The New Yorker

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THE MONEY ISSUE
OCTOBER 24, 2022
4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
The midterms’ indignity playoffs;
Jalyn Hall’s Till; standing O’s for Robert McKee;
fresh rat initiative; a god of scribes.
THE SPORTING SCENE
Zach Helfand 24 Sand Trap
A Saudi-owned golf league upends the P.G.A. Tour.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Jay Katsir 31 Updated covid-19 Health-Screening Form
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
Kathryn Schulz 32 Scratch That
How lotteries have swindled the country.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Evan Osnos 38 Patriot Games
The secrets behind Guo Wengui’s fortune.
ANNALS OF DIPLOMACY
Joshua Yaffa 50 Arming Ukraine
Inside NATO’s support of Zelensky’s astonishing defense.
FICTION
Marisa Silver 62 “Tiny, Meaningless Things”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Louis Menand 70 The memoir Paul Newman tried to destroy.
73 Briefly Noted
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Julian Lucas 76 Abdulrazak Gurnah’s chronicles of displacement.
POP MUSIC
Carrie Battan 80 Two indie darlings return to their Southern roots.
THE THEATRE
Vinson Cunningham 82 “Death of a Salesman.”
DANCING
Jennifer Homans 84 A ballet tribute to Ukraine.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 86 “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Aftersun.”
POEMS
Emily Fragos 45 “The Night Nurse”
Rae Armantrout 56 “Finally”
COVER
Barry Blitt “Old Glory”
DRAWINGS Meredith Southard, Zachary Kanin, Tom Toro, Frank Cotham, Lonnie Millsap, Roland High,
David Borchart, Sam Gross, Adam Sacks, Amy Hwang, Liana Finck, William Haefeli, Tom Chitty,
Lars Kenseth, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, Emily Flake, E. S. Glenn and Colin Nissan, Roz Chast, Johnny DiNapoli,
Edward Koren, Kaamran Hafeez and Al Batt, Hilary Allison SPOTS Ben Wiseman
CONTRIBUTORS
Evan Osnos (“Patriot Games,” p. 38) is Kathryn Schulz (“Scratch That,” p. 32),
a staff writer who covers politics and a staff writer, received the 2016 Pulitzer
foreign affairs for The New Yorker. His Prize for feature writing. She published
latest book is “Wildland: The Making “Lost & Found” earlier this year.
of America’s Fury.”
Zach Helfand (“Sand Trap,” p. 24) is a
Marisa Silver (Fiction, p. 62) has pub- member of the magazine’s editorial
lished seven books of fiction, includ- staff.
ing the novels “Mary Coin,” “Little
Nothing,” and, most recently, “The Rae Armantrout (Poem, p. 56), a Pulitzer
Mysteries.” Prize-winning poet, published her lat-
est collection, “Finalists,” in 2021.
Joshua Yaffa (“Arming Ukraine,” p. 50),
a contributing writer to the magazine, Jay Katsir (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 31) is
is the author of “Between Two Fires: a head writer and a supervising pro-
Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in ducer for “The Late Show with Stephen
Putin’s Russia.” Colbert.”
Emily Fragos (Poem, p. 45) received a Kyra Wilson (Puzzles & Games Dept.)
Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014. She is a research assistant at New York Uni-
published “Unrest,” a book of new and versity Abu Dhabi.
selected poems, last year.
Barry Blitt (Cover) won the 2020 Pulit-
Julian Lucas (A Critic at Large, p. 76) zer Prize for editorial cartooning, for
became a staff writer in 2021. work that appeared in this magazine.
His latest book, “Blitt,” is a collection
Sophia Maymudes (Puzzles & Games of his illustrations for The New Yorker,
Dept.) is a software engineer based in the Times, Vanity Fair, and other pub-
Seattle. lications.
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
LEFT: ANUJ SHRESTHA; RIGHT: KHOLOOD EID
OUR COLUMNISTS THE NEW YORKER INTERVIEW

Jay Caspian Kang on a Mandarin- Carrie Battan and Ramy Youssef
immersion school that is drawing discuss jokes that “touch the stove”
families from across the Bay Area. and the third season of “Ramy.”
Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
THE MAIL
FOOD NETWORKS but I was bothered by one line, and
wondered if I should tell her. Like read-
Carolyn Kormann’s profile of the Oglala ers of my books, I had to make a choice:
Lakota chef Sean Sherman and his restau- Don’t tell her. As you’ve told every-
rant, Owamni, captures the chef ’s char- body, when you met Leslie, the two of
acter, many of his influences and sources you got along swimmingly. Why risk
of inspiration, and numerous facts about impairing good feelings?
the mistreatment of Indigenous people Tell her. Why would you be reluc-
(“Tribe to Table,” September 19th). But tant? Leslie is a real pro and a terrific
I was puzzled by the article’s omission of writer. She probably welcomes well-in-
any mention of Beth Dooley, the co-au- tentioned criticism.
thor of Sherman’s cookbook, “The Sioux Decision: Tell her.
Chef ’s Indigenous Kitchen.” Dooley has My first book, “Sugarcane Island,”
authored or co-authored eight cookbooks was not “a story full of branching paths
that celebrate local, sustainable foods and recounting Pete’s adventures on a remote
their producers; like Sherman, she be- island,” as the article states. Although
lieves that eating well and eating locally Pete was a character in bedtime stories
are one and the same. that I made up, the protagonist of “Sug-
Brian Nerney arcane Island” was you, the reader, and
St. Paul, Minn. the paths you took, leading to multiple
BE A
endings, depended upon your decisions.
Kormann mentions that, in the nine- As such, this book was the exact proto-
FORCE
teenth century, a “government-funded type for the books in Bantam’s original
campaign to kill buffalo herds” drove the Choose Your Own Adventure series.
1
species nearly to extinction. It bears not- Edward Packard
ing that it was ultimately the industrial
harvesting of buffalo hides, which took
place toward the end of the century, that
Durango, Colo.
SHALL WE DANCE?
FOR GOOD
wiped out the buffalo. Between 1871 and
1883, commercial hunters exterminated I was grateful for Hilton Als’s consider- Your name can live on
perhaps eight to ten million bison. They ate piece about David Bowie and the
destroyed the herds of western Kansas documentary “Moonage Daydream” (A as a champion of the
between 1871 and 1874, those of western Critic at Large, September 19th). But it
Texas between 1875 and 1879, and those strikes me as a bit of revisionism to say
causes, communities,
of eastern Montana between 1880 and that Bowie’s three nineteen-seventies re- and places dear to
1883. The hunters took only the hides, for leases with Brian Eno could “make us
which there was a lucrative market, as move”! At the time, these records were you...for generations
they were used to make machinery drive overlooked by much of Bowie’s fan base;
belts for Eastern and European factories. “Low” and “Heroes” were given little at-
to come.
Richard Edwards tention other than by New Wave fans.
Director Emeritus They were definitely beloved by a subset
Center for Great Plains Studies of people, but many of those people just
1
University of Nebraska sat and listened to their incredible sound-
Denver, Colo. scapes. In terms of invitations to move-
ment, they can’t compare to “Let’s Dance.”
MY ADVENTURE BOOKS Jeff Wiseman
Toronto, Ont.
I much enjoyed reading Leslie Jami-
son’s delightful article on the Choose • Kickstart your charitable legacy
Your Own Adventure books, which Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, with NYC’s community foundation.
were based on my original concept address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]
(“Now What?,” September 19th). I re- [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in (212) 686-0010 x363
ceived many laudatory comments about any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
it from friends and family members, of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. giveto.nyc
OCTOBER 19 – 25, 2022
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
When Sheku Kanneh-Mason—a cellist of blazing sensitivity, who catapulted to stardom when he performed at
Harry and Meghan’s wedding—comes to Carnegie Hall’s largest stage for the first time, on Oct. 22, he’ll play one
of his favorite pieces: Elgar’s Cello Concerto, a work that rises and falls grandly in the expression of intimate feeling.
“It’s an incredibly personal piece of music,” Kanneh-Mason said recently. “The interaction between myself and the
orchestra is often very conversational, and it’s important to have that active relationship for the music to be alive.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY LOLA & PANI
1
As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance gospel choir, to Dave the Potter, an enslaved ters who made them) went unrecorded by
to confirm engagements. ceramist—whose name was later recorded as the white owners of the stoneware factories.
David Drake—working in a clay-rich region One of the show’s highlights is a selection
of South Carolina in the early nineteenth of face jugs, a form whose emergence in
century. Underscoring the importance of South Carolina coincided with the arrival of
ART such potters to the art-historical record of abducted Africans on a ship in 1858—after
the African diaspora, this revelatory exhibi- the slave trade was outlawed—many of whom
tion of Drake and his fellow-potters, at the were sent to work in Edgefield potteries.
“Aubrey Beardsley, Met, features works by contemporary Black The genre’s resemblance to ritual objects,
150 Years Young” artists (Gates, Abedunmi Gbadedo, and Sim- known as minkisi, is a testament to the flour-
one Leigh among them), although they don’t ishing of African aesthetics and craft during
This jewel box of an exhibition at the Grolier take center stage. Drake’s enormous storage slavery.—J.F. (Metropolitan Museum of Art;
Club, an oasis for bibliophiles, founded in 1884, vessels, which greet visitors at the entrance through Feb. 5.)
offers an intimate view of the eccentric, erotic, to the exhibition, are remarkable both for
and devilishly satirical illustrations of Beard- their size and for the moving couplets of
sley, a British enfant terrible, who died from poetry that he etched into them. (“I wonder “Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered”
tuberculosis, in 1898, at the age of twenty-five. where is all my relation / Friendship to all— In 1942, in a now legendary event that intro-
(The show’s curators, Mark Samuels Lasner and every nation,” one, from 1857, reads.) duced New York to Surrealism, André Breton
and Margaret D. Stetz, are both associated with The show beyond these tremendous vessels and Marcel Duchamp installed the startling
the University of Delaware, which loaned most is rich with lessons about regional stoneware painting “Girl with Pigeons” in a midtown
of the material.) The decadent artist, an early manufacturing, although much information mansion. The picture, of a supine blonde
influence on Art Nouveau, benefitted from his (notably, the identities of the Southern pot- in a blue dress floating on a red divan, was
association with Oscar Wilde: Beardsley’s exqui-
sitely macabre drawings, inspired by Japanese
woodblock prints, accompanied the writer’s
play “Salomé.” The relationship between the ON TELEVISION
artist and the author was contentious, how-
ever; the show includes Beardsley’s caricature
“Oscar Wilde at Work,” published in 1914, which
portrays the dandyish wit as a slovenly hack.
And the homophobic prosecution of Wilde for
“gross indecency,” in 1895, had consequences for
Beardsley as well. He was fired as the art edi-
tor of the storied London quarterly The Yellow
Book—for which he created eyebrow-raising
cover art—based on his association with the
disgraced playwright. Several copies of that vin-
tage publication are on view among the seventy
seldom seen works of art and related ephemera
in this wonderful show, accompanied by beauti-
fully written wall text—another rarity.—Johanna
Fateman (Grolier Club; through Nov. 12.)
“Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane

Arbus Retrospective Revisited”
Fifty years ago, a posthumous retrospective
broke attendance records for a one-person
show at the Museum of Modern Art. Crowds
lined up around the block to see a hundred
and thirteen black-and-white pictures shot
by Diane Arbus, a relative unknown whose
brilliance was already an open secret among Nineties nostalgia is all the rage these days, but there are few series
her peers. (Before she took her own life, in that capture the grungy, lo-fi, often laconic feeling that accompanied
1971, at the age of forty-eight, Arbus had few
collectors, but they included Richard Ave- pre-Internet teen-age life as well as “High School,” a new Amazon
don, Jasper Johns, and Mike Nichols.) The Freevee original drama, from the showrunners Clea DuVall and
exhibition generated both rave reviews and Laura Kittrell. Based on the best-selling memoir of the same name,
hot takes; dissecting Susan Sontag’s scathing
essay “Freak Show,” published in 1973, is now by the twin musicians Tegan and Sara Quin, the show sweetly un-
almost an academic subgenre unto itself. The folds the story of two nearly identical sisters as they navigate the
images are reunited here, accompanied by the dingy hallways of a Canadian high school, taking divergent paths
new publication “Diane Arbus: Documents,”
a doorstop scrapbook that reproduces a half toward self-discovery. Sara (Seazynn Gilliland) has begun a clan-
century’s worth of writing about an artist who, destine romance with her best friend, Phoebe (Olivia Rouyre), a fact
as Avedon once observed, “made the act of that she keeps from her sister for as long as possible; Tegan (Railey
ILLUSTRATION BY CARMEN CASADO
looking an act of such intelligence, that to

look at so-called ordinary things is to become Gilliland), feeling alienated and confused, falls in with a partying
responsible for what you see.”—Andrea K. Scott crowd. Though the twins’ sororal bond begins to loosen, they remain
(Zwirner; through Oct. 22.) bound by a passionate love of music. (The show opens with the
sisters glued to a television interview with Björk.) We know that ul-
“Hear Me Now: The Black Potters timately they will reunite to form a band—but not before they come
of Old Edgefield, South Carolina” of age on their own. The show can feel like a slow burn, but it also
In 2010, the contemporary artist Theaster has the same coziness and gentle angst that made “My So-Called
Gates paid tribute, via an exhibition and a Life” a cult hit. It wears like a baggy wool cardigan.—Rachel Syme
THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 5
by a Polish American retiree named Mor- which have been re-created by the artist Liz no distinction, in the show’s arrangement,
ris Hirshfield, a former tailor and slipper Blahd for the exhibition.—A.K.S. (American between self-generated and commissioned
designer who had been painting for only Folk Art Museum; through Jan. 29.) works, original and appropriated images,
five years—with such success that the first framed fine prints and taped- or pinned-up
two pieces he ever made hung at MOMA, photocopies, deliberate and accidental dark-
in 1939, just a few months after they were Wolfgang Tillmans room misadventures, and, in matters of con-
completed. A headline-making figure in life MOMA’s immense, flabbergastingly installed tent, the politically committed and the purely
(as reviled by the press as he was admired by retrospective of the German photographer aesthetic. The fifty-four-year-old artist
the avant-garde), Hirshfield has languished Wolfgang Tillmans, titled “To See Without soared to fame, in the early nineties, for his
in art’s lost and found since his death, in Fear,” persuades me that the man is a genius. ostensibly scattershot but, in truth, acutely
1946. This abundant show rescues the master There’s a downside to the concession—it selective documentation of soulful youths
of pictorial patterning from obscurity, as dampens my quarrels of taste with certain whom he encountered on night-life outings,
does a definitive new book, a labor of love items, among the show’s predominantly in Berlin and London. His party scenes are
by the show’s curator, Richard Meyer (with brilliant several hundred, that I do not like panes of glass dropped through the mid-
vital research by Susan Davidson). Whether like. Geniuses alter the basic terms of their dle of symbioses: beholding them, you are at
Hirshfield is painting a nude woman, a fam- fields; criteria that once applied no longer once viewer and viewed. This body of work
ily of zebras, or a parliamentary building, compel. The ground zero at MOMA is “art put Tillmans on the art-world map, but he
realism is beside the point. His subjects photography,” its former autonomy diluted has somewhat downplayed it in his choices
are ornamental, so highly stylized—static, in a tsunami of images, in wildly varying for the present show, perhaps from exaspera-
hypnotic—that paint on canvas performs as sizes, mediums, and formats, which are often tion at being lazily identified with a fleeting
beads, trim, and pompoms once did on his mounted from floor to ceiling, and may less Zeitgeist that determined only the opening
patented slippers, a delightful selection of risk than exalt banality. Tillmans observes gambit for a game that he has conducted in
1
no end of other directions.—Peter Schjeldahl
(Museum of Modern Art; through Jan. 1.)
AT THE GALLERIES
PODCASTS
Seek Treatment
Do you ever wish your therapist would loosen
up and crack a joke, for once? For help process-
ing this feeling, you might turn to “Seek Treat-
ment,” a podcast hosted by the comedians and
best friends Catherine Cohen (whose special
“The Twist. . . ? She’s Gorgeous” premièred
on Netflix earlier this year) and Pat Regan (a
writer for HBO’s “Hacks”). They delve into
topics that you’d typically discuss with your
psychologist—especially those touted in the
tagline, “a podcast about boys, sex, fucking,
dating, and love”—in interviews with fellow
comics and writers, including Jo Firestone,
Bowen Yang, and Naomi Ekperigin. Cohen
and Regan maintain an artful, at times manic,
balance between earnest conversations about
addiction and eating disorders and nostalgic
banter involving, say, the cruelly medieval
nature of three-ring binders and the whim-
sical shape of a TiVo remote. If these chats
HAUSER & WIRTH

don’t leave you feeling like you’ve received
the treatment you need, Regan’s contagious
Since 2016, the American artist Zoe Leonard has taken hundreds of laughter, for which there is no cure, and Co-
photographs at the border of Mexico and the U.S., following the route hen’s spontaneous, melodic crooning of the
1
“7th Heaven” theme song may help soothe
of a body of water that divides the two countries for twelve thousand your sorrows.—Khiara Ortiz © ZOE LEONARD / COURTESY THE ARTIST / GALERIE GISELA CAPITAIN /
miles, known alternately as the Río Bravo and the Rio Grande (and by
at least five ancestral names, in Pueblo and Navajo). The exquisitely
installed exhibition “Excerpts from ‘Al río / To the River,’ ” on view at THE THEATRE
Hauser & Wirth through Oct. 29, offers only a glimpse of Leonard’s
epic project—ten works consisting of fifty-six black-and-white pictures, Cost of Living
hanging singly and in sequences on the walls—but it conveys her rare The two best scenes in Martyna Majok’s
balancing act of poetics and politics. You might call Leonard’s approach play—which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for
concerned conceptualism, as seen in a quartet of near-abstractions por- drama after its Off Broadway début, and is
now revived on Broadway, under the direc-
traying lines raked in dirt, a tactic used by ice to capture the footprints tion of Jo Bonney, for Manhattan Theatre
of migrants. These striations are echoed in five views of irrigation canals, Club—come one after the other, toward the
attended by flocks of birds (above, in an untitled detail, dated 2020/2022). middle of the show. In one, a young first-time
caretaker named Jess (Kara Young) chats re-
Leonard’s quiet vistas run counter to sensationalist media coverage of vealingly with her client, John (Gregg Moz-
borderland conflict. Her camera lingers on landscape, not people, who gala), a wealthy young Princeton graduate
appear in only six images here, as distant figures enjoying a day at the student with cerebral palsy. Between flurries
of talk, Jess moves John choreographically:
beach on a riverbank in Ciudad Juárez, under the omnipresent eye of into the shower, where she washes him, then
surveillance apparatus.—Andrea K. Scott back into his wheelchair, where she dresses
6 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022

Brains.
Heart.
Courage.
SCAN HERE
GERSHWIN THEATRE ♦ WickedtheMusical.com TO BUY TICKETS
AND LEARN MORE
family’s suffering.—Helen Shaw (Reviewed
OFF BROADWAY in our issue of 10/17/22.) (Longacre; open run.)
The Scottish director John Doyle peerless

came to prominence with his stripped- Jiehae Park’s vicious high-school reimagining
down, deconstructed revivals of Sond- of “Macbeth” (“Heathers” meets “Teenage
Dick”) searches for Shakespeare’s “vaulting
heim musicals, before becoming the ambition” and finds it in the college-applica-
artistic director of the East Village tion process. A pair of twins, M and L (Sasha
gem Classic Stage Company, in 2016. Diamond and Shannon Tyo), have sacrificed
much to get M accepted into their dream
He concludes his eight-year tenure school, strategically holding L back a year,
with a remounting of “A Man of No even exploiting their teachers’ tendency to
Importance” (in previews, opening confuse them. (“We’re Asian.” “It’s like dou-
ble hard for white people.”) When they’re sty-
Oct. 30), a 2002 musical by Lynn mied by a fellow-student (Benny Wayne Sully,
Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty, and the going for broke) and heckled by a witchy
late Terrence McNally. Set in Dublin, classmate (Marié Botha), they turn to more
sinister tactics, as does the playwright: teen
in 1964, it tells the story of Alfie, a suicide, ableist slurs, and lethal allergies be-
humble bus driver who runs an am- come Park’s bleak comic fodder. The director,
ateur theatre troupe in a church. His Margot Bordelon, never misses; this show, for
Primary Stages, is another of her beautifully
decision to stage Oscar Wilde’s “Sa- performed, pop-literate productions, but al-
lomé” scandalizes the clergy and forces though Park’s rapid-fire twin-speak text is
Alfie to reckon with his own thwarted initially thrilling, the exigencies of plotting
soon overwhelm its tartest point—that teach-
homosexuality. Jim Parsons stars as ing children to weaponize their own identities
Alfie, with Mare Winningham as his puts the culture in a damnable, or, rather,
sister, Lily.—Michael Schulman damned, spot.—H.S. (59E59; through Nov. 6.)
The Piano Lesson

and shaves him. In the second, a big, flawed After a few scene-setting anecdotes about his LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s star-studded
man named Eddie (David Zayas) tenderly father’s glass eye and his mother’s friendship Broadway revival of August Wilson’s exqui-
bathes his wife, Ani (Katy Sullivan), who with a pre-fame Andy Warhol, he arrives at site play is, not to mince words, magnificent.
has recently become quadriplegic after a car the show’s centerpiece: an extended narra- She has known this Pulitzer Prize-winning
accident. Both pairs carry rich freight—work, tive about his eighth-grade history teacher’s text since its première, at the Yale Repertory
intimacy, the total frailty of the body. The outright obsession with him, one that drove Theatre, in 1987, when her husband, Samuel L.
play moves elegantly and works just fine, but her to leave increasingly inappropriate notes, Jackson, originated the character of Boy Willie;
these tense twentyish minutes make the rest drafted on stationery, in his middle-school there are moments in this thrilling production
seem like throat-clearing.—Vinson Cunning locker. The tone is primarily comic, and Mc- (which again stars Jackson, this time as Doaker,
ham (Samuel J. Friedman; through Nov. 6.) Grath does his best to extract wisdom from one of the play’s elders) when she seems to
the tale, but it mostly feels inexplicable and have known it in some deeper, stranger way
sad.—R.R. (DR2; through Jan. 22.) even before that. John David Washington plays
Dodi & Diana Boy Willie, the astonishing Danielle Brooks is
A young married couple—Samira (Rosaline his sister, Berniece, and Jackson and Michael
Elbay), an up-and-coming Egyptian Ameri- Leopoldstadt Potts (both in incredible form) play the feud-
can actress, and Jason (Peter Mark Kendall), In Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” we see ing siblings’ uncles. The setting is Pittsburgh,
a white Canadian investment banker—spend the Merzes and the Jakoboviczes, two inter- 1936; at issue is whether to sell an elaborately
three increasingly fraught days in their room married and interfaith Viennese families, carved piano that contains (both artistically
at the Ritz Paris, the hotel where, twenty-five in five different years—1899, 1900, 1924, and supernaturally) the suffering of their
years earlier, Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed 1938, and, at last, 1955. The action all takes enslaved ancestors. To escape a wound or to
dined immediately before the car crash that place in one apartment, which dwindles treasure it? Balance, measure, the weighing of
killed them. They’ve checked in under the from a glittering, golden, crowded peak excellence and opposites—“The Piano Lesson”
exacting instructions of Jason’s astrologer, to the terrible bleak emptiness of post- contains these in its smallest and its largest
a far too influential presence in their lives, Holocaust absence. In each section, there gestures. Despite Wilson himself putting his
who has convinced him, at least, that the are characters who turn to or away from thumb on the scale (his sympathies clearly
pair are Spencer and Fayed’s “astrological Jewishness, looking for belonging or tra- lie with Boy Willie), the production has, by
1
doubles,” and that a life-changing “conver- dition or safety. (There is, of course, no casting the charismatic Brooks, evened out the
gence” awaits them when Jupiter completes safety.) Plots and generations rush past, argument.—H.S. (Barrymore; through Jan. 15.)
its transit. In this play, directed by Adri- and Stoppard’s dramaturgy-of-interruption
enne Campbell-Holt, for Colt Coeur, the delays and avoids emotional connection.
intriguingly odd premise occasions a tense, Could this awkwardness be deliberate? Per-
engrossing, and astute study of the myster- haps it’s meant to emphasize the grief of MUSIC
ies of a marriage; the playwright, Kareem the final scene, in which a Stoppard avatar
Fahmy, demonstrates a particular skill at learns how many of his cousins and aunts
ILLUSTRATION BY SHANE CLUSKEY
doling out insightful nuggets.—Rollo Romig and grandparents died in the camps. Yet Mary J. Blige
(HERE; through Oct. 29.) much of what’s most moving about “Leop- R. & B.Mary J. Blige earned her moniker as
oldstadt” is not onstage in Patrick Marber’s the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul in the nineties,
inelegant production: instead, it’s in the after a series of successful collaborations with
Everything’s Fine reading that the play persuades you to do, Sean Combs, Chucky Thompson, and Rodney
Directed by John Lithgow, the writer and the memories of other Stoppard pieces, and (Darkchild) Jerkins, among others. Together,
film director Douglas McGrath performs a the knowledge (gleaned from interviews and they closed the distance between the emergent
droll and gentle memoir of his childhood in his biography) of the playwright’s actual rap genre and classic blues songcraft, reimag-
Midland, Texas, an experience he likens to revelation, when he was fifty-six, that his ining popular music in the process. Her early
“growing up inside a blow-dryer full of dirt.” mother had kept secret the extent of his songs—built around her earthy voice and the

pragmatism seemingly inherent to her perfor- has been largely the work of the singer, song- But none has so absorbed his essence as Jon
mances—helped lay the groundwork for most writer, and multi-instrumentalist Gustav Faddis, who soaked up artfulness at the feet
contemporary R. & B., and she’s since become Ejstes. But, even when his bandmates sit them of the master. To celebrate the late Gillespie’s
an unobtrusive figure within a construct that out, the recordings somehow feel spontaneous hundred-and-fifth birthday, Faddis leads a
she shaped. The music Blige makes in middle and interactive—like human beings listening large ensemble in a performance of “Gillespi-
age, including her most recent album, “Good carefully to one another. A gentle spirit per- ana,” an ambitious 1958 composition by Lalo
Morning Gorgeous,” constantly seeks that vades “En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Schifrin—who, years before he wrote the
same sense of equilibrium—a near-perfect Nog,” despite guitars and drums revving into “Mission: Impossible” theme, was a pianist
fusion of nascent and vintage ideas.—Sheldon firework-like climaxes, with Ejstes’s foggy, in Gillespie’s band. The five-part opus, origi-
Pearce (Barclays Center; Oct. 20.) conversational croon grounding the music nally recorded in 1960, touches on Gillespie’s
as it reaches for the cosmic.—Michaelangelo expansive embrace of idioms, including his
Matos (Streaming on select platforms.) passion for Latin music. Scored for expanded
Brooklyn Folk Festival brass and percussion sections (but excluding
FOLK Through the years, the Gowanus Canal a reed consort), the ambitious piece provides
has swallowed untold pollutants, an unhealthy Essential Tremors sufficient room for Faddis’s conspicuous bra-
share of beer cans, and the occasional ill-starred ROCK In March, Angus Andrew, the com- vura and high-note wizardry.—Steve Futter-
body. Once per annum, its waters also make the mander of the veteran band Liars and of the man (Dizzy’s Club; Oct. 21-22.)
acquaintance of a funny-looking instrument, newly launched label No Gold, organized a fes-
hurled into the canal as part of the Brooklyn tival in his native Australia, featuring a three-
Folk Festival’s most whimsical tradition—its day heap of the slanted and the obscure. Now 92nd Street Y, New York
fabled banjo toss. The attraction embodies this the musician introduces a slightly pared-down CLASSICAL With a new name and a new ab-
homespun festival, launched in 2009 at the version of the event, Essential Tremors, to breviation, the 92nd Street Y, New York
Jalopy Theatre and since uprooted to loftier Queens. Like Liars, who are among the head- (92NY), promises a season that cuts across
quarters. Returning to full blast from pandemic liners, the acts selected by Andrew are astute musical genres. With such a broad mission,
purgatory, this year’s edition presents folk in its students of bug-eyed noise, be it maniacal (the some programming inevitably skews toward
many hues, encompassing children’s songs from long-running Japanese band Melt-Banana) lighter fare—including the violinist Joshua
Dan and Claudia Zanes, country blues from or meditative (the composer Faten Kanaan). Bell’s opening-night concert with his wife,
Jerron Paxton, and even Chinese traditional Often, the sounds engulf every corner of a the soprano Larisa Martínez (Oct. 20)—but
work, from Ba Ban Chinese Music Society. The room—witness Los Angeles’s scruffily ma- there are also more serious-minded offer-
renaissance folkie John Cohen, who served as a jestic No Age, a duo that evokes an army. But ings, such as the bass-baritone Eric Owens
patron saint to the festival before his death, in at other times it’s the space between notes in Brahms’s “Neue Liebeslieder,” for vocal
2019, is fêted through song as well as through that unsettles, as in the work of YL Hooi, an quartet (Oct. 25); the Berlin Philharmonic’s
documentary screenings. The finale brings the Australian pop minimalist who makes her New staggeringly good principal flutist, Emman-
charismatic Louisville singer Bonnie “Prince” York début with spectral, poignant songs that uel Pahud (Nov. 15); and the pianist Angela
Billy, who, like the Brooklyn Folk Festival it- feel disconcertingly hollow.—J.R. (Knockdown Hewitt, alongside the Orpheus Chamber
self, is a little reverential and a little brash—a Center; Oct. 21.) Orchestra, in Bach keyboard concertos (Nov.
human banjo toss.—Jay Ruttenberg (St. Ann & 17). Jessica Vosk inaugurates a series for
the Holy Trinity; Oct. 20-23.) Broadway singers, with the California folk
Jon Faddis Big Band: pop of Joni Mitchell and the Mamas and the
Papas (Nov. 5-7).—Oussama Zahr
Dungen: “En Är För Mycket “Gillespiana”
JAZZ Every modern trumpeter since the
och Tusen Aldrig Nog” postwar era has been influenced by Dizzy Santigold: “Spirituals”
ROCK For two decades, the studio output of Gillespie, the musical polymath who prac- POP Given that performing has become a key
the Swedish neo-psychedelic rockers Dungen tically invented bebop with Charlie Parker. means of remuneration for musicians in the
digital age, it says nothing good about the
music biz that Santigold aborted her tour
NEO-SUFI just before it was scheduled to kick off, this
month, citing the road’s unsustainability
for mid-tier artists. The singer, now a wife
The Pakistani composer and vocalist and a mom, has built her career on express-
ing perseverance and resolve. But there’s
Arooj Aftab named her third album, no mistaking the unease at the opening of
“Vulture Prince,” after the fearsome “Spirituals,” Santigold’s first album in six
bird known to subsist on the dead— years. “It’s my life . . . but I’m outside it like
I’m a passenger,” she sings on “My Horror,”
an allegory, she explains, for folklore. her gauzy falsetto simultaneously haunted
With her balm-like songs of longing, by viscous synth textures and sweetened
rooted in acoustic minimalism and by ukulele-like strumming atop one of the
Caribbean-inspired lilts that pervade the
Urdu lyrics, Aftab is now creating her album. Santigold’s sensibility, however, is too
own legend and unorthodox stardom. cheeky for ceaseless brooding. By the closer—
At the 2022 Grammy Awards, this the raucous guitar pop of “Fall First”—she’s
contemplating Heaven and a dance floor,
singer of ghazals was nominated in the even if, for now, the party is being thrown
Best New Artist category, in company from the sanctity of her and her children’s
1
with Olivia Rodrigo and Baby Keem, bedrooms.—K. Leander Williams (Streaming
on select platforms.)
a heartening ascent following her
decade and a half in the New York jazz
ILLUSTRATION BY HOI CHAN
and new-music scenes. On Oct. 19,

DANCE
Aftab plays a free show at Symphony
Space, in a trio that includes the harp-
Fouad Boussouf
ist Maeve Gilchrist and the guitar-
The Moroccan-born, Marseille-based chore-
ist Gyan Riley, alongside whom her ographer and his Compagnie Massala make
music flies.—Jenn Pelly their début at the Joyce. Inspired by the

tic direction. Diana Byer, New York The-
AT THE BALLET atre Ballet’s founder, has passed the reins
to one of the company’s veterans, Steven
Melendez, who most recently worked for
the dance-education organization National
Dance Institute. For now, the programming
hasn’t changed much—here the company
performs a mix of mid-to-late-twenti-
eth-century works, the oldest of which is
Antony Tudor’s “Dark Elegies,” a study in
communal grief, set to Mahler’s song cycle
“Kindertotenlieder.” In addition to “Sep-
tet,” a Stravinsky ballet by Jerome Robbins,
and “Mazurkas,” by the venerable American
modern-dance choreographer José Limon,
the company offers Martha Clarke’s “The
Garden of Villandry,” a movement-the-
atre piece that explores the dynamics of
a ménage à trois.—Marina Harss (Florence
Gould Hall; Oct. 21-23.)
Twyla Tharp
The two Tharp works that make up this
weeklong run, “In the Upper Room” and
“Nine Sinatra Songs,” are not new. “Nine
Sinatra Songs,” inspired by ballroom dance,
premièred in 1982; “In the Upper Room,” a
driving romp that pits all-American ath-
Amid the cluster of ballets in American Ballet Theatre’s fall season letic “stompers” against a balletic “bomb
(Oct. 20-30, at the David H. Koch Theatre)—which includes the spirited squad,” dates from 1986. Both capture aspects
“The Seasons,” by the house choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, and a of America’s idea of itself—the energetic
sportiness, on the one hand, and a glam-
new work by Christopher Rudd, designed to showcase the company’s orized, slightly synthetic idea of romance,
Black dancers—there is a gem that should not be overlooked. It is on the other. Tharp, being the force field
Frederick Ashton’s “The Dream,” based on Shakespeare’s “Midsummer that she is, has put together a real A-team
of dancers, drawing from top companies,
Night’s Dream.” It premièred at the Royal Opera House in 1964, and including American Ballet Theatre (Cassan-
at A.B.T. in 2002. Not only is the music, by Mendelssohn, full of magic, dra Trenary), Alvin Ailey (Jacquelin Harris
like the plot, but Ashton’s fantasia contains some of the most delightful and James Gilmer), Martha Graham (Lloyd
Knight and Marzia Memoli), and the Bavar-
choreography—intricate, funny, plush, and, at times, extraordinarily ian State Ballet (Julian MacKay). This new
sensual—ever made. Among the ballet’s many felicities is the role of generation of performers, each a powerhouse,
Puck, a creature of the air and of the earth, clever and malicious. Ever is sure to pour new life into what, by now,
1
are American classics.—M.H. (New York City
since Herman Cornejo débuted in the role, when the ballet premièred Center; Oct. 19-23.)
at A.B.T., he has become its most ideal interpreter. As Joan Acocella
wrote of Cornejo, two years later, “his Puck has about twenty ways
of bending—out of elegance, out of subservience, out of tree-branch MOVIES
avoidance.” He has even more ways of jumping. Cornejo, now forty-one,
returns to the role. It would be a shame to miss it.—Marina Harss
John McEnroe:
In the Realm of Perfection
pioneering band Nass El Ghiwane, “Näss” Emily Johnson In this unusual documentary, the director
(“People” in Arabic) is a workout for seven Julien Faraut chooses to focus—or, rather,
men in T-shirts that they sometimes pull over At once demanding and inviting, Johnson to fixate—on the lonely heyday of John
their heads, a trance dance that acrobatically makes little distinction between her art McEnroe. Only one match, against Ivan
explores the overlap between hip-hop and and her activism. Of Yup’ik descent, she’s Lendl in 1984, is shown in any detail; for
Moroccan musical traditions such as Gnawa an advocate for decolonization in many much of the movie, we gaze at McEnroe
and Reggada.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; senses. “Being Future Being” is a project on his own, darting around the court and
Oct. 18-23.) that also has an outdoor component. Even reacting to an invisible rival. Faraut makes
if the theatre performance isn’t an all-night substantial use of footage that was shot by
affair on an island—like her “Then a Cun- another documentarian, Gil de Kermadec,
Gallim ning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing which analyzes the player’s game as if he
Andrea Miller’s company celebrates its at the Stars”—don’t think it lacks ambition. were a machine; his strokes are reconfig-
fifteenth anniversary with a retrospective With her Indigenous collaborators, includ- ured as computer graphics, and his serve is
program. The ever-intense dancers contort ing the composer Raven Chacon, Johnson slowed down to a dream of coiled-up power.
their hyper-flexible bodies in a sampling is trying to embody an Indigenous future, What fans and foes alike remember best are
of labored eccentricity from across the using dance, video, and quilts woven with those times when the machine broke down,
ILLUSTRATION BY EVE LIU
company’s history, dipping into the more the wishes of volunteers.—B.S. (New York or overheated. McEnroe was special, per-
exuberant “I Can See Myself” and the more Live Arts; Oct. 20-22.) haps, because of the Cagney-like cohabita-
portentous “Stone Skipping,” which Miller tion within him of the violent and the deft,
presented at the Temple of Dendur while which made him so hard to predict. But his
she was an artist-in-residence at the Met- New York Theatre Ballet snits, the film is charitable enough to argue,
ropolitan Museum of Art.—B.S. (Chelsea New York’s most enduring chamber-ballet were not gratuitous; they were loud laments
Factory; Oct. 19-20.) ensemble returns, now under new artis- at a world that fell short of his impossible

The best and brightest
in medicine. x 2.
Uniting expertise from Columbia and Weill Cornell Medicine
to innovate women’s health.
What’s better than the top minds from one of the nation’s best
schools? Top minds from two of them. Dr. D’Alton, Dr. Riley, and
their teams are working to achieve pioneering breakthroughs in
all areas of women’s health and improve care for all our patients.
standards. Released in 2018.—Anthony Lane take place in Hollywood, amid the world of of impulsive chaos. Huppert’s performance
(Reviewed in our issue of 9/3/18.) (Streaming movies—or anywhere that young women de- in this role is among her greatest; even when
on Pluto, Tubi, and other services.) pend on powerful men for success, experience, seated, she seems to be in reckless motion,
and love.—Richard Brody (Streaming on Prime and her frenzy is infused with a sense of in-
Video, DAFilms, and other services.) tellectual possession. Schroeter conjures the
A Life of Her Own protagonist’s creative and destructive energy
George Cukor’s 1950 melodrama takes place with color-streaked, high-contrast images,
in the splashy milieu of fashion and the social Malina culminating in a conflagration that evokes
whirl surrounding it. Lana Turner stars as Lily The German director Werner Schroeter’s the passions of a mind on fire.—R.B. (Playing
James, a young woman who leaves her native 1991 adaptation of Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 Oct. 21 at Film Forum.)
Kansas for New York in order to become a novel is among the most fertile and furious
model. She meets a veteran of the field, Mary blends of literature and cinema. Its pedigree is
Ashlon (Ann Dvorak), who has squandered imposing—the script was written by the Nobel The Mule
her career through a combination of temper- Prize-winning writer Elfriede Jelinek—and Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this
ament, arrogance, hard partying, and, above its embodiment of Bachmann’s harrowing hard-nosed, tenderhearted, rowdy, and an-
all, an ill-advised romance with a playboy. vision is exhilarating and terrifying. The guished crime drama, from 2018, based on a
Still, Lily, enjoying her first successes, reck- film stars Isabelle Huppert as an unnamed true story. He plays Earl Stone, an ambitious
lessly gets involved with a married man (Ray writer in modern-day Vienna, who is tor- and artistic horticulturist living in Peoria,
Milland); though she’s strong, smart, and mented by memories of her abusive father Illinois, who, after losing his house and gar-
focussed, she lets her hopes and desires run (Fritz Schediwy), a Nazi, and of the Second den to foreclosure, accepts an offer to drive
away with her sense of reality. What distin- World War. She lives with an elegant literary loads of drugs from El Paso to Chicago in
guishes the familiar story of the other woman man named Malina (Mathieu Carrière) and his pickup in exchange for big cash payouts.
is Cukor’s, and the actors’, control of tone; the takes a younger lover, Ivan (Can Togay); she Earl has alienated his family—especially his
movie feels amazingly inward and tamped teaches philosophy and writes poetry in a daughter, Iris (played by Eastwood’s daughter
down, as if the director and the actors are col- state of ecstatic rage (in the form of mostly Alison)—by putting his horticultural career
lectively holding their breath in anticipation unsent letters). Driven by nightmares, she first. Now, enjoying his new underworld
of romantic disaster. The action could as easily abuses pills and lives at an exhausting pitch adventures and acquaintances, he uses his
sudden wealth to mend fences—but federal
agents (Bradley Cooper and Michael Peña)
SCREENING AND STREAMING are on the trail of the cartel for which he
works. Eastwood delights in the role of a
roguish coot who, under his crusty manner,
is a master manipulator—albeit one of un-
shakable principle. (Law enforcement and
unchecked gun toting come in for stern
critique.) The expansive, good-humored,
cleverly plotted action has the romantic res-
onance of a regretful self-retrospective, both
for Earl and for Eastwood; it plays like a
summing up of a life’s work and pain. With
Dianne Wiest.—R.B. (Streaming on HBO
Max, Prime Video, and other services.)
Till
Chinonye Chukwu’s passionate and insight-
ful drama shows how, in 1955, the lynching
of Emmett Till, a Black fourteen-year-old
from Chicago who was visiting relatives in
Mississippi, moved to the center of national
news and politics, sparking outrage and gal-
vanizing the civil-rights movement—partic-
ularly through the ardent determination of
Emmett’s mother, Mamie Bradley (Danielle
Deadwyler). She works daringly to bring his
body back to Chicago—and to turn his funeral
into a public event, in order to bear witness to
The high styles and narrow mores of bygone days meet the melancholy his mutilation—and she travels to Mississippi,
of changing times in Stanley Kwan’s romantic drama “Rouge,” from defying death threats, to testify at the kill-
ers’ trial. The story moves from family trag-
1987, which screens at BAM in a new restoration Oct. 21-27. (It’s also edy and local crime to a societal panorama,
streaming on the Criterion Channel.) The story is set in Hong Kong, detailing the legal and social system of Jim
where, in 1934, a courtesan and singer called Fleur (Anita Mui) and Crow and the bold, committed organization
of Black activists, in Mississippi and Chicago,
an industrial heir named Chen-Pang (Leslie Cheung), who aspires in pursuit of justice and freedom. Chukwu
to be an actor, fall in love. When Chen-Pang’s family won’t let them films the story with a poised intensity that’s
COURTESY THE CRITERION COLLECTION
marry, they carry out a suicide pact. Then, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, centered on extended and grandly expres-
sive closeups of Mamie, whom Deadwyler
Fleur—who hasn’t aged a day—shows up in dated finery at a newspaper portrays with a vital and complex presence.
office to place an ad in search of Chen-Pang. “Rouge” is a naturalistic The extraordinary cast includes Jalyn Hall,
ghost story, in which the flesh-and-blood revenant befriends two young as Emmett; Whoopi Goldberg and Frankie
Faison, as Mamie’s parents; and Tosin Cole
1
journalists (Alex Man and Emily Chu), gets a tour of her drastically and Jayme Lawson, as Medgar and Myrlie
altered old neighborhoods, and hunts for traces of her past life. Kwan Evers.—R.B. (In theatrical release.)
renders the thirties in florid images and modern times in muted tones;
his view of the shock of history feels all the more prescient in light of For more reviews, visit
recent repressive changes in Hong Kong.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

tails. On a Saturday night, I observed a The dressed crab, meanwhile, was a
surprising number of teen-agers playing relatively worthwhile, if stunning, splurge
video games on their smartphones, hulk- at sixty-five dollars. A Dungeness car-
ing headphones covering their ears, obliv- apace, on a bed of ice, was filled with
1
ious to their parents’ wining and dining. plump, slippery shreds of crabmeat that
It seems reasonable to presume that had been poached in court bouillon and
these were families on holiday. The nee- laid with neat rows of snipped chives,
TABLES FOR TWO dle that Rockefeller Center restaurateurs chopped egg white, grated yolk, and ca-
(Le Rock’s are the chefs Lee Hanson and pers, to be mixed with dollops of mayo
Le Rock Riad Nasr, of Tribeca’s Frenchette) must à la russe (horseradish, Worcestershire).
45 Rockefeller Plaza thread is a fine one: cater to tourists, but I appreciated the synergy of the Mar-
also to locals, who have traditionally tini au poivre (featuring vodka infused
What to wear to Le Rock, perhaps the avoided the complex unless required to with green peppercorn, and Manzanilla
buzziest of a collection of buzzy new commute to its offices. As the shift toward olives) and the bison au poivre, a lean
restaurants in Rockefeller Center? On a a work-from-home economy decreases but luscious, clean-cutting medallion
recent Friday night, my dinner compan- the market for business meals, the target of meat. I was entranced by the ovoid
ion settled on a canvas jacket somewhere audience increases to include the category potatoes that came with the halibut au
PHOTOGRAPH BY ZACHARY ZAVISLAK FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
between a blazer and a chore coat. Upon of discerning diners who normally prefer vin jaune: peeled and poached in clarified
arrival, it became apparent that he had lower Manhattan or Brooklyn. butter, they dissolved creamily, dreamily
correctly intuited the dress code—of the The result, at Le Rock—whose ex- on the tongue.
waitstaff, at least, each of whom wore a ecutive chef is Walker Stern, of Cobble A rolling dessert cart turned out to
garment almost identical to his. Hill’s dearly departed Battersby—is a be for a single dish: “beautiful, beautiful
Is Le Rock fancy? Well, yes. Its menu that doesn’t pander, but it does baba,” a server murmured as he presented
name, which is meant, I suspect, to be ramble. After two multicourse dinners, the baba aux muses vertes, a spin on baba
a bit arch, also refers to the generally I felt I’d barely scratched the surface. au rhum. A spongy wedge of yeasted
French theme of its upmarket menu: Moreover, the surface was uneven. cake gets sliced tableside and awkwardly
forty-five-dollar caviar dip, five-dollar- Cervelle de canut, a house-made cheese sloshed with the diner’s choice from an
per-ounce côte de boeuf, three house spread, brought to mind Boursin, the array of green-hued liqueurs, including
Martinis (twenty-six dollars each). The French equivalent of Philadelphia cream a Chartreuse and an amaro; the emperor
four-thousand-square-foot dining room, cheese, and the accompanying baguette wore no clothes, but he sure was drunk.
carved out of the lobby of a ravishing Art seemed to have been rewarmed in the The “very, very famous profiterole,”
Deco building, is outfitted with terrazzo oven to mask a hint of staleness—espe- meanwhile, exemplifies the restaurant’s
floors, a bronze bar, and inlaid mahogany. cially disappointing given that Hanson sweet spot, easy to love but exquisitely
On the stereo: the sorts of gentle big- and Nasr’s arsenal includes a bakery, also refined: a portly puff of choux, filled with
band arrangements that remind me of called Frenchette. Barbajuans, described salted-caramel ice cream, bejewelled in
the spectral ballroom scene in Stanley by a server as fried ravioli, were more disks of stiffly whipped crème diplomate,
Kubrick’s “The Shining.” But for the like miniature pastries, pale and doughy, and finished with buckwheat-honey hot
second coming of the Roaring Twenties scalloped edges giving way to an unin- fudge. (Dishes $6-$64 and up.)
everyone’s wearing sneakers instead of spiring mix of Swiss chard and ricotta. —Hannah Goldfield
David M.Rubenstein
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT other, but Trump won the state in 2020 by Republicans. And, owing to Repub-
ENDGAMES by more than eight points. lican retirements, there are open seats
According to projections by the re- that now seem to be in the Democrats’
here’s no shortage of threats to de- search firm AdImpact, a hundred and reach in Ohio and in Pennsylvania,
T mocracy this political season, and,
during a debate last week in Ohio, two
thirty-eight million dollars will be spent
in the Ohio race on media advertising
where John Fetterman, the hoodie-
wearing lieutenant governor, is in a close
candidates for the U.S. Senate were alone. Roughly a quarter billion dollars race against Mehmet Oz, the Trump-
asked what they thought the greatest is expected to be spent on ads in Sen- endorsed television doctor. The situa-
danger might be. Representative Tim ate races in Nevada, in Arizona, and tion is similar in North Carolina, where
Ryan, the Democrat, who spoke first, in Pennsylvania, and two hundred and a Democrat, Cheri Beasley, is running
said that it was “extremism,” and then seventy-six million is the estimate for a strong race against Representative
got more specific: his opponent, J. D. the most expensive race, in Georgia. Ted Budd. Beasley, who would be the
Vance, he said, has no ability to stand The motive for these outlays is clear. A state’s first Black woman senator, is a
up to his own party, or “to anybody.” At sitting President’s party usually loses former chief justice of the state’s Su-
a recent rally in Youngstown, Donald seats in the midterms, and that seems preme Court; Budd has said that the
Trump had bragged, “J.D. is kissing my likely to happen in the House, where January 6th assault was “just patriots
ass, he wants my support.” But what the Democrats have a margin of just standing up.”
was even more troubling to Ryan was eight. Barring a blue wave, Kevin Mc- In the House, Budd co-sponsored a
Vance’s response, which was to join Carthy, not Nancy Pelosi, will be Speaker bill that would ban abortion nation-
Trump onstage, “shaking his hand, tak- in January. But the Democrats have a wide after about the six-week mark,
ing pictures.” Ryan said, “I don’t know decent shot at holding on to the Sen- with no exceptions for rape or incest.
anybody I grew up with—I don’t know ate, which is now evenly divided, and Democrats around the country appear
anybody I went to high school with— even of picking up a seat or two. to be benefitting from public anger at
that would allow somebody to take their It helps that, of the thirty-five seats this summer’s Supreme Court decision
dignity like that.” being contested, twenty-one are held that overturned Roe v. Wade and made
With the midterms now only a few bills such as Budd’s plausible. Repub-
weeks away, one shouldn’t expect an over- licans, in turn, have focussed on discon-
flowing of dignity in any of the half- tent with inflation and, in attacks that
dozen or so states, including Ohio, where are more and more crudely drawn, on
Senate seats are being seriously con- immigration and crime. In Wisconsin,
tested. At the rally, Vance, who came to ads for Ron Johnson, the most vulner-
prominence as the author of “Hillbilly able G.O.P. Senate incumbent, portray
Elegy” and then reinvented himself as his challenger, Mandela Barnes, the
a MAGA man, said that Ryan doesn’t state’s Democratic lieutenant governor,
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
seem like an Ohioan because he’s a fan as an inciter of mobs who wants to
of yoga. Vance has also suggested that empty prisons and unleash havoc in
President Joe Biden was letting fentanyl the streets. The January 6th committee
stream across the border in order to pun- linked Johnson to Trump’s “fake elec-
ish Republican voters—an insinuation tor” scheme; the Senator called the al-
that G.O.P. candidates around the coun- legation a smear and said that he’d been
try have echoed. Recent polls have Ryan involved for only “a couple seconds.”
and Vance within a few points of each Pennsylvania, however, has been seen
as the Democrats’ best pick-up chance. ator Mark Kelly has had a small but steady abortion and had paid for it. (She is also
The Fetterman campaign gained ground lead over Blake Masters, a Trumpist who the mother of one of his children.)
by portraying Oz as a huckster whose is funded by Peter Thiel, the tech bil- Walker, who supports an abortion ban
true home is New Jersey. The question lionaire. (Thiel is also backing Vance.) with no exceptions, has offered bafflingly
is Fetterman’s health. He had a stroke In Nevada, though, in some polls, Sen- phrased denials—as he does on many
a few days before the primary, in May, ator Catherine Cortez Masto is falling subjects. Mitch McConnell, the Senate
and by his own account has not fully behind Adam Laxalt, the grandson of Minority Leader, is still standing behind
recovered. He has spoken at some ral- Paul Laxalt, the late Nevada senator. Ear- Walker. Last week, Senators Tom Cot-
lies, but still has difficulty with auditory lier this month, Laxalt appeared with ton, of Arkansas, and Rick Scott, of Flor-
processing. In interviews, he uses tran- Trump at a rally where the former Pres- ida, joined Walker at a campaign stop.
scription software: he reads what is said ident said that, because of Democrats, Cotton said that fans of the Razor-
to him, then responds. That technolog- American cities are “drenched” in blood. backs, the University of Arkansas foot-
ical work-around will get its biggest test But the most concentrated locus of ball team, had not forgotten how Walker
on October 25th, when the candidates G.O.P. indignity is in the race in Geor- dominated them when he played for
debate. The health discussion has ex- gia between Senator Raphael Warnock, the University of Georgia Bulldogs.
posed the lowness of Oz’s campaign, a Democrat who won a special election But, Cotton said, “they have no hard
which at one point said that, as a de- in 2020, and Herschel Walker, whose feelings, because they want Republi-
bate accommodation, it would let Fet- tight connection with Trump extends cans back in charge in Washington.”
terman “raise his hand and say ‘bath- back to his stint, in the nineteen-eight- The message to G.O.P. voters is that
room break!’ ” More recently, Oz has ies, with the New Jersey Generals, a team they all need to see themselves as in-
focussed on claiming that Fetterman is (in the ill-fated U.S. Football League) dulgent Razorback fans. The Repub-
weak on crime, calling him “Free-Them- that Trump briefly owned. In the latest licans are going after the Senate with
All Fetterman.” spectacle—in a campaign that has been Trump’s team, and they have stopped
The Democrats also need to hold on full of them—a woman told reporters caring what it takes to get over the line.
to the seats they have. In Arizona, Sen- that Walker had pressured her to get an —Amy Davidson Sorkin
THE PICTURES Visiting the galleries one recent der. “It’s one of those things where the
PLAYING EMMETT TILL morning was Jalyn Hall, the young earlier you learn the earlier you can adapt,
actor who plays Emmett in the new the faster you can be aware,” he said. “I
movie “Till,” directed and co-written have to think about it from my mom’s
by Chinonye Chukwu. Hall, whose perspective.”
family divides its time between Los Making a film about Till is an ob-
Angeles and Georgia, was in town for viously delicate endeavor. When Hall
the picture’s première, at the New York auditioned for the role, the filmmakers
n the walls of the New-York His- Film Festival. Accompanied by his wouldn’t let on what the project was.
O torical Society is an exhibition of
work by Kwame Brathwaite, a photog-
friendly but non-hovering mom, Yma
McGowan, he was wearing a camel-hair
He was given a few scenes to read—
Emmett goofing with his cousins—but
rapher and an activist who documented coat, a white shirt, and aggressively identifying details had been removed.
life in Harlem and the Bronx in the late fashion-forward jeans that appeared to “The character probably had the name
nineteen-fifties and sixties and was also be half denim, half patchwork quilt.
a driving force behind the era’s Black Is Given his evident interest in style—he
Beautiful movement. Brathwaite found happily described the blue Givenchy
his calling as a teen-ager, when he saw suit he’d worn to the première—it was
the graphic pictures of Emmett Till’s understandable that he was drawn to
open-casket funeral that were published Brathwaite’s photograph of a model at
in Jet in 1955. Till, a fourteen-year-old one of the fashion shows that he had
from Chicago, had been lynched in Mis- helped organize at the Apollo Theatre,
sissippi while visiting family; beatings back in the sixties.
and a gunshot left his face obscenely dis- “That’s a very good picture,” Hall
figured. His mother’s insistence that the said. He plopped down on a mod couch
world bear witness to what white racists and took it in. For a fifteen-year-old in
had done to her child was “a turning a museum, he was surprisingly cheerful.
point in our lives,” Brathwaite has writ- Hall first heard the name Emmett
ten. His response, as the exhibit demon- Till when he was twelve or thirteen.
strates (it was organized by Aperture), This was around the time of George
was to celebrate Black culture, experi- Floyd’s killing, and it was in the context
ence, and physicality—to insist on an of Black Lives Matter that his mother
African American gaze. told him the basic facts of Till’s mur- Jalyn Hall
Darrell or something,” Hall said. He like, ‘Oh, I want to be in the TV,’ but I language. I use profanity because I like
connected with “Darrell” right away, was looking behind the TV to see how to. It keeps my energy level up.” Other
with the role’s playfulness and open- they got in there.” He told his mom potentially offensive topics: politics, re-
hearted naïveté. His management team about this newfound ambition. “She was, ligion, sex. “Writing, ideally, is rooted in
called to say that there would be a sec- like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ You know four-year- reality, and if you can’t see things for
ond audition. “We were, like, ‘Yay!’” he olds, they want to do everything.” But, what they are you’ll never write any-
said. “But then they were, like, ‘Um, uh, after attending an acting camp at the thing worth shit,” he said.
the project is about Emmett Till.’ Me age of seven, he was determined to get McKee, who is eighty-one, with thick
and my mom, we looked at each other. in front of a camera. white hair and brows, is on a farewell
We were, like, ‘Wow.’ ” Hall started The Film Festival screening was the tour. (After Los Angeles, he’ll be in New
doing his own research. “The fun-lov- first time he saw “Till” with an audi- York, London, Budapest, and Tel Aviv,
ing person in the script was easy to ence. “My aunties came down to the city and then, in perpetuity, online.) He has
convey, but once you figure out it’s Em- to support me, and they were bawling delivered his seminar to tens of thou-
mett Till you’ve just got to come up their eyes out,” he said. “They were, like, sands of students, and on every conti-
with something more,” he said. By the ‘We ran out of tissues!’” He laughed, but nent. In Russia, he says, the book ver-
time he returned for a chemistry read only a little. “That’s how you know your sion of “Story” is known as “The Bible.”
1
with Danielle Deadwyler, who would job was well done.” When he lectured in Paris, three hun-
play Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till —Bruce Handy dred people shot to their feet to applaud.
Mobley, he said, “I was, like, I’m ready. “I always get a standing ovation,” he
I can’t wait to do this. I need to do this.” MASTER CLASS says. “But there are standing O’s, and
Hall was not quite Till’s age when he END OF STORY there are standing O’s.
started shooting last year, in Georgia. “The problem with Hollywood is,
The filmmakers introduced him to rel- they’ve all read the book, they’ve all been
atives of Emmett’s. “I just learned what to these lectures,” he said. “They know
a great boy he was. He loved to sing. He how to tell a story, but they don’t have
loved to dance. He loved his mother. He anything to say.” Occasionally, he has
was curious,” he said. “You never really looked out and seen a famous person
think of him as the kid he was.”
Making viewers do precisely that was
“ T hese days, apparently, I have to
offer trigger warnings for you
taking notes: David Bowie, Faye Dun-
away, Diane Keaton, Rob Lowe. More
Hall’s job. He has been working steadily snowflakes,” the screenwriting maestro often, his students are as yet unknowns,
since he was eight and is a regular on Robert McKee declared the other day, some of whom have gone on to win
the CW drama “All American.” Acting addressing the participants in “Story,” a Academy Awards. Then, there’s Steve
was his idea. “If anything, I pushed my three-day seminar he was conducting, Pressfield, who was a successful B-movie
mom into it,” he said. “When I was four, at a Westin near LAX, for approximately writer. McKee says, “He came to my
I had that little moment where I was, the four-hundredth time. “First of all, lecture and decided to hell with screen-
writing. He was going to do what he’d
always wanted to do and write novels.
And he did. Out came ‘Tides of War,’
and ‘Gates of Fire,’ and ‘The Legend of
Bagger Vance.’”
McKee is from the suburbs of De-
troit, the son of an engineer and a real-
estate agent. “I was raised in a family—
dysfunctional, of course,” he said. “Then
I raised a family—dysfunctional, of
course. I think all the best families are.
You don’t want a happy childhood!” One
of his “Ten Commandments,” along
with prohibitions like one against the
deus ex machina, is “Thou shalt not
sleep with anyone who has more prob-
lems than you.”
Over a lunch break—salad in his
hotel room—McKee expounded. “I
grew up in the theatre,” he said. “I
started acting when I was eight years
old.” Later, he got into directing, and
“Given the high cost of raising kids, we opted directed some sixty plays. In his thirties,
instead to be childless billionaires.” he moved to Hollywood to become a
screenwriter. “It’s called development
hell,” he said. “I had a couple dozen
1
ATLANTA POSTCARD
posed of in consultation with the man-
ager on duty.” Trapping, by unspecified
INFESTATION
deals, and you can buy a home and put means, would then occur. This would
in a swimming pool on those deals. I continue until there were “zero find-
put my kids in private school. But then ings” for five consecutive days. Office
the movies don’t get made.” He was in- carpets would then be shampooed, and
vited to give Saturday-morning talks the air would be filtered.
on story structure at an experimental Phase two, the deputy director went
college in L.A., where Dustin Hoff- on, amounted to “de-cluttering,” and
man taught acting and Sydney Pollack he Environmental Protection phases three through five entailed more
taught directing. Soon, he had to rent
an auditorium. In time, he said, “I went
T Agency has ten regional offices in
the country, including one in Atlanta,
cleaning, inspecting, and the long-
awaited—or dreaded—employee return.
from unfulfilled to fulfilled. which closed—like most government That return has yet to happen. One
“I had seen enough of my writing buildings—during the pandemic. The employee, still working from home,
on the screen to know that I was a good agency had planned to return to the called the situation “just weird.” During
writer, but not a great writer,” McKee huge concrete-and-glass Sam Nunn the pandemic, rats have been running
said. “It was very simple. Ingmar Berg- Federal Center this spring, but, in wild in cities such as New York, where
man, in my judgment, is the greatest March, an agency director e-mailed they feast on outdoor-dining leftovers—
screenwriter who ever lived, and I would the hundreds of employees in the of- but the E.P.A., as its Web site states,
never write to that level. On the other fice to announce a delay. In their ab- is the agency tasked “with offering the
hand, I could tell by the way people sence, rats had moved in. public tools for controlling rodents and
were responding to my teaching that I The director’s e-mail tried to tamp the risks they may pose.” The employee
understood at that level. down concerns. It announced the Fresh said, “Like, what the heck? That’s so
“There’s an idea, I think it’s still in Return Initiative. There would be a government-like.”
the world, that writing cannot be taught, “post-removal/trapping monitoring” The person had stopped by the of-
period,” he went on. “People who say that effort, she wrote, as well as services per- fice just once in recent months: “I was
or think that, they would never say that formed by an “Industrial Hygienist.” told not to go in, but the security guy
musical composition cannot be taught, All employees entering the building said, ‘I won’t know if you did.’” No rats
or painting. In the background of every- while it remained the dominion of rats were visible during the visit, which took
thing I did was this naïveté that writing would be provided with masks and place during daytime hours. Nor were
was this spontaneous, mystical thing.” gloves. A rodent-free reopening was the promised gloves and masks. But
A story, according to McKee, is a se- expected to take place by April 22nd, the employee had heard that “the ini-
ries of events building toward irrevoca- Earth Day. tial cleaning crew saw actual rats run-
ble change. “If you understand your story, On April 25th, the agency’s regional ning around.” Statistics on rat breed-
you’ll be able to say it’s about the change deputy director sent out a long follow-up ing were looked up: “Two rats can make
from ‘this’ to ‘that,’” he said. “Poverty to e-mail. He explained that there had fifteen thousand other rats in a year.
riches. Justice to injustice. It’s one mas- been a “pause” in the Fresh Return Ini- You can Google that. That’s just known
ter arching event.” Endings matter most. tiative. The rodent-eradication strategy facts about rat fertility.”
He writes that “the story’s ultimate event now involved a five-step plan—al- “I hate teleworking,” the employee
is the writer’s ultimate task.” The suc- though, as he acknowledged, no pest- said. “But I don’t want to work in a
cess of a movie, he says, often depends management contractor had yet been place where I’m the only person and
on its last twenty minutes. “procured” to execute the plan and so there’s rats everywhere. ” A theory had
McKee devotes the final day of his there were no “specific timelines” or “ac- been floated about why—beyond bu-
seminar to a six-hour, scene-by-scene tivity milestones” to share. reaucratic sluggishness and murine in-
analysis of “Casablanca,” which he con- Phase one outlined a sensible path: genuity—it was taking so long to get
siders a paragon of excellent writing. Employees should stay away from the rid of the rats: “Some folks at the E.P.A.
Walking back to the auditorium after rat-infested office, “unless the purpose don’t want to see rats killed.”
lunch, he said, “The last thing I talk is mission critical,” the deputy direc- An amateur investigator recently at-
about is being and becoming. Perma- tor wrote. A contractor would, even- tempted to enter the Sam Nunn build-
nence and change. The struggle between tually, “inspect each work area for ro- ing, but security guards turned him away,
keeping who you are and changing who dents or evidence thereof,” he went on, because he did not work for the federal
you are. And that’s what ‘Casablanca’ is including “obvious rodent droppings,” government. The investigator took a
about. And it is possible to have both, rat nests, and food remains. Office seat on an outdoor bench. A man leav-
if you love in the fullest possible way. If plants were deemed items of concern. ing the building, who worked on the
you love, you can have both.” (Rats, evidently, like office plants as seventh floor, below the E.P.A.’s offices,
After he delivers his last “Story” sem- much as E.P.A. employees do.) Shop- said that colleagues had reported “hear-
inar, McKee allowed, he’ll be devoting ping bags and other potential “nesting ing something in the walls.” A woman
himself to writing a sequel, “Story 2.” items” would be removed. Papers ri- smoking on a nearby bench said she’d
—Dana Goodyear fled through by rodents would be “dis- seen the something, and it was rats.
a trial, the attendees most focussed on one-minute high: three hundred and
the matter at hand—the court report- seventy words.
ers, who transcribe every word as it’s Tursi walked past a display of short-
uttered—must remain as stoic as Lady hand guides in various languages—
Justice. “You try not to react in any way,” “There’s even a Chinook one some-
Dom Tursi, who retired last year after where in there”—and approached a case
six decades of such work, mostly in New holding three dozen steno machines,
York courts, said recently. “Later on, you all from his private collection. He began
become a human being and have your amassing them in the seventies, for stu-
emotions.” dents to use at a school he’d opened for
Tursi was standing in the Gallery court reporters. Some dated to the nine-
of Shorthand, a permanent exhibit cel- teenth century. “They’re all my babies,”
ebrating the stenographic arts, in the he said. One held special significance:
airy lobby of the U.S. district court- a 1980 model of a rare machine used by
house in Central Islip, on Long Island. the Italian government. A few years
He wore a blue jacket and a lighter- ago, Tursi was disappointed to learn
blue shirt, and spoke a speedy Brook- that one had sold at auction.“Then I
The visitor noticed a black plastic lynese that could have challenged some found out it went for over twenty thou-
box by an exterior wall and asked the of his lesser colleagues. Tursi opened sand dollars,” he said. “I’m glad I missed
security guys about it. the gallery in 2010, after a building that.” Friends from Rome whom he’d
“That’s a rat trap,” one said. administrator familiar with his collec- met through an international shorthand
“We got rats,” another one added, tion of artifacts invited him to create society later gave him one as a gift.
laughing. “They all up in there.” an installation. “That was shocking to To create the exhibit, Tursi gathered
The first guard pointed to a crack me,” he said. the best books he could find on short-
in the sidewalk around the building. Tursi entered the field by chance. hand history (“There were about three”)
“They go right underneath there,” he When he was at Hunter College, in the and pored over trade magazines. His
said. “They’ve already got their holes nineteen-sixties, his parents met a court priciest acquisition was an eighteenth-
down in there. And they run out here reporter at a dinner party. “They came century handbook on Tironian nota-
freely.” He waved his arms around. home and said, ‘Why don’t you con- tion, a form employed by Cicero and
“A couple of them got their own of- sider doing that?’ ” he recalled. He named for his enslaved secretary. “This
fices,” a third guard said. They laughed worked in Central Islip for the last de- cost me a pretty penny,” he said—in the
some more. cades of his career, and lives nearby with mid-four figures. Marshals have told
The rats have continued to foil the his wife, Anneliese, a deposition re- Tursi that visitors browse the display
Fresh Return Initiative. In mid-Sep- porter, and the youngest of their four on their way into or out of the court-
tember, the General Services Admin- sons, Matthew, an Army reservist and house. One court reporter to whom
istration, which manages federal prop- a deposition videographer. Tursi gave a tour wept. For true devo-
erties, posted an online solicitation for The heart of Tulsi’s display is a se- tees, Tursi has self-published a book
“exterminating and pest control ser- ries of shadow boxes that trace short- called “The Legends of Shorthand.”
vices” for the Sam Nunn building. The hand’s history back to the origins of (Being a shorthand practitioner, he
required work, the agency estimated, written language. One held a foot-tall, writes, “is to be part of a fraternity that
1
would run through December of 2023. ibis-headed statue labelled “THOTH— spans decades.”) He has plans for a se-
—Charles Bethea GOD OF SCRIBES.” (Freud kept a like- quel, with the potential title “The Sec-
ness of Thoth on his desk.) Tursi re- ond-Oldest Profession.” “I feel that I
LIFE’S WORK counted how shorthand was banned have to get my knowledge out there on
WORDS PER MINUTE during the Dark Ages (“They saw it as paper,” he said. “Because, if I don’t, there’s
cryptography”), and praised the Sume- nobody else.”
rians of ancient Mesopotamia, who “did The exhibit contains a book that
some really clever things.” Millennia Tursi put together, devoted to twenty-
later, Tursi did, too. “I once had a case three icons of shorthand. “These were
where I had thirty-seven lawyers at a all heavy-duty people,” he said. He
deposition,” he said. He had to identify pointed out Billy Rose, the Broadway
courtroom can be a volatile place. each speaker in real time. In 1981, he set producer, who started out as an ace ste-
A Victims confront assailants. Trauma
is relived. During the proceedings to
a world record by reporting three hun-
dred words per minute for five minutes,
nographer, and Tursi’s late friend Vivien
Spitz, who reported at Nuremberg. The
award damages for defaming Sandy with 98.4-per-cent accuracy. “There are twenty-third icon is Tursi himself. He
Hook families, the professional loon people who could have broken that years said that Kislingbury, the new one-min-
Alex Jones grew so ungovernable that ago,” Tursi said. “But they’ve been very ute king, has lobbied for inclusion. Tursi
his own attorney asked the judge to kind.” A Texas court reporter named smiled. “I told him, ‘We’ll see.’”
order his client to shut up. Throughout Mark Kislingbury recently set a new —Dan Greene
only three types of pro—those who’ve
THE SPORTING SCENE taken Saudi money, those who are think-
ing about taking Saudi money, and those
SAND TRAP
who aren’t good enough to be offered
Saudi money.
Most outsiders first heard about LIV
Saudi money and Donald Trump roil “the gentleman’s game.” in February, from Phil Mickelson, one of
the P.G.A. Tour’s biggest stars and most
BY ZACH HELFAND consistent critics. “They’re scary mother-
fuckers,” Mickelson said of the Saudis,
in an interview with the golf writer Alan
Shipnuck. He said he viewed LIV as a ve-
hicle for Saudi “sportswashing”—a front
for the crown prince, Mohammed bin
Salman, known as M.B.S., to launder his
reputation. He also recognized it as use-
ful leverage. He went on, “We know they
killed Khashoggi and have a horrible rec-
ord on human rights. They execute peo-
ple over there for being gay. Knowing all
of this, why would I even consider it? Be-
cause this is a once-in-a-lifetime oppor-
tunity to reshape how the PGA Tour op-
erates.” Shipnuck published the story on
a golf Web site during the Genesis In-
vitational, in Los Angeles. (Observers on
the range noticed that, all at once, the
players stopped hitting and took out their
phones to read.) Mickelson issued an
apology to those he offended, to LIV’s ex-
ecutives, and to his business partners. He
began an indefinite leave from the Tour.
A few golfers reached out to him and
didn’t hear back. Reports surfaced that
he’d accepted an offer from LIV worth
roughly two hundred million dollars.
By August, when I arrived at East
Lake Golf Club, in Atlanta, for the P.G.A.
Tour’s season-ending Tour Championship,
professional golf had cleaved into warring
hen a professional golfer wants been quietly recruiting players for a new camps. The dispute felt deeply personal.
W to pass along a rumor, he’ll tell
you that he heard it “on the range.” The
super-league that they hope will rival the
P.G.A. Tour. They were calling it LIV;
LIV gobbled up players. Tour shunned
defector. Defector sued Tour. Strange oc-
pro driving range conjures a serious place the name derives from the Roman nu- currences were interpreted for signs of
where serious men who abide by dress meral fifty-four, to denote what they rancor: players walked in other players’
codes and honor systems tweak swing consider “a perfect score in golf,” and is lines on the green—accidental etiquette
paths and spin rates, but this impression pronounced as in “live large.” LIV life was breach or intentional snubbing? Unusual
is incomplete. The range, the one loca- lucrative. The Saudis, who’d devised a penalties were levied against the LIV-lean-
tion where everyone in the sport gath- twelve-team league, planned to spend ing. I heard stories of LIV types being
ers, is also golf ’s back room. Pre-round two billion dollars, much of that on guar- blacklisted at clubs in Jupiter, Florida, or
chat may concern course conditions, or antees for players. “You’d hear numbers,” run out of St. Simons Island, in Georgia.
who is sleeping with whose wife. Re- a longtime golf manager told me. “You’d Greg Norman, the former star player
cently, the range has been preoccupied hear ‘a hundred million’ a lot.” Tiger whom LIV had hired to be its C.E.O.,
by one topic. Since late last year, repre- Woods was said to have declined a pack- was particularly reviled. “He lived in Ju-
sentatives of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign age valued at seven to eight hundred mil- piter for thirty-five years,” a golfer told
wealth fund, the multibillion-dollar in- lion dollars. One line I heard often on me, on the practice green. “He cannot
vestment vehicle for the kingdom, have the range this summer was that there are join a golf club in our area. No one will
have him.” It was suggested that defec-
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is recruiting golfers for a new super-league. tors were hard up for cash. Mickelson
24 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL PORLAN
was known, through Shipnuck’s report Loyalties could be fluid. When I asked “became the vehicle for M.B.S.’s ambi
ing, to have gambling losses totalling tens Rory McIlroy, a prominent Tour loyal tions,” the analyst said. The fund con
of millions of dollars. “I think he was des ist, whether players had misled him about trols some six hundred billion dollars,
perate,” one old hand confided. (Mick LIV offers, he laughed and said, “Yes. Ev with investments in businesses, like Live
elson has acknowledged a gambling prob eryone’s turned quite cynical.” Homa Nation (half a billion), Uber (three and
lem but says he is financially secure.) added, “It’s like high school. People are a half billion), and SoftBank’s Vision
Generally, the players who cared most lying to your face. ” Reliable intelligence Fund 1 (fortyfive billion). Aramco pro
about prestige and legacy aligned with was essential. One needed to know whom vides a large part of the P.I.F.’s liquidity.
the P.G.A. Tour. Its tournaments offered to trust, and, if the winds shifted, when The fund operates professionally, with
history and gravitas but no guaranteed to jump, and for how much. Billy internal structures and board votes, but
income; you earned what you won in Horschel, another golfer committed to personal preferences occasionally preside.
prize money. Golfers viewed it as the the Tour, confided that he’d cultivated a Carla DiBello, a former realitytelevision
Americanindividualist ideal—“the pur network of caddy informants, but then producer and onetime friend of Kim Kar
est form of meritocracy,” one golfer said. most of them jumped to LIV, too. The dashian turned strategic consultant, has
But the fault lines were idiosyncratic and longtime manager told me, “A lot of become a gobetween. Rumayyan paid
difficult to untangle from old resent these players are talking against LIV pub more than three hundred million dollars
ments. Whether a person stayed or left licly. Privately, they’re trying to get a to acquire the English soccer club New
could be explained by some combina deal.” He went on, “Players are being castle, after meeting with her aboard
tion of political leaning, culturewar af shunned, threatened, threatened to be M.B.S.’s megayacht, Serene, in 2019.
filiation, sensitivity to peer pressure, and, shunned. I thought golf was supposed When the deal hit a snag, according to
most of all, naked selfdealing. “They to be ‘We call infractions on each other, news reports, M.B.S. texted Boris John
don’t really care what the Saudis’ inter we have rules, we’re gentlemen.’ All of son personally: “We expect the English
est is,” the old hand told me. Sometimes a sudden, they’ve turned into animals.” Premier League to reconsider.” It did,
it was a matter of a personal grudge. Did and Newcastle supporters, thrilled with
Woods stick with the Tour to protect olf has always been about money its wealthy owners, celebrated outside the
his records or to snub Norman? They’d
been at odds since at least 2006, when
G and power, but in Saudi Arabia it
literally came with the oil. The country’s
stadium wearing tea towels as kaffiyehs.
In 2018, Rumayyan appointed a high
Woods moved to Jupiter without giv first courses, and almost half its current school friend, Majed Al Sorour, to be
ing Norman a headsup. (Last year, Nor ones, were “sand courses” improvised from the C.E.O. of the Saudi Golf Federa
man sold his Jupiter spread for fiftyfive the desert landscape by the Americans tion. Both men are golf obsessives. (Each
million dollars to Leslie Wexner, the who helped build Aramco, the state pe claims a twelve handicap.) They began
mogul with ties to Jeffrey Epstein.) troleum giant. There was no grass, so asserting their presence in the golf world.
By the Tour Championship, LIV had golfers carried around little squares of ar At the Masters one year, according to a
poached enough players to be viable. It tificial turf to hit from. A woman is said person familiar with the conversations,
had signed a couple of stars (Dustin John to have killed a sheep with an approach they asked about renting Augusta Na
son, reportedly for a hundred and twenty shot. (She had to pay the shepherd.) The tional’s clubhouse to host a meet and
five million dollars), some aging hasbeens ingenuity required just to complete a greet for top golfers. “You can’t just do
(Ian Poulter, twenty to thirty million), round was almost inspiring. Landmarks that,” the person said. Sorour, a big
and a handful of lowerranked players moved with the wind. Balls could be red. biceped, aviatorwearing former soccer
(Pat Perez, ten million, lump sum; “I got Greens were brown. Reading them was player, also began searching for invest
it all,” he told Golf Digest. “It’s fucking tough; camels stomped across. Putting, ments. He told me recently that he’d ap
incredible”). Six more were rumored to at least, didn’t require the turf mat. To proached the P.G.A. Tour’s commis
be defecting after the tournament. maintain the requisite firmness and speed, sioner, Jay Monahan. “What I said to
The enormous sums had a way of the greens were slicked with oil. him is I have a budget of over a billion
revealing priorities even to the players Today, Saudi golf operations are dollars that I’d like to invest in the Tour,”
themselves. Johnson told friends he within the purview of Yasir AlRu he said. “I got no response.” (Tour offi
had rebuffed LIV offers until he couldn’t mayyan, the governor of the wealth fund cials deny that they were approached
anymore. “A lot of guys say D.J. isn’t and the chairman of Aramco. Rumayyan with such an offer.) Eventually, the P.I.F.
smart—he’s street smart,” the golfer is polite, with wavy black hair and well agreed to help bankroll the new Premier
Davis Love III said. “He told me, ‘I got cut suits. In 2015, he was running a bank Golf League, which would have star
to a number where I’m willing to take when M.B.S. offered him a job as an laden fields, threeround tournaments,
the consequences.’ ” One day at East adviser. Later, M.B.S. named him head shotgun starts (in which all the players
Lake, while practicing his chipping, Max of the fund. Terms were not discussed. start at the same time, on different holes),
Homa, a firm Tour loyalist, said that his “You will do it,” M.B.S. said. An Amer and, most radically, a team format. When
strategy was to avoid temptation en ican analyst who has dealt with Saudi that fell through, in 2021, the Saudis de
tirely. “I got an email,” he told me. He officials told me that Rumayyan “is cided to go it alone. “It is, for all intents
didn’t read it. “I don’t want to know. My known as being sort of obsequious.” and purposes, the same format that we
wife told me if I got offered x she’d kill Under Rumayyan, the wealth fund, devised,” the P.G.L.’s founder has said.
me if I said no.” known as the Public Investment Fund, The Saudis’ budget, however, was
are accompanied by gauzy paeans to
character. The customs recall an era of
a kinder, more genteel conservatism. It
would be considered crude to point out
that they’ve also been great for business.
At East Lake, where you could visit
the Comcast Business Pavilion before
hitting up the corporate hospitality cha-
lets, I spoke with Peter Cannone, the
C.E.O. of Demand Science (“the official
B2B sales pipeline generation sponsor of
the PGA Tour”), who explained to me
that advertising with the Tour was the
ideal way to reach America’s C-suite.
Tom Fanning, the C.E.O. of Southern
Company, which sponsors the Tour
Championship, told me, “Golf, more than
probably any other sport, is notable for
behaviors and values that transcend the
sport—sportsmanship, character, charity,
“We’re having the Petersons over for dinner—do you think you could honesty, hard work.” Of LIV, he went on,
run down to the store and stay there for a few hours?” “I’m not sure what ideals they represent.
We don’t have any interest in associating
with them.” Depending on one’s vantage,
• • this was either standard marketing or its
own kind of reputation-laundering game.
notably bigger. M.B.S. isn’t known to about the persecution of gay people in A sport that long excluded Blacks, Jews,
play golf (he prefers Call of Duty and Saudi Arabia, responded, “I’m not sure and women, and with a standard share
pickup basketball), but a person who whether I even have any gay friends, to of avarice and misbehavior, had turned
has communicated with him told me be honest with you.”) A golfer was asked itself into the image of nobility—an ideal
that an investment so large would typ- if he’d play in a tournament hosted by advertising vessel.
ically require the board’s sign-off, and Vladimir Putin. “I don’t need to answer The Tour itself began as a breakaway
M.B.S. chairs the board. that,” he said. Another, Talor Gooch, league. For decades, the touring pros,
LIV’s first event was in London, in said, “I’m not that smart. I try to hit a among them Jack Nicklaus and Arnold
June. The purse was twenty-five million golf ball into a small hole.” Palmer, split tournament revenue with
dollars, the largest ever in golf. (LIV’s Bafflingly, defenders insisted that LIV the “club pros,” who gave lessons and
championship, in late October, in Miami, was a kind of humanitarian organiza- sold merch. It was like having Aaron
will be double that.) The league held tion. Mickelson said, “I have seen the Judge hit against the hot-dog vender and
a launch party to introduce its teams. good that the game of golf has done then share the paycheck. In 1968, Nick-
(“With one eye on younger fans, Fire- throughout history.” Examples were not laus led a rebellion. Palmer was on the
balls has an anarchic, fun, and exciting given. Maybe the LIV adherents were fence—he made millions selling his brand
identity which embodies golf at its wild- just adopting golf ’s ambient self-regard. of golf clubs to the club pros—but he
est!” a presenter said.) Mickelson resur- It made for some strange utterances. eventually joined. (Nicklaus, who once
faced, bearded, in a leather jacket, and Graeme McDowell lamented the regret- said that golf wasn’t more diverse be-
looking, in his general gloominess, like table “Khashoggi situation,” and then cause “Blacks have different muscles that
a divorced dad. He played in the pro-am added, “If Saudi Arabia wanted to use react in different ways,” and who him-
with Rumayyan. He was heard exclaim- the game of golf as a way for them to self does golf business in Saudi Arabia,
ing, “Great shot, Your Excellency!” get to where they want to be . . . I think is still held up by Tour loyalists as the
The next day, Ari Fleischer, George W. we’re proud to help them on that journey.” paragon of the gentleman golfer.) Today,
Bush’s former press secretary, moderated the Tour has no owners, and the golfers
a press conference, having been hired he golf establishment, with its vote on the board. It functions as a play-
by LIV. The golf media, by then, were
in open opposition to LIV, which they
T Traditions Unlike Any Other, its
country-club morality clauses, its doff-
ers’ collective, at least in theory.
As in any quasi democracy, the com-
viewed as the vanity project of a despot. ing of the caps before the shaking of plaining began almost immediately. The
The scene was exhilarating in its uncom- the hands, was unaccustomed to such players’ beefs are legion: too many tour-
fortableness—tanned men in funny pants greed and dysfunction, or, rather, to their naments, too little freedom, restrictive
answering moral and geopolitical ques- public display. A common cry was that media rights, purses too low, purses too
tions for which they were clearly unpre- LIV was unfit for a gentleman’s game. evenly distributed, purses not evenly dis-
pared. (Earlier, Norman, when asked This is a sport whose major victories tributed enough, a hesitancy to take up
N.F.T.s. At its heart, the grumbling con- of golf ’s four majors, at Bedminster this said, “This thing runs much deeper. Who
cerns money and power. The stars want year but cancelled after January 6th. It’s knows what’s going to come out of Mar-
a bigger cut, and they probably deserve unclear if he knows that the P.G.A. of a-Lago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s
it. The rank and file, as a longtime golf America and the P.G.A. Tour are sepa- all intertwined.” Not far from the driv-
writer told me, “always assume they’re rate entities. In any case, LIV scheduled ing range, where Trump and Rumayyan
getting fucked over.” (One agent pointed two of its eight tournaments at Trump were hitting alone, I found Ivana’s head-
out, “I think we’re on a collision course properties, including its championship, stone on a parched patch of grass. It
for a union.”) Mickelson has claimed and Trump has returned the favor. “I looked out over the first tee box.
that the Tour is sitting on huge cash re- think LIV has been a great thing for Saudi Afterward, I followed Mickelson’s
serves that it should be giving out to Arabia, for the image of Saudi Arabia,” group with a sportswriter. He told me
players like him. (The Tour brings in Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “The that reporters in the media tent had
about a billion and a half dollars a year, publicity they’ve gotten is worth billions.” been playing a game of “What’s your
and roughly half gets disbursed as prizes Before the July tournament’s first number?”That is, what amount of money
and bonuses.) He has proposed cutting round, with hands washed, I stopped would compel them to quit their jobs
membership to just thirty golfers, and by a protest against the event, staged to work for LIV? The consensus was
once spent an entire round pitching the by families of September 11th victims. somewhere between one and five mil-
golfer Brandel Chamblee on the idea. I met with Dennis McGinley, whose lion dollars.
“He was totally oblivious to the fact that brother, Danny, a father of five, was an The crowds were sparse. Some holes
would eliminate my job,” Chamblee has equities trader in the south tower. “I was had a dozen spectators; tickets were re-
said. The notion wasn’t new. In 1994, on the phone with my brother before selling for a dollar. One perk was that
Greg Norman, then the world’s best the second plane hit,” McGinley said. you could get right up next to the golfers.
player, attempted to start a parallel league, “He was crying, he was praying for the It has been pointed out that LIV seems
comprising the top players. The P.G.A. people next door that were jumping out to appeal to a certain type of golfing
Tour, using Norman’s unpopularity, ral- the window. I have been haunted by personality—“a rogue’s gallery of ass-
lied to kill it; the players themselves, led that for twenty-one years.” He experi- holes,” as the golf writer Elizabeth Nel-
by Palmer, refused to join. “I felt back- enced LIV as a betrayal. “I just want ac- son put it to me. There was Mickelson,
stabbed,” Norman said recently. countability,” he said. and Bryson DeChambeau, who was so
LIV offered an alternative for the stars, I headed over to the course, which polarizing on the Tour that his colleague
without whom the Tour would collapse. was lined with signs that said “DON’T Brooks Koepka once promised free beer
This was what Mickelson meant by lever- BLINK” and “GOLF BUT LOUDER.” LIV to fans who heckled him. Also: Koepka
age. “Someone was bound to try this,” wants to appeal to a younger audience himself, who complained about LIV at
McIlroy told me. “The Tour has become with a faster-paced game. Golf being this summer’s U.S. Open, and then de-
quite complacent.” It has mostly stuck golf, the rounds still run five hours, so fected, joining DeChambeau, the day
with the same format and hasn’t attracted the league has curated the fan experience. after the tournament. (When asked what
a younger audience. Still, he went on, Tournaments double as concerts; the had changed, he replied, “Just my opin-
“I’ve always thought that the changes Chainsmokers were scheduled to per- ion, man.”) The golfer Patrick Reed,
could have been made from within, in- form. In the “fan village,” I encountered who has never been popular—his fel-
stead of, honestly, from Greg Norman a break-dancing troupe and a clown low Georgia alum Kevin Kisner once
having a thirty-year vendetta.” making balloon animals. told Golf Digest, of Reed’s college team-
The Tour considers LIV an existen- I went looking for Ivana Trump’s grave. mates, “I don’t know that they’d piss on
tial threat. “They don’t want to coexist,” The family had buried her on the grounds him if he was on fire”—joined, too. He
Davis Love III told me. But the Tour the previous week. It struck some peo- subsequently sued several reporters for
has taken solace in LIV’s actual product, ple as strange. Who would want to spend defamation. (One commentator mused,
which it views as a joke. On the range, eternity at her ex-husband’s golf club? “LIV needs a public investment fund to
LIV is compared to a member-guest at a On Twitter, rumors circulated about how sportwash its association with Patrick
mediocre country club. the property was, technically, a cemetery, Reed.”) An agent told me, “The Tour
which would eliminate the club’s obli- is milquetoast white guys. I think LIV
rump National Golf Club Bedmin- gation to pay state property, income, and is going for the W.W.E. model.” (The
T ster, in New Jersey, on the week in
July that it hosted LIV’s third tourna-
sales taxes. (NJ.com contacted tax ex-
perts who pointed out that this would
W.W.E. is big in Saudi Arabia. “There’s
a lot of pent-up male energy,” a frequent
ment, experienced an outbreak of noro- be true for roughly .026 per cent of the visitor to the kingdom explained.)
virus, according to a person familiar with grounds.) But the tax-shelter theory only The energy in Bedminster was of the
the club. “It’s like food poisoning,” the fed other hypotheses about Trump and unpent variety. LIV, or Trump, or some
person told me. “You throw up.” (A LIV that had made the rounds: that it combination of the two, had attracted
spokesperson for the club denied this ac- was a money-laundering scheme, or that an interesting crowd, part maga rally,
count.) In Trump, LIV has found an en- LIV was a front for Trump to share nu- part high-school lacrosse party. Behind
thusiastic partner. Trump loathes the clear secrets with the Saudis—Julius the tenth green, I saw a guy watching
P.G.A. of America, which had planned Rosenberg with a 9-iron. In Atlanta, one porn on his phone. A middle-aged man
to hold the P.G.A. Championship, one high-ranked golfer pulled me aside and wore a shirt depicting the Twin Towers
wrapped in the flag and the words “20TH Golf Club and planned an overhaul; failed to notice at all. “It’s so dope,” a
ANNIVERSARY, WE WILL NEVER FOR- Mickelson had ideas for the Hy Flyers. young man in a pink polo and a MAGA
GET.” I asked him if it was a protest. “We view ourselves very much as a hat remarked. “There are so many hot
“You’re, like, the third guy to ask me startup,” Khosla said. bitches here.” The Chainsmokers, cit-
that,” he said, looking perplexed. “I’m The players appeared to delight in ing an unspecified illness, pulled out of
just wearing it so nobody forgets.” the Trumpiness. As each threesome ar- the post-round concert.
rived at the tee, they removed their hats
s the weekend went on, the crowds and shook Trump’s hand. Broadly speak- rump knows from upstart sports
A grew in size and rowdiness. The
golf did not appear to be the primary
ing, affinity for Trump helps explain the
Tour-LIV divide. Professional golfers vote
T leagues; in 1983, he paid millions for
a team in the United States Football
concern. Someone had on a Trump Republican as reliably as any voting bloc; League, which collapsed two years later.
hockey jersey adorned with fake bullet in 2004, Golf Digest polled thirty-four Such efforts typically seem vain, even ri-
holes. Another guy wore a hat painted Tour golfers and found not one Kerry diculous, right up until they succeed. For
with the image of a vape voter. But, as in the G.O.P., every Continental Basketball Associa-
pen and the words “COME the Tour has its factions. tion, there is an American League. An
AND TAKE IT.” LIV appeals to the golf- established league is just a stunt that
At the final round, on ers who once identified with stuck around. The conventional wisdom
Sunday, I started to follow the white working class, or is that LIV, as a sportswashing exercise,
the lead group but heard to the merely resentment- doesn’t care enough about golf to estab-
a roar from the sixteenth tee prone. “Guys who grew up lish itself. But what if this misconstrues
and detoured. The hole was a little hardscrabble, didn’t what the Saudis want?
a par-3. The tee sat in front have country clubs to play David Schenker, a former Assistant
of the clubhouse, where at, that fought tooth and Secretary of State for Near Eastern Af-
Trump was holding court nail to play on the Tour, they fairs, was in charge of U.S. policy and
on a patio: Marjorie Taylor say, Look, I’m gonna get diplomacy in the Persian Gulf region
Greene, Caitlyn Jenner, Eric, Donald, what I can get,” the manager Mac Barn- from 2019 to 2021. He’s also a golf nut,
Jr. Tucker Carlson showed up to belly- hardt told me. The P.G.A. Tour, mean- with a fourteen handicap. “This is the
laugh at Trump’s jokes. Rumayyan and while, is for the élite, the club crowd intersection of my personal and profes-
Sorour stopped by periodically. Several that likes to think there are things more sional lives!” he told me recently, of LIV.
hundred spectators were there, just star- important than money. Of course, it’s Schenker believes that LIV is best un-
ing. “This is actually Christmas,” one easier to look down on cash grabs when derstood in the context of Gulf geopol-
said. “Pelosi for prison!” another yelled. your cash was grabbed for you genera- itics: the budding rivalry between the
Young women began tossing Budweisers tions ago. The savvier golfers also have Saudis and the Emiratis.
into the crowd, prompting scuff les. images to protect; rarefied dignity sells M.B.S.’s stated goal is to diversify
Someone said, gleefully, “This would Rolexes and lands Goldman Sachs spon- the economy and wean it from oil, a
never happen on the P.G.A. Tour!” The sorships. Nelson, the golf writer, told program he calls Vision 2030. The P.I.F.
previous day, Trump had arranged for a me that, if LIV embodied Trumpism, aims to spend forty billion dollars a year
microphone. “You wanna do a rally?” he “the P.G.A. Tour is not Abraham Lin- to bolster new Saudi industries—coffee
said. “We will make America great again! coln, it’s Mitch McConnell—the power production, electric cars, tech. One main
They’re not doing a very good job of it structure that says, Well, I don’t disap- objective is for Riyadh and Neom,
right now!” prove of élitist destructive behavior, but a megacity being built on the Red Sea,
Players were still coming through and this is bad for business.” to supplant Abu Dhabi and Dubai as
teeing off, but the crowd hardly noticed. Exceptions can be found on both the region’s de-facto capitals. Schenker
“Where the heck’s all the golf at?” some- sides, and, despite the exodus, the Tour said, “There was this picture, perhaps
one yelled, to laughter. It was difficult is not wanting for Trump voters. “That’s mistakenly, that M.B.Z.”—Moham-
to tell if the indifference owed to Trump’s what’s been so satisfying—seeing these med bin Zayed, the crown prince of
all-consuming presence or to the fact guys who had no problem with Trump Abu Dhabi—“was sort of a mentor to
that the product was kind of rinky-dink. torching the rule of law when it was the M.B.S. But Saudi Arabia increasingly
There was little of the tension that makes Constitution, all up in arms now that sees itself as the leader.” M.B.S. has plans
golf compelling. The team scores were Trump is doing the same to their golf to double Riyadh’s population in the
hard to follow. The LIV names and tour,” one golf writer told me. I talked next decade. The kingdom will require
logos—Crushers, Smash, the anarchic to a player (described by the writer as companies that conduct business with
and fun Fireballs—were, as my colleague “to the right of Attila the Hun”) who state institutions to establish a regional
David Owen put it, “created by an ad- said, of Trump, “It’s forced us into a very headquarters in the country. The prob-
visory group of fourth-grade boys, ap- odd, odd spot. It’s hard to handle. ” lem has been that a desert with no cin-
parently.” LIV’s chief operating officer, The final holes in Bedminster lacked emas or alcohol, and with a religious
Atul Khosla, told me that the team names any drama. Henrik Stenson won the police force that harasses women, is not
were largely provisional. The Australian individual competition by two strokes. very attractive.
pro Cameron Smith didn’t care for Punch A few people clapped politely. Many To appeal to the Dubai-inclined,
M.B.S. has lifted a ban on cinemas, main aim. Joseph Westphal, the U.S. named Frank McNamara, a U.S. Attor-
courted music festivals, and reined in Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 2014 ney during the Reagan Administration
the religious police. A ski resort is in to 2017, agrees. “This idea that this is and a father of twelve. “I’m pro-LIV and
the works. Schenker and others predict sportswashing is completely ridiculous,” pro-life!” he said. As Saturday’s round
that M.B.S. will legalize drinking in he told me. Of course, another way of started, he walked over with a man he
some form when he assumes the throne. looking at the situation is that LIV is en- wanted to introduce.
The centerpiece of his plans is Neom, gaging in sportswashing of a different The man wore pink pants and avi-
which he has described, privately, as kind, one that the Tour is familiar with. ators. “They called me a scary moth-
Dubai but better. According to the Wall The goal isn’t to clean reputations so erfucker!” he said, laughing. It was
Street Journal, he envisioned sand that much as to use them for profit. Majed Al Sorour, the C.E.O. of the
glows in the dark and an artificial moon; A Saudi LIV executive I spoke to Saudi Golf Federation. He had a ge-
canals for swim-commuting have been maintained that LIV was a legitimate nial bearing, but seemed bothered by
mentioned. The project, which is ex- business. Few outside the company see some of the press coverage. Un-
pected to consume half a trillion dol- profitability as likely. “There’s no way prompted, he said to me, “We don’t kill
lars, is a money pit; according to to underwrite making money on what gays, I’ll just tell you that.” (As recently
Bloomberg, Neom’s C.E.O. displays a they’re doing,” a person involved in the as 2020, an activist advocating for equal
graphic that former employees called Premier Golf League talks told me. On rights for L.G.B.T. people in the king-
the “wall of shame,” showing depart- the other hand, one persistent charac- dom was arrested and tortured.)
ment heads who failed to spend enough. teristic of P.I.F. investments is abundant I walked with Sorour up the first fair-
But other developments, elsewhere on optimism. “These are people who have way. Compared with Bedminster, the
the Red Sea and around Riyadh, are huge ambitions,” the person in contact crowds were dense. Everyone seemed ex-
farther along. Included in the plans is with M.B.S. said. “The ambitions are cited for the golf. “At the end of the day,
an amenity that the Saudis believe will really to make a shitload of money for look at this,” Sorour said, in front of the
draw wealthy Westerners: golf. the country. And also showing up the green. On the range, I’d noticed an un-
To build a grass course in the desert, other Gulfies.” But, he allowed, “maybe usual esprit de corps among the players,
the first thing you need is sand. Saudi their ambitions aren’t commensurate almost a rakishness. “They feel like pi-
Arabia, which now has eight grass with reality.” rates in a way,” David Feherty, a golf an-
courses, is planning to build as many as alyst who jumped from NBC to LIV, told
sixteen more in the next four years. Each ver Labor Day weekend, LIV held me. (Feherty, perhaps, felt like one, too.
requires ten thousand or so dump-truck
loads of sweet sand, which provides a
O its next tournament, the LIV Golf
Invitational Boston, at a club outside
When I asked him why he’d joined, he
replied, “Money.”) Maybe it was the
better base layer than desert marl. Over Worcester. Early in the week, I’d be- shorts—on the eve of the tournament,
the sand goes grass; the Saudis grow come friendly with a club member the players had voted overwhelmingly
heat-tolerant strains in a giant nursery
outside Riyadh. Saudi Arabia is one of
the most water-scarce countries in the
world, so golf officials plan to irrigate
the courses using recycled wastewater.
LIV serves as an advertising cam-
paign for the new industry. “You can’t
deny that even the controversy has in-
serted the Saudi name into golf,” a Saudi
consultant close to the government told
me. “I think they’re getting exactly what
they hoped for.” He said that he had
scheduled his first-ever golf lesson for
the next day: “I’m getting with the pro-
gram, as they say.”
Most people who study or work with
the Saudi royal family are skeptical of
the sportswashing motive. One person
who has been in contact with M.B.S.
said that the crown prince has given up
on trying to fix his reputation in the
West. “He’s not that naïve,” the person
said. After LIV’s launch, Khashoggi and
9/11 have been talked about more, not
less. Schenker believes that establishing
Saudi Arabia as a golf destination is LIV’s “No, it’s a single ingredient—baby carrots.”
to ditch golf ’s long pants, which are re- early adopters. The first ten had signed ers, and that its audience wasn’t large
quired on the Tour. Sorour said he before LIV had announced its launch. enough to make any significant reve-
would’ve voted otherwise, but he didn’t Another group had been ready to sign. nue. Sorour told me, “If it was up to me,
object. “Democracy’s O.K.,” he said. Then Mickelson made his comments I’d make it in-house.” He seemed to en-
“Sometimes!” about the “scary motherfuckers,” and the vision a LIV channel, like the N.F.L.
Shortly before the tournament’s start, league, suddenly, was on the brink of Network. According to a liv spokes-
the golf world had reached a tentative folding. Sorour told me, “I called the person, Jared Kushner, whose private-
stasis. The remaining P.G.A. Tour stars boss”—Rumayyan—“I said, ‘Everyone’s equity firm received two billion dollars
had held a players-only meeting in Au- walking away. Do you want to do it, or from the P.I.F., has spoken with a broad-
gust, before a tournament in Delaware; not?’” Sorour told Rumayyan he had a caster about LIV. Late last month, the
it was organized by Woods and Mc- plan: “Get the biggest mediocres, get the golf writer Eamon Lynch reported that,
Ilroy, who’d become convinced that the ten that we have, get you and I, and let’s after internal lobbying by Lachlan Mur-
Tour’s executives weren’t acting force- go play for twenty-five million dollars.” doch, Fox was planning to allow LIV to
fully enough to protect it from LIV’s in- Rumayyan decided to press ahead and buy airtime on the network. (LIV issued
cursions. Woods wasn’t playing, but he announce the launch immediately. a statement calling the reporting “in-
flew in on his Gulfstream. “It tells you Sorour said the P.I.F. had funding complete and inaccurate.”)
how much he despises Greg Norman,” for LIV through 2025. By then, he imag- LIV’s other pressing issue is that its
the old hand told me. ined, they would begin to cash out by tournaments don’t yet earn golf rank-
Twenty-three players attended the selling off ownership in their twelve ing points, making it more difficult to
meeting, in a conference room at the teams. The franchise model is how LIV qualify for the majors. There was spec-
Hotel duPont. They sat around a U- plans to recoup its investment. Sorour ulation that the Masters might ban LIV
shaped table. According to one attendee, envisions owners building home golf players. “For now, the majors are sid-
a handful were mulling LIV offers. In courses, like a stadium for a football ing with the Tour, and I don’t know
the course of three hours, the group went team. LIV had given certain players eq- why,” Sorour said. “If the majors decide
through a long slide presentation. Play- uity stakes in their teams. (Some of the not to have our players play? I will cel-
ers asked questions, but, ultimately, ev- reported compensation figures, such as ebrate. I will create my own majors for
eryone agreed to the plan advanced by the seven to eight hundred million al- my players.” He went on, “Honestly, I
Woods and McIlroy. Afterward, they legedly offered to Woods, included eq- think all the tours are being run by guys
followed up with Monahan, the P.G.A. uity and potential sponsorships. Of the who don’t understand business.”
Tour commissioner, who quickly adopted Woods offer, Sorour said, “It’s not Sorour got up and went to a railing
it. The top golfers committed to play- straight-out money. I never offered him overlooking the eighteenth green. It
ing in more tournaments. The Tour that money, not even close to that.”) was difficult to deny that the weekend
agreed to add four “elevated” events with There have been conf licting reports of golf had become exciting. Even Mick-
purses of twenty million dollars; to guar- about the valuations that LIV puts on elson, who’d played miserably since join-
antee annual earnings of half a million its teams, which consist of four players: ing LIV, walked up to the green shoot-
dollars; and to expand a bonus pool that a hundred million, half a billion, a bil- ing under par. “Finally,” Sorour said.
awarded millions more to the stars. All lion. Sorour told me it would vary by “Maybe he needed shorts all along.”
but one of the players who attended team. Outside LIV, the numbers are The players smiled and chatted on the
stuck with the Tour. When I talked to treated skeptically. McIlroy told me, course. As Harold Varner III, the lat-
McIlroy after the meeting, I asked him “People have to remember, golf is a niche est LIV addition, had walked past the
if it had been difficult to spurn the po- sport. All you’re getting is four golfers. suite, Sorour leaned over the railing
tential for hundreds of millions from And I get it, some M.L.S. teams are and shouted jokes. If nothing else, LIV
LIV. (Before LIV, he’d also declined to worth seven hundred million dollars. had created a counterpoint to the Tour’s
play in Saudi tournaments, citing moral But it’s all tied to the economics of the American-individualist mythos—a sort
objections.) “I’m gonna make a shit ton league, and right now that league doesn’t of Saudi dream. For the players, it looked
of money here, that’s the thing!” he said. have any economics.” like a weekend outing among buddies.
In Massachusetts, after a round, The next day, during the final round,
Mickelson, who has mostly avoided in- IV’s biggest problem is television the individual competition went to a
terviews, told me with a smirk, “It’s great
that they magically found a couple hun-
L rights. At the moment, it streams
its events on YouTube for free. Broad-
three-person playoff—the first in LIV
history. The gallery around the green
dred million. That’s awesome.” casters and streamers have consistently was twenty people deep. Dustin John-
The changes meant that the player turned down LIV. One TV executive, son, who’d already won more than five
exodus was likely to stabilize. Sorour and citing a “long, mutually beneficial rela- million dollars in his first three tourna-
I retreated to a private suite beside the tionship with the P.G.A. Tour,” told me, ments, smoked a long eagle putt way
eighteenth green. He sat on a couch, his “Our strategy is we always want the too hard, but it banked off the back of
arms spread on the cushions, and said, best. LIV doesn’t rise to that level.” Ed the cup and in, for the victory. The first
“We have many players who want to Desser, a former lead negotiator for the reaction of his defeated opponents was
come in now. But I need to protect my N.B.A.’s media deals, said that LIV’s to burst out in laughter. Everyone was
people.” He felt a sense of loyalty to the reputation would drive away broadcast- rich, happy, and having fun. 
masks, and a lot of light shone through,
SHOUTS & MURMURS so maybe they’re not actually safe?
The only other possibility is I got it
at Sturgis.
7. If you recently experienced symp-

tomatic COVID-19 and have since re-
covered, was it worth it?
☐ Yes. Now I can eat inside restau-
rants like all the people who never cared.
☐ No. Having the virus was hard
enough, but it was worse to have to
tweet “Thankful to be vaxxed and
boosted!!”
8. If the line on the rapid test shows

up slowly and faintly, does that mean
UPDATED COVID-19
that you’re less infectious than when it
appears right away and is the color of
HEALTH-SCREENING FORM
a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto?
☐ I found an article that says you
shouldn’t make decisions based on the
BY JAY KATSIR intensity of the line. But: if it’s light,
board your flight.
1. Are we still doing these? breath, piping-hot sneeze, shortness ☐ You are most infectious when the
☐ Yes. Go to the next question. of smell, loss of throat, intergluteal elm test window shows four pirate ships.
bark, unmotivated fibula, buffalo moon
2. Are you completing this form for a hump, the Galloping Dancey Boys, 9. Should I expect to get COVID-19
child who is younger than kindergar- increased sensitivity to rhyming in- every two months until the end of time?
ten age? sults, Count Scrofula, and fisherman’s ☐ At some point, you’ll also get
☐ No. I am completing it as an empty lonely-eye. monkeypox.
ritual. ☐ Similar to before I had COVID,
☐ Yes. But I acknowledge that proto- with reduced paranoia about catching 10. Is it weird that there are so few cur-
cols are insufficient, toddler life has re- COVID. rent TV shows that exist in a COVID
sumed, and I will contract BA.9 at the ☐ Adrift on my sickbed, I have de- universe? It’s like the characters are
Bluey party from the Silent Finance scended into a spectral tunnel, where nominally living on our time line and
Dads around the cheese-cube platter. I wander through a column of humid in our reality, but I guess it would be
twilight, hearing echoes of my chil- just too dismal to watch them manage
3. Have you experienced any symptoms dren’s voices calling out for me, only protocols and masking.
of COVID-19 in the past ten days? to suddenly awake and realize that I’m ☐ No. Mass entertainment is a form
☐ No. I am one of the four Americans making them waffles. of escape. No one wants to watch Ted
yet to contract COVID-19. ☐ Spectral tunnel but with diarrhea. Lasso come to staggering realizations
☐ No. I am in my Inter-Infection In- about his childhood via Zoom therapy.
vincibility Window. This morning I 5. In the past thirty days, have you re- ☐ Kind of. “This Is Us” tried to work
went to the airport and licked every- ceived a positive result from a COVID-19 COVID into the plot for a while but
one arriving from Des Moines. diagnostic test? gave up to focus on ending the series
☐ Yes. The distemper has visited its ☐ Yes. Also in the past sixty days and with nine consecutive funerals.
cold hand upon my lintel. Though I in the past thirty seconds.
be fortified since Michaelmas with 11. I know this is annoying, but do you
charms and amulets thrice-blessed, the 6. Do you have any idea where you mind taking a test before we hang out?
miasma entered unto my chambers, got it? We’re supposed to visit my parents
smuggled there, no doubt, by an un- ☐ No. next weekend, and we’re trying to be
seen Dutchman. ☐ I think maybe from work, but no extra safe.
one else tested positive. I was the only ☐ Yes. It is annoying.
4. If you answered “yes” above, which of one in the office wearing a mask, but ☐ Yes. We’ve decided it’s time to stop
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
the following describes your symptoms? I’m not sure if it was a real KN95— warping our lives around what’s basically
☐ A fever of less than a hundred de- the box looks pretty bootleg, and the an inconvenience at this point. There are
grees Fahrenheit, cough, sore throat, mask straps are constantly breaking. a lot of other problems in the world, and
loss of taste or smell, shortness of I held a flashlight up to one of the we like ignoring those, too. 
The strangest of the many strange
A M E R I CA N C H R O N I C L E S things about these tickets is that,
unlike other convenience-store sta-
SCRATCH THAT
ples—Utz potato chips, Entenmann’s
cinnamon-swirl buns, $1.98 bottles
of wine—they are brought to you by
What we’ve lost playing the lottery. your state government. Only Alabama,
Alaska, Hawaii, Nevada, and Utah
BY KATHRYN SCHULZ are not in the business of selling lot-
tery tickets. Everywhere else, Blazing
Hot Cash and its ilk are, like state
parks and driver’s licenses, a govern-
ment service.
How this came to be is the subject
of an excellent new book, “For a Dol-
lar and a Dream: State Lotteries in
Modern America,” by the historian
Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of
Cohen’s book is a peculiar contradic-
tion: on the one hand, the lottery is
vastly less profitable than its propo-
nents make it out to be, a deception
that has come at the expense of pub-
lic coffers and public services. On the
other hand, it is so popular that it is
both extremely lucrative for the pri-
vate companies that make and sell
tickets and financially crippling for its
most dedicated players. One in two
American adults buys a lottery ticket
at least once a year, one in four buys
one at least once a month, and the
most avid players buy them at rates
that might shock you. At my local store,
some customers snap up entire rolls—
at a minimum, three hundred dollars’
worth of tickets—and others show up
in the morning, play until they win
something, then come back in the eve-
ning and do it again. All of this, re-
t my local convenience store, and the Double Blackjack, and the Family peated every day at grocery stores and
A almost surely at yours, too, it is
possible to buy upward of fifty differ-
Feud, but most are straightforward
about the point of buying them: Show
liquor stores and mini-marts across the
country, renders the lottery a ninety-
ent kinds of scratch-off lottery tickets. Me $10,000!, $100,000 Lucky, Money one-billion-dollar business. “Ameri-
To do so, you must be at least eighteen Explosion, Cash Is King, Blazing Hot cans spend more on lottery tickets
years old, even though the tickets look Cash, Big Cash Riches. If your taste every year than on cigarettes, coffee,
like the décor for a kindergarten class- runs toward Fast Ca$h or Red Ball or smartphones,” Cohen writes, “and
room. The dominant themes are pri- Cash Doubler, you can buy one for just they spend more on lottery tickets an-
mary colors, dollar signs, and shiny, as a buck; if you prefer VIP Club or nually than on video streaming ser-
in gold bars, shooting stars, glinting $2,000,000 Gold Rush, a single ticket vices, concert tickets, books, and movie
horseshoes, and stacks of silver coins. will set you back thirty dollars. All this tickets combined.”
When you are looking at a solid wall is before you get to the Pick 3, Pick 4, As those two sets of comparisons
of them, they also resemble—based on Powerball, and Mega Millions tickets, suggest, lottery tickets can seem like
the palette, font choices, and general which are comparatively staid in ap- either a benign form of entertainment
f lashy hecticness—the mid-nineties pearance—they look like Scantron or a dangerous addiction. The ques-
Internet. Some of them are named for sheets—and are printed out at the time tion that lurks within “For a Dollar and
other games, such as the Monopoly X5, of purchase. a Dream” is which category they really
belong to—and, accordingly, whether
The modern incarnation of the lottery arose out of a crisis in state funding. governments charged with promoting
32 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY GABRIEL ALCALA
the general welfare should be in the bent, early America was short on rev- ing source, such as the amount of
business of producing them, publiciz- enue and long on the need for public money traded on the New York Stock
ing them, and profiting from them. works. Over time, it also became, as Exchange. Numbers games were enor-
Cohen notes, “defined politically by mously popular everywhere—in 1964,
otteries are an ancient pastime. its aversion to taxation.” That made they raked in two hundred million dol-
L They were common in the Roman
Empire—Nero was a fan of them; make
the lottery an appealing alternative for
raising money, which was used for
lars, about two billion in today’s money,
in New York City alone—but espe-
of that what you will—and are attested funding everything from civil defense cially so in Black communities, where
to throughout the Bible, where the to the construction of churches. Har- they provided a much needed source
casting of lots is used for everything vard, Yale, and Princeton were all fi- of income. This was true mostly for
from selecting the next king of Israel nanced partly by lotteries, and the Con- their organizers and runners, whose
to choosing who will get to keep Jesus’ tinental Congress attempted to use ranks included Ella Fitzgerald and
garments after the Crucifixion. In many one to help pay for the Revolutionary Malcolm X, but occasionally also for
of these early instances, they were de- War. (Lotteries formed a rare point of players who lucked into a windfall,
ployed either as a kind of party game— agreement between Thomas Jefferson, such as Luther Theophilus Powell, who
during Roman Saturnalias, tickets were who regarded them as not much risk- won ten thousand dollars on a twenty-
distributed free to guests, some of whom ier than farming, and Alexander Ham- five dollar bet in the nineteen-fifties
won extravagant prizes—or as a means ilton, who grasped what would turn and used it to buy a house in Queens
of divining God’s will. Often, though, out to be their essence: that everyone for his wife, daughter, and young son,
lotteries were organized to raise money “would prefer a small chance of win- Colin Powell.
for public works. The earliest known ning a great deal to a great chance Eventually, numbers games proved
version of keno dates to the Han dy- of winning little.”) And, like almost so profitable that they were taken over
nasty and is said to have helped pay everything else in early America, lot- by organized crime, sometimes with
for the Great Wall of China. Two cen- teries were tangled up with the slave the aid of police officers who accepted
turies later, Caesar Augustus started a trade, sometimes in unpredictable ways. bribes to shut down African Ameri-
lottery to subsidize repairs for the city George Washington once managed a can operators. Dutch Schultz and Vito
of Rome. Virginia-based lottery whose prizes Genovese both used the game to help
By the fourteen-hundreds, the prac- included human beings, and one for- bankroll their operations, and the Win-
tice was common in the Low Coun- merly enslaved man, Denmark Vesey, ter Hill Gang, Whitey Bulger’s crew,
tries, which relied on lotteries to build purchased his freedom after winning got its start partly by running numbers
town fortifications and, later, to pro- a South Carolina lottery and went on in Somerville, outside Boston. By the
vide charity for the poor. Soon enough, to foment a slave rebellion. nineteen-fifties, increasing concern
the trend made its way to England, This initial era of the American lot- about the power and reach of the Mob
where, in 1567, Queen Elizabeth I char- tery was brought to an end by wide- culminated in a Senate investigation,
tered the nation’s first lottery, desig- spread concern about mismanagement the Kefauver committee, which judged
nating its profits for “reparation of the and malfeasance. Between 1833 and profits from gambling to be the pri-
Havens and strength of the Realme.” 1880, every state but one banned the mary financial engine of crime syndi-
Tickets cost ten shillings, a hefty sum practice, leaving only the infamously cates in America. This declaration, and
back then, and, in addition to the po- corrupt Louisiana State Lottery Com- the torrent of news coverage it gener-
tential prize value, each one served as pany in operation. Despite its name, ated, had a paradoxical effect: it made
a get-out-of-jail-free card, literally; the L.S.L.C. effectively operated across lottery games seem so lucrative that,
every lottery participant was entitled the country, sending advertisements after decades of dismissing them as in-
to immunity from arrest, except for and selling tickets by mail. So power- appropriate for the honorable business
certain felonies such as piracy, murder, ful was it that, as Cohen explains, it of public service, state governments
and treason. took the federal government to kill it once again began to consider getting
The lottery did not so much spread off; in 1890, Congress passed a law pro- in on the take.
to America from England as help spread hibiting the interstate promotion or
England into America: the European sale of lottery tickets, thereby devas- t is at this point that Cohen’s narra-
settlement of the continent was fi-
nanced partially through lotteries. They
tating the Louisiana game and, for the
time being, putting a stop to state lot-
I tive really gets going; although he
nods to the early history of the lottery,
then became common in the colonies teries in America. he focusses chiefly on its modern in-
themselves, despite strong Protestant Predictably, in the absence of legal carnation. This started, he argues, when
proscriptions against gambling. In the lotteries, illegal ones flourished—above growing awareness about all the money
Massachusetts Bay Colony, which held all, numbers games, which awarded to be made in the gambling business
its first authorized lottery in 1745, dice daily prizes for correctly guessing a collided with a crisis in state funding.
and playing cards were forbidden even three-digit number. To avoid allega- In the nineteen-sixties, under the bur-
in private homes. tions that the game was fixed, each den of a swelling population, rising in-
That contradiction can be explained day’s winning number was based on a flation, and the cost of the Vietnam
in part by exigency; whatever its moral publicly available but constantly chang- War, America’s prosperity began to
all walks of life, but the most vocifer-
ous of them were devout Protestants,
who regarded government-sanctioned
lotteries as morally unconscionable.
(Catholics, by contrast, were over-
whelmingly pro-lottery, played it in
huge numbers once it was legalized,
and reliably flocked to other gambling
games as well; Cohen cites the stag-
gering fact that, in 1978, “bingo games
hosted by Ohio Catholic high schools
took in more money than the state’s
lottery.”) As one Methodist minister
and anti-lottery activist declared at the
time, “There is more agreement among
Protestant groups on the adverse ef-
fect of gambling than on any other so-
cial issue, including the issues of abor-
tion, alcohol, and homosexuality.” Such
adverse effects included fostering gam-
bling addictions, sapping income from
the poor, undermining basic civic and
moral ideals by championing a route
to prosperity that did not involve merit
“He doesn’t seem to grasp the historical significance of this moment.” or hard work, and encouraging state
governments to maximize profits even
at the expense of their most vulnera-
• • ble citizens.
However valid these concerns might
wane. For many states, especially those governments should also sell heroin— have been, they were largely ignored.
that provided a generous social safety but it gave moral cover to people who In 1964, New Hampshire, famously tax
net, balancing the budget became in- approved of lotteries for other reasons. averse, approved the first state-run lot-
creasingly difficult without either rais- Many white voters, Cohen writes, sup- tery of the modern era. Thirteen states
ing taxes or cutting services. The dif- ported legalization because they followed in as many years, all of them
ficulty was that both options were thought state-run gambling would pri- in the Northeast and the Rust Belt. In
extremely unpopular with voters. marily attract Black numbers players, the meantime, as Cohen recounts, the
For politicians confronting this who would then foot the bill for ser- nation’s late-twentieth-century tax re-
problem, the lottery appeared to be a vices that those white voters didn’t volt intensified. In 1978, California
perfect solution: a way to maintain ex- want to pay for anyway, such as better passed Proposition 13, cutting property
isting services without hiking taxes— schools in the urban areas they had taxes by almost sixty per cent and in-
and therefore without getting pun- lately fled. (In reality, the oft-repeated spiring other states to follow suit; in
ished at the polls. For them, Cohen claim that legalizing the lottery would the early nineteen-eighties, with Ron-
writes, lotteries were essentially “bud- merely decriminalize current gamblers ald Reagan in the White House, fed-
getary miracles, the chance for states rather than create new ones of all races eral money flowing into state coffers
to make revenue appear seemingly out proved dramatically wrong.) Mean- declined. With more and more states
of thin air.” For instance, in New Jer- while, many African American voters casting around for solutions to their
sey, which had no sales tax, no income supported legalization because they budgetary crises which would not en-
tax, and no appetite for instituting ei- believed that it would ease their fric- rage an increasingly anti-tax elector-
ther one, legislators claimed that a lot- tion with the police, for whom num- ate, the appeal of the lottery spread
tery would bring in hundreds of mil- bers games had long served as a rea- south and west.
lions of dollars, thereby relieving them son—sometimes legitimate, sometimes As Cohen relates in perhaps the
of the need to ever again contemplate not—to interrogate and imprison peo- most fascinating chapter of his book,
the unpleasant subject of taxation. ple of color. those pro-lottery forces had a power-
Dismissing long-standing ethical Lottery opponents, however, ques- ful ally in Scientific Games, Inc., a
objections to the lottery, these new ad- tioned both the ethics of funding pub- lottery-ticket manufacturer that first
vocates reasoned that, since people lic services through gambling and the made a name for itself by pioneering
were going to gamble anyway, the state amount of money that states really scratch-off tickets. In addition to de-
might as well pocket the profits. That stood to gain. Such critics hailed from livering instant results, these tickets,
argument had its limits—by its logic, both sides of the political aisle and like Ikea furniture, offer the appeal of
active participation, which gives play- forty-million-dollar contract. Wins terintuitive—the worse the odds of
ers the illusion of exercising some like that soon turned Scientific Games winning became, the more people
control over the outcome. Scratch-off into an unstoppable force within the wanted to play. Alexander Hamilton
tickets débuted to great success in Mas- lottery industry. By 1982, the company was right: to the average person, the
sachusetts in 1974; by 1976, every state had printed its five-billionth ticket difference between one-in-three-
lottery had jumped on the bandwagon. and was producing a million more million odds and one-in-three-hun-
But that triumph presented a problem every hour. At the same time, the lot- dred-million odds didn’t matter, but
for Scientific Games, since it meant tery industry itself had become un- the difference between a three-million-
that the available market was saturated. stoppable, too—thanks to S.G.I. and dollar jackpot and a three-hundred-
To keep expanding its business, the the wave of legalizations, but also million-dollar jackpot mattered enor-
company set about persuading more thanks to the introduction of a new mously. Recognizing this, lottery
states to legalize the lottery. Starting version of a very old game of chance commissioners began lifting prize
in the late seventies, S.G.I. began hir- that, as Cohen writes, “fundamentally caps and adding more numbers—say,
ing lobbyists, contracting with adver- reshaped the place of lotteries in six out of fifty instead of five out of
tising firms, creating astroturf citizens’ American society.” thirty—thus making the likelihood
groups, and spending millions of dol- of winning even smaller. The New
lars to persuade voters in Arizona, Cal- ased on a betting game originally York Lotto launched, in 1978, with
ifornia, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Or-
egon, and the District of Columbia to
B played in seventeenth-century
Genoa, lotto is not self-evidently
one-in-3.8-million odds; today, the
odds are one in forty-five million.
pass lottery initiatives. groundbreaking—or, for that matter, Despite all this, and to the despair
Scientific Games was not the only self-evidently appealing. To play, you of statisticians everywhere, lotto soon
company providing lottery services, guess a certain quantity of numbers became the nation’s most popular lot-
but its competitors had largely es- from a specified range. The New York tery game. But although ticket sales
chewed lobbying, nominally out of Lotto, for instance, requires six num- and prize winnings soared, they did
ethical concerns but really because bers between one and fifty-nine; the not do so equally across the country,
they were reluctant to spend money North Carolina lotto, five numbers be- since rollover jackpots disproportion-
that they wouldn’t recoup if they didn’t tween one and forty-three. The odds ately benefitted states with large pop-
land the resulting contracts. S.G.I. got of getting all the numbers right are ab- ulations and therefore more potential
around this difficulty by making sure surdly low—which, paradoxically, is players. In response, smaller states
that the lottery initiatives it backed why lotto revolutionized the industry. banded together to form multistate
contained language—allegedly in- Before the game was introduced, lotteries, a trend that culminated in
tended to prevent the involvement of state jackpots were relatively modest. Powerball and Mega Millions, each
organized crime—that required ex- Their size was limited by the number of which started as a collaboration
tensive financial disclosures not only of players, since payouts reflected a per- among a handful of states but is now
from all the executives at companies centage of ticket sales, as well as by played everywhere the lottery is legal.
submitting a bid but from all the ex- state lottery commissions, which set a The resulting prizes are truly astro-
ecutives at their parent companies, cap on the prize money; from 1964 to nomical; this past July, two people who
too. That requirement alone made the bought a lottery ticket in Illinois
bidding process too burdensome to bucked one-in-three-hundred-and-
be worthwhile for S.G.I.’s chief com- two-million odds to win a $1.34-bil-
petitor, Webcraft Games, since it was lion Mega Millions jackpot.
owned by Beatrice Foods, which at In some respects, the modern Amer-
the time was larger than Lockheed ican lotto game is a product of tech-
Martin, 3M, and Coca-Cola. The nological change; it could not have ex-
S.G.I.-supported initiatives also man- isted prior to computer programs that
dated tight timelines for the bidding enabled states to know more or less in-
process, giving the company a plan- stantly whether anyone had purchased
ning edge while making it virtually 1979, jackpots seldom exceeded a mil- a ticket with the winning numbers. But
impossible for anyone else to com- lion dollars. But lotto was a rollover Cohen makes a persuasive case that it
plete the paperwork in time. game: if a drawing was held and no- was also a product of cultural change:
However dodgy this strategy may body won—a common occurrence, the end of a shared reverence for mid-
have been, it worked. Every lottery given the odds—players could keep dle-class stability and the rise, in the
initiative backed by S.G.I. succeeded— buying tickets. For those profiting from nineteen-eighties, of the veneration of
and, in every case, the company was the lottery, this created a virtuous cycle. extravagant wealth. The years in which
rewarded with a contract. That meant Every time the pot got bigger, more lotto reshaped the national gambling
its lobbying investment paid off, spec- people were tempted to buy a ticket, scene were the years of deregulation
tacularly; in California, for instance, and the more people bought tickets, and Reaganomics, Donald J. Trump
S.G.I. spent $2.4 million to pass a lot- the bigger the pot became. and Alex P. Keaton, the première of
tery initiative, then won the resulting The whole thing was hugely coun- “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”
and a remake of “Brewster’s Millions.” be true. Life, as it turned out, imitated help of Scientific Games. Rather than
Pastors were preaching the prosperity the lottery: for most Americans, it was argue that a lottery would float most
gospel; politicians were singing the getting harder and harder to win. of a state’s budget, they began claim-
praises of the unfettered free market. ing that it would cover a single line
Suddenly, Cohen writes, “it was no lon- he lottery was supposed to make item, invariably a government service
ger taboo to collect a massive fortune;
neither was it offensive to show it off.
T all this better, not worse. Its ad-
vocates claimed that, by filling state
that was popular and nonpartisan—
most often education, but sometimes
Wealth—not the prosperity of blue-col- coffers without increasing state taxes, elder care or public parks or aid for
lar workers but the fortunes of their it would keep money in the pockets of veterans. One virtue of this narrower
bosses—became a means of reassert- average citizens. But this premise, which approach was that it made campaign-
ing the bounty of capitalism.” led state after state to approve lotter- ing for legalization easy. A vote for the
The irony, as Cohen notes, is that ies, was simply untrue. Evidence from lottery was not a way of supporting
this obsession with unimaginable the first legalized lotteries quickly put gambling but a way of supporting vet-
wealth, including the dream of hitting paid to the fantasy that they would erans; a vote against the lottery was a
a multimillion-dollar lottery jackpot, provide sufficient income to fund much vote against education.
corresponded to a decline in financial of the business of running a state. In These campaigns were extraordi-
security for most working people. Be- New Jersey, where proponents had narily effective but, as with the earlier
ginning in the nineteen-seventies and imagined proceeds on the order of hun- ones, fundamentally misleading. For one
accelerating in the nineteen-eighties, dreds of millions of dollars, the lottery thing, they, too, wildly inflated the im-
the income gap between the rich and brought in thirty-three million dollars pact of lottery money on state finances.
the poor widened, job security and pen- in its first year—about two per cent of In California, where an S.G.I.-backed
sions eroded, health-care costs and un- the state’s revenue. lottery initiative passed after a high-
employment rose, and, for children When figures like that proved typ- profile campaign touted it as a boon for
born in those decades, our long-stand- ical of the era, legalization advocates, schoolchildren, the resulting revenue
ing national promise—that education no longer able to sell the lottery as covered, in the lottery’s first year, about
and hard work would render them bet- a statewide silver bullet, ginned up five per cent of the state education bud-
ter off than their parents—ceased to other strategies instead, often with the get. As of this year, according to the
California Department of Education,
lottery income accounts for roughly one
per cent of all K-12 funding.
But that was not the worst of it.
Again and again, education and other
line items that served to persuade peo-
ple to pass lottery proposals did not ac-
tually get any additional funding; in-
stead, the revenue went into the state’s
general fund. After this happened in
California, other states mandated that
lottery money flow directly into spec-
ified programs, but, as is so often the
case, when one loophole closes, another
one opens. In Illinois, Florida, and Vir-
ginia, among other states, the lottery
revenue did indeed go to a designated
education fund—whereupon legisla-
tors offset those gains by reducing the
money coming in from general appro-
priations. In the end, Cohen writes, “the
lottery supplanted, rather than supple-
mented, state spending on education.”
Today, according to the National
Conference of State Legislatures, lot-
teries bring in, on average, about one
per cent of state revenue per year. Like
all money, it matters, but whatever dif-
ference it makes is offset by two prob-
lems. The first is that lotteries have
made it harder than ever to pass much
“Other than moist feet, it’s exactly the same as earth.” needed tax increases, because, thanks
to years of noisy campaigning followed
by decades of heavy promotion, the
public wrongly believes that schools
and other vital services are lavishly
supported by gambling funds. The sec-
ond is that the money raised by lot-
teries comes largely from the people
who can least afford to part with it.
Every state lottery is regressive, mean-
ing that it takes a disproportionate toll
on low-income citizens. Rich people
do play the lottery, of course; one of
the largest-ever Powerball jackpots, a
quarter of a billion dollars, was won
by three asset managers from Green-
wich, Connecticut. But the wealthy
buy fewer tickets than the poor (ex-
cept when jackpots approach ten fig-
ures); because of that and because their
purchases constitute a much smaller
percentage of their income, playing the
lottery has a far smaller impact on their
pocketbooks. The difference can be
drastic: according to the consumer
financial company Bankrate, players
making more than fifty thousand dol-
lars per year spend, on average, one per
cent of their annual income on lottery
tickets; those making less than thirty
• •
thousand dollars spend thirteen per
cent. That means someone making bars, while paying for groceries at a five years. Still, he argues, we should
twenty-seven thousand dollars loses Dollar General. Nor are state lottery work toward common-sense reforms,
some thirty-five hundred dollars to the commissions above availing themselves such as banning the sale of tickets on-
lottery every year. To put that number of the psychology of addiction. Ev- line, capping the cost of scratch-off
in context, nearly sixty per cent of erything about the lottery—from ad tickets and the size of lotto jackpots,
Americans have less than a thousand campaigns to the look of the front and, perhaps most important, closing
dollars in savings. of the tickets and the math behind a loophole that leaves lotteries exempt
Defenders of the lottery sometimes them—is designed to keep players from F.T.C. regulation, and thus free
cast it as a tax on the stupid, meaning coming back for more. None of this from the constraints of truth-in-
either that players don’t understand is particularly different from the strat- advertising laws.
how unlikely they are to win or that egies of tobacco companies or video- What would happen if state lot-
they enjoy the game anyway. This sug- game manufacturers. It just isn’t nor- teries waned in influence or vanished
gests that lottery spending is a wholly mally done under the auspices of the altogether? Cohen surely overreaches
personal rather than a partly structural government. when he claims that, “without such
decision, but in reality it is responsive In the final pages of “For a Dollar a blinding beacon, more Americans
to economic f luctuation; as Cohen and a Dream,” Cohen, a fair and me- might be willing to think critically
writes, “Lottery sales increase as in- ticulous collector of data, finally puts about the economic forces that have
comes fall, unemployment grows, and his thumb on the scale. Considering degraded access to social mobility and
poverty rates rise.” As with all com- the regressive nature of state lotteries, have made it more difficult for people
mercial products, lottery sales also in- their predatory practices, their role to attain financial security.” But he is
crease with exposure to advertising— in fostering gambling addictions, the right that governments in a democratic
and lottery products are most heavily way they discourage normal taxation, society should be in the business of im-
promoted in neighborhoods that are and their relatively modest financial proving the odds, not rigging the game,
disproportionately poor, Black, or contributions, he concludes that they and that there are far more equitable
Latino. In Texas, where the minimum “should not exist in the modern United and effective ways for the state to use
wage is $7.25, you can buy a fifty-dol- States.” As he acknowledges, this ad- its mighty powers to improve life for
lar scratch-off ticket at a check-cash- vice is not likely to be taken anytime its citizens. As the California Lottery
ing venue or pick up Powerball and soon; no state has repealed its lottery put it in a 2013 advertising campaign,
Mega Millions tickets, like Snickers in more than a hundred and twenty- “Believe in something bigger.” 
A R E P O R T E R AT L A R G E
PATRIOT GAMES
Guo Wengui has been linked to Chinese intelligence, the F.B.I., and Donald Trump. What is he after?
BY EVAN OSNOS
he Sherry-Netherland, a slen- Snow. Around the building, the new the reports referred to by his Mandarin
T der neo-Renaissance tower at

781 Fifth Avenue, is known as
one of New York’s “white glove” co-ops,
tenant was hard to miss. He was a hand-
some, ebullient man in his late forties,
with an array of trim-cut Brioni suits
name, Guo Wengui—was at the center
of a burgeoning scandal involving cor-
ruption and espionage.
for the linen gloves that the elevator at- and a broad smile. For nearly a decade, he had main-
tendants wear. It has panoramic views From his adopted home on the Upper tained a secret partnership with one of
of Central Park, décor inherited from East Side, Guo spent lavishly and gained China’s most powerful spymasters, an in-
a Vanderbilt mansion, and amenities access to new worlds. He paid forty-three telligence officer named Ma Jian, who
befitting a luxury hotel; room service million dollars for a silver superyacht, had recently been arrested by his own
comes from the Harry Cipriani restau- Lady May, which had space to entertain government. Caixin, a Chinese investi-
rant downstairs. Through the years, fifty people and a living room that re- gative news organization, reported that
the Sherry has accommodated the oc- volved on a cushion of compressed air. Ma and Guo had used surveillance, black-
casional celebrity—Diana Ross, Fran- In London, he socialized at Mark’s Club, mail, and political influence to amass for-
cis Ford Coppola, David Bowie—but, a members-only establishment, and trav- tunes and evade scrutiny.
like other buildings of its kind, it tends elled around town in a white Rolls-Royce. Guo denied any wrongdoing; he told
to prefer quieter money. On one visit, he implored an acquain- a Hong Kong newspaper that he and
On a winter day in 2015, the Sher- tance, whom he’d met only hours before, Ma were just friends, who had met
ry’s co-op board received an unusual ap- to borrow the car for as long as he needed. through work and bonded over a shared
plication. A Chinese businessman call- Donald Trump became the Repub- appreciation for architecture. But, two
ing himself Miles Guo wanted the most lican Presidential front-runner that years later, he changed his story dramat-
expensive unit in the building—a pent- summer, and Guo’s instincts proved ically. He acknowledged that he had
house that occupies the entire eigh- well suited to the emerging era; he had been a longtime “affiliate” of China’s
teenth floor, with six bedrooms, nine already joined Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s all-pervasive Ministry of State Security.
bathrooms, and three terraces. There club in Palm Beach, and he wasn’t shy The agency, he said, had tasked him with
was no need to secure a mortgage; he about praising his own business acu- “handling things for them” and connect-
could send sixty-eight million dollars men (“I’m a genius at making money!”). ing with “sensitive figures” abroad, trav-
in cash. Although Guo didn’t know any- He boasted of expensive tastes: hand- elling on eleven different passports and
one at the Sherry who could vouch for made Louis Vuitton shoes, a rare vari- employing the code name Wu Nan.
him, his lawyers, at prominent firms in ety of tea that he reportedly declared Even more startling, he subsequently
Washington and New York, delivered was worth a million dollars a kilo. Even declared himself an enemy of the Chinese
confidential documents that identified before he was introduced to Steve Ban- Communist Party—a position almost
him as a married father of two, who non, Trump’s chief strategist, Bannon unheard-of among China’s élite. He ap-
owned a Beijing real-estate enterprise had heard enough about Guo to pro- plied for political asylum in the United
with assets of nearly four billion dollars. nounce him “the Donald Trump of Bei- States, and founded a media network,
He was No. 74 on a list of China’s rich- jing.” (Years later, when federal agents which broadcast incendiary criticisms
est people, but he avoided public atten- went looking for Bannon in connec- of the C.C.P. and enthusiastic support
tion, and even basic photographs were tion with an allegedly fraudulent scheme for Trump. His businesses reportedly
scarce. A reference letter from U.B.S., to raise money for a wall on the Mex- paid hundreds of thousands of dollars
the Swiss bank, characterized him as a ican border, they found him aboard to Trump advisers, including Bannon,
“modest gentleman with a warm heart.” Guo’s yacht, in Long Island Sound.) Rudy Giuliani, and the attorney L. Lin
A personal recommendation from Tony At the Sherry, though, Guo rapidly Wood, who joined efforts to overturn
Blair, Britain’s former Prime Minister, developed a reputation for peculiar hab- the 2020 election. As Guo’s neighbors
said, “Miles is honest, forthright and its. He seemed obsessed with the risk at the Sherry-Netherland watched in
has impeccable taste.” of intruders; he tried to block the fire confusion, he established himself as an
The co-op board, moving with un- exit in his penthouse, and residents com- election denier, a vaccine skeptic, and a
usual alacrity, convened to approve the plained that he stationed bodyguards in right-wing provocateur, with a degree of
application. Guo arrived soon afterward, the lobby. In March, 2015, a spate of re- influence that is virtually unique among
accompanied by a coterie of attendants ports in the Chinese press offered an foreign citizens on American soil.
and, later, by a white Pomeranian named explanation for his anxiety: Guo—whom Through the decades, Washington
NATALIE KEYSSAR
From a sixty-eight-million-dollar penthouse in New York, Guo built a new life as a player in the U.S. media and politics.
has attracted no shortage of wealthy with him claimed that he “was, and is, a for a time he found work selling clothes
figures who learned to surf the rivalries dissident-hunter, propagandist, and agent and electronics. But, in 1989, before he
in American politics. But how, exactly, in the service of the People’s Republic could build much of a career, he was
a Chinese intelligence collaborator was of China.” Guo denied the accusation put in jail. He has offered a high-minded
reborn as a darling of Trump Republi- and won the case, but the court left open explanation for his imprisonment: In-
cans is a measure of the shifting folk- the question of his actual identity. “The spired by the pro-democracy protests
ways of conservative politics, and the evidence at trial does not permit the in Tiananmen Square, he sold his mo-
extraordinary power that accrues to peo- Court to decide whether Guo is, in fact, torcycle and sent thirty-six hundred
ple with the wealth and savvy to com- a dissident or a double agent,” Judge yuan—about a thousand dollars—to
mand the technologies of influence. De- Lewis J. Liman wrote. “Others will have the student activists. When police came
pending on whom you believe, Guo has to determine who the true Guo is.” to arrest him, his younger brother ob-
been either an asset of the F.B.I. or a jected and was fatally shot. Guo served
target of its suspicions, or perhaps both he farming village of Xicaoying, in twenty-two months, and, according to
at the same time. Under one alias or
another—including Miles Kwok, Guo
T the flatlands of Shandong Prov-
ince, takes gritty pride in its history.
a brisk narrative in his court filings, un-
derwent a storybook transformation:
Haoyun, and Ho Wan Kwok—he has A monument marks the spot nearby “After his release from prison, Mr. Guo
been sued numerous times for defama- where Emperor Qin, who unified China became a successful real estate devel-
tion, libel, and inflicting emotional dis- more than two thousand years ago, is oper and investor.”
tress, and has sued many others on sim- said to have ordered an embankment A copy of the verdict in Guo’s case
ilar grounds. The Chinese government built at such speed that workers who makes no mention of political activism;
says that he is under investigation in at died from the toil were entombed in it lists his crime as fraud, for bilking buy-
least nineteen cases, for allegations that their own earthworks. Guo grew up there ers in a local oil scheme. Moreover, he
include bribery, money laundering, and in the nineteen-seventies, in an impov- was detained a week before the crackdown
rape—all of which he denies, attributing erished family with eight children. He on protests in Beijing. (Guo suggested
them to a propaganda campaign. (Guo started out without much more than the that prosecutors falsified the charges.)
and his attorneys declined requests to gift of gab—a “tireless tongue,” as it is But jail did change Guo’s life, pro-
comment for this article.) known in Chinese. He had little interest viding him with contacts that shaped
Some observers argue that Guo’s dis- in school. When Chinese reporters later his early career. After his release, a fel-
ruptive behavior makes sense only if he probed his background, a teacher re- low-inmate led him to an entry-level
is still linked to the Chinese state. In a called, “he led a group that mostly fought, job with a wealthy entrepreneur in Hong
federal court filing from 2019, a private gambled, and chased girls.” Kong, a woman named Xia Ping. Guo’s
intelligence firm in a business dispute At thirteen, Guo dropped out, and new position offered heady opportuni-
ties. In 1993, when he was in his twen-
ties, he was running a company called
Big Boss Furniture. Soon, he joined a
project to build the first skyscraper hotel
in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan
Province. Henan is a rough place, where
a legacy of poverty feeds an image of
endemic crime, as well as a cruel cari-
cature across China. (A Beijing news-
paper once lamented that the locals are
“generally regarded as cheaters, thieves,
troublemakers, and bumpkins.”) But
Guo thrived there.
The business scene ran on a quasi-
legal symbiosis between entrepreneurs
and Party officials. Builders needed land
and protection from regulators; apparat-
chiks wanted kickbacks, and they wanted
to be linked with the kinds of projects—
hotels, railways, coal mines—that inspire
promotions. Over time, Guo built enough
trust with patrons in high office that he
was allowed to handle their most deli-
cate business dealings. In China, such
attendants are known as “white gloves,”
because they help politicians make money
“Fine—which five-hour ballad of my adventures do you want to hear?” while keeping their hands clean.
Life as a white glove is lucrative but be as ruthless as he was generous. He “They find people in their early stage.
risky. “We were like the fish that clean seemed to have access to compromis- They can change their name; they can
the teeth of crocodiles,” a former white ing information—the power to “grab change their story. They need to be
glove named Desmond Shum recalled someone by the handle,” as the Chi- picked up from nowhere.”
in “Red Roulette,” a memoir that he nese expression goes. In 2006, while When Guo encountered Ma, he was
published after fleeing China. Accord- Guo was trying to secure a building already skilled at borrowing the govern-
ing to his account, in the two-thousands permit for a patch of land beside the ment’s power: after arriving in Beijing,
Shum, an entrepreneur in Beijing, be- site of the upcoming Summer Olym- he paid a transportation official for
came a white glove for the wife of Chi- pic Games, he was rebuffed by Liu Zhi- license plates bearing the letter “A,”
na’s Premier, Wen Jiabao. To succeed, hua, a powerful vice-mayor of Beijing. which typically signal connections with
he had to master what he called the “in- In retaliation, Guo obtained a tape of high officials. (For years, cars with these
finite fungibility of Chinese laws.” He Liu having sex with a mistress and de- plates were effectively exempt from traf-
and his wife, Whitney Duan, learned livered it to the government. The vice- fic laws, because cops rarely dared to
how to find political sponsors and how mayor was accused of corruption and pull them over.) Now he evidently began
to win deals by supplying bureaucrats of leading a “decadent lifestyle,” and to benefit from his association with the
with gifts; they learned when to flatter given a suspended death sentence. Guo security services. When a man named
an official’s knowledge of poetry and got his permit. Qu Long tried to report Guo for strong-
when to buy him a thousand-dollar Guo later revealed that he had ob- arm tactics, he was himself arrested by
bowl of soup, made from coveted fish tained the tape from government agen- a team that included an officer from
maw. The business relied on appeasing cies. Caixin reported that it came from Ma’s ministry and sent to prison.
officials’ vanity. One of Shum’s employ- Ma Jian, the spymaster, whom he had These kinds of gambits fed a fear-
ees accompanied “so many people to so befriended in Beijing. Ma had heavy- some reputation among Guo’s business
many bathhouses that his skin started lidded eyes, a rosebud mouth, and sturdy rivals, who nicknamed him the “god of
peeling off.” jowls. In three decades at the security war.” Even some of his employees were
Perhaps the most important princi- services, he had risen to the top of the frightened of him. Chen Zhiyao, a Tai-
ple of survival, Shum wrote, was that counterintelligence department—the wanese businessman, was once sum-
Party officials “used corruption investi- shadowy specialty of seeking out moles, moned to a company office to discuss
gations to purge their political foes,” so double agents, and conspirators. He not a dispute over money. Before going,
they were fanatical about hiding busi- only led the hunt for snooping foreign- Chen told his wife to call him every
ness deals from one another. A promi- ers; he also collected files on his com- thirty minutes; if he didn’t answer, she
nent Beijing venue dedicated two staff rades in the Communist Party, on the was to contact his friends—he gave her
members to staggering politicians’ din- theory that thwarting potential black- a list of ten—and raise the alarm. At
ner reservations, so that no one could mail requires cataloguing the weak- the office, according to allegations that
see whom anyone else was dining with. nesses of one’s own side—who has a Chen later published in Taiwan, he was
The couple knew they had joined a “life- young lover, say, or a drug habit that an detained, beaten, and threatened with
and-death” game, but they accepted the enemy could exploit. As a former dip- a gun. He sued in a Beijing court, but
risk. “We’d come from nothing,” Shum lomat put it, Ma was the man with a lost the case.
wrote. “So why not go for it all?” They “safe full of papers.” At the site that Guo had wrested
were divorced in 2015; two years later, The Chinese security services have back from the vice-mayor, he developed
Duan disappeared, presumably detained long cultivated relationships with “com- the Pangu Plaza, a complex containing
by the government. Shum has said that mercial cadres”—businesspeople who the Pangu 7 Star Hotel (Guo assigned
his family has not heard from her since, share information, and sometimes prof- the rating himself ) and a row of luxury
except for two phone calls pleading with its, in return for protection. The ethos, high-rises arranged in the shape of a
him not to publish the book. as one leader put it, is to “use business dragon. The tallest of the buildings, with
to cultivate intelligence, so that intelli- a crown designed to resemble an Olym-
round 2002, Guo turned his focus gence and business thrive together.” pic flame, became a new landmark on
A to Beijing, where the prospects,
and the stakes, were far higher. In the
At times, the linkages have extended
to criminal enterprises. In 1993, one of
the Beijing skyline. But reporters look-
ing into Guo’s background quickly ran
capital, he developed a reputation for China’s top law-enforcement officials, aground; the Beijing News, a local paper,
transactional generosity. A regulator, Tao Siju, praised “patriotic” elements of said that its editors received a letter from
whom Guo was courting for an ap- the Hong Kong Mafia, a brutal net- Ma’s ministry directing them to drop a
proval, is said to have walked out of work of drug runners and blackmailers story for reasons of “national security.”
his apartment to find a new sports car who were known to attack their rivals Even at the grand opening of the high-
waiting for him. In the glove compart- with meat cleavers. For decades, the se- rises, where Guo presided, photogra-
ment was a gift card, loaded with the curity services have built relationships phers were reportedly ordered not to
equivalent of several hundred thou- with scrappy young rogues whose in- take his picture.
sand dollars. (Guo has emphatically genuity and underworld contacts might Guo’s relatively low profile made him
denied paying bribes.) prove useful. A scholar who is familiar useful to the spy agency. Operating as
Word got around that Guo could with China’s security apparatus told me, a cutout—a civilian who can circulate
a journalist and author who leads the
Center on U.S.-China Relations, at the
Asia Society, was invited to join Guo in
his private dining room at the Pangu
Plaza. Guo gave him an effusive wel-
come, Schell told me: “Miles takes to you
like a long-lost friend.” After dinner, Guo
took him down to a basement garage, to
show off a collection of luxury cars: “Lam-
borghinis, Porsches, Maseratis—the
whole nine yards.” In Beijing, no one ac-
quires such ostentatious wealth without
powerful protection.
The two stayed in touch, and Schell
noticed that Guo seemed able to draw
anyone to his dinner table: Henry Kissin-
ger, George Shultz, politicians from Hong
Kong and Macau. He once returned from
a visit to North Korea with a pompadour
in the style of Kim Jong Il. “He waxed
quite elegiac about Kim, and what a close
buddy he’d become,” Schell said.
At one point, Schell, who had writ-
ten critically of China’s record on human
rights, encountered resistance to his visa
application, and Guo volunteered to help.
“He said, ‘I’m going to fix this for you.
But you’ve got to talk to some people.’”
Guo took Schell to a series of meetings
with two officials of indeterminate port-
folio. “Every session was at some fancy
tearoom,” Schell said. “They never wanted
to tell me directly who they were in the
• • government. But we would get together
to talk for hours about U.S.-China pol-
icy.” Schell concluded that they were in-
without attracting official attention— self and talked to the embassy, and the telligence officers. “I learned more from
he took several trips to meet with the embassy filed several cables. The narra- them about the inner thinking in Party
Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, tive he gave was that he was a prince- organs than in all my decades of experi-
whom Beijing regards as a dangerous ling”—a son of the powerful élite. “He ence in China. I’m certain they were try-
separatist. Guo said that he conveyed made up this whole biography. The em- ing to flip me. They tried to give me pres-
messages back and forth, and that the bassy did a little bit of digging, and it ents and take me on trips, but I thought,
government offered him awards for his all fell apart.” Still, it seemed possible Well, I know these guys are spooks, and
services, which he modestly declined. that he had valuable information. Dip- the room is obviously wired.” As Schell
But, before long, he began to draw in- lomats dined with Guo at his hotel pe- got to know Guo, it became increasingly
ternational notice. Randal Phillips, who riodically, and he spoke with unusual clear how closely he was entwined with
was then the C.I.A. station chief in Bei- candor about which Chinese leaders Ma. “We would be eating dinner, and
jing, noted that the head of the Chi- were womanizing and embezzling. He he’d be on the phone every ten minutes
nese military’s clandestine service some- claimed to have witnessed some of them with this guy,” Schell said. “This was how
times arranged meetings at Guo’s cavorting on his own private jet. “He’d he got everything done: Ma Jian.”
hotel—a sign that intelligence officers dish,” the former diplomat said.
considered it safe territory. In Washington, some of those who he competition among China’s élite
Eventually, Guo began talking to
American officials directly, though he
heard Guo’s tales suspected that they
were exaggerations, or disinformation
T usually takes place behind a kind of
virtual curtain. Officials do their best to
revealed little of himself. A former gov- meant to tarnish rivals and confuse Amer- obscure their infighting, and journalists
ernment official told me, “The first time icans about Beijing politics. But people know that reporting on such behavior is
the U.S. Embassy ran across Guo Wen- who encountered Guo were struck by forbidden—unless it becomes too pub-
gui, that wasn’t the name he was using— his access to the government. Not long lic to be ignored. A decade ago, a char-
it was Miles Kwok. He introduced him- after the 2008 Olympics, Orville Schell, ismatic Party boss named Bo Xilai was
purged after his wife murdered one of introduce Guo to members of the Royal Miles, you’re going to get seven differ-
their white gloves with a dose of cyanide. Family. The two men flew there together ent answers,” the former Bureau official
The deceased was an Englishman, Neil in a jet that Guo chartered, and Guo said. “It’s not always perfect. But no
Heywood, and, once the British Embassy raised three billion dollars from the roy- source is.” The official added, “He knows
publicly acknowledged suspicions about als. (A spokesman declined to answer that he needs us to protect him. So he’ll
his death, censors had no choice but to Caixin’s questions about the trip but constantly give just enough.” Guo looked
allow the topic into the news. noted that Blair “has never had a com- for other forms of protection, too, try-
In Guo’s case, he might still be in mercial contract with Mr. Kwok.”) ing to hire people with connections to
China if it weren’t for a secretive power Ultimately, Guo landed in New York, the local power structure. In New York,
play that spilled into public view. In late where he submitted his application for he invited Jeh Johnson, who ran the De-
2014, while trying to win control of a fi- the penthouse at the Sherry-Netherland. partment of Homeland Security under
nancial firm, he attempted to displace a It was increasingly clear that he might President Obama, to his apartment at
rival, Li You, by accusing him of corrup- never go back to China. He needed to the Sherry-Netherland. Johnson had
tion. Guo’s company publicized claims master a new terrain, and so he started left the government and was working
that Li was hiding a billion dollars abroad, with a game he knew: intelligence. as a lawyer at a white-shoe firm, and
manipulating stock prices, and securing Around the world, the F.B.I. maintains Guo wanted to hire him. During their
protection from high-level patrons. thousands of formal and informal meeting, Johnson responded politely,
Li did not give up without a fight. sources, ranging from government bu- telling Guo, “I feel like you’re somebody
When police came to a Beijing hotel to reaucrats to shoe shiners who monitor I want to help.” After doing more re-
arrest him, his bodyguards stalled while foot traffic on a street corner. Some have search into Guo, however, Johnson de-
he escaped—reportedly still in his paja- civic motives, in the way of a grand- clined to take him on.
mas. Although Li was eventually caught, mother on a porch who quietly notes
the conflict with Guo had become too the make and model of a drug dealer’s n China, Guo had demonstrated
visible to suppress. A Chinese reporter
had witnessed the fracas in the hotel,
car. But in most cases the relationships
are transactional. The source wants
I an unshakable instinct for aligning
himself with politicians who could help
and the feud had triggered investigations money or protection from prosecution; him. In the U.S., he seemed to deter-
inside the government. The details of the handler, as one former agent told mine quickly who his likeliest bene-
Guo’s ties to Ma started to appear in the me, is “trying to juice as much utility factors were. Since Xi Jinping became
overseas Chinese media, which are not out of that person” as possible. Party Secretary, in 2012, he has reasserted
bound by censors, and gradually made In New York, Guo spoke to the F.B.I. Party control, reversed reforms, and ex-
their way to the local press. about Chinese leaders’ financial and pri- panded China’s pursuit of power abroad.
The authorities were alarmed. If the vate lives, according to two sources fa- In Washington, a rare consensus grew
spymaster with a “safe full of papers” miliar with the arrangement. “He knew among Republicans and Democrats that
went rogue, he could do unimaginable who had girlfriends, who had boy- engaging China, in pursuit of coöpera-
damage. On January 16, 2015, the Party friends,” a former Bureau official re- tion and openness, has failed. But the
announced that Ma was under investi- called. More important, Guo knew two sides disagree on what to do about
gation. A former intelligence official which Party families profited from which it. Democrats tend to oppose Xi’s gov-
told me that Guo was nearly arrested, ernment on an array of issues—China’s
too, but he received a warning just in mass internment of Muslims, its pres-
time: “When the security guys came to sure on Taiwan, its military activities in
Ma’s office, trying to detain him, his se- the South China Sea—but they still seek
nior aide was on the phone to Guo, say- coöperation on climate change, health,
ing, ‘Get the fuck out now.’” The gov- and weapons proliferation. Republicans
ernment soon seized many of his assets have made aggression toward China a
and began arresting his relatives and measure of conservative credibility, and
employees. have edged closer to declaring the Com-
Guo flew to Hong Kong, and then munist Party illegitimate.
to London, where he had powerful con- companies: “Just going to Miles and In January, 2017, soon after Trump’s
nections—including the former Prime asking him these questions will save you Inauguration, Guo activated his Twit-
Minister Tony Blair, whom he had been three or four months of analytical work.” ter account and sat for the first of a se-
courting for years. Shortly after Blair and In one instance, the official said, Guo ries of interviews in the overseas Chi-
his wife, Cherie, departed Downing provided information about Xi Jinping’s nese media. He accused some of China’s
Street, Guo bought five thousand cop- daughter while she was attending col- most senior leaders of corruption. He
ies of Cherie’s autobiography, saying that lege in the U.S. focussed on Wang Qishan, the Party’s
it would inspire his employees. He also The C.I.A. was less impressed; an- anti-corruption chief, claiming that his
donated to Blair’s charities. An affinity alysts concluded that Guo could not be relatives were hidden stakeholders in
grew. By 2013, Blair was working for a trusted to keep secrets. But the F.B.I. HNA, the profitable parent company
sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi, remained in contact. “If you ask ten dif- of Hainan Airlines, and that they owned
and, according to Caixin, he agreed to ferent F.B.I. and C.I.A. people about American real estate worth as much as
ten million dollars. Guo posted personal was becoming an avid conspiracist. He agents confiscated the Chinese delega-
information online, including passports called a press conference in New York tion’s phones. (In retribution, according
and flight records. (HNA denied the and suggested that the executive had to the national-security official, the Chi-
claims and sued Guo for defamation.) been killed because he “knew too much.” nese later confiscated a notebook from
He started live-streaming from the a U.S. diplomat as she boarded a plane
penthouse and the deck of Lady May, ne day in May, 2017, a team of four out of the country.)
offering other salacious, often unproved,
allegations. His social-media accounts
O officers from China’s security ser-
vices—Guo’s former allies—turned up
Having failed to entice Guo to re-
turn home, authorities in China tried
attracted hundreds of thousands of fol- at the Sherry-Netherland. The lobby is to force him out of the United States.
lowers, mostly Chinese expatriates— an ornate place, with hand-loomed They made contact with Steve Wynn,
many of whom avidly supported Trump, French carpets, marble mosaics, and a who was then the finance chair of
because of his criticisms of China. Guo ceiling painted with cherubs inspired the Republican National Committee.
declared it the beginning of a “whis- by frescoes at the Vatican. The officers Wynn, a hotelier, was contending with
tle-blower movement,” and extolled his didn’t linger; they headed for the pent- recent restrictions on his casino oper-
own courage: “Guo Wengui is from the house, where Guo was expecting them. ations in Macau. In June, 2017, accord-
grass roots, born as a farmer, and not Guo and the security officers spoke ing to federal court filings, he spoke by
afraid of death.” for hours, arrayed on the gold-colored phone with Sun Lijun, the vice-min-
In China, Guo’s disclosures came as furniture in his solarium. The govern- ister of public security, who asked for
a bombshell. They arrived in the run-up ment was making an audacious push to help in getting Guo back to China.
to a major Communist conclave, the get him back. He later released excerpts Wynn agreed to raise the issue with
19th Party Congress, which would de- of a recording, in which they could be President Trump.
termine the top leadership for the next heard discussing a deal: return to China, In late June, at a dinner in Washing-
five years. The accusations were widely and they would leave his family alone ton, Wynn conveyed the request and
perceived as sabotage orchestrated by and unfreeze his assets. The officers, gave Trump’s secretary a packet that in-
Xi’s enemies, or perhaps by meddling Guo said afterward, had brought his cluded the Interpol notice, press reports,
Americans, in order to interfere with wife and their daughter from Beijing; and copies of Guo’s passport. After-
the coronation. permitting his family to leave was a ges- ward, he heard from Elliott Broidy, a
The Party struck back swiftly; it asked ture of good will. Guo didn’t trust them. venture capitalist and the deputy finance
Interpol, the global police organization, “Unless I get Secretary Xi’s approval, I chair of the Republican National Com-
to issue a “red notice” seeking Guo’s ex- won’t go back,” he said. mittee, who was in contact with Sun
tradition. A video confession from his The visit caught the attention of Lijun. Broidy texted that Sun was “ex-
former patron, the spymaster Ma Jian, Guo’s new contacts at the F.B.I. Later tremely pleased and said that President
was uploaded to YouTube. Looking be- that day, the Chinese team was at Penn Xi Jinping appreciates [the] assistance.”
draggled and reading carefully, Ma said Station, on the way to Washington, Wynn wrote to another person, who
that he had accepted some sixty mil- when agents from the Bureau stopped was also involved in the communica-
lion yuan in bribes from Guo and had them. The F.B.I. ordered the Chinese tions, “I remain grateful for the privi-
intervened repeatedly to aid his busi- officers to leave the country, and to stay lege of being part of the Macau and
nesses. (Guo has denied bribing Ma.) away from Guo. Two days later, though, PRC business community.”
Online, Chinese censors sought to they returned to his apartment, and a Soon after the dinner with Wynn,
block any trace of Guo’s accusations, but debate grew within the U.S. govern- Trump was in the Oval Office, receiv-
their efforts were evidently not strin- ment over whether the provocation was ing a briefing on China. According to
gent enough: ordinary Internet users significant enough that the F.B.I. should two attendees, he called out to his sec-
were circumventing the firewall in large arrest the officers. A national-security retary, “Bring me the letter that Steve
numbers. Xiao Qiang, a research scien- official who was involved in the discus- Wynn brought from Xi.” (One attendee
tist at U.C. Berkeley, studied trends in sions recalled, “My view was, we had to recalls that Wynn’s packet contained a
Web searches from mainland China and impose a penalty on them.” letter from the Chinese government,
found a pattern of sharp surges on days As the Chinese team headed to but not from Xi.) Trump told the group,
when Guo broadcast. Xiao called it “the J.F. K. airport for an afternoon flight to “We should get this guy out of here.
Guo Wengui effect.” Beijing, the Bureau dispatched agents He’s a rapist.”
The actual effect on Chinese politics to intercept them. The U.S. Attorney’s H. R. McMaster, the national-secu-
was less clear. Although Wang, the tar- office in Brooklyn prepared charges of rity adviser, who was also present, stud-
get of the attacks, remained in power, visa fraud and extortion. But the State ied the packet and concluded that it would
one of his top aides was later imprisoned. Department expressed a concern: the be inappropriate to act on the request.
HNA went bankrupt, and senior exec- Chinese officers might have diplomatic The attendee told me, “Trump never fol-
utives were detained by police. In 2018, immunity, and arresting them could ex- lowed up on it. He just moved on.”
the company’s co-chairman fell off a wall pose Americans in China to retaliation. Wynn tried once more: in a meeting
while posing for a photograph in France. A compromise was reached, under which with White House staff, according to a
The police ruled out foul play, but Guo, the Bureau could make a limited show participant, he offered the use of his pri-
in his new role as a media personality, of force. Just before the flight took off, vate jet to transport Guo to China. “It
offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He
had come to believe that China’s lever-
THE NIGHT NURSE age over American businesses was a threat,
and he was intent on making China a
The night nurse turns me in my bed and changes central target of his brand of extreme
the white sheets under me. They are wet, they are soiled, conservative politics. Bannon said, of
Guo’s allegations, “This guy knows de-
and the night nurse washes my face and changes my gown. tails. He’s not just throwing shit out there.”
I am clean and refreshed because of the night nurse. Bannon had been in the Oval Of-
fice during the discussion about deport-
The night nurse comes to me with a pill in a tiny cup. ing Guo. Afterward, he told others that
I take the pill from her beautiful hands he had retrieved the packet that Wynn
had brought and put it in his office, to
and the night nurse takes away my pain, so that I may sleep make sure that Guo wasn’t extradited.
without plague of dream or fear of never waking. After Bannon was pushed out of the
White House, in August, 2017, he and
The moon is out. The night nurse does not notice. Guo met at the Hay-Adams Hotel, in
The night nurse only watches me. I am life and death Washington. “We spent six hours just
talking,” Bannon said. Like Guo, Ban-
to the night nurse. I am more important to the night nurse non was in search of new allies. The Mer-
than the full pink moon over which the poets obsess. cer family, the conservative funders who
had backed his earlier ventures, were
The night nurse comes flying low over me like a silent drone. breaking with him. Bannon was prepar-
The heart is beating peacefully like an upside-down bat, ing to relaunch his media career, and, as
a White House colleague put it, he
the heart is racing like a Serengeti cheetah. The heart needed a “new sugar daddy.”
must be listened to, beat by beat, minute by minute.
n the afternoon of June 4, 2020,
The night nurse knows my heart like no one else on earth.
The night nurse comes with a needle. I would cringe
O bobbing on a boat in New York
Harbor, Guo and Bannon held a live-
streamed press event to announce a joint
with anyone else, but the night nurse slips the hypodermic initiative. The two were an unusual sight:
under my skin and into the blue vein, and I do not mind, the exuberant Chinese tycoon in a dark,
double-breasted suit, alongside the glow-
for I have given myself up. The night nurse ering American with his rumpled sil-
needs my blood and I gladly give her my blood. ver hair and distinctive assemblage of
collared shirts. The setting had been
—Emily Fragos carefully arranged, with planes trailing
banners overhead and Guo’s yacht and
the Statue of Liberty in the background.
was a rendition that he was proposing,” China specialist at the Washington Free The date marked the anniversary of the
the participant told me. “No one an- Beacon, posted stories on Guo and his crackdown at Tiananmen Square.
swered.” (Broidy and Wynn maintain claims, calling him a “leading Chinese Peering into a camera, Guo an-
that they never acted as agents of the dissident”—until Gertz left, in 2019, nounced the establishment of a shadow
Chinese state. The Justice Department after failing to disclose that he took a government, which he called the New
sued Wynn, to force him to register under hundred-thousand-dollar loan from one Federal State of China. In Mandarin,
the Foreign Agents Registration Act, of Guo’s associates. (Gertz did not re- he made an impassioned call to arms.
but last week the case was dismissed. spond to a request for comment.) Nev- “We can’t keep dreaming anymore. We
His attorney said that Wynn believed ertheless, Gertz helped introduce Guo need to take action, action, action!” he
he was acting as a “patriotic messenger,” to influential conservatives, including shouted, slicing the air with his hand.
and that the offer of his jet was “a hun- the man who would become his most Bannon, who does not speak Chinese,
dred per cent tongue-in-cheek.”) important collaborator: Steve Bannon. stood by awkwardly. In 2018, he had
The politics of Beijing had prepared Even before they met, Bannon had signed a yearlong deal with one of Guo’s
Guo well for navigating Trump’s Wash- taken a special interest in corruption companies for “strategic consulting ser-
ington—another realm where money among the Chinese élite. Earlier in his vices,” at a cost of a million dollars.
bought influence, business mixed with career, Bannon had been a naval officer Guo built toward a climactic finish,
government, and truth merged with fic- aboard ships in the South China Sea, chanting a slogan—“Take Down the
tion. Guo used his resources to make worked as a banker at Goldman Sachs, C.C.P.!”—in Chinese. After the ninth
inroads in Trump’s world. Bill Gertz, a and run an online gaming company with repetition, he switched to English, and
Bannon joined in. Guo was in a cele- nating to his initiatives would give them ment made at the time, Guo said that he
bratory mood. He kissed Bannon on an advantage on their immigration ap- had “never condoned any type of violence
the cheek and, gazing up at him, said, plications. “It’s very simple,” he said, in toward any individuals.”) For nearly two
“Love you.” a video in 2020. “If you say you support months, the protesters showed up at
“Thank you,” Bannon said. “Are we the whistle-blower movement and you’ve Teng’s house every day, as if they were
still on live?” To close out the ceremony, applied for political asylum, your appli- punching a clock—shouting from 10:30
they presented a statement of princi- cation for asylum will one hundred per in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon,
ples, which Guo signed in his own blood. cent get approved.” with a break for lunch. A memo from
(Bannon skipped that part.) In the intelligence community, Guo’s the New Federal State of China, which
For all their differences in style, the disclosures on China were fuelling was subsequently cited in a lawsuit,
two shared an unsentimental view of skepticism. When he released what he showed that some had been recruited for
human affairs, a conspiratorial mind-set, described as an internal Party plan to fees of as much as three hundred dollars
and a belief in the power of calculated boost the number of spies in America, a day, with a reward of ten thousand dol-
alliances. They formed a joint venture some specialists deemed it a forgery. lars for “excellent performance.” Among
called GTV Media Group, an alterna- “It had some of the right things, but Guo’s followers, the protests were a clar-
tive-news platform, which ran Bannon’s it’s a very particular kind of art—how ifying moment, Teng said: “More and
War Room podcast, dubbed in Manda- they number, where they put certain more of his previous supporters have re-
rin, along with frequent live streams from markings,” the former government of- alized that he is a swindler.”
Guo and his fans. The broadcasts touted ficial said. But it was not until the fall
the Rule of Law Foundation, which Guo of 2020 that the expats who formed uo’s animosity toward dissidents
and Bannon had founded to reveal the
Communist Party’s corrupting effects at
the core of Guo’s audience began to
question his loyalties. Faced with grow-
G might have been surprising, but it
wasn’t new. In a leaked recording of a
home and abroad. (Guo pledged a hun- ing criticism of his falsehoods and phone call from 2017, he had expressed
dred million dollars; Bannon was chair- his dubious ventures, Guo denounced contempt for them. “They never say
man.) And they hyped Guo’s business many of the most prominent Chinese anything good about China,” he said.
initiatives, including cryptocurrencies, dissidents in America as “fake pro- “They deserve to die,” he added. “I can
called G-Coins and G-Dollars; a mem- democracy activists,” and said that they take these bastards down and help our
bership group called GClubs; and an “should be beaten up as soon as we see leaders get revenge.”
apparel line called GFashion. them.” He called on his followers to Some American observers speculate
Bannon had instructed Guo that suc- join what he called Operation Elimi- that Guo never entirely broke away from
cess in the media required simplified nation of Fake Activists. Chinese intelligence. One popular the-
messages, put on a loop—a principle Teng Biao, a legal scholar at Hunter ory holds that he hopes to return to
that he has described as “wash, rinse, re- College, who fled China after being per- China and regain some of his stature,
peat.” On the air, Guo spoke constantly secuted for advocating human rights, so he has maintained ties to factions in
of the Communist Party’s crimes and began seeing comments online from Beijing. Chris Johnson, a former C.I.A.
the hypocrisy of its leaders. “Everything people seeking his home address. One analyst on China, told me that Guo’s
is fake,” he said. Despite its eccentricity, wrote, “I wanna send him a bullet di- disclosures must be read not only for
Guo’s network pulled in hundreds of rectly into his head!” In December, Teng “the people that he chooses to name,
millions of dollars, mostly from Chinese was at his house in a quiet cul-de-sac but also the people he does not name.”
expats, who thrilled to the promise of near Princeton, New Jersey, teaching a If Guo does represent a faction of
challenging the Party. (When Bannon class on Zoom, when his wife came into the Chinese government, the best bet
was arrested on the yacht, he left his po- his office. She was nervous. Sixteen peo- is that it’s composed of powerful fam-
sition as chairman, but was pardoned by ple were standing in front of their house ilies and security officials who have been
Trump. He has pleaded not guilty to with signs and bullhorns, shouting that harmed by Xi’s purges. For all Guo’s ful-
similar charges in state court.) Teng was a “C.C.P. spy.” minating against the Party, the attendee
Guo’s platforms became popular ven- The protesters returned the next day, at the Oval Office meeting said, “he’s
ues for Covid misinformation, anti-vac- in a convoy of vehicles, and the day after not anti-C.C.P. He just views himself
cine rhetoric, and the promotion of folk that, chanting, cursing, and shouting so as a counter to Xi. This is an intra-C.C.P.
cures. His fashion line included a but- loudly that Teng’s children could hear fight.” Teng, the dissident, shares that
ton-down shirt emblazoned with the them from inside the house. The pro- view. He suspects that Guo is seeking
word “Ivermectin,” for almost twenty- testers live-streamed the scene on GTV to “replace some C.C.P. leaders with of-
two hundred dollars. As the boundary and YouTube, and argued with neigh- ficials more inclined in his favor.” The
between his businesses and his politics bors who came out to defend Teng. goal, he says, is to “replace well-fed ti-
faded, he made wildly unsubstantiated Similar protests appeared outside more gers with hungry tigers.”
claims. He announced that his media than a dozen dissidents’ homes in Texas, But, in the serpentine logic of intel-
venture would be a good investment if Virginia, and California. In Vancouver ligence, another theory suggests that
the Chinese currency collapsed, and and Los Angeles, people in the crowd Guo is actually representing a faction
promised investors, “I will not let you harassed their targets till they emerged, loyal to Xi, which is using him to attack
lose any money.” He told fans that do- then beat and kicked them. (In a state- rivals. He has rarely criticized Xi by
name, and some of the strongest evi- The Trump campaign had heard of but leaked messages suggest that he
dence against Guo’s description of him- the laptop during the summer, when a coördinated his followers to edit images
self as a dissident has come from his man from Delaware reached out to say and to spread the story. Three days
own words. In the summer of 2017, that it had been abandoned at his re- before the election, Bannon met with
shortly after the Chinese security offi- pair shop. The first known public men- Guo’s supporters and applauded their
cers visited him in New York, he re- tion of it came on September 25th, from “editorial creativity over the pictures,”
leased a public letter to Communist a guest on the YouTube channel of Wang according to a recording provided to
Party leaders. He suggested that he could Dinggang, one of Guo’s collaborators. Mother Jones. Bannon said that the lap-
use his “influence and resources” on their The guest claimed that explicit mate- top story stalled Biden’s momentum and
behalf, and asked them to “assign me a rial on the laptop was “recorded by the “drove up his negatives,” which kept the
clear, targeted task, so that I can atone C.C.P.” and had “arrived mysteriously race close enough that Trump could de-
for my past mistakes, and demonstrate in America” to provide the Party with clare victory, whether or not he went on
my patriotism and support for President leverage over Joe Biden as he ran for to win. “That’s our strategy,” Bannon
Xi.” He claimed that his revelations in President. Some of Guo’s allies followed told them. “So, when you wake up
America were made “under pressure,” up by creating and spreading fabricated Wednesday morning, it’s going to be a
and promised, “I will continue not to images, according to Jack Maxey, a for- firestorm.”
cross the red lines.” Hoping to “safe- mer co-host of Bannon’s podcast. “It After Trump lost the election, Guo’s
guard our nation’s interests and image,” was a huge def lection from reality,” network joined the effort to overturn
he offered to be a “propagandist,” em- Maxey recalled. “I said to Steve on Day the outcome. On November 14th, hun-
ploying “my own style of propaganda.” One, ‘This is a bad idea.’” But, he added, dreds of his supporters travelled to
In the years after that letter, Guo’s “I can’t tell Steve what to do. Appar- Washington for the Million MAGA
efforts turned more squarely to promot- ently, Miles can.” March, erecting a stage and hiring ad-
ing division and cynicism in U.S. poli- In the final weeks of the race, Rudy vertising trucks to traverse the city. A
tics. Guo has long claimed to have Giuliani ignited a media campaign al- company controlled by Guo spent more
knowledge of a secret Communist Party leging that the computer’s hard drive than four hundred thousand dollars on
plan for subversion, which he calls 3F: contained e-mails and pictures of Hunter the rally, according to Mother Jones, and
“foment weakness, foment chaos and Biden that compromised his father. Guo also gave a hundred thousand dollars to
foment the destruction of America,” by has denied involvement in disseminat- an organization headed by the attorney
using leaked documents, bribery, and ing disinformation about the laptop, L. Lin Wood, who was suing to reverse
blackmail—an approach that Guo’s crit-
ics note precisely describes his own pat-
terns. The national-security official, who
was involved in Guo’s case, described
him as a chaos agent working on Chi-
na’s behalf: “You could make a circum-
stantial argument that this guy is here
to fuck us up. Just tie us in knots.”
The divisive power of Guo’s network
became clear as the 2020 Presidential
election approached. A study conducted
by Graphika, an analytics firm, found
thousands of social-media accounts
spreading his quotes, along with con-
spiratorial claims about dissidents, vac-
cines, Joe Biden, and QAnon. Chat
groups for Guo’s fans were stocked with
templates of pro-Trump messages that
users were encouraged to distribute as
if they were spontaneous.
During the 2016 campaign, when
Trump allies circulated anti-Clinton
propaganda, they relied on Twitter and
Facebook, but those platforms had since
made it more difficult to spread elec-
tion disinformation. Now Guo’s net-
work provided an alternative. Nothing
demonstrated its impact more than its
promotion of doctored reports about
Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Trump’s loss in Georgia. On January Navarro!’” Navarro, shifting uncomfort- “I think you guys are a bunch of thugs,”
6th, Guo’s network carried live streams ably, gave a wan smile. Bannon seemed he said, in a deposition, in October, 2018.
of the siege of the Capitol, and pro- happy to maintain the spirit of admira- “I don’t need to pay any attention to
moted comments that hailed the attack- tion, though. “Miles is the George Wash- you.” In 2021, a New York court ordered
ers as “patriots.” ington of the new China,” he said, later him to pay the fund a hundred and six-
in the broadcast. “We’re talking about a teen million dollars in debt and inter-
n the strange economics of Trump- new China and new Chinese—Chinese est; when he failed to do so, the court
I world, the former President’s electoral
loss was a gift to his supporters in the
who finally have freedom after millennia
of history.” Toward the end, one of the
tacked on an additional hundred and
thirty-four million in fines. The judge
media—the radio hosts and conspiracy translators asked when the U.S. govern- wrote that if “billionaire litigants” can
theorists who profit from grievance. In ment would recognize Guo’s govern- “knowingly and intentionally violate
the months after January 6th, GTV and ment-in-exile. Bannon answered, “Some- Court orders, there is no rule of law.”
its related businesses were operating time after 2024—when Trump takes the Guo promptly filed for bankruptcy,
from an office tower overlooking Co- White House back.” claiming to have as much as half a bil-
lumbus Circle. One day that Septem- Even as Guo and his allies predicted lion dollars in debt and no more than
ber, Guo summoned a collection of for- victory, his operation was in turmoil. Two a hundred thousand dollars in assets.
mer Trump aides to the office for a live days earlier, the Securities and Exchange The yacht and the penthouse, he main-
stream on the subject of China. To his Commission had charged three compa- tained, were actually not his at all, but
left sat Peter Navarro, a former busi- nies associated with Guo—GTV Media properties of family members, shell com-
ness-school professor who had served Group, Saraca Media Group, and Voice panies, and other financial entities. His
as Trump’s trade adviser and as his Ad- of Guo Media—with illegal sales of stock creditors called the bankruptcy “an ob-
ministration’s most ardent China hawk. and cryptocurrency. The companies nei- vious attempt to avoid both payment
Navarro, who wore a windbreaker with ther admitted nor denied wrongdoing, and possible incarceration.”
“TeamTrump” stencilled on the chest, but they agreed to pay more than five As the case inched through the courts,
looked gaunt and glumly captive—a hundred and thirty-nine million dollars, the image that Guo had erected was
fierce critic of China working with a self- including restitution to thousands of in- wobbling. The signature high-rise in
acknowledged former affiliate of the vestors in at least thirty-nine countries. Pangu Plaza had been auctioned off for
country’s spy services. Bannon had on a Guo’s news site played down the seven hundred and thirty-four million
black sport coat over a black shirt, with charges, telling fans that the companies dollars. Its most audacious design fea-
another shirt underneath. He was seated had reached a settlement “without pen- ture—the giant wisp of flame—was dis-
beside Jason Miller, the former spokes- alty clauses.” In reality, they had been mantled, rendering the building all but
man and now the C.E.O. of Gettr, one ordered to pay thirty-five million dol- indistinguishable from others. In New
of several new social-media networks lars in penalties, and the S.E.C. said York, Guo had put his penthouse at the
vying to attract conservative users. It, too, that it was continuing to investigate the Sherry-Netherland up for sale, and grad-
had received funding from Guo. matter. GTV shut down, and the case ually reduced the price to thirty-five
They were all there to celebrate Na- marked a turning point in Guo’s move- million dollars, barely half of what he
varro’s installation as the “international ment. Some former aides and support- had paid. The co-op board that once
ambassador” from the New Federal welcomed Guo was now suing him for
State of China. But Navarro wanted to allegedly failing to pay maintenance fees,
talk about vaccines, too; he has been a which amounted to some eighty-two
devoted proponent of hydroxychloro- thousand dollars a month.
quine. “The illegitimate Biden regime As ever, Guo approached the chal-
is preventing the use of these therapeu- lenges with exuberant aggression. He
tics and killing people,” he said. Guo continued live-streaming from an estate
agreed, and made a dark prediction, in in Greenwich, Connecticut, delivering
his patchwork English: “In six months, his messages against the backdrop of a
ten months, you will see on the street pool house and an expansive lawn. He
talented drivers, driving their cars, im- ers rebelled, turning their social-media harangued a lawyer who had been ap-
mediately by accident, die because of and chat networks into venues for crit- pointed as the bankruptcy trustee, de-
Covid vaccine. That’s murder.” icism and revelation. Guo lashed out, nouncing him as “fully representing the
The rhetoric was heated, but Guo calling his erstwhile allies liars, rats, and C.C.P.” And he dabbled in new ven-
seemed to sense that the scene wasn’t “running dogs” of the Communist Party. tures, including a hip-hop track titled
much to look at. He encouraged his trans- Ultimately, a different legal case dealt “The Hero,” which featured him in ac-
lators to ask questions, and one began to a heavier blow to Guo. The operators tion-movie garb, assuming a series of
rave about Navarro’s appearance: “I have of a hedge fund, Pacific Alliance Asia valiant poses: astride a white horse, wield-
a colleague who is a very beautiful lady, Opportunity Fund, had been suing him ing a lightsabre in ritual combat, com-
and she is the greatest fan of Mr. Na- to repay a loan taken years ago to demanding a squadron of backup dancers
varro. So when you appear, every time velop the Pangu Plaza, in Beijing, but in front of luxury S.U.V.s and a private
she will just shout, ‘Oh, here comes Peter Guo had treated the case with contempt. jet. On the way to the chorus—“Take
Down the C.C.P.!”—Guo made a res-
olute proclamation: “To die on the bat-
tlefield is my honor.”
uo insists that he is a freedom fighter,

G and has claimed that he has faced
threats of assassination from China. But
hunted men do not often release hip-
hop tracks, and, as the former intelli-
gence official observed, “If the M.S.S.
really wanted to kill his ass, they have
the ability to do it.”
In trying to untangle Guo’s zigzag-
ging identities and feuds and bluffs, I
often thought of the late James Jesus
Angleton, the longtime head of counter-
intelligence at the C.I.A. Angleton spent
years hunting for Soviet moles in Amer- “Trust me. Don’t do it.”
ica, straining to see through ploys and
misinformation to divine who was work-
ing to “confuse and split the West,” as
• •
he put it. Angleton described his domain
as a “wilderness of mirrors,” a metaphor able at a cost of fifty thousand dollars mystery: “It’s like the very end of the
borrowed from T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion.” per family. In 2020, the Wall Street Jour- movie ‘Chinatown,’” when Jack Nichol-
The poem, written amid the ashes of the nal reported that the F.B.I. was exam- son’s character is told to accept what he
First World War, contains a warning: ining Guo and the funding of his media cannot understand. More important,
“History has many cunning passages, work with Bannon. (At the time, both from Bannon’s perspective, is that Guo
contrived corridors/And issues, deceives Guo and Bannon said that the Bureau has forced Republican contenders to
with whispering ambitions,/ Guides us had not contacted them.) It seems pos- adopt a more bellicose stance: “He’s done
by vanities.” By the time Angleton re- sible that his efforts to cultivate various more than anybody to wake this coun-
tired, in 1974, his obsession had become government connections will offer some try up to the threats of the C.C.P. as a
so consuming that some people won- protection. Guo’s dealings with the F.B.I. transnational criminal organization and
dered if he himself was the mole. could make him “messy” to prosecute, an existential threat to America. Whether
What of Guo was real and what was according to a former Justice Depart- he’s working for a faction or he’s hedg-
fake? Was he pulled to and fro by the ment official. He could adopt the strat- ing his bets, the stuff he’s done and what
tensions between the U.S. and China, or egy that prosecutors call “graymail”— he’s galvanized is just relentless.”
was he exerting forces of his own? Was threatening to disclose national-security It is tempting to dismiss Guo as just
he heightening the chaos in American secrets in the process of defending him- another wacky artifact of the Trump era.
politics, or simply reflecting our own self. The official said, “Even if you win But, if Trump proved anything, it is that
anxieties back to us? At bottom, Guo it, he might be revealing a lot more than seemingly unpersuasive figures can have
may simply be an inveterate grifter. An anyone ever wants revealed.” a lasting effect if they find political part-
American who worked at the Pangu Teng, the dissident, sees a lesson for ners who, like Bannon, focus only on
Plaza in its early years recalls that, two critics of Chinese authoritarianism who outcomes. In September, Mike Pompeo,
floors below the garage of luxury cars, made the Faustian choice to support one of several Trump Administration
there was an unfinished basement, a dark, Trump and, later, Guo. “They think the veterans who are competing to be the
wet place where wood planks formed a end justifies the means,” Teng said. In a most hawkish on China, appeared in a
gangway over mud. One part was dedi- public essay, he made a moral argument video all but calling on Xi’s citizens to
cated to storing high-end Japanese por- against coöperating with dubious allies, rise up against the government. “There
celain plates and gold-colored flatware. asking, “Must the enemy of the enemy is no bigger enemy for the C.C.P. than
“You could see lights in the distance,” he be a friend? Hitler and ISIS were also you, the Chinese people,” he said. Ban-
said. “It was some of the migrant work- anti-communists.” non was thrilled. “That was just un-
ers, who lived down there. They’d built Bannon, Guo’s most prominent de- heard-of five years ago,” he said, and of-
these little huts out of scaffolding pipes.” fender, has heard all the criticisms. “Other fered a prediction: “That will be the plank
The migrant laborers in the basement guys are saying, ‘Hey, all he’s doing is in the Republican Party in 2024. There’ll
camp were building the fantasy that Guo feeding you bullshit.’” He doesn’t care. be a huge platform fight over saying that
was promoting up on the surface. “I think in outcomes. Whether he’s work- the Chinese Communist Party is not the
Guo is still selling aspiration. Last ing for a faction or not, who knows?” legitimate government of China.” He
year, he proposed that passports from Bannon suggested, reviving an old cli- credited Guo, saying, “He’s changed the
his government-in-exile be made avail- ché, that China was an impenetrable Overton window in this country.” 
A N N A L S O F D I P LO M ACY
ARMING UKRAINE
How the West helped fight Vladimir Putin.
BY JOSHUA YAFFA
n early September, Oleksii Rez able advantage in terms of heavy weap
I nikov, Ukraine’s defense minister,

travelled from the center of Kyiv
to a U.S. airbase in RamsteinMiesen
ons; its longdistance missiles could
rain down terror and death across the
battlefield and beyond, clearing the way
bach, Germany, where NATO officials for its troops to advance. But Ukraine
were gathering to discuss military sup received enough artillery systems and
port for Ukraine. The trip, a distance munitions from the U.S. and other
of about twelve hundred miles, roughly NATO states to mount an adequate re
the equivalent of travelling from New sponse. “This allowed the country’s mil
York to Minneapolis, lasted the better itary and political leadership to think
part of a day. Because there are no flights seriously about the third phase,”
out of Ukraine, Reznikov had to take Reznikov said. “That is, launching an
a car to the border and a plane the rest offensive operation.”
of the way. As he set off from the cap Vladimir Putin had effectively em
ital, he couldn’t help but hope for good braced the stalemate of the war’s sec
news. Ukrainian forces had opened a ond phase, wagering that, as the front
second flank in an ambitious counter lines held and the conflict increasingly
offensive, a surprise operation in the di disrupted global energy and food sup
rection of Russianoccupied territory plies, the Ukrainian public would tire
in the Kharkiv region. “I learned not to of the war and the West’s commit
raise my expectations too high,” Rez ment would wane. There was some
nikov said, “especially in wartime.” basis for questioning the durability of
Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Ze U.S. and NATO support—it seemed to
lensky, appointed Reznikov defense strengthen in proportion to Ukraine’s
minister last November, just three ability to repel Russian forces. “We
months before the Russian invasion. have seen U.S. arms supplies contrib
Reznikov is a lawyer and a longtime ute to real success on the battlefield,
fixture of Kyiv politics, a veteran of the which has in turn consolidated support
Soviet Air Force and an avid skydiver. for providing more,” a Biden Admin
He now serves as a lead negotiator se istration official involved in Ukraine
curing the Western arms his country policy told me. “But one could imag
needs to continue its fight. “I get a cer ine things reversed: if the former were
tain request from the generals,” he not the case, then maybe the latter
said.“Then I explain to our partners the wouldn’t be, either.”
need for it.” As spring turned to summer, Rez
At the time of Reznikov’s trip to nikov sensed a growing weariness in
Ramstein, the war was in what he called some Western capitals. The attitude, he
its third phase. “The first phase was said, was, “O.K., well, we helped Ukraine
simply to hold off the enemy in those resist, we kept them from being de
places where they managed to break stroyed.” Reznikov and other officials
through,” he said. This was the battle wanted to demonstrate to their partners
for Kyiv and for Ukraine’s survival as in the West that the Ukrainian Army
a sovereign state, which Russia effec could reclaim large swaths of Rus
tively lost. “The second was to stabi sianoccupied territory. “The counter
lize the front and achieve something offensive would show that it’s one thing
resembling an equal opposition of forces to take part in helping the victim,”
on the battlefield.” Russia, which had Reznikov said, “another to realize you
occupied a number of key cities in can punish the aggressor.”
Ukraine’s south and east, retained a siz In July, military officials from Ukraine, “The counter-offensive would show that it’s
one thing to take part in helping the victim,” Ukraine’s defense minister said, “another to realize you can punish the aggressor.”
ILLUSTRATION BY ÁLVARO BERNIS THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 51
tralian Bushmaster armored person
nel carriers.
Reznikov was still en route to the
Ramstein Air Base when he first re
ceived a text message about the break
through near Kharkiv. The Ukrainian
armed forces had retaken Balakliya, a
key gateway city in the region. Reznikov
pictured the map in his head, counting
the next towns likely to be liberated. He
was travelling with a small delegation
that included top officials from the gen
eral staff and military intelligence, who
were also receiving updates from the
front. They began comparing notes.
Ukrainian units moved east, toward
Kupyansk, an important logistics hub,
then spread north and south, retaking
key roads and rail junctions. By the time
Reznikov landed in Germany, on Sep
tember 8th, paratroopers had reached
the Oskil River, thirty miles behind what
had been the Russian front line just
• • hours before. Within days, the Ukrainian
military recaptured more than seven
hundred square miles of territory.
the United States, and the United King icanprovided precision rocket systems. The next morning, Reznikov met
dom converged at a base in Europe to In response, Russia’s generals had moved with Lloyd Austin, the U.S. Secretary
plot out possible scenarios. The Ukrai a considerable number of units out of of Defense, and Mark Milley, the chair
nians’ starting point was a broad cam the Kharkiv region, in the northeast, to man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They
paign across the southern front, a push back up forces near Kherson. The as had been briefed on the counteroffen
to liberate not only the occupied city of sembled planners settled on an idea that sive, and joined Reznikov in tracking
Kherson but hundreds of square miles would take advantage of this vulnera the military’s progress on a map. Both
in the nearby Mykolaiv and Zapor bility: a twofront offensive. Shortly af maintained their composure, Reznikov
izhzhia regions. The military planners terward, Reznikov was informed of the noted, but they were clearly excited.
met in three rooms, divided by coun plans. “It wasn’t the first time I was “Their faces were glowing,” he said.
try, where experts ran the same table struck by our military’s ability to come “They knew what was happening, and
top exercises. They often worked twenty up with unexpected solutions,” he said. what this meant.”
hours a day, with American and Brit “I understood it was up to me to get In the afternoon, Reznikov addressed
ish military officials helping to hone the them the necessary weapons.” a group of thirty NATO defense minis
Ukrainians’ strategy. “We have algo In late August, Ukrainian ground ters. “The success of Ukraine’s coun
rithms and methodologies that are more forces started their push toward Kher terattack is thanks to you,” he said.
sophisticated when it comes to things son. It was a slow, grinding operation, He later told me, “Of course, I meant
like mapping out logistics and calculat with both sides suffering heavy losses. the U.S. most of all.”
ing munitions rates,” a senior official at A week later, troops dashed toward
the Defense Department said. “The Russian lines in the Kharkiv region, a rior to this year’s invasion, officials
idea was not to tell them what to do
but, rather, to give them different runs
move that clearly caught Russian mil
itary leaders off guard. With so many
P in Kyiv often felt as if the political
establishment in Washington viewed
to test their plans.” units relocated to the south, a number their country as little more than a bit
The initial tabletop exercises showed of territories in the northeast were player in a geopolitical game. “Ukraine
that a unified push across the southern guarded by underequipped Russian was not considered to have its own
front would come at a high cost to forces and riot police with little com agency,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top ad
Ukrainian equipment and manpower. bat experience. Many of them simply viser to Zelensky, said, “but rather as
It looked ill advised. “They ran this ver abandoned their positions and ran off, just one of the many elements in man
sion of the offensive many times and leaving behind crates of ammunition, aging the relationship with Russia.”
just couldn’t get the model to work,” and even a few tanks. Ukrainian troops In 2014, Putin had ordered Russian
the Defense official said. sped through one town after another, troops with no insignia—the socalled
In the south, Ukraine had been bat often on Westernsupplied fighting little green men—to Crimea, a Ukrai
tering Russian positions with Amer vehicles, such as Humvees and Aus nian peninsula in the Black Sea, and
sparked a separatist conflict in the Don- that, during an official phone call with ing a path for Ukraine’s admittance to
bas, in eastern Ukraine. At the time, Zelensky, Trump had implied that fu- NATO, and preventing the startup of
Ukraine retained a largely Soviet-style ture Javelin sales could be linked to a the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which
military, with a baroque bureaucracy “favor.” The President wanted Zelen- would allow Russia to circumvent
and Cold War hardware. Zelensky’s sky to look into an obscure conspiracy Ukraine in supplying natural gas to
predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, appealed theory suggesting that the Ukrainian Germany and the rest of Europe.
to Barack Obama for more and better government, not Russia, had interfered That fall, intelligence data showed
weapons. Obama’s concern, according in the 2016 Presidential election, and to that Russia had positioned more than
to the senior Defense official, was that, order the investigation of a case involv- a hundred thousand troops along the
“if we escalated, the Russians would ing the work of Biden’s son Hunter on Ukrainian border. “At that point, we
counter-escalate, and the conflict would the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian en- weren’t yet sure if Putin had made the
spiral.” Joe Biden, then the Vice-Pres- ergy company. The exchange led to ultimate decision to invade,” a person
ident, was more inclined to provide Trump’s first impeachment trial. It also familiar with White House discussions
arms. The Defense official said, “He unlocked U.S. military aid for Ukraine: on Ukraine said. “But it was without
had the position that if Putin had to Congress, with bipartisan support, in- doubt that he was giving himself the
explain to Russian mothers why cas- sured that a package worth two hundred capability to do so.”
kets were coming back home, that could and fifty million dollars was released. In November, Biden dispatched the
affect his calculus.” Zelensky saw Biden’s election as a director of the C.I.A., William Burns,
Ukrainian officials were particularly chance to re-start relations with the on a secret trip to Moscow. Burns had
adamant in their requests for one U.S. In the spring of 2021, Russia be- previously served as the U.S. Ambas-
weapon: the shoulder-fired Javelin anti- gan assembling troops and equipment sador to Russia and had often dealt
tank missile, which takes its name from on the Ukrainian border. That Septem- with Putin personally. In the course
the similarity of its flight path to that ber, during a meeting with Zelensky at of two days, Burns met with Putin’s
of a spear—the missile arcs nearly five the White House, Biden announced an inner circle of advisers, including Al-
hundred feet into the air, then back additional sixty million dollars in secu- exander Bortnikov, the director of Rus-
down, striking a tank or armored vehi- rity assistance, including more Javelins. sia’s Federal Security Service, and Ni-
cle from above, where it’s most vulner- The two Presidents projected an air of kolai Patrushev, the head of the
able. “The Javelin was the one thing the mutual interest and bonhomie, but Ze- Kremlin’s Security Council. He also
Ukrainians understood they really lensky left Washington without com- had an hour-long phone call with
needed,” Ben Rhodes, a deputy nation- mitments on two key issues, both of Putin, who, wary of COVID and in-
al-security adviser in the Obama White which he had raised with Biden: creat- creasingly isolated, was hunkered down
House, said. “It was also a purely de-
fensive weapon, which, they hoped, could
make it relatively easier for us to supply.”
Obama declined to provide any le-
thal arms at all. Instead, the Adminis-
tration focussed its efforts on training
Ukrainian forces. At a base near Yavoriv,
in western Ukraine, fifteen miles from
the Polish border, instructors from the
U.S. and other NATO countries taught
the principles of small-unit tactics and
trained a new branch of Ukrainian spe-
cial forces. Still, Carol Northrup, who
was then the U.S. defense attaché at the
Embassy in Kyiv, said, the Ukrainians
“were much more interested in our stuff
than our advice. They would say, ‘We
want stuff.’ And we’d answer, ‘We want
to train you.’ ”
Donald Trump came into office
promising improved relations with Rus-
sia, which alarmed officials in Kyiv. But
his Administration approved the Jave-
lins. The first shipment—about two
hundred missiles and thirty-seven
launchers—arrived in Ukraine in the
spring of 2018. The following year, an
anonymous whistle-blower revealed “I’m searching for underutilized outlets.”
in his Presidential residence in Sochi. and use it as a staging point for flying adviser, said. “We couldn’t allow for
Burns thought that Putin sounded in troops and equipment. panic in society.”
cool and dispassionate, as if his mind At the White House, a “Tiger Team,” Behind the scenes, Zelensky and
was nearly made up. Upon returning made up of experts from the State De- other top Ukrainian officials were ask-
to Washington, Burns relayed his find- partment, the Defense Department, the ing the U.S. for a significant infusion
ings to Biden. The message, accord- Joint Chiefs, and intelligence agencies, of weapons. “At each phase, they just
ing to Burns, was that “Putin thought carried out exercises to anticipate the said give us everything under the sun,”
Zelensky a weak leader, that the Ukrai- shape of a Russian attack. After Putin an Administration official said. “We
nians would cave, and that his mili- came to power, two decades ago, the tailored what we provided to the actual
tary could achieve a decisive victory Kremlin leadership had advertised a situation they were facing.” In late Jan-
at minimal cost.” wide-scale effort to modernize its armed uary, the Administration announced
In January, Burns made a trip to forces. The C.I.A. and other Western that it was sending a two-hundred-mil-
Kyiv to warn Zelensky. The Orthodox intelligence agencies concluded that lion-dollar package of military aid,
Christmas had just passed, and a fes- Russia’s military would overwhelm which included three hundred more
tive atmosphere lingered in Ukraine’s Ukraine. Intelligence assessments at the Javelins and, for the first time, Sting-
capital, with decorations lining the time were that Putin expected Russian ers, the man-portable anti-aircraft sys-
streets. Zelensky understood the im- forces to seize Kyiv within seventy-two tems, or MANPADs, that had played a
plications of the intelligence that Burns hours. “We thought it might take a few key role in the mujahideen’s defeat of
presented, but he still thought it was days longer than the Russians did,” the the Red Army in Afghanistan. “You
possible to avoid a large-scale inva- Defense Department official said, “but can’t take over a country with MAN-
sion. For starters, he was reluctant to not much longer.” PADs,” the Defense Department offi-
do anything that might set off a po- cial said. “But you can defend an air-
litical and economic crisis inside utwardly, Zelensky acted as if war port from an airborne assault.”
Ukraine. He also worried that mobi-
lizing the military could inadvertently
O were not inevitable. “The captains
should not leave the ship,” he said near
U.S. Air Force transport planes, car-
rying crates of arms, began landing sev-
provide Putin with a casus belli. Burns the end of January. “I don’t think we eral times a week in Kyiv. The Biden
was sympathetic with the dilemma, have a Titanic here.” But he did take Administration had also declassified
but he emphasized that the looming the prospect of a Russian invasion se- summaries of its intelligence assess-
danger was not hypothetical. Burns riously. “There’s a difference between ments, issuing public warnings that a
specifically told Zelensky that Russian what you articulate with the public and full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine
forces planned to seize the Hostomel what you are actually doing,” Oleksiy was imminent. Many U.S. officials be-
airport, twenty miles from the capital, Danilov, Zelensky’s national-security lieved that Zelensky wasn’t ready to ac-
cept the urgency of the threat. In mul-
tiple conversations with Biden, Zelensky
brought up the negative impact that the
talk of war was having on Ukraine’s
stock market and its investment climate.
“It’s fair to say the fact that those issues
remained a priority item as late as they
did raised some eyebrows,” the person
familiar with the White House’s Ukraine
policy said.
Six months earlier, the Taliban had
seized power in Afghanistan within
days of the U.S. withdrawal. The Biden
Administration had wagered that the
U.S.-backed Afghan Army could fight
the Taliban to a stalemate over the
course of several months. When it came
to the Russian threat in Ukraine, U.S.
defense and security officials erred on
the side of alarmism. “I think in some
ways we transposed the Afghan expe-
rience onto the Ukrainians,” the senior
Defense Department official said. Po-
dolyak, Zelensky’s adviser, felt that the
warnings coming from Washington and
elsewhere were incomplete: “They
would say, ‘The Russians will attack!’
O.K., then, what’s the next step? Are at the general-staff headquarters and erful weaponry, including fighter jets,
you with us? And it felt like there was shown a one-page sketch of Ukrainian tanks, air defenses, and long-range ar-
no answer.” positions and defensive schemes. She tillery and rockets. “The deliveries were
Another underlying source of un- was not given a copy, and was permitted not so big, not like we would have liked
ease was that U.S. officials had little un- to take only handwritten notes. Even to see,” Danilov said. “No one believed
derstanding of the Ukrainian plan to having stipulated these conditions, that we could hold out.”
defend the country, or even if such a Zaluzhnyi was less than forthcoming. Zelensky displayed tremendous cour-
plan existed. General Milley, the chair- His subordinates showed the attaché age by remaining in Kyiv. According to
man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a false version of the plan, masking the Reznikov, the country’s security services
speaking several times a week with his full scope of the defensive campaign. were tracking three Chechen hit squads
counterpart in Kyiv, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ultimately, Zaluzhnyi’s strategy was sent to assassinate the Ukrainian Pres-
the commander-in-chief of the to prevent the capture of ident and other top politi-
Ukrainian armed forces. Milley pressed Kyiv at all costs, while, in cians. Zelensky also proved
Zaluzhnyi for information about how other areas, letting Russian an adept leader, projecting
Ukraine would defend itself, including forces run ahead of their an air of defiance to pro-
a request for detailed inventories of logistics and supply lines. mote cohesion at home and
weapons stockpiles. Milley also offered The idea was to trade ter- support internationally.
his own strategic vision—an emphasis ritory in the short term in Two days into the invasion,
on dispersed mobile units, multiple lines order to pick off Russian the Associated Press re-
of defense across the country, and a units once they were over- ported that Zelensky had
mixture of conventional forces and par- extended. “We trusted no rejected a U.S. offer to evac-
tisan warfare. “Our message was not, one back then,” a senior uate him from Kyiv, saying,
‘You guys are about to get steamrolled, Ukrainian military official “I need ammunition, not a
so you should just sue for peace,’” a U.S. said. “Our plan was our one tiny chance ride.” A senior U.S. official said, “To the
military official said. “Rather, the mes- for success, and we did not want any- best of my knowledge, that never hap-
sage was that you are about to get steam- one at all to know it.” pened.” The official added, “But hats
rolled, so you have to get your defenses off to Zelensky and the people around
majorly shored up.” n the war’s early days, Biden told na- him. It was a great line.”
Zaluzhnyi seemed hesitant to pro-
vide any details. Not only was he pro-
I tional-security officials at the White
House and the Defense Department
Ukrainian forces managed to keep
Russian transport planes from landing
tective of his plans, he refused to share that the U.S. had three main policy in- at the Hostomel airport. In the coun-
the placement of arms caches, which terests in Ukraine. “One, we are not tryside around Kyiv, Russian armored
he was constantly moving and camou- going to allow this to suck us into a war convoys were stranded beyond the reach
flaging to keep them from being de- with Russia,” a senior Biden Adminis- of their supply lines and became easy
stroyed or captured by the Russian tration official recalled. “Two, we need targets for ambushes and drone strikes.
Army. Some U.S. officials worried that to make sure we can meet our Article 5 Washington’s fears about the country’s
Zaluzhnyi, like Zelensky, didn’t fully commitments with NATO.” (Prior to armed forces now seemed misplaced.
believe the U.S. intelligence. “Others the invasion, the Biden Administration “Obviously, it turned out they had a
were convinced he believed it, and had had sent several thousand additional plan,” the U.S. military official said. “Be-
war plans on hand,” the military offi- soldiers to NATO member states in East- cause you don’t whip the Russians like
cial said, “but wanted to keep them se- ern Europe and the Baltic region, to that and expertly execute a mobile de-
cret from Zelensky.” show that the U.S. military was pre- fense in depth without one.”
Given Zelensky’s reluctance to put pared to defend them.) “And, three, we The Ukrainians benefitted from an-
the country on a war footing, there was will do what we can to help Ukraine other factor that the U.S. had not con-
speculation that Zaluzhnyi may have succeed on the battlefield,” the official sidered: Russian hubris and disorgani-
been trying to avoid the possibility of continued. “The President was clear: zation. Putin had planned the invasion
being asked to scale down his prepa- we do not want to see Ukraine defeated.” with a small circle of trusted advisers,
rations. If this was the case, the U.S. From a bunker in Kyiv’s government who settled on a lightning-fast raid to
military official said, it’s possible that quarter, Zelensky led a conference call overthrow Zelensky and his cabinet.
Zaluzhnyi didn’t want to share them with Ukrainian officials twice a day, at Ukrainians were finding dress uniforms
with Milley because he was afraid that ten in the morning and ten at night, on inside the Russian military vehicles that
Milley would then brief the White the subject of arms supplies. The U.S., they captured—the invading forces had
House, which would in turn say some- along with the United Kingdom, the thought that within a matter of days
thing to Zelensky. Czech Republic, Poland, and the Bal- they would be marching victorious down
Finally, in February, Zaluzhnyi tic states, was sending anti-tank weap- the streets of central Kyiv. Instead, they
agreed to share his plan for defending ons, MANPADs, and small arms. But to found themselves deep in Ukrainian
Ukraine. A defense attaché from the the Ukrainians, who were suddenly in territory without access to basic neces-
U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, an Air Force a fight for survival, these shipments sities like food and water. As the De-
colonel, was summoned to a meeting seemed trivial. They wanted more pow- fense Department official put it, “We
presumed they had their shit together,
but it turns out they didn’t.”
Ukraine’s early success changed atti- FINALLY
tudes in Washington. “The Ukrainians
were putting up a good fight, which Not afterglow,
helped open the floodgates for a lot more not the last
military assistance,” the Defense De- word. Still
partment official said. Even so, the Biden they were able
Administration did not give Kyiv every- to more or less
thing it wanted. One wish list circulat- enjoy
ing around Washington said that Ukraine the feeling of being
needed five hundred Javelin missiles per washed up together
day; at the start of the war, the produc- on what was not
tion of Javelins was only around two really a floodplain
thousand per year. Other proposals aired from which the not-
in public by Zelensky and top Ukrainian quite water
officials, such as a no-fly zone main- had receded,
tained by NATO aircraft and air defenses, leaving a large number
were non-starters. “Our interests highly of more or less
overlap, but they are not identical,” the interesting artifacts,
Defense official said. “When we say which, they had learned,
things like ‘That is escalatory and could appeared to them
draw NATO into the fight,’ they are, like, differently
‘Yeah, good. How could it get any worse so that what she saw
for us? It’s already existential.’ Frankly, as a large wooden
if I were them, I’d have the same view.” radio, he saw
A moment of tension erupted be- as a fireplace mantel,
tween Milley and Zaluzhnyi. Ukraine and what she saw
wanted more MIG-29s, a Soviet-de- as self-sufficiency, he saw
signed plane that Ukrainian pilots had as strangulation.
flown since the eighties. Kyiv reached In past times,
a tentative deal with Poland, in which they had fought bitterly
Poland would deliver two dozen jets, about what things were,
and the U.S. would give American- what they should
made F-16s to Poland as a replacement. or should not be.
The Biden Administration worried that Now they tried to guess
flying aircraft from NATO territory into what the other would call
Ukraine’s contested skies would be seen any object they spotted;
as a clear escalation. U.S. officials were they had come
also skeptical of the planes’ usefulness to find failure
to Ukraine. The MIG-29 is primarily an hilarious, and even
air-to-air-combat interceptor—not a faked it
ground-attack plane that might, say, on some occasions.
provide aerial support to infantry or at-
tack a tank column—and Russia’s more —Rae Armantrout
advanced fighter, the Sukhoi Su-35,
could easily outmaneuver it. Zaluzhnyi
told Milley that Ukraine had almost no ments. U.S. officials believed that Putin But the assessment was also that, in the
fighter jets left. Milley insisted that would escalate given one of three sce- end, Putin could be deterred. A senior
Ukraine still had plenty. The two did narios: if the Russian military faced utter U.S. intelligence official said, “It’s not
not speak for more than a week. “Early collapse on the battlefield, if Putin felt like he wants World War Three, either.”
on, their conversations were formal and an immediate threat to his own rule, or
matter-of-fact,” the U.S. military offi- if the U.S. or NATO militaries directly n early April, the Russian military
cial said. “One would say his long piece,
and the other would say his. Now the
intervened in Ukraine. As for Putin’s
likely response, officials in Washington
I announced a full pullout from the
Kyiv region, essentially an admission
tone is more familiar, warmer, friend- forecast a range of worrying possibili- that its initial combat aims had failed.
lier. They talk about their families.” ties, from carrying out a nuclear-bomb Now it was shifting tactics to an artil-
No one knew for sure how Russia test in the Arctic to detonating a low- lery assault in the Donbas, using mis-
would respond to Western arms ship- yield tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine. sile strikes to level cities and towns be-
fore sending in ground forces to seize existing howitzer-style artillery. “Aus- The M777s allowed Ukraine to
the rubble. This meant that Ukraine tin called and said the decision has been mount a defense in the Donbas. “In any
required heavy artillery of its own. taken,” Reznikov said. “I understood war, of course, it’s not only about quan-
“There’s not much a unit with some we crossed a certain Rubicon.” tity, but quality,” Roman Kachur, the
Javelins can do if you have two hun- Within days, the first contingent of commander of Ukraine’s 55th Artillery
dred tanks coming at you,” the senior Ukrainian soldiers—two-man teams Brigade, said. “There’s a difference when
Ukrainian military official said. made up of a gunner and a section you’re fighting with a modern weapons
At the time, according to Ukrainian chief—arrived at a U.S. Army training system or one that hasn’t been signifi-
generals, the Army had enough artil- facility in Grafenwöhr, in southern Ger- cantly updated since the days of the
lery ammunition to last for two weeks many. Over six days, U.S. instructors Second World War.” For weeks, his
of intensive fighting. Ukraine used taught them how to set up and move forces had faced heavy artillery fire from
152-millimetre shells, a family of am- the M777, how to manually line up a a fortified Russian position near Do-
munition that many former Warsaw target, and how to maintain the gun’s netsk, a Russian-occupied city in the
Pact member states inherited from the levels of nitrogen and hydraulic fluid. Donbas. “We couldn’t knock the enemy
Soviet Union. NATO forces use 155-mil- As one U.S. trainer put it, “This isn’t a out of there, because we simply couldn’t
limetre shells, and the two systems are gun you can beat the crap out of and reach him,” Kachur told me. Then the
not interchangeable. The problem was will keep humming along.” M777s arrived. “Within three or four
not merely the depleting stocks of So- The Ukrainian soldiers in Grafen- days, the Russians had pulled all their
viet-calibre munitions inside Ukraine— wöhr struck their American counter- artillery out of there,” he said. “It’s a
they were becoming increasingly hard parts as highly motivated. During one new situation. We are dictating their
to find anywhere in the world. At the lunch break, a Ukrainian soldier reported behavior to a certain degree.”
start of the war, Western governments that his village had just come under The U.S. does not have the ability to
and private arms dealers had negotiated Russian shelling; the rest of the Ukrainian monitor the howitzers’ locations and
transfers from places such as Bulgaria troops stood up without finishing their conditions from afar, or electronically
and Romania. Among the largest caches meal and returned to their training. limit where they could be used. “Once
were those the U.S. and NATO had des- “They’re not here for R. and R.,” Brig- this equipment gets to them, it belongs
ignated for Afghan security forces, which adier General Joseph Hilbert, who over- to them,” the senior Biden Administra-
had been sitting unclaimed in ware- sees the facility, said. “They want to get tion official said. “We don’t have a score-
houses in Eastern Europe since the Tal- back and put these things to use.” card.” Occasionally, bad news arrived
iban takeover. Belarus, where Russian By the end of the month, eighteen from the field. In one case, forces in east-
troops had amassed before the invasion, M777s were flown to bases in Eastern ern Ukraine moved a number of M777s
had sizable stores of artillery ammuni- Europe and brought to the border with from a firing position to a barn, and
tion, but Russia’s ally certainly wasn’t Ukraine. Under the cover of night, the within minutes a Russian missile hit the
going to give it to Ukraine. Rear Ad- howitzers were transferred to small con- location, destroying both the guns and
miral R. Duke Heinz, the director of voys of unmarked trucks driven by the trucks used to transport them.
logistics for the U.S. Army’s European Ukrainian teams. As the war has pro- Even as another seventy-two systems
Command, said, “We were seeing fewer gressed, U.S. defense officials have arrived—along with dozens of NATO-
and fewer countries raise their hands to compatible howitzers from France and
say they had munitions to donate.” Germany—Ukrainian generals esti-
That left another option: Ukraine mated that Russian artillery pieces out-
would have to switch to NATO-calibre numbered Ukraine’s by seven to one;
weaponry. On April 26th, defense min- each day, Russian forces were shooting
isters from more than forty countries, some twenty thousand shells, pummel-
including all the NATO member states, ling cities such as Severodonetsk and
met at the U.S. airbase in Ramstein. Aus- Lysychansk. Zelensky said that, in June,
tin, the U.S. Defense Secretary, opened as many as a hundred Ukrainian sol-
the proceedings. “Ukraine clearly believes diers were being killed every day. It was
that it can win, and so does everyone opened other routes, shipping equip- the most difficult moment in the war
here,” he said. “I know we’re all deter- ment on rail lines across Europe and for Ukraine, with Russia—fitfully and
mined to do everything that we can to through ports on the North Sea, in Ger- at great cost to its own forces—blast-
meet Ukraine’s needs as the fight evolves.” many. Putin and other Russian officials ing through Ukrainian defenses and
Prior to the summit, the U.S. had have threatened to target these trans- capturing territory one metre at a time.
agreed to transfer ninety M777 howit- fers. But, according to Heinz, not one Washington encouraged Ukraine to
zers to Ukraine, the first time it would has come under fire. “Russia is aware rely on judicious planning and the ef-
be providing the country with heavy of how security assistance gets into ficiency of Western weaponry rather
artillery. The M777, which was designed Ukraine,” the senior Defense Depart- than try to outshoot the Russian mili-
to support infantry operations in Af- ment official said. “But, so far, they have tary. NATO had chosen a similar strat-
ghanistan and Iraq, was more power- refrained from attacking those hubs, be- egy in the latter stages of the Cold War,
ful and more accurate than Ukraine’s cause they don’t want a war with NATO.” when it found itself with far fewer tanks
and artillery than the Soviet Union. terparts to confirm a set of coördinates. range with artillery and rocket fire. The
“We told the Ukrainians if they try and This had become a common practice. high death toll is partially a reflection
fight like the Russians, they will lose,” Ukrainian representatives might ask for of Russian military doctrine, which calls
the senior Defense Department official verification of the location of a Russian for topdown, hierarchical operations.
said. “Our mission was to help Ukraine command post or ammunition depot. In most cases, midranking Russian of
compensate for quantitative inferiority “We do that, fair game,” the senior Biden ficers and enlisted soldiers are not em
with qualitative superiority.” Administration official said. In some powered to make decisions, creating a
cases, U.S. intelligence and military of need for generals to be positioned closer
kraine has a fleet of reconnaissance ficers provide targeting information un to the front. “They were depending on
U drones and a loose network of
human sources within areas controlled
solicited: “We do let them know, say,
there’s a battalion moving on Slovyansk
them to control and direct troops,” the
U.S. military official said. “It’s a huge
by the Russian military, but its ability to from the northwest, and here’s roughly operational catastrophe.”
gather intelligence on the battlefield where they are.” But, the official em The Ukrainian request in April con
greatly diminishes about fifteen miles phasized, Ukrainian forces choose what cerned the suspected location of the
beyond the front line. U.S. spy satellites, to hit. “We are not approving, or dis Moskva, a Russian naval cruiser and
meanwhile, can capture snapshots of approving, targets.” the f lagship of the Black Sea Fleet.
troop positions anywhere on earth. Closer The Biden Administration has also Could U.S. intelligence confirm that
to the ground, U.S. military spy planes, refused to provide specific intelligence the ship was at a certain set of coördi
flying along the borders, augment the on the location of highvalue Russian nates south of the Ukrainian port city
picture, and intelligence intercepts can individuals, such as generals or other of Odesa? The answer came back af
allow analysts to listen in on communi senior figures. “There are lines we drew firmative. Soon, officials in Washing
cations between Russian commanders. in order not to be perceived as being in ton began to see press reports that the
Since the invasion, the U.S. and other a direct conflict with Russia,” the se ship had suffered some sort of explo
Western partners have shared a great nior U.S. official said. The United States sion. On April 14th, the Moskva dis
deal of this information with Ukraine. will pass on coördinates of a command appeared into the Black Sea.
Mykola Bielieskov, a defense expert at post, for example, but not the presence Kyiv said that two Ukrainianmade
the National Institute for Strategic Stud of a particular commander. “We are not Neptune antiship missiles, fired from
ies, in Kyiv, said, “That’s a major field trying to kill generals,” the senior Biden onshore near Odesa, had hit the Moskva
where the U.S. is helping us.” Administration official said. “We are —a statement that was confirmed by
One evening in April, at an intelli trying to help the Ukrainians under U.S. intelligence agencies. Russia never
gencecoördination center somewhere mine Russian command and control.” admitted that the strike took place, in
in Europe, Ukrainian military officers Still, Ukraine has so far killed as many stead blaming an onboard fire and stormy
asked their American and NATO coun as eight generals, most of them at long seas for the loss of the ship. Some forty
Russian sailors are reported to have died.
After the arrival of the M777s, the
Ukrainian Army increasingly shared
information with the U.S. about the
condition of its weaponry on the bat
tlefield, something it had not always
been eager to do. Reznikov described
it as a “mirror reaction” to Washington’s
initial approach to the war. “You see
they don’t trust you with serious weap
ons,” he said, “so why should you trust
them?” But, as the U.S. and other West
ern powers increased their commit
ments, the relationship improved. Ac
cording to Reznikov, “When we received
one package of assistance after another,
and we could see there was a real de
sire to help, it allowed us to come to an
agreement and reach a genuine dia
logue.” A Western diplomat in Kyiv
told me, “It’s a common story here. You
can be incredibly wary, until you’re not.
Then you become trusting and open.”
When the U.S. military carries out
operations with a partner force, such as
“Nap? I’ll nap when I’m thirty.” a fellow NATO member state, it coördi
nates battle movements on a common
operational picture, or COP, a single dig-
itized display showing the location and
composition of forces. “We don’t quite
have that with Ukraine,” the military
official said. “But it’s close.” Ukrainian
commanders feed information to the
U.S. military, which allows for an al-
most real-time picture of its weaponry
in Ukraine. “These days we know sim-
ilar information about what we have
given to Ukraine as we know about
equipment in our own military,” the of-
ficial said. “How many artillery tubes
are functioning, what’s down for main-
tenance, where the necessary part is.”
In May, Ukrainian artillery crews,
using M777s along with some Soviet-
era systems, fired on a large contingent
of Russian forces that was trying to
cross a pontoon bridge on the Siverskyi
Donets River. Intelligence provided by
the U.S. appeared to allow the Ukrai-
nians to identify the moment of the
Russian column’s crossing. It was one
of the single biggest losses for the Rus-
sian Army since the war began. Doz-
ens of tanks and armored vehicles were
destroyed, left charred along the river’s
swampy banks, and as many as four “I know they should be invited to our house next, but can’t we just
hundred Russian soldiers were killed. give them the cash equivalent and call it even?”
or months, Ukraine had one U.S.
F weapons system at the top of its
wish list: the High Mobility Artillery
• •
Rocket System, or HIMARS. Whereas for the Biden Administration was not bridge too far,” the Defense official said.
the M777 can hit artillery pieces, troop whether to give HIMARS to Ukraine, The battlef ield realities inside
formations, tanks, and armored vehicles but which munitions to send along with Ukraine were another determining fac-
at what is known as tactical depth, them. Each system can carry either a tor. “The imperative was ‘What does
around fifteen miles, HIMARS can reach pod with six rockets, known as GMLRS, Ukraine need?’ ” the Defense official
an entirely different target set: ammu- with a range of forty miles, or one sur- said. “Not what they are asking for—
nition depots, logistics hubs, radar sys- face-to-surface missile, or ATACMS, what they need. And we do our own
tems, and command-and-control nodes, which can reach a hundred and eighty assessment of that.” The Biden Admin-
which tend to be situated considerably miles. “It’s not HIMARS that carries a istration asked for a list of targets that
farther behind enemy lines. The HI- risk,” the Defense Department official the Ukrainian military wanted to strike
MARS system is mounted on a standard said. “But, rather, if it was equipped with with HIMARS. “Every single grid point
U.S. Army truck, making it able to “shoot long-range missiles that were used to was reachable with GMLRS rather than
and scoot,” in military parlance. Colin strike deep in Russian territory.” ATACMS,” the Defense official said.
Kahl, the Under-Secretary of Defense Putin is extremely paranoid about There was one exception: Ukraine
for Policy, has described HIMARS as the long-range conventional-missile sys- expressed a more ambitious desire to
equivalent of a “precision-guided air tems. The Kremlin is convinced, for ex- launch missile strikes on Crimea, which
strike,” delivered from the back of a truck. ample, that U.S. ballistic-missile defense Russia uses for replenishing its forces
The Ukrainian military could only platforms in Romania and Poland are across the south and which is largely be-
take advantage of the HIMARS’ extended intended for firing on Russia. Even if yond the reach of GMLRS. During the
range if its soldiers had intelligence on Ukraine agreed not to use HIMARS to war-game exercises held over the summer,
where to strike. “Precision fires and in- carry out strikes across the border, the when the possibility of ATACMS came
telligence are a marriage,” the U.S. mil- mere technical capability of doing so up, it was clear that Ukraine wanted
itary official said. “It’s difficult to have might prove provocative. “We had rea- them to “lay waste to Crimea,” the De-
one without the other.” The dilemma son to believe the ATACMS would be a fense official said. “Putin sees Crimea as
away, ‘You’re not going to get very many
of these systems,’” the Defense Depart-
ment official said. “ ‘Not because we
don’t trust you but because there sim-
ply isn’t an unlimited quantity of these
on planet Earth.’”
In July, Russia’s defense minister, Ser-
gei Shoigu, instructed commanders in
Ukraine to “prioritize the targeting of
the enemy’s long-range rocket artillery
weapons with high-precision strikes.”
Two weeks later, Russia claimed to have
destroyed six HIMARS systems. At the
time, the U.S. had provided a total of
sixteen launchers; Germany and the
United Kingdom had given nine sim-
ilar systems. U.S. officials insist that all
of them remain intact and functional.
In preparation for its counter-
offensive this summer, Ukraine used
HIMARS to repeatedly strike Russian
command posts and ammunition de-
pots in the Kherson region. Several mis-
siles hit the Antonivskyi Bridge, which
connects the city to the eastern bank
of the Dnipro River. Russian units in-
side Kherson risked being cut off from
resupply lines and logistics support.
“The use of HIMARS in the south con-
tributed to a high attrition rate of Rus-
“We might not have any worshippers, but we’re sian troops and hardware,” Bielieskov,
still a viable intellectual property.” the defense analyst in Kyiv, said. “The
whole Russian group on the right bank
• • of the Dnipro is dependent on a very
small number of crossings.”
The U.S. had also begun to supply
much a part of Russia as St. Petersburg. The first batch of HIMARS appeared Ukraine with AGM-88 HARM missiles,
So, in terms of escalation management, on the battlefield late in June. Within launched from military aircraft, which
we have to keep that in mind.” days, videos circulated of Russian equip- home in on electronic transmissions
In multiple conversations, U.S. offi- ment and munitions depots outside Do- from surface-to-air radar systems. The
cials were explicit that the HIMARS could netsk exploding in clouds of fire and missiles are designed to be carried by
not be used to hit targets across the bor- smoke. Reznikov announced that the U.S. fighters, such as the F-16, but the
der. “The Americans said there is a very military had used HIMARS to destroy Ukrainian Air Force figured out a way
serious request that you do not use these dozens of similar Russian facilities. In to mount them on their MIG jets. The
weapons to fire on Russian territory,” the response, the senior Biden Administra- senior Defense Department official said,
Ukrainian military official said. “We said tion official said, Russian forces “have “It was pretty MacGyvery, and opens
right away that’s absolutely no problem. had to adjust their tactics and maneu- up the possibility to think of what other
We’ll use them only against the enemy vers,” moving command posts and mu- munitions could be adapted to Ukrainian
on the territory of Ukraine.” As with nitions depots out of range—which also platforms.” The HARM missiles created
other weapons platforms, there is no tech- diminishes their utility in battle. “They a dilemma for Russian forces. They
nical mechanism to insure compliance. are very mindful of the presence of HI- could either turn on their radar batter-
Officially, the U.S. has signalled that all MARS,” the official said. ies and make themselves vulnerable to
Ukrainian territory illegally occupied by Each launcher costs roughly seven HARM strikes, or keep them turned off
Russia since 2014—not only that which million dollars. According to some cal- and lose the ability to detect Ukrainian
it has taken since February—is fair game culations, Ukraine could fire more than aircraft and armed drones, namely the
for HIMARS strikes. “We haven’t said spe- f ive thousand GMLRS missiles per Turkish-made Bayraktar.
cifically don’t strike Crimea,” the Defense month, whereas their manufacturer, U.S. military and intelligence circles
official told me. “But then, we haven’t en- Lockheed Martin, was only producing have debated the reason that Putin has
abled them to do so, either.” nine thousand a year. “We said straight- not yet attempted an escalatory move
to discourage further arms shipments that the draft could reach up to a mil- sile of yours will lead to six of ours fly-
on Ukraine’s western border. “As we lion Russian men.) Putin said that ing in your direction.’ ”
have gotten deeper into the conflict, we Russia was not battling just the In early October, Russia launched a
realized we could provide more weap- Ukrainian Army but “the entire war series of missile strikes on Kyiv and a
ons of greater sophistication and at machine of the collective West.” In a number of other cities, killing more than
greater scale without provoking a Rus- final, ominous threat, he seemed to three dozen people and damaging civil-
sian military response against NATO,” suggest a willingness to use nuclear ian infrastructure across the country. The
the Defense Department official said. weapons to defend the parts of Ukraine attacks, which came in response to a
“Was it that we were always too cau- that he intended to annex. “If the ter- large blast that damaged the bridge con-
tious, and we could have been more ag- ritorial unity of our country is threat- necting the Russian mainland to Crimea,
gressive all along? Or, had we provided ened, in order to protect Russia and offered renewed force to Ukraine’s calls
these systems right away, would they our nation we will unquestionably use for Western air defenses. According to
have indeed been very escalatory?” The all the weapons we have,” he said. “This the senior Defense official, the challenge
official went on, “In that scenario, Rus- is no bluff.” in providing such weapons is more tech-
sia was the frog, and we boiled the water The annexation of these territories— nical than political: “There aren’t that
slowly, and Russia got used to it.” which was finalized in Russia on Oc- many spare air-defense systems to give.”
tober 5th and quickly refuted by the rest The U.S. military is not going to pull its
he embarrassment of the Kharkiv of the world—effectively announced a existing Patriot batteries or NASAMs—
T retreat revealed a fundamental
weakness of the Russian forces: they
fourth phase of the war. Putin has now
staked his rule on an ability to hold
two ground-based air-defense systems
Ukraine has been requesting—from, say,
had been degraded, in terms of both these lands, which he has declared, with South Korea or the Middle East. They
personnel and equipment, to the point great fanfare, to be inexorably a part of have to be manufactured and procured.
at which they could no longer hold on Russia. His wager is that the escalation However, the Defense official said,
to captured territory while trying to will not deter Ukraine so much as its Ukraine should be receiving the first two
carry out major offensive operations. backers in the West. Will the U.S., for NASAMS in late October or early No-
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian military was example, debate the use of its weapons vember, with more to follow.
receiving fresh waves of NATO-trained in strikes on Russian targets in Kher- The Biden Administration has also
conscripts and Western arms. Through- son as it had about targets in Crimea? announced a military-aid package worth
out September and into October, “We have not sorted all the way through more than a billion dollars, bringing
Ukrainian forces pushed farther, re- that,” the U.S. military official said. “But the total amount the U.S. has spent on
claiming the entirety of the Kharkiv re- it’s clear we’re not going to be bullied arming Ukraine over the past year to
gion and moving into towns and vil- around by what Putin decides to call sixteen billion. Among the key items
lages in the Donbas, the “protection” of Russia.” The senior Biden Administra- in this package were an additional eigh-
which was Putin’s stated aim for the tion official said, “We monitor Russia’s teen HIMARS systems, more than dou-
war. “We continue to see that Putin’s nuclear forces as best as we can,” and bling the number in Ukraine’s arsenal.
political objectives are not matched to “so far we haven’t seen any indication Ukrainian officials are now eying a num-
what his military can achieve,” the se- that Putin has made a serious move in ber of items that, they argue, would
nior U.S. intelligence official said. that direction.” allow even more aggressive counter-
This paradox is a potentially desta- In Kyiv, the prospect of a Russian offensives: modern NATO-standard bat-
bilizing factor. U.S. intelligence agen- nuclear attack is both horrifying and a tle tanks, fighter jets such as F-16s, and
cies had assumed that if Putin were to nonfactor. “Ukraine has no choice but the long-range ATACMS for striking lo-
face what he regarded as an “existen- to liberate all its territories,” Podolyak, gistics and ammunition hubs in Crimea.
tial” threat he would feel forced to es- Zelensky’s adviser, said, “even if there Reznikov is certain that such deliv-
calate, possibly with chemical or nu- exists the possibility of strikes with eries are inevitable. “When I was in
clear weapons. “But seeing as how he weapons of mass destruction.” Ukraine D.C. in November, before the invasion,
understands his own legacy and place has no nuclear weapons of its own—it and asked for Stingers, they told me it
in history,” the senior U.S. official said, gave up its arsenal in 1994 in a treaty was impossible,” he said. “Now it’s pos-
“a humiliating setback in Ukraine can signed by the United States and Rus- sible. When I asked for 155-millimetre
also begin to look existential.” sia, among others—so any response guns, the answer was no. HIMARS, no.
After Kharkiv, with the momentum would have to come from the West. HARM, no. Now all of that is a yes.” He
of the war shifting against Russia, Putin “The question is not what we will do,” added, “Therefore, I’m certain that to-
moved to double down on what in- Podolyak said, “but what the world’s morrow there will be tanks and ATACMS
creasingly appeared to be a losing hand. nuclear powers will do, and whether and F-16s.”
In a speech on September 21st, he an- they are indeed ready to maintain the With the help of the U.S. and NATO,
nounced a series of referendums to doctrine of deterrence.” He called on he went on, Ukraine’s military has shown
annex Russian-occupied territories in Western nuclear powers, particularly that Russia can be confronted. “We are
southern and eastern Ukraine and or- the U.S., to make their response clear not afraid of Russia,” he said. “And we
dered a “partial” mobilization of con- up front: “Send a message to Putin now, are asking our partners in the West to
scripts in Russia. (It soon became clear not after he strikes—‘Look, any mis- also no longer be afraid.” 
FICTION
t i n y,
meaningless
things
Marisa Silver
62 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZA BOURNER

ednesday is ironing day, a could call should anything be amiss— but Evelyn knows that her daughters
W day of smoothness, the

pleasing, embryonic smell
of wet heat, and the satisfactions of
Dr. Barnes and Vivian Branch next
door. She’d left the number of the house
where she’d be staying. But Paula hadn’t
can’t fathom how their mother can cre-
ate enough mess to warrant this con-
stant cycle of chores. “It gives her some-
erasure. How rewarding it is, Evelyn called anyone. She hadn’t even checked thing to do,” she once heard Naomi
thinks, to work the tip of the iron into on her father when she came home whisper to Ruth when they were vis-
the wrinkled underarms of her favorite from the party she’d promised to forgo. iting together. She wanted to tell them
blouses and watch their instant trans- The next morning, when the nurse that jobs, marriage, child rearing—all
formation into material that is fresh called Evelyn, she said that Frank had of it is just something to do. But she
and untried. Now that she is seventy- been gone for “some time.” Evelyn kept quiet. No more warnings.
four, and her skin has lost its elasticity, hadn’t asked how long. She didn’t want
this trick of reversing time is no lon- to know if the nurse had found him t’s when she’s ironing the collar of
ger available to her.
It’s like a head of wilted lettuce, she
with his mouth agape, didn’t want to
imagine that he’d been that way for
I her favorite lilac-colored blouse that
she senses Scotty outside the apart-
thinks, as she mists a blouse with water. hours, his final call unheard. Paula was ment door. She’s told him many times
All you have to do is put it in ice water still asleep, the nurse said. Should she that he needs to ring the doorbell, or
and it springs back to life. These were wake her? at least knock, but he never does. It
lessons she’d tried to impart to her Thursday is the day when Evelyn doesn’t matter, really. She always knows
daughters: the proper way to store veg- clears the refrigerator of those vegeta- when he’s there. She senses a hovering.
etables, to fold clothing, to wash their bles that have been in the bins long She lays the iron in its cradle and goes
faces (never soap, only water). They past cold water’s ability to revive them, to the door. There he is, swallowed up
hadn’t listened, of course. They couldn’t when she tosses the slices of turkey that by his baseball uniform, which is spot-
imagine decay. Her daughters’ bored have acquired a slick, iridescent sheen. less, even though he’s coming from
or frankly antagonistic responses to She eats less now than she used to, but practice. She knows his summer sched-
her attempts to make them understand she hasn’t got used to grocery shopping ule by now. She imagines him on the
the value of preservation had agitated with that in mind. She watches the field, mitt dangling at his side, staring
her, and she’d repeated her warnings women who roam the aisles gripping at a bug in the grass or at a cloud, while
two or maybe three times until they baskets barely weighted with a single the other seven-year-olds yell that the
screamed or slammed doors. They were chicken breast, two oranges, a child- ball is heading his way. She’s certain
young. How could they know the di- sized carton of milk meant for lunch- that he doesn’t care if he misses a catch.
saster of carelessness? She knew. She’d boxes. Walking advertisements for pre- Scotty seems uninterested in his child-
been at her cousin’s wedding in Tulsa carity. Who wants to die alone in her hood. He’s marking time, waiting for
when her husband died so long ago. apartment and be left undiscovered for these years to pass, if possible, without
The doctor had told her that it would enough time that the smell of soured his participation. He’s skinny, and his
be safe to take those days off from her milk would be the giveaway? And here ears stick out. His bangs fall into his
vigil, that Frank had a while yet. Naomi was another piece of advice her daugh- eyes no matter how often he brushes
and Ruth were away at school, Naomi ters had ignored: Always wear a good or blows them away. Despite his slight-
in Lincoln, Ruth all the way east at a pair of underwear and a matching bra. ness, there is a weight about him, a
private college that had given her a Which was the opposite kind of warn- sombre gravity. She knows not to greet
scholarship to insure her sharp and ing, she realizes, aimed not at longev- him enthusiastically or to use those en-
critical company. It had been up to ity but at the possibility of dying sud- dearments which adults so often be-
Paula to keep tabs on her father that denly and violently and being discovered stow on children they barely know.
weekend. Evelyn paid for a nurse to with your skirt up around your ears in Something about Scotty doesn’t invite
come in during the day. All Paula had a pair of sad panties. intimacy. Better for her to behave as if
to do was peek into the bedroom once Friday, she vacuums, which, like iron- he were a worker, clocking in for his
or twice before she went to bed, just ing, is a kind of vanishing, this time ac- shift. He stands, as he always does, at
to make sure that her father was sleep- companied by the obliterating sound of the threshold, waiting for her to walk
ing easily. It wasn’t a lot to ask of a six- her old Hoover. She sometimes thinks a few steps into the room before he
teen-year-old who stayed awake late of the machine as sentient, the way follows. He doesn’t close the door be-
into the night, whispering on the phone the motor excitedly revs up when it hind him, so she doubles back to do it.
to boys. Evelyn had been surprised that encounters a density of crumbs, the This bit of choreography has become
Paula hadn’t complained. That had greedy crackling as the throat of the so routine that she no longer notices
touched her, and she’d thought that hose sucks down a pebble she’s tracked it, although, at first, it irritated her. She
perhaps now that Paula’s sisters were in on the bottom of her awful-look- assumed that he was one of those chil-
gone, and she was no longer the young- ing but, yes, sturdy crêpe soles. The in- dren whose parents cut their food or
est, alternately teased or ignored, she dignities are everywhere. tie their shoelaces well beyond the age
was beginning to feel the grownup “How’s the wash going, Mom?” Ruth when that type of interference is nec-
pleasures of responsibility. Evelyn had might ask if she calls on a Tuesday. The essary. She once watched a news pro-
left phone numbers for people Paula familiarity is meant to be a gentle tease, gram about a man who was released
from prison after serving thirty years small bites around each of the four sides closet looks. Once, earlier in the sum-
for a crime he didn’t commit. The re- before starting the circuit again. Finally, mer, just after Scotty started coming
porter followed the man around as he he’s left with the morsel at the center, over, Evelyn shared an elevator with
tried to get used to the free world. When where the toast is most thoroughly his mother. They acknowledged each
the man reached a door—the front door soaked in butter and spice. She admires other with nods. The woman didn’t
of his home, say, or the door of the local his patience. Most children would fin- mention Scotty’s visits or ask if Eve-
bar—he would simply stop and wait ish off the toast in a few bites. But Scotty lyn minded the intrusion. Evelyn took
for someone else to open it for him. is not most children. this as an insinuation that an old lady
For decades, he had not been allowed She knows almost nothing about should be happy for the company of a
to open a door and walk through it on him. She doesn’t know when his birth- small, odd boy. She was about to say
his own. It was this detail day falls, or the name of something to clarify who was doing a
that made Evelyn under- his school, his favorite favor for whom, but then she noticed
stand that he’d lost some- color, or the name of his that the woman’s blouse was buttoned
thing more fundamental little brother. She doesn’t wrong, and that her bra showed where
than time. No, Scotty isn’t know what he wants to be the material puckered. Evelyn touched
spoiled. He asks for noth- when he grows up. It would her own blouse the way she might touch
ing and expects nothing. embarrass them both for her lip to let a friend know about a
He goes into her bed- her to ask the condescend- crumb, but it didn’t work. When they
room, humming quietly to ing questions adults nor- reached the garage and went in sepa-
himself. He often sings, mally come up with to pre- rate directions to find their cars, Eve-
narrating his activity as it’s tend they’re interested in lyn felt anxious. The woman was going
happening in high-pitched, children’s lives. The cru- to go out in public looking like that!
wandering tunes that he makes up as dity of superficial intimacy would make Throughout the afternoon, she thought
he goes. “We’re folding the sheets,” he what goes on between them incon- of Scotty’s mother at the market or in
might sing. “We’re watering the plants.” sequential. No, her relationship with line at the bank and her concern for
He doesn’t seem to be aware of his Scotty is something else. It is unen- the woman turned to anger. If she’d
habit, and she doesn’t point it out. cumbered by the baggage of the past only noticed Evelyn’s warning, she
She’s touched by his lack of inhibition. or by other attachments. They exist for would have avoided that humiliation.
She counts this as a measure of his each other only during the time when Evelyn is about to put the clothes
comfort and, more than that, proof of Scotty helps her with her chores and back the way she likes them but stops.
something about her that is intrinsi- eats his toast. Scotty, who speaks only when spoken
cally good. Children know what’s what. He finishes the last bite and slides to, who eats his snack with solemn rev-
Children and dogs. Now Scotty’s sing- off his chair. She follows him to the erence, is communicating something
ing about hangers, and when he reap- door, opens it, and watches him walk with this rearrangement. Even if she
pears he’s holding an armload of them. to the far end of the hallway, where he can’t grasp his meaning, she feels the
On Wednesdays, it’s his job to put the disappears into his apartment. She interior charge of a shared secret.
pressed clothing back in her closet. closes her door, feeling a little bit whole-
She’s taught him how to think of the some, a little bereft. t’s Saturday, and Scotty helps her
hanger as a pair of shoulders so that he
can properly arrange a blouse to hold
It’s only later, when she’s changing
for bed, that she notices that Scotty
I with the dusting. With his step stool,
he can reach the top of the refrigera-
its shape, how to fix a skirt on clips, or has rearranged her closet, putting her tor and the lintels above the doors with
hang a pair of slacks so that the crisply dresses on the left side, the skirts to the chamois cloth. He hasn’t yet begun
ironed seams match up. He’s too small their right, then her slacks, and finally the alternating puff and stretch she no-
to reach the hanging rod, so she keeps the blouses. She had organized her ticed in her girls when they were about
a step stool next to the closet for him. clothes in reverse order, based on use— his age, the way they would amass
Forty-five minutes can go by with them she almost always wears pants and weight around their middles right be-
barely speaking to each other—an oc- blouses these days. Skirts are for the fore a growth spurt, as if they needed
casional “Here you go” when she hands infrequent lunch out. Dresses are for a store of energy in order to blast off.
him a piece of clothing. funerals. She wonders what compelled She doesn’t know about boys, though.
They’ve finished their work, and Scotty to make the change. Is this the Their bodies don’t swell and shrink on
Scotty sits at the kitchen table eating way his mother’s closet is set up? She’s a monthly schedule. For a boy, grow-
a piece of cinnamon toast. She made it seen the woman only in the hallway or ing seems like a less conditional en-
for him once, and now he prepares it in the garage. She’s always overbur- terprise. There’s a dull honesty to it.
himself, getting the loaf from the bread dened with children, or grocery bags, The bodies of girls are deceptions that
box, toasting a slice, spreading the but- or pails and shovels if she’s taken her they learn to control so they can use
ter, sprinkling just the right amount of boys to the park. She dresses in shorts them to their advantage. This was
cinnamon and sugar on it so that it and tennis shoes, heedless of her cel- something she never advised her daugh-
tastes sweet rather than bitter. He holds lulite. She doesn’t seem like a woman ters about. She didn’t have to.
the toast with both hands and takes who has time to worry about how her As Scotty follows her around the
apartment, he hums one of his little her grandchildren back exactly as they just the way the world works. Do you
tunes. He sings a word or two about a were. She couldn’t keep up the pre- understand?”
dust bunny he finds under the bed, or tense that any of it mattered. “O.K.,” he says, which is a madden-
about passing the white-glove test, In the kitchen, when Scotty takes ing non-answer, the kind that only in-
which is something she once told him the last bite of his toast she pulls a dol- creases her apprehension, her sense
about. Of course, she doesn’t use a white lar from her purse and puts it on the that this vital piece of information has
glove. She doesn’t even own a pair— table next to his plate. “That’s for you.” not been understood and that she has
who would, these days? But he was cap- She’s never given him money before. not prevented him from making ter-
tivated by the idea, probably because “Why?” rible mistakes in the future. But she
she told him it was a custom at Buck- “If someone wants you to do a job, moves aside and lets him leave. She
ingham Palace, which was something they should pay you for it.” closes the door after him. Her heart is
that might not be true but sounded “But anyone could help you.” beating fast. It’s horrible to care.
true. She tries always to be straightfor- “But I don’t let just anyone help me.
ward with Scotty, but sometimes she I let you.” n eyeglass chain is the first thing
can’t resist the look on his face when
he reconsiders her and wonders what
He stares at the dollar for another
moment before he takes it, stands, and
A that goes missing. She hasn’t
thought about it for years, but, the
further mysteries she might contain. heads to the front door. As she opens minute it’s gone, she notices. She looks
When they’re done with the living it, she moves to block his passage. She at the now empty saucer on her bu-
room and the bedroom, they go into feels the same welling anxiety that reau, where the chain lived, coiled and
the den. It irks her that the grass cloth threatened when her daughters ignored unused. When she’d first seen it at
above the television console is lighter her advice. the drugstore, it seemed like a rea-
where the portrait of Burl’s racehorse “Scotty, what I’m trying to tell you sonable idea, even cheeky in the way
once hung. She didn’t keep her sec- is that if you don’t put a value on your- that it suggested a librarian-like effi-
ond husband around long enough for self no one else will. People will take ciency while, at the same time, draw-
him to make much of an impression advantage of you. It’s not nice, but that’s ing the eye toward her chest, where
on other rooms in the apartment, but
the den gets direct sunlight, and the
reverse stain feels like a rebuke. He was
so angry when she said she wanted a
divorce. She was surprised by that,
somehow having imagined that he’d
take it all in the genial manner in
which he took most things. He’d done
nothing wrong. He hadn’t changed.
He hadn’t cheated. He adored her.
But she’d never believed in his ardor.
Maybe that was the problem. Frank
had been gone for nearly three de-
cades, but another man’s professions
of love still sounded phony. She’d
begun to hope that when she returned
home after a day at work Burl wouldn’t
be there. She couldn’t bear the trivi-
ality of their life together. The fridge
is making that sound again meant that
he was going to hoist himself out of
his chair with his customary grunt,
put his shoulder to it, and give it a si-
lencing shove. I sense an eggroll com-
ing on meant that he wanted to go to
Golden Palace for dinner. Living with
Burl was a daily reminder that most
of the ways people invented to fill up
time were harrowingly insignificant.
That was the explanation, wasn’t it,
she thinks now, as Scotty moves things
off the television console, dusts the
wood, and puts the magazines and
the ashtray and the photographs of “Ooh, this looks like a cute place to argue.”
the glasses were dangling. She wasn’t spent in Florida. Nothing that’s gone Paula’s apology was bitter and uncon-
too old to enjoy that. But it turned missing is worth anything. The eye- vincing. Her hatred was genuine, and
out that it was annoying to have her glass chain was made of plastic and Evelyn’s anger quickly turned into
glasses bouncing against her all day, cost only a few dollars. On her last something approximating awe. She
and she didn’t like the inference that visit, Ruth had told her to get rid of felt as if she were witnessing some-
she was forgetful. it. But that was a different generation thing both hideous and marvellous:
The next thing that is gone is a pack talking. Evelyn’s daughters had been the utter truth.
of tissues from the cabinet under the trained by advertising to throw out She should confront Scotty, she
bathroom sink. She only just opened perfectly good things and replace them thinks, one night, when she’s rubbing
a pack of six that she bought at the with the new and (not much) improved. moisturizer into her skin, contorting
drugstore. She put one in her purse, Now look! Evelyn says, in silent con- her face to make sure the cream gets
and now there are four left. She always versation with her absent daughter. It into the creases and wrinkles. She’d be
keeps one with her to blot her lipstick. turns out that the eyeglass chain was doing him a favor, stopping him before
Oh, how Frank used to tease her about useful, after all. It was something for he shoplifts at the grocery store. She
her lipstick! They’d be in a movie the- Scotty to steal. could reassure him that she won’t tell
atre, and right in the middle of a dra- Because of course it’s Scotty. Who his parents, that it will be another se-
matic scene she’d take out the tube of else could it be? She and Scotty are cret between the two of them. But does
her favorite red and redo her lips. “Van- the only two people who’ve set foot she want him to stop? The thefts are
ity, thy name is Evelyn,” he’d tease her. in her apartment all summer. She isn’t a kind of flattery. She feels, in some
But, over time, she could see that he angry—could a person feel angry about unusual way, chosen. Scotty, this pecu-
found her habits a comfort, just as she Q-tips? Maybe he misunderstood liar, inscrutable boy, wants to keep these
took solace from the way he stored his when she paid him the dollar, and small parts of her for himself. She looks
shoes upright, leaning against the wall thought she’d given him a broader per- around the apartment, wondering, with
like tired men waiting for a bus. There mission. At any rate, she thinks, chil- some excitement, what he will take
are some things so irrational they sim- dren are as devious as adults. They lie. next. He’s only a little boy, but he’s
ply take your breath away! They steal. They covet and take what managed to unsettle her. It has been
The disappearances continue. A they need. They are ruthless when it so very long since she was unsettled.
handful of Q-tips. One of the cedar comes to relationships. She saw Paula, Scotty doesn’t always steal some-
blocks she keeps at the back of her at eight or nine, in the schoolyard, tell thing. A week goes by when she no-
closet to deter moths. A thumbnail- her best friend that she hated her. The tices nothing gone. He comes to the
size shell from the small collection girl’s mother was standing nearby, so apartment and folds towels fresh from
that sits on the rim of the bathtub to Evelyn gave Paula a smack and made the dryer or helps her wash the win-
remind her of all those winters she her apologize to the tearful girl. But dows with Windex and newspaper.
He handles his tasks with dutiful se-
riousness. He sings. He eats around
the edges of his toast. During these
dry periods, she sometimes places an
intriguing object in plain sight—a small
porcelain cat no bigger than a walnut,
a brightly painted Ukrainian Easter
egg a co-worker gave her one year, not
realizing that she didn’t celebrate the
holiday. Scotty doesn’t steal the cat or
the egg or the fancy pen she was given
by the temple women’s auxiliary to ac-
knowledge all the candy centerpieces
she’d made over the years for various
events. That he overlooks these lures
tantalizes her.
Another week passes during which
she experiences a turbulent alertness
that is relieved only when she discov-
ers that he’s stolen a travel-sized tube
of Colgate from the medicine cabi-
net. The following day, the golf pen-
cil she keeps in the drawer of her cre-
denza is gone. Her last boss gave her
a case of them as a joke retirement
gift, in recognition of her preference
for these quirky implements. At her
send-off party, he toasted her, saying
that she was the brains behind the op-
eration. It was the kind of lift-you-
up-to-put-you-down thing that men
said to women all the time, the exag-
geration implying its opposite. Only
in her case it was true. Her boss was
fired six months after she left, unable
to manage things without the reminder
notes she’d always written with her
stubby pencil.
And then, one morning, she opens
the silverware drawer and discovers that
Scotty has stolen the last remaining
corn holder that’s shaped like an ear of
corn. She used to have six sets, but over
the years they met various fates, falling
out of the silverware basket and be-
coming disfigured by the dishwasher “Ready? I was born ready. I just need a few
heating element, slipping into the nar- minutes to get dressed and stuff.”
row crevice where the counter and the
refrigerator don’t quite meet. Frank
loved corn on the cob and always chal-
• •
lenged the girls to see who could strip
theirs the fastest. He’d get out the type- Paula rarely visits. She has no chil- to back away, to creep downstairs as
writer and provide the sound effects. dren, so there isn’t that obligation. quietly as she could and leave the
His silliness was the first thing to go She’s divorced from Darren, whom house so that no one would catch
once his heart started to give out. Un- she shouldn’t have married in the first her in this life that wasn’t, that could
predictability took too much out of him. place. Evelyn had hoped that Paula not be, hers. Behind her, there was a
Staring into the drawer at the empty would see what she so clearly saw in sound. She turned and there was Paula,
place where the corn holder used to sit, the man: the untenable combination peeking through her half-opened bed-
she feels a quiet wrenching. of self-regard and self-hatred. You could room door, as if to protect herself from
not fill the hole in a man like that, an intruder.
he phone rings. She knows it’s she’d told Paula when she announced It was never easy between them
T Paula, who calls once every two
weeks, usually on a weekday before she
her engagement. Paula levelled her
with a look so cool that Evelyn had
after that. Ruth and Naomi came
home for the funeral but left soon af-
leaves for work. The hour—8 a.m.— the feeling that, in that moment, she terward to go back to school. She and
is a warning that the call will be short no longer existed for her daughter. Paula did their best to avoid each
and dutiful. Evelyn imagines Paula al- Evelyn has never said anything out- other. Paula would come home at the
ready dressed in her business skirt and right to Paula about the night she failed end of the day and go directly to her
jacket, her pale hose, her heels. She’s a to check on Frank. On the flight home room. At dinnertime, she’d say that
divorce lawyer with her own practice from Tulsa, she was consumed by anger, she wasn’t hungry. Evelyn would leave
in Lincoln. Naomi once called excit- and she rehearsed versions of her ac- a plate in the oven for her and eat her
edly to say that she’d seen an ad for cusation. But, when she fit her key into own meal alone at the kitchen table,
the firm in a city magazine featuring the lock of the door, a different feel- hoping that Paula wouldn’t change
a glamorous shot of Paula. Evelyn pre- ing overwhelmed her. Inside, the sofa, her mind and join her. Any conver-
tended to be impressed, although she the houseplants, the coffee table—they sation between them, whether it was
thought it was a little desperate for a all seemed like impostor versions of about the news, or Paula’s college
lawyer to advertise like that. the things she’d lived with for decades. plans, or what dress she wanted Ev-
“How are your spirits, Mother?” The house was silent. She climbed the elyn to make for her high-school grad-
Paula says. stairs and slowly opened the door of uation, included not talking about
She begins every conversation this her bedroom. Her heart was beating that night. The house practically vi-
way, as if she can’t imagine her moth- fast, which was foolish—she’d given brated with Paula’s impatience to leave,
er’s happiness. the nurse instructions to call the un- to get away from her mother as soon
“Fine,” Evelyn replies. “And yours?” dertaker even before she boarded the as possible. Which was why, not two
“I’m about to leave for work,” f light back home. There was the months after graduation, Evelyn found
Paula says, starting the timer on the perfectly made bed where Frank had herself converting that same dress into
conversation. so recently lain. She fought the urge a wedding gown. Paula, marrying at
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re not listening to what I’m
saying.”
“You just told me you’ve been
robbed.”
But that’s not what she was trying
to say at all.
“I’ve got to get to work, Mother.
Report the theft. Please.”
velyn hangs up the phone feeling

E a sense of panic. She leaves the
apartment and walks down the hall
and knocks on the door. After a mo-
ment, Scotty’s mother answers. Be-
hind her, Scotty and his brother lie on
their stomachs on the carpet, watch-
ing television.
“Can I help you with something?”
she says.
“I need to speak with you,” Evelyn
says. “It’s very important.”
“All right,” the woman says, open-
ing the door further. “Boys, turn off
the TV.” She leads Evelyn into the liv-
ing room and gestures for her to sit
on the couch. The couch is unusually
deep, and when Evelyn settles she feels
crowded by the soft cushions that en-
velop her. She suspects that she’ll need
help getting up. Scotty’s mother has
taken a chair opposite the couch. She
holds her younger boy on her lap.
“Charlie has weaponized apple crisp.” Scotty stands by her side. They watch
her, waiting.
Evelyn straightens her back, and
• • tries to draw herself up, but the couch
defeats her. “I thought you should
the courthouse, kissed that sulky boy, much. The missing Kleenex. The corn- know,” she says, “that certain things
and then turned toward the small cob holder. Somehow, if a real thief have gone missing in my home.”
group that had gathered, her expres- had come and stolen her television or “I’m sorry to hear that,” the woman
sion fiercely triumphant. her jewelry she would not feel as be- says.
“What are you going to do with wildered as she does now. The woman looks genuinely con-
your day, Mother?” Paula says now. “It’s nothing,” she says. “Just some cerned, and Evelyn feels emboldened.
It’s an innocuous enough question. mail.” “Many things,” she says.
But still. Evelyn feels a pressure to make “Mother, mail theft is a federal crime. “May I ask what is missing?” the
her life seem meaningful. “I’ve been Did you report it?” woman says.
robbed,” she says. “It’s fine,” Evelyn says. “Personal items,” Evelyn says. She
“What? Mother? What do you mean?” “It’s not fine if they stole your So- enjoys the power that comes with the
“I’ve been robbed,” she repeats. It cial Security check.” ambiguity.
feels good to say it. Wonderful! The “No one stole my Social Security “I wonder if there have been other
shock of the word in her mouth. The check.” thefts in the building. Maybe you should
truth of it. “They prey on the elderly, these peo- contact the super?”
“Oh, my God. Are you all right?” ple. And once they get your Social Se- “You don’t understand,” Evelyn says.
Paula’s concern seems sincere, and, curity number you’ve got a real prob- “The only person who comes to my
for a moment, Evelyn wants to come lem on your hands.” apartment is your son.”
clean, to confess what’s been stolen and “Are you charging by the minute?” She glances at Scotty, who betrays
by whom. But suddenly she’s confused Evelyn says. Her jaw is growing tense, nothing, his expression as softly im-
by feeling and she can’t speak. It’s too her disquiet building. passive as ever.
“What are you saying?” the woman Was there anything you could ever missed the moving truck, the boxes
says, her sympathy disappearing. “Are say to another person that would and the furniture? She reaches the
you accusing him of stealing?” make a difference in the way things landing and pushes the heavy door
“Ask him,” Evelyn says. “Ask Scotty.” turned out? that opens into the lobby. No one is
But before the woman can do any- there. The lobby is furnished with
thing Scotty leaves the room. A few cotty never returns to her apart- black leather chairs and a glass coffee
moments later, he returns holding a
shoebox. He sets it on the coffee table.
S ment after that. She doesn’t expect
him, but still, sometimes, when she’s
table, but it’s all for show. She’s never
seen anyone sit in those chairs. The
“Scotty, what is this?” his mother dusting the television console or hang- room is immaculate and useless. It
says, alarmed. She lets her younger son ing her skirts, she stops, thinking she frightens her.
slide off her lap, then leans forward senses him hovering. But there is no There was a time, after Frank’s
and carefully lifts the lid off the box, wrinkle in the air to alert her to the death, when she found herself watch-
as if it might contain a bomb. possibility of an encounter. She dis- ing other people—a man dragging a
Evelyn struggles to inch forward on tracts herself with activities. She gets garbage can to the curb, a woman put-
the couch until she can see the con- tickets to a concert. She attends a vol- ting coins into a parking meter. Her
tents, too. Everything that Scotty stole unteer signup event at the temple. fixation on them was so intense that
is there. She feels a small sense of tri- Over Labor Day weekend, she trav- often they noticed, but she couldn’t
umph until she notices that Scotty’s els to Omaha to visit Naomi and her help it. She was mystified by the way
mother is giving her a strange look, as grandchildren. people went about the simplest tasks,
if she were reconsidering Evelyn and One morning in early October, she’s the ones that had once seemed so minor
now found her odd, even a little dan- standing at the elevator, her car keys to her as to require no thought but that
gerous. The woman picks up one of in hand. She has a hair appointment she now had to talk herself through,
the Q-tips, then drops it back into the and then some errands to run. Scot- step by step, as if she were a stroke vic-
box, where it falls without a sound. She ty’s apartment door opens. She feels tim who couldn’t remember how to
picks up the pack of Kleenex, looking heat rising up her neck, and then a use a fork. Once, when Ruth was home
not at the stolen item but at Evelyn, man and a woman and a teen-age girl from college, she found herself mov-
as if Evelyn were playing some kind she doesn’t recognize come out and ing a lock of hair out of Ruth’s eyes
of trick on her, insisting on the value head toward the elevator bank. The just the way a woman at the post of-
of this box full of trash. man and woman look dressed for office had done for her daughter. Ruth
“Those belong to me,” Evelyn says, fice jobs. The girl carries a schoolbag pulled back and gave Evelyn a funny
weakly. over her shoulder. Evelyn feels as look, as if she’d registered the in-
Scotty’s mother puts the Kleenex back though she’d woken up in the middle authenticity of the gesture, which left
into the box, then covers the box with of the night from a fraught dream and Evelyn wondering if she’d ever been
the lid. “Scotty, apologize to the lady,” has forgotten where she is. When they the kind of mother who did such a
she says, without much conviction. reach the elevator, the adults acknowl- thing. She’d been prepared for Frank’s
“I’m sorry.” edge her with nods, then they talk death—his decline was slow, the end
“There we go,” she says. She hands quietly between themselves about who inevitable. When it finally came, she
the box to Evelyn, then stands and didn’t feel “lost” the way people often
walks quickly to the door and opens said they did after a tragedy. No, it was
it. Evelyn can feel the woman’s impa- that she lost herself. She wonders if
tience as she works to get up from the the person she’s been for all these years
couch, and leaves. is only a vague approximation of some-
As she walks toward her apartment, one she never found again.
cradling the box, she feels she’s been Scotty will forget what happened.
cheated of something. Her justifiable ac- He’s seven, after all, and there is so
cusation. The apology. Nothing changes much ahead of him that will consume
the humbling absence she felt when his attention. If he remembers her at
she looked at the space between her will be home at what time. The girl all, it may be years or even decades
deodorant and the dental floss where reminds them that she has practice. from now. He’ll eat a slice of cinna-
the toothpaste once lay. Nothing makes The elevator door opens. The family mon toast and have a vague impres-
up for the unnerving sensation she had hesitates to allow Evelyn to enter first, sion of an old lady, or the warmth of
when she discovered that the corncob but she turns, instead, to the stairway a freshly ironed shirt, or maybe a slight
holder was missing and felt as if she exit next to the elevator bank and feeling of regret. But before he can
were standing, once again, in that bed- pushes through the door. The stair- place the memory something will dis-
room doorway all those years ago, star- well is cold and too brightly lit. Her tract him. And then he’ll forget all
ing at emptiness. hand, grasping the rail, looks pale and over again. 
Don’t wash your face with soap or you’ll bloodless. Scotty’s family must have
dry out your skin. Wear a bra or your moved out while she was visiting NEWYORKER.COM
breasts will sag. Check on your father. Naomi. How else could she have Marisa Silver on logic and the human heart.

THE CRITICS
BOOKS
BECOMING PAUL NEWMAN

Who the actor was and who he wanted to be.
BY LOUIS MENAND
s Paul Newman’s memoir, “The Ex- Hawke Zooming with his pals, few of Own brand of food products.) And the
I traordinary Life of an Ordinary Man”

(Knopf ), really Paul Newman’s
memoir? As best I can piece together
whom knew either Newman or Wood-
ward, and most of whom present on-
screen like they just rolled out of bed.
series includes classic scenes from the
best movies, along with amusing fugi-
tive bits, like a 1953 episode of the tele-
the story, in 1986, the year he turned sixty- (The lockdown look, I guess.) The vision program “You Are There” called
one, Newman sat down with an old friends read from the transcripts, each “The Death of Socrates,” in which New-
friend, the screenwriter Stewart Stern, having been assigned a part. Laura Lin- man plays Plato. When it’s Paul New-
and began recording on a cassette player ney reads Woodward, for instance. (Lin- man, you want to see him, so the show
material for an autobiography. ney actually does know Woodward, is a lot more satisfying than the book.
This continued for several years, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s One question that no one involved
during which Stern also interviewed disease in 2008 and is still living.) in these otherwise worthy enterprises
some of Newman’s buddies from col- George Clooney does an uncanny Paul addresses is why, more than twenty
lege and the Navy, his two wives, his Newman. One anomaly is that Stern years ago, Newman burned the tapes.
brother and other members of his fam- appears to have done a lot of interviews Was it because he didn’t like what other
ily, friends and show-business colleagues, with Gore Vidal, who knew both New- people were saying about him? Was it
including screenwriters, directors, pro- man and Woodward, and although because he didn’t like what he was say-
ducers, agents, and actors—pretty much Vidal is expertly impersonated in the ing about himself ? Was it because he
everyone he could find who’d had some series by the actor Brooks Ashmanskas, decided, after five years of reminiscing,
relationship to Newman. By 1991, Stern he’s entirely absent from the book. that he wasn’t a very interesting per-
had recorded more than a hundred in- Clips from Newman and Wood- son? Whatever the reason, the auto-
terviews. Then Newman asked him to ward’s movies (they made around ninety da-fé at the town dump seems a pretty
stop. In 1998, Newman took the cas- films between them, some of which are clear indication that Newman did not
settes to the dump and burned them all. forgettable) are used to “illustrate” in- want a memoir. But now he has one.
Newman died, of cancer, in 2008. cidents in the actors’ lives, a device that And he obviously had no say about
About ten years later, some of his chil- doesn’t work perfectly. There are more what got put into it.
dren (he had six altogether; his only recent interviews, with people like David Another question is why Newman’s
son died in 1978) approached Ethan Letterman, who teased Newman about children wanted all this stuff to come
Hawke to discuss making a documen- his charity work but became a convert, out. They say it was to set the record
tary. Hawke learned that Stern (who and Martin Scorsese, who directed straight. As with any star of Newman’s
died in 2015) had had transcripts of the Newman in “The Color of Money,” the magnitude, a lot of myth and rumor ac-
tapes made—maybe Stern had worried role for which he won his only Oscar. crete to the image. (See, e.g., “Paul New-
that Newman might destroy them— Newman’s children and two of his man: The Man Behind the Baby Blues:
and he used the transcripts to put to- grandchildren are heard from as well. His Secret Life Exposed,” by Darwin
gether a six-part series on the lives and “He was a really excellent grandfather,” Porter.) But even though the memoir
careers of Newman and his second wife, one of the grandchildren says. The chil- was put together by friends and family,
the actress Joanne Woodward. It’s called dren’s feelings seem a bit mixed. it has a slightly diminishing effect.
“The Last Movie Stars,” and it aired Hawke was able to fill in the years Newman was self-deprecating, well
this summer on HBO Max. Mean- after the tape bonfire, when Newman past the point of modesty. He was
while, the transcripts were edited by was involved with his philanthropic ac- self-deprecating about his self-dep-
David Rosenthal, and made into the tivities. (He is said to have raised and recation. It can grow a little monoto-
book that Knopf has just published. given away more than half a billion dol- nous. The memoir’s title is apt: New-
A lot of the television series is Ethan lars, much of it profits from his Newman’s man thought of himself (or he said he
JOHN R. HAMILTON / TRUNK ARCHIVE; OPPOSITE: PHILIPPE PETIT-ROULET
Newman—captured here on set in 1958, reading The New Yorker—maintained that he embodied a suburban blandness.
thought of himself ) as nothing special, ple did when they got married—and he only thing I ever felt graceful at was
just an ordinary guy—who happened worried that he never related to his kids racing a car,” he said. “And that took
to look like a Greek god, but that was as people. “I would not want to have me ten years.”
an accident of birth, a burden as much been one of my children,” he told an
as a gift. It was not something he could old college drama teacher of his. When mong the things the children want
take credit for. his son, Scott, died from an accidental
overdose after a troubled life, Newman
A to amend is what one of them calls
“the public fairy-tale” of Newman’s fifty-
ewman grew up in Shaker Heights, felt remorse for not having connected year marriage to Woodward. Wood-
N Ohio, outside Cleveland—his fa-
ther ran a successful sporting-goods
with him. “Many are the times I have
gotten down on my knees and asked
ward dated a lot of men before she met
Newman, including Marlon Brando.
store—and he felt that he embodied a for Scott’s forgiveness,” he told Stern. But she was not glamorous. You wouldn’t
suburban, middle-American blandness Like his own father, Newman was a know her in the street, which is why
all his life. He always considered him- functioning alcoholic. He was said to she could play many types. You would
self Jewish, although his mother was drink a case of beer a day, followed, until know Newman, which is why he
not. He was politically liberal, and served he gave up hard liquor, around 1971, by couldn’t. They had an intense, lifelong
as a Eugene McCarthy delegate from Scotch. He would often pass out. Wood- love affair, and a big part of it, which
Connecticut at the 1968 Democratic ward called his drinking, before he cut they spoke about frankly in interviews,
National Convention, in Chicago, where back, “the anguish of our lives.” was sex. “Joanne gave birth to a sexual
police beat antiwar protesters in the Newman attributed some of his suc- creature,” Newman says in the mem-
streets. He later made it onto Richard cess as an actor to luck—the death of oir. “I’m simply a creature of her inven-
Nixon’s “enemies list,” a point of pride. James Dean in a car crash opened up tion.” They also bonded professionally.
But socially he was, in many respects, some big roles for him—and the rest They made sixteen movies together;
a square. He once described himself as to perseverance. He thought that per- he directed her in five of them.
“an emotional Republican.” forming came much more easily to For a long time, though, the relation-
His insecurity goes all the way back other people—for example, to his wife. ship was clandestine, because Newman
to childhood. “I got no emotional sup- Acting is like sex, she once said. You was already married, to a woman named
port from anyone,” he said. He disliked should do it, not talk about it. Jackie Witte, and he couldn’t bring him-
and distrusted his mother and believed Newman always had to talk about self to ask for a divorce. “Impossible
that his father thought he was a loser. it. He needed to understand his char- times,” he told Stern. “I was a failure as
(The father died in 1950, before New- acters’ psychology; he studied move- an adulterer.” (It’s not clear what counts
man had had any professional recog- ments and accents he thought he could as a success in that field.) The affair made
nition.) He told Stern that, as a teen- use in his roles; he asked writers and him wretched, and, incredibly, it lasted
ager, he was a “lightweight.” “I wasn’t directors endless “What’s my motiva- in secret for five years, during which time
naturally anything,” he said. “I wasn’t tion?” questions. During the making Jackie gave birth to a daughter. New-
a lover. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t a of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance man said that he felt “guilty as hell” about
student. I wasn’t a leader.” Kid,” Robert Redford, an instinctive his treatment of Jackie: “I’ll carry it with
He became involved in theatre at actor, had to get used to standing around me for the rest of my life.” Jackie even-
Kenyon College, which he attended after while his co-star prepared for the shot. tually remarried, but she wasn’t too happy
being discharged from the Navy, but he Newman told Stern that the first role about what he had done to her, either.
claimed that he “never enjoyed acting, he felt emotionally comfortable in was Woodward was as ambitious and, in
never enjoyed going out there and doing that of Frank Galvin, the alcoholic law- the beginning, as accomplished as New-
it. . . . I never regarded my performances yer in “The Verdict,” which came out in man—in 1958, she won Best Actress for
as real successes; they were just some- 1982, rather late in his career. “I never had “The Three Faces of Eve”—but after
thing that was done, nothing more im- to ask myself to do anything in that pic- they began having children she often
portant than someone working hard and ture,” Newman said. “Never had to call stayed home while her husband was on
getting an A in political science.” upon any reserves. It was always right location. “Being Paul’s wife is my career,”
He said essentially the same thing there. I never prepared for anything, never she said then. Over the years, that sen-
about his early acting career in New had to go off in a corner, it was there im- timent seems to have curdled somewhat.
York: “I never had a sense of talent be- mediately. It was wonderful.” They fought a lot, and it is intimated
cause I was always a follower, following After he made “Winning,” in 1969, that Newman had affairs. At least one
someone else with stuff that I basically a movie about a race-car driver, for which is known, with a minor Hollywood ac-
interpreted and did not really create.” he was paid a record 1.1 million dollars, tress named Nancy Bacon (“Sex Kittens
He got into acting, he claimed, to avoid Newman took up auto racing, and he Go to College,” “The Private Lives of
having to take over the family business. got very good at it. He is in the Guin- Adam and Eve”). It began while he was
“I was running away from something,” ness Book of Records as the oldest per- making “Butch Cassidy,” seems to have
he says. “I wasn’t running towards.” son to win a professionally sanctioned gone on for a year or more, and got into
Newman described himself as com- race—the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona. the tabloids. (You won’t find it men-
pletely unprepared to be a parent—he He was seventy. He attributed his suc- tioned in either the television series or
had children because that’s what peo- cess as a driver, too, to persistence. “The the book. Bacon recounts it in her own
memoir, “Legends and Lipstick.” New-
man’s biographer Shawn Levy says her
story checks out.) In 1983, Newman and BRIEFLY NOTED
Woodward renewed their vows.
The Book of Goose, by Yiyun Li (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
he problem with all this biograph- This novel dissects the intense friendship between two thir-
T ical insight is not that Paul New-
man wasn’t Cool Hand Luke around
teen-year-olds, Agnès and Fabienne, in postwar rural France.
Believing themselves “old enough for everything,” they stave
the house. That’s no surprise. The prob- off boredom with increasingly elaborate schemes. Fabienne
lem is that his flaws were so, well, ordi- begins dictating morbid tales to Agnès, and then engineers
nary. People do drink too much, cheat their publication under Agnès’s name. Agnès is celebrated
on their spouses even though they love as a child prodigy and her life assumes a new trajectory. The
them, and wish they had been better story unfolds in retrospect, after Agnès, now twenty-seven
parents. What people generally do not and living in Pennsylvania, learns of Fabienne’s death. Her
do is become the biggest male star in recollections of their friendship and her brush with unearned
Hollywood and get nominated for ten fame have an ethereal tone, punctuated with sharp descrip-
Academy Awards. There’s got to be tions of adolescent convictions.
more to Paul Newman than this.
It seems that most people who knew The Birdcatcher, by Gayl Jones (Beacon). With the plush scen-
Newman thought that there was. In the ery of a travelogue, the misshapen soul of a noir, and the an-
memoir, the juxtaposition of their tes- archic spirit of a trickster tale, this novel revolves around
timonies with Newman’s self-analysis three Black American expatriates. The narrator, Amanda, is
produces a sort of cognitive dissonance. a divorced travel writer invited to the island of Ibiza by her
Here is Arthur Newman, Paul’s brother: friend Catherine, a prize-winning sculptor, who “sometimes
“Paul ended up with drive and energy tries to kill her husband.” (“He puts her into an asylum, thinks
and resourcefulness. . . . He gets this she’s well, takes her out again, and she tries to kill him.”)
self-starting built into him and what Catherine is suspicious of Amanda’s intentions toward her
happens to him? He becomes a suc- husband, but, in Jones’s fearsome, fractured narrative, her po-
cess.” And: “He was loveable, had a great tential for violence seems no more alarming than anything
personality, and made people instantly else that might befall these social outsiders.
like him. Furthermore, he was smart
and he was perceptive and he had all The Black Period, by Hafizah Augustus Geter (Random House).
the ingredients no matter what he did.” In this lyrical memoir, Geter, a poet, sets down a powerful
A Navy comrade: “From a thousand vision of Black life in the United States by intertwining dual
yards away, I could tell it was Newman origin stories: her own (she is the daughter of an African
coming. . . . He had a certain stride about American man and a Muslim Nigerian woman) and the na-
him; he was a confident kid even then tion’s, with its history of Native genocide and African en-
as a nineteen-year-old.” A college friend: slavement. Recounting the lives of her forebears (enslaved
“He was probably the most well-known people, sharecroppers, artists), she expresses grief and rage,
guy on campus. He drank more. He but she also sees the potential for liberation, which she terms
screwed more. He was tough and cold— “the Black Period,” a time both prospective and realized,
it turned on the girls. They liked him “where, if not our bodies, then our minds could be free.”
because he was the devil.” Again and again, she asks, “What would it look like to emerge
A fellow-student in the Yale drama from erasure?” Her father’s oil paintings and charcoal draw-
department, where Newman studied ings, scattered throughout the book, provide one response.
after Kenyon, referring to a coveted role:
“Paul got it because he was by far the Master of the Two Left Feet, by Richard Meyer (M.I.T.). This
most magnetic and attractive of all the biography of the self-taught painter Morris Hirshfield (1872-
actors there. . . . He got [it] because he 1946) is also a study of the vagaries of artistic reputation.
made sure he got it.” George Roy Hill, Hirshfield, a Russian Polish immigrant, worked as a tailor
who directed Newman in “Butch Cas- and a slipper-maker in Brooklyn before turning to art, in his
sidy,”“The Sting,” and “Slap Shot”: “You mid-sixties. Championed by avant-garde luminaries includ-
never saw him act—he just was.” A fam- ing André Breton and Alfred Barr for his “primitive” ap-
ily therapist: “Paul is a very loving and proach to pattern and figuration, he enjoyed brief renown—
caring father. He has tremendous re- with a solo show at MOMA, in 1943, and much press
spect and love for his kids.” It’s choose- coverage—before being largely forgotten. Meyer situates
your-own Newman, I guess. Hirshfield’s idiosyncratic output in the popular imagery and
In 1954, Newman broke into Holly- fine art of the period, suggesting that he was savvier than his
wood, after some Broadway success, with early admirers knew.
a turkey called “The Silver Chalice.” He other leading men, and he made a ca- The New Hollywood was a great
played the part of Basil, an artist who reer out of underacting—just as the actor place for leading men. It was less wel-
makes the chalice used at the Last Sup- he was often compared to starting out, coming to women. The new female
per. Bible stories were often big money- Marlon Brando, made a career out of stars—Julie Andrews, Audrey Hepburn,
makers in those days. This one was not. overacting. (Newman admired Brando, Katharine Ross, Natalie Wood—com-
Newman called it “the worst movie pro- but the comparison annoyed him. “I won- manded far fewer leading roles than had
duced in the fifties,” and in 1963, when der if anyone ever mistakes him for Paul the “screen goddesses” of Old Holly-
it was scheduled to be broadcast on a Newman,” he said. “I’d like to see that.”) wood, like Joan Crawford, Vivien Leigh,
local television station in Los Angeles, The movies that established this cin- Bette Davis, Grace Kelly, Katharine
he took out an ad in the papers: “Paul ematic persona were “The Hustler” Hepburn, and Ingrid Bergman, women
Newman apologizes every night this (1961) and “Hud” (1963). “Hombre” and who could reliably carry a picture. Mar-
week—Channel 9.” (The ad seems to “Cool Hand Luke” came out in 1967, ilyn Monroe, potentially the biggest star
have increased viewership.) “Butch Cassidy” in 1969. They were all in the new cohort, died in 1962.
In 1958, Newman played opposite hits, and the posters sold the star, not The female characters in Newman’s
Elizabeth Taylor as Brick in an adapta- the film: “Paul Newman Is Hud.” He movies are either damaged and expend-
tion of Tennessee Williams’s psychosex- was one of the biggest box-office draws able, like Piper Laurie in “The Hus-
ual melodrama “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” of the nineteen-sixties—and there was tler” (she kills herself ) and Patricia Neal
for which he received the first of his Best almost nothing sixties about him. The in “Hud” (she leaves town on a late-
Actor nominations. Newman looked very music he liked was Bach. night bus), or they are peripheral eye
fine in a T-shirt, and he could play a Newman was part of the generation candy, like Katharine Ross in “Butch
drunk, both useful in the role. But psycho- of male Hollywood stars who replaced Cassidy.” “Butch Cassidy” is pure bro-
sexual melodrama was not his genre. His Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy mance. Ross has almost nothing to do
persona was too cool, too dry, too laconic. Stewart, and Cary Grant—a generation in that picture except watch Newman
That persona derived not from the that included Redford, Warren Beatty, perform tricks on a bicycle while lis-
Broadway stage but from Westerns. On Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, and tening to Burt Bacharach’s maddening
the stage, you have to act. In the mov- Sidney Poitier. Along with a fresh crop “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,”
ies, if the camera loves you, you just have of screenwriters, directors, and prod- in a dramatically pointless scene. She
to be in the frame. The movie camera ucers, they built the New Hollywood leaves the story before the finale.
loved Paul Newman as it has loved few on the ruins of the old studio system. There is one female role in “Cool
Hand Luke,” Luke’s dying mother ( Jo
Van Fleet), who has a single, four-min-
ute scene with Newman. (I don’t count
the young lady washing her car, a part
that has, and needs, no dialogue.) There
are only minor female roles in “The
Sting,” another Newman-Redford bro-
mance and one of the top moneymakers
of Newman’s career. As Newman’s fian-
cée in “The Towering Inferno,” yet an-
other big box-office bromance, this one
with Steve McQueen (all right, who has
the bluest eyes?), Faye Dunaway is tasked
mostly with looking concerned. There
are many female characters in “Harper,”
a hardboiled sexist travesty released in
1966. They all have the hots for the lead,
who has his way with them (much like
in the early James Bond movies).
Even in the later films in which he
gives his most Newmanesque perfor-
mances—“Absence of Malice,”“The Ver-
dict,”“The Color of Money,”“Slap Shot,”
“Nobody’s Fool”—there are only the ves-
tiges of a romantic subplot. Newman is
still undeniably sexy in those pictures,
but there is very little sex. “In Nobody’s
Fool,” Melanie Griffith flashes her breasts
at him and he just shrugs. His charac-
“It keeps me focussed.” ters’ take-it-or-leave-it attitude about
women is part of their cool, of course, I can in any other,” he once said. “In fact, torso, flat and perfectly toned. He looks
and their cool was what people came to I cannot seem to function in any other.” eighteen. In fact, he was forty-two.
see. “His likableness is infectious,” Pau- At the Actors Studio, students work- Newman kept that physique his
line Kael once wrote. “Nobody should shopped scenes, which were then cri- whole life. One of his last roles was the
ever be asked not to like Paul Newman.” tiqued by Strasberg or by the director Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s
Elia Kazan. Newman said that, after get- “Our Town,” which was broadcast on
“ T he last movie stars” is what Gore
Vidal called Newman and Wood-
ting ripped apart for one of his perfor-
mances, he mostly observed. He discovered,
PBS in 2003. He looks like a young actor
who has been made up, not very skill-
ward. Discounting for hyperbole (Scar- he said, that he was “primarily a cerebral fully, to impersonate an old man. He
lett Johansson and Denzel Washington actor.” He had to calculate, not emote, was nearly eighty. To consume a case of
are not movie stars?), this seems to capture because he felt blocked off from his own beer a day and maintain that body—
something about Newman in particular. emotions. He believed that he did not Newman said he had a good metabo-
He can look a little Old Hollywood, more have an inner well of feeling lism—is preternatural (and
a star than an actor. But that is mislead- to draw on. What this meant, a little unfair).
ing. In fact, along with Brando and Dean though, was that he was an It’s hard to credit New-
and a few others, it was Newman who Adlerian. He needed to un- man’s claim that when he
brought Method acting to Hollywood. derstand a character in order entered the Actors Studio
Newman found the drama depart- to play him. That was the he realized that he was emo-
ment at Yale too academic, so in 1952 Method that worked for him. tionally “anesthetized.” He
he moved to New York, where he be- He was so good at it that au- felt passion (for Joanne); he
came a member of the Actors Studio, diences felt he was not act- felt guilt (about Jackie); he
famous as the home of the Method. ing. They felt he was Hud. felt rejection (by his parents).
(As usual, Newman attributed his ad- Many actors in the New He felt plenty of self-doubt.
mission to good luck: he was not ap- Hollywood were trained by On the evidence of the
plying himself, just performing with Adler or by Strasberg: Karl Malden, Julie memoir, he would not have had to dig
another actor who was auditioning to Harris, Warren Beatty, Montgomery very deep to channel those feelings.
get in, and he got accepted instead. He Clift, Cloris Leachman, Patricia Neal, It seems that his real recognition was
always assumed they made a mistake.) Eli Wallach, Rod Steiger. (Brando, that he would never be an actor’s actor,
He regarded his time there as the piv- though he trained with Adler, dropped because he would never be a noncon-
otal experience of his career. “I learned in on Actors Studio workshops.) Rob- formist; he was incurably bourgeois. “To
everything I’ve learned about acting ert De Niro was a student of Adler; Al this day,” he said to Stern, “people I con-
from the Actors Studio,” he said. Pacino was a student of Strasberg—re- sider the eccentric people of the the-
The commonly understood theory lationships that form a sort of Oedipal atre, the bohemian people, are the ones
of Method acting is that the actor ex- meta-text in “The Godfather Part II,” whose circles I yearned to be a part of,
presses emotion by summoning up per- in which De Niro plays the young Vito people like John Malkovich, Geraldine
sonal memories. This is what Lee Stras- Corleone (Brando’s character) and Pa- Page, Rip Torn, Scorsese, Nicholson,
berg, who directed the Actors Studio, cino has the character played by Stras- Brando, Huston. . . . I don’t have the im-
taught. But there was a rival Method berg, Hyman Roth, assassinated. mediacy of personality. I’m not a true
theory, taught by Stella Adler, who had Immersion is challenging because ac- eccentric. I’ve got both feet firmly placed
her own acting studio. Adler thought tors are given little to work with. There in Shaker Heights. Those people, they’re
that actors express emotions by im- are some lines of dialogue, an occasional authentically themselves. They’re not
mersing themselves in the circum- stage direction, or, in a screenplay, action working toward something they aren’t.”
stances of their characters. lines, but actors largely have to invent The idea that to perform—that is,
Actors, Adler believed, are relating the people they play. An important ele- to pretend—you need first to be au-
not to themselves but to a fiction cre- ment in Method acting, for example, is thentic is part of the mystique of the-
ated by a writer. The aim is to act as movement. Typically, a screenplay says atre. It belongs to the fan’s cherished il-
though you are not acting, to appear nat- almost nothing about movement, but lusion that the performer is just as
ural. You’re living the role, on the stage the way a character walks can convey a charismatic offstage as on, that what is
or on the screen. And living the role was lot of information. Newman created a emoted in front of the camera is a gen-
something that Newman, with the right distinctive walk, a kind of weary swag- uine expression of the person who is
parts, turned out to be very good at. ger, and he used it in all his best pictures. performing the emotion. James Dean
When he had to perform, in movies like Newman was blessed with a classic really was a rebel without a cause; Muddy
“The Silver Chalice” and Otto Pre- face; he was also blessed with a classic Waters was as blue as he sang. If any-
minger’s ponderous “Exodus,” in which body. “He got to be twenty-nine years one should have seen through this, it’s
he plays a member of Haganah who is old,” Woodward once said, “and then he the actor who “was” Hud. It’s poignant
smuggling Jewish refugees into Pales- stayed twenty-nine years old year after that Newman, a man with whom most
tine after the Second World War, he year after year, while I got older and older human beings would gladly have
goes wooden. “I know I can function and older.” You could almost say that the changed places, wished so desperately
better in the American vernacular than star of “Cool Hand Luke” is Newman’s that he could be a person he was not. 
account for the experiences of soldiers
A C R I T I C AT L A R G E like them. In “Paradise,” his lapidary
fourth novel, he tried to envision what
CHILDREN OF THE COAST

kind of life might lead to such an act
of desertion.
The novel centers on a rubber- and
Abdulrazak Gurnah weighs the costs of leaving—and staying—home. ivory-trading expedition led by Yusuf ’s
“uncle” Aziz. He is, in reality, a shark-
BY JULIAN LUCAS ish merchant who has seized the boy
from his parents through a predatory
loan. Their imaginary bond keeps Yusuf
complacent during their long march
into the continent. But when the mas-
ter’s caravan fails—spectacularly, in an
ironic revision of Conrad’s “Heart of
Darkness”—the slave takes flight, dis-
gusted with a world where “vengeful
acquisitiveness had forced even simple
virtues into tokens of exchange and
barter.” Yusuf ’s decision to join the
Schutztruppe is a gloomy vision of ex-
changing one oppressive system for an-
other at the dawn of colonial rule.
Gurnah has spent more than three
decades chronicling the Swahili coast
and its diaspora, in wry, wandering fic-
tion whose understated style belies its
narrative sophistication. A novelist in
the old-fashioned school of fateful sep-
arations and buried family secrets, he
is interested not only in the experience
of displacement but also in its myriad
causes: debt, shame, misguided ambi-
tion, and, especially, the toxic entan-
glement of kinship and dependence.
“Paradise,” which was short-listed for
the Booker Prize, exemplifies the typ-
ical arc of his novels, following a young
man from provincial innocence to
worldly disenchantment. But it also
rmies, like writers, prey on or- dogs had known a shit-eater when they leaves Yusuf ’s fate as an askari entirely
A phans and misfits. Scenes of mil-
itary recruitment have been a literary
saw one,” Yusuf decides, and promptly
joins the askari.
to the imagination. How did African
soldiers fare in the wars between their
staple at least since Bulgarian soldiers The grotesque analogy poses a pain- colonizers? And, once the smoke had
kidnapped Voltaire’s Candide, but few ful question: How did so many colo- cleared and the borders had shifted,
are more bleakly memorable than the nial subjects end up fighting for their how did they face coming home?
one at the end of “Paradise” (1994), by conquerors, living, as it were, on the Gurnah’s most recent novel, “After-
the novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah. It’s leftovers of empire? More than a mil- lives”—published in the U.K. in 2020,
around the time of the First World lion Africans served in the two World and now available in the United States—
War. Yusuf, a runaway servant in what’s Wars, deployed both in Europe and in revisits the era in a spiritual sequel to
now Tanzania, wanders into a camp their own occupied continent. Gurnah, “Paradise.” It revolves around a love
abandoned by askari, or local troops, who grew up in Zanzibar, knew that story between two young runaways.
who have occupied his coastal town in one of his relatives had been conscripted Afiya is an orphan from a rural village,
the name of Germany. He finds wild as a porter into Germany’s Schutz- whose brother entrusts her to cruel
dogs eating the soldiers’ excrement, truppe. Another had enlisted with the neighbors when he goes to fight for
and, when they return his gaze, expe- British, in the King’s African Rifles. the Schutztruppe. Hamza, an escaped
riences a shock of recognition. “The Yet scarcely any testimony survived to servant, also becomes an askari, join-
ing a brutal brawl for the continent at
Gurnah’s harrowing fiction explores storytelling as a mode of survival. a time when “every bit of it belonged
76 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY YVAN ALAGBÉ
to Europeans, at least on a map: British award, but the universe of his fiction Zanzibar’s nineteenth-century capital,
East Africa, Deutsch-Ostafrika, África was far removed from familiar histo- where his father traded in fish. Their
Oriental Portuguesa, Congo Belge.” ries centered on the Atlantic. He was neighborhood was abuzz with the
Their search for a place in the world only the seventh African-born laure- tongues of the Indian Ocean—Swa-
unfolds against the monumental ab- ate, but some cavilled that he was, hili, Somali, Kutchi, and others. He
surdities of empire: more pertinently, one more Anglo- grew up on Hollywood films, Indian
As [the askari] told their swaggering sto-
phone writer based in the U.K. Oth- songs, the distinctive taarab music of
ries and marched across the rain-shadow plains ers wondered why he’d edged out a the island, and the rock and roll of
of the great mountain, they did not know that fellow East African and a longtime Elvis Presley. His first language was
they were to spend years fighting across swamps favorite, Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o, known Swahili, quickly supplemented by Ar-
and mountains and forests and grasslands, in for his insistence that writers from the abic and, later, the English of a colo-
heavy rain and drought, slaughtering and being
slaughtered by armies of people they knew
continent should use their indigenous nial education. “By that time I had
nothing about: Punjabis and Sikhs, Fanti and languages. Even in Tanzania, people already been exposed to complex nar-
Akan and Hausa and Yoruba, Kongo and Luba, struggled with the meaning of Gur- rative traditions in the Qur’an school
all mercenaries who fought the Europeans’ nah’s achievement. Could they claim [and] in Qasidas,” or traditional odes,
wars. . . . It was astonishing to the askari to see a writer whom their country had in he recalled in an autobiographical essay.
the great variety of people whose existence
they had not even known about.
many ways driven out? “I had listened to stories at home told
Zanzibar is a small island that is by grannies and aunties, I had heard
A crop of recent narratives has ex- also a major crossroads for Africa, Asia, ribald and forbidden stories in the
plored Africa’s overlooked role in the and Europe. It is one of the historic streets. I cannot describe what a rich
World Wars. Scholastique Mukason- centers of Swahili civilization, a loose and unforgettable body of work all this
ga’s “Kibogo” is set in a Rwanda that’s network of coastal societies stretching amounted to.”
being starved to feed the Allies in their from Somalia to Mozambique, whose In 1964, a month after independence
struggle against Nazi Germany. David language serves as East Africa’s lingua from Great Britain, Zanzibar was con-
Diop’s “At Night All Blood Is Black” franca. Swahili cities were shaped by vulsed by a revolution. The sultanate
follows two Senegalese tirailleurs into more than a millennium of trade with was abolished, the old “foreign” élite—
the trenches of no man’s land. “After- the Arabian peninsula, embracing Islam many of whom had been African for
lives” focusses on the East African cam- and developing a distinctive mixture generations—was suppressed, and the
paign of 1914-18. Those who fought in of African, Arab, and South Asian cul- island’s new government joined what
it came from all over Africa—men torn tures. Their wealth also attracted the had been Tanganyika, forming the
from their communities who tore up envy of empires overseas. Portugal United Republic of Tanzania. Thou-
others in turn. But the Schutztruppe seized Zanzibar in the sixteenth cen- sands of Zanzibaris were killed, and
could also be a realm of social oppor- tury, but later lost it to the Sultan of many others left. Gurnah, who saw lit-
tunity, where “askariboys” from the Oman, whose descendants turned the tle future under the revolutionary gov-
ranks of the poor and the powerless island into a base for conquering swaths ernment, moved to the U.K. with his
could become big men. of the mainland. brother in 1968.
Gurnah’s novel interrogates the costs Under the Omanis, Zanzibar grew They met with a chilly reception.
and rewards of this violent, cosmopol- rich selling spices, ivory, and slaves, South Asian emigrants were arriving
itan world and its circumstantial soli- mostly non-Muslims from the interior, in Britain from across East Africa,
darities. When Hamza learns German whom the island’s élites derided as where, as in Zanzibar, many indepen-
from a lieutenant who recognizes him washenzi, or uncivilized. The island dence governments were persecuting
as a kindred spirit, their closeness elic- reached the peak of its power in the them as accomplices of empire. (Fred-
its suspicions of treachery in the ranks. late nineteenth century, when the leg- die Mercury, who was also born in
A postwar return to his coastal home endary trader Tippu Tip—Uncle Aziz Stone Town, came in the same wave.)
town brings new struggles for accep- from “Paradise” writ large—established Racist abuse was a part of everyday
tance, especially once Hamza meets armed settlements as far west as present- life; it was the year that Enoch Pow-
Afiya and the childless couple who day Congo. His colonial designs ran ell, a conservative member of Parlia-
have rescued her from abuse. For ev- afoul of rivals in Europe, as they launched ment, delivered his infamous “Rivers
eryone, a longing for togetherness is their Scramble for Africa. Zanzibar lost of Blood” speech, warning about the
bedeviled by old shames and secrets. its territory to the Germans and then dire consequences of large-scale im-
“I’m not sure there is a benign form of to the British, who reduced its once migration. “We had no idea we had
belonging,” Gurnah has said. “Even if mighty sultan to a figurehead. “New arrived in the middle of an exodus,”
you stay put.” maps were made, complete maps, so Gurnah recalled in a 2001 Guardian
that every inch was accounted for, and piece. “But there was no going back.”
hen Gurnah won last year’s everyone now knew who they were,” He earned an undergraduate degree
W Nobel Prize in Literature, there
was little consensus on how to cate-
Gurnah writes, sardonically, in “By the
Sea” (2001). “Or at least who they be-
at a teacher-training college in Can-
terbury, and later studied literature at
gorize his dark-horse victory. He was longed to.” the University of Kent, where he re-
the fourth Black writer to win the He was born, in 1948, in Stone Town, ceived a Ph.D., in 1982, before joining
couldn’t embrace the back-to-the-land
radicalism of a writer like Ngũgĩ. But
neither did he share the attitude of an
émigré such as V. S. Naipaul, whose
disaffection with his homeland had
soured into something like renuncia-
tion. Gurnah’s challenge was to depict
a home defined by journeys and losses
long preceding his own.
In the ensuing years, Gurnah’s fic-
tion came to synthesize the British
and the Tanzanian halves of his ex-
perience in stereoscopic narratives
charged with irony. “By the Sea,” the
most accomplished of his novels, re-
volves around a chance encounter be-
“My kid, who is also a giant clown, could do that.” tween two migrants with bitterly en-
tangled histories. Saleh Omar, a wily
old furniture merchant with a mem-
• • orably sarcastic sensibility, narrates the
first section of the novel, which be-
the faculty. His first years in England who turns out to be a cause of his gins when he arrives seeking asylum
felt “strangely weightless,” he observed, own displacement. Grievances are at London’s Gatwick Airport. He pre-
intensifying the “sense of a life left be- aired, skeletons tumble from closets, tends not to speak English, believing
hind, of people casually and thought- and the protagonist’s origin story that this might improve his chances,
lessly abandoned, a place and a way of proves to be far more complicated but amuses himself by pleading the
being lost to me forever.” The distance than he previously knew. Yet it’s no case in his imagination:
inspired him to write. In 1987, he pub- longer possible to put things right. Do you remember that endless catalogue
lished his début novel, “Memory of The mother is dead, the beloved has of objects that were taken away to Europe be-
Departure.” married another, or the country of cause they were too fragile and delicate to be
It’s a story of truncated youth set childhood has changed beyond rec- left in the clumsy and careless hands of natives?
in a squalid, post-revolutionary Zan- ognition. (Dickens, with all his finan- I am fragile and precious too, a sacred work,
too delicate to be left in the hands of natives,
zibar—and an apologia, of sorts, for cial riddles and tragically belated dis- so now you’d better take me too. I joke, I joke.
emigration. The adolescent narrator, closures, is a clear influence.) With
Hassan, endures his brother’s death, any luck, though, there’s still time to The gambit works, but costs Omar
his tyrannical father’s alcoholism, his decipher what happened, and to seek his prized possession: a wooden casket
sister’s turn to prostitution, and the solace in the telling. of rare incense called ud-al-qamari,
foreclosure of his Arab family’s future At first, Gurnah wrote about the which is confiscated by a vindictive
by the new government. He leaves immigrant experience separately from customs official. The name alludes to
the island to pursue an inheritance East Africa. “Memory of Departure” “The Tale of Qamar al-Zaman,” from
from a rich uncle in Nairobi, but was followed by two novels set in En- “A Thousand and One Nights,” a story
a romantic transgression forces him gland, “Pilgrims Way” (1988) and “Dot- of two lovers who lose and find each
to leave Kenya for a life at sea. De- tie” (1990). Only with “Paradise” did other several times in the course of a
spite some abrupt plot twists and lurid he begin to combine these spheres of globe-trotting odyssey. For Omar, an
melodrama, the novel established a narrative, delving into the internal dis- unexpected reunion comes when Brit-
pattern that Gurnah continued to re- placements of his homeland’s history. ish do-gooders introduce him to a
fine: a ceaseless shuttling between the The impetus was partially corrective. young expatriate professor named
claustrophobia of home and the lone- As a scholar of post-colonial, and es- Latif—whose family, it turns out, was
liness of exile. pecially African, literature, he began ruined by the merchant. Their con-
to realize that few of its landmarks re- frontation inverts the hierarchy that
any of Gurnah’s novels go some- flected the reality of his birthplace. The prevailed back home. Latif, once a des-
M thing like this: A young man
from a declining family, ruined by
paradigm of a local culture’s collision
with Western modernity (say, in the
perate debtor’s child, becomes Omar’s
confessor, listening to his account of
debt, vice, or government repression, forest village of Chinua Achebe’s their shared history in successive eve-
leaves home because he wants to seek “Arrow of God”) had little relevance ning visits that recall Scheherazade’s
his fortune, or simply because he has to a multiracial region whose calendar audiences with Shahryar.
no choice. Abroad, he’s forced to con- turned on the rhythms of trade in the Omar is mourning a daughter; Latif,
tend with revelations from the past, Indian Ocean. The hybridity of the an older brother who went off with a
often by confronting an older relative Swahili coast meant that Gurnah man who had sexually abused him.
With time, sharing their versions of world as governed by taboos, intimate that alphabet of the emaciated, they
what happened becomes an unexpected hierarchies, and the ever-present threat were the stars of my mythology.” Hamza
form of consolation. “He was my of dishonor as any traditional house- finds a job as night watchman at a local
shriver,” Omar reflects. “I needed to be hold. (A soldier who fails to keep his merchant’s warehouse, where Khalifa,
shriven of the burden of events and uniform clean, or dares to look a Eu- the Afro-Indian bookkeeper, finds him
stories which I have never been able to ropean officer in the eye, will be lashed.) sleeping in the open. “What are you,
tell, and which by telling would fulfil Gurnah revisits the homoerotic themes an idiot, some kind of saint?” Khalifa
the craving I feel to be listened to with of “Paradise”—Aziz’s rowdy, all-male exclaims, pressing money into his hand.
understanding.” expedition is full of “furtive caresses” Eventually, Hamza moves in with Khal-
Gurnah’s subsequent work reflects and led by a “merciless sodomizer” ifa, his wife, and Afiya, whom they’ve
this shriving spirit. In “Desertion” (2005), whose bamboo cane is the terror of the taken in and raised. Overcoming their
the scandalous love of an Afro-Indian ranks—in the scandal of Hamza’s re- suspicions and resentments, the four
woman and a marooned British trav- lationship with the lieutenant. “You are form a family of the disinherited that
eller reverberates in the lives of their a shoga,” or homosexual, a fellow-askari mirrors the emerging post-colonial so-
descendants. The thrillingly plotted mocks. “These Germans, they like play- ciety around it.
“Gravel Heart” (2017), a mature reprise ing with pretty young men, especially The agent of this transformation is
of the wicked-uncle trope from “Mem- ones with such nice manners as you neither of the young lovers but Khal-
ory of Departure,” ends not with a flight have.” As in Melville, worlds collide ifa, a cranky yet tenderhearted old
into the unknown but with a conver- amid the unruly frictions of men on man who listens to their stories. His
sation between the narrator and the fa- the margins. vocation as a bookkeeper has special
ther who failed him. Mischance, as Gur- The architecture creaks in places. significance in Gurnah’s debt-governed
nah said in a recent interview, interests Lively scenes of askari life are joined fictional universe. (The author’s first
him less in itself than for what people together by a mortar of historical sum- novel begins with a boy’s visit to the
retrieve from its wake. mary—mostly about troop movements mosque on his fifteenth birthday—the
in the East Africa campaign. Afiya, age of majority in Islam—to “open an
“A fterlives,” too, is a story of re-
trieval. Possibly the most expan-
though intended as a co-protagonist,
recedes into the background after the
account with the Almighty.”) Khalifa,
though, is no tallier of debts and sins
sive of Gurnah’s ten novels, it reverses strong opening chapters recounting her but “a sentimental bearer of crimes,”
the pattern of dispersal that drives childhood. Readers of Gurnah’s more whose understanding ear becomes the
most of his fiction: strangers become tightly focussed novels may miss their story’s moral center. When people are
kin, orphans go home, and a diverse sardonic voices and hairpin ironies; repaid what’s owed them, we say that
society takes shape in the wreckage busy with subplots, and narrated from they have been “made whole.” Appro-
of a war-torn colony. But changing a distance, “Afterlives” feels more dif- priately, then, the bookkeeper settles the
direction can be difficult. Gurnah’s fuse than “Paradise” or “By the Sea.” novel’s accounts by playing matchmaker
title refers not only to his characters’ The novel’s breadth does lend grav- for those whom life has dispossessed.
postwar aspirations but to the linger- ity to its central homecoming, which The worst fate, in Gurnah’s fiction,
ing injuries that impede their realiza- begins, midway through the novel, with is to be left alone with guilt and griev-
tion. Both protagonists are wounded Hamza’s arrival in the coastal town of ance. His novels are full of sorrows that
early in the novel. When Afiya, whose his enslaved childhood. He arrives by never find an audience, and that end
parents died of illness, learns to write dhow at twilight. Low tide forces the by harrowing their hosts. In “By the
in Swahili, her foster father accuses boat to wait beyond the harbor till Sea,” a single, vivid sentence delineates
her of sending letters to a pimp and morning; Hamza, too, floats in limbo, the tragedy of an elderly hermit who
breaks her hand. Hamza, the askari, vainly scanning the quayside for fam- guards a deserted British barracks: “The
suffers parallel abuse during language iliar landmarks. “It had been many caretaker was a shrunken, sprightly old
lessons with a mercurial lieutenant, months of wandering, many years,” we man with scheming eyes, living a se-
who slaps and demeans him even as read, “and now he was making yet an- cret life of imperial duties and hoarded
he grows dependent on their conver- other start in the company of a “spec- stores, tending the monuments of an
sations. After the war begins, and the tral host of accusers.” empire which had retreated to the safety
Schutztruppe is driven deep into the He is returning to a place where ev- of its own ramparts and forgotten him.”
bush, Hamza’s abilities elicit a near- erything, however damaged, hovers on Hamza’s story is haunted by two askari
fatal slashing, when another officer the cusp of renewal. Gurnah’s cosmo- who don’t find their way back so eas-
decides that he has betrayed the unit. politan, lovingly satirical vision of ily: Afiya’s brother, led astray by the
The association of wounds and liter- an interwar Swahili port—busy with Germans, and, especially, Yusuf from
acy sets the stage for a courtship of hustlers, hashish-addled fishermen, and “Paradise.” Their absences underscore
narrative cures. merchants from every corner of Asia, the necessary link between loss and
A number of false families precede Africa, and Europe—recalls the poet hospitality. Those we lose don’t always
their union. Several of the novel’s most Derek Walcott’s evocation of his own return—and it’s precisely for this rea-
memorable scenes transpire at the Ger- island corner of the waning British son, Gurnah suggests, that we must
man fort, where the askari inhabit a Empire: “These dead, these derelicts, welcome strangers and their tales. 
as a child in Alabama. The pulse of her
POP MUSIC songs slowed, and her lyrics conveyed a
tranquillity that, to anyone familiar with
TAKE ME HOME
the turmoil of her earlier work, sounded
hard-won. She’d also moved to Kansas
City, and the record was infused with a
With Plains, two indie-rock stars rediscover their Southern roots. fantasy of a slower existence—the sort
of unadorned, slice-of-life imagery that
BY CARRIE BATTAN modern country songwriting is known
for. “I lose my grip, I drive out far /Past
fireworks at the old trailer park / And
folding chairs, American flags / Selling
tomatoes at five bucks a bag,” Crutch-
field sings on “Arkadelphia,” a title that
looks like an apt portmanteau, given that
she spent much of her twenties living
in Philadelphia, but is actually the name
of a street in Birmingham, Alabama.
(Despite its seeming lightheartedness,
Crutchfield has said that this song is
about addiction.)
Even in the digital era, much new
music is created out of some alchemy
between the broader stylistic heritage
of a geographic location and the mo-
ment-to-moment emotional experience
of a lone musician. Being a touring per-
former is a kind of vagrancy, and musi-
cal evolution often takes place on the
road. There are few contemporary song-
writers for whom this complicated in-
terplay between set and setting has been
more fruitful than it has been for Crutch-
field. She wrote her widely lauded, un-
varnished début solo album, “American
Weekend,” from 2012, during a few emo-
tionally fraught days spent visiting her
childhood home in Birmingham. (Waxa-
hatchee is the name of a creek nearby.)
She grew up on the sounds of founda-
n 2018, the singer-songwriter Katie tive indie-rock singer, but when she tin- tional female country artists like Loretta
I Crutchfield released a pair of covers
she’d recorded with her boyfriend, the
kered around with Molina’s songs “Fare-
well Transmission” and “The Dark Don’t
Lynn and Shania Twain, but, in her youth,
she gravitated toward the sound and the
musician Kevin Morby. They were trib- Hide It” she was taken aback by how ethos of punk and indie rock. (In inter-
utes to Jason Molina, a singer and gui- comfortable she felt inhabiting Molina’s views, she notes the lengths she once
tarist who performed under various stage warbly twang. went to conceal her Alabama accent.)
names in the nineties and two-thousands After years of touring and heavy As Crutchfield was being drawn back
before dying, of alcohol-related organ drinking, Crutchfield was also reconsid- into country and Americana, she crossed
failure, at thirty-nine. Molina’s work ering her relationship with alcohol. The paths with another musician who was
sprawled across decades and collabora- next album she recorded as Waxahatchee, experiencing a similar trajectory shift.
tors, but almost all of it was indie rock “Saint Cloud,” from 2020, reflected a This was Jess Williamson, also an indie-
that had been suffused with the spirit transformation, both personal and sty- rock singer and songwriter. Early on in
and the inflections of the blues. When listic. Newly sober, she moved away from her career, Williamson, a Texas native,
Crutchfield began playing his songs, she some of the guitar-pedal distortion and made melancholy, lo-fi banjo folk, some-
had an unexpected breakthrough. Under thematic heaviness of her previous rec- times singing in a raspy whisper that
the name Waxahatchee, she’d risen to ords, instead embracing the folk and sounded a bit like Cat Power’s. Her début
prominence as an emotionally evoca- country music that she’d been raised on album, “Native State,” from 2014, chron-
icled her experience of moving back to
The record “I Walked with You a Ways” is equal parts fantasy and homage. Texas after a brief period in New York
80 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY PAT MARTIN
City. She released three more solo al- seems a bit more trepidatious in un-
A LA VIEILLE RUSSIE
E tab h Ky v 1851
bums, and experimented with both brac- leashing her twang, anchors the record.
A t qu J a Fab rgé
ing electric sounds and wispier styles Williamson, who in the past often had
that had hints of New Age mysticism. a featherlight vocal presence that some-
(Her latest album, “Sorceress,” came out times made it sound as if she were haunt-
in 2020.) But as Williamson grew as a ing her songs, is swaggering and play-
musician she, like Crutchfield, found ful. She’s the show-woman of the album,
herself yearning to reëxamine some of evoking the waltzy femininity of early
the formative artists of her youth. country greats like Tammy Wynette. “It
For years, Crutchfield performed was always fun getting a little drunk /On
alongside her twin sister, Allison, and your back deck in the rain /And I cooked
she has experience with intimate collab- for you like a good woman do,” she sings
oration. She and Williamson met in on “Summer Sun,” the album’s jaunty
Austin in 2017, and quickly struck up a pop-country opener.
partnership. Together, the two musicians There’s an element of jubilant play-
were emboldened to continue their for- acting to “I Walked with You a Ways,”
ays into Southern music. They made an and the record represents some of the
album using the band name Plains. The musicians’ cheeriest work yet. Although
record, “I Walked with You a Ways,” this approach means that the songs lack
which comes out this month, is a broad- the specificity of the artists’ solo albums,
strokes exploration of the American it also offers them a kind of respite. Both
South which sounds both lived and imag- Crutchfield and Williamson have been
ined. The record is equal parts fantasy performing in a golden era of indie rock
and homage—not quite a stand-alone dominated by women, many of whom
concept album, but not a perfect exten- are lauded for their emotional rawness. 745 F fth Av u
sion of either woman’s solo work, either. This may explain why some contempo- (B t 57 th & 58 th Str t , 4 th F oor)
rary female artists are so inclined toward
ALVR.com • 212.752.1727
hereas Crutchfield’s “Saint Cloud” collaboration. After a decade of excavating
W took a tentative step toward the
nebulously folksy, catchall genre known
personal strife for public consumption—
particularly in Crutchfield’s case—side
as Americana, “I Walked with You a projects like Plains are a pressure release.
Ways” is a playful leap into a distinctly It’s one thing to be a stylistic tourist
new arena. It’s a record that evokes im- passing through a new sound; it’s en-
ages more than feelings, conveying a tirely different to settle in for the long
sense that both musicians would sooner haul. Crutchfield and Williamson, both
defiantly drive off into the horizon than independently and as a duo, seem to be
wallow in one place, ruminating on the choosing the latter path. This year,
dissolution of a relationship. “We don’t Crutchfield, who has long been a fix-
need to talk about Abilene,” William- ture at indie festivals, began booking
son sings on a track named after the different types of stages. She performed
town in central Texas. “Well Main Street a string of amphitheatre dates opening
was cute / And the rents there were for Sheryl Crow and the Southern-rock
cheap. . . . Texas in my rearview, plains darling Jason Isbell, and she joined the
in my heart.” On “Problem with It,” the lineup at a country-and-Americana fes-
duo’s first single and their catchiest, most tival called Beachlife Ranch, in Redondo
fully realized song, Crutchfield takes the Beach, California. She has also fash-
lead in crafting a scene: “I drive fast on ioned herself as a student of country
high alert/Past the Jet Pep and the Bap- and its adjacent styles, spending time
tist Church,” she sings coolly, over some with Lucinda Williams and recording
banjo fingerpicks. Williamson joins her a collaboration with Wynonna Judd.
on the chorus. “If you can’t do better than Williamson, meanwhile, released “Texas
that babe/I got a problem with it,” they Blue,” a two-song EP featuring her in-
sing, in the style of Lucinda Williams, terpretations of Townes Van Zandt’s
exuding casual sternness. “Loretta” and a classic folk tune called
On “I Walked with You a Ways,” “Texas River Song.” Plains, the women
Crutchfield and Williamson choose to have said, will be a one-off project. They
harmonize rather than duet. It’s an ap- will tour together this fall only, giving
proach that allows each of them to main- the album not just a sense of place but
tain a distinctive style. Crutchfield, who also a distinct moment in time. 
New Orleans, and is highly interested
T H E T H E AT R E in music. Recently, he made a guest ap-
pearance on the genre-spanning album
WILLY LOMAN, JAZZMAN

“The Ever Fonky Lowdown,” by his
high-school friend Wynton Marsalis,
as Game, a harshly satiric carnival barker
“Death of a Salesman.” and master of ceremonies. Here are some
of Game’s lines, delivered with cruel and
BY VINSON CUNNINGHAM thrilling verve by Pierce:
Success is my middle name. I became fa-
mous for my financial twerking that showed
folks how to make money, without even the
money working. We could go on and on about
me, but we have a lot of stuff to do and to-
night’s proceedings are all about you. Believe
me, O, Glorious People! You are great and we
are sooo fantastic.
All of this helps me understand why

Pierce, a kind of jazzman of the acting
art, was picked to play Willy Loman in
the new, weirdly uneven Broadway re-
vival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Sales-
man,” from 1949, directed by Miranda
Cromwell at the Hudson Theatre. (The
production comes from London, where
it was highly acclaimed.) After all, Wil-
ly’s got a quite understandable case of
the blues, and he’s supremely susceptible
to the dream-selling in which Game so
flagrantly indulges. He’s a not so success-
ful salesman who nonetheless can’t quit
his patter, having grown so accustomed
to the rhythms of his verbose trade that,
as we discover early in the play, he’s been
talking to people who aren’t even there.
He’s like a peripatetic trumpeter—always
a sideman, never a bandleader—whose
fingers remember their patterns long after
his breath has gone short. Willy has
started mysteriously crashing his car; it’s
atching Wendell Pierce act is I liked him better in the less plot-de- become so bad that he can’t make the
W more like listening to music than
it is like taking in a play. It’s his job to
pendent “Treme,” also by Simon, in
which he plays Antoine Batiste, a wily,
trip from Brooklyn to New England, his
long-standing sales territory. His sons,
carry a story forward, but he’s best en- tricksterish New Orleans jazz trombon- Biff (Khris Davis) and Happy (McKin-
joyed on the basis of individual line ist who finds his calling as a public-school ley Belcher III), are temporarily at home,
readings and gestures. At his finest, his music teacher. Antoine moves through appalling Willy with their bad job pros-
scratchy, searching baritone can make “Treme” ’s ambling milieu like a tune pects and even worse character.
the melody of a sentence carry mean- through a song, subject to surprising de- Willy buys into the bountiful prom-
ing beyond its words. His stocky, solid velopments but always recognizably him- ises of his country, but thinks that the
body, fraught with intention, moves de- self, suggesting a wildness and a soulful route to happiness—to success, however
cisively: he twitches a shoulder or points depth beyond the borders of the screen. thinly imagined—is through the self, not
a finger and you know what he means If acting is an art of compression—where the state. He stands alone on the knife’s
to get across. Often, it’s something you one movement or inflection is meant to edge between survival and the abyss. In
won’t find spelled out in the script. crystallize whole social contexts and this way, he’s an ideological twin of Al-
Pierce is probably best known for highly particular ways of being—Pierce bert Murray, the jazz critic and gonzo
playing the wisecracking detective Bunk achieved a rare mastery in “Treme.” theorist who had a deep influence on
in “The Wire,” created by David Simon. Like Antoine Batiste, Pierce is from Marsalis and, I imagine, on Pierce, too,
at least by osmosis. In his book “The
Wendell Pierce’s Willy is like a peripatetic trumpeter, always a sideman. Hero and the Blues,” Murray fleshed out
82 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY OWEN GENT
sullivan + associates
A R C H I T E C T S
his idea of how the jazzman—a symbol offered a two-part comment on the ubiq-
for the daring exertions and possible vic- uitous trope of the stoic, strong Black
tories of all art—stands athwart the woman, and the ways in which her silence
dragon of history and social unrest, en- can curdle. In Caroline’s case, it bubbles
martha’s vineyard
during its thrashings in “antagonistic co- over into words she can’t take back. Linda
operation,” not complaining about its takes devotion to inadvisable extremes,
fierceness but challenging it to a duel. becoming a toxic enabler of Willy’s de-
That’s a brutal construal of society— lusions and an unwitting co-conspirator
lofty but, when you think about it, sad. in his ruinous spoiling of their boys.
As a guide for life, it works if you are
indeed a hero, but if you’re made of espite the genuine glints of insight
softer stuff, as Willy is, well, then, too
bad. Willy can’t swing with the band,
D in Pierce’s and Clarke’s perfor-
mances, it’s hard to enjoy them, because
and he plays wrong note after wrong they haven’t been coaxed into coherence
note; it drives him off the deep end, and with one another. They often seem not OUR
his family with him. to be acting in the same play or point- BROU HT TO IF
Pierce plays Willy with a grim irony, ing out the same unspoken realities.That’s FAMILY CREST RINGS
Research Included
utterly aware of his aspirations and there- doubly true of the larger ensemble. Davis,
JOHN- HRISTI N. OM
fore even more pained by his failures. in particular, can’t settle on an angle. In
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Pierce—Juilliard-trained, conscious of his flashbacks depicting Willy’s memories,
body as an expressive engine—makes a Davis plays a pastiche of a snot-nosed,
meal out of Willy’s long-winded rafts of obnoxious kid, and even in what’s sup-
speech. In Pierce’s imagining, Willy has posed to be a more or less naturalistic
the raw materials—the voice, a certain present he’s goofy, then serious, then doing
way of straightening his back—to make a stilted cartoonish-comedic voice.
a good preacher or politician, but his es- The fault lies less with the actor than
sential silliness turns even his natural fac- with the production, which riff les
ulties against him. He talks too much. through approaches but can’t find a suit-
Cromwell’s revival casts Black actors able symbolic framework for the trag-
as the Lomans, adding a new sociolog- edy it means to convey. The set (by Anna Introducing . . .
ical layer to Willy’s travails. Sharon D Fleischle) is intriguingly constructed—
Clarke plays Willy’s wife, Linda; the
production takes advantage of Clarke’s
excellent voice by adding a helping of
it’s got all the frames for doors and win-
dows but no walls, a reminder of how
we peek into our neighbors’ homes and,
THE MEADOWS AT PENNSWOOD VILLAGE
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mately cheap momentary comfort. Linda says in her famous speech. But to Learn More,
Clarke’s voice is as rich and varied what? This show won’t direct our gaze. Call 855-944-0673
when she speaks as it is when she sings; Cromwell dabbles in high-strung, www.pennswood.org
she lilts in questioning, up-turning ca- often antic Expressionism, especially in Located in Beautiful Bucks County, PA
dences even when she’s not asking a flashback, but those moments tend to In-Person & Virtual Tours Available
question. That vocal fullness adds to the be broad—particularly the ones featur-
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and makes her seem as though she’s say- De Shields), who is dressed up, inex-
ing only half (or less) of what she really plicably, in campy white, like a vampire
feels. Her Linda is a clotted, halting crea- or a feeble pimp, appearing and retreat-
ture who sometimes explodes into tor- ing in plumes of smoke. The method
Never stop
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rents of reproval at her insufficiently re- undermines the power of these scenes
spectful sons.
The last time audiences saw Clarke
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This new “Salesman” might have
learning.
on Broadway was in last fall’s revival of used Pierce’s finely tuned instrument Retirement living in proximity to
Tony Kushner’s tense musical “Caroline, to make new, unlikely statements about Oberlin College, Conservatory of
or Change,” where she played Caroline, race and capital, the self and the howl- Music and the Allen Art Museum.
a Black maid in Louisiana whose bitter ing winds outside. Instead, it’s a clash
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dancer named Tatiana Kilivniuk. After
DA N C I N G the Soviet Union imploded, Ratman-
sky came to the West: he danced with
MOBILIZED
the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and the
Royal Danish Ballet, and since 2009 he
has been the artist-in-residence at
Alexei Ratmansky responds to the war in Ukraine. American Ballet Theatre. But, in the
past two decades, he has had a parallel
BY JENNIFER HOMANS career in Russia, including a stint, from
2004 to 2008, directing the Bolshoi Bal-
let. In a way that would have been un-
thinkable for artists a generation older,
he did not have to choose between Rus-
sia and the West.
On February 24th, that ended. He
happened to be in Moscow on the day
the invasion was launched, staging a new
dance at the Bolshoi. He and his team
quickly packed their bags and fled the
country; Russian colleagues called him
a traitor, but for him it was a reckoning,
and his choice left him with a painful
schism inside. “To be able to function,
I have to shut out this [Russian] side of
my history,” he has said. “I will come to
the moment when I need to glue to-
gether my identity and come in peace
with that Russian part of my life.” In
the meantime, he helped form a com-
pany of Ukrainian refugee dancers, based
in The Hague, with whom he recently
mounted his 2019 version of “Giselle.”
Now, in Seattle, he has given us a dance
for Ukraine performed, with precision
and poignancy, by American dancers.
The piece is short, just under twenty
minutes, and split into three parts: two
elegiac sections with a pair of cheerful
Ukrainian folk dances stuck abruptly
in the middle. The elegiac sections are
ccording to a running tally com- Elegy,” which recently had its première set to a lyrical and elusive composition
A piled by UNESCO, the war in
Ukraine had, by early this month, dam-
at Pacific Northwest Ballet, in Seattle.
It is the first dance he has made since
by Valentin Silvestrov, Ukraine’s most
famous living composer. The set de-
aged thirty-seven historic buildings, the Russian invasion, and he has dedi- signs, by Wendall K. Harrington, fea-
thirteen museums, eighty-six religious cated it to the people of Ukraine. During ture projections of melancholy paint-
sites, eighteen monuments, ten libraries, the opening-night bows, Ratmansky ings and sketches—a fragmented statue
and thirty-seven other cultural build- unfurled a Ukrainian flag and held it or body lying sideways, a stark but im-
ings. What about dances? This is harder high over his head. pressionistic landscape—by the artist
to calculate, because dance is essentially Ratmansky is both Russian and Matvei Vaisberg, a friend of Ratman-
stored in bodies. When Oleksandr Ukrainian. Born in Leningrad, in 1968, sky’s who was deeply involved in the
Shapoval, a longtime dancer for the Na- to a Ukrainian Jewish father and a Rus- art scene that grew out of the 2013-14
tional Opera of Ukraine, died in com- sian mother, he grew up in Kyiv, where Maidan protests against Russian influ-
bat, in September, the Russians killed much of his family still lives. He moved ence. The folk material in the middle
both the man and the dances he con- to Moscow to train at the Bolshoi, but is performed in front of colorful pat-
tained. I couldn’t help thinking that he returned after graduating, in 1986, terns by Maria Prymachenko (1909-97),
Alexei Ratmansky had something like and began dancing with the Kyiv Bal- whose brightly whimsical folk paint-
this in mind when he made “Wartime let, where he met his wife, a Ukrainian ings have become a kind of interna-
tional symbol for the Ukrainian na-
In “Wartime Elegy,” folk dance erupts from within an atmosphere of mourning. tional cause, particularly after a Russian
84 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY OLA JASIONOWSKA
strike hit a small museum in Ivankiv backdrop, and we plunge into a festive ideological message, as the Soviets liked
that housed a significant collection of dance, the men in gray tights and white to do, but there is a politics to them all
her work. (According to Prymachenko’s shirts with red folk-style belts, and the the same. He has worked meticulously,
great-granddaughter, a number of works women, who dance separately, in gay for example, in archives of Russian im-
were saved as the building burned.) colors and floral headpieces. perial notations to retrieve a more ac-
At first, Ratmansky’s choreographic Ratmansky is careful: there is no hint curate rendition of the dances that Mar-
organization seems almost too clear: here of the Soviet folk troupes that se- ius Petipa made for the tsar’s court,
a nationalist folk cry surrounded by duced audiences with a kitschy evoca- including “The Sleeping Beauty.” Rat-
sad dances of grief and wartime tragedy. tion of rural Ukrainian life, heavy on mansky’s fondness for these opulent
And yet the whole production is strangely bravura tricks and ethnic costumes. In- spectacles—impressive but too decadent
moving, even haunting. It doesn’t fit eas- stead, these are kids goofing around— and polite for my taste—is a way of
ily together; the shards are too jagged, having fun, competing, making jokes— grounding himself in a recovered impe-
the transitions between dark and light, and doing these old dances their way, rial past and thus of excising the U.S.S.R.
grief and rollicking joy too sudden. But free, easy, mixed with detailed and from the history of Russian ballet.
that is part of the point, and, by some fiercely difficult balletic steps. For any- To the same end, he has—somewhat
logic of loss, memory, and fun woven one who knows the history, though, paradoxically—also revived old Soviet
through the whole, it nonetheless holds, there is also an invisible story of the socialist-realist ballets and purged them
especially in recollection, as the mind Ukrainian peasantry murdered by Sta- of their socialism. In “The Bright Stream,”
allows the borders to soften and meld. lin in the thirties. Prymachenko spent he took a ballet from 1935, which had in-
her life reviving Ukraine’s folk art in curred Stalinist censure despite its cele-
artime Elegy” begins in semi- her paintings, and now Ratmansky re- bration of workers on a Caucasian col-
“ W darkness, with three couples claims all of this—the art and the his- lective farm building a socialist paradise,
lying in piles. A single man moves from tory—for us. and gutted it, turning it into a country-
couple to couple, taking each of the The folk dancing—and this is a key side romp, with a decorative hammer
women in turn and placing her care- to the ballet—doesn’t really end. Rather, and sickle on full display. When Rat-
fully in an arabesque, profile to the au- the flowers on the backdrop darken, mansky’s version premièred, in Moscow,
dience. The women stand there, pre- turning silvery, like an old photo, and in 2003, his sunny treatment of such a
cariously balanced on one leg. Vaisberg’s then morph into a drawing by Vaisberg dark time seemed bizarre, if harmless—
backdrop of body parts emphasizes their of the Nike of Paionios, a partially pre- as if to say, That is all over. Now that it
vulnerability, and a piano picking its served statue from the fifth century B.C. is abundantly clear that Soviet-style bru-
way through dissonance in Silvestrov’s The goddess of victory’s face is erased, tality is far from ended, things feel dif-
score is both quiet and unstable. an arm is missing, and her head, hav- ferent. Ratmansky, in one recent inter-
The dancers are a group in constant ing fallen off, has been set precariously view, couldn’t bear to discuss the work.
and fluid motion, but each dancer also back on her neck. Vaisberg’s line figure “I don’t know if I want to see this ballet
moves in his or her own time, and their further emphasizes her fragility; she again,” he said.
steps seem to circle in on themselves in floats in the air without a base to sta- Ratmansky’s struggle with Russia
patterns that evaporate before they are bilize her forward motion. She hovers and its past has not, to my mind, pro-
achieved. We feel no will or self-expres- over the dancers as they find the thread duced his best work. His voice is stron-
sion, only flow and fate. One of the men of the elegy, like a memory of a mem- gest in original dances like “Serenade
splits away—a man always seems to be ory, and the dance eventually winds back After Plato’s Symposium” and, especially,
splitting away, and it is clear that these to its beginning: the dancers lie on the in his dances to music by the Ukrainian-
men are the central figures of the dance. stage—except for one of the men in born composer Leonid Desyatnikov,
Dressed in black leotards, with bare black, who takes a woman and places including “Russian Seasons,” “Songs
legs, they appear almost androgynous, her in an arabesque. This time, she is of Bukovina,” and “Odessa.” These
with long lines, deep curves, and move- alone and center stage. He lets go and dances share an interest in the balletic
ments that draw (as Ratmansky has lies on the floor with the rest. She stays, possibilities of transmuted folk forms,
done in the past) from both feminine a living, breathing statue beneath the and, like “Wartime Elegy,” they are in-
and masculine ballet vocabularies. There floating Nike—not triumphant but vul- timate, with their own motives and lan-
is no narrative, just a soft, sad dancing, nerable, balanced on that one leg, as the guage. They seem to grow intuitively
full of weeping bends and runs that curtain falls. from Ratmansky’s way of bringing to-
seem to cross fields to nowhere. There has been much talk in the gether dancers, music, art, and lighting,
Then the stage empties, and time, dance world about whether the war is and catching the life that emerges.
place, and mood suddenly shift. An making Ratmansky into a political art- “Wartime Elegy” is rawer and more
image of an old folk musician is pro- ist. The question baffles me. Ratman- askew, but it also contains a genuine
jected on the backdrop, and a voice sky has already spent much of his ca- eruption of emotion, as fragile and hu-
announces boisterously in Ukrainian, reer revisiting past Soviet and Russian man as the men in black, the bright
“Hey, guys, play it like our glorious ballets, and he has made several ballets flowers, the women in arabesque, and
Dovbush”—a folk hero. “Play!” Pry- on Ukrainian themes. They are not po- the broken Nike presiding—its own
machenko’s glorious flowers flood the litical in the sense of delivering a blunt kind of politics. 
he heads to the pub, where the land-
THE CURRENT CINEMA lord, Jonjo (Pat Shortt), uncorks a bot-
tle of stout. An ideal existence, crowned
COMING APART
by epic chats with Colm. And now the
crown has fallen.
As to what follows, admirers of Mc-
“The Banshees of Inisherin” and “Aftersun.” Donagh will know what to expect: a
dark and measured whimsy, borne by its
BY ANTHONY LANE own momentum into violence. Jokes
that get stuck in the throat. Such was
riendship, on film, can be broken Pádraic, indeed, the statement is too the pattern established by “In Bruges”
F by many things. For Mark Zuck-
erberg and Eduardo Saverin, in “The
simple by half. “You do like me,” he re-
plies, in a tone at once beseeching and
(2008) and “Three Billboards Outside
Ebbing, Missouri” (2017). Before them
Social Network” (2010), the issue is befuddled. His smile wavers and fails. came “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” a
“Who owns how much of Facebook?” The movie is minutes old, and already play that opened in 2001, in which a man
In the case of Tony Stark vs. Steve the rupture is complete. called Mad Pádraic travels to the island
Rogers, in “Captain America: Civil If Pádraic seems nonplussed, that of Inishmore and, enraged by reports of
War” (2016), it’s a question of “Should may be because his life, hitherto, has the death of his cat, Wee Thomas, com-
the Avengers submit to an authority been particularly plussed. On the beau- mits multiple murders. The turf that is
trodden by the latest film, in other words,
is not entirely fresh. We are not alto-
gether surprised when Colm declares
that, if Pádraic won’t leave him in peace,
he will take a pair of garden shears and
snip off his own fingers, one by one. The
threat, we soon discover, is not idle. Even
a Jedi would flinch.
The danger of so ominous a setup is
that it can harden into the schematic.
Something of the sort occurs as Mc-
Donagh presents us with the minor char-
acters. Each of them, in turn, intensifies
the comedy of menace. We get the local
policeman, Peadar Kearney (Gary Lydon),
who punches Pádraic, right on the dock-
side, and leaves him in tears; a mean man
of God (David Pearse); and Kearney’s
son, Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who
Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell star in Martin McDonagh’s film. hungers for female company, and is men-
tally a notch or two below the other in-
beyond themselves?”And, in “Star Wars tiful (and imaginary) island of Inisherin, habitants. (Mind you, his is the sharp-
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” off the coast of Ireland, where parcels est reaction to Colm’s intransigence:
(2005), when Obi-Wan Kenobi sabres of green land are neatly divided by dry- “What is he, twelve?”) There is also a
off two legs and one arm from Anakin stone walls, he shares a little house with pipe-smoking crone, Mrs. McCormick
Skywalker, like somebody carving a his sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon). Like (Sheila Flitton), who prophesies doom.
chicken, there’s no hiding the bone of children, they still sleep in the same She is funny, but her divinations have
contention: “Which of us, in signing room, and, like everyone else in the story, the smack of a skit—“I wasn’t trying to
up for this dialogue, was the bigger they are, though poor, decked in item be nice, I was trying to be accurate”—
Jedi schmuck?” after item of suspiciously lovely knit- and, when Pádraic calls her “you feckin’
In each instance, the casus belli is wear. We have a good idea of Pádraic’s nutbag,” it’s hard to disagree.
complicated stuff. How refreshing, then, typical day. He gets up and lets the don- From Inisherin, you can see the main-
to meet Colm Doherty (Brendan Glee- key in, pretty much as you or I would land in the distance, and, occasionally,
son), in Martin McDonagh’s new film, let the cat out. (The donkey, Jenny, played hear the crackle of gunfire. The Irish
“The Banshees of Inisherin,” which is by Jenny, who comes up to Pádraic’s Civil War is in its bitter final act. One
set in 1923. Sitting outside a pub, with a waist, is the most contented and the evening, Kearney reveals that his pres-
pint, Colm looks at Pádraic Súilleabháin saddest character onscreen.) Porridge is ence is required across the water. “The
(Colin Farrell), who is—or was, until served. Pádraic herds his handful of cat- Free State lads are executing a couple
now—his best pal, and says, “I just don’t tle down a track, in a desultory fashion. of the I.R.A. lads,” he says. Pause. “Or
like you no more.” Simplicity itself. For So much for work. As two o’clock strikes, is it the other way around?” That note
86 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 24, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY PING ZHU
of weary confusion is all too believable; “bleakness and grudges and loneliness Calum is separated. That is why this
less persuasive is McDonagh’s effort to and spite.”That is not the wail of a ban- holiday, a rare haven of togetherness
frame the private hostilities on Inisherin shee. It is the voice of modern exasper- for him and Sophie, feels both casual
as a parable of the larger conflict. “I ation—of anyone, anywhere, who has and intense.
think they’re coming to the end of it,” had enough of hatreds, great and small, The movie is set in the nineteen-
Colm says. Pádraic replies, “I’m sure and who chooses adventure over ata- nineties, and what counts are not the
they’ll be at it again soon enough, aren’t vism. No wonder Siobhán ends up pack- fixtures and fittings of the era—Walk-
you?” But the parallel doesn’t hold. The ing a suitcase. To her, the men of the mans, functioning phone booths, and
black humor of the two men’s bilious island are barely more than boys, “all Blur’s “Tender,” with its chorus of
relationship, finally arriving at what you feckin’ boring,” scrapping uselessly in “Come on, come on, come on”—so
might call a tiffhanger, arises from the their soft green playground. She is a much as the emotional charge that they
fact that it’s founded on next to noth- grown woman, and she wants out. emit. The first sound we hear is the
ing—a grumpy grievance. The combat- whirr and click of a tape; Sophie films
ants on the mainland, by contrast, have o fingers are sheared off in “Af- Calum, on a camcorder, going out onto
fought over matters of fiery political
principle, torn by their differing visions
N tersun,” the début feature from
the Scottish director Charlotte Wells.
the balcony of their hotel room, and
Wells is forever shuffling between im-
of how that land should be constituted Nobody is abducted, shot, or, despite ages of varying texture, including video
and run. Colm wants to be left alone the many scenes that are filmed un- footage and strobes. It’s as if she were
to play his fiddle. Ireland is burning. derwater, drowned. All that happens is grabbing at memories on the fly.
What animates “The Banshees of that a Scotsman, Calum (Paul Mes- Rumors of something remarkable
Inisherin” and saves it from stiffness is cal), goes on vacation with his daugh- have circled around “Aftersun” since its
the clout of the performances. Within ter, Sophie (Frankie Corio), to a Turk- première, at this year’s Cannes Film
the oxlike Colm, thanks to Gleeson, we ish resort, where they talk, swim, paste Festival, and guess what? The rumors
glimpse a ruminative despair, and Far- themselves in mud, and briefly bicker. are true. Somehow, Wells retains con-
rell adds Pádraic to his gallery of heroes That’s it. But a shimmer of vulnerabil- trol of her unstable material, and the
so hapless that they forfeit all claim to ity hangs over the tale like a heat haze. result, though intimate, guards its se-
the heroic. The movie, however, belongs Sophie has recently turned eleven, crets well. We get glances ahead to So-
to Condon, familiar to viewers of “Rome” and Corio poises her, with startling phie’s future, in which, as an adult, she
and “Better Call Saul,” on TV, and now, assurance, on the threshold between views evidence of the long-ago vaca-
at last, given her cinematic due. She adds unknowing and knowing. Awkward- tion, and more piercing still are the flick-
a snap of anger, never dour but zestful ness jostles with a heedless grace. So- ers of Calum’s past. “When you were
and vivifying, to the role of Siobhán, phie receives her first kiss from a boy, eleven, what did you think you would
making her so much more than a go- sips her dad’s beer, and greets with be doing now?” Sophie asks him, and
between, or a foil. When Colm com- scorn his suggestion that she team up the innocent question tips him into a
plains that Pádraic is dull, she hits back: with some other children, at the pool. trough of inexplicable woe; we see him
“But he’s always been dull. What’s changed?”
“They’re, like, kids,” she says. As for from behind, seated on the bed, his bare
“I’ve changed. I just don’t have a place for Calum, he looks youthful enough to torso heaving with sobs. Sophie is ev-
dullness in me life anymore.” be mistaken, at one point, for her older erywhere in the movie, but it’s not just
“But you live on an island off the coast of brother; you can’t help but reflect on about the quiet blaze of her childhood.
Ireland, Colm—what the hell are you hopin’ how painfully young he must have been It’s about the ghost of his. 
for, like?”
when she was born. Nowadays, as we
Later, she cautions her brother against gather from their conversation, she NEWYORKER.COM
all that remains for him in Inisherin: lives with her mother, from whom Richard Brody blogs about movies.
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THIS WEEK’S CONTEST
“ ”
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THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION
“Goodnight trees, goodnight dirt. Goodnight

human race on the earth.”
Benjamin Vidalis, Santa Fe, N.M.
“Would you like me to read it or just implant it in your head?” “It leaves me feeling empty.”
Johannes Epke, San Anselmo, Calif. Jesse Spain, Palo Alto, Calif.
“O.K., time to go to sleep. We’ve got a

long trip ahead of us tomorrow.”
Steve Lieberman, Lake Oswego, Ore.
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THURSDAYS, PREMIERING NOVEMBER 10

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
P UZ Z L E S & G A M E S D E P T.
14 15 16
AT THE 17 18 19
WATERING 20 21 22 23
HOLE
24 25 26 27
28 29 30
A themed crossword.
31 32 33 34
BY KYRA WILSON AND

35 36 37 38 39
SOPHIA MAYMUDES
40 41 42 43
ACROSS
1 Coming up 44 45 46 47 48
6 Coming up
11 Birmingham-to-Montgomery dir. 49 50 51 52 53
14 Value
15 Teensy 54 55 56
16 Roman goddess of peace
17 Lyre-playing Muse 57 58 59 60 61 62
18 Lager + hard cider

20 What picky people pick 63 64 65
22 ___ sum
66 67 68
23 Tabloid couple
24 Vodka + ginger beer + lime juice
27 Stay fresh DOWN 45 Type of mammal with teeth that never
28 Sleeve filler 1 Have student debt, say stop growing
29 “Lost” actor Daniel ___ Kim 2 What may be found between here and 46 Point in the right direction
30 Neglected to there? 50 ___ B. Jones (kid-lit heroine)
31 It may show a big heart 3 Brian Michael Smith and Elliot Fletcher, 51 Hit with, as a cheesy line
32 Jazz locale? e.g.
Room that often has spooky vibes 52 Carols
34 Grandma, across the pond 4
35 Keynesian term for emotional factors 5 Post-vacation Instagram posts, perhaps 53 North Carolina home of the historically
that affect financial decision-making . . . 6 Plank targets Black Junaluska community
or an apt description of 18-, 24-, 50-, and 7 Holi celebrant 58 Kit ___
57-Across 8 Cyber Monday transactions, e.g. 59 “Sprechen ___ Deutsch?”
40 Go (for) 9 “Fire away!” 61 Chats, in a way
41 Chip 10 Substance used on hair and eggs 62 Bill who got his television start on the
42 Swear words? 11 Chose to be petty to, perhaps sketch show “Almost Live!”
44 Places to pose for some “Titanic”- 12 Glossy fabric
inspired photos Free (from)
47 Thumbs-downs
13
Solution to the previous puzzle:
19 Midriff-baring swimwear
48 Expected 21 Shoo, as flies S C A M P A T E F B I
49 Dance involving lifts 24 Kid’s noise
S P A R E O L Y M P I A N S
50 Rum + Campari + lime juice + pineapple O R B I T R A P B A T T L E

25 Largest member of the dolphin family A I L S S T R E E T H A T
juice + simple syrup
26 Spread out on a table? K N E E L E M U R S E W S
54 Norse god for whom Wednesday is
30 Skeleton in one’s closet E T C K I N P S S T
named
33 QVC alternative D E A D E N D S T I S
55 G.I. entertainers
34 “Nailed It” host Byer D R I N K S A R E O N M E
56 Major for future I-bankers
36 Voters traditionally courted early in S T Y D E M O T A P E
57 Gin + lemon juice + honey syrup primary season T A N S D I P L I L
60 Samurai without a master 37 Signal used for an Internet-speed test C A M O O T T E R A L S O
63 Resting place 38 Quick and easy 26-Down R N A H I R E E S A T O P
64 Garlicky mayo 39 Tart-sounding début album for Olivia A D N A U S E A M T R A D E
65 Cheetah, to Wonder Woman Rodrigo B I G C H E E S E M O L E S
66 QB’s stat E A T S P E D I N K S
43 United
67 Difference between lead and led 44 Reason not to travel by plane, give a Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
68 Short speech, or interact with a clown newyorker.com/crossword

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n early September, Oleksii Rez­ able advantage in terms of heavy weap­

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18 Lager + hard cider

50 Rum + Campari + lime juice + pineapple O R B I T R A P B A T T L E

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n early September, Oleksii Rez able advantage in terms of heavy weap