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 APRIL 8, 2024

4 GOINGS ON
7 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Jonathan Blitzer on Texas’s border showdown;
a St. Patrick’s Month detour; Polaroid oratorio;
the Lou Gehrig of seat venders; Mannequin Pussy.
ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY
Leslie Jamison 12 Crazy-Making
Why is “gaslighting” everywhere?
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Megan Amram 19 Our Environmental Pledge
DEPT. OF GASTRONOMY
Lauren Collins 20 Feast Mode
The restaurant in France transforming buffet dining.
LETTER FROM RORAIMA
Jon Lee Anderson 26 The Amazon Patrol
Can armed environmentalists save the rain forest?
COMIC STRIP
R. Kikuo Johnson 35 “Birthday Blues!”
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Peter Hessler 38 Opportunity Cost
How Chinese students experience America.
FICTION
Souvankham Thammavongsa 50 “Bozo”
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Andrew O’Hagan 53 Mesmerized by music managers.
BOOKS
James Wood 58 “My Beloved Life,” by Amitava Kumar.
Elizabeth Kolbert 61 Exploring the fateful expeditions of Captain Cook.
65 Briefly Noted
POP MUSIC
Amanda Petrusich 66 Vampire Weekend’s spiritual reckoning.
THE THEATRE
Helen Shaw 68 “The Who’s Tommy” returns.
POEMS
Jane Hirshfield 32 “Today, My Hope Is Vertical”
Jorie Graham 42 “Death”
COVER
Pascal Campion “Into the Light”

DRAWINGS Ellie Black, Kaamran Hafeez and Al Batt, Peter Kuper, Jeremy Nguyen, Frank Cotham,
Ali Solomon and Miriam Jayaratna, Johnny DiNapoli, Roz Chast, Drew Panckeri, Amy Hwang, Matthew Diffee,
Paul Noth, Anjali Chandrashekar, Amanda Chung and Vincent Coca, P. S. Mueller SPOTS Rose Wong
 CONTRIBUTORS
Jon Lee Anderson (“The Amazon Patrol,” Peter Hessler (“Opportunity Cost,” p. 38)
p. 16), a staff writer, has published sev- has been a staff writer since 2000. His
eral books, including “Che Guevara: A next book, “Other Rivers: A Chinese
Revolutionary Life.” Education,” will be published in July.

Lauren Collins (“Feast Mode,” p. 10), a Leslie Jamison (“Crazy-Making,” p. 11)

staff writer since 2008, is the author of is the author of five books, including,
“When in French.” most recently, “Splinters.”

R. Kikuo Johnson (Comic Strip, p. 35) James Wood (Books, p. 58), a staff writer
is an artist and the author of, most since 2007, teaches at Harvard. He most
recently, “No One Else.” In 2023, he recently published “Serious Noticing:
became the first graphic novelist to re- Selected Essays, 1997-2019.”
ceive a Whiting Award.
Souvankham Thammavongsa (Fiction,
Jane Hirshfield (Poem, p. 31) most re- p. 50) has written four books of poetry
cently published “The Asking.” She is and a short-story collection, “How to
a member of the American Academy Pronounce Knife,” which received the
of Arts & Sciences. 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Holden Seidlitz (The Talk of the Town, Andrew O’Hagan (A Critic at Large,
p. 11), a member of the magazine’s ed- p. 53) has published six novels; his sev-
itorial staff, is working on a book about enth, “Caledonian Road,” is due out
the band Bright Eyes. this month. He is the editor-at-large
of the London Review of Books.
Elizabeth Kolbert (Books, p. 61), a staff
writer, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Jorie Graham (Poem, p. 41) teaches at
general nonfiction. Her latest book is Harvard. Her latest poetry collection
“H Is for Hope.” is “To 2040.”

INTRODUCING THE NEW YORKER MINI CROSSWORD

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

Take a little break with our new bite-size brainteaser.

Find it every Thursday and Friday at newyorker.com/mini

Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 1008.
 THE MAIL
ETHICAL A.I. Bible) developed my mind in ways that
set me apart and served me well through­
Andrew Marantz’s appraisal of two Sil­ out my education, including in my grad­
icon Valley camps that hold conflicting uate work.The school’s science curriculum,
ideas about A.I.’s development—“doom­ however, began six thousand years ago.
ers,” who think it may spell disaster, and Fortunately, the classical institution
“effective accelerationists,” who believe in Austin is not the only school I ever
it will bring unprecedented abundance— attended. I expect that most of its gradu­
offers a fascinating look at the factions ates remain believers, but, after I left, the
that have dominated the recent discourse evangelical and Western­chauvinist agen­
(“O.K., Doomer,” March 18th). But read­ das I was taught there were the first things
ers should know that these two vocal to fall away. Ironically, it was the school’s
cliques do not speak for the entire in­ own commitment to a single question,
dustry. Many in the A.I. and machine­ asked repeatedly in every course—“What
learning worlds are working to advance does this reveal about the subject’s world
technological progress safely, and do not view?”—that prepared me to think crit­
suggest (or, for that matter, believe) that ically about my educators’ beliefs.
A.I. is going to lead society to either Elliot Cole
utopia or apocalypse. New York City
These people include A.I. ethicists, 1
who seek to mitigate harm that A.I. has CARRYING THE FLAG
caused or is poised to inflict. Ethicists
focus on concrete technical problems, I was so glad to see that Maya Binyam,
such as trying to create metrics to bet­ in her Profile of the writer Percival Ev­
ter define and evaluate fairness in a broad erett, mentioned his short story “The
range of machine­learning tasks. They Appropriation of Cultures,” from his
also critique damaging uses of A.I., in­ book “Damned if I Do” (“You Tell Me,”
cluding predictive policing (which uses March 18th). In that story, the main char­
data to forecast criminal activity) and acter inverts the meaning of the Confed­
school­dropout­warning algorithms, both erate flag and causes it to lose its power in
of which have been shown to reflect rac­ the eyes of the community until “one day
ist biases. With this in mind, it can be it was not there.” The character, who is
frustrating to watch the doomers fixate Black, does this by buying a pickup truck
on end­of­the­world scenarios while emblazoned with a decal of the flag and
seeming to ignore less sensational harms driving around without removing it.
that are already here. I often use this story in my graduate
Dan Turkel course about public administrative ethics,
Brooklyn, N.Y. because I think it is a hopeful one. For
1 future public servants—especially those
NEW CLASSICS living in communities, such as ours, in
Gary, Indiana, that are facing challenges—
I read Emma Green’s article about the this story encourages good stewardship.
classical­education movement—which Susan Zinner
advocates for primary­ and secondary­ Professor, School of Public and
school curricula based on the classics— Environmental Affairs
with nostalgia and ambivalence (“Old Indiana University Northwest
School,” March 18th). I attended a clas­ Chicago, Ill.
sical school in Austin, Texas, in the
nineteen­nineties, and cherish the para­ •
doxes of this formative episode. Study­ Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
ing Latin, logic, and grammar; practic­ address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
ing public speaking and dramatic [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
performance; and, yes, memorizing lots any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of texts (including entire books of the of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
 live sounds of the dancers’ breath.—Ma-
rina Harss (New York City Center; April 3-6.)
GOINGS ON ART | The most delightful thing about Sonia
APRIL 3 – 9, 2024 Delaunay may well have been her playing cards.
At a new exhibition of her work, “Living Art,”
they are the brightest, most pulse-racingly
colorful objects from an œuvre in which color
is both the principal tool and the supreme ideal.
Delaunay, born in 1885, borrowed from Cub-
ism and Fauvism to find idiosyncratic ways of
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. producing movement with complementary
hues. The results of her experiments included
paintings, but also dresses, curtains, furniture,
A prime offering in this year’s “New Directors/New Films” series, playing and theatre sets. A proud democracy of color
April 3-14 at MOMA and Film at Lincoln Center, is the opening-night work, governs them all: there are no high or low art
“A Different Man,” written and directed by Aaron Schimberg. It stars Sebas- forms, just different ways of pleasing the eye.
Delaunay was a rare species, an unfairly ne-
tian Stan as a struggling New York-based actor whose career and social life glected artist who managed to live long enough
are hindered by a medical condition that causes tumors on his face. His pros- to enjoy significant, belated acclaim. Let’s keep
pects brighten when he meets a friendly new neighbor (Renate Reinsve), a it going.—Jackson Arn (Bard Graduate Center;
through July 7.)
playwright; he undergoes an experimental treatment in hopes of a cure, and it
changes more than his appearance. Further complications ensue when he en- CLASSICAL | One thing that can make good
counters another actor (Adam Pearson) with the same condition. Schimberg’s piano playing so spellbinding is the auditory
spectacle of an artist in conversation with
wide-ranging satirical film encompasses allegorical fantasy, anguished com- themselves: left hand teases right, right wan-
edy, and harrowing melodrama of inner and outer identity.—Richard Brody ders off, left interrupts and the two play on to-
gether. In a duet, that conversation is between
two pianists, playing shoulder to shoulder at
the same eighty-eight keys. Schubert, whose
greatest pleasure was to make music with his
friends, wrote more than sixty duets; Mitsuko
Uchida and Jonathan Biss, both formidable solo-
ists and, together, the directors of the Marlboro
Music Festival (they must have plenty to say to
each other), present a program of four of them,
including the affectionate Rondo in A Major
and the blithely exoticizing “Divertissement à
la hongroise.” Two hands good, four hands bet-
ter?—Fergus McIntosh (Carnegie Hall; April 9.)

TROPICAL ELECTRO-CUMBIA | The singer and gui-

tarist Fabi Reyna and the producer Nectali
(Sumohair) Díaz—united as the duo Reyna
Tropical—spent the past half decade tinkering
with a sweeping, buoyant sound of the tropics.
Their music was really coming into focus when
Díaz died, in 2022, in the midst of work on
their full-length début, “Malegría,” leaving
Reyna to finish in his wake. The album born
of this transition considers our relationship to
the earth and celebrates musical customs from
Congo, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and beyond,
reimagining the duo’s influences to create a
style that’s both far-reaching and traditional.
Bright moments draw out Reyna’s wispy voice,
and the rhythmic yet soothing songs of renewal
ABOUT TOWN wash over you like a cool mist.—Sheldon Pearce
(Public Records; April 6.)
OFF BROADWAY | The remounting of Clubbed away again by the next breeze.—Helen Shaw
Thumb’s Obie Award-winning play “Grief (Public Theatre; through April 20.) MOVIES | The four-film “Hong Kong in New
Hotel” is exquisitely weightless: Liza Birken- York” series that’s newly streaming on the
meier’s covertly romantic flotsam bobs along DANCE | The repertory of the Dutch troupe Criterion Channel parses the experiences and
for a swift seventy minutes, funny and grace- Nederlands Dans Theatre, which was led for ideals of émigrés from mainland China, Taiwan,
ful, only occasionally indicating bleaker cur- a quarter century by the choreographer Jiří and Hong Kong, while also depicting American
rents below. Aunt Bobbi (Susan Blommaert) Kylián, tends toward the hyper-abstract, freedom as reckless frenzy. Clara Law’s 1990
talks to the audience as if we’re in her mar- the minimalist, and the monochrome. “The drama, “Farewell China,” stars Maggie Cheung
keting class—she proposes a hotel that caters Point Being,” by the brother-and-sister as Hung, a Chinese woman who moves to New
to the traumatized—while her niece’s friends team Imre and Marne van Opstal—both York in order to send money back to her hus-
and their lovers drily text and call one another former N.D.T. dancers—is a case in point: band, Nansan (Tony Leung Ka-fai), and their
about infidelity, loss, and death. The director, an exploration of synchronicity set within a young son. Instead, she vanishes, and Nansan
Tara Ahmadinejad, presides over a tremendous mistily lit kinetic installation, by the Dutch arrives in the city, undocumented, to search for
cast, including the mischievous spirits Nadine design studio DRIFT; in it, dancers move her. Law tells the story freely and flamboyantly,
COURTESY A24

Malouf and Susannah Perkins. Even the pale, through a chiaroscuro space like mysterious with flashbacks and fantasies, following Nansan
slice-of-room set design seems light as a blade beings from another dimension. The com- through a clandestine underworld that’s as
of grass; it rests there diagonally, as if it has pany also brings William Forsythe’s quartet exploitative and violent as Hung’s capitalist
just blown into the Public and will be tossed “N.N.N.N.,” from 2002, set mainly to the struggle is soullessly desperate.—Richard Brody

4 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024

 1
PICK THREE
The film critic Justin Chang shares
current obsessions.
1. The ongoing furor over Jonathan Glazer’s
Oscars acceptance speech has brought only
greater attention to his movie “The Zone of
Interest,” which rightly won the prize for Best
International Feature. That work would form an
exceptional double bill with Glazer’s enigmatic
2014 thriller, “Under the Skin” (streaming on mul-
tiple platforms). Starring a never-better Scar-
lett Johansson as a come-hither alien, it is, like
“Zone,” a mesmerizing exploration of the em-
pathy void, set to a demonically beautiful Mica
Levi score that takes possession of your brain.
1
TABLES FOR TWO
the real bird. The “shark” in her bake and
shark, a Trinidadian flatbread sandwich, 2. Years before “The Woman King” (2022),
is banana blossom, spiced and deep-fried the director Gina Prince-Bythewood made a
HAAM and strikingly reminiscent of the fried splendid feature début with the tender and ki-
234 Union Ave., Brooklyn fish it replaces. The space is white-walled,
netic 2000 coming-of-age romance “Love and
Basketball” (streaming on Netflix). The movie
I’m not sure what “healthy” really means, with basket-cane lights and painted mu- wonderfully pairs Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps,
when it comes to describing food. Is rals of tropical greenery. Even on a rainy as childhood friends turned high-school and
college sweethearts, chasing each other as well
it food that’s low-calorie? Low-fat? day, it feels like sunshine is pouring in. as their own dreams of basketball stardom. It’s
Nutrient-dense? Minimally processed? As The restaurant keeps slightly bizarre a classic, and a March Madness perennial.
a matter of personal policy, I am skeptical hours, opening at 1 p.m. during the
3. The death of the great film scholar David
of restaurants that foreground the concept. week—a little late for the lunch crowd— Bordwell last month, at seventy-six, represents
But there is nothing dutiful or dimin- and closing most nights at nine. When I an incalculable loss to all of us who benefited
ished about the menu at haam—short dropped in recently for an afternoon meal, from his brilliant, generously illuminating writ-
ing on cinema. As a mystery enthusiast, I’ve been
for “healthy as a motha”—a Caribbean a server suggested that I try the Chimi- savoring his final book, from 2023, “Perplexing
restaurant that opened in Williamsburg churri Chunk Steak, which is made with Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Mur-
last fall. Take, for example, the kaleido- a soy-and-wheat-based faux beef. Seared der,” a deeply researched dive into the history
of crime fiction on the page and on the screen.
scopic riot of flavors in the Buss Up Shut until crusty outside and juicy within, it was It’s a perfect capper to a career that revelled in
Roti Plate. A paratha roti—the so-called marvellous and uncanny, especially under the intricate, puzzle-like nature of film con-
busted-up shirt that gives this iconic Trin- a drizzle of ultra-garlicky chimichurri. struction—the way that shots, cuts, sounds, and
images clue us in to deeper patterns of meaning.
idadian dish its name—is piled on a large Ramdass first started haam as a pop-up,
dish, surrounded by a vivid-orange swipe in 2020, and eventually landed a stand
of earthy-sweet mashed pumpkin, a scoop at Smorgasburg. Social-media-friendly
PHOTOGRAPH BY JUTHARAT PINYODOONYACHET FOR THE NEW YORKER;
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN (TOP); RAJ DHUNNA (BOTTOM)

of tender stewed greens, and a dollop of snacks from the business’s earlier incar-
curry mango that’s sharp enough to make nations are still available, such as a gor-
every neuron in your brain fire at once. geous mess of saucy fake meat piled onto
The “motha” in question is the restau- a fried plantain sliced lengthwise, like a
rant’s chef-owner, Yesenia Ramdass, a savory banana split. But a dine-in crowd
mom of three from Washington Heights allows Ramdass to explore flavors and
who grew up in an omnivorous Domin- presentations that are a little more re-
ican American family but got into veg- fined. A ceviche appetizer is made with
anism as a teen. At haam—though the hearts of palm, whose brisk salinity and
name is pronounced like the meat—she bouncy texture serve as a clever dupe for
devotes herself to re-creating plant-based fish or shrimp. The dish is lime-bright,
versions of both Dominican favorites and salty, and bracingly alive, especially if you
dishes from her husband’s native Trinidad. add a few dashes of the fiery house-made
The curry chicken on the Buss Up Shut hot sauce. It’s a joy to eat—and, I suppose,
plate, stewed and spicy and turmeric-yel- it’s healthy, by some definitions, if you care NEWYORKER.COM/NEWSLETTERS
low, is actually “chik’n,” a meat substitute about that sort of thing. (Dishes $10-$29.) Get expanded versions of Helen Rosner’s reviews,
that almost perfectly mimics the texture of —Helen Rosner plus Goings On, delivered early in your in-box.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 5

evergreen favorites, limited-edition items, and more.
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT as a result, interfering with U.S. foreign federal court.) “He’s done a great job,”
BORDER CONTROL policy. The government of Mexico, for Trump recently told Sean Hannity, who
instance, has already said that it would asked if Abbott was on the shortlist to

Sweektarting this spring, Donald Trump

will be spending four days of every
in a Manhattan courtroom, leav-
refuse to accept deportations from Texas.
The law is only the latest example of
Abbott’s dramatic role on the national
be his Vice-President. “Absolutely, he
is,” Trump replied.
On February 29th, Trump and Biden
ing weekends for most of his campaign scene. In March, 2021, vowing that Texas were both in Texas, giving speeches on
travel. Fortunately for him, the governor would “not be an accomplice to the open immigration. Trump, accompanied by
of the country’s second-largest state has border policies” of the new Administra- Abbott, spoke in a public park in the
become a reliable surrogate. Greg Ab- tion, he announced Operation Lone Star, city of Eagle Pass. Since early January,
bott, the Texas Republican, has been an immigration crackdown that has cost on orders from the Governor, the Texas
fighting the federal government since Texas ten billion dollars and led to tens National Guard has barred federal agents
the early months of Joe Biden’s Presi- of thousands of arrests. The following from a two-and-a-half-mile stretch of
dency. In some ways, he poses a more spring, he started busing migrants to the border that includes the park. At
acute political problem for Biden than Democratic cities; since then, the arrival one point, when Border Patrol agents
Trump does: Abbott is in charge of a of more than a hundred thousand peo- learned that two migrants were stranded
border state at a time when the immi- ple has overwhelmed local officials in in the middle of the Rio Grande, they
gration issue may be the President’s most Chicago, New York, and Denver. He has tried to use the park’s boat ramp to ac-
glaring electoral vulnerability. A senior also tried to install impassable buoys in cess the river. A state guardsman turned
Administration official recently conceded the Rio Grande and laid razor wire on them away. Those migrants were res-
that “Abbott has changed the immigra- U.S. soil to entangle migrants, forcing cued by the Mexican government; the
tion conversation in this country.” Border Patrol agents to cut them loose. same day, however, according to a legal
Lately, the number of people arriv- (Both policies are being litigated in filing by the U.S. Solicitor General, a
ing at the border has declined from rec- mother and her two young children
ord highs earlier this winter. Yet Texas drowned while trying to cross the river.
has radically escalated its confrontation “This is like a war,” Trump told Ab-
with the Administration. A new state bott, praising his efforts. Those attempt-
law, called SB-4, briefly went into effect ing to enter the country, Trump added,
on March 19th, before a federal injunc- “look like warriors to me.” His message
tion temporarily halted it. SB-4 would hasn’t changed much since at least 2015.
allow state officials to arrest any people He continues to spew lies and invective,
they suspect of having crossed the bor- saying, most recently, that immigrants
der illegally, and, if they are undocu- are “poisoning the blood of our coun-
mented, to deport them. The larger aim try.” What’s different now is his open
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

is to challenge the bedrock constitu- alliance with Republican states that are
tional principle that the federal govern- willing to sabotage the federal govern-
ment, not the states, has the sole au- ment at his behest. Twenty-five gover-
thority to enforce national immigration nors have said they “stand with Texas”
laws. There are many reasons that this in its showdown against the Biden Ad-
has been (and should be) the case, not ministration. Many have offered to send
least of which is the rampant chaos of their own state guardsmen to assist Ab-
fifty states crafting their own rules and, bott. One governor, Sarah Huckabee
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 7
Sanders, who served in the Trump White Biden announced that he was perfectly multiple provisions of a more modest
House before returning to Arkansas, willing to “shut down” the border and to Arizona law that gave local and state
has said, “This is a fight that all of us curtail asylum. When a bipartisan deal police the authority to ask for someone’s
have to engage in.” Another, Ron De- emerged in the Senate, in February,Trump immigration papers. On March 20th of
Santis, has announced that Florida will assailed it anyway. Predictably, the Re- this year, the solicitor general of Texas
now interdict Haitian migrants travel- publicans fell in line, abandoning their claimed, before an appeals court, that
ling by boat to the United States. own lead negotiator. The asylum restric- SB-4 did not violate the precedent set
Biden has insisted that he would be tions in the bill were unlikely to alter the by the majority in 2012, and should there-
tougher at the border, if only Republi- over-all dynamic at the border, but the fore go into immediate effect. But, later
cans would let him. Last fall, when the funding attached to them would have that day, Abbott shared an ulterior mo-
Administration requested fourteen billion helped substantially with triage. Its failure tive with a crowd at the Texas Public
dollars from Congress for more resources gave the White House an opportunity Policy Foundation, in Austin. “We found
to process people at the border, House to present Biden as a pragmatist thwarted ways to try to craft that law to be con-
Republicans refused. Their condition was by Republican cynicism. “Instead of play- sistent with the dissent that was wrote
a broader asylum reform—the kind of ing politics with the issue, why don’t we [sic] in the Arizona case by Justice Sca-
policy that, three years ago, top Demo- just get together and get it done,” Biden lia,” Abbott said. His plain hope is that
crats would have dismissed out of hand. said in Texas last month. “Join me,” he the current Court will be sympathetic
But Abbott’s busing scheme has increas- told Trump. “Or I’ll join you.” to Scalia’s reasoning. It’s easy to write
ingly alarmed members of the Party, some An appeals court will hear arguments off Abbott’s legal thinking as colossally
of whom openly criticized Biden for fail- on the legal merits of the SB-4 law in flawed. But he clearly knows that court
ing to do more. (Other Democratic city early April. However the judges rule, the losses can often serve as political victo-
and state officials have privately told the case seems bound for the Supreme Court, ries. The case will last through the elec-
White House that they’re worried Ab- which was apparently Abbott’s goal all tion season, as designed.
bott might target them next.) In response, along. In 2012, the Court invalidated —Jonathan Blitzer

AFTERMATH “and we would plot out our journeys

FIND A GRAVE the night before.”
As satellites guided them across
Fifty-fifth Street, Mitchell recounted
their first gig in New York, at the old
Bottom Line. “We were with the Del
McCoury Band,” he said. “Super venue.”
An Irish festival in Chicago was their
ear the end of February, the over- first full-on American Irish event—a
N head bins on flights from Ireland
to the U.S. start filling up with fiddles
shock. “We nearly got blind looking at
as much green,” Mitchell said. “We’d
and bouzoukis, as Irish traditional mu- never have seen the likeness at home.
sicians make their seasonal migration We now know that it’s part and parcel
across the Atlantic to play during what of the whole St. Patrick’s Day thing
the players themselves sometimes call over here.”
St. Patrick’s Month. But toward April, They turned on to the Henry Hud-
in the aftermath of the parades, logis- son Parkway. “Where else did we go
tical constraints loosen. This was the that time, Liam?” Mitchell asked. Shane Mitchell, Liam Kelly,
case for three members of Dervish, a “To be honest with you, I’d only be and Tom Morrow
band from Ireland’s County Sligo—and guessing,” Kelly said.
the reason they were able to finally take Kelly was busy with his phone. The Kevin,” Morrow said. “And, even though
a day off from their thirtieth annual cemetery offices, he discovered, were Kevin’s born in London, Kevin’s people
U.S. tour, to make a trip to an old cem- closed, and the precise location of Cole- are Sligo people.”
etery in the Bronx, in search of the grave man’s grave was inscrutable. Texts were Burke, the players learned, had also
of Michael Coleman, a Sligo fiddler. going out to other musicians for guid- visited St. Raymond’s to search for Cole-
Tom Morrow, Dervish’s fiddler, was ance, including one to Eamon O’Leary, man’s grave, in 1973. He was insuffi-
driving a rented Ford Explorer, and a New York-based guitarist, who hap- ciently dressed at the time, and after
Liam Kelly, the flute player, was enter- pened to be staying with Kevin Burke, roaming the cemetery he gave up, cold
ing the address for St. Raymond’s Cem- an Irish fiddler based in Oregon. “We and discouraged—only to realize that
etery into his G.P.S. Shane Mitchell, know Kevin,” Mitchell said. he was facing the grave of Paddy Kil-
the accordion player, was in back re- “I missed a tour of America for my loran, another renowned Sligo fiddler.
membering their first trip to the U.S., daughter’s birth, and we got Kevin to On the Cross Bronx Expressway,
in 1994.“We used to buy maps,” he said, replace me, so that’s how we know Coleman’s career was discussed. Born
8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
in 1891 in Knockgrania, a rural district row starting off with a reel called “Sligo unbelievable that this place still sur-
of Sligo, he sailed to the U.S. in 1914, Maid.” Suddenly, his fiddle popped its vives.” In the late eighties and early nine-
working a vaudeville circuit. In the nine- tuning peg. “That’s Coleman!” Kelly ties, Van Taylor lived nearby and fre-
teen-twenties, he opened for jazz or- said. Tunes started up again as a plane quented Flor de Mayo with friends,
chestras in Manhattan, fiddling with a departed LaGuardia. sometimes captured in photographs. He
rhythmic style that still echoes in the Kelly smiled. “This is a big moment produced a laptop image of a Polaroid
music of New York’s traditional play- for us.” of himself there, in 1991, and posed with
ers. Coleman made eighty 78-r.p.m. re- “It’s practically spiritual,” Mitchell said. it. Onscreen: twenty-eight-year-old Van
cordings, many of which found their After a while, they packed up their Taylor, bespectacled, dark-haired, and
way back to Ireland; he is said to have instruments. Clouds had covered the moody, with café con leche. Today: Van
revived the country’s traditional-music sun. Mitchell put his hands in his Taylor, bespectacled, balding, and beam-
playing, which for various reasons (em- pockets and shivered. “It’s cold, lads,” ing, with same.
igration, the Catholic Church’s disdain he said. The picture was taken by Van Tay-
for dancing) was dormant. In Sligo, a —Robert Sullivan lor’s late friend Jamie Livingston, a Man-
memorial to Coleman, who died in 1 hattan cinematographer who took a Po-
1945, reads “Master of the fiddle. Sav- THE BOARDS laroid every day, from when he was a
iour of Irish traditional music.” NUMBER OUR DAYS senior at Bard College, in 1979, until 1997,
The Explorer pulled off the Cross when he died, of cancer, on his forty-first
Bronx and into a hundred and eighty birthday. He took only one each day—
acres of gravestones. “Ah, there’s just “He had kind of a Spidey sense for the
thousands of ’em,” Kelly sighed. Through right moment”—and stored the results,
more texting (a piano player in Brook- dated, in suitcases and a grapefruit box.
lyn, a f lutist in Ballinaglera, County The images are alternately beautiful, art-
Leitrim, and a harmonicist in the Cats- avid Van Taylor, a sixty-one-year- ful, mysterious, and mundane: twenty-
kills), it was determined that they were
standing in New St. Raymond’s Cem-
D old documentary filmmaker (“Good
Ol’ Charles Schulz”) who lives in Park
somethings posing with clarinets or gar-
goyles, a woman sunbathing with the
etery, and Coleman was in the old one, Slope, returned recently to an old lunch- Twin Towers behind her, frolickers en-
just beyond the Bruckner and the Cross time haunt, the Peruvian-Chinese restau- joying a naked summer at a lake. “Jamie
Bronx. Kelly was upbeat, having de- rant Flor de Mayo, on the Upper West was very skilled at and dedicated to hang-
ciphered the plot numbers. “Maybe Side. “I haven’t been here in thirty years,” ing out,” Van Taylor said. “There was
it’ll be more apparent when we get he said. He ordered a soupy rice with something about him that was easy to
there,” he said. chicken and a café con leche and looked connect to. He wasn’t Mr. Patter or Mr.
As Morrow followed the G.P.S. around, taking it all in—noisy families, Gab, but there was a comfort—you know,
through a knot of highway interchanges, hulking fish tank, lack of the old maître ‘Let me show you my experimental film
he opined on Coleman’s fiddling. “Peo- d’ station and its microphone. “I remem- about my trip to Italy to see the accor-
ple spend their lifetimes trying to em- ber walking in here and my friend grab- dion-makers.’ ” Livingston’s Polaroids
ulate him,” he said. bing that microphone and singing, ‘You also capture a particular New York mo-
In Old St. Raymond’s, the Explor- ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog,’ ” Van ment, “especially lower Manhattan, a
er’s windows rolled down. “Section 21 Taylor said, appearing nostalgic. “It’s certain period—you know, Cindy Sher-
should be ahead of us,” Kelly said. “O.K., man, the West Side Highway, Art on
Row 29. We’re walking from here.” the Beach, the Twin Towers, running
It was cold and getting cloudier, the into Kevin Bacon, that whole scene.”
wind gusting over the Hutchinson Park- After Livingston died, friends scanned
way’s white noise. One far-off family the Polaroids, some sixty-seven hundred
tended a grave as the musicians walked of them, and posted the collection on-
quietly, inspecting stones. After ten min- line, where it amassed more than three
utes, Mitchell stopped and pointed hundred million views. The images have
down. “Michael Coleman,” he said. The been featured in an exhibition, a book,
others arrived and stared. “We should and daily posts on Instagram; now, in
have brought some cleaning stuff with April, they’ll be sung about, in Van Tay-
us,” Kelly said. He bent to clean the lor’s new work, “Number Our Days: A
blackness from the stone. “We have to Photographic Oratorio,” at PAC NYC,
tell Kevin Burke how easy it was!” at the World Trade Center, with music
“My God,” Kelly went on. “What by Luna Pearl Woolf. The performance
the hell was Kevin doing?”Then he said, features Polaroid-shaped screens with
“Let’s play a tune!” projections, the countertenor John Hol-
“Just for the sake,” Mitchell said, “just iday, and three choirs and an orchestra
to say we played for Michael Coleman.” from Trinity Wall Street Choir.
Instruments came out of the car, Mor- David Van Taylor To write the libretto, Van Taylor
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 9
interviewed friends in Livingston’s pho- ect, and she provided another “Aha!” ton concert. He wore a Padres hat and
tographs and strangers affected by them, moment. “She said, ‘Oh, it’s like Psalm a yellow shirt with brown sleeves, and
and created characters who sing their 90’—allegedly the oldest psalm, writ- he had three huge satchels slung across
words, such as the Seeker (“You can’t al- ten by Moses himself, about mortality his shoulders.
ways tell from the photo / Sometimes it and balancing the joys and the pains in Duvalsaint is a celebrated figure
was a pain in the ass”), the Curmudgeon life, and beseeching God. And the key among seat venders, or hawkers—the
(“A blurry photo of two stoned twenty- line is ‘Teach us to number our days guys shouting “Beer here!” at ballparks.
year-olds in Italy / I bought this box of that we might gain a heart of wisdom.’ He works six or seven days a week across
spaghetti”), and the Curator (“Did we Every time I say that, I get chills. Be- the country, sometimes twice a day in
know what we had? . . . New York in cause that’s what Jamie was doing.” different cities, like the Lou Gehrig of
those days . . . Grownups away”). The —Sarah Larson venders. The only N.F.L. stadium that
Inventor—who is inspired by Edwin 1 he hasn’t yet hit is the Minnesota Vi-
Land, the inventor of the Polaroid, “but HOT DOG DEPT. kings’. “Seniority and unions,” he said.
also Steve Jobs, and a little Elon Musk WORLD RECORD “I’m knocking on that door actively.”
thrown in”—sings of invention, tech- This week, he’ll be at the Detroit Ti-
nology, and revolutionizing human con- gers’ home opener at one, then fly to
nection. Van Taylor and Woolf first col- Atlanta for a Braves game at seven.
laborated on an opera about Bernie Before hawking, Duvalsaint, who is
Madoff (“It was definitely a Saul-on- thirty-four, worked at HSBC in New
the-road-to-Damascus moment—Oh, York, in platform sales. In 2017, while
my God, I would so much rather write ports are full of records, and Reggie visiting his parents near Miami, he
the libretto of an opera about Bernie
Madoff than make a documentary about
Sto become
Duvalsaint is chasing one of his own:
the first seat vender to work
wanted to catch the M.L.B. All-Star
Game but balked at the ticket prices.
him”), but for “Number Our Days”Woolf at all sixty Major League Baseball and Instead, he responded to a Craigslist ad
suggested an oratorio instead of an opera, National Football League stadiums. “If for short-term help. “I don’t remember
to emphasize community. That felt right, I do Fenway this year, there are only my first hot dog sold, it was so quick,”
and in the libretto Van Taylor put the three baseball stadiums left,” he ex- he said. “I made it about ten feet before
pieces together “in a shape that would plained between hot-dog sales recently. I got swarmed.”The pitchman Anthony
tell a story about the bigger themes, loss “The White Sox, Twins, and Toronto. Sullivan, from OxiClean’s infomercials,
and connection and memory.” That’s going to be the toughest one, be- also happened to be at the game. “He
Early on in writing the libretto, Van cause you’ve gotta get a work visa. Which was walking around on the concourse
Taylor was telling his cantor (“Unre- I’ve tried. Or marry a Canadian woman.” and saw me selling,” Duvalsaint said.
lated—my cantor went to high school (Which he hasn’t.) He was at Petco “He said, ‘You’ve got a great future in
with Prince”) about the oratorio proj- Park, in San Diego, for a Chris Staple- sales!’ He even came into the seats and
said, ‘Let’s push these hot dogs!’”
A month later, Duvalsaint quit bank-
ing. “People thought I was crazy,” he
said. High-end travelling hawkers can
make six figures a year, but they tend to
chase profit rather than completionism.
“For me, the travel part is a mix between
passion project and profitability,” Du-
valsaint said. He uses Frontier Airlines’
six-hundred-dollar all-you-can-fly pass.
In a pinch, he sleeps at the airport. He
used to schedule Dead & Co. shows
whenever possible, but the band stopped
touring. “The crowd is super generous,
they like to drink,” he said.
In San Diego, Duvalsaint carried
forty-eight water bottles (five dollars and
fifty cents each), thirty hot dogs (nine
dollars), and thirty churros (six-fifty) at
a time. At a Dodgers-Giants series in
San Francisco last year, he lugged a
hundred and forty-four sixteen-ounce
beers—nearly equivalent to carrying the
“It’s so hard to get a job as a white man with Dodgers’ center fielder Mookie Betts
a terrible personality these days.” around his shoulders. “I practice yoga
three to four times a week to maintain have included “PissDrinker” and a waltz spect copyright law.”) Why did Man­
flexibility,” he said. called “Clit Eastwood.”) The band’s four nequin Pussy do it? “I only had three
His sales strategy is standard. “You members were in town for a gig at Rough thousand dollars and three weeks to make
go for the saltier items first, then later Trade recently. On their day off, they a video,” Dabice said. “There’s an alarm­
switch to sweet,” he said. He passed a visited the Museum of Sex, to see the ist reaction to what A.I. ultimately does
concession stand with a long queue. exhibit “Radical Perverts.” mean, instead of simply as a tool in the
“Folks, hot dogs, churros, water, no line!” Before entering the gallery, a mu­ hands of a creator.” She went on, “It can
Soon he had his own line. seum staffer asked them to sign injury­ be ethical and pleasurable and art.”
“I don’t really have any shtick,” he and­liability waivers for the show’s in­ They moved on to other works––a
said. “There are a lot of guys who do. teractive games. “I am extremely litigious, dildo belonging to Allen Ginsberg, a
In Philly, we have a guy with a parrot so this is great,” Maxine Steen, the pink­ vitrine that displayed a leather whip.
on his shoulder.” He finds that being haired guitarist, said. She wasn’t entirely The gallery was also stocked with reli­
friendly works best. At one concert, the joking. Earlier this year, Mannequin gious iconography. Dabice gazed at a
singer Luke Combs noticed Duvalsaint Pussy was deemed obscene by Big Tech. Picasso etching of Raphael with his mis­
working the floor. “After he finished a “One day, I woke up and had a bunch tress, regarded by an unlikely voyeur.
song, he goes, ‘Hey, beer guy—you got of messages from people that were, like, “ ‘The Pope savors the scene from his
a Miller Lite?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you want ‘Hey, um, your music’s not on TikTok armchair,’” she read from a placard. She
one?’ He shotgunned it.” anymore?’” Marisa Dabice, the band’s felt creatively affirmed. “Artists through­
He headed for the floor and scanned front person, said. She wore a leather out history have understood that sex is
the crowd while bellowing out his mer­ duster coat with fur cuffs. After con­ part of our humanity,” she said.
chandise. A drizzle fell, but he wasn’t firming that typing in the band’s name Mannequin Pussy’s new album, “I
fazed. “Sales are good when it’s really yielded no results, she had a theory. “I Got Heaven,” was rated an 8.8 by Pitch­
hot or cold,” he said. “When people are type in ‘Mannequin Cock’ to see what’s fork in its Best New Music listings. Dab­
comfortable, it’s kind of slow.” up,” she said. “Our music came up!” She ice said that her idea of heaven was an
For the second opening act, Duval­ didn’t stop there. “I type in ‘Mannequin oasis where “Weird Al” Yankovic per­
saint ascended to the upper deck. In Dick.’” Same thing. formed an eternal residency.
one steep aisle, he sold everything he Steen shook her head. On TikTok, Colins (Bear) Regisford, the band’s
had. “When a few people buy, every­ it was not hard to find such dude­penned bassist, said that, to him, heaven would
body buys,” he explained. “Other fans classics as “Fela’s Cock,” “My Dick,” or be seeing Nirvana in its prime.
just need to see that it’s O.K.” At a Phil­ “Dick in a Box.” “To be feminine is to “And I could play drums, like, as loud
lies playoff game last year, one fan bought be profane,” Dabice said sadly. as I want,” the group’s fourth member,
forty­five hundred dollars’ worth of beer At around the same time, if you asked Kaleen Reading, who wore a wind­
for his entire section. an Amazon Alexa to play Mannequin breaker, said. She went on, “My cats
It had been a great night so far. He’d Pussy, the device would shut down. Ep­ would live as long as I do. And, uh, I
sold about eighteen hundred dollars of itaph, the band’s record label––whose can kiss my girlfriend without having
goods. During the intermission, before offerings include Noam Chomsky’s re­ people looking at us.”
Stapleton came on—prime selling corded lectures and NOFX’s “Punk in “Synthesizers, lasers,” Steen said.
time—the commissary ran out of hot Drublic”––contacted TikTok. (“I’m re­ “I want a bacchanal every night,”
dogs and churros, and Duvalsaint had ceiving a notice that the phrase ‘may be Dabice said.
to settle for cotton candy, without much associated with behavior or content that For the band, the question of language
success. “Not a cotton­candy crowd,” he violates our guidelines,’” the label’s legal and profanity is of great importance.
said. “If this was Taylor Swift . . .” counsel wrote.) TikTok backed down, “When I sit down to write lyrics, I spend
—Adam Elder and now Mannequin Pussy is back on a lot of time really wavering over what
1 the platform. “They reprogrammed their those words are going to be,” Dabice said.
FREE SPEECH DEPT. algorithms,” Dabice said. “Now the only “They’re not just magazine­flips through
WORDPLAY type of pussy that can be searched on obscurity, stringing random words to­
TikTok is mannequin.” gether. There’s an intentional meaning
She was enchanted by a museum di­ that’s been labored over, because there
orama titled “Iron Hole,” part of a se­ aren’t that many moments in our life that
ries called “Sex Lives of Robots.”“That’s we get to say something.” She made a
one thing that people are worried about, Delphic expression. “How often do we
right?” Dabice said. “That robots are actually get to say something?”
he Philadelphia punk band Man­ going to be the only ones who get to She invoked the 1973 court case
T nequin Pussy got its name from an
offhand joke that a friend made years
make art in the future?”
The band had recently come under
Miller v. California, which determined
that a work is only considered obscene
ago, now lost to history. The group has fire for using A.I. in a music video for if it “lacks serious literary, artistic, polit­
always had certain appellative affinities. the song “Nothing Like.” (Among the ical, or scientific value.” By that stan­
Two early demos, from 2011, were called dissenters, the YouTube user @TheEpic­ dard, she concluded, “we’re artists.”
“BonerJamz!” and “Meatslave.” (Tracks Bunch12222 commented, “real punks re­ —Holden Seidlitz
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 11
 doubt anything he said. But, in private,
ANNALS OF PSYCHOLOGY she saw glimpses of a darker side—stray
comments barbed with cruelty, a certain
cunning. He never drank, and, though
CRAZY-MAKING in public he cited vague life-style rea-
sons, in private he told her that he loved
Is gaslighting on the rise, or are you just imagining it? being fully in control around other peo-
ple as they unravelled, grew messy, came
BY LESLIE JAMISON undone. Girls, especially.
Sometimes, when they were having
sex, Leah would get a strong gut feel-
ing that what was happening wasn’t right.
In these moments, she would feel over-
whelmed by a self-protective impulse
that drove her out of bed, naked and
crying, to shut herself in the bathroom.
What she remembers most clearly is not
the fleeing, however, but the return: walk-
ing back to bed, still naked, and embar-
rassed about having “made a scene.”
When she got back, her boyfriend would
tell her, “You have to get it together.
Maybe you should see someone.”
A few months after they broke up—
not because of the sex but for “stupid
normal relationship reasons”—Leah
found herself chatting with a girl who
was sitting next to her in a science lec-
ture. It emerged that this girl had gone
to the same high school as her ex, and
when Leah asked if she knew him the
girl looked horrified. “That guy’s a psy-
cho,” she said. Leah had never heard
anyone speak about him like this. The
girl said that, in high school, he’d had a
reputation for sexual assault. Some of
what she described sounded eerily fa-
miliar. “The idea that he would want to
have power over a girl while she was
asleep was as easy for me to believe as
hen Leah started dating her first in which the woman was supposed to the idea that he needed air to breathe,”
W serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-
year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she
be largely passive, she told herself that
her role was to be “strong enough” to
she said. “It reminded me of every sex-
ual experience I had with him, where
had very little sense that sex was sup- endure everything that felt painful and he had all of the power and I was only
posed to feel good. (Leah is not her real scary. When she was with other people, a vessel to accept it.”
name.) In the small town in central Ohio she found herself explaining away bruises Leah went back to her dorm room
where she grew up, sex ed was basically and other marks on her body as the re- and lay in bed for almost two days
like the version she remembered from sults of accidents. Once, she said to her straight. She kept revisiting memories
the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, boyfriend, “I guess you like it rough,” from the relationship, understanding
because you will get pregnant and die.” and he said, “No, all women like it like them in a new way. Evidently, what she’d
With her college boyfriend, the sex this.” And she thought, “O.K., then I understood as “normal” sex had been
was rough from the beginning. There guess I don’t know shit about myself.” something more aggressive. And her ex’s
was lots of choking and hitting; he would Her boyfriend was popular on cam- attempts to convince her otherwise—
toss her around the bed “like a rag doll,” pus. “If you brought up his name,” she implying that she was crazy for hav-
she told me, and then assure her, “This told me, “people would say, ‘Oh, my God, ing any problem with it—were a kind
is how everyone has sex.” Because Leah I love that guy.’” This unanimous social of controlling behavior so fundamen-
had absorbed an understanding of sex endorsement made it harder for her to tal that she did not have a name for it.
Now, six years later, as a social worker
The philosopher Kate Abramson describes gaslighting as “existential silencing.” at a university, she calls it “gaslighting.”
12 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 ILLUSTRATION BY JOSIE NORTON
 These days, it seems as if everyone’s and carried out by an intimate partner— tive—dimly aware of a world outside
talking about gaslighting. In 2022, it was but as a clinician she has witnessed the but lacking any idea of how to reach it.
Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year, rise of the phrase with both relief and The first recorded use of “gaslight” as
on the basis of a seventeen-hundred- skepticism. Her current job gives her the a verb is from 1961, according to the Ox-
and-forty-per-cent increase in searches chance to offer college students the lan- ford English Dictionary, and its first
for the term. In the past decade, the guage and the knowledge that she didn’t mention in clinical literature came in the
word and the concept have come to sat- have at their age. “I love consent educa- British medical journal The Lancet, in a
urate the public sphere. In the run-up tion,” she told me. “I wish someone had 1969 article titled “The Gas-Light Phe-
to the 2016 election, Teen Vogue ran a told me it was O.K. to say no.” But she nomenon.” Written by two British doc-
viral op-ed with the title “Donald Trump also sees the word “gaslighting” as being tors, the article summarizes the plot of
Is Gaslighting America.” Its author, used so broadly that it has begun to lose the original play and then examines three
Lauren Duca, wrote, “He lied to us over its meaning. “It’s not just disagreement,” real-life cases in which something sim-
and over again, then took all accusations she said. It’s something much more in- ilar occurred. Two of the cases feature
of his falsehoods and spun them into vasive: the gaslighter “scoops out what devious wives, flipping the gender dy-
evidence of bias.” In 2020, the album you know to be true and replaces it with namic usually assumed today; in one, a
“Gaslighter,” by the Chicks (formerly something else.” woman tried to convince her husband
known as the Dixie Chicks), débuted that he was insane, so that he would be
at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, he term “gaslighting” comes from committed to a mental hospital and she
offering an indignant anthem on behalf
of the gaslit: “Gaslighter, denier . . . you
T the title of George Cukor’s film
“Gaslight,” from 1944, a noirish drama
could divorce him without penalty. The
article is ultimately less concerned with
know exactly what you did on my boat.” that tracks the psychological trickery of gaslighting itself than with safeguards
(What happened on the boat is revealed a man, Gregory, who spends every night around admitting patients to mental hos-
a few songs later: “And you can tell the searching for a set of lost jewels in the pitals. The actual psychology of gas-
girl who left her tights on my boat/That attic of a town house he shares with his lighting emerged as an object of study a
she can have you now.”) The TV series wife, Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman. decade later. The authors of a 1981 arti-
“Gaslit” (2022) follows a socialite, played (The jewels are her inheritance, and we cle in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly inter-
by Julia Roberts, who becomes a whis- come to understand that he has married preted it as a version of a phenomenon
tle-blower in the Watergate scandal, her in order to steal them.) Based on Pat- known as “projective identification,” in
having previously been manipulated into rick Hamilton’s 1938 play of the same which a person projects onto someone
thinking she had seen no wrongdoing. name, the film is set in London in the else some part of himself that he finds
The Harvard Business Review has been eighteen-eighties, which gives rise to its intolerable. Gaslighting involves a “spe-
publishing a steady stream of articles crucial dramatic trick: during his night- cial kind of ‘transfer,’” they write, in which
with titles like “What Should I Do if time rummaging, Gregory turns on the the victimizer, “disavowing his or her
My Boss Is Gaslighting Me?” gas lamps in the attic, causing all the own mental disturbance, tries to make
The popularity of the term testifies other lamps in the house to flicker. But, the victim feel he or she is going crazy,
to a widespread hunger to name a cer- when Paula wonders why they are flick- and the victim more or less complies.”
tain kind of harm. But what are the im- ering, he convinces her that she must On its way from niche clinical con-
plications of diagnosing it everywhere? have imagined it. Filmed in black-and- cept to ubiquitous cultural diagnosis,
When I put out a call on X (formerly white, with interior shots full of shadows gaslighting has, of course, passed through
known as Twitter) for experiences of gas- and exterior shots full of swirling Lon- the realm of pop psychology. In the 2007
lighting, I immediately received a flood don fog, the film offers a clever inversion book “The Gaslight Effect,” the psycho-
of responses, Leah’s among them. The of the primal trope of light as a symbol therapist Robin Stern mines the meta-
stories offered proof of the term’s broad of knowledge. Here, light becomes an phor to the fullest, advising her readers
resonance, but they also suggested the agent of confusion and deception, an em- to “Turn Up Your Gaslight Radar,” “De-
ways in which it has effectively become blem of Gregory’s manipulation. velop Your Own ‘Gaslight Barometer,’”
an umbrella that shelters a wide variety Gregory gradually makes Paula doubt and “Gasproof Your Life.” Stern anchors
of experiences under the same name. herself in every way imaginable. He the phenomenon in a relationship pat-
Webster’s dictionary defines the term as convinces her that she has stolen his tern that she noticed during her twenty
“psychological manipulation of a person watch and hidden one of their paint- years of therapeutic work: “Confident,
usually over an extended period of time ings, and that she is too fragile and un- high-achieving women were being
that causes the victim to question the well to appear in public. When Paula caught in demoralizing, destructive, and
validity of their own thoughts, percep- reads a novel by the fire, she can’t even bewildering relationships” that in each
tion of reality, or memories and typically focus on the words; all she can hear is case caused the woman “to question her
leads to confusion, loss of confidence and Gregory’s voice inside her head. The own sense of reality.” Stern offers a se-
self-esteem, uncertainty of one’s emo- house in which she is now confined be- ries of taxonomies for the stages (Dis-
tional or mental stability, and a depen- comes a physical manifestation of the belief, Defense, Depression) and the
dency on the perpetrator.” Leah’s own claustrophobia of gaslighting and the perpetrators (Glamour Gaslighters,
experience of gaslighting offers a quint- ways in which it can feel like being Good-Guy Gaslighters, and Intimida-
essential example—coercive, long-term, trapped inside another person’s narra- tors). She understands gaslighting as a
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 13
dynamic that “plays on our worst fears, catalogues the ways in which gaslight- chicken: the “winner” of the argument
our most anxious thoughts, our deepest ers leverage their authority, cultivating is the one less willing to doubt their
wishes to be understood, appreciated, isolation in the victim and leaning on own memories—arguably the more
and loved.” social tropes (for example, the “hyster- flawed moral position—whereas the one
In the past decade, philosophy has ical woman”) to achieve their aims. Out- who swerves first looks weaker but is
turned its gaze to the phenomenon, too. lining the various forms of suffering that often driven by a more conscientious
In 2014, Kate Abramson, a philosophy gaslighting causes, Abramson stresses commitment to self-doubt.
professor at the University of Indiana, the tautological bind in which it places Being a philosopher, Abramson
published an essay called “Turning Up the victim—“charging someone not sim- spends a good deal of time defining the
the Lights on Gaslighting,” which she ply with being wrong or mistaken, but phenomenon by specifying what it isn’t.
has now expanded into a rigorous and being in no condition to judge whether Gaslighting is not the same as brain-
passionately argued book-length study, she is wrong or mistaken.” Gaslighting washing, for example, because it involves
“On Gaslighting.” Early in the book, she essentially turns its targets against them- not simply convincing someone of some-
describes giving talks and having conver- selves, she writes, by harnessing “the thing that isn’t true but, rather, convinc-
sations about gaslighting in the decade very same capacities through which we ing that person to distrust their own ca-
since publishing her original article: “I create lives that have meaning to us as pacity to distinguish truth from falsehood.
still remember the sense of revelation I individuals,” such as the capacities to It is also not the same as guilt-tripping,
had when first introduced to the notion love, to trust, to empathize with others, because someone can be aware of being
of gaslighting. I’ve now seen that look of and to recognize the fallibility of our guilt-tripped while still effectively being
stunned discovery on a great many faces.” perceptions and beliefs. This last point guilt-tripped. At the same time—and
The core of Abramson’s argument is has always struck me as one of gaslight- although Abramson recognizes that
that gaslighting is an act of grievous ing’s keenest betrayals: it takes what is “concept creep” threatens to dilute the
moral wrongdoing which inflicts “a kind essentially an ethically productive form meaning and the utility of the term—
of existential silencing.”“Agreement isn’t of humility, the awareness that one might her own examples of gaslighting some-
the endpoint of successful gaslighting,” be wrong, and turns it into a liability. times grow uncomfortably expansive.
she writes. “Gaslighters aim to funda- Any argument in which two people re- (And her decision to use male pronouns
mentally undermine their targets as de- member the same thing in different for gaslighters and female pronouns for
liberators and moral agents.” Abramson ways can feel like a terrible game of the gaslit also reinforces a reductive no-
tion of its gender patterns.) Both the
book and her original essay open with
a list of more than a dozen “things gas-
lighters say,” ranging from “Don’t be so
sensitive” to “If you’re going to be like
this, I can’t talk to you” to “I’m worried;
I think you’re not well.” It’s hard to imag-
ine a person who hasn’t heard at least
one of these. The quotations function
as a kind of net, drawing readers into
the force field of the book’s argument
with an implicit suggestion: Perhaps this
has happened to you.

rowing up in Bangladesh as the

G daughter of two literature profes-
sors, a woman I’ll call Adaya often had
difficulty understanding what other peo-
ple were saying. She felt stupid because
it seemed so much harder for her to
comprehend things others understood
easily, but over time she began to sus-
pect that her hearing was physically im-
paired. Her parents told her that she
was just seeking attention, and when
they finally took her to the family doc-
tor he confirmed that her hearing was
fine. She was just exaggerating, he said,
as teen-age girls are prone to do.
Adaya believed what her parents had
“Run it by the legal department—but don’t let them see you.” said, though she kept encountering situ-
ations where she couldn’t hear things. It The idea of gaslighting first began to
wasn’t until her mid-thirties, in 2011, that resonate with Adaya when she finally
she finally went to see another specialist. went to therapy, in her forties. She had
This was in Iowa, where she’d moved for gone in order to understand the dynam-
a graduate program in writing after her ics of her failed marriage, but came to
first marriage, in Bangladesh, fell apart. see that the problems went deeper. As
The clinician told her that her middle-ear she wrote in one of her first messages to
bone was calcifying; it was a congenital me, she found it easier to talk about sur-
problem that had almost certainly af- viving domestic violence than about the
fected her hearing for at least twenty-five emotional violence she experienced in
years. Waiting for a bus home from the her childhood. The things her mother
hospital—in the middle of winter, with had said about her “dislodged and dis-
a foot of snow all around her—Adaya oriented and to some extent destroyed
called her mother to tell her. She re- my sense of self.” Adaya has come to di-
sponded without apology (“You’re old vide her life into three parts: her youth,
enough to take care of yourself, so take when she believed in the version of her-
care of yourself ”), and let another six years self shaped by her mother’s narrative;
pass before casually disclosing that the the period of adulthood when the hear-
family doctor had found something wrong ing diagnosis caused her to wrestle with
with Adaya’s hearing, all those years be- that narrative; and the current era, in
fore. When Adaya asked why they had which she has a stronger self-concep-
kept this from her, her mother replied, “I tion and is in a stable romantic relation-
didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t ship. She was able to arrive at this point
want you to be weak about it.” in part because her therapist helped her
Of all the people who approached identify her relationship with her par-
me on X with testimonies of gaslighting, ents as one of gaslighting. Looking back
I found Adaya and her story particu- on herself when she was young, she says,
larly compelling because her diagnosis “I almost feel like it’s a different per-
eventually offered her a kind of irrefut- son—like she is my child, and I want to
able confirmation—something the gaslit take care of her.”
crave, but often never receive—that al-
lowed her to confront the dynamic di- he psychoanalyst and historian Ben
rectly. For Adaya, the damage of her
parents’ deception went beyond the hard-
T Kafka, who is working on a book
about how other people drive us crazy, THE REAL
ACTION IS
ships of her medical condition. “It made told me that he thinks our most famil-
me feel that what I was experiencing in iar tropes about gaslighting are slightly
my body was not real,” she told me. “All misleading. He believes that, although
my life I was told I was lying and ex-
aggerating. . . . In those years when my
sense of self was being formed, I was
romantic relationships dominate our cul-
tural narratives of gaslighting, the par-
ent-child dynamic is a far more useful
OFF THE
being given a deficient version of my-
self.” It was part of a broader pattern.
From an early age, Adaya told me, she
frame. When I visited Kafka in the cozy
Greenwich Village office where he sees
his patients, he pointed out that, for one
COURT
felt that she didn’t fit in with her fam- thing, the power imbalance between par-
ily without quite knowing why. Even- ents and their children is intrinsically GET TO KNOW THE
tually, she realized that this sense of fall- conducive to this form of manipulation.
ing short had arisen from things her Indeed, it often happens unwittingly: if
BIGGEST ATHLETES
mother said. She thought of herself as a child receives her version of reality from ON EARTH AT
ugly because her mother said so, dispar- her parents, then she may feel that she GQ.COM/SPORTS
aging her dark skin; when she got a skin has to consent to it as a way to insure
infection, she was made to believe it was that she continues to be loved and cared
because she didn’t keep herself clean for. (And what other sense of reality do
enough. “If your mother cannot see the we have at first, besides what our par-
grace and beauty in you, who can?” Adaya ents tell us to be true?) Additionally, gas-
said. That sense of shame and worth- lighting later in life almost always in-
lessness propelled her toward an abu- volves some degree of infantilization and
sive marriage (“The first boy who told regression, insofar as it creates an en-
me I was worth loving, I moved toward forced dependence. Lastly, and crucially,
him”) and kept her in it for years. Kafka’s orientation toward parent-child
 (He changed his mind once he learned
that his friend had gonorrhea.) For
Dunn, her father’s failure to affirm her
sense of being preyed upon was far more
damaging than the other man’s preda-
tion. Years later, whenever she asked her
father to acknowledge that his behav-
iors had affected her, he would gaslight
her even more. Echoing the teachings
of his sannyasin guru, he acted as if it
were inappropriate for her to blame him
for any emotional damage: “ ‘You can
choose how you feel,’ he said, again and
again. ‘It has nothing to do with me.’”
For years after that incident, Dunn
told me, “I could never trust that what
I was feeling was quite right,” because
she’d been consistently told by her fa-
ther that she felt too much, and that she
needed to deal with these feelings on
her own rather than foisting them onto
others. At fifteen, she began her first
serious romantic relationship, with a
much older man (he was thirty-two),
and found it almost impossible to trust
her suspicions about him. Looking back,
it’s clear to her that he was living with
his female partner, but he said that the
woman was just a roommate, and Dunn
didn’t have the confidence to disbelieve
him. Instead, she told me, she got lost
in obsessive thought patterns, trying to
figure out whether this man was lying
or if she was being paranoid; she couldn’t
concentrate properly because she was
so consumed by this circular thinking.
“I thought I had to work it out myself,”
• • she said. Looking back, she sees herself
frantically trying to play two roles at
bonds stems from an essentially Freud- with a much younger wife (they’d got once: she was the anxious child, who
ian belief that the dynamics at play in together when he was thirty-seven and knew something was wrong but couldn’t
our adult relationships can usually be she was eighteen) and a rotating crew figure out what, and the adult who was
traced back to those we grew familiar of fellow cult members. In the entranc- attempting—but not yet able—to take
with in childhood. ing but unsettling paradise of the villa— care of things, to make them right.
There are many memoirs that re- with its marble floors and grand stair- Sitting in Kafka’s office thinking of
count experiences one might call gas- cases, shoddy electricity, and plentiful Dunn and Adaya, I found myself swell-
lighting—indeed, the very act of writ- vats of wine—one of her father’s mid- ing with indignation on behalf of these
ing personal narrative often involves an dle-aged friends began trying to seduce gaslit children, taught to feel responsi-
attempt to “reclaim” a story that’s al- her. After kissing her in the kitchen, ble for the pain their parents had caused
ready been told another way—but few his skin leathery and his breath stale them. But beneath that indignation
trace the lasting residue of parental gas- from cigarette smoke, he whispered, “I lurked something else—a nagging anx-
lighting as deftly as Lily Dunn’s “Sins want to have sex with you,” and invited iety coaxed into sharper visibility by the
of My Father.” When Dunn was six, her back to his camper van to listen to therapeutic aura of Kafka’s sleek ana-
her father left the family to join a cult his poems. lytic couch. I eventually told him that,
who called themselves the sannyasins When Dunn told her father how as I worked on this piece, I had started
and preached a doctrine of radical emo- anxious these sexual advances made her, to wonder about the ways I might be
tional autonomy. At thirteen, Dunn he replied that she shouldn’t be worried. unintentionally gaslighting my daugh-
went to spend the summer at her fa- “You could learn something,” he told ter—telling her that she is “just fine”
ther’s villa, in Tuscany, where he lived her. “He’s a good man. He’ll be gentle.” when she clearly isn’t, or giving her a
16 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
hard time for making us late for school how often they come to her with the cated relationship to motherhood, say,
by demanding to wear a different pair idea already in their minds, and how or the effects of certain imbalances or
of tights, when it is clearly my own fault often she is the one to bring it up. Ash- conflicts in your parents’ marriage. The
for not starting our morning routine tor said that, if she introduces the term, work is to “understand what’s getting
ten minutes earlier. In these interac- she tries to use it as a placeholder, a first enacted and why.” One doesn’t neces-
tions, I can see the distinct mechanisms step in figuring out what was at play in sarily emerge from this type of exam-
of gaslighting at work, albeit in a much a relationship. When patients introduce ination with a self that is entirely “cured”
milder form: taking a difficult feeling— it—and sometimes she can sense a pa- or integrated, but it can, as she says,
my latent sense of culpability whenever tient wanting her to use it first—she allow one to “live in closer proximity to
she is unhappy, or my guilt for running may be skeptical, not because they are the questions and struggles that ani-
behind schedule—and placing it onto wrong but because they usually haven’t mate the self.” In working with patients
her. Part of me hoped that Kafka would fully reckoned with their own role in the to better understand their experiences
disagree with me, but instead he started dynamic yet. It’s as if they are trying of being gaslit, Ashtor is hoping to give
nodding vehemently. “Yes!” he said. to close something by invoking the them a different way to engage with the
“Within a two-block range of any el- word—to mark it as settled, figured out— impulses that led them there.
ementary school, just before the bell whereas she wants to open it up. Ash- Although most accounts of gas-
rings, you can find countless parents tor says it frequently becomes clear that lighting focus on interpersonal dynam-
gaslighting their children, off-loading patients are very attached to the term ics, Pragya Agarwal, a behavioral scien-
their anxiety.” “gaslighting,” and fear something will tist and a writer based between Ireland
We both laughed. In the moment, be taken away from them if she disputes and the U.K., believes that it’s more use-
this jolt of recognition seemed inciden- it. The question of what would be taken ful to consider the phenomenon from
tal, a brief diversion into daily life as we away is an illuminating one, and it raises a sociological perspective. “People who
crawled through the darker trenches of an even trickier question: what did the have less power because of their status
human manipulation. But, after I’d left dynamic give them in the first place? in society, whether it be gender, race,
Kafka’s office, it started to feel like a The issue of susceptibility gets thorny class, and so on, are more susceptible to
crucial acknowledgment: that gaslighting quickly; it can appear to veer danger- being gaslighted,” she told me. “Their
is neither as exotic nor as categorically ously close to victim-blaming. Ashtor inferior status is used as leverage to in-
distinct as we’d like to believe. doesn’t believe in the old psychoana- validate their experiences and testimo-
lytic idea that everything that happens nies.” She spoke of instances in medi-
ila Ashtor, a psychoanalyst and a to us is somehow desired, but she does cine in which genuinely ill patients are
G professor at Columbia University,
told me she often sees patients experi-
think that it’s worthwhile to investigate
why people find themselves in certain
repeatedly told that their symptoms are
psychosomatic. Endometriosis, for ex-
ence a profound sense of relief when it toxic dynamics. Without discounting ample, is an underdiagnosed condition,
occurs to them that they may have been the genuine suffering involved, she finds she said, because women’s pain is often
gaslit. As she put it, “It’s like light at the it useful to ask what her patients were discounted. Similarly, in the workplace,
end of the tunnel.” But Ashtor worries seeking. Ashtor wondered aloud to me minorities who report microaggressions
that such relief may be deceptive, in that whether there could be something may be told that they are being “too
it risks effacing the particular (often un- sensitive” or that the offending colleague
conscious) reasons they may have been “didn’t mean it like that.”
drawn to the dynamic. Ashtor defines In this view of gaslighting, it be-
gaslighting as “the voluntary relinquish- comes harder to see the utility of sus-
ing of one’s narrative to another person,” ceptibility as a framing concept. When
and the word “voluntary” is crucial— I asked Agarwal about what role the
that’s what makes it a dynamic rather gaslit party might play in the dynamic,
than just a unilateral act of violence. For she replied, “I don’t believe that it is
Ashtor, it’s not a question of blaming the responsibility of the oppressed to
the victim but of examining their sus- create conditions where they wouldn’t
ceptibility: what makes someone ready “good” about gaslighting, and why it be oppressed.”
to accept another person’s narrative of feels so transgressive even to suggest
their own experience? What might they that this might be the case. “There’s a hat does the gaslighter want? In
have been seeking?
In addition to working as a psycho-
real appeal in adopting someone else’s
view of the world and escaping our own,”
W the 1944 film, the gaslighter’s mo-
tivation (to steal Paula’s jewels) is so car-
analyst, Ashtor has studied and taught she told me. “There are very few ac- toonishly superficial that it seems like a
in Columbia’s M.F.A. program in cre- ceptable outlets in our lives for this hun- stand-in for something larger—a meta-
ative nonfiction (where I also teach), and ger for difference.” phor for the desire to undermine a wom-
she thinks a lot about the connections Ashtor thinks that therapeutic ex- an’s self-confidence, perhaps, in order to
between gaslighting and personal nar- amination of a gaslighting dynamic can keep her dependent. In real life, casting
rative. I asked her how patients tend to bring you closer to understanding some- the gaslighter as a two-dimensional villain
narrate their gaslighting experiences: thing crucial about yourself: a compli- seems insufficient, another way of avoiding
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 17
a reckoning with complicity and desire. It doesn’t help that the accusation is she inhabits the role of madwoman as
The question of the gaslighter’s essentially unanswerable: “No, I’m not” a repurposed costume:
motivation often becomes a chicken-or- is exactly what a gaslighter would say. How can a madwoman help her husband
egg dilemma: whether their impulse to Even a third party who disputes some- to escape? . . . If I were not mad, I could have
destabilize another person’s sense of re- one’s account of being gaslit is threat- helped you. . . . But because I am mad, I hate
ality stems primarily from wanting to ening to inflict the same harm as the you. Because I am mad, I have betrayed you.
harm that person or from wanting to gaslighter. No wonder the issue of proof And because I’m mad, I’m rejoicing in my heart,
without a shred of pity, without a shred of re-
corroborate their own truth. Think of is crucial in many accounts of gaslighting: gret, watching you go with glory in my heart!
the college boyfriend who convinces his the tights on the boat, the charts that
girlfriend that all sex involves violence— show decades of hearing loss, the other On its surface, this final scene offers
is his fundamental investment in con- women who were assaulted. These are us a clear, happy ending. The gaslit party
trolling her or in somehow justifying his empirical life preservers that pull us out triumphs and objective truth prevails.
own desires? Abramson writes that both of the epistemic whirlpool. In proving But deeper down it gestures toward a
goals can be at play simultaneously, such that our past perceptions were correct more complex vision of gaslighting: as
that a gaslighter may be “trying to rad- after all, they also seem to guarantee a reciprocal exchange in which both
ically undermine his target” and also, “in that we are correct now in our feeling parties take turns as gaslit and gaslighter.
a perfectly ordinary way, trying to tell of having been hurt. This is a version of gaslighting that psy-
himself a story about why there’s noth- Such certainty is possible only in ret- choanalysis is more congenial to. In the
ing that happened with which he needs rospect, however. Inside the experience Psychoanalytic Quarterly article from 1981,
to deal.” (Indeed, as she points out, gas- of gaslighting, Abramson writes, “the the authors describe a “gaslighting part-
lighters “are often not consciously trying gaslit find themselves tossed between nership” whose participants may “oscil-
to drive their targets crazy,” so they may trust and distrust, unstably occupying late” between roles: “Not infrequently,
not always be self-aware enough to dis- a world between the two.” Which is to each of the participants is convinced
tinguish between these reasons.) If the say, the more adamant you are that you’re that he or she is the victim.”
need to affirm one’s own version of re- being gaslit, the more probable it is that In this sense, gaslighting is both more
ality is pretty much universal, it makes you’re not. On Reddit, a man laments, and less common than we think. Ex-
sense that a desire to attack someone “My last GF loved to tell me I was ‘gas- treme cases undoubtedly occur, and de-
else’s competing version is universal, too. lighting’ her every time I simply had a serve recognition as such, but to under-
Yet, in the popular discourse, it can seem different opinion than hers. Infuriat- stand the phenomenon exclusively in
as if everyone has been gaslit but no one ing.” Has he been gaslit into thinking light of these dire examples allows us
will admit to doing the gaslighting. he’s a gaslighter? to avoid the more uncomfortable no-
Kristin Dombek, in her 2014 book, Part of the tremendously broad trac- tion that something similar takes place
“The Selfishness of Others: An Essay tion of the concept, I suspect, has to do in many intimate relationships. One
on the Fear of Narcissism,” discusses how with the fact that gaslighting is adjacent doesn’t have to dilute the definition of
narcissism, once solely a clinical diagno- to so many common relationship dy- gaslighting to recognize that it happens
sis, became an all-purpose buzzword. In namics: not only disagreeing on a shared on many scales, from extremely toxic to
her view, we hurl the accusation of patho- version of reality but feeling that you are undeniably commonplace.
logical selfishness at others as a way of in a contest over which version prevails. Ben Kafka told me that he thinks
making sense of the feeling of being ig- It would be nearly impossible to find one of the key insights of psychoanal-
nored or slighted. Gaslighting is not a someone who hasn’t experienced the ysis is that people respond to anxiety by
clinical diagnosis, but, as with narcissism, pain and frustration—utterly ordinary, dividing the world into good and bad,
less precise applications of the term can but often unbearable—that comes when a tendency known as “splitting.” It strikes
be a way to take an inevitable source of your own sense of reality diverges from me that some version of this splitting
pain—the fact of disagreement, or the someone else’s. Because this gap can feel is at play not only in gaslighting itself—
fact that we are not the center of other so maddening and wounding, it can be taking an undesirable “bad” emotion or
people’s lives—and turn it into an act of a relief to attribute it to villainy. quality and projecting it onto someone
wrongdoing. This is not to say that nar- else, so that the self can remain “good”—
cissism or gaslighting don’t exist, but that, t the climax of Cukor’s film, Paula but also in the widespread invocation
in seeing them everywhere, we risk not
just diluting the concepts but also attrib-
A confronts her husband with the
truth of his manipulations. (He has been
of the term, the impulse to split the
world into innocent and culpable par-
uting natural human friction to the ma- tied to a chair by a helpful detective. ties. If the capacity to gaslight is more
levolence of others. Although “gas- She is brandishing a knife.) He doubles widely distributed than its most extreme
lighting” is a term that many members down on his old tricks, trying to con- iterations would lead us to believe, per-
of Gen Z have grown up with, one teen- vince her that she has misinterpreted haps we’ve all done more of it than we
ager I know expresses its perils in this the evidence and should cut him free. care to admit. Each of us has been the
vein succinctly: “Every time someone But Paula turns his own game against one making our way back into bed, vul-
gets criticized or called out, they just him: “Are you suggesting that this is a nerable and naked, and each of us has
say, ‘Oh, you’re gaslighting me,’ and it knife I hold in my hand? Have you gone been the one saying, Come back into
makes the other person the bad guy.” mad, my husband?” In a further twist, this bed I made for you. 
18 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
 bigger than the rest of the snake. You’re
SHOUTS & MURMURS welcome, Mother Earth.

Oil on ducks: We pledge to stop putting

crude oil on those baby ducks that you
see in soap commercials. Those ducks
are, as our founder, J. M. Milligan, loved
to say, “slipperier than a drunk Italian
with a pregnant wife.” He said this
about oil-slicked ducks as recently as
1951. But we will not do this anymore.

Girlbosses: We pledge that at least fif-

teen per cent of SaaxoAmco executives
will be women. Is that what we’re doing
here? Is that what people are mad about
OUR ENVIRONMENTAL PLEDGE right now? Feels like it can’t hurt, right?

BY MEGAN AMRAM Going green: We are making SaaxoAmco

literally go green by dumping all the
t’s National Environmental Awareness are the only things that will protect runoff from our pipelines straight into
I Month, and all of us at SaaxoAmco
Petroleum Corp. are dedicated to using
us from the Irish.” That sort of for-
ward-thinking environmentalism has
a shallow lake, where it turns the for-
merly clean drinking water a neon green.
our powerful access and responsibility to been part of our brief since 1863. Also—and this is fun—it makes every-
insure that the Earth is a healthier and thing it touches form a human penis.
cleaner place for future generations. To C-suite jet racing: Because we are so There are lily pads with human penises,
demonstrate our dedication, we would dedicated to the future of this planet, even some water spiders with human
like to announce a new array of environ- our C-suite will no longer use the com- penises. We don’t understand it even a
mental-progress investment areas. pany’s private jets to drag-race in the little bit, but did van Gogh question
sky. Sure, it’s the most fun thing ever what made his masterpieces beautiful
Carbon offset: For every pipeline that and life is barely worth living without or what gave him a human penis?
we build, we will plant one tree in a local it, but we’ll make the sacrifice.
park. We will then cut down the tree to Oceanic symphonic harmonization: This
make paper to send a memo to that Greenhouse-gas capture: I think we are new SaaxoAmco project harnesses the
town’s mayor to announce that we have capturing carbon dioxide. I haven’t boundless potential of resonating fre-
planted the tree so that the public knows followed up, but I’m pretty sure I quencies, psychedelic sonatas, and
to come and look at the tree. Just in case heard a guy say that we were, like, rhythmic ripples, in order to foster an
the public doesn’t know exactly where seven years ago in the break room. otherworldly bond between marine life
the tree is, we will make hundreds of As our founder, J. M. Milligan, said and the cosmos. Isn’t this good gibber-
thousands of paper maps available to in 1870, “The Earth is a beautiful place ish? Thanks to our panel of highly paid
show the location of the tree before we and we should keep it that way. The eco-experts, this fake process that
cut it down, so that visitors won’t need only real downside is that Jews live doesn’t exist will save up to zero bio-
to use their phones (whose batteries are here and poison all the bread and species and sounds real!
the world’s leading cause of pollution, candy unless we make them live un-
as per a bunch of studies). This will derground in special sewers.” We agree Killing people: We care about saving the
mean that it will soon take only four with the first part! human race more than anything, which
thousand trees to see a tree that used to is why we pledge to kill more people than
be there! And get this. The mayor we Biodiversity: SaaxoAmco is committed ever before. Human beings have huge
told you about? She’s a woman! to fostering biodiversity, which is why carbon footprints, and by killing about
we take responsibility for the roughly seven thousand people a day (that’s about
Minimizing operational waste: At all of sixteen hundred new species of flora thirty-five hundred human penises) we
our offices, digs, and pipeline sites, we and fauna that were created when we will do the equivalent of planting a million
have forbidden our employees to drink dumped toxic sludge into the oceans. and a half trees. We’ll do this any way
bottled water. We have also forbidden Who cares about old-fashioned ani- we can—not just by polluting the planet
them to drink any water whatsoever, mals like the “black bear” and the “bum- but by taking to the streets with knives
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

so that it can be saved for the flowers blebee”? We can give you a snake with and bayonets if we have to. By the time
and the beetles. In the words of our a human penis! The eco-possibilities SaaxoAmco is done, no one will have to
founder, J. M. Milligan, “We need to are endless. And I don’t know what live on a polluted planet Earth anymore.
look out for the beetles, because they you’re imagining, but the penis is much No one will have to live anywhere. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 19
 suit, a sports jersey, flip-flops, a ball cap,
DEPT. OF GASTRONOMY or any of three kinds of shorts. The
toughest reservation in France, it turns
out, is not at a Michelin-starred desti-
FEAST MODE nation like Mirazur or Septime. It’s at
an all-you-can-eat buffet situated in a
The hottest table in France is an all-you-can-eat buffet in a local rec center. municipal rec center in the smallish city
of Narbonne.
BY LAUREN COLLINS Last year, more than three hundred
and eighty thousand people paid fifty-
y friend Guillaume is always tell- the sky, as though it had just slayed a two euros and ninety centimes for the
M ing me interesting things. Like:
there’s a dance called the Madison that
halftime show, amid a cloud of mist.
The restaurant is called Les Grands
pleasure of visiting Les Grands Buffets.
Drinks cost extra, but they are sold at a
many French people think is a regular Buffets. A week or so later, I went to its minimal markup, so a bottle of Mercier
feature of parties in the United States. Web site, and entered my e-mail ad- champagne costs twenty-five euros,
Guillaume recently alerted me that a dress to receive a secure link to make a about the same as it does in the super-
man who was fired for not being fun reservation online. It was late July. The market. Everything else is unlimited,
enough at work got his job back, win- next available table was for a Wednes- from caviar to stewed tripe. There are
ning five hundred thousand euros in a day in December, at 8:45 p.m. “We re- nine kinds of foie gras on offer, and five
landmark case. Last summer, I went to mind you that this reservation is non- pâtés en croûte, including one known
dinner at Guillaume’s, and he mentioned modifiable, you cannot change the as Sleeping Beauty’s Pillow, which in-
a restaurant, an all-you-can-eat buffet number of guests, the date of the meal, volves a panoply of meats (chicken,
not far from his home town in the South the hour of the meal, or the name of duck, wild boar, hare, quail, sweetbreads,
of France. He had just celebrated his the beneficiary,” the confirmation e-mail ground pork) and is considered by con-
birthday there. There was talk of flam- read. If I wanted to bring children under noisseurs to be “charcuterie’s holy grail.”
ing duck and a chocolate fountain. Guil- ten years of age, I needed to submit The chef Michel Guérard has called
laume showed me a picture of the crys- their names at least three days in ad- Les Grands Buffets “the greatest culi-
tal-curtained lobster tower—seven layers vance. (They eat at discounted rates.) I nary theater in the world.” Guinness
of vermillion crustaceans, topped by an would be refused entry if I showed up has certified its cheese platter, featuring
upright specimen thrusting its claws to in sweatpants, an undershirt, a bathing a hundred and eleven varieties, as the

“More than a gargantuan orgy,” one newspaper reported, the restaurant is “a sort of conservatory of the nation’s gastronomy.”
20 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEXANDER COGGIN
largest known to restaurant-going man. consigned silver to drawers, is, Privat It was nearly the end of lunchtime.
It’s more of a cheese room. thinks, a cost-cutting crusade masquer- Guests clustered around the dessert bar,
All-you-can-eat buffets are usually as- ading as a trend. “Our golden rule is where chocolate flowed down the fa-
sociated with a catholic array of foods: that, if it’s complicated, then that’s a mous fountain in glossy sheets. They la-
California rolls and king-crab legs, baby good reason to do it,” he said. dled chocolate onto strawberries, pine-
back ribs alongside pasta bakes and hot- Pascal Lardellier, an anthropologist apple chunks, financiers, and canelés from
fudge sundaes. However, Les Grands at the University of Burgundy, calls Les separate vats offering a choice of white,
Buffets serves only what it considers to Grands Buffets “the site of all the super- dark, and milk. As Roy Strong writes in
be traditional French food. You will find latives.” Last year, it brought in twenty- “Feast: A History of Grand Eating,”
chorizo at the charcuterie station, but four million euros in revenue, which re- fountains have dazzled diners for centu-
there is no pizza, paella, or couscous, no portedly makes it the highest-grossing ries, disgorging rose water and eau de
nems or thiéboudiène, even though more restaurant in France. The Sybarites of muscade. One attendee of a banquet in
than a tenth of people living in France ancient Greece issued invitations to guests Lille in 1454 recalled a statue of a naked
were born elsewhere. Les Grands Buf- up to a year in advance, so that they would girl, guarded by a real lion, who sprayed
fets takes a panoramic view of the French have time to prepare their outfits and mulled wine from her right breast.
classics, ranging from the palace-hotel jewelry. Fans of Les Grands Buffets also An employee led me to the tented
repertoire (lièvre à la royale, peach Melba) book up to a year in advance, and spend room, where Louis Privat was finishing
to bourgeois cooking (veal blanquette, the intervening months dreaming of how up a meal with a pair of V.I.P.s. Privat
bœuf bourguignonne), regional specialties they’ll fill their plates. “My husband and is seventy, with cornflower-blue eyes
(quenelles de brochet, pissaladière), and I can’t dine out often,” one repeat cus- and a meringue of gray hair. He was
rustic dishes (snails, frogs’ legs). “More tomer wrote on Facebook, “so we prefer wearing a black cashmere turtleneck,
than a gargantuan orgy,” Le Journal du to reserve our leisure budget exclusively and bemoaning chefs’ attempts to pass
Dimanche reports, the restaurant repre- for Les Grands Buffets.” off bastardized forms of classic dishes
sents “a sort of conservatory of the nation’s on an unsuspecting public. “It’s tom-
gastronomy.”The effect is something like hen December came around, I foolery,” he said. Imagine: serving a Mont
a Golden Corral by Auguste Escoffier.
Les Grands Buffets has four dining
W caught a train from Paris and rode
south for five hours before arriving in
Blanc without chestnuts, or calling a
plate of beans a cassoulet. He contin-
rooms, sumptuously decorated in differ- Narbonne, less than seventy miles north ued, “That’s the main fight we’re lead-
ent styles. One has an Art Deco theme. of the border with Spain. The city cen- ing today, not to let these dishes be cor-
Another is a tented room, paying trib- ter, with Roman ruins and a fantastically rupted, even if the recipes aren’t patented.”
ute to Louis XIV, complete with an orig- old-school market hall, was within walk- At another table, a corps of waiters
inal 1697 map by the King’s engraver. ing distance, but I took a cab toward the wheeled out a gramophone that played
Chandeliers made by the craftsmen who outskirts of town. Bypassing gas stations André Claveau crooning “Bon anniver-
light the Château de Chambord cast a and a KFC, we circled a roundabout, saire.” Out the window, one could
lush glow over lemon trees planted in where an inflatable snowman bobbed in glimpse a five-story waterslide.
wooden boxes originally designed for the wind. Finally, we arrived at a mas- Privat ordered tulip-shaped glasses
the gardens at Versailles. Tables through- sive leisure complex built by the local of raspberry eau de vie—an eight-euro-
out are set in a grand style, down to the government in the nineteen-eighties. In- and-fifty-centime supplement—for his
fish knives. Waiters clear plates and serve side, gray light streamed through a py- guests. In the restaurant’s gilded ice-
drinks, instead of leaving guests to a soda ramidal skylight, accentuating turquoise cream parlor, diners availed themselves
fountain, squirting cherry Coke into the exposed pipes. From the lobby, you could of eleven flavors, along with Irish cof-
same paper cup as Tropicana and Sprite. enter a bowling alley, an ice rink, a swim- fee and lemon ice doused in vodka. Also
Louis Privat, the restaurant’s propri- ming pool, or Les Grands Buffets. The on offer was the trou normand, or Nor-
etor, believes that gastronomy is suffer- restaurant’s entrance, in cherry wood and man hole—a shot of Calvados served
ing from globalization: everything is the gleaming brass, brought to mind the over apple sorbet, which is said to coun-
same everywhere, and even some of the cabin of an ocean liner, plunked down teract the sensation of a full stomach.
most creative cuisine, he says, “has lost on the set of “Saved by the Bell.” The restaurant serves about a hundred
its national identity.” In his view, French In the vestibule, floor-to-ceiling cab- and fifty trous normands during each
people, especially the young, need rein- inets displayed a collection of silver serv- service of five hundred diners. Some
troduction to the culture of the table and ing dishes. Nearby, what was supposedly guests take more than one. They are
its associated arts. He sees his restaurant the world’s biggest silver fork was welcome to. “Our job is to rid people of
as something like a “Louvre of dishes,” mounted on a wall. While waiting for their inhibitions,” Privat said.
with a pedagogic mission as well as an the maître d’, a customer could step on Like all buffets, Les Grands Buffets
epicurean one. “Why would you put a an antique scale the size of a grandfa- is a volume business. About eighty-five
tarte Tatin in a shot glass?” he said to ther clock. Lest that put him in an ab- per cent of the restaurant’s patrons are
me recently, a cloud of despair passing stemious mood, a golden plaque dis- French; others come in large numbers
over his face. The bistronomy move- played a quote in Middle French, from from Belgium and Spain, notwithstanding
ment, which in the past thirty years has Rabelais’s “Gargantua”: “Fay ce que voul- a decision by Les Grands Buffets to pro-
whisked the cloths off French tables and dras,” it commanded—“Do as you wish.” hibit tour buses. Hardly a year passes
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 21
 for my liking, so I went back to the des-
sert station, trying to think of a French
delicacy that wasn’t represented. But they
were all there, from technical feats like île
flottante to spoonable goops like choco-
late mousse. In a nook, an employee was
flambéing crêpes on a silver chariot that
originally belonged to Le Negresco hotel,
in Nice. Despite the foreign-food ban, a
brownie had sneaked into the offering.
(The French pronounce it “broonie,” by
the way.) I took a slice of opéra cake—al-
mond sponge, buttercream, coffee syrup,
chocolate ganache—and thought of le
droit à l’erreur. The principle, enshrined
in a 2018 French law, minimizes punish-
ment for people who screw up their taxes
in good faith. I added a dollop of prunes
stewed in red wine to my plate. Like few
things in life, the all-you-can-eat buffet
guarantees the right to make mistakes.
“Out of the way— “Out of the way—he’s
he writer André Borel d’Hauterive
I’m a doctor!” not in-network.”
T once attempted a taxonomy of eat-
ers: the gastronome (appreciates good food
• • and wine and partakes reasonably), the
gourmand (prefers quantity to quality),
without Privat dreaming up a new en- nia, which bills itself as America’s the friand (has a sweet tooth), the goinfre
ticement or entertainment. “We add largest all-you-can-eat buffet, the vibe (eats enthusiastically to excess), the ventru
things all the time, but we hardly ever is almost prosecutorial. “Don’t Risk It (“makes a God of his stomach”), the glou-
take things away,” he said. (A fancy ver- for a Biscuit,” the restaurant admonishes ton (dessert comes and he has no idea
sion of mashed potatoes, he admitted, diners, warning that anybody who pock- what he’s eaten), the goulu (dessert comes
had not been a success.) Irène Derose, a ets a roll will be treated as a shoplifter. and he has no idea how much he’s eaten).
retired bank employee who lives in a vil- (I couldn’t help but think of the “Simp- Buffet-goers might fall into any of
lage in the Hérault, has been to Les sons” episode in which Homer is dragged these categories, but their chosen pursuit
Grands Buffets eighteen times, most re- out of the Frying Dutchman by the arm- requires a logistical edge. There are com-
cently for her birthday, which she cele- pits after helping himself to a whole petitors to be assessed, maneuvers to be
brated by eating both lunch and dinner steam tray of shrimp.) considered, routes to be mapped. I was
at the restaurant. “And I still haven’t tasted By contrast, Privat practices a sort of reminded of a football playbook as I
everything,” she told me. gastronomic prosperity gospel. He be- studied a brochure that featured a bird’s-
Restaurateurs typically adhere to a lieves that the client who feels that he eye view of Les Grands Buffets, with ar-
three-hundred-per-cent markup, so that is not being taken advantage of will rows indicating various counters (“Ice
a hanger steak that costs five euros appears relax; the client who is relaxed will have Cream Shop,” “9 Kinds of Ham”). If a
on the menu at fifteen, and a filet that another glass of wine; the client who day at Disneyland is all about beating
costs ten goes for thirty. Because Privat’s enjoys his wine will go home with a case the lines, a meal at Les Grands Buffets
costs are relatively flat—he serves the (rendering the bottle drunk at the table is an exercise in optimizing calories. Some
same thing every day to a consistent num- gratis); the client who savors his case at expert buffet-goers swear by starting with
ber of diners and receives bulk discounts— home will come back. “I prefer to get the most expensive stuff, or by assem-
he chooses to earn his margin as a sta- away from this logic of rationing,” Pri- bling an “introductory taster plate.” Oth-
ble rate, rather than as a multiple. “It’s vat said. “If you give, you will receive.” ers warn against maxing out on carbs.
the same supplier, the same refrigerator, He suggested that we sample the One Reddit tactician writes, “NEVER
the same cook,” he said. “What justifies restaurant’s russe: a striated dessert of take a single piece of food until you do
taking ten euros on one dish and twenty sponge cake and praline cream. It was a preliminary reconnaissance sweep of
on the other? Here, if you want to eat concocted by a French baker in the nine- the entire buffet. No use filling up on
something better, I take the same amount.” teen-twenties, but was named either for fried chicken breasts when there’s a prime
Some buffets jack up their prices on its main ingredient, almonds sourced from rib carvery station at the end.”
weekends or charge customers for un- Crimea, or for the sprinkling of powdered Les Grands Buffets prides itself on
eaten food. At Shady Maple Smorgas- sugar on top that recalls the snowy Sibe- never running out of anything. At the
bord, in Lancaster County, Pennsylva- rian steppes. The russe was a touch sweet same time, the restaurant claims to pro-
22 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
duce little waste. “We know down to the There is just one rule at Les Grands risians frequented buffets such as one
gram how much to allot for each client,” Buffets: at the stations where diners that stood at 10 Boulevard Montmar-
Pierre Cavalier, the general manager, told place orders instead of helping them- tre, offering a choice of dishes at sixty
me. “The foie gras, for example—it’s not selves, they can take only one dish at a centimes, seventy-five centimes, and one
fifty or fifty-one, it’s precisely forty-eight time. This creates a minor barrier to franc. “No table, no utensils, no garçon,”
grams!”The average customer, he contin- marquee food while insuring that cus- one journalist noted. “Some people talk
ued, goes through 1.3 oysters and 7.4 plates. tomers can get it hot. At the rotisserie, about these places as the first fast food
(He added that leftovers go toward staff a short line had formed in front of a in France,” Loïc Bienassis, of the Euro-
meals for the restaurant’s two hundred stylish open kitchen, where cooks in pean Institute for the History of Cul-
employees.) Once, as the stock of shrimp toques bustled around, wielding copper ture and Food, said. “That’s debatable,
dipped perilously low, Cavalier jumped pots. Privat sees the restaurant as a pre- but it’s certain that they were intended
into his car and sped to the local fishmon- serve not only of hard-to-find dishes for eaters in a hurry.”
ger to get more. “Without looking at the but also of disappearing métiers: rôtis- With the advent of railroads, buffets
price, I bought everything they had,” he seur, écailler, saucier. A sign bore a list of gained widespread popularity in France.
recalled. “The diners were lucky that day.” twenty-six specialties that customers They were a particularly convenient for-
The atmosphere at Les Grands Buf- could have prepared in front of them. mat for train stations, where hungry pas-
fets is calm and even reverent. Still, strat- A man stepped up to the counter and sengers came and went throughout the
agems abound. I saw one multigenera- ordered an omelette with cèpes. day. As the pace of travel accelerated,
tional family gathered around a table The orders went out over a micro- these “station buffets” suffered. Le Monde
loaded with plates, each containing a phone. “Oui, chef ! ” the underlings called. reported in 1955 that only about four
single foodstuff: rillettes, saucisson, pâté (Privat had warned them in a staff meet- hundred were left. At the same time,
en croûte, œufs mimosa, organic crudi- ing that morning that just “oui” or “ouais” though, buffets were enjoying success at
tés. Their postures were relaxed and the would not suffice.) The customer waited all-inclusive holiday destinations such as
conversation was flowing, as was the with a ticket, which he exchanged for Club Med. The generation that had sur-
twenty-five-euro champagne. I realized the dish once it appeared. The plates vived the Second World War “knew what
that they had decided to set up an apéro— kept coming: marrowbones, tournedos it was to lack,” Kilien Stengel, of the Uni-
the French equivalent of cocktail hour, Rossini, andouillette with mustard sauce, versity of Tours, told Madame Figaro.
except that it often lasts much longer— a whole roasted turbot. At the back of Bienassis sees buffets as the gastronomic
just as they would have at home. Every the kitchen, a cook stood on a raised manifestation of postwar economic pros-
so often, someone would pop a cherry platform, basting a suckling pig. perity, reflecting “a society that no lon-
tomato into his mouth. ger measured, that had stopped count-
Cavalier showed me around the main ood historians trace the origins of ing, that believed in infinite growth.”
floor. That morning, staff members had
prepared each station according to spec-
F the modern buffet to the seventeenth
century, when Louis XIV entertained at
Swedes popularized the buffet in
America with a revolving smorgasbord
ifications laid out on laminated pages in impromptus and soirées d’appartement, his at the 1939 World’s Fair. In the mid-for-
a binder. “Obviously, the notion is sub- servants quickly dressing tables with sil- ties, the El Rancho Hotel opened Las
jective, but everything needs to look ap- ver torches, pyramids of flowers, and fil- Vegas’s first all-you-can-eat buffet, lur-
petizing,” Cavalier said. He adjusted the igreed baskets heaving with oranges, lem- ing deal-seeking gamblers to the Buck-
claw of a crab: “They’re all supposed to ons, and candied fruits. This aristocratic aroo Buffet “chuck wagon.”The concept
point in the same direction.” The cheese caught on, with Sin City becoming the
room emitted a farmyard odor, but he historic home of an exuberant strain of
was unbothered. “Some clients who don’t gluttony. “The South has fried chicken,
like cheese complain that it stinks, but Texas has barbecue, Chicago has hot
we own it,” he said. (A new ventilation dogs, New York has pizza and Las Vegas
system has apparently helped.) has them all,” C. Moon Reed, of Las
Cavalier noted with satisfaction that Vegas Weekly, writes. “That is to say, our
many patrons were following the clas- regional cuisine is the buffet.”
sic sequence of hors d’œuvre, fish, meat, I have loved buffets since childhood—
salad, cheese, and dessert. Some people if my dad was working late, my mom
think that there is a correlation between habit was eventually codified as service sometimes took us to a “steak house”
price and abandon: the cheaper the buf- à la française, distinguished by the prac- chain called Quincy’s. It may have served
fet, the higher the customers stack their tice of putting multiple dishes on the sirloins and filets, but I never saw them,
plates. If Shoney’s inspires teetering sky- table at once. “The buffet, historically, loading up instead on yeast rolls and ice
scrapers of meat loaf and onion rings, c’est chic,” Madame Figaro recently de- cream from a soft-serve machine. Call
Les Grands Buffets encourages hori- clared, in an article about the resurgence them tacky, or repulsive, but buffets elicit
zontality, with stuffed quails and leeks of all-you-can-eat restaurants. a hopeful, almost juvenile feeling of pos-
vinaigrette and babas au rhum stretch- The first commercial buffets likely sibility. As with a scavenger hunt, there
ing neatly into the distance, an endless originated in gaming houses and at tick- is a satisfaction in checking things off
suburb of plates. eted balls. In the nineteenth century, Pa- your list. As with a yard sale, you never
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 23
know what kinds of treasure you’ll find, chains folded in 2020 and 2021. But both the success of Les Grands Buffets has led
nestled amid the junk. budget-conscious and high-end buffets to imitators elsewhere in France. Custom-
One person’s plenty, however, is an- have partially recovered since the pan- ers at one restaurant in the southwest,
other’s overkill. Even in the first century, demic, aided by inflation, social media, for instance, can visit a familiar-looking
Petronius was satirizing the culinary ex- and the pent-up desire for communal fun. array of stations, right down to a rotisserie
cesses of wealthy Romans, envisioning a “We’re the comeback kids,” the C.E.O. with a raised platform for basting meats.
banquet at which slaves trimmed guests’ of Golden Corral told the Times. The
toenails and the belly of a gutted pig dis- Bacchanal Buffet at Caesars Palace
gorged sausages and puddings. In the
1973 film “La Grande Bouffe,” a group of
charges up to $84.99 a head for a mind-
boggling spread (Filipino congee, red-
IJeannin thedethelaevening, I dined with Privat
newly constructed Salon Doré
Fontaine. It is decorated in a
friends retreat to a villa and stuff them- velvet waffles, an omelette bar, birria tacos). neoclassical style and pays tribute to the
selves to death on meats, sweets, and the In College Point, New York, the Buffet seventeenth-century fabulist, immortal-
decadence of a consumerist society in recently augmented its pan-Asian offer- ized in a series of murals featuring his
which everyone has to have everything ings (sushi, hibachi, dim sum, teppanyaki) crafty foxes and unsuspecting crows. “I
all at once. with a Brazilian Churrasco Experience. wanted to reopen in a flamboyant fash-
Covid was supposed to kill buffets, In France, elaborate buffets featuring ion after the pandemic,” Privat explained.
which have long been associated in the attractions such as koi ponds and kara- He looked around the dining room. To
public imagination with dubious hy- oke have lately become popular. Accord- his satisfaction, many people were dressed
giene. The fear is sometimes warranted: ing to Le Monde, around seventy per for the occasion. There were several
a 1987 study of customers in self-service cent are run by people of Chinese de- women wearing sequins. A toddler sucked
restaurants observed nearly a dozen scent, many with roots in Wenzhou. “An on a pacifier clipped to his shirt with a
“problem behaviors” in salad bars alone, essential element of peri-urban civiliza- spiffy gold chain.
reporting that “licking fingers was noted tion, with its housing estates and ware- Privat was born in Narbonne. His fa-
45 times and most frequently associated houses, maxibuffets, most of which are ther was a doctor, with a thriving clinic,
with salad dressings.” At Les Grands halal, attract a middle class who want which his mother helped run.They hoped
Buffets, most of the cold offerings are to taste chic without emptying their wal- that Privat would work at the clinic one
presented on specially designed refrig- lets,” the article notes. Les Grands Buf- day. He pursued acting instead, joining
erated slabs, and Cavalier told me that fets strives to set itself apart from its a theatre troupe in Toulouse. Later, he
the restaurant works with an indepen- anything-goes peers, calling itself, for studied international commerce and be-
dent lab to develop its hygiene proto- example, an “eat-what-you-wish” rather came a certified accountant. In his thir-
cols. “If they tell us that something lasts than an “all-you-can-eat” buffet. ties, Privat and his soon-to-be wife, Jane,
five days, then we give it two,” he said. At one point, Privat griped that a cer- took over a dusty restaurant at the sea-
“The idea, as I’m sure you can under- tain Hong Kong restaurant had plagia- side near Narbonne. ( Jane is now the
stand, is never to take a risk.” rized his concept. I went to its Web site purchasing manager at Les Grands Buf-
According to IBISWorld, a market- and wasn’t too convinced. For one thing, fets.) They renovated everything in a
research company, several mid-range the place serves abalone and curries. Yet blue-and-white scheme and replaced the
frozen food and canned sauces with fresh
local fish. The restaurant was a success,
but by then the Privats had two children,
and its seasonal rhythms clashed with
their desire for a peaceful family life.
In 1989, Narbonne was looking for
someone to handle catering in the new
rec center. The Privats decided to put
in a bid. “At the time, especially in the
provinces, going to a restaurant was
hardly the habit that it is today,” Louis
Privat once recalled. He knew that in
order to flourish they would have to
draw people from far beyond the city.
So he decided to offer something novel:
an all-you-can-eat cafeteria. Little by
little, he upgraded the menu and tricked
out the décor. The hyper-French con-
cept emerged only gradually—a brand
identity as much as a patriotic convic-
tion. “We had sushi,” Cavalier confessed,
of the early days, during our tour.
“I have a theory that too much sunlight isn’t good for you.” Privat can come off as something of
a reactionary, valorizing a national culture bonnais, Malquier told me fondly, has a tower. I ate no more and no less than
that has probably never been as homo- been to Les Grands Buffets at least once. usual, took no chances, enrobed no straw-
geneous as he would like to think. But In fact, his family had just celebrated his berries, commissioned no omelettes,
his politics are less predictable than his son’s eleventh birthday there. Malquier made no mistakes. I missed Les Grands
tarte-Tatin fetish and his lectures about had discovered a delicious new cheese. Buffets. The point of all its over-the-top
manners might lead one to believe. Les It was actually from England—Stilton, excess might actually be a kind of scar-
Grands Buffets offers interest-free loans he thought it was called? city: an experience so bonkers that it’s
to help employees pay off debt, and work- exceedingly rare.
ers participate in a profit-sharing agree- ecently, I was listening to “On Va Before I left Narbonne, I returned
ment. In 2022, Privat made headlines
around the country for raising buffet
R Déguster,” a popular French radio
show, when the host mentioned BOULOM,
for a final meal at Les Grands Buffets.
Precisely at noon, I dropped my stuff at
prices in order to bring up employee in- an all-you-can-eat buffet in the Eigh- a table for one in the tent room and went
come by an average of about thirty per teenth Arrondissement of Paris that was, off to fill my first plate. I started with
cent. And, for all their talk about French according to the show, “turn- the caviar (technically, it’s
tradition, Privat abstains from alcohol, ing away hundreds of peo- just “f ish eggs”), simply
and Cavalier eats meat at work but “not ple a weekend.” BOULOM is being greedy. Then I added
in my private life,” because of ethical con- the venture of Julien Du- some stuffed mussels, be-
cerns. Over the years, scores of investors boué, a classically trained cause someone had recom-
have tried to persuade Privat to expand chef (he’s worked at George mended them; some leeks
Les Grands Buffets to other locations. V and with Daniel Boulud), mimosa, for health; some
He has refused, because he considers the and it has garnered fantas- Serrano ham, because Les
bald pursuit of profit pointless, and the tic reviews in publications Grands Buffets lets you put
idea of churning out imitations bores such as Le Figaro, which on a metal glove and shave
him. “Using Les Grands Buffets as an congratulated Duboué for your morsel off the leg your-
A.T.M. doesn’t interest me at all,” he said, his decision “to lend his no- self. In the cheese room, I
picking at some smoked salmon. bility to the all-you-can-eat buffet, an pushed a button and an automated slicer
For several years, Privat has threat- exercise in style regularly massacred in produced a frilly mop of Tête de Moine.
ened to decamp from Narbonne, saying the establishments that practice it.” Now I was having fun. Buffets are the
that his public landlords don’t maintain A friend and I visited the restaurant culinary version of your wedding day or
the facilities properly. In 2023, he accel- for lunch the following Tuesday. We a big birthday—a bunch of foods that
erated this campaign, conducting pub- entered through a picture-perfect bak- don’t belong together all in the same
lic auditions for a new site. Le Parisien ery, squeezing past racks loaded with space, somehow getting along.
reported, “The juicy saga of the move cooling loaves and pastries, and emerged I was standing near the rotisserie
of this culinary institution has a million into a back room packed with custom- when, suddenly, a “Welcome, shoppers”-
French cuisine enthusiasts in suspense ers, as though we’d stepped through a style intercom activated. “Ladies and
on social networks on both sides of the magical wardrobe. BOULOM charges be- gentlemen, behold the pressed-duck rit-
Pyrenees.” As Privat delivered theatri- tween thirty-two and fifty-eight euros ual, just as it was conceived in the nine-
cal ultimatums, local officials sprang into per person, depending on the meal and teenth century,” a suave male voice in-
seduction mode. One parliamentary can- the day of the week. A sign warns that toned. “The duck has been roasted on
didate even made retaining Les Grands two euros will be added to the bill for a spit. It is now placed on the table of
Buffets part of his platform. every hundred grams of waste, but an the master canardier. With the silver
“I completely share Mr. Privat’s vi- employee I spoke to said that she’d never duck press, he will crush the carcass to
sion of being able to continue to develop seen it enforced. The idea is more to extract the blood and juices, which give
and innovate,” Bertrand Malquier, the create a chilling effect, bringing over- the sauce its unique flavor.”
city’s mayor, told me. “We are fighting zealous plate loaders back to reason. I turned to see a black-aproned em-
so that, when he makes his choice, it will The place is supposed to feel like a ployee emerging from backstage, carry-
be exclusively Narbonne.” Last week, village inn of yesteryear, where simple, ing an impaled bird as though it were the
Narbonne and Privat were set to an- lovingly made dishes are left to simmer Olympic torch. Flames leaped from a cup
nounce that they had come to an agree- on the stove throughout the day, offer- at the bottom of the spit. She proceeded
ment: Narbonne would pledge fifteen ing nourishment to all comers.The week- to the table, where she was joined by the
million euros to renovating the rec cen- day spread includes roast meats, a dozen canardier. “Discover le canard au sang,
ter, carving out a separate entrance for desserts, and name-brand ingredients the emblematic dish of French gastron-
Les Grands Buffets, while Privat would like Joël Dupuch oysters and Eric Os- omy,” the voice continued. “Les Grands
commit nearly five million to the cre- pital charcuterie. I loved the grilled mack- Buffets is the only restaurant in France
ation of new attractions, including a sep- erel, and my friend made what amounted to offer this historic recipe every day.”
arate tea salon and a shop selling re- to a personal pan pizza of the crème The triumphant chords of “Ride of the
gional products, with a shared goal of brûlée, nearly emptying the dish in three Valkyries” filled the room as the canardier
increasing the annual number of visitors rounds. Still, it felt like a regular meal. lifted the duck off the spit with two forks,
to eight hundred thousand. Every Nar- Seafood occupied a few metal bowls, not raising the carcass up to the gods. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 25
I
n a clearing in the Brazilian Ama-
zon, I stood with a group of armed
men, discussing a viral TikTok video.
The video, shot from a helicopter full
of illegal miners, showed a vast stretch
of rain forest, with dense foliage extend-
ing in all directions. The only sign of
human habitation was below: a dirt cir-
cle surrounded by fanlike lean-tos made
of wooden poles and palm fronds. It
was a maloca, a traditional compound
of the Yanomami, an Indigenous group
that inhabits a remote territory in the
rain forest of northern Brazil.
As the helicopter hovered, five Yano-
mami ran into the clearing, gazing up
at the intruders. Several lifted bows and
shot arrows. The miners whooped with
derisive laughter. “Look at the cannibals,”
one of them cried. Another said, “Go
on, throw the arrow,” before telling his
friends, “Let’s get out of here.” They
flew away, yelling, “Bunch of faggots!”
For many viewers, the video was a
rare document of an encounter with iso-
lados—members of a Yanomami com-
munity living with no links to the out-
side world. For the armed men I was
with, it was evidence: a potential lead
in a high-profile initiative, sponsored
by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
to dislodge thousands of illicit miners
from Yanomami territory.
The men—fighters with combat
gear and assault rifles—belonged to a
tiny special-forces unit known as the
Specialized Inspection Group, or G.E.F.
Most of them wore face coverings; min-
ing in the rain forest is increasingly in-
filtrated by violent criminals, making
it dangerous for them to reveal their
identity. The G.E.F.’s leader and co-
founder was Felipe Finger, a wiry man
in his forties with a salt-and-pepper
beard. Finger trained in forestry engi-
neering, and his unit works under the
Brazilian ministry for the environment.
But he has spent much of his adult
life in armed operations to protect the
wilderness, and he talks like a soldier,
with frequent references to operations
and objectives and neutralizing threats.
The current mission was known to na-
tional authorities as Operation Free-
dom. Finger and his men called it Op-
eration Xapirí, from a Yanomami word
for nature spirits.
The group formed a circle as Fin-
ger laid out the day’s targets. On a The G.E.F. burns mining camps as part of a long-running counteroffensive against
26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
 LETTER FROM RORAIMA

THE AMAZON PATROL

As mining devastates the rain forest,
an armed environmental unit fights back.
BY JON LEE ANDERSON

environmental depredation. “Wherever they go, the miners destroy everything,” Felipe Finger, the unit’s leader, says.
PHOTOGRAPH BY TOMMASO PROTTI THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 27
G.P.S., he pointed to a yellow circle looked on, the G.E.F. men torched the took the modem. The G.E.F. fighters
showing where the isolados had been boat, a plume of fire rising from the water. are well trained, and equipped with sat-
harassed in the TikTok video, and then A few miles downriver, the helicop- ellite imaging, combat gear, assault ri-
red dots, representing the miners, in an ters paused over a scarred patch of jun- fles, and night-vision goggles provided
irregular cluster around them. Miners gle and a carved-out stretch of river- by the U.S. State Department. Increas-
had been detected roughly eight miles bank: a mine that the team had destroyed ingly, though, their opponents have sim-
from the isolados—meaning that they in a previous operation. There was no ilar resources. The day’s raid had de-
had penetrated dangerously far into a evidence that digging had resumed, but stroyed a facility that might have em-
protected ecosystem. “Wherever they not far off were signs of another min- ployed a dozen miners. The number of
go, the miners destroy everything, en- ers’ camp: a huddle of plastic tents barely people involved in illegal mining in the
tire river systems,” Finger said indig- visible beneath the tree canopy. In a Brazilian Amazon is believed to be as
nantly. “And they do it at clearing at the edge of the many as half a million.
the expense of these highly river, the miners had driven
vulnerable people.” rows of cut saplings into or four years, Lula’s predecessor, Jair
The Amazon faces many
threats. The constant pro-
the dirt—a low-tech de-
fense against landing heli-
F Bolsonaro, insisted that the crisis in
the rain forest was an elaborate hoax. A
liferation of road networks— copters. Eventually, Finger far-right former military officer who em-
both legal and illegal— found a way to set down, braced Donald Trump as an ally and a
brings new settlements, and and his men yanked the role model, Bolsonaro maintained that
growing human populations poles from the sand and advocates for the environment and for
burn forests to clear land threw them aside. Indigenous rights were part of a com-
for cattle and crops. The The team fanned out munist-globalist conspiracy. He ran for
rain forest is enduring an and searched for miners, the Presidency promising to dismantle
unprecedented drought, and in Roraima, but there was no one in sight. When environmental safeguards, and his sup-
the state where the Yanomami territory the G.E.F. can’t catch garimpeiros, as porters took him at his word. He as-
is situated, wildfires set off by such slash- the illegal miners are called, the goal is sumed office in January, 2019, and within
and-burn efforts have spread out of con- to destroy their camps and their equip- months an estimated twenty thousand
trol; more than four thousand square ment: excavators, planes, house-size garimpeiros were at work in Yanomami
miles burned there this year, releasing dredging rafts used to dig up the river land. Despite Yanomami leaders’ pleas
vast amounts of carbon into the atmo- bottom. The team quickly found the for help and a Supreme Court judge’s
sphere. But mining for gold and cassit- mine pit, an ugly gouge of muddy water order for the miners to be forced out,
erite, a mineral used in electronics, ex- with a pump, a giant hose, and a sluice, Bolsonaro did nothing.
acerbates the environmental problems along with a truck engine that served Lula, a veteran left-wing politician
with singular ferocity. Wildcat miners, as a generator. Using cans of fuel left who served as Brazil’s President from
using giant excavators, dredgers, and by the miners, they doused the machin- 2003 to 2010, took office again last year,
mercury, can devastate miles of river and ery and lit it on fire. For good measure, after a perilously close election. By then,
forest in a matter of days. With the price one of them peppered the generator the Yanomami were enduring a crisis,
of gold now above two thousand dol- with bullets. with malaria, hunger, and infant mal-
lars an ounce on the global market, a While a few men stood guard, scan- nutrition spreading widely; hundreds
rush is under way in the Amazon, and ning the forest edges, others moved of children had died. Outsiders com-
illegal prospecting accounts for more through the tents and a cookhouse area, mitted growing numbers of rapes and
than half of Brazil’s supply. searching for anything that might pro- murders, including incidents in which
The G.E.F. team was travelling to vide a clue to who controls the mines. miners on motorboats shot and tear-
its targets in two helicopters. Finger (Some were makeshift local operations; gassed Yanomami as they sped past a
took the lead, along with another founder others were run by crime syndicates or riverside community.
of the unit—Roberto Cabral, a boyish- shadow investors in major cities.) Then The crisis gave Lula an opportunity
looking man of fifty-five. When a mine they piled up flammable materials and to present himself as a savior, and in
site was found, their chopper would go set the rest of the camp ablaze. one of his first acts as President he flew
in first, in case there was gunfire. As we watched the fire spread, a small to Boa Vista, the capital of Roraima.
As the helicopters picked their way plane buzzed away over the trees. It be- He toured a clinic that treated Indig-
through the forest, Finger radioed to say longed to the miners, Cabral said; they enous patients, and in emotional re-
that he had “a situation.” We followed must have been warned that the G.E.F. marks afterward he blamed Bolsonaro
G.P.S. coördinates to a river bend, where was coming. He pointed to a white rect- for “the neglect and abandonment of
his chopper had landed on a sandbank. angular antenna on a tall pole in the the Yanomami.” It was “more than a
Just upriver was a boat, loaded with equip- center of the camp and said, “Starlink”— humanitarian crisis,” he added. “What
ment and fuel cannisters—a miner’s sup- Elon Musk’s portable satellite-commu- I saw was a genocide.” He vowed to
ply launch. Finger and several of his men nications system. One of the men hacked end illegal mining on Indigenous land,
waded toward it, their weapons drawn, at the pole with a machete until it top- just as he had vowed, during the cam-
but its occupants had fled. While we pled, and Finger broke the antenna and paign, to achieve “zero deforestation”
28 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
in the rain forest by 2030. “The planet is an inescapable reality,” he told me, that prohibited destroying equipment
needs the Amazon alive,” he said. “which is that you have people living in confiscated from illegal miners within
Lula declared a public-health emer- poverty sitting on top of vast wealth.” its jurisdiction. Outside the office of the
gency and ordered an ambitious series governor, a Bolsonaro ally named An-
of raids to eject the miners. After op- oa Vista is a low-slung city of half tonio Denarium, miners and ranchers
erations began, in February, 2023, dra-
matic footage emerged of security forces
B a million people, spread along the
banks of the Rio Branco. Although Bra-
gathered to celebrate with a barbecue
and concert, under a banner that read
surging in and destroying equipment, zil has a complex web of laws to protect “Garimpo Is Legal.” (Last year, after
and of miners fleeing the forest. By June, the wilderness, settler communities in- Lula took office, Brazil’s Supreme Court
Lula declared the Yanomami land “free evitably find ways to profit from the min- threw out the law.)
of illegal mining.” Soon afterward, his erals and the timber found in the rain Cognizant of the local attitudes, the
government promoted new statistics forest, and Boa Vista is booming. Newly G.E.F. keeps its presence in Boa Vista
showing that illegal deforestation in the built avenues are lined with ostentatious quiet. When I’d arrived, I was told to
Amazon had fallen thirty-four per cent villas, restaurants, and boutiques. Down- check into a hotel and wait. Nearly a
in six months. town, a children’s water park has been week later, I got a call telling me that
Last August, in the city of Belém, constructed next to an artificial beach, an unmarked car would take me to meet
Lula presided over a meeting of regional decorated with huge, colorfully painted the team at one of the helicopter launch-
heads of state, and called on them to statues of anacondas, jaguars, anteaters, pads that it uses in town: a walled-in
join him in realizing “a new Amazonian and crocodiles. Near the government of- grassy patch at the regional headquar-
dream”—a grand plan for conservation fices, a modernist stone sculpture depicts ters of the federal police. Around the
linked to sustainable development. A a prospector panning for gold. wall were rusting carcasses of helicop-
few months later, in Dubai for the an- Local officials leave little doubt about ters and airplanes confiscated from min-
nual climate-change conference, Lula their support for mining. In 2022, the ers on previous raids. A couple of years
hailed Brazil’s progress in preserving the Roraima state legislature enacted a law before, an angry group had protested
rain forest, and celebrated its selection
as the site of the 2025 summit.
But, for all Lula’s talk about a green
future, the large-scale operations in Ro-
raima lasted only a few months. The
armed forces, which had joined last year’s
initiative only reluctantly, ceased coöp-
erating. It wasn’t even clear how much
loyalty the new President could expect
from the military, a largely conservative
body that ran the country as a dictator-
ship from 1964 to 1985. After the inau-
guration, Bolsonaro partisans had
launched a chaotic assault on the Pres-
idential palace, Congress, and the Su-
preme Court, and some police and mem-
bers of the military had assisted the
mob. Lula subsequently pushed out the
commanders of the Army and of the
police force that guards the capital. But
the military is still regarded as hostile
to Lula—not to mention to the idea of
Indigenous rights.
When I visited Roraima, authorities
there said that garimpeiros had been re-
turning to Yanomami territory. Some
politicians were not only tacitly accom-
modating the miners but in some cases
coöperating with them. For many peo-
ple in Brazil, the lure of easy money far
outweighed environmental concerns.
Even the judge who had tried to force
Bolsonaro to intervene in the Amazon, “By the power vested in me, from this day forth you may
Luís Roberto Barroso, acknowledged text each other as many times in a row as you want without
the persistence of the problem. “There worrying that you’re coming across as desperate.”
the seizures by attempting to set a gov- Speaking in breathy bursts, she told managed to occupy this gap. And some
ernment helicopter on fire. Cabral and Finger that her name was Indigenous people, without another way
The G.E.F. helicopters took us past Margarida. She was a widow, and after to carry on their lives there, end up get-
the edge of Boa Vista, where vast, tree- her husband’s death she had struggled ting involved.”
less cattle ranches and soy farms stretch to pay rent and buy food. She had ar- The G.E.F. team sometimes showed
into the distance. In thirty minutes of rived at the mine two days before, after concern for the miners; when they found
flying at a hundred and twenty miles a long river journey, she said, and she prescription medicine during a raid, they
an hour, we could see the open plains didn’t know anything about its opera- threw it clear of the burn zone so that
start to give way to forest, until my chop- tion—not even what the miners’ names its owner could retrieve it. But, when I
per landed at a site where the paved were. Cabral, looking skeptical, asked asked Cabral if we were going to fly the
road turns to red-dirt track. It was the what her salary was. She gave a figure cook out with us, he shook his head.
team’s refuelling point before seeking that amounted to about four hundred “She got herself here,” he said. “She can
out mines in Yanomami territory. Near dollars a month. It was a suspiciously get herself out.” He reassured me that
a farmhouse, a shiny steel tanker was small amount, but the cooks, invariably most of the miners attached to the camp
parked by a mango tree. The truck drove women, were the worst-paid employ- were hiding in the forest and would surely
several hours from Boa Vista each morn- ees of the mines; younger cooks earned emerge as soon as we left. With their
ing with an armed escort. extra money as sex workers or were co- food stores destroyed, they would have
During the raids last spring, the erced into prostitution. to evacuate the jungle, and would make
G.E.F. had been able to refuel in a No one could say precisely how many the journey together.
Yanomami community where the mil- miners had made their way back into Heading back to the choppers, Fin-
itary maintained an outpost. But, a few the territory after last year’s raids, or had ger was frustrated. This mine had been
weeks before my visit, the Air Force had never left, but one government minis- destroyed not long before. “They were
suddenly removed the fuel tank, offer- try recently estimated the number at quiet for a couple of months,” he said.
ing no explanation. The arrangement about seven thousand. Many of the peo- “But when they saw that the operations
at the farm was provisional and seemed ple who worked the mines were impov- had decreased they came back, and
unlikely to last. One of the agents pro- erished locals looking for any job they they’ve learned how to adapt to our tac-
viding security told me that men in a could find; others made a career of it. tics.” He pointed to a wide trail leading
pickup truck had pulled up early that At one camp, we’d come across the ré- from the mine into the forest. It was a
morning, taken pictures of the tanker sumé of a thirty-seven-year-old named track for A.T.V.s, built under tree cover
and its guards, and then driven away. José, who had been a sales assistant at to thwart detection from the sky. On
Within a few minutes of taking off an auto-parts shop in Boa Vista, then his G.P.S., Finger measured our dis-
again, we had entered Yanomami ter- moved to the city of Manaus to work tance from the isolados. “Less than thirty
ritory: a rolling green blanket, punctu- in a shoe store. His legal employment miles,” he said. “It’s very close, consid-
ated only occasionally by the bright-yel- history ended in 2016, which presum- ering the range some Yanomami need
low flowers of an ipê tree. Deep in the ably was when he had turned to illegal for hunting.”
forest, we set down at a gouged min- mining. Finger drew a distinction be-
ing area. In a camp under the trees, we tween people like Margarida and those or four decades, the Amazon has ex-
found a cook fire still burn-
ing. The miners clearly
like José. “These simpler
people, a hundred per cent
F isted in a state of persistent conflict—
protected by federal law but threatened
weren’t far away. are there for financial gains,” by the people who live there. On the way
The G.E.F. members he said. “But many of the to Boa Vista, I’d had lunch in Brasília
started to burn the camp, miners are in this for a bet- with Sydney Possuelo, who had seen
monitoring the flames to ter life style. If he can make much of this history at first hand. Pos-
make sure that they didn’t five thousand reais per week suelo is a legendary sertanista—one of
spread. While the men mining, why would he stay the jungle scouts who made the first con-
worked, Finger quietly in the city earning a thou- tacts with isolated people. He started
headed into the forest, like sand or less?” travelling into the Amazon six decades
a hunting dog that had Indigenous people who ago. Since then, he has hiked thousands
picked up a scent. Fifteen got involved in mining had of miles through unexplored jungle, been
minutes later, he reappeared with a more complex incentives. Many were shot by arrows, and made first contact
woman in tow. He explained that he’d motivated by fear, some by necessity, with seven Indigenous groups. Now
found underwear drying on a clothes- others by the lure of consumer goods eighty-three, he occupies a position in
line and a stack of warm pancakes in that miners offered, including liquor, the Brazilian consciousness somewhere
the mess, and he figured the camp’s shotguns, and new iPhones. “If an In- between Buffalo Bill and John Muir.
cook must be nearby. He’d found her digenous person was co-opted by a crim- We met at an open-air restaurant and
hiding in some bushes. She was in her inal, either simply to turn a blind eye sat outside, at his request, until a tropi-
fifties, wearing a pink dress and carry- or to directly participate, it’s a sign that cal downpour forced us indoors. We were
ing a bag stuffed with belongings. She the state failed,” Finger argued. “The joined by Rubens Valente, the author of
looked frightened. state is not present, and the criminals “The Rifles and the Arrows,” an author-
30 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
itative book on Indigenous resistance
movements. A soft-spoken man of fif-
ty-four, Valente is one of a very few Bra-
zilian journalists who have made a ca-
reer of reporting on the Amazon and its
Indigenous inhabitants. This media in-
attention is symptomatic of a larger na-
tional neglect, which is partly a result of
geography. The rain forest makes up sev-
enty-eight per cent of Brazil’s landmass
but contains less than fifteen per cent of
its population. For Brazilians who live
outside the Amazon, it can seem as re-
mote and exotic as it does to Americans.
As a young man, Possuelo worked
for FUNAI, Brazil’s agency for Indige-
nous affairs. In those days, the Indige-
nous were thought of as “wild Indians,”
and Possuelo’s job was to initiate con- “I’m not great at this whole networking thing.”
tact in order to “tame” them; the mili-
tary government planned to open the • •
“green hell” of the Amazon to develop-
ment by building a highway through it.
By the early nineteen-eighties, Pos- munities, they live much as they always “The military fundamentally doesn’t be-
suelo had begun to understand that ex- have, in malocas that house communal lieve in conservation. They think the de-
posure to the outside world was largely groups of several dozen families. They velopment of the wilderness is neces-
disastrous for Indigenous groups. Many hunt, fish, and gather fruit in the forest, sary and see it as inevitable.” He showed
succumbed to disease; others suffered and also grow a few crops—plantains, me a book titled “The Yanomami Farce,”
from alcoholism and sexual exploita- cassava, maize—for their sustenance. released in 1995 by the Army’s publish-
tion, their forests targeted by unscru- The gold in Yanomami rivers has ing house. The cover depicts a blond,
pulous loggers and miners. Some chiefs been a problem for as long as outsiders fair-skinned man holding up a mask
sold access to their lands and began to have made their way into the jungle. with the face of a Yanomami man in a
make profits of their own. Possuelo said that, in the early nineties, feather headdress. The book, written
In 1987, after the fall of Brazil’s dic- there were perhaps forty thousand min- by an Army colonel, argued that the
tatorship, Possuelo created a department ers operating there, but that he and his Yanomami were not a real Indigenous
at FUNAI that organized expeditions to allies had forced most of them out. It community but the invention of an in-
confirm the presence of isolados, to le- was harder now, though. The Indige- ternational cabal that intended to take
gally protect their territories—but he in- nous were more involved in the trade, over the Amazon. Bolsonaro promoted
sisted they be left alone unless they ini- and the miners were better equipped the same idea, accusing Greenpeace and
tiated contact. “The true importance of and more organized. Perhaps most im- environmentalist celebrities like Leon-
the isolados isn’t in their numbers,” Pos- portant, he said, the military wasn’t help- ardo DiCaprio of being part of this ne-
suelo told me. “It’s in their languages and ing to protect the Yanomami. The armed farious master plan.
cultures and societies, about which we forces maintained three bases in the ter- Yet Possuelo was also skeptical of the
know little, and that has to be respected.” ritory, but, he said, it had not deployed current government’s campaign, point-
A new constitution, instituted the fol- soldiers to stop river traffic, or consis- ing out that Lula had acted after a Su-
lowing year, contained provisions to pro- tently used aerial surveillance to prevent preme Court judge ordered the govern-
tect Indigenous lands. Soon afterward, the miners from coming in. The mili- ment to remove the miners. “The fact
Possuelo led the demarcation of the vast tary had opposed the creation of the is that the Brazilian state has never liked
Yanomami territory, a chunk of jungle Yanomami territory from the beginning, the Indians,” he said. “The left doesn’t
that spans almost twenty-four million Possuelo explained; when he was mark- like the Indians, and the right doesn’t like
acres—an area larger than Portugal— ing its borders, the commander of the the Indians, and the center doesn’t like
along the border with Venezuela. Army accused him of advancing an in- the Indians, either.”
In those days, the Yanomami were one dependent “Yanomami empire,” stretch-
of Brazil’s most secluded Indigenous ing across the border with Venezuela. ne afternoon, as we approached a
groups; regular contact with the outside
world had begun barely two decades
Possuelo laughed as he recalled news
stories that the military had orchestrated
O mine from the air, a crew of pan-
icked miners went running into the for-
before. Today, about thirty thousand to spread the conspiracy theory. est. One of them fell over a log, scram-
Yanomami live in the Brazilian Amazon. Valente said that the armed forces’ bled to his feet, and took off again. As I
Spread out in some three hundred com- view of the Amazon hadn’t changed: followed their progress, something caught
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 31
my eye: two dazzling macaws, flying away
from the commotion. After we landed,
I found macaw feathers, yellow and blue, TODAY, MY HOPE IS VERTICAL
hanging on a string from a pole in the
camp. Cabral shook his head and said Today, my hope is vertical.
that the garimpeiros must have hunted Tomorrow it will be horizontal.
and eaten the bird. “The animals die a The next day, cloudy.
silent death,” he said mournfully. My hope is like a Greek myth:
For a public servant, Cabral is un- exchanging skin for bark,
usually outspoken—at least on Insta- bark for scales,
gram, where his account is devoted to scales for the hollow bones of a bird.
denouncing animal cruelty. In one re- In these ways my hope
cent post, he shared a photograph of attempts to escape its fate.
someone’s pet parrot, with green feath- In myth, hope surely knows,
ers tinged yellow. “This is mistreatment,” escape is useless.
he wrote. “The yellow pigmentation in- Still, hope will try.
dicates nutritional deficiency. A trained I, who will someday leave behind
environmental agent would notice and this three-dimensioned puzzle,
fine the person responsible.” pity my hope.
At the camp, Finger told Cabral that Poorling, I say to my hope,
he had found signs of an active site even I cannot spare you,
deeper in the forest. We followed him, even I cannot make you mortal.
moving silently along a path through Winged, rooted, finned,
the woods. As we advanced, we could roofed or roofless,
hear a dog barking. Finger scouted of all my shapes, only you, hope,
ahead, then crept back and motioned know nothing of irony,
for us to follow. In a clearing, there was only you cannot be cynical
a wooden shack and a cookhouse, aban- or cloak yourself
doned except for a black dog with dis- in the objectivity of grammar.
tended teats, yowling in distress. Then Only you
we heard a peculiar squalling from a cannot suffer suffering.
box next to the shack. Cabral lifted a You exempt, you deny,
plastic cover, revealing a mass of wrig- you protest with speech and with silence.
gling puppies, just a few days old. He You forgive—helpless to not—
picked up a couple and held them, then in speech and in silence.
walked to a rack where the miners had I, citizen of perspective,
been drying bush meat—tapir, he born into the tribe of time,
guessed. He threw a piece to the mother will vanish into its blurring distance.
dog, which began devouring it. But you—most intransigent,
The team searched through belong- most stubborn of all my parts—
ings, but no one poured gas or piled up will be forced to continue.
flammables. Were they going to burn How tenderly, with two open hands,
the place? I asked. The men didn’t an- you reach again today for hunger’s apple.
swer; they were looking at Cabral, fuss-
ing over the puppies. Eventually, Finger —Jane Hirshfield
barked, “Let’s go.” As the team fell in,
Cabral told me that they were leaving
the camp intact because of the puppies: armed patrols only in service of wild- came increasingly aware that ecologi-
“We could move them away from the life conservation, his lifelong passion. cal abuses converged with other crimes:
shack, but the mother might run away He came from Juiz de Fora, a city in gunrunning, drug tra3cking, homicides.
in fright and not be able to find them Brazil’s interior, and spent his childhood But the Brazilian government dealt with
afterward.” One of the men joked that, immersed in nature, watching wildlife these things through a patchwork of
if there had been a child in the camp programs and reading about animals. federal bureaucracies and police agen-
instead of the puppies, they would have “This is all I ever wanted to do,” he told cies, with no force that had both the
burned the shack. Cabral laughed and me. He earned a degree in biology and requisite scientific knowledge and mil-
shook his head, but he didn’t protest. another in ecology, then joined IBAMA, itary-style training. In 2013, Cabral se-
Early in his career, Cabral acquired a branch of the environment ministry cured approval to build a unit of rang-
the nickname Rambo, but it seemed that protects threatened ecosystems. ers who were committed to saving the
mostly like a joke. He had taken up Working in the Amazon, Cabral be- environment, by force if necessary. The
32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
next year, he was shot in the shoulder he aspired to be a photographer for skate vironment. The agencies that worked in
when he and his men surprised illegal magazines, until his parents persuaded the Amazon were handed to archcon-
loggers in the woods; he was back at him to go to law school instead. Half- servative military officers. The environ-
work in less than two months. way through, he attended a ceremony ment ministry was given to an advocate
The members of the G.E.F. are biol- of the União do Vegetal, a Christian of deregulation, who later resigned after
ogy nerds who found themselves carry- sect that incorporates ayahuasca in its being accused of involvement in an il-
ing guns—a gang of jungle Ghostbusters. sacraments. “During the opening chant, licit logging scheme. (The minister de-
They undergo intensive training, devel- I left my body,” he recalled. “I started to nied any wrongdoing.) FUNAI’s Indige-
oped by a specialized police unit that see the Amazon rain forest and found nous-outreach department went to an
fights organized crime. “There are courses myself walking through it in a uniform evangelical preacher who had previously
on weaponry and shooting, survival in with a team, while Indigenous people sought out isolated groups to convert
operational environments, vertical activ- chanted behind me. That moment filled them. The director he replaced, Bruno
ities, and aerial operations,” Finger said. me with joy, and there I discovered the Pereira, kept up his work independently.
“We had a tactical-entry course, but mission of my life.” In 2022, he was murdered, along with a
adapted to our reality—they focus mostly British reporter named Dom Phillips,
on urban operations, while we focus on
rural areas, forest environments.” IBAMA
has twenty-eight hundred employees,
Iof ncapacious
Brasília, I met Lula in his office, a
room with a corner view
the city. He acknowledged that his
while investigating illegal intrusions in
the Javari valley.
During the Bolsonaro years, the
but very few apply for the training, and administration had allowed the situa- G.E.F. struggled with political interfer-
fewer still qualify. Out of the twenty or tion in Roraima to deteriorate again. ence, and for one eight-month stretch
so who tried out most recently, Finger “We should have done something, and was confined to base. Now it had the
said, only four were accepted. we didn’t do it,” he said. Yet he seemed government’s public blessing, but it still
Finger had the physique and the wary of criticizing the military, whose didn’t have the support it needed. There
temperament of a natural athlete. Grow- support he needs to remain in power. were vexing limitations on making ar-
ing up in the city of Cuiabá, in Brazil’s Even as he allowed that the armed forces rests. “If we catch someone in the act
farm belt, he had played soccer well “could have made mistakes,” he said, “I of committing a crime, we can arrest
enough to consider a career, but ended don’t think we need to single out some- the criminal and take them to the fed-
up emulating his father, who ran the one responsible.” All the ministries in- eral police,” Finger said. But Brazilian
forestry-engineering department at the volved had failed, he suggested: “Here law made it nearly impossible to im-
local university. Even working in ecol- in Brazil, we used to say that a dog that prison mine workers, so the G.E.F. de-
ogy, he was drawn to action. “If I had has too many owners will starve, be- tained only those who had what Finger
stayed in soccer, I’d have played offense,” cause everyone thinks that the other called “relevant strategic interest”—peo-
he said, laughing. After college, he had owner gave him food.” (He also noted ple higher in the command structure,
found his way to IBAMA and helped es- that the armed forces had flown nine who are rarely in the field. “If it’s just a
tablish the G.E.F. hundred and forty missions distribut- worker at the mining site, we identify
Most members of his team had grad- ing aid to the Yanomami, and that “not them but usually leave them there.”
uate degrees in the sciences. Renato, a one dumped cargo on anyone’s head, as The miners were brazenly aware of
muscular man of thirty-four with a happened in Gaza.”) the G.E.F.’s limits. On one raid, we
shaved head, had specialized in fish Part of the problem with policing f lew over a camp on a forested hill,
ecology. During raids, he did a lot of the territory was its sheer size, he said. where a man stood blithely watching
the heavy lifting, keeping up a cheer- There was also the fact that some of as we circled. Cabral explained that he
ful patter as he destroyed mine equip- the miners are Venezuelans who have had probably deduced, correctly, that
ment; other times he fixed engines. Al- crossed the border, which meant that there was nowhere for us to land the
exandre, forty-eight and the father of arresting them and blowing up their helicopters. Technology provided an-
two young girls, had worked in a na- boats risked creating an international other kind of cover. “Wherever the min-
tional park and in fisheries regulation incident. “If we send in the military to ers have Starlink, we’re at a real disad-
before taking the G.E.F. training course. take such actions, I could face prob- vantage,” Finger told me. “They can
“I’d never imagined working with weap- lems,” he said. warn each other there is a raid going
ons,” he said, but he had shown an un- The greatest problem, in Lula’s tell- on in the territory, and they can orga-
expected aptitude. He was generally a ing, was that Bolsonaro had left him a nize their work better.”
guard, calmly scrutinizing the surround- mess. “The state machinery was disman- Some members of the G.E.F. felt
ing forest with a gun at his shoulder. tled—everything that has to do with cli- increasingly that Lula’s administration
The only nonscientist was Marcus—a mate change, everything that has to do was doing only what was necessary to
former lawyer, forty-two, tall and rangy, with Indigenous people, everything that preserve its image. “There are few peo-
with an easygoing manner. At the head- has to do with environmental conserva- ple in this government who really care
quarters, in Brasília, he procured weap- tion,” he said. Bolsonaro had reduced about the conservation of the wilder-
ons and ammunition for the group; in IBAMA’s staff of rangers by sixty per cent, ness,” one told me. “Lula is not really
the field, he was often a guard. Grow- and had imposed similar cuts at the agen- an environmentalist himself—it’s more
ing up in the interior province of Goiás, cies for Indigenous affairs and the en- that he’s worried about international
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 33
public opinion.” Cabral lamented that, ered in black or blue tarps, and open- riverbed as he hid in the bushes a few
even aside from the Yanomami crisis, sided cookhouses littered with charred feet away. Gang members helped trans-
obvious solutions to environmental pots and cans of sardines. On one mess port gold out of the territory, and in set-
problems were being ignored. If saw- table, I saw a Bible, an acetylene torch tlements they sold drugs and ran pros-
mills were properly licensed and mon- with a bottle of mercury, and a supply titution rings.
itored, for example, it would hugely re- ledger listing aspirin, ointment for sores, On April 30th, G.E.F. members
duce illegal logging. and stomach medication. On another, joined a group of federal highway po-
Of course, Cabral said, things had I saw shotgun cartridges and a pair of lice to raid an encampment occupied
improved since the previous adminis- black assault rifles. There was often the by the P.C.C. “The operation took place
tration. IBAMA was being rebuilt, and smell of food being cooked and eaten during the day, on a Sunday,” an agent
its ranks of active rangers had expanded in close range of stagnant water and who was involved told me. “It was by
slightly. Nevertheless, there were roughly places where people shit. helicopter—the only way to reach the
eight hundred rangers responsible for At one mine, Finger led the column area surgically.” A river incursion would
all of Brazil’s regions, including not just up an A.T.V. trail that stretched into have been risky: the miners knew the
the Amazon but also the Pantanal wet- the forest, and as we left camp the light terrain better.
lands and the immense Atlantic coast- grew dimmer and the trill of cicadas The helicopters that ibama supplied
line. The country needed at least five swelled. A few hundred feet along the for the mission weren’t bulletproof, so
thousand more, Cabral said—yet the path, two shots cracked through the they dropped the men and left as quickly
salaries were paltry, with the most ex- trees. We all threw ourselves on the as they could—“a very quick infiltration
perienced rangers earning no more than ground and waited tensely, until word to avoid being hit.” As the patrol moved
a rookie in the federal police. Cabral came down the line that it was Finger through the jungle, gunfire came from
himself made about twenty-five hun- who had fired. When we caught up off the trail several times. “We knew that
dred dollars a month. Even so, he with him, he was still scanning the the risk of an armed confrontation was
wouldn’t change jobs, he said: “I love woods with his weapon ready. He had real,” the agent said. “We had prepared
what I do.” But others were losing pa- spotted a man with a gun and had fired for it, planned for it.” Nevertheless, the
tience; not long after my visit, employ- before his opponent could. The man first burst of gunfire was jarring: “I
ees at IBAMA and other environmental had fled, apparently unharmed. thought to myself, We have to apply the
agencies began to protest by refusing to In some ways, the sweeps that Lula techniques we’ve learned and come back
go on field operations. ordered last year had only increased the alive. We have our families to take care
Cabral told me how many members danger for Finger and his men. Most of.” In training courses, he said, “there is
the G.E.F. had only after swearing me of the impoverished locals who worked a bell that you ring when you give up. In
to secrecy. It was a shockingly low num- in the mines had fled, and many of those the middle of the war, there is no bell.”
ber. Finger, who was listening in, ex- who had taken their place were better When the shooting stopped, the
plained, “It’s hard to find people who armed and better funded—often be- government agents were safe and four
want this kind of life. People want to cause they were linked to criminal criminals had been killed. Among them
go to a desk and work for some hours groups. The most fearsome was a São was Sandro Moraes de Carvalho—a
and then go home.” I asked Cabral how Paulo-based crime syndicate known as gangster known as Presidente, the
much bigger the team would need to the P.C.C., from a Portuguese phrase P.C.C.’s commander in the area. The
be in order to flush the miners from meaning “First Command of the Cap- firefight made national news, drawing
Yanomami territory. “With thirty-six ital.” The P.C.C., founded in a prison attention to the Amazon, and Brazil’s
men, I could do two operations simul- annex known as Big Piranha, had grown minister of justice announced that he
taneously, which would be ideal,” he re- into Brazil’s largest criminal enterprise, was sending in more than two hundred
plied. It would still be a small team, but with connections to the Calabrian Mob armed officers. “It was the most impor-
with the right kind of backup, he said, and a significant presence in the global tant action in the history of the G.E.F.,”
it could achieve a lot. To address all of cocaine trade. Gold prospecting offered Finger told me.
the mining hot spots around the Am- the gang both revenue and opportuni- Finger avoided discussing his more
azon, he guessed, the G.E.F. would need ties to launder drug money. dangerous missions with his wife. “I
at least three hundred and twenty men— Early in 2023, the G.E.F. had arrived don’t know if she doesn’t ask to avoid
many times what he had. in Roraima and started collecting intel- knowing the details, for psychological
ligence. “In three uninterrupted months reasons—but she doesn’t ask, and I don’t
s we walked through the forest on acting daily on the ground, we were able tell,” he said. “If my mother knew, she
A raids, we were shaded by huge trees,
and when we emerged into the cleared
to gather a lot of precise information
about how the P.C.C. was operating,”
wouldn’t sleep.” But he showed few res-
ervations about the use of force. “The
spaces around mines there was a sud- Finger said. The gang supplied miners idea that criminal groups can take over
den shock of heat. The signs of ex- with equipment and guns, and also sent territory and hold Indigenous people
traction were always the same: gouged its members to supervise and provide hostage is more than a humanitarian
earth, trees felled and burned, the for- security. I saw one video, taken by a ter- emergency—it is a war,” he said. “In-
est floor stripped to bare soil. The camps rified, whispering Yanomami man, of digenous people are just like us, and
were usually crude: stick palisades, cov- heavily armed men hiking up a ravaged maybe better than us. But their lives
34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
COMIC STRIP BY R. KIKUO JOHNSON

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 35

are being destroyed. The state needs to garden. It’s the kind of thing white peo- sage to the President: “Tell Lula that
come in and protect them and treat ple plant to say they like plants.” the problems of the Yanomami people
them like Brazilians.” Inside, his office walls were hung with have not been resolved, that illegal min-
photographs of the Yanomami, taken by ing continues, that I am worried about
he Yanomami do not have a single some of the earliest visitors: a vision of our children. Tell him that criminals
T leader, but Davi Kopenawa, a sha-
man in his late sixties, is widely acknowl-
life before the incursion of outsiders. Ko-
penawa perched in a chair and toyed
with guns have joined the miners—and
the police are afraid to go there.” He
edged as their representative to the out- with a macaw feather on his desk as we added, “Lula has been travelling a lot
side world. Kopenawa, who is sometimes talked. I asked if he had thought of going all over the world. But he should come
referred to as “the Dalai Lama of the with Lula to the climate conference in here, to our land, which has been in-
jungle,” maintains a home in the forest, Dubai. Kopenawa waved his stick and vaded. We need his help, too.”
but he spends much of his time in Boa grimaced. “That’s just for white people.” The local authorities were worse, Ko-
Vista, spreading awareness of his peo- He liked Lula, he said, but Lula did not penawa said: “They don’t like or respect
ple’s concerns from the offices of the grasp the full extent of what was hap- us. All they want is to exploit our land
Hutukara Yanomami Association. pening in Yanomami territory. He hadn’t and to rob our forest.” He had received
One morning, I visited the associa- even been there—only to Boa Vista, he death threats, which is why his security
tion’s compound, which overlooked the said chidingly—and little had changed wall had been reinforced. The house
Rio Branco and was secured with sur- since he had declared the health emer- next door to the association’s belonged
veillance cameras and a wall topped with gency. In one place, Kopenawa said, the to an influential senator named Chico
electrified razor wire. Past the gate, I miners had built a road right into their Rodrigues, who, like the state’s gover-
found Kopenawa inspecting a small strip land. In another, they had surrounded a nor, was a Bolsonaro ally. Rodrigues had
of garden that ran between the security community, razing its forest; now some made news in 2020, when federal po-
wall and the house, which was painted Yanomami there were working for the lice raided his house as part of an in-
an institutional gray. Barefoot, in shorts miners and had become addicted to drugs. vestigation into the embezzlement of
and a T-shirt, Kopenawa had wooden Kopenawa suggested that the mili- COVID-19 relief funds. Agents searched
plugs in his earlobes and a stick in his tary was being duplicitous. “They just him and found more than five thou-
hand. He stood scowling at a line of come to make it appear as if everything sand dollars’ worth of Brazilian cash
small bushes that had recently been is all right,” he said. “But they’re not hidden in his underwear and his clothes.
planted next to the wall. In halting Por- taking out the miners—they’re support- Rodrigues had previously been fined
tuguese, he grumbled, “This isn’t a real ing them.” He asked me to pass a mes- for illegally razing more than fifteen
hundred acres of rain forest and con-
verting it into cattle range, but he never
paid. (He has maintained his innocence
on both counts.)
Back on the street, as I got into a car,
a mud-spattered pickup pulled in front
of me. A group of rough-looking young
men got out and buzzed at the security
door of Rodrigues’s house, an impos-
ing white multilevel place that loomed
over the association’s compound. As
they were shown in, a Yanomami man
in the car with me whispered, “Garimpo.”

hen I met with Lula, he told me

W that he hoped to return to Ro-
raima. “It’s important to go there again,”
he said, adding, “We have a human ob-
ligation to solve this issue.” Despite the
increasing problems in the region, he
spoke energetically of his plans. His ad-
ministration recently passed an emer-
gency measure that allocated more than
two hundred million dollars to efforts
in the Yanomami territory. “We’re going
to hire more federal police,” he said.
“We’re going to hire more armed forces.”
In order to facilitate a more coherent
response, his administration had set up
a multi-agency “coördinating center” in zilians.” She was talking, in effect, about garimpo plane, a Cessna, quickly took
Boa Vista, run by one of his close loy- a revolutionary change in the way her off, heading farther into Yanomami ter-
alists; it opened in mid-March. “Six country’s citizens imagined their lives. ritory. Finger and Franke raced after it,
months from now, you come back to as the garimpeiro pilot took evasive ac-
Brazil and we’ll have another conver- n the morning of our last raid, the tion—banking hard to the left, then
sation,” Lula assured me.
Marina Silva, Lula’s environment
O rain in the jungle was too heavy to
fly in, so we had to wait out the storm at
dropping down till his plane almost
brushed the treetops.
minister, suggested that the concerns a new refuelling point—a farm farther While the Cessna sped above the for-
would be difficult to address. When I into the forest. The last place had fallen est, we chased after it, listening to its pilot
visited her office, she was preparing for through; the owner, under pressure from shouting over the radio, “He’s on my back!”
the latest climate-change summit, where his garimpo neighbors, had But the garimpeiro stayed
she would appear alongside Lula. She told the team to refuel else- tauntingly ahead of us; as
looked exhausted. Silva, the daughter where. The new farm had a Franke explained, our chop-
of an Amazonian rubber tapper, is a be- Starlink connection, and, as per’s top speed was the same
spectacled woman with an ethereal pres- the rains abated, a pilot said as the Cessna’s. Franke
ence who has spent decades leading ef- that he was sure the farm watched the fuel gauge anx-
forts to safeguard Brazil’s wilderness. manager would warn the iously as he flew. We’d started
She served as Lula’s environment min- miners that we were coming. the chase with not much
ister during his first tenure, and although He was right: at the first more gas than we needed to
she succeeded in fighting deforestation, target site, the garimpeiros get back to base, and the nee-
differences emerged between them over were speeding away on dle was dropping fast. Fi-
a series of infrastructure projects, which A.T.V.s by the time we ap- nally, Finger had to peel away,
included a huge hydroelectric dam and proached. We found a string of mines, and soon afterward so did we. As we
a major road in the rain forest. She fi- connected by trails, with two airstrips watched, the plane flew on into the jungle.
nally resigned, citing “growing resis- carved out of the forest. A stretch of riv- Despite these kinds of frustrations,
tance by important sectors of the gov- erbank perhaps two miles long had been the G.E.F. team maintained a stubborn
ernment and society.” Still, after the smashed and ruined. Marcus, the former resolve. Alexandre, the fisheries expert,
calamitous Bolsonaro Presidency, she lawyer, said that G.E.F. members often told me, “In the remote areas where we
had agreed to rejoin Lula, in the hope told themselves, “We won’t end the deg- work, our efforts have consequences—we
of repairing the damage. radation of the Amazon—we will only manage to halt encroachment. Even if
In her office, Silva chose her words postpone the end of the Amazon.” As we it’s a little ant’s work, it’s possible to see
carefully, saying, “There have been some hiked around one of the mine pits, he con- the progress.” But Finger described their
advances and also challenges.” Lula’s fessed that he feared that “the Yanomami efforts as a zero-sum game. As the G.E.F.
first advance, obviously, was the “reëstab- jungle would become like Rio, all of it in chased out miners from Roraima, others
lishment of democracy.” Immediately the hands of criminal organizations.” were encroaching on Kayapó territory,
after taking office, she pointed out, he On our flight back, my pilot, Franke, and on protected Munduruku land. An
had signed five decrees to protect the found a radio frequency where garimpo Indigenous settlement called Sararé, on
environment. Yet his administration pilots were talking. As we listened, one the Bolivian border, was increasingly wor-
had also auctioned off oil- and gas-drill- gave his coördinates to another. Fran- risome. “The feeling of fighting a losing
ing rights in nearly two hundred areas; ke’s co-pilot traced them to an airstrip battle is constant,” Finger said.
there is talk that Lula may authorize in the woods—just a few miles from the On one raid, Franke slowed the ro-
the paving of a five-hundred-mile-long G.E.F. team’s new refuelling point. tors and pulled into a wide circle over the
road through the rain forest. Franke passed the information to Fin- forest, gesturing for me to look out the
A large portion of Brazil’s exports ger, in the other helicopter, and they window. Below us was a clearing, with a
rely on farming and natural-resource agreed to try to intercept the plane be- circle of lean-tos at the center. Accord-
extraction, and implementing a policy fore it could take off. ing to Franke’s G.P.S., it was the same
of “zero deforestation” would require The laws concerning intercepting maloca the miners had flown over two
rebuilding the economy. Silva acknowl- planes are intricate. “I can set fire to clan- weeks earlier, terrifying the isolados in the
edged that there was “no magic key” to destine airstrips but not shoot planes TikTok video. There was no sign of life
changing a development model that down,” Finger told me. Aircraft discov- now; the maloca appeared abandoned.
was three hundred years old. “It will re- ered on the ground can be destroyed or As we flew away, Franke pointed down
quire pressure, sustained policies, and flown to Boa Vista, though there was no again. I could see a river, its muddy banks
also sustained investment,” she said. way of knowing that they were in good gouged and punched, with shining pools
Unless the government found ways to enough condition to make the trip safely. of stagnant water—the signs of a min-
provide economic solutions for its cit- The best hope was to apprehend the peo- ing operation. I asked him how far we
izens, its plans would be doomed, she ple on board. “When we manage to get were from the maloca. “One point seven
suggested. The only way forward was our hands on the pilot, we take them into kilometres,” he said. The mine was de-
to be “sustainable,” and to “create an en- custody,” Finger said. serted, and the miners were gone, for now.
vironmental consciousness among Bra- As we approached the airstrip, the But so, it seemed, were the Yanomami. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 37
After Vincent moved to Pittsburgh, he bought a car and several guns, and was baptized in two different churches. Not all students
38 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
 A REPORTER AT LARGE

OPPORTUNITY COST
How Chinese students experience America.
BY PETER HESSLER

I
n my composition class at Sichuan son, but he wouldn’t explain why. After
University, in the southwestern the call, Vincent tried to figure out if
Chinese city of Chengdu, the first he had committed some crime. He was
assignment was a personal essay. I gave the only student who wrote his essay
some prompts in case students had trou- in the third person, as if this distance
ble coming up with topics. One sug- made it easier to describe his mind-set:
gestion was to describe an incident in
He was tracing the memory from birth to
which the writer had felt excluded from now, including but not limited to [the time]
a group. Another was to tell how he or he broke a kid’s head in kindergarten, he used
she had responded when some endeavor V.P.N. to browse YouTube to see some videos,
went unexpectedly wrong. For the third and talked with his friends abroad in Facebook
prompt, I wrote: and so on. Suddenly he thought o1 the most
possible thing that happened two years ago.
Have you ever been involved in a situation In the summer vacation in 2017, he bought
that was extremely threatening, or dangerous, an airsoft gun in the Internet, which is illegal
or somehow dramatic? Tell the story, along in mainland China but legal in most countries
with what you learned. or regions. Although it had been two years since
then, he left his private information such as the
address and his phone number. In modern so-
It was September, 2019, and the class ciety, it is possible to trace every information
consisted of engineering majors who in the Internet and [especially] easy for police.
were in their first month at university.
Like virtually all Chinese undergrad- Vincent ’s parents both worked
uates, they had been admitted solely tizhinei, within the government sys-
on the basis of scores on the gaokao, tem. The boy approached his father for
the national college-entrance examina- advice, and the older man didn’t lec-
tion. The gaokao is notorious for pres- ture his son about following the rules.
sure, and most of my students chose to Vincent described their exchange:
write about some aspect of their high-
school experience. One girl described “I1 you are asked about this matter,” dad
a cruel math instructor: “He is the per- said, “you just tell him that the seller mailed
a toy gun and you were cheated. And then you
son whose office you enter happily and felt unhappy and threw it away.”
exit with pain and inferiority.” Edith, Sure enough, two policemen came to his
a student from northern Sichuan Prov- home the next day.
ince, wrote about feeling excluded from
her graduation banquet, because her incent stood about six feet tall, a
father and his male work colleagues hi-
jacked the event by giving long-winded
V handsome boy with close-cropped
hair. He always sat in the front of the
speeches that praised one another. class, and he enjoyed speaking up, un-
“That’s what I hate, being hypocritical like many of the other engineers, who
as some adults,” she wrote. tended to be shy. On the first day of the
Few students chose the third prompt. term, I asked students to list their fa-
Some remarked that nothing danger- vorite authors, and Vincent chose Wang
ous or dramatic had ever happened, be- Xiaobo, a Beijing novelist who wrote
cause they had spent so much of their irreverent, sexually explicit fiction.
short lives studying. But one boy, whom As with many of his classmates, Vin-
I’ll call Vincent, submitted an essay ti- cent hoped to complete his undergrad-
tled “A Day Trip to the Police Station.” uate degree in the United States. I was
The story began with a policeman teaching at the Sichuan University–
calling Vincent’s mother. The officer Pittsburgh Institute, or SCUPI. All SCUPI
adapted as quickly. said that the police needed to see her classes were in English, and after two
ILLUSTRATION BY JUN CEN THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 39
or three years at Sichuan University stu- pressed by the officers’ politeness. (“It’s relatively low in the hierarchy of Chi-
dents could transfer to the University not scary at all, no handcuffs and no nese universities, but even such a place
of Pittsburgh or another foreign insti- cage.”) The police informed him that was highly selective. In 1996, the year
tution. SCUPI was one of many pro- they had found a host of sensitive and that I started, only one out of twelve
grams and exchanges designed to di- banned material on his cloud storage: college-age Chinese was able to enter
rect more Chinese students to the U.S. a tertiary educational institution. Al-
“But how interesting it is!” the policeman
In the 2019-20 academic year, Chinese said. “They sent pornographic videos, traffic
most all my students had grown up on
enrollment at American institutions accident videos, [breaking news] videos, and farms, like the vast majority of citi-
reached an all-time high of 372,532. funny videos.” zens at that time.
Nobody in Vincent’s section had “Yes,” he said helplessly, “so I am innocent.” In two years, I taught more than two
previously studied in the U.S. Almost “Yes, we believe you,” the policeman said. hundred people, not one of whom went
“But you have to [sign] the record because it
all of them were middle class, and they is the fact that you posted the terrorism video
on to live abroad or attend a foreign
often said that their goal was to com- in the Internet, which is illegal.” graduate school. Most of them accepted
plete their bachelor’s degree in Amer- government-assigned jobs in public
ica, stay on for a master’s or a Ph.D., On one level, the essay was terrify- middle schools or high schools, where
and then come back to work in China. ing—Chinese can be imprisoned for they taught English, as part of China’s
A generation earlier, the vast majority such crimes. But the calm tone created effort to improve education and engage
of Chinese students at American uni- a strange sense of normalcy. The basic with the outside world. Meanwhile, the
versities had stayed in the country, but narrative was universal: a teen-ager government was expanding universities
the pattern changed dramatically with makes a mistake, finds himself gently with remarkable speed. In less than ten
China’s new prosperity. In 2022, the corrected, and gains new maturity. Along years, the Fuling college grew from two
Chinese Ministry of Education reported the way, he connects with the elders thousand undergraduates to more than
that, in the past decade, more than eighty who love him. Part of this connection twenty thousand, a rate of increase that
per cent of Chinese students returned comes from what they share: the par- wasn’t unusual for Chinese institutions
after completing their studies abroad. ents, rather than representing author- at that time. By 2019, the year that I re-
Vincent also intended to make a ca- ity, are also powerless in the face of the turned, China’s enrollment rate of col-
reer in China, but he had specific plans larger system. The essay ended with the lege-age citizens had risen, in the span
for his time in the U.S. Once, during a father giving advice that could be viewed of a single generation, from eight per
class discussion, he remarked that some- as cynical, or heartwarming, or defeat- cent to 51.6 per cent.
day he would purchase both a car and ist, or wise, or all these things at once: When I had first arrived, in the nine-
a real firearm. The illegal airsoft pistol ties, I believed that improved educa-
“That’s why I always like to browse news
that he had acquired in high school shot [but] never comment on the Internet,” father tion was bound to result in a more open
only plastic pellets. In 2017, when Vin- said. “Because the Internet police really exist. society and political system. But in Fu-
cent ordered the gun, it had been de- And we have no private information, we can ling I began to understand that college
livered to his home at the bottom of a be easily investigated however you try to dis- in China might work differently than
rice cooker, as camouflage. At the time, guise yourself. So take care whatever you send it did in the West. Students were in-
on the Internet, my boy!”
such subterfuges were still possible, but From this matter, Vincent really gained doctrinated by mandatory political
the government had since cracked down, some experience. First, take care about your classes, and Communist Party officials
as part of a general tightening under strictly controlled teaching materials.
Xi Jinping. They were also skilled at identifying
In Vincent’s essay, he was surprised talent. In “River Town,” a book that I
that the two policemen who arrived at wrote about teaching in Fuling, I de-
his home didn’t mention the forbidden scribed my realization that the kind of
gun. Instead, they accused him of a much young people I once imagined would
more shocking crime: spreading terror- become dissidents were in fact the most
ist messages. likely to be co-opted by the system:
“That’s ridiculous,” Vincent said. “I have “The ones who were charismatic, in-
never browsed such videos, not to mention posted telligent, farsighted, and brave—those
them in the Internet. You must be joking.” account in the Internet, and focus on some basic were the ones who had been recruited
“Maybe you didn’t post it by yourself,” the setting like automatic backup. Besides, don’t long ago as Party Members.”
policeman said. “But the app may back up the send some words, videos, or photos freely. In This strategy long predated the
video automatically.” China, there is Internet police focus on WeChat,
QQ, Weibo, and other software. As it is said in Communists. China’s imperial exam-
Vincent admitted that once, in a 1984, “Big Brother is watching you.” ination system, the ancestor of the
WeChat group, he had come across a gaokao, was instituted in the seventh
terrorist video. The police instructed ore than twenty years earlier, I century and lasted for about thirteen
him to get his I.D. card and accompany
them to the station. After they arrived,
M had taught English at a small
teachers’ college in a city called Fu-
hundred years. Through these centu-
ries, education was closely aligned with
they entered a room labelled “Cyber- ling, less than three hundred miles east political authority, because virtually all
security Police,” where Vincent was im- of Chengdu. The Fuling college was schooling was intended to prepare men
40 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
for government service. That emphasis
stood in sharp contrast with the West,
where higher learning in pre-modern
times often came out of religious insti-
tutions. Elizabeth J. Perry, a historian
at Harvard, has described the ancient
Chinese system as being effective at
producing “educated acquiescence.”
Perry used this phrase as the title for a
2019 paper that explores how today’s
Party has built on the ancient tradition.
“One might have expected,” she writes,
“that opening China’s ivory tower to an
infusion of scholars and dollars from
around the world would work to liber-
alize the intellectual climate on Chi-
nese campuses. Yet Chinese universi-
ties remain oases of political compliance.”
At Sichuan University, which is
among the country’s top forty or so in-
stitutions, I recognized some tools of
indoctrination that I remembered from
the nineties. Political courses now in- “O.K., go long, and then go about a hundred feet
cluded the ideas of Xi Jinping along to your left or your right—who knows?”
with Marxism, and an elaborate system
of Party-controlled fudaoyuan, or coun-
sellors, advised and monitored students.
• •
But today’s undergraduates were much
more skilled at getting their own infor- accept that the world is a flawed place, write about how they characterized 2020.
mation, and it seemed that most young and they were prepared to make com- Vincent, like more than seventy per
people in my classes used V.P.N.s. They promises. Even when Vincent wrote cent of his peers, wrote that it had been
also impressed me as less inclined to about his encounter with the Internet a good year. He described how his think-
join the Party. In 2017, a nationwide sur- police, he never criticized the monitor- ing had evolved after observing the ini-
vey of university students showed de- ing; instead, his point was that a Chi- tial mistakes in Wuhan:
creased interest in Party membership. nese citizen needs to be careful. In an- Most people held negative attitudes to the
I noticed that many of my most tal- other essay, Vincent described learning government’s reaction, including me. Mean-
ented and charismatic students, like to control himself after a rebellious phase while, our freedom of expression was not pro-
Vincent, had no interest in joining. in middle school and high school. “Now, tected and the supervision department did a
But they weren’t necessarily progres- I seem to know more about the world,” lot to delete negative news, critical comments,
and so on. I felt so sad about the Party and the
sive. In class, students debated the death he wrote. “It’s too impractical to change country at that time.
penalty after reading George Orwell’s a lot of things like the education sys- But after things got better and seeing other
essay “A Hanging,” and Vincent was tem, the government policies.” countries’ worse behaviors, I feel so fortunate
among the majority, which supported Vincent took another class with me now and change my idea [about] China and
capital punishment. He described it as the following fall, in 2020. That year, the Party. Although I know there are still too
many existing problems in China, I am con-
a human right—in his opinion, if a mur- China had a series of vastly different vinced that the socialist system is more ad-
derer is not properly punished, other responses to COVID. Early on, Party of- vanced especially in emergency cases.
citizens lose their right to a safe soci- ficials in Wuhan covered up reports of
ety. Another day, when I asked if polit- the virus, which spread unchecked in n 2021, after suspending visa services
ical leaders should be directly elected,
Vincent and most of his classmates said
the city, killing thousands. By Febru-
ary, the national leadership had started
Idemic,
for Chinese students during the pan-
the U.S. resumed them.
no. Once, I asked two questions: Does to implement policies—strict quaran- Throughout the spring, I fielded anx-
the Chinese education system do a good tines, extensive testing, and abundant ious questions from undergraduates
job of preparing people for life? Should contact tracing—that proved highly ef- who were thinking about going to
the education system be significantly fective in the pre-vaccination era. There America. One engineer itemized his
changed? Vincent and several others wasn’t a single reported case at Sichuan concerns in an e-mail:
had the same answer to both: no. University that year, and we conducted
1. How to feel or deal with the discrimi-
The students rarely exhibited the our fall classes without masks or social nation when the two countries’ relationship
kind of idealism that a Westerner as- distancing. Our final session was on [is] very nervous?
sociates with youth. They seemed to December 31st, and I asked students to 2. What are the root causes [in] America

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 41

to cause today’s situation (drugs; distrust of
the government, unemployment, and the most
important, racial problem)? DEATH
They generally worried most about
COVID, although guns, anti-Asian vi- flashed her brights at me.
olence, and U.S.-China tensions were She was driving straight into the sun.
all prominent issues. One student who Her dark glasses flared
eventually went to America told me as she went by.
that in his home town, in northeastern
China, ideas about the U.S. had changed Midday wintering light
dramatically since his childhood. oiled gently up every tree,
“When people in the community went half-brightening, half-
to America, the family was proud of darkening,
them,” he said. “But this time, before I
went, some family members came and stones here and there in walls
they said, ‘You are going to the U.S.— picked out & pointed to
it’s so dangerous!’” by the adamant
Vincent’s mother was on a WeChat winter sun,
group for SCUPI parents, and that
spring somebody posted an advisory and the branches in the air, and the branches draped across the roads
from the Chinese Embassy in Wash- as shadows
ington, D.C.: were siblings of a kind
I didn’t want to think about.
Since the COVID pandemic, there have
been successive incidents of discrimination and I wondered why she flashed,
violent crimes against Asians in some cities in
the United States. . . . On March 16, three had I made a mistake,
shooting incidents occurred in Atlanta and sur- I knew this place was full of mistakes,
rounding areas, killing 8 people, of whom 6 it was the most beautiful day ever,
were Asian women, including 1 Chinese and
1 Chinese citizen. . . . When encountering such the burning bush was extravagantly presenting
a situation, you must remain calm, deal with
it properly, try to avoid quarrels and physical fables to the daylight, the holly
conflicts, and ensure your own safety. knowing it had forever
took on its wicked shine, and the vines
That month, Vincent told me that
he planned to buy a .38 revolver after up the old chestnuts
arriving in Pittsburgh. He had already were liquid and calm—
researched how to acquire a hunting li- the most beautiful day ever—
cense and a firearm-safety certificate. the white picket fences
In July, a month before he was sched-
uled to leave, I had dinner with his plucked slowly by the minutes shone
mother. She said that she worried about limits & boundaries
gun violence and racial prejudice. “Lots we no longer understood,
of people say that now in America you even the dead trees in the woods
can’t rise to the highest level if you are
Chinese,” she said. confounded the
Vincent’s mother was born in 19D4, imagination. Why
the same year as many of the people I did she flash
had taught in Fuling. Like them, she when she crossed me,
had benefitted from a stable govern-
ment job during the era of China’s eco-
nomic boom. She and her husband Pittsburgh—more than forty thousand her daughter to have the opportunity.
weren’t rich, but they were prepared to dollars a year. Like Vincent, and like At dinner with Vincent’s mother, I
direct virtually all their resources to- nearly ninety per cent of the people asked how his generation was different
ward Vincent’s education, a common I taught, Edith was an only child. Her from hers.
pattern. Edith, the girl who wrote about mother had majored in English in the “They have more thoughts of their
her graduation banquet, told me that nineties, when it was still hard to go own,” she said. “They’re more creative.
her parents were selling their down- overseas. After reading “Gone with But they don’t have our experience of
town apartment and moving to the the Wind” in college, she had dreamed chiku, eating bitterness.”
suburbs in order to pay her tuition at of going abroad, and now she wanted Even so, she described Vincent as
42 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
 seemed illicit or inappropriate: Christian
churches, gay bars, tattoo parlors. Occa-
sionally, they travelled far afield. One boy
in Vincent’s year who called himself Bruce,
had I missed some clue, gone back on after Bruce Lee, rode a motorcycle sev-
some vow, dropped the eral hundred miles into the Hengduan
governing stitch, the note, the ID Mountains, at the edge of the Tibetan
paper for the court Plateau, to research a road that had been
constructed as part of China’s supply chain
date—am I during the Second World War.
speeding—am I accidentally unbandaging Vincent liked interacting with peo-
the wound—am I mis- ple from different backgrounds, and he
understanding solitude—is joy a researched a massage parlor, a seedy
pool hall, and an outdoor marriage mar-
mistake now ket in Chengdu’s People’s Park. At the
marriage market, singles tried to find
as I snake between the shadows and the untouchable partners, often with the help of parents
and various middlemen. In Vincent’s
brightnesses the leaf-emptied forests opinion, Chinese parents were too con-
cast on my face— trolling, and young people had spent so
might I avoid the whole drama of much time studying that they had no
being dating experience. He wrote:
Because of one-child policy and traditional
alive where a flaming tree-crown is visible in the distance ideology, many parents consider their chil-
dren as their treasure which belongs to the
beyond the dead stands, or parents instead of the children themselves. . . .
am I lucky, time is I hope the future Chinese children can have
genuine liberty.
so narrow, I could so easily
have missed Vincent’s mother told me that she
and her husband had made a point of
her turning & flashing allowing their son to decide for himself
on this planet just now itself whether to go to America. But many
turning & parents were nervous, including Bruce’s
father, who didn’t want his son to go to
flashing the U.S. because of the political tensions
with China. In the end, Bruce decided
something shown us then instantly to take a gap year before leaving. The
delay was probably fortunate, because
pocketed again while researching the highway in the
into its folds mountains he drove his motorcycle
by some excited icy force we around a blind curve and was hit by a
almost see thirteen-ton dump truck. Bruce and the
motorcycle slid beneath the truck; by
go by some miracle, the vehicle came to a halt
before killing the boy. I didn’t hear about
in this flash. the accident from the police, or the hos-
pital, or anybody at the university. It was
—Jorie Graham characteristic of these hardworking stu-
dents that the news arrived in the form
of an e-mailed request for an extension:
hardworking and unafraid of challenges. hood is so pressured, that even prosper-
Dear Prof. Hessler,
I saw these qualities in many students, ous young people have experienced their I had an accident on my way to the Lexi
which in some ways seemed counter- own form of chiku. Highway. I was turning a corner when I was hit
intuitive. As only children from com- They often seemed eager for a change by a truck. Now I have a fracture in my left
fortable backgrounds who had spent of environment. In my classes, I required hand and a piece of flesh has been grinded off
high school in a bubble of gaokao prepa- off-campus reporting projects, which aren’t my left hand. Then the ligaments and nerves
were damaged, and the whole left hand was im-
ration, they could have come across as common at Chinese universities. Some mobile. My left foot was also injured. It was
sheltered or spoiled. But the exam is so students clearly relished the opportunity badly bruised. The whole foot was swollen and
difficult, and a modern Chinese child- to visit places that otherwise may have couldn’t move. I’m in hospital now. I’ll have to

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 43

stay in the hospital for a while before I can come nese Church Oakland, an evangelical “What about hunxue’er?” The term
back. So I may not be able to write the article congregation that offered meals and means a person of mixed race.
about the Lexi Highway. I don’t know what to various forms of support for students. “I think that works.”
do now. Can I write the article at a later date?
Because I can’t do my research right now. And In China, Vincent had never gone to One weekend in 2022, I watched Pitt
it’s really hard for me to type with one hand. church, but now he was exploring dif- play Carnegie Mellon. Or, more accu-
Best wishes, ferent denominations. He had his own rately, I watched “UPitt,” because that
Bruce way of classifying faiths. “For exam- was the name on the jerseys. My father
ple, a church with all white Ameri- attended Pitt in the late sixties, and I
he first time I saw Vincent in Pitts- cans,” he said, referring to his options. had grown up wearing school parapher-
T burgh, in October, 2021, he had
lived in America for only eighty-two
“One of my classmates joined that. I
think he likes it. He goes every week.
nalia, but I had never heard anybody refer
to the place as UPitt. The colors were
days, but already he had acquired a used He can earn so many profits. Even the also different. Rather than using Pitt’s
Lexus sedan, a twelve-gauge Winchester Chinese church, they can pick you up royal and gold, the Chinese had made
shotgun, a Savage Axis XP from the airport, free. They up uniforms in white and navy blue,
6.5 Creedmoor bolt-action can help you deliver furni- which, in this corner of Pennsylvania,
rifle, and a Glock 1D hand- ture from some store, no verged on sacrilege: Penn State colors.
gun. “It’s the Toyota Camry charge. They do all kinds The team received no university
of guns,” he said, explain- of things!” funding, so it had found its own spon-
ing that the Glock was sim- In 2021, there were more sors. Moello, a Chinese-owned athletic-
ple and reliable. than fifteen hundred Chi- clothing company in New York, made
Vincent had studied the nese at the University of the uniforms, and Penguin Auto, a local
gun laws in Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, and around dealership, paid to have its logo on the
learning that an applicant three thousand at Carne- back, because Chinese students were
for a concealed-carry per- gie Mellon, whose campus reliable car buyers.
mit must be at least twenty- is less than a mile away. I The Northeastern Chinese Basket-
one, so he applied on his birthday. The came to associate the city with Si- ball League, which is not limited to the
permit cost twenty dollars and fea- chuanese food, because I almost never Northeast, has more than a hundred
tured a photograph of Vincent stand- ate anything else while meeting former teams across the U.S. On the day that
ing in front of an American flag. He students. Some of them, like Vincent, I watched, the Pitt team played a fast,
had also researched issues of jurisdic- were trying to branch out into Amer- guard-dominated game, running plays
tion. “I can use it in Ohio,” he said. ican activities, but for the most part that had been named for local public
“But not in California. I don’t like Cal- they found it easy to maintain a Chi- bus lines. “Qishiyi B!” the point guard
ifornia.” One reason he disliked Cal- nese life. Many still ordered from Tao- would call out: 71B, a bus that runs to
ifornia was that state law follows the bao, which in the U.S. is slower than Highland Park. It was the first time I
Castle Doctrine, which, in Vincent’s Amazon but has a much better selec- had attended a college basketball game
opinion, provides inadequate protec- tion of Chinese products. They also in which the starting forward hit a vape
tion for gun owners. “Pennsylvania has used various Chinese delivery apps: pen in the huddle during time-outs.
Stand Your Ground,” he said, referring Fantuan, HungryPanda, FreshGoGo. The forward was originally from
to a law that allows people to defend The people I taught still relied heavily Tianjin, and his girlfriend was the team
themselves with deadly force in pub- on V.P.N.s, although now they used manager. She told me that she was try-
lic spaces. “They made some adjust- them to hop in the other direction across ing to get him to stop vaping during
ments to the Castle Doctrine.” China’s firewall. They needed the Chi- games. Her name was Ren Yufan, and
Vincent was thriving in his engi- nese Internet in order to access various she was friendly and talkative; she went
neering classes, and he said that some streaming apps and pop-music services, by the English name Ally. Ally had
of the math was easier than what he as well as to watch N.B.A. games with grown up in Shanghai and Nanjing, but
had studied in high school in China. cheaper subscription fees and Manda- she had attended high school at Christ
His views about his home country were rin commentary. the King Cathedral, a Catholic school
changing, in part because of the pan- For students who wanted to play in- in Lubbock, Texas, where she played
demic. Vaccines were now widespread, tercollegiate basketball, the Chinese tennis. “I was state sixth place in 2A,”
but the Party hadn’t adjusted its “zero even had their own league. An athletic she said. She noted that she had also
COVID” strategy. “Their policy overre- boy named Ethan, who had been in my been elected prom queen.
acts,” Vincent told me. “You should not composition class at Sichuan Univer- Ally often answered questions with
require the government to do too many sity, was now the point guard for the “Yes, sir” or “No, sir,” and her English
things and restrict our liberties. We Pittsburgh team. Ethan told me that had a slight Texas twang. Her parents
should be responsible for ourselves. We about forty students had tried out and had sent her to Lubbock through a
should not require the government to seventeen had made the cut. I asked if program that pairs Chinese children
be like our parents.” somebody like me could play. with American host families. Ally’s
A couple of times, he had attended “No white people,” Ethan said, host family owned a farm, where she
Sunday services at the Pittsburgh Chi- laughing. learned to ride a horse; she enjoyed
44 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
Lubbock so much that she still re- an AK-47 and two Sig Sauer handguns Texas, whose gun laws appealed to him.
turned for school holidays. In the past to his arsenal. He had also downgraded
ten or so years, more Chinese have to a less expensive car, because the Lexus Corn grows high, crime stays low
There’s little towns everywhere where ev-
found ways to enroll their kids in U.S. had been damaged in a crash. Rather erybody knows. . . .
high schools, in part to avoid gaokao than getting the Glock 19 of automo-
agony. In Pittsburgh, my Sichuan Uni- biles, Vincent decided on the Camry’s During the winter of Vincent’s first
versity students described these Chi- cousin, a used Toyota Prius. He picked academic year in the U.S., his political
nese as a class apart: typically, they me up in the Prius, and we headed out transformation had been rapid. “I
come from wealthy families, and their for a traditional Steel City meal of la- watched a lot of YouTube videos about
English is better than that of the Chi- jiao and prickly ash. Vincent wore a Sig things like June 4th,” he told me, refer-
nese who arrive in college or afterward. Sauer P345 XL with a laser sight in a ring to the date of the Tiananmen
Their work patterns are also different. holster on his right hip. The car radio Square massacre, in 1989. He began to
Yingyi Ma, a Chinese-born sociolo- was playing “Water Tower Town,” a question the accommodationist views
gist at Syracuse University, who has country song by Scotty McCreery: that he had previously held. “Young
conducted extensive surveys of stu- people are like this in China,” he said.
dents from the mainland, has observed In a water tower town, everybody waves “They tend to support the system.”
Church doors are the only thing that’s open
that the longer the Chinese stay in the on Sundays
In the spring of 2022, Vincent be-
U.S. the less they report working harder Word travels fast, wheels turn slow. . . . came dismayed by the excessive COVID
than their American peers. Like any lockdown in Shanghai. He posted a se-
good Chinese math problem, this dis- Earlier in the year, some Mormon ries of critical remarks on social media,
tinctly American form of regression missionaries had struck up a conversa- and in May he sent me an e-mail:
toward the mean can be quantified. In tion with Vincent on campus. “Their
Ma’s book “Ambitious and Anxious,” koucai is really good,” he told me, using In recent months, I make some negative
comments on WeChat on the humanitarian
she reports on her survey results: “Spe- a word that means “eloquence.” “It helps crisis caused by the lockdown in Shanghai and
cifically, one additional year of time in me understand how to interact with some other issues. My parents got nervous and
the United States can reduce the odds people. They say things like ‘Those shoes asked me to delete these contents because their
of putting in more effort than Amer- are really nice!’ And they start talking, colleagues having me in their contact lists in
ican peers by 14 percent.” and then they ask you a question: ‘Are WeChat read my “Pengyou Quan” [friends’
circle] and reminded my parents of potential
Ally’s boyfriend had attended a pri- you familiar with the Book of Mor- risks of “Ju Bao” [political reporting] that would
vate high school in Pennsylvania that mon?’ ” Now Vincent had a Chinese affect my parents’ jobs.
cost almost seventy thousand dollars a app for the Book of Mormon on his
year, and he drove a Mercedes GLC. phone, and he attended services every One day, a man who may have been
“We are using our parents’ money, but Sunday. He had been baptized on July from the Chinese security apparatus
we can’t be as successful as our parents,” 23rd, which was also the day that he had phoned Vincent’s parents. Unlike in
Ally said. Neither her father nor her quit drinking and smoking cigarettes, the call from years before, this man
mother had attended university, but they a habit he’d had since Sichuan Univer- didn’t identify himself as the police.
had thrived in construction and private sity. He thought that the church might But he said that Vincent’s actions could
business during the era of China’s rapid be a good place to meet a girlfriend. He cause trouble for the family. Such anon-
growth. Now the country’s economy had a notion that someday he’d like to ymous warnings are occasionally made
was struggling, and Ally accepted the have a big family and live in a place like to the parents of overseas Chinese,
fact that her career opportunities would
likely be worse than those of the pre-
vious generation. Nevertheless, she
planned to return to China, because she
wanted to be close to her parents. I asked
if anything might make it hard to fit in
after spending so many formative years
in America.
“My personality,” she said. “I’m too
outgoing.”
“There are no prom queens in China,
right?”
“No, sir.”

y my second visit to Pittsburgh, in

B November, 2022, Vincent had de-
cided to stay permanently in the U.S.,
been baptized in the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints, and added “I’m a monster.”
and they weigh heavily on students. in nearly a decade. But there were still their options open. But virtually all my
Vincent deleted his WeChat com- almost three hundred thousand, and former students in the U.S. planned to
ments. But he also decided that he many of them arrived in places like Pitts- apply to graduate school here.
couldn’t imagine returning to China. “I burgh and realized that qishiyi B and They were concerned about the eco-
would say something and get arrested,” other public buses weren’t adequate for nomic and political situation in China,
he told me. “I need to be in a place where their needs. They preferred to hire driv- but they also often felt out of place in
I have freedom.” An older Chinese friend ing instructors who spoke Mandarin, Pittsburgh. American racial attitudes
in Pittsburgh had made a similar deci- and Vincent’s rate was eighty dollars an sometimes mystified them. One engi-
sion, and he advised Vincent on how to hour. He charged even more for the use neer had taken a Pitt psychology class
eventually apply for a green card. of his car during exams. Vincent told that frequently touched on race, and
Vincent told his parents that he me that a Chinese-speaking driving in- he said that it reminded him of the
planned to stay in America for at least structor who hustled could earn at least political-indoctrination classes at Si-
five years, but initially he didn’t say that two hundred thousand dollars a year. In chuan University. In both situations,
his decision was permanent, because he my own business, the Chinese political he felt that students weren’t supposed
worried that they would be upset. In the climate had made it almost impossible to ask questions. “They’re just telling
meantime, he didn’t want to waste their for American journalists to get resident you how to play with words,” he said.
money, so he earned cash on the side by visas, and specialists of all sorts no lon- “Like in China when they say social-
teaching Chinese students how to drive. ger had access to the country. Some- ism is good. In America you will say,
Professional garages charged at least five times I envisioned a retraining program ‘Black lives matter.’ They are actually
hundred dollars to install a passenger for old China hands: all of us could buy the same thing. When you are saying
brake, but Vincent found one on Tao- passenger brakes on Taobao and set up socialism is good, you are saying that
bao for about eighty-five dollars, includ- shop as mandarins of parallel parking. capitalism is bad. You are hiding some-
ing shipping from China. “I don’t know thing behind your words. When you
if it’s legal,” he told me. With his engi- knew of only a few former students say, ‘Black lives matter,’ what are you
neering skills, he was able to install the
brake in the Prius.
Icided
who, like Vincent, had already de-
to make a permanent home out-
saying? You are basically saying that
Asian lives don’t matter, white lives
The number of Chinese studying in side China. It was viewed as an extreme don’t matter.”
the U.S. had dropped to the lowest level step, and most of them preferred to keep It wasn’t uncommon for Chinese
students to have been harassed on the
streets. They often said, with some dis-
comfort, that those who targeted them
tended to be Black. Many of these in-
cidents involved people shouting slurs
from passing cars, but occasionally there
was something more serious. One group
of boys was riding a public bus at night
when a passenger insulted them and
stole some ice cream that they had just
bought. Afterward, one of the students
acquired a Beretta air pistol. He was
wary of buying an actual gun, but he
figured that the Beretta looked real
enough to intimidate people.
One evening, I went out for Si-
chuanese food with four former stu-
dents, including a couple who had been
involved in that incident. They seemed
to brush it off, and they were much
more concerned about Sino-U.S. ten-
sions. One mentioned that if there were
a war over Taiwan he would have only
three options. “I can go back to China,
or I can go to Canada, or I can go
somewhere else,” he said. “I won’t be
able to stay here.”
“Look at what happened to the Jap-
anese during World War Two,” another
said. “They put them into camps. It
“How about you wash and dry and I’ll curate a dish-washing playlist?” would be the same here.”
 They all believed that war was un- department. “Some of my friends from about the shooting. She left before the
likely, although Xi Jinping made them SCUPI are jealous because I have a friend police arrived.
nervous. Back in China, my students who is a foreign girl, a white girl,” he A woman from a nearby house came
had generally avoided mentioning the said. “They make some jokes.” out to talk with Vincent. She remarked
leader by name, and in Pittsburgh they He said that he would always re- that shootings actually weren’t so com-
did the same. member Pittsburgh fondly, but he ex- mon, and then she walked off to pick
“It all depends on one person now,” pected his departure to be final. “I don’t up her child from Westinghouse Acad-
a student said at the dinner. “In the think I’ll come to the U.S. again,” he emy. After a while, a police officer drove
past, it wasn’t just one person. When said. “They will check. If they see that up, carrying an AR-15. Vincent ex-
you have a group of people, it’s more you work with rockets, with the mili- plained that he was also armed, and
likely that somebody will think about tary, they won’t let you in.” the officer thanked him for the infor-
the cost.” mation. He asked Vincent to wait until
I asked whether they would serve in n the afternoon of January 10, a detective arrived.
the Chinese military if there were a war.
“They wouldn’t ask people like us to
O 2023, at around three o’clock, in
the neighborhood of Homewood, Vin-
For more than two hours, Vincent
sat in his car. The Carnegie Mellon
fight,” one boy said. He explained that, cent was stopped behind another ve- student took an Uber home. When
in a war, he wouldn’t return home if his hicle at a traffic light when he heard a the detective finally showed up, his
country was the aggressor. “If China popping sound that he thought was questions were perfunctory, and he
fires the first shot, then I will stay in fireworks. He was driving the Prius, didn’t seem interested in Vincent’s
America,” he said. and a Chinese graduate student from offer to provide dashboard-camera
I asked why. Carnegie Mellon sat in the passenger footage. A brief report about the in-
“Because I don’t believe that we should seat. Vincent wore a Sig Sauer P365 cident appeared on a Twitter account
attack our tongbao, our compatriots.” subcompact semi-automatic pistol in called Real News and Alerts Allegh-
I knew of only one Pitt student who a concealed-carry holster on his right eny County:
planned to return to China for grad- hip. The Carnegie Mellon student was
uate school. The student, whom I’ll preparing to get his driver’s license, Shot Spotter Alert for 20 rounds
Vehicles outside of a school shooting at
call Jack, was accepted into an aero- and Vincent was taking him to prac- each other.
space-engineering program at Jiao tice at a test course in Penn Hills, an 1 vehicle fled after firing shots.
Tong University, in Shanghai. Jack was area that was known for occasional
one of the top SCUPI students, and in crime problems. Later that year, Vincent took me to
an earlier era he would have had his At the traffic light, Vincent saw a the site. He recalled that during the
pick of American grad schools. But car approach at high speed and run a incident he had repeatedly said, “Lord,
Chinese aerospace jobs are generally red light. Then there were more pop- save me!,” like Peter the Apostle on
connected to the military, and Amer- ping sounds. Vincent realized that they the Sea of Galilee. The lack of police
ican institutions had become wary of weren’t fireworks when a bullet cracked response had surprised Vincent. “I
training such students. Even if a uni- his windshield. didn’t know they didn’t care about a
versity makes an offer of admission, it He ducked below the dashboard. In shooting,” he said. For our visit, he
can be extremely difficult to get a stu- the process, his foot came off the brake, wore a Sig Sauer P320-M17 on his
dent visa approved. “Ten years ago, it and the Prius struck the vehicle ahead right hip. “Normally, I don’t open-
would have been fine,” Jack told me. of him. The shooting continued for a carry,” he said. “But this gun can hold
“My future Ph.D. adviser got his Ph.D. few seconds. After it stopped, the Car- eighteen rounds.”
at Ohio State in aerospace engineer- negie Mellon student said, “Ge, brother, It had been four years since Vin-
ing.” He continued, “Everybody knows you just hit the car in front!” cent arrived in my class at Sichuan
you can’t get this kind of degree in the “Get your head down!” Vincent University. Have you ever been involved
U.S. anymore.” shouted. He backed up, swerved in a situation that was extremely threat-
When I met Jack for lunch, I ini- around the other vehicle, and tore ening, or dangerous, or somehow dra-
tially didn’t recognize him. He had lost through a red light. After a block, he matic? Back then, he had written about
twenty pounds, because in Pittsburgh saw a crossing guard waiting for chil- what happened when the Chinese In-
he had adopted a daily routine of a dren who had just finished the day at ternet police came to his home. Now
four-mile run. “In middle school and Westinghouse Academy, a nearby pub- Vincent’s American story was one in
high school, my parents and grandpar- lic school. which the police effectively didn’t
ents always said you should eat a lot “Shots fired, shots fired!” Vincent come after twenty rounds had been
and study hard,” he said. “I became shouted. “Call 911!” fired near a school. But there was a
kind of fat.” He parked on the side of the road, similar sense of normalcy: everybody
He had assimilated to American life and soon he was joined by the driver was calm; nothing seemed out of the
more successfully than most of his peers, whose car he had struck. They checked ordinary. The following month, four
and his English had improved dramat- the bumpers; there wasn’t any dam- students were shot outside Westing-
ically. He told me shyly that he had be- age. The driver, an elderly woman, house Academy.
come good friends with a girl in his didn’t seem particularly concerned I asked Vincent if the incident had
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 47
 Chinese classmates, and she had attended
church-group meetings out of curiosity.
She told me that recently she had taken
up skateboarding as a hobby.
It was typical for students to pursue
activities that would have been unlikely
or impossible in China, and several boys
became gun enthusiasts. Nationwide, ris-
ing numbers of Asian Americans have
purchased firearms since the start of the
pandemic, a trend that scholars attribute
to fears of racism. One afternoon, I ar-
ranged to meet a former student named
Steven at a shooting range outside Wex-
ford, Pennsylvania. I knew that I was in
the right parking lot when, amid all the
pickup trucks, I saw a car with a bumper
sticker that said “E=mc2.” On the range,
whenever the call came for a halt in shoot-
ing—“All clear!”—a bunch of bearded
white guys in camo and Carhartt stalked
out with staple guns to attach new paper
covers to the targets. Steven, a shy, round-
faced engineer in glasses, was the only
Chinese at the range, and also the only
• • person who used quilting pins for his tar-
get. He told me that the quilting pins
changed his opinion about gun laws. the fact that he was a foreigner. During were reusable and thus cheaper than sta-
“No,” he said. “That’s why we should his initial few months in the city, he had ples. He had come with a Smith & Wes-
carry guns. Carrying a gun is more com- experienced three unpleasant anti-Asian son M&P 5.7 handgun, a Ruger Amer-
fortable than wearing body armor.” incidents. As a result, he had changed ican Predator 6.5 Creedmoor bolt-action
the route he walked to his bus stop. “I rifle, and a large Benchmade knife that
t Sichuan University, I also taught think I don’t belong here,” he said. he wore in a leather holster. At the range,
A journalism to undergraduates from a
range of departments. Last June, I sent out
Yingyi Ma, the sociologist at Syra-
cuse who has surveyed Chinese students
he shot his rifle left-handed. When he
was small, his father had thought that he
a detailed survey to more than a hundred in the U.S., has observed that almost was a natural lefty, but he was taught to
and fifty students. One question asked if sixty per cent of her respondents intend write with his right hand, like all Chi-
they intended to make their permanent to return to their homeland. She told nese students. He told me that shooting
home in China. A few weren’t certain, but, me that young Chinese rarely connect was the first significant activity in which
of the forty-three who answered, thirty with the political climate in the U.S. he had used his left.
said that they planned to live in China. “But what makes America appealing is On the same trip, I met Bruce for a
There was no significant difference in the the other aspects,” she said. “The agency. classic Allegheny County dinner of mapo
responses of students who were currently The self-acceptance. Over time, as they tofu and Chongqing chicken. After the
in China versus those abroad. stay in the U.S., they figure out that accident in the Himalayas, Bruce had
Since the pandemic, there have been they don’t have to change themselves.” sworn off motorcycles. At Pitt, in addi-
increasing reports of young Chinese en- One former student told me that she tion to his engineering classes, he had
gaged in runxue, or “run philosophy,” es- might remain in America in part because learned auto repair by watching You-
caping the country’s various pressures by people were less likely to make comments Tube videos. He bought an old BMW,
going abroad permanently. A number of about her body. She’s not overweight, but fixed it up, and sold it for a fifty-per-
my students pushed back against the idea she doesn’t have the tiny frame that is cent profit. He used the money to pur-
that runxue had wide appeal. “I think common among young Chinese women, chase a used Ford F-150 truck, which he
that’s just an expression of emotion, like and people in China constantly remarked customized so he could sleep in the cab
saying, ‘I want to die,’” one student who on her size. In Pittsburgh, I met with for hiking and snowboarding excursions
was studying in Pittsburgh told me. “I Edith, the student who had written about to the mountains. He had decorated the
don’t take it very seriously.” He planned her graduation banquet. Now she had truck with two “thin blue line” American-
to go to graduate school in America and dyed some of her hair purple and green, flag decals and another pro-police in-
then return home. He said that in China and she avoided video calls with her signia around the license plate. “That’s
it was easy for him to avoid politics, grandparents, who might judge her. Once, so it looks like I’m a hongbozi,” Bruce
whereas in Pittsburgh he couldn’t avoid she had gone to a shooting range with said, using the Mandarin translation of
48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
“redneck.” “People won’t honk at me or friend were alone they instinctively cov- plained. “But they said that because it
mess with me.” He opened the door and ered their phones if they talked about was Mormon it doesn’t count.”
pointed out a tiny Chinese flag on the politics, as if this would prevent surveil- The previous summer, Vincent’s
back of the driver’s seat. “You can’t see lance. I noticed that, like many other for- mother had visited Pittsburgh, where,
it from the outside,” he said, grinning. mer students, she never uttered the name among other places, he took her to church
Xi Jinping. Afterward, I asked her about and to the shooting range. During the
ver time, I’ve also surveyed the peo- it over e-mail, and she replied: trip, he told her about his plan to live
O ple I taught in the nineties, and last
year I asked both cohorts of former stu-
I do find myself avoiding mentioning Xi’s
permanently in the U.S. When I spoke
with her recently by phone, she still held
name directly in [California], even in private
dents the same question: Did the pan- conversations and in places where I generally out hope that he would someday return
demic change anything significant about feel “safe.” . . . I guess it’s a thing that has been to China. “I don’t want him to stay in
your personal opinions, beliefs, or values? reinforced millions of times to the point that America,” she said. “But if that’s what
The older group reported relatively few it just feels uncomfortable and daunting to say he wants I won’t oppose it.” She said
his full name, as it has too much association
changes. Most are now around fifty years with unrestrained power and punishment. that she was impressed by how much
old, with stable teaching jobs that have her son had matured since going abroad.
not been affected by China’s economic In the survey of my Sichuan Univer- After receiving his degree in indus-
problems. They typically live in third- or sity students, I was most struck by re- trial engineering, Vincent decided not
fourth-tier provincial cities, which were sponses to a simple query: Do you want to work in the field. He believed that he
less likely to suffer brutal lockdowns than to have children someday? The most was best suited for a career in business,
places like Shanghai and Beijing. common answer was no, and the trend because he liked dealing with all kinds
But members of the younger gener- was especially pronounced for women, of people. He had started working for
ation, who are likelier to live in larger at seventy-six per cent. Other surveys his landlord, Nick Kefalos, who man-
cities and generally access more foreign and studies in China indicate a similar aged real-estate properties around Pitts-
information, responded very differently. pattern. One former student explained: burgh. One morning, I accompanied
“I can’t believe I’m still reading Mao Ze- Vincent when he stopped by Kefalos’s
I think that Chinese children are more
dong Thought and Socialism with Chi- stressed and profoundly confused, which will
office to drop off a check from a tenant.
nese Characteristics,” one graduate stu- continue. We are already a confused genera- Kefalos was a wiry, energetic man of
dent at a Chinese university wrote. “In tion, and children’s upbringing requires long around seventy. He told me that on a cou-
this collectivist ideology, there is no re- periods of companionship and observation and ple of occasions a roommate had left an
spect for the dignity and worth of the guidance, which is difficult to ensure in the apartment and Vincent was able to find a
face of intense social pressure. The future of
individual.” Another woman, who was Chinese society is an adventure and children
replacement. At one point, he persuaded
in graduate school in the United King- do not “demand to be born.” I am worried that a Japanese American, a Serbian, and a
dom, wrote, “Now I’ve switched to an my children are not warriors and are lost in it. Dane to share a unit, and all of them
anarchist. It reduces the stress when I had got along ever since. “We could see
have to read the news.” y my third visit to Pittsburgh, in that he had a knack,” Kefalos said. “He
Their generation is unique in Chi-
nese history in the scope of their educa-
B November, 2023, Vincent had grad-
uated, been baptized again, and em-
was able to find unrelated people and
make good matches.” Kefalos also liked
tion and in their degree of contact with barked on his first real American job. having a Chinese speaker on staff. “We
the outside world. But this doesn’t nec- The previous year, I had attended Sun- think a diverse population is ideal,” he
essarily mean that their concerns are day services with him at a said. Vincent was currently
broader. In my survey, I asked what they Mormon church, but this studying for his real-estate li-
worried about most, and, out of forty- time he took me to the cense, and he hoped to start
seven responses, three mentioned poli- Church of the Ascension, his own business someday.
tics. Another three worried about the an Anglican congregation Kefalos’s grandfather
possibility of war with Taiwan. Only one near campus. When I asked had come from Greece, and
cited environmental issues. The vast ma- why he had switched, he his father had worked as an
jority of answers were personal, with used a Chinese word, qihou. electrical engineer in the
more than half mentioning job oppor- “Environment,” he said. steel industry. Many of his
tunities or problems with graduate school. “They aren’t pushy. The current tenants were immi-
This seemed to reflect the tradition of Mormons are too pushy.” grants. “My personal expe-
“educated acquiescence”: there’s no point He liked the fact that the rience is that they are rela-
in concerning yourself with big ques- Anglicans were conservative but reason- tively hardworking,” he said. “And I think
tions and systemic flaws. able. He saw politics in similar terms: he that’s true with most immigrants who
Nevertheless, their worldliness makes disliked Donald Trump, but he consid- come into the country. Whether it’s for
it harder to predict long-term outcomes, ered himself most likely to vote as a education or a better life.” He looked
and I sense a new degree of unease. On traditional Republican if he became a cit- up at Vincent and said, “My sense is
a recent trip to California, I interviewed izen. He had been baptized in the An- that most U.S. citizens born in the
a former student who commented that glican Church on Easter. “I told them United States don’t have any idea how
even when she and her Chinese boy- that I had already been baptized,” he ex- fortunate they are.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 49
 FICTION

50 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 PHOTOGRAPH BY BOBBY DOHERTY

T
he man stood in front of an ar- last more than one night. I don’t know why their wet palms on their pants, sneezing
rangement of bottles and glasses. I wanted that, but there it was, that want. into the food, or just breathing heavily
He knew what everything in If we’d been online, I could have onto everything—he probably doesn’t
those bottles tasted like, and what to pair looked at a still picture. I could have want to eat out.
them with. He was a bartender. He could clicked on a heart to let him know I was He was so hard to talk to. He said so
make a drink for you, if you wanted. All interested. I could even have sent a mes- few words.
you had to do was lean over and ask. sage and been direct. And if he didn’t But one night he was chatty and spoke
I wanted something he could make. reply I could have moved on to the next to me, because I seemed familiar to him.
Something no one else had. I asked him face. After all, there were hundreds of He knew I had been there before. He
if he could make this for me, and he nod- messages to respond to, and that was just told me his name. He said he’d grown
ded. I saw him pause and think. What in twenty-four hours. Stacks of faces and up in a small town. So maybe the shy-
he had in mind seemed to require him bodies offering themselves up. Who knew ness was real. His days off were Mon-
to go and look for things. He rummaged if any of them were who they said they day and Wednesday.
through a plastic bag and plucked some- were? Whether their good looks were a I asked him about his summer plans.
thing out. When he brought the drink result of well-placed lighting, a flatter- He told me he was sticking around. He
to me, it looked like water. In the mid- ing angle, an old picture? Were those said he used to take off to Hawaii for
dle of the drink was a mint leaf in the faces even theirs, and how would I know the beaches. I told him that I was going
shape of a heart. The leaf floated there, if what they said about themselves was to travel there, and mentioned what I
and then it didn’t anymore. true? I could only take their word for it. did for work. I wasn’t used to saying what
I didn’t know how to talk to him. He Out in the wild, like this, what I saw I did. I said, “I know that sounds fake,
was right in front of me. Making drinks was true. I could see him in any light but that’s really what I do.” He laughed,
that other people in the room had asked and at any angle. It was possible to know and mentioned that he used to model.
for. So I just watched him work. That him. But, really, I didn’t want to know That sounded fake, too, but looking at
was all he was doing. Working. He was him. I liked him at exactly this distance. his face and his body, considering how
someone who could carry four glasses They all disappoint, eventually, when comfortable he was with being looked
using the space his palms and fingers you get to know them. I just wanted to at, and the way he let me look at him
could provide. He did this repeatedly. look and make up stories. I loved that I without it ever having to mean anything,
He never fumbled or broke anything. knew where he was every evening. That I could tell that he knew how to make
He cut up oranges and limes and lem- I didn’t have to wait for a call or a text. his living from someone’s gaze.
ons. He scooped ice, decorated drinks If I wanted to see him, I could, and I I wondered how old he was. My guess
with straws. He seemed to know what knew exactly where to go. was maybe early thirties, and I asked
people in the room wanted before they him. I was close. He was thirty-eight. I
wanted it. From a small machine, next or six months, I returned once a week, didn’t see a ring on his finger. Was he
to him, orders spooled like ribbons.
He didn’t try to talk to anyone. Didn’t
F on Tuesday or Thursday nights. It
wasn’t so busy, and I could lean over and
incapable of commitment? Didn’t want
to commit, ever? Or was it something
walk over and ask anything. Didn’t seem ask him to make me something. Some- he wanted but it had never worked out?
curious about anything. A waitress went times I let two or three weeks go by with- I liked that he was almost forty. It meant
by, and, though there was plenty of room out returning. I didn’t want to seem too that I wouldn’t have to teach him any-
behind him, she squeezed so close that available. I am a busy girl, after all. And thing or help him become anything. It
her chest brushed up against him. And I wanted him to wonder where I was or meant that he wasn’t like other men, get-
on the way back, when she passed him, who I was with. I thought a gorgeous ting married and starting a family in their
she touched his arm. He didn’t react ei- man like that probably gets someone any- twenties, with a house by the time they’re
ther time. Part of the job. No turning time he wants. He just leans over, and thirty. What after that? An affair, to keep
around to acknowledge her with a smile. women know what he wants. He has it going, or a divorce, for giggles. And,
No asking about her shift and how it probably never spent much time alone or being polite, he never asked me how old
was going. But she got to touch. She got known what being lonely feels like. He’s I was. I was a few years older than him,
to be back there, with him. probably never had to long for anything. but I didn’t look it.
If I looked at him, he’d look over and Strangely, he seemed shy. Though I
smile. If I leaned forward a bit, he’d come don’t think that people really are shy. It’s very time I went back to the restau-
to me. It was so easy to get him to pay
attention. I wanted to invite him to my
just a way of getting you to do all the work.
He wiped the bar top with a cloth.
E rant, I sat at the bar and watched
him work. He never yelled at anyone,
place, to ask when his shift was over. But He was probably someone who knew and no one spoke unkindly to him. He
he probably got questions like that every how to clean at home. Maybe he wouldn’t had a quiet confidence. I was jealous of
night. Was he a person who went with have to be told to do the dishes. He’d every drink I saw him make.Those drinks
anyone who asked, or was he more dis- keep the glassware spotless. It would were going to other people’s mouths, and
cerning? And what, then, if he came to my gleam behind the doors of the cupboards. I wanted to drink them all before he took
place? A few pumps and it would be over. And he might even know how to cook. them to the tables. When he wasn’t mak-
I didn’t want a few pumps. I wanted to be Working in a place like this, he’d see peo- ing drinks, he served food to all of us sit-
something to him. Something that would ple coming out of the washroom wiping ting at the bar. Nothing special. Pale,
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 51
soggy sticks of potato. Things fried in turned his left ear to me. I tried again. even if you didn’t love someone, you
lard. Clumps of meat. That made me It felt as if I had to say so many words would then, because the circumstances
feel a terrible sadness for him. and a year had passed by the time I fin- encouraged it.
He just wanted to go to the beach ished saying them. I was nervous and I thought of the woman. His girl-
once a year. I wanted to give that to him. scared, and I let it show on my face. friend. Who she was. Whoever she was
Actually, I wanted to make it so that he’d He paused for a moment, and said, she was probably like me. She proba-
never have to come back and serve any- “I don’t think it’s a good idea.” I nodded bly wanted him to stop bartending and
one here again. and let him see my disappointment. He wanted him to have his beach vacations.
I don’t know why, but I wanted to give added, “I have a girlfriend.” I thought It’s hard to leave a woman. Women are,
him everything. Where had these feelings of the words “with my girlfriend,” which for the most part, good people. Nice—
come from, and why were they here now? he could have used at any time. An omis- and, if they’re not nice, people make
I had them, and I couldn’t tell him. I could sion like that didn’t feel like an accident. them feel bad about it, so they have no
want so much based on so little. It was Maybe he did it just for tips, to sell a choice but to learn how to be nice. At-
smaller than that, even. It was nothing. hope to someone. It seemed, if he had tentive and caring. Thoughtful. They
A few weeks before, I had been to the a girlfriend, unkind, even cruel. take out the garbage, clean the toilets,
aquarium. There really is a place called But I hadn’t asked, had I? Instead, I’d have dinner on the table, buy you clothes.
the abyss, I learned. It’s three levels below asked his age. What he did on his days They’re ambitious for you. And they
where sunlight reaches. I don’t know how off. Maybe when you have someone, you forgive anything, because they allow you
to swim. I would never go diving or snor- see the two of you as one, and so when your mistakes. You don’t even have to
kelling. You swim toward things and they you say “I” you mean both of you. try very hard. Just look clean, and pretty.
dart away. You don’t get to see anything, I asked, “How long have you been I wondered if he was unhappy. Being
really. I like how safe it feels at the aquar- together?” and he told me three years. unhappy is comfortable. No one is going
ium. I can breathe on my own, and look. I thought, Three years is pretty seri- to come for your unhappiness, and, re-
I don’t have to know how to swim or be ous, and it should be worth at least ally, you don’t have to do anything about
afraid of drowning. a mention. it if you don’t want to. Why give that
I thought of a school of fish I saw “I really appreciate it, though,” he up? It was his job to be nice to me, to
there that swam together as one giant said, like someone used to being given serve me. And I was mistaken. I thought
ball, spinning and spinning. A lobster things when he had so many already. it was interest.
with three claws. The giant octopus and He walked away, to let me have a mo- “She comes in on Friday nights,” the
its three hearts. Jellyfish that glowed. I ment to myself. I didn’t want to slink old man said, offering another detail.
wanted to go there with him and watch off. I was hungry, and I wanted to eat, “Sits right here.”
him look at those things. See him in the to stuff something into my mouth. An I thought about that, and I wanted
dark. See if he could be beautiful there, old man sitting next to me at the bar to see for myself.
too. It probably seemed like a strange looked at me and said, “I knew he had
thing to ask someone I’d just met. I leaned a girlfriend.” He offered more, saying, hen I returned to the restaurant,
over, almost tried, lost my nerve.
He took my leftovers and put them
“I’m from New York. A couple of weeks
ago, he took his girlfriend there and he
W the following Friday, I knew that
the woman at the bar was her. His girl-
in small containers. There were round asked me for places to go.” friend. The woman was—as I wanted her
paper containers with plastic tops that I thought of New York then. I had to be for him—beautiful. I watched her,
kept liquids from spilling out. Brown visited the place many times. I thought and I listened. She kept calling him some-
paper boxes for the things that didn’t of the way people crossed the street. thing. I tried to make out what it was.
have liquid. He placed them all inside a That’s what came to mind. The people “Bozo,” she said.
paper bag and rolled down the top as if there don’t wait for cars to stop for them. I’ve heard babes, sweetheart, darling,
it were a gift to me. I looked at what he They cross when they want. I thought, honey. But bozo I’d never heard before.
did for others sitting at the bar who had too, how lovely it is that they really do I knew then that he really did love her.
leftovers. He brought over the same trust the one-way signs. They look one To be a bozo to someone meant that
brown paper boxes and plopped them way and then start to cross. They actu- you let them call you anything, and you
down in front of them. They all had to ally seem to think that no one will come would be that for them. He wanted to
pack up their own leftovers. He didn’t the other way. be a bozo.
consider whether they might need a The two of them had gone there, to- Then, alone, I got up and left the
round container with a plastic top for gether, and crossed the street like that. restaurant. I walked down a dark alley
any liquids. I wasn’t like the others, I I thought, What happened three years nearby. And there, with my back up
thought. Special, I thought. ago? The world had shut down. The against a brick wall, I closed my eyes. I
pandemic. People had paired up quickly. said the thing she’d called him to no one

Itoreturned a few days later and thought

that I would try again. Ask him to go
the aquarium with me.
Survival can feel a lot like love. The way
you are forced to need each other. Maybe
that was what it was for him. A com-
in particular. I wanted what was in her
mouth to be in mine, too. 

He came over as before, and smiled. ing together that was a convenience. NEWYORKER.COM
I said it. He said he didn’t hear me, and And after two years, being that close, Souvankham Thammavongsa on adoration.

52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024

 THE CRITICS
SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS FROM ALAMY; GETTY

A CRITIC AT LARGE

THE DEVOURING NEON

Mesmerized by the music managers.

BY ANDREW O’HAGAN

n any day of the week, you might a writer from Creative Loafing, proclaim- kind of hustle he’s got.” And this was
O find Scooter Braun working his
magic in a pair of vintage Reeboks. He
ing his status as the guy who knows all
the guys in the know. Braun, the son of
before Braun raked in an estimated half
a billion dollars from his various efforts,
has a love of superior kicks, and was two dentists from Greenwich, Connecti- including serving as Justin Bieber’s man-
among the high-profile investors in cut, was already perfecting his hustle— ager. He has also managed Ariana
StockX, the “stock market for sneak- from basketball courts to boardrooms. Grande, Carly Rae Jepsen, Idina Men-
ers.” He’s now forty-two, but some of “He’s hustle concentrate,” the hip-hop zel, Demi Lovato, and the Kid Laroi.
us can still picture him in 2006, a col- producer Jazze Pha said. “You ever made “He is as much the author of the pop
lege dropout riding around Atlanta with Minute Maid out of a can? That’s the music we listen to incessantly as are the

Brian Epstein bled for the Beatles; Colonel Parker made Elvis an icon. But the all-powerful pop impresario is a dying breed.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LINCOLN AGNEW THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 53
artists on his roster,” Amos Barshad manager relationship. . . . Often the man- management was a sort of husbandry
wrote of Braun in “No One Man Should ager has very different ideas from those of the self, and deferring to the Colo-
Have All That Power,” his 2019 book of the artist.” Meanwhile, a new sort of nel was the price to be paid for all the
about behind-the-scenes schemers. “He audience was gathering on the horizon, blessings he had received. “I knew Col-
is, as much as anyone, controlling the humming a different tune. onel Parker for almost four decades,”
last vestiges of the monoculture.” But The rock-and-roll manager proper, Greg McDonald, who worked for
there’s reason to wonder whether his or improper, really begins with Elvis Pres- him, writes in “Elvis and the Colonel”
profession—like that of lamplighters, ley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, the (St. Martin’s). “I saw first-hand how
town criers, and cigarette girls—might former carny with the omnipresent cigar, Colonel Parker worked . . . how he ne-
be a thing of the past. nodding, winking, and fanning his latest gotiated contracts, and how he made
In the twilight hours favored by the flame into a global conflagration. Parker sure there was enough honey to go
owl of Minerva (not to mention the in- was a huckster—he liked to call Presley around.” McDonald, displaying com-
dustry’s A. & R. scouts), we can now “my attraction”—but he never, as far as pany loyalty, depicts Elvis as his own
begin to study some vital elements in one can tell, thought of Elvis as anything worst enemy and his manager as a sim-
the job description. Back in the nineteen- other than a leg-quivering dynamo who, ple businessman doing his best. The
forties, the popular-music industry de- sooner or later, might be capable of bring- Colonel’s superpower—much mim-
pended on bookers, promoters, and ing in more than a hundred thousand icked, we are told—was for turning El-
agents, but there was a growing demand dollars a week in Vegas. Working the vis’s bid for glory into huge bundles of
for bespoke handling. Nat King Cole lights from the shadows, Parker was a cash. The agonies of creation were not
found it in the Honduras-born Carlos shambling Svengali, his pockets, one the manager’s concern. What mattered,
Gastel, a six-foot bruiser in a pin-striped imagines, stuffed with ready cash, match- McDonald thinks, is that Parker “could
suit with a pocket square, best known books, and a plethora of calling cards. sell tickets to see two flies wrestling on
for repping dance bands and the occa- A scene in Sofia Coppola’s film “Pris- a windowpane, and the line would go
sional boxer. The two men had been siz- cilla” shows a young Elvis, sveltely por- around the block.”
ing each other up for a while, but the trayed by Jacob Elordi, settling down The Colonel was old enough to be
story goes that they became partners at on a soft bed with his intended for a Brian Epstein’s father, and, in manage-
Herb Rose’s 331 Club, where Gastel spot of heavy petting. He begins by ment terms, the distance between them
bought Cole out of his performing con- phoning an assistant and telling her to is the journey from the peddler of wares
tract for ten dollars. (Gastel became hold all calls, “unless it’s from my daddy to the custodian of genius. Epstein, a
the manager of many of the key artists or an emergency from the Colonel.” young Liverpool store manager, had
from Capitol Records, including June Among those occasions which life may turned himself into the Beatles’ biggest
Christy, Nelson Riddle, Peggy Lee, and offer for vital interruptus, a message fan when, in January, 1962, he signed
Mel Tormé.) “Carlos and I thought gen- from one’s manager must rank fairly them. He was slightly weak at the knees,
erally the same way,” Cole recalled in low for most of us. But not for Elvis. and he never gained the steadiness re-
1957. “This is really unusual in an artist- To him, it appears that professional quired of hard business. Where Colo-
nel Parker’s relationship with Elvis al-
ways seemed largely transactional—with
a shift in demand, he might readily have
swapped out his young buck for a brace
of bearded ladies—Epstein had a wor-
shipful attitude toward his most famous
clients. They were always “my boys.” He
told a friend that once, during a big Beat-
les concert, he slipped into the crowd
and screamed like one of the girls, say-
ing it was what he’d wanted to do from
the minute he saw them.
In Epstein’s 1964 memoir, “A Cellarful
of Noise,” the young mogul with a silk
tie and an Aquascutum coat establishes
the credo of all pioneering pop manag-
ers from the golden age of twisting and
shouting: I was there, calling the shots.
He wasn’t Colonel Parker’s equal when
it came to making his clients rich, but
he was a few steps ahead when it came
“I asked folks to bring whatever they want, so to protecting them as artists. Nat Weiss,
now we have ten tubs of guacamole, no chips, and eight Epstein’s American business partner, felt
cases of the most obnoxiously flavored hard seltzer.” that a great moneyman was not what
the band required at that point: “They label bosses that he ran from the room eyebrows, was true to type. In “Don’t
needed a person who would inspire them, in tears. (And Klein was on his side.) Look Back,” D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967
whose neurosis was sufficient for him to When Epstein died, of an overdose, in documentary about Dylan on tour in
identify with them. And for Brian the 1967, Klein moved quickly to gain the England, a hotel manager arrives at
Beatles were an alter ego.” Epstein’s sense confidence of John Lennon, George Dylan’s room to say that there have been
of sacrifice was always a major part of his Harrison, and Ringo Starr—Paul Mc- complaints about the noise, and Gross-
character, and, even while he was mak- Cartney never liked him, preferring his man lets loose: “You’re one of the dumb-
ing sensible managerial moves (pushing girlfriend Linda Eastman’s father and est assholes and one of the most stupid
the Beatles toward matching suits and brother. In the end, Klein’s efforts at persons I’ve ever spoken to. If we were
clean hair), his notion of being a man- managing the Beatles, appearing to sort someplace else I’d punch you in your
ager was to bleed himself out. Robert out chaotic finances while goddam nose.” The theatre
Stigwood, who knew Epstein socially, not having the backing of could only go so far. “Evi-
recalled him saying that what he really McCartney, would be added dently, Dylan had finally
wanted to do was manage a cuadrilla of to the accumulating num- got around to reading all
bullfighters in Spain. ber of reasons they had for his contracts,” Clinton Hey-
splitting up. There would be lin writes in a new book,
“ M anning the phones, injecting
our hustle into every moving
lawsuits between Klein and
the Beatles, and Klein and
“The Double Life of Bob
Dylan, Vol. 2, 1966-2021: Far
thing”: that was how Andrew Loog the Rolling Stones—the Away from Myself ” (Bod-
Oldham described his life as the Roll- latter alleging “mismanage- ley Head). “Please don’t put
ing Stones’ manager. Oldham was a ment of funds.” He would a price on my soul,” Dylan
King’s Road ingénue, a manic child of later be convicted of tax implored in his 1967 song
the fashion boutique. It was Oldham fraud and spend two months in prison. “Dear Landlord.” His contractual rela-
who got Mick Jagger and Keith Rich- Rock management, it was becoming tionship with Grossman would end de-
ards to write songs, but perhaps his main clear, was a protection racket. For a high finitively in 1970.
contribution was to introduce them to price, the early pop impresarios worked When Dylan was asked, in a depo-
Allen Klein, the son of a butcher from to shield their young charges from the sition, how long he had known Gross-
New Jersey, who was to accountancy venality of the record labels and the greed man, he replied, “I don’t think I’ve ever
what Colonel Parker had been to the of the concert venues; only with time known the man.” There were sugges-
cowboy hat. (He wore it well.) Rich- would the artists come to recognize that tions, alluded to by Dylan in other
ards later described their first meeting: they also needed protection from their songs, that the manager had a tendency
“In walks this little fat American gee- protectors. Bob Dylan’s manager Albert to keep his clients in a state of narcotic
zer, smoking a pipe, wearing the most Grossman spent a lot of his career ham- dependency as well as financial uncer-
diabolical clothes.” It helped that Klein mering out deals for artists who claimed tainty. “Too many of his artists were
could make the Stones laugh. “Let’s go to hate materialism. A Chicago-born junkies,” Ed Sanders, of the Fugs, told
with someone who can turn everything son of Russian tailors, Grossman had a music critic, “and I think it’s possi-
round,” Richards added, “or fuck things owned the Gate of Horn, a club in the ble he used their addiction as a way of
up once and for all.” Klein came on like basement of the Rice Hotel, on Chica- controlling them.” Grossman’s response
a gangster, which was completely shock- go’s Near North Side, and he began to to the heroin addiction of his client
ing to the little gray gentlemen of the manage some of the acts that appeared Janis Joplin was to take out a life-
British recording industry. “We’ve got there. Grossman had already helped start insurance policy on her.
a lot of good people working at this the Newport Folk Festival, in 1959, when In the early nineteen-seventies, the
company,” Sir Edward Lewis, the head he saw Bob Dylan at the Gaslight Cafe, notoriety of rock managers was start-
of Decca, once reportedly said to Klein, in Greenwich Village. “Whenever he ing to rival that of their clients. Don
who replied, “Well, I hope they can sing, came in, you couldn’t help but notice DeLillo’s novel “Great Jones Street”
because you’ve lost the Stones.” him,” Dylan later wrote. “When he talked, (1973), about the “devouring neon” of
Klein immediately got the band a his voice was loud, like the booming of fame, gives us the rock star Bucky Wun-
better publishing deal, upping their war drums.” Dylan, signing with him in derlick, who, burned out at twenty-five,
end from fifty-six cents on the dollar 1962, appears not to have known about holes up in a cold New York apart-
to seventy-two. He came in like the Grossman’s deal with the music publish- ment, awaiting cosmic lessons about
man who shot Liberty Valance. “I will ers M. Witmark & Sons, which prom- power and language. After stepping
succeed because I believe all men are ised the manager fifty per cent of the out for food one day, he returns to find
born evil,” he apparently said. Having publishing income his artists brought in. his manager with one arm down the
started out as the Stones’ moneyman, toilet bowl looking for a dime. Bucky’s
he’d edged out Oldham by 1967. Accord- anagers who prey on their cli- manager is a stand-in for many famous
ing to Ray Davies, of the Kinks, the word
“bully” doesn’t begin to cover it. At one
M ents often mask their bad faith
with theatrically belligerent displays
managers, putting his client at ease
about broken commitments, “revenues,
meeting, Davies’s lawyer was so horri- of loyalty, and Grossman, with his monies, so forth—grosses and the like.”
fied by the way Klein was treating the double-breasted suits and comb-worthy Before Bucky gains the attention of a
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 55
terrorist group, we get to admire the suite and, as he recalled, told him to do was McLaren the magazine interviewed,
bold imperatives of his manager, a man his worst. “Here you are, have this room under a banner headline, “Meet the Col
“propelled, ballistically, to and from dis- on Led Zeppelin,” Grant said. “And he Tom Parker of The Blank Generation.”
tant points of commerce.” went ‘Oh, yes!’ and enjoyed himself, and
The type is captured quite hilariously it cost me $670.” He claimed that, in the ccording to her brother, Madonna
in the character of Dennis Hope, played
by Jimmy Fallon in Cameron Crowe’s
company of Don Arden (Sharon Os-
bourne’s father and the onetime man-
A had a Sid Vicious poster and a
naked light bulb hanging in her New
“Almost Famous” (2000), also set in the ager of the Small Faces), he dangled York apartment when she started out.
early seventies. Hope is angling to man- Robert Stigwood, a rival manager, from Her first manager, Camille Barbone,
age the band Stillwater, and he arrives the fourth-floor balcony of Stigwood’s promised a weekly wage of a hundred
wearing a brown leather jacket and a London office. “He had disgusting dollars and got her bicycle repaired. It
brazenly spread collar, preening beneath skinny ankles,” Grant later recalled. was different for girls, but, in the nine-
the kind of glasses that helped Elvis con- Dressed in silk scarves, rings, and a teen-eighties, toughness became central
quer Las Vegas. “I didn’t invent the rainy long beard, Grant, weighing in at three to the rules of engagement. “Madonna
day,” Hope says, with relish. “I just own hundred pounds at his heaviest, was basically pushed me to my financial limit,
the best umbrella.” The rock manager driven by fear and cocaine to do every- my loyalty limits, my patience limits,”
had by then become his own tribute act, thing he could for the band. Before Barbone recalled. “I knew she was using
and in the overblown manner of the day him, the usual split with bands and con- me. But what could I expect, really?”
Hope goes on to impress on his neo- cert promoters was sixty-forty; after Madonna’s biographer Lucy O’Brien
phyte charges the Wagnerian serious- him, it was ninety-ten. “The artist al- tells us that Barbone knew she didn’t
ness of their world-conquering quest. ways wears the white hat,” Colonel Tom have the juice to get her client to the
“Welcome to New York,” he says. “It’s Parker had said, but with Grant the art- next level. (Other biographers reported
O.K. to be nervous. You should be ner- ist also wore white suits and white feath- that Barbone was in love with Madonna.)
vous. All you can do is be yourself and ers, bleached with sanctity. “The power It’s true that managers—like agents, like
leave a pint of blood on that stage.” The we had was incredible,” Phil Carlo, the husbands, and like wives—are often fired
consensus was that the manager had be- band’s road manager, recalled. “At this and that, when they are, the parties in-
come the bullshit king of the turning point I discovered the only people who volved seldom agree about how to split
world, a belief that hasn’t quite gone could jump red lights with a police es- the blame. Madonna wanted the eight-
away. (“He’s a piece of shit,” an indus- cort were the president of the United ies and nineties to be a testing ground
try source told Business Insider, com- States and Peter Grant.” for female power and erotic candor, and
menting on Scooter Braun’s relationship A contrasting case is presented by they were. But the manager couldn’t keep
to his clients. “But he’s my piece of shit.”) Malcolm McLaren, the London-born up with the star’s ambition. Barbone was
agitator and propagandist, who not only so distressed by the experience that she
eter Grant, who started out in the messed with the capitalist yearnings of left the industry altogether and tempo-
P late nineteen-fifties as a bouncer at
a London rock-and-roll coffee bar, was,
rock but installed the manager as its
central artist. (It took Poly Styrene of
rarily took work in a nursing home. “I
needed people to say, ‘thank you,’” she
by the mid-seventies, a cosmic beacon X-Ray Spex, Viv Albertine of the Slits, later explained.
of death-defying behavior as well as the and a tranche of female punk artists to All artists have their own particular
chief exemplar of the crim- expose the conformity in spiral of needs. Staci Robinson, in
inal-adjacent management McLaren’s program of “Tupac Shakur: The Authorized Biog-
style. He once wrapped Lit- change.) Attending to a sta- raphy” (Crown), recounts that when
tle Richard in a bedsheet ble of Dickensian types, execs at Time Warner, Tupac’s record
and carried him to a wait- McLaren was part Fagin, label’s distributor, grew concerned about
ing vehicle when he refused part Uriah Heep, up from violent content (politicians had started
to do a gig. A whole bygone the streets to magnify your to speechify about gangsta rap), the hip-
era is encapsulated in the life and pick your pockets. hop star’s manager, Atron Gregory,
fact that Grant, who became In Paul Gorman’s “The Life agreed with them that Tupac’s next
best known as Led Zeppe- & Times of Malcolm Mc- album “would have to be rethought.”
lin’s manager, once tried to Laren” (Constable), an ex- Atron’s unease made Tupac uneasy about
drive a car into a swimming ultant recent biography, him, and he thereafter insisted that he
pool but got it wedged between two McLaren plays a catalytic role similar become his manager’s only client. “I
palm trees. (Bands today are kind to to the one Warhol played for the pre- need to be the most important to you,”
trees, and some have been known to vious generation; the Sex Pistols emerge Tupac told him, testing not only Greg-
mount concerts in aid of them.) At Se- as McLaren’s house band, embodying ory’s loyalty but his own requirements.
attle’s Edgewater Hotel, Grant encoun- his situationist rant, his cultural riposte, “And if you don’t want to do it this way,
tered a hotel manager who confessed to and his big joke. McLaren turned mak- I gotta move on.” His next manager
envying the rock guests who could vent ing an exhibition of yourself into a ruse came from the Black Panthers.
their frustrations by trashing their rooms. de guerre, and when New Musical Ex- Managerial hysteria has evolved in
Grant took the gentleman to his own press finally went big on the Pistols it all sorts of ways in the decades since
56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
Brian Epstein first joined the girls to
scream his head off. Kurt Cobain, of
Nirvana, turned out to require a man-
ager who would protect him not only
from the industry but also from him-
self. Danny Goldberg, who looked after
the band in the early nineties, recalls
having a telephone conversation with
the manager of Aerosmith to find out
how you go about rescuing a rock star
who’s out of his mind on drugs. Cobain
wanted to call Nirvana’s third album “I
Hate Myself and I Want to Die,” like
his anthemic song, and one of Gold- “It’s easy to control your portions when they won’t stop moving.”
berg’s jobs was to talk him out of it
while he still could. Goldberg was ex- • •
pected to double as a second father and
the person in charge of critical inter-
ventions, which worked until it didn’t. team and let him take over her career. in the music industry. In 2019, backed by
Cobain died by suicide in 1994. “The Idol” is consistent only in its the Carlyle Group, Braun bought Big
Father fixations come up a lot in depravity. With the plausibility of day- Machine Label Group for three hun-
these highly fraught situations. The time soaps, the casual menace of Grand dred million dollars, giving him owner-
nineties boy-band impresario Lou Pearl- Theft Auto, the logic of revenge porn, ship of the masters of Swift’s first six al-
man, known to his clients as Big Poppa, and the momentum of a psychotic ep- bums. “Never in my worst nightmares
looked after many young men who isode, the series takes the issue of con- did I imagine the buyer would be Scooter,”
yearned for a dependable father figure. trol and turns it into a lethargic rock she wrote on Tumblr. She has been re-
’N Sync had already toured for two years opera, with levels of confusion repur- recording those early songs, each one la-
and sold millions of dollars in records posed from the career of Britney Spears. belled “Taylor’s Version.”
when its five members received their That performer’s struggle with profes- Taylor Swift is effectively the C.E.O.
first checks from him: ten thousand sional and parental control is central to of her own company. An article in Forbes,
dollars each. A fellow-manager said the memoir she published last October, “What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About
Pearlman reminded her of “the kid who “The Woman in Me” (Gallery Books), Leadership,” reveals that, when she gave
would tear the wings off of flies—not in which she questions the decision of the staff on her recent tour bonuses to-
to kill them, just to watch them crawl her managers “to claim I was some kind talling fifty-five million dollars, she in-
around and not be able to fly.” He had of young-girl virgin even into my twen- cluded five hundred notes she’d written
spent his bands’ earnings promoting a ties.” In Spears’s time, managers oper- herself. (It’s hard to imagine Bob Dylan
huge Ponzi scheme, stealing hundreds ated variously as cult leaders or spin writing five hundred notes to his peeps,
of millions of dollars, the life savings of doctors, issuing editorials about their and even harder to imagine Albert Gross-
fourteen hundred people, and by 2008 clients as opposed to repairing their bi- man or Colonel Parker signing off on
his fiction had unravelled. He was sen- cycles. By the end of 2006, Britney had bonuses to lighting operators and cater-
tenced to twenty-five years in prison, begun to fall into a period of mental ing staff.) In the higher reaches of the
where he died, in 2016, at the age of six- illness, and she later endured a legal bat- industry, the backstage hustlers and hot
ty-two. Still, his last days were spent tle with her father to escape from his messes are being supplanted by the ex-
dreaming of a comeback. All he needed conservatorship. The singer writes that, ecutive power of the star herself, backed
was a phone and an Internet connec- at the height of her mismanagement, by a calming “manager” in a nice suit
tion and he could start some new bands. her father told her he was the boss. He who helms a team of lawyers. “Every-
Management is increasingly por- was Britney now. thing has changed,” as Swift sings. Doug-
trayed as a creeping ailment in the om- las Baldridge, a Washington litigator and
niverse of the singular rock artist. Not
that anyone comes off well in HBO’s
“The Idol,” a series about the music in-
SCarlycooter Braun has reportedly been los-
ing many of his high-profile clients;
Rae Jepsen, Idina Menzel, Demi
a former partner in a white-shoe law
firm, is now the general counsel for 13
Management, which helps look after
dustry which was co-created by Sam Lovato, BabyJake, and, most recently, Swift in her efforts to look after herself.
Levinson and aired last year, about a Ariana Grande have moved on. He was He is unlikely to be dangling anybody
young and beautiful star, Jocelyn (Lily- never Taylor Swift’s manager, but his from a fourth-floor window by his an-
Rose Depp). She gets entangled with a troubled relationship with the superstar, kles. The carnival barker and the char-
sleazebag called Tedros (played by the a billionaire who in February became the ismatic goof, the superfan and the mad
Canadian singer-songwriter Abel Tes- only artist to win Album of the Year at accountant—these types belong to a
faye, better known as the Weeknd), who the Grammys four times, may have a sunset tale of diminishing power. We’ll
advises her to ditch her professional lasting impact on questions of authority probably miss them when they’re gone. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 57
 his birthplace. A multigenerational novel
BOOKS of father and son might bend all the
way from the rural poverty of Seeper-
sad’s origins in the Caribbean to the
A LIFE MORE ORDINARY sparkling Stockholm hall in which Vidia
Naipaul received the Nobel Prize in
A father is resurrected by his children in Amitava Kumar’s “My Beloved Life.” Literature, in 2001.
I thought often of “A House for
BY JAMES WOOD Mr. Biswas” while reading Amitava Ku-
mar’s new novel, “My Beloved Life”
(Knopf ). Kumar, who has written elo-
quently about his complicated indebt-
edness to the Indian Trinidadian writer,
here tells the story of “an ordinary life”:
one that, in its Biswasian quietness,
might not seem to claim the loud space
of a novel. Jadu Kunwar, Kumar writes
of his gentle hero, “had passed unno-
ticed through much of his life.” His ex-
periences “would not fill a book; they
had been so light and inconsequential,
like a brief ripple on a lake’s surface.”
The realization that Kumar, like Nai-
paul, might also be writing a fictional-
ized version of his own late father’s life
breaks like a slowly cresting wave over
the sad and joyful ground of this story.
“My Beloved Life” comprises two
large sections and two smaller ones. The
first tells the life of Jadunath Kunwar.
Jadu, as he is known, is born in 1935 in
a backwater of the state of Bihar, in east-
ern India, to illiterate farmers; moves to
the nearby city of Patna for his educa-
tion, and eventually becomes a lecturer
in history at Patna College; marries a
woman named Maya and has a daugh-
ter, Jugnu; and wins a Fulbright schol-
arship to study at Berkeley, in the late
nineteen-eighties, before returning to
or years I have been haunted by a Mr. Biswas’s life was not worth writing. India. He dies in 2020, in the first wave
F sentence from V. S. Naipaul’s great
tragicomic novel “A House for Mr. Biswas”
Novelistic time is more forgiving. Nai-
paul’s novel takes in Mohun Biswas’s
of the Covid pandemic.These, you might
say, are the facts that can be compre-
(1961): “In all, Mr Biswas lived for six life episode by episode, telling it from hended in one glance, though the facts
years at The Chase, years so squashed by inside his protagonist’s comprehension, are precious and the life remarkable.
their own boredom and futility that they as a story of tremulous ambition and The novelist then tenderly sows the
could be comprehended in one glance.” anxiety. How terrible it would have been, hundred and fifty or so pages with a trail
A sentence, indeed: imagine handing down Mr. Biswas thinks, “to have lived and of story and detail, and the remarkable
this summary verdict, and then imagine died as one had been born, unnecessary life becomes also a beloved life, one com-
writing a novel whose every page rises and unaccommodated.” passionately appraised by the noticing
up against the very summation. The ver- Naipaul had good reason to accom- novelist. And what noticing! Kumar—
dict belongs to historical time: it tells us modate Mohun Biswas in his full ne- who himself grew up in Patna, came to
that Mr. Biswas’s life, seen from above, cessity, because he was essentially writ- America as a graduate student in the late
is knowable only in its very unimpor- ing the life of his own father, Seepersad nineteen-eighties, and now teaches at
tance, as an existence steadily disappear- Naipaul. Unlike his brilliant son, who Vassar College—has never lacked for
ing into the careless comprehension of left Trinidad for Oxford and did not material. Patna, he tells us in “Bombay
the cosmos. Historical time tells us that live at home again, Seepersad never left London New York” (2002), an early work
of criticism and memoir, was a poor city.
Kumar’s small details have the vitality of invention and the resonance of the real. In the hospital where Kumar’s sister
58 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK DRISCOLL
would eventually work as a doctor, stray stories, pointedly revealed but not over- episode in which Jadu and his sister Lata,
dogs pull at patients’ bandages and fly- poweringly unpacked by the writer. in order to improve her English, work
ing ants settle in wounds: “Patna is a Cosmopolitans, Kumar wrote years together to translate a poem from Jadu’s
place where rats carried away my moth- ago, are not only those people who move college textbook into Hindi. It is Ed-
er’s dentures.” When he moved, as a stu- between countries or continents but also ward Thomas’s “Adlestrop,” a brief lyric
dent, to Minnesota, Kumar had never those who move great distances, geo- published in 1917 which offers a glimpse
seen an olive. graphic or social, within their native coun- of pastoral England. In late June, a train
In the fiction that followed “Bombay tries. Such is Jadu. When he arrives at stops at a rural station in Gloucester-
London New York,” Kumar sometimes college in Patna, he has two shirts, one shire. Mild English summer is every-
demonstrated an uneasiness with letting blue and one white. He spends his first where. The train hisses, someone coughs,
stories and details speak for themselves, night in the city sleeping on the river- a blackbird sings. All around are willows,
tending to expand and expatiate on them bank. His greatest desire, Kumar writes, willow herb, and meadowsweet. Lata re-
via essay, cultural criticism, long foot- is to tell his fellow-students about the marks that she has seen such stations in
notes, and literary allusion—varieties of poverty of his origins. He might tell them, India, desolate rural platforms. But how
autofictional expression that teasingly for instance, that he was born in the vil- to translate the word “Adlestrop,” or the
came together in “Immigrant, Montana” lage of Khewali, where his father and names of these very English flora and
(2018). That book’s narrator, sharing Ku- grandfather were also born. That his par- fauna? Eventually, they have a poem, less
mar’s trajectory from Bihar to America, ents are peasants. That his village school a translation than a reinvention, in which
and even the author’s initials (in the book, had only one teacher, who was absent a train stops at a station called Sugauli,
he sometimes goes by AK), writes this whenever he was needed to help with to take on water. The passengers want
about his origins: “My father had grown the harvest, and that this teacher was the train to stay there, because a mynah
up in a hut. I knew in my heart that I also a wrestler, earning extra rupees from is singing in the branches of a mahua
was closer to a family of peasants than matches in nearby villages. Often, after tree. When Jadu tells Lata that Edward
I was to a couple of intellectuals sitting these fights, the teacher would “ask two Thomas died in the First World War,
in a restaurant in New York.” Moments of his strongest students to massage his before the poem was published, her eyes
like these pierce, from time to time, AK’s limbs. When this happened, the other glisten, but he doesn’t want to ask what
comic narrative about American girl- students were asked to loudly recite the has moved her so much. “Instead, he
friends, sex, new music, movies, Presi- multiplication tables.” congratulated his sister for her poem,
dent Obama, and reading Edward Said Not that all the students in Patna are and she, finding herself praised by her
and Stuart Hall. Reading Kumar, one wealthier or more privileged than Jadu. brother, the college student, spoke to him
sometimes has a stronger sense of what Ramdeo Manjhi, for instance, is a Dalit, in English,” Kumar writes. “ ‘Thank you,’
he wanted to avoid than of what he was a so-called untouchable. Ramdeo tells she said, before rushing out of the room.”
willing to embrace. Satya, the Kumar-like Jadu that his people “did the jobs that It is a touching and freighted mo-
narrator of “A Time Outside This Time” the upper-caste people didn’t do—drag- ment. The English poem, not unlike the
(2021), appears to disdain what he calls ging away the carcasses of dead animals, returning Jadu in relation to his less ed-
the conventional, “eternal” bourgeois for instance.” Throughout the book, ucated sister, is the bearer of cultural
novel—which deals with “the human Kumar keeps his eye on questions of prestige. The translation into Hindi in-
heart in conflict with itself et cetera.” class and social stratification. Ramdeo evitably fails; instead, two fabulously dif-
grows up to be a corrupt local politician. ferent, almost rivalrous texts sit next to
t’s not clear, by this rather narrow defi- Kumar’s details have the vitality of each other. I’m reminded of a moment
Iexactly
nition, whether “My Beloved Life” is
a bourgeois novel, since it is less
invention and the resonance of the real,
as if echoing with actual family history.
in Amit Chaudhuri’s novel “Odysseus
Abroad” when the protagonist, an In-
about the human heart in conflict with When Jadu returns from college in Patna dian student adapting to life in London,
itself than it is about the self in conflict to his parents’ village, he brings gifts. He pauses to reflect on Shakespeare’s line
(and sometimes in agreement) with so- gives his father a heavy bronze lock, in- “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
ciety and history. Certainly, Kumar knows tended for a trunk of precious family pa- The poem had been senseless at home:
that his own biography, a novelized ver- pers. So proud is Jadu’s father that he who would want to be compared to a
sion of which appears in “My Beloved goes about all day with this lock in his summer’s day in Bombay? Only now, in
Life,” concerns nothing less than the fab- hand, “key attached,” ready to answer any London, does the simile make sense, but
rication of a bourgeois self, however frag- questions about the gleaming new ac- the Indian student had to be himself
ile or contradictory that achievement quisition: “The brand name Harrison translated in order to grasp it. In “Im-
may occasionally feel to him. Above all, was etched in the metal. In reality, the migrant, Montana,” Kumar’s narrator
his new novel is always deeply human; lock company owed its name to an en- reads a story by Ismat Chughtai in En-
the heart is everywhere in these pages. trepreneur named Hari Monga.” Jadu’s glish, and cannot turn it back into its
It is easily the best thing Amitava Kumar father doesn’t know this. “English-make,” original Urdu. He feels sad and stranded,
has written, largely because the novelist he tells any inquisitor. “See the name.” far from home in America: “I had be-
relaxes into the novelistic, and trusts the Gentle comedy like this can turn to come a translated man, no longer able
tale rather than the teller. Its astonish- tears within a page or two. The scene to connect with my own past.” But what
ing details sit in the text like little coiled with the lock is followed by a moving is notable in the scene from “A Beloved
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 59
Life” is that Kumar resists this kind of she attended Patna Women’s College, mar’s work, the question invariably gets
commentary. He does not spell out the got her master’s degree in journalism in caught up in feelings of guilt: the guilt
source of Lata’s tears, instead closing with Delhi, and has been living for more than an emigrating child has about leaving
her rushed departure from the room, her twenty years in Atlanta, where she works his parents behind and so far away, about
English “thank you” a pained and proper for CNN. We discover that her mother, having had greater opportunities and
response to the perhaps rare excitement Maya, died young, at the age of fifty-two, greater ease than they did, about never
of being “praised by her brother.” All the and that her father’s year in Berkeley is returning for good and rarely returning
emotion finds its locus in that beautiful what inspired Jugnu to leave for Amer- for long. Jugnu’s section is dominated
human phrase. It is a novelist’s scene, an ica. She retells some of the episodes that by an American daughter’s grief, and her
episode that would have been spoiled by the first section has already presented, guilt: she cannot forgive herself for the
a superadded term like “translated man.” with a daughter’s simultaneously for- fact that her father died alone and far
giving and judgmental eye. As a jour- away from her, that in his last hours he
rom time to time, Jadu attempts to nalist, she speaks plainly and boldly: “I phoned her in America and left a mes-
F write the remarkable-unremarkable
story of his life. A memoir is completed
believe strongly that we are in touch
with a great astonishing mystery when
sage, that she did not immediately pick
up. By the time she listened to the mes-
but is never published. He is too much we put honest words down on paper to sage, her father had died. Her account,
the professional historian. The uncer- register a life and to offer witness.” She like the entirety of Kumar’s novel, com-
tainty of memoir disturbs him; he is tells us about an episode from not long mits itself to a kind of narrative recom-
drawn to collective history over personal after her father’s return from Berkeley. pense: “I’m trying to understand how to
drama. His daughter says that he has a Jugnu, then working at a Delhi news- mark the life of my father who died
tendency to speak as if reciting text from paper, accompanies Jadu to a local club, alone.” Jadu’s cousin voices Jugnu’s own
a Wikipedia entry, that he’s the sort of where he is to speak to a group of in- guilt when they speak on the phone
person who would rather write about tellectuals about his Fulbright year. In- about her recently deceased father: “This
the manufacture of jute than about his stead of giving the audience what it is the problem with all of you who go
own child. When Jadu arrives at Berke- wants (tales about peanut butter), Jadu so far away,” he chides her.
ley, in 1988, he is lonely, and cuts a for- speaks about caste inequalities, racial In a recent LitHub piece, Kumar
mal figure. When asked what he is re- prejudice against Indians in the United wrote that his mother died in 2014, and
searching in California, he stiffly replies, States, episodes of anti-Indian violence that his father died last year, and not in
“I’m studying a chapter in history.” So, by Americans, and so on. Jugnu won- 2020, as Jadu, the fictional father, does.
as in “A House for Mr. Biswas,” the ques- ders if others in the room see her father Kumar was able to reach his father’s
tion of how Jadu’s private life is re- as she does. In his watchful anxiety, he bedside before he died, but not quickly
counted, and by whom, will be humanly simply cannot play the happy returning enough to find his father still conscious.
and politically important. And, as in sightseer, the grateful Indian visitor: “He Kumar’s essay tells us what actually hap-
“Biswas,” the novel’s recounting of the wasn’t a tourist or even a traveler at the pened but dissipates some of its per-
life is also the novel’s continuous justi- airport; he was like a patient in the wait- sonal force amid references to Naipaul,
fication of its own existence as a form. ing room outside a doctor’s clinic,” some- Annie Ernaux, Martin Amis, Sharon
This, Kumar signals, is what novels do. one who is nursing a sickness and knows Olds, and Nick Laird, all writers who
There is “the chapter in history” that that others are sick, too. “The poverty have in powerful ways described their
comprises the biographical arc of Jadu’s of his childhood defined him utterly,” dying fathers. Kumar’s novel has far
life. And then there are all the private she concludes. greater autobiographical power than his
undulations within that chapter in his- At the club, Jadu told his audience, nonfiction essay does. His beautiful,
tory. For the novelist can then comment, “I was born in a hut and my village still truthful fiction rings with all the grat-
as he now does, using the novelist’s priv- doesn’t have electricity.”The phrase “born itude and anticipated grief that he ex-
ileged insight, “A chapter in history! The in a hut,” or some version of it, appears pressed in 2002, in “Bombay London
language of application forms. Clichés often enough in the novel (at least five New York,” when both of his parents
in the dull getup of office clerks. Jadu times) for the reader to register its tal- were still alive. It is not the immigrants,
would have felt a greater sense of ease ismanic importance. Recall those sen- he wrote then, but the ones who stay
if he was expressing himself in Hindi. . . . tences from “Immigrant, Montana”: “My behind who are truly heroic: “Each year,
At Berkeley, he now spoke only English; father had grown up in a hut. I knew in I travel to the town in India where my
it felt as if he was doing something new my heart that I was closer to a family of parents live. I am able to spend only a
or strange, like wearing a hat.” peasants than I was to a couple of intel- few days with them. And then I return
In fact, Jadu’s life is told twice over lectuals sitting in a restaurant in New to America.” Kumar says he wants to
in this novel—the first large section re- York.” Kumar’s felt proximity to his own believe that his parents, “old and set in
counts it in the third person, and then family origins in poverty has always given their ways, anxious, and forever bicker-
the second large section recounts it in his work a tender, corrective power. In- ing, find in each other the strength that
the first-person voice of Jadu’s daugh- deed, what is it like to be “a translated their children do not provide.”This novel
ter, Jugnu, bringing us to the present man”? What is it like when such trans- finds and provides great strength—too
day. Jugnu tells us, too, about her own lation plays on an axis of economic as late for Kumar’s parents, but in good
ordinary yet also remarkable existence: well as geographic relocation? In Ku- time for his grateful readers. 
60 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
 entitled to the admiration and grati-
BOOKS tude of posterity.”
Posterity, of course, has a mind of
its own. In 2019, the two-hundred-and-
VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED fiftieth anniversary of Cook’s landing in
New Zealand, a replica of the ship he’d
Exploring the fateful expeditions of Captain Cook. sailed made an official tour around the
country. According to New Zealand’s
BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT government, the tour was intended as an
opportunity to reflect on the nation’s com-
plex history. Some Māori groups banned
the boat from their docks, on the ground
that they’d already ref lected enough.
Cook “was a barbarian,” the then
chief executive of the Ngāti Kahu iwi
told a reporter. Two years ago, an obe-
lisk erected in 1874 to mark the spot
where Cook was killed, on Kealakekua
Bay, was vandalized. “You are on native
land,” someone painted on the monu-
ment. In January, on the eve of Austra-
lia Day, an antipodean version of the
Fourth of July, a bronze statue of Cook
that had stood in Melbourne for more
than a century was sawed off at the an-
kles. When a member of the commu-
nity council proposed that area resi-
dents be consulted on whether to restore
the statue, a furor erupted. At a meet-
ing delayed by protest, the council nar-
rowly voted against consultation and
in favor of repair. A council member
Cook was a brilliant navigator. What horrors did he leave in his wake? on the losing side expressed shock at
the way the debate had played out, say-
n Valentine’s Day, 1779, Captain went, he claimed land for the Crown. ing it had devolved into an “absolutely
O James Cook invited Hawaii’s
King Kalani‘ōpu‘u to visit his ship, the
When King George III learned of
Cook’s demise, he reportedly wept. An
crazy mess.”
Into these roiling waters wades “The
Resolution. Cook and the King were obituary that ran in the London Ga- Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition,
on friendly terms, but, on this particu- zette mourned an “irreparable Loss to First Contact and the Fateful Final Voy-
lar day, Cook planned to take Kala- the Public.” A popular poet named Anna age of Captain James Cook” (Double-
ni‘ōpu‘u hostage. Some of the King’s Seward published an elegy in which the day), a new biography by Hampton
subjects had stolen a small boat from Muses, apprised of Cook’s passing, shed Sides. Sides, a journalist whose previ-
Cook’s fleet, and the captain intended “drops of Pity’s holy dew.” (The work ous books include the best-selling
to hold Kalani‘ōpu‘u until it was re- sold briskly and was often reprinted “Ghost Soldiers,” about a 1945 mission
turned. The plan quickly went awry, without the poet’s permission.) to rescue Allied prisoners of war, ac-
however, and Cook ended up face down “While on each wind of heav’n his knowledges the hazards of the enter-
in a tidal pool. fame shall rise, / In endless incense to prise. “Eurocentrism, patriarchy, enti-
At the time of his death, Cook was the smiling skies,” Seward wrote. Art- tlement, toxic masculinity,” and “cultural
Britain’s most celebrated explorer. In the ists competed to depict Cook’s final appropriation” are, he writes, just a few
course of three epic voyages—the last moments; in their paintings and en- of the charged issues raised by Cook’s
one, admittedly, unfinished—he had gravings, they, too, tended to represent legacy. It’s precisely the risks, Sides adds,
mapped the east coast of Australia, cir- the captain Heaven-bound. An account that drew him to the subject.
cumnavigated New Zealand, made the of Cook’s life which ran in a London
first documented crossing of the Ant- magazine declared that he had “dis- ook, the second of eight children,
arctic Circle, “discovered” the Hawaiian
Islands, paid the first known visit to
covered more countries in the Atlan-
tic and Pacific Oceans than all the other
C was born in 1728 in Yorkshire. His
father was a farm laborer, and Cook
South Georgia Island, and attached navigators together.” The anonymous would likely have followed the same
names to places as varied as New Cale- author of this account opined that, path had he not shown early promise
donia and Bristol Bay. Wherever Cook among mariners, none would be “more in school. His parents apprenticed him
ILLUSTRATION BY JULIE BENBASSAT THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 61
to a merchant, but Cook was bored by there sailed around the tip of South which the British knew of only vaguely,
dry goods. In 1747, he joined the crew America. Arriving in Tahiti, where Brit- from the Dutch.
of the Freelove, a boat that, despite its ish and French sailors had already in- The Endeavour spent several weeks
name, was designed for the distinctly fected many of the women with syph- searching for the continent. Nothing
unerotic task of ferrying coal to London. ilis, Cook drew up rules to govern his much happened during this period ex-
After working his way up in the Mer- crew’s dealings with the island’s inhab- cept that a crew member drank him-
chant Navy, Cook jumped ship, as it were. itants. The men were not to trade items self to death. As per the Admiralty’s
At the age of twenty-six, he enlisted in from the boat “in exchange for any thing instructions, Cook next headed west.
the Royal Navy, and one of his command- but provisions.” (That rule appears to The ship landed on the east coast of
ers, recognizing Cook’s talents, encour- have been flagrantly flouted.) New Zealand’s North Island on Octo-
aged him to take up surveying. A chart The day of the transit—June 3, ber 8, 1769. Within the first day, Cook’s
that Cook helped draft of the St. Law- 1769—dawned clear, or, as Cook put men had killed at least four Māori and
rence River proved crucial to the British it, “as favourable to our purposes as we wounded several others.
victory in the French and Indian War. could wish.” But the observers’ mea-
In 1768, Cook was given command surements differed so much that it was ship like the Endeavour was its
of his own ship, H.M.S. Endeavour, a
boxy, square-sterned boat that, like the
evident—or should have been—that
something had gone wrong. (The
A own floating world, its commander
an absolute ruler. A Royal Navy cap-
Freelove, had been built for hauling coal. whole plan, it later became clear, was tain was described as a “King at Sea”
The Navy was sending the Endeavour fundamentally flawed.) Whether Cook and could mete out punishment—typ-
to the South Pacific, ostensibly for sci- had indeed waited until this point to ically flogging—as he saw fit. At the
entific purposes. A transit of Venus was open his secret instructions is unknown; same time, in the vastness of the ocean,
approaching, and it was believed that in any event, they pointed to the true a ship’s captain had no one to turn to
careful observation of the event could purpose of the trip. From Tahiti, the for help. He had to be ever mindful that
be used to determine the distance be- Endeavour was to seek out a great con- he was outnumbered.
tween the Earth and the sun. Cook and tinent—Terra Australis Incognita— Cook was known as a stickler for
his men were supposed to watch the theorized to lie somewhere to the order. A crew member recorded that
transit from Tahiti, which the British south. If Cook located this continent, Cook once performed an inspection of
had recently claimed. Then, and only he was to track its coast, and “with the his men’s hands; those with dirty fin-
then, was the captain to open a set of Consent of the Natives to take pos- gers forfeited the day’s allowance of
sealed orders from the Admiralty which session of Convenient Situations in grog. He seemed to have a sixth sense
would provide further instructions. the Country in the Name of the King for the approach of land; another crew
The Endeavour departed from Plym- of Great Britain.” If he didn’t locate member claimed that Cook could in-
outh, made its way to Rio, and from it, he was to head to New Zealand, tuit it even in the dead of night. Al-
though in the seventeen-seventies no
one knew what caused scurvy, Cook
insisted that his men eat fresh fruit
whenever possible and that they con-
sume sauerkraut, a good source of
Vitamin C.
Of Cook’s inner life, few traces re-
main. When he set off for Tahiti, he
had a wife and three children. Before
she died, Elizabeth Cook burned her
personal papers, including her corre-
spondence with her husband. Letters
from Cook that have been preserved
mostly read like this one, to the Navy
Board: “Please to order his Majesty’s
Bark the Endeavour to be supply’d
with eight Tonns of Iron Ballast.” Cook
left behind voluminous logs and jour-
nals; the entries in these, too, are gen-
erally bloodless.
“Punished Richard Hutchins, sea-
man, with 12 lashes for disobeying com-
mands,” he wrote, on April 16, 1769,
when the Endeavour was anchored off
Tahiti. “Most part of these 24 hours
Cloudy, with frequent Showers of Rain,”
he observed, from the same spot, on which his own expeditions will facili- family. Instead, he set out on yet an-
May 65th. The captain, as one of his tate. “From what I have said of the Na- other expedition.
biographers has put it, had “no natural tives of New Holland they may appear “The Wide Wide Sea” focusses al-
gift for rhapsody.” Sides writes, “It could to some to be the most wretched Peo- most exclusively on Cook’s third—and
be said that he lived during a roman- ple upon Earth; but in reality they are for him fatal—voyage. Sides portrays
tic age of exploration, but he was de- far more happier than we Europeans,” Cook’s decision to undertake it as an
cidedly not a romantic.” he writes. act of hubris; the captain, he writes,
Still, feelings and opinions do some- “could scarcely imagine failure.” The
times creep into Cook’s writing. He is The earth and Sea of their own accord fur- journey got off to an inauspicious start.
nishes them with all things necessary for Life.
by turns charmed and appalled by the They covet not Magnificient Houses, Household- Cook’s second-in-command, Charles
novel customs he encounters. A group stuff, etc.; they live in a Warm and fine Climate, Clerke, was to captain a ship called
of Tahitians cook a dog for him; he and enjoy every wholesome Air. . . . They seem’d the Discovery, while Cook, once again,
finds it very tasty and resolves “for the to set no Value upon anything we gave them, sailed on the Resolution. When both
future never to dispise Dog’s flesh.” nor would they ever part with anything of their vessels were scheduled to depart, in
own for any one Article we could offer them.
He sees some islanders eat the lice that This, in my opinion, Argues that they think July, 1776, Clerke was nowhere to
they have picked out of their hair and themselves provided with all the necessarys of be found. (Thanks to the improvi-
declares this highly “disagreeable.” Life, and that they have no Superfluities. dence of a brother, he’d been tossed
Many of the Indigenous people Cook in debtors’ prison.) Cook set off with-
met had never before seen a European. f Cook’s first voyage failed to turn out him. A few weeks later, the Res-
Cook recognized it was in his interest
to convince them that he came in friend-
Iculate
up the missing continent or to cal-
the Earth’s distance from the
olution nearly crashed into one of the
Cape Verde Islands, a mishap that
ship; he also saw that, in case persua- sun, imperially speaking it was a re- Sides sees as a portent. The ship, it
sion failed, the main advantage he pos- sounding success: the captain had turned out, also leaked terribly—an-
sessed was guns. claimed both New Zealand and the other bad sign.
In a journal entry devoted to the east coast of Australia for Britain. (In The plan for the third voyage was
Endeavour’s first landing in New Zea- neither case had Cook sought or se- more or less the inverse of the sec-
land, near present-day Gisborne, Cook cured the “Consent of the Natives,” but ond’s. Cook’s instructions were to head
treats the killing of the Māori as re- this lapse doesn’t seem to have trou- north and to look not for land but for
grettable but justified. The British had bled the Admiralty.) The very next year, its absence. The Admiralty wanted
attempted to take some Māori men Cook was dispatched again, this time him to find a seaway around Can-
on board their ship to demonstrate in command of two ships, the Resolu- ada—the fabled Northwest Passage.
that their intentions were peaceful. tion and the Adventure. Navy brass Generations of sailors had sought the
But this gesture was—understand- continued to insist that Terra Austra- passage from the Atlantic and been
ably—misinterpreted. The Māori lis Incognita was out there some- blocked by ice. Cook was to probe
hurled their canoe paddles at the Brit- where—presumably farther south than from the opposite direction.
ish, who responded by firing at them. the Endeavour had ventured—and on The expedition also had a second-
Cook acknowledges “that most Hu- his second voyage Cook was supposed ary aim involving a Polynesian named
mane men” will condemn the killings. to keep sailing until he found it. He Mai. Mai came from the Society Is-
But, he declares, “I was not to stand crossed and recrossed the Antarctic lands, and in 1773 he had talked his
still and suffer either myself or those Circle, at one point getting as far as way on board the Adventure. Arriving
that were with me to be knocked on seventy-one degrees south. Conditions in London the following year, he en-
the head.” on the Southern Ocean were generally tranced the British aristocracy. He sat
After mapping both New Zealand’s terrible—frigid and foggy. Still, there in on sessions of Parliament, learned
North and South Islands, Cook was no sign of a continent. Cook ven- to hunt grouse, met the King, and, ac-
headed to Australia, then known tured that if there were any land nearer cording to Sides, became “something
as New Holland. The Endeavour to the pole it would be so hemmed in of a card sharp.” But, after two years
worked its way to the countr y ’s by ice that it would “never be explored.” of entertaining toffs, Mai wanted to
northernmost point, which Cook (Antarctica would not be sighted for go home. It fell to Cook to take him,
named York Cape (and which is now almost fifty years.) along with a barnyard’s worth of live-
called Cape York). The inhabitants of Once more, Cook hadn’t found stock that King George III was send-
the coast made it clear that they what he was seeking, but upon his re- ing as a gift.
wanted nothing to do with the Brit- turn he was again hailed as a hero. Clerke, on the Discovery, finally
ish. Cook left gifts onshore, but they Britain’s leading scientific institution, caught up to Cook in Cape Town,
remained untouched. the Royal Society, granted him its where the Resolution was docked for
Cook’s response to the Aboriginal highest honor, the Copley Medal, and provisioning and repairs. Together,
Australians is one of the most often the Navy rewarded him with a cushy the two ships sailed away from Af-
cited passages from his journals. In it, desk job. The expectation was that he rica and stopped off in Tasmania. In
he seems to foresee—and regret—the would settle down, enjoy his sinecure, February, 1777, they pulled into Queen
destruction of Indigenous cultures and finally spend some time with his Charlotte Sound, a long, narrow inlet
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 63
in the northeast corner of New Zea- had adopted a Polynesian dog known circles. (Two prominent anthropologists,
land’s South Island. There, more trou- as a kurī. (The breed is now extinct.) Marshall Sahlins, of the University of
ble awaited. The men accused the dog of cannibal- Chicago, and Gananath Obeyesekere,
ism, found it guilty as charged, then of Princeton, engaged in a high-profile
ook had visited Queen Charlotte killed and ate it. feud on the subject which spanned de-
C Sound (which he had named) four
times before. During his second voyage,
Sides doesn’t think that Cook knew
about the cannibal burlesque, but the
cades.) Cook and his men happened to
have landed on the Big Island at the
it had been the site of a singularly grue- captain, he says, sensed his crew’s dis- height of an important festival. The cap-
some disaster. Ten of Cook’s men—sail- affection. And this, Sides argues, caused tain was greeted by thousands of peo-
ors on the Adventure—had gone ashore something in Cook to snap. For Cook, ple invoking Lono, a god associated with
to gather provisions. The Māori had slain he writes, the “visit to Queen Charlotte peace and fertility. According to some
and, it was said, eaten them. Sound became a sharp turning point.” scholars, the Hawaiians gathered for the
Cook wasn’t in New Zealand when It would be the last time that the cap- festival saw Cook as the embodiment
the slaughter took place; the Adven- tain would be accused of leniency. of Lono. According to others, they saw
ture and the Resolution had been sep- As evidence of Cook’s changed out- him as someone playacting Lono, and,
arated in a fog. But, on his way back to look, Sides relates an incident that oc- according to still others, the whole Cook-
England, he heard rumblings about it curred eight months after the trial of as-Lono story is a myth created by Eu-
from the crew of a Dutch vessel that the dog, this one featuring a pregnant ropeans. What Cook himself thought
the Resolution encountered at sea. Cook goat. The Resolution had anchored off is unknown, because no logs or journal
was reluctant to credit the rumors. He Moorea, one of the Society Islands, and entries from the last few weeks of his
wrote that he would withhold judg- animals from the ship’s travelling me- life survive. It is possible that he just let
ment on the “Melancholy affair” until nagerie had been left to graze onshore. his record-keeping slide, and it is also
he had learned more. “I must however One day, a goat went missing. Cook possible that the entries contained com-
observe in favour of the New Zealand- was told that the animal had been taken promising information and were de-
ers that I have allways found them of to a village on the opposite end of stroyed by the Admiralty.
a Brave, Noble, Open and benevolent the island. With three dozen men, he After Cook had been on the Big Is-
disposition,” he added. marched to the village and torched it. land for several days, King Kalani‘ōpu‘u
By the time of the third voyage, Cook (Most of the villagers had fled before appeared with a fleet of war canoes. (He
knew the stories he’d heard were, broadly he arrived.) The next day, the goat still had, it seems, been off fighting on an-
speaking, accurate. Why, then, did he had not been returned, and the British other island.) At first, Kalani‘ōpu‘u wel-
return to the scene of the carnage? Sides continued their rampage. Such was the comed the British—he presented Cook
argues that Cook was still searching for level of destruction, one of Cook’s men with a magnificent cloak made of feath-
answers. The captain, he writes, thought noted in his journal, that it “could ers, and he dined several times on the
the massacre “demanded an inquiry and scarcely be repaired in a century.” An- Resolution—then he indicated that it
a reckoning, however long overdue.” other crew member expressed shock at was time for them to go. It’s unclear
In his investigation, Cook was aided the captain’s “precipitate proceeding,” whether the King’s impatience reflected
by Mai, whose native language was sim- which, he said, violated “any principle the religious calendar—the festival as-
ilar to Māori. The sequence of events one can form of justice.” sociated with Lono had concluded—or
that Mai helped piece together began Having wrecked much of Moorea, more mundane concerns, such as feed-
with the theft of some bread. The leader Cook couldn’t leave Mai there, so he in- ing so many hungry sailors, but Cook
of the British crew had reacted to this stalled him and his livestock on the got the message. The expedition soon
petty crime by shooting not only the nearby island of Huahine. A few years departed, only to suffer another mishap.
thief but also a second Māori man. In later, Mai died, apparently from a virus The foremast of the Resolution snapped.
retaliation, the Māori had killed all ten introduced by yet another boatload of There was no way for it to go forward,
British sailors and chopped up their European sailors. so both ships made their way back to
bodies. Eventually, Cook learned who Kealakekua Bay.
had led the retaliatory raid—a pugna- ook spent several months search- It was while the British were trying
cious local chief named Kahura. One
day, Mai pointed him out to Cook. The
C ing fruitlessly along the coast of
Alaska for the Northwest Passage. But,
to repair the Resolution that someone
made off with the small boat and Cook
following day, the captain invited Ka- on the journey north from Huahine, he decided to take the King hostage.
hura on board the Resolution and ush- had stumbled upon something arguably The captain had often resorted to this
ered him down into his private cabin. better—the Hawaiian Islands. In Jan- tactic to get—or get back—what he
Instead of shooting Kahura, Cook had uary, 1778, the Resolution and the Dis- wanted; it had usually worked well for
his draftsman draw a portrait of him. covery stopped in Kauai. The following him, but never before had he dealt with
Mai found Cook’s conduct unfath- January, they landed at Kealakekua Bay, someone as powerful as Kalani‘ōpu‘u.
omable. “Why do you not kill him?” he on the Big Island. Cook was leading the King down to
cried. Cook’s men, too, were infuriated. What the Hawaiians thought of the the beach—Kalani‘ōpu‘u seems to have
They made fun of his forbearance by strange men who appeared on strange been convinced he was being invited
staging a mock trial. One of the sailors ships has been much debated in academic for another friendly meal—when war-
64 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
riors started to emerge from the trees.
Sides argues that Cook could have saved
himself had he simply turned and run, BRIEFLY NOTED
but, as one of his men put it, “he too
wrongly thought that the f lash of a Out of the Darkness, by Frank Trentmann (Knopf ). Germa-
musket would disperse the whole is- ny’s postwar transformation into Europe’s political conscience
land.” In the fighting that ensued, Cook, is often cast as a triumphant story of moral rehabilitation.
four of his men, and as many as thirty This book points to the limitations of that narrative, argu-
Hawaiians were killed. As was custom- ing that, in the past eight decades, German society has been
ary on the island, Cook’s body was “preoccupied with rebuilding the country and coming to
burned. Some of his singed bones were terms with the Nazi past” rather than with confronting its
returned to the British; those that re- obligations to the broader world. Trentmann draws from a
mained in Hawaii, according to Sides, wide range of sources, including amateur plays and essays by
were later paraded around as part of schoolchildren. These lend intimacy to his portrait of a citi-
the festival associated with Lono. zenry engaged in the continuous process of formulating its
Though Sides says he wants to own views of right and wrong as it debates issues from rear-
“reckon anew” with Cook, it’s not ex- mament to environmentalism.
actly clear what this would entail at a
time when the captain has already Whiskey Tender, by Deborah Jackson Taffa (Harper). This vi-
been—figuratively, at least—sawed off brant memoir recalls the author’s childhood on the tradi-
at the ankles. “The Wide Wide Sea” tional lands of the Quechan (Yuma) people on a reservation
portrays Cook as a complicated fig- in California, and in a Navajo Nation border town in New
ure, driven by instincts and motives Mexico. The move to New Mexico, in 1976, reflected Taffa’s
that often seem to have been opaque parents’ desire for their children to “be mainstream Ameri-
even to him. Although it’s no hagiog- cans.” As a young woman, however, Taffa sought to link her
raphy, the book is also not likely to identity to figures from her ancestral past, such as a great-
rattle teacups at the Captain Cook So- grandmother who lectured and performed for white society.
ciety, members of which receive a quar- In her account, Taffa regards the broad tapestry of history
terly publication devoted entirely to and picks at its smallest threads: individual choices shaped
Cook-related topics. by violent social forces, and by the sometimes erratic pow-
Like all biographies, “The Wide ers of love.
Wide Sea” emphasizes agency. Cook
may be an ambivalent, even self-con- Ours, by Phillip B. Williams (Viking). In this ambitious début
tradictory figure; still, it’s his actions novel, a Harriet Tubman figure possessed of supernatural
and decisions that drive the narrative abilities founds a town in Missouri, whose first inhabitants
forward. But, as Cook himself seemed she has rescued from slavery. Magically concealed from the
to have realized, and on occasion outside world, the community is ostensibly a haven, yet the
lamented, he was but an instrument in weight of its inhabitants’ pasts and the confines of safety prove
a much, much larger scheme. The whole to be difficult burdens. In lush, ornamental prose, Williams,
reason the British sent him off to seek who is also a poet, traces many characters’ entwined journeys
Terra Australis Incognita was that they as they seek to understand the forces that assemble and sep-
feared a rival power would reach it first. arate them. The novel is an inventive ode to self-determination
If Cook hadn’t hoisted what he called and also a surrealistic vision of Black life as forged within the
the “English Colours” on what’s still crucible of American history.
known as Possession Island, in north-
ern Queensland, it seems fair to as- Worry, by Alexandra Tanner (Scribner). This dryly witty novel
sume that another captain would have centers on Jules, a twenty-eight-year-old aspiring novelist
claimed Australia for England or for turned study-guide editor living in Brooklyn, and her younger
some other European nation. Simi- sister, who has just moved in with her. Jules swings between
larly, if Cook’s men hadn’t brought sex- irritation and compassion toward her sibling; she notes that
ually transmitted diseases to the Ha- “having a sister is looking in a cheap mirror: what’s there is
waiian Islands, then sailors from a you, but unfamiliar and ugly for it.” Jules is just self-aware
different ship would have done so. Co- enough to admit that chief among her joys in life is feeling
lonialism and its attendant ills were superior to others. She spins a fixation on her Instagram feed
destined to reach the many paradisa- as research for “a book-length hybrid essay” on feminism,
ical places Cook visited and mapped, capitalism, antisemitism, and the Internet. As Tanner’s novel
although, without his undeniable nav- explores these topics, its depiction of Jules’s relationships also
igational skills, that might have taken highlights absurdities of contemporary culture and the con-
a few years more.  sequences of self-absorption.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 65
 of the City,” in 2013, and “Father of the
POP MUSIC Bride,” in 2019.
Koenig’s voice is high, clear, and
mannered, but there’s something un-
HOPE usually intimate about his phrasing and
delivery. It always sounds, to me, as if
Vampire Weekend doesn’t want your defeatist grousing. he’s both close and far away, maybe on
the other end of a phone, shouting
BY AMANDA PETRUSICH across some vast distance. He has a few
recurring lyrical motifs, one of which
is a vague religiosity—a deep and per-
sistent curiosity about faith and the di-
vine. In this way, Koenig most resem-
bles Simon, whose music—including
its deft (if ballsy) adoption of poly-
rhythms from sub-Saharan Africa—
has always been a major touchstone for
the band. Like Simon, Koenig grew up
around New York City and was raised
Jewish. On “Unbelievers,” a song from
“Modern Vampires of the City,” Koe-
nig wonders about salvation, forgive-
ness, baptism: “But what holy water
contains a little drop, little drop for
me?”That question—could he willingly
submit to a sublime force, be it God’s
love, romantic love, or anything that
requires untold devotion?—comes up
again and again in Vampire Weekend’s
discography. On “Everlasting Arms,”
Koenig asks, “Could I be made to serve
a master? / Well, I’m never gonna un-
derstand, never understand.” Another
of Koenig’s lyrical preoccupations—
surely not unrelated—is the unstoppa-
ble trudge of time. (Koenig co-hosts
an online radio show titled “Time Cri-
sis.”) On “Step,” also from “Modern
Vampires,” he worries about man’s in-
or a while, in the late two-thousands, music was polished and sunny, a little evitable trajectory: “Wisdom’s a gift,
F it was extremely fun to dunk on
Vampire Weekend. Formed at Colum-
cocky, with melodic sensibilities in-
debted to the dynamic, sensitive songs
but you’d trade it for youth.” What if
at the end of all this there is simply
bia University in 2006, the band made and songwriters of the seventies and more unknowing? “Age is an honor, it’s
perky, bleating indie rock about Cape eighties: the Beat’s “Save It for Later,” still not the truth,” Koenig adds.
Cod, mansard roofs, and Oxford com- Paul Simon’s “Under African Skies,”
mas. The singer and guitarist Ezra Koe- Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up.” his month, Vampire Weekend will
nig wore khakis and sometimes loosely
knotted a sweater around his shoulders,
The band’s second album, “Contra,”
released in 2010, débuted at No. 1 on
T release “Only God Was Above Us,”
its fifth album. The band’s current lineup
a look that everyone knows is the un- the Billboard 200. The songs were id- includes Koenig, the drummer Chris
official uniform of rich, scummy boy- iosyncratic but had shockingly broad Tomson, and the bassist Chris Baio.
friends in high-school movies. The appeal. That winter, the single “Holi- (In 2016, the visionary multi-instru-
band’s vibe was preppy but lightly de- day,” a reggae-inflected rock track that, mentalist and producer Rostam Bat-
bauched, somewhere between “Dead for better or worse, could have been air- manglij announced that he had left the
Poets Society” and “Less Than Zero.” lifted from a third-wave ska compila- group, on amicable terms; he is cred-
Vampire Weekend felt slightly out of tion, appeared in two major television ited as a co-writer and a co-producer
step with the arch, fuzzy, forward- commercials at the same time. More on “The Surfer,” a gorgeous, spacey new
thinking indie rock of the time. Its albums followed—“Modern Vampires song.) Vampire Weekend has never
made a bad album, but “Only God Was
One of the band’s motifs is a persistent curiosity about faith and the divine. Above Us” is one of its best. The song-
66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 ILLUSTRATION BY DENNIS ERIKSSON
writing is less compact and urgent, and movie released in 1999, the cover of
the sound is looser, hazier, more free. which will be familiar to anyone who
Koenig will turn forty this month. We haunted downtown video stores before
all soften and uncoil, in different ways, the advent of streaming. Another song
in middle age. takes its name from a New York mag-
I can’t stop hearing the lyrics of “Only azine cover story from 1996, titled “Prep-
God Was Above Us” as a treatise on School Gangsters,” in which the jour-
inheritance, decay, generational disso- nalist Nancy Jo Sales bums around
nance, and the delicate idea of choos- Manhattan with a crew of trust-fund
ing optimism over defeatist grousing. dirtbags. On “The Surfer,” Koenig re-
We have to reckon with the past: the fers to the construction of Water Tun-
cascading spiritual fallout of our an- nel No. 3, a New York City water-sup-
cestors’ wars. We have to reckon with ply tunnel that broke ground in 1970
the present: the ghastliness of our cur- and will be completed, it’s estimated,
rent wars. But there’s also a way to un- in 2032. (It was once touted as “the great-
derstand violence and struggle as inher- est nondefense construction project in
ent to the human journey—a challenge the history of Western Civilization.”)
we have survived countless times (though My favorite track on the new record
not without sustaining wounds). The is “Capricorn,” a big, hazy tune featur-
album opens with Koenig singing, “Fuck ing a swell of synthesizers, piano,
the world,” his voice soft, almost trem- guitar, harmonica, and strings. Could
bling. But it turns out that he’s merely just be because I’m a Capricorn my-
quoting someone who’s got himself self—“Takes a while to warm up to
mired in a self-fulfilling fear spiral. people,” “Motivated by duty,” “Full-
That song, “Ice Cream Piano” (on the grown adult since age six,” according to
lyric sheet, the titular phrase appears the astrology app Co-Star—but I found
as “In dreams, I scream piano”), is noisy the song’s final verse almost unbearably
but buoyant. “We’re all the sons and romantic. What’s kinder than telling
daughters / Of vampires who drained someone they don’t have to work so
the Old World’s necks,” Koenig, a de- hard? “Good days are comin’/ Not just
scendant of Romanian and Hungarian to die/ I know you’re tired of tryin’/ Lis-
immigrants, sings. ten, baby,/ You don’t have to try.”
Koenig is a meticulous lyricist, The album ends with an eight-min-
not one of those say-any-old-thing ute song called “Hope,” of course. It
types. He favors harsh, distinctive nouns inventories various wrongs an individ-
(horchata, balaclava, pincher crabs, ual or a society can endure, then sug-
aranciata, Masada—and that’s just on gests that we’d better find a way to let
one song, “Horchata,” off “Contra”), our rage evanesce. It’s a notion—sur-
and he often has to do some major syl- render—that has come up for Koenig
labic gymnastics to make the rhythm before. On “Ya Hey,” a song from “Mod-
work, like in this part of “Ice Cream ern Vampires,” Koenig sings, “And I
Piano”: “You talk of Serbians / Whis- can’t help but feel /That I made some
per Kosovar Albanians /The boy’s Ro- mistake / But I let it go.” During the
manian /Third-generation Transylva- chorus, he wails, “Ut Deo, Deo,” a Latin
nian.” He seems to be suggesting, albeit phrase meaning “To God, God.” (The
gently, that it’s advisable to expand our song’s title feels like a reference both
historical understanding of conflict— to OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” and to Yahweh,
that no bloodline is innocent, that righ- the God of the Israelites, marking per-
teousness is never totally earned, that haps the first and last time those things
war is constant. “Each generation makes were so explicitly combined.) On
its own apology,” he trills, on the cho- “Hope,” Koenig returns to the idea of
rus of “Gen-X Cops,” a whirling song submission. “My enemy’s invinci-
built around a distorted slide-guitar ble / I’ve had to let it go,” he sings. You
riff that sounds buggy and possessed, can nearly hear the shrug. Control is a
like an insect careening around a porch fiction. Justice might be, too. Or, as
light at dusk. Koenig puts it, “The signatories broke
“Only God Was Above Us” is rife the pact /The surfer sacked the quar-
with semi-arcane references: “Gen-X terback / Your bag fell down onto the
Cops” is named after a Japanese action tracks / I hope you let it go.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024
 nostalgia is being delivered by brute force.
THE THEATRE Before this outing, I had never seen “The
Who’s Tommy” in a theatre, but when I
heard the overture’s guitar chords, hiss-
THE OLD PINBALL ing with cymbals, I felt a shudder of false
memory. The sound designer Gareth
“The Who’s Tommy” returns. Owen has added a recording of a roar-
ing crowd to the performance’s first few
BY HELEN SHAW moments, and I found myself remem-
bering stadiums that I’d never been in.
But, yeesh, then the show gets going.
It starts with a long, breathless intro-
duction, some of it enacted in slightly
goofy mime, as the rock instrumental
plays: during the Second World War, a
welder (Alison Luff) and a Royal Air
Force officer, Captain Walker (Adam Ja-
cobs), meet, marry, and lose each other,
when he’s sent to Europe and shot down
by the Germans during a parachute jump.
McAnuff, directing his own show once
again, three decades after the original,
displays his finest moment of stagecraft
here: the projection design (by Peter Ni-
grini) shows us the inside of a bomber
bay, and a line of paratroopers deploys by
dropping, one by one, through the floor.
Back in England, Tommy is born, and
the Air Force mistakenly notifies Mrs.
Walker that the captain is never coming
back. When he does eventually make it
home, he breezes in, shoots his wife’s new
lover—don’t bother mourning him; he
immediately fades back into the chorus—
and traumatizes his four-year-old son. (I
saw Cecilia Ann Popp as the youngest
Tommy.) Tommy’s parents insist to him,
“You didn’t hear it/you didn’t see it,” in-
ducing in the child a total psychic block—
he can no longer sense the world.
t’s been a long, wild trip since 1969, sult smashed onto Broadway in 1993. A The world then preys on the locked-in
ITownshend’s
when the opening chords of Pete
“Tommy,” written with and
whole bunch of folks won Tony Awards;
certainly, everybody made money. So,
boy. Tommy’s uncle Ernie ( John Am-
brosino) molests him when he’s ten years
recorded by the Who, first blasted on- thirty years later, here we are again. old (I saw Quinten Kusheba, wearing
stage. The band toured the genre-defy- Or, rather, we’re trying to be there again. one of the wig and hair designer Charles
ing album—a seeker’s rock opera in which Which “there”—the seventies? the nine- LaPointe’s silliest curly wigs); his cousin
a “deaf, dumb, and blind kid” discovers ties?—may depend on your age. It will Kevin (Bobby Conte) flings him into a
a messianic gift for pinball—for several also depend on whether your “Tommy” garbage can. Tommy’s older self, played
years. Throughout the next decade, other preferences lean toward the rawness of by an oddly muted Ali Louis Bourzgui
artists took a crack at the Who’s mate- the band’s concerts (which the lead singer, in a white turtleneck, croons beautifully
rial: there was a ballet, a symphony, and Roger Daltrey, once referred to fondly as to his ten-year-old body. “See me, feel
Ken Russell’s nutterbutter psychedelic a “bum note and a bead of sweat”) or to- me, touch me, heal me,” he calls through
film, in 1975. Then, about fifteen years ward Broadway’s glossy, show-and-also- a one-way mirror, like a Phantom of the
after the Who had more or less put tell approach. Is it a good idea to act out Opera who has studied est. Kevin does,
“Tommy”away, the director Des McAnuff the lyrics of a song about a mystical at least, put wee Tommy in front of a
convinced Townshend that, together, drugged-out prostitute? Responses will pinball machine, and the kid discovers
they could turn it into a musical. The re- vary. Either way, now at the Nederlander, his talent. The ensemble lifts his little
legs so he seems to fly, and the first act
The director Des McAnuff has lost the rock opera’s original grip on metaphor. ends with something that should have
68 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 ILLUSTRATION BY JIM STOTEN
happened from the start: the back scrim of flying neon lights, but beneath that structs his followers to go find truth for
flies out, and we see what appears to be the core geometries are the same. And themselves. Yeah! I thought. Don’t fall in
the house band, shredding like mad. En- many elements are presented like talis- line! But immediately thereafter, for the
ergy finally fizzes and pops; voices that mans, to the point of bafflement. Did finale, everyone in the cast gets into . . .
have been restrained are unleashed. We’re Michael Cerveris, as Tommy, wear a yel- a line . . . and sings the ecstatic “Listen-
given a break from all the vibe-killing low jacket in 1993? Then the costume ing to You”: “Right behind you, I see the
black-and-white projections as the light- designer Sarafina Bush must put one on millions/On you, I see the glory/From
ing designer Amanda Zieve triggers weird Bourzgui now. Even Christina Sajous, you, I get opinions/From you, I get the
spherical kaleidoscopic lights, which playing the psychonautic sex worker, does story.” I get opinions? Tommy, did they
move and shimmer like warp cores. a Tina Turner impression—probably be- hear you? Did you hear yourself?
Here, as elsewhere, the set designer cause her character, the Acid Queen, was Somewhere in the transition from
David Korins has chosen abstraction for played by Turner in the movie. concert to musical, Townshend and
the key prop, the pinball machine, which McAnuff have lost the rock opera’s orig-
is played by a black folding table with a ost important, the show’s already inal grip on metaphor. A double album
glowing rectangle sticking up on one
end. If you are, say, from a generation
M bizarre storytelling suffers; perhaps
McAnuff assumes that we’ll be as famil-
doesn’t need logic: no one cares about
surface sense when the music is mov-
unfamiliar with pinball, you won’t get iar with the plot as he is. (He does cut a ing your blood around with sheer noise
much of a sense of those Carnaby Street number, and it makes things less clear.) and rhythm; everything can mean any-
whistles and bells. Maybe old people used The need to pack a gajillion events into thing. But McAnuff and Townshend’s
to play with tables, the young will think. tiny spaces discombobulates the end of dramatization insists we’re watching a
They made do with so little. the show. Here’s what happens in the story that does make sense, and then
And this struck me as the problem course of four swift scenes: adult Tommy’s refuses to create that sense. I kept re-
throughout. The production, more a re- senses are cured when his mother smashes turning to one question: Who is Tommy?
animation than a revival, seems to think a mirror; he attains immense pinball ce- He’s more an abstraction than a char-
that there’s no point in showing us the lebrity (sure!), employing his cousin as acter, really. Townshend once wrote that
pinball machine since surely we remem- the head of his private pseudo-Brown the name sublimed out of Britishness
ber it. All the theatregoer will need is Shirts; he abandons that guru-like status itself—it’s been slang for an English
the reference, right? Nostalgia is a key because a fan gets hurt; and he joyfully soldier since the eighteenth century—
element of many shows—that’s basically leaves the Big Life for home, where he but also out of his own spiritual yearn-
the whole point of Broadway now—but is welcomed by his sexual-abuser uncle, ing. It contains the meditative syllable
it’s ruinous if the makers are seeing a his killer dad, his mirror-smashing mum, “om,” and, for many, the idea of a child
past that we aren’t enthralled by, too. and his jackbooted cousin. (There’s also a drifting without senses will remind us
McAnuff created this production last projection that reads “IN THE FUTURE,” of our shared, unawakened selfhood.
year at the Goodman Theatre, in Chi- which, since we start in the nineteen- We are all, Townshend’s songs imply,
cago, and chose new collaborators rather forties, would mean that Tommy’s fam- living in that kind of dissociated illu-
than the 1993 team: Korins instead of ily is immortal.) sion. What force will help us recognize
John Arnone; the choreographer Lorin No one explains why Tommy’s fol- the real? “Tommy” the album wants us
Latarro instead of Wayne Cilento. But lowers sometimes wear silver helmets; if to have our own ideas about this, and
McAnuff seems to have asked them to you never learned from one of the sto- I’ve dreamed several in the hours I’ve
stylistically point to those earlier artists’ ry’s earlier incarnations that Tommy en- spent listening to it. The music is still
work so frequently that I felt I was some- courages his acolytes to muffle their own frequently beautiful: it asked me to look
times seeing constraint rather than fresh senses, this production won’t let on. Has- within, and to look without. But it cer-
creativity. Korins uses an innovative grid sled by his fans’ adulation, Tommy in- tainly never told me to look back. 

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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2024 69

 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by P. C. Vey,
must be received by Sunday, April 7th. The finalists in the March 25th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the April 22nd & 29th issue. Anyone age
thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”
..........................................................................................................................

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“Apparently, in space no one can hear you ask for bread.”

Matt Nettleton, West Hartford, Conn.

“ You could have mentioned that those “It doesn’t make you any less of a cactus.”
photos were from thirteen billion years ago.” Matt Cowhey, Beesley’s Point, N.J.
Jake Phillips, Washington, D.C.

“Can I finish my drink before you

suck all the fun out of this evening?”
M. J. McKinven, Ithaca, N.Y.
Conversations
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 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

14 15 16

THE 17 18

CROSSWORD 19 20 21

22 23 24
A moderately challenging puzzle.
25 26 27 28 29

BY WYNA LIU
30 31 32 33

34
ACROSS
1 Sends unsolicited offers to, say 35
6 Prepper’s pack
36 37 38 39 40
11 Greeting in Brasília
19 Sharapova with a 2–20 record against 41 42 43 44 45 46
Serena Williams
15 Onetime features of the SAT 47 48 49 50

16 Accord
51 52 53
18 Yo-yos
13 Close again, in a way 54 55

21 Beer whose logo depicts Huilan Pavilion

56 57 58
22 Ingredient in a fancy mimosa, for short
29 Destine for, as a life of mediocrity
3 No longer in bed 33 Property
25 Lead-in to Marino
9 Tick relatives 90 Fusion genre that emerged from
26 Faction SoundCloud in the twenty-tens
5 Request that might make someone stick
23 “___ there” out their tongue 92 First Hebrew letter
30 [Womp-womp] 6 Wander (about) 93 Important street in the history of
39 Words accompanying a reality check? 6 Handling the situation Memphis blues
35 “And I thought I’d seen everything . . .” 8 Makes off limits 95 Components of accordions, bagpipes,
and clarinets
36 Christmas, in Chartres 3 Freezing cold
96 Academy entrant
36 Proofreader’s instruction 10 “Anything but that!”
98 Mild Dutch cheese
38 Source of some wax 11 Fly in the ___ (minor irritation,
idiomatically) 93 Place for une toque
91 Gov’t emissions-testing site
12 Recipient of a bequest 52 Made like mascara in the rain
99 It might be punctuated with “. . . not!”
13 Half of A.S.A.P.
96 Group of fliers Solution to the previous puzzle:
16 Piece of popular sixties footwear
50 Simple shelter S W A P P O T S I E
20 Both, in Spanish
51 Person who might struggle with Y O G A S O N W A R D S
academic jargon 23 Volkswagen sedans S K A T E S D E E P C U T S

53 “The Dance Class” painter Degas 26 Produce with care T E S T M A T C H E S C E L

S U S H I T R A I N P A P A
59 Only U.S. state motto in Spanish 28 Labour opponents
P I E C R U S T D O T T Y

55 Triangular landform 30 Little fish in a big pond B O A S T A R T O O

31 Resident of a formicary G U L P S S W E A R
56 Sch. in Greenwich Village N O N O S D U N S T
32 Only human
56 Brawny dudes L E A N N W E B I S O D E
33 Projected pellets A R T Y C E L I N E S O N G
58 Get in hot water?
B F F M A T I N G D A N C E
39 Reassurance from a listener
S E A P O R T S S U L T A N
DOWN 35 Tree animals, say? D R O P L E T P A B S T
1 Cartoon characters who wear Phrygian 36 Nineties “Weekend Update” anchor M I S E R S D E E S
caps Kevin
Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
2 Bread chain 38 Wrist decoration newyorker.com/crossword
OC EAN O F STO RMS