Harpers 2020-01 PDF

m a g a z i n e
LETTERS
John R. MacArthur, President and Publisher
Editor
Christopher Beha
Managing Editor
Katherine Ryder
Senior Editors
Christopher Carroll, Rachel Poser,
Matthew Sherrill
Art Director
Kathryn Humphries
Editor at Large
Ellen Rosenbush
Editor Emeritus
Lewis H. Lapham
Washington Editor
Andrew Cockburn
Poetry Editor
Ben Lerner
Web Editor
Violet Lucca
Associate Editors
Elizabeth Bryant, Joe Kloc,
Stephanie McFeeters
Assistant Editors
Will Augerot, Joseph Frischmuth,
Adrian Kneubuhl, John Sherman,
Will Stephenson
Art Researcher
Alyssa Coppelman
Editorial Interns
Teddy Burnette, Claudia Crook, The Fall of Men subways. A sense of nostrum abounds
Laurel McCaull, Daniel Rathburn in the Evryman ethos, with its blind
Art Intern
Clara von Turkovich Barrett Swanson’s take on Evryman appropriation of various healing prac-
Contributing Editors retreats and the “new men’s groups” tices and terminologies. Having spo-
Andrew J. Bacevich, Kevin Baker, Dan Baum,
Tom Bissell, Joshua Cohen, John Crowley, [“Men at Work,” Report, November] is ken at mental-health events with
Wes Enzinna, Tanya Gold, Gary Greenberg, understandably skeptical. As a veteran members of this community, I’ve ob-
Jack Hitt, Edward Hoagland, Scott Horton,
Frederick Kaufman, Garret Keizer, of several of these groups—having, in served this tendency firsthand.
Mark Kingwell, Walter Kirn, fact, started one in college with one of That said, Swanson’s article is
Rafil Kroll-Zaidi, Gideon Lewis-Kraus,
Richard Manning, Clancy Martin, the Evryman founders—I thought disappointingly reductive. The bul-
Duncan Murrell, Vince Passaro,
Francine Prose, Jeff Sharlet, Swanson’s ambivalence was illuminat- warks that privilege has historically
Christine Smallwood, Zadie Smith, ing. In my experience, what men need afforded men are being pulled apart,
Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Stevenson,
John Edgar Wideman most aren’t opportunities to engage and the results, as Swanson ac-
Contributing Artists with their ids or reinforcement of knowledges, can be devastating. In
Olive Ayhens, Lisa Elmaleh, Lena Herzog,
Aaron Huey, Samuel James, Steve Mumford, their anguish; they need to be en- dismissing the Evryman retreats, he
Richard Ross, Tomas van Houtryve, gaged in a rigorous practice of learn- risks ignoring the bedrock principle
Danijel Žeželj
ing how to listen. on which much contemporary ther-
Vice President and General Manager
Lynn Carlson apy and healing is founded—that is,
Jonathan Gold
Vice President, Circulation that we must meet people where they
Shawn D. Green Providence, R.I.
Vice President, Marketing and Communications
are. For all its failings and millennial-
Giulia Melucci marketing trappings, Evryman of-
Vice President, Advertising Barrett Swanson rightly draws par- fers a program that can help men
Jocelyn D. Giannini
Virginia Navarro, Assistant to the Publisher allels between men’s groups like who otherwise wouldn’t examine
Kim Lau, Senior Accountant Evryman and the irritating bounty of themselves gain a cursory sense of
Eve Brant, Office Manager
Courtney Joyal, Marketing Assistant life-hack companies sprouting in Sili- emotional intelligence.
Lydia Chodosh, Production Manager and Designer con Valley and related cure-all ser- The only way to eradicate toxic
Cameron French, Advertising Operations Coordinator vices advertised in New York City masculinity is for men to interrogate
Advertising Sales:
(212) 420-5773; [email protected] and reconceive the systems that sup-
Sales Representatives Harper’s Magazine welcomes reader response. port it, but one can hardly expect a
Chicago: Tauster Media Resources, Inc. Please address mail to Letters, Harper’s
(630) 336-0916; [email protected] man who has never carefully consid-
Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y.
Detroit: Maiorana & Partners, Ltd.
10012, or email us at [email protected]. ered his own issues to see the broader
(248) 546-2222; [email protected]
Canada: JMB Media International Short letters are more likely to be published, implications of institutional patriar-
(450) 405-7117; [email protected] chy. Evryman should certainly aug-
For subscription queries and orders please call: and all letters are subject to editing. Volume
800-444-4653 precludes individual acknowledgment. ment its program to account for the
2 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

larger social implications of its work,
but to deride it for exploring mascu-
linity at the personal level is as elitist
west Power and Conservation Coun-
cil; in fact, they belong to a 2002 re-
port presented to the council by a
“ DAVID HOLDRIDGE
describes humanitarian aid
from the ground up, a diﬀerent
as it is counterproductive. panel of independent economists. The
council makes recommendations and fascinating perspective.”
Mike Rosen about hatchery operations but does — JOSEPH S. NYE, former dean of the
Brooklyn, N.Y. not estimate a cost per fish, a figure Harvard Kennedy School of Government
that is difficult to assess, as the panel
The more skeptical and disap- itself acknowledged. For that matter,
proving Barrett Swanson grew of hatchery designs and operations have
the Evryman retreat he attended, the changed significantly in the seventeen
more moved I was by it. I found his years since that report’s presentation.
argument—that these retreats are, at Symmes also mischaracterizes the
best, Band-Aid solutions to toxic mas- council and its mandate. We are a
culinity and, at worst, detours that dis- four-state planning agency responsi-
tract from the work of addressing the ble for assuring the Northwest has a
root of the problem—unfair. reliable and affordable electric power
The problem is that his expecta- supply while also mitigating any
tions are unrealistic. “The relevant damage done to the Columbia River
question for me,” Swanson writes, “is basin’s fish and wildlife by hydro-
whether this torrent of emotion is a power dams. Our regional power
meaningful intervention into the de- plan and energy-efficiency measures
bate about masculinity, whether have eliminated the need to build
Evryman is treating the symptom or approximately eighteen thermal-fuel
the cause.” But what would such a power plants.
“meaningful intervention” look like?
John Harrison
How can we expect a retreat to solve
Northwest Power and Conservation
a problem that goes back thousands
Council
of years and has no clear cause? A MEMOIR BY DAVID HOLDRIDGE
Portland, Ore.
In Swanson’s view, the retreats
embody the modern tendency to de- WINNER OF THE PRIZE AMERICANA
cry “personal deprivations” without Any discussion of “the future of
recognizing their “social or political salmon in the Pacific Northwest”
dimensions.” It’s true that these should begin with the U.S. govern- THE AVANT GARDE
groups have not developed a mecha- ment’s 1855 treaties with the Colum-
nism for the total eradication of bia Plateau tribes, which, along with OF WESTERN CIV
toxic masculinity. But he describes, subsequent Supreme Court rulings,
and seems to have experienced, nu- established the basic legal parame-
merous instances of real and com- ters of the issue. The word “treaty” “David and his team in
pelling human connection. While does not appear in Patrick Symmes’s the Shia heartland of Iraq
not a perfect or comprehensive essay, however, and his portrayal of
cure, the retreats do offer a measure the Plateau tribes is superficial and represented the best values
of relief, and they can serve as op- misleading as a result. and hopes of his country . . .
portunities for productive introspec- Symmes argues that “the Native in pursuit of leaving some
tion. I can’t help thinking this American tribes . . . were more than lasting good behind within
should be enough. happy to see the rivers filled with
hatchery fish.” Plateau people have di- the larger Iraqi context of
Annie Nova dismay and disintegration.”
verse views on hatcheries, dams, and
New York City the future of the Columbia River. By
limiting his discussion to a vague pro- — CHRISTOPHER SHAYS,
hatchery contingent, Symmes ignores former congressman, R. Conn.
Dam Nation all those Native activists leading ef-
forts to restore the Columbia to its
Patrick Symmes writes that the cost free-flowing state and to protect treaty
of producing one Columbia River fishing rights.
salmon varies from $66 to $68,031, de- Today, the Nez Perce tribe’s ongo-
pending on the hatchery’s location ing litigation against the manage- AVAILABLE ONLINE AT
[“The $68,000 Fish,” Letter from the ment of the Lower Snake River dams www.avantgardeofwesternciv.com
Columbia River, November]. These
estimates are attributed to the North- Continued on page 94 OR FOR PURCHASE FROM
AMAZON + BARNES & NOBLE
LETTERS 3
INCREASE AFFECTION LETTERS lumbia River dams—in accordance
Created by Continued from page 3 with the Northwest Power and Con-
Winnifred Cutler, servation Council’s plan—is essen-
Ph.D. in biology from
U. of Penn, post-doc
represents perhaps the most direct tial to the region. This would be
Stanford. challenge to the industrialization of more convincing if the area’s power
Co-discovered human the Columbia. But the fight takes administration did not devote itself
pheromones in 1986 place on many fronts. Visitors to the to blocking the transmission of
(Time 12/1/86; and Tamástslikt Cultural Institute on wind-turbine energy, a move that
Newsweek 1/12/87)
the Umatilla Indian Reservation are protects its own market share. Like
Effective for 74% in
two 8-week studies likely to be reminded that Celilo the improvement in “mitigation”
Falls—the most significant fishing hatcheries Harrison cites, these sorts
PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 DOUBLE BLIND site on the Plateau—remains intact, of practices merely sustain the very
STUDIES IN PEER REVIEW JOURNALS hidden underneath the reservoir cause of the problem. As for the
Athena Pheromones increase created by the Dalles Dam, ready to $68,000 figure, one wonders how we
your attractiveness. Worn daily
lasts 4-6 mos, or use straight. return in the event that the dam is could determine whether it’s out of
Athena 10X tm For Men $99.50 removed. The Yakama— the tribe’s date so long as the council has not
Unscented 10:13 tm For Women $98.50 preferred spelling, as opposed to “Ya- produced or commissioned a more
Fragrance Additives Cosmetics Free U.S. Shipping
kima,” which was used in the recent estimate.
♥ Sara, PhD (CA) “I find 10:13 has major positive article—continue to practice dip-net Blake Slonecker rightly points to
effects on my professional work in my contacts
with people. My interviews, or important meet-
fishing at those few traditional sites the complex role of treaties and
ings.. It’s like the Red Sea parts. I don’t think that have not been flooded by dams. tribal involvement in the Columbia.
think its all my charm! Thank you Dr. Cutler. This Symmes entertains the fantasy that I regret that, for reasons of space, I
product is shocking!” to “ban all fishing” might solve things, left out the important work of the
♥ Joseph (MI) “I am married and am with my but fishing is not the problem. Plateau Nez Perce tribe, among others.
wife only. Well within 5 days it was amazing. The people have fished the Columbia for
affection level went up 20 fold.” thousands of years without endanger-
Not in stores 610-827-2200 ing the survival of the salmon. Mean- Correction
tm
www.Athenainstitute.com while, Symmes’s decision to limit the
Athena Institute, 1211 Braefield Rd., Chester Spgs, PA 19425 HP appearance of Native people to those
“experimenting with a pneumatic ‘fish “Where We Live Now” [Reviews,
FOR CLASSIFIED RATES AND INFORMATION, cannon’ ” is cartoonish. In a nuanced November], by Stephanie Burt, in-
PLEASE CONTACT:
piece addressing how Native people correctly quoted lines from Jana Pri-
Cameron French
are combating salmon decline, this de- kryl’s collection of poems No Matter.
[email protected]
tail might be worthwhile. As the sole We regret the error. The correct
detail about Native people, it is absurd. lines are as follows:
(212) 420-5773
TEXT ADS: Minimum ten words. Blake Slonecker who doesn’t love a winter
COST per word: 1X rate $4.50; 3X rate Toppenish, Wash. heat wave though its period aroma
$4.40; 6X rate $4.30; 9X rate $4.10;
12X rate $4.00. its settled questions
Patrick Symmes responds: smell so accurate the warm blast
Telephone numbers, box numbers, URLs,
and email addresses count as two words. John Harrison argues that the carries something more, antiquity
ZIP codes count as one word. large electric capacity created by Co- of future time, the matter settled
SPACE: One-inch, $270; Two-inch, $530;
1/12, $650; 1/9, $765. Frequency
Harper’s Magazine is owned and published monthly by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation, 666 Broadway,
discounts available. New York, N.Y. 10012. Tel: 212-420-5720. Andrew J. Bacevich, Chairman; John R. MacArthur, President;
CLOSING DATES: 1st of the 2nd preceding Rosa Brooks, Eric Foner, and Robert Volante, Board Members. Copyright © 2020 by the Harper’s Magazine
Foundation. All rights reserved. The trademark Harper’s is used by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation under li-
month. For example: August 1st for the
cense and is a registered trademark owned by HarperCollins. The trademark Harper’s Index is a registered trade-
October issue. mark owned by the Harper’s Magazine Foundation. Printed in the United States. Periodicals postage paid at
PAYMENT: Prepayment for all text ads and New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. In Canada, second-class postage paid at Windsor, Ont. In Canada,
International Publications Mail Agreement #40013802. Canadian GST 12477 4167 RT. Return undeliverable
first-time display advertisers is required. Canadian addresses to Harper’s Magazine, P.O. Box 885, Markham Station Main, Markham, Ont. L3P8M9.
Make checks payable to Harper’s Magazine, POSTMASTER: Send all address changes to Harper’s, P.O. Box 6237, Harlan, Iowa 51593-1737. ISSN0017-789X.
CHANGE OF ADDRESS: Please provide both address from last issue and new address. Allow six weeks’ ad-
666 Broadway, New York, NY 10012, vance notice. SUBSCRIPTIONS: $30 one year. Canada and United States possessions, add $3; other foreign,
or charge your ad to MasterCard, Visa, add $20 per year. Send orders to Harper’s Magazine, P.O. Box 6237, Harlan, Iowa 51593-1737. SUBSCRIPTION
PROBLEMS: Write Harper’s Magazine, P.O. Box 6237, Harlan, Iowa 51593-1737, or call 800-444-4653,
or American Express. Include telephone
M–F, 8 a.m.–midnight, S&S, 9 a.m.–7 p.m., EST. All requests for PERMISSIONS and REPRINTS must be
number on all correspondence. made in writing to Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10012. The Readings in Harper’s Magazine
PERSONAL ADS: Minimum ten words. every month include texts and documents found in the public domain, most of them abridged for reasons of
space and not all of them reprinted with permission. Harper’s Magazine will not consider or return unsolicited
COST per word: $4.50. Check, MasterCard, non-fiction manuscripts that have not been preceded by a written query, but will consider unsolicited fiction.
Visa, or American Express only. Unsolicited poetry will not be considered or returned. No queries or manuscripts will be considered unless they
are accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Visit our website at www.harpers.org.
TO RESPOND TO AN AD: Harper’s Magazine
Personals, 666 Broadway, New York,
NY 10012.
HARPER’S INDEX
Number of different forms of torture the Syrian government is suspected of having used during the country’s civil war : 72
Factor by which women are more likely than men to develop P.T.S.D. over the course of their lives : 2.5
Average penalty, in lost vacation days, for N.Y.P.D. officers the department finds to have committed domestic violence : 30
For officers the department finds to have been discourteous to a supervisor : 60
Rank of 2018 among the deadliest years since 1990 for cyclists in the United States : 1
For pedestrians : 1
Percentage of Uber riders who never tip : 60
Who always tip : 1
Percentage by which male riders give higher tips to female drivers than to male drivers : 12
Value of the personal possessions that the average American lost while drinking alcohol last year : $192
That the average North Dakotan lost : $380
Percentage by which new plastic was more expensive than recycled plastic in 2018 : 20
By which recycled plastic is now more expensive : 19
Number of grams of plastic that the average person ingests per week : 5
Percentage of U.S. gamers who say they have skipped a meal to continue playing video games : 38
Who say they have skipped a shower : 25
Average number of minutes that teens in households making $100,000 or more per year spend on screens for leisure each day : 409
That teens in households making $35,000 or less per year do : 512
Number of states that have passed or proposed laws allowing students to take days off for mental health : 4
Chance that a millennial has voluntarily left a job for mental-health reasons : 1 in 3
That a Gen Z-er has : 1 in 2
Percentage of U.S. schools that have at least one police officer stationed inside a school building : 40
Factor by which U.S. public school districts’ spending on email-monitoring services has increased since 2013 : 2
Minimum number of U.S. colleges and universities that track prospective students’ web activity : 33
Minimum number of states that use artificial intelligence to grade student essays : 21
Estimated number of people who could go unaccounted for in the 2020 census because of an “increased climate of fear” : 4,000,000
Minimum number of polling places that states in the South have closed since 2012 : 1,327
Portion of those that were in Texas : 1/2
Percentage of Republicans who regard the Democratic party as “too extreme” : 76
Of Democrats who regard the Republican party as such : 76
Average effective tax rate, as a percentage of income, paid by the richest 400 households in the United States in 2018 : 23
By the poorest half of American households : 24
Percentage of all public tweets from U.S. adults that come from people 50 and older : 29
Percentage of public political tweets that do : 73
Percentage of white Americans who say they follow local news very closely : 28
Of black Americans : 46
Portion of new digital New York Times subscriptions in 2018 that were for its cooking or crossword apps : 1/3
Percentage by which owning a dog lowers one’s risk of death : 24
Number of states expected to lose the majority of their summer state-bird populations by 2050 : 7
Figures cited are the latest available as of November 2019. Sources are listed on page 64.
“Harper’s Index” is a registered trademark.
HARPER’S INDEX 9
READINGS
[Essay] nience but to lie nearer the organ it thoroughly

symbolizes—it is the very sign of the murder the
MINOR THREATS child will never carry out in reality; instead, it
impregnates his dreams and drives them, I
By Jean Genet, from The Criminal Child: Se- hope, toward the most criminal acts. What
lected Essays, published this month by NYRB use is it, then, to take these knives away? The
Classics. This text is an abridged version of the child will choose another, seemingly more be-
essay “The Criminal Child,” which was commis- nign object to signify murder, and if that, too,
sioned in 1947 by the national French radio is taken away from him, he will guard carefully
program Carte Blanche. The show’s producers the object within himself, the image
I
requested that Genet write on the topic of criminal of the weapon.
justice. Genet submitted, in his own words, “not a
criminal’s complaint, but rather his exaltation.” The apologize for using language as seemingly
text was rejected. Translated from the French by imprecise as mine. But weren’t you the first ones
Jeffrey Zuckerman.
to speak of the “power of shadows,” of “the dark
S
power of evil”? You don’t shy away from a meta-
phor when it can convince. I find metaphors
cattered throughout the French countryside, more effective for talking about this nocturnal
often in the most elegant locales, there are several side of man that can only be explored, that can
places that have never ceased to fascinate me. only be understood once armed and armored
These are correctional facilities that now bear and adorned with all the accoutrements of lan-
the official and officious titles Moral Rehabilita- guage. When you endeavor to accomplish
tion Facility, Reeducation Center, Home for the Good, you know where you’re headed. When
Rectification of Delinquent Youths. it’s Evil, you won’t know what you’re speaking of.
One time, a director at one of these institu- But I know that Evil is the only thing that can
tions showed me, in his desk, a collection he spark enthusiasm when writing with my pen, a
took pride in: some twenty knives belonging to sign of my heart’s allegiance.
the kids. Indeed, I don’t know any criterion for beauty
“Monsieur Genet,” he said, “the administra- in an act, an object, or a being, other than the
tion requires me to take away these knives. I do song that it rouses in me, that I translate into
so accordingly. But look at them. Are you going words to share with you: this is lyricism. If my
to tell me they’re dangerous? They’re tin. Tin! song were beautiful, if it affected you, would you
You can’t kill anyone with tin.” dare to say that the man who inspired it was vile?
Didn’t he realize that when an object is re- You could claim that there are words that have
moved from its practical purpose it becomes a long been charged with expressing the most ex-
symbol? Even its form changes sometimes; it be- alted stances, and that it is those words I use
comes stylized. And so it acts silently; it carves so that the least thing might seem exalted. I
ever more deeply into children’s souls. Buried in a could answer that my emotion rightly called
straw mattress at night, or hidden in the folds of forth these words and that they naturally
a jacket, or rather of some pants—not for conve- come to serve it. And so, if your soul is low,
READINGS 11
call it recklessness, the movement that carries pursuing them out of spite, because they sneered
the fifteen-year-old child toward offense or at you and they’re abandoning you.
crime; I call it by another name. Because it takes I won’t make any recommendations. I have
some nerve—great courage—to rebel against a been talking not to the educators but to the
formidable society, against the harshest institu- criminals. And I don’t want to invent any new
tions, against laws upheld by the police whose plan for society to protect them. I trust society;
force is in the legendary, mythical, amorphous it knows how to ward off the amiable danger
fear they instill in children’s hearts. that is a criminal child. These children are the
What drives these children to crime is roman- ones I’m talking to. I ask them never to feel
tic belief, which projects them into the most shame at what they’re doing, to keep intact the
magnificent, audacious, and ultimately danger- rebelliousness that has made them so beautiful.
ous of lives. I am translating for them because I would hope that there is no cure for heroism.
they have the right to use whatever language al- Whoever seeks, out of benevolence or privilege,
lows them to venture. . . Where? you might ask. I to attenuate or abolish rebellion destroys any
do not know. Nor do they, even if their dreams chance of salvation for himself.
purport to be precise, but certainly it’s outside Since we are divided between you who are
your homes. And I wonder whether you aren’t not guilty and we who are guilty, remember
that it’s a whole life that you’re leading on the
side of the bar where you believe you have
power, are free from danger, and enjoy moral
comfort, and we hold out our hands to shake.
As for me, I’ve made my decision: I’m on the
[Abuses] side of crime. And I’ll help these children, not
to return them to your houses, your factories,
KINDERGARTEN COPS your schools, your laws, and your
T
sacraments, but to steal them.
From records of alleged behavior by U.S. Customs
and Border Protection officers, as reported by unac- he papers still show photographs of corpses
companied minors, dating from 2009 to 2014. The overflowing from silos or littering fields, stuck
A.C.L.U. Foundation of San Diego and Imperial in barbed wire, in the crematory ovens; they
Counties obtained the complaints from the Depart- show nails torn out, skins tattooed and tanned
ment of Homeland Security through a Freedom of for lampshades: these are Hitlerian crimes. But
Information Act lawsuit. nobody seems to realize that there have always
been torturers in children’s jails, in prisons, tor-
menting children and men. It doesn’t make any
Called a child a pig difference to know that some are innocent and
Called a child an idiot others guilty in the eyes of divine or strictly hu-
Called a child a she-male man justice. In the eyes of the Germans, the
Told a child that girls came to the United States French were guilty. In prison we were so mis-
to contaminate the country with their babies treated, in such a cowardly way, that I envy you
Told a child to strip to his underwear your tortures. Because they are akin to and bet-
Threatened a child with rape ter than ours. It’s as a result of heat that a plant
Locked a child in a freezing room in just his boxers grows. Because it was sown by the bourgeoisie
Fed a child frozen ham who built prisons of stone, with their guards of
Threw a child’s frozen bologna on the ground flesh and mind, I am overjoyed to finally see
Threw a child’s Bible in the garbage the sower devoured.
Kneed a child in the stomach But we will continue to be your conscience.
Hit a child in the head with a flashlight And for no reason other than to give yet more
Pulled a child to a standing position by his hair beauty to our adventure, because we know
Lifted a child by the neck and pushed him against that beauty depends on the distance separat-
a glass structure ing us from you, because wherever we wash
Pointed a gun at a child up, I am sure, the shores won’t be any differ-
Tased a child ent, but on your well-established beaches,
Threw a child to the ground we’ll recognize you immediately: small, slim,
Threw two children on top of another child sullen, we’ll sense your powerlessness and your
Stomped on a child benedictions. Rejoice all the same. If the cruel
Kicked a child in the ribs and malicious ones represent the forces you’re
Ran over a child with a CBP vehicle fighting against, then we’ll be a force for evil.
We’ll be that which resists, without which
there would be no artists.

© PRIVATE COLLECTION. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND HOLLIS TAGGART, NEW YORK CITY
Nurses with Wine, a painting by Alex Kanevsky, whose work was on view in September at Hollis Taggart, in New York City.
I know that the morality driving you to hunt courtroom in a patched-up robe with its lining
down children isn’t one you subscribe to at all. sometimes not even made of silk, but of rayon
I don’t hold that against you. Your merit is in or glazed cotton. The criminal child no longer
professing principles that tend to order your life. believes in your dignity because he’s realized
But you have far too little fortitude to give your- that it’s made from an unraveling rope, a torn-
self over entirely to virtue or to evil. You preach off insignia, a threadbare fur.
the one and disavow the other despite profiting None of your functionaries will be able to
from it. I concede you your practi- take these children and help them succeed
Y
cality. But I cannot sing it. in the adventures they themselves have be-
gun. Nothing will replace the allure of out-
ou’ve been cheating for far too long. Dan- laws. Because the criminal act is far more im-
gerous carelessness has brought you to the portant than any other act, since it’s an act
READINGS 13
COURTESY THE ARTIST; JAMES FUENTES, NEW YORK CITY; AND ANNA ZORINA GALLERY, NEW YORK CITY
Dantor a Anais and Sanité Bélair, mixed-media artworks by Didier William, whose work is on view this month at the Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art, in Hartford, Connecticut.
of rebelling against such a great moral and [Interview]

physical force.
All that’s left for you to do, if you don’t win DEADLY POETS
over these children with sweet words, is to cure
them, since you have your psychiatrists. As for
SOCIETY
these psychiatrists, all they have to do is ask a
few simple questions, which have been asked By Jessica Stern, from My War Criminal: Per-
a hundred times. If their function is to modify sonal Encounters with an Architect of Genocide,
children’s moral behavior, then what kind of out this month from Ecco. The book recounts the
morality are they being led to? The kind taught author’s interviews, conducted between October
in school books? Yet men of science wouldn’t 2014 and November 2016, with Radovan Karadžic, ´
dare take that seriously. Is there a particular a former Bosnian Serb politician convicted for his
actions in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, in which
morality outlined by each doctor? What does more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed.
their authority rest upon? What’s the use of these
I
questions? They’ll be evaded. I know this is a
matter of ordinary morality, invoked by psychi-
atrists in bestowing the label of misfit on chil- sought a lot of advice about how best to in-
dren. How can I respond to that? I’ll always terview Radovan Karadžic. ´ One idea, suggested
counter your cunning with my craftiness. to me by the eminent scholar of Slavic litera-
As a poet who was once one of those chil- ture Andrew Wachtel, was to ask Karadžic´ to
dren, I want to reiterate my love for these ruth- interpret his own poems. Together, Karadžic´
less little kids once more. I hold no illusions. and I went through many of his works. Some
My words fall in darkness on deaf ears, but even are astonishingly violent. I was most intrigued
just for my own sake, I want to insult yet again by our discussion of “Goodbye, Assassins.” It
the insulters. begins with the lines:

Goodbye Assassins, it seems from now on Angers Milutin, the ancestor asleep,
The gentlefolks’ aortas will gush without me. gentle even in death, as if in times of fasting.
The last chance to get stained with blood
I let go by. “Gentle . . . as if in times of fasting,” Karadžic´
repeated.
Karadžic´ explained that the poem is about “Princip is saying, I cannot share in this
Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb who shot madness, this violence. The poet knows that
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, precipitating something terrible is about to happen. He senses
World War I. disaster. He understands the futility of plotting
He reminded me of the history. With the the assassination. Everything is going in the
Treaty of Berlin in 1878, Serbia had finally wrong direction. Heading toward war, toward a
achieved full independence from the Ottoman target or bullet.”
Empire. Bosnia was liberated from the Otto- Until now, I’d not crossed Karadžic´ in any way.
mans at the same time, only to be comman- I was there to learn about how he came to be the
deered by Austria-Hungary. Bosnian Serbs were man he is today, the man convicted of genocide.
particularly resentful of the occupation. “Croats But a thought came to me, and I uttered it before
and Muslims both found a way to benefit during having a chance to worry he’d turn against me.
the Hapsburg occupation,” Karadžic´ said, sound- “This poem is about you,” I said.
ing as angry as he would have been had these I saw a new look on his face, which I had trou-
events occurred only the day before. “In 1914 ble interpreting. “Why didn’t you tell me that you
Princip fought for all Bosnians, not just Bosnian studied so much psychoanalysis?” he asked, now
Serbs! But Muslims glorify the archduke.” looking like a petulant child. “You’re scaring me.”
In truth, Bosnian Muslims are somewhat di- “I’m just interpreting a poem. You told me
vided in relation to Princip. Prior to Bosnia’s in- that you let your unconscious run free when
dependence, Princip was viewed as a hero for you write poems.”
fighting to liberate Bosnia from Hapsburg rule, “You’re scaring me,” he said again.
and he was celebrated with a plaque placed at He would repeat this phrase many times over
the spot where the murder occurred. During the the following year and a half. I believe that the
wars in the 1990s, when Bosnia was fighting for first time he said it he probably meant it. But
its independence from Yugoslavia, the view of the second, third, and fourth times, what I think
Princip changed. He was seen as a terrorist, a he meant was, I’ve got you. I had noticed the
participant in a Serbian plot against Bosnia. division within him—of poet and assassin—and
The memorial plaque was smashed. After the in the moment I brought that observation into
1990s wars were over, a new plaque was put up, the room, I believe he hated me. But he still
with a more neutral telling of the same history. wanted to use me. He hoped against hope that I
“Princip had two natures,” Karadžic´ said. “He might tell his story as he wanted it told.
was not just an assassin but also a poet.”
I hadn’t realized that.
“Before the 1970s, we all read Princip’s
poetry. I was thinking, Who is this guy who
writes poetry, who also assassinated the arch-
duke?” The revolutionary movement Young [Notes]
Bosnia, Karadžic´ said, didn’t just plot the assas-
sination but also held literary meetings. PAPERBACK TO THE
“There is Princip the poet, a member of the in-
telligentsia. And there is Princip the assassin, who
FUTURE
feels compelled to shoot at senseless decoration.”
I assumed he meant the trappings of the fad- By Vivian Gornick, from Unfinished Business:
ing Austro-Hungarian Empire. Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, a collection of essays
“Princip has a conflict within himself. In my published next month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
T
poem, he is saying: Let someone else be the as-
sassin,” Karadžic´ said. “The poet is trying to get
rid of Princip the fighter. He wasn’t interested he other day I was asked a question of fact
in business affairs or in fighting or killing. He is that I could not answer about a book I had once
saying, I will answer the call to be a poet. He known well but hadn’t looked at in years. Natu-
loves the mountains and streams.” rally, I thought that if I just riffled through it, I’d
He returned to the poem: soon have the information that now eluded me.
Goodbye, assassins, a rare thought of As it happened, the copy of this book that had
genesis enters my mind. Of knowing the heaven. been sitting on my bookshelf, untouched for
And blood, that ugly word, violent and dark, decades, was a cheap 1970s paperback that began
READINGS 15
to fall apart in my hands no sooner than I had underlined sentence: it puzzled me. Why did
picked it up. I turned back the cover and the first you underline this, I asked myself, what’s so in-
page instantly came away from the spine of the teresting here? Then again, look at this one
book; then page after page came loose and bits of you’ve also underlined—how obvious!—what
paper from their crumbling edges began to rain were you thinking? My eyes drifted to a sen-
down. Soon I was looking at more than four hun- tence on the page opposite where nothing was
dred loose pages lying all about, on my lap, on the underlined, and I thought, Now here’s some-
desk, on the floor. thing really interesting, how come this didn’t
Somehow, this devastation of the book went attract your attention all those years ago?
through me like an electric shock. It was as though How come indeed.
the physical book had been a living thing, and I I began to read the various pages with reader’s
could not bear to sweep its tortured remains into marks on them; and then I began to piece them
the trash. I began picking up random pages, hold- together, like an archaeologist poring over an-
ing one after another up close to my eyes as if cient fragments to see which order will yield
committing to new memory its fading print, and some design worth having been excavated, and
then to my nose, as if intent on inhaling some soon enough I saw my younger reading self clear
essence of book. After that, I alternated between enough, marveling at the most elementary in-
concentrating on individual pages and examin- sights this wonderful book had yielded up. Very
ing the dried-out glue along the spine, as if it held nearly, it was as though I’d written “So true!” all
some scientific secret that would explain what over the margins.
had happened. I put the pages back together in their proper
Suddenly my attention was caught by the order and sat down to read the book anew, this
sight of a sentence I must have underlined time underlining and circling in a pen of another
some forty years ago, and after that a paragraph color the sentences and passages that now struck
I’d circled, and in a margin two exclamation me as worth noting. Then I bound the pages to-
points standing side by side. I looked first at the gether with a thick rubber band and put the
book back on the shelf where it had been sitting
all this time. I hope I live long enough to read it
again, with a pen of yet another color in hand.
[Results]
POWERS FOR
ALGERNON [Census]
LEFTOVERS
From news reports of tasks that various types of By Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, from Children
rodents have been trained to perform. of the Land, a memoir published this month by
Harper. Hernandez Castillo was born in Mexico
Distinguish healthy patients from tuberculosis and immigrated to the United States when he was
patients five years old.
Distinguish Japanese speech from Dutch speech
T
Fear cherry blossoms
Fear terrorists
Find land mines he butcher went to the other side. His son,
Detect severed animal body parts the one with the amputated leg, also went to the
Regain the use of their limbs other side. They settled in Georgia. The middle
Search for humans school math teacher went to the other side—her
Assault other rodents cousin swore she could make forty dollars in a
Hide single day picking oranges if she was fast enough.
Find marijuana No math required.
Take ecstasy She wouldn’t be fast enough.
Find cocaine The priest went to the other side and left the
Use cocaine believers to wander through the church, blessing
Trade in foreign-exchange and commodity everything they touched. The Virgen de Guadalupe
futures markets and the Pale Christ abandoned the altar and went
to serve food in a Denny’s on the other side. They
went by Chuy and Lupe, and they took English

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LUIS DE JESUS LOS ANGELES
La Güera, a mixed-media artwork by Hugo Crosthwaite, whose work was on view in December at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
classes at the library at night. The neighbors to our other side, as did their bartender, serving them
right went, but only half of the family; the other drinks along the way, all lamenting the women who
half sat anxiously every day, waiting for the mail to had left them. The young man who went to the
arrive. The mayor went to the other side national track-and-field championship tried to go
E
to enroll his children in school. to the other side but died in the crossing. His run-
ning was only good for circles.
very Sunday the crowds that gathered at the The dogs went to the other side. The women
plaza shrank by one or two. It was hardly even no- waiting on the corner for their bus to the market
ticeable at first. The sheriff went to the other side went to the other side. The markets went to the
and left his uniforms in the street to whoever would other side.
claim them. No one claimed them. The drunks who The debts all went to the other side—the only
spent their mornings in the cantina went to the things that death could not touch. All the paper
READINGS 17
in the town was taken to the other side, so people vated sense of humor. She enjoyed the situation.
reverted to memorization. The stonemasons, Men and women behave so queerly when caught
their tools, the trees, the money, the nuns, have red-handed at anything. Sometimes when they
gone to the other side. expected fight she laughed and passed on. Some-
It seemed like there was hardly anything left times she thought out ingenious, embarrassing
except the mothers who sent their sons ahead situations and engineered the two into them, with
of them. all the cruelty of the rural.
Eventually, all that was left was a lamppost next Her body was wiry and tough as nails and she
to a fruit stand where Angelica, my uncle’s mistress, could hold up her end of the argument anytime in
sold mangoes to anyone passing by. No one passed a rough and tumble with her husband, so he couldn’t
by anymore, but she still waved the parched man- hope to settle things that way. All these things were
goes in the air, yelling, “Dos por diez pesos.” She bit in Mitchell’s mind as he faced her on Seventh
into a mango and spat the pulp onto the road. Avenue. He saw a number of people crowding
There were still roads, yes, but no signs, so she might around them and he was eager to be going.
as well have been anywhere. She picked her teeth “Les us g’wan home, Cal’line.”
with a fingernail, trying to pry loose the small fibers “You wuzn’t headed dat way when Ah met you.”
lodged in her gums. “Yes, Ah wuz, too. Ah just walked a piece of
The streetlight turned on, and the mangoes de way wid Lucy Taylor.”
got sweeter and sweeter in their box. “You done walked enough ‘pieces’ wid dat
’oman to carry you back down home.”
Mitchell caught her arm cajolingly. “Aw
come, dese heah folks is all standing ’round try-
ing to git into mine and yo’ bizness.”
She permitted herself to be led, but before she
[Fiction] moved she let out: “Maybe dat hussy think she’s
a big hen’s biddy but she don’t lay no gobbler eggs.
THE COUNTRY IN She might be a big cigar, but I sho kin smoke her.
THE WOMAN The very next time she gits in my way, I’ll kick
her clothes up round her neck like a horse collar.
She’ll think lightnin’ struck her all right, now.”
By Zora Neale Hurston, from Hitting a Straight All of which was very delectable to the ears of
Lick with a Crooked Stick, a book of short stories the crowd on the street but pizen to Mitchell. He
including previously uncollected work, published this led her away to their flat in the Caribbean For-
month by Amistad. ties with as much anxiety as if she had been so
“L
much trinitrotoluene.
There she grew as calm as if nothing had hap-
ooka heah Cal’line, you oughta stop dis pened and cooked him a fine dinner which they
heah foolishness you got. Youse in New Yawk still spoke of as supper. After which he felt encour-
now—you ain’t down in Florida. Thaas just what aged to read her a lecture on getting the country
Ah say—you kin git a woman out de country, but out of the woman.
you can’t git a country out de woman.” “Lissen, Cal’line, you oughten ack lak you did
The woman, Caroline Potts, in sloppy clothes today. Folks up heah don’t run after they husbands
and rundown shoes, was standing arrogantly and carry on cause they sees him swappin’ a few
akimbo at Seventh Avenue and 134th Street. She jokes wid another woman. You ain’t down in the de
was standing between her husband, Mitchell basement no more—youse in New Yawk.”
Potts, and a woman, heavy built and stylish in a “Swappin JOKES! So you tryin’ to jerk de wool
Lenox Avenue way. over MY eyes? New Yawk! Humph! Youse the same
The woman was easing on down 134th Street guy you wuz down home. You ain’t one bit
away from the threatening black eyes of Caroline. different—ain’t nothin’ changed but you clothes.”
Mitchell wanted to vanish, too, but his wife was “How come YOU don’t git YO’SELF some
blocking his way. He didn’t know whether to run, more? Ah sho is tired uh dat way down in Dixie
to fight, or to cajole, for Caroline was as tempera- look you totes.”
mental as Mercury. Nobody ever knew how she “Who, me? Humph! Ah ain’t studying about all
would take things. Back in the Florida village from dese all-front-and-no-back colored folks up in
which they had emigrated, Caroline Potts and her Harlem. Ah totes de cash on MAH hip. Don’t try
doings were the chief topics of conversation. to git ’way from de subjick. You better gimme dat
Whatever she did was original. Mitchell was al- ’oman if you don’t want trouble outa me. Ah ain’t
ways having a side gal and Caroline was always nobody’s fool.”
catching him. No one besides her husband be- Mitchell jumped to his feet. “You ain’t going to
lieved that she was jealous. She had an unculti- show off on me in Harlem like you useder down

home. Carryin’ on and cuttin de fool! I’ll take my 2. Delphine Hicks—Caroline had waited for
fist to you.” her beside the church steps one First Sunday (big
“Yas, and if you do, Ah’ll up wid MAH fist and meeting day) and had thrown her to the ground
lamm you so hard you’ll lay an egg. Don’t you git and robbed the abashed vampire of her un-
ME mad, Mitchell Potts.” derthings. Billowy underclothes were the fashion
“Well, then you stop running down women like and in addition Delphine was large. Caroline
Lucy Taylor. She’s a NICE woman. You just keep had seen fit to have her pony make the home-
her name out yo’ mouth. Fack is, you oughter be ward trip with its hindquarters thrust into Del-
made to beg her pardon.” phine’s ravished clothes.
Caroline turned from the dish-
pan very cooly. That was just it—
NOTHING seemed to stir her
up. Even her a nger seemed
unemotional—a pretense, the ef-
fort of a good performer. [Poem]
“Ah let Lucy Taylor g’wan home
today, an’ didn’t lay de weight of mah AN INSTANT OF NOWHERE
hand on her, so her egg-bag oughter
rest easy. But don’t you nor her try to By Stéphane Bouquet, from “Translating Paul Blackburn,” pub-
bulldoze me; cause if you do, you’ll lished in The Next Loves, a collection of poetry that was released
meet your mammy drunk. Ah ain’t in September by Nightboat Books. Translated from the French by
gointer talk no mo.” Lindsay Turner.
They went to bed that night full of
feelings. No one could know what the
paradoxical Caroline had stewing in- Finally I gave up
side her, but all who ran might read overwhelmed
the heart of Mitchell. counting the powerful ankles
His body was warm for Lucy Taylor in this city, even the ones behind which
with all the ardor of a new affair. I’m walking right now
Caroline’s encounter had aroused his
protective instinct, too. Moreover he ultra-blond • super-rivery
was mad clear through because his
vanity was injured—all by this dark if only he knew: it would take so little
brown lump of country contrariness to be saved but ok
that was lying beside him in a yellow
homespun nightgown. He wanted to I just go straight to dinner—
feel his fist crashing against her jaw the building bizarrely lost
and forehead and see her hitting the in an instant of nowhere
floor time after time. But he knew he between the R
couldn’t win that way. She was too and nothing
tough. Every one of their battles had
ended in a draw. night falls the wind
He thought too of the side gals picks up the storm we close the windows
he had had down in Florida and tip out buckets of second-light
how his wife had not only worsted
them, but had made them all—and we eat blueberries we listen
HIM—low foolish. to the voices of Paul and Frank
1. Daisy Miller—he had bought
her shoes—that which all rural la- and why have I
dies of pleasure crave—and Caro- suddenly a mouthful of tears
line had found out and had come
out to a picnic where Daisy was flut- for not having known
tering triumphantly and had forced
her to remove the shoes before ev- how to protect them? from death no matter if I wasn’t really
erybody and walk back to town born yet of course
barefoot, while Caroline rode com- (remember the
fortably along in her buckboard with falling rain)
a rawhide whip dangling signifi- I could have made the effort
cantly from her masculine fist.
Daisy was laughed out of town.
READINGS 19
3. She had removed a hat from the head of her comes one at a time—like lawyers going
Della Clarke and had cleared her throat rau- to Heaven.”
cously and spat into it. She had then forced Della “Well, any of ’em will cool down after I massage
to put it back upon her head and wear it all during their jaw wid mah African soup bone, yessir! I
the big Odd Fellows barbecue and logrolling. knocks ’em into a good humor,” Mitchell lied
Mitchell thought and his heart hardened. Every- boldly. “Heah come Lucy, now. Oh boy! She sho
body in the country cut the fool over husbands and is propaganda!”
wives—violence was the rule. But he was in New “I’ll say she’s red hot—she just want don’t for
Yawk and—and—just let her start something! the red light!”
Mitchell had changed. He loved Caroline in a She came up smiling coyly as she noticed, in
way, but he wanted his fling too. The country had the order of their importance to her, the new fur
cramped his style, but Harlem was big—Caroline coat, Mitchell’s nifty suit, and Mitchell.
couldn’t keep up with him here. He looked the big “Well, so long Tweety, see you in the funny
town and tried hard to act it. After work, he af- papers.”
fected Seventh Avenue corners and a man-about- “So long, Mitch, I’ll pick you up off the junk pile.”
town air. Silk Shebas, too; no cotton Lucy and the fur-bearing Mitchell strolled off
T
underwear for him. down 132nd Street. It was nearly sundown and
the sidewalk was becoming crowded.
ime went past in weekly chunks and Caro- About twenty minutes later the loungers were
line said nothing more, and so Mitchell decided amazed to see a woman on Seventh Avenue
she had forgotten. He told the men at work about strolling leisurely along with an axe over her
it and they all laughed and confessed the same shoulder. Tweety recognized Caroline and grew
sort of affairs, but they all added that their wives cold. Somehow she had found out and was in
paid no attention. pursuit—with an axe! He grew cold with fear for
“Man, you oughter make her stop that foolish- Mitchell, but he hadn’t the least idea which of the
ness; she’s up North now. Make her know it.” brownstone fronts hid the lovers. He tried to stop
Mitchell felt vindicated and saw Lucy Taylor Caroline with conversation.
with greater frequency. Much silk underwear “Howdy do, Mrs. Potts; going to chop some
passed under the bridge and there was talk of a fur wood?”
coat for Thanksgiving. But he had ceased to meet Very unemotionally, “Ah speck so.”
her on 134th Street. They switched to 132nd, “Ha, ha! You forgot you ain’t back down South,
between Seventh and Lenox. don’t you?”
Whenever they passed his friends before the “Nope. Theys wood to be chopped up North
poolroom at 132nd and Seventh, the men acted too,” and she passed on, leaving the corner agog.
wisely; unknowing Caroline would never find out “Somebody ought to have stopped her. That
through them, surely. female clodhopper is going to split Mitch’s head—
One Saturday near the middle of November, late and he’s a good scout.”
in the afternoon, Mitchell strolled into the pool- “We ought to call the police.”
room in the Lafayette Building, with a natural “Somebody ought to overtake her and take
muskrat coat over his arm. that axe away.”
“Hi, Mitch,” a friend hailed him; “I see you got “Who for instance?”
de herbs with you. Must be putting it over on your So it rested there. No one felt like trying to
lifetime loudspeaker.” take an axe from Caroline. She went on and
“You talking outa turn, big boy. Come on out- they waited, full of anxiety.
side.” They went out on the sidewalk. A few minutes later they saw her returning just
“Say, Mitch, I didn’t know you had it in you— as leisurely, her wiry frame wrapped in the loose
you’re a real big-timer! Whut’s become of your folds of a natural muskrat coat. Over her shoulder,
wife lately?” like a Roman lictor, she bore the axe, and from the
Mitchell couldn’t resist a little swagger after the head of it hung the trousers of Mitchell’s natty suit,
admiration in his friend’s voice. He held up the coat the belt buckle clacking a little in the breeze.
for inspection. It was nearly five weeks—long after
“Smoke it over, kid. What you think of it? Set Thanksgiving—before the corner saw Mitchell
me back one hundred smackers—dat.” again, and then he seemed a bit shy and diffident.
“Boy! It’s there! Wife or your sweet stuff?” “Say, Mitch, where you been so long? And
“You KNOW it’s for Lucy. Dat wife of mine don’t how’s your sweet stuff making it?”
need no coat like dis. But, man, Ah sho done tamed “Oh Lucy? Ain’t seen her since the last time.”
her. She don’t dare stick her paddle in my boat no “How come—y’all ain’t mad?”
mo—done got some of dat country out of her.” “Naw, it’s dat wife of mine. Ah cain’t git de
“I’m glad to hear dat ’cause there ain’t no country out dat woman. Let’s go somewhere
more like her nowheres. Naw sir! Folks like and get a drink.”

“Untitled (Forest 2),” a photograph by Sandra Kantanen, whose work was on view in November at Elizabeth Houston Gallery, in New York City. Kantanen’s
monograph, More Landscapes, was published last year by Hatje Cantz Verlag.
Courtesy the artist READINGS 21

EASY CHAIR
On Courage
By Kevin Baker
A T
s of this writing, we are still is it that America doesn’t have a uni- rying for a closer, saner look at
about three months away from versal system of affordable care, as ev- the candidate who seems to
the first vote of the campaign ery other country in the developed frighten Big Money the most, I
for the Democratic presidential world established decades ago? went to hear Warren speak at her Sep-
nomination—and already “our side” Off the stage, the national media has tember rally in New York’s Washington
seems set to tear itself apart. Tempers been nearly as bad, mostly rushing to Square Park. I was there with the Re-
are frayed, charges are flying, and there get the panicked reaction from Wall member the Triangle Fire Coalition
is much talk about how none of the Street to all the frightening things (R.T.F.C.), a nonprofit group dedicated
declared candidates will do. Democrats are saying. Billionaire Leon to educating the public about the 1911
Part of this is life under Trump. The Cooperman—previously best known Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and
president is like a low-pressure system for his pompous 2011 open letter accus- now trying to install a permanent me-
that never lifts. The sheer weight of his ing President Obama of promoting morial to the victims of the blaze. War-
presence hanging over us—tweeting “class warfare,” and for shelling out ren’s campaign had reached out to the
out ignorant pronouncements, denying nearly $5 million to settle an insider- president of our coalition, Mary Anne
reality, subjecting us to his bottomless trading suit from the S.E.C.—broke Trasciatti, a Hofstra University professor
insecurities—is enough to make us rub into tears on CNBC while contemplat- and a brilliant speaker and writer about
our temples and flex our jaws for relief. ing Senator Elizabeth Warren’s plans the fire, which was one of the worst
The intraparty tension is due to a for regulating Wall Street. “This is the industrial disasters in American history.
candidate selection process that is head- fucking American dream she is shitting The Triangle fire killed 146
smackingly stupid even for the Demo- on,” he later told Politico. people—almost all of them women or
crats. Massive debates put the four or Steve Rattner, the financial adviser girls, many of them teenagers—in
five serious contenders onstage with and New York Times opinion writer, fewer than twenty minutes. They died
some half dozen hecklers eager to sav- agreed with Cooperman that “a War- when a blaze broke out in the Triangle
age the front-runner dramatically ren presidency is a terrifying prospect,” Shirtwaist Factory, located on the
enough to make the next news cycle. to be entertained only “if you want to eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of what
Even worse are the media interlocu- live in France.” Rattner—a “lifelong was then the Asch Building, in Green-
tors, who seem mostly interested in Democrat” who has spent the past wich Village. They died because the
promoting themselves: brand over forty years scooping up a great fortune factory’s owners had failed to provide
country. Beyond that, many of them while dancing merrily back and forth any firefighting equipment. They died
take an accountant’s-eye view of ev- between major media outlets, the because most of the doors were locked
erything, preoccupied with how much Street, and the White House (and, hey, at the Triangle, so that their handbags
a program costs and unconcerned with whaddaya know, having to pay out mil- could be inspected before they left, lest
what it’s worth. lions to the S.E.C. for his own scandal, they walk off with a few pennies’ worth
Conspicuous by its absence is any which involved kickbacks in exchange of cloth. They died after rushing out
sense of a bigger picture. How are we for gaining control over investing pub- to a fire escape that quickly collapsed
to remove the influence of money from lic pension funds)—warned: beneath them. They died falling
a system in which members of Con- through a glass roof, impaled on an
gress now routinely spend four or five Left to her own devices, [Warren] would iron fence, tumbling down an empty
extend the reach and weight of the fed-
hours a day making fund-raising calls? elevator shaft. They died plunging
eral government far further into the
Do we really need to maintain some economy than anything even Presi- through the firemen’s nets—and even
eight hundred military bases, in eighty dent Franklin Roosevelt imagined. through the sidewalk.
countries around the world? Never Warren was speaking where she was
mind the costs and terms of this or Yes, that whole crazy New Deal because of the Triangle fire, which
that particular health-care plan; how thing . . . occurred just a few hundred feet from
EASY CHAIR 5
Washington Square. Her speech was titution when they arrived in Philadel “There is no contribution that a Cab
part of a tour of key sites in the strug phia, she faced down a pair of menac inet member has made in the history of
gle for economic justice in America. ing pimps with nothing more than her this country that has had the lasting
The tour had started in Lawrence, umbrella, shouting their names until kind of effect on all of us and the way we
Massachusetts, where an epic mill they ran away. Years later, after she live than what Frances Perkins did,”
strike had taken place in 1912. If the became secretary of labor, she surprised Lawrence O’Donnell notes in the new
dates make it sound as if these must be corrupt officials from the Hoover Ad television documentary Summoned:
old and familiar stories, they sounded ministration who were trying to dispose Frances Perkins and the General Welfare.
fresh and vital in Warren’s telling. of damning files at the Labor Depart She did some of her most courageous
She framed the tragedy at the Tri ment; accompanied only by a single, work in the field of human rights. Dur
angle factory in terms of corruption, elderly watchman, she ordered them ing the Depression, she ceased federal
which was just: the deaths happened in out of the building. They went. cooperation with the Mexican Repa
part thanks to the venality of the city’s She was visiting a friend in the Vil triation, in which state and local au
legendary Democratic machine, Tam lage when the Triangle fire broke out, thorities deported hundreds of thou
many Hall. Just the year before, women and she rushed to the site in time to see sands of workers to Mexico, many of
had been out on a massive garment the women plunging to their deaths. them U.S. citizens. She refused to deport
strike, the Uprising of the Twenty “One by one, the people would fall Harry Bridges, the radical West Coast
Thousand, and the Tammany machine off,” she later recalled. “They had gone labor leader accused of being a Com
that claimed to be for the people had to the window for air, and they jumped. munist. She declined to intervene
sided with the sweatshop owners. Tam It’s that awful choice people talk of— against striking workers—as the fed
many sent the cops—and the cops what kind of choice to make?” eral government so often had before—
brought the pimps and gangsters they It was, she later said, “the day the which allowed for major labor victories
controlled—to beat and arrest the New Deal began”—mostly because it on the San Francisco waterfront and at
women on the picket lines, and scoffed was the day that Perkins decided to the General Motors plant in Flint, Mich
at any suggestion that New York busi throw herself fully into what used to be igan. And almost alone in Washington,
nesses be compelled to create a work called “practical politics.” In New York, she recognized the threat that Adolf
place that wasn’t a death trap. At the she brought change by allying herself Hitler posed when he first came to
time of the fire, in a city already chock with the new emerging leaders of the power; she won a yearslong struggle with
ablock with tall buildings, New York corrupt old machine, men such as Al the State Department to let refugees stay
fire trucks had no ladders that reached Smith, Robert F. Wagner, and “Big in the United States, saving the lives of
beyond six stories, because Tammany Tim” Sullivan. She learned to drink at least twelve thousand Jewish Germans
viewed the fire department mostly as straight whiskey to keep their company, and tens of thousands of other Europe
another means of filling its pockets. and she wore black tricornered hats ans desperate for sanctuary.
“The tragic story of the Triangle fac that reminded the pols of their For her efforts, Perkins’s enemies tried
tory fire is a story about power,” Warren mothers—then dragged them through to impeach her. They floated a smear
told the thousands jammed into the park the worst factories in the state. Change that she was really a secret Jewish Soviet
that night. “A story of what happens began to happen: workplaces grew agent named Matilda Watski—a charge
when the rich and the powerful take safer, hours got shorter, pay increased. Perkins was loath to deny, lest she appear
control of government and use it to in Franklin Roosevelt named her New antiSemitic. “If I were a Jewess I would
crease their own profits while they stick York State’s first industrial commis make no secret of it,” she finally said in
it to working people.” The aftermath of sioner, then asked her to come to Wash a public statement. “On the contrary, I
the fire, she continued, was “a different ington as his labor secretary. Perkins said would be proud to acknowledge it.”
story about power.” She invoked the she would do it if she could do big The irony was that there was no more
name of “one very persistent woman,” things—much like Warren’s repeated devout Christian in the Roosevelt Ad
Frances Perkins, the first female Cabi calls for “big, structural change.” ministration. An Episcopalian, Perkins
net member in American history. “You wouldn’t want me if you tried to spend one weekend a month in
didn’t want that done,” she told the silent prayer and contemplation at a
P
erkins was born in 1880 to an presidentelect. FDR agreed. Catholic convent near Washington.
old but unmoneyed New En In Washington, Perkins charted a What other spare time she had was de
gland family. After graduating course for the New Deal. She initiated, voted to caring for both a husband and
from Mount Holyoke, she set out into wrote, and lobbied for legislation that a daughter who were repeatedly institu
the world—living and working in some abolished child labor; guaranteed work tionalized for what is now known as bi
of the harshest slums in America, be ers the right to join a union; and estab polar disorder. Film footage of the cer
coming a friend, protégé, and student lished a minimum wage, the fortyhour emony at which FDR signed the Social
of reformers ranging from Florence work week, overtime laws, workers’ Security Act into law shows Perkins
Kelley to Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair compensation, and aid to families with moving restlessly behind him, even roll
to Teddy Roosevelt. dependent children. She also wrote ing her eyes through the speechmaking.
Nothing deterred her. Fighting to most of the Social Security Act, trans On that day of her greatest accomplish
keep young Southern women, black forming life for the aged and disabled ment she had just received word that her
and white, from being forced into pros in America to this day. husband had escaped his caretakers and

was lost somewhere in New York. As Casey, Suzuki, and Woodard took
soon as she could, Perkins slipped out of the podium into the park and assem-
the White House and took a train back bled it. Afterward, they walked over to
to the city, where she managed to find stand in silent tribute in front of the
her husband that evening. building where the Triangle factory
“She used the same model that she had been and where Perkins and a
and her friends had used after the Tri- crowd of horrified New Yorkers had
angle fire: she worked the political sys- watched helplessly as so many young
tem relentlessly from the inside while a women died.
sustained movement applied pressure “Every ounce of our energy was put
from the outside,” Warren told us. It was into this piece, with no corners cut,”
a pretty fair description of how the New said Casey, who described the work as
Deal worked—and how liberal govern- the greatest honor of her professional
ment has always worked best. life. “As a furniture maker,” she added,
“I know that objects have a presence
B
y the end of Warren’s speech and a power.”
there was a sense of excitement Warren would privately thank these
in the air, it seemed to me, at “three amazing women” for the podium,
being connected to such a woman as which she will take with her on the
Frances Perkins, and to a time when campaign trail. But I thought the most
Americans did big, good things. Mill- telling part of the evening was that she
ing around the speaker’s platform af- did not mention this “bully pulpit” from
terward while the senator worked her which she spoke. It was, in other words,
usual selfie line, I met three women who something important to her, not just
seemed as high as so many of us felt on another political prop.
the evening’s sense of possibility. They
I
were Kate Casey, owner of the all- can’t tell you whether Senator
women Peg Woodworking company in Warren will be or even should be
Brooklyn, and two of her managers, the Democratic nominee for presi-
Sally Suzuki and Catherine Woodard, dent. Nor can the Triangle Coalition,
who had made the podium Warren as a nonprofit, endorse Warren or any
had just spoken from. other candidate. That choice, which
When Warren decided to make a requires such a careful balancing of
speech in this place, her campaign head and heart, will be made by the
reached out to Tomlin Perkins Cogge- voters. But I do think that the senator’s
shall, Perkins’s grandson and a genial interest in connecting to the worthy
keeper of the flame, who still lives at the struggles of the past—right down to the
Perkins Homestead in Maine—a site podium she grasps—tells us where her
designated a National Historic Land- heart lies, what her core values and
mark. Coggeshall donated some “very, principles are. I would also say that,
very weathered” wood from the prop- whichever candidate you choose, choose
erty, which Casey made into the lectern her or him on the basis of the extent
at the campaign’s request. to which you can discern that core. Not
When the wood arrived, Casey and on the fears of Steve Rattner, or the tears
her team “milled down to some really, and curses of Leon Cooperman, or any-
really beautiful grain,” she said, and body else who tells you the sky can still
fashioned it into a podium much like fall in a country that elected Donald
those from Perkins’s time, forty-six Trump president.
inches high for the woman they hoped No candidate can truly say exactly
would be the forty-sixth president of the what their plan for something will be
United States. They then reached out or what it will cost before it is negoti-
to the women in their lives and with ated with Congress. There has never
them wrote quotes from great women been a perfect presidential campaign,
and messages of support to Warren in or a perfect president. Even our best
the glue seams and other places where presidents have been what we, the
they will never be seen, but where Casey people, have made them with that “sus-
hoped they might “provide a deep mean- tained pressure from the outside.” Our
ing to this piece that by the very nature only guide should be the courage that
of its historical material carries such Frances Perkins demonstrated every
weight in women’s history.” day of her life. n
EASY CHAIR 7
R E P O R T
CLICK HERE TO KILL

The dark world of online murder markets
By Brian Merchant
O
n a sunny July day in 2018, She had no idea what the cops might in,” the synopsis reads. “Facing issues
Alexis Stern was sitting be- want with her. “I was like, am I going with his girlfriend and attempting to
hind the wheel of the red Ford to get arrested?” she said. gain control of his dark side, the tension
Fusion her parents had given her the Stern had graduated from high intensifies. Being the best agent comes
previous year when she’d learned to school the month before, in Big Lake, at a price, a price of kidnapping, torture
drive. Robbie Olsen, the boy she’d re- Minnesota, a former resort town turned and even death.”
cently started dating, was in the pas- exurb, forty miles northwest of the Twin At the station, the police told
senger seat. They were in the kind of Cities. So far she had spent the summer Stern a story that could have been a
high spirits unique to teenagers on visiting family, hanging out with her plot from one of her books. They said
summer vacation with nothing much new boyfriend, and writing what she that a credible threat had been made
to do and nowhere in particular to go. describes as “action-packed and brutal on her life through an assassination
They were about to take a drive, maybe sci-fi fantasy fiction.” At sixteen, she’d marketplace on the dark web, the
get some food, when Stern’s phone self-published her first novel, Inner Mon- unregulated stretch of the internet,
buzzed. It was the police. An officer ster, about a secret agent named Justin not indexed by Google or other tra-
with the local department told her to Redfield whose mind has been invaded ditional search engines, that’s home
come down to the station immediately. by a malevolent alter ego that puts the to many forms of illicit activity. Her
lives of his loved ones at risk. “It isn’t murder had apparently been ordered
Brian Merchant is a writer based in Los until his inner demon returns that he on a website called Camorra Hit-
Angeles. realizes how much trouble he really is men, which advertised gun-for-hire
Illustrations by Danijel Žeželj REPORT 23

services with the promise of keeping updates on her case. If the FBI had der of public officials. Inspired by a
its clients anonymous. learned anything new, the bureau wasn’t Scientific American article on the new-
Earlier that month, a user had logged sharing it with her. She was beginning fangled concept of encrypted “digital
on to Camorra Hitmen with the Tor to despair, and she felt, perversely, as cash”—which did not yet exist in any
browser—the most popular way to ac- though the threat was her fault. In Inner meaningful way—Bell created one of
cess the dark web—and created an Monster, she had written about hidden the most sinister thought experiments
account with the alias Mastermind365. identities, the dark web, and torture. “I of the early web.
Five days later, Mastermind365 sent a feel like I somehow helped make this The essay imagined a website or
message asking whether it was possible happen,” she told me. “Like I wrote platform where users could anony-
for a hit man to carry out a kidnapping about the dark web in my novel, and mously nominate someone to be killed
instead of a murder. The site’s admin- now I’ve made all this real.” and pledge a dollar amount toward the
istrator replied that it was, but it would Writing used to be something that bounty. They’d also be able to pay a
be more expensive, because such an sustained her. “I spent most of my time small fee to make a “prediction”—an
operation was riskier. alone, and I didn’t really have many encrypted message that only the pre-
A week later, on July 15, Master- friends,” she said. When she was out in dictor and the site were privy to—as
mind365 sent another message. “I have public, she would frequently stop to to when that person would be killed.
changed my mind since i previously Once the person was confirmed
spoke to you,” the user wrote. dead, the predictions would be
decrypted and the pledged funds
I would not like this person to be “I WOULD JUST LIKE THIS PERSON automatically transferred to the
kidnapped. Instead, i would just successful predictor. Implicit in
like this person to be shot and TO BE SHOT AND KILLED. WHERE,
killed. Where, how and what with
the design was that the best way
does not bother me at all. I would
HOW, AND WHAT WITH DOES NOT to predict when someone is going to
just like this person dead. die is to kill them yourself.
BOTHER ME AT ALL” An ardent anarcho-libertarian,
And with that, Mastermind365 Bell was one of the more extreme
sent more than $5,000 in bitcoin to cypherpunks, a group of internet
Camorra Hitmen, along with a photo consider how people behaved in various privacy and cryptography advocates
of Stern—a portrait she’d posted on a situations, so that she might better that coalesced around a mailing list in
website she’d built in one of her classes. draw her characters later. Through the early Nineties. (John Gilmore, a
Stern remembers leaving the station them, she explored things that were founder of the Electronic Frontier Foun-
in a state of shock. She was supposed to hard to talk about, like her personal dation, and Timothy C. May, a senior
be taking courses at the local commu- history with anorexia and self-harm. scientist at Intel, were among the first
nity college, but now she felt she “I’ve always been fascinated with the contributors.) Bell’s own politics were
couldn’t trust anyone, and she was darker side of humanity,” she told me. animated by a pronounced distrust of
afraid to be on campus. Her parents “What people can come up with, the government. He believed that his sys-
installed a home security system and stuff people are willing to do, and how tem would bring power to heel and
bought her police-grade pepper spray. far they’re willing to take it.” usher in a new anarchic order. “If only
She took a self-defense class. Her father But the reality of a murder plot was 0.1% of the population, or one person
gave her a pocketknife, and her boy- more unsettling than anything she had in a thousand, was willing to pay $1 to
friend gave her a bigger knife to carry written. Both the FBI and DHS seemed see some government slimeball dead,”
in her purse. hapless in the face of it, and Stern was Bell wrote,
Not long after her interview with Big becoming paranoid. “I was just con-
Lake police, Stern was told that the FBI stantly looking over my shoulder, keep- that would be, in effect, a $250,000
and DHS would be taking over the ing an eye on anyone that seemed to bounty on his head. . . . Perfect anony-
mity, perfect secrecy, and perfect secu-
case. Agents visited Big Lake and ques- notice me, checking behind cars and rity. . . . Chances are good that nobody
tioned her about who might want to under them,” she said. “You don’t know above the level of county commissioner
harm her. She said she honestly didn’t what you’re looking for.” would even risk staying in office.
know, but she gave them the names of
T
some ex-boyfriends. One, a young Brit- he idea of an online assassina- Since conspirators would never
ish man she’d met and mostly dated tion market was conceived long meet, or even be aware of one another’s
online, and who’d recently visited her before it was possible to build identities, it would be impossible to rat
in Minnesota, had taken their breakup one, and long before there was any- anyone out. The money trail would be
hard. “But he was this sensitive soul thing resembling the dark web. In 1995, invisible. Back in 1995, there was no
who would faint at the sight of blood,” Jim Bell, an anarchist engineer who such thing as bitcoin or any other
she said. “He couldn’t even finish read- had studied at M.I.T. and worked at tradeable cryptocurrency, and few had
ing my novel—he said it was too in- Intel, began writing a serialized essay access to encrypted web browsing. Now
tense and gruesome.” titled “Assassination Politics” that pro- it’s easy to purchase bitcoins on any
In the weeks after law enforcement posed a theoretical framework for en- number of mainstream markets and
alerted Stern to the hit, she received no couraging and crowdsourcing the mur- “tumble” them so that their point of

purchase is obscured. Similarly, thanks parole by researching the FBI agents all, is only one name among hundreds
to Tor, accessing the dark web requires assigned to tail him, and he returned of potential victims on dark-net kill lists.
only opening a browser and enduring to prison for most of the Aughts. Since In early 2016, Monteiro was passing
slower download speeds. being released, he’s continued to pro- an evening as he typically did, bathed in
In 2013, a developer using the alias mote his assassination prediction sys- the glow of six computer monitors in his
Kuwabatake Sanjuro created what he tem, giving talks in the Czech Republic flat, browsing dark-web message boards
called the Assassination Market. It was and at Anarchapulco, a libertarian and bazaars, when he stumbled upon a
built largely according to Bell’s specifica- conference in Mexico. “This is not the site called Besa Mafia, which promised
tions, with a system in place for submit- kind of thing that was going to happen to provide hit men in exchange for bit-
ting predictions and donations. In an overnight,” he said, referring to the new coin. It offered visitors a menu of op-
interview with Forbes, Sanjuro said that wave of prediction markets. “I’ve been tions ranging from maiming to kidnap-
his ultimate intent was to ping to murder, a built-in
destroy “all governments, ev- messaging system, and a por-
erywhere.” Bounties of up to tal where users could apply to
$75,000 were placed on the be hit men. Besa Mafia had a
heads of President Obama; somewhat slicker graphical
Ben Bernanke, the chair of interface than the dark-web
the Federal Reserve; and assassination markets Mon-
Keith Alexander, the director teiro had seen before, but it
of the National Security was nevertheless clear to him
Agency. No one took the site that this one, like the others,
very seriously, and it sat idle was a scam, designed to pilfer
until 2018, when Sanjuro, ap- money from gullible users.
parently realizing that the Monteiro wrote up a sneer-
bitcoin collected there had ing list of Besa Mafia’s frauds
accrued over a million dollars and flaws, and published the
in value, cashed out. report to his blog, Pirate Dot
In July 2018—the same London. Soon after, he re-
month that a hit was taken ceived a furious message from
out on Alexis Stern—the someone named Yura, who
Forecast Foundation, a claimed to be Besa Mafia’s ad-
nonprofit that promotes de- ministrator and first implored,
centralized technologies, then tried to bribe, Monteiro
launched a user-friendly pro- to take down the critical post.
tocol called Augur that made Monteiro refused. A few days
it easy to set up blockchain- later, Yura sent him a link to
based prediction markets. a YouTube video in which a
Augur’s debut immediately hooded figure could be seen
gave rise to a spate of new setting a car ablaze, holding
assassination markets and up a sheet of paper saying that
death pools, the vast majority the act of vandalism was a
of which were almost certainly created waiting twenty-three years. I’m happy “dedication to pirate london.” “Honestly,
as stunts. Because the betting pools are they’re finally getting around to making I was intimidated,” Monteiro told me.
small, and because no one has any con- this happen.” “This was not typical scammer behavior.
fidence in them, there is little risk that This was someone who wanted to pro-
T
they will engender any killing. But the here is just one reason that a tect the reputation of their operation.”
technology Augur demonstrates— a local police department in Min- Nonetheless, Monteiro kept prob-
distributed, encrypted, and anonymous nesota was aware that someone ing the site. He exploited a vulnera-
prediction market—is enough to lend had paid an obscure site on the dark web bility in the Besa Mafia messaging
encouragement to Jim Bell, who has to have one of its teenage residents system that allowed him to see every
never given up on his dream. killed, and that reason is Chris Mon- order that flowed through it, and he
“These people are doing a great teiro. Monteiro, a systems administrator built an automated system that kept a
thing,” Bell said when I reached him who runs I.T. security for a midsize firm record of the desired hits. Months later,
over Skype in Vancouver, Washington, in London, spends his nights as a white- with the help of a friend—a prominent
where he now lives. Bell was arrested hat hacker and independent cybercrime cybersecurity officer who wished to be
in the Nineties for obstructing the work researcher, navigating the shadowy identified only by his online alias,
of IRS agents and using false Social spaces of the dark web. Murder market- Judge Judy—Monteiro hacked into the
Security numbers, and he spent just places have in recent years become both site and shut it down entirely.
under a year in prison. Shortly after- his signature area of expertise and his Yura quickly built a new site, one
ward, he was found to have violated his exhausting burden. “Alexis Stern,” after unstained by the reputational damage
REPORT 25
inflicted by Monteiro’s criticisms and be Latin-American gang members star- Allwine. Dogdaygod transferred more
hacks. Monteiro took aim at that one, ing grimly into the camera and, on the than $6,000 to Yura, and fed him dates
too. Since then, this process has re- other, a body stabbed with dozens of on which Allwine would be out of town
peated itself over and over. There have knives. It advertised the sale of weapons, for work and windows when she would
been Sicilian Hitmen, Azerbaijani drugs, and murder-for-hire services—all, be alone at home without her husband,
Eagles, and Camorra Hitmen, the site it claimed, at reasonable rates. There Stephen—an I.T. professional and elder
Mastermind365 used to place the hit was an “About” section, a field for sub- in the United Church of God—or their
on Stern. mitting inquiries, and an F.A.Q., which adopted teenage son.
On each of Yura’s sites, users set up an included items such as “Q: Do you kill First, dogdaygod and Yura discussed
anonymous account, select from a drop- women? A: Of course. Some of our con- orchestrating a hit-and-run made to look
down menu the kind of violence they tract killers might refuse to kill women like an accident, then a killing followed
would like inflicted, upload the photo but we have plenty of other contract by arson. “I liked the idea of shooting
and address of their intended target, and killers that are willing to kill women.” and fire, because I think it would look
wait to hear back through the messaging Squinting up at the screens, Mon- like a robbery and cover up,” dogdaygod
system. Users often have questions for teiro scanned the entries. “It’s Yura,” he wrote. But as time wore on, and the “hit
Yura: How do I know you’re for real? Can said, “it has to be. It’s a bit different men” kept failing (“this did not hap-
you make it look like an accident? When than usual; let’s see what he did.” After pened this morning,” Yura explained,
they are satisfied, the user transfers a few minutes, Monteiro succeeded in “because the assigned hitman was
bitcoin into a special wallet on the stoped by police for a driver and reg-
site, where it will ostensibly be held istration check and the car was sto-
until the job is completed. Instead, len, he was token in for declara-
Yura takes the money immediately, THE SITE ADVERTISED THE SALE OF tions”), dogdaygod grew incensed:
and makes no attempt to complete WEAPONS, DRUGS, AND MURDER-
the job. The user complains; Yura I do not care about date or method,
FOR-HIRE SERVICES—ALL, IT you have her picture and address,
says he needs more money to hire a
CLAIMED, AT REASONABLE RATES so you can tail her or do whatever
better hit man; the user either pays you need to do to get the job done.
again or asks for a refund; and Yura I ask that you only get her and not
either disappears or attempts to ex- the dad or kid as the kid is a friend
tort the user by threatening to turn in- hacking into the site with stolen ad- of our child’s and I do not want to
formation over to the authorities. Yura ministrator codes and installing an leave him orphaned.
sometimes goes by Barbosa or Juan, but automated script that scraped the en-
Monteiro believes they are all the same tire site every three hours and dumped In May of that year, another hacker,
scammer, who likely lives in Romania. the data on his server. bRspd, broke into Yura’s operation and
On a cold day in December, I went Monteiro started scrolling through dumped these early messages online,
to visit Monteiro at his flat in London. messages he had cached from Yura’s and the FBI looked into the handful of
It was early morning, raining lightly, previous sites. The markets may have identifiable targets found there. They
and the sky was the gray-beige color of been scams, but the desire for violence visited the Allwines’ home and in-
an old PC. An Uber dropped me off in was real. Monteiro had amassed a run- formed them that someone had ordered
front of a homely apartment complex ning list of people who had been sin- a hit on Amy. The agents suggested the
in the southeast part of the city. I gled out for death; people who’d had Allwines beef up security, and then
couldn’t find Monteiro’s unit, so, with bounties placed on their heads, and a they left. Amy and Stephen installed
no phone service, I wandered from door log of detailed conversations about a home security system and bought a
to door in the winter chill. When I fi- how and why their would-be killers gun. Six months later, Stephen shot
nally ran into Monteiro outside his wanted them beaten, tortured, kid- Amy in the head with it.
apartment, he was smiling faintly, as napped, and murdered. It was like a Stephen Allwine was dogdaygod;
though he’d expected me to get lost. Wikipedia entry for the outer extremes he’d been arranging affairs through the
Monteiro is in his mid-thirties, with of human cruelty. Before I left, Mon- infidelity website Ashley Madison but
thick black hair that’s going silver teiro gave me the password so I’d be could not consider divorce because of
around his ears. He narrows his eyes able to keep tabs on it myself. his position in the church. He had
when he talks, and is prone to shifting taken out a $700,000 life-insurance
T
his glance abruptly to the side. Inside his hree years earlier, in February policy on his wife, and had been send-
flat, dirty dishes filled the kitchen sink, 2016, a user had logged on to ing her threats and exhortations to kill
and a guitar leaned against the couch in Besa Mafia with the alias herself through various aliases online.
his spartan living room, much of which dogdaygod and ordered a hit on a His exchanges with Yura would prove
was given over to his formidable com- middle-aged woman who lived in Cot- central to the state’s investigation into
puter station. “Look at that,” he said, tage Grove, Minnesota. “For reason Amy’s death: the bitcoin signature of
after we’d sat down at the monitors. “It’s that are too personal and would give the payment to Besa Mafia matched
a brand-new assassination market.” away my identity I need this bitch dead, the key that authorities found on Ste-
The site he was browsing displayed, so please help me,” the user wrote. The phen’s hard drive at home. Stephen had
on one side, images of what appeared to target was a dog trainer named Amy attempted to make the death look like

a suicide, and the bitcoin key was proof that his operation was under greater people knew where she worked. “I
it was not. In January 2018, he was scrutiny, had either written or paid couldn’t be left alone; I couldn’t drive
convicted of first-degree murder and someone to write blog posts alleging by myself; I had all my freedom taken
sentenced to life in prison. that Monteiro was the site’s adminis- away,” she said. She spent most of her
Federal law enforcement appears to trator. Monteiro spent two days and time with her boyfriend, with whom
have struggled with how to handle the two nights in jail before the NCA real- she felt safe, in the neighboring town
case. Amy’s family has criticized the ized its mistake and released him. of Monticello.
FBI’s approach to the investigation: they She had started to suspect her British
A
say that interviewing Stephen and Amy lexis Stern, too, was fed up ex-boyfriend, Adrian Fry, of ordering the
together, when statistics show that the with law enforcement. Months hit on her life. Fry was older, worked as
majority of violent crimes are commit- had gone by with seemingly an accountant, and was the only person
ted by a domestic partner, was a fatal no progress on her case, and the check- she could think of who had access to
misstep. Monteiro says he had tried to ins from the FBI and DHS had become that kind of money. Plus, he’d become
contact the FBI to share infor- pushy, even aggressive, in
mation about this case and their chats and texts since
others, but because he is a they’d broken up. But she
British citizen, he had been couldn’t prove anything, or
redirected to the U.K.’s Na- even point to any evidence.
tional Crime Agency (NCA), I asked her whether she’d
which was disinclined to use recognized Mastermind365’s
data that had been illegally conversational style, since
obtained in a hack. most of her interactions with
The FBI Office of Public Fry had taken place via text
Affairs told me that homicides message or Facebook Mes-
and murder-for-hire cases senger. “I haven’t seen the
typically do not fall under the chat logs,” she told me. “I
bureau’s jurisdiction, making asked. But the FBI wouldn’t
it difficult to determine which let me see them. They said
agency is best suited to handle they’d only show them to me
threats made over the dark if they thought it would help.”
web. The FBI has a mandate This seemed odd to me—
to pursue only those crimes here was a relationship built,
that violate a federal statute. as many teenage relationships
Any threat of immediate now are, over messaging plat-
harm should be reported to forms. If law enforcement was
local law enforcement, a bu- serious about investigating
reau spokesperson told me, the case, wouldn’t they show
since the FBI can’t provide her the logs to see if she could
anything but support in such I.D. any notable traits in the
situations, whether that be phrasing? If the FBI couldn’t
conducting interviews or al- help, maybe I could. I had ac-
lowing the use of its crime cess to the chat logs, after all.
labs. “We are not a world po- So I copied the messages be-
licing agency and must be mindful of our less frequent. The police had told tween Mastermind365 and Yura from
venue, resources, and limitations,” FBI Stern they would be patrolling her Monteiro’s database and emailed them
special agent Efrene Sakilayan wrote neighborhood more often, but she to Stern.
Monteiro’s lawyer in an email. couldn’t detect any change. “I never
I
Monteiro has good reason to doubt saw them in my neighborhood, not f Stern hadn’t been shown key parts
law enforcement’s ability to handle once,” Stern said. When she turned of the evidence that might help her
highly technical investigations like over her phone so that the FBI could identify her would-be assassin, who
these. In February 2017, he was eating log her messages as evidence, she else on the kill list might have been kept
pumpkin soup in his flat when a bat- claims the agents accidentally deleted in the dark? Did all these people know
tering ram knocked his door off its them instead. “They said they’d never that they might be in danger at this very
hinges. Armed police burst in, hand- had anything like that happen before,” moment? The list had begun to haunt
cuffed him, and searched his apart- she said. They handed her back a me, as it haunted Chris Monteiro. It
ment. He was thrown in the back of a wiped phone, seeming embarrassed. It infected my sleep. The grainy portraits
van and taken into custody, at which did not inspire confidence. of those marked for death popped into
point an NCA agent told him he was Stern dropped out of community my head at unexpected times: the faces
under arrest for running Besa Mafia. It college and quit her job at the local of wives, husbands, students, friends,
turned out that Yura, perhaps sensing movie theater, worried that too many lovers, kids—a shy teenager mustering a
REPORT 27
smile; a bemused middle-aged man, order. However, the target would be 14. the fact that the nearest state is 2,500
mouth agape; a young woman posed for Is that an acceptable age or too young? miles and a considerable swath of the
a glamorous selfie. I could see them in Pacific Ocean away, the user paid him
front of me. My wife worried about my Yura replied, “Yes, 14 years old is around three thousand dollars.
mental health. acceptable,” and named the price as Reading through the kill orders, it’s
I began calling, emailing, and reach- $18,500, which agentisai promptly easy to spot the online disinhibition
ing out on social media to massage paid. There is now a boy in New Jersey effect—the psychologist John Suler’s
therapists and managers of Chinese with a nearly $20,000 hit on his head. theory of why and how human behav-
restaurants and right-wing bloggers I told Monteiro what I was up to. ior changes when we log on. “We wit-
and I.T. guys and aerospace engi- “This is my life,” he said, adding, “It’s ness rude language, harsh criticisms,
neers and sex offenders and web devel- deeply unpleasant.” anger, hatred, even threats,” Suler
opers. Some I couldn’t track down at all; In June 2018, news came of a second wrote in a 2004 paper.
others never answered their phones or death from the kill list. Twenty-one-
returned my messages. I didn’t blame year-old Bryan Njoroge was found dead People visit the dark underworld of
the Internet—places of pornography,
them. There is no easy way to say, in Indiana, shot in the head on a base-
crime, and violence— territory they
“Hello, I found your name on a kill list ball field. The police ruled the death a would never explore in the real world.
on the dark net, and while the site is a suicide. Weeks earlier, a user with the We may call this toxic disinhibition.
scam the order is not; someone you alias Toonbib had paid around $5,500
likely know wants you dead badly to order his murder and provided details The paper describes six factors in-
enough to pay thousands of dollars to of his upcoming travel. Njoroge was a volved in producing the disinhibition
an impossibly shady website. Give me effect—including the sense of ano-
a ring back anytime,” though I tried nymity and invisibility— which
every imaginable permutation. I was contribute to some users’ propen-
blocked on Twitter, hung up on, and, “I’M A STRONG BELIEVER IN GOD, sity for treating life online as a
occasionally, kindly received. AND IF IT’S MY TIME AND SOMEONE game in which rules and norms no
Of those I was able to contact, longer apply.
about half said they had never been WANTS TO KILL ME . . . I’VE GOT A For that reason, it can be hard to
alerted by the police. An Instacart distinguish genuine intent from
delivery driver told me that the cops BURIAL PLOT AND A CASKET READY” rage- clicking through a dumb-
had called her, but they were vague looking website. A user named
about why they wanted to speak to Frankbill161 was apparently furious
her. “They said, ‘We can meet you at U.S. military serviceman who, before at the operators of the sports-betting
any police station,’ ” she told me. “I said, he died, had made a female friend the website FanDuel for not refunding his
‘Give me your badge number.’ They beneficiary of his life-insurance policy. money, which, he told Yura, “ruined my
said, ‘We can meet in the lobby.’ I said, His father questions whether the death life.” So he’d paid $6,232 to order the
‘I don’t think so.’ ” was a suicide, but the local police de- murder of the customer service repre-
I did my best to fill her in—a user partment has said that it is aware of the sentative who delivered the bad news to
going by Say279 had sent a down pay- dark-web assassination order and stands him over the phone. This sort of spon-
ment of $357 for an assassination by its conclusion. taneous anger, which might otherwise
they’d “like to look like a car accident Despite the repulsive intent, there’s be spent on a Twitter or Reddit thread,
or robbery gone wrong”—but, perhaps an element of black comedy to some of can now be unleashed on sites where
confused by all the talk of scammers the logs from Yura’s sites. For one thing, users believe their clicks can kill.
and dark-net markets, she waved it off. the users’ eagerness to believe the service So far, according to Monteiro, eight
“I’m a strong believer in God, and if is real leads them to ignore obvious signs people have been arrested for ordering
it’s my time and someone wants to kill that they are being scammed. Yura’s murders through Yura’s websites, on the
me, well, maybe it’s my time,” she said. marketplaces, for example, use stock basis of evidence Monteiro passed to
“I’ve got a burial plot and a casket photos of assassins or photos pulled from law enforcement. One of them, a young
ready to go.” Google image searches. His poor English Californian named Beau Brigham, had
Whenever I thought I’d grown numb and poorer knowledge of U.S. geography paid less than $5 toward a hit on his
to the casual requests for violence, I’d result in glaring slipups, and the lan- stepmother. Nevertheless, he was found
come across a log that managed to guage he employs can make him sound guilty of soliciting murder and sen-
eclipse the others in some new arena of like a customer service representative tenced to three years in prison.
depravity. One of the highest-cost orders channeling a B-grade Mafia film. Murder marketplaces may force us to
on Besa Mafia had been placed by a user During the back-and-forth on one reexamine—and redefine—what con-
with the alias agentisai. On May 7, 2016, recent order, the user Happynewyear stitutes criminal intent. Though judg-
the user wrote, asked Yura if he could send hit men to ments have been somewhat inconsis-
I am in south NJ and need a handgun Hawaii. “Yes,” Yura responded, “we have tent, courts seem to regard making a
with ammo because I lack the ability to someone in a nearby state. He can drive payment of any amount as proof that
obtain one myself legally. . . . Alterna- to the location with a stolen car and do the desire for harm is sincere. David
tively to a gun order, I could place a hit the job with no problems.” Overlooking Crichton, a doctor in the United King-

dom, was acquitted of attempted-murder order from kidnapping to murder on attention,” Olsen said. “I got out and
charges after ordering a hit on a finan- the same day that Stern told Fry that walked up to the car, and they sped
cial adviser who’d lost most of his pen- she was seeing someone new. Stern sent away. I tried to get a good look at them,
sion, because he had never transferred me screenshots of their text conversa- but I couldn’t.”
any money to Yura. In court, Crichton tion, and they confirm the timing. Stern and Olsen called law enforce-
claimed he had been trying to “clear his ment. The police tracked down the
M
head” of his own suicidal thoughts, and innesota was swept by a bliz- vehicle and determined that the driver
that he’d never really wanted the kill- zard the weekend I went to was an undocumented immigrant who
ing to happen. meet Stern and her then boy- had accidentally followed the wrong
friend, Robbie Olsen. I drove my mock- car. He didn’t speak English. Stern’s
“I
t’s definitely him,” Stern said when ingly named Chevy Malibu through a contact at the FBI said he would pay
I reached her by phone last March. dim white haze—drifts of snow blowing them a visit anyway, but he never
She had been going through the across the highway like steam off dry showed. “The FBI isn’t doing anything,”
logs I’d sent her, and was now con- ice—and tried to avoid the cliché of Stern said. “I’ve learned more from you
vinced that Fry was the person who comparing any of this to Fargo. It was than I have in months from the FBI.
had tried to order her assassination. hard. The immediate setting aside, I was They keep saying it takes time, but,
The two had met online through interviewing the victims of a hare- like, how long? They told me, ‘If this
friends, and carried out an intense re- brained scheme to sic contract killers on was my daughter, I’d want this taken
lationship over Facebook, texts, and an innocent woman—people who’d care of, too—don’t worry,’ and then
video chat for a few years. They talked found themselves in a situation that was they don’t do anything.”
every day, and had at one point become at once ridiculous and brutal, darkly They were both clearly rattled. They
very serious. “I was planning on mov- comic and deeply sad. said they had debated whether to meet
ing overseas with him,” Stern said. “I Monticello, where I met Stern and with me at all—I’m a journalist with a
sent him some personal belongings.” Olsen at a diner, is the kind of de- public profile, but how could they be
In March 2018, Fry came to visit pressed working-class town with plenty sure I was who I said I was? Stern’s
Stern in Minnesota and spent a week at of closed shops, weather-stained build- parents had told her not to come. The
her parents’ house. But the relationship ings, and almost no one on the streets. hit had hobbled her capacity for trust,
had been fraying for several months, she “They call it Methicello,” Olsen said. especially in people with whom she’d
said. He had become increasingly pushy “It’s pretty bad.” communicated only electronically.
and controlling, and he didn’t like it They were late to meet me, and I’d If Stern was correct and the offend-
when Stern went out with her friends. started to worry they were going to blow ing party lived in the United Kingdom,
She wound up breaking up with him me off; I’d received a semi-cryptic mes- it would be hard to extradite and try
while he was in the States. sage from Stern late the night before, him in the United States. Stern said that
“I said very clearly I didn’t want to and I’d sat at a coffee shop that morning either the FBI or DHS had told her
be with him, and he tried telling me I for hours before she texted me apolo- that Fry’s name was on a flight watch list
wasn’t thinking right and I was making getically. When they eventually drifted and that she would be alerted if he at-
a mistake,” she said. “He just kept push- into the diner, they did so like ghosts; it tempted to travel to the United States,
ing it onto me and guilt-tripping me, was clear that neither had slept much. but she wasn’t reassured. “I mean, if he
saying he wouldn’t find anyone else, Stern has brown wavy hair and was willing to take out a hit and try to
and made me do sexual things I didn’t glasses, and she was wearing a black buy a gun on this website, how do I
want to do. Overall, toward the end he Deadpool shirt over her slight frame. know he wouldn’t try to do it again on
was a manipulative bastard.” Her cautious smile was the same as the another site, under a different name?”
Even after Fry returned home, he one on her kill-list picture, only wearier. Stern ate hungrily but warily, as if
continued pursuing her. “He wouldn’t After Stern and Olsen sat down and there were a chance someone had poi-
take no for an answer,” Stern said. He ordered breakfast, they told me why they soned her food. She told me she hadn’t
kept sending her messages, to which she were so late. For the first time since all been writing as much lately, but when
would respond perfunctorily, politely, this began, they said, they had had a she did, the plotlines were even darker
the way you do when you’re moving genuine scare. The night before, around than before. “I’m more bitter,” she said.
on. But he didn’t stop, even after the eleven o’clock, as they were dropping off “I’ve definitely changed. I still want to
hit on her was ordered. Olsen’s mother at the trailer park where be an author, but I worry about attract-
There were three intriguing pieces she lives, they noticed a car following ing attention now.” She remained
of evidence in the logs I’d sent to Stern. them. It tailed them into the park and shaken, angry, and exasperated. She
Mastermind365 had a habit of writing moved to block the exit. The car didn’t fidgeted in her seat, and when she spoke,
“thankyou” as one word—something budge as they inched their own vehicle she mostly looked down at her plate.
that was also present in Fry’s correspon- forward. After a few minutes, Olsen Seeing her in person made it abun-
dence with Stern. Second, Master- unbuckled his seat belt. dantly clear: whoever had targeted
mind365 tried to buy a gun, which he “Lock the doors and don’t get out,” Stern had succeeded in shattering her
would not need to do over the dark web he told Stern. sense of security and well-being.
if he lived in the United States. And “I was ready to throw a block of ice Before she left the diner, Stern gave
finally, Mastermind365 changed the through a window, just to get someone’s me permission to contact Fry, who now
REPORT 29
works as a clerk for a large network of March 12, 2019, two young men, aged man who torched the car to intimi-
veterinary clinics in Bath. By night, he seventeen and nineteen, were arrested date Monteiro, for example, was
hosts a Twitch channel, where he plays for the murder of a prominent investiga- hired by Yura after applying through
video games like League of Legends, and tor in Moscow who had been aggres- Besa Mafia. “i am offering my services
later uploads the streams to YouTube. sively pursuing a drug-trafficking opera- because i am broke (of course),” he
Most have around a dozen views. He is tion. The murder was not orchestrated wrote, “and am looking for quick
also on Twitter, where his avatar is a over any of Yura’s scam sites, but over a cash [and] i have military training
cartoonish, pixelated depiction of his standard, all-purpose dark-web market- (US Navy).” He provided a price list
portrait: a young man with mid-length place similar to the Silk Road, accord- that started at $750 for a beating all
hair pushed to one side, big glasses, and ing to Andrei Soshnikov, one of the the way up to a “sharp object kill” for
a small smile. reporters who broke the story. The kill- $7,500. Dozens of others have made
In his streams, Fry sits in a black-and- ers never met the person who posted the such inquiries. “We know how adept
white chair with a bulky headset on, job. They were paid anonymously, in capitalism is at finding new markets,”
looking pale and serious. “It’s been a bitcoin, and one of them attended a Wilson says. “There are always going
while, it’s been a while, boys and girls,” concert later that night. to be husbands who want divorces
he said in September, introducing one A threshold had been crossed. For and businessmen who want to eradi-
of his Twitch sessions. The room behind years, “dark-net hit man” stories made cate rivals. And sadly, the cost of life
him is sparse; the only thing visible is a for good clickbait and little else. Expe- can be quite cheap.”
black-and-white curtain. rienced tech journalists emphatically Assassination markets do not need
I tried to call Fry on his cell phone debunked such stories as myths, be- to be foolproof, Jim Bell–style opera-
and to reach him at work, but he never cause for years, that’s all they were: tions for users to turn to them. The
picked up. He didn’t respond to a re- myths and fearmongering. But the fact fear is that as more out-of-work men
quest for an interview I sent him in a that the hits didn’t happen was never hear that it is possible to make money
direct message on Twitter, either. So really about the technology; it was an contracting on the dark web, even
after a week, I sent another message issue of trust. There has never been any shoddy, scammy, and slipshod market-
explaining that he had been linked to serious question that the technology places could help arrange killings. As
an order made on the dark web, first behind the dark web could preserve a result, Jim Bell himself is feeling san-
to kidnap, then to murder, a woman anonymity and allow users to move guine. “If anything, I’d argue it’s not
named Alexis Stern. untraced through its pages: it abso- nearly as controversial as I thought it’d
To my surprise, the string of jumping lutely can. That’s why the FBI resorts be twenty years ago,” he said. “People
blue dots that indicate typing popped to old-fashioned methods of going un- are pissed off at politics and govern-
up on my screen. They disappeared, dercover as drug buyers, child pornog- ment. The level of hate is astonishing.”
reappeared, disappeared, and appeared raphers, and hit men in an effort to I asked him how he felt about online
again. Fry finally responded, saying he catch criminals there. marketplaces being used to target not
didn’t know what I was talking about. As the dark web matured, drug and government officials but regular citi-
I told him that it was imperative that weapons buyers were able to document zens like Alexis Stern. “I would target
we speak if he believed my information that yes, this pound of marijuana was no one other than those who aggressed
to be incorrect. The blue dots came indeed delivered to my address; yes, I against the public,” he wrote in reply.
and went for several minutes before a received this Glock as advertised. Us- “I can’t prevent other people . . . from
new message arrived. “I would not like ers verified and began to trust those not being so selective.”
to speak about it,” he wrote, “but markets. “On the early dark net, it used After years of being ignored by the
thankyou for the offer.” * to be impossible to buy a real rhino FBI and burned by the NCA, Mon-
horn, for example,” Monteiro told me. teiro, for his part, is glad that other
W
hile I was working on this “It was all hoaxes. Now it’s not.” The agencies are finally paying attention.
story, journalists at BBC change matters, though it’s too early to He’s been in close contact with a
News Russia confirmed the say how much. A murder was ordered branch of DHS, which is working
first known case of a murder being or- online and cryptocurrency changed with him to identify targets. Accord-
dered on the dark web and successfully hands, entirely anonymously. The killing to him, DHS plans to pursue ev-
carried out by hired assassins. On ers were caught, not because they had eryone who’s made a transaction on
*
When contacted a second time, by a a motive, but because surveillance Yura’s sites with the intent of ordering
Harper’s Magazine fact-checker, Fry said cameras captured their faces. This a killing, and even some who have
that he had been previously unaware of the raises the question: Have online con- posted names and expressed intent
investigation and that he couldn’t comment tract killings happened before and without paying, if the threat is deter-
on the story because he didn’t “know any-
thing about the ‘dark web.’ ” He did not passed unnoticed? mined to be serious enough.
deny ordering a hit on Stern. With regard to David Wilson, a professor of crim- But, in many cases, Monteiro wor-
her allegation that he pressured her sexu- inology at Birmingham City Univer- ries, it may be too late. “There are
ally, Fry told Harper’s: “All that i can say sity who studies contract killers, says hundreds of names,” he told me. By the
is that i am unsure how i manipulated her
as i do not recall doing so. That’s all I that a surprising number of economi- time law enforcement sorts through
have,” he wrote. “I hope that it has helped cally desperate young men are will- the list of potential victims, “some will
with your story.” ing to take on these brutal jobs. The be dead.” n

F R O M T H E A R C H I V E
1 9 7 5
CRIMINAL MINDS
By Lewis H. Lapham
J ust over an hour after he had been

threatened with assassination
conceive of a nation held together by a
common idea of justice, then we must
books, laws, nor civilizations. The
grand predators come and go like so
in Sacramento, President Ford spoke make do with the primitive loyalties of many lizards in the desert, killing and
about the troubling rise in crime in the Mafia. The collective glamoriza feeding and leaving nothing to their
the United States. The little of his re tion of organized crime seems to me heirs except a taperecorded conversa
marks that were quoted in the news analogous not only to the psychotic tion with David Frost.
papers suggested that the president fantasies of the Manson family but also No doubt it is unfair to expect Pres
contented himself with platitudes. to the wistful longings of those intel ident Ford to think of such things at
“Peace on Tenth Street in Sacra lectuals who wish that the world could the moment when Squeaky Fromme
mento,” he said, “is as important to the be restored to the spiritual purity of pointed a gun at him. One virtue of the
people who walk and work there as the late Middle Ages. I can under politician is his willingness to learn
peace in the Sinai Desert”; “one man stand the desire for simplification, but slowly, changing his opinion to con
or woman or child becomes form with the opinions held
just as dead from a switchblade by a majority of his constitu
slash as from a nuclear missile ents, but unless Ford learns
blast”; “the billions of dollars to recognize his enemies in
spent at all levels of govern all their personae, he must
ment since 1960 have not bear the constant risk of assas
done the job,” et cetera. sination. Some people might
The president had looked say that a president accepts
into the barrel of a pistol and such a risk with his office, that
seen the nearness of his own he is a brave man for doing so,
death, but he apparently failed to un the celebration of the criminal is a that he should be congratulated for
derstand that he also had seen a confession of defeat. The predatory the risk, which he also imposes on
magical transformation. With a single mode of doing business depends everybody else in the country. Possi
gesture, a deranged girl named Ly upon the equation of something for bly true, but it is the courage of lost
nette Fromme, aged twentysix and nothing: draw the three of diamonds causes and inevitable defeats, the
dressed in the red robe of an imagi and live happily ever after; steal an courage of the man who prefers to die
nary religious order, had become a na other man’s invention and sell it into with his stupidity rather than try to
tional celebrity. Within a matter of the mass market; borrow from the find a way out of the desert. The
hours it became necessary to know government and let the next genera newspapers gave the distance between
about her unhappy childhood, about tion pay the debt. the president and Manson’s “main
her belief in “the people’s court of ret All well and good, and maybe even lady” as two feet, but the distance in
ribution,” about her squeaky voice and successful, but to what purpose? If I time was much greater. It was the dis
her devotion to the murderous fanta think of the thieves and confidence tance between the Neolithic hunt
sies of Charles Manson. men whom I have met, I remember the and the articles of the American
boredom in their eyes and their lack of Constitution, between the ritual
T he present admiration of the

criminal no doubt arises from
what sociologists would describe as a
interest in anything beyond the next
day’s scam. Contrary to popular report,
the criminal mind is remarkably dull.
sacrifice of the Aztecs and the sci
ence of celestial navigation. The dis
tance is worth preserving, but it is a
condition of alienation. If the state Because it believes in nothing, it difficult thing to do in a society that
can be perceived as a hostile abstrac doesn’t take the time or the trouble to makes celebrities of the people who
tion, and if too many people cannot make anything of value—not families, would destroy it. n
From “The Assassin as Celebrity,” which appeared in the November 1975 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete essay—along with the
magazine’s entire 169-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.
Illustration by Elizabeth Van Itallie, which appeared in the September 1978 issue of Harper’s Magazine ARCHIVE 31
E S S A Y
VICIOUS CYCLES
Theses on a philosophy of news
By Greg Jackson
This is what I feared, that she would speak of what’s important. But what is impor- smarm, or folksiness. The talking
about the news . . . about how her father tant? What’s in the news. point is its handmaiden. News analy-
always said that the news exists so it can sis is a second-order pseudo-event, not
disappear, this is the point of news, what- i. an event per se but the dissection of
ever story, wherever it is happening. We pseudo-events: that is, theater criti-
I
depend on the news to disappear . . . n his 1962 book The Image, Daniel cism. It is not that pseudo-events are
—Don DeLillo, “Hammer and Sickle” J. Boorstin explains, “There was a always uninteresting or meaningless
time when the reader of an unex- but that they are always not news.
What a story. What a fucking story. citing newspaper would remark, ‘How They only exist to be reported on. To
—Dean Baquet, on the election of dull is the world today!’ Nowadays he supply a format. To make up for the
Donald Trump says, ‘What a dull newspaper!’ ” The non-glut of occurrences. Take away
first American paper, Benjamin Har- the pseudo-event and what is left to
ris’s Publick Occurrences Both Forreign fill the news?
a circular conversation and Domestick, committed to appear-
ing only once a month—or “oftener ‘if ii.
W
hat is the news? That which any Glut of Occurrences happen.’ ”
T
is new. But everything is Clearly, things have changed. “We o meet our demand for new-
new: a flower blooms; a need not be theologians,” writes ness and stimulation, we re-
man hugs his daughter, not for the Boorstin, “to see that we have shifted fashioned public life as a rit-
first time, but for the first time this responsibility for making the world ual sequence of pseudo-events. This
time . . . That which is important and interesting from God to the newspa- transformed politics from an industry
new. Important in what sense? In be- perman.” The chief tool in this new of policy and legislation into an in-
ing consequential. And this has been labor is the pseudo-event. dustry of emotion and entertainment.
measured? What? The relationship What is a pseudo-event? They are If the news covered only the proposal
between what is covered in the news everywhere; we hardly notice. Some and passage of specific legislation— or
and what is consequential. Not mea- familiar examples: the speech, the the proposal and enactment of spe-
sured. Why? Its consequence is ensured. rally, the press conference, the brief- cific policy— we would have little
Ensured. . . ? It’s in the news. But then ing, the ribbon cutting, the political news, and audience interest would
who makes it news? Editors. Editors announcement, the political re- quickly fade. But the work of politi-
dictate consequence? Not entirely. Not sponse, the interview, the profile, cians might become the work of gov-
entirely? It matters what people read and the televised debate, the televised erning. As things are, the job of
watch—you can’t bore them. Then argument, the televised shouting politicians is to feed the emotional-
boredom decides? Boredom and a sense match, the televised roundup of oth- entertainment industry that we call
er televised events, the official ex- “news,” which is accomplished by
Greg Jackson is the author of the short-story pression of outrage, remorse, righ- grandstanding and self-promotion.
collection Prodigals. teousness, fear, sanctimony, jingoism, Reporters and pundits cover politics
Stills from Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, which is currently screening at Northwest Film Forum, in Seattle.
Beginning in 1979, Stokes recorded television around the clock for over thirty years. Courtesy Matt Wolf/Zeitgeist Films ESSAY 33
by analyzing how politicians succeed spent consuming news in a given year know that the “news” is not to be taken
and fail as spokespeople and media put to the service of one vote in one seriously, that it is all in fun, so to say.
figures. Interest shifts, by turns, to how election is a terrible use of any per-
the game is played, how the media fits son’s time. Consider what all these —Neil Postman
into this game, and, eventually, how people, with all these hours, might
A
journalists do their jobs. The news otherwise accomplish. Consider that nalyses of the news tend to
today, properly understood, is about most viewers would vote similarly, focus on how the internet has
the careers of politicians and journal- and not necessarily less well, with changed things, and there is
ists. It is career drama. much less information. The principal no doubt that the intrusions of Face-
effect of TV news is to create engage- book’s news feed and Google News,
iii. ment through distress. News shows online aggregation and free content,
cannot connect viewers to meaningful real-time reporting, YouTube, blogging,
T
elevision news aims to alert actions they might take in their own podcasting, and Twitter have roiled
you to problems. In life, when lives to relieve this distress because and remade the news business. But
someone alerts you to a prob- these actions would mean ceasing the crisis in news as an industry is not the
lem, the problem’s meaning takes to watch TV. And this is the goal to same as the crisis in news as a cultural
shape within an implicit context, an- which all others will be sacrificed: institution. The latter took root long
swering: (1) How important is this to keep you watching. before we connected online. It is for
problem? (2) Where does it fit into this reason, because so much media
the rest of my life? (3) What should I iv. today represents the continuation,
do about it? News shows cannot an- even the culmination, of trends that
swer these questions because their Entertainment is the supra-ideology of originated in the late Seventies and
format and their content are at odds. all discourse on television. No matter early Eighties, that writers such as Neil
Their content says, “This is very im- what is depicted or from what point of Postman remain relevant. They saw
portant,” but their format says: (1) No view, the overarching presumption is that the news was moving in two direc-
more important than the next seg- that it is there for our amusement and tions even then: toward entertainment
ment; (2) In a time slot; (3) Keep pleasure. That is why even on news and away from the local reality of
watching. If you are a teacher or a car shows which provide us daily with frag- people’s lives. For all the intervening
ments of tragedy and barbarism, we are
mechanic or a doctor, your job is not technological change, entertainment
urged by the newscasters to “join them
simply to identify a problem but to tomorrow.” What for? One would think on TV remains the dominant modal-
connect people to a solution. The that several minutes of murder and ity of all twenty-first-century news.
news media doesn’t do this. It believes mayhem would suffice as material for a And while the news may not feel
it does—insofar as its audience mem- month of sleepless nights. We accept like fun, it is fun in the sense that it
bers vote—but hundreds of hours the newscasters’ invitation because we is stimulating without demanding
effort— that doing anything else
would require more energy and com-
mitment, even turning off the TV.
Watching television leaves no mean-
ingful residue of knowledge or skill.
When I visited Amsterdam many
years ago, kids staying at the hostels
liked to tour the Heineken brewery for
an afternoon. They wanted to do
something “cultural,” an activity that
justified having traveled to the Neth-
erlands, but really they wanted to
drink beer. This is the logic of all
infotainment, all TV and most in-
ternet news: it soothes the mind’s
demand for constructive activity
while delivering entertainment— a
sugary drink sold on its vitamin con-
tent. Prestige TV works the same
way: by convincing people that they
are engaging with art. Make no
mistake— well-wrought entertain-
ment can require as much talent as art
to create, but that alone does not
make it art. Likewise, not all experi-
ences of information are the same,
34 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 Reading the Globe on the Red Line, a painting by Rebecca Ness © The artist. Courtesy 1969 Gallery, New York City
since more or less passive forms
of learning involve us differently.
What distinguishes art (or
knowledge) from entertainment
(or infotainment) is that art asks
something of its audience, and
that its form serves the artwork,
and not the other way around.
Until the news can say, “We
have no show (or paper) today
because there is nothing of sig-
nificance to concern you,” the
news will build its monument to
truth on a lie.
v.
W
hen you think you
are doing something
serious but you are
doing something trivial and
fun, you grow to believe that se-
rious things are effortless and
enjoyable. You are experiencing
a format, while believing you
are experiencing a content. The
content suggests you are learn-
ing about truth, when you are
really learning how to feel. You
are learning how you should feel
in the presence of certain in-
formation. These feelings go on
to determine your expectations
and worldview. who attended it—its life as a news and the real. The news narrativizes
The formal message of the news item—it might as well have. the world, but distortedly, according
is simultaneously the vital impor- Which was the truth: That it was to the proclivities of its format, and so
tance and utter triviality of every- news, and it did belong in our minds? the story the news tells is always at
thing that is happening. For weeks Or that it was an irrelevant side- heart the story of news: the story of
leading up to the 2018 midterm show? What we can say for certain is curating what we recognize as news.
elections, the media covered the that this question was not decided in
“migrant caravan” as the central the real world of human necessity vi.
story of the moment. Journalists un- but in the virtual world of the news.
I
derstood that its salience as a crisis The caravan story may be notable s it a problem that our mental
had been manufactured, and they for how precipitously it disappeared, representation of the world is the
devoted pages and segments and but the same uncertainty hangs over product of a for-profit entertain-
podcasts to debunking this salience, every news story: What space does ment industry? Yes. Our government,
to exposing it as, in effect, a periph- this deserve in the limited sphere of for instance, cannot be dully compe-
eral real event being turned into a our awareness? Since media atten- tent if what we demand of it is that it
central pseudo-event. These debunk- tion rarely solves the problems it fix- isn’t boring. (After the first day of
ings of course contributed to the criti- ates on, in time the news must move open testimony in the impeach-
cal mass of coverage, until the story, on, letting every story vanish like ment hearings, NBC News noted
or nonstory, took up significant space the caravan— even wars. The raw that the witnesses “testified to Presi-
in our minds: in our idea of the world matter and proportions of the world dent Trump’s scheme, but lacked the
“out there.” Then the election took “out there” take shape in our minds pizzazz necessary to capture public at-
place; the migrant caravan had served in relation to the imperatives of an tention.”) Journalists often rightly
its purpose as an object of media at- industry. This proportionality, rather claim that the engaged polity should
tention, and it disappeared. Presum- than fact or truth, decides the image focus more on state and local politics,
ably it did not disappear from the face of the world we construct: what Jean but people follow national politics for
of the earth, but to judge by the sole Baudrillard calls a “hyperreality,” the the same reason journalists and pun-
connection it had to most people inseparable amalgam of the virtual dits do: because it’s interesting. Were
The Wall, by Terry Powers © The artist. Courtesy Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco ESSAY 35
we to take their advice, they would be must do that right now when it fantasy about how facts and news and
out of a job. Our attention sustains comes to information because we are truth are treated, with emphases and
them, as it sustains politicians, and so being inundated by charlatans who mores that signal seriousness and im-
when journalists wring their hands don’t give a damn about the effect portance within well-understood and
over the unfortunate necessity of cov- they’re having on people. And they fairly rigid parameters. What she is
just care about clickbait and just care
ering Trump’s tweets—to choose an- about racking up their own dollars,
selling, in other words, is not an expe-
other example—they mistake their their own profit margins. It is a dis- rience of reality but of what her view-
own complicity in what they, again grace. It is immoral. It is the market- ers wish reality were like—that is,
rightly, find toxic. For there is no place. So I think that people need to therapy, not news.
noncircular logic that ordains the be responsible and choose their des-
newsworthiness of the president’s tination carefully, and come to peo- vii.
tweets. As the celebrity is famous for ple like us who are tried and true and
T
being famous, so Trump’s tweets are tested and proven brand names in he coincidence of trauma and
news because they get covered as this sphere. therapy, alarm and comfort,
news. If the news media chose only to is the essence of today’s news,
report on concrete actions and orders Amanpour’s show is on PBS, which which requires emergency, high-
emanating from the White House, may partially insulate it from the mar- stakes drama, breaking stories, up-
the activity of governing would once ket. Still, her assumptions and elisions dates, and alerts to keep its audience
again become the proper object of engaged, but which must then
political contemplation. solve the problem it has created by
What news outlets appear to offering explainers and analyses to
mean by insisting that they must AS THE CELEBRITY IS give coherence to so much terrify-
cover Trump’s tweets and other FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS, ing chaos and by employing infor-
provocative ephemera is that if TRUMP’S TWEETS ARE NEWS mational docents, in the form of
they don’t, someone else will and likable media figures, to soothe our
will thereby steal their audience, BECAUSE THEY GET COVERED fear of a world on fire with their
or that they feel obliged to report good humor, their intelligence,
on what their audience seems to and the reassuring whisper embed-
want. But this only draws attention to are striking, if predictable. She does ded in their format: the news exists so
the central flaw in their industry. They not ask whether meaningful or es- it can disappear. And the news does
are not, they reveal, reporting “the sential truth may be different from disappear, inevitably, because its sa-
news”—an expert and principled cura- “real news, facts, truth” as dictated by lience in the virtual sphere of our ap-
tion of what they believe is important— a TV news show. She glides over the prehension is so disproportionate to
but seeking to win audience share, like question of whether she is supplying its salience in our lives. But what does
any other entertainment business, by facts and information to an audience not disappear is the residue of the ex-
trading on the inherent prestige of and that would otherwise not have this perience and how this primes us for
misconceptions about what we have information or fall prey to conspiracy our next encounter with news of poli-
come to call “news.” theories and fake news. She assumes, tics and the world out there.
On the podcast Stay Tuned with against all reasonable belief, that One consequence of inflating the
Preet, Preet Bharara asked Chris- people are drawn to her show because stakes of ongoing political activity in
tiane Amanpour whether the media they are searching for truth or facts in order to fill formats and draw audi-
underestimates people in assuming a morass of confusion and deceit. She ences is that people are afraid of pol-
they want to be entertained rather suggests, with no apparent irony, that itics: afraid of politicians—the
than informed. It is a confused ques- being “responsible” means choosing government— actually doing any-
tion and received a confused answer: your TV news “destination” carefully. thing. Large constituencies stand
Finally, while denigrating the charms ready on either side to denounce any
I think maybe that was the case in of less “true and tested and proven new policy or law as the end of ev-
the past several years. But I do be- brand names in this sphere,” she seems erything they cherish. The potential
lieve that since we’ve entered this utterly (or conveniently) incurious effect of policy gets subsumed into
vortex of a different kind of politics, about what people actually get out of the virtual space of the news, where
I think many, many people are actu- her program and others like it. What it languishes as an untested proposi-
ally looking for real news, facts, she must know—just as Bharara tion, an object of endless, futile de-
truth. Clearly, there’s a lot who don’t knows it—is that she is not princi- bate. Instead of implementing policy
really care, who buy into conspiracy pally the purveyor of unique informa- and evaluating it in practice, we re-
theories, who still go to Facebook
tion but a media personality, someone main paralyzed, and the more para-
and other places where they can find
fake news. I do think that people people like to spend time with, and lyzed we get—the less able to enact
have to take on a responsibility of that her show, while presumably made or amend policy—the more the case
their own right now. . . . They go out up of real news and facts and truth, is for paralysis grows, since the chances
and they shop around, and they get a fantasy, a shimmering hyperreality, of fixing a mistake diminish. This
the best that they can. And they one that in this case happens to be a grants an asymmetric power to the

forces that want the government to But even old-school newspapers suc- recent profusion of ideology? Here’s why:
do less, not more. cumb to the tyranny of format, worship- ideology is an answer to the problem of
But the more pernicious effect is a ping, in their way, a less glitzy hyperreal- conceptual questions destined to re-
psychic cancer introduced into the ity we call “the news of the day.” This is main in the conceptual sphere. It fills
culture as a whole. The extreme coin- what a newspaper is and has been—a a vacuum of action. You can argue using
cidence of urgency and irrelevance, kind of composite pseudo-event—since ideology, but you can’t build a bridge
terror and impotence, turns into a the telegraph and other technologies of with it. If you spend more time arguing
maddening unsettledness and contra- communication freed information from than building bridges, it’s very useful.
diction in the conceptual sphere of limits imposed by space and time. The One way to tell you’re in the pres-
life, authoring fear, anger, and confu- news of the day comprises real- and ence of ideology is when an entire
sion everywhere. The essential experi- pseudo-events and even, sometimes, industry of opinion exists to bolster
ence of a hyperreality is angst: dread, real news, but it is only one of infinite and substantiate beliefs that people do
hushed panic, ambient foreboding. A possibilities of how we might narrativ- not know how to justify on their own.
disturbing fiction at least comforts you ize the world. It strives to be factual but Its nature is to confuse the question of
that it is fiction. A needling friend adheres to strict conventions of format who is thinking for whom and where
may finally admit, “I’m just fucking about what can and can’t appear. It thought or belief began. Ideology flat-
with you.” The news is, on balance, collapses the dimensionality we rely on ters people that their beliefs are their
just fucking with us, but it can never to judge the world around us so that the own precisely when they are not, and
say so because it draws its stimulating proportions of the world it presents can- thus the sort of opinions and analyses
power from the pretense that it isn’t not agree with the proportions of our that present themselves as ideology’s
entertainment, isn’t just “fun,” but is lives—“cannot” because the news is correctives are in fact its enablers. The
deeply consequential. It rigorously above all else this proportionality, this consumer of opinion does not ask him-
blurs the line between entertainment idiosyncratic condensation of the world self “Why do I believe this?” but “Who
and public service, since its market out there. can remind me why I believe this?”
share and prestige depend on this con- This is what Neil Postman meant Much has been made of the dichot-
fusion. But when you ask yourself what when he wrote, “The news of the day is omy between news and opinion in the
you can do with what you have learned a figment of our technological imagina- case of Fox News or the Wall Street
on the news, you see that it only per- tion.” Our means of apprehending real- Journal, but almost all news today
mits you to consume subsequent news ity determine the reality we apprehend. comes with a lacing of opinion or ideol-
more conversantly. What few could foresee was that, as ogy, a framing, at the very least, that
technological and business pressures helps sort through the implications of
viii. drew the news further toward stimula- a piece of information and put it in the
tion and away from representing im- context of a prior ideological frame-
W
hether as a news show, a pod- mediate life, at a certain point the value work. Rarely are you left to wonder
cast, or an article, chances of the news’ being true, its hewing as whether a given idea matches Republi-
are today the news came to close as possible to an accurate picture can or Democratic, conservative or
you through a screen. Online news plat- of the world, would fall away. The news’ liberal ideology. Rarely are you left to
forms differ from traditional broadcast relationship to people’s lives had grown wonder what you yourself think, or
media and newspapers in significant perilously virtual and its meaning, on an what else you would like to know before
ways. When clicks and engagement emotional level, nearly indistinguishable forming an opinion, without someone
define the metrics of success, prompts from entertainment. That no feedback swooping in to think for you.
and alerts, listicles, clickbait, most-read mechanism existed to discourage people Guidance from those who know
or “top story” sections, and otherwise from getting their facts wrong, or to cor- more than you do is often a good thing:
manipulative headlines and teasers be- rect them when they did, underscored the substance of education. But educa-
come predominant aspects of the ex- how deeply insignificant and remote the tion means to empower you to think for
perience. The graphic layouts of news subject matter of the news—trumpeted yourself, not indoctrinate you. The
on TV and on websites converge, with for its significance and immediacy—was signs of education and of ideology mir-
chyrons mimicking banner ads and to the lives of its audience. In the im- ror each other inversely: curiosity,
vice versa. Red-letter “breaking news” mediate and practical sense, news and open-mindedness, and self-doubt on
gets more common (and less likely to fake news became a distinction without the one hand; quickness to anger, de-
be urgent, or even news) as the thirst a difference. fensiveness, and tenacity of belief on
for constant stimulation grows. When the other. One welcomes new informa-
you buy a physical newspaper, what you ix. tion; the other fears it.
do with it next—what you read—is Most Americans are not significant
W
your business. Not so with news on the hat we call “news” is less consumers of news and are not espe-
internet; here the publication’s interest and less the meaningful cially ideological. One might hope that
does not end but begins at the “point h i s t o r ic a l f a ct s — t h i s if news were performing the educa-
of sale,” and everything about the ar- happened—and more and more “opin- tional function it sets for itself,
chitecture of the product is designed to ion”: argument to substantiate an ideol- news-savvy, high-information Ameri-
attach you to more of it. ogy or worldview. Have you noticed a cans would be still more open-minded
ESSAY 37
and less ideological. Studies suggest the mentary than to hold up a mirror to the less paramount. It goes one step fur-
opposite is true—that more “informed” culture’s own confusion. ther, since part of the illusion, in the
voters are more partisan and often have “Truth” and “fact” in isolation do face of political confusion and distress,
less accurate, more ideologically skewed nothing to combat ideology and error. is that the news celebrity’s competence
ideas about the world. This isn’t neces- It merely benefits the news industry to and clarity are your own. Her power is
sarily the news’ fault. Nonetheless, the pretend they do. I understand why briefly yours, and while you inhabit
news seems not to counteract or miti- people object to false equivalencies the aura of her expertise you are safe
gate but to abet our ideological drift. It between MSNBC and Fox News, but from your own ignorance and the frus-
gives us the tools not to interrogate but to focus on veracity blinds us to the tration of life among other people.
to taxonomize belief, not to develop deeper effect of opinion and punditry The most fervent devotees of a cult or
policy preferences but to identify to per se. The pertinent question con- demagogue are those who mistake
which political identity and tribe a cerns the terms of the implicit contract courtship for love and the power of a
policy belongs. In the internet age it between audience and commentator. If leader for their own. But when you
gives us just enough to cobble together commentators serve the sensibility of step outside the aegis of a leader’s
our own take— demonstrating our their audiences—which the necessity power, the aura of a pundit’s compan-
wonkish bona fides, unleashing a of attracting and retaining viewers (or ionship, you realize, suddenly, that
snarky dismissal or the sickest burn— listeners or readers) in a competitive you are alone and unprepared. You
just enough, that is, to pass off the media environment ensures—it hardly were misled into thinking you were
scraps of other people’s expertise as an matters that they traffic in fact or avoid getting help when you were giving
ersatz identity of our own. untruth since the overall message peo- worship. Ideology takes root in this
ple receive is: Your worldview is substan- disappointment because the alterna-
x. tially right, and here are the arguments tive is more painful: accepting that
to insulate and fortify it. The purpose you’ve been conned.
I
deology grows stronger for our belief is to justify ideological frameworks as a
in a lie: that information has an way of dealing with uncertainty and to xi.
additive property whereby at some reinforce the complex social agree-
N
point it becomes knowledge. This sim- ments on which these consensuses are ewspapers begin with the
ply isn’t true. Outside the contextual built. When Fox News anchor Shepard most serious and sober news,
frameworks that give information a Smith debunked what conspiracy the- which, though it has little to
place in life and a relationship to other orists had dubbed the Hillary Clinton do with your life, understands that
information, it is quite literally mean- “uranium scandal” in 2017, his audience you show up with good intentions.
ingless. Would more state-issued facts did not thank him for elucidating the You mean to do something civic, or
about the Soviet economy in 1980, or truth, but suggested he belonged on at least to cast a glance over those
more pages of talking points from an CNN or MSNBC and that, for expos- more serious headlines on your way
industry lobby, get you closer to the ing a false story, he was anti-Trump. In to controversy and gossip, celebrity
truth simply for not being untrue? Does other words, he had violated the terms and human drama.
knowing more trivia help someone of their contract, which was not to The news, like a fractal, repeats
build a better car or advance particle provide fact or best judgment but cor- this betrayal of good intentions on
physics or write a more touching ballad? roboration. Truth was welcome, but every scale. This is the poignancy and
If we judge the “informed” as those who only truth that confirmed one view. tragedy of the news. We need it: the
possess more information—more dis- Thus while ideology and entertain- Fourth Estate, complement to govern-
embodied or decontextualized bits of ment may seem at odds—entertainment ment, scourge of corruption, orches-
trivia that are “true” in the sense of not is reputedly fun and lighthearted, trator of public discourse. No one
being demonstrably false—we may find where ideology is deadly serious—they thinks we could get by without a
we have created a vacuous category are in fact flip sides of the same coin. press. No one who understands the
(“conversance”) and that we need in- Entertainment means to transfix, to work of journalism has anything but
vented contexts, like the proliferating keep you in place: watching, tuned in. admiration for its honest practice.
“news quizzes,” to put these incoherent It cannot ask you to endure discom- But this work—to hold power to ac-
facts to use. “Think You’re Smarter fort, and the comfort it offers is often an count, to safeguard the truth, to
Than a Slate Senior Editor? Find Out uncomplicated intimacy, even a vicari- comfort the afflicted and afflict the
With This Week’s News Quiz,” Slate ous identification, with a celebrity—in comfortable, in Finley Peter Dunne’s
suggests. “Did you stay up to date this the case of news, with the commenta- immortal words—has entered into a
week?” the New York Times’ news quiz tor or host. Because this person’s pri- fatal bargain with an effluvium that
more gently wonders. It’s only one step mary concern is your comfort—which demeans and yet supports it. Tradi-
further to propose the news business is to say your attention and approval—a tional reporting becomes the loss
itself and the practice of journalism as subtle con exists at the heart of the leader. It exchanges its status for a
the proper object of the news connois- exchange. This person does not know subsidy, and slowly a reluctant embrace
seur’s attention and interest. Asking who you are or, in any but the most of this co-optation—by the very forces
such people’s opinions in polls, then, superficial sense, care about you. But a profession that stands in opposition
may do less to draw out “informed” com- the illusion of a relationship is nonethe- to power should repel—turns into an

erotic grapple, because the apotheosis cycle, win within the rules of a con-
of market logic is the jittery Stock- fected game. Playing the game well,
holm syndrome that makes the prison- being stimulating and likable in a me-
ers of the market insist that it has set dia environment, suffices to justify one’s
them free. ascendancy within it, because—despite
So we find ourselves in a situation protestations to the contrary—this
in which an entertainment industry logic of celebrity explains why anyone
of specious value (called “news”) sub- is a media figure in the first place, and Rain or shine the Banjo Paterson is the
sidizes a much smaller and less popu- why we attend them. The sober, re- perfect crossover hat, at home in the city or
lar subindustry (real news), which sponsible news, now in its watchdog country. Full grain roan leather sweatband,
lends its prestige to the former and guise, enters here—when the mecha- Barramundi hatband. 4 ½" crown, 2 ¾" brim.
permits it to call itself by the same nism of its own industry has elevated a Sizes: 6 ¾ - 8. Heritage Fawn or Charcoal.
name. As this entertainment indus- crook or a scoundrel to a position of #1622 Banjo Paterson ........................... $175
try subsumes and replaces the news power—promising to solve, through
industry, a little game takes place, exposure, a problem it helped create.
more or less in public. The game in- But it can’t undo the media mechanism
volves pretending— journalist and without relinquishing its own power
audience alike—that they have gath- and profitability by copping to the lie Your Akubra hat will faithfully protect
ered to discuss a truth that exists on which its prestige rests. you on your adventures in all types of
outside the media, when, except in weather. Made in Australia of pure
the rarest cases, they intend to dis- XII.
cuss the processes of the media itself: rabbit fur felt to perform rain or shine.
B
the drama of how information and ut we need the news, don’t we?
sentiment evolve and are influenced We need information spread-
within a media environment. Like ing through society. We need
sports fans, news consumers learn people digging into convenient stories
the subtleties of the game. They to check the facts. We need to un-
grow “media-savvy,” and media-savvy cover what power seeks to hide and
becomes the hope of an industry. discourage those who can abuse their
Members of the news business power from doing so.
(and practically they alone) call Of course, we can’t judge the sol-
for greater “media literacy”— a so- dier, the police officer, the watchdog
lution to a problem they have cre- only by what they do, but also by what This classic fur felt fedora distinguishes
ated that expects the reformation would happen without them. a gentleman as well today as it did on
of their audience but not of their And yet no one would suggest we the streets of Melbourne or Sydney in
industry—because they do not want fund the military by watching it wage the nineteen-fifties. Made in Australia.
to choose between responsibility war on TV, that the size of its audi- 4¾" crown, 2½" brim, grosgrain band.
and popularity, or principle and ca- ence should determine its budget. We Sizes 6 ⅞-8, Black, Acorn or Carbon Gray.
reer. They are selling a healthy prod- understand where such incentives
#1746 The Stylemaster ........................ $140
uct, they imply, which people are us- would lead.
ing the wrong way. But this is But this is the way the news
Please add $9 handling per order.
confused. No one wants the healthy works. Its greatest social benefit rests
product. They want its misuse. They in discouraging the sensational and
want to believe something so stimu- scandalous from happening, but it
lating can be healthy, and they rely needs the sensational and scandalous Order on davidmorgan com
on media members to help perpetu- to attract the audience that supports Call or request a catalog
ate this lie. it. No one would propose we fund
As civic discourse—the news— cancer research through tobacco #KB-336-SSC
becomes increasingly shaped by sales or link heart-disease treatment
media-savvy and game-play, as it be- to McDonald’s revenue. No one
comes a metadiscourse not about ac- would say that the CIA should part-
tual events but about the translation ner with TMZ to run a celebrity-
and distortion of actual events within gossip site. But with the news we are #D1050 #N980
a virtual sphere, the little lie about not so far from these fanciful scenar-
what the news is and why we follow it ios. Breitbart and right-wing talk ra- Akubra® Hats from Australia
permits bigger lies. Charlatans, con dio belabor fake scandals to create a Australian Aboriginal Jewelry
men, demagogues, and cheats crawl out salable emotional product, but the
^
of the woodwork and operate with im- mainstream media, for all its under- Wildlife Jewelry & much more..
punity, knowing they need not win on standable concern about Trump,
truth or merit, but simply win the news cannot stop helping him when it
800-324-4934 davidmorgan.com
11812 N Creek Pkwy N, Ste 103•Bothell, WA 98011
ESSAY 39
boosts their bottom line. They can’t news industry is unfair. The news is something missing
limit themselves to reporting on con- trapped in a business model that
W
crete actions by the White House makes no sense, that rewards it for its hen we turn away from the
but must breathlessly amplify every worst behavior and refuses to pay it news, we will confront a
ephemeral utterance, every remark for what of greatest value it contrib- startling loneliness. It is the
designed to cause a little flurry of utes. But the news can be blamed for loneliness of life. The loneliness of
reporting and nothing more. They confusing the issue. We need to thinking, of having no one to think for
can’t stop saying “Tr ump” and know when we are being entertained us, and of uncertainty. It is a loneliness
broadcasting his likeness, when his and when we are having a different that was always there but that was
likeness has nothing to do with the experience. Being fed trivialities obscured by an illusion, and we will
news and when they could as easily when we need importance, like empty miss the illusion. We will miss the il-
say “the White House” or “the execu- calories when we need nourishment, lusion that we had a place in history,
tive branch.” They are puppeteered makes us sick. We grow to mistake the sense that we were celebrities our-
by their own game, caught in a bind bigness for importance, when impor- selves, actors on the grand stage. We
whereby their abhorrence of Trump tance is a measure of our involve- will miss the voices and images that
and their audience’s abhorrence of ment. Big trivialities make us psychi- came to us daily and convinced us they
Trump elevated him to such cacoph- cally obese, with nowhere to expend were our friends. We may, if we listen
onous prominence that he had a this pent-up energy. “What a story. closely to the echo inside this loneli-
shot of winning the presidency. What a fucking story,” Dean Baquet ness, hear the expectant beating of our
And when he did win and the said, watching Trump’s inauguration. own hearts and understand that what
mood among reporters at the New The essayist Lauren Hough writes we longed for, what we asked for, and
York Times turned bleak, the paper’s about being a “cable guy” and de- what was given us was a story—a story
executive editor, Dean Baquet, was scribes the clenched-teeth white- of such grand metaphysical proportions
surprised at the response: this was knuckling of a customer who hears that reality could never meet it. Reality
the story of a lifetime. “Great stories he will have to forgo Fox News for a could only meet it by inflaming itself,
trump everything else, right?” he says week. A junkie without a fix. What and this was the danger—the danger
in the documentary miniseries The is this hunger, this addiction? An that made our hearts beat faster and
Fourth Estate. addiction is a hunger briefly satis- the story grow stronger. Then we will
But only someone besotted with the fied, then redoubled, by its object. see the news for what it was: the narra-
news as an end in itself could believe But hunger for what? Hunger for tor of our national epic. “The news of
that—another executive clinging to something much more significant the day” was the next chapter in an
the delusion that he’s a celebrity and a than the news. An answer to the in- evaporating book. And we will miss
civic hero at once. The privatization of commensurable. To the incommen- tuning in each day to hear that voice
a public good has progressed to a far- surability of the scope of the world that cuts boredom and loneliness in its
gone place when market success and and the scope of our lives. The vast- solution of the present tense, that like
moral success are so confused that you ness of our hopes and the range of Scheherazade assures us the story is still
congratulate yourself for selling both our capabilities. Meaning and place. unfolding and always will be. I don’t
antidote and toxin. I feel it, too. It does not begin in an- know whether we can give it up. We
ger or fear, but it can be twisted into may need it too much, miss it too
xiii. these by a cynical exchange— too sharply. We may never get to the quiet
many cynical exchanges, one after place where we can read a poem, be-
T
he news may be judged by what the next. Too many trivialities cause this will mean distinguishing
it crowds out. democracy dies passed off as sustenance. Too much happiness from pleasure and under-
in darkness, the Washington fake intimacy. Too much stimulation standing that happiness means bore-
Post motto reads. For billions who live to no end. dom, means loneliness. Means life
in countries without a free press, this is William Carlos Williams writes: among one another, in the world: a place
true. But our problem in the United where drama subsides and horizons of
States is not an absence but a glut. My heart rouses thinking to bring you time stretch to months, to years. Are you
Truth dies in darkness, but it also dies news of something that concerns not bored already? Who will narrate our
in blinding light. Separating what’s you and concerns many men. Look at epic now? Will we have one? What will
what passes for the new. You will not
important from what’s trivial is as es- bind us? No one knows. What we do
find it there but in despised poems. It is
sential as revealing what’s important. difficult to get the news from poems yet know is that some part of us longs for
A needle in the haystack isn’t much men die miserably every day for lack of our dreams to come true. Dream of
better than no needle. what is found there. monsters long enough and you bring
The problem of distinguishing the them into being. We make what we
important from the trivial is a prob- Good luck getting anyone to imagine real. And who then reminds
lem for all of us—for our educators, tur n away from the news to a us—and what must happen before we
our politicians, our leaders, for us as poem, but this is the lack—and the remember—that the drama we want in
individuals, as citizens, as friends. To surfeit, the glut—of which we die our stories is not the drama we want
lay this problem at the feet of the miserably every day. in our lives? n

L E T T E R F R O M T H E C O M O R O I S L A N D S
OCEANS APART
A neglected migration crisis off the African coast
By Tommy Trenchard
I
had been in Domoni—an ancient, town’s crumbling, lava-rock homes. hills that surround the town, dotted
ramshackle trading town on the But Onzardine had grown up in Do- with mango, palm, and breadfruit
volcanic island of Anjouan—for moni and was intimately familiar with trees. We clambered down a trail,
only a few summer days in 2018 when its contours. past scrawny goats foraging through
Onzardine Attoumane, a local English Stocky in build, with small, deep- piles of discarded plastic bottles,
teacher, offered to show me around the set eyes and neatly trimmed stubble, broken flip-flops, and corroded alu-
medina. Already I had gotten lost sev- Onzardine led me through the back- minum cans, toward a ledge where a
eral times trying to navigate the dozens streets, our route flanked by ferns dozen young men were waiting for
of narrow, seemingly indistinguishable and weeds sprouting from cracks in the fishing boats to return to shore,
alleyways that zigzagged around the old the walls and marked by occasional gazing blankly out across the sea.
Tommy Trenchard is a writer and photogra- piles of rubble. After a few minutes, Stone paths soon gave way to dirt
pher based in Cape Town, South Africa. This we emerged onto a sunlit cliff offer- tracks. On a low, concrete wall, a
article was supported by the Pulitzer Center. ing views of the mustard-colored man in a faded, dirt-caked T-shirt
Comorians resting on the waterfront in Moroni, the capital of the Union of the Comoros. All photographs
from the Comoro Islands, August 2019, by Tommy Trenchard for Harper’s Magazine © The artist LETTER FROM THE COMORO ISLANDS 41
sat hunched, staring out toward the a million people set in the warm wa- Government corruption and nepo-
water with wild eyes. Onzardine ters off the eastern coast of Mozam- tism are endemic, public services are
beckoned me to follow him up a bique. One of the world’s least-visited woefully inadequate, the natural re-
sheer slope of dusty soil to the rem- countries, the Comoros is best known sources on which the country’s largely
nants of the city’s sixteenth-century as the home of the West Indian rural population relies—fresh water,
defenses. Together, we too looked out Ocean coelacanth, an ancient fish arable land, fisheries—are critically
over the swell of the ocean. Toward once thought by scientists to have depleted, and the average per capita
the southeast, the faint outline of gone extinct sixty-five million years income is little more than a thou-
another island, Mayotte, some fifty ago, though Comorian fisherman had sand dollars per year. Since 1975, the
miles away, glowed like a mirage been regularly catching them for as Comoros has seen more than twenty
through the haze. long as anyone can remember. attempted coups.
Anjouan is one of three main is- Largely cut off from the global econ- Mayotte, by contrast, belongs to
lands that make up the Union of the omy, most Comorians make their liv- one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
Comoros, a tiny nation of fewer than ing through subsistence agriculture. Despite being some five thousand
miles from Paris, the shimmer of
land that Onzardine and I could see
across the straits was bona fide
French soil. The outpost has repre-
sentatives in the French parliament,
is subject to French law, uses the
euro, and enjoys benefits of European
Union membership.
Crossing the waters before us had
become the overriding goal of most
ambitious young Comorians. The sea
was calm that day, but in recent
years thousands have drowned in at-
tempts to reach Mayotte on flimsy fi-
berglass boats known as kwassa-
kwassa. A 2012 report by the French
Senate put the death toll since 1995
at between seven and ten thousand.
More recently, Comorian officials
have said that the true figure could
be as high as fifty thousand, an esti-
mate that would make the crisis
comparable in scale to that in the
Mediterranean. Without documenta-
tion, those who succeed in crossing
live a precarious existence on Ma-
yotte, unable to work legally, forever
hiding from the authorities.
The longer I stayed in the archi-
pelago, the more I began to think of it
as a microcosm of a planet nearing its
breaking point. It became impossible
not to see the islands’ increasingly
familiar constellation of problems—a
rapidly growing population, the un-
sustainable exploitation of resources,
climate change, economic inequality,
and the ensuing mass migration from
the poor world to the rich—as a blue-
print for many crises to come.
R
eaching Mayotte wasn’t always
so difficult. The four islands of
the Comoros archipelago—
Grande Comore, Mohéli, Anjouan, and
Mayotte—have been inhabited for over
42 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 A former smuggler who transported migrants to the French island of Mayotte, pictured in Anjouan
a thousand years, first by mainland Af- was transformed from a compara- saw Mayotte as Comorian, and the
ricans and Southeast Asians, followed tively prosperous trading hub into a United Nations, which claimed that
by Arab and Indian traders and, eventu- forgotten backwater. By 1886, hav- France had violated the principle of
ally, European settlers. The archipelago ing been drawn into the territorial territorial integrity. France, in turn,
was traditionally ruled by an assort- scramble between European powers cited the right of Mahorans—as citi-
ment of rival sultans and chiefs, with seeking farmland and regional mili- zens of Mayotte are called—to self-
power and influence shifting among tary footholds, all four of the islands determination. Two years later, Ma-
towns and islands, though their di- were either protectorates or colonies yotte reaffirmed its decision in a
verse populations shared the same of France. second referendum. In 2011, the is-
Sunni Islamic faith and spoke dialects In 1974, following decades of poland was granted the status of a full
of the same Shikomori language. Situ- litical agitation, the French govern- overseas department of France.
ated advantageously between Madagas- ment permitted a referendum on the By that time, Comorians had al-
car and the African coast, the islands’ question of independence. While ready been dying at sea for well over
inhabitants dealt in everything from 95 percent of the total votes were a decade. In 1995, the French prime
rice to slaves, first with Arab merchants cast in favor, a majority on Mayotte minister Édouard Balladur, seeking
and later with French, British, and voted to remain part of France. In- to stem the rush of immigration that
Dutch trading companies. tent on retaining Mayotte for itself, was already flowing from the Co-
With the opening of the Suez the French chose to interpret the re- moros, introduced a visa requirement
Canal in 1869, however, the major- sults on an island-by-island basis, for all Comorians visiting Mayotte.
ity of the maritime traffic on which and the archipelago was split in The Balladur visas, as they are uni-
the islands depended disappeared. two. The decision was fiercely criti- versally known, were, and remain,
Almost overnight, the archipelago cized by both the Comoros, which almost impossible to obtain without
Left: Mounira Saindou, one of six survivors from a failed transport of forty-six migrants, found after ten days
adrift at sea. Right: Comorians display pictures of family members who died attempting to reach Mayotte. LETTER FROM THE COMORO ISLANDS 43
high-level connections, so most Co- past twenty-five years, Anjouan has heard so many other migration hor-
morians were forced to travel in se- lost 80 percent of its forests, cut ror stories that week, I had assumed
cret by kwassa-kwassa, leading thou- down by farmers moving higher and that Onzardine wanted to stay in
sands to their deaths. higher up the island’s slopes in Anjouan. Unlike many of his peers,
One of the dead was Onzardine’s search of fertile land. This has led to he had managed to graduate from
cousin Bacar. The two had grown up the erosion of much of the topsoil, university and find a job. So I was
in the same household, like brothers. which has further exacerbated the surprised when he confided to me be-
Like many in Onzardine’s family, Ba- situation, and, in tandem with fore I left that he, too, was dreaming
car became a fisherman, but he de- changing weather patterns, has con- of making it to Mayotte. Onzardine
cided to switch careers when he real- tributed to the disappearance of up explained that the school where he
ized that he could earn as much to three quarters of the island’s riv- taught had not yet begun paying
smuggling a single group of migrants ers. One such river, Onzardine told him—public-sector workers are often
to Mayotte as he could fishing for an me, used to be so deep that he and forced to wait years before receiving
entire month. At his busiest, and as- his friends could leap into it from a their first paycheck. Moreover, he
suming the weather cooperated, Ba- high bridge without hitting the bot- told me, you really needed two or
car made as many as three crossings tom. Now it’s been reduced to a two- three jobs to be comfortable, and giv-
a week. On a stormy Friday in 2016, inch-deep trickle. en his humble background and lack
after he had dropped off his passen- Government services on the is- of connections, he couldn’t hope for
gers safely in Mayotte, Bacar’s engine lands are patchy at best—trash collec- much. In Mayotte, an English teacher
failed. “He called us and said his motion is virtually nonexistent, power could earn as much in a month as
tor had broken,” Onzardine’s mother outages are commonplace, the na- Onzardine could hope to save after
told me. “He said he was alone at sea tional health service suffers from a several yea r s of work i n t he
and needed help. When we called lack of equipment and expertise, and Comoros—if, that is, his school ever
him back, his phone wasn’t working. standards of education are so poor started paying him.
We called people to help him, but it that, according to UNESCO, about Onzardine also wanted to marry. A
was too late.” Fishermen searched 40 percent of the adult population typical grand mariage—the extrava-
for Bacar’s boat for ten days, finding cannot read or write. Medical condi- gant celebration that dictates a man’s
no trace. tions requiring ongoing treatment, status in Comorian society—costs tens
During my week in Anjouan, On- such as diabetes, can be financially of thousands of dollars and lasts for
zardine and I met a dozen families ruinous, and cancer is more or less a two weeks. (Onzardine and I attended
mourning children, parents, and sib- death sentence. Onzardine’s uncle, one in Domoni that had cost over
lings whose boats never reached Ma- who is diabetic, has twice had to board 35,000 euros. It included a public bull-
yotte. Some of those who died were a kwassa-kwassa to Mayotte to receive fight, held in the main square in front
fishermen turned smugglers like Ba- care. When Onzardine and I visited of the sultan’s palace, which was not
car, but most were passengers trying the hospital in Domoni, there ap- even included on the official schedule.)
to sustain their families amid eco- peared to be only a single patient. Onzardine had been with his fiancée,
nomic hardship and agricultural and Perhaps because of what had hap- Halima, for five years, but still lacked
environmental decline. Over the pened to Bacar, or because I had the five or six thousand euros he esti-
mated he would need for an ap-
propriately lavish ceremony.
At week’s end, before flying out
of the Comoros, I asked Onzar-
dine if he was nervous. “It’s a big
risk,” he admitted, “but it’s better
to take a risk than to do nothing.”
He promised he would try to avoid
bad weather. As the plane shot
smoothly over the jagged, volcanic
coastline and climbed over the sea
beyond, I imagined Onzardine
huddled in an overcrowded
kwassa-kwassa, crashing through
the waves, his eyes squinting
against the spray.
O
ne year after my first
meeting with Onzardine,
I returned to Anjouan.
My plan was to take the migrant
route to Mayotte via kwassa-
44 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 Onzardine Attoumane at a café on the outskirts of Domoni, on Anjouan
kwassa, and I set about finding a smug- going off by night throughout the He added, apologetically, that it would
gler. They were not hard to find—every town and the surrounding villages. not be possible to give me a receipt, but
village along the coast had at least one, My translator on this visit was an assured me that the voyage would be
and everyone knew who and where unemployed plumber named Anzize safe. We would travel by night, he ex-
they were. I stayed in the capital, Mut- Soilihi. We took a taxi to the village plained, and wait off the coast of Ma-
samudu, a decrepit port whose defining of Ouani, north of the capital, where yotte until his contacts onshore gave
feature is a large whitewashed fort built I hoped to find a ride to Mayotte. We him the all clear. Boss boasted that he
in the eighteenth century to guard walked down to the wharf, where could fit thirty passengers on his boat,
against marauding Malagasy pirates. colorfully painted kwassa-kwassa and then asked again for whiskey. I
Men wearing long white robes and bobbed offshore. A mural on a near- decided to check out his competitors
cadmium-yellow kofias wandered the by wall depicts migrants being de- before making a decision.
warren of the old medina, and teen- voured by sharks in a rough sea and In the neighboring village of
agers chatted by the waterfront, the reads: the balladur visa kills co- Mirontsi, I waited out of sight while
gray sand of the beach obscured by an morians. A stick figure in a boat Anzize negotiated terms with another
ankle-deep layer of trash. Just off- with french police written across smuggler who said he’d bring me to
shore, fishermen guided their boats the hull was firing at the figures in Mayotte for 400 euros. He took a
past the rusting wreck of a trawler. the water, and a crudely drawn heli- maximum of twelve people in his
The situation on Anjouan had copter circled above. kwassa-kwassa, which would leave
grown even bleaker. The previous I asked an old man resting in the before dawn the next day. He also
summer, the president of the Comoros, shade of a tree where I might find a offered a guarantee: if the French
Azali Assoumani, had cracked down smuggler. “You must talk to the com- patrol boats intercepted us before
on opposition parties and amended mandant,” he replied, gesturing to a making landfall, once we had been
the constitution to enable himself to young man in a baseball cap sitting on deported back to Anjouan he would
stay in power through 2030. A few the hull of an overturned boat. The take us again for free. That afternoon
months later, rebels had fought fierce “commandant”—he identified himself I walked through the cool streets of
gun battles against government troops as “Boss”—said that he would be happy the medina and found a shop where
in Mutsamudu’s medina, resulting in a to take me to Mayotte for the sum of I bought a life jacket, along with a
handful of deaths. The uprising had 1,500 euros, an offer that was quickly crate of water and some biscuits in
been put down by the time I arrived, reduced to 500 and a bottle of whiskey case our engine cut out and left us
but mysterious explosions were still after he saw my expression of disbelief. adrift. Then I retired to my hotel,
A bullfight known as the tam-tam de boeuf, part of wedding celebrations at the sultan’s palace in Domoni LETTER FROM THE COMORO ISLANDS 45
opened a can of warm, unpleasant the island, confiscating their motors took exactly twenty minutes at less
beer, and waited. and taking them in for questioning. than half the price. I looked out the
I woke to the sound of my alarm Fishermen who witnessed the arrests window of the twin-propeller Embraer
at two-thirty in the morning. I told me that the police had claimed feeling the full weight of the privilege
packed my life jacket, water, and sup- the boat captains were transport- bestowed upon me by my British pass-
plies, wrapped my bag in several wa- ing mercenaries and weapons in an port. I searched for kwassa-kwassa
tertight trash bags, and set off to effort to overthrow the government amid the featureless ocean, but saw
Mirontsi. Anzize phoned and con- on Grande Comore. For many nothing. At the immigration counter
firmed that he was on his way, but he Anjouanais, the crackdown had not in Mayotte, a border official glanced
sounded worried—it was too quiet, only become another obstacle to at my documents and welcomed me
he thought. When I reached the leaving—it had become a further to France.
wharf, it was deserted. reason for doing so.
O
I called Anzize back several times, I decided to wait for another op- n Mayotte, the women ped-
but his phone seemed to be off. After portunity to cross, but the arrests dling grilled meat at the side
forty minutes, I gave up and trudged continued, and the smugglers stayed of the road sold plump, aro-
the mile and a half back to Mut- in hiding. Stories emerged of brutal matic chicken breasts and legs, instead
samudu. Back in my hotel, I tried beatings inside police stations. Driv- of the scrawny imported wings on offer
him again, with the same result. The ers and fixers grew too afraid to work on Anjouan. Instead of kwassa-kwassa
sun came up, and by the time my with me. One fixer told me he sus- moored in the harbor there were sail-
phone rang, it was almost midday. pected the staff and guests at my ho- boats and a handful of police patrol
Anzize told me he had been arrested. tel were spies, and that a friend of vessels, instantly recognizable from
The police had accused him of being his, a teacher whose brother-in-law the graffiti in Anjouan. Trinkets and
behind a spate of explosions that had was a smuggler, had just been re- souvenirs filled the shelves of bou-
gone off over the previous days, and leased by the police with bruises all tiques by the ferry terminal, and be-
only after searching him thoroughly over his body and two broken fin- hind them stood shops, hotels, and
and interrogating him for several gers. I decided I should leave before I office blocks that looked almost space-
hours did they conclude that he was got anyone hurt. age after the dilapidated, weatherworn
not an insurgent. In the end, a journey that would townscapes of the Comoros.
That night, I soon learned, the have taken many dangerous, uncom- The area around the ferry terminal
police had raided smugglers all over fortable hours and cost 400 euros formed the heart of the island’s capi-
46 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 A hillside in the bangas, or slums, of Mayotte

tal, Mamoudzou. It was also the scene behind the coastal towns, where the ing on the deposits around her eyes.
of a daily struggle between the French paths were too steep or too narrow to She looked sick. Najma was a French
security forces and vendors from Ma allow police vehicles to enter. Patrols citizen, but this had done little to im
yotte’s rapidly growing foreign popula still ventured in on foot, but a system prove her circumstances. Saltoun sold
tion, which now constitutes 48 per of lookouts ensured that there was cassava roots and bananas that she
cent of the island’s inhabitants. The usually plenty of time to escape. and her family farmed to try to make
past few years have seen a growing in In a tin leanto above a town a living, but they were still often left
flux of migrants from as far afield as called Kaweni, home to what the aid with no food at all, and water had to
Central Africa and the Middle East, but group Médecins du Monde has called be lugged up the hill in jerricans from
the vast majority, some 95 percent, are the largest slum in France, I met a a roadside tap. When Najma or the
Comorians. Of these, around half family who had been in Mayotte for other children fell ill, Saltoun told
are on Mayotte illegally, sans papiers. three generations. Saltoun Ali me, she could not take them to the
Each morning migrants assembled Abdullah, the matriarch, had been hospital without running the risk of
outside the terminal to sell printed living here prior to the Balladur visa deportation, so the family made do
fabric, bags of onions, and knockoff restrictions. Her husband had been with overthecounter medicine from
shoes to the traffic coming and going deported twenty times, and each a local pharmacy.
from the ferry. Their merchandise time he had returned. Some of her Our conversation was punctuated
was laid out on sarongs, so that it thirteen children and dozens of by periodic shouts of “PAF!” from
might be quickly bundled away. Every grandchildren, almost all of whom over a corrugated metal fence, send
hour or so, police patrols swept were born on Mayotte, had managed ing a ref lexive wave of tension
through the square, the migrants to acquire French citizenship, but through the family. PAF is the French
parting before them like baitfish pur others had not. Many of them were acronym for the hated border police
sued by a predator. Those who weren’t also not enrolled in school, despite a who patrol these areas—the Police
quick enough were herded into police French law that makes schooling aux Frontières. They’re not legally al
vans, sirens blaring, and carted away obligatory for anyone on French soil lowed to enter private property with
to be processed. If they lacked resi between the ages of six and sixteen, out a warrant, but several of Saltoun’s
dency papers, they were sent to a irrespective of their legal status. She family members told me that they
detention center to await deporta said the school staff needed an ad regularly did so anyway. Saltoun said
tion. It felt like a war zone, albeit one dress for each student, but they had it made the children cry.
conveniently ignored by the island’s no address in the banga. Above us loomed a series of gleam
legal residents, who went about their Outside the shack, children played ing white apartment blocks with views
daily business as if nothing at all un with toy cars made from sardine tins over both the bangas and the broad
usual were happening. and bottle caps, and beside us one of sweep of the ocean. “If we had papers,
The only places offering a modi Saltoun’s grandchildren, twoyearold maybe we could live like that,” said
cum of security for undocumented Najma, slept on an old couch cushion Saltoun. “It’s painful. We’re always
migrants were the slums, known as in the dirt. Flies covered her face, jealous.” She looked down at Najma,
bangas, that spilled up the hillsides crawling inside her nostrils and feed sleeping on her cushion. “What kind
of government allows this? Can
you imagine a French child suffer
ing like this?”
I asked whether she ever
thought about moving back to
Anjouan, but she said that pros
pects would be equally hopeless
in the Comoros. Anyway, after
decades on Mayotte, the island
had become home—for many of
her children, the only one they’d
ever known. But though she had
been filing residency applications
for more than two decades,
Saltoun had yet to receive a sin
gle reply. It wasn’t helping mat
ters that she was illiterate and
spoke no French, leaving her un
able to fill out the required pa
perwork without assistance from
family or friends.
Since 2014, France has en
acted a series of laws that have
Gendarme Nationale officers on patrol in the village of Majicavo Koropa, Mayotte LETTER FROM THE COMORO ISLANDS 47
left migrants in Mayotte with fewer In the eyes of many Mahorans, alongside two posters of Marine Le
protections than their counterparts however, the government should Pen, the firebrand of the French far
in the rest of the nation. Changes have been doing even more. Hedja right. Le Pen has made a name for
to the process through which chil- Ben, a twenty-eight-year-old delivery herself as a vocal critic of immigra-
dren born in French territory can driver, told me that Mayotte was tion and is widely reviled by ethnic
gain citizenship have tightened the “suffocating” and described feeling and religious minority groups in
requirements for Comorians born “submerged by a wave of foreigners.” France. In Mayotte, however, despite
on the island. Similarly, while mi- Like almost all the legal residents I its overwhelmingly black and Muslim
grants to mainland France in pos- spoke to, he drew a familiar connec- population, her anti-immigration
session of a carte de séjour, a resi- tion between the increase in undoc- rhetoric has struck a chord. The owner
dency permit, are typically free to umented migrants on the island and of the house, a pudgy, middle-aged
travel throughout the countr y, what he saw as a rising crime rate. man who smelled strongly of alcohol,
those permits issued in Mayotte do (Crime rates had actually fallen for said he was about to drive to the store
not generally grant the same privi- two consecutive years.) “All the ille- for more beer and invited me to join
leges. Foreigners in Mayotte are also gal people here get deported, but the him. I climbed in. “The other parties
denied the right to request a delay of kids stay and they’re left in a situa- are incompetent,” he slurred as we ne-
twenty-four hours before being deport- tion where they have nobody to look gotiated the narrow streets. Like ev-
ed, a privilege granted to migrants on after them. That’s why there’s so erything in Mayotte, though, his posi-
the mainland. Consequently, the ma- much crime,” he said. I asked how tion was complicated. He bemoaned
jority of those sent back to Anjouan things had changed since he was a the migrants arriving daily on the is-
do not manage to see a lawyer, let child. “We live in fear of criminals,” land, but he admitted that his own
alone a judge. Rights groups say that he replied. “Before, there was com- wife was born on Anjouan.
what protections do exist for the mi- munity. Now there’s individualism.
T
grants are often disregarded given Everyone has closed up. . . . They’re he préfet of Mayotte, Domi-
the pace and scale of the island’s de- not bad people, and I understand nique Sorain, arrived here in
portation machine, with tragic why they’re coming here, but I just 2018 to find the island para-
results—children separated from want to live like we used to.” lyzed by protests. Amid a general
their parents, and people being de- Walking through Mamoudzou one strike, citizens had set up roadblocks
ported to a country in which they’ve day, I saw an orange two-story house and were marching in the streets to
never before set foot. flying the tricolor flag of France demand action against illegal immi-
48 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 Officers apprehending an undocumented migrant on Mayotte

gration. Some were taking things fur- Mayotte on a three-month rotation back seat of the second vehicle. His
ther, forming vigilante groups that after a stint battling the Gilets possessions were confiscated, re-
were rounding up suspected migrants Jaunes back home. Cordary had a corded, and bagged up: two ciga-
and handing them over to the police. boyish face, and he greeted me with rettes, some gum, a small fruit I
But at his office overlooking the ferry a firm handshake, agreeing to let me didn’t recognize, and a handful of
terminal, Sorain told me that things ride along on the unit’s daily roundup euros. They would be returned be-
could have been even worse. of suspected undocumented mi- fore he was deported, the gen-
“There were Mahorans who wanted grants. The day after my conversa- darmes assured him. Within a few
to kick the Comorians out of their tion with the préfet, I climbed into the hours they had detained six men,
homes,” Sorain acknowledged, “or to back seat of his unmarked car, flanked all of whom were deposited in the
stop Comorian children from going by two young gendarmes. Behind us, back of a truck while officers filled
to school. This we cannot accept. a second car followed, filled with out the requisite forms. It was the
But it’s also the reason why we can’t more officers. They wore black shirts, same routine they had practiced ev-
let the situation deteriorate, and we wraparound sunglasses, black jack- ery day since their arrival.
have to stop this illegal immigration. boots, and tactical vests outfitted At one point, a panicked woman
If not, the risk is there that we’ll have with an assortment of sidearms, tas- approached, clutching a sheaf of pa-
confrontations between the commu- ers, batons, and handcuffs. All but pers. The gendarmes had just arrested
nities. And above all, there’s the one of them was white, and none her husband in a village a few miles
problem that we won’t be able to de- spoke any Shikomori. To solve this away, she explained. Now he was sit-
velop the island.” problem, a local Mahoran police- ting in the truck with the others. She
A seasoned diplomat, Sorain was man rounded out the team. He insisted that he was French and
several inches taller than anyone on claimed to be able to tell whether a showed the gendarmes the docu-
his staff, with graying hair and a deep, particular person was from Mayotte ments, but the man had spelled his
sonorous voice. The cast of his lips or Anjouan simply on the basis of name slightly differently when asked
gave him the disconcerting appear- their appearance. by the officers, so they took him any-
ance of being constantly amused, As we drove through Chirongui, a way. Cordary told me that further
even when he was deadly serious. To sleepy town on the south end of the checks would be conducted before he
him, the problem was one of numbers. island, the Mahoran officer sized up was deported. Mistakes, he said, were
The population of the island had one passerby, shouting, “Orange never made.
exploded from around 50,000, in 1975, shirt! Orange shirt!” He slammed on The capitaine maintained that the
to 270,000 today, nearly half of them the breaks and the gendarmes leaped locals were grateful for the team’s work,
foreigners. Moreover, he claimed, out, blocking the man’s path. They and no doubt many of them were. But
Ma hora n women had the looks of simmering ha-
around three children per tred from the migrants
family, while Comorians whose lives we had abrupt-
had six or seven (Comori- ly and dramatically inter-
an women actually have an rupted were hard to stom-
average of 4.3). Public ser- ach. Watching through the
vices just couldn’t keep up. windshield as the officers
“We need to ensure that spotted each new target,
the island is no longer at- unaware and vulnerable, I
tractive to the Comori- hoped he or she would spot
ans,” he told me, “for the us first and make a run for
Comorians to understand it. Some did. They knew
it’s better to stay at home that the gendarmes were
than to come here.” forbidden to enter private
In the first seven months homes without a warrant,
of 2019 the Mahoran au- so the nearest open door-
thorities had de ported way or garden gate prom-
more than 15,000 people, ised a measure of safety,
the overwhelming majority of them politely, but intimidatingly, scruti- often resulting in frantic chases
Comorians. By the end of the year nized the man’s documents, and after through the narrow lanes. “It’s incred-
the government was hoping to have a few minutes were persuaded that ible how fast they can run in sandals,”
expelled some 30,000, a colossal fig- he was, in fact, a French citizen. joked one of the gendarmes.
ure representing more than one tenth They hastily returned his papers and “My feeling is that we’ll be doing
of Mayotte’s population. the patrol moved on. The next tar- this job for a very long time,” Cor-
Behind these statistics are men get, a man in an Olympique Lyon- dary said as we drove back to Ma-
like Capitaine Vincent Cordary, the nais soccer jersey tinkering with a moudzou that evening, over the
head of a seventy-two-person unit of car engine, was not so lucky. He was sound of dance music on the car ste-
the Gendarmerie Nationale sent to summarily cuffed and led into the reo. He told me that in the span of
The graves of migrants drowned at sea, Mamoudzou, Mayotte LETTER FROM THE COMORO ISLANDS 49
three months they had already de-
ported several of the same people
twice. One man’s record showed that
he had been deported twenty-eight
times. “This is a rich country in an
ocean of poverty,” he said. “I don’t
know if we’ll ever be able to stop peo-
ple from coming.”
W
hile searching for a smuggler
back in Anjouan, I had
reached out to Onzardine,
my guide from the previous year. It
turned out that three months earlier he
had finally made it to Mayotte, and we
decided to meet. Leaving his neighbor-
hood was far too dangerous, however—
Onzardine lacked paperwork and could
be sent back to Domoni within twenty-
four hours if caught—so I set out to the
slums above a town called Majicavo him 50 euros to unload a shipping mark. Some of the migrants we met
Koropa to find him. A taxi dropped me container full of bedroom furniture. were recent arrivals, others had
by the side of the coastal road, and I Another had paid him 150 for three been there for over a decade, but all
headed up a set of concrete steps be- weeks of construction work. of them described the constant
yond which the bangas rolled into the Without the security of a contract, strain of knowing that their life could
island’s interior. undocumented migrants on Mayotte be upended at any moment. One
Onzardine was living in an un- have little bargaining power, and On- woman, terrified of being deported,
painted concrete house that looked a zardine gave me an account of what could count on her fingers the num-
lot like the one he had left behind in usually happened when Mahoran em- ber of times she had left the safety of
Domoni. Its owners were currently ployers refused to pay: “You collect a her house that year. When neighbors
away in mainland France, and they group, and then you go to wait some- called out from across the fence, her
had allowed Onzardine to live there where he will pass, and you beat him.” husband explained that they assumed
for the time being, along with So far, violence hadn’t been necessary I had come to evict them.
twenty-two other members of his in his case (Onzardine said he pre- Unlike many of his friends, On-
extended family. We found a café on ferred to leave justice to God any- zardine had no intention to stay
a rutted backstreet and ordered way), and the little money he was on Mayotte permanently. He found
Cokes while Onzardine filled me in earning was more than he could have the restrictions on his freedom irk-
on the past few months. His deci- hoped for in Anjouan. He had even some, and wondered aloud whether
sion to make the crossing had been managed to send 50 euros back to his it would be better to be back home
hastened when his cousin fell sick, mother. Within the month, he earning nothing than stuck in this
he explained. With no way to diag- planned to start a small underground house. He also worried about what
nose or treat him in Anjouan, the English-language school for anyone would become of him when the own-
family had decided to send him to who wanted classes. (The plan had er returned. I asked him where he
Ma yotte, and Onzardine had ac- been briefly delayed after his partner would like to be in ten years’ time.
companied him. They had rented a in the venture was deported, but he He wanted to open a small shop, he
kwassa-kwassa to make the crossing, managed to make it back to Mayotte replied, in the medina near his moth-
filling it with migrants to recoup after only a week.) er’s house back in Anjouan. He
cost. The sea was calm, the trip A few days later, Onzardine offered would sell rice, palm oil, and soft
largely uneventful. Avoiding both to show me the neighborhood, and drinks. With that, and with his fian-
the marine patrols and the perilous we spent the afternoon wandering cée, Halima, he would be happy. But
coral reef that rings the island, it along the dirt tracks of the slums, achieving that dream still required
took only three hours to reach meeting with friends of his from An- money, and he wouldn’t leave Ma-
French waters, and eleven more to jouan who had also made the journey. yotte until he had enough.
safely reach the coast. Their shacks sat clustered together on It was dark by the time I left the
Onzardine’s movements were now the near-vertical hillsides in jumbled slums, and Onzardine used his cell
restricted almost entirely to the slums mosaics of tarpaulin and corrugated phone to illuminate the rocky path
around the house. Though he could sheet metal. Someone had scrawled back toward the main road. At a
not legally hold a job, he had been able the French national motto, liberté, certain point, we reached the un-
to find temporary work through his égalité, fraternité, in bold letters marked border beyond which On-
aunt and cousins. One man had paid across a wall, followed by a question zardine would forfeit the protections
50 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 Deportees and other passengers approaching Anjouan on the ferry from Mayotte
of the slums, and he turned back to- and children with residency papers, men and women around me. “You
ward his home. since 2011, and he was the sole bread- can’t talk to them.” Youssouf pro-
winner of the family. Before he was tested, but the man insisted, and I
M
y departing f light was caught, he had been working for a reluctantly went back to the top deck.
scheduled to leave from charity dedicated to educating vulner- We motored along, parallel to the
Grande Comore, and I de- able children, most of them the chil- shoreline, the wake of the boat trail-
cided to travel back to the Comoros dren of deported migrants, who had ing behind us like a highway through
by boat. A fleet of ferries shuttled ended up out of school and living on the desert. Towns on the coast slid
paying passengers—mostly Mahorans, the streets. Now he too was being slowly past, each one ringed by ban-
along with the lucky few Comorians separated from his family members, gas stretching up into the hills. We
who had managed to obtain visas— and was terrified about what would passed Kaweni, where Saltoun would
back and forth between the islands. happen to them. Anger and despair be holed up with her family; and Ma-
Their other main cargo was deportees. were etched onto Youssouf’s face in jicavo Koropa, where I imagined On-
Walking past the Comorian street equal measure. He said he felt like he zardine sweating away at a construc-
vendors on my way to the ferry ter- might explode. tion site or waiting impatiently for
minal, I spotted a human-rights “Imagine being in a country where work on the porch of his new home;
worker I had met earlier in the week. kids are left alone on the streets and then Koungou, Longoni, and Ban-
Solène Dia had been on the island treated like dogs,” he said. “Imagine draboua, before we rounded the
for a year and a half, working for an having a family here legally, a wife northern tip of the island and set a
organization that helped inform mi- who’s legal, kids who are legal, and course for Anjouan.
grants of their legal rights, a job they put me on a boat.” He was apo- Once we were beyond the reef,
that had earned her hate mail and plectic about having been seized from there was a heavy swell and the ship
death threats. A man had been ille- the private premises of the charity rocked violently from side to side.
gally arrested on private property, where he worked, and he wanted to Down in the hold I could see de-
she explained, and she was trying to know whether I could help overturn portees throwing up into yellow plastic
halt his deportation. If she didn’t his deportation. Regardless, he told bags distributed by the crew. Yous-
succeed, he and I would likely be on me, he would be returning to Mayotte souf was slumped forward, his head
the same boat. as soon as he could. in his hands. I scoured the horizon for
An hour later, I boarded a ferry Shortly after we began talking, a kwassa-kwassa but saw only the tireless
called La Citadelle and watched over crew member spotted me in the sec- churning of the sea. In time, Mayotte
the railings of the top deck as a file of tion reserved for deportees. “Are you faded away into the distance, Anjouan
some sixty deportees was ushered a journalist?” the man asked. I said I emerged from the haze, and a deck-
aboard. They took their seats in the was. “These passengers are not like hand unfurled a Comorian flag, which
lower deck on blue, synthetic leather the others,” he said, gesturing at the fluttered, limply, in the breeze. n
chairs. Distorted mu-
sic videos played on a
television at the front
of the room, but no-
body was watching.
Some of the deport-
ees carried backpacks,
and others seemed to
have nothing at all.
I called Dia to see
whether she had
managed to forestall
the man’s deporta-
tion. She hadn’t. But
she gave me his num-
ber, and I went down
to the bottom deck to
meet him.
This man, whom
I’ll call Youssouf, was
slender and neatly
dressed in white trou-
sers and a maroon
button-up shirt. He
had been in Mayotte,
where he had a wife
A mural in Ouani, Anjouan LETTER FROM THE COMORO ISLANDS 51

L E T T E R F R O M S O H O
THE FORTY-YEAR
REHEARSAL
The Wooster Group’s endless work in progress
By David Gordon
O
n the evening of May 8, just madly scribbling notes. The woman point, Erin Mullin, the stage manag-
after eight o’clock, Kate Valk was Elizabeth LeCompte—known to er as well as a performer, shouted:
stepped onstage and faced all as Liz—the director of the Wooster “We have one hour left, and we’re on
the audience. The little playhouse was Group, watching the first open perfor- page eight of fifty!” Not to mention
packed with hardcore fans, theater mance of the company’s new piece, that the piece still had no ending.
people and artists, but Kate was per- Since I Can Remember.
I
forming, most of all, for one person, It had been a tense day, full of come from a family of Broadway
hidden among them, a small, fine- op eni ng-nig ht d r a m a. Ga ret h fans, so I’ve always hated theater. I
boned, black-clad woman, her blond- Hobbs, who would be playing a lead- spent many childhood evenings
gray hair up in a clip, who smiled, ing role, had been sick in bed for squirming in my seat—bored, restless,
laughed, and nodded along with every days with a 103-degree fever, and and oddly ashamed—as folks in cos-
word, swaying to the music and mir- he’d only arrived at the theater, still tumes sang or cried onstage and I pre-
roring the emotions of the performers shaky, at three-thirty that after- tended they didn’t know I was there. I
while whispering into the ear of the noon. During the final closed re- was better suited to hiding in dark
tall, bearded fellow who sat beside her hearsal, performer Suzzy Roche fell movie theaters or lurking in smoky
on her elbow, then felt faint and had clubs. But in the mid-Eighties, a girl-
David Gordon’s most recent novel is The to lie prone while her colleagues friend took me to see the Wooster
Hard Stuff. He lives in New York City. fanned her and fetched ice. At one Group, and I was instantly obsessed.
A rehearsal photograph from Brace Up!, 1991 © Paula Court. Courtesy the Wooster Group LETTER FROM SOHO 53
Here was the theater I’d been waiting is in costume, wearing a cartoonishly
for. The actors spoke directly into mi- wide striped tie with a shirt and jacket,
crophones, facing front, like singers. sitting on a pink chair that I recognize
The technicians running the show were from other pieces (including, of course,
visible, with their equipment, though A Pink Chair), occasionally checking
they were often in costume themselves, his phone. Suzzy Roche sits perfectly
and even spoke lines. Video, music, still, legs straddling one of the tables,
lighting, dance, speech, and action went back arched, looking chic in a slinky
off with amazing precision, while still costume and forbiddingly high heels.
feeling as though it was all being freshly She remains there, almost motionless,
improvised. Seeing them was like seeing for hours, a soldier on guard. (Wooster
a favorite band, and over the years I Group performers often seem like ath-
went to every performance I could. I letes, running in place, playing bad-
became convinced that Liz LeCompte minton, fighting, memorizing speech-
was one of our greatest living artists. es in languages they don’t speak, and
At some point, I conceived the idea attempting heroic feats of discipline
of attempting, somehow, to learn how and endurance.) Kate Valk stands at
the group operated. I wanted, if possible, the table, before the audience, though
to grasp the inner workings of genius by Pamela Reichen, the general man- now it is Liz who is seated front and
trying to understand a great artist who ager, wrote: Liz had invited me to center, with her assistant director
also happened to be living her everyday rehearsal. On December 14, 2018, I Matthew Dipple beside her. To the
life—seeing the dentist, shopping for knocked on the door of the Perform- side is Erin Mullin; as well as the
groceries—a short subway ride away ing Garage, the converted space in costumer, Enver Chakartash; and an-
from my own. Aside from a few post- SoHo where the Wooster Group has other assistant director, Michaela
performance thank-yous, I had never been rehearsing; storing props, cos- Murphy. All three transcribe what is
met Liz, until she visited a colleague’s tumes, and sets; and performing since said and improvised, then update the
class at the college where I teach. At the the mid-Seventies. script via Google Docs, so that the text
start of the question period following as it appears on the actors’ iPads is
W
her talk, the students hesitated, and my hen I first walk in, nothing itself an organic, fluid form. The
hand shot up. At the dinner that fol- much seems to be happen- sound guys, Eric Sluyter and Omar
lowed, I told her I wanted to watch her ing. No one even acknowl- Zubair; lighting designer David Sex-
make a new piece. She agreed, and she edges me. I simply take a seat in the ton; and video designer Wladimiro
gave me her email address. back of the black-painted theater. The Woyno are also present.
A year went by. I emailed periodi- stage area is filled by two long tables on An old black-and-white video
cally, never receiving a reply, though wheels, arranged diagonally, with a plays on the monitor. Ari copies—
when I encountered her off-line, she counter directly in front of the seats. A “channels” or “transmits” are the
greeted me warmly, apologized, and large flatscreen monitor sits atop a mo- group’s preferred terms of art—the on-
asked me to write again. At long last, bile totem, high in the air. Ari Fliakos screen action. He carries around a re-
cord player and tries, in a sort of
dance, to untangle the cord, coiling it
around his body, whipping it free.
Meanwhile, Kate delivers a mono-
logue based upon the audio playing in
her ear. Liz leaps down from the risers
and runs out to drag the giant totem
and move the tables. Various crew
members twice her size and decades
younger rush to help, but she waves
them off. They try it again. Again.
After a couple of hours of this, they
decide not to double the film here af-
ter all. Ari protests wistfully, “But
that means that what we’ve been do-
ing all week. . . ,” then drops it.
There is something strange and
mysterious about the work of the
Wooster Group, their performances
so thrilling and yet inscrutable. Since
they are often speaking lines they are
hearing via earpiece, then stepping
Top: Photograph for Rumstick Road, performed in 1977 © Clem Fiori. Courtesy the Wooster Group. Bottom: Kate
54 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 Valk and Helen Pickett in North Atlantic, 2000. Photograph © Paula Court. Courtesy the Wooster Group
out of character to discuss the lines, sense and a rigorously intellectual performance in Eugene O’Neill’s The
then incorporating the recordings critical practice with an intense, often Emperor Jones, her skin darkened
and transcriptions of those same con- subversive energy. They became noto- and her voice a deep rumbling Louie
versations, one quickly loses the sense rious for things like reenacting videos Armstrong bass. It was widely hailed
of what is real and what is art, of of themselves tripping on acid, while as a masterpiece.
what qualifies as performance. (Kate also working with dedication to refine
A
recounted to me how, one night dur- their craft and achieve their unique t the next rehearsal, Liz talks
ing Nayatt School, a piece from 1978, theatrical effects, built on virtuoso about her preparations for the
the actor Ron Vawter fell off the stage performance and flawless timing. De- company Christmas party she
and broke his arm. When Liz called constructing texts, combining multi- is hosting. She had spent the morning
for a doctor, the audience thought it ple sources of material, splintering at home hiding embarrassing personal
was part of the show.) You leave the representation, pioneering the use of items in case her guests, who are all
present and listening as she tells me
this, “start looking for things to steal.”
For example, there is her set of
“smarmy asshole” photos. Apparently,
she once called her crew a bunch of
smarmy assholes, and they responded
by taking Polaroids of their butts and
presenting them to her on a ring. Ari
admits one was his and Liz waves it off.
“I recognized yours!”
Later, practicing a scene from the
new piece, Liz wants actor Scott
Shepherd to “channel” Spalding’s
voice and movement from a video-
tape while Erin bases her speech on
the original recording of the play
they’re using, T. S. Eliot’s The Cock-
tail Party, while also copying move-
ment from a recording of Ari’s young
daughter giggling, fidgeting, and bit-
ing her lip. As Scott notes: “It’s going
to be a mess, but that’s where the ge-
nius comes from.”
theater blinking at the late-afternoon cutting-edge video and sound technol- During this rehearsal I solve one
noise and light with that feeling of ogy, all kept the group constantly at of my longstanding Wooster Group
climbing out from a dream. the forefront of theater. mysteries: the lip-synching. Many
At the end of my visit, Pamela Over the past forty years, Liz has productions achieve astonishing,
pulls me aside to tell me that I am moved from obscurity to fame, win-
welcome back anytime. (As I found ning heaps of awards, including a
out later, it was the sound of my of- MacArthur “Genius Grant,” a Gish
ten embarrassingly loud laughter Prize, and a Guggenheim. Today, she
that won Liz over.) I say I’ll be back is probably the leading experimental
the next day. theater director in the United States
and a tremendous inf luence on
T
he Wooster Group was found- younger artists worldwide. She has
ed in 1975 by Liz and her then also endured, and generated, con-
partner, Spalding Gray, who stant scandal and upheaval: Arthur
were soon joined by Ron Vawter, Kate Miller pulled the rights to the group’s
Valk, Willem Dafoe, Peyton Smith, version of The Crucible after seeing
and Jim Clayburgh. (Liz and Dafoe it; more recently, the estates of Har-
later had a long-term relationship and old Pinter and Tennessee Williams
share a son.) Radically experimental, withdrew permission for shows they
the group used text, performance, disapproved of. In 1982, New York
dance, film, music, and other elements State ceased funding after the group
to create original “autobiographical” re- created old Pigmeat Markham
work and to reinterpret classic theater records, performing the black com-
(Hamlet, Three Sisters), combining a ic’s acts in blackface (as he did).
highly sophisticated, rarefied aesthetic Years later, Kate gave an astounding
Top: (left to right) Willem Dafoe, Spalding Gray, Matthew Hansell, and Ron Vawter in Point Judith (an epilog),
1979. Photograph © Nancy Campbell. Courtesy the Wooster Group. Bottom: Artwork for Brace Up!,
performed in 1991. Photograph © Mary Gearhart. Design by Yvan Greenberg. Courtesy the Wooster Group LETTER FROM SOHO 55
This kind of performance re- She laughs at the same joke over and
quires an insane amount of rehears- over and snaps at the slightest flaw.
al, relentless in both its duration At one point, a character played by
and its microscopic focus. When de- Erin drinks a glass of water, and Liz
veloping a show, the group works fidgets, tormented by having to wait
five days a week, all together in the for Erin to accomplish this task. She
Garage. Today, group performers considers cutting it. She considers
wear in-ear receivers, which play speeding it up. Then she realizes that
back their source recordings, and the sound of Erin drinking has been
tiny mics that amplify and record inadvertently picked up by her mic
their voices, while also watching and is playing at volume throughout
strategically placed miniature video the theater. She is entranced. This is
screens that sometimes are and the lucky accident she spends so
sometimes are not showing the much time waiting and preparing
same footage the audience is seeing. for. Despite the fixation on exacti-
Snatches of movement and speech, tude and the constant corrections,
even individual words or sounds—a she is paradoxically delighted by er-
cough, a chuckle—are drilled again rors, and nothing seems to make
and again, to the point of madness, her happier than when the cast
even disturbing feats of mimesis: and a single scene might combine messes up; laughing and slapping
talking or singing along with records movement from one source, speech her thighs, she declares, “That was
and tapes, reproducing movement from another, and music from some- a good mistake!”
and mimicking speech—Richard thing else entirely. Of course, mem- Over six months, I attend about
Burton’s Hamlet, a blustering Nor- bers practice and review on their forty rehearsals. After a while, I
man Mailer debating Germaine own, but there is no real way to come to feel as though I am living
Greer, an avant-garde theater troupe learn a Wooster Group “part” other inside one of their shows.
writhing and moaning in Polish—or than by doing it, over and over, re-
T
even mirroring one another. In one fining along the way. That’s why Su- his then is the method, such
of the first shows I saw, Ron Vawter zzy Roche, who has been working as it is: no plan, no theory. Liz
did all the voices in a video that he with Liz for years—her performance never goes in search of a new
was pretending to edit, a fake late- as the devil in House/Lights was project; they are brought to her by her
night porn talk show featuring a indelible— sat silently through actors or else by chance. She slowly
nude cast of Woosters, imitating hours of rehearsal when her own develops a piece in rehearsal, building
their accents live, switching from part was not even being performed. everything—sound, light, video,
male to female, even moving the mic “You can’t really just memorize it,” props, costumes—at the same time,
to approximate distance. When the she told me. “You’re steeped in it. with long detours to discuss a con-
tape “fast-forwarded,” he spoke faster You have to be here, even when stantly accumulating body of source
as well, and when it paused and re- you’re not doing anything. You have material (a late-night movie, a used
started, he’d be back in perfect to surrender to the greater thing, book, a half-remembered song) as she
synch. Impossible. which can be difficult.” intuitively finds elements that might
As it turns out, both this obsession “Difficult” is putting it mildly. illuminate or obscure, elucidate or
with lip-synching—again, Liz prefers There are times when it is excruciat- complicate. This is completely unlike
such terms as “channeling” or ing just to watch. A tape or recorded a conventional show, in which the ac-
“transmission”—and the repurposing bit of sound is played, the actor starts tors might rehearse for a few weeks
of found source materials originated to recite the words or mime the ac- while set designers do their thing at a
with Liz and Spalding’s attempt to tion, and almost immediately Liz in- studio and music is added later. This
make use of the material surrounding terrupts, corrects, and the whole is everyone together, every day, for
the suicide of Spalding’s mother: thing is rewound and reset. Other months, maybe years. In this case,
Spalding had taped interviews about times she is whispering notes, or sig- they spend a lot of time discussing
her with his father, his grandmother, naling David to adjust the lights, or books about Eliot and watching vid-
and even the psychiatrist who treated asking Eric to add music or noises, eos related to suicide and the New
her. It is these tapes that he and Ron humming what she wants while he York underground, like the Alexan-
reenact in the early piece Rumstick improvises on a keyboard or searches der McQueen documentary or the
Road, eventually arriving at a degree online. Still lithe and graceful at infamous Lower East Side episode of
of verisimilitude so perfect that even seventy-five, she bounds up and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown.
the breathing and throat clearings down the risers, jumps and runs A whole video was actually made in
seem to be issuing from their bodies. and demonstrates the dances, and that documentary style, focused on
They are not so much actors portray- fixes her performers with a fierce, in- SoHo, then discarded. The group
ing characters in a conventional sense tense energy that seems both utterly spent a week “transmitting” the
as mediums conducting a séance. focused and instantly distractable. video of a French performance of The
56 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 Artwork for Hamlet, performed in 2012. Photograph © Richard Prince. Courtesy the Wooster Group
Cocktail Party, a “bad TV version” filmmaker Ken Kobland decided to ous sanatorium, ends up crucified in
with a visible boom mic and a grip create a DVD of Nayatt School, one of Africa, after refusing to abandon
hiding behind a couch, but it is un- TWG’s first productions, composed plague victims whom she is nursing
clear whether it will ever be used. Fic- by Liz and Spalding Gray, part of a when a violent insurrection begins.
tion writing and painting have both trilogy drawn from Spalding’s autobi- Eliot’s witty comedy ends as a pro-
been described as the sum of thou- ography: his family life, his acting life, foundly serious mystery play, and it was
sands of choices, as big as cutting a and his mother’s suicide. It included this aspect that so fascinated Spalding.
novel’s ending or as small as a brush- the first of the monologues for which In Nayatt School, the Wooster
stroke, and this describes what Liz is he became famous, in which he dis- Group mounted two scenes from that
doing as well: feeling her way forward, cussed his early love of radio theater play, one performed with local chil-
sculpting in time and scoring in and played records, particularly one dren. But when they dived into the
space, through an endless number of of The Cocktail Party. archives for old footage, all they found
micro-adjustments and sudden, wild Eliot’s play concerns the fate of Ce- was a low-resolution black-and-white
insights. The whole evolves toward a lia Coplestone, a young woman in love reel-to-reel video from the Nether-
form that could not have been with Edward Chamberlayne, who is lands, in which much of the sound
planned, only discovered, but one unhappily married to Lavinia. These was indecipherable, as well as some
that feels inevitable because it is to- three mutually and comically misera- 16-millimeter footage shot with the
tally organic, as the elements start to ble characters consult a psychiatrist, kids in New York. Liz decided to have
connect and a “picture” or “image” of Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, who, along the current group reenact the missing
the final piece comes into focus. with Julia Shuttlethwaite and Alex parts and present it as a “teaching
I am not surprised when Liz tells me Gibbs—society types who double as piece”—a performance that would it-
that her father played jazz. One of her mystical, fates-like figures—guides s el f demon st r ate t he g roup’s
methods—as well as a “theatrical his-
tory” that would explore its past.
In the new work, Kate relates all
this while playing the records Spald-
ing played (including the same library
copy of The Cocktail Party), in the
space he first played them, and also
providing the soundtrack for the gor-
geously faded video running on the
screen behind her, speaking Spald-
ing’s lines, narrating her own experi-
ence, or chatting with Ari, who sits
beside her now, impersonating Ron
Vawter in the original show, staring
down the absent audience. Ari joined
the group as an intern in 1998 and
went from answering phones to per-
forming, much like Ron, who was a
Catholic seminarian and National
Guardsman before starting in the
group’s office. Kate herself started out
sewing costumes, though they didn’t
call them interns then. Everyone did
everything: Willem Dafoe was doing
carpentry when she arrived.
Kate plays a little of an old horror
mottoes, repeated constantly, is “close them toward their destinies: Edward record, Drop Dead, the source for sev-
enough for jazz.” Ari laughs at the and Lavinia reconcile, and by accept- eral slapstick doctor skits in the vid-
thought of how often he hears this, ing their own lot in life, as more or less eo: while Kate narrates, Spalding
but notes the paradox it contains: jazz ordinary souls who will never truly plays a mad dentist onscreen, chasing
is a loose form that requires total pre- understand each other, they attain a patient Ron around the room with a
cision; it is improvisation by people measure of peace. But in Celia, Sir drill. Then he is a doctor, and Ron a
who practice obsessively. Henry (played originally, and on rec- nurse who gives dancer Libby Howes
ord, by Alec Guinness) realizes he has an absurdist breast exam while Kate
T
he new piece, the one I’m encountered a rare soul capable of pur- delivers both sides of the jokes in al-
watching them create, is ensuing the lonely, “terrifying” path to ternating male and female voices.
titled Since I Can Remember. spiritual transcendence. She makes her Kate Valk is herself an artist of
It was conceived when Liz and the choice and, after visiting his mysteri- legendary talent (Times critic Ben
Left to right: Ron Vawter, Spalding Gray, and Joan Jonas in Nayatt School, 1978.
Photograph © Bob Van Dantzig. Courtesy the Wooster Group LETTER FROM SOHO 57
Brantley called her “the most accom- Arguing passionately, Ken reminds plains to the assembled group, then
plished actress in New York”), and Liz of all the things he knows about her sighs: “I’m just really afraid that
her decades-long collaboration with that she wouldn’t want him to expose. someone is going to call the lawyer!”
Liz is now more like a partnership, or “Go ahead,” Liz says, “I want you to. I “So,” Ari points out, “you’re not
even a creative marriage, as she has don’t care.” Ken says that he’s worried really apologizing.”
begun directing as well and helps people will focus on this alone, criticize “No,” Liz admits, and everyone
run the company. But today, for her, and the show will be ruined. Again laughs merrily. Work for the day begins.
some reason, she can’t quite connect. she says she doesn’t care: “I’m an artist The problem, Liz decides, was try-
She needs to introduce the piece, and I have to do this. I don’t care what ing to get Kate to reproduce Spalding,
and do so in the manner of Spalding, people think.” When he won’t relent, who was, she says, “uniquely uncom-
chatting confidentially with the au- she tells him, “You can leave!” He fortable, yet open.” So, if she tries to
dience while he’s onscreen, but she is doesn’t, but he goes quiet. The whole push Kate to be more like him, “stop
awkward, stiff. Liz keeps interrupting place is very quiet. I am holding my me and say, Let her be uncomfortable,”
as Kate grows more frustrated she says. “It’s going to take an
and upset. The others keep re- immense amount of will.” Kate
minding Liz to “be kind” and gets frustrated and wants to cry
pointing out possible solutions, again. “No,” Liz says, “go straight
which of course only embarrass- to anger.” I realize how angry Liz
es Kate more. Finally, stretched is, especially about the struggles
to the snapping point, she cries of women like Celia, who is “sent
and asks for a break. Erin calls off to be crucified.”
for five minutes. Liz cries a little, too, and every-
“No!” Liz yells. “You can use one tries to comfort her. “Do you
this! I want her to do it crying.” need someone to yell at?” Kate asks.
On the next run-through, Ari In the end, Kate’s long open-
recites Spalding’s lines, and they ing speech becomes a tour de
return to Kate for the text she force, a true monologue of her
originated herself, about her own own and another testament to
first days with the group. Every- the strange alchemy she shares
one seems back to normal, the with Liz. Ken, who had been so
tears dried, until Kate delivers her angry about including Libby’s
speech about their former com- story in the speech, sees it in its
rade Libby Howes. new form and says: “It was great.
As Kate describes it in the It was exactly what Spalding
piece, Libby was a talented danc- would do, finding those connec-
er and fearless performer who suf- tions through the language. I
fered a breakdown at the Garage, think it’s fantastic.”
bringing in trash from the street,
A
sleeping under the risers, letting t the next rehearsal,
homeless addicts use her own Kate reads from a used
apartment, growing increasingly copy of Spalding’s novel,
incoherent. Finally, Kate took her Impossible Vacation, in which he
to Bellevue, where she was com- discusses, in fictionalized form,
mitted, though later she escaped and breath. A dozen people have been how he and Liz first began making
hitchhiked to Canada. Kate took over silently observing all this. “Does any- theater together. Liz asks Kate what
her role in Nayatt School: “A classic one else feel like this is offensive?” she she was doing when she first read the
theater story,” Kate says. asks the whole theater. No one speaks. book. Turns out she was in Florida,
At this point, Ken Kobland, who “Tell me now so I can furlough you.” waiting for a death certificate so that
shot much of the old and new footage, There is laughter; this is during the her mother could be cremated. Kate
interrupts. He is upset with Liz and government shutdown. All this is being describes how she visited a second-
argues that this is exploitative and not recorded for posterity on video, bits of hand shop with her niece, after tour-
“her experience to use.” Liz is adamant: which are randomly posted on the ing the funeral home where her
It is Kate’s story too. She is merely re- group’s website by a program Wlad other niece worked. (“She’s hardcore.
lating her own personal experience. designed. It is chilling, too, that this She digs out pacemakers.”) Kate
And it is important, because of the story of madness took place right here, found Spalding’s book for just a few
theme of women suffering breakdowns. in the same space where it is now being dollars. All the characters were ver-
Spalding connected deeply with the argued over. sions of people she knew (Liz is Meg,
character of Celia; his own mother, a Before the next rehearsal, Liz an- Ken is Barney, Spalding himself is
Christian Scientist, was also treated by nounces that she wants to apologize. Brewster North, named after his local
psychiatrists before taking her life. “I wasn’t patient or kind,” she ex- train station). “It was like I had a
58 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 Photograph of Elizabeth LeCompte © Saito Ogata/AUGUST

same plane, has become more, she of having her name mentioned or
says, of a “palimpsest.” even being called the director. (In her
“It was so easy in ancient Greece to monologue, Kate says that when she
make a pot, but now to get that pot joined the group, Liz “seemed to be in
out of the ground and put it together charge,” which always gets a big
and clean it takes twenty times as laugh, to Liz’s chagrin.)
long,” she says, reflecting, it seems, both Kate reads on: “Meg said surely a
on her own development—sharing the lot of people will walk out. . . .”
sense many great artists have that “That’s good!”
the work gets more difficult, not eas-
O
ier, the further you go—as well as on mar is playing Peter Quilpe
the decline of culture. As the actors in The Cocktail Party, a part
try to separate and connect two ta- that in Nayatt School was
bles that roll on casters along tracks, played by a child. “Did he wear his
a wheel snaps off and she groans green jacket?” Liz asks before seeing
tragicomically: “This feels like the him. He did. They also give him a fe-
end of an empire!” dora and shoulder pads, sunglasses
The new piece is also a personal and a big fake cigar. “Looking good
excavation of private history lived in so far, kiddo,” Liz says. As he falters
friend there.” She says the book ends this very space (“I feel ghosts here all his way through his lines, making hi-
happily. He’s going to be okay, she the time,” Liz says) and a way to reach larious mistakes (“I don’t understand
thought about Spalding’s character Spalding through his work. “I always nothing!” he moans, hardly how El-
when she finished, though she knew thought,” she says, “that Spalding iot would have put it), Liz mentions
that, in reality, he would eventually identified with his mother so strongly.” in passing: “Omar is a sound guy,”
take his own life. The group shot video from the ferry who has been with the company for a
Spalding went on to attain great of the spot where he likely jumped, number of years, and now is premiering
fame, more or less inventing the where the currents would be right. But onstage. This is his first time acting,
stand-up (or in his case sit-down) that won’t be in this show. ever; his first day of rehearsal for his
performance-art monologue (Swim- “Anything nice about Meg in the first appearance. And she has tossed
ming to Cambodia, Sex and Death to book?” Liz asks. him in with some of the top per-
Age 14), as well as acting in movies Kate: “He says your notes were reformers alive. She laughs gleefully at
(The Killing Fields) and straight the- ally helpful. He also says you had a the result.
ater (Our Town) and writing books. great ass.” Later, Omar tells me he was over-
His last performance with the group Everyone laughs. Kate continues to whelmed, but that working with Liz,
was in 1984, but he continued to be a scan for mentions of Meg in the book. “more than in any other professional
supporter of it and was Liz’s loft “He says, ‘I trusted her instincts.’ . . .” opportunity, you’re allowed to really
neighbor until, after a long battle “No, that’s too nice.” Liz is leery of do everything you can.” On the other
with depression and trauma related using positive remarks about herself, hand, “no one is allowed to have the
to an injury, he leaped from the
Staten Island Ferry in 2004.
Liz talks about the impulse be-
hind their early pieces: “He had
made recordings of his father and
grandmother discussing his mother,
and in the back of his mind he
knew he wanted to do something
with them.” In his novel, Spalding
describes his performance as “a gi-
ant, scandalous, gossipy audition for
the audience.”
As Kate says in her monologue,
their attitude back then was, “Why
not put a transcript of a 9-1-1 call
next to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?” The
two elements were set beside each
other “without too much interpreta-
tion or analysis.” Now Liz feels that
they need to research, debate, build
up layers. Something once like col-
lage, with discrete elements on the
Artwork for To You, The Birdie! (Phèdre), performed in 2002. Photograph © Ken Kobland. Courtesy the
Wooster Group. Kate Valk in Brace Up!, 1991. Photograph © Mary Gearhart. Courtesy the Wooster Group LETTER FROM SOHO 59
limelight. It’s the group.” His only a crazed, scheming director trying to One day, she conceives and then
acting experience was a grade-school manipulate his former lover and star rejects an amazing ending. While the
production of You’re a Good Man, (Carole Lombard) into working for footage of Nayatt School’s version of
Charlie Brown, but one day Liz just him. Liz is a huge fan of slapstick and The Cocktail Party plays in silence, a
asked him, and he said yes, basically screwball, quoting Groucho Marx languid dance version is performed
because of his belief in her and in her (whom she calls Macho Grouch) and live. But Liz ultimately doesn’t want
belief in him: if Liz thinks you can do pratfalling down the stairs, but now to repeat herself. TWG is famous for
it, then you can. she tells me, “I have never related so their dances, which have been widely
Children were first used in Nayatt much to a film character.” On the imitated, and she has decided to move
School, because, Liz says, “Spalding saw one hand, she is casting herself as on. I admire her rigor but feel sad for
kids performing Shakespeare in Wash- the monomaniacal, down-and-out the work to lose that beautiful end-
ington Square Park and got a flash of director. On the other, he is played ing, a Wooster Group dance. Then I
insight.” He cast actors from the local gloriously by John Barrymore, one of realize, I saw it. I recall an early con-
public school. Some of the children the titans of theatrical history. Both versation about how rehearsal can
were natural performers, but the kid sides are true. And this is why I be- sometimes be better than perfor-
who played Peter Quilpe was so awk- lieve her company stick around, la- mance, which I took to be about the
ward, he was unable to find a mark boring on with a fierce loyalty and added frisson of watching something
onstage, so Spalding would pick shot on set or seeing a band re-
him up and place him there. Now hearse. But now, watching Liz
Liz has cast a first-time actor to play painstakingly construct and then
that awkward kid playing Peter THE PROCESS IS AT THE HEART OF erase this ending, I grasp its more
Quilpe. After five days, she has THINGS FOR LIZ AND HER TROUPE. literal sense: amazing things hap-
Omar go off script: “You’ve gotten THE FINAL VERSION IS ALMOST pen that have to be cut or simply
too good.” The combination of am- can never be reproduced (Kate
ateurism and virtuosity is emblem- AN AFTERTHOUGHT speeding up as the tape does; Ari
atic of the group’s aesthetic. clowning with a fake hand in a jar,
Costumes and props are recy- pretending it is his arm; Scott and
cled and patched together, with the total devotion: they know this is where Gareth dancing gracefully together,
feeling of a rainy day spent rummag- great art is being made, that they imitating Spalding and a child). They
ing in the attic, but at times achieve themselves will be better than ever un- appear and disappear in the process
a striking aesthetic complexity, like der her direction, and that they will yet leave their traces, like those paint-
the lawn chair worn by Dafoe in The never be bored. ings under paintings revealed in X-ray,
Emperor Jones, which he would oc- or a photo series of twenty versions of
R
casionally unfold to sit down on. ehearsing a scene from The a Matisse or Giacometti, painted and
Most of Liz’s actors were, essentially, Cocktail Party, Eric accidently scraped down and painted over, that
trained by her. (One day, I watch her plays Julia’s voice on the rec- make you think, I would actually be
and Kate spend an hour working ord fast and high, weirdly distorted, happy to hang any of them on my
through a speech with Erin, word by and Kate goes along with it, impec- wall. It is this process that is at the
word, breath by breath. It’s like a cably speaking each word in a crazed, heart of things. The final version is
master class.) As Kate says, “Liz’s cartoon blur. Liz loves it, but all almost an afterthought.
company is built by attraction, not three agree it could never really hap-
S
solicitation.” The people who belong pen again. It is a one-time perfor- cott is out of town, so first Ga-
here find their way. Some stay for one mance made just for Liz. And for me, reth and then a young actor
piece, some for decades. Almost all of I suppose. named Niall Cunningham stand
them see it as a defining experience In a sense, Liz has created a kind of in for him, playing the part of Spald-
in their artistic evolution. private theater, in which a company ing, playing Sir Henry, originally
Forgetting the names of longtime chosen and trained by her endeavor played by Alec Guinness. This is a
collaborators, whom Liz might call to please her. And since, unlike most practical reality for a troupe like
“the redhead” or “that guy,” barking directors, she attends every perfor- TWG, but despite the huge inconve-
at people for unwrapping candy mance, at home and on tour, continu- nience of working around these ab-
while she is listening, noting happily ing to adjust and rehearse along the sences, their technique actually lends
that Scott’s bald spot matches Spald- way, she is the group’s most important itself to having actors “stand in” for
ing’s, complaining repeatedly that audience member. Both harshest crit- one another. That’s what acting is,
Gareth is “too tall” for her stage de- ic and biggest fan, she will happily after all, standing in the place of a
sign: much of this is the price of do- watch them improvise or dance character, filling a role that another
ing all your thinking out loud, in real around, like kids competing for the actor could or already has filled. As
time, with people watching. Part of it attention of a doting but moody par- Liz points out, even Shakespeare
is simply her nature. One day, we dis- ent. Ari and Scott goof and gag, fool- wrote his roles with particular actors
cussed the Howard Hawks film Twenti- ing with props and silly accents, until in mind; he was running a company,
eth Century, a screwball comedy about Liz pleads, “Stop entertaining me!” like her. At the same time, of course,

“One helluva team of
any number of players can step in and sense of multiple layers of reality writers has produced a
be Hamlet. The difference is that, present all at once, alive in the air. book you’ll be dipping
while most directors labor to make us Ken, Liz, Wlad, and others have
forget the awkward fact that someone completed the video of the martyred
into for years.”
who might have been beside us on Erin. She looks like a lovely Pre- — JIM BOUTON, AUTHOR OF BALL FOUR
the subway that morning is now in Raphaelite image—until they super-
makeup and costume onstage, Liz in- impose a photo of a rotting corpse
sists that we remember it. “Film act- from a body farm on her. The effect
ing is all about trying to convince
yourself it’s real,” Ari told me. “The-
is creepy and beautiful at once. Liz
says Ken is going to crack open an RULES OF THE GAME
ater, or Liz’s theater anyway, is about ant farm and film it to add ants THE BEST SPORTS
remaining committed to the unreali- crawling on Erin/Celia.
ty of the situation.” In this piece, as I Liz thanks Michaela for her work WRITING FROM
said, Ari stands in for Ron, a mesmer- on the script and she replies: “I’m so HARPER’S MAGAZINE
izing performer and one of Liz’s great happy you remember my name!” Un-
PREFACE BY ROY BLOUNT JR.
collaborators until his death, from fortunately, later in the day, she calls
AIDS-related complications, in 1994. her Monique. Liz is notorious for for-
At one point, Ari opens a bottle of getting names. Enver has been Emer-
glycerin drops and dabs some in each ald; Gareth, Garth; the intern
eye. Immediately he begins weeping. I Hunter, Plumber and Hummer. While Rules of the Game: The
actually saw Vawter do this live and it arranging the now seemingly preg- Best Sports Writing from
was a formative aesthetic experience: nant Suzzy (Enver sewed a half bas- Harper’s Magazine uncovers
openly dripping “fake” tears, he com- ketball under her skirt) at the base of
posed his face into a striking mask of Erin’s crucifixion, Liz gushes at the ef-
funny, touching, exciting, in-
sadness, then gave a speech, so beau- fect. “You look so Elizabeth.” Suzzy is triguing stories of the sport-
tifully that I was somehow even more confused. “Wait,” Liz asks, “who was ing life, both professional and
moved than had the tears been real. Jesus’s mother again?” “Mary!” Suzzy amateur. These essays show
It was akin to the magician telling exclaims. “Then who’s Elizabeth?”
you he is going to trick you and then “You are!” that how we play and write
doing it so skillfully that it still seems Old records have been brought in about sports reflects and cele-
like a miracle. Liz recalls being up- for Ari to break during the big line brates our nation’s character.
braided on a panel by the other di- Edward delivers at the news of Ce-
rectors (all of them male) for using lia’s death (“It’s the waste that I re- This collection includes some
the drops instead of getting her ac- sent!”), but he plays one instead of the most well-known and re-
tors to recall past feelings, Method- and Liz loves it. “We need to use spected writers of the past cen-
style. But Ari tells how, when he this!” Everyone dances to the old-
tried the glycerin, it burned: actual time jazz. This will become a run- tury, including Mark Twain,
physical pain, not metaphoric sense ning joke and finally an inspiration, Tom Wolfe, Shirley Jackson,
memories. It is “real.” as Liz keeps wanting to save the Lewis H. Lapham, Gary
Godard noted that every film, even junk-shop records.
a Hollywood feature, is also a docu- Now Niall raises the screen and
Cartwright, A. Bartlett Gia-
mentary of its actors. We see them we see the full video of Erin for the matti, Pete Axthelm, George
live and age, just as we see clothes first time, fading from the taped Plimpton, and Rich Cohen.
and cars and interiors from a period, performance into the image of her
and eventually we are seeing ghosts feet, then traveling up her body to EDITED BY MATTHEW STEVENSON
in a world that has passed. Similarly, her face as the screen is hoisted on
AND MICHAEL MARTIN
onstage, the primary truth is the ex- the totem. The picture looks great,
istence of the performers, who are but timing the raising becomes an
there, alive, before us, something elaborate task—Niall has to match ORDER TODAY AT
that became profoundly moving in the camera movement so that the store.harpers.org
shows such as Frank Dell’s The Temp- screen lifts as the image itself
tation of St. Antony, performed as moves up Erin’s body, but he can’t
Vawter’s death approached. Part of see the screen, since he’s behind it.
FRANKLIN
what the Wooster Group activates is Again and again Liz interrupts; ev- SQUARE
PRESS
this sense that, first and foremost, we eryone is counting the beats and
are seeing them live their lives on- coaching at once. Frustrated, she
stage, inhabit their breaths, move- yells: “Can someone count for him?”
ments, and glances. The show—play, Kate laughs hard and tells him:
text, character—seems to hover like “Now you’re really working for the
a mirage between us. One has the Wooster Group.” PUBLISHED BY FRANKLIN SQUARE PRESS
DISTRIBUTED BY MIDPOINT TRADE BOOKS,
A DIVISION OF IPG
LETTER FROM SOHO 61
Niall finally gets it, and the image her body said to be in an “advanced show from the audience, describes it
of Erin imposed on the rotting state of decomposition” and “smeared as “ecstatic.”
corpse thrills everyone. Liz: “Wait with a juice attractive to ants.” Eliot’s
L
till we get the ants on there.” She producer, among others, felt it was iz often shows up cheerful and
also tells Ari, “You might have to too shocking and would distract the eager, then plunges into de-
darken your hair for this, or maybe audience from the larger purpose of spair. “I don’t know what this
we can just stencil a hairline.” He the play. He removed it. Now, Liz piece is yet. I’m lost. There are like
deadpans it. Erin, regarding her now points out, she has not only rein- four different ways to go.” Eric un-
rotting corpse, says, “I’m glad I got serted those elements, but actually wraps a snack. Matthew blows his
my toenails done.” depicted them, made an explicit im- nose. Liz snaps, “What is that sound?”
Meanwhile, since the lack of de- age. This is both a transgression Watching the wild ending again, Liz
odorizing spray in the restrooms was against the taste of those earlier thinks back to Ron miming shooting
one of the hot topics at a recent com- times and a violation of the text as all the kids, who gleefully play dead.
pany meeting, Liz has presented the such: she has made a picture to re- Ron also dances with a young girl.
group with two possible solutions: a place what Eliot painted in words. Years later, at eighteen, she died of a
large scented candle and a spray bot- On the other hand, she feels that brain tumor, and Liz notes that the
tle of deodorizer. One option has time has flowed the opposite way re- child’s parents are coming to the
been placed in each bathroom. Then, garding her own explicit footage, show and might be upset by the foot-
throughout the day, she keeps asking which should not be shown but age. In the film, though, she is having
if anyone “took a shit” so she can test turned into words, discussed. In 1978, a ball. When she and Ron worked on
whether her odor-relief plan worked. it felt natural and right that this that dance together, she would shout
No one volunteers. would happen: her performers liked with joy each time.
getting naked, and she simply saw this “Maybe I come down and say I’m
B
ig discovery: more tape of the image in her mind. No one ques- sorry,” Liz suggests. “I’m the only one
Amsterdam performance has tioned it. In our current age, some- here left. Is that what the teaching
been found. Completely blown how both more jaded and more piece is about? I wouldn’t do this
out and unwatchable in places, it nev- easily offended, this would be too now? I just thought the lid was off
ertheless shows the original, outra- shocking or not shocking enough or civilization and they should do some-
geous ending of Nayatt School, the shocking in the wrong way. thing outrageous, but you could
section that followed the last scene I’m reminded of another dis- never do that today. And the piece is
from The Cocktail Party. carded ending, with a speech Kate called Nayatt School—it’s a school
In the chaos of the final party, derived from the Anthony Bourdain shooting. If we’re being honest and
Ron had mimed shooting all the kids Lower East Side episode: “We just trying to show how things evolve
with a toy gun while they staggered want to make things that are so and how we work.”
around elaborately. Liz told them to beautiful we get lost in them. We Kate says, “You didn’t know you
play dead and keep their eyes shut. return to it over and over, and it were invoking the later atrocities,
“The last part was not for them,” she begins to break down. It loses mean- school shootings, brain tumors.”
said, though one later admitted ing, then it returns to meaning. I’m “That’s when you weren’t afraid of
peeking from behind his mirrored going to die one day and these shows your own mind,” Liz says. “Now I’m
glasses. Then Ron, Spalding, and won’t exist. Does it have to end afraid of my mind.” Then, looking at
Libby return to the front table. badly? I’m glad I survived. I’m glad I the screen, which now shows ants
Spalding pulls his pants down, squats have my own liver. I’m sure glad I didn’t crawling over the fruit heaped at
over the turntable, his bare bottom miss it.” Erin’s feet, she addresses Wlad: “Can’t
to the audience, mere inches away, They read over a negative New York you have one ant eating her toe?”
and drills holes in a record, using the Times review: “Nayatt School is not Suzzy brings up Eliot’s Four Quar-
drill from the crazy-dentist skit. Lib- really an ironic commentary on The tets, which Spalding referenced in
by scratches a record while sticking Cocktail Party, but a savage assault on the original Nayatt School. They read
her hand down her dress to simulate phonograph records.” Liz contends the last section, which Eliot said is
masturbation. Ron leans over and that it’s both. She notes that this prin- about his own failure as a poet. Fail-
puts his penis on the record as ciple—and, not but—was already ure as an artist? A late masterpiece
though using it as the stylus arm taken for granted in music and visual that looks back not in glory but in
while also lighting matches and art but not in theater. After all the despair and then, finally, acceptance?
dropping them on the turntable. destruction, Spalding takes the record Next, Ari reads from Prometheus Un-
Now, as the group discusses player into a little house in the rear of bound, the lyric drama by Shelley
whether to include this footage, they the stage and plays a Bach partita that Eliot’s Harcourt-Reilly quotes in
are reminded of the criticism Eliot while Ron and Libby climb to the up- The Cocktail Party, and a long dis-
himself faced when The Cocktail per reaches of the theater and exit, as cussion ensues: What is a magi?
Party premiered in Edinburgh. Ce- if into heaven. The two ideas, both Whose dead child? Who’s speaking?
lia’s violent end was described by the equally present, are of destruction and The earth, addressing Prometheus,
players in much more graphic detail, transcendence. Kate, who saw this as dead child. Liz seems re-energized.

After lunch, she thanks them all for
their help. I’m not sure what was re-
throughs in the traditional sense,
since Liz can never resist interrupt-
KEVIN BAKER’S
solved really, but “for the first time,” ing. I imagine her in front of the LYRICAL ELEGY FOR
she says, “it feels handleable.” As El- live audiences, conducting.
iot has Harcourt-Reilly say, following Perhaps this is why, however NEW YORK CITY,
this recitation: “A sudden intuition anxious or stressed she might be, A HARPERÕS MAGAZINE
in certain minds may tend to express one thing she does not seem at all
itself at once in a picture.” Or, a worried about is whether the piece COVER STORY
scene onstage. will be ready in time: it is in fact
unclear what this would mean. The IN JULY 2018,
I
hate when writers or documentary rest of her group don’t take it so IS NOW EXPANDED
filmmakers try to make their own lightly. Wlad describes feeling like
style an imitation of their sub- he is having a meltdown as open- IN BOOK FORM
ject’s, but out of sheer necessity, the ing night approaches.
composition of this article has re- Rehearsing the Shelley lines, Liz
flected the group’s own process. I be- decides that they feel too stilted and
gan reporting with only the vaguest dry—unless they are sung. That
sense of what they were working on, morning, once again, she has be-
and as I watched rehearsal after re- come distracted by the pile of junk
hearsal, I was constantly thwarted in records Matthew bought (five for a
my attempt to impose structure or dollar). The one Ari was about to
design: long, complex discussions I smash was of Enrico Caruso singing
faithfully transcribed would never be Donizetti’s “Una Furtiva Lagrima.”
mentioned again; speeches would Liz has someone play it, then, hours
be labored over for a week, then sud- later, has the idea of setting the poem
denly dropped. “First we have to get it to this tune. They revise the text to
right,” Kate joked, “then we cut it.” fit the melody while different people
It could be a motto. try singing it and argue intensely
In late April, with the beginning over the changes. Scott is bugged by
of open rehearsals now less than the elision of the word “till,” which
two weeks away, Liz continues to alters the syntax. Gareth, a musi-
reconsider everything, to happily cian, gets pushed past the point of
spend precious time on a phrasing, patience by Liz’s interruptions. Su-
a gesture. All she needs to discover, zzy, a singer with the Roches in her
she says, is how to get to the “pic- non-Wooster life, renders it beauti- VISIT HARPERS.ORG/CITY
ture,” the central image of Celia fully, and for a while, she, Kate, and TO RECEIVE 20% OFF
crucified, what she now considers Liz harmonize. “Come up here, ass-
the heart of the piece. The actual hole,” Suzzy tells Scott, who is lurk-
ending can be worked out later, ing under the table. Next, with a
that is to say, after the show is al- rough melody fleshed out, Eric drops The Fall of a Great
ready on and she’s seen an audi- the recording and starts to play the American City
ence reaction. Maybe, she jokes tune on an electric piano, adapting examines the urban
(jokes?), they will ask the audience it to fit their new song. The whole
how it should end. group sings it, thrillingly. (“Idiotic crisis of aﬄuence:
In fact, I begin to realize, there will yet moving,” is Liz’s judgment.) how money is
be no end, there is never an end, just Then she has the three men in the driving away all the
more rehearsals, some of which an au- scene—Scott, Ari, and Gareth— things we love about
dience is invited in to see. Matthew, sing together. It is added to the
who sits beside Liz at every perfor- show, where it is powerfully affect- metropolitan life and
mance, says it is like seeing a painter ing: a dazzling example of how her how we can, and must,
finish a canvas, again and again. In- seemingly impulsive moves, her di- get them back.
deed, this theater is her mind, as gressions and associations, are some-
much as any painting is for another how exactly right.
artist. Erin says she has come to re-
I
alize that Liz is the one true audi- began this project with two aims
ence. The cast and crew all see in mind: to learn how the Wooster HARDCOVER • $19.95
their opening nights as beginnings, Group make their work, and to
not endings: it is the first time that learn about the mystery of talent itself
the piece has ever been played by studying, at close range, an artist I
straight through. There are no run- considered to be a genius. Now, after
LETTER FROM SOHO 63

THE
SIXTIES
RECOLLECTIONS OF THE DECADE
FROM HARPER’S MAGAZINE
six months of class, as it were, I feel I
have come a long way in achieving the
first goal. But what of the second, to
understand something about genius?
You will journey blind. But the way
leads towards possession
Of what you have sought for in the
wrong place.
Here I must admit total failure. That’s
not to say I haven’t come to know Liz At five-fifteen on opening night,
better. She is warm, eccentric, hilari- Liz arrives at a provisional ending:
ous, wise, brave, shy, generous, and The company gathers at the long
stubborn. She loves to argue but loves table and reenacts Eliot’s final cock-
to laugh most of all. I think this might tail party as performed in the origi-
be why she hires whom she does— nal Nayatt School. While the actors
they are fun to argue with and they onscreen cavort wildly, grown-ups
make her laugh. I like her very much swirling the kids around in their
indeed. But what, if anything, all this homemade Halloween- style cos-
has to do with her unique body of tumes, props flying, the present com-
work is beyond me. pany re-creates the scene as a styl-
I’ve noticed a few traits that she has ized, hypnotic dance, speaking the
in common with other artists I ad- lines as the kids did forty years be-
mire: First of all, she has an incredible fore. At the news that Celia, who
MCGINNISS work ethic—pretty much every day,
with few vacations, year after year.
joined a nursing order, has been cru-
cified by natives while caring for
(Wlad, young enough to be her grand- plague victims, an image of Erin as
son, describes her energy as “electric.” Celia appears onscreen, transforming
She has been known to go in on Sun- from a beatific saint on the cross into
day to clean or repaint the theater.) a rotting corpse. As the characters
She is relentless, both patient and plunge into rapturous mourning, we
impatient, and always ready to rip up see the past company in black and
what she’s done, to destroy in the white, and we see them reanimated,
name of creation. She is tough in the embodied by the present company;
way good artists are tough, with a hard we see the dead and the living. The
core that leaves her, despite the fret- ghosts are present in the room with
ting, ultimately unswayed by what us. The séance has been a success.
others think. But this is far from an Kate removes her wig and outer cos-
explanation, and frankly, I knew most tume, puts on a sweater, and comes
of it already. back up to the mic. “That’s all we
In her theater, Liz is the indisput- have for tonight.” n
able boss, the dictator of this anarchic
ministate—as Kate says, “a master.”
Yet, as Freud reminds us, when speak-
ing of the human mind, we are not January Index Sources
1 Syrian Network for Human Rights
even master in our own house. In the (Gaziantep, Turkey); 2 U.S. Department of
end, I realize, I cannot understand Veterans Affairs; 3,4 Debevoise & Plimpton
Liz’s gift because she does not under- LLP (NYC); 5,6 U.S. Department of
stand it herself. She merely serves it, Transportation; 7–9 Bharat Chandar
(Stanford, Calif.); 10,11 American Addiction
following her own impulses like a trail Centers (Brentwood, Tenn.); 12,13 Plastics
of clues, getting lost until she finds her News (Detroit, Mich.); 14 Kala Senathirajah
way again. Even for an outside ob- (Newcastle, Australia); 15,16 Limelight
LOMAX
server, it is thrilling when a piece sud- Networks (Scottsdale, Ariz.); 17,18 Common
Sense Media (San Francisco); 19 National
denly begins to come together. There Alliance on Mental Illness (Arlington, Va.);
is almost an audible click. In the final 20,21 Qualtrics (Provo, Utah); 22 Future of
moments of the (for now) final version Privacy Forum (Washington); 23 Brennan
of Since I Can Remember, Kate de- Center for Justice (NYC); 24 Washington
scribes the wild ending of Nayatt Post; 25 Todd Feathers (NYC); 26 The Urban
Institute (Washington); 27,28 Leadership
School: “I never asked Liz why it ended Conference on Civil and Human Rights
that way. She just said it was a picture (Washington); 29,30 Pew Research Center
ORDER TODAY FROM that appeared in her head.” (Washington); 31,32 Gabriel Zucman,
STORE.HARPERS.ORG
University of California, Berkeley; 33–36
Pew Research Center; 37 New York Times; 38
The destination cannot be described; Caroline Kramer, Mount Sinai Hospital
FRANKLIN
You will know very little until you get (Toronto); 39 National Audubon Society
SQUARE
PRESS there; (San Francisco).
Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books,
a division of IPG

L E T T E R F R O M W A S H I N G T O N
ELECTION BIAS
The new playbook for voter suppression
By Andrew Cockburn
I
n the spring of 2018, Tequila John- Shelby County as well as several seats fines for any group that turned in mul-
son, an African-American admin- on the county commission. In Nash- tiple incomplete applications, man-
istrator at Tennessee State Uni- ville, a local measure was passed intro- dated severe penalties for failing to
versity, led a mass voter-registration ducing a police-accountability board. submit registration forms to election
drive organized by a coalition of The Republican response to the officials within ten days of being
activist groups called the Tennessee Black Voter Project’s accomplishments signed by the applicant, and required
Black Voter Project. Turnout any person registering voters
in Tennessee regularly ranks to receive official certification
near the bottom among and government-administered
U.S. states, just ahead of Texas. training. (A Freedom of Infor-
At the time, only 65 percent of mation Act request filed by
the state’s voting-age popula- Johnson revealed that the pro-
tion was registered to vote, portion of incorrect forms sub-
the shortfall largely among mitted by her group was in line
black and low-income citizens. with previous registration drives
“The African-American com- in the state.)
munity has been shut out of Speedily passed by the
the process, and voter suppres- Republican-controlled legisla-
sion has really widened that ture, HB 1079 was signed by
gap,” Johnson told me. “I felt I G over no r Bi l l L e e o n
had to do something.” May 2, 2019. “We want to pro-
The drive generated ninety vide for fair, for genuine . . . for
thousand applications. Though elections with integrity,” Lee
large numbers of the forms declared. Civil-rights groups
were promptly rejected by quickly filed suit in federal
election officials, allegedly be- court to block the new mea-
cause they were incomplete or sure. In a withering ruling
contained errors, turnout against the state, a district
surged in that year’s elections, court judge, Aleta Trauger, de-
especially in the areas around Memphis was swift. The official charged with scribed the law as a “complex and puni-
and Nashville, two of the cities specifi- overseeing elections, secretary of state tive regulatory scheme.”
cally targeted by the registration drive. Tre Hargett—who, the previous year, Nevertheless, it remains enormously
Progressive candidates and causes had won a fight to retain the bust of difficult to register voters in Tennes-
achieved notable successes, capturing Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand see. “We don’t know how many people
the mayor’s office in heavily populated Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in the state we registered are actually on the
capitol—spearheaded a bill to place rolls,” Johnson told me, citing the ap-
Andrew Cockburn is the Washington edi-
tor of Harper’s Magazine and the author, mass registration drives under state con- plications that were summarily dis-
most recently, of Kill Chain: The Rise of trol and to criminalize mistakes made missed. As Cliff Albright, cofounder
the High-Tech Assassins. on applications. The bill imposed heavy of the national group Black Voters
Illustrations by John Ritter LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 67

T
Matter, pointed out, voter-suppression he press and Democratic es- their election rules. (Chief Justice
legislation serves its purpose even when tablishment would generally John Roberts has been venting his
struck down in court: “It intimidates have us believe that malign opposition to the Voting Rights Act
people. It says, ‘Anytime you try some- foreign meddling is the greatest since the early 1980s, when as a junior
thing like this, we’re going to come threat to the integrity of our elec- DOJ official he ghostwrote op-eds for
after you.’ It’s not just that this particu- tions. yes, russian trolls helped his superiors denouncing the law.) The
lar act got squashed, it’s the message elect trump blared one New York results of the Shelby decision were
that they send.” Times headline in December 2018. A felt immediately. The Brennan Center
Outrageous as it might seem, the recent CNN report highlighted an for Justice reported that states previ-
response of Tennessee Republicans ominous warning from the FBI and ously covered by the 1965 act began
was by no means exceptional. Across the Department of Homeland Secu- purging voters, mostly minorities, at
the country, the G.O.P. has maneu- rity that “Russia may focus on voter record rates as soon as the justices had
vered tirelessly to restrict, impede, suppression as a means to interfere in spoken. Although the Roberts court’s
dilute, and otherwise frustrate demo- the 2020 presidential election.” (admittedly outrageous) decision in
cratic threats to their control. To cite But Vladimir Putin played no role Citizens United has received far more
just a few examples: In Florida, suc- in George W. Bush’s election victory attention and protest with regard to its
cessful litigation to prevent a ban on in 2000, the result of a dominant effect on fair elections, Shelby’s assault
“pop-up” early polling stations on on democracy has been at least as
college campuses has been coun- drastic and far-reaching.
tered with a measure requiring any
T
W
college hosting such sites to ensure HE MOST POWERFUL ENABLER OF hy is the systematic dis-
extra parking. In Arizona, a mea- VOTER SUPPRESSION IN RECENT enfranchisement of large
sure passed last year restricting the YEARS HAS BEEN THE CONSERVATIVE numbers of citizens—
use of mail-in ballots, a form of what LaTosha Brown correctly calls
voting particularly popular among MAJORITY ON THE SUPREME COURT “the dominant issue in American
Native Americans. In Ohio, almost politics today”—so often ignored, as
200,000 voters, most of them black it has been in the ongoing Demo-
and poor, were purged from the rolls Republican apparatus eliminating cratic presidential debates, rather than
last year. In January 2019, Texas sec- 20,000 mostly poor, black, and His- foregrounded and denounced? For an
retary of state David Whitley issued panic Florida voters from the rolls and explanation, I turned to Armand
an Election Advisory stating that al- guaranteeing through its Supreme Derfner, a legendary civil-rights attor-
mo s t o ne hu nd r e d t ho u s a nd Court appointees that all attempts at ney. Brought to the United States in
noncitizens were registered to vote—a an accurate vote count would be struck 1940 at the age of two by Jewish parents
claim that was proved to be wholly down. (Al Gore lost the state by 537 fleeing Nazi Europe, Derfner aban-
false, and was only rescinded after votes.) Nor was there a foreign power doned a career with a white-shoe
Texas taxpayers spent $450,000 in its behind the documented examples of D.C. law firm to work on civil rights in
defense, settling a legal challenge from voter purges in Ohio in 2004, where 1960s Jim Crow Mississippi, where, for
a Latino civil-rights organization. John Kerry lost by a narrow margin of his efforts, he and his wife were shot at
When publicized, such cases elicit 2.1 percent; in Wisconsin in 2016, and his dog was poisoned. At the age
disapproving comments in the press. where a voter-I.D. law appears to have of thirty, he argued (and won) his first
But whereas the violent suppression played a part in dissuading up to voting-rights case before the Supreme
of the black vote in the 1960s turned 200,000 people, most of them minori- Court; he has subsequently argued and
civil rights into a dominant national ties, from voting, in a state that Trump won four more, as well as a host of
issue, twenty-first-century voter sup- carried by just 23,000 votes; or in Mich- landmark judgments in lower courts.
pression is all too often framed as a igan that same year, which Trump won After moving to Charleston, South
regrettable “anomaly,” as Albright’s by 10,000 votes while 70,000 presiden- Carolina, he suggested in a letter to the
fellow Black Voters Matter cofounder tial votes from the largely black city of Post and Courier that
LaTosha Brown explained to me. Far Detroit mysteriously disappeared.
from being anomalous, Brown in- Undoubtedly, the most powerful the Confederate flag should keep fly-
sists, such behavior is “even more enabler of U.S. voter suppression in ing over the state Capitol. It is a use-
ful reminder about the people inside,
American than apple pie.” Indeed, recent years has not been foreign in- like a warning label on a hazardous
voter suppression is not a matter of tervention but the conservative major- product or a sign at the zoo saying,
a few lamentable, isolated incidents; ity on the U.S. Supreme Court. Its “Beware of the Animals.”
it is a carefully conceived campaign 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision
to keep political power in the hands gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Currently, he is involved in a suit to
of white Republicans, a campaign nullifying a provision that required invalidate a provision of Mississippi’s
facilitated by an ideologically driven states and localities with a history of 1890 constitution expressly designed
Supreme Court majority and aided discrimination to get “preclearance” to prevent black former prisoners
by the feeble resistance offered by from the Justice Department or the from voting, a rule that is still rigor-
the Democratic Party. D.C. district court before changing ously enforced today.

Whereas LaTosha Brown and other illiterate white voters were directed to This particular Texas law was
activists view voter suppression as all the correct boxes, illiterate blacks were eventually struck down after years of
of a piece since the days of the Found- offered no such help. Virginia adopted expensive trench warfare in the
ing Fathers, Derfner believes that it the gerrymander approach, redistrict- courts, during which time half a mil-
attracts less attention now because its ing five times in ten years. “After lion Texans were prevented from
very nature has changed. “It used to 1890,” the Southern states “were able voting. Texas legislators reacted to
be that the intent, at least in the to get to complete disenfranchise- their belated setback with a modified
South, was to stop black people vot- ment, and the Supreme Court upheld law permitting people without photo
ing, period,” he explained. “They them every time,” Derfner explained. I.D.s to vote, so long as they signed
didn’t want different factions of the With the passage of the Voting Rights a legally binding affidavit at the poll-
Democratic Party competing for black Act, black Americans again began ing site attesting to one of seven
voters.” Today, however, he says, “the voting in large numbers, and the tac- permissible reasons as to why they
aim is to win an election. The reason tics of suppression reverted to the don’t have one. A number of voters
there isn’t greater awareness are likely to be intimidated
of the severity of the problem by the legalese, a fine ex-
is because of the way it works. ample of a seemingly small
It’s bureaucratic, not blatant impediment that neverthe-
like it used to be.” less contributes to collective
In the 1960s, a former client disenfranchisement.
of Derf ner’s, the civil-rights
A
campaigner Fannie Lou Hamer, rtfully contrived sup-
was fired, evicted, and bru- pression strategies
tally beaten by police officers tend to be invisible to
as she tried to register herself the casual media observer.
and others to vote. Now, in- Election Day reporting, for
stead of clubs—and bullets— example, almost invariably
suppression tactics take the includes accounts of long
form of what Derfner calls lines faced by voters in many
“hindrances”—restrictive locations themed as a wel-
I.D. requirements, truncated come sign of “enthusiasm”
voting hours, limited numbers for the democratic process.
of polling sites, and earlier reg- But the lines—particularly if
istration deadlines. These in- those waiting in them are
dividually minor impediments black or brown—are more of-
collectively amount to voter ten than not a sure sign of
suppression. “If your goal is not voter suppression at work. An
to stop a whole bunch of people from earlier piecemeal approach. “I feel I’m exhaustive report by the Leadership
voting, but simply to stop enough people watching a movie going backward,” Conference on Civil and Human
so you can win the election,” Derfner Derfner told me, sadly. Rights revealed that 1,688 polling sites
explained, “you don’t need to stop a lot As an example of the return of were shut down across the country
of people.” nineteenth-century tactics, Derfner between 2012 and 2018. The vast ma-
The turn toward a more bureau- cited a previously blocked Texas law, jority of these were in states such as
cratic mode of voter suppression is not put into effect by the then attorney Texas, Arizona, and Georgia, which,
an unprecedented development. In general, Republican Greg Abbott, prior to Shelby, were obliged to clear
terms of incremental impediments to within hours of the Shelby decision, such closures with the Justice Depart-
black votes, Derfner told me, “What that requires Texans to have a photo ment. “Quite often, people don’t real-
we see in the 1870s and 1880s was very I.D. to register. “People say, ‘So what? ize what is going on at the local level,
like what’s going on now.” In the late Everyone has a driver’s license.’ Well, and we needed to document that,”
nineteenth century, there were still ninety-five percent of people do have Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO
large numbers of black voters in the licenses, but five percent don’t, and of the Leadership Conference, told me.
South. Whites seeking to regain con- that adds up to six hundred thousand “The sheer scale of the closures after
trol after Reconstruction could not Texans.” Moreover, many Texas Shelby in states with a long history of
simply ban black people from voting, counties— especially those with sub- discrimination points to a real crisis.”
so they crafted hindrances. South stantial black or other minority Arizona’s Maricopa County, for
Carolina passed the “eight box” law in populations— lack Department of example, which is almost one-third
1882, requiring voters to put their bal- Public Safety offices, the only places Latino, has lost no fewer than 171 vot-
lots in the correct box for any given where one can obtain a driver’s license. ing sites since 2012, guaranteeing long
office—governor, lieutenant governor, Traveling the distance necessary to waits and transportation difficulties.
state senator, and so on. Any mistake reach one often requires a car—a A recent nationwide study led by
meant the vote was disallowed. While catch-22 for those without licenses. M. Keith Chen, an economist at
LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 69

U.C.L.A., demonstrated with preci of them in poor counties with large lawenforcement officers at the polls
sion that black voters must wait in line AfricanAmerican populations.) in minority neighborhoods and send
longer than white voters. Using geo Kemp also took advantage of Geor ing mailers to black neighborhoods
location data from 93,000 polling gia’s “use it or lose it” voting law— threatening penalties for violating
places across the country, researchers similar to measures in at least eight election laws, a practice known as
on the project found that voters in other states—by which voters are “voter caging.” But in January 2018, a
black neighborhoods waited 29 per dropped from the rolls if they skip voting federal judge in New Jersey had allowed
cent longer on average than those in for a certain number of consecutive elec the decree to expire, arguing that the
white areas, and that they were also tion cycles. In 2017, his office stripped Democrats, “by a preponderance of the
74 percent more likely to wait for half a million people of their voting evidence,” had failed to demonstrate
longer than half an hour. rights on one day alone, arguing that if that it had ever been violated.
Standing in line for extended someone had failed to show up at the As an example of the subtle, bu
stretches would be a deterrent for any polls, they must have either moved away reaucratic approach to modern voter
one, but the deterrent gets progres or died. Similarly fruitful was his use of suppression highlighted by Derfner,
sively stronger for those lower down the an “exact match” rule stipulating that a GrohWargo cited provisional ballots.
income scale. Since all attempts to The 2002 Help America Vote Act
make Election Day a national holi gave voters the right to cast provi
day have been resolutely beaten sional ballots if their names were
back—Mitch McConnell called a “VOTER SUPPRESSION, ALONG not on the registration list or their
recent effort by Democrats a “power WITH GERRYMANDERING, IS A CORE eligibility were somehow in doubt,
grab”—any hourly worker taking INVESTMENT STRATEGY AT THE the notion being that, after further
time off work to vote is losing mon review confirmed a person’s eligibil
ey, as is someone who has to worry HIGHEST LEVELS OF THE G.O.P.” ity, the vote would be counted. “On
about the cost of childcare; the lon the face of it, requiring someone to
ger he or she waits, the costlier it fill out a provisional ballot if their
gets. As the minutes stretch into voter application would be delayed if its registration is in question is not voter
hours, the number of poorer people information was inconsistent with the suppression,” GrohWargo explained.
who can afford to vote that day ticks driver’s license on file. If the applicant “But if you look at the way provi
lower and lower. did not provide a correction, even the sional ballots are overused, misused,
most inconsequential divergence, such in states controlled by Republicans, it’s
R
epublican Brian Kemp’s route as a missing hyphen or capitalized letter, absolutely voter suppression.”
to victory in the 2018 Georgia was treated as legitimate grounds for The predictable problems caused by
gubernatorial race was lined dismissal—a way of targeting the black “exact match” regulations and sweeping
with closed polling sites. As secretary and Hispanic voters (many with hy voter purges, not to mention faulty vot
of state, Kemp was responsible for phenated names) who formed the bulk ing machines, have ensured that provi
overseeing elections during his own of new registrants. As it happened, the sional ballots are in high demand, par
campaign for governor, and he bra number of wouldbe voters Kemp’s office ticularly in black precincts, but in the
zenly refused to resign despite the blin flagged for mistakes—53,000—almost 2018 Georgia election, according to a
dingly obvious conflict of interest. exactly matched his 55,000vote margin lawsuit filed by Fair Fight Action, many
When local officials in Randolph of victory. polling sites ran out of the ballots. In
County— a poor, rural community “Voter suppression, along with gerry other cases, officials failed to inform
two and a half hours south of Atlanta mandering, is a core investment strat voters about how to use them or simply
that is 60 percent black—asked the egy at the highest levels of the Repub refused to supply them.
secretary of state’s office for help in lican Party,” Lauren GrohWargo told Similar examples of the misuse of
organizing the election, Kemp was me recently. Formerly the campaign this seemingly benign initiative were
happy to recommend a consultant manager for Brian Kemp’s opponent reported elsewhere. A study per
who advised the officials to close seven Stacey Abrams, she is now CEO of formed by the group All Voting is
of the county’s nine polling sites for Fair Fight Action, the group Abrams Local found that at Ohio’s Central
being underused or for being in vio set up in the wake of the election to State and Wilberforce universities,
lation of the Americans with Dis fight voter suppression nationwide. two historically black colleges, stu
abilities Act. The “consolidation” of Among other examples of suppression dent voters cast a disproportionate
polling sites, the consultant blithely tactics, GrohWargo mentioned a sher number of provisional ballots in 2018
informed the community, came iff being stationed in at least one and were twice as likely to have their
“highly recommended by the sec Georgia polling site on Election Day. ballots rejected than were voters in
retary of state” as a means of reduc “Ballot security” had been used by the rest of the county.
ing election costs. (In this in the Republican National Committee Once installed as Georgia’s gov
stance, Randolph County refused elsewhere in the country up until ernor, Kemp duly resigned as secre
to comply with the consultant’s pro 1982, when a federal consent decree tary of state, his work well done.
posal, but 214 polling sites have been barred the R.N.C. from engaging in But his spirit lives on. His successor,
closed in Georgia since 2012, most such efforts as posting armed, offduty Brad Raffensperger, has pledged to

continue Kemp’s agenda, with a thinking and personalities behind provision mandating congressional
particular emphasis on combating gerrymandering. In August, four- apportionment based on total popula-
(nonexistent) voter fraud. The state teen hundred Republican legislation as “fundamentally unfair” be-
campaign-finance commission has tors, party officials, and lobbyists cause “states with large numbers of
launched probes into the actions of gathered in Austin, Texas, for the aliens, particularly illegal aliens, are
Abrams and her supporters, an effort annual meeting of the American getting more political power.”
that has been costly to its targets in L eg i sl at ive Excha nge Council Along with the incendiary com-
both time and legal bills. “Make no (A LE C), a c o r p o r a t e- f u n d e d ments about undocumented immi-
mistake,” Groh-Wargo warned, “the nonprofit that guides state-level Re- grants and the unfairness of the
Kemp election model will be the publicans on legislation favorable to Fourteenth Amendment, the confer-
template for the Republicans nation- big business. While much of the pro- ence speakers had plenty of concrete
wide in 2020.” ceedings were closed-door, at least advice for their audience. Former
one of these panels—titled “How to G e o r g i a r e p r e s e nt at ive Ly n n
N
aturally, those working to Survive Redistricting”—was record- Westmoreland—another tireless ad-
suppress unwelcome votes do ed and a transcript was subsequently vocate for voter-I.D. laws, though he
not advertise their work as published on Slate by David Daley. is possibly best known for his efforts
such, preferring to justify their maneu- “Your notes from this conference,” to post the Ten Commandments in
vers as a defense of voting rights. said moderator Cleta Mitchell, “will the House and Senate— gave de-
“Voter-I.D. requirements remain in probably be part of a discovery detailed, practical advice on creating
place going forward to prevent fraud mand. My advice to you is: if you partisan voting districts that exclude
and ensure that election results accu- don’t want it turned over in discov- black residents. Thomas Farr, known
rately reflect the will of Texas voters,” ery, you probably ought to get rid of for defending a North Carolina
declared Texas’s attorney general, Ken it before you go home.” voter-I.D. law deemed by an appeals
Paxton, hailing a court ruling that Gerrymandering has been a hal- court to have singled out black vot-
upheld the state’s voter-I.D. law. “Safe- lowed political tactic since the dawn ers “with almost surgical precision,”
guarding the integrity of our elections of the republic—Patrick Henry tried expounded on techniques for defend-
is a primary function of state govern- to gerrymander James Madison out ing gerrymanders against the inevi-
ment and is essential to preserving our of winning a congressional seat— table court challenges.
democratic process.” and it currently underpins Republi- Texas, a prize of supreme political
But every so often the real agenda can (and Democratic) control in importance, was a suitable venue for
is laid out in plain sight. The Trump many localities despite popular disfa- such a gathering. As Tory Gavito,
Administration’s determined efforts vor. A study from the Schwarzeneg- president of the progressive donor
to add citizenship status to the 2020 ger Institute at the University of group Way to Win, reminded me, “If
census questionnaire were upended Southern California found that fifty- you add Texas to Colorado, New
by the discovery that the move was nine million Americans lived in Mexico, Minnesota, and Virginia,
the brainchild of the late Republican states where Republicans had de- Democrats could lose Michigan, Wis-
redistricting strategist Thomas Ho- signed the districts and thereby con- consin, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida,
feller. The Supreme Court was re- trolled at least one chamber of the Georgia, and Arizona and still win
portedly on the verge of approving state legislature even though more the White House.” Given the elec-
the census question, accepting the people in sum had voted for Demo- toral stakes and the fact that the
administration’s claim that it sought crats in the 2018 elections. white population has lagged signifi-
only to enable better enforcement The more enlightened Supreme cantly behind minorities in popula-
of the Voting Rights Act, when Court of the 1960s did bequeath tion growth, Texas Republicans have
Hofeller’s daughter found several some limited constraints on gerry- defended their rule with desperate in-
hard drives detailing his plans and mandering, still irksome to its practi- tensity. It is now literally impossible
handed them over to the watchdog tioners. As Hans von Spakovsky of to run a statewide registration drive: a
organization Common Cause. In the the Heritage Foundation derisively worker must be a “deputized” registra-
files, Hofeller stated outright that the reminded the ALEC conclave, the tion agent in the county where they
census question was aimed at giving court “established the one person, live, and can only register voters from
electoral advantage to “Republicans one vote rule. That’s the equal pro- that county. Other Republican ap-
and Non-Hispanic Whites.” This rev- tection clause of the Fourteenth proaches have been open exercises in
elation apparently made it too embar- Amendment. And they created it cruelty. When the current governor,
rassing for the chief justice to endorse out of whole cloth.” Von Spakovsky Greg Abbott, was attorney general,
the administration’s disingenuous ar- brought to the gathering the exper- in 2008, he prosecuted a group of se-
gument. (One close observer of the tise from his days in the George niors for helping homebound, elderly
proceedings told me he heard that W. Bush Justice Department, as a vig- neighbors vote by mail. By not in-
Roberts changed his opinion at the orous exponent of both voter-I.D. laws cluding their own names, addresses,
last minute.) and the widely debunked theory of and signatures on the backs of the
A similarly opportune revelation voter fraud. At the Austin confer- mailed ballots, they earned six months
last year provided insight into the ence, he lamented the constitutional of probation and a lifelong criminal

T
record. In 2017, Crystal Mason, an here are some signs that Dem- O’Malley admitted in 2017 that he had
African-American mother of three, ocrats are endeavoring to halt intended to “create a map that, all
was handed a five-year prison term for this repressive wave at the things being legal and equal, would,
violating a law that made former in- national level. The Democratic- nonetheless, be more likely to elect
mates on supervised release ineligible controlled House has passed the For more Democrats rather than less.”) A
to vote—a law of which she was un- the People Act of 2019, a bill contain- 2010 redistricting plan in Illinois,
aware. Rosa Maria Ortega, a Mexican ing a number of obvious and neces- drawn by Democratic house speaker
immigrant with a green card, also sary reforms, including the automatic Mike Madigan, prompted one Repub-
voted mistakenly and is serving an registration of all eligible citizens. lican consultant to remark, “It’s kind
eight-year sentence, after which she Democrats have also introduced the of a work of art—in the wrong direc-
will be deported. When it comes to Voting Rights Advancement Act, tion.” In Democratic-controlled New
conceiving new means of hindering which would restore and expand the York State, the rules discourage chal-
undesirable voters, Zenén Jaimes Pérez original Voting Rights Act by extend- lenges to incumbent officials through
of the Texas Civil Rights Project told ing its application nationwide. Un- a requirement that primary voters
me, “They’re pretty cutting-edge fortunately, neither has the slightest must be registered members of the
down here.” chance of passage in the Republican- relevant party in advance of the elec-
Pérez added that the state’s 2018 led Senate. It will be left to national tion. In order to run against the Dem-
Senate race, in which Beto O’Rourke civil- rights groups such as the ocratic establishment candidate Joe
came within two hundred thousand A.C.L.U., the Leadership Conference Crowley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
votes of beating Ted Cruz, has spurred on Civil and Human Rights, and had to persuade thousands of voters to
a fresh backlash of vote-suppressing Stacey Abrams’s Fair Fight Action, register as Democrats eight months
creativity among the state’s Republi- along with state-level organizations before the vote. (The requirement has
cans. Texas Senate Bill 9 was intro- such as the Tennessee Black Voter since been cut to two months.) She
duced in March of last year; the Project, to undertake the slog of reg- has said this was the hardest part of
House version contained a provision istration drives, court challenges, and her entire campaign. Now, in the af-
reallocating voting districts in a way turnout mobilizations. termath of her victory, the Demo-
that would have granted more polling One especially potent initiative has cratic Congressional Campaign Com-
places to majority-white districts than been the fight to allow former inmates mittee has introduced a rule aimed at
those populated by people of color. to vote. In 2018, Floridians voted by a preventing challengers from hiring
Among other novelties, the bill re- 65 percent majority to restore voting professional campaign consultants,
quired volunteers driving people in rights to 1.4 million fellow citizens with thus potentially further depriving vot-
need of assistance to the polls to fill felony convictions, though the Republi- ers of the possibility of choice.
out burdensome paperwork, and insti- can legislature was quick to respond Elsewhere, while the party is often
tuted penalties for the improper use of with measures restricting the number of generous with rhetorical support for
a provisional ballot. people thus re-enfranchised. Former voting rights, it’s less than forceful
“This was a voter-suppression bill Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe over- when it comes to actually funding ef-
on steroids,” Mimi Marziani told came determined Republican resistance forts toward reform. LaTosha Brown
me. Marziani is president of the to restore voting rights to approximately noted that, while the Democrats were
Texas Civil Rights Project, which 173,000 former felons, but only managed ultimately victorious, the mobilization
led the fight against the bill, and to do so by signing off on each individ- of black voters in the historic 2017
she cited her organization’s cam- ual case. In Kentucky, Andy Beshear Alabama Senate special election was
paign as an example of how opposi- made restoring the voting rights of “under-resourced” by the party. Simi-
tion to voter suppression can attract 140,000 citizens a central plank of his larly, it is usually difficult to raise
a wide variety of activists: “We were successful 2019 campaign for governor. money for secretary of state races in the
able to call on groups advocating for These initiatives are still timid in com- thirty-five states where the office is
people with disabilities, people who parison with Bernie Sanders’s call to elective, despite the importance of the
had never thought about election allow everyone—including prisoners— post in terms of determining fairness in
mechanisms and voting rights. We to vote: “This is not a radical idea,” he elections. “I have never heard of the
said, ‘This bill is going to make it has said. “If we are serious about calling national Democrats putting money into
harder to drive somebody with dis- ourselves a democracy, we must firmly those races,” Jim Duffy, a longtime
abilities to the polls.’ ” In response, establish that the right to vote is an Democratic consultant, told me, “and
advocates for the disabled drove from inalienable and universal principle.” the state parties usually have no money.”
all corners of the state to testify Unfortunately, such clarity finds The party probably regrets having given
against the measure. “My child is few echoes in the Democratic Party almost no money to Karen Gievers in
going to be in a wheelchair for the establishment, not least because elec- her failed 1998 race for Florida secretary
rest of his life,” said one woman in a tion manipulation is by no means of state. Republicans poured in $140,000
committee hearing. “Are you telling unique to Republicans. Democratic- at the last minute for Katherine Harris,
me he is less of a citizen?” Thanks dominated Maryland is one of the who would go on to make the state safe
to such powerful appeals, the bill most heavily gerrymandered states in for George W. Bush’s presidential vic-
never made it to a House vote. the country. (Former governor Martin tory just two years later.

World’s Finest Eye Cream
“A lot of people have been able to run a “selections” product in Oprah magazine
AIRBRUSH
under the radar for that job,” DeJuana
Thompson told me. Thompson is the
founder of Woke Vote, an organiza-
tion that played a key role in organiz-
ing the black voters who made possible
the Democratic upset in the Alabama
special election. “It’s not the most Airbrush eye cream reduces
glamorous position, but Georgia 2018 puffiness right away, especially
let everyone know there’s a lot of power cold Promotes new collagen
when cold.
in that role. We need to be giving a lot which reduces fine lines and
of thought about who is in the pipeline
for those positions.”
wrinkles. Reduces dark circles, is
Since Thompson is working to over- soothing, hydrating and promotes a
come obstacles erected by Republicans Compare to: youthful healthy glow!
against Democratic candidates, one La Mer Eye Balm @ $200 Hypo-allergenic and natural containing
might expect the party to embrace and Shiseido Solution LX @ $130
support her work, but that hasn’t been La Prairie Swiss @ $240
emu oil serum, green tea extract, aloe vera,
the case, at least not in Alabama, where, collagen and elastin.
she said, “A lot of the people that we Reg 68 $ Use am & pm for best results and the jar
turned out have historically been disen-
franchised, or at least under-engaged by Now only $54.40 will last about 3 months!
the party.” As a result, many voters are
uninformed or ignorant as to the rules Use 20% discount code: HARP2 at
preventing them from casting a ballot. www.dremu.com
Given that today’s suppression often
takes the form of bureaucratic traps, or call 800-542-0026 and get free shipping.
Thompson emphasized that defeating it Open 7 days
requires relentless, long-term attention
to detail. “In Florida, for instance, there
are sixty-seven counties, and each
county has its own set of election rules
that you have to know,” she explained.
“So that’s why it’s no use trying to orga-
nize around the time of the election, SOLUTION TO THE C I R C U M N A V I G A T E S
because, by then, whatever rules and DECEMBER PUZZLE O M O O P O N O R M A L C Y A
tricks they’ve created for voter suppres- M M A A P E
17
P L A P L P O E M
sion will already be set.” “Obviously they P A R T I C I P I A L O U B P
can’t do the bubble test anymore— NOTES FOR “PRESENT TENSE” A N T I T R A D I T I O N A L
asking someone to count the bubbles in R E Y B Y I F E C H O R T L E
a bar of soap,” Thompson continued, I N J U N S K I M P S D E L E
The present is A PARTRIDGE IN A S T O R E I I D O G I E R S N
referring to a notorious Jim Crow–era PEAR TREE. O P E N S S E A T E L A V I V
ploy to disqualify black voters. “But N U I T S Q L N E C K L A C E
when someone with a college I.D. is T R A N S U B S T A N T I A L
asked for a home I.D. at the polls, when Note: * indicates an anagram. E P H E B E A K B A R L L R O
they’ve been living on campus for three S L E A Z E S I T R E E T O P
years—that’s just another form of a poll T E M P E R A N C E V I L L E
tax or an unfair test. There’s a lot of
different things that have been insti-
tuted that inhibit a person from being
able to participate, and that’s really
what the goal is.” ACROSS: 1. *; 12. O-moo; 13. Norma-L[u]cy; 16. *; 19. Poe-m[istletoe]; 20. part(ici-p[unctuation])
Armand Derfner summed up his ial; 22. pun; 25. chor(t[i]l)e; 26A, 27D. Injun Joe*; 28. ski(MP)s; 32. dele[ctable]; 33. sto(R[udolph])
frustration with the current state of af- e*; 34. d-og(rev.)-i.e.; 36. sea[son]; 37. viva-let, rev.; 38. nu(1)ts*; 40. neck-lace; 42. transubsta(n)tial*;
fairs more pithily: “Why are we send- 46. [sh]ephe[rd]-be; 47. hidden; 50. S.-le(A-Z)es; 51. po(t ee)rt, rev.; 52. tempera-in Clevel*[and].
ing observers around to check other
countries’ elections, when they should DOWN: 1. co(m[Paris]on te)st; 2. *; 3. hidden; 4. pit[a]-yes-spun*; 5. Mo[r]e; 6. lo-a, rev.;
7. vira[l]*; 8. gall-10; 9. hidden; 10. pun; 11. s(ample-enve*)lope; 14. pun; 15. [p]arty; 17. first letters;
be coming here?” he asked. “These 18. p[o]ath; 21. c[hristmas-chee]r-is-is; 23. dei[gns]; 24. b(urn)t; 29. kiel*-bas[s]-a; 30. *; 31. lik[e]s*;
things ought to be crimes. In fact, 32. *; 34. Danski*-n; 35. upper-l*; 39. que-ER; 41. two mngs.; 43. a-hem; 45. homophone; 48. two
they are crimes.” ■ mngs.; 49. homophone.

S T O R Y
THE WHALE MOTHER

By Susan Choi
A
s promised in the she replied. “Are you?”
email she’d re And when he said yes, in
ceived, the shut fact he’d lived on the is
tle was waiting at the land at one point for more
curb outside baggage than ten years, the conver
claim. It was just a mini sation went from there,
van, it turned out, not the simply bloomed and sent
wheeled and finned am tendrils all over the mini
phibious contraption she’d van’s grimy interior as if
been vaguely expecting there weren’t ultimately
from its mysterious name, nine people crammed in
SeaTac–Whidbey Island side, including themselves
Shuttle. The shuttle’s and the driver. They’d had
doors were open; a driver to interrupt themselves to
was checking names off a listen with impatient po
clipboard. A frowsy older liteness when the driver
couple in matching rain gave his spiel about sched
jackets; a likely student ule and safety.
plugged into her earbuds; Perhaps she hadn’t
and a very tall man, who quite reclaimed alacrity.
was busily befriending the Information tumbled from
others with an eye, he the tall man, place names
told them cheerfully, to and business concerns and
getting the seat with the most legroom. Leila the instant his eyes lit on her, waterways; at one point he broke eye
This turned out to be in the first row, continued once they were seated, twist contact with her to look down at his
while Leila wound up in the second, but ing his long torso to halfface her over phone, but before she could seize the
the tall man, who had begun talking to his shoulder. “Coming home?” he asked, opportunity to muster her focus he
and his abrupt address paired with his handed the phone to her, its screen
Susan Choi is the author of five novels, most singular physical presence surprised her displaying a threemasted boat. How
recently Trust Exercise, which received the
2019 National Book Award. Last year she into something like alacrity, a state she’d beautiful, she said automatically.
also published her first book for children, been so far exiled from for so long she Just the previous week she’d brought
Camp Tiger. hadn’t even remembered its name. “No,” her sons home from Martha’s Vineyard
Illustration by Seo Kim STORY 75

THE
The LUXURY
Heated Sweater
Fleece Jacket
YOU’D EXPECT. on that island’s ferry, their first time he didn’t glance over his shoulder—she
visiting as a trio (she’d made mistakes had to hurry to keep up with him.
AND MORE. there, also, forgetting to reserve park- Then they came out into the enormous
ing in Hyannis, ending up paying indoor passenger area with its superflu-
three times the usual rate to a sailor- ous seating for hundreds and beautiful
suit-wearing cabal of criminal Moldo- wraparound windows in the forgotten
vans, as she called them, to the dis- modernism of the late 1950s. Leila’s
tress of her sons, who felt, rightly, she pulse quickened with pleasure. This
knew, that this was an insensitive was the kind of erstwhile sophisticated
stereotype), and when the van halted interior she and her husband had always
again, here, just as there, were the sought out. The decades of their accord
painted lines on the asphalt where had lulled her into thinking theirs was
the soon-to-be-passenger cars formed everyone’s preference; but the tall man
their columns to wait, and here just was making straight for the doors to the
as there was a concession stand offer- outer deck, and Leila didn’t even have
ing seafood standards, even New En- time for a photo. Then they were stand-
gland clam chowder. Leila stood in line ing together on a wide balcony span-
for a bottle of water and then rejoined ning the bow, with the heavy green
the tall man, who had seated himself water spread around in an arc and the
on the back of a bench. How long had dark green landmasses crouched re-
Developed exclusively for it been since she’d had this sensation of garding the boat from their various
Hammacher Schlemmer, this is instant camaraderie with a man? But distances. Leila couldn’t guess which
the sweater-jacket that provides in fact, she reminded herself, she’d once landmass was which. She wished she’d
three levels of heat for up made friends with men all the time, studied a map. Around the port side she
to six hours. It uses virtually when in her right mind, to which this could see a pretty lighthouse she would
undetectable heating elements trip had been meant to return her. have liked to go look at, but the tall
woven from carbon fibers, The tall man took from his back- man’s easy cooptation of her company
delivering sustained warmth pack a very good-looking sandwich. somehow ruled out all such tourist’s
in the front and back while Leila took in its toothsome-appearing behaviors. He was explaining his rea-
allowing comfortable wear. whole-grain bread, its crisp lettuce, its son for coming, and just as, curbside
Fleece lined interior. 100% fat slice of tomato, its strata of cheeses back at the airport, his question to her
Polyester. Imported. and meats, as the tall man with some- had shocked her into alacrity, now the
Men's #94486 $129.95 how fastidious wolfishness dispatched superior solitude of the ferry deck and
the sandwich in a very few bites, with- the surrounding dark water shocked her
Women's #94489 $129.95 out dirtying his fingers, his clothes, or into greater attention, as if her con-
his face. It hadn’t crossed Leila’s mind sciousness were being awakened by
to buy food while she stood in the increments. From the corner of her eye
20
line, and now she realized she hadn’t she could see the couple in their match-
$ eaten since around eight the previous

night—Eastern time—and it was now
almost one on this coast, which
ing raincoats gazing out through one of
the rhomboid windows from the pas-
senger area, but they didn’t venture onto
OFF meant it had been twenty hours since
her last meal. “You’re prepared,” she
the deck. No one did, despite the mild-
ness of the wind. Leila asked the tall
On Orders of $125 or more. remarked, of the sandwich, and the man a series of questions, and though
Order at hammacher.com man replied, “My wife is,” with an ap- his replies let her know that he’d ex-
or call 1-866-409-5548 preciative nod at the now-empty Zip- plained much of this already, still she
Use promo code #601100 loc that he folded up neatly and re- felt the satisfying tightness of the
Offer ends 3/31/20 turned to his backpack. So that was grip of her mind on the interesting
that, Leila thought, for the first time problem, this stranger whose world
aware that the long-unused apparatus didn’t overlap with hers in the least.
had begun to unfurl. Better fold that It didn’t seem to bother him to tell her
back up, like the Ziploc. things twice. Suddenly she laughed—
When the ferry came in, the tall the laughter shook free of her with-
man led her up its two metal stair- out warning and only once it had did
SCAN HERE & SHOP OUR SITE cases with their metal walls and she fathom her reason for laughing,
diamond-plate treads, which still which she tried to explain as he
Hammacher somehow conveyed the excitement of

going to sea. Though he seemed to
smiled with surprise, not the least
offended by the interruption.
Schlemmer know he towed her in his wake he
didn’t hesitate to use his long legs, and
“I didn’t realize we were moving!”
she cried. The barely wrinkled green
Guaranteeing the Best, the Only,
and the Unexpected for 172 years.
water lay around them like pavement “Leila.” No sooner had she spoken vided towels to wipe dry the walls and
over which the ferry rolled with im- her name than she doubted her under- floor of the showers after each use, to
perturbable tires; it was only when standing of his. Lance? Like a spear? inhibit mold growth. These towels are
she noticed that behind the tall “Leila?” a new voice asked—her ride only for wiping the shower; they’re not
man’s back, where he leaned against to the colony. She turned toward it as for your personal use. You did bring
the rail facing her, the featureless if not feeling what she felt, and the your own towel, right? We ask that you
crouching landmass had grown tall minivan was gone so quickly that even place nothing on the windowsills; the
and sprouted houses whose individual her sense of its absence seemed foolish. lovely wood they’re made of is easily
features she could easily see that she damaged. We ask that you descend
T
was even aware they’d cast off. But he colony was only for women. from the sleeping loft facing the stairs,
how could she explain to him that it Leila had learned about it with both hands on the railings; we’d
wasn’t just the smoothness of the from a colleague years before hate to have you fall. We ask that you
ride but the feeling of herself magi- and had held off applying perhaps due abide by the quiet hours of ten p.m. to
cally transposed—as if lifted by a gi- to some unease or shameful snobbery, seven a.m.; please no music between
ant’s hand and smoothly set down perhaps the same internal impediment those times. The cabins might be
again? “I mean, I didn’t even realize that had kept her from admitting that widely separated but in these quiet
we’d started!” her marriage was afflicted by all the woods noises carry. We ask that you
“It’s not always like this,” he said. same problems about which her girl- take the time to read the reflective
“We’re lucky to have a calm day.” friends complained, until it was too words of the residents who have pre-
As Leila and the tall man headed late and the whole worm-eaten edifice ceded you, which are recorded in these
back down he said, “What’s your heri- turned to powder, leaving hardly a notebooks, and that you record your
tage, if you don’t mind me asking?” It trace of the two decades it had en- own reflections for the women who
was the question she would have asked dured. When this happened her scru- follow; you’ll want to do that in the
him if such questions weren’t, now, a ples (or whatever the obstacle) van- most recent volume, which is number
minefield. Leila welcomed the question ished, and she applied to the colony fifteen. Please don’t write in any of the
when it came from another brown per- and was admitted for a few weeks, al- other ones even if you find a blank
son but would not have assumed other most eighteen months into the future. page. We ask that you try not to leave
brown people felt the same way. She She couldn’t imagine what good it a blank page between the end of your
explained herself and, when he replied, would do her then. But when the time predecessor’s reflections and the begin-
“It worked out very well. Nice results,” arrived in fact no part of her catastro- ning of yours, the way some of the
wasn’t sure whether she was more phe had been resolved. She could women have done. It wastes space in
pleased by the hint of flirtation or by barely pack, not from reluctance to go the notebooks. We ask that you arrive
the fact that, in seeming to flirt, he’d but from the sense she was running promptly to meals, read the fireplace
crossed a behavioral line that enabled toward refuge from a fire or a flood, instructions with great care, move no
her to feel faultless when she asked the and packing was a superfluous nicety. items of furniture. We ask that in the
question back. Why bother to bring anything? garden you feel free to pick flowers but
“Oh, that’s an interesting story,” Now, though, the reality of the not vegetables—if you want to have
he said. “White father and Native colony began to take form like so many dinner.” Above all, no guest was allowed
American mother—or so my mother bands circling her chest, one for each without the prior permission of all the
claimed. It turns out—” rule her greeter explained. There was other colonists—dinner was a good
There had been many other divaga- no internet as this disrupted solitary time to seek this—and no overnight
tions, in the course of which they meditation. Cell coverage was very guest, or man, was allowed, period.
dropped off the raincoat couple at a poor throughout the island and non- “So only women can visit?” Leila
rent-a-car and rocketed on down the existent at the colony, but should she sought to clarify.
narrow highway that lay like a trench miraculously find herself with service, “It’s a women’s retreat,” said her
between black pines and beneath a dull it was asked that she desist from mak- greeter, as if the implications should
sky. Leila was aware she felt stirrings of ing or receiving calls on the property, be obvious.
dread when the van stopped again as this disrupted solitary meditation. It was, of course, a sort of monastery—
abruptly and the driver hauled the side There was no meat served on the prop- nunnery? perhaps “cloister” was the less
door open. “Freeland,” he called. This erty nor television watched nor per- religious term—and once alone in her
was Leila’s stop. Now her feeling was fume worn, given certain sensitivities; cabin Leila understood that it had not
actual panic, as she groped toward the the rustic accommodations were ex- been the rules themselves but the pres-
rectangle of light and the driver yanked ceptionally beautiful but, it seemed, ence of the greeter that had felt like
her suitcase from the rear and dumped equally fragile; the prefix phrase “we bands circling her chest. Something
it onto the pavement. ask that” recurred like a mantra: about that greeter reciting the rules had
“I didn’t get your name,” she tried “We ask that you leave shoes outside reminded Leila, yes, of her husband,
to say casually over her shoulder as on the mat and walk only barefoot or regardless of the fact that the greeter
she managed the awkward step out in slippers or socks in the cabins, as had been a seventy-year-old woman
of the van. the fir floors get scratched,” said her with her silver hair piled in a bun. With
“Lance. I didn’t get yours.” greeter. “We ask that you use the pro- the greeter gone, the rules shifted the
STORY 77
nature of their encirclement. Now only the light. He’d confounded her.
M A G A Z I N E Leila regarded the flawlessly ordered When in doubt, she dialed down. No
interior of her cabin with such abject more than forty-five, she decided, then
gratitude that her eyes overflowed; reminded herself this made him
BOOKSTORE interestingly, an open box of Kleenex younger than her. As if he’d observed
T-shirts • Books • Tote Bags sat on every surface: one on the desk, her internal debate he had told her,
one on the side table next to the arm- “My wife’s fifteen years older than me.
chair, one on the bedside table, and She had the two oldest kids when we
one beside the bathroom sink; four met. Then together we had Julia. I’m
boxes of Kleenex for a cabin no more sixty-one; my wife’s seventy-six.” They
than two hundred square feet, a higher had been climbing back into the shut-
concentration than even in Leila’s tle to get aboard the ferry when he’d
therapist’s office. Leila sat down in made this revelation, in front of all
the window seat, within reach of the their fellow passengers, as if she’d asked
armchair side table, and cried, luxuri- him to provide credentials.
antly ripping tissues from the mouth of For the rest of their time together
the Kleenex box without regard for how she’d tried to press his age onto him
many she used. We ask that. When had like a hat. It was cheering how poorly
Leila, a popular teenager, a brilliant it fit. Everything about him seemed
college student, a successful young youthful: his bright eyes, his hawk’s
woman, lost the ability to ask that her nose, his plentiful dark untrimmed
own existence be ordered in the way hair, his leather jacket, the wrought-
that pleased her? iron pendant he wore on a thong
Her hard cry lasted so long she be- around his neck. Yet at the same time
came bored with it; she felt enor- he was reassuringly adult: the jacket’s
mously better. She lugged her suitcase leather was supple and unstained, and
into the sleeping loft, where the chest the reading glasses he’d briefly put on
of drawers was, and stood for a time while searching his phone for the photo
wishing there were rules about how to of the boat were far more stylish and
unpack. In a monastery surely the expensive-looking than Leila’s own
monks had a place for each cowl or readers, which she had bought at the
whatever it was. With some difficulty grocery store. Strongest evidence of all,
she unpacked her few, poorly chosen his teeth were the faint yellow of aged
clothes with extreme care, as if each ivory: they lent the rest of the illusion
drawer were laid open for judgment by authenticity. Like the ferry Leila had
God. She descended again, facing the not felt transporting her over the wa-
stairs with both hands on the railings, ter, Lance perhaps moved through the
and then went for a walk in the world without friction, aging at a frac-
woods. The woods were exquisitely tion of the usual rate. Transplanted
beautiful. Leila wished for more rules into fiction his appearance would be as
to protect them—We ask that you not implausible as his name.
tread on moss, We ask that you pluck “Ancestry.com,” he’d been telling
no wildflower—but perhaps it was the her as they clambered back onto the
colony’s rules for itself that enabled shuttle and for the third time took
the woods to remain so pristine. Once their seats, for the final and shortest
awoken to the need for such rules, ev- leg of the trip. The website had been
eryone made her own. how he’d found out that his maternal
ancestors weren’t Native American at
T
he first thing she’d wondered all, as his mother had always said, but
about the tall man, Lance, African-American Creoles from Loui-
TO ORDER MERCHANDISE , was his age; she’d wondered siana. Whether that information had
VISIT STORE.HARPERS.ORG about that even perhaps before she’d been inadvertently lost or someone
OR CALL (212) 420-5754 wondered about his heritage or ances- had covered it up wasn’t clear; Lance
try or whatever was the currently pal- was still in the throes of his research.
atable word. No, she’d wondered about And not only that, but he’d found a
the two at the same time. She had to whole branch of relations, descended
admit it: she’d gazed on his brown skin, from an illegitimate child of his
adjusted. Taut at the jaw, the slightest grandmother’s sister. That pregnancy
loosening under the ears. Dark hair was a secret that no one had known
barely dusted and perhaps that was until now, but they had all found one

another, and they were having re- It took Leila a moment to grasp why formed on a bunting-draped stage,
unions. His own mother, aged ninety, this sounded familiar. It had been a whittlers whittled, scrimshaw was dis-
who remembered her aunt, had been wooden-boat festival, on the next is- played. There was also no shortage of
able to share stories of their ancestress land over, to which Lance had said he twenty-first-century culture, of displays
with the grandchildren who’d had no was going. Until now it had not on behalf of endangered orcas or op-
idea, before now, what their back- crossed her mind that this event might portunities to buy vegan food, but
ground might be. be real. It had not crossed her mind these only increased Leila’s sense of
It had been this tale, frankly en- that a mere call to a cab company, dispossession. She would rather have
thralling to Leila, that the shuttle such as she made the next morning, lived long ago. At least then the
driver had interrupted with his harsh then a mere ferry ride, would bring the world wasn’t so obviously ending.
cry of “Freeland!” and his violent festival under her nose before she’d Thank God, here was exactly what
yanking open of the minivan’s door. entirely decided to go. she needed: a very esoteric guide to
All that had welled up in Leila to say She still hadn’t entirely decided tying knots (Aidan) and a fold-your-
in response had tumbled back down to go when the festival greeted the own-fleet paper kit (Dashiell); they
her throat. ferry far ahead of the shoreline; of would even fit into her suitcase. Clear
course, it was a boat festival— it as a dream, she saw her suitcase flying
T
he reasons Leila’s marriage would be taking place largely out on over the railing while she stood on
had failed seemed to multiply the water. Up and down the ferry the ferry with Lance; saw its blunt
with every day since its ex- railing under the early morning sun corner dent the dark water, the water
tinction. Early on, despite the mental Leila’s fellow passengers crowded to recoil and spring back, the suitcase
disarray of grief, Leila had felt she was see the small boats on the mirrorlike regrettable jetsam rapidly shrinking
able to describe the trouble fairly con- water. Then the boat Lance had and then lost in the wake. That
cisely. In retrospect, her concise de- shown her on his phone appeared hadn’t happened. Extremely carefully
scription came to seem spurious. It alongside a pier. Leila recognized it Leila stowed her purchased souvenirs
might have been a product of self- so easily that she doubted herself. for her two unforgotten children in
delusion, or of false consciousness in- What had she remembered from the most sheltering part of her back-
stilled by her husband, or even, para- that photo? It seemed unlikely she pack and suddenly knew Lance had
doxical as this seemed, both. Every would have recalled that it was a strode rapidly down the pier because
aspect of the marital reality now three-masted boat with a midnight- he was departing.
seemed the product of her feeble sub- blue hull, but as if to remove any Yesterday, out the window of her
jectivity: perhaps she and her husband lingering doubt, a strikingly tall cottage, she had seen a chickadee
had not even liked midcentury mod- dark-haired man strode down the bouncing around the branches of a fir
ern interiors. Perhaps only her hus- pier toward the boat; then the angle like a freshly whacked pinball. Now
band had liked them and she had pre- of the ferry’s approach made this her heart was behaving this way. Leila
tended she did, to please him. Perhaps view disappear. Leila found herself quickly walked toward the water,
she had liked them and he’d humored alone at the railing. The ferry was seeming to bump into something—a
her. Perhaps no one had liked them docking; the other passengers had table, a person, a trash can—at every
and it had all been a misunderstand- already gone down. Leila reminded step. A premonition of old age—her
ing. Perhaps their experience of love— herself that nothing she was doing poor parents were like this, they
if they had even experienced it—had was wrong, that her husband had drove to the Y every morning to slow-
been a misunderstanding as well. left her eighteen months ago and, motion walk in the pool to maintain
At the women’s retreat, Leila floun- though he was still living in the their balance. But how ironic it was
dered. She couldn’t seem to break guest room, he had hired a lawyer. that they drove there—they must
through the skin of the place. It was a She had hired a lawyer, too, and her have paid bribes to renew their li-
perfectly translucent skin through lawyer, a woman, had said to her, Go censes; one of these days they’d wind
which she could see the stately trees, forth and date. Even that had been up in a ditch. Or worse. Leila flying
the charming cottages, the dewy flow- six, eight, or ten months ago. Leila to visit them monthly, unable to talk
ers, the serenely smiling other women, couldn’t remember. them into moving closer to her and
but she could not pierce that skin, Onshore she drifted among the ta- now, with her impending penniless-
could not seem to get on the right bles and stalls as if she’d never seen the ness, having to consider moving
side of it. She found more and more boat and Lance at the end of the pier. back in with them—but her hus-
pretexts to loiter in the retreat’s li- It was a painfully charming Victorian band would never allow it. Shared
brary, where one afternoon, on her seaside town; everything Leila laid her custody; his job was in New York. It
fourth or fifth day, her non-reading eyes on was like the life-size version of was already a foregone conclusion
was disturbed by the sudden entrance a toy of an aristocratic child of times that they would have to sell the old
of a woman—a visitor from nearby, it past, as if she’d stepped into the nurs- house they had worked so hard on,
turned out—who said, “Look at you, ery of, who was it, perhaps those side by side, stripping the paint from
so serene! At least there’s one place moody jerks from Brideshead Revisited. the doorframes.
around here that’s not crawling with As if to twist the knife of nostalgia for Halted on the waterfront walkway,
wooden-boat tourists.” a past never lived, a brass band per- buffeted on all sides by festivalgoers,
STORY 79
*
Leila could not see Lance’s boat but because of these people his usual
knew it had to be off along the water kismet particularly the thing with
to her left, as the ferry was off along his wife and the whale. So what did
the water to her right. She would turn she think? Of the boat. Maybe im-
right. It was not even lunchtime. proved for her misadventure?
* She’d forgotten, disembarking, to “What about your wife and the
check the return schedule, but it whale?” Leila asked, struggling to follow.
didn’t matter; she would go back to “That dream she had that I told you
the ferry and wait. “So you decided about on the shuttle —the mother
Not sure where to check it out,” said a friendly and whale with two calves? In the dream
unsurprised voice. “Great timing. Ju- the mother whale tells my wife, The
to start with lia’s all rigged and ready to go.” whales need you! My wife says, I’m
In memory she’d smoothed out headed to Haiti, where the poor peo-
169 years of some of the minor irregularities of ple need me, are these whales in
his face, slightly diminished the true Haiti? Should I cancel my trip? My
archives? dimensions of the beaklike nose, but wife has a history of visions and pre-
he was otherwise exactly as he’d monitions. I could tell you some sto-
been however many days before. It ries. Anyway, after lots of debating she
must be some trick of the brain, per- goes through with her trip to Haiti, I
haps particularly on its guard against come here, Julia’s a fucking mess, the
abrupt variations, that made this people I left her with didn’t know
man with whom Leila had only ever what they were doing, but luckily the
spent ninety minutes less than one best riggers in the world are all hang-
week before seem so hyperintensely ing around here all week, I get busy
familiar when the face of Leila’s own but these things can’t be rushed, I’d
estranged husband was mush in her originally planned to leave Tuesday
mind. Though it was less how Lance but I’m still here Wednesday, yester-
looked that was familiar than his day, when the orca-watch people
SUBSCRIBE TO affect—his affect, in fact, of finding come into the bar where I’m having
Leila so familiar. As before he my lunch. It turns out, their whale-
The Weekly Archive seemed to feel entirely assured of her spotting boat has been rammed by
company. Hurrying again to follow these right-wing assholes and they
Newsletter from him, she wondered if in fact during can’t do their annual count. There I
their prior conversation they’d made was, on the brink of being done with
Harper’s Magazine a date she’d forgotten for her to come outfitting Julia to sail her down to Big
and see his boat? But he strode not Sur, where I happen to not have a
with impatience, just that same unre- berth. I didn’t really know what I was
strained, unconscious speed of a long- going to do with her, and then here
a curated selection legged person. “So we’ve had a looooot came the orca-watch people. I said,
of work to do,” he was telling her as Here’s your boat. When I called my
of excellent writing if resuming a complicated conversa- wife, she just couldn’t stop laughing.
tion in which she’d been a fully edu- She said, Why didn’t the goddamn
that helps put the cated participant. Was it men who whale mother appear in your dream?
were mostly like this? Voluble riv- And I said, Remember how I never
week’s events into ers of action and thought? No, that remember my dreams? That whale
greater context, was ridiculous. Leila knew plenty
of women who were rivers of action
mother had to leave me a message
with you. So I’m off to Orcas tomor-
delivered to and thought, carving paths with row,” he concluded. “Want to come?”
their waterweight and not caring a “Me?” Leila exclaimed when it was
your inbox twig if the f lotsam f lowed with clear, from his expectant silence,
them or not; and as well she knew that he was not only finished telling
* free of charge * plenty of men who were inactive his story but had actually asked her
f lotsam. Now Lance, whose out- this question.
pourings had not paused while she “Yes, you. Aren’t you looking for
pondered their nature, was handing something like this?”
her onto the boat—Mind the cleat— “What would make you say that?”
to sign up today, she wouldn’t believe this but the
people he’d entrusted this boat to
“People find their way to us, my wife
and me, all the time. People who are
visit HARPERS.ORG/ had neglected or misunderstood but looking for something, or who just
in a way it had all turned out better need to be somewhere. I thought that
FROMTHEARCHIVE/
might be your situation. To be honest, “You told your wife about our “You don’t even have to do that. If
I thought that you might be the whale connection?” Just like that, she had you’re here tomorrow, you’re here.” It
mother. You have two sons, right? In acknowledged it. was all up to her, then, as she knew
my wife’s dream, the whale mother “My wife and I opened our marriage it must be.
had two calves. Sometimes my wife’s a long time ago. It works well for us.”
A
dreams are symbolic, not literal.” Was this something people did? Had t dinner that night the other
The boat—Julia—was shifting Leila, running the rat race in New York women were delighted with
subtly and rhythmically beneath for the past twenty years, entirely missed her fraudulent story of hav-
them; even still water can never be a revolution in social arrangements? ing gone to the wooden-boat festival
still if it’s part of the ocean. Leila un- “And did she—did she think I was just because it had piqued her inter-
precedentedly perceived that the the whale mother, or not?” This was est. So celebratory were they of her
ocean was truly one body, lying be- cowardly and evasive; now it was Leila little excursion that she understood
neath the eyes of her children as who was cornered. how obvious her floundering had
they rode the Q train over the Man- “She thought you’d come to me for been to them, yet she wasn’t embar-
hattan Bridge to school in the morn- a reason. Whether or not you were rassed. Something had changed in
ing no less than it lay against the the whale mother, we were taking a her on the trip back. Their praise
hull of Julia, atop which she now sat. wait-and-see attitude. We’ll know bounced against her like blows off a
Connecting Leila to her children when we need to.” drum—she felt taut and resonant
and to whale mothers and calves and She hadn’t meant for her laughter to and dominating.
all the other millions and billions of sound so derisive. “I’ve never known After dinner she slipped off to the
creatures suspended in ocean trans- when I need to. I’m not sure I believe field where she’d found she could get a
lucence like the raisins and grapes people can.” clear signal. It was past ten at home—
Leila’s mother suspended in quiver- Lance turned away from her for so the boys would be in bed, but it would
ing rings of grape Jell-O, which had long she thought he might be re- be better to have his entire attention.
been, in her ignorant girlhood, Lei- ceiving Morse code from the shore. He said, irrelevantly, “Where are all
la’s favorite dessert. She’d liked the He was apparently thinking. His those women you’re supposed to be
way light passed into the Jell-O and profile was extremely unusual, like retreating with?”
picked out the resident fruits. Run- shale roughly hacked with a hatchet. “You think they’d take your side? Is
ning away on a boat with a man to Despite the severity of the outline that really how smug you are?”
save whales wasn’t something any ac- there was something boyish about “Leila, if you run off on a boat
tual person, certainly not any middle- his face in profile that was maybe the with some man, you will lose custody
aged woman with two children and absence of judgment. He seemed of your kids. Do you hear what I’m
an estranged husband, did. Running genuinely puzzled by what she had saying?” She couldn’t even listen to
away on a boat with a man to save said. “Most people are at a total loss him, his knee-jerk condescension.
whales was the sort of thing a highly when there’s nothing important to Into her silence he added, “You’re
privileged, self-indulgent, insuffer- do,” he said finally. “We’re not sup- having an episode.”
ably youthful sort of person did. posed to be totally idle and cared “You’re having an episode,” Leila
Anyone who did something like for—even kids shouldn’t be totally replied automatically. It was such a
this was a person Leila envied and idle and cared for. It makes them de- mistake to have called.
loathed. “Did you ask your wife if she pressed. I think your problem is that “I’m not having an episode,” he
thought I was the whale mother?” you’re punishing yourself for the said with the same infuriating com-
she asked challengingly. He couldn’t completely normal feeling of want- posure. “I’m making tuna salad for the
possibly be here, tall, lean, brown, lu- ing something important to do.” kids’ lunches tomorrow, I’m going
dicrously capable, standing on a Before she left, they exchanged over Dashiell’s math, I’m ordering all
storybook boat on the mirrorlike sea numbers, and then—as had so many the shit Aidan needs for his science-
on a paradisal day in an island chain of the women at the retreat upon first fair project, and I’m waiting to switch
just offshore of the sunset, offering to meeting her, as if there were no more laundry into the dryer.”
transform her existence. mundane salutation—he embraced “As if you’re a hero for doing it!
“I did, the day I met you. Actually, her. But he was so much taller—so Who did it for the ten years before
I texted her, because her service is so much larger overall —than those you left me?”
shitty in Haiti. My text said, Maybe women. His body blotted the sun. “Go to sleep, please. Enjoy your re-
the whale mother isn’t a whale? Then Her cheek, pressed to his ribs, was treat. Try to make use of it.”
she called the next day and we talked indented by the mallet of his heart. Screaming Fuck you! into the
about it.” She wondered if this was his resting phone would only bring the retreat
“Talked about it how?” Leila said, pulse or if his heart was agitated. She women fluttering into the field. Lost
with the sense that she was driving couldn’t tell. would be her brief moment of triumph
him into a corner. “There’s no obligation,” he clari- at dinner. Lost would be that sensa-
“I told her about our connection.” fied as he released her. “Only come if tion, so novel, that she knew what she
After a moment he added, “Don’t pre- you want to.” wanted, that there was nothing more
tend you don’t know what I mean.” “I’ll text either way.” simple to know. n
STORY 81
R E V I E W S
new books
By Julian Lucas
T
here’s a lot of crying and cum- of passion as with
ming in Garth Greenwell’s its fulfillment.
CLEANNESS (Farrar, Straus The narrator
and Giroux, $26), an arresting novel o f Cl e a n n e s s,
that revolves, title notwithstanding, older and more
around the upheaval and mess of desire. restless, drifts
Set in Bulgaria, where an expatriate among irrecon-
teacher finds himself caught between a cilable roles: mentor to local students; podar, or “lord,” who derides him as “fat”
strained relationship and the lure of on-and-off boyfriend of R., a closeted before whipping him with a cat-o’-nine-
one-off S-and-M hookups, it’s an elec- man from Portugal; and compulsive if tails. The dynamic gives the narrator
trifying portrait of sex’s power to lacer- ambivalent partner to fetishists he pleasure before it tips, imperceptibly,
ate and liberate, to make and unmake meets online. The novel itself is di- into harrowing abuse. He weeps in an
our deepest selves. The book arrives vided into three acts. In the center lies alley after making a narrow escape: “I
amid a wave of mainstream interest in the narrator’s relationship with R., felt with a new fear how little sense of
the erotic lives of gay men, but its frank which flourishes during an idyllic va- myself I have, how there was no end to
exploration of kink, loneliness, shame, cation to Italy but founders back in what I could want or to the punishment
and dark pleasures hearkens back to a Bulgaria, where R., struggling with I would seek.”
less carefree period—as though to re- childhood trauma and still tethered to The book’s sex scenes unfold like
store a charge of risk and consequence his life in Lisbon, hesitates to put down revelations, effortlessly braiding inner
to queer sex in the era of corporate roots. On either side stand trials of drama with precisely choreographed
pride and Call Me by Your Name. desire in the wilderness, from trysts intimacy. Greenwell’s long, luxuriously
What Belongs to You, Greenwell’s with strangers to shame-inducing flirta- becomma’d sentences, always on the
2016 debut, locates that charge in the tions with attractive male students. edge of ending, create a tension re-
relationship between an American The anchoring tension is between ceptive to the lightest touch: a shift
teacher and a young hustler he meets sex’s transformative possibility and the in rhythm, or one clause’s tiny revi-
in the men’s room un- ever-present danger of sion of its predecessor, can entirely
der Sofia’s National harm, whether psy- alter the chemistry of a scene. He
Palace of Culture. A chic, social, or even melds an incantatory cadence with
quick suck in the stall that of violence and the catechistic language of porn,
leads to an obsessive, infection. R. temporar- which is ridiculous until you’re “lit up
manipulative attach- ily delivers the narrator with a longing that makes it the most
ment, which begins to from his free-floating beautiful language in the world.”
erode the boundaries lust, as though he When the narrator barebacks a sub-
between the narrator’s “poured a kind of missive Bulgarian partner, relin-
privileged life and his cleanness over every- quishing his fear of disease and first
lover’s desperate cir- thing,” but it’s only a experiencing the thrill of domina-
cumstances. Cleanness partial reprieve: “even tion, Greenwell writes:
is a variation on the as I lay with R., flooded I slapped him then, hard on his ass,
same pattern—both books’ narrators with love . . . a part [of me] longed to be and he groaned, Please, he said, his
teach English in Sofia, as did back here.” In one instance, “back here” voice electric with need, please, fuck
Greenwell—but is more self-reflexive in means on his knees in the drab apart- me like your whore, I want to be your
outlook, as concerned with the purpose ment of an older Bulgarian he calls gos- faggot whore, and at the sound of it I
Top: A Polaroid by Pierre Keller from his monograph My Colorful Life, published by Edition Patrick Frey.
Courtesy the artist and Edition Patrick Frey. Bottom: Photograph from Sofia, Bulgaria © Mihaela Ivanova REVIEWS 83
felt something move in me, like a
shifting of gears.
Bulgaria itself provides a less stimu-

lating backdrop. Too often, Greenwell
aligns the narrator’s angst with its
vaguely sketched political malaise, as
though the nation, too, feels trapped
between a repressive status quo and li-
bidinal chaos. His relationship with
R. flickers out at a kitschy light show
near a castle beloved by nationalists,
while the assault by gospodar immedi-
ately precedes a chapter detailing a
2013 antigovernment demonstration.
Like the sex, it begins as a thrilling
experiment and ends in tears: a friend
of the narrator is beaten by fellow pro-
testers for his sexual orientation.
Though this is a wrenching moment,
the character and the politics subse-
quently drop out of the book. Despite invaders, labored in fortified settle- by their experiences in Africa, soldiers
his seven years in Bulgaria, the narrator ments on turbulent frontiers, and from any of these states would have
remains a self-conscious interloper, and served masters who viewed them as been “dangerous people to own.”
the scene a perfunctory engagement adversaries. Nowhere was this pattern Brown uses this African background,
with circumstances that might have more pronounced than in 1760s Ja- and his intimate knowledge of Jamai-
added dimension to Greenwell’s other- maica, “a fabulous commercial en- ca’s geography, to interpret the rebels’
wise intimately powerful work. trepôt and a potent military garrison” aims. Reading their maneuvers, he con-
where slaveholder-officers split their cludes that Tacky’s revolt was a serious
T
he expatriate novel may set time between plantation management attempt to establish “territorial and
local politics at a distance, but and expeditions to annex French Sen- political control” over Jamaica—a proj-
some foreigners profoundly egal or sack Spanish Cartagena. ect the book’s transatlantic context
challenge the societies in which they Maroons—runaway slaves who estab- makes legible for the first time. The
find themselves. In TACKY’S REVOLT lished villages in the mountainous rebellion’s first target was a coastal fort,
(Harvard University Press, $35), his- interior—patrolled the wilderness, where Tacky’s forces shot a sentinel and
torian Vincent Brown tells the story their autonomy secured through a seized a store of armaments. Rather
of the African soldiers responsible for devil’s bargain to enforce their former than heading for the safety of the
the eighteenth-century British Em- masters’ rule. The largest ethnic group mountains, they marched from planta-
pire’s largest slave rebellion. It began on the island, the so-called Coroman- tion to plantation, burning, looting,
in Jamaica in April 1760, when a man tees, from the Gold Coast, were both and recruiting—even pausing to roast
named Tacky led a three-week upris- coveted and feared by the planter class an ox on the second night. After a
ing in a rugged northeastern parish. as natural leaders. British counterattack, they retreated
Tacky was a former military leader In some cases, military men owned seaward and occupied a rocky coastal
from the Gold Coast, and Brown ar- military men. Another rebel com- inlet, a “defensible dominion [that] held
gues that his revolt was one phase of mander, Wager, belonged to a British the promise of communication with
a larger plot that spanned the island naval captain who named him after— the world beyond Jamaica.” Cuba, and
and reverberated across the region. The and employed him aboard—the Britain’s Spanish enemies, were just
roughly one thousand men and women H.M.S. Wager. Like Tacky, Wager was across the water.
who participated were veterans of West a Coromantee warrior. We know this, A maroon mercenary killed Tacky,
African battlefields and British impe- incredibly, because a slave agent who whose forces subsequently dispersed or
rial campaigns, bringing strategic had retired to Jamaica recognized Wa- died in grisly executions. But after-
knowledge from the Old World to ger as a former business contact from shocks across the colony suggest that
the New. From their particular strife, the other side of the Atlantic. There, the uprising was intended to have a
Brown derives not only a story of the Brown determines, he might have wider scope. There was another upris-
insurrection, but “a martial geography been a dignitary from one of several ing at the naval yard in Port Royal,
of Atlantic slavery,” vividly demon- warring kingdoms such as Dahomey while Wager’s rebellion struck the west-
strating how warfare shaped every or Asante, where nearly every man ern parishes in May. His faction briefly
aspect of bondage. was trained for battle, and hit-and-run defended a barricaded village against
Slavery itself was war all the way fighting in forested terrain was com- the British, and after its fall, survived
down. Captives lost their freedom to mon. Prepared for asymmetric war nearly a year of guerrilla combat.
The Maroons in Ambush on the Dromilly Estate in the Parish of Trelawney, Jamaica, an aquatint by
84 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 ¸ Jules Bourgoin. Courtesy the British Library, London
J. Mérigot, based on a painting by Francois
Meanwhile, authorities discovered throughout, Condé’s OF MORSELS shameful eccentricity. Other meals
strange conspiracies among the en A ND M A RV ELS (Seagull Books, make new homelands more bearable.
slaved: a black woman enthroned at $27.50) is a lightheartedly grand and At Thanksgiving in the United States,
secret meetings as the Queen of Kings gossipy memoir in meals. The genre she substitutes goose marinated in or
ton, a “sword of state” more than a might seem insubstantial fare for a ange juice and rum for “boiled card
meter long with a velvet hilt, mourners writer of Condé’s stature, and she knows board” turkey. Still others signal the
smuggling firearms in a coffin. it, slyly opening with her publisher’s vanishing of old ways: after teaching
For Brown, the reluctance among pearlclutching refusal to consider the an elaborate class on Guadeloupean
military historians to “acknowledge book of recipes she initially proposed. “ethnocuisine” in Paris, she moves
slave revolt as an act of war” is part of a It’s an easy segue from there to her girl back home to find everyone on the is
long tradition of erasing resistance from hood experiments in the kitchen. Defy land eating Margherita pizza. Even her
below. Opposing this tendency, Brown ing a mother who believed that “only relatives no longer have time for tradi
finds “fugitive territories” and “counter stupid people like to cook”—and whose tional food. After she stages a kitchen
mappings” that didn’t move borders but own mother, the subject of Condé’s bio intervention at her brother’s house,
profoundly altered the Jamaican and graphical novel Victoire, spent her life her sisterinlaw all but evicts her—but
imperial landscapes. Tacky’s revolt cooking for a family of white Creoles— not before decreeing a list of culinary
might have been brief, but it did help she began adulterating recipes at an taboos, including a prohibition on
scare the British into abolishing the early age, mixing cinnamon with curry mixing sweet and savory flavors.
slave trade. It also illuminates an archi or aged rum with coconut flan. She “Cooking does not lend itself to po
pelago of uprisings that struck Suri brings the same transgressive spirit to liteness or pretence,” Condé writes.
name, St. John, Antigua, and New York the book’s mélange of cooking and lit “Whatever the palate doesn’t like the
in the same period, all led by Coroman erature, which “boils down to mixing throat cannot swallow or the stomach
tees. Most of all, the revolt lived on as a sheep with goats, jute with silk”: an digest.” She might as well be describing
model of resistance in Jamaica. Forty “enduring crime of treason.” her own sensibility. The book’s great
years after Tacky’s defeat, new arrivals The book is more travelogue than pleasure is how frankly Condé, a one
from Africa were still hearing about the gastronomic treatise. Condé writes of woman dinner party, holds forth on
daring rebels who upended the island leaving the lychee and black pudding everywhere she’s been and everyone
and—according to the eighteenth of Guadeloupe for the boiled vegeta she’s met, a roster that includes Japa
century slaveholding historian Bryan bles of the Parisian pension where she nese academics, future African presi
Edwards—drank rum spiked with their lived while studying at the Sorbonne. dents, and even Mother Teresa, who
masters’ blood. She compares the hands Condé a busi
variants of mafé—a ness card in the Cal
C
uisine requires a dash of rebel Malian dish of meat, cutta airport. There’s
élan, and few have it in greater peanut paste, and plenty of dishing
abundance than the Guadelou tomato sauce—at throughout: Angela
pean writer Maryse Condé. Among the homes and in restau Davis misunderstood
Francophone Caribbean’s greatest liv rants across West Af I, Tituba; the Cala
ing novelists, and regularly considered rica, where she led a bash Literary Festi
a contender for the Nobel Prize in Lit peripatetic life after val is mediocre.
erature, Condé is renowned for his divorcing her first Cuisine becomes
torical fiction that spans the African husband in Guinea. a model for the in
diaspora, focusing on lives that link its She recounts moving tuitive allergies and
several parts. Her masterpiece, Segu, an to America, where affinities that gov
epic of the Bambara Empire, extends she learns Jewish and ern interpersonal
from Malian royal courts to Brazilian Mexican recipes from academic col relations—and indeed, for the cosmo
plantations, while I, Tituba imagines leagues but initially dislikes soul food: a politan writer, tasked with adapting the
the life of the enslaved Bajan woman synecdoche for her constantly frustrated tastiest morsels from every milieu. Just
who bedeviled colonial Salem. Her attempts to integrate herself into as she flouts the rules of “traditional
writing was transatlantic before the AfricanAmerican cultural life. The dishes whose unchanging recipes seem
concept was in vogue, and her remark later chapters detail trips occasioned by to come from sacred texts,” Condé the
ably international career has involved literary and cultural conferences, of writer advocates for what she calls “lit
long residences in Guadeloupe, Ghana, which Condé seems to have attended erary cannibalism,” after a model for
Guinea, and France, as well as on both every one on earth. postcolonial literature inspired by the
coasts of the United States. Along the Some dishes arrive like longlost re Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade. His
way, she’s purloined recipes from profes lations. After striking up a friendship 1924 manifesto praised the Tupi Indi
sors, revolutionaries, restaurateurs, and, with the wife of a North African dig ans who devoured the “noble parts” of
in one instance, the sultan of Yogya nitary in Paris, Condé flies to visit her Portuguese missionaries—an invita
karta, who appeared to her in a dream. in Tunisia and eats tagine, a stew that tion, Condé writes, for colonized art
Translated by her husband, Richard mixes fruit and meat in a way she’d ists to digest only the most nutritious
Philcox, whom she affectionately ribs previously considered to be her own values of the West. n
Photograph by Valery Rizzo REVIEWS 85

the confidential lilt of German, and,
salka the salonnière through the open terrace doors, the
ionized breath of the sea,” in the de-
On the queen of old Hollywood’s émigrés scription of Donna Rifkind, a book
critic and the author of The Sun and
Her Stars, the first English-language
By Ruth Franklin biography of Viertel. The house
quickly became a headquarters for
the luminaries of Hollywood’s “Ger-
Discussed in this essay: man colony.” “You might find your-
self sharing brilliant conversation or
The Kindness of Strangers, by Salka Viertel. New York Review Books. a Sachertorte with [Bertolt] Brecht,”
368 pages. $17.95. recalled the producer and actor
The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of John Houseman (bor n Jacques
Hollywood, by Donna Rifkind. Other Press. 352 pages. $28.99. Haussmann in Romania). There,
Greta Garbo discussed how to play
Hamlet with producer Max Rein-
hardt; Charlie Chaplin discovered
his musical ghostwriter; and Arnold
Schoenberg made small talk with
Arthur Rubinstein.
At first, Salka—as Rifkind always
refers to her—primarily played the
role of social connector, helping new
émigrés create friendships and find
employment opportunities. As the
political situation grew more dire,
she used her wide-ranging list of con-
tacts to help secure visas and affida-
vits for friends, family members, and
strangers seeking a lifeline out of Eu-
rope. Once scolded by her childhood
governess for being too extroverted,
Salka put that very quality to work
in saving countless lives.
Salka chronicled her fascinating
life in The Kindness of Strangers, a
stylishly written, stirring memoir
originally published in 1969, when
I
n May 1941, Thomas and Hein- nominally a birthday toast to his she was seventy-nine, and recently
rich Mann, along with several brother—Thomas Mann denounced restored to print. Now complement-
dozen other members of the Eu- what had become of Germany’s great ing it is The Sun and Her Stars, in
ropean intelligentsia in exile, gath- humanist tradition, suggesting that which Rifkind makes a passionate
ered in a Santa Monica living room even Goethe and Nietzsche, were case for rescuing her subject from an-
for a belated celebration of Hein- they still alive, would have joined the onymity. The refugees—“a group of
rich’s seventieth birthday. As Nazism émigrés in America rather than suffer traumatized artists who were lucky
consumed their native Germany, the the depredations of the Third Reich. enough to escape Hitler’s death
brothers had fled to Hollywood, “When the homeland becomes for- trains and extermination camps”—
where, during the war years, an as- eign,” he concluded, “the foreign be- were “Hitler’s gift to America . . . pro-
toundingly distinguished group of comes the homeland.” digious individuals who enriched the
European artists and intellectuals The host of the birthday gather- film culture and the intellectual life
found refuge and employment. In a ing, Salka Viertel, was the living em- of our nation, and whose influence
speech he delivered that night— bodiment of that idea. A former stage continues to resonate,” Rif kind
actress who had the luck and the pre- writes. The story of their contribu-
Ruth Franklin is the author, most recently, of science to get out of Europe in the tions to Hollywood’s golden age has
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life late 1920s, she reinvented herself in been told. But, as Rifkind argues, the
(Liveright), which won the 2016 National America as a screenwriter and created accomplishments of those who
Book Critics Circle award for biography.
Her essay “The Eeriness of the Everyday” a replica of a Continental salon in worked behind the scenes—many
appeared in the September 2018 issue of her beachside home: “Arpège and ci- of whom were women—have been
Harper’s Magazine. gar smoke, a tumult of piano chords, unjustly forgotten.
Illustration by Joan Wong. Source images: photographs of Salka Viertel © Private Collection;
86 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 filmstrip © imageBROKER/Alamy; map of the German Empire © World History Archive/Alamy
R
ifkind focuses her book on Berlin, she and her brother Edward, town. “You know that I am going to
Salka Viertel’s years in Hol- a pianist whom Schoenberg had marry you?” he asked at the end of
lywood, skipping her sub- tapped as his designated interpreter, the night.
ject’s early life almost entirely. It’s a created their “own small Wychylowka” The Viertels spent the next de-
defensible choice—many biographers in a two-room apartment. Every cade moving from one set of fur-
chafe at the de rigueur recitation of morning, a new page from Schoen- nished rooms to another, following
grade-school accomplishments. Still, berg’s opera Pierrot Lunaire would ar- job opportunities from Prague to Zu-
knowing where a person comes from, rive in the mail, and Edward would rich to Dresden and back again.
especially an exile, is important. As immediately sit down to practice it. Their financial condition was so pre-
she writes in her memoir, Salka— The first performance was greeted carious that Salka often feared to re-
born Salomea Steuermann; she used with boos and hisses, but his admira- move the dust covers from their bor-
her nickname almost exclusively— tion for the composer did not dimin- rowed furniture. Nonetheless, they
grew up happily on an estate called ish. Salka would remember Schoen- seem to have encountered all the
Wychylowka, just outside the town berg’s “huge, dark, burning eyes, the greatest artists of the era. Rifkind
of Sambor, in what was then Polish eyes of a genius.” laments in her biography that re-
Galicia and is now Ukraine. She, her Salka was vacationing with her searchers have mined Salka’s book
sister, and their two brothers spent family in Zakopane, a Polish moun- for anecdotes about her more famous
summer days swimming in the Dnies- tain resort, when the Archduke acquaintances while ignoring the
ter River or collecting mushrooms Franz Ferdinand was shot. By the memoirist herself, but it’s easy to see
and berries; in the evening, the fa- time they got home, Wychylowka why—the anecdotes are wonderful.
mily gathered around the piano to had become an army headquarters In Prague, the Viertels dined occa-
sing Mozart, Verdi, or Schubert. Her and was filled with soldiers. She and sionally with Max Brod and Franz
father was the town’s first Jewish her sister volunteered as nurse’s Kafka, but Salka was “too awed and
mayor; from her mother, Auguste, aides at the hospital up the road: too shy” to speak to the great writer.
the young Salka learned the impor- Later, when Berthold was working
tance of hospitality. The house had What we desperately wanted to con- in Dresden (she commuted via over-
two kitchens, one featuring a French vey to those dazed, maimed men, night train from Munich to visit
was that we were personally con-
chef, the other kept strictly kosher cerned, and we tried to draw them
him), they had tea with Rilke and
for observant guests. out from the horrible anonymity lunch with Oskar Kokoschka:
Like many assimilated European into which they had been thrown.
families, the Steuermanns were only Entering his studio I noticed a blond
nominally Jewish—though even so, Meanwhile, the railway station in woman reclining on the couch,
which in my short-sightedness I be-
Salka’s father would express disap- Sambor filled with trains from the
lieved to be another guest, but which
proval when her first suitor proposed east, “crowded with starved, parched, was a life-sized doll, the replica of a
on Yom Kippur. They celebrated ill-smelling people, mostly Jews . . . lady he had been in love with. . . . We
Christmas twice each year: once as a with memories of pogroms still in ignored her presence.
family, then again two weeks later their bones.” The Steuermanns fled
with their Ukrainian servants. But ahead of the Russian advance, roll- Meeting Brecht for the first time in
Salka was fascinated by an Orthodox ing up their precious Persian rugs for Berlin, she writes: “He could have
family in the village and would peer safekeeping in the vaults of the local been painted on a silk scroll as an
in the windows as they lit their Sab- Catholic church. The train journey Oriental sage, had it not been for
bath candles. “I knew that we were to the Carpathians, usually two his eternal leather coat and cap,
Jewish,” she wrote in her memoir, hours, took six days. It was Salka’s which made him seem dressed for
first taste of refugee life. an automobile race.”
but we certainly did not belong to By the time she returned home, The life of a working actress was
those strange people in long black the following summer, the house especially difficult in those politi-
kaftans, with beards and sidelocks,
and we did not understand their
had been looted; even the rugs in cally unsettled, economically un-
harsh idiom. Still, we were not the church had been eaten by rats. stable years. After the birth of
Christians either. The Germans were r unning a Hans, her first child, Salka went
P.O.W. camp next door. They invited back to performing almost immedi-
Even as a child, she lived between the Steuermann women to join them ately, nursing the baby in her dress-
two worlds. in their bowling alley, but “the pres- ing room. (One of the parts she
Salka’s parents brought their ence of the two skeletons [P.O.W.s] played, a longtime role, was Me-
theater-obsessed teenage daughter to putting up the pins prevented us from dea.) She had no money for baby
visit a famous director, hoping he appreciating our hosts’ humor and in- clothes, but a fan who heard about
would discourage her. “The girl has dubitable politeness,” she wrote. Back her pregnancy sent a layette, a ges-
talent,” he pronounced instead. She in Vienna, an acquaintance intro- ture that moved her to tears. After
spent the early years of her career duced her to Berthold Viertel, a the arrival of her second son, Peter,
bouncing from one company to an- young director who listened with in- Salka returned to work “after six
other in Zurich, Berlin, Vienna. In terest to her stories about her home- weeks of exercise and dieting.” She
REVIEWS 87
took jobs in Hamburg, Leipzig, and cast in a few small film roles, includ- don’t see any reason why one should
wherever else they were offered, ing opposite Garbo as the prostitute not work in Germany. The Jewish
while Berthold directed in Dresden Marthy in the German-language ver- question concerns only the Jews.”
and the children spent much of sion of Anna Christie. But—at age She got up and left.
their time with a nanny. Mean- thirty-nine when she emigrated—she In August 1939, now naturalized
while, the conditions around the soon realized she was “neither beau- as an American citizen, Salka was
family deteriorated. Returning to tiful nor young enough” for film. in Europe again—this time laying
Germany with the children after a And after working in the theater, the groundwork for a biopic about
summer in Wychylowka, Salka had she was frustrated by the pace: “Act- Marie Curie. Just two days before
to buy new train tickets at each ing in fragments is like drinking she intended to meet her mother in
transfer point, the prices changing from an eyedropper.” Warsaw, the Non-Aggression Pact
constantly with inflation. In Kra- Salka was a writer, as her memoir was announced:
kow, she spent all her Polish zloty makes beautifully clear. Here is her
on milk for the children; at the first impression of California, in- My telephone kept ringing; people had
Czech border, as the customs offi- flected by her European perspective heard that I was in Paris and desperate
voices besieged me for help. I had
cer poked through her bag of dirty but instantly recognizable: heartbreaking visits from total strang-
diapers, she learned that her deval- ers and I promised everyone to do
ued currency was insufficient to get We found Los Angeles cold and
whatever I could to get them affidavits.
her even as far as Prague. A theater- overcast, with the sun, against
which we had been so emphatically
goer recognized her and bought her The problem was the American quota
warned, invisible. While we were
a third-class ticket to Dresden, driving along Sunset Boulevard I no- system for immigration, which, as Rif-
where she left the children with ticed that there were no sidewalks in kind writes, “was designed to accept
Bert hold before continuing on to front of the uniform, clapboard more ‘racially desirable’ people from
the job that awaited her in Ham- houses and bungalows. An extraor- northern Europe . . . and fewer unde-
burg. A peasant family on the train dinary fantasy was displayed in roof sirable emigrants,” and which actually
offered the children thick slices of styling: some roofs were like mush- inspired, in part, Nazi policies. (The
bread slathered with raspberry jam, rooms, many imitated Irish thatch Nazis were also impressed by our Jim
but pride prevented her from ask- and the shape of others was inspired Crow laws, although they found the
ing for one for herself. by Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread “one drop” standard too high.) After
house. Ice cream was sold in the gap-
In the summer of 1928, at Wychy- Kristallnacht, the U.S. Consulate in
ing mouth of a huge frog, or inside a
lowka again with the children—who rabbit; a restaurant was called “The Berlin alone received 160,000 applica-
now included a third son, Tommy— Brown Derby” and looked like one. tions for visas, but 77 percent of
Salka received a cable from Berthold The buses we passed offered service Americans opposed increasing the
telling her he had been offered a job with a smile . . . quotas. The official government posi-
in the United States. “They say Hol- tion toward the refugees was “sympa-
lywood is a paradise! We will have a But she would soon chafe at the thy without hospitality.”
bungalow,” he wrote. The couple’s frustrations of life in Hollywood. Af- Salka offered sympathy with hos-
recent years had been marked by the ter she spent months working on a pitality. Liesl Frank and Charlotte
failure of an experimental theater treatment for a film about Queen Dieterle, two other émigrés in Holly-
troupe they had founded together in Christina of Sweden—a vehicle for wood’s German community, had es-
Berlin; later, Salka had come down Garbo—the producer Irving Thal- tablished the European Film Fund,
with a near-fatal case of pneumonia. berg insulted her with a lowball offer, which asked all Europeans employed
It is no surprise they were both ready which she defiantly rejected. They by studios to donate 1 percent of
to leave a disintegrating Europe. eventually agreed on a number, and their salaries to refugee relief.
Still, Salka regretted giving up an of- Salka was proud of the final product, (Among those who complied were
fer from a theater company in Berlin; but the film was not commercially the Casablanca cast and crew, which
she must have suspected that moving successful. A story about Napoleon’s was made up almost entirely of émi-
to Hollywood meant that she would affair with Marie Walewska, another grés.) Together with them and oth-
never work in theater again. But she potential role for Garbo, spurred the ers, Salka marshaled her powerful
could not let her own desires get in studio to send Salka on a research friends to offer affidavits guarantee-
the way of her husband’s ambition. trip to France, allowing her to re- ing financial support to new emi-
unite briefly with her mother, her sis- grants; among those who contributed
“W
hy don’t you write?” Garbo ter, and Edward, in Switzerland. were Dorothy Parker and Herman
suggested to Salka. The Though anti-Semitism in Poland was Mankiewicz. Sometimes the matches
two women had met at a on the rise, Jews continued to be ac- she made were fateful. The director
party not long after Salka’s arrival in cepted in cultural life; Edward was James Whale had heard the music of
Hollywood, striking up a lifelong still able to perform, even if his stu- Franz Waxman, a Jewish composer
friendship. “I am not a writer,” Salka dents were beginning to leave Vienna. from Germany, and wanted to com-
replied. “I am an actress, temporarily At a dinner party in Paris, the permission him to write a score for The
unemployed.” She managed to get son seated next to Salka remarked, “I Bride of Frankenstein, but didn’t

know how to contact him until the through luck / Have I outlived so ducing the two men, calling her “a
two men encountered each other at many friends.” destroyer of walls, a builder of bridg-
Salka’s salon. After that commission es, a welcome among strangers.” But
H
launched Waxman on a successful ollywood, in the words of here Salka was unsuccessful: Schoen-
career, he used his newfound wealth screenwriter S. N. Behrman, berg, a consummate artist, insisted
to provide affidavits for just about was “as crowded with artists as on complete control of all the sound
anyone who asked, including an en- Renaissance Florence. . . . It had never in the film, including the actors’ dic-
tire family in Vienna who shared his happened before. It will never happen tion, and naturally Thalberg de-
last name but to whom he was not again.” Rifkind argues strenuously for clined. Nothing, not even Salka’s
related. “Their school-age daughter Salka’s significance in shaping the emotional intelligence, could have
had written to him out of the blue motion-picture industry, noting that made Schoenberg a composer of
after seeing his name on the credits movie music. Still, she told the story
at the cinema,” Rifkind reports. “He the aspirations and concerns of émi- of the encounter unforgettably, de-
saved them all.” gré filmmakers such as Salka—themes scribing Schoenberg as so anxious
of isolation and belonging, of home
Meanwhile, Salka cabled ever- and away—were now so fused into the
about forgetting his umbrella that
increasing sums to “unknown people language of Hollywood pictures as to he clutched it throughout the meet-
with Jewish names” on behalf of her be indistinguishable from it. ing. (Things didn’t go much better
mother, who was now at the mercy of when Brecht decided he wanted to
the Soviets occupying eastern Poland. But it’s a stretch to call Salka a write a “commercial” screen treat-
Garbo, too, pleaded with the U.S. am- filmmaker: she seems to have been ment with Salka as his coauthor:
bassador to Moscow, whom she had mainly a screenwriter and consul- “What the producers want is an
met in Sweden, to expedite Auguste tant, although it’s hard to tell, since original but familiar, unusual but
Steuermann’s visa. In September 1941, some of her work was uncredited. popular, moralistic but sexy, true but
as the Nazis advanced eastward, Sal- Her ultimate gift was in creating improbable, tender but violent, slick
ka’s mother was finally allowed to links between people, although even but highbrow masterpiece,” she told
board a ship for the United States. It she could not always bridge the him with all the jadedness of her
is only too clear what happened to all chasm between brash Hollywood years in Hollywood.)
the people who could not take advan- and genteel Central Europe. Rifkind It is a distinct challenge to write the
tage of such well-placed connections, cites her skill as a “cultural broker” at life story of someone who has already
including Salka’s younger brother, a meeting between Thalberg and written it so well herself. Rifkind’s
Dusko, whom she was unable to get Schoenberg—the producer, prepos- main contribution is providing histori-
out of Poland. When Salka confided terously, wanted the avant-garde cal context, filling in details that
to Brecht about her survivor’s guilt, he composer to provide music for one of Salka herself didn’t know, such as the
wrote a poem for her about it that his films—and scorns those who fate of Dusko, who was likely mur-
began: “I know, of course, that only have credited Salka only with intro- dered by the Germans during an Ak-
tion in 1943, when all the Jews re-
maining in Sambor were rounded up
and shot. Rifkind’s wide-angle view is
also useful in examining what hap-
pened to Salka during the years im-
mediately following the war, when she
was “pink-listed” owing to what some
people misinterpreted as her sympa-
thy for the Soviet Union. One night
at a dinner party, the head of Warner
Brothers asked how her mother had
escaped from the Soviet Union, and
Salka volunteered her opinion that
the Soviets had largely behaved de-
cently to the Jews under their control.
She would later qualify it:
It was no news to anyone that I ab-
horred nationalism, militarism, fas-
cism, torture, concentration camps,
genocide, starvation and the unspeak-
able sufferings of mankind, inflicted
to create a superior race or a classless
society. But I never equated Stalin
with Hitler, nor communism with
Naziism, and I optimistically believed
Greta Garbo (left) and Salka Viertel (right) in Anna Christie, 1930 © MGM/Photofest REVIEWS 89
A PORTRAIT OF
VALOR
in the victory of reason, which would in Rifkind’s telling she comes across
ultimately defeat white, red or black as nearly saintly. Her charm was ob-
global bestiality. viously legendary; even a Western
Union operator, after taking down a
Though some of her friends spoke morose telegram from her, called back
FROM A LION OF up in her defense, Salka’s work the next day to make sure she was all
THE LEFT
dried up as McCarthyism took hold. right (“All night I worried about you,
Owing to her FBI file—“a briefcase honey”). But there was another side
containing the list of my sins . . . as to her too. “There are people of such
thick as the New York telephone harmonious, Apollonian disposition,
book”—she was initially forbidden to of such well-balanced desires and
renew her passport; only through the temperament, that they never aban-
intercession of a lawyer was she finally don the prudent domain of self-
allowed to leave the country again. control,” Salka wrote in a moment
In both the memoir and the biog- of self-reflection. “I belonged to a
raphy, Salka’s most striking quality is more reckless race.” More of that
her uncompromising moral code, recklessness would have given a bet-
which she expressed unconvention- ter sense of her as a human being.
ally in her marriage to Berthold. Both But Rifkind has done an enormous
of the Viertels seem to have accepted service in spotlighting the life of Salka
that their affairs with others—some Viertel: not only by telling a story
serious, some not—did not interfere that deserves to be better known, but
with their deep love for each other. also by implicitly making the case for
When Salka was ill with pneumonia more such books. As a genre, biogra-
in Düsseldorf, her doctors, searching phy has traditionally been dominated
for Berthold one night, discovered by the stories of “great men”; only in
him in a restaurant “having a late the relatively recent past, starting
supper with a pretty actress.” A close with the groundbreaking biographies
friend of Salka’s couldn’t forgive him, of Zelda Fitzgerald by Nancy Mitford
BEFORE HE BECAME A CELEBRATED but Salka was untroubled. “Only (1970) and of Alice James by Jean
POLITICIAN, GEORGE MCGOVERN death can cure my addiction to Strouse (1980), has the circle of pos-
SERVED IN WORLD WAR II AS A you,” Berthold insisted later, during sible subjects opened wider. Even
her decade-long affair with Gott- now, when women’s stories are told,
B-24 BOMBER PILOT. HE FLEW IN
fried Rein hardt, son of the producer it’s often because of their positions as
THIRTY-FIVE COMBAT MISSIONS AND Max Rein hardt and twenty-two wives or mothers of the famous (as
EARNED THE DISTINGUISHED FLYING years her junior. (Berthold was largely the enduring popularity of first-lady
CROSS FOR HIS INGENUITY IN THE absent from Hollywood during this biographies demonstrates) rather
FACE OF ADVERSITY. MY LIFE IN THE period, working on plays in New than for the inherent value of their
SERVICE, A FACSIMILE OF THE DIARY York and Europe.) They stayed mar- own lives.
ried for thirty years, divorcing only In its Overlooked series of obituar-
MCGOVERN KEPT BETWEEN 1944 when, for the sake of convenience, ies, the New York Times has recently
AND 1945, VISUALLY EVOKES THE Berthold needed to marry his own made a project of bringing attention
ERA AND PROVIDES A FIRSTHAND longtime mistress. “When I married to the lives of people not deemed
ACCOUNT OF THE ALLIED BOMBING you, I was convinced that our rela- worthy of coverage when they died.
OF NAZI-OCCUPIED EUROPE. tionship would be exceptional in our As its subjects make clear—they in-
absolute truthfulness toward each clude people such as Mihri Rassim,
other. I loved you and I shall always an artist who fought for women’s
INTRODUCTION BY do so,” Salka wrote to him afterward. rights in Ottoman Turkey, and Geor-
ANDREW J. BACEVICH, Her unmitigated honesty—personal, gia Gilmore, a cook who organized
CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF professional, and political—is per- meals to help fund the Montgomery
HARPER’S MAGAZINE haps her most unusual quality. bus boycott—it’s often the people be-
“Whoever touches your heart does hind the scenes who make things
not foresee that he is unleashing an happen. Biography, at its best, is a
STORE.HARPERS.ORG avalanche!” Berthold told her after way of telling history through the
witnessing her distress over her lens of a single person’s life. Focusing
FRANKLIN
SQUARE
breakup with Rein hardt. If some- that lens on those whose stories
PRESS thing is missing in Rifkind’s book, haven’t yet been told will do more
it’s a sense of Salka as avalanche. than reveal the specifics of their indi-
While others have written of her vidual existence. It will open up new
sharp tongue and her eccentricities, paths of historical inquiry. n
Distributed by Midpoint Trade Books,
a division of IPG
emblematic, partially disguised, ma-
existential noir ture but of no specific age.
I suppose the hats worn by male
On the fiction of Juan Carlos Onetti characters in Onetti’s made-up port of
Santa María lend them a sort of tat-
tered dignity. We see that tattered
By Edmund White dignity in the Uruguayan writer’s best-
known novel, A Brief Life (1950), in
which a journalist is unsuccessfully
Discussed in this essay: trying to put together enough money
to have his wife’s breast cancer treated,
A Dream Come True: The Collected Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, by Juan Carlos and in The Shipyard (1961), when an
Onetti. Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. Archipelago Books. enigmatic pimp, Larsen, back in Santa
547 pages. $26. María after a five-year exile, accepts the
position of directing a bankrupt ship-
yard. A contemptuous boy says to him:
“ ‘What are you hoping for from here?
It’s been a long time, and nothing you
wanted has happened. Or so it seems
to me.’ ‘Ah!’ Larsen said, rubbing his
hands together.” That almost could be
a passage out of Beckett, though there
is too much narrative and too little
humor. T he last lines of Th e
Shipyard—part of a page-long paren-
thetical that concludes the book—are
like Malone Dies seen through the lens
of realism:
( . . . He sniffed at the air, licking his
split lip as the speeding boat made its
way up-river. He died of pneumonia
in Rosario before the week was out.
His real name appears in full on the
hospital register.)
Silence and solitude are recurring

elements in the work of Onetti
(1909–94), who developed, over the
course of the twentieth century, an
increasingly innovative and idiosyn-
cratic literary style often described as
some combination of Dashiell Ham-
mett, William Faulkner, Jean-Paul
Sartre, and Albert Camus. His fic-
A
ll the men in Juan Carlos As a kid growing up in the 1940s, I tion has been called a forerunner
Onetti’s fiction wear hats: not can remember my father instructing of the magical realism of the
caps, but proper Borsalinos, me to remove my hat when entering Latin-American Boom of the 1960s
wide-brimmed and pinched and someone’s house—but not a public and 1970s, and a great inspiration for
cocked at the top into Jean Arp sculp- building, except in the elevator, where writers such as Gabriel García
tures, gray or black with a subtle silk one unbonneted out of deference to Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Af-
band—no feathers—initials stamped the women present (the hat stayed on ter many years of neglect in the
in gold along the unseen interior in an all-male car). Holding the brim English-speaking world, most of Onet-
sweatband. For today’s watchers of between the thumb and the ring and ti’s novels have since been translated,
late-night films, such hats signal detec- middle fingers, one tipped one’s hat to but until now there has been no com-
tives and gang bosses, lonely romantic acquaintances, male and female, en- plete edition of his stories in English.
heroes and rich guys out on the town. countered on the street. Embarrass- These have recently been assembled,
ment was dramatized by twirling the in chronological order, by Archipelago
Edmund White is the author of nearly thirty hat nervously in both hands at stom- Books and translated by Katherine
books. Next summer Bloomsbury will pub- ach level. The shadows obscuring the Silver, who has managed admirably to
lish his new novel, A Saint from Texas. face under a hat made it abstract and preserve the oddness of the original.
Hombre con Sombrero (Man with Hat), by Joaquín Torres-García © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images REVIEWS 91
In Onetti’s stories, we listen to the only happiness possible. There’s the larly, both writers’ characters are al-
sound of moss growing; the color of doctor Diaz Grey, who “was left lis- most caricatures, woodcuts rather
the air is charged with quiet; a re- tening only to the sea, his eyes than watercolors.
volver is placed on the table, “quite closed, tenaciously repeating to him- Onetti may have been a pessimist,
still, incomprehensible, perhaps try- self that he was alive in a month in but the very beauty and startling un-
ing to communicate by a quivering autumn.” A woman, studying herself predictability of his prose attest to his
of its wings that was out of the in a mirror, smiles and thinks, “It’s devotion to something—possibly art
range of human hearing.” Someone me, it’s me. The person there with alone. In an interview he said, “Litera-
on the edge of old age tries white, naked arms, it’s me, with my ture is an end in itself, not a means for
brea st s cupp e d a nd my b o dy anything.” Earlier in that same inter-
to understand that moment in his life drenched in perfume.” view he had said, “When I write I
and in the world: the dark, twisted It’s become a commonplace to char- don’t have a specific purpose in mind.
trees with their fresh leaves; the light
glinting off the horse’s bronze
acterize Onetti’s stories and novels as Writing means tackling the theme
haunches; the stillness, the patient se- dreams. They are, of course, dreamlike, that has occurred to me.” His joy in
crecy of a provincial afternoon. one intense episode melting into an- writing is obvious from his painterly
other, the atmosphere highly charged eye: “I reconstructed the solitude of
Most writers, encouraged to be with inexplicable emotion, the events the street lamps in the plaza and
“vivid” or “precise,” tend to punch up terrifying and somehow symbolic. In A along the promenade, the perpendicu-
anything they describe, but Onetti Dog’s Night (1943), for instance, a man lar threads of rain without wind.”
does the opposite. People are often who is certain he is about to die is led Proust once said that writers always re-
bored; the usual weather is cold rain; by a familiar voice out of a ballroom veal their favorite moment; if Stend-
the buildings are shabby; faced with a into a private dining room. There he hal’s is viewing a sunstruck plain from
moral choice, characters usually take discovers someone he knows, dead and a very high place, then Onetti’s, we
the wrong path; women are fat; men laid out on the floor, accompanied by might say, is looking at a bleak pro-
are weak; people run out of things to two prostitutes— one short and one vincial town in the cold rain. Onetti,
say; priests are manipulative; everyone tall—who are chattering inconsequen- who refused to indulge in Nobel
is horny but never romantic. His tially. In the distance is the muffled Prize–worthy platitudes about fiction,
characters are conscious of living in a sound of artillery. said that he almost always started with
backwater, far from glamorous Buenos In a novel about a pimp, Body a room. He admitted he had no disci-
Aires, which is very far from a far Snatcher (1964), a young woman, Julita, pline and wrote only when he was
more glamorous Paris or Madrid. has been driven mad by the death of inspired— in that way writing for
Some people are rich but miserly; her husband. The scene of her him was like making love. And, like
most people are lazy and in debt. bedroom-cage is served up instanta- Faulkner, he was a drinker.
Neighborhoods are derelict. Drunks neously and indelibly. She has sex
O
are unfriendly, friendships lukewarm. late at night with a handsome teen- netti had a strange if mostly
If Balzac unrealistically lent all his age boy; we see her fat thighs, her uneventful life. He was born
characters his own dynamism, Onet- tangled hair, her vacant, sweating in Uruguay, his father of Irish
ti’s seem as gloomy and torpid— or face. Eventually, the pimp takes the descent (O’Nety), his mother from the
ornery—as he himself was. When in teenage boy to live in a blue bordello Brazilian aristocracy. After a happy
a short story from 1970 a Uruguayan by the sea. Characters dissolve from childhood, he held a number of odd
sailor places the first transatlantic one setting into another. They are jobs—eventually working as a journal-
phone call between Hamburg and his seen weeping in bed or standing in ist for Reuters in Buenos Aires—and
village in South America, his fiancée, the moonlight by a door or walking married four times (the first two times
on the other end, says, quite simply, slowly from the train station through to sisters, who were his cousins).
“Why don’t you go fuck your mother, town. The connective tissue between Though he published his first novel,
you shitfaced asshole?” scenes is missing and the reader must The Pit, in 1939—a bleak affair in
Every once in a while a character reconstruct the narrative. which a man, on the eve of his fortieth
is seized by the sheer ecstasy of be- In that way, Onetti reads a bit like birthday, sequesters himself in his
ing. Not by the beauty of the world Faulkner, his hero. Both writers in- room to write his life story— Onetti’s
or the thrill of intimacy, not by a vented a place and, in novel after first critical success didn’t come until
moment of understanding or a sweet novel, peopled it with the same char- 1950 with the publication of A Brief
memory, but simply by knowing that acters. Both wrote novels that the Life, which made his reputation. In a
one is present, that one exists. One reader is meant to have already read: sad irony, Onetti—whose fiction was
character thinks that the only thing that is, the books don’t gradually un- largely apolitical—was jailed for three
that matters is to be alive. Another fold in a clear, rational way, but rather months by the Uruguayan dictator
realizes “how happy he was to be the plot elements must be reassem- Juan María Bordaberry for serving on
sweating, a little drunk and in a bled retrospectively. Both Faulkner a jury that awarded a literary prize to
trance, how happy he was to be and Onetti get the metaphysical the wrong author, and he fled to Spain
watched and awaited.” A man smiles chills; they are equally astonished by the following year. By 1980, Onetti
to reassure a woman that living is the the mere habit of being alive. Simi- had won Spain’s highest literary

European Beret $18
100% Wool • One size fits all
Black, Navy, Brown, Red, Camel, Grey
award, the Cervantes Prize, and for other men feel attracted to tall and fat Check or Credit Card w/ Exp. Date.
Add $4 shipping plus $1 each additional
the last years of his life he lived in bed women and put up with their age with- www.johnhelmer.com
(according to one interview, he pre- out caring.” In still another instance, John Helmer • Est. 1921 • (503) 223-4976
969 S.W. Broadway, Dept. P010 • Portland, OR 97205
ferred to lie on a big white bedspread there’s a poetically correct but literally
with a black cat), drinking heavily, false description: “she continued walk-
surrounded by the books he was reading until she was able to plunge into
ing and writing. the extravagant moon that continued
Though he is often called the fa- to grow.” Or we read a highly detailed
ther of the Latin-American Boom, in but surreal sentence:
many ways Onetti more closely re-
sembled his Latin-American contem- I left the car at the top of the hill and
saw them almost immediately, like in
poraries, such as José Agustín Cajar
a small painting, the kind with wide
Escala, except that they, unlike him, gilded frames, motionless and surpris-
usually had a left-wing political mes- ing as I walked down toward them.
sage. They also lacked his oneiric
tone. But the early twentieth-century The stories collected in this volume
Latin-American novel was often a are sometimes slight but more often
multigenerational saga, as many of long and strikingly original, espe- FINEFINEFINE.BIGCA RTEL .COM
Onetti’s books are, and it frequently cially in the way time contracts and
indulged in pleonasms, which appear dilates and the plot veers off in unex-
often in Onetti’s fiction. His work is pected directions. They are also more Search the
also closely related to the Cuban daring than the novels. In one story, HARPER'S INDEX
neo-Baroque writers José Lezama Lima a Danish woman in Uruguay keeps
and Alejo Carpentier, both of whom imagining her native country so viv- online
are mindful of the continent’s strange, idly in bedtime conversations with her harpers.org/harpers-index
even surreal, landscape and its myste- husband that he finally steals money
rious history. While Borges is often to buy her a ticket home. In perhaps
credited with cleaning up Spanish my favorite story, “The Album,” a
diction in Latin-American fiction (a
later book such as One Hundred Years
man encounters a woman on the
street and, as they grow closer, is grad-
Chance that an
of Solitude can be seen as a condensed ually mesmerized by her descriptions American would
saga written in the chastened style of
a Borges), Onetti, by contrast, is ad-
of the far-flung exotic places she has
visited. The story shares the exoticism rather be mugged
dicted, like more traditional Spanish-
language novelists, to Góngorismo.
of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and the
writing throughout is mysterious and
than audited :
Luis de Góngora was a Spanish Ba- exquisite: “ . . . night on the prairie
roque poet of the seventeenth century that spreads, punctual and indomi- 1 in 2
known for the complexities and indi- table, only allows us to encounter
rection of his diction; “spun snow” was ourselves, lucid and in the present
his way of describing linen tablecloths. tense.” In another story, a female THE
Onetti’s way, especially in his later dwarf and her handsome fellow ad-
stories, is to indicate something venturer, having finally run out of
such as a girl’s first menstrual period
by writing, “You say the child was
options, befriend the richest woman
in town; after they attend to her every
INDEX BOOK
V O L U M E 3
twelve? And unable to foresee the hor- need for years, she dies and they dis-
ror that awaits her of blood in her cover she’s left her fortune to her dog. Order online at www.harpers.org/store
panties as she’s serving water tea and In yet another unforgettable story, a
biscuits to her dolls.” man—a good Catholic—is passion- DISCLAIMER: Harper’s Magazine assumes no
Onetti’s style, which can create such ately attracted to his own wife, who, liability for the content of or reply to any personal
lovely scenes of phantasmagoria, can be if she becomes pregnant again, will
obscure in other ways. A logical list can surely die. advertisement. The advertiser assumes complete
degenerate into absurdity: “others who These stories indicate the broad liability for the content of and all replies to any
tolerated without difficulty the inheri- trajectory of Onetti’s career. He was advertisement and for any claims made against
tance taxes, the taxes on the uncon- a clear-cut fabulist who turned into a
scious use of air, on the right to walk cloudy mythmaker, but who stayed Harper’s Magazine as a result thereof. The
through the streets.” In another in- true to his primary vision of a provin- advertiser agrees to indemnify and hold Harper’s
stance, there’s a Gogolian simile run cial town in the winter rain. He is too Magazine and its employees harmless from all
amok that provokes the reader but fails difficult ever to be popular, but every
to illuminate: “He loved money, as writer will admire his distinctive tone costs, expenses (including reasonable attorney
long as there was plenty of it, the way and originality of invention. n fees), liabilities, and damages resulting from or
caused by the publication placed by the advertiser
REVIEWS 93 or any reply to any such advertisement.

PUZZLE
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14
THEME AND 15
VARI-VARIATIONS 16 17 18
By Richard E. Maltby Jr. 19 20 21
22 23 24 25
T
26 27
28 29
hree related Theme Words, A, B, and C, are the
30 31 32
entry at 16A. Each Theme Word then has two “varia-
tions.” The variations are different in each case. For ex- 33 34 35 36 37 38
ample, if the Theme Words were HIGH and LOW, the
39 40 41
variations might be FIDELITY and TENSION (phrases
beginning with HIGH), and ALLOWANCE and 42 43 44
FLOWN (words containing LOW). In this puzzle, how-
45 46 47 48 49
ever, Theme Word B has two preliminary hints that
then lead to its variations. 50 51 52 53
Clue answers include nine proper nouns and two
54 55
foreign words. As always, mental repunctuation of a
clue is the key to its solution. The solution to last 56 57
month’s puzzle appears on page 73.
58 59
across
1. Loathe cruelty in exercising, in fact (15) 2. Variation on Theme Word B (6,11)
12. Having a family circle up front is coming back (6) 3. Took strides to do right, being upstanding (4)
13. Somewhat brooding presence in mythology (4) 4. T-Man pursuing lairs having no time for bad
14. Tips from Heloise I just adore, but it goes over some heads (5) appearance (11)
15. Falling flat fishing? (11) 5. Variation on Theme Word A (5)
16. Theme Words A, B, C (5,6,4) 6. Settle on sculpted torso (5)
19. Train driver in golf to be one of the Blues Brothers (6) 7. Outraced illegally? It’s academic (8)
22. Forsworn, died, are put off (10) 8. Denied being inappropriate unequivocally (6)
25. Ex–TV host shows scowl when speaking (5) 9. Hint to variation on Theme Word B (8,9)
26. It’s key to Italians but is nothing to Latin America (5) 10. Stopper when you go to commercial on radio? (8)
28. Sets limits in seismic energy when there’s no gravity (7) 11. Clean off a weapon (5)
29. “Blackout” is a name for disorientation (7) 17. Variation on Theme Word A (5)
30. Presents returned, like musical instruments (7) 18. Variation on Theme Word B (3,5,4)
32. Something from the underground can, when turned over (3) 20. No ailment can produce a hormone (9)
33. Diamond notoriously left, for example, by Soviet leader (4) 21. Hint to variation on Theme Word B (8,4)
34. Announced what Don did when tight (4) 22. Wrestles someone that’s a bit disturbed (8)
38. Plot in which star receives a letter of recommendation? (4) 23. Early Accord models, green, are met with soft
39. Slips belonging to a cockney woman? (4) opening (12)
41. Variation on Theme Word C (1,5,4) 24. Slay troops, then, er, retreat (6)
42. Cuisine so hot they say it might fire! (8) 26. Scheme for saving Gershwin (3)
43. Audibly incorporated publicity (3) 27. Rails all about purveyors of fake news! (5)
44. Hotshot iconographer? He has some nerve! (4) 31. Islander in South America (Oy!) (6)
48. 6A? I’m through! (3) 35. Be up against a bar (4)
49. Exclamation from Homer heads off dispute over Helen (3) 36. Can you get a little buggy going north? (3)
50. Single batter: man hurried around, but it’s a nonstarter (9) 37. The opposite of talk (8)
52. There’s no reason for hiding noise in bed (5) 40. It’s concerning that the old car needs a front end (7)
54. Unreliable flirter? (7) 45. Butch Cassidy originally—he halfway wears a kind
56. Set in an office includes this: one corral after another (9) of jacket (5)
57. Flew, but at first someone was sick (6) 46. Back up a member of the faithful (5)
58. Variation on Theme Word C (9) 47. Concerning little Margaret—in fix again? (5)
59. One “L” less spells out Harper Lee’s first name (5) 50. One calling out “Leap! Off with your head!” (3)
51. Massage after eliminating middle of floor exercises (4)
down 53. Wind up a dance (4)
1. Cure agues, in a manner of speaking (5) 55. Upset? If English: “A pox on you!” (3)
Contest Rules: Send completed diagram with name and address to “Theme and Vari-variations,” Harper’s Magazine, 666 Broadway, New York,
N.Y. 10012. If you already subscribe to Harper’s, please include a copy of your latest mailing label. Entries must be received by January 10. The sender
of the first correct solution opened at random will receive a one-year subscription to Harper’s Magazine (limit one winner per household per year). The
winner’s name will be printed in the March issue. The winner of the November puzzle, “Sixes and Sevens (and Twelves),” is Frank Fighera, Newark, N.J.
PUZZLE 95
FINDINGS
K nees in Asia are the most likely to have a fabella,
and knees in Africa are the least. The humerus can be
food. Korean researchers investigated the cognitive ef-
fects of pet bugs on the elderly and warned against
used to determine the sex of a Thai skeleton. A French pointlessly delaying bedtime. European eels retain
courtship researcher retracted his paper titled “High magnetic memories of their juvenile estuaries’ tidal
Heels Increase Women’s Attractiveness,” and female currents. A cold decorative vase is experienced as more
Instagram influencers were found to face criticism for luxurious than a warm one.
seeming both too real and too fake. Male green-veined
white butterflies use volatile flower compounds to cre-
ate the anti-aphrodisiac pheromone they transfer to fe-
E leven thousand scientists suggested that the hu-
man population needed to be curtailed to combat
males during mating to make them unattractive to global warming, and archaic mammals may have been
other males. The loudest known avian vocalization was nocturnal because they lacked scrota with which to
observed among male white bellbirds of the northern maintain cool sperm. Mice who travel into space do
Amazon, who scream their crescendo directly at fe- not experience a drop in sperm quality, and rats can
males perched next to them; the study’s authors ex- lower their stress levels by driving tiny cars. Migrating
pressed uncertainty as to why the females put up with steppe eagles fitted with cellular trackers by Russian
the risk of hearing damage. Researchers denominated zoologists incurred massive international roaming
three essential categories of arrogance and found that charges. Welsh marine biologists trained shore crabs to
narcissists are less prone to depression. Escapism pre- navigate mazes and sampled the parasites of shore
dicts problematic online gaming. Scientists offered a crabs at Mumbles Pier. Mussel cancer had crossed the
path to freedom for an all-male colony of wood ants equator, chytrid fungus had spread to frogs in the Pe-
who were trapped for years in an abandoned Polish nu- ruvian Amazon, half of China’s pigs died or were
clear bunker but had continued to thrive because of culled in 2019 as a result of African swine fever, and a
cannibalism. Doctors expressed concern that men newly discovered virus was contributing to stumbling
might unnecessarily second-guess medical advice by so- and seizures among bald eagles. The Wizard Rock, a
liciting opinions from Reddit users about photos of boulder that had vanished from the Prescott National
their diseased penises. Itchiness makes Europeans Forest, reappeared. Red deer on the Isle of Rum have
about twice as likely to contemplate suicide. been giving birth four days earlier each decade since
C hildren find bearded men strong but unattractive

and apply the attribute of “brilliance” preferentially to
the Nixon Administration. Five miles off the coast of
Maine, lobstermen caught a white-tailed deer, fisher-
men in Montana caught a bobcat, and three North
men, but not if they are black. Reward-based laboratory Carolina cows who had been swept away in a hurri-
experiments for assessing animal cognition may not cane were found grazing on an island in the Outer
test animals’ actual intelligence. Online cat-food reci- Banks. A Scottish tourist was presumed dead after a
pes are often nutritionally inadequate or dangerous, tiger shark near Réunion was caught in possession of
and Canadians are bad at measuring portions of dog a hand wearing a wedding ring. n
Red Pendulum, oil, acrylic medium, sawdust, and high-density foam on linen over panel, by Loie Hollowell © The artist
Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York City

Harpers 2020-01 PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Harpers 2020-01 PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Harpers 2020-01 PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

m a g a z i n e

2 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

[Essay] nience but to lie nearer the organ it thoroughly

12 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

of rebelling against such a great moral and [Interview]

14 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

16 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

18 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

20 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

Courtesy the artist READINGS 21

6 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

CLICK HERE TO KILL

Illustrations by Danijel Žeželj REPORT 23

24 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

26 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

28 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

30 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

J ust over an hour after he had been

T he present admiration of the

36 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

38 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

40 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

46 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 A hillside in the bangas, or slums, of Mayotte

48 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 Officers apprehending an undocumented migrant on Mayotte

A mural in Ouani, Anjouan LETTER FROM THE COMORO ISLANDS 51

58 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020 Photograph of Elizabeth LeCompte © Saito Ogata/AUGUST

60 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

62 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

LETTER FROM SOHO 63

64 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

Illustrations by John Ritter LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 67

68 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 69

70 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 71

72 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

LETTER FROM WASHINGTON 73

THE WHALE MOTHER

Illustration by Seo Kim STORY 75

$ eaten since around eight the previous

Hammacher somehow conveyed the excitement of

78 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

Bulgaria itself provides a less stimu-

Photograph by Valery Rizzo REVIEWS 85

88 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

Silence and solitude are recurring

92 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

REVIEWS 93 or any reply to any such advertisement.

By Richard E. Maltby Jr. 19 20 21

C hildren find bearded men strong but unattractive

96 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JANUARY 2020

You might also like