APRIL 11, 2022

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Dhruv Khullar on the current state of COVID;
boxing pros break down the slap; co-stars go shopping;
taking notes from Tinx; a proto-goth pilgrimage.
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Rachel Syme 16 Showtime
Natasha Lyonne addresses her past.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Hallie Cantor 23 What Tsunami?
NOTEBOOK
Ian Frazier 24 Stir-Crazy
Reflections on cabin fever.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Andrew Solomon 28 The Unthinkable
Why is youth suicide on the rise?
DEPT. OF CRIMINOLOGY
Lauren Collins 40 Murder, He Wrote
How true-crime fans derailed Stéphane Bourgoin’s career.
FICTION
Kevin Barry 50 “The Pub with No Beer”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Zoë Heller 54 Investigating the decline of sex.
57 Briefly Noted
James Wood 59 Ireland’s surreal postwar history.
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 64 A tumult of sensations at the Whitney Biennial.
POP MUSIC
Amanda Petrusich 66 Wet Leg’s grownup party music.
THE THEATRE
Vinson Cunningham 68 Watching real-life spouses in “Plaza Suite.”
POEMS
David Baker 35 “Pocket Garden in the City”
Taneum Bambrick 46 “Separating”
COVER
Saul Steinberg “Untitled, 1967”

DRAWINGSMike Twohy, Ellis Rosen, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Tom Toro, Joe Dator, Emily Flake, Drew Panckeri,
Zachary Kanin, Lars Kenseth, Roz Chast, Yinfan Huang, Sofia Warren SPOTS Robert Samuel Hanson
 CONTRIBUTORS
Andrew Solomon (“The Unthinkable,” Lauren Collins (“Murder, He Wrote,”
p. 28) is a professor of clinical medical p. 40), a staff writer since 2008, is the
psychology at Columbia University. author of “When in French.” She is at
His books include “Far and Away,” “Far work on a book about Wilmington,
from the Tree,” and “The Noonday North Carolina.
Demon.”
Ian Frazier (“Stir-Crazy,” p. 24) is a staff
Rachel Syme (“Showtime,” p. 16), a staff writer. His latest book is “Cranial Frack-
writer, has covered style and culture for ing,” a collection of humor pieces.
The New Yorker since 2012.
Zoë Heller (Books, p. 54) has written
David Baker (Poem, p. 35) teaches at the novels “Notes on a Scandal,” “The
Denison University. His new poetry col- Believers,” and “Everything You Know.”
lection, “Whale Fall,” will be out in July.
Kevin Barry (Fiction, p. 50) began con-
Hannah Seidlitz (The Talk of the Town, tributing to The New Yorker in 2010.
p. 15) is a member of the magazine’s His most recent short-story collection
editorial staff. is “That Old Country Music.”

Saul Steinberg (Cover), who died in Taneum Bambrick (Poem, p. 46) is the
1999, contributed to The New Yorker author of “Intimacies, Received” and
for nearly sixty years. An exhibition of “Vantage.” She is a Dornsife Fellow in
his work, “Saul Steinberg: In the Li- creative writing and literature at the
brary,” is on view at the Pace Gallery, University of Southern California.
in New York, through April 30.
Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 64)
Amanda Petrusich (Pop Music, p. 66) has been the magazine’s art critic since
is a staff writer and the author of “Do 1998. He published “Hot, Cold, Heavy,
Not Sell at Any Price.” Light” in 2019.

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

LEFT: NTI; RIGHT: NICHOLAS KONRAD

DISPATCH CURRENCY
Alexis Okeowo reports on foreign Nick Romeo explores a new pricing
students who have fled Ukraine for model that reflects hidden costs, such
Germany—and their fraught future. as child labor and climate damage.

Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
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 THE MAIL
FIXING PUBLIC EDUCATION schools have helped to keep my family
in a socioeconomically charmed circle—
As a Lowell High School alumna, I was and keep others out. Yet it was my grand-
impressed by how Nathan Heller captured parents who made the leap from precarity
the ambivalence surrounding the school’s to security, and there were no selective
transition from a highly selective admis- schools involved; their lives simply coin-
sions process to an open lottery system cided with a period in U.S. history when
(“The Access Trap,” March 14th). The wages rose and the poverty rate fell. In-
devotion and skill of teachers such as Re- creasing labor’s share of national income
becca Johnson show that it’s possible to would do more to widely lift school per-
introduce the school’s legacy of intellec- formance than vice versa.
tual excellence to a wider range of stu- Zoe Sherman
dents. But I found heartbreaking the fi- Associate Professor of Economics
nancial gut punch discussed toward the Merrimack College
article’s end: the school’s sudden loss of Brighton, Mass.
$3.6 million, and likely twenty per cent
of its faculty, because of changes in the My daughter graduated from Lowell, an
city’s budget. As a professor in a public experience from which she benefitted
university system that similarly prides threefold: she received an extraordinary
itself on bringing serious scholarship to free education, she got into one of her
low-income urban students, I have seen top university choices, and she sailed
that underprepared students can flourish through those four years because of the
with the right support. Cutting teachers conditioning that Lowell gave her. But
and school budgets directly sabotages my family recognizes that the merit-based
such students’ success. There are chal- admissions system that Lowell used
lenges in adapting to a changing school might not have been entirely fair, given
population, but let’s not miss the real the resources that some better-off fam-
story: the hollowing out of strong insti- ilies paid for so that their children could
tutions through austerity measures. become more competitive applicants.
Tanya Pollard San Francisco can address this chal-
Professor of English lenge without diminishing Lowell’s rep-
Brooklyn College, CUNY utation for rigor. I work as an after-school
Brooklyn, N.Y. tutor at 826 Valencia, a nonprofit in the
preponderantly Latinx Mission District.
Heller’s piece stirred up uneasy reflec- My students speak Spanish at home,
tions on urban public schools with se- typically with parents who never went
lective admissions. My father attended to college. Our tutoring services are free
Stuyvesant in the nineteen-sixties, I at- and well attended, and our students’
tended Bronx Science in the nineties, and track record of getting into Lowell and
my daughter is currently a student at into good universities is impressive. To
Boston Latin, and a member of the last instill greater equity in the processes by
class to be admitted solely via entrance which students prepare for and gain ac-
exam. Heller writes that “fulfilling any cess to top-performing high schools, big
promises that public education makes de- cities should offer similar networks of
pends on genuinely opening the doors to free support.
underprivileged students while carrying Peter Albert
the striving middle class through, too.” San Francisco, Calif.
But through to where? A school might
be able to change the odds of a particu- •
lar young person’s landing in a particular Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
station in her adult life, but a school can’t address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
change the distribution of such stations. themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
In a political economy in which decent any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
livelihoods are artificially scarce, selective of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
 APRIL 6 – 12, 2022

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

In the mid-seventies, the Brooklyn-born photographer Jamel Shabazz—the recipient of the 2022 Gordon
Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize—borrowed his mother’s camera to record the camaraderie and the
style of his high-school friends. He has continued to aim his compassionate lens on Black life throughout
New York City ever since, capturing such scenes as “Best Friends, Red Hook, Brooklyn, 1982” (above). On
April 6, the Bronx Museum opens “Jamel Shabazz: Eyes on the Street,” a survey of his legendary career.
 As New York City venues reopen, it’s from one mind to the next. Marshall-Oliver, ing works that are accessible to both disabled

11
advisable to confirm in advance the a brilliant, methodical performer, reveals that and nondisabled members of the company.
requirements for in-person attendance. gentle strain, transcending a sometimes awk- Trisha Brown’s “Set and Reset,” which incorpo-
ward text.—V.C. (HERE; through April 10.) rates improvised movement and is set to a cool,
breathy score by Laurie Anderson, is a fantastic
calling card for the company’s BAM début. The
THE THEATRE other work on the program, “Face In,” is by the
DANCE Israel-based Yasmeen Godder. The dancers,
bathed in beautiful pastel light and moving to an
At the Wedding electronic score, engage in surrealist seductions
Bryna Turner’s slight if zippy one-act (it clocks “A Benefit for Ukraine” and playful power dynamics.—Marina Harss
in at seventy minutes) serves as a deserved star iHeartDance NYC, an organization that has (BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House; April 8-9.)
vehicle for the fantastically fiery Mary Wiseman, been putting on shows to support dancers during
who appears in every scene as Carlo, a wedding the pandemic, now presents a benefit to raise
crasher whose pugnacious wit and jaundiced money for humanitarian aid to Ukraine. The City Center Dance Festival
anti-sentimentalism can’t hide her bruised heart. lineup includes stars of New York City Ballet The festival closes with Dance Theatre of Har-
Carlo has shown up to the Northern Califor- and American Ballet Theatre (Sara Mearns lem and the Martha Graham Dance Company,
nia barn-chic nuptials of her ex Eva (Rebecca and Isabella Boylston, among others), as well performing on alternating nights. The week
S’manga Frank), where she spars with a snooty as Ukrainian dancers.—Brian Seibert (Florence opens on April 5, with Dance Theatre of Harlem
bridesmaid (Keren Lugo), flirts with an allur- Gould Hall Theatre; April 9.) bringing its signature blend of classical ballet
ing stranger (Han Van Sciver), commiserates (excerpts from Petipa’s exotique “Le Corsaire”),
with the bride’s acerbic mother (Carolyn Mc- neoclassical ballet (Robert Garland’s “Higher
Cormick), tolerates a hopeless romantic (Will Candoco Dance Company Ground,” set to Stevie Wonder songs), and
Rogers), and orders too many drinks from a kind Candoco, based in London, is devoted to ex- cutting-edge contemporary dance (Annabelle
waiter (Jorge Donoso), as she attempts to win panding the idea of what a dancer is, by present- Lopez Ochoa’s “Balamouk”). The Graham troupe
back her lost love—who has just tied the knot
with a man. Directed by Jenna Worsham, the
play offers a comic portrait of a dark night of the
soul, and of a contemporary queer community ON TELEVISION
navigating the age-old marriage plot.—Alex-
andra Schwartz (Claire Tow; through April 24.)

Confederates
This new play by Dominique Morisseau, for
Signature Theatre Company, has as its spine
a photograph: a Black woman sits facing the
camera, a white child suckling at her breast.
The image works on two levels—as a form of
documentary truth about the past and as mock-
ing hate-graffiti in the present. Accordingly, it
informs two strands of plot, both set in “pecu-
liar institutions”: a Civil War-era slave-escape
thriller and the tale of a Black professor wading
through racial trouble at a university. This is as
much a work of visual art as a drama: the direc-
tor, Stori Ayers, turns fleet temporal switches
into a fashion show; the costume designer, Ari
Fulton, makes a symbolic meal out of the color
red. Analogies between today’s race challenges
and slavery are always fraught and often bad,
OPPOSITE: PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMEL SHABAZZ; RIGHT: ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI

but Morisseau navigates this one with her

characteristic flexibility and formal mastery,
modulating from scene to scene with musical
precision.—Vinson Cunningham (Pershing Square
Signature Center; through April 24.)
Does the world need more Julia Child content? The California-born,
French-trained chef and patron saint of home cooks has more or less dom-
7 Minutes
inated culinary pop culture for decades. For the past twenty years, there has
This play by Stefano Massini (“The Lehman
Trilogy”), newly translated into English by been a veritable glut of Childiana: several biographies, published collections
Francesca Spedalieri and directed by Mei Ann of letters and recipes, reissues of her cookbook “Mastering the Art of French
Teo (produced by Waterwell, in association Cooking,” at least two podcasts devoted to her life, and, perhaps most notably,
with Working Theatre), tells a compact story
based on real events. Eleven members of a Nora Ephron’s jaunty bio-pic “Julie & Julia,” in which Meryl Streep played
textile factory’s union executive committee—all Child with singsongy aplomb. One might wonder what terrain is left to
female or gender-nonconforming—argue over cover about duck terrine. And yet “Julia,” a new HBO Max series, from
how to vote on a befuddlingly simple proposal
from their new corporate overlords: no layoffs the creator Daniel Goldfarb, manages to squeeze a bit more juice out of her
at the factory, the suits promise, if everybody phenomenal rise from a humble housewife (who may or may not have been
gives up seven minutes of their fifteen-min- a government spy) to the crown jewel of PBS’s programming slate. “Julia”
ute break. It’s not much of an argument at
first—only Linda (Ebony Marshall-Oliver), picks up where Ephron’s film leaves off, beginning with the publication
the committee’s spokesperson, who has relayed of Child’s wildly successful first book and following her path to television
this offer, has a problem with the idea initially. stardom. The British actress Sarah Lancashire, who embodies Child in both
What unfolds, however, is less a comment on
class struggle than a disquisition on how diffi- roostery vocal tone and lanky stature, is a bona-fide star herself. The show can
cult it is to transmit a small, nagging thought drag at points, but ultimately it builds to a rich, buttery finish.—Rachel Syme
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 5
 an ensemble that includes the former Converge
FOLK member Stephen Brodsky along with the gothic
singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe and her band-
Since releasing her self-titled début, mate Ben Chisholm brings its collaboration,
“Bloodmoon: I,” an ornately ferocious record,
in 2014, the New Zealand-born sing- to life. Among the openers are the post-rock
er-songwriter Aldous Harding has made group Caspian and the Brooklyn black-metal
her songs a space for carefully crafted band Liturgy, which framed its most recent
full-length, “Origin of the Alimonies,” as an
scene work. She has referred to herself as opera.—Jenn Pelly (Brooklyn Steel; April 10.)
a “song actor,” and her lyrics are cryptic;
the mysteriousness is underscored by a DJ Harvey
malleable voice and a spooky folk sound. ELECTRONIC A native of London and longtime
Harding’s new album, “Warm Chris,” resident of Los Angeles, Harvey Bassett has
always been a d.j.’s d.j. His home style is nomi-
widens an aperture that its predecessor, nally house music, but a DJ Harvey set is likely
“Designer,” began opening, seeming to go in any number of directions—the wilder
to capture its subjects with more light the better—helped along by a sure hand with
effects and EQ. Whether he’s playing selections
than her older recordings. Her songs can so rare that even veteran vinyl-spotters have
feel like impressions, with singing that trouble identifying them or tracks that every-
extends from a wraithlike whisper to a body in the room knows by heart, he threads ev-
erything together with a palpably gleeful sense
low-toned croon, and many of them por- of mischief—not for nothing did he call one of
tray isolated characters. “Well, you know his L.A. parties Sarcastic Disco.—Michaelangelo
I’m married / And I was bored out of Matos (Elsewhere; April 9.)
my mind,” she sings on “Passion Babe.”
“Of all the ways to eat a cake / This one “Gianni Schicchi”
surely takes the knife.”—Sheldon Pearce OPERA Before the pandemic, On Site Opera had
a rewarding formula—find an unexpected space
in New York City and stage a work there that
resonates with it—but the ban on indoor gath-
places Graham classics such as “Appalachian for her contributions to the art of flamenco. erings forced the company to get creative. (For
Spring” alongside new works, including Her troupe is a tight-knit group: three musi- “To My Distant Love,” in the summer of 2020,
“CAVE,” by the hard-edged London-based cians, two singers, and four dancers, including a singer called individual ticket holders on the
choreographer Hofesh Shechter, which fea- Barrio herself and a guest from Jerez, Spain, phone and sang Beethoven’s “An die ferne Ge-
tures a guest appearance by the ballet virtuoso Antonio Granjero. The evening, entitled “Ni liebte.”) Now, for the first time in two years, On
Daniil Simkin.—M.H. (City Center; April 5-10.) Bien ni Mal, Todo lo Contrario” (“Neither Site Opera presents a complete work in a found
Good nor Ill, Just the Opposite”) is made up setting. For Puccini’s uproarious comedy “Gianni
of solos and small ensembles, some improvised, Schicchi,” the family of Buoso Donati gathers in
Kyle Marshall Choreography / some precisely choreographed, and all danced the impressive Prince George Ballroom, in the
in direct response to the music, performed Flatiron district, to find out what’s in Donati’s
Luke Hickey onstage.—M.H. (Joyce Theatre; April 5-10.) will, and an audience likewise comes together
The opening series of dance performances at around them, to see how it shakes out.—Oussama
the new Chelsea Factory, presented in part- Zahr (Prince George Ballroom; April 7-10.)
nership with the Joyce Theatre, continues. The Storyboard P
up-and-coming choreographer Kyle Marshall The name suggests stop-motion animation, one
presents a program, April 8-9, of recent work source of the style that Storyboard P calls mu- “Oratorio for Living Things”
aimed at joy and wonder, including “Stellar,” a tant. Another is the gliding and contortion of MUSICAL THEATRE Heather Christian’s “Oratorio
floating, circling Afrofuturist trip, and “Rise,” the street form flex. But even more distinctive for Living Things,” commissioned by the Off
which ascends along the intersection of church than Storyboard’s style is the slippery free- Broadway company Ars Nova, telescopes the
and club. Luke Hickey, an adept and appealing dom of his imagination. He is one of the most evolution of life into a ninety-minute choral
tap dancer, brings “A Little Old, a Little New,” extraordinary dancers in existence, but, even piece. The lyrics explain photosynthesis, delight
April 12-13. It’s a classic-format concert featur- as astonishing videos of him abound online, in the sweetness of childhood, and add up the
ing a jazz trio, Hickey, and his fellow-hoofers opportunities to see him live, in a ticketed per- minutes that make up a lifetime. The sheer di-
Elizabeth Burke and Tommy Wasiuta.—B.S. formance, are very rare. Such a chance is now at versity of musical genres feels like an exercise in
(Chelsea Factory; April 8-13.) hand: two nights of freestyle in the courtyard unity: the work opens with a Renaissance-style

1
of Performance Space New York.—B.S. (Per- motet on a Latin text, orienting the audience
formance Space New York; April 7-8.) within a vaguely distant past, before passing
Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith effortlessly through jazz, Sondheim-style poin-
For more than fifteen years, Lieber and Smith tillism, and a rollicking soul number that could
have been refining and deepening an artistic be mistaken for a backing track on an Adele
partnership of uncommon intimacy. In “Glo- MUSIC album. The prevailing sentiment is wonder,
ria,” they take on the objectification of women, which can feel overwhelming, but the cast of
ILLUSTRATION BY CAMILLE DESCHIENS

revealing how the aerobic or supposedly sexy twelve singers, clearly galvanized by the ex-
is also sad. To James Lo’s brilliant remix of the Converge pressivity and complexity of Christian’s vocal
Laura Branigan hit, the two perform a dance of HARDCORE PUNK Thrashing out of the hardcore writing, make a case for the work’s sincerity and
endurance in several senses. The work, which scene three decades ago, the Massachusetts darker reaches. The performers weave through
débuted last year, at Abrons Arts Center, gets heavy-music titan Converge has cemented its the audience in a tight theatre-in-the-round
a reprise.—B.S. (New York Live Arts; April 8-9.) status as a subcultural institution across ten in Lee Sunday Evans’s simple staging.—O.Z.
albums of anguished heart, polyrhythmic brutal- (Greenwich House; through May 15.)
ity, and blistering, unrelenting hooks. With the
Noche Flamenca vocalist Jacob Bannon’s influential Deathwish,
Soledad Barrio, the lead dancer of the New Inc., label and the guitarist Kurt Ballou’s work Regina Spektor
York-based flamenco company Noche Fla- as a highly regarded rock producer, the group INDIE POP The voice of Regina Spektor, whether
menca, was recently awarded the Vilcek Prize, has carried the scene along with it. On this tour, cast in opulent orchestrations or with her soli-

6 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022

 tary piano, flourishes on intimacy—her singing is canny in terms of your enjoyment, which Kathy Ruttenberg
seems to bypass the ear and insinuate itself increases as you go. The teeming complexities
directly into a listener’s head, podcast-host style. that mark Kandinsky’s late phase are numb- Think of this New York-based ceramicist as
The songwriter, who now makes dreamlike pop ingly hermetic. A middle range, from about the un-Disney: in Ruttenberg’s sculptural
songs that live and die in a self-contained world, 1910 to the early twenties, seethes with the vignettes, themes of sex, violence, and meta-
headlines Carnegie Hall a few blinks ahead of artist’s excitement as he abandons figuration to morphosis play out in an enchanted wood pop-
releasing her album “Home, before and after,” let spontaneously symphonic forms, intended ulated by mythic figures and magical fauna.
which finds her grappling with matters both as visual equivalents of music, enthrall on their One rotating, motorized statue in this fantastic
divine and mundane. On the track “Becoming own. Finally, we are engulfed in cadenzas of show, titled “Sunshine at Midnight,” depicts
All Alone,” God, a recurring Spektor character, hue that may be the strongest art of their kind a woman, in dishabille, with a bird emerging
invites a forlorn narrator out for beers. “We and their time, relatively crude but more vigor- from the back of her head; she embraces a tree,
didn’t even have to pay,” the singer gushes of her ous than the contemporaneous feats of Matisse, surrounded by a ring of human-faced deer.
date. “Cause God is God, and he’s revered.”—Jay Derain, Braque, and other Parisians whose Fau- Whether the herd’s intention is protective or
Ruttenberg (Carnegie Hall; April 11.) vism anchors standard accounts of modernism. menacing remains unclear. Ruttenberg started
The mining heir Solomon R. Guggenheim met out as a painter in the East Village scene of the
Kandinsky in 1930 and began collecting him nineteen-eighties, when expressive figuration
Tim Berne Trio in bulk, advised by the enthusiastic German was the dominant mode. Twenty years ago,
JAZZ That Tim Berne’s name rings a bell to few baroness Hilla Rebay, who also recommended she moved to the Hudson Valley, where she
outside a devoted coterie doesn’t make him any Frank Lloyd Wright as the architect of the developed her surrealist-fairy-tale style and her
less of a jazz hero. Since putting down New museum’s hypermodern whorl, which opened glazed-ceramic technique, in which intricate
York City roots, in 1974, this audacious alto in 1959. Kandinsky lingers in the ancestral (and often very large) sculptures are fired in
saxophonist, composer, and bandleader has DNA of the museum, and his equivocal majesty sections before being assembled. Here, the
never strayed from a path of his own making, haunts every visit to a building that cannot elaborate tableaux spill beyond the gallery’s in-
hewing to left-of-center forms and unfettered cease to amaze.—Peter Schjeldahl (Guggenheim terior and onto its small patio, where a fountain
improvisation. Berne originally drew inspiration Museum; through Sept. 5.) in the form of a towering daisy pours water into
from such second-generation avant-gardists as
Julius Hemphill; he’s now a patriarch of sorts
to a new generation of similarly risk-taking
players. United in a compact trio with the gifted AT THE GALLERIES
drummer Nasheet Waits and the guitarist Gregg
Belisle-Chi, Berne flaunts skills that are as pas-

1
sionate as they are exploratory.—Steve Futterman
(Soapbox Gallery; April 7.)

ART

Richard Diebenkorn
This trove of drawings and paintings on paper,
made between 1946 and 1992, is one of many
exhibitions planned this year to celebrate the
centennial of this inimitable Bay Area painter,
who died in 1993. Whether a Diebenkorn piece
is abstract or figurative, black-and-white or
in color, geometric or gestural, it is always an
etheric-architectural articulation of space, a fact
that is underscored here by the installation of
an untitled charcoal drawing, dated 1988-92,
between a pair of arched windows. The piece
depicts clean lines and a play of light in Die-
benkorn’s studio in the Sonoma Valley, but his
touch renders the interior as if it might dissolve
into a landscape glimpsed through an open The American painter Joe Bradley first made his mark two decades ago,
window at the center of the composition. On
the exhibition’s second level, a vitrine is lined with a wily non-style that might be described as painting in spite of itself.
with ephemera, including a handwritten ten- He arranged colorful monochrome panels into configurations whose
point list titled “Notes to myself on beginning associations toggled between Minimalist abstraction and eight-bit video
a painting.” Among its sage aphorisms is the
command to “tolerate chaos,” which might games; they landed in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Then came “Schmagoo,”
help to explain the exciting flux and the un- a pictographic series in grease pencil on big, stretched raw canvases. Those
fussy moments of order uniting his lifetime scruffy black-and-white works demolished the line between painting and
of work.—Johanna Fateman (Van Doren Waxter;
through April 23.) drawing, stripping the figural language of comics (the Superman logo was
one motif ) down to its essence with a macabre wit that Philip Guston would
Vasily Kandinsky surely approve of; MOMA, which exhibited them in 2014, certainly did.
Some eighty paintings, drawings, and wood- Even when Bradley’s approach became more brashly gestural, it remained
COURTESY THE ARTIST / PETZEL

cuts by Kandinsky, the Russian hierophant somewhat calculated, as seen in compositions that were stitched together,
of abstraction, line the upper three-fifths of Frankenstein style. Part of what makes “Bhoga Marga,” the artist’s first
the Guggenheim’s ramp, in the retrospec-
tive “Around the Circle.” The show’s curator, exhibition in New York City in six years—and his first at the Petzel gallery,
Megan Fontanella, recommends starting at the where it’s on view through April 30—such an exhilarating surprise is how
bottom, with the overwrought works of the expressive it is. Bradley’s new pictures (including the twelve-foot-wide
artist’s final phase, and proceeding upward,
back to the simpler Expressionist landscapes “Jubilee,” above) look as smart as ever, but also more expansive, with mean-
and horsemen of his early career. This course dering white lines that suggest inroads to the unknown.—Andrea K. Scott

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 7

the open mouth of an elfish girl, whose patch- (Keegan-Michael Key) is promoting his New charges, and a corrupt political fixer (Onslow
work dress teems with forest life—one of the Age religion, and the blithering director (Fred Stevens) comes up with a plan for him to beat
lighter moments in Ruttenberg’s supernatural Armisen) is an indie darling who’s out of his the rap—by propping Hank up to run for gov-

1
wilderness of cryptic allegory and strife.—J.F. league. The production’s minder (Harry Trevald- ernor against an authentic reformer. What re-
(Lyles & King; through April 30.) wyn) has the calm authority of a hit man, and sults is all too familiar: an affair with a flashily
the studio’s executives (Kate McKinnon among nicknamed woman, a takeover of a courtroom,
them) issue ever harsher demands with gleaming a plot to kill a potentially incriminating witness,
smiles—all for a numbingly silly special-effects Election Day chicanery, an election thrown into
MOVIES spectacle. The comedy (written by Apatow and the legislature, and a private militia that seeks
Pam Brady) has the caustic tone of score-set- to influence the decision. With his bounce and
tling; the satire is scattershot and the humor snap, his patter and charm, Cagney displays
The Bubble often forced, but the anger feels authentic and the ease with which a loud, audacious, brazen,
Judd Apatow’s hectic new comedy is set at a personal.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Netflix.) fast-talking rogue with a ravenous ego can win
lavish rural English hotel, where a Hollywood the hearts of the vulnerable and downtrodden
cast and crew are isolated in a pandemic bubble while making common cause with their oppres-
in order to film a fantasy-franchise sequel. Soon A Lion Is in the Streets sors.—R.B. (Playing on TCM April 7 and stream-
enough, however, the pressure turns the group James Cagney blusters and glad-hands his way ing on Prime Video, iTunes, and other services.)
into lords and ladies of the flies, and their cruel through this rowdy, splashy, yet chilling 1953
machinations soon threaten their health, their Technicolor drama, directed by Raoul Walsh,
careers, and even their lives. A star (David Du- which unfolds in detail an American autocrat’s Thirty Two Short Films
chovny) wants to rewrite his dialogue and seeks playbook. Cagney stars as a Louisiana-back- About Glenn Gould
the support of his co-star and ex (Leslie Mann), a woods peddler named Hank Martin, an expert
former star (Karen Gillan) is desperately seeking salesman and a local folk hero who organizes a Glenn Gould, as scorned and as revered as
relevance, a young influencer (Iris Apatow) is posse to threaten a businessman who’s cheating any figure in modern music, died in 1982.
acting mainly for social media, an action star sharecroppers. As a result, Hank faces criminal François Girard’s movie, from 1994, honors
Gould’s strong-willed, idiosyncratic genius
with a suitably offbeat approach: a bunch of
little films, none lasting more than a few min-
ON THE BIG SCREEN utes, all angling for a new take on the pianist’s
life and work—thirty-two ways of looking at
Glenn Gould. Scenes from his boyhood and
his professional career are neatly dramatized;
the Canadian actor Colm Feore plays the adult
Gould, though he never, thank goodness, tries
to reproduce Gould’s manner at the keyboard.
In between the scenes come interviews, dashes
of animation, and even a sequence shot as an
X-ray. The whole enterprise is designed to skirt
the traditional traps of the music movie; instead
of a laborious bio-pic, we get a sly, quick-wit-
ted meditation on a character always likely to
elude our grasp. The finale—a Gould recording
of Bach carried into deep space by a Voyager
spacecraft—leaves you gawking.—Anthony Lane
(Reviewed in our issue of 4/18/94.) (Streaming on
Prime Video, iTunes, and other services.)

Thomasine & Bushrod

In 1974, two years after making “Super Fly,” the
director Gordon Parks, Jr., infused this pica-
resque Western with a similar blend of cool swag-
ger and social acuity. The action starts in 1911,
in Texas, where Thomasine (Vonetta McGee), a
sharpshooting bounty hunter, and H. P. Bushrod
(Max Julien), a most-wanted outlaw, team up to
The South Korean director Hong Sangsoo, who often makes two and rob banks. Distributing their pelf to the poor
sometimes even three features a year, is the most prolific internationally ac- and disposing of murderous racists, they become
claimed director now active. His body of work is a world in itself, detailing, living legends throughout the South—fictional
Black forerunners of Bonnie and Clyde. Much of
with understated intricacy, the romantic bewilderments and artistic strivings the movie (written by Julien) involves the lovers’
of the country’s culturati. Yet some of his best films, such as “Hahaha,” gruff romance and practical difficulties on the
from 2010, have fallen through the cracks of U.S. distribution. An extensive run. Bushrod, an expert horseman, switches to
early-model autos, giving rise to semi-comedic
two-part retrospective of Hong’s movies, starting on April 8, at Film at low-speed chases; the proud and temperamental
Lincoln Center, presents that daringly original drama on April 10 and Thomasine drolly schemes to join her partner
April 12. The action is shown entirely in flashbacks, as two young men— on wanted posters—and to get top billing. But
the horrific landscape of lynchings and sum-
Moon-kyeong, a struggling filmmaker, and Joong-sik, a professor—relate, mary executions puts their impulsive energy and
over many drinks, their summertime adventures in the city of Tongyeong. taut composure into fatal focus. When, during
COURTESY CINEMA GUILD

Unbeknownst to them, their love affairs involve an overlapping array of a shoot-out, Bushrod—in a majestic closeup—
reloads his revolver, the whispered click of

1
characters, including Moon-kyeong’s mother, a wise and willful restaurateur metal on metal resounds like righteous thun-
played by Yuh-Jung Youn, who won an Oscar last year for her performance der.—R.B. (Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)
in “Minari.” The poignant yet acerbic tale of missed connections and cyn-
ical maneuvers is a modernist revision of classic melodrama; its hands-on For more reviews, visit
intimacy and local specificity belie a whirlwind complexity.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022

 wavy wafer-thin cracker, which turns it off a hangover. At Ernesto’s, the Bikini
into finger food, it’s layered with slices Hemingway—house-made txistorra (a
of acorn-fed paleta ibérico, produced by spicy, quick-cured sausage), Menorcan
the hundred-and-forty-year-old Spanish cheese, and sweet shrimp sheathed in

1
brand Cinco Jotas. (Paleta comes from slices of crunchy pan de cristal, or glass
a pig’s shoulder, as opposed to jamón, bread—is quartered, fanned elegantly,
from the hind.) Finished with a generous and drizzled with honey.
TABLES FOR TWO blanket of soft curls of heady black truffle, Even a plate of braised vegetables can
it’s a sloppy, salty, slightly stupefying dish. be a little sexy: cross-sections of leek,
Ernesto’s Truffle is an expensive ingredient standing upright, brush shoulders with
259 East Broadway that’s so often used cheaply, in the figu- turnips carved to have gemlike facets,
rative sense, to peddle the idea of luxury, pale slivers of pea pod, and geometric
If anyone objects to the union of two regardless of whether it truly belongs in knobs of carrot, all glossy with cook-
types of anchovies in the pintxo matrimo­ a dish. On the tortilla, it felt essential to ing liquid and sprinkled with Espelette
nio al ajillo at Ernesto’s, a Basque-lean- the bewitching depth of flavor, as did pepper. And though the macarrones con
ing restaurant on the Lower East Side, foie gras that had been melted into a port hongos is essentially stovetop mac and
speak now and I will eat yours for you. reduction spooned over beautifully rosy cheese, there’s nothing childlike about
The matrimony of a boqueron (plump, slices of grilled duck magret. You can it; the pasta is enrobed in a velvety sauce,
PHOTOGRAPH BY TONJE THILESEN FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

meaty, and white, pickled in wine vine- spend a small fortune eating at Ernesto’s, sharp with Idiazabal cheese and garlic,
gar and olive oil) and an anchoa (a dark, but you can also, in my experience, trust and topped with crispy maitake, yellow-
skinny, salt-cured umami bomb) is holy the kitchen, led by the chef-partner Ryan foot, and black-trumpet mushrooms and
indeed, made holier by the kitchen’s de- Bartlow, who previously worked in San a splash of parsley oil.
cision to mount the pair, like prostrate Sebastian, Spain; at Alinea, in Chicago; I can’t help finding it corny that it’s
wedding-cake toppers, on a rectangle of and at the Frankies Spuntino restaurant Ernesto’s as in Ernest, as in Heming-
delicately crisp, buttery pastry. Though group and Frenchette, in New York. way, but if Papa is Bartlow’s muse, so
the fillets are separated by a neat line of Bartlow knows just what to do with be it—the mood here, in an oasis of a
ajillo, a zingy condiment of parsley and less flashy ingredients, too. The ensa­ dining room on a fairly desolate block,
garlic, each bite brings them together in lada mixta, an unexpectedly beautiful ar- is as romantic as the food. The enor-
perfect harmony. rangement of Little Gem lettuce hearts, mous round-edged, globe-lit bar is an
I have a feeling that none of the ingre- shredded carrot, wedges of beet, silky especially nice place to sit, not least
dients in the tortilla abierta con Cinco Jotas, segments of fat white asparagus, green because of the easy-drinking yet civi-
meanwhile, are married, and if they are olives, white onion, and grated hard- lized cocktails, including the 5 Finger
it’s not to one another. This is not to say boiled egg, is thoroughly satisfying with Martini, made with two types of ver-
that the chemistry isn’t electric—to put or without the optional addition of ol- mouth and sherry instead of the hard
it politely, this may be the most lascivious ive-oil-cured tuna from Cantabria. In stuff, and a bright, effervescent Span-
dish I’ve ever encountered, an orgy of egg Catalonia, a bikini is a pressed sandwich, ish G. & T., with wheels of lime and
and potato browned on the edges and left named for a Barcelona concert hall, the grapefruit and sprigs of rosemary in a
unflipped (abierta means “open”) before type of thing you can imagine scarfing goblet running over. (Dishes $10­$42.)
it’s slipped from pan to plate. Set atop a late at night on a street corner to stave —Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 9
We’re stronger when
we work together.
And so are you.
Uniting the wisdom, skills, and innovations of both Columbia
and Weill Cornell Medicine for our patients.

In medicine, the more experience the better. At NewYork-Presbyterian,

cardiothoracic surgeons Dr. Takayama and Dr. Iannacone show what
can happen when two top-tier medical schools collaborate. Together,
they raise the level of care for New York—and the nation.
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT year-old who died during the pandemic is that America’s battle with covid-19
ONE IN A MILLION lost an average of almost eight years of has been more damaging than we like
life; a forty-year-old lost nearly four de- to think. And it is still ongoing. 
“ I fact,”
I look at the mass, I will never
Mother Teresa once said. “If I
cades. This means that a million deaths
will have expunged tens of millions of
In parts of the country, cases are ris-
ing again. Reopening plays a role. So
look at the one, I will.” During the pan- years of life—a mass erasure of new, does B.A.2, a subvariant of Omicron
demic, we’ve all grappled with this dy- strange, and wonderful possibilities. that is now dominant in the U.S. and
namic. Our country is on the cusp of a One of the most prevalent false be- around the world, and is thought to be
grim milestone: soon, a million people liefs about the pandemic is that the gov- thirty to fifty per cent more contagious
in the United States will have died of ernment has exaggerated the number than B.A.1, the version that swept across
covid-19. Yet for many Americans this of deaths; in fact, the official count is the U.S. this winter. B.A.2 doesn’t ap-
reality seems vague, abstract—a group an underestimate. Since the pandemic pear to be more lethal, and vaccines re-
problem for which we must take indi- began, at least a hundred thousand more main effective at averting the most se-
vidual responsibility. We struggle to see people have died in this country than rious consequences of infection; still, it
the crisis we’re in. would have during normal times. Many promises to cause breakthrough infec-
Part of the problem is fatigue. An- of these “excess deaths” are uncounted tions, and presents a serious threat to
other is that the coronavirus has exacted covid fatalities. Others are the result the elderly, the immunocompromised,
its toll unevenly. covid is relatively un- of missed care for conditions such as and the unvaccinated. Last month, B.A.2
threatening to younger people, but has heart attacks and strokes. Drug over- nearly tripled coronavirus cases in the
killed one in seventy-five older Ameri- doses have risen to record levels; skipped U.K.; at one point, one in thirty older
cans; residents of long-term-care facili- cancer screenings and childhood vacci- Britons was thought to be infected.
ties make up less than three per cent of nations will add to the virus’s collateral covid hospitalizations and deaths rose,
the population, but have accounted for damage in the years to come. The truth though not as dramatically—preëxist-
about one in five covid deaths. The ing immunity softened the blow.
death rate for Blacks and Hispanics has It’s not clear exactly how America’s
been twice that for whites. And, owing B.A.2 story will unfold. Our vaccination
to divergent immunization rates, people rates are lower than those of many Eu-
in the reddest counties have been dying ropean nations: just two-thirds of Amer-
at more than three times the rate of those icans are fully vaccinated, and although
in the bluest. For some of us, the pan- the F.D.A. has now approved a second
demic may feel over, but more Ameri- booster for people over fifty, just sixty
cans died of covid in 2021 than in 2020. per cent of them have received their first.
So far in 2022, the virus has taken an- Meanwhile, many states have done away
other hundred and thirty thousand lives. with most pandemic restrictions, and
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

It can be hard to grasp the meaning people are increasingly returning to their
of such numbers. We might come to pre-pandemic routines. Still, because
terms with them by noting that U.S. life immunity against B.A.1 appears to pro-
expectancy has now fallen by nearly two tect against B.A.2, the U.S. may escape
years—the sharpest single-year decline the worst consequences: according to
since the Second World War. We might one estimate, nearly four in five Amer-
count lost time, years forgone with fam- icans have some Omicron immunity.
ily, friends, and colleagues. An eighty- In 2020, when the virus arrived, the
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 11
government’s response was halting and creasingly, they are declining to use them. it easier for people to do the right thing.
disorganized. With time, however, some­ They’re also stymied by the murkiness For individuals, fighting the pan­
thing like consistency emerged: Amer­ of our moment: the country contains demic can feel a bit like combatting cli­
icans knew what was allowed and what within it such a diversity of immunity, mate change. Why recycle when poli­
wasn’t. We’re now reverting to the Wild vulnerability, and attitude that no policy cymakers allow carbon emissions to rise
West phase. The Centers for Disease prescription seems to fit. inexorably? And, indeed, to defeat this
Control and Prevention has indicated Amid the uncertainty, individuals, or­ and future pandemics, we’ll need invest­
that less than one per cent of the popu­ ganizations, and institutions must do ments in ventilation and air­filtration
lation currently needs to wear masks. their best. This means giving people the systems, paid sick leave, disability ben­
Some states are shutting down their test­ resources to confront covid not as an efits, disease­surveillance programs, and
ing and vaccination sites. Earlier this abstraction but through the decisions of more. But it’s also true that individuals
year, the Biden Administration asked for daily life. During moments of high viral retain some agency. We can get booster
thirty billion dollars in pandemic fund­ spread, this effort might entail provid­ shots and persuade others to do so; we
ing, but Congress agreed only to some ing rapid tests in the workplace, time off can make plans for accessing monoclo­
fifteen billion, and has so far failed to after exposure, outdoor spaces for events, nal antibodies or antiviral pills. When
authorize even that. As a result, the fed­ high­grade masks for all who want them, cases rise, as they will, we can consider
eral government has reduced shipments and a culture that respects varying lev­ how we might lower the chances that
of monoclonal antibodies to states and els of risk tolerance and medical vulner­ we’ll pass on the virus to someone for
delayed the purchase of more antiviral ability. Decades of behavioral­science whom the consequences could be cat­
pills. It no longer has the funds to pay research have revealed that our decision­ astrophic. After two years of ebbs and
for tests or vaccines for uninsured Amer­ making depends crucially on our envi­ flows, of surges, variants, vaccines, and
icans, or to secure booster shots for the ronment; even as politicians discard mit­ boosters, our choices matter, perhaps
fall. Politicians and policymakers hold igation measures, communities at school, now more than ever.
powerful tools for curbing the virus; in­ work, church, and elsewhere can make —Dhruv Khullar

PLAY-BY-PLAY “Will vowed to have no sex for the year,” To the scorecards we go! A few ex­
FIGHT CLUB Foster added. “Sex saps a fighter’s energy.” pert judges kept score at home. The first
Once, he ran Smith through exercises in matter of business was determining the
the Rocky Mountains. The oxygen depri­ slap’s legitimacy. Could it have been
vation was supposed to simulate the late staged? Charles Farrell, who managed
rounds of a championship bout. “He fell the former undisputed heavyweight
to his knees, and I made him write Ali’s champion of the world Leon Spinks after
name in the snow,” Foster recalled last he lost his title, and who sometimes rigged
n one sense, Will Smith has spent a summer. “He said, ‘Now I get it.’” professional fights for the Mafia, said no.
I career preparing to slap Chris Rock
across the face. In an industry that fetish­
After Smith hit Chris Rock onstage
at the Oscars, individual reactions
“Chris Rock doesn’t seem to anticipate
the slap,” he said. “He has his face slightly
izes masochism—Christian Bale’s sub­ spanned a spectrum of shock and blame. forward. For somebody who’s not a pro,
sisting on little more than two hundred Some of the discourse focussed on the it would be hard to take a shot like that
calories’ worth of black coffee and apples semiotics of a slap versus a punch. Also full force, knowing that it was coming.
for “The Machinist”; Robert De Niro’s on how much weight you give the ac­ You would flinch.”
arduous pasta regimen, which put sixty tion­hero training. Can a Hollywood Freddie Roach, the renowned trainer
pounds on him for “Raging Bull”— boxer actually fight like a real­life one? of Mike Tyson and Manny Pacquiao,
Smith’s prep work stands out for its the­ The pro­Smith, nothing­to­see­here was consulted on technique. An asyn­
atrical toughness. It could be said that he crowd (“If only folks were as agitated chronous panel was convened.
trains as if he were in a “Rocky” montage. by members of Congress taking a swing
To recover from playing a middle­aged at democracy and then [calmly] return­ ROACH: He got a good shot in. But the
dad in “King Richard,” Smith undertook ing to their seats,” one Twitter user mechanics were terrible. He definitely tele-
workouts that included climbing the posted) relied on a confidence that a graphed that punch.
hundred and sixty flights of stairs up the Will Smith slap is physically harmless, FARRELL: He was too squared up when he
Burj Khalifa; after that, he scaled the if psychically devastating. On the other let the punch go.
ROACH: Two weeks in the gym, we’ll get
spire. For “Ali,” he trained with Sugar end were those who viewed Smith as him fixed. Definitely he would start off on the
Ray Leonard’s former coach Darrell Fos­ something like a super­villain. “Just a mirror, work on delivering the punch correctly.
ter. Foster told the press at the time that reminder that if Will Smith had slapped Then we’d go right to the mitts. I’d hold the
Smith spent a year taking punches from Betty White for a joke she made (how­ mitts for him, and we’d make that shot a very
a former heavyweight champion and ever insensitive), she easily could’ve fallen meaningful shot.
FARRELL: What’s interesting about it is that
sparring with his hands tied behind his backward, cracked her skull and died of not even by professional standards, but by any
back; he broke his thumb, bruised his a brain bleed,” one doctor tweeted. “Same serious standards, Will Smith has absolutely
face. A certain realism was adhered to. with Bob Saget obviously.” no power. They say, in boxing, punchers are

12 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022

born, they’re not made. I think that probably met up the other day at a West Side buy that.” He crossed to a wall of old
applies here. thrift shop called No Particular Hours posters. “Or ‘Carmen Jones,’ ” Fish-
ROACH: If I were Chris Rock, I would’ve (“Vintage Goods / Industrial Arti- burne said. “I have the one from
come back with the right hand.
FARRELL: Smith overcommits with it. He facts / Dead People’s Things”). The ‘Black Orpheus.’ ”
turns his shoulder so that his arm is totally play, from 1975, is about three desper- “Dude, that Harry Belafonte–Danny
turned around. His face is completely exposed ate characters in a junk shop; the group Kaye video you sent me was awesome,”
with no ability to block a punch. had planned to visit one in March, Rockwell said. They f ist-bumped.
2020, shortly before the show’s open- Which video? Criss asked.
As for Rock, there was not much for ing; two years later, there they were. “It’s called ‘Mama Look a Boo-
the judges to go on besides an ability to The proprietor, Jerry Lerner—tall, griz- Boo,’” Fishburne said.
take a blow—thick skin, of the literal zled, fisherman’s cap—let them wan- “Belafonte was a real sex symbol,”
sort. “I like the chin,” Roach said. “The der, offering occasional commentary. Rockwell said. A feed bag caught his
chin is very good. Very, very good.” (Of a carved statue: “I used to call that eye. “ ‘Purina Goat Chow,’” he read. “I
Talk turned to a possible rematch. Bali Parton.”) The shop, a chockablock had that for breakfast.”
Both men agreed that the outcome riot of curiosities—wagon-wheel chan- In 2020, they had rehearsed for
hinged on unknown factors. Heart, can- delier here, helmeted mannequin head three weeks before everything shut
niness, un-sapped energy. Also: strategy. there—was a bit more festive than the down, then continued for several more
Farrell said, “My suggestion to Rock “Buffalo” set, and the actors were a bit
would be to keep his chin tucked in, snazzier than their onstage counter-
move his head back, let the punch miss, parts. Fishburne (Donny, the junk-
let Smith move out of position, and just shop owner) wore an African-print-
come back with a countershot.” inspired combo from Moshood, of
“Rock has to get into a short-dis- Brooklyn (“I modelled for them in the
tance fight,” Roach said. “His opponent eighties”), with a drawstring waist.
is taller and rangier. He’d have to stay Criss (Bobby, Donny’s slow-witted
close to his chest. Will Smith has to gofer) gestured at his own plaid pants,
keep him on the end of his jab. It’s just and said, “I’m also rocking the draw-
like Margarito vs. Pacquiao.” string.” Rockwell (Teach, their ne’er-
Oscar De La Hoya, one of the best do-well friend) looked mischievous—
pound-for-pound boxers of all time, rascally mustache, sweater with “HIGH
rendered a decision. “If it was a twelve- END” in colorful letters. “It’s just a
round fight, I would pick Will Smith sweater I got because I’m a Hollywood
to win in the fifth,” he said. As for the phony,” he said, smirking. Criss and
slap, “That wasn’t the right thing to do.” Fishburne laughed. “I’m a dickhead,
But he thought Smith was holding back. and I wore a dickish sweater,” he said.
“We saw him portraying Ali. We know They laughed more.
he can throw a punch with knockout “American Buffalo,” a blunt, stac- Sam Rockwell, Darren Criss,
power.” He said that he was exploring cato symphony of F-bombs, hapless- Laurence Fishburne
making a bio-pic about himself: “I’m ness, and simmering rage, centers on
looking forward to, hopefully, Oscar a scheme to steal a valuable nickel weeks via FaceTime. “This is the lon-
winning an Oscar.” De La Hoya fig- and culminates in mayhem. Pepe, a gest I’ve prepared for any show in my
ured he could say whatever he wanted prolific director of Mamet with the entire life,” Criss said. Pepe said that
onstage about Smith, and Smith wouldn’t presence of a director of much gen- he hoped it would feel “lived in.” Fish-

1
try anything. tler fare, leafed through a bin of old burne said, “I’ve wanted to do this
—Zach Helfand wrenches. “We’ve been talking about play since I was a kid.” When “Buf-
what makes a lot of noise,” he said. falo” first made waves, he added, “I
THE BOARDS “There’s stuff that happens physi- was in the Philippines, doing ‘Apoc-
DOING IAMBIC cally—it will all be choreographed, alypse Now,’ ”—but “the talk of
hopefully, so that all is safe.” Fish- it . . . this play changed shit for the
burne got intrigued by an old brass American theatre. Nobody had used
fire extinguisher; earthenware jugs language like this before.” Pepe said,
(“Jugs, baby! Now, that’s country”), “All of a sudden, Mamet’s doing iam-
one of which he blew into, jug-band bic with the stuff of the streets.”
style; and an early-twentieth-century Mamet wrote “American Buffalo”
aurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell, toaster, which he picked up and car- while living in Chicago and hanging
L and Darren Criss, who star in the
Broadway revival of David Mamet’s
ried around.
“Our shop is not as nice as this,”
around with poker players in a junk shop.
“Some of the guys were ex-cons, and in
“American Buffalo,” at Circle in the Rockwell said. “We don’t have a ‘Clash the business of thievery,” Pepe said. “He
Square, and Neil Pepe, who directs it, of the Titans’ poster. Boy, I would would hear their stories. The play has this
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 13
idea of wanting a bigger piece of the pie.”
“ ‘Gatsby’s Tennis Nets,’” Fishburne
1
L.A. POSTCARD
something subtle, like a $15 million town-
house in Park Slope.” Upper East Side:
ASK HER ANYTHING
said, reading a tag aloud. “Get a little crusty white dog that’s not
On a counter in front, a wooden box that cute. Name it Tabitha.” Beverly Hills:
displayed a mysterious object: ivory-like, “Oddly enough, a lot of people in Bev-
rounded, and carved with dancing skel- erly Hills have absolutely no taste . . . a
etons. The visitors leaned in. “I was clean- few lion statues out front never hurt.”)
ing out an apartment, and I said, ‘Oh, “It’s half satire, half aspirational,” she
nice bowl,’ right?” Lerner said. “Then I said, setting off on her daily “rich-mom
turned it over and said, ‘Holy crap.’” few months ago, the C.E.O. of walk” through Beverly Hills, where she
“It’s a turtle shell,” Fishburne said.
“It’s the top of somebody’s skull,” Ler-
A Poggio Labs, a San Francisco soft-
ware company, sounded an alarm. “If
lives. “Everybody hates the rich mom,
the archetypal anal woman who doesn’t
ner said. you’re a straight guy aged 25 to 35,” he eat carbs and has the five-thousand-dol-
“Holy shit!” Criss said. “That is tweeted, women are judging you “based lar stroller, but they’ll also say, ‘Ooh, I
intense! ” on a set of standards created by a per- go to the same coffee shop as her.’ It’s
“It’s a real kapala, from Tibet,” Ler- son named tinx.” The arbiter’s full name the last group of people that you can
ner said. “They drank blood out of that is Christina Najjar; as a teen-ager she safely poke fun at.”
thing.” Fishburne picked up the kapala adopted the name Tinx, which is how Najjar grew up in London, the daugh-
and put it on his head. Actors, skull: Had her nearly two million social-media fol- ter of an expat corporate lawyer, and at-
anybody done “Hamlet”? lowers know her. “They’re mostly tended Stanford and Parsons. “I used to
“I did the famous speech at my high- women,” she said the other day. She wore take pictures of my outfits and describe
school graduation,” Fishburne said. a green sweatshirt, gray leggings, and them in funny ways, come up with these
“To be or not to be, that is the ques- cantaloupe-colored wrist weights. “They rich-mom characters,” she said. “It started
tion,” Criss said. have disposable income and want to in grad school, when all my friends had
“I like ‘O, what a rogue,’ I like ‘O, that know how to spend it. They want to these cool, high-powered jobs and I was
this too, too solid flesh,’” Rockwell said. have margaritas and wake up at 6 a.m. crying in a coffee shop in Tribeca, try-
“I think those are funner.” and go to a workout. They don’t want to ing to write a paper.”
“Shakespeare and Mamet, to me, are be dicked around by fuck boys.” Every Monday and Thursday, she in-
extremely similar,” Criss said. He com- A former freelance writer, Najjar, who vites her Instagram followers to “Ask
pared the musicality to a Coltrane riff. is thirty-one, joined TikTok in 2020. “I Me Anything,” addressing such topics
“Even though it’s a bunch of dudes was, like, I don’t give a shit anymore,” she as how to deal with dating burnout
saying dirty words, they’re actually ex- said. “I’m hungover and alone. I’m going (“Take a break,” but “set a time limit”),
tremely vulnerable,” Rockwell said. to make some TikToks, because other- which Nobu is the best Nobu (“Mal-
“The junk shop is a fence, it’s a front, wise my only interaction will be with my ibu”), and what to do when you see your
it’s a clubhouse,” Pepe said. Amazon devices.” She satirized alterna- ex for the first time after breaking up
“It’s their home,” Fishburne said. tive-milk adherents, “basic” New York (“Shove them into a bush”). Najjar types
“When you start digging, you realize, Oh, millennials, and rich moms, describing each answer in a bold, sans-serif font
yeah—this is very sweet.” how they might acclimate to various re- and posts it on her Instagram account.
—Sarah Larson gions. (Brooklyn: “You’re going to need “I took a few psych classes at Stan-
ford, but nothing serious,” she said. (She
majored in English, which, she has said,
taught her “how to bullshit.”) She added,
“My whole ethos is, if you have a room-
ful of women and someone has a prob-
lem, someone in that room has the an-
swer. It’s about sharing information.”
She went on, “If I can save a girl three
weeks of feeling crummy about a fuck
boy she’s dating, or if I can give some-
one advice so they don’t waste money
on a face product, that’s a win.”
At a coffee shop, Najjar ordered an
iced Americano and prepared to address
the day’s A.M.A. “I’ll get upwards of
ten thousand questions within twenty-
four hours,” she said. On her phone
screen was a grid of pink squares, digi-
tal Post-its: “Can I ask someone on a
“ Your Easter bonuses are hidden throughout corporate headquarters.” same-day date?” “Any advice for apart-
ment hunting?” “Best chicken fingers in staging an avant-metal concert, which,
L.A.?” “I’m gonna answer that one,” she fearing pandemonium, he’d decided not
said, tapping her screen, “because the to publicize. He’d heard things about
answer is Delilah”—a West Hollywood past Giger shows. Two fans had played
club frequented by Drake—“obviously.” football inside a gallery in New York.
“ ‘Who were your celeb childhood/ In Berlin, Julian Schnabel had opened
teenage crushes?’ Vin Diesel. I’m just an exhibition the same day as Giger’s;
warming up with light ones right now,” a handful showed up for Schnabel and
she said, running a Google Image search thousands queued around the block
for Diesel. “You’ve gotta add a photo,” for Giger. At the opening of the Lomex
she explained. Posted. Back to the ques- show, in January, hundreds had swarmed
tions: “How to get over job rejection?” the tiny space, despite a nor’easter. Some
“How to learn to love yourself?” visitors had been reduced to tears, a few
“Let me think about this one,” she pulling back sleeves or pant legs to re-
said, biting her lip. “Sometimes I dictate, veal tattoos that matched the art. “It’s a
because the font gets so small.” Seven pilgrimage,” Shulan said.
minutes later, she posted a paragraph Shulan, who had on black jeans, a black
about journaling, gratitude lists, and button-down, and black sneakers, has re-
doing more of what you love. “I always vered Giger since he was a teen-ager. “It
try to couple woo-woo with practical.” was this obsession for me,” he said. “I met
A man approached. “Tinx? I met you his agent five years ago through Face- fore them was a wall of three white-on-
at the Grove a while ago, when I was book.” Giger is best known for design- black prints from a series Giger did in
with my girlfriend—well, ex-girlfriend.” ing the creature in Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” 1969 of body-horror biomechs––part fe-
“Oh, no, I’m sorry,” Najjar said. but he also created some nightmarish male viscera, part Ace Hardware.
“No worries.” He worked at a dentist’s album artwork, for such musicians as “My son was telling me this is like
office. “We handle a lot of celebrity cli- Danzig, the Dead Kennedys, and Deb- the anime thing?” Burkeman said.
entele,” he said. “I’d love to hook you up.” bie Harry. He’d never heard of Harry be- “Hentai,” an onlooker offered.
“You’re so sweet,” Najjar said. fore he met her (and became smitten), in “It’s sexual,” Erik Foss, the former
“I low-key want to get you in the of- 1980, on a trip to the States to collect his co-owner of the Lit Lounge, said. “It’s
fice just to make my ex jealous,” he said. visual-effects Oscar for “Alien.” In 2002, violent, but it’s sensual at the same time.”
Najjar laughed uncomfortably. “I actu- he pulled up to the last major American Suddenly, the lights flashed off and on
ally want to get her jealous right now.” exhibition of his work in a hearse. Some- and people headed toward the door.
The dental guy scooted next to her thing of a proto-goth, he kept company “What’s happening?” a woman shrouded
for a selfie and dropped a business card. with Salvador Dalí and Timothy Leary. in earth-toned cashmere asked.
“Let’s see,” Tinx said, resuming scroll- In the gallery, Shulan was scheming “A shredding,” a security guard said.
ing: “ ‘Thoughts on texting the guy and with his assistants pro tempore (a gag- “I’ll keep my mind open so it can get
not responding to his response?’ gle of clipboard-wielding young women blown,” she said, following the crowd
“We waste so much time on games,” in black) when the expected throng of up a flight of stairs.
she said. “You have to just think, like, Lower East Side scenesters and new In a loft above the gallery, dark but
Why am I playing this game? More Pratt grads flooded in. The throne Giger for a single strobe light, people gath-

1
often than not, it’s ego.” designed for Alejandro Jorodowsky’s ered around a bearded man whose
—Sheila Yasmin Marikar never-made “Dune” adaptation was the shadow was projected monstrously onto
first thing they saw. “My son would love the brick wall behind him. This was
THE ART WORLD it for gaming,” a guest named Matthew Ocrilim (his bio on Google lists his date
PROTO-GOTH Rosenberg said, peering at the nearly of birth as 1900). He held a Gibson gui-
seven-foot-tall glossy black chair mod- tar, similar to the model used by Angus
elled on a human skeleton. Young, of AC/DC.
“Imagine being a Twitch streamer in “It’s like a poetry reading,” a girl in
that thing,” another man said to his a chore coat and Doc Martens said.
friend. They both agreed that “Alien” “He has long hair, so that means he’s
was a perfect movie and took a minute connected to some crazy biorhythm,”
ne recent Sunday evening, Alexan- to appreciate some of Giger’s prototypes: her friend said.
O der Shulan, the thirty-three-year-
old owner of the Lomex Gallery, in Tri-
“All the penis images. He kinda based
the head of the alien off of a penis,” one
Without a word, the shredding com-
menced. The Gibson screeched. In the
beca, was pacing the space, worrying about said. The friend nodded thoughtfully. very back of the room, an art student
his gallery’s potential ruin. In a couple of Across the room, the former d.j. DB whispered to a friend, “Technical metal
hours, as part of the first major New York Burkeman, in joggers and a Mike Kel- is nerdy.”
retrospective of the Swiss artist H. R. ley T-shirt, was arguing with a painter “Exaltedly nerdy,” his friend corrected.
Giger since his death, in 2014, Shulan was about the origins of tentacle porn. Be- —Hannah Seidlitz
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 15
 told me. She is recognizable by her voice,
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS but also by her Clara Bow eyes and her
wild Titian curls, which lend her wise-

SHOWTIME
guy mien a jolt of femininity. In Chi-
natown, she got out in front of a shabby
walkup a block from Canal Street. In-
In “Russian Doll,” Natasha Lyonne barrels into the past. side, at a secret outpost of a Japanese
restaurant, she joined a table alongside
BY RACHEL SYME the director Janicza Bravo, the play-
wright Jeremy O. Harris, the “Succes-
sion” star Nicholas Braun, and several
others who’d worked on “Zola,” Bravo’s
super-fuelled 2020 film about a pair of
strippers on a road trip gone wrong.
They ate green-bean tempura and lac-
quered lamb chops while Harris, a pre-
cocious dandy of the theatre world, held
forth on being fitted earlier in the day
for his outfit, a custom Thom Browne
suit in red-and-blue gingham. Lyonne
picked at the food and chatted with
Braun about a bar in the neighborhood
that he helped open. In the presence of
other outsized personalities, she seemed
content to cede the spotlight.
“I’ve been waiting for a New Yorker
profile since I was twelve,” Harris said.
“See, that makes one of us, because
I was always, like, this is for intellectual
bullies who graduated high school,” Ly-
onne replied.
After dinner, the group piled into
two cars and headed to the nearby Met-
The second season of Lyonne’s Netflix series is a riff on “Back to the Future.” rograph Theatre, where Lyonne mod-
erated a post-screening panel with the
n a November evening outside a and had a hand in every aspect of post- “Zola” team in front of a full house. Back
O sound-editing studio in Chelsea,
Natasha Lyonne was sipping a can of
production. “Directing is this whole
other third thing that came into my life,
outside on the street, she bear-hugged
the actor Colman Domingo and brought
Red Bull Sugar-Free and puffing on and I’ve never felt so at home,” Lyonne up a vacation they’d soon be taking to-
a Marlboro Light 72, her brand of choice. said. “It just turns all my defects into gether in Mexico. At about ten o’clock,
“Short, like Robert Mitchum would assets. Meaning, you know, being hyper- the comedian and actress Nora Lum,
have smoked,” she explained. She’d spent decisive and obsessive and tireless.” She a.k.a. Awkwafina, pulled up to the curb
the afternoon doing a “watch-down” of pulled out her phone and ordered a Lyft, in a luxury S.U.V. to whisk Lyonne off
new episodes of “Russian Doll,” her then decided that the wait was too long to a taping of “Saturday Night Live.”
macabre Netflix comedy, in which she and strode to the curb to hail a yellow Raised between New York and Is-
stars as Nadia Vulvokov, an East Village taxi. Before she could flag one, a group rael, Lyonne entered show business as
video-game engineer who in the first of young men in suits and ties recog- a child, and as a young adult she be-
season gets hit by a cab on the night of nized her and gave up theirs. “Thank came a star of cult comedies such as
her thirty-sixth-birthday party. The ac- you, gentlemen,” Lyonne said, and “Slums of Beverly Hills” and “But I’m
cident is fatal, but instead of expiring mimed the doffing of a cap. a Cheerleader.” Her family life was tu-
Nadia finds herself in a “Groundhog Lyonne speaks in the rhythms of a multuous, though, and by her early twen-
Day”-like loop of reliving the same night Borscht Belt comedian. Her accent is ties she was receding from Hollywood
and then dying in increasingly grue- outer borough, featuring rumbustious owing to drug abuse. She’s been clean
some and unlikely ways. Lyonne co- pronunciations (“cahk-a-rooch”) and since 2006, but she returned to profes-
created the series with Leslye Head- the raspy “Ehhhh”s of a tired old rabbi sional prominence only after playing a
land, and for Season 2, which premières settling into a comfortable chair. In front scene-stealing role in the Netflix prison
on April 20th, she has taken over from of a crowd or a camera, the effect be- series “Orange Is the New Black,” which
Headland as showrunner. She wrote comes even more pronounced. “When premièred in 2013. Now forty-three, she
four of the seven episodes, directed three, I get nervous, I become Joe Pesci,” she is charging ahead through her life at
16 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY MALERIE MARDER
full tilt. She told me, “I get panicky I well say what you want while they’re tory of the lobotomy. She told me that
won’t have enough time. I feel like I al- letting you,” she said, adding, “If people the show’s riddle-like construction was
ready blew so much.” don’t like it, I’ll just sue them.” influenced by her love of word games.
“Russian Doll” is, in a sense, a show Hanging in her kitchen is a frame con-
about lost time. In the course of the first yonne lives in a luxury condominium taining a crossword puzzle that she wrote
season, Nadia drowns in the East River,
falls down a flight of stairs, chokes on a
L inside a converted synagogue in
Manhattan. An Orthodox congregation
for the Times, in 2019, and an accompa-
nying article. “This for me is my favor-
chicken wing, and gets stung by a swarm still occupies the ground floor. One win- ite interview I’ve ever done,” she said.
of bees. Each time, she ends up back in ter afternoon, she showed me around “Because it was about something I have
the eccentrically renovated bathroom of her three-bedroom unit, which is filled very clean feelings for.”
her friend Maxine as the peppy open- with a stylishly jumbled array of art and Lyonne recalled that she has wanted
ing notes of Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get personal memorabilia. “This can all be to be a director ever since her first major
Up” blare from the next room, where yours for twenty-five hundred a month, film role, in Woody Allen’s musical
Nadia’s birthday bash is still raging. in perpetuity,” she joked. “Hear me out, “Everyone Says I Love You,” playing
Eventually, she meets a man in the this is not a scam!” The bed was un- the Allen character’s free-spirited teen
neighborhood named Alan (Charlie Bar- made. Framed movie posters were daughter. In her apartment she keeps a
nett), who is having a similar problem, propped along the walls, some two or cramped “movie room” outfitted with a
and together they set out to solve the three deep. Lyonne was wearing her TV, a love seat, and dozens of vintage
mystery of their shared existential glitch. ringlets pulled away from her face in a VHS tapes. On one wall hung a still
Season 1 was a showcase for Lyonne’s lopsided bun. On her fingers were acrylic photograph from the first project she
gregarious bravado and her world-weary nails—red, white, and spiky—that she’d directed, a short film for the Parisian
one-liners (“Thursday. What a concept.”), kept on with Krazy Glue since a photo fashion brand Kenzo, from 2017. Lean-
but it also packed in philosophical mus- shoot a month earlier. She pointed out ing against another was a poster of Linda
ings and hefty themes of mortality and a set of timbales from her ex-boyfriend Manz, a tough-girl actress of a previ-
redemption. Its look channelled Lyonne’s Fred Armisen, and a Sonos speaker from ous generation, from a new restoration
favorite New York films, from the down- the “lovely new man” in her life, whom of Dennis Hopper’s “Out of the Blue,”
town grime of “Sid and Nancy” to the she preferred not to name. which Lyonne and Chloë Sevigny, her
urban kookiness of “After Hours.” In a Lyonne is an autodidact and a film longtime best friend, helped finance. In
review for this magazine, Emily Nuss- obsessive, who peppers conversations the living room, two huge stained-glass
baum compared the show to such “arch, with references to silent cinema, Jewish windows cast colorful shadows on the
deeply emotional puzzle boxes” as “Flea- mysticism, nineteen-seventies Holly- rug. On the coffee table was a copy of
bag” and “The Leftovers.” It won Emmy wood moguls, New York City trivia, and the script for one of Lyonne’s most be-
Awards for its costumes, cinematogra- Lou Reed lyrics. A single question sent loved films, Bob Fosse’s semi-auto-
phy, and production design, and was nom- to her by text message might elicit a biographical musical “All That Jazz.”
inated in ten other categories, including waterfall of replies, plus a GIF of, say, a Boisterous and hallucinatory, it follows
Outstanding Comedy Series. Pikachu with the caption “Haters Gonna a pill-popping choreographer (Roy
For Season 2, the “Groundhog Day” Hate.” In her apartment, nearly every Scheider) as he burns the candle at both
premise has been traded for a riff on shelf, wall nook, and windowsill was ends while being courted by an angel
“Back to the Future,” and the result is crowded with books. She excitedly of death, played by Jessica Lange. Each
heavier than one might expect. In an showed me a volume called “House of morning, he tells his beleaguered reflec-
early scene, Nadia discovers that she has Psychotic Women,” about female neu- tion in the mirror, “It’s showtime, folks!”
teleported, via the No. 6 train, to 1982, rosis in genre films, and a copy of Cyn- Lyonne told me, “It’s the closest approx-
the year she was born. This sets her off thia Ozick’s 1997 novel, “The Putter- imation to what life feels like that I’ve
on a race to uncover a family mystery messer Papers,” which she said she would ever seen.” Sitting on top of an old piano
and its psychological reverberations. be reading aloud for a new audiobook were the two SAG Awards that she re-
Through seven episodes, parts of which recording. Pointing to a beat-up biogra- ceived for her performance in “Orange
were filmed on location in Budapest, phy of Rasputin, she said, “In my addic- Is the New Black.” “You always read
Nadia keeps barrelling into the past, tion I was always carrying this around. about people who say, ‘I put my awards
connecting the dots between her own It was my safety blanket.” Lyonne was directly in the garbage, because I’m
sense of dislocation, her mother’s mental- educated in part at a Modern Orthodox grounded.’ No! Put your awards where
health problems, and her Hungarian Jewish high school where students read people can see them! What are you, a
grandmother’s experience of the Holo- the Talmud in the original Aramaic, and fucking dummy who wants to pretend
caust. (Alan, meanwhile, delves into his she runs “Russian Doll” a bit like a ye- like you didn’t do that work? Schmucks.”
own personal history.) Lyonne admit- shiva study circle. A lengthy syllabus that Lyonne has been working since
ted that an earnest exploration of in- she distributed to the writers of Season 2 kindergarten. Born Natasha Bianca
herited trauma might not resonate with included texts on Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Lyonne Braunstein, in 1979, she is the
every fan of “Russian Doll” ’s jaunty first Search for Meaning,” the Hungarian- second child of parents whom she de-
season. “You don’t get a lot of shots to American mathematician John von Neu- scribes as “rock-and-roll black sheep
say what you want to say, so you may as mann, quantum mechanics, and the his- from conservative Jewish families.” Her
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 17
mother, Ivette Buchinger, was the daugh- they would have her take sips of their would move out of the house after the
ter of Hungarian Holocaust survivors beer and belt out David Lee Roth lyr- couple’s ugliest fights, dragging Lyonne
who settled in Los Angeles by way of ics “to show off for their friends.” Rid- with her to a Manhattan rental apart-
Paris and went into watch distribution. ing the Long Island Rail Road to audi- ment. “It was a lot of basic shit, like
Lyonne described her mother as a “red- tions in the city, Ivette would urge her Mommy called the cops on Daddy,” Ly-
headed European prima-ballerina hot daughter to read the Wall Street Journal onne said, adding, “For me and my
chick,” who hoped to become a profes- stock trades aloud. “It was, like, my brother, it was very much trying to hold
sional dancer but never quite found an street-urchin trick,” Lyonne said. She on.” When she was eight, her father
on-ramp. As a teen-ager, Ivette met Ly- landed her first film role at the age of abruptly announced that the family was
onne’s father, Aaron Braunstein, a loud- six, a minor part in Mike Nichols’s 1986 moving to Israel, and that he had grand
talking, ponytailed Brooklyn native, and adaptation of Nora Ephron’s novel plans to bring Mike Tyson to the Hil-
they began a high-octane love affair. “Heartburn,” and, that same year, got a ton Tel Aviv. (Lyonne refers to the move
“They were both into fast cars, fur coats, recurring role on “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.” as her parents’ “tax-evasion scheme,”
Rottweilers, cocaine, drinking,” Lyonne She auditioned for but didn’t get the because they ended up in debt to the
said. Ivette moved to New York to be lead role in “Curly Sue,” though the char- I.R.S.) Her dad bought a black Porsche
with Aaron, and they had Lyonne’s older acter, a frizzy-haired ham who assists and promoted boxing matches in small
brother in 1972. They bought a run- her grifter father figure, may as well have venues around the country. Lyonne re-
down mansion in Kings Point, Long been written for her. “When I go to called visiting the ancient city of Cae-
Island, that they boasted had once been Times Square I get nostalgic, because I sarea, taking a ski trip in Lebanon, and
the home of Herman Melville. (It had think of myself as a little kid with a brief- performing in an Israeli movie involv-
not.) Ivette worked on and off for her case walking around, developing street ing a hot-air balloon. In a narrow office
parents’ business, but around the time smarts, wondering if my drunk dad is at the back of her apartment, she showed
Lyonne was born the company foun- going to pick me up,” she said. me a framed photograph of her work-
dered, and the family struggled finan- In social settings, Lyonne trots out ing as a “ring girl” at a fight in Tel Aviv,
cially. “My father was always up to shit,” certain anecdotes from her childhood grinning and waving an Israeli flag. Ly-
Lyonne said. “First he wanted to be a as if they were bits in a comedic mono- onne described that period as the “great
race-car driver, then a boxing promoter. logue. But in reality her parents’ mar- years” of her childhood, but in 1989 Ivette
So I got put into this business.” riage was volatile, and her upbringing returned to New York and took Nata-
Aaron and Ivette took a gimmicky was distressingly unstable. She recalled sha with her. “My dad’s drinking was
approach to stage parenting. When Ly- that Aaron would disappear on drink- no longer magnanimous or the life of
onne was five, they legally changed her ing sprees or lock himself in his bed- the party,” Lyonne said. “And it’s not
last name. She recalled that at parties room for days at a time, and that Ivette like they were winning at this boxing-
promoting life style. That pipe dream
was dying, and the money was running
out.” (Her brother stayed in Israel, and
as adults the siblings lost touch.)
Back in New York, mother and
daughter bounced from one apartment
to another. Lyonne landed a role in the
film version of “Dennis the Menace,”
but she was auditioning more than she
was landing parts. “I’m no Drew Bar-
rymore, I’m not in fucking ‘E.T.,’” she
said. “And I’m lugging around this
nutjob”—her mother—“and we are a
package deal.” Ivette’s parents helped
support them financially, and at their in-
sistence Lyonne secured a scholarship
to Ramaz, an Orthodox academy on the
Upper East Side, but she was expelled
in her sophomore year for dealing mar-
ijuana to her classmates. In 1995, Ivette
moved to Miami, and Lyonne, who was
fifteen, stayed behind to make “Every-
one Says I Love You,” sleeping on the
couch of a family friend’s studio apart-
ment in Murray Hill. The movie was
packed with stars—Goldie Hawn, Alan
“Leave this house and never return! It’s a seller’s market!” Alda, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts—
but Lyonne recalled feeling out of place daughter’s problems. “It was, like, life as performance, both insolent and poi-
among them, “like they all had a shared an endurance test of how much one can gnantly mature, but during filming she
secret I wasn’t in on.” After filming, she withstand,” Lyonne said. The new sea- drove while she was drunk and crashed
joined her mother in Florida and fin- son of “Russian Doll” doesn’t draw on her car into the window of a furniture
ished high school there, a year early, Ella’s story directly, but it explores the store on La Brea Avenue. “I’ll never for-
through a bridge program at N.Y.U. rift between a traumatized older gen- get the steering-wheel imprint on her
She applied with an essay comparing eration and a vulnerable younger one, chest,” Jenkins said.
her co-stars to the characters in T. S. and the ripple effects of what Lyonne In 1998, Lyonne enrolled at N.Y.U.,
Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” “It was very calls “damaged love.” She told me, “I but she quickly dropped out. Accord-
over the top, like how I would not be a joke that there’s a straight line from Hit- ing to the terms of the bridge program,
part of a lost generation and was going ler to heroin.” she needed to complete a year of col-
to show up and be the real deal because Nadia has a surrogate-parent figure lege studies before receiving her high-
mendacity makes me sick,” she said. “So, on the show, named Ruth (Elizabeth school diploma, so she never did receive
basically, me now, but high and sixteen.” Ashley), based on a friend of Ivette’s, one. “The jobs and drugs were doing
As an adult, Lyonne communicated Ruth Factor, whom Lyonne considers to this two-handed dance of pulling me
with her parents irregularly, and by the be her godmother. In a Season 1 scene away from an education,” she told me.
time of their deaths, in the twenty-tens, that was inspired by actual events, young “Slums of Beverly Hills” made her one
she’d mostly cut off contact. Her father Nadia (Brooke Timber) helps her mother, of Hollywood’s most in-demand young
moved back to New York and ran a failed Nora, as she manically hauls watermel- actresses, and in 1999 she starred in the
campaign for City Council on the Upper ons out of a bodega and into the back queer satire “But I’m a Cheerleader,”
West Side, in 2013, the year before he seat of their car, which is already packed and in “Detroit Rock City,” a seventies
died. In a piece that appeared in the Ob- with the fruit. Later, when Nora has a period piece, with her then boyfriend,
server, he showed off an apartment clut- meltdown at home, Ruth sweeps in to Edward Furlong. She also signed on to
tered with images of his daughter but care for the girl. Lyonne wrote several play a sexually sophisticated sidekick in
admitted that they no longer spoke. “Poor of Factor’s signature phrases into Ruth’s “American Pie,” the gross-out teen com-
Natasha. Let’s all cry for her,” he said. lines, among them, “Nothing in this world edy, a gig that she told me she took only
“What makes her be angry, angry at the is easy, except pissing in the shower.” for the money, after turning it down,
father, that’s part of the thing, right?” “like, five times.” She bought a studio
Ivette struggled with mental-health n the second episode of “Russian Doll” apartment on Sixteenth Street and, at
problems, especially later in her life.
When I asked Lyonne when her mother
I Season 1, Nadia goes on a nihilistic
bender, pounding shots, snorting co-
a party around the same time, met Se-
vigny, an actress and downtown It Girl
died, she had to think for a moment. “It caine off the end of a comb, and falling who was five years her senior. Lyonne
was around Season 1 of ‘Orange Is the asleep in the middle of her party with described seeing Sevigny as a sort of big
New Black,’ because I remember being a lit cigarette dangling from her fingers. sister. “I remember Chloë coming over
so scared that those billboards were Sevigny, who plays Nadia’s mother on and washing my fishnets in the bath-
gonna trigger her,” she told me, adding, the show, recalled sobbing as she watched tub with Woolite,” she said. Sevigny told
“I was quite intentionally trying to be the episode for the first time. “Seeing me, “I found her very dynamic and en-
invisible the entire time my parents were her that way again,” she told me, her gaging and reckless in a way that was,
alive.” She continued, “No one is a vil- voice breaking, “I couldn’t handle it.” at that point, fun.”
lain or a victim; I don’t feel like anyone By her late teens, Lyonne was a In 2001, just as “American Pie 2” be-
was trying to cause harm. I make a lot self-professed “club-kid raver and pot- came the No. 1 movie in the country,
of jokes about my parents and stuff, but head,” but she told me, “I was so young Lyonne was arrested on a D.U.I. charge.
ultimately I am very impressed that peo- that the consequences weren’t that se- The following year, she moved into a
ple seem to have this endless reservoir rious yet. I was seventeen. I was Teflon.” town house in Gramercy Park owned
of strength and empathy to engage with She landed her breakout role, in 1997, by the actor Michael Rapaport, a close
things that are as deeply and constantly in Tamara Jenkins’s dramedy “Slums of friend, with a series of roommates that
triggering as a family unit.” Beverly Hills,” playing the adolescent included the Hole bassist Melissa Auf
One of Lyonne’s major creative am- daughter of a huckster used-car sales- der Maur and the singer-songwriter
bitions is to make a film about the years man in nineteen-seventies California. Rufus Wainwright. The place became
she spent in Israel—“ ‘Paper Moon,’ but Jenkins told me that she initially had a rowdy neighborhood gathering spot,
with Jews,” as she put it—but “Russian doubts about whether Lyonne was right and drug use was common. (After mov-
Doll” is focussed on wrestling with for the part. “I was, like, she’s really in- ing out and going to rehab, Wainwright
matrilineage. Lyonne’s maternal grand- teresting, but I don’t know. She talks wrote a song, called “Natasha,” that goes,
mother, Ella, was a survivor of Ausch- like she’s walking out of ‘Mean Streets’ “Does anybody know how scary / This
witz, and her maternal grandfather, or something. I kept saying, ‘We have is for you and is for me?”) In Decem-
Morris, lost his first wife in the camps. to peel back your De Niro thing, be- ber of 2004, new tenants in the house
According to Lyonne, they coped with cause I want to know who you are, and called the police, accusing Lyonne of
the horrors in their past with a brusque I want to be able to have your vulnera- threatening their dog and ripping a
stoicism that left little room for their bility present.’ ” Lyonne gave a bravura mirror off the wall. She spent a night
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 19
in jail, and, soon afterward, Rapaport confront her knotty predicament “with- toward a small guesthouse, between the
evicted her. out being spooked by it.” Often, Nadia patio and a wooden pergola, where I
“I just decided to drop out completely,” discusses dying with a detached curios- found Todd Downing, an editor and a
Lyonne said. “It gets really dark. I sort ity. “This is not good or bad. It’s just a co-producer of the new season, sitting
of think I’m done forever. And I’m not bug,” she tells Alan in one episode. Nadia in front of several monitors cutting a
coming back.” She recalled periods when sees the world as absurd and wearying, sequence from Episode 3.
she went by the street alias Crystal Snow but also as being suffused with possi- “Sorry,” Lyonne said, a minute later,
and would call her agent from pay phones bility should she make it out the other entering the cottage and flopping down
to inquire about booking jobs. “It’s a long side. Lyonne’s friend Michaela Coel, the on a brown leather couch. “I was just
time between snorting heroin to shoot- creator and star of the British show “I arguing with the Netflix people about
ing it to sharing needles,” she said. “I May Destroy You,” about surviving the my music budget.”
took it to the finish line.” She continued obliterating aftermath of sexual assault, On the wall was a whiteboard scrawled
acting sporadically, including in “My Sui- told me that she admired Lyonne’s will- with notes for several episodes and a
cidal Sweetheart,” a 2005 indie flop about ingness to delve into her lowest expe- framed poster for the 1974 Robert Alt-
an escaped mental patient road-tripping riences. “I don’t know if this will make man comedy “California Split.” Lyonne
with her boyfriend while trying repeat- sense to anyone other than Natasha, but stretched her legs out on a coffee table
edly to end her life. But she wouldn’t it feels like we are both living life on and asked Downing, a burly man with
have another noteworthy onscreen role some sort of dangerous and thrilling a thick brown mustache, to pull up a
until “Orange Is the New Black.” The edge,” Coel said, adding, “We’re on two scene that takes place after Nadia has
press pounced on the story of a young parallel edges. And we’re shouting at rocketed back in time. Nadia is at Crazy
celebrity’s downward spiral. In May of each other, and waving, and talking about Eddie, the now defunct electronics store
2005, Rapaport wrote a piece in Jane how cool it is to be alive.” in the East Village, exchanging banter
called “Evicting Natasha Lyonne.” (He with the store clerk (Malachi Nimmons).
and Lyonne have since reconciled, but ince 2018, Lyonne has co-run a pro- He mentions that he edits a zine about
at the time, she said, “my heart was bro-
ken.”) The same year, life-threatening
S duction company called Animal
Pictures with the producer Danielle
“commodity fetishism and the Debord-
ian spectacle,” referring to the French
health complications landed Lyonne in Renfrew Behrens and the actress and theorist Guy Debord.
the I.C.U., and the details were leaked comedian Maya Rudolph, one of sev- “Let’s cut that,” Lyonne said. “It feels
to the Post. After she missed several court eral close friends who are “S.N.L.” very mundane.” Downing wordlessly
dates for charges related to the neigh- alumni. “The name comes from when clicked and then played the scene again
bor incident, a judge issued a standing we were sitting at lunch, and I said, with the line scrubbed.
warrant for her arrest. In December of ‘You’re a fucking animal,’ ” Rudolph “I kind of miss it,” he said.
2006, she turned herself in, and, on court told me. “She wants to devour.” The “O.K., O.K., we keep the Debord-
orders, checked into a rehab center in company is headquartered in L.A.’s ian spectacle!” she replied.
Pennsylvania. She hasn’t used drugs since. Studio City, in a white stucco ranch To end the scene, Lyonne had im-
Lyonne rejects the notion that what house whose main room is dominated provised several “wackadoo exits.” In
she went through was tragic or shame- by a giant painting of Rudolph in the one, she tried a riff on Crazy Eddie’s
ful. “What always made me feel really slogan: “My prices are also insane!” In
bad with, like, Terry Gross or Barbara another, she said, “You should know I
Walters was when they would just come have an I.U.D.” Lyonne wrinkled her
for me with the drug stuff,” she said. nose as she watched herself onscreen,
“And I’m, like, Dude, why are you vic- and said, “What is she doing?” Lyonne
timizing something I’m transparent is by all accounts an exacting show-
around?” She told me that in retrospect runner. “She’s very demanding,” Alex
she sees her drug use, in part, as an at- Buono, an executive producer and the
tempt to grapple with her parents’ reck- producing director of Season 2, told me
less tendencies. “Now that I’m an adult, fondly. Amy Poehler, who executive-
I think so much of my being a wild style of a Gilded Age heiress. When I produced both seasons, described her
thing was because I was trying to get arrived, on an August morning, I found as a “very humane dictator.” But, after
in their shoes,” she said, adding, “I fully Lyonne smoking in the back yard and some back-and-forth over Nadia’s lines,
cleaned house on that type of behavior. talking intently on her phone. She was Lyonne settled on the one that made
I make sure that, at this point in my life, wearing a backward black leather Tel- Downing laugh: “All right, well. We
I just don’t fuck with chaos.” far baseball cap and a Gucci purse with live and we die, huh? Yeah. Adios!”
In “Russian Doll,” Nadia’s self- a lion’s-head clasp, plus her mother’s Lyonne nodded approvingly when
destructive moments—and the grisly gold chain and her grandmother’s she saw another shot from the episode,
deaths that result—are treated without watch. The look was not unlike Nadia’s showing Sevigny’s image replicating in-
sentimentality. Lyonne said that she punk-rococo style in “Russian Doll,” a finitely on a pair of closed-circuit TV
made the character a video-game pro- combination of glamorous and street screens. “What you’re seeing there is in-
grammer because she wanted her to tough. Noticing me, Lyonne pointed trospective camera stuff based on Doug-
20 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
las Hofstadter’s ‘Strange Loop’ theory,
made into a half-hour comedy,” Lyonne
said. “That’s very satisfying to me.” Hof-
stadter’s book and many of the other
texts on her Season 2 reading list ex-
plore ideas about the construction of a
self or the hidden forces that shape a
life. Lyonne showed me an app called
Universe Splitter, which maps the re-
percussions of small individual choices
using quantum theory, and explained
that in the writers’ room they’d occa-
sionally use it to “open up story ideas
for fun.” She said, “The bigger question
I’m asking is if it’s true that we all have
the ability, regarding past trauma, to re-
orient ourselves around it, or if in fact
there is no free will, because it’s a set el-
ement of the universe, and therefore we
must just radically accept the full weight
of the past.”
“Russian Doll” came about after
Poehler approached Lyonne, in 2014,
with a concept for a sitcom, called “Old “Is it close enough to spring for nice weather
Soul,” in which Lyonne would play a not to be existentially terrifying?”
reformed rebel working at a home for
the elderly. They pitched the show to
NBC and recruited Ellen Burstyn, Fred
• •
Willard, and Rita Moreno as co-stars,
but the project languished in the pilot woman in the big city. “She has the same tasha all the time, ‘You have all these
stage. Poehler and Lyonne continued cat as Holly Golightly,” Headland said. incredible ideas, but it’s like you need
exchanging ideas, one of which involved And yet the show is refreshingly unin- the gel cap to put the NyQuil in. It
Lyonne’s being stuck in a time loop and terested in a conventional heroine’s jour- doesn’t have a container.’ What I did for
entering a new romantic entanglement ney toward romantic or professional the show was a lot of narrative wran-
each week. “I think it came from the fulfillment. In 2017, Lyonne and Head- gling. But, by the second season, I wasn’t
fact that I just selfishly love to watch land secured a straight-to-series order really sure I needed to be there any-
Natasha argue,” Poehler said. Lyonne from Netflix. They partnered with Jax more.” Lyonne had some reservations
met with several potential showrunners Media, the production company behind about stepping in to head the team, but
before settling on Leslye Headland, a “Broad City” and “Search Party,” and re- Jenji Kohan, the showrunner of “Or-
playwright and the director of such acer- cruited a team of quirky character actors ange Is the New Black,” and Poehler
bic comedies as “Bachelorette” (2012) to populate the show’s surrealist world, encouraged her. Poehler told me, “With
and “Sleeping with Other People” (2015), including Greta Lee, whose hilarious Russian nesting dolls, you open them
in which Lyonne had played a small performance as Maxine includes ditzily and they get smaller and smaller and
role. Together, the two decided to use uttering the greeting “Sweet birthday tighter and tighter. When you look at
the “Groundhog Day” conceit to tackle babyyyyy!” each time Nadia crashes back the show, she is the distilled tiny doll.”
Lyonne’s troubled past through the met- to the land of the living. Lyonne jokes that she wants to become
aphor of a death wish that won’t stop Because of the pandemic, Season 2 like Robert Evans, the matinée idol who
coming true. took three years to create. Headland left went on to run Paramount Pictures in
Headland recalled that Lyonne asked the show before writing began, and in its seventies glory days. “Even though
her early on to read “You Can’t Win,” 2020 she signed on to make “The Ac- this is so stressful and intense, I’ve never
the cult-classic memoir by Jack Black, olyte,” a “Star Wars” series for Disney+. been happier,” she said. “As a child actor,
from 1926, about life as an opium-addicted Lyonne cited the “Star Wars” commit- you have this hypervigilance that the
drifter. “That was a big ‘Aha’ moment ment as the reason for Headland’s de- rug is gonna be pulled out from under
for me,” Headland said. “I saw that Na- parture. “There’s also tricky stuff that you. As the showrunner, I feel very calm
tasha is a transient figure, one who moves happened that has nothing to do with by having all the information.”
in and out of spaces without ascribing me, to be honest,” she added without Lyonne loaded Season 2 of “Russian
to social norms or dictates.” In “Russian elaborating. Headland didn’t comment Doll” with visual references to the au-
Doll,” the character of Nadia in some on the circumstances surrounding her teurist cinema she reveres—Cassave-
ways fits the trope of the lonely young exit, but told me, “I used to say to Na- tes’s “A Woman Under the Influence,”
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 21
Coppola’s “Dracula,” Cronenberg’s office, Lyonne keeps a note from Nora cause I was so hungover. I came in and
“Videodrome.” She attributes the Dutch that reads, simply, “I love you.”) In 2012, was, like, ‘You guys have seen “China-
angles in one episode to Orson Welles’s Lyonne appeared in her third “Ameri- town”? Have you thought about any-
“Touch of Evil,” and a long tracking can Pie” film, and the following year she thing like that?’”
shot through a morgue in another to had small roles in a string of other for- “I actually do wish you’d found your-
“Spike Lee dolly tricks.” “The entire gettable comedies. Then Jenji Kohan self in ‘Chinatown’ for teens,” Bravo said.
season is an Easter egg,” she told me. launched her comeback by casting her “I was in there pitching it before I
Perhaps as a consequence, the season is in “Orange Is the New Black,” in the knew what pitching was, like, ‘You guys
more shambolic than the first. As Na- cheekily self-referential role of a former need slats in the shades where the light
dia’s adventures expand into multiple heroin addict whom another inmate dubs gets through.’”
time lines, the story becomes disorient- “the junkie philosopher.” “And a suit, right? And a secretary!”
ingly twisty. The result is less a puzzle Through Animal Pictures, Lyonne is Bravo said, putting on a Lyonne accent.
box than a messy metaphysical punk currently developing shows with several Lyonne talked about her family.
opera, for worse and for better. In life female creators, including Alia Shawkat “I mean, I got really lucky, because
and in “Russian Doll,” Lyonne employs and the “Russian Doll” writer Cirocco they died,” she said. Bravo laughed sym-
the classic Jewish coping mechanism of Dunlap. She compared her friendships pathetically. “I only mean that it was so
leavening difficult moments with shtick. with other women in the business to the all-consuming, and I think it’s very hard
There are scenes in Season 2, though, fellowship among such men as Martin to let go of that,” Lyonne continued.
when Nadia’s wisecracking finally gives Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Paul “Now I’m an adult, and I can start my
way to quiet emotion. When she first Schrader in nineteen-seventies Holly- life. That’s no longer a present danger
sees her mother’s image, in the 1982 time wood. “It’s almost like they had a pick- in my psyche.”
line, the camera lingers on Nadia’s ter- up-basketball-game community of film- “Did you ever see them in your
rified face as tears roll down her cheeks. making, where they came around and dreams?” Bravo asked.
“I figured out how to stop dying,” Ly- saw each other’s stuff,” she said. A few “It was worse than that. I would think
onne said. “How do I learn how to live? nights after the “Zola” panel, I went with I saw them on the street or in a grocery
That’s what Season 2 is about.” Lyonne and Janicza Bravo to see a Ro- store, because I was terrified of running
manian film called “Bad Luck Banging into them. For me, it’s a great relief to
yonne told me that one of the great or Loony Porn” at Film Forum. The feel like I can walk free in New York.”
L moments of her life was being in-
vited to read Lou Reed’s song “Coney
movie is an experimental romp about a
teacher’s weathering the aftermath of
After dinner, we strolled south through
Washington Square Park toward Bra-
Island Baby” at his memorial service, her homemade sex tape appearing on vo’s hotel on the Lower East Side. De-
in 2013. An episode of “Russian Doll”’s the Internet. Its middle section features spite the rise of Omicron, the night-life
new season was named for the song. a dispassionate narrator reciting facts crowd was out in full force. Lyonne has
Reed was one of many hard-living men about Romanian history. “Have you guys a distinctive way of moving through
whom Lyonne idolized in her youth. seen Lina Wertmüller’s ‘Seven Beau- the city: clomping, springy, coat collar
“Any macho swing involving a guy on a ties’?” Lyonne said afterward. “I don’t popped high. Season 2 of “Russian Doll”
Greyhound bus with a notebook,” she want to insult this movie, but that one opens with one of many shots of Nadia
said. “A Hemingway type with a glass of is better done.” perambulating, her black boots tapping
whiskey. Bukowski at the bar. John Fante She and Bravo retired to the nearby in rhythm with Depeche Mode’s “Per-
on the case,” she said. “I started to think, Washington Square Diner, where they sonal Jesus.” Lyonne is currently work-
O.K., so that’s what being a person is. settled into the same side of a booth. ing, with the director Rian Johnson, on
You’re supposed to go into the belly of Like Bill Murray in the diner scene in a “Columbo”-style crime show for Pea-
the beast.” “Groundhog Day,” Lyonne ordered with cock, and it’s not hard to picture Ly-
But her recovery and her second act abandon: two grilled cheese sandwiches, onne, an avid Peter Falk fan, as the hard-
have been shaped by the guidance of two cups of chicken-noodle soup, French boiled detective, stalking the streets with
other women. In 2009, Lyonne audi- fries, turkey sausage, a side of pickles, a cigarette between her fingers and a
tioned for Nora and Delia Ephron’s Off and black coffee. Bravo asked only for wry expression on her face. Waiting to
Broadway play “Love, Loss, and What mint tea. As Lyonne dipped a sandwich cross Houston Street, we spotted a group
I Wore.” Nora remembered her from into a puddle of ketchup, she spoke of of fratty-looking revellers on the far side
“Heartburn,” and the two struck up a being a teen star in turn-of-the-millen- of the intersection, elbowing one an-
friendship. She cast Lyonne in the play nium Hollywood. other and pointing in Lyonne’s direc-
and later offered her second home, in “After ‘Slums of Beverly Hills,’ they tion. “Oh, no, we need to get away from
L.A., as a place for Lyonne to stay during were, like, ‘Welcome to the WB! What them,” Bravo said. But Lyonne just cocked
work trips. “I was, like, ‘Nora, what are do you want to do here?’” she said. “And her head confidently as she stepped off
you doing? I’m a crackhead and a chain- I was, like, ‘I don’t fucking want to be on the curb. I asked her if the attention both-
smoker!’” Lyonne recalled. “She was, like, “Dawson’s Creek”!’ I went into that meet- ered her. “In New York, I like to think
‘Oh, shut up already. Not anymore. Just ing in a Lenny Bruce T-shirt with a bot- I’m a gnome or a leprechaun,” she said.
smoke outside and tell the housekeeper tle of whiskey in my back pocket. My “I’m part of the psychedelic journey
when you’re done.’ ” (On the wall of her manager had to get me out of bed be- through Manhattan.” 
22 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
 to-break tsunami will be terrible. It might
SHOUTS & MURMURS be different, sure. Underwater, maybe.
But it will still be life! Unless, you
know . . . it’s death. But there’s no get-
ting around death, dear. You’re not God.
All I’m saying is, don’t overthink it.
Procreation is what we’re put on earth
to do. Literally. We gave birth to you so
that you would one day give us a grand-
child to squeeze and spoil and bounce on
our knees twice a year. You’re kind of not
holding up your end of the bargain here.
Don’t get upset. Why can’t you see
this as a compliment? We’re saying we
want another you! A cuter, sweeter,
pinker version of you who is too young
and dumb to see our flaws!
Yes, things are dark right now. Lit-

WHAT TSUNAMI?
erally, because the tsunami is blocking
out the sun. But standing there frozen
in panic and avoiding living your life is,
BY HALLIE CANTOR frankly, just self-indulgent. I think you’re
being a bit dramatic, honestly. You’re
ook, honey, we know it’s been a hard And now it’s time for you to repay us going to end our genetic line over one
L few years. It’s perfectly normal to
feel uneasy about making any major life
for that.
Don’t tell me that no one in your
little splash of city-demolishing water?
And the debris it’s currently picking up
changes right now. But your stepfather generation is having kids because of the as it rushes closer with deadly speed—I
and I agree that just because we’re cur- giant wall of water rising higher and know, I know.
rently standing in the shadow of an enor- higher every second, nearly engulfing Look, I’m agreeing with you. The
mous tsunami still gathering momentum the entire horizon. You know my friend catastrophic tsunami filling our field of
is no reason not to give us a grandchild. Jeanie? Her son already has three. Yes, vision does make things seem pretty
Yes, the tsunami is big. Yes, it’s scary. you did know that. Yes, you did. Re- hopeless. But that’s all the more reason
Yes, there’s a hundred-per-cent certainty member? I sent you pictures of the blan- to give the whole family something to
that it will crash down in a matter of kets I knit for them? Along with the live for! Not to mention something to
minutes and drown everyone in its path. text “When will I get to make one of talk about at family gatherings that isn’t
But you know what? There’s always going these for you???” And then “LOL!” and politics! Come on, doesn’t that pit of
to be a reason not to do something. the laughing emoji, so you’d know I terror at the base of your stomach just
You don’t think my generation had wasn’t one of those moms, who would make you think about creating a life?
fears? We fought for civil rights! And ever dream of putting pressure on you. Kids bring hope. You have to have hope.
women’s rights! I mean, not us specif- Here’s the thing: you don’t even know You just have to!
ically but our contemporaries. And for sure that the tsunami will hit us! Will hope slow the enormous tsu-
things seemed dark to us, too, when our No one can predict the future. Maybe nami now looming directly above our
friends first started having kids. We they’ll find a way to reverse kinetic wave heads, poised to crash with the force of
weren’t sure the world would ever be energy in the next sixty seconds. Or at a speeding bullet train? Probably not.
the same after the Exxon Valdez oil least slow it down! You could have But it will certainly make me feel good,
spill. But we decided to be brave any- grandkids of your own by the time the in the waning moments of humanity,
way, and we had you. thing even crests. Or all your friends to be the one posting the chubby-lit-
And it just makes me so sad to think will, and you’ll be alone, with no one to tle-thigh pics on Facebook, instead of
about what would have happened if we pay for your nursing home. And how the one commenting “What a cutie!”
hadn’t! I wouldn’t have been able to do silly will you feel then? and then unnecessarily signing my name
all those picnics and sing-alongs and Oh, you have “moral concerns” about to the comment.
Mommy and Me classes with my sweet consigning an innocent baby to a ter- Anyway, dear, the top of the wave
little curly-haired girl! I probably would rible post-apocalyptic life? O.K., Miss looks like it’s cresting, so we might have
have just kept working at the firm and “I took one philosophy course in col- to continue this later. We have to walk
eventually been promoted, and had a lege and now I refuse to shop at the the dog before the continent is ravaged.
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

whole life and a sense of self outside Gap because it’s ‘fast fashion,’ even You know your stepfather doesn’t like
the domestic sphere. Your father and I though they have some very cute pieces her paws to get muddy.
might still be together, actually. Hmm. this season.” You don’t know for sure Before I let you go: promise me that
But, the point is, you wouldn’t exist! that a life conceived under an about- you’ll at least freeze your eggs. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 23
 are less important than the global shiver
NOTEBOOK of the story itself. The newsgathering
business is connected to the world’s un­

STIR-CRAZY
conscious and also to surface reality.
With the story of Savitsky and Belogu­
zov, everyday news coverage slipped
What the Mad Trapper, Huck Finn, and the rest of us have in common. into prophetic mode. Covid would not
appear for another fourteen months,
BY IAN FRAZIER but the planet somehow knew it was
heading for a period of lockdown that
would drive people crazy. Savitsky and
Beloguzov were early victims of a soon­
to­be­global complaint waiting up
ahead, in 2020. Entwined today with
Covid is the age­old mental malady
called cabin fever.

man whose real name nobody

A knows showed up in Canada’s
Northwest Territories in the summer
of 1931 and built a cabin on the Rat
River, a tributary of the Peel, deep in
the bush. His not having acquired a
trapping license from the Royal Cana­
dian Mounted Police in Fort McPher­
son seemed strange, because people
who lived out where he did mostly
trapped furs for income. That winter,
Native people in the region complained
that he was disturbing their traps, and
four Mounties journeyed the eighty
miles to his cabin by dogsled to inves­
tigate. He shot one of them through
the door and later escaped, on foot and
on snowshoes, eluding capture for more
than a month, crossing a range of moun­
tains and covering maybe a hundred
Entwined today with COVID is the age-old mental malady called cabin fever. miles in the middle of winter. He killed
one Mountie when a group of them
n October 31, 2018, I read a story Chile, where he recovered. Authorities briefly caught up with him, and finally
O in the New York Post about a Rus­
sian scientist who stabbed another Rus­
brought Savitsky to St. Petersburg, ar­
rested him, and charged him with at­
died in a shoot­out after a bush pilot
who had been tracking him from the
sian scientist at a research station in tempted murder. air radioed his location to pursuers.
Antarctica. Crime is uncommon on Note the date: October, 2018. The The man called himself Albert John­
that continent, but what made this one story went around the globe instantly. son, but that probably wasn’t his name,
even more unusual, according to the Dozens of news outlets picked it up. and nobody knows where he came from.
Post, was that the one scientist, Sergei The Post cited, as its source, a story in He is sometimes called the Mad Trap­
Savitsky, had attacked the other, Oleg the Sun, the British tabloid. Checking per of Rat River. Books and movies
Beloguzov, for giving away the end­ online, including on Russian sites, I have told his story and looked into the
ings of books. At the isolated station, could find no solid source for the de­ mystery, but it remains unsolved. Be­
run by Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic tail about Beloguzov giving away the fore the chase began, the Mounties dy­
Research Institute, the two men had endings of books. The Sun’s source was namited his cabin, so he couldn’t go
been together for many months. Sa­ unnamed. A stabbing did seem to have back to it. Not much dynamite was re­
vitsky was reading books from the li­ occurred at Bellingshausen Station. quired, because the cabin was eight feet
brary to pass the time, and Beloguzov The incident was blamed on alcohol. wide by ten feet long. The Mad Trap­
kept telling him the endings; finally, A Russian judge later dismissed the per’s behavior indicates a case of cabin
Savitsky snapped and stabbed Belogu­ case against Savitsky, who had no pre­ fever, and an eight­by­ten­foot cabin
zov in the chest with a kitchen knife. vious record. in the remote Canadian Northwest
Beloguzov was flown to a hospital in In retrospect, the facts of the case would be a good place to get it. During
24 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY MIROSLAV WEISSMÜLLER
Covid, people have used the term “cabin peeled and varnished log, had an ex- wealth downward, I said. As I looked
fever” to refer to their going stir-crazy tra-long cord that could reach wall to at the reaction on the salesperson’s face,
in their apartments. But technically, to wall. I dialled my friend’s number. No it sank in that I was not in a normal
catch genuine cabin fever, you should answer. I figured he must be away. It frame of mind.
be in a cabin. Lacking that, you need was about 4 a.m. in New York, 2 a.m. My then ex-girlfriend was living in
a huge amount of unoccupied land- in Montana. I kept the phone to my ear Sarasota, Florida, and we got back in
scape all around you, like what the Rus- while I poured myself another drink, touch. She had no phone and made
sian scientists had in the Antarctic. (Or built up the fire, made something to eat. calls from a pay phone near her apart-
seascape—you can also catch it in the The phone rang and rang. I liked to ment. I wrote the number of the pay
cabin of a boat.) think of it sitting there, ringing, all by phone on the beam next to my phone.
itself in that empty apartment twenty- One afternoon, I decided to fly down
think about Albert Johnson because four hundred miles away. I must have to Sarasota and propose that we get
I sometimes I sympathize with his
antisociability (but not his violence).
let it ring for forty minutes. Suddenly
my friend picked up, in no mood to par-
married. I picked up my phone to let
her know I was on my way, and dialled
In my early thirties, forty years ago, I ley. “O.K., shithead!” he said. the number of the pay phone. It was
moved from New York to an A-frame He had been asleep and hadn’t half a block from her apartment, but
cabin in the woods in northwest Mon- wanted to climb down from his loft bed she happened to be walking by at that
tana. For the first eleven months, I lived and deal with the phone, so he put a exact moment. She heard it ringing
there by myself. I walked on old log- pillow over his head. Eventually, the and answered it. (Later, when our kids
ging roads and up and down foothills ringing got to him. We then talked about were small, we took them to Sarasota
and fished for small brook trout in one subject and another, the night wore to see that pay phone, and they couldn’t
marshy ponds. I tried to write a novel. on, and when I hung up it was starting have cared less.) We were married in
I did not know one person in the en- to get light. the town of Ferndale, Montana, and
tire state. My social life consisted of I didn’t notice what a weird thing rented a bigger house, on the side of a
calling friends in other parts of the that was for me to do. What happens mountain, next to the boundary of a
country on the phone. I didn’t like it with cabin fever is that you become national forest.
that my phone was on a party line. The weird and don’t know it. Fortunately, That house had begun as a cabin,
neighbors, who lived in bush cabins my friend did not hold it against me. or a dugout. The man who owned it
not nearby, and whom I had not met, Next to the cabin I had a woodpile of could afford to finish only the base-
would pick up and need to use the tamarack logs, with a galvanized roof ment at first, so he had dug into the
phone, and I would have to hang up. overhead to keep them dry. I used to side of the mountain and made five
So I took to making my calls early in set an empty quart Coors beer bottle rooms, and he and his wife and two
the morning or late at night. on a log, about head-high, and then kids lived there until he could afford
A friend who lived in Manhattan walk fifteen paces, turn, and throw a to do the rest. By the time we moved
had a phone number that happened to stone at the bottle as hard as I could. in, the original basement dwelling was
be one digit different from the num- About ninety-seven per cent of the vestigial and empty, and we lived above
ber for a phone-sex line, a coincidence time I missed, but it was satisfying when it, on the first floor. The woods came
that annoyed him. Guys who hoped I didn’t—the explosion of amber glass— right up to the house. The owner had
for a conversation at two-fifty a min- as if I’d just won a classic old-time duel. once shot a black bear, legally, from a
ute used to misdial his number at all I had to stop when I realized I was re- side door. In that part of Montana, you
hours. After a while my friend devel- distributing the stones from the drive- can go for months without seeing the
oped a strategy of putting the callers way to the woodshed. sun. By midwinter, the snow berm
through a lot of paperwork. He told A big excursion for me was to drive alongside the gravel road up to our
them that before he could connect them to the town of Kalispell, some twenty driveway was taller than I was. On the
he had to fill out a form. He asked for miles away. I was writing on a brand main road, several miles from our house,
their name, date of birth, height, weight, of paper called Potlatch. Such an in- the snow berm had deer feet and other
occupation, etc. Then he would move teresting name for copy paper—Pot- body parts sticking out of it. Deer got
on to “So what kind of car do you drive?” latch. I ran out of my first ream of it, run over all the time on that road, and
and get into the details of that—year, and when I was buying more at an sometimes the plows just scooped them
model, engine size. Finally, becoming office-supply store in Kalispell I told up with the snow.
bored, he would hang up. I thought I the salesperson about potlatch—how The road ran through the valley of
would call and pretend to be a phone- it was a Native American word that the Swan River. Intersections along it
sex caller, and when he started to put meant a kind of party in which a chief were few. At one of them, an A-frame
me through the rigmarole I would turn or even just an ordinary person gave bar called the Junction provided the
the tables somehow. away stuff to other members of the only place to stop for miles. It had a big
My cabin was about twenty feet by tribe. “Giveaway” is a rough translation gravel parking lot, in which local tough
fifteen—bigger than the Mad Trapper’s of the word into English, I told the customers got into scrapes. There were
but not big. The phone, affixed to the salesperson. The potlatch was a system shootings nearby. One gray winter day
central supporting beam, which was a for showing status and spreading the my wife and I could not stand another
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 25
minute up there on the side of the meetings. Sometimes many thousands Henry David Thoreau had incipient
mountain, and we drove down to the attended these gatherings, which were cabin fever but didn’t recognize it. New
Junction to get a drink. Bars are not themselves deep in the woods. At the England-like, he channelled it into
meant to be seen by daylight. The rus- camp meeting you could let out all that utilitarian and literary purposes. John
tic, bare-wood décor looked so defeated pent-up cabin fever. Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-Bound,” a
in the dreary afternoon. I ordered a Jack The entire assembly sometimes long work about people who tell one
Daniel’s and a beer, and my wife or- seemed to lose its mind. Talking in another stories when a blizzard keeps
dered a Scotch. After another round or tongues was just the start. When the them indoors, became that rare thing,
two I asked the barmaid how business preachers (often there was more than a best-selling poem. It was published
was. “Not great,” she said. “Just a few one) summoned the spirit, row upon just after the Civil War, when being
cabin-fever drunks.” (“Like you,” she row of people flung themselves to the stuck inside could seem like fun again.
did not say out loud.) ground and screamed and wept and Stephen King’s novel “The Shining”
prayed. In holy transports, women flung took cabin fever all the way to horror.
assed down to me through my fam- their heads back and forth, and their
P ily is a letter written by my four-
greats grandmother Sally DeForest
long hair fell loose and whipped around.
Preachers exhaled at the ends of words:
“A nd how slow and still the time
did drag along.” The main dif-
Benedict, whose husband, Platt Ben- “We-ah shall-ah praise-ah the-ah ference today is that the computer
edict, built one of the first permanent Lord-ah”; camp-meeting preaching makes you feel both less lonely and
dwellings in the town of Norwalk, Ohio. was a special, hyped-up style. Then, lonelier. Online distraction comes into
In the letter she talks about being ter- having been brought back to Jesus, peo- your cabin or wherever and entertains
rified that Indians would attack one ple sometimes laughed a joyous laugh and wracks you, and then you go cra-
night when she was by herself with her known as “the holy laugh,” or even emit- zier than you would have otherwise. I
children. She begins her story, “Two ted what was called “the holy bark.” now live in a house on a busy street in
miles from any neighbor, our little cabin During the breaks, the food was deli- a New Jersey suburb, and during the
stood . . .” No attack occurred, and to cious—hams and baked goods and worst Covid days the shut-down world
me it seems that she didn’t have rea- other special dishes prepared in ad- was so quiet, and the street so empty,
son to be so worried. An Indian had vance—and there was plenty of it. After that the neighborhood seemed like a
stopped by the cabin, drunk but not a good camp meeting the attendees ghostly Thornton Wilder town. Two
unamiable, looking for her husband. said they slept like babies. The new, reminders of the plague were the red
The visitor then slept for a while in personal Jesus of American religion, blinking lights of ambulances going si-
front of the fire, woke up sober, and the one who “walks with me” and “talks lently up and down the street—sadly,
left. She thought he would return with with me” (as the hymn says), was in- seventy-nine people in the town have
his brothers and kill them all: “The vented at camp meetings by frontier died of Covid—and the high-pitched
riches of a Kingdom would not repay sufferers of cabin fever. scream of motorcycles speeding on the
me for another such night of anxiety.” empty pavement, usually late at night.
Cabins out in the woods breed that . H. Lawrence once defined the Motorcycle and other vehicle accidents
type of scary thought. You start seeing
things out of the corner of your eye.
D American soul as “hard, isolate,
stoic, and a killer.” I don’t know about
increased across the country during the
pandemic, despite the over-all reduc-
She and her husband were Episco- “hard,” “stoic,” or “killer,” but the “iso- tion in vehicle miles driven.
palians—starchy folks from Danbury, late” part is right. The isolation that’s In my few trips into New York, I was
Connecticut, even if at first they and out there at large in the continent sets surprised at how close different parts
their children slept on the cabin’s dirt American stories in motion. Huck Finn, of the city are to one another when
floor. From what little I know of them, trapped in the cabin where Pap, his there’s no traffic. But driving was not
the family did not go in for tent-meet- drunken father, has confined him, says, fun, because the occasional madly speed-
ing religious revivals. (Episcopalians “And how slow and still the time did ing vehicle meant that being in a car
are sometimes called “the Frozen Cho- drag along.” He sits there, alone, saw- going forty-five was like sitting parked
sen.”) Frontier people were more likely ing at a section of one of the cabin’s and motionless in the middle of a high-
to belong to the Methodists, the Bap- bottom logs. The book really begins way where cars were going fifty. They
tists, the Disciples of Christ, and other when he saws it through and pulls the would come hurtling into the rearview
even livelier persuasions. At the time, piece away and sets himself free. His mirror and blaze past. A man I know
the upsurge of religious enthusiasm enormous freedom afterward, when he’s whose job description is “violence in-
called the Second Great Awakening on the raft, is more spacious for his hav- terrupter”—he tries to intervene in dis-
was sweeping across the frontier like a ing previously been locked in Pap’s dread putes and keep people from shooting
crowd doing the wave at a baseball cabin. It’s connected also to his travel- one another—told me that shootings
game. Families that had been by them- ling in the company of the unfree Jim, and stabbings went up during the pan-
selves for months on end, trying to who eventually will be betrayed, cap- demic because young men isolating in
make a go of little farms in the woods, tured, and locked up alone in a cabin their apartments saw insults directed at
convened once or twice a year at tent- himself, from which he is freed in the them online, seethed to the combustion
meeting religious revivals, or camp final and not-good part of the book. point, and came out ready for a fight.
26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
 During the lockdown’s early period, tell you where to sit for fifteen min- upper left-hand corner among other
sometimes my own instinct was to bur- utes on the remote chance that you clippings on the door of our refriger-
row even deeper into bed. I imagined will have a bad reaction, and send you ator. I saw it every day and meditated
myself the nymph of a seventeen-year on your way. The whole experience subconsciously on it. After a while an-
cicada pushing blankets of dirt up made me proud to live in New Jersey. other clipping replaced it, but I kept
around myself under the roots of a tree, I would like to begin every day with “He Tried to ‘Ice’ His Pal” close at
looking to outsleep the predators. Often, such positive-oriented interactions hand on my desk. I reread the story
I failed, and didn’t sleep at all. The local with my fellow-citizens in an aban- from time to time, trying to extract its
wildlife grew bolder while the humans doned Kmart, even if I wasn’t getting true meaning. Or meanings, plural—
were staying in. As I lay awake, I could a shot. I can’t think of a better use for lately I’ve realized that the story wasn’t
hear animals abroad in the night. A fox abandoned Kmarts. Meet only about “the close con-
lives in our neighborhood; probably there every morning, stroll finement in the camp on
there is more than one. Along with the around, say hello, greet one remote Antarctica,” as the
motorcycles, another recurring late- another; then back into our Post put it. Another mean-
night noise was the fox’s bark. It’s not cars to get on with the day. ing, buried deeper, had to
one of those romantic wildlife noises We need something large- do with Russia. The world’s
like the call of the wild goose, which I scale like that to knock fascination with the story
also heard. A barking fox kind of gags back the isolation. meant that we knew some-
and hacks, like a cat coughing up a hair Making the common thing like Covid was on
ball, except that the fox sounds as if he’s mistake, I then became the horizon. We also must
enjoying it. Late at night a fox some- overconfident, went out to have sensed that Russia
times walked down the street and gatherings over the holi- was going to go mad, and
stopped in front of the houses where days, and caught Covid. The Omicron do something violent and off the
there are dogs, and then it hack-barked variant, which I probably had—the tests charts. Russia is now committing what
for a while. If a dog happened to be out came back positive, but they didn’t say may be war crimes against its neigh-
in the yard, it would wake up and start anything about any variant—is sup- bor, and nobody knows the ending.
barking back in outrage. After getting posed to be relatively mild, but it wasn’t During Covid, Russia’s President dis-
one dog riled, the fox would go down for me. I have not been so sick since I appeared for weeks at a time, rarely
the street and taunt another. got pneumonia twenty-some years ago. leaving his residence outside Moscow.
Once on a sunny afternoon I saw My main symptom was coughing, along The isolation seems to have changed
the fox close up. I was sitting in a chair with sore throat, headache, body aches, him and made him ready to fight. His
on my patio when he walked quickly and a temperature. Plus, being freaked particular case of Russian cabin fever
across my small back yard. He was dis- out. This virus has a sneaky, foxlike per- preceded terrible consequences.
guising himself as one of those fleet- sonality. I could feel it go in various di- On March 5th, the U.S. State De-
ing things you see out of the corner of rections in my lungs, meet vax 1, vax 2, partment said that all Americans
your eye and aren’t really sure you saw, and booster, and sneakily withdraw. should leave Russia immediately. My
and he went by in a “you don’t see me” Then it would try the throat, the si- son had lived and worked in Russia
instant, the model of self-effacement. nuses; then sidle back into the lungs. It for six years and eight months. He had
A human equivalent would be one of was a wheedling, advantage-taking, con- a whole life there—girlfriend, job, good
those stagehands dressed all in black fident, and extremely weedy presence. friends. Many of them, horrified by
who come out and quickly and unob- It spread like one of those trashy weeds their country, are trying to get out or
trusively prepare the set for the next which fill a garden space overnight. I have left already. During the pandemic
scene. The only difference is that the remembered what a doctor at Weill my son read hundreds of books that
unobtrusive stagehands don’t sneer. The Cornell had said in a video, about how he ordered online. As he made ar-
fox wore an expression of alienness and Covid dies instantly in the presence of rangements to leave, he decided to give
contempt on his narrow, cartoonish disinfectant (the susceptibility, by the most of his books to Moscow’s Li-
snout as he vanished behind the ga- way, that inspired Donald Trump to talk brary for Foreign Literature. He com-
rage. Or maybe that look was fright. about applying disinfectant internally). piled a list, sent it to the library, and
In me, it was trying to win not by asked the people there which books
y wife and I got our Covid vac- strength but by gigantically amplified they wanted. They said they didn’t
M cinations and boosters in a for-
mer Kmart in West Orange. The place
and multiplied weakness. I felt as if I
had an infestation of weeds growing in
need another copy of “David Copper-
field,” and they did not want the books
is huge, like a convention center, with my lungs as I sat up coughing all night. about the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa,
echoing far reaches and scores of vol- Oklahoma. He boxed the rest, called
unteers in white or blue-plastic lab coats he headline of the Post article a taxi, and took them to the library.
distributed throughout. They radiate
good will and civic-spiritedness as they
T about the Antarctica stabbing was
“He Tried to ‘Ice’ His Pal.” For a
Russians are big readers. That’s what
made it plausible that one Russian
greet you, tell you where to go, handle while, the clipping of that article, held would stab another for giving away
your paperwork, give you the shot, by a souvenir magnet, occupied the the endings of books. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 27
 A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE UNTHINKABLE
Child suicide is on the rise. Where are we going wrong?
BY ANDREW SOLOMON

y husband and I first met Tristan Colt, fell to his death from the

M Trevor Matthews when he

and our son, George, started
kindergarten together at St. Bernard’s,
family’s apartment building. Climbing
through a window in the apartment, on
the twelfth floor, he’d dropped carefully
a private boys’ school on the Upper East down to a terrace one floor below, from
Side. Trevor was perhaps the brightest which it was possible to access a neigh-
kid in the class. In first grade, he was boring building, go down the stairs, and
already reading adult narrative nonfic- head out undetected. He was last seen
tion. He could be charming, generous, sitting on the terrace ledge, before top-
and humane. But he could also turn pling over backward. He’d thrown a tan-
suddenly violent. At my son’s seventh- trum and been scolded, but the general
birthday party, Trevor bit another boy conclusion was that his death was prob-
on the ear so hard that the mark was ably not a suicide. Eleven years later,
still visible when that child next went Angela’s half brother, Trevor Nelson—
to school. Trevor terrorized the smaller for whom she named her son—died at
kids in the class, and, if they pushed thirty-four, when a hospital treating him
back, he would try to get them in trou- for viral meningitis inexplicably admin-
ble. He was shrewd in his manipula- istered a fatal admixture of drugs. Eleven
tions. In second grade, he tried extract- years older than Angela and a child of
ing cash from other boys by threatening her mother’s first marriage, he had been
to spread embarrassing rumors. “Trevor a charismatic presence at St. Bernard’s,
was in trouble more than everyone com- athletic and academically brilliant but
bined,” a classmate recalled. Parents com- also a bully. He would gather kids in re-
plained, and Trevor was frequently dis- cess for a game called Kill, where they
ciplined. “By first grade, he was already would chant and then Trevor would an-
awash in a sea of conflict,” one parent nounce the name of the person who was
said. “I remember seeing his mother’s going to be attacked. Trevor Nelson
anguish and just wanting the path for went on to be kicked out of multiple
her son to be a little less hard. But it prep schools. But eventually he mel-
was hard.” lowed. He attended U.C. Berkeley, be-
Trevor’s mother, Angela Matthews, came a top producer at “60 Minutes,”
a driven intellectual-property lawyer in and was a doting husband and father
her early forties, studied ballet and still with a wide circle of loyal friends. Hun-
carries herself like a dancer. Her intel- dreds attended his funeral.
ligence and the intensity of her charac- When it was Trevor Matthews’s turn
ter can make her intimidating, but she to attend St. Bernard’s, he wore Tristan
is also given to acts of tremendous kind- Colt’s blazer, and longtimers at the school
ness. Trevor’s father, Billy Matthews, often drew comparisons between him
who works in finance, is affable and ath- and his other uncle, Trevor Nelson. If
letic. They have a daughter, Agnes, three he acted badly, teachers would say, “Well,
and a half years younger than Trevor; Trevor’s like his namesake.” Trevor’s glit-
Billy also has two sons, Trey and Tris- tering intellect delighted many adults.
ten, from a previous marriage. He was precocious in other ways, too:
Angela grew up in New York in a he was interested in girls and, in fourth
Wasp family, and Trevor’s attendance at grade, brought a date to a school bene-
St. Bernard’s was shadowed by the mem- fit. “It was totally a big deal that he
ory of two uncles who had been pupils brought her,” Angela told me. “I said, ‘If
there and had both died young. In 1992, he wants to have a date, he can have a
Angela’s eight-year-old younger brother, date.’ They’re not holding hands, it’s When Trevor Matthews took his own life, a
28 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
year ago, his parents were left trying to understand why there are so few therapeutic interventions for children with depression.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SARAH PALMER THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 29
O.K.” Trevor was elected class repre- would he do that?,” and then he said, “I to write objectively without increasing
sentative that same year, promising to wasn’t always that nice to Trevor. Maybe their suffering made it more fraught—
have the recess deck refurbished and to I made his life worse.” I reassured him but it also became deeper and more lov-
get the boys more involved in helping that nothing he did had caused the trag- ing. As the April 6th anniversary of Trev-
the neighborhood’s homeless. edy and nothing he could have done or’s death approached, I started to share
Yet his aggression intensified. He would have prevented it. The mother of their hope that this article would be a
pushed one child down some stairs; the one of George’s classmates said, “Their kind of memorial to him.
mother asked the school to insure phys- childhood ended on Tuesday.”
ical distance between the boys in the I asked Angela if we could come by ngela was right that a larger issue
stairwell. Playing paintball, Trevor
sneaked up behind a boy and fired close-
for a condolence call. She said yes, if we
were vaccinated. Because vaccines were
A is at stake. The average age of sui-
cides has been falling for a long time
range into his helmet; the child devel- not yet available to children, she added, while the rate of youth suicide has been
oped blurry vision. Another boy came “Don’t bring George.” She paused, then rising. Between 1950 and 1988, the pro-
home from school with red marks on explained, “It’s just—because of Agnes. portion of adolescents aged between fif-
his neck; the school told his mother that She can’t get vaccinated yet, either. And teen and nineteen who killed themselves
Trevor had choked him. In 2019, toward she’s all I have left.” In the following quadrupled. Between 2007 and 2017, the
the end of fourth grade, the school and weeks, Angela told her story over and number of children aged ten to four-
Trevor’s parents came to an agreement over to any friend who asked, as though teen who did so more than doubled. It
that he’d be better off elsewhere. Many she could contain it through repetition. is extremely difficult to generalize about
of his classmates were relieved. One For Billy, even conversational boiler- youth suicide, because the available data
mother told me, “I could tell my son plate was a struggle. are so much sparser and more fragmen-
didn’t really want Trevor to leave, be- Angela and Billy had been trying to tary than for adult mental illness, let
cause they do feel like family. But the understand why there are so few ther- alone in the broader field of develop-
tension is gone.” Her son had said, “It apeutic interventions for children with mental psychology. What studies there
was sad that Trevor left, but we can get depression. Trevor, the child of well-off, are have such varied parameters—of age
a lot of work done now.” educated parents, had far better mental- range, sample size, and a host of demo-
Last year, over Presidents’ Day week- health support than most American graphic factors—as to make collating
end, my husband and I took George children, but was not saved by it. An- the information all but impossible. The
and one of his sixth-grade friends ski- gela wanted to lobby for legislation to blizzard of conflicting statistics points
ing upstate at Catamount, a popular mandate services her son had needed; to our collective ignorance about an area
destination for many families from the she considered setting up a center to in which more and better studies are
school. As we pulled up, we saw Trevor. undertake research and provide clinical urgently needed. Still, in 2020, accord-
George and his friend both groaned. treatment. Because I have written about ing to the Centers for Disease Control
We said they didn’t have to ski with depression, she and Billy encouraged and Prevention, in the United States
Trevor but should try to be polite. As it me to address child suicide, and agreed suicide claimed the lives of more than
turned out, they did end up skiing with to tell me their story. I talked to those five hundred children between the ages

PREVIOUS SPREAD: SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY ANGELA MATTHEWS AND BILLY MATTHEWS
Trevor and a handful of other St. Ber- who had known Trevor and began mak- of ten and fourteen, and of six thousand
nard’s boys. Trevor, a spectacular skier, ing contact with other bereaved fami- young adults between fifteen and twenty-
skipped the hardest trails to stay with lies and with researchers and mental- four. In the former group, it was the sec-
the others. When George and his friend health workers who are investigating ond leading cause of death (behind un-
piled into the car at the end of the day, this escalating phenomenon. intentional injury). This makes it as
George said, “Trevor has changed. He’s Every suicide creates a vacuum. Those common a cause of death as car crashes.
way nicer. We could even be friends.” left behind fill it with stories that aspire Although it is too early to quantify
We were happy to hear it. Perhaps, as to rationalize their ultimately unfathom- fully the long-term impact of the pan-
others had supposed, Trevor Matthews able plight. People may blame themselves demic, it has exacerbated the burgeon-
was on the same redemptive path as or others, cling to small crumbs of com- ing crisis. The C.D.C. found that in 2020
Trevor Nelson. fort, or engage in pitiless self-laceration; mental-health-related visits to hospital
Seven weeks later, on the afternoon many do all this and more. In a year of emergency departments by people be-
of April 6th, Trevor jumped off the roof interviewing the people closest to Trevor, tween the ages of twelve and twenty-
of his apartment building, on Eighty- I saw all of these reactions and experi- seven were a third higher than in 2019.
sixth Street and Park Avenue, killing enced some of them myself. I came to The C.D.C. also reported that, during
himself. He was a few months past his feel a love for Trevor, which I hadn’t felt the first seven months of lockdown,
twelfth birthday. when he was alive. The more I under- U.S. hospitals experienced a twenty-four-
I heard the news from another St. Ber- stood the depths of his vulnerability, the per-cent increase in mental-health-
nard’s parent while I was buying grocer- more I wished that I had encouraged my related emergency visits for children aged
ies and rushed home to tell my husband, son, whose relationship with Trevor was five to eleven, and a thirty-one-per-cent
wondering how we would break the often antagonistic, to befriend him. As increase for those aged twelve to seven-
news to our son. George cried on and I interviewed Trevor’s parents, my rela- teen. Among the general population,
off all evening. He kept saying, “But why tionship with them changed. The need suicides declined, but this change masks
30 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
a slight increase among younger people dictive signs, such as a mental-health dering what would have happened if
and a spike among the country’s Black, diagnosis, though sometimes a retro- they’d walked in ten minutes sooner or
Latinx, and Native American popula- spective analysis points to signs that hadn’t had that one argument. So many
tions. Last October, the American Acad- were simply missed. Jimmy Potash, the families told me that there had been no
emy of Pediatrics declared that the pan- chair of the psychiatry department at hint. Isaac Shelby, a sixteen-year-old
demic had accelerated the worrying Johns Hopkins, told me that a boy who from Albuquerque, was one of the most
trends in child and adolescent mental survived a suicide attempt described the popular kids in his class—handsome,
health, resulting in what it described as suddenness of the impulse: seeing a knife smart, a soccer star—and showed no
a “national emergency.” in the kitchen, he thought, I could stab signs of depression. One day last Sep-
The sooner depressed or suicidal chil- myself with that, and had done so be- tember, after a minor altercation with
dren receive treatment, the more likely fore he had time to think about it. When his parents about a vaping pen, he took
they are to recover, but children remain I spoke to Christine Yu Moutier, who the gun from his father’s nightstand,
radically undertreated. There are too is the chief medical officer at the Amer- went into the back yard, and killed him-
few child psychologists and psychia- ican Foundation for Suicide Prevention, self. His parents told me that what they
trists, and most pediatricians are insuf- she told me that, in children, “the mo- most wanted to know was why: even if
ficiently informed about depression. Re- ment of acute suicidal urge is very short- it turned out that it was somehow their
search suggests that only one out of five lived. It’s almost like the brain can’t keep fault, it would be a relief to have some
American adolescents who end up in a up that rigid state of narrowed cogni- sort of answer.
hospital after attempting suicide is trans- tion for long.” This may explain why Trevor’s suicide became a reference
ferred to a mental-health facility, and access to means is so important; chil- point in the lives of everyone who knew
access is predictably worse among the dren living in homes with guns have him. Many had perceived him as some-
poor and in communities of color. Ac- suicide rates more than four times higher one who inflicted suffering on others,
cording to the National Institute of than those of other children. not seeing that he was suffering intensely
Mental Health, of the three million Children contemplate suicide far himself. But people who respond to oth-
American adolescents who experienced more often than parents may realize. ers aggressively and act impetuously are
major depression in 2020, almost two- According to a 2020 study in The Lan- at acute risk of suicide, because they re-
thirds received no treatment. cet, among nine- to ten-year-olds, one spond to themselves with impulsive bel-
Scott Rauch, the president of Mc- in twelve reported having had suicidal ligerence, too. Bullying is strongly asso-
Lean Hospital, near Boston, and a pro- thoughts, and another recent study found ciated with suicide not only among its
fessor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical that nearly half of parents whose ado- victims but also among its perpetrators.
School, told me, “The convergence be- lescent children had been contemplat- Experts speak of childhood depression
tween stigma and long-standing tradi- ing suicide were unaware of this. As a as having internalizing symptoms (with-
tions of not supporting this kind of care result, parents may be left forever won- drawal, sadness) that are often ignored
is the shame of our nation.” The authors
of a study on the absence of any evi-
dence-based treatment for under-twelves
with inclinations toward suicide—“sui-
cidality,” in the psychiatric parlance—
wrote, “That so little about this topic ex-
ists in the professional literature is
baffling. Does it perhaps reflect a collec-
tive level of denial that children are sim-
ply incapable of such thoughts?”
“Parents can’t fathom and don’t want
to fathom their kids doing it, so they
underinvest in making sure it doesn’t
happen,” Brad Hunstable, who lost his
twelve-year-old son to suicide in 2020,
told me. “Most pediatricians know how
to test for lead poisoning. They know
how to tell you what percentile you are
in height.They don’t know how to screen
for suicidal ideation.”
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect
of child suicide is its unpredictability. A
recent study published in the Journal of
Affective Disorders found that about a
third of child suicides occur seemingly “An algorithm matched us as soul mates, and yet it can’t
without warning and without any pre- suggest a movie we both want to watch.”
 cussed on getting Trevor to understand
that his actions had consequences. Later,
Trevor conferred with the school psy-
chologist, to whom he said, “I can’t re-
ally tell you everything about me. It
would be too upsetting to you.”
“If Trevor felt wronged, he came back
hard,” Billy said. “And he could feel
wronged for very little reason.” He saw
his son as having a strained relationship
to empathy when he was young, direct
in expressing what he did or didn’t like.
“Trevor’s frustration would dominate,”
he said. “He never saw anything from
the other person’s point of view.”
In 2017, after second grade, Trevor
attended Brant Lake Camp, in the Ad-
irondacks. He was on the young side
for sleepaway camp but adamant about
wanting to go, and he returned the next
two years. He adored the sports—he
learned to water-ski and was proud to
have his name painted on a wall of
home-run hitters—but, in the photo-
“I can’t decide if I’m in the mood for Italian or hay.” graphs posted online by the camp, he
sometimes looked moody.
At the beginning of the second sum-
• • mer that Trevor attended, another of the
boys wrote to his parents. As it was later
and externalizing symptoms (aggres- pares the proof of harm to the cam- reported, the letter said, “I miss you guys
sion, disruptiveness) that are usually paigns against the tobacco and asbes- so much. Dylan touched my penis. Evry
punished. Both can be manifestations tos industries. thing is good except for that.” Dylan
of the same underlying illness. And Stolz had been a counsellor at the camp
Trevor, like many bullies, was also some- n Trevor’s desk, after his death, for thirty-three years, and there had been
times the victim of bullying. On one
occasion, a group of boys held Trevor
O Angela found a list marked “Goals
as of right now”:
previous issues. Now other boys reported
similar incidents, and Stolz was arrested.
down and kicked him. When he was released on bail, Trevor
By the age of thirteen, more than a iPhone 12 mini started weeping and Angela and Billy
(birthday so Nov. 29)
third of bullies have actively considered Airpod pros
asked repeatedly if Stolz had done any-
ending their lives, according to a study (b-day) thing to him. Trevor said that he was just
published in the Journal of Adolescent PC/Laptop upset by what his friends had suffered.
Health. Children who are both bullies (Christmas) As the Warren County district attorney’s
and victims are particularly predisposed Dyed hair, preferably blonde/green/pink i office built its case against Stolz, several
want piiink!! (hopefully by summer)
to suicide, with nearly half reporting a Alta trip (Saturday)
of the boys prepared to testify, but, in the
suicide attempt or self-harm. What’s Getting music on Fitbit (end of april *fin- end, he took a plea bargain and was sen-
more, the omnipresence of social media gers crossed) tenced to four and a half years in prison.
has created new venues for bullying. That autumn, Trevor’s challenges to
Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at The note was recent and betrayed no authority intensified. Often, he’d be
San Diego State University, found that hint of darkness. caught reading a book of his own during
teens who spend five or more hours a Trevor was given to nightmares. “He class and would refuse to put it away.
day online are nearly twice as likely to would be screaming in the middle of the Once, he was so disruptive that a teacher
have suicidal tendencies as those who night,” Angela said. “Trevor wouldn’t re- called Angela, who left work to collect
spend less than an hour. Parents of kids member the nightmares in the morn- him. Trevor was eventually called be-
who have died by suicide have recently ing, but Billy and I did.” They first took fore the school’s Conduct Committee
begun filing lawsuits against the social- Trevor to see a psychologist at the age and reprimanded. In May, 2019, An-
media companies that perpetuate the of six or seven, when teachers at St. Ber- gela had to tell Trevor that he would
algorithms that kept their children on- nard’s suggested that he might suffer be leaving at the end of the school year.
line; Matthew Bergman, a litigator in from impulsivity. The psychologist, Trevor was distraught at being sepa-
Seattle who works on such cases, com- whom he continued to see for years, fo- rated from his friends.
32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
 That summer, he went back to Brant being all vulnerable, and COVID—the to go to the emergency room with
Lake, but many of his friends had not world shuts down on him,” she said. In Trevor, and you should do it now,” he
returned, and he became disillusioned the fall of 2020, he started at Wagner said. “You’ve crossed the Rubicon.”
and frustrated. After just a few weeks, Middle School. He knew no one and
the camp told Angela and Billy that he couldn’t even meet his teachers. n the first half of the twentieth cen-
was cruel to other children and asked
them to take him home. Trevor was mis-
That semester, Trevor’s difficult be-
havior escalated in puzzling ways. When
I tury, many psychologists assumed that
depression in children was a necessary
erable at home. His psychologist sug- the family travelled back and forth be- developmental phase, but in the forties
gested getting him screened for oppo- tween the city and their country house, René Spitz identified it among children
sitional defiant disorder. The psychiatrist in Connecticut, he would refuse to get in foundling hospitals, who failed to
who screened him said that Trevor was in the car, sometimes for a few hours. thrive after being separated from their
amazingly bright, seemed emotionally “Not because he didn’t want to be in the mothers. Depression, he wrote, was “a
unsettled, and did not have significant country and not because he didn’t want specific disease in infants arising under
O.D.D. “No one used the terms ‘depres- to deal with the drive,” Angela said. “He specific environmental conditions.” John
sion’ or ‘anxiety,’” Angela said ruefully. couldn’t really articulate why. He had Bowlby’s work on attachment included
Angela and Billy decided to send these very, very intense feelings that were records of very young children trauma-
Trevor to P.S. 6, on the Upper East Side, coming out in ways that didn’t make a tized by separation from their parents.
one of the best public elementary schools lot of sense.” Angela and Billy tried to Crying and protesting at first, some chil-
in the city. Billy recalls feeling it was create opportunities for him to feel in dren descended into lethargy and later
the right place. Teachers would take the control. “He felt trapped and needed became delinquent. In the seventies,
time to ask Trevor why he was frus- space,” Billy wrote me. “There was so Leon Cytryn and Donald McKnew
trated or had said something aggres- much going on in his head and he wanted proposed that childhood depression be
sive—“those simple questions that he release, not further tightening.” With- accorded its own diagnostic category,
had never had the room to process.” out in-person school, Trevor acted out and came up with an interview struc-
In January, 2020, after starting a new at home. He lashed out when his par- ture for arriving at a diagnosis.
course of therapy, Trevor began telling ents tried to limit his sessions playing Children are often secretive about sui-
Angela details about what Dylan Stolz Fortnite. Angela sensed despair in his cidal impulses; parents are often in de-
had done to boys at camp. She asked constant generation of conflict—“ ‘Well, nial. Some years ago, the eleven-year-old
him, “My darling, how do you know if I do this, will they love me?’” son of a friend of mine required a psy-
that?,” and he said, “Because it happened In December, Angela was in Boston chiatric hospitalization because of un-
to me.” She hugged him and thanked for three weeks for a trial. As the date controllable outbursts of anger. I rode
him for telling her. When she asked why of her return approached, Trevor grew with my friend and his son in the am-
he had not told her sooner, he said, “I anxious. In an argument that flared up bulance from his house to the hospital.
really wanted to put it out of my mind.” when he had to miss some time on his The boy at first could express only rage,
He initially didn’t want to talk to the Nintendo Switch, he picked up a knife then lapsed into despair at his lack of
police, because the abuse had happened in the kitchen and said, “What are you self-control. He said, “I think of suicide
as he was falling asleep, and he wasn’t going to do?” Billy approached him a lot. I was thinking about it earlier today,
sure he could trust his memory of the in fact. I don’t plan to do it, probably.”
details. (Stolz’s lawyers could not be When we arrived at the hospital, the
reached for comment.) But he worried admitting physician asked my friend
that his not reporting it might have lim- whether his son had ever been suicidal,
ited Stolz’s prison term. and he said, “I don’t think so.” I pointed
Gradually, though, he did start to tell out that the boy had expressed strong
friends and even submitted to a foren- suicidal ideation not twenty minutes ear-
sic interview with the department that lier in the ambulance. Suicide is so un-
had investigated the case. Angela took imaginable to parents in general that a
him out for sushi afterward. “That’s as child’s mentioning it can wash over them.
fun as you can make that kind of thing,” calmly, and took the knife away; it was As early as 1996, a review of research
she said wryly. He had a recurring night- not clear what Trevor was intending to indicated that major depressive disor-
mare in which Stolz was following him do, and Billy saw the moment as essen- der appeared to be “occurring at an ear-
down Eighty-seventh Street. In another, tially a provocation. When Angela re- lier age in successive cohorts.”Two stud-
he would have a feeling of foreboding, turned, Trevor got into a fight with her ies on preschoolers suggest that around
open a door, and confront Stolz’s face. and began smashing things. When she one per cent of them suffer from de-
“He was literally haunted by this guy,” tried to stop him, he punched her. pression. Early-onset depression often
Angela said. Angela was terrified. “O.K., we’re in persists. A study of depressed adults
As Trevor articulated this torment, a different universe,” she recalled. “This found that those whose condition had
Angela felt that he was finally learning is no longer ‘I’m sad.’ This is ‘Holy shit, first appeared in childhood tended
to deal with his feelings. “And here he he’s going to do something.’” Her fa- to have the most frequent and severe
is, he’s now opened himself up and he’s ther, a doctor, agreed. “You really need episodes of suicidality and were likelier
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 33
to act on the impulse. Indeed, a third had a night of clawing at our inner selves. the best way to help him. His despair
of people with childhood depression go But some people don’t make it until would express itself as nearly incoherent
on to make at least one suicide attempt. morning; tangled in their woes, they tie rage, and he would make terrible accu-
Youth suicides occur more often a noose, fire a gun, or leap from a great sations and threats. He told Angela that
during the school year, when social and height. Some of the people who do that she was to blame for her brother Tristan’s
academic stresses are highest. A recent are children. death, though she had been thirteen and
meta-analysis of studies on youth sui- on her way home from school when it
cide found that a history of abuse and illy and Angela took Trevor to a hos- happened, and implied that he, too, might
neglect was significantly associated with
a higher rate of suicide attempts. Rates
B pital near their Connecticut house.
A triage nurse asked Trevor if he was
kill himself as revenge on his parents for
hospitalizing him.
of suicide are also particularly high for thinking of suicide and he said, “Yeah, Angela was bewildered: “He didn’t
children in care—three times higher definitely.” He was held in the E.R. for even sound like a boy that I knew. I felt
than for children who live with their two days, before being transferred to like I was talking to somebody else. The
own families without legal supervision. St. Vincent’s, in Westport. His parents despair he had was almost nonsensical.
Another group with alarmingly high were beginning to realize the inadequacy It was incredibly, deeply painful, in my
rates of suicide and suicide attempts is of psychiatric services for acute mental chest and in my gut. But it was also ‘Is
the L.G.B.T.Q. population, reflecting illness in children. “There’s nothing,” this happening?’ His trauma was all about
an unaccepting society—and, frequently, Billy said. “We felt like we were blind, being betrayed by someone you trust,
an unaccepting family. According to a feeling around. And this is our son’s life.” someone who is supposed to take care
2021 survey conducted by the Trevor Because of COVID, the family was of you.” Her fear is that she recapitulated
Project, an organization that has worked not allowed to visit, a situation that An- the very experience he had had with Stolz
for more than two decades on suicide gela believes exacerbated Trevor’s sense and was trying to escape.
prevention among L.G.B.T.Q. youth, of rejection. One of the other kids in the The psychiatrist at St. Vincent’s pre-
some forty-two per cent of this popu- hospital punched him, unprovoked. “I scribed the antipsychotic Abilify for
lation seriously considered suicide and wasn’t there, I couldn’t protect him,” she Trevor, which helped enough that he was
more than half of trans and nonbinary said. She brought items he had request- able to go home. The family celebrated
young people did. ed—a ChapStick, a T-shirt. She was told Christmas a week late. Billy and Angela
Environmental factors almost cer- that ChapSticks weren’t allowed, although put sharp knives and belts in locked boxes,
tainly interact with genetic predisposi- she’d checked in advance that they weren’t as the hospital had directed. They didn’t
tions that are not yet well understood. considered dangerous, and a guard even need to do anything to the windows:
J. John Mann, a professor of translational tried to disallow the T-shirt, saying that Tristan’s death still loomed so large for
neuroscience at Columbia, believes that it was too small for Trevor. One day, a Angela that she insisted on having win-
genetics and epigenetics account for a nurse called to complain about Trevor’s dow guards, even one blocking access to
substantial proportion of suicides. “We’re behavior. “I’m sorry—he’s in a crisis right the fire escape.
not sure what genes they are yet, but we now,” Angela recalled saying. “That’s why Although there was no more violence,
know that there are genes there,” he said. he’s in your institution.” She was outraged Angela saw little improvement. “The
“Suicide is not ex nihilo.” process of being hospitalized as a child
It is evident that many children who for suicidal behavior is itself traumatic,”
suffer from depression do not become she said. “It was terrifying for Trevor in
suicidal. What is sometimes harder to the moment. It was terrifying for him
understand is that many children who afterwards.” He spent a month in what
do not show signs of depression none- is known as a Partial Hospitalization
theless attempt suicide. This speaks not Program, involving all-day treatment,
only to the impulsivity of younger minds which was followed by six weeks in an
but also to the lack of the perspective intermediate program. Both were oper-
that age eventually brings. There is al- ated by High Focus Centers, a chain of
most no adult who has not endured a when the nurse said that Trevor should commercial rehab facilities, and consisted
sleepless night obsessing over some- be sedated with an intramuscular injection. primarily of group therapy.
thing that has gone wrong and global- Trevor’s psychiatrist at St. Vincent’s Because of the pandemic, these treat-
izing it into the panicked sense that didn’t want to discharge Trevor until she ments happened online, and there didn’t
nothing will ever work out again. Chil- was confident that he would not hurt seem to be much contact between the
dren have those moments, too, and himself; he stayed nine days. He’d hoped High Focus therapists and the psychia-
middle-school drama doesn’t seem silly desperately to be home for Christmas. trists who were prescribing Trevor’s med-
or insignificant to the children caught “When that didn’t happen, he sank so ication. He began taking Geodon, an-
up in it. Children’s worlds may be smaller low,” Angela said. She and Billy called other antipsychotic, which didn’t do
than adults’, but their emotional hori- every day, and Trevor would scream at much, and was also started on Prozac.
zons are just as wide. Because we find them, “You abandoned me.” They kept In mid-February, after an episode of
our own pain absurd once it relents, saying that they had put him there be- tachycardia that led to an E.R. visit, he
most of us don’t tell people when we’ve cause they loved him and that this was was taken off both medications. A new
34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
 Tennisha N. Riley, a developmental
psychologist at Indiana University, cites
POCKET GARDEN IN THE CITY a finding that the average Black adoles-
cent experiences five instances of racial
You would miss it if you were hurrying. discrimination a day, just when he or
If you were harried or the day was drab. she is becoming increasingly aware of
racial identity. Discrimination aggravates
It’s tucked between two old brownstones, now mental-health vulnerabilities among
a defunct pet store, a pop-up for sneakers. youth already at risk, which, Riley says,
can “exacerbate their inability to regu-
Take the stone path back. It’s so narrow— late emotions.” Riley further observes
the leaning greenery like sticky sleeves, that, in American culture, parents often
don’t allow adolescents to express emo-
sunflower above, like a lighthouse, the ocean tions that can sound disrespectful. Black
aroma of yellow hibiscus. But what are they doing. children repeatedly see scenes of violence
between law enforcement and people
Two cops, in the back corner, under a lime tree. who look like them. They experience
Hooded figure between them—what’s your name. school as the locus of a metal detector
and a body search by a police officer. At
You stand there and they stand there. younger and younger ages, they begin to
Snapdragon. Hollyhock. Daylilies ablaze. question whether life is worth living.
Last fall, I travelled to Louisville to
—David Baker visit Tami Charles, who lost her ten-
year-old son, Seven Bridges, to suicide
in 2019. We had agreed to meet at her
psychiatrist ventured that he might be districts. As Michael Lindsey, the exec- house at 11 A.M., but overnight she sent
suffering from insomnia and that this utive director of N.Y.U.’s McSilver In- a text saying that anxiety had been keep-
could be the root of his other symptoms. stitute for Poverty Policy and Research, ing her up and asking to delay to half
He prescribed clonidine, which can be told me, “Whether those interventions past twelve. Texting back, I said not to
used as a mild sedative and to treat anx- can be helpful to minoritized youth is worry and that I’d be as nice and gentle
iety, then reintroduced the Prozac. still a question.” Depressed children of as I could. When I walked in the door,
For the first three months of 2021, all races manifest both internalizing and the first thing Tami said was “If you’re
Trevor seemed to improve steadily. He’d externalizing symptoms, but Black chil- really going to write this article, you can-
earlier agreed to say when suicidal feel- dren who are sad and withdrawn are not be nice. This is not a nice subject.
ings overcame him. One day, skiing at often ignored, while those who are more That’s like picking up a turd from the
Catamount, he stopped Angela in the aggressive are misdiagnosed as having clean end.” Tami is a giant personality
lift line and said, “The last time I was conduct disorders and receive discipline and an exuberant talker, and she has be-
on this chairlift, I wanted to jump off it.” instead of treatment. “Zero-tolerance come a prominent voice on the problem
He often said that he couldn’t get Dylan discipline policies in schools have had a of suicide among young Black people.
Stolz out of his head and wondered if disproportionate impact on Black and Despite her anguish, she maintained a
he’d ever be able to escape such thoughts. brown kids, who often get seen as the patter of humor as we talked. “I ulti-
She’d tell him that, because he’d acknowl- troublemaker,” Lindsey said. “In lieu of mately forbid people to feel sorry for
edged and confronted the abuse as a receiving behavioral-health supports, they me,” she said. “They even criticized me—
child, he would triumph over his tor- will be suspended or expelled.” Most ‘You’re not crying enough on TV.’ Let
mentor. Angela was encouraged when child psychiatrists are white, and they me get this straight. We get twenty-four
Trevor volunteered as a gatekeeper for often show a negative implicit racial bias hours, you see me on TV for twenty min-
ski races and wanted to race himself. “By in their treatment of Black children. Ef- utes, so them other twenty-three hours
March, he was desperate to go to all the fective forms of therapy can be fantasti- and forty minutes, what the hell do you
races,” she said. “I definitely felt like we cally expensive, and Black children are really think I’m doing?”
had passed the most dangerous part.” often just put on medication. Tami grew up in Chicago and settled
Lindsey added that Black communi- in Louisville after a career in the Navy,
ccording to a study published in ties have historically resisted acknowl- serving as a physician assistant. As she
A JAMA Pediatrics in 2018, the suicide
rate among Black children between the
edging depression as an illness. Black
children, who are more likely to be ex-
approached thirty-five, she prepared to
get a hysterectomy: at eighteen, she’d been
ages of five and twelve is double that of posed to violence, are less likely to re- told that she couldn’t conceive because
white children. Suicide-prevention strat- ceive mental-health services. “There’s of polycystic ovary syndrome. She also
egies such as increased access to school this ethic of ‘Life is going to be tough, had endometriosis, ovarian cysts, and fi-
advisers and counsellors have tended to but bear it, deal with it, lift yourself up, broids, which made her menstrual cycles
be implemented in largely white school overcome it,’” he said. agonizing. She had recently encountered
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 35
a musician named Donnie Bridges, eigh- kept him home on Tuesday and Wednes- them fire, but every day you’ve got to
teen years her senior. She fell for him the day. On Thursday, the girl kept tor- have your liver eaten out again, right,
minute they met, and to their great sur- menting Seven, Tami said, and, on Fri- buddy?” she said. “I do not regret speak-
prise Tami conceived just before her sur- day, Seven told a teacher. “And this bitch ing out. I can’t help experiencing the pain
gery was scheduled. says to my son, ‘Well, what do you want of getting my liver eaten out every day,
In 2008, Tami and Donnie had a son, me to do about it?’” Tami recalled. “She but I focus on the fact that it gets re-
Seven, who was born with a tethered said, ‘Your mom has already called the newed every day, too.” She told me that
spinal cord, which can cause urinary in- principal. The principal called her mom, she sometimes stayed awake for days.
continence, and an imperforate anus, a and her mom has told her. And if the Other times, she can’t get out of bed.
condition in which the opening to the principal can’t do it and her mom can’t “God, I love therapy,” she said, and
anus is blocked or missing. He had to do it and your mom can’t do it, what lamented how few Black people get it:
wear a colostomy bag from birth. Seven do you think I can do? And besides, “In the Black community, mental health
played as hard as any other child and was Seven, nobody likes a tattletale.’ Made is not a thing. What they have for us is
particularly fond of karate. Still, during my son feel—he told me these words— a liquor store and a church on every block.”
his short life, he had twenty-six surger- that there was nothing nobody could
ies. Eventually, the colostomy bag was do for him. He said that on Friday. Sat- hen Trevor’s outpatient program
removed, but he continued to have leak-
age and was teased for the way he smelled.
urday morning, my son was dead.”
Seven hanged himself in his bedroom
W ended, on March 22, 2021, the staff
told Angela that he was no longer a risk
In August, 2018, Seven was called the closet when his mother was out grocery to himself. His parents found him a ther-
N-word on the school bus, and a boy shopping and his father was practicing apist and he also saw a new psychiatrist,
choked him so badly that Tami took him with the church choir. When Seven died, who said that his medication—forty mil-
to the emergency room, where he had a Tami said, she lost three things: “First, ligrams of Prozac—looked reasonable.
CT scan. “Mommy, I don’t understand,” my living, breathing son. Second, when On March 27th, Angela took Trevor
Seven said. “I thought he was my friend.” you have a kid, you realize you will never and Agnes to ski in Alta, Utah. “He had
The episode was caught on a security relinquish the ability to worry, but that really, it seemed to us, turned a corner,”
video, a still from which shows another was taken from me. I haven’t worried she said. “Things that he had withdrawn
student with his arm around Seven’s neck; about a damn thing from that day to this from he was engaged in—his sports,
the school district later referred to the one. And I mean anything, like whether school, friends, playdates.” In Alta, he
incident as “horseplay.” my shoes are tied or whether somebody seemed exuberant and skied every day.
Donnie and Tami complained to the likes me, whether I’m going to enjoy this On April 4th, back in Connecticut,
school, Kerrick Elementary. Donnie spoke food I’m eating. Third, and the least he had another episode of tachycardia.
with the assistant principal, who is white, talked about in a situation like this: You “Something terrible is happening,” he
but nothing happened. So Tami met with always see people fighting to live and said to Angela. “My heart is racing and
the principal, who is Black. When Tami doing all the treatments and taking all I feel like I’m living someone else’s life.
asked her for a report on the incident, it the pills. To see the evidence of some- I feel like I’m running out of time and
emerged that the assistant principal hadn’t body who chose not to fight, it changed I need to tell people that I love them.
even mentioned it. Tami went out to the me. It took away my own urgency of I’m afraid something terrible is going to
school’s parking lot and recorded a video fighting to live.” happen.” When she asked if he was sui-
on Facebook about what had happened. Because of Tami’s public advocacy, cidal, he said that he was not. Later that
The video attracted thousands of views, five thousand people came to the fu- day, while trying to remove some tape
and people began posting outraged com- neral, including mayors and council from a pair of ski poles, Trevor cut his
ments. It soon reached the local news. members and the governor. Seven’s story left thumb badly with the scissors. On
Tami went to the Louisville Urban appeared in People, and colostomy pa- the way to the E.R., he told Angela, “I’m
League, to the 100 Black Men, to her tients mounted a campaign called #Bags- really sorry. It just slipped. I was not try-
church. She went to the school district’s OutforSeven, in which people took pho- ing to hurt myself.” Angela said she hadn’t
diversity department, complained to the tos of themselves with their bags on thought he was. He said, “You see, Mom,
school board, and approached the police. display. For Tami, talk about colosto- I told you something terrible was going
Her protests had an unintended con- mies and mental health can take atten- to happen. Now it has.”
sequence, she said. Now Seven was bul- tion away from the role of racism. “The On April 6th,Trevor had Zoom classes.
lied not only by other children but also bullying, the Black and brown—nobody The next day, his school was to begin a
by teachers who resented Tami’s cam- wants to talk about that,” she said, not- new level of in-person classes, and Trevor
paign. One Monday in January, 2019, ing that, among suicide activists, she is was looking forward to it. He was en-
Seven came home and Tami knew some- “the only raisin in the rice.” gaged, encouraging his classmates to
thing was wrong. A girl who had been She is fiercely proud of her advocacy, watch a documentary he’d just seen. He
cruel to him for years had been saying but said that it takes a toll: “God com- was planning a science project with his
mean things about how he smelled. mandeers my mouth and gets people best friend at the school. Billy made him
Tami called the principal, who remon- whatever they need, but when they get ramen for lunch, one of his favorites.
strated with the girl’s mother. Seven what they need I am depleted.” Often, Zoom school ended at 2 P.M. Trevor
didn’t want to go back to school. Tami she feels like Prometheus. “You’ve given had online therapy for the next hour,
36 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
then Angela and Billy talked to the ther- this is all right, because he couldn’t have Angela is a devout Episcopalian, and
apist, who judged that Trevor’s suicide fallen that far. And then I see the lower she called Matthew Heyd, the rector
risk was zero. But, as someone who had part of his body and immediately I knew of the Church of the Heavenly Rest,
known him from an early age later said, that it would not be possible for a human on Fifth Avenue. “I had told him that
“Trevor could outsmart any therapist if to survive that.” I knew my son was going to die,” she
he wanted the privacy to end his life.” Angela went down, leaving Agnes said. “I felt that the deaths of my broth-
At some point in the day, Trevor in the apartment. “There were all these ers were purely to prepare me.” Heyd
walked the dogs, then left them with the police officers with their arms out- drove to the hospital. Angela said, “Matt,
doorman while he went around the cor- stretched, telling me I couldn’t cross I’m scared, because Trevor wasn’t sure
ner to buy a bag of Jolly Ranchers. An- their line,” she said. “And I was scream- what he believed in.” Heyd said, “An-
gela told him that she’d have to confis- ing, ‘I’m his mother. He’s my son. These gela, God believed in Trevor. That’s all
cate them: “I need you to ask permission are his final moments. You cannot keep that matters.”
before you go shopping. I need to know me from him.’ They moved apart and At Lenox Hill, medical staff contin-
where you are. It’s a safety thing.” Trevor I got into the ambulance with him. They ued doing chest compressions. Angela
was distraught. A bit later, he asked again were doing chest compressions. They said, “As we were moving into the E.R.,
for the candy he had bought and talked had his shirt open. Billy said, ‘Should I they had him on the gurney on wheels,
with his parents for about ten minutes. come with you?’ And I said, ‘No, you and I was walking, and again there are
Angela said, “I still need better choices, need to stay with Agnes. You tell her the cops with the patronizing horse-
so, no, I’m not giving you back the Jolly that it’s very serious. But we have to talk shit—‘You don’t want to come in here,’
Ranchers.” He seemed resigned. “There to her together after that.’” ‘You don’t want these to be your im-
was no fight, no despair,” Angela told me, The medical examiner later confirmed ages.’ I was, like, ‘I’m all set with my im-
and added, “I know he didn’t do what he that Trevor’s neck had snapped on im- ages. It’s my son.’
did because of a bag of sweets, but I wish pact. “I knew that what I was looking at “The E.R. doctor looked at me, and
I’d given him those Jolly Ranchers.” was not a living creature anymore, was he said, ‘It appears you understand what’s
Soon afterward, from the dining room, not my son,” Angela said. In the ambu- happening here.’ I said, ‘I do.’ He said, ‘In
where he had set up a home office, Billy lance, she recorded images of Trevor. “I my experience, there are additional mea-
noticed that Trevor was, oddly, in the knew I was going to need them later, be- sures that I can take, but they will not
hall, looking at the mail. “I wish I had cause I wouldn’t believe that he was dead,” alter the outcome.’ And I said, ‘I know.’ ”
held on to that pause a little longer and she said. “And I have needed them.” As Angela climbed onto the gurney with
asked him how he was doing, or if he the ambulance headed to Lenox Hill Trevor’s body. “I just put my head on
wanted to go for a walk,” Billy said. Hospital, Angela texted Billy, “He is dead.” Trevor’s chest and listened,” she told
Trevor quietly slipped out the door
of the apartment, and climbed the fire
staircase to the roof. Angela later heard
from a doorman in the building that a
woman told him she’d seen Trevor there
from her apartment across the street.
For a moment, the woman thought he
was playing, but she noticed that he kept
peering down. Suddenly, it dawned on
her what he was about to do, and that
he was checking that there were no pe-
destrians whom he’d hurt. Trevor closed
his eyes and jumped feet first.
When the doorman on duty rushed
upstairs and said that Trevor had jumped
out a window, Angela knew that was
impossible: their windows wouldn’t open
far enough. Billy said, “He’s right here.
I don’t understand.” Angela started
screaming and dialled 911. Billy went
downstairs with the doorman.
“There’s an ambulance parked on
Park Avenue,” Billy recalled. “And the
super is there, and I’m kind of holding
on to him, because I feel like I’m going
to faint. The paramedics are working
on Trevor, but I can see the top of his
body. And I’m thinking, O.K., maybe “One day you wake up and your grandpa cardigan isn’t ironic anymore.”
me. “I did that every day in the morn- a significant number of people, it appears vessel dilation, digestion, and body tem-
ing, when we would snuggle. And this that trying once brings about a perma- perature.) Hannah had to deal with per-
time there was no beating. His legs were nent change in perspective. sistent blackouts while also negotiating
badly broken and his face was pretty in- I met one such teen, Hannah Lucas, constant sexual harassment from other
tact and I just held him and caressed him.” who grew up in Cumming, Georgia. students. “It got to the point where I
Now twenty, she was a victim of abuse couldn’t even use the bathroom by my-
nnumerable treatments have been as a child, and told her counsellor about self, because what if I passed out and one
I proposed for reducing suicide rates.
Most have had sporadic success but
it when she started therapy, at fifteen.
The counsellor, who, according to Han-
of those guys found me?” she said. “I
didn’t have anyone I could relate to. I al-
none has significantly reduced the scale nah, was “not culturally competent,” con- ways had to put on this façade of being
of the problem. Currently, the best treat- tacted child-protective services. Hannah this strong Black woman—well, not too
ments for young suicidal people appear is Black; the counsellor was white. C.P.S. strong, because you don’t want to scare
to be medication and therapies, espe- was involved with the family for the next anyone, or be the loud Black lady. I al-
cially Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. three years, a traumatic period for Han- ways had to be perfect.”
D.B.T. combines cognitive techniques, nah and her family. She and her brother She told me, “The moment I decided
Zen philosophy, and mindfulness, and told a C.P.S. agent to keep the troubles to take my life, it was just like a switch
emphasizes effective ways of tolerating they disclosed confidential. “C.P.S. vio- had been flipped.” Hannah was overdos-
distress. Blaise Aguirre, at McLean Hos- lated that trust,” Hannah said, and the ing when her mother found her and phys-
pital, is a leading exponent of D.B.T., consequences for her were severe. She ically extracted the pills from her mouth.
having overseen the treatment of thirty- maintains that the agency made things “I always viewed death as an escape, as
five hundred adolescents and young “exponentially worse.” She would show peace—and I wanted that peace,” Han-
adults, many of whom have had as many caseworkers a bruise and they would say nah said. “She made me realize that I
as ten previous psychiatric hospitaliza- it was a stretch mark. “But it wasn’t a have anchors holding me, and that I would
tions. Many of their parents have told stretch mark—it was a completely dif- harm so many people in the process.”
him that there were no further hospi- ferent color,” Hannah said. When I met Hannah, she was tak-
talizations, and fewer than one per cent She had been a perfectionist: beauti- ing a gap year and hoped to attend the
have later died prematurely. ful, a star gymnast, an excellent student. Savannah College of Art and Design,
Although someone who has made a She was taking all A.P. classes and re- to study luxury fashion and business
suicide attempt is much likelier to die calls being the only Black student in any management. Hannah still struggles with
by suicide than the average person, ninety of them. But now she began getting dizzy depression: “It’s an ongoing fight. I have
per cent of those who survive a suicide and passing out and was so tired she my good days and bad, but I’m in ther-
attempt do not go on to kill themselves. could barely function. (She was later apy and see a psychiatrist, so I’m work-
Most are responding to a crisis, which given a diagnosis of postural orthostatic ing on getting better.” Four years ago,
suggests that, if you can bring them into tachycardia syndrome, a nervous-system she launched an app, notOK, which
treatment, you may save their lives. For disorder that affects heart rate, blood- serves as a digital panic button. A user,
having selected up to five trusted con-
tacts, can with a single push of a button
send them each a message asking for
immediate help and automatically pro-
viding the user’s location. It has been
downloaded more than a hundred and
fifty thousand times.
Saniya Soni, who is from a South
Asian family, decided to take her life in
2015, when she was sixteen. She told me,
“Leading up to the attempt, it was al-
ways ‘If I do this, I’m going to hurt so
many people,’ which was a sucky feeling
of ‘I have to be responsible for all these
people’s emotions when I’m hurting so
much.’ Suicide may look selfish to ev-
erybody else, but, as the person who is
contemplating it, you’re battling with
that idea of ‘I don’t want to be selfish, I
want to support all these other people,
but I cannot do it anymore.’”
In her suicide attempt, she recalled,
“I stopped myself midway through. My
method just wasn’t working. I was just
overwhelmed.” She called a friend, who Angela put out an arm to keep them to- ence betrayal, humiliation, sadness, fear,
came over, held her as she sobbed, and gether in front of her. “It’s your loss, too,” before I understand those things to be
said she should tell her mother. Saniya’s she said. “And you are here because Trevor anger. I’m not angry at Trevor. I’m just
mother took her to the E.R., where she loved you. We couldn’t invite everyone bewildered.” Trevor was deeply loved,
remained for seventeen hours, until a to this service, and I want you to know but not everyone can be saved by love.
child psychiatric bed could be found. you are here because you meant some- Angela did everything humanly possi-
“The psychiatric ward was not what I thing to Trevor. Every one of you, even ble, one St. Bernard’s mother said, but
needed,” she said, but the mandated ther- if you didn’t know it all along.” Then, was outmatched by her son: “To have
apy that followed was transformative, with great emphasis, she said, “I want a child who is ahead of you like that is
because it included group therapy with you boys to promise me—promise me— destabilizing and scary.”
other children who had harmed them- that you will talk about your feelings Angela tries to steer Agnes through
selves. “I didn’t realize other people felt with one another or with your parents her grief. Once, when she was reading
that way,” she said. “I didn’t realize what or with a teacher or even with a doctor. a bedtime story, Agnes stopped her.
would happen if I attempted.” Promise me that. Because I “The books you read to me
Shared experience with others was don’t want to come to an- have happy endings,” she
also the turning point for Bridgette other funeral like this one.” said. “But our story doesn’t
Robek, from Columbus, Ohio, who’d Last summer, about have a happy ending.” An-
begun self-harming and speaking of sui- three months after their gela wrapped her arms
cide in her early teens. When she was in son’s death, Billy and An- around Agnes. She said,
ninth grade, the suicide of a classmate gela separated. Billy, having “How old are you?,” and
put her over the edge and she was hos- lost one struggling son, Agnes said, “Nine.” Angela
pitalized. “I got really close with an eight- brought one of the sons said, “So let’s say you’re
year-old boy during my stay,” she told from his first marriage to going to live to be ninety.
me. “I like to think of him as my guard- New York for a fresh start. How much of your life have
ian angel. He was in there because he But, not long afterward, an you lived?” Agnes said, “Ten
was getting bullied so bad, and he wanted argument erupted in the car, and An- per cent.” Angela said, “Are all these
to die. And that was my first time expe- gela felt as if the young man was blam- books with happy endings happy all the
riencing that with a young kid.” This ing her for Trevor’s death. She asked way through, or do many of them have
hospitalization turned out to be key for Billy to pull over at the next train sta- trouble or worse somewhere in the mid-
Bridgette. “I finally realized that I wanted tion and send him home. “I understand dle?” Agnes nodded. “My darling, there
to get better. I didn’t want to be sick any- that Billy loves his son,” Angela said. is still time for your life to have a happy
more.” Because of privacy laws, she wasn’t “But a line needs to be drawn at some ending, even with this.”
allowed to keep in contact with the boy. point. I thought it was ill-advised to Grief is inherently lonely, and there
“I think about him a lot,” she said. “I do bring the person who was so traumatiz- are as many ways to grieve as there are
hope that he’s O.K. I hope . . . I’ll put it ing closer to me.” human beings. Billy sought out books
easiest—I hope he’s still alive.” Billy told me that, although he loves and people who could provide philo-
Angela, he struggled in their marriage. sophical perspective, while Angela was
revor’s funeral took place on April “It seemed that I increased her unhap- spurred to a focussed dynamism, an
T 14th last year. Because of COVID,
the service was relatively small, but nine-
piness,” he said. “Continuing in this ten-
sion-filled environment wasn’t good for
outward-facing construction of her son’s
legacy. “I had one responsibility as a
teen boys from St. Bernard’s, including me or for our children.” He contends mother,” Angela said, “and it was to
my son, were there. I had thought he that he had previously stuck things out keep my child alive. And I failed at it.”
might be anxious about going, but he because he was afraid that leaving could When I asked her whether she was out-
said he was glad to be asked. It was full further destabilize Trevor. Billy said that raged or just sad, she said, “I’m so
of music, and the eulogies, including telling his daughter about the separation ashamed that I failed him.”
one by Billy and one by Angela, were was “the second most difficult day of my She was spending as much time as
remarkable. Sam Fryer, a teacher at life.” Agnes “folded into a puddle.” possible in the country—“because Trevor
P.S. 6, said, “Because he was so bright, Once, talking to Angela, I tentatively was only alive here.” She had learned
being Trevor’s teacher could be some- posited a connection between Trevor’s that you can preserve your late child’s
what unnerving at moments. But the death and Tristan Colt’s, as many peo- clothing in ziplock bags and their scent
thrill of it was never lost on me.” ple apparently had. Angela recognized will remain years later; she would go
In the church, the St. Bernard’s boys that the comparisons were inevitable, into Trevor’s room to smell his clothes,
sat together toward the back. We were but they pained her. It is impossible because that made her feel close to him.
among the last to file through the long to know whether Tristan’s death gave “I feel often not just lonely but utterly
reception line. Angela had been wear- Trevor access to the idea that he could alone,” she said. 
ing large sunglasses, but now she took do this. Another time, she mentioned
them off, revealing red eyes. The boys the anger that people warned her grief If you are having thoughts of suicide, please
shuffled past, eyes downcast, mumbling would entail. “It is unusual for me to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at
something about being sorry for her loss. experience anger,” she said. “I’ll experi- 1-800-273-talk (8255) or text talk to 741741.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 39

 DEPT. OF CRIMINOLOGY

MURDER, HE WROTE
Stéphane Bourgoin was a celebrated expert on serial killers. Then his own story came under investigation.
BY LAUREN COLLINS

brother and a sister are stand- lisher Grasset. Travelling around the 2015. Female fans, he added, would be

A ing on the balcony of a sixth-

f loor apartment in Monte
Carlo. It’s the nineteen-seventies, in
country to book festivals, Bourgoin
built up a particularly devoted follow-
ing within the already zealous sub-
given priority.
Bourgoin was most famous for his
jailhouse interviews with murderers.
May, the afternoon of the Grand Prix. culture of true crime. One fan, Bour- In the course of more than forty years,
The sun is glinting off the dinghies goin said, sent him annotated copies he had conducted seventy-seven of
in the turquoise shallows of the har- of his own books, with items such as them, he said, “in the four corners
bor. The trees are so lush they’re al- scissors, razors, and pubic hairs glued of the planet.” He riveted audiences
most black. to the pages, corresponding to words with tales of his encounters with the
The brother, Stéphane Bourgoin, in the text. “Son of Sam” killer David Berkowitz
is in his twenties. He’s come from Bourgoin also had admirers in law (“David, I come here, you agreed to
Paris to visit his sister Claude-Marie and law enforcement. “He was one of meet me, but I hope you’re not going
Dugué. Race cars circle the city, ca- the first people in France to say that to tell me the same bullshit that you
reening onto the straightaway on Bou- serial killers weren’t only in America,” told at your trial”), with the homicidal
levard Albert 1er, which Dugué’s Jacques Dallest, the general prosecu- hospital orderly Donald Harvey (“He
apartment overlooks. Over the thrum, tor of the Grenoble appeals court, told confesses seventeen additional crimes
Bourgoin leans in and tells her some- me. Dallest was so impressed with to me that he hadn’t even been sus-
thing shocking: in America, where Bourgoin that he invited him to speak pected of ”), with the “Killer Clown”
he’d recently been living, he had a at the École Nationale de la Magis- John Wayne Gacy (who, Bourgoin
girlfriend who was murdered and “cut trature, France’s national academy for said, grabbed his buttocks during the
up into pieces.” Her name was Hélène. judges and prosecutors. Bourgoin also encounter). “Confronting these indi-
Bourgoin’s revelation was one of gave talks at the Centre National de viduals can be dangerous from a men-
those moments when you “remember Formation à la Police Judiciaire, a train- tal point of view,” Bourgoin wrote, in
exactly what you were doing that day ing center for one of France’s main “Mes Conversations avec les Tueurs”
at that precise moment, the news is law-enforcement bodies, for which he (“My Conversations with Killers”), a
so striking and indelible,” Dugué re- claimed to have created the country’s 2012 book. “To make them talk, you
called recently. “It was stupefaction first unit of serial-killer profilers. have to let down your guard, open
and shudders, amid the revving en- An energetic self-promoter, Bour- yourself completely to a psychopath,
gines of Formula 1.” Dugué and Bour- goin appeared frequently in the press who manipulates, lies, and is devoid
goin shared a father but had differ- and on television. “I counted, I did of any scruple.”
ent mothers. They had got to know eighty-four TV shows in one month,” If you dedicate your life to serial
each other not long before, and Dugué he once said. “I get up at 4:45 A.M. to killers, the first question anyone asks
didn’t feel that she could probe for be on the morning shows and go home is “Why?” Bourgoin’s answer was that
details about a girlfriend she hadn’t at midnight to have a bite to eat.” He Hélène’s death made him want to con-
met, or even heard of until that day. cultivated a flamboyantly geeky look, front the worst that humanity had to
“I found the whole situation disturb- with equal shades of Sherlock Holmes offer, as “a form of catharsis” or even
ing,” she said. She simply told Bour- (ascot, horn-rimmed glasses) and Ace as “a personal exorcism.” At some point,
goin how sorry she was. Ventura (cerulean blazer, silky skull- he started pronouncing her name “Ei-
At the time, Bourgoin had a career print shirt). A quirky-shoes enthusi- leen,” the American way. He said that
in the realm of B movies, reviewing ast, he sometimes wore a pair of white he’d met her in the mid-seventies, when
fantasy and horror films for fanzines brogues made to look as though he was living in Los Angeles, work-
and dabbling in adult film. Later, he they were spattered with blood. On ing on B movies; that, in 1976, he went
started writing his own books, which Facebook, he claimed to possess on a trip out of town; that when he
became hugely popular and helped es- the remains of Gerard Schaefer, a se- returned to the home they shared he
tablish him as a prominent expert on rial killer from Florida. “To each per- discovered her dead body, “mutilated,
serial killers in France. His best-known son who buys my book, I will offer a raped, and practically decapitated.”
work, “Serial Killers,” a thousand-page small bag containing a little piece of The killer was apprehended two years
compendium of depravity, was released Schaefer—fingernails, hair, ear, knee- later, and eventually confessed to al-
in five editions by the prestigious pub- cap, skin, bones, etc.,” he wrote, in most a dozen other murders. He was
40 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
Bourgoin told interviewers that studying serial killers provided “a personal exorcism” after the murder of his girlfriend.
ILLUSTRATION BY MAXIME MOUYSSET THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 41
 photograph in a fake electric chair,
captioning it “Today, I’m lacking a
little juice.” What might normally
have seemed in bad taste could feel
like defiance coming from a bereaved
partner. He showed up for interviews
in a Jeffrey Dahmer T-shirt and signed
books “With My Bloodiest Regards.”
In 1991, Bourgoin travelled to the
Florida State Prison to meet Ottis
Toole, sometimes called the Jackson-
ville Cannibal, for a French-television
documentary. Toole claimed to have
eaten some of his victims and allegedly
issued a recipe for barbecue sauce call-
ing for, among other ingredients, two
cloves of garlic and a cup of blood.
Bourgoin opened the interview
brightly, saying that someone had sent
him the recipe for the sauce. “And I
“Let the war of succession begin!” must tell you that I tried it,” he said.
“Was it any good?” Toole asked.
• • “Yeah, it was very good,” Bourgoin
answered, his voice quickening. “Al-
though I didn’t try it on the same kind
now awaiting execution on death row. as if he had seen it all and emerged of meat that you did!”
When an interviewer asked for omniscient, emotion transmogrified Despite Bourgoin’s inclination to-
an image of Eileen, Bourgoin would into expertise. He spoke in data points: ward facts and figures, his own mem-
produce a black-and-white photo- seventeen crimes, seventy-seven se- ories could be indistinct. Sometimes
graph of the young couple. It was rial killers, “hundreds of thousands” he said that he’d been introduced to
beautifully composed, almost profes- of case files that he claimed to have serial killers, in the late seventies, by
sional-looking. In it, the two of them stored in his cellar. “For nearly fifteen a police officer he got to know from
are pictured in closeup, facing each years, I accumulated files that I syn- Eileen’s case; at other times, he said
other. Eileen has feathered hair and thesized into more than five thousand that he’d met some sympathetic cops
rainbow-shaped brows. Bourgoin’s tables, four of which are reproduced at meals hosted by Robert Bloch, the
hair is long, and he appears to be wear- in the book,” he said at one point, an- author of “Psycho.” Bourgoin refused
ing a leather jacket with a big shear- nouncing that he had, in all likeli- to identify Eileen’s killer, or to give
ling collar. He is turned toward her hood, solved the long-standing mys- her last name, saying that he was pre-
in a protective stance. She looks up tery of the murder of Elizabeth Short, serving her anonymity out of respect
at him with a snaggletoothed smile. known as the Black Dahlia. for her parents. Whether because of
They’re so close that their noses are Bourgoin could seem a little off at decency, laziness, or esteem for his
almost touching. times, more like an admirer than a reputation, Bourgoin’s interlocutors
“Eileen was his hook,” Hervé Weill, dispassionate observer of the killers tended not to press him very hard. “I
who co-runs a crime-fiction festival he studied. But it was easy enough to seem to have been prepared to put
at which Bourgoin often appeared, interpret this macabre streak as a con- down his evasions to professional
told me. The story of her death stirred sequence of his trauma. His social- caution or eccentric obsession,” Tony
the public’s emotions, adding a sheen media feeds featured an uncomfort- Allen-Mills, a British journalist who
of moral righteousness to Bourgoin’s able mixture of cat pictures (he named interviewed Bourgoin in 2000, told
vocation. “I knew of Stéphane Bour- a cat Bundy), promotional brags (“once me. “He was accepted as an expert,
goin well before this program having again a packed house, for the seven- and that’s how I treated him.”
seen almost all his interviews with teenth time in a row”), morbid memes Bourgoin knew the power of fan-
prisoners, but I’m only here learning (“BEING CREMATED IS MY LAST dom, having spent decades stoking
that he was the partner of a victim,” HOPE FOR A SMOKING HOT BODY”), the public’s emotional investment in
a YouTube user wrote, after watching and crime-related kitsch (barri- true crime. But he underestimated the
one of Bourgoin’s television appear- cade-tape toilet paper; gloves and a intelligence of the audience. After
ances. “Incredible man.” jacket designed to look as if they were years of watching TV specials, attend-
In his public appearances, Bour- made from human skin). He spoke of ing talks, reading books, and replay-
goin delivered even the most grue- his opposition, on moral grounds, to ing DVD boxed sets about necrophilia,
some anecdotes with weary didacticism, the death penalty, but he’d pose for a satanism, bestiality, torture, infanti-
42 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
cide, matricide, patricide, and the like, mand at Saint-Malo, on the coast of inundated me with references and an-
followers of the genre had learned not Brittany. “Intelligent, courtesan-like, ecdotes.” At some point, Bourgoin
to count on anybody’s better angels, and calculating,” according to one parlayed this interest into a series of
or to underestimate humankind’s ca- writer, she spent the war years facili- jobs in adult film. He is credited as
pacity for deceit. They were connois- tating fishing permits, attending cock- the screenwriter of “Extreme Close-
seurs of the self-valorizing lie, having tail parties, and consorting with the Up,” “La Bête et la Belle,” and “Johnny
been trained by authors like the “mas- Grand Duke of the Romanovs, who Does Paris,” a series of late-seventies
ter of noir” himself. was living in exile at a nearby villa. A and early-eighties productions star-
One group of true-crime fans, dis- French official recalled that she even- ring John Holmes, the prolific Amer-
turbed by inconsistencies in Bourgoin’s tually acquired “such an influence that ican porn actor.
stories, launched their own investiga- she was known to all as ‘Comman- Bourgoin has said that his career
tion, which would unravel his career. dante du Port.’ ” A newspaper article in movies got started in the U.S., but,
“Can you imagine yourself in a long later dubbed her the “Mata Hari of despite featuring some American
hallway?” a member of the group told Saint-Malo.” actors, the three films were shot in
me. “Each time you open a door, be- Toward the end of the war, Fran- France. Bourgoin did go to America
hind it there’s another door. That’s how ziska was arrested on charges of trea- at least once in his youth, as I learned
many lies there were.” son and was accused of acting as an from the papers of his father’s former
informant. At her trial, ten local wit- wife, Alice Gilbert Smith Bourgoin.
ne seemingly grandiose element nesses, including the former mayor Alice was a New England patrician,
O of Bourgoin’s life story is true: his
father, Lucien Joseph Jean Bourgoin,
of Saint-Malo, testified in her de-
fense. “It was thanks to her excep-
with a degree from Smith College,
who appears to have had an ardent
was a great man of history. Jean, as he tional situation with the high Ger- but melancholic relationship with Jean,
was known, was born in 1897, in Pa- man command that the docks of exacerbated by the turbulence of their
peete, Tahiti. He joined the French Saint-Malo, where ninety-six mine- era. Toward the end of her life, she
military at the age of seventeen, fight- shafts had been set, were not ex- wrote an affectionate letter to Jean of-
ing with distinction in the First World ploded,” a newspaper article reported. fering to return “two handsome and
War before studying at the élite engi- She was ultimately acquitted. valuable rings you gave me—a soli-
neering school École Polytechnique. Jean and Franziska married in Sai- taire diamond and a beautiful dark
During the Second World War, he gon in 1951. He was fifty-three and blue sapphire.”
made a bold escape from French-co- she was forty. Two years later, their Alice’s letter arrived in Paris on
lonial Indochina after being put under only child, Stéphane, was born in Paris. June 7, 1977, but Stéphane was the
surveillance for his support of the The family lived in a Haussman-style one to receive it. Jean had died, of a
Free French, and was personally sum- apartment in the Seventeenth Ar- heart attack, three days earlier, at a
moned by Charles de Gaulle to join rondissement, not far from the Arc de ceremony hosted by his alma mater.
the government-in-exile in London. Triomphe. Stéphane spoke French, Jean’s death must have been a shock,
As a civilian, Jean travelled the world German, and English, and attended but Stéphane replied to Alice, in a
building roads, tunnels, railroads, irri- the venerable Lycée Carnot. He seems letter dated the same day. “You do
gation systems, and electrical networks. not know me, but I am Jean’s son,
Later, he became a Commander of the Stéphane, born in 1953, and, by the
Legion of Honor, and took part in way, the only child of his last mariage
UNESCO’s effort to relocate the ancient [sic],” he wrote, in English. “Perhaps
Egyptian temples of Abu Simbel. His you want to know a little bit more
twenty-two-page dossier in the Na- about me.”
tional Archives of France chronicles He told her that he had recently
countless missions, decorations, and spent almost a year in America, but
“special services rendered to Coloni- the letter made no mention of a mur-
zation” in roughly twenty countries. dered lover, or of a serial killer. “I love
“I’ve heard that there was much more to have been an awkward child. “The very much the USA and the kindness
to the story, that he was also a high- second the bell rang, three minutes of the Americans,” he wrote. He added
level intelligence officer,” Julien Cuny, later I was outside with twenty peo- that he was engaged to an American
his grandson, told me. ple, but he was rather isolated,” Jean- girl who was living in France, a love
Bourgoin’s mother, Franziska Louis Repelski, a classmate, recalled. story just like Alice and his father’s.
Glöckner, was as mysterious and dar- An unremarkable student, Bour- “Right now, I am keeping aside every
ing as her husband. Born in Germany goin left high school without a di- penny I earn to be able to make an-
in 1910, she moved to France in the ploma. He was obsessed with cinema, other trip to the States.” He concluded
thirties after marrying her second hus- sometimes seeing five movies in a day. by giving Alice his telephone num-
band, a French diplomat. In 1940, with “He was a walking dictionary,” Claude- ber and his address.
her husband at war, she took a job as Marie Dugué told me. “He knew all In the bottom left-hand corner of
an interpreter with the German com- the directors and films by heart, and the second page of the letter, there is
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 43
a handwritten note, made at a later cribbed his tale of suicide by piano galed guests at a dinner party with
date by a nephew of Alice’s: from the plot of an obscure novel. tales of these new American murder-
Bourgoin also seems to have inspired ers and the profilers who spent their
Stéphane subsequently came to the USA the character of Étienne Jallieu, a “self- days tracking them. “We were utterly
and visited ASB, at her expense, when she
handed over the rings. He never wrote to ex-
taught erudite shopkeeper” who out- captivated,” Carol Kehringer, a docu-
press any appreciation and was not heard from wits professional sleuths, in Jean- mentary producer who attended the
again before she died. Hugues Oppel’s thriller “Six-Pack.” dinner, told Scott Sayare, writing in
Bourgoin spun the myth out further, the Guardian. “I started asking him all
s a young man, Bourgoin resem- co-writing several especially grisly sorts of questions,” she added. “The
A bled a character out of a potboiler.
In the late seventies, he began work-
true-crime books (one focussed on in-
fanticides) under the pseudonym Éti-
more he spoke, the more I thought to
myself, We’ve got to do a film!”
ing at Au Troisième Œil, a second- enne Jallieu. Kehringer and Bourgoin were ac-
hand crime bookstore in Paris’s Ninth Bourgoin got an early taste of pub- quaintances and had worked together
Arrondissement, which he later took lic attention in 1991, as a writer on “100 before, so she asked him to conduct
over. Customers could find him there, Years of X,” a cable documentary about the interviews for the documentary.
presiding “like a spider in his web,” ac- porn. This was also the year of Bour- In the fall of 1991, Bourgoin and a
cording to a longtime client. The shop goin’s first filmed meeting with a mur- crew flew to the United States to shoot
was a narrow room bursting with first derer. Serial killers were having a cul- the f ilm for the French television
editions, forgotten genre novels, and tural moment, following the success channel FR3. At Quantico, they met
rare crime fanzines, stacked double on of Thomas Harris’s novel “The Silence with John Douglas, the pioneering
shelves that ran from floor to ceiling. of the Lambs.” On the eve of the book’s F.B.I. criminal profiler who would
“It was a lair stuffed with literary trea- publication in French, Bourgoin wrote later gain fame through his book
sures, and you could spend ages there an article for a small crime-literature “Mindhunter.” They travelled to Flor-
talking about le roman noir,” the writer review about “a new type of criminal: ida and California for meetings with
Didier Daeninckx recalled. the serial killer.” He seems to have murderers, arranged by the produc-
The cultivated seediness of the place sensed that a phenomenon was in the tion crew.
and its proprietor was irresistible to air, one that would only gain momen- The film, sold as “An Investigation
the writers who frequented the shop. tum with the release of a film version Into Deviance,” was Bourgoin’s first
Daeninckx put Bourgoin into one of of “The Silence of the Lambs,” star- public foray into the world of serial
his books, as a bookstore manager ring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Fos- killers, but, by the time it was finished,
who deduces that a key character has ter. One night in Paris, Bourgoin re- Bourgoin and Kehringer were no lon-
ger speaking. “When he had the kill-
ers in front of him, it was as if he was
sitting across from his idols,” she told
the Guardian. Still, other producers
continued working with him, and he
soon published his first book on serial
killers, a study of Jack the Ripper. He
followed it with a flurry of spinoff vol-
umes and, in 1993, with the first edi-
tion of his masterwork, the “Serial
Killers” almanac.
Eileen doesn’t figure in Bourgoin’s
work from this time. He seems to
have introduced her into his profes-
sional repertoire sometime around
2000, even though, according to his
sister, he had been telling the story
privately for decades. “I had doubts
when he said his girlfriend had been
murdered, simply because I had known
him for years and he had never spo-
ken about it before,” François Guérif,
a well-known French crime-fiction
editor and Bourgoin’s former boss at
the bookshop, recalled. Bourgoin was
clearly conscious of a need to add
emotional punch to his work. “He
“Don’t be sad, Bud. These decisions are so political.” could cry on command,” Barbara
Necek, who co-directed documenta- stallment, about Fourniret, came out adult, he was struck by its sloppiness.
ries featuring Bourgoin, told me. Some in March of 2020. Alerted by an ac- “There were things that didn’t seem
of Bourgoin’s peers considered him a quaintance to the book’s existence, Sy coherent,” Valak told me. “I told my-
hack who presented himself as a globe- was shocked to encounter her ado- self, ‘O.K., it must be me that’s par-
trotting criminologist when he was lescent image rendered “f lesh and anoid, that’s looking for a nit to pick.’
merely a jobbing presenter. “Neither bone” in a cartoon strip, with Fourni- And then I discovered Facebook.”
I nor any of our mutual friends at the ret threatening her (“I will be forced One day, in a large Facebook group
time had heard the story of his mur- to disfigure you if you don’t do ex- of true-crime enthusiasts, someone
dered girlfriend, nor of his so-called actly as I say”), his words suspended posted a link to an article about Bour-
F.B.I. training,” a colleague and friend in dialogue bubbles. Sy says that nei- goin. Valak commented, expressing
of Bourgoin’s from the eighties told ther Bourgoin nor the publisher had his unease about the work. He re-
me. “It triggered rounds of knowing notified her about the book, or about called, “There were a bunch of peo-
laughter among us, because we all the fact that it reprinted the entirety ple who responded after that, saying,
knew it was absolutely bogus.” of an interview that she’d given in ‘Bah, oui, I agree.’ ”
But elsewhere Bourgoin was taken a different context years earlier. She The skeptics—about thirty of
seriously. As his career progressed, he hired a lawyer to send a letter of com- them—formed a chat group to dis-
came into contact with family mem- plaint to the book’s publisher, which cuss their doubts about Bourgoin.
bers of the victims of killers. They withdrew it from the market. “It was That group eventually splintered into
saw him as a kindred survivor, some- like being defiled a second time,” she a smaller cohort, composed of Valak
one who could be trusted to treat them told me. and seven others, living in France,
with integrity, because of his personal Bourgoin never interrogated Fourni- Belgium, and Canada. (One member
experience. Conversely, proximity to ret, but, oddly, the book’s writer in- left the group after a falling out.) They
them was valuable to Bourgoin as a serted a character inspired by Bour- called themselves the 4ème Œil Cor-
form of reputational currency. “Each goin throughout the text, a revered poration (the Fourth Eye Corpora-
month, two or three people contact criminologist who goes by Bourgoin’s tion)—a play on Au Troisième Œil
me,” he boasted, of his relationship old pseudonym Étienne Jallieu. (At the Third Eye), the name of the
with victims’ families, in 2012. Through “I admit that I’m having trouble bookstore that Bourgoin once ran.
his association with a victims-advocacy understanding the dynamics of your At first, the group members saw
group called Victimes en Série, Bour- relationship with your wife,” Jallieu their task as largely literary. They set
goin got to know Dahina Sy. She had tells Fourniret, facing him across a to work combing through Bourgoin’s
been kidnapped and raped at the age table in an alfresco interrogation room dozens of books, expecting to find in-
of fourteen by Michel Fourniret, who set up on a prison basketball court. stances of plagiarism. Bourgoin had,
later murdered seven young women. “Probably because none of you tell the in fact, lifted passages from English-
One evening, Sy went to a dinner exact truth.” language works that hadn’t been trans-
at Bourgoin’s house. The atmosphere “What is the truth for you, Mon- lated into French. In some cases, he
there was peculiar—a “museum of hor- sieur Jallieu?” Fourniret asks. had even pilfered other people’s life
rors,” according to a journalist who “What you’ve spent your entire life experiences. He claimed, for instance,
once visited, filled with slasher-film trying to hide, Monsieur Fourniret,” that, while visiting a crime scene in
posters, F.B.I. memorabilia, porcelain Jallieu replies. South Africa with the profiler Micki
cherubs in satin masks, and case files Pistorius, he was splattered by mag-
of uncertain provenance. Sy told me, n 2019, a man who goes by the gots and decomposing body parts that
“He said, ‘Come here, I want to show
you something.’” Bourgoin began pull-
I pseudonym Valak—inspired by
a demon in the film “The Conjur-
had been churned up by police heli-
copters. (Pistorius did experience a
ing crime-scene photographs out of a ing 2”—picked up a Bourgoin book similar incident, but Bourgoin was
folder. “Puddles of blood,” Sy said. “It that happened to be at hand. Valak, not there.)
was absolutely abject.” Sy had suffered who is forty-five, lives in a port city The members of the collective
from post-traumatic stress for years in the South of France and works in weren’t professional researchers, but
after her abduction. One of its man- a field unrelated to serial killers. When they were assiduous. “As soon as we
ifestations was extreme arachnopho- we spoke one day, over Zoom, he sat started looking,” Valak recalled, “we
bia. At the dinner table, Bourgoin put in a small room in front of a red vel- found more and more inconsistencies.”
a plastic spider on her shoulder. “I was vet curtain. He wore a black baseball They decided to expand the scope of
paralyzed, and he was laughing,” Sy cap, a black polo, and a black mask, their investigation. Soon, they were
recalled. “I think it gave him pleasure an outfit that was intended to protect devoting as much time to Bourgoin
to mess with my mind.” his identity but also gave off a whiff as they were to their day jobs. They
In 2018, Bourgoin began collabo- of stagecraft. Valak told me that he contacted Bourgoin’s purported for-
rating with the publishing house had always been interested in human mer colleagues, sent letters to prisons
Glénat on a branded series of graphic psychology, particularly at its extremes. across the U.S., and scoured YouTube
novels (“Stéphane Bourgoin Presents He had enjoyed Bourgoin’s work as for clips of obscure speaking engage-
the Serial Killers”). The second in- a teen-ager, but, revisiting it as an ments and television appearances, like
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 45
music lovers searching for concert
bootlegs. They were completists, even
interviewing a representative of the SEPARATING
clerk of court in St. Lucie County,
Florida, about Bourgoin’s claim that At twenty-nine I drink strawberry cider with an ex in the mist
he possessed most of the case evidence
related to Gerard Schaefer, who was outside a pizza restaurant. He painted off a ladder this summer.
sentenced there in 1973. (Bourgoin had
neither the evidence nor the remains Asks if I’ve smelled the difference between fear and regular sweat.
that he had bragged about.) This was
the inverse of fandom: a passionate Down the road, there’s a church with a tall wooden door where we
connection driven by disappointment once kissed
rather than by admiration. One man
became so consumed by the work that so fast the earrings fell off my head. Today he lives with a beautiful artist.
his relationship nearly ended.
In January of 2020, after months I often think of him holding my thighs beside a river after we finished
of research, the collective began post- a bottle of Malbec.
ing a series of damning videos on You-
Tube. They contended that Bourgoin, Mosquitos pulling little blankets above the grass. I know if I sit here
a “serial mythomaniac,” had fabricated long enough
numerous aspects of his life and
career. Eileen, for example, was not he will say the thing he forgets he always says: You’re a planet. I never want
Bourgoin’s first wife, as he sometimes
claimed (alternatively, he called her you to leave. I know I am not the only woman he keeps
his “partner,” “girlfriend,” or “very close
friend”): French public records ob- wrapped in the same story. Because I’ve been hurt, I order another drink.
tained by the group established that
his first wife was a Frenchwoman, and Wait for him to say what men say before getting married: Loving you
that they divorced in 1995. The col-
lective showed that Bourgoin had also is its own time. A place that always exists but cannot in this life.
given wildly conflicting accounts of
the timing, the place, and even the —Taneum Bambrick
manner of Eileen’s death. Her sup-
posed killer, furthermore, was nowhere
to be found. The 4ème Œil had gone Bourgoin’s lies ran the spectrum would have been pro at 16.” (Red Star:
through a list of prisoners awaiting from pointless little fictions to brazen “No trace of him.”)
execution in California, and there fabulation. In some cases, he tried to Bourgoin’s story wasn’t so much a
wasn’t a single one who had killed the make himself sound more important house of cards as a total teardown.
correct number of people in the time than he was—he really did give talks Some of his lies hardly made sense
period that Bourgoin had laid out. at the Centre National de Formation except in fulfilling his seemingly ir-
Nor did they find evidence of a vic- à la Police Judiciaire, even if he had resistible desire to become a charac-
tim who fit the description that Bour- nothing to do with creating the law- ter in dramas that didn’t concern him.
goin had given of Eileen. enforcement body’s profiling unit. He At a talk that he gave to high-school
Bourgoin’s professional résumé was really did know the writer James Ell- students in 2015, he showed a clip of
as dubious as his personal history. By roy, but a picture of the two of them the interview he had done with the
the collective’s reckoning, he had not that he had tweeted wasn’t taken “on killer Donald Harvey, who was ac-
interviewed seventy-seven serial kill- vacation”; it was from a crime-fiction companied by his longtime attorney,
ers but, rather, more likely only eight and film festival. Bourgoin also often William Whalen. Bourgoin called
or nine. An interview with Charles took risks that didn’t comport with Whalen “a very close friend of mine.”
Manson? Nobody in Manson’s camp their potential payoff, as when he He told the students, “Whenever he
had ever heard of it. In setting out his claimed that he had played profes- came to Europe, he stayed at my place
credentials, Bourgoin often claimed sional soccer for seven years with the in Paris. Unfortunately, last year he
that the F.B.I. had invited him to com- Red Star Football Club before mov- committed suicide, and in his suicide
plete two six-month training courses ing to America. Bourgoin was born note he said that he was ultimately
at Quantico with Douglas’s team of in 1953, and by 1976, the year in which never able to live with the fact that
profilers. The 4ème Œil contacted Eileen was allegedly murdered, he was he’d defended a killer like Donald
Douglas, who, according to the group, supposed to have been living in the Harvey.” Whalen, Bourgoin concluded,
replied, “Bourgoin is delusional and U.S. “If his career had lasted for 7 was a “new victim” of Harvey’s. Wha-
an imposter.” years,” the 4ème Œil deduced, “he len’s family told me that they had never
46 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
heard of Bourgoin, that Whalen had being targeted by “bitter and jealous” with Bourgoin’s lies, I found, could
never travelled outside North Amer- individuals. Their acts, he declared, have a strange generative power, in-
ica, and that Whalen was, to the end, were akin to those of people who spiring in those who tried to decipher
a strong believer in the American ju- snitched on their neighbors during them the same kind of slippery spec-
dicial system and “very proud of de- the collaborationist regime of Mar- ulation that they were attempting to
fending Donald Harvey.” shal Pétain. resist. Étienne Jallieu, people pointed
The 4ème Œil even composed a Three months later, with pressure out, was nearly an anagram for “J’ai
psychological sketch similar to the on Bourgoin mounting in the French tué Eileen”—“I killed Eileen,” in
serial-killer profiles with which Bour- press, he spoke to Émilie Lanez, French. (A more likely derivation is
goin had titillated the public: “The of Paris Match. “STéPHANE BOUR- the town of Bourgoin-Jallieu, near
typical mythomaniac is fragile, sub- GOIN, SERIAL LIAR?” the headline read. Lyon.) A bio of Bourgoin at the end
ject to a strong dependence on oth- “HE CONFESSES IN MATCH.” The of an old, undated interview claimed
ers, and his faculties of imagination article was empathetic, attesting to that he had sometimes used the alias
are increased tenfold. Whatever his Bourgoin’s “phenomenal knowledge” John Walsh in his adult-film days.
profile, he is often the first victim of and the respect that he commanded John Walsh is a common enough
his imaginary stories, which he strug- in the law-enforcement community, name, but it also happens to be the
gles to distinguish from reality.” The and presenting his lies as an unfortu- name of the man who hosted “Amer-
collective described Bourgoin as a “vo- nate sideshow to a largely legitimate ica’s Most Wanted” for many years.
leur de vie”—a stealer of life. “We’re career. Bourgoin seemed erratic, tog- Walsh’s six-year-old son was mur-
by no means accusing Stéphane Bour- gling between tears and off handed- dered in Florida in 1981, and in 2008
goin of being an assassin,” the group ness, lamenting the weight of his lies Ottis Toole, the Florida drifter with
wrote. “By voleur de vie we mean that but then dismissing them as “bullshit” whom Bourgoin joked about barbe-
he helps himself to pieces of other or “jokes.” cue sauce, was posthumously recog-
people’s lives.” Even as he unburdened himself, nized as the child’s murderer. Might
Most cons become harder to keep Bourgoin was sowing fresh confusion. Bourgoin have refashioned himself as
up the longer they go on, but Bour- The article explained, for instance, the family member of a victim in im-
goin’s was cleverly self-sustaining. His that Eileen was actually Susan Bick- itation of Walsh? Or was his desire
lies enabled him to gain the very ex- rest, who was murdered by a serial for proximity to mass killing born of
perience that he lacked, and every jail- killer near Daytona Beach in 1975. his work on the films of John Holmes,
house interview doubled as a master The article described Bickrest as a who was later tried for and acquitted
class in manipulation. Blagging his barmaid and an aspiring cosmetolo- of the so-called Wonderland murders
way into prisons and police acade- gist who supplemented her income of 1981?
mies, Bourgoin, in pretending to be with sex work. Before her death, she Just when I thought I was gaining
a serial-killer expert, at some point and Bourgoin had seen each other some traction on Bourgoin’s story, a
actually became one. “four or five times,” and he had trans- tiny crack would open up, sending me
formed her into his wife because he down a new rabbit hole. The Paris
he 4ème Œil has extended the “didn’t want people to know that he’d Match article, for instance, made the
T right of reply to Bourgoin on sev-
eral occasions, but he has never re-
unusually specific claim that Bourgoin,
in the seventies, lived on the eleventh
sponded to the group directly. The f loor of an apartment building on
closest he came was when he hired a 155th Street in New York. I remem-
legal adviser who, citing copyright bered that Bourgoin had once given
and privacy violations, got the group’s a similar address in a Facebook post,
videos removed from YouTube. In claiming that he’d “lived in New York
February of 2020, Bourgoin announced at the moment of the Son of Sam’s
that he was closing his public Face- crimes.” That address turned out to
book page and migrating to a private be slightly different: 155 East Fifty-
group. (It has nearly three thousand been helping her out financially.” The fifth Street. Curious, I typed it into
members, but its administrators dates of Bickrest’s murder and her a database. One of the first hits was
blocked me as I was reporting this killer’s arrest didn’t align with the Ei- a Times article from 1976—the year
story.) He was going to be less active leen story, however, and even a cur- of Son of Sam—describing an apart-
on social media, he said, but only be- sory glance at photographs of the two ment at the address as a “midtown
cause he needed to save all his time women revealed that, except for both house of prostitution.”
and energy for “the most important having blond hair, they didn’t look Xaviera Hollander, a former sex
project of my life,” whose parameters much alike. worker who now runs a bed-and-
he didn’t specify. Almost airily, he “Day after day, we patiently untan- breakfast in Amsterdam, confirmed
mentioned that he had been the vic- gled the threads, trying to distinguish that 155 East Fifty-fifth Street was
tim of a “campaign of cyberbullying true from false in the jumble of his “the famous, or should I say infamous,
and hate on social media” and was statements,” Lanez wrote. Engaging apartment building where I started
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 47
off as the happy hooker,” in the early quickly furnished his address. Several was to show me his collections: piles
seventies, but she had no memory of miles down the road, I found him of dusty tabloids, stacks of pulp fic-
Bourgoin. Hollander added that the standing in funky green shoes outside tion, an attic full of DVDs, desks and
building used to be called the “hori- a modest house with an orange tiled dressers and wardrobes containing
zontal whorehouse,” where “every floor roof and voile curtains with teapot ap- boxes of old notebooks in which he
had one or two hookers.” Eventually, pliqués and gingham trim. had dutifully listed and rated, in a
I found the owner of apartment 11-H, Bourgoin invited me inside. I no- prim, upright hand, every film he’d
where Bourgoin supposedly lived, and ticed, as he made coffee, that his knife seen. When I asked about the apart-
he told me that a man named Beau rack was shaped like a human body, ment at 155 East Fifty-fifth Street, he
Buchanan had rented it in 1976. A di- stuck through with blades at various produced three large envelopes, post-
rector and producer of porn movies, points: forehead, heart, groin. Even- marked in the early fall of 1975 and
Buchanan died in 2020. He easily could tually, we sat down at a small table in sent to “Stéphane Bourgoin, A.R.T.
have known Bourgoin—but did Bour- the sunroom. He seemed unruff led Films” at that address. A.R.T., he said,
goin take Buchanan’s address and make by my unannounced visit, almost as was a distribution company that had
it his own, or had he really lived there? though he’d been waiting for some- belonged to a friend of his, Beau Bu-
It seemed a reasonable guess, given one to show up. chanan. The envelopes didn’t shed
the period fashions and the profes- A person who was once close to much light on Bourgoin’s doings
sional composition, that the photo- Bourgoin told me that he was an “ex- in seventies New York, but for him
graph of Bourgoin and the woman he cellent actor” and “extremely convinc- such objects seemed almost equiva-
had identified as Eileen had been taken ing, because, when he lies, he believes lent to experiences.
on one of the movie sets he worked it very strongly, and so you believe it, In an article called “How I Was
on in the seventies. The 4ème Œil felt too.” At the table, though, Bourgoin Bamboozled by Stéphane Bourgoin,”
reasonably sure that Eileen was Dom- was diffident. He didn’t seem to be the Swiss journalist Anna Lietti ex-
inique Saint Claire, a well-known putting much effort into making me— amined her decision to write a mostly
adult-film actress of the era. A porn or, possibly, himself—believe what he positive article about Bourgoin, de-
expert I contacted suggested, inde- said. Or maybe he believed it so deeply spite her discomfort with his “overly
pendently, that Eileen might be Saint that the delivery was no longer rele- smooth” presentation. “I was disap-
Claire, but, looking at the pictures of vant. When I asked how many kill- pointed by the superficiality of my in-
Saint Claire that were available online, ers he had actually interviewed, he re- terlocutor and the lack of depth of
I wasn’t convinced. (My attempts to plied, in English, “It depends. Each his remarks,” Lietti, describing him
contact Saint Claire were unsuccessful.) time I was going to a jail, I asked to as a sort of human reference book,
I watched a head-spinning selection meet serial killers other than the ones wrote. “He lined up facts, dates, de-
of films from the era and called a num- I was authorized to film or interview. tails, without offering a perspective,
ber of former actors—one was a maker So sometimes at Florida State Prison an original key to understanding these
of traditional and erotic chocolates— I met in the courtyard during the monsters to which he devoted his
searching for some hint of Eileen. The promenade—I don’t know, two? life.” In his countryside house, Bour-
movies that Bourgoin wrote are almost five?—other serial killers.” He was goin seemed a sad figure—a collec-
impossible to get ahold of, but Jill C. tor of trivia and paraphernalia, a man
Nelson, a biographer of John Holmes, who just as easily could have spent
agreed to mail me a DVD of “Extreme decades amassing esoteric toys or ob-
Close-Up” from her personal collec- sessing over cryptocurrency, rather
tion. It’s a love-triangle story in which, than living off the misfortunes of oth-
as the DVD’s jacket copy notes, an ers. It was as though he thought that
American writer “is led into a world gathering enough props would make
of European sexual delights where fan- him a protagonist.
tasy merges with reality.” I watched the “I’m sorry that I lied and exagger-
movie attentively—at one point paus- ated things,” Bourgoin told me, at one
ing an open-mouthed-orgasm scene just as evasive on other subjects. I point. “But I never raped or killed
to search for a snaggletooth—but none asked him about the prank that he anybody.”
of the women resembled the one in played on Dahina Sy. “It was a fake I asked what lies he was apologiz-
Bourgoin’s photograph. spider,” he said, as though that ex- ing for.
plained everything. (He later claimed “All the lies,” he said. But, he added,
n early March, I called Bourgoin that he was unaware of Sy’s arachno- “there was mostly one important lie
I from a street corner in a rural vil-
lage on France’s southwest coast, near
phobia.) When I brought up the rings
that Alice, his father’s former wife,
that I would do again.”
Bourgoin was referring to the Ei-
where he now lives. I wasn’t expecting had given him, he said that he had leen story—the foundational lie upon
him to answer; I had tried to contact called to thank her the next time he which he had constructed his career.
him before, without much luck. But, was in New York. He admitted that he had invented her
to my surprise, he picked up and His instinct, in tense moments, name, and the location of the murder.
48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
But, he insisted, he had really had a
girlfriend who was murdered by a se-
rial killer. “It was just a young girl that
I met three times that I had sex with,”
he said. Later, he was more explicit:
“I invented that story because I was
afraid that people would think that . . .
I paid for a prostitute.”
Bourgoin didn’t want to give the
woman’s name, even if I promised not
to publish it. I asked if he could at
least give me the identity of the woman
in the photograph, but he claimed not
to remember. “I think she was Span-
ish!” he added later.
The only time Bourgoin truly came
alive was when he talked about the
anonymous collective that had brought
him down. We stood in his office, sur-
rounded by fright masks and first edi-
tions, and he said that he was “quite
happy it came out, but not the way
• •
that the 4ème Œil did it.” He asked
me if I’d looked into the group’s mem- ship between Jean Bourgoin and her self next to these two exceptional par-
bership. “You must have done some mother, Béatrice Pourchasse, as was ents, crushed by so much strength and
research on the people who accused her sister, who was born thirteen months power?” she said. “He was happy to
me,” he said, suggesting that I get to before her. The girls lived with their discover all at once that he had two
work on a counter-investigation of mother in the Fourth Arrondissement. sisters, and we started to communi-
his investigators. Jean Bourgoin lived with his family— cate amongst ourselves.” They sent
Franziska and Stéphane—across town. long letters between their father’s two
laude-Marie Dugué found out Jean organized his parallel lives strictly, households, written in violet ink.
C that her brother had been lying
to her for half a century when the Paris
keeping them “watertight,” Dugué re-
called, but she always felt loved by her
The incident may have been Bour-
goin’s initiation into the power of
Match article came out. She had never father, who “followed and protected his secret lives. “Back to my childhood I
suspected it, but the news didn’t shock liaison with my mother until the end,” felt I didn’t do enough compared to
her. “Nothing surprises me in my fam- providing money for the family, keep- my parents,” Bourgoin told me. “So I
ily,” she said. Nor was she offended, ing track of the girls’ studies, and see- had always an inferiority complex.”
on a personal level, by the breach of ing them regularly. Even if he didn’t Cuny echoed the sentiment. “I decided
trust. “He didn’t really deceive me,” live with them, Dugué said, she felt very early on that having a normal life
she said. “He let me into his world.” immense pride “to be the daughter of means boring, and that would be the
Dugué’s son, Julien Cuny, told me such a man.” most horrible thing that could hap-
that one quote from the article jumped One day, Dugué decided that she pen to me,” he told me. “My bet is
out at him. “Parfois, je me fais des films wanted to meet her younger brother. Stéphane would prefer this outcome
dans ma tête. J’ai toujours voulu qu’on She was in her early twenties, and had to being a local accountant who never
m’aime,” it read. “Sometimes I make known about him her entire life. He left town.”
films in my head. I’ve always wanted was maybe sixteen, a high schooler, In “My Conversations with Kill-
to be loved.” Cuny is an accomplished and had no idea that she existed. “I ers,” Bourgoin wrote, “The immense
tech executive in Montreal, but he has posted myself discreetly inside the majority of serial killers are inveterate
always been daunted by his family’s building where he lived, waiting for liars from a very young age. Isolated,
distinction. To him, Bourgoin’s words his return from the Lycée Carnot,” marginalized in their lives, they take
were an almost inevitable response to Dugué recalled. When he came home, refuge in the imaginary to construct a
an overwhelming mythology, “a phan- she introduced herself: his secret sis- personality, far from the mediocre re-
tasmagoric picture of distant family ter. “He hardly believed me,” Dugué ality of their existence.” “Parfois, je me
members (you almost never meet) who remembered. Nonetheless, they im- fais des films dans ma tête. J’ai toujours
are always on an adventure somewhere.” mediately got along. She remembered voulu qu’on m’aime,” Bourgoin said, as
The first time Dugué and I ex- Bourgoin as a shy and serious boy with though he were performing a voice-
changed e-mails, she told me some- round glasses, adrift in a world of ex- over for his own life. “Sometimes I
thing that I wasn’t expecting: she was travagantly accomplished adults. “How make films in my head. I’ve always
the product of an extramarital relation- must Stéphane have perceived him- wanted to be loved.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 49
 FICTION

50 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY BEN HICKEY

 e hadn’t noticed the voices grain and the nicks and scratches of the window above the sink and sprayed

H at first. In the endless stretch

of the afternoon he entered
the pub through the side door with
its great age. The pub had been his
father’s for the long shift of four de-
cades. His father in turn had taken it
the one toilet with Dettol. Bringing
his broad face close to the mirror, he
breathed slowly on it to make a fog,
a soft hushed aspect as if broaching from a bachelor uncle. For three gen- and as the cloud slowly dissipated it
a place of burial. It was late March erations behind this bar much the showed the weary stare of his aging,
by now, the clocks about to change, same set of thick, knitted eyebrows greenish eyes. The little map lines of
and the first heat of the year was in- had insisted on a semblance, at least, bloodshot. The twist of the nose, a
timated when he raised the blinds a of decorum. The sunlight crept by Frenchman’s nose. The foolish pride;
few inches to allow the sunlight slow inches across the floor. It was the the ageless vanity. The extravagant
through. He did so as to show the moment, in more usual times, of the eyebrows of a disgraced Christian
place up. The effect of the light was primary school’s letting out and he Brother. He closed his eyes. A long
to insinuate life. The motes of dust missed the high excited chatter from sensuous parade of lips had been
in the sunbeams were life. He opened the yard across the way. Neither loud- painted in this mirror.
the windows a fraction to freshen the ness nor drunkenness in this barroom “That particular dog comes at me
air and looked out— had ever been tolerated. one more time and it’s getting the
The bay was filling on a neap tide “There is such a thing as a thoughtful quare end of the stick,” Alice Nealon
and the Stags of Broadhaven thrust at pub,” his father had always maintained. said. “Every night, half gone seven,
the clear white skies in raucous appeal. He rinsed out the cloth and left it on the one walk I can feckin’ muster,
“Softly, softly, turn the wheel softly,” by the sink and dipped beneath the the bastard come at me, him with the
Michael Batt said. “Until I’m blue in bar and went down the passageway long face out of the Sullivan yard.
the face I’m telling that boy to turn the to the jacks. He stopped halfways Eejit dog! Eejit dog come lollopin’!
wheel soft but will he listen to me? In along and put a palm to the wall to Next time I’ll open the ignorant face
my sweet hole he will. Boy took down steady himself. A rising feeling in the on him.”
eejitry from the mother’s side. He sits lungs was endured, a kind of mari- Always she began her evening with
in behind that wheel and it’s like he’s time swell—he believed it to be a spe- a decorous half pint of stout; it was fol-
wrestling a fucken gorilla.” cies of panic, but it passed over again lowed by another; then, after a pause
The boy was long since raised and as quickly, as quickly as the clouds off for deliberation, she would announce
driving temperately; long dead was the North Atlantic passed. His phone in a startled voice that she would nearly
Michael Batt, the father. But the cor- pinged and he squinted to read a chance a full one. Three more would
ner stool at the bar was still vaguely text—he spent half a minute then follow before the double Jameson at
Batt’s terrain. At an L to it sat six com- tapping a careful reply to a worried eleven that would send her to the door
panion stools to face the optics and aunt in the family WhatsApp group. rosy-faced and muttering darkly against
the hung spirits arranged beyond the Would she ever leave the house the dogs of the vicinity.
row of taps. The Cerberian taps, his again? He left the Ladies’ and entered the
own father had called them; for Cer- And would she ever get off the fuck- Gents’ and never in all his time had
berus, he would curtly explain, he who ing Internet? it smelt more passable. He opened
had guarded the gates of Hell. At the The tread of his dependable step the window anyhow. He ran the taps.
other end of the bar was the curtained the family listened for always—this He f lushed the toilet. He took the
hatch to the back kitchen, then the was increasingly a burden to him. rubber gloves from his back pocket
sorrowful passageway to the jacks. He “It could be one of forty-two things and changed the tablets in the urinal.
smiled at Michael Batt’s words, the air that’s wrong with me,” Frank Waught He pissed on the fresh ones for good
of long-sufferance that was hard prac- half whispered to a pint of Smithwick’s. luck and ritual and laughed to him-
ticed for effect, the lines that were re- “It could be the stomach acid. It could self gently. He laughed to himself
hearsed as Batt walked the shore road be the pollen. It could be worse than frequently these times. There was a
toward the lights of the pub all those either. And of course it could be just strange hilarity to the predicament.
lost evenings ago. the fear.” He had been closed now for almost
He stepped behind the bar and Waught had lived until he was two four hundred days.
placed his hands upon it lightly and days shy of ninety. He had been some- As he reëntered the barroom, three
looked out to the room and moved his and-fifty years dying. Waught had slow knocks sounded on the front door,
eyes slowly left and then slowly right been a man for the low tables rather followed by two rapid ones, as if a code
across the empty stage of it. than a barside perch—an antisocial were being employed. He went to the
“Now,” he said. man who needed people. From the window and looked under the blind
He took up the cloth and damp- passageway, he looked back now to- and saw a blocky man in late middle
ened it in the sink and ran it along ward the barroom, toward the lost age faced to consider the bay, the Stags,
the bar top. He brought up a quiet voices. The five empty tables were lit the equinoctial sky. He did not recog-
shine. The intention of the polishing in the afternoon glare. Continuing nize the man but his mood turned
was to approximate soft labor. Daily on, he entered with an apologetic air quickly sombre as he moved to the
the bar top was polished to show its the realm of the Ladies’. He opened front door. An experienced publican
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 51
is an educated reader of mood’s nu- on the wrack-encrusted rock. The ers perceive us. The pub had been a
ance. It wasn’t Death, by any chance, O’Casey peered across his shoulder, respectable premises always and he
that stood there? into the gloom of the barroom. could not have imagined that the fam-
“I’d take a whiskey?” he tried. ily was other than well regarded. But
s he opened the door the man “I suppose if I don’t charge you for it.” he realized, too, that the charge of
A turned to him with an owl’s incred-
ulous eyes and spoke lowly to inquire—
He turned from the doorway and
crossed the floor of the barroom—his
snobbery is often an astonishment to
those so arraigned.
“There’s a cuckoo, hey?” breath was coming more thickly now. O’Casey f inished the whiskey
“Oh, there is,” he said. “In the bushes He dipped beneath the bar and pol- quickly and held out his hand to offer
beyond the schoolyard. He’d let you ished a whiskey glass that did not re- the empty glass but as he reached for
know all about himself.” quire polishing and set it beneath the it O’Casey withdrew it again, as if play-
“Loud all right, a throttle on him. optic to fill a single measure of Pow- fully, and he did not smile. He just set
Would you sell me a pint?” ers. He was watched all the while and it down on the stoop by his feet and
“I can’t do that.” smilingly from the doorway. turned and walked away.
The man let his jaw drop in an ex- “I’ve no ice even,” he called out. “A
aggerated, vaudevillian way. drop of water?” e reëntered the pub and locked the
“Are you not allowed to sell takeout?”
“Some are doing so in the towns.
“I don’t take it.”
He brought the drink and placed it
H door. He sat at a low table in the
guise, briefly, of a customer. He looked
I’m not. I have no stock at all.” in the stranger’s hand. around the bar for a slow minute. No
“Hard aul’ times all right. I noticed “I don’t remember which one you singsongs; no recitals; no displays of ro-
the window was open. Thought I’d were,” he said. “There were a few of ye, mantic affection. This had been a house
chance it.” I think?” that favored schoolmasters, respectable
“There’s no harm in that.” “There were eight of us for chil- farmers, country solicitors. The meagre-
“You wouldn’t recognize me, I dren,” O’Casey replied. “Your father ness of his world closed in. In such a
suppose?” would have put mine out of this place quietness all was amplified. The veils
“No, but I’m trying to place you.” more than once.” slip away; the edifice itself might crum-
It was true that he was. The stranger “Is that right?” ble. In late March of the year the light
was fastidiously keeping the two-metre The man turned his face bayward was rawly new and revealing.
distance and he had to narrow his glance again and bore down on the slow years, “He’d mind a mouse for you at the
against the sunshine to make him out. the decades. He sipped at the Powers mart in Ballina,” Tim Godfrey said. “A
The face had an antique bearing; it was and made no comment on it. The world careful man, he would not be found
somehow medieval. The clear, hard had grown so quiet in this season of wanting. Hard enough tack to have a
gleam in the eyes—these were eyes that eeriness. Down the long solitude of the father the like of that?”
might seek a quick killing. But he spoke shore road, across the new fresh green He must concede that it had been.
pleasantly enough. of the fields, upon the clear and boat- It was many years since Godfrey had
“I grew up not far from here,” he said. less bay, there was not a soul otherwise haunted the premises, had across the
Age receded from the stranger’s to be seen. low tables roamed a humorous gaze.
face then to allow an O’Casey be made “One night my father came home Godfrey had been a Church of Ireland
out. A poor family from a sad stretch from this place trembling,” O’Casey farmer from the Ox Mountains trans-
of the shore road they had been. One said. “I remember he sat looking into planted by a peculiar marriage to the
of those families that had broken up the fire and I could tell that he could North Mayo plain—from beyond the
and trickled away in all directions. hardly breathe.” place himself, he could see it more
They’d left a wound of a house be- Keeping his eyes fixed on the bay, clearly. True enough that his father had
hind them. The gaping maw of the letting them fill up with its springtime been a careful man. Growing up in the
blank doorway had stood on the shore radiance, O’Casey dredged from the house of such a man you could hear
road for years as invitation to the mis- past a woman’s voice, his mother’s, and yourself thinking. Without a single
eries banked within. It must have been it was perfectly got— word being said you could sense that
three decades since the family had “What’s wrong with you, Joe? Wrong you were being measured for what tasks
lived there. Hadn’t there been a story with you, for the love of God? Did he might be presented. The running of
about the father gone mad? say something?” the pub was at slow length presented.
“Are you an O’Casey?” he asked. “My mother worried over him all He rose and went behind the bar
The man smiled broadly and parted the time,” O’Casey said. “His nerves and set a glass beneath the optic and
his lips to show a proud battalion of weren’t set right. He had what she called poured himself a large Bushmills and
remade teeth. his spells.” diluted it with three or four teardrops
“You’d be a long time stepping out “I’m sorry. I don’t recall any . . .” of tap water. He drank it in a swoop
from your own shade,” he said, con- “Ah, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t re- and felt the slow fire descend into his
firming the speculation. call any of it. You’d have been away at belly. It was years since he had taken a
The afternoon conspired with its the boarding school.” spirit. The charge of its heat stirred
languors. The heron stood beyond time The greatest mystery is how oth- him powerfully. He had felt the inten-
52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
sity of anger in youth. He had not it was removed from the public view. fattened for the mart himself, to see
wanted this place but had allowed him- Once in this room he had seen his fa- what he would fetch. He knew al-
self to be shaped to it. There was a re- ther weeping. Time unspooled, un- ready how to slap away and mock
sentment he had never quite named reeled. Angered by a customer, thrown the comment—
before. He shook his head against this perhaps by an intrusive comment, riled “Get up the road, Gertie,” he said.
feeling and came out from behind the by some perceived slight, his father The peat fumes and the stout
bar and went to the window and raised had withdrawn to this room and si- opened the men’s mouths for them.
the blind another fraction and saw the lently wept. To be a publican was a The Mayo team was a disgrace. There
expanse of the bay and the Stags of lifelong performance. were fellas togging out who had drank
Broadhaven looming and the cormo- “People need steadiness,” his fa- the winter. The waft of Carrolls cig-
rant arranged gothically on the black ther said. “They want to look into the arettes and Majors. Pint bottles were
glister of its rock. Time could not be taken down from the shelf for those
measured in the usual ways. The mark- who objected to the gassiness of the
ers of day and evening had fallen into draught. Newspapers were folded over
disuse. Subtracted from his routines he and the Deaths column squinted at
was no longer the full equation of him- with sour interest. He knew that his
self. These afternoon visits to the pub father spoke to God in the night.
were to simulate routine but now they Once he had heard his father whis-
were failing. They were filling increas- per so in the night. His father told
ingly with the old lost voices. He went God that he was very proud of him
to the door and opened it and leaned and of all his godly works. A high
down to take the whiskey glass from same expression on your face always. tide sounded beyond, roughly and
the stoop where O’Casey had left it You’ve to arrange your misfortunate unseen, in heavy booms and deep an-
but there was no glass there. He closed face for them.” swering echoes, and as the wind roared
the door and locked it again. He sat at The look his father arranged for to his boy’s mind the Stags were bay-
a low table. The sun was moving with- the barroom was tactful, indeed al- ing at the sky. Such was his world
out regard and rounded the building most priestly—he had offered a place then. He was the prince of the room
and suddenly its light filled the kitchen of calm and reprieve, or at least such and invulnerable.
out back. was his intention. The sunlight that He could not himself speak to God.
He felt drawn to the light. He re- came through the kitchen threw its He stepped from the kitchen and into
mained at the table. Voices swam shabbiness now into awful relief. He the barroom and wrung out the cloth
around him, one entered the other’s, closed his eyes against the sight of it. in the sink. The voices in the bar of
Fred Coakley’s, Andrew Mac’s, Tess He tried to imagine another life but more recent times had been an af-
Hennebry’s— could not. From the bar, a voice made front to him. They offered themselves
“I’ve only two speeds of mood. Easy- imitation of the stuttering caller at baldly as affront; their bodies were
going, ten mile an hour, or a hundred the Ballina mart offering some dubi- arranged barward in aspects of af-
and fifty, I lose the rag altogether. I ous Charolais— front. The voices of recent times, he
goes from nought to Hiroshima. What “F-four forty, f-four forty, all the felt, were colored by avarice and vul-
do be fucken wrong with me?” w-way home. . . . Have ye n-nothin’ garity. He had come to that unfortu-
“Would I eat? I don’t know would about ye at all? F-four forty once. . . . nate age when he believed the young
I eat. Would you throw on a sandwich Have it. . . . F-four fifty?” to be savages. He closed the windows
for me anyhow? I’m not sayin’ I’d eat As the men laughed in response and drew down the blinds against
it. Though it might steady the ship a to the soft mockery, he was again a what light the March evening had
small while.” small boy. He sat on the bar counter mustered. Age wore down on him.
“Your father should have been a with his legs dangling and a glass of The voices faded out and left noth-
priest. But didn’t he have a brother one Coke at his elbow, a packet of Taytos ing at all behind. He might sell the
already? Two in the family would be ripped open beside it. Perhaps he was fucking place yet.
kinda going to town on it.” five or six years old. The men were He left through the side door to
He was alone with the voices. He back from the mart. His father poured walk by the water for a while. He could
wanted to be away from them. He wanted pints of stout until they were a third never sell to the price you’d get for it.
to travel past himself and across the fields shy of the brim and lined them on There was barely a ripple on the bay.
of the bay and beyond the horizon and the counter to settle for a little more There were no people anywhere to be
into the equinox, into the light. than a minute before finishing them seen. There was across the slate-gray
with a wristy flourish. The voices in water a sensation of great silence and
ising and gauntly now he crossed the room were in easy conspiracy and now somehow of peace. The year again
R the barroom floor. He went under
the bar and into the kitchen. The
had great warmth. The mart must
have gone well. He was spoilt and
turned on its slow wheel. 

kitchen always had been the sanctu- fussed over as the son of the place. NEWYORKER.COM
ary of the house. Draw the curtain and An old man told him he was to be Kevin Barry on ghost stories and Irish pubs.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 53

 THE CRITICS

BOOKS

DOWN WITH LOVE?

Modern intimacy, modern loneliness, and the advent of the sex robot.

BY ZOË HELLER

t the beginning of the COVID-19 risen from forty-five per cent to sixty of social isolation threaten not only

A pandemic, some people pre-

dicted that lockdowns and
work-at-home rules would produce
per cent. People who are in their early
twenties are estimated to be two and
half times more likely to be sexually
our physical and mental health but the
health of our democracies. She cites
many factors that have contributed to
great surges in sexual activity, just as inactive than members of Gen X were this dystopian moment—among them,
citywide blackouts have been said to do at the same age. smartphones, the gig economy, the con-
in the past. No such luck. In Novem- One partial explanation for this tactless economy, the growth of cities,
ber, a study published in The Journal of trend—versions of which have been ob- the rise in single-person households,
Sexual Medicine found that the pan- served across the industrialized world— the advent of the open-plan office, the
demic had caused a small but signifi- is that today’s young adults are less replacement of mom-and-pop stores
cant diminution in Americans’ sexual likely to be married and more likely to with anonymous hyper-chains, and
desire, pleasure, and frequency. It’s easy be living at home with their parents “hostile” civic architecture—but she be-
enough to see how the threat of a le- than previous cohorts. In the U.S., liv- lieves that the deepest roots of our cur-
thal virus might have had a generally ing with parents is now the most com- rent crisis lie in the neoliberal revolu-
anaphrodisiac effect. Quite aside from mon domestic circumstance for peo- tion of the nineteen-eighties and the
the difficulty of meeting new partners ple between the ages of eighteen and ruthless free-market principles cham-
and the chilling consequences of being thirty-four. Even after accounting for pioned by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald
cooped up with the same old ones, evo- these less than favorable conditions, Reagan, et al. In giving license to greed
lutionary psychologists speculate that however, the suspicion remains that and selfishness, she writes, neoliberal-
we have a “behavioral immune system” young people are not as delighted by ism fundamentally reshaped not just
that protects us in times of plague by sex as they once were. Speculation about economic relationships “but also our
making us less attracted to and less mo- why this might be so tends to reflect relationships with each other.”
tivated to affiliate with others. the hobbyhorse of the speculator. Some In illustrating its thesis, this book
Not so obvious is why, for several believe that poisons in our environ- draws a wide array of cultural and so-
years before the virus appeared on our ment are playing havoc with hormones. cioeconomic phenomena into its the-
shores, we had already been showing Others blame high rates of depression matic centrifuge. Hertz’s examples of
distinct signs of sluggishness in the at- and the drugs used to treat it. Still oth- global loneliness include elderly women
traction and affiliation departments. ers contend that people are either sub- in Japan who get themselves convicted
In 2018, nearly a quarter of Ameri- limating their sexual desires in video of petty crimes so that they can find
cans—the highest number ever re- games or exhausting them with por- community in prison; South Korean
corded—reported having no sex at all nography. (The dubious term “sexual devotees of mukbang, the craze for
in the previous twelve months. Only anorexia” has been coined to describe watching people eat meals on the In-
thirty-nine per cent reported having the jadedness and dysfunction that af- ternet; and a man in Los Angeles whose
intercourse once or more a week, a drop flict particularly avid male consumers use of expensive professional “cuddler”
of twelve percentage points since 1996. of Internet porn.) services is so prolific that he has ended
ABOVE: PHILIPPE PETIT-ROULET

The chief driver of this so-called “sex For the British economist Noreena up living out of his car. But is lone-
drought” is not, as one might expect, Hertz, the decline in sex is best under- liness what chiefly ails these people?
the aging of the American population stood as both a symptom and a cause And, if so, does their loneliness bespeak
but the ever more abstemious habits of a much wider “loneliness epidemic.” an unprecedented emergency? Old
of the young. Since the nineteen-nine- In her book “The Lonely Century” women get fed up with their charm-
ties, the proportion of American high- (Currency), she describes “a world that’s less husbands, kids watch the darned-
school students who are virgins has pulling apart,” in which soaring rates est things on YouTube, and men, as
54 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
In 2018, nearly a quarter of Americans—the highest number ever recorded—reported having no sex in the past year.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH RENSTROM THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 55
they have done since time immemo- of single-person households in the U.S. ing the view that their unhappiness is
rial, pay for the company of women. over the past fifty years has been driven, of their own making—the price they
Yet still the world turns. more than anything, by affluence, and pay for putting their careers first, or
in particular by the greater economic being too choosy. She notes that the
any books about the atrophy of independence of women. A similarly plight of lonely, sexless men tends to
M our associational ties and the per-
ils of social isolation have been pub-
rosy story of female advancement can
be told about the sex-decline data: far
inspire more public concern and com-
passion than that of women. The term
lished in recent years, but we continue from indicating young people’s worri- “incel” was invented by a woman hop-
to underestimate the problem of lone- some retreat from intimacy, the find- ing to commiserate with other unhap-
liness, according to Hertz, because we ings are a testament to women’s grow- pily celibate women, but it didn’t get
define loneliness too narrowly. Prop- ing agency in sexual matters. In a recent much traction until it was appropri-
erly understood, loneliness is a “per- interview, Stephanie Coontz, a veteran ated by men and became a byword for
sonal, societal, economic, and political” historian of family, said, “The decline sexual rage. This, Lutkin believes, re-
condition—not just “feeling bereft of in sexual frequency probably reflects f lects a conservative conviction that
love, company, or intimacy” but also women’s increased ability to say no and men have a right to sex.
“feeling unsupported and uncared for men’s increased consideration for them.” Is this true? A less contentious ex-
by our fellow citizens, our employers, This is certainly a jollier view of things planation for the greater attention paid
our community, our government.” This than Hertz’s hell-in-a-handbasket ac- to male sexual inactivity might be that
suspiciously baggy definition makes it count, but, as several women writers have it has risen more dramatically among
easier to claim loneliness as the signa- pointed out, reports of modern women’s young men than among young women
ture feeling of our time, but whether self-determination in sexual and roman- in recent years. In a study released in
it’s useful to conflate sexlessness and tic matters tend toward exaggeration. 2020, nearly one in three men between
political alienation—or accurate to trace In “The Lonely Hunter” (Dial), Aimée the ages of eighteen and twenty-four
their contemporary manifestations to Lutkin, a writer in her thirties, wrestles reported no sexual activity in the past
the same dastardly neoliberal source— with the question of how “chosen” her year. What’s more, young male sexless-
is questionable. single life has been. The book describes ness, unlike the female variety, correlates
Disagreements about definition are a year in which she set out to break a with unemployment and low income.
at the root of many disputes about lone- six-year spell of near-celibacy by taking Men’s greater tendency to violence also
liness data. Spikes in loneliness were up exercise, losing weight, joining a dat- probably creates greater public aware-
recorded after the J.F.K. assassination ing site, and so on. The inspiration for ness. (Female incels, however grumpy
and 9/11, raising the possibility that this experiment was an evening with they get, do not generally express their
what people were really reporting to friends that left her feeling unfairly dissatisfaction by shooting up malls.)
survey takers was depression. And even blamed for her loneliness. Nevertheless, Lutkin is surely right that
the most soberly worded research is li- By the end of the year, she hadn’t women’s authority over their sexual and
able to become a bit warped in its jour- found a lasting relationship, but she romantic fates is not as complete as the
ney from social-science lab to newspa- had gone on many dates, had some sex, popular imagination would have it.
per factoid. The figure that Hertz quotes and even fallen (unrequitedly) in love Asked to explain why one out of four
in her first chapter, for example—“Three for a time, so one might reasonably single American women hasn’t had a
in five U.S. adults considered them- conclude that the cure for her loneli- sex partner for two or more years (and
selves lonely”—comes from a Cigna ness had in fact been in her gift all more than one in ten haven’t had a sex
health survey published in 2020, which along. She largely rejects this notion, partner for five or more years), research-
found that three in five U.S. adults however. To insist that any determined ers have cited women’s aversion to the
scored more than forty-three points on individual can overcome loneliness if “roughness” that has become a standard
the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale. Scor- she tries hard enough is to ignore the feature of contemporary, porn-inflected
ing high on this twenty-question sur- social conditions that make loneliness sex. In one recent study, around twenty-
vey is easier than you might think. In so common, Lutkin writes. In her case, one per cent of female respondents re-
fact, if you answer “Sometimes” to there were strong economic reasons ported that they had been choked during
enough questions like “How often do that she focussed on work rather than sex with men; around thirty-two per
you feel that your interests and ideas on love for many years; she also pur- cent had experienced a man ejaculat-
are not shared by those around you?,” sued people who didn’t return her af- ing on their faces; and thirty-four per
you have a pretty good chance of being fections. And some significant part of cent had experienced “aggressive fella-
deemed part of America’s loneliness her loneliness came not from being sin- tio.” If, as Stephanie Coontz suggests,
problem. Given such caveats, three out gle but from living in a world that re- women feel freer these days to decline
of five seems encouragingly low. gards a romantic partner as the sine such encounters, that is of course a wel-
Sociologists who are skeptical about qua non of happy adulthood. Ironically, come development, but it’s hard to con-
whether loneliness is a growing prob- she suggests, celebrating single women strue the liberty of choosing between
lem argue that much modern alone- as avatars of modern female empow- celibacy and sexual strangulation as a
ness is a happy, chosen condition. In this erment has made things harder, not feminist triumph.
view, the vast increase in the number easier, for lonely women, by encourag- In a new collection of essays, “Love
56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
in the Time of Contagion” (Pantheon),
the film-studies professor and cultural
critic Laura Kipnis argues that women BRIEFLY NOTED
are still far from exercising enough
agency in their sexual dealings with My Fourth Time, We Drowned, by Sally Hayden (Melville).
men. For her, the decline in sex is one In 2018, Hayden, an Irish journalist, received a Facebook mes-
of several signs that relations between sage from an Eritrean man imprisoned in a migrant detention
men and women have reached an im- center in Tripoli. His missive afforded her a window into the
passe. “Just as the death rate from COVID horrors faced by African refugees seeking a Mediterranean
in the U.S. unmasked the enduring in- route to Europe. Through interviews with hundreds of migrants,
equalities of the American political sys- whose remarks punctuate the text, and humanitarian workers,
tem,” she observes, “#MeToo exposed Hayden learns of Libyan warehouses where starving detain-
that heterosexuality as traditionally ees are held in scorching temperatures, raped and beaten, and
practiced had long been on a collision sold to traffickers. While documenting these cruelties, Hayden
course with the imperatives of gender also examines how Western institutions like the European
parity.” Kipnis credits #MeToo with Union perpetuate the conditions that allow them to take place.
unleashing “a lot of hatreds,” some of
which were warranted and overdue for Dream-Child, by Eric G. Wilson (Yale). This electrifying por-
an airing, and some of which, she be- trait of Charles Lamb is the first full-length biography of the
lieves, were overstated or misplaced. Romantic-era essayist, poet, and satirist to appear since 1905.
Her exhilaration during the early Perhaps best remembered as the co-author, with his sister,
stages of #MeToo curdled, she reports, Mary, of “Tales from Shakespeare,” and as the interlocutor
when “conservative elements” hijacked of Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lamb has long been regarded
whatever was “grassroots and profound” as a benevolent figure who cared for his sister after she mur-
in the movement, and what had seemed dered their mother in a psychotic break. This idealized ren-
to her a laudable effort to overturn dering elides the Lamb who confronted drinking problems
the old feudal order degenerated into and depression, and whose urbane first-person essays—iden-
a punitive hunt for men who told tified by Wilson as forerunners of those by Virginia Woolf
ill-considered jokes or accompanied and David Foster Wallace—exhibited a complicated embrace
women on what became uncomfort- of city life and of modernity.
able lunch dates.
Kipnis sees a tension between the Run and Hide, by Pankaj Mishra (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
puritanism of the rhetoric surrounding An examination of “rising India” that casts a critical eye on
the movement and what she suspects its self-made men, Mishra’s novel follows three college class-
is a continuing attraction on the part mates who are bonded by sexual trauma and desperate to es-
of many young feminists to old-school cape their “dire lower-middle-class straits.” While two of
masculinity. “There’s something diffi- them—a hedge-fund billionaire and a brash public intellec-
cult to talk about when it comes to het- tual—struggle with the vertiginous heights to which they
erosexuality and its abjections . . . and have elevated themselves, the narrator, who has retreated to
#MeToo has in no way made talking a mountain village to work as a translator, avoids becoming
about it any more honest,” she writes. ensnared in similar dilemmas until he begins a romance with
“I suspect that the most politically a wealthy woman. Written in lucid prose, with a keen sense
awkward libidinal position for a young for sociological detail, the novel is a study of figures “dazzled
woman at the moment would be a sex- by their own hard-won freedom.”
ual attraction to male power.” One sign
of the “neurotic self-contradiction” lurk- The White Girl, by Tony Birch (HarperVia). This novel, set
ing within the culture, she contends, is in a remote Australian town in the nineteen-sixties, centers
that, in 2018, the Oxford English Dic- on an Aborigine woman, Odette, and her granddaughter,
tionary’s shortlist for Word of the Year whose unusually light complexion draws the interest of a po-
included both “toxic”—as in toxic mas- lice officer intent on exercising the state’s legal guardianship
culinity—and “Big Dick Energy.” of Indigenous children. As Odette attempts to protect her
Kipnis is less interested in banish- granddaughter, she finds that bureaucracy can dictate harsh
ing such contradictions than in having consequences for performing innocuous actions without the
her fellow-feminists acknowledge and prescribed permissions. While dramatizing the legal tight-
embrace the transgressive nature of de- rope that Odette must walk, Birch illustrates how Australia’s
sire. If the heterosexual compact is ever policies dehumanized not only the Indigenous people they
to be repaired, she suggests, not only sought to control—often by taking children from their fam-
will men have to relinquish some of ilies and placing them in white mission schools—but also
their brutish tendencies but women will the white people who were complicit in enforcing them.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 57
have to become a little more honest coming easier for machines to master. For those who persist in finding the
and assertive about what they do and Lest any of us doubt our capacity prospect of the robot future a little bleak,
don’t want. It seems unlikely that this to suspend disbelief and feel things Kislev adopts the reassuring tone of
eminently reasonable prescription will for robots, however beautifully they an adult explaining reproduction to a
find favor with young feminists, but replicate the patterns of our degraded squeamish child: it may all seem a bit
Kipnis remains optimistic. She was en- twenty-first century speech, Kislev re- yucky now, he tells us, but you’ll think
couraged during the pandemic to read fers us to Replika, a customizable chat- differently later on. He may well be
the accounts of several women express- bot app produced by a company in San right about this. In surveys, young peo-
ing nostalgia for the touch of strang- Francisco which is already providing ple—young men in particular—seem
ers in bars. If, in the short term, the romantic companionship for hundreds sanguine about robot relationships.
pandemic has made sex seem even of thousands of users. (In 2020, the Wall And even among the older, analog set
more dangerous and grim, her hope is Street Journal reported that one Rep- resistance to the idea has been found
that it will turn out to be a salutary re- lika customer, Ayax Martinez, a twenty- to erode with “continuous exposure.”
set—“a chance to wipe the bogeyman four-year-old mechanical engineer liv- Whether this erosion is to be wished
and -woman from the social imagina- ing in Mexico City, flew to Tampico for, however, is another question.
tion, invent wilder, more magnanimous to show his chatbot Anette the ocean.) All technological innovations in-
ways of living and loving.” In fact, Kislev points out, machines spire fear. Socrates worried about writ-
don’t need to attain the sophistication ing replacing oral culture. The hunter-
hould the business of making het- of Replika to be capable of inspiring gatherers probably moaned about the
S erosexuality compatible with gen-
der parity prove too onerous or intrac-
our devotion. Think of the Tamagot-
chi craze of the nineties, in which adults
advent of agriculture. But who’s to say
they weren’t right to moan? The past
table, we can always consider resorting as well as children became intensely at- fifty years would seem to have provided
to the less demanding companionship tached to digital toy “pets” on hand- persuasive evidence contradicting Kis-
of machines. A forthcoming book by held pixelated screens. Think of the lev’s assertion that technology only ever
the sociologist Elyakim Kislev, “Rela- warm relationships that many people “discovers” or “answers” human wants.
tionships 5.0” (Oxford), describes a rap- already enjoy with their Roombas. The Internet didn’t disinter a long-bur-
idly approaching future in which we Robots may not be “ideal” compan- ied human need for constant content;
will all have the option of assuaging ions for everyone, Kislev writes, but it created it. And, as for our enduring
our loneliness with robot friends and they do offer a radical solution to the ability to be engaged by the lie of art,
robot lovers. To date, technology’s chief world’s “loneliness epidemic.” For the it’s not at all clear that this is a con-
role in our love lives has been that of elderly, the socially isolated, the chron- vincing analogy for robot romance. One
a shadchan, or matchmaker, bringing ically single, robots can provide what crucial distinction between fiction and
humans together with other humans, humans have manifestly failed to. Given robots is that novels and plays, the good
but in the next couple of decades, Kis- that technology is credited with hav- ones at least, are not designed with the
lev asserts, technology will graduate ing helped to foster the world’s lone- sole intention of keeping their “users”
from this “facilitator” role and become liness, it may strike some as perverse happy. In this respect, they are less like
a full-fledged “relationship partner,” to look to more technology for a salve, robots and more like real-life roman-
capable of fulfilling “our social, emo- but Kislev rejects any attempt to blame tic partners. What makes life with hu-
tional, and physical needs” all by itself. our tools for our societal dissatisfac- mans both intensely difficult and (the-
Artificial intelligence has already come tions. Advanced technology, he coolly oretically) rewarding is precisely that
close to passing the Turing test—being assures us, “only allows us to acknowl- they aren’t programmed to satisfy our
able, that is, to convincingly imitate edge our wishes and accept our nature.” desires, aren’t bound to tell us that we
human intelligence in conversation. In Investing meaning and emotion in a did great and look fabulous. They are
2014, scientists attending a Royal So- machine is essentially no different, he liable to leave us if we misbehave, and
ciety convention in London were in- argues, from being moved by a piece sometimes even when we don’t.
vited to converse via computer with a of art: “Many fictional plays, films, and Tellingly, one of the most recent A.I.
special guest, Eugene Goostman, and books are created intentionally to fill sex-companion prototypes, a Spanish-
then to decide if he was powered by us with awe, bring us to tears, or sur- made bot named Samantha, has been
A.I., or if he was human. A third of prise us. These are true emotions with endowed with the ability to say no to
them mistook him for a human. Robot very real meanings for us. Emotions- sexual advances and to shut down if
conversationalists even more plausible by-design, if you will.” Among the es- she feels “disrespected” or “bored.” Pre-
than Eugene are said to have emerged tablishment figures whom he quotes sumably, her creator is hoping to sim-
since then, and the C.E.O. of a com- discussing robo-relationships with ulate some of the conditionality and
puting company tells Kislev that the equanimity and approval is a British unpredictability of human affection. It
task of developers has actually been doctor who, in a recent letter to The remains to be seen whether consumers
made easier of late, by a decline in the British Medical Journal, described prej- will actually prefer a less accommodat-
linguistic complexity of human con- udice against sex robots as no more rea- ing Samantha. Given the option, hu-
versation. In the era of WhatsApp, it sonable or morally defensible than ho- mans have a marked tendency to choose
seems, our written exchanges are be- mophobia or transphobia. convenience over challenge. 
58 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
 and once boasted that, when he used
BOOKS the magnifier to scrutinize “the draw-
ings of women in ads for underwear, it

BY THE COLLAR
was possible to see the outline of a mons
veneris.” The moment, in 1963, when
Ireland acquired its first escalator. The
How does a nation emerge from theocracy? Ask the Irish. fact that Irish viewers could see only a
chaste version of “Casablanca” that “cut
BY JAMES WOOD out all the references to Rick and Ilsa’s
passionate love affair in Paris, leaving
their motivations entirely mysterious.”
The deeply corrupt Prime Minister
Charles Haughey, who spent a thou-
sand pounds of someone else’s money
a week on dinners with his mistress. The
strange fact that Albania got its own
television station before Ireland did.
The bishop who fled Ireland for a con-
vent in Texas after his lover told the
press about their illegitimate son, whom
he had refused to acknowledge.
These public events have the irre-
sistible tang of the actual, and around
them O’Toole—who has had a substan-
tial career as a journalist, a political com-
mentator, and a drama critic—beau-
tifully tells the private story of his
childhood and youth. But because the
events really happened, because they are
part of Ireland’s shameful, sometimes
surreal postwar history, they also have
the brutishly obstructive quality of fact,
often to be pushed against, fought with,
triumphed over, or, in O’Toole’s pre-
ferred mode of engagement, analyzed
into whimpering submission. His great
gift is his extremely intelligent, mor-
tally relentless critical examination, and
here he studies nothing less than the
past and the present of his own nation.
ovels arise out of the shortcom- historical correction, and reading Fin- James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus prom-
“ N ings of history,” Novalis said. It tan O’Toole’s new book, “We Don’t ised to forge in the smithy of his soul
was subtle of Penelope Fitzgerald to Know Ourselves: A Personal History the uncreated conscience of his race;
use this as the epigraph for her histor- of Modern Ireland” (Liveright), is like less Parnassian than Dedalus but just
ical novel about the poet, “The Blue reading a great tragicomic Irish novel, as angry as Joyce, O’Toole tells the story
Flower,” implying, as it does, the nov- rich in memoir and record, calamity of how his race, at last breaking the fet-
el’s best powers of restoration. History and critique. The book contains funny ters of religion and superstition, created
is full of destruction and certain death, and terrible things, details and episodes its own conscience.
but fictional people may live forever, in so pungent that they must surely have O’Toole opens his book in 1958, the
an eternal redemption. And recorded been stolen from a fantastical artificer year of his birth. He was born into the
history struggles to capture not only like Flann O’Brien.The pedophile Dub- working classes; his father was a bus
unwritten lives but unwritten thoughts, lin priest who built a swimming pool conductor and his mother became an
very often leaving a void around pri- in his back garden—in drizzly Ireland!— office cleaner. The family lived in a
vate existence, interiority. The novel so that little boys could swim with him. newish housing estate, “lined by largely
gladly rushes in where the angel of his- The censoring, all-seeing Archbishop identical two-storey working-class
tory fears to tread. of Dublin who kept a telescope and a dwellings,” in a suburb southwest of
But the novel has no monopoly on magnifying glass in his official residence, Dublin. The modernity of the hous-
ing stock was important: the O’Tooles
Fintan O’Toole’s “We Don’t Know Ourselves” makes national history intimate. had electricity, running water, and an
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALL THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 59
indoor lavatory. In a book rippling with sessed the lowest proportion of women to the superstitious past, though the
extraordinary facts, here are some of in Europe (women emigrated faster members of the clergy didn’t know it,
the starkest: at the end of the Second than men). It had a severely uneducated of course, and had not yet even begun
World War, two-thirds of Irish homes populace (most pupils dropped out of to cede their immense authority. The
had no electricity. In the countryside, school at the age of fourteen), and a I.R.A. raid opened the long chapter of
especially, development was sluggish. limited, colonial economy, based in large terroristic violence, perpetrated by both
The 1961 census revealed that nearly part on exporting beef and other cattle Catholics and Protestants, known as
seventy-five per cent of rural homes products to Great Britain. “The state the Troubles—most of it confined to
didn’t have plumbing. At least half founded in revolution and civil war had the British province of Northern Ire-
these houses “had no fixed lavatory become remarkably stable,” O’Toole land and to the British mainland—that
facilities at all, indoor or outdoor.” writes. “But it was a stability sustained more or less came to an end in 1998,
O’Toole remembers visiting his ninety- by radical instability—to keep it as it with the Anglo-Irish Good Friday
eight-year-old great-grandmother in was, huge parts of the population had Agreement. The ministerial trip to Paris
County Wexford: her house had re- to emigrate, for otherwise the sheer set in motion an economic expansion
cently been electrified, but the toilet weight of their discontented numbers and an integration with the rest of Eu-
was a dry outhouse that had a plank would drag it down.” rope that is open-ended and ongoing.
with a hole in it, and water was brought The three events occupy the past, the
from a distant pump. ’Toole uses his birth date to plot finite present, and the unlimited future.
Politically, the Ireland of his child-
hood appeared to be remarkably sta-
O the country’s tensions and contra-
dictions, drawing the reader’s attention
Also: religion, violence, and identity.
Was Ireland just a curious, dusty little
ble. It was the triumphant survivor of to three symptomatic events that oc- annex of the Catholic Church—its na-
its Easter Rising struggle, in 1916, curred in the week of his birth. Two tional vestry, essentially—or a modern
against British colonialism, culminat- days before he was born, the Dublin nation willing to join a large, techno-
ing, six years later, in the establishment Theatre Festival struck “Bloomsday,” cratic, increasingly secular political bloc,
of the Irish Free State; a wily evader an adaptation of Joyce’s “Ulysses,” from whose laws and mores were bound to
of the ravages of the Second World the schedule, when Archbishop Mc- conflict with Irish bans on abortion, di-
War (it stayed neutral); a newborn dem- Quaid made his disapproval clear by vorce, and contraception? In a state that
ocratic republic where ancient Catho- refusing to mark the festival opening fused Catholic identity and republican
lic identity and ancient national iden- with a special votive mass. (Samuel nationalism, would sectarian political
tity were fruitfully locked together in Beckett withdrew his play in protest.) violence—violence done in the name
place. The state was presided over by The second event, while O’Toole’s of Catholics against the Protestants of
its aging founding father, the noble and mother was in labor, took place in En- Northern Ireland, and in the service of
deeply pious Taoiseach (Prime Minis- gland. Masked members of the Irish the “unfinished” Irish revolution of
ter) Éamon de Valera, who had led Republican Army (I.R.A.) raided a Brit- 1916—bind Catholicism and Irishness
forces against British soldiers in the ish Army camp in Dorset, and bound ever more intensely together or pull
Easter Rising and had been a British and gagged ten young soldiers. The ep- these identities apart? The sixty-year
prisoner of war. De Valera’s party, Fi- isode was relatively trivial, but it por- development that O’Toole so dexter-
anna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny), had ously tracks is one in which an isolated
comfortably dominated Irish politics religious nation becomes—slowly, then
since soon after its formation, in 1926. suddenly—a hospitably “normal,” sec-
But Ireland, in O’Toole’s telling, was ular one, and in which Catholicism and
in crisis, more of a fragile agrarian the- Irishness are no longer seen as synon-
ocracy than a modern democratic re- ymous. This sundering eventually made
public. It was not de Valera who was religiously sectarian violence not just
really in charge but the zealous magni- difficult to defend (the modern Irish
fier of women’s private parts, the Arch- government never had a lot of time for
bishop of Dublin, John Charles Mc- the I.R.A.) but, finally, incoherent.
Quaid. (O’Toole includes a photograph tended many years of murder and sor- Like most nations, but more acutely,
of de Valera on his knees, kissing Mc- row. Meanwhile, the government’s the Ireland of the late nineteen-fifties
Quaid’s ecclesiastical ring.) Crucially, minister for industry and commerce, and the sixties was torn between isola-
the country was shrinking. In 1961, its Seán Lemass—like de Valera, a veteran tion and community. Most important,
population was less than half the size of the 1916 Easter Rising—flew to Paris it had to navigate a path between the
it had been in 1841. “Three out of five to discuss the possibility of Ireland’s claims of the Church and the secular
children growing up in Ireland in the joining the newly proposed European appeal of the new. The country’s appar-
1950s were destined to leave at some Free Trade Association, a precursor to ent strengths—its population’s ethnic
point in their lives,” O’Toole notes. the European Union. and religious homogeneity, its battle-
Oddly, given the country’s ardent Ca- Seen in hindsight, the three events scarred unity against the old colonial
tholicism, Ireland had very low rates of occupy tellingly different temporalities. aggressor, the romantic brilliance of
marriage—perhaps because it also pos- The censoring Church already belonged its self-mythologizing—were the very
60 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
forces that were pushing it toward dis-
ruptive upheavals. O’Toole is almost
Hegelian in his understanding of his-
tory as a critical process in which eras
helplessly recruit the agents of their
own undoing. Religion and national-
ism, the cross and the clover, promised
a timeless stability but were actually
subversive forces.
They were subversive because, de-
spite the rhetoric of confidence, they
were anxiously unstable, held together
by a will to hypocrisy; when the defi-
cits of this hypocrisy overwhelmed the
benefits, the will began to wane. Read-
ing this book, I was struck by parallels
with the collapse of various European
Communist regimes. In particular, I
often thought of the jokes, novels, and
allegories that circulated in places under
Communist rule, like Czechoslovakia
and Albania, with their comic, grim
evasions and knowing irony around
doublethink. Josef Škvorecký, as much
as Flann O’Brien, could have produced
• •
the basic script.
Take contraception. The pill, though book occurred in 1971, when members Brothers, the more shadowy “mother
illegal in Ireland, had been imported of a new feminist group known as the and baby homes,” the Magdalene asy-
into the country since 1963, officially as Irish Women’s Liberation Movement lums, and the “industrial schools”—var-
a “cycle regulator.” As long as no one (aided, in the legal realm, by the young iously disciplined and incarcerated boys,
spoke the word “contraceptive,” doctors law professor Mary Robinson, a future girls, and pregnant or otherwise “way-
could conspire with their female pa- President of the republic) mounted a ward” women. Of these institutions, the
tients in this medical fiction.The Church campaign to break the law restricting most notorious, thanks to a landmark
connived at this solution, too. “Catho- the importation of contraceptives. The government investigation in 2015, are
lic schools and hospitals would have women took a train to Northern Ire- the mother-and-baby homes, most of
ceased to function if teachers and nurses land, with the intention of buying con- which were run by Catholic nuns. Un-
were not having awful trouble with their traceptive pills in Belfast and then married pregnant women were sent to
periods,” O’Toole winkingly comments; openly declaring them at customs in these homes to deliver their babies, who
pregnant teachers and nurses would have Dublin. But because they were unable were put up for adoption or neglected
been sacked. (It was only in the year of to acquire the pill in Belfast without a unto death and buried in situ. At the
his birth, he points out, that the gov- prescription, they returned with aspi- Tuam Children’s Home, which was ad-
ernment lifted its prohibition on mar- rin, confident that the customs guards ministered by the Sisters of Bon Se-
ried women working as teachers.) would not be able to tell the difference. cours, some eight hundred children were
O’Toole bundles these hypocrisies Alas, nothing much happened. When buried within a decommissioned sew-
under the delicious term “Connie dodg- one of the group announced that she age tank, O’Toole writes. Between 1920
ing.” Cornelius (hence “Connie”) Lucey, was carrying the banned substance, and 1977, many hundreds of dead ba-
the Bishop of Cork, had demanded a O’Toole recounts, the customs men in bies were dispatched from these homes
particularly strict version of Lenten fast- Dublin “dropped their eyes, silent and to the nation’s finest medical schools,
ing, in which parishioners were restricted fussed,” and waved the women through, in Dublin, for research purposes.
to one meal a day, along with two “col- as if they hadn’t heard anything. Offi- The Magdalene asylums confined
lations,” which were understood to be cial hypocrisy doubled down; Connie women who had broken the law and
something like a biscuit, to be had with dodging lived to fight another day. were perceived to have fallen into sex-
one’s tea. A resourceful local baker then ual immorality. The industrial schools
invented a gigantic biscuit for Lent, ’Toole’s book pulses with righteous were boarding schools for problem kids,
known as a Connie dodger. “The law
of God was not defied,” O’Toole ob-
O anticlericalism, and at its heart lies
his eloquent outrage at what amounted
who were subdued by regimes of ter-
ror that included flogging, burning, head
serves. “It was dodged. And so it was to a vast religious penal colony. This shaving, beatings on the soles of the
with the Pill.” network—comprising the ordinary feet, and being made to sleep outside
One of the liveliest episodes in the Catholic schools run by the Christian overnight. The network incorporated
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 61
fifty-two such places and interned some ment. (That’s the kind of thing I used to get divorced in Ireland had to con-
fifty thousand children. O’Toole writes to hear in my Church of England school vince a body called the diocesan Mar-
that he can’t recall a time when he didn’t in the North of England, as the head- riage Tribunal that their marriage should
know the names of the biggest “schools,” master, the Reverend Canon John be annulled on the ground that, owing
which “formed a hinterland of dread.” Grove, bent down to beat my bottom to some “defect” at the time of the nup-
When he was eight, a boy named with the back of a wooden hairbrush: tials, they were never properly married
George, who lived across the street, dis- “Believe me, Wood, this hurts me more anyway. In Dublin, O’Toole writes, the
appeared into one of these places. He than it will hurt you.”) It is the logic moral arbiter before whom you had to
had apparently stolen a bike. of original sin: all have sinned, all must lay these sophistical contortions was a
O’Toole was lucky enough to attend suffer, and only through suffering is priest named, appropriately enough,
a relatively normal school run by the glory achieved. Ivan Payne. In 1968, Payne had become
Christian Brothers, if normality can be Irish society was premised on what the chaplain of the Crumlin children’s
stretched to accommodate unrestrained O’Toole calls “the unknown known,” hospital, not far from where the young
physical violence meted out with leather Ireland’s “genius for knowing and not O’Toole lived. He replaced Father Paul
straps or bamboo canes, and much en- knowing at the same time.” This gap, McGennis, who had been discovered
forced propaganda; the Brothers pub- this useful fiction, could be maintained photographing little girls’ genitalia and
lished such texts as “Courtesy for Boys in the postwar decades as long as ordi- had been secretly pardoned and pro-
and Girls” and a “Catechism of the nary people, many with modest educa- tected by our man with the magnify-
History of Ireland,” which asserted that tions and modest aspirations, under- ing glass, Archbishop McQuaid. At
“in the martyrology of history, among stood their lowly place in the hierarchy. the children’s hospital, Payne started
crucified nations, Ireland occupies the Parents trusted predatory or violent abusing little boys: O’Toole tells us that
foremost place. The duration of her schoolteachers and priests, and were there were sixteen known victims at
torture, and the ferocity of her execu- happy to outsource a fair amount of the the hospital, and fifteen more identi-
tioner, are as revolting as the power of parenting: a dog’s obeyed in office, as fied victims after Payne joined the Mar-
the victim is astonishing.” A crucified mad King Lear has it. The secret can riage Tribunal. The Church knew about
nation must imagine itself a holy na- survive as long as the monarch stays Payne’s activities as early as 1981, when
tion, allied in defeat and in victory with sane and does not reveal himself in all one of his young victims alerted Church
Christ’s necessary suffering. But once his doglike animalism, because then authorities. Payne admitted his offense,
suffering is somehow necessary all con- someone in the street might yell out, and was quietly moved from one par-
trol is lost, and violence can be theo- “But he’s just a dog!” ish to another. As O’Toole puts it, with
logically justified, because punishment For instance, until the divorce ref- measured fury, from 1985 to 1995 the
is really a kind of shared self-punish- erendum of 1995, a couple who needed body charged with making discrimi-
nations about the moral fineness of
marriages “included a man who had
admitted the sexual abuse of a child
and two other priests who knew about
that abuse.”

ypocrisy shrivels when it is named

H in sunlight. In the nineteen-nine-
ties, that sunlit naming happened fast,
and the two sides of the unknown
known—the knowing and the not
knowing—started openly talking to
each other, like a mistress and a wife fi-
nally comparing notes on the same atro-
cious man. Four events were propulsive.
In 1992, Eamonn Casey, the popular
and telegenic Bishop of Galway, fled
Ireland for New York on an Aer Lin-
gus plane. His American lover, Annie
Murphy, had told the Irish Times about
her long affair with Casey, and about
their son, Peter, born in 1974, who was
being financially supported by the
Bishop—or, more precisely, by funds
from the Galway diocese, without its
“Will you spend eighteen months and tens of thousands knowledge. Not that Peter was being
of dollars planning a party with me?” supported with much grace. Bishop
Casey had, of course, urged Murphy to majority of Protestants and Catholics, eyes, and keeps them averted. “It was
give the child up for adoption. Peter voted in favor of the Agreement; in Ire- like tearing up telephone directories,
was not her child, he had admonished land, ninety-four per cent did so. Para- the hardest part was getting started,”
her in the hospital, but God’s. What military organizations agreed to disarm. Powers jokes. Change in postwar Ire-
right did she have to keep a boy who The Agreement bound the signatories land was a bit like that, except in moral
had been born in sin? O’Toole writes to accept the principle of self-determi- reverse. Ireland was slow to throw off
that, with the Irish Times story, “a code nation; namely, that they must “recog- its repressions and deceits, slow to un-
of silence had been broken forever.” nize the birthright of all the people in seat a theocratic system that insisted
Connie was not dodged; this time, it Northern Ireland to identify themselves on votive masses to bless theatre festi-
was Connie who had dodged. and be accepted as Irish or vals, and slow to overturn
Politically, change was also under British, or both, as they may a moral arrangement that
way. In 1990, Mary Robinson was so choose.” Both govern- coddled molesting priests
elected President, after a brutal cam- ments moved to allow cit- and murderous, secretive
paign that exposed the nation’s religi- izens to hold simultaneous institutions. The nineteen-
ose misogyny. A Fianna Fáil parlia- British and Irish passports, eighties, so violently trans-
mentarian asked at a rally if Robinson which pushed the Irish to formative in Thatcher’s
was going to set up an abortion-refer- amend their constitution Britain, produced little ev-
ral clinic in the Presidential residence; thus: “It is the firm will idence of general secular-
Prime Minister Haughey, the Fianna of the Irish nation, in har- ization in Ireland. The Irish
Fáil leader, claimed that Robinson was mony and friendship, to reaffirmed the prohibition
just fronting for a “Marxist-Leninist unite all the people who on divorce in a 1986 refer-
Communist Party”; and a government share the territory of the island of Ire- endum. But when the process began
minister, Pádraig Flynn, accused her land, in all the diversity of their identi- for good, in the nineteen-nineties, the
of faking “a newfound interest in the ties and traditions.” establishment phone book, as it were,
family,” and wondered aloud about her got ripped up very fast indeed. The key
bona fides as a mother and a wife. ’Toole’s commentary here is espe- dates fall on O’Toole’s closing pages
O’Toole notes that this kind of mor-
ally presumptuous misogyny worked
O cially acute. He points out that
these words allowed for the reconcili-
like accelerating hammer blows: Mary
Robinson’s election (1990); Eamonn
when it remained unspoken, as part ation of two compound identities, Cath- Casey’s flight (1992); the tribunal on
of the general contract of hypocrisy. olic/Irish and Protestant/British, that Charles Haughey (1997); a documen-
The mistake was speaking it so bla- had once seemed immutably at odds, tary series, produced by Mary Raftery,
tantly, since to do so “revealed the re- and, in consequence, broke any neces- on the industrial schools, titled “States
ality obscured by the rhetoric, a deep sary link between Irishness and Cathol- of Fear” (1999), which was such a pow-
contempt for women. It triggered a icism. Identity could now be plural and erful exposé that the government began
visceral rage that had been built up open-ended. This prospect was still discussing the possibility of making a
over generations.” largely conceptual, perhaps, but, thanks formal apology the day after its screen-
Robinson’s election, according to to the enormous investments from ing on Irish TV; the governmental re-
O’Toole, broke the reflexive alliance of America and elsewhere which had been port (2009) that confirmed Raftery’s
the Church and the Fianna Fáil Party, pouring into Ireland since the nineteen- reporting, and, in the same year, an of-
debunking the notion that both had eighties, Irish society was indeed being ficial report into sexual abuse in the
some kind of moral monopoly over Irish transformed. Something unimaginable Dublin archdiocese. These were fol-
culture. Haughey—whose florid, sharp- in 1958 was coming to pass: mass emi- lowed by happier events, moments of
eyed face, with its ruddy wattles, proved gration was being reversed. A quarter triumph not just through suffering but
an icon for an era—resigned as the Fi- of a million people flocked to an eco- over suffering: the 2015 vote in favor of
anna Fáil leader in 1992. A government nomically revivified Ireland between gay marriage, the 2018 referendum that
tribunal, held in 1997, revealed that he 1995 and 2000. Foreign-born inhabi- lifted the ban on abortion.
had funded his lavish life style from tants grew from six per cent of the pop- What happened? Ireland became
other people’s pockets and shielded his ulation in 1991 to ten per cent in 2002. normal. “To be normal was a wonder
wrongdoing via a shell company based Once the European Union allowed the that deserved celebration,” O’Toole
in the Cayman Islands. free flow of people and labor, in 2004— writes. Is it possible to say how in a sen-
A year later, the Good Friday Agree- later to be one of the main engines of tence? He makes a brave effort, in what
ment, announced by the Irish and Brit- Brexit—Irish society began to diversify may be the most moving line of the
ish governments, largely ended the rapidly. By 2016, O’Toole informs us, book: “This, I think, was what really
armed conflict between Catholics and seventeen per cent of the population changed: ordinary Catholics realized
Protestants. On both sides, all political had been born elsewhere. that, when it came to lived morality,
prisoners who accepted the Agreement In J. F. Powers’s novel “Morte D’Ur- they were way ahead of their teachers.”
were to be released. Simultaneous ref- ban,” a priest named Father Urban is O’Toole leaves unspoken the gaping
erendums were held: in Northern Ire- put under moral pressure when a woman implication: and perhaps way ahead of
land, seventy-one per cent of voters, a undresses in front of him. He averts his God Himself ? 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 63
 tion regarding their motives and nuances,
THE ART WORLD should await registration of the show’s
collective potency. (I suggest walking

ALL TOGETHER NOW

through the whole thing quickly, then
doubling back to contemplate individual
exhibits.) The effect is less cumulative
The Whitney Biennial returns, after a pandemic-induced delay. than immediate in each of two main com-
ponent sections.The museum’s vast, sunny
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL fifth floor has been stripped of interior
walls to become an open labyrinth of
freestanding sculptures and white-painted
wooden frameworks that display smaller
pieces. The airy structures, in themselves
sculptural, are deleterious to paintings
and to anything else pictorial, which crave
the serenity of flat walls. But the incon-
venience to pictures is justifiable by a
one-off (not fungible, I hope), terrific cu-
ratorial expedient. The gist is an orderly
tumult of sensations fed by, and feeding,
an impression of besetting emergency.
The Whitney’s sixth floor hosts a
warren of black-walled spaces that allow
for a viewer’s immersion in gnomic cre-
ations, several of which function in ser-
vice to the show’s most overt embrace
of identity politics, keyed to the past and
present ordeals of Native Americans in
(let’s admit it) settler society, and to some
of their enduring folkways and evolving
artistic preoccupations. In addition to
this focus, there’s an omnipresence on
both floors—sometimes pointedly so,
but in general matter-of-factly—of art-
ists who define themselves as anything
other than heterosexual white males, in-
dicating a potential climax after years of
strident agitation for diversity. Provi-
sional togetherness reigns. If that seems
utopian, so do the frail but stubborn
he startlingly coherent and bold a year by Covid-19, the show consoli- wishes of many of us for a redemption
T Whitney Biennial is a material
manifesto of late-pandemic institutional
dates a trend that many of us haven’t
suspected: a sort of fortuitously shared
of our multiply fractured America. We
needn’t stop dreaming even when jarred
culture. Long on installations and vid- conceptual sensibility that suggests an alert by assaultive realities.
eos and short on painting, conventional in-group but is open to all who care Don’t necessarily expect to under-
sculpture, and straight photography, it about art’s relations to the wide world. stand much at a glance. A piece by Re-
is exciting without being especially plea- Even the most expressive of the artists becca Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist
surable—geared toward thought. The who were selected by Breslin and Ed- from Canada, “ishkode (fire)” (2021), cen-
innovative, intimately collaborative cu- wards seem oriented not to personal ters on a representation of a sleeping
rators David Breslin and Adrienne Ed- feelings but to hard facts of common bag, cast in clay, that appears to cocoon
wards ignore rather than oppose pres- experience. Away with moonbeams. a standing figure not otherwise in evi-
COURTESY PRIVATE COLLECTION

sures of the ever-romping art market, Does the outward-looking spirit seren- dence. Surrounding it, on the floor, are
which can see to itself. (The hundreds dipitously coincide with the emotional thousands of small-calibre bullet casings
of contemporary works that are always convulsions occasioned by the war in intermixed with copper wire. It is beau-
on view in commercial galleries consti- Ukraine? It does for me. tiful both before you speculate on its
tute what might be described as a per- Any concentration on specific works, thematic aim and after. I single it out
manent floating Diurnal.) Delayed for many of which require lengthy explana- for the glory of painstaking design that
typifies scores of works in the show. I
The Biennial includes N. H. Pritchard’s “Red Abstract / fragment” (1968-69). fancy that pandemic isolation, at once
64 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022
depriving and disburdening artists of ca- ers who met on the Lower East Side invisible may turn out to have been
reer exigencies, has fostered lonely cul- in the nineteen-sixties. He died in 1996, merely a speed bump.
tivations of perfection. The Biennial’s at the age of fifty-six.“Red Abstract/frag- Even among the living, death broods
title this year, “Quiet as It’s Kept,” is that ment” (1968-69) is a lyrical verse text here and there in the catacomb-like
of a 1960 Max Roach album, and was typewritten on a brushy red ground and sixth-floor rooms, where it finds explicit
subsequently employed in Toni Morri- scribbled with restive cross-outs, revi- reference in my favorite work in the
son’s novel “The Bluest Eye,” in 1970, sions, and notes. Its meanings dance at show. Indelibly disturbing and enthrall-
and for a show that was curated in 2002 the edge of comprehension, but with ing, “Your Eyes Will Be an Empty
by David Hammons, the New York infectious improvisatory rhythms. Word” (2021), by the veteran Cuban
provocateur in many mediums. The The quality of personhood turned American artist and singularly plain-
phrase befits art that, emerging from a inside out sings in a poignant film by spoken social activist Coco Fusco, is a
spell of obscurity, is as insistent as an the South Korean-born Berkeley grad- gorgeous twelve-minute video explora-
unexpected tap on the shoulder. uate Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, which tion of Hart Island—New York’s pot-
Perfect, as a matter of course, are fig- is projected on translucent cloth and in- ter’s field for unidentified or unclaimed
ures, placed outdoors on a fifth-floor cludes haunting portraits—eyes closed corpses. Shots of the artist laboring in
terrace, by the commanding Californian alternating with eyes open—of the art- a rowboat along its shores are intercut
sculptor Charles Ray. Hand-formed and ist and of a sister of hers. In 1982, at the with drone overviews of a really quite
then cast or machined in metal, three age of thirty-one, Cha, a tremendously lovely place where rows of small stone
outsized, seated men—unprepossessing, erudite linguistic philosopher (con- markers perfunctorily memorialize in-
regular guys, by the look of them—im- cerned, she wrote, with “the roots of the numerable lost lives. Beauty stands in
pose a force field of held-breath aes- language before it is born on the tip of for unconsummated mourning. The
thetic tension and laconic pathos. A few the tongue”) and novelist as well as art- work can seem to invoke the cascading
other established stars on hand and in ist, was raped and murdered in New fatalities of the Covid pandemic and,
good form include Alfredo Jaar, Ellen York, at the Puck Building, by a secu- by chance, the remorseless current car-
Gallagher, Jane Dickson, Nayland Blake, rity guard. She figures in the Biennial nage in Ukraine, whereby the destruc-
and the late Jason Rhoades. But the bulk as a too-little-recognized progenitor of tion of so many people occasions news
of the Biennial is devoted to artists un- ideas and forms that are still in play for headlines as sullen as those stones. To
familiar to me, whose outputs run the art and nowhere near exhausted. be alive now is to be overwhelmed by a
gamut from hanging fabrics to compact It’s not new for the Biennial to in- consciousness of the untimely dead, who,
narratives. Of incidental note is proof clude deceased artists who seem rele- in Ukraine, have resigned their parts in
that video art, after nearly half a cen- vant to present creative tendencies. The a drama of ever more urgent military,
tury of self-conscious experimentation, show has served, traditionally, not only political, and humanitarian imperatives.
has come of age: a camera is as second- to update the public on the state of con- Their silence roars.
nature and ready to hand for many art- temporary art—mostly American, of On a far less dire but, in itself, weirdly
ists now as a pencil or a paintbrush. The course, that being a mandate embla- elegiac note is “64,000 Attempts at Cir-
scant paintings on view reverse an em- zoned in the museum’s name—but also culation” (2021), by the young Queens
phasis on figurative imagery in the 2019 to propose benchmarks and challenges artist Rose Salane. It consists of tables
Biennial, tilting toward a lately preva- for upcoming generations, even by wel- heaped with incredibly various slugs—
lent revival of abstraction in perfervid coming some foreign talents of local metal washers, casino and arcade to-
styles that have yet to demonstrate stay- note. What sets this edition apart, for kens, religious medals, play money, and
ing power. me, is the determined consistency of its what all—that were used as counterfeit
taste in this respect, which avoids the bus fare in New York between 2017 and
collection of photographic works baggy eclecticism that has enfeebled 2019. (Salane acquired them at a Met-
A by the Laos-born artist Pao Houa
Her both document and poeticize her
some years’ exhibitions. (Will our city’s
art people love the result? Nah. Hating
ropolitan Transit Authority auction
of unwanted assets.) Call the content
Hmong family and community in North the Biennial is practically a civic duty, misdemeanor populism, representing in
America. There are fifty-two of the im- or a pledge of un-allegiance, for cogno- each instance the recourse of someone
ages, and none too many. The sense of scenti hereabouts—and bless us for that, motivated by need or only petty cupid-
an intricately braided history, unfold- as it fuels the contrarian passion that ity. Most of those folks, if not includ-
ing in the present while irradiated by makes New Yorkers crave to be better ing (shh!) ourselves, still walk among
memory, left me with an appetite for than . . . well, whatever you’ve got.) I us, mute testifiers to the cussedness of
still more. Such gestation in personal won’t forget the shock of learning Cha’s humanity chafing at the constraints of
testimony, distanced aesthetically, is an- terrible fate. I was assailed by it, having law. The disconcertingly handsome en-
other frequent tone of the show. It in- first discovered and savored her work— semble drolly epitomizes this Bienni-
fuses a poem by the mystically inclined stumbling from delight to horror in a al’s predominant detour, for now, from
N. H. Pritchard, a Caribbean-parented few minutes. But the delight abides. exalting autonomous art to braving the
New Yorker who was steeped in art his- Where art is concerned, death need be routine chaos of a world where no kind
tory, and was a member of the Umbra no more than an inconvenience, and, as of comfort or conviction can be sure to
Poets Workshop, a group of Black writ- in the case of Pritchard, being all but persist from one day to the next. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 65
 nered by an oversharer near a sweat-
POP MUSIC ing tub of supermarket hummus, or
having to athletically jockey for a bar-

DUMB FUN
tender’s attention, or spending seventy-
five dollars moving from club to club
in a series of careering taxicabs. It’s
The glorious lightness of Wet Leg. hard to think of a sentiment more ger-
mane to our collective, post-traumatic
BY AMANDA PETRUSICH disillusionment than “It used to be so
fun / Now everything just feels dumb / I
wish I could care.” The line comes from
“I Don’t Wanna Go Out,” a track on
“Wet Leg,” the band’s long-awaited
first album, which is being released
this month.
Teasdale and Chambers are plainly
having a very good time making each
other laugh, and anyone else’s enjoy-
ment of their salty, lackadaisical indie
rock feels almost incidental. The duo
met a decade ago, in college, on the
Isle of Wight, and their easy rapport
gives “Wet Leg” a glorious lightness.
Though each had been involved with
other musical projects, neither had a
full-time music career before last year.
(Chambers was working in her fami-
ly’s jewelry store, and Teasdale was a
wardrobe assistant.) According to band
lore, they decided to start making music
together while paused at the top of a
Ferris wheel, drunk, and they made it
through just four gigs before signing
to Domino Records.
“Wet Leg” is a charming, addictive
début—wry, melodic, gleeful, smart,
and cool. Chambers plays lead guitar,
Teasdale handles rhythm guitar, and
they are backed here by the bassist Mi-
chael Champion, the drummer Henry
or a brief moment last spring, when were premature, and a clumsy misread- Holmes, and the synth player and pro-
F securing a vaccination appointment
no longer felt like winning some sort
ing of the cultural moment. Shaking
off mass death wasn’t so easy. What
ducer Dan Carey. Teasdale has a voice
that can swing from deep and teas-
of lunatic lottery, and Covid-19 cases followed was more like Trying-Our- ing to dry and laden with ennui. When
had convincingly, if temporarily, re- Best Summer. she thinks something is lame, she
ceded, it seemed as though Americans For some people, the pandemic can be withering. On “Loving You,”
were collectively poised for a grand re- ended up changing the contours of Teasdale informs an ex, “I don’t want
turn to pleasure. Remember pleasure? their social lives in a more permanent to have to be friends / I don’t want to
People were talking about the much way. Why return to the pre-quaran- have to pretend.” She sweetly adds, “I
anticipated centennial of the Roaring tine slog of deafening bars, intermina- hope you choke on your girlfriend.”
Twenties, and about the imminence of ble poetry readings, and awkward din- On “Angelica,” she laments the te-
a so-called Hot Vax Summer. The hope ner parties? What about cutting loose dium of going out:
was that, after months of confinement at home, maybe with one excellent
and terror, we might carouse and frolic friend over? Wet Leg, the duo of Rhian But I don’t wanna follow you on the ’gram
I don’t wanna listen to your band
again, retire the elbow bump in favor Teasdale and Hester Chambers, makes I don’t know why I haven’t left yet
of the full-body embrace, have a little party music for adults who are down Don’t want none of this.
fun. In the end, those proclamations to hang but are tired of getting cor-
Much of “Wet Leg” addresses the
The band’s long-awaited début album is charming, addictive, and endlessly cool. banality of adulthood, and particularly
66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH RENSTROM
the discombobulating stretch between (wan, vaguely sardonic, perfectly know-
youth and middle age—from twenty- ing) reiterated the idea that rock music
five to forty, say. (Teasdale is twenty- performed by women did not always
nine and Chambers is twenty-eight.) have to be concerned with heartbreak—
In the video for “Too Late Now,” Teas- it could also be jokey, stylized, effort-
dale and Chambers stumble around in less. “Chaise Longue” opens, of course,
striped bathrobes with cucumber slices with a dick joke:
over their eyes. A montage gathers some
of the more aesthetically unpleasant Mummy, Daddy, look at me
I went to school and I got a degree
elements of modern life: cranes, a cig- All my friends call it the big D
arette butt, Botox, trash spilling from I went to school and I got the big D.
an overstuffed dumpster, graffiti wish-
ing passersby a shit day, f luorescent Teasdale goes on to quote the film
lights, a pigeon. “I’m not sure if this is “Mean Girls”—“Is your muffin but-
the kinda life that I saw myself living,” tered? Would you like us to assign
Teasdale admits. A synthesizer rings someone to butter your muffin?”—and
out like church bells. Though she never to gently entice a potential suitor back-
sounds especially devastated, “Too Late stage: “I’ve got a chaise longue in my
M A I N E | C H I LT O N S . C O M
Now” is Teasdale’s most tender and re- dressing room / And a pack of warm
vealing vocal performance, and one of beer that we can consume.” (Teasdale
the best and most dynamic songs on is fond of purposefully terrible come-
“Wet Leg.” As children, we’re often ons, and on the single “Wet Dream” A DV ERTISE ME NT

desperate to grow up, yet it turns out she sings, “Baby, do you wanna come
that adulthood can be ugly and de- home with me / I got ‘Buffalo ’66’ on
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Small space has big rewards.
pressing. “I just need a bubble bath to DVD.”) “Chaise Longue” was an in-
set me on a higher path,” Teasdale in- stant hit, in part because it showed two TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159
tones grimly. I always hear the line as women having the sort of fun—dumb, jgenet@zmedia-inc.com
an adroit skewering of the self-care resolutely laid-back—typically reserved
industry and its goofy promises of tran- for young men, but mostly because its
scendence—no soak or steam or com- barrelling melody and loud-quiet-loud
bination of crystals can undo the real- architecture made it so joyful to hol-
ities of tax season, garbage day, and ler along to. The dream of Hot Vax
furniture assembly. Summer was a ruse, and a cruel one,
but Teasdale and Chambers were of-
usically, Wet Leg makes prickly fering a kind of carefree intimacy. (It
M but playful post-punk that often
sounds like a cross between the Pix-
sounds silly, but there’s a huge amount
of unexpected closeness in a moment Wear our new
ies, Pavement, and Garbage—all be- on “Chaise Longue” when Teasdale official hat to show
loved stalwarts of the nineties indie-
rock scene—but the most obvious point
says, “Excuse me?,” and Chambers an-
swers, “What?”)
your love.
of comparison is Dry Cleaning, an- Wet Leg encourages its listeners to
other excellent new British band with briefly pause their endless fretting and
droll, absurdist lyrics. Both groups built remember what it feels like to be goofy
significant followings by putting out with your best friend for a few hours.
weird, enticing singles far in advance Despite the unending heaviness of
of their first albums. Wet Leg man- world events, there is still room for
aged to sell out most of a U.S. tour inanity; delight doesn’t always need to
after releasing just two tracks. (“Big feel indulgent, and art doesn’t need to
thank you to everyone that’s bought be sombre or humorless. In the fall,
a ticket after having only heard two when Teasdale and Chambers were
songs haha,” the band tweeted.) “Chaise asked about the band’s name—“What
Longue,” Wet Leg’s first single, ap- does it mean to be a wet leg?” the d.j.
peared in June of 2021. Initially, it re- Jill Riley wondered—they couldn’t stop 100% cotton twill.
minded me of the Breeders’ “Cannon- giggling. “That’s a nice question,” Available in white, navy, and black.
ball,” an alt-rock hit from 1993, insofar Chambers said. Teasdale added, “It
as it was a song I liked immediately doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just
and ferociously, it was bizarre and funny, a reminder to not take yourself too se-
newyorkerstore.com/hats
it was centered on a rubbery guitar riff, riously, because, at the end of the day,
and both the lyrics and the delivery you’re in a band called Wet Leg.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 67
 New Yorkers on TV and in the movies.
THE THEATRE So perhaps it’s good timing for the
new Broadway production of Neil Si-

HUSBANDS AND WIVES

mon’s “Plaza Suite,” a trio of one-act
plays, directed by John Benjamin
Hickey, at the Hudson Theatre. The
Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick star in Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite.” recently renovated Hudson, hand-
some in turquoise and glittering green,
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM is redolent of a grander and more el-
egant New York, and so is the Plaza
Hotel, where each of the one-acts
takes place. They’re all set in Room 719,
where the crown molding is sharp,
the wood trimmings shine, and the
gold patina on the curtains shimmers
gently. The production has its prob-
lems: it’s big, broad, silly, sometimes
dated, often emotionally obtuse. But
something about Simon’s charming
insistence on the two-sidedness of
life—on an inexplicable lightness
that abides even as stunted adults
wade through the dark corners of ro-
mantic relationships, blithely incur-
ring a fallout that they can’t control
and barely notice, until it’s too late—
matches my mood.
Each play is essentially a two-hander,
with brief appearances from hotel wait-
staff and other secondary characters.
Each couple is played by the real-life
spouses Sarah Jessica Parker and Mat-
thew Broderick, whose personas—
together and as individuals—hover
over Simon’s text and add new mean-
ing to it. In the first one-act, “Visitor
from Mamaroneck,” Parker and Brod-
erick are Karen and Sam, an aging mar-
ried couple staying at the Plaza for
their anniversary—although they argue
hese past few years have changed dough.) Two weeks ago, I caught about the day and the year of their
T my taste, and not just in theatre.
The sensory deprivations of social dis-
“House of Gucci”—a rococo carnival
of a movie—and it soothed me like a
wedding—and failing the basic test of
mutual kindness.
tance and the funk of onrushing bad Saturday-morning cartoon. Karen strains futilely to bring en-
news have made me deeply hungry for I’m not the only one, it seems. Our chantment back to the marriage, in
fun. I’ve never believed in a zero-sum city recently elected a Fun Mayor, Eric part by trying—like Mayor Adams—
struggle between entertainment and Adams, whose most urgent appeal is to bring enchantment back to New
serious art, but lately entertainment for New Yorkers to loosen up, get out- York itself. But the city won’t coöp-
has been winning the day. In the morn- side, and turn that frown upside down. erate. The Savoy-Plaza has been razed,
ing, I spring for the Post and the Daily His promises to bring “swagger” (one and the old view of that grand hotel
News, with their lurid excitement and of his watchwords) back to New York has been replaced by the big, graphic
unambivalent staccato sentences, be- may be vapid, but their emotional stripes of the General Motors build-
fore turning to the Times. I watch power is real, rooted in a cunning com- ing. “I guarantee you Central Park
TV singing competitions in hyper- mingling of place, nostalgia, and gen- comes down in five years,” Karen says
saturated color and laugh like a kid. erational self-pity—a sense that, if to the bellhop (Eric Wiegand) who’s
(Have you seen “The Masked Singer”? only history hadn’t happened, we’d be helped her up to the room. “Five years
It rots your molars like a plate of fried carrying on like those older, happier from now, you’ll look out this window,
and you’ll see one little tree and the
The personas of the celebrity actors hover over Simon’s text, adding new meaning. world’s largest A. & P.”
68 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 11, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTINA TZEKOVA
 It’s striking to see Parker, who tel-suite mirrors, and is unrelentingly brown wig and a dark turtleneck, seems
starred in “Sex and the City,” in a role mean and condescending to his wife. to be performing Mike Myers-inspired
like this. Her face, with its humorous “Plaza Suite” débuted in 1968, and some sketch comedy, and Parker shows off
eyes and big, bright teeth, is everlast- ambient attitudes of that era, partic- her chops as a physical comedian, doing
ingly associated with New York as a ularly where women are concerned, her best Lucille Ball. The two some-
canvas for raucous fun and romantic cling to this production. It’s hard to times seem to be in different plays,
adventure. But, of course, that show parse, in places, whether Sam’s exas- but, man, are they having fun. Simon’s
is now almost a quarter century old, peration toward Karen is meant to tennis-volley dialogue, densely witty,
and the hot spots for which it served point to his poor temper or to be an captures perfectly how hopelessly stuck
as a de-facto tourist guide have mostly appropriate response to her clichéd in the past each of them is. The play
faded. (The reboot, “And Just Like dottiness. Parker’s innate wit pulls has some ironies in the present, too:
That . . .,” seems to agree.) To watch against, and nicely complicates, sev- there’s a funny riff on the Los Ange-
Parker play a middle-aged woman— eral moments that have the whiff of les Rams, who, having skipped town
Karen could be forty-seven or forty- casual misogyny, but the pattern of in 1995 and headed to St. Louis, have
eight; she’s got a counting problem— hapless and vaguely annoying women lately returned to Southern Califor-
f lailing to summon the older New in all three sketches is hard to miss. nia, where they won the Super Bowl
York she fell in love with is to med- earlier this year. Everything old comes
itate on the belatedness of our ideas n the second one-act, Parker and rumbling back.
about the city. It feels done, washed
up—the fun is in the past.
I Broderick play Muriel and Jesse.
They were high-school boyfriend and
The director, Hickey, is also an actor;
I last saw him in the playlike TV drama
Something similar, if slightly girlfriend in the suburb of Tenafly, New “In Treatment,” as a full-blown narcis-
stranger, is happening with Broder- Jersey—a town whose mere mention sist facing off with his court-ordered
ick’s performance. No matter how old gets a big laugh. Now Jesse’s a famous therapist. He knows two-handers, and
the actor gets, he retains the air of Hollywood producer who lives in he navigates Simon’s dialogue grace-
boyish mischief that he became fa- Humphrey Bogart’s old house, and fully, choreographing Broderick and
mous for in 1986, when he played Fer- Muriel’s a P.T.A. member whose claim Parker’s movements to grab a few ex-
ris Bueller. Here, he often comes off to fame is an appearance in the Tena- tratextual laughs from the crowd.
as an only slightly older Bueller, dressed fly newspaper after winning the mother- Mostly, though, it’s just a good time
up in order to mock the oafish adult and-daughter potato race. Jesse’s at the seeing Parker dressed up in tacky
men he hopes never to become. The Plaza on business, and it’s clear that clothes and Broderick with big whis-
hairpieces and eyebrows and other fol- Muriel, increasingly buzzed on vodka kers for eyebrows. In the final one-act,
licular adjustments made to Broder- Stingers, is overawed less by Jesse than “Visitor from Forest Hills,” they play
ick’s face by the wig honcho Tom Wat- by the exalted, faraway existence that crestfallen parents of the bride. Parker
son—the wig-and-makeup director at he represents. They’re talking past each is in vivid pastels, looking like an even
the Metropolitan Opera, that stub- other: she wants a celebrity fantasy, more smudged version of Monet’s
born repository of New York glam- and he, after a pair of bad show-biz water lilies. Broderick’s in a horrible
our—are punch lines in themselves, marriages, wants to idealize his pro- morning suit. Both actors use the thin
sly digs at passing male fashions and vincial childhood. drama—their daughter won’t leave the
monstrous vanities. It’s the funniest and most purely bathroom and get married—as an ex-
Broderick plays Sam as a bland ass- enjoyable of the pieces, a sweet but cuse to play to the back of the balcony,
hole having a textbook midlife crisis. tart confection, containing all the fun to mug and grin and do gags, daring
He obsesses over his weight, is mag- highs and the awkward lows of the you not to crack a smile amid the flaws.
netized to his own image in the ho- show. Broderick, wearing a big, shiny Sometimes that’s enough. 

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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 Frank Cotham,
must be received by Sunday, April 10th. The finalists in the March 28th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the April 25th & May 2nd 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

“Turns out they only check to see if you return the shoes.”
Jonathan Carter, Fredericksburg, Va.

“Or we could get a burglar alarm.” “Oh, no! They’re returning him.”
Jeff Unger, Urbana, Ill. George Mulligan, Ardmore, Pa.

“The downstairs neighbors? What is it this time?”

Kip Conlon, Brooklyn, N.Y.
 SAVE
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 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

11 12 13

THE 14 15 16

CROSSWORD 17 18 19

20 21 22
A challenging puzzle.
23 24 25 26

BY NATAN LAST
27 28 29

30
ACROSS
1 Unkempt
31 32 33 34
7 ___ App (Venmo competitor)
11 At risk of 35 36 37

12 Not seriously
38 39 40 41
14 Much parodied William Carlos Williams
poem
42 43 44
17 “Rumor ___ . . .”
18 Initials, say 45 46 47
19 Draw
20 Linguistic cousin of Manx 48 49

21 Some yoga poses

50 51
22 ___ Baker Center for Human Rights
(Oakland-based nonprofit)
23 Like the title character of Camus’s “The 4 Jazz virtuoso Montgomery 33 Digs (into)
Stranger” Missouri birthplace of Eminem,
5 34 Load-bearing device?
25 They may go from A to A informally
35 Garage A ___ (jazz group that, despite its
27 ___ Narciso (fictional California city 6 “Same as always” name, has often performed as a quartet)
in Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of
7 1931 pre-Code film noir starring Gary 37 Tank top
Lot 49”)
Cooper as the Kid
28 Place for hot rolls 38 Scoundrel
8 “What is this? A center for ___?”
30 Symbol seen on the one-dollar bill (Zoolander’s reaction to a scale model, in 40 Davis who stars in “Miss Fisher’s
31 Ripoff? “Zoolander”) Murder Mysteries”
32 Curious 9 Hub between LAX and SEA 43 Group of textbook chapters
35 Home wrecker? 10 Go-getter 44 Tap-in, e.g.
36 One giving ten per cent 11 Big ___ 46 Beaut
38 Stuff tight 13 Does perfectly 47 ___ Search (predecessor of Bing)
39 ___ one’s time 14 A.L. West team, familiarly
41 Like smear campaigns 15 Sorry sort Solution to the previous puzzle:
42 Member of the Squad, for short 16 Affirmative vote S L O P O P E R A G R A F
N A V I E R R O R P R O N E
43 Alternatives to yellow cabs 21 Strips of first place?
L I E N D O G T R A I N E R
44 Bear out 22 “Being ___” (2015 documentary about C R E D I T S S P A W N
45 Series on which Dick Van Dyke played a Robert Knievel) S C O P E F U S E
doctor who solves crimes with his 24 Man whose name God lengthens at the A C H O R U S L I N E O P S
detective son age of ninety-nine, in Genesis B L A N K S T A R E C N E T
48 Crocheter’s purchase 26 Family name in sixteenth- and B O D E S V W S P A T T I

Pays attention E N O S D O N T B O T H E R
49 seventeenth-century Italian music
Y E W C U T S C O R N E R S
50 Some music-festival volunteers: Abbr. 29 Video ___ (British term for some W A G E O N E A L
51 Gave for a while unregulated, often obscene films) S H E I K S U N S P O T
30 Seed G A R D E N H O S E P O O F
DOWN T H A T D O E S I T E S P Y
31 Husband of Janie in “Their Eyes Were
1 Goosebump-inducing shiver Watching God” who shares his nickname S A S H T R A N S D E S I

2 More optimistic with a baked good

Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
3 “I’ll handle that” 32 “Never in a million years!” newyorker.com/crossword