PRICE $6.

99 APRIL 21, 2014

 APRIL 21, 2014

13 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

31 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Philip Gourevitch on Rwanda’s reckoning;
Cat Stevens; city smells; Toni Collette;
James Surowiecki on car dealers vs. Tesla.

DAVID Owen 38 GAME OF THRONES

Design secrets of luxury air travel.
LAURA Miller 48 ROMANCING THE STONES
Stonehenge and modern-day Druids.
GEOFf Dyer 55 SHIPMATES
Life on an aircraft carrier.
bURKHARD Bilger 62 IN DEEP
The world of extreme cavers.
mattathias SchWARTZ 76 THE ANCHOR
Ministering to Europe’s African refugees.
roz chast 86 “BIRDS OF THE PANTANAL”

FICTION
THOMAS Mcguane 90 “HUBCAPS”

THE CRITICS
BOOKS
JILL LepOre 96 Elizabeth Warren’s “A Fighting Chance.”
ADAM Gopnik 102 In search of the Great American Novel.
105 Briefly Noted
ON TELEVISION
EMILY Nussbaum 106 “Adventure Time.”
THE THEATRE
HILTON Als 108 “The Threepenny Opera,” “Bullets Over
Broadway,” “I Remember Mama.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA
DAVID DENBY 110 “Draft Day,” “The Unknown Known.”
JOEL HOLLAND

Continued on page 8
6 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
 POEMS
W. S. Merwin 56 “Forgetting Clouds”
jessica Greenbaum 82 “I Took Out the Part”

IVAN BRUNETTI COVER

“Getting There”

DRAWINGS Harry Bliss, Charles Barsotti, P. S. Mueller, Pat Byrnes, Jack Ziegler, Charlie Hankin,
Edward Steed, Danny Shanahan, Frank Cotham, Michael Crawford, Edward Koren, David Sipress,
Liam Francis Walsh, Shannon Wheeler, John O’Brien, William Haefeli SPOTS Michael Kirkham

FPO ONLY—
A18175

“Don’t make me come up there!”

8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
 CONTRIBUTORS
philip gourevitch (comment, p. 31) is working on his second book about
Rwanda, “You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know.”

david owen (“game of thrones,” p. 38) has been writing for the magazine since
1991. “The Conundrum” is his most recent book.

laura miller (“romancing the stones,” p. 48), the author of “The Magician’s
Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia,” is a staff writer for Salon.

geoff dyer (“shipmates,” p. 55) is an award-winning novelist and nonfiction

writer. His new book, “Another Great Day at Sea,” will be published in May.

burkhard bilger (“in deep,” p. 62) has been a staff writer since 2001. He is at
work on a book about his grandfather’s experience in wartime Alsace.

mattathias schwartz (“the anchor,” p. 76), a contributing writer, lives in

New York.

Jessica Greenbaum (poem, p. 82) is the poetry editor of upstreet. “The Two
Yvonnes” is her second book of poems.

roz chast (sketchbook, p. 86), a New Yorker cartoonist, is the author of

“Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?,” which comes out in May.

thomas mcguane (fiction, p. 90) will publish “Crow Fair,” a collection of

stories, next spring.

jill lepore (books, p. 96), the author of “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions
of Jane Franklin,” is a professor of history at Harvard.

ivan brunetti (cover) is an illustrator, a cartoonist, and a teacher. His most

recent book is “Aesthetics: A Memoir.”

T H E N E W YO R K E R D I G I TA L
W W W. N E W YO R K E R . C O M D I G I TA L E D I T I O N

MULTIMEDIA COMMENT INFOGRAPHIC VIDEO

Videos, interactive Daily news Mapping the A look inside
infographics, audio analysis by Jeffrey depths of MexicoÕs the worldÕs deepest
slide shows, and Toobin and others. ChevŽ cave system. cave.
more.

ELEMENTS PODCASTS POETRY

Posts by Maria Adam Gopnik and Elizabeth Gilbert Jessica Greenbaum
Konnikova and talk to Sasha Weiss about the reads her new
others about Great American Novel. Plus, Amelia poem.
science and tech. Lester hosts the Political Scene.

ARCHIVE CARTOONS SLIDE SHOW TELEVISION

Our complete A Daily Cartoon At sea on the U.S.S. Emily Nussbaum on
collection of issues, drawn by George H. W. Bush, Cartoon NetworkÕs
back to 1925. Mick Stevens. a Navy aircraft ÒAdventure Time.Ó
carrier.

Access our digital edition for tablets and phones at the App Store, Amazon.com, Google Play, or Next Issue Media.

10 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014

 THE MAIL
THE LIVES OF PAUL DE MAN
It is clear from Louis Menand’s review
of Evelyn Barish’s biography that Paul
de Man played American academic
circles after the Second World War in
exactly the same way that he played
publishing circles under the Nazis
(“The de Man Case,” March 24th).
He attached himself to a powerful ide-
ological élite, strengthening its cultural
hegemony by his own skillful applica-
tion of its signature jargon, stigmatiz-
ing those outside the cult by insisting
on an exaggerated purity of approach,
and thus securing the allegiance of the
other members of the privileged cote-
rie and distracting attention from his
own corruption.
Janet H. Murray
Atlanta, Ga.
In 1983-84, I was a first-year Ph.D.
student in Yale’s Comparative Litera-
ture Department, lured there in part
by the brilliance of de Man’s “Blind-
ness and Insight.” On the first day, we
had to translate passages from French
or German into English. At the get-
together that followed, I met de Man
for the first time, and remarked that
the passages we had translated all
seemed to have the quality of self-un-
doing about which he theorized. I re-
member the puddle of sherry jiggling
in his glass as he cackled, “Yes! They
fall apart! They just fall apart!” I sud-
denly saw nihilism where before I had
seen brilliance, and I left Yale at the
end of the year. Later, I became a clin-
ical psychologist. Reading Menand’s
review, I find it all too likely that the
diagnosis of sociopathy is correct, and
I agree that this neither invalidates
de Man’s writing nor exculpates his
actions.
Michael Lipson
Great Barrington, Mass.
Menand’s summation of the sad and dis-
turbing life of Paul de Man and the leg-
acy of his literary criticism was superb.
At last, a perspective on de Man that
does not whitewash his anti-Semitism
and collaborationist history or vilify his
literary criticism as the poisonous out-
come of his earlier sins. I was one of de
Man’s graduate students at Cornell in
the early nineteen-sixties. He was a
gifted, even inspired teacher, and he
opened my eyes to the depth and rigor
that true reading demands. How devas-
tating it was to discover, years later, his
profound immorality. Menand has cap-
1
tured those two realities—the intellec-
tual brilliance and the moral stupidity—
perfectly.
Jocelyn Harvey
Ottawa, Ont.
MOVING MOUNTAINS
Evan Osnos, in his article about the re-
cent chemical spill in West Virginia,
cites the Battle of Blair Mountain, in
1921, which set more than ten thousand
coal miners against mine operators
backed by police and federal troops, to
illustrate that “the struggle over the
costs and spoils of industrial production
is as much a part of West Virginians’
self-image as the coal miner on the state
flag” (“Chemical Valley,” April 7th). In
fact, Blair Mountain continues to em-
body this tension. In March, 2009, the
site of the battle was listed on the Na-
tional Register of Historic Places, but,
following objections raised by the coal
industry, it was removed from the reg-
ister just nine months later. Today, per-
mits for highly destructive mountain-
top-removal mines now cover parts of
the battlefield site. A monument to the
state’s historic struggle over worker ex-
ploitation will therefore be replaced by
an unintended monument to the state’s
current struggle with environmental
exploitation.
Peter Morgan
Denver, Colo.
t
Letters should be sent with the writer’s
name, address, and daytime phone num-
ber via e-mail to themail@newyorker.
com. Letters and Web comments may be
edited for length and clarity, and may be
published in any medium. We regret that
owing to the volume of correspondence we
cannot reply to every letter or return letters.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 11
 GOI G O
ABOUT T W

M O N T H   I 7 6 @ 7 E 6 3K 
 F : G D E 6 3K 
 8 D ; 6 3K 
 E 3F G D 6 3K 
 E G @ 6 3K 
 ? A @ 6 3K 
 F G 7 E 6 3K
3BD;> 16TH 17TH 18TH 19TH 20TH 21ST 22ND

In 1998, when “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” premièred Off Broadway, at the Jane Street Theatre, the
show’s clever black humor and the catchy glam-rock-influenced songs offered an inspired twist on the MOVIES | THE THEATRE
drag-queen stereotype and thrilled audiences. In the story (the book is by John Cameron Mitchell, and CLASSICAL MUSIC
the music is by Stephen Trask), Hedwig is a moody transgender singer from East Berlin who has had a
ABOVE & BEYOND
botched sex-change operation, which left the titular angry inch. She performs in tiny venues while her
ex-boyfriend, who stole her songs, becomes a famous rock star. Now, at the Belasco, the multitalented NIGHT LIFE | ART | DANCE
Neil Patrick Harris—best known for the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” but perhaps most affectionately FOOD & DRINK
remembered as Doogie Howser, M.D.—stars in the musical’s Broadway début.
B ZafaYd S b Z Tk 5 :D ;EF3 3 @ 87 > 4 7 D

MOVIES
Opening
Fading Gigolo
Reviewed in Now Playing.
Opening April 18. (In limited
release.)
JG
A meditation on the writer
J. G. Ballard and the artist
Robert Smithson, directed by
Tacita Dean. Opening April 16.
(Film Forum.)
Proxy
A horror film, directed by
Zack Parker, about a woman
in a victims’ support group
who is coaxed into delusions.
Starring Alexia Rasmussen and
Alexa Havins; co-starring Joe
Swanberg. Opening April 18.
(In limited release.)
Soft in the Head
Reviewed in Now Playing.
Opening April 18. (Cinema
Village.)
Transcendence
Wally Pfister directed this
thriller, about a dying scientist
(Johnny Depp) whose mind
is u
Co-starring Rebecca Hall.
Opening April 18. (In wide
release.)
In Anthony MannÕs film noir ÒThe Great Flamarion,Ó at Museum of the Moving Image, Erich von Stroheim, a great
director of the silent era, channels his martinet persona in the role of a murderous vaudeville marksman.
14 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
Now Playing
Border Incident
Primitive writing mars this blunt
1949 exposé off the exploitation of
illegal immigrants, but the hero—a
Mexican immigration agent who goes
undercover as a bracero—is unusual
for a Hollywood picture, and Ricardo
Montalban displays a simmering
energy and alertness in the part. He
brings a tingle to the nerve-racking
moment when he realizes that his
soft hands will give him away. The
song-and-dance man George Murphy
pulls offf a gritty change of pace as the
hero’s partner, an American inspector
who poses as a trader in black-market
work permits. The director, Anthony
Mann, and the cinematographer, John
Alton, imbue the action, whether it’s set
on a water tower or in a canyon or on
a flat
f ffield with a deadly tractor, with
a shadowy, vertiginous tension. The
speedy pace and the ninety-six-minute
running time help the virtues offset f
the flaws.—
f Michael Sragow (Museum
off the Moving Image; April 20.)
Dom Hemingway
The American writer-director Richard
Shepard must love Shakespeare,
ploaded to a computer.
because this lightweight British
mock gangster film offers f words
in exuberant torrents delivered by
an actor, Jude Law, who has played
Hamlet and Henry V onstage and
who understands the swing and
color off vaunting rhetoric. Dom, an
arrogant Cockney safecracker, leaves
prison, links up with an old friend
(the comically sepulchral Richard E.
Grant), settles scores with those who
did him dirt, and engages in endless
debaucheries. He speaks in spangled
outbursts whose comic point is that
they are absurdly garrulous and
unnecessary. Law, saying farewell
to his youthful good looks (Dom
has scars and is a little overweight),
makes this hyper-articulate ruffian
the most intricately soulful character
in current movies.—David Denby
(Reviewed in our issue off 4/7/14.)
(In limited release.)
Fading Gigolo
This vulgar and outlandish locker-
room tale is written, directed, and
performed by John Turturro with
such sincerity, relish, heart, and
good humor that it almost sneaks
through the bullshit filter. He stars
as Fioravante, a graying vestige of
rent-stabilized Manhattan, who
works a couple off days a week at
a flower shop. His elderly buddy
Murray Schwartz has a dermatologist
(Sharon Stone) who mentions that
she and a girlfriend would like to
try a threesome. Murray, played by
Woody Allen, offers
f Fioravante—for
a price—and suddenly they’re a
pimpin’, ho-in’ duo. But when Mur-
ray, taking his stepson to a youthful
Hasidic widow (Vanessa Paradis)
for delousing, somehow sells her
on Fioravante’s services, all sorts of
lines are crossed and the story veers
into “Pretty Woman” quicksand.
Yet Allen, as a sideman, riffsf with
an adolescent glee, and Turturro,
mining stereotypes like a “Broadway
Danny Rose” tummler and breaking
them with a trivial audacity, moves
and gazes with a seductive romantic
longing that awaits a solid dramatic
vehicle. The eccentric exuberance
and smothering warmth off an old-
neighborhood New York provide the
nostalgic mist, along with burnished
grooves by Gene Ammons on the
soundtrack. With Liev Schreiber,
as a righteously glowering Satmar
watchman.—Richard Brody (In lim-
ited release.)
Finding Vivian Maier
An unlikely tale, well told. John
Maloof, who directed the documentary
with Charlie Siskel, speaks off attend-
ing a Chicago auction in 2007 and
buying a box off old negatives. This
eventually led him to a vast cache of
photographs, numbering more than
a hundred thousand, that were taken
by a nanny named Vivian Maier. Few
were printed; many others were never
even developed; none were shown
in public during her life. She died
in 2009, and Maloof—as seen in
the film—has spent the intervening
years making her work available and
seeking to reconstruct her private
history. He interviews those whom
she had helped to raise as children; a
portrait slowly emerges off a cussed,
reclusive woman whose fixations
could verge on the bizarre, and yet
whose eye for an image was as cool
in its compositional skill as it was
tender in its concern for the lowly.
She was all too memorable yet she
chose to remain unknown, and there
is no guarantee that she would have
welcomed her posthumous fame, let
alone the intrusion off this film. It
seems fitting, then, that she escapes
definition even here; by the end, we
feel as iff we have been hearing not
off a real person but of a character
in a book.—Anthony
— Lane (3/31/14)
(In limited release.)
Jewel Robbery
The erotic edge off looming danger,
the sexual charge off a sure and
confident
f touch, the thrilling distinc-
tion between true refinement and
mere formality electrify this 1932
Hollywood drama by the director
ILLUSTRATION BY SKIP STERLING
William Dieterle (who had recently
emigrated from Germany) with a
frenetic swoon o frustration. It’s set
in Vienna, where the rigid hierarchies
and absurd regimentation o daily
life are a brazen mask for passion
and power. There, in the theatrical
glitter o a high-end jewelry shop,
the concupiscent young wife (Kay
Francis) o a stu y and immensely
wealthy politician is caught in the
midst o a robbery masterminded by
a dashing and sensual thie (William
Powell), with whom she falls instantly
in love. The breathless excitement o
the chase, with its cunning twists and
turns, is matched by the lacerating
dialogue and the silken cinemato-
graphic sheen (thanks to the gifted
and short-lived cameraman Robert
Kurrle). The feline Francis, in extreme
décolleté, reveals even more with her
carnal gaze; Powell’s ironic heat, so
audacious in Vienna, seems almost
avuncular at home.—R.B. (MOMA;
April 17 and April 19.)
Joe
The new David Gordon Green ilm
is set in rural Texas, although the
prevalence o boozers, bums, and
brothels may not endear it to the
local tourist industry. Joe (Nicolas
Cage) is an ex-con with a drinking
habit, barely steering clear o the law.
He runs a gang o casual laborers
whose job it is to poison healthy
trees. (As with much o the movie,
the threat o symbolic overload is
never far away.) Among the workers
is a new recruit, a teen-ager named
Gary (Tye Sheridan), whose family
is unmendably broken; beaten by his
violent father (Gary Poulter), the
kid casts around for a surrogate, and
inds Joe. The relationship between
them is the movie’s richest seam, not
least because it allows for a touch
o comic relaxation, and because
Cage, for once, delves hard into a
role without being diverted into the
overwrought. I Poulter seems even
more convincing, that is because he
is, or was, the real thing: a homeless
man, found on the streets o Austin
and cast in a role that he knew all
too well. Not long after ilming
concluded, he was found dead, out
o doors, after a drunken evening.
The movie, with all its laws, will
be his memorial.—A.L. (4/14/14)
(In limited release.)
Noah
Darren Aronofsky’s Biblical epic is the
craziest big movie in years, a farrago
o tumultuous water, digital battle,
and environmentalist rage (think o
Al Gore glaring at the apocalypse).
Aronofsky’s Noah (Russell Crowe)
is a gloomy vegan who accepts the
annihilating judgment o the entity
he calls the Creator: man has polluted
the earth, and must go. The movie
shifts back and forth between the
visionary and the mercenary, between
startling invention and mall-movie
cliché. At one point, Noah tells his
family the story o existence, and
we see the void, the irst dazzling
light, protozoa, lizards crawling out
o ponds, and evil, unclean man. In a
single sequence, Aronofsky combines
creationism, Darwinian evolution,
original sin, the end o days, and
radical environmentalism. With Ray
Winstone as Tubal-Cain, a ilthy thug
who ights to get himsel and his
followers onto the ark, and Jennifer
Connelly as Noah’s wife, who pleads
for human life to be spared.—D.D.
(4/7/14) (In wide release.)
Nymphomaniac: Vol. II
Further adventures o the erotic
voyager Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg)
and her kindly interlocutor and
middle-aged commentator, Selig-
man (Stellan Skarsgård), as created
by Lars von Trier in what can only
be called a pornographic work o
art. Joe, mated with Jerôme (Shia
LaBeou ), has lost any feeling o
sexual pleasure. He urges her to get
her groove back by experimenting,
and, in a comic episode, she takes
up with two African brothers she
spies from her window. Then, ever
more desperate, she lings hersel
into masochistic rituals with a pro-
fessional sadist (Jamie Bell), which
are not at all comical—the sessions
are shown in excruciating detail. (It’s
as i von Trier were saying, “You’re
fascinated? Stomach this.”) As in
the irst volume, von Trier links
his hungry woman to philosophical
ideas, mathematics, and digressions
o all sorts. The movie, a descendant
o such eighteenth-century libertine
texts as “Thérèse Philosophe,” is less
a slice o life than something told
and chewed over.—D.D. (3/24/14)
(In limited release.)
Only Lovers Left Alive
Jim Jarmusch, having lirted with
various genres, now has his eye on
vampires. His milk-pale heroes are
Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and his
wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton), who live
in Detroit and Tangier, respectively,
although, as the story shows, they
are never more than a night light
apart. The whole ilm defers to the
rules o the game; not a single shot
takes place in daylight—a zone that
Jarmusch, in any case, seems always
to have regarded as uncool. Blood,
too, is the only nourishment, although
Adam and Eve sip it like vintage
port, whereas her younger sister,
the feckless Ava (Mia Wasikowska),
insists on the old-fashioned ploy o
fangs in the mortal neck. The ilm
is not just louche but lofty, clearly
bored by the doings o ordinary folk,
and littered with name drops from
the world o music and books; some
viewers will themselves be bored,
rather than entranced, by this low o
weary condescension. Yet the result
has undoubted panache, and wit to
spare, especially when Swinton is in
the frame. She genuinely appears to
have worked out how to live forever,
of note Journey to the West
CWTCPXfP]QPbTSSXaTRc^aCbPX<X]V;XP]V´baPeXbWX]VR^]RT_cdP[
UX[\PRWXTeTbPaPaTQ[T]S^UbT]bd^dbST[XVWcP]SS^Rd\T]cPah
b_TRXUXRXch8c^_T]bfXcWPRdcP]T^dbR[^bTd_^UPUPRTcWPc
dominates the screen like a landscape: the face of the actor
3T]Xb;PeP]ccWTUXTaRTXR^]^U\^STa]5aT]RWRX]T\PfW^bT
QaTPcWUX[[bcWTb^d]ScaPRZ[XZTcWTfX]S7XbeXacdP[R^\_P]X^]
PaTSa^QTS\^]Z\^eTbX]bT[UX\_^bTSb[^f\^cX^]cWa^dVW
a grottolike darkness and laboriously enters the world at large.
8]PQP[[TcXR[^]VcPZTcWT\^]Z´bSTbRT]c^UcWTbcTT_bcPXaRPbT
of a Marseille subway station before bewildered passers-by
becomes a Pilgrim’s Progress away from the idea of progress.
His infinitesimally sublimated action passes to a busy street
X]cWTRXchX]Ua^]c^UPcWa^]V^UbZT_cXRP[RPU|_Pca^]bP]S
dashing urbanites. The act of useless beauty—which also offers
P[Tbb^]U^acWTRX]T\P´b[XeX]V[TVT]S°aPXbTb\TcP_W^aXRP[
questions of how such a way of life is sustained. Tsai’s radical
eXbX^]RWP[[T]VX]VQPbXRXSTPb^URd[cdaP[_^[XcXRbP]STR^]^\XR
RW^XRTbcda]bcWTf^a[SPbfTZ]^fXcd_bXSTS^f]°Richard
BrodyCaXQTRP5X[\5TbcXeP[*0_aX[!!
and to do it in style. With John Hurt, Revivals and Festivals
as Christopher Marlowe—not just Titles in bold are reviewed.
a playwright, but a vampire, too. Anthology Film Archives
Big surprise.—A.L. (4/14/14) (In The films of Lau Kar-Leung.
limited release.) April 18 at 7:45 and April 19
at 1: “The 36th Chamber of
The Raid 2 BWP^[X]² (&'© ©0_aX[!Pc&)
The Welsh director Gareth Evans “Dirty Ho” (1979).
returns to Indonesia for this sequel BAM Cinématek
to his 2011 action classic, starring the “Back with a Vengeance.” April
martial-arts expert Iko Uwais as a 'Pc!P]S#)"P]S0_aX[ (
Jakarta cop who goes undercover Pc#)"P]S() $)±=X]Tc^5XeT²
to take down a huge underground
 ('2^[X]7XVVX]b© ©0_aX[!
Pc!P]S')")“Xala.”© ©
organization. The plot, similar to 0_aX[!Pc#)")±9TP]]T
that o “The Departed,” is built 3XT[\P]² (&$2WP]cP[
for maximum mayhem and a heavy 0ZTa\P]© ©±>eTaSdT²0_aX[! 
body count. Evans devises brutal, at 7: “Rhythm Thief,” followed
faultless action sequences; his luid QhP@0fXcWcWTSXaTRc^a
camerawork allows Uwais’s bloody <PccWTf7PaaXb^]©
©0_aX[! Pc
ight choreography to soar to gory, ()")±7XVWCXST² (#&9^W]
bone-crunching heights. Evans also Reinhardt).
o ers an admirably more complex Film Forum
story than the original, but his clunky CWTUX[\b^U5aP]{^XbCadUUPdc
screenwriting rhythms are no match 0_aX[ %Pc ) $") $$) $&)"
for his brilliant, lengthy combat scenes. and 9:45: “Such a Gorgeous
O special note: a riot, staged in a Kid Like Me.”©
©0_aX[ &Pc
muddy prison yard, that approaches )"#&P]S()#)±CWT;Pbc
<Tca^² ('©
©8]aTeXeP[
Wellesian grandeur.—Bruce Diones 0_aX[ '!#Pc ) $") $$) $&)"
(In limited release.) P]S()#$)±6^SiX[[P² ($#8bWXa^
7^]SP*X]9P_P]TbT
The Railway Man
Film Society of Lincoln
A sombre true-story footnote to the Center
ifties classic “The Bridge on the “Art of the Real.” April 18 at 5
River Kwai.” In 1980, Eric Lomax P]S0_aX[!Pc')")±;dZPb
(Colin Firth), a veteran o the Burma cWTBcaP]VT²! "9^W]
campaign in the Second World War, C^aaTb© ©0_aX[ 'Pc&P]S
lives gloomily and silently in a gray 0_aX[!Pc!)")±0CW^dbP]S
English river town, his life frozen Bd]b²!(<PcX3X^_
by memories o working on the Museum of Modern Art
hellish Thailand-Burma Railway in The films of Marco Bellocchio.
1943, when the Japanese tormented April 16 at 8: “The Wedding
thousands o captured Asians, Brits, 3XaTRc^a²!%© ©0_aX[ &
and Australians into creating tracks at 7: “Dormant Beauty”
through the jungle. Lomax, pulling ! !© ©0_aX[ 'Pc#)±5XbcbX]
himsel together, travels to Thailand
cWT?^RZTc² (%$© ©0_aX[ '
Pc&)±CWT4hTbcWT<^dcW²
to confront the o icer, Takashi  ('!© ©0_aX[ (Pc&)"P]S
Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada), who 0_aX[!!Pc#)±CWT=P]]h²
waterboarded him years earlier.  (((© ©±EXT]]PD]eTX[TS²
The scenes o coercion are more April 17 at 4 and April 19 at
violent than in the earlier ilm, !)")“Jewel Robbery.”© ©
but the story—a morally admirable 0_aX[ 'Pc'P]S0_aX[!
but dramatically inert case o high-
minded reconciliation—is far less
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 15
 at 5: “Prater” (2007, Ulrike interesting. Firth is unsmiling, energy (itsel part o the time capsule) Under the Skin
>ccX]VTa© ©0_aX[ (Pc$P]S jowly, and almost punitively honor- captures a moment when New York The director o “Sexy Beast” (2000)
0_aX[!Pc!)")±APh^U able; you wait a long time for him bohemia had a mortal edge and the and “Birth” (2004), Jonathan Glazer,
Bd]bWX]T² (""?Pd[5TY b to explode. Nicole Kidman, in a façades were crumbling.—R.B. (BAM has taken nine years to deliver his
Museum of the Moving muted, ine ective performance, is Cinématek; April 21.) third feature. His devotees, who
Image Lomax’s extraordinarily supportive enjoy nothing more than to be
±BTT8c1XV²0_aX[!Pc%)") wife, a Canadian nurse he meets on Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me hypnotized by his imagery into a
±0[_WPeX[[T² (%$9TP];dR a train. With Stellan Skarsgård, as a The title character o this bumptious state o confusion and wonder, will
fellow-veteran o the “death railway,” comedy, from 1972, is the wildest o consider the result worth waiting
6^SPaS© ©±0]cW^]h<P]])
Mean Streets and Open
B_PRTb²0_aX[ (Pc#)±C<T]² and Jeremy Irvine as the young François Tru aut’s wild children—an for; his detractors will chide its
 (#&© ©0_aX[ (Pc&)±APf3TP[² Lomax. Frank Cottrell Boyce and abused girl who quickly learns an pretensions. Scarlett Johansson,
 (#'© ©0_aX[!Pc!)±CWT Andy Paterson adapted Lomax’s 1995 amoral repertoire o survival tactics making not so much a sharp career
6aTPc5[P\PaX^]² (#$© ©0_aX[ autobiography; Jonathan Teplitzky that lead her to a life o crime. Jailed move as a leap into terra incognita,
!Pc#)“Border Incident.” directed.—D.D. (In limited release.) for murder, Camille (Bernadette plays a nameless woman who drives
Tribeca Film Festival Lafont) is visited by a sociologist around Glasgow, chatting with
0_aX[ &Pc%0_aX[ 'Pc )" Rhythm Thief (André Dussollier) and tries to catch young men (most o whom, during
0_aX[!#Pc()#$P]S0_aX[!% Matthew Harrison’s harsh and him in her seductive web. Tru aut the ilming, neither recognized the
Pc )“Summer of Blood.”© © doom-laden 1994 low-budget feature, plays up the ambiguities through star nor knew that they were even
0_aX[ &Pc(0_aX[ 'P]S0_aX[ shot in seemingly gravel-rubbed a dazzling multitude o styles and in a movie). She takes some o them
! Pc')"P]S0_aX[!%Pc black-and-white, is a time capsule allusions, including an elaborate back to her lair, where the mood,
!)")±5XeTBcPa²! #:TXcW for the street life o the ungentri ied ilm-noir lashback structure, a series the landscape, and the soundscape
<X[[Ta© ©0_aX[ &Pc(0_aX[ ( Lower East Side—and the mean- o “Vertigo” references, a Hawksian (courtesy o an extraordinary score
Pc#0_aX[!!Pc&P]S0_aX[!#
ness o those streets is the engine setup o a scientist loosening up, and by the young British composer Mica
Pc%)#$)±6 Ta^b²! #0[^]b^
AdXi_P[PRX^b© ©0_aX[ 'Pc o its drama. The title character is unstrung performances à la Jerry Levi) are transformed, and where we
$)"0_aX[ (Pc()#$0_aX[!  Simon (Jason Andrews), a tense and Lewis. The picaresque adventure realize that the temptress is, in fact,
Pc")"P]S0_aX[!$Pc )") tough-minded music bootlegger—he involves a sleazy lounge singer a bringer o death. Her origins and
“The Kidnapping of Michel surreptitiously tapes live rock shows (Guy Marchand), an exterminator motives are unexplained, although,
7^dT[[TQTR`²! #6dX[[Pd\T and peddles cassettes o them on a and forty-year-old virgin (Charles in her eyes, the same could be said
=XR[^dg© ©0_aX[!!Pc$)") Delancey Street corner that he claims Denner), a predatory lawyer (Claude o humanity; pitiless at the start,
“Journey to the West.”© © as his own. His avowed meanness is Brasseur), and a wet noodle o a she grows more inquisitive about
0_aX[!!Pc()"P]S0_aX[!$ a survival instinct, but people keep husband (Philippe Léotard), who our mortal habits, and that curiosity
Pc")±;P]S7^²! #<PacWP following him—Cyd (Kimberly belong to a gallery o dubious takes her into the rural wilderness,
BcT_WT]bP]S0Pa^]:Pci
Flynn), a miserable o ice worker masculinity that’s ripe for pluck- and into a danger zone. Glazer is
who comes to him for sex but can’t ing. Lafont’s antic embodiment nothing i not ambitious; the rough
help wanting more; Fuller (Kevin o feminine ferocity cuts cleverly edge o naturalism, on the streets,
Corrigan), a scatterbrained sidekick against Tru aut’s grim vision o slices into the more controlled and
whose friendship means trouble; and a world that both represses and stylized look o science iction,
Marty (Eddie Daniels), a woman craves it, and the comedy masks and the result seems both to drift
from his home town who tracks him the endless round o victimhood. and to gather to a point o almost
down to his cacophonous, rage- illed In French.—R.B. (Film Forum; painful intensity. Adapted from a
tenement building. The papery-voiced, April 16.) novel by Michel Faber.—A.L. (In
blank-gazed Simon has a sentimental limited release.)
side, and the boldly inventive direc- Summer of Blood
tor has one, too; the raw emotions Graying, paunchy, cynical, underem- Xala
DVD OF THE WEEK are nailed by the jittery, abrasive ployed—the aging Brooklyn hipster The opening sequence o Ousmane
A video discussion of Robert images, and the actors—memorably Eric Sparrow (Onur Tukel) is lucky in Sembene’s bitter satire, from 1974,
Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly,” from typecast—don’t get past the boundar- love with Jodi (Anna Margaret Holly- shows Africans taking over the
1955, in our digital edition. ies o their roles. But the theatrical man), a sensible and sensitive young Dakar Chamber o Commerce from
lawyer. But after rejecting her marriage its European overlords—and then
proposal, Eric is out on his ear; in his exchanging their garb for suits, speak-
of note Soft in the Head downward spiral o sexual frustration ing in French instead o Wolof, and
Nathan Silver’s raucous, disturbing new film is a shrewdly and bewildered vanity, he meets a happily accepting briefcases full o
conceived yet emotionally unhinged blend of uproarious vampire—an encounter that changes money from the remaining French
situations and devastating outcomes. It stars Sheila Etxeberría everything. Tukel, who also wrote functionary. Sembene’s righteous
as Natalia, a young New York woman whose boyfriend reacts and directed this self-deprecating political anger inds indigenous tar-
comedy, lends his ego-mad slacker gets as well, including the one that
with fury when she goes to her friend Hannah’s Shabbat a pungent motormouthed vigor; i launches the drama: the practice o
dinner without him; as a result, Natalia arrives late, drunk, and his character o Eric doesn’t have polygamy, endorsed by local Islamic
homeless, and ends up spending the night in a small private quite enough architecture to form an customs. El Hadj (Thierno Laye),
shelter, where the saintly manager, Maury (Ed Ryan), protects archetype and his direction is e icient a corrupt businessman who sits on
her from the advances of the facility’s uncouth and unbalanced rather than expressive, he surrounds the council, takes a third wife (to the
residents. Knowing that Hannah’s introverted, socially inept himsel with an independent-scene great dismay o his other two) but
all-star team, including the poised, suddenly—under a curse, or xala—be-
brother, Nathan (Carl Kranz), has a crush on her, Natalia turns commanding Hollyman; the wildly comes impotent and fails to consum-
him into another protector and, in the process, sows trouble inventive Dakota Goldhor, as the mate the marriage. He scurries to
with his observant family. The setup and several way stations of target o Eric’s fantasies; the acerbic shamans (one, comically, has him crawl
the plot are ready-made Jewish jokes, but the emotional stakes Alex Karpovsky, as his admonitory to his new wife with a talisman between
are no laughing matter; Silver aims every scene at its points of colleague; the director Dustin Guy his teeth), but superstition proves to be
maximal vulnerability, and the high-strung performances seem Defa, moonlighting as a neck-biter; just another form o blindness to the
and the lunar Keith Poulson, as a underlying ills—his own and those o
to shred the actors in real time. Mixing principle and violence, victim o his own bad choices. The African society at large. In Sembene’s
delight in a grotesque tall tale and horror at actual pain, he vestigial desolation o urban waste view, a corrupt system merely replaced
channels the tone of the Hollywood shock master Samuel Fuller. spaces is nearly a character in the white dictators and pro iteers with
With Melanie J. Scheiner, as Hannah; Moshe and Nechama antic action; when the story’s gears black ones; the symbolic ending, a
Kessler, as her long-suffering parents; and Theodore Bouloukos, grind, Tukel gives it a metaphysical glimmer o revolutionary hope, is as
kick that lends its inal arc an eerie morally gratifying as it is implausible.
EVERETT

as a shelter resident addicted to decaf coffee.—Richard Brody

spin.—R.B. (Tribeca Film Festival; In French and Wolof.—R.B. (BAM
(Cinema Village.) April 17-18, April 24, and April 26.) Cinématek; April 20.)

16 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014

THE MUSEUM OF
ONCE YOU ALIBIS:
Major support is provided by Support for the publication is
MODERN ART provided by The International
Council of The Museum of
11 WEST 53 STREET
MoMA.ORG/POLKE
The Museum acknowledges
generous funding from the Mimi
Modern Art and by the Jo Carole
Lauder Publications Fund of CAN BE SIGMAR
and Peter Haas Fund, Jerry I.
Speyer and Katherine G. Farley,
The International Council of The
Museum of Modern Art. DEFINED, POLKE
GIVE IT UP. 1963–2010
Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis, Park Hyatt® is the hotel sponsor
Anna Marie and Robert F. of Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010.
Shapiro, Sully Bonnelly and
Robert R. Littman, and The
Sigmar Polke. Untitled (Color Experiment MEMBER PREVIEWS
Contemporary Arts Council of
The Museum of Modern Art.
[Farbprobe]) (detail). 1986. Synthetic
resin and enamel coating on canvas.
ON NOW
The exhibition is made possible
by a partnership with Volkswagen
Additional support is provided by Collection Susanna Hegewisch-Becker. OPENS APR 19
The Charles Lafi tte Foundation, © 2014 The Estate of Sigmar Polke/
of America. The Junior Associates of The Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/
Museum of Modern Art, and the VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany
MoMA Annual Exhibition Fund.
 IT’S A
BIG WORLD
IN HERE.

As the only PreK–12 school in Manhattan with sister campuses in Europe, Asia and Latin America,

Léman offers your child the world like no one else. Our personalized approach to education ensures that our

students know how to make the most of their experiences here, and in the global society that awaits them.

DAY AND BOARDING STUDENTS ARE INVITED TO APPLY AT LEMANMANHATTAN.ORG

LOCATED IN THE FINANCIAL DISTRICT AT 41 BROAD STREET 212.232.0266
 T
TEATRE
party people
The timely resurgence of Ed Bullins.

long ago, in the late nineteen-

seventies, when I treated Manhattan like
one big discothèque, or the glittery gritty
mirrored universe in “A Chorus Line,” I
also went to parties. The best were hosted
or, rather, curated by Owen Dodson. Justly
renowned for his work as a drama teacher at
Howard University (his students included
Toni Morrison and Phylicia Rashad), Owen
was also a significant director; he was the
first to put on James Baldwin’s “The Amen
Corner.” The world Owen created at his
parties was like a dream of Manhattan
sophistication. In the shadowy glamour,
one saw Ruby Dee, a poet named Derek
Walcott, the playwright Richard Wesley,
Billy Dee Williams, and a round-faced writer
named Ed Bullins.
Of all the people Owen entertained,
Bullins was the most political. His gifts
extended beyond the page; along with
Tonya Pinkins and Roscoe Orman star in a revival of Ed Bullins’s 1971 play, “The Fabulous Miss Marie.”
Robert Macbeth, he worked with the New
Lafayette Theatre, in Harlem, on the same than the Watts riots, which will change their he left Black Nationalism behind as his art
site where Orson Welles had staged his local climate? Not that Miss Marie, who is grew, no longer informed by propaganda.
famous “voodoo” “Macbeth” some thirty hosting a party, and her guests are aware of Despite his later success, there was a falling
years before. There, young black people the violence outside—they’re more focussed off
ff of interest in Bullins’s work as the
learned how to craft their own theatre, on the violence they can inflict on one eighties came to an end; different
ff views of
expressive of their lives and concerns. another from the haven of their self-interest. blackness were being embraced.
At seventy-eight, the great playwright Growing up in Philadelphia, Bullins Like August Wilson, another
is now educating new audiences. At the was involved with street gangs, and was Pennsylvania native, Bullins thought of
Castillo Theatre, Woodie King, Jr., is subsequently stabbed. But he also saw a “The Fabulous Miss Marie” as part of a
staging, with the exceptional Tonya Pinkins play and became interested in the theatrical play cycle—No. 4 in his own “Twentieth
in the title role, Bullins’s funky and mean and form. After dropping out of high school, Century Cycle” plays. But, unlike Wilson,
funny 1971 Obie Award-winning play, “The the burgeoning artist decamped for Los Bullins never sacrificed his politics for
Fabulous Miss Marie.” Set in Los Angeles Angeles and then, later, San Francisco, familiar narratives that encouraged
during the Vietnam War, it’s a kind of where he enrolled in a writing program. audience identification. In the end, he
domestic drama about blacks who feel they’re Meanwhile, Amiri Baraka’s “Dutchman” has always been Emersonian in his desire
far removed from the civil-rights movement had exploded, followed by Baraka’s Black to be himself, and he possesses what the
as they try to deal with the surrealism of Arts movement, which promoted the idea American theatre turns its back on too
their everyday lives. The whole piece is a that art by black artists could and should often: a sense of evil, which, in the right
kind of dirty joke about the times: the black reflect black life. Bullins not only committed characters’ hearts, can sometimes be as
bodies and thoughts in them are anarchic himself to that idea, he became the Black attractive as love.
in spirit, but are they any less out of control Panther Party’s minister of culture. But then —Hilton Als

ILLUSTRATION BY RAYMOND BONILLA THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 17


Openings and Previews
The Complete & Condensed
Also Notable
Act One
Stage Directions of Eugene
Vivian Beaumont O’Neill, Volume 2
The New York Neo-Futurists pre-
After Midnight
sent the second part o a show that
Brooks Atkinson
originated in 2012, adapted and
All the Way directed by Christopher Loar, in
Neil Simon which the company created comedy
Annapurna and drama out o stage directions
Acorn taken from O’Neill’s oeuvre. Pre-
Beautiful—The Carole King views begin April 17. (Theatre for
Musical the New City, 155 First Ave., at
Stephen Sondheim 10th St. 212-868-4444.)
The Box: A Black Comedy
Irondale Center The Fabulous Miss Marie
Bullets Over Broadway Woodie King, Jr.,’s New Federal
St. James. Theatre presents the play from 1971
(Reviewed in this issue.) by Ed Bullins, part o the Ed Bul-
Cabaret
lins Project, which follows a group
Studio 54 o middle-class African-Americans
living in Los Angeles in the early
Casa Valentina
Samuel J. Friedman
sixties. Tonya Pinkins and Roscoe
Orman star. Previews begin April
The City of Conversation 17. (Castillo, 543 W. 42nd St. 212-
Mitzi E. Newhouse 941-1234.)
The Civilians’ The Great
Immensity Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Public Neil Patrick Harris stars in the Broad-
The Cripple of Inishmaan way première o a musical based on
Cort the 1998 O Broadway production,
A Gentleman’s Guide to about a transgender East German
Love and Murder chanteuse. John Cameron Mitchell
Walter Kerr wrote the book, and Stephen Trask
Heathers: The Musical wrote the music and lyrics. Michael
New World Stages Mayer directs. In previews. Opens
I Remember Mama April 22. (Belasco, 111 W. 44th St.
Gym at Judson. 212-239-6200.)
Through April 20.
(Reviewed in this issue.) The Mysteries
If/Then More than ifty playwrights interpret
Richard Rodgers stories from the Bible, in a six-hour
Isolde performance featuring ifty-four
Abrons Arts Center members o the Bats. Playwrights
include David Henry Hwang, Craig
Lady Day at Emerson’s
Bar & Grill Lucas, Billy Porter, José Rivera,
Circle in the Square Madeleine George, Lucas Hnath,
Je Whitty, Najla Said, Trista Bald-
The Library
Public win, and Erin Courtney. In previews.
Opens April 18-21. (Flea, 41 White
Les Misérables St. 212-352-3101.)
Imperial
The Mystery of Irma Vep The Substance of Fire
Lucille Lortel Second Stage presents a revival o
Of Mice and Men Jon Robin Baitz’s play from 1991,
Longacre about members o a publishing fam-
Pippin ily who try to convince the father
Music Box to improve business by publishing
Red Velvet
what they think will be a best-seller.
St. Ann’s Warehouse. Directed by Trip Cullman. In pre-
Through April 20. views. (Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd
St. 212-246-4422.)
Rocky
Winter Garden
Under My Skin
Satchmo at the Waldorf
Kerry Butler (“Xanadu”) and Matt
Westside
Walton star in this comedy by Robert
The Threepenny Opera Sternin and Prudence Fraser, about a
Atlantic Theatre Company. bachelor and a single mother who
(Reviewed in this issue.) trade places. Kirsten Sanderson di-
The Velocity of Autumn rects. In previews. (Little Shubert, 422
Booth W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200.)
Violet
American Airlines Theatre The World Is Round
Your Mother’s Copy of Ripe Time presents the world
the Kama Sutra première o a play based on the
Playwrights Horizons Gertrude Stein book, conceived,
written, and directed by Rachel
Dickstein. Previews begin April 17.
3
Opens April 21. (BAM Fisher, 321
Ashland Pl., Brooklyn. 866-811-4111.)
Now Playing
Fishing for Wives
In this Pan Asian Repertory pro-
duction o Edward Sakamoto’s
comedy, Nishi Takeo (Viet Vo),
a poor Japanese isherman living
in Hawaii in 1913, isn’t handsome
enough to lure a “photo wife” from
Japan, so he sends a picture o his
good-looking best friend, Aoki
Tsutomu (Bobby Foley), and hopes
for the best. O course, when the
woman (Kiyo Takami) arrives, she’s
furious, but she goes along with the
marriage so that she can be near
Aoki, with whom she has fallen in
love. Sakamoto’s play, under the
direction o Ron Nakahara, feels
like a fable without a moral, or
even a message. It’s not that it’s
poorly acted, or even unfunny—in
fact, it’s sometimes charming—but,
lacking in emotional, psychological,
and even historical depth, it feels
irrelevant. (Clurman, 410 W. 42nd
St. 212-239-6200.)
The Heir Apparent
Does David Ives use a rhyming
dictionary? He must have consulted a
medical one as he described Geronte,
the invalid at the center o his ad-
aptation o this 1706 Jean-François
Regnard comedy, as “asthmatic,
rheumatic, and myopic, smegmatic,
aspermatic, misanthropic, sclerotic,
cirrhotic, phlebotic, thrombotic,
neurotic, necrotic.” Trouble is, Ge-
ronte (Paxton Whitehead) lives on,
which inconveniences his destitute
nephew Eraste (Dave Quay) and
his beleaguered servants Crispin
(Carson Elrod) and Lisette (Claire
Karpen). The trio enact a series
o increasingly absurd schemes to
part the old man from his money
and life. Elrod exploits his gift for
caricature, while Suzanne Bertish
glisters as “an avaricious bitch.”
The director John Rando sets a
giddy, hurtling pace, crashing past
unlikely verse and doubtful plot
points. Ives’s baroque rhymes often
delight, and he even achieves a few
topical couplets, as when he follows
“diarrhea” with “Crimea.” (Classic
Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St.
866-811-4111.)
The Most Deserving
The members o a small arts council
in rural Kansas must ind a recipi-
ent for an unprecedented twenty-
thousand-dollar grant, but can’t agree
on which o the contenders—local
minority artists in need—is the best
choice. This has little to do with the
worthiness o the potential recipients
and everything to do with the self-
interest o the council members, all
o whom have something to gain
from the outcome. This Women’s
Project production o Catherine
Trieschmann’s comedy is a smart
and biting commentary on the
pettiness o small-town politics,
but the acting, under the direc-
tion o Shelley Butler, is uneven.
Veanne Cox, though, as the leader
who compromises hersel to keep
the council alive, and the hilarious
Kristin Gri ith, as the wealthy wife
o a dead donor, are both riveting.
(City Center Stage II, 131 W. 55th
St. 212-581-1212.)
A Raisin in the Sun
In Kenny Leon’s revival o Lorraine
Hansberry’s 1959 play, Walter (Denzel
Washington), a poor chau eur, lives
in a cramped, two-bedroom apartment
on the South Side o Chicago, with
his wife, Ruth (Sophie Okonedo),
his ten-year-old son, Travis (Bryce
Clyde Jenkins), his younger sister,
Beneatha (gorgeously inhabited by
Anika Noni Rose), and their widowed
mother, Lena (LaTanya Richardson
Jackson). The family anticipates Wal-
ter’s father’s life-insurance payout:
ten thousand dollars that will help
Walter open his own liquor store and
make him feel, unequivocally, that
he’s the head o the household. After
it arrives, Lena reveals that she has
used some o the money to buy the
family a new home—in Clybourne
Park, a white section o town. The
stage revitalizes Washington. With
his wide-legged, gunslinger stance,
he helps cast the sanctimony out o
the role. Watching Washington is like
watching a great actor at the start o
his career: free and joyous, in love
with words. (Reviewed in our issue
o 4/14/14.) (Ethel Barrymore, 243
W. 47th St. 212-239-6200.)
The Realistic Joneses
Will Eno’s Broadway début as a
playwright, directed by Sam Gold,
has a starry cast: Toni Collette
and Tracy Letts play Jennifer and
Bob Jones, and Marisa Tomei and
Michael C. Hall play their new
neighbors, Pony and John Jones.
What starts out as story about the
creepiness o neighbors turns out
to be a stealthily heartfelt lament.
In the profuse dialogue, Eno layers
banalities with small truths that are
seemingly hidden in plain sight,
pieced together in short scenes
(the play is an intermissionless
ninety- ive minutes). This eventually
reveals, theoretically, four people
in deep pain, due to a ravaging
neurological disease. With the
exception o Collette’s Jennifer,
however, none o the characters
are able to show it, and the deft
craftiness o the words becomes
like a character in the play that
you hope will unveil what’s within
those concealed depths. The actors
perform in their best high-gloss
sitcom style, but with an ominous
tilt, to handsome e ect; Letts is
especially potent, giving a deadpan
delivery that makes clichés sound
hilariously ironic. (Lyceum, 149
W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.)

18 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014

 cLASSical
Opera
Metropolitan Opera
Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s romantic
comedy “Arabella,” their inal collabora-
tion, will always be a lawed gem, but
Stephen Pickover’s lively staging o
the traditional Otto Schenk produc-
tion radiates appeal. This revival is a
great showcase for the talents o the
rock-solid German baritone Michael
Volle, who, in an overdue Met début,
brings a surprising, Golaud-like touch
o menace to Mandryka, the blustery
Croatian landowner impulsively in love
with the beautiful but impoverished
Arabella—who, despite Mandryka’s
boorish behavior, decides to love him
back. (Another impeccable German
singer, Juliane Banse, sings the role
o Zdenka, Arabella’s little sister, with
ardor, intelligence, and committed high
notes.) In the title role, the young
Swedish soprano Malin Byström lacks
dramatic presence, but displays ine
intonation and creamy timbre; Philippe
Auguin exudes quiet authority in the
pit, giving a gentle cast to Strauss’s
opulent outpourings o sound. (April
16 at 7:30 and April 19 at noon.)

Also playing: It’s been a good year for
Bellini at the house: irst an ardently
acclaimed “Norma,” last fall; then a
ine “La Sonnambula” in the winter;
and with spring comes “I Puritani,”
the composer’s spacious and melodi-
cally abundant inal opera, set in the
civil-war England o the Roundheads
and the Cavaliers. Back in 1835, all o
London (including the teen-age Princess
Victoria) was stricken with “Puritani
fever”; the Met’s hopes to re-create such
excitement depend on its impressive
new cast. The dazzling tenor Lawrence
Brownlee and the persuasive baritone
Mariusz Kwiecien take the male leads,
with the breakout Russian soprano Olga
Peretyatko, in the role o Elvira, mak-
ing her much anticipated Met début;
Michele Mariotti conducts. (April 17
and April 22 at 7:30.)
The winning
young tenor Vittorio Grigolo, in the
role o Rodolfo, anchors the cast in the
SIC
latest revival o Ze irelli’s production
o “La Bohème,” joined by Jennifer
Rowley and Massimo Cavalletti as
Musetta and Marcello, and with an
established star, Barbara Frittoli, as
Mimì; Stefano Ranzani. (April 18 at 8.
This is the inal performance.)
An-
thony Minghella’s vividly cinematic
production o “Madama Butterfly”
returns to the schedule, with Kristine
Opolais, singing the title role, and an
up-and-coming young American tenor,
Adam Diegel, as Pinkerton. The reli-
able Maria Zifchak and Dwayne Croft
complete the leading roles; Marco
Armiliato. (April 19 at 8.)
It’s hard
to imagine a revival more welcome to
Met audiences than that o Rossini’s
“La Cenerentola,” the house’s principal
vehicle for the bracing virtuosity o the
bel-canto tenore di tenori, Juan Diego
Flórez. Owing to illness, however,
Flórez will not join the production
until May 2; replacing him is Javier
Camarena, who excelled at the house last
month as Elvino in “La Sonnambula.”
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
This year, Joyce DiDonato, another
audience favorite, sings the role o
Cinderella. Filling out the cast are
Pietro Spagnoli, Alessandro Corbelli,
and Luca Pisaroni; Fabio Luisi, still
the Met’s principal conductor, is in the
3
pit. (April 21 at 7:30.) (Metropolitan
Opera House. 212-362-6000.)
Orchestras and Choruses
New York Philharmonic
In the season o Easter and Passover,
the city’s classical scene calms down a
bit before the inal, sustained rush o
late spring. This week, Alan Gilbert
and the Philharmonic o er a one-time-
only, all-American concert in Avery
Fisher Hall. The Japanese jazz pianist
Makoto Ozone, who collaborated with
the orchestra during its recent Asian
tour, returns as soloist in Gershwin’s
“Rhapsody in Blue”; the rest o the
only-in-New York program features
Bernstein’s “Candide” Overture and
the Symphonic Dances from “West
19

A reënergized Aspen Music Festival and School presents its first-ever New York concert, at SubCulture.
Side Story,” as well as Gershwin’s
“An American in Paris,” music the
Philharmonic, and its audience, knows
extremely well. (212-875-5656. April
22 at 7:30.)
Pomerium
The Cloisters, Upper Manhattan’s au-
thentically medieval venue, is a natural
spot for early-music concerts; they
take place in the museum’s evocative
Fuentidueña Chapel, parts o which
were salvaged from a twelfth-century
Spanish church. Next on the schedule
is an appearance by a long-established
home-town choral ensemble, Alexander
Blachly’s excellent Pomerium, which
features a selection o sacred works
by Dufay, Sen l, Gesualdo, Lassus,
Byrd, and Monteverdi—a group o
composers with incisively individual
personalities. (Fort Tryon Park. 212-
650-2290. April 19 at 1 and 3.)
Mannes College Lamar and
Ruth Alsop Memorial Concert
Marin Alsop, the music director o
the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra,
20 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
comes from a deeply musical family:
her parents, Lamar and Ruth Alsop,
were members o the string section o
the New York City Ballet Orchestra
for thirty and ifty years, respectively.
They died within a few days o each
other, earlier this year, and Mannes
(o which Mr. Alsop was an alumnus)
is presenting an orchestral concert
in their honor, conducted by Marin
Alsop and featuring such admired
soloists as the cellist Eugene Moye
and the violinist Nadja Salerno-
Sonnenberg; the repertory features
concertos and concerto movements
by Vivaldi, Barber, and Brahms.
(John L. Tishman Auditorium, the
New School, 63 Fifth Ave., at 13th
3
St. April 21 at 6. To reserve free
tickets, visit alsop.eventbrite.com.)
Recitals
“Complete Aspen Music
Festival and School
(Abridged)”
Aspen, the Tanglewood o the West—
which, under its music director, Robert
Spano, is emerging from several years
o controversy and sta changes—
presents its irst-ever concert in New
York, a cheekily titled, hundred-minute
event that mixes performance with
discussion and “artistic immersion.”
Among those participating are the
festival’s C.E.O., Alan Fletcher, several
distinguished faculty members, young
musicians o serious promise, and
Spano, an excellent pianist, who will
lead a performance o Brahms’s Piano
Quintet in F Minor. (SubCulture, 45
Bleecker St. subculturenewyork.com.
April 16 at 7:30.)
MATA Festival 2014
This annual festival, under the mot-
to “Young composers now!,” has
become the city’s leading showcase
for fresh international talent. (This
year’s series includes thirty-four
composers under forty from seven-
teen countries.) The Kitchen serves
as the home base; the irst concert
features Ensemble Uusinta, Finland’s
leading contemporary-music group,
performing works by Hikari Kiyama,
Aaron Helgeson, Joan Arnau Pàmies,
and Ilari Kaila, with further concerts
provided by such groups as New
York’s International Contemporary
Ensemble and Germany’s Neue
Vocalsoloisten (performing Oscar
Bianchi’s evening-length cantata,
“Matra”). (512 W. 19th St. thekitchen.
org. April 16 at 8. For full details, see
matafestival.org. Through April 21.)
Axiom: Boulez and
Stockhausen
Je rey Milarsky, the expert con-
ductor o Juilliard’s able group o
students devoted to the music o
our time, o ers a survey o the
insistent, raucous, and exquisitely
calibrated sounds o two o Europe’s
regnant postwar modernists. Boulez’s
“Dérive 2 is featured along with
Stockhausen’s “Five Star Signs” and
“Refrain.” (Alice Tully Hall. April
17 at 8. Free tickets are available at
the Juilliard box o ice.)
“Bach, Revisited:
Tower and Bach”
JoanTower, one o America’s paramount
women composers and a superb pia-
nist, has a irm appreciation for the
music o Bach. She curates the next
concert in Miller Theatre’s ongoing
Bach series, a program by the Curtis
Institute’s Curtis 20/21 Ensemble which
interleaves the three movements o
Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto
with three o her own works: “Big
Sky,” “In Memory,” and the String
Quartet No. 5, “White Water.”
(Columbia University, Broadway at
116th St. 212-854-7799. April 17 at 8.)
“Collected Stories: Hero”
David Lang, a Pulitzer Prize-winning
composer and perhaps the leading
representative o the postminimalist
generation, is curating a series o concerts
at Zankel Hall that radiate like spokes
out o the timeless human need for
storytelling. The irst, “Hero,” o ers a
contrast o ancient and classic modern.
Benjamin Bagby, the storyteller and
master o the medieval harp, performs
scenes from “Beowulf,” followed by
the Harry Partch Institute Ensemble,
who will present their indomitable
namesake’s “The Wayward,” a work
that includes the spoken and written
words o Western hitchhikers and
train-riding hobos, compiled during
the Great Depression. (212-247-7800.
April 22 at 6.)
Bargemusic
Gilles Vonsattel, the gifted young
Swiss-American pianist who performs
with the Chamber Music Society o
Lincoln Center, leads o the week
at the loating music series with a
solo recital featuring music across
the centuries by Beethoven (the Six
Bagatelles, Op. 126), Liszt, Mes-
siaen, Janáček, Heinz Holliger, and
Frederic Rzewski (“The Winnsboro
Cotton Mill Blues”). (Fulton Ferry
Landing, Brooklyn. bargemusic.org.
April 18 at 7.)
ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY
 AB VE
B YO D
New York International Auto Show
The earliest automobiles were de ined by what
they lacked: horses. In 1900, at the irst New
York International Auto Show, a hundred and
sixty vehicles, all greatly resembling horse-drawn
carriages minus the horses, crammed the old
Madison Square Garden’s racetrack. These cars
were a refreshing change: they heralded a gradual
farewell to the tons o horse manure that annually
decked the city streets, not to mention the arduous
task o removing carcasses. This year, more than
a thousand vehicles will be displayed at the Javits
Center, with one perched on the Empire State
Building’s observation deck. It’s a brand-new Ford
Mustang that was chopped into pieces, brought up
in the elevators, and reassembled at the top—the
same publicity stunt the company pulled ifty years
ago, when the pony car was irst introduced. (655
W. 34th St. autoshowny.com. April 18-27.)

Auctions and Antiques

Swann presents its irst auction dedicated exclusively
to vernacular (i.e., non-“high-art”) photographs (April
17), a vast category that embraces everything from
snapshots to erotic mementos to souvenir albums. The
selections include a daguerreotype o the abolitionist
John Brown, a photographic archive documenting
the life o a twentieth-century nudist couple, and a
Chinese fan decorated with a photogram o lowers
and leaves. (104 E. 25th St. 212-254-4710.) At its
sale o American art on April 16, Sotheby’s o ers
a typical mix o pleasing works from the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, including an unusual
oblong oil by Norman Rockwell depicting a cel-
ebratory street scene o shops and brass bands in
Pitts ield, Massachusetts. (The work is a study for a
mural-size painting commissioned by the Berkshire
Life Insurance Company, eventually completed by
another artist, Cli ord Young.) In a more melancholy
vein, the Pennsylvania Impressionist Edward Willis
Red ield captures the muddy reds and browns o
late fall in a forest scene entitled “Frosty Morning.”
(York Ave. at 72nd St. 212-606-7000.)
Readings and Talks
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century”
The French economist Thomas Piketty discusses
his groundbreaking new book, “Capital in the
Twenty-First Century,” with Joseph Stiglitz, Paul
Krugman, Steven Durlauf, Janet Gornick, and
Branko Milanović. (The Graduate Center, City
University o New York, Fifth Ave. at 34th St.
212-817-8215. April 16 at 6.)

World Book Night

For this annual event, which takes place April
23, a panel o librarians and booksellers choose
about three dozen books, the authors waive their
royalties, and publishers support the printing o
special editions that are given away for free. The
night before, on April 22 at 6:30, Garrison Keil-
lor, Tobias Wol , Walter Dean Myers, Malcolm
Gladwell, and others gather at the New York
Public Library to discuss their love o literature,
and how they can support it. (Fifth Ave. at 42nd
St. 917-275-6975. For more information about
World Book Night, visit worldbooknight.org.)

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 21

 NIGHT LFE
irreverence allows him to evade
cliché and keep the genre vibrant.
“Often, that’s where the soul
revivalists fall flat,” he said. “They
invest the music with a mystique
that it doesn’t warrant, which
destroys it. I was playing in a club
once and a very earnest young
French couple said to me, ‘Do you
feel your music is like a religion?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I take it seriously.’ ”
It’s tempting to view the more
melancholy songs on “Minute by
Minute”—especially “So They
Say,” a beautifully understated
meditation on loss and mortality—
in an autobiographical light,
given the fact that Hunter’s wife,
Jacqueline, died of cancer in 2011.
But he cautioned against reading
the songs too straightforwardly.
“The things that happened add
a poignancy,” Hunter said.
“And because of the fact that
relationships and sadness often
recur in soul music, people
sometimes assume that those songs
have autobiographical content. For
me, though, I write vicariously,
stealing bits of other people’s lives.
Most of my stuff ff is from hearsay.”
Hunter first started performing
in the late eighties, under the nom
James Hunter’s tight, taut compositions are rooted in American soul music without being bound to it.
de soul Howlin’ Wilf, and has
since played every kind of venue:
hunter and collector roadhouses, street corners, arenas,
theatres. He’s coming to New
A British singer-songwriter’s unconventional remedies for heartbreak.
York on April 20, to perform at
onstage, the fifty-one-year-old british singer and songwriter James Hunter City Winery, which serves food
has the energy of a man half his age, or younger. With a soulful tenor that recalls a range of and drink at tables. He admitted
R. & B. giants, from Sam Cooke to Bobby Bland, Hunter leads his band, the James Hunter that this arrangement poses certain
Six, through strict tempos and lightning-quick switchbacks. And unlike his former mentor challenges. “I can’t say that it’s a
Van Morrison, who enlisted him as a guitarist and backup singer in the mid-nineties, Hunter great comfort zone for me to be
is warm and engaging: while Morrison is known to turn his back to the crowd between songs, playing to people who are trying
Hunter is more likely to be telling a joke and checking with the audience to see if they’re having to digest their dinner,” he said.
a good time. “Sometimes with the Winery,
The answer, invariably yes, has everything to do with Hunter’s tight, taut compositions, though, we can transcend that a
which are rooted in American soul music without being bound to it. Traditionally, soul songs little bit. The people there can,
deal with romantic doubt or longing; Hunter’s lyrics have plenty of lovelorn types, too, but his under the right conditions, be a sit-
remedies for heartbreak are often unconventional. The jaunty “Chicken Switch,” which opens down audience with the attributes
up his most recent album, “Minute by Minute,” comes not to praise romantic bravery but to of a standup audience.”
bury it (“When in doubt / Take the coward’s way out / Hit the chicken switch”). Hunter’s —Ben Greenman

22 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 ILLUSTRATION BY A. RICHARD ALLEN

Rock and Pop
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead complicated
lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm
engagements.

Joey Bada$$
Born Jo-Vaughn Virginie Scott, this performer is
just nineteen years old, but he’s already cemented
himsel as one o the most exciting rappers on
the local scene. He started laying down rhymes
at Edward R. Murrow High School in Midwood,
Brooklyn, favoring the lighthearted style o hip-
hop pioneered by the old-school heavy hitters o
New York, combined with the positive lyricism
o A Tribe Called Quest and Black Star. He
generally travels with members o his Pro-Era
collective, so expect a few special guests at this
performance. (Music Hall o Williamsburg, 66
N. 6th St., Brooklyn. 718-486-5400. April 20.)

Black Lips
Fifteen years ago, this group started o as
garage punks, and since then its members have
spent several years becoming more and more
art-damaged: they introduced elements o psy-
chedelia and Southern rock into their music, and
pushed the envelope and then some in their live
performances. (With them, “pushing the envelope”
means participating in extreme onstage antics,
including but not limited to vomiting, nudity,
and urination.) As they have become more suc-
cessful and experienced, they have also become
more professional, in a manner o speaking. The
neo-soul producer Mark Ronson worked on their
last record, “Arabia Mountain,” and more than
hal the songs on their new album, “Underneath
the Rainbow,” were produced by Patrick Carney,
o the Black Keys. The results range from inspir-
ing (“Dog Years,” co-written with Bradford Cox,
o Deerhunter) to somewhat less than inspiring
(“Dandelion Dust,” which is energetic enough
but not easily di erentiated from a dozen other
Carney-associated tracks by other groups). Even
in their older, (slightly) wiser form, the Lips
are still something to see live. (Webster Hall,
125 E. 11th St. bowerypresents.com. April 17.)

Cloud Cult
This group from Minneapolis paints the whole
picture, literally. Onstage, two artists (including
the soul-searching songwriter and front man Craig
Minowa’s wife, Connie) make paintings while
the band plays soaring rock compositions that
include bright electric-guitar parts, melancholy
cello strands, and life-a irming hand claps. It’s
the kind o music that makes you feel happy and
sad at the same time, while also o ering pop
music’s glorious sense o abandon. At the Music
Hall o Williamsburg, they’ll be performing two
sets, one acoustic and one electric, in support
o an acoustic live album called “Unplug.” And
the whole picture is something they take seri-
ously: the band drives a biodiesel-fuelled tour
bus, plants trees to o set their carbon-dioxide
output, and packages its CDs using entirely
postconsumer recycled materials. (66 N. 6th St.
musichallofwilliamsburg.com. April 17.)

Guy Davis
Unless you can hitch a ride to the nineteen-
twenties and thirties with Mr. Peabody in the
WABAC, your best shot at experiencing Delta
country blues is to be in the same room with
Davis. The New York-raised son o Ruby Dee
and Ossie Davis has been releasing albums
since the seventies, and in concert his singing,
storytelling, and guitar- and harmonica-playing
drip with soul-satisfying authenticity. (Terra

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 23

Blues, 149 Bleecker St. 212-777-
7776. April 19.)
Lila Downs
This impassioned singer-songwriter
was born to a Mixtec singer in
Oaxaca, and she grew up there and
in California and Minnesota, where
her father was a professor. A former
student o opera and anthropology,
she embraces everything from jazz
and rock to ranchera and cumbia.
She appears at Town Hall on April
19, backed by her longtime band,
La Misteriosa. (123 W. 43rd St.
800-982-2787.)
Easy Star All-Stars
A decade ago, this reggae collective
turned its sights on “The Dark Side
o the Moon,” the 1973 Pink Floyd
album that spent more than a quarter
century on the Billboard charts. They
rendered the art-rock masterpiece in
a heady dub-reggae style on “Dub
Side o the Moon,” which intrigued
and appalled Floyd purists in equal
measure.The band is marking the tenth
anniversary o that breakthrough with
a forthcoming special reissue o the
original set and a show at Brooklyn
Bowl on April 19, with John Brown’s
Body, who are also reggae innovators.
(61 Wythe Ave. 718-963-3369.)
Eaters
Jonathan Schenke is a go-to producer
for Brooklyn’s indie-rock élite, having
worked on albums for Dirty Beaches,
Parquet Courts, and Frankie Rose,
based soundscapes that would not be
out o place in a classic early-eighties
slasher lick, are celebrating the release
o their irst, self-titled record this
week, and they’ve enlisted a handful o
local friends for the party: the former
Parts & Labor front man Dan Friel
and the captivating industrial rockers
Yvette. A d.j. set from Future Punx
rounds out the evening at this bi-level
performance venue. (Glasslands
Gallery, 289 Kent Ave., Brooklyn.
theglasslands.com. April 17.)
Holly Golightly & the
Brokeoffs
Born Holly Golightly Smith, this
English singer-songwriter special-
izes in Americana with a gritty
twist. She irst came on the scene
in the early nineties as part o Billy
Childish’s garage-rock project, Thee
Headcoatees. She’s cut more than
twenty albums and collaborated with
numerous artists, including, perhaps
most famously, the White Stripes on
the cheeky track “It’s True That We
Love One Another.” Now she works
with the Brokeo s, which is a hell
o a name for a band, but is really
just one guy, Lawyer Dave, a Texas
musician with whom she runs a farm
in rural Georgia, where they care for
rescued horses and do some home
recording. The pair’s latest album,
“All Her Fault,” is a collection o
rollicking honky-tonk and sweet
country ditties, with a barbed side,
o course. (Knitting Factory, 361
Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn. 347-
bandleader who’s been enriching the
New York scene for some ifteen
years now, calls his backing group
Enemies instead o Friends tells you
something about their music—it’s
a little perverse, a little dark both
harmonically and lyrically, with a
touch o humor. Each song on the
group’s new album, “English Dream,”
is accompanied by a video intermin-
gling archival British cinema with
shots o the band in period dress.
The group will perform at Joe’s Pub
in front o the archival footage, in
celebration o the album’s release.
(The Public Theatre, 425 Lafayette
St. 212-967-7555. April 17.)
Tonstartssbandht
Considering that the two brothers
who make up this band (pronounced
“TAHN-starts-bandit”) are used to
playing basements and D.I.Y. venues,
they have a disproportionately large
fan base in Russia. In the spring o
2010, a Moscow enthusiast convinced
his friends that Tonstartssbandht
was performing at one o his house
parties, despite the fact that the band
had no touring plans in that country.
Thanks to this ib, considerable inter-
est in the band’s experimental fuzz
pop was generated, and the group
travelled to Russia in 2011. They’ve
gone back every year since. Last year,
they even released a limited-edition
cassette tape on Spacebridge records,
specially crafted for their third trip to
Russia and Ukraine. With Weed and
Laced. (Shea Stadium, 20 Meadow
and that’s what you get from Smith,
one o the leading practitioners o
the jazz organ since the mid-sixties.
April 17-18 inds the guitarist Lionel
Loueke matching wits with this often
daring and always expressive player’s
trio. On April 19-20, the good doctor
fronts an octet. (Jazz Standard, 116
E. 27th St., between Lexington and
Park Aves. 212-576-2232.)
Javon Jackson
This forty-eight-year-old tenor saxo-
phonist is a no-nonsense hard bopper
who learned the tricks o the trade
from Art Blakey, Freddie Hubbard,
and other masters. Still, he retains
a taste for the vintage seventies
R. & B. he grew up on, and his most
recent album, “Expression,” contains
a ectionate performances o Stevie
Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout a
Thing” and the Roberta Flack–Donny
Hathaway classic “Where Is the
Love.” His lean quartet includes the
veteran bassist David Williams and a
irebrand o a drummer, Willie Jones
III. (Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh
Ave. S. 212-255-4037. April 15-20.)
Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom
Miller, a powerhouse drummer, has
stirred up bands led by an impres-
sive collection o leaders, from Ani
DiFranco to Marty Ehrlich. Last year,
with her evolving Boom Tic Boom
ensemble, she released “No Morphine
No Lilies,” which demonstrated that
her craftiness as a percussionist is
matched by her ingenuity as a com-

3
among others. He steps out from 529-6696. April 16.) St., Brooklyn. liveatsheastadium. poser and group conceptualist. (Cor-
behind the mixing boards with this com. April 16.) nelia Street Café, 29 Cornelia St.
exaggerated electro-funk project that he Spottiswoode & His Enemies 212-989-9319. April 18.)
shares with the multi-instrumentalist The fact that Jonathan Spottiswoode,
Bob Jones. The duo, who build synth- a British guitarist, songwriter, and Jazz and Standards “Playing for Jim Hall”
Lucie Arnaz Hall’s death late last year should
of note A scion o pop-culture royalty, the have resulted in a national day o
Fanfarlo singer and actress has spent the mourning, but musical tributes to
past hal century both honoring the the magisterial guitarist will have
Two months ago, this artsy quintet from London released its family heritage and inding her own to su ice. At the Blue Note, one o
third album, “Let’s Go Extinct,” a beguiling collection of songs way on the stage and the screen. his most important and in luential
marked by unaffected joy. Founded in 2006 by the Swedish multi- Expect sturdily sung standards, in a acolytes, Bill Frisell, is at the fore o
instrumentalist Simon Balthazar, the group has developed a richer program devoted to the evanescence a program organized in coöperation
sound over the years, and the songs on this album are filled with o love. (Café Carlyle, Carlyle Hotel, with Hall’s family and friends. It
complex vocal harmonies and appealing violin and trumpet lines. Madison Ave. at 76th St. 212-744- includes many players and colla-
1600. April 15-19.) borators who have been touched
While some of the material touches on the dark subject hinted by the late guitarist’s unmatched
at in the album’s title, the band’s upbeat tempos and dreamy The Cookers lyricism, among them the pianist
orchestration evoke optimism. You can hear a smile in their voices. With peers o a certain age, including Bill Charlap, the saxophonists
(April 22 at the Bowery Ballroom. 6 Delancey St. 212-533-2111; April 23 the saxophonists Billy Harper and Greg Osby and Chris Potter, and
at Rough Trade NYC, 64 N. 9th St., Brooklyn. roughtradenyc.com.) James Spaulding, the trumpeter Ed- the guitarists Russell Malone and
die Henderson, the pianist George Julian Lage. (131 W. 3rd St. 212-
Cables, the bassist Cecil McBee, 475-8592. April 18-20.)
Mingus Big Band and the drummer Billy Hart, playing
The larger-than-life bassist, composer, bandleader, author, alongside admiring younger confed- Loren Stillman and Bad Touch
and social activist Charles Mingus was such a creative force erates, such as the trumpeter and An unfortunate name shadows a
when he was alive, from 1922 to 1979, that it’s little wonder that arranger David Weiss and the alto terri ic ensemble whose new album,
undiscovered work of his keeps appearing, as if he were still saxophonist Donald Harrison, this “Going Public,” showcases the lucid
group revels in the edgier boundaries and contained improvising o the
delivering more evidence of his genius from the great beyond. o modal hard bop. (Iridium, 1650 alto saxophonist and group leader
On April 21, one day before what would have been his ninety- Broadway, at 51st. St. 212-582-2121. Stillman. With the lilting jabs o
second birthday, this intrepid twenty-three-year-old repertory April 20.) the organ player Gary Versace, the
band, which under the musical direction of his widow, Sue, aqueous lines o the guitarist Nate
shares Monday nights at the Jazz Standard with the chamber- Dr. Lonnie Smith Radley, and the shrewd dynamism
jazz-inclined Mingus Orchestra and the Mingus Dynasty septet, You should expect a major dose o o the drummer Ted Poor, this new
personality from a performer who jazz quartet creates a sinuous mood.
presents “Noonlight,” a recently unearthed Mingus composition. wears a turban and has taken on an (Jazz Gallery, 1160 Broadway, at 27th
(116 E. 27th St. mingusmingusmingus.com.) honorary title for no apparent reason, St., 5th l. 646-494-3625. April 19.)

24 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014


Museums Short List
Metropolitan Museum
ÒLost Kingdoms of Early
Southeast Asia.Ó Through July 27.
Museum of Modern Art
ÒAlibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963-2010.Ó
Opens April 19.
MOMA PS1
ÒTasterÕs Choice.Ó Through
May 25.
Guggenheim Museum
ÒItalian Futurism, 1909-1944:
Reconstructing the Universe.Ó
Through Sept. 1.
Whitney Museum
Ò2014 Whitney Biennial.Ó
RT
Museums and Libraries
Museum of Modern Art
“Jasper Johns: Regrets”
The museum harvests recent paint-
ings, drawings, and prints that run a
glamorously louche image—from a
beat-up copy o a photograph o Lu-
cian Freud, commissioned by Francis
Bacon—through the mill o Johns’s
peerless pictorial techniques. The
standard R.S.V.P. brusho , “Regrets,”
provides a unifying verbal conceit
and a whi o noble melancholy.
It’s all excruciatingly high-toned in
style and impenetrable in feeling,
while admirable to the nth degree.
triviality o the category “outsider
art” and the undying symbolic
potency o Southern experience.
No distinction is made between
works by sophisticates and those
by unschooled creators who came to
mastery in rural isolation, old age,
or prison. Art is art. And the South
is ever with us, stirring bitter and
sweet associations and demanding
the sorts o creative accounting that
are here delivered in myriad forms,
with qualities o feeling that range
from clenched force to high humor
and poetic grace. I ever a show were
more than the sum o its parts—as
American West. Foglia’s subject—the
boom-and-bust impact o mining on
rural Montana, Nevada, Wyoming,
and nearby states—isn’t obvious at
irst glance. Yet every picture has
weight and a sure sense o place and
(sometimes eccentric) character. In
one image, a man wearing only a
cowboy hat, boots, a bandanna, and
boxers lumbers through falling snow.
Like Alec Soth, Foglia constructs loose
narratives rooted in the American
landscape. Their meaning is elusive;
their beauty is plain as day. Through
April 19. (Fredericks & Freiser, 536
W. 24th St. 212-633-6555.)

Through May 27.
Brooklyn Museum
ÒAi Weiwei: According to What?Ó
Opens April 18.
American Museum of
Natural History
ÒPterosaurs: Flight in the Age of
Dinosaurs.Ó Through Jan. 4.
Asia Society
ÒGolden Visions of Densatil:
A Tibetan Buddhist Monastery.Ó
Through May 18.
Grey Art Gallery
ÒEnergy That Is All Around:
The Mission School.Ó Opens
April 15.
Jewish Museum
ÒOther Primary Structures.Ó
Through May 18.
Neue Galerie
ÒDegenerate Art: The Attack on
Modern Art in Nazi Germany,
1937.Ó Through June 30.
New Museum
ÒPawel Althamer: The
Neighbors.Ó Through April 20.
New-York Historical
Society
ÒHomefront and Battlefield:
Quilts and Context in the Civil
War.Ó Through Aug. 24.
Queens Museum
ÒPedro Reyes: The PeopleÕs
United Nations.Ó Through
May 19.
of note ÒIf YouÕre Accidentally Not Included, DonÕt
Worry About ItÓ
Artists should curate more often. The painter Peter Saul has
rounded up small works by twenty friends and acquaintances,
old and young, whose penchantsÑfor the cartoonish, stridently
Through Sept. 1.
Frick Collection
“Enlightenment and Beauty:
Sculptures by Houdon and
Clodion”
Presented in the museum’s sun-splashed
portico as two o a kind, these sculptors
o eighteenth-century France (who
shared a studio during their time in
Rome) actually make an odd couple.
Claude Michel, a Lorraine-born artist
who went by the sobriquet Clodion,
isn’t much exhibited these days, and
his small terra-cotta sculptures on
mythological subjects—such as a nimble
Zephyrus embracing a quadruple-
winged Flora—read now as a sweet last
gasp o the rococo. But Jean-Antoine
Houdon’s classicized, exacting marble
busts o the seventeen-seventies have
lost none o their power in the inter-
vening centuries, whether depicting
an ancien-régime justice minister or
a lower-bedecked countess. Their
individualism and precision resonate
with the spirit o the age, though it’s
too bad that this show includes none
o his even sterner post-Revolutionary
busts. Through April 5, 2015.
Studio Museum in Harlem
“When the Stars Begin to Fall:
Imagination and the American
South”
Works by thirty-four artists drive
home two timely critical points: the
3
good as most o the parts are—it’s
this one. Through June 29.
GalleriesÑUptown
Elinor Carucci
The New York photographer’s staged
self-portraits, co-starring her twin son
and daughter, zero in on the pleasures
and terrors o motherhood. The show
opens with a striking nude image
o Carucci as a pregnant odalisque,
and she’s often naked in the pictures
that follow, which were made over
the course o a decade. There are a
few seemingly spontaneous images
o the kids on their own—crying,
pouting, daydreaming—but all
o the work is frankly theatrical.
Carucci joins Sally Mann, who has
a long-term claim to this fraught
territory, blending fact and iction
to get closer to some wonderfully
complex emotions. Through May
3. (Houk, 745 Fifth Ave., at 57th
St. 212-750-7070.)
Urs Fischer
The Swiss jokester inaugurates two
new Gagosian spaces with goo ball
sculptures in pawed and lumpy
clay, some cast in bronze. Uptown
there’s a life-size “Last Supper” in
which Christ appears to bless a roast
chicken and a taco as the disciples
schmooze; the table bears replicas
o McDonald’s fries, cigarettes,
bullets, and rats, among other items.
Downtown, a defunct Chase Bank
branch hosts many pieces made by
Fischer and volunteer collaborators—a
miscellany o caricatured igures and
things, insolently and (perhaps to
their credit) perfectly meaningless.
Through May 8. (Gagosian, 821 Park
Sharon Hayes
One o New York’s most politically
incisive artists, Hayes has made a
specialty o restaged protests, public
speeches, and unexpected verbal
interventions. Here, she occupies
the gallery with an acid-yellow
banner, re-created from the 1977
National Women’s Conference, in
Houston: “WOMAN,” it shouts in
black, disco-era typeface, evoking a
feminist audacity that, these days,
can feel sorely lacking. The confer-
ence was led by Bella Abzug, who
is the subject o the show’s second
piece: a transcript, presented on
video, o the congresswoman and
her speech coach working to reduce
her New York accent, which, like
everything about the trailblazing
Abzug, was strong. Through April
26. (Rosen, 544 W. 24th St. 212-
627-6100.)
Jerome Liebling
Although his most famous images
were made in New York in the
nineteen-forties, the Brooklyn-born
photographer (who died in 2011,
at eighty-seven) had a long and
wide-ranging career, and this smart,
eye-opening retrospective covers its
full scope. As a member o the Photo
League, Liebling trained an incisive
eye on the city’s street life, and a
lively concern with social issues in
America and abroad informs much
o his subsequent work. His strength
is portraiture, often o children old
before their time, but he’s equally
engaging with urban and rural
landscapes, including a number o
large-scale pictures in color that have
a Hockneyesque speci icity and

3
colored, and well madeÑmirror his own. The results suggest Ave., at 75th St., and 104 Delancey sweep. Through April 19. (Kasher,
a movement heretofore unknown to anyone, including its St. 212-796-1228.) 521 W. 23rd St. 212-966-3978.)
members. Standouts include Karl Wirsum, Luis Cruz Azaceta,
Mark Greenwold, Judith Linhares, and Chuck Close (with Gary Stephan
GalleriesÑChelsea The veteran abstractionist’s lovely
an unusually jazzy print). But nothing misfires in what seems, Lucas Foglia new paintings seem o two or more
serendipitously, to be a mutually supportive team effort The young photographer makes a minds. Eccentric shapes intrude on
dedicated to cobweb-clearing sensation and frank fun. knockout New York début with big straight, broad strokes o thinned
Through May 3. (ZŸrcher Studio, 33 Bleecker St. 212-777-0790.) color landscapes and portraits o the paint that look woven. Pleasantly

26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014


Since 2007, Richard Renaldi has been asking people who don’t know each other—like Elaine and Arly, of New York
City, above—to make contact for his camera. The resulting series, “Touching Strangers,” is on view now at Aperture.
sedate colors and sensitive touch
lavor but can’t resolve the perplexi-
ties. Stephan has always piled more
kinds o thought into painting than
the medium can quite integrate.
(In this, though not in style, he
recalls the later Kandinsky.) Here,
the problem becomes the subject,
obliging viewers to decide what
the artist is doing, and why. The
e ect is a tender trap. Through
3
April 26. (Inglett, 522 W. 24th St.
212-647-9111.)
Galleries—Downtown
Ellie Ga
Contemporary art is going through an
obsession with archives and archeology,
but few artists take it as literally as
this London-based American, who
joined an underwater expedition to
ind a lost ancient lighthouse in the
28 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
harbor o Alexandria. Her resulting
three-channel video engagingly
mingles interviews with archeologists,
personal re lections, and images o
Egyptian parliamentary candidates,
a reminder that time is not the only
obstacle to the resurrection o the
past. There’s also a slide show that
counterbalances medieval descrip-
tions o the lighthouse with images
borrowed from coins and fantasizing
illustrators; no less than the video
installation, it evokes the weight o
history without slipping into didacti-
cism. Through April 27. (Bureau, 178
Norfolk St. 212-227-2783.)
Brian O’Doherty
Now in his mid-eighties, O’Doherty—
a critic, editor, Booker-short-listed
novelist, medical doctor, and artist,
who frequently showed under the
pseudonym Patrick Ireland—is a
Conceptualist with a mischievous
streak. This victory lap o a ret-
rospective, at two young galleries,
concentrates on his early work, which
utilized language, mathematics, and
logic but frequently turned playful,
as seen in a text piece incorporating
some very rude Irish and American
sexual slang. (“Fanny” means some-
thing quite di erent depending on
which side o the Atlantic you’re
on.) Many o the games and puzzles
pay a debt to his friend Marcel
Duchamp, whose pulse O’Doherty
took for a portrait in the form o
an electrocardiogram. Duchamp’s
heart beats steadily all these years
later; your own heart, in the midst
o O’Doherty’s work, might soon be
racing. Through April 20. (Subal, 131
Bowery, 917-409-0612, and P!, 334
Broome St. For more information,
visit p-exclamation.org.)
D CE
Ballet NY
Now in its sixteenth season, this
hardworking chamber ensemble
presents a varied program o ballet
miniatures, including the minimalist
“Dreams,” by Margot Parsons, and
a lighthearted reverie set to Allen
Shawn’s “Childhood Scenes,” for
piano, by the former New York City
Ballet dancer Antonia Franceschi.
(Ailey Citigroup Theatre, 405 W. 55th
St. 212-868-4444. April 15-17 at 7:30.)
Taisha Paggett
The young choreographer and artist,
based in Los Angeles, has an idiosyn-
cratic sensibility and is accustomed to
working both onstage and in gallery
settings. As part o the Whitney
Museum’s Biennial, she performs in
the lobby gallery. (Madison Ave. at
75th St. 212-570-3600. April 16-20.)
Ballet Hispanico
In his four years as artistic director,
Eduardo Vilaro has transformed this
venerable troupe into a sleek contem-
porary ensemble, with an emphasis
on the new and modish. This season
includes one première: “El Beso,” a
tongue-in-cheek homage to kissing by
the Spanish choreographer Gustavo
Ramírez Sansano. Annabelle Lopez
Ochoa’s “Sombrerísmo” (2013) is also
playful: a romp for the company’s sexy
men and their hats. Vilaro’s own “Hogar”
(2013) bene its from a tango hoedown
o a score by Lev Zhurbin, played live.
(Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th
St. 212-242-0800. April 16 at 7:30, April
17-18 at 8, April 19 at 2 and 8, and April
20 at 2 and 7:30. Through April 27.)
“Soaking Wet” / Tricia Brouk
and Vicky Shick
Held at the intimate, high-ceilinged
West End Theatre and organized by
David Parker and Je rey Kazin o
the Bang Group, this low-key series
presents back-to-back performances
by two choreographers who could not
be more di erent. Vicky Shick, whose
style is poetic and quirky, presents a
quartet for hersel and three female
colleagues, “Miniatures in Detail.”
The younger o the two, Tricia Brouk,
a veteran o television, movies, and
o -Broadway, is more slick and more
earnest. Her “Committed” is a piece
o musical theatre built around the
life stories o psychiatric patients in
nineteen-eighties New York. (263
W. 86th St. 866-811-4111. Vicky Shick:
April 17-19 at 8:30 and April 20 at 4.
Tricia Brouk: April 17-19 at 6:30 and
April 20 at 2.)
 FOOD &
DRI K
BAR TAB refinery hotel
63 W. 38th St. (646-664-0310)
During Prohibition, the Colony Arcade
Building was part hat factory, part
tea salon. Today, as the Refinery
Hotel, it’s just as charmingly weird,
and home to two bars. The Refinery
Rooftop—accessible by elevator, with
rigmarole—has a stunningly gorgeous
view of the Empire State Building.
There’s a retractable glass ceiling, a
fireplace, high tables and low couches,
tiered plates of food, and a menu of
Bites, Dips, Flats, Crispies, and Balls.
One evening, hotel guests posed for
pictures holding flutes of champagne,
and noisy young professionals drank
sauvignon blanc. “It feels like a
wedding venue in Chicago,” a woman
said. Downstairs, hidden behind
velvet curtains, is Winnie’s Lobby Bar,
the tea salon to the rooftop’s hat
factory. It’s uncrowded, friendly, and
soothing—qualities that midtown office
workers have learned not to hope
for—and the absurd drinks on offer
turn out to be terrific. The Quinoa
Old-Fashioned (muddled raspberries,
Corsair Quinoa Whiskey) did not
taste overpoweringly of quinoa; the
Smoke and Mirror Martini (Laphroaig
rinse, blue-cheese-stuffed olive) was
fantastic. “God, this is pleasant!” a man
said. “It’s too pleasant—the New York
of my dreams.” A waitress said that
a jazz singer was about to perform:
“She’s very soulful, and she scats up a
storm.” The man and his friend braced
themselves. But then the night got
ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW HOLLISTER
even pleasanter.
—Sarah Larson
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS
Tables for Two
little lamb
40-24 College Point Blvd., Level B, Queens (718-359-1668)
 Õ    for a Subway sandwich or a Five Guys burger,
the Shops at SkyView Center, a mall packed with big-box stores like Target and Best
Buy, may seem like the least likely place to eat in Flushing. And yet, around the corner
from Chuck E. Cheese and just past Applebee’s, one of the world’s most thrilling
culinary experiences awaits, at a place called Little Lamb. To be fair, one man’s Little
Lamb is another man’s Applebee’s: the restaurant is part of an Inner Mongolian chain
that claims around six hundred locations worldwide, and one of several suspiciously
similar places in Flushing that offer the East Asian specialty known as hot pot. But this is
the first and only official Little Lamb in New York, and, especially for anyone unfamiliar
with hot pot, a meal here is extraordinary.
It begins, of course, with a pot, piping hot, perched on an electric burner in the
center of each table, and brimming with broth made from beef bone, bone marrow, and
chicken. It’s described almost Biblically on the menu: “When boil is ready, we add our
mixture of little lamb special sauce. Then it became the ‘God Soup.’ ” The special sauce
is customizable: House “Mala” Spicy will set your mouth on fire and turn the liquid a
murky red, bobbing with dried chili peppers, numbing peppercorns, garlic cloves, whole
nutmeg, and cinnamon bark; a more timid palate would be better off with the House
Original, cloudy yellow and swimming with scallions, ginger, and goji berries.
Once the God Soup is roiling, the diner becomes the chef, tasked first with menu
planning, choosing from dozens of raw ingredients, which arrive in bite-size pieces, and then
with cooking the haul, by dropping things into the pot and determining when to scoop them
out. The first step can be difficult, thanks to curt descriptions and sometimes unappealing
translations (Supreme Lamb Shoulder is “Under Cervical Vertebra and it taste soft”). But
many items are straightforward—napa cabbage, enoki mushroom, fresh tofu—and taking
risks can yield high rewards, as with House Fish Noodle, which turns out to be ribbons of
dough sparkling with shards of briny dried fish, and Sun Volume, a platter of lamb slices
ringed in fat and appealingly fanned in a circle. The true challenge is in the timing: most
meat is cut so thin that it needs only a few seconds in the pot before it’s overcooked, but taro
root takes several minutes, and the optimal texture of baby bok choy is a matter of taste.
The menu offers a handful of excellent things that arrive ready to eat—perfectly flaky
scallion pancakes; cumin-rubbed, lusciously fatty lamb ribs “grilled until the tasty come
out”—but none are quite as satisfying as what comes out of the pot. Cooking your own
food is a good reminder of what hard work it is, just as the enormous backlit photographs
of sheep grazing in sunny fields are a good reminder of exactly what you’re eating.
—Hannah Goldfield
Open daily for lunch and dinner. Soup base $3.75 per person; ingredients 50¢-$13.99.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 29
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
REMEMBERING IN RWANDA
I n Kigali last week, thousands of mourners trekked through
a thick predawn fog to converge on Amahoro Stadium. By
midmorning, in hot, raking sunshine, they filled the stands.
The Army band, with sousaphones flashing, marched to the
center of the field, arrayed itself there on a round stage, and
began softly playing solemn hymns. President Paul Kagame
arrived, along with a dozen other sitting and former heads of
state from Africa and Europe. The sky clouded over. The air
smelled like rain. A tall man in a brown suit appeared on the
stage. He said that he was Fidel, a genocide survivor, and he
started to tell how he was supposed to have been killed. Then
the screaming began. The first voice was like a gull’s, a series
of wild, high keening cries; the next was lower and slower,
strangled with ache, but growing steadily louder in a drawn-
out crescendo; after that came a frantic, full-throated bab-
bling—a cascade of terrible, terrified pleading wails.
Every year, at the genocide-commemoration ceremonies
during mourning week, scores of Rwandans erupt in this way,
unstrung by grief, convulsed and thrashing when anyone comes
near to soothe or subdue them, including, at the stadium,
yellow-vested trauma teams who carry them out, bucking and
still screaming. You can expect it, but
you can’t protect against it. All around
the stadium, all around the city, all
around the country hung misty-gray
banners displaying the word kwibuka—
“remember.” The lacerating voices in
the stadium make the banners seem al-
most cruel. Is it really healing to keep
reopening a wound?
A lot of Rwandans will tell you
that all through mourning week they
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
are prone to bad and bitter feelings.
For those who were there in 1994,
during the genocide, memory can feel
like an affliction, and the greater im-
perative has often been to learn how
to forget enough for long enough to
live in the present for the rest of the
year. And for those who were not yet
born—more than half the country today—what does it mean
to be told to remember? Many Rwandan schools have yet to
teach the history of the genocide.
The centerpiece of the stadium program was a song-and-
dance spectacle, featuring six hundred and thirty performers
in a pop-opera pageant of modern Rwandan history. In the
beginning, a harmonious pre-colonial society is ruptured and
polarized by the arrival of white colonizers. “Dehumanization
started,” the narrator shouts over loud, hard-pulsing music.
“And humans became objects.” The Rwandans cower and
scatter in disarray. Then the killing begins: “Denying human
dignity, life or death became the order of the day.” And, as the
colonizers swap their pith helmets for U.N.-blue berets, climb
into a Land Rover, and roar off, the abandoned Rwandans
collapse one by one in an appallingly realistic spasm of mass
death. Against the ensuing tableau of hundreds of lifeless
bodies, the pitch of lamentation in the stadium achieved its
most berserk emotion. It was too much, and at the same time
it was wholly inadequate to the reality that it arose from.
The season of slaughter that decimated Rwanda twenty
years ago is one of the defining outrages of humankind. At no
other time in the history of our species
were so many of us killed so fast or so
intimately: roughly a million people in
a hundred days, most of them butch-
ered by hand, by their neighbors, with
household tools and homemade
weapons—machetes and hoes and
hammers and clubs. The killing was
programmatic, a campaign prepared
and orchestrated by the state to extir-
pate the Tutsi minority in the name
of an ideology known as Hutu Power.
It was, in conception and execution,
the starkest and most comprehensive
case of genocide since the crime was
defined in international law, in re-
sponse to the Holocaust. But, at the
time, Rwandans had no word for it.
What we call things is one way we
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 31
remember them. In Kinyarwanda, the language of the coun-
try, the word gutsemba means to “massacre” or “exterminate,”
but evidently the killers felt the need for a stronger expression
to capture the intensity of their action and the absoluteness of
their purpose. So they doubled down: they called what they
were doing gutsembatsemba. To the Rwandan linguist Éva-
riste Ntakirutimana, this redundancy proclaims the limitless-
ness and the relentlessness of the slaughter. The social psy-
chologist Assumpta Mugiraneza does not disagree, but to her
ear the emphasis is on the extremity of the slaughter. She says,
“In Kinyarwanda, we reduplicate the root to underscore the
radical aspect of the action. It describes the movement of
coming back and reassuring oneself that the deed is com-
pleted. So gutsembatsemba is ‘to exterminate radically.’ ” Of
course, the spirit of an expression is also tonal, and there’s a
rhythmic punch to gutsembatsemba that caught the world-
upside-down carnival energy of the Hutu Power enterprise.
Sometimes, when a pack of killers went on the attack, they
could be heard chanting, “Tuzabatsembatsemba, tuzabatsem-
batsemba”: “We all will exterminate you all.”
In July of 1994, three months after the killing began, Hutu
Power was routed by Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front,
which has run the country ever since. Soon, the more exact
terms itsembabwoko (to describe the systematic massacre of
Tutsis) and itsembatsemba (the killing of anti-extremist Hutus)
gained currency. But some survivors, refusing to echo the kill-
ers’ language so closely, began speaking of “genocide,” appro-
priating the word shared by English and French, Rwanda’s
secondary languages. They spelled it “jenoside,” and in 2003
it was codified in the country’s new constitution. Yet that still
wasn’t the last word. In 2008, the government once again re-
named the crime. Now they call it “the genocide against the
Tutsi.” It’s an inelegant phrase that has been slow to take hold,
perhaps because the foundational idea of Rwanda’s post-geno-
cide order is to emphasize an inclusive national identity, and
to treat Hutu and Tutsi as distinctions that belong more to the
past. We are all Rwandans now: that’s the idea.
At Amahoro Stadium, cheers mixed with the cries as the
show continued, with several dozen R.P.F. soldiers jogging
onto the field and tenderly lifting the bodies up, restoring
them to life. As the resurrected Rwandans regrouped center
stage, flocks of children joined them, and the music soared.
The nation was made whole again. But the screams did not
let up. So there is memory that we manage, and there is
memory that manages us. At the stadium, you had both, and,
at times, two decades of aftermath felt equal to the moment
between two heartbeats.
—Philip Gourevitch

HOMECOMING questioned about whether he had in-
NINE LIVES advertently donated money to Hamas,
and in 2004 was denied entry to the
United States. Though Yusuf insisted
he was a man of peace, a casual ob-
server might have thought that he’d
come to embody his own lyrics to
“Wild World”: “A lot of nice things
Yusuf planned to thank his lodestars,
from Beethoven to the Beatles. “Before
I came around to seeing the prophets as
my models, the Beatles represented the
kind of people I wanted to be with, be
one of. But when I met John and
George, in David Bailey’s photo-
graphic studio, about ’69, I was com-

T he singer Steven Demetre Geor-

giou Adams has never maintained
one identity long. As a teen-ager in
sixties London, he took the stage name
Cat Stevens—but his first hit, contra
his new feline brand, was “I Love My
Dog.” Next, after a near-fatal bout of
tuberculosis, he transformed from a
pop heartthrob into a soulful super-
star. Albums such as “Tea for the Till-
erman” became the soundtrack of
the early seventies; every passing VW
bus blasted Stevens’s staccato vocal
rhythms and scratchy, joyful acoustic
guitar.
By decade’s end, he’d grown disen-
chanted with a business that craved his
hits but rejected his quest. After forays
into Zen Buddhism and numerology,
he became a Muslim named Yusuf
Islam and forswore music. He went
on to found Islamic schools in Britain
and to work for peace in the Balkans,
but he also became embroiled in the
Salman Rushdie controversy, was
32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
turn bad out there.”
Last Thursday, at Brooklyn’s Bar-
clays Center, Cat Stevens was inducted
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Beforehand, his current, sixty-five-
year-old iteration sat cross-legged on a
couch in a room at the Essex Hotel,
drinking tea and looking out on Cen-
tral Park. Of the impending ceremony,
he said, “It seems like a very nice rap-
prochement—would you say that?
Something that heals?”
Aside from Peter Gabriel, he didn’t
view the other artists in his Hall of
Fame class as fellow-travellers. “Kiss?”
he wondered, in a soft London lilt. “I
have no feelings for Kiss. I admire the
way they look”—a reference to the
band’s face paint. He laughed and
added, “But maybe it’s just a way of hid-
ing yourself behind makeup.”
First, Art Garfunkel would intro-
duce him: “If he says anything wrong,
I’ll say, ‘Where’s the other guy?’ ” He
mimed looking for Paul Simon. Then
pletely tongue-tied. I finally said some-
thing stupid, like ‘It took me a long
time to make it!’ They looked at me,
knowing I’d hit it after two years, and
said, ‘You didn’t have it so hard.’ ” And
then he’d sing three of his hits. “I was
thinking about how ‘Father and Son’
and ‘Wild World’ are about leav-
ing,” he mused, reflecting on his life’s
journey, “and ‘Peace Train’ is about
waiting for the train to come back, as
it now has.” His lyrics always foretold
what was coming: “When you allow
the music to flow, it’s a very mystic
thing.”
For years, of course, the music didn’t
flow. Yusuf married in 1979; his wife,
Fawzia, had never heard of Cat Stevens
(she was an Elvis fan). “And at the time
I became a Muslim,” he said, “there
were two points of view about music
and the prevalent one was a bit strict, so
I just withdrew entirely. I eventually
came around to the other view, which
allowed the voice and a drum.” In 2000,
Yusuf released a popular children’s
album, “A Is for Allah.”
Then he began to realize, he said,
that “I’d left a whole generation who
loved me and my music.” When did
that occur? “I think Yoriyos is the guilty
one,” he said, smiling at his twenty-
nine-year-old son, who was sitting
attentively on the floor nearby. “He
brought a guitar into the house in,
what, 2003?”
“Actually, before that,” Yoriyos ad-
mitted. “I kept it in my cupboard.”
Yusuf raised his eyebrows, and they
both laughed. “After you took it off me
in Dubai, the next morning you’d writ-
ten a new song, already—”
“I had to find F,” Yusuf recalled, his
fingers shaping the chord in the air.
“C was always easy, but for F, I had to
press a little harder.”
Now he’s touring again, as Yusuf/
Cat Stevens. Yoriyos, whose band used
to open for his father, explained that
his own name is the Greek version of
George: “It means farmer—”
“Tillerman!” his father cried, rising
to his feet. He added, “I’m not happy
about the part of entering the Hall of
Fame that means I’m entering history.
What I’m happy about is that I’m burst-
ing with music—my new album is very
bluesy, actually. I’m singing again be-
cause it’s the best way to communicate
without politics, without all this terrible
mess!” He gestured toward the win-
dow, beyond which lay all his past in-
carnations and impediments. “And be-
cause your identity is the thing you
never stop becoming.”
—Tad Friend
“Give it up—Frisbee is your game.”
1
SPRING FEVER DEPT.
STINKYTOWN
L ast Monday morning, anyone
around town who stepped outside
expecting either a loamy first whiff of
spring or some more familiar indige-
nous reek discovered instead the faint
but unmistakable smell of woodsmoke.
Not burning-building woodsmokiness,
which in these parts, thanks to the alac-
rity of the fire department, typically
comes in the dismal, water-soaked va-
riety, but real, woodsy woodsmokiness.
Campfires. The air was thick and kind
of yellow. It brought to mind Idaho in
July—not sage-and-dew Idaho, or
dung-and-diesel Idaho, but droughty-
combustible Idaho. We shall call this
scent Ponderosa Apocalypse.
It didn’t take long for the news to
spread that the source was indeed a for-
est fire—a forest fire!—in the New Jer-
sey Pine Barrens, about a hundred miles
southwest. In a way, it was a bummer to
find out so fast. In 2005, a mysterious
odor of maple syrup began wafting over
from Jersey, and it took the authorities
years to identify the source. (Eventu-
ally, they traced it to fenugreek seeds at
a flavor-and-fragrance plant in Bergen
County.) In the interim, speculation
opened minds, and noses. People paid
closer attention to the city’s smells. It
was like a movie in which a charismatic
stranger comes to town, dazzles every-
one, and then, exposed as a cheat, flees,
leaving the townspeople to reflect on
how little they’ve appreciated what they
had all along.
This is the beginning of smelly sea-
son. Post-thaw, olfactory New York
springs to life. The freeze this year was
a long, hard one, by mid-Atlantic stan-
dards, and so one predicts an abrupt re-
lease. In the parks, the dogs are going
bonkers, and even humans can pick up
on the residual scent of the turds that
dog owners somehow felt the snow ab-
solved them from having to scoop up.
As the days heat up, the sewage stench
on the north side of Forty-second
Street just west of Sixth Avenue—Eau
de Bank of America—ripens, and the
ruts of horse shit along Central Park
South begin to sing. At certain subway
stops, the odor of rotting flesh returns,
as though from a winter in Arizona,
and all over town you can enjoy the
blossoming of that chief attribute of
New York: the smell of urine. Bus ex-
haust, hot garbage, clove cigarettes, Axe
cologne. Some of it is a matter of taste.
The sickly sweetness of the roasted-nut
carts is to the nose what the Andean
pan-flute ensembles are to the ear.
Spring, of course, is generally associated
with nice smells: magnolia, then crab
apple, then lilacs, then rain on warm
pavement and block-party barbecue.
In 2011, a state legislator from Staten
Island proposed that New York adopt
an official smell. He nominated pine:
aspirational, perhaps, or else the delu-
sion of a homer. It might be better to
defer to an outsider, a fresh set of nos-
trils. In February of last year, an “olfac-
tory artist” from Antwerp named Peter
de Cupere—the inventor of the Blind
Smell Glove, which can smell anything
you touch, and the Olfactiano, a piano
that emits scents—came to New York
for a long weekend, but, owing to the
cold, he couldn’t get a good read on how
the city smelled. All his previous visits
had been in winter, too. So, while here,
he decided to ask other people about
it—strangers on the street, whose an-
swers he recorded on camera and as-
sembled as a work under the rubric “NY
Smells Like.”
“The people, they really had to think
about it,” he said last week, on the phone
from Belgium. “They were thinking for
two or three minutes before they could
answer. It’s very strange that people don’t
know the smell of their own city. People
don’t know how to smell anymore.”
Even so, he, too, found it hard
to narrow down a New York smell.
“Around every corner there is a different
fragrance,” he said. “I think of a city’s
smell like a dialect. Every city in Bel-
gium has a dialect—one dialect. But in
New York you have a lot of dialects.”
He went on, “Most of the time,
New York is smelling bad, to be hon-
est. But I don’t mean that in a negative
way. The women smell good! And the
MOMA—it smells nice. It has a cozier
smell than the Guggenheim.”
The city gave him ideas. “There’s life
in New York under the ground,” he
said. “I find exciting the smoke coming
out of the ground. If they want to per-
fume the city, you could put fragrances
in the smoke. I’m willing to do that.
That is a dream for me. Imagine if Fifth
Avenue smelled of strawberries, or
roses. And another avenue, it smelled of
lilac. A blind person could find his way
around. At each crossroads, you could
have the smell of burned meat”—per-
1
haps he was not aware that this is al-
ready the case—“and the blind would
know where they were! There are so
many possibilities.”
—Nick Paumgarten
THE BOARDS
BUOYANT
T wo aspiring trampoliners arrived
the other day at Streb Lab for Ac-
tion Mechanics (SLAM, a fitness and
dance studio in Williamsburg, de-
scribed by its founder, Elizabeth Streb,
as a “beta test for a new cultural para-
digm.” (It is housed in a former mustard
depot.) Jumper No. 1 was Toni Col-
lette, the chameleonish Australian ac-
tress, who wheeled up on a powder-
blue bicycle. Jumper No. 2, whose
bouncing career ended in elementary
school, was alarmed to learn that Col-
lette’s last trampoline experience had
been less than a year ago. She and her
husband, the musician Dave Galafassi,
have a trampoline in their back yard in
Sydney, a wedding gift she requested
from her parents. “I mean, there’s noth-
ing better,” she said, removing her lime-
green helmet. “Just jumping up and
down feeling good about life—right?”
Collette has been a temporary Wil-
liamsburg resident since last summer,
when she relocated with her husband
and two children to film the CBS series
“Hostages.” She stuck around to star in
a Broadway show, her first in fourteen
years—the existential comedy “The Re-
alistic Joneses,” which just opened. “At
first, I thought, Oh, my God, where am
I bringing my children? This is a shit-
hole,” she said of the neighborhood.
“But now we love it.” Her six-year-old
daughter, Sage, took gymnastics classes
at SLAM, before moving on to ballet.
(Her son, Arlo, is almost three.) “I kind
of covet her experience,” Collette said as
she opened her jacket to reveal a Bronx
Zoo hoodie and workout pants.
Unlike her frazzled characters in
“Muriel’s Wedding” and “Little Miss
Sunshine,” Collette is inhibition-free.
Growing up near Sydney, she played
netball and swam at the local pool,
where there was a large trampoline. “I
was quite athletic,” she said. “Then I dis-
covered dancing and night-clubbing.”
(She shaved her head five times in her
twenties.)
The gym was empty, save for a chip-
per, curly-haired instructor named Ash-
ley Walters. Walters led Collette to the
Olympic-size trampoline, which she
described as “really, really bouncy.” So
it was. Collette stood in the center and
did five consecutive jumps, her feet
pointed like a letter opener. (When
Jumper No. 2 tried this, he fell.)
“Isn’t it funny?” Collette said. “The
older you get, the fear just creeps in. It’s
so stupid.” Nevertheless, she was ready
for pivots. Walters called out instructions:
quarter turn to the right, quarter turn to
the left, one-eighty, two-seventy, three-
sixty. “After you have kids, your bladder
is not the same,” Collette said, before
running to the ladies’ room. When she
returned, Walters moved on to “shapes”:
tuck jumps (knees to chest), straddles
(midair splits), pikes (touch your toes).
Collette nailed them, the bounce mat
thrumming beneath her feet. Walters
said, “Were you a gymnast?”
Next up: seat drops (land on your
bottom) and swivel hips (do a half twist
between seat drops). Collette gave it a
try, saying, “I do feel like I’m eight.”
Walters reminded her to keep her arms
aloft. “You know what’s happening?”
Collette said. “Years of doing it badly in
the back yard.” She lay down as if she
were in a hammock and stared at the
ceiling: “This is the best part.”
Walters demonstrated the next chal-
lenge: lying on your back with your legs
Toni Collette
up, like a baby, and kicking the air to
achieve a steady bounce. “This feels ab-
solutely horrible when you first learn
it,” she warned. Collette got it right
away, and said, “It kind of feels good!”
( Jumper No. 2 tried this, but he woke
up the next day with bad shoulder
pain.)
Finally: back drops (fall on your
spine). This one worried Collette. “It’s
like a trust exercise with yourself,” she
said, after a few failed attempts. “Your
brain gets in the way.”
Walters told her to concentrate on
an exit sign: “That’s what trampoline
work is mainly about—knowing where
to look.”
“The focus,” Collette said. She sat
on the springs for a minute, then stood
up and did a flawless back drop. “Hey!
I just had to distract myself.”
It was time to get to rehearsal.
“Overthinking is the danger,” she said,
of stage acting, as she laced up her
sneakers. “There’s a certain amount of
rumination, and then you just have
to jump.”
—Michael Schulman
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 35
THE FINANCIAL PAGE
SHUT UP AND DEAL
T he electric-car company Tesla seems like everyone’s dar-
ling these days. Its stock, even amid a pervasive selloff in
the tech sector, is up nearly forty per cent this year. It has an-
nounced plans to build a five-billion-dollar battery factory,
which various Southwestern states are vying to host. And it’s
now starting to sell cars in China. But there is one place where
Tesla is getting no love: New Jersey. Last month, the state de-
creed that the company would have to shut down its show-
rooms. In doing so, New Jersey joined states like Texas and Ar-
izona, where it’s effectively illegal to buy a Tesla. Pretty soon,
you’ll be able to get a Model S in Beijing but not in Paramus.
Why was Tesla banned? It sold cars. It built showrooms
where customers could check out a vehi-
cle, arrange a test drive, and buy a car.
The hitch was that Tesla sold cars directly
to the public, without going through in-
dependent dealers. In most industries,
this would hardly be a radical idea. Dell
built its business on selling direct to con-
sumers, and the most successful retail
phenomenon of the past decade is the
manufacturer-owned Apple Store. But
the auto industry is different. In its early
years, companies tried all kinds of ways of
selling cars; you could buy them right at
the factory, or at local department stores,
or even from the Sears catalogue. But
by the nineteen-twenties the industry’s
major players had settled on a system of
local, independently owned car dealers.
Today, almost every new car in the U.S.
is sold this way. In forty-eight states, direct sales by car manu-
facturers are restricted or legally prohibited, and manufacturers
are often prevented from opening a dealership that would com-
pete with existing ones. If Ford wanted to open a flagship store
on Santa Monica Boulevard, it couldn’t.
Tesla, since it’s starting from scratch, has no existing deal-
ers, and so in theory it isn’t encroaching on anyone’s turf. But
auto dealers around the country have still been lobbying state
governments to force the company to change its ways. Deal-
ers like the existing system, and they don’t want other auto-
makers to get any ideas. Fiona Scott Morton, an economics
professor at Yale who has written extensively on car dealers,
told me, “There isn’t a rational argument for why a new com-
pany should have to use dealers. It’s just dealers trying to pro-
tect their profits.”
Of course, no one involved presents it like this. State leg-
islators insist that the status quo benefits consumers: the
relevant Florida statute claims to be “providing consumer
protection and fair trade.” We’re told that only independent
dealers can guarantee service and warranty coverage. But look
36 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
at the Apple Store: manufacturer-owned, and yet famous for
the customer service and tech support provided at the Genius
Bar. And while the argument is sometimes made that the use
of independent dealers lowers prices, it’s hard to see how
forcing Tesla to sell its cars through middlemen would make
them cheaper. Indeed, a series of studies in the nineteen-
eighties found that the various rules protecting dealers led to
higher prices—six per cent higher, according to an estimate
by the Federal Trade Commission. And in 2001 the Con-
sumer Federation of America estimated that restrictive fran-
chise laws could be costing consumers as much as twenty
billion dollars a year. In any case, no one expects dealers to
disappear. The question is whether automakers should be le-
gally banned from trying out new ways to sell their cars.
It isn’t just auto dealers. State regulations are littered with
provisions designed to protect incumbent businesses. In most
states, retailers and restaurants have to buy alcohol from
wholesalers rather than directly from producers. And there’s
an ever-growing thicket of occupational
licensing regulations. For some profes-
sions, a licensing requirement makes
sense. But, according to a 2008 study,
almost thirty per cent of jobs now re-
quire a license in some state or other, in-
cluding many—auctioneer, shampooer,
home-entertainment installer—where
licensing seems totally unnecessary.
State governments have been looking
out for local businesses since way back—
in the nineteenth century, they forced
travelling salesmen to pay extortionate
fees—and they haven’t minded too much
when this protectionism comes at the
expense of consumers. Besides, as Scott
Morton says, “dealers employ a lot of
people and they generate a lot of sales-tax
revenue, so they have great influence over
state legislators.” Auto manufacturers, by contrast, are typically
based out of state, while consumers are too amorphous a group
to really exert much political pull. And, as the political scientist
Mancur Olson famously noted, when the benefits of a regula-
tion are concentrated and the costs are diffuse, the party that gets
the benefits is almost certain to win.
Of course, you might ask, who really cares if some luxury-
sedan maker has to sell through dealers? But what the New Jer-
sey ban exemplifies is the tendency for businesses to use state
power to divide the economy between insiders and outsiders.
This discourages innovation, raises prices, and makes life hard
for people trying to start new businesses—or even just get a new
job. Does it really make sense to force someone, as Utah did
until 2012, to go through two thousand hours of cosmetology
training to work as a hair braider? Such statutes delegitimatize
the idea of regulation, by making it look merely like a way for
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
governments to indulge special interests. As the financial crisis
showed, there are plenty of areas in real need of regulation. But
maybe car buyers can take care of themselves.
—James Surowiecki

DEPT. OF AVIATION
GAME OF THRONES
How airlines woo the one per cent.
BY DAVID OWEN
New first-class seating units can cost more than half a million dollars each.
S even years ago, I flew business class
on Qantas from Australia to Califor-
nia, a thirteen-hour trip. I hadn’t had
much experience outside economy, but I
didn’t want to look like a front-of-the-
plane rookie, so I stowed my “amenity
kit” without ripping it open, declined the
first cocktail a flight attendant offered
me, and tried to appear engrossed in a
book while the passenger nearest me
bounced around like a four-year-old at a
birthday party. I didn’t begin to play with
my own seat until after dinner, when I
lowered it into its fully extended position,
and stretched out—not to sleep, which is
something I hardly ever manage on air-
planes, but to see how the thing worked.
The concave back of the seat shell formed
a domed enclosure over my head, like
a demi-cocoon. Suddenly, I heard peo-
ple speaking in loud voices and bang-
ing things around. I sat up, indignant—
and realized that the noise was the sound
of breakfast being served. I’d slept
for eight hours straight, something I
never do even at home. In a little while,
38 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
we began our descent into Los Angeles.
In the early nineties, the best seats on
airplanes were still just seats, even if they
reclined almost all the way back. Then,
in 1995, in first class on some long flights,
British Airways introduced seats that
turned into fully flat beds, and within a
relatively short period airborne sleeping
became a potent competitive weapon.
The carriers that fly the wealthiest pas-
sengers on the longest routes have been
especially aggressive about adding com-
forts, in both first and business (while
also often shrinking the seats in economy
and squeezing them closer together).
A first-class passenger on the upper deck
of some Lufthansa 747s gets to hop
back and forth between a reclining seat
and an adjacent full-length bed. On
some of Singapore Airlines’ A380s, a
couple travelling in first can combine two
“suites” to create an enclosed private
room with a double bed and sliding
doors. On some flights on Emirates,
first-class passengers who make a mess of
the treats in their personal minibar can
tidy up with a shower before they land.
The modern aircraft-seating industry
is highly specialized. The number of
manufacturers is small, in part because
creating new seats is so complex that
moving from conception to installation
takes years and entails large financial
risks. It also poses unique design chal-
lenges, since a premium-class seat has to
create an impression of opulence in what
is actually a noisy and potentially nausea-
inducing metal tube filled with strangers.
If you checked into a luxury hotel and
were taken to a room the size of a first-
class airplane cabin, and told that you’d
be sharing it with eleven people you
didn’t know, all of whom would be sleep-
ing within a few feet of your own skinny
bed, you wouldn’t be thrilled, especially if
you were paying twenty thousand dollars
for the experience. Yet it’s not unheard of
for people who travel long distances in
really good seats to remember the flight
as one of the best parts of their trip. Mak-
ing them feel that way requires a partic-
ular kind of design and engineering skill,
along with what amounts, almost, to psy-
chological sleight of hand.
I n March, TheDesignAir, an air-travel
Web site, published its second annual
ranking of the best international busi-
ness classes. The winning airline was
Singapore, and the runner-up was Ca-
thay Pacific, which is based in Hong
Kong. One interesting fact about Singa-
pore and Cathay is that they held the
same positions on last year’s list, though
in the other order. Another is that the
business-class seats on both were created
by the same design firm: James Park As-
sociates, whose main office occupies
three rooms in a building on Worship
Street, in Shoreditch, in East London.
Just inside the largest room is a workta-
ble surrounded on three sides by IKEA
bookcases filled with fabric swatches,
carpet samples, and plastic bags contain-
ing pajamas, robes, and other “soft
goods” that J.P.A. created for first-class
cabins on Air China. In the main part of
the room, two dozen designers work
shoulder-to-shoulder at computers on
two long tables.
James Park, the firm’s founder and
principal, is sixty-seven years old, and
when he’s wearing his glasses he looks a
little like the poet Philip Larkin. He
earned a degree in architecture in 1974 at
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL
London’s Architectural Association,
whose other alumni include Zaha Hadid,
Rem Koolhaas, and Richard Rogers. His
first job after graduation was with the
Louis de Soissons Partnership, a distin-
guished architectural practice. When
that firm moved out of London, he left
and took what he assumed would be a
stopgap job: helping to restore and de-
sign vintage railway carriages for the
Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, a lux-
ury private-train service.
“The train project became much more
involving and much more enjoyable than
I’d thought it would,” Park told me re-
cently, as we sat at a big table in the firm’s
conference room. “There was a lot of
marquetry and very high-quality finishes
in the interiors.” There was also the chal-
lenge of fitting things together in a way
that would allow the wooden panels to
move without splitting or cracking.
“That’s a tricky problem, because a train
car is moving all the time, and it isn’t a
completely rigid object,” he said. “It also
contracts and expands—say, as it goes
up into the mountains and then comes
down to Venice in the summer.”
One of the old train cars was so badly
corroded that it couldn’t be salvaged.
Park cut it in half, and studied, in cross-
section, the way the interior had been as-
sembled—a technique that he and his
colleagues adopted, and called “loose-fit
technology.” To explain, he took my pen
and a piece of scrap paper, and sketched
the profile of a train car sliced vertically,
across its width: ceiling, frieze, raised
panel, heater grille, skirting, floor—all
made of wood. The parts fit together in
a way that allowed them to move on their
anchors, he said, and each panel was se-
cured by a horizontal piece, which was
screwed in place. “If you simply removed
that one piece, you could dismantle the
whole thing, because it was all interlock-
ing,” he said. “All you needed was a
screwdriver.”
That train restoration led to others.
Then, in the early nineteen-nineties,
Singapore Airlines invited J.P.A. to
compete for the job of reconceiving the
first-class cabins on its Boeing 747s.
“They were interested in us because of
the trains, because we’d shown we were
good at dealing with small spaces,” Park
said. He quickly decided that aviation
seating had changed little in decades, and
that even in first class the ambience was
coldly utilitarian. The seats were large,
and they reclined, but they looked more
like dentist’s chairs than like luxury fur-
niture. “We decided to try to do some-
thing about the way the elements were
put together and presented, to make
them more comfortable, and to provide
more of a club atmosphere,” he said.
The interiors that Park created for the
Orient-Express trains resemble rolling
versions of Downton Abbey, but achiev-
ing that effect while satisfying late-twen-
tieth-century safety regulations required
lots of modern technology. All of Park’s
“loose-fit” woodwork had to be anchored
securely enough to remain intact after a
train wreck, and it had to be impregnated
with a flame-retardant chemical and
finished not with ordinary varnishes or
paints but with what are known as “intu-
mescent” coatings, which foam up when
they’re exposed to high heat, forming an
insulating layer that prevents the under-
lying wood from igniting.
Airplane interiors are even more
tightly regulated. Nearly every element
undergoes a safety-enhancing process
called “delethalization”: seats have to
withstand an impact equal to sixteen
times the force of gravity, and to remain
in place when they do, so that they don’t
block exit routes or crush anyone, and
they can’t burst into flames or release toxic
gases when they get hot. Doing some-
thing as simple as slightly increasing the
thickness of the padding in a seat cushion
can necessitate a new round of testing and
certification, because a more resilient seat
could make a passenger bounce farther
after an impact, increasing the risk of in-
jury caused by turbulence or a hard land-
ing. Delethalizing some premium-class
seats—in which a passenger’s head and
torso have a lot of room to accelerate be-
fore being stopped by something solid—
requires the addition of a feature that
many passengers don’t even realize is
there: an air bag concealed in the seat belt.
In economy, the tight spacing of the
seats makes air bags mostly unnecessary.
But seat-back video screens and the hard
frames that surround them pose a safety
challenge, partly because of the potential
for injuries caused by head strikes, and
partly because the computers and the
electrical systems that serve them have to
be both fireproof and fully isolated from
the plane’s—so that crossed wires in
somebody’s seat don’t allow a ten-year-
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 39
old playing a video game to suddenly take
control of the cockpit. Largely as a result,
in-flight entertainment systems are al-
most unbelievably expensive. The rule of
thumb, I was told, is “a thousand dollars
an inch”—meaning that the small screen
in the back of each economy seat can cost
an airline ten thousand dollars, plus a few
thousand for its handheld controller.
At the same time, nearly every surface
on an airline seat has to be easily replace-
able during the brief interval between
landing and takeoff, so that if a passenger
spills a glass of red wine the seat won’t
have to be kept vacant for the following
flight: a lost fare. No design change is
made casually, because even small ones
can affect operating costs. Gulf Air,
which is based in Bahrain, reduced its
annual fuel bill by a hundred and twenty
thousand dollars a few years ago by using
slightly thinner leather in the upholstery
of its first-class seats—a change that in-
volved just sixteen seats on fifteen planes.
Despite such challenges, J.P.A. cre-
ated a first-class cabin for Singapore that
was seductively different from anyone
else’s. The seats, which could be trans-
formed into fully flat beds, looked less
like conventional airplane seats than like
oversized wing chairs, each with its own
ottoman, dining table, and wood-framed
video monitor. (The “wood” was actually
a delethalized photographic imitation.)
The new seats first flew in 1998. They
won many awards and remained in ser-
vice in their original form for almost a
decade. Their successors fly today.
The Singapore job enhanced J.P.A.’s
reputation, and not just in aviation. The
firm created a first-class lounge for Sin-
gapore Airlines at Changi Airport, and
soon afterward it won contracts for sev-
eral hotel renovations, including, in
2009, a hundred-million-dollar redesign
of the guest rooms in the Pierre, in New
York. (Most of J.P.A.’s hotel work is
handled by a second office, in Singa-
pore.) As a result, the firm’s portfolio
grew to include luxury environments on
a variety of scales, and Park’s conception
of what J.P.A. does inside aircraft ex-
tended from the plane to the airport and
beyond. “There are certain little events
you experience as you progress through
this promenade up to the plane,” he told
me. “They should climax in your vision
of the seat.”
O ne afternoon, I drove to Heathrow
with John Tighe, a design director
at J.P.A., to see a new long-haul business-
class seat, called Next Generation, which
the firm created for Singapore, and which
first flew last year. Tighe is thirty-two
years old, and before coming to J.P.A. he
worked for both a seat manufacturer and
an airline; he said that he has become
“bilingual in measurement.” He slips
effortlessly between metric and English
units, both of which are used in the in-
dustry, and isn’t thrown by the occasional
oddball unit, such as a mysterious Tai-
wanese measure that, he said, turned out
to be slightly more than an inch.
Boarding an airplane with no boarding
pass takes some doing. We presented our
passports at an airport office, and were es-
corted through security and onto the
plane by an airline employee. Departure
was an hour and a half away, and flight at-
tendants were bustling like stagehands on
opening night. Singapore’s attendants
were made famous by the airline’s early-
seventies motto, “Singapore Girl, you’re a
great way to fly,” and they still wear batik
sarong kebayas designed in 1968 by Pierre
Balmain. To stay out of their way, I sat in
one of the new seats, a capacious but in-
vitingly snug enclosure. Nearly every hard
surface was a curve, and the colors were
soothing: tan, mauve, plum, taupe, cop-
pery-pinkish, brown. The plane had two
business-class sections: a small one, with
just eight seats, directly behind first class,
and a larger one behind that, with thirty-
four seats. To keep the larger section from
seeming enormous (and therefore less ex-
clusive), J.P.A. had used different uphol-
stery tones in alternate seats, checker-
board style—a pattern that causes the
brain to register less than the entire ex-
panse. “In a way, it’s a trick of the eye,”
Tighe said. “It cuts down on the percep-
tion of the repetition of objects.”
Tighe pushed a button on a control
panel near my arm, and hidden down-
lights subtly accentuated the detailing in
the console on my right. A button on the
 Special Advertising Section
SMART MEDICINE
PART 1: RESPONDING TO A CANCER DIAGNOSIS
By Lisa Reisman
Significant progress in the fight against cancer in recent
years means that everyone, including those diagnosed with
an advanced stage of the disease, has more treatment
options than ever before. All of which leads to one unassail-
able truth: how you respond to a cancer diagnosis is among
the most important first steps on the road to recovery.
GETTING A SECOND OPINION
With the emotional and potentially life-altering impact of a
cancer diagnosis, it’s essential to seek a second opinion
before you commence treatment. Getting the facts about your
disease and learning about evolving treatment options is a
process of empowerment that can assist in your recovery
efforts. Indeed, evidence is mounting that second opinions
do more than verify the accuracy of the diagnosis and give
patients and their families more information to help them
weigh their options. Medical experts trained to deal with the
nuances of complex or advanced-stage cancer, and armed
with a panoply of cutting-edge tools and therapies, can sig-
nificantly refine and enhance care recommendations. Second
1 in 8 cancer patients are misdiagnosed.
Source: webmd.com
opinions may also reveal the need for supplemental therapies,
such as nutrition planning, spiritual guidance, counseling services,
and family or social support, that yield more comprehensive
treatment regimens. Regular feedback and communication
with care providers on all these points can be essential in
helping ease side effects, which can lead to a better quality
of life for the patient while undergoing treatment.
“We now have more options for patients
when they’re making important decisions
about their lives.”
– George Daneker, Jr.,
MD, Chief of Staff, CTCA Atlanta.
FINDING THE RIGHT DOCTORS
Once a diagnosis is confirmed, ensuring appropriate medical
care is the next step. Different types of cancer are treated dif-
ferently, so expertise in the treatment of your specific disease
is especially important. Physicians who specialize in treating
cancers matching a particular diagnosis have the experience,
The average patient devotes an
hour or less to researching his or
her surgery or surgeon—less time
than a person spends researching a
new refrigerator.
Source: American College of Surgeons
Special Advertising Section

SMART MEDICINE

knowledge, and expertise to tailor appropriate therapeutic

options. For clinicians who specialize in the treatment of cancer,
caring for patients goes further than accurately diagnosing
and treating the disease. It means paying attention to patients’
well being and frame of mind, and being accessible to respond
to any issues or concerns that may arise. It means, moreover,
a comprehensive effort that involves coordinating care with
medical oncologists, surgeons, and radiation oncologists,
as well as registered dietitians, naturopathic physicians, and
other appropriately trained clinicians. The shared objective:
a personalized treatment plan that maximizes the patient’s
quality of life, both during and after treatment.

More than 1.5 million people

in the U.S. will be diagnosed
with cancer this year.
Source: American Cancer Society

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

Most people with cancer are, understandably, not experts on
cancer treatment. They may lack the time, energy, or resources
to learn what they need to know, or they may simply feel
overwhelmed by the prospect of wading through the vast
amount of information available. Often they choose to leave
most decisions to their doctors.
“Do you really understand the kind of
cancer you have; have you done the
research? Have you asked your doctor
every question you can think of? This
is a life-altering journey. You really
need to weigh the options.”
– Randy Knight,
Lymphoma cancer patient
Indeed, in responding to a cancer diagnosis, some patients
may opt to ascertain only what they need to know—for example,
what pill to take or what their treatment will be and when it
will be over. Other patients, in order to fully understand their
situation, may have questions that range from their doctors’
level of experience and rate of success in treating their type
and stage of cancer, to the pros and cons of each treatment
option and management of side effects. Patients need to
“You need to stay strong for the fight.
That’s what integrative care is all about.”
– Carolyn Lammersfeld, MS, RD, CSO, LD, CNSC,
Vice President of Integrative Medicine, CTCA
decide for themselves and communicate to their doctors how
involved they want to be in treatment decisions.
STAYING STRONG FOR THE FIGHT
For cancer patients, maintaining strength during treatment is
vital to the healing process. That’s because the body is not only
fighting the disease, but also contending with the potentially
debilitating side effects of treatment, as well as the psycho-
logical wear-and-tear of coping with a threatening illness. The
stronger you keep your body, the more you enhance its ability
to tolerate treatment and pave the road to your recovery.
Essential to this challenge is a cancer care plan that combines
traditional treatment options, such as chemotherapy, radiation
and surgery, with complementary therapies that fight fatigue
and help maintain immune-system function. Expert counselors

1 in 3 1 in 2
women will men will be
be diagnosed diagnosed
with cancer. with cancer.
Source: National Cancer Institute Source: National Cancer Institute

“My naturopathic clinician and my dietitian
worked together to balance my diet and
my supplements to help manage my
side effects during and after chemo.”
– Heather Holladay,
Breast cancer patient, working mom
and consultants—working in concert with the medical staff
and dedicated to supporting the whole patient, as well as the
patient’s loved ones—are an integral part of this approach.
Staying strong for the fight, in short, requires an integrative
strategy that treats the whole patient, not just the tumor. A
dietician can help the patient develop a personalized nutrition
plan to combat unintentional loss of weight and muscle mass.
An acupuncturist alleviates the discomfort of side effects
and may be able to reduce pain without traditional medication.
And a massage therapist can apply various techniques to
the muscular structure and soft tissues, to help restore a
sense of harmony, relaxation, and well being. This integrative
approach addresses the needs of the whole person.
When confronted with a diagnosis as daunting as cancer,
it’s essential that you enlist an entire team of specialists
to help sustain you through the fight and assist with your
recovery. Caring for the whole patient is what integrative
cancer care is all about. And that’s smart medicine.
Cancer Treatment Centers of America® is a national network
of five hospitals in the U.S. with expertise in treating patients
who are fighting complex or advanced-stage cancer, although
many patients with an early-stage diagnosis seek our expertise
as well. We combine world-class treatment with an integrative
approach to care in order to reduce side effects and maintain
quality of life during cancer treatment. If you or someone
you love has advanced-stage or complex cancer, call
855-587-5528 or visit cancercenter.com.
Special Advertising Section
Questions Every Patient
Should Ask
Q. What does my diagnostic testing say?
The information from diagnostic tests includes:
where the cancer originated, the size of the
tumor, the stage of the disease, and whether
or not it has spread to other parts of the body.
Q. What treatment options are available?
What do you recommend and why?
Many types of cancer can be treated in
multiple ways. Your doctor should be able
to explain the potential benefits and
drawbacks of each course.
Q. What happens if a treatment approach doesn’t
work for me? Look for professionals who will
tailor treatments to your specific diagnosis, and
who are willing to pursue other options if your
treatment isn’t progressing as expected.
Q. How should I expect to feel during treatments?
No two people will have exactly the same
response to cancer treatment, and side effects
vary. Talk to your doctor and carefully consider
your options.
Q. How will you help me manage side effects?
Integrative therapies—including nutrition
therapy, naturopathic medicine, mind-body
medicine, acupuncture, oncology rehabilitation,
spiritual support, and pain management—can
help reduce side effects so you can stay
strong and active.
Q. Who are my main points of contact?
An integrated care team including a surgical,
medical and/or radiation oncologist; dietitian;
naturopathic oncology provider; clinical nurse
and medical advocate (often a nurse care
manager) can ensure you get the support
you need during treatment.
Q. Will all of my treatments take place under one roof?
Having appointments and procedures in
one place can make treatment less stressful
for you, and it may allow you to begin your
treatment plan sooner.
Q. How will you help me balance my cancer
care with the demands of my normal life?
Your cancer treatment should adapt to your
individual needs, along with familial and
professional obligations.
* Visit cancercenter.com/secondopinion for a complete
set of questions and a more comprehensive discussion
on the benefits of getting a second opinion.
The Power
Precision
of
Cancer
Treatment
Cancer Treatment Centers of America® (CTCA) now offers
expanded genomic tumor assessment, a form of precision
medicine that may identify cancer treatment options many
patients haven’t previously considered. This innovation
reveals the DNA alterations that are driving the growth
of a cancer, which better enables us to provide cancer
treatment therapies that target changes in the tumor’s
genomic profile.

At CTCA®, we believe that every family, every patient,

and every tumor deserves a personalized treatment
plan. Genomic tumor assessment is helping us better
understand individual tumors, right down to their unique
genetic composition, taking personalized treatment to a
new level of care.
Hospitals in Atlanta, Chicago,
Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Tulsa
If you or a loved one has complex or
advanced-stage cancer, call (800) 515-0179
or visit cancercenter.com.

No case is typical. You should not expect to experience these results.

© 2013 Rising Tide
inner surface of the aisle-side armrest, he
showed me, was positioned so that a Sin-
gapore Girl could switch off my video
screen once I’d fallen asleep. He extended
the tabletop, and said that a Singapore
Girl could do that from the aisle, too,
without reaching across my lap, and
then he raised it into the proper position
for breakfast in bed. He clicked open a
door to the right of the video console, re-
vealing a lighted makeup mirror—use-
ful upon arrival. “A good seat doesn’t
show you everything it’s got in the first
ten minutes,” he said. “It surprises you
during the flight, and lets you discover
things you weren’t expecting.” Such fea-
tures can pay off in unexpected ways:
passengers who like their seats tend to
give higher ratings to everything on their
flight, including movie selections that
haven’t changed.
To the left of the video screen was a
retractable coat hook—a surprisingly
humble accessory, given that long-haul
first-class seats nowadays often have a
shallow personal “closet,” in which pas-
sengers can hang things like jackets and
sweaters. But Tighe explained that the
simplicity was intentional. Singapore had
stipulated that nothing J.P.A. did should
undermine the airline’s emphasis on per-
sonal service, and the hook, he said, cre-
ates an opportunity for passenger inter-
action. “You might hang your jacket on
it when you arrive at your seat, but by the
time you’ve sat down a flight attendant
will have taken it away.” Similarly, J.P.A.
designed the seat so that its transforma-
tion into a bed is mainly a manual oper-
ation, rather than, as is common, some-
thing a passenger can do by pushing
buttons. “Usually, a flight attendant will
make your bed up for you, maybe while
you’re getting ready to go to sleep,” he
said. The upper part of the bed is created
by pulling down the seat back, revealing
a flat, fabric-covered mattress section at-
tached to the other side. (Leather is nice
for sitting and is easy to clean quickly, but
it can be hot and slippery for sleeping.)
A cantilevered panel fills the gap be-
tween that surface and the stationary
footrest, and then a Singapore Girl adds
bedding and a pillow. Manual operation
has the additional benefit of reducing the
seat’s weight, by shrinking the machinery
inside it.
Next Generation, as the name sug-
gests, evolved from an earlier seat that
J.P.A. designed for Singapore. In both,
the passenger sits facing forward but
sleeps on the diagonal, an innovation that
makes it possible to create what looks like
a first-class experience in a significantly
smaller space. In bed mode, each seating
unit borrows some empty volume from
the underside of the shell of the seat in
front of it. Designing seats is like solving
a three-dimensional puzzle, in which all
the pieces have to fit together and even
tiny spaces can be significant. During one
project, on which J.P.A. worked essen-
tially around the clock, by using employ-
ees in both of its offices, the designers in
Singapore sent the designers in London
an exultant overnight message saying
that they thought they’d found another
half inch.
B eds on aircraft aren’t a recent inven-
tion. Some of Pan Am’s early planes
had Pullman-style berths, and on one of
those planes, in 1937, a crew member
woke a man and asked to look out his
window, so that he could complete his
celestial navigation chart, because he
hadn’t been able to see the North Star
clearly from the cockpit. The awakened
passenger recalled later that the actress
Anna May Wong, who had starred in
the film “Shanghai Express” five years
earlier, was in the berth across the aisle,
and that he knew she was asleep, on the
other side of her curtain, because he
could hear “a kind of soft snore.” As air
travel extended down the income scale,
though, and as airplanes got faster, bed-
like sleeping surfaces became less com-
mon, then disappeared, until British Air-
ways reintroduced them, in the nineties.
Early flights were classless in the sense
that only the wealthy could afford them.
(In 1938, a ticket on Imperial’s flight
from London to Durban, which took six
days, cost a hundred and twenty-five
pounds, hotels and meals included—a
little less than a quarter of the cost of an
average house.) On early mixed-class
planes, the first-class seats were some-
times back near the tail, farther from the
noise of the engines and, perhaps, from
the chauffeur-like men handling the
controls. In 1977, British Airways intro-
duced a third division, a mid-plane Ex-
ecutive Cabin, which it described as hav-
ing “a quiet, exclusive atmosphere free
from the distraction of movies and young
babies.” The seats and their spacing were
the same as those in economy, but the
section was intended for passengers pay-
ing nondiscounted fares—typically, busi-
ness travellers.
The first true business class arose soon
afterward, and versions of it have evolved,
since then, in response to the fluctuations
of national economies, the increased
competition that followed airline dereg-
ulation, and other factors. One key to its
success is that many of the tickets are pur-
chased with the world’s oldest virtual cur-
rency: Other People’s Money. For self-
paying passengers who upgrade with
frequent-flier miles, the cost is supported
by things like the fees that retailers pay to
credit-card companies, which buy miles
in bulk from airlines and distribute them
to cardholders as rewards; for corporate
executives and their lawyers, bankers, and
consultants, the expense is partly borne by
shareholders, as is also the case with cor-
porate jets. (Private jets divide the wealthy
into two classes: there are the rich, who
fly first class without thinking about it,
and then there are the jet-rich, who have
never seen the inside of Concourse B.)
Not long after beds returned to first
class, they began to appear in business
class, too. Today, the variation in detail,
size, spacing, comfort, and ticket price in
all classes is so great that traditional cabin
designations aren’t very meaningful. Ben
Orson, the managing director of J.P.A.’s
London office, told me that it’s probably
more accurate to think of seating types as
tightly spaced points on a continuum—
from the thrombosis-inducing perches on
regional jets to the bedroom-like micro-
palaces on Emirates and Etihad. Between
those extremes is a Cambrian explosion of
features and variants, including an emerg-
ing intermediate class with names like
Economy Comfort, Economy Plus, and
Main Cabin Extra. Air New Zealand has
been especially innovative, and in recent
years has introduced two distinctive seat
types: the Skycouch, which is formed by
turning three adjacent economy seats into
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 45
a broad mini-bed, and the Spaceseat,
which the company classifies as “premium
economy” but on some airlines might pass
for business class.
Competing for travellers in this way
is economically risky. Some first-class
cabins on Kingfisher Airlines, based in
India, had a bar, a bartender, and a spa-
cious lounging area, as well as a chef who
prepared delicacies to order. But King-
fisher stopped flying in 2012, after just
seven years in operation, in part because
it had allocated too much cabin space to
functions that delighted passengers but
produced no revenue.
Yet moderation is risky, too. Premium
cabins contribute disproportionately to an
airline’s economic performance—both
directly, through higher ticket prices, and
indirectly, by solidifying relationships
with big-budget customers who fly all the
time. Business class is especially valuable;
first class can be problematic, because
first-class ticket holders require extra
pampering and won’t tolerate overbook-
ing. Web sites like SeatGuru enable
picky fliers to compare seats on many
routes, and keeping such fliers loyal is ex-
pensive: new first-class seating units can
cost more than half a million dollars
each. Jami Counter, a senior director
at TripAdvisor, which owns SeatGuru,
told me, “The true international first-
class cabin actually keeps shrinking, be-
cause the international business-class
cabin has become such a great product, to
the point where you’re differentiating
more on things like food and service.”
Because costs are high,
passenger density is ex-
tremely important, especially
outside first class. The critical
industry measure is “pitch,”
which is the distance between
a point on one seat and the
same point on the seat just
ahead of it or just behind it.
Short pitches mean more
rows; more rows mean more
revenue (and, usually, cheaper tickets—
the main criterion by which most econ-
omy passengers compare flights). Seat
pitch on commercial jets ranges from
about thirty inches, in many short-haul
economy cabins, to slightly more than
ninety inches, in a few long-haul first-
class cabins. In any cabin with more than
a few rows, even centimetres become im-
portant, because they add up. If you have
46 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
a seating pattern that repeats every sev-
enty inches, sixty inches of leftover space
is an expensive extravagance, because the
difference between profit and loss on a
given flight can be less than the fare from
a single seat. Accurately pricing tickets for
all cabins has become so important that
airlines work hard to predict demand,
which is influenced, on an hourly basis,
by weather, military coups, school vaca-
tions, disease outbreaks, sporting events,
and innumerable other factors. Prices
move constantly, as conditions change.
“If you sell out a flight too quick,” Tighe
told me, “you weren’t charging enough.”
D uring my visit to J.P.A., nearly ev-
eryone in the office was preparing
for the Aircraft Interiors Expo, which is
held each spring in Hamburg and is the
world’s largest trade show for people who
design, manufacture, sell, or buy almost
anything that goes into the inside of al-
most anything that flies. The J.P.A. de-
signers were working on a new long-haul
business-class seat, which they were de-
veloping in partnership with an aircraft-
interiors manufacturer called Jamco.
The seat—its prototype was first
shown at Hamburg in 2013—is in some
ways a descendant of a fully-flat-bed seat
that J.P.A. and another manufacturer in-
troduced in 2007. Versions of that earlier
seat, called Cirrus, are used by a number
of airlines, mostly in business but some-
times in first. Cirrus seats are enclosed
within curving, podlike shells—a look fa-
miliar to many international travellers,
who, by now, have either
flown in Cirrus seats or
grumpily walked past them
on the way to the back of
the plane. The seats nest
together in a herringbone
pattern, so that each unit is
oriented diagonally to the
longitudinal axis of the plane,
like cars parked at an angle to
a curb. That arrangement
makes it possible to provide more than
six feet of sleeping surface within a pitch
of less than four feet, while also preserv-
ing what may be the single most coveted
modern premium-class feature: direct
aisle access from every seat, so that pas-
sengers never have to say “Excuse me”
when they get up to go to the bathroom.
The Cirrus arrangement is called “re-
verse” herringbone, because it flips the
orientation used by Virgin Atlantic,
which was the first airline to angle busi-
ness-class passengers for both sleeping
and sitting. In Virgin’s arrangement, pas-
sengers at the sides of the cabin sit with
their back to the window and their feet
toward the aisle; in Cirrus’s, they face the
other way.
“The Virgin seat was very innovative,
but we felt it was a shame to make peo-
ple look away from the window,” Tighe
told me. “And that seat has a global
limitation, because there are cultures in
which the soles of the feet are considered
unsavory, or rude, and people are un-
comfortable sleeping with their feet ex-
posed where other people are walking—
mainly in Asia and the Middle East.”
Cultural differences in air travel can be
significant. Americans are less bothered
than Arab sheikhs when slobs wearing
flip-flops end up in first class.
J.P.A.’s new seat, like Cirrus, will be
sold, in various versions, to more than
one airline, and the purpose of demon-
strating it in Hamburg and elsewhere
is to line up customers in advance of
production. The prototype is a full-size
mockup of a five-unit cluster, in which
one seat is fully functional, another is set
up as a bed, and a third is partially re-
clined. “The C.E.O. of the airline usu-
ally sits in the seat that works, and every-
one else gathers around,” Orson told
me. During demonstrations, J.P.A.’s de-
signers act as salespeople, but they also
watch closely for hints about likely pas-
senger behavior. One thing they learned
from watching airline executives at last
year’s show was that a curved element on
the aisle side of the seat shell, near a
seated passenger’s shoulder, occasionally
bumped a passenger who was getting up,
so they eliminated it.
After the 2013 expo, the model was
shipped to Seattle, Singapore, Tokyo,
and other cities, for additional demon-
strations, and by the end of last year rep-
resentatives from several dozen airlines
had studied it. Even so, the seat is at least
two years from launch, and almost every-
thing about it, including its name, is still
a trade secret. Before this year’s expo,
the model was disassembled, repaired,
modified, rebuilt, and refinished in a
different color scheme, and while that
work was under way J.P.A.’s designers
built a crude mockup out of white foam-
core panels. The seats themselves were
ordinary office chairs, but the mockup al-
lowed the designers to double-check
things like sight lines and clearances.
Full-size models have been important
tools for aircraft designers for a long time.
Computer software can create extraordi-
narily realistic three-dimensional repre-
sentations of entire airplane cabins, Park
told me, but there are still features and
qualities you can’t perceive accurately
without studying a full-size physical ob-
ject. The demonstration model of J.P.A.
and Jamco’s new business-class seat was
built in Pitstone, about forty miles north
of London, by Curvature Group, a pri-
vate company, which makes exquisitely
detailed 1:1 scale models of everything
from cell phones to rockets. Tighe lives
nearby, and sometimes looks in on his
way to or from work. One day, I joined
him there, and James Lilley, who is Cur-
vature’s project manager, gave us a tour.
In one room, we watched a man gluing “Is there anything else I can do wrong for you?”
together several huge polyurethane
planks that he would later turn into part t t
of a boat model, using the largest of Cur-
vature’s thirteen computer-controlled
milling machines. “We can quite com- because virtually every part has to be cus- with a blanket—a novice move, since he
fortably build a full-size train in-house,” tom-made. Once a prototype is finished, was going to have to sit up again in a few
Lilley said. Curvature built a (non-func- building an actual airplane seat is faster, minutes, for takeoff.) Toward the end of
tioning) prototype railway car for Hita- but the process is similar. “The aviation- my week in London, I briefly put my
chi not long ago, Tighe said, and the seating industry isn’t like the automotive journalistic conscience on standby, and
model had such a perfectly detailed inte- industry,” Park told me later. “The multi- didn’t object when a publicist asked me if
rior that even when you walked inside it ples are much, much smaller, and it’s still she could see about getting me a better
you couldn’t tell it wasn’t the real thing. almost an artisan process. With motor- seat for the flight home, and I was given
In another room, a craftsman who cars, robots do most of the welding and, a “space available” upgrade.
had been hand-shaping the curved edge nowadays, even a lot of the electrical When I checked in at the airport,
of part of a seat shell explained to Tighe work. With aviation seats, even parts of though, the ticket agent laughed, and
why reproducing a particular color sam- the frames are milled by hand.” Tighe told me to forget it. There were two
ple would be difficult. The sample, a added, “Once you know what goes into an empty seats in business class, she said,
translucent blue, had been sent over by a airplane, it seems insane that you can buy but the line ahead of me was long. “Em-
J.P.A. materials designer, who thought an airplane ticket for as little as you can.” ployees get space-available upgrades,
that it might be perfect for a particular too,” she said, “but in the new planes
trim piece on the new seat. “We think we
know how to achieve this,” the craftsman
said, “but what you’d have to do is a real
F or my trip to London, I flew on
American Airlines. Carriers in the
United States have been slow to add truly
there’s never space for us.” Even on
flights on which economy was half
empty, she said, first was always full, and
pain in the ass.” Creating the sample’s fancy seats. But expectations are chang- business was oversubscribed. I resigned
effect in a coating, he said, would require ing, and U.S. airlines are hurrying to myself to my thirty-one-inch pitch, and,
a primer, a black coat, a gloss coat, a paint catch up with international competitors, once the plane was in the air, sought
coat, a lacquer coat, and at least a couple and American has made a huge commit- comfort in the thought that my seat’s
of other things, plus long drying times ment to revamping its fleet. My plane, a entertainment system had cost more, by
between steps. But he thought he’d brand-new Boeing 777-300ER, had an several thousand dollars, than all the
found a simpler way to achieve almost interior designed entirely by J.P.A. The video and audio equipment in my house.
the same thing, and he gave Tighe two seats in business class were a Cirrus vari- I closed my eyes occasionally, when the
samples. “The first person who figures ation very similar to Cathay Pacific’s— book I was reading got boring, but I
out how to make a convincing chrome though I could only gaze at them as I kept my seat back in its fully upright po-
paint will make a fortune,” Lilley said. walked back to my own seat, in economy. sition for the entire flight, out of respect
Building a model of an airplane seat (One business-class passenger had al- for the guy squeezed in behind me, and
can take Curvature as long as ten weeks, ready stretched out and covered himself I’m pretty sure I never slept. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 47

ANNALS OF ARCHEOLOGY
ROMANCING THE STONES
On the winter solstice, modern-day Druids flock to Stonehenge.
BY LAURA MILLER
W hen we got off the bus, at around
6 A.M., it was pitch dark, and the
fields of Salisbury Plain were sodden
after a night of desultory rain. Most of
the passengers—who included a retired
physicist and his wife, and a pair of young
lovers peering at their smartphones while
audibly pining for hot chocolate—were
Stonehenge appears to be isolated, but it is situated amid one of the densest concentrations of prehistoric structures in the world.
dismayed to learn that the bus would go
no farther. To our right, the new Stone-
henge Visitor Center, an elegantly wispy
structure with more than two hundred
slender, tilted pillars and an undulating
steel roof, was a blur in the murk. The
standing stones were a mile and a half to
the southeast. It was too blustery for um-
brellas, so those of us with hoods pulled
them over our heads, and we all started
48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
walking. The sun would not rise for more
than two hours: it was the winter solstice,
the darkest day of the year.
Four and a half thousand years ago,
people also approached Stonehenge on
foot, but they walked from the northeast,
along a wide processional path leading up
from the River Avon. Traces of this earth-
work road, which is known as Stonehenge
Avenue, are etched in the field north of
the stones: a pair of long, straight creases
about twenty feet apart in the pillowy turf.
Until recently, the A344 was paved over
them. Such indignities were decried in
Parliament as a “national disgrace,” and in
June, 2013, the highway was decommis-
sioned and the land was reseeded with
grass where the road grazed the henge.
The old, bunker-like visitor center—
which had been built just across the road
from the stones—was closed in Decem-
ber. These changes, along with the more
distant placement of the new visitor cen-
ter, are intended to return the landscape
of Stonehenge to the “solemn and lonely”
setting described in Thomas Hardy’s
“Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” when Tess and
Angel Clare stumble into the stones in the
dark after her flight from the law.
Some of the people walking along-
side me were merely curious travellers;
an intrepid Japanese teen-ager had come
by herself. But the pilgrims on our bus
were predominantly British, and many
of them felt that Stonehenge connected
them to their collective past, to a time
before England itself existed. “You used
to say . . . that I was a heathen,” Tess tells
Angel as she lies down on one of the
fallen stones. “So now I am at home.”
E xcept for a few days a year, you can
walk among and touch the stones
of Stonehenge only by special arrange-
ment with English Heritage, the quasi-
government agency that manages the
PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE STEINMETZ
site. In 2000, the agency began opening
the site to the public on the solstices and
the equinoxes. On these days, during the
hours around dawn, pilgrims descend to
worship or wander among the mega-
liths. Otherwise, visitors are limited to a
narrow path that ribbons through the
grass and stops a few yards from the
stones. Stonehenge has been slowly fall-
ing down for millennia; a stone toppled
as recently as 1900. English Heritage
aims to retard this process by mini-
mizing erosion, including the damage
caused by human feet. The monument’s
most iconic stones, called sarsens, are
sandstone megaliths the color of ele-
phant hide; the heaviest weigh forty
tons. Of the outer ring of thirty or so up-
right sarsens, seventeen still stand, and
five of the curved lintels that were placed
on the uprights, forming an unbroken
circle, remain in place. Five sarsen tril-
ithons—separate three-stone struc-
tures—once stood at the center of the
circle, in a horseshoe configuration.
Three of them endure, along with the
surviving upright from the tallest of the
five, the Great Trilithon, which towers
twenty-four feet above its fallen lintel.
English Heritage occasionally allows
filmmakers inside the circle, and an epi-
sode of “Doctor Who” was shot there in
2010. But many of the groups that are
granted special access are religious, or, as
Tess would put it, heathen. Several idio-
syncratic faiths claim a special bond with
Stonehenge, one that English Heritage is
willing to honor, up to a point. The most
prominent groups call themselves Druids,
after the priestly caste of Iron Age popu-
lations in Britain. The Sunday before the
winter solstice, Christine Cleere, the lead
priest of a Druid group called the Gorsedd
of Cor Gawr, led about eighty partici-
pants in a twilight ritual inside the stone
circle. After Cleere delivered a “call to
peace,” in Welsh, the worshippers blessed
mistletoe, shared bread and mead, and
prayed for the “return of the light.”
William Stukeley, an eighteenth-cen-
tury pioneer of British archeology, errone-
ously believed that Druids built Stone-
henge, and scientists have since found it
difficult to dispel the notion. (The word
“Druid” was coined by the Romans some
three thousand years after the stones were
erected.) In any case, ancient Druids left
no record of their beliefs or practices, so
any continuity between them and con-
temporary groups is more imagined and
desired than actual. Although modern
Druidry can be roughly characterized as
revering nature, it has no set rituals or be-
liefs, and can be customized to suit each
practitioner’s preferences. It is a young
faith, at best a couple of centuries old,
which hankers after an irretrievable, pri-
mal past whose most celebrated and mys-
terious remnant is the prehistoric stone
circle on Salisbury Plain.
M arching toward the stones, we
passed people emerging from
parked cars, pulling tunics over their
heads, wrapping cloaks around their
shoulders, and taking up staffs or drums
or masks before joining the procession.
We soon caught up with what appeared
to be a walking Christmas tree: black
against the indigo sky, and studded with
colored lights. A portable tower light
placed farther down the path revealed
the figure to be a man wearing a pointed
headdress above a sort of full-body
hoopskirt, the hoops tied with multicol-
ored rags and twined with a strand of
tiny battery-powered lights. He carried
a concertina, and played Celtic-sound-
ing music on it as he walked.
The rain was now lashing us; Salis-
bury Plain’s chalkland plateau is notori-
ous for its gales. Halfway to the stones,
and just to the north of us, lay one of
the most enigmatic monuments in the
Stonehenge area: the Greater Cursus,
a giant rectangle, formed by ancient
ditches, nearly two miles long and four
hundred and ninety feet wide. It resem-
bles an athletic field or an airstrip, but its
original purpose is a mystery. Although
Stonehenge’s wind-whipped setting and
the unusual configuration of its sarsens
have contributed to its reputation for
strangeness and isolation, the stone cir-
cle is situated amid one of the densest
concentrations of prehistoric structures
in the world. The oldest known human
alterations to this part of Salisbury Plain
are three Mesolithic postholes, dating
back more than ten thousand years. (The
holes are currently covered by the old vis-
itor center’s parking lot, which will soon
be removed.) The Greater Cursus pre-
dates Stonehenge by several hundred
years, and the countryside surrounding
the stone circle is dotted with round and
rectangular burial mounds from the
Stone Age and the early Bronze Age. This
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 49

t t
was a sacred landscape for millennia.
The Greater Cursus, first noted by
Stukeley, was partly excavated and au-
thoritatively dated in 2007, as one stage
of an extensive archeological inquiry
called the Stonehenge Riverside Proj-
ect. The project exemplifies a trend in
the discipline, known as landscape ar-
cheology, which considers ancient peo-
ples in the context of their environ-
ment, and views archeological sites as
parts of a network rather than as solitary
phenomena. The archeologists have
made major discoveries, identifying
what they believe is the temporary set-
tlement where the builders of Stone-
henge lived, and pinpointing the date of
the settlement to within a few decades.
These revelations support a new theory
about why the stone circle was built: it
apparently served not as a temple, or as
a site of regular religious ceremonies,
but as a cemetery. We can only surmise
what Stonehenge meant to its builders,
but there are indications that, as one
scholar has put it, “the meaning was in
the making.”
T he fundamental element of the pre-
historic monuments surrounding
Stonehenge isn’t stone but earth. When
the late-Neolithic peoples of Britain set
to work commemorating their dead and
50 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
invoking their gods, they began by dig-
ging. What makes Stonehenge a henge
is not the stones but the circular ditch
surrounding them and the bank built
from the excavated chalk. Stonehenge’s
ditch, not much deeper than a city curb,
usually goes unnoticed, but there is a
much larger henge and stone circle at
Avebury, a short drive away, which
gives a sense of how much this society
invested in earthworks.
Avebury’s original bank once loomed
nearly fifty-five feet over a thirty-foot-
deep ditch. Even today, with the grassed-
over bank standing at around eighteen
feet and the ditch plunging more than
sixteen feet below ground level, it’s an
impressive sight. It encircles nearly
twenty-nine acres; thousands of years
later, an Anglo-Saxon settlement was
founded inside the henge, and a village
stands there to this day. Like all the
Neolithic banks and ditches in the re-
gion, including the Greater Cursus, the
Avebury henge was dug with simple
tools, mainly picks made from deer ant-
lers. (Archeologists have performed ra-
diocarbon dating on the remnants of
antlers found at the sites to determine
the age of the monuments.) It took
about a million hours of human labor to
construct Avebury’s henge. When it was
new, it would have been visible for
miles: a towering ring of chalk blazing
white against the green turf.
There are at least fifty known henges
in Britain, all round, some containing
standing stones or stone circles, others
with the remains of timber circles. At
Woodhenge, a site two miles from
Stonehenge, concentric rings of stout
wooden poles were arranged to form a
sort of artificial forest. Some henges,
like Stonehenge, are aligned with the
movements of the sun. Like henges,
cursuses are unique to Britain, and there
are more than a hundred of these vast
enclosures; they contain nothing of ev-
ident importance, except for the occa-
sional burial mound. Although archeol-
ogists cannot say for sure why these
labor-intensive earthworks were built,
others are far less circumspect. Days be-
fore the solstice, I met a snaggletoothed
Druid named Kim, who announced
portentously that he had a theory about
the Greater Cursus: “It’s long, like a
runway, yeah? Well, that’s where they’d
land when they flew in on their dragons,
and Stonehenge was the bus terminal!”
He cackled madly, confirming my sus-
picion that Druids know just how nutty
you think they are.
T he people who made Stonehenge
and the other monuments in the
area were part of what archeologists call
the Grooved Ware culture, which is
named for its pottery: thick-sided, flat-
bottomed vessels decorated with a pattern
of linear scratches. “It’s a whole-package
idea,” Sara Lunt, one of the archeologists
who curated the new Stonehenge Visitor
Center, told me when I went to see the
exhibits. “Stone monuments, grooved
pottery, a particular type of arrowhead, a
tendency at a drop of a hat to have a
feast—and, when they’re done, to drop
everything in a pit. It’s what they do for
fun.”
Those pits are significant: excava-
tions often uncover objects buried in an
apparently ceremonial manner, includ-
ing caches of special items placed at the
bottom of the ditches of henges. In
some of the pits, scientists have found
animal bones and pottery arranged in
seemingly deliberate fashion on top of
the remnants of feasts. Some pits in-
clude “curated” objects—particularly old
bones—that predate other material in
the pit by many years, and that appear
to have been hoarded for the occasion.
Joshua Pollard, an archeologist at the
University of Southampton and one of
the directors of the Stonehenge River-
side Project, told me that, compared
with other sites from the period, Stone-
henge looks “really odd.” He said that
archeologists had long puzzled over the
underground deposits at Stonehenge:
“lots of burials; no ceramics, really; odd
animal burials; a fair number of wild an-
imals.” Fifty-six pits circle the rim of the
henge and are among the oldest parts of
the monument, predating the sarsens;
thirty-four have been excavated, and
most of them contained cremated hu-
man remains. There are few signs of do-
mestic life in the immediate vicinity of
the henge, and none of the feast pits that
Lunt described.
Yet many people would have been
required to haul the sarsens to the chalk
plain, most likely by rolling them over
logs on sledges, from the Marlborough
Downs, some twenty miles to the north.
Once transported, the sarsens were
dressed to a remarkably fine degree, by
pounding them with smaller stones, or
mauls, in a nearby field, where archeol-
ogists have found sandstone debris.
Mortise-and-tenon joints, like those
made by carpenters, were fashioned to
attach the upright stones to the lintels.
Ramps and counterweights were prob-
ably used to tip the upright stones into
place, and a platform and levers likely
raised the lintels.
Figuring out who these builders
were, and where they lived, has been
complicated by the fact that Neolithic
houses in Britain typically had shallow
foundations, leaving behind few traces.
“They are quite lightly constructed,”
Pollard explained. “Whereas people are
putting colossal amounts of effort into
creating these huge ceremonial struc-
tures that they don’t actually live in.
They could make very big, very elabo-
rate houses, but they choose not to.
They choose to invest everything into
this domain that relates to the sacred.”
A s a milky-gray dawn bloomed
through the rain, we came up an in-
cline in the road, and the stones finally
emerged, like whales rising to the surface
of the sea. We weren’t going to see the sun
come up, but no matter: although Stone-
henge is aligned so that its stones frame
the sunrise at midsummer, at midwinter
the stones frame the sunset. In the early
twentieth century, Druid groups started a
popular modern tradition of welcoming
the summer solstice at the monument.
But most archeologists believe that the
midwinter sunset was the crucial astro-
nomical event for Stonehenge’s creators.
It marks the point in the calendar, her-
alded by many solar religions, when the
nights shorten and Earth begins return-
ing to its most fecund state. If you ask
Druids about the importance of midwin-
ter, they’ll tell you that the Christmas hol-
iday was scheduled at the same time in
order to co-opt pagan celebrations.
The idea that Stonehenge was de-
signed to be an astronomical calendar,
an observatory, or a calculator gained
popularity in the mid-nineteen-sixties,
prompted by the work of Gerald Haw-
kins, an astronomer at Boston Univer-
sity who published a book called “Stone-
henge Decoded.” Perhaps inevitably,
this line of argument inspired wild no-
tions about space aliens and supernatu-
ral forces, and such tainted associations
may explain why scholarly research on
the astronomical aspects of Britain’s
Stone Age monuments is not often
published.
However, in 2008, the Stonehenge
Riverside Project made a discovery that
underlined the site’s association with the
two solstices. Scientists found long
ridges in the chalk beneath the turf cov-
ering the final leg of the Stonehenge
Avenue, close to the stone circle. The
ridges point directly toward the stones.
At first, the project’s leader—Mike
Parker Pearson, of University College
London—thought that the ridges
might be the work of human hands, but
they turned out to have been produced
by a cycle of freeze and thaw at the end
of the Ice Age. Disappointment gave
way to excitement when two geologists
on the team pointed out that the ridges
would have been visible during the early
Mesolithic period, and that their corre-
spondence to the solstice axis would
have made the spot look like a place
marked out as special by a divine hand.
The ridges are like arrows shot directly
at the midwinter sunset, and the henge
is aligned along the same axis. In a re-
cent book, “Stonehenge: A New Un-
derstanding,” Parker Pearson writes,
“We had stumbled upon the reason why
Stonehenge is where it is.”
If you follow those ridges away from
the stone circle, and continue down the
Stonehenge Avenue, you eventually
reach the River Avon. At this juncture,
the Stonehenge Riverside Project found
the remains of another, smaller henge
with standing stones. This spot, arche-
ologists believe, was a ceremonial dis-
embarkation point. Stone Age visitors,
perhaps bearing the ashes of their most
honored dead, would have stepped off
their boats and walked up the avenue to
the stones. But where did these people
come from? The archeologists had their
eye on a known prehistoric settlement
upriver, Durrington Walls. At that lo-
cation, about two miles from Stone-
henge, the Stonehenge Riverside Project
performed some of its most signi -
ficant excavations.
The digging revealed that Dur-
rington Walls, which was occupied for
a brief time four and a half thousand
years ago, was a much larger community
than anyone had anticipated. It was sur-
rounded by a henge, and inside were the
remnants of two timber circles. At its
peak, Parker Pearson said, Durrington
Walls contained perhaps a thousand
houses and sheltered four to five thou-
sand people—a significant percentage
of Britain’s population at the time.
Among the items found at Dur-
rington Walls were many pig bones. One
such bone is on display at the Stone-
henge Visitor Center; the tip of a flint ar-
rowhead is lodged in it. Yet DNA anal-
ysis indicated that this pig, like all the
others found at the site, was a domesti-
cated animal. The pigs may have served
as targets in exhibitions or contests. In
his Stonehenge book, Parker Pearson
memorably imagines such events as “ar-
chers demonstrating their skill by bring-
ing down squealing ranks of porkers in
front of a crowd.” Chemical analyses of
pig and cattle bones at Durrington Walls
suggest that some animals had been
driven to this riverside gathering place
from as far west as Wales and as far north
as Scotland. All the pigs had been
slaughtered in autumn or winter. 
This indicates that Durrington Walls
operated seasonally, almost like a winter
resort—it was not a place where many
people put down lasting roots. Parker
Pearson estimates that people lived in
the village for no more than forty years
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 51
and possibly for as briefly as a decade or
two. “Their year is split in two, I suspect,”
he told me. Like many archeologists, he
has a habit of speaking about ancient
peoples in the present tense and in the
second person. “You’d live in relatively
isolated small groups and then come to-
gether once a year,” sometime between
the fall harvest and the spring planting.
Durrington Walls is full of the do-
mestic touches that are missing at the
austere and stately Stonehenge. Its Neo-
lithic houses resemble dwellings from
the same period that have been discov-
ered all over England and Scotland:
small square constructions, probably
with thatched roofs, featuring com-
pacted chalk-plaster floors with a hearth
in the center. Parker Pearson writes of
finding “two knee prints close by, on the
south side of the fireplace,” where a res-
ident had spent hours cooking food.
Although most of the houses at Dur-
rington Walls have the same modest
configuration, a few dwellings were ap-
parently set apart for élites. “Stone Age
society has been characterized as fairly
egalitarian,” Parker Pearson told me, but,
for a project as grand as Stonehenge,
“you need a management structure, sad
to say.” Yet there’s no evidence of forced
labor. “What we’ve found at Durrington
Walls is a community who have far too
much to eat. They haven’t extracted the
full nutritional value from these car-
casses. They left whole ribs lying there!
You’d ordinarily just find bone frag-
ments, because the bones would have
been broken up to get every bit of mar-
row. So these are people who are living
high on the hog, literally.” The erection
of Stonehenge appears to have taken
place in an atmosphere of festivity, dur-
ing the longest and coldest nights of the
year, with the promise of spring heralded
by the stones themselves.
The increasing precision of radio-
carbon dating, Parker Pearson said,
makes clear that Durrington Walls was
largely abandoned after a period of in-
tense use. Stonehenge itself saw alter-
nating periods of construction and rel-
ative neglect: “We’ve discovered to our
horror that, instead of monuments
being built and then used for genera-
tions, they were built, saw a short pe-
riod of activity, and then they were left
alone. That’s been a consistent pattern
we’ve seen over two thousand years of the
52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
Neolithic in Britain: the short-used site.”
Years ago, Parker Pearson invited a
colleague from Madagascar to see
Stonehenge. The colleague shrugged
and said that, when people in his home-
land built in stone, they did so to honor
the dead; wood was for the living.
Struck by the analogy, Parker Pearson
has become convinced that Durrington
Walls and Stonehenge, with their par-
allel circles in wood and stone, were
dwelling places for, respectively, the liv-
ing and the dead. When I asked other
British archeologists about this theory,
some expressed enthusiastic assent, but
many were more guarded. Sara Lunt,
the curator at the visitor center, said,
“We were taught to approach ethno-
graphic parallels with great caution.”
Parker Pearson supports his claim
that Stonehenge is “our largest cemetery
from the entire third millennium B.C.”
by pointing to the many cremations de-
posited in the pits along the rim of the
stone circle. So far, sixty-three different
cremation burials have been unearthed
at Stonehenge, and he estimates that
there may be as many as a hundred and
twenty more. Joshua Pollard, of the
Riverside Project, tends to agree with
this view, although he notes that cre-
mated remains “are mostly found on the
periphery of the monument. So it kind
of makes you wonder whether or not
what’s represented in the center of the
monument might actually have connec-
tions with even higher orders of deities.”
When it comes to Stonehenge, it’s hard
to imagine a consensus emerging. “No
one explanation will completely satisfy
anyone,” Lunt told me.
A t about 7 A.M., I stepped onto the
henge and into a damp, milling
mass of people dressed in everything
from Druidic garb to sporty anoraks.
Musicians toted gongs, drums, and even
a didgeridoo, and media crews wrangled
cameras and boom mikes. At the center
of the stones, where the ground had
been trampled into a porridge of mud
and grass, the crowd gathered around a
small Druid group standing in a ritual
circle, led by a Stonehenge veteran
named Rollo Maughfling. At his re-
quest, onlookers delivered “the univer-
sal mantra of om” on behalf of such
causes as Aboriginal rights, the crisis in
Syria, and “nuclear-fuel cores in the
sea.” A mustached man wearing a re-
splendent buffalo-fur collar intoned,
“By the great lords of the air, by the
great lords of fire, by the great lords of
the sea, we’re gathered here to celebrate
the return of the sun!” Spectators held
up their smartphones to record the cer-
emony. Their posture made the glow-
ing screens look like ritual offerings.
On an ordinary solstice morning,
Maughfling would have been joined
by Arthur Pendragon, a biker turned
Druid activist who has been protesting
English Heritage policies at Stone-
henge for two decades. That day, Pen-
dragon and his followers, who call
themselves the Loyal Arthurian War-
band, held their own ritual just outside
the henge; by removing themselves
from the circle, they were expressing in-
dignation over English Heritage’s deci-
sion to display at the new visitor center
cremated human remains that were ex-
cavated inside the henge, as well as
human bones found in a nearby burial
mound and in a flat grave. The Druids
consider the exhibit degrading, and
want only replicas to be displayed. By
the time I arrived at the stone circle,
Warband members were marching
around the henge, chanting “Put them
back!” and “Let those we lay to rest stay
at rest!”
Modern Druid groups have a fraught
history with Stonehenge. Some of
the oldest of these organizations were
Mason-like fraternal orders; Winston
Churchill belonged to one. In the early
twentieth century, however, a more mil-
itantly spiritual faction—devoted to
sun-worshipping and socialism and call-
ing itself the Church of the Universal
Bond—began using the site regularly.
This irritated archeologists, who saw
these people as keeping alive William
Stukeley’s mistaken belief that ancient
Druids had either built Stonehenge or
had some notable connection with it.
When pressed, most contemporary
Druids admit that their way of life is an
invention no older than the eighteenth
century; many prefer not to call Druidry
a religion. Druidry makes up for its lack
of history with a surplus of opportuni-
ties for self-exaltation. Almost every
Druid I met had a grand title or a “cir-
cle” of his or her own to lead. Terry
Dobney, a sixty-five-year-old Gandalf
look-alike who was protesting outside
the visitor center, told me that he is
“the Keeper of the Stones and the dem-
ocratically elected ArchDruid of Ave-
bury,” a claim that elicited fond chuck-
les whenever I mentioned it to other
Druids. A penchant for flowing gar-
ments and a love of nature seem to be
the only universals among Druids; there
is no set pantheon, creed, or liturgy, al-
though most groups stand in a circle
and chant. A group oath recited by both
Rollo Maughfling and Arthur Pen-
dragon goes, “We swear by peace and
love to stand / Heart to heart and hand
in hand / Mark, oh spirit and hear us
now, / Confirming this, our sacred vow.”
For decades, archeologists tolerated
Druid rituals at Stonehenge. In the
nineteen-seventies, however, the sum-
mer solstice became the climax of a
monthlong gathering with live music,
called the Stonehenge Free Festival, and
English Heritage grew concerned about
the preservation of the site. By 1984, the
concerts were attracting tens of thou-
sands of revellers associated with a no-
madic subculture called the New Age
Travellers. They camped out in the field
across the A344, participating in a
Burning Man-style experiment in alter-
native communal living, complete with
drugs, loud music, and nudity. Their
disrespectful behavior upset some Dru-
ids. Helen Tarrant, a member of the
Gorsedd of Cor Gawr, remembers
vandalism: “People were climbing all
over the stones and spray-painting them
purple.”
Before the summer solstice of 1985,
constabularies established a four-mile
exclusion zone around Stonehenge.
Hundreds of revellers vowed to take the
fields anyway, and the two sides clashed
in what is now known as the Battle of
the Beanfield. Hundreds of people were
arrested, and several were injured. Af-
terward, the government announced
that the exclusion zone would remain in
place on future solstices.
Druids were dismayed, and in 1990
Arthur Pendragon launched a protest
by setting up camp in what he describes
as “a hole in the ground,” on a ridge
overlooking the stones. (He now lives in
a flat in Salisbury.) Pendragon has been
arrested more times than he can count,
and in 1996 he argued against the exclu-
sion zone before the European Com-
mission of Human Rights, in Stras-
bourg; the commission ruled against
him, stating, “The ban on observing the
summer solstice in the vicinity of Stone-
henge cannot be said to have had a dis-
proportionate effect on Druids as op-
posed to other groups who wanted to
observe the summer solstice due to
different beliefs or purely secular rea-
sons.” In the spring of 2000, however,
English Heritage softened its stance,
and the public regained access on the
solstices and the equinoxes. According
to Pendragon’s autobiography, “The
Tales of Arthur,” on the morning of
the next summer solstice he stepped
into the center of the stone circle and
shouted to the crowd, “This is your
henge. This is your temple. Don’t let
anyone tell you otherwise.”
T hree days before the most recent
winter solstice, Druids and pagans
gathered outside the new visitor center
and staged a protest about the remains.
They were hardly the kind of genteel
hobbyists who had once welcomed
Winston Churchill into their assem-
blies. I met home-care workers, a fu-
neral-home employee, and a street
vender. Some of Pendragon’s followers
had covered their street clothes with
white tunics emblazoned with the red
symbol of the Loyal Arthurian War-
band: a dragon rampant with a crown, a
sword, and an erect penis.
Kazz, a small, fierce, wiry woman
with white-blond hair and an abun-
dance of mystical-looking jewelry, is
Pendragon’s partner and shares his
penchant for fiery rhetoric. She’d been
pounding a ceremonial drum so pas-
sionately that both hand and drum were
stained with blood. “During the 2008
dig, we were told that the remains
would be put back,” she said. “We were
lied to. Not only have they not been
put back but what English Heritage
has done to display them is just taste-
less.” (In a statement, English Heritage
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 53
said, “Authenticity is important to tell
England’s story. We use real objects
and artifacts because we believe they are
the best way for people to come close
to history.”)
As visitors approached the center’s
admission-ticket windows, Kazz stood
with forty other protesters, stamping
her foot and shaking her fist. “Don’t
pay, walk away!” she shouted. There
was an occasional rallying whoop of
“Warriors!”
Not all Druids favor such confronta-
tional methods. The next day, in Ave-
bury, I met Christine Cleere, the priest
who had led the Sunday-morning ritual
inside the Stonehenge circle. She is a
soft-spoken, articulate woman in her
sixties with chin-length gray hair; wear-
ing a yellow cable-knit sweater and a
blue scarf, she resembled a branch li-
brarian. In addition to her priestly role
in the Gorsedd of Cor Gawr—gorsedd
is a Welsh-derived term for a gathering
of bards—she is the Stonehenge repre-
sentative for a group called Honouring
the Ancient Dead, or HAD. According
to Cleere, HAD’s members include “peo-
ple from all sorts of walks of life” who
believe that remains excavated by arche-
ologists should be “treated with honor
and respect.”
Cleere isn’t necessarily against the dis-
play of remains in museums, but insists
that it be done in an appropriate way.
“HAD has provided all sorts of booklets
and guidance on this that some museums
are following,” she said. What bothers
HAD most about this issue, according to
Cleere, is being shut out of discussions.
“The main issue over these displays is
about consultation, because they were
put in without any form of consultation
whatsoever.”
But why should archeologists consult
Druids about handling prehistoric re-
mains? Cleere, Kazz, and Pendragon
compared their claims on the bones of
their “ancestors” to the efforts of indig-
enous peoples from other countries to
persuade museums and other govern-
ment institutions to return their ances-
tors’ human remains and cultural ob-
jects. (In the United States, the Native
American Graves Protection and Repa-
triation Act has provided for the repa-
triation of such remains since 1990.)
When I pointed out to Druids that they
could not actually document their de-
54 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
scent from the Grooved Ware people,
the conversation often took an emo-
tional turn. Several people asked me
how I’d feel if my grandmother’s bones
were on display.
Mark Horton, an archeologist at the
University of Bristol, dismissed the
Druids’ attempts to invoke the moral
authority of Native Americans. He said
of repatriation requests, “Archeologists
don’t like them, but at least there’s a link
between the members of the tribes and
the remains in question, and addition-
ally there’s the history of white Euro-
pean settlers imposing themselves on
Native Americans. Here, there isn’t that
history. There’s no genetic or direct cul-
tural connection between contemporary
pagan groups and the people whose re-
mains are displayed here. I have as
much right to determine their fate as
they do.”
Sara Lunt, the curator, said that
English Heritage is “proud of what we
do” at the new visitor center, adding,
“Visitor surveys show that people expect
and like to see human remains. They
need these people to take them by the
hand.” Seeing the bones may offend
Druids, but it makes other Britons feel
more connected to the ancient dead.
For all their disputes, the Druids and
the archeologists that I met ordinarily
get along pretty well. When an archeol-
ogist fits her knees into the depressions
left by a Neolithic cook, or a modern-
day Druid invokes ancient gods he can
never understand in the way that their
original worshippers did, both are strug-
gling to connect with an elusive past.
Some of the Druids hanging around
Stonehenge have helped out on digs,
and they closely follow the archeologists’
reports, incorporating new findings and
theories into their views of the monu-
ment. Joshua Pollard said of the Druids,
“They are a force for good, in terms of
having a real affinity with these sites, of
wanting to protect them.” Indeed, the
return of Stonehenge’s setting to a more
pastoral state pleases scientists and spir-
itualists alike.
A fter a few hours of standing in the
wind and the rain, I had begun to
envy the Druids’ cloaks. As I drifted
through the crowd, I spotted a plump
woman in a tiger-striped catsuit danc-
ing to the beat of a drum circle, a tall
man in white robes with a mask made
of leaves, and a hobbity fellow in a
brown woolly sweater telling an inter-
viewer, “I’m a pagan and I’ve come here
to exercise my religious rights.” Some-
one had made a sign that began with the
line “Hello, I am an Earthian,” and
surely nobody read past that point. A
man in a green Inverness coat and a
wide-brimmed felt hat was blowing
mightily on a three-foot trumpet made
from an ox horn. He told me he was the
Summoner of the Hearth of the Turn-
ing Wheel and urged me to have a go
at the instrument. I couldn’t even get it
to squeak. Behind a trilithon, people
rubbed the padded heads of mallets over
gongs, producing a groaning and swell-
ing tone that seemed just right.
The eccentric aspects of a Stone-
henge solstice draw the eye first, but
people in ordinary street clothes turned
out to be more affecting. Some placed
small offerings—a tangerine, a painted
rock—on the fallen upright of the Great
Trilithon. Many people, like me, stepped
up to one of the three remaining tril-
ithons and rested their palms against its
oddly dry-feeling surface, heads tilted all
the way back. Tourists who visit Stone-
henge without entering the circle often
come away saying that the monument is
smaller than they expected it to be, but
anyone who’s stood next to a forty-ton
behemoth dotted with puffs of green li-
chen, and gazed up its mottled gray
length, knows what big is.
The sky had turned white, and I re-
sisted the urge to remain inside the cir-
cle, where the crush of bodies cut the
wind. Moving on, I passed an older man
with a battered face posing for a photo-
graph by leaning jauntily on a fallen lin-
tel, holding a cigar. He intended to take
the piss, as the British say, but it was a
hopeless cause. The dignity of those
stones is impermeable; only the wind,
the rain, and another thousand years
will ever diminish it. I turned a corner
and spotted a young man with cropped
fair hair, in a brightly striped rain jacket.
He was facing an upright trilithon, lean-
ing into it with his whole body, his eyes
closed, his arms curled in front of him,
and his head resting on his hands. He
molded himself to the stone, like a child
clinging to his mother. Ten minutes
later, when I circled back the same way,
he was still there, unchanged. 
 The ramp hatch at the back of the
OUR FAR-FLUNG CORRESPONDENTS plane lowered slowly to reveal that we
had landed in another world—albeit a

SHIPMATES
world with the same pure-blue sky as
the one we had left. Rotating radars, an
American flag, the bridge, and assorted
Life on an aircraft carrier. flight-ops rooms rose in a stack on the
starboard side of the deck: an island on
BY GEOFF DYER the island of the carrier. The hatch con-
tinued to inch its way down, revealing
the flight deck, which was populated
by visor-faced beings in red, green,
white, and yellow sweatshirts and float
coats (a type of life preserver), color-
coded according to the person’s func-
tion. There were parked jets—F-18s—
and helicopters.
This world had its own rules, cul-
tures, norms, and purposes. Three peo-
ple in white sweatshirts and float coats
stepped onto the ramp and told us to
follow in single file. They must have
been yelling, because we stepped out
into silence—I had not realized until
now how effective the cranials’ ear pro-
tection was. Three more cranial-headed
guys, in brown sweatshirts and trousers,
were swathed in heavy chains, like me-
dieval mechanics in charge of a siege en-
The flight deck: this world had its own rules, cultures, norms, and purposes. gine. (The chains were used to restrain
the aircraft and any of its cargo.) We

W e were going to be flying to the

U.S.S. George H. W. Bush from
the Navy base in Bahrain on a Grum-
man C-2A Greyhound, an ungainly
propeller plane. There was nothing
sleek or speedy about it. The sky was
doing what it always did at this time:
waiting for the sun to show up. The
temperature was pleasant; a few hours
from now it would be infernal. Sixteen
passengers, all but two Navy, gathered
around the back of the plane to listen to
the safety briefing. Our luggage had
been weighed and taken away for load-
ing. I had had to hand over my com-
puter bag, because when we landed on
the carrier—when the plane touched
down and hooked the arresting wire,
the “trap”—we would go from a hun-
dred and forty miles per hour to zero in
a couple of seconds. The “trap”—the
first of many words that I would hear for
the first time.
The sky brightened from gray to
blue. We carried our head-ear-eye pro-
tectors—“cranials,” which look like hel-
MAGNUM
The seats all faced backward. There
were two windows on either side of the
fuselage, each the size of a dinner plate.
The ramp winched itself closed and
sealed us in. Further safety checks were
made. The woman who made them was
the military equivalent of a flight atten-
dant. She was wearing a sand-colored
flight suit, and looked as tough as a
woman in an Annie Proulx story. Her
hair had been braided and pinned into a
tight bun on the back of her head.
Forty minutes after takeoff, we de-
scended, bucking the bronco air. There
was a stomach-draining lurch and heave.
We were landing!
No, we weren’t. The woman’s arm
came up in a spiralling lasso gesture to
indicate that we had missed the trap and
were going up and around again—
“bolting.”
We circled, tilted, and descended.
This time, we thumped down and came
to a dead stop. It was sudden, but not as
violent as I’d expected and feared—pos-
sibly because we were facing backward
were in one of the most technologically
advanced places on earth, but these men
in grease-smeared brown sweatshirts
and float coats, with their chains over
their shoulders, looked as if they were
ready to face boiling oil poured on them
from the walls of an impregnable castle.
We trooped down the stairs from
the flight deck, and took off our crani-
als. There may have been no jets land-
ing down here, but we were engulfed
by industrial clamor. In the course of
a two-week visit, I moved constantly
between the numerous levels below
the flight deck, often barely conscious
of where I was. The boat remained a
three-dimensional maze of walkways,
stairs, and hatches. I walked the walk-
ways and stoop-ducked through hatches,
always focussed on a single ambition:
not to smash my head, even though
there was an opportunity to do so every
couple of seconds. Bahrain, which felt
distant from this island we were on, was
known as “the beach,” a place where
complex repairs could be made. I’d

mets with headphones attached—and and were pushed into our seats rather heard a story about two brothers work-
filed up a ramp at the rear of the plane. than thrown forward. ing in different sections of a carrier who
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRIS STEELE-PERKINS THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 55
didn’t set eyes on each other during the
six months of their deployment. It
didn’t matter whether this was factually
correct; the truth to which it attests is
that carriers are big.
T he purpose of an aircraft carrier
is to carry aircraft. As a plane
prepared to take off, members of the
ground crew, in green and red, signalled
to one another with absolute clarity.
One woman in a green sweatshirt sig-
nalled from a perch on the edge of a
kind of manhole. Everyone was in con-
tact, visually, with everyone else, but the
jets were the center of attention, and
the pilots flew the jets. The pilot was
the observed of all observers. There was
no room for anything even slightly am-
biguous. There was a guy near the front
of the aircraft, keeping low, making
sure that he didn’t get sucked into the
intake. Two other guys almost behind
the wings—the final checkers—crouched
down on the heel of one foot with the
other leg stretched out in front, also
keeping low, so that they wouldn’t be
hit by the jet blast. The hypnotic cho-
reography was devoted entirely to the
safe unleashing of extreme violence: vi-
olence not just in terms of what hap-
pened hundreds or thousands of miles
away, where the planes were headed,
but here, where the immense forces re-
quired for launch were kept under sim-
mering control.
Flight Deck Control was the fiefdom
of Lieutenant Commander Ron Ran-
court. He had a view of the activities
from what he called “the nerve center of
flight operations.” In front of him was a
Plexiglas-covered table with a plan of
the flight deck on it, on top of which
were little model planes and helicopters.
Rancourt referred to it as the Ouija
board. For me, as a Brit, seeing this
hands-on throwback to the Battle of
Britain, when the Women’s Auxiliary
Air Force would broom little plaques
around a giant map of our island for-
tress, evoked nostalgic feelings. Appro-
priately, as it turned out: after this de-
ployment, Rancourt’s quaintly efficient
board was to be replaced by a new elec-
tronic system, in keeping with the high-
tech style of operations elsewhere on the
ship. Around the edge of the board,
under the Plexiglas, were banknotes
of various denominations in many
56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
FORGETTING CLOUDS
The quiet morning has a few cloud friends
that are gone when I look for them again
in this one summer to which I have come
after everything that I remember
what can I call it before it has gone
it does not hear me and does not know me
it passes without seeing I am here
it is only me going my own way
there is no one else who can forget it
—W. S. Merwin
different currencies. They were fines of steam from the catapult tracks, which
that Rancourt had collected from any- are built into the flight deck. After a few
one who touched his Ouija board. moments, the catapult shuttle—a large
His hair was clipped short, and he piston attached through the tracks to
smiled all the time that he was talking. He the landing gear—comes back like a
described his role with an unerring clarity singed hare at a greyhound race. A min-
of purpose: he was responsible for the ute later, another plane, from a neigh-
safety and the movement of all sixty-six boring catapult, blasts into the sky.
aircraft on board. “When we’re launching We could see the planes high up in
and recovering aircraft, we have to be the blue distance, specks coming around
going into the wind and heading straight,” in an immense circle. As one approached
he explained. “The longer we do that, the the carrier, its wings tilted slightly, first
more vulnerable we are. So the shorter we one way and then the other, adjusting,
make that window the better. We’re al- compensating. Three arresting wires, as
ways looking for effectiveness, always thick as rope, were stretched across the
shooting for a thirty-minute window rear of the deck. On the port side of the
from the initial launching of an aircraft boat, very near the back, the landing-
until that last bird lands.” signal officers—all pilots themselves—
Rancourt was the ranking aircraft- communicated detailed refinements of
handling officer on the ship. For a long approach to the pilot.
time, working on a flight deck was re- The plane thumps down and then,
garded as the most dangerous job in the rather than slowing, immediately accel-
world. Now, he explained, it was “the erates to full speed, in case it misses all
safest most dangerous job”—at least, on the arresting wires and needs to bolt, as
his watch it was. He’d been doing this had happened to us when we landed. If
for twenty-eight years, and there had the hook catches one of the arresting
been no deaths on any of the decks he’d wires, the wire extends in a long V and
worked. brings the plane to a halt. The dangers
Up to a certain point, a plane can be of the operation are numerous and evi-
touched by members of the ground dent. The plane can crash into the back
crew. Then a J.B.D. ( jet blast deflector) of the ship, slide off to port and into the
comes up behind it, and everyone moves sea, or, worse, slide starboard into the is-
away. The plane goes to full power— land, people, tow trucks, and other
only now does one appreciate that the parked planes. The metaphor that kept
aircraft has been idling, dawdling. The coming up in pilots’ accounts was that
wing flaps jiggle. Final checks. Thumbs- landing on a carrier was like trying to
up between the pilot and the last two land on a postage stamp.
members of the ground crew, who If all goes as planned, the plane
scurry away, staying low. The plane is comes to a halt, the tail hook is raised,
flung forward by a catapult and quickly and the arresting wire is released and
curves away from the end of the carrier, comes snaking back, helped on its way
over the sea. In its wake, there is a wash by crew members, who prod it along.
Within seconds, it’s back in place,
kinked and quivering somewhat from
the strain, but otherwise ready for the
next tug-of-war with an F-18.
E very day, the crew froze, mid-
stride, for the captain’s address
from the bridge, as he reminded every-
one that it was “a great day to be at sea.”
I suppose it was, given the sun, the clear
skies, and the lack of typhoons and in-
coming torpedoes. At first, I didn’t real-
ize that the captain always told the crew
what a great day it was. And yet, despite
this, he invariably managed to italicize or
reëmphasize the “great.” Today, while in
many ways indistinguishable from the
interminable days that had gone before,
was somehow better and greater, and
thereby also raised the possibility that
tomorrow might be greater still. It be-
came a standing joke among the crew.
The day I visited the bridge, a dozen
people were there, all doing something.
A lot of that doing was looking out the
window, and some of the looking was
being done with binoculars. Planes were
taking off relatively quietly beyond the
glass—specimens released from a tech-
nological aviary. It was all contempo-
rary-looking but steeped in tradition,
too—as when a sailor suddenly piped
up, “Captain’s on the bridge!” The cap-
tain, whose name was Brian Luther,
was here to make his daily address, but
first he admonished someone for a gross
impertinence: “I don’t want to hear any-
thing about the Pittsburgh Steelers on
my bridge.”
The Captain began his address by
confirming what everyone knew: that it
was another great day at sea. The next
part of the speech was devoted to pub-
licizing the achievements of the Avenger
of the Day, a member of the crew who
had been selected for outstanding work.
On this great day, it was a sailor named
Stremmel, a lanky twenty-two-year-old
whom the Captain invited to sit in the
big chair and “drive the boat for a bit.”
While Stremmel was driving the boat,
the Captain explained on the loud-
speaker that Stremmel had volunteered
for extra shifts, had done this and that,
and was—this, too, was part of the daily
incantation—“an outstanding example
of freedom at work.” Another nice part
of this little ritual was that the Avengers
got to call home to tell their sweethearts
or parents that they were being hon-
ored. The Captain’s Avenger of the Day
announcement ended not with a hierar-
chical nod of approval but with a dem-
ocratic “Well done, shipmate!” In that
instance, Captain and Avenger were
equals—and the promise was held out
that any sailor on board had the oppor-
tunity to attain a similar relationship,
and, ultimately, to become not simply
the beneficiary of the award but its
bestower.
One night, I met Captain Luther
and two fellow-officers as they sat in
fold-up chairs on a starboard-side cat-
walk, smoking cigars in the dark. The
sea was nothing but shadow. I couldn’t
see the faces, just the red orbs of the ci-
gars’ tips. Then a crew member rigged
up a line of blue fairy lights. It was still
hard to see, but in a soft, romantic way.
With the Captain were Air Wing Com-
mander Jeff Davis—the Captain’s equi-
valent, in charge of the planes and the
fliers in the same way that the Cap-
tain was in charge of the ship and the
sailors—and Davis’s deputy, Captain
Dan Dwyer. Davis was fifty, Dwyer
forty-four, and the Captain forty-eight.
(I was the oldest person aboard, at
fifty-two.) We sat in a line, facing out
to sea.
The Captain’s life, I discovered, em-
bodied compromise and scaled-down
hopes. He’d wanted to be an astronaut
but had settled for bossing an aircraft
carrier. One of the things that distracted
him from his ambition was
falling in love with “the
ballet” of carrier aviation.
He once told me, “With no
light pollution, on a night
when there’s no haze, you
can see the majesty of the
Milky Way.” Like his two
colleagues, he had notched
thousands of hours as a
carrier aviator. Davis and
Dwyer were still flying missions every
other day, but they were getting toward
the end of their flying years.
I asked about the tension between
becoming middle-aged and confronting
advances in technology that are trans-
forming what it means to fly a plane and
be a pilot.
This posed a challenge, the Captain
acknowledged, but experience counted
for so much. Dwyer, he pointed out,
had a thousand arrested landings to his
credit. That added up to a lot of skill, a
lot of thrills, and a whole load of scares.
I could see the shapes of the men’s
faces, slightly illuminated when they
puffed on their cigars, but at times I
could not tell who was speaking. It
didn’t matter, because they all agreed on
one thing: the job was fun. They were
like kids, still delighted that they got to
drive and fly around in these incredible
machines. But they were in earnest, too,
about dedicating themselves to a life of
service.
“It’s a respectable profession,” one
said.
“An honorable profession,” another
said.
I asked where they were and what
they were doing when the 9/11 attacks
happened. “I was on the Enterprise,”
the Captain said. “We’d left the Gulf
on 9/9 and were headed south to port
call in Africa. Then 9/11 occurred, and
the C.O. of the ship watched what
was going on. He turned the ship
around on his own initiative and started
steaming toward the coast of Pakistan.
When things happen, the President
says, ‘Where are the carriers?’ We are
part of world events, part of history as
it’s made.”
“There are a lot of people on this
boat who’ve been in ten years now,”
Davis said. “Kids who were in the
heartland, who had never seen the
ocean—who, when 9/11 happened,
said, ‘I’m gonna make a
difference.’ No need for
a draft or recruitment or
retention.”
Was the Avenger of the
Day the Captain’s idea?
“No, that was up and
running before I took com-
mand. But it’s interesting,
because, normally, these
kids want to stay away from
the captain. What I introduced was the
phone call home. You can always tell who
was the problem child. The mom picks
up and she’s, like, ‘What did he do now?’ ”
Another night, I joined the Captain
and some other guests for dinner in his
cabin. The cabin was modelled on a
room in the Bush family home, but
with smaller windows, to prevent light
from beaming out into the enemy
night. The Captain had a permanent
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 57
sparkle in his eye; he could not have
done more to put people at ease. He
was the subject of a little respectful rib-
bing, but he was the captain, so every-
one was on best behavior. That meant
that he had to do some of the ribbing
himself. The day before, he’d com-
pleted a marathon on the treadmill—a
good place to be, he said. “Never more
than a gurney away from a defibrillator.”
Perhaps part of him longed for a rela-
tionship of complete equality, where
people were judged not by their rank
but by their wisecracking. It was impos-
sible to get a sense of him outside his
captainness.
T he U.S.S. George H. W. Bush is
also known as CVN-77, the tenth
and final Nimitz-class nuclear-powered
aircraft carrier. Construction began in
2003, and it was commissioned in Jan-
uary, 2009. It carries a crew of five
thousand. Enlisted men and women
sleep in quarters that hold up to two
hundred people. (Only the Captain and
a few others—including me, as the
writer-in-residence—had private rooms.)
Every bit of space is maximized. The
kitchen has to go forty-five days with-
out running out of anything. Warrant
Officer Charles Jakes, who has spent
twenty-five of his forty-four years in the
Navy, showed me around. Jakes, from
New York City, was in charge of a hun-
dred and twelve cooks and a hundred
and eighty food attendants, serving
seven dining rooms on the ship. He
took me into a freezer the size of a
Manhattan apartment and showed me
its contents: eight thousand pounds of
chicken, five thousand pounds of steak,
four thousand pounds of hamburger.
The goal was to return to port with a
near-empty larder. “I aim to eat my way
through everything on the boat,” he
said. Moving on to the bakery, we
donned little paper Nehru hats. The
bakers, from New York, Texas, Chi-
cago, and California, were lined up to
meet us. They bake eight thousand
cakes a week.
In the launch-valve room, the tem-
perature was a hundred and ten degrees,
much hotter than the bakery. Here was
where the catapults—the “cats”—were
operated and maintained. On a boat
where everyone worked hard, no one
worked harder than the catapult guys.
Some of them spent most of their six-
teen-hour shifts there. The evening be-
fore I met Leading Petty Officer Jona-
than Dicola, who worked in the launch-
valve room, he had finished his shift at
midnight, got to sleep at one, and was
up at five-thirty.
The workings of the catapults were
complex, but the consequences of mis-
haps were easy to grasp. On one boat, a
vertical stabilizer or a wing flap on a
jet had malfunctioned, and the plane
flipped into the water, killing all five
people on board. On another, a plane
was launched before one of the crew got
out of the way, and the wing took his
head off. It wasn’t clear which of these
and the other incidents recounted by
Dicola had actually been witnessed
by him: a testament, perhaps, to the
spirit of shared responsibility that binds
together those who work in a particular
part of the Navy.
Another time, the topside petty
officer was still underneath when the
aircraft went full throttle, and it sucked
him into the intake.
Jeez! When did that happen?
“Maybe ’96 or ’97. So now they wait
for the topside P.O. to come out and
wait for the shooter to say, ‘Go to mili-
tary power,’ and then the aircraft goes to
full tension.”
He went on, “Over the years, we
learn from those mistakes. We’ve also
had incidents like the chief who wasn’t
paying attention and ran between the
plane and the jet-blast deflector. The
blast blew him up over the J.B.D. He
was torn up pretty good after that. It
wasn’t funny at the time. But, you know,
where was your mind?”
You can see this incident, or one
very like it, on YouTube. Amazingly,
you can even see a guy getting sucked
into the jet intake. Against all odds, in-
stead of getting sucked in, through, and
out the other end, he blows up the en-
gine, which cuts out, and he emerges
the way he went. A few days later, he
appears at a press conference, bandaged
like a mummy but understandably
chipper, given the implausible fact of
his survival.
O ne morning, I was taken down
to the brig. In charge was Petty
Officer Young, a small, no-nonsense
woman with metal-framed glasses and
hair pulled back in a tight carceral bun.
She’d become a mom at twenty, had
done two years of college, married at
twenty-eight, worked as a teacher’s as-
sistant and in landscaping and retail,
and joined the Navy at thirty-two. It
was like a life lived backward, somehow,
even if she was only now achieving her
longtime ambition: “I wanted to be in
law enforcement.”
Before I looked at the cells, Young
explained to me what you needed to do
to end up here. Minor offenses meant
you were put on restriction.
“What sort of offenses are those?” I
asked.
“Falsifying your logbooks, sleeping
on watch, talking back to an officer, dis-
respecting an officer, calling him a bad
word, telling him he’s acting like a bad
word.”
Restriction required that you muster
for roll call several times a day. Just a few
hours earlier, I had seen sailors on re-
striction lined up on the hangar deck,
while an exercise class was in progress
and others were going about their busi-
ness of fixing up planes. Those on re-
striction were standing at attention,
clearly regretting the added increment of
inconvenience to which they were being
subjected. Everything about the Navy
system of discipline advertised the ad-
vantages of not getting deeper into trou-
ble. Better to suck up being on restric-
tion and then get off restriction and
enjoy that as a pleasure and a bonus than
to suck up whatever comes your way at
the tier below restriction. Better to im-
prove than to get worse. But not every-
one does.
“Miss three musters and you’re here
on bread and water for three days,”
Young said. More serious offenders by-
passed restriction and came straight to
the brig.
Today, the brig was devoid of pris-
oners. There were two individual cells
and a large dorm cell that could sleep
fifteen. I studied both with the apprais-
ing eye of a real-estate agent. There
were no windows, but, since almost no
one on board had an ocean view, this
did not represent a diminution of priv-
ileges. While somewhat basic, the ac-
commodation benefitted from high
levels of security. In a sense, the brig
represented not a removal from but an
extreme concentration of the experi-
ence of being on the carrier. For every-
one except the pilots and the helicopter
crews, the carrier was a kind of prison
ship. So I guess the real punishment of
being in the brig would be the annihi-
lating boredom.
We were joined by Petty Officer
Heath. He’d signed up for the Navy at
twenty-three, because “the environ-
ment I was in at home didn’t have
much promise.” Previously, he’d built
trailers, driven semitrucks—bounced
from one thing to another. He was
twenty-eight now, with a wife and four
kids.
Prison guards were obliged to spend
their days in the joint. They were run-
ning a deeply unsuccessful establish-
ment whose lack of business was the
price paid for the success achieved else-
where in town.
“So what do you do when you’ve got
no customers?”
“Before you got here, I was touching
up the paint,” Young said. Heath said,
“I clean.”
I n the brig, I asked to meet someone
who’d been in trouble or, at the very
least, had been on restriction. I was
taken to see Yeoman Second Class
Sonia Martin, as I will call her. A yeo-
man performs administrative and cleri-
cal work, dealing with protocol, evalua-
tions, forms, and supplies. What had
she done to get put on restriction?
“I was found in a space with my then
husband. We were sleeping but . . . He
was getting out of the Navy, he was on
restriction, so he was stuck on the ship,
and I stayed with him.”
They had met on the ship; he was
getting kicked out for doing drugs (“He
popped some meth”), and they got
married shortly before this was due to
happen. The ship was in port in San
Diego. “Why he ever joined the Navy
I’m not quite sure,” she said.
I asked her about being on restriction.
“It sucked, and the stigma of every-
one seeing that you were on restriction
was embarrassing.”
It was only after being on restric-
tion—near the end of her third year—
that she’d decided to make a career of
the Navy. Before that, she’d intended
to get out after the four years she’d
signed up for—though she still credits
the initial decision to join with turning
her life around. “I would have been ei-
ther dead or in jail if I hadn’t joined the
Navy,” she explained. “I was living with
a dealer at one point. I was working for
Domino’s. We were buying drugs in-
stead of paying rent. It was nice work-
ing at Domino’s, because we could
make our own dinner. We didn’t have
the money to buy food. It was not a
good life.”
She said, “I’m a follower. Peer pres-
sure’s a bitch for me. It just happened
the group that I got into did drugs. So I
did, too.” And now she was in the Navy,
where being a follower was a good
thing—if what you followed was orders.
She was committed to the Navy as a
career even if the fit was not absolute. It
had made her life better, but it hadn’t
reconfigured her personality and the
possibilities she contained to the extent
that it had with some people I spoke
to. Often, a life other than the Navy
seemed inconceivable to people in it,
or, rather, they seemed inconceivable
outside of it.
“I’d like to stay in to do my full
twenty,” she said. “Retire here as chief.”
I asked about her ex-husband.
“Last I heard, he was working in a
tattoo parlor.”
I was deeply asleep, my ears stuffed
with wax earplugs, but an announce-
ment on the P.A. woke me up.
“Man overboard! Man overboard!”
The next bit was clear to everyone on
the boat except me: something about
muster stations. Immediately, there was
a tramping and rumble of feet and then,
again:
“Man overboard! Man overboard!
Time: Plus One.”
The human voice—not prerecorded
or automated—was calm and authorita-
tive. Not knowing what else to do—it
was probably a drill, in any case—I just
lay there. Another minute passed:
“Time: Plus Two.”
Then someone knocked on my door.
“Is this a drill?” I asked, hiding,
naked, behind the door.
“No, this is the real thing. But best
just to stay in your stateroom.”
“Time: Plus Three.”
I went back to my rack—my bed—
while crew members hurried to wher-
ever they were meant to be. There was
nothing to do except think of being the
person alone in the dark ocean.
“Time: Plus Four.”
I remembered Cowper’s “Castaway”—
“Of friends, of hope, of all bereft, /
His floating home for ever left”—
and Golding’s “Pincher Martin”: “He
didn’t even have time to kick off his
seaboots.” Rescue boats, presumably,
were being lowered and launched,
swimmers readied.
“Time: Plus Five.” And then: “The
following individuals report to the quar-
terdeck with your I.D. card. From
Combat Systems: ET3 Denny. From
Supply: ET2 Luskin, ADA33 Smith.
From Air: ADAN Fletcher.” From
Ops: OSSN Lucas . . .” I lost track of
the names, perhaps ten or a dozen of
them, the unaccounted for, the missing.
“Time: Plus Six.”
The list was repeated with a few
names added and a few removed until it
began inexorably to shrink—six names,
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 59
then five—as fate converged on fewer
and fewer people:
“The following individuals report to
the quarterdeck with your I.D. card.
From Supply: ET2 Luskin, ADA33
Smith. From Ops: OSSN Lucas . . .”
It was like listening to the ball rattling
around a roulette wheel, waiting to hear
where it would land.
Time continued to pass, to mount,
with no increase or diminution of either
urgency or desperation.
“Time: Plus Eight.”
Then a voice sounding distinctly ir-
ritated but immediately recognizable
as that of the man who each day pro-
claimed that it was another great day to
be at sea: “From the bridge of the U.S.S.
George Bush, this is the Captain. Hey,
anyone throwing anything over the side
of this ship needs to stop right now.”
By “Time: Plus Eleven,” the list of
the missing had shrunk to just two:
“The following individuals report to the
quarterdeck with your I.D. card. From
Supply: ET2 Luskin, ADA33 Smith.”
Lying in my rack. Alive.
“Time: Plus Twelve. Will the fol-
lowing report to the quarterdeck with
your I.D. card. From Supply: ADA33
Smith.”
So that was it. If there was a man
overboard, it was ADA33 Smith for
whom time was not increasing but run-
ning out. One man out of five thousand.
At “Time: Plus Eighteen,” the Cap-
tain came on the Main Circuit again: “A
float coat has been picked up. We have
a complete and full muster
of all hands on board.”
Everyone was safe, pres-
ent, and—the phrase had
never seemed so caring—ac-
counted for.
A n exceptional event was
dealt with by the me-
ticulous application of end-
lessly rehearsed routine. So
frequent are the rehearsals—and so se-
riously are they taken—that the distinc-
tion between practice and the real thing
is all but irrelevant.
Also: there is never a dull moment.
But this translates into: there is never a
moment’s peace, no guarantee of a good
night’s sleep. There is never a dull mo-
ment, and yet life on the carrier is an
endless succession of dull moments (the
60 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
idea is to make even the most unex-
pected emergency a matter of routine),
especially for those sweeping the decks,
or cleaning, wiping, washing, shining.
This was confirmed when I met two
of the security guys, Chris and Myrl, on
their rounds. They looked pretty mean,
biologically disposed and militarily
programmed to cut no slack, to listen
indifferently to lame-ass excuses before
getting down to the serious business
of meting out punishment. But in the
course of our time together I came to
see that their facial expressions were just
part of the uniform, something they put
on each day before coming to work.
We went on a tour of nooks and
crannies where people stashed alcohol,
and linen cupboards where people had
been caught making out.
“We know all the sneak spots,” Myrl
said.
“The only time you get any privacy
is in the head or in the rack,” Chris
said. We came across a fire extinguisher
whose tamperproof thing had been
tampered with. We checked out a re-
fuelling sponson, which, as Myrl ex-
plained, was “another popular sneak
spot.” That said it all. Even the places
where you hoped to get some time with
your secret sweetheart or on your own
were “popular.”
Chris and Myrl were twenty-seven
and twenty-three, respectively, and both
had wanted to be cops. Both said several
times that they were here not to bust
their shipmates but to help them out.
“The difference between
any of us and being behind
bars is one bad day,” Chris
said.
Our patrol had been un-
eventful in the extreme. As
so often with Navy life,
boredom seemed the worst
enemy, but even worse than
boredom—so much worse
that it was unthinkable—
was the idea that it might be pointless.
All the drills, the redundancy and pa-
trols and the checking—you have to
put out of people’s minds the idea that
anything might be a waste of time, that
any of it could be skipped. This, it turns
out, is surprisingly easy, for a carrier—
or any military institution—exists in a
state of constant potential threat (of ac-
cidents or attack), and it’s only by mak-
ing the responses routine that these
threats can be dealt with calmly when
they are realized. So a successful de-
ployment in which no lives are lost and
no one is seriously injured resembles
nothing so much as an endless series of
dress rehearsals for a performance (a
real fire, say) that is less dramatic than
any of the simulations leading up to it.
Day in, day out, people toil away, mak-
ing the rounds on the boat that is going
round and round in a bit of sea, on a
planet that is also doing its rounds.
Auden said that poetry makes nothing
happen. Much of what happens on a
carrier is dedicated to turning the boat
into a poem, to making sure that noth-
ing happens. So round and round we
go, with Chris and Myrl doing their
part, scouting out sneak spots and
linen-cupboard liaisons, not expecting
to find anything and glad, in a disap-
pointed sort of way, when they don’t.
Along the corridors, around the cat-
walks, and up and down the stairs they
go, chipping away at the days of this
vast and orbital deployment, getting
one day nearer to going home to see the
year-old daughter who is keeping in
step, doing her bit (though in one di-
rection only), growing one day older.
F or several days, much of the talk on
board had been about the upcom-
ing Steel Beach Picnic. The planes were
parked at the front half of the boat. Ta-
bles and chairs were set out on the flight
deck—which looked much bigger than
it did when flights were operating—so
that it was like the terrace of a seaside
café. A sound system had been set up. A
d.j. was playing rock in the shadow of
the island. There were already a lot of
folks up there, half of them out of uni-
form, in shorts and T’s, many of them
lining up for steaks.
The ocean was a calm blue. Over-
night, the George Bush had become the
best cruise ship in the world, with a view
of the sea unimpeded by guardrails—
just angled nets to catch you should you
wander over the side.
Soon, the line of sailors waiting for
steaks stretched alongside the aft of the
boat and for thirty yards along the star-
board side. Everywhere you looked,
people were chowing down or waiting
to chow down. Nowhere in the Ara-
bian Gulf were so many people chowing
down on such huge quantities of steak.
But there was no beer to go with it. It
was extraordinary, in a way, that there
could be a party like this without a keg
in sight—just bath-size troughs filled
with ice, soft drinks, and bottles of
water. The d.j. played a heavy country
stomp, and a whole bunch of sailors
wearing coveralls, uniforms, or shorts
started line dancing.
I found myself standing next to Cap-
tain Luther, who was wearing shorts. “If
you help them create good memories,
they’ll forget a lot of the bad stuff,”
he said.
He went on, “I’m an old-fashioned
forward thinker. Mission first, people
always. We’re on a warship, so certain
things have to be the way they are. But
every sailor on this ship is a volunteer.
They gave something up to be here. So
we have to give ’em something back. A
lot of it is just standard leadership. Eat
after they eat, sleep after they sleep.
Never give them an order if you don’t
understand what it’ll mean they’ll have
to do.”
A football was flying through the air
toward a group near us. “Better make
sure that ball doesn’t land on me,” the
Captain called out to one of the receiv-
ers. I was curious to see what would
happen if it landed in his coleslaw. But
it never did, and it never would.
I met a tall, square-shouldered man
named Clinton Stonewall III, from
Birmingham, Alabama. He was about
to be promoted, that very day, from
lieutenant to lieutenant commander.
He said that water has a cycle. “You
know, that’s the same water that Noah
sailed on,” he explained. “That Christo-
pher Columbus sailed on. And guess
what? This day, I’m sailing on that
same water. I’m a part of that cycle.
And, you know, we have a lot of tech-
nology up here. Man, this is the most
powerful ship on the face of the earth.”
His gaze returned to the sea. “But that
thing right there, that is power. It’s
beautiful. It’s grace. And I’m inspired
every time I see it.”
Late in the afternoon, when it came
time for Stonewall’s promotion cere-
mony, Steel Beach had been trans-
formed back into a flight deck. A couple
of dozen people were there to witness
the promotion, including Captain Lu-
ther, who was in his flight suit again. A
“Care to make it interesting?”
t t
strong breeze was blowing, and the sky
was ablaze with holiday light. Stonewall
stood immense, smart, and proud, and
said, “I want to thank each and every one
of you, especially those who kept me up-
right and squared away.” He went on, “I
put out to sea with family members.
And everything we do, whether it’s up
here on the flight deck, on the second
deck, or on the seventh deck, I tell you
right now, whether it’s getting these cat-
apults ready, serving in the meal line,
whatever it is you’re doing, it’s all for me.
You got my back. And I got yours. If
you’re a leader out here, you need also to
be a servant. The bottom’s a reflection of
the top. ‘If you don’t look good, I don’t
look good.’ I think Vidal Sassoon had it
right when he came out with that.”
Stonewall had to pause here to let a wave
of laughter die down. “And if I’m look-
ing good here today it’s because of you.
It’s because of you.”
O n my final morning, a woman I
knew only as Angela came to
change the sheets and prepare the
room for the next guest. The place
where I’d been sleeping in such privi-
leged isolation could not have been
more different from her berthing: she
was sharing quarters with more than
fifty other women, though it didn’t
seem to worry her.
“I know how to share,” she said. “I’m
more adjustable than most. Instead of
making them adjust to me, I adjust to
them, so it’s easier for me to commune.
I prefer to have my own space, but I
know how to make it comfortable, so
they don’t have to worry about me and
I don’t have to worry about them.”
She was twenty-eight, and from
Chicago. Before joining the Navy, she’d
been a supervisor at UPS, and before
taking care of the guest suites she’d been
up on the flight deck, where she carried
the chains and, at night, washed the jets.
“Flight deck, once you know it and
know what to avoid, it’s like being in a
river,” she said. “When you’re up on the
flight deck, time flies.”
Time was not flying for me. It had
stalled. The minutes were anchor-
heavy. It all came back to the first new
word I’d heard: the trap. You’re on the
boat and you’re trapped. I’m ready to go,
I said to myself, ready to slip the surly
bonds of earth, so put me in that bird,
strap me in, and shoot her up.
When, at last, I was back on the very
dry land of Bahrain, I checked in at a
hotel, went up to my room, and show-
ered for a long time. The water felt
cleaner, more sparkling. I washed my
hair using palmfuls of shampoo and
conditioner, dried myself with a fluffy
white towel the size of a flag, and dug
out unworn clothes from my suitcase. I
looked out the window at the empty
cityscape and experienced another reve-
lation: I could go for a walk!
The streets were sky-high and, rela-
tively speaking, desert-wide. You could
walk without stooping, could cross them
without wearing a cranial. You didn’t
even need ear protection. There were
Indians or Bangladeshis walking in little
groups of three, and a few tourists. They
were, I suspect, enjoying the same sen-
sations that I was, relishing the opportu-
nity to walk, to go where you pleased. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 61
O n his thirteenth day underground,
when he’d come to the edge of the
known world and was preparing to pass
beyond it, Marcin Gala placed a call to
the surface. He’d travelled more than
three miles through the earth by then,
over stalagmites and boulder fields,
cave-ins and vaulting galleries. He’d spi-
dered down waterfalls, inched along
crumbling ledges, and bellied through
tunnels so tight that his back touched
the roof with every breath. Now he
stood at the shore of a small, dark pool
under a dome of sulfurous flowstone.
He felt the weight of the mountain
above him—a mile of solid rock—and
wondered if he’d ever find his way back
again. It was his last chance to hear his
wife and daughter’s voices before the
cave swallowed him up.
“Base camp, base camp, base camp,”
he said. “This is Camp Four. Over.” His
voice travelled from the handset to a
Teflon-coated wire that he had strung
along the wall. It wound its way through
sump and tunnel, up the stair-step pas-
sages of the Chevé system to a ragged
cleft in a hillside seven thousand feet
above sea level. There, in a cloud forest
in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, lay the
staging area for an attempt to map the
deepest cave in the world—a kind of
Everest expedition turned upside down.
Gala’s voice fell soft and muffled in the
mountain’s belly, husky with fatigue.
He asked his seven-year-old, Zuzia,
how she liked the Pippi Longstocking
book she’d been reading, and wondered
what the weather was like on the sur-
face. Then the voice of Bill Stone, the
leader of the expedition, broke over the
line. “We’re counting on you guys,” he
said. “This is a big day. Do your best,
but don’t do anything radical. Be brave,
but not too brave.”
Gala had been this deep in the cave
once before, in 2009, but never beyond
the pool. A baby-faced Pole of unre-
markable physique—more plumber
than mountaineer—he discovered cav-
ing as a young man in the Tatra Moun-
tains, when they were one of the few
places he could escape the strictures of
Communism. When he was seventeen,
he and another caver became the first
MARCIN GALA

people to climb, from top to bottom,

what was then the world’s deepest cave,
the Réseau Jean Bernard, in the French
Alps. Now thirty-eight, he had explored Atanasio, a cliff-face opening in the Sierra de Juárez mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. The
62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
 A REPORTER AT LARGE

IN DEEP
The dark and dangerous world of extreme cavers.

BY BURKHARD BILGER

mountains are home to the Chevé system, some eighty-five hundred feet deep—potentially the deepest cave in the world.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 63

“Half a dozen brown—three large, three jumbo!”
t t
caves throughout Europe and Ukraine,
Hawaii, Central America, and New
Guinea. In the off-season, he was a
technician on a Norwegian oil plat-
form, dangling high above the North
Sea to weld joints and replace rivets.
He was not easily unnerved. Then
again Chevé was more than usually
unnerving.
Caves are like living organisms,
James Tabor wrote in “Blind Descent,”
a book on Bill Stone’s earlier expedi-
tions. They have bloodstreams and res-
piratory systems, infections and infesta-
tions. They take in organic matter and
digest it, flushing it slowly through their
systems. Chevé feels more alive than
most. Its tunnels lie along an uneasy
fault line in the Sierra de Juárez moun-
tains and seethe with more than seven
feet of rain a year. On his first trip to
Mexico, in 2001, Gala nearly died of
histoplasmosis, a fungal infection ac-
quired from the bat guano that lined the
upper reaches of a nearby cave. The
local villagers had learned to steer clear
of such places. They told stories of a
malignant spirit that wandered Chevé’s
tunnels, its feet pointing backward as it
walked. When Western cavers first dis-
covered the system, in 1986, they found
some delicate white bones beneath a
stone slab near the entrance: the re-
64 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
mains of children probably sacrificed
there hundreds of years ago by the Cui-
catec people.
When the call to base camp was
over, Gala hiked to the edge of the pool
with his partner, the British cave diver
Phil Short, and they put on their scuba
rebreathers, masks, and fins. They’d
spent the past two days on a platform
suspended above another sump, re-
building their gear. Many of the parts
had been cracked or contaminated on
the way down, so the two men took
their time, cleaning each piece and can-
nibalizing components from an extra
kit, knowing that they’d soon have no
time to spare. The water here was be-
tween fifty and sixty degrees—cold
enough to chill you within minutes—
and Gala had no idea where the pool
would lead. It might offer swift passage
to the next shaft or lead into an endless,
mud-dimmed labyrinth.
The rebreathers were good for four
hours underwater, longer in a pinch.
They removed carbon dioxide from a
diver’s breath by passing it through can-
nisters of soda lime, then recirculating
it back to the mouthpiece with a fresh
puff of oxygen. Gala and Short were ex-
pert at managing dive time, but in the
background another clock was always
ticking. The team had arrived in Feb-
ruary, three months before the rainy
season. It was only mid-March now,
but the weather wasn’t always predict-
able. In 2009, a flash flood had trapped
two of Gala’s teammates in these tun-
nels for five days, unsure if the water
would ever recede.
Gala had seen traces of its passage on
the way down: old ropes shredded to
fibre, phone lines stripped of insulation.
When the heavy rain began to fall, it
would flood this cave completely, trick-
ling down from all over the mountain,
gathering in ever-widening branches,
dislodging boulders and carving new
tunnels till it poured from the mountain
into the Santo Domingo River. “You
don’t want to be there when that hap-
pens,” Stone said. “There is no rescue,
period.” To climb straight back to the
surface, without stopping to rig ropes
and phone wire, would take them four
days. It took three days to get back from
the moon.
T he truth is they had nowhere better
to go. All the pleasant places had
already been found. The sunlit glades
and secluded coves, phosphorescent la-
goons and susurrating groves had been
mapped and surveyed, extolled in guide-
books and posted with Latin names. To
find something truly new on the planet,
something no human had ever seen, you
had to go deep underground or under-
water. They were doing both.
Caving is both the oldest of pastimes
and the most uncertain. It’s a game
played in the dark on an invisible field.
Until climbing gear was developed, in
the late nineteenth century, a steep shaft
could end an expedition, as could a
flooded tunnel—cavers call them termi-
nal sumps. If an entrance wasn’t too
small or a tunnel too tight, the cave
could be too deep to be searched by
torch or candlelight. In the classic
French caving books of the nineteen-
thirties and forties, “Ten Years Under
the Earth,” by Norbert Casteret, and
“Subterranean Climbers,” by Pierre
Chevalier, the expeditions are framed as
manly jaunts belowground—a bit of
stiff exercise before the lapin chasseur
back at the inn. The men wear oilskins
and duck-cloth trousers, carry rucksacks
and rope ladders, and light their way
with a horse-carriage lantern. At one
point in “Subterranean Climbers,” a
sweet scent of Chartreuse fills the air
and the party realizes, with dismay, that
their digestif has come to grief against a
fissure wall. Later, a rock tumbles loose
from a shaft and conks a caver named
François on the head, causing some dis-
comfort. The victim, Chevalier notes
with regret, was “poorly protected by
just an ordinary beret.”
Chevalier and his team went on to
map more than ten miles of caverns in
the Dent de Crolles, outside Grenoble.
Along the way, they set the world depth
record—twenty-one hundred and fifty-
nine feet—and developed a number of
caving tools still used today, including
nylon ropes and mechanical ascenders.
Casteret may have done even more to
transform the sport. In the summer of
1922, he was hiking in the French Pyr-
enees when he noticed a small stream
flowing from the base of a mountain.
He shucked off his clothes and lit a can-
dle, then wedged himself through the
crack and waded in. The tunnel fol-
lowed the stream for a couple of hun-
dred feet, then dipped below the water-
line. Rather than turn back, Casteret set
his candle on a ledge, took a deep
breath, and swam ahead, groping the
wall till he felt the ceiling open up above
him. He went on to explore many miles
of tunnels inside the cave, culminating
in a pair of large, airy galleries. The first
was covered in spectacular limestone
formations. The second was smaller and
drier, with a dirt floor. When Casteret
held his candle up to its walls, the flame
flickered over engravings of mammoths,
bison, hyenas, and other prehistoric
beasts—the remains of a religious sanc-
tuary some twenty thousand years old.
Casteret and Chevalier helped turn
caving into a heroic undertaking, and
the search for the world’s deepest cave
into an international competition—a
precursor to the space race. “Praise
Heaven, no one can give France lessons
in this matter of epic achievement,”
Casteret wrote, in his preface to Cheva-
lier’s book. “The race of explorers and
adventure-seekers has not died out from
our land.” By combining lighter, stron-
ger climbing gear with scuba tanks, cav-
ers went deeper and deeper into the
earth, more than tripling Chevalier’s
depth in the next sixty years. The record
would bounce between France, Spain,
and Austria (where one of Gala’s teams
went below fifty-three hundred feet
at Lamprechtsofen in 1998), before
settling in the Republic of Georgia,
in 2004.
A cave’s depth is measured from the
entrance down, no matter how high it is
above sea level. When prospecting for
deep systems, cavers start in mountains
with thick layers of limestone deposited
by ancient seas. Then they look for
evidence of underground streams and
for sinkholes—sometimes many miles
square—where rain and runoff get fun-
nelled into the rock. As the water seeps
in, carbon dioxide that it has picked up
from the soil and the atmosphere dis-
solves the calcium carbonate in the
stone, bubbling through it like water
through a sponge. In Georgia’s Krubera
Cave, in the Western Caucasus, great
chimneylike shafts plunge as much as
five hundred feet at a time, with crawl
spaces and flooded tunnels between
them. The current depth record was set
there in 2012, when a Ukrainian caver
named Gennadiy Samokhin descended
more than seventy-two hundred feet
from the entrance—close to a mile and
a half underground.
T he Chevé system is even deeper.
Drop some fluorescent dye into the
stream at the entrance, as a teammate
of Stone’s did in 1990, and it will tum-
ble into the Santo Domingo eight days
later, eleven miles away and eighty-five
hundred feet below. No other cave
in the world has such proven depth
(though geologists suspect
that some caves in China,
New Guinea, and Turkey
go even deeper). But that
isn’t enough to set a record:
cave depths, unlike moun-
tain heights, are inherently
subjective. Everest was the
world’s tallest peak long be-
fore Edmund Hillary and
Tenzing Norgay scaled it.
But a cave is only officially a cave when
people have passed through it. Until
then, it’s just another hole in the ground.
Deep caves rarely call attention to
themselves. Like speakeasies and opium
dens, they tend to hide behind shabby en-
trances. A muddy rift will widen into a
shaft, a crawl space into a vaulting nave.
Krubera begins as a grave-size hole full
of moss and crows’ nests. When local
cavers first explored it, in 1960, they
got less than three hundred feet down
before the shaft levelled off into an
impassable squeeze. It was more than
twenty years before the passage was dug
out, and another seventeen before a side
passage revealed the vast cave system
beneath it. Yet the signs were there all
along. The bigger the cave, the more air
goes through it, and Krubera was like a
wind tunnel in places. “If it blows, it
goes,” cavers say.
Chevé has what cavers call a Holly-
wood entrance: a gaping maw in the
face of a cliff, like King Kong’s lair on
Skull Island. A long golden meadow
leads up to it, bordered by rows of pines
and a stream that murmurs in from the
right. It feels ceremonial somehow, like
the approach to an altar. As you walk
beneath the overhang, the temperature
drops, and a musty, fungal scent drifts
up from the cave’s throat, where the
children’s bones were found. The stream
passes between piles of rubble and boul-
ders, their shadows thrown into loom-
ing relief by your headlamp. Then the
walls close in and the wind begins to
rise. It’s easy to see why the Cuicatec felt
that some dark presence abided here—
that something in this place needed to
be appeased.
Like Krubera, Chevé starts with a
precipitous drop: three thousand feet in
less than half a mile. But then it levels
off to a more gradual slope: to go an-
other vertical mile, you have to go ten
miles horizontally, at least half a mile
of it underwater. Although
the water eventually gathers
into a single stream, the
cave’s upper reaches are full
of oxbows and tributaries,
meandering and intertwin-
ing through the rock, paral-
leling one another for a
stretch, then veering apart or
abruptly ending. It’s tempt-
ing to imagine the system as
a giant Habitrail, with cavers scurrying
through it. But these tunnels weren’t
meant for inhabitants. They’re geologi-
cal formations, differentially eroded,
their soft deposits ground down to ser-
rated edges or carved into knobs and
spikes that the body has to contort itself
around. A long squirm down a tight
shaft will lead to an even longer crawl, a
slippery descent, and so on, in a natural
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 65
Bill Stone has led several trips to Chevé. “We can burn as many calories as a Tour de France rider every day underground,” he says.
obstacle course, relentless in its chal-
lenges. Near the main entrance, there’s
a thirty-foot section known as the Cat
Walk, where a caver can hoist his pack
and stroll forward without thinking.
It’s the only place like it in the system.
“Every other piece of this cave might kill
you,” Gala told me.
Bill Stone has led seven expeditions to
Chevé in the past ten years, all but one of
them with Gala. In 2003, his team dove
through a sump that had thwarted cav-
ers for more than a decade, then climbed
down to nearly five thousand feet, mak-
ing Chevé the deepest cave in the West-
ern Hemisphere. But there was no clear
way forward: the main passage ended in
a wall of boulders. The only option was
to try to bypass the blockage by entering
the system farther downslope. The fol-
lowing spring, Stone sent teams of Pol-
ish, Spanish, Australian, and American
66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
cavers bushwhacking across the cloud
forest in search of new entrances. They
found more than a hundred, including
a spectacular cliff-face opening called
Atanasio. The most promising, though,
was a more modest but gusty opening
labelled J2 (the “J” was for jaskinia—
Polish for “cave”). It was wide open at
the top, but pinched tight as soon as you
went down. The Australians called it
Barbie.
The J2 system runs roughly parallel
to the main Chevé passage and about a
thousand feet above it. The water’s exact
course through the mountain is hard to
predict, but cave surveys and Stone’s
3-D models suggest that the two sys-
tems eventually merge. If Gala and
Short could get past the sump beyond
Camp Four, their route should join up
with Chevé, drop another twenty-five
hundred feet, and barrel down to the
Santo Domingo. “Imagine a storm-tun-
nel system in a city,” Stone told me. “All
these feeders connect to a trunk and
then go out to an estuary. We’re in the
back door trying to get into that primary
conduit.” This is it, he said. This is the
big one. “If everything goes well, we’ll
be as far as anyone has ever been inside
the earth.”
D eep caving demands what Stone
calls siege logistics. It’s not so
much a matter of conquering a cave as
outlasting it. Just to set up base camp in
Mexico, his team had to move six
truckloads of material more than twelve
hundred miles and up a mountain.
Then the real work began. Exploring
Chevé is like drilling a very deep hole.
It can’t be done in one pass. You have
to go down a certain distance, return
to the surface, then drill down a little
PHOTOGRAPH BY EMILIANO GRANADO
farther, over and over, until you can go
no deeper. While one group is recover-
ing on the surface, the other is shuttling
provisions farther into the cave. Stone’s
team had to establish four camps under-
ground, each about a day’s hike apart.
Latrines had to be dug, ropes rigged,
supplies consumed, and refuse carried
back to the surface. Divers like Gala and
Short were just advance scouts for the
mud-spattered army behind them, lug-
ging thirty-pound rubber duffelbags
through the cave—sherpas of a sort,
though they’d never set foot on a moun-
taintop. Stone called them mules.
Two months earlier, in Texas, I’d
watched the final preparations for the
trip. Stone’s headquarters are about
fifteen minutes southeast of Austin, on
thirty acres of drought-stricken scrub.
There is a corrugated building out front
that’s home to Stone Aerospace, a ro-
botics firm he started in 1998, and a
two-story log house in back, where he
lives with his wife, Vickie, a fellow-
caver. (They met at a party where Stone
overheard her talking about tactical rig-
ging.) The trucks were scheduled to
leave in two days, and every corner of
the house had been requisitioned for
supplies. One room was piled with cook
pots, cable ladders, nylon line, and long
underwear. Another had dry suits, div-
ing masks, rebreathers, and oxygen bot-
tles. In the basement, eight long picnic
tables were stacked with more than a
thousand pounds of provisions. Shrink-
wrapped flats of peanuts, cashews, and
energy bars sat next to rows of four-litre
bottles filled with staples and dry mixes:
quinoa, oatmeal, whey protein, mangos,
powdered potatoes, and broccoli-cheese
soup. Stone had tamped in some of the
ingredients using an axe handle.
“In the past, I’d lose twenty-five
pounds on one of these trips,” Stone
told me. “We can burn as many calories
as a Tour de France rider every day un-
derground.” Ascending Chevé, he once
said, was like climbing Yosemite’s El
Capitan at night through a freezing wa-
terfall. To fine-tune the team’s diet, he’d
modelled it on Lance Armstrong’s pro-
gram, aiming for a ratio of seventeen per
cent protein, sixteen per cent fat, and
sixty-seven per cent carbohydrates. In
Mexico, the supplies would be replen-
ished with local beans, vegetables, and
dried machaca beef. “What you aren’t
going to find is candy,” Stone said.
“Stuff like Snickers—that’s bullshit.”
When I looked closer, though, I found
a bottle of miniature chocolates that
Vickie had hidden among the supplies.
Cavers, even more than climbers,
have to travel light and tight. Bulky
packs are a torture to get through nar-
row fissures, and every ounce is ex-
tracted tenfold in sweat. Over the years,
caving gear has undergone a brutal
Darwinian selection, lopping off redun-
dant parts and vestigial limbs. Tooth-
brushes have lost their handles, forks a
tine or two, packs their adjustable
straps. Underwear is worn for weeks on
end, the bacteria kept back by antibiotic
silver and copper threads. Simple items
are often best: Nalgene bottles, water-
proof and unbreakable, have replaced
all manner of fancier containers; cavers
even stuff their sleeping bags into them.
Yet the biggest weight savings have
come from more sophisticated gear.
Stone has a Ph.D. in structural engi-
neering from the University of Texas
and spent twenty-four years at the Na-
tional Institute of Standards and Tech-
nology, in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
His company has worked on numerous
robotics projects for NASA, including
autonomous submarines destined for
Europa, Jupiter’s sixth moon. The re-
breathers for the Chevé trip were of his
own design. Their carbon-fibre tanks
weighed a fourth of what conventional
tanks weigh and lasted more than four
times longer underwater; their software
could precisely regulate the mix and
flow of gases.
Stone’s newest obsession was a set of
methanol fuel cells from a company
called SFC Energy. Headlamps, phones,
scuba computers, and hammer drills
(used to drive rope anchors into the
rock) all use lithium batteries that have
to be recharged. On this trip the cavers
would also be carrying GoPro video
cameras for a documentary that would
be shown on the Discovery Channel. In
the past, Stone had tried installing a
paddle wheel underground to generate
electricity from the stream flow, with
fairly feeble results. But a single bottle
of methanol and four fuel cells—each
about the size of a large toaster—could
power the whole expedition. The ques-
tion was whether they’d survive. High-
tech gear tends to be fragile and finicky.
While I was in Texas, one of the re-
breathers kept shutting down for no ap-
parent reason (it was later found to have
a faulty fail-safe program), and this was
the sixth generation of that design. The
fuel cells weren’t nearly as robust. Stone
would keep them in shockproof, water-
tight cases, but he doubted that would
suffice. “We’re going to take them down
there and turn them into broken pieces
of plastic,” he said.
S tone knew what it meant to be a
battered piece of hardware: he’d
turned sixty that December and had
spent more than a year of his life under-
ground. His gangly frame—six feet
four, with a wingspan nearly as wide—
was kept knotty by free weights, and he
could still outclimb and outcarry most
twenty-five-year-olds. But he was get-
ting old for an extreme sport like this,
and he knew it. He had the whiskered,
weather-beaten look of an old lobster-
man. “I think it’s a little surprising to
him how hard the caving is on his body
these days,” one of the team members
told me. “I won’t say that he’s feeling his
age, but he’s realizing that he isn’t at the
pointy end of the stick anymore.”
As a leader, Stone models himself
on the great expeditionary Brits of the
past century. He has an engineer’s me-
thodical mind and an explorer’s heroic
self-image. He’s pragmatic about de-
tails and romantic about goals. His
teammates often compare him to Er-
nest Shackleton, another explorer who
felt most alive in the world’s most un-
pleasant places. But Shackleton, despite
shipwreck and starvation, never lost a
man under his direct command. (“I
thought you’d rather have a live donkey
than a dead lion,” he told his wife, after
failing to reach the South Pole.) Cave
diving is less forgiving. Stone has lost
four teammates on his expeditions, in-
cluding Henry Kendall, the Nobel
Prize-winning physicist. Kendall failed
to turn on the oxygen in his rebreather
while cave diving in Florida. Others
have succumbed to narcosis or hypoxia,
fallen from cliffs or had grand-mal sei-
zures, lost their way or lost track of
time. They’ve buried themselves so deep
that they couldn’t come back up.
Stone’s single-minded, almost mech-
anistic style can sometimes raise hack-
les. He can be inspiring one moment
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 67
and dismissive the next. “Bill has prob-
lems identifying people’s emotions,”
Gala told me. “So he doesn’t always
react to them well.” Then again it’s hard
to avoid tension in a sport that takes
such a mortal toll. Stone’s mentor, the
legendary cave diver Sheck Exley, re-
trieved forty corpses from diving sites in
Florida alone, then drowned in a Mex-
ican cenote in 1994. “When cavers be-
come cave divers, they usually die be-
cause of it,” Stone’s friend James Brown
told me. In 1988, Brown and Stone
were called in to help remove the body
of a female diver from a cave near Al-
toona, Pennsylvania. When they found
her, she was tangled in rope at the bot-
tom of a sump, arms so stiff that, Brown
recalled, Stone suggested they cut them
off for easier transport. “Nobody liked
that idea much,” Brown said. “But after
a while her arms softened up, and we
were able to fold them down.”
It took them two days to get her out,
with Stone pushing from behind. “He
kept saying, ‘Don’t leave me back here
if she gets stuck!’ ” Brown said. If there’s
one rule of caving, Stone told me, it’s
that you never leave a person behind.
Especially if they’re alive, he added. “If
they’re dead, it’s another matter.”
B y the time I arrived at base camp,
in mid-March, the team had set-
tled into a soggy routine. A week under-
ground followed by ten days on the sur-
face. Five days of drizzle followed by
one day of sun. They’d spent most of
the first month hauling gear up the
mountain—a muddy three-hour hike
“As far as I know, mine is the only job he’s created.”
from a farmhouse in the valley—load-
ing the heaviest items on burros and
the rest on their backs. They’d set up
tents and dug latrines, strung lights
and cut trails to the cave. The camp
was spread out beneath pines and low-
hanging clouds, on a rare stretch of rel-
atively flat ground. To one side, the
Discovery crew had erected a geodesic
dome with two full editing stations in-
side. To the other, the cavers had hung
a giant blue tarp, sheltering a long ply-
wood table, stacks of provisions, and
a pair of two-burner camp stoves. On
most expeditions, base camp is a place
to dry out and recover from infections
acquired underground—cracked skin
and inflamed cuts and staph bacteria
that burrow under your fingernails till
they ooze pus. But this forest was nearly
as wet as the cave.
“Welcome to Hell,” one of the cav-
ers told me, when I joined him by the
campfire that first night. “Where hap-
piness goes to die,” another added.
There was a pause, then someone
launched into the colonel’s monologue
from “Avatar”: “Out there, beyond that
fence, every living thing that crawls,
flies, or squats in the mud wants to kill
you and eat your eyes for jujubes. . . . If
you wish to survive, you need to culti-
vate a strong mental attitude.” It was
a favorite conceit around camp: the
cloud forest as hostile planet. But,
looking at all the gleaming eyes around
the fire, I was mostly reminded of the
Island of Lost Boys. Beneath all the
mud and gloom and dire admonitions,
there burned an ember of self-satisfac-
tion—of pride in their wretched cir-
cumstance and willingness to endure
it. As Gala put it, “It’s just one contin-
uous miserable.”
Fifty-four cavers from thirteen coun-
tries, forty-three of them men and
eleven women, would pass through the
camp that spring. The team had a core
of twenty or so veteran members, rein-
forced by recruits from caving groups
worldwide. On any given day, the cave
might be home to a particle physicist
from Berkeley, a molecular biologist
from Russia, a spacecraft engineer from
Washington, D.C., a rancher from
Mexico, a geologist from Sweden, a tree
surgeon from Colorado, a mathemati-
cian from Slovenia, a theatre director
from Poland, and a cave guide from
Canada who lived in a Jeep and spent
two hundred days a year underground.
They were a paradoxical breed: restlessly
active yet fond of tight places, highly
analytical yet indifferent to risk. They
seemed built for solitude—pale, phleg-
matic creatures drawn to deep holes and
dark passages—yet they worked to-
gether as a selfless unit: the naked mole
rats of extreme sport. As far as I could
tell, only two things truly connected
them: a love of the unknown and a tol-
erance for pain.
Matt Covington, a thirty-three-
year-old caver from Fayetteville, was a
typical specimen. A professor of geology
at the University of Arkansas, he had
earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics but
switched fields so that he could spend
more time underground. He had a build
best described as Flat Stanley. Six feet
four but only a hundred and fifty
pounds, he could squeeze through a
crevice six and a half inches wide. “My
head isn’t the limiting factor,” he told
me. “It’s my hips.” Covington was a vet-
eran of seven Stone expeditions as well
as caving trips to Sumatra, Peru, and
other remote formations. Five years ear-
lier, he was climbing up a cliff face in
Lechuguilla Cave, near Carlsbad Cav-
erns, when an anchor came loose from
the rock. Covington’s feet caught on
the cliff as he fell, tumbling him onto
his left arm, causing compound frac-
tures. Rather than wait for rescue, he
spent the next thirteen hours dragging
himself to the surface. “The crawling
was fairly uncomfortable,” he allowed.
“There was a lot of rope to climb.”
 When I first met Covington, late one
night, he’d just slouched back into camp
after five days underground. His eyes
were bloodshot, his blond hair clumped
and matted, his skin as blanched and
fuzzy as moldy yogurt. He was so tired
that he could barely stand, and his
clothes reeked of cave funk. Yet he
seemed fairly content. “A good caver is
one who forgets how bad it really is,” he
said. There was more to it than that,
though. Covington didn’t feel claustro-
phobic underground; he felt at home.
The rock walls, to him, offered a kind of
embrace. As a boy, he told me, he used
to flop around so much in his sleep that
he often fell on the floor. Rather than
climb back up, he’d crawl under the bed
and stay till morning. He felt better
there, beneath the springs, than he did
looking up at the ceiling in his big
empty room.
It was an instinct almost everyone
here seemed to share. One of the cavers
remembered staring at a slice of rye
bread as a child, fascinated by all the air
bubbles beneath the crust. He wanted
to go down there. Gala was so comfort-
able in caves that he sometimes felt as if
they were made for humans. “The pas-
sages are exactly the right size for my
body to fit in,” he told me. And his wife,
Kasia, who worked as a photo editor in
Warsaw, was nearly as happy under-
ground as he. They took turns explor-
ing the cave and taking care of their
daughter, Zuzia, up on the surface.
Zuzia had spent much of her life watch-
ing people disappear into holes and
reëmerge weeks later. She traversed her
first cliff face at the age of four, in
Spain’s Picos de Europa mountains,
and kept a map above her bed with pi-
rate flags pinned on all the countries
she’d visited. When she first came to
Mexico, in 2009, she would sometimes
cry out in frustration, “It’s so uncom-
fortable here!” Now she flitted between
tents like a forest sprite, half naked in
the cold, fencing with corncobs and set-
ting traps for mice. Life at camp had
built up her immune system, Gala as-
sured me, and had taught her the “skills
of dynamic risk assessment.”
I wished that I could see Chevé
through her eyes. Before her father went
underground with Phil Short, for their
long hike beyond Camp Four, he’d read
to Zuzia from “The Hobbit.” Chevé
was no Lonely Mountain. Yet it had
glistening caverns and plummeting bore-
holes, stalagmites tall as organ pipes and
great galleries draped in flowstone,
deeper than any goblin lair. And they
were right beneath her feet. “When you
squeeze through these small holes into
these big halls, you feel like you’re the
only person on the earth,” Gala said.
“It’s like the kingdom of the dwarves.”
G ala had been exploring Chevé with
Stone so long that he could nearly
navigate it blindfolded. After a while,
he said, you start to create a map of
the system in your mind, to memorize
each contortion and foothold needed to
climb through a passage. On the steep-
est pitches, certain rocks almost seemed
to smile and wave at him, and to reach
for his hand. He would grab them,
thinking, Old friend! And yet the deeper
he went the more unfamiliar the terri-
tory became. By the thirteenth day, the
escalating uncertainty—the risk of a
careless stumble or a snapped limb so far
from the surface—was starting to weigh
on him. “The further in you go, the
more you begin to doubt and question
yourself,” he told me. “What the fuck
am I doing here?”
The sump beyond Camp Four was
like nothing Short and Gala had seen
before. The three sumps higher up in
this system were relatively shallow and
less than five hundred feet long. This
sump was more than thirty feet deep,
and it seemed to go on and on. And
something more rare: it was beautiful.
The water was a luminous turquoise,
flowing over pure-white sand; the lime-
stone was streaked with ochre and rust.
Most sumps are cloudy, tubelike pas-
sages carved by underground streams,
but this one had been a dry cave not
long ago. The stalactites on its ceiling
could only have been formed by slow
drip. With its lofty chambers and lim-
pid water, it reminded Gala of the blue
holes of Florida and the caves of the Yu-
catán. Finning through it felt like flying.
The hazards of cave diving are insep-
arable from its seductions. Wide-open
tunnels can fork into a maze; white
sands swirl up to obscure your view.
You think that you know the way back
only to reach a dead end, with no place
to come up for air. “People think that
cave diving is an adrenaline sport, but
really it’s the opposite,” Short told me.
“Whenever you feel your adrenaline
racing, you have to slow down. Stop,
breathe, think, act, and, in general,
abort. That’s the rule in cave diving.”
Short is one of the sport’s premier
practitioners, with experience as far
afield as the Sahara and shipwrecks off
Guam. His body is a testament to its
rigors: long and arachnid, skin taut over
bone, head shaved to shed its last en-
cumbrance. With his rapid-fire talk and
glasses that seem to magnify his eyes, he
could pass for a street preacher or a
pamphleteer. But his absurdist wit was
a great gift around a campfire, and his
diplomacy often took the edge off
Stone’s blunt directives. Gala and Short
were a good match: one quiet, the other
loquacious; one expert at climbing, the
other at diving. Just as Gala could pick
his way through Chevé by memory and
internal gyroscope, Short could divine a
sump’s path from half-conscious clues:
the flow of current and its fluctuating
temperature, the shape of the walls and
ripples in the sand. Still, he took no
chances. As they swam from chamber to
chamber, the beams of their headlamps
needling the dark, he unspooled a three-
millimetre line behind him, like The-
seus in the Labyrinth.
An hour later, he signalled for Gala
to stop. Below them in the sand was the
line they’d laid down fifteen minutes
earlier. The tunnel had led them on a
loop. They’d expected the sump to be
about a thousand feet long, but they’d
already gone twice that distance, and
time was running out. Cave divers like
to ration their air supply by a rule of
thirds: one part for the way in, another
for the way out, and a third in reserve.
On a four-hour rebreather, that left
them less than half an hour for explor-
ing. The cave was a honeycomb, they
realized, with tunnels angling off in
every direction and hardly any current to
guide them. “There were passages ev-
erywhere, everywhere,” Gala recalled.
“It was so complex we could spend a
year looking.”
In the end, they just picked a tunnel
and hoped for the best. When they’d
backtracked around the loop, reeling
in their line, they came to a kind of
four-way intersection. One passage led
back to the beginning of the sump, an-
other to the loop behind them, a third
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 69
to a dead end they’d explored earlier.
That left one unexplored passage. It
took them up a short corridor, along a
rising slope of terraced mustard-colored
flowstone, and into a small domed
chamber. There was an air bell at the
top about the size of a car trunk, so they
swam up and took off their helmets and
neoprene hoods to talk. They seemed to
be at a dead end. They were cold, tired,
and disoriented, and their air ration had
nearly run out. There was no choice but
to head back. “We were just a little over-
whelmed by this dive,” Gala told me.
Then they heard the waterfall.
A mile above them, at base camp,
Stone was waiting impatiently for
their call. This was the pivotal mo-
ment in the expedition—the day for
which he’d spent four years perfecting
gear, recruiting cavers, and raising
money. (The total budget for the trip
was roughly three hundred and fifty
thousand dollars, most of it paid for by
equipment sponsors and the Discovery
Channel.) He had expected Gala and
Short’s reconnaissance trip to take less
than six hours—two hours to dive the
sump, two hours to look around and
find a camp site, and another two to
swim back and call in—yet nine hours
had passed. “There are a bunch of sce-
narios that could be going on right
now,” he told the Discovery cinematog-
rapher, Zachary Fink. “Even a one-
kilometre swim with fins would take
only about an hour. And that was way
beyond our limit.”
Stone looked haggard and thin, his
mustache drooping over sallow skin.
Weeks of shuttling supplies into the
cave had taken a toll on him. He was a
strong climber and diver, but he wasn’t
a “squeeze freak” like some of the oth-
ers. His broad, bony shoulders weren’t
built for these tunnels. In the tightest
fissures he had to take off his helmet just
to turn his head, or strip down to his dry
suit and wriggle between walls for hun-
dreds of feet. (They called one passage
the Contusion Tubes.) “It’s hypother-
mic as hell down there,” he told me.
“The wind is whipping through, the
water’s in contact with the rock, and
you can just feel the calories being
sucked out. It can be more dangerous
than a high-altitude peak at twenty-
five below.” By the time he’d resurfaced
70 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
a few days earlier, he was coming down
with a flu. Then it rained for three and
a half days.
It was late evening when the call
finally came: “Base camp, base camp,
base camp!” Stone rushed over to the
phone and hit the talk button. “Tell us
what happened,” he said. There was a
blast of static, then Short’s clipped Brit-
ish accent came crackling over the line.
“We have good news and we have com-
plicated news,” he said. “From a point of
view of future exploration, complicated
is today’s understatement.”
The waterfall could mean only one
thing, Short and Gala knew. They’d
reached the end of the sump and the
river was flowing nearby. How to get
there? When Gala ducked his head un-
derwater and looked around, the cham-
ber looked sealed off. But when he
looked again his headlamp picked up
an odd texture in the wall to his right.
There was a gap in it just below the wa-
terline—wide enough for a person to
squeeze through. Gala could tell that his
rebreather wouldn’t fit, so he handed it
to Short, along with his mask, helmet,
and side tanks. “I left him holding all
these things with his teeth and both his
hands,” he recalled later. Then he held
his breath and dove through.
When he resurfaced on the other
side, he was in a fast-flowing canal of
clear water. The walls were formed by
ancient breakdown piles, their boulders
napped in calcite; the low ceiling was
hung with stalactites. As he swam, a
wide, airy passage opened up ahead,
with a large pool in the distance. It
glimmered in his headlight. He hiked
over to it and swam across, feeling light
and buoyant without his rebreather.
He could hear the roar of the waterfall
growing louder as he went, but an enor-
mous stalagmite blocked the way, with
only a thin gap to one side. He stretched
an arm and a leg through the open-
ing and shimmied around, thankful
again to be rid of his gear. When he was
through, he found himself in a great
chamber filled with mist and spray, its
floor split by a yawning chasm. The
river ran into it from the right and fell
farther than his light could follow.
Across the chamber, thirty or forty feet
away, a huge borehole stretched into the
darkness. This is it, Gala thought, the
breakthrough they’d imagined. With
any luck, it would take them straight to
Chevé’s main passage.
Stone wasn’t so sure. “Is there any
place at all over there that you saw that
would be suitable for a camp?” he asked
Short over the phone, when the story
was done. “Negative. There is not a sin-
gle flat surface other than the surface of
the river.” Stone clutched his head and
frowned. The sump was too long. Two
thousand feet! They didn’t have enough
line down there to rig that distance.
Without rigging, most of the team
couldn’t dive the sump safely, and with-
out their help Gala and Short couldn’t
resupply for the next push. “The whole
game had changed,” Stone told me
later. “Just diving through wasn’t the
game. The game was to get all the sup-
port material to the other side. It was
like running a war: if you don’t get the
food and fuel and ammo to the front
line, you’re going to stall out.”
Only a few dozen people in the
world had both the caving expertise and
the scuba skills to go this deep in the
cave. Of those, twelve had originally
agreed to join the expedition. Then the
number began to drop. Three died be-
fore the expedition began: one on a
deep dive in Ireland, another in an un-
derwater crevice in Australia, the third
from carbon monoxide poisoning in
Cozumel. Three had left early or had
not yet arrived. And three had physical
limitations: James Brown had gimpy
knees, a Mexican diver named Nico Es-
camilla had a pulled groin muscle, and
a veteran diver named Tom Morris had
torn a rotator cuff. “It was like getting
hit in the head with a two-by-four,”
Stone told me. “Oh, crap! We’ve lost
most of our divers! The three that are
qualified to dive the sump are the two
CLOCKWISE: KASIA BIERNACKA; MARCIN GALA; KASIA BIERNACKA
that are down there and me—and, God
bless them, Phil and Marcin want to see
daylight.”
It was too late to recruit new divers
to the team. The best candidate, a vet-
eran British caver named Jason Mallin-
son, had joined another expedition,
across the river at a cave system called
Huautla. “He’s one of the best divers in
the world,” Stone told me. “But he has
a certain personality—it’s abrasive, and
what I really wanted this year was har-
mony, and I got it.” Stone had planned
to join Gala and Short for the last leg of
the expedition, to see the very deepest
Clockwise from top: a caver rappels down a water-
fall; Matt Covington, a caver from Arkansas, who
says that “a good caver is one who forgets how bad it
really is”; Marcin Gala, a Polish veteran, who
climbed the deepest cave system then known, in
the French Alps, when he was seventeen.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 71

regions of the cave. But without more
divers to support them he wasn’t sure it
was safe to continue. “They did a fantas-
tic thing there, but it may also be the
end of that route,” he said, after Short
got off the line. “There is no glory in
rushing into something like that and
losing a friend. It just is not worth it.”
W ord of Stone’s misgivings filtered
down to Gala and Short as they
worked their way back up the cave,
camping with the support crews. It
seemed a kind of betrayal. The yo-yo lo-
gistics of deep caving required that they
return to the surface to rest and reprovi-
sion, but they had every intention of
going back down. Yes, the sump was
longer than expected, the conditions
more challenging. But they’d found ex-
actly what they wanted on the other
side. How could they stop now?
“My thinking was that Bill is just
tired with this cave—that this is just an
excuse not to come back,” Gala told me.
“I think that he spent too much time
preparing this expedition, making all
these tools, all these deals.” But Stone
insists that his reluctance was just a
matter of safety and logistics—an equa-
tion like any other, balancing risk and
reward. On Gala and Short’s first eve-
ning back at base camp, the scene
around the campfire got so tense that
Stone shouted at Zachary Fink to turn
off his camera. “It’s always like that at
some point in an expedition,” Gala told
me. “There’s always a shouting match
between Bill and me, with someone
almost crying.” But over bourbon that
night and coffee the next morning, they
slowly hashed out a plan. They would
have to work fast, resupplying the camps
themselves and exploring the new tun-
nels without backup divers. If they
hung hammocks from the wall beyond
Sump Four, they could bivouac there
and explore the cave for another three
weeks before they ran out of rope. With
any luck, they’d reach the Chevé junc-
ture before they were done.
Stone went underground the next
day. Short took five days to rest and
heal—half the usual recovery time, after
three times the usual stay underground—
and by the morning of March 21st he
was leading a ragtag team down the
mountain. This was just a five-day trip to
help prepare the cave for the final push.
72 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
But with the expedition so under-
manned, Short had no choice but to lead
the team and to bring two novices along:
Patrick van den Berg, a hulking informa-
tion-security specialist from Holland,
and David Rickel, an emergency medical
technician from Texas. Van den Berg
was a weekend caver in relatively poor
shape (“I get most of my exercise moving
a mouse around,” he told me). Rickel was
the team medic. He had a rock climber’s
ropy build, but the closest he’d come to
deep caving was working in an iron-ore
mine in Australia.
Short was of two minds about taking
them. He knew that one injury could
derail the whole expedition, and that
the cave ahead would test even the fit-
test athlete. “You can lift weights and go
wall climbing and run a few miles every
day, but it’s not the same,” he told me,
as we wound our way down the slope.
“When you’re nineteen days under-
ground, in the cold and wet without a
bed, with a forty-pound pack on your
back, crawling on your hands and knees
or climbing up and down cliffs or diving
through sumps, and then you come
back and resurface, and four days into
your ten-day break some sadist wants to
send you back down under, and you
end up volunteering to go—most peo-
ple hear that and they think you’re stark
raving mad.” Yet Short was an optimist
at heart and an experienced teacher—he
gave scuba and cave-diving lessons in
England—and he’d seen even novices
accomplish unimaginable things. “It’s
not the body that breaks, it’s the mind,”
he said. “If you compare this to what the
British infantry were lugging in the
Ardennes in World War I, or what
Shackleton’s team did in the Antarctic,
this shit is easy. They were trudging up
those slopes with old-fashioned ropes
and no oxygen, and I’m sitting here com-
plaining about the hole in my antibac-
terial underwear.”
Whether van den Berg took any
comfort in this wasn’t clear. Less than
an hour from camp, he was already red-
faced and wheezing, sweat streaming
down his chest. The altitude was getting
to him, he told me. Hiking at seven
thousand feet made him feel like he was
breathing through a straw. When the
team set down its packs for a brief rest,
Short came over and crouched beside
him. “I’m a little concerned that you’re
as tired as you are after just walking
down a hill,” he told him. “Your pulse
was up to one-sixty, which David tells
me is pretty high.” Van den Berg shook
his head and insisted that he was fine.
He wouldn’t have a problem going
down the cave. “But you have to come
back out, too,” Short told him.
We were headed toward a cave en-
trance known as the Last Bash, about a
mile from base camp. Discovered in
2005, it was a side entrance to the J2
passage, an hour or so down the slope
from the original entrance. It would
allow the team to bypass a sump and
cut twelve hours out of the trip down,
but it was tighter and more punishing
than the other entrance—just a crack in
the rock ten feet above the trail, flanked
by boulders and elephant-ear vines. If
Short hadn’t pointed it out, I would
have passed right by it.
Short’s team peered up at the opening
for a moment, then slowly put on their
gear. They stepped into their waterproof
caving suits and climbing harnesses, at-
tached special ratchets for rappelling
down cliffs, and strapped on their hel-
mets and headlamps. “This is not going
to be some macho-driven bullshit,” Short
assured them. “It’s going to be a slow
bumble down the cave, with double din-
ners when we get to camp.” They made
a quick snack of crackers and energy
bars, while Rickel checked van den
Berg’s heart rate again. It had dropped to
a hundred and twenty. “How did you
end up here?” van den Berg asked him
when he’d finished. Rickel laughed. “A
long sequence of poor life choices,” he
said. Then they crawled into the crack
one by one and disappeared.
T he rains were getting to be a serious
concern now. The tunnels below
the Last Bash weren’t known to flood,
but neither were the tunnels above it
before 2009. Then some gravel got
clogged in a fissure at the bottom of a
pool, flooding the chamber behind it
and trapping seven people in the cave
below. Five were able to dive out, but
the other two, Nikki Green and David
Ochel, had to sit and wait, not knowing
if the tunnel would clear. “We had no
food for five days, just watching the
water,” Green told me. In the end, the
rain abated long enough for them to
climb out, and then the cave flooded for
the rest of the season. “We stayed too
long,” Green said.
A neighboring cave, known as
Charco, had an even more unpleasant
history. In 2001, a team of six cavers
was heading back to the surface there,
after a week of surveying, when they
noticed the underground stream start-
ing to rise. It had been raining for two
days by then, and the tunnel was so
tight that it began to flood. Charco is a
place to make even cavers claustropho-
bic: the first camp is a twelve-hour
crawl from the surface, mostly on your
belly. By the time the last team mem-
ber neared the entrance, the water in
the tunnel was inches from the ceiling.
As he treaded water, lifting his face up
to breathe, bits of soft white debris
drifted toward his mouth and got
caught in his hair. But it wasn’t debris,
as it turned out. A cow had died in the
entrance that spring. Its belly was in-
fested with maggots and the rains had
washed them into the cave.
If there was an advantage to going
deep, it was that the cave was fairly ster-
ile. In the lower reaches of J2, the only
signs of life were a few translucent crus-
taceans and bits of refuse that washed
down from above. (In the Huautla sys-
tem, teams sometimes found Popsicle
sticks a mile belowground.) By early
April, the camps were reprovisioned,
Rickel and van den Berg were safely
back on the surface with Stone, and
Gala and Short were alone once again
at Camp Four. The sump beyond it,
once the dark side of the moon, now
seemed comfortingly familiar. Short
had discovered a larger opening in the
chamber at the end, which allowed
them to dive out with their rebreathers
and equipment. When they had swum
down the canal on the other side and
followed the tunnel to the misty cham-
ber with the waterfall, it was as if they’d
arrived at another beginning. “Now we
were in truly dry, unexplored cave,”
“Get another cab, Dad. This one is creepin’ me out.”
t t
Short told me. “Our lights were the first
light that had fallen on this place since
it had been created.”
Two promising passages lay ahead:
the fossil gallery where the river had
once flowed, and the canyonlike fissure
where it now fell. They took a moment
to gather themselves at the top of the
falls and to make a pot of hot choco-
late. But Gala couldn’t bear to wait.
While Short tended the stove, he free-
climbed the forty feet to the other
side of the canyon—ropes would come
later. Then he shouted at Short to
join him.
It was just as they’d hoped: a cavern-
ous passage, perhaps fifteen feet high
by thirty feet wide, with a packed mud
floor. There was even a flat spot ahead
where they could set up a camp. The
gallery followed the path of the tunnel
behind them at first, then meandered
left and right, up and down. Gala and
Short took surveyor’s notes as they
went, one man walking ahead and
holding up a saucepan lid while the
other shot a laser at it to get the dis-
tance. They used a compass and a cli-
nometer to measure the tunnel’s direc-
tion and slope, marked the numbers
with a Sharpie onto a waterproof sheet,
then copied them onto a piece of col-
ored tape and tied the tape to the refer-
ence point. (Back at base camp, Stone
would enter the data on his laptop to
create 3-D maps of the cave.) This was
standard practice in new tunnels and
could add hours to a trip. But not here:
after three or four hundred feet, the
passage abruptly ended. Rather than
drop down to rejoin the stream, it had
circled back on itself like the oxbow in
the sump, ending in a large chamber
walled with flowstone. It would take
them no farther.
Gala and Short trudged back the
way they’d come, their spirits deflated.
A dry fossil gallery is the caver’s version
of a superhighway: the fastest, safest
way underground. But at least they had
another option. “There was still the wa-
terfall,” Gala told me, “and it had to go
further down.” He and Short strapped
on their climbing harnesses and un-
packed their rigging. The hammer drill
had gone dead after the battery got
wet—the fuel cells had all met the same
fate—so Gala had to knot the rope
around a rock to anchor it. But it held
firm as they rappelled down the chasm.
Forty feet below, the water thundered
into a shallow pool, then slipped down
a stair-step streambed to another, much
larger pool below. They’d left their dry
suits at the top of the falls to air out, so
they had no choice but to swim across
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 73
Base camp in a cloud forest near the Chevé system. Just to set up the camp, Stone’s team had to move six truckloads of material more
in their thermal underwear. The water
here was a few degrees warmer than
higher up in the cave, but still close to
forty degrees below body temperature,
and the sopping cloth kept it close to
their skin. Yet they kept moving for-
ward. “Expedition fever had bitten us,”
Short says.
When they reached the far shore, the
PHOTOGRAPH BY EMILIANO GRANADO
water cascaded down to yet another
pool, twenty feet below. They rigged
ropes for the descent, scrabbled down,
and swam across, their limbs trembling
as the cold sank into them. In the dis-
tance, the dusty beam of Gala’s head-
lamp picked out a pile of boulders in
their path, but this only quickened his
pulse. It reminded him so clearly of
a passage higher up, where a series of
pools led to a breakdown pile along a
fault line, and then a wide-open tunnel
beyond it. “I had this feeling that we
were almost done,” he told me. “We will
climb these boulders. We will find a
huge borehole, and that will open the
way to Chevé.”
It was not to be. When Gala and

than twelve hundred miles and up a mountain.
Short arrived at the breakdown pile, it
was just the back end of a small sealed
chamber—another cul-de-sac. Its boul-
ders were bound together with flow-
stone, the holes between them no larger
than your hand. “There was no air, no
anything,” Gala recalls. As for the river,
it had found a long crack in the floor
less than an inch wide, and spooled
through it like an endless bolt of tur-
quoise cloth.
They stood there for a moment in
shock, not quite believing that they’d
reached the end. They knew that the
cave kept on going below, gathering
the waters of Chevé beneath them. Yet
there was no way forward. Like the
cavers in Krubera before the side tun-
nel was discovered, they had yet to
unlock the system’s secret door. Gala
looked over at Short—he was shak-
ing uncontrollably now, his wiry limbs
lacking all insulation—and was grate-
ful, once again, to have him at his side.
“It’s like a friendship during war,” he
told me. “So strong an experience, it
ties souls together.” He clasped Short’s
shoulder and told him to go make
some hot drinks while he finished sur-
veying. Then they packed up their gear
and began the long climb back to the
surface.
D eep caving has no end. Every
depth record is provisional, every
barrier a false conclusion. Every cave
system is a jigsaw puzzle, groped at
blindly in the dark. A mountain climber
can at least pretend to some mastery
over the planet. But cavers know better.
When they’re done, no windy overlook
awaits them, no sea of salmon-tinted
clouds. Just a blank wall or an impass-
able sump and the knowledge that there
are tunnels upon tunnels beyond it. The
earth goes on without them. “People
often misunderstand,” Short told me.
“All you find is cave. There is nothing
else down there.”
When I spoke to Stone recently, he
was already planning his next trip to
Chevé. His team had brought back
some intriguing data, he said. Gala’s
survey showed that the end of J2 lies
directly below a cave entrance discov-
ered in the early nineties. The tunnel
beyond it is fairly cramped, but there’s
enough air blowing through to suggest
that it leads to a larger passage—one
that could bypass the blockage in J2. If
Stone’s team can connect the two tun-
nels, then drop down into the main
Chevé passage, they might still stitch
the whole system together. “Where did
the water go a million years ago? That’s
what you have to ask yourself,” Stone
said. “As a cave diver, you have to think
four-dimensionally.” In the meantime,
this spring, he was joining an expedi-
tion across the river to Huautla, where
Jason Mallinson had managed to
reach a depth of more than five thou-
sand feet—a new record for the West-
ern Hemisphere. Huautla can never go
as deep as Krubera, Stone said, much
less the full Chevé system. But it could
well be the longest deep cave in the
world. Why not see how far it goes?
That was as good a reason as any. For
most of the team, though, it wasn’t the
chance at a record that would bring
them back, or even the lure of virgin
cave. It was the camaraderie under-
ground—the deep fellowship of shared
misery. The camps down there were just
a few damp tents on rubble, clustered
around a propane flame. The food was
the same dehydrated stuff they ate
up top. A trip to the latrine could be
a life-threatening experience—a squat
on slippery rocks above a thundering
chasm. But after weeks underground,
even that smell could lift your spirits. It
held the promise of dry clothes and hot
coffee, black humor and noisy sex,
drowned out by sing-alongs. Gala and
Short spent one very good night holler-
ing “C Is for Cookie” until they were
hoarse.
On their twenty-first day under-
ground, when they finally emerged from
the cave’s rocky clutch, they blinked up
at the sun like newborns. Their skin was
ashen, their eyes owl-wide and dilated.
“I had these mixed emotions,” Gala told
me. “I understood that this is the end of
J2—nine years of my life, of the most
beautiful exploration of my life. It was
a sad story.” Yet it had also been the
longest and hardest trip he’d ever taken,
and it made the return to the surface all
the sweeter. The green of the forest, so
luminous and deep, seemed nearly psy-
chedelic after weeks of dun-colored
earth and the pale wash of his head-
lamp. The smell of leaves and rain and
the workings of sunlight were almost
overwhelming.
“It is beautiful here, isn’t it?” Gala
had told me when we first met, on a
gray, drizzly morning at base camp.
“Listen to these strange birds! When
I’m back on the surface, just by contrast,
I enjoy every piece of my life. Every-
thing is fantastic.” He laughed. “Some
people say that all this caving is just for
a better taste of tea.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 75
Father Zerai, who left Eritrea as a teen-ager, says that the deaths of immigrants trying to reach Europe are “the fruit of a sick relationship
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX MAJOLI
 LETTER FROM LAMPEDUSA
THE ANCHOR
The Africans who risk all to reach Europe look to an exiled priest as their savior.
BY MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ
I n Eritrea, you turn eighteen and go
into the Army, and you stay in the
Army for many years, sometimes for the
rest of your life. You work for a few dol-
lars a day—in construction, farming,
mining. Those who refuse are sent to
prison. There is no other choice.
We wanted a better life, a free and
normal life. In Europe, we heard, you
can live however you want. And so we
left Eritrea and entered the desert. We
went on foot and took very little with
us—some dates, water, a number to call
when we ran out of money, a number to
call if we made it to Europe.
We walked west, into Sudan, to
Khartoum, then into the Sahara and
into Libya. There were a hundred and
thirty-one of us. This is the story that
we told later, to the police, the journal-
ists, and the courts. One day in Libya, a
band of armed Somalis came upon us.
They forced us into vans and brought
us to the town of Sabha, where they
locked us up in a house. They made us
stand for hours. They tied us upside
down and beat the soles of our feet.
They held weapons to our heads and
fired bullets into the floor. They drove
two of our young women into the des-
ert, raped them, and returned with only
one. They poured water over the floor
and tried to shock us with a live wire,
but they succeeded only in burning out
the lights.
The Somalis wanted a ransom of
thirty-three hundred dollars a head.
Two weeks later, most of our families
had paid, so they drove us to Tripoli.
They took us to the smuggler Ermias.
He was dark-skinned, around thirty,
well fed. He took sixteen hundred dol-
lars from each of us to arrange a boat to
Lampedusa. It’s an Italian island about
a day off the Libyan coast. Many of us
had never seen the sea and did not
MAGNUM
know how to swim. We asked if we
could pay extra for life jackets; Ermias
between the north and south of the world.” refused. His men locked us in a ware-
house with many others, where we
waited through the month of Septem-
ber, 2013. On October 2nd, hours be-
fore dawn, they drove us to the shore
and ferried us out to a boat, sixty-five
feet long. They packed more than five
hundred of us onto the bridge and the
deck and down in the cabins. The
smugglers did not like the look of the
boat, so heavy and low in the water, and
so old. But they said, “God willing, you
will be lucky.”
The boat set off. We sent the
women and children belowdecks,
where they would be more comfort-
able. Some of us wrote the phone
numbers of our families on our clothes.
One woman, pinned in a crowded
cabin, wrote a number on the wall. It
belonged to a Catholic priest, Abba
Mussie Zerai—Father Moses. His
number is written on the walls of the
prisons in Libya. We believed that he
could make a rescue boat appear in the
middle of the sea.
The captain was a Tunisian man
who did not speak our language. He ran
the engine through sunset. At three in
the morning of October 3rd, the engine
stopped. We were close enough to see
the lights on shore. Lampedusa. We
waited for the engine to start again. We
began to take on water. The captain
picked up something and ripped it—
was it a bedsheet, a piece of clothing, a
blanket? He dipped it in fuel and set it
on fire to signal for help. Some people
panicked when they saw it burning, and
everybody pushed toward the bow. It
sank beneath our shifting weight, and
the boat turned over and dumped us
into the sea.
We said, “Let’s try our luck.” We
started swimming. Hands reached out
to drag us down. We shook them off.
Through the portholes, we could see in-
side the cabins. Some saw their sons
and daughters and wives and chose to
drown; some drowned trying to save
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 77
them. Some called out their names and
the names of their villages, so that news
of their deaths might be carried to shore.
A round 9 A . M . on October 3rd,
Father Mussie Zerai’s telephone
began to ring repeatedly. Outside his
apartment at the Catholic diocese in
Fribourg, Switzerland, the Alps rose
above the red-tiled roofs and the Gothic
cathedral of the medieval town. The
phone calls came from Sweden, Nor-
way, Eritrea, Italy, Sudan, and Lampe-
dusa. A boat travelling from Libya had
caught fire and sunk. At least a hundred
and eleven people were dead and more
than two hundred were missing. It was
depressingly familiar news—in the past
twenty years, more than twenty thou-
sand immigrants have died on their way
to Europe. There would be many more
were it not for Zerai, a thirty-nine-year-
old Eritrean exile, whose phone number
circulates among Europe-bound Afri-
cans like a Mediterranean 911. Boats in
distress call Zerai by satellite phone, and
he writes down their coördinates and
passes them on to the Italian authorities
to arrange for rescue. When there is no
rescue, Zerai takes to Italian TV and
radio and mass e-mail to name those
whom he believes to be responsible.
According to the Italian Coast Guard,
Zerai’s calls have helped save five thou-
sand lives.
What struck Zerai on October 3rd
was the boat’s proximity to land. The
drowning of hundreds of people less
than a kilometre from Lampedusa
seemed like a manifestation of Europe’s
approach to African migration—a
hardening of its borders coupled with a
disturbing indifference to human life.
He told an Italian news service that the
deaths were “the fruit of a sick relation-
ship between the north and south of the
world,” an observation quickly picked
up by La Repubblica. That day, Pope
Francis called the shipwreck “a dis-
grace.” Coast Guard divers spent the
next week pulling bodies from the hull.
Among them, under a hundred and fifty
feet of water, was a newborn baby, still
attached by the umbilical cord to his
mother, who had drowned while giv-
ing birth.
Zerai grew up during Eritrea’s long
struggle for independence. When he
was very young, his home town came
under attack. As the walls of his house
shook with bomb blasts, his grand-
mother led him and his siblings to a
bunker belowground, knelt with them,
and prayed. Later, when a close relative
died, she noticed that Zerai was the only
family member who did not show any
emotion. “And you, what did you put in
your belly to make yourself so cold—a
stone?” she asked.
Zerai keeps his inner life hidden to
this day. “It’s not like I don’t get angry,”
Zerai says. “I do. But when I have to
have a dialogue with the media or poli-
ticians I try to present my reasons with
tranquillity.”
“He really does have, for lack of
a better word, a grace to him,” Luis
CdeBaca, the ambassador for the State
Department’s anti-human-trafficking
office, told me. “You can’t help but be
affected by someone who has true calm,
true spirituality.”
Zerai works for the Vatican as a par-
ish priest, ministering to the thousands
of Eritrean Catholics who live in Swit-
zerland. On his own time, he pursues
his migration work under the auspices
of Agenzia Habeshia, a charity he
named using an ancient word for the
Eritrean and Ethiopian peoples. Its
phone bills can reach a thousand euros
a month. For a while, Zerai was raising
tens of thousands of euros to pay his
callers’ ransoms, until he realized that
this was like trying to smother a fire
with kindling. He has set the plight of
African migration before Italian minis-
ters, European Union commissioners,
and two Popes. In return, he has re-
ceived many sympathetic words but lit-
tle change in policy. In fact, the situa-
tion is getting worse. The number of
immigrants reaching Italian shores in
the first three months of 2014 was ten
times higher than in the same period
last year, the Times reported. Last week,
four thousand people arrived on Italy’s
coast in two days. Frontex, the Euro-
pean equivalent of the Department of
Homeland Security, plans to deploy sat-
ellites and drones to guard Europe’s
borders, and counsels its security
forces on the distinction between di-
recting “returnees” back to Africa and
engaging in pushback, a violation of in-
ternational law. In early February, a
video surfaced online showing police
officers firing rubber bullets into the
water near Africans trying to swim
around a breakwater protecting a Span-
ish enclave in Morocco. Fifteen people
drowned.
Two weeks after the October 3rd
shipwreck, Zerai wondered whether
there would be any response to the
atrocity. “The politicians, they talk, talk,
talk. But . . . ,” he said, and shrugged.
“Every year, the same thing. After a few
months, no one will remember this.
Unless us—we continually remember.”
Sweat gathered on his forehead, and he
dabbed at it with a handkerchief. “It is
not possible to accept this type of trag-
edy as normal,” he said. “This is not a
normal accident.”
L ampedusa is a seven-mile flyspeck of
limestone and arid soil. Along
with nearby Lampione, it is the last of
Italy’s footprints on Africa’s continen-
tal shelf. Most of its southern shore is
forbidding terrain, where the sirocco
pushes breakers onto bare crags. In
1843, Ferdinand II claimed Lampe-
dusa for the Kingdom of the Two Si-
cilies; during the Second World War,
the Allies bombed it heavily. After the
war, it enjoyed sixty years as a sleepy
enclave of fishermen and tourists. In
2000, a wave of xenophobic violence
gripped Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya,
and displaced immigrants from across
Africa began arriving by boat. In
2009, as Italy’s tolerance for new arriv-
als declined along with its economy,
Silvio Berlusconi’s government re-
named Lampedusa’s eleven-year-old
reception facility the Center for Iden-
tification and Expulsion. Today, along
with Spanish Morocco, Cyprus, Christ-
mas Island, and Nauru, Lampedusa is
a zone of global limbo, where devel-
oped nations decide who is most de-
serving of a new life on the other side
of the wall. More than two hundred
thousand people have landed on the
island in the past fifteen years. In Libya,
human smuggling is called “the
Lampa-Lampa business.” During the
Arab Spring revolutions of 2011, Ital-
ian politicians warned of “a Biblical ex-
odus,” “an invasion” that would bring
the country “to its knees.”
Most of the October 3rd survivors
aspired to official status as “refugees,”
meaning that they had fled political per-
secution and were entitled to protection
under international law. Some call the
survivors “asylum seekers,” to account
for the tenuous nature of their rights. In
Italy, they are called clandes-
tini. In Algeria, they are
called harraga, Arabic for
“those who burn”—some
Africans destroy their pa-
pers before arrival, to avoid
being sent back. The media
call them “migrants,” imply-
ing that they leave Africa
for purely economic rea-
sons. The power to decide
who is a refugee and who is a migrant
usually lies with interviewers wher-
ever the survivors wind up applying
for asylum. The rates at which asylum is
granted vary widely. On Lampedusa,
new arrivals try to avoid being finger-
printed in Italy so that they can apply
for asylum in Norway, Switzerland, and
Sweden, which receives more applica-
tions from asylum-seeking Eritreans
than any other country. The 2006
Schengen Borders Code, which raised
the legal walls surrounding Europe
while lowering them inside, works in
the arrivals’ favor as they continue north.
Relatives will drive thirty hours from
Oslo to Sicily, and drive back with their
family member, taking advantage of
the E.U.’s open internal borders. Those
without someone to call often end up
living in baraccopoli—shantytowns—
outside Milan and Rome.
U ntil recently, Zerai was based in
Rome. “That is not my decision,”
he said, when I asked about his move.
“My bishop say I go to Suisse, and I go.”
Switzerland is two days’ journey from
Lampedusa. On October 21st, after two
train rides and a short flight, Zerai
boarded an overnight barge from Sicily.
Travelling with him was Meron Estefa-
nos, an Eritrean-born Swede who also
advocates for Eritrean asylum seekers.
She receives many calls from Eritreans
in the Sinai, who beg for ransoms as
large as forty thousand dollars while
their captors pour molten plastic down
their backs. As an activist, Estefanos is
more extroverted than Zerai, mixing
with hackers at human-rights confer-
ences and battling with Eritrean gov-
ernment supporters on Twitter.
Estefanos and Zerai hired a van to
take them through Lampedusa’s small
port town, where the warm, salty air and
the low, pale buildings evoke Tunis or
Algiers. The road to the detention cen-
ter ran past a yard heaped
with the remains of boats,
Arabic script still visible on
their splintered hulls. The
van parked near a rusting
gate; some distance beyond
it, milling around in govern-
ment-issued tracksuits, was
a group of detainees.
Zerai wore a blue short-
sleeved shirt with a white
square at the center of the collar. His
beard, flecked with gray, covered most
of his neck and crept up his cheeks.
Most striking are his eyes—they are
heavy-lidded and formed like a cello’s
cutouts. With his deliberate gestures
and serious demeanor, he looks like a
portly Haile Selassie.
After some discussion, the Italian
soldiers guarding the center allowed a
small number of detainees to approach
the gate. Estefanos took out her re-
corder to interview an Eritrean named
Mogos. He was around twenty, and he
had arrived in Lampedusa six days ear-
lier. Estefanos asked him why he had
risked the journey.
“The situation in Libya is really bad,”
Mogos said, speaking in Tigrinya, his
first language. “All you do is get out
from one prison and go to another one.
We thought it better to die than to be in
prison all the time.” The day before, the
Italian government had held a memo-
rial for the October 3rd dead, but the
service was in Sicily, and the victims
were represented by a number of large
wreaths. On Lampedusa, the survivors
were not permitted to take a ferry to the
service, and they staged a sit-in, block-
ing the road in front of the town hall.
Many had begun a hunger strike, in-
cluding Mogos. His words slurred in
places and his handsome face was slack.
He seemed to be holding himself up by
his fingers, which poked through the
grid of the gate. He lacked the energy to
give a full account of his ordeal—how
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 79
guards had fired on him as he ran away
from a Libyan prison, how smugglers
had kept him in a place they called the
mazra’a, an abandoned barn, where he
waited with others for a boat. The
mazra’a, he said later, was so hot that no
one wore clothes. One day, the police
arrived, made them lie face down in the
dirt, and opened fire. “God spared us,”
Mogos said later. “To them, our lives
are no more important than a housefly.”
Earlier, during a failed sea crossing, he
saw another passenger try to escape
from Libyan border guards. They doused
him with fuel, set him on fire, and threw
his body into the water.
Standing at the gate on Lampedusa,
Mogos kept this mostly to himself.
“Please give our regards to Father Mus-
sie,” he said, not realizing that Zerai was
standing a few steps away. Zerai heard
his name and turned to Mogos. “We
haven’t yet done anything for you,”
he said.
A tall Italian soldier approached
Zerai. He seemed uneasy, a man under
vague orders. “Buongiorno, Padre,” he
said. “Tutto bene?” Zerai took him
aside. He asked in a low and even tone
to be allowed past the gate. (Unlike
Zerai’s English, which was learned
more recently, his Italian has a hard-
won precision.) The soldier steered
him toward a young woman who was
handling the camp’s public relations.
Zerai repeated his case. Another sol-
dier seemed to find him ridiculous. He
turned to a comrade and laughed. Zerai
continued to press for twenty minutes
more, to no avail. He did not seem sur-
prised by this result. “A low-ranking
officer will try to exert some form of
power, even if in practice there’s not
much they can do,” he said later. “But
they use their power just to be there, to
make you waste time. The one who
can do something, who has the power,
is elsewhere.”
Z erai was born in 1975 in Asmara,
where his father worked as an en-
gineer. Today, Asmara is the capital of
Eritrea, but at that time it was held by
the Marxist government of Ethiopia.
When Zerai was five years old, his
mother died in childbirth. Two years
later, the secret police arrested his fa-
ther, who bribed his way out of prison
and fled the country, eventually reach-
80 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
ing Italy. Zerai and seven siblings were
raised by his grandmother, Kudusan, a
sturdy woman who attended Catholic
Mass daily. He calls her “my first testi-
mony in the faith.”
As a boy, Zerai sought refuge in the
church, where he played volleyball and
soccer and sang in the choir. On Satur-
days, the friars took him along to the
store to buy groceries. Having lost both
parents, he saw that priests could have a
larger family, and, at fourteen, he told
his grandmother that he wanted to join
the priesthood. She asked the bishop.
The bishop told him to seek permission
from his father, who summoned Zerai
to Rome.
When Zerai left Eritrea, in the early
nineties, the country had nearly secured
its independence after thirty years of
fighting. Isaias Afewerki, the rebel
leader who had assumed control of the
new Eritrean government, enjoyed the
country’s confidence for six relatively
peaceful years but then began cracking
down on opposition; he went to war
with Ethiopia, and imposed mandatory
military service. Zerai’s brother Biniam
told me that Zerai, during his last year
in Asmara, chose to spend his time
with “big, big people”—businessmen,
lawyers, judges. He was sixteen years
old but “his mind was not like a kid,”
Biniam told me. Zerai travelled to
Rome by plane, with one suitcase. Ze-
rai’s father had remarried, and was not
much help as Zerai got settled. Their
father “was up and down,” Zerai’s sister
Senait, who now lives in Uganda, says.
“He doesn’t stay in one place.” Zerai
found his way to a British priest who
worked out of an office at Rome’s cen-
tral railway station and helped unac-
companied minors apply for asylum.
With his help, Zerai obtained a resi-
dence permit.
Rome was nothing like Asmara. He
could go anywhere he wanted without
fear of arrest. On Saturday nights, he
partied with Eritrean friends at discos
on Via Casilina, Via Cassia—wherever
was in fashion. He wanted “to experi-
ence life,” never thinking of the way-
ward years of Francis or Augustine. Oc-
casionally, Zerai heard racial slurs on
the bus and at one of his early jobs, sort-
ing newspapers. When Africans made
mistakes, the managers called them stu-
pid or negro di merda. Zerai quit and
found work at a fruit stand in the Piazza
Vittorio, where he honed his Italian by
chatting with customers. He tasted fruit
that he had never seen in Asmara—
“pear abate, apple renetta,” he said. “The
kiwi I had never seen.” After work, he
volunteered with the British priest as a
translator and an informal consul. He
learned how to expedite the official pro-
cesses of obtaining identification, resi-
dency permits, health cards, thirty-year
pensions, tax forms. The immigrants
“could have gone by themselves, but
they didn’t know the language or the lo-
gistics,” he told me.
Father Giampiero, the vice-priest
of one of the parishes with which Zerai
worked, remembers him as “very quiet,
with a deep sensitivity, a remarkable
spirituality, and great attention paid
toward others.” Giampiero recom-
mended that he join the Scalabrinians,
a religious order known for helping
immigrants. Three years earlier, Zerai
had watched on television the beati-
fication of the order’s founder, John
Baptist Scalabrini, who preached de-
tachment and humility. As Zerai sat in
his apartment learning about Scalabri-
ni’s works, he felt fulminato, struck by
lightning.
Zerai spent three years studying
with the Scalabrinians in Piacenza,
the founder’s home town. In 2003,
he returned to Rome, where he lived
for seven years in a Scalabrinian mis-
sion. The living conditions for immi-
grants had deteriorated during his time
away. Many Africans were sleeping in
baraccopoli or abandoned factories.
New laws allowed the government to
forcibly deport migrants and tightened
controls on who could receive a work
permit. His work with the British
priest and Giampiero had led him to
believe that the difficulties facing im-
migrants were mostly bureaucratic and
could be overcome through persever-
ance, but these were problems of a
much larger scale. He began to orga-
nize street demonstrations and to lobby
E.U. officials in Brussels. He flew to
Eritrea to see his grandmother for the
last time. She gave him a gold ring,
which he wears on his fourth finger,
and he left behind his phone number
with some friends of the family. Soon,
he was receiving calls from Eritreans in
Libya, Sudan, and Egypt. “I start to
 call them to collect more information,” tionality, and home address of each. up on Malta, where the inhabitants re-
he recalls. “He pass from one to the When names could not be obtained, ceived him with “unusual kindness.”
other . . . in short time, my number be- they recorded other identifying infor- Before Zerai sat some eighty Eritre-
came public.” mation, such as hair styles. The families ans, about half of the October 3rd sur-
One day, Zerai’s superior called him of four missing passengers had given vivors, who had walked from the deten-
into his office. “You are much too busy,” Estefanos their names to check against tion center. All but one were men. Zerai
he said. “Pay attention. You are not the the list. All four were dead. told them how to present their stories to
savior of the world. The savior of the Zerai took Asmelash and the rest the officials who would be interviewing
world is Jesus Christ.” of the group to dinner at a nearby res- them. It would not be enough to talk
Zerai recalls this advice when he
senses that his mission is pushing him
toward exhaustion. “I know what is my
limit,” he says. “I say to myself, ‘Moses,
you are not the savior of the world.’ Is
important to do what is possible to do.
But when I do all that is possible and I
don’t receive good result, is important to
remember who I am.”

A t the time of Zerai’s visit, the Lam-

pedusa detention center was filled
to well over capacity. Some detainees
were sleeping outside, on scraps of
foam. In 2011, hundreds of Tunisian
detainees who had fled the violence of
the Arab Spring learned that they would
be deported. They rioted, burning down
part of the center and throwing stones
at police. Now the guards kept the peace
with a cigarette ration, and by looking
the other way when detainees slipped
through the camp’s porous perimeter
and walked the mile into town.
After dark, in a stone plaza facing
a Catholic church in the town center,
Zerai stood chatting with a group of
Eritreans, passing out his phone num-
ber, when Mogos rushed up. His eyes
were wide and shining. He seized Zer- Since 1999, more than two hundred thousand people have landed on Lampedusa.
ai’s hand, kissed it, and pressed it to his
forehead. “Abba Mussie is a good man,” taurant. He was preoccupied with a about the general hardships of the mil-
he said. “Everybody in Libya have his detail that he had heard several times itary—they would need to relate speci-
mobile.” The notion that the phone throughout the day—that, just before fic violations of their rights. He also
number he carried across the sea was the wreck, two other boats had ap- spoke of spiritual matters. Those who
connected to the man now standing be- proached the Eritreans’ ship and then had survived the sinking of the ship
ROCCO RORANDELLI/TERRAPROJECT/CONTRASTO/REDUX

fore him seemed to strike him as mirac-
ulous. “Because of Abba Mussie, I am
here in life!” he exclaimed.
In a nearby café, Zerai and Estefanos
met a group of older October 3rd sur-
vivors who were acting as representa-
tives for the rest. One of them, Mesfin
Asmelash, was forty years old, tall and
slender. He wore spotless white Nikes,
which had been sent to him by a relative
while he was in Sudan. He showed Es-
tefanos a list, handwritten in Tigrinya,
that attempted to collect the names of
the October 3rd dead, with the age, na-
left. Some witnesses identified the ves-
sels as belonging to the Italian Coast
Guard. Others were not sure. (A spokes-
man for the Coast Guard vehemently
denied any contact with the Eritreans’
boat.)
The next morning, Zerai, in a brimless
white hat and a white robe, stood in front
of the altar in the church on the plaza.
Near the entrance hung a painting of
Paul, barefoot and shackled, floating on a
plank of wood. He was sailing as a pris-
oner from Palestine to Rome when his
ship was swamped by a storm. He washed
were now reborn. They should think
about what to do with their new lives
and not dwell too much on what had
happened. “He say this happens because
of God,” Mogos told me afterward.
Outside, on the steps of the church,
a man sat alone wearing a towel over his
head, like a shawl. It was his partner
who had drowned while giving birth. A
poem mourning the child later spread
through Eritrea’s online diaspora: “His
mother feebly fighting to stay afloat /
A baby boy was born / No one saw
his eyes / Open briefly / Then shut.” I
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 81
watched from across the square as Este-
fanos approached the child’s father, put
her hand on his shoulder, and took out
her recorder. He said that his partner
was named Yohanna, or “congratula-
tions,” in honor of Eritrea’s indepen-
dence. He had searched for her that
night in the water and on every boat that
came to shore.
Zerai spent the rest of the day dis-
pensing what he called “small, practical
help.” This took the form of mobile
phones and SIM cards. Under an Italian
anti-terrorism law, the detainees could
not buy SIMs without passports. Nor
could they change money or receive wire
transfers from their families. Zerai en-
listed journalists and tourists with valid
passports to buy SIMs on their behalf,
then he passed them out to a circle of
Eritrean detainees, as an older man
checked their names off a list. Zerai
showed the recipients how to turn their
phones on and activate the SIMs. One by
one, he entered his number into their
address books. “We do everything that
is possible to do today,” he said. “To-
morrow . . .” His voice trailed off.
I TOOK OUT THE PART
I took out the part where I compared a letter
Travelling steadily in its envelope
To the live pig I saw, travelling
Calmly in a basket
Atop the head of a woman
Riding a bicycle down the street in Bali. Too much
I figured. Juliet’s “happy dagger” came in
A little later on, and I took that out. I took out
Mention of the elephant’s
Foot pad, how it expands “like a bag of jelly”
When pressure is applied, meaning
The weight of the elephant. I might have been
Packing for your transcontinental
Bike ride, because I deemed superfluous
The woodpecker’s tongue reaching
Back and curling around the
Jackhammered brain like a skein of Bubble Wrap
Which I learned about from Patty. And
I nixed the image of the lake’s crust
vest five billion euros in the country over through a call from a satellite phone. He
twenty years. In early 2011, as Qaddafi’s called the number back. A man named
hold on Libya began to weaken, Italy Ghirma greeted him in Tigrinya. He
joined NATO in backing the revolution- told Zerai that he was on a thirty-foot

I n Tripoli, on the wall of the Catholic

vicariate, the nuns have taped an open
letter from Father Zerai. “Do not be de-
ceived by traffickers,” it reads. “They are
only interested in your money and do
not care for your life.” To the smug-
glers themselves, Zerai renders Biblical
censure:
Do not play with the lives of your brothers
and sisters, do not sell your soul to the devil. . . .
For you arrive to the Day of Judgement, you
have to answer before God for your actions.
Woe to you Cains of our time, woe to you who
are Judas . . . that you sell your brothers for
thirty pieces of silver to the Libyans.
Libya’s long borders and weak gov-
ernment make it an ideal location for
human smugglers. Four of Libya’s six
neighbors have had recent wars or revo-
lutions. Because undocumented asylum
seekers cannot arrange legal travel to Eu-
rope, smugglers are able to charge about
five times the cost of airfare. Before the
revolution, the Qaddafi regime held
human smuggling in check by patrolling
the coast and accepting boatloads of im-
migrants turned back from Italy. In
2008, the Italian government signed a
treaty of “friendship, partnership, and
coöperation” with Libya, agreeing to in-
82 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
aries, and Qaddafi retaliated by opening
his borders.
Starting that March, Zerai’s phone
rang more or less continuously for seven
straight months. “It was impossible to
have one second free,” he remembers.
Boats set off across the Mediterranean
in unprecedented numbers, carrying
Egyptians, Tunisians, and any dark-
skinned stranger suspected of being
among Qaddafi’s foreign mercenaries.
One terrified caller told Zerai that reb-
els in the city of Misrata were hunting
immigrants for sport. Days before the
revolution, Zerai arranged for the evac-
uation of a hundred and ten Eritreans
by air to Italy.
Zerai was living at the Ethiopian
College, in the Vatican, where he was
writing a thesis connecting human rights
to Church doctrine. He had one room
for sleeping and writing. Like his quar-
ters in Fribourg, it had a comfortable
austerity—bed, desk, window, kitchen-
ette. His mobile phone had two SIM
cards, and he usually left it on through
the night.
On the morning of March 27th, as
NATO jets bombed Qaddafi’s forces,
Zerai awoke and saw that he had slept
inflatable Zodiac with seventy-one
other people. There was almost no food
or water. The motor was too small for
the load, and low on fuel. Through his
phone, Zerai could hear the waves
sloshing.
Zerai told Ghirma that he would
help, but the rescue might take time;
Ghirma needed to be patient. “I try to
give them some hope,” Zerai remem-
bered. He called the Maritime Rescue
Coördination Center in Rome, which
called the phone company to obtain
coördinates for Ghirma’s number. Less
than an hour later, the M.R.C.C. trans-
mitted a distress call to NATO head-
quarters and all vessels in the area.
Ghirma’s boat was about halfway be-
tween Lampedusa and Libya, in the vi-
cinity of around twenty NATO vessels.
Help had not yet arrived when Zerai
called Ghirma again, that afternoon.
A few hours later, no one answered.
He presumed that the phone’s battery
had died.
Zerai pressed his contacts at the
M.R.C.C. and NATO for news about
Ghirma’s boat. The coördinates had
been passed up their chains of command,
they said, and there was little more that
 say that a French aircraft had spotted
the boat and photographed it shortly
Made from crests on a windy day before Ghirma reached Father Zerai.
Or how we practice on fireworks NATO has said that “there is no record
Saying, Oh, that’s like a pink weeping willow of any aircraft or ship under NATO
Hallucinating a geranium, or, Hercules just command having seen or made contact
Hit a line drive up to the moon. with the small boat in question.” Survi-
I decided against Steve’s paraphrase vors have filed suit in four European
Of Brecht, “It’s hard to describe the trees countries.
When police are in the forest,” and also Two and a half years after Tripoli
The old gag about LPs being like gasoline was taken by the rebels, Libya’s interim
Puddles that go up and dizzy us government is too disorganized to
With their fumes, and of middle age write a constitution or to stop the free-
Rotating us out of Earth’s orbit, stars like lance expropriation of oil. Ali Zeidan,
A corrupted computer file the former Prime Minister, who ran
And the forgetful mind, a red-topped Libya from a suite of hotel rooms, was
Tupperware when we were young ousted by Parliament last month and
Now without gravity or capacity like the shallow fled the country. Libya’s lawlessness
Teacup and you calling my name was apparent to Daniel, an Eritrean
Like a soliloquy of wildflowers whom I met in Tripoli, in November,
Spilled and gone, I took all that out. at the Eritrean Embassy. He was about
thirty years old, with a narrow face,
—Jessica Greenbaum and his clothes looked stiff and dusty
from days on the road. He had tried to
cross to Europe, he said, but the boat
they could do. Zerai’s phone continued satellite phone into the water, so that stalled and began taking on water.
to ring with calls from the relatives of the authorities would not take him for Someone on board called Zerai, who
passengers on Ghirma’s boat. “Some of a smuggler. Hours later, the helicopter arranged for help. But the Italian
them cry,” he said. “Some of them are in returned and lowered packets of bis- Coast Guard, instead of taking Daniel
very bad condition.” He could not put cuits and eight bottles of water on a to Lampedusa or Malta, put him on a
Ghirma’s boat out of his mind. He tried rope. Days later, after the boat had Turkish cargo ship heading back to
to settle himself with prayer and garden- passed through the storm, the passen- Libya, where, he said, his jailers beat
ing, then he returned to his room and gers encountered a military ship. They him on the soles of his feet and hung
wept. Fifteen days later, Zerai learned held up some of the bodies to show him from a rope. The day before we
what had happened. One of Ghirma’s their distress. The ship came within met, Daniel had persuaded his captors
fellow-passengers, Dan, contacted him fifty feet, took pictures, and sailed to assign him to a work detail outside
and said that the boat had drifted into a away. the prison, and ran away. He had once
storm. As the current carried them south, Later, Italian and Swiss researchers had a U.N.-issued asylum-seeker
back toward Libya, the passengers tried interviewed five of the eight other sur- certificate. It had done him little good.
to sustain themselves on seawater and vivors, who corroborated Dan’s ac- The Libyans who arrested him had
urine mixed with toothpaste. Soon, five count. The case is known as the Left- confiscated it.
or six people were dying each day. When to-Die Boat, and Zerai still gets angry Zerai, Daniel said, remained in
the boat washed up on the Libyan coast, when he speaks about it. “I want to regular contact with many prisoners.
a hundred miles east of Tripoli, all but know who is the responsibility of this,” “He is telling them all to wait in Trip-
eleven of the seventy-two passengers he said. “I want to look face to face with oli, even the ones in prison, until he
had died. One of the survivors died al- those who leave them in the sea. I want gets paperwork from the U.N., so they
most immediately after landing. Another to ask, Why? Why do you do this? Why can travel by plane. They are still wait-
died in a Libyan prison, where they were don’t you help them? I want to say, ing for him.” Daniel was done waiting.
held for three days without food or med- What you see in the Mediterranean is “I have no paperwork, no job,” he said.
ical attention. human being like you. Not containers. “I can’t go back to my country. So I
Dan told Zerai that the military had Not something without life. A ship have only one choice: to go by boat
come near the boat three times while it with animals, you would help.” Zerai again.”
was at sea. First came a helicopter. The arranged for the survivors to meet with
passengers say that it bore the word
“army,” in English, but they could not
discern its nation of origin. It circled,
the Catholic Church in Tripoli. Some
tried the crossing again and arrived in
Europe; others went to a Tunisian
F rom Lampedusa, Zerai went to the
Vatican, where, on the morning of
October 25th, he woke at seven o’clock,
appeared to take photos, and left. The camp. A report by the Council of Eu- ate a breakfast of bread and goat’s milk,
Zodiac’s captain, believing that a rescue rope could not determine why NATO and prayed. Then he walked to St. Pe-
was imminent, threw his compass and had failed to intervene, though it did ter’s Square and hired a cab. He had
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 83
a long day of meetings ahead—with and nobody says anything,” Calogero
two ministries and the president of Ferrara, a Sicilian prosecutor investigat-
the Chamber of Deputies. There were ing human smuggling, said. “There is
many marks to hit, many opportunities no legal title to keep them in this center.
for error—but there was no time to They go to the north of Europe, or
worry about it. Zerai’s phone rang; it Canada, or Germany, where they have
was an Italian number. “Buongiorno,” relatives. And there, for the first time,
he said, then switched to Tigrinya. He they are officially recognized. Only
advised the caller not to go to Verona when they arrive in the country where
but to seek out a certain person in they want to stay do they give their per-
Milan. “Let us speak once you get there sonal details.”
with her, and we’ll try to arrange some “Italy sucks,” Mogos said. After
way of getting you to Switzerland,” he Lampedusa, he was transferred to Sicily
said. “Be careful and take care of your- and eventually made his way to Milan.
self, O.K.?” His mother, in Eritrea, sold all her gold
Ambassador CdeBaca, from the jewelry and sent him a thousand euros.
State Department, told me about an He bought a false passport and a plane
“underground railroad” that helps un- ticket to Stockholm. When we spoke,
documented Africans settle in Europe. he was living in state housing there and
The network is underground because, waiting to find out whether his asylum
since 2009, giving such Africans assis- application had been approved. Sweden
tance has been a crime in Italy. The next was better than Libya but had not yet
step for the October 3rd survivors would met his expectations. “I don’t want to
be a transfer to a larger detention cen- sound ungrateful, but they give us boiled
ter, in Sicily. “From there, they escape grains to eat,” he said. “We hate it. If
“How much speech did you take in last month?”
they gave us a house, we’d get to cook
for ourselves. Having a house is every-
thing.” He hoped to arrange an “ex-
change wedding,” a double green-card
marriage between two pairs of siblings
from two families, for himself and his
sister. She was still back in Khartoum.
“I need to help her as soon as I can,”
he said.
Zerai’s first meeting in Rome that
day was with the chief of the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs’ sub-Saharan Africa
office, a Pharaonic man of around sixty,
trim, wearing a double-breasted suit,
the jacket of which remained buttoned
as he sat down, crossed his arms, and
made a sort-of listening face. Zerai and
two other Eritrean activists tried to en-
list his help with repatriating the Octo-
ber 3rd dead to Eritrea, but with little
success. From the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Zerai went by taxi to the an-
cient Egyptian obelisk at the Piazza di
Montecitorio, where several hundred
Eritreans from the United Kingdom,
Germany, and Switzerland had come
to protest E.U. immigration policies.
Two Eritrean Orthodox priests prayed
over two papier-mâché coffins—a large
one bearing the number of the Octo-
ber 3rd dead, and a small one represent-
ing the dead newborn. After darting
away for another meeting, this one with
a cabinet minister, Zerai led the protest
past the Pantheon to the Teatro Valle,
where he delivered a speech in Italian
and Tigrinya. He demanded an inves-
tigation into the allegation that the
Coast Guard had seen and approached
the October 3rd boat minutes before
it sank. “Three hundred and sixty-
six people could have been saved if
they had done their duty,” he said.
“Someone must take responsibility.” He
left early—in twenty minutes, he was
scheduled to go on TV. Zerai had ar-
ranged for a taxi, but the driver arrived
late and did not at first appreciate the
urgency of the situation.
“At four, I must be at the Chamber
of Deputies, in Montecitorio,” Zerai
told him.
“Now?” the driver asked. “At Mon-
tecitorio? Just say it!”
“No!” Zerai said, loudly. “Now we
have to go to the TV studio.”
“Well, I am sorry. The meter is
running.”
“Yes, I know. But it is not my fault!”
 By 3 P.M., Zerai was live on Sky TV.
“Is Italy a racist country?” the an-
nouncer asked.
“There is racism, but not all of Italy
is racist,” Zerai answered. In fact, the
first rescues on October 3rd were made
by Vito Fiorino, a Lampedusan who
happened to be out fishing. He and his
friends pulled forty-seven survivors
from the water. He had at first mis-
taken their cries for seagulls.
While Zerai was on TV, European
leaders were summiting in Brussels;
immigration was high on the agenda.
The German Chancellor Angela
Merkel said that she was “deeply trou-
bled” by the “horrible” shipwrecks.
The E.U. leaders promised more
hardware—ships, aircraft, surveillance
equipment. The Sky TV announcer
asked Zerai what he wanted from the
Italian government. Zerai offered
some proposals. Europe should open
a “humanitarian corridor”—typically
used to rescue civilians from war
zones—to give asylum seekers an al-
ternative to the smugglers’ boats. New
arrivals needed a “dignified welcom-
ing” with “economic inclusion.” “We
must also seek some radical solutions,”
Zerai said. He suggested that Europe
consider opening its embassies in
Libya and Sudan to asylum requests.
His interviewer cut in with an up-
date from Brussels. There would be no t t
immediate action, she said. More talks
were scheduled for December and June. being held accountable for the Octo- In front of it was a laminated printout:
“Tra il dire e il fare c’è in mezzo il mare,” ber 3rd deaths were the Tunisian cap- The gift of H.I.M.
she remarked. Between words and tain and a Somali man who was alleged Haile Selassie I
deeds there is a sea. to have helped arrange the voyage. Both The last emperor of Ethiopia.
The day’s final meeting, at the face criminal charges in Italy. No one in Selassie claimed to have descended
Chamber of Deputies, had a warmer Washington or Brussels talks seriously from King David. On his 1966 visit to
tone. Laura Boldrini, the president about a trans-Mediterranean humani- Jamaica, a crowd of thousands met him
of the Chamber, expressed sympathy tarian corridor, or about accepting ref- at the airport and hailed him as the
for the situation on Lampedusa. She ugee applications at their missions in Messiah. Though Zerai lacks Selassie’s
offered encouragement and advice, Africa. The E.U. is struggling to pre- imperial pretensions, he, too, is on the
but no solutions were forthcoming. vent another catastrophe on the scale receiving end of a great deal of hope
Afterward, Zerai joined an old friend of October 3rd, as boats leave North projected by a great number of desper-
at a nearby café. They sipped wine, Africa at the fastest rate since the Arab ate people. I asked him about pride.
and Zerai’s accumulated frustrations Spring. “For me, is only service,” he said. “I
leaked out. He remained troubled by Toward the end of the day, a deacon don’t have this type of . . . what you
the thought that the boat had been picked Zerai up in a minivan and took say? . . . pride. No. I am priest. I am pas-
spotted by Italian Coast Guard ships. him back to the Ethiopian College, then tor of the persons. Even when the peo-
“They were white, with a red stripe left to make a pizza run. Zerai sat at an ple kiss my hand, they don’t kiss me.
all around,” he said. Most troubling oak table. He seemed tired and impa- They kiss Jesus Christ. Not me.”
of all was that few in Rome seemed tient. He was supposed to be in Switzer- Zerai excused himself to book an
to care. land the next morning, to lead Mass. Be- early flight to Switzerland. He slept a
The months that followed bore out hind him, in a glass case, was an Ethiopian few hours that night, and a bit more on
Zerai’s pessimism. The only people Bible, its cover adorned with a gold cross. the plane, and arrived for Mass on time. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 85
86 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 87
88 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 89
 FICTION

90 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 DESIGN BY RADIO

B y late afternoon, Owen’s parents
were usually having their first
cocktails. His mother gave hers some
thought, looking upon it as a special
treat, while his father served himself “a
stiff one” in a more matter-of-fact way,
his every movement expressing a con-
viction that he had a right to this stuff,
no matter how disagreeable or lugubri-
ous or romantic it might soon make
him. He made a special point of not
asking permission as he poured, with a
workmanlike concentration on not
spilling a drop. Owen’s mother held
her drink between the tips of her
fingers; his father held his in his fist.
Owen could see solemnity descend on
his father’s brow with the first sip, while
his mother often looked apprehensive
about the possible hysteria to come.
Owen remembered a Saturday night
when his father had air-paddled back-
ward, collapsing into the kitchen trash
can and terrifying the family boxer,
Gertrude. Gertrude had bitten Owen’s
father the first time she saw him drunk
and now viewed him with a detach-
ment that was similar to Owen’s.
In any event, the cocktails were Ow-
en’s cue to head for the baseball dia-
mond that the three Kershaw boys and
their father had built in the pasture
across from their house, with the help of
any neighborhood kids who’d wanted to
pitch in—clearing brush, laying out the
baselines and boundaries, forming the
pitcher’s mound, or driving in the posts
for the backstop. Doug, the eldest Ker-
shaw boy, was already an accomplished
player, with a Marty Marion infielder’s
mitt and a pair of cleats. Terry, the mid-
dle son, was focussed on developing his
paper route and would likely be a mil-
lionaire by thirty. Ben, the youngest and
sweetest, was disabled and mentally
handicapped, but he loved baseball
above all things; he had a statistician’s
capacity for memorizing numbers and
had learned to field a ball with one crip-
pled hand and to make a respectable
throw with the other. To Owen, Ben’s
attributes were nothing remarkable: he
had his challenges; Ben had others.
It was rare to have full teams, and oc-
casional lone outfielders started at center
field and prepared to run. Eventually,
Ben was moved off first base and into
the outfield. With his short arms, he
couldn’t keep his foot on the bag and
reach far enough for bad throws. Dou-
ble plays came along only about three
times a summer, and no one wanted to
put them at risk. So long as Ben could
identify with a renowned player who
had played his position—in this case,
Hoot Evers—he was happy to occupy it,
and physically he did better with flies
than with grounders.
Owen was happy with his George
Kell spot at third base, and he didn’t in-
tend to relinquish it. He was a poor hit-
ter—he was trying to graduate from
choking the bat, though he was still not
strong enough to hold it at the grip—
but his ability to cover stinging ground-
ers close to the foul line was considered
compensation for his small production
at the plate. He had learned to commit
late to the ball’s trajectory—grounders
often changed angles, thanks to the
field’s irregularities—and he went fairly
early when they chose up sides. Chuck
Wood went late, despite being the most
muscular boy there, as he always swung
for the fence in wan hope of a home run
and was widely considered a show-
boater. Ben was a polished bunter and
could run like the wind, assuring his
team of at least one man on base. He
was picked early, sometimes first, but
never got to be captain, because in the
hand-over-hand-on-the-bat ritual for
choosing sides, his hand wouldn’t fit
anywhere below the label. In the begin-
ning, Mrs. Kershaw had stuck around
to make sure that he was treated fairly,
announcing, “If Ben doesn’t play, no-
body plays.” But now he belonged, and
she restricted her supervision to meet-
ing him as he got off the school bus and
casting an authoritarian glance through
the other passengers’ windows.
After a game, the equipment was
stored on the back porch of the Kershaw
house, where Terry ran his newspaper
operation and often recruited the players
to help him fold for the evening delivery.
The Kershaws’ small black schipperke
dog, Smudge, watched from a corner.
Doug put a few drops of neat’s-foot oil
in the pocket of his mitt, folded a ball
into it, and placed it on the broad shelf
that held shin guards, a catcher’s mask,
and a cracked Hillerich & Bradsby
thirty-four-inch bat that Mr. Kershaw
thought could be glued. It had been a
mistake to go from oak to maple, he
said. Eventually, Mrs. Kershaw would
appear, mopping her hands on her apron
before making an announcement: “Ker-
shaw dinner. All other players begone.”
Owen and the other boys would rush
out, with ceremonial doorway collisions,
looking up at the sky through the trees:
still light enough to play.
Owen would walk home, reflecting
on the game, his hits, if he’d had any, his
errors and fielding accomplishments.
His parents dined late and by candle-
light, in an atmosphere that was disqui-
eting to Owen and at odds with thoughts
about baseball. He eventually gave up on
family dinners altogether and fed him-
self on cold cereal. Sometimes he arrived
home in time for an argument, his father
booming over his mother’s more pene-
trating vehemence. There were times
when his parents seemed to be enter-
taining themselves this way, and times
when they seemed to draw blood. Owen
would flip his glove onto the hall bench
and slip upstairs to his room and his
growing collection of hubcaps. He’d still
never been caught. He had once been on
probation with the Kershaws, though:
Doug, hiding in the bushes with a
flashlight, had caught him soaping their
windows on Halloween, but winter had
absolved him, and by baseball season he
was back in their good graces. He still
didn’t know why he had done it. The
Kershaws’ was the only house he’d
pranked, and it was the home of people
he cherished. He’d wanted contact with
them, but it had come out wrong.
O wen sat with Ben on the school
bus every morning. Half asleep,
his lunchbox on his lap, he listened
to Ben ramble on in his disjointed way
about the baseball standings, his mouth
falling open between assertions—“If
Jerry Priddy didn’t hold the bat so high,
he could hit the ball farther”—and his
crooked arms mimicking the moves
he described: George Kell’s signature
scoop at third or Phil Rizzuto’s stretch
to loosen his sleeve after throwing some-
one out. Only Ben, whose bed was like
a pass between two mountains of Base-
ball Digest back issues, would have re-
membered that Priddy had torn up Riz-
zuto’s fan letters or that he was the first
white guy to talk to Maury Wills. Yet in
almost every other way he was slow, and
easily influenced by anyone who took
the trouble: Mike Terrell lost a year of
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 91
Kershaw baseball for sending Ben on a
snipe hunt.
The MacIlhatten twins, Janet and
Janice, sat at the back of the bus, two
horsey, scheming freshmen who dressed
alike, enjoyed pretending to be each
other, and amused themselves by play-
ing tricks on Ben, hiding his hat or
talking him out of the Mars bar in his
lunchbox. They laughed at his blank
stare or repeated everything he said
until he sat silent in defeat. Idle malice
was their game, and, because they were
superior students, they got little resis-
tance from adults. Not entirely pretty
themselves, they were brutal to Patty
Seitz and Sandy Collins, two unattract-
ive girls unlucky enough to ride the
same bus, who quietly absorbed the
twins’ commentary on their skin, their
hair, their Mary Jane shoes, and their
Mickey Mouse lunchboxes. Only Stan-
ley Ayotte, who was often suspended,
except during football season, when he
was a star, stood up to the twins, and to
their intervening mother, actually call-
ing them bitches. They flirted with
Stanley anyway, though he ignored it.
Owen felt the twins’ contemplation
of his friendship with Ben: they were
watching. At school, they disappeared
down the corridor and forgot about
him, but on the bus at the end of the
day they resumed their focus. His rapt
absorption in Ben’s recitation of base-
ball statistics seemed to annoy them,
but, because they knew nothing about
the subject, he had been safe so far.
The school knew about Ben’s love of
sports. His schoolwork was managed
with compassion, but water boy for the
football team was the best the teachers
could come up with on the field. Still, it
was a job he loved, running out in front
of the crowded bleachers with a tray of
water-filled paper cups.
C hurch. Owen hated church and
fidgeted his way from beginning
to end. Or maybe not all of it, not the
part where he stared at some girl like
Cathy Hansen, the plumber’s beautiful
daughter. The moment when Cathy
turned from the Communion rail, her
hands clasped in front of her face in
spiritual rapture, took Owen to a dazed
and elevated place. He wondered how
a girl like her could stand to listen to
a priest drone on about how to get to
92 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
Heaven. Cathy must have registered his
attention. After Mass, she sometimes
tried to exchange a pleasantry, but Owen
could only impersonate disdain from his
reddening face, his agony noticed with
amusement by his mother, when she
wasn’t gazing down the sidewalk in
search of a good spot for a cigarette.
After contemplating the suffering of
Christ, she needed a bit of relief. Ow-
en’s father had slipped an Ellery Queen
novel into the covers of a Daily Missal;
he kept his eye on the page, present-
ing a picture of piety. He saw his pres-
ence at the weekly service as an expres-
sion of his solidarity with the commu-
nity, sitting, standing, or kneeling fol-
lowing cues provided by the parishio-
ners around him.
The slow drive home after church
was a trial for Owen, who could picture
the game already under way on the Ker-
shaws’ diamond. Slow because they had
to creep past the Ingrams’ driveway.
Old Bradley Ingram had married the
much younger Julie, who claimed to
have been a Radio City dancer but was
suspected of having been a stripper at
the downtown Gaiety Burlesque house.
Now they were separated. Bradley had
moved into the Sheraton, and Julie was
still in their home, receiving, it was
said, all-night visitors. Julie did not
mingle locally, and so no information
could be got from her. The best Owen’s
parents could do was check out her
driveway on the way home from church.
His father stopped the car so that
they could peer between the now un-
kempt box hedges. His mother said, “It’s
a Buick Roadmaster.”
“I can’t see the plates. I don’t have my
glasses.”
“They’re Monroe.”
“That tells us nothing.”
“Really?” His mother blew smoke at
the ceiling of their Studebaker. “Last
week it was a Cadillac.”
“She’s coming down in the world.”
“Not by much,” his mother said, and
they drove on.
Owen was required to stay at the
table for Sunday lunch, which went on
until the middle of the afternoon. Usu-
ally, he missed the game.
I n the hardwood forest, a shallow
swamp immersed the trunks and
roots of the trees near the lake. Owen
and Ben hunted turtles among the
waterweeds and pale aquatic flowers.
The turtles sunned themselves on low
branches hanging over the water, in
shafts of light spotted with dancing
dragonflies. Ever alert, the creatures
tumbled into the swamp at the first
sound, as though wiped from the
branches by an unseen hand. The wild
surroundings made Ben exuberant. He
bent saplings to watch them recoil or
shinnied up trees, and he returned home
carrying things that interested him—
strands of waterweed, bleached muskrat
skulls, or the jack-in-the-pulpits he
brought to his mother to fend off her ir-
ritation at having to wash another load
of muddy clothes. Once, Owen caught
two of the less vigilant turtles, the size of
fifty-cent pieces, with poignant little feet
constantly trying to get somewhere that
only they knew. Owen loved their tiny
perfection, the flexible undersides of
their shells, the ridges down their top-
side that he could detect with his thumb-
nail. Their necks were striped yellow,
and they stretched them upward in their
striving. Owen made a false bottom for
his lunchbox with ventilation holes so
that he could always have them with
him, despite the rule against taking pets
to school or on the school bus. He fed
them flies from a bottle cap. Only Ben
knew where they were.
One afternoon, Owen came back
from the swamp to find the flashing
beacon of the town’s fire truck illumi-
nating the faces of curious neighbors
outside his house. He ran up the short
length of his driveway in time to see his
mother addressing a small crowd as she
stood beside two firemen in obsolete
leather helmets with brass eagles fixed
to their fronts. She looked slightly di-
shevelled in a housedress and golf-club
windbreaker, and she spoke in the lofty
voice she used when she had been
drinking, the one meant to fend off all
questions: “Let he who has never had a
kitchen grease fire cast the first stone!”
She laughed. “Blame the television.
Watching ‘The Guiding Light.’ Mea
culpa. A soufflé.” Owen felt the com-
plete bafflement of the neighborhood as
he listened. Then her tone flattened.
“Look, the fire’s out. Good night, one
and all.”
Owen’s father’s car nosed up to the
group. His father jumped out, tie loos-
ened, radiating authority. He pushed
straight through to the firefighters,
without glancing at his wife. “Han-
dled?” The shorter of the two nodded
quickly. His father spoke to the neigh-
bors: “Looks like not much. I’ll get
the details, I’m sure.” Most had wan-
dered off toward their own homes by
then, the Kershaws among the last to
go. Owen’s father turned to his wife,
who was staring listlessly at the ground,
placed his broad hand on the small
of her back, and moved her through
the front door, which he closed be-
hind him, leaving Owen alone in the
yard.
When Owen went in, his parents
were sitting at opposite sides of the
kitchen table, the Free Press spread out
in front of them. The brown plastic
Philco murmured a Van Patrick inter-
view with Birdie Tebbetts: it was the
seventh-inning stretch in the Indians
game. Owen’s father motioned to him to
have a seat, which he did while trying to
get the drift of the interview. His mother
didn’t look up, except to access the flip
lid on her silver ashtray. She held a Par-
liament between her thumb and middle
finger, delicately tapping the ash free
with her forefinger. His father flicked
the ash from his Old Gold with his
thumbnail at the butt of the cigarette
and made no particular effort to see that
it landed in the heavy glass ashtray by his
wrist. Commenting on what he had just
read, his father said, “Let’s blow ’em up
before they blow us up!”
“Who’s this?” his mother said, but
got no answer. Instead, she turned to
Owen. “Your father and I are going to
take a break from each other.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“We thought you’d want to know.”
“Sure.”
His father lifted his head to glance at
Owen, then returned to the paper.
Owen knew better than to say a single
word, unless it was about the weather.
“I can’t take him seriously since he shaved.”
t t
He wanted his parents to be distracted,
so that he could fit in more baseball and
get any kind of haircut he liked, but he
worried about things falling apart en-
tirely. He was unable to picture what
might lie beyond that. School, of course,
out there like a black cloud.
His mother said, “Ma said she’d take
me in.”
At this, his father raised his head
from the paper. “For God’s sake, Alice,
no one is ‘taking you in.’ You’re not
homeless.”
“Why don’t you go someplace and
I’ll stay here? Maybe someone will take
you in.”
“I’ll tell you why: I’ve got a business to
run.” His business, which dispatched
plumbers and electricians to emergen-
cies, was called Don’t Get Mad, Get
Egan and made the sort of living known
as decent. With tradesmen on retainer,
he worked from an office, a hole-in-the-
wall above a florist’s shop. An answering
service gave the impression that it was a
bigger operation than it was.
“Ma will think you’ve failed.”
“Well, you tell Ma I haven’t failed.”
“No, you tell her, sport.”
“I’m not calling your mother to tell
her that I haven’t failed. That doesn’t
make sense. Owen, where have you
been? You look like you’ve been in the
swamp.”
“I’ve been in the swamp.”
“Would you like to add anything to
that?”
“No.”
His mother stubbed out her cigarette
and said, “I think you owe your father a
more complete answer, young man.”
“It’s nothing more than a little old
swamp,” Owen said. “Mind turning that
up? It’s the top of the eighth.”
Nobody was going anywhere except
back to the newspaper.
M r. Kershaw was an agricultural
chemist for the state—a white-
collar position that was much respected
locally—but, despite his sophisticated
education and job, he was a country boy
through and through, with all the prac-
tical and improvisatory skills he’d ac-
quired growing up on a subsistence
farm. He wore bib overalls on the week-
ends and had a passion for Native Amer-
ican history. He was interested in any-
thing from the remote past. He had a
closet full of Civil War muskets that had
been passed down through his family
and a cutlass given by a slave on the Un-
derground Railroad to a forebear who
had run a safe house on the way to Can-
ada. This same forebear, by family leg-
end, while pretending to help find a run-
away, had pushed a Virginia slave hunter
out of a rowboat and held him off with
an oar until he drowned.
When baseball was rained out one
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 93
Saturday, Mr. Kershaw took Owen aside.
“How’s everything at your house?”
“Great,” Owen said suspiciously, as-
suming he was being asked about the
grease fire in the kitchen.
Mr. Kershaw looked at him closely
and said, “Now, Owen, after it rains I
hunt arrowheads. The rain washes away
the soil around them, and if you’re lucky
you can see them. My boys don’t care,
but maybe you’d like to come along.”
They drove a few miles to a farm that
belonged to a friend of Mr. Kershaw’s.
The long plowed rows in front of the
farmhouse stretched to a line of trees
that shielded the fields from wind off the
lake. A depression, not quite plowed in,
ran diagonally across the main field,
from corner to corner.
“That was a creek, Owen. The Pot-
tawatomies hunted and camped along it.
Their palisades were right over there,
where you see the stacks of the electric
plant. So you go down the left side of the
old creek, and I’ll go down the right. If
you have anything at all on your mind,
you will never find an arrowhead.”
The two walked in close sight of each
other, staring at the ground. From time to
time, Mr. Kershaw stooped to examine
something, while Owen strained to catch
sight of an arrowhead among the stones.
At length, Mr. Kershaw summoned him
to look at a broken point. Owen was
amazed to see how its symmetrical flakes
distinguished it from an ordinary stone.
When Mr. Kershaw called him over
again, he had an arrowhead in his hand,
perfect as a jewel. “Bird point,” Mr. Ker-
shaw said, and Owen stared in possessive
longing. Mr. Kershaw dropped it into his
shirt pocket with a smile. “Don’t think
and you’ll find one,” he said.
Owen resumed the search with
greater intensity as they approached the
row of trees, whose tops were ignited
by lake light. Sticking out of a clod was
a pale-white object that Owen picked
up and gazed at without recognition.
“What’ve you got there?” Mr. Kershaw
called. “Bring it here.” Owen crossed the
depression and handed it to Mr. Ker-
shaw. “Oh, you lucky boy. It’s a—” He
shook dirt from it. “French trade pipe.
Indians got them from the trappers such
a long time ago. Want to swap for my
arrowhead?”
“Which is worth more?”
Mr. Kershaw laughed. “Probably
your trade pipe, but that’s a good ques-
tion. So good, in fact, that I’ll give you
my arrowhead. Perhaps I’ll find an-
other.” He reached into his shirt pocket,
removed the arrowhead, and dropped
it, warm, into Owen’s palm, where
its glittering perfection nearly over-
whelmed him.
The ground had dried, and by the
time Owen got back to the diamond the
other boys were choosing up sides. Mike
Stallings was captain of one team and
Bobby Waldron captain of the other.
Owen wanted to put his finds in a safe
place; he ran toward his house, a hand
pressed over the lumps of arrowhead and
clay pipe in his shirt pocket, the late sun
starting to flash from the windows of the
neighborhood, a lake freighter moaning
as it passed to the east.
T he early football game with Flat
Rock a week later was played under
lights and in the mud from another af-
ternoon rain. It was a bloody affair from
the start, with poorly understood game
plans and pent-up, random excitement
among the players. At the end of the
first quarter, Ben dashed out with his
tray of water, tripped, and fell in a melee
of paper cups. The stands erupted in
laughter. Owen ran onto the field and
squatted beside Ben to pick up the mess,
stacking wet cups while Ben stood by,
helpless and ashamed. The players
waited, hands on hips, while Ben and
Owen carried the remains back to the
sidelines. The game resumed, and Owen
wandered behind the bleachers, hoping
that Flat Rock would kick the home
team’s asses and give the handful of vis-
itors something to cheer about. He
headed over to the parking lot, thinking
he might spot some Oldsmobile spinner
hubcaps to steal for his collection but
settled for a set of Pontiac baby moons,
which he stashed in the bushes, to be
picked up later. The car didn’t look quite
the same with its greasy wheel studs ex-
posed, and he really wanted to stop
there, but then he saw Bradley Ingram’s
Thunderbird and soon had all four of its
dog-dish ten-inch caps.
On the bus the next morning, the
twins were arguing with each other, a
welcome change, as it kept their atten-
tion away from others. Ben watched
them with delight, despite all their teas-
ing. The twins were as knowledgeable
about radio hits as Ben was about base-
ball, and he was drawn to their statisti-
cal world. Also, he had begun to notice
girls. These days he often sat at the back
of the bus by the twins, who seemed to
regard him as a trophy stolen from
Owen. They sensed that Owen’s popu-
larity was falling, and they enjoyed see-
ing him sitting by himself. On good
days now, Ben was their playmate, their
mascot. They alone—thanks to their
status—could make liking Ben fashion-
able. Owen used his new privacy to peek
into the false bottom of his lunchbox
and check on the well-being of his tur-
tles. He liked finding his bottle cap
empty of flies. The safety patrol, an un-
smiling senior with angry acne and an
attitude that went with the official white
belt across his chest, had been steadily
expanding his list of prohibitions from
standing while the bus was in motion to
eating from lunchboxes and arm wres-
tling. He had never bothered Owen but
appeared to watch him in expectation of
an infraction. Owen watched him back.
T he low autumn light left barely
enough time for a few innings after
school. The chalk on the base paths had
faded into the underlying dirt, and a ring
of weeds had formed around third base.
Horse chestnuts were strewn across the
road between the Kershaws’ house and
the diamond. Somehow, partial teams
were fielded, though even the meagrest
grounders ended up in the outfield, to be
run down by Stanley Ayotte, who was
proud of his arm and managed to rifle
them back. Shortstop had been elimi-
nated for lack of candidates. The score
ran up quickly.
Owen’s father appeared and boomed
that an umpire was needed. He hung his
suit coat on the backstop, tugged his tie to
one side, stepped behind the catcher,
folded his arms behind him, and bent for-
ward for the next pitch. There was no next
pitch. The players saw his condition, and
the game dissolved. As Owen started to
walk home with his father, Mr. Kershaw,
observant, came out his front door and
gave them a curt wave. Owen tried to
think of hubcaps he didn’t have yet, while
his father strode along, looking far ahead
into some empty place toward home.
On the school bus the next day,
Owen fielded questions about “the ump”
and sat quietly, sensing the small move-
ments of the turtles in the bottom of his
lunchbox, which was otherwise filled
with the random sorts of things his
mother put in there—Hostess Twinkies,
not particularly fresh fruit, packaged pea-
nut-butter-and-crackers. Ben was sitting
on the broad bench seat at the back, be-
tween the twins, who tied things in his
hair and pretended to help him with his
homework while enjoying his incompre-
hension. He must have begun to feel re-
warded by his limitations. The twins
whispered to each other and to Ben and
made his face red with the things they
said. Then Ben told the twins about
Owen’s turtles, and the twins told the
safety patrol, who towered over Owen’s
seat and asked to see his lunchbox.
“Why do you want to see it?”
“Give it to me.”
“No.”
The safety patrol worked his way for-
ward to the driver and said something,
then returned. “Give it to me or I’m put-
ting you off the bus.”
Owen slowly handed the lunchbox to
him. The safety patrol undid the catch,
opened the lid, and dumped the food.
Then he pried out the false bottom and
looked in. “You know the rules,” he said.
He gingerly lifted the turtles out of the
box, leaned toward an open window,
and threw them out. Owen jumped up
to see them burst on the pavement. He
fell back into his seat and pulled his coat
over his head.
“You knew the rules,” the safety pa-
trol said.
Life went on as though nothing had
happened, and nothing really had hap-
pened. Ben was the twins’ plaything
for several months, and then something
occurred that no one wanted to talk
about—if one twin was asked about it,
the question was referred to the other—
and Ben had to transfer to a special
school, one where he couldn’t come and
go as he pleased, or maybe it was worse
than that, since he was never seen at
home again or in town or on the football
field with his water tray. Owen contin-
ued to attend the football games, not to
watch but to wander the darkened park-
ing lot, building his hubcap collection.
As time went on, it wasn’t only the
games: any public event would do. 
nyr.kr/thisweekinfiction
Thomas McGuane on “Hubcaps.”
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 95

THE CRITICS
BOOKS
THE WARREN BRIEF
Reading Elizabeth Warren.
BY JILL LEPORE
I n her new book, Elizabeth Warren
tells the story of her life in order to
make an argument about America (the
middle class is trapped in a vise of debt),
which is the sort of thing politicians do
when they’re running for office. Warren,
who spent most of her career as a law-
school professor, was elected to the U.S.
Senate in 2012; she’s not up for reëlec-
tion until 2018. “I am not running for
President,” she insisted at a press confer-
ence in Boston in December, pledging
that she will finish her term. But the
publication, this month, of her autobiog-
raphy, “A Fighting Chance” (Metropol-
itan), ahead of a memoir by Hillary Clin-
ton that is due out this summer, only
adds to the speculation that Warren is
considering challenging Clinton for the
Democratic nomination in 2016. And,
even if Warren doesn’t run, this book is
part of that race.
Warren’s book was originally called
“Rigged,” a reference to her contention
that the American political system places
power in the hands of plutocrats and
bankers at the expense of ordinary, mid-
dle-class Americans. “Big corporations
hire armies of lobbyists to get billion-
dollar loopholes into the tax system and
persuade their friends in Congress to
support laws that keep the playing field
tilted in their favor,” Warren writes.
“Meanwhile, hardworking families are
told that they’ll just have to live with
smaller dreams for their children.”
“A Fighting Chance” is in many ways
Warren believes that the two-income family has contributed to the bankruptcy rate: there’s no longer reserve capacity for hard times.
96 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
heir to a book published a century ago.
“Other People’s Money and How the
Bankers Use It,” by Louis Brandeis, ap-
peared in the spring of 1914. Brandeis
believed that the country was being run
by plutocrats and, especially, by invest-
ment bankers, who, by combining, con-
solidating, and aggregating the functions
of banks, trusts, and corporations, con-
trolled both the nation’s credit and the
majority of its resources—including the
railroads—and yet had not the least ac-
countability to the public or any sense
that the functions they had adopted were
essentially those of a public utility. “The
power and the growth of power of our
financial oligarchs comes from wielding
the savings and quick capital of others,”
Brandeis wrote. “The fetters which bind
the people are forged from the people’s
own gold.”
Brandeis was concerned with Gilded
Age plutocrats’ use of people’s bank sav-
ings to build giant, monopolistic con-
glomerates answerable not to the people
but to shareholders. “Other People’s
Money,” which originally appeared as a se-
ries of essays in Harper’s, is a polemic, but
it’s also a huge compilation of facts and
figures. Brandeis pointed out, for in-
stance, that J. P. Morgan and the First
National and the National City Bank to-
gether held “341 directorships in 112 cor-
porations having aggregate resources or
capitalization of $22,245,000,000,” a sum
that is “nearly three times the assessed
value of all the real estate in the City of
New York” and “more than the assessed
value of all the property in the twenty-two
states, north and south, lying west of the
Mississippi River.” (Brandeis’s ability to
enlist data in the service of a legal argu-
ment, a statement known as a “Brandeis
brief,” is among his many legacies.) In
1933, Brandeis arranged to have “Other
People’s Money” republished—in an edi-
tion that cost only fifteen cents—so that it
could exert the same influence on F.D.R.’s
Administration that it had exerted on
Woodrow Wilson’s. In the first decades of
the twentieth century, arguments made by
writers like Brandeis led to a series of an-
titrust reforms and financial-industry reg-
ulations that, in the middle decades of the
century, made possible the growth of the
middle class.
Warren is concerned not with saving
but with borrowing, not with monopoly
but with debt. Since the nineteen-eighties,
many Progressive-era and New Deal re-
forms have been repealed, including a cap
on interest rates and a wall, erected in
1933, separating commercial and savings
banking from investment banking. In the
second gilded age, the fetters that bind the
people were forged first from the people’s
own credit cards and then from their
mortgages. Credit-card companies lured
borrowers in with “teaser rates.” Rates of
consumer bankruptcy skyrocketed. Eying
the profits made by credit-card compa-
nies, mortgage companies began selling
an entirely new inventory of “mortgage
products,” with low down payments, bal-
looning rates, and prepayment penalties.
Home prices shot up, and then they col-
lapsed. “When the housing market sank,”
Warren writes, “so did America’s middle
class.”
Warren speaks Brandeis’s language.
“There is nobody in this country who
got rich on his own,” Warren said at a
campaign stop in 2011, in remarks that
defined her candidacy. “Nobody. You
built a factory out there, good for you.
But I want to be clear. You moved your
goods to market on the roads the rest of
us paid for. You hired workers the rest of
ABOVE VASCO MOURÃO
us paid to educate.” You used other peo-
ple’s money. “You built a factory, and it
turned into something terrific or a great
idea—God bless! Keep a big hunk of
it. But part of the underlying social con-
tract is you take a hunk of that and pay
ALEX WONG/GETTY

ILLUSTRATION BY SHANE HARRISON THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 97

 “I’d like to meet the algorithm that thought we’d be a good match.”
t t
forward for the next kid who comes
along.” It’s the Brandeis in Warren that
got her elected. What she does next will
have to do with the many ways in which
2014 is not 1914.
A
“ Fighting Chance” begins this way:
“I’m Elizabeth Warren. I’m a wife,
a mother, and a grandmother.” No-
where in “Other People’s Money” did
Brandeis mention his life or his family;
no doubt, these matters did not strike
him as relevant to his discussion of fi-
nancial oligarchy. Also, Brandeis wasn’t
running for office. He was appointed to
the Supreme Court in 1916, but, even if
he had run for office, and had been re-
quired to write the necessary campaign
autobiography, its first words would not
have been “I’m Louis Brandeis. I’m a
husband and a father.”
Warren, like Brandeis, is a lawyer and
a scholar. She was born in Oklahoma in
1949, the youngest of four children.
When she was twelve years old, her fa-
ther, a salesman for Montgomery Ward,
98 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
had a heart attack and lost his job. The
family lost a car and might have lost their
house if Warren’s mother hadn’t man-
aged to get a job at Sears. Warren went
to college on a debating-society scholar-
ship but dropped out when she was
nineteen to marry an old high-school
boyfriend, Jim Warren. She later fin-
ished college and moved with her hus-
band to New Jersey; he’d been trans-
ferred there by his employer, I.B.M.
Warren started work as a schoolteacher;
by the end of her first year teaching,
when she was twenty-one, she was preg-
nant. “Somewhere in between diapers
and breast-feeding, I hatched the idea of
going to school,” she writes. Her hus-
band didn’t want her to work full time,
but agreed that it would be O.K. if she
took classes. She decided on law school,
because she liked the lawyers on TV.
Every day, she brought her daughter,
Amelia, to a woman who took care of
half a dozen kids, and went to class at
Rutgers Law School. By the end of her
third year, she was pregnant again; she
had a boy named Alex. Much of War-
ren’s book is about her children and
grandchildren. She writes about a mo-
ment in 1978: “It was early evening, the
cranky time of day. I was jostling Alex on
my hip and frying pork chops. Amelia
was on the floor with crayons scattered
all around. I kept an eye on the clock,
knowing Jim would come through the
door in about twenty minutes.” The
phone rang. It was a professor at the
University of Houston Law Center, ask-
ing her about a job inquiry she’d sent be-
cause her husband might be transferred
to Houston. Warren writes, “I tried to
sound smooth and relaxed, even as I jig-
gled Alex furiously in the hope that he
wouldn’t start crying. And I kept looking
at those damn pork chops.”
Warren got a teaching position at
the law school (where she was routinely
mistaken for a secretary), and the fam-
ily moved to Houston. One day in 1979
when she picked up Alex from a day-
care center in a strip mall, he held on to
her and cried and cried and cried. She
took him out of the day-care center. “I
was so tired that my bones hurt,” War-
ren writes. She was about to quit. Then
her aunt Bee volunteered to move to
Houston from Oklahoma, to help take
care of the children. “Nearly eighty
years old and so needed,” Bee said. Not
long afterward, when Warren’s mar-
riage fell apart, her parents moved to
Houston to help out, too. In 1980,
Warren remarried.
Warren’s interest in debt, she says, is
partly personal. “My daddy and I were
both afraid of being poor, really poor.
His response was never to talk about
money or what might happen if it ran
out—never ever ever. My response was
to study contracts, finance, and, most of
all, economic failure, to learn everything
I could.” Her research led her to con-
clude that the bankruptcy rate is a ca-
nary in the economy’s coal mine and
that, sometime during the Reagan Ad-
ministration, the canary died.
The argument Warren offers in “A
Fighting Chance” is one that she began
to make in “As We Forgive Our Debt-
ors: Bankruptcy and Consumer Credit
in America,” a monograph written with
Teresa A. Sullivan and Jay Lawrence
Westbrook and published by Oxford in
1989. Sullivan, a sociologist, is now
president of the University of Virginia;
Westbrook teaches bankruptcy law at
the University of Texas School of Law,
where Warren taught from 1981 to
1987. (In 1986, Warren and West-
brook wrote a textbook, “The Law of
Debtors and Creditors,” currently in its
seventh edition.) In “As We Forgive
Our Debtors,” Sullivan, Warren, and
Westbrook reported the results of a
study they made of twenty-four hun-
dred bankruptcy petitions filed in 1981.
Bankruptcy rates had risen because of
the 1978 Bankruptcy Reform Act,
which made filing for bankruptcy eas-
ier, but also because, by the nineteen-
seventies, consumer spending had be-
come the engine of the American
economy. Sullivan, Warren, and West-
brook found that most filers weren’t
cheats or frauds and they also weren’t
poor; they were members of the middle
class, undone by the volatility of the
economy and by a six-hundred-billion-
dollar consumer-credit industry. More
than half were homeowners, and many
were women rearing children.
In 1987, Warren began teaching at
the University of Pennsylvania Law
School. In 1995, she moved to Harvard.
In “The Fragile Middle Class: Ameri-
cans in Debt,” published by Yale in
2000, Sullivan, Warren, and West-
brook reported the results of a follow-
up study of another twenty-four hun-
dred bankruptcy filings, these from
1991. Even more Americans were
drowning in debt. Between 1979 and
1997, the number of personal-bank-
ruptcy filings rose by four hundred
per cent.
In an age of debt, an unexpected loss
can drive almost anyone to ruin. “Di-
vorce, an unhappy second marriage, a se-
rious illness, no job,” Warren writes. “A
turn here, a turn there, and my life might
have been very different, too.”
L ouis Brandeis had a knack for mak-
ing himself an expert on just about
anything, but the original “Brandeis
brief” was a hundred-and-thirteen-page
document that he submitted to the Su-
preme Court in 1908, in Muller v. Ore-
gon, a case concerning a law limiting the
workday for women in laundries and fac-
tories to ten hours. “The decision in this
case will, in effect, determine the consti-
tutionality of nearly all the statutes in
force in the United States, limiting the
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 99
 hours of labor of adult women,” Brandeis
explained in his brief. He proceeded to
cite and summarize the findings of hun-
dreds of reports and studies by physicians,
municipal health boards, public-health
departments, medical societies, factory
inspectors, and bureaus of labor, demon-
strating the harm done to women who
worked long hours, an argument that relied
on ideas about women’s weakness rela-
tive to men. The Oregon law was upheld.
The efforts of a generation of Pro-
gressive reformers, including Brandeis,
lies behind the abolition of child labor
and the establishment of maximum-hour
and minimum-wage laws for both men
and women. A century later, Warren’s
brief, too, has to do with the long hours
that women work. She’s interested in the
unintended economic consequences that
arise when women rearing children enter
the paid labor force. Warren’s counterin-
tuitive argument is that, for all the public
and private good that has come from
gains made by women in education and
employment, earning money has made
women who are mothers more econom-
ically vulnerable, not less.
Warren believes that the two-in-
come family has contributed to the
bankruptcy rate. “For middle-class fam-
ilies, the most important part of the
safety net for generations has been the
stay-at-home mother,” Warren and her
daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, wrote
in “The Two-Income Trap: Why Mid-
dle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are
Going Broke” (2003), a book aimed at
a wider audience than War-
ren’s earlier, academic work.
(“Mom, you are boring,”
Tyagi told Warren. “Col-
laborating with my daugh-
ter is not for sissies,” War-
ren says.) It used to be that
when a middle-class family
was faced with a financial
crisis the woman in the
house could get a job, to
tide things over, which is what hap-
pened when Warren’s father had a heart
attack and her mother got a job at Sears.
This cushion doesn’t exist in the two-
income family, which, in its short his-
tory—it has its origins, as a middle-class
phenomenon, in the nineteen-seven-
ties—has also taken on a great deal
more housing debt. The 1974 Equal
Credit Opportunity Act required lend-
100 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
ers to count a wife’s income when eval-
uating borrowers; the deregulation of
the mortgage lending industry began in
1980. With two wage earners and low
down payments, middle-class families
took on bigger mortgages and contrib-
uted to an increase in the cost of hous-
ing, especially when families with chil-
dren paid a premium for property in
school districts with high test scores. Fi-
nancial crisis, for a two-income family,
usually means having to live, quite sud-
denly, on one income. In these straits,
families with children tend to totter on
the edge of ruin. “Having a child is now
the single best predictor that a woman
will end up in financial collapse,” War-
ren and Tyagi reported. Between 1981
and 2001, the number of women filing
for bankruptcy rose more than six hun-
dred per cent.
Warren entered the world of policy-
making when, in 1995, she was ap-
pointed to serve on the National Bank-
ruptcy Review Commission, during the
Clinton Administration. She found the
work thrilling and the results madden-
ing. She describes a report, sponsored by
the banking industry, alleging that bank-
ruptcy protection amounted to a five-
hundred-and-fifty-dollar “hidden tax”
levied on every hardworking American
family: “I’d spent nearly twenty years
sweating over every detail in a string of
serious academic studies, agonizing over
sample sizes and statistical significance
to make certain that whatever I reported
was exactly right. Now the banks just
wrote a check, commis-
sioned a friendly study, and
purchased their own facts.”
Warren’s frustration was
part of what led her to seek
a broader audience for her
research by writing “The
Two-Income Trap,” which
led to appearances on the
“Today” show and “Dr.
Phil,” where she spoke with
a family struggling with debt. “Year in
and year out, I’d been fighting as hard as
I could,” Warren writes. “But by spend-
ing a few minutes talking to that family
on Dr. Phil’s show—and to about six
million other people who were looking
on—I might have done more good than
in an entire year as a professor.”
Nevertheless, the solutions that War-
ren has proposed often fail to convince.
To counter both the crisis in public ed-
ucation and the high cost of housing,
Warren and Tyagi recommend a uni-
versal public-school voucher system in
which parents could send their kids to
any public school: “An all-voucher sys-
tem would be a shock to the educa-
tional system, but the shakeout might
be just what the system needs.” Yes,
that would be a shock. It would also be
reckless.
In 2008, Warren joined a five-person
congressional-oversight panel whose
creation was mandated by the seven-
hundred-billion-dollar bailout. She
found that thrilling and maddening,
too. In the spring of 2009, after the
panel issued its third report, critical of
the bailout, Larry Summers took War-
ren out to dinner in Washington and,
she recalls, told her that she had a choice
to make. She could be an insider or an
outsider, but if she was going to be an
insider she needed to understand one
unbreakable rule about insiders: “They
don’t criticize other insiders.” That’s
about when Warren went on the Jon
Stewart show, and you get the sense
that, over that dinner, she decided to
run for office.
E lizabeth Warren has a case to make
about what bankers do with other
people’s money; she’s been making it
for twenty-five years. It’s hardly un-
contested, but it rests on collaborative,
peer-reviewed, empirical research. Get-
ting that argument across to voters in
2012 required a great deal of compression
and simplification, even more than was
required to write “The Two-Income
Trap,” but Warren’s expertise—her au-
thority as an intellectual—also helped
get her elected. Running against Scott
Brown, she had to tell a stump-size story
about her life, a story that includes this
fact: for a time, she was a single mother.
That story helped get her elected.
My life explains my fight has been the
argument of every American political bi-
ography for a long time. When you’re
grafting a life story onto a political argu-
ment, there will always be places where
the grain runs in different directions. (An
argument that the system is rigged tends
to be somewhat undermined, for in-
stance, by the success of the person
pointing that out.) And, particularly for
women with children, campaign biogra-
phy can be a snare. When Wendy Davis
decided to run for governor of Texas, her
consultants advised her to tell the story of
how she started out as a single mother
before becoming a lawyer; conservatives
accused her of having abandoned her
children. This snare exists because polit-
ical biography as a genre follows conven-
tions whose origins lie with Andrew
Jackson, in the early nineteenth century,
long before women gained the right to
vote or to hold office. Discrimination is
the afterlife of discredited ideas. By the
standards applied to Davis, who left her
two young daughters with their father so
that she could go to law school, most
candidates elected to office in the United
States in the past two centuries aban-
doned their children.
But there’s another snare here: the
danger of adopting, in place of the con-
ventions of the Andrew Jackson’s-boot-
straps political biography, the newer
conventions of diaper-pin Girl Jackson-
ianism. Political consultants appear to be
eager to advise their female candidates to
include, when telling the story of their
lives, gauzy intimacies, silly-little-me
confessions of domestic ineptitude, stagy
performances of maternal devotion, and
the shameless trotting out of twinkle-
eyed tots. In “A Fighting Chance,” War-
ren argues that the federal government
has allowed an unregulated financial in-
dustry to prey on the middle class; she
also writes no small amount about peach
cobbler and burned frying pans. Still, she
is not adorable; instead, she’s fierce in her
affections. “Sometimes, late at night,
when the house was quiet, I’d scoop La-
vinia out of her crib and hold her,” she
writes, referring to one of her grandchil-
dren. “Not because she needed it but be-
cause I did.”
Warren is also smart enough to use the
conventions of political biography, old
and new, to insist on the existence of a re-
lationship between caring for other peo-
ple and caring about politics. Her brief is
really about the abandonment of children,
not by women who go to school or to
work but by legislatures and courts that
have allowed the nation’s social and eco-
nomic policies to be made by corporations
and bankers. Writing about her children
and grandchildren—rocking that baby—
is more than the place where Warren
leaves Brandeis behind. It’s an argument
about where our real debts lie. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 101

BOOKS
GO GIANTS
A new survey of the Great American Novel.
BY ADAM GOPNIK
W hen Theodore Dreiser wrote “An
American Tragedy,” in 1925,
he meant that “American” to give
some dignity to a sordid murder story.
But sometime in the past forty years the
sordidness got the upper hand over
the adjective: “American Graffiti,”
“American Gigolo,” “American Sucker,”
“American Hustle,” even “American
Pie”—all those “American”s superintend
a story that is in some way seedy, or just
naïve, yet is still meant to be exemplary.
The difference between a mere “Psy-
cho” and an “American Psycho” is the
difference between a weirdo living in a
lonely motel and someone who, though
an even bigger weirdo, is a Wall Street
Why don’t Americans produce panoramic, class-crossing, epoch-defining novels?
102 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
slickster, and so a representative man. A
movie called “American Hero” now
would far more likely be about Hulk
Hogan than about Dwight Eisenhower.
One lesson of Lawrence Buell’s new
survey of our literature, “The Dream of
the Great American Novel” (Harvard),
is that the “American” in that famous
phrase was one of the first instances of
the kind—more ironic than solemn, and
always touched with an undercurrent of
self-mockery, even when people were
pursuing it more openly than they do
these days. When the now forgotten
novelist John W. De Forest spread the
phrase, in 1868, in an essay in The Na-
tion, he meant it as a more or less straight
ambition. But in Buell’s introduction
one learns that Henry James, fastidious
to a fault, gave De Forest’s ideal the jolly
nickname of “the G.A.N.,” while Wil-
liam Dean Howells placed it in the same
category as other quested-for chimeras,
announcing that “the great American
novel, if true, must be incredible.” Kept
in quotation marks from the beginning,
it survived more as a dream than as a
goal. By the time Philip Roth, in the
nineteen-seventies, got around to actu-
ally writing a novel called “The Great
American Novel,” the only way to treat
it was as a joke. (Roth’s—very good—
novel was about baseball, then still the
Great American subject.)
What De Forest and some of his
followers were urging Americans to
write, Buell explains, was a very speci-
fic sort of book: the kind of panora-
mic, class-crossing, manner-marking,
epoch-defining novel that Balzac and
Thackeray (and, in a more radical way,
Dickens and, later, Zola) had produced
in England and France. A book that
gets it all in, from working-class accents
to eccentric aristocrats. Why no Amer-
ican has yet been able to pull off that
kind of book—a novel to stand along-
side “Lost Illusions” or “Bleak House,”
as a cross-section cut from a country—
is a good question, which Buell rather
quickly passes over. (It might simply be
that, in a country dedicated to the prop-
osition of the autonomous individual,
books about people defined by their
place in a social web will never fly, while
books about autonomous agents will al-
ways have a market, even if their moral
is that no agent is truly autonomous.)
Buell’s new idea is that the dream of
the Great American Novel has resolved
itself, invisibly, into four distinct and re-
curring “scripts.” The first script, he ex-
plains, derives from Hawthorne’s “Scar-
let Letter,” and its essential quality is its
adaptiveness, the way the book has lent
itself to a “series of memorable imitations
and reinventions.” But one might also
add that the subject itself is “canoni-
cal”—the tale of sexual transgression and
punishment in enclosed American com-
munities is, after all, one that reaches
from Hawthorne to such later candidates
as Updike’s “Couples.” Then, there’s the
“up-from” novel, which follows an aspi-
rant as he or she rises from “obscurity to
prominence” (“Invisible Man,” “The
ILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL GALLARDO
Adventures of Augie March”); the “ro-
mance of the divide,” which dramatizes
a racial or geographic gap and the mostly
failed attempts to bridge it (“Uncle
Tom’s Cabin”; all of Faulkner); and,
finally, the “compendious meganovel,”
which may superficially resemble the
Balzacian book but is more often a mi-
crocosm than a true cross-section—a
bunch of guys on a boat hunting whales,
a squadron of soldiers at war. (All the
American types are there, but crowded
in, not spaced out: the familiar platoon
with the wise guy from Brooklyn, the
towheaded boy from farm country, etc.)
Buell, a professor of American litera-
ture at Harvard, has many shrewd things
to say about patterns in American fiction.
He shows, for instance, that, for all the
presumed chauvinism of our literature,
the up-from story in nineteenth-century
literature was actually far more often a
girl’s story than a boy’s: Henry James’s
novels, as much as Edith Wharton’s, are
concerned mainly with how women
make their way. He also identifies, and
explains, why American fiction is drawn
to a “split-focused narrative structure in
which a symbolically charged actor gets
viewed largely from the perspective of
more quotidian dramatized observers.”
It’s a kind of fiction, he suggests, uniquely
suited to a country often shaped by “a
symbiotic tension between a rigid, obso-
lescent order of values and a more ‘mod-
ern,’ disenchanted, pragmatic, and intel-
lectually mobile emergent one exempli-
fied by the observer(s).” The narrators
are plain modern guys, and they look
in wonder at the shining archaic hero.
“Moby-Dick” and “The Great Gatsby”
are classic cases. So is Owen Wister’s
“The Virginian,” a once universally read
novel of a dude who goes West and
meets an “omni competent” but soon to
be out-of-date ranch hand, and Robert
Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men”—
once regarded as a very-big-deal poten-
tial G.A.N.—where the populist Huey
Long character is observed by a cau-
tiously modern Southern gent.
Good ideas about books tend to be
both simple and sticky. “The anxiety of
influence” may have become a catch-
penny phrase, but there’s something in
the notion that strong writers either
swerve from their predecessors or com-
plete them. Buell’s scripts are often
sticky in that way. Thinking of the split-
consciousness type, where the enfeebled
narrator studies the active subject, one
instantly adds to the list, with twists
and turns, other good A.N.s: Randall
Jarrell’s “Pictures from an Institution,”
where the hyperactive postwar college
president is observed by a weak, “Euro-
peanized” narrator, and Budd Schul-
berg’s “The Disenchanted,” set in the
nineteen-thirties, where the P.O.V. is
that of a young left-wing screenwriter,
and the romantic figure he is struggling
to understand, his own tarnished
Gatsby, is a portrait of the dissolute,
post-“Crack-Up” Scott Fitzgerald.
You could also add “Citizen Kane” to
the list of old-style heroes with new-
style narrators, of course, and that raises
an issue with the idea of these scripts:
the scripts apply to scripts, as much as to
books, and therefore seem just to be sto-
ries that work, rather than something
peculiar to the novel. (Roth says, in
“Reading Myself and Others,” that he
first learned about point of view from
listening to Mississippi’s Red Barber an-
nounce Brooklyn Dodger games—in a
country with many accents and games
that are always changing, the best narra-
tor is the guy from outside the borough.)
Which leads to a larger question, for
the most part scanted in Buell’s study:
What is it in the scripts of the American
novel that you don’t find in the British
novel or the French novel? There are,
after all, many famous and chewy French
and English novels on up-from subjects:
how does Balzac’s “Lost Illusions” or
Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Caster-
bridge” differ from our American tales of
ascent? We have many “mooncalf ” sagas,
of troubled youths who see the world
with sensitivity and humor: Twain (“The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”), Fitz-
gerald (“This Side of Paradise”), Salinger
(“The Catcher in the Rye”), Roth
(“Goodbye, Columbus”). But you can
wonder how they differ from the French
kind, like Françoise Sagan’s “Bonjour,
Tristesse,” or Alain-Fournier’s prewar
classic “Le Grand Meaulnes,” which also
has Gatsby-ish echoes: a mysterious
figure in love with a remote, rich prin-
cess. Maybe it matters that the idea of an
aristocracy, even if it exists only as a com-
munity of ghosts, persists in Alain-
Fournier as it does not in Fitzgerald. The
absence of a hovering aristocracy gives
the American novel the urge to induce
one—the fairy-tale energy derived from
needing a princess, whether Daisy Bu-
chanan or Brenda Patimkin.
S till, the point of revisionist history of
this kind is not to settle old arguments
but to start new ones, and Buell does. His
view of books tends to be thoroughly so-
ciological or historicizing. At times, this
pays off; he makes, for instance, the very
interesting point that the kind of ascent
that Gatsby achieves—poor boy to bil-
lionaire—was far rarer in the mid-twen-
ties than it had been three decades earlier,
so that this particular up-from tale is re-
ally more a nostalgic memento of Fitzger-
ald’s St. Paul upbringing than an account
of the roaring twenties. But then “The
Great Gatsby” is a made-up story about
that unreal fair princess and an improba-
ble knight-errant, and no more meant to
survive that kind of historical test than any
other American myth. Fiction departs
from the truth to intensify it. In Victorian
England, there were doubtless no young
gentlemen whose great expectations de-
rived from secret funds sent by convicts
who had been transported to Australia
many years earlier, but Dickens’s vision of
a society whose top ranks rested, without
knowing it, on the labor of the very bot-
tom one was poetically exactly right.
Like most contemporary professors of
literature, Buell doesn’t make distinctions
between the really good stuff and the
merely significant stuff. Indeed, “The
Dream of the Great American Novel” can
make the life of literature into a dense so-
ciological echo chamber. Buell is a passion-
ately horizontal reader, looking across time
from book to book, more than a vertical
one, looking deep into a page. In Chap-
ter 10, praising Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,”
one of his most beloved G.A.N. candi-
dates, he tells us disarmingly that “one
measure of ‘Beloved’ ’s achievement is
its brilliantly subtle reinvention of key
strategies, even individual scenes, from
the novels examined in Chapters 7-9.”
There’s little sense of books as they exist
for readers, in people and phrases. For
Buell, the difference between a beautifully
written book and a badly written book ex-
ists at about the same level as a politician’s
hair—it’s something you might notice,
but not something that should distract
you from his real agenda. Humor is as-
sumed to be sprinkled on sentences like
confectioner’s sugar at a bakery. Tone,
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 103
mood, and dramatic incident are largely
taken for granted—the work, the will, the
labor of writing is entirely invisible.
“Moby-Dick” is simply a fancier version of
what you find in “The Virginian.”
Buell’s defense seems the familiar
one: what we mean by good and bad,
beautiful and ugly, changes so much
over time, and is itself so dependent on
context, that to fetishize these terms is a
way of not actually studying literature.
You just end up studying your own sen-
sibility. You can’t “get” a good book like
“Huck Finn” without passing through a
badly written one like “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.” (Buell presses the insight that
Huck’s heroism in opposing slavery,
even at the risk of damnation, is a whole
lot less heroic in the eighteen-eighties,
with the evil of slavery a settled ques-
tion, than the same attitudes were in
Stowe’s time.)
Still, how much better “Huck Finn”
is than “Uncle Tom” doesn’t depend on
where it stands in the history of other
books; it depends on the flow of its line,
on Twain’s magical simplification of
language. Huck’s comment on “Pil-
grim’s Progress”—“The statements was
interesting, but tough”—is the perfect
American summation not just of Bun-
yan but of a whole kind of philosophical
literature. And when Huck says of the
gloomy backwoods-Gothic poet Em-
meline Grangerford, “I reckoned, that
with her disposition, she was having a
better time in the graveyard,” he writes
an epitaph not just for Emmeline but for
an entire strain of the American morbid
confessional, right through Sylvia Plath.
The sociological turn too quickly
makes books into steps in career-build-
ing. By writing “Invisible Man,” we’re
told, Ralph Ellison “opened up a never
ending series of opportunities for high-
profile interviews and conferences, criti-
cal essays and position papers, fellow-
ships, and visiting professorships.” Buell’s
sense of what matters in fiction depends
to a disquieting degree on best-seller lists
and even Amazon reviews—not exactly
a scientific index of opinion, let alone
of the difference between dull and dis-
tinguished writing. What is meant to
be a disabused view of literary culture
becomes an enthralled view of literary
commerce. The critical view of Ameri-
can literary commerce and the com-
mercial view of American literary com-
104 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
merce end up looking oddly the same.
With every allowance for the virtues of
treating books as commodities like any
other, the literary marketplace might still
be made distinct from the community of
readers. This distinction is subtle, and
hard to make cartographic, but it’s one
known to both book buyers and booksell-
ers. The literary marketplace responds to
headlines and shared trauma in a more or
less predictable way: books about sex and
vampires and Jesus sell; more subtly—
Buell’s point—books about the illusion of
social updraft in America sell, too. What
sells says a lot about the country; even the
kind of sex that sells—adultery in John
O’Hara’s time, S. & M. amid extreme
wealth now—tells you something about
the readers who buy the books. Yet the
community of readers has an existence
outside the literary marketplace as well,
and is responsible for the slow but irresist-
ible rise and fall of reputations. When you
read the letters of Robert Lowell and
Elizabeth Bishop today, you are startled
to realize that, in their day, Lowell was a
god and Bishop still very much an aspi-
rant, a judgment that has been turned al-
most on its head now. The forces that
propelled the change come mostly from
below. No one biography, no one critical
text, no one “reading,” and certainly no
one publisher altered the view; readers al-
tered it by reading and then talking to one
another. It was the suffrage of ordinary
readers that rediscovered Barbara Pym
and remade Trollope a classic alongside
Dickens. The literary marketplace turns
profits; the community of readers makes
reputations. (And guarantees the value of
literary estates.) A study of the literary
marketplace is essential in order to be
honest about the development of the taste
of a community of readers, but it can’t
replace it.
How the two interact is a study in it-
self. The now unread Van Wyck Brooks’s
five-volume history of American litera-
ture, “Makers and Finders,” though prize-
winning (and best-selling) in the late thir-
ties and forties, seems quaint and narrowly
Waspy now. But it combined a strong
sense of why books occur at the moment
that they do with an ear for the sentences
that make books last. In his great “New
England Indian Summer,” Brooks under-
stood that De Forest, to name only one,
was inseparable from the history of the
post-Civil War era, while what made
Emily Dickinson great was not that she
achieved some synthesis of later-nine-
teenth-century ideas but that she could
describe a stranger with a face “as hand-
some and meaningless as the full moon.”
A s Buell, nearing the end of his study,
turns to his own view of what comes
close to the Great American Novel among
contemporary contenders—Morrison’s
“Beloved”; Roth’s late “American trilogy”
(“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Com-
munist,” “The Human Stain”)—one
senses that the “American” may have been
a misdirection. What matters is the “Great.”
No matter how resistant and detached
Buell is from the idea of the G.A.N., he
cannot resist an idea of bigness: he favors
“Beloved” over “The Catcher in the Rye,”
say, because it seems somehow to get it
all in, to sum it all up, to encompass its
predecessors. He writes much more
about the American trilogy (what is
sometimes called by Roth fans the “Letter
to Stockholm” series) than about Roth’s
smaller but perhaps fictionally more in-
tense, more eccentrically obsessive Zuck-
erman books, because the three novels
cover more ground, report on how gloves
were made as well as on the actions of the
hands beneath. Nothing is more Ameri-
can than our will to make the enormous do
the work of the excellent. We have googly
eyes for gargantuan statements. Even in
this supposedly diminished era, the cre-
dence that Americans give to grandeur
and gravity sets our novels apart.
It may be a script that also runs out-
side the novel proper; Francis Ford Cop-
pola, in “Apocalypse Now,” came as close
to the Great American Movie as anyone
has, by sacrificing his sanity to this idea
and satirizing it at the same time. Bran-
do’s Kurtz is the elder Hemingway, crazy
with frustrated ambition and grandiosity
among the heathen. But the trait lends
our literature its dignity, even in a hard
time in the marketplace, giving signi-
ficance to those thousand-page black
holes—Ross Lockridge, Jr.,’s “Raintree
County,” Harold Brodkey’s “Runaway
Soul.” Few may read them, but the Amer-
ican community of readers holds them in
regard. We hear about Matthew Barney’s
six-hour film of Norman Mailer’s seven-
hundred-page “Ancient Evenings,” an
unwatchable adaptation of an unreadable
book, and we think, Hey, that might be
great! It’s the American way. 
BRIEFLY NOTED
THE BRIGHT CONTINENT, by Dayo Olopade (Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt). In this upbeat study of development in Africa,
Olopade identifies the great obstacle as “formality bias”—the
tendency of outsiders to recognize solutions to African prob-
lems only when they come from governments and other for-
mal organizations. Africa’s great asset is kanju, a Yoruba word
that Olopade defines as “the specific creativity born from Af-
rican difficulty.” Examples include the Nollywood film in-
dustry, which began when an electronics dealer had a surplus
of blank VHS tapes, and Ushahidi, a mapping application
that Kenyan coders created to pinpoint violence. Despite ev-
ident exasperation at Western interventions that fail to adapt
to local systems, the book is written more in wonder at Afri-
can ingenuity than in anger at foreign incomprehension.

DYING EVERY DAY, by James Romm (Knopf ). The Emperor

Nero, having had his mother murdered, sent the Senate a
flimsy cover story involving a shipwreck, a coup, and a sui-
cide. It was ghostwritten for him by Seneca, the great Stoic
philosopher. Romm adeptly expounds the puzzle of the phi-
losopher’s life: Seneca, revered for centuries as a pristine
moral voice, was despised by many contemporaries as a hyp-
ocritical, profiteering lackey. He was Nero’s tutor, got rich
serving in the Emperor’s degraded regime, and may have
hoped to be emperor himself. In Nero’s purge of the aristoc-
racy, he stood by, then killed himself when death seemed in-
evitable. Stoicism has a power that outlasted Seneca and
Nero; but where, Romm asks, is the line between peace and
perversity, complacency and complicity?

OFF COURSE, by Michelle Huneven (Sarah Crichton Books). Any

novel that has a bear and casual sex in the first chapter has to pay
off somehow, and this one, Huneven’s fourth, is full of surprises.
Cressida Hartley, with an economics dissertation to write, holes
up in her parents’ home high in California’s Southern Sierra,
and gets distracted by the locals: the bar scene, the builders, the
small pool of social contacts, among them a goaty guy and a
married man. Months go by, and she veers into obsession, de-
spite her reserve and her determined realism. Huneven’s touch
is sure, and her protagonist is simultaneously sympathetic and
maddening. The landscape descriptions are erotic, and the
erotic scenes have near-hallucinatory power.

, by Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Linda

Coverdale (New Press). This novel begins on a sluggish Au-
gust day in 1914, in the Loire region. Soon, the idyllic coun-
tryside is “drained almost empty of its men,” completely up-
ended by the rumblings of war. In terse, impressively
researched chapters, Echenoz follows the lives of five friends
in the trenches, and ruminates on the curious realities of war-
fare: the throngs of left-behind animals, the mustiness of
open air at the front, the mind-numbing slog of endless
marching. None of the men are spared the “sordid, stinking
opera” of the battlefield, the “perpetual polyphonic thunder
beneath the vast entrenched cold.”
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 105

ON TELEVISION
CASTLES IN THE AIR
The gorgeous existential funk of “Adventure Time.”
BY EMILY NUSSBAUM
T he animated series “Adventure
Time,” now entering its sixth sea-
son on Cartoon Network, is the kind of
cult phenomenon that’s hard to de-
scribe without sounding slightly nuts.
It’s a post-apocalyptic allegory full of
helpful dating tips for teen-agers, or
like World of Warcraft as recapped by
Carl Jung. It can be enjoyed, at varying
levels, by third graders, art historians,
and cosplay fans. It’s also the type of
show that’s easy to write off as “stoner
humor,” which may be why it took me
a while to drop the snotty attitude, to
open up and admit the truth: “Adven-
ture Time” is one of the most philo-
sophically risky and, often, emotionally
The show’s foreground is jaunty, but its background hints at a ruined world.
106 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
affecting shows on TV. It’s beautiful
and funny and stupid and smart, in
about equal parts, as well as willing to
explore uneasy existential questions,
like what it means to go on when the
story you’re in has ended.
If that sounds pretentious, there’s
definitely a simpler way to watch the
show: as a cartoon about a hero who
fights villains, with fun violence, the oc-
casional fart joke, and a slight edge of
Bushwick cool-kid hipness. When it
began, in 2010, “Adventure Time”
stuck more closely to a familiar formula,
in which a good-hearted human boy
named Finn and his dog, Jake, a gruff-
voiced wingman type, were brought up
as siblings. For no clear reason, Jake can
stretch to any length and alter his body,
extending his front leg to make a bridge,
blowing up to mountain size, or turn-
ing himself into an armchair. Finn and
Jake’s friendship has a classic nerd-and-
his-id dynamic, a bit like Calvin and
Hobbes, in which a wild animal en-
courages his friend to go on adventures
and cheers him on with girls (among
them, the scientist-princess Princess
Bubblegum). Online summaries make
it sound like a wacky romp: “Finn and
Jake are assigned to watch three magi-
cal beans; two of the beans are innocent,
but one of them is evil. . . . Eventually,
one of the stalks produces evil piglets,
and Finn and Jake defeat the beings
using a novel method that involves
ice cream.”
But, as the series progresses, an eerie
backstory emerges. The candy-tinted
world we’re seeing has a terrible history:
while Finn is surrounded by magical
beings, virtually every other human
appears to have been killed or trans-
formed, during something called the
Mushroom War, which included, ac-
cording to one unnerving voice-over,
“frightful bombs poised to bathe the
land in mutogenic horror.” As a baby,
Finn was left on a leaf, crying and alone.
The other major characters have their
own disturbing origin stories. The so-
ciopathic Ice King, who keeps trying
to kidnap princesses and marry them,
used to be a gentle antiquarian named
Simon, a personality he lost while fight-
ing mutants after the war, when a magic
crown drove him crazy. The punk-goth
vampire Marceline has a mobster-like
dad, who rules an underworld called
the Nightosphere, but she, too, wan-
dered alone in a postwar landscape as
a child. At the age of seven, she was res-
cued by Simon, but once he became
the cackling Ice King he forgot he ever
knew her.
As with “The Simpsons,” the en-
semble is enormous, allowing episodes
to go off on odd detours and tell the
stories of minor figures, such as the
woozy Southern elephant named Tree
Trunks; or the freaky Lemongrabs,
lemon-headed maniacs who spend
most of their time howling in frustra-
tion; or the friendly Korean-accented
computer named B.M.O. In later
seasons, these threads cohere into a
ILLUSTRATION BY PENDLETON WARD
broader cosmology; it includes an alter-
nate time line, in which the bombs
haven’t yet exploded. Finn is the only
character who ages in a normal fashion:
he began as a twelve-year-old, but this
season he’s sixteen, and his relation-
ships, and the show itself, have become
deeper and (codedly) more sexual.
There are moments when Finn’s story
feels suspiciously like a compensatory
fantasy, invented to disguise a trauma
that can’t be faced head on—as if it
were the “Mulholland Drive” of chil-
dren’s television.
I n interviews, Pendleton Ward, the
show’s creator, has laid out some
of his influences, including the role-
playing game that was the leisure-time
activity of my own nerdy teens, the
dice-and-paper-based Dungeons &
Dragons. Many of the villains, like the
skeletal Lich, have visual origins in the
old D. & D. “Monster Manual”; the
plots include classic quest-style puz-
zles—find the gems, open the portal! In
the hand-drawn pastel backgrounds
and the characters’ bubble eyes, there
are hints of Japanese animation—Ward
has cited the Hayao Miyazaki movie
“My Neighbor Totoro” as an inspira-
tion—but the aesthetic feels equally in-
formed by the urbane squiggles of Felix
the Cat, the jolting aggression of early
Mickey Mouse cartoons, and the bratty
buddy energy of series like “Beavis and
Butt-head” and “Ren & Stimpy.”
No matter how jaunty the fore-
ground, though, with its penguin named
Gunter and its goofy shouts of “Youth
culture forever!,” the background hints
at a ruined world: missiles poke out,
and abandoned technology is every-
where. Bodies morph grotesquely—
when Marceline’s father gets angry, he
transforms from a businessman into a
demon with an ass face, a vertical orifice
for a mouth and a tentacle beard worthy
of H. P. Lovecraft—and these ugly vi-
sions suggest both the horrors of ado-
lescent bodies and postwar mutations.
Such darkness might easily turn cyn-
ical, and yet “Adventure Time” has a
gentle heart. Even characters like the ri-
diculous Lumpy Space Princess, a brash
Valley Girl who is voiced by Ward, have
layers, and moments of pathos. Take
“Bad Timing,” an episode from the fifth
season, which opens with an odd image:
a large circle in the center of the screen,
like a porthole. Peering into it, we can
see Princess Bubblegum demonstrating
her newest invention, a time machine
called a “phasical sphere.” When Bub-
blegum places this sphere over the cir-
cle, she seems to break the fourth wall,
turning the TV into a lens. Then she
shouts, “Now check it out! It’s logging
time.”
What follows is a tragicomic fable
in which Lumpy Space Princess, while
on the rebound from a breakup, gets
into her first real romance and then,
swamped by insecurity, wrecks it. As
we peer at various scenes through the
circle—Lumpy shrieking “You skunk!
You pretty skunk!” at Bubblegum,
then, later, tossing a root-beer Molotov
cocktail at an imagined rival’s castle—
there’s a strange flickering. In the cor-
ners of the screen are tiny creatures:
two triangles fishing in a creek; a dia-
mond doing curls with a dumbbell.
These miniature dramas don’t affect
the story, yet we’re forced to glance at
them, like footnotes, or a silent chorus;
they suggest a larger universe of loneli-
ness and connection. In the final scene,
after Lumpy has accidentally dissolved
her boyfriend in the phasical sphere,
she begs Bubblegum, “If he’s gone,
can you send me back, to before I met
him? So I won’t have to remember
this heartache?” A tiny shape hovers
nearby, seeming sympathetic. Bubble-
gum grants the request, and blue rivers
spill from Lumpy’s eyes. Just before
the credits, the borders beyond the cir-
cle fade to black, and the small chorus
disappears.
Of course, this description may leave
you cold—like any trip, “Adventure
Time” has a definite “you had to be
there” quality. It’s a dreamlike experi-
ence, and a druglike experience, and we
all know how much people enjoy hear-
ing other people describe those. (Luck-
ily, each episode is eleven minutes long,
so this is not the same as when your
friends were nagging you to watch “The
Wire.” Five late-season episodes should
suffice.) But that’s part of the show’s
most freeing quality: childlike, nonlin-
ear, poetic, and just outside all the cate-
gories that the world considers serious,
it’s television that you can respond to
fully, without needing to make a case for
why. Here. Have a taste. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 107

THE THEATRE
DRESS-UP
Style in three new stagings.
BY HILTON ALS
Martha Clarke’s “Threepenny Opera” revival is less about style than about posing.
S tyle, when it works, can be a startling
and pleasurable thing. But the Amer-
ican response to it is often complicated. It’s
not unusual for one’s fellow-citizens to re-
sist imaginatively decorated people, envi-
ronments, or cuisines: falling for such
manicured charm, they fear, would be a
sign of shallowness. While style is, gener-
ally speaking, about surfaces, there can
be something deep, moral, and anarchic
about it, too. I think Kennedy Fraser was
right when she remarked, in this maga-
zine, in 1973, that a “touch of outrageous-
ness” can be “a moral obligation.” And
that’s because style is the enemy of middle-
of-the-road thinking—of what Fraser
called “meanness, calculation, petty-
mindedness, and the base fear of going out
on a limb.” Sussing out real style in Amer-
ican theatre today requires one to go out
on a kind of limb, avidly searching for
shows that are more than just a series of
producers’ calculations.
Truman Capote, a grand stylist himself,
108 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
argued that “high style has never been a
forte of the Western theatre,” but he must
not have been thinking of theatre artists
like Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, whose
incredible first collaboration, “The Three-
penny Opera” (1928), is an exercise in
nasty style. Its creators, drawing on the en-
ergy they found in the trashy newspaper
stories they read, the myths they heard
about America, the foul-smelling tango
palaces they visited, put together a collage,
whose glue was the cynicism that informed
life in Berlin, as Germany slid into the
Great Depression. Set partly in London’s
Soho—Brecht had never been to England
when he and Weill started work on the
piece, but he liked to invent things about
real places—the show opens at a fair,
where, Brecht says, “the beggars are beg-
ging, the thieves are stealing, the whores
are whoring.” In the director and choreog-
rapher Martha Clarke’s new staging (an
Atlantic Theatre Company production, at
the Linda Gross), Mr. Peachum (F. Mur-
ray Abraham), who runs a sort of school
and way station for thieves and panhan-
dlers—“Threepenny” is based on John
Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera”—tells us a bit
about the world we’re entering as he pulls
back the heavy curtain, like an illusionist
in love not with fantasy but with the con.
A scantily clad woman writhes against
a wall as another woman, drunk and
passed out, is kicked awake by a man.
(The female characters, appropriately
and creatively dressed by Donna Zakow-
ska, remind one of Deborah Turbeville’s
wanted and wanting models, all done up
in Weltschmerz-tinted makeup.) A Street
Singer (the beautiful-of-face-and-voice
John Kelly) enters and performs the fa-
mous “Ballad of Mack the Knife,” about
the man at the center of this crummy
world, where cobblestones and souls exist
to be spat on: a pimp named Macheath
(the sexy, strapping Michael Park), who,
when we meet him, has just married Mr.
Peachum’s daughter, Polly (Laura Osnes,
whose Linda Ronstadt-like voice is very
true). There are things that Polly doesn’t
know about her husband: before they met,
he knocked up a woman named Lucy
Brown (Lilli Cooper, perfectly cast), who
is carrying not only his child but a hatred
for Polly that is matched in intensity only
by the despair that another of Macheath’s
lovers, Jenny (Sally Murphy), feels when-
ever she’s alone or in his presence. Jenny is
not your typical scorned woman: she’s
careful about her carelessness; Mack’s
pimping her out is just one of the shitty
things that life has offered her and she has
held on to. Jenny is a tragic figure, in the
real sense of the word: she can’t change the
course of her life; everything has been
predetermined.
Drawn but beautiful, Murphy certainly
looks the part, but she’s not given much of
a chance to make a character out of Jenny.
As Murphy sings her big number, “Pirate
Jenny,” Nina Simone’s infinitely more
powerful rendition comes to mind, dimin-
ishing the actress’s efforts. Those efforts
have been diminished already by Clarke,
who seems less interested in the content of
each scene than in making shapes. Like
Brecht, Clarke believes in “total” theatre—
many genres cross-pollinating at once—
but her style here is more visual than sub-
stantive. As in her adaptation, last season,
of Colette’s “Chéri,” she makes too much
of what should be jettisoned. In “Chéri,” it
was Colette’s cloying “sensuality,” which
PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTAAN FELBER
only exacerbated the self-conscious eroti-
cism of Clarke’s work. You can’t have all
that writhing and gyrating without feel-
ing that there’s something “naughty,” or
wrong, about sex. Look at Bob Fosse. But
Fosse used language as a scalpel to cut
through his own weaknesses or obsessions;
Clarke either won’t or can’t see through her
love of surfaces. She has a romantic notion
of Expressionist painting and poetry, but
she doesn’t understand that their tortured
lines pose serious questions: the world is a
brutal and brutalizing place—what can we
make of it? Instead of depicting weary
souls, Clarke has her actors pose as weary
souls. Her “Threepenny” is a museum of
outdated images that Brecht, always for-
ward-thinking, would consider trite.
And yet Clarke makes theatre pictures
like no one else. In the Peachums’ shop
for beggars, Mr. and Mrs. Peachum
(Mary Beth Peil) work at a table down-
stage right, while the small orchestra, also
in period costume, sits upstage center in a
room that is partially enclosed by a fold-
ing door, so that the musicians seem to
eavesdrop on the action from the next
room. Clarke treats Brecht’s multiple set-
tings as though they were one big house—
a den of iniquity—which is a great idea,
until she overdoes it. In one scene, for in-
stance, as Polly, on one part of the stage,
plays up her sexual attraction to Macheath
while he introduces her to his cohort,
Jenny is taken from behind, on another.
It’s that emphatic do-you-get-this?-are-
you-really-getting-it? nature of Clarke’s
work, her inability to leave well enough
alone, that makes her “Threepenny” less
about style than about posing. (Clarke did
make a smart choice by casting Peil as
Mrs. Peachum, who despises sex and be-
lieves that a woman always loses when she
gives herself up to a man. An actress of a
certain age, Peil knows what it means to
be battered about, and to keep going any-
way. She’s one of the few actors in the
piece who are able to invest their perfor-
mance with emotion and intellection,
without directorial interference.)
C larke began her nearly fifty-year ca-
reer as a dancer, performing with
Anna Sokolow’s troupe. The critic Edwin
Denby, writing about a 1943 Sokolow
piece, remarked, “The trouble is that Miss
Sokolow has not developed enough vari-
ety of expression in dancing . . . to repre-
sent a complex theme from an adult point
of view.” I think Clarke is a gifted artist,
but, like her first mentor, she hasn’t devel-
oped a mature critical point of view toward
the works she chooses to stage. When she
adapts historical works, we feel her nostal-
gia, but not her contemporary vision.
The director and choreographer Susan
Stroman is interested in nostalgia, too, but
her focus is not so much on getting things
historically accurate as on imposing a cer-
tain, slightly rickety razzmatazz style on
the show she’s directing. Sometimes that’s
O.K., because Stroman’s star power al-
lows performers blessed with their own
style to be seen and, perhaps, to become
stars in their own right. In the musical
“Bullets Over Broadway” (at the St. James),
the actors who bring something extra to
Woody Allen’s serviceable script, based
on his 1994 movie, are Nick Cordero,
Brooks Ashmanskas, Marin Mazzie, and
Heléne Yorke, who play Cheech, Warner
Purcell, Helen Sinclair, and Olive Neal,
respectively. Cheech is a Mob guy who
works for Olive’s boyfriend, Nick Valenti
(Vincent Pastore), a gangster and a club
owner in nineteen-twenties Gotham.
Warner, Helen, and Olive are show peo-
ple with varying degrees of talent, who are
cast in a pretentious drama by a youngish
playwright, David Shayne (the some-
what lost Zach Braff). Shayne wants to
bask in the glow of Broadway success,
but without compromising his artistic
values. (Some of his dialogue sounds like
Clyde Fitch by way of Archibald Ma-
cLeish.) Slowly but surely, Cheech, who
has a real ear for dramaturgy, tinkers with
Shayne’s script until it actually works as a
play. Whether Stroman’s show works as
a musical is another matter. Amid the
generic rolled stockings, feathers, and
guys who say “de” for “the,” I thought for
a moment that I was watching Kathleen
Marshall’s staging of “Nice Work If You
Can Get It,” another madcap musical
with twenties showgirls. That the two
productions merged in my mind, how-
ever, is less remarkable than the discovery
of Cordero, Ashmanskas, Mazzie, and
Yorke, none of whom I had seen perform
before. The quartet sketch their charac-
ters broadly, but without giving too much
away at first: they peek out at us, wide-
eyed, from behind the curtain of their
technique, like children backstage, happy
and expectant, waiting to go on.  the bright well of make-believe that she
There are no physical curtains in the
Transport Group’s brilliant staging of “I
Remember Mama” (at the Gym at Jud-
son), but that’s only fitting, since the entire
production is about emotional naked-
ness—and about how style, artfully de-
ployed, can encourage that kind of vulner-
ability. Directed by Jack Cummings III,
who shows immense love for the job, the
play is John Van Druten’s 1944 adaptation
of Kathryn Forbes’s 1943 novel, “Mama’s
Bank Account.” (George Stevens’s movie
version, starring Irene Dunne, came out in
1948.) In “I Remember Mama,” a Norwe-
gian-American woman named Katrin (a
beyond-great Barbara Barrie) looks back
on her childhood in turn-of-the-century
San Francisco, with Mama (Barbara An-
dres), Papa (Dale Soules), and her three
siblings, Christine (Louise Sorel), Dagmar
(Phyllis Somerville), and Nels (Heather
MacRae). The family has to take in a col-
orful boarder, Mr. Hyde (Lynn Cohen),
in order to make ends meet after Papa
loses his job, but Mama maintains the fan-
tasy that everything is all right: she reas-
sures the family that they “don’t have to
go to the bank” for help. The help and
nourishment they need will come from
one another.
Forbes’s story is a rare thing—a narra-
tive about the transcendence of family—
and the ten-person all-female cast, most of
whom play multiple roles, is transcendent,
too. That the actresses are all over sixty-
five is less a conceit than a radical rejigger-
ing of our expectations. Mature women
are rarely given the chance to play any-
thing but their age, if they’re given work at
all. These ingenious performers have more
than five hundred years of acting experi-
ence among them, and it’s magical to
watch them use their technique to go back
in time and reconnect with who they once
were: girls who loved to stand in front of a
mirror and emote. (They’re Alice, and
we’re their looking glass.)
Nothing “happens” in “I Remember
Mama” that you couldn’t recount in a few
lines, but to do so would be to discredit the
richness that the performers bring to Van
Druten’s work. Andres’s Mama, soothing
the self-dramatizing Katrin and her other
children with her solid arms, pushing
worry back from the corners of her eyes, is
a titanic creation, never more expansive
than when she has to describe someone
else’s hope or loss. She dives so deeply into
and her fellow-actresses remind us what a
gift and a miracle pure style can be. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 109

THE CURRENT CINEMA
FIELD MANEUVERS
“Draft Day” and “The Unknown Known.”
BY DAVID DENBY
Kevin Costner plays a football general manager in a movie by Ivan Reitman.
I n a funny scene in Bennet Miller’s
“Moneyball,” Billy Beane (Brad Pitt),
the general manager of the Oakland Ath-
letics, aided by his in-house sabermetrics
genius, Peter Brand ( Jonah Hill), success-
fully trades for a player he wants by calling
other general managers on the phone,
bluffing, stalling, and strategically hang-
ing up. Finally, he gets his man. Ivan
Reitman’s football movie, “Draft Day,”
takes off from “Moneyball” in general
and from that scene in particular. Kevin
Costner, back in a sports arena, is Sonny
Weaver, Jr., a fictional general manager of
the lowly Cleveland Browns, a team that
gets a good shot at signing great college
players in the annual N.F.L. draft. (The
poorer your record the year before, the
earlier you get to choose.) He’s under
pressure from the Browns’ owner (Frank
Langella) and the fans to grab a touted
Wisconsin Badgers quarterback ( Josh
Pence), and to do that he seemingly trades
away the team’s future—first-round
choices in the next three years of the draft.
Both movies are a feast for fantasy players
(who wheel and deal in their heads),
110 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014
but that’s about all they have in common.
Miller, working with a screenplay by
Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, shot
his scene entirely in Billy’s office, so that
you enjoy the interplay of the men, egg-
ing each other on, exulting together as
they bamboozle the other G.M.s. Reit-
man, working with a crudely emphatic
script by Scott Rothman and Rajiv Jo-
seph, shoots the many trading scenes
in his film with split screens, so that
the G.M.s of other teams get to show
off how tough they are on the phone.
“Draft Day,” in fact, celebrates everyone
in football, including the fans. The
camera soars over stadiums, and a vari-
ety of football celebrities turn up, in-
cluding old stars, announcers, ESPN
commentators—even the N.F.L. com-
missioner, Roger Goodell, who has
been contending with one scandal after
another in recent years. “Moneyball”
was deft, knowing, arrogantly amusing;
“Draft Day” is routinely macho, blus-
tery, and square—so square that one
wonders if there isn’t generalized anxi-
ety behind the heartily approving tone.
Football is shadowed by the fear of
concussions and other injuries in a game
whose inner logic demands violence, and
by such incidents as a bullying scandal,
criminal charges, and players paying a
“bounty” to teammates who injure men
on other teams. As if in response, “Draft
Day” offers a way of judging draft choices
based on virtue. Where Billy Beane dug
deep into the statistics and chose players
who didn’t look like stars, Sonny searches
for clues to a player’s character. But is a
college star who tells little lies about
himself likely to be a bust in the pros? Is
a guy who looks after his family likely to
be a great player? This literal-minded
movie sells old pieties and washes away
fear so thoroughly that it creates a new
kind of fantasy, in which all’s right with
a very troubled world.
A gain we hear the words, which now
seem as nonsensical as a riddle
meant for children: “There are known
knowns. There are known unknowns.
There are unknown unknowns.” Don-
ald Rumsfeld reads them at the start of
“The Unknown Known,” Errol Morris’s
documentary portrait of the former Sec-
retary of Defense. Rumsfeld, who first
aired the notorious formulation in a
memo from early 2002, as the Bush Ad-
ministration was gearing up for war in
Iraq, wants the statement to be seen as
practical and hardheaded: how much
can you be sure of ? He continues read-
ing, “There are also unknown knowns.
That is to say, things you think you
know that it turns out you did not.”
This final term is the subject of Mor-
ris’s film. It’s Rumsfeld himself who is
the unknown known—a celebrated man
in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush
Administrations, who, as the movie sug-
gests, is unconscious of how his own
mind works. In the period preceding the
invasion of Iraq, Rumsfeld disregarded
the “unknowns” and plowed ahead,
while the obsessional sources of his con-
duct remained hidden. “The absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence” is
another of his chestnuts from the period,
which he also repeats here. He’s referring
to the absence of evidence that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruc-
tion. But how can an absence be used as
a goad to invasion? This brilliant movie
may not tell Rumsfeld’s critics anything
new, but, as a revelation of the way that
ILLUSTRATION BY STAMATIS LASKOS
a powerful man, convinced of his own
rationality, can cause so much damage, it
still provokes unease.
As in “The Fog of War” (2003),
Morris’s acclaimed portrait of another
former Secretary of Defense, Robert
McNamara, the director asks the ques-
tions but places himself out of view.
Rumsfeld, suave, amused, and bland, sits
before a neutral background and wards
him off. At eighty-one, he is as imposing
as ever. With his broad forehead and
strong facial bones, he looks as much like
a fortified bunker as anything not made
of concrete possibly could. At Morris’s
request, he reads a memo that he wrote
to Condoleezza Rice, before 9/11, as-
serting that the U.S. will soon have to
confront a Saddam Hussein “armed with
nuclear weapons. . . . If Saddam’s regime
were ousted, we would have a much im-
proved position in the region and else-
where.” He reads the memo confidently,
without any sense of the catastrophic
misjudgments lodged in it. He reads
later memos—written after the invasion
went sour—the same way. This is not a
man given to irony or even to simple
acknowledgment of history. Nothing
he says suggests that he realizes that he
and others in the Administration got it
wrong. He expresses no regret over the
invasion; instead, he faults Saddam for
not preventing the war to remove him.
Morris goes through his subject’s long
career, surrounding the interview and the
memos with historical footage, charts,
and documents, and he doesn’t always
challenge Rumsfeld as aggressively as he
might. This reticence will lead some
viewers, their moral bloodlust frustrated,
to dismiss the movie as soft. Still, if Mor-
ris doesn’t quite nail Rumsfeld, his ques-
tions lead the Secretary to nail himself.
You watch him obfuscate, fudge the issue
of torture, smirk about George H. W.
Bush (whom he doesn’t like), and offer
dull commonplaces when impassioned
clarity is called for. “Wouldn’t it have
been better not to go there at all?” Mor-
ris finally asks him, about Iraq. “I guess
time will tell,” Rumsfeld answers.
Amused and outraged, a darkly
comic intellectual crossed with a fierce
moralist, Errol Morris has returned
again and again in his work to two re-
lated issues: the difficulty (but not the
impossibility) of anyone’s being able to
grasp the reality of a complex situation;
and the special power of human vanity
to produce self-deception and outright
lies. Morris’s indignation grows in the
course of the film. Dividing the known
from the unknown, after all, is his obses-
sion, and Rumsfeld makes a mockery of
the hard job of seeking truth. One of
his habits, which Morris seizes on, is to
identify a problem in a manner that re-
moves it from a category he must deal
with. In a press conference that Morris
includes, he says that “guerrilla warfare”
is the wrong word for the resistance that
arose in Iraq after the invasion. And,
since he doesn’t call it that, he doesn’t
have to take it seriously. Rumsfeld vali-
dated himself by dictating innumerable
memos, which he calls “snowflakes,” to
his staff. In a teasing repeated image,
Morris shows flakes suspended in a
glass globe, reminiscent of a child’s toy
(and perhaps the snow globe that be-
longed to another powerful man, Charles
Foster Kane); he implies that Rumsfeld
found a pleasing distraction in the end-
less production of words.
As always in Morris’s films, the in-
sistence on factuality is accompanied by
a kind of rapt dreaminess, an almost
Zen-like mood of contemplation, in
which Rumsfeld’s mind, in all its par-
ticularity, becomes just a single element
in the eternal flux (here represented by
shots of empty oceans). As Rumsfeld
speaks, Morris makes lyrical use of
stock footage and photographs of the
Vietnam and Iraq conflicts, slowing
down shots of helicopters and troop
movements until memory, for us, is
overtaken by sadness. The movie, de-
spite its flinty subject, has a smoothly
beautiful, almost velvety texture and a
tone of mournful regret.
“The Fog of War” is a sorrowful
movie, too, but McNamara comes across
as a very different kind of retired warrior.
Eighty-five when the film was shot, he
admits mistakes and wonders whether he
bears personal responsibility for the deaths
of civilians and soldiers. He’s tormented
by an unresolved question: what if the
Johnson Administration completely mis-
understood the ambitions of the Viet-
namese Communists? He’s like a suppli-
cant who implores God for answers and
for peace, and receives neither. The con-
trast with Rumsfeld is startling. McNa-
mara asks whether rational analysis is ever
enough—“Empathize with your enemy”
is one thing he takes away from the expe-
rience of war—while Rumsfeld relies
on redefining mistakes out of existence.
McNamara is tragic, Rumsfeld merely
self-infatuated and maliciously witty. It
would be tempting to say that the joke’s
on him, if it weren’t so obviously on us. 
newyorker.com/go/frontrow
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2014 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
VOLUME XC, NO. 9, April 21, 2014. THE NEW YORKER (ISSN 0028792X) is published weekly (except for fve combined issues: February 17 & 24, June 9 & 16, July 7 & 14, August 11 & 18, and
December 22 & 29) by Condé Nast, which is a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: The Condé Nast Building, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. Elizabeth Hughes, vice-
president and publisher; Beth Lusko, associate publisher advertising; James Guilfoyle, director of fnance and business operations; Fabio Bertoni, general counsel. Condé Nast: S. I. Newhouse, Jr., chair-
man; Charles H. Townsend, chief executive officer; Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., president; John W. Bellando, chief operating officer & chief financial officer; Jill Bright, chief administrative
officer. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Cana dian Goods and Services Tax Registra-
tion No. 123242885-RT0001. Canada Post: return undeliverable Canadian addresses to P.O. Box 874, Station Main, Markham, ON L3P 8L4.

POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO THE NEW YORKER, P.O. Box 37684, Boone, IA 50037 0684. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE
INQUIRIES: Please write to The New Yorker, P.O. Box 37684, Boone, IA 50037 0684, call (800) 825-2510, or e-mail subscriptions@newyorker.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed
on most recent label. Subscribers: If the Post Offce alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. If during your subscrip-
tion term or up to one year after the magazine becomes undeliverable, you are ever dissatisfed with your subscription, let us know. You will receive a full refund on all unmailed issues. First copy
of new subscription will be mailed within four weeks after receipt of order. For advertising inquiries, please call Beth Lusko at (212) 286-4454. For submission guidelines, please refer to our Web site, www.
newyorker.com. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence to The New Yorker, 4 Times Square, New York, NY 10036. For cover reprints, please call (800) 897-8666, or e-mail
covers@cartoonbank.com. For permissions and reprint requests, please call (212) 630-5656 or fax requests to (212) 630-5883. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The New
Yorker. The New Yorker’s name and logo, and the various titles and headings herein, are trademarks of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. Visit us online at www.newyorker.com. To subscribe to other Condé
Nast magazines, visit www.condenet.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If
you do not want to receive these offers and/or information, please advise us at P.O. Box 37684, Boone, IA 50037 0684 or call (800) 825-2510.
THE NEW YORKER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED
ART WORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE
SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ART WORK, OR OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY
REQUESTED TO DO SO BY THE NEW YORKER IN WRITING.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 21, 2014 111

 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 Tom Cheney, must be received by Sunday,
April 20th. The finalists in the April 7th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s
contest, in the May 5th issue. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Any resident of the United States,
Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or over can
enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit newyorker.com/captioncontest.

THE WINNING CAPTION

THE FINALISTS
“I know I have a book in me.”
Jeremy Cohn, Newton Highlands, Mass.
“The Founding Fathers were clear.
You must win by two.” “I’m working from home.”
Sefton Price, Southern Shores, N.C. Mary Melton, Newtown, Pa.

“I could go digital, but I love the

old-fashioned feel of paper.”
Paula Markowitz Wittlin, Mamaroneck, N.Y.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

“ ”