The New Yorker - 24 01 2022

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JANUARY 24, 2022
4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Dhruv Khullar on understanding Omicron;
incarcerated artists; country-club controversy;
Bill Bradley’s one-man show; recess for adults.
DEPT. OF TECHNOLOGY
Sue Halpern 18 Flying Aces
Aerial combat meets artificial intelligence.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
David Kamp 25 Wirecutter: The Best Partner
LIFE AND LETTERS
Alex Ross 26 Behind the Mask
The magic of Thomas Mann.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Patrick Radden Keefe 32 The Bounty Hunter
What drives whistle-blowers to act?
ANNALS OF JUSTICE
Eren Orbey 46 Fault Lines
Forgiving the most personal crimes.
FICTION
Arthur Krystal 54 “What’s the Deal, Hummingbird?”
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Kathryn Schulz 58 Bambi before the Disney classic.
BOOKS
63 Briefly Noted
Blair McClendon 65 Lorraine Hansberry’s struggle.
POP MUSIC
Amanda Petrusich 70 John Mellencamp, older and realer.
ON TELEVISION
Doreen St. Félix 72 “The Righteous Gemstones.”
POEMS
Donika Kelly 38 “Sixteen Center”
T. R. Hummer 50 “My Mother in Bardo”
COVER
George Booth “Around the Clock”
DRAWINGS Jason Adam Katzenstein, Maddie Dai, Carolita Johnson, P. C. Vey, Tom Chitty, Mike Twohy,
Frank Cotham, Roz Chast, William Haefeli, E. S. Glenn, Lonnie Millsap, Liana Finck, Zoe Si, Sarah Akinterinwa,
Joseph Dottino, Benjamin Schwartz, Caitlin Cass SPOTS Antonio Giovanni Pinna
CONTRIBUTORS
Patrick Radden Keefe (“The Bounty Sue Halpern (“Flying Aces,” p. 18) is a
Hunter,” p. 32), a staff writer, received staff writer and a scholar-in-residence
the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for his at Middlebury College.
book “Empire of Pain.” His new book,
“Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Kill- Alex Ross (“Behind the Mask,” p. 26)
ers, Rebels, and Crooks,” will come out has been the magazine’s music critic
in June. since 1996. His latest book is “Wag-
nerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow
Donika Kelly (Poem, p. 38 ) has pub- of Music.”
lished the poetry collections “Bestiary”
and “The Renunciations.” She teaches Arthur Krystal (Fiction, p. 54) is the
at the University of Iowa. author of four books of essays, includ-
ing “This Thing We Call Literature.”
Eren Orbey (“Fault Lines,” p. 46) is a He began contributing to The New
contributing writer at the magazine. Yorker in 1998.
Amanda Petrusich (Pop Music, p. 70), a Kathryn Schulz (A Critic at Large,

staff writer, is the author of “Do Not p. 58 ), a staff writer, won the 2016 Pu-
Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive litzer Prize for feature writing. Her
Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm latest book is “Lost & Found.”
Records.”
T. R. Hummer (Poem, p. 50) has pub-
George Booth (Cover) has contributed lished two essay collections and thirteen
cartoons to The New Yorker since 1969. books of poetry, including “Eon” and
“After the Afterlife.”
David Kamp (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 25)
is the author of, most recently, “Sunny Blair McClendon (Books, p. 65), a writer,
Days: The Children’s Television Rev- an editor, and a filmmaker, is based in
olution That Changed America.” New York City.
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
LEFT: EDWARD KINSELLA; RIGHT: RICHARD SAKER / CONTOUR / GETTY
THE NEW YORKER INTERVIEW DAILY COMMENT

Amanda Petrusich talks with the Graciela Mochkofsky on how
musicians Bonnie “Prince” Billy and COVID-disinformation campaigns
Bill Callahan. have affected the Latinx community.
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
HUMANITIES, REDEFINED tilingual approaches to literacy, and so-
cial- and racial-justice writing—attract
Louis Menand, in his review of two students with diverse interests and
books that defend so-called “great backgrounds. Last fall, I taught a writ-
books” courses, points out that the ten- ing course that brought together stu-
sion underpinning both works, between dents in Latinx studies, business, nurs-
professors’ motivations and their insti- ing, social work, engineering, and
tutions’ priorities, is nothing new (A English. Menand critiques the tradi-
Critic at Large, December 20th). Re- tional purpose of the great-books
cent trends in undergraduate enroll- course, to “know thyself.” Writing
ment, however, may help to explain classes propose another purpose: to
why students seem to be turning away know others, through the process of
from subjects such as English, foreign listening, collaborating, and revising.
languages, and philosophy in favor of Jessica Yood
more career-oriented courses of study. Associate Professor of English
1
According to a report published by the Lehman College, CUNY
Pew Research Center in 2019, between Bronx, N.Y.
1996 and 2016, the share of dependent
undergraduates in the U.S. who came MY BRILLIANT FRIEND
from families living below the poverty
line rose from twelve per cent to twenty In the early nineteen-nineties, I met
per cent. A decline in humanities en- Eddy Zheng, the subject of a recent
rollment might stem from the fact that profile by Hua Hsu, when we were
students from less affluent backgrounds both prisoners at San Quentin (“The
often feel that they don’t have as much Other Side,” December 20th). I was
freedom to pursue degrees in fields— inspired by the way that he questioned
like art, literature, and philosophy— every aspect of prison life, and by his
that, though life-enriching, promise advocating for peace during times of
small, or uncertain, financial payoffs. racial unrest. In my last year there, we
For the humanities to appeal to such became cellmates. Because I am white,
students, conditions beyond the uni- our friendship caused a stir. (The staff
versity also need to change. thought we were starting an Anglo-
Jack Maurer Asian gang. In reality, I appreciated
Huntsville, Ala. his culinary skills—what he could do
with Top Ramen and a can of tuna
Menand refers to figures showing steep was incredible.) That year, tensions be-
drops in enrollment in the humanities tween the northern Mexicans and the
at research universities as “real-world whites ran high, after the staff acci-
context.” I teach at a public college, the dentally placed two men from rival
kind that most American students at- gangs in the same cell. There was a
tend (around three-quarters of them, slew of razor slashings of white in-
according to the National Center for mates. Eddy, knowing that I had mere
Education Statistics). Here, we are see- days left before my release, kept me
ing a reinvention of the humanities, out of harm’s way. I salute him and am
and writing classes are a part of that. proud to be his friend.
As Menand notes, writing classes seem James Guardino
to defy the humanities’ downward trend. San Francisco, Calif.
Statistics show that freshman compo-
sition is the class taken by more Amer- •
ican undergraduates than any other. Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
Writing courses are especially popular address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
in public institutions, where, in my themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
experience, new offerings—including any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
those centered on digital media, mul- of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 3

JANUARY 19 – 25, 2022
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
The streaming service MUBI is a virtual repertory cinema, adding a movie each day alongside ongoing
series. The January offerings include notable first features ( Janicza Bravo’s “Lemon,” Noah Baumbach’s
“Kicking & Screaming”), the new release of the 2020 documentary “There Will Be No More Night,” and a
tribute to the Sundance Film Festival, presenting such independent-film classics as “But I’m a Cheerleader,”
“Chuck & Buck,” and Jonathan Caouette’s pioneering personal documentary “Tarnation” (pictured above).
1
As New York City venues reopen, it’s The Search for Signs of play still feels firmly dated. Strong is funny and
advisable to confirm in advance the works from the heart. She could rivet in a show
requirements for in-person attendance. Intelligent Life in the Universe written about her own generation—one that
This one-woman show first arrived on Broad- is at once more sincere and more at sea than
1
way in 1985, tailor-made for Lily Tomlin by Jane Tomlin and Wagner’s.—Vinson Cunningham
PODCASTS Wagner. Now it has been revived at the Shed, (The Shed; through Feb. 5.)
performed by Cecily Strong and directed by
Leigh Silverman. The new production clari-
Cocaine & Rhinestones fies how tuned in—and limited—to Tomlin’s
This exhaustively researched, feverishly de- rhythms, and to the problems of the eighties, DANCE
livered history-of-country-music podcast—a the original was. The show begins with Strong
passion project and one-man show from Tyler as Trudy, who is “crazy,” but happily so. She can,
Mahan Coe—was an instant cult hit among as she says, “pick up signals that seem to trans- “Bolshoi Ballet in Cinema”
music obsessives when its first season came mit snatches of people’s lives,” watching—and In the past few decades, Balanchine’s 1967 bal-
out, in 2017. Coe spent the next few years creat- enacting—scenes from them. The characters let “Jewels,” a triptych set to music by Fauré
ing the second season, a wildly ambitious, and she visits form a social frieze; among them are (“Emeralds”), Stravinsky (“Rubies”), and
wildly long, epic about George Jones. In telling a latchkey kid and a once earnest activist whose Tchaikovsky (“Diamonds”), has become a sta-
the great singer’s story, Coe zooms in and out life runs parallel to the failure of the Equal ple of the international ballet repertoire, not
to include the development of the Nashville Rights Amendment. There are now contem- quite on the level of “Swan Lake” and “Giselle”
sound, the history of pinball, the invention porary references to, say, Elon Musk, but the but close. The Bolshoi has performed it since
of ice cream, the Medicis, the production of
moonshine, Martin Luther’s opposition to the
Roman Catholic Church, Jones’s alcoholism, PODCAST DEPT.
Tammy Wynette’s affair with Burt Reynolds,
the history of drag and masquerade balls—and,
quite deftly, cocaine and rhinestones. Coe, an
autodidact and the son of the outlaw-country
musician David Allan Coe, relishes his role as
scholar-enthusiast-gadfly, and his zeal is the
show’s animating force. It’s at its most sublime
when he delves into the songs themselves:
“The song ‘White Lightning’ isn’t exactly
about outrunning the law with a trunkful of
moonshine, but you wouldn’t know it from
the music,” he says, playing a bit of the track.
“Buddy Killen’s standup bass turns over like
an engine, and all of a sudden you’re chugging
down a mountain, Pig Robbins’s piano tinkling
around somewhere in the back with all the
glass jars, and Floyd Robinson’s guitar lines
1
whipping by the windows faster than passing
tree trunks.”—Sarah Larson
THE THEATRE
Company
Stephen Sondheim’s gimlet ode to the eternal
fear of shrivelling up and dying alone—that is, Last summer, the journalist, author, and self-proclaimed “insufferable
of being thirty-five and single—from 1970, based
on a series of one-act plays by George Furth gossip” Kelsey McKinney wrote an Op-Ed for the Times with the
OPPOSITE: ENTERTAINMENT PICTURES / ALAMY; RIGHT: ILLUSTRATION BY MIN HEO
(who wrote the book), gets a bristling, buoyant headline “Gossip Is Not a Sin.” In the piece, McKinney grappled with
revival, directed by Marianne Elliott. Bobby, her conservative Christian upbringing and with the way that her church
the musical’s avowed bachelor, has become
Bobbie (Katrina Lenk), a singleton in pres- leaders demonized gossiping as an onanistic and shameful activity that
ent-day New York, who is pursued not by a trio had no place in a moral life. Still, McKinney argued, she loved gossip, and
of marriage-hungry gals but by three eligible she found it useful, not only in terms of bonding and entertainment but
gents who think she’s crazy not to settle down.
Her friends, all of them long ago partnered, also for breaking down toxic power structures from within and providing
heartily agree. Bobbie, who is seen by her cohort crucial whisper networks that protect the vulnerable and shine light on
as a kind of willful kid, visits with her various abusive behavior. The #MeToo movement began as gossip, after all.
friends and lovers, and what she observes does
not tempt her matrimonial appetite. Thanks to McKinney’s new podcast, however, takes a much more lighthearted and
the gender switch, when Joanne (Patti LuPone), low-stakes approach to the subject. She and the producer Alex Sujong
Bobbie’s salty, seen-it-all older friend, raises Laughlin have created a weekly show, “Normal Gossip” (from Defector
her vodka Stinger to “the girls who just watch,”
in the song “The Ladies Who Lunch,” she’s Media), that provides pure, voyeuristic, candy-coated pleasure. The
no longer talking only to herself but to Bob- conceit is that McKinney speaks to a “normal” person (her first guest was
bie, too; LuPone has concocted a signature, the author and podcaster Virgie Tovar) about more or less meaningless
bouncy version of Joanne’s ferocious number.
If there’s a weak link here, it’s Lenk, who has or wacky rumors that have been floating around in their social scene
the sharp comic timing and the ironic emo- for a while. In Tovar’s case, the steaming tea involves a messy group of
tional armor required for the role but seems entangled graduate students and an ill-fated camping trip. The show
to push her voice, straining where she should
soar.—Alexandra Schwartz (Reviewed in our issue evokes the thrill of sitting next to chatty, high-drama strangers at a café,
of 12/20/21.) (Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre; open run.) a rare feeling in these indoor-oriented times. It’s delicious.—Rachel Syme

Wall Street protests. “Burn the streets, burn
POP the cars,” she incants, a clear-eyed reminder that
people have the power.—Jenn Pelly (Streaming on
select platforms.)
Fred Hersch: “Breath by Breath”

JAZZ It’s little wonder that Fred Hersch’s “Breath
by Breath,” a collaboration between his trio and
the Crosby Street String Quartet, is shaded
in tender colors. The work emanates from a
pianist who prizes lyricism and contemplative
improvisation, and whose compositions are often
touched by that same assiduousness. Yet Hersch’s
eight-movement “Sati Suite,” inspired by his
meditation practice, never drifts completely into
the ether, thanks to the well-integrated roles of
the bassist Drew Gress and the drummer Jochen
Rueckert, and to the sympathetically positioned
string ensemble. This careful project may lack
the stirring interaction that powers Hersch’s in-
spired trio recordings, but resisting the discreet
beauty of such polished gems as “Rising, Falling”
and the title track is futile.—Steve Futterman
(Streaming on select platforms.)
Víkingur Ólafsson:
In his decade-long career as the Weeknd, the singer Abel Tesfaye has “Mozart & Contemporaries”
evolved from faceless art-house R. & B. enigma into a bona-fide pop CLASSICAL This imaginative pianist’s latest
star and a Super Bowl act. The reaches of his music have expanded, too, album, “Mozart & Contemporaries,” places
the much vaunted eighteenth-century genius
both sonically and conceptually. His new album, “Dawn FM,” imagines alongside other classical-era composers whom
purgatory as a traffic jam inside a tunnel, where a dialled-in default radio he tends to muscle out of recital programs.
station helps the dead transition into the next phase. The songs are decid- Víkingur Ólafsson demonstrates the individual
charms they offer—the restive flair of a C. P. E.
edly vintage and glam, evoking eighties synth pop and even Japanese city Bach rondo, or the pensiveness of a Galuppi
pop, but they retain Tesfaye’s signature haunting tone. With collaborative larghetto—but Mozart still comes out on top:
production from the pop guru Max Martin and the electronic alchemist the playfulness and harmonic fluency of his
Piano Sonata No. 16 in C Major, with its mem-
Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never), at once ethereal and stark, orable motive that cracks a smile in the simple
upbeat and eerie, Tesfaye probes his hedonistic persona and discovers act of spelling a major triad, transcends the
accountability. In a rare turn, the once heartless womanizer finally feels more conventional material. Ólafsson’s signa-
ture touch, which rounds the edges off of each
the sting of infidelity and desertion—in perdition.—Sheldon Pearce note, remains captivating, even if his phrasing
in slower passages sometimes feels too diffuse.
Galuppi and company get their day in the sun
when Ólafsson takes the album to Zankel Hall,
2012. Unsurprisingly, the company is most different about “Antidawn,” his new EP, is that next month, for a sold-out concert.—Oussama
convincing in “Diamonds,” the most glamorous he dismisses such beats almost entirely, as if Zahr (Streaming on select platforms.)
and imperial of the three ballets. The lead bal- stripping a film set of nearly everything, leaving
lerina in this section plays a kind of remote and mainly horizon, weather, and a few glimmer-
melancholy queen who is served by an adoring ing details. Those details accrue weight with Christopher Otto: “rag’sma”
cavalier. The roles were created on Suzanne attention, though a fan could be forgiven for CLASSICAL The violinist Christopher Otto, a
Farrell and Peter Martins, and are danced here wondering if there’s anywhere else for this ap- founder of the JACK Quartet, has contributed
by Svetlana Zakharova and the recently pro- proach to go.—Michaelangelo Matos (Streaming to that ensemble’s assurance and allure across
moted Jacopo Tissi. Violette Verdy’s role in on select platforms.) a staggering range of styles, from Xenakis’s el-
“Emeralds” is danced by the sparkling Evgenia emental roil to John Luther Adams’s ineffable
Obraztsova. The performance will be trans- stillness and Catherine Lamb’s infinitesimally
mitted live from Moscow on Jan. 23, as part of Cat Power: “Covers” shaded harmonic world. For his own composi-
“Bolshoi Ballet in Cinema.” Participating New INDIE ROCK Since Chan Marshall débuted as Cat tions, Otto embraces the pure mathematics of
York cinemas include Kips Bay 15, Empire 25, Power, in the mid-nineties, she has made cover just intonation. In “rag’sma,” two prerecorded
1
and Union Square Stadium 14.—Marina Harss versions a fixed part of her repertoire—bracingly quartets spiral apart slowly through simple in-
(bolshoiballetincinema.com; Jan. 23.) rocking Hank Williams’s “I Can’t Help It (If I’m tervals, their mounting distance producing a
Still in Love with You),” or casting Rihanna’s web of phantom tones, pulsations, and frictions.
“Stay” into time-stopping relief. With a voice Two versions of the work offer complementary
of mystery, conviction, ache, and awe, Marshall perspectives on that interplay; in a third, a live
ILLUSTRATION BY MATT WILLIAMS
MUSIC locates new depths of emotion in obscurities quartet smooths the divide between its recorded
and pop songs alike. In reinterpreting classics, counterparts. Joseph Branciforte’s judiciously
she has furthered her stature as one. Her latest managed recording illuminates this uncanny
Burial: “Antidawn” release, “Covers,” spans jazz, country, punk, music.—Steve Smith (Streaming on select platforms.)
ELECTRONIC The British electronic-music pro- rock, and pop, including staples of her live sets,
ducer Will Bevan, who works as Burial, makes such as Frank Ocean’s generation-defining bal-
ghost-town tracks, full of curling static and lad “Bad Religion” and the spry “Pa Pa Power,” Hana Vu: “Public Storage”
flickering vocal wisps. But he tends to arrange by the actor Ryan Gosling’s band, Dead Man’s At twenty-one, the Los Angeles singer
INDIE POP
these abstruse elements in the service of a Bones. Marshall was inspired to cover “Pa Pa Hana Vu boasts an improbably deep repertoire,
pronounced, if oft-pockmarked, beat. What’s Power” ten years ago, following the Occupy having been born to an era of indie artists who
6 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022

graduated swiftly from lock-and-key diaries Kauffer worked mainly with small agencies, Thacher, a New York artist who died in 2017,
to Bandcamp pages. Her early songs grap- winning commissions including the creation shot the transporting piece on 16-mm., cleverly
pled with high-school angst—that perennial of some hundred and twenty-five posters for linking Cubist sight gags and casually surreal
songwriter’s gift—with a present-tense zest. the London Underground. Never settling on vignettes. In this exhibition, it’s shown as the
Where home-recorders once repudiated the a signature style, he said that his criteria for artist intended: projected onto a large screen
pop world, Vu, like many in her cohort, has posters were “attraction, interest, and stimula- installed between two walls, obscuring a corner.
a more ambivalent relationship. Her album tion,” deeming “no means too arbitrary or too The configuration heightens the recursive effect
“Public Storage” makes room for surly guitars classical”—Apollonian values.—Peter Schjeldahl of the film itself, blurring cinematic and phys-
as well as airy synths, dark ruminations and (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; ical space. The onscreen action unfolds in the
also chipper disco beats. At times, Vu flirts through April 10.) corner of a white room, whose blank architec-
with a self-deprecation that seems spiritually ture provides a stage for a woman, a man, a boy,
torn from the nineties: “I am just the world’s and a dog to interact with a quartet of Lillipu-
worst talker,” she laments in “World’s Worst.” Anita Thacher tian doubles. Like any great magician, Thacher
“I can’t say anything.” Yet she sings the lines The predicaments of scale faced by Alice on saves her best trick for the grand finale, in
with a characteristic robustness and poise—a her sojourn to Wonderland are echoed in which the room appears to fill with water, be-
diva with a schlumpy veneer. Though a January “Loose Corner,” a gaily desultory yet precisely coming an aquarium with a starry sky reflected
tour was scuttled by COVID, Vu is set to play constructed ten-minute film, from 1980-86. in its depths.—J.F. (Microscope; through Jan. 29.)
1
Baby’s All Right in March.—Jay Ruttenberg
(Streaming on select platforms.)
AT THE GALLERIES
ART
Robert Gober
Since the nineteen-seventies, this esteemed
American artist has made work that seems
to materialize directly from his unconscious,
albeit slowly; elements that might appear to be
found (sinks, beds, bundles of newspapers) are,
in fact, painstakingly made by hand, realistic
but also somehow uncanny. The diorama-like
shadow boxes on view in Gober’s current
show—titled “Shut up. No. You shut up.”—
reflect his characteristic emotional restraint
and cool touch, but they gain new power from
their intimate size and the inherent tension of
containment. Two arresting examples, both
titled “Help me,” are installed facing each
other at a distance, offering cropped views of
the same window, complete with floral cur-
tains and a rusted can labelled “farm grease”
atop the sill. Initially, they look identical, but
close inspection—which requires traversing the
space—reveals more differences than similar-
ities, not unlike two siblings’ recollections of
the same childhood memory.—Johanna Fateman
(Matthew Marks; through Jan. 29.)
E. McKnight Kauffer
This commercial poster designer, the subject
of a startlingly spectacular retrospective at
the Cooper Hewitt, was a magus of boundless In 2018, an impeccable installation by Cynthia Talmadge, at 56 Henry—
resourcefulness in the nineteen-twenties and
thirties. (Kauffer died in 1954.) With assis- one of the most exciting young galleries on the Lower East Side—turned
tance from his second wife, Marion V. Dorn, a pointillist eye on the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, whose clients
he mined—and evangelized for—adventurous are the rich, famous, and dearly departed of New York City. In Talmadge’s
aesthetics to change the street-level look of
cities, invigorate book-cover design, and inflect new exhibition, “Franklin Fifth Helena” (at 56 Henry, through Jan. 30), the
theatre sets and interior decoration. His influ- scene has shifted from the Upper East Side to the Brentwood neighbor-
ence proved so infectious that it was swallowed hood of L.A., and the medium from oil paint to colored sand, but the art-
up by successive generations in a profession
whose manufacture is inherently ephemeral. ist’s preoccupations remain languidly morbid. If the immersive installation
Kauffer spent his childhood in Evansville, (a detail is pictured above) had a soundtrack, it might be Lana Del Rey’s
Indiana, and later became a live-wire cosmo- “Born to Die.” You don’t have to be versed in Talmadge’s tabloid-worthy
politan, based in England from 1915 to 1940.
COURTESY THE ARTIST / 56 HENRY
A vast chart spanning a wall of the show is a subjects—the death of Marilyn Monroe and the shady conduct of the
name-drop constellation of associations: Alfred actress’s final psychoanalyst—to marvel at the trompe-l’oeil intricacy of
Hitchcock, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Virginia the interior, whose latticework and wraparound, still-life composition
Woolf, Langston Hughes, Man Ray, and Sir
Kenneth Clark. So why isn’t this “Underground were inspired by the fifteenth-century studiolo from the Ducal Palace, in
Modernist,” as the show is subtitled, better Gubbio, Italy, long on display at the Met. As Talmadge exposes Monroe’s
known himself? One factor is his practically complex character through the details of the rooms in which she passed
exotic integrity, public-spirited in service to
civic and political causes and holding that her last days, the project recalls another celebrity portrait of sorts: William
a proper designer “must remain an artist.” Eggleston’s 1983 photo essay, “Elvis at Graceland.”—Andrea K. Scott
1
MOVIES
as a cimbalom band pounds out high-speed
folk songs. Yet—as if cautioning rock-and-roll
study in Berlin, and Young-ho plans to ask
his father for the money to join her there.
radicals of the Age of Aquarius—the same Meanwhile, Young-ho’s mother (Cho Yun-hee)
spirit of solidarity in song accompanies a lurks in the background, aiming to keep his
The Confrontation shift in the action, as friendly exhortation focus on his future career. Hong—who wrote,
The joys and the deceptions of revolution- gives way to revolutionary terror.—Richard produced, and directed the film, and also did
ary fervor are staged as a color-splashed, on- Brody (Screening and streaming at Metrograph the cinematography and the editing—packs
location musical in the Hungarian director starting Jan. 19.) a novel’s worth of dramatic complexity and
Miklós Jancsó’s exuberant historical drama, a lifetime of rage into its sixty-five-minute
from 1969. The action is set in 1947, mainly at span. Parents and children and their partners
a Catholic seminary, where a group of Com- Introduction and friends come off as the closest of enemies,
munist college students breach the gates and, The battle of the generations is fought pas- making misery for one another with good
following their warmhearted leader (Lajos sive-aggressively in this spare, wry, yet bitter intentions as well as with indifference.—R.B.
Balázsovits), attempt to hold a political de- drama by Hong Sangsoo. It’s an intricate tale (In limited theatrical release.)
bate with the young seminarians. The police of push-and-pull romance, in which a young
try to impose order, but the students, confi- man named Young-ho (Shin Seok-ho) is
dent of their powers of persuasion, keep the summoned to a meeting with his father (Kim Master and Commander:
atmosphere festive. The entire movie takes Young-ho), a prosperous doctor, and chances
place outdoors, in sunlight. When students to meet his father’s friend (Gi Ju-bong), a The Far Side of the World
face down the police, they do so with a circle well-known actor who sparks Young-ho’s ar- The work of Patrick O’Brian finally arrived
dance as they sing a song of the Spanish Civil tistic ambitions. But Young-ho’s girlfriend, onscreen in this 2003 drama. Two of his
War; in the seminary courtyard, they march Ju-won (Park Mi-so), gets the opportunity— twenty Jack Aubrey novels were requisitioned
arm in arm while intoning other hearty parti- thanks to an artist (Kim Min-hee) who’s a for the film, directed by Peter Weir; instead
san chants, and boys and girls whirl together friend of her mother (Seo Young-hwa)—to of receiving a gentle introduction, we are
launched straight into a fogbound firefight,
and from there into a race around Cape Horn.
WHAT TO STREAM The casting of Russell Crowe as Aubrey may
divide the fans; he can handle the sway of
action with aplomb, but O’Brian’s readers
may flinch at his sullen air and pine for the
bluffness of the original. Paul Bettany does
a delicate job with the role of Stephen Ma-
turin, Jack’s best and cleverest friend; we sense
his quiet eagerness—common to the work of
both Weir and O’Brian—to press on toward
the darker reaches of the world and discover
more. For all the foul weather, and despite a
charming amputation scene, we feel ourselves
to be in good company with these men, and
strangely jealous of their packed and salted
lives.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
11/17/03.) (Streaming on Paramount+, YouTube,
and other services.)
The Whistle at Eaton Falls

A plastics factory in a small New Hampshire
town is the focus of this unusual 1951 drama,
filmed on location, that’s centered on the
workers’ labor union. After the owner’s sud-
den death, his widow, Helen (Dorothy Gish),
hires Brad Adams (Lloyd Bridges), a factory
worker who’s also the union president, to
take his place. Despite Brad’s sympathies,
The Oregon-raised, Paris-based director James Blue’s clandestinely he follows through on planned layoffs, put-
ting him into conflict with the union and
filmed 1962 drama, “The Olive Trees of Justice,” reveals the attach- his longtime friends. The director, Robert
ment of French colonists to Algeria and the emotional and moral Siodmak, renders the rustic town ominously
drive for the country’s independence (which was achieved later that labyrinthine, with interconnections of power
as tangled as those of a teeming metropolis.
year). The film—screening and streaming at Metrograph starting on The drama interweaves financial chicanery,
Jan. 21—is based on a novel by Jean Pélégri, who co-wrote the script the wiles of salesmen, the peculiarities of
and plays an aging man of French descent, the founder of a vineyard military-procurement bids, the delights of
industrial design, and the banalities on which
in the Algerian countryside, who is now on his deathbed. The patri- fortunes pivot—in this case, the plastic chan-
arch’s adult son, Jean (Pierre Prothon), who lives in France, returns nel selector of television sets. A happy ending
to Algiers to see his father and, while there, reconnects with lifelong is balanced with cautionary ironies regarding
the future of unions in an environment where
friends—indigenous Algerians, who display a wide range of responses management has the built-in upper hand.
to the fight for independence. Flashbacks to Jean’s childhood at the The cast features such great character actors
as Ernest Borgnine, Lenore Lonergan, and
COURTESY KINO LORBER
family farm show his strong bond with his native village’s residents,
Arthur O’Connell alongside local nonpro-
1
who nonetheless endured his father’s unchallenged domination. Blue fessionals.—R.B. (Playing on TCM Jan. 24
evokes both the campaign of terrorism by Algerian militants and the and streaming on Watch TCM.)
brutality of France’s military occupation; above all, he depicts the
nuances of irreconcilable inequalities, the web of local subtleties that For more reviews, visit
both compose and miss the historically big picture.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

Many years before the chef Cosme ory of his paternal grandmother, who
Aguilar opened Casa Enrique—be- would press into service anyone within
fore he toiled in French restaurants as shouting distance whenever she made
a porter and then a line cook and then a mole. “Someone would be peeling the
1
chef, before his first career, as a teen-age chilies, someone else would be toasting
car mechanic, before even his birth— the nuts,” he said. “It’s a lot of ingredi-
his mother ran a small restaurant in ents!” Aguilar’s version has twenty-four,
TABLES FOR TWO Chiapas. She passed away in 1983, including chilies (five types), almonds,
when he was a boy. Twenty-nine years raisins, figs, sesame seeds, plantains,
Casa Enrique later, when Aguilar decided to open and cocoa powder. Atop the accom-
5-48 49th Ave., Queens his own place, he turned to a notebook panying yellow rice, he throws down
of recipes she left behind. One of the a dare: a single mature chile de árbol
One of the first Mexican eateries in first dishes he attempted to re-create (Scoville heat units: up to 65,000). A
New York City opened in midtown was her albondigas—meatballs, each frozen blueberry margarita, or several,
in 1938. Its proprietor, Juvencio Mal- with a hard-boiled egg in its center, is some comfort here.
donado, who had sailed over from the sunk in a smoky tomato sauce prepared Whatever you order comes with a
Yucatán Peninsula, called his place Xo- with onion, garlic, and chipotle chilies. hot pot of steaming tortillas, and many
PHOTOGRAPH BY HARUKA SAKAGUCHI FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
chitl, after an Aztec goddess. He pat- “The first time I made albondigas here, dishes lend themselves to imaginative
ented a mechanical taco-shell fryer and it really got me,” Aguilar said. “I hadn’t reassembly in the form of tacos. Take
printed a glossary of imported culinary tasted that meal in a very long time, and the cochinito Chiapaneco, a love letter
terms for his befuddled diners. (Tortilla: I was, like, ‘Oh, my God, it’s just like to Aguilar’s native Chiapas, for which
“a flat, round corn cake, about 6 inches my mom used to make.’ I almost cried.” he marinates pork ribs in apple-cider
in diameter and 1/16 inch thick . . . can Aguilar has a dozen stories like vinegar, guajillo chilies, garlic, and fresh
be bent or rolled, as we shall explain.”) that. “Everybody who wants to open thyme before slow-roasting them for
For decades, Xochitl was just about the a Mexican restaurant in New York,” four hours. Once you’ve dispatched
only game in town. The scene ramified he said, “they want to go fancy—they the ribs, what is to be done with the
in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, use truffles.” He was wearing a mask, leftover marinade? Spoon it over a rice-
when the city’s Mexican population but you could tell he made a face when and-beans medley and fold it into a
grew eightfold. New arrivals would he said “truffles.” Aguilar is not above tortilla, obviously.
launch taco trucks, tamale pushcarts, aesthetic embellishment, but he also The heartiest winter dish, a shred-
panaderías, tortilla factories, and more believes that overbold improvisation ded-pork-and-hominy soup topped
than a thousand professional kitchens on traditional fare too often spins out, with julienned radish, appears on the
in the five boroughs. If a certain French crashing over the guardrails of tribute menu as Pozole de Mi Tía. Aguilar
tire manufacturer is to be believed, and into the pit of cultural snobbery. won’t specify which aunt. “I have to
among the best of them today is Casa He, instead, elects to go deeper. His be careful,” he said. “I have six aunts
Enrique, which opened a decade ago, in menu is his memoir. on my father’s side, and another six on
Queens, and is the first Mexican restau- Aguilar’s mole de Piaxtla, poured over my mother’s side.” A pause. “It’s a lot
rant in the city to have been awarded a stewed chicken, is an homage both to of aunts!” (Entrées $21-$36.)
Michelin star—every year since 2015. his father’s home town and to the mem- —David Kortava
three sentences.
three hundred pages of art.
one heartbreaking-heartmaking manifesto.
★“
A visual smash up of art and text that captures what it’s like
to not be able to breathe. To be Black. In America. Right now.
The book you need to read. Now.
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT The United States is recording, on aver- find out. Last week, rates of social dis-
OMICRON BY THE NUMBERS age, more than eight hundred thousand tancing and self-quarantining rose to
coronavirus cases a day, three times last their highest levels in nearly a year, and
here’s an urban legend about a Texas winter’s peak. Given the growing use of dining, shopping, and social gatherings
T man who takes a rifle to the side of
his barn and sprays bullets across the
at-home tests, this official count greatly
underestimates the true number of in-
fell to new lows. Half of Americans be-
lieve that it will be at least a year before
wall, more or less at random. Then he fections. We don’t know how many rapid they return to their pre-pandemic lives,
finds the densest clusters of holes and tests are used each day, or what propor- if they ever do; three-quarters feel that
paints a bull’s-eye around each one. Later, tion return positive, rendering unreliable they’re as likely, or more so, to contract
a passerby, impressed by this display, trots traditional metrics, such as a communi- the virus today—a year after vaccines be-
off in search of the marksman. In a re- ty’s test-positivity rate, which is used to came available—as they were when the
versal of cause and effect, the Texas guide policy on everything from school pandemic began.
Sharpshooter is born. closures to sporting events. Should we be focussed on case counts
The Sharpshooter Fallacy is often There are many other numbers we’d at all? Some experts, including Anthony
used by scientists to illustrate our ten- like to know. How likely is Omicron to Fauci, argue that hospitalizations are
dency to narrativize data after the fact. deliver not an irritating cold but the worst now the more relevant marker of viral
We may observe an unusual grouping of flu of your life? How does that risk in- damage. More than a hundred and fifty
cancer cases and back into an explana- crease with the number and severity of thousand Americans are currently hos-
tion for it, cherry-picking statistics and medical conditions a person has? What pitalized with the coronavirus—a higher
ignoring the vagaries of chance. As we are the chances of lingering symptoms number than at any other point in the
muddle through covid-19’s winter surge, following a mild illness? How long does pandemic. But that figure, too, is not
the story holds a deeper lesson about the immunity last after a booster shot or an quite what it seems. Many hospitalized
perils of interpreting data without a full infection? Americans aren’t waiting to COVID patients have no respiratory
appreciation of the context. Omicron, symptoms; they were admitted for other
because of its extraordinary contagious- reasons—a heart attack, a broken hip,
ness and its relative mildness, has trans- cancer surgery—and happened to test
formed the risks and the consequences of positive for the virus. There are no na-
infection, but not our reading of the sta- tionwide estimates of the proportion of
tistics that have been guiding us through hospitalized patients with “incidental
the pandemic. Do the numbers still mean COVID,” but in New York State some
what we think they mean? forty per cent of hospitalized patients
A coronavirus infection isn’t what it with COVID are thought to have been
once was. Studies suggest that, compared admitted for other reasons. The Los
with Delta, Omicron is a third to half as Angeles County Department of Health
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
likely to send someone to the hospital; Services reported that incidental infec-
by some estimates, the chance that an tions accounted for roughly two-thirds
older, vaccinated person will die of COVID of COVID admissions at its hospitals.
is now lower than the risk posed by the (Pediatric COVID hospitalizations have
seasonal flu. And yet the variant is exact- also reached record levels, probably be-
ing a punishing toll—medical, social, eco- cause Omicron’s transmissibility means
nomic. (Omicron still presents a major that many more kids are contracting
threat to people who are unvaccinated.) the virus; there’s little evidence that the
variant is causing more severe illness in infection into delirium; a bout of diar- ployees to continue working even after
them, though.) rhea dehydrates a man admitted with they’ve been infected. Some states have
Clarifying the distinction between a sickle-cell disease. In such cases, COVID called in the National Guard; others have
virus that drives illness and one that’s isn’t an innocent bystander, nor does enacted “crisis standards of care,” whereby
simply along for the ride is more than it start the fire—it adds just enough overwhelmed hospitals can restrict or
an academic exercise. If we tally asymp- tinder to push a manageable problem deny treatment to some patients—I.C.U.
tomatic or minimally symptomatic in- into a crisis. beds, ventilators, and other lifesaving re-
fections as COVID hospitalizations, we It is a positive development that we’re sources—in order to prioritize those who
risk exaggerating the toll of the virus, able to engage in this discussion at all. are more likely to benefit.
with all the attendant social and eco- With Alpha and Delta, almost all COVID But this wave, too, shall pass—pos-
nomic ramifications. If we overstate the hospitalizations were related to the in- sibly soon. At the end of it, the vast ma-
degree of incidental COVID, we risk pro- fection. The situation is different with jority of Americans could have some
moting a misguided sense of security. Omicron—a function both of its dimin- degree of immunity, resulting from vac-
Currently, the U.S. has no data-collec- ished ability to replicate in the lungs and cination, infection, or both. In all prob-
tion practices or unified framework for of its superior capacity to infect people ability, we’d then approach the endemic
separating one type of hospitalization who’ve been vaccinated or previously phase of the virus, and be left with a
from another. Complicating all this is contracted the virus. Still, parsing the complex set of questions about how to
the fact that it’s sometimes hard to dis- numbers in a moment of crisis can seem live with it. What level of disease are
tinguish a person hospitalized “with a subordinate aim. Omicron is impos- we willing to accept? What is the pur-
COVID” from one hospitalized “for ing an undeniable strain on the health- pose of further restrictions? What do
COVID.” For some patients, a coronavirus care system. Last week, a quarter of U.S. we owe one another? A clear-eyed view
infection can aggravate a seemingly un- hospitals reported critical staffing short- of the numbers will inform the answers.
related condition—a COVID fever tips ages. Many have postponed non-urgent But it’s up to us to paint the targets.
an elderly woman with a urinary-tract surgeries, and some have asked their em- —Dhruv Khullar
UP THE RIVER another artist cut in. “There was a riot.” One spectator, Tim Walker, a mus-
ARTISTS AT WORK Minson went on, “Tear gas, every- cular man with a soft voice, pulled out a
thing! You know, anytime you’re in this Moleskine notebook filled with poems
type of setting, tension is flaring up, the and colorful marker illustrations. “I’m al-
wrong person can say the wrong thing, most tempted to put my notepad up
and it could get crazy.” there,” he said, gesturing toward several
Darrian Bennett, who is known as art works displayed on easels. Alen Hay-
Plank—“I’m a fan of ‘SpongeBob,’ and mon, who wore a state-issued white cot-
ournalists incarcerated at San Quen- there’s a character named Plankton”— ton mask over a salt-and-pepper beard,
J tin produce a monthly broadsheet
newspaper. Cowboys locked up at the
stood listening. He chimed in, “I have
a policy: I don’t go to the yard.” He
leaned in. “Art is art. No matter the size
or the style,” he said. “Put it up there!”
Louisiana State Penitentiary perform at laughed. “I can’t paint in the yard. I can’t The exhibition was hosted by Reha-
the Angola Prison Rodeo (events include draw in the yard. I can barely read in bilitation Through the Arts, a nonprofit
barrel racing and a game of poker in the yard.” Plank wore pink Pumas with that works with dancers, actors, poets, and
which four men play seated at a table pink laces, and a pink sweatshirt. He
while a loose bull bucks around). Re- continued, “I was always taught, ‘Go to
cently, at Sing Sing Correctional Facil- the school building.’”
ity, a maximum-security prison thirty In the school building, a classroom
miles up the river from New York City, overlooked the A Block yard, which was
several painters gathered for an art show. ringed in razor wire. Iron bars on the
“There was a second earlier today when windows, instructional posters taped to
I thought this wasn’t going to happen,” the walls. (“Ditch double negatives!”) Vi-
Ryan Lawrence, who wore wire-frame sual artists living in B Block and Five
glasses and paint-splattered work boots, Building mingled with actors and sing-
said. He had a fresh stick-and-poke tat- ers from Seven Building. Spectators from
too of a lion on his left arm. the Honor Housing Unit, who had just
“Oh, man, the situation was rough,” finished a dinner of whitefish with white
another artist, Charles Minson, said, rice and greenish vegetables, took their
wiping sweat from his bald head. He seats. A prison administrator scratched
wore a pressed red cotton shirt tucked his nose, which peeked over a cotton
into state-issued green trousers.“Last mask; a corrections officer wearing sun-
night, they had a big thing in the yard—” glasses slumped in a plastic chair at the
“—There was a big fight in the yard,” back of the room. Darrian Bennett
artists at six prisons in New York. R.T.A.’s couldn’t get my pencils sharpened. We “I did expect there to be controversy,”
teachers have put on art classes, workshops, need a pencil sharpener!” (The artists use Craton later told the Rome News-
and performances with the aim of help- nail clippers and emery boards to sharpen Tribune. But, he went on, “you’d have
ing people in prison develop life skills. their pencils; oil paint is prohibited.) thought I killed the Lindbergh baby,
(Nationwide, the recidivism rate for incar- Minson: “Y’all see it’s glossy, right?” sunk the Lusitania, and started World
cerated people is about sixty per cent; less He pointed to a painting (“Boo’d Up”) War II.” There had never been a porn
than five per cent of R.T.A. participants of a couple dressed for a night on the shop in Floyd County—although, as
re-offend.) The show was the brainchild town. “Well, that’s floor wax!” Craton had discovered, no ordinance
of Plank, who said he wanted more at- Lawrence: “ ‘Home’ is a word we use barred them. The county commission
tention for visual artists. “I came up with a lot around here. It’s different for ev- subsequently passed one; Craton un-
the idea for an in-house art show because erybody. ‘What are you gonna do when successfully challenged it. But he was
I wanted to show love to the guys,” he said. you get home?’ ‘Man, I can’t wait till I allowed to stay open as long as he
“I wanted the guys to have an opportu- get home.’ But it’s not that simple for changed the store’s name to Entice
nity to be seen on a grander scale.” me.” His triptych collage depicted a mo- Couples Boutique and promised that
In 2019, R.T.A. appealed to the prison’s torcycle. “I’ve taken so much, especially no more than thirty-five per cent of his
administration to hold Plank’s art show, from my family. And it’s now in pieces.” inventory would be dildos and other
and it agreed. It was the first event to Walker: “We’ve watched one another “adult novelties.”
take place since the coronavirus halted arts change from ignorance to consciousness By that time, Craton had been ex-
programming at the prison. “Tonight is to accountability. ” pelled from the Coosa Country Club,
about family and love,” Plank said, point- McFadden: “Instead of painting this in Rome, which is in Georgia’s Four-
ing to one of his paintings (title: “The piece, I coulda been outside acting crazy, teenth Congressional District. The
One with All the Books”), which de- like the rest of these guys. But, no, I choose club offered Craton several reasons
picted the writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and to settle my difference and take my an- for his expulsion in addition to his
1
Nikole Hannah-Jones sitting behind a gers and frustrations out on the canvas.” ownership of Entice. A Coosa mem-
pile of hardbacks. “I feel like these two —Adam Iscoe ber is said to have resigned “because
people have a lot of love for their peo- of a known pornographer”—Craton—
ple, Black people!” DEPT. OF EXCLUSIVITY among the membership, and because
Plank introduced a few artists, who MEMBERS ONLY Craton’s wife allegedly appeared on
stood before a chalkboard to discuss a “pornographic Web site.” All this,
their work. First up, Gary Butler: “I think the club maintained, endangered “the
this piece is about all the ongoing de- good order, welfare and character of
bate about global warming and fossil the Club.”
fuels and all that kind of stuff. ” His Craton, who had been a Coosa
painting (“The title, I think, is ‘Mother member for four years, sued the club
Earth’ ”) showed a woman in a liquid n the spring of 2006, Charles T. Cra- for five million dollars. “This is me
shawl floating above a crystalline river,
which was certainly not the Hudson.
I ton III, a businessman in northwest-
ern Georgia, best known for his work
standing my ground against the moral
elitists of Rome, Georgia,” he told the
David McFadden: “The reason I on Chick-fil-A’s “Eat Mor Chikin” cam- News-Tribune. His lawsuit noted that
started working with acrylic is ’cause I paign, opened Entice Adult Superstore. he had “conducted himself, at all times,
on and off the club premises, as a gen-
tleman.” Craton also published an
open letter in the paper, addressed to
“The Members of Coosa Country
Club,” in which he referred to “felony
crimes” and “public drunkenness” by
fellow-members, and mentioned “il-
legal gambling in the men’s locker
room.” The letter went on, “If the
Coosa Country Club Board is going
to conduct witch hunts, then for God’s
sake, let’s find all the witches.” It con-
cluded, “Once we investigate who all
the witches are, there won’t be any
members left.”
The suit was dismissed before Cra-
ton could tell his Coosa stories to a jury.
“Private clubs are the last bastion of
legal prejudice,” he told the News-
“It’s nice that we want the same things.” Tribune, after the decision. He built
WE DESIGN BEAUTY TECHNOLOGY
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himself a house with a view of the club’s
eighth hole.
1
THE BOARDS
sense of where you are”—he was feel-
ing a bit lost.
PLAYING IN SPACE
“We called it the ‘porn hole,’” a for- For the next hundred minutes, Brad-
mer club member, who believed that ley told the story of his life, organized
Craton had got a raw deal, said re- around polished anecdotes. He began in
cently. The club’s “moral hypocrisy,” as Crystal City, Missouri, where he was the
the former member put it, was on view only child of a small-town bank presi-
again this month, when Coosa wel- dent with a bad back, and moved quickly
comed Representative Marjorie Tay- through his ascent as a high-school ath-
lor Greene. t was twenty minutes before curtain lete, a college-basketball prodigy, an Ox-
Greene and her husband, Perry,
who runs a construction company, were
I on opening night for a production
called “Rolling Along.” The audience
ford scholar, a faltering rookie with the
Knicks, a star, and a two-time champion.
among eight new members mentioned clustered in the lobby of the Signature And then a rookie senator from New Jer-
in the January edition of the Coosa Theatre, on West Forty-second Street. sey, a three-term senator from New Jer-
Chronicle, along with an engineer and One woman got out her iPad and cell sey, and, in 2000, a Presidential candidate
an anesthesiologist. Greene’s admission phone. “I’m at an event you would running in a primary against Al Gore,
was never put before the Coosa mem- love to be at,” is how she began a call, after which he became an investment
bership committee, as is standard for while scrolling the CNN Web site. She banker—at last, “my father’s banker son.”
a controversial figure, according to a paused for exactly as long as it takes to And, now, performing in a one-man play.
committee member who first learned say “What?” There was anecdote after anecdote
of it on Twitter. Shortly before joining “Bill Bradley doing a one-man show!” about life as a basketball star. The time
Coosa, Greene described the events of All hundred and sixty attendees signed he went to a Russian professor at Prince-
January 6, 2021, as “just a riot at the Cap- paperwork acknowledging that they ton before facing the Russians in the
itol.” The violence, she said, was con- might appear in a documentary that would Olympics, in 1964, and learned a couple
sistent with the Declaration of Inde- of Russian phrases, which he used to
pendence’s support of “overthrowing spook the Russians during the gold-
tyrants.” (Any wrongdoing, she sug- medal game. How he was initially re-
gested, was the work of the F.B.I.) sented in the Knicks locker room be-
“They ran Craton off for ‘pornog- cause he was making more money than
raphy,’” the former member said. “But anyone else in the league, for reasons
they don’t seem to have a problem with that seemed connected to his being white.
an adulteress who promotes insurrec- How the fans booed him on the court
tion?” He said he’d read about various that year, throwing coins at him.
extramarital affairs that Greene alleg- In the lobby of the Signature a few
edly conducted years ago—one with a days later, after the final performance,
man who, according to the Daily Mail, Bradley, who is seventy-eight, was fa-
now calls himself the Polyamorous Tan- tigued but game; he runs cool, and had
tric Sex Guru on his OnlyFans page— some energy in reserve. He said that the
when she worked at a CrossFit gym idea for the show had begun after a re-
outside Atlanta. (Greene’s office denied ception at Princeton, to which he do-
the affairs.) Bill Bradley nated his papers in 2017. The universi-
He was not the only Coosa mem- ty’s library had compiled an oral history
ber to be perturbed. John Cowan, a local be filming during the performance, the about him, talking to more than a hun-
neurosurgeon, who lost to Greene in a first in a four-night run. They filed into dred people. About seventy showed up
primary runoff, tweeted his reaction: “I the theatre to find a name card on each for the reception. “I prepared a talk where
hope she realizes she can’t handpick seat, as though the show were a giant I mentioned each person,” he said.
who else attends while she’s there like dinner party: Katrina vanden Heuvel, His friend Manny Azenberg, a the-
she does for her Townhall meetings.” Charlie Rose, Bob Kerrey, Phil Murphy. atre producer, was in attendance. “Manny,
Entice Couples Boutique closed When the lights went down, the stage a friend of fifty years, has never given me
in 2015, and Craton moved on to other was empty except for a table and chair. a compliment,” Bradley said. “But after
businesses. By then, the Rome Area Bradley appeared, dressed in slacks and my talk he came up and said, ‘Sounds like
History Museum had published a a pale-blue V-neck sweater over a but- Hal Holbrook. Why don’t you work some-
book titled “Legendary Locals of ton-down shirt. He faced the audience thing up?’ And then I just started doing
Rome.” The chapter “Outside the Box: with an odd, ambiguous expression that it.” Bradley continued, “I would go around
Innovators and Rebels” opens with suggested an apology was coming. It’s the country revising it. I would go to Salt
the story of Charles T. Craton III, possible that, as someone who had lived Lake or Chicago, or Austin, Texas, or
who built “the largest store of its kind up to immense expectations for most Marin County, to these little theatres.”
in the southeast.” of his life—who had, as John McPhee As part of his research, he said, he looked
—Charles Bethea put it, in an article in this magazine, “a at work by Holbrook, Billy Crystal, and
Spalding Gray. Gray always performed flops, a Schaffhausen watch, and several medicine before?” Roe asked. He nod-
his monologues with a script open in beaded chakra bracelets; his graying hair ded. “O.K. I’ll let you be the judge.”
front of him, but Bradley memorized his. was slicked back. “We have incredible Magic mushrooms were not included
“Discipline is discipline,” he said. “You houses,” he went on. When the festival in the workshop, to the dismay of some
need discipline to hit twenty-five in a was new, in 2016, “we were getting calls, attendees. “I didn’t pay eighty dollars to
row. And you have to have discipline to like, ‘Can I see a photo of the bathroom?’ make a mushroom-flavored chocolate
memorize something. There have prob- ‘Can I see a photo of the toilet?’ Now it’s bar,” a man in a white fedora said.
ably been, in the past eighteen months, ‘Please, can I have a house, any house— Other substances were plentiful. Erika
three to five days that I haven’t done this whatever you have?’” Valero Tlazohtiani, a shaman in a white
show, or some version of it.” After the In 1968, Brignone’s father, Gian Franco, gown, told attendees, “Tobacco is a way
onset of COVID, he rehearsed during long an Italian real-estate developer, bought to talk with God.” She led a cacao cer-
walks in Central Park. the twenty thousand acres after see- emony that involved drinking ritualis-
When he was on the road with “Roll- ing them from a plane. “It was quite de- tically prepared hot chocolate and tak-
ing Along,” he’d ask the audience for serted,” Brignone said. “Not good for aging a puff from a communal pipe.
notes after each performance: “One guy riculture.” But perfect for cliff-top villas (Possible side effects: happiness, con-
in Salt Lake said, ‘You know, Senator, with screening rooms and infinity pools. tentment.) “With this smoke, say thank
that’s interesting, but people want guts Gian Franco, when setting up his com- you to your mothers,” Tlazohtiani said.
on the floor. Put some more guts on the munity, which he envisioned as “a little Less prescriptive: pop-up shops, disco
floor.’” This could be seen as a valid cri- Positano,” sold only to buyers who met naps, pool parties at private villas. “I’ve
tique of Bradley’s demeanor as a senator, his twenty-seven criteria. (“24. To have been to Ibiza, Mykonos, Vegas,” a man
and especially as a Presidential candi- faced serious financial problems. 25. To with salt-and-pepper hair and John Len-
date. But his talent may be for coherence have a sense of humor.”) Heidi Klum non sunglasses said, half submerged in
and a sense of proportion, of playing in and Seal used to own a house there; Cindy the pool at Casa Selva (six bedrooms,
space. Even in a one-man show, he was Crawford, Mick Jagger, and Uma Thur- live-in staff, thirty-one hundred dollars
thinking about teamwork. “The key is man have passed through. a night). “Nothing compares to this.”
finding the balance between candor and “At one time, my father didn’t want “It feels safe,” a woman next to him
too much,” he said. “You want to say any Americans,” Brignone said. “You want said. “You know there’s no riffraff.”
enough but leave enough room for peo- people who have a certain level of con- Ticket prices, which don’t include
1
ple’s imagination.” sciousness.” He has described the right lodging, start at eighteen hundred and
—Thomas Beller type of people as “not interested in watches fifty dollars. “We avoid the generation of
and cars” but seeking “something that twentysomethings who come with the
UTOPIA DEPT. helps them.” In 2011, Lulu Luchaire, a idea of a rave in their heads,” Brignone
NO RIFFRAFF Parisian looking for respite from her job said. “It’s rich people with an intellectual
helping lead Apple’s global retail strat- level. Artists, successful businessmen—
egy, heard about the place. Five years later, you know, opinion leaders.” At one my-
she and Brignone started Ondalinda, celium party, bass thumped across a polo
which translates to “beautiful wave,” and field illuminated by ten thousand can-
whose proceeds partially go to benefit dles and towering neon mushroom pup-
local Indigenous communities. (Luchaire pets with red-rimmed eyes. L.E.D. las-
onferences are on the wane these didn’t make it to the mycelium festival sos swirled.
C days. CES? Scaled back. Davos? De-
ferred. Where’s a moneyed professional
because of a green-card snafu.)
Seven hundred and fifty people con-
“That’s a crazy-awesome outfit, even
if you’re not on a lot of drugs,” a guy in
in need of camaraderie to go? Filippo vened at Ondalinda in November; neg- a glow-in-the-dark T-shirt said, watch-
Brignone, a member of the founding ative COVID tests were required. “There ing a couple in matching sequinned tie-
family of Costa Careyes, a gated com- was a big debate about if we were going dyed jumpsuits.
munity in the Mexican state of Jalisco, to test everybody again,” Brignone said. “It’s like adult recess on crack, but all
thinks that “the network of Careyes” may “It’s expensive.” (They did.) Among the the kids on the playground want to play
be able to serve as a substitute. Every offerings was a chocolate-fungi work- with you,” a philanthropist named Gillian
year, Careyes hosts Ondalinda, a five-day shop with Parker Roe, who describes Wynn—the daughter of Steve Wynn—
festival. The theme of the most recent himself as a “mushroom-and-plant-med- said. “It’s not an unsavory thing like Las
edition was mycelium, the fuzz of fun- icine product designer.” Roe stood under Vegas. There’s a wholesome component.”
gal threads through which plants pur- a ceiba tree in front of an array of Bun- She added, “Everything is tasteful.”
portedly communicate. “Nature’s Inter- sen burners and blenders, and addressed Connections were made. A shirtless
net,” a pre-festival marketing e-mail called the class: “Now start weighing out the L.A. real-estate developer in latex pants
it, linking to a dress-code mood board. ingredients with a scale.” gestured at a man near the ice-cream
“We get compared to Burning Man, “Parker!” a student called. “If we were buffet. “I used to work with that guy at
but we didn’t want Ondalinda to be that,” going to add psilocybin, how much per Morgan Stanley,” he said. “He didn’t rec-
Brignone said, seated in the palapa of bar should we do?” ognize me without my tie on.”
his Pacific-front home. He wore flip- “Have you experimented with the —Sheila Yasmin Marikar
Artificial intelligence is being designed
DEPT. OF TECHNOLOGY to improve supply logistics, intelligence
gathering, and a category of wearable
FLYING ACES
technology, sensors, and auxiliary ro-
bots that the military calls the Inter-
net of Battlefield Things.
Artificial intelligence is transforming warplanes. Will pilots trust it? Algorithms are already good at fly-
ing planes. The first autopilot system,
BY SUE HALPERN which involved connecting a gyro-
scope to the wings and tail of a plane,
débuted in 1914, about a decade after
the Wright brothers took flight. And
a number of current military technol-
ogies, such as underwater mine de-
tectors and laser-guided bombs, are
autonomous once they are launched
by humans. But few aspects of war-
fare are as complex as aerial combat.
Paul Schifferle, the vice-president of
flight research at Calspan, the com-
pany that’s modifying the L-39 for
DARPA, said, “The dogfight is proba-
bly the most dynamic flight program
in aviation, period.”
A fighter plane equipped with arti-
ficial intelligence could eventually ex-
ecute tighter turns, take greater risks,
and get off better shots than human
pilots. But the objective of the ACE
program is to transform a pilot’s role,
not to remove it entirely. As DARPA
envisions it, the A.I. will fly the plane
in partnership with the pilot, who will
remain “in the loop,” monitoring what
the A.I. is doing and intervening when
necessary. According to the agency’s
Strategic Technology Office, a fighter
jet with autonomous features will allow
pilots to become “battle managers,” di-
recting squads of unmanned aircraft
n a cloudless morning last May, every pitch and roll, in an attempt to “like a football coach who chooses team
O a pilot took off from the Niagara
Falls International Airport, heading
do something unprecedented: design
a plane that can fly and engage in ae-
members and then positions them on
the field to run plays.”
for restricted military airspace over rial combat—dogfighting—without a Stacie Pettyjohn, the director of the
Lake Ontario. The plane, which bore human pilot operating it. Defense Program at the Center for a
the insignia of the United States Air The exercise was an early step in New American Security, told me that
Force, was a repurposed Czechoslovak the agency’s Air Combat Evolution the ACE program is part of a wider ef-
jet, an L-39 Albatros, purchased by a program, known as ACE, one of more fort to “decompose our forces” into
private defense contractor. The bay in than six hundred Department of De- smaller, less expensive units. In other
front of the cockpit was filled with sen- fense projects that are incorporating words, fewer humans and more ex-
sors and computer processors that re- artificial intelligence into war-fighting. pendable machines. DARPA calls this
corded the aircraft’s performance. For This year, the Pentagon plans to spend “mosaic warfare.” In the case of aerial
two hours, the pilot flew counterclock- close to a billion dollars on A.I.-re- combat, Pettyjohn said, “these much
wise around the lake. Engineers on the lated technology. The Navy is build- smaller autonomous aircraft can be
ground, under contract with DARPA, ing unmanned vessels that can stay at combined in unexpected ways to over-
the Defense Department’s research sea for months; the Army is develop- whelm adversaries with the complex-
agency, had choreographed every turn, ing a fleet of robotic combat vehicles. ity of it. If any one of them gets shot
down, it’s not as big of a deal.”
Implementing new technology will mean convincing humans to cede control. All told, the L-39 was taken up above
18 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY KAROLIS STRAUTNIEKAS
Lake Ontario twenty times, each sor- pilots will one day wonder how their way that human pilots can interpret
tie giving the engineers and computer fighter jet acquired the skills of a Chuck what’s going on.”
scientists the information they need to Yeager. When they do, they will be told During each contest, the A.I. agents,
build a model of its flight dynamics about a refurbished Soviet-era war- represented by dime-size airplane av-
under various conditions. Like self- plane that was flown high above Lake atars, moved around a screen at a stately
driving cars, autonomous planes use Ontario by old-school pilots who were, pace, mimicking the flight dynamics
sensors to identify discrepancies be- in a way, writing their own obituaries. of an F-16. It wasn’t exactly “Top Gun,”
tween the outside world and the in- but the algorithms were doing some-
formation encoded in their maps. But s part of the effort to devise an al- thing that would have been impossi-
a dogfighting algorithm will have to
take into account both the environ-
A gorithm that can dogfight, DARPA
selected eight software-development
ble a year earlier: interacting with each
other and adjusting their tactics in real
ment and the aircraft. A plane flies dif- companies to participate in the Alpha- time. As the agents battled it out, Mock
ferently at varying altitudes and angles, Dogfight Trials, an A.I. competition compared the action to “a knife fight
on hot days versus cold ones, or if it’s that culminated with three days of pub- in a phone booth.”
carrying an extra fuel tank or missiles. lic scrimmages in August, 2020. The In the decisive scrimmage, on day
“Most of the time, a plane f lies prize was a flight helmet worn by Col- three, Falco, an A.I. agent created by
straight and level,” Phil Chu, an elec- onel Dan (Animal) Javorsek, who was Heron Systems, a boutique software
trical engineer who serves as a science in charge of the program until he re- company based in Virginia, competed
adviser to the ACE program, explained. turned to the Air Force last year. The against an A.I. agent developed by Lock-
“But when it’s dogfighting you have to contest was supposed to be held in front heed Martin, the country’s largest de-
figure out, O.K., if I’m in a thirty-degree of a live audience near Nellis Air Force fense contractor. The matchup drew the
bank angle, ascending at twenty de- Base, in Nevada, but the pandemic rel- obvious David and Goliath compari-
grees, how much do I have to pull the egated the action to an online event, sons—though this David had gone
stick to get to a forty-degree bank angle, hosted by the Applied Physics Lab at through about the same number of com-
rising at ten degrees?” And, because Johns Hopkins, and broadcast via a puter iterations as a pilot who trained
flight is three-dimensional, speed mat- YouTube channel called DARPAtv. Jus- all day, every day, for thirty-one years.
ters even more. “If it’s flying slowly and tin (Glock) Mock, an F-16 pilot, of- After a few tightly fought rounds, Her-
you move the stick one way, you get a fered play-by-play commentary. At one on’s Falco emerged victorious. But there
certain amount of turn out of it. If it’s point, he told the five thousand or so was a final contest: a seasoned F-16 pilot
flying really fast and you move the stick viewers that the objective was simple: was going to take on Falco.
the same way, you’ll get a very differ- “Kill and survive.” The pilot, dressed in an olive-green
ent response.” Each team took a slightly different flight suit, sat in a high-backed gam-
In 2024, if the ACE program goes approach with its A.I. agents, as the ing chair, his face obscured by a virtual-
according to plan, four A.I.-enabled algorithms are called. EpiSci, a defense reality headset. He was identified only
L-39s will participate in a live dog- contractor based in Poway, California, by his call sign, Banger. (His identity
fight in the skies above Lake Ontario. mounted an effort led by Chris Gen- was concealed for “operational secu-
To achieve that goal, DARPA has en- tile, a retired Air Force test pilot. The rity.”) He’d trained with the team at
listed three dozen academic research company broke the problem down into A.P.L. beforehand, learning how to use
centers and private companies, each component parts, and used Gentile’s the controls to guide his plane, and the
working on one of two problem areas: flight expertise to solve each step. “We V.R. headset to track his opponent’s
how to get the plane to fly and fight start at the lowest level,” Gentile told vector of attack.
on its own, and how to get pilots to me. “How do you control the airplane? On a split screen, viewers could see
trust the A.I. enough to use it. Robert How do you fly it and direct it to go what Banger saw from the cockpit.
Work, who was the Deputy Secretary left and right, all the way up to what Another screen displayed a visual rep-
of Defense during the Obama Ad- tactics should we use?” resentation of the fight, as the planes—
ministration, and pushed the Penta- PhysicsAI, in Pacifica, California, yellow for Banger, green for Falco—
gon to pursue next-generation tech- fielded a four-man squad who knew jockeyed for the best angle. About a
nologies, told me, “If you don’t have next to nothing about aerial combat. minute in, each team aggressively rolled
trust, the human will always be watch- They used a neural-network approach, its aircraft, and Banger evaded the A.I.
ing the A.I. and saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got enabling the system to learn the pat- by dropping down to ten thousand
to take over.’ ” terns of a successful dogfight and feet. Falco came around and got off a
There is no guarantee that ACE will mathematically arrive at the maxi- series of good shots. Banger was down
succeed. DARPA projects are time-lim- mum probability of a good outcome. to four lives.
ited experiments, typically lasting be- “The problem we have to solve is like In the end, Banger failed to sur-
tween three and five years. Schifferle, playing chess while playing basket- vive a single skirmish. He said, “I think
at Calspan, told me, “We’re at the ‘walk’ ball,” John Pierre, PhysicsAI’s princi- technology has proven over the past
stage of a typical ‘crawl, walk, run’ tech- pal investigator, said. “You’re taking few years that it’s able to think faster
nology maturation process.” Still, it shots while making split-second de- than humans and react faster in a pre-
seems increasingly likely that young cisions, and it needs to be done in a cise pristine environment.” Banger also
suggested that artificial intelligence to drivers’ faces to detect the move- School, where he was an instructor. As
might execute tactical maneuvers that ment of small muscles around the an example, he mentioned “Auto-GCAS,”
pilots had been trained to avoid, such mouth and eyes, which might indicate an automated ground-collision-avoid-
as flying too close to enemy aircraft smiling or frowning, and electrocar- ance system that grabs the controls if
and moving at speeds that would tax diogram leads to monitor their heart. a plane is in imminent danger of crash-
a human body. “I may not be com- “I told them that if I was going to do ing. During testing, Auto-GCAS had a
fortable putting my aircraft in a po- this work they’d have to send me a fun tendency to pull up suddenly without
sition where I might run into some- car,” Schnell said of his early client. cause—what Hefron called “nuisance
thing else,” he said. “The A.I. would “And they did.” fly-ups.” The system has since saved at
exploit that.” Schnell soon found that each sen- least eleven lives, but test pilots re-
Mock seemed pleased with the out- sor came with its own proprietary data- mained wary of it for years because of
come. “You could look at this and collection system, which made it nearly these early setbacks.
say, ‘O.K., the A.I. got five, impossible to analyze all “There’s a saying in the military,”
our human got zero,’ ” he the information at once. Peter Hancock, a psychology profes-
told viewers. “From the He built a common frame- sor at the University of Central Flor-
fighter-pilot world, we trust work, which he named the ida who studies the effect of trust on
what works, and what we Cognitive Assessment Tool technology adoption, told me. “Trust
saw was that in this lim- Set, and began collecting is gained in teaspoons and lost in buck-
ited area, this specific sce- the physiological data of ets.” It’s not just an issue in warfare.
nario, we’ve got A.I. that people who operated all In the most recent surveys conducted
works.” (A YouTube video kinds of machinery. “They by the American Automobile Associ-
of the trials has since gar- could be train engineers, ation, about eighty per cent of respon-
nered half a million views.) or helicopter pilots, or peo- dents said that they were not comfort-
Brett Darcey, who runs ple driving cars,” he said. able with the idea of autonomous
Heron, told me that the company has The face sensors supplied one set of vehicles. “Most of the drivers say that
used Falco to fly drones, completing data points. So did a device that ana- they want the current systems to work
seventy-four flights with zero crashes. lyzed galvanic skin response—how better before they can trust a fully
But it’s still unclear how the technol- much a subject was sweating. Another self-driving system,” Greg Brannon,
ogy will react to the infinite possibili- tool looked at blood-oxidation levels, the director of automotive engineer-
ties of real-world conditions. The which served as a proxy for mental ing at AAA, told me. “The percent-
human mind processes more slowly workload. age hasn’t moved much despite a lot
than a computer, but it has the cogni- In 2004, Schnell persuaded his de- of advances in technology, and that’s
tive flexibility to adapt to unimagined partment chair at the University of pretty shocking.”
circumstances; artificial intelligence, so Iowa to buy O.P.L.’s first aircraft, a To assess trust, psychologists typ-
far, does not. Anna Skinner, a human- single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza. ically administer surveys. “No one has
factors psychologist, and another sci- Within a few years, he had acquired a ever come up with an objective measure
ence adviser to the ACE program, told jet, and commercial airlines and the of trust before,” Skinner said. DARPA
me, “Humans are able to draw on their Air Force hired him to conduct stud- hired SoarTech, an A.I. research-and-
experience and take reasonable actions ies on their pilots. “We did a lot of development firm based in Ann Arbor,
in the face of uncertainty. And, espe- work on spatial disorientation,” Schnell to build a “trust model,” which aims
cially in a combat situation, uncertainty said. This involved things like having to verify self-reported trust with the
is always going to be present.” pilots close their eyes during aerial ma- hard data from O.P.L.’s Cognitive As-
neuvers and then try to fly straight once sessment Tool Set. “I think that’s how
n early May, I visited the Operator they’d opened them again. By the time you do good science,” Schnell told me.
I Performance Lab, at the University
of Iowa, where members of the ACE
DARPA put out its request for proposals
for the ACE program, in 2019, Schnell’s
“You take the best building blocks you
have and put them together to answer
program had gathered for a demon- laboratory had more than a decade of very difficult questions. DARPA actu-
stration. O.P.L. is the creation of Tom experience capturing the physiological ally stepped up to the plate and said
Schnell, a Swiss-born professor of in- responses of pilots. we want to know: ‘Are you trusting
dustrial and systems engineering. In Persuading pilots to hand over the the avionics?’ ”
his spare time, Schnell flies loops and controls may prove even more elusive One of O.P.L.’s hangars, at the
rolls in an aerobatic plane above the than developing A.I. that can dogfight. Iowa City Municipal Airport, was
cornfields of Iowa, but his expertise “It’s probably the paramount challenge filled with secondhand aircraft that
was, initially, in ground transportation. we’re trying to tackle,” Ryan Hefron, Schnell had purchased and retrofit-
In the late nineties, a luxury-car com- the current ACE program manager, told ted: two L-29 Delfins, a smaller cousin
pany—Schnell won’t say which one— me. Hefron, a thirty-eight-year-old of the L-39, painted a glossy Hawk-
asked him to develop a way to mea- lieutenant colonel with a doctorate eye yellow; a hulking Soviet helicop-
sure how much people enjoyed driving in computer science, came to DARPA ter, purchased for about the cost of a
its vehicles. Schnell attached sensors in 2021 from the Air Force Test Pilot Cadillac Escalade, upgraded with a
full-color night-vision system that with planes flying at speeds of up to sions I could make,” he said. “To let it
Schnell built himself. At the far end five hundred miles an hour, algorithms ride and see what happens or paddle
of the hangar was the simulated cock- won’t always be able to keep pilots in off.” After a moment, he added, “I as-
pit of a 737 jet which was the size of the loop. Hancock, the U.C.F. profes- sessed that the bandit was starting to
a studio apartment. sor, calls the discrepancy in reaction turn towards me. And so I paddled off.”
An Air National Guard pilot, on time “temporal dissonance.” As an anal- For the most part, Woodruff told
loan to O.P.L. for the day, lowered ogy, he pointed to air bags, which de- me, the pilots in the study trusted the
himself into another simulator, a rect- ploy within milliseconds, below the A.I. when it behaved appropriately and
angular metal shell that Schnell called threshold of human perception. “As took over when it didn’t. There were
“the bathtub.” Schnell hooked him soon as you put me in that loop,” he a few exceptions: a pilot who had re-
up to electrocardiogram leads, in order said, “you’ve defeated the whole pur- cently ejected from his plane was deeply
to gather some baseline data. Until pose of the air bag, which is to inflate suspicious of the technology. The
that morning’s briefing, the pilot knew almost instantaneously.” thirty-year-old pilot whom I had ob-
only that he would be participating In the “bathtub” at O.P.L., a com- served thought that the autonomy “was
in a DARPA research project. Even puter relayed what the pilot was seeing cool,” but he paddled off even when
now, as he adjusted his V.R. headset in his goggles. As he turned his head his plane had the potential to achieve
and fidgeted with controls that rep- to the right, a wing came into view; a good offensive angle. “I wanted to
licated an F-16’s, all he’d been told when he looked down, he could see basically figure out my limits with
was that artificial intelligence would farmland. A radar screen at the front the A.I.,” he told Woodruff. “What is
be controlling the plane while he of the cockpit kept track of the adver- too conservative, and what is going
played a rudimentary video game sary, which, in the first skirmish, quickly to get me killed. And then find that
broadcast on his display panel. (A gained an advantage, coming at the happy medium.”
separate ACE effort is developing a pilot from behind and preparing to take Schnell’s graduate student, who can’t
more complex version.) a shot. “Paddle,” the pilot called out, be named because he’s on active duty
The game simulated the battle- ending the skirmish. The computer was in the military, came over to listen to
management tasks that pilots are ex- reset. One of Schnell’s graduate stu- the debriefing. “You would be the per-
pected to conduct in the future; to win, dents, who helped design the experi- fect example of someone we’d need to
the pilot’s eight blue planes had to shoot ment, counted down from three, then influence, because—and I do not mean
down eight red enemy planes. An eye called “Hack” to start the next contest. this to be rude at all—you completely
tracker inside his helmet would mea- Forty minutes later, as the pilot left violated the construct of the experi-
sure when and for how long he looked the simulator, he was greeted by Kath- ment,” he told the pilot. “You were de-
up to see what the A.I. was doing, which arine Woodruff, a researcher working ciding to not let the A.I. do the job
could be considered an expression of with SoarTech. Woodruff asked him that it’s put there to do, even though
distrust. He did not know that some about an incident in which he stopped it was actually performing fine in the
of the simulated skirmishes were primed the encounter even though he was not sense of not getting you killed. If we
for him to win and others to put him in imminent danger. “I had two deci- want to make you a battle manager
and his aircraft in jeopardy. But, if he
felt that the A.I. was about to do some-
thing dangerous, he had the option of
stopping the engagement by “paddling
off.” This, too, would demonstrate a
lack of trust.
Ultimately, the idea is to supply pi-
lots with more information about the
A.I.’s next move, in order to elicit the
appropriate level of trust. Glenn Tay-
lor, a senior scientist at SoarTech, told
me, “We’re building visual and other
interfaces into the system to let the pilot
know what the A.I. is doing, and give
him or her enough information, with
enough time, to know whether or not
to trust it.” The researchers called this
relationship “calibrated” trust. Phil Chu,
one of the ACE program’s science ad-
visers, told me, “If we can show pilots
what the A.I. is going to do in the next
four seconds, that’s a very long time.”
Trust will also be crucial because, “And this hall reminds us we have always been very rich and quite ugly.”
pilots, tested two drones in live flight.
Skyborg drones will be able to detect
ground and air threats, identify suitable
“kill” targets, and aim weapons for an
optimal strike. The actual decision to
“employ lethality,” as the Air Force calls
it, will remain in the hands of a human
pilot. But, in 2020, the Air Force’s chief
scientist, Richard Joseph, cautioned that
“we have some other questions to an-
swer. How much autonomy do we want
for a system that can deliver lethal force,
and especially one that’s moving at ma-
chine speed?”
In a paper published last April, Rob-
ert Work wrote that A.I.-enabled sys-
tems “are likely to help mitigate the
biggest cause of unintended combat en-
gagements: target misidentification.”
The U.S. military has repeatedly prom-
ised that improved technology would
enhance enemy targeting. The results
have been mixed. In 2003, during the
Iraq War, an early autonomous weapon,
“Have you tried turning it off and taking a nap?” the Patriot missile, inadvertently shot
down a British fighter jet, killing both
pilots, and a Navy plane, killing that
• • pilot as well. A subsequent Pentagon
report concluded that the human op-
in thirty years, we’d need to be able mous weapons beyond meaningful erators had given too much autonomy
to push that behavior in the opposite human control.” to the missile system. In a recent exam-
direction.” And yet artificial intelligence is al- ination of thirteen hundred classified
ready driving a worldwide arms race. reports of civilian casualties in the Mid-
n 2017, the Future of Life Institute, an In 2020, global spending for military dle East, the Times characterized the
I advocacy group focussed on “keeping
artificial intelligence beneficial,” which
A.I. was estimated to exceed six billion
dollars, and is expected to nearly dou-
American air war as “a sharp contrast
to the American government’s image
counts Elon Musk as a member of its ble by 2025. Russia is developing un- of war waged by all-seeing drones and
advisory board, released “Slaughter- manned vehicles, including robotic precision bombs.”
bots.” The short film imagines a world tanks and surveillance systems. Last Pettyjohn, of the Center for a New
in which weaponized quadcopters about year, it was reported that Libya launched American Security, told me that the
the size of a smartphone target politi- an autonomous drone that appeared to military is currently developing auton-
cal dissidents, college students, and mem- be equipped with “real-time image pro- omous systems to help identify targets.
bers of Congress. “Nuclear is obsolete,” cessing,” to identify and kill enemy “And that’s one of the things that A.I.
a Steve Jobs-like character tells an en- fighters. Robert Work, the former Dep- still struggles with,” she said. “It’s still
thusiastic audience at the Slaughterbot’s uty Secretary of Defense, told me that a really hard thing to do—discriminate
product launch. “Take out your entire intelligence suggests that China has in the air when you’re ten or twenty or
enemy, virtually risk-free.” turned decommissioned fighter jets into thirty thousand feet in the sky.” In 2018,
At the end of the video, which has autonomous suicide drones that can researchers at M.I.T. and Stanford found
been viewed more than three million operate together as a swarm. “That be- that three popular A.I. facial-recogni-
times on YouTube, the Berkeley com- comes an entirely new kind of weapon tion systems often failed to identify the
puter scientist Stuart Russell says into that’s extraordinarily difficult to defend gender of women with dark skin. Two
the camera, “Allowing machines to against,” he said. years later, a Congressional Research
choose to kill humans will be devastat- The United States, too, is testing the Service report noted that “this could
ing to our security and freedom.” Rus- use of swarming drones. In an experi- hold significant implications for A.I.
sell is among a group of prominent ac- ment last April, a drone swarm attacked applications in a military context, par-
ademics and tech executives, including a naval vessel off the coast of Califor- ticularly if such biases remain unde-
Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Noam nia. In October, the Skyborg program, tected and are incorporated into sys-
Chomsky, who signed on to a letter an Air Force project to build autono- tems with lethal effects.”
calling for a ban on “offensive autonomous aircraft to serve alongside F-35 Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of
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more than a hundred and eighty non- pit at all. “The Defense Department But during his debriefing he ex-
governmental organizations, includ- will tell you that they’re not going to pressed some frustration with the ex-
ing Amnesty International, Human have totally autonomous systems,” periment. In one scrimmage, his plane
Rights Watch, and the World Council Pettyjohn told me. “But I have a hard and the adversary’s chased each other
of Churches, has urged nations to adopt time imagining, when everything is around and around—on the screen, it
a legal treaty controlling the use of le- premised on making decisions faster looked like water circling a drain. The
thal autonomous weapons. The U.S. is than your adversary does, how people pilot told Woodruff that, though he
not among the nearly seventy countries can actually be in that loop.” let the A.I. keep fighting, “I know it
that have so far signed on. “It’s not just is not going to gun this guy anytime
about banning a particular weapon, like n late September, I observed another soon. In real life, if you keep going
we ban land mines or chemical weap-
ons,” Bonnie Docherty, a lecturer on
I trust experiment at O.P.L. For much
of the day, a veteran pilot sat in the
around like that you’re either going to
run out of gas or another bad guy will
human-rights law at Harvard Law cockpit of one of the L-29s, which come up from behind and kill you.” In
School and a senior researcher in the Schnell had turned into a flight sim- an actual battle, he would have ac-
arms division at Human Rights Watch, ulator. Wearing a V.R. headset, he per- cepted more risk in order to get to a
said. “This is an effort to preëmpt the formed the battle-management role as better offensive angle. “I mean, A.I.
development of a technology that could the A.I. fought a series of scrimmages. should be so much smarter than me,”
alter the way wars are fought in a re- Like the young pilot I’d watched the he said. “So if I’m looking out there,
ally dreadful way.” previous spring, he was asked to rate thinking I could have gained some ad-
The D.O.D.’s position on lethal au- his trust in the A.I. while his biomet- vantage here and A.I. isn’t, I have to
tonomous weapons, established in 2012, ric and flight data were recorded. But start asking why.”
requires a human decision-maker to this time, instead of using pre-scripted For the moment, the pilot’s critique
remain in the loop to an “appropriate” scenarios, he was dogfighting with the ref lects the immaturity of the A.I.
degree. David Ochmanek, a senior de- three A.I. agents that had survived elim- agents, which will need much more
fense analyst at the Rand Corporation, ination: those developed by Heron Sys- training if they are to become sophis-
whose former office at the Pentagon tems, PhysicsAI, and EpiSci. ticated enough to take on a real adver-
drafted the 2012 directive, told me, “It Toward the end of the day, the sary. But it also harks back to what Jus-
does not, in fact, prohibit the develop- parameters of the experiment were tin Mock said at the AlphaDogfight
ment of autonomous weapons.” Rather, changed. The pilot was allowed to Trials a year earlier: fighter pilots trust
he added, “it puts in place a number of paddle off, f ly the plane manually, what works.
processes for review and safeguards. then, when he felt that it was safe, Since then, the teams had been de-
The commander has to be able to in- cede the controls back to the A.I. Ac- veloping and testing A.I. agents that
tervene and turn on the autonomy and cording to Lauren Reinerman-Jones, could take on two adversaries simulta-
turn it off as needed.” a senior scientist at SoarTech, the re- neously, a far more complicated task.
Ochmanek sees the development of searchers’ expectation was that, if the They were also beginning to develop
autonomous weapons as a matter of pilot lost the first scrimmage, it would the tools that would enable them to
deterrence, particularly against large- take several more to recover trust. But, advance to live flight. The first step
scale acts of aggression, such as Rus- if he won the first fight, his trust in was to integrate the L-39’s flight dy-
sia invading NATO territory or China the A.I. would carry over to subse- namics into the dogfighting algorithms
invading Taiwan. “Can autonomy in quent scenarios. Then, if he lost the and test them in drones. In the next
different manifestations enable us to final scrimmage, trust would decrease, few months, the program will be put-
credibly believe we could defeat an in- but to a lesser degree—in coffee cups ting the A.I. agents into an airborne
vasion of this type?” he said. “The an- rather than buckets. simulator, so that the pilots can expe-
swer to that question is very much yes.” Four computers were positioned next rience g-forces, and see how that af-
In Niagara Falls last spring, as the to the plane. One recorded what the fects trust in A.I. “There’s a saying in
L-39 was flying over Lake Ontario, the pilot was seeing in his headset. Another the flight-test community: All models
ACE program’s scientists and engineers graphed his physiological responses, are wrong, some models are useful,”
gathered for their regular quarterly which were translated into various types Ryan Hefron, the ACE program’s man-
meeting. In a session with the groups of trust processing, each represented by ager, said. “So we have to find the use-
competing to design the dogfighting a different-colored line. Reinerman- ful pieces.”
algorithm, Chris Gentile, of EpiSci, Jones explained that a brown line, dis- When I discussed some of these ad-
emphasized that the program was not played above the rest, aggregated the vances with Schnell, he said, “Every-
creating lethal autonomous weapons: data into a crude rendering of the trust one’s a hero in the sim.” The stakes are
“What we are doing is building tools model she and her colleagues were de- easy to overlook inside the O.P.L.’s han-
to enable pilots to execute decisions veloping. Woodruff sat nearby, with a gar. Nobody gets hurt or killed crash-
more effectively.” But, as artificial intel- computer on her lap and a recorder in ing a virtual plane. “To truly trigger this
ligence ramps up the speed of deci- hand. Every minute or so, she’d ask the trust equation we’re working on,” he
sion-making, the question ultimately pilot to assess his trust in the A.I. Al- told me, “you have to have another piece
may be why have a human in the cock- most invariably, he said it was high. of metal coming right at you.” 
white images of their zaftig forebears,
SHOUTS & MURMURS is sometimes too cute by half. But it’s
tolerable, and there’s all that free food.
Our upgrade pick

Established Creative
Why we liked them: They must be doing
something right to have that deal with
Netflix, the series of fantasy Y.A. nov-
els, and the annual residency at the Bea-
con Theatre. Our testers appreciated
that established creatives reliably book
business class, receive screeners of every
new flm, and know amazing people.
One tester boasted of dining with
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Oskar Eustis, and
Meryl Streep in the course of a single
week. The hetero package comes with
a Jaguar E-Type, attractively shelved
frst editions of John Steinbeck, and a
meticulously catalogued collection of
WIRECUTTER:
rare jazz 78s. The queer version comes
with a country house set on a tidy work-
THE BEST PARTNER

ing farm run not by the established cre-
ative but by a hardy, amiable woman
named Abby. Most but not all such farms
BY DAVID KAMP feature an in-ground pool, stables, two
horses, four types of garden (vegetable,
he ongoing pandemic has only ex- ft without being vain or extreme about butterfly, Zen, tulip), a neighbor who is
T acerbated the difficulty of fnding
an ideal partner for the purposes of
it. The one we tried most recently was
generally sinewy, but with an unintim-
a luthier, and a quintet of Araucana hens
that lay splendid blue-green eggs.
companionship, intimacy, and low- idating midsection that was pleasingly Where they fall short: Be sure to stick to
stakes bickering. After researching three soft to the touch. the moderately successful established cre-
hundred and ffty-fve adult-human ar- Where they fall short: They are all booked ative. Our testers found extremely suc-
chetypes and testing some four dozen, solid through 2024, so you’ll be lucky cessful established creatives to be more
we at Wirecutter confdently offer these to enjoy as many as fve genuine two- susceptible to messiah complexes, inf-
suggestions for the partners least likely day weekends a year with one. They delity, using Jessica Chastain as a com-
to disappoint you, what with your high sometimes get moody and demand munications proxy, and assigning to their
expectations and all. “me time” that includes the dog but children such names as Django, Willa,
not you. Trumbo, ’Sconset, and Samuel L.
Our pick
Licensed Carpenter Also great Our budget pick
Why we liked them: We tried licensed Deli Owner (fourth generation) Tenured Humanities Professor
plumbers, electricians, and general con- Why we liked them: A huge improve- Why we liked them: Our testers found
tractors, but carpenters stood out for ment on the third-gen deli owner— them to be every bit as bright as un-
their combination of pensiveness, art- whose performance was compromised tenured humanities professors but mer-
istry, and pleasant sawdust aroma, not by high cholesterol, the stress of meet- cifully humbled by age, hard knocks,
to mention the steady demand for their ing payroll during the Pritikin fad, and and the recognition that their books are
skills. (Our testers enjoyed sexual con- deep depression caused by overbear- uncommercial. Bodily, they are unim-
gress with plumbers but were put off ing parents and grandparents—the pressive, but some testers found this a
by the occasional whiff of sewage.) Li- fourth-gen deli owner is a hassle-free welcome relief and even an asset, “a cozy
censed carpenters have abilities that breath of fresh air. Our testers were comfort to the Patinkin-curious.” In
are transferrable to home and leisure wowed by the fourth-gen model’s mar- this price range, compromise is a given—
pursuits, e.g., slicing summer squash keting savvy, flair for tile-based décor, the ’97 Subaru Forester, the campus-
and Thai eggplants on a mandoline healthful life style, and hair that is not adjacent bungalow that always smells
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
without cutting off fngertips, picking a comb-over. of a gas leak—but factor in job secu-
a banjo in Earl Scruggs style, and re- Where they fall short: Their self-aware rity, free gym access, and a European
storing abandoned Old Town canoes. embrace of family heritage, including sabbatical, and you’re getting Whole
Licensed carpenters are also physically selling T-shirts featuring black-and- Foods value on a Trader Joe’s budget. 
eration. The accumulation of German-
LIFE AND LETTERS language literature about him and
his family is immense, approaching
BEHIND THE MASK

Kennedyesque dimensions. Whatever
resistance Mann inspires—Bertolt
Brecht voiced the standard objection
The ironic genius of Thomas Mann. in calling him “the starched collar”—
his chessboard mastery of German
BY ALEX ROSS prose is not to be denied, nor can a
certain historical nobility be taken from
him. It is impossible to talk seriously
about the fate of Germany in the twen-
tieth century without reference to
Thomas Mann.
In America, however, one can coast
through a liberal-arts education with-
out having to deal with Mann. Gen-
eral readers are understandably hesitant
to plunge into the Hanseatic decadence
of “Buddenbrooks” or the sanatorium
symposia of “The Magic Mountain,”
never mind the musicological diabol-
ism of “Doctor Faustus” or the Bibli-
cal mythography of “Joseph and His
Brothers.” There was an upsurge of in-
terest in the nineteen-eighties and nine-
ties, when the publication of Mann’s
diaries revealed the pervasiveness of
his same-sex desires. Four biographies
appeared, and Knopf released fine new
translations of the major novels, by
John E. Woods. Then the aura of wor-
thy dullness settled back in place. Two
recent books—Colm Tóibín’s novel
“The Magician” (Scribner), an absorb-
ing but unchallenging fantasia on
Mann’s life; and a problematic reissue,
from New York Review Books, of
Mann’s conservative manifesto “Re-
flections of a Nonpolitical Man”—prob-
n 1950, a Briefly Noted reviewer in as a bourgeois relic, irrelevant in the ably won’t disturb the consensus.
I this magazine made short work of
“The Thomas Mann Reader,” an an-
age of bebop and the bomb. Another
commentator numbered Mann among
Because I have been almost un-
healthily obsessed with Mann’s writ- COURTESY THE THOMAS MANN ARCHIVE AT THE ETH BIBLIOTHEK ZURICH
thology culled from the German those “literary monoliths who have out- ing since the age of eighteen, I may be
novelist’s vast prose output: “The total lived their proper time.” ill-equipped to win over skeptics, but
impression created by this three-hun- In Germany, that verdict did not I know why I return to it year after
dred-thousand-word monument is that hold. Circa 1950, Mann was a divisive year. Mann is, first, a supremely gifted
Mann is a major writer, but perhaps figure in his homeland, widely criti- storyteller, adept at the slow windup
not all that major.” A New Yorker sub- cized for his belief that Nazism had and the rapid turn of the screw. He is
scriber in Los Angeles, residing at 1550 deep roots in the national psyche. Hav- a solemn trickster who is never alto-
San Remo Drive, in Pacific Palisades, ing gone into exile in 1933, he refused gether earnest about anything, espe-
was annoyed. “Yes, I may well be a ‘major to move back, dying in Switzerland in cially his own grand Goethean per-
author,’ ” Thomas Mann wrote to a 1955. Over time, his sweeping analysis sona. At the heart of his labyrinth are
friend, “ ‘but not that major.’ ” The cre- of German responsibility, from which scenes of emotional chaos, episodes of
ator of “Tonio Kröger” and “Death in he did not exclude himself, ceased to philosophical delirium, intimations of
Venice” was at the summit of his fame, be controversial. More important, his inhuman coldness. His politics traverse
yet many younger critics dismissed him fiction found readers in each new gen- the twentieth-century spectrum, rico-
chetting from right to left. His sexu-
Mann is a solemn trickster who is never altogether earnest about anything. ality is an exhibitionistic enigma. In
life and work alike, his contradictions who, decades earlier, had inspired the trast, is allowed to have several same-
are pressed together like layers in met- character of Lotte in “The Sorrows of sex encounters, though the details re-
amorphic rock. It is in the nature of Young Werther.” Goethe is endowed main vague.
monoliths not to grow old. with Mannian traits, flatteringly and In the most memorable sequence
otherwise. He is a man who feeds on of Tóibín’s novel, sexuality and politics
he Magician was a nickname be- the lives of others and appropriates his are interwoven, with gently wrench-
T stowed on Mann by his children,
and it conveys the distance he main-
disciples’ work, stamping all of it with
his parasitic genius. Mann, too, left
ing consequences. In the spring of 1933,
Mann, then a few months into his exile,
tained even with those closest to him. countless literary victims in his wake, was agonizing over the fate of his old
Tóibín’s novel of that title is a follow-up including members of his family. One diaries, which had been left behind at
to his previous meta-literary fiction, of them is still with us: his grandson the family house, in Munich. Because
“The Master” (2004), which delves into Frido, who loved his Opa’s company he had renounced right-wing nation-
the shadowy world of Henry James. and then discovered that a fictional alism in the previous decade, the Nazi
Tóibín, with a style as spare as Mann’s version of himself had been killed off regime viewed him as a traitor—Rein-
is ornate, brings a measure of warmth in “Doctor Faustus.” hard Heydrich wanted to have Mann
to an outwardly chilly figure. Tóibín’s It is only fitting, then, that Mann arrested—and the diaries could have
Mann is a befuddled, self-preoccupied, should fall prey to his own invasive tac- been used to ruin his reputation. Mann’s
not unlikable loner, pulled this way and tics. The early chapters of Tóibín’s novel son Golo had packed them in a suit-
that by potent personalities around re-create the crushes on boys that Mann case with other papers and had them
him, the most potent being his wife, endured in his youth, in the North Ger- shipped to Switzerland. For several
Katia Pringsheim Mann, the scion of man city of Lübeck. We meet Armin weeks, nothing was delivered. “Terri-
a wealthy and cultured Jewish family. Martens, with whom Mann took long, ble, even deadly things can happen,”
At first glance, Tóibín’s undertak- yearning walks. Tóibín writes, “He won- Mann wrote in a diary entry in late
ing seems superfluous, since there are dered if Armin would show him some April. Decades later, it became known
already a number of great novels about sign, or would, on one of their walks, that a German border officer had way-
Thomas Mann, and they have the ad- allow the conversation to move away laid the suitcase but had paid atten-
vantage of being by Thomas Mann. from poems and music to focus on their tion only to a top layer of book con-
Few writers of fiction have so relent- feelings for each other. In time, he re- tracts. The contracts were sent to Hey-
lessly incorporated their own experiences alized that he set more store by these drich’s political police, examined, and
into their work. Hanno Buddenbrook, walks than Armin did.” The question sent back, whereupon the suitcase was
the proud, hurt boy who improvises is how much this adds to the parallel allowed to proceed.
Wagnerian fantasies on the piano; narrative of “Tonio Kröger,” which was Tóibín vividly evokes Mann’s panic
Tonio Kröger, the proud, hurt young bold for 1903: “He was well aware that when the diaries went missing. In a won-
writer who sacrifices his life for his art; the other attached only half as much derful detail, the protagonist asks a Zu-
Prince Klaus Heinrich, the hero of weight to these walks together as he rich bookshop for a biography of Oscar
“Royal Highness,” who rigidly per- did. . . . The fact was that Tonio loved Wilde: “While he did not expect to go
forms his duties; Gustav von Aschen- Hans Hansen and had already suffered to prison as a result of any disclosures,
bach, the hidebound literary celebrity much over him. Whoever loves more as Wilde did, and he was aware that
who loses his mind to a boy on a Ven- is the subordinate one and must suf- Wilde’s life had been dissolute, as his
ice beach; Mut-em-enet, Potiphar’s fer—his fourteen-year-old soul had al- had not, it was the move from famous
wife, who falls desperately in love with ready received this hard and simple les- writer to disgraced public figure that
the handsome Israelite Joseph; the con- son from life.” interested him.”
fidence man Felix Krull, who fools peo- Tóibín doesn’t adhere exclusively to While Mann frets, he recalls an ep-
ple into thinking he is more impres- the biographical record, and his most isode that the diaries would have re-
sive than he is; the Faustian composer decisive intervention comes in the realm vealed: his infatuation, in 1927, at the
Adrian Leverkühn, who is compared of sex. In all likelihood, Mann never age of fifty-two, with an eighteen-year-
to “an abyss into which the feelings engaged in anything resembling what old named Klaus Heuser. Mann de-
others expressed for him vanished contemporary sensibilities would clas- stroyed diaries from the period—the
soundlessly without a trace”—all are sify as gay sex. His diaries are reliable extant volumes are from 1918 to 1921
avatars of the author, sometimes chan- in factual matters and do not shy away and from 1933 to 1955—but subsequent
nelling his letters and diaries. Mann from embarrassing details; we hear comments suggest that he considered
liked to say that he found material about erections, masturbation, noctur- this his only consummated relationship
rather than invented it—a play on the nal emissions. But he clearly has trou- with a man. Tóibín describes it thus:
verbs finden and erfinden. ble even picturing male-on-male ac- “Thomas stood up and went to the
Mann’s most dizzying self-drama- tion, let alone participating in it. When, bookcases. Before he had time to com-
tization can be found in the novel in 1950, he reads Gore Vidal’s “The pose himself and listen out for Klaus’s
“Lotte in Weimar,” from 1939. It tells City and the Pillar,” he asks himself, breath, Klaus had moved swiftly across
of a strained reunion between the aging “How can one sleep with gentlemen?” the room, grasping Thomas’s hands for
Goethe and his old love Charlotte Buff, The Mann of “The Magician,” by con- a moment and then edging him around
so that they faced each other and started tion; instead, he felt lasting joy. Years perial strangeness of Mann’s nature. He
to kiss.” There we break off, with fur- later, he thought back on the Heuser comes across as a familiar, somewhat
ther fumbling implied. adventure with “pride and gratitude,” pitiable creature—a closeted man who
Passages in the later diaries might because it was the “unhoped-for ful- occasionally gives in to his desires. The
lead us to believe that something of fillment of a lifelong yearning.” real Mann never gave in to his desires,
the sort occurred: Mann indicates that All the while, Mann was ensconced but he also never really hid them. Gay
he drew Heuser into his arms and in a reasonably happy marriage—one themes surfaced in his writing almost
kissed him on the lips. There is, how- with enough of a physical component from the start, and he made clear that
ever, rival testimony. In 1986, the scholar that six children resulted from it. “The his stories were autobiographical. When,
Karl Werner Böhm tracked down Heu- Magician” is notable for its rich por- in 1931, he received a newspaper ques-
ser, who, it turned out, was gay. Heu- trait of the strong-willed, sharp-wit- tionnaire asking about his “first love,”
ser said that nothing remotely sexual ted Katia Mann, who studied mathe- he replied, in essence, “Read ‘Tonio
had taken place with Mann; indeed, matics before marriage ended the Kröger.’ ” Likewise, of “Death in Ven-
he had no inkling of any erotic inter- possibility of an academic career. The ice” he wrote, “Nothing is invented.”
est on the part of this kindly and re- twin sister of a gay man, Katia was alert Gay men saw the author as one of their
served older gentleman. to her husband’s sporadic crushes on own. When the composer Ned Rorem
To the modern eye, Mann may seem college-age lads; she also knew that was young, he took a front-row seat at
pathetically repressed. But from an- nothing would come of them. When, a Mann lecture, hoping to distract the
other perspective—one no less mod- in 1950, Mann became besotted with eminence on the dais with his hotness.
ern—there is something honorable in a Zurich hotel waiter named Franz “He never looked,” Rorem reported.
his inactivity. To have done anything Westermeier, Katia fired off teasing re-
more with Heuser, the son of family marks while the couple’s daughter Erika f Tóibín gives us a somewhat domes-
friends, would have been predatory.
Granted, it was not an ethical consid-
worried about appearances. A seem-
ingly stagy line of Erika’s in “The Ma-
I ticated version of Mann, the new edi-
tion of “Reflections of a Nonpolitical
eration that stopped him; it was a ter- gician”—“You cannot flirt with a waiter Man” trivializes him, reducing the Great
ror of the physical. (If Heuser had been in the lobby of a hotel with the whole Ambiguator to the level of an op-ed
as forward as he is in “The Magician,” world watching”—is based directly on columnist. The historian Mark Lilla,
Mann would probably have bolted from the diaries. who wrote an introduction for the vol-
the room.) In any case, the encounter “The Magician,” deft and diligent ume, thinks that Mann has something
didn’t leave Mann in a state of frustra- as it is, ultimately diminishes the im- to tell us about ideological conformism
in the arts today. It’s an obtuse reading
of a work that Mann came to see as an
artifact of his own political stupidity. In
Trumpian America, the chief lesson to
be drawn from the literary quagmire of
“Reflections” is how educated people
can accommodate themselves to irra-
tionality and violence.
First published in 1918, the book is
drenched in the patriotic fervor that
overtook Mann’s intellect during the
First World War. It seethes with con-
tempt for Western democracy and
with resentment of his brother Hein-
rich, who is never named but who
appears in the guise of the Zivilisa-
tionsliterat (“civilization’s littérateur”).
Heinrich decried the war in the name
of cosmopolitan ideals, and in his con-
temporaneous novel “Der Untertan”
he tracked the degeneration of Ger-
man nationalism into chauvinism, mil-
itarism, and anti-Semitism. Artists
should blaze a more enlightened path,
Heinrich argued. Thomas responded
in “Ref lections” that war is healthy
and enlightenment suspect. Art, he
“Since you somehow managed to get past says, “has a fundamentally undepend-
my moat, I’ll give you a few minutes.” able, treacherous tendency; its delight
in scandalous anti-reason, its inclina-
tion toward beauty-creating ‘barba-
rism,’ is ineradicable.”
Mann began backpedalling almost
immediately, informing friends that
the book would be better read as a novel.
By 1922, he had reconciled with Hein-
rich and endorsed the Weimar Repub-
lic. As the years went by, he became
increasingly embarrassed by “Reflec-
tions,” worrying that it had contrib-
uted to Germany’s slide into Nazism.
Although he stopped short of disavow-
ing the work, he commented in 1944
that it had “quite properly” never been
translated into English, adding, “I
should never have published it even in
German, for a more intimate and more
misusable diary has never been kept.”
Its only usefulness now, he went on, • •
was to show the roots of “The Magic
Mountain,” in which the Manns’ broth-
erly feud is revisited with a more proposed to have been especially popular rassment. Whatever the merits of Lil-
gressive slant. Not until 1983 did an in the trenches—and that “voluptuous la’s other work—his books include “The
English translation come out; that ver- emotions” of comradeship are running Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Poli-
sion, by Walter D. Morris, is what New rampant, to the point where, we are told, tics” and “The Stillborn God: Religion,
York Review Books has reissued. returning soldiers may no longer be at- Politics, and the Modern West”—his
The first problem with the publica- tracted to their wives. An especially stu- credentials as a Mann specialist are
tion is that it occupies a vacuum. In a pefying passage responds to humani- slim. He states that Mann wrote no
situation that would have infuriated tarian lamentations over the horrors of novel between “Buddenbrooks” and
Mann, almost all his other nonfiction war by bringing up the difficult birth “The Magic Mountain,” thus vaporiz-
writings either are out of print in En- of one of the Mann children: “That was ing the three-hundred-and-fifty-page
glish or have never been translated. We not humane, it was hellish, and as long “Royal Highness.” He declares that
need an updated “Thomas Mann Reader,” as this is around, there can also be war, Mann was away from Germany on a
one that places excerpts from “Reflec- as far as I’m concerned.” lecture tour when Hitler assumed
tions” alongside “An Appeal to Reason,” “Reflections” is an extraordinarily power, which is not the case. He says
“The Coming Victory of Democracy,” convoluted assemblage of allusions, that the young Heinrich Mann pro-
“The Camps” (one of the first serious imitations, oblique insults, unattributed duced “biting left-wing satires”; Hein-
engagements with the Holocaust, from quotations, plagiarism, and self-can- rich began on the right. He writes that
1945), “Germany and the Germans,” and nibalism. In the relevant volume of “Zivilizationsliterat” is “an unlovely
“On the Occasion of a Magazine”—the S. Fischer Verlag’s annotated edition- term even in German.” Indeed it is, be-
last an unpublished 1949 essay that Mann in-progress of Mann’s œuvre, the scholar cause it’s misspelled.
conceived as a “J’Accuse!” against Mc- Hermann Kurzke supplies almost eight The tendentious framing of “Re-
Carthyism. The “Reflections” volume hundred pages of commentary, ac- flections” is no less aggravating. Al-
does append “On the German Repub- counting for some four thousand ci- though Lilla acknowledges the book’s
lic,” Mann’s pivotal 1922 endorsement of tations. The New York Review Books dangerous ideological drift, he sym-
democracy, but it fails to counterbalance edition has no index, and contains five pathizes with its critique of the sup-
the preceding harangue. pages of notes, consisting mostly of posed Jacobinism of its time because
With proper contextualization, “Re- German texts of poems. Readers will he is reminded of the supposed Jaco-
flections” makes for a grimly fascinat- be left in the dark as to the identity of binism of ours. In “The Once and
ing read. Mann discloses as much of a certain “infinitely naïve and demo- Future Liberal: After Identity Poli-
himself in its pages as in any of his au- niacally tortured” writer (Frank We- tics,” from 2017, Lilla argued that mod-
tobiographical fiction. As Anthony Heil- dekind); the name of the novel that ern liberalism has been waylaid by
but pointed out in his 1996 study, mocks Wagner’s “Lohengrin” (“Der scoldingly self-righteous protesters,
“Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature,” Untertan”); and the source of the phrase from queer activists to Black Lives
the usual erotic fixations are in play. “affirmation of a human being apart Matter supporters, who value their
Mann imagines that Germany’s strap- from his worth” (the homoerotic so- own agenda above the common good.
ping heroes are drawing sustenance from ciologist Hans Blüher). This is presumably what Lilla has in
his work—“Death in Venice” is sup- The introductory essay is an embar- mind when he says that the following
“Reflections” traces the groggy awak-
ening of a writer who has never thought
systematically about politics. It is the
beginning of a journey that ends with
his embrace of democratic socialism.
As Kurzke points out, Mann succumbs
to the disease of nationalist resentment
just before it becomes endemic in Ger-
many. He effectively “immunizes” him-
self against Hitlerism.
To the end of his life, Mann kept
insisting that any attempt to separate
the artistic from the political was a cat-
astrophic delusion. His most succinct
formulation came in a letter to Her-
mann Hesse, in 1945: “I believe that
nothing living can avoid the political
today. The refusal is also politics; one
thereby advances the politics of the evil
cause.” If artists lose themselves in fan-
“I only know ‘Sit’ and ‘Stay.’” tasies of independence, they become
the tool of malefactors, who prefer
to keep art apart from politics so that
• • the work of oppression can continue
undisturbed. So Mann wrote in an af-
sentences in Mann’s treatise “could scouring anti-Wilhelmine spirit. A few terword to a 1937 book about the Span-
have been written today”: pages earlier, Mann mentions Wilhelm ish Civil War, adding that the poet who
The outlawing and expulsion of those who Liebknecht as a radical leader. He means forswears politics is a “spiritually lost
disagree is completely consonant with his con- Liebknecht’s son Karl, who helped man.” The same conviction is inscribed
cept of freedom. . . . He imagines himself jus- found the German Communist Party— into the later fiction. The primary theme
tified, yes, morally bound, to relegate to the and was murdered by Freikorps soldiers of “Doctor Faustus” is the insanity of
deepest pit every way of thinking that cannot in 1919. If Lilla’s historical analogy holds, the old Romantic ethos.
and does not want to recognize what glitters so
absolutely for him to be the light and the truth. we are on the brink of a Fascist take- To claim, as Lilla does, that Mann
over, and woke protesters are destined held fast to some eternal principle of ar-
Hermann Kurzke advises that the image to be the valiant last line of defense. tistic freedom reverses the arc of his ca-
of a glittering truth is probably an al- Let’s hope that this is not the case. reer and unlearns his hardest-won les-
lusion to the final scene of Wagner’s The assassinations of the early post- sons. In fact, Mann came to believe that
“Das Rheingold,” in which Loge laughs war period and the rise of Nazism in a just social order required limits in pol-
at the gods and their grasping after gold. Munich helped convince Mann that itics and art alike. Stanley Corngold un-
In truth, such lines could not have been he had made a terrible wrong turn. derscores this point in “The Mind in
written today. If you substitute “expul- Even while writing “Ref lections,” Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton,”
sion” with “cancellation,” however, you though, he had felt tremors of unease, which chronicles the time that the nov-
can see the point that Lilla is evidently torn between German war fever and a elist spent at the university between 1938
trying to make. cosmopolitan, pan-European sensibil- and 1941. In speeches of the period, Mann
The point doesn’t register with me, ity. There is a tortuous pleasure in called for “social self-discipline under
since gay activism of the ACT UP era watching the book totter under the the ideal of freedom”—a political phi-
helped save me from oblivion, but let’s weight of its contradictions. Hundreds losophy that doubles as a personal one.
set identity politics aside and assess of pages in, Mann admits that his main He also said, “Let me tell you the whole
what the analogy tells us about Mann. thesis—that leftists have injected pol- truth: if ever Fascism should come to
If you read “Reflections” without con- itics into an innocent artistic sphere— America, it will come in the name of
text, you might conclude that the Ger- is incoherent, because “antipolitics is ‘freedom.’ ” He left the United States in
man Jacobins whom Mann is denounc- also politics.” He suggests, after many 1952, fearing that McCarthyism had
ing were figures of frightening power pages of bilious anti-democratic rants, made him a marked man once again.
who could cancel their opponents with that democracy is inevitable in Ger-
a single feuilleton. In fact, they occu- many. In his saner moments, he sim- he baroque tangle of Mann’s sex-
pied a tenuous position in a militarized
state that was evolving toward dicta-
ply pleads for something other than
the hypocritical Anglo-American sys-
T uality and his politics can easily
consume discussions of his work, as it
torship. “Der Untertan” could not be tem that preaches freedom while sub- has this one so far. Nonetheless, there
published during the war, because of its jugating other peoples. (Fair enough.) is no way to make sense of his devel-
opment without taking the tangle into into the ether.” The real point of col- Serenus Zeitblom, another parodically
account. Consider the progression from lapse comes when we are assured that long-winded narrator, reacts to news of
“Buddenbrooks,” in 1901, to “The Magic the outer world will enjoy Aschenbach’s Hitler’s downfall just as Mann did in
Mountain,” in 1924. The family saga of miraculous prose without knowing its his study in Los Angeles; the self-mir-
“Buddenbrooks” was a huge triumph tawdry origins. The boundary between roring lends an uncanny reality to the
for a writer in his twenties. Then came art and life is obliterated as soon as it novel, as if a second author were watch-
a spell of uncertainty, with many false is drawn. ing from the wings. Mann observed
starts amid finished projects. “Fiorenza,” The political crisis of the First World himself as unsentimentally as he ob-
a verbose stage drama about Savona- War brings with it a parallel aesthetic served everyone else.
rola and the Medici, received biting re- crisis, which leads to another break- Was there an element of charlatan-
views; “Royal Highness,” an arch mar- through. In the early chapters of “Re- ism in the magpie methodology—par-
ital comedy, came across as disappoint- flections,” Mann gestures toward mount- ticularly when Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., was
ingly slight. Heinrich Mann, meanwhile, ing an orderly argument, but after a marketing his star émigré novelist as the
had a string of successes. The fraternal while the pretense falls away and the “Greatest Living Man of Letters”? Mann
break was caused in part by a gibe that book devolves into a diaristic collage, accepted the possibility, since he had al-
Heinrich made in a 1915 essay on Zola: with experiences plopped into the nar- ways been haunted by the sense of being
“It is the case with those destined to rative one after the other: friends’ pub- an empty shell, a wooden soldier. All
dry up early that they step forth con- lications arriving in the mail, perfor- along, the dubiousness of genius had
sciously and respectably at the start of mances of Hans Pfitzner’s opera “Pa- been one of his chief motifs. In “The
their twenties.” lestrina,” news of military advances and Brother,” his essay on Hitler, he wrote
In the years before the First World reversals. In his next major work, “The that greatness was an aesthetic rather
War, Mann labored to come up with a Magic Mountain,” he proceeds in much than an ethical phenomenon, meaning
second masterpiece. He contemplated the same way, but with far greater con- that Nazi exploitation of Goethe and
a novel about Frederick the Great and trol. Happenstance events in his daily Beethoven was less a betrayal of Ger-
other weighty schemes. When none of life—visits to séances, an encounter with man artist-worship than a grotesque ex-
them panned out, he busied himself an X-ray machine, the arrival of a pho- tension of it. The Magician’s finest trick
with seemingly trivial subjects: a story nograph—are seamlessly folded into his was to dismantle the pretensions of ge-
about a charming confidence man; a sanatorium epic. The turgid thrashings nius while preserving his own lofty stat-
tale involving tuberculosis patients at of “Reflections” have yielded a distinc- ure. The feat could be accomplished only
a Swiss clinic; a novella based on a beach tive novelistic technique that Mann em- once, and it happens definitively in “Doc-
vacation in Venice. The last, published ploys for the remainder of his career. tor Faustus,” when Leverkühn’s explica-
in 1912, proved to be the breakthrough Mann’s new style is modernism in tion of his valedictory cantata spirals
to Mann’s mature manner. But it took a high-bourgeois mode, as byzantine into madness. An immaculately turned-
the form of a fabulously intricate self- in its layering as anything in Joyce. The out personification of bourgeois culture
satire, in which the Frederick the Great seventh chapter of “Lotte in Weimar,” stages its destruction.
novel and other unrealized plans were in which Goethe delivers an interior What is left amid the ruins is cos-
attributed to an older, sadder version monologue, creates an astonishingly mic irony—Mann’s preferred mode from
of himself. It was a bonfire of his van- the start. At his death, he had finished
ities, a kind of artistic suicide. Mann the first part of “Confessions of Felix
struggled with suicidal impulses in his Krull, Confidence Man,” a novel-length
early years, and he found cathartic sat- elaboration of his earlier story. In one
isfaction in killing off his alter egos. chapter, the winsome protagonist is
“Reflections,” in the course of its me- working as a waiter in a Paris hotel when
anderings, addresses perceived misun- he meets a Scottish gentleman named
derstandings of “Death in Venice.” Read- Lord Kilmarnock—a slender man of
ers saw the novella as an exercise in stiff bearing, his eyes gray-green, his
attaining a “master style”; for Mann, it hair iron-gray, his mustache clipped, his
is a parody of his own quest for mas- dense mosaic of Goethean utterances nose jutting awkwardly from his face,
tery. “Death in Venice” is secretly a com- intermingled with Mann’s own thoughts; his manner friendly yet melancholy. Not
edy, in a very dark register. The narra- at the same time, it is a radical demy- for the first time, but never so obviously,
tor’s grandiloquence overshoots the mark thologizing of a cultural demigod. (You Mann takes a seat at the table of his
and becomes ludicrous: “What he craved, might not notice from reading Helen fiction. In a series of f leeting chats,
though, was to work in Tadzio’s pres- Lowe-Porter’s stilted translation, but Kilmarnock makes his interest in Felix
ence, to take the boy’s physique as the Goethe wakes up with a hard-on.) clear, without committing any impro-
model for his writing, to let his style “Doctor Faustus” restages the life of prieties. He expounds his philosophy
follow the contours of this body which Nietzsche, borrows fragments from of life, which is Selbstverneinung, the
seemed to him divine, to carry its beauty Mann’s old diaries, and absorbs chunks negation of the self: “Perhaps, mon en-
into the realm of the intellect, as the of the musical philosophy of Arnold fant, self-negation increases the capac-
eagle once carried the Trojan shepherd Schoenberg and Theodor W. Adorno. ity for the affirmation of the other.” 
A REPORTER AT LARGE
THE BOUNTY HUNTER

Jordan Thomas’s army of whistle-blowers has exposed one Wall Street
wrongdoing after another. But is he changing the industry?
BY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE
hese are strange days for the preliminary data and concluded that,
T American stock market, with

the exuberance of investors de-
fying the bleakest of outlooks. Yet, even
from an investment perspective, Cas-
sava might be the next “Google or Tesla.”
Last summer, a user on the Web site
in this warped moment, the outsized Seeking Alpha proclaimed, “cassava
success last year of a tiny company called sciences is on the brink of mak-
Cassava Sciences seemed exceptional. ing medical history,” enthusing,
With only two dozen employees and no “CEOs of public companies don’t make
product revenue, the Austin-based bio- these kinds of statements unless they
tech firm generated a stampede of in- can back it up.” In July, Cassava’s stock
vestor enthusiasm that caused its stock price surged to a hundred and thirty-
to rise nearly fifteen hundred per cent. five dollars, giving it a market value of
Cassava is run by Remi Barbier, a genial roughly five billion dollars.
entrepreneur who wears wire-rimmed This was an astounding turn for Bar-
glasses and is given to ambitious predic- bier’s company, which had no laborato-
tions. It has been developing a novel ries of its own, contracted out most of
treatment for Alzheimer’s, a pill called the science, and didn’t have much of a
Simufilam, which is designed to attack track record in Alzheimer’s research. In
the disease by fixing abnormalities of the fact, until 2019, Cassava had been named
protein filamin A. The medication has Pain Therapeutics and was known pri-
not yet received approval from the Food marily for developing what it described
and Drug Administration, but clinical as the groundbreaking formulation of
trials are under way. an opioid painkiller that had little risk
Six million Americans suffer from of abuse. The drug, Remoxy, seemed so
Alzheimer’s, and any drug that could promising that investors poured money
ameliorate the condition would repre- into the firm. In 2003, Sidney Wolfe, of
sent a milestone in public health—and the watchdog group Public Citizen, cau-
make billions of dollars. Cassava issued tioned that Remoxy “sounds too good
press releases touting the results of its to be true.” He was right: the drug never
clinical trials, and Barbier suggested that earned F.D.A. approval. But, because
Simufilam was “the first drug—to our Pain Therapeutics was publicly traded,
knowledge—that can restore cognition.” it managed to stay alive on the fumes
Word spread about the product on on- of investor optimism. In about a decade,
line forums, including Reddit, and Cas- the stock lost most of its value; mean-
sava became a “meme stock,” surging while, Barbier compensated himself with
in value as it was hyped by relatively nearly thirty million dollars. In the tart
unsophisticated retail day traders. Cas- summation of the medical-news Web
sava’s stock symbol is sava, and devo- site STAT, “Barbier has a reputation for
tees of the company called themselves profiting personally even while his com-
“savages.” They weren’t necessarily sci- pany suffered multiple setbacks.”
entists, but they felt certain that Cas- Barbier insisted that his Alzheimer’s
sava would, in the words of one Red- drug was a different story. Scientists af-
ditor, “eradicate Alzheimer’s.” Another filiated with the company had published
stockholder declared, “Ever since I seen papers in peer-reviewed journals. And
the 10% conginitive [sic] improvement the National Institutes of Health had
I’ve been convinced.” Barbier, mean- awarded some twenty million dollars in
while, told Fortune that a core group of grants to Cassava and its academic col-
institutional investors had looked at the laborators. In May, 2020, the company Thomas constantly promotes his business, noting,
“Whistle-blowers aren’t repeat clients.” If more people know that it can pay to sound the alarm, more people will sound the alarm.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM PAPE THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 33
acknowledged that the results of a clin- allegations are false.” He cast suspicion sixty-seven-million-dollar penalty, in
ical trial had been unsuccessful. But Bar- on those making the charges, noting 2015. Another client alerted the S.E.C.
bier said that there must be some mis- that Thomas had filed the petition not to the misuse of customer cash at Mer-
take, and subsequently announced that on his own behalf but at the behest of rill Lynch, leading to a four-hundred-
the company had commissioned a re- unnamed clients. Who were these shad- and-fifteen-million-dollar fine, in 2016.
analysis, by an outside lab, and that the owy antagonists, and why wouldn’t they Last summer, when the Facebook whistle-
data showed a significant improvement step forward? Barbier complained, “By blower Frances Haugen was preparing
in biomarkers for Alzheimer’s com- distancing the monkey from the organ to take her allegations public, she and
pared with a placebo. The stock began grinder, those behind this scheme are her legal team consulted Thomas.
to climb. In February, 2021, Cassava hard to detect.” Haugen acted in a very public way,
touted a round of promising results As it happens, submitting explosive testifying before Congress. With many
from another trial—without a placebo— government filings on behalf of anony- of Thomas’s clients, though, the gov-
and claimed that, in an unprecedented mous clients is what Jordan Thomas ernment agencies they inform may be
breakthrough, Simufilam could actu- does for a living. He is an attorney who aware of their identities, but the offend-
ally renew cognitive function. The stock represents whistle-blowers. Thomas pre- ing company—and the general pub-
price reached new heights. viously worked at the Securities and Ex- lic—is not. For whistle-blowers, corpo-
Barbier admitted that his company’s change Commission, where he helped rate retaliation is a very real danger, and
fortunes depended on the drug, saying, create a new program, implemented in the best way to avoid it, Thomas likes
“We’re a moonshot with one rocket 2011, that encouraged people to report to say, is to remain anonymous. Some-
ship.” Nevertheless, he was comfortable corporate malfeasance. The program, times his clients quietly report their
with the “high-risk, high-reward” as- developed after the 2008 financial crisis company to the S.E.C., reap a multi-
pect of the business, so much so that he and the Bernie Madoff scandal, estab- million-dollar reward, and continue
and his family owned more than a mil- lished a substantial monetary incentive working at the company. Some elect
lion shares of Cassava. “I’m putting my for whistle-blowers, by allowing them not to go public in order to avoid what
money where my mouth is,” he said. to share in the proceeds of successful Thomas describes as “the lottery-ticket
Last summer, the company made plans S.E.C. actions. These awards, which are effect”: friends and family hounding
to commence a much larger third phase sometimes referred to as bounties, can them for a piece of the prize.
of clinical trials, in the fall, with nearly range from ten per cent to thirty per “None of my friends know,” the
two thousand patients. cent of what the errant company ends JPMorgan Chase whistle-blower, who
But in August Barbier was blindsided up paying the government. Since its in- received a thirteen-million-dollar award
by a startling intervention. A New York troduction, the program has dispersed from the S.E.C., told me. “We’re just
attorney, Jordan A. Thomas, filed a “cit- more than $1.2 billion in awards. In the in a plausible-deniability situation where,
izen petition” with the F.D.A. citing words of the former S.E.C. chair Mary if I don’t drive around Manhattan in a
“grave concerns about the quality and Jo White, it has been “a game changer.” Ferrari, I can keep a low profile.” He
integrity of the laboratory-based stud- Just after Thomas helped introduce added, “Everyone says it’s super hard
ies surrounding this drug candidate.” this new regime, he left the government to keep a secret. It’s not. When some-
The petition contained a forty-two-page and opened a legal practice dedicated one pays you thirteen million dollars,
technical report outlining “a series of it’s really not.”
anomalies” in Cassava’s published re- Because Thomas is often among the
search “that strongly suggests systemic few people who know about the clan-
data manipulation.” Though the peti- destine risks that his clients undertake,
tion never said so explicitly, it insinu- and about the secret windfalls they re-
ated that Cassava had been fudging the ceive, he can occasionally act like their
data to inflate its stock price. Thomas therapist or priest, giving them the faith
even invoked the spectre of Theranos, to persevere. It helps, of course, that he
the Silicon Valley darling that was ulti- is one of the designers of the bureau-
mately exposed as a fraud. Cassava’s re- cratic gantlet they face. “He’s the archi-
search was “riddled with red flags,” he to representing whistle-blowers who tect of the Matrix,” the whistle-blower
argued, urging the F.D.A. to suspend brought cases to the S.E.C. Today, he is said. “Jordan Thomas built this machine.”
the clinical trials, and to investigate. perhaps the foremost attorney repre-
Citizen petitions to the F.D.A.— senting such whistle-blowers. “I’m not he majority of our clients are re-
which anyone can file to request action a model—I’m a Black man who got a
“ T ferrals,”Thomas told me last sum-
or express concern—are published on- G.E.D., who went to community col- mer, when I first met him. “Very few
line, and within hours Cassava’s stock lege,” he told me recently. “But I like the people do what we do.” Since the pan-
had plunged roughly thirty per cent. idea of being a pioneer in an area of law.” demic began, he has been working pri-
Within a week, the company had lost Thomas represented a whistle-blower marily from home; he lives with his wife,
two and a half billion dollars in value. from JPMorgan Chase who helped ex- Mona, and three children in a large house
Barbier declared himself “dazed and pose a pattern of self-dealing at the bank; overlooking Long Island Sound.Thomas
confused” by the attack, insisting, “These the case resulted in a two-hundred-and- had commandeered the dining-room
table, which was covered in stacks of
legal files. He has a youthful face and
close-cropped graying hair, and he was
dressed in athletic wear. A Peloton bike
stood in the corner. Thomas has an in-
tensely focussed manner; he’s not given
to casual chitchat about family, leisure,
or anything extraneous to his job. He
works nights and often rises to work
before dawn. He works weekends.
One reason for this urgency is the
sheer abundance of corporate malfea-
sance. After Thomas established his
whistle-blowing practice, at the law firm
Labaton Sucharow, he commissioned
an anonymous survey of finance pro-
fessionals, conducted by the University
of Notre Dame. The findings illumi-
nate a rampant ethical permissiveness:
more than a third of respondents who
have salaries of half a million dollars or “If I’m vaporized, you two will be the obvious suspects.”
more say that they have witnessed, or
have firsthand knowledge of, wrong-
doing in the workplace; nearly twenty
• •
per cent of respondents “feel financial-
services professionals must at least some- and was subsequently blackballed by the gance, but after that win he traded in
times engage in illegal or unethical industry. Blowing the whistle was a “ca- his fifteen-year-old Toyota for a Tesla.
activity to be successful.” The S.E.C. reer killer,” he has said. (Though Deutsche When Thomas talks about his job,
established the whistle-blower program Bank agreed to a penalty, it acknowl- he occasionally seems like a C.I.A. of-
partly so that people who witnessed edged no wrongdoing.) ficer whose mission is the surreptitious
misbehavior would have a reliable mech- Thomas thinks he can help upend recruitment and handling of well-placed
anism for reporting it. The agency had the notion that, whenever a whistle- insiders willing to betray their bosses.
ignored the forensic accountant Harry blower acts, “the company crushes them He relishes the intrigue of the accom-
Markopolos when he sounded the alarm and now they live in a motel eating cat panying tradecraft, describing cases in
about Bernie Madoff ’s Ponzi scheme. food.” He concedes that sometimes which his clients assumed generic pseud-
“Huge percentages of people know stuff,” “there are bad outcomes,” but says that onyms—Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones—or
Thomas told me. “They’re just not his work “is about levelling the playing disguised their voices with a scrambler
speaking up.” The JPMorgan whistle- field.” By any measure, his practice has when making phone calls. Thomas once
blower said, “There were a dozen peo- been a success. For the first five years, conducted a sub-rosa interview with a
ple I worked with who knew the same it ran at a loss, but he was confident client in an empty church. Often, the
information I knew and still didn’t re- enough about its prospects that he re- people he represents don’t merely alert
port anything.” negotiated with the firm, taking a smaller the government about misconduct; they
People look the other way out of ap- salary in exchange for a bigger piece of gather evidence, secretly record phone
athy or complicity—or fear. Tom Muel- the action should he ever make a profit. calls and meetings, even wear wires. In
ler, in his book “Crisis of Conscience: “I think now they would probably pre- one recent case, involving a public com-
Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud,” fer the old deal,” Thomas told me, flash- pany in China, a client smuggled thou-
notes that for most of us the notion of ing a smile. Because he works on con- sands of pages of sensitive documents
standing up to a government agency or tingency, his fee is a significant chunk out of the country and set up an office
a major corporation is “almost unimag- of any rewards that his clients receive. in Thailand, where the papers could be
inable,” because we sense that powerful When the S.E.C. announced, in 2018, photocopied and turned over to the
forces will retaliate and “pursue us like that in the Merrill Lynch case it would S.E.C. The Chinese Ministry of State
the Furies to the ends of the earth.” The pay two awards, totalling eighty-three Security caught on to the operation
biochemist Jeffrey Wigand, who turned million dollars, it was reported that La- and started questioning people, so the
on his employer, the tobacco company baton Sucharow could make more than whistle-blower had to remain one step
Brown & Williamson, received death twenty-five million dollars. Thomas ex- ahead. “It was like something from the
threats and had to hire bodyguards. An- panded his team, bringing on two part- movie ‘The Firm,’” Thomas said.
other former client of Thomas’s, Eric ners, Rich Levine and Michael Steven- A private whistle-blower may have
Ben-Artzi, told the S.E.C. about false son, who are also former S.E.C. officials. the freedom to do things that the S.E.C.
accounting practices at Deutsche Bank, He is not given to personal extrava- cannot: tape a call without obtaining a
warrant; gather intelligence abroad with- an intuitive sense of how to package his Some whistle-blowers, like the
out getting permission from the State arguments as accessible anecdotes. In woman I spoke to, are driven by prin-
Department. In some cases, Thomas conversation, he occasionally sounds like ciple, and by an almost custodial sense
points out, government officials can use a screenwriter in a pitch meeting, punc- of allegiance to their organization.
whistle-blower evidence that was ob- tuating a story by saying, “Let me just Thomas said of her, “This is her home,
tained illegally, “as long as it’s some- give you one more beat.” He has be- and people were doing things she didn’t
thing they didn’t ask for.” In such in- come the self-appointed bard of whistle- think were right.” Others are less pure
stances, whistle-blowers can occasionally blowing, readily accepting invitations to of intention. Occasionally, they hold a
function as an unofficial auxiliary, doing speak about what he does. “I used to go grudge against a co-worker who hap-
things that government investigators anywhere in the country,” he told me. pens to have engaged in nefarious ac-
do not have the resources—or the legal “Big audiences. Small audiences. Pick tivity. Sometimes they’re implicated in
authority—to do. any big city in Texas, for example, and that activity themselves. One of Tho-
Each year, the S.E.C. receives thou- I’ve flown there and talked to people.” mas’s clients, a junior trader named Jason
sands of tips. But it is chronically under- He does this in part because it drums Thorell, documented a pattern of fraud-
funded, and it lacks the personnel to sort up business. He jokes that “whistle-blow- ulent conduct at the hedge fund Vis-
through them. This makes Thomas—a ers aren’t repeat clients.” If more people ium Asset Management. Working with
former colleague who can essentially tri- know that it can pay to sound the alarm, the F.B.I., Thorell wore a wire and re-
age the agency’s in-box, serving as a fil- more people will sound the alarm. corded hundreds of hours of conversa-
ter and identifying the strongest cases— As good as Thomas is at promoting tions with his co-workers. But, as he ac-
extremely useful. “We take fewer than his business, he frequently feels ham- knowledged under cross-examination
twelve cases a year on average,” he told strung by his duty to maintain client when testifying in the trial of one of his
me. But he and his partners screen about confidentiality. “The people who have bosses, he had played a part in the
three hundred potential clients annually, the best outcomes are often the most scheme himself. (Visium paid a penalty,
and much of that culling is done on the circumspect,” he noted. Sometimes, he but admitted no wrongdoing.) “I did
phone. His number is posted online, so could tell me the name of a company the right thing by exposing the fraud at
that when the right cold call comes he’ll but not the whistle-blower. Other times, Visium,” Thorell told me in an e-mail,
be there to answer it. He noted, “People he could specify the industry but not the adding that he had received a “substan-
who are senior enough to really know company or the size of the fine. Hear- tial” award. Thomas said that he rarely
stuff don’t put their shit in an e-mail.” ing him discuss his caseload sounded a takes on clients who have participated
bit like a game of Clue. in the criminal scheme they wish to ex-
hen I met Thomas, he was in a One day, Thomas arranged a phone pose, because the S.E.C. program “is
W fight with the S.E.C. In 2020,
the Trump Administration had altered
call for me with a woman (whom I can’t
name) who is currently working with the
designed to prevent people from bene-
fitting from their own misconduct,” and
the rules of the whistle-blower program government to investigate misconduct such whistle-blowers therefore tend to
in a way that could limit the size of (which I can’t detail) at a large public receive reduced awards.
awards. Thomas was incensed: the “pri- company (which I can’t identify, because When Thomas filed his citizen pe-
mary beneficiary,” he pointed out, would she still works there). “Anytime you talk tition against Cassava Sciences with the
obviously be Wall Street, because high- about a female whistle-blower it is po- F.D.A., Remi Barbier could only spec-
level people would be discouraged from tentially identifying, because there are so ulate about the identity of Thomas’s
reporting significant wrongdoing. He few of them,” he said. In his experience, whistle-blower clients. Given that the
blamed the shift on Jay Clayton, Trump’s women are less likely to expose wrong- company had just two dozen employ-
S.E.C. chair, who had previously been doing than men, but they can be the best ees, one might assume that Barbier could
a partner at the law firm Sullivan & whistle-blowers, because they tend to be smoke out these insiders through some
Cromwell, representing major banks. more scrupulous about documentation. Agatha Christie-style process of elimi-
After leaving government, Clayton re- The woman I spoke to told me that when nation. But an interesting wrinkle of the
turned to his firm and also joined the she started observing inappropriate be- S.E.C. program is that a portion of the
board of the private-equity giant Apollo havior at work she made a point of reg- people who report misconduct—and get
Global Management. “Total cash-out,” istering her objections in e-mails: “Other rewarded for it—aren’t company insid-
Thomas said. “He’s like the poster child employees would say, ‘Don’t put it in an ers at all. In fact, according to the S.E.C.’s
of the revolving door.”Thomas sued the e-mail!’ But I kept putting it in e-mails, most recent statistics, forty per cent of
S.E.C., in an effort to reverse the deci- because I wanted everything docu- the whistle-blowers who have received
sion. Many of his clients, he argued, had mented.”The double life that she is lead- awards were outsiders who had scruti-
taken the extraordinary risk of blowing ing as a government informant is “so nized the public record and concluded
the whistle with an expectation that stressful,” she said. One study found that that something illegal must be going on.
they would be well rewarded, “in reli- about eighty-five per cent of whistle- In such cases, the calculus of incentives
ance on the prior rules.” Now they would blowers suffered from severe depression is clearly different, because outsiders do
be left out in the cold. or anxiety. The woman told me that she not face the same risks that insiders do.
If litigation is a contest of narratives, has sought psychological counselling to The company can’t fire you if you don’t
Thomas is a persuasive storyteller, with deal with the pressure. work there. But the S.E.C. values the
quality of the tip above all other con- the science didn’t make sense; there not pegged to F.D.A. approval or to the
siderations, and rewards outsider whistle- seemed to be signs of data manipulation. success of the drug—just to the share
blowers as generously as insiders. On July 26th, Cassava made a presen- price. This appeared to create an incen-
In the case of Cassava, Thomas’s cli- tation at an Alzheimer’s conference in tive for the company to pump its own
ents did not work at the company. And, Denver, and on the strength of the com- stock. Moreover, though Barbier had said
though he protected their identities, pany’s claims about Simufilam the stock that the re-do was conducted by an “out-
there was one important detail that he price spiked further. Bredt took a look side lab,” Bredt suspected that it was
did disclose. His clients already had a at the display materials from the confer- actually Wang’s group at CUNY. Incred-
major incentive to blow the whistle on ence and shared them with Pitt. Much ibly, Wang—the man guiding the Simu-
the company: they had taken a short of Cassava’s research involves Western- filam studies—was a participant in the
position on sava. They had made a fi- blot tests, a method used by scientists to cash-bonus plan.
nancial bet against its stock. detect and quantify specific protein mol- “I have this righteous streak,” Pitt told
ecules, which show up as dark bands on me. It offended him that the papers Wang
he Cassava case started with a San X-ray film. But some images of Cassa- published were peer-reviewed, that the
T Diego doctor named David Bredt,
who worked as a biotech entrepreneur
va’s Western-blot tests looked off—as
though they had been tweaked by a pro-
N.I.H. had invested twenty million dol-
lars in Cassava, and that the F.D.A. had
and, earlier in his career, had run neu- gram such as Photoshop. allowed the clinical trials to move for-
roscience research at Janssen Pharma- Bredt and Pitt homed in on Cassa- ward. The whole system of pharmaceu-
ceuticals and at Eli Lilly. “The first time va’s decision to re-do its analysis of the tical research and regulatory approval is
I heard of Cassava was around Febru- 2020 data. “Now, suddenly, it’s the best predicated on the notion that scientists
ary, when there was this explosion in the drug!” Pitt said. “That just doesn’t hap- will not lie about their results—a struc-
stock price,” Bredt told me. He found it pen.” They learned that Cassava had in- tural vulnerability that makes it difficult
odd that the stock was skyrocketing on stituted an unusual compensation scheme to identify fraud. Pitt said, with indig-
the basis of a trial without a placebo. in which Barbier and other senior exec- nation, “My identity is science. I have so
You can’t trust such results, he said, be- utives would be rewarded with cash bo- much pride in the stuff we do, and the
cause it is simply “human nature to want nuses if the company’s stock met certain idea that someone might have had the
things to work.” benchmarks. If the market cap main- gall to fabricate things over all these years
Bredt started reading Cassava’s retained specific valuations for twenty con- just really got to my soul.” He worried,
search. The company claimed to be secutive business days, the executives too, that, if Cassava was lying about Si-
developing a blood test that could ac- would share a multimillion-dollar bonus. mufilam’s efficacy, it might also be lying
curately provide a diagnosis of Alzhei- The full incentive scheme could exceed about the drug’s safety. The third phase
mer’s—something that Bredt described two hundred million dollars, and it was of clinical trials, in which the pill would
to me as a “holy grail” in the field. He
also discovered that all the company’s
publications associated with Simufilam,
the Alzheimer’s drug, appeared to have
been written by the same scientist: an
associate medical professor at the City
University of New York named Hoau-
Yan Wang. When Bredt consulted the
papers, he was shocked. “They were mak-
ing statements that were incompatible
with biology and with pharmacology,”
he told me. If all the claims in these pa-
pers were true, “they would win five
Nobel Prizes.”
Over the years, Bredt had occasion-
ally taken short positions on biotech
stocks. Last summer, he decided to share
his concerns about Cassava with a friend
and former medical-school classmate,
Geoffrey Pitt, a cardiologist and a pro-
fessor at Weill Cornell Medical Col-
lege who conducts neuroscience research.
The two are quite different: Bredt is
tanned, informal, and intense; Pitt is
buttoned up and cerebral. After exam-
ining Cassava’s research, Pitt echoed
Bredt’s skepticism. It wasn’t just that
be administered to a huge number of pa-
tients, would soon begin.
The doctors approached Jordan SIXTEEN CENTER
Thomas, who initially was dubious. “We
were both so emotional about it that Last week, an insurrection,
Jordan thought we were a little bit out yesterday, the second impeachment,
there,” Pitt recalled. At Thomas’s urg- and this evening of slurry and wind
ing, the doctors sent Cassava’s papers to that makes the old dog wary, I call
ten prominent experts, including the my grandpa, my mama’s daddy, to ask
neuroscientists Thomas Südhof, of Stan- why we called his parents’ land 16 Center.
ford, who received the Nobel Prize in He doesn’t know! And he laughs,
2013; Roger Nicoll, of the University of can fathom no reason but his daddy’s
California, San Francisco; and Don drunk whimsy and charisma in the naming
Cleveland, of the University of Califor- of those twenty acres of Arkansas backwoods,
nia, San Diego. Bredt and Pitt were im- those pastures and good timber a mile
mediately struck by the fact that Cas- down Columbia County Road 14.
sava—despite having won Wall Street Nor does he remember how to call a hog.
over with its audacious promises about Nor does he remember who first called
revolutionizing the treatment of Alz- him Billy, as much his name now as Sam
heimer’s—had gained little renown and for nearly as long. We leave what is forgotten
among specialists in the field. Bredt said, behind us easily enough, detour
“The first question we asked was ‘Have through what rough country he can recall:
you ever heard of Cassava Sciences?’ And his uncle Sonny Boy taking him west to live
every single one of them said no.” in Vegas; his grandma, Ma Gladys, in L.A.
When the scientists consulted Cas- rescuing him from Vegas; his baby sister shot,
sava’s research papers, “the main reac- and him thirteen, holding her feet at the hospital
tion was ‘Oh, my God, how could they down in Haynesville as she died; his many jobs;
get away with this?’ ” Pitt said, adding, his longest love; an outline, a sketch he’s drawn
“These Western-blot images are hard before that I want to fix in my mind. I know
to fake. It appeared that someone had my questions rarely resolve past treble: I talk
tried to crop them and cut out little too fast, too high, am nearly unintelligible
pieces of one and put them in another.” to him, yet we pass an hour this way.
Many of Wang’s papers were co-au- He offers some measure of a past
thored by Dr. Lindsay Burns, a senior we do not share, and it’s easier to let be
vice-president at Cassava—and Bar- what is lost, to put down what I never carried.
bier’s wife. Bredt and Pitt identified ap-
parent methodological problems in six —Donika Kelly
of Wang’s published papers. (Other sci-
entists have since found problems in
another twenty.) been frozen and then thawed months, it before, and successfully. His attitude
Südhof told me that the data in the or even years, later. “It’s hard for me to is that anyone can be a whistle-blower,
papers “looked suspicious and needed imagine how you could get any life from as long as they have the goods. In any
scrutiny,” and that the scientific conclu- that tissue,” he said. “I mean, this is wild. event, his clients were less focussed on
sions were “unjustified.” He was also It’s zombie science!” the S.E.C. than on the F.D.A., which
surprised that the F.D.A. had signed off When Thomas agreed to take the they wanted to halt the clinical trials,
on the “rationale” for the drug and the case, he warned his new clients that, even pending an investigation. Thomas told
clinical trials, because of a lack of evi- if they succeeded, any monetary award me, “The question is, Who’s going to
dence “linking filamin A to Alzheimer’s might be minimal, because Cassava was blink, Cassava or the F.D.A.?”
disease.” He pointed out that there are “a one-drug company.” If they were cor- Tom Devine, of the Government Ac-
a lot of scientific journals, and noted, rect that the drug wasn’t viable and Cas- countability Project, once remarked that
“The fact that a paper is published in sava was simply a fraudulent scheme, becoming a whistle-blower can mean
an apparently peer-reviewed journal public exposure would destroy the com- having to “out-Machiavelli the Machi-
doesn’t necessarily mean it was properly pany’s value, and there would be little avellis.” Thomas came up with the idea
peer-reviewed.” money left to pay a big penalty to the of using a citizen petition; it would put
Nicoll, who is an expert on the study S.E.C. Yet Bredt had his short position, the F.D.A. on notice, in a public way,
of brain slices, told me he was shocked and Pitt—who had never shorted a stock and force the agency to examine the
to see Cassava assert that it had tested before—made a similar bet. Thomas anomalies in Cassava’s research while
the effects of its drug on the brains of told me that he has no scruples about keeping the identities of his clients a se-
deceased Alzheimer’s patients which had representing short sellers. He has done cret. Initially, Bredt and Pitt wanted to
remain anonymous, because they antic- blower. But not too much. “The stron- power, and it espouses a notably Machi-
ipated blowback from the company— ger the case, the more you want to be avellian world view. “This was one of
and from the savages—if they went like Mr. Rogers,”Thomas told me. “You my father’s favorite books,”Thomas said.
public. But Thomas persuaded them that, don’t have to be emotional, because the Jordan Thomas was born Paul
in addition to making an S.E.C. com- evidence is so ridiculous.” At the same Thompson, in 1970. His mother, Celia
plaint, it would be savvy to recount their time, he didn’t want Bredt to “completely Andrade, a white woman from Hawaii,
investigation to the Wall Street Journal. muzzle himself and lose his soul, be- was a nun, in a convent in Compton,
He is not shy about enlisting the press cause there’s peace in expressing it.” One California, when she met his father,
when he thinks it might help, and in this detail Thomas had fastened on to was G. Thomas Thompson. “My father
case the choice of outlet was deliberate: the fact that Bredt’s grandfather had has a great story,” Jordan said. Thomas
it was thanks largely to the Journal that suffered from Alzheimer’s. On the call, Thompson attended Compton’s com-
Theranos was revealed to be a scam. he counselled Bredt that, when he spoke munity college, and then an unaccred-
to the Journal reporters, he should men- ited law school, before passing the bar
ne day in August, Thomas con- tion this family history. He added, “I and becoming a judge—one of the first
O vened a media-training session for
his clients, over Zoom, with a Manhat-
think you can say, ‘This is personal.’ ”
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pen-
Black elected judges in California. He
was tall, handsome, and charismatic.
tan-based consultant. They needed to tagon Papers to the Times, has suggested He was also a womanizer. It may be
prepare for their conversations with the that there is something otherworldly some measure of the man’s charm that
Journal. It was important not to get too about the whistle-blower, like an astro- he managed to father a child with a
lost in the science, Thomas advised: naut who cuts the safety cord and floats woman who’d taken a vow of chastity,
“The conclusion should be short and away from the mother ship. Blowing but a relationship was not in the cards.
sweet—‘It looks like the government’s the whistle is a psychologically fraught, By the time Thomas was born, his
being defrauded, investors have been existentially decisive act. Thomas is at- mother had left the convent. She ended
lied to, and patients are at risk.’ ” tuned to the ways his clients, by standup marrying another man and moving
Bredt, who was Zooming in from his ing on principle and antagonizing the to Yakima, Washington.
home, in California, was dressed in a powerful, often end up rewriting their “I grew up between two worlds,” Jor-
Rip Curl T-shirt and shorts. The pre- own lives in the process. “People are put dan Thomas told me. As a child, he
vious night, he had resigned from his under pressure,” he said. “The uncer- lived mainly with his mother. But he
job, at a biotechnology-investment firm, tainty, the doubt—not everybody comes found his relationship with his stepfa-
in order to avoid any potential conflicts out the other side of that the same.” ther deeply emotionally oppressive, and
of interest. He offered a dry run of his Often, whistle-blowers’ families disap- they clashed. Occasionally, he visited his
narrative of the case—which, to my lay- prove of their decision. Occasionally, the father, who filled him with awe: “He
man’s ears, was bewilderingly techni- act of speaking up initiates a lasting re- was young, he was Black, he was Obama
cal—before concluding, “In my thirty- invention. “Some of the people that I before Obama—in the sense that he
five years of research, I’ve never seen work with reflect my belief in second was hot. All the power people for the
such a long trail of apparently clear mis- chances,”Thomas told me. “Because I’m next several decades in California were
represented scientific data.” living a second chance to make a good supporting him. Stevie Wonder did a
“I thought that was quite good,” the fund-raiser for him. He was the man.”
consultant said. “As a reporter, my first Thomas opened a folder of yellowed
question would be ‘How the hell did news clippings from the Compton Bul-
the N.I.H. and the F.D.A. miss this?’” letin, and showed me photographs of
“The system has failed at many lev- his dad with various grandees.
els,” Bredt replied. At one point, his father got in a car
Thomas interjected, “It’s worth say- accident and was treated for his injuries
ing, ‘This is so bad, I couldn’t believe it. with powerful painkillers. “He became
So I went to some of the leading experts reliant on those,” Thomas said, and had
in the country.’ ” He reminded his cli- to retire from the bench. But he reinvented
ents to mention that they had consulted life, one I can be proud of.” Only in re- himself, Thomas explained, as one of
a Nobel laureate, because everyone knows cent years has he started speaking openly Southern California’s top political fix-
“Nobel Prize winners are super smart.” about his own former life, and his own ers—“someone with powerful friends.”
After the meeting, Thomas seemed secrets, including the fact that Jordan Thompson checked in with his network
optimistic. He was mulling over an issue Thomas is not his real name. so frequently that he carried huge rolls
that often comes up in his cases: how of dimes in his pockets, for pay phones.
best to harness his clients’ moral indig- t Thomas’s house, he pulled out a In 1986, when Thomas was fifteen, he
nation. On the Zoom call, Bredt had
been visibly exercised, chewing his lip.
A hardcover book with a worn red
dust jacket, titled “The Craft of Power.”
moved to California to live with his fa-
ther. He earned his G.E.D., enrolled at
It was evident that he felt profoundly Published in 1979 by a former military the community college in Compton, and,
aggrieved by the alleged fraud. A little scientist named R. G. H. Siu, it is a seat sixteen, transferred to U.C.L.A. “It
righteousness is useful for a whistle- ries of maxims about the cultivation of was like a dream,” he recalled. “My dad’s
lying about? Thomas was starting to re-
alize that, to his dad, many people were
expendable. Was he expendable, too?
After years of conflict with his stepfa-
ther, he had sought emotional refuge
with his father, and had come to wor-
ship him. But now the Judge seemed
like a false god.
Thomas packed his Volkswagen and
drove across the country. While attend-
ing U.C.L.A., he had seen a perfor-
mance by the Alvin Ailey dance com-
pany, and had been profoundly moved.
After reading that Bennington College
had a good dance program, he trans-
ferred there—under a new name, which
he had legally changed. “I kind of put
myself in a witness-protection program,”
he recalled. “Different location, changed
my name, changed my life.”
His new name was Jordan Andolini
Thomas. “Jordan” because he loved Mi-
chael Jordan. “Andolini” was a “Godfa-
ther” reference—before Michael Corle-
one’s father turned to crime, Andolini
“ Your passionate respect for physical books is put had been the family name. Thomas’s re-
into doubt by your use of them as coasters.” nunciation of his family was so extreme
that, at nineteen, he got a vasectomy. It
was seven years before he had it reversed,
• • at around the time he met his wife. By
that point, he said, “I had more confi-
my hero. He’s a judge. He drives fancy volved in a grift in which he helped dence that I would live a life where I
cars. He lives by the beach. He’s got a appoint people to be probate refer- wouldn’t cause more harm.”
place in Hawaii.” Thompson started en- ees—a form of patronage in which po- Susan Sgorbati, a member of the
listing his son to help him out. “I wore litically connected people were given dance faculty at Bennington who was
a suit and followed him around,”Thomas cushy sinecures. “I ended up being will- Thomas’s college adviser, remembers
recalled. “I was really engaged with my ing to do illegal and unethical things, him as a diligent student who was con-
father, going to meetings with him.” and I’m not proud of it,” Thomas told sumed by dark emotions, but who chan-
The Judge liked to discourse on the me, adding, “I just wanted to be his nelled them into choreography. “I could
art of Realpolitik, quoting “The Craft No. 2.” He remembers a time when it see that he really was struggling, and I
of Power” (“The glare of power bothers appeared that a close associate of his think dance was a great outlet,” she said.
people. They feel more at ease with the father’s had been indicted, and his fa- He could have had a career as a chore-
myth of the meek inheriting the earth”) ther, in a panic, suddenly refiled sev- ographer, she thought. So she was sur-
or another favorite book, “The Godfa- eral years’ worth of taxes. prised when he came to her office one
ther.” He had a sideline organizing clubby The incident that finally led Thomas day and said, “I want to be a lawyer.”
political fund-raisers in restaurants and to break with his father was compara- After graduating, in 1992, he attended
private homes around L.A., and at such tively minor. He came home from col- Southwestern Law School, then joined
events he whispered to his son about the lege one day to discover Thompson with the Navy as a judge advocate.
politicos and magnates, illuminating a a local woman who was married. His When I inquired about this tran-
secret world of influence peddling. “You’re father told an unconvincing story about sition, Thomas pointed out that one
either pulling the strings or you’re a pup- what they had been doing. It was no se- way Michael Corleone tried to break
pet,” the Judge said. cret that he had multiple overlapping with his family was by serving in the
It took a while for Thomas to see relationships with women; what shocked military. But “The Godfather” is ac-
that not all his father’s activities were Thomas was that he was trying to de- tually a story about how Corleone fails
legal. Many guests at the fund-raising ceive his own son about it. One of his to escape the Mafia—he ends up run-
events were there because they owed father’s maxims—cribbed, perhaps, from ning the family business. For Thomas,
someone a favor—and could pay it off “The Godfather”—was that “you never to become a lawyer was also to follow
by making a contribution to a pet cause lie to family.” If he lied to his son about in his father’s footsteps. In explaining
or candidate. His father was also in- a trivial dalliance, what else might he be his choice of “Thomas” as a last name,
he told me matter-of-factly that he When Thomas sued the S.E.C. to ing, so that he could better fake the
selected it because it sounded like reverse the Trump Administration’s rule numbers. “In other words, I was a real
“Thompson.” I couldn’t help but note, change limiting the awards given to prick,” he said. When the Feds came
however, that Thomas was also his fa- whistle-blowers, he was taking a con- after him, he flipped on his family. After
ther’s given name. siderable risk: his practice hinged on pleading guilty to three felonies, paying
For decades, few people in Jordan good relations with the agency. But he a fine, and receiving a sentence of house
Thomas’s life knew much about his past. decided that he had the legal advantage, arrest, Antar started a new line of work—
But he has started to talk more freely and that it was the right thing to do. as a consultant to law enforcement. He
about it. He gave an interview to the “The willingness to fight is an incredi- told me that he had a particular skill
Times in which he acknowledged that bly valuable thing,” he maintained. “I’m set: he knew “the underbelly of account-
he had changed his name but declined like a whistle-blower—lots of people see ing,” the “stuff you don’t learn in col-
to divulge his birth name. Since then, the problem, but nobody wants to step lege.” This made him particularly pro-
out of a sense of solidarity with his cli- forward and do something about it. Peo- ficient at spotting fraud.
ents, he has opened up more. “I didn’t ple are afraid of pissing off the S.E.C.” Antar is part of what Thomas de-
realize it at the time, but I was carrying Thomas had indicated that he was scribes as an “underground whistle-
secrets—I was hiding everything,” he going to file a motion for summary judg- blower support network”—a loose fra-
said. “Becoming a whistle-blower law- ment by August 10th. On August 6th, ternity of lawyers, accountants, and
yer helped to save me.” His clients were he called me, sounding giddy. “The com- ex-law-enforcement types. The network
“the models”: they rebel against their mission has agreed to rewrite the rules,” sounds reminiscent of his father’s phone
professional families; they break away. he said. It had backed down before he book: in any business, there is a pre-
“They fundamentally believe that’s their could even file the motion. mium on always knowing just the right
duty,” he said, adding, “They’re not per- His father, he said, had taught him person to call. When Thomas needed
fect. They’re human.” an adage: “The greatest samurai is the help with forensic accounting, Antar
All of that may be true. But Thomas one who doesn’t have to unsheathe his could comb through the public filings
is adept enough at telling stories that sword.” Reflecting on his victory, Thomas of a company and uncover subtle anom-
it is tempting to wonder whether he re- said, “We sought two things—that they alies. He has initiated several cases with
alized at a certain point that revealing fix the rules and that they don’t enforce Thomas simply by scrutinizing a com-
something of his own baroque personal them while they’re fixing them. Ulti- pany’s books. In one instance, he re-
background might make him a more mately, that’s exactly what we got, and ceived a substantial award. “The money
compelling subject for journalists. “Bring we didn’t have to go to court. My dad didn’t make a difference in my life style,”
it back to the personal,” he advised David would’ve liked that.” he told me. “All I give a shit about is I
Bredt. When I proposed that Thomas have the latest iPhone.”
seems to have retained a bit of his fa- ne day this summer, I met a con- In 2015, Antar and Thomas filed a
ther’s skill for Realpolitik, he readily
agreed. “My father was a realist and my
O victed fraudster named Sam Antar
for coffee at a café in a park on the West
complaint with the S.E.C. about the
Chinese conglomerate Alibaba. It had
mother was an idealist,” he said. “Whistle- Side of Manhattan. Antar, a man in his recently gone public in the United States,
blowers are both.” sixties, wore a “Star Trek” baseball cap in one of the largest initial public offer-
His practice has allowed him to fuse and Prada sunglasses. A face mask dan- ings in history. But when Antar dug
these parental attributes: he channels gled from the crook of his arm. “Whistle- into the company’s disclosures he found
righteous fervor on behalf of his clients blowing is a spectrum,” he told me. “The indications of accounting shenanigans.
while savoring the jousting and the power altruists—they don’t need money. Hope- Scouring the Hong Kong filings for any
games of legal combat. He regaled me fully, they end up with a guy in law en- mention of companies that had com-
with stories about cunning ways he has forcement who’s a pragmatist, because mercial or financial relationships with
used “misdirection” to cloak the identity two altruists never get anything done. Alibaba, he discovered apparent incon-
of clients, such as reporting a tip to the Then, you get the exes—ex-lovers who sistencies: in many cases, he alleged, Ali-
Los Angeles office of the S.E.C. so that are spurned, former business partners baba was not fully disclosing these in-
the suspect company will assume the and employees who got fucked over. teractions with financial affiliates to
tipper is based on the West Coast, when Then, you’ve got the bounty hunters.” American investors. Antar documented
in fact he lives in New York. Sometimes About a decade ago, Antar became a cli- a pattern of possible fraud in which
the S.E.C. will formally request an in- ent of Thomas’s, and, later, an occasional scores of Alibaba’s affiliated companies
terview with someone who is, secretly, consultant. “Jordan spoke my language,” did a flurry of transactions among them-
already his client. “Then the person in- he said. “He’s a pragmatist.” selves. As Antar put it, “It was all incest
forms the company where they work, all Antar grew up, after the Corleone accounting.” (Alibaba told me that it
concerned, and says, ‘Oh, my God, the fashion, in a crime family. His uncle and fully discloses all “material” matters to
S.E.C.’s called me. What can I do?’ ” cousin ran Crazy Eddie, a chain of elec- investors and has “complied with all ap-
Often, the company hires a lawyer to tronics stores in the New York area plicable securities laws.”)
represent the employee, unaware that which, in the early nineties, was prose- The S.E.C. whistle-blowing process
the employee is already being repre- cuted for securities fraud. Antar’s fam- can be frustratingly slow, and its inves-
sented by Jordan Thomas. ily sent him to college to learn account- tigators seldom give much indication
to whistle-blowers about an inquiry’s cies,” the whistle-blower told me, add- years, Antar never sweated an audit.
status, or whether their evidence will ing drily, “It’s the saddest way to learn What kept him up at night was the
lead to any charges, much less a reward. you’re making thirteen million.” prospect of “somebody ratting us out
Thomas joked, “It’s kind of like you’re Since Antar spoke with the S.E.C. from within our midst.”
dating a lot and then they start ghost- about the Alibaba case, he, too, has been Thomas’s practice can tolerate only a
ing you.” The whistle-blower delivers a left in the dark. “You work your ass off degree of failure, Antar observed. “You
formal submission to the S.E.C. and on the case, and then you sit there for don’t want to be the guy who cries wolf
often makes a presentation to agency six years and wonder if you wasted your with the S.E.C.,” he said. “It’s one thing
lawyers, who might ask follow-up ques- time,” he grumbled. “But that’s the way to make a submission they don’t take up.
tions. Then, silence. It can take seven it is.” He shrugged. “The cases you do But you don’t want to bring them some-
years before a case comes to fruition, a very well on will compensate you for the thing that wastes the S.E.C.’s time. If
penalty is secured, and the whistle-blower ones that you don’t get paid for.” Antar you do that, you can also hurt your fu-
is informed about any award. After the told me that Thomas has referred to the ture clients.”
JPMorgan Chase whistle-blower noti- business model as “legal venture capital.” Another former Thomas client, the
fied the S.E.C. about the misconduct When I asked Antar if he plans to Deutsche Bank whistle-blower, Eric
he witnessed, and submitted to a series expose the misdeeds of other compa- Ben-Artzi, agreed that a whistle-blower
of interviews, he heard nothing. He nies, he said he might not bother: “I’m attorney succeeds, in part, by having a
learned from the Wall Street Journal that sixty-four years old. I’m not going to close relationship with the S.E.C. He
the agency was investigating the bank. wait until I’m seventy-one. Every day is less convinced that this is a benevo-
Finally, six years after he had contacted is an adventure with my body parts.” lent proximity. After Ben-Artzi quali-
the S.E.C., the call came. Thomas in- But he was pleased to have taught the fied for roughly eight million dollars as
formed him that another unidentified Feds some of his tricks. A smart crook part of a shared award, he wrote an ar-
whistle-blower had also reported the can always beat an audit, he said. “All ticle in the Financial Times proclaim-
scheme—with better information—and it takes is management override of ining, “I refuse to take my share.” He de-
was receiving a much bigger bounty. ternal controls. Two people to collude, clared that the S.E.C. program’s focus
“Jordan went through all my deficien- and you’re done.” During his criminal on monetary penalties was problematic,
because the executives who had broken
the rules faced no consequences—and
the bank’s shareholders would end up
paying the fine. Thomas may invoke
the language of idealism, but that ide-
alism has its limits—Labaton Sucha-
row sued Ben-Artzi for its share of the
award. Thomas declined to speak with
me about the matter. But his firm ul-
timately got paid.
Ben-Artzi was similarly circumspect
about disparaging Thomas. He told me,
however, that his own life had unrav-
elled after he blew the whistle. Not only
did he renounce the award; he ended
up declaring personal bankruptcy. Ben-
Artzi thinks that the whistle-blower
program itself has become compromised
by the revolving-door problem that
Thomas often decries. Many of the law-
yers who have gone into the business
of representing S.E.C. whistle-blowers
are, like Thomas and the partners he
recruited to Labaton Sucharow, former
agency employees. The banks and cor-
porations that stand accused hire their
own set of ex-S.E.C. attorneys to de-
fend them. “You end up with a whole
system of people who are motivated by
money, and not by justice,” Ben-Artzi
said. The S.E.C. tends to settle with
the bad actors rather than go to trial.
“Most people I talk to see justice in
this,” Ben-Artzi told me. “They don’t ing expert on scientific fraud, Elisabeth and maybe even their lives.” Thomas
realize it’s all a game. It’s a business. Bik, had reviewed the Cassava papers wore a crisp white shirt, open at the col-
Structurally, it’s a protection racket.” and had concluded that some images lar. While I was there, he ushered in
looked manipulated. When I spoke to Sharon Muravez, a tall, elegant woman
n August, the Cassava whistle-blow- her recently, she avoided accusing Cas- with blue glasses and bright-blue eyes,
I ers had a video meeting with the S.E.C.
Thomas would tell me nothing about
sava of being a criminal enterprise but
said that she shared the concerns raised
who had worked for many years as his
father’s personal assistant.
how the meeting went, citing the confi- in the citizen petition, and added that “Paul, look at this office!” she said as
dentiality of any direct dealings with she had discovered additional problems she entered. Thomas had reconnected
the agency. Remi Barbier, the Cassava in the papers which had not been raised with Muravez on a recent trip to Cali-
C.E.O., was hitting back hard, defend- by Thomas and his clients. fornia. She was visiting New
ing Simufilam’s potential and accusing Bik asked Wang’s lab at York, and he had invited her
Thomas’s clients—who, at that point, CUNY to produce higher-res- to come and discuss his fa-
were still anonymous—of manipulating olution versions of the orig- ther. She brought with her
the market by issuing damaging allega- inal Western blots, but nei- two thick file folders. Mu-
tions simply to hurt his company’s stock. ther Wang nor Cassava ravez had been working as
Thomas was getting nasty e-mails from would do so, and “the silence a court reporter in the sev-
the savages, including death threats. Be- of the lab,” as she put it, had enties before she took a job
cause his was the only name associated intensified her skepticism. with Judge Thompson. “He
with the whistle-blower case, and be- (A spokesperson for CUNY was complicated,” she said,
cause he has made himself easy to reach, said that it “takes accusa- with a smile. “He was spit
he was flooded with strong reactions tions of research misconduct on a frying pan.” She reeled
from strangers. Calls came in day and very seriously” and is looking into the off his political associates and powerful
night, and—always having in mind that matter.) Meanwhile, a hedge fund named connections—Johnnie Cochran, Jerry
one might be a new whistle-blower with Quintessential Capital, which had its Brown, Gray Davis. Muravez had helped
a great tip—he picked up the phone. own short position on Cassava, released coördinate the fund-raisers that Thomp-
“Are you Jordan Thomas? I hope you a forty-page report detailing a months- son had held. She spread her files out on
get disbarred! Fuck you!” long sting it had conducted, which in- a glass table. “It was difficult to go through
Thomas told me, “It’s no fun when volved sending undercover investigators this,” she said. “I was helping a man who,
your wife is saying, ‘Should I be con- to infiltrate the clinical-research centers it turned out, did unsavory things.” She
cerned for our safety?’ ” People got in where Cassava was conducting its trials. herself had benefitted from Thompson’s
touch to tell him that they had loved The report described Simufilam as “a cronyism: he helped get her appointed
ones with Alzheimer’s and wanted to worthless compound,” suggested that as a probate referee. In retrospect, it all
enroll them in the Simufilam clinical Cassava might be engaged in “a scheme “felt dirty,” Muravez said, but at the time
trials. How dare he try to halt the pro- orchestrated by management to enrich she was “part of it—just swept away.”
cess? Occasionally, Thomas shared with itself at the expense of shareholders,” and When Thompson was a judge, Mu-
such people something that he had not questioned the methodology of the trials. ravez recalled, he “would ask the attor-
yet spoken about publicly: a close rela- Despite all this, Thomas’s impatience neys appearing before him to step into
tive of his also had the disease. with the Journal was palpable. “Right the chambers, please.” He would then
It was easy for me to believe that now, it’s just me—some lawyer who “shake them down for a business card,
Thomas might have become a choreog- works for a plaintiff’s law firm—saying tell them he was having an event, a
rapher as I watched him assemble the this,” he said. People are more inclined fund-raiser or a dinner.” The implica-
various participants—the clients, the out- to believe a multibillion-dollar public tion was clear: the attorneys should at-
side experts, the regulators, the press— company than a plaintiff’s attorney, he tend and make a donation. “I was new
and try to get them all moving at his suggested. But “the world changes when to all this,” she recalled. “I didn’t think
tempo. But, in the Cassava case, one el- the Journal comes out with a Nobel it was at all unusual.”
ement of his coördinated strategy did Prize winner who expresses concern.” Thomas, visibly unsettled, stood up
not seem to be falling into line: the Wall and paced around his office. “This is
Street Journal. Bredt and Pitt had spo- ne morning in October, I visited the stuff that”—he winced and trailed
ken on the record, knowing that as soon
as their identities were revealed they
O Thomas in his office at Labaton
Sucharow, in a skyscraper near the World
off. When it came to his father, he said,
“anything relating to the law, to the ad-
would come under attack. But weeks had Trade Center. The office has views of ministration of law, is tough for me.”
passed and the Journal had not yet run the Manhattan Bridge, and a wall cov- At a certain point, Muravez said, she
a story. “They’re not telling me anything,” ered in framed movie posters, includ- began to wonder if she could trust the
Thomas said. “Because my clients are ing one for “The Insider,” the Russell Judge, and, as a form of insurance, she
short sellers, I think they’re worried that Crowe film, and another for “All the made a list of improper activities that
my clients are going to try to time their President’s Men,” which featured the she knew he’d engaged in. She pulled
short on a story.” tag line “At times it looked like it might it out of a folder. There was an entry
Thomas did have good news: a lead- cost them their jobs, their reputations, about a doctor in North Hollywood
who had paid the Judge “cash for stop- by Brett and Pitt about the so-called ple sometimes do get away with things
ping state investigation of a complaint “outside lab” that had conducted the for a very long time.” He and Bredt
filed against him by a patient,” and an- reanalysis in 2020. It had been Wang’s told me that they no longer have a short
other item that described Thompson lab after all—a fact that Barbier had position on Cassava, and he told me
telling her he had paid Gray Davis not made clear to investors. (He has that he has been impressed by the
“speaking honorariums, with clear un- since maintained that Wang did the aplomb with which company officials
derstanding of why,” for “3 probate ref- work “under blinded conditions.”) Bar- had “thrown around jargon” to defend
eree positions.” Muravez exclaimed, “He bier defended Cassava but seemed to their claims. “But, because it’s science,
was playing the game!” (A representative change his story more than once in the eventually there will be an answer,” he
for Davis denied this account.) space of a single quote: “There is zero continued. “Eventually, the clinical trial
When Muravez read an item about evidence, zero credible evidence, zero has to work—and I’m very skeptical
Thomas’s father being paid by a local proof that I’ve ever engaged in, nor that it will.”
attorney for “helping him” on cases by anyone I know, has ever engaged in Thomas finds it hard to be quite so
intervening with other judges, Thomas funny business.” philosophical. “My personal brand is in-
stood up again. “This is one that makes Thomas and his clients were not cel- volved with this,” he told me. “I’ve been
me want to scream,” he said. “It’s small- ebrating. The Journal had framed the very thoughtful about the cases I pick
time. You’re with a small-time attorney controversy as a he-said, she-said situ- and the cases I go public on, and this
doing small-time corruption—on call.” ation, and they were disappointed that isn’t going to be the case where I look
He went on, “When you hear about the newspaper hadn’t drawn a more de- like I was wrong. I don’t want to be
the other stuff my father did, it’s big finitive conclusion, based on the ex- wrong. Eventually, I’ll be totally vindi-
time, big game. But that lawyer is a wit- perts’ evidence, that fraud had occurred. cated. Absolutely. One hundred per cent.”
ness against him for life! You’re doing They were also surprised that the re- He paused. “The issue is the interim.”
it with different judges. If you find one port did not quote any of the additional In addition to the S.E.C.’s inquiry,
judge with integrity, you’re dead. There’s experts they had consulted. It didn’t the N.I.H. is obligated to investigate
a lot of dumb stuff, but this is just spec- even mention Thomas Südhof and his the grants that it made to support the
tacularly dumb. I just can’t get over it.” Nobel Prize. They were alarmed that development of Simufilam, and jour-
It was as if Muravez were blowing Cassava’s Phase III clinical trials were nals that published Wang’s papers have
the whistle on Thomas’s own past. She proceeding. The whole process had issued statements of concern, announc-
offered him one damning revelation started with a citizen petition to the ing that his results were under review.
after another, all backed up by her scru- F.D.A., yet the F.D.A. did not appear Even so, many investors have remained
pulous notes. There must have been to be investigating. “Within two days bullish on Cassava, notwithstanding the
something therapeutic for him in re- of filing with the S.E.C., my people significant evidence of what looks like
investigating his father’s misdeeds, but were in the room with the S.E.C.,” scientific misconduct. Südhof told me
there was a touch of masochism, too. “I Thomas exclaimed to me. “The F.D.A. he is “surprised” that the financial com-
had seen my father at a different tier,” is the principal regulator and they’re munity doesn’t seem to take any of this
he said. “It wasn’t a life I wanted to fol- missing in action! They’re going to start very seriously. Instead, Cassava appeared
low. He was in the Mafia. I don’t like treating patients! People are going to to be benefitting from a broader Amer-
the Mafia. But he was the capo.” He ican tendency to pick a side and stick
paused. “This is not Mafia shit. This is with it—even when the experts on the
small-time. Small-time and dumb.” He other side have a Nobel Prize. “I’m just
shook his head and thrust his hands in amazed by how the Cassava fans are
his pockets. “I just—I just don’t know blindly defending it,” Elisabeth Bik said.
what was going on there.” In “The Craft of Power,” Siu counsels
Muravez looked at him, her eyes full that “people need buttressing in their
of compassion. “Sometimes he got in beliefs by respected specialists.” But this
money jams,” she said. approach doesn’t work in a society that
has fully embraced Siu’s cynicism and
he Journal finally published an put this thing in their mouths!” His is no longer impressed by what he calls
T article on November 17th, head-
lined “sec investigating cassava
frustration was so intense that he con-
tacted a House of Representatives com-
“the ritual of objective expertise.”
sciences, developer of experi- mittee that was investigating the F.D.A. hen I spoke to Remi Barbier re-
mental alzheimer’s drug.” In a
regulatory filing, the company had ac-
for its approval of an Alzheimer’s drug
from Biogen, called Aduhelm, whose
W cently, he suggested that Cas-
sava is the blameless victim of a smear
knowledged being investigated. The efficacy had been subsequently ques- campaign by short sellers, and said, “Jor-
story identified Bredt and Pitt as the tioned. Committee staffers got right dan Thomas could care less about pa-
whistle-blowers, and described their back to Thomas. “I briefed them,” he tients.” For the allegations in Thomas’s
short position, and their effort to halt told me, with satisfaction. petition to be true, he suggested, his
the clinical trials. In an interview, Remi “How long did Bernie Madoff get company and its academic advisers
Barbier confirmed the suspicion shared away with it?” Geoffrey Pitt said. “Peo- would have had to engage in “a fifteen-
year fraud.” They had not done so, he
insisted—and, if they had, the truth
would have come out. “There is no whis-
tle-blower,” he said. “Nobody has stepped
up from the company, not from CUNY,
not from anyplace.”
Barbier spoke fondly of Dr. Wang,
whom he described as a “top-notch sci-
entist,” and said, “One hundred per
cent, we stand by all his work.” He told
me that David Bredt has been “an ac-
ademic rival” of Wang’s “for many years,”
though Bredt is politely dismissive of
this idea. When I asked Barbier whether
it was appropriate for Wang to be in-
cluded in a bonus plan based on short-
term f luctuations in Cassava’s stock
price, Barbier said that this was stan-
dard practice, adding, “I’ve never been
able to get people to work for free.” (I
posed the same question about this ar-
rangement to Bob Gussin, a former
Johnson & Johnson executive who sits
on Cassava’s board, and he said, “It’s
not typical, I’ll say that. And I’m not
thrilled with that aspect of things.” Bar-
bier is an “excellent president,” Gussin
assured me, but also a salesman: “I keep
telling him, ‘Don’t overstate this stuff. “Someday, I’d like to take you over there.”
Don’t fluff it up. Because that can come
back and bite you.’”)
In the end, Barbier maintained, the
• •
F.D.A. cares chiefly about safety, and
there are no indications of such prob- bier’s defense against the whistle-blower pay billions and it doesn’t matter,” he
lems with Simufilam. Consequently, campaign. It incensed Thomas to be acknowledged. “Because they know how
when the agency responds to Thomas’s dismissed in these terms. “I care about to keep making more.” In the anony-
petition—which it is obliged to do how I’m perceived, that I’m perceived mous survey that Thomas commis-
next month—Barbier is convinced that as a person with integrity,” he told me. sioned, a third of respondents said that
Cassava will be cleared of any wrong- “This is my life’s work. The idea that Wall Street has not improved since the
doing. Even so, he acknowledged, in- I’m someone who is driven by money, 2008 financial crisis.
stitutional investors have fled the com- it drives me crazy.” Thomas’s father died in 2005, of pan-
pany, and all the members of Cassava’s In a book about whistle-blowers, the creatic cancer. There was no newspaper
own scientific advisory board appear scholar C. Fred Alford once suggested announcement of his death and, at his
to have done the same. “I suppose one that every person who takes this path request, no funeral. Thomas told me
brilliant insight Jordan Thomas has is must accept “some terrible truths about that he has not shared “The Craft of
that investors care more about price the world,” the greatest of which is that Power” with his children. “They don’t
than they do about information,” he “his sacrifice will not be redeemed. No even know about it,” he said. Earlier
said. “The man is a marketing genius, one will be saved by his suffering, not this month, he announced that he and
if nothing else.” Barbier said that he’d even himself.” Even when cases are suc- his partners are leaving Labaton Sucha-
been encouraged by the loyalty of cessful and bounties are paid, there is row, to establish an independent law
“smaller investors,” who, unlike the big reason to be skeptical that they will ef- firm focussed exclusively on S.E.C.
funds, can “see through” Thomas’s ar- fect systemic change. The JPMorgan whistle-blower cases. He currently has
guments. In another recent interview, Chase whistle-blower told me he doubts seven cases awaiting a determination
Barbier said his attitude is that “hat- that the penalties levied by the S.E.C. on whether an award will be paid. Col-
ers will hate.” program—even the nine-figure ones— lectively, his clients could be eligible for
There’s an adage in “The Craft of will deter future wrongdoing. “Share- more than three hundred million dol-
Power” that goes, “The more selfish the holders don’t care,” he told me. “I don’t lars. In the meantime, he keeps work-
drive, the more idealistic the label,” and think it stops anyone.” ing, strategizing, pacing. And, when the
this notion formed the thrust of Bar- Surprisingly, Thomas agrees. “They phone rings, he answers. 
ANNALS OF JUSTICE
FAULT LINES
A woman’s quest to free the man convicted of killing her father.
BY EREN ORBEY
atie Kitchen had always felt some had an imposing build and a “huge taller pedestals, sooner or later people
K sadness about the fate of the

man convicted of murdering her
father. On a summer night in 1991, Rob-
German voice,” Kitchen said. Before
he was rushed to the hospital, he told
the police that during the robbery he’d
are going to break down the walls.”
After Kaim died, Kitchen said, she
finally “started showing up for life.” She
ert Hans Kaim, a seventy-seven-year-old refused to hand over his wallet. Kitchen, travelled the globe, got a bachelor’s de-
white real-estate developer, had just who was out of town that night and gree, and, at a hatha-yoga class in Hous-
pulled into his garage in Houston’s up- didn’t reach the house until the next ton, met a financial executive named
scale Tanglewood neighborhood when morning, sometimes imagines that her Paul Kovach, who became her second
an assailant robbed him at gunpoint, father “scared the hell” out of White, husband. Kitchen was a liberal, but, as
shot him in the chest, and then drove perhaps leaving him no choice but to she wrote in her journal, she worried
off with his wallet. Nine days later, po- fire in self-defense. that “there was nothing I could really
lice arrested a twenty-year-old Black Now seventy, Kitchen is white- do to make a difference.” In August of
man named Joseff Deon White in con- haired and voluble, with a slight Texas 2014, she attended a two-day sympo-
nection with the crime. White told in- accent and an understated personal sium, “Making the Change They Want
vestigators that he’d had an accomplice, style. Versed in the anti-racist precepts to See,” at an arts center near Snow-
a Jamaican friend who went by the street of such writers as Ibram X. Kendi, she mass. One of the speakers, the artist and
name Blocker, but the police never found calls herself a “white woman of privi- policy advocate Laurie Jo Reynolds, de-
or even identified him. At White’s trial, lege” from a “very segregated world.” scribed organizing a successful cam-
Kitchen noticed his small stature, and During her childhood, a Black house- paign to shut down the Tamms Cor-
the mothers of his children sitting on keeper, Willie Lee, cooked the family’s rectional Center, a notorious supermax
his side of the courtroom, crying. The meals and lived in servants’ quarters prison in Illinois. “We are all bystand-
jury reached a guilty verdict in forty-five Monday through Friday. Kitchen’s first ers to torture, but we don’t have to be,”
minutes. On April 20, 1992, White was husband, whom she married when she Reynolds told the mostly white and
sentenced to life in prison. “All I could was nineteen and divorced shortly be- wealthy crowd. Another speaker, Dar-
think about was how senseless it was fore her father was killed, was the heir rell Cannon, had spent twenty-four years
for a person to throw away their life for to an oil fortune. Today, Kitchen splits in prison, including nearly a decade at
a wallet,” Kitchen, who was forty at the her time between homes in Austin, Tamms, for a murder that he did not
time, wrote later, in her journal. New York City, and Snowmass, Colo- commit. Kitchen asked to sit beside him
The Tanglewood home, where rado. With the exception of a stint as at a dinner after the event; she wrote in
Kitchen grew up, is a mid-century-mod- a waitress at a Holiday Inn, she has her journal that it was one of the first
ern structure made of brick and glass. never had a paying job. times she’d shared a meal with a Black
I met Kitchen there, in August, when As we sat in the back yard of her sis- man. Listening to Cannon discuss his
she was visiting one of her two older ter’s house, which is still decorated with incarceration, Kitchen felt a “deep-seated
sisters, Ellen Benninghoven, who moved their parents’ antique furniture and num- shame,” and she began to think of Jo-
back into the home a few years after bered-edition fine-art prints, Kitchen seff White. “What if he had become a
their mother’s death, in 2011. As Kitchen became emotional discussing her fa- good person?” she wrote. “Shouldn’t he
unlatched a tall security gate, which the ther’s death. She recalled his fondness have the right to be free after serving
family had installed in the wake of the for sailing trips and jelly doughnuts. some 20+ years?”
murder, she gestured toward the front But at other times she spoke of his mur- That fall, Kitchen and Kovach en-
entrance. “That’s where the police found der with an unnerving sense of perspec- rolled in a pair of personal-development
him,” she said. When officers reached tive, as if her personal tragedy were an seminars offered by the company Land-
the scene, after a neighbor heard a com- inevitable result of a broader societal mark Worldwide. A corporate reincar-
motion and called 911, Kaim was still reckoning. “I’m just so privileged that nation of Werner Erhard’s controver-
alive. According to the Houston Chron- I can’t imagine complaining about any- sial self-improvement trainings, which
icle, he had crawled to the entryway and thing,” she said. “We all lose our dads, were in vogue in the seventies, Land-
was banging his head against the door right? Mine was to a violent crime, but, mark is popular today among H.R. de-
in an attempt to wake his wife. An émi- then again, it just shows that I am part partments and M.B.A. types. Kitchen’s
gré from Berlin who’d fought for the of this world. If rich old white people course leader, Josselyne Herman-Saccio,
U.S. in the Second World War, Kaim keep putting themselves on taller and told me that Landmark helps people
Katie Kitchen petitioned for Joseff Deon White’s release from prison after taking seminars in personal development.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELI DURST THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 47
“clear out everything in their past” and learned that White was incarcerated at by his initials. “I had to let go of my
then create “something to fill that empty the Darrington Unit, a penitentiary ‘coping story.’ ’’
space.” Kitchen signed up on the advice thirty miles outside Houston. A war- During this period, Kitchen received
of her stepson, an administrator at an den’s assistant at Darrington referred a call from Cynthia Tauss, a member
élite private school in Manhattan, who her to the Department of Criminal Jus- of the Texas Board of Pardons and Pa-
told me he’d hoped that Landmark tice’s Victim Services Division, which roles. White had recently come up again
might help her sort out “her stuff around runs a program that facilitates meet- for parole, and word of Kitchen’s quest
wealth and privilege and her father’s ings between victims and offenders. to free him had reached Tauss, who
murder.” During the last session of the Only by “looking into his eyes,” Kitchen was one of three board members as-
second seminar, Kitchen recalled the assistant tell- signed to White’s case. In Texas, vic-
and some of her peers pre- ing her, could she deter- tim-offender dialogues are designed to
sented their work to an mine whether White was have no bearing on an offender’s pa-
audience of loved ones. “ready to be freed.” The role status. (They are distinct from cer-
Kitchen invited her sisters, notion baff led Kitchen. tain pretrial restorative-justice proce-
explaining that she’d had a In her journal, she wrote, dures, which can sometimes result in
“transformation.” When it “How in the world could I reduced sentencing for low-level of-
was her turn to approach make that kind of decision fenders.) But Tauss had been so struck
the microphone, she felt her having only spent several by Kitchen’s efforts that she’d moved
heart racing. “That’s where minutes with the man?” But White’s case to the top of her queue
I told them my story, and she suspected that partici- and driven to the Darrington Unit to
then my plan,” Kitchen re- pating in such a program conduct his parole-assessment inter-
called. “I was going to do everything in would make prison administrators more view herself. She learned that while in
my power to get the man who killed likely to take her seriously, so she en- prison White had converted to Islam,
my father out of prison.” rolled, and soon learned that White taking the name Yusuff, and had earned
was open to meeting. his G.E.D. With Kitchen’s permission,
n Texas, state law requires parole pan- Shania Springer, their mediator, de- Tauss planned to recommend to the
I els ruling on a murderer’s release to
solicit feedback from the victim’s fam-
clined to speak with me, citing the pro-
gram’s confidentiality policies. In a pro-
parole board that White be transferred
to the Carol Vance Unit, a highly se-
ily members. When White first came motional video shot by the Department lective prison in Fort Bend County,
up for parole, in 2006, after fifteen years of Criminal Justice last year, she nar- Texas, with an eighteen-month reha-
in prison, Kitchen’s relatives began re- rates a fictional encounter between a bilitative program. If he completed the
ceiving notices from Texas’s Depart- victim, played by a white woman, and program, he would be freed.
ment of Criminal Justice. (Kitchen her- an offender, played by a Black man. After Kitchen met White on May 20, 2015,
self had opted out of the department’s completing such sessions, Springer ex- in a windowless conference room at Carol
mailings.) Bruce Roberson, a family plains, victims often feel that they “fi- Vance, a few days after his transfer. As
friend, wrote back on behalf of Kitch- nally have some peace.” Since the nine- they approached each other, Kitchen’s
en’s mother, Elsa, to request that White ties, the Texas program has conducted “whole being was filled with compas-
remain in prison. Roberson told me, almost eight hundred mediations, but sion,” she later wrote. “I reached out my
“Elsa was fervent about not letting him in nearly twice as many cases the vic- hand and said ‘Hi, I’m Katie Kitchen.’”
out while she was alive, because she tim—or, more rarely, the offender—has They talked for four and a half hours.
feared for her life.” But by the time withdrawn before the meeting took White described life in prison before his
Kitchen had completed her Landmark place. In preparation for their encoun- transfer, when touching other inmates
course Elsa had died, and no one in the ter, Kitchen and White worked with was forbidden and guards routinely
family formally opposed White’s re- Springer and an assistant for four checked his rectum for drugs. He spoke
lease or Kitchen’s plans to free him. months. They were asked to keep jour- of his four children—he later discovered
In October of 2014, Kitchen called nals, to complete questionnaires, and to that he’d fathered a fifth—one of whom
Mark Vinson, the prosecutor on her draft imagined letters to each other. Sur- had a child of his own. Kitchen said she
father’s case and one of only a few Black vivors of violent crime often seek an- hoped that they could one day visit
lawyers in the Harris County district swers from perpetrators and relate the schools together to share their story.
attorney’s office at the time. During pain they’ve suffered. Kitchen, by con- White told me, “I expected for the white
the trial, Vinson had described White trast, wrote, in a pretend letter to White, lady to be angry, to go off on me, but it
as “a man who’d do anything to get “I have to believe that you never set out was nothing like that. It was all love.” At
paid.” Kitchen said that when she that night to hurt anyone.” The medi- the end of the meeting, he asked the me-
reached Vinson, who had retired, and ators were concerned that she might be diator’s permission to give Kitchen a hug.
has since died, he told her, “For the life in denial about White’s role in the crime. White completed the rehabilitation
of me, I don’t know why you would “They tell me that I have to come to program in the spring of 2017. The week
want to free that kind of a no-good grips with fact that JDW had killed my he was set to be released, Kitchen flew
man.” Kitchen then phoned the Texas dad and it wasn’t an accident,” Kitchen from New York to Houston, hoping to
Department of Criminal Justice and wrote in her journal, referring to White meet him as he left prison, but she
learned at the last minute that the con- parole board, Tauss considered up to a tempt to contact the killer, who was
ditions of his parole prohibited him thousand cases each month. Now re- serving a life sentence in prison. The
from having contact with her family. In- tired, she recalled only a handful of vic- facility prohibited visits from anyone
stead, she hired a local filmmaker to re- tims who supported parole for their of- other than inmates’ family members
cord the first hours of White’s freedom, fenders. The board didn’t always heed and approved guests, so I drove at a dis-
as he moved into his uncle’s home in these wishes: Tauss mentioned one case tance past its front entrance, which was
Houston. Eight months later, after suc- she’d voted against, in which a mother flanked by armed guards. My efforts
cessfully petitioning the Department of who’d been raped by her son advocated left my family aghast; my mother said
Criminal Justice to waive the ban on for him to be freed. Still, Tauss told me, that meeting the murderer would dis-
further contact, Kitchen attended a cer- “my feeling has always been that if the honor my father’s memory.
emony at Carol Vance for White and victim’s say is very important in not re- With the rise of the restorative-jus-
other parolees. White took the stage leasing someone, it should be just as im- tice movement, stories of meetings be-
last, wearing a paisley tie and a crocheted portant in letting someone out.” tween victims and perpetrators have
black taqiyah, which he’d bought, he entered the public consciousness. “The
told the audience, with earnings from was first introduced to Kitchen, by a Redemption Project,” a CNN series
his new job on an assembly line at an
ambulance manufacturer. “Twenty-five
I mutual acquaintance, because my fa-
ther was also killed in a robbery. In the
hosted by Van Jones, has mined such
encounters for their entertainment value.
years ago, I killed a man,” he said. “I’m summer of 1999, my parents, Turkish But I’ve found few detailed narratives
here because the daughter of this man immigrants who’d settled in Massachu- in which someone pursues contact with
forgave me.” setts, took my older sister and me on a a family member’s killer, let alone ones
Recounting this story, Kitchen vacation to Ankara. One night, an in- in which the outcome is mutually grat-
sounded both proud of her efforts and truder entered an open window in the ifying. In “Dead Reckoning,” a mem-
embarrassed by the ease with which she apartment where we were staying and oir from 2017, the Canadian social
succeeded. The family members of mur- shot my father six times, while my sis- worker Carys Cragg describes her two-
der victims have had a formal say in the ter and I hid in a closet. I was three year correspondence with her father’s
sentencing of perpetrators since the birth years old and barely understood what murderer, who seems incapable of ex-
of the victims’-rights movement, in the had happened, but as I grew up I sought pressing the degree of remorse that
seventies. Tauss, the parole-board mem- out information about the killer, whose Cragg craves. “I was seeking something
ber, told me, “When we are getting ready name I found in a newspaper clipping. from him that I knew that I would never
to release someone and the victim still After my junior year of college, in 2018, get,” she writes. “It was ludicrous of me
feels strongly about them not being re- I visited the lawyer, in Ankara, who had to even try, but I had to.” When I first
leased, we usually go along with it.” But represented my family at trial. Reluc- spoke to Kitchen, in the fall of 2019, I
victims who press for leniency have tantly, he made copies of his files from felt both inspired and mystified by her
sometimes had a harder time making the case, but he advised me not to at- relationship with White. Like Cragg, I
their voices heard. In one case in Col-
orado, in 2014, a judge blocked a cou-
ple’s attempt to advocate against the
death penalty for the man who mur-
dered their son. Sujatha Baliga, an Oak-
land-based restorative-justice advocate,
told me that she often meets survivors
who have petitioned parole boards for
permission to contact the people who
have harmed them. “They are not al-
lowed,” Baliga said, “even though they
deeply want to have a relationship.”
Kitchen told me that she had been
ready to hire “the best lawyer in the
country” to secure White’s freedom. In-
stead, it had taken little more than a few
phone calls. “What if I’d been Black?”
she said. “If I hadn’t looked the way I
looked, I don’t think they would have
afforded me the same courtesy.” Tauss,
who is white, denied that Kitchen’s race
was a factor. By phone from her home,
in Pearland, Texas, she said that she’d
simply been impressed by Kitchen’s ca-
pacity to forgive. In her decade on the “I started as a magician’s assistant, myself.”
felt that my father’s murderer owed me
something. An explanation? An apol-
ogy? I didn’t understand Kitchen’s will- MY MOTHER IN BARDO
ingness to aid the man who had killed
her father while seemingly expecting 1.
nothing of him in return.
Dear Future: It’s strange how much
ne morning last August, Kitchen you resemble the past, all the houses
O and I visited White’s house, in
Acres Homes, a historically Black neigh-
Gone dark, the rooms where we lived
so many lives: the ruptured sofa
borhood in Houston. In the years since Groaning as we read the book about the rabbit,
his release, Kitchen and her husband the kitchen table shattered with flour
have sent Christmas gifts to White and For bread, all vanished into an emptiness
have treated him to meals when they’re thirsty as old iron, a plowshare
in town. White lives in a beige cottage Left in a fallow field for decades beside
resting on cinder blocks and surrounded a snakeskin wound through the eyehole
by a chain-link fence. As Kitchen and Of a steer’s skull. Dear Future: I am still
I pulled onto his street, we passed a standing there, a shadow at the threshold.
horse grazing on a patch of grass be- My mother was the door through which
side a modest church. From the porch I entered the light. Now she is gone
of the house, we could hear a Bobby Alone through her own vanishing door.
Womack song drifting through the
screen door. White, who is fifty-one 2.
and stocky, with tattooed forearms,
stepped out, wearing calf-length cargo With the hands of my heart
shorts and several silver chain neck- I would claw out a place
laces. “I really want to hug you, but I For her in the darkness beyond
won’t, because of COVID,” Kitchen said. breath, I would break through
Kitchen hadn’t seen White since be- The silence after heartbeat
fore the pandemic, when he was still with another rhythm hammered
living with his uncle. As White showed
us his prayer room, where pairs of worn
loafers and bright sneakers were lined him to the Quran. “Once I started learn- soon as they got me, they put me in a
up neatly against the walls, she said, ing stuff, I just kept on going,” he said. cell by myself. I was dealing with trying
“You have more shoes than I do, and He recalled his childhood, which was to figure out what happened, and it was
they’re even better looking.” Behind the spent moving between Louisiana and real hard for me. All of a sudden, they’re
kitchen counter was a red barber’s chair, Texas. At Yates High School, in Hous- saying, ‘Hey, man, you been charged with
for the haircuts that White sometimes ton’s Third Ward, he’d been a talented murder.’ I’m not one of those guys that
gives to neighbors and relatives. “I’ve football player, but he began missing came up in the ghetto and went to juvie
been cutting hair since I was little,” he practices to support his mother, a nurse’s and all that.” White’s mother was in the
said. “That was one of my first hustles.” aide who was raising him and his younger hospital, with ovarian cancer, and he
White described Kitchen as a central brother as a single parent. White dropped worried about who would care for his
part of his support system, telling her, out in ninth grade and started selling brother, who was fourteen. “It was just
“You’re on the list of people I look at marijuana. Later, he found work as a se- crazy, man,” he said.
and say, ‘I refuse to let you down.’” curity guard but kept dealing drugs. I As White spoke, I felt put off by his
Before I arrived in Houston, Kitchen waited for an opening in the conversa- focus on the toll that the crime had taken
had told me that she’d never directly dis- tion, then asked, “Do you want to talk on his own life. But Kitchen was frown-
cussed the night of the crime with White, about the night?” ing sympathetically. “Were you surprised
and that she didn’t want to be present “I remember earlier that night. We to hear that he died?” she asked him.
when I broached the subject. But, as we were out drinking, smoking weed. I re- “I actually seen it on the news,”
drove to lunch, at a nearby New Amer- member Blocker coming through,” White said. “I think it was the next day.
ican restaurant, with White following White said, referring to his accomplice. I’m, like, ‘Man, I know that house.’ And
behind, she said that she’d had a change “He was, like, ‘Hey, man, what you doing? that’s when it dawned on me.”
of heart. During our meal—a patty melt I’m gonna come back and pick you up.’ “But you don’t remember being there,
for White, a Caesar salad for Kitchen— And so I went home and got dressed.” or doing it?” I asked.
White spoke of his time in prison. Then White skipped past the crime, to “No,” he said. “It’s like—I really want
During his first year there, a Muslim in- the night of his arrest, after the police to know, because when you’re incarcer-
mate had given him a copy of “The Au- received a tip from his neighbor. “What ated you’re in the cell by yourself, you’ve
tobiography of Malcolm X,” which led I was going through was so painful. As got a lot of time to think, and your mind
were among the first to reach the scene.
Margaret recalled hearing that there
On the hide drumhead of death. were two offenders, as did White’s de-
It would sound like the ghost fense lawyer, Kurt Wentz, but neither
Of Professor Longhair raging of them could point me to any evidence.
for goat’s blood from the bowl At the trial, Wentz portrayed White
I hold up in the underworld, that great as the perpetrator of a “robbery gone
New Orleans shuffle of hers, so she can wrong,” he told me, adding, “Although
Dance again, with the hands of my heart. Mr. White was armed, he had no an-
ticipation of a conflict.” In a “special
3. issue” appended to their guilty verdict,
the jurors found beyond a reasonable
No one in the family thought I could do anything doubt that White had been the one with
practical in this world, Mother, but look: the gun.
I have raised out of the core of the firmament Under Texas’s so-called law of par-
of my being a great lighthouse made ties, White was liable for Kaim’s death
Of what looks like gleaming obsidian but whether he pulled the trigger or waited
in fact, if there are facts anymore, is nothing in the getaway car; his punishment
But the grief of my time on this earth. It stands may have been the same either way.
on the edge of the valley of living fog White told me he suspects that Blocker
Where you have chosen to wander, flashing evaded arrest by f leeing back to Ja-
its warning: do not turn back, do not maica. Kitchen, though, found the po-
Think of us here still going on, because lice’s failure to track down Blocker in-
life doesn’t do that, we are here furiating. “Is Joseff Deon White serving
On the wrecking stones of existence a 65 year sentence for a crime he only
just like you. Its light goes on assisted in???” she wrote on a question-
As long as I go on. So go on. And there, look naire shortly before their first encoun-
how solid it stands. Dear Future: See what I did? ter. Only White knows for sure whether
he had an accomplice and, if he did, what
—T. R. Hummer role each of them played in the crime.
During our lunch, Kitchen pressed gin-
gerly for details. “So did you and Blocker
tends to wander. And so sometimes we said, ‘You know, I had to get paid.’ ” share the money?” she asked White.
formulate stuff in our minds to fit where White’s team appealed the verdict, to “Yes,” White said. “He gave me some
we want it to fit. Something might be no avail. The appellate judge, in his de- money.”
missing, but we’re gonna put something cision, questioned whether the “myste- “What do you mean ‘He gave you’?
there. You understand what I’m saying?” rious Jamaican” even existed. Mark Vin- Didn’t you get the wallet?” Whoever
“We create a story,” Kitchen replied. son, the prosecutor, had planted the got the wallet was presumably the one
According to court records, White same suspicion at the trial. “You know who’d robbed and shot her father.
claimed that he knew nothing about who Blocker is, don’t you?” he asked the “I didn’t get the wallet,” White said,
Kaim’s murder when he was first ques- jury. “It’s Joseff White.” shaking his head. “I remember us being
tioned by police. The next day, he signed I tried to find an answer to the at the store. After he came back to the
a statement saying that he had waited Blocker question. The Houston Police car, we left, and we went somewhere
in the car while Blocker robbed and Department provided me with a one- on the Southwest side. I think it was a
shot Kaim. The identity of the gunman page incident report, filed the night of Stop-N-Go. Blocker was giving me
was contested in court; the murder the crime. It notes that a Black male some money.”
weapon was never recovered, and there suspect shot Kaim and then “ran to the “So it was Blocker who got out of
were no eyewitnesses to Kaim’s attack. listed vehicle, which was waiting for the car?” I asked. “Who killed Katie’s
(The Galleria, a glitzy Houston mall him,” but does not specify whether any- dad? Was it you or Blocker?”
that Kaim helped to develop, offered a one else was inside. The department de- “That’s the problem I have,” White
reward for information about the crime.) nied my request for a full police report, said. “I keep seeing different stuff. See
At the trial, the neighbor who’d pro- on the ground that the case technically what I’m saying? I’m trying to fit in
vided White’s name to the police tes- remains open, and thus confidential, be- what’s missing.”
tified that White had shown him a gun cause there were two possible suspects,
and had described robbing an old man. one of whom “was never charged and / ven within a single family, people
“He explained that he told the guy to
give it up, but the guy didn’t want to
or was unable to be located.” Kitchen’s
ex-husband, Ben Kitchen, who died last
E grieve in different ways, and the
legal procedures that allow for mercy
give it up,” White’s neighbor said, ac- year, had been close with her parents, sometimes expose the fault lines.
cording to the Houston Chronicle. “He and he and his second wife, Margaret, “Meeting with a Killer,” a Court TV
ative-justice program called Bridges
to Life, which, according to its Web
site, leads incarcerated people through
a curriculum “centered on responsibil-
ity, repentance, and restitution.” But
Benninghoven has never wanted to
meet White, in part because she never
got the sense from Kitchen that he
was truly remorseful.
“Most of these guys, when they go
through this program, they realize what
they’ve done, and they want to say, ‘I
regret it,’” Benninghoven told me one
night at her house. She and Kitchen
were in the living room, eating mint
gelato from small glass bowls and fin-
ishing a game of Rummikub. A retired
real-estate agent with a chic white pixie
cut, Benninghoven has a more prag-
matic air than her sister. “If Joseff had
said, you know, ‘I’d been on drugs that
night, and I really regret what I did,’
it’s not like he would ever have been
my good friend, but I would sort of
want to keep up with him.” Benning-
hoven turned to Kitchen. “But when
he couldn’t say those words? And you
didn’t need them?”
“Unfortunately, positive thinking is not improving this experience.” “I didn’t want him to ever have to feel
he had to lie to me,” Kitchen replied.
“What would he have lied to you
• • about?” Benninghoven asked.
“Maybe he’d feel he had to say he
documentary from 2001 that has being. Kennedy’s widow and six of his was sorry, even if he didn’t mean it.”
come a touchstone for victim-offender other children have spoken out against “Well, whatever the reason was, you
dialogues, follows the mother and Sirhan’s release, and, in a decision last didn’t want to hear that he was sorry.”
daughter of Cathy O’Daniel, a Hous- week, California’s governor, Gavin New- “But he did tell me stuff,” Kitchen
ton woman who was raped and shot to som, sided with them. said. Before my visit, she had mailed
death, in 1986, as they prepare to visit Although Kitchen’s family mem- me copies of documents from the
one of her two assailants in prison. bers didn’t oppose White’s parole, some mediation process, including a de-
During the meeting, the assailant— have found her friendship with him briefing questionnaire that she and
who raped O’Daniel but wasn’t the discomfiting. Kitchen’s daughter, K. C. White had completed after their
shooter—vows to change his life, and Coats, a Realtor who lives in Austin, meeting. I retrieved it from my back-
afterward both women give him a hug. attributed her mother’s affection for pack. White’s handwriting was faint
Later, though, as Slate reported, O’Dan- White to her “childlike, innocent qual- and cramped, but on the back of the
iel’s daughter told the filmmaker that ity,” which she described with loving form Kitchen had rewritten some of
she regretted the embrace, and O’Dan- skepticism. “Forgiveness can some- his answers in cursive.
iel’s father, who’d declined to partici- times really require distance,” Coats “The question is ‘How do you feel
pate in the mediation, said that he said, “because it allows you to accept right now?’” I read aloud. Then Kitchen
couldn’t bear to watch the tape. More someone for who they are, and they’re read White’s answer: “I’ve been sorry,
recently, two sons of Robert F. Ken- over there.” She added, “My mother but now I’m even more sorry. I feel
nedy—Robert, Jr., and Douglas—have hasn’t fully let the reality of what hap- even worse for her father’s life being
supported the release of Sirhan Sirhan, pened wash over her. She could have taken, because she and her father and
who was recommended for parole after kept Joseff at an arm’s length, and it family are good people.’”
serving more than five decades in prison all would have been just as good.” Ellen “So he did say he was sorry,” Ben-
for assassinating their father. “I am Benninghoven shares her sister’s in- ninghoven said, a bit abashed.
grateful today to see him as a human terest in criminal-justice reform. Be- “I feel he was doing the best he
being worthy of compassion and love,” fore the pandemic, she volunteered could,” Kitchen said. When discuss-
Douglas said last year, at a parole hear- weekly with a Houston-based restor- ing White, she on occasion slipped
into an unintentionally condescend- like this before, with someone saying, ber, over FaceTime, while he was work-
ing tone. Before I’d met White, she you know, ‘Let me be active in forgive- ing a shift in the parking lot of a hoo-
had told me that I might not be able ness and help this person regain their kah lounge in downtown Houston. A
to understand him well, because he life.’ ” Kitchen knows that some peo- silver security badge gleamed against
“doesn’t have great enunciation.” Now, ple might dismiss her as a “white sav- the breast of his black shirt. I thought
to Benninghoven, she said, “We’re not ior,” or as a rich lady bent on centering that without Kitchen present White
all articulate. We’re not all educated her own racial and political awaken- might share more details about the
in a way that we can express our feeling. “I don’t know what her motive is night of the crime, or even admit to
ings or be smooth.” Then she asked for publicizing her story,” her oldest the murder. Instead, to my surprise, he
what I thought. sister, who asked that I not use her told me the same thing that he’d told
I told Kitchen that, as a child, I had name, told me, adding, “It sort of seems the police the morning after his arrest:
found it comforting to know that my like she might want credit for it, or he’d been in the car outside Kaim’s
father’s killer hadn’t targeted him in something.” Kitchen said that she hopes house, but it was Blocker who’d robbed
particular—that the murder was, to to serve as a model: “People always say, and shot him. “I wasn’t no killer, man,”
some extent, a “random act,” as I’d heard ‘How can you sit across from the man White said.
her call White’s crime. Like Benning- who did that to your family?’ I want He explained that he didn’t feel
hoven, though, I chafed at Kitchen’s them not to say that anymore.” he’d had any power to tell his side of
insistence on ignoring the question of At her sister’s house, Kitchen had the story at the trial. Kurt Wentz, his
White’s responsibility. In her narrative, worried that my own unresolved feel- lawyer, had chosen not to put him on
the murder was a terrible accident, and ings about my father’s killer might af- the stand. “It was me, as a young Black
White, because of systemic injustices, fect how I portrayed her. “When you boy, young Black man, whatever you
had been as much a victim as her fa- do decide to write what you write, I want to call it, against the system,”
ther. I admired that her mission on hope it will be you as the educated adult, White said. I asked why he hadn’t
White’s behalf was an attempt to live as opposed to the child who has lost told any of this to Kitchen at lunch—
up to her progressive ideals. But I won- his dad,” she told me. When I relayed and why, at the ceremony for Carol
dered whether she had truly let go of Kitchen’s story to Sujatha Baliga, the Vance parolees, in 2017, he’d intro-
what the mediators had called her “cop- restorative-justice advocate, she ac- duced himself as someone who’d
ing story.” Did she accept that White knowledged that Kitchen’s lack of in- “killed a man.” White brought up
may well have been the one who killed terest in White’s culpability was un- Toastmasters, a public-speaking pro-
her dad, and that the crime may not common. Baliga was sexually abused gram that he’d completed before his
have been an accident? by her late father, and she is working release from prison. “One of the things
Kitchen stood up, paced for a few on a book about how she came to for- you learn is knowing your audience,”
moments, and then settled on a beige give him. But she said it’s a mistake he said. “When you do speeches, you
armchair on the other side of the room. to presume that survivors should feel have to reach people and touch them
She started crying. “Even when I think a certain way. “In my line of work, I the way you feel like they can be
about it right now, I’m just so sad that have to constantly suspend the need touched. To be honest, don’t nobody
somebody’s life would be in such a for other people to have my needs,” wanna hear, ‘O.K., I’m in prison, and
place that they would do that,” she said. she told me. Indeed, as I reported on she got me out, but really I ain’t the
I replied that she seemed plagued Kitchen’s story, I grew less one who did it.’ People
by an unconventional kind of survi- frustrated by the evasive want to hear a story, to
vor’s guilt, stemming not from her fa- manner in which she and motivate them, to know
ther’s fate but from White’s. White discussed the mur- that things get better.”
She said again how sorry she felt der. It moved me that each His comment reminded
for people desperate enough to turn to seemed attuned to what the me of an entry in Kitch-
crime. “Maybe in a way it’s almost dis- other needed from their en’s journal, from 2018,
respectful,” she added. “I don’t even unusual friendship. after she and White gave
give them enough credit that they can White clearly coöperated a talk at the Darrington
be held accountable.” with this piece largely out Unit. Before it began, she
of obligation to Kitchen. pulled White aside to ask
itchen began giving talks about “Whatever she asks me to if he worried that their
K her quest to free White even be-
fore his release. “I am grateful that only
do, if I have time for it, I’ll make time
for it, because I feel like I owe her so
story might sound like “bragging to
folks who were stuck inside prison.”
one person’s life was lost that night in much,” he told me. Without Kitchen White reassured her. “He told me that
1991,” she likes to say. She and Jamal as an intermediary, though, White was many times when one is inside one
Joseph, a formerly incarcerated screen- hard to get in touch with. He works thinks about taking one’s life. It all
writer who now teaches at Columbia, two full-time jobs, as an electrician by seems so hopeless about ever getting
have discussed the possibility of a film day, with his uncle, and as a security out. He said our story will give them
adaptation of her story. Joseph, who is guard at night. After weeks of trying, Hope. The fact that anything can hap-
Black, told me, “I hadn’t heard a story I reached him one evening in Octo- pen to you.” 
FICTION
What’s
the
Deal,
Hummingbird?
Arthur
Krystal
© SAUL LEITER FOUNDATION / COURTESY HOWARD GREENBERG GALLERY
54 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY SAUL LEITER

n or around May 5th of 2020, ing wonderful that he never even thought came to class barefoot, wearing skimpy
O he just stopped. He stopped

exercising, stopped walking,
stopped reading, stopped planning. He
to look over at his girlfriend.
For a time, he wanted to live for art,
a fatuous notion since he couldn’t write,
white shorts. He remembered one of their
professors saying, “As long as you’re alive,
you’re immortal.” He believed that for
ate, drank, washed, and paid the bills, but paint, or sculpt, and played the piano with about five minutes and then he wondered
that was it. He was seventy-three. He’d a vague melancholic air that impressed how many other professors got things
spent more than 38,368,800 minutes on no one. A small trust allowed him some wrong. He remembered getting drunk
earth, only a precious few of which he leeway during the seventies, but once he and wanting to fight a cop during a pro-
remembered. That’s what hit him one had his fill of moving around he took a test against Dow Chemical, and being
evening, after the cheering and clanking job in a large advertising agency where pulled away by his roommate. He re-
of pots and pans had died down: a vast he made nice with people he often liked membered a long purple-and-white scarf
chunk of his life—the greater part of his but never admired. When he was thirty, he wore in college that no one else re-
life—might as well never have occurred. he met a woman whose skin and smell membered. He remembered sitting in
Not just the time spent sleeping but those were so intoxicating that he foolishly the Jardin des Tuileries next to a hand-
millions of minutes spanning lunches, spent every dollar he earned trying to some middle-aged woman and her daugh-
dinners, meetings, concerts, marriage, hold on to her, even though he knew it ter, who looked like Catherine Deneuve.
work, books, movies, conversations—all was hopeless. She was twenty-four and They struck up a conversation and the
gone. What remained? A bird’s breath thought cocaine, vodka gimlets, and going woman invited him to lunch, but he de-
of his existence. Sitting with his mother to CBGB part of the natural life cycle. clined. Why? He remembered going into
in Prospect Park when an actual bird had Five months after she totalled her dark- a pâtisserie after having rehearsed saying
shat on her dress and he, eight years old, blue MG, killing herself and a grad stu- “Je voudrais acheter une boîte de chocolats”
thought the world had swerved off course. dent, he married someone who knew more and being mistaken for a Parisian. He
Wounding a squirrel with a BB gun when about books than he did. She didn’t want remembered a sunset in Provence, a hos-
he was ten and crying over the small children and, after a while, he didn’t, ei- tel in Montpellier where he played Ping-
quivering body. Losing a footrace when ther. His wife was a writer and a lecturer Pong, a dog he almost hit when he was
he was twelve because he was so far ahead at various colleges, mostly in the East, so driving from Nice to Antibes. He remem-
he thought he could slow down. Spar- he met a lot of people in the arts, all but bered his wife pressing him to read “The
ring at seventeen with a handsome Black one of whom disappeared from his life Death of Ivan Ilyich.” He read it and was
kid who fought as an amateur under the after the divorce. How many times had bored. He remembered dropping acid on
name of Voodoo DaLeeba. Smoking a he slept with his wife in nineteen years of Martha’s Vineyard and asking everyone
joint in Sheridan Square Park when an marriage and the four months before that? who Martha was. No one knew. He re-
old man in tattered clothes approached Nineteen hundred times? Three thou- membered the last woman he had slept
and said, “If you tell me you love me, I’ll sand times? Five thousand four hundred with. She had been sixty-two. How
tell you how to make a lot of money.” and twenty-two? Shouldn’t he remem- strange was that? He remembered the
Watching “2001: A Space Odyssey” in a ber how it felt at least some of those days first time he removed a girl’s bra, only to
movie theatre on Fifty-first Street and and nights? It’s so damned intimate being think about a character in “Catch-22”
softly whistling when the dark bone flung inside another person. Isn’t it? who claimed that life is all downhill after
into the air descends and suddenly there’s that. He remembered meeting Joseph
a white satellite sailing through space. • Heller at the office of the Brooklyn parks
Running headlong down a steep hill in In the morning, he occasionally listened commissioner back in 1998 or ’99. He re-
a Kentucky hollow, exhilarated by the to Ben Webster. membered being face to bosom with
danger of falling and breaking his legs. • Jackie Onassis as he was going up the
Bumping into a friend, who told him stairs at the Metropolitan Opera and she
that she had slept with two men that By August, 2020, his sense of time had was coming down. He remembered sit-
day, and it so aroused him that he asked gone kablooey. Events thirty years in the ting on the Sixty-fifth Street crosstown
if he could be the third. Inhaling an distance now knocked at the door, while bus opposite Paul Newman, who was
intensely aromatic 1990 La Tâche at a things he’d done five weeks earlier seemed wearing a beautiful tan shearling coat
Sotheby’s pre-auction tasting. Listening impossibly remote. He remembered and orange-tinted sunglasses. He remem-
as Seiji Ozawa conducted “The Rite of watching war movies made in 1945 and bered Lauren Bacall, leaning on a walker,
Spring” at Tanglewood when the skies thinking they were ancient because it was asking him to reach for something on a
darkened and thunder rumbled and a 1960. Now he thought “The Graduate” shelf at Zabar’s. He remembered sitting
hard slanting rain sheeted into the tent, and “Jaws” were contemporary films. How in a Thai restaurant at a table next to
spraying the audience and the musicians do you know what you’ve forgotten? He Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, and two body-
onstage. Ozawa didn’t seem to notice, knew only that he was a case of nerves guards. Jagger caught him sneaking a
but he noticed that the musicians were between two eternities. His first day of glance and said, “It makes the food taste
smiling, almost grimacing. The strings college—that he remembered. He’d stood better, don’t it?” He remembered sitting
cried with the wind and thumped with in line to register behind a tall, light- across from John Updike on a 1 train
the drums, and the horns played searing haired, long-legged girl who ended up heading downtown from 155th Street. He
notes in various keys and it was so fuck- in two of his classes. It was 1965 and she remembered getting into an argument
with Christopher Hitchens over who dis- what had he done with his youth? He ries ended. It was like the death of a friend,
liked Henry Kissinger more. He remem- had never kept a diary and regretted, several friends. What he needed, he told
bered shaking the hand of Willie Pep in even resented, not knowing where he’d his ex, was a series that would run for as
a high-school gym in West Orange, New been or what he’d felt at 12:48 p.m. on long as he did.
Jersey. Pep was old by then and his small November 2, 1978. It wasn’t supposed to “Give ‘Cobra Kai’ a try,” she e-mailed
hand was soft and felt padded. be this way. He’d retired when he was one night.
sixty-nine, but he’d still gone through “No, there are limits,” he wrote back.
• the motions. He went out, attended open- “Do it,” she said.
In the morning, he sometimes listened ings and the opera, dined in good restau- One night, six months into the pan-
to the “Pastoral” Symphony. rants, borrowed books from the Society demic, when no one knew how bad it
Library, and visited New Orleans and would get, he watched “The Third Man,”
• San Francisco. He even tried snorkeling which he hadn’t seen in thirty years, and
Even before the pandemic, he barely heard in the Keys. But covid put a stop to partway through, as he lay on his couch,
from anyone. His old college friends were that, and then he stopped. he began to feel something he had trou-
more absorbed than ever in the lives of Obviously, he was afraid of catching ble identifying. It took a few seconds to
their children and grandchildren, and he the virus, but he rather liked the masks, understand that he felt happy. The writ-
had neither one nor the other. “Social the forced anonymity, the social distancing, the direction, the acting, the light-
media” were words he heard a lot but they ing, the sense of fear on the streets. He ing, the set design, the music, the cine-
meant nothing to him. He didn’t have didn’t mind lining up to get into a CVS matography—everything worked so well
many close friends. One had died of a and he got used to ordering his grocer- that he wanted to call up Graham Greene
stroke; another had killed himself by ies over the phone, though the stores al- and ask him, What’s the deal with the
jumping from a ferry in the English ways got something wrong. And though stupid, annoying landlady? Why couldn’t
Channel, his body never recovered. When he no longer walked regularly, he’d go out he have left her out?
he looked at people he knew, he consid- after it rained, when there were fewer
ered their absence. He himself was more people around. He now had an excuse •
or less in good health: no blood-pressure for doing what he always wanted to do: Sometimes in the afternoon he listened
pills, no blood thinners, no prostate is- live in the world without anyone notic- to Al Green or Sam Cooke or the Sta-
sues. But he had no energy. Without any- ing. Instead of feeling housebound, he ple Singers.
one cooking for him or watching what felt content to be at home. And now when •
he ate, he subsisted on sandwiches, take- he had nothing to do he felt justified in
out, and Entenmann’s. With nothing to doing nothing. As for boredom, well, sure, Music had always been there. He had
do, he began thinking about suicide. But but when had he ever not been bored? grown up listening to the radio, to Cousin
suicide required planning and he wasn’t “You need to get Netflix,” his ex-wife Brucie, Murray the K, and, later, switch-
up to it. He owned a gun, but he wasn’t told him. She had called him about two ing over to FM, Jonathan Schwartz and
about to shoot himself or leap to his death weeks after New York went into lockdown, Allison Steele. Although he didn’t re-
or jump in front of a train, and pills were partly out of guilt and partly because member the first time he heard the
not foolproof. Then the pan- she was just a nice person. Shirelles singing “Will You Still Love
demic hit and he stopped “Watch ‘Call My Agent,’” Me Tomorrow?,” it was the first popu-
thinking about dying. she said. “It’ll cheer you up.” lar song that had stuck with him. He
The pandemic perked He promised her he would, remembered the first time he heard “Sat-
him up. He didn’t tell peo- without intending to follow isfaction,” the first time he heard a re-
ple that, but, come on, it was through, but she knew him, cording of Bill Evans playing “Some
the most interesting thing so she put him on her ac- Other Time,” the first time he heard the
to happen to the world since count and e-mailed him her Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on
9/11. He didn’t downplay password, which obligated WQXR, the station of the New York
the misery and suffering it him to watch it. She was Times. He remembered George Jellinek,
caused, but that was the right: it cheered him up. He but not the other hosts. He remembered
point: it killed people. Every asked her what else he should Lenny Bernstein saying, in some inter-
day there was a body count, every day watch and quickly marshalled against the view or other, that he found it hard to
there were stories of loss, separation, and plague—as though they were chess pieces breathe when conducting the “Missa
grief. Every day he read about or heard in his match with boredom—“Longmire,” Solemnis.” If he had to guess, it would
accounts of the heroic behavior of essen- “Get Shorty,” “Sneaky Pete,” “Justified,” be during the Sanctus, about fifty-three
tial workers, frontline workers, and first “Line of Duty,”“The Kominsky Method,” minutes into the piece and lasting a lit-
responders, of spouses and children keep- “Peaky Blinders,” “Ozark,” “Bosch,” “The tle under thirteen minutes. Pensive
ing vigil outside hospitals that shut them Americans,” “A French Village,” “The strings with light support from flutes
out. Life had become a constant threat Queen’s Gambit,” and the always sooth- usher in a radiant violin solo right be-
to life. It was a goddam ticking time ing “The Durrells in Corfu.” Damn it if fore the Benedictus. Only Beethoven
bomb is what it was. Sure, it could feel he didn’t begin to live with these imagi- could have written this, and hearing it
good when you were young and fit, but nary people, and he hated it when a se- made the world bearable for a while.
Music cut out the noise. Rock, coun- and location, a chronological map that he had remembered and then forgotten
try, folk, jazz, or classical, it didn’t mat- led to oblivion. In the meantime, noise. the name of the duck dish that he used
ter; it cut out the noise. And, Lord knows, People wanting to wrap the country in a to order in a restaurant that had long
there was plenty of noise now. The na- shroud and bury it—tearing down stat- since closed. He remembered frankfurt-
tion seemed to be imploding. Watching ues, renaming buildings and holidays, ers sizzling on a grill at a deli called
the news, switching between Fox and cancelling this person and that one, stop- Schweller’s. He remembered a game of
CNN, he remembered a movie he’d seen ping the publication of a book because touch football in Brookline, or was it
some years back; it could have been five, its author was accused of rape. Where Boston? He remembered a pipe he had
it could have been ten. The movie was was Kate Smith when you needed her? smoked for a year after quitting cigarettes.
available on demand, so he watched it And what happens? Thousands of ma- He remembered a pair of Frye boots that
again and liked it, but thought it some- levolent idiots storm the Capitol because he had worn to the ground. He remem-
times talked because it could. Brad Pitt a reckless lowlife narcissist pays them a bered jogging around the Central Park
played a hit man who shows up at a bar little attention, making them feel they’re Reservoir a few yards behind Willie Nel-
to get paid off. But the man who hired still protagonists in the nation’s history. son. He remembered a lyric about listen-
him now feels he deserves a discount. Is this what America is about? A reign ing to Chet Baker on the beach, in the
They discuss it while a small TV over- of error countered by a reign of terror? sand, with the leaves falling down. He
looking the bar plays a live feed of a young- And everything playing out against a remembered a hysterical woman in a
ish Barack Obama delivering his election plague killing millions around the world. bloody nightgown stopping him on West
victory speech. When he gets to the part What did it all amount to? Maybe just End Avenue brandishing a carving knife.
about America being one country, one numbers. Generations come and gener- It was late, the street was deserted, and the
community—out of many, one—Pitt’s ations go, but space and dark matter abi- woman was screaming in Spanish. He
character scoffs, “It’s a myth created by deth forever. He remembered a student calmed her down and cautiously pried
Thomas Jefferson . . . a rich wine snob paper his wife had shown him. She had the knife from her fingers, which is how
who was sick of paying taxes to the Brits.” assigned her class a short story that ended the police, guns in hand, found them: a
Pitt’s hard-bitten cynicism caps the film. with the words “My God, only a mo- twentysomething man holding a large
“Don’t make me laugh,” he says. “I’m liv- ment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for knife, and a woman in a nightgown cov-
ing in America, and, in America, you’re a whole lifetime?”The student had some- ered in blood. He remembered a piece of
on your own. America’s not a country. It’s how missed the comma in the last line, pineapple upside-down cake a girlfriend’s
just a business. Now fucking pay me.” which only made his paper more heart- mother had given him. He remembered
He had never given much thought to felt. His wife had given him an A. hitching from Paris to Calais one summer
what America was about. It was above and getting picked up in a cream-colored
his pay grade. Once, it had been about • Rolls-Royce by a London publisher, who
the old versus the young, about support- In the evening, because he was essentially took him home and played him record-
ing the war in Vietnam or opposing it, a simple man, he occasionally listened ings of Schubert’s lieder. He remembered
but, with the televised killing of George to Puccini. being driven off the highway outside Cov-
Floyd, America had become a misfire, a • ington, Kentucky, by a man who wanted
moral mare’s nest. We’d found the secret to have sex with him. He remembered
portrait recording our sins: slavery, Jim When he was young, he liked to travel. the Lionel electric train set that his father
Crow, our treatment of Chinese work- He’d done the Grand Tour thing several had bought him after his mother died.
ers, Native Americans, unions, women. times and fallen in love with Italy. He re- He remembered the afternoon that his
But it was still America, right? Give me membered visiting the Uffizi for the first mother, wearing a green velour hat, had
liberty or give me death. Four score and time and thinking, This is what a museum picked him up at day care. Upon seeing
seven years ago. Ask not what your coun- should feel like. He remembered buying her, he had exclaimed, “What’s the deal,
try can do for you. “When the values go a print of Botticelli’s “Primavera,” a de- hummingbird?,” and she had given him
up up up/And the prices go down down tail, actually, that he’d hung in his first a brilliant smile and replied, “Hey, what’s
down/Robert Hall this season/Will show apartment, in Chicago. He remembered the word, banana peel?” For the whole
you the reason /Low overheads.” Com- Shirley Hazzard, who’d been a friend of ride back to the house, she had chuckled
pared to murdering fucking Nazis and his wife’s, saying to him, “It’s Cap-ri, not and tousled his hair, and when they got
crazed, robotic Japanese soldiers, we were Cup-ri.” He remembered riding a motor home she picked up the phone and called
goddam saints. Anyway, what was he sup- scooter in Ibiza in ’71 or ’72. He’d gone to his father. She then motioned him over
posed to do about it? His skin puckered a beach and had sunburned like crazy. so he could speak into the receiver. He
on the inside of his elbows, hair grew in That night, he picked up a short, pretty repeated what he’d said and his father
his ears, dark spots mottled the backs of American girl, taken her back to his room, slowly let out his deep-chested laugh. “So
his hands—what do you call them? Liver and had painful, slapstick sex. He remem- what’s the word, banana peel?” he roared.
spots, sun spots, age spots? Too many to bered a lion in a cage in the Bronx Zoo. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole
know which were recent and which had The cage was small and filthy and sat on lifetime? 
been around a while. He should have wheels. He remembered the first time he
taken pictures of them and dated each had crunched into butterfly shrimp in a NEWYORKER.COM
photo, so he could track their number Chinese restaurant. He remembered that Arthur Krystal on why writers lie.

THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
EAT PREY LOVE

The unsettling book behind a classic children’s movie.
BY KATHRYN SCHULZ
t is one of the most famous mur- viled. The English-language version, write a parable about Jewish persecu-
I ders in the history of cinema. A

mother and her child are out for a
walk, on the first warm day after a bit-
as translated in 1928 by the soon to be
Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, was
enormously popular, earning rave re-
tion, since, even after the book burn-
ings, he promoted a policy of appease-
ment toward Nazi Germany. And he
ter winter. Beguiled by the changing views and selling six hundred and fifty was an unlikely figure to write one of
weather, we do not see the danger com- thousand copies in the dozen-plus years the most famous children’s stories of
ing. In fact, we never see it at all, be- before the film came out. The original the twentieth century, since he wrote
cause the man with the gun remains version, meanwhile, was banned and one of its most infamous works of child
offscreen. We see only the mother’s sud- burned in Nazi Germany, where it was pornography.
den alarm; her panicked attempt to get regarded as a parable about the treat- These contradictions are nicely en-
her child to safety; their separation in ment of Jews in Europe. capsulated by Beverley Driver Eddy in
the chaos of the moment; and then the As that suggests, “Bambi” the book her biography “Felix Salten: Man of
child, outside in the cold as snow once is even darker than “Bambi” the movie. Many Faces.” Born Siegmund Salzmann,
again begins to fall, alone and crying Until now, English-language readers in Hungary in 1869, Salten was just three
for his mother. had to rely on the Chambers transla- weeks old when his family moved to Vi-
The film in question is, of course, the tion—which, thanks to a controversial enna—a newly desirable destination for
1942 Walt Disney classic “Bambi.” Per- copyright ruling, has been the only one Jews, because Austria had lately granted
haps more than any other movie made available for almost a century. This year, them full citizenship. His father was a
for children, it is remembered chiefly for however, “Bambi: A Life in the Woods” descendant of generations of rabbis who
its moments of terror: not only the kill- has entered the public domain, and the shook off his religious roots in favor of
ing of the hero’s mother but the forest Chambers version has been joined by a a broadminded humanism; he was also
fire that threatens all the main charac- new one: “The Original Bambi: The a hopelessly inept businessman who soon
ters with annihilation. Stephen King Story of a Life in the Forest” (Prince- plunged the family into poverty. To help
called “Bambi” the first horror movie he ton), translated by Jack Zipes, with won- pay the bills, Salten started working
ever saw, and Pauline Kael, the longtime derful black-and-white illustrations by for an insurance company in his teens,
film critic for this magazine, claimed Alenka Sottler. Zipes, a professor emer- around the same time that he began sub-
that she had never known children to itus of German and comparative liter- mitting poetry and literary criticism to
be as frightened by supposedly scary ature at the University of Minnesota, local newspapers and journals. Eventu-
grownup movies as they were by “Bambi.” who has also translated the fairy tales ally, he began meeting other writers and
Unlike many other Disney classics, of the Brothers Grimm, maintains in creative types at a café called the Grien-
from “Cinderella” to “Frozen,” this fright his introduction that Chambers got steidl, across the street from the national
fest is not based on a fairy tale. It was “Bambi” almost as wrong as Disney did. theatre. These were the fin-de-siècle
adapted from “Bambi: A Life in the Which raises two questions: How ex- artists collectively known as Young Vi-
Woods,” a 1922 novel by the Austro- actly did a tale about the life of a fawn enna, whose members included Arthur
Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten. become so contentious, and what is it Schnitzler, Arnold Schoenberg, Stefan
The book rendered Salten famous; the really about? Zweig, and a writer who later repudi-
ABOVE: TAMARA SHOPSIN
movie, which altered and overshad- ated the group, Karl Kraus.
owed its source material, rendered him elix Salten was an unlikely figure Salten was, in his youth, both liter-
virtually unknown. And it rendered the
original “Bambi” obscure, too, even
F to write “Bambi,” since he was an
ardent hunter who, by his own estimate,
ally and literarily promiscuous. He
openly conducted many affairs—with
though it had previously been both shot and killed more than two hundred chambermaids, operetta singers, ac-
widely acclaimed and passionately re- deer. He was also an unlikely figure to tresses, a prominent socialist activist,
Felix Salten’s 1922 novel sought to educate naïve readers about the violence of nature, as well as about man’s threat to it.
ILLUSTRATION BY ATAK THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 59
In Salten’s lifetime, nearly everyone
thought he wrote it, except for those
who liked him too much to believe he
could produce something so filthy and
those who hated him too much to
believe he could produce something
so well written. Salten himself twice
claimed not to have been responsible
for it but otherwise was silent or coy on
the subject. These days, everyone from
academics to the Austrian government
regards him as the undisputed author
of the book.
Written in the tradition of the rib-
ald female memoir, à la “Fanny Hill,”
“Josefine Mutzenbacher” recounts the
sexual adventures of the title character
beginning when she is five years old,
and continuing after her turn to pros-
titution in her early teens, following the
death of her mother. Today, what is most
shocking about the book is Josefine’s
youth. At the time, however, most of
the scandal concerned her unapologetic
embrace of her career, which she both
enjoyed and credited with lifting her
“We’ve rehearsed this conversation several times out of poverty, educating her, and in-
in my head—do not go off script.” troducing her to a world far wider than
the impoverished Vienna suburbs where
she (like Salten) grew up.
• • Perhaps inevitably, scholars have tried
to draw parallels between “Josefine
and, serially or simultaneously, several other respects, too. Inclined to be touchy, Mutzenbacher” and “Bambi.” Both title
women with whom other members of either by temperament or because he characters lose their mothers while still
Young Vienna were having dalliances felt the need to prove himself, he spent in their youth; both books introduce
as well. In time, he married and settled much of his young life fomenting dis- readers in detail to urban borderlands—
down, but all his life he wrote anything putes (he once walked into the Grien- the poor suburbs, the flophouses, the
he could get paid to write: book reviews, steidl and slapped Kraus in the face after forests—about which most proper Vi-
theatre reviews, art criticism, essays, plays, the latter criticized him in print), then ennese were largely ignorant. Still, for
poems, novels, a book-length advertise- resolving them via lawsuits or duels. the most part, such comparisons seem
ment for a carpet company disguised as Both his personal judgment and his crit- strained. “Josefine Mutzenbacher” oc-
reportage, travel guides, librettos, fore- ical judgment could be impulsive and cupies much the same place in the Salten
words, afterwords, film scripts. His de- errant; in his thirties, he borrowed pro- œuvre as his homage to carpets: the one
tractors regarded this torrent as evidence digiously to produce a modernist cab- that lies at the intersection of ambition,
of hackery, but it was more straightfor- aret, of the kind that was all the rage in graphomania, and penury.
wardly evidence of necessity; almost Berlin, only to see it become a critical But the place of “Bambi” is different.
alone among the members of Young and financial catastrophe. If there is a through line to Salten’s scat-
Vienna, he was driven by the need to The production that brought Salten tershot career, it is his interest in writ-
make a living. the most infamy, however, did not bear ing about animals, which was evident
Yet, like his father, Salten could be his name: “Josefine Mutzenbacher; or, from his first published work of fiction:
reckless with money. Anxious to seem The Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told “The Vagabond,” a short story about the
like an insider, he insisted on eating, by Herself.” Published anonymously in adventures of a dachshund, written when
drinking, dressing, and travelling in the Vienna in 1906, it has been continu- he was twenty-one. Many other nonhu-
manner of his wealthier peers, with the ously in print since then, in both Ger- man protagonists followed, most of them
result that he was constantly accruing man and English, and has sold some ill-fated: a sparrow that dies in battle, a
debts, some of which he dispatched in three million copies. Despite the subti- fly that hurls itself to death against a
dodgy ways—for instance, by “borrow- tle, no one ever seems to have enter- windowpane. Salten’s novel “The Hound
ing” and then selling a friend’s expen- tained the possibility that it was writ- of Florence” concerns a young Austrian
sive books. And he could be reckless in ten by a prostitute, or even by a woman. man destined to spend every other day
of his life as the archduke’s dog; in the That vision is of an Eden marred ure who becomes Thumper in the
end, he is stabbed to death, in his dog only by the incursion of humankind. movie—leaving him to die in excruci-
form, while trying to protect a courte- There is no native danger in Bambi’s ating pain. Later, Bambi himself nearly
san he loves from assault. (In an even forest; with the exception of his brief batters to death a rival who is begging
more drastic transformation than the clash with another male deer in mat- for mercy, while Faline looks on, laugh-
one “Bambi” underwent, this story being season, and maybe that hardscrab- ing. Far from being gratuitous, such
came, in Disney’s hands, “The Shaggy ble winter, the wilderness he inhabits scenes are, in the author’s telling, the
Dog.”) “Fifteen Rabbits” features, at first, is all natural beauty and interspecies whole point of the novel. Salten insisted
fifteen rabbits, who debate the nature amity. The truly grave threats he faces that he wrote “Bambi” to educate naïve
of God and the reason for their own are always from hunters, who cause both readers about nature as it really is: a
persecution while their numbers grad- the forest fire and the death of his place where life is always contingent on
ually dwindle. “Renni the Rescuer,” about mother, yet the movie seems less anti- death, where starvation, competition,
a German shepherd trained as a com- hunting than simply anti-human. The and predation are the norm.
bat animal, features a carrier pigeon trau- implicit moral is not so much that kill- That motive did not make Salten go
matized by its wartime service. And then, ing animals is wicked as that people are easy on human beings. On the contrary:
of course, there is “Bambi”—which, like wicked and wild animals are innocent. his depiction of our impact on nature
these other stories, was not particularly Some years ago, when the American is considerably more specific and vio-
suitable for children, until Disney bowd- Film Institute compiled a list of the lent than the one in the film, not to
lerized it to fit the bill. fifty greatest movie villains of all time, mention sadder. Consider the moment
it chose for slot No. 20—between Cap- when Bambi, fleeing the hunting party
f you haven’t seen the Disney version tain Bligh, of “Mutiny on the Bounty,” that kills his mother and countless other
I of “Bambi” since you were eight, here
is a quick refresher: The title character
and Mrs. John Iselin, of “The Manchu-
rian Candidate”—the antagonist of
creatures, comes across the wife of Friend
Hare, in a scene that reads like some-
is born one spring to an unnamed mother “Bambi”: “Man.” thing out of “Regeneration,” Pat Bar-
and a distant but magnificently antlered Unsurprisingly, “Bambi” has long been ker’s novel about the First World War:
father. He befriends an enthusiastic young unpopular among hunters, one of whom
rabbit, Thumper; a sweet-tempered sent a telegram to Walt Disney on the “Can you help me a little?” she said. Bambi
looked at her and shuddered. Her hind leg
skunk, Flower; and a female fawn named eve of the film’s release to inform him dangled lifelessly in the snow, dyeing it red
Faline. After the death of his mother the that it is illegal to shoot deer in the spring. and melting it with warm, oozing blood. “Can
following spring, he and Faline fall in Nor is the film a favorite among pro- you help me a little?” she repeated. She spoke
love, but their relationship is tested by a fessional wilderness managers, who now as if she were well and whole, almost as if she
rival deer, by a pack of hunting dogs, and, routinely contend with what they call were happy. “I don’t know what can have hap-
pened to me,” she went on. “There’s really no
finally, by the forest fire. Having tri- “the Bambi complex”: a dangerous de- sense to it, but I just can’t seem to walk. . . .”
umphed over all three, Bambi sires a pair sire to regard nature as benign and wild In the middle of her words she rolled over
of fawns; as the film concludes, the hero, animals as adorable and tame, coupled on her side and died.
like his father before him, is watching with a corresponding resistance to cru-
over his family from a faraway crag. cial forest-management tools such as What purpose are scenes like that
“Bambi” was not particularly success- culling and controlled burns. Even some one serving in this book? Salten main-
ful when it was first released. It was environmentalists object to tained that, despite his
hampered partly by audience turnout, its narrowness of vision— own affinity for hunting,
which was down because of the Second its failure to offer audiences he was trying to dissuade
World War, and partly by audience ex- a model of a healthy rela- others from killing ani-
pectations, since, unlike earlier Disney tionship between people and mals except when it was
productions, it featured no magic and the rest of the natural world. necessary for the health of
no Mickey. In time, though, “Bambi,” But perhaps the most a species or an ecosystem.
which was Walt’s favorite among his vociferous if also the small- (That was less hypocriti-
films, became one of the most popular est group of critics consists cal than it seems; Salten
movies in the history of the industry. In of devotees of Salten, who despised poachers and was
the four decades following its release, it recognize how drastically horrified by the likes of
earned forty-seven million dollars— Disney distorted his source Archduke Franz Ferdi-
more than ten times the haul of “Casa- material. Although the animals in the nand, who boasted of killing five thou-
blanca,” which came out the same year. novel do converse and in some cases be- sand deer and was known to shoot
Perhaps more notably, it also earned a friend one another across species, their them by the score as underlings drove
dominant position in the canon of over-all relations are far from benign. them into his path.) But authors do
American nature tales. In the words of In the course of just two pages, a fox not necessarily get the last word on
the environmental historian Ralph Lutts, tears apart a widely beloved pheasant, the meaning of their work, and plenty
“It is difficult to identify a film, story, a ferret fatally wounds a squirrel, and a of other people believe that “Bambi”
or animal character that has had a greater flock of crows attacks the young son of is no more about animals than “Ani-
influence on our vision of wildlife.” Friend Hare—the gentle, anxious fig- mal Farm” is. Instead, they see in it
what the Nazis did: a reflection of the or if anybody serves Him, He’s good ter, then itemizes all the other animals
anti-Semitism that was on the rise all to him. Wonderfully good!” who serve humankind:
across Europe when Salten wrote it. Every subjugated minority is famil-
iar with figures like Gobo—individu- “The horse, the cow, the sheep, the chick-
ens, many, many of you and your kind are on
s a textual matter, the best evi- als who have assimilated into and be-
A dence for this proposition comes
from two parts of “Bambi” that never
come defenders of the culture of their
subjugators, whether out of craven
His side and worship Him and serve Him.”
“They’re rabble!” snarled the fox, full of a
boundless contempt.
made it onto the screen. The first con- self-interest or because, like Gobo, they
cerns Faline’s twin brother, Gobo, who are sincerely enamored of it and con- It is easy, in light of these scenes, to
was written out of the movie. A frag- vinced that their affection is recipro- see why some people interpret “Bambi”
ile and sickly fawn, Gobo cannot flee cated. Such figures often elicit the dis- as a covert account of the crisis facing
during the hunting rampage that kills dain or the wrath of their peers, and European Jews in the nineteen-twen-
Bambi’s mother and Friend Hare’s Salten leaves little doubt about how he ties—a story about innocent creatures
wife. For several months, he is pre- feels: Bambi “was ashamed of Gobo forced to remain constantly vigilant
sumed dead. Then one day Bambi without knowing why,” and the half- against danger, from would-be betray-
and Faline spot a deer making its way tame deer soon pays the price for his ers within and proto-Brown Shirts with-
across an open meadow with reckless beliefs. One day, ignoring the advice of out. Some of Salten’s biography sup-
nonchalance, as if oblivious to any other animals, Gobo strolls into the ports that reading, starting with the fact
possible peril. meadow even though the scent of hu- that he knew a thing or two about as-
This newcomer turns out to be the mans fills the air. He is confident that similation. “I was not a Jew when I was
grownup Gobo, who, we learn, was res- they won’t harm him, but he is shot in a boy,” he once wrote; raised in a house-
cued by a member of the hunting party, the flank while his love interest looks hold that prized European liberalism,
taken into his home, and nursed back on. As she turns to flee, she sees the and educated in part by pious Catho-
to health. When Gobo returns, the hunter bent over Gobo and hears his lic teachers who praised him for his
other forest animals gather to hear him “wailing death shriek.” knowledge of the catechism, Salten only
describe the kindness of the hunter and One understands why Disney left really began to identify as Jewish in his
his family, the warmth of the dwelling, that part out. So, too, a scene in Salten’s late twenties, when he grew close to
and the meals that were brought to him book where a dog kills a fox, which un- Theodor Herzl, a fellow Austro-Hun-
every day. Most of them think that Go- folds at a horrifyingly leisurely pace. The garian writer and the father of the Zi-
bo’s time among humans has made him fox’s paw is shattered and bleeding, and onist movement. He claimed that it was
dangerously naïve, but he is convinced he knows he will die soon, but he pleads Herzl’s pamphlet “The Jewish State”
that it has made him wiser and more with the dog: “Let me die with my fam- that made Salten, as he wrote, “willing
worldly. “You all think He’s wicked,” ily at least. We’re brothers almost, you to love my Jewishness.”
he tells them. (In Salten’s books, hu- and I.” When that fails, he accuses the If so, that love was, to say the least,
mans are typographically styled the way dog of being a turncoat and a spy. The complicated. On the one hand, Salten
God is: singular and capitalized.) “But dog works himself into a frenzy defend- began writing a weekly column for
He isn’t wicked. If He loves anybody, ing the virtue and the power of his mas- Herzl’s Jewish newspaper, in which he
grew more and more critical of the as-
similationist impulse that had shaped
his childhood; on the other hand, he
wrote it anonymously and refused to
set foot in the newspaper’s offices. In
later years, his increasing willingness
to embrace his Judaism corresponded,
not coincidentally, with the increasing
anti-Semitism in Vienna, which made
it impossible for Jews to forget or deny
their religious background.
In 1925, three years after “Bambi,”
Salten published “New People on An-
cient Soil,” the product of a visit to Pal-
estine and a book-length tribute to his
friend’s dream of a Jewish state. A de-
cade later, his books, together with
countless others by Jewish authors, were
burned by the Nazis, and two years
after that, following Germany’s annex-
ation of Austria, he moved to Switzer-
land. Salten died in Zurich, at the age
of seventy-six, four months after Hit-
ler killed himself.
Does all this make “Bambi” a para- BRIEFLY NOTED
ble about Jewish persecution? The fact
that the Nazis thought so is hardly dis- Free, by Lea Ypi (Norton). This memoir of growing up amid
positive—fascist regimes are not known Albania’s transition to a democracy is bounded by two rev-
for their sophisticated literary criti- olutions: the violent uprisings against the Communist regime
cism—and, for every passage that sup- in 1990, and those that took place seven years later, against
ports such a reading, numerous others the depredations of the economic “shock therapy” that fol-
complicate or contradict it. Many crit- lowed its collapse. Ypi, who was twelve at the time of the first
ics see in “Bambi” different or more dif- protests, writes with compassion and dry humor of the dis-
fuse political sentiments, from a gen- mantling of the world view—in which socialism meant that
eralized opposition to totalitarianism “everyone was already free”—that she internalized in grade
to a post-First World War commen- school. As the reductive tenets of proletarian struggle give
tary on the brutality of modern com- way to the equally facile doctrines of capitalism and privat-
bat. All these readings are plausible, in- ization, she finds the latter, which has devastated Albania’s
cluding the specifically Jewish one and economy, to be deeply flawed. She ultimately launches a search
Salten’s own interpretation of his work for a new definition of “freedom” that would tame “the vio-
as a plea for greater understanding of lence of the state” in all its forms.
and greater care for the natural world.
Yet the most striking and consistent The Urge, by Carl Erik Fisher (Penguin Press). Addiction is var-
message of the book is neither obliquely iously described as a brain disease, a personal demon, and an
political nor urgently ecological; it is epidemic. This compelling history holds that it is simply “part
simply, grimly existential. of humanity.” Fisher, an addiction physician and a recovering
addict, illustrates the “terrifying breakdown of reason” that ac-
hatever else “Bambi” may be, it companies the condition by drawing on patients’ anecdotes and
W is, at heart, a coming-of-age
story, cervine kin to “Oliver Twist,” “Lit-
on his own experience. He also highlights the ways in which
stigmas—such as the “firewater” myth, which held that Native
tle Women,” and “Giovanni’s Room.” Americans were uniquely vulnerable to alcohol addiction—
In the language in which it was writ- have provided “ideological cover” for policing certain groups.
ten, however, it is often described not
as a bildungsroman—a general novel It’s Getting Dark, by Peter Stamm, translated from the German
of maturation—but more specifically by Michael Hofmann (Other Press). The characters in this ab-
as an Erziehungsroman: a novel of ed- sorbing story collection are bound by loss—of love, of for-
ucation and training. tune, of the lives they once had, or the ones they’ve missed
The agent of that education is a char- out on. In one tale, a man discovers a flirtatious e-mail on his
acter known as the old Prince, the old- girlfriend’s computer and, assuming the interlocutor’s name,
est surviving stag in the forest, and the carries on a written affair with her. In another, a model imag-
lessons he imparts are not subtle. When ines switching places with a sculpture of herself, situated in
he first encounters Bambi, the latter is the home of a well-to-do businessman. Though moody, the
still a fawn, dismayed because his mother collection is tinged with hope, as when a tarot-card reader
has lately grown distant—pushing him tells a woman, “I can see how everything will end. What I
away when he tries to nurse, and walk- can’t see is what we make of it, what we’ll look back on. And
ing off without caring whether he is that’s what happiness is.”
following. Thus rebuffed, he is by him-
self in the middle of the forest bleating In Case of Emergency, by Mahsa Mohebali, translated from
for her when the old Prince appears and the Farsi by Mariam Rahmani (Feminist Press). This novel,
scolds him. “Your mother has no time published in Iran in 2008, takes place in Tehran in the course
for you now,” the old Prince says. “Can’t of a day when the city has been flung into chaos by a series of
you stay by yourself ? Shame on you!” earthquakes. Shadi, the young, disaffected narrator, is less con-
That, in two sentences, is the ulti- cerned with the disaster than she is with locating her next
mate message of “Bambi”: anything opium fix. Rather than flee the city with her family, she spends
short of extreme self-reliance is shame- the day traversing it, getting high with various misfit friends
ful; interdependence is unseemly, re- and making observations about Tehrani society with her acer-
strictive, and dangerous. “Of all his bic wit. Her sardonic commentary is interspersed with sensual
teachings,” Salten writes, “this had been descriptions of her highs, and of the periodic quakes roiling
the most important: you must live alone. the ground beneath her. “I wish I could sink, pour into the
If you wanted to preserve yourself, if earth and dance with her,” she declares. “Let the tremors crawl
you understood existence, if you wanted through my body. I don’t want them to stop.”
to attain wisdom, you had to live alone.” he realizes while contemplating the sionate yet objective lens, using an in-
This is not “The Lorax” or “Maus.” dead man, “over us and over Him.” The novative writing technique that few
This is “The Fountainhead,” with fawns. old Prince, satisfied that his work is writers have ever been able to achieve”),
Most panegyrics to the solitary life done, goes off to die. and the Chambers translation, from
written by men have an element of mi- This vague gesture in the direction which I have quoted here, is much the
sogyny in them, and “Bambi” is no ex- of deism has no antecedent in the book, better one.
ception. Seemingly brave and vivacious no moral or theological trajectory to In both versions, the “Bambi” that
in her youth, Faline grows up to be make Bambi’s insight meaningful or emerges is a complex work, part na-
timid and lachrymose; she “shrieked satisfying. On the contrary, the book is ture writing, part allegory, part auto-
and shrieked,” she “bleated,” she is “the at its best when it revels in rather than biography. What makes it such a star-
hysterical Faline.” When she and Bambi pretends to resolve the mystery of ex- tling source for a beloved children’s
are (for lack of a better word) dating, istence. At one point, Bambi passes by classic is ultimately not its violence or
the old Prince teaches Bambi to ignore some midges who are discussing a June its sadness but its bleakness. Perhaps
her calls, lest they come from a hunter bug. “How long will he live?” the young the most telling exchange in the book
imitating the sound. Like Gobo, the ones ask. “Forever, almost,” their elders occurs, during that difficult winter, be-
romance between the childhood friends answer. “They see the sun thirty or forty tween Bambi’s mother and his aunt.
is doomed by the logic of the book. “Do times.” Elsewhere, a brief chapter re- “It’s hard to believe that it will ever be
you love me still?” Faline asks one day, cords the final conversation of a pair of better,” his mother says. His aunt re-
to which Bambi replies, “I don’t know.” oak leaves clinging to a branch at the sponds, “It’s hard to believe that it was
She walks away, and “all at once, his end of autumn. They gripe about the ever any better.”
spirit felt freer than for a long time.” wind and the cold, mourn their fallen It’s tempting to read those lines, too,
All other relationships with the female peers, and try to understand what is as a commentary on the Jewish condi-
of the species have a similarly short life about to happen to them. “Why must tion, if only because—to this Jew’s ears,
span; fatherly love is enduring and en- we fall?” one asks. The other doesn’t at least—they have the feel of classic
nobling, motherly love juvenile and em- know, but has questions of its own: “Do Jewish dark humor: realistic, linguisti-
barrassing. “Bambi” ends with its hero we feel anything, do we know anything cally dexterous, and grim. Yet no one
importuning two fawns, just as the old about ourselves when we’re down there?” alive today can regard such a sentiment
Prince had importuned him, to learn The conversation tacks back and forth as exclusive to any subgroup. It is sim-
to live alone. from the intimate to the existential. ply a way of seeing the world, one that
The curious thing about this insis- The two leaves worry about which of can be produced by circumstance, tem-
tence on solitude is that nothing in the them will fall first; one of them, gone perament, or, as in Salten’s case, both.
book makes it seem appealing. The “yellow and ugly,” reassures the other Reading him, one suspects that the con-
chief trajectory of Bambi’s life is not that it has barely changed at all. The ventional interpretation of his most fa-
from innocence to wisdom; it is from response, just before the inevitable end, mous work is backward. “Bambi” is not
contentment and companionship—in is startlingly moving: “You’ve always a parable about the plight of the Jews,
his youth, he cavorts with Gobo and been so kind to me. I’m just beginning but Salten sometimes regards the plight
Faline, with magpies and Friend Hare, to understand how kind you are.” That of the Jews as a parable about the human
with screech owls and squirrels—to iso- is the opposite of a paean to individu- condition. The omnipresence and in-
lation and bare-bones survival. Stranger alism: a belated but tender recognition evitability of danger, the need to act for
still, this valorization of loneliness seems of how much we mean to one another. oneself and seize control of one’s fate,
unrelated to the book’s second explicit the threat posed by intimates and strang-
moral, which concerns the relationship hat are we to make of this muddy, ers alike: this is Salten’s assessment of
between human beings and other ani-
mals. In the final pages, the old Prince
W many-minded story? Zipes, in
his introduction, blames some of the
our existence.
One of the forgotten novelist’s most
takes Bambi, himself now old and be- confusion on Chambers, contending forgotten novels, “Friends from All
ginning to gray, to see something in the that he mistranslated Salten, flattening Over the World,” is set in a zoo that
woods: a dead man, shot and killed by both the political and the metaphysi- is maintained by an enlightened and
another hunter. (Amazingly, Walt Dis- cal dimensions of the work and paving humane zookeeper yet remains, intrin-
ney planned to include this scene in his the way for Disney to turn it into a chil- sically, a place of suffering and cruelty.
film, excising it only after the sight of dren’s story. But that claim is borne out The animals within it, Salten writes,
the corpse made an entire test audience neither by examples in the introduction “are all sentenced to life imprisonment
leap out of their seats.) With the old nor by a comparison of the two En- and are all innocent.” That is a lovely
Prince’s prompting, Bambi concludes glish versions, which differ mainly on line, and one that seems to apply, in
from this experience not that we hu- aesthetic grounds. Zipes is knowledge- his moral universe, to all of us. In the
mans are a danger even unto one an- able about his subject matter, but he is forest—that is, in a state of nature—
other but, rather, that other animals not a lucid thinker or a gifted writer (a we are in constant danger; in society,
are foolish for imagining that we are representative sentence from the intro- tended and cared for but fundamen-
gods merely because we are powerful. duction: “Salten was able to capture this tally compromised, we are still not out
“There is Another who is over us all,” existential quandary through a compas- of the woods. 
for. “A Raisin in the Sun” was the first
BOOKS play written by a Black woman to ap-
pear on Broadway—in 1959, when
RADICAL ACTS
Hansberry was twenty-eight. It was an
instant hit, and Hansberry’s age, race,
and gender made her an emblem of
The many lives of Lorraine Hansberry. American progress. “Raisin” follows
the rise and fall and rise again of the
BY BLAIR McCLENDON Youngers, a Black mid-century family
trying to turn its loss into a legacy. Wal-
ter Younger, Sr., has died, and the pay-
out from his life-insurance policy prom-
ises to transform his family: five people
across three generations squeezed into
a kitchenette on Chicago’s South Side.
Walter’s widow, Lena, uses part of the
windfall for a down payment on a home
in a white neighborhood. Against her
better judgment, she entrusts another
part to Walter Younger, Jr., to open up
a liquor store, instructing him to set
aside enough for his sister Beneatha’s
medical-school education.
It is very nearly a tragedy. Walter
believes so deeply in the American
Dream that he cannot see the traps laid
in his path. His business partners swin-
dle him, and he loses everything. He
is offered a devil’s bargain to gain a
small portion of it back: a white man
from the Youngers’ new neighborhood
offers to pay them to relinquish their
house. Things can be set right if they
will give in. But Walter, who has con-
sidered his whole life a failure, refuses
to say “yes, sir” yet again. The curtain
closes as the family prepares to move
With “A Raisin in the Sun,” Hansberry became an emblem of American progress. into their new home.
On its surface, “Raisin” was the per-
t is a lonely, wild, and often fatal thing When I first encountered “A Raisin fect play for its time. The Youngers are
I to be Black and brook no compro-
mise. Lorraine Hansberry was rigorous
in the Sun,” I treated the play with sus-
picion. I was in high school, and thought
dignified, working-class folk, hemmed
in by injustice, demanding nothing more
and unyielding in her life, but she was that any Black writer who received such than their fair share of the national
gone too soon and claimed too quickly universal praise must have, in some way, bounty. For liberal white audiences, the
by those who thought they understood sold out. I followed Hansberry’s pro- play suggested an uplifting moral about
her. Like many other Black giants of her tagonist, Walter Younger, Jr., as he con- universal humanity. For liberal Black
time, her image proved pliable in death. fronted the future, “a big, looming blank audiences, it was consistent with the
She was turned into a saint so that her space—full of nothing.” I watched him messaging of the civil-rights movement.
life could be turned into a moral. Yet she try to fill that space, begging and plot- But Hansberry was more radical than
struggled beneath the weight of her own ting and raging and falling into the abyss her broad appeal would suggest. This
complexities and sorrows. She achieved of deferred dreams that still swallows was the same playwright who would
literary celebrity but called herself a “lit- people whole. Despite my best efforts, later insist that it was quite reasonable
erary failure,” was supported in a mar- I was moved. Perhaps I had succumbed; for Black people to “take to the hills if
riage that ultimately collapsed, resisted perhaps I would sell out, too. necessary with some guns and fight
DAVID ATTIE / GETTY
her family but didn’t denounce it, be- But I had misread Hansberry. She back.” As Charles J. Shields writes in
came an icon of the civil-rights move- knew all about Black success in Amer- his new biography, “Lorraine Hans-
ment that she relentlessly criticized, and ica—its rewards, its costs, its limits— berry: The Life Behind ‘A Raisin in the
wrote a masterpiece only to watch as it and her vision of it was murkier and Sun’” (Knopf ), Hansberry’s ex-husband
was widely misunderstood. more unsettling than she is given credit and longtime collaborator “wept with
disappointment” over the early reviews. “king of kitchenettes,” a businessman Freedom, the Harlem-based leftist
They struck him, Shields explains, as who spotted an opportunity in Chica- newspaper run by Paul Robeson, and
“too mild, and none of the themes or go’s rapidly growing Black population. was immediately thrust into the city’s
ideas were touched on about Black fam- Urban housing was scarce, in part be- political ferment. The names that crop
ily life, the stresses of poverty, the con- cause white landlords refused to rent up in Shields’s biography—Robeson,
flict of the generations—nothing.” apartments to Black families. Carl, Julian Mayfield, W. E. B. Du Bois,
In recent years, the puzzling paradox through a few intermediaries, set about Alice Childress, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis,
of how a Black lesbian Communist be- “blockbusting”—getting white families Claudia Jones (Hansberry’s erstwhile
came a darling of mainstream America to sell cheaply by moving Black resi- roommate)—read like a Who’s Who of
has been explored in mul- dents into their neighbor- the postwar Black intelligentsia, which
tiple biographies, includ- hoods. He’d buy a building, is to say, it reads like a list of F.B.I. sur-
ing Imani Perry’s “Looking then erect flimsy, flamma- veillance targets.
for Lorraine” and Soy- ble partitions dividing the Whether she knew it or not, Hans-
ica Diggs Colbert’s “Rad- apartments into cramped berry was already one of them. She had
ical Vision,” and in Tracy kitchenettes—like the one been identified by an F.B.I. informant
Heather Strain’s documen- that the Youngers yearn to at a meeting of a leftist college group;
tary “Sighted Eyes/Feeling escape. “When a decent by the time she died, in 1965, the Bu-
Heart.” Shields’s portrait is return on rental property reau’s file on her was a thousand pages
the latest attempt to expand was 6 percent, Hansberry long. In 1952, when Robeson was un-
our sense of the personal was making 40,” Shields able to attend an international peace
struggle behind the public writes. This unseemly fact conference in Uruguay—the State De-
figure, and to illuminate the many con- has been glossed over by some biogra- partment had cancelled his passport—
tradictions that she sought to live and phers, who have described Carl Hans- Hansberry went in his place. She wrote
work through. berry as an entrepreneur. The complaints an article describing the trip, in which
from his renters make clear that “slum- she referred to the Korean War as “the
ansberry was not raised to be a lord” is a more accurate description. murder in Korea” and denounced U.S.
H radical. She was born in Chicago
in 1930, the child of an illustrious fam-
For Lorraine, being the daughter of
a kitchenette king was a problem from
domination of Latin American econo-
mies. If she wasn’t yet a revolutionary,
ily that was well regarded in business the start. Shields describes her being she was certainly talking like one.
and academic circles. Lorraine’s father, sent to kindergarten in an expensive But Freedom was falling apart. As
Carl Augustus Hansberry, was a real- white ermine coat, then shoved to the the civil-rights movement shunned
estate speculator and a proud race man. ground by her classmates, leaving the many of the leftists with whom it
When Lorraine was seven years old, the fur stained. As she grew up, she drifted had once made common cause, fault
family bought a house in a mostly white away from the politics of her parents, lines among Black activists became
neighborhood. Faced with eviction by who remained committed Republicans unbridgeable divides. The vice-presi-
the local property owners association, even as most Black voters were shifting dent of the New York chapter of the
Carl fought against racially restrictive their party allegiance; at the University N.A.A.C.P., buckling under anti-Com-
housing covenants in court. Shortly be- of Wisconsin, she began campaigning munist pressure, shouted down Robe-
fore the case was argued, a crowd of for Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party. son during a panel on helping Black
white neighbors gathered outside the After the police turned up at a local people find jobs in radio and televi-
Hansberry home. Nannie, Lorraine’s protest that Hansberry attended, her sion. Many prominent intellectuals
mother, stood watch with a gun. Some- parents forbade her to continue sup- disavowed their old allegiances, but
one hurled a brick through the window, porting the insurgent candidate. “I am Hansberry, whose fealty to the Com-
narrowly missing Lorraine’s head. When quite sick about it,” she wrote to a close munist cause endured, later called the
the police finally arrived, one officer re- friend. “They are afraid Little Lorraine N.A.A.C.P. “outmoded.”
marked, “Some people throw a rock will call up one night from the police Through her political circles, Hans-
through your window and you act like station and ask for her pajamas.” She berry had met Robert Nemiroff, the son
it was a bomb.” It was 1937. The bomb- kept volunteering for Wallace. of Russian Jewish immigrants, and the
ing of Black families would come. Hansberry also got involved in stu- two became a couple. Hansberry called
Carl Hansberry’s fight wound up be- dent theatre, and her nascent political him, with a certain fondness, a “wide-
fore the Supreme Court, where he won and artistic aspirations fed off each eyed, immature, unsophisticated revo-
his suit; Lorraine, perhaps, learned some- other. In another letter, she wrote, “One lutionary.” On the eve of their wedding,
thing about the need to stay and fight either writes, paints, composes or in 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were
for what you deserve. Or at least that’s otherwise engages in creative enter- executed. The fiancés slipped out of a
the neatest version of the story. Shields’s prises . . . on behalf of humanity—or party at the Hansberry family home to
biography lays out a more complex nar- against humanity.” Never a strong stu- attend a candlelight vigil. In an unpub-
rative of political inheritance. Carl was dent, Hansberry left school during her lished short story based on the event,
not just a warrior against housing seg- sophomore year and moved to New Hansberry evoked her outrage that night,
regation. He was also, Shields says, the York. She took a job as an assistant at a “desire to fling the glass into the flow-
ers, to thrust one’s arms into the air and Communist, she had been forced to de- sage, she writes, “Outside it is already
run out of the house screaming at one’s cide “which of the closets was most im- deep autumn again and I am twenty-six
countrymen to come down out of the portant to her.” and somehow there are leaves, the brown,
apartments.” In college, Hansberry had It is hardly surprising, then, to en- unhappy, useless ones on the sidewalks
said that artists had to be for or against counter Hansberry writing to Nemiroff, of the streets outside—even though
humanity.The narrator of her story looks in 1956, that she was “terribly lonely, al- there are no trees. . . . If such emptiness
at the moral disaster and wonders, most to the point of madness.” Adding only had a shape.” The anguish gener-
“What shall I say to my children?” to her despair was the torture of writ- ated by her torpor calls ahead to the fear
ing. In her early twenties, she had fin- of a big nothing that threatens to con-
ansberry and Nemiroff shared po- ished several plays and staged readings sume Walter Younger, Jr.
H litical commitments, but “desire”
in a deeper sense was missing from their
with her friends, but she considered the
work inadequate. In a letter, Nemiroff
Only two years before “Raisin” opened,
Lorraine gathered all her material for
marriage. Hansberry wrote to her hus- wrote, “You are so obviously grappling the play in the fireplace and prepared to
band obliquely about her attraction to with yourself, uncertain, unresolved burn it. Nemiroff took the pages away.
women: “I want one or two things which about many things.” What she needed A few days later, he put the script in
you simply cannot give.” In letters, she was “a little more self-confidence; a lit- front of her and she went back to work.
seems torn between her radicalism and tle more self-honesty and self-criticism.”
the social conservatism of her upbring- He continued to champion her after uccess tends to make itself seem in-
ing. Intellectually, she had reservations
about marriage—“I know, for instance,
their marriage ended, managing her ca-
reer and prodding her to write through
S evitable, but at every stage “A Rai-
sin in the Sun” was an unlikely prospect.
that one does not go on loving people bouts of depression. The initial producers were record-label
because one says meaningless vows”— In her journals, Hansberry described owners who knew little about develop-
but she struggled to see the alternative: an ordinary day in the fall of 1956: she ing a Broadway show. Fund-raising
“What then? Promiscuity? Revolting.” thawed a chicken for dinner; a “very stalled, and there were disputes over
The internal conflict between Lor- dull” friend came over; she “smoked cig- who should direct. In January, 1959, after
raine the Village radical and Lorraine arettes and longed to be quite dead.” stops and starts, the play premièred in
the daughter of the Chicago bourgeoi- She was unmoored, unable to finish her New Haven, with Sidney Poitier starring
sie would become a familiar and pain- play. In a beautiful and harrowing pas- as Walter Younger, Jr. On March 11th,
ful one. She believed that homophobia
was a “philosophically active anti-
feminist dogma.” She subscribed to The
Ladder, the “first national lesbian pub-
lication,” and when it ran a piece about
“how lesbians should dress and act” she
dashed off a characteristically emphatic
letter to the editor. As a child of the
Black élite, she wrote, she had been
taught how to dress and act for the “dom-
inant social group.” It had not changed
which hotels would deny her entrance,
or stopped the cops from sneering at
her mother when a brick shattered her
window. Appeasement, Hansberry be-
lieved, wouldn’t get you very far. Her
demand was freedom, nothing less.
But living freely could be nearly im-
possible. Even when Hansberry’s mar-
riage began to dissolve and she started
dating women, she and Nemiroff con-
tinued living together. (They would di-
vorce a year before her death.) Her sex-
uality was well known in the Village,
where she could be seen driving a con-
vertible with a girlfriend, but it was never
a public matter in her lifetime. When
“A Raisin in the Sun” made her a ce-
lebrity, the editors of The Ladder tried
to persuade her to come out publicly. “And this is the part that will never let you forget the
Hansberry said that, as a Black lesbian time you called your third-grade teacher ‘Mom.’”
as a moral triumph is too complex, too
enmeshed in the compromises of Amer-
ican life to be so easily summed up.
Reducing “Raisin” to the standoff be-
tween the Youngers and their bigoted
neighbors ignores the play’s clashes
within its Black world—between gen-
ders, generations, and classes. The class
conflict is perhaps best captured by Wal-
ter’s sister, Beneatha, and her rich suitor,
George Murchison, whom she insists
she’ll never marry. The Murchisons, she
explains, are “honest-to-God-real-live-
rich colored people, and the only peo-
ple in the world who are more snobbish
than rich white people are rich colored
people.” When her mother admonishes
her not to hate the rich for being rich,
Beneatha responds that plenty of peo-
ple hate the poor for being poor.
Hansberry admitted that her fam-
ily was more like the Murchisons than
the Youngers. When “Raisin” premièred
in Chicago, what should have been a
momentous homecoming turned into
a fiasco. The city had doggedly pursued
the Hansberry company over unpaid
“If you cried a little during the week, maybe you fines and the poor living conditions at
wouldn’t have to scream at the game all weekend.” its properties, issuing arrest warrants
for all proprietors of the business, in-
cluding Lorraine. On opening night,
• • she had to flee Chicago—shadowed by
the very class divide that her play so
it opened at the Ethel Barrymore The- act, was easy to rally around. One critic sharply portrays.
atre, in New York. applauded the show for displaying Black Shields holds up this apparent con-
“Raisin” is a naturalist drama, sliding people’s ability to “come up with a song tradiction as proof of Hansberry’s in-
coolly between despair and hope, often and hum their troubles away.” It no doubt consistency. How, he wonders, could she
by way of bitter jokes. In the opening helped that all the Youngers want is to endorse “economic justice for Black
act, when the life-insurance check ar- own a business and a home. Walter is Americans that would give them access
rives, Walter, Jr.,’s wife, Ruth, tells Lena not staging a sit-in, staring down the po- to better opportunities and a standard
that she ought to go to Europe. After lice, or seizing the means of production. of living consistent with the pursuit of
all, she points out, “rich white women . . . He wants to get rich. He wants to own happiness” and also oppose capitalism,
don’t think nothing of packing up property. And who out there beyond the which had made her family—and then
they suitcases and piling on one of them stage lights didn’t? her—rich? “She never seemed to under-
big steamships and—swoosh!—they For starters, Black radicals even stand the complex ways aspiration, de-
gone, child.” Lena simply laughs: “Some- younger than Hansberry. Amiri Baraka mocracy, and an advanced market econ-
thing always told me I wasn’t no rich later recalled thinking that the play was omy can go hand in hand,” Shields writes.
white woman.” It’s a funny retort, but “middle class”; the Youngers’ fixation But this was exactly what Hansberry
Hansberry lets the meaning hang in the on “moving into white folks’ neighbor- did understand. Walter, Jr., is sick with
air. Her entire play revolves around that hoods” looked like an endorsement of aspiration and capitalism, and all that
“something”—the forces that withhold an assimilationist agenda. But this was democracy talk flitting around the coun-
simple dignity from Black Americans. never Hansberry’s intent. Of the critic try isn’t helping him get well. “Raisin”
For some critics, the play was a tri- who understood her characters to be punctures the American Dream, but
umphant story of overcoming these carefree, she wrote, in the Village Voice, takes seriously the question of why it
forces. In the final scene, Lena says “It did not disturb the writer that there has such power in the first place. Lena
proudly, of her son, “He finally come into is no such implication in the entire puts it starkly:
his manhood, today, didn’t he?”The seem- three acts.” Hansberry’s play is a mas- LENA: Son—how come you talk so much
ingly happy ending, which some audi- terpiece because it pushes ideas until ’bout money?
ences considered a quasi-revolutionary they mutate; what might read at first WALTER: Because it is life, Mama!

LENA: So now it’s life. Money is life. Once protégé to “presume no commitment,
upon a time freedom used to be life—now it’s disavow all engagement, mock all great
money. I guess the world really do change . . . expectations”—a succinct summary of
WALTER: No—it was always money, Mama.
We just didn’t know about it. the kind of writing that Hansberry de-
spised. The play opened to unenthusi-
Absent a political education, Walter astic reviews. One, Shields notes, deemed
demands the best thing he can imagine, it “an unresolved chaos of liberalistic po-
which is the right to be a boss. Who can litical and sexual ideas.”
say that he is wrong? Money is life. Peo- Through it all, Hansberry was sick
ple die for a lack of it every day. Yet and getting sicker. She had ulcers, ane-
Hansberry puts the line into the mouth mia, and calcium deposits. She visited
of a man descended from people who doctors and underwent exploratory sur-
were made into capital. Money is life has gery. The truth was that she had pancre-
historically been a reality too literal to atic cancer, but she was never told;
bear. Walter thinks that he’s taking a Nemiroff concluded that it would be bet-
step up, but listen closely and it sounds ter if she didn’t know how dire the state
like he’s giving in to a darker idea. Hans- of her health was. Their friends took up
berry knew that dreams like Walter’s a collection while she was in the hospi-
were lodged deep in the breasts of their tal, not to pay for her care but to keep
dreamers. What she doubted was “Sidney Brustein” running. The play
whether they were worth it. She had al- closed on January 12, 1965, the night Hans-
ways had what the Youngers wanted. It berry died. She was thirty-four years old.
did not keep the despair at bay, nor had In a speech a few weeks before “Raisin”
it set the world free. débuted in New York, Hansberry said it
Hansberry had been intoxicated by was a Black writer’s duty to join “the
the idea of public renown long before wars against one’s time and culture.” One
she achieved it. When she was twenty- can barely imagine what she would have
five, she wrote, “Fame. It has become a achieved had she been able to stay in the
sweet promise, hiding, whispering to me wars longer, through the terrible, aston-
daily. . . . I shock myself with such thought ishing years that followed. Instead, she
and shake my head with embarrass- was drafted into the culture in ways that
ment—fame!” “Raisin” depends on the likely would have discomfited her. She
tension produced by such a shock. It ad- became a star—bright but distant.
mits a fact denied by people of many Years ago, in my first Brooklyn apart-
races and politics: what a particular Black ment, I cut out of a magazine a photo-
person wants may not always be conso- graph of Hansberry and taped it to my
nant with freedom. American history wall. In the picture, she is twenty-nine
has placed such weight on the meaning or thirty, her hair high and tousled. A
of those wants that it can be hard to look cigarette hangs between her fingers. Her
at them straight on. Hansberry didn’t eyes are fiery, focussed just beyond the
turn away. frame. Her mouth is open, but her jaw
is set. She appears like a dream of this
fter “Raisin,” writing was still a city: a writer in pitched combat over
A struggle; depression was still sti-
fling. Even as the play received wide-
ideas. Many of us have tried to look like
this and failed.
spread acclaim—or perhaps precisely be- This vision, of course, doesn’t capture
cause it did—Hansberry considered it her in full. Her passion could be coun-
dramatically flawed. When adapting it tered by inhibition, her tenacity by trep-
for the screen, she set about trying to idation. The year before she died, she
make improvements, adding new scenes questioned whether her success had made
with more obviously political material. her too comfortable. She worried about
They never made it into the film. having “sold my soul.” All her pretty
Her next play—she didn’t know it words paled in comparison with what
would be her last—was “The Sign in was being done at lunch counters, on
Sidney Brustein’s Window,” about Vil- buses, and in streets around the coun-
lage intellectuals whose artistic careers try. In her journal, she made a note: “I
are floundering and whose love lives are think when I get my health back I shall
a mess. In the opening scene, Sidney, a go into the South to find out what kind
pretentious newspaper editor, advises a of revolutionary I am.” 
Besides sharing Steinbeck’s political
POP MUSIC radicalism, Mellencamp also possesses
his instinctive knowledge of just how
LIFE GOES ON
desolate even the sweetest life can feel.
“All great and precious things are lonely,”
Steinbeck wrote in “East of Eden,” from
John Mellencamp finds inspiration in aging. 1952. “Sometimes love don’t feel like it
should,” Mellencamp sang on the sin-
BY AMANDA PETRUSICH gle “Hurts So Good,” from 1982. Mel-
lencamp turned seventy in October, and
this month he is releasing “Strictly a
One-Eyed Jack,” his twenty-fifth album.
“Wasted Days,” the first single, a duet
with Bruce Springsteen, is about the
despair of aging. “How can a man watch
his life go down the drain?/ How many
moments has he lost today?” Mellen-
camp rasps. “And who among us could
ever see clear? /The end is coming, it’s
almost here,” Springsteen adds. Mel-
lencamp’s voice is shredded from de-
cades of cigarettes—it remains an illicit
delight to watch him smoke hungrily
throughout an entire 2015 appearance
on the “Late Show with David Letter-
man”—and his face has turned long and
craggy under his trademark pompadour.
Mellencamp sounds like he’s work-
ing through a season of mortal reckoning,
though, to be fair, he has been lament-
ing impermanence since his youth. On
“Jack & Diane,” another single from
1982, he sang, “Oh yeah, they say life
goes on / Long after the thrill of living
is gone.” “Strictly a One-Eyed Jack” is
lumbering, bleak, and engrossing. Mel-
lencamp’s voice, once booming and rau-
cous, is now softer, but never gentle.
(Vocally, he has landed somewhere be-
tween late-career Bob Dylan and early-
n 2012, the singer and songwriter John rooted in fantasy: men gazing wistfully career Tom Waits.) He is frequently
I Mellencamp was given the John
Steinbeck Award, presented annually
out the windows of vintage pickup
trucks, watching dust blow by, listening
accompanied by acoustic guitar. Age
seems to have given Mellencamp li-
to an artist, thinker, activist, or writer to some parched and distant radio sta- cense to gripe; he is a poet of ennui,
whose work exemplifies, among other tion. The image of such “real,” non- which makes him an apt mouthpiece
virtues, Steinbeck’s “belief in the dig- coastal Americans has become a useful for a moment when it is sometimes dif-
nity of people who by circumstance are cudgel for conservatives looking to de- ficult to feel optimistic.
pushed to the fringes.” The grace of the pict their opponents as élitist buffoons; These days, Mellencamp doesn’t care
marginalized is a long-standing theme Mellencamp finds this grotesque. “Let’s about appearing likable, grateful, or
of Mellencamp’s writing. The musician, address the ‘voice of the heartland’ thing,” good-natured. “I come across alone and
who comes from Indiana and began re- he told Paul Rees, whose satisfying bi- silent / I come across dirty and mean,”
leasing records in the late nineteen- ography, “Mellencamp,” came out last he admits on “I Am a Man That Wor-
seventies, is known as a populist sooth- year. “Indiana is a red state. And you’re ries.” He delivers each line with the
sayer, an irascible and unpretentious looking at the most liberal motherfucker steadfast confidence of a guy who has
spokesman for hardworking, rural-born you know. I am for the total overthrow witnessed a lot of ugliness and won’t
folks. Yet Mellencamp has also bristled of the capitalist system. Let’s get all pretend otherwise. As he told Rees, “I’ve
at this characterization, which is largely those motherfuckers out of here.” been right to the top and there ain’t
nothing up there worth having.” This
Mellencamp is a poet of ennui, making him an apt mouthpiece for our moment. sort of honesty—unconcerned with
70 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE CUSHMAN
commercial striving; a pure repudiation it’s stolen. The genre’s best songs un-
of the filtered and staged—is rare. It fold like short stories, with opening lines
buoys these songs and gives them heart. that tremble with foreboding. Lucinda
Caring for
©2020 KENDAL
Williams begins “The Night’s Too
ellencamp was born in 1951, in Long,” from 1988, “Sylvia was workin’ as
M Seymour, Indiana, with spina bi- a waitress in Beaumont / She said, ‘I’m the earth.
fida, a neural-tube defect in which the movin’ away, I’m gonna get what I want.’” Discover a retirement community with
spine and the spinal cord don’t develop On Mellencamp’s “Small Town,” from an emphasis on sustainability where
properly. In the fifties, spina bifida was 1985, he offers, “Well, I was born in a the pure beauty of nature is nurtured.
often terminal. It was standard practice small town / And I live in a small
to wait six months or longer to operate town / Probably die in a small town.”
on infants with the condition, but, be- Sometimes there are hints of redemp- 1.800.548.9469 EQUAL HOUSING
OPPORTUNITY
cause so many babies were dying before tion in the choruses. Often there aren’t. kao.kendal.org/environment
then, a pioneering surgeon performed Throughout the years, Mellencamp’s
the procedure on Mellencamp right advocacy for the neglected began to
away. Incredibly, he survived. Rees’s book focus on American farmers. In 1985, he, A DVERTI SE MENT
suggests that this early miracle gave the Willie Nelson, and Neil Young started
singer preternatural confidence. “Every Farm Aid, a nonprofit that puts on an
WHAT’S THE
day of my life my grandmother told me annual benefit festival to bring atten-
how lucky I was,” Mellencamp recalled tion to the plight of small family farms.
to him. “You get told that enough and
you believe it.”
In 1987, Mellencamp testified before the
Senate in support of the Family Farm
BIG IDEA?
Small space has big rewards.
Mellencamp’s family attended the Act. He said, of frustrated farmers, “It
Church of the Nazarene, a punitive seems funny and peculiar that, after my
Protestant sect that prohibited alcohol shows and after Willie’s shows, people
TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
and tobacco. Even as a youth, Mellen- come up to us for advice. It is because JILLIAN GENET 305.520.5159
camp had a reputation for being petu- they have got nobody to turn to.” (Farm jgenet@zmedia-inc.com
lant and cocksure. By the age of fifteen, Aid operates a hotline that provides
he was singing in a local band called “support services to farm families in cri-
Crepe Soul, six of whose members were sis.”) Mellencamp has also become a
Black. The band’s integration angered serious painter. His portraits suggest
some listeners. “They loved us when we the same preoccupations as his songs,
were onstage,” Mellencamp told Rees. depicting beautiful, sad-eyed figures
“It was when we came off they didn’t rendered in muted, earthy tones. One
like us so much.” Mellencamp learned self-portrait, “Pandemic John,” features
to fight with a blackjack—a strip of Mellencamp looking forlorn and slightly
leather with a piece of steel sewn into peeved. His brow is so furrowed that it Wear our new
it. At eighteen, he married his high- appears topographical. official hat to show
school girlfriend, Priscilla Esterline.
(The two later split, and Mellencamp
“Strictly a One-Eyed Jack” places
Mellencamp in a lineage of artists
your love.
married and divorced twice more; he (Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, even,
has five children.) In 1976, Mellencamp to some extent, Bob Dylan) who have
acquired a manager, who suggested that found new inspiration by reckoning
he change his name to Johnny Cougar. with death. Though rock music has
He did, reluctantly, and signed a deal historically venerated youth (“I hope I
with M.C.A. Records. His début LP, die before I get old,” Roger Daltrey, of
“Chestnut Street Incident,” was a flop, the Who, famously shouted in 1965),
and he lost both the manager and the its relevance has waned a bit in recent
deal. He didn’t become a pop star until years, as hip-hop and its various out-
1982, when he released his fifth album, croppings have ascended. This has per-
“American Fool.” haps left rock and roll available for a
Mellencamp was a champion of so- reclamation. Rebellious teen-agers and
called heartland rock, an earnest, vaguely aging, introspective rock stars share a 100% cotton twill.
melancholy mashup of traditional folk sense of freedom, an understanding of Available in white, navy, and black.
music and fractious, boot-stomping rock what’s possible when responsibilities—
and roll. The sound was marked, lyri- to the marketplace, to polite society—
cally, by concern for the working class melt away. A different kind of disobe-
newyorkerstore.com/hats
and a realist approach to romance: there dience might come with age, but it is
are no guarantees in life, so drive it like no less electrifying. 
Patterson), the lone daughter, underval-
ON TELEVISION ued by Eli because of her gender. Eli, a
poor boy done good, looks upon his bratty
SINNERMEN
adult children, who were weaned on his
prosperity gospel, with exasperation bor-
dering on disgust. This drives his kids to
“The Righteous Gemstones,” on HBO. destructive self-loathing.
“Gemstones” is an ensemble series,
BY DOREEN ST. FÉLIX although it’s Jesse’s egotism that sets off
the action. McBride is an undersung
contributor to the antihero canon; he
seems to understand that buffoons are
America’s true leading men. Jesse, who
is paunchy and dresses like an Elvis im-
personator gone to seed, has an absurdly
perfect life—a lucrative preaching gig; a
hot wife, Amber (Cassidy Freeman); doe-
eyed sons, one of whom is named Pon-
tius—but he doesn’t have Daddy’s ear.
In Season 1, Jesse receives an anonymous
text message that contains a video of him
partying at a prayer convention in At-
lanta, surrounded by topless women and
cocaine. The sender threatens to release
the video unless Jesse forks over a mil-
lion dollars. Because the Gemstones’ ul-
timate currency is reputation, Jesse’s prob-
lem is a problem for the entire family.
Jesse and his siblings meet the black-
mailers, and the confrontation erupts in
a spiral of violence and shenanigans evoc-
ative of a Coen-brothers noir.
As it turns out, Jesse’s estranged el-
dest son, Gideon (Skyler Gisondo), is
one of the blackmailers, as payback for
Jesse’s bad parenting. Gideon had run
off to Los Angeles, where he became a
stunt double, and, in a flashback, we see
Jesse sneer at Gideon’s dreams, claiming
that “people in Los Angeles hate Chris-
as Danny McBride been reading in grievances of race and gender. Both tians.” The line is played for laughs, but
H bell hooks? “The Righteous Gem-
stones,” McBride’s farce about a fam-
were somewhat absent fathers, and so
we weren’t worried about them passing
its meaning is pointed. There’s meaty
culture-war commentary in “Gemstones”
ily of mega-rich megachurch pastors in their angst on to others. In “Gemstones,” about opposing religions and compet-
South Carolina, grapples with the late McBride’s character, Jesse Gemstone, ing entertainers: Jesse’s disdain of Hol-
theorist’s conclusion that “most men is both a father and a son, and, to him, lywood, and, implicitly, the sexy liber-
find it difficult to be patriarchs.” The maintaining the family is a struggle of alism that attends it, betrays his fear of
scope of the conflict is a step up from the highest order. becoming irrelevant in the eyes of his
McBride’s previous HBO comedies, The Gemstones live in mansions on son. Gideon yearns for his father’s at-
which dealt with individual men who a gated compound that reeks of arrested tention, but he’s lukewarm on becom-
were unable to cope with losing their development. Pastor Eli Gemstone ( John ing a preacher, which makes him a threat
authority in narrower settings. As Kenny Goodman) is the widowed patriarch, the to the family order—the trinity of Eli,
Powers, the washed-up baseball star in stoic architect of the family’s Christian Jesse, and Gideon.
“Eastbound & Down,” and Neal Gamby, empire. He has three kids: Jesse, a hedo- Am I making “Gemstones” sound
the hostile educator in “Vice Princi- nist blowhard who’s mulling a takeover; grave? This is a filthy comedy, teeming
pals,” McBride played outrageous and Kelvin (Adam Devine), an earnest youth with rococo insults and grotesque gags;
dark “angry white men,” wallowing minister; and Judy (the incredible Edi we see cocked shotguns, road head, and
a menagerie of floppy pink dicks. One
Shades of Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell color this depiction of televangelism. night, Eli and his brother-in-law, Uncle
72 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY JAMES HEIMER
Baby Billy (the marvellous Walton Gog- corrupted the Gemstones utterly, and muckraker in the form of Jason Schwartz-
gins), face off with a group of saboteurs McBride wants to nudge his wayward man, from the houses of Coppola, An-
at a satellite church—in a shopping creations back to the path. derson, and Coen, which I take as a kind
mall—thwarting them and sending them of symbolic uniting of the modern strains
home completely naked. Later, Judy, he Gemstones are lost sheep: liars, of comic Americana. And then there’s
tired of being overlooked, threatens to
take off, vowing, “I’m gonna move to
T narcissists, victims when it’s advan-
tageous, bullies when it’s not. They’re
Eric Roberts, as Junior, an oily wrestling
promoter come back from Eli’s dark
Malibu Beach, shave my pussy, and learn protagonists always, which is to say, Amer- Memphis past to haunt him. Eli is in an
to surf!” McBride’s stubborn fidelity to icans. But the show makes plain its in- existential funk. But, mostly, family bonds
raunchy humor is a pledge of allegiance, vestment in the promise of salvation, as have been strengthened, although the
in a way, to the lingua franca we’re prone both a storytelling and a theological de- swaggering Lyle Lissons (Eric André),
to turn up our noses at. vice, which is why comparing it to “Suc- a Texas preacher who seduces Jesse into
The series has some blind-item plea- cession,” as people often do, works on backing his Christian resort, Zion’s Land-
sures when it comes to megachurch cul- only the most superficial level. In “Gem- ing, might be a problem later.
ture. Shades of Billy Graham and Jerry stones,” as in a Disney movie, it’s the This season also doubles down on
Falwell color the depiction of celebrity death of a mother that is the catalyst for the source of my biggest gripe: the han-
televangelism, a uniquely American in- the main characters’ dysfunction. In the dling of Kelvin and Judy, who get the
vention. One plot point, involving the first season, we meet, in a flashback to shoddiest character development. The
storage of millions of dollars in the vents the Aquanet eighties, Aimee-Leigh, who show doesn’t know what to do with their
of the Gemstones’ church, presaged a is played by the country singer Jennifer sexualities. Is it because of some kind of
similar real-life event: last month, a Nettles. A cross between Tammy Faye misconceived “respect” for the margin-
plumber found “bags and bags” of money Messner and Marie Osmond, Aimee- alized? Kelvin, a professed virgin, men-
in the walls of Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Leigh was, with her brother, a Christian- tors a reformed beefcake satanist named
Church, seven years after it had reported music child star. As an adult, married to Keefe (Tony Cavalero), who becomes
the theft of six hundred thousand dol- Eli, she’s the rock, grounding the Gem- the leader of Kelvin’s God Squad, a band
lars. But “Gemstones” isn’t primarily stones’ empire in the tenet of (relative) of greased-up Christian muscle boys.
interested in satirizing modern Christi- humility. But the boldness of a McBride The squad veers into John Waters ter-
anity; rather, McBride, not so much a production loses its edge when it comes ritory, which is exciting visually, but the
moralist as a closet sentimentalist, treats to women: the Aimee-Leigh story line “joke,” about the obvious homoerotic
his subject with some affection. Many is cloying. She really is an angel. undertones, needs to evolve. Meanwhile,
have found this approach frustrating. The début-season finale opens with Season 1 showed Judy confronting her
The series premièred in 2019, during the the family at her deathbed. When a bee father about his infantilization, and her
Trump Presidency, and there were crit- zips into the room, everyone freaks out, announcing, “I have tits. I do sex.” Pat-
ics who wished that the characters were making a mess of the medical equip- terson plays Judy with a wild despera-
more straightforwardly sinister. Why ment. Later, Uncle Baby Billy gets a slap- tion; sometimes she wants to resuscitate
wouldn’t McBride come out and con- stick smiting—he sustains a lightning her mother’s genteel femininity, but most
demn these predatory capitalists, who strike to the dome and drops dead—but of the time she wants to mount her hus-
have converted faith into so much per- the bee’s stinging brings him back to life. band, B.J. (Tim Baltz), who is coded as
sonal wealth? Why didn’t Eli move like “Gemstones,” with its deus-ex-machina effete. “Gemstones” is brave, and I want
a dastardly Robert Mitchum-esque huck- ploy, provides a comforting closing salve. it to explore rather than shy away from
ster? The plot endeavors to be more epic Season 2, which premièred this month, all that subtext—which is that straight
than topical. The stories unfold not un- introduces two new obstacles. One is white men are straight white men be-
like New Testament parables. Greed has Thaniel Block, a Ronan Farrow-like cause the rest of us are not. 
THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2022 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST
Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three
finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by E. S. Glenn,
must be received by Sunday, January 23rd. The finalists in the January 3rd & 10th contest appear below.
We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the February 7th 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
“My client is prepared to walk.”

Kenny Moore, Rocklin, Calif.
“He’ll negotiate, but he won’t beg.” “Mind if I read over your shoulder?
Lawrence Wood, Chicago, Ill. I have trouble turning pages.”
Jan Chambers, Chapel Hill, N.C.
“He may be your best friend, but I am his lawyer.”
Tim McNamara, New York City
Scan to shop.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

15 16
THE 17 18
CROSSWORD 19 20
21 22 23 24 25
A lightly challenging puzzle.
26 27 28 29 30 31
BY ANNA SHECHTMAN
32 33 34 35 36
37 38
ACROSS
1 Like vegan meat alternatives
39 40 41
11 Worms, e.g.
15 Change of scenery, professionally 42 43 44
16 Target of some medicated shampoos
17 Set of equipment for a newbie 45 46 47 48
18 Vegetarian frozen-food brand

49 50 51 52 53 54
19 Holds in custody
20 Fashion lines?
55 56 57 58 59
21 Fitting
24 Political org. whose e-mails were made 60 61
public in a 2016 WikiLeaks dump
25 Government org. whose hacking tools 62 63
were made public in a 2017 WikiLeaks
dump
26 Pointed put-down 4 Stereotypical role for Anthony Michael 45 Peacock comedy about a tough H.S.
28 Tangential remark Hall in the eighties science course
32 “Measure for Measure” or “Much Ado 5 French bean? 46 Staple accessory for Jennifer Lopez
About Nothing” role 6 “Less Than Zero” author ___ Easton 50 Meh
34 Masochists’ counterparts Ellis 51 “Just my opinion, but . . . ,” in a text
37 59-Down that captures the sound of 7 Source for talk, traffic, and weather 52 ___ Day (vitamin brand)
“melancholy womanliness,” per the 8 “How thoughtful!” 53 What there are six of in a fl. oz.
composer Christian Schubart 9 Demonstrates 54 Loretta who played Hot Lips Houlihan
38 Chicago school that’s the largest Catholic 10 Some police-dept. employees on “M*A*S*H”
university in the United States
11 Meh 57 Walt Whitman’s “Gliding ___ All”
39 Sports-betting site
12 Co-founder of the Négritude movement 58 Type of audio cable named for an
41 Authentic who wrote “Discourse on Colonialism” electronics brand
42 Twitch broadcaster, e.g. 13 “This isn’t exactly news, but worth 59 See 37-Across
44 H.I.V.-prevention drug signal-boosting anyway,” for short
45 Hawaiian tuna 14 Actress Thompson of “Passing”
Solution to the previous puzzle:
47 ___ King Cole 21 Grading range
48 The “e” of “i.e.” 22 “Carrie” director Brian De ___ F L I M S Y M U S E U M S
R E C I T E D A R M A N I S
49 Collectible disks of the nineties 23 Track lighting?
I M I T A T E M I O C E N E
51 The Stepford wives, e.g. 27 ___ pan (ring-shaped bakeware)
D O N T G I V E M E T H A T
55 U2 front man 28 Emphatic follower of yes or no A N E Y E V A L E T I C
56 Labor that Louise Kapp Howe called 29 Four-time Presidential candidate Ralph Y D S A X E L M E N U
“pink collar” 30 Greg who was the No. 1 pick in the 2007 E S S E N C E O R A N G E
60 Hoppy brews, for short N.B.A. draft L E N I N G R A D
E S P A N A S A C H E T S
61 Unbroken 31 Lift at one end
M Y O B A L B A U P C
62 City that’s home to the Munch Museum 33 Gloomy
T R E E P E E S O N Y A
63 Got off course 35 Makes pitch-perfect? I H A V E G R E A T N E W S
36 Recharged, in a way S A L T I N E T R E E S A P
DOWN 40 Innermost division of a track I N E R T I A S T A T U R E
1 Dell products 41 Bart Simpson catchphrase M A R Y A N N E L O P E R
2 Back muscle, for short 43 “You cannot serve God and ___”: Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
3 Palindromic constellation Matthew 6:24 newyorker.com/crossword

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4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Amanda Petrusich (Pop Music, p. 70), a Kathryn Schulz (A Critic at Large,

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

LEFT: EDWARD KINSELLA; RIGHT: RICHARD SAKER / CONTOUR / GETTY

THE NEW YORKER INTERVIEW DAILY COMMENT

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 3

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

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Fred Hersch: “Breath by Breath”

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68 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 24, 2022 73

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“My client is prepared to walk.”

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

18 Vegetarian frozen-food brand

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