Reporting

- The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law

- The Family Business That Put Nashville Hot Chicken on the Map

- The Personal Toll of Whistle-Blowing

- A Grand Plan to Clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law

American Chronicles

From audm.herokuapp.com

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” the Iowa congressman Steve King inquired of a Times reporter last month. After the remark blew up, King explained that by “that language” he was referring to “Western civilization.” He also said that he condemned white nationalism and white supremacy as an “evil and bigoted ideology which saw in its ultimate expression the systematic murder of six million innocent Jewish lives.” (It’s unclear whether King thinks of Jews as nonwhite.)

However, to answer the congressman’s original question: only after a long struggle. Seventeen states had laws banning interracial marriage, which is pretty much the heart of the doctrine of white supremacy, until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional. From the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, American race relations were largely shaped by states that had seceded from the Union in 1861, and the elected leaders of those states almost all spoke the language of white supremacy. They did not use dog whistles. “White Supremacy” was the motto of the Alabama Democratic Party until 1966. Mississippi did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, until 1995.

How did this happen? How did white people in a part of the country that was virtually destroyed by war contrive to take political control of their states, install manifestly undemocratic regimes in them, maintain those regimes for nearly a century, and effectively block the national government from addressing racial inequality everywhere else? Part of the answer is that those people had a lot of help. Institutions constitutionally empowered to intervene twisted themselves every which way to explain why, in this matter, intervention was not part of the job description. One such institution was the Supreme Court of the United States.

The case of Martha Lum is typical. She was the daughter of Jeu Gong Lum, who came to the United States from China in 1904. After being smuggled across the Canadian border by human traffickers, he made his way to the Mississippi Delta, where a relative ran a grocery store. In 1913, he married another Chinese immigrant, and they opened their own store. They had three children and gave them American names.

In 1923, the family moved to Rosedale, Mississippi, and Martha, then eight years old, entered the local public school. According to Adrienne Berard, who tells the Lums’ story in “Water Tossing Boulders” (2016), nothing seemed amiss for the first year, but when Martha returned to school after the summer the principal relayed the news that the school board had ordered her to be expelled. Public schools in Mississippi had been racially segregated by law since 1890, and her school educated only whites. The board had decided that Martha was not white and, consequently, she could not study there.

The Lums engaged a lawyer, who managed to get a writ of mandamus—an order that a legal duty be carried out—served on the school board. The board, which must have been very surprised, contested the writ, and the case went to the Supreme Court of Mississippi, which ruled that the board had the right to expel Martha Lum on racial grounds. That part was not so surprising.

The court acknowledged that there was no statutory definition of the “colored race” in Mississippi. But it argued that the term should be construed in the broadest sense, and cited a case it had decided eight years earlier, upholding the right of a school board to expel from an all-white school two children whose great-aunts were rumored to have married nonwhites.

That decision, the court said, showed that the term “colored” was not restricted to “persons having negro blood in their veins”—apparently since the children involved were in fact white. Martha Lum did not have “negro blood,” either, but she was not white. She could attend a “colored” school. Mississippi’s separate-schools law, the court explained, was enacted “to prevent race amalgamation.” Then why place an Asian-American child in a school with African-American children? Because, according to the court, the law was intended to serve “the broad dominant purpose of preserving the purity and integrity of the white race.”

The Lums appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue was the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been ratified in 1868. The first clause of that amendment is the most radically democratic clause in the entire Constitution, much of which was designed to limit what the Founders considered the dangers of too much democracy. It decrees that any person born in the United States is a citizen, and that states may not abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens; nor deprive them of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny them the equal protection of the laws. The United States has two founding documents: the Constitution, which is a legal rule book, and the Declaration of Independence, a manifesto with no force of law. The Fourteenth Amendment constitutionalized the Declaration.

The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case, Lum v. Rice, was handed down in 1927, three years after Congress passed the Johnson-Reed immigration act, which barred all Asians from entering the United States. Was Martha Lum a citizen? The Supreme Court said she was. Was she being denied the equal protection of the laws? The Court said that she was not, and cited a series of precedents in which courts had upheld the constitutionality of school segregation.

It was true, the Court conceded, that most of those cases had involved African-American children. But it couldn’t see that “pupils of the yellow races” were any different, and the decision to expel such pupils was, it held, “within the discretion of the state in regulating its public schools, and does not conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment.” Even though the Mississippi court had stated that the purpose of the school-segregation law was to preserve “the purity and integrity of the white race,” it was not a denial of equal protection to nonwhites. The Lums, of course, knew from firsthand observation what it meant to be classified as “colored” in Mississippi, and they did what a lot of African-American Mississippians were also doing—they left the state.

The decision in Lum v. Rice was unanimous. The opinion of the Court was delivered by the Chief Justice, William Howard Taft, a former President of the United States; among the Justices who heard the case were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Louis Brandeis. One of the precedents the Court quoted prominently in support of its decision was a case it had decided thirty-one years earlier—Plessy v. Ferguson.

After Dred Scott, Plessy is probably the most notorious decision involving race in the history of the United States Supreme Court. It is the case identified with the principle of “separate but equal”—the theory that segregation is not per se discrimination. Plessy is the decision the Supreme Court had to overturn, in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, to declare that school segregation violated the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

From our perspective, therefore, Plessy looks huge. So it’s revealing that, as the journalist Steve Luxenberg tells us in “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation,” little note was taken of the decision at the time. Even when principal figures in the case died, years later, their obituaries made no mention of it. It’s revealing because it suggests that Plessy should never have been brought in the first place. The decision did not create a new justification for racial segregation; it locked an old one into place.

Plessy was a test case. It challenged a law that Louisiana passed in 1890, the Separate Car Act, requiring railroads to maintain separate cars for white and “colored” riders—in order, according to the act, “to promote the comfort of passengers.” The penalty for breaking the law was a fine or a short prison sentence. Transportation had been segregated in parts of the country, both North and South, since long before the Civil War, and many cases had been brought by passengers complaining of discrimination, with mixed success. But in those cases segregation was a matter of company policy. In the Louisiana case, the constitutionality of a state law was at issue.

When the South began instituting Jim Crow, after the end of Reconstruction, laws mandating separate cars on trains appeared across the region. One of the first was passed in Florida, in 1887, followed by Mississippi, in 1888, and Texas, in 1889. When Louisiana passed its separate-cars law, a New Orleans lawyer and newspaper editor named Louis Martinet—his mother was born a slave; his father, a Belgian, bought her freedom—formed the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, and set about building a case.

First, Martinet approached the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which agreed to act as a silent partner. It did not do so out of altruism. From a business point of view, segregation represented a cost—the cost of providing separate facilities for black customers. It would have been cheaper for the railroads if the state had mandated integration instead.

Then Martinet recruited a plaintiff, Daniel Desdunes, a young mixed-race musician whose father was on the Committee. On February 24, 1892, Desdunes boarded a train in New Orleans with a ticket for Mobile, Alabama, and sat in a car reserved for whites. He was duly arrested and charged, his case set to be heard by the criminal-court judge in New Orleans, John Ferguson. All had gone as planned, but then, in another case, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that the Separate Car Act did not apply to interstate passengers. Because Desdunes had been going to another state, he could not be required to use a separate car, and the prosecution dropped the case.

The interstate-travel issue was a persistent wrinkle in the Jim Crow era, and it inspired some impressive judicial contortions. In 1878, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Reconstruction-era Louisiana statute requiring integrated facilities on steamboats. Under the Constitution, only Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. Because riverboats stopped in many states, the Court said, they could not be bound by the regulations of one state.

You might assume that a state law requiring segregated facilities on interstate carriers would be subject to the same prohibition. In 1890, however, the Supreme Court held otherwise. It declared that an interstate train was subject to a Mississippi law requiring separate cars for “colored” and white passengers for as long as the train was in Mississippi. The Court somehow parsed its way around its own earlier decision.

But now, because of the Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling, Martinet needed another volunteer scofflaw. Fortunately, he had one at hand: Homer Plessy. Like Desdunes, Plessy was light-skinned—“fair-skinned enough to cause confusion,” as Luxenberg puts it, suggesting that Plessy might have been accustomed to passing, as many nominally “colored” people in New Orleans did. He was twenty-nine years old, married, and in the shoemaking business. Like Desdunes, he followed the script. On June 7, 1892, he boarded a train, one travelling only within the state of Louisiana, and sat in the car for white passengers. When the conductor asked if Plessy was colored, he said yes, and was removed from the train and booked. (Train conductors were in a ridiculous position: even if the law required trains to have separate cars, riders could still sue the conductor for misclassifying them.)

Plessy came before the same Judge Ferguson, who ruled that, since there had been no claim that the cars for white and black passengers were not “equal,” there was no constitutional issue. The Louisiana Supreme Court agreed, adding that, if the Separate Cars Act were declared unconstitutional, many other state laws—on separate schools, intermarriage, and so forth—would be affected. The U.S. Supreme Court finally heard the case four years later, and on May 18, 1896, it issued its opinion.

As Luxenberg points out, the concept “separate but equal” (the phrase the Court used in Plessy was actually “equal but separate”) was hardly a novelty. It had been a customary way to throw out complaints about segregation since before the Civil War. In Plessy, the Court added a gloss that became almost as famous as the phrase itself: “We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority,” it said. “If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” As Charles Black, a Yale law professor, wrote of these sentences many years later, “The curves of callousness and stupidity intersect at their respective maxima.”

The assumption that separate facilities for blacks—railroad cars, steamboat berths, schools—were not inferior is a good example of the Supreme Court’s formalism in that period of American law. Everyone knew the assumption was false. The Jim Crow train car was sometimes called “the dirt car,” and “colored” schools were often shacks. It was also absurd to claim that the “badge of inferiority” was a black person’s construction. In Dred Scott, the Chief Justice, Roger Taney, had said that, constitutionally, black people were “a subordinate and inferior class of beings,” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

In Brown v. Board of Education, the Warren Court would cite psychological studies showing that black children are harmed by segregation. That’s not something a nineteenth-century court would have considered appropriate (and some people did not consider it appropriate in Brown). In cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court looked to the text of the statute. If the statute did not prescribe unequal conditions, then, legally, conditions were not unequal.

The Justices in the Plessy case were aware of the repercussions that a robust interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment would have, of course. Political realities, as always, put a constraint on judicial reasoning. The Supreme Court in the early twentieth century did decide cases in favor of African-American and Asian-American plaintiffs, but it mostly kept its hands off state racial regulations.

When Louis Martinet formed his Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, he wrote to Frederick Douglass and asked for his support. Douglass refused. He said he could not see how the case could help things. Douglass was proved correct. The decision was the worst possible outcome, and the one Plessy’s lawyers had feared. It stamped a constitutional seal of approval on state-mandated racial segregation. The case may not have received much press attention at the time, but over the next fifty years it was cited in thirteen Supreme Court opinions.

It’s true that in 1890, when the Separate Car Act was passed, Southern race relations were still somewhat in flux. Blacks voted and were politically active. The Louisiana legislature that passed the act had sixteen African-American members. And the composition of the Supreme Court is subject to change; the lawyers for Plessy might have hoped that they would draw a winning hand.

By 1896, though, the endgame was clearly in view. Six years earlier, Mississippi had become the first state to contrive laws to disenfranchise black voters, rather than rely solely on terror and fraud. Other states followed, although extralegal methods remained in use, and, by the end of the century, the work of disenfranchisement was complete. There were 130,334 African-Americans registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896; in 1904, there were 1,342. In Virginia that year, the estimated black turnout in the Presidential election was zero.

As for the Supreme Court, it had already made the character of its commitment to civil rights clear. In 1873, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not apply to most state laws. And in 1883 it struck down the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875—Congress’s last attempt to address civil rights until 1957.

“When a man has emerged from slavery,” the Court said in 1883, “there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.” Slavery had been abolished for just eighteen years, but the Court felt that that was enough time for African-Americans to get on their feet.

As Richard White tells us in his excellent volume on Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, published as part of the also excellent Oxford History of the United States, between seventy-eight and a hundred and sixty-one black men were lynched every year in the decade from 1890 to 1899. It was the height of wishful thinking in 1896 to imagine that the Court would undergo a conversion in the case of Homer Plessy. The only consolation Plessy’s advocates had was that, when they brought their case, there were a hundred others also challenging segregation laws in the courts. If it hadn’t been Plessy, it would have been someone else.

Luxenberg has chosen a fresh way to tell the story of Plessy. “Separate” is a group biography of three figures in the case: Albion Tourgée, one of Plessy’s lawyers; Henry Billings Brown, the Justice who wrote the majority opinion; and John Marshall Harlan, who filed the lone dissent.

Edmund Wilson, in “Patriotic Gore” (1962), his book on the literature of the Civil War, describes Tourgée as “an obstinate man, physically and morally courageous, with bad judgment in practical matters and possessed by an intransigent idealism,” and Luxenberg’s portrait is much the same. Tourgée fought in the Union Army and was badly wounded. After the war, he moved with his wife and daughter to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was active politically and as a writer and speaker on behalf of Republican policies. He called himself “a carpet-bagger of the very worst sort.”

But by 1877, the year the Army was pulled out of the South and Reconstruction ended, he had come to believe that the whole effort was an exercise in hubris—which would be the line on Reconstruction for decades afterward, and the line taken in two of the most popular Hollywood movies ever made: “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and “Gone with the Wind” (1939). In 1879, Tourgée published a novel whose title expressed his judgment on Reconstruction—“A Fool’s Errand.” The book was compared with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and became a big best-seller. It made Tourgée famous and, for a short time, wealthy.

Tourgée’s empathy for the Southern point of view did not erode his commitment to racial justice. After leaving North Carolina, he moved to upstate New York and began writing a column under the name Bystander, advocating for racial equality. At Martinet’s invitation, he served as an adviser on the Plessy case, and was instrumental in devising the legal strategy. He presented the case in oral argument before the Supreme Court.

Luxenberg is kinder in his treatment of that argument than other commentators have been. Instead of the standard claim that segregation was a denial of equal protection, Tourgée argued that it was a denial of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. A person’s reputation is property, he said, like an inheritance; and “the most precious of all inheritances is the reputation of being white.” In being denied seating in the white car, Plessy was deprived of his property without due process of law.

The theory is less cockeyed than it sounds. It turns on the absence of a definition of “colored” in Louisiana law. Tourgée was saying to the Justices: Louisiana law gives state officials complete discretion in determining racial identity. Homer Plessy looks a lot like you. If someone with authority to do so classified you as nonwhite, would you view the situation with equanimity? No, you would think that you had been deprived of something without due process of law.

This is basically the situation the Lums would complain of three decades later. In both cases, the argument was both an appeal to the racial prejudices of the Justices and essentially a racist argument in itself. Whatever the calculation, it went over the heads of the Court. Justice Brown, in his opinion, expressed bafflement. Plessy was colored, he said. How could he be deprived of something—“the reputation of being a white man”—that he never had?

Richard Kluger, in his landmark history of Brown v. Board of Education, “Simple Justice” (1975), called Justice Brown “one of the Court’s dimmer lights,” and nothing Luxenberg tells us suggests that this was unfair. Brown was from Lee, in western Massachusetts. He went to Yale, then pursued a legal career in Detroit. Like most Northerners, he was a Unionist, not an abolitionist, and he paid a substitute to take his place in the war rather than be drafted, as was perfectly legal. He married a woman with a large inheritance and cultivated a high style of living. He campaigned for Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 Presidential election. Grant gave him a federal judgeship in 1875, and he was appointed to the Supreme Court by Benjamin Harrison in 1890.

Brown’s goals in life, Luxenberg says, were “ascent, dignity, money, stature.” He almost certainly saw his opinion in Plessy as a routine disposition of a familiar challenge. What gave his opinion significance was its sweeping justification for segregation laws, and its timing, right at the moment that Jim Crow descended like a cage on the South.

The establishment of Jim Crow was not simply a matter of laws suppressing African-American voting and segregating schools and transportation, or of a pattern of social practices that became ingrained. Jim Crow was a regime that was created over and over again. In 1930, the city of Birmingham made it illegal for a black person and a white person to play dominoes or checkers together. In 1932, Atlanta prohibited amateur baseball clubs of different races from playing within two blocks of each other. In 1935, Oklahoma required the separation of races when fishing or boating. In 1937, Arkansas segregated its horse-racing tracks. Jim Crow required a constant reminder of who was in charge. Its mania for racial separatism was insatiable.

Harlan, the dissenter in Plessy, came from a family with a long history in Kentucky politics. His father was a U.S. congressman; his grandson, also John Marshall Harlan, became an Associate Justice on the Warren Court. Kentucky was a border state—it allowed slavery but did not secede—and Harlan began his career as a pro-slavery Unionist. He led a regiment against rebel forces in Kentucky, but he and his family had owned slaves, and he condemned the Thirteenth Amendment as “the overthrow of Constitutional liberty.”

As Luxenberg shows us, Harlan built his reputation mainly by following the political lead of others, but after he was appointed to the Supreme Court, in 1877, he became more independent. He was the only card in the judicial deck that Martinet and Tourgée could count on. He had filed the sole dissent in the so-called Civil Rights Cases in 1883. He had dissented when the Court upheld the Mississippi law mandating segregated cars on interstate trains, in 1890. He would later dissent, along with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in the Court’s pro-business ruling in Lochner v. New York (1905).

Harlan’s Plessy dissent seems unequivocal. “In the eye of the law,” he says, “there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” He saw as well as Douglass did the long-term effect of the Court’s ruling, warning, “The judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case.” When John F. Kennedy addressed the nation on civil rights from the Oval Office, in 1963—the speech that initiated the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—he quoted from Harlan’s dissent.

Harlan’s conception of color blindness had limits, however. “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States,” he wrote in his dissent. “Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race.” It seemed to him a blatant example of how arbitrary the Louisiana separate-cars statute was that it would permit “a Chinaman [to] ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens,” while forbidding African-Americans to do so. This head-spinning obiter dictum about the racial status of the Chinese helps explain why Holmes once compared Harlan’s mind to “a powerful vise the jaws of which couldn’t be got nearer than two inches to each other.”

“Separate” is deeply researched, and it wears its learning lightly. It’s a storytelling kind of book, the kind of book that refers to Albion Tourgée as Albion and John Harlan as John, and that paints the scene for us (“On a bright and beautiful night in late October 1858 . . . ”). Luxenberg does not engage in psychological interpretation. He doesn’t mention, for instance, that Brown’s Yale classmates called him Henrietta because they thought he was effeminate—which might have contributed to Brown’s eagerness not to appear like a man who didn’t belong. And he dismisses in a footnote speculation that Robert Harlan, a man of mixed race who grew up as a member of John Harlan’s family, might have been a half brother. Even if he wasn’t in fact related to John, however, it might have mattered if John believed otherwise.

Luxenberg skillfully works the military and the political background into his narrative. Still, despite ample quotations from letters and diaries, the three principals retain a sepia quality. They seem stiff, earnest, florid—Victorian. And there is a lot of biographical backstory. It takes four hundred pages to get to Homer Plessy; the argument and the decision are over after just twenty pages, and then the book abruptly ends. The afterlife of the case gets no real attention. Brown v. Board of Education receives a passing mention in a brief epilogue summarizing the post-Plessy lives of Brown, Harlan, and Tourgée.

And it does seem a misjudgment to tell the story of an important civil-rights case as the story of three white men. The temptation is understandable. Tourgée, Brown, and Harlan left large archives; Martinet left nothing. Even Tourgée’s letters to Martinet working out their legal strategy are lost; we only have copies of four of them that Tourgée kept. Little is known about Homer Plessy outside his role as a test-case plaintiff. But, if we are trying to understand the Plessy case as a human story, Martinet and Plessy, and millions of other African-Americans, are the ones who took the risks and suffered the consequences.

“Separate” is a different way to tell the story, but it does not give us a new story. It doesn’t help us with the big historical questions about the persistence of Southern racism after the Civil War. Those questions are central to David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski’s “Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy After Reconstruction,” a fine-grained and valuable scholarly analysis. The authors argue that “rendering the South as peripheral to the history of the United States minimizes the extent to which the South was ‘co-creator of the nation’s history’ and obscures the ways in which the ideas and practices underpinning this racial order were projected across the United States.”

As many historians have pointed out, one of the reasons the South was able to exercise a stranglehold on race relations in national politics was the supervention of the famous three-fifths clause, once the focus of abolitionist attacks on the Constitution. When the former slaves were counted as full persons, the former slave states gained twenty congressional seats, a twenty-five-per-cent bump. They also gained votes in the Electoral College. They suppressed the votes of their African-American residents, then got full representational credit for them.

But where was the political will in the rest of the country? Separation of the races did not originate in the slave South. The nature of the institution made that impractical, if not impossible. As Luxenberg says—repeating one of the main points of C. Vann Woodward’s classic study “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” first published in 1955—segregation began in the North, where it was the product not of the practice of slavery but of Negrophobia. In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those states where servitude has never been known.” This helps explain why the majority opinion in Plessy was by a man from Massachusetts who had no experience with slavery, and the dissenter was a man from a slave state who had once owned slaves himself.

After 1900, the South had Jim Crow, a legal regime of separatism, but the rest of the country had ghettos, redlining, gerrymandering, quota and exclusion systems, and the artifice of the local school district. De-facto discrimination—we now call it “institutional racism” or “structural racism”—is much harder to address. It requires more of people than just striking down a law. ♦

The Family Business That Put Nashville Hot Chicken on the Map

Letter from Nashville

From audm.herokuapp.com

Three days after Christmas, in a part of northeast Nashville that many locals describe as “dicey,” a Ford Explorer crashed through the front of a discount-tobacco shop at one end of a strip mall. Police later called the incident an attempted burglary. The vehicle, which had been reported stolen, was propelled by a brick weighting the accelerator. The store was empty—it was four-thirty in the morning. The authorities arrived to find the Ford abandoned and the shop on fire.

Two doors down, just past Jennifer Nails, Tyreese Lawless had come to work early, as usual, to clean the fryers at Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. After hearing a boom, he got out of there, in case the flames reached the restaurant. Lawless began calling colleagues—to them, and to generations of customers, Prince’s is a kind of second home. Firefighters went inside and started yanking down ceiling tiles and singed insulation. Ducts and wiring lay exposed, and there was extensive damage from smoke and water. As a precaution, the fire department shut off the strip mall’s gas and electricity. Yellow police tape outside Prince’s front door stretched toward the shattered glass of the targeted bodega.

When Nashville residents learned that Prince’s would be closed indefinitely, a minor panic ensued. In the past decade or so, the restaurant’s signature dish, hot chicken, has proliferated worldwide, and the original incarnation, fried chicken bathed in fiery spices, has been subjected to relentless permutation—tacos, ramen, sushi, oysters, apple fritters, empanadas, pâté, poutine. The invention, now known everywhere as Nashville hot chicken, sounds like a viral novelty, like the cronut, but it long predates Instagram: it became popular more than eighty years ago, in the city’s black community, and the recipe originated with one family, the Princes. After the fire, @ThuggBugg_ tweeted, “Literally any other hot chicken place coulda burned down but it had to be prince’s.” Addressing the driver of the Ford Explorer, @OcifferJJ declared, “All of Nashville hates you sir.”

In November, Eater named Prince’s one of the thirty-eight essential places to dine in America. Six years ago, the James Beard Foundation gave the restaurant its America’s Classics award, which honors “timeless” establishments serving “quality food that reflects the character of its community.” Nashville hot chicken, the foundation said, was a “totemic” creation. The proprietors of Prince’s, and its many imitators, regularly appear on TV food-and-travel shows. Anthony Bourdain, after sampling the hot chicken of a competitor, Bolton’s, said, “I eat many strange and spicy things around the world, but never in my life have I experienced something like this.” He added, “Is it food? Or an initiation ritual for Yankees?”

Such comments can make eating Nashville hot chicken sound like one of those “challenges” in which people choke down spoonfuls of cinnamon. But for many diners the dish is an obsession. In a short documentary for the Southern Foodways Alliance, a Prince’s devotee describes hot chicken as “worse than dope” in its addictiveness. When Isaac Beard, who owned a massage-therapy clinic in Nashville, first ate Prince’s hot chicken, he thought that it was just O.K.; then, about a month later, he woke up in the middle of the night with an enormous craving. “From that moment on, I was licked,” he later told Timothy Charles Davis, the author of “The Hot Chicken Cookbook,” adding, “There’s something legitimate there in hot chicken that’s not there with, say, Buffalo wings.” (Beard now owns a hot-chicken restaurant, Pepperfire, four miles south of Prince’s.)

On Fridays and Saturdays, Prince’s stays open until 4 a.m., and in those early hours graveyard-shift workers share vintage wooden booths with country-music artists and fans emerging from the honky-tonks. A Prince’s employee once said that Beyoncé and Jay-Z always “send somebody down” for takeout when they’re in Nashville. Devotees from out of town are known to head to Prince’s straight from the airport. In the Reddit thread FoodPorn, someone once reported that a friend “flew from Nashville with Prince’s Hot Chicken in hand like she was carrying a donor organ.”

Ira Kaplan, of the indie band Yo La Tengo, heard about Prince’s from Richard Baluyut, of the band Versus. Kaplan has recalled, “We were told it came in ‘mild,’ ‘medium,’ ‘hot,’ and ‘extra-hot,’ but if we’d never been there before we would not be allowed to have extra-hot. We asked if we could at least taste ‘extra-hot sauce.’ What rubes we were—we were informed that there is no sauce.” Kaplan found Prince’s hot chicken “simultaneously delicious and practically inedible.” He ate it four days in a row. The band wrote a song about it, “Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1),” and then another, “Don’t Say a Word (Hot Chicken #2),” and then another, “Return to Hot Chicken.”

Cayenne pepper is the only confirmed ingredient in Prince’s hot chicken, which one customer calls spicy “down to the bone.”

Photograph by Irina Rozovsky for The New Yorker

The weekend of the Ford Explorer crash, Prince’s had been expected to be even busier than usual: the Tennessee Titans were at home, playing the Indianapolis Colts, and the Predators, Nashville’s popular hockey team, were also in town. One vehicle after another pulled into the empty parking lot and idled, the occupants confounded by the “closed” sign.

The day after the crash, the woman who has been called the “queen mother” of Nashville hot chicken, André Prince Jeffries, drove to Prince’s and parked in her usual spot, four feet from the front door. Jeffries, who is in her early seventies, has run the restaurant since 1980. She wears glamorous hair styles, plum-colored lipstick, a smoky eye, and long lacquered nails. (That day’s shade was lavender.) She also had on gray sweatpants, a matching shawl, Ugg-style boots, and a red-and-purple crocheted cap. Enormous earrings dangled halfway to her chin. When she knows she’ll be interviewed on camera, she may dress in a Prince’s T-shirt; otherwise, she does not advertise. She regularly declines offers to open franchises—she recently rejected a request from Dubai—and to star in reality-TV shows.

Clutching a cane, Jeffries made her way into Prince’s, where a few employees had started cleaning up. Spotting a brick near the front door, she shrieked, “Is that the brick that was on the accelerator?” Her event planner, Katrina Ware, laughed and said, “Naw, that brick’s in evidence now.” Jeffries said, “Have mercy!” Her tinkly voice is laced with cackle and rasp.

People eat at Prince’s because of the chicken but also because of the story behind it. Jeffries has spent the better part of her adulthood recounting the legend, for she inherited both the recipe (which is secret) and the family lore (which is unverifiable). In the nineteen-thirties, her great-uncle Thornton Prince III was a handsome pig farmer and fond of women. One Saturday night, he dragged home late, angering his girlfriend. The next day, Prince asked her to make his favorite food, fried chicken. The girlfriend complied, but with a furious twist: she saturated the bird in cayenne pepper and other spices.

No doubt, Prince was expected to suffer, and did—but he also enjoyed the experience. He began replicating the spicy fried chicken and selling it on weekends, out of his home. He eventually opened a small restaurant, the BBQ Chicken Shack, which became beloved in the black community. It became popular with white people, too, especially after the restaurant moved to a location near the Grand Ole Opry. Under Jim Crow, the Princes were not free to dine wherever and however they wanted, or to use the front door of white establishments, but they never told their own customers where to sit or what door to use. The matter handled itself: black patrons sat up front; whites entered through the back door and sat in back.

Nashville, which was chartered in 1806, on the Cumberland River, is closer to Bowling Green, Kentucky—Union territory—than to Memphis. By the start of the Civil War, it was one of the country’s sixty largest cities, with a population of seventeen thousand. The Union Army saw Nashville as a potential supply center, and captured the city in 1862. Escaped slaves flocked there, adding to an already sizable African-American population. The Prince family had been enslaved at a plantation south of town. Thornton Prince III seems to have been born around 1893.

The civil-rights leader Ralph Abernathy once said that, in the black community of the nineteen-thirties, “chicken was the best of all meals to serve,” especially on Sundays: “Gospel bird” was “better than ham, better than pork chops, better even than roast beef or steak.” Timothy Charles Davis, in his cookbook, points out that poor people don’t tend to document their lives the way well-off people do, and that American journalists of the early twentieth century covered only “high-end, white-tablecloth places, not workingman joints peopled by African-Americans.” The name of the girlfriend whose attempt at revenge inspired a culinary phenomenon is unknown. The story is “so perfect, it almost—almost—seems created out of whole cloth,” Davis noted, but he added, “Does the lobster roll have such a story? I think not.” The chef and TV personality Carla Hall, a Nashville native who made hot chicken the main attraction at her former restaurant in Brooklyn, has said that, whatever the details about Thornton Prince III’s love life, “the chicken ain’t nothing but the truth.”

After Prince died, around 1960, the restaurant got passed around to relatives, eventually landing with Jeffries, the granddaughter of one of his brothers. She made some tweaks. First, she changed the name to Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack. “Hot chicken is not barbecue! ” she told me. She replaced the restaurant’s nineteen-inch cast-iron skillets with deep-frying vats. Then, after a mother asked her why Prince’s didn’t serve chicken that wouldn’t terrify her children, Jeffries introduced varying levels of spiciness. The current maximum level, XXXHot, is irresistible to spice-hounds and fools. The menu board, hanging above the order window, features an image of flames.

YouTube is filled with footage of people trying hot chicken. Rendered speechless, they cough, tear up, towel off. The best way to eat fried chicken is with your hands, but Nashville hot chicken leaves the fingertips glistening with red residue. Jeffries still talks about the customer who made the mistake of wiping his eyes with his fingers—he knocked over furniture in his agonized rush to reach the bathroom faucet.

Jeffries enjoys pointing out that men tend to order the hottest varieties to see if they can stand them, whereas women order their chicken that way because they like the heat. Hot chicken’s unofficial ambassador, the former mayor Bill Purcell, likes to say that, at Prince’s, anything hotter than Hot “ain’t chattin’ food.” When the English food writer Tom Parker Bowles, the son of Camilla, ate at Prince’s, in 2004, he ignored a recommendation to start with Mild or Hot and instead ordered XHot, telling himself, “This will show these lily-tongued Southerners what true British grit is really about.” He was soon silently berating himself as a “vainglorious twat.”

In 2013, Sean Brock, then a celebrated chef in Charleston, showed up at Prince’s with a pal. Jeffries took their order. “Am I crazy if I get the extra-hot?” Brock asked.

“That’s suicidal chicken,” Jeffries told him.

“I gotta do it,” Brock said. “But I’m nervous.”

The friend asked him, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Jeffries said, “Just don’t let it happen in here.”

Prince’s is so secretive about its recipe that employees must agree in writing not to divulge details. Cameras aren’t allowed in the kitchen, which is mostly walled off from customers’ view. Devotees are left to guess at the ingredients: paprika, garlic, onion powder, vinegar, pickle juice, pork fat, bacon grease, sugar? Perhaps the chicken is marinated in spiced milk, dredged in spiced flour, fried in spiced cooking oil, and then coated in a spicy paste. (“Milk?” Jeffries told me. “No, no, no!”) On Reddit, someone theorized that, during the preparation of hot chicken, “the oil combines with the chili to make some kind of undigestible lava.” Semone Jeffries, André’s daughter, who is in her early fifties and runs Prince’s with her mom, can be seen in the background of one video, ladling out a rich, auburn liquid; but, she has hinted, the secret isn’t “just dousing some spicy stuff on top at the last minute.” A customer once described Prince’s hot chicken as spice “down to the bone.”

“I’m downstairs.”

A food’s spiciness can be measured in Scoville Heat Units, a gauge developed, in the early twentieth century, by Wilbur Scoville, a pharmaceuticals chemist from Connecticut. A jalapeño, at its hottest, measures 8,000 S.H.U. Cayenne, the only confirmed hot-chicken ingredient, is at least four times hotter than that. There is a growing market for peppers that have been cultivated expressly for pungency. At last check, the hottest chili pepper, as recorded in August, 2017, by Guinness World Records, was the Carolina Reaper, which comes in at 1.64 million S.H.U. Prince’s fundamental recipe predates newfangled peppers.

Cayenne stimulates the nervous system, awakens mucus, and can cause the heart to beat faster. The heat builds on itself. Jeffries likes to say that hot chicken will sober you up and clean you out. She calls it “a twenty-four-hour chicken.” Activities that may not pair well with Nashville hot chicken include a road trip, a long flight, a first date, work, sleep, and your wedding. First-timers have been advised to prepare for hot chicken by putting a roll of toilet paper in the freezer at home.

As Brock, the chef, started to eat, he took off his eyeglasses. Jeffries told him, “Start out slow.” She added, “Say your prayers.”

Brock soon said, “This has ruined fried chicken for me.”

“This is not a boring chicken,” Jeffries agreed. “It’s a passionate food.”

His face flushed, his nose running, Brock said, “I think I’m hallucinating.”

At one point during the global spread of Nashville hot chicken, someone bad-mouthed the dish as a “stunt food.” Andrew Zimmern, the host of the Travel Channel show “Bizarre Foods,” disagrees. He first tasted hot chicken forty years ago, at Prince’s. “This is not gimmick fare,” he said. “This is not a scorpion you get inside a lollipop at the museum gift shop. This is a way of eating.”

Decades ago, a former cook at Prince’s left and started his own place, Columbo’s, in downtown Nashville. In the nineties, Bill Purcell, who at that time worked as a lawyer, represented the restaurant in a tax matter. After trying its hot chicken, he ate at Columbo’s at least once a week. When Columbo’s closed, amid downtown redevelopment, Purcell shifted his allegiance to Prince’s, even though it was a twenty-minute drive to northeast Nashville.

In that part of town, forty-two per cent of the children live below the poverty line. Prince’s Zip Code, 37207, has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates. Recent neighborhood crimes have included assault, robbery, and break-ins. Jeffries often refers to “my little thugs”; she is talking about the reputed drug dealers who “watch over” her and protect her business from harm.

Purcell noticed that Prince’s attracted an unusually broad cross-section of residents. The mixture of race, income, and ethnicity struck him as representative of the city he wanted Nashville to be. He told me, “This particular food is one that, literally from the start, has brought people together who otherwise would not be in the same place.” Hot chicken, he realized, might be Nashville’s “only indigenous food.” In 1986, Purcell, a Democrat, was elected to the state legislature, and he eventually became the majority leader of the Tennessee House of Representatives. In 1996, in his last official act as a lawmaker, he declared Prince’s to be the best restaurant in Tennessee, and presented Jeffries with a printed proclamation. She hung it on the wall at Prince’s. After it grew yellow and grease-stained, she framed it.

In 1999, Purcell was elected mayor. He served two terms, until 2007. He ate at Prince’s so often that people joked the restaurant had become his second office. During his final year as mayor, Nashville had its bicentennial, and Purcell commemorated it by creating the Music City Hot Chicken Festival. The event, held each Fourth of July, begins with a parade of fire trucks.

Other local restaurateurs began attempting to replicate Prince’s hot chicken, often adding their own twists. Dozens of places in the Nashville area now specialize in hot chicken—Slow Burn, 400 Degrees, Party Fowl, TNT B-B-Q—and indicate the level of spiciness with such terms as Poultrygeist, Executioner, and Shut the Cluck Up. Fans plan entire weekends around which hot-chicken restaurants they’ll visit. Zimmern, the Travel Channel host, told me that the mystery surrounding Prince’s recipe has led to a range of innovation: “All Nashville hot chicken is not created equal. The seasoning dredges are getting more complex, the oil baths are becoming more bespoke. Safflower oil, heated to three hundred degrees and then cooled before adding the ground hot chilies, is one famous joint’s secret.”

Nashville hot chicken can now be found everywhere from Los Angeles (Howlin’ Ray’s) to Melbourne (Belles Hot Chicken) to Singapore (Chix Hot Chick’n). In Chicago, the chef Jared Van Camp started Leghorn Chicken after developing a “hot tooth.” A dreadful form of hot chicken is now on the menu at KFC, and Pringle’s recently introduced a flavored potato chip that the Washington Post called “an insult to the fine citizens of Nashville.”

Although certain upstarts have earned admirers, Prince’s remains the gold standard. Bolton’s, which grew out of Columbo’s and developed “hot fish,” is also a favorite, and, like Prince’s, it remains embedded in the black community. A lot of the new places were started by white people, including, in 2001, the country-music star Lorrie Morgan. (Her restaurant has since closed.) In 2012, Hattie B’s Hot Chicken opened and became popular, especially with tourists; the company, which is family-owned, now has several Nashville locations and has opened outposts in Birmingham, Memphis, Atlanta, and Las Vegas, with plans to expand throughout the Southeast.

A window of the Prince’s location in northeast Nashville. In 2016, Jeffries opened a second location, in a former sports bar on the other side of town.

Photograph by Irina Rozovsky for The New Yorker

A few years ago, at a conference in New York, Devita Davison, the executive director of FoodLab Detroit, used Hattie B’s and Prince’s as examples in a lecture about restaurants and race, titled “Black Food Matters: Race and Equity in the Good Food Movement.” Recounting the story of Prince’s, she said, “Hot chicken, particularly in the African-American community, was more than just about eating chicken.” She cued up an image of an article, in the magazine Food Republic, bearing the headline “Meet the Man Who Launched the Nashville Hot-Chicken Craze.” The man in question wasn’t Thornton Prince III; it was John Lasater, the chef at Hattie B’s. Lasater, who is white, trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York. His brother-in-law, Nick Bishop, Jr., who is also white, co-founded Hattie B’s; Bishop’s grandfather was a C.E.O. of the Morrison’s Cafeteria chain.

As Davison observed, when “African-American entrepreneurs don’t grow rich” from an invention like hot chicken, it’s not necessarily because rivals make superior food; it’s because black entrepreneurs still struggle for such resources as bank loans and industry networks. The food world had been talking about “who gets credit for what cuisine.” Davison said, “I don’t think that white voices should be centered around a dish” invented and popularized “by black businesses eighty years ago.” She concluded, “We cannot afford to have a movement that is based” in “white privilege.”

Jeffries often jokes that Prince’s success allows her to “pay one more bill,” but her modesty is considered part of her shrewd business sense. She lives in a one-bedroom place but owns several properties in the Nashville area. Whenever Jeffries is asked what the Prince family thinks of copycats, she demurs; Thornton Prince, after all, was the first of the opportunists. The Nashville Tennessean recently tweeted, “What does the owner of Prince’s think about all these hot-chicken imitators?” One Prince’s fan replied, “Ms. Andre has always been so gracious about the Nashville Hot Chicken trend popularizing other restaurants. But Prince’s is the OG. And that’s that on that.”

On the Friday before the fire, Bill Purcell met me for an early lunch at Prince’s. The restaurant opened at eleven-thirty, and by eleven-fifteen the line outside was a dozen deep. Jeffries wasn’t expected until the late afternoon, because she always works the shift that ends at 4 a.m.

After serving as mayor, Purcell had returned to practicing law; he arrived at Prince’s in an overcoat, a blue blazer, and a striped scarf. Inside, he was pointed toward a table by the window, where an overturned Styrofoam plate, on which someone had Sharpie’d the word “reserved,” sat atop a Christmas-themed tablecloth. Purcell, who is in his sixties, with silver hair and an amused demeanor, said, “If I haven’t had hot chicken in a week, I feel a little puny.”

Customers place their orders at a cutout in a plywood wall that separates the kitchen from the dining room. After paying, they listen for their number to be called. Each dish is made to order—veterans know they’ll wait forty-five minutes or more.

“What you need to decide is really very simple—leg or breast, and what temperature,” Purcell told me. The leg quarter, which costs six dollars, consists of a drumstick and a thigh; the breast quarter, seven dollars, comes with a wing. Purcell only gets the leg quarter, Hot. “This is a hot-chicken shack,” he said. “If you wanted medium, you’d go to a medium-chicken shack.” We both got the leg quarter, Hot.

Bad fried chicken isn’t worth the loss of the bird; on this I am a reliable judge. Born and raised in Mississippi, I am the granddaughter of a fried-chicken savant who always managed to keep the meat tender and the skin crispy. The chicken that I saw on the plates at Prince’s looked like my grandmother’s, only much darker—an almost umber shade. “It’s such a personal chicken,” Jeffries told me later. “Our hands touched every piece. It’s not like in a machine.”

Our server was Tyreese Lawless—the man who was later cleaning the fryers when the Ford Explorer rammed into the tobacco shop. Purcell introduced Lawless, a former semi-pro football player, as a rising “superstar” of hot chicken. Lawless told me that when Semone hired him she had warned, in her soft-spoken way, that if he discussed the marinade with anyone he’d “never work in the hot-chicken world again.” When he brought us our lunch, he described the secret ingredient as “love.”

Prince’s hot chicken is served on two slices of white bread. A short stack of dill-pickle chips sits atop the chicken, speared with a toothpick. The bread and pickles may appear to be garnish, but they are, as the Beard Foundation put it, “the closest things to life rafts your taste buds will find.” The bread, having absorbed the spices and oil, appears to be soaked in blood.

The two chief attributes of hot chicken—fried chicken and spice—aren’t an inevitable pairing. Southern food tends not to be spicy, except for tangy barbecue. A lot of Deep Southerners like jalapeño jelly (with cream cheese, on crackers); and we may add jalapeños to corn bread, or to pintos or collards, and speckle our turnip greens with pepper sauce. But, beyond Cajun territory, spice isn’t a staple, making hot chicken an outlier in Southern cuisine. Fans have noted the convergence of several pleasures at Prince’s: the quality of the fry; the “complexity” of the seasoning; the degree of the burn. You either get it or you don’t. I got it. The spices were deep and smoky, and as we ate Purcell said what I was thinking: “I wouldn’t want the chicken to be hotter, and I wouldn’t want it to be less hot.”

Nearby, a customer named Ashenae Goins and her daughter, Madison Steptoe, were waiting for their order. We invited them to sit with us until their number was called. Goins, who is thirty-five, works for Verizon, and Madison is in the ninth grade. Both were wearing hijabs. When Purcell and I mentioned that we’d been talking about where Prince’s customers come from, Goins said, “We’re from here. We’re natives.”

Goins had eaten at Prince’s all her life. An uncle who worked the third shift used to bring it home, in an oily brown bag. “Prince’s would be our Saturday-night thing,” she recalled. Madison had just been saying that one of her earliest memories was standing in line at Prince’s with her mother. When the other hot-chicken joints started opening, Goins tried them, but declared everything but Prince’s “fake.” At work, her colleagues call her “the hot-chicken connoisseur.”

Goins was visibly pregnant. Jeffries generally advises prospective mothers to choose Plain or Mild (unless the baby is due—some believe that spicy food induces labor). Goins told me, “Since I’ve been pregnant, it’s not always hot enough for me. I dream about it. The other day, I called my husband and said, ‘Can you stop and get me some Prince’s?’ He was, like, ‘Right now?’ I said, ‘Right now.’ ” Goins said that her doctor had told her, “I don’t know if you should be eating that,” and that she had responded, “If I don’t, I’ll die.”

As she waited for her lunch, she thought about it and said, “I could go to Medium.”

Madison said, “You can’t go Plain, though. I know that.”

Under Jim Crow, the Princes were not free to dine wherever and however they wanted, or to use the front door of white establishments, but they never told their own customers where to sit or what door to use. The matter handled itself: black patrons sat up front; whites entered through the back door and sat in back.

Photograph by Irina Rozovsky for The New Yorker

The next day, I went to Hattie B’s with old friends who live in the Nashville area. Hattie B’s is their favorite. They especially like the sides—the black-eyed-pea salad, the pimento mac and cheese. The restaurant was spacious and loud, with piped-in pop music. The crowd was predominantly white. The line moved swiftly, past a self-serve soda station. I ordered my chicken Hot. The food showed up within minutes.

At that point, I had eaten Nashville hot chicken only once in my life, and yet I felt a snobbish disdain for the spices that ostentatiously coated the crust; the granules resembled crimson sand. I also tasted too much sugar. That night, I was back at the strip mall, where dozens of cars stretched from the Prince’s parking lot all the way to a nearby highway.

For years, fans of Prince’s clamored for a second location. Jeffries didn’t want to do it. “If you franchise something like this, you miss all of that intimacy,” she once said. In 2016, she gave in, and Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack South opened, in a former sports bar, on the other side of town.

Employees jokingly call the northeast Nashville location “the shack” and South “the palace.” The shack seats two dozen people; the palace seats more than a hundred. It’s got big-screen TVs, and beer on tap, and it closes well before four in the morning. On the walls, instead of the grease-stained proclamation and posters, there are enormous photographic portraits of Jeffries and Thornton Prince III. Aesthetically, it’s not all that different from a Ruby Tuesday (or a Hattie B’s). On Reddit, someone wrote, “Bougie Prince’s is much nicer in every conceivable way than O.G. Prince’s. And somehow for that, it’s just less magical.”

The night after the fire, every seat was taken at the palace, with a line to get in. Whenever someone entered, an employee hollered, “It’s a forty-five-minute wait for all orders!” I ordered a leg quarter, Hot, to go, and sat at a table near the entrance to wait. Julie Tracy and Eric Hinton were sitting there, too. Tracy, an out-of-work hotel clerk in her late fifties, was lamenting the damage at the other Prince’s and decrying its rivals as diabolical impostors. She has lived in Nashville for thirty-one years and had brought Hinton to Prince’s for his first visit. He had moved to the city only recently, from Illinois, and kept a pen in his pocket in case he felt the urge to write a song. He’d decided to “ease into” hot chicken, with Medium, while Tracy adheres to the maxim “Mild, baby!” She told me, “The Medium about melted my face off—and I like spicy.” She and Hinton had also placed an XXHot order for Tracy’s ex-boyfriend, whose diabetes had cost him a leg and an eye. Tracy told me that when she worked in hotels she steered tourists to Prince’s. “It’s important for people to hear how places like Prince’s came about,” she said. “In the new Nashville, I see too many things gone.”

A few hours earlier, I’d been with Jeffries at the damaged location, as she supervised the cleanup with Semone and several employees. “I’m having the hardest time, trying to adjust,” she told me. “I’m usually here until four in the morning. After all these years, I can’t believe I was off on a Friday.”

Looking around, she noticed that the vintage booths were missing. “Wait a minute,” she called out. “Where are my benches?”

“They went into storage,” Semone explained. She had also stashed away the kitchen equipment, the menu board, and the best-restaurant proclamation. The shack had become such a landmark that, she worried, thieves might try to steal artifacts.

Jeffries looked alarmed. “We ain’t gonna be closed that long!”

Semone explained that there were insurance matters to deal with, and the entire strip mall would need to be repaired and inspected before Prince’s could reopen. She told her mother, gently, “You’re gonna be closed for a few minutes.”

Jeffries absorbed the news. “Life is full of transitions,” she said. “Like my mama always told me, ‘No matter what happens, keep moving.’ ” ♦

The Personal Toll of Whistle-Blowing

Annals of Health Care

From audm.herokuapp.com

On the morning of September 17, 2009, Darren Sewell left his office at Freedom Health, the Tampa health-insurance company where he was a vice-president, and climbed into his Chevy Tahoe. He drove to Sonny’s BBQ, a restaurant nearby, where he picked up barbecue sauce for the sandwich he had brought for lunch. Then he continued on until he reached a drab stretch of road lined with gas stations and scraggly palm trees, where he pulled into a parking lot and waited, as discreetly as possible, to meet his F.B.I. handler.

Sewell, a physician, was thirty-four years old, six feet four inches tall, and broad-shouldered, with an earnest smile and barely perceptible dimples. He was born with one eye slightly crossed, and it still drifted when he was tired or feeling stressed; strangers sometimes found it disconcerting, but his quick wit and easy sense of humor usually dispelled any tension. In the parking lot, Sewell looked around nervously. He noticed that there was a large puddle in the parking space next to his car, where the F.B.I. agent would pull in, so he moved to another space, only to find himself boxed in by other cars. He moved again, but then decided that there were too many people milling around, and drove to a smaller parking annex. There, he found that he could no longer pick up the radio station he’d been listening to, so he pulled out, turned around, and backed his car into the same space, thinking that might help. Later, in audio notes that Sewell recorded about the day, he made fun of his clumsy attempt to be inconspicuous. “I realized I had changed my parking spot about seventeen times,” he said. “And had everyone that was sitting there for lunch probably wondering whether to call the F.B.I. to find out whether I was a terrorist or not.”

Sewell had joined Freedom, which made most of its money administering Medicare plans, in 2007. The financial crisis was beginning, and employment opportunities were drying up across the country, but the sector of the health-care industry that drew its revenue from Medicare was booming. During his time at Freedom, Sewell had become convinced that the company was defrauding the government of hundreds of millions of dollars by carrying out a sophisticated set of scams targeted at a new program called Medicare Advantage. Sewell, an avid reader of John Grisham novels, had been so appalled by what he observed, and so intrigued by the romanticism of going undercover, that he had decided to become a whistle-blower.

When Ed Ortega, the F.B.I. agent, arrived, Sewell joined him in his vehicle. Sewell had told Ortega that a meeting at Freedom later that day might provide valuable evidence. The two men had been working together for several weeks, and they got along well—Sewell later described Ortega as “absolutely the friendliest guy there could be”—but this was their first time out in the field together, and Sewell was taken aback by Ortega’s stern demeanor. “I just didn’t see him as a very intimidating person. Well, when I was in the car with him, I cannot begin to explain how wrong I was,” Sewell later said. “He reached out and shook my hand and nearly broke it . . . you just got this feeling that, my God, if he had to, he could just reach over and snap your neck without even thinking about it.”

Ortega had been a special agent with the F.B.I. for seventeen years, and he was experienced in health-care-fraud investigations. He tried to set Sewell at ease as he rolled up a piece of clear tape and stuck it inside Sewell’s shirt pocket, preparing to outfit him with a small recording device. Sewell was surprised by how low-tech the recorder looked, like something you’d find in a cluttered kitchen drawer. “It reminded me of kind of an old TV-antenna connector, but miniaturized,” he said. The device would record for between two and four hours, and under no circumstances should Sewell fiddle with it. It wasn’t easy to get a judge’s permission to secretly record executives, and strict rules governed how it could be done; Ortega would have to be the one to turn the device on and off.

The wire would capture everything that Sewell did. “All I could keep thinking of was, the whole world in court someday is going to know what radio station I listen to, and hear my pen click, and, you know, when I’m sitting here scratching myself, is the stenographer going to realize that that rustling isn’t papers, it’s me scratching myself?” Sewell said. “But Ed had said in an earlier conversation not to worry, these people are professionals, they’ve heard you burp and fart. . . . You’ll never surprise these guys.”

“Please indulge me—this moment calls for an artistic intervention.”

Ortega warned Sewell that he would probably feel conspicuous, as if everyone he encountered knew immediately that he was wearing a wire, but urged him to go about his day as normal. He gave Sewell some final words of advice—“Don’t worry, just relax”—and then sent him back to Freedom, the recorder running in his pocket.

The first documented whistle-blowing case in the United States took place in 1777, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when a group of naval officers, including Samuel Shaw and Richard Marven, witnessed their commanding officer torturing British prisoners of war. When they reported the misconduct to Congress, the commanding officer charged Shaw and Marven with libel, and both men were jailed. The following year, Congress passed a law protecting whistle-blowers, and Shaw and Marven were acquitted by a jury.

Institutional denial, obfuscation, and retaliation are hallmarks of many whistle-blowing cases. In the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, the New York City police officer Frank Serpico captured the popular imagination when he tried to expose rampant bribery and corruption in the N.Y.P.D., culminating in an episode in which he was shot in the face under bizarre circumstances during a drug raid. (He eventually took his evidence to the Times, which published a front-page story that led to an independent investigation that ultimately validated his allegations.) Since then, notable whistle-blowers have included Karen Silkwood, who revealed worker-safety issues inside an Oklahoma nuclear plant; Jeffrey Wigand, who went on “60 Minutes” in 1996 and disclosed that the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corporation had misled the public about the addictive and carcinogenic properties of cigarettes; Sherron Watkins, who exposed accounting fraud at Enron; and, in 2013, the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who leaked classified information about vast government surveillance programs. Whistle-blowers are usually, but not always, employees or members of the group on which they’re blowing the whistle; after they do so, their lives are never the same.

To become a whistle-blower, Darren Sewell had filed what is known as a “qui tam” complaint—the term comes from a Latin phrase that translates as “he who brings an action for the king as well as for himself.” Qui-tam cases are brought under the False Claims Act, a law passed in 1863, under President Lincoln, in response to war profiteers peddling defective weapons and ailing mules to the Union Army. The law allows private citizens to file suit on behalf of the government against anyone believed to be defrauding the government. The vast majority of these cases involve health care. To some, qui-tam cases are controversial because whistle-blowers share in the money that the government recovers. This provision was included in the legislation to encourage individuals, especially those who might be involved in the theft themselves, to report the abuse. One of the bill’s sponsors, Senator Jacob Howard, of Michigan, said that he had based the qui-tam provision on the “old-fashioned idea of hold[ing] out a temptation, and ‘setting a rogue to catch a rogue’ . . . a reward for the informer who comes into court and betrays his co-conspirator.”

The False Claims Act was strengthened in 1986, after a push by Senator Charles Grassley, of Iowa. Whistle-blowers can now share between fifteen and twenty-five per cent of the recovery, depending on such factors as the importance of their contribution. This change was an effort to recognize the financial toll of being a whistle-blower, both in lost employment and in legal fees incurred during the arduous process of building a case. The law effectively turned average citizens into a fleet of amateur federal agents, and it helped to reveal the staggering amount of money wrongfully extracted from government programs. A recent government report indicated that in 2017 alone almost $2.6 billion was recovered in health-care-fraud judgments and settlements. Two hundred and sixty-two million dollars of that was awarded to whistle-blowers.

Medicare Advantage, the program that Sewell believed Freedom was abusing, is at the center of a growing number of fraud cases, some of which involve the biggest names in the health-insurance industry. The regulations around the issue are complicated, however, and legal questions about what constitutes prosecutable fraud are still the subject of debate. In 2017, the Department of Justice joined a multimillion-dollar case against the nation’s largest insurer, UnitedHealth Group, alleging widespread fraud dating back to 2006. The Justice Department is also investigating several other health insurers, including Anthem, Humana, Cigna, Health Net, and Aetna. An analysis co-authored by Fred Schulte, at the Center for Public Integrity, estimated that insurance companies had received nearly seventy billion dollars in undeserved Medicare Advantage payments between 2008 and 2013.

Peter Budetti, who served in health-policy roles in Congress and as a deputy administrator at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (C.M.S.), told me that experts believe the real figures are up to ten times what the government actually recoups. “We’ve never been able to get a direct measure of exactly how much fraud there is, but one of the clearest indicators is that, the more money is spent on fighting fraud, the more money is recovered by the government,” he said. He now works as an attorney at Phillips & Cohen, a firm that specializes in whistle-blowing cases. Fraud perpetrated by companies in the health-care industry, he said, is especially pernicious. “On the one hand, they are stealing public money,” he told me. “And on the other hand that money is not going to where it’s supposed to go, which is to taking care of people. They aren’t stealing from people who are selling imported shoes. They are stealing from people who would otherwise be immunizing kids or delivering babies. That’s the heart of it.”

Critics of the whistle-blower payments argue that the windfalls could encourage people to induce corporate sabotage. William P. Barr, President Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, has called the False Claims Act an “abomination” spurred by “the mercenary motives of private bounty hunters.” But Budetti told me that, in his experience, most whistle-blowers are driven by frustration and moral outrage, not by money. “Whistle-blowers are one of the absolutely central ingredients in fighting health-care fraud,” Budetti said. “We’re lucky we have a system that encourages them to come forward.”

Darren Sewell grew up in Champion, Ohio, a small city about forty minutes from Cleveland, the oldest of three boys. Their father, Rickye, ran a family company that made industrial switchgear and other manufacturing equipment; their mother, Barbara, was a stay-at-home mom when the kids were young, and then took a job in administration at a medical-supply company. Most of the Sewell boys’ free time was devoted to sports: Sewell played baseball, basketball, and varsity soccer, and was a competitive swimmer, eventually qualifying for nationals.

Sewell was the academic star of the family and, according to his brother David, a magnanimous friend. “Darren didn’t care about material things,” David told me. “He drove around in a ratty car. But he never hesitated to buy everyone’s drinks, or to treat when we went out to dinner or on trips.” After graduating from high school, Sewell attended the University of Akron, and then earned his medical degree in an accelerated four-year program at Northeast Ohio Medical University. He did his residency at a hospital in downtown Orlando, and thrived in the adrenalized atmosphere of the emergency room. “In the E.R., you’ve got to be able to assess a patient really quickly, and figure out what’s wrong, handle that, and move on. He was so good at that,” David said. “He had stories: ‘I’ve got one finger plugging the guy’s heart from a gunshot wound and I’m making coffee with the other.’ ” Sewell saw a lot of trauma patients, and the work, though exciting, was draining. “The daily grind of being an E.R. doctor—he didn’t want to continue that,” David said.

Sewell was also interested in business, and he eventually left emergency medicine; he spent a few years working at H.M.O.s before joining Freedom Health. The company was owned by Kiran C. Patel, a cardiologist who was born to South Asian parents in Zambia and immigrated to the U.S. in 1976. Patel was already an enormously successful entrepreneur. In the nineteen-nineties, he took over a struggling H.M.O. called WellCare, which he sold to a group of investors in 2002 for two hundred million dollars. He was the financial backer of a high-end oceanfront hotel and resort near Tampa, and an investor in the Tampa Bay Times. In 2007, he bought Freedom and a smaller company, called Optimum Healthcare, for fifty million dollars, and joined them under the umbrella of one parent company. Freedom had been a family operation, and Patel maintained the tradition, appointing relatives to important positions in the company. Freedom’s founder, Devaiah Pagidipati, was also a physician of Indian descent who had immigrated to the U.S. in the nineteen-seventies; his son, Siddhartha Pagidipati, a former investment banker known as Sidd, served as Freedom’s chief operating officer under Patel. Around the office, Patel was known as Dr. K. (Patel, Devaiah Pagidipati, Siddhartha Pagidipati, Freedom, and Optimum declined to comment for this article.)

Patel was a high-profile figure in the Tampa area, due, in part, to his prolific philanthropy. Tampa’s conservatory building bears his name, and his wife, who is a pediatrician, sits on the board of the city’s center for the performing arts. The couple has sent money to India to rebuild a village and to establish schools, and has donated large sums to local colleges—the University of South Florida includes the Patel College of Global Sustainability—and to hospitals and other health ventures. Patel has spoken publicly about having a skin-pigmentation disorder called vitiligo, for which he has chosen not to seek treatment. “I have the respect of society, and my wife tells me that people love me for who I am,” Patel told a publication called Florida Trend, in 2017.

Patel has gained particular notoriety for the private estate he is building in north Tampa, renderings of which have been printed in the local press. The residence will be a cross between the Taj Mahal and Versailles—a sixty-eight-thousand-square-foot palace with a fountain, a twelve-car garage, a Hindu temple, domed pavilions, and latticework made of red sandstone imported from Rajasthan. There will be separate buildings for Patel’s three grown children and their families, spread across seventeen acres that abut White Trout Lake, which is celebrated for its sunset views. The estate’s centerpiece is a grand ballroom.

At Freedom, it was clear to Sewell that Patel wanted to expand quickly and then sell the company, as he had with WellCare. He seemed to have ambitious goals, such as quadrupling the number of members within three years. According to Sewell, the internal philosophy at Freedom was to keep costs low, to move swiftly, and to be aggressive.

“I wish you could have thought up warmer disguises.”

Medicare Advantage, on which Freedom’s business focussed, was part of a trend toward the privatization of health care. President Lyndon Johnson created the first national health-care program in 1965, after fierce political battles, when he signed the Social Security Act Amendments. The law established a fund to provide health-insurance coverage, known as Medicare, to Americans over the age of sixty-five, and to provide coverage to the poor through a sister program, Medicaid. “No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony, in Independence, Missouri, noting that eighteen million Americans were seniors, many with low incomes. “No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents, and to their uncles, and their aunts.” Johnson gave the first Medicare card to former President Truman.

There are currently sixty million seniors enrolled in Medicare, approximately eighteen per cent of the U.S. population, and the number is expected to rise to sixty-seven million by 2030. Medicare remains one of the most popular government programs. It has saved millions of people from financial ruin in old age, and, because of its importance to a crucial voting demographic, it has weathered decades of tax cuts and reductions to the social safety net. But the growing population of elderly Americans and the steep rise in the price of health-care services have spurred concern that Medicare could become insolvent; policymakers such as Paul Ryan, the former House Speaker, have argued that elderly citizens should receive vouchers to purchase health insurance on the open market, and there has been a push among certain lawmakers to privatize parts of the program.

Traditional Medicare is structured as a fee-for-service program: the government pays fixed amounts to doctors and other health-care providers for each service. The system is straightforward—the more health care you provide, the more money you are paid—but easy to abuse. Malcolm Sparrow, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the author of “License to Steal: How Fraud Bleeds America’s Healthcare System,” told me, “Under the fee-for-service system, the financial incentives were always to overutilize and overbill, and, if you were a crook, to fabricate claims.”

Medicare Advantage was supposed to mitigate the problem by harnessing the discipline of the private sector. In the nineteen-eighties, when health-care spending represented about nine per cent of the G.D.P. (the number is now eighteen per cent), President Reagan signed a bill that created an early version of the program. Medicare Advantage permits private health-insurance companies, including Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and United, to offer coverage to seniors under a new model: the companies receive a set amount of money from the government each month for each senior, and it is up to the companies to provide the prescribed coverage with the funds. “These were devices to make the health-care costs of the government more predictable and slower growing, and to shift the responsibility and accountability to a private entity whose entire well-being depended on prudent management,” Len Nichols, a professor of health policy at George Mason University, who served as a health-policy adviser during the Clinton Administration, told me. “Medicare Advantage is a long-standing part of the Republican strategy of privatizing Medicare.” The Advantage plans competed for patients with one another, and with traditional Medicare; they began offering perks such as health-club memberships, dental coverage, and rebates. And all this market competition would encourage better services and more preventive care, driving down costs. At least, that was the idea.

Around the time that Darren Sewell joined Freedom, his brother David was living in Ohio, working at G.E. Aviation. He was an expert in Six Sigma, a system for improving efficiency, originally developed by Motorola, and Sewell encouraged him to move to Florida and apply those skills to the health-care industry. David made a presentation to Sidd Pagidipati, the Freedom C.O.O., and was hired as a consultant. One of David’s first assignments was to improve the company’s growing backlog of client calls. (The C.M.S. closely monitors how long Medicare Advantage providers place members who call in on hold.)

I recently met with David at his home, in Tampa, where he lives with his partner, Sami, and two children, ages three and one. He is smaller than Sewell, athletic and tanned, with silvery hair and a sprinkling of stubble. He favors Florida-casual attire—khaki shorts and untucked button-down shirts—and seems to always have a stainless-steel canteen in his hand. He gets emotional when talking about his older brother, whom he described as fearless, the kind of person who would talk to anyone, and who frequently charmed women who seemed unlikely to pay attention to him. “It never ceased to amaze me,” David said.

When David first moved to Florida, the brothers were both single and lived fifteen minutes apart. They met for early-morning swims and made weekend trips to the beach with Sewell’s eight-year-old daughter, whom he had part time, in a shared-custody arrangement with a former girlfriend. The brothers talked about almost everything. One evening, Sewell told David that he had observed troubling practices at Freedom.

Sewell was the third-highest-ranking employee at the company; he helped lead the department that made clinical decisions and administered medical benefits to patients. He was privy to high-level corporate activity, and he sensed a general attitude of contempt toward the government. He believed that Freedom was intentionally rooting out sicker, more expensive enrollees by having sales agents target them and then encourage them to leave Freedom, an illegal practice known as “lemon-dropping.” He kept thinking of his grandmother, and how easy it would be for a salesperson to manipulate her.

To David, Sewell described the company’s behavior as “brazen”; he had already done significant research into the process of filing a qui-tam complaint. At one point, he jumped up, pulled a book from his shelf, and handed it to David. “You have to read this,” Sewell said. The book, by John W. Schilling, was titled “Undercover: How I Went from Company Man to F.B.I. Spy—and Exposed the Worst Healthcare Fraud in U.S. History.” Schilling had been a mid-level accountant at Columbia/HCA Healthcare, a multistate hospital chain co-founded by the former Florida governor (and now senator) Rick Scott, in 1987. In 1994, shortly after starting work at the company, Schilling became convinced that it was routinely overbilling Medicare. He filed a qui-tam case and became an informant for the F.B.I. The case proceeded in secret for several years, as the government gathered evidence. Scott resigned from the company in 1997, four months after the investigation became public, and began his career in Republican politics. Ultimately, his company paid $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines and penalties to settle a long list of charges, and two executives were convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison.

Freedom was a much smaller enterprise, but Sewell felt that he had stumbled onto a similar case. He had already spoken with attorneys at Phillips & Cohen, the law firm that had represented Schilling. It seemed to him that each time the government’s health-care policies changed the private sector found new ways to maximize profit—even if, in some cases, it meant bending or breaking the rules. Medicare Advantage was just the latest example, and it was new enough that regulators and fraud investigators hadn’t yet figured out all the ways in which it could be gamed. Sewell’s imagination began to spin. “He loved James Bond movies. The aspect of wearing a wire really intrigued him,” David recalled. “There was one moment where he said, ‘Donnie Brasco’s got nothing on me,’ ” referring to an F.B.I. agent who infiltrated the Mafia and became the inspiration for a film.

David recalled asking, “How the hell are you going to be able to pay an attorney?” Sewell explained that reputable lawyers in qui-tam cases usually work on a contingency basis: they take only those cases which they believe are solid, and are paid if the case is successful, typically getting forty per cent of the whistle-blower’s award. He suggested that David file the suit along with him. David hesitated.

“I’m certainly more reserved and private than Darren was,” he told me. They talked about Patel; he was wealthy and well connected, and they couldn’t rule out the possibility that he or his allies would retaliate against them. “I had more concerns about the retaliation aspect,” David said. “This guy is held up in the medical community, the Indian community, he’s done this philanthropy stuff. He’s held in very high regard. For any individual to go against that, you’re not on equal footing.” David was also worried about exposing the rest of the family to a backlash if he and Sewell filed the case jointly. “If you’re already in this, and taking the fire, taking the bullets, is there value to me also coming under fire?” David said. “Not from a selfish standpoint. It was partly about the family—if he’s going to take all the fire for the family, do we really want others to come along?” David decided not to join the suit, and Sewell continued on his own.

Mary Inman, who is now a partner at the law firm Constantine Cannon, had spent ten years representing whistle-blowers when her firm flew Darren Sewell to San Francisco to meet with her for the first time, in 2008. Inman is petite and lively, with wide brown eyes and wild dark hair. She has a tendency to smile brightly, even when she’s about to deliver unwelcome news. Her colleagues refer to her as the “whistle-blower whisperer.” She talks about serving as an informal therapist and parent to her clients during the lonely, multiyear process of developing a qui-tam case. Part of the purpose of the initial meeting, she told me, is to “size up” the potential client, to figure out whether he or she is trustworthy. She asks herself, “Do I really want to spend the next six years with this person?”

Inman told me that, when Sewell walked into the room, she thought, “This guy is weird. He’s tall, he’s awkward, he’s got this eye thing going on.” But, she continued, “it sort of added to the mad-scientist bit. He was so impossibly intelligent.” She was soon won over by his self-deprecating humor, and described him as a “gentle giant.” Sewell told her that he believed Freedom was “cherry-picking”—recruiting healthy enrollees who needed little or no medical care—in addition to lemon-dropping. He said that the company had offered sales agents cash bonuses for getting seniors who required a lot of health care off Freedom’s insurance rolls. Inman told me that the behavior sounded “odious.” She said that, as the meeting with Sewell wore on, “it became very clear to me he knew exactly what he was doing. He was very intelligent and credible, and he knew he was in a fairly compromised position with some pretty questionable characters.”

While Inman and her associates debated whether to take the case, Sewell sent her documents that he said would show how the company tracked sick patients and targeted them for disenrollment. He also shared a photograph of a conference table that Patel had installed in the office. The table was enormous, with a gleaming marble top. The faces of Patel, his wife, and his father were carved down the center and into the base, in a manner reminiscent of Mt. Rushmore.

Inman also did her own research, which revealed that Patel’s first company, WellCare, had been raided by the F.B.I. several years after he sold it, during a Medicaid-fraud investigation; WellCare executives were eventually indicted, in 2011. Its former general counsel was later sentenced to six months in prison, and the company paid two hundred and twenty-seven million dollars to settle civil and criminal charges. (Patel was not implicated in the case.) Inman found Sewell refreshingly honest about the appeal of the potential financial rewards. “He was human,” she said. “I told my partners, ‘I like this guy, we’re going to bet on him. It may not turn into anything, but we’ll try.’ ”

In a qui-tam case, a complaint is filed by the whistle-blower in secret, under seal, so that the government can conduct its own investigation without alerting the target. If federal prosecutors find the allegations credible, the Justice Department may decide to sign on as the lead plaintiff, which gives the case added heft and credibility. (The whistle-blower can also move forward on his or her own if the government declines.) Inman warned Sewell that being a whistle-blower would take a personal toll. He wouldn’t be able to talk about the case with anyone but his attorneys. Once the suit became public, he might be branded a traitor in the business community and have trouble finding another job. It would be lonely and stressful. But Sewell said that he wanted to proceed.

For several months, Sewell went to work as he normally did. When he came home, he began his second shift, e-mailing spreadsheets and documents to Inman from his Gmail account and then spending hours on the phone with her, explaining what they meant. There was a sense of time pressure; if a different Freedom whistle-blower filed a complaint first, Sewell might not be able to participate in the resulting case. On August 17, 2009, he finally filed his complaint with the district court in Tampa, alleging that Freedom was manipulating enrollment rolls. The complaint also alleged that Freedom was engaging in service-area-expansion fraud—misrepresenting the number of health-care providers in its network in certain counties, so that it could expand the areas in which it offered Medicare Advantage. Sewell and Inman filed hundreds of pages of supporting documents, including internal e-mails, spreadsheets, and marketing files. Then they waited for a call from the U.S. Attorney’s office, which came a few weeks later.

Randy Harwell, the chief of the civil division at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tampa, told me that the biggest challenge his office faces when assessing a new complaint is determining the whistle-blower’s motives and figuring out whether there are inconsistencies in the story. “This is the busiest whistle-blower docket in the country,” Harwell told me. “We get all kinds in this office—crusaders, people who are just really upset, people who are just crooks themselves, frankly. It’s not uncommon at all for complete grifters to come in and pitch cases.” But Sewell, he said, was credible from the start. Sewell and Inman eventually presented fifty PowerPoint slides of evidence to Harwell and a group of other investigators. “All of life is a bell curve, and the whistle-blower docket is certainly a bell curve, and there’s wheat and there’s chaff,” Harwell said, and added that he remembered Sewell “being a very squared-away, knowledgeable guy. It seemed like he knew what he was talking about.”

The next step was the government’s investigation. For more than a year, Sewell led a double life as an undercover agent, helping the government build its case. He became accustomed to a gruelling routine. Before work, he would meet Ed Ortega, the F.B.I. agent, in various parking lots—sometimes at a Catholic church or a motel, other times next to a Bank of America. Ortega would outfit Sewell with the wire. Then Sewell would go to work and record. A few hours later, he’d slip out to meet Ortega again to return the device, hoping that no one would notice his absence. It was critical that Sewell not discuss the investigation with anyone; if the seal was broken, Sewell was repeatedly warned, his role would be imperilled and he could get nothing. The only person potentially excluded from the circle of silence was a spouse; because Sewell wasn’t married, there was no one he could talk to.

In 2010, while the investigation was under way, Sewell was moved to a different job at Freedom, in the Medicare-revenue-management department, where he reported to an executive named Mital Panara. In his new role, Sewell was exposed to a different side of the business, including the risk-adjustment department, which assigned Medicare Advantage enrollees codes that reflected their diagnoses. Certain codes and combinations of codes led to larger reimbursements from the government, and it was simple, with modest computer-programming skills, to figure out how to generate the most profitable codes based on the group of patients you had. Of course, companies were supposed to apply codes only to patients who actually had the corresponding conditions, as determined by a physician who had treated the patient.

Sewell quickly noticed many coding inaccuracies, almost all of which were in the company’s favor, resulting in higher government payments. Sewell believed that Freedom was committing risk-adjustment fraud—instructing its internal coding auditors to scour medical records for places where the codes could be amplified, a practice known as “capturing” codes. Sometimes, he later alleged, Freedom pressured doctors to schedule unnecessary appointments and to assign additional codes that the internal data miners thought would be more profitable.

Sewell also saw further evidence of the service-area-expansion fraud: Freedom was “renting” groups of doctors in various counties in order to gain C.M.S. approval to expand, and then dropping the doctors after receiving it. In one example that Sewell found, Freedom said that there would be six in-network oncologists in Duval County, a large county in Florida, but patients couldn’t find a single one. The company’s strategy seemed to be paying off: in 2009, Inc. named Freedom one of America’s fastest-growing companies.

Sewell’s case was one of the first to show prosecutors and attorneys how Medicare Advantage could be defrauded. When, in January, 2011, a prospective whistle-blower named Benjamin Poehling contacted Inman’s law firm, Inman instantly understood what his allegations meant. “It was because of Darren that when Ben called me I was able to appreciate the gravity of what he was saying,” Inman told me. “Darren was our origin story of risk-adjustment fraud.”

Poehling grew up in Bloomington, a suburb near Minneapolis. His father was a high-school social-studies teacher who also sold residential real estate, and his mother was a stay-at-home mom. “My parents always surrounded me with positive role models,” Poehling told me recently. He attended a Catholic high school, and the family went to church every Sunday. He began playing golf at an early age, and the game helped shape his moral outlook. “Golf is a unique sport—you’re your own referee,” Poehling said. “One of the first times my dad introduced me to golf, he said, ‘Look, Ben, golf is very different from other things in life. No one is policing you. You are writing down your own scores. You’ll have multiple opportunities to cheat.’ His one rule was that you always follow the rules.”

Poehling graduated from Drake University, in Iowa, in 1998, with a degree in actuarial science and finance, and then joined Arthur Andersen, a multinational accounting firm, as a consultant. In 2002, Arthur Andersen, which was embroiled in the Enron scandal, split apart. Poehling went to work for a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, which had been one of his clients at Arthur Andersen. (United’s current and former C.E.O.s are also alumni of Arthur Andersen.) Around the time that Sewell joined Freedom, Poehling was working with United’s risk-adjustment and Medicare Advantage teams.

I met with Poehling in Bloomington, where he lives with his wife and three young children. He said that, over time, he realized that it wouldn’t be difficult to steal from Medicare Advantage. “The risk-adjustment system, it’s essentially an honor system,” Poehling told me. “It’s very similar to golf.”

Poehling was disturbed by what he described as a chart-review program at United, in which the company systematically went through hundreds of thousands of medical records, searching for places to increase the diagnosis codes in order to make patients appear sicker. In some cases, legitimate codes had been left out and needed to be added. But, according to Poehling’s allegations, the system was set up primarily to find opportunities for increases, and designed not to delete inappropriate codes. United had an aggressive internal culture, he said, with bonuses for executives who raised reimbursement numbers. In a 2007 e-mail provided to the Justice Department, the former C.F.O. of the group that managed United’s Medicare Advantage plans wrote to an executive at a data-analytics subsidiary, “Wanted to get together with you and discuss what we can do in the short term and long term to really go after the potential risk scoring you have consistently indicated is out there. . . . You mentioned vasculatory disease opportunities, screening opportunities, etc with huge $ opportunities. Lets turn on the gas! What can we do to make sure we are being reimbursed fairly for the members and risk we take on more than what we are currently doing.”

Poehling said that he briefly considered quitting his job, but decided that that would be unprincipled. He mulled over his other options. He could raise his concerns with United’s board of directors, but there was no way to be sure that they would take action. He could send an anonymous complaint to the C.M.S., but he didn’t know if the agency had the resources to pursue his case. (The limited C.M.S. budget can make it challenging for the organization to police fraud.) Filing a qui-tam complaint was personally risky, but at least it insured that the allegations would be investigated. “I’m sitting in this situation, and I don’t know if what United is doing is illegal or not. I’m not a lawyer,” Poehling said. “But it went against all the principles I had been taught and had lived by my entire life.”

Poehling said that the size of the alleged fraud made the matter urgent. “I would not have done this if this were a ten-million-dollar issue or a five-million-dollar issue, or if it were just limited to one part of the company,” he said. “But that wasn’t the case. This was potentially a multibillion-dollar issue. The scale of it was huge. And this was known for many years at the highest levels at the largest health-care company in this country.” (In a statement, a UnitedHealthcare spokesperson wrote, “Our company followed the Medicare Advantage program rules, and has been transparent with the government about our approach.” The spokesperson added that the C.M.S. “has continued to accept our bids and pays us under our contracts.”)

Poehling spent the next several months collecting documents and evidence, and, on March 24, 2011, he filed a qui-tam complaint.

In the summer of 2010, Freedom hired a nurse and coding specialist to conduct a mock audit of its diagnosis data in order to prepare for a possible audit by the government. According to evidence that Sewell gathered, the specialist found that approximately eighty per cent of the diagnosis codes in the company’s records were unjustified—a shocking number. When the specialist reported the results to Panara, Sewell alleged, he asked her to assess the codes more “leniently.” (Panara denies this.) Medicare regulations dictate that Freedom should have reported the invalid codes to the government and reimbursed it for millions of dollars in overpayments, but, according to Sewell, the company never did so. (In a statement, Panara’s lawyer wrote, “Panara did nothing to violate the False Claims Act or any federal regulations,” adding that he “Admitted no wrongdoing and suffered no personal penalties” in the case.)

After more than ten months, the government prosecutors were still unsure whether they had sufficient evidence to join Sewell’s case. They kept asking him to get more. “He liked the cloak-and-dagger stuff,” Inman told me. “At the start, everyone is kind of flattered. It’s kind of exciting. He would joke about it, humor was his device.” But, as the investigation dragged on through 2011 and into 2012, the novelty wore off and the stress started to weigh heavily on Sewell. He worried that Freedom would discover his actions and blacklist him in the industry, and that the legal case would fall apart. He also worried that he would implicate innocent or lower-tier employees through his indiscriminate taping. He became increasingly short-tempered and distracted. “Some days, you could just see the stress on him,” David said. “When he was under stress, his eye would deviate. I saw him every day, and I could tell something was going on.”

Even Ortega seemed frustrated by the government’s lack of momentum. Finally, in the spring of 2012, in a bid to move the investigation forward, Ortega decided to approach Panara and attempt to persuade him to flip. It was a risky move—if Panara said no, he might alert the rest of Freedom’s senior management to the investigation.

Ortega approached Panara after a conference and confronted him with comments that Sewell had recorded—comments that, from their context, likely made it clear that Sewell was the government’s source. Panara refused to coöperate.

The government rushed to send subpoenas to Freedom. Finally, two and a half years after Sewell had launched the case, Freedom executives knew that they were under investigation. The next day, Patel called an emergency meeting and instructed employees not to destroy documents or other evidence. Then Freedom launched its own inquiry into the fraud. Inman told me that this type of internal investigation is often intended in part to identify which employees, if any, have been coöperating with the government. (The law prohibits companies from retaliating against whistle-blowers, but punitive actions are nevertheless common.) Company attorneys began interviewing employees. When it was Sewell’s turn, he declined to answer certain questions, and instead responded as Inman had coached him: “I want to help you. I’m a coöperating witness in a federal investigation. And I’m represented by counsel.”

It would have been imprudent for Freedom to fire Sewell, but the revelation that he had become a whistle-blower marked the beginning of a swift and painful series of events. Within a few days, according to allegations in his complaint, Sewell was locked out of his office computer. His access was restored, but a few days later he discovered that his personal laptop had disappeared from his bag while he was out of his office for a few minutes. Sewell panicked. Anyone in the Freedom office could have taken the computer, which likely contained many of his communications with his lawyers, and also the presentation that he and Inman had given to government prosecutors. The laptop was never recovered.

In April of 2012, Freedom placed Sewell on administrative leave; in September, he submitted his “involuntary resignation.” Later that fall, while he was at home looking for a new job, Sewell heard that his former employers were telling others in the industry to avoid working with him. Former colleagues also told Sewell that Freedom executives had claimed that he was responsible for the fraud—that he had filed the whistle-blower complaint to punish the company for failing to promote him.

It was no surprise, then, when Sewell had trouble finding a new position in the clubby Florida Medicare-insurance industry. Each time he seemed close to getting an offer, the job would suddenly fall through. Sewell resisted the idea of moving out of the state, since he wanted to stay close to his daughter. And the government still hadn’t made a decision about whether to join his case. Everything was on hold.

“We’re looking for a long dining table that can symbolize the growing chasm between us as our marriage devolves into a bleak charade of alienation and indifference, for around twelve hundred dollars.”

In a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine, in 2010, a group of researchers studied how the qui-tam process affects whistle-blowers in major health-care-fraud cases. The study’s subjects reported feeling intense pressure while coöperating with the government, and said that the cases created high workloads. They expressed frustration with how slowly the investigations moved and with how little information prosecutors shared with them. They reported anxiety and uncertainty that lasted for years, and some spoke of being threatened, of losing their jobs, and of being blocked from new employment.

A few of the comments were particularly telling. One interviewee, in response to a question about what advice he would give a potential whistle-blower, wrote, “[Can they] afford 5 years of their life in turmoil?” Another said, “Part of your ability to do anything about this is keeping yourself together,” and suggested that whistle-blowers find someone “like a minister or a shrink who’s confidentiality-protected,” because “this could go on for a while.” A high proportion of whistle-blowers reported divorces or other marital strain, family conflicts, and stress-related health issues including shingles, autoimmune disorders, panic attacks, insomnia, and migraines. Several of them said that the financial consequences were devastating. “Honestly, I would not advise anybody to do it,” one said.

In mid-2013, Sewell was still without a steady income, and he had begun digging into his savings to pay the bills. “He was going broke,” David told me. “He liquidated I.R.A.s and his retirement accounts.” He became increasingly depressed; he gained weight, then lost it again. Inman recalled telling Sewell, one night on the phone, about the severe postpartum depression that she had experienced. “I know what you’re going through. I’ve been at the bottom of the well,” she told him. “I’m asking you—as your lawyer and your friend—you need to stay with us.”

Sewell’s fortunes appeared to take a turn when he was hired as a consultant by a midsized physicians’ group. But, a few weeks into the job, he was told, with little explanation, that the position had ended and that he should leave. Sewell was devastated. He felt certain that his former employers had learned about his new job and intervened. “It felt like there was an optimism there,” Inman said. “And, when it happened again, it was different. You could just see, it was defeatism. And I just felt like that was it.”

“That was the one that really just crushed him,” David said. Sewell told other family members, “They got me. They got me good this time.” David suggested that the two of them go on a beach vacation or a fishing trip, so that Sewell could think about something else. Sewell agreed that that was a good idea.

A few days later, in early September, 2014, Sewell was rushed to the hospital with a serious head injury after an accidental fall inside his house. Medical personnel found a clot in his brain. After three days in the hospital, Sewell died, at the age of thirty-nine.

Amid the shock and grief, David was informed that, as the executor of his brother’s estate, he would have to take Sewell’s place as the whistle-blower in order for the Freedom case to proceed. He was stunned to learn the extent of what Sewell had uncovered. David was planning to get married, and he had concerns about taking on such powerful adversaries. But, if he didn’t do it, the case would be terminated, and everything Sewell had gone through would be for nothing. There was very little left in Sewell’s estate for his daughter—except, potentially, his portion of the fraud recovery. David agreed to stand in as the whistle-blower.

According to Malcolm Sparrow, of Harvard, unchecked fraud could lead to the wholesale destruction of government health-care programs. Systemic theft creates cost inflation, he explained, which increases political pressure to make cuts, often affecting both the healthy and the unhealthy parts of a program. “That’s going to translate in one way or another to less medical treatment when it’s needed, and clear incentives for the insurance companies to provide poorer-quality care,” Sparrow said. “Indiscriminate cost cutting hurts the honest people more than the dishonest. If you just cut reimbursement rates, they’ll just bill more. They’re not constrained by the truth.” If politicians don’t learn to discriminate between fraud and legitimate activity, Sparrow warned, “this will grow like a cancer and destroy your program.”

In February, 2017, the government announced that it was joining Benjamin Poehling’s case against United. United has denied the charges and is fighting vigorously against them in court. The company filed a motion to dismiss the case, and, last February, a judge granted the motion for some of the claims but allowed a central allegation—that United had failed to correct diagnosis codes that it knew were false—to move forward. In its defense, the company cites a principle known as actuarial equivalence, which requires that the government treat Medicare and Medicare Advantage plans equally. United argues in court filings that the C.M.S. “does not delete or otherwise account for the unsupported diagnosis codes . . . when it is calculating risk scores for its traditional Medicare enrollees,” and that, as a result, requiring Medicare Advantage plans to delete unsupported codes without making traditional Medicare do the same violates actuarial equivalence.

Poehling left the company in 2012, before the case became public, and feels fortunate to have found another job. After our interview in Bloomington, Poehling and I took a drive. We circled United’s headquarters, a cluster of mirrored buildings in Minnetonka, just west of Minneapolis. We also visited Edina, an affluent area where many United executives live. We passed country clubs and grand houses surrounded by rolling lawns. It was late fall, and the streets were blanketed in golden leaves.

Poehling noted that United’s stock had performed spectacularly in recent years. “If you ask any health-care executive now, one of the driving forces in their business is government health-care programs,” he said. He seemed dubious that Medicare Advantage was working as intended. “A lot of enrollees get free gym memberships, free dental care. They get all these things you don’t get with fee-for-service Medicare. When people say, ‘Well, how do these private companies do it, how do they fund it?’ Well, this is how they fund it!” he said. “The fundamental question is, does Medicare Advantage really save the government money?”

In 2016, seven years after Darren Sewell filed his case, the Justice Department informed Inman that it would join the suit. In May of 2017, after months of difficult negotiations, Freedom settled charges that it had violated the False Claims Act and agreed to pay $31.7 million. Freedom’s former chief operating officer, Sidd Pagidipati, paid seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to settle charges related to his role in the alleged service-area-expansion fraud. Neither admitted liability. The whistle-blower’s share of the recovery, $6.4 million, will be split between Sewell’s estate and his attorneys. The company paid another $2.3 million for Sewell’s attorneys’ fees. Inman recently moved to London, which is a top source of American whistle-blower lawsuits outside the U.S., to build a new practice for her firm there.

Five months after the Freedom settlement, Patel announced that he was selling Freedom’s parent company to Anthem, the second-largest insurance firm in the country, reportedly for more than a billion dollars. That year, Florida Trend named Patel “Floridian of the Year.” He told the publication that he was planning to dedicate his time to philanthropy. When asked about the Freedom fine, he responded, “I decided to take it as a cost of doing business.” ♦

A Grand Plan to Clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

A Reporter at Large

From audm.herokuapp.com

In May, 2017, a twenty-two-year-old Dutch entrepreneur named Boyan Slat unveiled a contraption that he believed would rid the oceans of plastic. In a former factory in Utrecht, a crowd of twelve hundred people stood before a raised stage. The setting was futuristic and hip. A round screen set in the stage floor displayed 3-D images of Earth; behind Slat, another screen charted the rapid accumulation of plastic in the Pacific Ocean since the nineteen-fifties. Slat is pale and slight, and has long brown hair that resembles Patti Smith’s in the “Horses” era. He was dressed in a gray blazer, a black button-down, black slacks, and skateboarding sneakers, which he wears every day, although he doesn’t skateboard. Onstage, he presented plastic artifacts that he had collected from the Pacific during a research expedition: the back panel of a Gameboy from 1995, a hard hat from 1989, a bottle crate from 1977. “This thing is forty years old,” he said in Dutch-inflected English. “1977 was the year that Elvis Presley left the building for good, presumably.” The audience laughed. Slat then held up a clear plastic dish, filled with shards of plastic. “The contents of this dish are the actual stomach contents of a single sea turtle that was found dead in Uruguay last year,” he said. A picture of the dead turtle flashed on a screen behind him.

Then Slat made his pitch. In the next twelve months, he and a staff of engineers at the Ocean Cleanup, an organization he founded in 2013, would build the system they had designed, assemble it in a yard on San Francisco Bay, then set sail with it, travelling under the Golden Gate Bridge and out into the Pacific. Slat’s destination was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, midway between California and Hawaii, an area within what is known as the North Pacific Subtropical Convergence Zone. The patch is not, as is often believed, a solid island of trash but a gyre, twice the size of Texas, where winds and currents draw diffuse floating debris onto a vast carrousel that never stops.

There are four other ocean gyres in the world, but scientists believe that the one in the North Pacific contains the most trash—nearly two trillion pieces of plastic, weighing nearly eighty thousand metric tons, according to a study that scientists working with the Ocean Cleanup published in the online journal Scientific Reports last March. The study found that ninety-two per cent of the pieces are large fragments and objects: toothbrushes, bottles, umbrella handles, toy guns, jerricans, laundry baskets. Most problematic, and accounting for half of the plastic mass in the gyre, are what sailors call ghost nets: great tangles of mile-long discarded fishing nets weighing as much as two tons, which can ensnare animals such as seals and sea turtles. Attempting to fish out this drifting morass of trash using conventional methods—vessels, more nets—would be a Sisyphean task.

Slat became famous for a TEDx talk that he gave in 2012, in which he expounded on an idea that he had after a scuba-diving trip in Greece during high school. Instead of trying to catch ocean plastic, he thought, perhaps we could let the plastic come to us. “The oceanic currents moving around is not an obstacle—it’s a solution,” he told the audience. Slat, eighteen years old at the time, had entered an aerospace-engineering program at the Delft University of Technology and then, in keeping with the Silicon Valley archetype, dropped out before his second semester. But he had a big, vivid idea, a sweetly tremulous voice, and a goofy sense of humor. (His Twitter bio reads, “Studied aerospace engineering, becomes a cleaner.”) The video went viral, and Slat soon crowdfunded two million dollars from donors in a hundred and sixty countries. The United Nations Environment Programme named him a 2014 Champion of the Earth, noting his “keen mind” and “the lack of fear that marks out visionaries.” The jury for the world’s largest prize for design, the Danish INDEX: Award, granted him a hundred thousand euros, stating that his “incredibly ingenious idea will greatly improve the condition of the Earth’s greatest natural resource, as well as the lives of millions.” To date, Slat has hired eighty employees and raised some forty million dollars from donors online, charitable foundations, the Dutch government, a few anonymous Europeans, and Silicon Valley billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Benioff. After many iterations and scale-model tests of his invention, he and his team settled on a design.

The mechanism that Slat revealed in Utrecht was surprisingly simple: a two-thousand-foot floating plastic boom, attached to a geotextile skirt that would extend about ten feet beneath the ocean’s surface. The boom and the skirt would together create an artificial coastline that would accumulate flotsam riding the gyre’s currents, eventually forming a sort of shoreline of concentrated trash. Onstage, Slat gave a signal, and a black curtain behind him fell from the ceiling to reveal four monumental anchors. These were, Slat said, key to the concept. They would hang hundreds of metres deep, where the currents are much slower than at the top, insuring that the system moved more slowly than the trash, rather than just drifting around with it.

At regular intervals, Slat explained, a ship would transport the trash back to land, where it would be recycled. Some of it would be turned into plastic products (sunglasses, phone cases, chairs), which the Ocean Cleanup could sell to generate revenue for more systems. He expressed the hope that, by 2020, there would be sixty devices in the gyre; in five years, he said, they would have removed half of its trash. By 2040, Slat promised, he could clear ninety per cent of the trash from the North Pacific gyre.

The Monday after the announcement, Slat arrived at the Ocean Cleanup’s headquarters, an airy, modernist office in Delft. He was in high spirits. “We were at peak enthusiasm,” he told me later. Online donations were rising, and his in-box was full of congratulatory notes. His first meeting of the day was with his top engineers. They did not look cheerful. The lead engineer said that they had been running some new tests. They had not properly accounted for the power of “wave drift force”—the accelerating energy of the surface waves absorbed by the device—which would cancel out the drag of the anchors. The design would not work. Slat recalls the engineer saying, “We’re going to have to do it slightly differently.” There were some possible solutions, the engineer said. How about losing the anchors, allowing the device to race after the trash? Slat grew very quiet. “It was a bit stressful,” he said. “Like, whoops.”

In 1941, two British chemists, V. E. Yarsley and E. G. Couzens, published an article in Science Digest that imagined “a dweller in the ‘Plastic Age.’ ” This Plastic Man, they wrote, “will come into a world of color and bright shining surfaces, where childish hands find nothing to break, no sharp edges or corners to cut or graze, no crevices to harbor dirt or germs.” As the chemists had predicted with surprising accuracy, “tough, safe, clean” plastic was soon everywhere. By the mid-nineteen-sixties, fifteen million tons of plastic were being produced every year. By 2015, the annual total was nearly thirty times greater.

“I would imagine he’s on his way to stomp things in the big city.”

Of all the plastic waste ever created, only about nine per cent has been recycled. Seventy-nine per cent rests, forgotten, in landfills, dumps, forests, rivers, and the ocean. In recent years, less than fifteen per cent of the plastic packaging produced annually has been recycled—the sort of figure that has led Jane Muncke, the director of Zurich’s Food Packaging Forum, to describe recycling as “the fig leaf of consumerism.” The scale of the problem has been difficult to communicate to the public. In the past, images of animals, like the one that Slat showed in Utrecht, have mostly made the biggest impact. In the eighties, photographs of birds and turtles stuck inside six-pack rings caused a public outcry, and eventually the Environmental Protection Agency mandated that ring carriers be biodegradable. In 2005, a picture of Shed Bird, a six-month-old Laysan albatross, whose sliced-open belly revealed a collection of lighters, bottle caps, and other plastic scraps, became an environmental icon, a symbol of our careless throwaway lives. More recently, viral photos and videos have elevated the cause: a dead sperm whale that washed ashore in Indonesia with thirteen pounds of plastic in its stomach, a sea turtle with a drinking straw wedged up its nostril.

In 2015, the environmental engineer Jenna Jambeck co-authored a study, published in Science, in which she calculated that an average of eight million metric tons of land-based plastic entered the oceans each year: the equivalent, she wrote, when she testified about the problem before Congress, in 2016, of “five grocery-size bags filled with plastic going into the ocean along every foot of coastline in the world.” By 2025, she has said, those five bags will be ten. “That got a tremendous amount of pickup and really helped people understand the vastness of scale,” Janis Jones, the C.E.O. of the Ocean Conservancy, a D.C.-based environmental-advocacy group, told me. Sometimes the simplest comparisons have been the most effective. Another report, published by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, predicted that by 2050 there could be more plastic than fish, by weight, in the oceans.

One of the pioneers of plastic-pollution research, and of conveying the findings in tangible images, was Charles Moore, a horticulturist and oceanographer who, in the nineteen-nineties, observed an alarming amount of garbage in the sea while sailing between California and Hawaii. Moore began taking researchers to the gyre, dragging nets alongside his catamaran and cataloguing the contents. In 2001, Moore published the results of his studies: there was six times more plastic in the gyre, by mass, than there was zooplankton, the base of the food chain. Moore—charmingly grumpy, often with a map of the gyre and a dish of plastic shards in hand—went on to discuss the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” “The Colbert Report,” and “Good Morning America.” The image of the patch proved resonant, if misleading. Soon people were saying that you could walk on it and even spot it from outer space.

In fact, most of what Charles Moore found was not large pieces of debris but microplastic—the tiny fragments that remain when the sun breaks down the larger hunks, and which the scientist and former U.S. marine Marcus Eriksen has called “the smog of the sea.” In 2008, Moore hosted Eriksen and an ocean-policy analyst named Anna Cummins on one of his expeditions; the two got married and later co-founded a nonprofit called the 5 Gyres Institute, which made research expeditions all over the world. In 2014, Eriksen, Moore, and seven other co-authors published their findings in the online journal PLOS One: more than 5.2 trillion particles of plastic were swirling in the planet’s oceans, and, in time, much of it would be ingested by ocean dwellers and by creatures that eat fish, including people.

Since then, numerous studies have shown that microplastic is everywhere—in the melting ice of the Arctic, in table salt, in beer, in shrimp scampi. A study last year found traces of it in eighty-three per cent of tap-water samples around the world. (The incidence was highest in the United States, at ninety-four per cent.) A major concern of scientists is that chemical toxins in the microplastics may leach off during digestion, gradually building up in animal and human tissues. Judith Enck, a senior official at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama, told me, “Where we are on plastics is where we were fifteen years ago on climate change. We’re just beginning to get the picture.”

The looming public-health crisis has bolstered environmentalists’ arguments that the priority of governments, N.G.O.s, and the public ought to be preventing plastic from entering the ocean in the first place. According to some analyses, a forty-five-per-cent reduction in the leakage of plastic from land to sea is possible by improving waste management in China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. In the Philippines, Froilan Grate, an anti-plastic activist and organizer who has worked with Eriksen and Cummins, has helped establish zero-waste management systems in cities including San Fernando, which has set up citywide composting and recycling, created wage-paying jobs for garbage collectors, and banned plastic bags. Grate, who is working with sixteen cities across Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, estimates that San Fernando’s new system has prevented fifty-one thousand tons of plastic from entering the environment. But funding for such projects is scarce. When I asked Grate about Slat’s plan to remove the plastic from the ocean, he said, referring to the money that Slat had raised, “If I had forty million dollars, I could set up zero-waste programs all over Asia.”

In 2017, the Ocean Conservancy joined with industry heavyweights to announce that they were fund-raising for investments in recycling companies in Southeast Asia. The initiative grew into an investment-management firm, Circulate Capital, to which companies such as PepsiCo, Dow, Unilever, and Coca-Cola have pledged more than a hundred million dollars. Some efforts to ban the production of single-use plastics are succeeding—and not just in countries like Kenya, which addressed its litter crisis in 2017 by decreeing that anyone caught producing, selling, or even carrying a plastic bag could go to prison for four years or face a fine of up to forty thousand dollars. In October, the European Union advanced a directive to roll out bans on single-use plastics like plates and cutlery. In the United States, thanks to a campaign led by Eriksen and Cummins, microbeads—the exfoliating plastic sprinkles common in toiletries—became illegal in 2018. New York City has banned most polystyrene food containers. Straws, thanks in part to the turtle video, have become a favored cause: California has restricted their use, and Starbucks plans to phase them out altogether by 2020. Lego is introducing a new plant-based form of plastic.

According to Eriksen and other environmentalists, the Ocean Cleanup is a “distraction from the real solutions that the entire global movement is now working on.” And yet it is undeniable that the plastic already in the ocean will not simply disappear without a trace. In this dire moment, people are desperate for heroes. Slat agrees that prevention efforts are urgently necessary. “For us to be successful, that part needs to be taken care of as well,” he told me. But, he added, “all that large stuff will become the small, dangerous microplastic, and then we’ll be in a much worse position.” Given what Slat sees as the inevitable torpor of political change, he believes it is his job to remove plastic from the gyres before it degrades into tiny particles, making the smog worse. “The sooner we get it out, the better,” he said.

Unlike Moore and Eriksen, Slat has never sailed from California to Hawaii. “I do enjoy being at the ocean, like most people, but not so much being on the ocean,” he told me on a visit to New York after the Utrecht event. In 2015, he spent eight days surveying plastic in the Bermuda Triangle, during which he was violently seasick. Slat cares deeply about the environment, but, for him, the appeal of cleaning the oceans is also about puzzle solving. “There’s no better feeling than having an idea and seeing it become reality, emerging in the physical world,” he said.

Still, he knows that people need a story if they’re to get behind his idea. “Don’t get me wrong,” he told me, over tea in a downtown café with Joost Dubois, the fifty-seven-year-old head of communications for the Ocean Cleanup. “The trigger, the passion that made me want to do it, was its bigger significance, which you get from things like the experience I had scuba diving.” On Slat’s scuba-diving trip to Greece, when he was sixteen—as he has said in countless talks and presentations—he saw more plastic bags than fish. At the mention of the well-worn anecdote, he shot Dubois a conspiratorial glance, and they laughed.

Slat had with him a black backpack decorated with sew-on patches from the Ocean Cleanup’s plastic-counting research expeditions, and he was wearing his usual skateboarding sneakers. If I didn’t know him, I might have mistaken him for a high-school student. Many of his supporters recall his youthful demeanor, as well as his ageless poise, as having won them over. Laurent Lebreton, the lead oceanographer for the Ocean Cleanup, described him to me as “a very smart boy.”

Slat was born in Delft, a marine-engineering hub, and grew up in the historic city center, a few blocks from where Johannes Vermeer once lived. Slat’s mother, Manissa Ruffles, who worked as a city tour guide, brought him up alone. Slat’s father, a painter, lives in Croatia. Ruffles told me that, from a young age, Slat acted like a grownup and preferred D.I.Y. fairs to amusement parks. When he was two, he built a small but functional chair out of wood and nails.

In primary school, Slat lost a front tooth after some classmates shoved him into a wall; he now has a chipped crown. The bullying was relentless, he recalled. “Whenever I used to do sports at school, there were those children who were picked last,” he said. “I just wasn’t picked at all.” After switching schools when he was twelve, he made friends with other tinkerers. He started building rockets, then attempted to build a bottle-rocket-powered contraption that would launch a friend into the air. That idea had to be abandoned, but when he was fourteen he managed to get two hundred and thirteen people to stand in a field at Delft University and simultaneously hand-launch bottle rockets. The event established a Guinness World Record.

After the Tedx talk, and his subsequent decision to drop out of university, Slat taught himself more about ocean plastic, oceanography, and engineering. He is the only member of his research team who does not have an advanced degree. But, according to Arjen Tjallema, the technology manager, he keeps pace. Rick Spinrad, one of the members of the Ocean Cleanup scientific advisory board, and, until 2016, the chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, recalled having been skeptical when he first met Slat, in 2016: “I started asking more technical questions, on windage and the relative velocity of plastic particles, on what physical oceanographic models he was considering using. His answers were sophisticated, savvy, and quite candid. When he did not have the tech answer, he certainly knew how to get that answer. It was obvious to me that he had been talking with the right folks.” The list included scientists at the Delft University of Technology and at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.

Slat also had to learn how to build a startup. “There were mistakes,” he told me. He hired one man who he thought had an excellent résumé, with forty years of offshore engineering experience. After a few months, the man told Slat that what they were trying to do was impossible. He did not remain on the job. “We don’t have any glass-half-empty people,” Dubois said.

“I have some exciting news. Baked Brie wheel and I are engaged.”

Slat was spending more time flying around the world in order to network. His mother, with whom he still lived, told me that she sometimes worried about him. “He was always among middle-aged people in gray suits,” she said. “I feel he skipped his adolescence.” Slat now receives fifty speaking requests every day. As the face of the organization, he knows that such appearances are obligatory. “It’s not something I can delegate,” he said. He learned early on, from his success on social media, that people wanted what he was proposing—in particular, he said, a solution that would not mandate that anyone make a huge sacrifice. Slat is an admirer of Elon Musk. “He understands how human psychology works, just like the Ocean Cleanup,” Slat said. “We don’t say, ‘Ban all the plastic’—we sort of provide an alternative that’s better, that’s exciting, that fits into a world view that you can be excited about.” Jennifer Jacquet, a professor of environmental studies at New York University and the author of the book “Is Shame Necessary?,” believes that Slat’s success goes beyond “technological solutionism,” or the “TED Talk obsession.” “We always love the idea of cleanups more than we love the idea of prevention, or mitigation,” she said. “We love treating illnesses more than we do preventing them. But our affinity for simplistic solutions isn’t innate; they’re narratives we’ve been sold.”

In the café, Slat’s phone started buzzing. A video of an interview he had done earlier in the day, with Luke Rudkowski, a right-wing activist and videographer, had just gone online. Slat seemed nervous about what he had said. The subject of the interview was the Bilderberg Meetings, an annual off-the-record forum of international leaders, which he had attended the previous weekend, in Chantilly, Virginia. “It’s very secretive,” Slat said. “It’s like Davos, but with just a hundred people. The King of the Netherlands was there, David Petraeus. A lot of people think it’s some sort of conspiracy thing.” Rudkowski, for instance, referring to the Bilderberg participants, had asked Slat how his mission to clean the oceans would “work with their world-domination plan.”

It was sunny and warm, and Slat suggested that we take a walk. “When you walk, your brain is working better,” he said. “More blood flow.” We headed west to the Hudson River. Passing a small marina, we stopped, leaning over the railing to look at the dark, oily water. Dubois pointed at a drifting cigarette butt—cigarette filters are made of cellulose acetate that leaches toxins into waterways. “Ocean plastic,” he said. “Not ocean plastic yet,” Slat noted. “Will be soon,” Dubois said.

Just that morning, Nature Communications had published a paper by Slat, the oceanographer Lebreton, and four other scientists which estimated that as much as 2.4 million metric tons of plastic could be entering the ocean from rivers each year. Slat is often asked whether he will develop a cleanup system for river mouths, catching the plastic at its source. A few river-mouth systems have already been successfully deployed, including three in Baltimore known as Mr. Trash Wheel, Professor Trash Wheel, and Captain Trash Wheel. Universally celebrated by scientists, and citizens, they are arguably the most beloved and sensible anti-plastic-pollution mechanisms in the country. Slat has a few ideas for river projects down the road, but, he said, “if you do everything at the same time, you’ll succeed at nothing.”

We walked around the southern tip of Manhattan, then cut back inland to a park in Chinatown, the spot Slat had chosen for his next meeting. A tall man wearing a tuxedo and a woman in an evening gown appeared from between two parked cars and crossed the street toward us. The man was Hugh Welsh, the head of DSM North America, an arm of a Dutch multinational company that manufactures products including resins and plastics for the building and automobile industries, electronics, medical equipment, and food packaging. Dubois greeted Welsh warmly; he used to work as a public-relations director for DSM, and Welsh has become a major donor to the Ocean Cleanup. Welsh and his colleague apologized for their attire; they were on their way to a black-tie event.

In recent years, environmental groups such as Upstream and the international movement #BreakFreeFromPlastic, which Froilan Grate helps lead, have argued for what’s become known as “extended producer responsibility”—the idea that the manufacturers of products that become waste must bear the burden of cleaning it up, especially when they send those products to developing countries that have little solid-waste disposal or recycling infrastructure. Slat’s model, which relies on voluntary donations, might seem a good place to start, or, conversely, a compromise that will make plastic producers feel better about doing little to address the problem at its source. An entire fleet of sixty of Slat’s systems could cost around three hundred and sixty million dollars, and Slat hopes that much of this will come from corporations that have a stake in the production of plastic.

Slat politely greeted Welsh, who seemed amused and intrigued by the young Dutchman, as if he were meeting a child celebrity. “Is this your first time to New York?” he asked. Slat, who had been to the city many times before, said, “No, but it’s even more interesting every time.” Dubois and Welsh walked ahead, and Slat bid me farewell. It would be a private meeting. Slat later told me that he hoped companies like DSM, “or anyone who wanted to help the ocean,” would start sponsoring systems. “They would have plenty of space for logos, if there is any company out there that wants to be smart,” he said.

I met Slat again ten months later, in April, at the bleak waterfront assembly yard in Alameda, across the bay from downtown San Francisco. A tower housing Marc Benioff’s company, Salesforce, stood high on the skyline. Across from a row of ancient school buses awaiting retrofits, a turquoise Ocean Cleanup sign announced the presence of the prototype: “Home of System 001.” Resting on head-high risers was an enormous black plastic pipe, the first segment of the two-thousand-foot device’s boom. Workers were about to start the next fusion weld.

Slat’s original idea—using the ocean’s currents to do the work of collecting trash—has remained the foundation of his design, but almost everything else has changed. His first blueprint, presented at the TEDx talk in 2012, owed more to science fiction than to reality: a chain of manta-ray-shaped stations that would passively funnel trash into their bellies. In this model, an underwater system of mooring lines would anchor the entire structure to the seabed, fifteen thousand feet below.

In the summer of 2016, Slat launched a prototype called Boomy McBoomface (a suggestion from social-media followers) into the North Sea. Within two months, the ocean had torn it apart. Although Slat’s engineers were increasingly convinced that mooring a structure to the seabed would not work, Slat was reluctant to let go of the idea. “As an inventor, your inventions are your babies,” he said. Besides, he added, “it can be very risky if you leave an old idea and switch to a new idea too soon. It’s like a new girlfriend. You don’t see the flaws.”

As a banner at the assembly yard showed, the final blueprint had no anchors. Instead, it consisted of a free-floating boom, bent into the shape of a horseshoe, with a skirt secured to its underside. The new idea was that the device, driven by the forces of the wind and waves from outside the horseshoe, would act like a sweeper, reorienting itself when the wind changed direction. Models and tests suggested that the sweeper would travel about fifteen centimetres per second faster than the plastic and collect 2.2 metric tons of trash a week. G.P.S. trackers, cameras, and sensors positioned every hundred metres along the length of the boom would communicate the system’s progress to the team onshore, as well as indicate its presence to passing marine vessels and monitor for wildlife.

Longtime critics of the Ocean Cleanup, such as Miriam Goldstein, the director of ocean policy at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress, have repeatedly pointed to the potential of Slat’s system to hurt the “ecological community” on the ocean’s surface, including jellyfish, water striders, and tiny creatures known as blue sea dragons. In 2014, Goldstein and another oceanographer, Kim Martini, expressed this and other concerns—such as the boom’s ability to withstand harsh offshore conditions—in a critique online. In response, Slat countered by saying that they were not engineers. But, he told me, he did not want to dismiss critics, because their contributions had helped transform the design of the system from his original concept. “All the details are different now, and it’s in part thanks to unsolicited feedback,” he said.

Goldstein and Martini remained skeptical. Stefan Llewellyn Smith, who teaches fluid mechanics at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, also warned that successes in testing pools and in computer models were no guarantee that the system would behave the same way once it was at full size, out at sea. “I’d class the difference in velocity between the plastic and the structure as the main issue,” he told me. Gradually, Slat seemed to be absorbing such concerns, and, at the assembly yard, was more cautious in his promises than he had been earlier. “It still is very much an experimental system,” he said. Research equipment and tools would be sent out to the gyre with the device, and these would, in any case, benefit the scientific community, he stressed: “Always good to better understand the problem.”

Early on the morning of September 8th, the day of the launch, Slat dreamed that the pipe had been sent out into the seawater and had begun to melt. He woke up and could not get back to sleep, so he started preparing for the dozens of interviews he would give that day. The sky was blue, with light winds and warm air. When he arrived at the pier in San Francisco Bay, the top deck of the media boat, a ferry, was already packed with cameramen and reporters. The Ocean Cleanup’s publicity crew, seven strong, wore turquoise “Ocean Cleanup” shirts, which matched the turquoise-painted Maersk tug ship that would tow the system out to the gyre. Maersk, the largest shipping line in the world, was providing the ship and its crew free of charge. A Maersk spokeswoman named Stephanie Gillespie was aboard, and she told me, “Our seafarers sail through this garbage patch and see this plastic everywhere. So it made sense for our company to invest in cleaning it up.”

The team had given Slat’s invention a name, Wilson, for the volleyball that Tom Hanks, lost at sea, befriends in “Cast Away.” Slat held a brief press conference, concluding, “For sixty years, mankind has been putting plastic into the oceans. From this day onward, we’re taking it back out again.” The ferry set off, and a few minutes later Wilson came into view, gliding behind the Maersk ship like a long black tail. It was already speckled with bird droppings.

“It is a nice tie, but it’s mine.”

At the moment when the media ferry was behind the ship, as it approached the Golden Gate Bridge, Slat jumped up to stand on some benches at the bow for pictures, his hair blowing in the wind. Then a deckhand emerged from the bridge and yelled, “Please get down!” Slat, looking embarrassed, stepped off the bench. The journey back was fast and, once ashore, Slat collapsed on a flower planter along the boardwalk. “I’m dead,” he said. Dubois and a few other Ocean Cleanup staff were staring at their phones. Dubois started cheering: “We just got to a hundred thousand Instagram followers!”

A few days later, Goldstein, who had seen news of the Ocean Cleanup’s big day online, ran into Slat at a party hosted by Benioff at the Salesforce tower, during San Francisco’s Global Climate Action Summit. “Congratulations on the launch,” she said. “I hope it succeeds.” “You do?” Slat replied. Martini tweeted about the launch, posing three “critical questions” about the structure’s strength, efficacy, and impact on marine ecology. She said of Slat and his team, “I think they have overexaggerated what they can do, and that sells.” But despite all her doubts, she said, “at this point I kind of hope it works. Maybe they are going to prove me wrong. That’s my secret hope.”

In mid-September, Eriksen sent an e-mail blast to a Listserv called Marine Debris, in which he called Slat’s mission “a misdirected activity” that “makes it harder for those working to focus the narrative to prevention.” Eriksen reminded me, by phone, that only one per cent of the plastic entering the ocean is on the surface of the North Pacific gyre. Scientists still don’t know where, exactly, the rest goes. Eriksen explained that it might be on the seafloor, or suspended as nanoplastic, or have washed back onto the shore. A recent study on debris from the 2011 tsunami in Japan found that, of a thousand boats that the wave carried out to sea, only a hundred were estimated still to be offshore, travelling along the currents. “There are natural mechanisms that eject trash rapidly,” he wrote to the Listserv.

Five weeks after the launch, on October 16th, Wilson, towed behind the Maersk tug, arrived at the North Pacific gyre, a few dozen degrees of longitude east of the International Date Line. An Ocean Cleanup engineer had given Wilson its own Twitter feed, and its coördinates and pictures of its surroundings were posted almost daily. Each picture showed a portion of the pipe, and, when the sun was shining, sparkling blue water. There was no plastic in sight. A week later, Slat tweeted a picture: “First plastic.” Two bobbing white baskets and a scattering of fragments were visible in the waves.

As the weeks passed, Wilson behaved as the engineers hoped it would—reorienting itself when the wind changed direction, catching and concentrating plastic in its arms. But then much of the plastic would float away, back out to the infinite, or drift around Wilson and collect along its back. Slat’s engineers developed twenty-seven hypotheses to explain why this happened. Wilson was moving too slowly, sometimes slower than the plastic. Perhaps the surface plastic was more affected by the wave drift force than they had calculated, or perhaps an inertial current—one much smaller and more localized than the main one they had accounted for—was slowing Wilson’s motion. “This is, of course, something we never saw in the computer models, which underlines why it’s so important that we’re out there,” Slat said, when I met him in New York again, just before Christmas. “Another fun one is the jellyfish hypothesis,” he said. Scientists noticed that Wilson’s arms were oscillating, creating a propulsion that resembles the way a jellyfish swims, and causing Wilson to “swim” away from the plastic.

Slat had a cold, and hadn’t slept much for several weeks. Headlines had blared the system’s failure, and critics on Twitter scoffed at Slat’s boondoggle. “What I would be afraid of is that, if it fails, we let down the world,” he said. “People will point at it and say, ‘Look, fancy gizmos, silver bullet, panacea—basically, that proves that that is not the way to solve a problem.’ ” But his team of engineers had helped him “come to peace,” he said, as they all returned to work. He was already considering new iterations, possibly incorporating sails or wave gliders that would make Wilson go faster.

When I described Wilson’s plight to Chris Garrett, a physical oceanographer and an emeritus professor at the University of Victoria, he told me that he found the entire premise of the device “rather strange and puzzling.” He and other scientists pointed to additional phenomena—Stokes drift, Langmuir circulation, Ekman spiral—that could cause the plastic to move faster than Wilson. Spinrad described the Ocean Cleanup system as “medium-level technology,” with a high risk, and a high payoff. “The sea is an unrelenting trial judge,” he said. “The probability of failure was at least as high as the probability of success.” He added, “I see nothing that cannot be remediated with good physics and engineering and money.” The team has since stated that Wilson collected two metric tons of plastic.

A week and a half after Slat and I met in New York, crew members stationed in the gyre were doing a maintenance check of Wilson when they noticed that one end of the boom, an eighteen-metre segment, had snapped off and floated away, owing, apparently, to “material fatigue” on a small section. Perversely, Wilson’s plastic wasn’t durable enough. The segment was retrieved, and the two parts were towed to Hawaii, arriving just off the coast on January 17th. Dubois had been in Honolulu, trying to negotiate a way to bring Wilson into the harbor and onto a loading dock, either to be repaired in Hawaii or, if necessary, shipped back to the assembly yard in Alameda. When we spoke, he sounded determined, if weary. “The I-told-you-so’s have been pretty abundant,” he said. “But we’re not just a bunch of cowboys going out there to play with a big tube thing out in the ocean, trying to prove that we’re right. We want to show that this is an important research platform.” One of Slat’s funders, the grant foundation of the Swiss bank Julius Baer, recently gave the Ocean Cleanup an additional six hundred thousand dollars for research into safely recycling ocean plastic, which is brittle and often toxic. None of Slat’s other donors had indicated that they would stop supporting the Ocean Cleanup. Hugh Welsh told me that, despite the “unwarranted criticism that the project has faced,” he and DSM “remain steadfast supporters.” (In spite of repeated requests for an interview, Marc Benioff, Slat’s top donor, said that he was unavailable for comment.)

The last time I spoke to Slat, on January 7th, he was undeterred. “This is just a first act,” he said. “It’s not a system failure. It’s a component failure.” His words reminded me of an episode soon after Wilson’s launch, in Pacifica, a beach town south of San Francisco. Slat had learned that I surfed, and, despite being a beginner, he suggested that we go together. On the beach, he told me about a small rip in Wilson’s skirt that had occurred during the trip to the gyre. The skirt was Wilson’s most expensive component; it needed to be made by hand, and had required forty-eight people, working for sixty days, in a warehouse in the United Arab Emirates, to assemble. “That material seemed impenetrable, so it was a little hard to believe,” Slat said.

The wind was blowing onshore, turning the waves into a mess of white foam, and it was a long, exhausting paddle beyond the impact zone to calm water. Once there, Slat and I watched other surfers for a while, then Slat spotted a small ridge. He turned, paddled away, and disappeared. His board bobbed up to the surface without him, then he got tossed far back toward shore by the waves that followed. Some twenty minutes later, after another fight through breaking waves, he reappeared beside me. “Now I know how Wilson feels,” he said, gasping. “I feel sorry for him. So much power under there.” He sat on his board. Striving to catch his breath, he returned to Wilson’s journey to the gyre. “The skirt weighs twenty-seven thousand kilograms,” he said. “But when the swells are big enough it can flip out of the water like a flag in a hurricane.” As the afternoon passed, Slat stayed in the water, growing bolder, trying and failing to get up on his feet and ride a wave, washing to shore instead, then fighting the endless white water to get back out. ♦

The Critics

- Writing About Writing About the Border Crisis

- Briefly Noted

- The Once Radical Slashes of Lucio Fontana

- The Chaos of American Manhood in “True West”

- The Clever Thrill Ride of “Russian Doll”

- The Beige Noir of “Serenity”

Writing About Writing About the Border Crisis

Books

From audm.herokuapp.com

In the summer of 2014, the writer Valeria Luiselli, born in Mexico but resident in New York and awaiting the arrival of her green card, went on a road trip. A privileged immigrant, on the lintel of legality, she set out with her husband and their two children for Cochise County, Arizona, near the border with Mexico. While driving through Oklahoma, the family began to hear news of a crisis: unaccompanied children, most fleeing violence and intimidation in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, were turning up at the border in sizable numbers—eighty thousand between October, 2013, and June, 2014. The majority of them had made unspeakably dangerous journeys, riding on a freight train known as La Bestia. Desperate to reach relatives in the United States, they would first have to surrender to the Border Patrol, in order to begin the long, fraught, uncertain process of legal accommodation. They were child refugees. “It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born,” Luiselli observes.

Less than a year later, back in New York, Luiselli volunteered as an interpreter at a federal immigration court. At Hofstra University, where she taught in the Romance-studies department—she has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia—she watched with pride as her students formed an advocacy group to help newly arrived teen-age immigrants. Yet Luiselli also knows that what writers do best is write: the moving nonfiction account of her journey to the border and her involvement with the immigration system, “Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions” (2017), is also an achievement of activism. The subtitle refers to the forty questions of the standard intake questionnaire for undocumented children; the title gestures at children’s habitual questioning of parents, and the difficulty of telling a story whose apparent ending—safe arrival in New York, say, after the long journey from Central America—is only another difficult beginning. One of the stories Luiselli tells is about two sisters from Guatemala, ages five and seven, who have turned up in the New York courtroom. They want to reach their mother, who lives on Long Island. Before they left Guatemala, their grandmother, having failed to get the girls to learn their mother’s ten-digit telephone number, sewed it onto the collars of their dresses. Now they are in New York, and have received a court summons, a Notice to Appear. One story has ended, and another is beginning.

“Tell Me How It Ends” is all the more moving because Luiselli is so honest about the difficulties of writing these stories. There is the difficulty of her own proximity to and distance from the people she helps and writes about, a fact that she foregrounds by topping and tailing her book with her own beginning and ending: an application for a green card, and her receipt of the precious document. We know how her story ends. This political difficulty is, at the same time, a literary dilemma. What does activist writing, writing that wants to make a real difference, look like? How does the privileged author—when she moved from one country to another as a child, it was as the daughter of a Mexican ambassador—gather the stories of impoverished others and not commit theft? One response to these questions is properly circular: admit the questions, highlight the difficulty, so that you’re at least not trying to hide anything. Another response is the disavowal of traditional literary authority: just as there are many stories, so, too, are there many ways of narrating them and thus, by implication, many authors. And perhaps this disavowal implies a modesty about political efficacy; a writer can do only so much, after all. A literary intervention is literary. On the other hand, the literary is what a writer does. “Perhaps the only way to grant any justice—were that even possible—is by hearing and recording those stories over and over again so that they come back, always, to haunt and shame us,” Luiselli reflects. Although it is a short book, “Tell Me How It Ends” pulses with such questions and answers, and is strengthened by them.

“In the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from many different angles, by many different minds.” These sentences are also from “Tell Me How It Ends,” but they could just as easily have appeared in “Lost Children Archive” (Knopf), Luiselli’s new novel, which offers a fictionalized version of the material in her previous book—the author returning, in a different mode, to the same stories, and struggling with herself and her medium even more productively than in “Tell Me How It Ends.” The shape of her 2014 journey, and a number of the details, remain unchanged. The novel is narrated by an unnamed woman, who with her unnamed husband and their two children—a five-year-old girl, who is the woman’s daughter from a previous relationship, and a ten-year-old boy, who is the husband’s son, also from a previous relationship—is driving, in the summer, from New York City to the southeast corner of Arizona. The mother and father are not writers, exactly; they are documentary makers, of a kind, and met while working on a large audio-recording project, which aimed to make a soundscape of emblematic New York noises—subways screeching, ministers preaching, cash registers shutting, playground swings swinging. In Arizona, they plan to do different, adjacent things: she will work on “a sound documentary about the children’s crisis at the border”; he intends something vaguer and more abstract: to make what he calls an “inventory of echoes” about “the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches.”

The first part of Luiselli’s novel concerns the journey south, and is written diaristically. The text is divided into small sections of a few paragraphs, each with its own title (some of which recur), such as “Archive,” “Narrative Arc,” “Time & Teeth,” “Foundational Myths,” and so on. Readers of contemporary autofiction will recognize the form: plot is relaxed into essay, with room for authorial digression, political and theoretical commentary, and reports on what the author has been reading, along with just enough storytelling to keep the novel moving forward.

As in the previous work, the narrator thinks hard about her project, about its possibility and its propriety: “Political concern: How can a radio documentary be useful in helping more undocumented children find asylum? Aesthetic problem: On the other hand, why should a sound piece, or any other form of storytelling, for that matter, be a means to a specific end? . . . Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story, micromanaging identity politics, heavy-handedness, am I too angry . . . ?” Throughout the narrative, Luiselli finds analogues for her own literary processes. In a bookshop in Asheville, North Carolina, she overhears a book club discussing a work that sounds as if it might be treading on the heels of the one we are reading: “I think it’s more about the impossibility of fiction in the age of nonfiction, says a soft-spoken woman whose contribution passes unacknowledged.” A bit later, the narrator tells us that she likes the photographs of Emmet Gowin, in part because “he takes his time looking at things instead of imposing a point of view on them.” Her daughter tells her that her school has taught her to invent by drawing four squares, labelled Character, Setting, Problem, and Solution. “Bad literary education begins too early and continues way too long,” her mother thinks. The family starts listening to an audiobook of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” but the voice is merely that of “an actor acting—tries too hard, breathes too loud—instead of a person reading.”

This section of “Lost Children Archive,” like a growing number of contemporary works of fiction, evidences an impatience with traditional realist artifice and convention. Characters are nameless; dialogue is not flagged as such; dramatic “conflict” is kept to a minimum, and only faintly shaded in when it occurs; the self-reflexive narrative stops and starts, riffs and turns in on itself. But such formal radicalism is inevitably in search of its own realism. You can see why Luiselli would want this chastened, self-conscious, documentary veracity. The immediacy of the human suffering at the border, the delicacy of how to provide witness—these are good reasons to proceed with skepticism about narrative contrivances. So the novel, like Emmet Gowin’s photographs, takes its time rather than quickly imposing a point of view; unlike McCarthy’s actor, it inhabits its material naturally rather than performing it too strenuously.

The results are often engrossing. For about a hundred and eighty pages, we are with the family, inside their 1996 Volvo wagon, or looking over their shoulders as they eat in diners and stay in motels and rented cabins. The children may be unnamed, but they are utterly alive, hurling questions (What is a refugee?) and mangling adult signals. Who, the daughter asks, is this “Jesus Fucking Christ” her parents invoke so often? When they stop at Graceland, at the Elvis Presley Boulevard Inn, she looks at a portrait of Elvis: “Is that Jesus Fucking Christ, Mama?” The book offers a beautiful and patiently loving portrait of children and of the task of looking after them. The narrator remarks, at one point, that parenthood “seems at times like teaching an extinct, complicated religion. There are more rituals than rationales behind them.” It is a pleasure to be a part of the narrator’s generous family cult. The kids may wonder, “Are we there yet?,” but the reader is happy to prolong the journey.

And just as pleasurable is the access we gain to the narrator’s mind—a comprehensive literary intelligence sorting through a lot of data. She thinks, of course, about belonging and not belonging, and about borders and the dead; she defines a child refugee as “someone who waits”; she notes the way, at night, “the light from the parking lot frames the curtains in a whiskey orange.” In the car, father and mother decide that “The Road” is too bleak for the children, but they can’t escape it: each time the narrator’s phone is reconnected to the car speakers, a glitch causes the first line of McCarthy’s novel to play: “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night . . .” They choose, instead, “Lord of the Flies” as their audiobook, a novel that, with “The Road” and Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Páramo,” perhaps makes a troika of patron texts, guiding and drawing this novel onward: lost children (Golding), a last child (McCarthy), and the ghosts of the dead (Rulfo).

This is indeed an intensely allusive novel. Our narrator has brought books with her—by Daša Drndić, Arlette Farge, Jerzy Andrzejewski—and she makes use of them. A wonderful section has the narrator reading Susan Sontag’s journals, noticing phrases that have been underlined, unsure in one instance whether she or her husband did the marking. Alongside these actual authors is an invented one. The narrator tells us that she has brought with her the only work of an Italian writer named Ella Camposanto (1928-2014); the book, called “Elegies for Lost Children,” is a series of texts, set in unnamed lands, about children trying to make their way, atop trains but also on foot, through jungle and desert, toward the “big city” of their dreams. The narrator starts reading these densely wrought “elegies,” which are reproduced in the book. But Camposanto (the name was perhaps inspired by the title of a collection of essays by W. G. Sebald) is Luiselli’s invention—such whorled maneuvers are crucial to Latin American fiction, to say nothing of the age-old postmodernism of Spanish literature.

Given the novel’s sheer quantity of allusions, some readers may feel that one kind of artifice has been banished only for another to come in through the library door. But the intellectual amplitude and the moral seriousness are fortifying and instructive, and a solid realism undergirds most of the bookishness: this is a plausible picture of an intellectual at work—the character within the novel, and the author outside it. A deeper concern is that Luiselli’s literariness encourages explicit commentary at the expense of achieved creation. There is too much talk about archives, inventories, echoes, ghosts. Thematic layers thicken like rain clouds. The husband’s research on the Apaches is integrated deftly enough—the last free Americans; one of the nation’s first deportees—but its raison d’être seems too brightly coherent, like matching one’s shoes and coat.

“What? Is this not better?”

The book’s weaknesses in traditional evocation more generally revolve around the husband, a dimly realized creature who alternates between lecturing the children on the destiny of the Apaches and quarrelling, for no apparent reason, with his very appealing wife. This might not matter—plenty of vivid autofictions are strung out along the quivering elastic of a single authorial ego—were it not that the book’s central story line concerns the breakup of the narrator’s marriage. The couple had already become somewhat estranged back in New York City; the husband’s Apache project, for which, he announces, he will need to spend a couple of years in the Southwest, was a warning shot. Being forced to sit next to each other for hours at a time inside a speeding box does little for their relations. At night, in hushed voices, they argue fiercely, but what they fight about remains vague, Luiselli preferring commentary on marital estrangement to its actual staging:

My husband and I quarrel on our own bed. A routine exchange: his poisonous adjectives whispered sharply across his pillow to mine, and my silence like a dull shield in his face. One active, the other passive; both of us equally aggressive. In marriage, there are only two kinds of pacts: pacts that one person insists on having and pacts that the other insists on breaking.

And that’s it, as far as content goes. Still angry, the narrator leaves their room, and ends up at Dicks Whiskey Bar, where she meets a handsome man in a white tank top and jeans. Revenge sex scents the air. But, in the end, nothing much happens; the two mainly talk—a verisimilitude that I appreciated rather more than the narrator’s superfluous analysis of why they mainly talk. “Hard to explain why two complete strangers may suddenly decide to share an unbeautified portrait of their lives,” she tells us. “But perhaps also easy to explain, because two people alone in a bar at two in the morning are probably there to try to figure out the exact narrative they need to tell themselves before they go back to wherever they’ll sleep that night.” Drama—true fictive artifice—does such underlining in invisible ink; that’s the secret of its beautiful enigmas.

As the family heads south, “Lost Children Archive” begins to make good on its title. Husband and wife have brought archives with them—boxes of books and audio recordings—and are seeking, once they reach the border, to gather new material. (From those boxes, Luiselli’s novel reproduces documents, maps, and photographs, along with bibliographies.) But only gradually does the narrator’s project begin to shape itself around the stories of lost children. Back in New York City, she met a woman named Manuela, who told her about her two daughters, eight and ten, who had recently arrived in the country and were being held in a detention center in Texas. At the New York immigration court, she helped Manuela with translation. The searing detail from “Tell Me How It Ends,” about the telephone numbers sewn into the dresses, appears again in this fictionalized version of the story.

While the narrator and her family are travelling across Arkansas, she gets a phone call from Manuela. She has lost her case; her daughters are due to be deported. But the girls have disappeared, somewhere between detention centers in New Mexico and Arizona. Manuela is sure that they are making their way toward her. What, the narrator asks Manuela, can she do? She can look for them in New Mexico and Arizona. So the narrator’s journey, precarious and provisional, begins to find its center of gravity. She realizes that the story she must tell is “of the children who are missing, those whose voices can no longer be heard because they are, possibly forever, lost.” It’s brave of Luiselli to have taken almost the entire first half of her novel to enact the slow, exploratory discovery of what now becomes an urgent theme; it feels patiently lifelike. But, having revealed the emphasis, she once again underscores a little too explicitly and analytically what is already clear:

What ties me to where? There’s the story about the lost children on their crusade, and their march across jungles and barrenlands, which I read and reread. . . . There are many other children, too, crossing the border or still on their way here, riding trains, hiding from dangers. There are Manuela’s two girls, lost somewhere, waiting to be found. And of course, finally, there are my own children, one of whom I might soon lose, and both of whom are now always pretending to be lost children, having to run away, either fleeing from white-eyes, riding horses in bands of Apache children, or riding trains, hiding from the Border Patrol.

She’s referring to the imaginary games she can hear her kids playing in the back seat, and from these fantasies she learns another lesson. It is they who should tell the story of the lost children: “They’ve been telling it all along, over and over again in the back of the car, for the past three weeks. . . . I realize now, perhaps too late, that my children’s backseat games and reenactments were maybe the only way to really tell the story of the lost children.”

“Maybe the only way to really tell the story”—it’s like watching someone trapped in a door frame. Authorial authority is disavowed at the very moment it is asserted. Yet what can it mean, in a book of such diligent hesitation, to “really” tell any story? The second half of Luiselli’s novel is largely handed over to the narrator’s children. Now the ten-year-old boy assumes the book’s narration, and recounts a desperate adventure. Troubled by his parents’ disunity and pessimistic about the family’s future, the boy decides to become as important to his parents as are the mythical “lost children” of the mother’s research—by becoming a lost child himself. And, of course, he will also find Manuela’s lost children. One morning, brother and sister sneak out of the cabin where the family is staying and set out into the desert. What ensues is a gripping and somewhat fantastical tale, in which these fortunate children undergo some of the trials of the truly lost children—brother and sister get separated, the heat bears down, they have nothing to eat, they are forced to ride between the cars of a train, as if on La Bestia itself.

As this complex novel turns, the back-seat kids are the ones who must tell the story of the lost children, but, of course, they cannot “really” tell that story; all they can do is perform—imaginatively inhabit—the brutal hardships of others less fortunate. In this regard, the narrator’s kids merely enact the dilemmas of the narrator. The narrator’s “lost” children also, perforce, enter the fictional world of the children described by Ella Camposanto, which is to say, Valeria Luiselli. It is as if they were starring, painfully, in their own elegy, a beguiling mixture of the real and the doubly invented.

It is impossible not to admire the novel’s surging ambition. But this is also an oddly symptomatic book, characteristic of our age’s self-doubts, divided between the quotidian realism of diaristic autofiction and the magical privileges of unfettered fiction-making (the kids in the desert, Ella Camposanto’s texts). What is missing—the absence is surely intended—is, precisely, the middle: an artifice bold enough to invent and evoke the day-to-day specificities of people whose lives are very different from our own, and whose hardship seems almost unreachable. Oddly, such stories hardly appear in this passionately engaged book. Evidence that the scrupulous realization of such otherness is compatible with original and serious fiction-making can be found in recent novels by Jenny Erpenbeck (African migrants in Germany) and Rachel Kushner (a women’s prison in California). Luiselli, more playful than either of these writers, has, in this brilliantly intricate and constantly surprising book, honored her own difficult injunction: “the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself.” The story hasn’t ended yet—far from it. ♦

Briefly Noted

Books

Mouthful of Birds, by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell (Riverhead). Set in a dystopian near future, these surreal short stories address contemporary concerns—hunger, fertility, financial and sexual independence. In the title story, a young girl adopts a diet of live birds, and her dumbstruck parents struggle to reconcile their disgust with their roles as providers. Men are often the perpetrators of harm, through ambivalence or willful violence, and young, primarily female characters the victims. Varying in impact, the stories cumulatively summon a world in which the civilized is constantly receding and to be a human is to live in a state of desperation.

Love in the New Millennium, by Can Xue, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Yale). In this dreamlike novel, a constellation of men and women, far from their ancestral villages, frantically search for love and meaning in an industrial Chinese landscape. In one thread, a young widow and warehouse clerk is dumped by her lover, a married soap-factory worker, who, after a mystical visit to her home town, decides that she is “his life’s lucky star.” Meanwhile, a former lover of his, a cotton-mill worker turned prostitute, starts frequenting a pachinko hall that appears and vanishes inexplicably. Amid increasingly bizarre scenarios, appearances give way to hidden, otherworldly layers, presenting murky clues to a perhaps nonexistent riddle. As one character tells another, “Your not understanding is understanding.”

My Butch Career, by Esther Newton (Duke). This memoir by a cultural anthropologist who pioneered the study of gay communities sketches her formative years as a butch lesbian. Born in 1940, she absorbed the masculine gestures of various father figures and began tentatively negotiating her self-presentation in the face of discrimination and shame. The most captivating part of the book sees Newton circulating through second-wave feminist and lesbian circles in New York and Paris, where the debates, social hierarchies, and tangled affairs she encounters bring her to a late coming of age. In the eighties, her scholarship, once ignored, achieves recognition with the rise of gender and sexuality studies. The book is a thoughtful examination of how personal experiences spur intellectual progress.

The British in India, by David Gilmour (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Proceeding from the idea that even “abhorrent” institutions should be dispassionately understood in their totality, this dazzling account of the Raj unfolds as a social history of British colonial administrators, from the first forays of the East India Company, in 1615, to the Empire’s exit, in 1947. Gilmour’s command of detail is both scholarly and endlessly engaging. We learn what the British ate (overspiced curry; tins of smoked sprats shipped by Harrods); what they did for work (tea planting; mercenary soldiering for Indian princes); how they entertained themselves (tennis; adultery); and how they viewed India (gratefully; hatefully). The result is a complex vision of the colonial era that feels both immediate and distinctly new.

The Once Radical Slashes of Lucio Fontana

The Art World

There are some melancholy aspects to an elegant retrospective, at the Met Breuer, of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana, who is famous for the monochrome canvases, neatly slashed with knives, that he made—or executed—between 1958 and his death, ten years later, at the age of sixty-nine. One gloom is the awareness that this is among the last of the major shows that the Met will produce in Marcel Breuer’s granite alcazar on Madison Avenue, which it has occupied since the original tenant, the Whitney Museum, moved downtown, in 2015. (The Frick Collection will assume the lease next year, while renovating its Seventieth Street digs.) The annex’s offbeat, lively program will be missed, having featured cleverly themed historical shows, mostly of painting (“Unfinished,” in 2016) or sculpture (“Like Life,” last year), and revivals of what could be termed second-tier canonical artists whose virtues may have been unjustly neglected. The retrospective, two years ago, of Marisa Merz—like her husband, Mario Merz, a practitioner of Arte Povera, the carefully shaggy Italian answer to American minimalism—was revelatory. She proved to have been the most appealing artist in an otherwise all-male movement.

“Battle,” from 1947.

© 2019 Fondazione Lucio Fontana / ARS / SIAE

“Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold,” crisply curated by Iria Candela, is less auspicious, though it is instructively timed for reflecting on recently changed perceptions of modern art. Conveniently, the chaste brutalism of the Breuer building—finished in 1966, the year that Fontana won the Grand Prize for an Italian painter at the Venice Biennale—feels perfect for it, as it did for Merz’s show, housing a period style in period style.

“Olympic Champion (Waiting Athlete),” from 1932.

© 2019 Fondazione Lucio Fontana / ARS / SIAE

Despite pleasant surprises—notably involving the artist’s less-known ceramic sculptures, which, at their peak, from the late nineteen-thirties through the forties, veer between figuration and abstraction and suggest the euphoric neo-Baroque of a drunk Bernini—the show has a droopy feel of avant-gardism left out in the rain of subsequent history. So does a lot of once radical twentieth-century art these days, as myths of progress in culture complete their long collapse and mystiques of innovation gravitate from individual genius to corporate branding. Fontana’s Cuts, as he termed his meticulously violated canvases, could seem like a big deal in 1966. Now their success at the time points up the oddity of a modern tendency to esteem artists less for what they make than for what they do.

“Spatial Concept, the End of God,” from 1964.

© 2019 Fondazione Lucio Fontana / ARS / SIAE

Not that the Cuts are nugatory art. I was disarmed by some of them in the show: painted in matte, bright secondary colors or, most effectively, in warm whites, and inflicted with one or more slits, usually vertical. (He would do the cuts while the paint was wet, then mold their shapes by hand when it was dry and apply black gauze behind the spaces to yield an impression of measureless depth.) The fissures feel precisely placed, compositionally just right—which can’t have been easy to achieve. “You have no idea how much stuff I throw away,” Fontana once said. The failure-prone, one-shot knifework would seem an inefficient way to produce attractive art works, but the gesture, more than the results, put him on the map at a time when violations of traditional mediums could be confused with global upheaval. For a sense of how different things are today, visit the new Whitney, in the meatpacking district, where wood-floored capacious spaces with glass walls afford panoramas of Manhattan and the Hudson River. A Fontana might look like a fussy scrap there.

“Spatial Concept, Expectations,” from 1965.

© 2019 Fondazione Lucio Fontana / ARS / SIAE

The white Cuts, their non-hues at times continuous with those of the walls they hang on, put me in mind of the American Robert Ryman, who in the same period began his experiments with subtly varied all-white painting. I remember the art-world prestige of that work in the sixties and seventies. I still admire it, but I can’t not be aware that its hermeticism has a smaller fan base in 2019. Ryman is a finer, more sensitively exploratory artist than Fontana; but he is apt to provoke a similar impatience with pursuits that squeeze what drama is possible from tweaking the established formal repertoires of painting.

Obsolete now is the modernist rhetoric of revolution that hailed Pablo Picasso’s shattering of pictorial form, Jackson Pollock’s expansive drip technique, and Andy Warhol’s artisanal proliferation of demotic imagery. Fortunately for those masters, the art of each is about something permanently engaging: libido or lyricism or worldliness. But even they must endure a twenty-first-century test of application to life outside art games. The perennially interesting Marcel Duchamp, who made so very little and did so very much, takes on new if modest lustre for having treated artistic invention as pure sport. (It’s a neat trick, which none of Duchamp’s epigones even begin to pull off, to conduct a multifarious, lifelong career in art without for a moment seeming serious about it.) These thoughts swarmed me at the Met Breuer—not happily. Futile talent saddens.

Fontana was born to Italian immigrants in Argentina in 1899 and schooled in Italy from 1906 until 1922, when he came home and worked as an aide to and collaborator with his father, who sculpted funerary monuments. Fontana would remain fundamentally a sculptor, taking to canvas only at the age of fifty. He moved back to Italy in 1927 and studied with a prominent sculptor in Milan and produced a range of statuary and reliefs, often in showy materials—gold leaf, colored mosaic—displaying a lifelong decorative bent. He also took on official commissions, including, in 1939, a pompously classicist ceiling relief of flying female nudes for the Shrine of the Fascist Martyrs, in the new headquarters of the Federation of Fascists, in Milan. Fontana returned to Argentina in 1940, at the request of his father, but stayed partial to Mussolini, lamenting Il Duce’s fall from power, in 1943. Writing in the show’s catalogue, the art historian Emily Braun adduces, in Fontana, a temperamental identification with “the Fascist viewpoint of a Latin and Catholic culture in epochal conflict with a materialist, Protestant one.” But his politics, like his aesthetics, seemed fluid. In Buenos Aires, he aligned himself with artists and intellectuals opposed to the authoritarian regime of Juan Perón. Back in Italy for good, in 1947, he became the doyen of a movement that he called Spatialism, which favored abstraction but did not deter him from making sentimental statuary for the Vatican in 1956.

Fontana continued to create ceramics but began to punch holes in them, making empty space the focal point. He extended the idea to works on—or, rather, in—paper, puncturing and incising it from behind. He was decisively affected, in 1957, by an encounter with the art of the French avant-garde paladin Yves Klein. Among Klein’s many japes was his use of the paint-smeared bodies of naked women. The more circumspect Fontana had to notice that, however outrageous its means, Klein’s output was unfailingly handsome. Fontana seized upon that note of insolent suavity at a time in Italy of economic boom and cultural éclat—most brilliantly evident, of course, in film. For full “Dolce Vita” effect, imagine a Cut hanging in a chic living room with cool jazz wafting from the record-player. Critical paeans to his work, in Italy and, increasingly, abroad, yawed between symbol-mongering—the apertures as female genitalia or the wounds of Christ—and poetic lucubration on themes of space and time. (You know you’re in the twentieth century when people sagely invoke “the fourth dimension” as if they know what they’re talking about.) Still, Fontana earned his vogue. The best Cuts exercise firm aesthetic command, which will count for those, like me, who are residually enamored of art for art’s sake.

Likely more popular in the Met Breuer show, and perhaps of interest to current artists, are some of Fontana’s ceramics—free-form to the verge of exuberantly form-free, and gorgeous. Also beguiling, if only because they are unfamiliar, are such installation works as “Spatial Environment in Red Light” (1967/2019, reconstructed for this show). It’s a walk-through enclosure containing six parallel corridors and suffused with a neon redness that, having saturated your optic nerves, turns the world green when you exit. With that, Fontana was onto a new international trend in art, yet again and for all it matters now. ♦

The Chaos of American Manhood in “True West”

The Theatre

The Broadway première of Sam Shepard’s acclaimed 1980 play, “True West,” in 2000, was astonishing for several reasons. For one, by 2000, Shepard—who had brought his cowboy swagger, muscular language, and rock-and-roll rhythms to New York’s downtown theatre scene in the sixties and seventies—was a prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and a prolific, Oscar-nominated film actor. Yet the anguished, funny “True West,” which the actor Ethan Hawke recently called Shepard’s “card-carrying audience-pleaser,” had never been staged on Broadway. Then, there were the production’s virtuosic performances. Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly alternated in the roles of Austin, a screenwriter, and Lee, his ne’er-do-well brother—a device that could have felt like a gimmick but, instead, enriched the play’s exploration of duality. (A 1982 revival, at the Steppenwolf, in Chicago, starring Gary Sinise and John Malkovich, is also legendary.)

In the course of “True West,” the brothers display humor, vulnerability, and savagery; they also essentially destroy each other and their mother’s house. It is, in other words, a showcase for male actors in their prime. A new revival (a Roundabout Theatre Company production, at the American Airlines)—“True West” ’s first Broadway revival, and the first Broadway staging of a Shepard play since his death, in 2017—offers a showcase to Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano. The production was under way before Shepard’s death; he had enlisted the British director James Macdonald, and Hawke had been contacted about co-starring. Hawke had had a powerful connection to the play ever since he first watched a film of the 1982 Steppenwolf production, when he was fourteen. “Not to be corny, but it was truly a revelatory moment,” he has said. “I just couldn’t sleep all night. I said, ‘That’s what I want to do with my life.’ ”

Although he has performed in several Shepard plays since then, and directed a well-received production of “A Lie of the Mind,” Off Broadway, in 2010, this is his first foray into “True West.” The timing feels right. After three decades of movie stardom and artistic efforts ranging from cringe-inducing to brilliant, Hawke, now forty-eight, has been liberated by maturity and a weathering of his appearance. His creased brow lends him a new versatility that opens him up—he can play a regular guy, or a handsome one, or a dirtbag. His performance last year, as a tormented minister, in Paul Schrader’s film “First Reformed” is among the best of his career. Here, he wears the role of Lee like a second skin, stepping into the work that helped define him.

Shepard warned that grafting a “stylistic ‘concept’ ” onto the set design of “True West” would serve only to confuse his characters’ evolution. Macdonald and his set designer, Mimi Lien, have followed the script’s exacting instructions but have also played with them a little. Before each scene, a lighted border glows around the proscenium arch, like a snazzy picture frame or a hint of Hollywood. The stage space has been raised and made shallower, as if flat-screened. This doesn’t confuse anything: being continually reminded of the artifice of performance helps us forgive the play’s occasional staginess. As the lights come up, Austin (Dano) is hunched over a notebook at a kitchen table. He’s house-sitting for his mother, in suburban Southern California, caring for her plants and trying to write. This could be your grandmother’s kitchen. Cherry-print wallpaper, sunny yellows, lush houseplants, decorations approaching kitsch without succumbing to it—everything conveys haimish order and care. There’s love in this room, and it’s about to get torn apart.

Lee has shown up after three months in the desert; he’s drinking beer and making aimless conversation. “You always work by candlelight?” he asks. “Isn’t that what the old guys did?” Austin is trying to concentrate; he’s got a meeting with a producer the next day. “What old guys?” he says. “The Forefathers,” Lee says. “You know.” Hawke, in a scuzzy trenchcoat, looking convincingly greasy, enjoys himself, at times nearly singing his lines, waving his hands in teasing disdain. But he doesn’t overdo it. He indicates the insecurities behind Lee’s aggression, and not only when Lee is grousing about Austin’s “art” and his Ivy League education. Austin says that he’s writing a screenplay pitch for a “period piece,” a love story; Lee says that he’s made art, too, then talks about robbing local houses and, later, dogfighting.

Like much of Shepard’s work, “True West” was inspired in part by Shepard’s father, Sam Rogers, a violent alcoholic. Like Austin and Lee’s father, Rogers spent years living in the desert; he died after being hit by a car outside a bar. In “True West,” the father’s drunken chaos infects everything. (Austin talks about his father having his teeth pulled in Juárez, then losing his false teeth in a bag of chop suey.) That chaos is in Lee, too. He’s dismissive of Austin’s success. At the same time, he wants it for himself—along with the domestic pleasures he disrupts. “Just a sweet kinda’ suburban silence,” he says of one of the homes he cases. “Kinda’ place that sorta’ kills ya’ inside. Warm yellow lights. Mexican tile all around. . . . Blonde people movin’ in and outa’ the rooms, talkin’ to each other.”

Throughout, the thirty-four-year-old Dano, who made his Broadway début at ten, beautifully evinces a character navigating a loved one’s difficult behavior. His Austin veers from engagement to improvisation to damage control—trying to retain power over his pitch meeting, or his car keys—without causing offense. When Lee, carrying a stolen TV, walks into Austin’s meeting with Saul, the producer (Gary Wilmes, wonderfully smarmy here, with a hint of mid-career Jerry Orbach), Dano doesn’t act embarrassed. He does make a delightful hand gesture—downward-moving, palms flat—that’s somewhere between Well, Saul, wasn’t this fun? and Lee, take it down a notch. (It doesn’t work.) Dano is a thoughtful actor, who often embodies a kind of startled innocence; when he shows brutality, as he does in Act II of “True West,” it can be thrilling.

Lee charms his way into a golf game with Saul, and from there into talk of a “true-to-life Western,” and from there, improbably, into a movie deal. The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast. Questions about authenticity agonize them. Austin calls Lee’s movie idea “bullshit”—“two lamebrains chasing each other across Texas,” as “phony as Hopalong Cassidy.” The ensuing merging and transfiguring of identities—and blotto writer’s-block rage—culminates in shock, but to a contemporary audience the lead-up can feel like squalor for squalor’s sake: since 1980, we’ve seen countless semi-romanticized depictions of conflicted American men spiralling into oblivion. The misery is leavened by the return of the men’s mother (an appealing Marylouise Burke); Hawke plays Lee’s reaction to her with quiet, abashed politeness, shrinking into himself.

When Saul says, of Austin’s screenplay pitch, “Nobody’s interested in love these days,” he could almost be speaking for “True West,” which is as laconic about Austin’s love-story idea as it is about his wife and kids. We hear nothing about them but a great deal about fathers, competition, and male angst—the two “lamebrains” pursuing each other through the Texas Panhandle and the ones rolling around on the kitchen floor. The thought of desert life, like thoughts of their father, exerts a haunting pull on the brothers, out of desperation (for Lee) or a kind of desperate fantasy (for Austin). “There’s nothin’ real down here, Lee!” Austin says. “Least of all me!” That desolate landscape is more vivid to them than the domestic calm of the kitchen they destroy, or of Austin’s life back home.

A few years ago, Hawke tried to direct a version of “True West” starring Marin Ireland and Martha Plimpton. He wanted to “expose how the female psychology is just as vulnerable” to warring duality. Shepard “was utterly baffled by the suggestion.” Hawke explained, “He’s from a different tree in the forest—an older part of the forest.” Shepard’s writing and his vision are as powerful as ever, but American masculinity has evolved since he wrote “True West”; what’s true for one generation may not be true for the next. ♦

The Clever Thrill Ride of “Russian Doll”

On Television

“Russian Doll,” on Netflix, opens with a fun party and a tragic death. Nadia Volvokov (a spectacular Natasha Lyonne, wearing so much kohl eyeliner that it’s almost a special effect) is washing her hands in the bathroom at her thirty-sixth-birthday party. It’s a dirty-cool bohemian bash thrown by her friends Maxine and Lizzy, whose loft, in Alphabet City, used to be a yeshiva. In the kitchen, Maxine offers Nadia a joint: “It’s laced with cocaine, like the Israelis do it!” For the hell of it, Nadia picks up a stranger and stops by a bodega—and then, as she’s rescuing her lost cat on the street, she gets hit by a cab. She dies there, sprawled on the pavement.

Then Nadia’s back in the bathroom, washing her hands. Again and again, no matter how much she tries to circumvent her fate, Nadia keeps on dying—tumbling down stairs, taking pratfalls into basements—at unpredictable intervals, inevitably ending up staring at herself in the mirror (and at us, through the camera lens). The fact that she works as a video-game coder does not seem coincidental. Sometimes Nadia makes it to the next day, sometimes not. The premise, right away, appears to be a distaff version of “Groundhog Day,” that classic Zen Buddhist romantic comedy, in which “I Got You, Babe” keeps playing, eternally, at 6 a.m. (In “Russian Doll,” the song is Harry Nilsson’s eerily upbeat “Gotta Get Up”: “Gotta get up, gotta get out, gotta get home, before the morning comes!”)

But “Russian Doll” isn’t a reboot. Scene by scene, it finds raw, affecting themes about mortality and grieving, and it has some legitimately cool plot twists. One will be revealed in this review, so abandon all hope of being completely unspoiled, ye who enter the next paragraph. (Or, if you prefer, go watch the show—which, at eight twenty-five-minute episodes, is as compact as a Kondo’d camisole—and then come back.)

So, anyway, “Groundhog Day” was at heart a compassionate movie about solipsism, about the horror of being trapped inside the self. Phil Connors (Bill Murray) was a one-man guy, to quote the Loudon Wainwright III song, a nihilistic prick who had to evolve into a decent man in order to earn his soul mate (and, also, to become an impressive, accomplished person—a strikingly masculine path to love). In “Russian Doll,” Nadia is hardly St. Teresa: she’s a party girl whose ex-boyfriend broke up his marriage to be with her. But she’s got a grimy charm and a sense of adventure. She’s got real friends, too; she’s more a thrill-seeker than a jerk. And then, a few episodes in, as she spins out, hunting down explanations—Was it that coke-laced joint? Has she gone crazy?—she meets a stranger, Alan (Charlie Barnett), who is standing stoically as an elevator they’re riding threatens to crash to the ground. As everyone else panics, she says, “Didn’t you get the news? We’re about to die.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he tells her. “I die all the time.”

Suddenly, they’re a team. Sometimes apart, sometimes together, Nadia and Alan struggle to trace the origins of their shared glitch. The show expands into a shaggy-dog philosophical mystery, tracing every nook of Alphabet City, sweeping up other colorful characters, exploring red herrings that are as delicious as the main course. Refreshingly, “Russian Doll” isn’t a romantic comedy—Nadia may be a wisecracking hipster and Alan a repressed jock, but they aren’t quite opposites who attract. The show is interested in love, but it’s much more interested, in both jaunty and melancholic ways, in death itself—in the terror of dying, but also in its temptation. Nadia describes her birthday as “staring down mortality like the barrel of a gun”; exiting that bathroom requires pulling the trigger of a gun-shaped doorknob. In its poetic breadth, the series reminded me of the wonderful Kate Atkinson book “Life After Life,” in which a woman keeps on dying, for nearly a century; of “Search Party,” the terrific show about another flawed bohemian solving a New York mystery; of “Fleabag,” that stylized masterwork about a liberated woman’s self-loathing; and even of “The Leftovers,” with its loopy but sincere approach to grief. In other words, it reminded me of all the recent shows I’ve liked best: arch, deeply emotional puzzle boxes, whose visual wit makes them fun but never slight.

You could also compare “Russian Doll” to another Netflix show, from late last year: the eccentric, overpraised “Maniac.” The two series are both surreal, visually immersive fables overseen by detail-oriented people—“Maniac” was directed by Cary Fukunaga; “Russian Doll” was co-created by Leslye Headland, who directed the cult movie “Bachelorette.” They both feature a spitfire woman paired with a psychologically fragile man. But, unlike “Maniac,” which felt quirky without having much to say, “Russian Doll” is propulsive and joyful. The difference is the defining distinction of our moment, between a Netflix show that makes you desperate to press Play and one that you feel obliged to finish.

The other big difference is Lyonne, who finally gets a role worthy of her magnetism. (She also co-created the show with Headland and Amy Poehler, and co-directed and co-wrote some episodes.) Ever since she appeared as a teen in “Slums of Beverly Hills,” Lyonne has been a camera-grabbing presence, so incredibly herself—pop eyes, Mae West crackle, little-tramp slouch—that she burns through every frame, dominating stories even when she’s cast as nothing but the dissolute sidekick, the funny mess no one can straighten up. Here, that same addict persona is the heroine, continually relapsing into death, then getting clean. The actor she reminded me of most was Robert Downey, Jr., another black-humored clown with a special gift for combining slapstick with sexiness, and also someone who, like Lyonne, pours all of his characters into himself, instead of vice versa.

They also share a rough past, a caustic streak, and an air of Bugs Bunny resilience. At one point, Maxine, admiringly, calls Nadia a cockroach: “You can eat anything, take anything, do anything. It’s impossible to destroy you. You will never die.” Nadia is understandably offended, but that idea is the heartbeat of the show—that her character is so alive that she can’t help skirting the edges of existence, tiptoeing up to too much.

Lyonne makes a perfect collaborator for Headland, an underestimated director with a specialty in toxic femininity. Her movies have often been misperceived as nothing but dirty-joke bacchanalia, but they’re richer than that, and she has a particular gift for finding surprise depths in actors, as she did with Kirsten Dunst in “Bachelorette.” “All right,” Nadia says, early on. “Let’s make some choices.” And, in fact, there’s a choose-your-own-adventure delight to Headland’s pacing, a musical pleasure in the repetitions. Minor characters from Episode 1 play major roles later on; throwaway lines that Nadia overheard at that smoky, endlessly rewatchable party suddenly make sense. It never feels like a movie pulled like taffy into a TV format: instead, the cliffhangers work as true emotional pauses, playing off the way that television itself is built on repeated formulas. And yet the story also has a time-warped feel, miraculously leaving space for the characters to just hang out and talk, and allowing side characters—from Jeremy Bobb, as a sleazy professor, to Elizabeth Ashley, as Nadia’s elegant surrogate mother—to feel like whole humans, not plot contrivances.

There’s also something downright elegiac about the show’s portrait of downtown New York, which has a trace of the Scorsese classic “After Hours,” updated for gentrification. Now a homeless shelter coexists with a soulless condo; when some Wall Street bros ask for directions to a club, Nadia steers them, instead, to “a hardware store that closed in 1996.”

“You remember littering?” Nadia asks her ex (a terrific Yul Vazquez), as the two walk down Avenue A. “You remember Dinkins?” he responds. As is the case with many Manhattanites, or maybe anybody who gets older, the city they share is one that no longer exists, full of ghosts only the natives can see. ♦

The Beige Noir of “Serenity”

The Current Cinema

If you have to steal, be honest about it. Be like Steven Knight, the writer and director of “Serenity,” who, when it comes to a big fishing scene, doesn’t mess around. He goes straight to “Jaws” and takes what he requires: a closeup of a click. We’re on a boat, out at sea, and the camera stares at a reel of fishing line, which turns very slightly. Click. A bite? Then another click. Suddenly, the reel begins to spin, thrumming like crazy as the fish takes the bait and starts to run. The suspense is identical in both films, except that Spielberg puts a man-eating shark in the water, whereas Knight has a nice fat tuna. How frightened are we meant to be of something that comes in cans?

The boat is Serenity, and the skipper is Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey), a hard-drinking, lonesome, yet strangely fascinating man with a toffee tan and a past too painful to forget—you know. Having served in the Iraq War, he now lives in a shack beside a lighthouse, on the sweltering island of Plymouth. He has a son whom he never sees, a friend named Duke (Djimon Hounsou) who crews for him, and an occasional bedmate, Constance (Diane Lane), who gives him cash. “You’re no more than a hooker,” she says, and Baker retorts, quick as anything, “A hooker who can’t afford hooks.” Zing! Who said the age of wit was over?

Enter Karen (Anne Hathaway), Baker’s former wife. She clearly spells trouble, but we also hear a tingle on the soundtrack when she first appears, as if she were packing a magic wand. Think of her as a fairy fatale. Karen is now married to Frank (Jason Clarke), who is abusive, rude, and rich. In short, he is crying out to be tipped over the side of Serenity and fed to the tuna, which, though no man-eater, might just be partial to Franks. If Baker wants the job, plus the ten million dollars that go with it, it’s his.

A brief inspection of this narrative will tell you that, once again, Knight is on the prowl. He steals from “Body Heat” (1981), just as “Body Heat” stole from “Double Indemnity” (1944), and he has every right to do so: the disposal of unwanted husbands, arranged by guileful wives with the aid of less intelligent lovers, is—onscreen, at least—an honorable tradition. When “Serenity” was first announced as a project, in 2017, it was heralded, on IndieWire, as “a sexy tropical noir.” Well, it’s tropical, all right, having been filmed in Mauritius, and there’s a succulent shot of Baker driving down a road walled in by tall green sugarcane. But the noir is beige at the edges, and the sex is hopelessly brisk and coy; if Baker wanted it steamy, he should have put the kettle on to boil. Mind you, there’s a brave supporting performance from McConaughey’s derrière, which he flashes at regular intervals, as if to compete with the lighthouse. Message to passing sailors who get confused and end up on the rocks: sue his ass.

But wait. Knight, who wrote “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002), for Stephen Frears, and “Eastern Promises” (2007), for David Cronenberg, has surprises yet to spring, and, after an hour, the surface of “Serenity” begins to crack. Imagine “Body Heat” being consumed by “The Truman Show” (1998). To be honest, given how deeply the new film is dozing by this stage, I was grateful for any intervention; if Godzilla himself had stridden forth from the waves and ordered a mai tai, I would have welcomed him like a brother. What actually occurs on Plymouth, as the climax nears, I haven’t a clue, but, to judge by the dialogue (“Nobody knows anything,” “Do you even know what this is all about?”), nor does anyone else. Something fiddly, I’d say, involving love, death, salvation, and digital subterfuge. As Anne Hathaway exclaims, “All those nights on the Internet!” Whatever they pay these movie stars to keep a straight face, it’s not enough.

Congratulations. You’ve graduated from college, and the world is all before you—a prospect so rich in possibilities that you have no option but to slouch back home. There, if you are Buster Keaton, in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” (1928), you appall your thuggish father with your foppery, especially when he makes you swap your beret for a proper hat. If you are Dustin Hoffman, in “The Graduate” (1967), you lie in the pool, in Pasadena, and claim to be “just drifting.” If you are Lena Dunham, in “Tiny Furniture” (2010), you return to your mother’s apartment, in Tribeca, explaining that you suffer from “a postgraduation malaise.” And, if you are the hero of “The Wild Pear Tree,” you find yourself once more in Çan, a small town in the far west of Turkey, where you lie on your bed and read. It’s as though you never went away.

“The Wild Pear Tree” is directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose movies are, in the most demanding sense, talkies. Conversation is to Ceylan as the clash of metal monsters is to Michael Bay, and there are times in the latest film when the chatterers seem unable to stop. The graduate, Sinan (Aydin Doğu Demirkol), finds a couple of young imams picking apples from a tree, like truant schoolboys; one is in the tree, and he has the nerve, having clambered down, to advise Sinan to be “prudent and deliberate.” A theological debate ensues, both airy and ominous (“Who says free will is free?”), and continues during a stroll down a hill and then at a café table. Sinan glances at a newspaper. “Janet Jackson’s started wearing the veil,” he says. The imam is unimpressed. “Give me a break,” he replies.

That exchange is one of many, none of which arrive at any conclusion. Out in the countryside, Sinan meets an old friend, Hatice (Hazar Ergüçlü), who can see her fate coming fast. “You know that place they call the house of matrimony? That’s where I’m going,” she says, leaning against a tree. (The arboreal theme, in line with the movie’s title, is fairly constant.) Hatice removes her head scarf and lets the wind play havoc with her hair before kissing Sinan and biting him on the lip: a final gesture of freedom and frustration. His own future is less locked down, not just because he’s a man in an unequal culture but also because of his roving—and, it must be said, annoying—disposition. He’s a surly sort, morose and easily nettled; if Adam Sandler made a desperate mid-career move into crime dramas, and shaved once a week, he’d look exactly like Sinan.

Nobody could accuse this film of blossoming with plot. Things keep on not happening. Even when we spy what appears to be a corpse, covered in ants and lying beneath yet another tree, it turns out to be someone having a nap. Sinan takes an exam, in a bid to become a primary-school teacher, but he hasn’t bothered to study, and you can understand why; his father, Idris (Murat Cemcir), who is a teacher, has shrunk into a weary wastrel with a mound of debt. Sinan, meanwhile, has written a book, which he describes as “a quirky autofiction meta-novel.” (Translation: it’s all about him.) Lacking the money to self-publish, he goes first to the mayor and then to a guy who runs a sand quarry, requesting financial support. No joy. When he consults a famous local author, the two of them practically come to blows. His mother, addressing both her husband and her son, inquires, “Where did books get you?” She has a point.

The person who interests me most in “The Wild Pear Tree” is someone we never see. “I have a friend who graduated in literature. He joined the riot police,” Sinan says. When they speak on the phone, the friend jokes about controlling crowds of protesters (“Anywhere out of sight, we beat them up”), and the tone is neither horrified nor menacing but simply high-spirited, as if two old pals were recalling student japes. Such moments provide glimpses of a wider and more riven society. Accurate figures for the number of Turkish public-sector employees dismissed or imprisoned since the failed coup of 2016 are hard to come by, but tens of thousands have certainly lost their jobs, including teachers and cops. The wisest plan, for people like Sinan, must be to keep their heads down. As somebody says, “Education is great, but this is Turkey.”

If you saw Ceylan’s earlier works, such as “Distant” (2002) and “Winter Sleep” (2014), you’ll know how rarely they rage or surge. Instead, you find yourself gradually engulfed, as if by rising waters, and it seems only fair to report that “The Wild Pear Tree” lasts for more than three hours. True, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” (2011) was not much shorter, but that meticulous tale, centered on a murder investigation, was tightly paced, whereas the new film has a looser and more loping tread. Only fitfully does it accelerate, as when Sinan, seeking refuge, runs and hides in the belly of an enormous wooden horse. It stands on the seafront in Çanakkale, not far from what is thought to be the site of Troy, and for a wondrous instant you feel—or fancy that you feel—the ancient and modern worlds collide. Nice idea. In fact, the horse was donated to the city after the filming of “Troy” (2004), and our cunning hero is not following in the footsteps of Odysseus. He’s sitting inside a prop. ♦

The Talk of the Town

- Will the Supreme Court Use a New York City Regulation to Strike Down Gun Laws?

- Food Banks and Side Gigs at J.F.K.

- Save Our Starbucks

- The ABCs of Graffiti

- Redefining the, Like, Idea of the Valley Girl

Will the Supreme Court Use a New York City Regulation to Strike Down Gun Laws?

Comment

New York City is a strange and dangerous place, if the plaintiffs in a gun-control case that the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear are to be believed. The suit, which calls the city’s restrictions on transporting handguns through its streets “bizarre,” “irrational,” and “perverse,” was brought by the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association—the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association—along with two gun owners who live in the Bronx and one from Staten Island. The case is notable for reasons that go beyond its caricature of the city and its mores. To begin with, this will be the first time the Court seriously considers the Second Amendment since it adopted a radical view of gun rights in District of Columbia v. Heller, in 2008, which overturned a near-ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., and in McDonald v. the City of Chicago, in 2010, which did away with similar restrictions in that city. Those decisions were “transformational,” the plaintiffs argue, but “the news has not yet reached New York City.”

It will also be the first opportunity for the Court’s newest member, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, to begin building what promises to be a disastrous pro-gun legacy. Heller, a 5–4 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, upended the way that generations of judges had read the Second Amendment, by recognizing a fundamental, individual right to bear arms, unconnected to a “well-regulated militia.” McDonald then confirmed that Heller could be used to overturn state and local gun laws, as well as federal legislation. Still, both decisions leave room for some basic, long-standing restrictions on guns, such as those that prevent violent felons from buying them. Kavanaugh, though, in the wake of Heller, appears ready to toss out as many restrictions as he can. As an appeals-court judge, he wrote, in a 2011 dissent, that the District of Columbia should not be allowed to ban semi-automatic assault rifles, largely because they were “in common use.” He added that asking people to register their guns is unconstitutional.

The New York case has certain elements in common with Heller: it is a challenge to a municipal regulation which has the potential to loosen laws around the country. The very strictness of the regulation may have made it an appealing target. It is possible, but difficult, to get a license to carry a handgun in New York. An alternative is a “premises” license, which allows an owner to have a handgun in his or her home but also, under a city regulation that has been in force since 2001, requires that owner to keep it at home. With a few narrow exceptions, owners can only take their guns out of the house, unloaded and in a locked case, to go to a shooting range in the city which has certification from the N.Y.P.D. There are seven such ranges, with at least one in each of the five boroughs.

The plaintiffs want to be able to take their guns to second homes or to shooting ranges out of town. They take the view that preventing them from travelling through the streets with their guns actually increases the risk to public safety, in part by forcing them to leave their weapons “in their vacant New York residences,” where anything could happen. One brief suggested that the city might be “underestimating its burglars.” (Crime rates in New York have, in fact, gone down dramatically in recent decades; the number of shootings is the lowest it has been in twenty-five years.) The plaintiffs also claim that being asked to travel without their guns is akin to being forbidden to travel at all—as though a person were not constitutionally whole without a gun. To them, the restriction is as profound a violation of rights as “a prohibition on leaving city limits to get an abortion.”

An overriding issue at stake, then, is whether the Court will decide that the right to “bear” arms is tantamount to a broad right to travel with them. (Justice Clarence Thomas has said, with regard to an earlier case, that he emphatically believes it is.) Gun regulations now vary widely among the states; the strictest of them may eventually be forced to conform to the loosest. A far greater risk to public safety than leaving handguns in empty apartments is the nationwide effort to sanctify the right to carry weapons, concealed or openly, in public places. A majority of states now permit “open carry”—some of them even in bars, stadiums, and day-care centers—and some impose onerous requirements on stores, restaurants, and other businesses that seek to ban guns from their premises. Rates of gun deaths vary, too; they are about six times higher in Alaska and Louisiana—states with very lax gun laws—than they are in New York.

The Justices, in seeking a national standard in the wake of Heller, will, in effect, decide which type of situation is truly “bizarre.” They may do so partly by answering a question that Heller and McDonald left open: What level of “scrutiny” should be applied to gun-control laws in balancing valid government interests, such as public safety, against the individual right recognized by Heller? Kavanaugh, for his part, has written that public safety should not be a determining factor—only “text, history, and tradition” really matter. With that view, he exceeds what had, until recently, been the gun lobby’s wildest hopes.

Meanwhile, the movement to pass stricter gun laws has been gathering strength. A recent Gallup poll found that more than sixty per cent of Americans are in favor of them. There is a growing revulsion at a state of affairs that has made lockdown drills a rite of passage for kindergartners—not least from schoolchildren themselves, who, as the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, have shown, can be powerful advocates for saner laws. Candidates who support gun control won significant victories in the midterm elections, some of them—such as Representatives Lucy McBath, of Georgia, and Jason Crow, of Colorado—in red and purple states. According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, forty members of Congress who had been regarded as N.R.A. stalwarts lost their seats.

That political will is set to collide with the ideological priorities of the Court’s conservatives. The larger conflict will play out in the 2020 campaign, as voters decide whether Donald Trump will get to appoint even more judges who share an expansive view of gun rights. In 2011, Kavanaugh wrote that, after Heller, “D.C. seemed not to heed the Supreme Court’s message.” The echo of that language in the plaintiffs’ portrayal of New York is probably not accidental; gun-rights advocates have been waiting for Kavanaugh, or someone like him. Their brief was submitted on the day his confirmation hearings began. ♦

Food Banks and Side Gigs at J.F.K.

Shutdown Notes

As the government shutdown entered its fourth week, passengers at John F. Kennedy International Airport took note of hip-hop music playing on the sound system in Terminal 5: Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” (“Cut the lights / paid the price”), Kanye West’s “Lift Yourself” (“Poop, poop / Scoop-diddy-whoop”). Could it be an act of protest by airport security agents, who were working unpaid? “TSA has officially stopped giving a fuck,” one passenger tweeted.

“It wasn’t us,” a T.S.A. officer named Thomas Schoregge said last week. (The culprit turned out to be a music service called Rockbot, which lets passengers select the beats.) It was a damp afternoon, and Schoregge was bagging groceries in the back of a U-Haul truck, near the airport employees’ parking lot. Schoregge is a local leader with the American Federation of Government Employees, the union that represents T.S.A. workers. That morning, he and other union representatives had gone to Costco and purchased five thousand dollars’ worth of staples—ramen noodles, tuna fish, crackers, and pasta—for a makeshift food bank. “We’re doing what we can to help people out,” Schoregge said, as he and a few other volunteers greeted approaching colleagues with canned chicken breast and jars of Ragú sauce.

The T.S.A. was created in 2001, in the wake of the September 11th attacks; its officers are among the lowest-paid federal employees. Schoregge, who lives on Long Island, makes about forty-two thousand dollars a year working in Terminal 7’s baggage room—where the only tunes are “loud machines running,” he said. He’d yet to see a paycheck this year. “It’s gonna get bad,” he added. “I just did a huge renovation on my house, and I got a mortgage to pay, and I got kids going to private school.” He went on, “It hasn’t gotten to the point where we’ve got to start pawning jewelry or the TV, but—”

“I don’t have no jewelry, so I guess I’m gonna be in bad shape, huh?” another union leader, Hydrick Thomas, interjected. Thomas has worked as a screener for the T.S.A. for almost seventeen years, and is the president of the union’s T.S.A. council. “Fortunately, I’m a senior,” he said. “It’s just me and my wife. She works. So we’re O.K. But single parents? They’re really struggling.” A woman in a puffer coat approached the truck, and Thomas handed her groceries. “Thank you for what you’re doing out there,” he said.

A moment later, Thomas waved to a woman in a red Kia, calling out, “Tammy’s here!” He grabbed a bag of food for his colleague Tammy Kreiss. “She does my payroll,” he said.

“I’d love to give you money right now,” Kreiss told Thomas. She said that she had set up a GoFundMe page seeking help with utility bills and a car-inspection fee, and had raised about a hundred dollars. She was tired of hearing about the President’s squabbles with Congress over “border security”: “You’re sitting here yelling for money to protect our country and protect the border, and yet, how about, hello? We’re protecting your skies!” (Last Friday, Trump announced a deal to temporarily reopen the government for three weeks, while negotiations continued.)

“I hold both parties responsible,” Vinnie Butera, a baggage screener, said as he picked up groceries. He was still wearing the blue T.S.A. uniform he’d come to work in, at 5 A.M. “It’s like a relationship,” he said, of the federal-budget negotiations. “With my girlfriend, we have two shelves. I want to have fire-department memorabilia on them, and she wants plants. We compromise.”

Butera lingered near the truck as he waited for an Uber fare—his side gig. “I’m not gonna lie,” he said. In Terminal 7, where he works, “it’s not the greatest of moods.” His girlfriend has a job in a veterinarian’s office, “so that helps a little bit.” But, he added, “making it in New York is kinda tough.” He wasn’t questioning his career choice, though. When he arrives for a day of unpaid work, he said, “I just look to the west”—toward Manhattan, where the Twin Towers fell, when he was a high-school senior on Long Island. “I know why I put on the uniform. Most of the country can’t say that.”

“Don’t be ashamed,” Gino Morales, another union representative, told a tall woman collecting groceries during her break. “We’re all here for everybody.” Morales commutes to J.F.K. from the Poconos, where he has six kids. The youngest is nine months old, the oldest fifteen. His wife stays at home. “I’m in a different boat,” he said. He’d applied for unemployment and was looking for a new job, at Home Depot or Lowe’s.

Three T.S.A. employees accepted groceries from Morales and discussed carpooling home to the Bronx. “We’re new,” one of them, a young woman, said. They’d been on the job for just a week. “We weren’t supposed to be paid yet anyway,” she added, shrugging, although she wondered whether they’d miss their first paycheck. (They did.)

By early evening, the union leaders had given out about three hundred and fifty bags of food. In Terminal 5, T.S.A. screeners were asking travellers in sock feet about liquids and electronic devices. On the sound system, Katy Perry was singing “Unconditionally.” ♦

Save Our Starbucks

Dept. of Rabble-Rousing

In this era of “hyper-gentrification,” New Yorkers have a fraught relationship with Starbucks. In Brooklyn, Williamsburg residents greeted the company’s arrival, in 2014, with sneers. (“It’s only a chain store with bad coffee,” the performance artist Reverend Billy said.) Two years ago, East Villagers held a rally protesting the company’s new location on St. Mark’s Place. Signs read “Not another Starbucks!”

Recently, a different sort of petition has been circulating online. Titled “Keep Our Very Special Starbucks Open,” the petition, which has garnered more than four hundred and fifty signatures, implores the company not to abandon a struggling store at the corner of Seventy-sixth Street and Columbus Avenue. Starbucks has fourteen other Upper West Side locations, but the petition argues that this one is different. It challenges the company’s C.E.O., Kevin Johnson, to look beyond performance metrics and consider its “community value.”

A couple of Fridays ago, the petition’s three co-authors sat at a pair of café tables just inside the store’s entrance. Tourists trickled in from the American Museum of Natural History, across the street. An espresso machine whirred, drowning out a Mary J. Blige song.

“Who tries to save a Starbucks?” Michael Schertz asked. A soft-spoken entrepreneur, he lives on West Seventy-fourth Street. He wore a button-down shirt and slacks and cradled a mug of black coffee. “I looked on the Internet. All the stories are ‘Save our store from Starbucks.’ ”

Teddy Cohn, a writer with a blog called Random Acts of Commentary, added, “It’s with great ambivalence that I’m actively in defense of a Starbucks.” Cohn, who lives on West Seventy-sixth Street, was sipping a coffee with whole milk. He wore a beanie and a T-shirt bearing a red “X.” “I don’t like corporate brands,” he went on. But, with the Seventy-sixth Street location, Starbucks “happened to hatch a messiah child, and they decided to kill it.”

“Mason?” a barista bellowed, placing a drink on the counter.

Ethan Schneider looked thoughtfully at a thermos of water. “It’s sort of like a cultural node,” he said, of the store. Schneider, who has long ginger hair and goes by the moniker Central Park Yogi, sleeps on the steps of a nearby church. “For me, it’s a form of activism,” he said, of his living conditions.

The trio explained how they’d met. Six years ago, Schertz was in the Starbucks, working on a business plan, when he struck up a conversation with Cohn about basketball and, later, politics. (Schertz is conservative, Cohn liberal.) Soon, Schertz began sitting with Cohn at his regular writing spot: the bar stools along the counter.

Schneider joined them six months ago. He describes himself as a “freegan,” meaning he eats food that others have thrown away. He typically spends several hours a day in the Starbucks, using his phone or laptop to work on activism projects. They formed a kind of salon. Lately, Schertz said, they’d been discussing the meaning of the word “customer.” “A customer isn’t just someone who buys something,” he said. “A customer is someone who embraces the customs of the environment.”

Cohn said, “I’ve met people here who are rich bankers, and homeless people who are embraced. I’ve met people who are ‘jock’ kind of guys, and transgender people. And I’ve never seen anyone hassled because they’re not buying another latte.”

“Julia?” the barista called, putting another drink on the counter.

On January 2nd, Cohn said, he noticed the staff members talking in low voices. “They were saying, ‘Oh, my God, who’s going to tell Teddy?’ And they sent over this brave, young, sweet Honduran guy that I love, named Anthony, and he manned up”—Cohn puffed out his chest—“and he said, ‘Teddy, we’re closing on January 31st.’ And they all started crying.”

The regulars sprang into action. “I was, like, well, moping isn’t going to do us any good,” Schneider said. They created the petition. Schertz ordered five hundred cards asking people to sign it, and left them in the restroom and on the counter. Many signatories have shared their own memories of the Starbucks. One, Cynthia Weidner, recalled stopping by during a difficult time in her life. She ordered a Rev Up tea with steamed soy milk; it arrived with cold soy milk. “You could see there was no froth,” she said. Sensing that something was amiss, the barista caught her mistake and made Weidner a fresh beverage. Weidner had to wipe away tears. “They really cared,” she said.

In the store, Cohn waved over the shift manager, a woman named Cas, who was wearing a knit cap. “She’s one of my dearest, nearest,” he said, and they hugged. Cas said that she was transferring to a Starbucks downtown, noting, “It’s sad, because we made this a family.”

“Vincent?” the barista yelled.

Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, confirmed last week that the company knew about the petition, and said, “We recognize that the store is special to our customers.” But it would still be closing. He added, “There’s a nearby store on Seventy-third and Columbus, less than a three-minute walk away.”

Cohn, Schertz, and Schneider scoffed at the mention of the Seventy-third Street Starbucks. “It’s a hellhole,” Schertz said. ♦

The ABCs of Graffiti

Streetwise

According to lore, modern American graffiti began in the late nineteen-sixties, when a Philadelphia teen-ager named Darryl McCray started spray-painting his nickname, Cornbread, around the city, hoping to catch the attention of his crush. In New York, bands of urchin-artisans took up Cornbread’s style—stick letters, tags—and made it an art form. Graffiti now adorns the walls of museums from Brooklyn to Berlin, and sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auctions. What became of the kids?

On a recent, drizzly Sunday, about half a dozen of the old masters gathered in the lobby of the former P.S. 62 building, on Grand Street, a hulking brick structure now called the Seward Park Campus. The men, who are in their forties, fifties, and sixties, looked like hip dads, which many of them are, with scruffy salt-and-pepper beards, hoodies, and expensive sneakers. The occasion was the publication of “The ABCs of Style: A Graffiti Alphabet,” a Baby Einstein-like book for the streetwise set. Each letter is drawn by a graffiti legend: “A” by Doc, “B” by Blade. Dana Albarella James, the book’s co-author and publisher, explained, “The world is awash in this aesthetic. It’s important for kids to know where it came from.” She was accompanied by her own kids, ages eight and eleven, and her husband, Todd James, a.k.a. Reas—a graffiti writer famous for covering an entire subway car with an R. Crumb-inspired “EAT SHIT” mural, in 1988. (These days, his work shows at the Venice Biennale.) Lee Quiñones, a.k.a. Lee—a former member of the Fabulous Five crew, known for his depiction of the comic-book character Howard the Duck—was accompanied by his ten-year-old son, Benicio. Blake Lethem, a.k.a. Keo—whose brother is the novelist Jonathan Lethem—had brought an apprentice: a sharp-eyed eight-year-old who goes by the street name Squirm. Squirm’s father, Norman Turkowitz, a dentist with a practice on West Fifty-seventh Street, had come along, too. His patients include a number of graffiti writers; when Squirm expressed interest in the craft, they connected him with Lethem, and the two now meet regularly for drawing lessons. “There’s a big tradition in graffiti of mentoring, of having an apprentice,” Dana explained. “In the seventies, they called them butlers.”

Their host at Seward Park was Jesse Pais, a.k.a. Ev One, a graffiti writer turned dean at the New Design High School, which is housed in the building. These days, most of graffiti’s elder statesmen have gone straight; they ply their trade at invitation-only venues around the city. Pais has made the caged-in rooftop of Seward Park into one such venue. They took an elevator up six floors and emerged onto the roof: a kind of outdoor museum, with basketball courts, H.V.A.C. units, and brick walls covered in riots of color and form. Dana pointed out a wall featuring the Black Panther, painted by Wane Peterkin, a.k.a. Wane, one of the last of the so-called Bronx Bombers. Squirm admired the lettering. “The white—it pops,” he said. Peterkin was on hand. “This one probably took me ten hours,” he said, studying the mural. He griped about parking and lugging equipment. “Back in the day, when we went to paint a train, it would take us two hours, sometimes less.”

Some people like coming home to a dog. Carly preferred an eight-piece funk brass band.

Farther on, Christopher Vanager, a.k.a. Doc, pointed out his handiwork: three shape-shifting silver letters drawn on a corrugated metal wall. Vanager grew up in Brooklyn and started drawing in notebooks when he was in junior high. “My father drew,” he said. “My mother was an excellent seamstress.” Behind him, the kids had started an impromptu, netless badminton game with a Ping-Pong ball.

Cornelius Perry, a.k.a. Jester, was a bit older than the other writers in the group. (In “The ABCs of Style,” his lowercase “j” has the planet Jupiter for a dot.) He recalled growing up in a Manhattan housing project, and his friendship with Cliff 159, the leader of the 3 Yard Boys. Perry stopped writing graffiti in 1979, and today works as a paralegal. In 2013, he was coaxed back into graffiti by some old friends. “Whatever graffiti I do now is legal,” he said, cryptically. He talked about his children. “My youngest kid, right now she’s twenty-four years old,” he said, and held up an iPhone to show off her illustration work, which she posts on Instagram. “I just do letters. This young lady, she can actually draw.” ♦

Redefining the, Like, Idea of the Valley Girl

L.A. Postcard

So, like, a really long time ago (1983), this movie “Valley Girl” came out, and people, like, everywhere got the idea that girls from the Valley (the San Fernando Valley, a two-hundred-and-sixty-square-mile swath of Los Angeles County that is home to 1.75 million people) turn every sentence into a question? And only wear pink? And totally, like, live at the mall?

As if! The other day, nine female denizens of the Valley met for brunch at Myke’s Cafe, a Mexican diner in Pacoima. They’d been brought together by “Valley Girl Redefined,” an art exhibition currently showing at the Brand Library & Art Center, in Glendale. Works on display include a photograph of a Rubenesque woman in repose by a brick wall, titled “Together Again” (a play on the story of Humpty Dumpty), by Monica Sandoval, and a collage of images evoking Valley-girl stereotypes—pink bubbles, fake breasts, Britney Spears—by Casey Kauffmann.

A waitress passed out bowl-size mugs of coffee. “I didn’t realize what it meant to be from the Valley until I went to college in Washington State and people would do my voice back to me,” Kauffmann said. She had on tortoise-shell eyeglasses and wore her hair in a bob. “I was, like, ‘Oh, I have an accent.’ I didn’t even know that I was doing the Valley-girl thing that’s on TV.”

“Once, I was in France and I said to this guy, ‘I love your accent,’ ” Kathi Flood, another artist in the show, recalled. “He said, ‘I like your accent, too. This is what you do: you take a big breath, you talk and talk until you run out of breath, and then you take another big breath, and you just keep going like that.’ ”

Erin Stone, who curated the exhibition, said, “The idea of the Valley girl has expanded past this geographic area, to the point where people know about her, but they don’t know where she actually comes from.” The show was inspired, in part, by a trip that Stone took to Kathmandu. When she told a Nepali man where she was from, he responded, “Like, for sure!”

“What I discovered recently is how hard it is to discover artists that identify as from the Valley. As opposed to ‘Oh, I’m L.A.,’ ” Shannon Currie Holmes, the Brand’s exhibition supervisor, said.

“One of the biggest characteristics of a Valley artist would be lack of pretension,” Flood said. “I know a few artists in New York where everything they touch has to be documented. It’s just terribly important.”

“But a lot of very wealthy and famous people that everyone thinks are Hollywood—I mean, they’re Valley,” Holmes said. “The Kardashians are Valley. Dave Grohl is Valley.”

“Paul Thomas Anderson!” Stone shouted from across the table.

“You also have just regular people growing up there,” Erika Ostrander, who makes sculptures with human hair and animal tissue, said.

“I was dirt poor,” Sandoval said. “I was fighting against the stereotype of beauty, the stereotype of the Valley girl. No one can fit into that mold.”

Casey Kauffmann plays with Valley-girl stereotypes in her work. Above, “IRL (2014-2018).”

Art work by Casey Kauffmann

“Thank God,” Lynn Coleman, one of the original illustrators for the skateboard magazine Thrasher, said. (She drew the comic strip “Alleygator,” about an environmentally conscious skateboarding alligator.)

“The Valley girl, in film, always has this appearance of wealth, which is not the truth of the Valley, and yet she’s also sort of déclassé,” Holmes said. “So you’re wealthy without class.”

“That is often what women deal with,” Kauffmann said. “Beyond the Valley. It’s just sort of, like, you’re never enough.”

“One of the biggest things wrong with ‘Valley girl’ as a title is the gendering of it,” Rachel Apthorp, who paints pictures of deflated bouncy castles, said. “There’s no Valley boy. It suggests that women are airheaded and stupid.”

“I actually really love it when people underestimate me,” Kauffmann said. “A lot of my work, especially my digital work, is very pink and sparkly, and it’s basically a test for the viewer. If you think it’s frivolous, that’s on you.”

They ordered pancakes and chilaquiles. “If the Valley were its own city, it would be the fourth largest in the U.S., in terms of population,” Stone said.

Addy Gonzalez Renteria, who, with Stone, co-founded 11:11, the nonprofit behind the show, said, “It’s funny: historically, the Valley has tried to secede from L.A.”—most recently in 2002—“but L.A. won’t let us go.”

“Because they want that tax base,” Coleman said.

“And we would be fine,” Renteria said. “Ethnically, politically, geographically.”

“For sure!” Flood said. ♦

Shouts & Murmurs

- No Wonder He Kept Going Bankrupt

No Wonder He Kept Going Bankrupt

Shouts & Murmurs

SCENE: Corner office, Trump Tower, New York City.

DATE: Circa 2013.

IN ATTENDANCE: Donald Trump; Michael Cohen; Donald Trump, Jr.; Eric Trump; Allen Weisselberg, C.F.O. of the Trump Organization.

Donald Trump: All right, we’re here to decide if we should buy the Garfield Arms apartment building, on Lexington Avenue, from Stan Lewis for ninety-six million dollars, assuming that the financing from the Herzegovina Savings and Loan is still there after the investigation. Stan is a terrific guy, by the way—one of the original members of Mar-a-Lago and the author of that letter of appreciation about how my club is a lot better than any other club. “Out of the league of any other club” were his exact words. A really great guy. Donald, Jr., what do you have?

Donald Trump, Jr.: Well, I spoke to the commissioner of the New York City Department of Buildings, and he confirmed the existence of the inspection report that our spy in the D.O.B. warned us might be coming. The inspectors think that the building will fall down before the end of the year.

Donald Trump: Stan denies that vehemently.

Donald Trump, Jr.: The commissioner says that the department is preparing a condemnation order.

Donald Trump: Stan strongly denies that. He was very strong in his denial. Very, very strong. He denied it to me personally, on the phone, and he denied it to me last week, when he presented me with that plaque naming me the Carpet Manufacturer Association’s South Florida Man of the Year. Michael?

Michael Cohen: I called the commissioner of the Buildings Department and told him that if he condemned the Garfield Arms we would get him fired, we would crush him like a bug, we would litigate him into abject poverty, we would burn his crops, and we would kill his firstborn son.

Donald Trump: What did he say to that?

Michael Cohen: I think when I said that, he’d already hung up the phone. I was afraid to call back and find out.

Donald Trump: Eric. You have your hand up. What is it?

Eric Trump: I have to go potty.

Donald Trump: Go. Don’t come back. Somebody lock the door. Allen, what have you got?

Allen Weisselberg: Well, it turns out that the owners’ financial statement is a crock. Putting a soup kitchen in the lobby didn’t drive out nearly as many rent-controlled tenants as they thought it would, and it brought on a lawsuit that’s bound to cost millions before it’s over. Their income projections for next year are strictly fantasyland. Our accountants say that, even if the building doesn’t fall down, it will be in the red for at least the next forty years. They say that investing in the Garfield Arms makes the Kushners getting suckered into buying that white elephant on Fifth Avenue—the one Henry Geldzahler said looks like the box the Seagram Building came in—seem like getting in on the Amazon I.P.O.

Donald Trump: Stan denies that very strongly. He denied it once before, and then he denied it again when I phoned to thank him for the letter he wrote to the Palm Beach paper saying that I was the best businessman ever, and possibly the Messiah.

Donald Trump, Jr.: That was a great letter, Dad.

Eric Trump (shouting through the door): I framed that letter, Dad.

Donald Trump: O.K., that does it. We buy. That’s why I’m so much better at this than anyone else—I hear from the experts I’ve surrounded myself with, and then I make an executive decision.

All, in chorus: You’re the greatest! You’re the greatest!

Eric Trump (still shouting through the door): You’re the bestest ever in the whole wide world.

(Exeunt, brushing by Eric) ♦

Cartoons

- Cartoons from the February 4, 2019, Issue

Cartoons from the February 4, 2019, Issue

Cartoons From The Issue

Fiction

- What Can You Do with a General

What Can You Do with a General

Fiction

Play Audio

Linda was inside, on her phone—to who, this early? From the hot tub, John watched her pace in her robe and an old swimsuit in a faded tropical print that probably belonged to one of the girls. It was nice to drift a little in the water, to glide to the other side of the tub, holding his coffee above the waterline, the jets churning away. The fig tree was bare, had been for a month now, but the persimmon trees were full. The kids should bake cookies when they get here, he thought, persimmon cookies. Wasn’t that what Linda used to make, when the kids were little? Or what else—jam, maybe? All this fruit going to waste, it was disgusting. He’d get the yard guy to pick a few crates of persimmons before the kids came, so that all they’d have to do was bake them. Linda would know where to find the recipe.

The screen door banged. Linda folded her robe, climbed into the hot tub.

“Sasha’s flight’s delayed.”

“Till?”

“Probably won’t land until four or five.”

Holiday traffic would be a nightmare then, coming back from the airport—an hour there, then two hours back, if not more. Sasha didn’t have her license, couldn’t rent a car, not that she would think to offer.

“And she said Andrew’s not coming,” Linda said, making a face. Linda was convinced that Sasha’s boyfriend was married, though she’d never brought it up with Sasha.

Linda fished a leaf out of the water and flicked it into the yard, then settled in with the book she’d brought. Linda read a lot: she read books about angels and saints and rich white women from the past with eccentric habits. She read books by the mothers of school shooters and books by healers who said that cancer was really a self-love problem. Now it was a memoir by a girl who’d been kidnapped at the age of eleven. Held in a back-yard shed for almost ten years.

“Her teeth were in good shape,” Linda said. “Considering. She says she scraped her teeth every night with her fingernails. Then he finally gave her a toothbrush.”

“Jesus,” John said, what seemed like the right response, but Linda was already back to her book, bobbing peacefully. When the jets turned off, John waded over in silence to turn them on again.

Sam was the first of the kids to arrive, driving up from Milpitas in the certified pre-owned sedan he had purchased the summer before. He had called multiple times before buying the car to weigh the pros and cons—the mileage on this used model versus leasing a newer one and how soon Audis needed servicing—and it amazed John that Linda had time for this, their thirty-year-old son’s car frettings, but she always took his calls, going into the other room and leaving John wherever he was, alone with whatever he was doing. Lately John had started watching a television show about two older women living together, one uptight, the other a free spirit. The good thing was that there seemed to be an infinite number of episodes, an endless accounting of their mild travails in an unnamed beach town. Time didn’t seem to apply to these women, as if they were already dead, though he supposed the show was meant to take place in Santa Barbara.

Chloe arrived next, down from Sacramento, and she had driven, she said, at least half an hour with the gas light on. Maybe longer. She was doing an internship. Unpaid, naturally. They still covered her rent; she was the youngest.

“Where’d you fill up?”

“I didn’t yet,” she said. “I’ll do it later.”

“You should’ve stopped,” John said. “It’s dangerous to drive on empty. And your front tire is almost flat,” he went on, but Chloe wasn’t listening. She was already on her knees in the gravel driveway, clutching tight to the dog.

“Oh, my little honey,” she said, her glasses fogged up, holding Zero to her chest. “Little dear.”

Zero was always shivering, which one of the kids had looked up and said was normal for Jack Russells, but it still unnerved John.

Linda went to pick up Sasha because John wasn’t supposed to drive long distances with his back—sitting made it spasm—and, anyway, Linda said she was happy to do it. Happy to get a little time alone with Sasha. Zero tried to follow Linda to the car, bumping against her legs.

“He can’t be out without a leash,” Linda said. “Be gentle with him, O.K.?”

John found the leash, careful when he clipped it to the harness to avoid Zero’s raised stitches. They looked spidery, sinister. Zero was breathing hard. For another five weeks, they were supposed to make sure he didn’t roll over, didn’t jump, didn’t run. He had to be on a leash whenever he went outside, had to be accompanied at all times. Otherwise the pacemaker might get knocked loose. John hadn’t known dogs could get pacemakers, didn’t even like dogs inside the house. Now here he was, shuffling after Zero while he sniffed one tree, then another.

Zero limped slowly to the fence line, stood still for a moment, then kept going. It was two acres, the back yard, big enough that you felt insulated from the neighbors, though one of them had called the police once, because of the dog’s barking. These people, up in one another’s business, trying to control barking dogs. Zero stopped to consider a deflated soccer ball, so old it looked fossilized, then kept moving. Finally he squatted, miserable, looking back at John as he took a creamy little shit. It was a startling, unnatural green.

Inside the animal was some unseen machinery keeping him alive, keeping his animal heart pumping. Robot dog, John crooned to himself, kicking dirt over the shit.

Four o’clock. Sasha’s plane would just be landing, Linda circling arrivals. It was not too early for a glass of wine.

“Chloe? Are you interested?”

She was not. “I’m applying to jobs,” she said, cross-legged on her bed. “See?” She turned the laptop toward him for a moment, some document up on the screen, though he heard a TV show playing in the background. She still seemed like a teen-ager, though she’d graduated college almost two years ago. At her age, John had already been working for Mike for years, had his own crew by the time he was thirty. He was thirty when Sam was born. Now kids got a whole extra decade to do—what? Float around, do these internships.

He tried again. “Are you sure? We can sit outside, it’s not bad.”

Chloe didn’t look up from the laptop. “Can you close the door,” she said, tonelessly.

Sometimes their rudeness left him breathless.

He put together a snack for himself. Shards of cheese, cutting around the mold. Salami. The last of the olives, shrivelled in their brine. He took his paper plate outside and sat in one of the patio chairs. The cushions felt damp, probably rotting from the inside. He wore his jeans, his white socks, his white sneakers, a knitted sweater—Linda’s—that seemed laughably and obviously a woman’s. He didn’t worry about that anymore, how silly he might look. Who would care? Zero came to sniff his hand; he fed him a piece of salami. When the dog was calm, quiet, he wasn’t so bad. He should put Zero’s leash on, but it was inside, and, anyway, Zero seemed mellow, no danger of him running around. The back yard was green, winter green. There was a fire pit under the big oak tree which one of the kids had dug in high school and ringed with rocks, but now it was filled with leaves and trash. Probably Sam, he thought, and shouldn’t Sam clean it up, clean all this up? Anger lit him up suddenly, then passed just as quickly. What was he going to do, yell at him? The kids just laughed now if he got angry. Another piece of salami for Zero, a piece for himself. It was cold and tasted like the refrigerator, like the plastic tray it had come on. Zero stared at him with those marble eyes, exhaling his hungry, meaty breath until John shooed him away.

Even accounting for holiday traffic, Linda and Sasha got back later than he expected. He went out onto the porch when he heard their car. He’d had the yard guy put up holiday lights along the fence, along the roof, around the windows. They were these new L.E.D. ones, chilly strands of white light dripping off the eaves. It looked nice now, in the first blue dark, but he still missed the colored lights of his childhood, those cartoonish bulbs. Red, blue, orange, green. Probably they were toxic.

Sasha opened the passenger door, a purse and an empty water bottle on her lap.

“The airline lost my suitcase,” she said. “Sorry, I’m just annoyed. Hi, Dad.”

She hugged him with one arm. She looked a little sad, a little fatter than the last time he’d seen her. She was wearing some unflattering style of pant, wide at the legs, and her cheeks were sweating under too much makeup.

“Did you talk to someone?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I mean, yeah, I left my information and stuff. I got a claim number, some Web site. They’re never going to find it, I’m sure.”

“We’ll see,” Linda said. “They reimburse you, you know.”

“How was traffic?” John asked.

“Backed up all the way to 101,” Linda said. “Ridiculous.”

If there were luggage, at least he would have something to do with his hands. He gestured in the direction of the driveway, the darkness beyond the porch light.

“Well,” he said, “now everyone’s here.”

“It’s better this way,” Sam said. “Isn’t it better?”

Sam was in the kitchen, connecting Linda’s iPad to a speaker he’d brought. “Now you can play any music you want.”

“But isn’t it broken?” Linda said from the stove. “The iPad? Ask your dad, he knows.”

“It’s just out of batteries,” Sam said. “See? Just plug it in like this.”

The counter was cluttered—John’s secretary, Margaret, had dropped off a plate of Rocky Road fudge covered in Saran wrap, and old clients had sent a tin of macadamia nuts and a basket of fig spreads that would join the fig spreads from years past, dusty and unopened in the pantry. Lemons in a basket from the trees along the fence line, so many lemons. They should do something with the lemons. At least give some to the yard guy to take home. Chloe was sitting on one of the stools, opening Christmas cards, Zero at her feet.

“Who are these people, anyway?” Chloe held up a card. A photograph of three smiling blond boys in jeans and denim shirts. “They look religious.”

“That’s your cousin’s kids,” John said, taking the card. “Haley’s boys. They’re very nice.”

“I didn’t say they weren’t nice.”

“Very smart kids.” They had been good boys, the afternoon they visited, the youngest laughing in a crazy way when John dangled him upside down by his ankles.

Linda said that John was being too rough, her voice getting high, whiny. She got worried so easily. He loves it, John said. And it was true: when he righted the boy, his cheeks red, his eyes wild, he’d asked to go again.

Sasha came downstairs: her face was wet from washing, some sulfurous lotion dabbed on her chin. She looked sleepy, unhappy in borrowed sweatpants and a sweatshirt from the college Chloe had gone to. Linda talked to Sam every day, Chloe, too, and saw them often enough, but Sasha hadn’t been home since March. Linda was happy, John could tell, happy to have the kids there, everyone in one place.

John announced that it was time for a drink. “Everyone? Yes?” he said. “I think let’s do a white.”

“What do you want to listen to?” Sam said, controlling the iPad with a finger. “Mom? Any song.”

“Christmas songs,” Chloe said. “Put on a Christmas station.”

Sam ignored her. “Mom?”

“I liked the CD player,” Linda said. “I knew how to use it.”

“But you can have everything that was on your CDs, and even more,” Sam said. “Anything.”

“Just pick something and play it,” Sasha said. “Christ.”

A commercial blared.

“If you subscribe,” Sam said, “then there won’t be any commercials.”

“Give me a shout when you’re done with the space bar!”

“Come on,” Sasha said. “They don’t want to deal with that stuff.”

Sam, wounded, turned the volume down, studied the iPad in silence. Linda said that she loved the speaker, thank you for setting it up, wasn’t it nice how it freed up all this counter space, and dinner was ready anyway so they could just turn the music off.

Chloe set the table: paper napkins, the cloudy drinking glasses. John had to call someone to look at the dishwasher. It wasn’t draining properly, and seemed only to marinate the dishes in a stew of warm water and food scraps. Linda sat at the head of the table, the kids in their usual spots. John finished his wine. Linda had stopped drinking, just to try it out, she said, just for a while, and since then he had drunk more, or maybe it only felt that way.

Sasha pinched a leaf of lettuce from the salad bowl and started chewing.

“Excuse you,” he said.

“What?”

“We have to say grace.”

Sasha made a face.

“I’ll say it,” Sam said. He closed his eyes, bowed his head.

When John opened his eyes, he saw Sasha on her phone. The impulse to grab the phone, smash it. But best not to get mad, or Linda would get mad at him, they would all get mad. How easily things got ruined. He refilled his wine, served himself some pasta. Chloe kept reaching down to feed Zero scraps of rotisserie chicken.

Sasha poked at the pasta. “Is there cheese in this?” She made a show of not taking any. There was only wet lettuce and some shreds of chicken on her plate. She sniffed her water glass. “It smells weird.”

Linda blinked. “Well, get another glass then.”

“Smell,” Sasha said, tipping it at Chloe. “See?”

“Get a new glass,” Linda said, and snatched it away. “I’ll get it.”

“Stop, stop, I’ll do it, it’s fine.”

When the kids were little, dinner was hot dogs or spaghetti, the kids with their glasses of milk, Linda drinking white wine with ice cubes, John with his wine, too, tuning in and out. The kids fought. Chloe kicked Sam. Sasha thought Sam was breathing on her—Mom, tell Sam to stop breathing on me. Tell. Sam. To. Stop. Breathing. On. Me. How easily a veil dropped between him and this group of people who were his family. They fuzzed out, pleasantly, became vague enough that he could love them.

“We’re sorry Andrew couldn’t make it,” Linda said.

Sasha shrugged. “He would have had to fly back on Christmas anyway. He has his son the next day.”

“Still, we would’ve liked to see him.”

“Zero’s being weird,” Chloe said. “Look.”

There was chicken on the floor in front of the dog but he wasn’t eating it.

“He’s cyborg now,” Sasha said.

“Maybe he can’t see?” Chloe said. “Do you know if he’s blind?”

“Don’t feed him from the table,” John said.

“Not like it really matters at this point.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Can you imagine being a dog?” Sasha said. “Being ready to die and then just, like, no, you’re cut open and they put something inside you, and you’re still alive? Maybe he hates it.”

John had had a similar thought out on one of Zero’s shit walks. Zero had looked so mournful, so ill at ease in his harness, hobbling in the wet grass with his pale-pink belly, and it seemed awful, what people did to animals, pressing them into emotional servitude, keeping them alive for one last Christmas. The kids didn’t even care about the dog, not really.

“He likes it,” Sam said, bending to pet Zero roughly under the chin. “He’s happy.”

“Gentle, Sammy, gentle.”

“Stop, you’re hurting him,” Chloe said.

“God,” Sam said. “Calm down.” He sat back hard in his chair so that it scraped the floor.

“You made him mad, look,” Chloe said. Zero circled back to the grimy beanbag they used as his bed. The dog settled down in the lump of fake fur, shivering, staring at them.

“He hates us,” Sasha said. “So much.”

They watched the same movie every year. John opened a bottle of red and brought it into the living room, though only he and Sasha were still drinking. Linda made popcorn on the stove, a touch burnt. He felt for the unpopped kernels on the bottom of the bowl, rolled them around his mouth to suck the salt.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get a move on.”

“Are we ready? Where’s Sasha?”

Chloe shrugged from the floor. “Talking to Andrew.”

The front door opened. When Sasha came into the living room, she looked as if she’d been crying. “I told you guys to start without me.”

“You know, Sash, we can take you to get some clothes tomorrow,” Linda said. “The mall is still open.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Yeah.” She went to lie next to Chloe on the carpet. Her face was lit by her phone, her fingers tapping away.

The movie was longer than he remembered. He’d forgotten the whole first section, down in Florida, the train escape. Of course that one actor was a faggot, that seemed obvious now. The retired general, the inn, snowy, snowy Vermont—John fell into a lull, all this East Coast hale and heartiness, everyone in ruddy good health. Why had he and Linda stayed in California? Maybe that was the problem, raising kids in this mild place where they didn’t know the seasons. How much better off they’d have been in Vermont or New Hampshire or one of those states where the cost of living was cheap, where the kids could have done 4-H and gone to community college and got used to the idea of a small, good life, which was all he had ever wanted for his children.

The kids used to love movies like this when they were little, those old, live-action Walt Disney movies, “Pollyanna,” “The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band,” “The Happiest Millionaire.” Movies where the fathers were basically Jesus, the kids crowding around whenever the dad came into a room, hanging off his neck, kissing him, oh Pa-paw, the little girls said, almost swooning. Such great faces, those old actors. Fred MacMurray, the one from “The Music Man.” Or was he thinking of the actor from “Little House on the Prairie,” the boxed set that they’d watched in its entirety? Pa was always shirtless at least once an episode, his feathery hair so deeply seventies. John had read the girls those books when they were young. The Little House books and the book about the boy running away to live in the mountains, the boy running away to live in the woods, books about young people out in holy, unspoiled nature, fording clear brooks, sleeping in beds made of tree boughs.

Onscreen, Danny Kaye was singing, the blonde in her pink dress dancing, her great legs, and John hummed along, off key, the dog in the room, he could tell, the harness jangling though he couldn’t see the dog, but someone else could take Zero out, one of the kids. That’s why Zero was alive, anyway. For them.

He had fallen asleep. The movie was over, but no one had turned the television off. His wineglass was empty. Everyone was gone. They had left him alone. The room was dark but the holiday lights were still on outside, casting a peculiar glow through the windows, an eerie, alien brightness. It occurred suddenly to him that something was wrong. He sat, unmoving, the wineglass in his hand. He remembered this feeling from childhood, the nights he lay paralyzed in his bottom bunk, hardly breathing from fear, convinced that some evil vapor was gathering itself in the silence, gliding soundlessly toward him. And here it was, he thought, finally, it had come for him. As he had always known it would.

A spasm in his back, and the room reoriented itself: the couch, the carpet, the television. Ordinary. He stood up. He put his wineglass on the coffee table, turned out the hallway lights, the kitchen lights, went upstairs where everyone, his family, was sleeping.

The next day was Christmas Eve. John carried two cups of coffee up to the bedroom. It was sunny outside, the fog burning off, but the bedroom was dark, Colonial dark, anachronistically dark. Linda had picked the dark wallpaper and the dark curtains and the fourposter bed, and it’s not as if John had some vision of what he would have preferred. On the nightstand on his side of the bed: a wooden tray of pennies in the drawer; a shoehorn still in its plastic package; a chubby anthology of crime stories. In the closet, a broken-down device that he had used to hang upside down for twenty minutes a day, good for his back, until Linda said the sight was too frightening.

Linda sat up in bed and took the mug, her sleep shirt twisted up around her neck, her face rumpled. She blinked a few times, groping for her glasses.

“Sasha’s awake,” he said.

“Was she nasty?”

John shrugged. “She’s fine.”

“I’m afraid to go downstairs. She was so upset yesterday. About her bag. It really unnerved me.”

“She seems fine to me.”

Was that true? He didn’t know. Sasha saw a therapist, which John was aware of only because Linda paid the health insurance and Sasha was still on their plan. In high school, Sasha had also gone to a therapist, someone who was supposed to help her stop scratching her legs up with tweezers and nail scissors. It didn’t seem to do anything but give her new words to describe how awful her parents were.

When the kids were young, Linda had gone to a ranch in Arizona for a week or so, a health place. He guessed it would have been after one of the bad periods, when she sometimes ended up locking him out of the house, or taking the kids to her mother’s. One night, Sasha, nine years old, had called the police on him. When they arrived at the house, Linda told them it was an accident, cleared everything up. It was years ago, he told Linda when she brought it up. And things had changed after that. Linda came back from the health retreat with a book of low-fat recipes that all seemed to use mango salsa, and a conviction that she had communed with the ghost of her childhood dog during a guided meditation in a sweat lodge. And she’d decided that John needed to see a therapist. It was, he supposed, an ultimatum.

He’d gone twice. The man had prescribed him antidepressants and a mood stabilizer, and given him a handout of breathing exercises for impulse control. That first day on the pills he’d felt something like mania, his thoughts a bright crumple of tinfoil—he’d cleaned both cars, taken boxes down from the attic, decided he would have the crew turn the space into a painting studio for Linda. He had climbed out Chloe’s nursery window to empty the gutters, clawing out wet clumps of leaves and bird shit with his bare hands, hands gone blue and bloodless from the cold. When he’d wiped his cheek with his shirtsleeve, it came back damp. His whole face was wet. Even though he was crying, it was not unpleasant, like those times he’d taken mushrooms in high school and sat out in the nature preserve by Salt Point, tears streaming down his face when he felt the wave start to hit, his mouth filling with drool. On the roof he had leaned back on the shingles, considered the drop to the yard below. What had the calculation even been? Not high enough. He had not taken the pills again.

And how had it happened, the eventual neutering of his anger? He was too tired to knock things over. What had Sasha said, the last time they’d got in a fight? She’d been crying, on a trip about how he used to throw food at her when she didn’t eat it. These things seemed so far away, and then eventually they got farther away, and then nobody talked about them anymore.

When he brought the empty mugs down to the kitchen, Sasha was holding up a white package, a cardboard box opened in front of her.

“What are these?” she said.

“Where did you get that?”

“The box was on the counter. I just opened it, sorry.”

He snatched it away. “Was it addressed to you?”

“Sorry,” she said.

“You just do whatever you want?” He was aware that he was almost yelling.

“I said sorry.” She looked scared in a way that made him angrier.

“You might as well have it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

For Christmas he had bought everyone those DNA kits. Linda, too. A pretty good present, he thought. He had been proud—he’d got everyone a DNA kit and an AAA membership. Who could ever say he didn’t think of his family?

Sam came into the kitchen, already dressed.

John slid a box toward him. “Here.”

“What?”

“It’s your Christmas present,” he said. “You just spit into these tubes. It’s all included. Send it off. It comes back and tells you exactly what your DNA is.”

“Cool,” Sam said, making a show of studying the package, turning it over in his hands.

“You know,” Sasha said, “this is basically just giving your DNA to the police.”

“But you guys can find your heritage,” John said. “Find relatives. Learn about the family.”

Sasha smirked. “This is how they found that man who killed everyone. The serial killer. Through some fourth cousin.”

“They weren’t cheap,” he said, hearing his voice rise. Probably, he thought, his kids didn’t even know his own father’s name. Unbelievable. He took a breath. “I got one for everyone.”

Sasha looked at him, looked at Sam. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s great. Thank you.”

In the afternoon, Chloe put on home movies. Sam had transferred all the tapes to DVDs as John and Linda’s Christmas present the year before. Zero sat quivering beside Chloe on the living-room floor. The dog smelled, even from the doorway, faintly of urine. Chloe didn’t seem to notice, nuzzling into his neck. She was eating a microwave burrito off a paper towel. It looked damp and unpleasant, oozing beans.

“Want to watch with me?” she said.

He was tired. The living room was warm, the heat on. It was fine to sit in the big chair, to close his eyes, listen to the voices. It was his voice. He opened his eyes. The camera was jerky, handheld, John walking it down an empty hallway. Let’s go say hi to everyone, he said. Let’s go find them.

It was a house they had not lived in for at least twenty years. What an odd house it had been. So many levels and nooks, big dark beams. A row of pine trees whose branches the kids used to grab through the car windows as he drove past, the snow that covered the bedroom skylight. How strange to see it again, conjured from nothing. Their old life. The camera caught his sneakers, the carpet, the flash of a tweed couch.

“Where is that?” Chloe asked.

“You were a baby. We only lived there a year or two.”

It was hard to remember when it would have been exactly, but they lived in that house before Linda’s father died, so it was probably ’96 or ’97. It looked like winter, and maybe it was the winter that bears kept breaking into the car, often enough that he had to leave it unlocked so that they wouldn’t smash the windows. Sam liked seeing the muddy paw prints, though Sasha was deathly afraid of bears, wouldn’t even come out to look at the tracks.

What else did he remember about the house—the stone fireplace, the collection of pig salt shakers, the cramped kitchen with its mustard-colored refrigerator that they packed with cubes of hot dogs, the freezer limping along, barely keeping the waffles solid. The girls had shared a room. Sam in that nook. They played Go Fish and War, they made houses of cards, they watched “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” Linda’s brother came over all the time. George was still married to his first wife, Christine—she was beautiful then, hair that curled up at the ends, breasts that were always half out of whatever shirt she was wearing. John pulled her onto his lap, and Linda slapped his shoulder, Jo-ohn, Christine wriggling off but only after a few minutes. George and Christine got divorced, how many years after that? Christine fat from antipsychotics and claiming that George had pushed her down the stairs.

“Look at Mom’s hair,” Chloe said. “It’s so funny.”

Linda was wearing glasses popular at that time, brown saucers that made her eyes a little goggled.

She waved the camera away. John! Stop! The video cut out. He closed his eyes again. He heard only static. Then:

Sam, sit down.

It’s his birthday.

It was a nice present your grandpa got you.

The cake looks good.

Hold up how many fingers, how old?

It’s a special puppet. Be very gentle with it.

What do you want to be? You want to be a doctor?

No.

Lawyer.

No.

President? Sam?

John, don’t.

It wasn’t me. It was this guy.

Don’t touch the puppet. We’ll be very careful with it. It’s very expensive.

Sasha. The baby’s sleeping. Don’t touch.

Sasha stood in the doorway. “What are you guys watching?”

“It’s so funny,” Chloe said. “You should watch. You were so cute. Wait, let me put on the one of you. It’s really cute.”

The camera shook, pointed at the carpet. Then tilted up to Sasha in a nightgown, sitting on the bottom step of a staircase.

How old are you?

Five.

Who’s that there?

Gecko.

Is that your Gecko? Is it Gecko? What are you doing?

Making a Flounder house.

Flounder?

Ariel and Flounder.

And who do you love? Do you love your daddy?

Yes.

Who do you love more, your daddy or your mommy? Do you love your daddy the most?

John glanced at Sasha, but she was gone.

She was in the kitchen, ripping paper towels off the roll, square by square, floating them on a puddle under the table. “Zero pissed again,” she said. “Jesus,” she said, the roll of paper towels now empty. She was almost sputtering. Her eyes were puffy and red. “Why doesn’t anyone clean up the piss? It’s disgusting. The dog pisses all over this house and no one even notices.”

“Your mom loves that dog,” John said.

Sasha nudged the paper towels along the floor with the toe of her boot. He guessed that she would not actually take the step of picking up the towels, actually cleaning up.

“Any news about your bag?”

Sasha shook her head. “There’s this Web site to check, but it just says it’s still in transit,” she said. “I keep refreshing.”

“I can take you to the mall if you want,” he said.

“O.K. Yeah, thanks.”

He stood for a moment too long, expecting—what? Nothing. She didn’t pick up the paper towels.

Sasha was silent on the drive, thirty minutes up Highway 12. Not much traffic.

“You see they’re still not done with the hotel?”

He’d been outbid on that job. Good thing, since it was all tied up with the city anyway, people writing letters to the editor, wanting traffic-impact reports.

Sasha kept checking her phone.

“Do you have a charger or something?” she said.

When he reached across her to get the one in the glove box, she flinched.

He forced himself not to say anything. He should have let Linda take her, or one of the kids. He put on the radio, already tuned to Linda’s favorite station. It played Christmas music starting on Thanksgiving. Sam had told him that all radio was just programmed by computers now.

Yet in thy dark streets shineth

The everlasting light.

Hadn’t one of the kids’ classes done this song one year at a Christmas pageant? The kids dressed as angels in cut-up bedsheets, Linda making them halos out of tinsel.

Sasha pulled down the sleeves of Chloe’s sweatshirt and put her phone, now plugged into the charger, on the console between them. The background of her phone, John saw, was a photo of a family on the deck of a ferry. A woman, a man, a kid. The woman, he realized after a moment, was Sasha. She was in a bright-blue anorak—beaming, windswept. A young boy was sitting in her lap, and a man, Andrew, smiled with his arm around them both. The thought came clearly to John that they missed her. This man and his child. She was here and not there and they missed her. Why should that be so strange? The screen went blank.

She’d had a boyfriend in high school, or maybe it was Chloe’s boyfriend, a rangy kid with a dark bowl cut, a sharp nose, raw, red nostrils. The boy had been nice enough, except that he’d eventually snapped—was it drugs? Or maybe he was schizophrenic, John didn’t remember. His parents had called John and Linda once to see if the boy was staying with them. This was years after they’d broken up. The boy hadn’t been staying with them, of course, and his mother told John over the phone how the boy had put a dead bird in the coffee machine, how he thought his family was trying to kill him. How he’d disappeared and they had no idea where he was or how to find him. John had felt bad for the boy’s mother, embarrassed, even, by her unself-conscious grief, and glad for his own children: healthy, normal, off living their lives.

“Maybe you and Chloe should make persimmon cookies tonight?” he said.

“No one eats persimmon cookies. You don’t even like them.”

“I do like them,” he said. He felt hurt. Though he couldn’t remember what persimmons even tasted like. Astringent, maybe, soapy.

“All those persimmons are just going to rot if you don’t,” he said.

She didn’t care. She didn’t remember any of the good things. The night he’d woken them up, piled them into the back of his pickup with blankets, driven them to the reservoir, where they made a huge fire, where the kids sat on towels on the damp ground and ate burnt marshmallows off sticks. There was a photo from that night he used to keep on his desk, the three kids looking tired and happy and bundled in the bright, optimistic colors of that old clothing—and then how did that seem suddenly to mean nothing? Or the month all the kids had chicken pox and slept on sheets on the floor of his and Linda’s bedroom, nude and dotted with calamine lotion, the bathtub drain clogged from their oatmeal baths. So many illnesses and broken bones and sprained wrists and cracked skulls.

They didn’t care. As a girl, Sasha had watched “The Wizard of Oz” so many times that the tape had snapped.

“Do you remember that?” he said. “How much you liked ‘The Wizard of Oz’?”

“What?” She looked irritated.

“You loved it. You watched it twenty-five times, more. It must have been more. You broke the tape.”

She didn’t say anything.

“It’s true,” he said.

“Sounds like Chloe.”

“It was you.”

“Pretty sure it was Chloe.”

He tried to feel kindness toward her.

Even on Christmas Eve, the parking lot at the mall was full. He guessed he shouldn’t be surprised by that anymore, people wanting to shop instead of being home with their families. It used to be shameful, like being on your phone when someone was talking to you, but then everyone did it and you were just supposed to accept that this was how life was.

“You can drop me off here,” Sasha said, already opening her door. “This is good. You want to come back in, like, three hours or something? Meet back here?”

He might as well swing by the office, just to check on things—no one was there, of course, no other cars in the office park, the heat turned off, but it was good to sit at his desk, turn on his computer, answer a few e-mails. He signed some checks. He liked the office when it was quiet. John drank room-temperature water, wobbling in a paper cone, from the water fountain. They should start ordering regular paper cups. Linda texted that the neighbor had called. Zero had got out somehow, made it a few houses before someone found him.

All ok now?

Fine, she texted back.

She’d said she’d wait until after Christmas to put Zero down, but now, with the pacemaker, who knew. The dog would probably outlive John. Another hour before he had to get Sasha. He found a granola bar in his drawer that crumbled when he opened the wrapper. He tipped the pieces into his mouth, chewed hard. Margaret was with her son in Chicago: photos of her grandson were on her bulletin board, a tin of tea sat on her desk along with the tube of hand cream she used assiduously. Before she left, Margaret had turned the calendar—a freebie from the hardware store—to January. He checked the time. He knew he was going to have to get up, sooner or later, but there was no reason to leave until he had to.

He circled the parking lot once before he saw Sasha, leaning against a post, her eyes closed. She looked peaceful, untroubled, her hair tucked behind her ears, her hands in the pocket of Chloe’s sweatshirt. If he remembered correctly, Sasha had not got into that college. She had never been a lucky girl. He rolled down the passenger-side window.

“Sasha.”

Nothing.

“Sasha,” he said, louder.

“I kept calling for you,” he said, when she finally approached. “You didn’t hear?”

“Sorry,” she said, getting into the car.

“You didn’t buy anything?”

For a moment, she looked confused.

“I didn’t like anything,” she said.

He started to pull away. It had rained at some point without his noticing; the streets were wet. Other drivers had turned on their headlights.

“Actually,” Sasha said, “I didn’t even look for clothes. I saw a movie.”

“Oh?” he said. He couldn’t tell if she was trying to elicit some specific response. He kept his face empty, his hands on the wheel. “Was it good?”

She told him what had happened in the movie.

“Sounds sad,” he said.

“I guess,” Sasha said. “Everyone said it was supposed to be good. But I thought it was dumb.”

Sasha’s phone chimed on the seat between them.

“But why would people want to go see a movie that makes them sad?” John said.

Sasha didn’t answer him. She was busy typing, her face washed in the light from her screen. It had got dark so quickly. He turned on his own headlights. Her phone chimed again and Sasha smiled, a small, private smile.

“Is it O.K. if I call Andrew? Really quick. I’m just going to say good night,” she said. “It’s late there.”

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the road.

“Hi, sorry,” Sasha said, speaking low into her phone. “No,” she said, “I’m in the car.”

She laughed, softly, her voice dropping, her body relaxing into the seat, and at the stoplight John found himself tilting his head in her direction, straining to make out what she was saying, as if he might catch something in her words. ♦

Poems

- Gift Planet

- The Butterfly House

Gift Planet

Poems

Play Audio

My six-year-old said “I don’t know time.” She already knows it’s unknowable. Let it be always a stranger she walks wide around.

I fantasize about outer space as if I have some relation to it besides being an animal in its zoo. No visitors. No matter how far I travel on earth I wind up sitting in rooms.

Wind up running all over towns and streets the same. Then get hungry as anywhere, again. Going anyplace, I think: I never want to go home and I can’t wait to be home.

All travelling’s a way to imagine having a home to leave or return to.

The shame of never leaving home. The anguish of no home. Changing house keys on the unchanged ring. The ring is the home, the thing inside trees.

Claiming a tree “mine.”

Car feels like a pod, an exoskeleton, a place inside me. Car short for “carapace.”

I blame the weather, blame myself if the weather is “nice.” Tell myself the weather ruined my plans, though it’s me ruined the weather’s.

Plan: like plane like plain like pain/pane. Like planet. Plan acting like an overlay on everything most elemental. Trying to make everything go according to it—feelings, food, flight, ordinariness, the very earth.

Stop already. Stop as if you can. As if you can breathe back in your own baby, your two, your three. Breathe out all the ones you never had. Breathe in one two three. Breathe out all the others.

I don’t want to be cremated. I want to be part of earth. Space may be my original home but I only remember here.

I cling to this life. I’ve taped myself to it like a card on a gift. Happy birthday! Many happy returns and hope it’s lots of fun! We miss you! Love, Me.

A gift is always an exchange of energy. Like water boiling, like photosynthesis. Inside the box is a water pitcher and a picture of us together as we were when the photo was taken.

Now it’s given. It’s only a copy, but the original was a moment and was burned up, caloric.

Simone says before bed, “I’m imagining a strawberry automatically drawn. I dream so much when I’m awake.”

When I learned to tell time I told it. I told it so; I stopped listening to what it tried to tell me: You’re already losing everything as you go and go and go.

The Butterfly House

Poems

Play Audio

One more butterfly in the butterfly house
will count as overcrowding. Sun all morning
and the heaviness of piped heat
draws hundreds to the surface. They spend their days

being exquisite in a history without wars. We are able,
briefly, to forget the scaly intent,
the cold-skinned slither a hundred yards away
in the tropical ravine. Hold up your arm

and with luck you will emerge into the garden,
badged and sleeved with butterflies,
a thousand bright sails opening around you.

Goings On About Town

- NAO’s Simmering Slow Jams Come to Terminal 5

- Japanese Freshwater Eel Slithers Onto the New York Dining Scene

NAO’s Simmering Slow Jams Come to Terminal 5

Goings On About Town

Saturn’s return, the astrological paradigm shift said to usher in one’s thirties, was the inspiration for NAO’s latest album. The English R. & B. artist—a vibrant spark within the celebrated legacy of British soul music—depicts her psychic transformation in vulnerable confessionals and jubilant tales of romance. Her cosmic voice glides across songs that traverse a spectrum of simmering slow jams and danceable electro-grooves. She performs at Terminal 5 on Feb. 2, with support from another golden-voiced singer, Xavier Omär.

Japanese Freshwater Eel Slithers Onto the New York Dining Scene

Tables for Two

In Japan, freshwater eel, or unagi, is such a beloved and age-old delicacy—prized for its nutritional value (it’s high in vitamins and protein), its tender, ever so slightly gelatinous texture, and its rich yet delicate flavor, enjoyed especially in the summertime—that there is a category of restaurants that serve basically nothing else. In New York, where once there were no such establishments, suddenly there are two.

At Unagi-Ya Hachibei, the eel, served over sushi rice, can be prepared Western style (grilled, then sliced into slivers, as pictured above) or Eastern style (steamed first, then grilled and left in fillets) and eaten alone or seasoned to taste with wasabi, shredded seaweed, and scallions.

Photograph by Haruka Sakaguchi for The New Yorker

Though the restaurants have no direct connection, they share much in common. Both import eel, live, from Japan every week. Both charge around fifty dollars per eel—a price based not only on shipping costs but also on the fact that Japanese freshwater eel has been overharvested to the point that it’s a limited-supply luxury item. And both prepare the eel in a traditional manner—filleted, basted in a sweet soy-based sauce called tare, and grilled—and serve it with ground sansho pepper over sushi rice in a lacquered box, for a dish known as unaju.

On a recent evening, I went to the newer of the two, Unagi Aburi Ittetsu, which opened in December in Nolita, on Kenmare, a street that has become so dense with Japanese restaurants that you could call it Little Japan. The wealth of options—a ramen joint, a shabu-shabu omakase counter, a yakitori grill, a sushi spot, one shop for soba and another for Japanese curry—might help explain why Unagi Aburi Ittetsu, a brightly lit little box that seats only seventeen people, was nearly empty around eight o’clock.

Tiny, spiny eel bones, deep-fried until they’re as crunchy as potato chips, are offered as an appetizer.

Photograph by Haruka Sakaguchi for The New Yorker

At least one of my fellow-patrons was delighted to be there. Shortly after I sat down, a besuited banker type answered a video chat. “Diablo, man!” he said. “How ya doing?” Then he gave Diablo a tour of the place, making sure to zoom in on a large contraption that was circulating water through two tall plastic buckets; within them were slithering masses of eels. “Yeah, it’s sick,” he declared. “I gotta take you here next time you’re in New York.”

Should Diablo eat at Unagi Aburi Ittetsu the next time he’s in New York? The unaju here makes for a decent meal. Each eel is cooked over charcoal until its gray skin gets charred and silvery, its flesh soft and flaky; the tare is sweet but balanced, the chewy grains of rice candied in drippings. Each box comes with a cup of average miso soup and a few slices of pickled radish, and can be supplemented with blanched vegetables and overcooked edamame.

Diablo, and anyone else seeking unagi, would be much better off at Unagi-Ya Hachibei, which opened in November. Up an anonymous set of stairs in midtown, the place has a bit of a speakeasy vibe, romantically dim and atmospheric. At lunch, a whole-eel unaju is ten dollars more than at Aburi Ittetsu. (At dinner, it goes up another ten.) The difference is worth it for what’s included: a tangle of mixed greens; a bowl of clear, fragrant, floral-tasting dashi; smoky daikon pickles; and thick, almost stretchy yuzu sorbet or matcha ice cream for dessert.

For another appetizer, a fluffy yellow omelette is rolled around eel, sliced into segments, and garnished with shiso sprouts.

Photograph by Haruka Sakaguchi for The New Yorker

But the eel itself, sourced, the menu specifies, from Aichi, in central Japan, is a cut above, too. You can order it Western style (grilled, for a firm texture, then sliced into slivers) or Eastern style (steamed first, for silkiness, then grilled and left in fillets); either way, the cleaner, more buttery flavor of the fish shines through. The recipe for the complex, caramelized tare was honed for decades on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands.

Up a set of anonymous stairs, the dining room has a bit of a speakeasy vibe, with a romantically lit bar.

Photograph by Haruka Sakaguchi for The New Yorker

And there are a host of interesting appetizers, which are available à la carte or as part of a ninety-five-dollar kaiseki, or multicourse meal: spiny little eel bones, deep-fried until they’re as crunchy as potato chips and served in what looks like a miniature hot-air-balloon basket; a skewer of surprisingly mild and chewy grilled eel liver; a “Caesar” salad, topped with croutons made from crispy eel skin. Opt for them all, and you’ve got unagi nose-to-tail, nary a bit of luxury wasted. (Unagi Aburi Ittetsu, one eel $45; Unagi-Ya Hachibei, one eel $65.) ♦

The Mail

- The Mail

The Mail

The Mail

Newsworthy

Jill Lepore, in her insightful piece on journalism in the age of social media and fake news, writes, “Speculation is that BuzzFeed is trying to dump” BuzzFeed News (“Hard News,” January 28th). This speculation is incorrect. Whatever challenges we face in this difficult environment for digital media, BuzzFeed News remains a key part of the future of BuzzFeed. Its investigative reporting has freed men from prison, changed the way sexual assault is handled in Congress, given the public incredible insight into the Mueller investigation, and detailed Donald Trump’s business dealings in Russia during the 2016 campaign. I’m excited to see what our journalists do in the years to come.

Jonah Peretti

Founder and C.E.O., BuzzFeed

New York City

Lepore gets a lot right about the many challenges, and a few of the threats, facing journalism today. But the grim picture that she paints of HuffPost underestimates its commitment not just to journalism but to the journalists who produce excellent, agenda-setting reporting each day. The claim that HuffPost, or the publication’s earlier incarnation, the Huffington Post, “paid most of its writers nothing for years” is misleading. While the blog platform, shut down in 2018, was explicitly a place where outside contributors could share their views with a large audience, HuffPost’s unprecedented rise as a leading national publication has been fuelled by the work of top-tier journalists who command (and receive) competitive salaries. We take pride in our newsroom, which today numbers more than two hundred journalists in the United States and many more abroad, and in our commitment to game-changing journalism. The media are indeed facing powerful headwinds, but the need for incisive, balanced reporting has never been greater. At HuffPost, that’s where we see our future.

Lydia Polgreen

Editor-in-chief, HuffPost

New York City

Decisions, Decisions

As I read Joshua Rothman’s piece about how people make decisions, I couldn’t help but think about the unique challenges of end-of-life decision-making (“Choose Wisely,” January 21st). There is no preparing for the experience of being critically ill or close to death, and advance directives often fall far short of anticipating not just the circumstances of illness but also the ways in which those circumstances can change a person’s values and preferences. The decision-science approaches that Rothman describes may help. But, since dying people are not usually able to participate in discussions about their own care, family members and health-care providers often must intuit their values in order to make decisions on their behalf. It is hard enough for us to make end-of-life choices for ourselves; it is all the more difficult to do so for someone else. As decision science develops further, we would do well to keep this issue in mind.

Michael J. Podolsky, M.D.

San Francisco, Calif.

Rothman refers to several factors, often vague ones, that people consider in their decisions about having children. Oddly, all the factors he mentions—I count nineteen—concern the would-be parents. The experience that the child will have does not appear to be a major consideration. It seems to me that one question should supersede all others: What kind of life—what kind of world—will my child endure as an adult? It requires a kind of willful myopia not to be concerned about the answer.

Jefferson Ranck

Portland, Ore.

More Readings

- Trimmings Dept.

- Punch Line Dept.

- Hell, Yes

- What the Strong January Jobs Report Tells Us About the Economy

- Cory Booker’s No-Haters Presidential Proposition

- What to Stream This Weekend: Regina Hall’s Vital Performance in “Support the Girls”

- The Mythology of Marlon James, and the Mystery of Mueller

- An Irving Penn Portrait for the Coldest Days of Winter

Trimmings Dept.

Punch Line Dept.

Hell, Yes

What the Strong January Jobs Report Tells Us About the Economy

Our Columnists

On Friday morning, Donald Trump tweeted, “JOBS, JOBS, JOBS,” and who could blame him? A couple of hours earlier, the Labor Department reported that payrolls had increased by three hundred and four thousand in January, which was about a hundred and thirty thousand more jobs than economists on Wall Street had been predicting. The job gains were widely spread across the economy, with the construction, health-care, retail, and leisure-and-hospitality sectors showing particular strength. The report also showed that wages are still rising at an annual rate of more than three per cent, while consumer price inflation is falling, because of cheaper energy prices. That means that inflation-adjusted wages are rising, as well, which is key.

As I’ve said many times before, it is unwise to read too much into one month’s job figures. They are drawn from a sample survey carried out by the government and have a pretty large statistical margin of error attached to them. They sometimes get revised substantially in subsequent months. Furthermore, they can be distorted by temporary factors, such as freak weather conditions. After Friday’s report came out, a number of analysts suggested that milder weather than usual during the first few weeks of January could have accounted for as many as a hundred thousand extra hires.

Maybe that was the case, but, even taking all these cautionary notes into account, the jobs report was surprisingly strong. It comes at a time that economic growth in China and Europe is slowing; the U.S. stock market has recently been through a shaky period; some prominent economists, such as Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, have warned about a possible recession; and, just this week, the Federal Reserve has pressed the pause button on its policy of raising interest rates. Despite all this, employers are still hiring at a healthy rate, as they have been doing for many months now.

In an analysis of Friday’s report, Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, pointed out that, in the past three months, job growth has averaged two hundred and forty-one thousand a month, and in the past year it has averaged two hundred and thirty-four thousand a month. With all this hiring going on, and vacancies plentiful, many people who had retired or dropped out of the labor force have returned to it. In the past twelve months, the labor force has risen by more than 2.1 million. But, even with more people looking for work, job growth has been strong enough to keep the unemployment rate at or below four per cent, and employers have been forced to raise wages in order to retain their own employees and find new ones.

In other words, American workers are finally enjoying economic conditions that favor them over employers. This is drawing people back into the labor force and producing higher wages. Indeed, Bernstein suggested that recent wage growth has probably been strong enough to tilt the over-all split between wages and profits in the direction of workers, which would reverse long-standing trends. In summing up the lessons of the jobs figures, Bernstein wrote, “First, in an economy with too little worker bargaining power and too much inequality, the benefits of closing in on full employment are powerful and equalizing. And second, Chair Powell and the FOMC were smart to put interest-rate hikes on hold. There’s non-inflationary room-to-run in this job market!”

That there is, but how much room? The Fed’s decision to call a time-out on raising interest rates was predicated on the assumption that the economy is likely to slow down in the coming months, which would keep inflationary pressures at bay. Perhaps this will happen, but the boffo payrolls figure for January was accompanied by another strong report for industrial production. A separate indicator—consumer sentiment—did fall sharply last month. Most analysts attributed that to the government shutdown. Now that the shutdown has ended, consumer sentiment will probably pick up again. (The shutdown didn’t significantly affect the jobs report: federal workers who were furloughed were counted as employed.)

Friday’s strong numbers are a reminder that the American economy isn’t a zippy speedboat that can stop and start at short notice. It’s a vast supertanker that tends to plow ahead once it has built up some momentum. Bringing it shuddering to a halt requires something dramatic, such as the bursting of an asset-price bubble, a big financial crisis of the sort we saw in 2008, or sharply higher interest rates. Right now, none of those things is in place.

On the other hand, the Trump-G.O.P. tax stimulus is running down, and the trade war with China is affecting manufacturing adversely. Ian Shepherdson, a chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, thinks that these factors could cause G.D.P. growth to fall, from about three per cent, in 2018, to closer to two per cent, in 2019. “But I don’t think it is going to slow down enough to get the Fed off the hook when it comes to the labor market,” he said. “The fact is, wage growth is accelerating.” In the past twelve months, it has risen, from 2.6 per cent to 3.3 per cent, according to Shepherdson’s calculations. With low unemployment continuing, and workers realizing they have more bargaining power than they have had in a long time, wage inflation will continue to rise, he predicted. The big question, he added, is how the Fed will react when this happens.

Cory Booker’s No-Haters Presidential Proposition

The Current

Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, the birthplace of Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka, with its history of race riots, white flight, corruption, and neglect, is where Cory Booker started his political career, as a crusading, outsider city-council member and mayor. It is also the setting for much of the story Booker will now tell to try to win the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination. Newark is the place where Booker’s record and self-mythology merge: where he opted—after attending Stanford, then Oxford, and then Yale Law School—to live for years in a housing project known as Brick Towers, and where, as mayor, he orchestrated a gigantic experiment in using billionaire philanthropy for education-system reform. It’s where he still lives when he’s not in Washington, attending to his duties as New Jersey’s junior senator, and it’s where, on Friday, he gave a press conference to discuss the launch of his Presidential campaign.

One premise of Booker’s campaign, at least at the start, appears to be that he can win the Presidency without saying a bad word about anybody. “I think that people are tired of the demeaning and are ready for some redeeming,” he said outside his house on Friday, shrugging off a question about the former Starbucks C.E.O. Howard Schultz’s potential Presidential run as an Independent. But what about Donald Trump? Was Booker prepared to say that the President is a racist? “I don’t know the heart of anybody. I’ll leave that to the Lord—I know there are a lot of people who profess the ideology of white supremacism that use his words,” he said. He added, “But I just want everybody to know I’m going to run a race about not who I’m against or what I’m against but who I’m for and what I’m for.”

Booker has spoken often of the political potential of love, but is it possible to run a modern political campaign without personal conflict entering into it? Booker is an effusive public speaker. He likes to cite his heroes—Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.—and makes corny jokes. He tries to preëmpt cynics by talking about how easy it is to be a cynic. “Love ain’t easy,” Booker said. “Some of the toughest, most heroic people that I admire, whose pictures hang in my office, whose statues are in the Capitol, they’re folks that took on armed hate—billy clubs, and dogs, and firehoses—with unarmed love, and they took down Jim Crow.”

Booker also appears to be friendly with several of the other Democrats already in the Presidential race; one of them, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, tweeted out her congratulations to him on Friday. During his press conference, Booker was interrupted by a neighbor, a middle-aged woman from Ecuador, who stepped out onto her balcony to shout her encouragement. “¡Á la victoria!” Booker responded, in his accented, earnest Spanish. Booker went back to the question he’d been asked—a reporter from HuffPost had asked him to comment on the teacher’s strike in L.A. and his current position on charter schools. “I’m proud of my record,” Booker said. “Local leaders should decide what’s best for them.” Some reporters, though, had broken away to try to get a quote from the neighbor. Booker spoke for a few more minutes, his hands in his jacket pockets, the edges of his ears turning red in the cold. After he’d gone back inside the house with his staff, a journalist next to me was muttering to himself. “Fucking waste of time,” he said.

What to Stream This Weekend: Regina Hall’s Vital Performance in “Support the Girls”

The Front Row

Andrew Bujalski is one of the best and most influential American filmmakers to emerge in the new century. His first feature, “Funny Ha Ha,” is widely credited (or blamed) for sparking the “mumblecore” movement. But nobody mumbles in “Support the Girls,” except for a belligerent man who’s tossed from the Texas sports bar where the story is set. Rather, in Bujalski’s drama about the overlap of personal and professional demands on the waitstaff at the bar in question (as in all of his films), he’s ardently and incisively filming businesses, laws, rules, public power—and their private implications. He films institutions as insistently as Frederick Wiseman does in documentaries, as Vincente Minnelli did in fictions, and the low-key whimsy of Bujalski’s ironic yet hearty observations bursts out with passionately ornate workaday lyricism in “Support the Girls.”

The movie stars Regina Hall, whose role in the film won her the 2018 Best Actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle (of which I’m a member). She delivers a worldly, wise, live-wire-alert performance as a terribly conflicted yet preternaturally graceful manager who bends the rules to help the young women who work for her until the conflicts become irreconcilable. And her performance is only one of the many vitally energetic and nuanced ones in the film, which also features Shayna McHayle and Haley Lu Richardson, as members of the staff, Lea DeLaria, as a regular at the bar, and James Le Gros, as the bar’s owner; if there were an award for Best Ensemble Cast, I’d vote for “Support the Girls.” Yet, for all its artistry behind and in front of the camera, “Support the Girls” took in a grand total of $129,124 at the box office when it was released, in August, which hardly even registers as an opening weekend in Hollywood. But it can be viewed more or less anywhere now, because it’s available to stream at Amazon, YouTube, and other services, where you can also find many other of the best films of 2018.

N.B.: the world of streaming is about to get much larger, with two planned launches—of the Criterion Channel, the successor to the late, lamented FilmStruck, on April 8th, and the new platform OVID.TV, featuring films from some of the most ambitious distribution companies, in March.

The Mythology of Marlon James, and the Mystery of Mueller

The New Yorker Radio Hour

Illustration by Golden Cosmos

From www.wnyc.org

Washington is abuzz with rumors that the Mueller report is coming soon, and both sides are trying to strategize their next move. The reporter Adam Davidson summarizes the broad strokes of what we know so far, and Susan B. Glasser and Jeffrey Toobin debate what impact it will have on the partisan war in Washington. The author Marlon James talks about the trilogy he describes as “an African ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” and about writing fantasy from a Caribbean perspective. And a former C.E.O. talks about activist investing, and how short-term thinking is destroying innovation and competitiveness in American business.

The Mueller Investigation: What We Know So Far

From www.wnyc.org

The staff writer Adam Davidson delivers the broad strokes—just the key points—of what we have learned so far.

Will Trump Survive Mueller?

From www.wnyc.org

The staff writers Susan B. Glasser and Jeff Toobin debate the likelihood of impeachment.

Marlon James Builds His Own Damn Universe

From www.wnyc.org

The writer talks about a new trilogy he describes as “an African ‘Game of Thrones,’ ” and about writing fantasy from a Caribbean perspective.

A Former C.E.O. Says Activist Investors Are Killing American Business

From www.wnyc.org

A successful executive says that activist investors’ quest for one quick stock bump after another is wrecking companies and eroding American competitiveness.

An Irving Penn Portrait for the Coldest Days of Winter

Photo Booth

Every year around this time, when the air in New York City gets so cold that the tip of my nose starts to burn and my socks are always just a little bit damp, my fingers lead me to type “Freuchen and Dagmar” into a Google Images search bar. I cannot remember when I first encountered the photograph that pops up, an Irving Penn portrait, from 1947, of the six-foot-seven-inch Danish explorer Peter Freuchen and his diminutive third wife, a Vogue fashion illustrator named Dagmar Cohn (later, Dagmar Freuchen-Gale). But I know that I have got great pleasure from the vintage snapshot over the years. For one thing, look at the proportions! He is so large, swaddled in a colossal polar-bear coat, and she is so tiny, in her pert black suit and pearls, her one extravagance (a hat with a bow and netting, the millinery trend in those days) dwarfed by his opulent pelage. And then there are their expressions. His: leathered and intimidating, as if he were staring down a predator he intends to harpoon. Hers: complacent, demure, almost bored. She is perched, rather uncomfortably, on a bolt of scratchy cloth (a Penn motif), while he looms over the image, stepping forward on one leg as if he is about to lunge through the lens. The two don’t touch; if you cut the photograph in half, you might think they were in different rooms, different seasons, or even different centuries. All of this makes Penn’s photograph my favorite winter image, and also one of my favorite photographs of a marriage.

On Thursday I spoke with Alexandra Dennett, the legacy-program manager for the Irving Penn Foundation, who serves as a kind of in-house researcher for the foundation. She told me that “Peter and Dagmar Freuchen” was part of a portrait series that Penn shot between 1947 and 1948, in concert with the art director of Vogue. Penn was asked to capture some of the creative and cultural luminaries of the time, including Europeans who had fled the Second World War and ended up in New York City. Penn used the same austere style for all his subjects, shooting them with a bank of lights coming from one direction in raw, unfinished studios with wires running across the floor. He often shot subjects standing in corners fashioned out of wood scraps, or sitting on a mound of wool carpet or a metal folding chair. As the historian Maria Morris Hambourg wrote, in a Metropolitan Museum catalogue, Penn’s “existential portraits” were meant to be jarring and brutal, both for the sitter and for the viewer. “The sheer unlikelihood of seeing a celebrity squeezed into such an unforgiving space makes one wonder what was driving Penn,” Hambourg writes, “beyond the need to create an a priori tension for his sitters.”

It makes sense that Peter Freuchen would agree to sign up for such a process: he was nothing if not tough. Freuchen, who was born in 1886, in Denmark, quit school, at the age of twenty, to sail to Greenland, as a stoker on a steamship, after seeing a student play about polar exploration and realizing that it was his life’s calling. He spent the next three decades living in and exploring some of the coldest parts of the world. According to his many memoirs and journals (he wrote more than a dozen!), he encountered death at almost every turn. He was trapped for several days in an avalanche. A camp cook almost shot him, thinking he was a bear. He fell through a hole in fetid sea ice and had to have a team of sled dogs pull him out. He stabbed his own thigh with a harpoon as he climbed down a glacier using ropes made out of sealskin, and he got trapped in a snow cave because the warmth from his breath formed an impassable crust on the opening. In order to escape from the snow cave, he fashioned a chisel that he sometimes described as having been made from his own frozen feces. While he was stuck, whittling away at the ice, one of his feet froze so severely that he was forced to amputate several of his own toes. Later, he lost the foot entirely.

Dagmar was Freuchen’s third wife. Previously, he had married an Inuit woman, who died young, and, after her, an actress and Danish publishing heiress who, along with Freuchen, founded a women’s magazine in the nineteen-twenties. During the war, Freuchen, who had Jewish heritage, was involved in the anti-Nazi resistance (the Reich banned his books). According to his memoirs, he was captured by Germans but escaped and fled, with Dagmar, to the United States. There, he worked on several Hollywood films about the icy north, and also (because why not?) won the game show “The $64,000 Question.” Freuchen died, of a heart attack, in 1957. Dagmar outlived him by several decades. Penn’s sitting notes for their portrait, which were typed by a studio assistant, marvel at Freuchen’s distinctive style, which all of us would do well to emulate during the harshest days of winter. “Mr. Freuchen brought the polar bear coat he had purchased in Greenland, wrapped up in a gunny sack and slung over his shoulder. Clad in this he looked like a combination of an arctic explorer and a character from the Old Testament.”

Table of Contents

- February 4, 2019

- Reporting

- The Supreme Court Case That Enshrined White Supremacy in Law

- The Family Business That Put Nashville Hot Chicken on the Map

- The Personal Toll of Whistle-Blowing

- A Grand Plan to Clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

- The Critics

- Writing About Writing About the Border Crisis

- Briefly Noted

- The Once Radical Slashes of Lucio Fontana

- The Chaos of American Manhood in “True West”

- The Clever Thrill Ride of “Russian Doll”

- The Beige Noir of “Serenity”

- The Talk of the Town

- Will the Supreme Court Use a New York City Regulation to Strike Down Gun Laws?

- Food Banks and Side Gigs at J.F.K.

- Save Our Starbucks

- The ABCs of Graffiti

- Redefining the, Like, Idea of the Valley Girl

- Shouts & Murmurs

- No Wonder He Kept Going Bankrupt

- Cartoons

- Cartoons from the February 4, 2019, Issue

- Fiction

- What Can You Do with a General

- Poems

- Gift Planet

- The Butterfly House

- Goings On About Town

- NAO’s Simmering Slow Jams Come to Terminal 5

- Japanese Freshwater Eel Slithers Onto the New York Dining Scene

- The Mail

- The Mail

- Newsworthy

- Decisions, Decisions

- More Readings

- Trimmings Dept.

- Punch Line Dept.

- Hell, Yes

- What the Strong January Jobs Report Tells Us About the Economy

- Cory Booker’s No-Haters Presidential Proposition

- What to Stream This Weekend: Regina Hall’s Vital Performance in “Support the Girls”

- The Mythology of Marlon James, and the Mystery of Mueller

- The Mueller Investigation: What We Know So Far

- Will Trump Survive Mueller?

- Marlon James Builds His Own Damn Universe

- A Former C.E.O. Says Activist Investors Are Killing American Business

- An Irving Penn Portrait for the Coldest Days of Winter