WILL A REFRESHINGLY CURIOUS TRIP TO

NEW YORK GET Q OUT OF A PICKLE?

SIPS AND
THE CITY
Q and Ginny arrive in NYC
eager to be the toast of
the town.
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I
THE SHOW am no spring gherkin, thought Q, staring into the
MUST GO ON!
mirror on a summer night. Will I ever find someone
Ginny helps set the stage
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Tempted by the absurdity of it all, Q contemplates what

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one-knife stand…

First and foremost, I’m always in good spirits.

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there to refresh their senses. In short: green flags galore!

A PICKLE I have had my fair share of short-lived affairs with

BALL DATE memorable sandwiches and salads, but this time around, I
Will Q hit it off on the court? want a union to feel effortless, with off-the-charts natural
Or leave feeling sour?
chemistry and room to grow.

For a date, indulging in a Broadway show or strolling through

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While Q shares their imaginary love-profile, Ginny has a

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Will a summer romance begin? Scan the QR code to find

out how the story unfolds.
 JUNE 12, 2023

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

13 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
William Finnegan on the resurgence of child labor;
Berghain’s principal sorter; a Banksy custodian battle;
catchy hooks from Eau Claire; the next pasta puffer.
PERSONAL HISTORY
Jiayang Fan 18 What Am I Without You?
Two lives merged by immigration and illness.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Teddy Wayne 25 A Network Executive Writes a Sitcom
LIFE AND LETTERS
Helen Shaw 26 The Interview Artist
A writer’s fantastic tour of the theatre world.
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Michael Schulman 34 Comic Effect
How Marvel swallowed Hollywood.
LETTER FROM NORTH CAROLINA
Andrew Marantz 46 Minority Rules
The fringe legal theory that could unravel democracy.
FICTION
George Saunders 56 “Thursday”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Idrees Kahloon 65 The cost-benefit analysis of immigration.
Merve Emre 70 Susan Taubes’s afterlife.
73 Briefly Noted
Katy Waldman 76 A novelist’s two Hong Kongs.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 78 “Past Lives,” “Squaring the Circle.”
POEMS
Paul Tran 38 “The Three Graces”
Frank X. Gaspar 60 “Nausicaä”
COVER
Sasha Velour “The Look of Pride”

DRAWINGS Farley Katz, Asher Perlman, Julia Suits, Amy Hwang, Roz Chast, Dan Rosen, Mick Stevens,
Lynn Hsu, Pat Byrnes, Evan Lian, Michael Shaw, Brooke Bourgeois, Tadgh Ferry, Drew Panckeri, Sophie Lucido Johnson
and Sammi Skolmoski, Kendra Allenby, Oren Bernstein, Bruce Eric Kaplan SPOTS Iván Bravo
 CONTRIBUTORS
Michael Schulman (“Comic Effect,” p. 34) Andrew Marantz (“Minority Rules,”
is a staff writer at the magazine. His p. 46), a staff writer, is the author of
new book, “Oscar Wars,” was published “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-
in February. Utopians, and the Hijacking of the
American Conversation,” which was
Jiayang Fan (“What Am I Without You?,” published in 2019.
p. 18) became a New Yorker staff writer
in 2016. She is at work on her first book, Helen Shaw (“The Interview Artist,”
“Motherland.” p. 26) joined the magazine as a theatre
critic in 2022. She won the 2017-18
George Saunders (Fiction, p. 56) won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dra-
2017 Man Booker Prize for “Lincoln in matic Criticism.
the Bardo.” Most recently, he published
“Liberation Day: Stories.” Paul Tran (Poem, p. 38) is the author of
the poetry collection “All the Flowers
Marisa Acocella (Sketchpad, p. 17) is a Kneeling.” They teach at the University
cartoonist and a graphic novelist. Her of Wisconsin-Madison.
latest book is “The Big She-Bang.”
Sasha Velour (Cover) is a drag performer,
Frank X. Gaspar (Poem, p. 60) has pub- an actor, and an artist. She published
lished five poetry collections and three “The Big Reveal” in April.
novels, including, most recently, “The
Poems of Renata Ferreira.” Teddy Wayne (Shouts & Murmurs,
p. 25), a novelist and a screenwriter, will
Merve Emre (Books, p. 70), a contrib- publish his sixth novel, “The Winner,”
uting writer, is working on a new book, in 2024.
“Love and Other Useless Pursuits.” She
is a writer-in-residence at Wesleyan Katy Waldman (Books, p. 76) is a staff
University. writer who covers books and culture.

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

LEFT:VAN GOGH / COURTESY THE NATIONAL

GALLERY, LONDON; RIGHT: BEN HICKEY

THE ART WORLD ANNALS OF ACTIVISM

Jackson Arn writes about van Gogh’s Emma Green on the rise and fall
gift for seeing complexity in the of a so-called politically moderate
mundane. anti-woke organization.

Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
 THE MAIL
BREAKING THE CYCLE It is triggered only by harm to individu-
als’ reputations, not to that of the broader
As someone who has experienced public; it would not, as Suk Gersen rec-
homelessness, I read with great inter- ognizes, have stemmed the tsunami of
est Adam Iscoe’s piece on the tragedy COVID-19 conspiracies. Her call to revisit
of Jordan Neely (“The Revolving Door,” the case merely risks playing into the
May 22nd). I was fortunate to receive hands of politicians who want to over-
the help that I needed to turn my life turn Sullivan solely to make it easier to
around; my best friend was not as for- sue their critics and, in turn, bring pub-
tunate. He was homeless, and took his lic discourse to heel. Rolling back Sulli-
own life when faced with forced psy- van would mean adopting an idea long
chiatric intervention. ago rejected in this country: that we
I was impressed by the community should give courts the power to dictate
organizations and social workers cited what is fair game in political debate.
in Iscoe’s article who are offering alter- Matthew Schafer
natives to the endless cycle of forced Adjunct Professor of Law

1
treatment, incarceration, and homeless- Fordham University
ness, but such alternatives are scarce. I New York City
wish the article had included a discussion
of the Housing First approach, an evi- SPEAKING IN TONGUES
dence-based practice endorsed by mul-
tiple government agencies. Providing What a relief to finally hear from a
housing first and making mental-health fellow-bilinguist in Ian-ay Azier-fray’s
services available on a voluntary basis ode to Pig Latin (Shouts & Murmurs,
significantly reduces homelessness and May 22nd). I grew up in a nineteen-sev-
saves taxpayer money. Contrary to pop- enties, Upper West Side, Jewish milieu;
ular prejudice, most homeless people Pig Latin rolled off my tongue in fluid
struggling with mental illness want help. flourishes, while the ancestral traces of
It is the terrible experience with court- Yiddish that sprinkled my home left
mandated intervention that makes peo- only faint imprints. Like Frazier, I am
ple like my lost friend avoid mental- fiercely proud of my fluency in this glo-
health services at all costs. rious ongue-tay. When I first met my

1
Polaris Garfield husband, he asked if I spoke another
San Diego, Calif. language. I told him I was fluent in Pig
Latin. He scoffed. Now, after twenty
ACTUAL MALICE years of marriage, he has developed a
deep respect for Pig Latin’s glory. Our
Jeannie Suk Gersen’s piece about the Su- children, meanwhile, have been unable
preme Court’s landmark 1964 decision to grasp the language, though that, quite
New York Times Company v. Sullivan, frankly, has great advantages.
which protects the media against defama- For those who love Pig Latin, have
tion lawsuits, tells only part of the story no fear that it will die out. There may
(Books, May 22nd). Critics of the deci- be only a few places left in the world
sion argue that Sullivan must be reworked where it is spoken, yet its beauty and ef-
because its principle of “actual malice” ficiency will be with us orever-fay.
(knowingly or recklessly publishing false Leah Katz
information) presents an impossible bur- Montclair, N.J.
den for plaintiffs. Suk Gersen links that
burden with the rise in misinformation •
but largely disregards likelier explana- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
tions, such as the ease of Internet pub- address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
lishing and state-sponsored propaganda themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
campaigns. Defamation law is not the any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
right weapon to fight misinformation. of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
 JUNE 7 – 13, 2023

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

The outdoor screening series from Rooftop Films has been a New York mainstay since 1997. Upcoming programs,
at venues throughout the city (such as Green-Wood Cemetery, pictured above), include “In the Heights,” at Hinton
Park, in Queens, and a première of the post-apocalyptic drama “Biosphere,” at Brooklyn Grange, in Sunset Park.
A Juneteenth-weekend presentation of a documentary about the great jazz drummer Max Roach—in Herbert
Von King Park, in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy—features aQ. &A. with the filmmakers and members of Roach’s family.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN KANEPS
 1
As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance the early two-thousands, but the work itself his new boss (Jay O. Sanders). Booth and
to confirm engagements. begins with Marvin Gaye’s “Star-Spangled the director, Knud Adams, deploy various
Banner,” which preceded the 1983 N.B.A. classic techniques (Kenneth recalls the stage
All-Star Game. That soulful reconstruc- manager in “Our Town”; the musician Luke
tion of the problematic anthem is a proper Wygodny rings a call bell periodically, like
DANCE reflection of the playwright Rajiv Joseph’s a Buddhist mindfulness chime) to create a
take on America’s obsession with success, timeless mood. That mood remains fragile
idolatry, delusion, and disillusion. Shawn and sad. Extraordinary performances and
Yanira Castro (Glenn Davis) and Matt (Chris Perfetti), two this fogbound atmosphere are the show’s
Even more than most of Castro’s work, “I Clevelanders, forge an unlikely friendship chief pleasures: every detail has been tended
Came Here to Weep” is interactive. It’s billed in 2004, based on their mutual enthusiasm to, from the reduced-scale Main Street set
as a “collective exorcism,” examining the co- for LeBron James, in his rookie year with to the way that Sanders, popping up as a
lonial possession of Puerto Rico through the the Cavaliers. Joseph explores the racial, French waiter, blows out a match. Puff !
deconstruction and mockery of treaties and cultural, and economic strains on their bond He makes a miniature production around
other texts. Rather than put on a show, Castro, through the lens of LeBron’s career—as the a dying light.—Helen Shaw (Laura Pels;
with an audience of participants, facilitates player abandons the city, in 2010, to, as he through July 2.)
group activations of activity plans. The closing said, take his “talents to South Beach,” only
event is a tea ritual with Girl Scouts.—Brian to return, six years later, and lead the Cavs
Seibert (Chocolate Factory Theatre; June 7-11.) to a championship. Directed by Kenny Leon, Sweeney Todd
for Manhattan Theatre Club, Davis (the ar- In Stephen Sondheim’s grim, exhilarat-
tistic director of Chicago’s Steppenwolf The- ing horror operetta, from 1979, the titu-
Hudson River Dance Festival atre, where the play premièred) and Perfetti lar demon barber, wronged husband, and
At the start of every summer, Hudson River (“Abbott Elementary”) achieve a fine, funny world’s most horrifying sous-chef murders
Park and the Joyce present free sunset per- rhythm with their basketball banter and hit Victorian Londoners so that his landlady,
formances on the lawn of Pier 63. This year’s the requisite dramatic notes when things get Mrs. Lovett (Annaleigh Ashford), can pop
lineup includes the joy-giving tap dancer complicated.—Ken Marks (City Center Stage 1; ’em into pies. Played by the honey-voiced
Ayodele Casel, the beatboxer-and-b-boy col- through June 18.) baritone Josh Groban, this Sweeney isn’t
lective the Missing Element, and the Paul quite the servant of “a dark and a venge-
Taylor Dance Company, with a rosy, romantic ful god,” as the libretto would have it; he’s
Schubert piece by Taylor called “Mercuric Primary Trust more a broken and regretful cipher, with a
Tidings.”—B.S. (Hudson River Park, Pier 63; Eboni Booth’s delicate, dream-quiet play voice that pushes back the inky gloom of
June 8-9.) is a character study in search of a charac- Thomas Kail’s sometimes raggedly directed
ter: thirty-eight-year-old Kenneth (Wil- production. Kail keeps Groban seemingly
liam Jackson Harper, astonishing on the miles away from the audience, up a staircase
“Kids Dance” edge of tears) certainly has traits—such set well back on the stage, and Sweeney
Ballet Tech is a jewel; the organization has as his belief in an imaginary friend (Eric therefore cedes the show’s primary energy
been providing free dance education since Berryman) and a dependence on a local to Ashford’s riotously funny, capering ver-
1978, when it was created by the choreographer tiki bar (where every waitstaff member is sion of Lovett—the play spins and twirls
Eliot Feld. Its flagship is the New York City played by April Matthis)—but, in order like a whirligig along with her. Any wild
Public School for Dance, near Union Square, to develop, Kenneth would need to make grandeur the evening possesses is mainly
which offers academics and dance training for choices, which he’s too traumatized to do. allocated to the twenty-six-person orchestra
kids from fourth through eighth grade. And Booth gives him time, though, and he even- playing like mad under the stage; the eager
these kids can really dance. This year, the offer- tually establishes a toehold on life, aided by audience, in love with Groban or Sondheim
ings include “A Yankee Doodle,” a jocular piece kindly folk in his small town, including a or the event itself, provides its own dynam-
set to fife-and-drum music, with choreography warmhearted waitress (Matthis again) and ics, screaming before Sweeney’s razor ever
by Feld; “Embers of . . . ,” a collaboration
between two former New York City Ballet
dancers, Robert La Fosse and Brian Reeder; CONTEMPORARY DANCE
and a piece by the kids themselves (with a
little help from Ballet Tech’s artistic director,
Dionne D. Figgins), “Achoo, Adieu.”—Marina Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre
Harss (Joyce Theatre; June 8-11.)
doesn’t perform at the Brooklyn Acad-
emy of Music as regularly as it does at
River to River Festival City Center and Lincoln Center, but
The dance offerings in the Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council’s series of free, site-specific what it brings to Brooklyn is just as re-
performances are both known and unknown. In liably impressive. The company returns
“Zero Station,” the astonishingly attuned duo to BAM, June 6-11, with two programs.
of Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith continue
their sensitive yet raw grappling with the ob- One is a feel-good collection: Ronald K.
jectification of women, touching on pregnancy, Brown’s “Dancing Spirit,” which infuses
illness, and aging. In “Lotto Royale,” you won’t its spirituality with some funk; Twyla
know exactly what you’re getting: audience
members choose a time slot for a one-on-one Tharp’s “Roy’s Joys,” a jazz-based romp
performance by an artist assigned via lottery; on the goofy side of carefree; and Kyle
those artists include the noted choreographers Abraham’s “Are You in Your Feelings?,”

1
Moriah Evans, Jennifer Monson, and Mariana
Valencia.—B.S. (Various locations; June 9-18.) a pleasurable series of relationship vi-
ILLUSTRATION BY XIA GORDON

gnettes set to R. & B. and hip-hop tracks.

The other bill is all Ailey. It includes the
THE THEATRE recently revived “Survivors,” from 1986,
a rage-fuelled tribute to the resilience
King James of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, along
Before the play starts, DJ (Khloe Janel) with “Night Creature,” “Cry,” and, of
bathes the house with pop and R. & B. from course, “Revelations.”—Brian Seibert

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 7

 the luxury of checking the rearview mir-
HOUSE ror, with a tour that revisits “Yoshimi”
upon its anniversary. Come for the medi-
tative grandeur of “Do You Realize??”; stay
for the band’s storied live act, which puts
a homemade spin on the type of razzle-dazzle
typically reserved for big-budget stadium
stars.—Jay Ruttenberg (Kings Theatre; June 8.)

Stacey Kent
JAZZ Stacey Kent has a small voice—but, then,
so did Billie Holiday and Peggy Lee. The art,
as all three prove, lies in making the most of
what you’ve got. The singer has found abun-
dance in her vocal comfort zone and, by way of
strict attentiveness to lyrics, transforms songs
into short stories that brim with subdued pas-
sion, romance, and wonder; she’s clearly given
a good listen to both Holiday and Lee. As
befits a comparative-literature graduate, Kent
is drawn to words; she’s even collaborated with
the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, who’s taken on the
role of occasional lyricist for her, working with
Kent’s husband, the saxophonist Jim Tomlin-
son. A New Jersey native with internationalist
leanings, the British-based Kent is as com-
fortable with French chansons and Brazilian
bossa nova as she is with respected American
Danny Tenaglia is a d.j.’s d.j. For decades, his marathon events at chestnuts. Lean into her muted declarations
Winter Music Conference, a club-business confab in Miami, drew and Kent can bring the world to you.—Steve
every other headliner in the vicinity. But this New York native—who Futterman (Birdland; June 7-10.)
hasn’t had a residency here in years—is also a fan’s d.j. His sure hand
on the decks and his taste for house and techno at their most darkly New York Guitar Festival
dramatic can make converts of nonbelievers while also drawing regulars GUITARS The guitar’s possibilities seem bound-
less in the hands of Yasmin Williams, a young
from his glory days at Twilo (in the late nineties) and Vinyl (in the finger-style player from northern Virginia.
early two-thousands). Few d.j.s carry off multiple hours with his élan; Angling her instrument so that it sits hori-
a Tenaglia all-nighter feels as much sculpted as selected. At Sunset zontally, Williams has employed tapping tech-
niques, alternate tunings, and an attached
Park Rooftop, on June 10, he offers a six-hour set in an appearance for thumb piano to reimagine the guitar. Her flow-
the promoters Open Air Brooklyn—although, for Tenaglia, six hours ing compositions, though wordless, feel me-
is akin to a warmup.—Michaelangelo Matos lodic, rhythmic, and lyrical. Williams is part
of a vanguard of radically inventive pickers
revivifying the terrain of instrumental guitar
playing, incorporating modern, genre-agnostic
visions. She brings her idiosyncratic approach
catches the light.—H.S. (Reviewed in our we grow aware that there’s a joke being played to the second evening of New York Guitar
issue of 4/10/23.) (Lunt-Fontanne; open run.) here outside the farce—and that the largely Festival, a stylistically diverse summit, estab-
white audience, the white-led producing the- lished in 1999. Produced by the curator David
atre, and the white collaborators themselves Spelman and the WNYC host John Schaefer,
The Thanksgiving Play

1
are all part of the punch line.—H.S. (Hayes; the festival also includes the jazz virtuoso Bill
With Larissa FastHorse’s tart comedy “The through June 11.) Frisell with the multi-instrumentalist Luke
Thanksgiving Play,” for Second Stage, the Bergman, the jazz guitarist Brandon Ross
first known Native American woman to have with the bassist Stomu Takeishi, the singer
a work produced on Broadway pokes Juvena- and songwriter Steve Gunn, and the South
lian fun at the theatre’s approach to inclusion MUSIC Korean shape-shifter Jiji.—Jenn Pelly (Jerome
and diversity. Logan (Katie Finneran), an L. Greene Space, WNYC; June 12-13.)
elementary-school drama teacher with de-
lusions of grandeur, assembles an acciden- The Flaming Lips
tally all-white team to devise a show to be ROCK Few bands have metamorphosed with “Secret Byrd”
performed for schoolchildren during Native the drama and the panache that the Flaming CLASSICAL The Renaissance composer William
American Heritage Month: Jaxton (Scott Lips exhibited in the near-decade between the Byrd was a devout Catholic whose absten-
Foley), her lead actor and boyfriend; Caden group’s twin totems, “Transmissions from the tion from Protestant services landed him on
(Chris Sullivan), a lustful middle-school his- Satellite Heart” (1993) and “Yoshimi Battles recusancy lists and subjected him to fines in
torian; and Alicia (D’Arcy Carden), an actress the Pink Robots” (2002). On one side of the Elizabethan England. One of his patrons, Sir
ILLUSTRATION BY RICARDO DISEÑO

with an Indigenous-adjacent head shot but divide stood a psychedelic guitar quartet nav- John Petre, was known to hold clandestine
no actual Native ancestry. (“My look is super igating grunge; on the other was a wizened, Masses at home, and that practice undergirds
flexible!” she chirps.) Together, the quartet elegiac trio foregrounding the keyboard. The the director Bill Barclay’s “Secret Byrd,” a stag-
discombobulates the process, derailed by their road between included a fluke hit, experiments ing of the composer’s quietly transfixing Mass
own ignorance, empty allyship vocabulary, with quadrophonic sound, the departure of for Five Voices. In the atmospheric catacombs
and the awkwardness of dramatizing settler the sensational guitarist Ronald Jones, and below Green-Wood Cemetery, the singers of
violence for kids. Much of the production’s the subsequent elevation, into the band’s Cathedra, supported by the string ensemble
comic energy derives from the self-abnegating musical factotum, of the drummer Steven Abendmusik, enact an immersive ritual around
Logan (Finneran is a great zany), but the show, Drozd. Throughout the transmutation, the a candlelit table, raising their voices, one to a
which doesn’t always motivate its loudest mo- Flaming Lips gazed studiously forward. Now, part, in Byrd’s solemn strains.—Oussama Zahr
ments, is best when it’s quiet. In those lulls, forty years after its formation, the group has (Green-Wood Cemetery; June 9-11.)

8 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023

 Bobby Shmurda plastic bottles may be inspired by Pop art, but, Now,” is similarly overflowing. The fifty works
as she has noted, Indigenous people have always on canvas and paper shift in subject from mys-
HIP-HOP In 2014, the Brooklyn rapper Bobby made sacred objects from the materials at hand. tical inner visions and illicit midnight trysts
Shmurda was at the forefront of the reëmer- In “Fifty Shades of Brown,” from 2017-18 (one to a South African form of house music that
gence of N.Y.C. street rap when he and fel- of several riffs in the show on Jasper Johns’s inspired a TikTok craze. The exhibition’s flow-
low-members of the GS9 collective were famous maps), Smith names each of the states ing psychic terrain echoes that of the fiercely
charged with sixty-nine counts of conspiracy. after the color she used to paint it—Walnut, creative artist herself, who was born in Somalia,
The indictment pointed to lyrics from Shmur- Cocoa, Buckskin, Bronze, and others—a play- grew up in Kenya and Denmark, made her way
da’s songs as evidence. After taking a plea deal, ful yet pointed portrait of our country’s true to New York City, around 2000, and is now
he spent nearly seven years in prison, putting colors.—J.K. (Whitney Museum; through Aug. 13.) settled upstate. Uman’s intuitive, relentless,
his major-label début—and his momentum— joyful approach has something in common with
on hold. In the rapper’s absence, the local drill that of Yayoi Kusama, whose latest “Infinity
music forged in his image became a national Uman Room” has visitors waiting for hours—mean-
phenomenon, reënergizing the city’s sound The ecstatic new paintings by the self-schooled while, around the corner, with no line in sight,
with a crop of new stars. The lone word on Uman have more colors than colors have names. new limitless pleasures await.—Andrea K. Scott
his career epitaph might have been “pioneer,” Her star-making début, “I Want Everything (Nicola Vassell; through June 17.)
ending a tragic story of what could have been,
but Shmurda is persistent. Now free, he sounds
thrilled to simply be out and able to make his
riotous, bass-powered songs again, revelling IN THE MUSEUMS

1
in a landscape that he helped shape.—Sheldon
Pearce (Sony Hall; June 7.)

ART

Sherrie Levine
This indefatigable member of the Pictures Gen-
eration—who was once cheekily christened the
Franklin Mint of Modernism by the great critic
David Rimanelli—presents “Wood,” a small ex-
hibition of works old and new (and old as new)
which presses her long-standing interrogations
of authorship and originality ever onward. “Fitz:
1-12,” from 1994, is a suite of paintings on cherry-
wood panels, each of which replicates the same
image of a crabby cartoon dog. The pup doesn’t
change from piece to piece, but the wood grain
does—because nature, that authorless creator,
never duplicates itself precisely. If the concep-
tual allure of the found object dimmed long
ago, what remains sharp is Levine’s eye for that
which should be looked at. (It’s not as straight-
forward a talent as it seems.) The sweet, sleek
Japanese kitsune “Fox,” the sumptuously knotty
“Scholar Figure,” and the stone “Head,” from
New Guinea, are three carvings that Levine
acquired, dated 2023, and signed as her own. I Clay proves to be terrifically funny stuff in “Funk You Too! Humor
still wonder who made them.—Jennifer Krasinski and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture,” an invigorating exhibition of
(David Zwirner; through July 21.)
fifty-odd works at the Museum of Arts and Design, through Aug. 27.
With pieces including brightly colored piles of dog dung, a telephone-
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith cum-sex toy, and a frog balancing bagels and doughnuts on its head
Breaking the path to an American art we’ve
long needed to see, Smith is both a force for (by David Gilhooly, pictured above), the guest curator Angelik Viz-
reckoning and a force to be reckoned with. A carrondo-Laboy presents the largely untold legacy of this medium as
citizen of the Confederated Salish and Koote- deployed by mischief-makers who puncture the artificial hierarchies of
nai Tribes, the eighty-three-year-old activist
and artist has devoted herself to righting the high and low art, while taking on racism, sexism, and other American
COURTESY THE ARTIST / MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN

story of the Native experience, foregrounding plagues. The show begins in the nineteen-sixties, with the makers of
the genocide and ecological decimation that Funk ceramics, a loose band of West Coast outliers that included Robert
malformed the roots of our nation. Among
the hundred and thirty works on view in this Arneson (a self-reflexive goofball) and the mighty Patti Warashina, whose
glorious retrospective at the Whitney is “Urban “Pitter-Podder” (1968) giddily discombobulates the female form. The
Trickster,” from 2021, a cast-bronze head of a younger generations are less bawdy but no less sly. Genesis Belanger’s
grinning coyote: both a mythical healer and a
cosmically comical figure, not unlike Smith perverse luxury products (a gift box of facial features) seduce and repulse,
herself. Her sculptures, paintings, and works while Woody De Othello’s wit is darker, more complex. (Note the fate
on paper deliver doses of rage and wit in equal of his absent caller in 2021’s “Still on Hold”: no one’s answering.) Also
measure. At times, Smith takes direct aim at ti-
tans of Western culture, Pablo Picasso and Walt on view is a problematic portrait bust of a Black man—from Arneson’s
Disney among them, as icons complicate other “Black Series” (1988-89)—a representation of a racial stereotype, placed
icons: images of buffalo, horses, and canoes on a pedestal so that it’s met face to face. Here, art history isn’t merely
face off against those of the grieving mother
from “Guernica,” the Lone Ranger, and Snow the sum of humanity’s highest expressions; it is a whole story from which
White. Smith’s collaging of newspapers and we must not look away.—Jennifer Krasinski
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 9
1
MOVIES
him into rehab; when he came out clean, she
managed his triumphant comeback. Then
leads to violence; and as a grown man nick-
named Black (Trevante Rhodes), who faces
he left her for another woman, and tragedy adult responsibilities with terse determination
ensued. With an insightful blend of interviews and reconnects with Kevin (André Holland).
I Called Him Morgan and music, archival footage and photographs, Adapting a play by Tarell Alvin McCraney,
One of the traumas of modern music was the Collin anchors this resonant double portrait Jenkins burrows deep into his characters’
death of the trumpeter Lee Morgan, at the in its subjects’ enduringly influential artistic pain-seared memories, creating ferociously
age of thirty-three, when he was shot in a scene and era.—Richard Brody (Streaming on restrained performances and confrontational
Lower East Side jazz club, in 1972, by his the Criterion Channel.) yet tender images that seem wrenched from
common-law wife, Helen Morgan. Kasper his very core. Subtly alluding to wider societal
Collin’s 2016 documentary is centered on the conflicts, Jenkins looks closely at the hard
sole recorded interview granted by Helen, in Moonlight passions of people whose identities are forged
1996, shortly before her death. Her story has Miami heat and light weigh heavily on the under relentless pressure.—R.B. (Streaming on
a historical dimension, focussing on her life furious lives and moods realized by the di- Tubi, Kanopy, and other services.)
in New York in the nineteen-fifties, where rector Barry Jenkins. The grand yet finespun
she defied the limited opportunities for Black drama, from 2016, depicts three eras in the life
women and turned her midtown apartment of a young Black man: as a bullied schoolboy Shooting the Mafia
into a freestyle cultural salon. Interviews with called Little (Alex Hibbert), who is neglected At the age of forty, Letizia Battaglia, who
Lee Morgan’s great musical cohorts, such as by his crack-addicted mother (Naomie Harris) was born in 1935, became the first female
Wayne Shorter and Albert (Tootie) Heath, and sheltered and mentored by a drug dealer photographer in the Italian daily press; this
reveal the jazz circuit’s behind-the-scenes (Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend (Janelle candid and fervent documentary portrait,
activities, involving fast cars, sharp clothes, Monáe); as a teen-ager with his given name from 2019, directed by Kim Longinotto,
sexual conquests, and, often, drugs. When of Chiron (Ashton Sanders), whose friend- shows that Battaglia always lived at the tur-
Lee’s career was derailed by heroin addic- ship with a classmate named Kevin (Jharrel bulent crossroads of history. Born and raised
tion, Helen took care of him and checked Jerome) veers toward romantic intimacy and in Palermo, Sicily, Battaglia escaped her
domineering father by marrying at sixteen,
and then escaped her oppressive husband
ON THE BIG SCREEN by taking lovers, with melodramatic conse-
quences. Finally on her own, she became a
journalist before turning to photography at a
time of unprecedented Mafia violence, which
became her subject and her obsession—and
resulted in death threats. Her coverage of
the murder of judges led to a new career
in politics. Cannily juxtaposing Battaglia’s
photographs with both news footage and
clips from fictional films, and observing the
photographer in conversation with the men
in her life, Longinotto asserts the unity of
sexual, political, and creative freedom, and
bears witness to the patriarchal violence
of traditional families and Mob families
alike.—R.B. (Streaming on Prime Video, Apple
TV, and other services.)

Stranger Than Fiction

The existence of Harold Crick (Will Ferrell)
is of no interest, even to Harold Crick. He
works for the Internal Revenue Service, never
takes vacations, and always cleans his teeth
with the same number of brushstrokes. His
life is described to us in crisp female voice-
over; little by little, we realize that Harold
himself is listening to the voice, and that he
is something even worse than dull. He is fic-
To honor the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu’s hundred-and-twentieth tional, a character in a novel, and the narrator
birthday and the sixtieth anniversary of his death, Film Forum pre- is in fact his creator, Karen Eiffel (Emma
sents a complete retrospective of his extant work ( June 9-29), which Thompson), who is trying to find a way to
kill him off. The screenwriter, Zach Helm,
ranges from the urbane wit of his silent films and the bitter ironies of and the director, Marc Forster, of this 2006
his Second World War movies to the reserved yet exalted romanticism movie work through the comic implications
of his later masterworks. His career-long theme was the repression of of the setup, including the possibility that
it may not turn out funny. (Harold is dev-
authentic feeling by convention, tradition, and the authority of family astated when he reads the manuscript and
and state—and he embodied it in striking images as well as in drama. A understands that, in the name of art, he must
highlight of the series is “The End of Summer,” Ozu’s penultimate film, indeed expire.) Dustin Hoffman plays the
literature professor to whom the hero takes
from 1961, the story of a Kyoto merchant family in which two daugh- his problem, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is the
ters—a single businesswoman and a widowed mother—must decide free spirit who thaws Harold’s iced-up heart.
The ending may be mush, but the rest has
COURTESY JANUS FILMS

whether to accept arranged marriages. Meanwhile, their aged and ailing

surprising bite.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in

1
father, a widower, defies custom, propriety, and seemingly even death to our issue of 12/4/06.) (Streaming on Pluto, Vudu,
pursue an affair with a former lover from wartime. Most of the movie and other services.)
is cinematic chamber music, set in houses, restaurants, and offices; in a
spectacular, climactic outdoor sequence, Ozu suggests that nature itself For more reviews, visit
is in accord with true love.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

10 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023

 opened in March, is much larger, in a piled atop silky yet crispy nubs of “but-
building vacated by a Perkins pancake ter-roasted bread” (a phrase I haven’t
house. Though the dining room has been able to get out of my head), and
been thoughtfully renovated, with wood served with tangy yogurt.

1
beams and banquettes upholstered in The chicken gyro, made from
fabric reminiscent of a Turkish rug, it thighs spiced with orange peel and
still bears the aura of a diner, with a big, oregano and wrapped around the spit,
TABLES FOR TWO broad menu that includes avocado toast is just as good; get it to go and the
and chicken piccata. meat is packed on top of silky rice
Zara Forest Grill Happily, the expanded menu in- pilaf, soaking it in delicious fat. For
1745 Forest Ave., Staten Island cludes more Turkish food, too. For the ali nazik, a smoky eggplant purée
breakfast, there is gozleme, a flaky flat- is whipped with labneh and heavy
A few Saturday mornings ago, I made bread folded around potato, spinach cream, then topped with cubes of gar-
a grievous logistical error. There was and cheese, or ground meat, and men- licky marinated beef shish kebab and
a half-marathon in Brooklyn, where emen, a curdy scramble of eggs, toma- a brown-butter-and-paprika sauce.
I live, and it was pouring rain. And toes, and peppers. A breakfast platter For the indecisive, there’s the Zara
yet I packed my entire family into our comes with a traditional spread: fanned Mix Grill, a mountain of both lamb
station wagon and set out for Staten tomato and cucumber; salt-cured olives; and chicken kebab, beef shish kebab,
Island: I had a reservation at a new assorted cheeses; tiny links of beef sa- adana kebab—logs of ground lamb
PHOTOGRAPH BY YAEL MALKA FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

Turkish restaurant, Zara Forest Grill, lami, their ends split like tulip petals; or chicken—and ground-beef patties
and a little traffic wasn’t going to stand honey, cherry jam, and clotted cream; known as kofte, accompanied by pilaf,
in my way. The G.P.S. estimated forty- warm pita; a small, puffy, crisp-edged salad, and bread.
five minutes. An hour later, we’d barely omelette; and a pot of strong coffee or At the end of the meal, it’s worth
gone a mile. black tea. waiting the fifteen minutes it takes
Even in the best circumstances, a trip Lunch and dinner are best begun the kitchen to prepare the spectac-
to Staten Island from any other bor- with the balon bread, a shiny blimp ular kunefe—a nest of twiggy shred-
ough is a commitment, a decent jour- speckled in sesame seeds which ex- ded phyllo dough that is crisped in
ney by bridge or boat. For Zara Forest hales a gust of hot air when you tear off clarified butter, layered with cheese,
Grill, in Graniteville, which is closer an end, to swipe through meze, such and then flipped, bathed in a honey
to New Jersey than Manhattan, it’s a as a luscious labneh hiding crunchy syrup, and finished with crushed
commitment I’m willing to make. The walnuts in its depths, or aci ezme, a pistachio. And don’t miss the kazan-
following Monday, I went for breakfast, coarse and spicy mix of bell peppers, dibi, which translates to “bottom of
stayed for lunch, and left with enough tomatoes, cucumbers, walnuts, parsley, the pan”: neat squares of a wobbly,
takeout for dinner; who knew when I’d and chili flakes. Standouts among the cornstarch-thickened milk pudding
get back again? entrées include the Iskender kebab, with a skin bronzed from the heat of
Many of the dishes here are also which the menu describes as the “most the stove and further burnished with
available at the owner’s first restau- popular dish of Turkish cuisine”: glis- cinnamon—rich, creamy, and cool.
rant, Zara Cafe & Grill, on Hylan tening shavings of perfectly seasoned (Dishes $7-$40.)
Boulevard. But the new place, which lamb gyro are dressed in tomato sauce, —Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 11
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT In the past two years, according to a as likely as adults to be injured at work.
CHILD’S WORK recent report from the Economic Policy The reasons offered to justify these
Institute, at least fourteen states have en- initiatives often emphasize child welfare.
ou may think that child labor was acted or proposed laws rolling back child- In Ohio, where Republican legislators
Y abolished a century ago, at least in
the United States. That was never quite
labor protections. Typically, the new laws
extend work hours for minors, lift restric-
are also proposing weaker laws, a spokes-
man for the Ohio Restaurant Associa-
true.The Fair Labor Standards Act, passed tions on hazardous work, lower the age tion testified that extending work hours
during the New Deal, outlawed “oppres- at which kids can bus tables where alcohol for minors would cut down on their screen
sive child labor” but exempted agricultural is served, or introduce new sub-minimum time. (The lawmakers offered a concur-
work from many of its restrictions, which, wages. In Iowa, a new law allows children rent resolution urging Congress to lower
in the decades since, has left hundreds of as young as fourteen to work in indus- federal child-labor standards to conform
thousands of children in the fields. In trial laundries, and, with approval from with Ohio’s proposed rules.) Arkansas’s
every industry, enforcement of the law a state agency, allows sixteen-year-olds Republican governor, Sarah Huckabee
has been uneven. States have always been to work in roofing, excavation, demoli- Sanders, recently signed a law ending a
free to strengthen protections, which some tion, the operation of power-driven ma- requirement that fourteen- and fifteen-
did, but challenges to the federal stan- chinery, and other dangerous occupations. year-olds obtain a parent’s consent and
dards have been rare.The Reagan Admin- Jennifer Sherer, a co-author of the E.P.I. a state permit before starting work. Link-
istration, in its pro-business zeal, proposed report, said, “Iowa’s new law contains ing the bill, strangely, to parental rights,
lowering the standards, but abandoned multiple provisions that conflict with the governor’s office called the permit
the idea under fire from teachers, parents, federal prohibitions on ‘oppressive child “an arbitrary burden on parents.”
unions, and Democratic lawmakers armed labor.’” It also limits employer liability “It was a one-page form,” Nina Mast,
with Dickens references. for the injury, illness, or death of a child the other co-author of the E.P.I. report,
Today, however, child labor in Amer- on the job. Adolescents are almost twice said. “It contained basic information and
ica is on the rise. The number of minors informed parents of a child’s rights. Re-
employed in violation of child-labor laws moving it eliminates a paper trail, makes
last year was up thirty-seven per cent enforcement and monitoring much more
from the previous year, according to the difficult. It opens the door to exploita-
Department of Labor, and up two hun- tion.” Sherer said that a lobbying tem-
dred and eighty-three per cent from 2015. plate being used in state legislatures to
(These are violations caught by govern- gut child-labor laws had been provided
ment, so they likely represent a fraction by conservative groups such as the Foun-
of the real number.) This surge is being dation for Government Accountability,
propelled by an unhappy confluence of a think tank based in Florida.
employers desperate to fill jobs, includ- Many employers are clearly not wait-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

ing dangerous jobs, at the lowest possi- ing for the laws to change. Fast-food
ble cost; a vast wave of “unaccompanied chains, which rely on teen-age workers,
minors” entering the country; more than seemingly treat fines for violating the
a little human trafficking; and a grow- laws as a cost of doing business. (It’s the
ing number of state legislatures that are franchisees who actually break the laws,
weakening child-labor laws in deference while the parent corporations pay lobby-
to industry groups and, sometimes, in ists to help loosen them.) In February,
defiance of federal authority. the Labor Department announced that
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 13
it had found more than a hundred chil- great underage labor pool of children until the age of sixteen in some states,
dren between the ages of thirteen and who have crossed the border in recent eighteen in others—and many want noth-
seventeen working in meatpacking plants years. “Unaccompanied minors” who ar- ing more, they also need to work. There
and slaughterhouses, in eight states, for rive from non-neighboring countries— are debts to be repaid, living expenses,
Packers Sanitation Services, one of the which, in effect, means Central Amer- and remittances to be sent home. If em-
nation’s largest food-sanitation compa- ica—are permitted to remain in the U.S. ployers ask for an I.D. or a Social Secu-
nies. The facilities themselves are owned and are remanded to the custody of the rity number, faked documents can be eas-
by major corporations, including Tyson Department of Health and Human Ser- ily bought; many employers do not ask.
Foods and JBS. (All three companies de- vices, which delivers them as quickly as There are signs that the Biden Ad-
nied that they had engaged in any wrong- possible to a sponsor while asylum ap- ministration has begun to face the child-
doing.) The children worked overnight plications are processed. The asylum pro- labor crisis—the announcement of a
shifts at such jobs as cleaning bone saws cessing typically takes years. crackdown, a request to Congress to in-
and head splitters with hazardous chem- In 2022, a hundred and thirty thou- crease penalties against employers. And
icals. At least three were injured. Pack- sand unaccompanied minors entered the yet strengthening enforcement when the
ers, which is owned by Blackstone, the H.H.S. system, nearly half of them from budget of the regulatory state is shrink-
world’s largest private-equity firm, paid Guatemala. In the rush to house such ing under pressure from the debt-ceiling
a civil fine of a million and a half dollars. numbers, sponsors are barely vetted. Some negotiations seems unlikely. Republicans
Social-service agencies were frustrated are relatives, some are traffickers, some say that the problem is an insecure bor-
that the Labor Department referred none are a combination. Follow-up by H.H.S. der. Certainly, crumbling economies in
of the children from Packers to them. has been tenuous—the agency loses track Central America intensify this crisis. But
The Times reported that some had found of a huge number of children within a the immediate problem is a broad indif-
jobs at other plants. It was clear, in any month of their placement. But one thing ference to the well-being of children
case, from a range of reports, that they is certain: although these kids, like all when profits are at stake.
were all, or nearly all, drawn from the children, are required to go to school— —William Finnegan

NIGHT LIFE DEPT. Wick.” (His only line: “I am Klaus.”)

EIN BERLINER Does he get tired of being Herr
Berghain?
“A little bit,” he said the other day. “I
worked eighteen years for this house, and
it’s a big chance and good memories, but
ja, now everyone knows this place.”
At sixty-one, he is working there less
or almost two decades, Sven Mar- frequently—“I don’t know when my next
F quardt has worked as the doorman
and principal sorter at Berghain, the
shift is”—and focussing more on his long
side career as a photographer. Last month,
Berlin night club. He has been as re- he visited New York for an exhibition of
sponsible as anyone for its singular ad- his work at ArtsDistrict Brooklyn, a cav-
mixture of interesting humans, which, ernous space in Greenpoint. The show,
along with its freethinking ethos and of old and new work, is called “Disturb-
its killer sound system, has made it ing Beauty.” It was opening later that
world-famous and very hard to get into. night, at a party with a d.j., where his
Typically posted by the entrance, dressed newer images would be projected on the
in black, face-tattooed, with lower-lip walls in concert with the techno music. Sven Marquardt
piercings that look like silver fangs, “This way is more interesting to me than
he has become in his own way world- a gallery,” he said. up and spoke in German to his com-
notorious, too—as an embodiment of Marquardt, fully armored in Balen- panions. In a long hallway they’d hung
Berghain’s old East Berliner queer-punk ciaga (shades, black flight jacket, flared large-format prints he’d taken before
spirit, and as the intimidating assessor yellow sweatpants, giant black sneak- the fall of the Wall, when he began
of that spirit’s traces in the aspirants ers), was accompanied by Anja Mos- shooting pictures of his acquaintances
who stand in line. The criteria for entry beck, a representative of Galerie De- in the East Berlin underground.
are obstinately imprecise. They aren’t schler, in Berlin, and Hardy Paetke, He said, “In those days I sometimes
his alone, but for better or worse he has Marquardt’s assistant, fellow-doorman, saw books, also pictures and postcards,
become their face. He has milked this and good friend. Paetke, who is built from Robert Mapplethorpe. It was my
a bit. He’s been in a couple of docu- like a pro wrestler, made Marquardt inspiration. I thought, Whoa, what’s that?”
mentaries (“Berlin Bouncer”), has pub- seem less forbidding, as did Marquardt’s Mosbeck said, “To receive such things
lished a memoir (“Die Nacht Ist Leben”), gentle way of speaking. His English from the West, it was a special thing.”
and has a cameo in the latest “John was decent, but now and then he gave “It was not legal,” Marquardt said.
14 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
“Here was my first inspiration, a young lost, and I’m happy when I have my as- Scott Goldshine, the general man-
boy, the same age as me. 1984. I was sistant at my side.” ager of Zabar’s, said, “I don’t know
twenty-two.” He pointed out another The party that night began at ten, who he is.”
early shot, of a man on a tar roof in a which meant more like midnight. Oontz, It’s an art-related dustup. On West
leather cap and jacket, stockings, and oontz, oontz, oontz. The projections of Seventy-ninth Street, on the wall of a
high heels. “He looks like someone now Marquardt’s portraits flashed on the walls, former Designer Shoe Warehouse, a
from the new generation of the club apparently to the beat but in random se- block south of Zabar’s, is a stencil by
scene. He looks like a little bit today.” quences. The revellers seemed unsure the British street artist Banksy. Known
“There hasn’t been any clubs then,” whether to watch or to dance. In the hall, as the Zabar’s Banksy, it is likely the
Paetke said. “No drugs. No coffee, no Mosbeck, the gallerist, pulled on cotton last remaining public Banksy in New
bananas. Craziest thing was alcohol. gloves and rehung one of the eighties York, created during the artist’s month-
There has been in East Germany a prints, which had been knocked off the long residency, in 2013. The other few
strong regime of how to look, how to wall by the heavy thud of the kick drum. dozen New York Banksys have been
behave in public. So coloring your hair Marquardt, now in a black skirt (Auch variously covered over, defaced, sealed
or doing anything which could go in die Nacht ist Dunkel), took in the scene in private collections, or auctioned off.
the direction of queer would have caused and said, “I am happy.” Then he went One evening last summer, Janoff
serious problems.” with Paetke to hang out by the entrance, crouched by the stencil, which shows a
A couple weeks before coming to as though he were working his own party. small boy wielding a sledgehammer,
New York, Marquardt had encountered “Ja, I am at the door,” he said. “Maybe then affixed a piece of tape bearing his

1
Patti Smith at Berlin’s Soho House. He this is the normal situation.” name to the wall. His aim? Recogni-
didn’t say anything to her, but there had —Nick Paumgarten tion. His work? He’d been cleaning the
been a glance of recognition, or of af- painting.
finity, between them. Now, in Brooklyn, PUBLIC WORKS DEPT. For the past ten years, Zabar’s has
he said, “It was a little bit for me this ART VIGILANTE taken credit for guarding the Banksy
feeling that on the other end of the world from vandalism and the N.Y.P.D.’s “graf-
we have soul mates maybe.” fiti squad.” Saul Zabar and his brother
After the Wall fell, Marquardt took Stanley, the business’s two patriarchs,
a long break from photography. He had it covered with a pane of plexiglass
said, “I lost my identity, with millions the day it was discovered. Staff put a
of people. We felt like immigrants in sign above the art: “Help ZABAR’S save
our own country. Yes, this is why I don’t ndrew Janoff, a thirty-five-year- this Banksy.” One day last year, a new
take pictures.”
“All of a sudden everything is open—
A old e-commerce manager who
lives on the Upper West Side, spent
name appeared: “Help ANDREW JANOFF
save this Banksy.”
you have access to everything,” Mos- much of last year in a neighborhood “They don’t deserve to have their
beck explained. “Everything you did dispute with Zabar’s, the venerable name on there, because they’re not clean-
before was difficult, and you had to appetizing store on Broadway. That’s ing it,” Janoff said, over a smoothie at a
fight for it.” his version. When asked about Janoff, local café. For months, he said, he had
“For nine years I take no pictures.”
What did he do instead?
“Party,” Marquardt said. “It was a
great, great time. I didn’t miss my cam-
era. And I enjoyed our new life. But too
much party, too much drugs, too much
everything. Hardcore, ja.”
He has been shooting again for
twenty-five years—portraits of a differ-
ent kind of underground. Last year, he
did a seven-week residency in New York.
He and Paetke stayed in Harlem. He
went out into the streets and took pho-
tos of New Yorkers who caught his eye.
He rode the ferries. “In my long life, I
find that humans are very interesting,”
he said. “I take never pictures of people
I don’t speak with.” He added, “The city
is sometimes a little bit scary.”
Scary how? He spoke in German.
Mosbeck translated: “The tempo.”
He said, “Sometimes I feel a little bit
noticed a series of graffiti tags on the know, your picture isn’t truthful!” he yelled local fisherman, dressed in a green track-
Banksy’s plexiglass. He repeatedly wiped as they walked away. suit, caught a six-inch largemouth bass.
them away, using a rag and Goof Off. Recently, a breakthrough came in the Carey wore a hoodie, green Crocs,
Each time, he replaced “ZABAR’S,” on form of pastry. Janoff met another Zabar’s and polarized sunglasses, and carried a
the sign, with “ANDREW JANOFF.” manager, David Tait, who was more re- Patagonia tackle bag packed with flies,
“Zabar’s has abandoned it,” Janoff ceptive. Tait assured him that they would snacks, and a Lawrence Ferlinghetti
said. “Credit should go to where credit look after the Banksy, thanked Janoff for book. “Fishing gets you out of your own
is due. So that should be me.” his work, and, Janoff said, gave him a head,” he said. “Hours can pass, and
Zabar’s staff disagree. “We clean it,” chocolate babka. (Tait denies giving the you’re, like, ‘I don’t know what time it
Goldshine said. “Do we clean it twenty babka.) “I was glad I finally spoke to some- is.’” He held a fly rod under his left arm
times a year? No.” one more official, who took me seriously as he tied a fluffy orange-and-gold home-
The Zabar’s Banksy has come to and understood branding,” Janoff said. made Woolly Bugger onto the line. “I’m
mildly dominate Janoff’s life. He has Janoff is now shopping at Zabar’s terrible at knots, actually,” he said, twist-
brought the issue to the attention of again. The Banksy is clean. “It admit- ing the filament ten times.
Willie Zabar—Stanley’s grandson— tedly looks better without my name on “You do ten, huh? I, like, max out at
whom he met at an event for an Insta- it,” he said. “That was only put there for six, maybe!” Lester said. He had on camo
gram account called @oldjewishmen. justice purposes.” But he still accosts Crocs and a canvas fly vest. Carey threw
Janoff, who claims to have the world’s passersby who take pictures of it. “I tell out a cast, which landed near a partially
largest Jewish-bobblehead collection, them that, although they are reading submerged orange construction cone.
was there on a date. “He told me that ‘Protected by Zabar’s,’ it’s actually me Lester caught a six-inch bluegill. “I grew
he would take care of it,” Janoff recalled. who is protecting it,” he said. Then he up spin-casting,” Carey said. “It was my
It was not taken care of—at least, shows them a photo of him with his dad’s favorite hobby.” Fifteen years ago,

1
not to Janoff ’s liking. And there was cleaning supplies. in college, in Eau Claire, Lester taught
no second date. Janoff avoided shop- —Naaman Zhou Carey to fly-fish. “By the end of that
ping at Zabar’s. “I’m not even a lox summer, I was addicted,” Carey said.
fan,” he said. “So I’m not even missing ON TOUR A few years later, Justin Vernon, Bon
out there.” GONE FISHING Iver’s front man, uploaded his début
Goldshine, who fields complaints, album, “For Emma, Forever Ago,” to
isn’t worried. “If somebody tells me the MySpace. He had recorded the LP at
rye bread has got too much salt, or the a cabin in Wisconsin. Carey said, “I took
Banksy picture is being defaced, we it upon myself to learn all the songs re-
look at everything,” he said. “That’s why ally, really well. At his first show, at this
we’re still in business after ninety years.” coffee shop with eighty people, I just
Often, when visiting the Banksy, he musician S. Carey, whose first told him, ‘Hey, man, do you want me
Janoff would find that his name had
been removed. He utilized a three-step
T name is Sean, and who is a drummer
for the band Bon Iver, goes fly-fishing
to play drums and sing? I can do it.’
And he was just blown away by it.” Two
restoration process: first, a piece of blue whenever he has the chance. Largemouth hours before Bon Iver’s first show, Carey
tape, with his name on it; then a strip bass in Half Moon Lake with his kids, became the second member of the band.
of white paper, also bearing his name; near their home, in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The group’s next album won a Grammy.
then clear packing tape over that. Cutthroat trout while on tour in Mon-
One day, two pedestrians caught tana. He recently started organizing his
him. One carried a Zabar’s bag; the solo-tour schedule around fly-fishing: a
other was about to snap a photo of trout trip to a secret stretch of river in
the Banksy. the Catskills (“Some places you have to
“Take that down,” the photo-taker, be a bit closed-lips about”) was followed
whose name was Margo, told him. by a concert in Brooklyn, and then by
“We’re not here to take a picture of An- an afternoon angling for bluegill and
drew Janoff—we’re here to take a pic- bass in Central Park, with two of his
ture of the Zabar’s.” bandmates, Zach Hanson and Ben Les-
“Why would you want Zabar’s in ter. “I’m not, like, driven by success or
there if they’re not actually cleaning it?” fame,” Carey said. “I’d rather go fishing.”
Janoff asked. Snapping turtles stretched out along
“You’re cleaning a piece of plastic, the banks of the Harlem Meer, which is
man,” Margo said. “It’s like the Empire stocked with bass, crappie, and catfish.
State Building. The guys who wash the “Urban fishing is a whole different thing,”
windows don’t change the name to, you Carey said, walking by a little boy. “You’ve
know, the Jakowski State Building.” got to be careful not to hook anyone!”
Janoff moved aside, and the pair posed Nearby, James Brown blasted from a Zach Hanson, Sean Carey,
under the word “ZABAR’S.” “Just so you boom box on an electric scooter, and a and Ben Lester
16 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
 In 2009, Carey started recording his SKETCHPAD BY MARISA ACOCELLA
own first record in the spare moments THE FOOD-ON-CLOTHES FAD
between touring and fishing trips. He
released his most recent album, “Break
Me Open,” last year, on Earth Day. “It’s The “It” Coat . . . Is . . . a Pasta Puffer? The statement jacket
about loss and change and grief,” he said. designed by Rachel Antonoff and patterned with farfalle has become
In 2021, Carey’s marriage fell apart; his a social-media and street-style sensation. —The Times.
dad died a few months later. “It was tough
and dark, and the music was a huge way
out,” he said.
Around five o’clock, a stranger in a
wide-brimmed hat and Birkenstocks
shouted, “There’s a big white carp in the
corner over there!” He added, “This is
my home water. I live across the street.”
He grinned. “I’m not fishing today, but
this is my home water, man.” A huge
fish swam toward the shore. Hanson
cast at it, and the carp darted away.
The stranger suggested another spot:
“Go through the woods. There’s, like, a
crick that runs through, and you follow
the crick up over to the West Side, and
there’s a pond on that side, too.” In Cen-
tral Park, the woods are called the Ra-
vine, the crick is known as the Loch,
and the pond is the Pool.
The Pool was a bust, so Carey wan-
dered to a billion-gallon lake he’d heard
about, the Reservoir. “I thought it’d be
funny to walk around with all these fly
vests and fishing gear,” he said, “but no-
body’s batted an eye.”
A man rode past on a double-decker
custom-made bicycle. A gaggle of bird-
ers aimed expensive lenses up into a tree.
Someone on a park bench smoked a
blunt, and a group of friends debated
superpowers.
“What’s the ultimate superpower,
man?”
“Super strength!”
“Flying!”
“A lot of them are unique, that’s all
I’m gonna say. But the best one?”
“Wings.”
“Levitating!”
At the Reservoir, Carey peered over
an iron fence. “I like the water clarity,”
he said. But there was no access. He’d
caught only one fish all day.
“Let’s eat something!” Lester said.
They located a Mister Softee truck
out on Fifth Avenue. Lester and Han-
son ordered vanilla cones, and Carey got
an Oreo Crunchie Crash. “I suppose if
you’re gonna live in a city, you know, it’s
a pretty good one,” he said.
—Adam Iscoe
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 17
 teaching her a new language. Blink-
PERSONAL HISTORY ing is what she has—that raw, moist
thwacking.

WHAT AM I WITHOUT YOU?

One day, your mother wants to know
what you are writing about.
You tell her that it is about you. The
Two lives merged by immigration and illness. two of you.
“What’s interesting about us?” she asks.
BY JIAYANG FAN You are in the middle of explaining
that you are still working that out when
she starts blinking again: “Summery.”
Summer?
You often have trouble communi-
cating. Language warps and tangles
between you. Chinese and English.
Chinglish and misspelled English.
Words that begin in English and wob-
ble into Chinese Pinyin.
Her body, frozen, is still the most
expressive thing there is. That singu-
lar determination to be understood.
Summary, you realize—she is ask-
ing for a summary. When you were ten
and learning to write in English, she
demanded that you write book sum-
maries. Three-sentence précis with a
beginning, a middle, and an end. Taut
and efficient, free of the metaphors and
florid fuss of which you were always
The author and her mother, in Connecticut, circa 1992. so fond.
Before you can ask if that is what
“ W illmother
I live to see its end?” your
asks.
breaks. At which time she disintegrates
into smaller and smaller pieces until
she wants now—a synopsis of your un-
written story—there is a stench. It is
She is sixty-nine years old and lies you are whispering to a sliver on the your mother’s shit, and already a sin-
in the hospital room where she has tip of your finger. That fine fleck of gle brown rivulet has seeped down the
been marooned for the past eight years, her. What is a mother? you ask. Is this limp marble of her thigh.
shipwrecked in her own body. still a mother? Is that? Your mother is a marionette con-
“It” is the story that you are now trolled by tubes and wires. To position
writing—this beginning you have yet • her in such a way that the health aide
to imagine and the ending she will not Your mother, who has amyotrophic lat- can wipe and clean, you must align your
live to see. eral sclerosis, speaks with her eyelids, body with hers—yours are the limbs
• using the last muscles over which she that scaffold her limbs, the arm that
exercises twitchy control. clasps her arm, the knee that supports
Write as if you were dying, Annie Dil- A.L.S. is an insurrection of the body her knee.
lard once said. against the mind. It is a mysterious Your mother’s face is creased in
But what if you are writing in com- massacre of motor neurons, the mes- pain. Her teeth are clenched, tiny
petition with death? sengers that deliver data from brain to chipped doors.
What if the story you are telling is organ and limb. The alphabet chart again.
racing against death? It is a disease that Descartes would D-E-A-D.
have loved for its brutal division of the No, you hurry to assure her, as you
• mind, “a thinking, non-extended thing,” have a thousand times before. No, dis-
In your dreams, you are always run- from the body, an “extended, non-think- comfort is not death. Discomfort is
ning. Running to catch your mother, ing thing.” only temporary.
COURTESY THE AUTHOR

running to intercept her before she • The creases deepen.

reaches the end. L-I-N-E.
In your dreams, your mother has no To speak her mind, your mother is de- Deadline.
legs, no arms, no spine—no body. She pendent on your body. At her bedside, You tell your mother the month and
is smooth and pure, a sheet of glass you trail your finger around a clear- the year that your book is due, and she
that becomes visible only when it plastic alphabet chart, as if you were asks for the exact date.
18 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
 Most people don’t meet their dead- expire, and she had scarcely two hun- you were damned. A single moment
line, you say. You are distracted. There dred dollars to her name and an eight- of lassitude could signal a descent into
is too much shit. It is a wet, languid year-old daughter in tow. depravity. Discipline and endurance
mass that has gathered in all her folds. In the course of several months, Mis- were destiny.
Mud-brown and yellow and green ooz- sionary Lady visited weekly. Did your There was an old adage that your
ing across the loaf of her flesh. mother confide in her new friend the mother repeated for as long as you can
You want to rid your mother en- difficulties of her life? You don’t know. remember, as if fingering rosary beads:
tirely of its unacceptability, but that is But sometimes, as the light grew dim “Time is like water in a sponge.” You,
plainly impossible. Scrub too hard, in the evening, you saw her thumbing she implied, wouldn’t have the forti-
even with a wet towel, and you will through the picture book. tude to squeeze out every drop. Would
tear the rice paper of her skin. Too One of those times, when you you have had the perseverance of Old
lightly and the bacteria left behind couldn’t contain yourself any longer, Man Yu? she was in the habit of ask-
will fester into infection. These are you asked her, “Did Missionary Lady ing you, challenging you.
the inevitabilities that come from liv- accomplish her mission?” You couldn’t imagine your mother
ing in a bed for eight years. You want “It’s a good story,” your mother said, not moving a mountain. The brute,
to save your mother from these inev- sighing. “But a story can’t save me.” burning force of her striving was its
itabilities, just as she wants to save you own religion.
from your own. But, helplessly and •
•
hopelessly, you are both beyond each Your mother didn’t believe in God.
other’s reach. But she had an iron faith, embodied In China, your mother had been a doc-
I’ll try to make the deadline, you in a classic fable popularized by Chair- tor. In Connecticut, she got a job as a
say, as you pull the sheet from under- man Mao: live-in housekeeper. When that job
neath her. You are wiping the folds Once upon a time in ancient China, ended, she got another. For years, you
around her pubic bone when she sig- there lived an old man named Yu wandered like nomads, squatting in
nals with her eyes for you to stop. She Gong. His house was nestled in a re- immense, remote houses, as discon-
is grimacing again, in pain. A kind you mote village and separated from the nected from your idea of home as the
would have to crawl into her body to wider world by two giant mountains. country in which you found yourselves.
understand. Although he was already ninety years Not long after you moved into the
“Not try. Never try,” she spells out. old, Yu Gong was determined to re- first house, your mother’s employer
“You do. Or you don’t.” move these obstructions, and he called gave you a journal with a Degas balle-
on his sons to help him. His only tools rina on the cover. One of the first things
• were hoes and pickaxes. The moun- you recorded in it was the cost of the
Not long after you and your mother tains were massive, and the sea, where journal, which you found on the back
arrived in the U.S., before your father he dumped the rocks he’d chipped cover: $12.99, almost twice your moth-
left for good, a stranger came to the away, was so distant that he could make er’s hourly wage. “Dear Diary,” you
door of your dank studio apartment in only one round trip in a year. His am- wrote in an early entry, “How will I fill
New Haven to convince your mother bition was absurd enough that it soon you up?” The blank face of the page.
of the existence of God. Plump, dig- invited the mockery of the local wise The empty house of you.
nified, with a loose, expressive face, she man. But Yu just looked at the man In the residence that physically
was the first American, and the first and sighed. “When I die, there will housed you, you and your mother
Black person, you had ever seen up be my sons to continue the task, and occupied one room and one bed.
close. “Jehovah’s Witness” meant noth- when they die there will be their sons,” You liked to pretend that the room,
ing to your mother, so she took to call- he responded. The God of Heaven, wrapped in chintz and adorned with
ing the woman Missionary Lady. who overheard Yu, was so impressed prints of mallards, was your private
That first day, Missionary Lady with his persistence that he dispatched island in the middle of foreign terri-
came bearing a free Chinese-language two deputies to help with the impos- tory. All around you was unrecogniz-
picture book in which a white-haired sible goal, and the mountains were able, ephemeral wilderness, your
man with benevolent eyes presided forever removed from Yu’s sight. mother the sole patch of habitable ter-
serenely over Popsicle-colored sun- The world in which your mother rain. Only she knew where you came
sets. While your mother presented her grew up was predicated on the ideals from, was part of your life’s seamless
with slices of watermelon, the visitor of perseverance and will power. Born continuity, from the crumbling con-
even chimed in with a few halting of messianic utopianism, its morality crete tenement house where you lived
words of Chinese that she’d picked was one of extreme polarity. If you during your first seven years to the
up in the immigrant-dense neighbor- didn’t attempt the impossible, you were studio apartment where the Mission-
hood, only one of which you under- indolence itself. If you were not flaw- ary Lady brought you God and on to
stood: “Saviour.” less, you were evil. If you could not the mallards and the chintz. Without
Your mother could have used a sav- face the prospect of becoming a mar- your mother, everything was smoke,
ior then. Her marriage was on the verge tyr, you were a coward. If you were not the true shape of things hidden. A
of dissolution, her visa was about to absolutely pure in thought and deed, chipped enamelled rice cooker was all
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 19
you retained of the apartment from shared with your mother, it didn’t Specks of other people’s shit that clung
which the two of you had been evicted belong to you. One moment you were to the bowl’s upper rims, which she
months earlier. Your mother had man- your mother’s fellow-émigré and co- had to reach inside with her hands to
aged to sneak it into this room and conspirator, and the next you were a wipe off.
place it under the night table. You re- rope pitched into the unknown, braided The toilet bowl was the crucible
corded this fact in your journal, be- with strands of her implacable resolve of indignity, this strange commode
cause it was as if the two of you had and reckless ambition. You were the you began using only upon arrival in
got away with something illicit. ladder upward out of her powerlessness, this country.
The two of you, feckless as runaway the towline that pulled the enterprise In the latrine in your tenement
children. forward. in China, everything was steeped and
• You had only partial access to the smeared in the natural, variegated
plan, but your mother hurtled ahead, brown of feces. But here things were
When your mother was pregnant in measuring possibility against potential, different. Here the gleaming white of
China, she prayed for twins. It was maneuvering education and opportu- the porcelain was accusatory, so clearly
the only permissible subversion of the nity into position. did it mark the difference between the
state’s single-child policy. Your grades in school were not a disgusting and the pristine, the pure
Sometimes, in the womb, one twin measure of your aptitude in language and the wretched.
eats the other, you learned from a med- arts or arithmetic but a testament to The first time you clogged the toi-
ical encyclopedia in your school library. your ability to hold on to life itself. To let in the bathroom connected to your
This isn’t exactly true—one twin ab- grip the rock face, evade the avalanche, room—you had not known it was pos-
sorbs the other, who has stopped de- and swing yourself up to the next slab. sible to dam up such a civilized con-
veloping in utero. The medical term Your mother lived below you, on the traption with your own excrement—
for this is “a vanishing twin.” You were eroded slope, the pebbles always slip- you just stood there, stupefied, as the
not a twin, but the imagined carnage ping beneath her feet, as she spelled water rose and poured over the edge.
of cannibalism, of one baby devouring out the situation with a desperation Even before your mother sheepishly
the other, stayed in your memory. Both that struck you as humiliation: “You borrowed the plunger from her em-
children in the womb try to survive. go to school in America, and I clean toi- ployer, before she hissed that it was
Only one does. lets in America.” enough that she cleaned other peo-
• • ple’s shit to earn a living, she couldn’t
go around cleaning up yours, too, you
You wandered into the plot of your Your mother hated nothing so much felt dipped in an ineradicable disgrace.
life, half asleep. Like that room you as cleaning toilets. The injustice of it.
•
One of the first stories about survival
that you read in the American school
your mother sent you to was that of a
man who lost everything. You’d thought
this was a story about an American
god, but your teacher told you that it
was also “Literature.”
In the land of Uz, there lived a man
named Job. God-fearing and upright,
Job had seven sons and three daugh-
ters. He owned seven thousand sheep.
Then, as the story goes, Satan and
God decided to terrorize him. He was
robbed of his home, his livestock, his
children. Both mental and physical
illness tormented him. His entire body
was covered in painful boils that
caused him to cry, “Why did I not
perish at birth and die as I came from
the womb?” In the end, when Job
maintained his unswerving loyalty to
God, everything was returned to him
twofold.
In the story of Yu Gong, God re-
“I wasn’t getting any work done at home, so I thought wards an old man who endeavors to
I’d try somewhere hot, bright, and uncomfortable.” do the impossible by helping him to
accomplish in one lifetime what should story that is about not her childhood narrative moved through you until you
have taken many. In the story of Job, but her father’s: seemed to be living inside it, instead
God rewards an old man who main- There once lived a little boy, the of the other way round.
tains his faith against all odds by multi- son of impoverished tenant farmers. You read the novel once, twice, three
plying his worth. One day, he was invited to the village times, swallowed up by the dyad of the
• fair by the child of his richer neigh- plain, timorous, bookish daughter and
bor. The neighbor gave the boy a few her fierce and unsentimental working-
Your mother’s story was different from coins to spend at the fair. Ecstatic, class mother. The idea that mutual de-
both Yu Gong’s and Job’s: he bought himself the first toy of his votion could generate seething resent-
Once upon a time there lived a life, a wooden pencil, which he hung ment and sorrow—it made your heart
woman who wanted to exchange her proudly around his neck the whole hammer. The episode that left the deep-
present for her daughter’s future. Lit- day. When he returned home, his par- est impression on you involved a rit-
tle did she know that, if she did so, the ents beat him within an inch of his ual in which the mother allows her
two of them would merge into one life. Those coins could have bought daughter to have a cup of coffee with
ungainly creature, at once divided and rice and grains! Enough to feed the every meal, even knowing that she won’t
reconstituted, and time would f low family for a week! drink it, will just pour it out. “I think
through both of them like water in a This was the only story your grand- it’s good that people like us can waste
single stream. The child became the father told your mother of his child- something once in a while and get the
mother’s future, and the mother be- hood, and the first time she told it to feeling of how it would be to have lots
came the child’s present, taking up res- you, you recognized the echo of every of money and not have to worry about
idence in her brain, blood, and bones. hero tale you were taught as a child. scrounging,” the mother remarks.
The woman vowed that she had no A Communist cadre till the end, your Scrounging. Until you read that sen-
need for God, but her child always won- grandfather had run away at age six- tence, you had not realized that that
dered, Was the bargain her mother had teen to join the Party, which had given was what you and your mother did. It
made a kind of prayer? him the first full belly he had known. had never occurred to you that there
Just as important, the Party had taught could be another way for the two of
• him how to read, inspired the avidity you to live.
The first time you saw your mother with which he had marked up Mao’s Now it seemed that you could be
steal, you were eleven and standing in Little Red Book: his cramped, inky lacking in means yet be in possession
the lotions aisle of CVS. annotations marching up and down of possibilities—this you who was one
The air constricted in your lungs as the page like so many ants trooping with your mother but not your mother,
you watched her clutch a jar of Olay through mountains. who squatted in other people’s houses,
face cream, slipping it into her purse, The second time your mother told who hungered for everything but con-
while pretending to examine the bot- you the story, you were ten or eleven tributed nothing.
tles on the next shelf over. Her fingers: and she didn’t have to tell it at all. The But what did you mean to accom-
they moved with animal instinct, deft two of you were at Staples, shopping plish by telling your mother that story?
and decisive, as if trapping prey. for school supplies. “Back-to-school Your mother, for whom every story was
It was your mother who had taught sale,” the posters all over the store a tool, for whom that story could only
you that it was wrong to steal. screamed. Four notebooks, four me- be a knife.
She didn’t shoplift for the same rea- chanical pencils, your mother had stip- How slowly she turned to face you
son that your seventh-grade classmates ulated, but you wanted more. You al- as she said these words: “I know what
did. There was no thrill in it for her, ways wanted more. When you persisted, you are doing. If that’s the mother you
of that you were certain. The things she had only to look at you and utter want, go out and find her.”
she stole were not, strictly speaking, the words “You have more than any-
items you or she needed in order to one” for you to know exactly whom she •
survive. She stole small indulgences was referring to. You were alone and she was alone. But
that she did not believe she could af- The story was growing inside you, it was the way the loneliness lived sep-
ford, things that ever so briefly loos- just as it had grown in your mother: a arately in each of you that pushed you
ened the shackles of her misery. cactus whose spines pierced their way both to the brink of disintegration.
And, knowing this, whenever you through your thoughts. Every time she left the house with-
saw her steal you felt a slow, spreading out you to run an errand or to pick up
dread, the recognition that there was • the children who were her charge, you
something in you that could judge your One day, your mother unexpectedly were newly convinced that she would
mother, even as you actively colluded appeared in your reading life as an in- not return. Half of you had departed.
with her. digent Austrian immigrant in nineteen- The other half was stranded in that
• tens New York. The novel was called airless prison, with nothing but your
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” and al- journal, your notebooks, and your me-
What you know of your mother’s child- though you could have found neither chanical pencils.
hood can be summarized in a single Austria nor Brooklyn on a map, the One day, she let slip something she
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 21
 “A circle?” she said, and then said it
again, questing and songlike. “Life is
a circle.”
There was a silence during which
she tilted her chin and appraised you
as if you were one of the figures in the
sculpture. “That’s nice,” she said softly,
with something akin to wonder.
•
You spent your early twenties waiting
for your real life to begin, peering at it,
as if through a window. How to break
that windowpane? You didn’t know. You
were living in New York now, and you
had a menial job at the Y.M.C.A. on
the Bowery, where you were tasked with
putting up multilingual signage. Most
days, you had enough downtime to read
books purporting to teach you how to
write books.
“Odd, since neither of us ever overfeeds her by even the smallest amount.” The Y.M.C.A. was next to a Whole
Foods, and every day after work you
filled up a container with overpriced
• • lettuce, beets, and boiled eggs and
slipped upstairs to eat it in the café
could only have read in that journal. It was an act not of aggression but of without paying. One day you were
When you confronted her about it, desperate self-defense. caught and led to a dark, dirty room
she was coolly impenitent. where a Polaroid of you was snapped
“Oh, you must have known,” she • and you were told that, if you were ever
said briskly. How old were you the day the two of caught stealing again, the police would
“Known what?” you found yourselves in that art museum? be called.
“I wouldn’t have read it if I didn’t Old enough that you were interested in The security guard who caught
have to.” things that tested the boundaries of your you, a boy who looked younger than
You didn’t know how to respond ex- understanding, old enough to pause for you, couldn’t hide his pleasure when
cept to stare at her in amazement. a long while in front of a sculpture—a he dumped the untouched food in the
“Yes,” she doubled down, eyes ablaze. circle cast in metal, like an oversized trash. Did you steal that, too, he said,
“I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t keep clock, inside of which were two simpli- smirking, and nodded at the book in
so many secrets.” fied figures in profile. One walking from your hand.
Secrets? The only things you had ever the top, feet mid-stride at twelve o’clock, It was a copy of “The Writing Life,”
kept from your mother were thoughts the other, with the same rolling gait, step- the first book of Annie Dillard’s you’d
that you knew were unacceptable: sources ping past six o’clock. read. You had just got to the passage
of your own permanent self-disgust “What are we looking at?” your mother where Dillard refers to a succession of
and shame. Her reading your journal asked, by which she meant, What are words as “a miner’s pick.” If you wield
was akin to her examining your soiled you looking at? it to dig a path, she says, soon you will
underwear. You were in the habit of puzzling find yourself “deep in new territory.”
“You are behaving like a child,” you out the right answer, but this time you For you, the path always led back
muttered. spoke instinctively. to your mother. How many times did
“What did you say?” “Life is not a line but a circle,” you you start a story about a mother and a
You caught a glint in her eye, a pri- said. You spoke confidently precisely daughter, only to find that you could
mordial helplessness. She had no choice because it was not a great insight. You not grope your way to an ending? How
but to unleash upon you, smash her rage knew it to be true the way you knew the many times on a Friday after work, as
into you like countless shards of glass. sky to be blue. “No matter where you you rode the train from the city to Con-
Long after you had moved out of are, you can only walk into yourself.” necticut, where your mother still lived,
that room with the mallards and the You had received a scholarship to did you feel the forward motion as a
rice cooker, the room that fused two a fancy boarding school. She had moved journey backward through time?
into one, you understood that she was from housekeeping to waitressing. In her presence, you were always di-
not so much beating you into submis- Your world had expanded while hers vided against yourself.
sion as pulling you back into her body. remained suspended. There was the you who was walk-
22 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
ing away from her and the you who her eyes: dark, plaintive, screaming. two dogs, Max and Willy, a blond and
was perpetually diving back in. That was the first terrible day of the a chocolate Lab, but your mother never
alphabet chart, which you had encour- called them by their names. To her, they
• aged her to learn while she still had the were the Smart One and the Dumb One.
Motor neurons, among our longest faculty of speech. Which she had dis- Once, when the six-year-old child
cells, pave a path of electric signals missed, along with the use of a wheel- she was tasked with caring for asked
from brain to body. As A.L.S. pro- chair. Your mother’s belief in the fu- what her favorite animal was, she an-
gresses, cognitive function usually re- ture was always as selective as her swered “panda” without even a pause.
mains intact, but the motor neurons memory of the past. You were older, and it had never occurred
cease to deliver those signals. Without to you to ask your mother such a ques-
directives from above, limbs and or- • tion. “Have you ever seen one?” the child
gans gradually shut down until, at last, At 2 a.m., a heavy-footed, uniformed continued. “In real life?”
the body no longer knows how to in- woman came in to change your mother. “No,” she responded. “Of course not.”
hale air. “Family members aren’t allowed,”
You were twenty-five when your she said. •
mother’s illness was diagnosed, and You posed this as a possibility to your A whiskered doctor with a sagging belly
never had the battle plan been more mother and watched her eyes quake. delivers the news that your mother has
clear. You moved her into your apart- “We’ll be done in a jiff.” pneumonia in both lungs and is at grave
ment, one you had selected for the two A jiff—the words knocked around risk if she doesn’t get a tracheostomy.
of you, with a room for her and one in your head. “In a jiff,” you repeated Frowning, he speculates that she
for you. You fed her bottles of Ensure to your mother. In a jiff, you were pushed may not survive the pneumonia, in any
by the spoonful—until it had to be out of the room, stumbling down the case. “Look at her,” he instructs you,
pushed through a feeding tube directly waxen-floored corridor and wheedling his voice raised to be heard above the
into her stomach. You set an alarm with the charge nurse for permission machines that hum out her life. “Her
clock to wake you whenever you needed to be an exception to the rule. body is wasted.” That word: “wasted.”
to adjust her breathing machine. You “Really,” the woman said, “we are It is a word you want to eviscerate. A
took on additional freelance work and very experienced here.” She regarded word as savage as “jiff.”
began borrowing money from friends; you for a second—the clench of your “So what do we do?” you ask.
you opted out of medical insurance face, the madness of your eyes. “You “We wait.”
for yourself until you could afford a can’t care for the patient if you don’t She has been placed on two kinds
part-time home aide, who was subse- take care of yourself first.” of antibiotics. You ask how long they
quently replaced by a full-time one. You walked back to your mother’s will take to work.
And then two. room and pulled open the curtain. “If they work,” he corrects you.
• The aide was gone. The sheets had
been changed. A strong antiseptic smell •
The day that the motor neurons in your Once upon a time there lived a woman
mother’s body could no longer travel who wanted to collapse time and space.
the length of her diaphragm, you re- The plan was to exchange her present
ceived a call from the home aide, tell- for her ailing mother’s future. Little
ing you that your mother was uncon- did she know that, if she did so, the
scious and that her skin was turning a two of them would merge into one un-
translucent shade of blue. gainly creature, at once divided and re-
At the hospital, when it became clear constituted, and time would f low
that your unconscious mother would die through both of them like water in a
without mechanical ventilation, you were single stream.
asked to make the choice on her behalf. hung heavy in the air. Your mother’s But the stream. How strangely that
Will you save your mother or let face was twisted and swollen, streaked stream would flow, not forward but
her die? with secretions gray and green. in a loop, as the mother became the
It wasn’t a choice. You asked if she was O.K., but you child’s purpose.
Neither of you lived in the realm of didn’t want to know the answer. Or, One creature, disassembled into
choices. This was what you could not find rather, you already knew it. two bodies.
the language to convey when her eyes “How could you?” your mother re- •
flapped open, when her mouth dropped plied, through the alphabet chart. “You
and no sound came out. A maimed bird. left me like an animal.” Pneumonia, bladder infections, kidney
You had done that. You had done it not stones: predators that attack your mother’s
by choice but by pure instinct. • body with such frequency and ferocity
There was your mother, locked in- Your mother never liked animals much that she is permanently entombed in the
side her body. There was her face, the and barely tolerated the pets of her em- womb of her hospital room. The room
color of cement after rain. There were ployers. In the first family, there were around which you and a rotation of private
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 23
aides orbit like crazed, frenetic birds. clock, that strange hanging circle, long asks. Or just this particular octopus?
You are thirty and have just begun ago stopped. Sometimes you wonder All the octopuses who are mothers.
writing for a living. Your mother’s En- if you made her up. Her voice in your They don’t move or eat.
glish is not good enough for her to read head: an incessant pull of you to your- This is not the kind of story I had
your magazine articles, but she is in- self, your most enduring tether. in mind, she remarks.
terested only in the efficiency of a sum- Tell me a story, the mother inside A good story moves. It glides and
mary, anyway. Always her first ques- you says. slithers like an octopus in a way that
tion: Do other people like it? By which What kind of story? you respond. is unexpected yet inevitable.
she means the people on whom your Something you read that’s interest- Yes, I know that. You aren’t smarter
survival depends. ing but not too complicated. A story than me, you know.
When you began writing about her, that I can understand. I have always known that.
it did not feel voluntary. What comes to mind is the story of Well, go on and finish it. What hap-
But how it must have struck her: the octopus. pens to the octopus? When does she
treachery, theft, shame manipulated The kind I used to cook for you? get to eat? Will her babies survive?
and exploited. she asks. The babies in the eggs get bigger
• Yes, you say. Like the kind you used and stronger. They are eager to begin
to soft-boil for me and marinate with their own lives. But they are also small.
The last time you see your mother alive, vinegar and sesame oil. The mother knows this. She, too, has
you lie. You tell her that you need to But you know animals don’t inter- become small. She is weaker now. With-
leave so that you can check on her be- est me. out food and exercise, her tangle of
longings at the care facility, but, really, And why is that? arms goes dull and gray. Her eyes sink
you are hoarding time to work on a Because I am not a small child. into their sockets.
story, time that will vanish once the next Right. I am the child, and I want I don’t think I like where this is going.
day begins. She nods. You don’t make to tell my mother a story about a Just bear with me a little longer,
eye contact. You can never bear to look mother. A mother who also happens you say. When the eggs are about to
her in the eye when you are lying. to be an octopus. hatch, the mother octopus thrusts her
The last time you see your mother She rolls her eyes. Oh, how she rolls arms to help the babies emerge; she
alive, you lie. her eyes. may throw herself rocks, or mutilate
You lied, and she died. Once upon a time there lived a herself. She may consume parts of her
mother octopus. For a long time, she own tentacles. This is her final act,
• roamed alone on the ocean floor, and you see. And then, with her last bit of
Sunlight is a knife in the morning. There then one day she became pregnant. strength, she uses her siphon to blow
is a predatory quality to its intensity. How did she become pregnant? the eggs free. Those perfect minia-
Opening your eyes, you half expect to Not important to the story. What’s tures of their mother, with tiny ten-
disappear. To be absorbed into the ether. important is that she lays eggs only tacles and an inborn sense of what
When, instead, the world appears, you once in her life. they must—
cannot trust it. You have never seen the I hope she lays quality eggs, my No! she interrupts. I see what you
world without your mother in it. So how mother says, grinning. are doing.
can you be sure that you are seeing it or Well, there are a lot of them, tiny What? you respond. Jesus, what
that this is, in fact, the same “it”? white beads that float free until she is it?
gathers them into clusters with her You are doing the predictable thing.
• long arms and twists them into braids, Just what you say a story is not sup-
Tell the story well enough, because you which she hangs from the roof of an posed to do.
got to go to school while she scrubbed underwater cave. She is a very resource- I don’t know how to tell it any other
toilets. ful octopus, you see. way, you say quietly.
Tell the story well enough so that It sounds tedious, your mother says. Why don’t you have a choice?
time and space will collapse and the Not unlike this story. she asks.
two of you will course in a single stream, In the sea, there is no time for ex- Stop it, stop it! you interject. I
like water. Tell the story well enough haustion, you continue, faster, trying am talking to my dead mother in a
to abolish the end. to breathe it all out before she inter- made-up story. You would never use
Tell the story well enough. rupts you again. Everything is cold, that word: “choice.”
Tell the story well enough. barren, and dark. Death swallows up But I am free to do whatever I want
Tell the story well enough. whatever is not protected. To keep now, she says.
Tell the story well enough so that her eggs growing, the mother must Now that you are dead?
both babies will survive. bathe them constantly in new waves Now that I live only in your story.
of water, nourishing them with oxy- But my story is your story, you say.
• gen and shielding them from preda- What am I without you?
In your new apartment, you live among tors and debris. A thing that moves, your mother
your mother’s journals, her shoes, her Do all the mothers do this? she answers. A thing that is alive. 
24 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
 LINDA (puts hands on hips and cocks
SHOUTS & MURMURS head suspiciously): The big what?

INT. SALOON — NIGHT

FRANKLIN: Looks like I’m living
with Queen Battle-Axe—excuse me,
my mother-in-law.
JENNY (flirty): My offer still stands.
FRANKLIN: Really?
The roar of a motorcycle outside. JOE
(hunky, too dumb to review his one-day
contract) enters holding a boom box blast-
ing a public-domain rock-and-roll song.
JOE: Ready for the roller derby, babe?
JENNY: Missed your chance, Frank.
She leaves with JOE.

A NETWORK EXECUTIVE
FRANKLIN: Think she was serious?
CHARLES (sarcastically): Oh, yeah.

WRITES A SITCOM
Audience howls. (Note to sound: no
laugh track needed—this is gold.)

BY TEDDY WAYNE INT. RESTAURANT — NIGHT

FRANKLIN retakes his seat.
“We have been planning for this,” [Paramount tonio’s, the Italian restaurant we always LINDA: I received great news while
C.E.O. Bob Bakish] told Wall Street analysts . . . refer to. She mistakenly believes I am you were in the men’s room!
speaking to the WGA strike. . . . “We do have in the men’s room now. Tonight I shall FRANKLIN: I didn’t go to the— (ro-
many levers to pull.”
—Deadline, May 4th. practice subterfuge by running back botic monotone that the audience recognizes
and forth between the two locations! as “acting”) Oh, yes. The men’s room.
“Tipplers”: a situation-comedy teleplay CHARLES: In that case, let me make LINDA: Mother accepted our invi-
for the 18-34 demographic. you a “double.” tation! She’s moving in tomorrow.
He pours two bottles of ale into a mug. FRANKLIN (smiling wide, but we get
INT. SALOON — NIGHT (Multiple product-placement oppo here.) the subtext: he’s unhappy): Terrific.
The neighborhood watering hole is Walking by with a tray of glasses is the He drinks straight from the bottle of
populated by blue-collar denizens of an waitress, JENNY (twenty-one, blond knock- wine. The audience whoops as he polishes
untapped metropolitan market (one back- out, not enough lines to qualify for screen it off—classic FRANKLIN.
ground extra is Black). In walks FRANK- credit). FRANKLIN: I need the men’s room.
LIN (portly, salt of the earth, non-SAG). FRANKLIN: Hey, Jenny, when are LINDA: That’s the sixth time to-
FRANKLIN: Do not even converse you going to leave that ne’er-do-well night. Are you distracted by something?
with me until I have consumed my first punk boyfriend and run off with me? FRANKLIN: Just . . . (A beat—what’s
mug of beer. JENNY: As soon as you divorce that he going to come up with now?) your rav-
Laughter from audience—they expect nagging harpy of yours! ishing beauty, my dear.
this kind of “’tude” from FRANKLIN. Audience laughter, as it understands They kiss. The audience “aww”s.
He sits before the barkeep, CHARLES this is harmless flirtation between adults. FRANKLIN slowly lifts his phone behind
(handsome, magnetic; I could play him for LINDA’s head to watch.
scale), who wipes alcoholic-beverage mugs. INT. RESTAURANT — NIGHT LINDA: Mother asked if she could
CHARLES: Aren’t things better down FRANKLIN breathlessly rejoins his take our bedroom.
at your municipal workplace? wife, LINDA (over forty). He peeks at FRANKLIN (watching the game): Yes!
FRANKLIN: Yes, ever since we voted the big game on his cellular phone under LINDA: Really?
to dissolve our corrupt union. The the table.
problem, you see, is my battle-axe— LINDA: Mother has been having INT. SALOON — NIGHT
excuse me, my wife. (Audience laugh- trouble taking care of herself. What do CHARLES: Now that you’re not being
ter of recognition) Because tonight is you think about having her move in? gouged into paying union dues, what
our anniversary, she forbad me from FRANKLIN (pumps fist at game): Yes! will you spend your money on?
watching the big game with my drink- LINDA: You’re O.K. with my mother FRANKLIN (holds head in hands): A
ing chums! living with us? foldout couch.
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

CHARLES: Then how are you here? FRANKLIN: I never agreed to that! Freeze-frame as CHARLES pours three
For the ballplayers are about to take LINDA: I just asked. You said, “Yes!” bottles of ale into a mug. The audience’s
their positions! FRANKLIN: No, I was reacting to laughter turns into a standing ovation for the
FRANKLIN: She is next door at An- the big— show’s courageous pro-management stance. 
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 25
 to them. “I would like for you to ask
LIFE AND LETTERS these people if I ever mattered,” the
playwright says.

THE INTERVIEW ARTIST

So begins “Follies of God: Tennessee
Williams and the Women of the Fog,”
a book by James Grissom, which was
James Grissom met Tennessee Williams—and suddenly knew everybody. published by Knopf in 2015. (Knopf is
the publisher of several New Yorker col-
BY HELEN SHAW lections and writers.) Grissom’s haunted,
nonlinear, detail-rich book intertwines
interviews with the playwright (who is
by turns garrulous, melancholy, trans-
ported, resolute) and Grissom’s subse-
quent wide-ranging conversations with
those who influenced him. In “Follies,”
Grissom writes that, in the course of
five days that September, the two men—
one a seventy-one-year-old giant of
American letters, the other a lanky col-
lege student scribbling notes in a blue
exam booklet—pinballed around New
Orleans while Williams talked about
his favorite performers, his faith, his
lovers, his great plays, and his determi-
nation to return to work. In the St. Louis
Cathedral, the white wedding cake that
towers above Jackson Square, Williams
bought Grissom a rosary, naming each
bead for an inspiration: Maureen Sta-
pleton, Lillian Gish, Stella Adler . . .
the catalogue went on.
Grissom recounts that weeks before
Williams died, in February, 1983, the
playwright called his house and left a
message: “Be my witness.” It took Gris-
som six years, but once he moved to
New York he began reaching out to the
names on his list, bearing Williams’s
words as his calling card. It’s astound-
ing the interviews Grissom managed to
ometime in September, 1982, James ways begun his plays by imagining a get—the book includes a constellation
S Grissom, a twenty-year-old English
student at Louisiana State University,
woman walking across a stage, “an-
nounced by the arrival of a fog,” but he
of twentieth-century luminaries, among
them Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis,
receives a life-changing phone call from hasn’t seen this fog in years: the calci- and Marlon Brando. There are also less
Tennessee Williams. It doesn’t come fying effects of time and “monumental widely known figures, like the elegant
completely out of the blue: Grissom accretions of toxins self-administered” trouper Marian Seldes, who won a Tony
had sent a fan letter to the playwright, have left him unable to write at his “pre- Award for lifetime achievement in 2010,
enclosing a picture and a few short sto- vious level of power.” and two women who performed in re-
ries, and asking for advice. But the re- Grissom drives from Baton Rouge vivals of “The Glass Menagerie”: Jo Van
sponse, Grissom would write decades to New Orleans, and, at the Court of Fleet and Lois Smith, who won a Tony
later, surpasses his wildest hopes. When Two Sisters Restaurant, Williams dic- in 2021, at the age of ninety, for her role
he picks up the receiver, a rough voice tates to him a list of writers, directors, in “The Inheritance.” Grissom chroni-
drawls down the line, “Perhaps you can and (mostly) actresses. Grissom jots the cles a remarkable intimacy with his sub-
be of some help to me.” names down on a menu. Williams wants jects. He describes sitting with Staple-
On the phone, the famously dissi- Grissom to convey his thoughts to these ton as she drinks Blue Nun sweet wine;
pated playwright tells Grissom that he muses—specific praise, a memory—and talking with Hepburn over bowls of ice
is having a creative crisis. He has al- then find out what Williams has meant cream; and lying in bed next to Kim
Hunter, the original Stella from “A
Grissom says that the playwright gave him a life-changing mission. Streetcar Named Desire,” so they can
26 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 ILLUSTRATION BY VALENTIN TKACH
listen through the wall to a play at the Paul Newman) are quoted solely on his that he almost never taped his inter-
theatre next door. blogs. Grissom writes that he received views, and that his “ultimately more
Victoria Wilson, a legendary Knopf a series of phone calls from Brando in than twenty” blue books have “long since
editor whose writers have included Anne the early nineties, but most of that ma- deteriorated,” their contents transferred
Rice and the biographer Meryle Secrest, terial—in which the actor held forth on over the decades onto word processors
acquired the book and worked on it with everything from manliness to Christian and computers. Others pointed out that
Grissom for almost ten years. In the Science—was reserved for the Web, too. Grissom hadn’t provided concrete dates
intervening decade, Grissom started re- The scale of Grissom’s interviews, for his interviews. The idea that his
leasing some of his material online, which between the online material and the notebooks had “deteriorated” also struck
brought him into various Williams or- book, is staggering, as is the number of some readers as odd. “As if he had taken
bits—he spoke at the 2009 Tennessee people Williams seemingly counted as notes in 1882, not 1982,” one skeptic wrote.
Williams Scholars Conference, in New north stars. Grissom quotes him prais- In 2015, most of the people Grissom
Orleans, as part of its “I Remember Ten- ing, at length, more than a hundred sep- had quoted in the book were dead, so
nessee” panel. Over the years, Grissom arate artists, ranging from Barbra Strei- it was hard to double-check that his
launched Twitter and Instagram accounts, sand to Federico Fellini.The playwright’s encounters had taken place. His online
a “Follies of God” Facebook page (which observations weren’t all from five days quotes from artistic figures sometimes
now has more than a hundred and nine- of conversation; Grissom says they had appeared uncannily timed, published just
ty-four thousand followers), a Substack a few phone calls and that Williams also after their deaths. People in the theatre
newsletter (which currently lists more gave him written tributes to transcribe. world noticed. The director Mark Arm-
than seven hundred posts), and several Still, the range is surprising: the play- strong told me that he and his friends
blogs, including one dedicated to “Fol- wright says he noticed Annette O’Toole message one another when anyone fa-
lies of God.” On these platforms, he began in the schlock remake of “Cat People” mous dies: “We’ll say, ‘Oh, looking for-
publishing quotations from Williams and describes Holland Taylor as “crafted ward to James Grissom’s interview with,
and his muses, as well as reflections shared of bisque” after seeing her, Grissom pos- you know, Angela Lansbury coming next
with him in the nineties by Alec Guin- its, in an episode of “Bosom Buddies.” week.’” Grissom hasn’t posted anything
ness, Arthur Miller, Mike Nichols, Eartha “Follies” wasn’t reviewed by any major about Lansbury, but when Nichols died,
Kitt, and others. (One blog, mainly pic- outlets, but smaller papers raved. The in November, 2014, he posted an excerpt
tures, is called “Faking the Fog.”) Tampa Bay Times called it “the real deep from an interview with him for the first
In 2015, Grissom went on a book dish,” and the Connecticut Post declared time four days later.
tour, and Wilson interviewed him at a it “some of the best writing on theater On January 9, 2017, on Facebook,
Barnes & Noble on the Upper West and actresses you will ever encounter.” Augustin Correro, the co-founder of
Side. “From the moment I got this The memoir was blurbed by the pub- the Tennessee Williams Theatre Com-
manuscript,” Wilson said, “I knew this lishing heavyweight Michael Korda, who pany of New Orleans, called Grissom’s
book had greatness.” In a video of the said it was “electrifying,” and by the play- “Follies” blog “post-truth.” Correro soon
event, Grissom—then fifty-three, his wright John Guare, who described it as saw an unusual set of excoriating on-
fine, graying hair combed back, the “Fol- an “original, hypnotic . . . bound-to-be- line reviews on his theatre company’s
lies” rosary around his neck—is an easy controversial document.” Guare is men- Facebook page, made by profiles that
and gracious raconteur, chatting about tioned in the book and knew Williams— seemed strangely two-dimensional—
how he and Williams used to do im- they had made an Atlantic crossing on some of which he successfully chal-
pressions together of the comic actor the QE 2 in adjacent cabins. lenged as fake and had taken down. He
Charles Nelson Reilly. Wilson herself After the book’s publication, Gris- posted at length about the experience,
is steeped in American performance som’s work circulated widely. A Times specifically blaming Grissom and call-
history: she edited the letters of Wil- Style Magazine piece on James Baldwin ing his material “unverifiable.” Corre-
liams and his longtime friend Maria used a Brando quote from a Grissom ro’s comments were reposted by Ran-
St. Just, and wrote a biography of Bar- interview. Mark Harris included quotes dall Rapstine, who was then a graduate
bara Stanwyck. Wilson told the crowd, from a Grissom post in his 2021 biog- student at Texas Tech University.
“This is without question, as far as I’m raphy of Mike Nichols. And a Williams Grissom escalated the situation by
concerned, the best book on Tennessee phrase from a Grissom interview shared sending an e-mail that March to Rap-
Williams ever written.” on Facebook—“We live in a perpetu- stine’s adviser at T.T.U., Mark Charney.
ally burning building, and what we must “It has also been brought to my atten-
he book is more than four hundred save from it, all the time, is love”—even tion that you . . . have stated that the
T pages, but there clearly wasn’t room
for everything Grissom had gathered.
appeared on the chaplaincy Web site at
the University of Edinburgh, as one of
book is false,” he wrote, adding that
Knopf ’s lawyers were beginning legal
In his acknowledgments, he thanks a its daily prayers and reflections. (None proceedings against Charney, Correro,
hundred and thirteen people who were of these quotes had appeared in “Follies.”) and Rapstine. In the same e-mail, Gris-
“generous with their time and their A few commenters on Goodreads som said that he had “worked more than
memories.” Only seven of these are cited and Amazon, though, observed that two decades on the book, and all rele-
in the book, and, oddly, many of the Grissom’s book didn’t include sources vant materials proving this were given
starriest on the list (Elizabeth Taylor, or notes. Grissom explains in “Follies” to my publishers”; he also claimed that
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 27
his notebooks were being sent to the performance on Broadway and that erwise loving and supportive, blamed
Harry Ransom Center, at the Univer- “the New York Times review suggested him for the abuse: “They didn’t know
sity of Texas at Austin. (Eric Colleary, that the Billy Rose Theatre be fumi- how to deal with a gay kid.” After high
a curator of performing arts at the Ran- gated.” (His memory is sharp: the ac- school, he told me, he contributed arts
som Center, has no record of Grissom tual review said it “may need an air- reviews to local papers and, in 1980, he
ever contacting the archive. Knopf de- ing.”) During the first two hours, he appeared on a local TV morning pro-
clined to comment on Grissom’s claim framed parts of our conversation as a gram. There he met Pat White, a Baton
regarding legal action; Rapstine said that kind of bantering quiz. Hadn’t I heard Rouge native who had become a tele-
no case ensued.) of Weill? But someone had told him I vision actor in New York. “When my
Then, on June 16, 2020, Grissom was a scholar! He pivoted throughout mother saw Pat White on the set, she
posted a piece called “We Will Die of our interview, sometimes laughing at went, ‘Jim is going to come home being
Stupidity,” subtitled “Interview with Har- his own colorful biography, sometimes friends with her,’ because she moved to
old Pinter, conducted by James Gris- complaining wearily about how he has New York and she had this glamorous
som, via telephone, 1991.” In it, the play- been treated by those who have doubted life,” Grissom said. “Of course, we be-
wright observes to Grissom, “You and I him. “It speaks, I think, to something came friends.”
can find each other within a day via an far bigger than either of us,” he said. “It Two years after his fateful trip to
e-mail,” which raised eyebrows—very is so easy to hate and to malign some- New Orleans, he dropped out of his
few people had e-mail in 1991. (Gris- one you don’t know.” L.S.U. English program. He was living
som told The New Yorker that he “did Grissom calls “Follies” a memoir, but at home in Baton Rouge, working a se-
not talk to Pinter until 1997 and 1998. it contains few details about his life. ries of jobs and drafting short stories,
This could be a typo on my part or a James Grissom, Jr., was born in Octo- when White told him about a seventy-
misunderstanding.”) ber, 1961, in Baton Rouge, the youngest nine-year-old artist living in Manhat-
Last October, Kara Manning, an of four children. His father, James, Sr., tan who needed a roommate. He moved
employee of the public-radio station was an electrician who worked for a there in 1989.
WFUV, questioned a Pinter quote from chemical-manufacturing company; his In New York, he socialized with Sel-
Grissom. “This doesn’t sound like Pinter mother, Winnie, worked at the Baton des, and with other older New York
at all,” Manning wrote on Facebook. Rouge Clinic. Jimmy, as he was then actresses, including Jo Van Fleet and
“Curious. Are there any tapes of these called, attended Baton Rouge High Lois Smith. These women created a
interviews?” Grissom responded, “Yes, School, where he was a fixture in the network—and a soft place to land. Soon,
there are tapes. And notes.” But, rather drama department. On a 1978 class trip a Louisiana acquaintance, who was rent-
than producing them, within four days to New York, Grissom says, he saw Mar- ing a room in an apartment on the Upper
he published a Substack essay in which ian Seldes in “Deathtrap” and went back- West Side from a woman named Rose
he called Manning a “Disturbed On- stage to have her sign a copy of her au- Byrnes, invited him to move in. He’s
line Stalker,” and included a picture tobiography. This encounter, he told me, still there. “They’re gonna have to take
of her and the name of her workplace. led to their long friendship. (They ex- me out in a box,” he told me, “because
On Facebook, he wrote, “She danced changed so many letters, he has said, it’s rent-stabilized and it’s eight rooms.
with slander, and she may now dance that when they met again in 1989 she And the woman who had the lease I
with unemployment.” Manning was so married.” In 2014, James S. Grissom
concerned that she contacted Kathryn (then fifty-two) married his roommate
Zuckerman, the Knopf publicist who Rose M. Byrnes (then seventy-six). She
had worked on “Follies,” asking her to died in July of 2019.
intervene. Grissom then sent Manning His work pursuits in the nineties and
an e-mail that included the line, in all two-thousands were, as he described
caps, “I AM GOING TO SUE YOU.” them, picaresque. There were media gigs
(copy-editing at Penthouse, selling clas-
n April 3rd, I e-mailed Grissom, sifieds for the Times); sales positions in
O telling him that I was writing
about his work and the questions sur- dumped them out on a table and told
upmarket food stores (Dean & Deluca,
Ecce Panis); jobs in restaurants (Acme,
rounding “Follies of God.” He phoned him, “This is a book.”) In Grissom’s se- Artisanal). Grissom also clerked in mu-
me that night at around ten o’clock. We nior yearbook, he’s featured as the class seums (the Met and MoMA), worked
spoke—with a break for him to call me clown: “His personality is so Steve Mar- at front desks (the Princeton Club, the
from a landline when his cell died— tinish it is impossible to ever anticipate Carlyle Hotel), and even had a stint as
until 2 a.m. his next move.” In the accompanying a receptionist and a script reader for the
Grissom is an engaging, if digressive, picture, he’s wearing striped suspend- producer Daryl Roth.
anecdotalist. Referring to Gus Weill, a ers. (It was 1979.) Grissom was an employee at the
playwright turned advertising agent he Grissom was raised Southern Bap- Carlyle from March, 1998, to Decem-
said he worked for in Louisiana, he tist, but, he said, he was abused in the ber 16, 1999. (He’s exact about that date.)
noted that Weill’s 1978 play, “The No- Church, which drove him away. He said He suggested that I talk to his friend
vember People,” had closed after one he felt that his family, which was oth- the director Joe Calarco, who also
28 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
worked at the hotel’s front desk in 1998. story has changed as well. He told The
Calarco recalled the two of them stand- New Yorker that he auditioned for Juil-
ing around in their tuxedos, bonding liard, got in, but never attended. He and
over theatre; he remembered, too, hear- Seldes did know each other; there is a
ing about Tennessee Williams. “That picture of them together in 1997, and
was the big one for me,” Calarco said. many people I spoke with talked about
According to Grissom’s blog, he inter- how much they adored each other. Her
viewed Elizabeth Taylor at the Carlyle daughter, Katharine Andres, described
in 1991. I asked Calarco if he had ever the relationship between Seldes and
heard that Grissom spoke with Taylor Grissom as “symbiotic.” Andres did not,
in the very place where they worked. however, know how far back it stretched.
“Oh, no,” he said.
Grissom managed an Amy’s Bread hat we know about Tennessee
location from 2002 to 2004; Amy Scher-
ber, the bakery’s founder, still has great
W Williams in the last year of his
life is simultaneously a great deal and
affection for him. Every day, he would not enough. In addition to his other,
have “hilarious stories about the staff and more well-known addictions (alcohol,
customers,” she told me. (“I think it was prescription barbiturates), he never
the Southern upbringing,” Grissom said. stopped working, and scholars are still
“I can talk to anybody.”) Scherber re- digging through drafts and fragments
called that when he left he was going in the four main archives—at Harvard,
to do “freelance writing for some TV Columbia, the Ransom Center, and the
show.” Grissom’s IMDb page lists sev- Historic New Orleans Collection. The
eral credits, but he told me that a lot of writer Ellen F. Brown, who is working
the information is wrong, and that his on a cradle-to-grave biography of him,
work was mainly in punching up other has catalogued more than fifteen hun-
writers’ scripts. “I did a lot—‘Law & dred unpublished letters.
Order: Trial by Jury.’ I can’t remember Grissom describes Williams as being
how I got that job,” he said. “I think some- creatively blocked at the time they sup-
one just said, ‘Oh, he’s fast—and he can posedly met, but, in 1982, the playwright
imitate anybody.’” had at least three pieces in some stage
In the days following our call, I no- of production, and there are drafts of
ticed that certain biographical details seven full-length plays which date from
have proved malleable. In 2005, a short his final year. The record does have in-
story of Grissom’s—what he calls his consistencies. Some people I spoke to
only published piece of fiction—ap- referred to Williams’s own tendency to
peared in the collection “Fresh Men 2: tell yarns. (“This is a man who feigned
New Voices in Gay Fiction.” In that heart attacks in the middle of a show
book, his biography notes that he “stud- just to leave,” John Lahr, the longtime
ied at Louisiana State University, the New Yorker staff writer and the author
University of Pennsylvania, and Brown of the 2014 biography “Tennessee Wil-
University”; his “Follies” bio states that liams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,”
he attended L.S.U. and Penn. (Gris- told me.) Williams also allowed ac-
som told The New Yorker that he at- quaintances to stay in his many homes,
tended L.S.U. and went to conferences and, according to a letter he sent to
at the Ivy League schools.) Maria St. Just, he suspected that one of
His account of the late Marian Sel- them might be stealing manuscripts.
des’s role in his life has shifted a bit, The appetite for material to fill in the
too: in “Follies of God,” there is just gaps is bottomless. Yet “Follies of God”
their friendship; promoting his book in was mostly ignored in Williams circles;
a “Theater Talk” television interview, by the time it came out, Grissom had
Grissom said that she was the one who largely stopped being invited to speak
encouraged him to write to his idol in at the festivals. Guare remembers being
the eighties; and at an event at Books surprised that the book didn’t have a
& Books in Coral Gables, Florida, he bigger impact. “I was fascinated that the
said that she vouched for him on the Williams aficionados . . . were not over-
phone with Williams after their first whelmed,” he said.
contact. In Florida, he referred to her I wanted to meet these Williams afi-
as his teacher at Juilliard, though that cionados, so I went to New Orleans this
 who has connections apparently high
up and uses those connections to cre-
ate lawsuits and legal issues.” Bak, at
least, was willing to go on the record.
“He was never ever that coherent, phil-
osophical, poetic or winded in any in-
terview I heard him deliver,” he wrote
me later, referring to Williams. And, he
added, “he called his mother ‘mother’
and not ‘mama.’”
Lahr also objected to the book’s lan-
guage. His Williams biography came
out only six months before “Follies of
God.” (It won the National Book Crit-
ics Circle Award for biography, and was
a finalist for the National Book Award.
It also includes more than a hundred
pages of notes.) Lahr observed that the
women-from-the-fog creative process,
which is so central to Grissom’s narra-
tive—in “Follies,” “fog” is mentioned
more than forty times—is sui generis.
“There are books about his conversa-
tions. There are two volumes of pub-
“We haven’t lost one sock or shoe since installing the net.” lished letters. There is a diary. There
was not one mention of this. None,”
• • Lahr said. (I could find only one refer-
ence to fog and inspiration in his es-
says, letters, notebooks, and memoirs: a
spring to attend the Tennessee Williams But, when Williams speaks to Grissom, 1936 journal entry—“Maybe if I look
Scholars Conference. The community he is preoccupied by the dramas that had hard enough into this fog I’ll begin to
is small. At a panel on Williams and secured his legacy decades before, like “A see God’s face.”)
“The Sense of Place,” David Kaplan, Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Then, there are the discrepancies
the co-founder of the Provincetown Hot Tin Roof.” On Meryl Streep: “She that tear at the book’s underlying fab-
Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival, will age into the most extraordinary ric. For instance, Grissom repeatedly
looked down the table and said, “If the Blanche.” On Annette O’Toole: “She mentions Williams doing cocaine—“the
roof falls in, we lose a good deal of Wil- could grow into a Maggie.” porcelain countertop in the bathroom
liams scholarship.”The playwright’s vul- Some specialists told me that “Fol- appeared to have been utilized by a
nerability, especially at the end of his lies of God” wasn’t of interest to them manic baker”—but Rader told me that
life, and his courtly attention to char- because, without transparent sourcing, Williams didn’t use cocaine. And Gris-
acters at the social margin endear him they couldn’t rely on it for their own som sometimes seems to be revising
to his acolytes and readers in a way that work. But there are several Williams theatre history itself. Williams’s elegiac
goes beyond his work: several speakers memoirs—including that of his mother, “Summer and Smoke” was largely
imitated his rasping drawl when they Edwina, “Remember Me to Tom,” and panned when it opened on Broadway,
quoted him. his friend Dotson Rader’s “Tennessee in 1948. Then, in April, 1952, in an Off
Thomas Keith, a consulting editor at Williams: Cry of the Heart”—that have Broadway revival, the director José
Williams’s publisher, New Directions, been carefully read as subjective ac- Quintero and the actress Geraldine
has edited more than twenty Williams counts. John S. Bak, a professor at the Page turned the flop into a sensation.
titles. I asked him what he might expect Université de Lorraine and a specialist Grissom offers pages of overlapping
to see in a series of interviews conducted in Williams’s last twenty years, said of interviews with Williams, Quintero,
with Williams in September, 1982. “Any- “Follies,” “Everyone, probably, within and Page to create a portrait of their
thing about his new plays . . . his sister the tight-knit community recognizes collaboration on the production. But
Rose and his care for her, the friends he the book as—oh, I don’t want to say Ellen F. Brown, the biographer, notes
kept in touch with, his many health is- ‘fluff,’ but as undocumented, and there- that this “directly contradicts what the
sues, revisions to his will and legal mat- fore perhaps unreliable.” Some seemed key players said.” According to Quin-
ters, and the day-to-day affairs of life,” leery of speaking on the record with me tero’s 1974 autobiography, he didn’t meet
Keith said. “He was always polite about about Grissom, and, when I asked Bak Williams until the writer came to see
interest in his early successes, but his why, he said that Grissom has a repu- the show. In a 1959 interview, housed
focus was primarily on his new work.” tation as “rather a voracious individual at the Oral History Archives at Co-
30 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
lumbia, Page is asked if Williams was published by a reputable press. Who, would help him file these lawsuits and
“in evidence at all” during “Smoke.” then, is the gatekeeper of truth? “The travel to Washington, D.C., to testify be-
“Not till we’d been playing I guess a gate is shaky,” Palmer said, with a laugh. fore Congress. Online, he chronicled at
month or two,” she says. least seven supposed appearances, in-
Biographers outside the Williams n our conversation, Grissom seemed cluding before the House Oversight
circuit have also had doubts. William J.
Mann, who wrote “Kate: The Woman
I aware of his reputation. He mentioned
a New Yorker piece about Dan Mallory,
Committee. On January 18, 2019, he
wrote, “Mueller is in the room. Is it in-
Who Was Hepburn” (a 2006 Times No- the author who made up his own back- appropriate to give testimony with an
table Book of the Year) and “The Con- story—“I just think that’s what the piece erection?” He wrote in 2020 that he was
tender: The Story of Marlon Brando,” is, that I’m this fabulist.” He complained grateful in particular to Nancy Pelosi,
told me that Grissom’s accounts of his that, while he had plenty of supporting who had “been at my side for three years.”
conversations with Hepburn in “Follies” material, I was eight years late in ask- He was, he said, in litigation on other
“just didn’t ring true.” (Grissom wrote, ing to see it. “I’m done with it,” Gris- fronts, too. Grissom’s former literary
for example, that Hepburn cried.) Mann som said. “I don’t know why this keeps agent, Edward Hibbert, who sold “Fol-
showed the Brando quotes to Avra coming up.” He doesn’t seem to be al- lies” to Knopf, was one of the principals
Douglas, Brando’s onetime assistant and together done, though. In April, he wrote in the agency Donadio & Olson, which
now a trustee of his estate, who replied, an article for the online weekly Air Mail filed for bankruptcy in December, 2018,
“I’ve never heard Marlon mention him, about Nancy Schoenberger’s new book, the same month that its former book-
nor have I seen any evidence of their “Blanche: The Life and Times of Ten- keeper, Darin Webb, was sentenced to
connection in the archive.” (Grissom’s nessee Williams’s Greatest Creation.” two years for embezzling more than $3.3
next book, another memoir, has the Grissom spends much of his essay quot- million. Grissom had posted that he
working title “The Lake of the Mind: ing from previously unpublished con- was also “suing the literary agency that
Brando in the Night.”) versations he’d had with Williams. fucked me and others over.” A search
Some people I spoke with assumed Grissom told me that believing “Fol- of relevant legal databases did not turn
that Knopf had fact-checked “Follies.” lies of God” comes down to a question up any litigation with James Grissom’s
But a lot of nonfiction books come to of his word. “For a long time, the charge name attached to it, in New York or in
market without being fact-checked: the was ‘Why are there no source notes?’ the District of Columbia. Nor does his
legal burden for accuracy generally rests Well, because I’m the source,” Grissom name appear in the Congressional Record.
on the author, not on the publisher. Some said. “It’s a memoir. It’s not a biography.” According to Pelosi’s office, “Speaker
writers choose to pay out of pocket for Grissom has been the source of other Emerita Pelosi has no recollection of
a fact checker, which can cost between stories as well. In 2016, he wrote a Face- any interactions referenced in this re-
five thousand and twenty thousand dol- book post saying that he had been di- porting, and our office has no records
lars. (Grissom told The New Yorker that agnosed as having bladder cancer, in of any interactions between them.”
he did not hire an outside fact checker.) 2007, and, uninsured and desperate, he (Grissom told The New Yorker that he
Most books are vetted in-house by law- had turned to then Senator Hillary Clin- has never threatened to sue anyone—“I
yers, but, as Mann explained to me, “ba- ton’s office for help. He reported that pointed out to Kara Manning that her
sically, what they’re looking for is ‘Am Clinton told him, personally, “You need actions might be seen as actionable”—
I saying anything that might be libel- to fight this cancer and get well: You and that he can’t discuss the congres-
lous about someone who’s still alive?’” don’t have time for this nonsense.” The sional situation because of an N.D.A.)
A standard publishing practice, the so- post was picked up by People, Out.com, The actress Martha Plimpton was a
called “legal read,” scans for elements and Time. Cosmopolitan ran an article Facebook connection of Grissom’s—he
that might be accusatory, defamatory, titled “This Man’s Story About Hillary told her that Williams had noticed her
libellous, or negative. “Positive lies could Clinton Is Going Viral Because It’s as a child actor—and at first, Plimpton
easily slip through,” Mann said. Honestly the *Best,*” which was up- said, she let his dubious claims pass by.
Academic journals rely instead on dated with a Facebook comment from “He told me, ‘I’m working with higher-
peer review. The Tennessee Williams An- Clinton, thanking him for sharing his ups at HBO, and I mentioned you for a
nual Review is currently edited by Rich- experiences. (Clinton could not be major series.’ And I would just say, ‘Oh,
ard Barton Palmer, and it has published reached for comment.) O.K., thank you,’” she said. Once Gris-
only one Grissom quote, in a 2017 ar- On a GoFundMe page titled “Fight- som started raising money to fight the
ticle about Anna Magnani, by the ing the Right,” which he established early right, Plimpton’s discomfort increased.
scholar Tiffany Gilbert. Palmer said that the following year, Grissom wrote that “I started noticing that more and more
there was some debate about its inclu- his tribute to Clinton “apparently en- people were sharing these quotes from
sion and that the choice not to remove raged some particularly virulent Repub- ‘Follies of God’ that were just clearly
it “was, between us, a mistake.” (Gilbert licans,” who thought his story was a paid- writing,” she said. “They have the same
said she was never told that the quote for lie. He claimed that three unnamed kind of rambling, wonderfully fanciful,
had been questioned and would have Republican congressmen “illegally seized” sympathetic quality to them.” She un-
happily excised it.) An editorial-board his bank accounts, and, in response, he friended Grissom, and posted about the
member told me that those who argued sued them. Grissom eventually raised lack of corroborating evidence in public
to keep it pointed out that “Follies” was $35,929, which he said, on Facebook, records. In February, 2022, Grissom posted
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 31
a Facebook screed about “people with the waiter and he brought me this linen­ shown other people. If you’ve shown it
whom I am working at HBO and Net­ type paper”); a receipt of Jo Van Fleet’s; to other people, it’s out there.” Grissom
flix” and about a certain unnamed ac­ e­mails from the actresses Madeleine replied, “I’ve also not shown you my
tress who might be denied employment Sherwood, Lois Smith, and Frances penis. I’ve shown other people. You know,
for her “slander.” Sternhagen; and signed and dedicated there are times and places for things to
He has also written, on Facebook, copies of Seldes’s and Elia Kazan’s auto­ be shown. . . . I don’t understand some­
about working on various awards cam­ biographies. I was surprised that he did one just showing up out of thin air and
paigns, including Natalie Portman’s Oscar not include the signed and typewritten demanding to see documents.”
push for “Jackie.” He described their note from Hepburn, which says, “Dear Our conversation ended cordially; we
growing intimacy and brought up Ben­ Jim Grissom— Too bad Tennessee never were talking about places near his home
jamin Millepied, Portman’s husband: told me that— I thought he was—is where we could meet to talk. But, about
“I will post the video of me trying to get and always will be remarkable”; it’s the a week later, I realized that I had been
into and zip up a pair of pants belong­ only picture of personal correspondence blocked from both his personal Face­
ing to Benjamin Millepied. Like a pi­ in “Follies.” book page and the “Follies of God” Face­
ano through a transom and funnier than He also sent me my own head shot, book page. Then Grissom sent me an
Chaplin. I have a future in comedy, not and asked if it was my “preferred pho­ e­mail. “Dear Ms. Shaw,” he wrote. “I
to mention Millepied’s pants.” (A spokes­ tograph.” am reaching out today to those entities
person from Portman’s team said that He was more resistant to providing in possession of my material compris­
she has never met Grissom. HBO has the Pinter tapes (“How much am I sup­ ing Follies of God. When I receive this
no record of his working for the company.) posed to give?”), the letters from Seldes material, we will make scans or photo­
When I asked Grissom if he had met or the blue books or any contempora­ graphs of relevant items.”
Portman, he demurred. “Define ‘meet,’” neous notes (“I know what you want”),
he said. When I mentioned the Clinton or anything in Williams’s hand. (“If a hen I finally reached Edward Hib­
story and the ensuing lawsuits, he balked.
When I asked to see evidence for “Fol­
videotape appeared mysteriously tomor­
row, like a Zapruder film, and it showed
W bert, he told me that he took on
Grissom and his book after reading the
lies,” he brought up legal action. “And I me with Tennessee sitting at a sidewalk sequence on Jo Van Fleet. It’s the finest
don’t think a defense will be ‘He didn’t café, I don’t think it would quell any­ writing in “Follies,” a compassionate but
want to show me certain things,’” he said. thing.”) He insisted that the book had gimlet­eyed portrait of a frustrated ac­
In fact, he did provide some evidence. been vetted by Knopf—“With Vicky, tress in her seventies. Grissom tells her
After our conversation, he sent me a it’d be easier to go before The Hague,” that the choreographer Jerome Robbins
tranche of images via direct message he said, referring to his editor—and that has praised her, but she responds, “Fuck
which included a piece of paper with ac­ the publisher had seen the materials I him! He never called me, never sent me
tresses’ names written in colored pencil was inquiring about. In hour four of our a dime!” There’s something terribly recog­
(when I asked about the Court of Two call, I said, “I just don’t understand why nizable in Van Fleet’s desperation not to
Sisters menu, he said, “Tennessee asked you won’t let me see the stuff you’ve be discarded. When Hibbert sold the
book to Knopf, he vouched for it on the
strength of that passage.
As Grissom turned in more sections,
though, Hibbert “slowly, incrementally”
lost faith, he told me, noting that “the
interviews sound alike.” He says he
brought his concerns to Knopf, before
publication, multiple times. (Knopf de­
clined to comment on this point.)
Then, on May 28th, nearly two months
after I’d asked to see his contemporaneous
notes, Grissom e­mailed me twenty­six
photographs of handwritten pages, in­
cluding an undated diary entry (“can I
help him be a writer again?”), five closely
written pages from an exam booklet with
scenes that appear in “Follies,” and notes
on conversations with Alec Guinness
and Harold Pinter.There was also a photo
of the front of a 1991 journal. I asked
where these documents had been—Knopf
had told me that he was recovering them
from archives—and he e­mailed back,
“They were not at Ransom. I seriously
considered Ransom, but people who dershirt. She simply didn’t believe him, ing this piece, I ordered a used copy
looked over the things I had suggested but she is loath to judge. “He is react- of “Remember Me to Tom,” and two
other places. That is all I will say.” (Har- ing to life in this particular way,” she notes from the actual Edwina Williams
vard, Columbia, and the Historic New said. “Nothing that he has said or done dropped out. History fell hot into my
Orleans Collection do not show records has been super harmful to anybody— hands. I can understand chasing that
of any of Grissom’s Williams material it’s just not real.” (Grissom told The New strange, electrical feeling.
in their digital catalogues.) I asked to see Yorker that his comment about Avenatti When I was in New Orleans, I went
the documents in person; he declined. I was a joke.) to all the places Grissom says he visited
asked if Knopf had seen them before So, indeed, what is the harm? Gris- with Williams. Most of the cafés were
now; he did not reply. I showed the Alec som did pay attention to those who overrun, but there were quiet street
Guinness materials to Hibbert, and he might have felt forgotten corners with personal res-
wrote, “I’ve seen none of them nor did and gave them the gift of onance for the playwright
he show me any of these pages.” adoration by one of our where, according to “Fol-
Knopf offered the following state- most beloved American lies,” they spent time. Some
ment, delivered through an attorney: playwrights. And, in videos looked like their descrip-
In his contract with Knopf for FOLLIES
from his last few years, Wil- tions, some didn’t. I sat in
OF GOD, James Grissom warranted that the liams slurs his words and Jackson Square and listened
content of the book was entirely factual. He looks somehow clammy— to a mockingbird running
stands by that guarantee. Grissom’s source ma- it would be nice to believe through its catalogue of
terials included in-person interviews with both he met an eager student and impressions—catbird, car
Tennessee Williams and actresses who per-
formed his works, as well as the author’s copi-
talked to him about writ- alarm, chickadee. I was try-
ous notes from which the book was drawn. In ing instead of about death. ing to summon images of
the seven years since its publication, partici- In “Follies,” Williams is certainly en- my own. Did twenty-year-old James
pants in FOLLIES such as Lois Smith, Mar- ergetic, at once bombastic and dewy- Grissom ever meet Tennessee Williams
ian Seldes, and others never wavered in their eyed: “I try to approach the whiteness at all? John Guare, who delights in am-
support for the book nor challenged Grissom’s
narrative.
of the page, the pale judgment, as if I biguity, thinks he might have (though
were a neophyte priest. . . . I touch it he said that, given the amount of ma-
(Seldes died the year before the book gently, a frightened queer faced with his terial, they must have talked “on that
came out.) first female breast, a nipple that seeks park bench for fourteen years”). John
Grissom’s highly shareable quota- attention and ministration.” Lahr and Ellen F. Brown don’t rule it
tions have carried his work far. The whis- If you’re a Williams scholar, or a out, and Brown, who places Williams
per network has done its bit to coun- Pinter devotee, or a Brando biographer, in Key West and New York around the
teract his influence; the academic cold though, the issue seems clear-cut: Gris- early fall of 1982, can’t say for sure where
shoulder has, too. But Grissom’s mate- som is confusing an already fragile rec- the playwright was for about two weeks
rial continues to be more widely dis- ord. William J. Mann, the biographer, in mid-September.
tributed than anything written in The said, “There’s great harm in it. We’re At Books & Books in Florida, Gris-
Tennessee Williams Annual Review. And living in a period right now where facts som told his audience that “I am Ten-
it can be hard to be definitive about increasingly don’t matter.” That said, nessee Williams material,” referring to
which voices ring true. When I asked he’s willing to give “Follies” a certain his post-flight dishabille. During our
Antonia Fraser, Harold Pinter’s widow, place. “I love fan fiction! I love histor- interview, Grissom complained that the
if Grissom’s blogged interviews with ical fiction,” Mann said. “But don’t pass constant demands that he show proof
Pinter sounded like him, she was di- it off as truth.” were tiring. “All the burden has been
vided. “I do not recognise Harold’s voice James Frey exaggerated his life put on me to kind of dance and pull
in ‘We Will Die of Stupidity,’” she re- story in “A Million Little Pieces”; Clif- things out. And, you know, it’s like
sponded. Of the other three I sent her, ford Irving invented an entire Howard Blanche pulling things out of her trunk.
she thought two “could possibly be in- Hughes autobiography and nearly got And—I’m hurt by it,” he said. In “Street-
terviews with Harold.” away with it. The former was a best- car,” Blanche keeps all her papers and
What do Grissom’s friends think of seller; the latter garnered a big advance. costume jewelry in a trunk; her brother-
all this? Lois Smith—the last major fig- The creation of “Follies” and its associ- in-law Stanley is rough with her tinsel
ure quoted in “Follies” who is alive and ated ventures has not been all that fi- finery because at first he mistakes it for
able to answer questions—declined to nancially lucrative. Williams didn’t make treasure. But I didn’t see Blanche in
speak with me. (The e-mail from her Grissom rich. “I never got even poor,” Jackson Square, or Tennessee Williams,
that he shared noted that they met in he said. But his connection to Williams either. Instead, I thought of the young
1990.) The actor Lusia Strus met Gris- has helped Grissom become part of a Jimmy Grissom, the boy who sent short
som in 2016 and they were close for two glittering twentieth-century theatrical stories to his theatrical idol, looking
years; she allowed their relationship legacy. He wanted access to a certain for advice. Where were all the books
to drift after he told her that Michael world, and he found it—Katharine Hep- and stories and plays that he came to
Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’s lawyer, was burn wrote him, whether or not they New York to write? He was going to
hanging out in his apartment in his un- ate ice cream together. As I was research- do so much. 
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 33
 ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS

COMIC EFFECT
How the Marvel Cinematic Universe swallowed Hollywood.
BY MICHAEL SCHULMAN

rowing up in Missouri, Chris- characters and help package them for cade and a half avoiding Marvel movies

G topher Yost had boxes of Mar-

vel comic books, which his
mother bought at the grocery store. None
studios, “basically try to drum up inter-
est.” He and Feige had long bull sessions
about Namor, a sea-dwelling mutant. On
like scabies or are in so deep that you can
expound on the Sokovia Accords, it is
impossible to escape the films’ interga-
of his friends read Marvel; it was his own the last day of his internship, Yost left lactic reach. Collectively, the M.C.U. mov-
private world, a “sprawling story where the executives a sci-fi sample script, and ies—the thirty-second, “Guardians of the
all these characters lived in this universe he got a job writing for the animated se- Galaxy Vol. 3,” opened in May—have
together,” he recalled. Wolverine could ries “X-Men: Evolution.” grossed more than twenty-nine billion
team up with Captain America; Doctor Cut to 2010. Yost, having built up his dollars, making the franchise the most
Doom could fight the Red Skull. Unlike résumé on cartoons, was asked to join a successful in entertainment history. The
the DC comics, whose heroes (Super- writing lab at Marvel Studios, which deluge of content extends to TV series
man, Batman) towered like gods, Mar- was making its own live-action features, and specials, with an international fan
vel’s were relatably human, especially with astonishing success. The previous base that scours every teaser and corpo-
Peter Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Man. “He’s year, after Marvel’s first film, “Iron Man,” rate shakeup for clues about what’s com-
got money problems and girl problems, earned more than five hundred million ing next. As in the comics, the M.C.U.’s
and his aunt May is always sick,” Yost dollars, Disney had acquired the studio chief innovation is a shared fictional can-
said. “Every time you think he’s going to for four billion dollars. It now occupied vas, where Spider-Man can call on Doc-
live this big, glamorous superhero life, it’s a sprawling campus in Manhattan Beach, tor Strange, and Iron Man can battle
not that way. He’s a grounded, down-to- with its own soundstages. “Imagine an Thor’s wily brother. Hollywood has al-
earth dude. The Marvel characters al- office building stapled to a hangar of an ways had sequels, but the M.C.U. is a
ways seem to have personal problems.” airport,” Yost said. Feige was now the web of interconnecting plots: new char-
By 2001, Yost, then twenty-seven, was studio’s president. He would bound from acters are introduced, either in their own
getting an M.F.A. in film business in Los one conference room to another, as teams movies or as side players in someone else’s,
Angeles, but he wanted to be a writer; planned the next steps of what would then collide in climactic Avengers films.
he had written an unproduced screen- become known as the Marvel Cinematic In the seventies, “Jaws” and “Star Wars”
play about an alien invasion. He heard Universe, or the M.C.U. Yost said, “The gave Hollywood a new model for mak-
that Marvel had a new West Coast out- machine had started up.” ing money: the endlessly promoted sum-
post and cold-called for an interview. The Yost was one of four writers who mer blockbuster. The M.C.U. multiplied
studio shared a small office with a com- worked developing various characters, the formula, so that each blockbuster be-
pany that made kites. There were six em- some of whom would eventually join the gets another. David Crow, a senior editor
ployees. One of them, a guy in a ball cap M.C.U. The first Thor film was under for the Web site Den of Geek, calls it a
who was also in his late twenties, sat Yost way, and Yost was asked to take a shot at “roadmap for a product that never ends.”
down for what turned into a “comic-book a troublesome scene. Soon, he was sitting Twenty years ago, few people would
trivia-off.” The interviewer, whose name in front of the director, Kenneth Branagh, have bet that a struggling comic-book
was Kevin Feige, asked, “What issue does who had shaped the movie as a Shake- company would turn a bunch of second-
Spider-Man get his black costume in?” spearean saga that pitted father against string superheroes into movie icons—
“Oh, that’s a trick question,” Yost said. son and brother against brother—in space. much less swallow the film industry whole.
(The black suit first appeared in The Yost got in a few uncredited scenes. He Yet the Marvel phenomenon has yanked
Amazing Spider-Man No. 252, but its or- went on to co-write the sequels “Thor: Hollywood into a franchise-drunk new
igins weren’t revealed until the crossover The Dark World” and “Thor: Ragnarok,” era, in which intellectual property, more
series Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars.) as the M.C.U. grew into the dominant than star power or directorial vision, drives
He landed a summer internship, work- force in global entertainment, pulling all what gets made, with studios scrambling
ing from a desk belonging to Stan Lee, of Hollywood into its orbit. “There’s a to cobble together their own fictional uni-
Marvel’s legendary former editor-in-chief, lot of pressure on Marvel,” Yost told me. verses. The shift has come at a perilous
who rarely came in. The company, which “Everybody’s kind of waiting for them time for moviegoing. Audiences, espe-
had filed for bankruptcy a few years ear- to mess up. But, at the end of the day, cially since the pandemic, are seeing fewer
lier, had set up the L.A. branch to license we’re really just trying to make the mov- films in the theatre and streaming more
Marvel characters to Hollywood; Yost’s ies that we ourselves would like to watch.” from home, forcing studios to lean on
job was to dig through the vast library of Whether you have spent the past de- I.P.-driven tentpoles like “The Super
34 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
Robert Redford and Glenn Close now star in films whose plots can come down to “Keep glowy thing away from bad guy.”
ILLUSTRATION BY MAXIM USIK THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 35
Mario Bros. Movie.” Kevin Goetz, the Jackson, who plays the Marvel spy Nick over “the death of the movie star.” In an
founder of Screen Engine, which stud- Fury, signed a nine-picture deal with the I.P.-driven ecosystem, individual stars no
ies audience behavior, pointed to Mar- company in 2009, and this summer will longer attract audiences to theatres the way
vel’s sense of “elevated fun” to explain why lead his own Disney+ series, “Secret In- they used to, with a handful of exceptions
it gets people to the theatre: “They’re car- vasion.” The M.C.U. roster includes (Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts). You go to a
nival rides, and they’re hefty carnival rides.” seasoned icons (Robert Redford, Glenn Marvel movie to see Captain America,
Marvel’s success, he added, has “sucked Close), mid-career stars (Scarlett Johans- not Chris Evans. “It’s actually surprising
the air out of ” more human-scaled en- son, Chris Pratt), and breakout talents to me how almost none of them have ca-
tertainments. Whole species of mov- (Florence Pugh, Michael B. Jordan). It reers outside of the Marvel universe,” an-
ies—adult dramas, rom-coms—have may be easier to count the conscientious other agent said. “The movies don’t work.
become endangered, since objectors who haven’t gone Look at all the ones Robert Downey, Jr.,
audiences are happy to wait Marvel, among them Tim- has tried to do. Look at Tom Holland.
and stream “Tár” or “Book othée Chalamet, who has It’s been bomb after bomb after bomb.”
Club: The Next Chapter,” said that Leonardo DiCap- Marvel has similarly gobbled up
or to get their grownup kicks rio once advised him, “No screenwriters, special-effects artists, and
from such series as “Succes- hard drugs and no super- workers from nearly every other profession
sion” or “The White Lotus.” hero movies.” (This was after in Hollywood—including directors, who
Yet even prestige television Chalamet auditioned for are often snatched from other genres.
has become overrun with Spider-Man.) Taika Waititi made the vampire mocku-
Marvel, “Star Wars,” and Comic-book films have mentary “What We Do in the Shadows”
“The Lord of the Rings” se- attracted top stars as far back before getting placed in charge of Thor.
ries, which use the small as “Superman” (Marlon Chloé Zhao went from moody, micro-
screen to map out new corners of their Brando, 1978) and “Batman” ( Jack Nich- budget Westerns to Marvel’s moody,
trademarked galaxies. Hollywood writ- olson, 1989), but the M.C.U., by design, macro-budget “Eternals.” Career paths
ers, who are currently striking over the can tie up an actor for years. Benedict that once led to Oscars now lead inexo-
constricted economics of streaming, also Cumberbatch went from playing Ham- rably to the some-assembly-required
complain of the constricted imagina- let to invoking “the grand calculus of the world-building of the M.C.U. An agent
tions of TV executives: instead of search- multiverse” as Doctor Strange. Portray- who works with screenwriters complained,
ing for the next “Mad Men,” they’re ing a Marvel character often means not “I worry for the film industry, because, if
hunting for Batman spinoffs. just headlining movies but also filming you’re Chloé Zhao and you want to tell
Marvel’s fanciful house style has cameos and crossovers, to the point that a story on a big canvas, mostly you’re lim-
rubbed off even on Oscar winners. This even the actor gets confused. Gwyneth ited to trying to tell it on a canvas of a
year’s Best Picture, “Everything Every- Paltrow, who plays Iron Man’s paramour, big superhero.” He added, “It’s a pair of
where All at Once,” had a Marvel-ish Pepper Potts, had no idea that she ap- golden handcuffs.”
meld of walloping action, goofy humor, peared in “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” Dissenters have been loud. In 2019,
and multiverse mythology; it could have until the Marvel director Jon Favreau Martin Scorsese pronounced Marvel mov-
easily functioned as the origin story for mentioned it to her on his cooking show. ies “not cinema,” earning the undying en-
a new Avenger. Marvel, meanwhile, It can be dispiriting to see so much mity of comics fans. Last year, Quentin
has colonized nearly every other genre. acting talent sucked into the quantum Tarantino lamented Marvel’s “choke hold”
“WandaVision” was a pastiche of classic realm of the M.C.U., presumably for a on Hollywood and said, “You have to be
sitcoms; “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” tidy sum, but the paychecks alone don’t a hired hand to do those things.” When
was a feminist legal comedy. Detractors explain Marvel’s hold over stars. “At some I mentioned this comment to Joe and
see the brand’s something-for-everyone point, you want to be relevant,” an agent Anthony Russo, brothers who directed
approach as nefarious. An executive at a who represents several M.C.U. actors four Marvel movies, including the high-
rival studio, who called the M.C.U. “the said. “Success is the best drug.” This year, est grossing, “Avengers: Endgame,” An-
Death of All Cinema,” told me that the Angela Bassett became the first actor to thony said, “I don’t know if Quentin feels
dominance of Marvel movies “has served be nominated for an Oscar for a Marvel like he was born to make a Marvel movie,
to accelerate the squeezing out of the role, in “Black Panther: Wakanda For- which is maybe why he would feel like a
mid-range movie.” His studio’s comedies ever.” “Well, it’s so modern,” she told me hired hand doing it. It depends on your
had been struggling at the box office, and in February. “We try and stay current, relationship to the source material.” Joe
he groused, “If people want a comedy, and they’ve got a winning formula.” En- added, “What fulfills us the most is build-
they’re going to go see ‘Thor’ or ‘Ant- tire generations now know Anthony Hop- ing a sense of community around our
Man’ as their comedy now.” kins not as Hannibal Lecter but as Thor’s work.” People involved in Marvel proj-
In some ways, Marvel harks back to dad, King Odin of Asgard. “They put me ects often talk about “playing in the sand-
the old studio system, in which Para- in armor; they shoved a beard on me,” box,” which is another way of saying that
mount and Warner Bros. kept stables of he told me. “Sit on the throne, shout a the brand takes precedence over any in-
stars under seven-year contracts and bit. If you’re sitting in front of a green dividual voice—except that of Feige, the
M-G-M’s Freed Unit cranked out movie screen, it’s pointless acting it.” affable face of the franchise.
musicals on an assembly line. Samuel L. The result is a lot of hand-wringing Industry people like to speculate about
36 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
“Marvel fatigue,” which is mostly wish- Within the first ten minutes of “Iron movie would contain the germ of the
ful thinking—though a recent series of Man,” released in May, 2008, Tony gam- next, and end by teasing a tantalizing
creative missteps and corporate machi- bles, defends the military-industrial mystery or crossover.
nations have rivals salivating. As much complex, and beds a journalist. The Thirty-odd films later, Marvel’s crit-
as competitors gripe about Marvel, M.C.U. is an augmented reality—a ics (and even some fans) groan at the
though, they’ve spent the past decade world resembling our own, overlaid by formula. There’s the climactic C.G.I.
trying to emulate it. Marvel’s nemesis, superheroes—but the adult tone of “Iron slugfest, often pitting a good iron man
DC Studios, which is owned by Warner Man,” with its undercurrents of Bush- against a bad iron man, or a good dragon
Bros., has a hit-or-miss record, with often era geopolitics, didn’t last. “It’s very dif- against a bad dragon, or a good witch
gritty, self-serious movies that lack Mar- ferent from what Marvel is now,” the against a bad witch. There’s the self-ref-
vel’s zip and quality control. Last year, “Thor” screenwriter Zack Stentz ob- erential shtick, the interchangeable vil-
Warner Bros. brought in James Gunn served. “It’s, like, ten degrees off of re- lains. There are presumed-dead charac-
(who directed Marvel’s Guardians of the ality, rather than a talking raccoon with ters who reappear, as on a soap opera.
Galaxy trilogy) and Peter Safran to re- machine guns and magic and parallel Most plots boil down to “Keep glowy
boot DC’s film universe, presumably in universes.” thing away from bad guy,” and the stakes
the image of the M.C.U. Sony, which In other ways, “Iron Man” set a clear are nothing less than the fate of the world,
shares the Spider-Man franchise with course for the franchise, with bursts of which come to feel like no stakes at all.
Marvel, is building out its Spider-verse action punctuated by quippy, self-refer- Within that framework, however, the
with characters like Venom. In 2017, Uni- ential humor propelled by Downey’s M.C.U. allows for a range of stylistic vari-
versal announced its own Dark Universe, motormouthed, largely improvised per- ation. Branagh’s Shakespearean “Thor”
based on its classic monsters, such as Dr. formance, reminiscent of a Vegas lounge gave way to Waititi’s zany sequels, rife
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Russell Crowe) and act. In a post-credits scene, Samuel L. with dick jokes and heavy metal. Jon Watts
the Invisible Man ( Johnny Depp). After Jackson, as Nick Fury, shows up to tell modelled his Spider-Man films on John
the first installment—“The Mummy,” Tony, “Mr. Stark, you’ve become part of Hughes’s teen dramas. For “Captain
starring Tom Cruise—disappointed, the a bigger universe.” “The Incredible America: Winter Soldier,” the Russo
plan was scrapped. Hulk,” released the following month, brothers drew on Watergate-era thrillers
The lesson: you can’t wish a universe ends with Tony appearing at a bar to such as “Three Days of the Condor.” And
into existence, Genesis style. Marvel, drop a hint about “putting a team to- Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” movies,
which had a preëxisting tangle of comic- gether.” The model was in place: each which are in a class of their own, are
book plots to draw on, rolled out its mov-
ies methodically, gaining the audience’s
trust. Goetz, the audience analyst, com-
pared it to Apple: “The Marvel folks
have an emotional handshake with their
consumers.” Just as you can live your tech
life within the frictionless confines of
MacBooks and iPads, it’s possible to live
your entire entertainment life in the Mar-
vel universe, which pumps out a new se-
ries or movie every few weeks. Because
the M.C.U. rewards expertise, it can baf-
fle the casual viewer. If you saw “Wakanda
Forever” and wondered what the hell
Julia Louis-Dreyfus was doing in it, you
likely missed her character’s début, in the
Disney+ series “The Falcon and the Win-
ter Soldier.” But a critical mass is on board.
“The expression ‘preach to the choir’
often implies a certain niche-ness,” Chris-
topher Markus, one of the writers of
“Endgame,” said. “There was a very grat-
ifying, unduplicatable sense with that
movie that the choir was nearly global.”

he M.C.U. opens, improbably, on

T an arid Afghan landscape. A blast
of AC/DC cues a Humvee containing
Tony Stark, the playboy arms industri-
alist portrayed by Robert Downey, Jr. “Which button lets me quickly clear the screen after I don’t leave a tip?”
 THE THREE GRACES

Who could care about the probability of love when brought, like us, to this
world under endless darkness? A great mountain engulfed

by a greater ocean, we formed, ever so slowly, from tectonic plates

colliding, one mounting another, riding the way time rode

sunlight and moonlight across the icy surface of the water.

We learned, with time, to view and invent this life from the depths

where beasts, now extinct, bellowed and belted their brutal songs.
All that remains of them, and of that time, are the bones we buried, burnished

beneath beds of sandstone and limestone, made unknown and then known
when the waves and the darkness dried up. The wind whittled us

like a restless sculptor pacing around a slab of marble, imitating

God with a hammer and chisel. In the Garden of the Gods, we endured

the erotics of erosion. Loss. Change. What we couldn’t change

and what we lost to time made us more fully ourselves

steeped in Afrofuturism and postcolo- wasn’t anything dictated at all,” Joe John- but, when Johnston directed the dramatic
nial politics. ston, who directed the first Captain death scene, he had no knowledge of the
You might picture arriving for your America film, told me. Erik Sommers, character’s fate. “I assumed that was the
first day of work on a Marvel movie and who co-wrote the Spider-Man trilogy, end of Bucky,” he told me. When Som-
being handed a leather-bound bible of recalled that Marvel assistants had put mers was working on “Spider-Man: Far
character mythology. Instead, directors together a document that explained the from Home,” he and his writing partner,
who are in the running for their first difference between a “universe” and a “di- Chris McKenna, didn’t know what would
Marvel job are given a fifteen-or-so- mension.” But otherwise, he said, “it’s not happen in “Endgame”—which preceded
page “discussion document,” distilled a giant diagram of preëxisting dots that “Far from Home” in M.C.U. chronol-
from corporate brainstorming retreats. need to be connected in a certain order.” ogy—except for the death of Tony Stark,
Landing the job requires not slavish ad- A few directors—Patty Jenkins, Edgar which was referred to internally by the
herence to the document but a nifty ap- Wright—have quit Marvel projects, after code name The Wedding.
proach to executing it. The movies are battling for creative control. “The only Feige (who declined to be inter-
shot all over the world but edited in times we’d run into problems is if we got viewed) has a reputation as an all-know-
Burbank, on the same lot as Feige’s of- a filmmaker who said, ‘This is what I ing Oz, but collaborators describe him
fice. Each film’s creative team meets want to do,’ and then showed up and as a comic-book savant who pops in and
multiple times a week with Marvel’s wanted to do something completely dif- offers story fixes culled from his ency-
upper management—until recently, a ferent,” a former Marvel executive told clopedic Marvel knowledge and deliv-
group known as the Trio, consisting of me. “So then you hear people saying, ered with a gee-whiz fanboy enthusi-
Feige, Louis D’Esposito, and Victoria ‘Kevin Feige came in, and he took over asm. “Anytime somebody pitches him
Alonso. Filmmakers also receive notes the process!’ But, if you know what the something, he imagines himself in a the-
from the Parliament, a group of senior game plan is, you end up having a ton atre with a tub of popcorn,” Yost told
creative executives who are each assigned of creative freedom at Marvel, because me. A spitball session might result in
to individual projects but review them we’re working inside the box.” Scorsese tectonic maneuvering. When the Rus-
all as a committee. would shudder. sos pushed to base the third Captain
All this corporate machinery may Filmmakers are often left in the dark America movie on the Civil War com-
sound oppressive, but Marvel collabora- about larger plans for the M.C.U. In John- ics—a crossover series involving a toy-
tors tend to describe their experiences as ston’s film, Captain America’s best friend, box’s worth of heroes—Feige worked
surprisingly free-form and hands-off. Bucky, played by Sebastian Stan, falls off for months to get the actors and the I.P.
One editor referred to Marvel’s oversight a mountain. He returns in later movies aligned. Anthony Russo recalled, “He
as a “pinkie on the steering wheel.”“There as the Winter Soldier, a major character, opened up the door one day and poked
38 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
 and full of ourselves. We fooled around and made a fool of God.
We, in our faulted and faultless glamour, became a brand-new home

for the bighorn sheep and lions, the canyon wrens and white-throated swifts
swinging low below a cloudless sky. We drank the sky and threw up

acres of wild prairie grass, piñon juniper, and ponderosa pine

from the remains of ancestral ranges and sand dunes. Maybe this was love

after all. We remained. We reinvented ourselves. We let the weaker parts of us go

and decided, despite our egos and the tests of time, to test time and show

how miraculous it is to exist. To live beyond survival. To be alive

twice and thrice, and countless times to find one with and within another.

What are the chances of that? One in a thousand. One in a million. One in love
proves and is living proof that anything and everything is probable

through seasons counting on rain to come down like a downpour of stars.

Seasons of Never This Again. Seasons of This Could Last Forever.

—Paul Tran

his head in and said, ‘War is coming!’ ” worked together on the first Thor movie. of them would rather be home. This
But Feige’s zeal belies a cannier mana- Reflecting on Thor’s troubled relation- goes back to Stan Lee, back to the com-
gerial skill. “He’s really good at getting ship with his father, Stentz said, “I had ics—they had heroism largely thrust
what he wants, but at the same time an emotionally distant father, who often upon them by circumstance.”
making everybody feel like they got what seemed impossible to win the approval
they wanted,” the former executive said. of.” Miller keyed into Thor’s conflict n superhero tales, origin stories are
That particular superpower likely ex-
plains why M.C.U. filmmakers talk about
with his brother Loki, the god of mis-
chief. Six years after the movie, Miller’s
I crucial. The M.C.U. has several.
The first begins in 1939, when the pulp-
their projects so personally, as if unload- therapist helped him realize that he’d magazine publisher Martin Goodman
ing to a shrink. When Jon Watts was been drawing on his “quietly contentious launched Timely Comics, in Manhat-
hired to direct his first Spider-Man movie, relationship” with his older brother. tan. Its first issue, Marvel Comics No. 1,
he was best known for directing music M.C.U. movies are often metaphors featured stories of the Human Torch and
videos and the Sundance thriller “Cop for themselves. In “The Avengers,” the Namor the Sub-Mariner. In issue No. 7,
Car.” For “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” tense collaboration among superheroes a policewoman mentioned the Torch to
he had Peter Parker become Tony Stark’s with complementary powers and siz- Namor, revealing that the characters oc-
anxious acolyte. “It’s about a kid who gets able egos resembles nothing so much cupied the same fictional world. Not long
a huge opportunity and is really nervous as Hollywood filmmaking, with writ- afterward, Stanley Lieber, a young cousin
that he’s going to screw it up,” Watts said. ers, directors, and producers wrangling of Goodman’s wife, joined Timely as an
“That was me, I’m sure, externalizing my for control. In “Captain America: Civil errand boy. He soon began writing the
actual apprehension and nerves about War,” the Avengers are divided over the stories, under the pen name Stan Lee.
making this jump from a really small in- issue of government oversight, a handy Lee was still an ocarina-playing teen-
dependent movie to a two-hundred-mil- analogy for creativity under corporate ager when he became Timely’s editor-
lion-dollar Marvel movie.” supervision. As the M.C.U. goes on, in-chief, overseeing the company’s war-
It’s a cliché that superheroes are our the heroes become celebrities in their time golden age. Its breakout hero,
modern Zeuses and Aphrodites, but Mar- fictional world—in “Ragnarok,” a group Captain America, punched out Hitler
vel movies tend to refract the preoccu- of fangirls asks Thor for a selfie—just and gained a wide following among G.I.s
pations of a more earthbound subspe- as they became celebrities in ours. overseas. Unlike DC Comics, whose
cies: the middle-aged Hollywood male. “You’re watching them go through a characters lived in Metropolis or in
The writers Ashley Miller and Zack version of the stresses you go through, Gotham City, Marvel heroes lived among
Stentz met in the nineties, arguing over but they’re exaggerated,” Christopher us; Namor scaled the Empire State Build-
“Star Trek” in an online chat room, and Markus said. “And you know almost all ing, where Timely had offices on the
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 39
fourteenth floor. Once the war ended, in terms of intellectual property.” But man and Icahn, Perlmutter played—and
the superhero craze waned, and Con- he considered movies too risky. Instead, enraged—both sides. When Icahn threat-
gress scapegoated comic books for caus- he padded out the entity, renamed Mar- ened to “pull down Toy Biz and bury you
ing juvenile delinquency. In 1957, Lee had vel Entertainment Group, with trad- and Marvel with me,” Perlmutter faxed
to lay off his entire staff. ing-card and sticker acquisitions. By the back four pages from the Book of Judges.
Origin Story No. 2: a resurrection. In mid-nineties, Marvel’s famed “bullpen” (Samson: “Let me die with the Philis-
1961, Goodman was playing golf with of comic-book writers and artists had tines!”) In 1998, the court approved Perl-
DC’s publisher and learned that its he- lost many of its star talents, and the bulk mutter’s restructuring plan, a leveraged
roes would soon appear together in The of the staff was laid off. Incensed by the buyout that would merge Marvel and
Justice League of America. Goodman told declining quality, fans boycotted. Com- Toy Biz. Like the pair of corporate raid-
Lee to copy the supergroup concept, and pounding Marvel’s financial woes, a ers he’d bested, Perlmutter could hardly
Lee and the artist Jack Kirby issued Fan- Major League Baseball strike tanked tell Iron Man from the Silver Surfer. But
tastic Four No. 1. During its “silver age,” the trading-card business. By the fourth his business partner, Avi Arad, was a true
the renamed Marvel Comics rolled out quarter of 1996, Marvel was posting believer. Arad, a fellow-Israeli who wore
a slew of new characters—Spider-Man, losses of four hundred million dollars. Harley-Davidson jackets, had made his
the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man—becom- The stock price plummeted. Perelman name as a toy designer; his portfolio in-
ing the hip underdog to DC. By 1965, filed for Chapter 11. Another billion- cluded a disappearing-ink gun and a doll
circulation had tripled, to thirty-five mil- aire, Carl Icahn, led a group of insur- that peed. Through Toy Biz, he had es-
lion copies a year. Fellini was a fan. So gent bondholders in an attempted take- tablished himself as Marvel’s liaison to
were beatniks and college kids. As Sean over. During an agonizing year and a Hollywood, horning in on Stan Lee’s
Howe writes in “Marvel Comics: The half in Delaware’s bankruptcy court, the turf. During the bankruptcy proceed-
Untold Story,” “For twelve cents an issue, two men battled for control of Marvel ings, Arad gave an impassioned speech
Marvel Comics delivered fascinatingly like Green Goblin versus the Vulture. to the bankers to dissuade them from
dysfunctional protagonists, literary flour- Neither won. The surprise victor was taking a deal from Icahn: “I feel certain
ishes, and eye-popping images to little a reclusive Israeli entrepreneur named that Spider-Man alone is worth a bil-
kids, Ivy Leaguers, and hippies alike.” Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, whose company lion dollars. But now, at this crazy hour,
The Hulk had rage issues; the X-Men Toy Biz had an exclusive licensing deal at this juncture, you’re going to take three
fought anti-mutant discrimination. Mar- with Marvel. Perlmutter had served in hundred and eighty million—whatever
vel’s kooky, neurotic cast overlapped in the Israeli military and kept a gun in his it is from Carl Icahn—for the whole
ways that grew Talmudic in complexity, briefcase, which he would open conspic- thing? One thing is worth a billion! We
and fans were eager to flaunt their ar- uously during negotiations. People he have the X-Men. We have the Fantas-
cane knowledge. met in the U.S. mistakenly assumed that tic Four. They all can be movies.”
For a time, Lee oversaw the continu- he had fought in the Six-Day War; this Now that Marvel was back from near-
ity of this ever-expanding universe, but was repeated so often that even his close death and in need of cash, Arad set up
his eye roamed to Hollywood, where he associates believed it. Perlmutter had an office in L.A. to license characters.
decamped in an attempt to bring Mar- come to America in his twenties and In a short time, he succeeded where Lee
vel to the screen. He had luck in televi- begun his career by standing at the gates had failed. He’d already sold the X-Men
sion, with Saturday-morning cartoons to Fox, which released its first X-Men
and the live-action series “The Incredi- film in 2000. He hired Feige, a young
ble Hulk,” which ran from 1977 to 1982. associate producer on the movie, to
(CBS dropped a planned Human Torch work for Marvel full time. The rights
show, worried that it would inspire kids to Spider-Man, which had been scat-
to set themselves on fire.) But, even as tered among six different entities, were
the Superman movies proved that super- miraculously regrouped and sold for ten
heroes could work on the big screen, million dollars per picture to Sony, which
Marvel projects stalled. Cannon Pictures released the first Tobey Maguire film
tied up the rights to Spider-Man. In the in 2002; it grossed more than eight hun-
early eighties, there was buzz about Tom of Jewish cemeteries in Brooklyn and dred million dollars worldwide. Marvel
Selleck playing Doctor Strange. Noth- charging mourners to have him deliver was, at long last, in the moviemaking
ing materialized. In 1986, Universal re- the Kaddish. He made millions buying business. But, by parcelling its I.P. to
leased the first movie based on a Mar- up cheap surplus goods and distressed studios all over town, the company had
vel property, “Howard the Duck,” about retailers, but his life style remained par- sacrificed an essential part of its DNA:
a wisecracking alien duck who falls to simonious to the point of eccentricity. its heroes couldn’t intermingle onscreen.
Earth. It bombed. He and his wife spent much of their
Origin Story No. 3: another resur- time at a condo in Palm Beach, where onsider another origin story, hith-
rection. In 1989, the billionaire Ron
Perelman, notorious for his hostile take-
they are said to still split a hot dog at
Costco every Saturday. (His estimated
C erto ignored. One late-summer
weekend in 2003, a talent-agency exec-
over of Revlon, scooped up Marvel for worth: $3.9 billion.) utive named David Maisel was in his
$82.5 million, calling it a “mini-Disney In the bankruptcy war between Perel- sweatpants, in the loft of his L.A. apart-
40 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
ment. He had spent two years at the
Endeavor agency, and he was contem-
plating his next move. But he didn’t
want to remain an agent—he wanted
to run a studio. “That’s when I thought,
Hey, if I can get a movie I can believe
in, and every movie after that one is a
sequel or a quasi-sequel—the same char-
acters show up—then it can go on for-
ever,” he told me. “Because it’s not thirty
new movies. It’s one movie and twenty-
nine sequels. What we call a universe.”
He eyed the Marvel comics on his book-
shelves. This, Maisel claims, was the
birth of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Maisel, a slender and soft-spoken man,
was telling me this story in the spot where
the eureka moment took place. I had met
him at his nearby office, a second apart-
ment, festooned with Marvel posters,
action figures, and director’s chairs. He
wore cargo pants and a Silver Surfer
hoodie. Without him, he said plainly, “the
M.C.U. would never exist. It’s like a Tha-
nos snap.” Near a plastic Thor hammer
• •
was a framed Times article from 2007,
detailing Maisel’s plans for Marvel to re- ite things,” he recalled, sitting on a sofa sel flew to Palm Beach to pitch Perl-
lease “10 self-financed films in the next with Iron Man throw pillows, his feet mutter over lunch at Mar-a-Lago. (Don-
five years.” Feige, Maisel noted, was not on a Spider-Man rug. Tony Stark had a ald Trump, a friend of Perlmutter, who
even mentioned. “Most people right now cool suit and a captain-of-industry swag- later became one of his major political
think Kevin started the studio,” he said. ger, but “he had a frail heart.” In the eight- donors, came by to say hello. “I don’t re-
“They don’t know me at all.” ies, Maisel tried to rally his classmates member what Trump said at the time,
“David’s been sort of written out of at Harvard Business School to “go buy but it was nothing impressive,” Maisel
the history of the studio, which I really Marvel,” but the idea didn’t get further recalled.) Perlmutter was skeptical; he
think is weird,” John Turitzin, who until than a brainstorm over beers. He worked saw movies primarily as an engine to sell
recently was Marvel Entertainment’s for consulting firms, but after his sister merchandise. But that hadn’t always
chief counsel, told me. “It was his brain- died, of lupus, he realized that “life is worked out. In 2000, Fox moved up the
child.” Although Maisel came up along- precious” and moved to Hollywood, release date for “X-Men” by six months,
side such Hollywood wheeler-dealers as where he got a job with the superagent leaving Marvel without action figures in
Bryan Lourd, he has a gentle, almost Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of C.A.A. stores. The former Marvel executive I
childlike air. He is single and unextrav- “He needed his token Harvard M.B.A. spoke to recalled, “David had a sense
agant, describing himself as “very influ- that he could bring with him to Warren that, if Marvel could own its own mov-
enced by Buddhist philosophy and sim- Beatty’s house,” Maisel said. When Ovitz ies and control its destiny, it would change
plicity.” He had spent the previous three became the president of Disney—a tu- the course of cinema history.”
years living with his elderly mother, who multuous sixteen-month tenure—Mai- Perlmutter agreed to let Maisel try,
died eight weeks before we met. But he’s sel followed him and did strategic plan- appointing him president of Marvel Stu-
not without ego. “He thinks that he’s the ning at ABC, which was owned by dios. But there were hurdles. When Mai-
smartest guy in the room all the time— Disney and run by Bob Iger. “I learned, sel pitched the board of directors, they
just ask him,” a Marvel alumnus told me. at Disney, the power of franchises,” Mai- said no—or, at least, not as long as there
“Because he’s really smart and myopic, sel recalled. He joined Endeavor at the was any financial risk. Maisel asked them
he doesn’t read the room very well.” If beckoning of the firm’s partners Ari to halt movie licensing for six months
Maisel were a Marvel character, he’d be Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell. In Hol- while he put together the money. Tu-
a mysterious sorcerer in a cave, whisper- lywood, Maisel was living in the Tony ritzin recalled that, at a meeting with
ing to all who entered that he created Stark fast lane (he and Leonardo Di- Standard & Poor’s, to get a credit rating
the solar system. Caprio have taken their moms out to- on the financing, “David made a com-
Maisel grew up in Saratoga Springs, gether for Mother’s Day) when he de- ment about how Marvel was a compel-
the son of a dentist and a Czechoslova- termined that Marvel should finance its ling brand that people wanted to see on
kian-born housewife. “Marvel comics, own intertwining movies. The problem the screen, and the woman who was run-
and especially Iron Man, were my favor- was that he didn’t work at Marvel. Mai- ning the meeting for S. & P. spontaneously
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 41
 ting us do it,” the screenwriter Zak Penn
recalled. Feige was a film-school gradu-
ate from New Jersey with a storage unit
full of movie merch. “Kevin was the kind
of guy,” the former executive recalled,
“where you would find yourself at a Toys
R Us for the release of the ‘Phantom
Menace’ toys.” Maisel would debate
Feige—whom he described as “Avi’s
lackey” at that point—until 3 a.m. over,
say, who would win in a fight between
the Hulk and Thor. (Maisel leaned Thor:
“Strength doesn’t always win.”) On a re-
treat in Palm Springs, Feige and a small
group mapped out “Phase One” of the
movies on whiteboards and sticky notes,
deciding that it would revolve around the
Tesseract, a glowing, all-powerful cube
that looks like a design object from the
Sharper Image.
Like the Avengers, the group was not
immune to squabbling. Avi Arad, sev-
eral people told me, was excited about
the self-producing plan but then turned
against it; he worried that they were tak-
ing on too much. Perlmutter was also
“Can you send me a detailed list of knee exercises I could waffling. “Ike wanted to cancel the whole
do at home but won’t because I have no discipline?” thing. Avi didn’t like it. They realized
there was pressure on them to deliver,”
the former executive recalled. “It’s like
• • when a kid is trying to date an older girl.
All of a sudden, she says yes—well, now
guffawed, because the idea seemed like lion dollars—enough for four movies— what? ‘I don’t know how to take her to
such hubris.” Marvel would have to com- in risk-free financing through Merrill prom! I don’t even have a suit!’”
pete not only with DC’s Superman and Lynch. The collateral was the film rights A power struggle erupted between
Batman but also with its own best-known to the characters, which, if the movies Maisel and Arad. “Being in a room with
heroes, Spider-Man and the X-Men, failed, would presumably be worthless the two of them was like being in a room
which were licensed to other studios. “If anyway. “It was like a free loan,” Maisel with a divorcing couple,” Turitzin re-
I had gone there even eight months later, said. “You go to a casino and get to keep called. In Maisel’s telling, Perlmutter was
it would have been too late, because they the winnings. You don’t have to worry if forced to choose between them, like an
were about to license Captain America you lose. The board had really no choice Old Testament patriarch. He sided with
and Thor,” Maisel said. but to approve me making the new Mar- Maisel. Arad told me that he grew frus-
Like Nick Fury assembling the Aveng- vel Studios.” Marvel convened focus trated with how large the company had
ers, Maisel lassoed back whichever char- groups of children, who were shown the become and objected to a plan to expand
acters he could. He recovered Black available superheroes and asked which into animated features. “I’m a one-man
Widow from Lionsgate. He struck a deal one they’d most want as a toy. The an- show. One-man show makes a lot of en-
that let Universal keep the right to dis- swer, surprisingly, was Iron Man. emies,” he said. As for Maisel—whom
tribute a Hulk movie but had a loophole At the Marvel Studios offices, now he dismissed as an overambitious num-
allowing Marvel to use the Hulk as a above a Mercedes-Benz dealership in bers guy, while ascribing the studio’s re-
secondary character. (This is why, even Beverly Hills, a team of mostly Gen X invention to his own salesmanship and
though the Hulk is all over the M.C.U., men who had grown up on Marvel com- connections—he said, “He was brilliant,
Marvel has never released a “Hulk 2.”) ics—including Feige and Avi Arad’s son, but the way he deals with people turned
New Line, with pressure from Avi Arad, Ari—planned the first slate of movies, out to be a problem, specifically for me.”
reverted its rights to Iron Man, hardly which would introduce the heroes one Arad resigned in 2006, and he and his
an A-list hero. To prove the viability of by one, and then unite them in “The son set up their own production com-
its characters, Marvel released direct-to- Avengers.” (Anyone bemoaning Gen X’s pany, which continued to work on So-
DVD animated Avengers movies. In the supposed lack of cultural influence should ny’s Spider-Man films. Maisel became
pre-recession boom times, Maisel se- look to the M.C.U.) “There was this gen- the chairman of Marvel Studios. He
cured five hundred and twenty-five mil- eral feeling of, like, Holy shit, they’re let- made Feige head of production.
42 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
 To direct “Iron Man,” Marvel hired father. He had brought an identical orb, shipped it to us,” the former executive
Jon Favreau, who was best known for the which he’d bought at a gallery in up- recalled. “I remember having to unload
single-dude comedy “Swingers” and the state New York, and asked the Dalai a semi truck of furniture and opening
Christmas hit “Elf.” The title role came Lama to hold it. Maisel pitched him an drawers up and finding old sandwiches.”
down to Timothy Olyphant and Downey, idea: His Holiness could pass the orb Once, the studio accidentally ordered
who was in a career slump after years of to another person, who could pass it to pens with purple ink; Perlmutter refused
drug arrests and rehab. “My board thought another, until all of humanity could feel to allow a replacement order, so for years
I was crazy to put the future of the com- its awe. “My globe is now his. It’s going Marvel paperwork was done in purple.
pany in the hands of an addict,” Maisel to become a piece of art around the The stinginess extended to movies. Chris
said. “I helped them understand how world,” Maisel beamed. “I feel the same Hemsworth was paid just a hundred
great he was for the role. We all had con- way about Marvel.” and fifty thousand dollars to star in
fidence that he was clean and would stay “Thor.” Terrence Howard, the highest-
clean.” The movie, with a budget of a he M.C.U. arrived late in Marvel’s paid actor in “Iron Man,” was replaced
mere hundred and forty million dollars,
relied less on spectacle than on Downey’s
T history, but it was well timed. By
the late two-thousands, TV series like
in sequels by Don Cheadle; Perlmutter
reportedly said that no one would no-
detached playfulness and his screwball- “Lost” had primed audiences to follow tice, because Black people all look alike.
comedy chemistry with Paltrow. When byzantine serial storytelling. And effects (Perlmutter denies this.)
Perlmutter visited the set, the producers technology had finally caught up with To help maintain his grip on the L.A.
had to hide the free snacks and drinks the boundless, physics-defying action of profit center, Perlmutter established the
for the crew. Obsessively press-avoidant, the comics. It was one thing to make Marvel Creative Committee, a group of
he showed up at the première disguised Superman fly using wires and a green writers, editors, and allies from Marvel’s
in a hat and a fake mustache. screen; it was another to have Bruce Ban- New York-based publishing wing. A
In early 2009, Maisel met with his ner morph into the Hulk, or Tony Stark High Court of Nerds didn’t sound like
former colleague Bob Iger, who had be- zoom around in his mechanized suit a bad idea, but the committee became
come the C.E.O. of Disney. Without without it looking chintzy. With C.G.I., the bane of the movie people. “It was
consulting Perlmutter, Maisel suggested anything the comics had dreamed up basically a group that existed to tell the
that Disney buy the newly ascendant was newly filmable. studio that they were doing everything
Marvel. Perlmutter was assured that With Arad and Maisel gone and Perl- wrong,” the former executive said, re-
Disney would preserve Marvel’s corpo- mutter incognito, Feige became the poster calling that, on the first day of shooting
rate culture, as it had with Pixar, and that boy for Marvel’s meteoric success. But “The Avengers,” the committee sent a
he would remain its chief executive. The his executive style skewed adolescent. twenty-six-page memo suggesting that
acquisition was finalized on the last day Feige had spent years on the wait list for the entire story be rewritten. “It was de-
of the year. Maisel resigned, fifty million Disneyland’s Club 33, a members-only structive madness.”
dollars richer. “I wanted to leave and live executive lounge. “When we were pur- By 2015, the executive said, the feud
a life—find a wife, which I still haven’t chased by the company, Kevin’s big thing “was almost like an East Coast–West
done,” he told me. He’d installed Feige was ‘Can I get to the top of the Club 33 Coast rap battle.” Feige was chafing under
as the studio’s president and figured that list now?’ ” the former executive recalled. Perlmutter’s control, and, according to
the franchise was in good hands, though Because Feige had to sign off on nearly Iger, Perlmutter was “intent on firing”
he seems bewildered by how Feige’s con- every creative decision, frustrated exec- Feige. Iger blocked the ouster and re-
tributions have eclipsed his own. “Kevin utives learned to e-mail him not with structured the chain of command, so that
was a kid who I promoted, and I was his questions but with deadlines: “I’m con- Feige would report directly to Disney’s
biggest fan,” Maisel said. “But Kevin structing a set at three o’clock, unless you studio chairman, Alan Horn. (Perlmutter
wasn’t even in the room where it hap- tell me otherwise.” At first, Feige de- says that he never tried to fire Feige but
pened.” He’s currently planning a new clined a company driver, but he was even- worried that Marvel’s reliance on him
universe of animated musicals based on tually persuaded that his commute from was “unduly risky” and urged Iger to re-
Greek and Roman myths, starting with Pacific Palisades to Burbank was better cruit a backup.) The dreaded commit-
Justin Bieber as Cupid. spent reading scripts. His unpretentious tee was disbanded, and Perlmutter was
As we talked, Maisel pointed to a style endeared him to the Comic-Con sidelined, but by then he had presided
glass globe on his coffee table and asked crowd, as an Everyfan who represented over the clearing of Marvel’s biggest road-
me to cradle it in my palms for thirty all Marvel geeks’ dreams of getting the block: Sony’s hold on Spider-Man. For
seconds in silence. I obeyed. “How does key to the toy chest. years, the two studios had bickered over
it make you feel?” he asked. In truth, I The toy chest still belonged to Perl- the character like separated parents fight-
felt a bit like Thanos, with the power mutter, who continued to meddle from ing over custody. Sony executives were
to destroy worlds, but told him that I back East. Since taking over Marvel, he used to getting screaming calls from Perl-
felt peaceful and protective. He nod- had imposed an obsessive frugality. He mutter about expenditures as small as
ded. Weeks earlier, Maisel had met the would fish paper clips out of the trash. free drinks at press junkets.
Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, at the in- “Instead of buying us actual furniture, As the M.C.U. grew, Sony had an-
vitation of Robert Thurman, the pres- he took a truckload of furniture that he nounced a competing Spider-verse, but
ident of Tibet House U.S. and Uma’s had in a warehouse somewhere and the studio was getting fan petitions to
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 43
restore Spider-Man to Marvel, and its the apotheosis of the Marvel style, with America and killed off Downey’s Tony
2014 installment, “The Amazing Spider- the wisecracking heroes fighting off an Stark, who had been the franchise’s driv-
Man 2,” fell flat. Flailing, Sony contem- alien army and then celebrating over sha- ing personality.
plated a sequel that would send Spi- warma—Phase Two repeated the for- As the comics had done in the sixties
der-Man to a land of dinosaurs. Sony’s mula by adding more obscure characters, and seventies, the studio belatedly diver-
Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton finally such as the Guardians of the Galaxy and sified its heroes. The 2014 Sony hack had
flew to Palm Beach to strike a deal with Ant-Man. Skeptics wondered whether turned up an e-mail from Perlmutter
Perlmutter and Feige: Sony would con- Marvel was scraping the bottom of the casting doubt on the profitability of fe-
tinue to release Spider-Man movies, but superhero barrel, but the movies were male superheroes. ( John Turitzin, a long-
Feige would oversee them, and Peter hits. Phase Three brought in Doctor time Perlmutter ally, told me that Perl-
Parker could, at long last, meet his friends Strange and Black Panther, then mashed mutter had just been “parroting other
in the M.C.U. The deal cut out Avi Arad, up the whole sprawling cast in “Aveng- people” and added, “He has a very good
who calls it a “betrayal.” In an unsubtle ers: Infinity War,” in which the craggy feel for financing, but he knows noth-
nod, the first Spider-Man movie under superbaddie Thanos, concerned about ing about the characters.”) Loosed from
the new arrangement was subtitled galactic overpopulation, wipes out half Perlmutter’s grip, Marvel released a stand-
“Homecoming.” of all living things with a snap of his fin- alone movie for Scarlett Johansson’s Black
As new characters appeared, the gers. In truth, the M.C.U. was overpop- Widow and added Simu Liu’s Shang-
M.C.U. grew unwieldy. After Phase One ulated and in need of a reset. “Avengers: Chi. But, without Tony Stark leading
climaxed with “The Avengers,” in 2012— Endgame” retired Chris Evans’s Captain the pack, the new phases felt direction-
less. One potential successor, Black Pan-
ther, was eliminated by the death of
Chadwick Boseman, in 2020.
Nonetheless, the content spigot
opened wider still. In 2021, Phase Four
kicked off the “Multiverse Saga,” which
will unspool across phases at least through
2026. The multiverse may be a philosoph-
ical concept—that parallel universes con-
tain infinite possible realities—but it’s
better understood as an organizing prin-
ciple for colliding strands of I.P. Disney’s
purchase of Twentieth Century Fox
brought the promise of the X-Men and
the Fantastic Four finally joining the
M.C.U. At Feige’s suggestion, “Spi-
der-Man: No Way Home” used the mul-
tiverse idea to bring M.C.U. heroes
(Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange) together
with characters from Sony’s previous it-
erations of “Spider-Man” (Alfred Moli-
na’s Doctor Octopus). The premise was
both trippy fan service and blatant cor-
porate synergy. “You have this historic
deal between Sony and Marvel, and they
want things from each other,” the “No
Way Home” co-writer Chris McKenna
said. “There’s going to be cross-pollina-
tion of characters, so that both corpora-
tions are feeling like they’re getting some-
thing out of this relationship.”

his year has been tumultuous for

T Marvel. In February, “Ant-Man
and the Wasp: Quantumania,” the first
film in Phase Five, opened to a luke-
warm box office and some of the worst
reviews in Marvel’s history. (“Busy, noisy
“I’m taking a picture of where the food I ordered and thoroughly uninspired,” Manohla
twenty minutes ago ought to be.” Dargis wrote in the Times.) The visual
effects were singled out as muddy and out rainbow flags and other pride sym- vel Cinematic Universe, having reached
generic, adding to a perception that Mar- bols from a San Francisco street scene its outer limits, may be subject to a sim-
vel is spewing out more content than it in “Quantumania” for certain release ter- ilar law of nature.
can handle. A single film may have up- ritories, she refused, and the outside film
ward of three thousand effects shots, she’d produced was used as a pretext to n a Thursday last November, I went
and Marvel’s strategy of tapping direc-
tors from sitcoms or Sundance means
fire her. (“It’s not credible,” the former
executive I spoke to said, of this narra-
O to the Regal Union Square multi-
plex, in Manhattan, to see “Black Pan-
that the person in charge has little ex- tive. “We’ve been doing whatever was ther: Wakanda Forever” on opening night.
perience handling big action scenes. The asked of us by China, Russia, and the It was playing on twelve of seventeen
past few years have brought reports of Middle East for twenty years.”) After screens, but even that wasn’t enough to
burnout and discontent in the VFX in- her lawyer threatened “seri- prop up a dying theatrical
dustry. Because Marvel, its biggest cli- ous consequences,” Alonso model: weeks later, Regal’s
ent, is known for its penny-pinching, reached a multimillion-dol- parent company, which had
VFX firms underbid one another for lar settlement with Disney. filed for bankruptcy, revealed
work, leaving projects understaffed and “Quantumania” set up plans to close the Union
underfunded. Effects artists have been a new supervillain, Kang, Square location, along with
seen crying at their desks during eighty- played by Jonathan Majors, thirty-eight others.
hour weeks, tortured by Marvel’s im- who would recur through- For now, though, the es-
movable deadlines, last-minute rewrites, out the Multiverse Saga. In calators filled up with Mar-
and too-many-cooks indecision over, March, Majors was arrested vel fans. Jacob, an N.Y.U. stu-
say, Thanos’s exact shade of purple. on charges of assault, ha- dent, had seen his first Marvel
I spoke to several VFX artists, under rassment, and strangulation, movie, “The Avengers,” for a
the condition of anonymity. (Marvel is after an incident with his girlfriend. He friend’s tenth birthday. His favorite char-
said to blackball firms that push back.) denied wrongdoing, but the scandal has acter was the Scarlet Witch, he said, be-
Some said that Marvel stress was a symp- handed Marvel a dilemma. Two weeks cause she was “constantly getting things
tom of larger problems in the effects in- later, Disney terminated Perlmutter as thrown at her and overcoming them.”
dustry, which is decentralized across the Marvel’s chairman. Perlmutter, who re- Richard, an aspiring game designer, in a
globe, owing to tax incentives, and clearly mains one of Disney’s largest individual Marvel T-shirt and hipster glasses, had
in need of labor protections. “Marvel is shareholders, had recently antagonized been reading the comics since he was five.
the easy punching bag,” one said. But Iger by pushing (unsuccessfully) for his “I still feel very protective of those char-
another told me, “They have a tendency friend Nelson Peltz to get a seat on Dis- acters,” he said. His favorite M.C.U. hero
to change their minds pretty late, and ney’s board. Perlmutter told the Wall was Captain America, because of the char-
in effects that’s where we take all the Street Journal that he’d been fired for, acter’s commitment to his principles (“a
heat.” He pointed out one scene, in among other things, aggressive pursuit douchey thing to say”). Richard, who has a
“Endgame,” in which the Avengers go of cost-cutting. Iger cited “redundancy.” Mexican dad and a Black stepmom, called
back in time. During production, the All this followed Iger’s comments, Marvel “one of the most powerful engines
actors wore placeholder motion-capture at an investor conference, that Disney we have to teach people about difference.”
suits, which were then gussied up with would reduce its content, including After the film, he emerged from the the-
C.G.I. “They could have just worn the endless Marvel retreads. “Sequels typ- atre shaken by how it had connected the
costumes, and it would have been a bil- ically work well for us, but do you need grief over Boseman’s Black Panther with
lion times easier,” the VFX artist said. a third or a fourth, for instance?” he postcolonial trauma: “A lot of us who sup-
A month after “Quantumania” opened, said. With all the oversaturation, pal- port sci-fi and genre storytelling have suf-
Disney abruptly fired Victoria Alonso, ace intrigue, and brand deterioration, fered deep cultural losses that we’re still
Marvel’s long-serving head of postpro- the M.C.U. juggernaut finally appeared learning how to understand.”
duction and a member of the Trio, fuel- to be showing cracks. The release, last Coming up the escalators was Tim,
ling speculation that she was responsi- month, of “Guardians of the Galaxy a twenty-five-year-old financial analyst
ble—or being scapegoated—for the VFX Vol. 3”—which grossed twenty-eight and Marvel “aficionado.” His favorite
issues. Disney said that Alonso had vi- million dollars less on its opening week- character was Ant-Man, because “we’re
olated her contract by promoting an Os- end than the previous installment—did both really short,” he said. After seeing
car-nominated feature that she had pro- little to dispel the feeling that Marvel “Endgame,” he’d caught up on the
duced for another studio. She declined fatigue is real, and that Feige is spread M.C.U. on Disney+. “Honestly, now that
to comment, but a source close to the too thin for the avalanche of content. we work from home, I watch during the
matter told a different story: Alonso, a “The one downside to Marvel is that day,” he said. When I asked him to name
gay Latina, had been barred from the it all bottlenecks at Kevin,” the former the last movie he’d seen in a theatre, he
“Wakanda Forever” press tour after she executive said. “I think everyone’s agree- said “Thor: Love and Thunder.” “I only
gave a speech accepting an award from ing that this is not the optimal amount go to the theatres for Marvel,” he ad-
GLAAD which criticized Disney’s han- of stuff.” Scientists predict that our own mitted. “Even if I just go to Marvel mov-
dling of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. universe will begin to contract in the ies, it’s three or four a year. So I’m, like,
When her team was then asked to edit next hundred million years; the Mar- O.K., that’s enough.” 
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 45
 LETTER FROM NORTH CAROLINA

MINORITY RULES
The once fringe legal theory that became a threat to democracy.
BY ANDREW MARANTZ

he Museum of the Albemarle, way bisecting a cotton farm. Jones is Supreme Court case that was set to be

T on the eastern shore of North

Carolina, is a spacious building
the color of sand and sea glass. It’s in
forty­eight, with sandy hair and a round
face; he grew up in northeastern North
Carolina, a rural, working­class part of
argued in December and resolved by
the end of June. In 2021, with Tim Moore
as the speaker of the North Carolina
Elizabeth City, about as far from the the state. “When I tell people I was House, the majority­Republican legis­
Research Triangle as Baltimore is from born in a tobacco field, I’m only exag­ lature drew gerrymandered congressio­
New York City, but you can get there gerating, like, a tiny bit,” he said. He is nal maps—that is, even more egregiously
and back in the same day if you know white, but he’s from a county that is, gerrymandered than usual. Several vot­
how to drive fast without getting pulled like Elizabeth City, majority Black. “If ers (one of them named Becky Harper)
over. “There are a hundred counties in you’re used to the powers that be either and a handful of nonprofits (including
this state, and I’ve spent time in every passively ignoring you or actively screw­ Common Cause, where Jones works)
one,” Sailor Jones, a democracy activist, ing you over, for generations, it’s natu­ sued to block the implementation of
told me this past fall, on his way to speak ral to hear about some new nefarious those maps, and the state Supreme Court
at the museum. He was a skillful multi­ thing they’re up to and think, Same shit, ruled in their favor. The U.S. Supreme
tasker—sipping from a huge fountain different day,” he said. “The challenge Court was asked to decide whether the
Coke, tweaking a Rihanna­heavy play­ for us, messaging­wise, is to find a way legislature’s maps should stand—and,
list, and taking call after call on speak­ to tell folks, You’re not wrong, but, also, by extension, whether the state court
erphone, all while bombing his Toyota this one really is different.” had the power to review them at all. As
4Runner down an empty stretch of high­ “This one” was Moore v. Harper, a with many Supreme Court cases, this

An extreme version of the theory could give state legislatures the power to award Electoral College votes however they see fit.
46 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
is a narrow-sounding question that could more drastic version of the theory— Society; twenty-one U.S. senators; Ar-
have vast consequences. “It’s hard to not one directly at issue in the case, but nold Schwarzenegger; a group of re-
overstate how wild it would be if this one that might follow from its logic— tired four-star generals; and J. Michael
went the wrong way,” Marina Jenkins, could allow a legislature to award its Luttig, a conservative retired judge,
the executive director of the National state’s Electoral College votes to any who called Moore v. Harper “the most
Democratic Redistricting Committee, Presidential candidate, even one who important case for American democ-
told me. lost its popular vote. After the 2020 racy literally since the founding of the
If the Supreme Court reverses the election, lawyers arguing on behalf of nation.” Yet Justices Samuel Alito, Neil
state-court ruling, it would be a vindica- Donald Trump asked the Supreme Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas all
tion of the independent-state-legislature Court to set aside what they called “un- indicated, in a shadow-docket opinion
theory, or I.S.L.T., a line of legal rea- lawful election results” in Wisconsin, last year, that they found I.S.L.T. com-
soning that scarcely existed twenty-five Pennsylvania, and two other states, pelling, and Brett Kavanaugh, writing
years ago but has since travelled from based on unfounded claims of fraud, separately, sounded open to being
the fringes of legal discourse to the cen- and let the state legislatures decide persuaded.
ters of power. Some advocates of the the outcome instead. Their rationale Jones and two colleagues got to the
theory interpret a clause of the Con- was I.S.L.T. Elizabeth City museum around sunset.
stitution to mean that state legislatures “Descriptively speaking, it’s not a They were there to convene a town-hall-
can run federal elections almost how- doctrine, because there is no case law style meeting—half explainer about
ever they choose—drawing maps for behind it,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the I.S.L.T., half pep rally—stop No. 4 on
partisan advantage, outlawing forms of dean of the law school at the Univer- a statewide road show that they had
voting (such as mail-in ballots) that sity of California, Berkeley, told me. nicknamed the Moore Tour. Jones is an
tend to favor one party, and challeng- “Normatively speaking, I hope it doesn’t inveterate people person—a hugger, a
ing election results on thin procedural become a doctrine, because it’s incred- birthday rememberer, a first-name re-
grounds. Even when these actions vi- ibly frightening.” An unusually wide peater. He revels in the kind of salt-of-
olate state constitutions, the advocates range of legal scholars, from staunch the-earth phrases (“nary a soul,” “two
say, state courts would be powerless to originalists to loose constructionists, shakes of a lamb’s tail”) that might sound
stop them. (It’s this lack of oversight share this view. The list of people who affected coming from a carpetbagging
that would render the legislatures “in- have signed on to Supreme Court briefs politician, but not from him. In the park-
dependent,” though a less euphemistic opposing I.S.L.T. includes Steven Ca- ing lot, he ran into Keith Rivers, the head
word for it might be “rogue.”) A still labresi, a co-founder of the Federalist of the local N.A.A.C.P. “Why, Keith
ILLUSTRATION BY GOLDEN COSMOS THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 47
Rivers, as I live and breathe,” Jones said. lowing day, they would issue their sions, seeking ways to stop the recount,
The audience inside the museum— ruling. Blitzer was interviewing a Re- which seemed to be moving in Gore’s
two dozen already seated, a dozen more publican lawyer, a ruddy-faced young direction. “We kept looking through the
trickling in—skewed toward the civic- man with a slight Kermit the Frog lilt Constitution, and obviously at some
minded and the semiretired: church- in his voice, who had clerked for Jus- point the word ‘legislature’ jumped out
going grandmothers, candidates for tice Anthony Kennedy at the Supreme at us,” Carvin said.
school board. Onstage, Jones recounted Court, had helped draft the Starr Re- The independent-state-legislature
a few episodes from recent North port that led to President Bill Clinton’s theory ultimately boils down to a single
Carolina history when the legislature impeachment, and was now part of the word: “legislature.” It appears in two rel-
had attempted a draconian overreach, legal team advising George W. Bush. evant places in the Constitution—the
protests had erupted out- The question in Bush v. Elections Clause, which pertains to how
side the statehouse, and Gore was whether a man- federal elections are administered, and
lawmakers had backed off. ual vote recount in Florida the Electors Clause, regarding the ap-
Then he led a call-and- should be allowed to con- pointment of Presidential electors. Both
response chant, one that the tinue. The (Democrat- processes are to be directed in “each State”
audience knew well: “When appointed-majority) Su- by “the Legislature thereof.” Benjamin
we fight together, we what?” preme Court of Florida Ginsberg, the Bush-Cheney campaign’s
“We win!” It made for rous- wanted it to go on; mem- national counsel, told me that, in 2000,
ing theatre, yet it was hard bers of the (Republican- I.S.L.T. “was never our main focus. It
to tell whether he meant it majority) legislature did not. was one of many things we were fling-
literally. (As any student of The lawyer argued that it ing against the wall.” John Bolton, one
history knows, the people, should stop. “Article II of of the Bush campaign’s lawyers, who
united, are all too often defeated.) Chris the Constitution,” he said, “delegates au- later served as national-security adviser
Shenton, a lawyer with the Southern thority directly to the state legislatures.” under Trump, told me, “I don’t know
Coalition for Social Justice, outlined The young lawyer’s name was Brett that we fully thought through the fu-
the constitutional argument against Kavanaugh. That his stark reading of ture implications. It was more, The clock
I.S.L.T. “What the Supreme Court is Article II aligned with his immediate is ticking. What else can we try?” In his
being asked to do here is completely partisan interest was, he insisted, a mere book “Down and Dirty: The Plot to
bogus,” he said. The over-all tone was coincidence. “I think what we’re see- Steal the Presidency,” from 2001, Jake
roughly that of flight attendants mak- ing is more of a divide over how to in- Tapper attributes the I.S.L.T. eureka
ing a pre-takeoff announcement during terpret the Constitution than, really, moment to Don Rubottom, then a mid-
a rainstorm: Everything will surely be political differences,” he said. “What level Republican staffer in the Florida
fine, but here’s what to expect in the are the enduring values that are going House, who went to work the morning
unlikely event of an emergency. to stand a generation from now?” He after Election Day and showed his boss
Flight attendants use euphemistic was describing what was not yet known the Electors Clause. “My thing was, If
doublespeak because, understandably, as the independent-state-legislature this comes down to the wire, it looks
they want to avoid terms like “hijack- theory, given that the theory was still like the Constitution says it’s our job to
ing” and “September 11th.” For similar taking shape. step in,” Rubottom told me. By Decem-
reasons, Jones spoke in broad terms, A month earlier, when Election Day ber 11th, Republicans in the Florida leg-
without directly invoking Trump or Jan- had ended without a clear result, the islature had introduced a resolution ap-
uary 6th. (There were also other rea- Bush team had chartered planes to Flor- pointing a slate of electors for Bush.
sons for this, such as Common Cause’s ida and set up a makeshift “nerve cen- “The House even passed it,” Rubottom
nonpartisan status.) Even so, the impli- ter” at the G.O.P. headquarters in Tal- said. “But then Bush v. Gore happened.”
cations were clear. At one point, an or- lahassee. “They didn’t really have space Laurence Tribe, a law professor emer-
ganizer sitting in the audience stood, for us, so we had all our papers laid out itus at Harvard, represented Gore in a
using a cane, and gave an impromptu on the floor and stuff,” Michael Carvin, related case that went to the Supreme
speech, urging listeners to imagine a one of the lawyers, told me. Amy Coney Court shortly before Bush v. Gore. “We
Supreme Court opinion that enabled Barrett, then a twenty-eight-year-old knew that this was a claim that was out
legislatures to rig elections at will. “There law associate, spent a week in the sub- there, about the primacy of the legisla-
was a time when I used to think things urbs of Palm Beach doing research for ture, but, frankly, we thought it was such
like that couldn’t happen,” he said. “But the team; John Roberts, who was forty- a flimsy argument that none of the Jus-
then we had January 6th, Roe—these five, flew to Tallahassee at least twice— tices would be tempted by it,” Tribe told
things can happen. They’re happening.” first to advise the campaign’s lawyers me. “So, when Chief Justice Rehnquist
and then to advise Jeb Bush, the gov- started asking me about it during oral
n the night of December 11, 2000, ernor. “We had the great fortune to as- argument, I thought, Oh, that’s not good
O the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer re-
ported live from the steps of the Su-
semble, essentially, a legal ‘dream team,’”
Ted Cruz, another of Bush’s attorneys,
news.” On December 12th, the Court
issued the ruling in Bush v. Gore that
preme Court. The Justices had just heard later said in an Associated Press story. made Bush the President-elect. The
oral arguments in Bush v. Gore; the fol- The group held marathon strategy ses- constitutional ground was the Four-
48 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
teenth Amendment, but William Rehn- power over elections is “plenary”—un- judge, and has since attended dozens of
quist, joined by Thomas and Antonin constrained by state courts. But the Amar Federalist Society events. Morley did
Scalia, wrote a concurring opinion, hold- brothers contend that there is no indi- not submit an amicus brief in Moore v.
ing that “there are additional grounds cation that this power was meant to be Harper; reached recently by e-mail, he
that require us” to find in Bush’s favor. so absolute. “That’s just not how it wrote that he has “consistently and pub-
The first one he mentioned was the os- works,” Vikram said. licly criticized attempts to cast doubt on
tensible special power of the state leg- Unlike right-wing legal arguments the outcome of the 2020 Presidential
islature. (He put the word “legislature” against abortion rights and gun control, election.” A law professor who knows
in italics, for added emphasis.) I.S.L.T. was not the product of a Morley told me, “I don’t think he’s a
As Rehnquist’s italics suggested, multi-decade political movement. There total wing nut. I think he found an in-
I.S.L.T. might seem like an open-and- is no such thing as an I.S.L.T. think tank teresting academic argument that no
shut case. “Pretty simple,” Carvin told or a single-issue I.S.L.T. voter. Leah Lit- one else was making, and the work he
me. “Legislature means legislature.” And man, a law professor at the University did on it has been important to his ca-
yet, in a text as multivalent as the Con- of Michigan, argues that it’s hardly even reer, so now he can’t fully walk away
stitution, a cigar is never just a cigar. Does a theory; she prefers to call it the “inde- from it, but he can’t fully defend it, ei-
“freedom of speech” mean only literal pendent-state-legislature thingy,” or sim- ther.” Law journals are full of provoca-
speech, or does it also refer to a written ply “right-wing fanfic.” Tribe, the Har- tive thought experiments. They all seem
sign, a pornographic image, an algorithm, vard professor, put an even finer point like fun and games until someone uses
a campaign contribution? Does “well on it: “This wasn’t something that had one to justify an insurrection.
regulated Militia” cover only literal mi- an organic development in the law. It After Bush v. Gore, I.S.L.T. became
litias, or can it also apply to a suburban was, frankly, something that was pulled a potential Chekhov’s gun of the Amer-
mom who wants to exercise her inalien- out of somebody’s butt, because they ican experiment—a relatively obscure
able right to bring a Ruger to church? thought it was a convenient way to ful- one, gathering dust in a corner. It almost
Akhil Amar, a law professor at Yale, fill a short-term partisan agenda.” De- never came up, except maybe as a piece
is one of the most frequently cited le- spite the Justices’ repeated attestations of bar trivia. “Between 2000 and 2020,
gal scholars in the country. When it that they are not politicians in robes, it’s most law students—even most law pro-
comes to the Supreme Court, he is an hard to avoid the conclusion that I.S.L.T. fessors—would not have heard the words
ur-institutionalist who can rhapsodize is an idea tailor-made to empower state ‘independent’ and ‘legislature’ in the same
at length about the courtroom’s marble legislatures and federal courts, entities sentence,” Evan Tsen Lee, a professor
friezes, and who has long counted mul- that have been disproportionately shaped emeritus at the University of California
tiple Justices as personal friends. (A few by the Republican Party. College of the Law, San Francisco, told
months ago, on a podcast he hosts, he To the extent that there is serious me. Concurring opinions generally have
referred to Samuel Alito as “a princi- scholarship buttressing I.S.L.T., much no legal force; and, unusually, even the
pled person” and “one of the smartest of it has been promulgated by one guy, Court’s opinion in Bush v. Gore included
lawyers I know.”) On the question of an associate professor at Florida State a caveat that it was not to be taken as
I.S.L.T., though, he is uncharacteristi- University named Michael Morley. He precedent. Vikram Amar told me that,
cally cutting. In a recent debate at the graduated from Yale Law School in 2003, for two decades, “the Court never cited
Federalist Society, he conceded that the clerked for a conservative circuit-court Bush v. Gore, so most of us thought,
plain-text position sounded plausible
on its face, but he described his own
view as “clearly the better view for any-
one who’s gone to law school and who
has a brain.” Last year, he and his brother
Vikram, the dean of the University of
Illinois College of Law, published a law-
review article called “Eradicating Bush-
League Arguments Root and Branch,”
positing that the Framers actually in-
tended for “legislature” to mean a state’s
entire lawmaking apparatus, including
the judicial and executive branches. “This
kind of thing happens in the Constitu-
tion all the time,” Vikram told me. (For
example, the Constitution says that
“New States may be admitted by the
Congress,” but the process has always
involved the President, and courts have
weighed in, too.) Extreme proponents “What keeps me going? The tightening feeling
of I.S.L.T. maintain that the legislature’s in my chest that if I stop I’ll die.”
This is behind us. Why beat up the con- electors should be allocated. If it had been the election. “This is bigger than President
servatives for something they seem to up to him, that election would have been Trump,” he said. “It is the very essence
recognize was wrong?” decided unilaterally by a state legislature. of our republican form of government.”
In 2020, Eastman made the same ar- Meanwhile, Luttig, the conservative re-
n 2020, after Donald Trump lost the gument. Shortly after the election was tired judge, privately lobbied against East-
I Presidential election, he ordered a
team of lawyers to help him un-lose it.
called for Joe Biden, Eastman went to
Philadelphia, where a group of Trump
man, who had once been his clerk. “I told
the Vice-President’s team, ‘I know that
The most public-facing of them—Ru- aides asked him to advise them on post- John is very smart, but I have absolutely
dolph Giuliani, Sidney Powell—came election strategy; the meeting lasted only no idea what he’s thinking on this one,’”
from politics, or from undistinguished fifteen minutes, but that was enough for Luttig told me. “If the Vice-President had
careers in private practice. For a few him to catch COVID. A few days later, done what John had asked him to do—
darkly comic weeks, they flailed on live he spoke by video at a Federalist Soci- well, I’ve spent the last two years contem-
TV, inviting reporters to a landscaping ety conference. (The theme was “The plating what would have happened, and
company’s garage and vowing to “release Rule of Law and the Current Crisis”; I think it would have plunged the coun-
the Kraken.” “I know crimes,” Giuliani the keynote speaker was Samuel Alito.) try into a paralyzing constitutional cri-
said during a televised press conference, The following month, while spending sis.” In the end, of course, Pence refused,
hair dye streaking down his face. “I can Christmas Eve with family in Texas, he and the election was certified for Biden.
smell ’em.” (“This sounds SO FUCKING wrote a memo labelled “Privileged and In Moore v. Harper, only one legal ac-
CRAZY,” Raj Shah, who had left the Confidential: January 6 scenario.” He ademic filed an amicus brief in support
Trump White House for Fox News, then wrote a more detailed memo as- of the North Carolina legislature’s posi-
texted while watching Giuliani, accord- serting that “the U.S. Constitution as- tion on I.S.L.T.: John Eastman.
ing to communications revealed in Do- signs to the legislatures of the states the Recently, I reached Eastman by phone.
minion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against plenary power to determine the manner He’s originally from Nebraska, and he
Fox. “He objectively looks like he was a for choosing presidential electors.” Like speaks with a mild high-plains cadence—
dead person voting 2 weeks ago.”) Rehnquist, he added the italics. except when he gets worked up, which
A lesser-known but more formidable Kenneth Chesebro, another member happened a few times. “Most of the legal
member of Trump’s legal team was John of Trump’s legal team, maintained that academy doesn’t take seriously the orig-
Eastman, a former law-school dean, a legislators in seven swing states could inal understanding of the Constitution,”
fellow at the right-wing think tank the simply pretend that Trump had won, and he told me, denouncing not only leftists
Claremont Institute, and a former clerk submit slates of fake electors to that ef- but also most conservatives, including
and longtime friend of Justice Clarence fect. (“Fake” is actually the word that one “the anti-Trump crowd, which I don’t
Thomas. If Giuliani and Powell looked lawyer used in his e-mails, before catch- consider to be Republican lawyers any-
like made-for-cable-TV lawyers, then ing himself and writing, “ ‘Alternative’ more.” By refusing to delay the certifica-
Eastman, with half-rimmed glasses and votes is probably a better term than ‘fake’ tion, Pence had “accepted the view that
silver hair, seemed made for the seminar votes,” followed by a smiley face.) In a the role that the Constitution assigned
room. While the TV lawyers tantrummed, historical coincidence, Chesebro had to him was merely that of a potted plant.”
and Trump worked the phones, East- worked as a research assistant for Lau- Eastman still believes that Biden’s vic-
man looked for a constitutional loop- rence Tribe after the 2000 election, when tory was wrongly certified, and that many
hole. Cleta Mitchell, another Trump law- they had discussed the Electors Clause recent elections have likely been marred
yer, e-mailed Eastman after the election, at length. “He was a bit of a hanger-on, by voter fraud. (He even suggested that
writing, “A movement is stirring. But to be honest, and he didn’t seem to have the dimpled chads in 2000 were evidence
needs constitutional support.” She asked, much of a moral compass,” Tribe told of intentional malfeasance, which was a
“What would you think of producing a me. “I’d hate to think that those conver- new one on me.) Eastman’s role in the
legal memo outlining the constitutional sations inadvertently planted the seed attempts to overturn the 2020 election
role of state legislators in designating that became the evil tree of I.S.L.T.” (A had already landed him in a good deal
electors? . . . Am I crazy?” lawyer for Chesebro later said that he of trouble: he’d been brought in for ques-
Eastman didn’t think so. After the was merely advising the Trump campaign tioning by the January 6th committee,
2000 election, he had testified before the to keep “its options open.”) In 2022, a had his phone seized by the F.B.I., and
Florida legislature. (“We went on a mis- district-court judge referred to the Trump was in danger of being expelled from the
sion yesterday to find somebody who team’s post-election machinations as “a State Bar of California. Still, he claimed
could be sort of qualified as a, quote, ex- coup in search of a legal theory.” To the not to understand what all the fuss was
pert, if you will,” a state senator said, in- extent that there was such a theory, it was about. Until recently, he said, “I thought
troducing him. “He’s come all the way the independent-state-legislature theory. everybody agreed that the legislatures got
from California—actually overnight.”) On January 6th, shortly before Trump to do this.”
Eastman told the legislators that they spoke at the Ellipse and encouraged his A few years ago, many pundits might
didn’t have to wait for permission from supporters to march to the Capitol, East- have considered it unthinkable that the
the courts: the Constitution gave them man took the stage wearing a felt fedora. Supreme Court would give a hearing to
the power, which “knows no other ap- He gave a fiery speech, imploring Vice- a theory such as I.S.L.T. But recent events
peal,” to determine how the Presidential President Mike Pence to delay certifying have changed the consensus view of
50 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
what’s possible. Two days after the 2020
election, Ginni Thomas, Clarence Tho-
mas’s wife, texted Trump’s chief of staff
a meme asserting that the “Biden crime
family & ballot fraud co-conspirators . . .
will be living in barges off GITMO.” The
following summer, during a reunion of
Justice Thomas and his former clerks at
a resort, golf course, and shooting club
in West Virginia, Ginni posed for a photo,
according to the Washington Post. She
was flashing a double thumbs-up and
standing next to a grinning John East-
man. On the merits, I.S.L.T. may de-
serve to be rebuked in a lacerating 9–0
decision. But “the merits” don’t decide
what the law is. Judges do.

ailor Jones grew up in Warren County,

S one of the poorest counties in North
Carolina. In the early eighties, when he
was in elementary school, the governor,
a Democrat, advanced a plan allowing
• •
tons of carcinogenic chemicals to be
dumped in a nearby soybean field. A about a change in its priorities than about lina became the first state to pass a so-
group of local activists engaged in a six- the major parties’ evolving views on uni- called bathroom bill, forcing people to
week civil-disobedience campaign, lying versal suffrage. conform to the biological sex on their
in the roads to block the dump trucks. American activists of all stripes, para- birth certificate. Both these fights were
Warren County became known as the phrasing Justice Louis Brandeis, have personal for Jones, who married a woman
birthplace of the environmental-justice long referred to the states as laboratories and later came out as a trans man. “At-
movement, but the campaign failed— of democracy. But the adage has started tacking queer folks seems like good pol-
the protesters were arrested and the field to reverse itself: in the past two years itics if you represent an extreme parti-
became a toxic landfill. Jones spent his alone, there has been one book called san district where you’re insulated from
summer breaks curing tobacco. “This “Laboratories Against Democracy” and public opinion,” Jones told me. These
was the era of ‘Sure, honey, segregation another called “Laboratories of Autoc- days, he said, whenever he visits the North
is over,’ but everyone knows it ain’t re- racy.” North Carolina is often cited as a Carolina statehouse, “I make it a point
ally over,” he said. Later, in the fights for paradigmatic case. It’s a purple state— to stop by the men’s room, even if it’s
gay rights, trans rights, and voting rights, Barack Obama won it in 2008 and lost just to wash my hands.”
the same lesson would be reinforced: it in 2012—but in many recent years Re- In 2016, the anti-democratic maneu-
there’s what the rules say, on paper, and publicans have enjoyed super-majorities vers grew more brazen. McCrory ran
then there’s what the people in power in the legislature, and they have used this for reëlection and narrowly lost, but he
can get away with. power to grant themselves more power. didn’t concede to his Democratic suc-
Common Cause has brought dozens After the Republican Pat McCrory was cessor, Roy Cooper, for nearly a month,
of major lawsuits, several of which have elected governor, in 2012, the state passed citing “serious concerns of potential voter
gone before the Supreme Court, but what voting-rights advocates called the fraud.” This received less attention than
most of its work is more incremental and monster election law—a combination of it might have, given the Presidential elec-
lower-profile: election hotlines, pam- voter-I.D. requirements, reduced access tion that happened at the same time.
phlets about ranked-choice voting. It was to polling sites, and other obstacles that (McCrory recently told me that he now
founded in 1970 by a liberal Republican made it, at the time, among the most believes Cooper’s victory was legitimate,
fed up with the Nixon Administration’s suppressive laws of its kind in the coun- although he mentioned that the elec-
self-dealing; its objective was bipartisan try. (A court later overturned the law, rul- tion had included some “bad things” and
democracy reform, which then seemed ing that it would “target African Amer- “unfortunate coincidences,” including
achievable. (As Rick Perlstein recounts icans with almost surgical precision.”) faulty Dominion voting machines.)
in his book “Reaganland,” both parties When a referendum outlawing same- During McCrory’s remaining time in
supported a comprehensive voting-rights sex marriage was on the ballot, in 2012, office, the legislature convened for a
package in 1977, until it was scuttled by Jones protested by running across the special session and stripped the incom-
members of the New Right, including state, or most of it, “which is even more ing governor of a wide range of powers.
Ronald Reagan.) Common Cause is now impressive once you understand how bad “Partisanship, hardball politics—that we
perceived as progressive, which says less I am at running.” In 2016, North Caro- were familiar with,” Mike Woodard, a
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 51
 ton and his colleagues at the Southern
Coalition for Social Justice, in an office
park on the outskirts of Durham, as they
prepared potential arguments in Moore v.
Harper. “There are a couple of ways to
split the baby on this one, but not many,”
Shenton told me. “You either think the
whole concept of I.S.L.T. is coherent or
you don’t.” In 2015, in a case called Ari­
zona State Legislature v. Arizona Inde­
pendent Redistricting Commission, the
Court had rejected a version of I.S.L.T.
Another coalition lawyer, Hilary Harris
Klein, said that it would be highly un­
usual for the Court to reverse such a re­
cent major precedent.
“They could probably find a way,”
Shenton said.
“Well, sure,” Klein said, “they could
do anything, if logic and principles go
out the window.”

he North Carolina Capitol, in Ra­

“Well, the ‘beauty’ part is more obvious when she’s awake.”

T leigh, was built in the familiarly
grand Greek Revival style. The State
Legislative Building, a block away and
• • fashioned out of concrete in the sixties,
looks more like a formerly upscale air­
port hotel. One day last fall, I visited with
Democratic state senator, told me. “But ter handled by other entities, including two Common Cause employees. We ran
not just pulling the rug out like that.” state courts. into Woodard, the Democratic senator,
That year, Republicans in North Car­ In 2020, David Lewis retired, after who was in the middle of a garrulous
olina won a narrow majority of the vote pleading guilty to making a false state­ conversation with a Republican colleague.
but ended up with ten of the thirteen ment to a bank. Tim Moore, the speaker “I’m a guy who’s willing to work with ev­
congressional seats. During a public hear­ of the House, oversaw a new, more ex­ eryone, who gets along personally with
ing, David Lewis, the head of the state’s treme round of gerrymandering. Com­ a lot of folks,” Woodard told me. But in
House redistricting committee, con­ mon Cause sued once again in state court, his office, with the door closed, he added,
fessed that his committee had created a the case that would become Moore v. “When it comes to a lot of fundamental
map with ten Republican districts and Harper. “The Supreme Court had just things—voting rights, gerrymandering—I
three Democratic districts “because I do told us, If you don’t like the way your honestly don’t trust them.” One of the
not believe it’s possible to draw a map state legislature’s treating you, take it up many framed trinkets on his walls was a
with eleven Republicans and two Dem­ with state courts,” Jones said. “So that’s quote by Belva Lockwood, an uplifting
ocrats.” Lewis had not been caught on exactly what we did.” In February, 2022, sentiment that unfortunately has not been
a hot mike or injected with truth serum. the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled borne out by history: “Reforms are slow,
He and his colleagues hoped to avoid that the gerrymandered maps violated but they never go backward.”
being busted for racial gerrymandering, the state constitution. Normally, this The Common Cause staffers were
which violates the Voting Rights Act, would have been the end of it. But Moore there to meet with Pricey Harrison, a
by admitting to partisan gerrymander­ appealed, on the basis of I.S.L.T., and, Democratic state legislator with Eliza­
ing, which doesn’t. (Never mind that in shockingly, that June, the U.S. Supreme beth Warren energy. They sat in an in­
North Carolina, as in many states, par­ Court agreed to take the case. door courtyard, next to a lacklustre foun­
tisan gerrymandering and racial gerry­ The conventional wisdom was that tain, looking over the text of a draft bill
mandering achieve essentially the same the three liberal Justices would almost that would take the ability to gerrymander
thing.) Common Cause sued, and the certainly reject I.S.L.T., and the three away from the legislature, setting up an
case went to the Supreme Court. Jus­ most conservative Justices almost cer­ independent redistricting commission
tice Roberts, writing for the majority, tainly would not. This left the three Jus­ instead. Harrison had introduced the
acknowledged that partisan gerryman­ tices who currently pass for moderates— bill, with minor tweaks, in several leg­
dering is “incompatible with democratic the three who worked for the Bush legal islative sessions, but Tim Moore had
principles” but decided to let it slide any­ team in 2000—as the likely swing votes. never allowed it to come up for a vote.
way, reasoning that the matter was bet­ Not long ago, I met up with Chris Shen­ “If Moore v. Harper goes the wrong
52 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
way,” she said, “maybe this whole thing the various extralegal inputs that shape ozone layer that widens, imperceptibly
becomes futile.” I asked Harrison what what the Justices think, and, presumably, at first, setting off feedback loops that
it was like to work with colleagues who what they think they can get away with. become harder to contain. By the time
seemed ambivalent, at best, about the The sandwiches came, and Jones drove there’s consensus that this is what’s hap-
basic ground rules of democracy. “I’m in silence for a while. Gino Nuzzolillo, a pening, it may be too late to stop it.
an old-fashioned Southerner, so I don’t colleague who was sitting shotgun, com- In 2015, in The Journal of Democracy,
like conflict,”she said. But she mentioned, pared Moore v. Harper to Dobbs v. Jack- the political scientist Javier Corrales used
almost as an aside, that I might find it son Women’s Health Organization, the the term “autocratic legalism.” Crude to-
“interesting” to meet a freshman legislator case that overturned the federal right to talitarian regimes might get their way
named Donnie Loftis. I didn’t understand abortion. “I know that there were people through emergency powers or sweeping
what she was driving at until, just before just like us, on the ground, who were purges, but more sophisticated regimes
we knocked on his door, one of the Com- screaming about Dobbs around this time can weaken checks on their power by
mon Cause employees spelled it out for last year,” he said. “And yet, for most peo- bloodlessly manipulating the levers of
me: Loftis had proudly participated in ple, until that opinion got leaked, they the bureaucracy, thus retaining some plau-
the break-in at the Capitol on January 6th. did not want to think it could actually sible deniability. Corrales focussed on
(“I got gassed three times and was at happen.” Unlike abortion rights, democ- the Chávez government, in Venezuela,
the entrance when they breached the racy isn’t the sort of thing that can be and its selective “use, abuse, and non-use
door,” he posted on Facebook.) eradicated overnight. Still, it was startling of the rule of law.” Instead of shutting
Loftis’s legislative assistant, who is also to think of democracy as just another ten- down a critical media outlet, for exam-
his wife, invited us in. Loftis wore Oakley uous compromise, one whose terms can ple, the regime might burden it with spe-
glasses and a tie with a tie chain; on his always be renegotiated. Often, when cious investigations. Kim Lane Schep-
wall was a drawing of a bald eagle fighting groups like Common Cause organize ral- pele, who teaches international affairs at
a snake and a photo of himself as a younger lies, the goal is to hold elected officials Princeton, has identified similar meth-
man standing next to Jesse Helms, who accountable. This time, their goal was to ods in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and else-
has been called one of the most racist impose accountability on nine unelected where. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
U.S. senators in modern history. I asked Justices with life tenure, individuals whose of Turkey has not banned opposition
Loftis what he thought about the peace- relationship to public opinion seems to parties, but, prior to the most recent elec-
ful transfer of power. “We have been range from polite remove to open hos- tion, his party pushed through laws that
known for that for many years,” he began. tility. Jones said, “If I’m being honest, this diluted its rivals’ electoral power. Benja-
“And this last transfer of power was,” he one is a bit more of a Hail Mary.” min Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of
added, a bit haltingly, “different. At the Israel, has proposed reforms that would
same time, it’s, like, What is the real truth? alk of the looming demise of de- give his governing coalition unprece-
Who do you believe?” Some politicians,
he added, “work on the premise ‘I didn’t
T mocracy doesn’t have to be wrong
for it to have diminishing returns. The
dented control over the judiciary, while
trying to maintain the appearance of le-
lie to you, I just didn’t tell you the whole doomsayers may be directionally right gitimacy. “In all the democracies, includ-
truth.’ Which I struggle with. I’d much but off by a few degrees—calculating ing the United States, elected officials
rather you blatantly lie to me than try to the end to be slightly nigher than it is— are those who choose judges,” Netanyahu
deceive me in a roundabout way.” or they may not be wrong at all. Still, said this year, defending his position. “Is
One night, while driving home from the chorus of clanging alarm bells can the United States not a democracy?”
a stop on the Moore Tour, Jones asked For understandable reasons, the Su-
Shenton, “Is there any part of you that preme Court cases that get front-page
thinks we can win?” They had pulled off coverage tend to bear on culture-war is-
the highway and were waiting in a drive- sues. But the most direct path to power,
through line for fried-chicken sandwiches. almost by definition, is to alter the rules
“I think we can,” Shenton said, though of the game. This can take the form of
he added, “I wouldn’t put money on it.” wonky policy tweaks that the average
Legal formalists believe that the law is voter might not even notice, yet the cu-
bounded by invisible normative guard- mulative effect may be the difference be-
rails; legal realists believe that the law is tween a democracy in substance and a
whatever judges decide to do. When the have a habituating effect. “It’s the end democracy in name only. “You don’t need
Supreme Court first took a challenge to of the republic as we know it” may start to physically block voters from entering
Obamacare, in 2012, many pundits were to sound like “Act now while supplies the polls,” Scheppele said. “A lot of that
confident that the law would be upheld last”—easy to shunt into the mental can happen invisibly.” Last year, Mark
easily, maybe unanimously. But, Shenton equivalent of a spam folder. Lemley, a Stanford Law professor, pub-
said, “by the time the case was argued, it And yet we know from comparative lished an article called “The Imperial Su-
was a nail-biter.” The strength of the un- political science that, when twenty-first- preme Court,” warning, “If the Court de-
derlying arguments had not changed. century democracies do collapse, they cides next Term that we don’t have a right
What had changed was public sentiment, don’t collapse all at once. The process is to elect the winners of elections, as it
media chatter, and partisan dynamics— usually more gradual, like a hole in the seems poised to do, it may dismantle the
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 53
political apparatus of our country for often this temptation to believe that as said, “Ma’am, why are you breaking the
good.” If the Supreme Court does not soon as you remove one major violator law? We know you’re with Antifa.”
issue a calamitous opinion in Moore, some of norms—Trump, in the American con- In this election, Johnson was running
cooler-headed pundits will surely take text—the deep structural forces putting for a fifth term, on a MAGA platform.
this as a sign that the invisible guardrails democracy under strain will dissipate,” On Election Day, I saw him in the park-
have held once again, chiding those who Huq told me. “It’s wishful thinking.” He ing lot of a polling place, wearing his
raised a false alarm. And yet averting a mentioned Tennessee, where Republican pink sheriff’s-department polo. Parked
disaster once, or a hundred times, does legislators recently ejected two of their in front of the entrance was a military
not mean that the disaster was not worth fellow-lawmakers from office for the crime jeep bearing a P.O.W. flag and four signs
worrying about in the first place. Even if of chanting protest slogans—a move that that read “RE-ELECT TERRY JOHNSON.”
the apparatus of democracy is not dis- was more or less unprecedented, until it (A man standing next to Johnson, wear-
mantled this year, or next year, it’s worth wasn’t. “Once you get locked into that ing a sheriff’s-department jacket, said
reckoning with how easily it could be. dynamic,” he said, “it’s not always obvi- that it was his jeep.) A rumor was going
It is debatable when American de- ous how, or whether, you can get out.” around, on Facebook and elsewhere, that
mocracy started to backslide, or to what Some signs of democratic backslid- Johnson’s name had been left off the bal-
extent, but there is no longer any objec- ing are relatively overt; others are more lot. Election officials had already taken
tive reason, except for nostalgia or the ambiguous. In November, a couple of the unusual step of opening two ballots,
stale fumes of American exceptionalism, weeks before the midterm elections, I live on camera, to prove that this wasn’t
to exclude the U.S. from consideration. drove to a convention-center ballroom the case. I asked Johnson what he made
Last year, Tim Michels, a Republican in Hickory, in western North Carolina, of the rumor. “I trust the integrity of the
candidate for governor of Wisconsin, for a bipartisan forum designed to reas- Alamance County Board of Elections,”
pledged to do away with the state’s bi- sure the public, county by county, that he said, as if reading from an invisible
partisan elections commission. He also the electoral process could be trusted. teleprompter. That afternoon, I saw that
assured voters that, once he was in office, The audience raised several stubborn the rumor had been amplified, if not
“Republicans will never lose another elec- narratives about voter fraud, familiar from started, by the official Facebook pages of
tion in Wisconsin.” In April, a Montana Trump rallies and right-wing memes, the Alamance Republican Party and the
lawmaker named Zooey Zephyr argued and a series of election officials took turns Re-Elect Terry Johnson campaign.
against a bill restricting gender-affirming patiently demystifying the process. Still, According to the State Board of Elec-
surgery for minors, implying that any- at least a few listeners were able to re- tions, it is not permissible for “law enforce-
one who voted for the bill would have main mystified. A local I.T. official started ment to be stationed at a voting place.”
“blood on your hands.” Her colleagues a sentence “When it comes to cyber- Was Johnson canvassing voters while in
responded by banning her from the House security . . .” at which point he was in- uniform, or subtly attempting to intim-
floor for the rest of the legislative session. terrupted by a heckler, who shouted, “No idate them, or merely standing in view
Daniel Kelly, a former judge who was a such thing as cybersecurity! Anything of them? There’s what the rules say, on
key adviser in Donald Trump’s fake-elec- that’s hooked up to the Internet can be paper, and then there’s what the people
tor scheme in Wisconsin, recently ran hacked.” The I.T. official did his best to in power can get away with. It would cer-
for the state Supreme Court. (A spokes- explain that North Carolina’s voting ma- tainly be a stretch to say that democracy
person for Kelly later said that he now chines were not—in fact, could not be— is dead in Alamance County—Johnson
“believes Joe Biden is the duly elected connected to the Internet, but this seemed seemed authentically popular, and he won
President.”) He and Michels both lost, to have no effect. Afterward, in the park- handily. Even so, the day after Election
but only because it’s not possible to gerry- ing lot, I approached the heckler, iden- Day, Sailor Jones invited two of his col-
mander a statewide election: if the same tified myself as a journalist, and asked if leagues to his house to lead a workshop
vote patterns had been cast in a legisla- anything he’d heard had changed his on ballot curing. None of their most vivid
tive election, the G.O.P. probably would mind. “Go pound sand,” he said. He got fears had come to pass—no clear instances
have won. The Republican super-major- in his car and slammed the door. Then, of voter suppression or intimidation. Still,
ity in the Wisconsin state legislature has perhaps worried that he had been un- Jones said, “if we thought our democracy
signalled that it is open to impeaching clear, he rolled down his window, shouted, was operating at a hundred per cent, we
the judge who beat Kelly; it just hasn’t “Go fuck yourself,” and peeled off. would be taking the day off.”
settled on a reason for it yet. I spent Election Day in Alamance
In “How to Save a Constitutional De- County, where Sailor Jones lives. The s the oral arguments in Moore v.
mocracy,” the law professors Tom Gins-
burg and Aziz Huq argue that some in-
county is politically diverse, but its long-
time sheriff, Terry Johnson, is something
A Harper began, on the morning of
December 7th, it started to look as if the
stances of democratic decay are organized like a small-town Joe Arpaio. In the sum- diehard proponents of I.S.L.T. would be
around a charismatic leader, but that the mer of 2020, Johnson worked security at disappointed. “Your position seems to
process can also happen in the absence a rally in support of a Confederate mon- go further than Chief Justice Rehnquist’s
of a strongman or after a strongman leaves ument, wearing a pink polo with a sher- position in Bush v. Gore,” Justice Kava-
the stage. They call the latter dynamic iff ’s star and no mask. A protester asked naugh said, skeptically, to the lawyer rep-
“partisan degradation,” in which the rel- him why he was breaking the Gover- resenting Tim Moore. Outside, in front
evant actor is a party, not a person. “There’s nor’s mask mandate. He chuckled and of the courthouse steps, Common Cause
54 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
hosted a rally in a cold drizzle, with a go-
go marching band. “This does not seem
to be the nightmare time line,” Jones said.
Leah Litman, of the University of
Michigan, is a host of “Strict Scrutiny,”
a podcast about the Supreme Court, on
which she often jokes that the current
conservative majority’s approach can be
summarized as “No law, just vibes.” Ap-
parently, between June and December,
there had been a vibe shift. It’s possible
that the three swing Justices had simply
had time to reflect on the hundreds of
pages of legal briefs, Kate Shaw, a Car-
dozo Law School professor and one of
the other hosts, told me. “It’s also possi-
ble that they noticed the enormous pub-
lic outcry”—that they may have been
swayed by any number of blog posts,
radio segments, and perhaps even hum-
ble protest efforts like the Moore Tour.
Another thing that happened between
June and December was the midterm
election, in which the Republican Party
had not met expectations. One theory
was that the Court had overplayed its
hand with Dobbs. Many full-throated
election-denialist candidates, such as Kari
Lake and Doug Mastriano, had also lost,
which contributed to a burgeoning con-
sensus that insurrectionism was not good
politics. “If you’re Roberts or Kavanaugh,
you would have to be chastened by that,”
Michael Liroff, who co-hosts a staunchly
legal-realist podcast called “5–4,” told me. • •
It’s possible that Moore will be decided
narrowly, or that it will end in a 3–3–3
split that doesn’t fully resolve the ques- hoped that the Court would dispense that have not yet been invented. As long
tion. Some might greet this as a victory, with I.S.L.T. once and for all. Vikram as there are politicians determined to
but Liroff wasn’t so sure. “So a third of Amar, the University of Illinois profes- erode democracy, there will be plausible
the Court is endorsing the logic of full-on sor, worried that, “if I.S.L.T. is allowed means by which they can try. In “How
insurrection,” he said, “and that’s the sce- to stay alive and keep evolving,” it could to Save a Constitutional Democracy,”
nario that’s supposed to make me feel lead to disastrous outcomes, including Ginsburg and Huq write of the “majes-
like everything’s fine?” the possibility of a stolen Presidential tic vagueness” of the Constitution—a sal-
In last year’s midterms, the North Car- election. “If you’re going to tell me that utary tool in the hands of those who in-
olina Supreme Court flipped from major- in America the norms are so strong that tend to expand democracy, a dangerous
ity-Democrat to majority-Republican. it’s impossible to have one or two rogue weapon in the hands of those who want
This year, in another highly unusual move, legislatures, I’d have to say you’ve been to undermine it. “The document is suf-
the court reheard the case underlying asleep,” he said. “I might have agreed with ficiently old and terse that you can, if you
Moore v. Harper, and, without citing any that in 2000, or 2015, but there’s no way really want to, make a credible-sound-
new evidence, decided that the gerry- I could agree with it now.” ing argument for almost anything,” Huq
mandered maps it had just declared un- I.S.L.T. is by no means the only Che- said. “What has stopped this from de-
constitutional were now constitutional. khov’s gun. There’s the Electoral Count scending into total farce, so far, is a shared
Some pundits anticipated that the U.S. Act of 1887, which, even after recent re- political and legal culture, a sense of pro-
Supreme Court would throw out the case. forms, still contains potential loopholes; priety and self-enforced boundaries. The
As of this writing, that hasn’t happened, the prospect of “faithless electors” voting happy story you can tell about that is that
but whatever action the Court takes this unpredictably in the Electoral College; it has held back the tide for as long as it
month may end up frustrating everyone, and other scenarios that have been has. The less happy story is that there is
including the activists and scholars who sketched out on obscure legal blogs or no way to guarantee that it will last.” 
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 55
 FICTION

Thursday GEORGE SAUNDERS

56 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 ILLUSTRATION BY MARCIN WOLSKI

 n the bright side, it was lovely sounds of the old neighborhood: for what? To what end? Had it all been

O Thursday.
“Gerard, yes, hi, hello,” said
Mrs. Dwyer, the nurse’s assistant sanc-
yapping sales patter from a kitchen-
window-perched radio; the cars over
on Blair, more blatantly mechanical
just a pointless, random, meaningless
disposition of energy?
No, not pointless, not at all: we
tioned to hand over the Perlman head- and clank-clank-clank than their con- were the point. All that had occurred
piece and the big green pill and the smaller temporary counterparts; distant lawn- before had been necessary to bring
red one that activates the green one. mowers cross-bellowing like enraged us about, to produce the young and
“How was the week?” she asked. crewcut men in dispute; locusts buzz- healthy perfection that was us, our gen-
“Same,” I said. ing from positively everywhere. eration, so that we could finally, on be-
“Oh, gosh, sorry,” she said. All of it was so familiar, utterly dear. half of all who had come before, ren-
In Treatment Room 4, she checked And yet was happening for the first der meaningful that brutal thing called
with the caliper to make sure the pres- time. life on earth.
sure foot of the Perlman was seated Something in the quality of the light Or so I felt, lying on my childhood
correctly. seemed to be making promises regard- lawn beside my sister, Clara.
It was. ing our future: life would continue to Soon I would go inside for a drink.
She seemed a little nervous today. be what it had always been for us, a per- I knew this. I had done so back then
“Green first,” she said. “I know you petual opening, out and out and out. Not and therefore must do so again. I was,
know that.” only would delightful new experiences mostly, the boy I had been that day:
I took the green. keep materializing but our means of un- thirsty, sweet, self-pleased, ignorant
“Good,” she said. “Now the red. Then derstanding and enjoying those experi- of the future, the right side of my face
the agua.” ences would expand as well. A thrilling slightly more sun-warmed than the
I took the red. Drank the water from new world was coming, in which adult left. But I was also, fractionally, the
its pre-measured vial. privileges would be ours: we would drive, older person I was now, cringing at the
“Sit, wait, enjoy,” she said. “May this kiss, smoke, laugh confidently in hus- thought of what he, that boy, would
bring you healing.” kier voices soon to be born mysteriously find inside.
“Thanks,” I said. from within us. Which was: Dad pummelling Mom
By law she had to stand there wait- Then the light, plus the smell of the (joyfully, playfully at first, then with in-
ing until it kicked in. air (loam, just-cut grass, a hint of va- creasing rancor), while Uncle Rod pum-
“Everybody’s got a right,” she said nilla from the Nabisco plant across the melled Dad (in an attempt to quell Dad’s
absently. park), began communicating a second pummelling of Mom) and Aunt Staci
“For sure,” I said, anxious as always subverbal certainty: it was plain to me, also, somewhat performatively, pum-
that this time it wouldn’t work. lying on my back, that, of all the gen- melled Mom. (It was unclear what of-
“To feel O.K.,” she said, “in this crazy erations that had trod upon the earth, fense Mom had originally committed.)
old—wope. There it is. Here it comes, ours—Clara’s and mine, i.e., this very Clara had followed me in and was cow-
yes?” one—would be the first to discover ering near an upended coffee table. Now
Here it came, yes. that the oppressive patterns observable and then one of the adults would step
everywhere around us (wars, riots, away from the brawl to ingest more of
t started, as usual, with a vague divorces, famines, strange old people his or her drink. It was all as confusing
I feeling of remembering: me, grass,
summertime. Then came the youthful
whose bitterness had yellowed their
teeth and warped their spines) could
as it had once actually been. And yet I
knew dimly that, within the hour, all
Memory Body, gradually occupying the be disrupted. All of eternity, that is, had would be well, Rod, Staci, Mom, and
Randomly Recalled Iconic Space: our been leading up to this moment, when Dad restored to conviviality, gleefully
yard on Plymouth Street, me on my we would finally arrive. At last could flinging chairs down from the second-
back on the lawn, my sister, Clara, there begin the culmination of earth’s tire- story deck as if to celebrate the inten-
beside me. Soon, wherever I looked, some history, during which, early on, sity of the earlier round-robin pummel-
there it was, that old world, now the countless generations of men in crude ling, while Clara and I, in an attempt
one and only world, right down to a leather sandals had driven swords into to reëstablish normalcy, played a terse
robin on a leaning fencepost cocking other men in sandals, as the downtrod- game of Chinese checkers in the may-
its head at me, like, Remember me, ran- den women of the stabbed men looked hemic space that was the post-pummel-
dom robin from your youth? on, dreading their coming ravishment, ling living room: couch tipped on its
Based on the shirt I was wearing after which some slightly more sophis- back, several broken light bulbs lying
(red-white-and-blue peace sign in the ticated men, in leggings and cravats, there, like ivory eggshells out of which
center like a bull’s-eye), I was thirteen, had driven sabres into some other men exotic baby birds of light had just burst,
Clara ten (those sweet braids). The two in leggings and cravats, as their down- among a loose flotilla of eight or nine
of us were sharing, the way we did so trodden women coughed into delicate pink party hats, which had come from
often back then, an almost mystical handkerchiefs, dreading their coming a neat, hopeful stack, a stack now jammed
feeling of sibling camaraderie as we ravishment, and even in good times the beneath the radiator, as if it had tried
lay there trying to discern meaningful poor sickened, the rich feasted, men and failed to escape.
shapes in the clouds. Then came the beat horses, lions ate baby gazelles, and Noteworthy were the adjustments
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 57
our young minds were already mak- would imagine, a young person raised ing today. That we are, in a sense, going
ing. On the first level: shame was upon by virtuoso musicians might, on first in a somewhat different direction than
us, of course—embarrassment, resent- finding an instrument in his hand, feel usual. Are you having any issues with
ment of this mode of being, awareness that the moment had arrived for him to your session thus far?”
that others in our peer group likely begin pursuing the family business. I said nothing, so that I might sooner
did not live in such a low and volatile As for Clara, in the future, she would, return to Clara.
milieu. On a second level, perhaps con- more than once, find herself being pum- “Awesome,” Mrs. Dwyer said, and
tradictorily: denial that this pummel- melled and not objecting to it, in the eased the Pad back out.
ling was odd or indicated any defect in belief (the seed of which had just been Obscure details of memory once
our family. We were, that is, stretching planted) that being pummelled did not again began to present: the subtle but
to see this behavior as a manifestation mean she was unloved and, in fact, might specific smell of the marbles from the
of our parents’ enviable lust for life; very well mean the opposite. Chinese-checker set, the feel of my
the other children and their non- It was bitter, being back here. pinkie in one of the holes of the game
pummelling parents were mundane I could have wept for those two chil- board, the sound a deck umbrella made
squares, never moved by passion into dren, sitting still as bunnies before that as, having been tossed from the deck,
this higher realm of uncontrollability. ancient, long-ago-landfilled Chinese- it landed on its tip, lurched errantly to-
We were trying this attitude on for checker board as, the supply of chairs ward the house, and knocked the down-
size, one might say. up there having apparently been ex- spout askew.
And, alas, I saw now, we were in the hausted, couch cushions began raining Clara and I flinched at the sound.
process of being molded. Pummelling down from the deck. “They’re just being stupid,” I said.
would, ever after, be one of the choices “Drinking,” she said.
available to us. Pummelling had been
put on the menu, so to speak. To some,
“G erard?” I heard, and went outside
to find Mrs. Dwyer in the yard,
We both knew, with absolute cer-
tainty, that we would never drink.
pummelling was unthinkable. To Clara sort of, gigantic, nearly as tall as the tall- And yet we would, causing much
and me, henceforth? Quite thinkable. est of the three oaks. A green leaf the misery for ourselves and others over the
We had seen these people we loved size of a dinner plate wafted slowly course of the rocky, confused decades
and respected engaged in it, and there- earthward and landed on her shoe. She to come.
fore, forevermore, pummelling would made no motion to remove it. “Let’s go down the basement,” she
be something we ourselves might con- She had inserted, I could feel, there said.
sider doing should we be placed under between my implanted scalp receptor and Which was how she always phrased
sufficient duress. the Perlman pressure foot, one of those it back then, the little sweetheart.
Because this was such a signal fam- razor-thin Everton Interruption Pads. There were treasures at the bottom
ily event—a moment of peak emotional Well, of course she had. of the stairs: to the left, Mr. Petey, my
intensity—I would often, in the years to Otherwise, how would I be able to old rocking horse, a light coating of dust
come, find myself waiting, as it were, for see and hear her so well? on one haunch, in which I had, some-
an excuse or opportunity to pummel “Gerard,” she said. “You may have time earlier, I now recalled, lovingly traced
someone, in much the same way that, I noticed that something new is happen- out the words “OL’ PAL.” Here was the
tool table, Dad’s ham radio, the rack of
Mom’s old coats, which we briefly stood
among, enjoying the odors of that by-
gone time, when the streets of our town
had bustled with women in just such
coats (brightly colored, robustly belted),
their hair piled high, lipstick vivid, women
who, though ostensibly submissive, ex-
uded a dominative, flirtatious optimism.
Everywhere were forgotten wonders:
a button on one of Mom’s coats so loz-
enge-like I felt an urge to ingest it; a
faded Yosemite travel pennant with a
black spot situated near the bottom of
El Capitan that looked, if one squinted,
like a cave, but was actually a piece of
tarlike gum or putty; a cluster of um-
brellas roped together in a corner, near
the old crank-style telephone, whose
casing of grained wood made it seem
like a piece of fine furniture.
“Oh, look, another thing for the inevitable estate sale.” Then something happened.
 I experienced it as a click of the kind My God, was I ever there. Where? would pass before he would deign to
that occurs sometimes with the jaw, only Well, here. In the here and now. In the speak to his mother, and after which
it ran down the length of my spine. I current sadness. Heartsick that Mr. he never spoke to his father again.
turned to Clara. Had she also felt it? Petey would have to live out the rest
She was gone. of his life in this basement, unridden feeling of distance began to insert
I was wearing a different shirt.
Throughout the basement, a slight
among the relics. I would never forget
him, I assured him. I would be right
A itself between the boy and me. I
felt myself slipping out of the Memory
but universal rearrangement had oc- upstairs if he ever needed me. He should Body, being more or less dragged up-
curred. Things were inches away from just whinny. stairs as I grew several sizes, such that
where they had just been; were over- Then again, I was six. Did I really the house became a rigid squarish cloak
turned now, slightly off-kilter, or miss- still want this baby toy in my room? around my shoulders, my head popped
ing altogether. Half the Ping-Pong table Mr. Petey looked up out of the chimney, and the
was inexplicably folded up. sadly. rigid cloak became a scratchy
Outside, it was winter. Mr. Gleason Baby toy? he thought. clinic blanket.
shovelled next door, under a cerulean (That is, I had him think, Here was Mrs. Dwyer,
sky that was clear in the way a sky is back then.) offering me a Coke, which
clear only in the deepest cold. (The Sorry, old paint, I thought. I’d pre-chosen as my Post-
ground-level window through which I No, I get it, pard, he Session Drink / Snack.
was viewing him had lost a thin, diag- thought back. Look, you’d The Interruption Pad
onal crack that had been visible in it best mosey along. Don’t was in—I could feel it.
only moments before.) worry about me. I’ll just “Horace is here, Gerard,”
And, strangely, here on the game be down here with the rats. she said. “You know Horace,
shelf was the very Chinese-checkers We had some good right?”
set that Clara and I had just been play- times, though, didn’t we? I thought. I did know Horace. When Horace
ing with upstairs, only now the lid was And who knows? Maybe I’ll come visit wasn’t around, Mrs. Dwyer sometimes
not warped and held on with two green sometimes. referred to him as her “special tech
rubber bands but seemingly brand-new. For a little ride? he thought, ruefully. weenie.”
Nearby was a standing mirror. In it, Both of us knew this would never “What just happened, from your per-
I was small, smaller—maybe six. No happen, nor should it. spective?” Horace said. “Hi, Gerard, by
longer thirteen but six. Then I remem- Humming, the little boy I had been the way.”
bered: I had once, when about that age, began wandering around that January I held one finger up, as in: Hang on,
come down here to say goodbye to basement, inspecting a fistful of wooden I find myself somewhat trapped be-
Mr. Petey, whom Mom had just that shims in a dried-out caulk bucket, the tween two worlds.
morning pronounced me too old to shovel portion of an old snow shovel I took a sip of the Coke, then con-
ride. (The dust into which “OL’ PAL” connected by a length of twisted duct veyed to them as much as I could: Some-
would soon be inscribed had not yet, tape to its former handle, a length of thing was amiss. This immersion had
at this point, gathered upon his haunch.) rebar, a perfectly good pane of glass, not been tightly time-confined within
Something was amiss. These immer- considering whether any of these might the usual continuous one-hour window.
sions were always tightly time-confined prove useful for the fort, the fort he’d Not at all. Rather, I had started at thir-
within a continuous one-hour window. planned to build all last summer but teen, then leapt backward into a non-
One dropped in, lived that hour, came had never even begun. contiguous time interval some seven
back out as the meds wore off. One The pummelling? Had never hap- years earlier, and was, hence, six, there
never found oneself leaping forward or pened. Had not yet happened. He had at the end, six years old.
backward into some noncontiguous no idea that such a thing could happen. I had still enjoyed it, but it had been
time interval. Ditto the many pummellings that a little strange.
Which, it appeared, I had just done. would follow that first one, the reve- “So that’s good, right?” Mrs. Dwyer
Specifically, a seven-year backward lation that his mother had been cheat- said to Horace.
leap. ing with his father’s brother, Uncle “Yes and no,” said Horace, pulling a
But that wasn’t all. Rod, the shouting fights at restau- screwdriver from his back pocket. He
Something else was strange, though rants and school recitals, the separa- then uncapped my Perlman and shone
I found myself unable to say exactly tion, the divorce, the succession of his little flashlight down into it.
what. neo-partners both parents would plod “Moving nicely around in time, seems
I called out to Mrs. Dwyer. joylessly through in a series of dan- like,” said Mrs. Dwyer.
What a touchingly high voice I had. gerous-feeling, underfurnished apart- “Albeit in the wrong direction,”
“What’s that, David?” Mom yelled ments, all culminating in an explosive Horace said.
from upstairs. “Geez, say goodbye, final brawl at his own second wed- “Questions, Gerard, additional con-
then come up. It’s not like he’s a real ding (to Jolene, of the piled-up dark cerns?” said Mrs. Dwyer.
horse, goof.” hair, the snoring, the lovely singing Now that the fog was lifting, I found
David? I wondered. Who’s David? voice), after which nearly thirty years that, yes, I did have an additional concern,
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 59
a rather significant one: I had no sister.
Never had. I was an only child. I grew up
not in a suburban house on “Plymouth NAUSICAÄ
Street” but on a farm in northern Minne­
sota. A wheat farm, a sprawling wheat I can see your room only with my eyes closed now—
farm. In a tidy little farmhouse built on that’s how little I understand anything at all—and you
a solid slab, i.e., no basement. I had no sitting up as I entered, and in one motion you throwing
Uncle Rod, no Aunt Staci. My parents, off your nightgown, cornflowers and flannel, and the moment
both only children themselves, were min­ catching your hair’s wildness in an insolent shrug,
isters, exceedingly gentle ministers, who and then I was Odysseus naked before Nausicaä—but no
framed every picture I drew, incorporated you were naked—I was merely doomed, and I moved
my child­thoughts into their sermons, as into the twilight of a cave, like a man loving his own
eschewed alcohol entirely, had never raised ruin, happy for his wounds and happy for the wounds
a hand to each other. Never had there to come. Maybe a spark jumped, but there is no name
been the slightest hint of a falling­out for the god of fragments—there was just a fire I believed in.
between them, or between us, and, in fact, And there is still a fire that I believe in. Like the nymph,
I’d travelled back to Anslip on two occa­ incandescent in the glade, from whom the man should have
sions to help first Father, then Mother, run in terror instead of begging her to renounce her
pass into the next world—experiences, godliness in the name of carnal love. Still, there were
separated by a decade, that I counted old men once in their robes and togas who were wise and
among the most profound of my life, dur­ famously schooled by a woman, and they told us that
ing which I had grown even closer to the everything here is a shadow of something else—like a song
parent from whom I was parting and ever plucked on strings that implies two bodies dancing in an
more grateful to have been a member of ecstasy beyond all earthly knowing. Where is your bed
that loving, dignified, forthright family. now? Your prodigal body that whole polities might worship?
“Uh­oh,” Mrs. Dwyer said. “Some­ In what world? That is what I am asking, love. What world?
body’s onto us.”
She said it playfully but in her eyes —Frank X. Gaspar
was a touch of panic.

’d come here, as I did every Thurs­ “We possibly skipped a step,” said And yet, when I was growing up out
I day, for my usual, so to speak: to see
Mother and Father as they had been,
Mrs. Dwyer.
“The one of asking your permission,”
there, on what was known, geologically,
as the Hunter Uplift, no neighbor within
to bask once more in their love, to feel said Horace. thirty miles, Coke seemed a harbinger
their fond, unconditional acceptance, to “Which, by rights, we should have of a dazzling new space­age life, a life
be young again, deeply immersed in done,” said Mrs. Dwyer. less tedious and agricultural. Because
one of those sacred early days on the “That’s on us,” said Horace. forbidden, Coke was alluring. Coke,
farm—sunbeams slanting in through “Gerard, finish your Coke, please,” back then, seemed like something a
the wrecked roof of the old barn, the Mrs. Dwyer said. “Clearly, we owe you young person might need to know a lit­
smell of breakfast cooking in the house an explanation.” tle something about. If a Coke was on
slightly agitating the chickens outside, Trying to collect my thoughts, I took the blue table, I’d reach up, palm the
the antique post­office bench (salvaged a sip of the Coke. can, pretending to be a grownup about
and repainted by Father) gleaming with Coke, gosh. to pick it up. And Coke tasted amaz­
dew out there at the perfectly linear Even now, a Coke was a bit of a guilty ing! Like a drink that bites you back,
wheat­field/lawn boundary. What a pleasure. Mother and Father had never Mom would say, sneaking me a tiny sip,
dream, to be immersed again in the dear allowed Coke in the farmhouse. It rot­ matching my tiny sip with a long slurp
minutiae of the farmhouse itself: the ted the teeth, they felt, and initiated a from her drink.
pale­green Princess phone, a certain habit of craving, which might color a Her alcohol drink.
paw­shaped dog dish, the sound of the young person’s expectations of life, caus­ Cheers, kiddo, she’d slur. Seed the
Minneapolis Children’s Choir on the ing him to feel that happiness must con­ day.
record player, the way that, as a young sist of always getting what one wanted, Those were wild times back then.
child, I would pad through the house whereas true happiness lay in the knowl­ Wild, scary, uncontrolled—
to flip the record over as soon as I heard edge that God was within one always, Wait, wait.
the wop-wop-wop indicating that the nothing additional required. Back when?
needle had reached the end. We sometimes prayed on this as a Back where? There had never been
I had experienced none of this. family, asking the Almighty to aid in a Coke on any table in our farmhouse,
Instead I had been subjected to the our discernment as we worked to ex­ not ever, not once.
memories of a person entirely unknown clude from our lives anything that might No table of ours had ever been blue.
to me. obstruct our relation to Him. Mother had never slurped, nor slurred.
60 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
 “Gerard, forgive us,” Mrs. Dwyer said. There on my lap tray was the Coke a bit of a blank. Which was odd. To not
“There’s some urgency here.” (briefly khaki, then not). know where one’s sister was? Or what
“We turn to you in our hour of need,” “So, Gerard,” Horace said. “Any she had been like, after a certain point?
said Horace. further temporal leaping happening?” Didn’t seem like being a very good
“Equipped with your implants and “If so, in what direction?” said brother.
all, you have capabilities we simply don’t,” Mrs. Dwyer. “Unfortunately, no one knows,” said
said Mrs. Dwyer. “Were you getting older or younger?” Mrs. Dwyer. “She just up and vanished
She was, I noted, holding the Inter- said Horace. one day. A mother of four. Left a note
ruption Pad, which, apparently, she’d “Younger,” I said. but no forwarding address.”
eased out. “Interesting,” said Horace. “Which is where you come in, Ge-
“Damn it,” said Mrs. Dwyer. rard,” Horace said. “David Marker died
sheer curtain blew in and popped, Unbidden, apropos of nothing, like last April. Somewhere in there, in his
A blew in and popped. I was stand-
ing on a chair, at a blue table. Out a
the last shack from a destroyed village
that floats past at the end of a flood,
brain, would have been, or still is, we
assume, some possible residual knowl-
second-story window: red brick apart- came a final memory: in the midst of edge of his sister’s whereabouts.”
ment buildings as far as the eye could one of the fierce, grinding sessions, the Horace had glanced, as he said this,
see. On clotheslines strung between white metal cabinet in the kitchen, in at a waist-high closet back near a bin
them danced the garments of our fellow- which the cereal boxes were kept (boxes labelled “Only Soiled Linen.”
poor, flailing about in the wind, as if to embossed with exquisitely colored car- “ Well, not his ‘brain,’ exactly,”
say, Yes, though we are the clothes of toons of talking tigers and toucans), had Mrs. Dwyer said. “That makes it sound
the poor, we dance, and what of it? A come crashing down, causing toddler-me weird.”
shirt threw an arm up merrily. A pair to skedaddle, which elicited howls of “Relevant portions of it,” said Horace.
of boxers inverted itself in joy, leg holes tipsy laughter from Mom and Dad. “All legally obtained, by the way.”
briefly opening upward. “Gerard,” Horace said, “let us, if we “How it works, Gerard,” said Mrs.
In their bedroom, Mom and Dad may, say a single word to you.” Dwyer, “is, it’s on a sort of direct beam.
had the cans of Crazy Foam out and A few weeks after the cabinet crashed, Into your Perlman. Basically a Q-dif-
were mock-fighting. Why did they play Clara was born and they let me hold her. fractor. We also installed a Speyer Fo-
so rough and seem to like it? Someone “Clara,” Mrs. Dwyer said. cusser the last time you were in.”
was going to have to clean all that Foam “Does that name mean anything to “Probably should have mentioned
up. When they played rough like this, you?” Horace said. that as well,” said Horace.
I felt left out. There was something “My sister,” I said. “We know this is a lot to process,”
alarming about the way they would “Whom you loved,” said Horace. said Mrs. Dwyer.
sometimes, in the midst of wrestling, I did love her. And missed her. Or, I It was.
pause to have a fierce, grinding whis- should say, through every instant of all “Why do we care so much?” said
per. And I had to stand there, waiting that I had just been compelled to re- Horace. “You may be wondering.”
for them to remember that I was the member had run a quiet, pervasive feel- “O.K., full disclosure, Gerard,” Mrs.
main thing. ing of missing Clara, someone who, Dwyer said. “Clara is my grandmother.”
This was not Plymouth Street but “Also full disclosure?” said Horace.
an earlier, smaller apartment, where we “I’m in love with Rita.”
lived when Clara was born. Mrs. Dwyer blushed, as in, Yes, we’re
I was therefore three, maybe two. in love, and what a strange and beauti-
Now, seen through the popping cur- ful thing, to have worked side by side
tains, the Interruption Pad rose, hover- uneventfully all these years and then,
ing among the dozens of flailing clothes- wow, boom.
lines, while down in the small, grassless Horace was also blushing, either be-
rectangle that was the Mastrianis’ back cause he’d just revealed his love for Mrs.
yard (sun-scorched in summer, I re- Dwyer or because he’d admitted to hav-
called, a rippling blue, bubble-laced ice when all was said and done, had loved ing parts of David Marker’s brain over
field in winter) stood Horace, growing me more purely and disinterestedly than there in that little closet.
several feet a second, until he was gaz- anyone I’d ever known. “I was so lonely after Mr. Dwyer
ing in at me through the window. “Any idea where she is now?” said passed,” Mrs. Dwyer said. “I thought
“Hey, champ,” he said. Mrs. Dwyer. my life was over. And now, such bounty.”
The walls of the apartment fell away. “No,” I said. “We just can’t bear the thought of
The world was briefly made entirely of But suddenly I very much wanted to bringing our baby into this world know-
khaki (khaki clothes hung on khaki know. ing that somewhere he or she has a
clotheslines under a cluster of drifting It wasn’t like her to just disappear. great-grandma she or he’s never going
khaki clouds), which gradually resolved Or was it? I actually wasn’t sure. It hadn’t to get the blessing of having the chance
into the gentle khaki swell of one leg of been like her as a child. But, in terms of to learn from,” Horace said.
my trousers. what she was like later? I was drawing “We were close, Grandma Clara and
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 61
me, when I was little,” said Mrs. Dwyer. Clara had left behind when she fled the wipe into a grill or a deep fryer, spray-
“If we can just somehow get you to get state with her dealer, the brutal Jeff paint a dick on his truck, or spread a vi-
older, as David, the cool thing is you’ll Picks. I was off to find her, in the To- cious false rumor about him among our
likely meet me, as a kid. Isn’t that crazy? rino, the Torino gifted to Mom by one much younger co-workers.
I love that.” of her lovers, either Steve B. or Derek, The clicks, coming fast now, merged
“Wow, holy shit, just flashed on it, a total piece of crap she’d passed on to into a maddening spinal hum.
it’s so obvious,” Horace said, dropping me the minute it started needing re- Three wives, two kids, all of whom
to his knees, crawling triumphantly into pairs and thereafter always referred to had broken off contact with me; on wel-
the little closet. as “that sweet ride I bought you.” fare, bragging because briefly off wel-
Why me? Why, of all their clients, “Gerard!” Horace called from a rest fare, on welfare again; in the mirror, a
had they chosen me? area thronged with idling trucks. “You’re big red nose and a bulging gut, from all
Well, I thought I knew why: I was old. getting older now, yes?” the drinking; but if anybody felt like
Old and lonely. I left my small apartment Despite myself I must have nodded. judging me (David), such as, for exam-
only to come here for these treatments “Where’s Clara?”Mrs. Dwyer shouted, ple, him (Gerard), I (David) might just
or go to the market. I was tired, frail, had her face looking manic on a passing bill- point out, all due respect, that he (Ge-
no joy. What new thing could ever hap- board, seen through some lightly falling rard) had always been cautious to a fault,
pen to me? I just clanked around dully snow. “Focus on that!” prim in aspect, had managed to push
in the dissolving machinery of my body, Here came the click again, that jaw- away, with his brittle sanctimony, any-
farting pretty much continuously, largely click down my spine. one who’d ever entertained any idea of
unaware of it, because, in addition to going I was sitting splay-legged on a berm. getting close to him.
deaf, I had become forgetful and often Office-park berm. Spread out across the Well, wait a minute.
neglected to put my hearing aids in. berm were the pages of my résumé, fresh Mother and Father had, it was true,
I had once owned a small business, from the copy shop, pages that just loomed large in my (Gerard’s) mind
translating Christian texts into foreign needed to be put into the right order whenever I’d met a young lady. Some-
languages, had travelled widely in Eu- and the job would be mine, if only the times she would be dressed too sugges-
rope and Asia, had been, for a time, wind would die down and I could some- tively or prove too harsh in her speech;
friends with a local television personal- how become less buzzed. one might find oneself wincing at her
ity, used to dash up flights of stairs to Judging by my hair, through which table manners. I may have been from An-
meet colleagues for dinner, had happily I now ran a hand, I was thirty-five, slip, but we knew how to comport our-
picked up many a tab. thirty-six? selves at table. This was, in a sense, a form
But that was not my life now. Did I know where Clara was? At that of Christian love: to know how to behave
Now I lived for these Thursdays, on moment? I did. Living over on Ninth in order to put others at ease. As opposed
which I might briefly feel somewhat Street in that shit-box rental with her to holding one’s fork like a cudgel, à la
alive again. three kids, real stinkers all: they mocked Rosalie Swanson. To wad up one’s nap-
Knowing this, Horace and Mrs. Dwyer her, hid her glasses, dropped weird shit kin at the beginning of a meal and leave
must have considered me unlikely to in her food, mimed the way she walked it sitting there on the table throughout,
object. after she’d had a few. Last time I’d seen as the otherwise appealing Beth Lancer
This was hurtful. I was, though old, her, down at the Aero, she was in rough had done that fateful Thanksgiving?
still a person, and should have been asked. shape: just fired from Sam’s Club for Raised the question of what it might be
“I would like to go home,” I said. drinking while greeting, bugging me for like to spend one’s life with someone so
“And we are totally going to make a loan so she could go to (get this) rehab. heedless and disordered, especially should,
that happen,” Mrs. Dwyer said. “In just Ha, fat chance, what did I look like, God willing, children enter the picture.
a bit. Horace, are we good?” a sap? And then there was the closest call of all,
“Give it a shot,” Horace said from Two of the pages kite-skimmed off Emma Beam, a midlife companion (kind,
inside the closet. the berm, went airborne, vanished into warm, well read) who’d ultimately proved
At which time Mrs. Dwyer yanked the early-May leaves of some distant trees. unsuitable in light of the coarse, cackling
out my Interruption Pad. Great. Perfect. Shit. laugh she would emit whenever one tried
So much for that job. speaking in earnest to her about impor-
nd I found myself remembering. Then onward into middle age and tant matters of the spirit.
A Remembering mountains. When
driving in mountains, a guy needed to
the many disappointing failures there.
Jesus God, the number of low tav-
Friendships had, likewise, been diffi-
cult: Marco, the local television person-
keep his eye on the engine temp. So erns, parking lots, and public spaces in ality, whose inability to return my phone
Dad had said. The air smelled of pine, which I had pummelled someone or been messages in a timely manner—a result,
wood smoke, motor oil. That, over there? pummelled; the variety of bleak strip I felt, of the arrogance related to his (very
Denver. Wow, I was approaching Den- malls in which, too old for it, I had worked mild) “fame”—caused me, ultimately, to
ver. For the first time ever. Going, like, some food-service gig, wearing a paper end our acquaintance; Eric, a former em-
eighty. How did far-off lights even twin- hat; the number of times that, in such ployee and an agnostic, who repeatedly
kle like that? On the gearshift jangled places, my anger at being underestimated rebuffed me when I invited him and his
a stacked sheath of six hippie bracelets by a boss had led me to shove that ass- young family to our church, then quit
62 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
the company in a huff simply because,
in a gesture of friendship, as his mar-
riage was ending, I suggested that it
might have been his very failure to bring
God into his family that had doomed it.
Huh.
What a strange, uncomfortable thrill
it was, being judged from within by
someone not oneself, someone crude,
bold, obstreperous, obnoxious, forever
on the verge of pummelling someone,
with a booming laugh and a habit of
standing too close to the person he was
willfully deriding, someone who smoked,
drank, and always gunned the engine
of his car twice, loudly, before driving
off, someone who, nevertheless, saw one
with startling acuity, and communicated
quite convincingly his unequivocal con-
clusion that—
Well, that one had been a prig, all
one’s life.
A cautious, judgmental prig.
Superior, cold, aloof, impossible to
love, hence friendless in old age.
Goodness.

orace must now have turned some

H dial to its endmost point. I felt my-
self abruptly propelled forward through
a series of discrete late-life memory clus-
ters: all the diner countertops at which
• •
I (David) had sat during those final years;
every arrowhead-shaped silver cloud at sneaky turd never laid a finger on her The hospice nurse came in, the look
which I’d gazed up; all the dogs who, if the kids or grandkids were around. on her face saying, Lord, Mr. Marker,
walking by, had swung their heads affa- So: No telling. Anybody. Ever. That’s your time is nigh. Then she became
bly back to watch me pass; my last apart- your part, D. You have to promise. Horace, bearing a tiny body bag. Which
ment, the Lee Street dump, its front gut- Since she’d come out here, it’d been morphed into his fanny pack, from
ter hanging down the day I moved in, nothing but good. She’d never felt so which he withdrew a notebook. The
still hanging down the day I— free, so happy. All she did was take walks sun slipped out from behind a cloud,
Ah, yes, Lee Street was the place I down by the lake, say her prayers, go to causing the tree-shaped dancing shad-
would die; it was my death apartment. meetings, write in this funky diary she’d ows on the rug to vanish, even as the
I was in bed, in pain, in quite a lot of bought. No stress, no chaos. Her job was rug divided itself into the discolored
pain, all the chub having recently fallen a piece of cake. Yeah, she’d found a lit- Italianate tiles of Treatment Room 4.
right off. I was, yes, hoo boy, dying, while tle job. At a candle store. The simple Mrs. Dwyer, Interruption Pad in
looking for something, something dear things, so good, so good. hand, was looking down at me like I
to me. One hand pawing around the Was Clara, as of today, the day of my was a Christmas gift she meant to
rumpled sheets, I found it—a note, on a death, still alive, in that place, Dunbar, unwrap.
purple piece of stationery, which I’d been to which she’d fled years ago? “And?” she said gleefully.
hanging on to for many years now, from She was. It occurred to me, to us, to David
Clara, this address on the envelope: 138 Had she ever written to me again? and me, to be quiet, appear stunned.
Shallow Pond Lane, Dunbar, N.Y. Every Christmas. (“All still good,” So stunned by what we had just ex-
In the note, a request that I destroy one card had said. “Still finding life a perienced that we literally had nothing
the note and not tell anyone that I’d blessing,” said another.) to say.
heard from her, not even her kids. Es- Had she ever, in all those years, re- “Um, O.K.,” Mrs. Dwyer said.
pecially not her kids. Or her grandkids. leased me from my promise? “Nothing?” said Horace. “Nothing
They’d tell Lewis. They were somehow No. at all?”
all in cahoots with Lewis. Lewis had Asked me to visit? Sorry, sorry, I told them. It had all
them eating out of his hand. That Never once. been a blur. I’d seen David’s death,
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 63
yes. Wow, had I. Death: gosh, geez, who had always been either on some- Then, up the sidewalk, here she
terrible. But sadly, if he had ever known thing or promising to quit something, came: a handsome woman in her
where she’d gone, he’d forgotten by either praising to the sky the latest mid- to late seventies, tall, pretty but
then. And, actually, at the moment of big but surprisingly gentle guy re- hunched, somewhat Earth Mother-
death, one is not thinking of such cently kicked out of the Marines for ish in aspect. Not breaking stride,
things. One is not really even a person no reason or claiming that she hadn’t she arranged her long red-gray hair
anymore but, rather, a frightened ani- seen it coming when that fat son of into two pert braids, left first, then
mal, drawn inexorably toward that a bitch suddenly started accusing her right.
which one fears most. of wiretapping his landline. She was, That was her, that was Clara to a
“Huh,” said Mrs. Dwyer. in truth, someone I, mired in my own tee. She’d been doing that move since
“Why do we not quite believe you?” battles, had lost track of years ago. fifth grade.
said Horace. To me (Gerard), had I ever met her, Now she caught sight of me. I knew
They’d find somebody else. They she would have seemed a highly prob- what I looked like: Gerard. And had
would. So many people came in here: lematic individual; my over-developed no wish to alarm her.
old people, poor people, bored people, sense of preëmptive offended caution But, also, David was there within me,
lonely people, people just ripe for this would have caused me to shun her. even still.
sort of thing. (She chewed with her mouth open, Could she see it?
All I had to do now was hold steady, listened to “classic rock,” nose-snorted I would have to talk fast: ask her
continue to appear clueless. when she laughed.) I had never been to step inside, read the note, while I
I reached for the empty Coke, tried comfortable around such people. Such waited respectfully on the porch. Soon,
to drink from it, shook the can around people, although they were, yes, of she would come out. I could just imag-
as if shaking it might miraculously course, children of God, were best kept ine the look she’d have, then, on her
refill it. at arm’s length, for their sake and for face. I’d seen it many times before, a
“Oh, well,” Mrs. Dwyer said. “Worth one’s own. look that said, Are you messing with
a try, I guess.” Still, if a person didn’t wish to be me right now, brother?
“Gerard, what was done to you, by found, we felt, she should not be. But I would not be. I would not
us?” Horace said. “Was wrong. We see And Mrs. Dwyer and Horace would be messing with her. I would be, as
that now.” be coming for her soon. David might have put it, “serious as
“Clearly, we made just a ton of mis- For all their dreamy yapping, they a heart attack.” I would have much to
takes in here today,” said Mrs. Dwyer. were brats, entitled brats, with the tell her. For the first time in my (Da-
“It would mean a lot to us to part as mindless vigor of youth, who wanted vid’s) life, I would have the means to
friends,” said Horace. what they wanted so strongly and tell her, really tell her, how I felt,
By which they meant: How about with such a presumption of eternal equipped, as I would be, with his (Ge-
don’t rat us out? innocence that it would never occur rard’s) words, his inexplicable self-con-
For a retreating enemy, Father always to them that a thing they strongly fidence. I (Gerard) would have what
said, build a golden bridge. felt like doing might be better left I sorely needed: a pal, a platonic con-
I indicated that although I would undone. fidante, someone I might, because of
be happy enough to consider the mat- our long history with her, at least be
ter closed, I felt, unfortunately, that, drove the two hours west to Dunbar. somewhat able to tolerate. I (David)
in the future, I must pursue these treat-
ments in a different Center, perhaps
I There, parked in front of the lit-
tle duplex at 138 Shallow Pond Lane,
would have his (Gerard’s) body, a pre-
cious, life-filled body that, though old,
the one over in the Peltham Mall. I wrote a note, explaining to Clara, still promised some number of good
“Fair enough,” said Mrs. Dwyer. as well as I could, all that had hap- days ahead.
“I know those guys over there,” pened. If she wished to reconnect with It was really something.
Horace said. “Tell Eric I said hi.” Rita, her granddaughter, I said, I could The sun was dropping. From the
With that, Mrs. Dwyer unseated my arrange it. If not, I suggested she leave shore of the lake came the singing of
Perlman foot. this address and go somewhere new, happy children. That singing might
And they let me go. quickly, somewhere that would have have come from any time, any place
meant nothing to David, that would at all. Life (I felt, we felt) could hardly
utside, I sat a moment in my an- have been nowhere in his mind at be sad, or over, if such sounds were
O cient Dart.
What a day.
or around the time of his death, a
place, ideally, that he’d never even
still being made, and if, up a sidewalk,
there could still come someone we
Across the parking lot were the heard of. had held dear for many years, who
closed-down casino and the defunct I pushed open the mail slot, dropped might, in what time was left, become
Arthur Treacher’s. the note in. As I did, there came from both our sister for the first time and
I found myself thinking of Clara. inside the unmistakable smell of her: our sister again. 
Who was she? Who was she to her perfume, her clothes, the foods she
me, really? liked to cook. NEWYORKER.COM
To me (David), she was someone Gosh. George Saunders on the nature of mind.

64 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023

 THE CRITICS

BOOKS

BORDER CONTROL
The economics of immigration vs. the politics of immigration.

BY IDREES KAHLOON

n October 5, 1908, a hammy melo- ican religion. “America is God’s Cruci- The critics were mainly contemptu-
O drama made its début in Wash-
ington, D.C.: Israel Zangwill’s “The
ble, the great Melting-Pot where all the
races of Europe are melting and re-form-
ous. “Sentimental trash masquerading
as a human document,” the New York
Melting-Pot,” a four-act play that in- ing!” the protagonist, a struggling Jew- Times judged. Across the Atlantic, the
troduced the dominant metaphor for ish composer named David Quixano, Times of London declared the play’s
the American immigrant experience. proclaims. “What is the glory of Rome “rhapsodising over music and crucibles
The plot is thin—a New York tenement and Jerusalem where all nations and and statues of liberty” to be “romantic
romance threatened by an Old World races come to worship and look back, claptrap.” But when President Theodore
blood feud is mended by the salvific compared with the glory of America, Roosevelt attended the première he was
power of patriotism. Mostly, it’s a pre- where all races and nations come to la- utterly smitten. (“That’s a great play,
text for pontificating about a new Amer- bour and look forward!” Mr. Zangwill, that’s a great play!” he is

The limits of immigration are set not by economics but by political psychology—by backlash unconcerned with net benefits.
ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 65
said to have shouted.) The vivid alle- different—a drag on the welfare state, Márquez style, six brothers who all had
gory—of “souls melting in the Cruci- a threat to native laborers, a pox on the first name Muhammad—were able
ble” and divine fires purging inherited the culture. to wend their way to America. My
rivalries—imprinted something indeli- mother, the tenth of the litter, ended up
ble on the American psyche. he politics of immigration have in Lexington, Kentucky, where I was
The play arrived during a heyday of
immigration. Ellis Island was at peak
T always made for strange bedfel-
lows. Free-trading Ayn Rand acolytes
born in 1994. With a few substitutions
of place and date, many Americans can
capacity, accepting nineteen hundred join with cosmopolitan social-justice tell some variant of this tale.
newcomers a day; one in seven Ameri- progressives in encouraging more What has all this global movement
cans was foreign-born. Although plenty migration. Cultural conservatives join actually done to America? The politi-
of native-born Americans with old-guard trade union- cal arguments are harder to answer than
were troubled, Zangwill’s ists in opposition. Sorting the economic ones. Although the dis-
openhearted sentiments through the thicket of ques- mal science is rife with disagreement
spoke to many others. Yet tions—economic, political, on many topics—from microeconomists
only a few years later the and philosophical—posed butting heads about the irrationality of
play’s hopefulness seemed by immigration has always human preferences to macroeconomists
dated and out of step. The been difficult. But those arguing about how to quell inflation—
First World War height- questions have gained ur- there is a broad consensus that immi-
ened suspicion of foreign- gency as the cycle now re- gration is largely beneficial to migrants
ers, who competed for jobs peats itself. The percentage and their hosts alike. In 2017, the Na-
(maybe harboring unionist of foreign-born Americans tional Academies of Science, Engineer-
sympathies?) and dressed is currently at a level last ing, and Medicine released a mammoth
and spoke oddly (maybe never planning seen a century ago, and it continues to report titled “The Economic and Fis-
to assimilate?). In 1924, the Times pub- rise. Today, the Know-Nothing Party of cal Consequences of Immigration.” It
lished a screed complaining that “the the mid-nineteenth century has been found that, although immigrants tend
melting pot, besides having its own color, reborn in the contemporary G.O.P.; the to earn less than native-born workers
begins to give out its own smell. Its America First movement, once cham- and are therefore a bit more costly to
reek fills New York and floats out rather pioned by the aviator Charles Lind- governments, their children exhibit un-
widely in all directions.” The same year, bergh, has a new avatar in Donald usually high levels of upward mobility
Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, Trump. Joe Biden’s policies to stanch and “are among the strongest economic
which set extremely low quotas on total unauthorized migration across the and fiscal contributors in the popula-
immigration and barred people from southern border, meanwhile, suggest tion.” For a country with an aging labor
Asia. For the next four decades, the Trumpism with a human face. And, in force, like the U.S., immigration can
great, godly smelting machines would New York City, behind Lady Liberty’s act like Botox for the welfare state, tem-
largely sit idle. back, Mayor Eric Adams is busing un- porarily making the math of paying for
Alongside that history of xeno- wanted migrants to Canada. promised benefits, like Social Security
phobia, of course, is a civic creed that Our present-day paroxysms can be and Medicare, less daunting. (Eventu-
we teach schoolchildren and roll out traced to the reopening of America’s ally, age comes for the immigrants, too.)
for public ceremonies—the one that borders in the mid-twentieth century. A breezy but powerful case for the
declares America to be a “nation of im- This time, the arrivals were mainly non- consensus view is made in “Streets of
migrants,” even if the melting-pot meta- Europeans. The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 Gold: America’s Untold Story of Im-
phor has been replaced with kalei- allowed migration from Asia once more; migrant Success” (Public Affairs), by
doscopes, mosaics, and salad bowls guest-worker programs greatly increased Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan,
(plus a rueful acknowledgment of those the United States’ Hispanic population; professors of economics at Stanford and
whose arrival was a matter of abduc- a diversity-lottery program that was Princeton, respectively. Many of their
tion and slavery). We might exult in started in 1990 helped enable sizable arguments come from their analysis of
the economic advantages we owe to emigration from Africa. At the same a fascinating big-data set—genealogi-
immigration, through both ordinary time, demand for immigration far out- cal records collected by Ancestry.com.
population growth and extraordinary stripped the number of available visas. (When the researchers started gather-
entrepreneurship—then Andrew Car- Familial preferences in immigration ap- ing the site’s data with an Internet
negie, titan of steel, now Sundar Pichai, plications meant that an individual en- scraper, its lawyers sent a cease-and-de-
titan of search. The fact remains that trant could effectively relocate an entire sist letter.) Seeing the long-run benefit
mass migration and nativist backlash clan. This feature, sometimes derided of immigration requires measurement
have stalked one another for more than as “chain migration,” is rather dear to “at the pace of generations, rather than
a century. However enthusiastic the me. My uncle, an adventurous doctor years,” Abramitzky and Boustan con-
American dogma may be about immi- from a small Punjabi village near Si- tend. In combination with detailed cen-
grants past, rising migration levels in- alkot, Pakistan, moved to West Virginia sus records, the ancestral data debunk
variably trigger the fear that immigrants in 1971. As a result, all eleven of his the idea that earlier waves of European
present and future may be something siblings—including, in Gabriel García migrants were more industrious and
66 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
more culturally smeltable than contem- asites; economists might try harder to braceros had been most important; the
porary migrants from elsewhere. “New- correct that picture. farms there seemed, instead, to have ac-
comers today are just as quick to move Consider winemaking, which, for pi- celerated their use of labor-saving ma-
up the economic ladder as in the past, oneering economists like Adam Smith, chinery. Repeat the experiment today,
and immigrants now are integrating was a favorite way of illustrating the many vignerons warn, and the whole
into American culture just as surely as benefits of trade. In America today, the industry would go kaput.
immigrants back then,” the economists wine industry provides employment to The most significant academic dis-
write. Unlike other big Anglo countries, nearly two million people; it also pro- senter from this pro-immigration con-
such as Australia, Britain, and Canada, vides revenue to the government by the sensus is George Borjas, an economist
America lacks a points-based system billions (and semblances of personali- at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Borjas
that explicitly advantages the already ties to people by the millions). At the spies examples everywhere of immigrant
educated and already wealthy, but same time, domestic winemaking is workers bringing down native ones, from
Abramitzky and Boustan disagree with made possible by temporary guest work- the ivory tower to the factory floor. (One
conservative critics who argue that we ers, typically from Mexico, who harvest of his best-known papers suggests that
should adopt one. Their analysis of a grapes—including at the winery owned native-born mathematicians in the U.S.
century of immigration data finds “very by Donald Trump. Are foreign agricul- became less productive—as measured
few countries from which the fact of tural laborers hurting job prospects for by their pace of generating high-impact
upward mobility does not hold.” Even hardworking Americans? Cesar Chavez, theorems and papers—after the Soviet
if migrants arrive poor, “one generation the famed organizer of the United Farm Union collapsed and talented Russian
later their children more than pay for Workers, was inclined to think so; in mathematicians flooded their depart-
their parents’ debts.” the nineteen-seventies, he launched his ments.) Borjas has long been locked in
Empirical economic research has so-called Illegals Campaign, encourag- an econometric duel with David Card,
tended to affirm conclusions suggested ing union members to report undocu- a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the
by the discipline’s first principles: the ar- mented workers to the authorities and University of California, Berkeley, over
gument for the free trade of goods, dat- to run unauthorized border patrols. In the consequences of an episode known
ing back to Adam Smith, implies an ar- the nineteen-sixties, as it happened, the as the Mariel boatlift. In 1980, Fidel Cas-
gument for the free movement of labor. U.S. once eliminated a program for guest tro announced that all Cubans wishing
Michael Clemens, a prominent econo- workers called braceros (Spanish for to immigrate to America would be free
mist of immigration, maintains that “those who work with their arms”) at to do so from the port of Mariel—as
present-day migration barriers are so the behest of American politicians wor- long as they could arrange their own
self-defeating that they are analogous to ried about domestic wages, including transportation. In the course of six
governments leaving trillion-dollar bills John F. Kennedy. Yet Clemens and his months, an extraordinary number of
on the sidewalk. The gains from looser fellow-researchers found that wages for Marielitos, some hundred and twen-
migration, in his analysis, would be sev- native agricultural workers didn’t appear ty-five thousand refugees, arrived in Flor-
eral times larger than the gains from to rise in states where the suspended ida. The incident provided economists
eliminating all remaining trade barriers.
The essential question is not what
size the potential windfall would be but
cui bono—who benefits? The primary
beneficiaries are the migrants them-
selves, who in rich countries can earn
a multiple of their old wages. Their
homelands can also benefit from trans-
fers of money; remittances make up
more than one-fifth of the national in-
comes of countries such as El Salva-
dor, Haiti, and Honduras. But what
about their host nations, who may be
effectively subsidizing this global re-
distribution? Ecologists distinguish be-
tween interspecies relationships that
are parasitic (as between tapeworms
and humans) and those which are mu-
tualistic (like the bromance between
clown fish and anemones you may re-
member from “Finding Nemo,” in which
both parties benefit). In the domestic
politics of immigration, restrictionists “I’m assuming this coffee date covers an extension
are convinced that immigrants are par- of our friendship for at least a year.”
 that the current deal the U.S. is hawk-
ing to its allies—the Indo-Pacific Eco-
nomic Framework—cannot offer the
benefit those allies most prize: access to
American markets. A similar logic ap-
plies to both the movement of goods and
the movement of people. Open the doors
too hastily and they may slam shut and
stay that way for a rather long time.

f the limits of immigration are bounded

I by political psychology rather than by
economic necessity, a series of uncom-
fortable questions arise. What moral
weight, for instance, should be accorded
to the human desire for cultural conti-
nuity? Taken to an extreme, it could le-
gitimatize the sort of ethnic separation
that white nationalists aspire to when
they recite their credo known as the Four-
“Running away from a shark.” teen Words: “We must secure the exis-
tence of our people and a future for white
• • children.” A few months ago, on a drive
through Silicon Valley, Ro Khanna, the
congressman who represents the only
with a tantalizing chance to study what immigrants” in ways that can be socially majority-Asian district in the continen-
an acute surge of foreign workers could disruptive. You could agree with him tal United States, put the balance to me
do to labor markets. about the distributional concerns while this way: “People don’t mind that folks
In 1990, Card wrote a paper conclud- also thinking that a fair government could are playing cricket in Fremont. They just
ing that “the Mariel influx appears to insure that everyone was truly better want to make sure we have baseball, not
have had virtually no effect on the wages off—that the winners effectively com- cricket, as a national pastime.”
or unemployment rates of less-skilled pensated the losers. But what’s theoret- On the other hand, there’s the ques-
workers, even among Cubans who had ically possible has to be tested against tion of whether rich countries have Good
immigrated earlier”—despite the fact what’s politically possible. Economists Samaritan responsibilities to help poorer
that the influx had expanded the num- can be too impatient with such realities. ones, perhaps especially former colo-
ber of available workers in the local labor Recall the discipline’s Pollyannaish nies. Is there an obligation to bequeath
market by seven per cent. This was a sen- embrace, in the nineteen-nineties, of less the perquisites of citizenship upon not
sational result. In 2015, though, Borjas fettered trade with countries like China: just asylum seekers and refugees but also
circulated his reappraisal of Card’s find- such trade boosted the over-all economy, economic migrants who come without
ings. He argued that the right way to but eroded the livelihoods of millions of any prior authorization? Are unregu-
measure the job displacement was to look Americans who were exposed to import lated borders consistent with sover-
squarely at non-Hispanic, male high- competition. The trade-adjustment as- eignty? If migration is a fire starter for
school dropouts in the Miami area, who sistance that was meant to compensate reactionary populism, which may burn
would have competed most directly with those workers was, in truth, a pittance, hot enough to endanger democracy, is
the Marielitos. Their wages, he calcu- and left many Americans behind, and restriction defensible on the ground of
lated, dropped dramatically, by between resentful. Not even a quarter century self-preservation? Some immigration
ten and thirty per cent. Supporters of after Bill Clinton successfully champi- skeptics are xenophobes; many more
Card retorted that Borjas had restricted oned a trade deal with China and that fear the xenophobia of others. Despite
his sample so severely that he was con- country’s inclusion in the World Trade realistic fears about our compatriots’
fusing statistical noise for meaningful Organization, a bipartisan consensus baser instincts, do we still have an eth-
signal. On it went. Today, Borjas remains against liberalizing trade has emerged. ical obligation to support open borders?
a maverick within the profession. America’s “pivot to Asia” has been ham- Modern political philosophers have
Yet even Borjas, who was born in Ha- strung by this reality. The sweeping largely found extreme limitations on
vana and arrived in the United States at Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, people’s ability to migrate to be unjus-
the age of twelve, does not claim that which American officials hoped would tifiable. Joseph Carens, perhaps the most
the net effect of immigration is negative. counter Chinese influence in the East, prominent contemporary ethicist of im-
Rather, his view is that immigration can went on after the U.S. withdrew from migration, is a full-throated advocate
redistribute gains “from those who com- it—and China has now applied to be a for open borders. “In many ways, citi-
pete with immigrants to those who use member. Congressional politics means zenship in Western democracies is the
68 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
modern equivalent of feudal class priv- convictions: is the case for open borders ocratic norms against invidious discrim-
ilege—an inherited status that greatly obliged, morally, to reckon with its fore- ination should, she argues, constrain the
enhances one’s life chances,” he writes. seeable political consequences? state even when dealing with non-mem-
If humans all have equal moral worth, In “Immigration and Democracy” bers. In some cases, like reunifying fam-
how can it be fair to let the dumb luck (Oxford), Sarah Song, a professor of law ilies or saving refugees, humanitarian
of birth determine opportunity to such and political science at Berkeley, offers considerations tip over into requiring
an extreme degree? an alternative to this depressing dialec- admission rather than simply allowing
It’s notable that neither John Rawls tic. “It is not an exaggeration to say that it. What Song ends up constructing is
nor Robert Nozick, the past century’s the open borders position has emerged an ethical basis for an immigration sys-
two greatest thinkers about the social as the dominant normative position” tem that, with some reforms, America
contract, was eager to reckon with the among her fellow political theorists, she could plausibly achieve. A sigh of relief
matter of migration in his magnum opus. writes. She offers calm and methodical can be breathed.
In “A Theory of Justice,” Rawls argued critiques of the logic of open-borders You might wonder, as I sometimes
that the rules ordering a just society are advocates, whether they proceed from did as a student taking classes on polit-
the ones we would agree to behind a veil left, liberal, or libertarian foundations. ical theory, how much these thought ex-
of ignorance about our position in it. If If such a thing as global equality of op- ercises actually matter. Countries will
the entire world could be placed behind portunity can be conceived, open bor- continue to restrict immigration despite
one such veil, would it settle for the ders might not even be the best route the opinions of professors—in exactly
present-day system of tightly regulated to achieve it, she contends, because that the same way that Vladimir Putin will
borders? It seems unlikely, but Rawls approach “would reinforce rather than continue to wage his unjust war on
dodged the issue by limiting his analysis ameliorate the economic vulnerability Ukraine no matter the protestations of
to “closed” societies, in which migration of people in poor countries.” She dis- just-war theorists. But political philoso-
was assumed away. In the book “Anar- putes the idea of a fundamental human phy can take a long and circuitous route
chy, State, and Utopia,” Nozick sketched right to immigrate which would require to practice. The great English philoso-
a vision for a minimalist state that prized the dismantling of the world’s borders. pher John Locke published his “Two
property rights, but he did not consider When Song turns to constructing her Treatises on Government” in 1689; a cen-
the tricky business of people entering and own account of the state and its right to tury later, it inspired Thomas Jefferson
exiting. Yet here, too, the logic may lead regulate movement into and out of its as he helped draft America’s divorce let-
to openness. The minimally viable state territory, she arrives at a middle road: ter to Britain. Karl Marx published “Das
in Nozick’s utopia would be so emaci- “What is required is not closed borders Kapital” half a century before Vladimir
ated, having ceded almost all its power or open borders but controlled borders Lenin founded the Soviet Union. And
to individual property owners, that it is and open doors.” Citizenship creates so the intellectual contests held today
unclear who could stop someone who a special set of commitments that can may affect how future generations tra-
sought to wed or employ an outsider. Ca- be in tension with our humanitarian, verse whatever of the globe is left to them.
rens takes these conundrums as evidence universalist commitments. You cannot In the short term, it is easy to despair
for his position: whatever account of po- believe that people have the right to as nativist backlash recurs once again and
litical justice you adopt, it will confirm collective self-determination—a core borders militarize. But America today
the moral necessity of open borders. has forty-five million foreign-born resi-
Judging by the damage that Britain dents—the most of any country, and as
willingly inflicted on itself by leaving many as the next four combined. And
the European Union, which requires free Biden, loudly hawkish on unauthorized
movement among its members—or by immigration, has quietly expanded the
the far-right parties that have sprung up number of legal admissions, extending
in Germany and the Scandinavian coun- welcome to Ukrainians, Venezuelans, and
tries in response to surges of refugees—I Haitians fleeing war and chaos. Quietly,
would guess that most societies would too, the economic dividends will accrue.
be ripped apart if they even came close In the U.S., opinion poll after opinion
to implementing the program that Ca- principle of international law—without poll shows that immigrants are deeply
rens recommends. Reihan Salam, the also ceding them the right to regulate a optimistic about the course of their
president of the conservative Manhat- polity’s membership. Indeed, she writes, adopted country. Demographic transi-
tan Institute, pointedly titled his book “part of what it means for a political tions have often been marred by oppres-
on the subject “Melting Pot or Civil community to be self-determining is that sion and violence. If America’s proceeds
War?” Even Carens is quick to clarify it controls whom to admit as new mem- peacefully, it would mark success for one
that he is not “making a policy proposal bers.”This is not, as some believe, an un- of the greatest experiments any democ-
that I think might be adopted (in the questionable right embedded in state racy has ever tried, and help secure eco-
immediate future) by presidents or prime sovereignty—which would sanction, for nomic primacy over closed and sclerotic
ministers”; he concedes that “the idea of example, a revived Chinese Exclusion societies like China’s. However sentimen-
open borders is a nonstarter.” But per- Act or the Trump Administration’s so- tal the critics found “The Melting-Pot,”
haps he should have the courage of his called Muslim travel ban—because dem- its hopeful vision could yet be borne out. 
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 69
 Susan Taubes’s novel “Divorcing”
BOOKS (1969) begins with a report in France-
Soir of a femme décapitée, a woman whose

BACK FROM THE DEAD

head was cut clean off when she was hit
by a car in the Eighteenth Arrondisse-
ment of Paris.The woman, Sophie Blind,
The afterlife of Susan Taubes. is, like Taubes, the daughter of a psy-
choanalyst, the granddaughter of a rabbi,
BY MERVE EMRE and the estranged wife of a scholar and
a rabbi. She is also the mother of mostly
male children, and the lover of Gaston,
Roland, Alain, Nicholas, and Ivan. In
flight from her married life in New York,
she has just moved to Paris with her
children. She is killed before she has a
chance to finish arranging the furniture
in her new apartment.
In life, Sophie’s mind and her body
were beholden to men. In death, her
severed head is free to wander backward
through her life in a series of surreal
images. Her head can detach from the
first-person point of view and float into
omniscience. It can leap across time
and space: to her marriage in New York,
to her melancholy childhood in Buda-
pest. It can fantasize about her funerals—
there are at least two—or imagine her
dead body on a dissection table, “the
four limbs together, the skin carefully
folded, the glands in a separate bowl.”
It can filch a phrase here, an entire form
there: a joke from Freud, an essay on
“losing and being lost” by his daughter
Anna, a dreamlike play-within-a-novel
from “Ulysses.” When it cannot make
sense of Sophie’s life, it can summon
gods and men to its aid. “Gorgons, my
sisters. Poseidon, where are you? Homer,
Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Joyce, comfort
n Sigmund Freud’s “Rat Man,” a have a mother: Metis, whom Zeus swal- me!” Sophie pleads.
I case history of a neurotic young man,
there is a curious footnote about the
lowed, fearing that the children she bore
would be too mighty for him to gov-
The head is the ideal guide to a novel
whose subject is severance in its many
natural uncertainty of paternity. For a ern. In some versions of the myth, Metis, agonizing forms: familial, national, re-
man to believe that his father truly was while pregnant inside Zeus, made her ligious, and, above all, subjective. “Di-
his father, he had to accept what no daughter a breastplate, which Athena vorcing” is the story of a woman es-
evidence could corroborate. Paternity eventually adorned with the decapitated tranged from a sense of self that she
was not a physical relation, Freud ex- head of the gorgon Medusa, whose eyes never assented to, a self she seems to
plained. It was an idea that sprang, as held the power to turn anyone who have accumulated passively. Leaving her
if already fully formed, from one’s mind. looked upon her into stone. “To decap- marriage is one way of casting off this
COURTESY ETHAN AND TANIA TAUBES

“The prehistoric figures which show a itate = to castrate,” Freud wrote else- self and “coming into consciousness, a
smaller person sitting upon the head where. Had he put the two heads to- lifelong struggle,” Sophie thinks. She
of a larger one are representations of gether, he might have wondered at the recalls her hostile and baffling encoun-
patrilineal descent,” he wrote. “Athena paradox they presented: that the fierce ters with her parents, her love affairs,
had no mother, but sprang from the and divine female child could symbol- her degrading fights with her husband,
head of Zeus.” ize both the extension of the patriarch’s and her anxious fussing over her chil-
But Freud was wrong. Athena did authority and its undoing. dren. All this seems to have led her to
a turning point, a moment of self-defi-
Previously unpublished work casts new light on Taubes, who killed herself in 1969. nition. But how should a woman be
70 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
after she has been severed from the so- her in the Times as “a quick-change art- was, for her, “literally the home the di-
cial order? Cut off from the men who ist with the clothes of other writers.” mension where man and woman, Fa-
gave her a sense, however oppressive, Here, one wants to insist, was a woman ther, Mother, child, friend and friend,
of her place in the world? whose thoughts sprang from no one’s priest and participant, come home.” In
At one of the funerals, the head rises head but her own. Here was a woman New York, where the couple settled,
to deliver a kind of answer to these ques- who, when faced with the scorn and Susan Taubes joined an experimental-
tions: “Woman is part less than human, the judgment of the patriarchs, laughed theatre troupe and edited volumes of
part more than human and part human.” the laugh of the Medusa, and turned Native American and African folktales.
A woman must be an entity that is un- these stony-faced men into even ston- She had two children and taught reli-
formed and unfixed. She must unbur- ier stones. gion at Columbia. She became a close
den herself from the expectation that But this is too simple a revision. For friend of Susan Sontag, who, with
she will be consistent and knowable, Taubes, no woman could ever truly free her characteristic mixture of attraction
like a character in a nineteenth-century herself from existing in some relation and suspicion, referred to Taubes as
realist novel. “I’m not hanging on to the to men—of being, and of having been, her “double.”
old psychology, ego hang-up, continu- begotten by them, flesh of their flesh, To an observer, Taubes would seem
ity bit, the whole business of being a blood of their blood, their ideas and to have found her place. But her aca-
person, it’s absurd,” Sophie declares. their history the starting point of her demic success, her marriage, her chil-
Most of us simply accept the whole struggle. “I can’t make a revolution,” dren—none of it reconciled her to the
business of being a person and go about she wrote. “But we must at least plant world. America remained a foreign coun-
our lives. But that, Taubes suggests, is the seeds.” try to her. Now Hungary was one, too.
not living at all. The bond of marriage, which Taubes
Days after the novel was published, er name was not Susan Taubes, described in “Divorcing” as a state of
Taubes walked into the sea at East
Hampton and drowned herself. Inevita-
H not at first. In 1928, she was born
Judit Zsuzánna Feldmann, the daughter
“sheer twoness that endured indepen-
dent of moods, likes and dislikes,” did
bly, for readers, the novel’s dead narrator of Sándor Feldmann, a respected Freud- not endure; she and Jacob separated in
and its dead author merged into an em- ian psychoanalyst, and the granddaughter 1961, after many infidelities and cruel-
blem of glamorous, doomed feminin- of Mózes Feldmann, who had been the ties. She drifted away from academia,
ity. Recently, however, there has been a Grand Rabbi of Budapest. Biographers but neither her criticism nor her fiction
reappraisal of Taubes’s work. In 2003, stress Taubes’s sense of grievance to- found an enthusiastic audience. “The
the Leibniz Center for Literary and ward her mother, the “pitiful and neu- homeland she could discover was in
Cultural Research, in Berlin, established rotic dragon” who had brought her into exile,” Wolfson observes. “But in such
a Taubes archive, describing her life as being only to abandon her for a new a homeland, one finds one’s place only
a “story in which Jewish exile meets fe- life with a new husband. “One could by being displaced.”
male intellectualism.” From her papers, not become a ‘hero’ slaying her,” Taubes Her fictions are unhomely works,
there emerged surprising discoveries: commented. In 1939, the year the Hun- tales of bewildered, wild, and estranged
unpublished fiction; two volumes’ worth garian government began to conscript women, who dwell, as Taubes imagined
of letters between her and her husband, Jewish men into its forced-labor ser- it, in “neither pure light nor pure dark-
Jacob Taubes, a scholar of religion; and vice, Sándor Feldmann and his daugh- ness.” Their ghostly voices flit between
enough notes and manuscripts to in- ter immigrated to the United States. the material and spiritual realms. Years
spire two books, an intellectual biogra- In America, Judit Zsuzánna became after Taubes’s suicide, Sontag evoked
phy by Christina Pareigis, and Elliot R. Susan. She was a serious and brilliant her intellectual project in a short story,
Wolfson’s “The Philosophical Pathos student, first at Bryn Mawr, then at “Debriefing.” The narrator’s friend Julia
of Susan Taubes” (Stanford), a study of Harvard, where she received a doctor- spends her days cultivating love affairs
the philosophical work that she pro- ate in the history and philosophy of re- and wondering. “Wondering?” the nar-
duced alongside her fiction. In 2020, ligion for her work on Simone Weil’s rator asks, to which Julia replies:
New York Review Books reissued “Di- quest for an absent God. When she “Oh, I might start wondering about the re-
vorcing” to appreciative reviews. Now was still an undergraduate, she met and lation of that leaf”—pointing to one—“to that
they have released her far superior un- married Jacob Taubes, who had been one”—pointing to a neighbor leaf, also yellow-
published novella “Lament for Julia,” born to a Jewish family in Vienna. Their ing, its frayed tip almost perpendicular to the
along with nine short stories. published correspondence—rapturous first one’s spine. “Why are they lying there
just like that? Why not some other way?”
This flurry of activity seems to de- letters on art, exile, Judaism, and Heide-
mand a reckoning on Taubes’s behalf, gger which they exchanged from 1950 “Crazy,” the narrator thinks dismis-
and recent critics have declared her fic- to 1952—reveals a shared desire to find sively. For Sontag, Taubes functioned
tion a feminist triumph over the patri- a way to be at home in the world. “Hei- in part as a kind of cautionary tale, a
lineal line—over her father and her degger says one very true and wise thing, parable of squandered brilliance. The
husband; over Freud and Heidegger; that to attain authenticity of Being is tableau she creates of Julia is beauti-
over the critic Hugh Kenner, who, hear- not a matter of driving toward a cer- ful—the delicacy of the personified
ing the echoes of James Joyce and Har- tain goal,” Susan wrote. It was a mat- leaves, the contingency of their ar-
old Robbins in “Divorcing,” dismissed ter of staying in the same place, which rangement, the earnestness of Julia’s
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 71
wondering—yet ultimately parodic. bourgeois family that has fallen into the many skirts I bought her, flared, pleated
The search for truth is always in dan- grotesque disrepair in what Taubes and scalloped. I try them on one after an-
ger of toppling into either pretension called “undefined, implied central Eu- other. . . . Her skirts subdue and appease me.
or madness. ropean settings.” Julia is the child of
But Sontag undersells the sophis- Father and Mother Klopps, cold and Who, or what, is the voice that speaks
tication of Taubes’s philosophy. The vaguely incestuous creatures who sit in from under Julia’s gorgeous skirts? It
fiction courted neither insanity nor de- a vast, moldering house while butlers, fancies itself an “actor,” an “artist,” a
spair. Rather, it created a strain of dark nurses, and maids scurry about. As a poor puppeteer. It is a “celestial spark,”
antihumanist comedy that drew its child, Julia is a daydreamer, abscond- a “fallen angel,” an “exalted conscious-
humor from its insistence that reason ing to the attic to fantasize about being ness,” a brooding ghost. It is a whisper
and agency were illusions, and that kidnapped by gypsies and rescued by in the ear, warning Julia not to sin: “God
“homelessness, insecurity and fear” were her dark prince, her true love. At fif- is looking at you now, Julia.” It is a par-
the grounds of authentic being. “Won- teen, she is violently def lowered by asite, “mysteriously grafted on Julia.” It
der myself why the comedy,” Sophie’s Bruno, a soldier wider than he is high is convinced that it is real and that Julia,
head remarks. It yearns for a world in and baldish. At eighteen, she marries the fleshly creature, is a mere semblance,
which a person could cease to exist Peter Brody, a naval engineer with a a series of costumes and masks—“a de-
without leaving any trace of her exis- small, graying head, a timid man raised mure Julia, a seductive Julia, a mater-
tence: “Whisk one’s self out of the by his spinster aunts. Between eigh- nal Julia”—that may be worn and dis-
world whole—dress, shoes, gloves, pure teen and twenty-nine, she has three carded. The drama of the lament is as
and all.” children. At twenty-nine, she has an much about the uncertainty of the
affair with a young architect named voice’s identity and origins as it is about
“ L ament for Julia” was originally
called “Confession of a Ghost,”
Paul Holle, her “one great passion.”
After they separate, she has her final
Julia’s fate and folly.
What does the voice want? Above
which Taubes proclaimed a less digni- child, whose paternity is uncertain. all, it desires order and propriety. It longs
fied, if funnier, title for a comic novel. After turning thirty, she disappears. to transform its charge from the moody,
Yet the difference between a confes- She is made to reappear by an un- chubby “Klopps girl” in a puffed-sleeve
sion and a lament is one not just of named voice that, mourning her disap- dress into “a lady, a dream, an appari-
tone but of purpose. We confess in the pearance, narrates glimpses of her life: tion!” Sometimes it seems able to in-
hope of redemption; we lament know- She is gone. Julia has left me. For good now, tervene in her life, or, at least, to con-
ing that redemption is impossible. All I think. She went silently under the cover of vince itself that it has agency with regard
one can do is howl in sorrow and, when night. It was the only way she could leave with- to her actions: “My next ten years with
sorrow has been exhausted, laugh. out being followed. I think of her going out Julia were spent mostly watching over
into the night, going out like a candle, going
What has been lost in the novella down perhaps. I will never know where. I will her manners: keeping her from stick-
is a wife and mother named Julia never know how long ago. This used to be Ju- ing out her belly, holding her head to
Klopps, the descendant of an haute- lia’s room. She left skirts hanging in the closet, one side, chewing her nails, sitting with
her legs apart, laughing at the wrong
time.” In Julia’s adolescence, the voice
is mortified by her bloating flesh, by
her monthly cycles and the leaking hole
between her legs, where it would pre-
fer to find a stiffening member. She
cannot “even cast her own water from
herself without wetting her bush,” it
complains. “But enough of the melan-
choly topic of the cunt. The missing
member was enough to disconsole me,
even apart from the nightmares I pro-
jected into Julia’s concavity.”
Classic penis envy, the voice admits,
sneering at the psychology volumes
that line the family’s bookshelf. Its fix-
ation on the phallus is a symptom of
its own anxiety about its inability to
live outside Julia’s body. “Did I exist?
Was I a thinking substance?,” it won-
ders, not convinced, as Descartes was,
that its ability to ask the question an-
“Just tell me if the movie was supposed to make swers it. It is enlightened enough to
sense or not supposed to make sense.” know that no higher power has au-
thorized its existence: “If it had only
pleased God to seal my appointment,
everything would have turned out dif- BRIEFLY NOTED
ferently.” It has read widely in philoso-
phy and the history of religion but still The Wounded World, by Chad L. Williams (Farrar, Straus &
cannot find a reason for its being. Its Giroux). This literary history traces the genesis of W. E. B.
learned voice slips from solipsism to Du Bois’s ambitious, unfinished study of the role of Black sol-
contempt, prurience to prudery; from diers in the First World War. Du Bois had called on African
inside Julia’s limbs to outside her body, Americans to “close ranks” (“first your Country, then your
as she indulges her “stupid, harmless Rights!”), but his postwar research revealed to him the con-
vices, window shopping, bubble baths, flict’s horrors—Black troops denied crucial equipment; Black
waiting for her true love to appear, officers convicted in sham trials—leading him to question the
paging through endless stacks of fash- merits of the war and the point of Black soldiers’ sacrifice.
ion magazines.” Du Bois meticulously documented “a devastating catalog of
“Lament for Julia” devises a femi- systemic racial injustice,” Williams writes, while showing “an
nist metaphysics, or, as the voice puts ability to distill it into concise, lively, accessible prose.” The
it with comic incredulity, a portrait of same goes for this book, which weaves a propulsive narrative
“the elements of being in a skirt!” The from a tangle of facts and forces.
voice is the spirit of old European civ-
ilization—from Augustine to Freud— Samuel Barber, by Howard Pollack (Illinois). Barber’s music
battling the flesh of a young woman. continues to be treasured for its melding of flawless crafts-
It is what Taubes, in her correspon- manship and deep feeling. Barber himself was more compli-
dence, called the “not-I,” as distinct cated, as this fine biography reveals. Born on Philadelphia’s
from the “I” that one uses to fix one’s Main Line in 1910, he was an ebullient gay uncle to his ex-
identity in speech and in writing. It is tended family, and counted Andy Warhol and Jacqueline
the superego personified, made mon- Kennedy among his friends. But his personality was tinged
strous, obscene, sadistic, and abject. It with nastiness and melancholia, intensified by alcoholism
is the voice of the cunt—described by and by the collapse of his relationship with the composer
Taubes elsewhere as “a nothing, a neg- Gian Carlo Menotti. Pollack’s account of the psychosexual
ativum”—at the center of existence. intrigue that engulfed many of the guests at the couple’s
The voice can be silenced only by Westchester home is startling in its frankness.
Julia’s surrender to conformity, the strait-
jacketing of her desire by a Christian Commitment, by Mona Simpson (Knopf ). Set in the nineteen-
sense of shame and law-giving. “The seventies and eighties, this novel follows the Aziz siblings—
holy family!,” it proclaims after Julia Walter, Lina, and Donnie—after their mother’s commitment
marries Peter, apparently sealing her to a mental-health institution. “The sadness was always there,
bourgeois fate. Together, Julia and the an underground cascade,” Lina observes of her mother, whose
voice “become transfigured,” it says. condition becomes a reflecting pool around which the siblings
“Pure, remote, angelic, I basked in the gather, peering into themselves, and into her. Simpson darts
morning sunlight that fell upon Julia’s between their points of view, detailing the vicissitudes of their
hand serving coffee, or brushing her lives. The novel’s strength lies less in dramatic conflict than in
daughter’s hair.” The lament testifies to small details, which continually highlight questions of care.
everything that women repress—de- Lina speaks about “medieval olfactory therapy with flowers”
sire, disappointment, rage—in order to and about the Belgian town of Geel, where patients are inte-
be consecrated as women before the grated into the community—as her mother never was.
presence of God the Father and Peter,
the Biblical patriarch, the rock on which An Honorable Exit, by Éric Vuillard, translated from the French
the Church and its orthodoxies were by Mark Polizzotti (Other Press). Vuillard, who specializes in
built. “I codified the past, set down the novels tracking historical events, turns his eye to France’s at-
canon for good, a final version,” the tempts to extricate itself from the First Indochina War, cul-
voice announces. minating in the disastrous defeat at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954.
The voice inhabits many roles, but, Vuillard examines not only the battlefield but also company
in the end, it is Julia herself, a paradoxically boardrooms and National Assembly watering holes, to cap-
singular and divided creature. As such, ture “how easy it was to be pragmatic and realistic thousands
the voice cannot abide by its own doc- of kilometers away, to draw up a balance sheet and make pro-
trines; Julia’s body will betray it and her jections, when you were in no personal danger.” With mea-
husband both. Her affair with Paul Holle sured outrage and penetrating irony, he pillories the alternat-
begins after he sees her on a park bench. ing bluster and euphemism of French decision-makers while
They meet in shops and in gardens, at emphasizing colonialism’s brutal toll on the Vietnamese.
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 73
the hairdresser and in the bookstore. complaining Julia, the gin-numbed likely refers to the hanged man of the
They drive in the country and have sex Julia, the voice will find that it has no tarot deck, suspended upside down on
in his shabby room while the spinster reason left to speak. a tree whose branches reach up to
aunts mind the lonely, perplexed chil- heaven and whose roots grow down to
dren. The great accomplishment of n the archives of the Radcliffe In- hell. What appealed to Taubes and
“Lament for Julia” is how impercepti-
bly it draws the fine filaments of sym-
I stitute, at Harvard, there is a record-
ing, from 1966, of Taubes reading from
Beckett about the pendue was the in-
voluntary nature of her body’s reac-
pathy between the voice and Julia—the “Lament for Julia.” The voices of the tions—what Beckett called “the integ-
anguished control with which conscious- dead are often seductive, but hers is es- rity of the eyelids coming down before
ness is harnessed to f lesh. Soon, the pecially mesmerizing. When she be- the brain knows of the grit in the wind.”
voice cannot tell what influence it has, gins to read, it is in a fragile murmur As a genre, the lament is, after all, ad-
or could ever have again, over Julia’s will: that is precise, calm, and almost clini- jacent to the spontaneous sighs and
cally detached. When she breaks off shapeless screams of mourners. It car-
Was there a decision to be made, when she and leaps ahead to a later passage—to ries the purity of their suffering.
lay naked between another man’s sheets? . . .
Had Julia made her decision? She sat by the
the “many Julias, one to be a whore, Taubes, near the end of her reading
window with opiate eyes. Like some sea plant one to marry in white, another, no, at at the Radcliffe Institute, acknowledged
incapable of volition, yet responsive to every least a dozen little Julias to be raped Beckett’s influence. “I was sort of think-
ripple; a fish brushing against its fine hairs in turn”—the murmur turns insistent ing, Well, if you do have problems like
would cause its cup to dilate and shut. He came and agitated, stumbling on its own Samuel Beckett, and, at the same time,
up behind her and laid his hand on her throat.
Her mouth went after it, lay open on his hand.
words. When she stops reading and you’re a woman, how can you write
Was that a decision? explains the novel in asides to the au- Madame Unnamable?” she told her au-
dience, it is with small sighs of apol- dience. This may have been what she
Under the reign of Eros, spirit and ogy, hesitation, and embarrassment. “I set out to do in “Lament for Julia,” but
flesh come to coexist in an involuntary wrote it while I was teaching compar- she ended up doing one better, creat-
state of being, “incapable of volition, ative mythology and history of reli- ing a female precursor of the male voice
yet responsive to every ripple.” Julia’s gion, which I fear shows,” she says. “I in “Company,” a novella that Beckett
transgressions bring the voice to con- realized perhaps too late in the book composed nearly a decade after Taubes’s
sciousness, to life; in turn, the voice that it’s really a comic novel, and, had death. In it, a voice addresses a man in
gives Julia’s life a sense of purpose. It I known that earlier, probably I would the dark, speaking about a mother, a
has a reason to speak, to exist: she has have written a less mournful work.” father, and a lover—glimpses of a past
a story to tell, even if it is an “old melo- Listening to the strange rhythms of life that are attached ever so tenuously
drama,” headlined by “a woman past Taubes’s delivery, one realizes how much to the prostrate body of the present.
thirty waiting to be saved, ready at the is lost when the abstracted voice of the The voice Beckett devised is a sparser,
glimmer of a hope to fall from the lament becomes a real voice emanating gentler, and more constant presence
dignity of marriage and motherhood.” from an actual human body. The no- than Taubes’s raging and changeable
Yet the growing intimacy of Julia and vella’s success hangs on the voice re- spirit. But it brokers the same relation-
the voice comes at a terrible price: the maining dislocated: “In the dark I try ship, between the comedy of the un-
crackup of the Julia of the holy family to remember Julia.” It must be capable protected, reactive body and the pa-
into many Julias who cannot be rec- of existing everywhere and nowhere, of thos of the self-conscious voice. “I. We.
onciled. There is the Julia who feels moving into and out of Julia’s body with- She. No, I give up,” Taubes ends her
safe with Peter, and the Julia who feels out her consent or even her knowledge. lament. Beckett begins his, “Use of the
alive with Paul. There is the Julia who Julia’s “sole right to exist was through second person marks the voice. That
resigns herself to the life she has made, my strict, fastidious, incarnal presence,” of the third the cankerous other. Could
and the Julia who hopes to disappear the voice insists. Conversely, its exis- he speak to and of whom the voice
from it. (Paul, knowing that Julia is in- tence is premised on Julia’s unreality— speaks there would be a first. But he
capable of making a decision, realizes the absence of her words, the immate- cannot. He shall not. You cannot. You
that he must be the one to leave.) riality of her body. shall not.”
At the end of the affair, where has By the time of the reading, Taubes Between Beckett and Taubes range
Julia gone? Physically, she is still pres- had approached several publishers about all the voices in which literature can
ent, dressing the children, or bringing “Lament for Julia, ” including Jérôme speak: first, second, and third person,
in the milk, or sitting in the shed at Lindon, at Les Éditions des Minuit, singular and plural, each estranged from
night alone, drinking gin and playing in Paris. One of Lindon’s authors, Sam- the world but still in touch with its el-
solitaire. But, as the novella draws to a uel Beckett, wrote in support, pronounc- emental matter. In their dark, there is
close, it is clear that she and the voice ing Taubes “an authentic talent.” He no man who boasts of his creation. No
are undergoing a mutually assured de- described “Lament for Julia” as the woman raises a head in triumph. But,
struction. The voice’s rebukes are mur- “study of a ‘pendue,’ tension between ‘I’ if we pay attention, we hear something
dering her desire, and the murder of and ‘she,’ search of identity. . . . . Pro- else, part more human, part less—a
her desire is silencing the voice. Con- nounced erotic touches, very effective faint sob of laughter. Listen. It keeps
fronted with the docile Julia, the un- rawness of language.” The “pendue” itself company. 
74 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023
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 top of each other, and both go by the
BOOKS name Nevers. Great Britain is Valeria;
the authoritarian Vanguard Republic,

UNCANNY VALLEY
which rules over inland Ksana, stands
in for the People’s Republic of China.
In the first Nevers, Q , a scholar of Va-
Mannequins and mystification in Dorothy Tse’s dreamlike Hong Kong. lerian, writes research proposals, applies
for superfluous funding, and tends to
BY KATY WALDMAN routine paperwork. He and his wife,
Maria, a government bureaucrat, own
an apartment in an “orderly and nar-
row” neighborhood, where all construc-
tion is “meticulously calculated.”
The first Nevers is a place of hier-
archy and compression, of breakneck
development and brutal yet submerged
competition for status. Blue-eyed for-
eigners patronize the fine-dining es-
tablishments left over from colonial
days, and second-generation Ksanese
immigrants look down on newer ar-
rivals. Pinched storefronts and dark,
mazy alleys abut a vision of urban
modernity, all skyscrapers and glass.
With his respectable post, his becom-
ing spouse, and his “flat most people
couldn’t even dream of being able to
afford,” Q has carved out a foothold in
the city’s vertiginous slope. But it is a
precarious one. Untenured at fifty, he
seems to lack his own profession’s codes
of advancement. He comes from some-
where else—the couple’s friends won-
der where, noting that his complexion
almost appears to shift with the light—
and there are hints of harrowing run-
ins with military police. Q , who has a
“pounding heart rate” and “sorrowful
creases in his forehead,” is a man under
pressure; he is tentative, resentful, ready
“ T he professor had his arms around
Aliss’s waist, and imagined him-
in “Owlish,” a new work of fiction by
Dorothy Tse, a lonely middle-aged pro-
to explode.
The second Nevers is a shadow zone,
self a prince from a fairy tale.” Already, fessor named Q falls in love with Aliss, a dream world behind or beneath the
the reader is peeking anxiously through a life-size mechanical ballerina. He for- first. “Dangerous” but “full of unknown
her fingers. Abort! Abort! Literature is gets that his princess is just a toy and potential,” it hosts Q’s fecund—and un-
littered with the bodies of would-be that he is just a “hack teacher.” In thrall abashedly filthy—fantasy life. Tse’s prose
lovers who gallop off the edge of real- to an inanimate object, he feels freer curls around Q like a vine, dropping
ity. Don Quixote, the ur-fantasist, “spent than he ever has. him in landscapes that are equal parts
his nights reading from dusk till dawn Tse, who lives in Hong Kong and Bosch and Freud, lush and deranged.
and his days reading from sunrise to writes in Chinese, is an accomplished Imagine an after-hours cut of Disney’s
sunset,” until “his brains dried up, caus- author of short fiction. “Owlish,” her “Fantasia”; Alexander Portnoy on acid;
ing him to lose his mind.” Two centu- début novel, has been translated into a a Losing Your Virginity theme park
ries later, Emma Bovary died of over- playful and sinuous English by Na- brought to you by Mephistopheles. Here
exposure to romances, having fancied tascha Bruce. The book, which took the professor crosses a waterfall that
herself “the beloved of every novel, the shape during the city’s pro-democracy sounds like a woman crying out in plea-
heroine of every drama, the vague she protests in 2019 and 2020, features two sure, encounters “a livid red nipple” the
of every volume of poetry.” And now, thinly veiled Hong Kongs. They lie on size of a wide-screen TV, and ogles
preposterous foliage: “A magenta ba-
Opposites converge and hierarchies are upended in Tse’s début novel. nana flower protruded from a cluster
76 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 ILLUSTRATION BY WOSHIBAI
of bananas, the blossom pendulous and Q is not the only resident of Nevers and the mechanical, reflects his incom-
plump, like a cheerful penis.” Tse gives whose sight is compromised: plete humanity—how he struggles to
exaggerated form to Q’s fears as well Every year, the smog grew thicker. You distinguish between freedom and own-
as to his frustrated urges. In the second could tell by simply extending a hand, with no ership, how he can no longer conceive
Nevers, mechanical tigers gnaw on the need for any official government report, but of what it would mean to be real.
viscera of mechanical soldiers, and “men this was an age in which you couldn’t trust
with guns at their waists” snarl “with what was right in front of you. Newspapers et “Owlish” is not only a story about
their big, gaping mouths.”
At the beginning of “Owlish,” Q
and televisions maintained there was no smog
in Nevers, or else that there had always been Y Professor Q. As the plot progresses,
Tse turns her attention to Maria and,
smog in Nevers, and that these were two sides
hides a collection of female dolls in a of the same truth. And no matter which side especially, to Aliss. Some chapters un-
secret cabinet in his study. He brings a person chose to believe, the important thing fold from Aliss’s perspective, inviting
them out only while Maria is at work; was that the pollution could not possibly have us to identify with her. The doll won-
blown in from inland Ksana.
otherwise he keeps his fantasies safely ders about her own nature: “She touched
locked away. Once Q acquires Aliss, The smog in Nevers engulfs the her cheek. . . . Soft and not ice-cold, but
that changes. He installs her in an skyscrapers and the hand in front of not exactly warm either.” After finding
abandoned church, which he visits for one’s face—and perhaps also the stu- a copy of the “Kama Sutra,” she quickly
hours on end, brushing her hair, ar- dent protests, which never appear in outstrips Q in the art of lovemaking—
ranging her limbs, and draping her in the news. the student has become the master. She
the latest fashions. She is his co-star Within the mist and the govern- also falls into fellowship with the pro-
in the “folk tale full of lust and pas- ment mystification around the mist democracy activists. (In Tse’s hands,
sion” playing out in his head. (Roci- hangs a question: Is “Owlish,” which this convergence is sensuous and roman-
nante makes a cameo as a “snow-white riffs on the perennial theme of runaway tic, a “warm current” passing through
rocking horse with a flowing golden imagination, also a political allegory? hard flesh.) When their van steers into
mane,” which the sweethearts bestride For years, Q’s life has felt curiously faint a protest march, Q pounds on the par-
in the nude.) With the encouragement and dreamlike. Strange lacunae inter- tition and shouts at the driver to flee.
of a mysterious friend named Owlish, rupt his memories, most jarringly when Aliss, more receptive to the flowing,
Q recites poetry to Aliss and expounds Q interacts with university officials or nocturnal lessons of the second Nev-
on “great philosophical and academic law enforcement. It is as though the ers, likens the protesters to “black water
debates, seeking to express his views book, with its ellipses and obstructed droplets . . . leading to another secret,
on love, time, consciousness, desire, messages, were depicting the reality- expectant city, waiting to bloom wide
existence, and as yet unnamed new warping effects of an uncanny, con- open like a flower.”
fields of thought.” Tse describes Aliss straining force—a force like state cen- This political and civic unfurling
with characteristic slyness: “Her pout- sorship. The half-encrypted aspect of parallels Aliss’s own awakening. Tse’s
ing rosebud lips were always so con- Tse’s place-names, as if she had hastily interest in machines becoming people
tented,” and “her glimmering eyes, crossed out “Hong Kong” and written brings her back to the circumstances
their colour shifting like the sea, com- in “Nevers,” adds to an aura of dissi- that turn people into machines. At the
municated to him the message: Yes, I dent literature, of samizdat. novel’s outset, state censorship, eco-
get it. I completely understand.” As the Amid all this, Q rebels by doubling nomic precariousness, and class strati-
book continues, Q’s sleeping and wak- down on fantasy. Aliss, he believes, has fication have transformed Q into a
ing hours blur, and Tse’s writing grows liberated his desires, imagination, and “flesh-and-blood mannequin.” He re-
increasingly surreal. When Aliss comes intellect. He grows his hair out and bels, but in a limited way, shrinking
to life (or the professor dreams that stops spending time at the university. back from his students and refusing
she does), her awakening has the rus- He treats Aliss like a status symbol, solidarity with their protest movement.
tle of inevitability. whisking her onto helicopters and the His vision of freedom remains private
balconies of luxury hotels. He hires and acquisitive, whereas Tse suggests
eanwhile, demonstrations are a chauffeur to ferry the two of them that real freedom—political, imagina-
M spreading across the city. Activ-
ists in Nevers protest the “groundless
around town in a minivan with tinted
windows. “To hell with his university
tive, and erotic—does not subjugate
others; real freedom is democratic, a
disqualification of an election candi- superiors!” he thinks. “To hell with his public and collective project. Aliss
date” and the modifying of history wife and her old, lowbrow friends! Fuck comes to embody this ideal, and with
textbooks. One student even climbs a them all!” it the most hopeful and the most human
clock tower. But Q is insensible to the But how free is he, really? Like Emma parts of Q. “She looked nothing like a
angry signs on the cafeteria walls and Bovary, he has escaped the prison of re- doll,” he thinks, as their tryst draws to
the bulletin boards outside the library. pression only to fall victim to his own a close. “She was him”—pulled up from
He hardly notices when just three stu- mind. In his head, he is unbounded, a the depths of the looking glass, less a
dents show up to his hundred-person mythical figure, but from the outside Q mistress than a twin. But, by the time
lecture course. “The world around him,” resembles a “discarded toy,” full of “rusted Q realizes that he and Aliss are dou-
Tse writes, “seemed to vanish into his gears” and “blocked-up pipes.” His dream bles, it’s too late. He will never see him-
blind spot.” woman, stranded between the organic self again. 
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 77
 City?” he asks. “When I first immigrated,
THE CURRENT CINEMA I used to cry a lot,” Nora replies, “but
then I realized that nobody cared.” You

PLAYTIME
sense a sharp turn in Lee’s performance:
she is seldom less than charming, but
there are increasing flickers of severity,
“Past Lives” and “Squaring the Circle.” too—the implication being that charm
alone will not fuel you for city life. You
BY ANTHONY LANE have to be hard. Hence the abruptness
with which Nora, in a video call, tells
ack and forth we go, through time, glish name, Nora Moon, which sounds Hae Sung, “I want us to stop talking
B in Celine Song’s début film, “Past
Lives,” and there’s not a DeLorean in
like the heroine of a fairy tale. Hae Sung
is upset by her departure, but, hey, he’s
for a while.”
Another dozen years flit by. Nora,
sight. After a brief opening scene, in a kid; he’ll get over it. He does not. (The living in the East Village, is married to
a New York bar, the words “24 years whole movie is alive to the idea of our Arthur ( John Magaro), a writer whom
earlier” appear onscreen. For a sec- not getting over things. Think of it as she met at a creative retreat in Mon-
ond, I misread “years” as “hours”—a a welcome rebuke to our nagging de- tauk. The existence of Hae Sung, on the
more manageable flashback—but no, mands for closure.) Twelve years later, other hand, has stalled. Now an engi-
Song really is grabbing us by the hand as an adult (Teo Yoo), Hae Sung reaches neer, he still goes out drinking in Seoul
with his buddies, and he’s meant to be
getting married, but, as he says, “I’m too
ordinary.” The one extraordinary thing
about him is the strength of his feelings
for Nora, which refuse to subside. He
flies to New York, checks into a hotel
room (a Whistlerian study in blue-gray),
and then stands in a park, awaiting Nora,
nervously smoothing his hair and his
clothes, as if he were twelve years old
again and preparing to receive a prize.
When Nora calls his name, the camera
stays on him, gauging the swell of emo-
tion on his face—a kind of grateful as-
tonishment, tranquil with ecstasy.
Here, at last, you get swept up in the
action. If such moments are rare, the
rarity is not exactly a fault. Suffice to
say that Song’s film is a romance—per-
Teo Yoo and Greta Lee star in Celine Song’s début feature. haps the romance—of the now. Com-
pared with Max Ophüls’s “Letter from
and asking us to leap before we look. out to Nora (Greta Lee), now an aspir- an Unknown Woman” (1948), which is
The first leap takes us to Seoul, where ing playwright in New York. True to the no less reliant on chronological hops,
Na Young (Seung-ah Moon), aged twelve, mechanisms of modern love, they con- and which slays me with every viewing,
lives with her parents and her sister. She nect on Facebook. In lieu of billets-doux “Past Lives” is strikingly cautious, calm,
walks home from school with a boy, Hae sealed with wax, we get buffering, fro- and superfine. A cynic might even sug-
Sung (Seung-min Yim), who, for once, zen laptop screens, and texts that arrive gest that, like its title, it flirts with the
has got better grades than she has. She at three o’clock in the morning. timid, fighting shy of excess in its char-
could not be more annoyed. He calls her Some things, though, never go out acters as in its compositions. (Try count-
a psycho, as if that were a quality to be of style. Notice Nora’s response to mak- ing all the shots with mirrors and win-
admired. The two of them go on a play- ing contact with her old pal: filmed on dows. In every respect, Song is inviting
date, climbing on chunky sculptures in the street, from overhead, she walks reflection.) The only scenes that ring
a park, their faces vanishing and coming along with a spring—or a springtime— false, tellingly, are the male boozing
back into view—a hint of the transience in her step, as if barely able to stop her- bouts in Seoul. Vulgarity is not on the
that will lend the film an air of cheer- self from breaking into a dance. It’s a menu. If there is comedy here, it’s light
fully worried fragility. lovely old-school touch, all the more and consciously awkward; villainy is un-
The exciting news for Na Young is unexpected because the grownup Nora imaginable; sex is scarcely mentioned,
that she and her family are relocating, is the most composed of souls. Hae let alone performed. When Nora and
to Canada. As if that were not trans- Sung recalls that, as a child, she used to Arthur wake up in bed, she admits that
formative enough, she acquires an En- weep a lot. “You can’t cry in New York her strongest desire is for chicken wings.
78 THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 ILLUSTRATION BY LEONARDO SANTAMARIA
 Yet the film hits home. In part, that Nothing but the cow—who is not to McCartney, for example, Hipgnosis
is a tribute to its melancholy. Unlike the be confused, obviously, with the cow thought nothing of ferrying a statue to
nocturnal strollers in Woody Allen’s who appeared on a Pink Floyd bootleg the snowy peak of a mountain, by heli-
“Manhattan” (1979), who leaned into in the nineteen-eighties titled “Dark copter, for the cover of “Wings Great-
love while seated on a bench, beside a Side of the Moo.” est.” And if you were one of the spaced-
gorgeously envisioned Fifty-ninth Street The cover of “Atom Heart Mother” out fans who spent hours puzzling over
Bridge, Hae Sung and Nora stand stiffly was dreamed up by Hipgnosis, the de- the front of Pink Floyd’s “Wish You
in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, in day- sign company that you instinctively Were Here,” trying to work out whether
light, while another couple, behind them, sought out, from the late sixties to the the guy on fire, in a suit, was truly on fire,
are enfolded in a kiss. In short, Song’s late seventies, if you were a big and smelly the new movie, far from pouring cold
film may not be a love story at all. I sus- cheese in the world of British rock. The water on rock mythology, is here to fan
pect that its real theme is transplanta- saga of the business, which was formed the flames.
tion, of which love is both a casualty and defined by two men, Storm Thor- “Squaring the Circle” is thus a dou-
and a blessing. Look at Arthur, sweetly gerson and Aubrey (Po) Powell, is told ble elegy. On the A-side, it conjures up
attempting to learn Korean, and fret- in a new documentary, “Squaring the a lost world of noisome glamour, in which
ting because Nora, when she dreams, Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis).” This visitors to the toilet-less headquarters of
speaks Korean in her sleep. Listen to is your chance to learn about the naked Hipgnosis, in London’s Soho, were forced
her, meanwhile, on the subject of Hae blond children clambering over rocks to pee in the sink. (This could explain
Sung: “He’s so Korean. I feel so not Ko- on the front of Led Zeppelin’s “Houses why the company was never commis-
rean when I’m with him.” Rich in set- of the Holy”; the delicate drawing of sioned by, say, Diana Ross & the Su-
tling and unsettling, “Past Lives,” for all filmmaker paraphernalia on 10cc’s “The premes.) On the B-side lies a more spe-
its coolness, provokes us with difficult Original Soundtrack”; and, for Peter cific loss. The album cover was a minor
questions. When a person is described Gabriel’s first solo album, the droplets but deliriously popular art form that was
as Korean American—or French Mo- of rain on the hood of a car, each of limited not just by shape—a neat fit, in-
roccan, or whatever—what depths of which was minutely scratched on the cidentally, for the square format favored
experience are embodied in that juxta- print to intensify its gleam. Oddly, Ga- by many modish photographers of the
position? Is it surprising that Greco- briel’s shiny alien stare on the inner sleeve sixties—but also by the prospect of its
Roman wrestlers tie themselves in knots? was not a graphic effect; he wore silver own inevitable death. Technology gave,
Is Hae Sung being cruel, or honest, when contact lenses. Of course he did. and technology hath taken away. Dis-
he refers to Nora as “someone who Why do such arcana matter, and how mal though it was to see the cover of
leaves”? No wonder the whole thing come “Squaring the Circle” is so brac- Genesis’s “The Lamb Lies Down on
ends in tears. ing to behold? It’s directed by Anton Broadway,” into which Hipgnosis had
Corbijn, whose film “Control” (2007)—a packed an entire narrative, shrunk to a
f you happened to be driving down dramatized account of the life of Ian flimsy insert inside the case of a com-
I the Sunset Strip in 1970, you might
have seen a cow. Not a live cow, or por-
Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division—
is the least fanciful and the most grimly
pact disk, how much sadder it is to sum-
mon the LP on Spotify these days and
tions of a dead one on a barbecue, but vehement of musical bio-pics. Corbijn to find your iPhone displaying some-
a billboard that featured a placid beast, has an obsessive eye, and it suits the detail- thing smaller than a graham cracker.
in a green field, turning to face the cam- crazy methods of Powell and Thorgerson. Vinyl has made a comeback, of sorts, but
era. The image was there to advertise a (The latter was famously cussed; accord- who still wants to be Hipgnotized? 
new Pink Floyd album, “Atom Heart ing to Nick Mason, Pink Floyd’s drum-
Mother,” whose cover bore no mention mer, he “wouldn’t take yes for an an- NEWYORKER.COM
of the band. No words at all, in fact. swer.”) To meet the demands of Paul Richard Brody blogs about movies.

THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2023 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 12, 2023 79

 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Sam Marlow,
must be received by Sunday, June 11th. The finalists in the May 29th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the June 26th issue. Anyone age thirteen
or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“It’s an honor to work with a giant in the field.”

Nicole Chrolavicius, Burlington, Ont.

“Actually, the toughest thing was finding a tiny clipboard.” “I’ll take the jacket and the pants and the pants.”
Jon Ketzner, Cumberland, Md. Yael Nobel, New York City

“You’ve outgrown the lab, so we’ve assigned you a cubicle.”

Elizabeth Ann Stein, Houston, Texas
 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

14 15

THE 16 17

CROSSWORD 18 19 20

21 22 23
A beginner-friendly puzzle.
24 25 26 27 28 29 30

BY ROBYN WEINTRAUB
31 32

33 34 35
ACROSS
1 Leave out
36 37 38
5 Parking spots at a pub?
14 Update, as a kitchen
39 40
15 “Hotel ___” (Eagles song about a place
where “you can check out anytime you
41 42
like, but you can never leave”)
16 Far from frazzled
43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51
17 Embarrassing discovery at the Louvre, say
18 Some beer-garden offerings
52 53 54
19 Three-___ (back-to-back-to-back
championships)
55 56
20 Makes more bearable
21 Stare, as into a crystal ball 57 58
23 “Some aquatic mammals at the zoo
escaped. It was otter chaos!,” for example
24 Electrical device that might get mistaken 3 Fodder for water-cooler chitchat 40 “American ___” (2013 film starring Amy
for a surge protector 4 Friend of Huckleberry Finn Adams and Christian Bale as scammers)
28 Media company based in London 5 Reveal, as claws 41 Common mixer with gin
31 Flitting between numerous tasks 6 Ski resort near Salt Lake City 43 Like a wet noodle
32 Nation south of Ecuador 7 Africa’s Great ___ Valley (long series of 44 Stench
33 Adams who photographed Yosemite trenches caused by tectonic activity) 45 Large Asian desert
34 ___ Maria (brand of coffee liqueur) 8 Bay Area airport code 46 Classic soft drink whose name sounds
35 Flower at the center of a seventeenth- 9 Ripped into pieces like a calf-covering sock
century Dutch market crash Boarding school attended by Princes
10 Instrument that may have several 47
36 Verb in many sauce recipes thousand pipes William and Harry
37 Reference book for geography buffs and 11 Bills featuring George Washington 48 Street performer who never says “thank
armchair explorers you” to tippers?
12 Italian coins replaced by the euro
39 Mind reader’s purported gift, briefly 50 Lead-in to skirt or van
13 “Survey ___ . . .” (“Family Feud”
40 Garment from an older sibling, perhaps catchphrase) 51 Word in a shoelace-tying tutorial
41 Penguin suit 15 Briny bagel-and-lox toppers 53 Aid for styling a pompadour
42 Lion’s locks 22 Great enthusiasm
43 The Apple apple, the Shell shell, and the
Domino’s domino
23 Dessert that, aptly, has a typical Solution to the previous puzzle:
circumference-to-diameter ratio of
46 The Seas with ___ & Friends (Epcot approximately 3.14 H U T T A P P S H A T H
attraction based on a Pixar film) I N S H A L L A H O P R A H
24 Plays often called on fourth down
49 Code used by Webmasters P O K E R F A C E S E I Z E S
25 Didn’t disclose, as key information S C A N R A T B M W S
52 “That went over my head”
26 Leather-jacket-wearing greaser in the P I P E B A R B A R A A N N
54 Where many Browns, Blue Jackets, and movie “Grease” T U M I D L I B A L T
Reds fans live
27 Royal domain A R I A F D A O P T T I E
55 Residence that, despite its name, doesn’t B E N N I E A N D T H E J E T S
28 Predictor or indicator of change
typically move after it’s been delivered S E T G E N O S X E A S T
56 Jay who hosted the “Tonight Show” 29 “Scarface” director De Palma
H B O U Z O C O M M A
57 Travel-booking site whose ads feature 30 Beer-pong containers C H E R R Y B O M B A P S E
Kaley Cuoco 31 Opposite of an acid B O Z O E E O A T T A

58 Sound from a leaky faucet 32 Subjected to tinny Muzak, maybe S L O O P S M Y S H A R O N A

35 “Look what I did!” A N D R E E A T A N D R U N
DOWN 37 Material used to create the figures at E X E S D O E R Y E T I

1 Black-and-white ocean predator Madame Tussauds Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
2 Happy ___ (McDonald’s menu item) 38 Assign to a lesser rank newyorker.com/crossword
evergreen favorites, limited-edition items, and more.