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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 44 Deception, Inc.
Ronan Farrow The business of information warfare.
SKETCHBOOK
Roz Chast and 56 “The Rules, Guidelines, Principles, Precepts, Decrees, No-No’s,
Patricia Marx 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 48 “I Saw a House, a Field”
Ilya Kaminsky 64 “In a Time of Peace”
PUZZLES DEPT.
Natan Last 93 Anniversary Crossword
COVER
Kadir Nelson “Spring Blossoms”

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ARMORY
CONTRIBUTORS
PRESENTS

“ Adam Entous (“Deception, Inc.,” p. 44)
of riches and ruin. This is a
ticket worth cashing in your
gilt-edged securities for. Under
Sam Mendes’ impeccable
direction, its three actors –
Simon Russell Beale, Ben
Miles and Adam Godley – are
extraordinary. Behold them
with wonder.
REMARKABLE! “
Ben Brantley, The New York Times
is a staff writer. Previously, he was a re-
porter for the Washington Post, where
his team won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize
for national reporting.
Donald Antrim (“Everywhere and No-
where,” 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.
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 writ-
ten several books, including “The Per-
fect 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.

Michael Schulman (“A Living Docu-
ment,” p. 38) has contributed to the mag-
azine 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 pub-
lish the poetry collection “Deaf Re-
public” in March.
Kadir Nelson (Cover), an artist, has re-
ceived Caldecott Honors, a Sibert
Medal, and N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards.
He is the illustrator of the forthcom-
ing 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.”

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

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By Stefano Massini Adapted by Ben Power

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THE MAIL
SEPARATE BUT EQUAL
Louis Menand, in his piece on the
history of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Su-
preme 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., seg-
regation) was embedded and prac-
ticed 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 sep-
aration in schools, arguing that the
principle of equality under the law
was a great theoretical concept but
impossible to implement when “ap-
plied to the actual and various con-
ditions of persons within society.”
Thus the separate-but-equal doctrine
entered American legal history. A sub-
sequent case in Massachusetts, Pin-
dall 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-separa-
tion laws endured for the next cen-
tury, 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 “de-
crees that any person born in the United
States is a citizen, and that states may
not abridge the privileges or immuni-
ties of citizens; nor deprive them of
life, liberty, or property without due
process of law; nor deny them the equal
Our members
return each year
protection of the laws.” This para-
as faithfully as
phrasing understates just how radical the tides.
the amendment was: in fact, the clause
extends equal protection and due pro-
cess 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 unconstitu-
tional 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 demon-
strated 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 Chi-
nese 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 Situated on 2,500 acres of unspoiled
leaders, this language was, in part, the paradise, Ocean Reef provides a long list
result of a cynical political calculus. of unsurpassed amenities to its
Plantation owners knew that they were Members including a 175-slip marina, two
sitting on a human powder keg: they 18-hole golf courses, tennis facilities,
were outnumbered and despised by state-of-the-art medical center,
those they lorded over. Keeping the K-8 school, private airport and more.
races apart was a way of preventing
African-Americans from gaining the There are only two ways to experience
resources and the knowledge that might Ocean Reef Club’s Unique Way of Life –
enable them to rise up against their as a guest of a member or through
oppressors and free themselves. A sim- the pages of Living magazine.
ilar type of insecurity and fear charac- Visit OceanReefClubMagazine.com
terizes exclusionary racial policies today, or call 305.367.5921 to request your
against, for example, migrants from complimentary copy.
Central America.
John V. H. Dippel
Salisbury, Conn.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
PRIVATE • AUTHENTIC • UNIQUE
 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
Eddie and Dave affairs and heartaches, hopes and frustrations.
What’s less ordinary is how the playwright
Atlantic Stage 2 Stephen Belber tells her story: in nonchro-
The playwright Amy Staats’s teasing tribute nological vignettes that jump around various
The American Tradition to the cock-rock band Van Halen, directed by points in her life. Johanna Day (“Sweat”) does
Margot Bordelon, offers a smart and funny not inflect her portrayal as her character’s age
13th Street Repertory take on a variety of themes: nostalgia, the shifts, suggesting that Joan has always been
The title of Ray Yamanouchi’s new play creative process, rock-star insecurity. But its the same throughout the decades. It’s a daring
could refer to its subject, slavery, or to this masterstroke is to cast women as the band choice that may turn off some audience mem-
country’s skill at wrestling entertainment members, a choice that effortlessly transforms bers, but it gives Joan a sense of unshakable—
out of unlikely topics—in this case, the tale the play into a vivacious dissertation on the bordering on self-centered—integrity. Adam
of two nineteenth-century runaways trying performance of gender. Staats herself is oddly Harrington and Marjan Neshat are marvellous
to make their way north. The light-skinned touching as Eddie, an innocent often lost in as Joan’s family and friends, and Adrienne
Eleanor (Sydney Cole Alexander) crosses the wilds of stardom; Adina Verson is hilar- Campbell-Holt directs with her usual sensitive
racial and gender barriers by passing as a iously businesslike as his drummer brother, touch for the Colt Coeur company. Even when
white gentleman, while her husband, Bill Alex; and, most impressively, Megan Hill nails it’s overwritten (which is often), “Joan” is a
(Martin K. Lewis), tags along as the freshly the restless envy underlying David Lee Roth’s fractured portrait that holds together.—E.V.
minted dandy’s personal slave. On their jour- manic, hammy charisma. The costumes and (Through Feb. 16.)
ney, they encounter the leader (Alex Herrald) wigs, by Montana Levi Blanco and Cookie
of a movement dubbed Not All Slavers and Jordan, are appropriately appalling. In a better
a woke train conductor (Hunter Canning), world, this is what a Broadway jukebox musi- Mies Julie
who brags, “I’m an ally.” Directed by Axel cal would look like.—R.R. (Through Feb. 17.)
Avin, Jr., for New Light Theatre Project, the Classic Stage Company
gleefully anachronistic show is admittedly a From its opening moments, this production
bit of a mess, but it also has a rambunctious Joan of Yaël Farber’s 2012 adaptation of August
punk-rock energy that’s all too rare on our Strindberg’s 1889 play “Miss Julie” (in reper-
increasingly sanitized stages.—Elisabeth Vin- HERE tory with “The Dance of Death”), set in the
centelli (Through Feb. 16.) In many ways, Joan has led a normal existence: modern-day hinterlands of South Africa and
daughter and mother, lover and wife, sister steeped in its twisted racial politics, is super-
and friend, artist and teacher. She has had charged with portent. There’s no chance that
Colin Quinn: Red State Blue State
Minetta Lane Theatre OFF BROADWAY
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.)

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 Earlier this winter, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris seized the attention
Julie”), extracts maximum comedy from its of the downtown theatre world with “Slave Play,” at New York Theatre
grim scenario: over several bruising days in
the decommissioned Swedish island prison Workshop—a kinky, disturbing, and unsparing sendup of the sexual
they call home, Edgar (Richard Topol), an baggage between black and white Americans. Harris, a third-year
arrogant but blundering military officer, and student at the Yale School of Drama, is poised to make another splash
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIANO PONZI

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.)
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 (Char-
layne 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 ac-
tivists—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 Ber-
rigan 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 Berri-
gan’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 pro-
duction 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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 of-
fense. 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
1
be true for the next. (2/4/19)—Sarah Larson
(Through March 17.)
ART
“Bruce Nauman”
Museum of Modern Art
This immense retrospective, titled “Disap-
pearing Acts,” which is also at MOMA PS1,
in Long Island City, is a discontinuous pa-
rade 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 art-
ist. 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 pur-
pose, 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 wish-
fully 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 paint-
ings by Jackson Pollock: “Pasiphaë” (1943),
a quaking compaction of mythological ele-
ments, 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
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 vulner-
abilities: 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
CHELSEA Have scrolling and swiping replaced
thinking and feeling? Is your credit card racist?
In “Animal Static,” a hilarious but pointed ex-
hibition 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 entertainment-
industrial 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 chal-
lenging as transcribing a script by Ryan Tre-
cartin, 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.)
Doris Guo
Bodega
DOWNTOWN 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.)
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 documen-
tary 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
AT THE GALLERIES 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 view-
ing 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.)

“God Made My Face”

Zwirner
CHELSEA This beautifully calibrated group exhi-
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 An-
thony 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; pho-
For eighteen years, Janice Guy was best known as the co-proprietor tographs of the piers in Manhattan, taken by
of Murray Guy, the thinking person’s gallery—more Kunsthalle than Alvin Baltrop during the pre-AIDS heyday of
commercial showcase—that she ran with Margaret Murray, in Chelsea, gay liberation, convey carnal desire. Each choice

1
by Als eloquently amplifies the polyphony of
until 2017. The British-born Guy’s sixth sense for experimentalist talent Baldwin’s voice.—A.K.S. (Through Feb. 16.)
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 CLASSICAL MUSIC
and Hilla Becher. You can see their typological influence in Guy’s unti-
tled, 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 Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
reliable source for intelligent art, Higher Pictures, on the Upper East Side Carnegie Hall
(through March 9). If Guy was typologizing any subject, it was the female Holland’s prestigious Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra rolls into town with two tradi-
psyche, replacing the male gaze with her camera. For twenty-five years, tional but vital programs. The first includes
her work was on hiatus, stored by a former classmate, the esteemed pho- Schumann’s “Manfred” Overture—played
tographer Thomas Struth. He contributes an essay to a recently published alongside members of the National Youth Or-
chestra—and a pair of canonical symphonies:
book on these incisive pictures, available at the gallery, which has produced Brahms’s Fourth, and Mozart’s famous No. 40
its own scrappier but no less beautiful publication.—Andrea K. Scott (you know the tune). The second night opens
with “Eiréné”—a new work, named for the
Greek word for “peace,” by the lively, space-
obsessed French composer Guillaume Con-
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HIGHER PICTURES

mini-survey are almost stupefyingly beauti-
ful, despite their sometimes dark heart. Dun-
geon 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.)
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 retro-
spective of her work, in 2017, this career-span-
ning exhibition, curated by Flavia Frigeri, is
a fine introduction to her early, tauntingly
explicit drawings, her poured and splattered
nesson—followed by Beethoven’s “Emperor”
Concerto, played by the uncompromising pia-
nist Pierre-Laurent Aimard. Richard Strauss’s
lofty tone poem “Ein Heldenleben,” which
closes the program, is a record of its compos-
er’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

10 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

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French director and costume designer Laurent
Pelly taps into the work’s sauciness, turning
Marie, an orphan taken in by a military regi-
ment, into a tomboy with a rebellious streak.
The current revival stars the bel-canto stal-
warts 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 Vegas-
inspired production.—Oussama Zahr (Feb.
15, Feb. 23, and Feb. 26 at 8, Feb. 18 at 7:30, and
March 2 at 1.)
“Dido and Aeneas”
Willson Theatre, Juilliard School
There’s certainly a precedent for Juilliard Op-
era’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.)
“Metamorphosen”
Alice Tully Hall
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
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 en-
sembles performing modernist works that
incorporate both ancient folkloric evoca-
tions 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—In-
ternational Contemporary Ensemble and
Yarn/Wire—present a mix of new and re-
cent 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
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
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 with-
out 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.)
William Basinski
St. George’s Episcopal Church
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-
lion years ago. This concert, which also fea-
tures 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 mu-
sicianship, 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 Ro-
many life, “Zigeunerlieder.” But then the pro-
gram 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
1
Jennifer Johnson Cano) and how it consumes
him.—O.Z. (Feb. 24 at 3.)
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 chamber-
and electro-pop to psychedelic rock and retro
jazz. But all the extra adornments fall away for
this Appel Room performance of “MassEduca-
tion,” 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
ILLUSTRATION BY PAIGE VICKERS
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,
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 reper-
toire 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.)
ART

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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 nam-
ing her label Jackathon Jams.—Michaelangelo
Matos (Feb. 16.)

Interpol
Madison Square Garden
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
© AS America, Inc. 2018

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 Ham- CLASSIC GOLDEN ERA MODERN CONTEMPORARY
burg’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
New Yorker
S.O.B.’s
Prince nurtured many female artists through-
Cover Prints
out his career, and the Dominican-American
singer and rapper DaniLeigh was among his last newyorkerstore.com
protégées. Following creative impulses gleaned
from the late icon, she stacks breezy vocals and
staccato rhymes over well-manicured R. & B. Carl Fornaro, March 21, 1925
and hip-hop beats on her album “The Plan,”
from November. The effort is almost too pol-
ished, but DaniLeigh’s grit and clear-eyed confi-
dence break out on songs such as the swaggering

THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 13

 tone so deep and textured that it transfixes
JAZZ FUSION 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-by-
new-school mien, he makes music that’s as
timeless as it is endearing.—B.Y. (Feb. 22.)

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 in-
tricacies of a doomed love affair—such as on
the soaring Spanglish cut “When I’m with
Him”—her music never loses its bright ef-
fervescence.—J.L. (Feb. 22-23.)

Piano Master
In 2015, Kendrick Lamar’s acclaimed album “To Pimp a Butterfly” flung Appel Room
open a portal to new jazz for audiences previously unaware of or unin- A superman of mainstream jazz piano, the
terested in the genre’s offerings. But the bassist and vocalist Thundercat late Canadian-born virtuoso Oscar Peterson
could do almost anything with his instru-
and the saxophonist Kamasi Washington, both of whom appeared on ment; attempting to prove just that in the
that record, had already long been mainstays of L.A.’s bustling mod- space of any given performance may have
ern-jazz scene and members of the influential collective West Coast Get been his chief weakness. Prolix though he
could be, Peterson remains a lasting keyboard
Down. On the 2017 album “Drunk,” Thundercat injects his sharp and influence. Established piano stylists—includ-
freewheeling musicianship with whimsical flourishes, while “Heaven ing Kenny Barron, Benny Green, Gonzalo
and Earth,” Washington’s ambitious double release from last year, is a Rubalcaba, and Gerald Clayton—along with
Peterson’s old rhythm mate, the drummer
transcendent meditation on jazz music’s past and present. This pair of Jeff Hamilton, celebrate this most popular
Brainfeeder labelmates—each brilliant in his own right—are leaders of a of postwar jazz artists.—S.F. (Feb. 22-23.)
charge that is reshaping the genre and triumphantly returning it to main-
stream consciousness. Thundercat embarks on a six-night, fourteen-show Hailu Mergia
residency at the Blue Note on Feb. 12; Washington brings his horn and Brooklyn Baazar
his ten-piece band to the Apollo Theatre on Feb. 23.—Briana Younger In the seventies, Hailu Mergia played key-
boards in Ethiopia’s Walias Band, whose
marathon sets often stretched into daylight
“Lil Bebe,” giving her smoother, feel-good reper- a topnotch quartet, featuring the pianist Aaron to accommodate audiences wary of violat-
toire a razor-sharp edge.—Julyssa Lopez (Feb. 17.) Parks, the bassist Ben Street, and the drummer ing the government’s curfew. Long based in
Gregory Hutchinson.—S.F. (Feb. 19-24.) Washington, D.C.—of the city’s taxi-drivers,
he must be the funkiest—Mergia recently
MNEK reëmerged with “Lala Belu,” an album of
Bowery Ballroom Buddy / Vince Staples shadowy, accordion-laden jams that he
worked out between fares. He plays the Soul
MNEK may be only twenty-three, but he has Hammerstein Ballroom Clap & Dance-Off party, featuring Jonathan
an ear for pop music that allows him to create The Compton rapper and vocalist Buddy is Toubin and his celebrated trove of 45s.—J.R.
big hits. The U.K.-born singer-songwriter’s a preacher’s son who, on his recent album (Feb. 23.)
lyrics and melodies—displayed on songs by “Harlan & Alondra,” taps into hip-hop’s
Madonna, Dua Lipa, and Beyoncé—have mellow side with soulful hooks and hopeful
earned him much success behind the scenes. verses. The project is an auditory elixir stirred Jacquees
But last year he poured his gifts into his own with syncopated guitar solos, 808 drums, and
work, with a début album titled “Language”—a gospel-inspired meditations on faith and the Irving Plaza
glorious project showcasing the breadth of his herculean task of lifting himself and his family A product of Internet savviness, Jacquees
ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTI

vocals and emotions.—Lakin Starling (Feb. 19.)
Dayna Stephens Quartet
Village Vanguard
The riveting post-bop saxophonist Dayna Ste-
phens has already proved his worth on this band-
stand as a trusted associate in the ensembles
of Kenny Barron and others. For this critical
engagement, though, he débuts at the helm of
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-
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

14 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

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 sing-
er-songwriter opened 2019 with his heartfelt
recording “Assume Form.” A musical poly-
math, he expanded his sound with contribu-
tions 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 stun-
stretch as they spin and tumble. Balancing such as a première by Wiles for students
together in extreme positions, dropping and from the University of Utah, with a score by
catching each other, they hint at the desire the esteemed jazz trumpeter Tom Harrell.
for union suggested by the title (Latin for But the news is the participation of Amar
“not alone”). Yet the show, beginning behind Ramasar, who made a splash on Broadway last
a plastic sheet that’s like a shower curtain, year in “Carousel,” and was fired from New
stays misty, its risk and beauty continually York City Ballet in September, after being
dampened by ponderous pacing and kitschy accused of texting sexually explicit photos
music. It’s a cabaret act overextended.—B.S. of female dancers. He’ll be dancing Mauro
(Feb. 14-16.) Bigonzetti’s “BachGround” with his former
City Ballet colleague Maria Kowroski.—B.S.
(Feb. 19-23.)
Kathy Westwater
New York Live Arts Complexions
A veteran of the experimental-dance scene,
Westwater has, for more than twenty years, Joyce Theatre
been plumbing the very private and elusive For most of its twenty-five years of exis-
subject of the ways in which our bodies pro- tence, Complexions Contemporary Ballet
cess pain and trauma. Research for “Rambler, has endured critical disapproval of its flashy
Worlds Worlds a Part”—a piece for seven aesthetic and its relentless, all-exclamation-

1
ningly visceral listening experience.—L.S. dancers, co-presented by Lumberyard— points preening. And, for most of that time,
(Feb. 24-25.) included exploration of the dancers’ own such complaints have had little to no effect on
traumatic memories and workshops with its loyal, adoring audience. Its silver-anniver-
individuals experiencing oppression, illness, sary programs at the Joyce include a greatest-
and social exclusion. The score, which will be hits compilation, as well as the premières of
DANCE played live, is by the post-minimalist Amer- the supposedly neoclassical “Bach 25” and
ican composer Julius Eastman.—M.H. (Feb. the topical “Woke.”—B.S. (Feb. 19-24 and
14-16.) Feb. 26-March 3.)
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch BalletNext Farruquito
If you’re looking for a primer to Petipa’s
“Sleeping Beauty,” New York City Ballet’s New York Live Arts Town Hall
production (Feb. 13-24) is the thing: swift This season of Michele Wiles’s company By the time Farruquito was a teen-ager, in
and to the point. Somehow—mainly by cut- features the usual assortment of novelties, the mid-nineties, he was considered heir
ting 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 IN PRAISE OF PAINTING
Rose Adagio, with its perilous balances on
point; George Balanchine’s kaleidoscopic
Garland Dance; and the climactic wedding
Dutch Masterpieces
pas de deux, with its grandiose melodies
and heart-quickening “fish dives”—a move
AT THE MET
in which the ballerina spins and then dives
precipitously forward, only to be caught, at
the very last moment, by her cavalier.—Ma-
rina Harss (Through March 3.)

Gallim
Joyce Theatre
Last May, as the first choreographer to serve
as artist-in-residence at the Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, Andrea Miller presented dances
that were like anthropological fantasies:
sweaty, sculptural, not wholly convincing evo-
cations of early humans. “To Create a World,” “How great
her latest piece for her troupe, Gallim, takes are the Met’s
those ideas further, expressing the instinct to
survive as an impulse to twist, flex, and arch holdings in
in the Gaga style of Ohad Naharin.—Brian the Dutch
Seibert (Feb. 12-17.) Golden Age?
Very.”
Recirquel
—The New Yorker
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 Now on view metmuseum.org #MetDutchMasterpieces
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC

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 thirteen-
year absence that included a prison term,
revealed him, in his mid-thirties, to be still a
traditionalist, still a heartthrob, still a virtu-
oso of extraordinary brilliance and shading.
For his current production, named after him-
self, 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 cir-
cus arts covered: acrobatics, juggling, illu-
sionism, 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 hun-
dred 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 nineteen-
sixties 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 (Nata-
lia 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-
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 appli-
cants 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.)

MODERN DANCE The Favourite

The new Yorgos Lanthimos film is his friend-
liest to date, though admirers should not
fret. The people in the story—best thought
of as human animals—are every bit as malef-
icent 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, con-
cerning Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). She is
attended by Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of
Marlborough (Rachel Weisz), who guides the
sovereign’s political thinking and occasion-
ally 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.)

Hotel by the River

In this, the centenary year of Merce Cunningham’s birth, discussions of This melodramatic comedy by the South
his philosophy and choreography are proliferating like the wild mush- Korean director Hong Sang-soo is a sharp and
bittersweet confrontation with love, art, fam-
rooms that John Cage—Cunningham’s partner in life and art—so loved ily, and mortality. It’s set in a seaside resort
to harvest and cook. When Cunningham’s company ceased to exist, in during the winter off-season and centered on
2011, two years after his death, there was reason to worry that his legacy two of its few guests: a young woman (Kim
Min-hee) who’s seeking refuge from a bad
might languish. So it has been heartening to see the determination with breakup with a married man, and an elderly
which his former dancers continue to spread the word by teaching and man, a renowned poet (Ki Joo-bong), who’s
staging his works. Silas Riener was one of the troupe’s most striking there at the invitation of the resort’s manager,
a fan. The woman is visited by a female friend
and daredevil performers in its final years; in a program called “Runs who offers company and consolation; the poet
ILLUSTRATION BY ANA GALVAÑ

the Gamut: Exploring the Creative Legacy of Merce Cunningham,” at is joined by his grown sons—the younger is
Baryshnikov Arts Center on Feb. 16, Riener leads a group of young a well-known film director, and the elder is
jealous of their father’s admiration. The trav-
dancers from the Ailey School, Juilliard, N.Y.U.’s Tisch, and Harvard in ellers’ paths drolly and poignantly crisscross,
a discussion and a demonstration of Cunningham’s rigorous technique and Hong builds a scheme of coincidences
and pathbreaking approach to composition. The composer Tei Blow into a volatile tangle of misunderstandings,
memories, premonitions, fantasies, and
will provide accompaniment using found objects, microphones, and dreams. The brisk and lyrical action, filmed
prepared piano.—Marina Harss in chilly black-and-white tones, is adorned

16 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019

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with eccentric, symbolic details; the petty
stuff of daily life shudders with stifled con-
flict and looming calamity. In Korean.—R.B.
(In limited release.)
Late Spring
Noriko (Setsuko Hara), a widowed profes-
sor’s adult daughter, loves the scholarly Hat-
tori (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 ac-
ceptable 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 ex-
pression. 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
AT THE MOVIES
relief from the universal tyranny of love. In
Japanese.—R.B. (BAM, Feb. 18, and streaming.)
Minding the Gap
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 ther-
apy, 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 hard-
won progress, a passionate form of political
action.—R.B. (In limited release and on Hulu.)
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 (Se-
bastian 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 school-
teacher 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 physi-
cal 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 ur-
gent matters as labor politics, school inte-
gration, the devastating legacies of subju-
gation and humiliation, and the constant
threat of violence, which the drama renders
agonizingly personal.—R.B. (BAM, Feb. 16.)

A Star Is Born
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
This year’s edition of MOMA’s wide-ranging “Doc Fortnight” series directs a fresh version of the well-worn tale,
and takes the leading role; he plays a rock star
(Feb. 21-28) presents the U.S. première of “Chaos,” the second feature named Jackson Maine, who drops into a bar
by the Syrian filmmaker Sara Fattahi, who’s one of the most original and finds Ally (Lady Gaga) raising the roof.
documentarians working today. Her first, “Coma,” from 2015 (and still Before long, she is sharing a stage with him,
and then a bed, but happiness lies beyond
unreleased in the U.S.), shows three generations of women in her family his grasp. The film is intrusive and intense,
confined, by war, to their apartment in her native Damascus. In “Chaos,” surveying their rocky relationship and their
Fattahi, who now lives in Vienna, films the war from the perspective bonds with other people—Jackson’s brother
(Sam Elliott), Ally’s father (Andrew Dice
COURTESY LITTLE MAGNET FILMS

of exile, both inner and outer. A woman in Damascus whose son was Clay), and the smooth Svengali (Rafi Gavron)
killed by the regime stays indoors and tends his memory with a ritual- who guides her rising career. To follow the
istic devotion—and contemplates vengeance with a Shakespearean fury. example of Judy Garland and Barbra Strei-
sand requires nerve, but Lady Gaga takes

1
Another woman, whose brother was killed in Syria, has taken refuge in possession of the movie, and her singing sets
Sweden; in the depth of her grief, she also contends with mental illness. it ablaze.—A.L. (10/8/18) (In wide release.)
Doing her own camerawork, Fattahi creates images of an overwhelmingly
expressive intimacy; she evokes the soul-shattering traumas of war while For more reviews, visit
finding their cultural reflections in her new life in Europe.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

18 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019


1
TABLES FOR TWO
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 is-
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID WILLIAMS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
land’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 volca-
nic, but the wine was. On another eve-
ning, 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’Don-
nell—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 en-
countered, a beautiful, delicate pile of
celery leaves, shaved fennel, and radic-
chio, dressed lightly in a Meyer-lemon
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 pearl-
shaped 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 Ital-
ian 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
19
 DRAMA IN
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 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
HOUSE CLEANING
he crisis of democracy that has at-
T tended 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 rage-
tweeted about an alleged three million
non-citizens whose ballots delivered the
popular-vote majority to Hillary Clin-
ton. His fulminations were a fanciful ex-
tension of the Republican Party’s con-
cern, 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 de-
mocracy is being undermined.
Nearly two million fewer African-
Americans 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 commu-
nities. Civil-rights groups and members
of the Congressional Black Caucus point
to another factor as well: 2016 was the
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
first Presidential election since the
Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court
decision, which eviscerated sections of
the Voting Rights Act. Suppressive tac-
tics, some old, some new, ensued—
among them, voter-roll purges; discrim-
inatory voter-I.D. rules; fewer polling
places and voting machines; and reduc-
tions in early-voting periods. After an
election in which some two million
Americans went missing, the Admin-
istration concluded that three million
too many had shown up at the polls.
(The equation here is: reality minus de-
lusion equals three million.)
Last week, with these events in mind,
a hearing on H.R. 1, the For the Peo-
ple Act, took place in the House of Rep-
resentatives. Elijah Cummings, Dem-
ocrat of Maryland, the new chair of
the Committee on Oversight and Re-
form, referred to the bill, in his open-
ing remarks, as “one of the boldest re-
form packages to be considered in the
history of this body.” He added, “This
sweeping legislation will clean up cor-
ruption in government, fight secret
money in politics, and make it easier for
American citizens across this great
country to vote.” That statement was
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
not partisan hyperbole. The bill is a
broad, imaginative, and ambitious set
of responses to the most pressing chal-
lenges 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 funda-
mentally, 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 ac-
curacy of voting results; to establish early
voting in all states for federal elections;
and to launch independent redistrict-
ing commissions, to address the prob-
lem of partisan gerrymandering.
A federal matching system for small-
dollar 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 can-
didates would be required to release their
tax returns. The bill also includes provi-
sions for mandating transparency in dig-
ital-ad spending, strengthening disclo-
sure 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
21
since 1965, when the bill was signed. The
Court, however, left open the possibil-
ity that Congress might bring it in line
with more recent circumstances, if war-
ranted. H.R. 1 could spur the creation
of new formulas for determining which
states should be subject to federal over-
sight. It might, for example, be pos-
sible to take into account recent voter-
suppression 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 be-
hind 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
TABOO DEPT.
CODE RED
everal years ago, when Helen Yenser
S was a senior at Oakwood School, a
private K-12 school in North Holly-
wood, 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 meet-
ing of the Pad Project, a school club
she launched after learning, on a field
trip to the United Nations Commis-
sion 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-mak-
ing machine—comprising a grinder, a
block, a press, and an ultraviolet mi-
crowave—to Kathikhera, a rural vil-
lage on the outskirts of New Delhi,
where girls don’t have much access to
pads or tampons and typically drop out
22 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 pre-
dicted that federal employees would
use the time to volunteer for Demo-
cratic campaigns.
It’s not uncommon for a single bill
to encompass such a wide range of con-
cerns. 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 in-
terference in the 2016 election. Intelli-
gence agencies, media outlets, and in-
dependent researchers have consistently
pointed to Russian intentions to sway
the electorate in Trump’s favor. Possi-
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 peri-
ods.) The Oakwood students also raised
enough to bring on a director and make
a short documentary about what hap-
pened when the machine arrived in
Kathikhera and some of the women,
most of whom had never before had
money of their own, became entre-
preneurs. The film, “Period. End of
Sentence,” has been nominated for an
Oscar. “Sometimes people think it’s a
film about grammar,” Rayka Zehtab-
chi, 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 fac-
ulty adviser and a producer on the film.
She is also Yenser’s mom. (Other pro-
ducers include Lisa Taback, a Holly-
wood publicist who specializes in cam-
paigning for Oscars, and her daughter,
a founding member of the club.) Pad
Project alumni, many of them at far-
flung 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
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 med-
dling. Russian attempts to influence
American voters—including ad pur-
chases on social media intended to fo-
ment 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 adver-
saries. H.R. 1 is the most cogent cor-
rective 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 prac-
tices that subtract citizens from the
electorate.
—Jelani Cobb
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,” Zeh-
tabchi said.
“In India, a lot of the time, if a fam-
ily discovers their daughter is menstru-
ating they try to bury it, and keep si-
lent about it, because once a woman
menstruates she becomes a target for
sexual abuse and harassment,” Zehtab-
chi 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 wom-
en’s bodies every month.”
For Zehtabchi, the most revealing
moment of the project was when she
went unannounced into a coed class-
room in Kathikhera and asked the
teacher to have the students define a
period. The teacher called on a teen-
age girl and asked her to stand. For two
and a half excruciating minutes, the girl
writhed, unable to answer. “We discov-
ered 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
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was uncomfortable,” Zehtabchi said.
At first, the Kathikhera women told
their male relations that the pad ma-
chine made Huggies. By the film’s end,
Sneha, a young woman who is financ-
ing 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 respect-
ful.” 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,” Zeh-
tabchi 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 Bolly-
wood musical, tells the story of Aruna-
chalam Muruganantham, the inventor
of the machine installed in Kathikhera.
“I don’t know if the United States
would ever do a big Hollywood block-
buster about pads,” Yenser said.
“Give it a year,” Zehtabchi said.
—Dana Goodyear
24 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
1
EXCURSIONS
SPACE ROCK
n a recent Friday, the musician
O 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 par-
ents, 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, look-
ing pleased. “When I’m doing some-
thing Delirium-oriented, I tend to put
on a captain’s hat, or Navy attire.”
In the past couple of decades, Len-
non, a versatile performer and skilled
guitarist, has released two solo albums,
scored films, started a record label, acted,
and appeared on albums by, among oth-
ers, Marianne Faithfull and Lady Gaga.
His prog-rock duo, Claypool Lennon
Delirium, with the far-out Primus bass-
ist, 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 ex-
acting, if not militaristic, deployments
of whimsy, with a frisson of psyche-
delic Beatles. The new one begins with
wind chimes—they recorded at Clay-
pool’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 ab-
sinthe 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
with egg-crate walls and eggplant-col-
ored 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,” Len-
non said. “That giraffe eventually disin-
tegrated. This reminded me of the one
that I had in my room.” Later in Feb-
ruary, 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 chemis-
try. As a solo artist, Lennon wrote about
his own life; working with Claypool pro-
vokes 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 curi-
ous 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 newspa-
per,” Lennon said. It wasn’t. But Len-
non later showed the clip to Claypool,
who quickly wrote some music and lyr-
ics: “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 Rus-
sian boy who “claimed to be a star child,
an indigo child, who was a reincarna-
tion 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 In-
finite 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 clus-
ter of symbols. “This is the sign for ‘ap-
proximate’ 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
1
like a good son.”
—Sarah Larson
ROUNDS
SEEKING HEAT
mong the least shocking Trump-
A family revelations of the past
year: the New York City Council
launched an investigation into Kush-
ner Companies, the firm once run by
the President’s son-in-law, for what one
council member described as “the wea-
ponization of construction.” Step 1: Buy
a building full of rent-stabilized ten-
ants who are paying below market rate.
“Astonish me.”
Step 2: Bang and drill until they leave.
“The Kushners are just one of many,
many predatory landlords,” Noelle Fran-
cois 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 an-
other weapon of bad landlords: turning
down the heat. City law requires apart-
ments 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’ apart-
ments. 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 tempera-
ture’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 out-
side. Murphy, a legal secretary, sat on
her bed, wearing leg warmers and two
sweaters. She has lupus, a disease that
affects her lungs, kidneys, and joints,
and the cold aggravates her condition.
Francois, who is petite and blond-
ish, 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 own-
ers 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 some-
one 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 some-
times I’m sleeping in a hat!”
Francois stood up and handed Mur-
phy a form. “This is the tenant agree-
ment,” 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,” Mur-
phy said.
Francois mounted the sensor, then
applied a strip of shiny tamper tape to
its base. “If you rip it off, it leaves a res-
idue,” she explained. “If there’s no res-
idue, 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 sen-
sor 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 pin-
striped 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
1
back to Bushwick.
—Jeanie Riess
THE PICTURES
HELLO, GORGEOUS
he first time the actor Richard E.
T Grant met Barbra Streisand, they
spoke for twenty-two minutes. He re-
cently recalled the encounter, which took
place at a house party somewhere “above
Sunset Boulevard,” in 1991. She was wear-
ing 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!”) Strei-
sand 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 ex-
citement 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, Brook-
lyn. The destination was 3102 Newkirk
Avenue, the housing complex where Strei-
sand grew up. It was the first stop on
Grant’s tour of Streisand’s New York—a
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 rhap-
sodic 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 Holly-
wood 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 beau-
tiful 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 wag-
gish con man in Marielle Heller’s “Can
You Ever Forgive Me.” On a social-me-
dia 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 grate-
ful that Barbra Streisand did not have
me arrested or sue me for, you know, tak-
ing 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 pub-
lished two gossipy volumes littered with
boldface names. “Who, and how, and
where people come from so informs ev-
erything about them,” he said. “So now
I’m in actual Streisand Land.”
The next stop was the former Eras-
mus Hall High School, a Gothic build-
ing on Flatbush Avenue. Grant was dis-
mayed to find no mention of Streisand
on the façade. “She was, like, an A-
triple-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 En-
gland!” he chirped, to a security guard
monitoring a metal detector. “Am I al-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
lowed to have a look?” He was not. An-
other 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 relation-
ship 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 lac-
quered red door padlocked. Grant la-
mented 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 Clin-
tons 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
27

THE POLITICAL SCENE
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 Lau-
R derdale, is situated between a quiet
street and one of the city’s canals,
which are the only feature Fort Lau-
derdale 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 Pres-
ident and photographs of Stone with
candidates for whom he’s worked.
There’s one of Arlen Specter, the late
senator from Pennsylvania, and sev-
eral of Stone with Donald Trump,
whose political aspirations Stone has
championed since the nineteen-eight-
ies. When I visited him, on a quiet af-
ternoon in early January, the room also
28 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
featured a reminder of the crisis that
was enveloping him—and his char-
acteristic response to it. In a pair of
cardboard boxes, there were dozens of
polished rocks, which Stone was au-
tographing and selling: “Roger stones,”
to benefit his legal-defense fund. As
subsequent developments have demon-
strated, 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 Muel-
ler, 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 for-
mer madam and onetime New York
gubernatorial candidate.
According to Matthew Whitaker,
the acting Attorney General, Muel-
ler’s investigation of Russian inter-
ference in the 2016 election is “close
to being completed,” but Mueller has
not yet said whether he believes that
anyone on the Trump campaign col-
luded 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. di-
rector. Nevertheless, Mueller’s legal
filings, which include indictments and
sentencing memorandums, have cre-
ated an almost novelistic narrative,
featuring rich portraits of the politi-
cal and personal motivations of a large
cast of characters. Mueller has shown
that Russian citizens and companies
created a stunning array of fake social-
media accounts to boost Trump and
damage Clinton, and that Russians
hacked and released, notably to Wiki-
Leaks, the e-mails of prominent Dem-
ocrats, including John Podesta, Clin-
ton’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 for-
mer personal lawyer; George Papado-
poulos, 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 trans-
atlantic quest for dirt. Mueller’s in-
dictment does not charge Stone with
BLOOMBERG/GETTY; ALBIN LOHR-JONES/CNP/POOL/DPA/ALAMY
PHOTOGRAPHS BY (FROM LEFT TO RIGHT): ALEX WROBLEWSKI/
any involvement in the hacking, but
accuses him of lying to the House
Permanent Select Committee on In-
telligence 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 some-
time 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 pre-
vent Credico from sharing what he
knew, sent menacing e-mails to him,
including one that said “Prepare to
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKE MCQUADE
die,” followed by an expletive. He also
threatened to steal Credico’s thirteen-
year-old therapy dog, a Coton de Tu-
lear 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 dream-
ing,” he told me on the phone in early
February, after his arraignment in fed-
eral 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 ap-
point 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 con-
cede nothing.”
Corsi has not been charged, but, in
December, he sued Mueller for three
hundred and fifty million dollars, say-
ing that the special counsel had en-
gaged in prosecutorial misconduct and
illegal surveillance, among other mis-
deeds. In this civil case, which is pend-
ing, Corsi is being represented by Larry
Klayman, a Washington lawyer and
eccentric best known for filing multi-
ple lawsuits against Bill Clinton’s Ad-
ministration. Also in December, Corsi
published an e-book, “Silent No More:
How I Became a Political Prisoner of
Mueller’s ‘Witch Hunt,’ ” which re-
counts his experiences with Mueller’s
team and what he calls being “men-
tally 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 satel-
lites 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 cor-
porate 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 no-
madic businessman. In middle age,
he began writing books whose con-
ceits—“Swift-boating,” “birtherism”—
became shorthand for journalistic ir-
responsibility. 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 plat-
inum 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 ev-
erything.” Corsi is a long-married sub-
urban burgher who lives in a McMan-
sion 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 informa-
tion on Eliot Spitzer, the former gov-
ernor. 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 de-
cide whether to charge Corsi, but the
geriatric bad boy and the literary char-
latan have a wider significance. Stone
and Corsi are, respectively, the pro-
genitor and the expositor of the world
view of the current President of the
United States. Stone’s vulgar narcis-
sism and his insistence on claiming
victory at all costs anticipated Trump’s.
Stone has Richard Nixon’s face tat-
tooed on his back and Nixon’s values
imprinted on his soul; the amoral ruth-
lessness of the thirty-seventh Presi-
dent 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 pur-
ported 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-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
termine the outcome of the epic clash
between the special counsel and the
President.
hen I had lunch with Stone in
W Fort Lauderdale, he was confi-
dent that he would not be indicted but
weary from the toll of the investiga-
tion. He was haunted, too, by the sit-
uation 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 devel-
oped a unique field of expertise.
“Manafort and I are both from Con-
necticut, 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 Federa-
tion rules, as are the College Republi-
can 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 fel-
low Connecticut native, Terry Dolan,
for president of the College Republi-
cans. (Dolan lost to Karl Rove.) Four
years later, Manafort managed Stone’s
run for president of the Young Repub-
licans. 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 de-
cade, 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 poli-
tician Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort
made many millions and spent lavishly,
especially on his own wardrobe, which
included a fifteen- thousand-dollar
29
ostrich-skin jacket, as Mueller’s pros-
ecutors 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 Re-
publican Convention. Trump then pro-
moted Manafort to chairman of his
campaign, and his tenure there, though
brief, is what brought him to Muel-
ler’s attention.
Stone acknowledges that he has had
nowhere near the financial success that
Manafort enjoyed after their partner-
ship ended. “Manafort was rolling at a
much higher level than yours truly,” he
told me. “I mean, I don’t have any for-
eign 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 aes-
thetic grounds. “It ’s not just that
Manafort’s suits were expensive, it’s also
that they didn’t fit,” he told me. “I ha-
ven’t bought a new suit in twenty years,
because, first of all, when you have cus-
tom-made suits—which I originally had
to do because I had forty-six-inch shoul-
ders 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 Rea-
gan cause. Stone visited Donald Trump,
who provided office space to the cam-
paign, 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 al-
ways felt that Roger was not only tough,
but a smart guy, and very political.”
When Stone opened his lobbying shop,
30 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 rul-
ing two-party élites, but he wants to
be appreciated for his accomplish-
ments.” 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 elec-
tion, 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 qual-
ity 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 fall-
ing-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 al-
ways liked” and “a character.” The two
may never have had a conventional al-
liance, 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 Pres-
idential 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
“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 na-
tional-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 Sub-
vert the President,” by Theodore Roo-
sevelt 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 Dem-
ocrats, 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 illegit-
imate 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 be-
havior 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 ob-
I sessions, 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 Dem-
ocrat. Corsi’s father often travelled to
Washington, and he had an unusual
method for dealing with his unfo-
cussed 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
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 In-
stitute for Advanced Study, in Prince-
ton, recalls little about Corsi as a stu-
dent, but he wrote a prescient letter of “The only time my muse ever shows up is when I’m on break.”
recommendation for him in 1971, the
year before Corsi received his doctor-
ate. “I believe him to be a strong can-
• •
didate for a job at a good university,”
Walzer wrote. “Jerry writes easily and erty and I’m a V.I.P. customer, and of is that it worked. Kerry never figured
well . . . he will certainly be a prolific course he’s going to be cordial.” out how to respond to it, and he lost.
scholar. . . . I have been a little over- The turning point in Corsi’s career So the book created a niche and fuelled
whelmed by his productivity.” came in 2004, when Kerry ran for other false narratives, like the birther
Notwithstanding Walzer’s hopes, President. Corsi teamed up with John movement, with Obama.”
Corsi never found a secure home in ac- O’Neill, who served with Kerry in Viet- Corsi has spent the rest of his ca-
ademia. He bounced around several nam, and they rushed out a deeply reer filling that niche, becoming a kind
campuses for about a decade, and began misleading book, called “Unfit for of ersatz Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., for
consulting for government agencies, Command,” which accused Kerry of the alt-right. With the energy that
work that seems to have pushed him falsifying and exaggerating his Navy Walzer recognized decades earlier, Corsi
further to the political right. Under combat record as a commander of a began turning out best-sellers at a pace
contract with a unit of the Department Swift boat. “John Kerry would like of nearly one a year. The books had
of Justice, Corsi later wrote, “one of my many people today to view his service copious details, hundreds of footnotes,
assignments was to work undercover in Vietnam as one of honor and cour- and monstrous distortions of key facts.
with the FBI to penetrate the Vietnam age,” the authors wrote. “But the real In 2008, Corsi produced another No. 1
Veterans Against the War (VVAW), a John Kerry of Vietnam was a man who best-seller, “The Obama Nation: Left-
vocal organization of anti-war activists filed false operating reports, who faked ist Politics and the Cult of Personal-
whose public figurehead at the time Purple Hearts, and who took a fast ity,” which claimed that the Demo-
was none other than John Kerry.” Even- pass through the combat zones.” As cratic nominee “is and always has been
tually, Corsi concluded, “I could never the Kerry campaign temporized about a radical on the far left.” (Among Cor-
truly succeed in an academic environ- whether to ignore the slurs or respond si’s bill of particulars was a three-page
ment that was beginning to be domi- to them, the book reached No. 1 on section headed “Obama Fails to Hold
nated by leftists.” the Times best-seller list. Douglas Hand Over Heart During National
For the next two decades, Corsi lived Brinkley, a Presidential historian at Anthem.”) Three years later, Corsi
at various times in Colorado, Oregon, Rice University, who wrote “Tour of published “Where’s the Birth Certifi-
and New Jersey, and worked in bank Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam cate?: The Case That Barack Obama
marketing. He was a regular at the Plaza War,” told me, “Corsi’s book is filled Is Not Eligible to Be President.” Writ-
Hotel, which at the time was owned with falsehoods, a fake history mas- ten with sneering condescension, and
by Donald Trump. Corsi told me, “I querading as some kind of truth. It was featuring racially inflammatory chap-
would say the relationship was pretty an unvetted attack document, a polit- ter headings such as “The Strange Case
typical for the owner of a major prop- ical hit job—but the important point of the Obama Mama,” the book never
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 31
came close to proving its thesis—that
Obama was born in Kenya. It, too, was
a best-seller.
As a prominent birther, Corsi be-
came better acquainted with Trump.
He travelled to Hawaii with investi-
gators 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 con-
versations would typically last ten,
fifteen minutes—very polite,” Corsi
said. Stone, who was in contact with
Trump at this time, responded cau-
tiously 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 be-
cause 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 con-
versation at the Harvard Club, he told
me that Obama’s release of his “long-
form” 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 responsi-
ble 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 Ho-
nolulu. There was a birth certificate.
There was an announcement in the
newspaper. It was just a totally nor-
mal situation.”
The connective tissue of Corsi’s
work is an insistence that the world
is not as it appears—that he is reveal-
ing secrets that powerful forces want
to preserve. Trump was the perfect
candidate for a world beset by con-
spiracies, because, as he put it in his
acceptance speech at the Republican
Convention, “nobody knows the sys-
tem 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. Ac-
cording 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, in-
cluding the White House, the Na-
tional Security Council, and numer-
ous intelligence agencies, including
the CIA.”
Like Stone, Corsi begins his defi-
nition of the deep state with Eisen-
hower’s military-industrial complex,
but he winds up lumping virtually ev-
eryone opposed to Trump under the
same rubric—the federal bureaucracy,
Democrats, the news media, and in-
ternational 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 conspir-
T acy 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 En-
lightenment figures such as Locke and
Montesquieu. But, as Bailyn spelled
out in his classic “The Ideological Or-
igins 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 con-
spiracy.” Bailyn noted that the Decla-
ration of Independence, after its fa-
mous opening lines, consists mostly
of an “enumeration of conspiratorial
efforts” against the American colonies.
This preoccupation “serves to link the
 Great Literary Works
Revolutionary generation to our own
in the most intimate way.”
Bailyn was writing in the aftermath
of the assassination of John F. Ken-
nedy, the fulcrum of modern conspir-
N E W I N PA P E R B A C K
acy 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 gripping, triumphant
a former journalist named Mike Co- adventure story.”
lapietro, is an extended diatribe against —Los Angeles Times
Johnson, but it offers little in the way
of proof (because there is none) that “ Exquisitely interesting.”
he was complicit in his predecessor’s —San Francisco Chronicle
murder. Corsi’s book “Who Really
Killed Kennedy?” portrays the assassi- A San Francisco Chronicle
nation as the product of the deep state. Best Book of the Year
He explores the purported roles of the
C.I.A. and organized crime in the mur-
der 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 “Beautiful and complex....
and bonded over their mutual disdain Hollinghurst achieves [a]
for the Bush family. Both strongly sup- kind of symphonic effect.”
ported Trump’s candidacy (notwith- —The New York Times Book Review
standing Stone’s unceremonious de-
parture from the campaign staff ), and “Undeniably the work of a master.”
their shared enthusiasm prompted —Chicago Tribune
them to meet, in February, 2016. Corsi
hosted a dinner at the Harvard Club A New York Times,
that appealed to Stone’s Dionysian ap- Philadelphia Inquirer, NPR,
petites. “We began with martinis, pro- and Slate Best Book of the Year
ceeded to a vintage French Bordeaux,
topped off by the Harvard Club’s Lon-
don-style roast beef,” Corsi wrote in
his recent e-book. “By the time the
dinner was over, it was clear our com-
plementary skills in politics could be Ma^Û\mbhg]^[nm
combined to Donald Trump’s benefit.” from the Los Angeles Times
Corsi was working as a journalist, bestselling author of
mostly for right-wing Web sites such What We See When We Read
as WorldNetDaily, but advocacy for
Trump became his predominant in- “ A deeply inventive and
terest. He wrote, “I had crossed over wonderfully strange novel.”
from the reporter’s role to work be- C^ggrH_Ûee%Znmahkh_
hind the scenes as a political opera- Dept. of Speculation
tive, working secretly with Roger Stone
to engineer events that would affect “ Rewarding…. Absurdist, uncanny
the news cycle favorably for the Trump f^mZÛ\mbhgZ[hnmma^gZmnk^h_
campaign during the 2016 presiden- identity, individuality.”
tial election.” —Publishers Weekly
Stone and Corsi saw their oppor-
tunity to help Trump in July, when, the
week before the Democratic National ALSO AVAILABLE IN EBOOK
VINTAGE Read excerpts at VintageAnchor.com ANCHOR

“And, finally, where do you see yourself in five years?”
• •
Convention, WikiLeaks released thou-
sands of e-mails that had been ob-
tained during a hack of the Demo-
cratic 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 As-
sange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had
boasted publicly that he had more
e-mails that he would release to em-
barrass 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 ca-
reer included time as a standup come-
dian, a radio talk-show host, and the
director of the William Moses Kun-
stler Fund for Racial Justice, named
34 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
for the late civil-liberties lawyer. Cred-
ico worked for the foundation along
with Kunstler’s widow, Margaret Rat-
ner Kunstler, herself a well-known
lawyer, who had contact with some-
one affiliated with WikiLeaks. Over
the summer, Credico had Assange as
a guest, by telephone, on his New York-
based radio show. Stone recalled,
“Credico tells me it’s coming in Oc-
tober. He never says what it is, other
than that it’s devastating, it’s a bomb-
shell, 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 Ecuador-
ian 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.
Corsi asked Malloch to visit Assange
at the Embassy—where Assange had
taken refuge to escape extradition to
Sweden on charges of rape and mo-
lestation—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 in-
formation 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 han-
dling 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 consul-
tant. In Fort Lauderdale, Stone re-
counted 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 substanti-
ated.) Stone took to Twitter to argue
that Podesta’s problems would turn out
to be worse than Manafort’s. On Au-
gust 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? Stone’s and Corsi’s accounts of these he has told multiple provable lies.” (Last
Or was Stone saying “the Podestas’ time,” events have diverged in recent months. week, Corsi sued Stone for defamation,
referring to John and his brother, Tony? Corsi now says that on August 30th arguing that Stone’s public statements
Stone said that the August 21st tweet Stone asked him to create “an alter- about him were designed to intimidate
meant both Podestas, but this may be a native explanation”—that is, a cover him and to coerce him into giving false
position he has adopted to make the tweet story—for how he came to write the testimony at Stone’s upcoming crimi-
look less prescient and thus less suspi- August 21st tweet. In his account, Stone nal trial. Corsi seeks damages “in ex-
cious. On October 7th, WikiLeaks began was nervous about being accused of cess of $25,000,000.”)
releasing an enormous tranche of John having an inside source at WikiLeaks, Corsi has chronicled his dealings with
Podesta’s e-mails. Coverage of their con- so, Corsi said, he obliged by writing Mueller’s office in his e-book. His most
tents consumed a great deal of the last an e-mail that backed up Stone’s claim. bizarre accusation is that one of the pros-
month of the campaign, and proved highly As Corsi described it to me, “My in- ecutors, Jeannie Rhee, a prominent Wash-
damaging to Clinton. If the August 21st terpretation of it was that I was pro- ington lawyer, attempted to intimidate
tweet referred to just John Podesta, Roger viding an explanation for Roger’s tweet him with her choice of clothing during
Stone had predicted the WikiLeaks dis- about Podesta and the barrel. I was his grand-jury testimony. “I was shocked
closure six weeks before it happened. giving him an alternative explanation to see that Rhee was wearing what
to say, ‘It was really Corsi who had appeared to be an expensive, possibly
tone and Corsi would seem to be in been telling me about all the work that designer-made see-through blouse,” he
S a position to answer one of the major
questions in the Mueller investigation:
Podesta had been doing in Russia.’ ”
When I spoke to Stone, he denied
wrote. “Maybe my seventy-two years
were showing but I had never imagined
whether anyone affiliated with the having asked Corsi to come up with a any woman would appear before a grand
Trump campaign knew more about the cover story, and said that his explana- jury exposing her breasts to public view
WikiLeaks disclosures than has so far tion for the tweet has been consistent through a see-through blouse.”The spe-
been acknowledged. Since the Ameri- from the beginning—that it was really cial counsel’s spokesperson declined to
can intelligence agencies have concluded about the Podestas’ business, not about comment on this or any other subject.
that Russian hackers stole the e-mails WikiLeaks. Stone told me last week, Before Mueller’s prosecutors in-
and provided them to WikiLeaks, proof of Corsi, “He’s certifiably insane, and dicted Stone, they tried to elicit a guilty
of any nexus between WikiLeaks and
the Trump campaign might establish
collusion, and possibly crimes like con-
spiracy to defraud the United States.
Stone’s August 21st tweet at least sug-
gests that he had some inside knowledge
of WikiLeaks’ operation. Stone’s and
Corsi’s explanations for the events lead-
ing up to Stone’s tweet are highly sus-
pect. 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 Max Pechstein, Sommer I, woodcut with hand coloring in watercolor, 1912. Estimate $10,000 to $15,000.
not even work at the D.N.C. Subsequent
investigations revealed that Podesta was 19th & 20th Century Prints & Drawings
Featuring Property from the Ismar Littmann Family Collection of
hacked in another operation, which used German Expressionism & European Avant-Garde
a different form of attack. The evidence March 5
indicates that someone told Corsi that
Todd Weyman • tweyman@swanngalleries.com
Podesta’s e-mails were going to be dis-
closed, rather than that he figured it out Preview: February 28 & March 1, 10-6; March 2, 12-5; March 4, 10-6
on his own. If that’s what happened, it 104 East 25th St, New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM
remains unclear who told him.
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 35
plea from Corsi. Last November, Muel-
ler’s team made its position clear in an
unusually specific way, presenting Cor-
si’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 spe-
cial counsel’s office. (Corsi disclosed
the draft to the public when he rejected
a plea deal offered by Mueller.) Ac-
cording to the draft, Corsi lied by say-
ing that he had declined Stone’s re-
quest 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 pro-
cess. 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 cate-
gorical in his statements, Stone is cau-
tious when describing Trump’s involve-
ment 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 un-
named person, possibly Trump him-
self, who “directed” a senior campaign
official to tell Stone to find out what
was coming from WikiLeaks. In pub-
lic comments, Trump has denied ever
speaking to Stone about the organi-
zation. It would not necessarily have
been illegal for Trump and Stone to
have discussed WikiLeaks in the sum-
mer 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 aggres-
sive 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, in-
cluding Representatives Adam Schiff
and Eric Swalwell, to testify. (It’s not
36 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
clear why their testimony would be
relevant, as there is an official tran-
script of Stone’s statements before the
committee.) Stone also said he would
argue that any false or mistaken state-
ments 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 un-
likely, given Stone’s record of inflam-
matory 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 pos-
sibility, but Trump, in his CBS inter-
view, 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 mari-
juana legalization in New York. But
the relationship has always been com-
bustible—Credico is a man of the left
and was a fervent Bernie Sanders sup-
porter in 2016—and Stone and Cred-
ico are now estranged. “I don’t know
why Roger gave up my name to them
as his source about WikiLeaks,” Cred-
ico told me recently. “Why did he
buckle without even getting a fuck-
ing subpoena? He gave up a name.
That’s called ratting.” In addition,
Credico has found his dealings with
Mueller’s office daunting. “Those peo-
ple are like Columbo and Sherlock
Holmes and Hercule Poirot com-
bined, 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 sev-
eral 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 com-
mittee 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
comedian. “He does impressions. I
was asking him to do his Frank Pen-
tangeli impression. I wasn’t telling
Randy to lie.”
he statement by the acting Attor-
T ney General, Matthew Whitaker,
that Mueller’s investigation was wind-
ing down drew attention because Muel-
ler 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 Wa-
tergate scandal was like Shakespeare—a
drama that built to a satisfying climax.
The Russia story is more like Beck-
ett—a mystifying tragicomedy that may
drift into irresolution. Did Trump col-
lude, and did he obstruct justice? Muel-
ler may never have the answers.
Criminal defendants customarily
remain silent when they are facing
trial, but Stone has used his indict-
ment as another opportunity to de-
fend the President, and himself. ( Judge
Amy Berman Jackson, who is presid-
ing 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 Rev-
olution. My particular Kafkaesque
nightmare is nothing more than pun-
ishment 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?” 

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 modal-
ities, 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
I 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
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
it on CineSteal, but, believe me, you
want—need—to experience this movie
on the big screen.
Bigger than that.
Louder. Whatever you do, I insist
that you go to a theatre that has Sur-
roundScream. 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 the-
atres 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 bi-
cycle, 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
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
not afraid to hold the camera on a sin-
gle 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 sub-
titles 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 noz-
zles. 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 in-
terpreted 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 some-
how ended up ripping her jacket be-
cause 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 oxy-
gen 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. 
37

ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
A LIVING DOCUMENT
Heidi Schreck takes the Constitution to Broadway.
BY MICHAEL SCHULMAN
hen Heidi Schreck was four-
W teen, her mother cajoled her into
entering the American Legion Ora-
torical Contest, in which high-school
students give speeches on the U.S. Con-
stitution for prize money. This was 1986,
in Wenatchee, Washington, a conser-
vative-leaning town dotted with or-
chards, which calls itself the Apple Cap-
ital 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 Re-
publican, 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
“What the Constitution Means to Me” is, Schreck says, “relentlessly anti-theatrical.”
38 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 con-
test, in 1938, to “develop deeper knowl-
edge and appreciation for the U.S. Con-
stitution among high-school students.”
Its alumni include the former Repub-
lican Presidential candidate Alan Keyes
and the conservative pundit Lou Dobbs.
Each contestant must give an eight-
to-ten-minute prepared oration, draw-
ing personal connections between the
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 in-
stance, she would recount how the girls
in her eighth-grade class had protested
a school policy against shorts by wear-
ing 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 ge-
nius 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 com-
petitions, 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 re-
member being very conscious of the
fact that my appearance was in con-
trast to my mind. That felt like my se-
cret 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 com-
peting 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 win-
ning 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 elim-
inated. 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 chil-
dren’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 col-
lege tuition.
Almost two decades later, in 2007,
when Schreck was a thirty-six-year-
old 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 Broad-
way 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 Consti-
tution related to her own life. She re-
calls wondering, “What if I did that as
an adult woman? What would it actu-
ally 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 try-
ing to win?”
The result was a ten-minute piece,
directed by Fagan, which Schreck ti-
tled “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 per-
formed the longer version for ten days,
as part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summer-
works 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 writ-
ten 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. Jus-
tice William O. Douglas, in his ma-
jority opinion, drew on a number of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hildalgo Don Quixote
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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
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THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 39
 saw it three times. On Twitter, Hillary
Clinton, who attended with Bill and
Chelsea, described it as “an empower-
ing 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, de-
scribes “What the Constitution Means
to Me” as “relentlessly anti-theatrical.”
For much of the play, she stands alone
on a set resembling a slightly exagger-
ated 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 per-
form the rest of the piece as my fifteen-
year-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 de-
grees. “It’s a deliberate decision to begin
with the most appealing version of my-
self, 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 her-
self the stage direction “HEIDI releases
any last remnants of the buoyant, per-
formative girlishness that is one of her
lifelong coping mechanisms.”
Exercise Much as “Hamilton” gave Ameri-
ca’s founding a progressive cool factor
and became the quintessential Obama-
your mind era musical, “What the Constitution
Means to Me” captures the mood of a
time when institutional protections
feel shockingly vulnerable and the
Keep your mind active country is getting an unwelcome crash
course in constitutional arcana. (How
with 6 issues of the many Americans knew about the emol-
LRB for just $6 uments clause before November, 2016?)
The show was still in previews Off
Broadway on September 27th, when
Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kav-
anaugh testified before the Senate—a
To place an order, visit: real-life morality play that pitted a
woman’s experience of sexual abuse
lrb.me/ny 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 rel-
evance of the stories that Schreck was
telling. From the stage, she heard mem-
bers of the audience “audibly respond-
ing 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-year-
old granddaughter and went with his
family in December. “I thought, This is
something that needs a huge audience,”
he told me. “When most people—in-
cluding, I have to say, some of my col-
leagues 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 im-
pressed by Schreck’s analysis of the
Ninth Amendment, which, he said, “a
number of contemporary scholars don’t
really understand.” It reads, “The enu-
meration in the Constitution, of cer-
tain 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 fram-
ers 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 McEn-
tire. She was not related to the singer. Just be-
cause 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 segregation) and Obergefell v. Hodges According to her death certificate, she
life depended on it, I couldn’t tell you (allowing same-sex marriage). But, died at the age of thirty-six at West-
what the Ninth Amendment was.” as Schreck recounts in the show, the ern State Hospital, of “melancholia.”
amendment failed to protect Jessica Schreck, who has struggled with de-
ne bright afternoon in January, I Gonzales (later Lenahan), a Colorado pression, always believed that she and
O met Schreck at Café Slavia, an
Art Deco coffeehouse in Prague. She
woman who, in 1999, asked her local
police department to enforce a restrain-
her mother inherited Theressa’s condi-
tion, but her outlook changed when she
was visiting her younger brother, Carl, ing order against her abusive husband. discovered records of widespread do-
who moved to the Czech Republic two After he killed their three daughters, mestic abuse in the logging town where
years ago with his family, to work as a Gonzales sued the police, and, in 2005, Theressa lived and began to wonder if
journalist. “Is it too early to get a beer?” Castle Rock v. Gonzales reached the her ancestor’s affliction was as much
Schreck asked. It was two-thirty. She Supreme Court, where Scalia, in his societal as it was chemical.
ordered a Budweiser Budvar. majority opinion, found no constitu- As a girl, Schreck occasionally saw
In the mid-seventies, Václav Havel tional obligation to enforce the restrain- her mother retreat into her room and
and other dissidents met at Café Slavia ing order. (The amendment also makes weep. One day, when Schreck was fifteen,
to discuss Charter 77, their manifesto the Constitution’s only explicit mention her mother sat her down at the dining-
criticizing the Communist regime for of “male citizens,” which drew backlash room table. When Sherry was growing
ignoring human rights in the Czecho- at the time of its passage from Eliza- up, she told her daughter, her stepfather
slovak Constitution and in other offi- beth Cady Stanton and other women’s- beat his wife—Heidi’s grandmother—
cial documents. Havel, who was later rights advocates.) and physically and sexually abused his
imprisoned for his political activities, As Schreck considered the prompt stepchildren. On one occasion, he threat-
became President in 1989, the year of that she had been given as a teen-ager, ened the family at gunpoint. Sherry’s
the Velvet Revolution and, less conse- she reëxamined her own family history. mother refused to go to the police, so
quentially, of Schreck’s high-school grad- As family lore had it, her maternal great- Sherry and her sister reported him. At
uation. “I remember I was so thrilled great-grandmother Theressa Finkas fourteen years old, Sherry testified against
that a playwright could become Presi- emigrated from Germany to Washing- him, and he was sent to prison for “car-
dent,” she said. “That seemed impossi- ton State in 1879, as a mail-order bride. nal knowledge.” When I spoke to Sherry
ble! Theatre people are always, like, bur-
ied outside the city limits.”
Schreck had Googled the Constitu-
tion of the Czech Republic, written in
part by Havel and ratified in 1993, and
had found things to envy, including
GET YOUR TICKETS
environmental protection and gender BEFORE ANOTHER DAY GOES BY
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 posi-
tive rights, like the right to education.
Older constitutions, such as the United
States’, more often guarantee negative
rights—say, protection from unreason-
able 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 ac-
tion restricting their exercise, rather
than promising government assistance
in making their exercise possible.” For
instance, the Fourteenth Amendment,
E D E N G AGE MENT
passed during Reconstruction to in- L I M I T
sure the citizenship of former slaves,
THRU APRIL 7
prohibits states from denying any per-
son “equal protection of the laws.” It
formed the bedrock of historic Supreme
HAROLD AND MIRIAM STEINBERG CENTER FOR THEATRE/
Court decisions including Brown v. LAURA PELS THEATRE
Board of Education (outlawing school 111 WEST 46TH STREET • ROUNDABOUTTHEATRE.ORG
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 adver-
sity/Which, like the toad, ugly and ven-
omous,/ 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 stud-
ied Russian in college—and fell in love
in the process. “It was one of those hor-
rible theatre-company things, where we
were a couple but we weren’t telling any-
body,” she said.
Schreck had been dabbling in play-
writing since she read “Fefu and Her
Friends,” by the Cuban-American play-
wright María Irene Fornés, in college,
and “sobbed with some sense of recog-
nition I couldn’t articulate,” she said. In
Seattle, she had a secretarial job at a kid-
ney-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 di-
rector 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 com-
edy “Amazons and Their Men.” “She
was so specific and strange and beauti-
ful,” Baker told me. Without having
met her, Baker wrote Schreck a part
in her play “Circle Mirror Transforma-
tion,” set in a community drama class
in Vermont. It was staged at Playwrights
Horizons the following year, with
Schreck playing Theresa, a sunny for-
mer 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 autobiogra-
phy in English. The play, “Creature,”
opened at the Ohio Theatre, on Wooster
Street, while Schreck was acting in Ba-
ker’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, nat-
ural 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 unteth-
ered 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 lis-
tening 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 Cas-
tle Rock v. Gonzales; between her great-
great-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 am-
bivalence: 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 twenty-
one. “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 an-
cestors. It was a very big turning point
for me, and I began working on the show
with a kind of fever. I suddenly under-
stood 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 pol-
icy banning most transgender people
from serving in the military. This deci-
sion 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 vio-
lated the due-process protections of the
Fifth Amendment.) “This is why basic
human rights can’t just be left up to in-
terpretation,” 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 in-
tentions of its Framers in 1787. During
the Obama Administration, the Repub-
lican congresswoman Michele Bach-
mann 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, trans-
gender rights. During the Trump Ad-
ministration, many Democrats are reach-
ing for the Constitution to protect the
most vulnerable people, but some schol-
ars 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 over-
whelming 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 con-
taining 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 Con-
centration,” in which a philosopher jug-
gles 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 per-
manently 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 democ-
racy is, in many ways, a lie.”
ike the Constitution it-
L self, “What the Consti-
tution 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 cur-
rently 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 Con-
stitution, and an audience member picks
the winner.
In late January, Schreck visited Wash-
ington, 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 in-
terested in law doing a mock-trial con-
test 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 pro-
gram at Brooklyn Law School. “The
Constitution is something I’ve been try-
ing 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 profes-
sional reasons, she wants to change Ar-
ticle II, Section 1, which says that only
natural-born citizens can be President.
The two women took an Uber to the
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 law-
yer 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 Amend-
ment 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 arti-
cles that address taking care
of the environment, and I wish ours had
it, too. If we can’t get it into the Consti-
tution, 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 fad-
ing parchment. Murals of the Found-
ing Fathers loomed above. The women
leaned over George Washington’s an-
notated draft of the Constitution, and
Williams jabbed a teal-painted pinkie
nail at the glass. “Why does ‘Hamp-
shire’ 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 illegi-
ble 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 Found-
ing 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 appall-
ing, appalling document.” 
43

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 twenty-
O five-year-old community-col-
lege student named Alex Gu-
tiérrez was waiting tables at La Piazza
Ristorante Italiano, an upscale restau-
rant in Tulare, in California’s San Joa-
quin Valley. Gutiérrez spotted Yorai Ben-
zeevi, 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 Tu-
lare organization called Citizens for Hos-
pital Accountability. The group had ac-
cused Benzeevi of enriching himself at
the expense of the cash-strapped hos-
pital, which subsequently declared bank-
ruptcy. (Benzeevi’s lawyers said that all
his actions were authorized by his com-
pany’s contract with the facility.) Ac-
cording to court documents, the con-
tract 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 thou-
sand dollars a month. (In Tulare, the
median household income was about
forty-five thousand dollars a year.) The
citizens’ group had drawn up an ambi-
tious plan to get rid of Benzeevi by root-
ing 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 cam-
paign he attended a rally for Bernie
Sanders. Gutiérrez grew up watching
his father, a dairyman, work twelve-
hour shifts, six days a week, and San-
44 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
ANNALS OF COVERT ACTION
ders’s message about corporate greed,
income inequality, and the ills of Amer-
ica’s for-profit health-care system res-
onated with him. Seeing Benzeevi and
Kumar enjoying themselves at La Pi-
azza inflamed Gutiérrez’s sense of injus-
tice. He spent the week between Christ-
mas and New Year’s knocking on doors
and asking neighbors to sign a petition
for a recall vote, which ultimately gar-
nered more than eleven hundred sig-
natures. Gutiérrez later asked his mother,
Senovia, if she would run for Kumar’s
seat; the citizens’ group thought that Se-
novia, 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 Ben-
zeevi’s hospital-management business,
and he consulted a law firm in Wash-
ington, D.C., about mounting a cam-
paign to save Kumar’s seat. An adviser
there referred him to Psy-Group, an Is-
raeli private intelligence company. Psy-
Group’s slogan was “Shape Reality,” and
its techniques included the use of elab-
orate 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 se-
cret 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 tech-
nological innovations and lax govern-
mental 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
are won, and terror is promoted. There
are no regulations. It is a no man’s land.”
In recent years, Psy-Group has con-
ceived of a variety of elaborate covert
operations. In Amsterdam, the firm pre-
pared a report on a religious sect called
the Brunstad Christian Church, whose
Norwegian leader, Psy-Group noted,
claimed to have written “a more im-
portant book than the New Testament.”
In Gabon, Psy-Group pitched “Oper-
ation Bentley”—an effort to “preserve”
President Ali Bongo Ondimba’s hold
on power by collecting and disseminat-
ing intelligence about his main politi-
cal 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 ridic-
ulous” that the church considered “any
book” to be more important than the
Bible. Ondimba’s representatives could
not be reached for comment.) In an-
other project, targeting the South Af-
rican 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 ac-
tivists on American college campuses
who support a movement to put eco-
nomic 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 Kush-
ner, Trump’s son-in-law. The effort to
drum up business included brash claims
about the company’s skills in online de-
ception. 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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 45
to attract clients—but it also attracted
the attention of the F.B.I. Robert Muel-
ler, the special counsel, has been exam-
ining the firm’s activities as part of his
investigation into Russian election in-
terference 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 dol-
lars—as little as two hundred and sev-
enty-five dollars an hour. The new strat-
egy 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 mat-
ter 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 cam-
paign” in Tulare to preserve Kumar’s seat
on the hospital board. Operatives would
use fake identities to “uncover and de-
liver actionable intelligence” on mem-
bers of the community who
appeared to be leading the
recall effort, and would use
unattributed Web sites to
mount a “negative cam-
paign” targeting “the oppo-
sition candidate.” All these
activities, the proposal as-
sured, would appear to be
part of a “grass roots” move-
ment in Tulare. The oper-
ation was code-named Project Mock-
ingjay, a reference to a fictional bird in
the “Hunger Games” novels, known for
its ability to mimic human sounds.
he modern market for private in-
T telligence dates back to the nine-
teen-seventies, when a former prose-
cutor named Jules Kroll began hiring
police detectives, F.B.I. and Treasury
46 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
agents, and forensic accountants to con-
duct detective work on behalf of corpo-
rations, law and accounting firms, and
other clients. The company, which be-
came 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 ver-
sions of Kroll entered the market. These
companies had a unique advantage: few
countries produce more highly trained
and war-tested intelligence profession-
als, as a proportion of the population,
than Israel. Conscription in Israel is
mandatory for most citizens, and top
intelligence units often identify tal-
ented recruits while they are in high
school. These soldiers undergo inten-
sive training in a range of language and
technical skills. After a few years of
government service, most are dis-
charged, at which point many finish
their educations and enter the civilian
job market. Gadi Aviran was one of
the pioneers of the private Israeli in-
telligence industry. “There was this
huge pipeline of talent coming out of
the military every year,” Aviran, who
founded the intelligence firm Terro-
gence, 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 inter-
esting passing by.” The sys-
tem 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 inves-
tigators, criminals, and even some jour-
nalists have long used false identities to
trick people into providing information,
a practice known as pretexting. The In-
ternet made pretexting easier. Aviran
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 Ter-
rogence, which became the first major
Israeli company to demonstrate the
effectiveness of avatars in counterter-
rorism 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 ava-
tars proliferated, their operators joked
that the most valuable online chat rooms
were now entirely populated by avatars,
who were, inadvertently, collecting in-
formation from one another.
Aviran tried to keep Terrogence fo-
cussed on its core mission—counterter-
rorism—but some government clients
offered the company substantial con-
tracts 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 some-
body 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 imi-
tators, 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 Is-
raeli spy agencies, including Mossad
and Unit 8200, the military’s signals-
intelligence corps. Black Cube got its
start with the help of Vincent Tchen-
guiz, an Iranian-born English real-
estate tycoon who had invested in Ter-
rogence. In March, 2011, Tchenguiz was
arrested by a British anti-fraud unit in-
vestigating 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 for-
mer intelligence officers to look into
the business rivals he believed had
alerted authorities. Dagan’s message to
Tchenguiz, a former colleague of Da-
gan’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 infor-
mation—were becoming popular, and
Terrogence’s avatars had become more
sophisticated to avoid detection. Bur-
stien urged Aviran to consider using
the avatars in more aggressive ways, and
on behalf of a wider range of commer-
cial clients. Aviran was wary. After less
than a year at Terrogence, Burstien re-
turned to Israel’s military intelligence,
and joined an élite unit that specialized
in PsyOps, or psychological operations.
In the following years, some of Bur-
stien’s ambitions were being fulfilled
elsewhere. Russia’s intelligence services
had begun using a variety of tools—in-
cluding hacking, cyber weapons, online
aliases, and Web sites that spread fake
news—to conduct information warfare
and to sow discord in neighboring coun- “I bond with things.”
tries. In the late two-thousands, the Rus-
sians targeted Estonia and Georgia. In
2014, they hit Ukraine. Later that year,
• •
Burstien founded Psy-Group, which,
like Black Cube, used avatars to con- fungal infection that causes flulike symp- ing part time as a housekeeper. When
duct intelligence-collection operations. toms. Not long ago, when wildfires were she was thirty-five, she got her high-
But Burstien also offered his avatars for raging across California, winds pushed school diploma, then attended commu-
another purpose: influence campaigns, the smoke into Tulare, leaving an acrid nity college and went on to earn a B.A.
similar to those mounted by Russia. smell in the air. at California State University, Fresno.
Burstien boasted that Psy-Group’s so- Citizens for Hospital Accountabil- In 2015, she became an American cit-
called “deep” avatars were so convinc- ity began as a simple Facebook page. izen and completed a master’s degree
ing that they were capable of planting At first, the group’s leaders hoped that in social work.
the seeds of ideas in people’s heads. Alex Gutiérrez would run for Kumar’s Alex doubted whether his mother
seat, but he was planning to stand for would agree to enter the race. She had
ulare seemed an unlikely target for a position on the city council. Senovia never shown much interest in politics.
T an influence campaign. The town
took its name from a lake that, in 1773,
was the backup choice. She had grown
up as the youngest of twelve children,
“Growing up as immigrants, parents
know what’s happening, but, aside from
was christened by a Spanish comman- in the central Mexican state of Aguas- voting, they don’t really want to get in-
dant as Los Tules, for the tule reeds calientes. Her parents were impover- volved,” he said. Over family dinners
that grew along the shore. The town ished farmers who cultivated corn and in Senovia’s three-bedroom home, Alex
was later memorialized in a song, beans until a drought forced them to told her stories about the “corruption
“Ghost of Bardsley Road,” about a head- abandon their land. She started work- and mismanagement” that he said was
less spectre who rode a white Honda ing full time when she was sixteen; hurting the hospital. “I will happily do
motorcycle. when she was twenty-four, she crossed it because you’re so involved,” Senovia
Today, the city is home to just over the border at Tijuana to join her boy- told him.
sixty thousand people. The county leads friend, Miguel Gutiérrez, who was liv- Hospital-board races are usually small-
the nation in dairy production. In the ing in Los Angeles. They married and, time affairs. One former member of the
summer months, dry winds churn up two years later, moved to Tulare, where Tulare board said that her campaign had
so much dust that many residents suffer Senovia raised five boys and supple- cost just a hundred and fifty dollars,
from what’s known as valley fever, a mented the family’s income by work- which she used to buy signs and cards
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 47
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 col-
lege and serve as his mother’s campaign
manager. He suspected that the race
would be bitterly contested, and expen-
sive. 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 foot-
hills 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 Repub-
lican; 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 dairy-
man 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 sug-
gested 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 vic-
tory 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 so-
liciting small donations from neigh-
bors, Benzeevi got on a plane to Israel
to meet with Psy-Group.
sy-Group operated out of a nonde-
P script building in a commercial area
about twenty minutes outside Tel Aviv.
Its offices were on the fourth floor, be-
hind an unmarked door. Employees used
48 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
I SAW A HOUSE, A FIELD
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 leading anticorruption officer. (The pair
intelligence firm, security was comically pleaded guilty and received probation.)
lax, particularly between noon and Psy-Group tried to capitalize on Black
2 P.M., when men carrying motorcycle Cube’s legal troubles. Burstien reassured
helmets raced in and out, delivering prospective clients that lawyers vetted
lunch. Clients were escorted through a everything the company’s operatives did.
communal room, which had a big-screen Former company officials said that Psy-
TV facing a large, listing couch, where Group didn’t hack or appropriate the
twentysomethings in faded jeans and identities of real people for its avatars.
T-shirts spent their breaks playing Mor- It clandestinely recorded conversations,
tal Kombat and FIFA 17. but never in jurisdictions that required
Burstien tried to position Psy-Group “two-party” consent, which would have
as a more responsible alternative to Black made the practice illegal.
Cube, which was known for a willing- The company’s claims of legal legit-
ness to break the rules. “I’m not saying imacy, however, skirted the fact that reg-
we’re good guys or bad guys,” Burstien ulations haven’t kept pace with advances
said in one meeting. “It’s not black or in technology. “What are the regula-
white. The gray has so many shades.”
In 2016, Romanian police arrested two
tions? What’s the law?” Tamir Pardo,
who was the director of Mossad from
Black Cube operatives for illegal hack- 2011 to 2016, said. “There are no laws.
ing and harassment of the country’s There are no regulations. That’s the
main problem. You can do almost what-
ever you want.”
Psy-Group went to great lengths to
disguise its activities. Employees were
occasionally instructed to go to librar-
ies 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 sensi-
tive operations, Psy-Group created fake
front companies and avatars who pur-
ported 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 op-
eratives sometimes paid the local con-
tractors 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 ava-
tars, the operatives hired local analysts
to work for the think tank, which then
disseminated reports to bolster the po-
litical campaign of the company’s cli-
ent and to undermine the reputations
of his rivals. In another meeting, Psy-
Group officials said that they had cre-
ated an avatar to help a corporate cli-
ent 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 Psy-
Group employee said, of Burstien’s
strategy.
Most Psy-Group employees knew
little or nothing about the company’s
owner, Joel Zamel. According to cor-
porate 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, diplo-
macy, and strategy, with a specialization
in counterterrorism and homeland se-
curity. Zamel’s father had made a for-
tune in the mining business, and Zamel
was a skilled networker. He cultivated
relationships with high-profile Repub-
licans in the U.S., including Newt Gin-
grich and Elliott Abrams, who served
in foreign-policy positions under Ron-
ald Reagan and George W. Bush, and
whom Psy-Group listed as a member
of its advisory board. (The Trump Ad-
ministration recently named Abrams its
special envoy to oversee U.S. policy to-
ward Venezuela.) Documents show that
Zamel was a director of a Cyprus-based
company called IOCO, which controlled
Psy-Group. (Zamel’s lawyers and Bur-
stien declined to say how much of an
ownership stake Zamel held in IOCO,
or to identify who else provided fund-
ing 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 cre-
ated 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 teen-
ager from a Christian family in Chi-
cago. 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 reli-
gion and expressed interest in learning
more about Islam. Eventually, a Face-
book member from Casablanca intro-
duced Madison online to two imams
at Moroccan mosques, one of whom
offered to guide her through the pro-
cess of becoming a Muslim.
Madison’s conversion was conducted
through Skype. The call required a fe-
male 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 Face-
book. “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 en-
couraged her to become an ISIS bride.
At that point, Burstien decided to end
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
the operation, which, he felt, had dem-
onstrated the company’s ability to cre-
ate 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 De-
partment never acted on the proposal.
Psy-Group had more success pitch-
ing 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, Divest-
ment, 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 treat-
ment 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 com-
munity, 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, social-
media accounts, and the “deep” Web—
areas of the Internet not indexed by
search engines like Google—for de-
rogatory information about B.D.S. ac-
tivists. If a student claimed to be a pious
Muslim, for example, Psy-Group op-
eratives would look for photographs of
him engaging in behavior unacceptable
to many pious Muslims, such as drink-
ing alcohol or having an affair. Psy-
Group would then release the informa-
tion online using avatars and Web sites
that couldn’t be traced back to the com-
pany or its donors.
Project Butterfly launched in Feb-
ruary, 2016, and Psy-Group asked do-
nors 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 em-
ployee said, donors asked Psy-Group
to target B.D.S. activists at universities
49

“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 Democra-
cies, which had shared some of its re-
search 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 Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley. In the
memo, Psy-Group asked the founda-
tion for guidance on identifying future
targets. According to an F.D.D. official,
the foundation “did not end up con-
tracting 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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 national-
security adviser to Prime Minister Ben-
jamin Netanyahu, also became an ad-
viser 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 le-
gal?” Amidror recalled asking. Reisner
responded that it was. While active Is-
raeli intelligence operatives aren’t sup-
posed to spy on the United States, Ami-
dror said, he saw nothing improper
about former Israeli intelligence officers
conducting operations against Amer-
ican 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
O in Tel Aviv. He checked into the
Dan Hotel, across from the city’s sea-
front promenade. At the start of his
first full day in Israel, he was greeted
by a “Welcome home!” e-mail from
Scott Mortman, a former lawyer who
managed Psy-Group’s American cli-
ents. The e-mail described their sched-
ule for the day. At lunch, Mortman
would give Benzeevi a briefing on Psy-
Group’s offerings. Then Benzeevi would
meet with Burstien, who would walk
him through the company’s proposed
campaign to keep Kumar on the hos-
pital 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 for-
mer 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 & CONFI-
DENTIAL.” The proposal assured Ben-
zeevi 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 com-
pany employee said that Benzeevi “ap-
peared to like the idea that someone
from Mossad would be on his side.”
Before Benzeevi flew back to Califor-
nia, 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 com-
pany 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 Mock-
ingjay to Katniss, a reference to Kat-
niss Everdeen, the protagonist in the
“Hunger Games” novels.
hospital-board election in central
A California wasn’t exactly what Bur-
stien had in mind when he set out to
establish Psy-Group in the U.S. elec-
tion market. In early 2016, as the Pres-
idential 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.
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, pre-
sented 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 se-
cure a potentially lucrative project,
Burstien drew up plans for an intelli-
gence and influence campaign to pro-
mote 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. Psy-
Group also hired the Washington law
firm Covington & Burling to conduct
a legal review of its work. Former Psy-
Group officials said that the resulting
memo gave a green light to begin offer-
ing the company’s services in the U.S.
(A spokesperson for Covington & Bur-
ling said that the firm could not dis-
cuss 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 so-
cial media to advance Trump’s chances.
Zamel suggested a meeting in Wash-
ington 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, includ-
ing Brad Parscale, who ran Web op-
erations. According to a person famil-
iar 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 intro-
duced to George Nader, a Lebanese-
American with ties to the Emirati leader
Mohammed bin Zayed and other pow-
erful 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 net-
workers 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 ap-
proached him and requested a meet-
ing. 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
“I think we should be other people.”
Blackwater security firm, helped ar-
range a meeting at Trump Tower among
Zamel, Nader, and Donald Trump, Jr.
(Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos be-
came Trump’s Education Secretary, was
a major Trump donor and had access
to members of his team.) In the meet-
ing, Zamel told Trump, Jr., that he sup-
ported his father’s campaign, and talked
about Psy-Group’s influence opera-
tions. (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 hav-
ing to do with the election. But, ac-
cording to the Nader representative,
shortly after the election Zamel bragged
to Nader that he had conducted a se-
cret campaign that had been influen-
tial in Trump’s victory. Zamel agreed
to brief Nader on how the operation
had worked. During that conversation,
Zamel showed Nader several analyti-
cal 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 repre-
sentative. Nader paid Zamel more than
two million dollars, but never received
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 repre-
sentative said, he was mistaken. “Nader
may have paid Zamel not knowing
when, how, or why the report was cre-
ated, but he wanted to use it to gain
access and new business,” the repre-
sentative said. “In fact, it used publicly
available material to show how social
media—in general—was used in con-
nection with the campaign.”
nformation warfare is as old as war-
I fare 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 de-
stabilize the other side. Long before the
advent of social media, Moscow con-
cocted fantastical rumors that the AIDS
virus had been manufactured by Amer-
ican government scientists as a biolog-
ical 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 en-
rage the Kremlin leadership and deepen
anti-Soviet sentiment among dissident
circles inside the country.
In 1991, when the Soviet Union col-
lapsed, 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 information-
warfare 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 op-
erations” officers, in the early nineties.
He and other specialists created exper-
imental Web sites aimed at readers in
Central Europe and North Africa. The
sites were designed to look like inde-
pendent news sources; the U.S. mili-
tary’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-
52 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
cial who specialized in psychological
operations said.
U.S. leaders were generally skepti-
cal 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 misinforma-
tion 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 Penta-
gon leaders on information operations
from 2014 to 2018, was that a cautious
approach to information warfare pre-
vailed 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 in-
fluence operations. “We didn’t appre-
ciate it—until it was in our face.”
The 2016 election changed the cal-
culus. In the U.S., investigators pieced
together how Russian operatives had
carried out a scheme to promote their
preferred candidate and to stoke divi-
sions within U.S. society. Senior Israeli
officials, like their American counter-
parts, had been dubious about the effec-
tiveness of influence campaigns. Rus-
sia’s operation in the U.S. convinced
Tamir Pardo, the former Mossad direc-
tor, 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 con-
trol it, because it’s a ticking bomb. Oth-
erwise, democracy is in trouble.”
Some of Pardo’s former colleagues
took a more mercenary approach. Rus-
sia had shown the world that informa-
tion warfare worked, and they saw a
business opportunity. In early 2017, as
Trump took office, interest in Psy-
Group’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-
cause we see this ability to affect deci-
sions that we weren’t fully aware of.”
Another former Psy-Group employee
put it more bluntly: “The Trump cam-
paign won this way. If the fucking Pres-
ident is doing it, why not us?”
To capitalize on this newfound in-
terest, Burstien started making the
rounds in Washington with a new Pow-
erPoint presentation, which some Psy-
Group employees called the “If we had
done it” slide deck, and which appeared
similar to the one that Nader saw. Ti-
tled “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, creat-
ing a hostile environment for real mem-
bers 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 re-
ception 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 men-
tion 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 per-
ceptions about itself. The image it pro-
jected was mostly bluster; the compa-
ny’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
I happening in Tulare. A series of
ominous Web sites appeared: Tulare-
speaks.com,Tulareleaks.com, and Drain-
tulareswamp.com. The sites directed
visitors to articles that smeared Seno- home of Mrs. Senovia in addition to sev- under the headline “Tulare Politics
via Gutiérrez and her allies in the eral other unidentified cars.” The Web Get Fishy as Hospital Recall
hospital-board fight. site used Senovia’s nickname, Martha. Nears.” Psy-Group, one of the compa-
Tony Maldonado, a reporter for the The photographs seemed designed to ny’s former employees later said, was en-
Valley Voice, the local newspaper, saw the make it appear as if Senovia had taken gaged not in “serious intelligence” but in
sites and thought, What the fuck? He a bribe. (The envelope contained a thirty- “monkey business.”
knew that residents were fired up about dollar Tommy Hilfiger gift certificate.) Other articles on Draintulare-
the hospital-board election, but these Later, the Valley Voice posted an article swamp.com questioned whether Seno-
shadowy tactics, he said, were “com-
pletely 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 play-
ing off themes from the 2016 Presiden-
tial campaign. Trump liked to use the
phrase “drain the swamp” to rally his
anti-Washington base. The address Tu-
lareleaks.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. Oth-
ers 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 com-
pany 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 ap-
peared 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 pub-
lic should be watching Martha Senovia
closely. This past week a very expensive
black car was seen parked in front of the

“Because I said so.”
• •
via was fit to manage finances, and pub-
lished records showing that she had
filed for bankruptcy in 2003. (The bank-
ruptcy 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 Face-
book, Alex Gutiérrez responded to the
smear tactics, writing, “The gall of their
campaign to fabricate and move for-
ward with such trash speaks volumes
of their desperation and fear!”
On June 15th, campaign flyers ridi-
culing Senovia for having “zero expe-
rience,” 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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
which appears to be a made-up per-
sona. (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 cam-
paign veteran named Michael Mc-
Kinney, to fight the recall. When ru-
mors started to spread that Kumar or
Benzeevi was behind the attacks on
Senovia, McKinney tried, unsuccess-
fully, 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 elector-
ate angry enough to vote. To stop a re-
call, 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-
ing him to tell whoever was orchestrat-
ing the campaign to “knock it off.” Ben-
zeevi stopped returning McKinney’s
calls after that. “It didn’t really hurt Se-
novia,” 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
B work in Tulare would help the com-
pany land other small campaigns, but
that proved overly optimistic. He told
colleagues that he was close to finaliz-
ing 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 chan-
nel with Vladimir Putin. In January,
2018, F.B.I. agents stopped Nader, an
American citizen, at Dulles Interna-
tional 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 im-
munity in exchange for testifying truth-
fully, according to one of his represen-
tatives. “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 sub-
poena. Agents also tracked down Bur-
stien in the San Francisco area, where
he was on a business trip. Burstien re-
turned 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 vis-
ited Psy-Group’s so-called D.C. office,
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 Bur-
stien’s employees about Psy-Group’s ac-
tivities. 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 acknowl-
edged. “We had to show them, it’s smoke,
it’s smoke, it’s smoke, and not fire.” Psy-
Group officials referred the F.B.I. to the
letters they had received from law firms,
attesting to the legality of their activi-
ties 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 Psy-
Group 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 in-
fluencer, who really understands how
we can make use of online platforms,”
he said. “There needs to be more regu-
lation, 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 mis-
take.” 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 av-
atars and misinformation. “This is the
challenge of our time,” he said. “Every-
thing 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 pow-
erful. “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 mar-
ket, with people that will, basically, do
anything.”
n Tulare, the test of Psy-Group’s strat-
I egy 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 thou-
sand 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 Se-
novia attracted scant attention in the
community. “It was like they organized
a concert and nobody showed up,” a
computer-security expert said after re-
viewing 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 discov-
ered that the hospital’s financial records
were completely disorganized, with “en-
tries 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 re-
opened in October, 2018.) One morn-
ing, Blitz’s chief financial officer found
police carting away computers and tele-
phones. The local district
attorney has issued more
than forty search warrants
as part of a fraud investi-
gation, one of the largest
such investigations in Tu-
lare County history. Ben-
zeevi and his legal team
refused to respond to ques-
tions 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 offi-
cial, Zamel decided to shut down Psy-
Group in February, 2018, just as Muel-
ler’s team began questioning employees.
But its demise hasn’t suppressed the
appetite for many of the services it pro-
vided. Some of Psy-Group’s former
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
employees have met with Black Cube
to discuss job opportunities. Black Cube
has been criticized for some of its re-
cent work, including for the producer
Harvey Weinstein, but there’s no sign
that the notoriety has hurt business;
one person familiar with the compa-
ny’s operations bragged that there was
booming interest from a variety of cor-
porations. 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 col-
leagues 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 neighbor-
hoods, 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, in-
cluding an old encryption machine.
Some Psy-Group veterans expressed
regret that the firm had closed. “Had
the company still been open, all this so-
called negative press would have brought
us lots of clients,” one said. Despite em-
barrassing missteps, which have ex-
posed some Psy-Group and Black Cube
operations to public scrutiny, a former
senior Israeli intelligence official said
that global demand for “private Mos-
sads” 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 av-
atars to influence real-
estate prices—by creating
the illusion that bidders
are offering more money for a prop-
erty, for example, or by spreading ru-
mors about the presence of toxic chem-
icals 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 ice-
berg in terms of where this can go.” 
55
 SKETCHBOOK BY ROZ CHAST AND PATRICIA MARX

If you run out of food at your dinner party, You only need to have one child, but
the world will end. 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 Never serve salmon when entertaining. It is boring.
to use up in a lifetime. It’s reckless to exercise, since you
will only exhaust your quota sooner and die.

Never wear red and black together or If your book club chooses “Absalom, Absalom!,”
you will look like a drum majorette. that will be the end of your book club.

If you see me eating egg salad, you will Show me now what you’re going to wear to my funeral so
know the diagnosis is terminal. I can let you know whether it’s appropriate.

PUMPER’S CORNER
Day in and day out, Rachael Van Horn tends to the oil wells of the Panhandle.
achael Van Horn, fifty-six years
R old, lives by herself in a two-bed-
room house at the southeast cor-
ner 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-year-
olds. 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 al-
ready 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 re-
maining 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-
58 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
LETTER FROM OKLAHOMA
BY IAN FRAZIER
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 be-
came 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 frol-
icsome animals, like imaginary cows
in a children’s book or a cartoon. Ra-
chael 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 celeb-
rity in northwest Oklahoma, and ev-
erybody calls her Rachael—was born
in Ipswich, England. Her father, a ca-
reer Air Force pilot who flew F-15 jets
in Vietnam, was stationed near Ips-
wich, and in many more places after
that. Rachael can’t count the number
of schools she attended between kin-
dergarten 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 fam-
ily moved to Edmond, Oklahoma, in
the early nineteen-eighties, and Ra-
chael 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 as-
sistant to John Deere truck- and trac-
tor-parts salesperson, but the job she
kept returning to was newspaper re-
porter. 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 Okla-
homa. She still contributes to that paper
at least once a month.
Of medium height, Rachael is a gray-
blond, 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 regu-
lar recruits. During training at Fort
Jackson, in South Carolina, a drill ser-
geant sexually assaulted her one eve-
ning when she was alone in a laundry
room. He ran off when he heard some-
body 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 recog-
nized him as the officer who was con-
ducting 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 twenty-
one 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 fifty-
five 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 con-
struction 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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 59

“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 se-
curity credentials. She told her col-
league 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 repe-
tition 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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
Iraqi assistant feared that he would be
shot. She stayed with him and several
other Iraqis all night, playing tic-tac-
toe 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 mor-
tar round fired outside the base. The
discovery of fragments of a torso and
of an explosives belt pointed to a sui-
cide bombing. Apparently, the bomber
had dressed in an Iraqi National Guard
uniform and gained admittance to the
mess hall with other Iraqi troops. Re-
ports 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.
Rachael’s return from Iraq to Okla-
homa 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 writ-
ing 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 Bagh-
dad 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 Okla-
homa, 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 be-
come what is known as a pumper.
estern Oklahoma has been its
W 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 pro-
duce 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 ev-
erywhere, 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. Al-
most every one of those wells, if it is in
operation, must be checked every day,
year in and year out, to make sure it’s
running right, and when it’s not it must
be fixed. The checking and mainte-
nance is the job of pumpers.
Pumpers usually work alone, driv-
ing from well to well, tending anywhere
from ten to forty or fifty wells a day. If
they are employed by an oil-well com-
pany, they’re called company pumpers
and receive a salary; if they’re not, they’re
contract pumpers and are paid a cer-
tain amount per well. Contract pump-
ers 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 per-
sonal suffering in common. Rachael was
working through her P.T.S.D., and Ev-
elyn was mourning her husband, “a gor-
geous 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 al-
ready. 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 lit-
tle 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 some-
times 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 Washing-
ton, 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,” Ev-
elyn 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 sur-
vived 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 no-
tice it.”
“And they want you to file a com-
plaint. 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 help-
ful 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 fibre-
glass and they were totally incinerated,
down to just the metal ring on the
ground, and all the product that was
62 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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
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 compres-
sor where some of it had collected, and
when he jumped the circuit that gas ig-
nited and almost blew his face off. Luck-
ily, his beard partly saved him.”
“A few years ago, a pumper was walk-

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,” Ra-
chael 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.
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, be-
hind auburn-rimmed glasses, were mis-
chievous and cheery. “I could take a dis-
ability 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
T we were bouncing across it in a sil-
ver 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 sur-
gery, and she had agreed to pump some
of them for him. Prairie grasses turn
colors in the fall, like trees in New En-
gland. The broad patches of big blue-
stem 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, sun-
glasses, 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 partic-
ular piece of ground. One was on a
ridgetop with a view, another in a
mini-canyon above a dry creek bed, an-
other on table-flat bare-dirt prairie; one
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 distinc-
tive 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., an-
other at two hundred and twenty, and
so on. In effect, the earth itself was driv-
ing 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 an-
other pipeline, and eventually to the
heater or the stove in your house. Me-
ters 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 cas-
ing. Either one of these can break, cor-
rode, 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 Goldberg-
ness 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 ris-
ing gas from a mile down hissed and
63
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 temporar-
ily 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 tempera-
ture 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 ma-
chine 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 shriek-
ing noise had come from the compres-
sor, 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,
W 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 Conven-
tion and Visitors Bureau for the city of
Woodward. The job comes with a cor-
ner office at the city’s Conference Cen-
ter and a staff of five. As director, she
oversees events—the longhorn-cattle
drive down Main Street that accom-
panies the Elks Rodeo; the Extreme
Monster Truck Summer Nationals; the
Twister Alley International Film Fes-
tival—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 re-
plied, “I just finished doin’ my wells.”
64 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 Wench with a Wrench.” One of her
reds, was setting up banquet tables. In pieces mentioned that she lived in Ross-
her coveralls and boots, she looked as ton. Having no other contact info, I
if she might be there to jackhammer a drove over one Saturday and looked
few holes in the parking lot, not to over- her up. When she came out of her house,
see the centerpieces. She introduced she was brushing her teeth. The arrival
me around, praising each staff member
generously and individually. Later, I saw
of a stranger at her door at nine-thirty
in the morning did not faze her, and
her dressed up for the ball, for which she continued to brush for a few min-
she wrote the award-citation speeches. utes as we talked.
She wore heels, a white blouse, black- Later in the year, at an event in Okla-
and-white plaid pants, and a black homa City, I happened to meet a woman
blazer, with her long blond hair out of named Linda Edmondson, who is the
its ponytail. wife of Drew Edmondson. He is a Dem-
ocrat and was running for governor of
first met Rachael because of her news- Oklahoma at the time. (In November,
I paper pieces. I was in the Panhan-
dle just after last year’s fires, and I read
he lost to Kevin Stitt, a semimoderate
Republican.) Hearing of my interest in
and admired what she wrote about them. the Panhandle, Linda told me, “You
Then I came across her column, “Pump- must meet Rachael Van Horn!” I said
er’s Corner,” which appears in a monthly I already had. Linda, who grew up in
insert, the Oilfield Outlook, in the Wood- Woodward, still follows local issues and
ward paper. The insert, which is twenty reads Rachael’s stories. The Woodward
pages or so, lists new well drillings, lease News, on its highest-circulation days,
signings, and other information of in- has a readership of thirty thousand, a
terest mainly to the industry, but Ra- not insignificant number in a market
chael’s column jumps off the page. She of that size; Woodward County and the
describes her pumping adventures, and counties that surround it have a com-
sometimes Evelyn’s, from a female bined population of about forty-five
pumper’s point of view, and she signs thousand. Perhaps even more people
herself “Rachael Van Horn, a.k.a. The 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.
ances on K-101 FM, a Woodward radio
station with listeners across northwest
Oklahoma. She is a regular on a pop-
ular morning talk-and-country-music
program.
Starting in 2015, Rachael began to re-
port in the News about a proposed amend-
ment to the state constitution which was
known as the Right to Farm Amend-
ment. 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 “compel-
ling state interest” was involved. The
amendment would make the freedom
to use all farming and ranching meth-
ods and technologies the same as the
freedom of speech or religion, essen-
tially transferring the power to regulate
agricultural practices—such as, say, a
hog farm polluting a public drinking-
water 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-
—Ilya Kaminsky
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 amend-
ments. 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 sup-
porters. 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 forty-
two 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-
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
chael and I ever spoke on the same
program, but I was aware of what she
was doing. She took a very smart ap-
proach, which was to say that Okla-
homa has been letting the legislature
handle these kinds of agricultural is-
sues for a hundred years, and we have
done pretty well with that so far. Peo-
ple listened to her, because she is a
rural person herself, from the western
part of the state, and not an eastern-
Oklahoma 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 con-
servative places, I asked them how they
would like to wake up tomorrow and
find a thousand-acre corporate mari-
juana 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
W Policemen’s Ball, Rachael did not
get home until late. I was supposed to
meet her soon after dawn the next morn-
ing. I made the fifty-minute drive from
Woodward to Laverne in darkness that
became a gray day. No trees in Amer-
ica are more beaten down than the cot-
tonwood trees of the central plains, chas-
tised 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 ar-
rived, 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 pump-
ing in Texas some years ago that be-
came covered in ice during the hottest
65
days of summer. Subzero carbon dioxide
being forced into a nearby injection
well had broken into her well under-
ground 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 at-
tention. 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 stay-
ing 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 ve-
hicle, she called Evelyn on her cell
phone and woke her up; in this lone-
some spot, she wanted to be in con-
stant contact with someone. On the
battery’s control panel, she saw a read-
out 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
“It would be good to settle in a place that has recreational facilities.”
me,” she says, in her Sergeant Van Horn
voice.) She vaguely remembered the
guy as someone who worked for the
company that serviced the compres-
sors. He said, “Aw, c’mon—don’t be
that way.” She told him to get in his
truck and leave. Later, she stopped see-
ing 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 grand-
daughter is half black. When I hear oil-
field 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 ig-
norant 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 prob-
lem 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
that when she was in Texas she had
met a guy who was a fellow-pumper.
They got along, and later started see-
ing 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 look-
ing to avoid getting serious with any-
body. Now, if they go out with some-
one 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 pump-
ers, 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 un-
coöperative Neff well. She went out-
side 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 compres-
sor 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 de-
ice. Plus, there’s less daylight to work
with, and of course the weather’s gen-
erally 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 completely present when I’m doing it, Out” signs—and walked the mile or so
the question of other people on the and that’s relaxing. I usually come in to the well. I had brought my sketch-
plains; most said that they did not be- from pumping calmer than when I book, and when I got there I sat on the
lieve in it, and a few said they were went out. ground and started drawing. Looking
withholding judgment. Rachael was “Last winter, I got stuck in the snow back along the track I had walked, I
the first to say that climate change was at one of these wells out here, and I noticed a car coming toward me. Across
real. I laughed, because she took me by could not extricate myself. For a few the empty prairie, driving carefully in
surprise. I then asked how she could minutes, I really got upset. But I called and out of the ruts, it approached with
square that belief with her job of re- around and found someone to come antlike slowness. As it got closer, I saw
moving fossil fuels from the ground. and pull me out. Then I sat back, and that it was the Oklahoma Highway Pa-
She thinks that the oil field here does on my phone I watched videos my trol. I stood up and started to walk to-
a tolerable job of conserving what it daughter had sent of my granddaugh- ward it, to show compliance. Pretty
pumps, that gas (its main product) burns ter opening her Christmas presents. soon, it pulled alongside.
more cleanly than other fuels, and that Eva, two years old, was just tearing into The window rolled down. A crew-
until we quit using fossil fuels we should that wrapping paper. Up to my door cut young officer—Trooper Chance
be as careful with them as we can. From handles in snow, in the middle of no- Housted, according to his nametag—
what I saw, the local wells are subdued, where at the well site, I was undis- asked what I was doing. I said that I
discrete markers in the landscape. That tracted by anything, and I was happy.” was drawing wells and showed him my
pumpers are checking on each one of sketchbook. He took this in without
them every day seems dutiful and con- efore heading back East, I went out comment. Then I told him that I had
scientious—an act that helps to hold
the world in place.
B one morning to look at some wells
on my own, to see what I had learned.
been riding with a pumper named Ra-
chael Van Horn.
“I love the people I work with in Along an empty stretch of paved road, “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I know Rachael.
my Convention and Visitors Bureau I passed wheel ruts leading off to the I live down by Rosston not too far from
job,” Rachael said. “But pumping wells, right, toward a horse-head well in the her. She’s been pumping wells around
working alone, is my meditation. Be- distance. I pulled over, left my car by here for a while.” He smiled. “Yeah, Ra-
cause there can be some danger, I’m the cattle guard—there were no “Keep chael,” he said. “She is the real deal.” 
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 67
 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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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
O the afternoon and evening pac-
ing the roof of my apartment
building in Brooklyn, climbing down
the fire-escape ladder and hanging by
my hands from the railing, then climb-
ing back up with sore palms and lying
on the roof, in a ball, or stretched out
on my back or on my stomach, peer-
ing 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, ambu-
lance, and fire. What agency would come
for me? A helicopter was flying over-
head 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 down-
stairs in my apartment, Regan, my part-
ner then, my caregiver, thought that I’d
gone to the street. We had been fight-
ing 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 anx-
ious 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 psy-
chosis, 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 slop-
ing 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 deci-
sion or a wish. I do not understand sui-
cide as a response to pain, or as a mes-
sage 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
70 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
origins in trauma and isolation, in depri-
vation 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 sui-
cide, lasted years, through hospitaliza-
tions, through more than fifty rounds
of electroconvulsive therapy—once
known as shock therapy—through re-
covery, relapse, and recovery. It can seem
recent in memory, though at times it
feels ancient, far removed, another life-
time, 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 back-
ward, 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 ne-
glected. 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 lead-
ing 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 apart-
ment, and they’ve replaced the old chain-
link 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 scream-
ing on the rooftop playground of the pri-
vate 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 roof-
top and back, letting go with one hand,
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 un-
derstood 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 al-
coholic life and her resignation in death,
and my role as her son, savior, and aban-
doner. 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 exposi-
tion to scene, defense to acceptance,
mortification to love. But my old worlds—
Florida, Virginia, the places of my child-
hood—were costly to rebuild. I was en-
gaged 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 pre-
cipitously remarried, and she was drink-
ing 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 Seven-
ties, 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 up-
town to my apartment, where I packed,
checked the stove, turned off the lights,
locked the door behind me, and hur-
ried down the stairs, onto the street and “Oh, man, I got real confused by the mirrors in here.”
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. eaten and rested and slept, I drove her stucco bungalow with a red tiled roof,
My grandfather had a ticket waiting, to A.A., to what people in recovery call Venetian blinds, a mowed lawn, a paved
and I took the last flight of the night the rooms, rooms in churches and com- driveway and carport, a front door that
from LaGuardia to Miami. My mother munity centers and sometimes schools, wasn’t used, a guest bedroom downstairs,
lived in a new two-story duplex, cheap where she had friends waiting, friends and three bedrooms upstairs. My sister
construction on a canal. The yard was she had met before and friends she was and I lived with our grandparents when
bare, the front door was open, and light about to meet; and a sponsor. And, once our parents were divorcing for the first
shone out. In “The Afterlife,” I describe again, she embarked on sobriety, which time. They would remarry a few years
bottles on their sides in the doorway lasted, this time, for the rest of her life. later, when Terry was seven and I was
and on the carpet in the living room, I was born in Sarasota, Florida, on a eight, and then divorce again when we
empty bottles. I describe my mother September night in 1958. In the story were in our early twenties. But, at the
standing on the stairs. In my memory, that my mother tells of my birth, I was time that I am writing about, Terry was
she wears a long nightgown. Her an- taken from her by force. Her mother, my five and I was six. I remember lying awake
kles and feet are blue, and blue-veined. grandmother, pulled me out of my moth- in the heat. Fans blew. Downstairs, a sun-
The doctors had told her that she would er’s arms and kept me. My mother was porch with orchids and potted shrubs
die if she drank. I suspect that that night, not allowed to hold me. My father, who faced a little square yard planted with
after a long binge, she came close. She had graduated from college the summer orange and tangerine trees. There was
was forty-five, fifteen years younger than before on an R.O.T.C. scholarship, was wisteria and hibiscus. The air was wet
I am as I write this. I sat with her through away, training to command tanks at Fort and sticky. Down a little walkway out
her delirium tremens, and held her hand, Bragg, North Carolina, where, eleven back was the two-story garage where my
or kept my hand on her arm, while she months later, my sister, Terry, would be grandfather spent part of each day, where
shook. She’d been drinking and quit- born. My mother told me that she and he had tools hung on a pegboard, stacked
ting, and in and out of hospitals and I were distraught; I cried and cried, but paint cans, a worktable with a vise, and
A.A. for two years. My grandfather and her mother would not give me back. beer in an old refrigerator. The garage
I had taken turns watching over her, There was panic, she told me, and more smelled of paint thinner, insecticide, and
going to her, through that time. He and fighting and crying, and it took my fa- lawnmower fuel. My grandfather sat at
I were in contact. He wanted to know ther a day and a night to get there. a bench and mended kitchen-cabinet
if I thought that she would be all right. Where was my grandfather? I knew drawers, or rewired appliances, or sanded
He knew that she hadn’t ever been. That my mother’s father as a docile, suffering wood, while sipping from a can. He
night in Miami, in my mother’s duplex, man. When I was very little, he’d fallen chewed cinnamon gum and toothpicks.
after she’d fallen asleep, I cleared the off the roof of the house, while replac- In “The Afterlife,” I report that my
bottles and cleaned the floors and fed ing tiles, and broken his back. I remem- mother was subjected to Munchausen
the cats. A few days later, once she’d ber that house. It was a two-story white syndrome by proxy, a form of abuse that
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 71
is carried out, usually by a parent or a
caregiver, as unnecessary medical or
surgical intervention. My mother re-
counted a succession of operations, de-
manded by her mother and performed
by compliant doctors. In one story she
told, she was a teen-ager, at Sarasota Me-
morial 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 vi-
olation, and symbolic repair,
was never understood in my
family, and it implicates my
grandmother and grandfa-
ther, together in collusion or complicity,
in crimes against their only child. “They
drank,” my mother told me shortly be-
fore 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 mis-
takes. 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, ner-
vousness, neurosis, neurasthenia, mad-
ness, lunacy, insanity, delirium, derange-
72 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 in-
ferno, Hell, a pain syndrome, stress, an
anxiety disorder, lack of affect, an affec-
tive disorder, a mood disorder, panic,
loneliness, bad wiring, a screw loose,
a mercurial temperament, irritability,
schizophrenia, unipolar disorder, bipolar
disorder, post-traumatic
stress disorder, obsessive-
compulsive disorder, atten-
tion-deficit disorder, border-
line personality disorder,
laziness, pain, rumination,
grief, mourning, malinger-
ing, unhappiness, hopeless-
ness, sadness, low spirits,
invalidism, despondency, dys-
thymia, detachment, disas-
sociation, 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-cen-
teredness, weakness, withdrawal, distrac-
tion, 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, will-
fulness, defiance, thoughts of hurting
oneself or others, the thousand-yard stare,
craziness, rage, misery, mania, morbidity,
genius, suicidality, suicidal ideation, ag-
gression, regression, decompensation,
drama, breakdown, crackup, catatonia,
losing one’s mind, losing one’s shit, los-
ing one’s way, wasting away, psychic dis-
organization, spiritual despair, shame,
raving, the furies, a disease, an enigma, a
tragedy, a curse, a sin, and, of course, psy-
chosis—suicide, in the past and in our
time, has been called many things. What-
ever 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
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 Manhat-
tan, 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, un-
touched, breathing my cigarette smoke,
not eating, not laughing, morose—the
winter. Then, in early spring, I had stag-
gered 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 sui-
cides don’t; we don’t leave last testaments.
I wrote them all winter long, on a note-
pad, while sitting on a tarp on the liv-
ing-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, spread-
ing 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 bur-
ied 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 bulk-
head, next to the door to the stairs. I was
breathing fast, and my body hurt. Be-
yond the Brooklyn rooftops was Man-
hattan. Lights were on in the skyscrap-
ers. 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 press-
ing 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 col-
lapsing from the inside, collapsing and
hardening? Where was Regan? Where
were my friends? I wanted a bullet. I’d
wanted one since Christmas, to elimi-
nate an itch behind my temple. I re-
member lying in bed, imagining the bul-
let 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 irri-
table-bowel syndrome, and headaches,
and, starting in fifth grade, when I was
ten, awful and incapacitating back
spasms. They began early one morn-
ing before school, in the upstairs bath-
room in our house on Lewis Moun-
tain 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 At-
lantic seaboard, or sometimes just across
town—Sarasota, Gainesville, Charlottes-
ville, 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 prob-
lems. While the teacher talked, I imag-
ined 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 fa-
ther 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-
“I’ll cover your meal if you pick the other guy.”
ories. Even the bad times, in recollection,
seem somehow not to include him, though
he was right there, drunk, sarcastic, maud-
lin, 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 Ven-
ice 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 mov-
ing. 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 remem-
ber 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

• •
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 sin-
gle 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 emo-
tions, 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 heli-
copter. I realized that I would go to a
hospital. I’d been ruminating over hos-
pitals, imagining them, fearing them. On
the roof, looking out across the city, I pic-
tured Gothic piles and state psychiatric
74 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
prisons, stone dungeons and brick bar-
racks; 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 be-
hind 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 psychia-
trist 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. Some-
time 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 re-
assurance. I paced, and every night at
two, three, four o’clock, woke up sweat-
ing. 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, unsuccess-
fully, and again, also unsuccessfully,
during the months leading up to the
day on the roof: S.S.R.I.s, which target
the mechanisms that control the neu-
rotransmitter serotonin; an S.N.R.I.,
which affects both serotonin and nor-
epinephrine levels; Wellbutrin, a dopa-
mine enhancer; and Lamictal, a mood
stabilizer developed to treat epilepsy,
and now also used to treat a broad range
of clinical psychiatric conditions. Klo-
nopin 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 yel-
low 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 sec-
tions of curve below the horizontal axis
he labelled “depression,” and the area
above the axis “anxiety.” The doctor ex-
plained that benzodiazepines might
worsen depression but help with anxi-
ety, 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 un-
derstand? 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 symp-
toms, thoughts, and behaviors, rather
than on the origins and historical ex-
perience of illness in the patient’s life.
The doctor asked if I had been think-
ing of hurting myself. Was I having sui-
cidal 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 to-
ward 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 cir-
cle 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 remem-
ber 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, ca-
tastrophes 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 differ-
ent 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. Up-
stairs, 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 rect-
angular, 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 commu-
nal area for the staff. Patients’ bedrooms
lined the hallways. A common area dou-
bled as the dining room. The television
was on all day. Patients leaned in door-
ways 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 an-
other 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 ra-
zors, 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 communicat-
ing 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
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
and their residents came. The ward bus-
ied, like any workplace at the start of a
new week. My own doctor, the prescrib-
ing 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 hap-
pen 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 harm-
ing 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 un-
locked 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
75
route. Was it the brightness in the light,
a sharpness to the day, that Monday af-
ternoon? 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 up-
stairs, 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, re-
turned. 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 con-
stant. 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 ei-
ther. 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 re-
member that? I would leave a note, beg-
ging 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 swal-
low. Regan and I spoke less and less. At
76 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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, in-
stitutionalization and the removal from
society—abjection and the end of be-
longing. The calm that I’d had for a mo-
ment in the hospital was gone. I slept
two or three hours, and then sat up watch-
ing the light change with morning; and,
later, during the day, took the death po-
sition, phoned those who might answer,
or sped from back to front in the apart-
ment, dragging the tarp. It was April, and
then May, an eternity in real time. I wor-
ried 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. Per-
haps this was, as it were, an instance of
hypochondria—I’d had a history of dis-
locations when I was younger. But what
to make of the strange fluctuations in
balance when walking, the tipping side-
ways, 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 be-
come 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 terri-
fying. I would press myself
against the platform wall
and hyperventilate.
I gave the driver the ad-
dress, 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 be-
fore 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-
sick. The time that I remember best was
in the Smoky Mountains, on hairpin
turns outside Asheville, North Caro-
lina. 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 vis-
ited 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, mod-
ern place. I barged up to the desk. The
receptionist asked if I had an appoint-
ment. 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 impor-
tant! 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 accom-
pany him down the hall?
We went into a room. I didn’t climb
onto the examination table, and the doc-
tor 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 “ You said you’d be home at half a candle.”
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 and the roof, the infantilizing doctor and secondhand. The doctor sat in a corner,
back along the hall, past the reception the Brooklyn ward; and I promised her near the window, writing notes on a pad.
desk, and across the waiting room. Peo- that I was not thinking of hurting my- I sat in the middle of the room, in a red
ple watched. The doctor held the door, self, though dying was my only thought. armchair. The upholstery was frayed and
and then quietly shut it behind me. I I was lying, of course. I couldn’t bring tearing. The doctor warned me that I
rode the elevator to the lobby. On the myself to do otherwise. What would I was in danger, and that damage and harm
street, I called my friend David, who be admitting to? I insisted that I did not would accrue and intensify. She meant
lives in Nyack, twenty miles up the Hud- need a hospital. brain damage. She told me that if I stayed
son. David had stayed on the phone She said that I sounded sick. She told out of the hospital I would die.
with me through the winter and the me to come to Columbia Presbyterian. Later that week, on a Friday, I called
spring, listening patiently to my jagged They’d take care of me, she said; they’d a car and asked the driver to take me to
talking. I raged to David about my phys- help me get better. She told me that it 168th Street and Broadway. On the drive,
ical condition, and he shouted, “Why was dangerous for me to stay out on my I phoned Regan, my father, and my
aren’t you in a hospital? You need to be own, that I’d be safe in the hospital, and friends, and told them that I was going
in a hospital!”  that I needed treatment. What did she to Columbia Presbyterian.
I thought of Anne. We’d been friends mean, treatment? I told her that I would I felt calmer in the car than I had at
in college. She was a year behind me. I consider what she was saying. She then home. I breathed more easily. It was a
remembered that she’d gone to medical gave me the phone number of a colleague clear day. I remember the drive up the
school and become a psychiatrist, and I in private practice, another Columbia West Side Highway. The Hudson River
recalled hearing that she practiced at Co- doctor, whom I’ll call Dr. T. “Everyone was on the left, and I could see the
lumbia Presbyterian, at 168th Street and respects her,” Anne told me. George Washington Bridge ahead in
Broadway, near the George Washington Dr. T.’s office was on the Upper West the distance. The trees in Riverside Park
Bridge and the top of Manhattan. I didn’t Side, in the Nineties, near Central Park, were green. I hadn’t planned. I’d taken
phone her that day after leaving the clinic, on the ground floor, facing the street. some things—my keys, some cash, but
but the next day, or maybe the day after, Diplomas hung on the wall above a desk. not much else. I’d stopped writing and
I got in touch with Anne, and she told Freud’s works, the Hogarth Press Stan- reading long before, and hadn’t both-
me that she was an in-patient doctor in dard edition, sat in their faded blue jack- ered with a book.
Columbia’s psychiatric emergency room. ets behind glass doors in an antique book- The car pulled up in front of a build-
I remember where I was when Anne case, and a fainting couch for patients in ing made of stone. I saw doctors, nurses,
picked up the phone. I was on the little analysis was spread with kilim rugs, a and ambulances.There was the emergency
sofa in my living room. I told her about touch taken straight from Freud’s Vi- room. I paid the driver, got out of the
the Klonopin and the Ativan, Regan enna consulting room. Everything looked car, and walked toward the entrance. ♦
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 77
 FICTION

78 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY RACHEL LEVIT RUIZ
 can’t tell you my name. Or the
I 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 fer-
tile 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 mus-
cles. “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 teen-
agers in the village kept their distance.
When they met up to drink stolen
beers in the evening, they never in-
vited 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 illiter-
ate. There was no electricity in the
village yet, and nobody had a televi-
sion 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 behav-
ior and that she now roamed the
streets like the dog she was. The old
women said nothing. They just low-
ered their eyes. I imagine they were
praying for the soul of that young
peasant girl. I listened with interest
to conversations about the mysteri-
ous vagabond, always on the alert for
any new information. That sordid
tale, whose protagonist lived new ad-
ventures every day, was my only source
of entertainment. During the days,
as I halfheartedly helped look after
the animals, I would listen for the
latest rumor, passed from mouth to
mouth, growing more exaggerated
and distorted with each telling.
ne afternoon, a man named Achour
O suggested that I go to the plains
with him to gather grass for the ani-
mals. 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 sev-
eral occasions I had witnessed his ex-
traordinary physical strength. He was
followed by his ten-year-old son, who
already seemed used to the tough farm-
work. 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 uncomfort-
able, and I barely said anything in re-
sponse. 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 chew-
ing 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 vil-
lagers were always talking about.
“This one’s for you!” he shouted,
suddenly excited. “You don’t get a chance
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 mid-
dle 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 threat-
ening 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 pre-
pared. 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 mo-
ment. 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 cer-
tain that my memories of her corre-
spond 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 coun-
try 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 pen-
etrated 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
79
but as someone who uses her mind to
escape a terrifying situation. I cannot
say why, but I had the painful impres-
sion 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
“Hey, we’re all rooting for you! Don’t ever forget—
you’re a world-class planet.”
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 hun-
gry.” 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 vaga-
bond’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 peas-
ant’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,
who shrugged. “So?” he seemed to ask.
In his mountain village, hunger was a
constant state, a habit formed in child-
hood 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 stupid-
ity of women. Finally, the boy arrived
with a round loaf of bread, some but-
ter, and a steaming teapot in a wicker
basket. We could have given the food
to the girl and left then and there, es-
pecially 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 de-
serted 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 fuch-
sia. 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 bri-
dle, he insisted that I ride the animal.
Watched by Achour, I feigned indiffer-
ence. 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, stand-
ing 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 think-
ing about her, and about the cold night
ahead of her. About the predators who
would attack her: men, animals, mem-
bers 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,
W 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 for-
got my regrets and the coldness of the
night. I interrupted Achour and told
the rest of the story myself, adding an-
ecdotes and lewd details that made
those hicks burst into laughter. In my
telling, the girl became a happy, lust-
ful peasant girl, full-breasted, buttocks
spread. We rolled in the grass, then lay
back giggling. My audience was won
over. The men congratulated me, slap-
ping me on the shoulder.
hat year, my father was transferred
T to Casablanca and I began my se-
nior 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-
“I have to use the rest room. Would you mind mumbling ‘Mm-hmm’
on my conference call for a few minutes?”
• •
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 en-
courage 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 col-
lapsed. 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
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 sweat-
soaked rump and recognized the fa-
miliar 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-à-
tête 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 fol-
lowed, 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 sad-
ness, by the consciousness of a crime
whose name I dared not speak. ♦
(Translated, from the French,
by Sam Taylor.)
NEWYORKER.COM
Leïla Slimani on unbearable secrets.
81
 THE CRITICS
DANCING
MISSTEPS
What went wrong at New York City Ballet?
JOAN ACOCELLA
robably the most cherished old tale
P 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 reli-
gion. 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 addi-
tion 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 ara-
besque 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, last-
ing at least up to Keats, that beauty,
truth, and virtue are inseparable, that
we live in a good world.
Such thoughts, however, are unlikely
Peter Martins, left, in 1978, long before the recent scandals at City Ballet,
rehearsing dancers in his severe, sarcastic duet “Calcium Light Night.”
82 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
to have occurred to Alexandra Water-
bury, a nineteen-year-old model and a
former student of the School of Amer-
ican Ballet, New York City Ballet’s affili-
ate 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 law-
suit 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 Zach-
MARTHA SWOPE © THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY; ABOVE: LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
ary 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,” Longhi-
tano 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 bal-
lerina and her sister! That was my first
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 83
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, Jor-
dan 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 mat-
ter 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, Water-
bury’s lawyer filed a lawsuit seeking
compensatory and punitive damages for
the pain and humiliation she had suf-
fered, together with the damage to her
reputation and, therefore, to her job
prospects. Soon afterward, Ramasar and
Catazaro were fired. (A lawyer for Fin-
lay called the claims “distorted and in-
accurate,” and Catazaro’s lawyer said
that he would be seeking to have the
complaint dismissed. Longhitano de-
clined to comment, and a lawyer for
Ramasar argued that one of the women
had consented to having her photo-
graphs 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 Washing-
ton, 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, accord-
ing to the lawsuit, the hosts of the party,
though they had to pay for the repairs
to the hotel property, were not other-
wise punished; instead, they were sim-
ply 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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
damage control. By means of such tol-
erance, the suit claimed, N.Y.C.B. sig-
nalled 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 “con-
doned, 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 scan-
dal, it had had only four-
teen male principals. Now,
in one fell swoop, it lost
three, and two of them, Ra-
masar 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 male-
factors. 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 compa-
ny’s fall fashion gala, in September of
last year, the curtain rose not on a bal-
let but on a large, loose collection of the
troupe’s dancers, in street clothes—peo-
ple like you and me, people who pre-
sumably did not fantasize about tying
women up like farm animals. Stepping
out from among them, Teresa Reichlen,
a seraphic-looking principal dancer wear-
ing a dress that covered her from neck
to ankle, delivered a speech, reading it,
modestly, from a printout. “We the danc-
ers of New York City Ballet,” she began,
in an echo of the Constitution’s We-the-
People, “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 essen-
tial to our art form: dignity, integrity,
and honor.” That is, what happened was
just the work of a few bad apples. Man-
agement totted up the donations that
Jared Longhitano had made to City Bal-
let and gave the money to the organi-
zation Women in Need. The amount
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 sug-
T gest 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 Bal-
let in 1969 and was a sensation—beau-
tiful of face and form, and with big, won-
derfully 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 Far-
rell, 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 ap-
pointed 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 ca-
reer should keep in mind that, in the his-
tory 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,
at the end of time, anyone ever congrat-
ulates us on being the human race, he
will be one of the prime exhibits. By con-
trast, Peter Martins, however beautifully
he danced, was, at best, a middling cho-
reographer, until, in the late eighties, per-
haps under the strain of being compared
with Balanchine night after night, he
became something worse, a very pissed-
off 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-wor-
shipping duets. The element of aggres-
sion might have been put down to youth-
ful iconoclasm, but, as the years passed,
it did not diminish; it grew. In 1988, Mar-
tins 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 re-
sponds, but mostly he recoils. Eventu-
ally, 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 af-
terward. 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 eigh-
teen, 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 de-
fense team portrayed Levin as sexually
rapacious, and, when the jury was un-
able to reach a verdict on the charge of
murder, he pleaded guilty to manslaugh-
ter. Less than two weeks before the first
performance of Martins’s ballet, with its
depiction of female sexual demands pro-
voking 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 trans-
ferred to the Princess and her consort—
an action that was hard to interpret as
anything other than Martins telling his Finding discreet, proven
audience that they should stop pining treatment for drug and
for Balanchine and get happy with his alcohol abuse is no joke.
successor. In 1999, the company danced
Martins’s “Swan Lake,” a ballet that tra- But it is possible.
ditionally ends with the Swan Queen
and the Prince drowning themselves in
The difference between
the lake and, in many versions, going to
Heaven together. Martins simply has addiction and recovery
the Swan Queen walk out on the Prince. can be a single phone call.
The message seemed to be: Isn’t this the We’re ready to talk.
way it happens in real life? People get
together; they have problems; they split 844.359.0535
up. So what? In 2007, Martins made a
new, brutal “Romeo and Juliet.” In Shake-
speare’s play, Lord Capulet, furious over
his daughter’s rejection of his marriage Ranked #1 by
U.S. News & World Report
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
mclean.org
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. Bal-
anchine 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 New Yorker Cartoon Prints
like body snatchers. When Martins had
a success, it was usually with something
fast and furious—for example, his “Har-
monielehre” (2000) and “Hallelujah Junc-
tion” (2002), both to frenetic scores by
John Adams—where the steps were so
hard that no one expected the dancers David Sipress, April 8, 2013
to do more than get through them. The
company rose to the challenge, and it newyorkerstore.com
was quite a sight—you felt as though
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 85

“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 after-
ward, though. I remember having a con-
versation about Martins in the late eight-
ies 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
I Kistler, almost twenty years his junior,
a tall, sweet-faced blond dancer from
Southern California whom Balanchine
had plucked from the School of Amer-
ican Ballet and installed in the company
two years earlier, when she was only six-
teen. She and Martins were together on
and off throughout the eighties, and they
married in 1991. One night the follow-
ing 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
86 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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 stormi-
ness with Heather Watts, an N.Y.C.B.
principal. “I saw him pick her up and
slam her into a cement wall,” John Clif-
ford, 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 De-
cember, 2017, that N.Y.C.B. and S.A.B.
announced that they had begun an in-
vestigation 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 sus-
pended from teaching his weekly class
at the school.) Why was he finally being
questioned? Because, the newspapers
reported, S.A.B. had received an anon-
ymous letter containing “general, non-
specific allegations of sexual harassment”
by him. A good deal of Martins’s treat-
ment 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.
Soon, however, more dancers—and
not only women—began to speak to
the press about mistreatment by Mar-
tins. Jeffrey Edwards, a very refined so-
loist, told Robin Pogrebin, of the Times,
that in 1993 he was physically abused by
Martins. He said that he lodged a com-
plaint with the company’s general man-
ager and with the dancers’ union, de-
scribing 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 on-
stage in front of the whole cast.”
In an interview with Salon, Wilhel-
mina Frankfurt, a tall, commanding
N.Y.C.B. dancer from the seventies
and eighties, recalled an incident, mid-
performance, 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 wit-
ness signed nondisclosure agreements.
(The company disputes her account.)
The accusations did not always in-
volve 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 bal-
let companies—and Balanchine’s career
was marked, even shaped, by serial in-
fatuations—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 busi-
ness. (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 in-
stitutions”—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 in-
vestigation “did not corroborate the al-
legations of harassment or violence both
made in the anonymous letter and re-
ported in the media.” No report on the
inquiry was ever published, so it is im-
possible to know how this surprising
judgment was reached. And although
certain important dancers stood by Mar-
tins, 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 disap-
pointed that Sarah Jessica Parker, the
vice-chair of N.Y.C.B.’s board of direc-
tors and a vocal feminist, had remained
silent throughout the affair. (She even-
tually texted the Times, saying that the
safety of the company’s dancers “is par-
amount 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 danc-
ers he had caused to “scream and squirt.”
fter Martins left, the boards of
A 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 compa-
nies—the Bolshoi, the Paris Opera Bal-
let, 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 Bal-
anchine, to show his work. And though
Jerome Robbins was eventually given
significant space—perhaps a third of the
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 cho-
reographer currently working in the
United States, Alexei Ratmansky, a Rus-
sian, who is the artist-in-residence of
American Ballet Theatre, across Lin-
coln Center’s plaza, whence he is un-
likely 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 hide-
bound 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, fe-
male City Ballet alumnae who have gone
on to notable careers as teachers or ad-
ministrators have been revisiting the
troupe’s halls, and various names have
been floated, but not on the basis of cho-
reographic achievement. Whereas mod-
ern dance has been dominated, in large
measure, by female choreographers, clas-
sical-ballet choreography is a career that
in most Western countries has been all
but closed to women, and this is chang-
ing only very slowly. To my knowledge,
only two twentieth-century women—
Bronislava Nijinska and Twyla Tharp—
regularly made ballets for major inter-
national 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 an-
swers that description.
But a distinguished ballet company
does not need to be headed by a distin-
guished choreographer. The example
always cited is that of Diaghilev’s Bal-
lets Russes. Serge Diaghilev was not a
choreographer at all, but he had the en-
ergy and discernment to foster young
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
people who were. After he died, the
graduates of his troupe more or less
staffed the directorships of Western bal-
let—Léonide Massine and Bronislava
Nijinska in Europe and America, Marie
Rambert and Ninette de Valois in Lon-
don, 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 will-
ing 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 Wheel-
don, N.Y.C.B.’s resident choreographer
from 2001 to 2008, who is now one of
the leading lights of international bal-
let. Wheeldon’s successor as resident
choreographer is the thirty-one-year-
old 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 addi-
tion, 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. 
87

A CRITIC AT LARGE
THE FIREMAN
Eugene V. Debs and the endurance of American socialism.
BY JILL LEPORE
Debs ran for President five times, captivating crowds by the tens of thousands.
ugene Victor Debs left school at the
E age of fourteen, to scrape paint and
grease off the cars of the Vandalia Rail-
road, in Indiana, for fifty cents a day. He
got a raise when he was promoted to
fireman, which meant working in the lo-
comotive next to the engineer, shovel-
ling 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 en-
gineers, which was safer than being a
switchman or a brakeman, jobs that in-
volved 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 re-
ported 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—
88 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
the engineers, the firemen, the brake-
men, the switchmen, and even the scrap-
ers—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 Amer-
ican railroad in the last decades of the
nineteenth century became, of neces-
sity, 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 stu-
dent of this subject is more important
to American history than Debs, half
man, half myth, who founded the Amer-
ican 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-
liness, always said that the best kind
of man was a sand man. “ ‘Sand’ means
grit,” he wrote in 1882, in Firemen’s Mag-
azine. “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, some-
thing of a morbid fear of ashes. Maybe
that’s a fireman’s phobia, a tending-the-
engine man’s idea of doom. In prison—
having been sentenced, brutally, to ten
years of hard time at the age of sixty-
three—he had a nightmare. “I was walk-
ing by the house where I was born,” he
wrote. “The house was gone and noth-
ing left but ashes . . . only ashes—ashes!”
The question today for socialism in the
United States, which appears to be stok-
ing 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, In-
D diana, in 1855, seven years after
Marx and Engels published “The Com-
munist Manifesto.” His parents were
Alsatian immigrants who ran a small
grocery store. Debs worked for the rail-
roads 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, home-
sick, he tramped back to Terre Haute,
where, in 1875, he took a job as a labor
organizer, and, later, as a magazine ed-
itor, for the Brotherhood of Locomo-
tive 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 rub-
bery, 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 ad-
FOTOSEARCH/GETTY
mire, in tall men who don’t like to tower
over other people. In a new book, “Eu-
gene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography”
(Verso), drawn by Noah Van Sciver and
written by Paul Buhle and Steve Max,
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 ar-
chival sound, no one has ever found a
recording of his voice. When Nick Sal-
vatore wrote, in his comprehensive bi-
ography, “Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and
Socialist,” in 1982, “His voice ran a gamut
of tones: mock whisper to normal con-
versation 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 pub-
lished 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 Peo-
ple’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 Pol-
ish 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, dub-
bing 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 per-
mitted myself as a member of the Demo-
cratic party to be elected to a state legis-
lature,” 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 ar-
chitect 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 work-
ers’ strike. The firemen’s brotherhood was
less a labor union than a benevolent so-
ciety. “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 so-
cialism. He placed his faith in democ-
racy, the franchise, and the two-party
system. “The conflict is not between
capital and labor,” he insisted. “It is be-
tween 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 an-
other 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 Ameri-
canism, 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 indus-
trial union, a federation of all the broth-
erhoods of railroad workers, from brake-
men to conductors, as equals. Samuel
Gompers wanted those men to join his
far less radical trade union, the Amer-
ican 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,
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
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
D 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 mem-
bers, had already begun a wildcat strike
in May of 1894, a month before the
A.R.U.’s first annual meeting, in Chi-
cago. As Jack Kelly recounts, in “The
Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Bar-
ons, the Gilded Age, and the Greatest
Labor Uprising in America” (St. Mar-
tin’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 depart-
ment for five years, upholstering and
making curtains, addressed the conven-
tion. 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 boy-
cott, 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 conven-
tion. But, by a vote of 112 to 110, the as-
sembled 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,
89

BRIEFLY NOTED
Maid, by Stephanie Land (Hachette). The author recalls a life
lived on the brink, where a petty mishap can mean destitu-
tion. 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 precarious-
ness 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 mem-
oir pays homage to “To the Lighthouse,” while recounting
the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vi-
brant 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 res-
olution.” The question remains: “Have I come up with any-
thing, 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 hum-
ble 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 in-
stabilities of contemporary Nigeria and of the whole cosmos
of the Igbo religion. The preponderance of traditional wis-
dom can feel cumbersome, but this spiritual grounding rep-
resents 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 gi-
gantic” genie. Aladdin’s future becomes his to write, or so it
seems at first. In an introduction, Horta lays out the histori-
cal 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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
to fill positions opened by striking whites.
If working on a Pullman car was degrad-
ing, 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 Mar-
shall’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 recog-
nition 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 Amer-
ican 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 misgiv-
ings 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. Pur-
sued by a U.S. Attorney General who
had long served as a lawyer for the rail-
roads, Debs and other A.R.U. leaders
were indicted and convicted of violat-
ing a federal injunction to stop “order-
ing, directing, aiding, assisting, or abet-
ting” 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 two-
story 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 prison-
er’s uniform, seated at a desk in a bare
room, with a beady-eyed, billy-club-
wielding prison guard looking on from
the doorway, while a cheerful man in a
suit, carrying “The Communist Mani-
festo,” approaches Debs, his speech bub-
ble 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 stand-
ing collar and a small black and white
scarf tied in a bow-knot.” The Milwau-
kee socialist Victor Berger did bring
Debs a copy of Marx’s “Das Kapital.”
And Debs and his fellow labor orga-
nizers 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-slav-
ery,” he wrote. “I am for socialism be-
cause I am for humanity. . . . Money con-
stitutes no proper basis of civilization.”
That June, at the annual meeting
of the American Railway Union, Debs
founded the Social Democracy of Amer-
ica 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 pro-
duction. “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 suffer-
ing 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 nom-
inating 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 mes-
sage that he gave to his class as he came
from his darkened cell was a message of
liberty.” Debs earned nearly ninety thou-
sand votes in that year’s election, and
more than four times as many when he
ran again in 1904. In 1908, he campaigned
“I just think after six years of marriage you’d take your coat off.”
in thirty-three states, travelling on a cus-
tom 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 mil-
lion Americans voted for him for Pres-
ident. 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 minimum-
wage 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 world-
wide war of the social revolution. In
that war I am prepared to fight in any
way the ruling class may make neces-
sary, 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 coun-
try,” 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 peo-
ple against working families, against
the disappearing and shrinking mid-
dle 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 Pro-
gressive-era reforms, in the New Deal,
and in Lyndon Johnson’s Great Soci-
ety. In the decades since Ronald Rea-
gan’s election in 1980, many of those
reforms have been undone, monopo-
lies have risen again, and income in-
equality has spiked back up to where
it was in Debs’s lifetime. Socialism has
been carried into the twenty-first cen-
tury by way of Sanders, a Debs disci-
ple, and by way of the utter failure of
the two-party system. Last summer, a
Gallup poll found that more Demo-
crats view socialism favorably than view
capitalism favorably. This brand of so-
cialism has its own obsession with man-
liness, with its “Bernie bros” and alle-
gations 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 move-
ment’s new face, and new voice: the
former Sanders campaign worker Al-
exandria 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 prob-
lem: “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 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
and when we die we shall go to an Am-
azon 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
D 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 Wash-
ington Post announced. Most of the na-
tion’s newspapers described him as a
dictator or a traitor, or both. And, be-
cause what he had said was deemed se-
ditious, newspapers couldn’t print it,
and readers assumed the worst. But the
speech was vintage Debs, from its vague
blandishments and programmatic prom-
ises—“We are going to destroy all en-
slaving and degrading capitalist insti-
tutions and re-create them as free and
humanizing institutions”—to its astute
observations and forceful repetitions:
“The working class who fight the bat-
tles, the working class who make the
sacrifices, the working class who shed
the blood, the working class who fur-
nish the corpses, the working class have
never yet had a voice in declaring war.”
Debs was one of thousands of so-
cialists jailed during the First World
War and the Red Scare that followed,
when the Justice Department effec-
tively 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 ora-
tion, 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, watch-
ing 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 sen-
tencing that would be his best-remem-
bered 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,
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 At-
lanta Federal Penitentiary. On the wall
of a cell that he shared with five other
men, he hung a picture of Jesus, wear-
ing 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 sec-
tion 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 hierar-
chy, 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” cam-
paign, in 1920, he earned nearly a mil-
lion votes running for President as Con-
vict 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. 
 66 “___ right?” (leading question)
PUZZLES DEPT. 67 The ability to act freely, in philosophy
68 Pushup muscles
69 Feed type
ANNIVERSARY CROSSWORD 70 Colorful South African brew

How well do you know The New Yorker? The starred clues refer DOWN
to the surnames of contributors from the magazine’s history. 1 Club where “music and passion were
always the fashion,” familiarly
BY NATAN LAST 2 Mathematician Turing
3 Swiss city where Einstein theorized
relativity
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14 15 16 6 Sister of Venus
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31 32 33 34 35 36 37
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38 39 40 41
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26 Quaint plaint
42 43 44 45 46 47
27 “A League of Their Own” actor Petty
48 49 50 51
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forget house style!)
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Corner” from 1928 48 Abandoner of the cause 59 “Who ___?”
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20 February 21st, for The New Yorker 52 User-edited site singing)
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THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019 93


MUSICAL EVENTS
DEEP CUTS
Early-music performers venture beyond the Baroque’s familiar names.
BY ALEX ROSS
he early-music movement has
T changed not only how musicians
play—tuning, timbre, technique, style—
but also what they play. A couple of gen-
erations 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
The Flemish composer Leonora Duarte lived in a Vermeer-like world.
94 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
Baroque repertory has undergone a diz-
zying democratization, as two midwin-
ter 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 Fuen-
tidueña Chapel, at the Cloisters, the en-
semble Sonnambula based a program
around the Flemish composer Leonora
Duarte. The absence of historical celeb-
rities hardly hurt attendance; both events
played to full houses.
Duarte, who lived from 1610 to around
1678, belonged to the converso commu-
nity of Antwerp—Jews who fled Portu-
gal and Spain and converted to Cathol-
icism. Diego Duarte I, Duarte’s grand-
father, established a thriving jewelry
business that went on to have various il-
lustrious 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 En-
glish 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 Admira-
tion.” Another visitor said that he had
heard comparable music-making only
under Monteverdi in Venice—an ex-
travagant compliment.
The Flemish artist Gonzales Co-
ques, who studied in the Brueghel stu-
dio, 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 com-
poser’s brother, owned a Vermeer—prob-
ably “A Young Woman Seated at a Vir-
ginal,” 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 pen-
sive musical women? Evidence is lack-
ing, but there is no harm in imagining.
While Sonnambula played at the Fuen-
tidueña Chapel, images of two Vermeers
were projected on the wall.
Seven Sinfonias by Duarte survive,
amounting to just under twenty min-
utes of music. Sonnambula filled out
the program with other works of her
era, including pieces by English com-
posers: John Blow, William Brade, Al-
fonso 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 pro-
gram 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-fash-
ioned 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 paint-
ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO
ings, small in scale and infinite in depth.
The members of Sonnambula—who
include, in addition to Weinfield, the vi-
olinists 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 collabo-
rated 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 seven-
teenth century. The Duartes died one by
one, Cole said, “like instruments in a con-
sort sequentially falling silent.” For a re-
markable hour on a cold February night,
their world came alive again.
rliński, who performed at Weill
O with members of New York Ba-
roque Incorporated, is part of a formi-
dable wave of gifted younger counter-
tenors which also includes Philippe
Jaroussky, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Ies-
tyn Davies, Franco Fagioli, John Holi-
day, 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 celeb-
rity. 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 cos-
tumes 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 Fran-
cesco Cavalli’s “Erismena,” at the Aix-
en-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 clari-
net-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 be-
tween registers. The sheer polish of his
singing can lead to a certain sameness; What a Beautiful World...
at times, I wanted sharper diction and
better-defined contrasts. Still, his feel- More than 100 spacious, natural
ing for the music was profound. acres for a retirement community
What sets Orliński apart is his inven- where stewardship of
tive choice of repertory. Half the pieces the environment is
that he sang at Weill also appear on his prized by all.
recent Warner Classics album, titled
“Anima Sacra,” a collaboration with the
ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro. Orliński de-
vised the program in consultation with
the Guadeloupean singer and dancer 1-800-548-9469
Yannis François, who moonlights as a kao.kendal.org/environment
researcher into overlooked Baroque rep-
ertory. François thought that Orliński
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 fluence, concerned as it was with a stag-
THE CURRENT CINEMA ing of “Death of a Salesman” in Tehran.
Farhadi, whose morally searching tales

THE MISSING PIECE

“Everybody Knows” and “The Lego Movie 2.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
t seems like only yesterday that Pe-
I nélope Cruz and Javier Bardem were
wrestling a pig on a highway and mak-
ing love beneath a cutout of a giant bull.
Such were the joys of “Jamón, Jamón”
(1992), the first of nine films on which
they have collaborated. Bardem and Cruz
married in 2010, and one clever touch
in “Everybody Knows,” their latest movie,
Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz star in Asghar Farhadi’s film.
is that they do not play impassioned lov-
ers. They play ex-lovers, Paco and Laura,
who were together in their youth but
have since married other people. Old
flames have a habit, though, of refusing
to be snuffed out. Ex appeal is real.
The setting is a Spanish village, and,
if you’re expecting it to be dozy, the first
half of the film is designed to prove you
wrong. The place is a hive, and trying
to understand who is who feels like part
of the buzz. Slowly, things become
clearer. Laura lives in Argentina with
her husband, Alejandro (Ricardo Darín),
although, for whatever reason, he hasn’t
made the trip. Together with their chil-
dren, teen-aged Irene (Carla Campra)
and her younger brother, Diego (Iván
Chavero), Laura has flown to Spain to
96 THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 18 & 25, 2019
attend the wedding of her sister Ana
(Inma Cuesta), and to catch up with
their aging father. The family used to
own some local land, which was sold to
Paco. With his wife, Bea (Bárbara Len-
nie), he has toiled to turn it into a flour-
ishing vineyard.
All of the above, plus a busload of ad-
ditional guests, show up for the wedding,
which kicks off with a cheerful church
ceremony and continues, as night de-
scends, with a wine-fuelled wingding.
Paco, ever the party boy, leads the rev-
elry, while Irene, something of a wild
child, who has spent much of the day
flirting with a kid named Felipe (Sergio
Castellanos), drinks too much and has
to be put to bed. Later, Laura goes up-
stairs and checks on her. She’s not there.
The director of the movie is Asghar
Farhadi, and it’s the second time that
he has ventured abroad in pursuit of a
theme, away from his native Iran. “The
Past” (2013) was set in France, and even
“The Salesman” (2016)—which, like his
masterwork, “A Separation” (2011), won
the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language
Film—felt the pressure of external in-
are evidently matched by his diplomatic
arts, has succeeded thus far in keeping
the Islamic authorities on his side, but
you wonder about their reaction to “Ev-
erybody Knows,” with its snatches of
Catholic liturgy, its rumors of sexual in-
discretion, and its merry flood of booze.
Unwarranted absences, in Farhadi’s
films, are nothing new. “About Elly” (2009)
tells of a woman who goes missing during
a weekend gathering of law-school pals,
and of the suspicions that then arise.
Those are mild, however, compared with
the squall of recriminations that follows
the disappearance of Irene. Her mother,
in Cruz’s hands, and in the teary glare of
her eyes, is transformed into a mater do-
lorosa, and her pain appears to be harsh-
ened, not soothed, by the arrival of her
husband from Argentina. A ransom of
three hundred thousand euros is de-
manded, by text message, on the assump-
tion that Alejandro is a wealthy man; in
fact, he’s a former drunk (the film is rife
with ex-somethings) who hasn’t worked
in two years. The only one who can raise
the cash is Paco, but why should he be
involved? After all, the gone girl is an-
other man’s child, is she not?
To a faintly embarrassing extent, what
we have here are the components of a
basic whodunnit: the lonely location, the
clannish secrets, and the herrings that
grow redder by the minute. The kidnap-
pers, naturally, threaten to dispose of
their hostage if the cops are called. At
one point, with almost all the possible
perpetrators corralled in one room, I
prayed that Señora Marple would come
bustling in and start quizzing them, over
a small sherry, as to where exactly they
were on the night of the vanishing. Far-
hadi’s forte, however, is not the solving
of puzzles, and his one narrative nov-
elty—a drone that hovers over the fes-
tivities and films them, supposedly to
give the family an overview as a keep-
sake—is largely ignored. (Imagine what
Michael Haneke would do with such a
device.) Mischief and miscalculation, in
Farhadi’s world, are far too messy to be
cleaned up by a mere sleuth, and it gave
me no great satisfaction to guess the
guilty party with an hour to go.
Here’s the thing. “A Separation,” which
is about divorce proceedings and the care
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN KIRCHNER
of an elderly parent, is twice as tense as
“Everybody Knows,” which features a
full-blown crime. Could the change of
scenery, from Iran to the unfamiliar
ground of Spain, be responsible for that
slackening? Maybe so. No drone, how-
ever inquisitive, and no glances, however
loaded, between blood relations can rival
the stern gaze of a theocratic state. The
first things we see in the film are the
cogs of the town clock, grinding away
in the belfry, and it crossed my mind that
Farhadi could have planted his film in
the same spot but wound the clock back
by six or seven decades, to an age when
Franco still ruled and the Church held
solemn sway. He might then have been
able to conjure, as a master of daily trep-
idations, a mood more suited to his skills.
You never know.
Yet the movie is not to be skipped.
You should sample its mixture of bac-
chanal and gall, and revel in Farhadi’s
dependable deftness, as he sketches and
frames his collection of characters. Be-
fore the crisis comes, for example, we
get to glimpse Paco through an open
doorway—dancing in a dark street, tap-
ping out a few steps in a downpour. He’s
definitely the worse for wear, and all the
better for it. If “Everybody Knows” has
a heart, it lies not in the veiled mystery
of Irene but in the solid figure of Bar-
dem: shaggy, noble, rooted, not entirely
civilized, and still Cruz-crazy after all
these years.
here is a moment, in “Everybody
T Knows,” when Paco asks Laura, “Do
you trust your husband completely?” And
there is a moment, in “The Lego Movie 2:
The Second Part,” when a tough guy,
Rex Dangervest, asks a sweet but un-
tough guy, Emmet Brickowski, “You sure
we can trust her?” Snap! The “her” refers
to a warrior named Lucy, also known as
Wyldstyle, who is both tough and, if you
dig down, not unsweet. Like most of the
folks in the film, she’s made of plastic—
to be precise, Legoid plastic, bearing the
scratches and scuffs that demonstrate
how long, and how lovingly, she has been
played with. The cosmos of toys could
hardly be farther from the dusty roads
and the ripening vines of “Everybody
Knows,” yet both movies are menaced
by the same fear: that your faith in some-
one else will fall to pieces.
The first Lego film, in 2014, with its
unrelenting surfeit of gags, both visual
and verbal, was directed by Phil Lord
and Christopher Miller. To equate them
with kids in a candy store would be un-
just; they were more like kids who’d de-
cided to build a store from candy, using
bubble gum as cement. This time,
they’ve written the screenplay but left
the direction to Mike Mitchell, and the
result is, if anything, even more of a
sugar rush. At one point, a little yellow
star tumbles to the ground, announces
“I feel dizzy,” and belches forth a wave
of glittering vomit.
I saw the film in a vast auditorium,
surrounded by young children and their
parents. The laugh that greeted the vom-
iting was the loudest noise emitted by
the kids, whereas their elders, being
sufficiently ancient to remember “Die
Hard” (1988), were more amused by the
Lego Bruce Willis who pops up, with-
out warning, in a ventilation shaft. In
short, the age-based stratification of com-
edy is now complete, and you can pic-
ture the script conference, at Warner
Bros., during which the rations of junior
and senior jokes were meted out. At one
point, Rex bemoans “the death of imag-
ination in the subconscious.” Good luck
explaining that to your five-year-old.
The plot is a carnival of fuzzy logic.
Emmet’s home town, bright and neigh-
borly in the earlier film, has shrivelled
to a wasteland called Apocalypseburg—
essentially, an excuse for a parade of angry
Lego mashups to hurtle to and fro, as if
auditioning for “Mad Brix: Fury Road.”
One day, creatures made of Duplo (Lego
for younger and more fumble-fingered
users, with a heavy emphasis on pink)
approach with a terrifying vow: “We are
here to destwoy you.” Lucy is spirited
away, and Emmet, aided by the stubbly
Rex, embarks on a rescue mission.
Viewers reared on “The Lego Movie”
will find plenty to nourish them anew.
The songs are still peppy. The principal
voices are still supplied by Chris Pratt,
Elizabeth Banks, and Will Arnett. And
real, non-animated kids are still shown,
now and then, sporting with their Lego
creations. (Grungy dystopias for the boy,
unicorns and princesses for his sister. So
much for gender parity.) Why, then, does
the sequel give off such a whiff of near-
insanity? How come the climax depicts
a shape-shifting Duplo queen being mar-
ried off to Batman, while a talking ice-
cream cone introduces the maids of honor
as Marie Curie, Chocolate Bar, Tin Man,
and Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Yeah, me
neither. But let the record show that, be-
tween the first and the second Lego films,
Proposition 64, permitting the legal sale
and distribution of marijuana, was passed
in California. Just saying. 
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three
finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Pia Guerra,
must be received by Sunday, February 24th. The finalists in the February 4th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the March 11th issue. Anyone age thirteen
or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”
..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“We’ll pick this up next week.”

Keith Bollt, Potsdam, N.Y.

“Seems to me that you’re the underlying issue.”
Mordechai Lichtenstein, Beachwood, Ohio
“And you say it was a gift from your mother.”
Misha Tsukerman, San Francisco, Calif.
“Watch as I transform this ordinary magician’s assistant
into an accomplice to a federal crime.”
Max Nussenbaum, Brooklyn, N.Y.
 THE #1 PLAY OF THE YEAR
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”
Howard Fishman, The New Yorker

”
Sara Holdren,
New York Magazine

Photo: Jill Greenberg

By Heidi Schreck Directed by Oliver Butler

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