatars who purported to work there, and then hired real outside contractors who weren’t told that they were doing the bidding of Psy-Group’s clients. Psy-Group operatives sometimes paid the local contractors in cash. In one meeting, Burstien said that, before a parliamentary election in a European country, his operatives had created a sham think tank. Using avatars, the operatives hired local analysts to work for the think tank, which then disseminated reports to bolster the political campaign of the company’s client and to undermine the reputations of his rivals. In another meeting, PsyGroup officials said that they had created an avatar to help a corporate client win regulatory approval in Europe. Over time, the avatar became so well established in the industry that he was quoted in mainstream press reports and even by European parliamentarians. “It’s got to look legit,” a former PsyGroup employee said, of Burstien’s strategy. Most Psy-Group employees knew little or nothing about the company’s owner, Joel Zamel. According to corporate documents filed in Cyprus, he was born in Australia in 1986. Zamel later moved to Israel, where he earned a master’s degree in government, diplomacy, and strategy, with a specialization in counterterrorism and homeland security. Zamel’s father had made a fortune in the mining business, and Zamel was a skilled networker. He cultivated relationships with high-profile Republicans in the U.S., including Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams, who served in foreign-policy positions under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and whom Psy-Group listed as a member of its advisory board. (The Trump Administration recently named Abrams its

special envoy to oversee U.S. policy toward Venezuela.) Documents show that Zamel was a director of a Cyprus-based company called IOCO, which controlled Psy-Group. (Zamel’s lawyers and Burstien declined to say how much of an ownership stake Zamel held in IOCO, or to identify who else provided funding for the venture.) Using Cyprus as a front made it easier for Psy-Group to sell its services in Arab states that don’t work overtly with Israeli companies. Initially, Psy-Group hoped to make money by investigating jihadi networks, much as Terrogence did. In an early test of concept, a Psy-Group operative created a Facebook account for an avatar named Madison. Burstien’s idea was to use Madison as a virtual honey trap. The avatar’s Facebook page depicted Madison as an average American teenager from a Christian family in Chicago. She was a fan of Justin Bieber, and after graduating from high school she took a job at a souvenir shop. She posted Facebook messages about religion and expressed interest in learning more about Islam. Eventually, a Facebook member from Casablanca introduced Madison online to two imams at Moroccan mosques, one of whom offered to guide her through the process of becoming a Muslim. Madison’s conversion was conducted through Skype. The call required a female Psy-Group employee to bring Madison to life briefly and chant the

Shahada, a profession of faith, from a desk in the company’s offices. “Finally! I’m a Muslim,” Madison wrote on Facebook. “I feel at home.” She added a smiley-face emoticon. After her conversion, Madison began to come into contact with Facebook members who espoused more radical beliefs. One of her new friends was an ISIS fighter in Raqqa, Syria, who encouraged her to become an ISIS bride. At that point, Burstien decided to end

the operation, which, he felt, had demonstrated the company’s ability to create convincing “deep” avatars. Not long afterward, he sent representatives to pitch State Department officials on an influence campaign, “modeled on the successful ‘Madison’ engagement,” that would “interrupt the radicalization and recruitment chain.” The State Department never acted on the proposal. Psy-Group had more success pitching an operation, code-named Project Butterfly, to wealthy Jewish-American donors. The operation targeted what Psy-Group described as “anti-Israel” activists on American college campuses who supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, known as B.D.S. Supporters of B.D.S. see the movement as a way to use nonviolent protest to pressure Israel about its treatment of the Palestinians; detractors say that B.D.S. wrongly singles out Israel as a human-rights offender. B.D.S. is anathema to many ardent supporters of the Israeli government. In early meetings with donors, in New York, Burstien said that the key to mounting an effective anti-B.D.S. campaign was to make it look as though Israel, and the Jewish-American community, had nothing to do with the effort. The goal of Butterfly, according to a 2017 company document, was to “destabilize and disrupt anti-Israel movements from within.” Psy-Group operatives scoured the Internet, socialmedia accounts, and the “deep” Web— areas of the Internet not indexed by search engines like Google—for derogatory information about B.D.S. activists. If a student claimed to be a pious Muslim, for example, Psy-Group operatives would look for photographs of him engaging in behavior unacceptable to many pious Muslims, such as drinking alcohol or having an affair. PsyGroup would then release the information online using avatars and Web sites that couldn’t be traced back to the company or its donors. Project Butterfly launched in February, 2016, and Psy-Group asked donors for $2.5 million for operations in 2017. Supporters were told that they were “investing in Israel’s future.” In some cases, a former company employee said, donors asked Psy-Group to target B.D.S. activists at universities

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“Hey, I know things look bleak now, but once we find a palm tree and grow beards we’ll be making jokes in no time.”

• where their sons and daughters studied. The project would focus on as many as ten college campuses. According to an update sent to donors in May, 2017, Psy-Group conducted two “tours of the main theatre of action,” and met with the campaign’s outside “partners,” which it did not name. Psy-Group employees had recently travelled to Washington to visit officials at a think tank called the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which had shared some of its research on the B.D.S. movement. In a follow-up meeting, which was attended by Burstien, Psy-Group provided F.D.D. with a confidential memo describing how it had compiled dossiers on nine activists, including a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. In the memo, Psy-Group asked the foundation for guidance on identifying future targets. According to an F.D.D. official, the foundation “did not end up contracting with them, and their research did little to advance our own.” Burstien recruited Ram Ben-Barak, a former deputy director of Mossad, to help with the project. As the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, from 2014 to 2016, Ben-Barak had drawn up a plan for the state to combat the B.D.S. movement, but it 50

• was never implemented. Ben-Barak was enthusiastic about Butterfly. He said that the fight against B.D.S. was like “a war.” In the case of B.D.S. activists, he said, “you don’t kill them but you do have to deal with them in other ways.” Yaakov Amidror, a former nationalsecurity adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, also became an adviser to Psy-Group on Butterfly. Before accepting the position, Amidror said recently, he spoke to Daniel Reisner, Psy-Group’s outside counsel, who had advised five Israeli Prime Ministers, including Netanyahu. “Danny, is it legal?” Amidror recalled asking. Reisner responded that it was. While active Israeli intelligence operatives aren’t supposed to spy on the United States, Amidror said, he saw nothing improper about former Israeli intelligence officers conducting operations against American college students. “If it’s legal, I don’t see any problem,” Amidror said with a shrug. “If people are ready to finance it, it is O.K. with me.” n April 22, 2017, Benzeevi arrived in Tel Aviv. He checked into the Dan Hotel, across from the city’s seafront promenade. At the start of his first full day in Israel, he was greeted

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by a “Welcome home!” e-mail from Scott Mortman, a former lawyer who managed Psy-Group’s American clients. The e-mail described their schedule for the day. At lunch, Mortman would give Benzeevi a briefing on PsyGroup’s offerings. Then Benzeevi would meet with Burstien, who would walk him through the company’s proposed campaign to keep Kumar on the hospital board. Burstien and Mortman were a well-practiced tag team. “Royi would give his ‘cloak and dagger’ spiel and then Scott would come on and give his ‘Boy Scout’ spiel, which is ‘What we’re doing is completely legal,’” a former colleague said. Benzeevi had already received a draft of Psy-Group’s battle plan, contained in an e-mail that was password-protected and marked “PRIVILEGED & CONFIDENTIAL.” The proposal assured Benzeevi that Psy-Group’s activities would be “fully disconnected” from him and his hospital-management company. To close the deal, Burstien called in Ram Ben-Barak, one of his biggest hired guns. Lanky and charismatic, Ben-Barak looked like someone from Mossad central casting. A former company employee said that Benzeevi “appeared to like the idea that someone from Mossad would be on his side.” Before Benzeevi flew back to California, he was given the number of a bank account where he could wire Psy-Group the fee for the Tulare campaign—two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. On May 8th, just days after Senovia’s Cinco de Mayo party, Benzeevi’s company sent the first of three payments, which was routed to a bank in Zurich. The project was set in motion, and its code name was changed from Mockingjay to Katniss, a reference to Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist in the “Hunger Games” novels. hospital-board election in central California wasn’t exactly what Burstien had in mind when he set out to establish Psy-Group in the U.S. election market. In early 2016, as the Presidential race was heating up, he and Zamel both tried to pitch much bigger players. Being hired by one of the main campaigns initially seemed like a long shot for an obscure new company whose services sounded risky, if not illegal.

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Lawyers at firms in New York and Washington expressed curiosity about Psy-Group, but most were too cautious to sign contracts with the company. The Trump campaign, however, presented an opportunity. Early in 2016, a Republican consultant with ties to the Israeli government put Psy-Group in touch with Rick Gates, a senior Trump campaign official. Eager to secure a potentially lucrative project, Burstien drew up plans for an intelligence and influence campaign to promote Trump and undermine his rivals, first in the Republican primary and then in the general election. In the proposal, dubbed Project Rome, which was first reported on by the Times, last October, Psy-Group used code names for the candidates: Trump was Lion, and Hillary Clinton was Forest. PsyGroup also hired the Washington law firm Covington & Burling to conduct a legal review of its work. Former PsyGroup officials said that the resulting memo gave a green light to begin offering the company’s services in the U.S. (A spokesperson for Covington & Burling said that the firm could not discuss its advice to clients.) Zamel often operated independently of Burstien, and it’s unclear how closely the two coördinated, but both saw the Trump campaign as a potential client. Trump’s vocal support for Israel and his hard-line views on Iran appealed to Zamel, and he reached out to Trump’s inner circle. In early May, 2016, Zamel sent an e-mail to Gingrich, saying that he could provide the Trump campaign with powerful tools that would use social media to advance Trump’s chances. Zamel suggested a meeting in Washington to discuss the matter further. Gingrich forwarded the e-mail to Jared Kushner and asked if the campaign would be interested. Kushner checked with others on the campaign, including Brad Parscale, who ran Web operations. According to a person familiar with the exchange, Parscale told Kushner that they didn’t need Zamel’s help. (A 2016 campaign official said, “We didn’t use their services.”) Also that spring, Zamel was introduced to George Nader, a LebaneseAmerican with ties to the Emirati leader Mohammed bin Zayed and other powerful figures in the Gulf. Born in 1959,

Nader was almost twice Zamel’s age. Both men preferred to operate behind the scenes, but were consummate networkers who touted their connections to high-level political figures. Some viewed Nader as an influence peddler; others said that he had been intimately involved in high-stakes negotiations in the Middle East for decades. Martin Indyk, an adviser to Presidents Clinton and Obama on Middle Eastern affairs and now a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “We used to joke that George was in the pay of at least three intelligence services— the Syrian, the Israeli, and the Iranian.” In June, 2016, Nader was attending an international economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia, when Zamel approached him and requested a meeting. According to a representative for Nader, Zamel told Nader that he was trying to raise money for a social-media campaign in support of Trump; he thought that Nader’s Gulf contacts might be interested in contributing financially. Nader listened to Zamel’s pitch but didn’t make any commitments, according to the Nader representative. (Zamel’s representatives denied that he spoke to Nader in St. Petersburg about trying to help Trump.) Zamel had another opportunity to pitch his services in early August, 2016, when Erik Prince, the founder of the

Blackwater security firm, helped arrange a meeting at Trump Tower among Zamel, Nader, and Donald Trump, Jr. (Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos became Trump’s Education Secretary, was a major Trump donor and had access to members of his team.) In the meeting, Zamel told Trump, Jr., that he supported his father’s campaign, and talked about Psy-Group’s influence operations. (Zamel’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, played down the encounter, insisting that Zamel made no formal proposals during the meeting.) Burstien said that his talks with the Trump campaign went nowhere; a representative for Zamel denied that his client engaged in any activity having to do with the election. But, according to the Nader representative, shortly after the election Zamel bragged to Nader that he had conducted a secret campaign that had been influential in Trump’s victory. Zamel agreed to brief Nader on how the operation had worked. During that conversation, Zamel showed Nader several analytical reports, including one that described the role of avatars, bots, fake news, and unattributed Web sites in assisting Trump. Zamel told Nader, “Here’s the work that we did to help get Trump elected,” according to the Nader representative. Nader paid Zamel more than two million dollars, but never received

“I think we should be other people.”

copies of the reports, that person said. A representative for Zamel denied that he told Nader that he or any of his operatives had intervened to help Trump during the 2016 election. If Nader came away with that impression, the representative said, he was mistaken. “Nader may have paid Zamel not knowing when, how, or why the report was created, but he wanted to use it to gain access and new business,” the representative said. “In fact, it used publicly available material to show how social media—in general—was used in connection with the campaign.” nformation warfare is as old as warfare itself. In “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu declared that “all warfare is based on deception.” In modern times, both Soviet intelligence and its American counterpart used disinformation as a tool of persuasion and a weapon to destabilize the other side. Long before the advent of social media, Moscow concocted fantastical rumors that the AIDS virus had been manufactured by American government scientists as a biological weapon. The C.I.A. supported the publication of underground books in the Soviet Union by such authors as Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a ploy that the agency knew would enrage the Kremlin leadership and deepen anti-Soviet sentiment among dissident circles inside the country. In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. government convinced itself that it was now free of many of the challenges it faced during the Cold War, and its interest in information warfare faded. The military’s special forces stepped into the informationwarfare void. “We knew we needed to operate in this space,” Austin Branch, who specialized in PsyOps, said. “It was the information age. We didn’t have a road map.” Branch became one of the military’s first “information operations” officers, in the early nineties. He and other specialists created experimental Web sites aimed at readers in Central Europe and North Africa. The sites were designed to look like independent news sources; the U.S. military’s role was revealed only to readers who clicked deeper. “We didn’t hide who it was from, but we didn’t make it easy to find,” a former military offi-

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cial who specialized in psychological operations said. U.S. leaders were generally skeptical about the effectiveness of these kinds of operations. They also worried that the open flow of information on the Internet would make it difficult, if not impossible, to insure that misinformation disseminated by the United States wouldn’t inadvertently “blow back” and reach Americans, in violation of U.S. law. The result, according to retired Army Colonel Mike Lwin, who served as the top military adviser to Pentagon leaders on information operations from 2014 to 2018, was that a cautious approach to information warfare prevailed in Washington. Russian military and intelligence agencies, on the other hand, didn’t see information warfare as a sideshow. They invested in cyber weapons capable of paralyzing critical infrastructure, from utilities to banks, and refined the use of fake personae and fake news to fuel political and ethnic discord abroad. “We underestimated how significant it was,” Lwin said, of these online influence operations. “We didn’t appreciate it—until it was in our face.” The 2016 election changed the calculus. In the U.S., investigators pieced together how Russian operatives had carried out a scheme to promote their preferred candidate and to stoke divisions within U.S. society. Senior Israeli officials, like their American counterparts, had been dubious about the effectiveness of influence campaigns. Russia’s operation in the U.S. convinced Tamir Pardo, the former Mossad director, and others in Israel that they, too, had misjudged the threat. “It was the biggest Russian win ever. Without shooting one bullet, American society was torn apart,” Pardo said. “This is a weapon. We should find a way to control it, because it’s a ticking bomb. Otherwise, democracy is in trouble.” Some of Pardo’s former colleagues took a more mercenary approach. Russia had shown the world that information warfare worked, and they saw a business opportunity. In early 2017, as Trump took office, interest in PsyGroup’s services seemed to increase. Law firms, one former employee said, asked Psy-Group to “come back in and tell us again what you are doing, be-

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cause we see this ability to affect decisions that we weren’t fully aware of.” Another former Psy-Group employee put it more bluntly: “The Trump campaign won this way. If the fucking President is doing it, why not us?” To capitalize on this newfound interest, Burstien started making the rounds in Washington with a new PowerPoint presentation, which some PsyGroup employees called the “If we had done it” slide deck, and which appeared similar to the one that Nader saw. Titled “Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Campaign—Analysis,” the presentation outlined the role of Web sites, avatars, and bots in influencing the outcome of the election. In one case highlighted in the slide deck, pro-Trump avatars joined a Facebook page for Bernie Sanders supporters and then flooded it with links to anti-Hillary Clinton articles from Web sites that posted fake news, creating a hostile environment for real members of the group. “Bernie supporters had left our page in droves, depressed and disgusted by the venom,” the group’s administrator was quoted as saying. As part of the presentation, Burstien pointed out that Russian operatives had been caught meddling in the U.S.; Psy-Group, he told clients, was “more careful.” Psy-Group’s post-election push into the U.S. market included a cocktail reception on March 1, 2017, at the Old Ebbitt Grill, near the White House, “in celebration of our new D.C. office.” The next day, an article in Politico briefly mentioned the gathering and described Psy-Group as a multinational company with “offices in London, Hong Kong and Cyprus.” There was no mention of Israel; Burstien thought it would be better for business to play down the Israel angle. In fact, the reception was part of Psy-Group’s campaign to shape perceptions about itself. The image it projected was mostly bluster; the company’s “new D.C. office” consisted of a desk at a WeWork on the eighth floor of a building across the street from the White House. n June of 2017, strange things began happening in Tulare. A series of ominous Web sites appeared: Tularespeaks.com,Tulareleaks.com, and Draintulareswamp.com. The sites directed

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visitors to articles that smeared Senovia Gutiérrez and her allies in the hospital-board fight. Tony Maldonado, a reporter for the Valley Voice, the local newspaper, saw the sites and thought, What the fuck? He knew that residents were fired up about the hospital-board election, but these shadowy tactics, he said, were “completely out of left field.” “I guess you might see that in a big city or on a national level,” Maldonado said. “But to see it in a small town, about a hospital board in Tulare, is just insane.” The domain names appeared to be playing off themes from the 2016 Presidential campaign. Trump liked to use the phrase “drain the swamp” to rally his anti-Washington base. The address Tulareleaks.com was similar to DCleaks. com, a site allegedly set up by Russian intelligence officers to publish hacked e-mails with the aim of influencing the 2016 race. Along with the Web sites, online personae, who claimed to be local residents but whom nobody in town recognized, began posting comments on social media. Some of the messages suggested that Senovia took bribes. Others pointed to her Mexican background and her accent and questioned whether she was an American citizen. Psy-Group also conducted “off-line” operations, as the company sometimes termed clandestine on-the-ground activities, according to a former company employee. Early on the evening of June 9th, a woman with short blond hair knocked on Senovia’s front door, and told Senovia’s adult son Richard, who answered, that she was a supporter of his mother’s campaign. The woman handed Richard an envelope that read “To: Mrs. Sanovia,” misspelling her name. Richard noticed that a man was standing across the street, next to a Yukon Denali S.U.V., taking photographs with a telephoto lens. Later that night, the S.U.V. returned to Senovia’s street, and the man took more photographs. Some of the photographs soon appeared on Draintulareswamp.com, under the title “Who Is Pulling Senovia’s Strings?”The accompanying article said, “This post is addressed to one member of our community in particular. The public should be watching Martha Senovia closely. This past week a very expensive black car was seen parked in front of the

home of Mrs. Senovia in addition to several other unidentified cars.” The Web site used Senovia’s nickname, Martha. The photographs seemed designed to make it appear as if Senovia had taken a bribe. (The envelope contained a thirtydollar Tommy Hilfiger gift certificate.) Later, the Valley Voice posted an article

under the headline “Tulare Politics Get Fishy as Hospital Recall Nears.” Psy-Group, one of the company’s former employees later said, was engaged not in “serious intelligence” but in “monkey business.” Other articles on Draintulareswamp.com questioned whether Seno-

ing him to tell whoever was orchestrating the campaign to “knock it off.” Benzeevi stopped returning McKinney’s calls after that. “It didn’t really hurt Senovia,” McKinney said. “It made it look like she was being harassed. It hurt Kumar. It backfired.” On the eve of the election, Alex’s house burned down and he lost almost everything, including his final batch of campaign flyers. He suspected that the blaze could have been election-related, but local fire-department officials said that they saw no evidence of foul play. A former Psy-Group official told me, “I never initiated any physical fire on any project whatsoever.” urstien hoped that Psy-Group’s work in Tulare would help the company land other small campaigns, but that proved overly optimistic. He told colleagues that he was close to finalizing several deals, but the new clients fell through, and, in February, 2018, Burstien found that he couldn’t make payroll. Psy-Group’s financial woes coincided with sudden scrutiny from the F.B.I. The Bureau had taken an interest in George Nader for helping to organize a secretive meeting in the Seychelles ahead of Trump’s Inauguration, with the aim of creating an unofficial channel with Vladimir Putin. In January, 2018, F.B.I. agents stopped Nader, an American citizen, at Dulles International Airport and served him with a grand-jury subpoena. Nader agreed to coöperate, and told F.B.I. agents about his various dealings related to the Trump campaign, including his discussions with Zamel. (Nader has been granted immunity in exchange for testifying truthfully, according to one of his representatives. “Someone who has this kind of immunity has no incentive to lie,” the representative said.) The following month, F.B.I. agents served Zamel with a grand-jury subpoena. Agents also tracked down Burstien in the San Francisco area, where he was on a business trip. Burstien returned to his hotel room and found a note under his door informing him that the Bureau wanted him to come in for questioning. Burstien told friends that he was “in shock.” The F.B.I. also visited Psy-Group’s so-called D.C. office,

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“Because I said so.”

• via was fit to manage finances, and published records showing that she had filed for bankruptcy in 2003. (The bankruptcy records were authentic.) “It was horrible—they put out stuff that we couldn’t believe, and they were turning it out so fast,” Deanne Martin-Soares, one of the founders of Citizens for Hospital Accountability, said. “We couldn’t trace anything. We didn’t know where it was coming from.” On Facebook, Alex Gutiérrez responded to the smear tactics, writing, “The gall of their campaign to fabricate and move forward with such trash speaks volumes of their desperation and fear!” On June 15th, campaign flyers ridiculing Senovia for having “zero experience,” and directing residents who “want proof ” to visit Tularespeaks.com, appeared on door handles around town. The small businessman who printed and distributed the flyers said that he had been paid in cash by a stranger who used the name Francesco Manoletti, 54

• which appears to be a made-up persona. (In another Psy-Group operation, a similar-sounding name—Francesco Gianelli—was used to hire contractors.) Parmod Kumar had hired his own political consultant, a California campaign veteran named Michael McKinney, to fight the recall. When rumors started to spread that Kumar or Benzeevi was behind the attacks on Senovia, McKinney tried, unsuccessfully, to discover who had created the Web sites. “Recall elections are about voter anger,” McKinney said. “To win a recall, you have to keep the electorate angry enough to vote. To stop a recall, you have to diminish the voters’ anger.” The attacks, McKinney felt, had the opposite of the intended effect: they motivated Senovia’s supporters to turn out on election day. When McKinney asked Kumar about the Web sites, Kumar said that he didn’t know where they had come from. McKinney said that he also confronted Benzeevi, urg-

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at the WeWork, and seized a laptop computer that had been hidden in a desk drawer, where it had been running continuously. The F.B.I. questioned some of Burstien’s employees about Psy-Group’s activities. In the interviews, agents acted as if “there’s no smoke without fire,” a former company official said. “There was a lot of smoke,” the official acknowledged. “We had to show them, it’s smoke, it’s smoke, it’s smoke, and not fire.” PsyGroup officials referred the F.B.I. to the letters they had received from law firms, attesting to the legality of their activities and telling the company that it didn’t need to register as a foreign agent. “The F.B.I. seemed genuinely surprised that this shit wasn’t illegal,” a former PsyGroup employee said. In an interview, Burstien said that he was comfortable with how Psy-Group had operated but believed that changes were needed to protect average citizens. “I’m coming from the side of the influencer, who really understands how we can make use of online platforms,” he said. “There needs to be more regulation, and it’s up to our legislators, in each and every country. What have U.S. legislators done since they learned, more than two years ago, about the potential of these new capabilities? They have the power to move the needle from A to B. Nothing substantial has been done, as far as I know.” Ram Ben-Barak, who helped woo Benzeevi on behalf of Psy-Group, said that he decided to leave the company after he learned about the extent of its operations in Tulare, which he objected to. Ben-Barak said that he regrets his decision to work with the firm. “When you leave the government and you leave Mossad, you don’t know how the real world works,” he said. “I made a mistake.” Ben-Barak, who is now running for a seat in Israel’s parliament, said that he believes new regulations are needed to stem the proliferation of avatars and misinformation. “This is the challenge of our time,” he said. “Everything is fake. It’s unbelievable.” Gadi Aviran, the Terrogence founder, said that he “never dreamed” that the business of fake personae, which he helped establish, would become so powerful. “In order to understand where we are, we have to understand where we

started,” he said. “What started as a noble cause ended up as fake news. What you have today is a flooded market, with people that will, basically, do anything.” n Tulare, the test of Psy-Group’s strategy came on the night of July 11, 2017. The hospital-board election resulted in a landslide—but not for Psy-Group’s client. There were more than a thousand ballots cast, and only a hundred and ninety-five people voted for Kumar to keep his seat. Senovia Gutiérrez won with seventy-five per cent of the vote. In the end, the Web sites attacking Senovia attracted scant attention in the community. “It was like they organized a concert and nobody showed up,” a computer-security expert said after reviewing trace data from the sites, which were taken down after the election. After Senovia’s victory, Benzeevi’s contract was rescinded. Larry Blitz, a hospital-turnaround specialist, stepped in as the interim C.E.O., and discovered that the hospital’s financial records were completely disorganized, with “entries that indicated artificial means of balancing the books.” Eventually, Blitz said, his team realized that the accounts contained a “hole as big as the Grand Canyon.” The hospital was more than thirty-six million dollars in debt, and had to close for nearly a year. (It reopened in October, 2018.) One morning, Blitz’s chief financial officer found police carting away computers and telephones. The local district attorney has issued more than forty search warrants as part of a fraud investigation, one of the largest such investigations in Tulare County history. Benzeevi and his legal team refused to respond to questions about Psy-Group. At first, Kumar said that he wasn’t aware of the covert campaign and that he wanted to help with this story. Then he stopped returning calls. According to a former company official, Zamel decided to shut down PsyGroup in February, 2018, just as Mueller’s team began questioning employees. But its demise hasn’t suppressed the appetite for many of the services it provided. Some of Psy-Group’s former

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employees have met with Black Cube to discuss job opportunities. Black Cube has been criticized for some of its recent work, including for the producer Harvey Weinstein, but there’s no sign that the notoriety has hurt business; one person familiar with the company’s operations bragged that there was booming interest from a variety of corporations. Recently, Efraim Halevy, who served as the director of Mossad from 1998 to 2002, joined Black Cube’s advisory board. Uzi Arad, a Mossad veteran and a former national-security adviser for Netanyahu, said that he was ashamed to see some of his former colleagues become “mercenaries for hire,” adding, “It’s highly immoral, and they should know it.” Last year, Black Cube moved to one of Tel Aviv’s most expensive neighborhoods, where it now occupies a sleek, full-floor office in the Bank Discount Tower. The entrance is unmarked, and painted black; doors are controlled by fingerprint readers. One area of the office is decorated with spy memorabilia, including an old encryption machine. Some Psy-Group veterans expressed regret that the firm had closed. “Had the company still been open, all this socalled negative press would have brought us lots of clients,” one said. Despite embarrassing missteps, which have exposed some Psy-Group and Black Cube operations to public scrutiny, a former senior Israeli intelligence official said that global demand for “private Mossads” is growing, and that the market for influence operations is expanding into new commercial areas. In particular, the former official cites the potentially huge market for using avatars to influence realestate prices—by creating the illusion that bidders are offering more money for a property, for example, or by spreading rumors about the presence of toxic chemicals to scare off competition. “From a free-market point of view, it’s scary,” a former Psy-Group official said, adding that the list of possible applications for avatars was “endless.” Another veteran of Israeli private intelligence warned, “We are looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of where this can go.” 

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SKETCHBOOK BY ROZ CHAST AND PATRICIA MARX

If you run out of food at your dinner party, the world will end.

You only need to have one child, but make sure it’s the right one.

Nature, if seen at all, is best seen from a car.

Everything would be better if they put me in charge of naming the world.

Everyone has a predetermined number of footsteps to use up in a lifetime. It’s reckless to exercise, since you will only exhaust your quota sooner and die.

Never serve salmon when entertaining. It is boring.

Never wear red and black together or you will look like a drum majorette.

If your book club chooses “Absalom, Absalom!,” that will be the end of your book club.

If you see me eating egg salad, you will know the diagnosis is terminal.

Show me now what you’re going to wear to my funeral so I can let you know whether it’s appropriate.

LETTER FROM OKLAHOMA

PUMPER’S CORNER Day in and day out, Rachael Van Horn tends to the oil wells of the Panhandle. BY IAN FRAZIER

achael Van Horn, fifty-six years old, lives by herself in a two-bedroom house at the southeast corner of Rosston, Oklahoma. Although the town is on a two-lane highway that runs east and west across the Panhandle, it offers no services to travellers. Prairie surrounds it. Rachael’s fenced-in yard adjoins twenty acres of pasture she owns, in which she keeps four cattle: Raffi, a black-and-white steer with only one horn, and three Black Angus two-yearolds. Phoenix is the Angus bull, and Freya and Cow Polly are the cows. The steer and the three Angus may be the happiest livestock in Oklahoma. When Rachael comes to the fence, they run across the pasture and contend jealously to be next to her. At the time of the fires that burned thousands of square miles of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas in 2017, Rachael already owned Raffi, who was then a small calf. Her pasture was spared, but cattle that had burned to death, or almost to death, dotted the prairie for miles around and bunched up against the remaining fences. Rachael sometimes wept as she drove by them. Most of the ones that survived were too far gone to save. When Rachael was out helping a neighbor shoot his injured animals, she saw three badly burned Angus calves that she thought might make it, and the rancher who owned them said that she could have them. Rachael brought the calves to her place and bucket-fed them, called a vet to treat them, put salve on their burned foreheads and lips and on the stubs of their burned-off ears, and built a small wading pool that she filled with a saline solution and walked them through twice a day in order to soothe their burned feet. The pain they were in distressed her so much that she drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and bought liquid THC— marijuana extract—to give them. After they began taking the THC, she no-

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ticed that they got hungrier, started to eat more, and put on a lot of weight. The calves gradually got better. She spent endless hours doctoring them. She had been in Iraq for three years and was present at the mess-hall suicide bombing near Mosul on December 21, 2004, which killed twenty-five people. She was continuing to deal with her post-traumatic stress, and the calves became part of the process. She did not brand any of them, or castrate the bull, because she did not want them to suffer any more pain. The three Angus and the steer are frolicsome animals, like imaginary cows in a children’s book or a cartoon. Rachael says that they will never be sold and will spend the rest of their lives in her pasture. Rachael—it seems wrong to call her Van Horn, because she is now a celebrity in northwest Oklahoma, and everybody calls her Rachael—was born in Ipswich, England. Her father, a career Air Force pilot who flew F-15 jets in Vietnam, was stationed near Ipswich, and in many more places after that. Rachael can’t count the number of schools she attended between kindergarten and twelfth grade. She thinks it was about eight. Her father wanted her to join the Air Force and become an officer like him, but after the family moved to Edmond, Oklahoma, in the early nineteen-eighties, and Rachael enrolled in Central Oklahoma College, she instead joined the Army Reserves. The specialties she chose to train for were transport logistics and truck-engine repair. She married and divorced three times. With her first husband, she had a daughter, Johnna, in 1987. ( Johnna is now married and has a three-year-old daughter, Eva.) Outside of Reserve duty, Rachael worked at all kinds of jobs, from feedlot hand to veterinarian’s assistant to John Deere truck- and trac-

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tor-parts salesperson, but the job she kept returning to was newspaper reporter. Starting in the mid-nineties, she wrote for papers in Enid, Oklahoma, and Shreveport, Louisiana, where she moved with her second husband. Later, she was hired by a woman she knew from the Reserves who had become the editor of the Woodward News, in Oklahoma. She still contributes to that paper at least once a month. Of medium height, Rachael is a grayblond, green-eyed woman with even, white teeth and strong-looking arms and shoulders. Somehow, she appears different every time you see her; in fact, I’ve never known anyone with such a differing repertoire of looks, or personae. One of those is a severe military type she refers to as Sergeant Van Horn, with the accent on the “Van.” Her eyes change when she is Sergeant Van Horn, and become gimlet-like and fierce. Being in the Reserves involved going through the same boot camp as regular recruits. During training at Fort Jackson, in South Carolina, a drill sergeant sexually assaulted her one evening when she was alone in a laundry room. He ran off when he heard somebody coming, but she saw who he was. She did not report the assault. Near the end of boot camp, when she was taking a proficiency test, she recognized him as the officer who was conducting it. With a gimlet look, she let him know she knew him. When she should have failed on a technicality, he passed her. She served in the Reserves for twentyone years and retired just before her unit was called up for duty in Iraq. By then, her daughter was about to go to Emory University, which costs upward of fiftyfive thousand dollars a year. Because of her military experience, Rachael got an offer from Kellogg Brown & Root to work in Iraq as a civilian liaison for construction projects in the villages. She

“Pumping wells, working alone, is my meditation,” Rachael said. “Because there can be some danger, I’m completely present.” PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATY GRANNAN

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“I just want to know if I’m healthy enough for bacon.”

• needed the hazard pay to help with the tuition, so she accepted. The job took her to Forward Operating Base Marez, by the Mosul airfield, where she was in charge of recreation, morale, and welfare. On the day of the bombing, a colleague asked her to come along with him to lunch, but she was with an Iraqi assistant who had not yet received security credentials. She told her colleague that she had to get the Iraqi “badged,” and went to the credentials office to do that. After waiting awhile with the Iraqi, she decided to run up to the mess hall and get them both some sandwiches. She had just opened the mess-hall door when the explosion occurred. She remembers the blood on the uniforms, the female soldier with her arm blown off, and the constant repetition of call letters on her radio as the distress signals went out and people tried to find those who were missing. Immediately after the bombing, a wave of anger ran across the base, and the 60

• Iraqi assistant feared that he would be shot. She stayed with him and several other Iraqis all night, playing tic-tactoe and drawing pictures, so that she could vouch for them. Later, she learned that the colleague who had asked her to lunch had been among those killed. The base held a memorial gathering for the victims, but she hardly had time to grieve, or even to take in what had occurred. She stuffed her feelings down and kept going. Investigators thought at first that the explosion might have been from a mortar round fired outside the base. The discovery of fragments of a torso and of an explosives belt pointed to a suicide bombing. Apparently, the bomber had dressed in an Iraqi National Guard uniform and gained admittance to the mess hall with other Iraqi troops. Reports in Arab-language newspapers said that the bomber was not an Iraqi but a Saudi, of the large al-Ghamdi clan, three members of which took part in the September 11th attacks.

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Rachael’s return from Iraq to Oklahoma didn’t happen all at once. “There is nothing—nothing!—as real as being in a war,” she said. “You come back and you feel guilty because nothing else is that real or that exciting.” Before her first return, she heard about a house and pasture for sale in Rosston for forty thousand dollars, and bought them sight unseen. She moved in and started writing for the Woodward paper again, but she became depressed, so she re-upped with Kellogg Brown & Root. As she was running with her morning cup of Turkish coffee down a street in Baghdad to dodge possible sniper fire, she realized that she now felt un-depressed, and actually great. She stayed for eight more months. On her re-return to Oklahoma, she settled into her house and took a different approach by beginning a new profession. Memories of the bombing made it difficult for her to be in crowded areas. Having people around bothered her, as did the mess-hall smell of fried chicken, as did enclosure of any kind. She wanted to work by herself and had always liked being outdoors. She was a good mechanic, could keep engines running, and did not mind a certain amount of physical danger. She decided to work in the oil field and become what is known as a pumper. estern Oklahoma has been its own particular kind of oil patch for going on a hundred years. Small operators started it—men who got a few thousand dollars together, drilled a well, made money or didn’t, drilled another. There are wells out there that are older than Rachael and still produce a few barrels of crude or a few M.C.F.s (million cubic feet) of natural gas a day. Oil-and-gas infrastructure is so much a part of the land that it’s everywhere, like strands of mushroom mycelium symbiotically wound among tree roots. Gas-pipeline valves emerge abruptly from the prairie here and there, oil and heater-treater and wastewater tanks stand beside horizon-seeking lease roads, and wellheads with slowly rising and falling horse-head pumps, or with submersible electric pumps, or with no pumps at all, meet your eye randomly throughout the wide-open spaces. Almost every one of those wells, if it is in operation, must be checked every day,

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year in and year out, to make sure it’s running right, and when it’s not it must be fixed. The checking and maintenance is the job of pumpers. Pumpers usually work alone, driving from well to well, tending anywhere from ten to forty or fifty wells a day. If they are employed by an oil-well company, they’re called company pumpers and receive a salary; if they’re not, they’re contract pumpers and are paid a certain amount per well. Contract pumpers can make more money, because if they’re skillful they can do more wells in a day. Almost all pumpers are men, as is true in other oil-field jobs. A few women assist their pumper husbands; an even smaller number are contract pumpers working on their own. Rachael was lucky to know perhaps the greatest female pumper in western Oklahoma, Evelyn Dixon, whom she had met in a bar in the town of Laverne. The two had personal suffering in common. Rachael was working through her P.T.S.D., and Evelyn was mourning her husband, “a gorgeous backhoe operator” she met while working for a pipeline company, who dropped dead of an aneurysm, in 2005. Unexpectedly widowed, Evelyn had to find a way to hold on to their ranch all on her own. Pumping can pay a lot— a hundred and fifty thousand dollars plus, depending on circumstances, in a good year. Evelyn had done some pumping already. By taking on a lot more wells, she soon achieved such success that she not only kept her ranch but added to it. Today, she is a contract pumper with

all the work she wants. Her house, which she moved intact eight miles from Gate, Oklahoma, to its present location despite people telling her that a brick house would fall apart if you moved it, sits out of the wind in a little draw at the end of a long, sinuous red-dirt driveway. One morning, I had coffee with her and Rachael at her kitchen table before each went out to pump her wells. “People think being a pumper is easy, it’s just readin’ gauges and writin’ on a clipboard,” Evelyn said. “They have no idea what we actually do. Women sometimes want me to take ’em out and teach ’em, and I generally say no. Or I give ’em an hour, tops—I know they’ll quit on me. But I made an exception for Rachael.” “You needed me on a thirty-six-inch pipe wrench,” Rachael said. “Yes, you did help me that first day. Rachael’s strong, and she’s a quick study. She’s the only woman I’ve showed the business to who’s stayed in it. It is a very hard business to break into. A whole lot of guys in the oil field are good ol’ boys who can be real jerks to women. My son works in Washington, D.C., and he tells me that as far as treatin’ women goes we are way behind the times out here. I used to get a lot of ‘Why, little lady, we wouldn’t want a woman to pump wells, it ain’t safe.’ ” “At my first job as a company pumper, I had a guy ask me who I’d fucked to get hired,” Rachael said. “I told him, ‘Motherfucker, if I fucked anybody to get here, I’d be your fucking boss by now.’ ” “There’s only two ways you can be

in the oil field, if you’re a woman,” Evelyn said. “You’re either sweet and nice and sort of incompetent or you’re a total bitch. Let’s just say that I haven’t survived this long by being incompetent.” “Guys will sabotage you, sneak out to your wells and mess with your gauges, kick open a valve and see if you’ll notice it.” “And they want you to file a complaint. They would love for you to file a complaint. Then they can say, ‘See? What’d I tell you? That’s what happens when you let a woman in here.’ ” “My first company job, I had to keep going back week after week before they would hire me,” Rachael said. “Then the only reason they did was I happened to see the head of the company in the lobby and he asked Personnel why they hadn’t given me a chance. I was rammed down their throats, basically.” “They will hire an unqualified man over a qualified woman every time,” Evelyn said. “I was pumping some wells for Enron and a new guy they brought in said, ‘We’re gonna cut your pay, and if you don’t like it we’ll bring in a man who will do your job for half what you’re gettin’.’ I said, ‘You go right ahead. I’m nobody’s half-price pumper. You’ll find you get what you pay for.’ Pretty soon, he came around.” “Now, some of the pumpers are helpful and great,” Rachael said. “We’ve had some good bosses, too. And they are right about it being a dangerous job. Pumpers get injured and killed out here all the time.” “I was surprised, during the fires last year, none of my wells blew up when

Rachael’s newspaper column describes her adventures from a female pumper’s point of view, and she signs herself “Rachael Van the flames went by them,” Evelyn said. “The cottonwood trees were burned black thirty feet up right next to the well site, but the well was fine. I mean, those well sites can blow sky high and burn to the ground. I had a well hit by lightning this year, and there was just nothin’ left of it. The tanks are fibreglass and they were totally incinerated, down to just the metal ring on the ground, and all the product that was 62

inside burned with ’em. I looked at that and said, ‘Well, o-o-o-o-o-kay ...’ ” So, obviously, you stay away from the wells when there’s lightning in the area? I asked. “No, but you try to get in and out as quick as you can,” Evelyn said. “Whenever you’re around the wells, you’re careful,” Rachael said. “You don’t wear fabrics that can create static, and Evelyn and I will both tie our hair back

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so it doesn’t swing and maybe throw off a static spark.” “We had a pumper who was tryin’ to jump-start a compressor and he didn’t let the gas disperse after he vented it, and there was a roof over the compressor where some of it had collected, and when he jumped the circuit that gas ignited and almost blew his face off. Luckily, his beard partly saved him.” “A few years ago, a pumper was walk-

I’m out there on my own schedule, with my truck, my dogs, my gun—I’m free. Beats waitressin’ any day.” As Evelyn talked, she pulled a heavy insulated jumpsuit in a woodland-snow camo pattern over her shirt and jeans. She has lustrous brown hair, bangs, and a lined, weathered face; her eyes, behind auburn-rimmed glasses, were mischievous and cheery. “I could take a disability and live off that, a doctor told me. But he said that, if I did, ‘Of course, you couldn’t work.’ I told him, ‘Oh, no— I’m gonna work. I grew up on a farm, it’s the way I was raised.’ ” he prairie in early December: now we were bouncing across it in a silver Toyota Tundra pickup that belonged to Rachael’s boss Greg Evans. He is a contract pumper with a lot of wells who was recovering from triple-bypass surgery, and she had agreed to pump some of them for him. Prairie grasses turn colors in the fall, like trees in New England. The broad patches of big bluestem had darkened as if marinated in red wine; other grasses seemed to have been bleached to the palest yellow, like sun-damaged hair. A brisk wind blew, and hawks teetered by on it. Rachael was wearing a purple sweatshirt, a brown cotton coat, brown Carhartt coveralls, an electric-green baseball cap, sunglasses, and large, brass-colored hoop earrings; her hair was tied back in a ponytail. The pickup stepped wheel by wheel through the complicated red-dirt ruts or sped on improved county-road straightaways, tossing up gravel. At every intersection, Rachael slowed down, whether or not it had a stop sign or a yield sign. Pumpers making time to their next well race along these roads and sometimes crash into each other. On an average day, Rachael might drive two hundred and fifty miles. Today, she did not have so many wells that she needed to hurry. At fence gates, she sometimes had to get out to open their combination locks, or pull at a gatepost with all her strength to unhook the loop of wire holding it. Each well occupied its own particular piece of ground. One was on a ridgetop with a view, another in a mini-canyon above a dry creek bed, another on table-flat bare-dirt prairie; one

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Horn, a.k.a. The Wench with a Wrench.” ing from his truck to a well, and a bull that happened to be in that pasture chased him down and killed him,” Rachael said. “You gotta pay attention, always,” Evelyn said. “But I think a woman can actually do this job better than a man. I listen closely to the well, just sense what’s goin’ on with it. Sometimes you have to baby it along. But, no matter what I have to deal with, I love this job.

sat, islandlike, in the middle of a plowed field. As Rachael explained, each well also connected to a specific part of the rock formation five thousand or more feet below. Each had its own distinctive pressure, measured in the pounds per square inch exerted by the oil and natural gas rising within it. One well was at a hundred and ninety p.s.i., another at two hundred and twenty, and so on. In effect, the earth itself was driving the wells, usually with the help of the various pumps that were lifting the underground salt water from atop the oil and gas and allowing the oil and gas to rise. Each well is a delicate balance of pressures. The oil goes into storage tanks and, from there, via tanker trucks, to bigger tanks or to refineries. The salt water takes a similar route and ends up in permanent underground disposal sites. But the gas, in its raw state, is basically ready to sell. It flows from the well into a pipeline connected to another pipeline, and eventually to the heater or the stove in your house. Meters measure the flow so that the well owner can be paid. The pipeline itself is at pressure. If the well’s p.s.i. happens to be less than the pipeline’s, the gas is run through a compressor so that it will go into the pipeline. Within the well bore are the tubing and the casing, the first inside the second. The tubing brings up the salt water and the oil, while most of the gas comes up through the casing. Either one of these can break, corrode, or get blocked by a salt deposit or paraffin; swerves in pressure are an early indication that something is wrong. Wells have redundant safety shutoffs and backups. Pumpers deal mainly with problem diagnosis, re-starting shutoffs, and keeping the pump motors and the compressor motors running. As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldbergness of it all. No two were the same. “The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,” Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and

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echoed—all O.K. there. Each well had a name. A well called the Hieronymus, on a hill above an old homestead with a falling-down farmhouse, needed an expensive new part, but its production was small, so the owner had temporarily shut the well in. (When wells are taken out of service, they are “shut in,” not “shut down.”) Rachael looked at it with regret. Pumpers don’t like to see their wells shut in. A well called the Neff was making a horrible racket. We could hear it shrieking above the cold wind as we got out of the truck. The horse-head pump had stopped. Rachael determined that it had cut off because the temperature of the outgoing gas was too high. She made an adjustment to the gas flow, ran over and punched some buttons on the pump controls, and got the machine moving again. As the pump motor re-started, the horse head lurched to its full twenty-foot height above her, like a waking Tyrannosaurus. The shrieking noise had come from the compressor, which shrieked differently with the new flow setting. Rachael listened for a while, then drove away. “I know that pump is going to cut out again,” she said. “I can’t understand why that gas is running so hot.” ith all her wells taken care of, and lunchtime come and gone, Rachael drove straight to her actual full-time job. A person of many hats, she is also the director of the Convention and Visitors Bureau for the city of Woodward. The job comes with a corner office at the city’s Conference Center and a staff of five. As director, she oversees events—the longhorn-cattle drive down Main Street that accompanies the Elks Rodeo; the Extreme Monster Truck Summer Nationals; the Twister Alley International Film Festival—and superintends civic functions and other types of gatherings at the Convention Center, trying to put the city on the map. That night was to be the Woodward Police Department’s annual Christmas ball. Rachael still had her pumping clothes on. As she walked in, the police chief, who was carrying a pair of poinsettias, said, “Hey, Rachael! You look like you just came in off a deer stand.” She replied, “I just finished doin’ my wells.”

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IN A TIME OF PEACE

Inhabitant of earth for fortysomething years I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open their phones to watch a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When the man reaches for his wallet, the cop shoots. Into the car window. Shoots. It is a peaceful country. We pocket our phones and go. To the dentist, to pick up the kids from school, to buy shampoo and basil. Ours is a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement for hours. We see in his open mouth the nakedness of the whole nation. Her staff, dressed in holiday whites and reds, was setting up banquet tables. In her coveralls and boots, she looked as if she might be there to jackhammer a few holes in the parking lot, not to oversee the centerpieces. She introduced me around, praising each staff member generously and individually. Later, I saw her dressed up for the ball, for which she wrote the award-citation speeches. She wore heels, a white blouse, blackand-white plaid pants, and a black blazer, with her long blond hair out of its ponytail. first met Rachael because of her newspaper pieces. I was in the Panhandle just after last year’s fires, and I read and admired what she wrote about them. Then I came across her column, “Pumper’s Corner,” which appears in a monthly insert, the Oilfield Outlook, in the Woodward paper. The insert, which is twenty pages or so, lists new well drillings, lease signings, and other information of interest mainly to the industry, but Rachael’s column jumps off the page. She describes her pumping adventures, and sometimes Evelyn’s, from a female pumper’s point of view, and she signs herself “Rachael Van Horn, a.k.a. The

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Wench with a Wrench.” One of her pieces mentioned that she lived in Rosston. Having no other contact info, I drove over one Saturday and looked her up. When she came out of her house, she was brushing her teeth. The arrival of a stranger at her door at nine-thirty in the morning did not faze her, and she continued to brush for a few minutes as we talked. Later in the year, at an event in Oklahoma City, I happened to meet a woman named Linda Edmondson, who is the wife of Drew Edmondson. He is a Democrat and was running for governor of Oklahoma at the time. (In November, he lost to Kevin Stitt, a semimoderate Republican.) Hearing of my interest in the Panhandle, Linda told me, “You must meet Rachael Van Horn!” I said I already had. Linda, who grew up in Woodward, still follows local issues and reads Rachael’s stories. The Woodward News, on its highest-circulation days, has a readership of thirty thousand, a not insignificant number in a market of that size; Woodward County and the counties that surround it have a combined population of about forty-five thousand. Perhaps even more people know about Rachael from her appear-

We watch. Watch others watch. The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy— It is a peaceful country. And it clips our citizens’ bodies effortlessly, the way the President’s wife trims her toenails. All of us still have to do the hard work of dentist appointments, of remembering to make a summer salad: basil, tomatoes, it is a joy, tomatoes, add a little salt. This is a time of peace. I do not hear gunshots, but watch birds splash over the back yards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky as the avenue spins on its axis. How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright. —Ilya Kaminsky ances on K-101 FM, a Woodward radio station with listeners across northwest Oklahoma. She is a regular on a popular morning talk-and-country-music program. Starting in 2015, Rachael began to report in the News about a proposed amendment to the state constitution which was known as the Right to Farm Amendment. State Question 777 (its official name, usually shortened to S.Q. 777), which was set to come before voters in the fall of 2016, would have amended the constitution to prohibit legislation that interfered with any farming or ranching practice without proof that a “compelling state interest” was involved. The amendment would make the freedom to use all farming and ranching methods and technologies the same as the freedom of speech or religion, essentially transferring the power to regulate agricultural practices—such as, say, a hog farm polluting a public drinkingwater source—from the legislature to the courts, where the advantage would be strongly on Big Agriculture’s side. Corporate livestock and poultry farms, the Cattlemen’s Association, and the Oklahoma Farm Bureau supported the amendment, while small farmers, envi-

ronmentalists, Oklahoma’s Indian tribes, and the Humane Society opposed it. Many states have right-to-farm laws, but only North Dakota and Missouri have right-to-farm constitutional amendments. Both were supported by groups that had received funding from the Koch brothers. The more Rachael looked into S.Q. 777 and its implications, the surer she was that it had to be stopped. She began to argue against it on the radio. Then, with no organizational backing, she spoke against it at Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, and town meetings across Oklahoma, often debating S.Q. 777 supporters. She paid for the travel herself and drove her own vehicle thousands of miles. For months, she devoted all her free time to this cause; the one-woman push exhausted her. When the election came in 2016, the amendment went down to defeat, fifty-eight per cent to fortytwo per cent. Drew Edmondson was then the head of the Oklahoma Stewardship Council, which also had campaigned against the amendment. When I asked him about Rachael, he said, “Well, as is the case with many things, my wife knew about her before I did. In the S.Q. 777 campaign, I don’t believe Ra-

chael and I ever spoke on the same program, but I was aware of what she was doing. She took a very smart approach, which was to say that Oklahoma has been letting the legislature handle these kinds of agricultural issues for a hundred years, and we have done pretty well with that so far. People listened to her, because she is a rural person herself, from the western part of the state, and not an easternOklahoma liberal. As it turned out, all our urban counties voted against the amendment, but a number of rural counties did, too. Woodward County and Garfield County, where Rachael campaigned the most, both voted no, and I think it was because of her.” Rachael told me, “In the really conservative places, I asked them how they would like to wake up tomorrow and find a thousand-acre corporate marijuana farm next to their pasture and nothing they could do about it. The amendment’s supporters called that ‘fear tactics,’ but it was true.” hat with the cleanup after the Policemen’s Ball, Rachael did not get home until late. I was supposed to meet her soon after dawn the next morning. I made the fifty-minute drive from Woodward to Laverne in darkness that became a gray day. No trees in America are more beaten down than the cottonwood trees of the central plains, chastised by ice storm and fire and wind into postures of broken supplication. Their black, wracked branches emerged against the sky as the light came up. In Laverne, where Rachael planned to switch to Greg Evans’s truck again, a few small, lighted Christmas wreaths hung over Main Street. Cattle-hauling semis downshifted past; a school bus stopped at the railroad tracks, its red lights flashing. Rachael texted to say that she’d be late; eventually, she arrived, tired but ready. As we drove up to the first well, I remarked that we had visited this well yesterday. Rachael said, “Yes, that is the point. You check each well every day.” A weak winter sun came through the clouds, and the red dust turned the truck a pale Easter-egg pink. Rachael talked about a well she had been pumping in Texas some years ago that became covered in ice during the hottest

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days of summer. Subzero carbon dioxide being forced into a nearby injection well had broken into her well underground and was coming up through the pipes and freezing the water vapor that condensed on them. She reported it, but none of her superiors paid attention. Pretty soon, ice-induced metal fatigue, plus the pressure of the carbon dioxide, caused a pipe on the well site to rupture, spewing oil and salt water and carbon dioxide thirty feet in the air. Finally taking notice, management told her it was not her fault. Another time, she said, she was staying in a Winnebago near Perryton,Texas, where she was on call in case something went wrong with a battery—a central group of storage tanks—in the middle of the night. She received an alert on her phone at 2 a.m. saying that the compressor at the battery had quit. She got up and drove to it. Nearby, she saw a truck parked. Before leaving her vehicle, she called Evelyn on her cell phone and woke her up; in this lonesome spot, she wanted to be in constant contact with someone. On the battery’s control panel, she saw a readout indicating that the compressor had been shut off manually. Just then, a guy appeared out of the darkness and said, “I was hoping it would be you that showed up.” She had brought a large wrench, which she held aloft. In touch with Evelyn all the while, she told the guy that he needed to stay where he was. (“I don’t let anybody close distance on

me,” she says, in her Sergeant Van Horn voice.) She vaguely remembered the guy as someone who worked for the company that serviced the compressors. He said, “Aw, c’mon—don’t be that way.” She told him to get in his truck and leave. Later, she stopped seeing him around, and assumed that he had been fired. “When I first started pumping, I had this idea that I was going to reform the oil field,” she said. “But I failed, just like we failed in Iraq. We keep going into these countries thinking we’re going to change them, and they change us, make us barbaric instead. But I keep trying anyway. My daughter’s husband is Ethiopian-American, so my granddaughter is half black. When I hear oilfield people using racial epithets, I tell them about my son-in-law and my granddaughter. I want them to know that they can’t assume anything, because most Oklahomans don’t have those ignorant opinions. I want people to know we’re more diverse out here than you might think.” We stopped at the Neff well again, as planned. It was out again. Rachael checked the gas temperature, which was still high. By again reducing the flow, she got the temperature to go down enough that the pump re-started. The compressor still shrieked. Rachael thought and thought about the problem but could not figure it out. As we headed for the last well of the day, she said, “You haven’t asked me about my personal life.” She told me

“It would be good to settle in a place that has recreational facilities.”

that when she was in Texas she had met a guy who was a fellow-pumper. They got along, and later started seeing each other off and on, but he is a lot younger than she is. “Seems like the only guys who are interested in dating me are twenty, thirty years younger,” she said. “I tell them they’re just looking to avoid getting serious with anybody. Now, if they go out with someone their own age, that’s serious, and could have consequences of kids and family and so on. With me, the next thing they know I’ll be going around with a walker, and they’ll still be young and not interested in an old woman. “So I’m basically single,” she went on, “and what really irritates me is when people assume that I must be a lesbian. It would be totally fine if I was, but I’m not. People think that Evelyn is, too, and she’s not, either. You can be a pumper, and do the kind of work that women don’t usually do, and still be attracted to guys. I also get asked if I feel safe living alone. I answer that I have neighbors I can depend on, and my dog is a great watchdog, and if there’s one issue where I’m far to the right politically it’s guns. I know how to shoot, and I have a gun in every room in my house, including the bathroom.” We took a lunch break at the Tiger Hut Café, in Laverne. A tableful of pumpers, all young guys, greeted Rachael warmly. “If you’re riding with her, you’re riding with the best,” one of them said to me. While we waited for our orders, Rachael kept thinking about the uncoöperative Neff well. She went outside and called Greg Evans and had a conversation about it. As soon as we finished eating, we drove back to the Neff. “I have to take one more look at this well,” she said. It had shut down again. She and Evans had decided to use a different tactic—to turn the flow up, flood the compressor with gas, and see if that cooled it. She went to the control box and prepared to reset the flow. “Would you mind standing over there on the other side of the fence?” she asked me. “I’m sure this will be fine, but just in case.” She hit a button or two, there was a strong smell of gas, and the compressor lugged down and started to labor. Its shrieking dropped several octaves. Then she re-started the horse-head

pump. The compressor kept going, now laboring less. She fine-tuned the flow, and the machine started to hum smoothly. “I think I finally got the flow right,” she said. “All it took was to flood it and then pinch it down just enough.” She sat in the truck with the window open. The compressor still hummed, and the pump motor continued its steady pop-pop-pop. After another few minutes of listening, she said, “Looks like we solved it. Yay, us!” She drove up onto a ridgeline road, and a many-mile prairie vista opened out—low hills in waves, green fields of forage crops scattered with black specks of grazing cattle, and, on the horizon, long, faint lines of white wind turbines, like the protest signs of an approaching crowd. “Soon it will be real winter,” Rachael said. “That’s the hardest time of year to pump wells, because things constantly freeze. You’ve got valves to thaw out, fuel lines to deice. Plus, there’s less daylight to work with, and of course the weather’s generally bitter cold and windy, and the roads get so terrible that I wish I had a hovercraft.” Once, out of the blue, I asked Rachael if she thought climate change was real. She said, “Well, of course!” and looked at me as if I were kidding. I had asked the question of other people on the plains; most said that they did not believe in it, and a few said they were withholding judgment. Rachael was the first to say that climate change was real. I laughed, because she took me by surprise. I then asked how she could square that belief with her job of removing fossil fuels from the ground. She thinks that the oil field here does a tolerable job of conserving what it pumps, that gas (its main product) burns more cleanly than other fuels, and that until we quit using fossil fuels we should be as careful with them as we can. From what I saw, the local wells are subdued, discrete markers in the landscape. That pumpers are checking on each one of them every day seems dutiful and conscientious—an act that helps to hold the world in place. “I love the people I work with in my Convention and Visitors Bureau job,” Rachael said. “But pumping wells, working alone, is my meditation. Because there can be some danger, I’m

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completely present when I’m doing it, and that’s relaxing. I usually come in from pumping calmer than when I went out. “Last winter, I got stuck in the snow at one of these wells out here, and I could not extricate myself. For a few minutes, I really got upset. But I called around and found someone to come and pull me out. Then I sat back, and on my phone I watched videos my daughter had sent of my granddaughter opening her Christmas presents. Eva, two years old, was just tearing into that wrapping paper. Up to my door handles in snow, in the middle of nowhere at the well site, I was undistracted by anything, and I was happy.” efore heading back East, I went out one morning to look at some wells on my own, to see what I had learned. Along an empty stretch of paved road, I passed wheel ruts leading off to the right, toward a horse-head well in the distance. I pulled over, left my car by the cattle guard—there were no “Keep

B

Out” signs—and walked the mile or so to the well. I had brought my sketchbook, and when I got there I sat on the ground and started drawing. Looking back along the track I had walked, I noticed a car coming toward me. Across the empty prairie, driving carefully in and out of the ruts, it approached with antlike slowness. As it got closer, I saw that it was the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. I stood up and started to walk toward it, to show compliance. Pretty soon, it pulled alongside. The window rolled down. A crewcut young officer—Trooper Chance Housted, according to his nametag— asked what I was doing. I said that I was drawing wells and showed him my sketchbook. He took this in without comment. Then I told him that I had been riding with a pumper named Rachael Van Horn. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I know Rachael. I live down by Rosston not too far from her. She’s been pumping wells around here for a while.” He smiled. “Yeah, Rachael,” he said. “She is the real deal.” 

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PERSONAL HISTORY

EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE A journey through suicide. BY DONALD ANTRIM

I was not on the roof to jump. I was not there to kill myself. I was there to die, but dying was not a plan. I was not making 68

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decisions, choices, threats, or mistakes. I was, I think—looking back now—in acceptance. PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES WELLING

ne Friday in April, 2006, I spent the afternoon and evening pacing the roof of my apartment building in Brooklyn, climbing down the fire-escape ladder and hanging by my hands from the railing, then climbing back up with sore palms and lying on the roof, in a ball, or stretched out on my back or on my stomach, peering surreptitiously over the ledge. The roof is painted silver. The building is four stories tall. A group of my friends, each of whom had been on the phone with me, one after the other, all through the morning, when I’d been alone and dialling wildly, had got busy calling one another. Janice owned a car, and she and Nicky were coming across the bridge from Manhattan, but there was traffic, and no one knew where I was. From the roof, the world seemed to scream. I heard sirens—police, ambulance, and fire. What agency would come for me? A helicopter was flying overhead and circling back. The woman I’d just run from, the woman who had rushed over from work ahead of the others, who had been with me downstairs in my apartment, Regan, my partner then, my caregiver, thought that I’d gone to the street. We had been fighting over something I’d done. I’d hurt her, and we were both in anguish. She spoke harshly, and I ran away to die and end her burden. The sun was setting, and the sky over New Jersey was orange, and I was in my socks, shivering. I was afraid, not anxious or scared but afraid for my life. I didn’t know why I had to fall from the roof, why that was mine to do. Or, rather, I did know. I was in psychosis, a fatal emergent illness, and I knew what the suicide knows. I knew that I would die. I felt that I had been dying all my life. When telling the story of my illness, I try not to speak about depression. A depression is a furrow, a valley, a sloping downward, and a return. Suicide, in my experience, is not that. I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision or a wish. I do not understand suicide as a response to pain, or as a message to the living. I do not think of suicide as the act, the death, the fall from a height or the trigger pulled. I see it as a long illness, an illness with

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origins in trauma and isolation, in deprivation of touch, in violence and neglect, in the loss of home and belonging. It is a disease of the body and the brain, if you make that distinction, a disease that kills over time. My dying, my suicide, lasted years, through hospitalizations, through more than fifty rounds of electroconvulsive therapy—once known as shock therapy—through recovery, relapse, and recovery. It can seem recent in memory, though at times it feels ancient, far removed, another lifetime, another life and my life. I was hanging from the fire escape. I kept a slight toehold. The sun was low; the air was cold. I was wearing socks but no shoes, and my palms were scraped and beginning to blister from letting go a little, one hand at a time, falling out at an angle, sideways or backward, then grabbing fast for the rail and clutching tight. I gazed down at the concrete patio and the chain-link fence surrounding the back yard. The yard was inaccessible, small, and neglected. My apartment is on the third floor, and windows in my kitchen and bedroom overlook it, though you’d have to stick your head out to see much. I’d never looked at the yard for more than a minute. Below me was the small patio area littered with trash, and a stairwell leading to the locked basement and the boiler. The rest was hard ground. Since that time, since 2006, new people, a family, have moved into the first-floor apartment, and they’ve replaced the old chainlink fence with one made of wood and put in a barbecue and a picnic table; I can hear their children when it’s warm out, along with, on school days, even in the cold winter months, older children, neighborhood kids, playing and screaming on the rooftop playground of the private school a few doors down the street. Recess was over; school was out; night was falling. I had no children. I held on to the railing. It was less dizzying to look down than up. Clouds crossed the sky. Here and there, I could see people having after-work cocktails on private decks on neighboring roofs—it was the beginning of a spring weekend. Now, remembering that day, I wonder what those people might have thought of the man scrambling from fire escape to rooftop and back, letting go with one hand,

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flopping down on his belly to crane over the edge. Did they imagine that he was doing work, maintenance or repair, some job they couldn’t clearly make out? If they had known the man’s troubles, had known the man, would they have understood that he was about to die? Or would they have imagined that he was trying to live? It was getting darker, and I could hear traffic on the street below, people driving home through Brooklyn after work. I was cold; I’d been up there a long time. I didn’t know that it had been five hours. It could have been any amount of time. I had on pants, a shirt, and socks. My hands and clothes were dirty from the rooftop. I remember how loosely my pants fit, how thin I’d become over the winter. Where was my belt? I shoved my hands into my pockets and squeezed my arms against my sides, holding up my pants, trying to get warm. I’d written about my mother, her alcoholic life and her resignation in death, and my role as her son, savior, and abandoner. I began writing the year after she died, too soon for writing to be safe. The book, “The Afterlife,” is divided into seven parts, the number of years, in classical myth and literature, that is considered an appropriate period of mourning, and the number of years it took me to complete the manuscript. It is an accounting of the death of my family. Writing the book had been an excitement, but publishing it was an ordeal. I didn’t know that the book wasn’t about me, that it was about something shared between writer and reader. It was a movement from exposition to scene, defense to acceptance, mortification to love. But my old worlds— Florida, Virginia, the places of my childhood—were costly to rebuild. I was engaged in betrayal: mine of my mother, hers of me, mine of myself. When I was in my early twenties, out of college and living in New York, on East Eighty-fifth Street, I returned again and again to Miami to rescue my mother. My father had left her and precipitously remarried, and she was drinking herself to death. One night, back in New York, back behind the lines, as we say, I was with friends at the Madison Pub, a dark old bar on Madison Avenue in the Seventies, up from the old Whitney Museum. The panelled walls were scarred with

the carved signatures of literary men— Walter Winchell’s was the biggest. I was drinking a Manhattan. There was a pay phone at the back of the bar; I left my drink on the table, went to the phone, picked it up, called my mother, and listened to fifteen rings, twenty rings, twenty-five. There was a sound, someone picked up, but there was no voice. “Mom, Mom, Mom,” I said, and then hung up the phone, picked it back up, and dialled my grandfather, my mother’s father, in North Carolina. He worried over his daughter all the time. I told him that she was in trouble. I told him that I had to go to Florida. I stopped at the table and told my friends that I had to go, and then walked uptown to my apartment, where I packed, checked the stove, turned off the lights, locked the door behind me, and hurried down the stairs, onto the street and into a cab that just about ran over my foot when I opened the door before the driver had stopped; from there, east on Eighty-sixth Street, left on the F.D.R. Drive, and across the bridge. My grandfather had a ticket waiting, and I took the last flight of the night from LaGuardia to Miami. My mother lived in a new two-story duplex, cheap construction on a canal. The yard was bare, the front door was open, and light shone out. In “The Afterlife,” I describe bottles on their sides in the doorway and on the carpet in the living room, empty bottles. I describe my mother standing on the stairs. In my memory, she wears a long nightgown. Her ankles and feet are blue, and blue-veined. The doctors had told her that she would die if she drank. I suspect that that night, after a long binge, she came close. She was forty-five, fifteen years younger than I am as I write this. I sat with her through her delirium tremens, and held her hand, or kept my hand on her arm, while she shook. She’d been drinking and quitting, and in and out of hospitals and A.A. for two years. My grandfather and I had taken turns watching over her, going to her, through that time. He and I were in contact. He wanted to know if I thought that she would be all right. He knew that she hadn’t ever been. That night in Miami, in my mother’s duplex, after she’d fallen asleep, I cleared the bottles and cleaned the floors and fed the cats. A few days later, once she’d

“Oh, man, I got real confused by the mirrors in here.”

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eaten and rested and slept, I drove her to A.A., to what people in recovery call the rooms, rooms in churches and community centers and sometimes schools, where she had friends waiting, friends she had met before and friends she was about to meet; and a sponsor. And, once again, she embarked on sobriety, which lasted, this time, for the rest of her life. I was born in Sarasota, Florida, on a September night in 1958. In the story that my mother tells of my birth, I was taken from her by force. Her mother, my grandmother, pulled me out of my mother’s arms and kept me. My mother was not allowed to hold me. My father, who had graduated from college the summer before on an R.O.T.C. scholarship, was away, training to command tanks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where, eleven months later, my sister, Terry, would be born. My mother told me that she and I were distraught; I cried and cried, but her mother would not give me back. There was panic, she told me, and more fighting and crying, and it took my father a day and a night to get there. Where was my grandfather? I knew my mother’s father as a docile, suffering man. When I was very little, he’d fallen off the roof of the house, while replacing tiles, and broken his back. I remember that house. It was a two-story white

stucco bungalow with a red tiled roof, Venetian blinds, a mowed lawn, a paved driveway and carport, a front door that wasn’t used, a guest bedroom downstairs, and three bedrooms upstairs. My sister and I lived with our grandparents when our parents were divorcing for the first time. They would remarry a few years later, when Terry was seven and I was eight, and then divorce again when we were in our early twenties. But, at the time that I am writing about, Terry was five and I was six. I remember lying awake in the heat. Fans blew. Downstairs, a sunporch with orchids and potted shrubs faced a little square yard planted with orange and tangerine trees. There was wisteria and hibiscus. The air was wet and sticky. Down a little walkway out back was the two-story garage where my grandfather spent part of each day, where he had tools hung on a pegboard, stacked paint cans, a worktable with a vise, and beer in an old refrigerator. The garage smelled of paint thinner, insecticide, and lawnmower fuel. My grandfather sat at a bench and mended kitchen-cabinet drawers, or rewired appliances, or sanded wood, while sipping from a can. He chewed cinnamon gum and toothpicks. In “The Afterlife,” I report that my mother was subjected to Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a form of abuse that

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is carried out, usually by a parent or a caregiver, as unnecessary medical or surgical intervention. My mother recounted a succession of operations, demanded by her mother and performed by compliant doctors. In one story she told, she was a teen-ager, at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. Under anesthesia on the operating table, her chest cut open, she heard the doctors pronounce her dead. She could not move or speak, but she could see them peering down at her. The long story of forced visits to doctors, of my grandmother’s control of her daughter’s body, the authoritarian cycle of manipulation, intimate violation, and symbolic repair, was never understood in my family, and it implicates my grandmother and grandfather, together in collusion or complicity, in crimes against their only child. “They drank,” my mother told me shortly before she died. She told me that they fought and were violent, and that her mother had tried to drown her in a well when she was tiny. I was in my socks on the fire escape. I was cold, underweight, and scratched up from the roof ’s rough surface, from crawling to the edge and leaning over to peer down. I imagined my body on the ground. It was something that I could picture. But the fall, how long would that last? My motor control was failing. I clutched the railing, then let go a little, then grabbed hold, then let go again, but caught myself. I was not on the roof to jump. I was not there to kill myself. I was there to die, but dying was not a plan. I was not making decisions, choices, threats, or mistakes. I was, I think—looking back now— in acceptance. It was a relinquishing, though at the time I would not have been able to articulate it. I did not want to die, only felt that I would, or should, or must, and I had my pain and my reasons. If you have had this illness, then you’ve had your reasons; and maybe you’ve believed, or still believe, as I have, that it would be better for others, for all the people who have made the mistake of loving you, or who one day might, if you were gone. Depression, hysteria, melancholia, nervousness, neurosis, neurasthenia, madness, lunacy, insanity, delirium, derange72

ment, demonic possession, black humors, black bile, yellow bile, the black dog, the blues, the blue devils, a brown study, the vapors, a funk, a storm, the abyss, an inferno, Hell, a pain syndrome, stress, an anxiety disorder, lack of affect, an affective disorder, a mood disorder, panic, loneliness, bad wiring, a screw loose, a mercurial temperament, irritability, schizophrenia, unipolar disorder, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessivecompulsive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, borderline personality disorder, laziness, pain, rumination, grief, mourning, malingering, unhappiness, hopelessness, sadness, low spirits, invalidism, despondency, dysthymia, detachment, disassociation, dementia praecox, neuralgia, fibromyalgia, oversensitivity, hypersensitivity, idiocy, an unsound mind, cowardice, obstinacy, apathy, recalcitrance, spleen, a broken heart, battle fatigue, shell shock, self-pity, self-indulgence, self-centeredness, weakness, withdrawal, distraction, distemper, a turn in the barrel, a break in a life narrative, bad thoughts, bad feelings, coming undone, coming apart, falling apart, falling to pieces, willfulness, defiance, thoughts of hurting oneself or others, the thousand-yard stare, craziness, rage, misery, mania, morbidity, genius, suicidality, suicidal ideation, aggression, regression, decompensation, drama, breakdown, crackup, catatonia, losing one’s mind, losing one’s shit, losing one’s way, wasting away, psychic disorganization, spiritual despair, shame, raving, the furies, a disease, an enigma, a tragedy, a curse, a sin, and, of course, psychosis—suicide, in the past and in our time, has been called many things. Whatever terms we use, whatever the specific nature of their origins and progress, our so-called mental illnesses are themselves traumatic and stigmatizing. They isolate us from others. I was thin and cold. I held my arms to my sides. I peered up at the clouds and the jet planes and the sunset. It was hard to look at the sky. I couldn’t hold my head up. I was taking Klonopin for anxiety and insomnia. My mother was dead, and my socks had holes. The light hurt my eyes, and sounds felt like sharp little jabs at my head; when the helicopter came, that

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afternoon on the roof, I hunched over, protectively. Was the helicopter coming for me? Regan had raised her voice with me. It was happening more and more. She and I were in the living room. It was a bright April Friday. She’d rushed to Brooklyn from her office in Manhattan, panicked after hearing my voice on the phone, and of course Janice and Nicky were on their way in Janice’s car, in traffic. For months, Regan had been with me, sleep-deprived, anxious, angry, afraid, untouched, breathing my cigarette smoke, not eating, not laughing, morose—the winter. Then, in early spring, I had staggered into Manhattan and spent the night with a former girlfriend. I remember Regan screaming at me that I would go to Hell, and that she hoped I would die. I wrote so many letters. Most suicides don’t; we don’t leave last testaments. I wrote them all winter long, on a notepad, while sitting on a tarp on the living-room floor. Writing, moving my arm, my wrist, my hand, was effortful. My grip on the pen was rigid, and my hands ached, and were always cold. I wrote an opening, ripped the page from the pad, and began another note. The notes were apologies. Sometimes I called friends and held them on the phone. I was fine, I told them. When I lay down, I crossed my arms over my chest, in the position of a corpse. But then I was up, startled, pacing, shaking, scared, awake without having slept, worrying about my heart, spreading out the tarp, not wanting to leave a mess, and then sitting with pills, pad, pen, and a knife, an old Sabatier that had been in our kitchen when I was a boy. The blade was rusty. None of the letters got finished. At the end of the day, at around five or five-thirty, before Regan came over after work—she was a poet but worked then as an administrator at a hedge fund—I stored the tarp, replaced the knife in the kitchen drawer, cleaned the ashtrays, put away the pills, and buried the suicide notes deep in the garbage. On the roof, late that day in April, after running from the apartment and up the stairs, after a session of hanging from the fire escape and letting go in stages, I climbed the ladder to the roof and huddled against the stairwell bulkhead, next to the door to the stairs. I was breathing fast, and my body hurt. Beyond the Brooklyn rooftops was Man-

hattan. Lights were on in the skyscrapers. The pain seemed to come from my skin and my muscles and my joints and my bones. But when I touched myself I couldn’t find anything. I felt as if I hurt everywhere, but also nowhere. My chest was constricted, as if a weight were pressing in—but from where? There was no weight, no feeling of a source or origin or cause, nothing to palpate. I’d say that it was the pain of being crushed or squeezed to death, but I’ve never been crushed or squeezed to death. Have you? Have you felt as if your body were collapsing from the inside, collapsing and hardening? Where was Regan? Where were my friends? I wanted a bullet. I’d wanted one since Christmas, to eliminate an itch behind my temple. I remember lying in bed, imagining the bullet easing in. Was Jesus waiting, or a trip into brightness, some stellar afterlife, like the one my mother had imagined on her deathbed? Was death knowledge, or nothing, or might I wake up, a baby again, born into some new violence? What were the chances? Might I, after falling, be maimed and alive? If I was gone, would Regan live? I grew up sleep-deprived. I was sickly. I wasn’t robust. I couldn’t keep up in school, and often missed days. I had anxiety, allergies, and asthma, and irritable-bowel syndrome, and headaches, and, starting in fifth grade, when I was ten, awful and incapacitating back spasms. They began early one morning before school, in the upstairs bathroom in our house on Lewis Mountain Road, in Charlottesville, while I was bending over the toilet, throwing up after a night of staring around my dark bedroom, struggling to breathe, listening to the fighting. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, my sister and I crept out of our rooms and sat in our pajamas on the landing, behind the bannister, afraid to look. You could say of our childhood that she played in her room, while I went out to the yard. Or you could say that she fled into her room, and that I fled outside. I made friends, but my friends were always changing; our family moved almost yearly, moved up and down the southern Atlantic seaboard, or sometimes just across town—Sarasota, Gainesville, Charlottesville, Tallahassee, back to Charlottesville, and then south again, down Interstate 95

to Miami. Pretty much every year, we packed up the old house and unpacked into a new one: single-story, two-story; driveways, sidewalks; screened porch, no porch; three cats, four cats; swimming pools, beaches, ponds; a converted Army barracks in Gainesville, a bungalow in Tallahassee, suburban tract houses in Miami, a farm at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I remember, as best I can, the houses. I remember the crying. I remember the questions: If he kills her, and the judge asks me what I saw, what will I say? If she kills him, and the judge orders me to tell what happened, how can I speak? If he kills her, and goes to prison, what will happen to Terry and me? If our mother kills our father, and goes to prison, what will we do? How can I prosecute my father? How can I accuse my mother? I imagined myself on the witness stand. I was in fifth grade. I remember that I was failing math. For a time, I had tutoring, but couldn’t solve the problems. While the teacher talked, I imagined a courthouse scene. There was a lawyer, and it was quiet; people waited for me to speak. I imagined the knife. There were knives in the kitchen, and I remember my mother screaming, one night in Charlottesville, when I was ten and Terry was nine, the year in the house on Lewis Mountain Road, that my father was trying to kill her with one. My father was a graduate student then, a T. S. Eliot man, at the university. I don’t have good memories of him, only mem-

ories. Even the bad times, in recollection, seem somehow not to include him, though he was right there, drunk, sarcastic, maudlin, a phantom. He died in 2009, of a heart attack, after falling asleep on my stepmother’s shoulder, on a layover in their journey from Fort Worth to Venice for Christmas. Maybe the knife that my mother was screaming about that night was the Sabatier that I took from the drawer when I left home, back in the late nineteen-seventies or so, and then, nearly thirty years later, carried from my own kitchen in Brooklyn, through the bedroom, up the hall, moving fast, off balance and stumbling to the living room, where I laid it on the plastic tarp, beside the pills, and then sat on the tarp, next to the pills and the knife, sat out the day, smoking, trembling, not yet dead. When I was a boy, in bed I brought the covers up to my chin, wrapped them tightly around me, and lay without moving. I held my arms close to my sides, or crossed over my chest. I gazed up at my model airplanes, moonlit, hanging by threads from the ceiling. My chest, my body, felt tight, tight in the sense of a contraction, but also tight in the sense of being bound and squeezed. I remember that I felt paralyzed, or not exactly that, though something like that. I wasn’t paralyzed. It was just safer to lie still. Nonetheless, I shook, though not in a way that you’d notice—it was more of a hum. I felt numb yet in pain, and breathed shallow breaths, restrained. Even now, at sixty, if I cry hard I will be frightened, and you may find me in

“I’ll cover your meal if you pick the other guy.”

• a corner, crouching, turned toward the wall, my hands raised to protect my face. I will sob and shake, and make myself small, and beg, Please, go away. I will not be able to look at you. If you touch me, I will scream in pain and run from the room. Why can’t you see that it would be better for you without me? If any single feeling has defined my life, it is the feeling, more an awareness than a thought, that only lonely rooms are safe. This is how I feel and imagine shame, not as guilt or regret or remorse, not as some particular emotion or amalgam of emotions, but as a basic provision, abjection, the condition of those who have been cast out, neglected, harmed. The sun had gone down, and I was on the roof. I couldn’t stand straight. I couldn’t walk straight. I couldn’t pull my shoulders back, or take a deep breath. I was forty-seven, middle-aged, at the time of life when, for men living on their own, the incidence of suicide rises. I could see the city in all directions, buildings and bridges. My friends Janice and Nicky had driven from Manhattan across the East River, and Regan—I didn’t know where Regan had gone. That had been earlier, such a long time before. There had been a plane in the sky. I remembered a helicopter. I realized that I would go to a hospital. I’d been ruminating over hospitals, imagining them, fearing them. On the roof, looking out across the city, I pictured Gothic piles and state psychiatric 74

• prisons, stone dungeons and brick barracks; and the wards, paint peeling, floors stained, locked and dark, fenced in. I opened the door to the stairs, stepped through, and drew the bolt behind me. For months, Regan and others had told me that I wasn’t well, that I needed to get better. What did they mean, better? When had I been better— when had that been? I imagined that I would be in the hospital, in hospitals, for a very long time. I’d been seeing my psychotherapist, on the Upper East Side, as well as, for prescriptions, a psychiatrist who was connected to a Brooklyn hospital. In the winter, he’d prescribed a benzodiazepine, Klonopin, for the daily panic and terror that began after I delivered the finished manuscript of “The Afterlife” to my publisher. Sometime around the New Year, my heart started pounding. I checked my pulse over and over with a watch, hour after hour, day after day. Regan assured me that my heartbeat was normal, but I contradicted her, and then asked for reassurance. I paced, and every night at two, three, four o’clock, woke up sweating. Waking was sudden—the new dark day. My gut seized, and I rolled into a ball. I felt as if my body were burning. But I was also cold and shivery. I’d tried antidepressants, years before, unsuccessfully, and again, also unsuccessfully, during the months leading up to the day on the roof: S.S.R.I.s, which target

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the mechanisms that control the neurotransmitter serotonin; an S.N.R.I., which affects both serotonin and norepinephrine levels; Wellbutrin, a dopamine enhancer; and Lamictal, a mood stabilizer developed to treat epilepsy, and now also used to treat a broad range of clinical psychiatric conditions. Klonopin is a strongly sedating drug with a long half-life. Like other drugs in the benzodiazepine family—Valium, Ativan, and so on—it is addictive; its effects are systemically transformative. Over time, I adapted to a schedule, one little yellow pill, four times a day, a schedule around which, over the winter and into the spring, I organized my worsening days and nights, counting down the hours and minutes to each new pill. I recall a visit to the psychiatrist in his office. Leaving the house for any reason was scary and difficult; I felt, walking out of the building and down the sidewalk, as if I could not make it to the corner, and often I didn’t. My legs were heavy, and trembled; out on the street, the pain in my chest became sharper and more crushing. I told the doctor that I thought the Klonopin might be making things worse. I remember that he was sitting at his desk. He sketched a picture on a piece of paper. It was a picture of crossing perpendicular lines with a waveform running along the horizontal axis, a graph showing a sine curve. The sections of curve below the horizontal axis he labelled “depression,” and the area above the axis “anxiety.” The doctor explained that benzodiazepines might worsen depression but help with anxiety, and that I seemed to have more anxiety than depression, and that there should be a middle ground. He pointed to the picture. It was an explanation for a child. He was trying to reach me, to get through to me. Why couldn’t I understand? His voice was insistent, and I could hear, and feel, that he wanted the session to end. Agony and anxiety. I told the doctor that I understood the drawing, but nonetheless believed that the medication itself was a problem. He wanted me to try cognitive behavioral therapy, which focusses directly on symptoms, thoughts, and behaviors, rather than on the origins and historical experience of illness in the patient’s life. The doctor asked if I had been think-

ing of hurting myself. Was I having suicidal thoughts? I made it down the first flight from the roof, and then the second. My clothes were filthy, and my hands were black. I held the bannister. I wasn’t going to die that day. I padded in torn socks along the landing to my apartment. The door was unlocked. Nicky, Janice, and Regan were in the living room. They came toward me, but then retreated, as if afraid of getting too close. Where had I been? What had happened? Why had I scared them? I remember that they made a circle around me. Nicky told me that we were leaving for the hospital. A bed was waiting—the psychiatrist had arranged for a pre-admit. I told my friends that I wanted a cigarette. I’m not certain that I washed my hands and face. I remember looking in the bathroom mirror. Dark circles showed around my eyes. I put on a belt. Nicky told me to forget the cigarette. I put on a coat. Nicky drove Janice’s S.U.V. to the wrong hospital, where we tumbled in, got directions, and rushed back to the car. You would’ve thought that I was dying. I remember traffic and lights. We were there. Regan helped with the forms, and later Janice and Nicky drove back to Manhattan. A nurse came with a plastic trash bag, and I took off my belt and unlaced my shoes and tugged the laces through their holes and handed them over, and Regan and I put laces, keys, change, and the belt, anything that might be used for harm, into the bag. The nurse took the bag, and I was led to a small room. Regan waited with me. A doctor came. The doctor asked how I was feeling. I named the wrongs I’d done in my life, the people I’d hurt, catastrophes and losses. He told me to try not to worry about all that—I needed to get well. I asked him why he didn’t hear what I was saying, and he told me that when I felt better I might take a different view of my life. I asked him how long I would be in the hospital, and he said that he didn’t know. Then Regan had to go. It was late at night. I told her that I didn’t want her to leave me. After a while, a man arrived with a wheelchair. He rolled me through the halls to the elevator. Upstairs, on the ward, I told the nurse that I’d been taking Klonopin, but thought that it was having a bad effect, and asked for Ativan, a shorter-acting benzodiaz-

epine, and she saw her way to that, and I woke up the next morning in a white room with a narrow view of rooftops. I was in a room of my own. There wasn’t much to it. The ward was rectangular, with steel doors, cinder-block walls, a nursing station and medication dispensary, an isolation room for stressed or threatening patients, and, behind the scenes, offices, supply cabinets, closets, restrooms, and, presumably, a communal area for the staff. Patients’ bedrooms lined the hallways. A common area doubled as the dining room. The television was on all day. Patients leaned in doorways and sat on beds. Nurses checked the rooms, counting us every twenty minutes throughout the day and night. Many of us had had more than one hospitalization. Some knew one another from earlier stays. Had I been admitted before? What was I taking? By the next day, Saturday afternoon, my body felt lighter, and my thoughts, I thought, were pretty clear. Was it the Ativan? I stayed on my bed, or talked on the pay phone down the hall. I called my father and my sister and my friends, and told them where I was, and then I joined a table with male patients and a supervisor, who gave us disposable razors, shaving cream, and water in cups. My hand shook; the razor scraped my face. I remember a young man who had brain damage from sniffing chemicals from a paper bag. He told me that he was Dominican. He looked like Jesus. He had long black hair, and spoke with kindness, but his sentences ended before communicating much meaning. He passed me a pocket Bible. I still have it in a drawer. Regan came during visiting hours, bringing clean clothes. A few old friends were with her that Saturday. Or was it Sunday? The nurse unlocked the door, and my friends showed their backpacks and bags, and signed in, and then we all visited, as my Tennessee relatives used to say, in the common room. My friends told me that I would get better. What did they know? I wore my own pants and shirt, not a hospital gown. I was ashamed, and they seemed abashed. I felt that. Or I should say that we shared in that. On Monday, the in-patient doctors

and their residents came. The ward busied, like any workplace at the start of a new week. My own doctor, the prescribing doctor, was not at the hospital. I told his colleague that I was all right, and that I believed I could go home. We were in my room. The doctor was making morning rounds. I sat on the bed, and she sat on a chair that she’d dragged in from outside. (There were no chairs in those rooms.) “Do you think you’ll be safe?” she asked. “Yes.” I told her that I’d had a scare, but that I didn’t think it would happen again. “How are you feeling now?” “Much better.” I wasn’t lying. I’d slept some. I was momentarily safe. “Are you having thoughts of harming yourself ?” “I think I’ll be O.K.” “Can you tell me what brought this on?” I told the doctor that I’d written a book about my mother, an alcoholic who’d lived a horrid life. I told her that the book was scheduled to come out in June. I told her about losses and errors of my own, and she watched my face and listened to my voice. Later that day, the hospital approved my discharge. A nurse brought the plastic bag, and I laced my shoes and signed the papers and sorted my things back into my pockets. I put on my coat. The nurse with the key chain led me down the hall and unlocked the door. I left the ward and walked toward the elevators. The door closed behind me, a heavy sound, and then I heard the key turn in the lock. I rode the elevator to the lobby. I left the building, crossed the street, and got into a waiting car. Sometimes, when I think of that day, I remember that Regan had come to get me, and that we went home together. Mainly, though, I remember that I was on my own. It was about three o’clock. I was wobbly. I had my Ativan. The day was sunny; the world seemed to shimmer. I opened the bottle of pills and shook one into my hand. I was breathing rapidly. My skin felt prickly. The world did not look right. Brooklyn was unfamiliar. I don’t mean that the driver took a novel

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route. Was it the brightness in the light, a sharpness to the day, that Monday afternoon? I put the pill on my tongue. People passed on the sidewalks and crossed at the lights. It was early spring. The houses and shops were in rows, and the trees were already flowering—pink, violet, white. I recognized Prospect Park, and my neighborhood, and my street. Surely I would be all right. I paid and thanked the driver, and then hurried upstairs, shut the door, and turned the lock. The living room was as I remembered. Things were where they belonged. The view out the windows hadn’t changed. I crumpled onto the sofa. Where was I? I stayed out of the hospital for five weeks. The symptoms that I’d gone in with, that I’d lived with for months, returned. I didn’t sleep that first night home. Regan told me that I would be all right, it would be all right, but I knew that I wasn’t safe. I remember waking, startled, sick with a burning in my chest—the worst kind of waking. I got out of bed and fled up the hall to the front of the apartment, then paced the living room, where I sat down and got up, sat and got up. It went that way every night, and it was the same during the day, not just most days but every day. The itch in my temple, the need for a bullet, was constant. The itch wasn’t topical. It wasn’t itchy skin. It lay deep. If I scratched it, I might feel clarity and peace. Without the bullet, I would never again have either. But had I ever felt clear? When had I been peaceful? How long until it was time for another Ativan? Some days, I lay in bed, picturing the bullet moving slowly through my brain. The image soothed me. Outside the window was the fire escape. How to die? Who would find me, and then remember finding me? Who would have to remember that? I would leave a note, begging Regan not to unlock the door but to call the police instead. Children played and yelled on the rooftop of the school down the street. My hips and back, my arms and legs felt stiff, though loose, somehow. Later, Regan would come back from work, and I would try to eat. My jaw was tight, and it was hard to swallow. Regan and I spoke less and less. At 76

night, she stayed in the front room, and I mainly went in back. Sometimes I took out my cell phone and dialled person after person. What were my crimes? What are yours? What do you look forward to? I looked forward to poverty, abandonment by my remaining family members, the inability to write or work, the dissolution of friendships, professional and artistic oblivion, loneliness and deterioration, institutionalization and the removal from society—abjection and the end of belonging. The calm that I’d had for a moment in the hospital was gone. I slept two or three hours, and then sat up watching the light change with morning; and, later, during the day, took the death position, phoned those who might answer, or sped from back to front in the apartment, dragging the tarp. It was April, and then May, an eternity in real time. I worried about my shoulders. Over the spring, the joints had seemed to weaken. I could control my arms, but felt also that they were somehow just hanging there. Perhaps this was, as it were, an instance of hypochondria—I’d had a history of dislocations when I was younger. But what to make of the strange fluctuations in balance when walking, the tipping sideways, one way and then the other; or the effort required to hold a cup or a glass, or to write with a pen? How had I become so clumsy and uncoördinated? Why did sounds hurt? Why the adrenaline, the ruminations, the bullet and the knife, and when had the light begun to feel like sand in my eyes? I remember stumbling downstairs and out of the building. I stuffed keys, cash, and my meds into my pockets and called a car. The subway was too terrifying. I would press myself against the platform wall and hyperventilate. I gave the driver the address, an orthopedic clinic on the Upper East Side, not far from the apartment where I lived in my twenties, back when my mother was getting sober, back before everybody started dying. There’s a hospital not far from my apartment in Brooklyn, but it didn’t occur to me to go there. On the ride into Manhattan, I lowered the window and felt the air. When I was a boy, I often got car-

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sick. The time that I remember best was in the Smoky Mountains, on hairpin turns outside Asheville, North Carolina. My grandfather was driving, and my grandmother sat beside him, my mother’s parents. My sister and I were in the back seat. I must have been five or six, and Terry four or five. Maybe it was 1964. I remember trees and valleys and the motion of the car. I recall that the car was white, with red upholstery, and that we were on a trip, and that my grandfather liked to speed, and that my grandmother turned and reached back to hand me an apple. It was a yellow apple. The apple was mushy and dry, and the road wound left, right, up, down through the hills. Now, as I write this, I wonder where we were going, where we’d been; and it seems to me that this was a time when our grandparents had taken my sister and me from our mother and father. We were heading across the mountains, then south to Sarasota, to the house on Wisteria Street. We’d visited relatives in Tennessee. Our parents’ marriage was ending. I threw up on the seat, and my grandfather stopped the car. He and my grandmother put down towels, and my grandfather told me that if I got sick again I could stick my head out the window and breathe, and I’d feel better. The clinic was busy. It was a big, modern place. I barged up to the desk. The receptionist asked if I had an appointment. I said that I needed a doctor, and she asked me what the problem was. “My shoulders.” “Your shoulders?” People behind the reception desk turned and whispered. I was shaking. I hadn’t shaved. I’d got skinnier since my weekend at the hospital, and my clothes were big, like clown clothes. I remember the receptionist telling me that there were no appointments available, but that I could make one for another time. I pleaded, “It’s important! Can I talk to a doctor? Isn’t there a way?” My throat was tight, and my mouth dry. I remember worrying that I was shouting. She told me to wait. I recall sitting in the waiting room. Was I holding a clipboard, a pen? The waiting room was quiet. I do my best to remember. A doctor appeared. He was young,

and wore a white coat. Would I accompany him down the hall? We went into a room. I didn’t climb onto the examination table, and the doctor didn’t sit on his rolling stool. We faced each other. He seemed wary. He asked me what was wrong, and I said, “It’s hard to pinpoint. It feels like my arms are falling out of the sockets.” “Both arms?” I was breathing fast. “It’s more on the left.” “Can you rotate?” I swung my arms in the air. I told the doctor that if I raised and brought my arms too far back the shoulders might dislocate.  He briefly poked and manipulated, going through the motions, and said, “I’m not finding anything out of the ordinary.” “There is!” He took a step back and said, “You’re welcome to make an appointment. But I don’t think the problem is with your shoulders.” Then he told me that he had patients to see. He opened the door and walked me back along the hall, past the reception desk, and across the waiting room. People watched. The doctor held the door, and then quietly shut it behind me. I rode the elevator to the lobby. On the street, I called my friend David, who lives in Nyack, twenty miles up the Hudson. David had stayed on the phone with me through the winter and the spring, listening patiently to my jagged talking. I raged to David about my physical condition, and he shouted, “Why aren’t you in a hospital? You need to be in a hospital!”  I thought of Anne. We’d been friends in college. She was a year behind me. I remembered that she’d gone to medical school and become a psychiatrist, and I recalled hearing that she practiced at Columbia Presbyterian, at 168th Street and Broadway, near the George Washington Bridge and the top of Manhattan. I didn’t phone her that day after leaving the clinic, but the next day, or maybe the day after, I got in touch with Anne, and she told me that she was an in-patient doctor in Columbia’s psychiatric emergency room. I remember where I was when Anne picked up the phone. I was on the little sofa in my living room. I told her about the Klonopin and the Ativan, Regan

“ You said you’d be home at half a candle.”

•

•

and the roof, the infantilizing doctor and the Brooklyn ward; and I promised her that I was not thinking of hurting myself, though dying was my only thought. I was lying, of course. I couldn’t bring myself to do otherwise. What would I be admitting to? I insisted that I did not need a hospital. She said that I sounded sick. She told me to come to Columbia Presbyterian. They’d take care of me, she said; they’d help me get better. She told me that it was dangerous for me to stay out on my own, that I’d be safe in the hospital, and that I needed treatment. What did she mean, treatment? I told her that I would consider what she was saying. She then gave me the phone number of a colleague in private practice, another Columbia doctor, whom I’ll call Dr. T. “Everyone respects her,” Anne told me. Dr. T.’s office was on the Upper West Side, in the Nineties, near Central Park, on the ground floor, facing the street. Diplomas hung on the wall above a desk. Freud’s works, the Hogarth Press Standard edition, sat in their faded blue jackets behind glass doors in an antique bookcase, and a fainting couch for patients in analysis was spread with kilim rugs, a touch taken straight from Freud’s Vienna consulting room. Everything looked

secondhand. The doctor sat in a corner, near the window, writing notes on a pad. I sat in the middle of the room, in a red armchair. The upholstery was frayed and tearing. The doctor warned me that I was in danger, and that damage and harm would accrue and intensify. She meant brain damage. She told me that if I stayed out of the hospital I would die. Later that week, on a Friday, I called a car and asked the driver to take me to 168th Street and Broadway. On the drive, I phoned Regan, my father, and my friends, and told them that I was going to Columbia Presbyterian. I felt calmer in the car than I had at home. I breathed more easily. It was a clear day. I remember the drive up the West Side Highway. The Hudson River was on the left, and I could see the George Washington Bridge ahead in the distance. The trees in Riverside Park were green. I hadn’t planned. I’d taken some things—my keys, some cash, but not much else. I’d stopped writing and reading long before, and hadn’t bothered with a book. The car pulled up in front of a building made of stone. I saw doctors, nurses, and ambulances.There was the emergency room. I paid the driver, got out of the car, and walked toward the entrance. ♦

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FICTION

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THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

ILLUSTRATION BY RACHEL LEVIT RUIZ

can’t tell you my name. Or the name of the rural village where this story took place. My father is a feared and respected man there, and I do not want to bring shame upon him. He was born on those fertile plains but he made his career in the city, where he became an important man who wears suits and drives a big car. In my sixteenth summer, he sent me to “that hole” to learn the hard life of the countryside, to strengthen my soul and my muscles. “I don’t want you to be like those idle boys who wander our streets,” he told me. “There you will learn how to live.” My memories of that summer are hazy. All the days blurred into one, and I could find nothing to distract me from the boredom. I offered to help with farmwork, but nobody dared put me to such a thankless task, because I was a judge’s son and my arms were so thin. The other teenagers in the village kept their distance. When they met up to drink stolen beers in the evening, they never invited me to join them. I could hear them laughing and burping from my bedroom, where I lay and stared up at the earthen ceiling for hours on end. Most of the villagers were illiterate. There was no electricity in the village yet, and nobody had a television or a computer. They entertained themselves by spreading ridiculous rumors or by telling stories that a city kid like me found hard to believe. That summer, everybody was talking about a girl from the area who had been rejected by her clan. The boys said that she had sullied the honor of her village with her brazen behavior and that she now roamed the streets like the dog she was. The old women said nothing. They just lowered their eyes. I imagine they were praying for the soul of that young peasant girl. I listened with interest to conversations about the mysterious vagabond, always on the alert for any new information. That sordid tale, whose protagonist lived new adventures every day, was my only source of entertainment. During the days, as I halfheartedly helped look after the animals, I would listen for the

I

latest rumor, passed from mouth to mouth, growing more exaggerated and distorted with each telling. ne afternoon, a man named Achour suggested that I go to the plains with him to gather grass for the animals. He was a big, strong man, about forty years old, with a round face aged by the sun. He was wearing a little wool hat that he took off from time to time to scratch his head. When he smiled, you could see his toothless purple gums. The man was a colossus, and on several occasions I had witnessed his extraordinary physical strength. He was followed by his ten-year-old son, who already seemed used to the tough farmwork. I asked the boy if he went to school, if he liked his teacher. But he just glared at me suspiciously and wiped the snot from his nose with the back of his hand. As we walked, Achour talked to me about my father, to whom he owed so much. He treated me with a deference that made me uncomfortable, and I barely said anything in response. I was seized by the beauty of the landscape, by those wheat fields shining gold in the dazzling sunlight. In the distance, I could see the outlines of the Atlas Mountains. I almost said something, but I knew that Achour would just shrug: these fields were all he had ever known. We walked past a herd of cows so thin that I could count their ribs. Their ankles had been tied together with rope to keep them from running away and they were chewing on a bramble bush, immobile and disillusioned. We got to work. Achour taught me the least tiring way to fill the big jute bags we had brought with us. I was daydreaming, enjoying the silence, when we spotted a woman, only a dozen yards from us, silhouetted against the sun. At first, I thought I was hallucinating. I wondered if the stories I’d heard in the village had affected my mind, if I was seeing a mirage. But the figure came closer: it was a young woman, shuffling toward us. Achour turned to me and from the look in his eye I guessed that, like me, he was thinking about the mysterious girl that the villagers were always talking about. “This one’s for you!” he shouted, suddenly excited. “You don’t get a chance

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like this every day!” Like a man dying of thirst who suddenly finds water, Achour started running toward the girl. She watched him without reacting, weighed down by fatigue, resigned to her fate. She did not try to run away. And, now that I think about it, where could she have gone? How could she have escaped from Achour, in the middle of those empty fields, half an hour’s walk from the nearest house? I said nothing. I did not try to dissuade him. Partly because he didn’t give me time, and partly because, deep down, I wanted something to happen to save me from the deathly dullness of that summer. Achour reached the girl and beckoned me over. When I came within a few feet of them, I could hear him threatening to hit her if she screamed or if she didn’t do what I wanted. He made her sit down amid the wheat stalks, which hid her face, and brutally tore off the harem pants she was wearing under her djellabah. Then he gestured with his hand. The same gesture you make to your guests when you want them to taste a dish that you have prepared. A gesture of invitation, with his huge, red, calloused hand. Without a word, I accepted. Today, I cannot explain what was going through my mind at that moment. All I can do is recount the facts and acknowledge that I knelt down in front of the girl and that, while I was unfastening my pants, I heard Achour walking away, calling to his son to keep a lookout. I cannot be certain that my memories of her correspond to the reality, but when I think about it I have the sense that she was barely sixteen years old. A child’s full, round cheeks. Dark rings under her long-lashed eyes. Unlike most country girls, she did not look worn out from working in the fields. Her skin was soft and cool. She did not say a word. She did not resist me. As I moved closer to her, as I lay on top of her slender body, she turned her head slightly to the side, as if her only act of freedom were not to see me. She seemed to have accepted the idea that she had no choice. I penetrated her, and tried to kiss her, but she did not respond. She abandoned herself, not in the sense of someone who is offering her body out of love

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but as someone who uses her mind to escape a terrifying situation. I cannot say why, but I had the painful impression that I was not the first, on that beautiful, sun-drenched day, to press her against the ground and possess her. I withdrew. As I got dressed, I became aware that my hands were stained with blood. The sight of that blood, on my fingers, on her thighs, shook me from the torpor that had enveloped me up to that point. Hurriedly, I helped her to get dressed. I grabbed her harem pants, which Achour had thrown to the side, and handed them to her. I looked away while she put them on and, to cover my discomfort, attempted to make

conversation. I asked what her name was. I tried to find out where she had come from, where she was going. How old she was. All she said was “I’m hungry.” I leaped up, as if entrusted with a divine mission. Achour, who had seen me getting dressed, was coming toward me. I beckoned him closer, eager to find something to satisfy the vagabond’s hunger. But Achour cheerfully misunderstood my gesture, and, like a beast, threw himself on the young woman, who this time tried to resist. She screamed and scratched the peasant’s face. She was ready to gouge his eyes out. I stepped in and managed to calm them both down. “She’s hungry,” I explained to Achour,

“Hey, we’re all rooting for you! Don’t ever forget— you’re a world-class planet.”

who shrugged. “So?” he seemed to ask. In his mountain village, hunger was a constant state, a habit formed in childhood and staved off by smoking hash or brewing homemade alcohol. But I insisted, and, in the end, Achour sent his son to the village to find something to eat and drink. “Say it’s for the young man, you understand?” He smacked the boy sharply on the back of his head. The boy mounted a donkey and yelled “Ra!” before clicking his tongue. The donkey set off. The three of us sat in the wheat field for nearly an hour. The girl was a few feet away from me, and more or less the same distance from Achour. She sat with her legs stretched out in front of her and stared straight ahead in silence. Achour chewed on a stalk, stood up to survey the horizon, and sat down again, cursing his son, the slowness of donkeys, and the stupidity of women. Finally, the boy arrived with a round loaf of bread, some butter, and a steaming teapot in a wicker basket. We could have given the food to the girl and left then and there, especially as it would soon be dark. But the boy kept repeating, “Mama said we have to bring the teapot back with us. She said she’d beat me if I forgot.” We sat down again and drank our hot tea together, like one happy family. She the gentle, loving mother. Achour the brave and faithful father. And I the elder son, who would take care of his little brother. As we drank, the girl kept looking up at us with fearful eyes. She seemed afraid that we would go, leaving her alone in that dark and deserted field. Several times, our eyes met and I had the feeling that she wanted to say something to me but did not dare speak in front of our two boorish witnesses. Had I been more courageous, had I been a good man, I would probably have gone over to her so that she could speak to me in confidence. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, and the sky had turned fuchsia. Before our eyes, the countryside was lazily fading into night. The boy picked up the teapot and tossed it into the basket. Holding the donkey’s bridle, he insisted that I ride the animal. Watched by Achour, I feigned indifference. I wanted to appear manly, so I

barely even said goodbye to the girl. But in the half-light of dusk I turned around several times and saw her, standing there in the middle of the field. She had covered her hair with a black head scarf and crossed her arms to keep warm. All the way back, I kept thinking about her, and about the cold night ahead of her. About the predators who would attack her: men, animals, members of her clan seeking vengeance. About the blanket I could have fetched for her. About the money I could have slipped into her hand that she could have used to buy a bus ticket out of this place, which had trapped her and was eating her alive. hen we arrived at the village, Achour couldn’t wait to tell the men about my adventure. They watched him wide-eyed, drooling slightly. They laughed, and I was proud of the looks they gave me. In that moment, I forgot my regrets and the coldness of the night. I interrupted Achour and told the rest of the story myself, adding anecdotes and lewd details that made those hicks burst into laughter. In my telling, the girl became a happy, lustful peasant girl, full-breasted, buttocks spread. We rolled in the grass, then lay back giggling. My audience was won over. The men congratulated me, slapping me on the shoulder.

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hat year, my father was transferred to Casablanca and I began my senior year of high school. There was no question of my wasting long summer weeks in the fields again. My studies had become my sole preoccupation. I was, my father said, “the pride of the family,” and he moved heaven and earth so that I could go to France and enroll at a reputable university. One year after my encounter with the vagabond, I moved to a small French town to study engineering. During the week, I worked until late at night; I was the last one on campus to turn off my desk lamp. On weekends, like all my friends, I chased girls and drank until I vomited. I was happy. And then, one night, I had a dream. I was sitting in a horse-drawn carriage. The leather seat was torn and flakes of gray, moldy foam were spread out over the wooden floorboards. We were rid-

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“I have to use the rest room. Would you mind mumbling ‘Mm-hmm’ on my conference call for a few minutes?”

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ing at a frantic speed through the streets of a southern city, which could have been Seville or Isfahan. The wheels were bumping over the cobblestones. My hands gripped the armrests so tightly that the tips of my fingers turned purple and numb. I was terrified. At each jolt or lurch, I imagined that I was about to be hurled earthward and that my skull would end up like those smashed bitter oranges which litter the ground around trees, their sour scent seeping out. The driver kept whipping the horse harder and harder, with a rage that I could not understand and which, strangely, made me feel ashamed. I wanted to tell him to stop. I wanted to come to the animal’s defense, to encourage its master to go easy, but I didn’t dare let go of the slender iron support that kept me from falling. As we entered a square, I managed to put my hand on the driver’s shoulder. It was at that moment that the horse collapsed. The carriage flipped over, and the poor old nag lay lifeless on the ground. Its body seemed to distend, its muscles to melt. Its death was like a grateful surrender. The driver leaped from the carriage and threw himself at the animal. Insanely, absurdly, he tried to drag it to its feet. He grabbed it by the teeth, sank his fingers into its flared

nostrils. But the horse’s eyes stared into the void. I leaned over the corpse, with its visible ribs. I hadn’t noticed how gaunt it was. I put my hand on its sweatsoaked rump and recognized the familiar scent of my childhood. The clean smell of animal sweat, the smell of earth, garlic, brackish water. When I woke, the sheets were soaked and my hands were groping at air. It took me several minutes to clear my head. I was afraid to turn on the light and find myself in a macabre tête-àtête with a rotting corpse. All that day, the smell of my dream clung to me. It was the smell of the peasant girl’s hair, the smell of the fields mingled with her sweat. During the weeks that followed, I could not rid myself of that uneasy feeling. I felt haunted by that imaginary carriage ride. I heard the whip cracking against the horse’s flesh, I relived its collapse, and my heart shrank at the idea that I was going to die on the sidewalk of an unknown city. Day and night, I would walk around, escorted by a feeling of sadness, by the consciousness of a crime whose name I dared not speak. ♦ (Translated, from the French, by Sam Taylor.) NEWYORKER.COM

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THE CRITICS

DANCING

MISSTEPS What went wrong at New York City Ballet?

robably the most cherished old tale about George Balanchine is the one in which the mother of a girl who had auditioned for him comes up to him later and asks whether her daughter will become a professional dancer. “La danse, Madame,” Balanchine replied, “c’est une question morale.” You could say that he dodged the question, but many of his admirers would say that he answered it directly and accurately. Dance, by virtue of its energy and its precision—and, often, its mounting intensity—brings us close to what many people in the world once looked for, and many still do, in religion. Music operates in the same way, of course, but most dance includes music, and it has something else as well: the body. On the dance stage, human beings place themselves before us much as, in old Italian frescoes, souls came before God: without words, without excuses, without much covering of any kind. They are more or less as they were when they came out of their mothers: flesh and energy, now with the addition of skill. That composite stands for what they are as moral beings, and what, in consequence, they tell us the world is. The better the dancer’s first arabesque penché—the more exact, the more spirited, the more singing its line—the more he or she will embody the promise of the ancient Greeks, lasting at least up to Keats, that beauty, truth, and virtue are inseparable, that we live in a good world. Such thoughts, however, are unlikely

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to have occurred to Alexandra Waterbury, a nineteen-year-old model and a former student of the School of American Ballet, New York City Ballet’s affiliate academy, on the morning of May 15, 2018. She woke up in the apartment of her twenty-eight-year-old boyfriend, Chase Finlay, a principal dancer at N.Y.C.B., who was away at the time, and thought to check her e-mail on his computer. What she found on the screen was a series of photographs of women’s private parts, including her own, plus a brief clip of her having sex with Finlay. According to the complaint in a lawsuit that she later filed, there were text messages, too. Finlay, sending someone a photograph of Waterbury naked, asked, “You have any pictures of girls you’ve f *cked? I’ll send you some . . . ballerina girls I’ve made scream and squirt.” The exchanges included several participants, notably two other N.Y.C.B. principals, Amar Ramasar and Zachary Catazaro, and a young donor, Jared Longhitano.“We should get like half a kilo”—of cocaine, one assumes— “and pour it over the . . . girls and just violate them,” Longhitano wrote to Catazaro and Finlay. “I bet we could tie some of them up and abuse them like farm animals.” “Or like the sluts they are,” Finlay rejoined. “Yeah,” Longhitano wrote back. “I want them to watch me destroy one of their friends. And they know they’re next. I bet we could triple team.” Finlay also reported that he had just “fucked a 20-year-old ballerina and her sister! That was my first

Peter Martins, left, in 1978, long before the recent scandals at City Ballet, rehearsing dancers in his severe, sarcastic duet “Calcium Light Night.” 82

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threesome with family members. It was incredible!” In another thread, a former student at the ballet school thanked Finlay for sending a picture of himself and Waterbury engaged in a sex act: “I can’t stop looking at Alex’s tits lol.” Waterbury got herself a lawyer, Jordan K. Merson, one of the attorneys who had just obtained a settlement in which Michigan State University agreed to pay five hundred million dollars to young gymnasts molested by Larry Nassar. Merson sought a settlement for Waterbury, but N.Y.C.B. refused, and there the matter appeared to rest, until the end of August, when the company announced that Finlay had resigned, and that it had suspended Ramasar and Catazaro after receiving allegations of “inappropriate communications.” A week later, Waterbury’s lawyer filed a lawsuit seeking compensatory and punitive damages for the pain and humiliation she had suffered, together with the damage to her reputation and, therefore, to her job prospects. Soon afterward, Ramasar and Catazaro were fired. (A lawyer for Finlay called the claims “distorted and inaccurate,” and Catazaro’s lawyer said that he would be seeking to have the complaint dismissed. Longhitano declined to comment, and a lawyer for Ramasar argued that one of the women had consented to having her photographs shared.) Furthermore, Waterbury alleged that New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet knew about this misconduct, or should have. The suit described a party that Finlay and other members of City Ballet had recently thrown at a hotel room in Washington, D.C., inviting underage girls, whom they “plied with drugs and alcohol.” The damage to the hotel came to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But, according to the lawsuit, the hosts of the party, though they had to pay for the repairs to the hotel property, were not otherwise punished; instead, they were simply advised to confine such behavior to New York City, where “it would be easier to control.” This, apparently, did not mean control of the behavior but control of the repercussions—that is, 84

damage control. By means of such tolerance, the suit claimed, N.Y.C.B. signalled to a group of male dancers “that they could degrade, demean, mistreat and abuse, assault, and batter women without consequence.” (An N.Y.C.B. spokesperson called the lawsuit baseless and said that, far from having “condoned, encouraged, or fostered” the men’s behavior, it had investigated the matter and taken “immediate and appropriate action.”) Losing these dancers was a serious sacrifice for N.Y.C.B. Before the scandal, it had had only fourteen male principals. Now, in one fell swoop, it lost three, and two of them, Ramasar and Finlay, were stars. Accordingly, some people speculated that additional revelations might be coming, and that the company was trying to cover itself. Sexual misconduct in a ballet troupe, just as at the Metropolitan Opera or at Miramax or in the Roman Catholic Church, may be judged less severely by the public than the failure of those in charge to punish or remove the malefactors. The one confronts us with a bad person, the other with a bad world. In other ways, too, N.Y.C.B. tried to prop up its reputation. At the company’s fall fashion gala, in September of last year, the curtain rose not on a ballet but on a large, loose collection of the troupe’s dancers, in street clothes—people like you and me, people who presumably did not fantasize about tying women up like farm animals. Stepping out from among them, Teresa Reichlen, a seraphic-looking principal dancer wearing a dress that covered her from neck to ankle, delivered a speech, reading it, modestly, from a printout. “We the dancers of New York City Ballet,” she began, in an echo of the Constitution’s We-thePeople, “will not put art before common decency or allow talent to sway our moral compass. . . . Each of us standing here tonight is inspired by the values essential to our art form: dignity, integrity, and honor.” That is, what happened was just the work of a few bad apples. Management totted up the donations that Jared Longhitano had made to City Ballet and gave the money to the organization Women in Need. The amount

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was only twelve thousand dollars, but the institution was doing what it could to assert that it still embraced the faith of Balanchine. Dance is a moral matter. here was much at N.Y.C.B. to suggest that this was not true—above all the career of the man who had been the company’s boss for the preceding thirty-five years. Peter Martins, a Dane who was trained at the Royal Danish Ballet’s excellent school, joined City Ballet in 1969 and was a sensation—beautiful of face and form, and with big, wonderfully precise feet. He was also six feet two, which meant that he could partner just about any woman in the company, and he was superb at doing so. Women danced better when they danced with him. His partnership with Suzanne Farrell, many would say, was the starring act of N.Y.C.B. in the late seventies. Ballet historians still do not agree on how, or whether, Balanchine, as his health began to fail, chose Martins to succeed him as the company’s artistic director. Martins says that Balanchine telephoned him early one morning in the summer of 1978, invited him to breakfast, and offered him the job. But Balanchine never anointed him publicly. After the great man died, a number of his close associates—including Betty Cage, the company manager—questioned whether any such offer had ever been made and said that Balanchine’s choice would have been Jerome Robbins, whom he had appointed as a ballet master in 1969. The board of directors diplomatically named both men “co-ballet-masters in chief.” This arrangement continued—with Robbins working mainly on his own ballets and Martins looking after the rest of the repertory—until 1990, when Robbins resigned from the company and Martins became its sole artistic director, a position that he retained until last year, when he retired during an investigation of his treatment of the troupe’s dancers. People trying to assess Martins’s career should keep in mind that, in the history of ballet, he had what was probably the worst case, ever, of big shoes to fill. Balanchine was an artist on the order of Bach or Tolstoy, in the sense that he had a long career, an enormous range, and a kind of poetic force that made people, when they saw his ballets, think about their lives differently, more seriously. If,

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at the end of time, anyone ever congratulates us on being the human race, he will be one of the prime exhibits. By contrast, Peter Martins, however beautifully he danced, was, at best, a middling choreographer, until, in the late eighties, perhaps under the strain of being compared with Balanchine night after night, he became something worse, a very pissedoff person. Even early on, there was a spirit of antagonism in his work. His first piece for New York City Ballet, “Calcium Light Night” (1978), to music by Charles Ives, was a severe, sarcastic, and also rather witty duet, with the woman and the man taking turns dragging each other around the stage on their bottoms. This was the opposite of Balanchine’s woman-worshipping duets. The element of aggression might have been put down to youthful iconoclasm, but, as the years passed, it did not diminish; it grew. In 1988, Martins premièred a new piece, “Tanzspiel,” to a score by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. In it, we see a lone man coming forward. As in a Balanchine ballet, a woman (or the ghost of a woman, or the memory of a woman) approaches him from behind. But then, instead of mesmerizing him, she grabs him, hangs on him, falls to the ground in desperation. He fleetingly responds, but mostly he recoils. Eventually, just to get rid of her, it seems, he strangles her, then dances around the stage with her lifeless body. “Tanzspiel” was talked about long afterward. Part of what made it shocking was its apparent echo of the so-called “preppie murder,” two years before, which was given huge play in the New York press. In August, 1986, two private-school graduates—Jennifer Levin, who was eighteen, and Robert Chambers, Jr., a year older—were having sex in Central Park in the middle of the night when she died of strangulation. Chambers’s story was that she had pressed him for “rough sex” and was killed accidentally when he tried to stop her from hurting him. His defense team portrayed Levin as sexually rapacious, and, when the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charge of murder, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Less than two weeks before the first performance of Martins’s ballet, with its depiction of female sexual demands provoking male violence, Chambers received a sentence of five to fifteen years.

Presumably for ticket buyers in search of milder material, Martins later created versions of Russian classics. Each was curiously unsatisfying. “The Sleeping Beauty” (1991) was radically shortened, and it had a strange ending, in which the crowns of the King and the Queen are removed from their heads and transferred to the Princess and her consort— an action that was hard to interpret as anything other than Martins telling his audience that they should stop pining for Balanchine and get happy with his successor. In 1999, the company danced Martins’s “Swan Lake,” a ballet that traditionally ends with the Swan Queen and the Prince drowning themselves in the lake and, in many versions, going to Heaven together. Martins simply has the Swan Queen walk out on the Prince. The message seemed to be: Isn’t this the way it happens in real life? People get together; they have problems; they split up. So what? In 2007, Martins made a new, brutal “Romeo and Juliet.” In Shakespeare’s play, Lord Capulet, furious over his daughter’s rejection of his marriage plans for her, says, “My fingers itch”— in other words, I feel like hitting you. In Martins’s ballet, Capulet actually did hit her, delivering a slap on the face that echoed through the theatre. (Within weeks of Martins’s retirement, the slap was removed.) But it wasn’t just the revised stories— people deposing their parents and smacking one another around—that made Martins’s work look ruthless. More serious was the tone of the dancing in the company’s storyless ballets. Balanchine ballets that had seemed to be about the most exalted matters in our lives now sat cold and dry on the stage. The dancers appeared to be concealing their performances, as if they were afraid that we would see them defacing these revered works. The situation was worse in Martins’s own ballets. The dancers often looked like body snatchers. When Martins had a success, it was usually with something fast and furious—for example, his “Harmonielehre” (2000) and “Hallelujah Junction” (2002), both to frenetic scores by John Adams—where the steps were so hard that no one expected the dancers to do more than get through them. The company rose to the challenge, and it was quite a sight—you felt as though

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“I’d love to meet up, but my calendar is jam-packed with squares and sequential numbers.”

• your face were being scraped off. The experience didn’t stay with you afterward, though. I remember having a conversation about Martins in the late eighties with one of N.Y.C.B.’s female stars, who told me, “He hates ballerinas. He hates beauty. He hates Balanchine.” n 1982, Martins began dating Darci Kistler, almost twenty years his junior, a tall, sweet-faced blond dancer from Southern California whom Balanchine had plucked from the School of American Ballet and installed in the company two years earlier, when she was only sixteen. She and Martins were together on and off throughout the eighties, and they married in 1991. One night the following year, the police in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.C.B.’s summer headquarters, got a call from Kistler, reporting that, after an evening out, she and Martins had had a fight, and that he had beaten her and thrown her into the next room, cutting her ankle. Martins was charged with third-degree assault, and spent the night in jail. Kistler later dropped the charges, though she never withdrew her account of what happened that night. Readers should bear in mind that Kistler was not only Martins’s wife; she was one of the leading female dancers in his company, and was often described as Balanchine’s

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• last muse. And Martins damaged her leg, the thing on which a dancer dances. That’s like damaging a pianist’s hand. Before Martins married Kistler, he had a relationship of legendary storminess with Heather Watts, an N.Y.C.B. principal. “I saw him pick her up and slam her into a cement wall,” John Clifford, another principal, reported. Gelsey Kirkland, in her 1986 memoir, “Dancing on My Grave,” recalled watching Martins drag Watts up and down a flight of stairs. Given the notoriety of such episodes, it’s remarkable that it was not until December, 2017, that N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B. announced that they had begun an investigation into Martins’s behavior. While this was going on, Martins took a leave of absence and a four-person committee was appointed to manage artistic operations. (He was also suspended from teaching his weekly class at the school.) Why was he finally being questioned? Because, the newspapers reported, S.A.B. had received an anonymous letter containing “general, nonspecific allegations of sexual harassment” by him. A good deal of Martins’s treatment of women was a matter of public record, so there was something odd about an investigation prompted by something as easy to discredit as an anonymous letter making unspecific allegations.

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Soon, however, more dancers—and not only women—began to speak to the press about mistreatment by Martins. Jeffrey Edwards, a very refined soloist, told Robin Pogrebin, of the Times, that in 1993 he was physically abused by Martins. He said that he lodged a complaint with the company’s general manager and with the dancers’ union, describing the episode in detail, but that no real action was taken. Edwards soon left the company and now teaches at Juilliard. A former child dancer named Victor Ostrovsky recalled a rehearsal in 1994, when he was a twelve-year-old student at S.A.B. He was horsing around with some other children in the ballet when Martins grabbed him by the neck. “He’s yanking me around to the left and to the right,” Ostrovsky told Pogrebin. “I felt like he was piercing my muscle. I started crying and sobbing profusely.” He soon left S.A.B.: “I was depressed; I was embarrassed. He assaulted me onstage in front of the whole cast.” In an interview with Salon, Wilhelmina Frankfurt, a tall, commanding N.Y.C.B. dancer from the seventies and eighties, recalled an incident, midperformance, in which Martins, she said, “pulled me into his dressing room and exposed himself to me. And I had on a tutu. I mean, with an American flag on it, and I ran out because I had to do the finale.” Another encounter she had with Martins, she said, “is so big I don’t think I can talk about it.” The company had no human-resources department for her to go to, and, even years later, once the investigation was under way, she’d been unable to give her version of events. The investigators, she said, would not allow her to bring a witness unless both she and the witness signed nondisclosure agreements. (The company disputes her account.) The accusations did not always involve force. A number of dancers have claimed simply that Martins slept around among the female dancers, and that roles were often allotted accordingly. This, alas, is a time-honored tradition in ballet companies—and Balanchine’s career was marked, even shaped, by serial infatuations—but it is no longer honored, and managements are now scrambling to institute codes of conduct. N.Y.C.B.’s investigation had been in progress for only a few weeks when

Martins, who was then seventy-one, seems to have tired of the whole business. (Or did the board finally tire of him?) In any case, on January 1, 2018, a few days after being arrested for drunken driving, he announced his retirement. He still denied all the allegations against him, and he expressed confidence that he would be exonerated, but he wanted, he later said, to “allow those glorious institutions”—New York City Ballet and its school—“to move past the turmoil that resulted from these charges.” Six weeks later, N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B. issued a statement that the Martins investigation “did not corroborate the allegations of harassment or violence both made in the anonymous letter and reported in the media.” No report on the inquiry was ever published, so it is impossible to know how this surprising judgment was reached. And although certain important dancers stood by Martins, the news that he never did any of the things that others had reported was received with considerable skepticism. As Victor Ostrovsky asked, how was it possible that the rest of the cast could recall nothing of what Martins did to him, as a child, at that rehearsal? “They all knew what happened,” he said. Many people in the dance world were disappointed that Sarah Jessica Parker, the vice-chair of N.Y.C.B.’s board of directors and a vocal feminist, had remained silent throughout the affair. (She eventually texted the Times, saying that the safety of the company’s dancers “is paramount to me.”) It was a few months after all this that Alexandra Waterbury logged on to Chase Finlay’s computer and found the photographs of the dancers he had caused to “scream and squirt.” fter Martins left, the boards of N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B. formed a search committee to find a new artistic director. Who that person should be is a mystery, not just to observers but also, no doubt, to the boards. N.Y.C.B. is different from other large ballet companies—the Bolshoi, the Paris Opera Ballet, England’s Royal Ballet—in that it has almost no history of succession. The company was created by Balanchine and his patron Lincoln Kirstein for Balanchine, to show his work. And though Jerome Robbins was eventually given significant space—perhaps a third of the

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troupe’s stage time—there was never any question of whose ballet company it was. What everyone would want now is a great ballet choreographer, aided, as Balanchine was, by a superbly capable executive director and staff. But there is only one absolutely first-class ballet choreographer currently working in the United States, Alexei Ratmansky, a Russian, who is the artist-in-residence of American Ballet Theatre, across Lincoln Center’s plaza, whence he is unlikely to be seduced. Ratmansky had his fill of managing ballet companies in the five years, from 2004, that he spent as the artistic director of Moscow’s hidebound Bolshoi Ballet. His contract with A.B.T. allows him to do a good deal of freelancing at other companies, and he seems to like this. But, however gifted Ratmansky is, no one is claiming that he is the equal of Balanchine. Furthermore, many people, for obvious reasons, have recommended that the new artistic director be a woman. The company, to its credit, has recently mounted ballets by a number of female choreographers. The executive director, Katherine Brown, is a woman. Would the audience accept an N.Y.C.B. run by two women? Why not? In the past, it was often run by two men. Lately, female City Ballet alumnae who have gone on to notable careers as teachers or administrators have been revisiting the troupe’s halls, and various names have been floated, but not on the basis of choreographic achievement. Whereas modern dance has been dominated, in large measure, by female choreographers, classical-ballet choreography is a career that in most Western countries has been all but closed to women, and this is changing only very slowly. To my knowledge, only two twentieth-century women— Bronislava Nijinska and Twyla Tharp— regularly made ballets for major international companies. So if it is hard to find a topflight ballet choreographer who is prepared to move to New York, it is even harder to find a woman who answers that description. But a distinguished ballet company does not need to be headed by a distinguished choreographer. The example always cited is that of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Serge Diaghilev was not a choreographer at all, but he had the energy and discernment to foster young

people who were. After he died, the graduates of his troupe more or less staffed the directorships of Western ballet—Léonide Massine and Bronislava Nijinska in Europe and America, Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois in London, Serge Lifar in Paris, and, notably, George Balanchine in New York. This is no doubt the model that N.Y.C.B.’s search committee has in mind: someone with taste who is willing to share the throne or, periodically, to yield it. Peter Martins made no new ballets for N.Y.C.B. during the last five years of his directorship, and one of his virtues—they should be noted—was that he could spot talent in others. He was the first company director in New York to present a ballet by Ratmansky. He also cultivated Christopher Wheeldon, N.Y.C.B.’s resident choreographer from 2001 to 2008, who is now one of the leading lights of international ballet. Wheeldon’s successor as resident choreographer is the thirty-one-yearold Justin Peck, who, whatever his title, is increasingly emerging as the artistic face of the company. Peck, who still dances as a soloist with the troupe, is a man of great skill and productivity. He seems, however, to lack a subject. His casts, even when they are not wearing sneakers, and jackets emblazoned with protest slogans, as they did in his recent “The Times Are Racing,” often seem like teen-agers, a notion that is highly vulnerable to cliché and sentimentality. The audience claps loudly for his work. He was viewed by many people as a top contender to succeed Martins, but he told Gia Kourlas, of the Times, that he didn’t want the job. It’s not hard to see why. At this point, like Ratmansky, he can have pretty much any gig he chooses. Why should he narrow his ambit? But the audience’s receptivity to Peck is touching. They like him, above all, I think, because he cheers them up and makes them feel, after all the scandals, that something good may once again come out of New York City Ballet. And if that something good is not, in addition, wise or profound—well, any port in a storm. After all, Balanchine never said what he wanted after his death, or how he thought the company should go forward. “Après moi, le board,” he once declared, and, boy, did he know what he was talking about. 

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A CRITIC AT LARGE

THE FIREMAN Eugene V. Debs and the endurance of American socialism. BY JILL LEPORE

liness, always said that the best kind of man was a sand man. “ ‘Sand’ means grit,” he wrote in 1882, in Firemen’s Magazine. “It means the power to hold on.” When a train stalled from the steepness of the incline or the weight of the freight, railroad men poured sand on the tracks, to improve the grip of the wheels. Men need sand, too, Debs said: “Men who have plenty of ‘sand’ in their boxes never slip on the path of duty.” Debs had plenty of sand in his box. He had, though, something of a morbid fear of ashes. Maybe that’s a fireman’s phobia, a tending-theengine man’s idea of doom. In prison— having been sentenced, brutally, to ten years of hard time at the age of sixtythree—he had a nightmare. “I was walking by the house where I was born,” he wrote. “The house was gone and nothing left but ashes . . . only ashes—ashes!” The question today for socialism in the United States, which appears to be stoking its engines, is whether it’s got enough sand. Or whether it’ll soon be ashes, only ashes, all over again. ebs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855, seven years after Marx and Engels published “The Communist Manifesto.” His parents were Alsatian immigrants who ran a small grocery store. Debs worked for the railroads a little more than four years. In the wake of the Panic of 1873, he lost his job at Vandalia and tramped to East St. Louis looking for work; then, homesick, he tramped back to Terre Haute, where, in 1875, he took a job as a labor organizer, and, later, as a magazine editor, for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. He hung his old scraper on the wall, part relic, part badge, part talisman, of his life as a manual laborer. Debs was a tall man, lanky and rubbery, like a noodle. He had deep-set blue eyes and lost his hair early, and he talked with his hands. When he gave speeches, he leaned toward the crowd, and the veins of his temples bulged. He was clean-shaven and favored bow ties and sometimes looked lost in crumpled, baggy suits. He had a way of hunching his shoulders that you often see, and admire, in tall men who don’t like to tower over other people. In a new book, “Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography” (Verso), drawn by Noah Van Sciver and written by Paul Buhle and Steve Max,

Debs ran for President five times, captivating crowds by the tens of thousands. ugene Victor Debs left school at the age of fourteen, to scrape paint and grease off the cars of the Vandalia Railroad, in Indiana, for fifty cents a day. He got a raise when he was promoted to fireman, which meant working in the locomotive next to the engineer, shovelling coal into a firebox—as much as two tons an hour, sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Firemen, caked in coal dust, blinded by wind and smoke, had to make sure that the engine didn’t explode, an eventuality they weren’t always able to forestall. If they were lucky, and lived long enough, firemen usually became engineers, which was safer than being a switchman or a brakeman, jobs that involved working on the tracks next to a moving train, or racing across its top, in any weather, at the risk of toppling off and getting run over. All these men reported to the conductors, who had the top job, and, on trains owned by George Mortimer Pullman, one of the richest men in the United States, all of them—

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the engineers, the firemen, the brakemen, the switchmen, and even the scrapers—outranked the porters. Pullman porters were almost always black men, and ex-slaves, and, at the start, were paid nothing except the tips they could earn by bowing before the fancy passengers who could afford the sleeping car, and who liked very much to be served with a shuffle and a grin, Dixie style. Every man who worked on the American railroad in the last decades of the nineteenth century became, of necessity, a scholar of the relations between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the masters and the slaves, the riders and the ridden upon. No student of this subject is more important to American history than Debs, half man, half myth, who founded the American Railway Union, turned that into the Social Democratic Party, and ran for President of the United States five times, including once from prison. Debs, who wrote a lot about man-

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Debs looks like an R. Crumb character, though not so bedraggled and neurotic. People could listen to him talk for hours. “Debs! Debs! Debs!” they’d cry, when his train pulled into a station. Crowds massed to hear him by the tens of thousands. But even though Debs lived until 1926, well into the age of archival sound, no one has ever found a recording of his voice. When Nick Salvatore wrote, in his comprehensive biography, “Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist,” in 1982, “His voice ran a gamut of tones: mock whisper to normal conversation to full stentorian power,” you wonder how he knew. Debs could speak French and German and was raised in the Midwest, so maybe he talked like the Ohio-born Clarence Darrow, with a rasp and a drawl. Some of Debs’s early essays and speeches have just been published in the first of six volumes of “The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs” (Haymarket), edited by Tim Davenport and David Walters. Really, he wasn’t much of a writer. The most delightful way to hear Debs is to listen to a recording made in 1979 by Bernie Sanders, in an audio documentary that he wrote and produced when he was thirty-seven years old and was the director of the American People’s Historical Society, in Burlington, Vermont, two years before he became that city’s mayor. In the documentary— available on YouTube and Spotify— Sanders, the Brooklyn-born son of a Polish Jew, performs parts of Debs’s most famous speeches, sounding, more or less, like Larry David. It is not to be missed. Debs began his political career as a Democrat. In 1879, when he was only twenty-three, he was elected city clerk of Terre Haute, as a Democrat; the city’s Democratic newspaper called him “one of the rising young men of Terre Haute,” and the Republican paper agreed, dubbing him “the blue-eyed boy of destiny.” Debs looked back on these days less fondly. “There was a time in my life, before I became a Socialist, when I permitted myself as a member of the Democratic party to be elected to a state legislature,” he later said. “I have been trying to live it down. I am as much ashamed of that as I am proud of having gone to jail.” Throughout his life, he believed in individual striving, and he believed in the power of machines. “A railroad is the architect of progress,” he said in a speech

at the Grand Lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen in 1877, the year the President of the United States sent federal troops to crush a railroad workers’ strike. The firemen’s brotherhood was less a labor union than a benevolent society. “The first object of the association is to provide for the widows and orphans who are daily left penniless and at the mercy of public charity by the death of a brother,” Debs explained. At the time, he was opposed to strikes. “Does the brotherhood encourage strikers?” he asked. “No—brotherhood.” For a long time, Debs disavowed socialism. He placed his faith in democracy, the franchise, and the two-party system. “The conflict is not between capital and labor,” he insisted. “It is between the man who holds the office and the man who holds the ballot.” But in the eighteen-eighties, when railroad workers struck time and time again, and as many as two thousand railroad men a year were killed on the job, while another twenty thousand were injured, Debs began to wonder whether the power of benevolence and fraternity was adequate protection from the avarice and ruthlessness of corporations backed up by armed men. “The strike is the weapon of the oppressed,” Debs wrote in 1888. Even then he didn’t talk about socialism. For Debs, this was Americanism, a tradition that had begun with the American Revolution. “The Nation had for its cornerstone a strike,” he said. He also spent some time with a pencil, doing sums. Imagine, he wrote in an editorial, that a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt started out with two million dollars—a million from his grandfather and another million from his father. “If a locomotive fireman could work 4,444 years, 300 days each year, at $1.50 per day,” Debs went on, “he would be in a position to bet Mr. Vanderbilt $2.50 that all men are born equal.” In 1889, Debs argued for an industrial union, a federation of all the brotherhoods of railroad workers, from brakemen to conductors, as equals. Samuel Gompers wanted those men to join his far less radical trade union, the American Federation of Labor, which he’d founded three years earlier, but in 1893 Debs pulled them into the American Railway Union. Soon it had nearly a hundred and fifty thousand members,

with Debs, at its head, as their Moses. That’s what got him into a battle with George Pullman, in 1894, and landed him, for the first time, in prison, where he read “Das Kapital.” ebs once said that George Pullman was “as greedy as a horse leech,” but that was unfair to leeches. In the aftermath of the Panic of 1893, Pullman slashed his workers’ wages by as much as fifty per cent and, even though they lived in housing he provided, he didn’t cut rents or the price of the food he sold them. Three thousand workers from the Pullman Palace Car Company, many of them American Railway Union members, had already begun a wildcat strike in May of 1894, a month before the A.R.U.’s first annual meeting, in Chicago. As Jack Kelly recounts, in “The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America” (St. Martin’s), Debs hadn’t wanted the A.R.U. to get involved, but the members of his union found the Pullman workers’ plight impossible to ignore, especially after nineteen-year-old Jennie Curtis, who’d worked in the Pullman sewing department for five years, upholstering and making curtains, addressed the convention. Curtis explained that she was often paid nine or ten dollars for two weeks’ work, out of which she paid Pullman seven dollars for her board and two or three more for rent. “We ask you to come along with us,” she told Debs’s men, because working for Pullman was little better than slavery. After hearing from her, the A.R.U. voted for a boycott, refusing “to handle Pullman cars and equipment.” That Curtis had a voice at all that day was thanks in part to Debs, who had supported the admission of women to the A.R.U. He also argued for the admission of African-Americans. “I am not here to advocate association with the negro, but I am ready to stand side by side with him,” he told the convention. But, by a vote of 112 to 110, the assembled members decided that the union would be for whites only. If two votes had gone the other way, the history of the labor movement in the United States might have turned out very differently. Black men, closed out of the A.R.U., formed the Anti-Strikers Railroad Union,

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BRIEFLY NOTED Maid, by Stephanie Land (Hachette). The author recalls a life

lived on the brink, where a petty mishap can mean destitution. As a domestic cleaner “paid near minimum wage to hand-scrub shit,” she assesses empty homes with a detective’s eye: one “always seemed to be set up for a dinner party,” but dusty furniture suggests that “nights with guests and fancy meals rarely happened.” Sharing a studio apartment (and, in the winter, a bed) with her young daughter, she maintains a life of “careful imbalance” through ceaseless labor and an array of government assistance programs. The particulars of Land’s struggle are sobering, but it’s the impression of precariousness that is most memorable: “I knew that at any moment, a breeze could come and blow me away.” All the Lives We Ever Lived, by Katharine Smyth (Crown). Sub-

titled “Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf,” this searching memoir pays homage to “To the Lighthouse,” while recounting the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer. Smyth’s reflections on loss weave in and out of literary criticism, and gesture toward questions about how art gives meaning to life, and vice versa. Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive, but one can feel the effort in her attempt “to bind the disparate parts” of her story and “lay a path toward some sense of resolution.” The question remains: “Have I come up with anything, has Woolf come up with anything, that is more than merely circling a brutal truth?” An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma (Little, Brown).

Chinonso, the protagonist of this complex novel, is spoken for by a guardian spirit, whose voice, tinged with regret at being unable to forestall a mortal’s worst decisions, is a clever blend of subjectivity and omniscience. Chinonso is a humble Nigerian chicken farmer who prevents the daughter of a rich chief from committing suicide and falls in love with her. His attempt to win her family’s respect leads him into dire circumstances—and the reader on a tour both of the instabilities of contemporary Nigeria and of the whole cosmos of the Igbo religion. The preponderance of traditional wisdom can feel cumbersome, but this spiritual grounding represents a passionate argument for the enduring vitality of indigenous culture. Aladdin, translated by Yasmine Seale, edited by Paulo Lemos Horta

(Liveright). This new translation of the classic tale is, like the lamp at its center, darker, grubbier, and more twisted than its Disneyfied iteration, emphasizing its transgressive qualities. Aladdin, a “cruel, stubborn, and rebellious” boy given to “wild tendencies,” finds himself the master of a “hideous and gigantic” genie. Aladdin’s future becomes his to write, or so it seems at first. In an introduction, Horta lays out the historical argument for separating “Aladdin” from the stories known as “The Arabian Nights,” in which it is usually included. Seale’s text has a fluidity and an elegance that give even this diet of “dreams, smoke, and visions” a satisfying heft. 90

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to fill positions opened by striking whites. If working on a Pullman car was degrading, it was also, for decades, one of the best jobs available to African-American men. Its perks included safe travel at a time when it was difficult for black people to make their way between any two American cities without threat or harm. George Pullman’s company was the nation’s single largest employer of African-American men. Thurgood Marshall’s father was a Pullman porter. The A.R.U. vote in 1894 set back the cause of labor for decades. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters achieved recognition from the Pullman Company only in 1937, after years of organizing by A. Philip Randolph. The Pullman strike of 1894, one of the single biggest labor actions in American history, stalled trains in twenty-seven states. Debs’s American Railway Union all but halted transportation by rail west of Detroit for more than a month— either by refusing to touch Pullman cars or by actively unhitching them from the trains. Whatever Debs’s initial misgivings about the boycott, once his union voted for it he dedicated himself to the confrontation between “the producing classes and the money power.” In the end, after a great deal of violence, George Pullman, aided by President Grover Cleveland, defeated the strikers. Pursued by a U.S. Attorney General who had long served as a lawyer for the railroads, Debs and other A.R.U. leaders were indicted and convicted of violating a federal injunction to stop “ordering, directing, aiding, assisting, or abetting” the uprising. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Debs’s conviction. He and seven other organizers were sentenced to time behind bars—Debs to six months, the others to three—and served that time in Woodstock, Illinois, in a county jail that was less a prison than a suite of rooms in the back of the elegant twostory Victorian home of the county sheriff, who had his inmates over for supper every night. “The Socialist Conversion” is the title of the half-page panel depicting these six months in “Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography.” It shows Debs in a prisoner’s uniform, seated at a desk in a bare room, with a beady-eyed, billy-clubwielding prison guard looking on from the doorway, while a cheerful man in a

suit, carrying “The Communist Manifesto,” approaches Debs, his speech bubble reading “This is a present from the Socialists of Milwaukee to you.” Very little of this is true. Debs’s time in jail in Woodstock was remarkably comfortable. He ran the union office out of his cell. He was allowed to leave jail on his honor. “The other night I had to lock myself in,” he told the New York World reporter Nellie Bly, when she went to interview him. “There was no sign of the prisoner about Mr. Debs’ clothes,” Bly reported. “He wore a well-made suit of grey tweed, the coat being a cutaway, and a white starched shirt with a standing collar and a small black and white scarf tied in a bow-knot.” The Milwaukee socialist Victor Berger did bring Debs a copy of Marx’s “Das Kapital.” And Debs and his fellow labor organizers dedicated most of their daily schedule to reading. “I had heard but little of Socialism” before the Pullman strike, Debs later claimed, insisting that the reading he did in jail brought about his conversion. But it’s not clear what effect that reading really had on him. “No sir; I do not call myself a socialist,” he told a strike commission that year. While in jail, he turned away overtures from socialists. And when he got out, in 1895, and addressed a crowd of more than a hundred thousand people who met him at the train station in Chicago, he talked about “the spirit of ’76” and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not Marx and Engels. The next year, Debs endorsed the Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, running on both the Democratic and the People’s Party tickets. Only after Bryan’s loss to William McKinley, whose campaign was funded by businessmen, did Debs abandon his devotion to the two-party system. The people elected Bryan, it was said, but money elected McKinley. On January 1, 1897, writing in the Railway Times, Debs proclaimed himself a socialist. “The result of the November election has convinced every intelligent wageworker that in politics, per se, there is no hope of emancipation from the degrading curse of wage-slavery,” he wrote. “I am for socialism because I am for humanity. . . . Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization.” That June, at the annual meeting of the American Railway Union, Debs

founded the Social Democracy of America party. When it splintered, within the year, Victor Berger and Debs joined what became the Social Democratic Party, and then, in 1901, the Socialist Party of America. For Debs, socialism meant public ownership of the means of production. “Arouse from your slavery, join the Social Democratic Party and vote with us to take possession of the mines of the country and operate them in the interest of the people,” he urged miners in Illinois and Kansas in 1899. But Debs’s socialism, which was so starry-eyed that his critics called it “impossibilism,” was decidedly American, and had less to do with Karl Marx and Communism than with Walt Whitman and Protestantism. “What is Socialism?” he asked. “Merely Christianity in action. It recognizes the equality in men.” The myth of Debs’s Christlike suffering and socialist conversion in the county jail dates to 1900; it was a campaign strategy. At the Social Democratic Party convention that March, a Massachusetts delegate nominated Debs as the Party’s Presidential candidate and, in his nominating speech, likened Debs’s time in Woodstock to the Resurrection: “When he came forth from that tomb it was to a resurrection of life and the first message that he gave to his class as he came from his darkened cell was a message of liberty.” Debs earned nearly ninety thousand votes in that year’s election, and more than four times as many when he ran again in 1904. In 1908, he campaigned

in thirty-three states, travelling on a custom train called the Red Special. As one story has it, a woman waiting for Debs at a station in Illinois asked, “Is that Debs?” to which another woman replied, “Oh, no, that ain’t Debs—when Debs comes out you’ll think it’s Jesus Christ.” “This is our year,” Debs said in 1912, and it was, in the sense that nearly a million Americans voted for him for President. But 1912 was also socialism’s year in the sense that both the Democratic and the Republican parties embraced progressive reforms long advocated by socialists (and, for that matter, populists): women’s suffrage, trust-busting, economic reform, maximum-hour and minimumwage laws, the abolition of child labor, and the direct election of U.S. senators. As Debs could likely perceive a couple of years later, when the Great War broke out in Europe, 1912 was to be socialism’s high-water mark in the United States. “You may hasten Socialism,” he said, “you may retard it, but you cannot stop it.” Except that socialism had already done most of what it would do in the United States in those decades: it had reformed the two major parties. Debs was too sick to run in 1916. The United States declared war on Germany in April, 1917; the Bolshevik Revolution swept Russia that November. Debs spoke out against the war as soon as it began. “I am opposed to every war but one,” he said. “I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the worldwide war of the social revolution. In

“I just think after six years of marriage you’d take your coat off.”

that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make necessary, even to the barricades.” Bernie Sanders recorded this speech for his 1979 documentary. And, as a member of the Senate, Sanders said it again. “There is a war going on in this country,” he declared on the floor of the Senate in 2010, in a speech of protest that lasted more than eight hours. “I am not referring to the war in Iraq or the war in Afghanistan. I am talking about a war being waged by some of the wealthiest and most powerful people against working families, against the disappearing and shrinking middle class of our country.” After Debs, socialism endured in the six-time Presidential candidacy of his successor, Norman Thomas. But it endured far more significantly in Progressive-era reforms, in the New Deal, and in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. In the decades since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, many of those reforms have been undone, monopolies have risen again, and income inequality has spiked back up to where it was in Debs’s lifetime. Socialism has been carried into the twenty-first century by way of Sanders, a Debs disciple, and by way of the utter failure of the two-party system. Last summer, a Gallup poll found that more Democrats view socialism favorably than view capitalism favorably. This brand of socialism has its own obsession with manliness, with its “Bernie bros” and allegations by women who worked on Sanders’s 2016 Presidential campaign of widespread sexual harassment and violence. Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, recently addressed some of these charges: “Was it too male? Yes. Was it too white? Yes.” Hence the movement’s new face, and new voice: the former Sanders campaign worker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Debs wrote its manifesto, but there’s a certain timidity to the new socialism. It lacks sand. In 1894, one Pullman worker stated the nature of the problem: “We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell.” We live in Amazon houses and eat Amazon groceries and read Amazon newspapers 92

and when we die we shall go to an Amazon Hell. In the meantime, you can buy your Bernie 2020 hats and A.O.C. T-shirts on . . . Amazon. ebs was arrested in Cleveland in 1918, under the terms of the 1917 Espionage Act, for a speech protesting the war that he had given two weeks earlier, on June 16th, in Canton, Ohio. “Debs Invites Arrest,” the Washington Post announced. Most of the nation’s newspapers described him as a dictator or a traitor, or both. And, because what he had said was deemed seditious, newspapers couldn’t print it, and readers assumed the worst. But the speech was vintage Debs, from its vague blandishments and programmatic promises—“We are going to destroy all enslaving and degrading capitalist institutions and re-create them as free and humanizing institutions”—to its astute observations and forceful repetitions: “The working class who fight the battles, the working class who make the sacrifices, the working class who shed the blood, the working class who furnish the corpses, the working class have never yet had a voice in declaring war.” Debs was one of thousands of socialists jailed during the First World War and the Red Scare that followed, when the Justice Department effectively tried to outlaw socialism. His defense attorney compared him to Christ—“You shall know him by his works”—and called no one to the stand but Debs, who, during a two-hour oration, talked less about socialism than about the First Amendment. “I believe in free speech, in war as well as in peace,” Debs told the court. “If the Espionage Law stands, then the Constitution of the United States is dead.” The socialist Max Eastman, watching him speak that day, described Debs’s growing fervor. “His utterance became more clear and piercing, and it made the simplicity of his faith seem almost like a portent,” Eastman wrote. But it’s the speech Debs gave during his sentencing that would be his best-remembered address, his American creed: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” After being sentenced to ten years,

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he was taken, by train, from Cleveland to a prison in West Virginia, where he was held for two months before being transferred to the much harsher Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. On the wall of a cell that he shared with five other men, he hung a picture of Jesus, wearing his crown of thorns. Refusing to ask for or accept special treatment, he was confined to his cell for fourteen hours a day and was allotted twenty minutes a day in the prison yard. He wore a rough denim uniform. He ate food barely fit to eat. He grew gaunt and weak. Debs came to think about the men he met in prison the way he’d once thought about men he’d worked with on the railroad. “A prison is a cross section of society in which every human strain is clearly revealed,” he wrote in a memoir called “Walls and Bars.” But, if the railroad was a model of hierarchy, prison was a model of equality: “We were all on a dead level there.” He became an American folk hero, a champion of free speech. In his “from the jail house to the White House” campaign, in 1920, he earned nearly a million votes running for President as Convict No. 9653. But a vote for Debs in 1920 was not a vote for socialism; it was a vote for free speech. Convict No. 9653 refused to ask for a pardon, even as he grew sicker, and leaner, and weaker. His reputation as a twentieth-century Christ grew. (Kurt Vonnegut’s much beset narrator in “Hocus Pocus” says, “I am so powerless and despised now that the man I am named after, Eugene Debs, if he were still alive, might at last be somewhat fond of me.”) His supporters began holding Free Debs rallies. President Woodrow Wilson refused to answer calls for amnesty. Warren Harding finally released him, on Christmas Day, 1921. Debs never recovered. He lived much of what remained of his life in a sanatorium. In 1925, he said that the Socialist Party was “as near a corpse as a thing can be.” He died the next year. Debs understood capitalism best on a train, socialism best in prison. One of the last letters he wrote was to the judge who had sentenced him in 1918, asking whether his conviction had left him disenfranchised or whether he still had the right to vote. 

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PUZZLES DEPT.

ANNIVERSARY CROSSWORD

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How well do you know The New Yorker? The starred clues refer to the surnames of contributors from the magazine’s history.

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Some speaker needs Selina Meyer and John Hoynes, e.g. *She profiled Hemingway in 1950 The first two words of “Hot Hot Hot” Tavern tipple Canned brand *Her famously acerbic book reviews include a pan of “The House at Pooh Corner” from 1928 Genuine article February 21st, for The New Yorker Anger “Delta of Venus” author Nin Part of a Scrabble set *He profiled Morrison, in 2003, and Fonda, in 2011 Like Oliver Twist’s clothes Scoundrel

“___ right?” (leading question) The ability to act freely, in philosophy Pushup muscles Feed type Colorful South African brew

33 Fictional Jane who married him, reader 34 “Check this out!” 38 *She wrote about the Eichmann trial in 1963 40 Nissan S.U.V. with an earthen name 42 King or queen, e.g. 43 Exxon competitor 47 Get the lead out? 48 Abandoner of the cause 51 “OMG, hilarious” 52 User-edited site 54 Condor’s claw 55 HBO rival 56 See 62-Across (don’t forget house style!) 62 With 56-Across, The New Yorker’s founding year 64 *Her “Silent Spring” ran in 1962 65 Toiling away

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Club where “music and passion were always the fashion,” familiarly Mathematician Turing Swiss city where Einstein theorized relativity Asgardian no-goodnick High-register, as diction Sister of Venus Jacket type Word with “people” or “crowd” Blacken on the grill “Sweet!” Acid in soap *Her story about Miss Jean Brodie ran in 1961 One underfoot? Instrument played by Sappho Write a Yelp review of, say *She reported on the Selma march, in 1965, and on “Sesame Street,” in 1972 Quaint plaint “A League of Their Own” actor Petty City east of Cairo “Toy Story” dinosaur voiced by Wallace Shawn Go furtively Kind of history “Ish” *Her defense of “Bonnie and Clyde” ran in 1967 Dickinson poem “___’ my destiny be Fustian” Between twelve and twenty (don’t forget house style!) Holds high Brother of Robert and Renly Baratheon in “Game of Thrones” It may be used in a pinch Frequent Fincher leading man Matchbox item *He created a famous pig, and wrote for The New Yorker for more than fifty years Alternative to Corinthian Lose it Have on Ginger partner “Who ___?” Mezza ___ (half-strength, in choral singing) Ireland’s best-selling solo artist Klingons, e.g., for short

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93

MUSICAL EVENTS

DEEP CUTS Early-music performers venture beyond the Baroque’s familiar names. BY ALEX ROSS

he early-music movement has changed not only how musicians play—tuning, timbre, technique, style— but also what they play. A couple of generations ago, programs of Baroque music were dominated by such starry names as Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Handel, and Bach. It became clear, though, that an auteur theory of the Baroque, one that limits the repertory to a few masters, suppressed vast quantities of excellent music. One sign of this emerging view was the suggestion, from musicologists, that “Pur ti miro,” one of Monteverdi’s most beloved arias, might actually have been written by Francesco Sacrati or by Benedetto Ferrari. The obvious next question was which other works of theirs are worth hearing. In recent years, the

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Baroque repertory has undergone a dizzying democratization, as two midwinter concerts in New York made plain. At Weill Hall, the Polish countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński sang music of Nicola Fago, Domènec Terradellas, Gaetano Maria Schiassi, and Johann Adolf Hasse, alongside a little Vivaldi. In the Fuentidueña Chapel, at the Cloisters, the ensemble Sonnambula based a program around the Flemish composer Leonora Duarte. The absence of historical celebrities hardly hurt attendance; both events played to full houses. Duarte, who lived from 1610 to around 1678, belonged to the converso community of Antwerp—Jews who fled Portugal and Spain and converted to Catholicism. Diego Duarte I, Duarte’s grand-

The Flemish composer Leonora Duarte lived in a Vermeer-like world. 94

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

father, established a thriving jewelry business that went on to have various illustrious clients, including King Charles I of England. The Duarte family, steeped in culture, was famous for its musical evenings; Leonora and her five siblings all sang or played instruments. The English polymath Margaret Cavendish, a regular visitor, wrote that Duarte’s voice “Invites and Draws the Soul from all other Parts of the Body, with all the Loving and Amorous Passions, to sit in the Hollow Cavern of the Ear, as in a Vaulted Room, wherein it Listens with Delight, and is Ravished with Admiration.” Another visitor said that he had heard comparable music-making only under Monteverdi in Venice—an extravagant compliment. The Flemish artist Gonzales Coques, who studied in the Brueghel studio, painted a splendid portrait of the Duartes in musical mode. Certain works by Vermeer may also give glimpses of their world. Diego Duarte II, the composer’s brother, owned a Vermeer—probably “A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal,” which now hangs at the National Gallery in London—and the painter may have sold it directly to the family. Could Duarte be one of Vermeer’s pensive musical women? Evidence is lacking, but there is no harm in imagining. While Sonnambula played at the Fuentidueña Chapel, images of two Vermeers were projected on the wall. Seven Sinfonias by Duarte survive, amounting to just under twenty minutes of music. Sonnambula filled out the program with other works of her era, including pieces by English composers: John Blow, William Brade, Alfonso Ferrabosco II, and John Bull, who was based in Antwerp for a time. As Elizabeth Weinfield, a viol player and Sonnambula’s leader, observed in a program note, Duarte’s music draws on the English viol-consort tradition, which is centered on the introverted, aching tone of the viola da gamba. At a time when homophony was coming to the fore—melody over accompaniment— Duarte’s contrapuntal interplay of lines would have had a somewhat old-fashioned sound. Yet the texture is suitable for a family of independent minds. It’s tempting to describe the Sinfonias as jewel-like in construction. You could also compare them to Vermeer’s paintILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO

ings, small in scale and infinite in depth. The members of Sonnambula—who include, in addition to Weinfield, the violinists Jude Ziliak and Toma Iliev, the gambists Amy Domingues and Shirley Hunt, and the keyboard player and tenor James Kennerley—are in residence at the Cloisters this season, under the auspices of the Met Museum’s LiveArts program. On this occasion, Sonnambula collaborated with the writer Teju Cole, whose work is rich in musical references. Cole read aloud short prose texts meditating on Duarte’s life and times. He noted that none of the Duarte siblings had children, meaning that the family had vanished from Antwerp by the end of the seventeenth century. The Duartes died one by one, Cole said, “like instruments in a consort sequentially falling silent.” For a remarkable hour on a cold February night, their world came alive again. rliński, who performed at Weill with members of New York Baroque Incorporated, is part of a formidable wave of gifted younger countertenors which also includes Philippe Jaroussky, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Iestyn Davies, Franco Fagioli, John Holiday, and Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen. The popularity of Baroque opera has pushed this voice type out of the niche category and, in some cases, into crossover celebrity. Jaroussky has long been a media star in France. Costanzo has won notice for his appearances in Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten”—he will sing the role at the Met next season—and for a chaotic but memorable multimedia spectacle called “Glass Handel,” in which he performs Glass and Handel arias in ornate costumes while dancers swirl and videos play. Orliński, who is twenty-eight, is the rare countertenor—possibly the only countertenor—who can break-dance. He reportedly incorporated a move called the windmill into a production of Francesco Cavalli’s “Erismena,” at the Aixen-Provence Festival, in 2017. Modern countertenors have overcome the pale, pinched sound of yore, finding a stronger core to their tone. Orliński’s voice is warm and bright, almost clarinet-like in timbre. Exceptional breath control allows him to spin out tensile, buoyant phrases. He swoops across wide intervals with little sense of a break between registers. The sheer polish of his

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singing can lead to a certain sameness; at times, I wanted sharper diction and better-defined contrasts. Still, his feeling for the music was profound. What sets Orliński apart is his inventive choice of repertory. Half the pieces that he sang at Weill also appear on his recent Warner Classics album, titled “Anima Sacra,” a collaboration with the ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro. Orliński devised the program in consultation with the Guadeloupean singer and dancer Yannis François, who moonlights as a researcher into overlooked Baroque repertory. François thought that Orliński was particularly suited to Baroque sacred music. Most of the composers gathered for “Anima Sacra” were active in Naples or in Dresden during the first part of the eighteenth century. Some works received their première recordings and may not have been performed in several centuries. The prize discoveries are two pieces by Fago, who figures in music history mainly as a teacher at Neapolitan conservatories. Fago’s “Confitebor” and “Tam non splendet” unfold like miniature operas, with vivid melodic writing and propulsive dance rhythms. The “Memoriam” section of the “Confitebor,” celebrating the Lord’s miraculous works, begins with a rugged, minor-mode instrumental unison, followed by an ethereal melisma on the word “memoriam”: a suggestion of dark earth against luminous sky. Orliński delivers these obscurities with such assurance that, after a few listens, they lodge in one’s memory as classics. The same is true of “Mea tormenta,” a slashing aria from Hasse’s oratorio “Sanctus Petrus et Sancta Maria Magdalena.” Orliński dispatched this incisively at Weill. On disk, he sings it with unrestrained ferocity, and Il Pomo d’Oro storms around him. Orliński, having opened his recital with Vivaldi’s “Stabat Mater,” returned at the end to familiar ground, offering as an encore the aria “Vedrò con mio diletto,” from Vivaldi’s “Giustino.” This is one of the loveliest laments in Baroque opera, and Orliński dedicated it to the memory of the great American baritone Sanford Sylvan, who had died, suddenly, a few days earlier. Sylvan was a singer of immaculate taste and acute expressivity; Orliński’s performance, charged with emotion and unerringly graceful, was a worthy tribute. 

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