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 THE HEALTH ISSUE
APRIL 8, 2019

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

21 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Steve Coll on Mueller’s investigation and the media;
government reports as literature; false fronts;
Apple event horizon; a nerd picks up his axe.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Paige Williams 26 Under the Gun
Responding to emergencies in the age of mass shootings.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Gary Richardson 33 It’s a Flat Earth
DEPT. OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Nicola Twilley 34 Home Smog
Indoor pollution’s hidden dangers.
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
Rachel Aviv 40 Bitter Pill
The difficulties of leaving psychiatric drugs behind.
ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD
Douglas Preston 52 The Day the Earth Died
A discovery sheds light on the dinosaurs’ final hours.
FICTION
Te-Ping Chen 66 “Lulu”
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Adam Gopnik 76 Did Reconstruction have to fail?
BOOKS
Joanna Biggs 83 Susan Choi’s “Trust Exercise.”
Louis Menand 85 Baseball as a way of seeing.
89 Briefly Noted
Dan Chiasson 90 The poetry of David Baker.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 92 “The Beach Bum,” “Dumbo.”
POEMS
Joan Murray 59 “The El”
Richie Hofmann 68 “French Novel”
COVER
Kenton Nelson “The Acrobat”

DRAWINGS Bruce Eric Kaplan, Amy Kurzweil, Farley Katz, Carolita Johnson, Liana Finck,
Harry Bliss, Roz Chast, John McNamee, Adam Douglas Thompson, Kaamran Hafeez, Adam Cooper and Mat Barton,
Amy Hwang, Brendan Loper, Maggie Larson, Pia Guerra, Zachary Kanin, Will McPhail SPOTS Annie Jen
 If we can conquer outer space then we can conquer Parkinson’s.

Rich / Parkinson's Patient Doug / Parkinson's Researcher

Rich, a former astronaut, is one of nearly 1 million Americans living with Parkinson’s. Doug
is one of the thousands of American researchers working each day to stop it. With over 500
new medicines in development for neurological disorders, the brain is truly the final frontier.
Innovation.org
 She cared
about people CONTRIBUTORS
with disabilities.
Douglas Preston (“The Day the Earth
So she gave. Died,” p. 52) has written more than thirty
books. His latest nonfiction work, “The
Lost City of the Monkey God,” is about
the discovery of an archeological site
in the Honduran rain forest.
Paige Williams (“Under the Gun,” p. 26)
became a staff writer in 2015. She is the
author of “The Dinosaur Artist: Ob-
session, Betrayal, and the Quest for
Earth’s Ultimate Trophy.”
Kenton Nelson (Cover) is an artist based
in California. This is his fifth cover for
the magazine.
Rachel Aviv (“Bitter Pill,” p. 40) is a
staff writer and a national fellow at
New America.
Nicola Twilley (“Home Smog,” p. 34), a
frequent contributor to the magazine,
is a co-host of the podcast “Gastropod.”
She is at work on two books: one about
refrigeration and one about quarantine.
Steve Coll (Comment, p. 21), a staff
writer, is the dean of the Columbia
University School of Journalism. His
latest book is “Directorate S: The C.I.A.
and America’s Secret Wars in Afghan-
istan and Pakistan.”

Judy Goldring’s brother was
born with a brain injury.
She created a fund in
The New York Community Trust
to help others with disabilities.
Forever.
Every year, her gift helps
effective nonprofits provide
opportunity and improve lives.
Joanna Biggs (Books, p. 83) is a writer
and editor at the London Review of
Books.
Nathan Heller (The Talk of the Town,
p. 24), a staff writer, has contributed to
the magazine since 2011.
Joan Murray (Poem, p. 59) has published
five poetry volumes, including “Swim-
ming for the Ark: New and Selected
Poems, 1990-2015.”
Te-Ping Chen (Fiction, p. 66) is a writer
based in Philadelphia.
Richie Hofmann (Poem, p. 68), a Steg-
ner Fellow at Stanford University, is
the author of the poetry collection “Sec-
ond Empire.”
Dan Chiasson (Books, p. 90), a contri-
butor since 2007, teaches English at
Wellesley College. His latest book of
poems is “Bicentennial.”

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NEWS DESK TOUCHSTONES

Sandra Day O’Connor’s biographer Naomi Fry revisits “Heathers,”
writes about how the first female the cult classic that blew up the
Justice helped preserve abortion rights. high-school comedy thirty years ago.

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and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
4 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
 THE MAIL
TAKE ME TO THE RIVER
Elizabeth Kolbert, in her article about
rising sea levels, ascribes much of Loui-
siana’s disappearing coastline to the levee
system (“Under Water,” April 1st). The
levees are indeed a significant cause of
the problem, but they aren’t the only one.
Scientists employed by oil and gas com-
panies have conceded that their indus-
try is responsible for at least thirty-six
per cent of the land loss. River dams are
also a problem: on the Missouri, which
empties into the Mississippi, just six
dams retain roughly a hundred mil-
lion tons of sediment—a quarter of the
entire sediment load that the Missis-
sippi once carried to the Gulf. At the
mouth of the Mississippi, two-mile-long
shipping-channel jetties divert a sub-
stantial amount of sediment into deep
water, where it can’t contribute to build-
ing land. These and other engineering
interventions have catastrophically dis-
rupted the coastal ecosystem, destroy-
ing communities, industries, and lives.
1
John M. Barry
New Orleans, La.
WELLNESS CULTURE
There are many reasons to be skeptical
of Outdoor Voices, the faddish cloth-
ing brand that Jia Tolentino writes about
in her recent piece on athleisure, and
its C.E.O.’s commitment to the health
of its customers (“Athleisure Time,”
March 18th). Chief among these is the
fact that a significant amount of the
brand’s clothing is made of plastic. Only
a few weeks ago, The New Yorker ran a
piece by Carolyn Kormann about the
world’s growing addiction to plastic,
which is severely degrading the ocean
environment. A 2017 report by the In-
ternational Union for Conservation of
Nature estimated that thirty-five per
cent of microplastics entering the ocean
comes from synthetic textiles. As Kor-
mann explains, scientists around the
world are gravely concerned about these
microplastics, which take decades to
break down and are becoming increas-
ingly present in our food cycle. Cus-
tomers of clothing companies like Out-
door Voices should realize that they
aren’t just wearing plastic—eventually,
they might be eating it, too.
Henry Seth Resnik
West Hollywood, Calif.
After spending time with the staff and
the C.E.O. of Outdoor Voices, Tolentino
observes that she has never been “less
able to distinguish what was good from
what was profitable, or my life from my
work.” The concept of “wellness” pro-
moted by Outdoor Voices and many Juan Navarro, first music by a New World composer published in
other companies depends on the blurring the Americas, Mexico, 1604. Estimate $8,000 to $12,000.
of another distinction: between virtue
and health. These brands encourage cus- Printed & Manuscript
tomers who have the time and the money Americana
APRIL 16
to get fit to feel superior about their abil-
Rick Stattler • rstattler@swanngalleries.com
ity to do so. Going to a Pilates class or
drinking an expensive juice isn’t a moral Preview: Apr 11 & 12, 10-6; Apr 13, 12-5; Apr 15, 10-6; Apr 16, 10-12
act; it’s just another form of consumption. 104 East 25th St, NY, NY 10010 • 212 254 4710
SWANNGALLERIES.COM
Becca Schonberg
Oakland, Calif.
Tolentino includes the clothing brand Estate Jewelry
Nasty Gal in her list of companies that, (Yellow gold
and diamond)
like Outdoor Voices, are “highly visible,
female-centered, life-style-adjacent, Graduated
digital-savvy millennial brands built spiral
necklace,
around a charismatic founder and her Swiss,
c.1980
story.” It’s true that when Sophia Amo- $27,500
ruso founded Nasty Girl, in 2006, her
personality was central to the branding
of the company. Initially, this seemed like
a successful formula. But by 2015 Amoruso
had resigned as C.E.O., and by 2017 the Hinged
bangle
company had declared bankruptcy, after bracelet,
spending heavily on advertising that French, c.1970
$6,750
failed to build a long-term customer
base. The brand was bought by an on-
line fashion retailer. Entrepreneurs seek-
Bee pin
ing to emulate the early success of com- $1,750
panies like Nasty Gal would do well to
consider the whole story.
Joshua C. Garbarino
Philadelphia, Pa.
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, SHOWN
ACTUAL SIZE
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited FIRESTONE AND PARSON
for length and clarity, and may be published in 30 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02116
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume (617) 266 -1858 • www.firestoneandparson.com
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 5
 APRIL 3 – 9, 2019

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

When the new arts space the Shed opens, on April 5, it’ll be heralded by “Soundtrack of America.” The
five-day concert series highlights a broad spectrum of black music, calling on such acts as the soulful folk band
Victory, the punk musician Tamar-kali, the vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Braxton Cook, the R. & B.
and jazz-fusion outfit Phony Ppl, and the Afrofuturist duo Oshun (all pictured above). Lovingly curated
with an eye toward innovation, this progressive bill is filled with artists as galvanizing as they are virtuosic.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTHEW TAMMARO

1
ART
“Joan Miró”
Museum of Modern Art
This enchanting show draws on the museum’s
immense holdings of Miró’s work, along with
a few loans. Its star attraction is “The Birth of
the World,” painted in 1925, while the artist
was under the spell of the Surrealist circle
of André Breton. It presents drifting picto-
graphic elements—a black triangle, a red disk,
a white disk, an odd black hook shape, and
some skittery lines—on an amorphous ground
of thinned grayish paint that soaks here and
there into the unevenly primed canvas. It’s
large—more than eight feet high by more than
six feet wide—but feels larger: cosmic. There
had never been anything quite like it in paint-
ing, and it stood far apart from the formally
conservative, lurid fantasizing of the other
Surrealist painters. Today, we are ever less apt
to base valuations on precedence—who did
what first. Art of the past seems not so much
a parade as a convocation, subject to case-by-
case assessments. Never unsettling in the ways
of, say, Matisse or, for heaven’s sake, Picasso,
Miró is a modernist for everybody. He earns
and will keep his place in our hearts.—Peter
Schjeldahl (Through June 15.)
“Siah Armajani”
Met Breuer
This Iranian-American sculptor, Conceptual-
ist, and political philosopher is the subject of
a fascinating retrospective of paintings, draw-
ings, sculptures, architectural models, charts,
computer printouts, a video, a slide show,
and more. Armajani, who is seventy-nine
and based in Minneapolis, is preposterously
under-recognized, even in the art world, con-
sidering the local successes of the seventy-odd
site-specific works he has made since 1968, in
eighteen states and five European nations.
These tend to put colorful structures of ab-
stracted architectural elements in service to
civic functions: bridges, gardens, gazebos,
open-air reading rooms. There are any number
of reasons for Armajani’s relative obscurity:
a penchant for befuddling mathematical, sci-
entific, and literary arcana can rather daunt
a viewer, with installations that invite the
perusal of books. Politically, he identifies
with historical anarchism, having dedicated
pieces to the memories of Emma Goldman
and Sacco and Vanzetti. Then there’s the un-
categorizable salad of his sculptural styles,
harvested from Russian Constructivism, the
Bauhaus, American vernacular architecture,
and sheer fantasy. All in all, he recalls no
predecessor except, perhaps, Buckminster
Fuller, minus Fuller’s grandiose self-promo-
tion.—P.S. (Through June 2.)
Günther Förg
Hauser & Wirth
CHELSEA A German artist who died of can-
cer, in 2013, on his sixty-first birthday, Förg
was an eclectic formalist in modes unabash-
edly borrowed from Abstract Expressionist
and minimalist forebears, most obviously
Barnett Newman, Cy Twombly, and his
tragically short-lived countryman Blinky
Palermo. Solemn ironies attend Förg’s im-
posingly handsome paintings in monochrome
or loosely brushed batches of hash marks (one
of the latter is thirty-one feet long) and his
enlarged photographs of Bauhaus or Fascist
architecture. Did he come to praise or to bury
grandiose modernism? Maybe both, with an
extended encore of styles that are poignantly
all the more satisfying, as exercises of taste,
for being drained of urgency. It might be said
that Förg immortalized belatedness.—P.S.
(Through April 6.)
Christina Forrer
Luhring Augustine
CHELSEA The tapestries of crazed cartoonish
figures by Forrer, a Swiss-born artist who
lives in L.A., are pleasurably absurd and al-
most absurdly pleasurable. Who knew that
weaving could rival painting in combined
optical and tactile potency? Knitted patches of
intensely hued yarns range across a multitude
of techniques, from loose and webby to dense
and nubbled. They enchant the eye and beg
to be touched (don’t). Meanwhile, blobby
personages rage, panic, or engage in combative
or bizarrely erotic goings on, beguiling the
imagination. The usual decorative decorum of
tapestry succumbs to happy anarchy. Surface
and imagery register independently of each
other, as if mutually oblivious, even as they
share states of fire-alarm commotion.—P.S.
(Through April 13.)
Jonathan Gardner
Kaplan
CHELSEA Any painter in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury might have dreamed up the crackerjack
synthesis of modern styles that amazes in the
work of this New Yorker from Kentucky. But
no one did, and here it is now, suavely split-
ting differences between Léger and Matisse
with input from Surrealism, geometric ab-
straction, and Jean Hélion’s bulky figuration.
Fancy the complexities of just one composi-
tion, in which a recumbent woman wears a
yellow pants suit on a red-dotted purple rug
and smokes a hookah, emitting clumps of
gray smoke; a nude in a frame fusses with her
black hair in a green landscape; a cubistically
distorted blue goblet rests on a wood-grained
orange table near multicolored stripes, pat-
terned tiles, and decorative metalwork. Sound
chaotic? It’s not. “Hollywood Raga” (2018), as
the canvas is titled, has no business being this
snug, strong, and gorgeous.—P.S. (Through
April 20.)
Jim Lambie
Kern
UPTOWN Brightly colored ladders rise, tilted,
from blocks of concrete, with mirrors in be-
tween their rungs; wooden doors gleam under
layers of automotive paint; “stained glass”
pieces are made from soldered sunglasses.
It sounds like the California-based Finish
Fetish movement, of the nineteen-sixties. But
Lambie is Glaswegian, and the works in his vi-
sually uplifting show are all new, with a strong
undercurrent of personal sentiment; the artist
is also a d.j., which such titles as “Lost in
Music” and “Starman” convey. The placid,
hypnotic “Self-Portrait (In Seven Parts)” is a
multiscreen video piece, which at first seems
to be a horizontal line of small monochrome
works. Periodically, the artist appears, only to
blot out our view with a can of spray paint,
reminding us of the expressive impulse behind
his seductive industrial surfaces.—Johanna
Fateman (Through April 20.)
Jessi Reaves
Donahue
DOWNTOWN The artist’s ingeniously makeshift
furniture-sculpture hybrids rely on scavenged
materials. Deconstructed (disemboweled?)
chairs, sofas, shelves, and cabinets are recom-
bined into colorfully appealing monstrosities.
In the past, the American sculptor’s pieces
maintained some degree of functionality, but
her new works tend to shrug off their utili-
tarian origins. “Redemption Island Standing
Table” is composed of a worn black leather
chair, its arms ossified with the help of a gluey
substance; it’s placed behind Plexiglas, under
a tall table, and wrapped with a long strip of
black rubber. In “Blue Heart Shelf,” a stack
of Breuer Cesca chairs is outfitted with a
transparent blue drawer. Complicated, bri-
colaged sconces and a carpeted platform lend
the installation a homey, strangely welcoming
air.—J.F. (Through May 12.)
Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Team
DOWNTOWN The subjects of these tender and
puzzlelike portraits are the intimacies of the
studio. Lovely men—the artist included—and
the occasional woman pose alone or together,
naked or clothed. Brown velvet backdrops are
draped behind bodies, their lush expanses
playing off—or standing in for—dark skin.
Mirrors and sliced segments of other photos
heighten the visual complexity; the results
can appear so kaleidoscopic that it’s hard to
believe they’re not collages. Such fragmenta-
tion, which also extends to cropping portions
of bodies out of the frame, serves a conceptual
purpose, underscoring the marginalized po-
sition that L.G.B.T.Q. artists have occupied
for most of art history. Sepuya’s frankly queer
eye unlocks a secret history of the studio as
a safe space for free expression.—Andrea K.
Scott (Through April 13.)
Fin Simonetti
Company
DOWNTOWN Impeccable carvings in Spanish
blue alabaster—sepulchral renditions of an
electric candle, a flaccid penis, a fire extin-
guisher, and the paws and tail of a sculptural
dog—are arranged on a welded metal rail that
makes a stark zigzag through the gallery. This
unusual, bannister-like pedestal suggests a
walkway as well as a barrier; the poetic stone
objects themselves could be oversized pieces
for a surreal board game. On the walls, two
wavy stained-glass grids in the same cool pal-
ette partially reveal underlayers of barbershop
posters (the kind that offer a taxonomy of
men’s clipper cuts), their numinous presence
a foil to a small, silently looping video of
weightlifters’ grimacing faces. Simonetti’s
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 7
 has an ingratiating ability to mock self-help
AT THE GALLERIES tropes even as she employs them, an approach
that somehow makes even her decision to
stay married seem reasonable. (If only Bart
Fasbender’s blaring sound cues and Elaine J.
McCarthy’s obtrusive projections shared her
sense of nuance.) But Corman never explores
the enormous privilege that has smoothed her
recovery, nor does she seem to worry about
the anonymous children in the videos her
husband had on his hard drive.—Rollo Romig
(Through July 14.)

After
59E59
When the Beckmans (Denise Cormier and
Bill Phillips) drop by the tastefully appointed
house of the Campbells (Mia Matthews and
Michael Frederic), they are not paying a
friendly social call: their teen-age son has
received an alarming text from the Camp-
bells’ son, a schoolmate, and now the adults
must process the boys’ entanglement. As
in Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage,” bul-
lying precipitates a confrontation between
concerned parents. After this premise is
established, however, the playwright Mi-
White Columns is New York City’s oldest alternative gallery, founded in chael McKeever (“Daniel’s Husband”) takes
1970 by a cohort of downtown experimentalists. Its current director, the a different route. Preoccupied by issues of
incomparable Matthew Higgs—a British-born curator, artist, writer, and responsibility and guilt, the show, directed
by Joe Brancato, lays down each side’s po-
d.j.—has burnished that indie-insider legacy, supporting fresh M.F.A. grads sition a little too artlessly—the language
and rock stars alike. More crucially, Higgs has an impeccable eye for free and structure are strictly utilitarian. But
spirits working at a remove from the system. Shortly before the ferociously the approach is effective: it’s obvious from
the get-go that this is the kind of story that
talented Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick died, in British Columbia in doesn’t end well, and “After” moves along
2017, at the age of sixty-one, he and Higgs planned his first solo show in with a chilling ineluctability.—Elisabeth Vin­
New York, a convocation of ceremonial masks so visceral they might as well centelli (Through April 14.)
be breathing. Carved from Western red cedar, painted red, blue, green, and
black, and embellished with horsehair and bark, they are rooted in centuries If Pretty Hurts Ugly Must
of tribal tradition (Dick was a hereditary chief ) and informed by concerns Be a Muhfucka
about disregard for the planet and rapacious consumerism. One skull-pale Playwrights Horizons
ghost wears banknotes in place of a headdress, poised to wage what the Akim wants to hang out with friends and
artist described as “nonviolent but spiritual warfare.”—Andrea K. Scott date a cute boy—in other words, this teen-
ager wants a normal life. Unfortunately,
her striking looks get in the way: Akim’s
parents fear that less fortunate girls may
approach to symbols of masculinity isn’t po- dispersal of color, made by Whitney Claf- become jealous, and even her schoolmates
lemical; instead, her alternately meditative lin this year. Ulla Wiggen, a septuagenarian are wary. “God of earth, god of wind, god of
and mocking gestures suggest a compellingly Swedish painter, is represented by six out- fire, god of the Obamas!,” Akim (Níkẹ Uche
ambivalent nostalgia.—J.F. (Through April 21.) standing paintings of computer circuitry, Kadri) pleads. “Please take my beauty away
made between 1964 and 1968, which chan- from me!” Set in “Affreakah-Amirrorkah”
nel the clairvoyant past of Hilma af Klint and inspired by a Nigerian folktale, Tori

“Vista View”
Galerie Buchholz
UPTOWN Caleb Considine, who is in his
mid-thirties and lives in New York, is a re-
alist painter of lapidary precision and leftist
perspective, which you might guess from the
labor he lavishes on Everyman subjects, in-
cluding subway interiors as exalted as any
cathedral. This uncommonly absorbing show,
1
while predicting the digital future.—A.K.S. Sampson’s assured professional début adorns
(Through April 20.) a picaresque narrative with magical-poetic
touches. The show, zippily directed by Leah
C. Gardiner, handles the subjectivity of
beauty and how we respond to people’s ap-
THE THEATRE pearance with a light touch and an offbeat
wit. And it’s clear that the playwright and
her talented cast have great affection for
Accidentally Brave the characters—the humor is never facile or
mean.—E.V. (Through April 5.)
DR2
ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE CUSHMAN

his first curatorial effort, unites pictures by

eighteen artists, spanning seventy-five years.
The earliest work is Ben Shahn’s exquisitely
weird 1944 tempera “Bountiful Harvest,” in
which two giant hands cup grain in the sky
above a Lilliputian industrial-agrarian scene.
But, to Considine’s credit, his exhibition is
no primer on progressive politics. Abstrac-
tion rules, too: a pair of drawings by Agnes
Martin, from 1963 and 1977; an incantatory
filigree by Tomma Abts, from 2002; a woozy
In 2015, the actress Maddie Corman’s husband
(and the father of her three children) was
arrested for possessing and sharing child por-
nography, and he was convicted the following
year. Directed by Kristin Hanggi, Corman’s
one-woman show about “the incident” avoids
the salacious details, instead plumbing her
own attempts to pull herself and her family
out of its crisis. Under the circumstances,
she’s impressively funny about it all, and she
Juno and the Paycock
Irish Repertory
This 1924 play, the second in the Irish Rep’s
trilogy of Sean O’Casey works in repertory,
is set in the Dublin apartment of Jack Boyle
(Ciarán O’Reilly), a strutting “paycock,” as
his wife, Juno (Maryann Plunkett), describes
him. It’s 1922, at the height of the Irish Civil

8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019

 ©2019 Walgreen Co. All rights reserved.
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War, a time of strikes, terror, and murder,
and Jack is an idler, a liar, a drunk. He and
his buddy Joxer (John Keating) speak of Juno
as a harridan, but Plunkett plays her as a
woman of quiet resolve and resourcefulness,
desperately trying to insure the survival of
her deeply troubled family. Indeed, among
the script’s dozen speaking characters (all
superbly portrayed), the men, to one degree
or another, reveal themselves as dangerously
untrustworthy, and it’s the women who hold
the social and moral future of Ireland in their
hands. O’Casey presents a complex mixture
of comedy, politics, song, and mourning,
and the director, Neil Pepe, fashions it mov-
ingly.—Ken Marks (Through May 25.)
Kiss Me, Kate
Studio 54
In Scott Ellis’s revival of Cole Porter’s 1948
musical, for Roundabout Theatre Company,
the heroine, Lilli (the preternaturally kind
Kelli O’Hara), expresses longing for her di-
rector, co-star, and former husband, Fred (the
lively Will Chase), who is staging a produc-
tion of “The Taming of the Shrew.” The book,
written by Sam and Bella Spewack, involves
the usual staples of comic mayhem—mistaken
ON BROADWAY
identity, crooks—as well as a director and his
muse who are at odds with each other until
they realize what they have had all along: a
shared creativity that heightens their love.
O’Hara is perfect when Katherina (and thus
Lilli) kisses Petruchio (Fred), but we don’t
see Lilli’s trials or how they have transformed
her. Because O’Hara’s Lilli doesn’t seem to
feel oppressed, she has nothing to struggle
against, and her diva displays none of the
divadom that “Kiss Me, Kate” requires. (Re-
viewed in our issue of 3/25/19.)—Hilton Als
(Through June 30.)
Perp
TBG Theatre
There’s been a string of murders in Phil-
adelphia, and, unfortunately, Douglass
(Ali Arkane) is the perfect fall guy: a trag-
ically trusting man-child who likes to talk
to earthworms in the same woods where
the killer prowls. Lyle Kessler’s play, for
Barrow Group, is intriguingly odd, like a
shaggy, sardonic fable that’s both sinister
and sweet, and it often teeters on the edge of
absurdity. These are tough tones to pull off
in combination, and, though the cast is sure-
footed and appealing, Lee Brock’s direction
is inconsistent: the scenes with Douglass’s
avuncular cellmate, Myron (Craig Mums
Grant), and, after Douglass escapes from
prison, with the frighteningly off-kilter
Harry (Javier Molina) play well, but the
ones featuring the two alarmingly snarky
detectives who set Douglass up (Tricia Alex-
andro and Paul Ben-Victor) don’t quite keep
pace with the dialogue’s antic energy.—R.R.
(Through April 11.)
Smart Blonde
59E59
In Willy Holtzman’s skillfully structured
play, fluidly directed by Peter Flynn, it’s
December, 1964, and Judy Holliday (Andréa
Burns), at a recording session, tells stories
of her life and career between takes. Ex-
quisitely painted scenes show the actress,
born Judy Tuvim (Hebrew for “holidays”),
performing cabaret with her friends Adolph
Green, Betty Comden, and Lenny Bern-
stein; auditioning for “Born Yesterday”;
fighting off the predatory producer Darryl
Zanuck; using her wits at a Senate hearing
to avoid naming names in the McCarthy
era; and encountering Gerry Mulligan and
Marilyn Monroe. All the supporting roles
are played by Mark Lotito, Andrea Bian-
chi, and Jonathan Spivey; they all sing and
dance. Burns not only captures the incan-
descent Holliday of the stage and screen but
reveals the depth, insecurity, intelligence,
and strength of Judy Tuvim.—K.M. (Through
April 13.)

Southern Promises
Flea
The backdrop for this new production of
Thomas Bradshaw’s 2008 play is a giant,
stage-wide photo of the façade of an ante-
bellum plantation mansion. It’s angled in
such a way that it looms menacingly, but
you could also say that it represents a society
about to topple. And pretty soon the stage is
filled with scenes illustrating the corruption,
degradation, sinfulness, hypocrisy, and inhu-
manity bred by the practice of slavery. We
witness rapes, whippings, murders, betrayals,
and the tearing asunder of families. The fact
that the cast of ten is made up entirely of
performers of color is supposed to give a
spin to the unconscionable racism of these
acts, but it’s hard to find anything besides
tiresome disgust in Niegel Smith’s heavy-
handed, meant-to-shock direction.—K.M.
(Through April 14.)

The 1988 comedy “Beetlejuice,” Tim Burton’s colorfully warped ren-

dering of the afterlife, has had a long afterlife of its own, including a White Noise
Beetlejuice museum that one diehard fan started in his midtown studio Public
apartment, in 2011. A musical version is now in previews on Broadway Suzan-Lori Parks’s new work, directed by
Oskar Eustis, begins as the story of four mil-
(opening April 25, at the Winter Garden), with music and lyrics by lennials in interracial relationships trying
ILLUSTRATION BY MAX DALTON

Eddie Perfect, a book by Scott Brown and Anthony King, and direction to figure it all out: Leo (Daveed Diggs), a
by Alex Timbers (“Oh, Hello on Broadway”). The crackerjack Alex light-skinned black man, is a painter with no
gallery; his closest friends include his lover,
Brightman, who starred in “School of Rock,” slips into Michael Keaton’s Dawn (Zoë Winters), a white litigator, and
zebra-striped suit and green fright wig, as the netherworld’s equivalent another couple, Ralph (Thomas Sadoski), who
of a used-car salesman. Sophia Anne Caruso (“Lazarus”) joins him in is white, and Misha (Sheria Irving), who is
black. Then Leo has a proposition: Will Ralph
the Winona Ryder role, as a goth teen-ager who discovers that her new be his slaveowner? In the old days, when a
house is haunted by its former owners.—Michael Schulman slave had a master and he was a good slave,

10 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019

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 that difference might be what’s interest-
AT THE BALLET ing.—Brian Seibert (April 2-7 and April 9-14.)

Kota Yamazaki / Fluid Hug-Hug

New York Live Arts
Yamazaki was born in Japan, but his choreo-
graphic career has been one of international
exploration and exchange. An aesthetic of
merging is evident in the name of his company
and in his description of his recent “Dark Od-
yssey” trilogy as a study in the body as a black
hole, absorbing all. The final installment,
“Non Opera, Becoming,” features Yamaza-
ki’s wife, the captivating Mina Nishimura,
among other distinct New York dancers, along
with Alain Sinandja, from Togo, and Taketeru
Kudo, one of the last remaining artists to have
trained with the Butoh pioneer Tatsumi Hi-
jikata—all mingling, all slowly transform-
ing.—B.S. (April 3-6.)

Ayodele Casel
Various locations
In 2011, Natalia Osipova, a shooting star of Moscow’s Bolshoi Ballet, A tap dancer of fine-grained musicianship,
left that august institution, she said, because she was tired of dancing Casel has lately found her voice as an ap-
the saucy señorita in “Don Quixote.” Now, after a stopover in the top pealing spokesperson for her art. Dancing or
talking, she’s a grounded charmer. That makes
ranks at American Ballet Theatre, she’s a principal at London’s Royal her an excellent choice to lead the inaugural
Ballet. She does things on the side, too. On April 3-6, with the superb tour of “City Center on the Move.” At recre-
David Hallberg, Osipova will give a special solos-and-duets concert ation centers in all five boroughs, this proud
Bronx native is putting on free shows with
at City Center. You’d think the evening’s highlight would be the duet some up-and-coming dancers and a Latin-jazz
from Antony Tudor’s luscious “The Leaves Are Fading” (1975), but, as trio that includes the composer and band-
it turns out, the best piece on the program is “Valse Triste,” set to the leader Arturo O’Farrill. See nycitycenter.org/
onthemove for a full schedule.—B.S. (April 3-5
Sibelius hit, by Alexei Ratmansky, Osipova’s old boss at the Bolshoi. and April 12-14.)
Ratmansky made this ballet for her, and it combines her sometimes
relentless can-do-ism with an unforced sweetness. She should send him
a present.—Joan Acocella Kyle Abraham /A.I.M
N.Y.U. Skirball
Drawing on his experience in club dance and
he was protected by the master. After some Michel Fokine, Vaslav Nijinsky, and George hip-hop, Abraham delves into representations
initial obligatory horror, Ralph agrees, and Balanchine, felt for ancient and archaic art. of masculinity, coolness, and glamour in the
for forty days and forty nights Leo becomes The drapery on a Hellenistic statuette of a context of African-American and hip-hop
his slave. In this play, race and pain are met- muse stands next to a chitonlike costume for culture. In many ways, his newest piece,
aphorical props, attached not to real bodies the ballet “Daphnis and Chloé”; shapes from “Live! The Real MC,” evolves from an ear-
but to black-and-white forms the playwright ancient Egyptian friezes pop up on a costume lier work, a solo Abraham created for himself

1
can imagine but cannot feel. (4/1/19)—H.A. for the ballet “Cléopâtre.” And the images of a
(Through May 5.) maenad and a satyr on a Greek amphora pre-
figure the stylized movements of Nijinsky’s
“Afternoon of a Faun.” It’s worth noting that
every object in the show is extraordinarily
DANCE beautiful in its own right.—Marina Harss
(Through June 2.)
“Hymn to Apollo”
in 2006, called “Inventing Pookie Jenkins.”
In it, Abraham, wearing a long skirt, played
with conventions of toughness and urban
attitude. Now, more than a decade later, his
ideas about identity and self-presentation
have deepened, unfolding in a wider spectrum
of colors. Here, one way of approaching the
subject is through the prism of Carlo Col-
lodi’s classic tale “Pinocchio.” What does

Institute for the Study of
the Ancient World
From its beginnings, in the Renaissance
courts of Europe, the art of ballet has main-
tained a constant conversation with clas-
1
Martha Graham Dance Company it mean, asks Abraham, to become a “real
boy”?—M.H. (April 4-6.)
Joyce Theatre
For its new season, Martha Graham’s
company commissions new work to pre-
sent alongside its founder’s repertory, and NIGHT LIFE
ILLUSTRATION BY ELENI KALORKOTI

sicism; its great champion Louis XIV saw
himself as a latter-day Apollo. The allure of
antiquity was particularly strong for the Bal-
lets Russes, a company founded in the early
twentieth century by the Russian impresario
Serge Diaghilev. This small but exquisitely
curated exhibition, “Hymn to Apollo: The
Ancient World and the Ballets Russes,” viv-
idly illustrates the fascination that many of
the Ballets Russes creators, particularly the
designer Léon Bakst and the choreographers
brings back pieces made for the troupe
by Annie-B Parson and Lucinda Childs.
Of the two premières, one is by Maxine
Doyle, a creator of the immersive show
“Sleep No More,” and Bobbi Jene Smith, a
gutsy alumna of that show and of Batsheva
Dance Company; it borrows themes from
the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The
other is by Pam Tanowitz, who, as a choreog-
rapher, would seem to have little in common
with Graham, apart from brilliance. But
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in
advance to confirm engagements.
Sullivan Fortner Trio
Village Vanguard
A highlight of his latest album, “Moments
Preserved,” finds the adroit pianist Sullivan

12 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019

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Fortner reunited with his former employer, the
late trumpeter Roy Hargrove, for a lovely ac-
count of Elmo Hope’s early-sixties gem “Eyes
So Beautiful As Yours.” It’s an off-center and
cunning choice that showcases Fortner’s his-
torical awareness as well as the shining touch
and unerring taste that he displayed on his
recent work with the singer Cécile McLorin
Salvant. He leads a trio that features the bass-
ist Ameen Saleem and the drummer Jeremy
(Bean) Clemons.—Steve Futterman (April 2­7.)
Open Mike Eagle
Rough Trade NYC
The rapper Open Mike Eagle weaves sto-
ries out of witty observations and wrenching
scenes of injustice. Take, for example, his 2017
album, “Brick Body Kids Still Daydream,”
through which he reconstructs the demol-
ished Chicago housing projects he lived in as
a child, filling them with memories of hopeful
young people, tough-talking drug dealers, and
elderly churchgoers. He centers the record’s
final scene on the tragedy of displacement as
he broods, “They blew up my auntie’s build-
ing, put out her great-grandchildren.”—Julyssa
Lopez (April 3.)
FESTIVAL SEASON
Ex Hex
Bowery Ballroom
As her fellow-alumni of nineties indie
rock roll out their various comebacks,
Mary Timony has steadily gone about
her business, evolving through a series of
solo projects and collaborations. In recent
years, that has meant Ex Hex, a power trio
(alongside Betsy Wright and Laura Harris)
with a hot sophomore album, “It’s Real.”
The band’s provenance may lie in an artsy
milieu of the East Coast and Generation X,
yet its heart belongs to a mall from “Fast
Times at Ridgemont High.”—Jay Ruttenberg
(April 4.)
Burna Boy
Apollo Theatre
The Nigerian artist Burna Boy seems to
absorb the sun and dispense it through an
arresting hybrid that includes traditional
and modern West African styles, hip-hop,
and R. & B., which he has deemed Afro-fu-
sion. His album “Outside,” from last year,
is a euphoric celebration of homegrown and
diasporic sounds, but a recent EP, “Steel &
Copper,” with the electronic production duo
DJDS, is a concise showcase of his multi-
tudes: his warm, earthy tones applied to
menacing trap rap and exuberant Afro-pop
create a sound that, even in its darkest mo-
ments, sounds like bottled joy.—Briana
Younger (April 5.)
Detroit Love
Le Bain at the Standard
The intimate and elegantly appointed eigh-
teenth floor of the Standard Hotel, with
its crystal-clear sound system, is about the
best place to dance to the pair of Motor City
house-music heroes on this bill. DJ Minx
was a resident at the crucial nineties Detroit
club Motor, and she still plays with ferocious
energy. Moodymann is one of the city’s major
dance auteurs—his mixes are steeped in
R. & B. history, with a political edge, while still
putting a body in the mood to grind.—Michael­
angelo Matos (April 5.)
Honey Dijon
99 Scott
The d.j. Honey Dijon, a Chicago native who’s
long lived in Brooklyn and was recently added
to the BBC Radio 1 lineup, tends to play freely
across the disco-house-techno continuum,
often favoring records marked by big ges-
tures. Her contribution to the Resident Ad-
visor podcast, uploaded this past New Year’s
Eve, starts that way, with Grace Jones’s florid
“Hurricane,” but soon enough it becomes—
surprise—an exploration of minimalism so
skeletal in places that it feels almost line-
drawn.—M.M. (April 5.)

Guy Gerber
Avant Gardner
A tech-house producer and d.j. from Tel
Aviv, Guy Gerber has tended to bring a
pitched urgency to his sets, as he did in a
memorable September, 2015, appearance
in Brooklyn. He seems to be maturing—in
recent appearances, the builds are a shade
airier and the bass grinds its way in more ju-
diciously. He tops the bill of a two-night mu-
sic-and-art project called “BLACK,” which
also features the Blaze, Mano Le Tough,
and, most promisingly, the sharp-witted
electronic singer-songwriter Marie David-
son.—M.M. (April 5.)
The Brooklyn Folk Festival is entering its eleventh year, which makes it
a battle-tested stalwart among music festivals and, in the folk world, a L’Rain
sexy young comer. Presented at St. Ann’s Church by the Jalopy Theatre National Sawdust
and School of Music, it thrives on its inclusiveness. This year’s edition Grief may be universal, but the ways in
opens on April 5 with a Sardinian vocal quartet and concludes, two days which we navigate it are unique and com-
and more than forty acts later, with a Malian kora player. It also features plex. For the Brooklyn-based experimental
artist L’Rain, mourning resembles gauzy
workshops on such pursuits as flat-foot dancing; like the beloved Newport free jazz and twinkling shoegaze melted
festivals of yore, the prevailing vibe is that of a socialist summer camp. into a hazy stew of ambient music and found
ILLUSTRATION BY YUKAI DU

Fittingly, one highlight is a sing-along to commemorate Pete Seeger— sounds. But, even in its heady sorrow, her
eponymous début album, from last year, still
no doubt presently engaged in unionizing his fellow-angels—on his manages to convey release and restoration.
centennial. Another is the annual Banjo Toss, a wish-fulfillment exercise Her first show as an artist-in-residence at
for generations of bluegrass audiences in which the festival producer National Sawdust further teases out those
ideas, employing video as well as spoken
Eli Smith leads contestants in hurling the instrument into the poor, word to probe the cycles of emotion.—B.Y.
unsuspecting Gowanus Canal.—Jay Ruttenberg (April 5.)

14 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019

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RECITALS
“I am convinced,” Shostakovich pro­
claimed in reference to one of his pupils,
“that the music of G. I. Ustvolskaya will
achieve worldwide renown, to be valued
by all who perceive truth in music to be
of paramount importance.” In recent de­
cades, Galina Ustvolskaya (who died in
2006) has attained the eminence that her
teacher prophesied, thanks in large part
to such ardent advocates as the Swiss
pianist Marianne Schroeder, whose in­
terpretations were admired by the dog­
gedly private Ustvolskaya. Presented on
April 5 by the curatorial organization
Blank Forms at St. Peter’s Episcopal
Church, in Chelsea, Schroeder performs
the six sonatas that Ustvolskaya wrote be­
tween 1947 and 1988—an idiosyncratic
cycle of gaunt chorales and explosive
violence that, when played in sequence,
suggests a private liturgy.—Steve Smith
Oliver Lake: “Alto Madness”
Roulette
Oliver Lake, with his penetrating tone and
deft ability to slip between the crevices of both
free and conventional jazz, has one of the most
unmistakable voices on the alto saxophone.
Here, with the inclusion of three other shrewd
altoists—Bruce Williams, Darius Jones, and
Michaël Attias—Lake revisits the massed
sound of the World Saxophone Quartet, the
epochal ensemble in which he first gained
widespread fame. The drummer Pheeroan
akLaff will bring additional rhythmic mo-
mentum to the proceedings.—S.F. (April 5.)
Alex Ferreira
Joe’s Pub
Whether he’s cradling a ukulele or crouching
over a synth machine, the Dominican singer-
songwriter Alex Ferreira takes his cues from
the kind of old-school Latin balladry that
allows for a generous outpouring of feelings.
Even though he’s a classic romantic at heart,
he delights in his own hyperactive need to
experiment, which has allowed him to build
a wildly eclectic catalogue. His solo albums
and collaborative projects feature songs that
dabble in the assorted dance rhythms of ba-
chata, merengue, electro-pop, and folk.—J.L.
(April 7 and April 12.)
Lil Baby
Terminal 5
Hip-hop has been overrun by babies. Last
month, separate shows featured Bali Baby
and Yung Baby Tate, and this week brings the
sharp wit of the promising Charlotte rapper
Da Baby, whose nimble rhymes will be on
16 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
display at S.O.B.’s on April 7. It’s Atlanta’s
Lil Baby, though, who stands above the rest:
a one-two punch of magnetic charm and hyp-
notic melodies netted him a pair of Top Ten
hits in less than a year. His “New Generation”
tour offers a snapshot of fellow rising stars;
supporting acts include the City Girls and
the off-kilter stylings of the lively rhymer
Blueface.—B.Y. (April 8.)
Pink Sweat$
Bowery Ballroom
When a voice is as elegant as that of the singer
Pink Sweat$, not much else is required. He
creates songs that are sparse, often stripped to
just fluttering guitar melodies for production.
His début project, “Volume 1,” from last year,
was built on this acoustic formula: six gor-
geous songs as bare in their lyrics as the music
itself. It’s R. & B. minimalism pushed to its
ostensible end—an answer to the abundance
of overproduced tracks that race up the charts,
and a space where Pink Sweat$ operates as
his own lone peer.—B.Y. (April 8.)
Charlotte Gainsbourg
Brooklyn Steel
Few humans are as genetically equipped to
project chic intelligence in song as Charlotte
Gainsbourg is. She débuted at age twelve via
her randy, deified father, Serge, before taking
a two-decade breather (for movie stardom).
Since 2006, the singer has made up for lost
time with a string of albums distinguished
by her breathy croon and a murderers’ row
of collaborators. On her latest, “Rest”—a new
companion book complements the songs with
art and notes—Gainsbourg grapples with loss
over lush modern disco.—J.R. (April 9.)
1
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Piotr Anderszewski
Alice Tully Hall
In 1819, the publisher Anton Diabelli sent a
gawky little waltz he’d written to the leading
composers of the day, asking each to submit a
variation on it. Beethoven wrote thirty-three,
burrowing into the tune’s smallest recesses
and expanding them with wild invention. The
pianist Piotr Anderszewski, whose playing
burns with Romantic fire, performs the “Di-
abelli” Variations alongside selections from
Book II of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,”
a very different kind of compositional exer-
cise, in which the Baroque master worked
his way through preludes and fugues for all
twenty-four major and minor keys.—Oussama
Zahr (April 2 at 7:30.)
“Diary of One Who Disappeared”
Brooklyn Academy of Music
When Janáček wrote “Diary of One Who
Disappeared” (1921), he was nursing an un-
requited love for Kamila Stösslová, a married
woman decades his junior. The song cycle
whirls with passion and obsession, as the
male protagonist (sung here by the tenor
Andrew Dickinson) is driven to abandon
his life for Zefka, a Romany woman (the
mezzo-soprano Marie Hamard). Ivo van
Hove’s staging makes the connection between
life and art more explicit but also more bal-
anced: an actor recites snippets of Janáček’s
letters to Stösslová (there were more than
seven hundred of them), and the composer
Annelies Van Parys provides Zefka with five
new songs based on poems written by Roma
women around the time of “Diary” ’s com-
position.—O.Z. (April 4-6 at 7:30.)
“Don Giovanni”
Metropolitan Opera House
Michael Grandage’s production of “Don
Giovanni”—its set a series of weathered
balconies along an anonymous street in sev-
enteenth-century Spain—provides window
dressing, though not much else, for Mozart’s
exquisite morality play about a seductive
cad and the women who love him. With his
plush yet forceful baritone, Peter Mattei
makes for an irresistible Don, and he heads
up a cast that includes Guanqun Yu, Susanna
Phillips, Serena Malfi, Pavol Breslik, and
Adam Plachetka; Cornelius Meister con-
ducts. • Mozart’s opera seria “La Clemenza
di Tito” may be a throwback to the Baroque
era, requiring an ensemble cast that can han-
dle its long sequence of intricately adorned
arias, but the Met utilizes it as a vehicle for
a star mezzo-soprano. Joyce DiDonato slips
ILLUSTRATION BY JULIA ROTHMAN
into the trouser role of Sesto, her shimmery
voice well suited to the marathon runs of
“Parto, parto.” The revival of Jean-Pierre
Ponnelle’s stately production also features
Elza van den Heever and the superlative Mo-
zartean Matthew Polenzani; Lothar Koenigs
conducts. (April 3 and April 6 at 8.) • Also
playing: Michael Mayer’s staging of Verdi’s
“La Traviata” (April 5 at 8), a fever dream of
glimmering golds and rowdy parties, returns
 with Anita Hartig and Stephen Costello after a lot like math, it’s because it is, but a pro-
its première, last fall.—O.Z. (April 4 and gram from the Australian Chamber Orches-
April 9 at 8.) tra leaves no doubt that fugues are music,
too. The concert opens with the first part of
Bach’s “Art of Fugue,” its voices unravelled
“Reich Richter Pärt” and then recombined in innovative arrange-
ments (at one point, the players murmur
The Shed along to pizzicato lines) by the ensemble’s
Festival. The first program this year fo-
cusses on small groups: Gabriel Zucker, a
composer and an improvising pianist, leads
a sextet, and Seven)Suns, a string quartet
plus drums, plays original compositions
alongside arrangements of heavy-metal and
hardcore-punk songs. The next night, the
orchestra presents new pieces by John King

This immersive multidisciplinary perfor-
mance brings together the work of three of
the world’s most widely celebrated artists.
The first section, presented in an earlier ver-
sion at the 2015 Manchester International
Festival, proposes common threads between
the muted luminosity of certain gray Richter
canvases and the austere shimmer of Pärt’s
choral music. A new segment, involving a film
by Corinna Belz, suggests a similar affinity
between Richter’s colorful, process-driven
“Patterns” paintings and Reich’s trademark
rhythmic pulsations. The Choir of Trinity
Wall Street and the Brooklyn Youth Cho-
rus alternate appearances during the work’s
run, through June 2, as do Ensemble Signal
and the International Contemporary En-
semble.—Steve Smith (April 6-7 and April 9
at various times.)
artistic director, Richard Tognetti. Bach’s
counterpoint is sketched in vivid color, and
a version of Beethoven’s Thirteenth String
Quartet, which ends with the kaleidoscopic
“Grosse Fuge,” gets the same treatment.
As a break from such cerebral pursuits, the
soloist Inon Barnatan performs Mozart’s
sleek Piano Concerto No. 12, which the com-
poser described as falling into that “happy
medium between what is too easy and too
difficult.”—F.M. (April 9 at 7:30.)
String Theories Festival
Roulette
Never an ensemble to shy away from mod-
ern fare, the String Orchestra of Brooklyn
concentrates entirely on twenty-first-cen-
tury music in its annual String Theories
1
and J. G. Thirlwell and a recent work by Lisa
Renée Coons.—S.S. (April 9-10 at 8.)
MOVIES
Amazing Grace
This concert film of Aretha Franklin’s 1972
performances, in a Baptist church in Watts,
of the gospel and popular songs contained
in her album of the same name, is a glory of
musical cinema, despite being born under a
bad sign. Its director, Sydney Pollack, had no
documentary experience and failed to slate
the images, leaving them unsynchronized
with the sound. (After Pollack’s death, it
was completed, thanks to modern digital
technology, by the producer Alan Elliott.)

“Leonardo”
92Y Tribeca IN REVIVAL
Jonathan Berger, a composer with a talent
for melding science with art, adds to the
mythology of Leonardo da Vinci, who, five
hundred years after his death, is as much a
culture hero as a historical figure. The bari-
tone Tyler Duncan is the sole singer in this
chamber opera, which promises to revive
the famous polymath through excerpts from
his notebooks. In a production designed by
Gabriel Calatrava, Duncan is backed by the
cult-worthy St. Lawrence String Quartet,
among others.—Fergus McIntosh (April 6
at 8.)

Jeremy Gill
National Sawdust
A concert dedicated to the music of Jeremy
Gill sheds light on the composer’s disparate
sources. A new violin duo, “Lascia fare mi”
(“Leave me alone”), explores Bertolucci’s
claustrophobic “Last Tango in Paris” through
a repeated punning phrase, la, sol, fa, re,
mi. “Six Pensées de Pascal,” commissioned
and performed here by the vocal group Vari-
ant 6, refracts texts by the seventeenth-cen- The vast transformations of postwar Japan under the American occupa-
tury French mathematician and theologian
through choral dissonance. The Duo for tion are furiously satirized in Kiju Yoshida’s comedic melodrama “Blood
Violin and Piano is open to interpretation, Is Dry,” from 1960. (It’s part of Japan Society’s series “The Other Japa-
but “Whitman Portrait,” a song cycle for nese New Wave,” running April 5-27.) The action is set in a thoroughly
six individual singers with a shimmering
piano part (played here by Gill), makes its Westernized Tokyo, where an office worker named Takashi Kiguchi,
intentions plain. Texts drawn from the poet’s protesting his company’s mass layoffs, tries to kill himself. But he survives
collected works emphasize different aspects and is chosen, by a young female executive, as the center of an insurance
of his character—as a prelude to the piece has
it, “hankering, gross, mystical, nude.”—F.M. company’s advertising campaign—and his instant celebrity thrusts his
COURTESY SHOCHIKU CO., LTD.

(April 7 at 7.)
Australian Chamber Orchestra
Rose Theatre
In a fugue, a simple theme can be multiplied,
turned upside down, squeezed, stretched, or
played in perfect sequence. If that sounds
life, and Japanese media, into chaos. Yoshida’s turbulently sardonic vision
encompasses paparazzi, baseball, blackmail, night clubs, political strife,
and casual sex; billboard-size images of Takashi holding a gun to his own
head come across as an icon of the times. The film’s thrillingly hectic
style blends documentary-based urgency with mock-majestic tracking
shots and disorienting closeups to conjure a new world of media-mad
distortions.—Richard Brody
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 17
The two nights of filmed performances find
Franklin—accompanied by the Reverend
James Cleveland and the Southern California
Community Choir—in spectacular voice and
prolific imagination. Her rapturous power
and intense concentration are revealed in
long, urgent closeups that seem to reflect
even the cinematographers’ awed astonish-
ment. Her musical flourishes of spiritual
passion prove contagious: Cleveland, the
choir, the conductor Alexander Hamilton,
and the instrumentalists rise to the occasion
as well, as displayed in high-relief images and
on the soundtrack. The film is a triumph of
timeless artistry over transitory obstacles; its
very existence is a secular miracle.—Richard
Brody (In limited release.)
Diane
The sharp-edged bonds that hold a family
and a community together are examined
intimately but vaguely in this lyrical melo-
drama by the writer and director Kent Jones.
Mary Kay Place plays the title character, a
widowed, middle-aged woman in upstate
New York, who displays energetic and effi-
cient devotion to others while she’s on the
verge of falling apart. She’s trying to get
her truculent adult son (Jake Lacy), a drug
addict, back into rehab; she dashes to the hos-
pital to visit her mortally ill cousin (Deirdre
O’Connell), who still holds a grudge over a
long-ago romantic betrayal; she volunteers
long hours at a local soup kitchen; and her
friends and relatives are rapidly dying off.
Then the drama both accelerates and frag-
ments to suggest Diane’s own dissolution.
Jones’s compassionate sensibility doesn’t find
much of an aesthetic counterpart; the charac-
ters’ motives and personalities remain unde-
fined, though the actors—including Andrea
Martin, Estelle Parsons, and the late Charles
Weldon—displaying steadfast commitment,
nonetheless offer poignant moments.—R.B.
(In limited release.)
Dragnet Girl
This silent gangster film, from 1933, directed
by Yasujiro Ozu, seethes with sardonic com-
edy. It opens like a classic office melodrama,
as Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), a demure young
secretary, is pursued by her wily boss. Then,
after work, she heads to a boxing gym where
her criminal boyfriend, Joji (Joji Oka), holds
court. Ozu treats underworld swagger with
brazen contempt yet adorns it with images
of an uproarious visual ecstasy. His gleeful
compositions put objects obsessively front
and center—a drum kit, a set of dice, a row
of Martini glasses, a billiard cue that pokes
right at the camera—and presage the deep-
focus symphonies of Orson Welles. Ozu’s
mobsters aren’t just living in a material
world; they are its unwitting pawns. Though
the violence never uncorks and the story
takes a sentimental turn, the deep shadows,
the jarring angles and cuts, and the idio-
syncratic whims of gesture evoke a sorry
underworld that’s out of joint, out of luck,
and out of time.—R.B. (Film Society of Lincoln
Center, April 9, and streaming.)
Gloria Bell
Sebastián Lelio repeats himself, in style.
Having directed “Gloria” in 2013, with Pau-
18 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
lina García as the heroine of the title, he
now shifts the story from his native Chile to
Los Angeles, and the language of the drama
from Spanish to English. This time, the role
of the middle-aged protagonist—divorced,
employed, and cautiously looking for love—
is taken by Julianne Moore, who brings her
bravest smile to the fray. She needs it, too, as
Arnold (John Turturro), Gloria’s latest beau,
who initially seems like a good catch, turns
out to be yet another male invertebrate. Not
a lot happens in the movie, save for some
paintballing action and a thunderous hang-
over, but Moore is a constant source of energy,
whether she is carolling along to the radio,
sharing a can of tuna with a cat, or dancing the
troubled night away. With a subdued Michael
Cera.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
3/11/19.) (In wide release.)
Hotel Mumbai
The 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai were
merciless—more than a hundred and sixty
people were murdered—and agonizingly
scattered across three days and multiple lo-
cations. The task for Anthony Maras, the
director of this feature film, who co-wrote
the screenplay with John Collee, is one of
dramatic concentration: how can such a splin-
tered tale cohere? Maras chooses to focus
on the majestic Taj Hotel (in an unsettling
irony, the same decision was made by the
attackers themselves) and its blend of local
staff and incoming guests. Dev Patel plays a
waiter, and Anupam Kehr plays the unflap-
pable head chef; also present is a wealthy
American (Armie Hammer), who arrives with
his wife (Nazanin Boniadi), their baby, and a
nanny. Real-life and fictional characters are
tossed together, and the tension is cranked
up; the result, however, like almost every re-
construction of a genuine outrage, leaves you
with a deep sense of disquiet.—A.L. (3/25/19)
(In wide release.)
The Pain of Others
Penny Lane’s found-footage documentary
is almost entirely a collection of YouTube
videos posted by people with the mysterious
condition called Morgellons disease, charac-
terized by the sense that fibres are emerging
from one’s skin but widely considered to be a
mental disorder. It’s centered on three women
who post—at length and in intimate physical
and psychological detail—about their suffer-
ings and their quests for relief. The women
express a wide range of emotions, from despair
and fear to hope and rage. One offers a varied
range of conspiracy theories to explain the
illness; another displays a harrowing range
of moods, from suicidal despair to tearful
exaltation; a third is persuaded, to her anguish,
that her hair is infected. The abysses of agony
into which all three women are plunged are
matched by the women’s desperate desire to
communicate—and to represent themselves.
Lane, far from merely compiling these vid-
eos, seems to be watching and experienc-
ing them as if in real time, along with the
viewer.—R.B. (Museum of the Moving Image,
April 7, and streaming.)
Roll Red Roll
Nancy Schwartzman’s documentary is sober
and unexcitable, as it needs to be, in its pre-
sentation of the facts. The story that she
recounts, dating from 2012, is centered on
the sexual assault of a sixteen-year-old girl
in Steubenville, Ohio. Two members of the
high-school football team were convicted
of rape. Teen-age drinking, unsurprisingly,
was part of the equation, but what made the
case especially disturbing, and very much of
its time, was the role played by technology:
photographs of the naked victim were sent
online to the offenders’ friends, and they in
turn were filmed reacting to such images.
Their jesting went viral, and thus a culture
of voracious misogyny was exposed, to the
discomfort of the school authorities and the
indignation—or shame—of local citizens.
Schwartzman talks to many of those affected,
and her movie is strewn, ominously, with the
debris of social media.—A.L. (4/1/19) (In
limited release.)
Shazam!
The comedic high points of this lighthearted
and sentimental superhero caper from the
DC archive are unfortunately submerged
in a sluggish story. The eye-rollingly drawn-
out exposition establishes a metaphysical
realm where a great and aged wizard (Djimon
Hounsou) seeks someone “pure of heart” as
his successor, and chooses a fourteen-year-old
Philadelphia boy named Billy Batson (Asher
Angel), who lives in a group home with five
other children. Billy’s newfound powers—
which he drolly struggles to discover—are
coveted by the evil Thaddeus Sivana (Mark
Strong), once an abused child, now a dam-
aged and vengeful adult. When he says the
magic word, Billy instantly becomes a super-
hero with the body of a grownup (Zachary
Levi) but retains his goofball adolescent
mind; this contrast sparks most of the humor.
Nonetheless, there’s too little of it to rescue
the rickety plot; even the endearing perfor-
mances of the young actors who play his fos-
ter siblings and the wise warmth of his foster
parents (Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews)
can’t overcome the pedantic world-building
and generic C.G.I. gyrations.—R.B. (In wide
release.)
Us
Jordan Peele’s latest film is not a sequel to
“Get Out” (2017), but it’s driven by a similar
wish to unsettle and to provoke. In both cases,
the feeling that comedy lurks nearby, peeking
over the shoulder of the story, makes the
provocation more, not less, intense. This is, in
the fullest sense, a family movie; at its heart
are the Wilsons—Gabe (Winston Duke),
his wife, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), and
their kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and
Jason (Evan Alex). After a trip to the beach in
Santa Cruz, where Adelaide once had a freaky
experience as a child, they are visited by an-
other family, whose members look just like
them but behave with a raw and unquenchable
rage. Where the invaders spring from, and
how far the invasion has spread throughout
society, is slowly revealed. Once again, under
Peele’s command, a horror film comes fully
1
armed with political intent.—A.L. (4/1/19)
(In wide release.)
For more reviews, visit
newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

1
TABLES FOR TWO
The Standard Grill
848 Washington St.
By the time Rocco DiSpirito was a con-
testant on “Dancing with the Stars,” in
2008, it had been so long since he’d
worked as a chef that it wasn’t clear
whether the job description still applied.
He’d come to prominence in the late
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
nineties as one of the most promising
young culinary talents in New York
City—but quickly became one of the
first celebrity chefs, spending more time
on TV shows (including his own ill-fated
NBC reality series, “The Restaurant”)
and hawking products (Bertolli’s frozen
food, a line of cookware on QVC) than
actually cooking.
And then he sort of disappeared. It
isn’t clear whether, after a decade spent
mostly out of the limelight, he’s still a
celebrity. This may explain why, last
fall, DiSpirito decided to become a chef
again, not just overseeing but actually
working the line at the Standard Grill,
the restaurant at the Standard, High
Line hotel, in the meatpacking district.
If he’s been humbled, there are few signs
of it here. Despite the fact that the newly
renovated dining room hasn’t quite been
filling up in recent weeks, menus that
look like high-end wedding invita-
tions—on heavy-stock, gold-embossed
paper—are printed daily, each bearing an
inspirational quote, such as the hopeful
“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We
shall get there some day.”
I can’t speak to DiSpirito’s food at
Lespinasse, in the early nineties, under
his mentor Gray Kunz, or later at Union
Pacific, the place that cemented his fame,
when Ruth Reichl awarded it three stars
in the Times, in 1998; his heyday was
before my time. At the Standard Grill,
he seems to be tripped up by his desire
to pay homage to his early career—and
to a style of cooking based on fairly
outdated ideas of luxury—while also
playing catch-up on some of the trends
he missed.
And so you’ll find sous-vide short rib
(both a technique and a cut of beef that
he helped popularize) finished with cold
applewood smoke (the kind that figured
prominently at cocktail bars in the early
two-thousands), but also an appetizer of
beet tartare and a selection of “lovingly
cooked organic vegetables,” including
charred Brussels sprouts in cashew sauce.
The vegetables are grown as locally as
the Hudson Valley, but a recent special
pasta was made with king crab flown in
from Finland.
A dish revived from Union Pacific—
raw Peconic Bay scallops and uni, served
on the half shell in sweet tomato water
and a hint of sharp mustard oil—is de-
licious, but DiSpirito’s claim, in a recent
interview in New York, that when he
débuted it, in the nineties, it was “a new
idea” to combine “sour, sweet, salty, bit-
ter” sounds woefully out of touch; entire
countries might beg to differ. Tiny skew-
ers—French white asparagus, bluefin
toro, wagyu beef—charred over Japanese
charcoal arrive tableside on miniature
grills, but, given that they’re already
cooked, the spectacle falls flat.
DiSpirito still has the chops of a
great chef. His tender, kidney-shaped
Italian-parsley fregola, made with
water-chestnut and chickpea flours and
served in a bowl of garlicky steamed
Manila clams, is delightful. I loved a
dessert of poached Bartlett pears, fanned
over creamy coconut mousse and coco-
nut sorbet and ringed with warm cin-
namon maple syrup. These, and nearly
every dish on the menu, are both dairy-
and gluten-free, in another embrace of
latter-day fads.
But hasn’t DiSpirito heard that bread
is back? Across town at Narcissa, at the
Standard, East Village, there’s a new chef,
too: the young Max Blachman-Gentile.
His rustic sourdough—which he calls
Glenn the Redeemer, and which you
can buy by the loaf—is among the best
I’ve found in New York City, and I’m still
thinking about a bowl of Hakurei turnips
I had there a couple of weeks ago. Some
were al dente, some softened until silky,
all bathed in a luscious green sauce and
topped with crunchy chorizo-fat bread
crumbs and tart coins of rhubarb. Spring
had almost sprung, and the kitchen was
ready. (Entrées $29-$139.)
—Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 19
 “
This blissful revival packs a delightful comic punch.”
–David Cote, Observer

“Sizzling and gutsy, with

DYNAMITE A REVIVAL “

CHOREOGRAPHY
and a jewel box full of musical gems.”
TO FALL FOR! ”
-Roma Torre, NY1
-Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Post

The Company of Kiss Me, Kate

“
GLORIOUS!
A sparkling, sumptuous treat.”
-Tim Teeman, Daily Beast

Book bySam and Bella Spewack

Choreographed byWarren Carlyle
Directed by Scott Ellis

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 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
WHAT’S THE STORY?
ast year, the Times and the Wash-
L ington Post shared a Pulitzer Prize
for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported
coverage” of Russian interference in the
2016 Presidential election. None of the
stories established that Donald Trump
or members of his campaign had con-
spired illegally with Russians, though
some of the reporting raised that pos-
sibility. The Times, for example, reported
that, in the summer of 2016, when Don-
ald Trump, Jr., was informed in an e-mail
that a high-ranking Russian official was
offering to share dirt that could “in-
criminate” Hillary Clinton, he replied,
“I love it.” (When the paper contacted
Trump, Jr., for comment, he released
the e-mails in question.)
On March 24th, Attorney General
William Barr, summarizing the special
counsel Robert Mueller’s final report,
announced that Mueller had cleared
Trump and his campaign of conspiring
with Moscow. In this revelation, com-
mentators on both the left and the right
perceived an epic media fail: Russiagate
reporting had been conjectural, hyper-
bolic, and, in the end, just wrong. Pres-
ident Trump, for his part, tweeted that
the media had “pushed the Russian Col-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
lusion Delusion” while knowing that it
was false, and reprised his incitements
against journalists, saying, “They truly
are the Enemy of the People.”
The coverage of the investigation
did include embarrassments—specious
chyrons, tendentious talking heads, and
retracted scoops, among them. Yet it
does not follow that American journal-
ism failed because the best-resourced
newsrooms in the nation chose to re-
port assiduously on the Mueller inves-
tigation and its subjects, only to learn
that Mueller did not prove that Trump
had conspired with Russia. Mueller was
appointed in the first place because the
Justice Department and the F.B.I. had
uncovered troubling information about
the campaign. According to Barr, Muel-
ler found that there had been “multiple
offers from Russian-affiliated individ-
uals to assist the Trump campaign,” and
he did not exonerate the President of
obstruction of justice.
Apart from that, the evidence, in-
dependently uncovered by journalists,
suggesting that members of the Trump
campaign might have colluded, if not
conspired, in order to win the election,
was newsworthy, and begged for addi-
tional reporting. So did the evidence of
Russian hacking attempts to manipu-
late the vote to Trump’s benefit; of cam-
paign-finance violations committed by
the President’s personal lawyer; and of
corruption and false statements made by
Trump’s former campaign aides. Muel-
ler’s investigation resulted in the indict-
ment of thirty-four people, seven of whom
have pleaded guilty so far. The country’s
major papers, magazines, and digital
newsrooms published reams of accurate
reporting about all of this. But the in-
dictments and the reporting also built up
outsized expectations for Mueller’s re-
port. As the investigation extended into
this year, the portentous question of what
new information Mueller’s team, exer-
cising subpoena power, might disclose
remained unanswered. The mystery pro-
voked fevered speculation, but Mueller’s
office, unusually for Washington, did not
leak, and so arrived the March Surprise.
The media’s role was complicated
by the fact that revelations uncovered
by professional reporters, once pub-
lished, became engulfed in a toxic fog
of hot takes, opinion masquerading as
reporting, and hyper-partisan compe-
tition. The news organizations that em-
ployed the best workaday reporters on
the Mueller beat are not entirely blame-
less in this regard. At the top of the
Times desktop homepage, these days,
as many opinion pieces appear as news
stories, and the Washington Post has
been expanding its opinion sections
(though such pieces are careful about
facts). Cable television, meanwhile,
mixes field reporting and news-mak-
ing interviews with personal asides from
prime-time personalities and round-
tables of bombast-mongers. Journalists
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 21
have long harbored a belief that read-
ers and viewers understand the differ-
ence between editorializing and report-
ing. It would be unrealistic to expect
them to make such a distinction now.
The economics of news is partly re-
sponsible for this state of affairs. In an
age of distraction, many Americans now
get their news from social media. At
the same time, Facebook and Google
have broken the advertising models on
which newspapers and digital news-
rooms previously relied. The survival
strategy adopted by many papers—per-
suading readers to buy digital subscrip-
tions—requires them to publish con-
tent that readers find indispensable or,
at least, touches on their sense of iden-
tity. In cable TV, channels that viewers
feel they can’t live without command
the highest fees from distributors. Fox
News’s deeply devoted audience makes
that network exceptionally valuable. As
a result, the temptation in media busi-
nesses is to exploit political tribalism.
INK
MUELLER’S MAGNUM OPUS
he Mueller report has been awaited
T with more excitement than—and
for three times as long as—Meghan
Markle’s baby. Now that the special
counsel’s report is here, sort of, three
publishers have announced plans to
release it as a book: Skyhorse, with
an introduction by Alan Dershowitz;
Scribner, with supplementary material
by Washington Post reporters; and Mel-
ville House, straight up. (The docu-
ment will be in the public domain.)
“Our printers are ready to print faster
than usual,” Dennis Johnson, Melville
House’s co-founder and co-publisher,
said last week, over the phone. “And
we’ll ask the truck drivers to do at least
the speed limit to deliver the book.”
Tony Lyons, the president and pub-
lisher of Skyhorse, said that he’d re-
ceived thousands of pre-orders, and
he’s been touting his edition’s Der-
showitz bonus. “Alan was right from
Day One,” he said. “He was the only
22 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
President Trump, for all his dema-
goguery, has yet to marginalize profes-
sional reporting. In many newsrooms,
investigative journalism is enjoying a re-
naissance, and it is having a strong im-
pact, within and beyond Washington.
Last summer, while covering the Ad-
ministration’s “zero tolerance” policy of
removing immigrant kids from their par-
ents, Ginger Thompson, of ProPublica,
obtained and released a recording of
young children crying in a holding fa-
cility. Her work provoked a public out-
cry, and the Administration reversed its
policy. Reporting by the Indianapolis
Star helped bring to justice the child
molester Larry Nassar, of USA Gym-
nastics. A series of stories in the Baton
Rouge Advocate found that a Jim Crow-
era law, which allowed defendants ac-
cused of felonies such as murder to be
convicted by a split-jury verdict, fos-
tered racism and mass incarceration.
Louisiana’s Republican-led state legis-
lature approved a referendum to recon-
pundit whose cautious predictions
proved to be correct.”
The first government report pub-
lished as a trade book was the Warren
Commission’s 1964 report on J.F.K.’s
assassination, which sold more than a
million copies. In his novel “Libra,” Don
DeLillo calls the report “the megaton
novel that James Joyce would have writ-
ten if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived
to be a hundred.” Three decades later,
the independent counsel Kenneth Starr,
with help from Brett Kavanaugh, au-
thored the Starr report, which three
different publishers released as a four-
hundred-plus-page potboiler. (It sold
almost two million copies in two days.)
Adam Gopnik, in this magazine, ar-
gued that the Starr report could be read
“as a novel in the classic tradition,” with
Bill Clinton as the scapegrace hero. Oth-
ers likened the work to soft-core porn.
Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian,
asked, “Why did Starr and Kavanaugh
put all the sex in it? Well, they didn’t do
it to sell a lot of copies.” Gopnik ac-
knowledged, “The laboriously recounted
instances of near-ejaculation, the or-
gasms achieved and enumerated—it’s
all there for the reviewers.”
Then came the 9/11 Commission Re-
port, a doorstop of nearly six hundred
sider the law, and, in November, voters
chose to require unanimous verdicts in
trials involving felonies.
Last Wednesday, the President gave
a lengthy interview to Sean Hannity, of
Fox News, in which he discussed the
Mueller report. Trump praised Fox while
attacking pretty much everyone else. The
2020 election cycle is all but certain to
deliver another divisive, attention-grab-
bing spectacle. News organizations will
have important choices to make. Inves-
tigative reporting can change politics, as
it did in Alabama, in 2017, when voters
elected the Democrat Doug Jones to the
U.S. Senate after the Washington Post,
and others, revealed the alleged miscon-
duct of his Republican opponent, Roy
Moore. The First Amendment protects
all political journalism, even when it serves
merely as a megaphone for particular
candidates, but voters will benefit most
from legions of reporters working with-
out fear or favor.
—Steve Coll
pages, written in what the Post called
the “ultra-spare, purposely unemo-
tional—yet quietly seething—language
of American pain.” The Harvard histo-
rian Daniel Aaron, the librettist Leslie
Dunton-Downer, and the lawyer Har-
vey Silverglate went further, arguing in
a 2005 article that the literary genre that
the 9/11 report belongs to is the epic.
The terrorists are our Grendel, and the
Twin Towers, like Heorot, are “too lofty
and too visible” for their own good. “Be-
reft of a miraculous rescuer like Beo-
wulf,” the authors write, “The 9/11 Com-
mission Report calls on the American
people to serve as their own collective
hero.” The report sold more than a mil-
lion copies in the first four months, and,
in 2004, it was named a finalist in the
nonfiction category of the National Book
Awards, cited for its “literary style.”
Harold Bloom, the eminent Yale lit-
erature professor, finds the idea of such
reports having literary merit offensive.
“If a Harvard professor thought that
the 9/11 report could be compared to
‘Beowulf,’ they achieved an abyss of ab-
surdity,” he wrote in an e-mail. As for
the Warren Commission report, he said,
“I am very fond of Don and of ‘Libra,’
but there are limits: Joyce in Iowa City
is like visualizing the eighty-nine-year-
 SKETCHPAD
o pass the time as we
T wait for the Mueller
report to be released to the
reading public, we asked five
graphic designers to create
book covers for the special
counsel’s masterwork,
twenty-two months in the
making, which is said to
weigh in at more than three
hundred pages.
Alex Merto
old Harold Bloom climbing mountains
in Tibet.”
Stephen Greenblatt, a professor at
Harvard and Bloom’s sometime rival in
Shakespeare criticism, was more open
to the idea of the Mueller report as lit-
erature. “Quite a large number of peo-
ple have been indicted. Some of them
are going to jail,” he said. “I would have
thought those individual instances would
be quite gripping, both as stories and as
PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY (CAT)
outcomes.”
If the Warren report is a modern
novel, the Starr report a bodice ripper,
and the 9/11 report an epic, then which
genre will the Mueller report fall into—
assuming we ever get to read it? “Like
Michael Bierut
Paul Sahre
a lot of people, I was led to believe that
the Mueller report might resemble Rich-
ard Condon’s ‘Manchurian Candidate,’”
Greenblatt said. “But I gather from the
Attorney General’s letter that it’s most
likely to resemble a postmodern novel,
like DeLillo’s ‘White Noise’—one in
which there isn’t a big bang at the end.”
Wilentz had doubts that the Mueller
report would be nominated for a liter-
ary prize. “It’d be a political statement,
in a way that nominating the 9/11 re-
port was not,” he said. “Regardless of
what the report says.”
The publishers are more optimistic.
“These are exciting books,” Johnson said.
“They remind you of the power of a
Na Kim
Janet Hansen
book and its place in our democracy.”
Lyons said, “The reports that have been
released in the past have been of the
highest quality. I have no reason to be-
lieve that the Mueller report would be
any different.”
But Greenblatt is skeptical that
Americans will be racing to the book-
store to purchase the next “Infinite Jest.”
“If the report turns out to be a post-
modern novel with interesting and com-
plex threads that go in different direc-
tions but don’t lead into a grand, clear
narrative, then it’ll probably have less
appeal,” he said. “More like something
that people would just look at online.”
—Tyler Foggatt
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 23
1
CUPERTINO POSTCARD
APPLE’S BIG SHOW
isitors to the Apple campus early
V last Monday—a morning that
ended with Big Bird promoting cod-
ing for preschoolers, Tim Cook hawk-
ing a credit card, and Oprah showing
up in white and proclaiming, “I have
joined forces with Apple!”—got an un-
usual greeting as they drove toward
Apple Park. With the appointed hour
approaching, many guests’ iPhones
perked up, like dogs in the back seat
arriving home, and barked a notifica-
tion at their owners: “Prepare to check
in.” The owners did what they could.
An advance guard of Apple employ-
ees wearing black down jackets over
teal T-shirts hailed them with greet-
ings and directions. A rear guard pulled
credentials from the Wallet apps and
Touch I.D.s on visitors’ phones. Then
it was up a winding footpath (Steve
Jobs Way) to a round glass pavilion
perched atop a subterranean audito-
rium (Steve Jobs Theatre), the route
marked at each turn by more employ-
ees, more greetings, more teal. By this
point, visitors felt extremely checked
in, and a warm bemusement settled on
the crowd. “It’s unclear to me where
any of these people come from or why
they’re here,” Ken Ziffren, a media-
and-entertainment lawyer whose firm
represents Apple talent, remarked. He
was unsure what the company planned
to announce but, like everyone, was
being made cozy in the dark.
It was a Scandinavian-seeming day
in Cupertino: gray, blustery, and bright.
Fresh mulch along Steve Jobs Way gave
the wind a fervid springtime musk.
Multiculti digital music playing from
speakers in the foliage helped enforce
a Zen-like air. Inside, at a round bar
centered in the room, baristas proffered
apple-cinnamon rolls and apple cakes
and poured hot Chemex coffee into
paper cups whose off-white hue re-
called the Apple IIc. Outside, on a ter-
race ringing the pavilion, caterers re-
freshed trays of yogurt, empanadas,
24 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
fruit skewers, pastries, bread pudding,
inari, and quiches topped with swirls
of savory cream. These sculpted por-
tions, like much about the theatre,
seemed a challenge to chaos encroach-
ing from outside. At one point, a gust
tipped a coffee cup over. The spill van-
ished from the cream-colored terrazzo
floor within minutes.
Vanishments of all sorts added a
mysterious air. There were no trash
cans in the pavilion. In their place, hu-
mans walked around with trays onto
which guests tossed garbage. The big-
gest absence, over all, was informa-
tional: What was this event about?
Media types slumping over laptops or
Tim Cook and Oprah Winfrey
lecturing at selfie sticks had specula-
tions, nothing more. The teal shirts
answered most specific questions with
a helpful vagueness, like Parisians di-
recting lost Americans toward a dis-
tant restaurant for lunch. What were
the meanings of the color-coded lan-
yards that visitors had been given—
silver for media; teal, orange, or pur-
ple for something else? Oh, that wasn’t
important. What was going on when,
at 9:01 a.m., an eerie chorus of syn-
chronized clapping swelled from the
floor below? That was really nothing,
just a group of Apple colleagues “get-
ting ready” for the day’s event.
The crucial moment, when it did
arrive, was quick and quiet. At 9:28 A.M.,
one teal shirt caught the eye of another
teal shirt and snapped her hands into
a parallel formation, the way a flight
attendant might indicate an emergency
exit: doors open. Visitors streamed down
the theatre’s graceful white staircase.
Inside the auditorium, cameras were
waiting: one on a robot jib, one on a
harness, one at either end of the stage,
two farther up the flanks, another mov-
ing on a ceiling track. Seats near the
front, within camera range, were re-
served for Apple employees and oth-
ers. (It was unclear who the others
were.) A custom radio station played
“Sunflower,” by Vampire Weekend, and
a British-voiced d.j. came on. “Just one
more song and then it’s showtime,” he
announced. The song was “Lisztoma-
nia,” by Phoenix (the same song that
resurfaced recently as the soundtrack
to a viral video of Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez dancing on a roof in college).
“This is showtime, this is showtime,”
the band echoed, and then Tim Cook
walked onstage, wearing a sweater. The
audience cheered.
In his introduction, pausing in re-
hearsed fashion to take applause, Cook
talked about “world-class services” and
curating journalism through the com-
pany’s values. He introduced Apple
News+, a low-cost subscription service
for digital editions of magazines, and
spoke of its voraciousness. “We want
them all,” he said, of magazines. “What
if we could have them all?” An ele-
gantly produced video, featuring jour-
nalists paid to present the product,
started up. “One of the functions of
journalism in this moment is to offer
a fuller picture of power: who has it,
who doesn’t have it, and what the costs
of that have been,” Rebecca Traister, a
writer for New York, said onscreen. Then
the video ended, but the Apple show
1
went on.
—Nathan Heller
THE BOARDS
REVENGE OF THE NERD
erds are often oppressed in life,
N but on Broadway they’re the rul-
ing class. There’s the green-faced out-
cast of “Wicked,” the squeaky-clean
missionaries of “The Book of Mor-
mon,” the mathlete turned queen bee
of “Mean Girls.” The Tony-winning
musical “Dear Evan Hansen,” about
an antisocial teen who becomes a viral
sensation, made a geek heartthrob of
its star, Ben Platt. When it opened, in
2016, the actor Will Roland played Ev-
an’s only friend. Now Roland is mak-
ing his own bid as Broadway’s reign-
ing nerd-hero, in the new musical
“Be More Chill.” He plays Jeremy, a
high-school junior who is hopelessly
devoid of social skills, until he takes a
SQUIP—“super quantum unit intel pro-
cessor”—a pill that implants a com-
puter chip in his brain, instructing him
on how to be cool. The musical, based
on a young-adult novel, arrived on
Broadway with a mob of online su-
perfans, who now swarm the Lyceum
stage door each night to take selfies
with Roland.
In real life, Roland has just turned
thirty, is engaged to a live human
woman (Stephanie Wessels, who works
at a photography studio), and lives in
Brooklyn, where nerddom and hip-
sterdom are indistinguishable. He’s
the kind of guy you might find at a
novelty retro-amusement bar, and that
is why he requested to meet, one
recent Tuesday afternoon, at Kick
Axe Throwing, an establishment in
Gowanus. “I’ve never been here, but
all of my neighbors say it’s great,” he
said. He wore jeans and an orange
flannel shirt over a punkish mini-golf
T-shirt. He signed a waiver (Kick Axe
is not liable if you wind up with a
blade in your skull) and joined some
strangers.
An instructor with bleached hair,
Ryan Ortiz, split the group into two
teams of three and asked each to come
up with a team name. Roland sug-
gested Axe Body Spray; his opponents
called themselves the Axe-Holes.
“Both have been done a thousand
times,” Ortiz said. Then he laid down
the rules. Two players at a time were
to stand side by side on a black line
and hurl tennis-racquet-size axes at
wooden five-ring targets. The outer
ring was worth one point; the bull’s-
eye was worth five. He recommended
gripping the axe with both hands and
throwing from over your head. “If we
see you visibly intoxicated or throw-
ing in an improper manner while
“I loved it as a child, so I’m going to force you to love it, too.”
• •
sober, we have to tell you to stop
throwing,” Ortiz said. “Everybody got
that?” Roland sipped a Pepsi and said
excitedly, “It sounds very dangerous!”
He took a practice throw and landed
the axe square in the four-point zone,
suggesting hidden reserves of hand-
eye coördination. “I’ve played a lot of
sports . . . in my mind,” he said, shrug-
ging. “Between you and me, I can
imagine certain mean writers’ heads
in those bull’s-eyes.”
After his throw, Roland sat back on
a leather couch. “I definitely self-iden-
tify as a nerd,” he said. He was born
in Manhattan, where his father ran an
auction house. When Roland was eight,
the family moved to Locust Valley, on
Long Island. Starting in sixth grade,
he attended the Friends Academy, a
Quaker school, where his hobbies in-
cluded Dungeons & Dragons. “I got
shoved into a locker once,” he said. He
vowed to transform himself. “I don’t
know if you’ve read ‘The Power Bro-
ker,’” he went on, “but that’s basically
what I did for the rest of my high-
school career. I became a person not
to be shoved into a locker.”
He starred in school plays—“They
had a really bomb theatre program”—
and this somehow earned him social
capital. In “Be More Chill,” the SQUIP
turns Jeremy into a popular jerk. Ro-
land’s high-school-theatre career threat-
ened to do the same, as he discovered
when his drama teacher sat him down
one day when he was fifteen. “She
pointed out, ‘You’re very clever, and
sometimes you say things to your friends
and classmates that are really mean.’
She cared a lot about making sure I
didn’t become a douchebag.”
He got up to throw some more
axes. Was he picturing anyone on the
bull’s-eye? “Whoever invented ‘The
Bachelor,’ ” he said. “I think it’s poi-
soning America.” Thwap! Four points.
On his next turn, he pictured “the
Latin teacher who nearly failed me
for missing an assignment the week-
end we opened ‘Macbeth’ and told
me, ‘What are you going to do with
all of this theatre stuff ?’ While I was
learning Latin.” Another four. He
went on to throw at Bill Cosby, peo-
ple who walk too slowly in Times
Square, “my anxiety around things
like awards,” fractional-reserve bank-
ing (“I’m not a fan”), and the chair-
man of the F.C.C. (“I’m so mad about
net neutrality”). With the game al-
most over, he imagined throwing the
axe at the kid who shoved him in a
locker in sixth grade. Three points.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Roland said. “He
didn’t get hugged enough.”
—Michael Schulman
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 25
 A REPORTER AT LARGE
UNDER THE GUN
In the mass-shooting era, bystanders must act as first responders.
BY PAIGE WILLIAMS
ne April morning in 2014, a six-
O teen-year-old sophomore at Frank-
lin Regional Senior High, in Murrys-
ville, Pennsylvania, stole two butcher
knives from his parents’ kitchen, hid
them in his backpack, and took them
to school. He was wearing all black and,
according to witnesses, had a “blank ex-
pression.” Just before first period, in the
hall of the science wing, he stabbed sev-
eral classmates. Then he pulled the fire
alarm. As the corridor filled with peo-
ple, the boy moved down the hallway,
a knife in each hand, stabbing more
students. He turned and raced back up
A person can bleed to death in as little as five to eight minutes.
26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
the hall—an administrator remembered
him “flailing the knives like he was
swimming the backstroke.” One girl
later testified, “I could feel that my lip
wasn’t attached to my face anymore.”
A boy, stabbed in the belly, recalled, “I
was gushing blood.”
The students at Franklin Regional,
which is seventeen miles east of Pitts-
burgh, had been trained to lock them-
selves inside classrooms during a “code
red” event. In one room, a home-eco-
nomics teacher called 911 as she at-
tended to an injured boy. A dispatcher
asked where the “patient” had been
hurt. “The lower abdomen,” the teacher
said. “On the right side.”
“Do you have any way to control the
bleeding?” the dispatcher asked.
“I’m putting pressure on it,” the
teacher said. She was stanching the
blood with paper towels. This was help-
ful, the dispatcher told her, saying, “If
it starts soaking through, I don’t want
you to lift it up at all. Find anything
else you can to put on top of that.”
The teacher had been applying pres-
sure for about four minutes when the
dispatcher said, “We have the actor in
custody,” adding, “But I don’t want you
to let any of your students leave that
room.” As the teacher bore down on
the wound, she talked with the injured
boy, her voice tense but cheerful. They
joked that he could use the experience
in a college-application essay. When
he predicted that his mother was going
to “have a panic attack,” the teacher
said, “I think she will.” Then she said,
“I never thought I’d have to do this.”
Gracey Evans, a seventeen-year-old
junior at the time, remembers that she
was walking down the hall with her
friend Brett when someone rushed past
them “like a black mass.” She didn’t re-
alize that Brett was hurt until he “fell
to the ground, withering in pain”—he
had been stabbed in the back. In front
of her, a boy in a red hoodie grabbed
his stomach. A third boy collapsed. The
victims took refuge in a nearby science
classroom.
Brett’s wound did not look life-threat-
ening, so Gracey dropped to her knees
beside the boy in the red hoodie. She
raised the hem of his sweatshirt and
saw blood pouring out of a clean slit
above his waistband. Although she had
never witnessed real physical trauma
before, she didn’t flinch. Her mother
was an orthopedic nurse, and she had
seen videos of athletes’ legs broken at
grotesque angles.
Gracey recalls that someone handed
her a “big wad” of those “terrible” brown
paper towels that aren’t very absorbent.
She placed them over the gash, inter-
laced her fingers, and pushed. A dancer,
she’d been told that she was stronger
than she appeared, and she worried that
she might be hurting her classmate, but
she kept pressing. The boy suddenly
vomited, and part of his liver emerged
from the wound. Gracey, nauseated, let
ILLUSTRATION BY WOODY HARRINGTON
go, and blood rushed out again. “I’m so
sorry!” she cried, unable to continue.
Another student, who happened to be
an E.M.T., took over, buying the boy
more time.
Twenty-one people had been knifed,
several severely, yet everyone survived.
(The attacker was later sentenced to a
minimum of twenty-three and a half
years in prison.) Law-enforcement and
health-care professionals in the Pitts-
burgh area took note of the fortitude
and the competence of many bystand-
ers. Listening to a playback of the
teacher’s 911 call, they marvelled at her
calm and her effectiveness. Brad Or-
sini, an F.B.I. agent who worked the
case, told me, “You’d have thought it
was just another day for this woman.”
At one point, the teacher had told the
boy, “You know what? Sometimes when
stuff happens, you go into a different
state of mind. You surprise yourself at
how you can handle things.”
category of emergency known
A as an Intentional Mass Casualty
Event is now considered a public-health
crisis. In recent years, deadly attacks
have occurred at schools, offices, con-
certs, sporting events, shopping malls,
and houses of worship. They have in-
volved guns, knives, trucks, and impro-
vised explosive devices. In March, a gun-
man killed fifty people at two mosques
in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Much attention has been given to
the rising frequency of mass shootings
in the United States, but equally alarm-
ing is their worsening severity. In the
attack at Columbine High School,
which occurred in 1999, thirteen peo-
ple were killed and twenty-four were
injured. In the 2017 massacre at a music
festival in Las Vegas, fifty-eight peo-
ple were killed and eight hundred and
fifty-one were injured. The arsenal of
the Las Vegas perpetrator included the
AR-15 assault rifle, a weapon that has
been used in many rampages. (In fact,
he had fourteen of them with him.)
Bullets shot from an AR-15 travel at
an extremely high velocity; the force
of the ammunition can shatter the bones
in a human arm merely by grazing it.
Last year, Richard Carmona, a former
U.S. Surgeon General, said, “More and
more, the injuries we’re seeing in the
civilian world look like combat casu-
alties.” After the 2018 shooting at Mar-
jory Stoneman Douglas High School,
in Parkland, Florida—seventeen killed,
seventeen injured—a trauma surgeon
opened up a victim to find at least one
organ in “shreds,” with “nothing left to
repair.”
For victims whose injuries are seri-
ous but survivable, rapid treatment is
essential. A person can bleed to death
in as little as five to eight minutes. Tra-
ditionally, during an active-shooter event,
paramedics held back until law enforce-
ment secured the area, then rushed in
to treat the wounded and evacuate them
to hospitals. That approach changed
after Columbine. During that event,
rescuers, unable to determine if the kill-
ers were dead or hiding, didn’t reach
some victims for hours. In a second-floor
science lab, teachers and students were
stranded with a coach, Dave Sanders,
who had been shot once in the neck
and once in the back. Two Eagle Scouts
applied pressure to his wounds, and
someone else put a sign in a window—“1
bleeding to death.” Sanders died
at the scene; it’s unclear whether he
would have survived with quicker or
different treatment.
The Las Vegas shooter positioned
himself in a sniper’s nest—a hotel win-
dow overlooking the festival—and
sprayed the crowd with bullets. In this
case, it was impossible to stage an or-
derly transition from a security phase to
a medical phase: victims arrived at hos-
pitals in Ubers and pickup trucks, or in
the arms of loved ones and strangers.
As public shootings became com-
monplace, doctors started paying more
attention to them. One such doctor was
Lenworth Jacobs, the head trauma sur-
geon at Hartford Hospital, in Connecti-
cut. He’d grown up in Jamaica, where
his father was a doctor; when Jacobs
was about seven, he and his dad came
across an injured bicyclist by the side of
the road, and the sight of his father ur-
gently helping a stranger left a lasting
impression. Jacobs told me that trauma
surgery appealed to him because each
case contains a “beginning, middle, and
end.” A patient presents with a prob-
lem—“a gunshot wound, a stabbing”—
which is then resolved, one way or an-
other. When Jacobs wasn’t operating,
he devised protocols that would help
increase survival rates in the Emergency
Department. At Hartford, he founded
Life Star, the first helicopter-ambulance
service in Connecticut.
On December 14, 2012, a deranged
young man with a semi-automatic rifle
and two handguns entered Sandy Hook
Elementary School, in Newtown, Con-
necticut, an hour away from Hartford
Hospital. The hospital is a Level 1
trauma center, a designation that sig-
nifies the highest level of care. As news
of the shooter reached Jacobs, he pre-
pared to send medevac choppers to
Newtown, but was soon advised to stand
down. “You hear ‘Everybody’s dead’—
and that makes no sense,” he told me.
“Then you hear ‘It’s children’—and that
makes no sense.”
Twenty first graders had been killed,
along with six administrators and teach-
ers. Jacobs wondered whether the shock-
ing number of casualties was related to
the local emergency response, or to the
nature of the gunshot injuries, or both.
He reviewed the autopsy reports, and,
although he had successfully operated
on patients with unimaginable physi-
cal trauma, he was nevertheless unpre-
pared for what he saw. Many of the
children had been shot multiple times,
at close range. The reports, he said, were
“overwhelming.”
The victims at Sandy Hook likely
died instantly, but Jacobs, unable to “go
back to business as usual,” kept think-
ing about what could be done to reduce
casualties in the future. There was not
even a second to waste in such inci-
dents: the wounded had to be treated
immediately, at the scene.
Jacobs was a regent of the American
College of Surgeons, an organization
with some eighty thousand members
worldwide. At an A.C.S. meeting soon
after Sandy Hook, he urged his col-
leagues to focus on mitigating losses in
Intentional Mass Casualty Events. “Ob-
viously, prevention is the way to go,” he
said. “But, once something has hap-
pened, how can we increase survival?”
n trauma care, the primary cause of
I preventable death is hemorrhage. Ex-
ternal bleeding can always be controlled
in an extremity wound, if it is addressed
quickly enough: no one should bleed to
death from an arm or a leg injury, even
with the loss of a limb.
This message had never been clearly
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 27
conveyed to the public. Four months
after Sandy Hook, Jacobs convened a
small group of physicians, military lead-
ers, and law-enforcement officials—in-
cluding representatives of the F.B.I. and
the Department of Defense—at Hart-
ford Hospital. The group became known
as the Hartford Consensus.
One member was Frank Butler, an
ophthalmologist and a former Navy
seal platoon commander. In the nine-
teen-nineties, Butler reviewed the state
of battlefield trauma care in the U.S.
military. He ultimately discovered that,
during the Vietnam War, more than
thirty-four hundred service members
died because of hemorrhaging from ex-
tremity wounds.
For Butler, a solution came to mind:
tourniquets. The devices are known to
have been used as far back as 1674, during
the Franco-Dutch War. Early versions
consisted of a strip of cloth and a stick,
which was used as a windlass. Modern
tourniquets work much the same way:
you snugly encircle a bleeding limb with
a band of cloth, then turn the windlass,
tightening the band until it stops the
flow of blood.
Tourniquets lost favor after the Civil
War, because of their association with
gangrene and amputation. By the time
of Butler’s review, medical doctrine had
long held that tourniquets did more
harm than good. It was true that the
longer a tourniquet stayed in place the
more it could damage the surrounding
tissues and nerves, but in the modern
era a patient could usually be evacuated
quickly to a hospital. Moreover, early
tourniquets hadn’t always been used
properly—they were strapped below the
wound instead of above it, or they weren’t
tight enough. In a report, Butler argued
that “the ‘no tourniquet’ rule,” a “vener-
ated tenet of prehospital trauma care,”
was wrong. As he recently put it to me,
“Tourniquets save lives—period.”
Butler’s recommendations also in-
troduced the concept of “tactical com-
bat casualty care”: soldiers, trained with
basic lifesaving skills and equipment,
could act as front-line medics when nec-
essary. Several élite combat units im-
mediately embraced the idea. The Ar-
my’s 75th Ranger Regiment—whose
members had seen comrades bleed to
death from extremity wounds during
the 1993 battle in Mogadishu—began
28 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
training with tourniquets during simu-
lated missions. Soldiers were taught how
to apply a tourniquet to themselves or
to someone else within seconds. A group
of soldiers at Fort Bragg, in North Car-
olina, designed a tourniquet that was
optimized for battlefield conditions; the
device, which came to include a built-in
windlass, secured by a plastic clip and a
Velcro strap, is called a Combat Appli-
cation Tourniquet, or C-A-T.
An outdated technique had become
a modern cure. Tourniquets are now
standard issue in the U.S. military, along
with hemostatic dressings—sterile gauze
infused with kaolin, a clay that promotes
swift blood clotting. By 2012, the Jour-
nal of Vascular Surgery reported, some
soldiers were embarking on missions
with tourniquets “already in place” on
their limbs.
In April, 2013, when Jacobs and the
other experts convened at Hartford
Hospital to talk about Intentional Mass
Casualty Events, they discussed the
tourniquet revival. The group decided
that the military’s standardized ap-
proach to controlling external hemor-
rhage could be applied to civilian life:
members of the public could be trained
to identify and treat life-threatening
bleeding. The Hartford Consensus
devised a protocol, Stop the Bleed,
in the hope that it would become as
widely known as C.P.R. and Stop,
Drop, and Roll.
Jacobs told me that Stop the Bleed
training had to be short enough to fit
“between church and cooking dinner, or
between dinner and the football game,”
and simple enough for a sixth grader to
understand. The instruction had to focus
on one goal: “Keep the blood in the body.”
He and his colleagues knew that the
protocol would save lives if they could
persuade people to use it.
Thirteen days after the Hartford
Consensus first met, explosive devices
filled with nails and ball bearings det-
onated near the crowded finish line of
the Boston Marathon. The sidewalks
of Boylston Street were strewn with in-
jured spectators. As a team of special-
ists later wrote in The Journal of Trauma
and Acute Care Surgery, the bombing
was the first major terrorist event in the
modern United States “with multiple,
severe, war-like, lower-extremity inju-
ries.” More than a dozen people lost
limbs in the blasts.
Boston has many hospitals, and para-
medics were quick to the scene, but
they were astonished by how many
spectators had already applied pressure
to wounds, using clothing or coffee-
shop napkins. “Much of the early life-
saving was performed by amateurs,” the
Washington Post reported. Although
more than two hundred people were
injured, only three died, and The New
England Journal of Medicine credited
this achievement, in large part, to “cou-
rageous civilians.”
The marathon attack confirmed
the Hartford Consensus’s view: peo-
ple would instantly help one another
during a crisis, even when the injuries
were almost unbearable to see, much
less to touch. The real first responders
were bystanders.
ne icy morning in mid-January,
O Matthew Neal, a trauma surgeon
and a research scientist at the Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh Medical Center, got
in his car and drove twenty-six miles
north of the city. He arrived at Mars
Area High School, where more than
two hundred employees of the public-
school district were filing into the au-
ditorium, for a mandatory Stop the
Bleed seminar. They wore puffy coats
and snow boots, and carried Starbucks
cups and thermoses that were still warm.
Neal, who is thirty-eight, is tall and
lean, with a resonant voice. People call
him Macky. He has his own laboratory,
which recently received a grant partly
funded by the Department of Defense
to study treatments for types of bleed-
ing that don’t respond to compression,
such as certain belly wounds. One night,
when I joined his family for dinner, he
told me, “My whole focus is blood.”
He stood at the front of the audi-
torium with Raquel Forsythe, another
U.P.M.C. trauma surgeon, who wore a
voluminous red scarf and had her hair
in a high bun. They used a laptop to
project a presentation onto a screen.
One slide read, “Why do I need this
training?” The answers included “mass
shootings,” “motor-vehicle crashes,”
“home injuries,” and “bombings.”
The stabbings at Franklin Regional
Senior High had occurred in the wake
of other horrific attacks in the Pitts-
burgh area, including shootings at an
L.A. Fitness franchise and a psychiat-
ric clinic. The city’s trauma specialists
reviewed these tragedies, but, Neal told
me, they often ended a case analysis
“feeling a bit empty.” No matter how
nimble first responders are, Neal is
prone to say, “I can’t do anything if the
patient’s dead.”
In October, 2015, the American Col-
lege of Surgeons launched a national
Stop the Bleed campaign. The White
House backed it. President Barack
Obama declared that national disaster
preparedness was a “shared responsi-
bility” between citizens and the gov-
ernment, and Vice-President Joe Biden
described Stop the Bleed as a “call to
action” for anyone “in a position to
help.” Cities at high risk for gun vio-
lence, including St. Louis and Balti-
more, welcomed the program. Laurie
Punch, a trauma surgeon and a leader
of St. Louis’s Stop the Bleed efforts,
has said that trainers “want people to
discover that they’re not just victims—
that they can actually save a life.”
The Orlando Fire Department was • •
modernizing its first-responder proto-
col when, in June, 2016, a gunman shot
up the Pulse night club, killing for- out the region, with a special emphasis a group of Cranberry Township para-
ty-nine people and injuring fifty-three. on training law-enforcement officers. medics and U.P.M.C. flight nurses. The
Trauma specialists based at George U.P.M.C. announced that it would do- team also included a more unusual par-
Washington University Hospital, in nate more than a million dollars to pro- ticipant: Neal’s nine-year-old son, Cam-
Washington, D.C., found that four of vide such supplies as tourniquets and eron, who often helps his father teach
the victims might have survived if they hemostatic gauze to every public school, workshops. He was standing with the
had received “basic E.M.S. care” within and to put “a tourniquet on the belt of other volunteers in a red-and-blue
ten minutes and had been transported every law-enforcement officer in west- striped shirt, khaki cargo pants, and
to a trauma hospital within an hour. ern Pennsylvania.” By the start of this glasses. Before Christmas, Cameron’s
(None of those who died had received year, nearly forty thousand people in third-grade teacher had assigned how-
tourniquets or other bleeding-control western Pennsylvania had been trained, to presentations; recommended topics
interventions.) Two days after the Pulse and bleeding-control kits had been included how to bake cookies or make
shooting, the American Medical As- handed out to some five hundred pub- a paper airplane. Although Cameron
sociation voted to adopt a new policy lic schools in the area—more than any- has various areas of expertise—Legos,
aimed at training the general public in where else in the country. kung fu—he chose to demonstrate Stop
bleeding control. Stop the Bleed uses a “ripple” ap- the Bleed.
In Pittsburgh, Andrew Peitzman, proach: volunteers train people, who, The standard presentation contains
U.P.M.C.’s chief of surgery, urged the in turn, train others. At the Mars Area graphic images: an enormous leg gash,
hospital system to embrace Stop the High School seminar, Neal and For- a nearly severed foot. Macky Neal warns
Bleed. Seminars were soon held through- sythe were the volunteers, along with audiences that the photographs may be
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 29

• •
upsetting, and trainees sometimes look
away or leave. The queasiness is under-
standable. Blood is supposed to remain
inside the body, and it can be sicken-
ing to see it released, especially in large
quantities. Blood is slippery and messy,
and it has a strong metallic smell. Under
certain circumstances, it may transmit
disease. In traumatic injuries, blood may
be mixed with body tissue and teeth
and bone. Neal, the son of a Pennsyl-
vania State Police commander, believes
that showing people images of severe
injuries, if done sensitively, can reduce
their unease in a crisis later, just as the
use of dummies in C.P.R. training helps
people overcome the discomfort of per-
forming chest compressions and mouth-
to-mouth resuscitation during a car-
diac arrest.
Primarily, the images are intended
to help attendees identify life-threat-
ening bleeding. Many bystanders’ in-
stinct is to cover up blood. But, as For-
sythe put it, “to stop bleeding you need
to see bleeding.”
Paramedics talk about getting pa-
tients “trauma naked”—moving aside
any clothing and pinpointing the source
of hemorrhage. The loss of a limb is
automatically considered life-threaten-
ing. In other cases, there are warning
30 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
signs: Is blood pooling around the vic-
tim? Is the wound spurting? Are ban-
dages saturated? Bystanders should pay
close attention to a victim who becomes
suddenly irrational or loses conscious-
ness, symptoms that suggest the onset
of hemorrhagic shock. Explaining that
“people can bleed to death in as little
as five to eight minutes,” Forsythe told
the audience, “It often takes E.M.S.
that long to respond.”
The location of a wound dictates
treatment. For an arm or a leg, use a
tourniquet. For a “junctional” injury—
neck, armpit, groin—press against the
wound or pack it with gauze. (Place
the victim on a hard surface, to maxi-
mize pressure.) For a chest, belly, or
head wound, the most helpful inter-
ventions, such as suction or a needle
thoracostomy, require E.M.S. training,
but applying pressure can help a pa-
tient hold on. Skeptics sometimes ask
Neal whether administering emergency
care will traumatize a young person, to
which he responds, “It may be more
traumatic to stand there and watch
someone die.” The National Center for
Disaster Medicine and Public Health
recently received a fema grant to de-
sign a Stop the Bleed-style program
for schools.
Neal’s son climbed onstage, to de-
monstrate how to address a severely
bleeding wound. He knelt over an ob-
ject that resembled a piece of smooth
firewood. It was a training limb the size
of an average male adult’s thigh, with
the spongy consistency of flesh. A
“wound” in the limb went all the way
to the “bone.”
Cameron started by explaining man-
ual pressure. He told the audience
to place one hand on top of the other,
interlocking the fingers for stability.
“You’re gonna push as hard as you can,
shrugging your shoulders,” for at least
ten minutes, he said, or until help ar-
rives. His father added, “This is not ‘one
hand while you’re calling for help on
your phone.’ When it’s your job to hold
pressure, that is exclusively your job.”
The next subject was tourniquets.
When a victim has a potentially fatal
injury to an arm or a leg, Neal and Cam-
eron explained, tourniquets should be
applied right away and should be “high
and tight.” Cinch the tourniquet just
below the armpit or groin, they coun-
selled, and “you will never be wrong.”
Cameron slipped a C-A-T onto the
fake limb. As he cranked the windlass,
Neal asked, “How do we know when
to stop?” Cameron said, “When you
don’t see any more blood coming out.”
Once a tourniquet is on, it must be left
on: only a medical professional should
remove it. (Doctors advise against using
improvised tourniquets—without a
proper windlass, a belt or a tie won’t be
tight enough.)
They moved on to wound packing.
Forsythe told the crowd, “This is the
part that gives some people the wil-
lies.” The hole in the fake limb simu-
lated a gunshot or a stabbing injury.
Cameron poked an index finger into
it and said, “As you can see, it’s really
deep.” He steadily thumbed length
after length of gauze into the hole, and
said, “You’re gonna stuff it in.” The au-
dience laughed.
The wound held several feet of
gauze. When no more fit, Cameron
balled up the remaining material and
used it to apply pressure on top. His
father explained that, beneath the skin,
a wound could be surprisingly large—
it was important to “get gauze down
in there, to occupy that space.” Pack-
ing a wound added pressure that im-
peded blood flow, and the kaolin in the ter, which can be used as a makeshift importance of maintaining situational
gauze encouraged clotting. In a mass­ca­ toilet. Shaking his head, he said, “Times awareness: don’t walk around wearing
sualty incident, using tourniquets and have changed.” earbuds or staring at a phone. At offices
packing wounds could free up first re­ and places of worship, it’s essential to
sponders to move on to other patients. rad Orsini, one of the F.B.I. agents have worked out an escape plan, and to
The audience had questions. Which
should be used first with an extremity
B who worked the Franklin Regional
case, retired in December, 2016. The
practice it regularly. To smash open a
window, he advises trainees, strike the
wound, a tourniquet or wound pack­ Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh corners, not the center. He teaches Run,
ing? A tourniquet. What if the patient hired him right away, as its first direc­ Hide, Fight—the protocol that has be­
fights you? Calmly but firmly explain tor of community security. Violence come a dreadful necessity as mass shoot­
what you’re doing, and acknowledge affecting the Jewish community had ings have proliferated.
that the tourniquet may be painful. For­ “become increasingly common around One morning in January, I sat in on
sythe noted, “Tourniquets hurt—a lot.” the world,” the group’s C.E.O., Jeffrey security training at a Pittsburgh­area or­
(Paramedics typically give victims pain Finkelstein, said at the time. ganization. The door was open; I had
medication.) What if you don’t have Orsini spent twenty­eight years in walked right in. In a conference room,
any hemostatic gauze? “If I needed to, the F.B.I.; during part of that time, he employees were gathering around freshly
right now, I could take off my scarf or was a crisis manager. His new job entails delivered pizzas. Orsini, who is tall and
my jacket and use that,” she said. conducting security assessments of the bald, with a strong Pennsylvania accent,
For the second half of the training, federation’s seventy or so buildings and told them, “Our worst nightmare is some­
everyone trooped to the cafeteria and training the fifty thousand members of body walking in here with a semi­auto­
broke into groups. Each table held a the local Jewish community in how to matic rifle and high­powered rounds.”
fake limb and a Stop the Bleed kit. stay safe during an Intentional Mass Ca­ On a large screen, he cued up secu­
The basic kit, which is sold online by sualty Event. Orsini and the federation rity footage from January 6, 2017, of the
the American College of Surgeons, have also begun providing free training baggage­claim area of the Fort Lauder­
costs sixty­nine dollars. It contains a at mosques, through the Muslim Asso­ dale airport. As travellers wheeled their
C­A­T, a compression bandage, pro­ ciation of Greater Pittsburgh. luggage past carrousels, a young man
tective gloves, hemostatic gauze, and At Orsini’s workshops, he stresses the reached into his waistband, removed a
a Sharpie, for writing “tourniquet,”
and the time it was put on, in a highly
visible location, such as across the pa­
tient’s forehead.
Neal and his son claimed a table
near the cafeteria’s plate­glass windows,
which overlooked a parking lot white
with ice. Their students included a
track­and­field coach, two custodians,
an eighth­grade English teacher, a fifth­
grade math teacher, and various ad­
ministrators. One of the administra­
tors watched the math teacher stuff
gauze into the training limb, and said
to Neal, “I mean, I understand that we
need to stop the bleeding, but if you
use your T­shirt to pack a wound—
that’s not sterile!”
“You’re not gonna introduce a life­
threatening infection,” Neal told her.
“We can take care of that at the hos­
pital, with antibiotics.” He added, “I
don’t mean to be blunt, but let me worry
about that problem.”
Dorothea Lange, Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, silver print, 1940, printed circa 1966. Estimate $10,000 to $15,000.
As everyone took a turn with the
fake limb, the track coach, who had Classic & Contemporary Photographs
taught at the school for thirty years, April 18
mentioned that, after Sandy Hook, each
Daile Kaplan • dkaplan@swanngalleries.com
of the classrooms at Mars had been is­
sued a five­gallon “lockdown” bucket. Preview: April 13 & April 15 to 17, 12-5; April 18, 10-12
The typical bucket contains gloves, 104 East 25th St, New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM
bandages, Smarties candy, and kitty lit­
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 31
handgun, and began firing at random.
Orsini told the room, “Watch what the
people do. They just stood there, or got
down on the ground.”
The gunman killed five people. The
shooting lasted about a minute. Orsini
asked the group, “In seventy seconds,
how far can you move?”
A woman said, “So you’re saying run.”
“I’m saying run,” he said, adding, “Do
whatever you can to stay alive.”
In early September, 2018, Orsini
taught the same protocol at Tree of Life,
a synagogue in the Squirrel Hill neigh-
borhood of Pittsburgh. The Jewish
Healthcare Foundation had bought a
bleeding-control kit for every synagogue
in town. Tree of Life had installed a kit
near the front door and was upgrading
its security measures. The rabbi, Jeffrey
Myers, did not like carrying his cell
phone on Shabbat, for religious reasons,
but Orsini urged him to reconsider.
n the morning of Saturday, Octo-
O ber 27th, Myers began services at
nine-forty-five. At five minutes to ten,
an armed man entered and started
shooting. Myers instructed congregants
to run, then he, too, fled, as he had
been trained to do. From a second-floor
bathroom, he called 911. The gunfire
grew louder, then softer, then louder
again, giving him a rough sense of the
shooter’s movement through the build-
ing. Myers’s phone call helped first re-
sponders understand what was hap-
pening inside.
When the gunman attempted to
leave the synagogue, two police officers
confronted him, and he shot at them;
one was hit, and the other took shrap-
nel. The shooter then retreated into the
building. For the next hour and a half,
the city’s emergency airwaves squawked
with the communications of police,
medics, and swat operators working
the scene.
“We are pinned down by gunfire.
He’s firing out of the front of the build-
ing with an automatic weapon.”
“Trauma surgeon is with the team.”
“We got four D.O.A.s—checking
on one more.”
“I got one alive!”
“Four additional victims. Eight down,
one rescued.”
“Two rescued from the basement;
three more victims in the basement.”
32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
“Contact! Contact! Shots fired! Shots
fired!”
“We have one operator hit high in
the arm. We have tourniquetted it.”
“He’s carrying an AR-15 and a Glock.”
The emergency-medicine physician
at the scene was Keith Murray, who
serves as the medical director of the
city’s swat force. He leads a team called
the Tactical Emergency Medical Ser-
vice unit, which adheres to the “tactical
combat casualty care” protocol that Frank
Butler recommended in the nineties,
after reviewing the Vietnam War data.
Murray and the paramedics he over-
sees have undergone advanced swat
training, including in the use of fire-
arms. Dressed in body armor, carrying
sidearms, they move with swat oper-
ators to the “far forward” point of conflict,
to provide medical care as soon as pos-
sible. Like combat medics, they risk their
lives in order to save lives.
Tactical medicine, in the civilian
world, is an emerging specialty. Teams
like Murray’s have been trained in hun-
dreds of municipalities, from Los An-
geles to Nantucket. Jim Morrissey, a
former tactical paramedic for the F.B.I.’s
San Francisco swat team, recently
noted that “ ‘active shooter’ incidents
have shifted the way law enforcement
operates.”
Pittsburgh’s first responders use an
app that alerts them to urgent calls.
When an incident occurs, they receive
bulletins on their phones, and they can
notify the group if they plan to respond.
As the Tree of Life emergency unfolded,
Murray and ninety others responded
that they were on the way.
Murray, who is in his early forties,
grew up in Nevada, in a military fam-
ily. He attended medical school in Chi-
cago, where he became interested in
tactical medicine. In 2011, he moved to
Pittsburgh to start the Tactical Emer-
gency Medical Service unit, and he and
Macky Neal became friends. Both have
young children, and wives in the med-
ical field: Neal’s wife, Donielle, runs a
research project on liver cancer; Mur-
ray’s wife, Jennifer, is a surgeon. Until
Neal met Murray, he’d never heard of
a trauma doctor being attached to law
enforcement.
When Rabbi Myers dialled 911, Mur-
ray was getting his son, Aspen, ready
for a birthday party for Neal’s daugh-
ter, Ellie. As Murray raced toward the
scene, Neal, who was heading straight
to the hospital, called him and asked,
“Can this be real?”
Murray and his unit entered Tree of
Life wearing Kevlar helmets and body
armor, alongside swat operators. Mur-
ray carried a Glock in a drop holster on
his left thigh. The pockets on his tac-
tical vest held medical gear, including
hemostatic dressings, chest seals, and
tourniquets.
Inside the synagogue, they found a
woman who had been shot in the upper
right arm, and put a tourniquet on her.
They cleared room after room, making
their way to the third floor, where the
shooter had barricaded himself in a
classroom.
As operators forced their way in-
side, the shooter fired. The point man
went down, with a shot to the head.
Another operator positioned himself
on the ground in front of him, so that
his body armor could block bullets “like
a sponge.”
The other operators couldn’t access
the room because the first two lay in
the doorway. An officer shot rounds
through the wall, but the attacker was
moving. “He’d shoot and move, shoot
and move,” Murray told me. swat op-
erators splashed light on the darkened
space, to get their bearings, and saw dust
falling from the disintegrating ceiling,
like snow.
An officer dragged the point man
out of the doorway and down the stairs,
to a treatment station that Murray had
set up. The team cut away his clothes
and saw that he had been hit in multi-
ple locations, including the left arm and
both legs. As the gunfire continued,
Murray put two tourniquets on the point
man’s arm and a tourniquet on each leg.
The officer who made the rescue had
been shot in the wrist, and a teammate
tourniquetted him.
All eleven of the congregants who
were killed died before Murray’s unit
arrived. Everyone who left Tree of Life
as a patient survived. The shooter, shot
in the wrist and the hip, surrendered.
“Suspect’s talking about ‘all these Jews
need to die,’ ” someone on the emer-
gency airwaves told a dispatcher. Mur-
ray’s team packed the attacker’s hip
wound and put a tourniquet on his arm,
and sent him out alive. 
 SHOUTS & MURMURS
IT’S A FLAT EARTH
BY GARY RICHARDSON
recently watched “Behind the Curve”—
I a new Netflix documentary about
the community of people who believe
that the Earth is flat rather than spher-
ical—with the expectation that I’d sit
back and have a laugh at the expense
of the flat-Earthers. But I was wrong.
I was totally swayed. Here are the four
major arguments that shifted my think-
ing; I have a feeling that they will
change yours as well:
1. Standing on the ground and staring
straight ahead, I can’t see the curve of
the Earth. If our planet were round,
surely the buildings in the distance
would begin to slant, no?
2. The government has proved time
and time again that it is willing to lie
to the American people in order to
keep us docile and ignorant. Why can’t
this be just another ploy by the rich
and powerful to keep us oppressed?
3. In 1998, while on tour, the science
bad boy Bill Nye found himself at
a diner in Chicago’s Uptown neighbor-
hood. He ordered only a black coffee
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
and puffed cigarette after cigarette.
He dropped a sixty-dollar tip on a
dollar-fifty check, flashed the waitress
a smile, and invited her out. She told
“
A BONA FIDE”
MASTERPIECE.
Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal
“
EXHILARATING!
SIT BACK AND ENJOY THE CRAZY RIDE!”
Barbara Schuler, Newsday
JOHN LARROQUETTE IS
“
MAGNIFICENT AND
MIRACULOUS!”
Robert Hofler, The Wrap
him that she had to finish her shift.
Bill looked around at the empty diner
and said, “C’mon. Lock up. Let’s go
downtown.” Completely smitten, she A RAUCOUS ,
“
fell under his spell. Soon they were in
a cab and he was showing her the high
HILARIOUS COMEDY!”
Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
life. She had never experienced such
extravagance.
As the night turned into day, they
found themselves in his penthouse. He
gave her a kind of pleasure that she’d
never known was possible. When she
awoke, several hours later, he was gone.
Off to a new city. A new girl.
My wife returned to me that after-
noon a changed woman. She left me
for good a few days later, saying that
she had been spoiled rotten and my
“broke ass” had nothing to offer her.
She took the kids, the dog, and my
ability to reconcile the world I was
living in.
Certainly, if the Earth were round
and we were governed by the scientific
laws we’ve been taught since childhood,
this menace would not have been able
to torpedo in and reduce my life to
ruins, right?
4. The flight patterns in the Southern
Hemisphere make no sense! Why aren’t
there more direct flights straight from
150 W. 65TH ST. • TELECHARGE.COM • 212.239.6200 • LCT.ORG
Australia to South America? 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 33
 DEPT. OF PUBLIC HEALTH
HOME SMOG
When it comes to air pollution, indoors may be worse than out.
BY NICOLA TWILLEY
ood magazines typically celebrate
F Thanksgiving in mid-July, bronz-
ing turkeys and crimping piecrust four
months in advance. By that time last
year, Marina Vance, an environmental
engineer at the University of Colorado
Boulder, had already prepared two full
Thanksgiving dinners for more than a
dozen people. Vance studies air quality,
and, last June, she was one of two sci-
entists in charge of Homechem, a four-
week orgy of cooking, cleaning, and emis-
sions measurement, which brought sixty
scientists and four and a half million
We spend most of our lives inside, where air quality has received little scrutiny.
34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
dollars’ worth of high-tech instrumen-
tation to a ranch house on the engineer-
ing campus of the University of Texas
at Austin. The two Thanksgiving din-
ners were the climax of the project and
represented what Vance called a “worst-
case scenario.” She suspected that the
Pilgrims’ harvest celebration, as it is ob-
served in twenty-first-century America,
qualified as an airborne toxic event.
The morning of the second simula-
ted Thanksgiving began simply enough,
with the researchers making themselves
breakfast. Vance and three helpers ar-
rived at the house at half past eight. The
kitchen was open plan and modest, with
peeling laminate surfaces and flimsy cab-
inets, but its countertops were crammed
with instruments for monitoring airborne
particles: a condensation-nucleus counter,
a differential-mobility analyzer, and so
on. Wires threaded all around the room,
and stainless-steel hoses led to four trail-
ers outside, which contained equipment
too big to fit in the kitchen.
Andrew Abeleira, a postdoctoral re-
searcher, cracked eight eggs on the edge
of the countertop and whisked them;
Vance chopped tomatoes while heating
oil to fry sausage patties. The banality
of the activities was belied by the pre-
cision with which the team carried them
out: a rigid protocol dictated when each
gas burner could be lit, how hot the fry-
ing pan should be, and at what setting
to toast the bread. The aim was to turn
Thanksgiving into a reproducible, sci-
entifically valid experiment.
Tapping a pair of tongs on the cook-
top, Vance wondered aloud whether it
was nine-twenty yet, the appointed time
for switching on the coffeemaker. “Oh,
shoot, toast!” she exclaimed, popping
two slices of honey-wheat in the toaster.
A minute later, a student volunteer
named Caleb Arata, looking at data on
his laptop, announced a spike in the
presence of so-called volatile organic
compounds. The term describes any car-
bon-based chemical that evaporates at
room temperature, and it encompasses
a huge variety of molecules, emitted
both by plants and by human activities.
VOCs are responsible for much of what
we smell—toast, flowers, gasoline—al-
though some have no odor at all. And,
while certain of them, such as benzene
and toluene, are known to be harmful
when inhaled, for the most part their
health effects have not been studied.
“The scariest thing in this house is
probably the toaster,” Erin Katz, an-
other student volunteer, said. “I just had
no idea that toasters emitted so many
particles.”
After breakfast, the serious work
began: peeling sweet potatoes, trimming
Brussels sprouts, simmering turkey parts
to make a stock for gravy. Culinary am-
bition had not been sacrificed to scien-
tific rigor: Arata had spatchcocked the
turkey and dry-brined it for two days;
Abeleira tossed the sprouts in balsamic
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL SAVAGE
dressing; Katz downloaded a recipe for
sweet-potato casserole from a foodie
Web site. The oven stayed on for five
hours straight, the burners in constant
rotation. Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” played
from a Bluetooth speaker, and the four
cooks began to sweat, the air-condition-
ing system unequal to all the activity.
While stirring, scrubbing, and bast-
ing, the cooks darted back and forth be-
tween the kitchen and their laptops, in
the dining area. Every action, however
seemingly inconsequential, had to be
logged: opening the oven door, chang-
ing the trash bag, even a bout of sneez-
ing. At 1:37 P.M., the team briefly de-
bated whether to set fire to an oven mitt;
one had accidentally caught light at that
time during the previous Thanksgiving,
and, as responsible scientists, they were
keen to insure that the data sets from
the two days matched. Eventually, they
decided that the integrity of their exper-
iment wouldn’t be fatally compromised
if they failed to sacrifice a second mitt.
The conversation turned into a kind
of play-by-play pollution commentary.
When Vance peeled an orange for the
cranberry sauce, Arata noted that its fra-
grance—that is, its monoterpene VOCs—
had made the readings on his instrument
soar. Abeleira, checking levels of nitric
oxide and carbon dioxide during a brief
lull before the turkey went in, observed,
“They’re orders of magnitude higher than
outdoors.” It was the same for fine par-
ticulate matter—particles small enough
to reach deep inside our lungs. By around
eleven o’clock, the fine-particulate con-
centration had risen to such a level that,
if the house were a city, it would have
been officially labelled polluted. Concen-
trations peaked when the stuffing, and,
later, the pies, came out of the oven. And,
for nearly an hour, fine particulate mat-
ter was within the range that the Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency’s Air Qual-
ity Index defines as “very unhealthy.” If
outdoor air reaches these levels, a public
alert is triggered, warning that even
healthy individuals are at risk of serious
damage to the heart and lungs.
These days, a “very unhealthy” desig-
nation for outdoor air is rare. After the
passage of the Clean Air Act, in 1963,
and the creation of the Environmental
Protection Agency, in 1970, the chemi-
cal composition of outdoor air became
federally regulated, with penalties for
polluters. Since the seventies, emissions
of many harmful gases, such as carbon
monoxide and sulfur dioxide, have fallen
by half, and particulate counts by eighty
per cent. But this victory may be less
significant than we assume, because, in
America, we spend, on average, ninety
per cent of our lives indoors. (By way of
comparison, this means that humans
spend more time inside buildings than
sperm whales spend fully submerged in
the ocean.) The statistic, from an E.P.A.-
funded study conducted in 2001, might
seem implausible, but it probably under-
states the case. More recent data, from
the U.K., show that, on average, Britons
are outside for just five per cent of the
day—an hour and twelve minutes.
Unlike outdoor air, the air inside our
homes is largely unregulated and has
been all but ignored by researchers. We
know barely the first thing about the
atmospheres in which we spend the vast
majority of our time. Homechem—
House Observations of Microbial and
Environmental Chemistry—was the
world’s first large-scale collaborative in-
vestigation into the chemistry of indoor
air. Thoroughly dissecting the data ac-
cumulated will take a couple of years,
at least, and, even when the findings
are published, no one will be able to
state their public-health implications
with certainty; Homechem was de-
signed to explore what the chemistry
of indoor air is, not what it’s doing to
us. But the experiment’s early results
are just now emerging, and they seem
to show that the combined emissions
of humans and their daily activities—
cooking, cleaning, metabolizing—are
more interesting, and potentially more
lethal, than anyone had imagined.
n September, 1776, Congress sent
I Benjamin Franklin and John Adams
on an ultimately fruitless mission to
Staten Island to negotiate peace with
the British. One night, the two shared
a room at a country inn, an adventure
recorded in Adams’s diary. Adams, “who
was an invalid and afraid of the Air in
the night,” shut the window. To which
Franklin responded, briskly, “The Air
within this Chamber will soon be, and
indeed is now worse than that without
Doors: come! open the Window and
come to bed, and I will convince you.”
According to the architectural his-
torian David Gissen, debates about the
relative dangers of household emissions
versus urban emissions, and indoor air
versus outdoor air, have swung back and
forth between Franklin’s and Adams’s
positions ever since, depending on each
era’s prevailing beliefs and concerns. In
1867, inspired by the miasmatic tene-
ments of America’s burgeoning cities,
the engineer Lewis W. Leeds delivered
a series of lectures under the title “Man’s
Own Breath Is His Greatest Enemy.”
He warned the unwary that “it is not
in the external atmosphere that we must
look for the greatest impurities, but
it is in our own houses that the blight-
ing, withering curse of foul air is to be
found.” Half a century later, by contrast,
the modernist architect Le Corbusier
saw the indoor environments he de-
signed as beneficent bubbles of man-
made weather, shielded from the smog-
choked city outside.
In mid-century America, cities such
as Los Angeles and New York were re-
peatedly shrouded in thick brown fog—
sometimes so lung-burningly toxic that
it was mistaken for a chemical-weapon
attack by a foreign power—and air pol-
lution became an urgent issue. Legisla-
tion to curb it began appearing in the
U.S. and other countries in the nine-
teen-fifties. After the passage of the Clean
Air Act, government research dollars
flowed to scientists looking to under-
stand and to mitigate the sources and
the health effects of air pollution. But
there was still almost no funding avail-
able for research into indoor air. Charles
Weschler became one of just a few sci-
entists in the field when he went to work
for Bell Labs, in 1975, soon after com-
pleting a Ph.D. in chemistry. The com-
pany had noticed that the equipment in
its telephone switching offices was fail-
ing faster than expected; it turned out
that wire relays were being eaten away
by an acidic, invisible indoor smog.
Weschler told me that the little indoor-air
research that was being done at the time
was mostly geared not toward protect-
ing people but toward preserving things.
In the eighties, amid emerging con-
cerns about “sick-building syndrome,”
a nonspecific malaise reported by occu-
pants of the era’s new, more tightly sealed
buildings, the E.P.A. started measuring
indoor concentrations of known toxins,
such as formaldehyde and asbestos, and
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 35

“Will you still love me when I’ve metamorphosed
into a hideous winged insect?”
• •
assessing where they came from (paint,
floor coverings, upholstery, particle-
board). Researchers found that concen-
trations of these compounds were con-
sistently higher indoors than they were
outdoors, and some states began regu-
lating consumer products containing
the contaminants.
But it wasn’t until the aftermath of
9/11, with its heightened fear of airborne
biological attacks, that indoor-air research
finally attracted some funding—from the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, one of the
largest private grant-making nonprofits
in the U.S. (Among its many grantees is
a podcast I produce.) Through a program
managed by Paula Olsiewski, a biochem-
ist by training, Sloan began supporting
research into H.V.A.C. filtration systems.
Olsiewski identified a major difficulty in
detecting traces of biological weapons: a
complete lack of knowledge about the
typical, baseline conditions inside build-
ings. As she put it to me, “If the biolog-
ical threat was a needle in the haystack,
what’s in the haystack? What microbes
are in the air, and in the rooms, and on
the surfaces?”She launched a multimillion-
dollar program to investigate the micro-
biology and, later, the chemistry of our
built environment.
36 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
Because there were so few special-
ists in the area, she decided to use Sloan
money to lure eminent atmospheric
chemists indoors. Delphine Farmer, a
chemist based at Colorado State Uni-
versity, told me that, when she was in-
vited to attend a workshop on indoor
air chemistry in France, in 2015, her ini-
tial reaction was “You know, sure, I’ll
take a free trip to France.” Farmer had
spent the bulk of her career developing
ways to accurately measure extremely
tiny amounts of very complicated air-
borne molecules. She knew little about
indoor air, but assumed that it wouldn’t
be of interest. Outdoors, primary emis-
sions—whether from tailpipes, facto-
ries, or fertilizer-laden farms—undergo
near-constant transformation into new
combinations of chemicals through a
cascading sequence of reactions. Indoor
atmospheres were widely assumed to be
far more static. But Farmer was capti-
vated by the presentations that she heard.
“I realized that we know nothing about
indoors from a chemistry perspective,”
she told me. “It was very clear that it
was an area that was ripe for study, and
that the indoor community just hadn’t
had the resources we have in outdoor
atmospheric chemistry.”
Olsiewski asked Farmer to lead an
initiative to develop new instruments
and databases for the study of indoor
atmospheric chemistry. She recruited
Marina Vance around the same time,
hoping that the pair could build net-
works among researchers in the field.
Vance and Farmer decided that the best
way to achieve both goals was to initi-
ate a large field study. Collaborative field
studies are common in outdoor atmo-
spheric research, because capturing the
diversity and the complexity of the chem-
istry involved requires more instruments
and more varied expertise than one lab
can muster, but nothing of this scale had
ever been undertaken indoors. Farmer
and Vance gathered twenty research
groups from thirteen universities, and
Homechem was launched.
t the University of Texas at Aus-
A tin, the UTest House sits in a cor-
ner of the J. J. Pickle Research Campus,
a scrubby four-hundred-and-seventy-
five-acre plot of land dotted with radio
antennae, a prototype nuclear reactor,
and one of the nation’s largest nonmil-
itary computers. Atila Novoselac, the
building engineer who runs the house,
drove me there, pointing out the local
landmarks before parking next to a jum-
ble of weathered concrete chunks, which
a structural-engineering lab was using
to study the aging of pillars that sup-
port bridges and highway overpasses.
The house, a twelve-hundred-square-
foot prefab that cost sixty thousand dol-
lars, has been on the campus since 2006.
Novoselac signed the contract to buy it
on a Monday, and the house, delivered
in two halves that were then glued to-
gether, was ready by the end of the week,
complete with kitchen cabinets, bath-
room fixtures, vinyl flooring, and cur-
tains so ugly that he removed them im-
mediately. In the years since then, for
various research projects, Novoselac and
his colleagues have cut the house open,
studded it with thermal sensors, and
pumped it full of gases. Novoselac says
that although it is fully operational as a
house, he doesn’t think of it as one: “It’s
a tool, a piece of equipment—the same
as a screwdriver or a sensor.” Nonethe-
less, over the years it has been decorated
with a doormat that says “hello” in loop-
ing cursive, a wobbly floor lamp, and a
selection of scientific posters detailing
research that has been conducted there.
By the time that Delphine Farmer
and Marina Vance were looking for a
site to host Homechem, the UTest House
was so dilapidated that Novoselac was
contemplating scrapping it. But, as one
of only a handful of full-scale test homes
in the country, it was a perfect place to
conduct a full-scale simulation of human
inhabitation. Vance and Farmer devised
a schedule that would organize real-life
activities—cooking, cleaning, and sim-
ply hanging out—into a series of con-
trolled, sequential experiments.
When I visited the house, two doc-
toral students, Catherine Masoud and
Kanan Patel, made us all stir-fry for lunch,
while Novoselac used an ultrafine-par-
ticle counter to monitor the air quality.
The instrument, which looked like a
clunky blue plastic car phone from the
eighties, complete with telescoping
aerial, recorded a background level of
around two thousand particles per cen-
timetre cubed before the cooking began.
Patel pulled up the project’s stir-fry
spreadsheet on her laptop, turned the
right-front burner to its highest setting,
and set rice to boil in a small pot. Ma-
soud warmed up a couple of tablespoons
of oil in a wok, dumped in two bags of
frozen vegetables, and stirred them over
a high heat. As the broccoli and the sugar
snap peas started to caramelize, the smell
from the kitchen made my stomach rum-
ble, and Novoselac’s particle counter
emitted an accelerating series of beeps.
“That sound means we’ve hit the limit
of the instrument,” he said. “Above a
hundred thousand, it’s unreliable.” As
the beeps blurred together into a shrill
lament, Masoud doused the vegetables
in three-quarters of a cup of Baby Ray’s
Sweet Teriyaki Sauce and a tablespoon
of sriracha, and lunch was served.
Stir-fries were a staple of Homechem
life, because Vance and Farmer had de-
termined that dishes cooked at high
heat would produce the most interest-
ing organic aerosols. When Vance first
arrived in Austin, she went to a grocery
store, picked out four brands of teriyaki
sauce, made four stir-fries, and served
them to the students. “We were, like,
Which one do you want to eat for a
month?” she told me. “There was no
science in the choosing of the stir-fry
sauce—we just wanted it to taste good.”
In the early phases of Homechem,
the researchers ran into difficulties. Their
instruments, designed for outdoor atmo-
spheric measurement, had to be recali-
brated to deal with the much higher con-
centrations that build up indoors. A
bigger obstacle was controlling for the
irreducible complexity of human behav-
ior. On the first full day of the study, stu-
dent volunteers mopped the floor with
Pine-Sol five times in a row, airing out
the house completely between each clean-
ing. The goal was to create an emissions
inventory for mopping: a consistent sig-
nature that would allow the team mem-
bers to isolate its chemical contribution
from the noise of everyday activity. Un-
fortunately, the initial data revealed that
some students mopped less thoroughly
than others, giving rise to noticeably un-
even emissions of organic chemicals. As
a result, the most diligent mopper—sub-
sequently christened Mr. Clean—was
appointed mop boss, in charge of en-
forcing quality control for the month.
Once the baseline emissions for things
like cooking a stir-fry or an English
breakfast and mopping with Pine-Sol or
a bleach-based cleaner had been estab-
lished, the scientists began to layer ac-
tivities together. A group of volunteers
would spend the day in the house, cook-
ing breakfast and lunch, checking their
e-mail, cleaning up, making dinner, and
running the dishwasher, in order to see
whether, say, the emissions from frying
vegetables in teriyaki sauce would react
with the bleach fumes from mopping
the kitchen floor afterward. Farmer told
me that, based on her preliminary data,
it seems as though they did, producing
temporary spikes of chloramines, a class
of chemicals that are known to inflame
airway membranes. Another product of
the marriage of bleach-based mopping
and gas-burner ignition is nitryl chlo-
ride, a compound that is known to at-
mospheric chemists for its role in coastal
smog formation. No one had expected
to find it indoors.
Cooking a stir-fry on a gas burner
rather than on an electric hot plate pro-
duced much higher emissions over all,
primarily because of the additional prod-
ucts of combustion. Meanwhile, the two
Thanksgiving experiments provided some
hints that cooking meat produces differ-
ent atmospheric chemistry than cook-
ing vegetarian dishes does: one group
has been analyzing ammonia concentra-
tions that they believe came from the
breakdown of proteins in the turkey. In-
deed, Atila Novoselac told me that, al-
though Homechem was not designed
to study this, it’s entirely possible that
different dietary regimes or national cui-
sines could result in quite different emis-
sions inventories. Spices have varying
levels of reactivity to ozone, a key ingre-
dient in smog formation; for example,
star anise, which contains high levels of
volatile sesquiterpenes, might act as an
ozone sink, reducing its levels and im-
proving air quality.
Cooking and cleaning are thought to
be the main activities through which hu-
mans add chemicals to the indoor envi-
ronment, but we also create emissions
by simply existing. Exhaled breath con-
tains carbon dioxide and also a host of
organic chemicals such as isoprene, ac-
etone, and acetaldehyde. When I asked,
Caleb Arata told me that his gauges are
capable of registering the gaseous signa-
ture of a fart, though he discreetly de-
clined to confirm or deny the presence
of flatulence in the data. And squalene,
a primary ingredient in skin oil, is ex-
tremely reactive with ozone—a fact that
may explain why air travel, which ex-
poses us to the higher ozone concentra-
tions of the upper atmosphere, often
leaves us feeling dirty.
On top of these involuntary emis-
sions, many humans also intentionally
apply a cocktail of chemical compounds
in the form of personal-care products.
Three days of the Homechem experi-
ment were dedicated to studying their
effects: on the first day, student volun-
teers were asked to use only minimal
skin and hair care; on the second, they
were allowed to follow their normal
routine; and, on the third, they were en-
couraged to go to town with scented
body sprays, lotions, mousses, and mists.
This data set has yet to be analyzed, but
earlier research hints at its potential.
Novoselac and another Homechem
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 37
researcher, Richard Corsi, recently col-
laborated on a separate study of nearby
high schools and found that the highest
emission levels were always of the same
two chemicals, found in exactly the same
ratio at every location. After a little bit
of detective work, they identified the cul-
prit: Axe body sprays, which the teen-
age boys of Texas apparently apply lav-
ishly in classrooms between periods.
By the end of a month of stir-fries,
mopping, and antiperspirant, even re-
searchers who’d doubted whether indoor
air would be interesting had come around.
One converted skeptic, Philip Stevens,
an atmospheric chemist at Indiana Uni-
versity Bloomington, had contributed an
instrument designed to measure the hy-
droxyl radical, a compound so reactive
that it is known as “the Pac-Man of the
atmosphere.” Hydroxyl radicals drive
much of outdoor atmospheric chemis-
try, and are a mixed blessing from a health
point of view: they break down VOCs
but also react with nitrogen oxides to
produce ozone, making smog formation
more likely. Stevens was surprised when
his readings registered their presence,
because their production requires sun-
light, and a house’s walls and windows
block much of the sun’s energy. Like
many researchers, he’d assumed that in-
door air, lacking sunlight and, thus, hy-
droxyl radicals, wouldn’t yield the kind
of rapid photochemical reactions that
atmospheric scientists like to study. But
his results, supported by a colleague’s
measurements of light intensity inside
the house, have convinced him that af-
ternoon sunshine filtered through a win-
dow, combined with emissions from a
gas stove, is sufficient to produce chem-
ical reactions “similar to what you might
find outside on a smoggy urban day.”
ozens of the chemicals measured
D by the Homechem team are known
to be harmful, and, as every scientist I
spoke with mentioned, we spend almost
all our time indoors, breathing them.
Nonetheless, it is outdoor air-pollution
levels that have been firmly linked to
public health. In 2016, the World Health
Organization attributed 4.2 million pre-
mature deaths to outdoor air. The as-
sociations between outdoor air pollu-
tion and heart disease, lung disease, and
cancer have been well documented; more
recent research has suggested connec-
38 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
tions to low birth weight, diabetes, and
even cognitive damage.
“So there is a big question here,” Ma-
rina Vance pointed out. “If all these stud-
ies have found an association between
outdoor air pollution and a decrease in
life quality and life expectancy, but we’re
not outside, how does that relationship
still hold?”
One possibility is that the brief mo-
ments we spend outdoors have an out-
sized impact on our health. Another
consideration is that outdoor pollutants
can and do come inside. But one Home-
chem researcher, Allen Goldstein, re-
cently co-authored a paper that suggests
a fascinating inversion. The dominant
source of VOCs in Los Angeles is now
emissions from consumer products, in-
cluding toiletries and cleaning fluids. In
other words, vehicle emissions have been
controlled to such an extent that, even
in the most car-clogged city in Amer-
ica, indoor air that has leaked outdoors
may create more smog than transpor-
tation does.
The scientists involved in Homechem
wonder about these questions, though
they are cautious about speculating too
freely. So far, Delphine Farmer told me,
it’s safe to say that levels of many tradi-
tional air pollutants are lower indoors—
until you do something like cook a stir-
fry, at which point some of those levels
will briefly reach peaks that are ten times
the maximum observed outdoors. Other,
more complex organic molecules seem
to always be more plentiful indoors.
There’s also evidence that outdoor par-
ticles can get coated with gases when
they come indoors, which could poten-
tially provide a different pathway for
them to penetrate your lungs.
Simply measuring concentrations of
a chemical in a test house is not enough
to infer potential exposure, however.
John Balmes, a pulmonologist at the
Human Exposure Laboratory, at the
University of California, San Francisco,
told me, “Going from chemistry to ep-
idemiology is a big leap.” To gauge the
varying levels of each compound that
the Thanksgiving cooks and their guests
likely inhaled would require precise read-
ings at various heights in various rooms,
correlated with activity patterns. Still,
when I told Balmes that the carbon-
dioxide reading for Thanksgiving had
peaked at four thousand parts per mil-
lion, he was taken aback. “Wow,” he said.
“Those kinds of levels will lower your
cognitive functioning, at least in the
short term. Whether it has any long-
term effect, we don’t know.”
Similarly, when I told Francesca
Dominici, a biostatistician at Harvard,
that the Thanksgiving levels of fine par-
ticulate matter had reached two hun-
dred and eighty-five micrograms per
cubic metre, she responded with shock.
“Even short-term increases of just ten
micrograms per cubic metre from one
day to the next will increase hospital
admission rates and mortality in the
over sixty-fives,” she said.
Katherine Hammond, an exposure
scientist at U.C. Berkeley’s School of
Public Health, was particularly struck
by the holiday’s high levels of ultrafine
particles. As little as a nanometre in di-
ameter, ultrafines are small enough to
pass through into the bloodstream with
ease. “They’re tiny, but we think they
may have a disproportionate health
effect,” she told me. Some of her previ-
ous research has scrutinized emissions
from self-cleaning ovens. “When the
ultrafines soared, you could feel it in
your eyes and in your throat,” she said.
“There are even some theories that they
can go from your nose directly into your
brain, following the olfactory nerve.” All
the same, she was careful not to sound
alarmist. “The point of an experiment
like this is that you start raising ques-
tions and figuring out how to go fur-
ther into the detail,” she said. “But you
can’t take this data and convert it to
a health risk.” Right now, as Balmes
pointed out, scientists don’t even know
whether all particles of the same size
are created equal. “Is inhaling particles
from diesel engines worse than inhal-
ing particles from fried foods?” he said.
“The research hasn’t been done.”
None of the Homechem researchers
consider the health risks of cooking emis-
sions to be worrying enough to forgo
the benefits of a delicious, home-cooked
meal, and they agree that we’re still a
long way from being able to predict ex-
actly which combinations of activities
and environmental conditions might cre-
ate harmful indoor air. As the pace of
indoor research increases, however, we
will soon know enough to do so—at
which point, the question will be how
to make indoor air healthier. Many of
the primary sources of indoor emissions
are resistant to regulation. A move to
outlaw toasters or bleach-based floor
cleaners seems unlikely to succeed. “You
can even light a candle at home!” Ma-
rina Vance pointed out, in a tone that
expressed her horror at the atmospheric
implications of doing such a thing.
On the other hand, once the main
risk factors are identified, pollution may
prove easier to curb indoors than out,
precisely because the space is more
confined. It’s taken nearly fifty years for
the United States to successfully reduce
outdoor ozone and particulate concen-
trations, whereas much of the particu-
late matter from cooking can probably
be removed by measures as simple as in-
vesting in a decent exhaust hood and re-
placing its filter frequently. John Balmes
already has data suggesting that running
an exhaust hood while cooking correlates
with a steep reduction both in house-
hold particulate levels and in childhood
asthma attacks. Benjamin Franklin’s ad-
vice to open the window is worth fol-
lowing, too, particularly when mopping
or making toast—provided, of course,
that the air outside is clean.

T he Thanksgiving guests began to

arrive at 3:35 P.M., exactly as they
had done the previous week. They
brought with them a whoosh of dust
particles from the outside, and also their
own personal emissions—lactic acid
from sweat, squalene from skin oil, and
carbon dioxide. The diners, all Home-
chem researchers, had been excluded
from the house while the cooking was
happening, because their presence would
have skewed the data—scientists can
calculate how many people have en-
tered a space from the rise in carbon-
dioxide levels alone. Crammed around
a couple of folding tables, some eating
from bowls, owing to a shortage of plates,
the group offered toasts to the cooks
and to the experiment.
Whatever the air quality, the atmo-
sphere was lively. “That’s obviously a
combination of grad students and free
food,” Caleb Arata told me. “But then,
also, you know, it wasn’t loaded with
family dynamics.” Instead of awkward
discussions about children, careers, and
politics, conversation revolved around
such matters as the likely source of the
limonene that one of the instruments
• •
had registered at lunchtime. (It had
been produced by a spritz of lime added
to guacamole.)
One of the scientists, Lea Hilde-
brandt Ruiz, said that conditions in-
side the house had briefly exceeded
those of the world’s most polluted city—
“and I can say that,” she added, “be-
cause I have a monitoring program in
New Delhi.” According to the World
Health Organization, the Indian cap-
ital’s air quality is the worst of any major
city. During the dirtier winter months,
levels of fine particulate matter in the
air there typically hover at around two
hundred and twenty-five micrograms
per cubic metre. That’s still significantly
lower than the two hundred and eighty
micrograms per cubic metre that was
reached during the final, frenzied hour
of cooking. Everyone had expected
Thanksgiving to be bad, but no one
had expected it to be that bad—a find-
ing that was alarming but also, from a
research point of view, thrilling.
Curiously, although an understand-
ing of indoor air is still in its infancy,
scientifically speaking, it’s something
that we’re all equipped to detect. “Your
nose is a pretty good chemical instru-
ment,” Farmer told me, giving the ex-
ample of cutting onions. Slicing through
an onion’s cell walls causes them to emit
syn-propanethial-S-oxide, a VOC re-
sponsible for a temporary but power-
ful shift in the indoor atmosphere—
and for the resulting tears. But our noses
can lead us astray, too. Vance pointed
out that food smells most delicious when
it is browning, in a process called the
Maillard reaction, yet the compounds
emitted as steaks sear and bread toasts
include brown carbon (a form of par-
ticulate matter) and VOCs from in-
complete combustion. “I used to think,
Wow, this house smells so good—it
smells like Thanksgiving,” Caleb Arata
said. But, this past November, he told
me, as he prepared his third turkey din-
ner of the year, he thought instead, “This
house smells so good—I wonder what
I’m inhaling?” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 39

Why do we know so little about how to stop taking psychiatric drugs?
aura Delano recognized that she
L was “excellent at everything, but
it didn’t mean anything,” her doc-
tor wrote. She grew up in Greenwich,
Connecticut, one of the wealthiest com-
munities in the country. Her father is re-
lated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and
her mother was introduced to society at
a débutante ball at the Waldorf-Astoria.
In eighth grade, in 1996, Laura was the
class president—she ran on a platform
of planting daffodils on the school’s
grounds—and among the best squash
players in the country. She was one of
those rare proportional adolescents with
a thriving social life. But she doubted
whether she had a “real self underneath.”
The oldest of three sisters, Laura felt
as if she were living two separate lives,
one onstage and the other in the audi-
ence, reacting to an exhausting perfor-
mance. She snapped at her mother, locked
herself in her room, and talked about
wanting to die. She had friends at school
who cut themselves with razors, and she
was intrigued by what seemed to be an
act of defiance. She tried it, too. “The pain
felt so real and raw and mine,” she said.
Her parents took her to a family ther-
apist, who, after several months, referred
her to a psychiatrist. Laura was given a
diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and pre-
scribed Depakote, a mood stabilizer that,
the previous year, had been approved for
treating bipolar patients. She hid the pills
in a jewelry box in her closet and then
washed them down the sink.
She hoped that she might discover
a more authentic version of herself at
Harvard, where she arrived as a fresh-
man in 2001. Her roommate, Bree Tse,
said, “Laura just blew me away—she was
this golden girl, so vibrant and attentive
and in tune with people.” On her first
day at Harvard, Laura wandered the
campus and thought, This is everything
40 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
BITTER PILL
BY RACHEL AVIV
I’ve been working for. I’m finally here.
She tried out new identities. Some-
times she fashioned herself as a “fun,
down-to-earth girl” who drank until early
morning with boys who considered her
chill. Other times, she was a postmod-
ern nihilist, deconstructing the arbitrari-
ness of language. “I remember talking
with her a lot about surfaces,” a class-
mate, Patrick Bensen, said. “That was a
recurring theme: whether the surface of
people can ever harmonize with what’s
inside their minds.”
During her winter break, she spent
a week in Manhattan preparing for two
débutante balls, at the Waldorf-Astoria
and at the Plaza Hotel. She went to a
bridal store and chose a floor-length
strapless white gown and white satin
gloves that reached above her elbows.
Her sister Nina said that, at the Wal-
dorf ball, “I remember thinking Laura
was so much a part of it.”
Yet, in pictures before the second ball,
Laura is slightly hunched over, as if try-
ing to minimize the breadth of her mus-
cular shoulders. She wears a thin pearl
necklace, and her blond hair is coiled in
an ornate bun. Her smile is pinched and
dutiful. That night, before walking on-
stage, Laura did cocaine and chugged
champagne. By the end of the party, she
was sobbing so hard that the escort she’d
invited to the ball had to put her in a
cab. In the morning, she told her family
that she didn’t want to be alive. She took
literally the symbolism of the parties,
meant to mark her entry into adulthood.
“I didn’t know who I was,” she said. “I
was trapped in the life of a stranger.”
efore Laura returned to Harvard,
B her doctor in Greenwich referred
her to a psychiatrist at McLean Hos-
pital, in Belmont, Massachusetts. One
of the oldest hospitals in New England,
McLean has treated a succession of ce-
lebrity patients, including Anne Sexton,
Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Syl-
via Plath, who described it as “the best
mental hospital in the US.” Laura’s psy-
chiatrist had Ivy League degrees, and
she felt grateful to have his attention.
In his notes, he described her as an “en-
gaging, outgoing, and intelligent young
woman,” who “grew up with high ex-
pectations for social conformity.” She
told him, “I lie in my bed for hours at
a time staring at the wall and wishing
so much that I could be ‘normal.’”
The psychiatrist confirmed her early
diagnosis, proposing that she had bipo-
lar II, a less severe form of the disorder.
Laura was relieved to hear the doctor
say that her distress stemmed from an
illness. “It was like being told, It’s not
your fault. You are not lazy. You are not
irresponsible.” After she left the appoint-
ment, she felt joyful. “The psychiatrist
told me who I was in a way that felt
more concrete than I’d ever conceptu-
alized before,” she said. “It was as though
he could read my mind, as though I
didn’t need to explain anything to him,
because he already knew what I was
going to say. I had bipolar disorder. I’d
had it all along.” She called her father,
crying. “I have good news,” she said.
“He’s figured out the problem.”
She began taking twenty milligrams
of Prozac, an antidepressant; when she
still didn’t feel better, her dose was in-
creased to forty milligrams, and then to
sixty. With each raised dose, she felt
thankful to have been heard. “It was a
way for me to mark to the world: this
is how much pain I am in,” she said.
Laura wasn’t sure whether Prozac actu-
ally lifted her mood—roughly a third
of patients who take antidepressants do
not respond to them—but her emotions
felt less urgent and distracting, and her
ORIGINAL IMAGE BY BACHRACH PHOTOGRAPHY

Diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teen-ager, Laura Delano was prescribed nineteen medications in fourteen years.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LEVI MANDEL THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 41

• •
classwork improved. “I remember her
carrying around this plastic pillbox with
compartments for all the days of the
week,” a friend from high school said.
“It was part of this mysterious world of
her psychiatric state.”
At parties, she flirted intently, but
by the time she and a partner were to­
gether in bed, she said, “I’d kind of get
hit with this realization that I was phys­
ically disconnected. And then I’d feel
taken advantage of, and I would kind
of flip out and start crying, and the guy
would be, like, ‘What the heck is going
on?’” Most antidepressants dampen sex­
uality—up to seventy per cent of peo­
ple who take the medications report
this response—but Laura was ashamed
to talk about the problem with her psy­
chiatrist. “I assumed he’d see sexuality
as a luxury,” she said. “He’d be, like, ‘Re­
ally? You have this serious illness, and
you’re worried about that?’”
During her junior year, her phar­
macologist raised her Prozac prescrip­
tion to eighty milligrams, the maxi­
mum recommended dose. The Prozac
42 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
made her drowsy, so he prescribed two
hundred milligrams of Provigil, a drug
for narcolepsy that is often taken by
soldiers and truck drivers to stay awake
during overnight shifts. The Provigil
gave her so much energy that, she said,
“I was just a machine.” She was on the
varsity squash team and played the best
squash of her life. She was so alert that
she felt as if she could “figure people
out,” unpacking the details of their iden­
tities: she imagined that she could peer
into their childhoods and see how their
parents had raised them.
The Provigil made it hard for Laura
to sleep, so her pharmacologist pre­
scribed Ambien, which she took every
night. In the course of a year, her doc­
tors had created what’s known as “a
prescription cascade”: the side effects
of one medication are diagnosed as
symptoms of another condition, lead­
ing to a succession of new prescrip­
tions. Her energy levels rose and fell
so quickly that she was told she had a
version of bipolar disorder called “rapid
cycling,” a term that describes people
who have four or more manic episodes
in a year, but is also applied, more
loosely, to people who shift dramati­
cally between moods. Sometimes Laura
thought, Women who are happy and
socialize like to buy dresses. She’d go
to Nordstrom and buy two or three
dresses. She recognized that this be­
havior was “textbook”—she had bought
her own copy of the Diagnostic and Sta-
tistical Manual of Mental Disorders—
but the awareness didn’t prevent the
purchases.
Laura felt that the pressures of her
junior year were paralyzing, so she did
not return for the spring semester. That
summer, she kept a journal in which
she outlined her personal goals: “over­
analysis must go”; “stop molding my­
self to the ideal person for my surround­
ings”; “find some faith in something, in
anything.” But the idea of returning to
Harvard that fall made her so distressed
that she thought every day about dying.
She took the semester off, and, at her
request, her parents drove her to a hos­
pital in Westchester County, New York.
A psychiatrist there wrote that she “pre­
sents with inability to function academ­
ically.” At the hospital, where she stayed
for two weeks, she was put on a new
combination of pills: Lamictal, a mood
stabilizer; Lexapro, an antidepressant;
and Seroquel, an antipsychotic that she
was told to use as a sleep aid. Her fa­
ther, Lyman, said, “I had no conviction
that the drugs were helping. Or that
they weren’t helping.”
aura returned to Harvard and man­
L aged to graduate, an achievement
she chalked up to muscle memory; she
was the kind of student who could re­
gurgitate information without absorbing
it. Then she held a series of jobs—work­
ing as an assistant for a professor and for
a state agency that issued building per­
mits—that she didn’t believe would lead
to a career. She experienced what John
Teasdale, a research psychologist at the
University of Oxford, named “depres­
sion about depression.” She interpreted
each moment of lethargy or disappoint­
ment as the start of a black mood that
would never end. Psychiatric diagnoses
can ensnare people in circular explana­
tions: they are depressed because they
are depressed.
Over the next four years, her doc­
tors tripled her antidepressant dosage.
Her dosage of Lamictal quadrupled.
She also began taking Klonopin, which
is a benzodiazepine, a class of drugs
that has sedative effects. “What I heard
a lot was that I was ‘treatment­resis­
tant,’” she said. “Something in me was
so strong and so powerful that even
these sophisticated medications couldn’t
make it better.”
For a brief period, Laura saw a psy­
chiatrist who was also a psychoanalyst,
and he questioned the way that she’d
framed her illness. He doubted her
early bipolar diagnosis, writing that
“many depressions are given a ‘medi­
cal’ name by a psychiatrist, ascribing
the problem to ‘chemistry’ and neglect­
ing the context and specificity of why
someone is having those particular life
problems at that particular time.” He
reminded her, “You described hating
becoming a woman.” Laura decided
that “he wasn’t legit.” She stopped going
to her appointments.
She rarely saw friends from high
school or college. “At a certain point, it
was just, Oh, my God, Laura Delano—
she’s ill,” the friend from high school
said. “She seemed really anesthetized.”
Laura had gained nearly forty pounds
since freshman year, which she attri­
butes partly to the medications. When
she looked in the mirror, she felt little
connection to her reflection. “All I ever
want to do is lie in my bed, cuddle with
my dog, and read books from writers
whose minds I can relate to,” she wrote
to a psychiatrist. “That’s all I ever want
to do.” She identified intensely with
Plath, another brilliant, privileged, char­
ismatic young woman who, in her jour­
nal, accuses herself of being just another
“SELFISH, EGOCENTRIC, JEALOUS AND
UNIMAGINATIVE FEMALE.” Laura said
that, when she read Plath’s work, she
“felt known for the first time.”
Laura found a psychiatrist she ad­
mired, whom I’ll call Dr. Roth. At ap­
pointments, Laura would enter a mode
in which she could recount her psychic
conflicts in a cool, clinical tone, taking
pride in her psychiatric literacy. She saw
her drugs as precision instruments that
could eliminate her suffering, as soon
as she and Dr. Roth found the right
combination. “I medicated myself as
though I were a finely calibrated ma­
chine, the most delicate error poten­
tially throwing me off,” she later wrote.
If she had coffee with someone and
became too excited and talkative, she
thought, Oh, my God, I might be hy­
pomanic right now. If she woke up with
racing thoughts, she thought, My symp­
toms of anxiety are ramping up. I should
watch out for this. If they last more
than a day or two, Dr. Roth may have
to increase my meds.
he day before Thanksgiving, 2008,
T Laura drove to the southern coast
of Maine, to a house owned by her late
grandparents. Her extended family was
there to celebrate the holiday. She no­
ticed relatives tensing their shoulders
when they talked to her. “She seemed
muted and tucked away,” her cousin
Anna said. When Laura walked through
the house and the old wooden floor­
boards creaked beneath her feet, she felt
ashamed to be carrying so much weight.
On her third day there, her parents
took her into the living room, closed
the doors, and told her that she seemed
trapped. They were both crying. Laura
sat on a sofa with a view of the ocean
and nodded, but she wasn’t listening.
“The first thing that came into my
mind was: You’ve put everyone through
enough.”
She went to her bedroom and poured
eighty milligrams of Klonopin, eight
hundred milligrams of Lexapro, and
six thousand milligrams of Lamictal
into a mitten. Then she sneaked into
the pantry and grabbed a bottle of Mer­
lot and put the wine, along with her
laptop, into a backpack. Her sisters and
cousins were getting ready to go to a
Bikram­yoga class. Her youngest sis­
ter, Chase, asked her to join them, but
Laura said she was going outside to
write. “She looked so dead in her eyes,”
Chase said. “There was no expression.
There was nothing there, really.”
There were two trails to the ocean,
one leading to a sandy cove and the
other to the rocky coast, where Laura
and her sisters used to fish for striped
bass. Laura took the path to the rocks,
passing a large boulder that her sister
Nina, a geology major in college, had
written her thesis about. The tide was
low, and it was cold and windy. Laura
leaned against a rock, took out her lap­
top, and began typing. “I will not try to
make this poetic, for it shouldn’t be,” she
wrote. “It is embarrassingly cliché to as­
sume that one should write a letter to
her loved ones upon ending her life.”
She swallowed a handful of pills at
a time, washing them down with red
wine. She found it increasingly hard to
sit upright, and her vision began to
narrow. As she lost consciousness, she
thought, This is the most peaceful ex­
perience I’ve ever had. She felt grate­
ful to be ending her life in such a beau­
tiful place. She fell over and hit her
head on a rock. She heard the sound
but felt no pain.
hen Laura hadn’t returned by
W dusk, her father walked along the
shoreline with a flashlight until he saw
her open laptop on a rock. Laura was
airlifted to Massachusetts General Hos­
pital, but the doctors said they weren’t
sure that she would ever regain con­
sciousness. She was hypothermic, her
body temperature having fallen to nearly
ninety­four degrees.
After two days in a medically in­
duced coma, she woke up in the inten­
sive­care unit. Her sisters and parents
watched as she opened her eyes. Chase
said, “She looked at all of us and pro­
cessed that we were all there, that she
was still alive, and she started sobbing.
She said, ‘Why am I still here?’”
After a few days, Laura was trans­
ported to McLean Hospital, where she’d
been elated to arrive seven years earlier.
Now she was weak, dizzy, sweating pro­
fusely, and anemic. Her body ached from
a condition called rhabdomyolysis,
which results from the release of skeletal­
muscle fibres into the bloodstream. She
had a black eye from hitting the rock.
Nevertheless, within a few days she re­
turned to the mode she adopted among
doctors. “Her eye contact and social com­
portment were intact,” a doctor wrote.
Although she was still disappointed that
her suicide hadn’t worked, she felt guilty
for worrying her family. She reported
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 43
having a “need to follow rules,” a doc-
tor wrote. Another doctor noted that
she did not seem to meet the criteria
for major depression, despite her at-
tempted suicide. The doctor proposed
that she had borderline personality
disorder, a condition marked by unsta-
ble relationships and self-image and a
chronic sense of emptiness. According
to her medical records, Laura agreed.
“Maybe I’m borderline,” she said.
She was started on a new combina-
tion of medications: lithium, to stabi-
lize her moods, and Ativan, a benzodi-
azepine, in addition to the antipsychotic
Seroquel, which she had already been
taking. Later, a second antipsychotic,
Abilify, was added—common practice,
though there was limited research jus-
tifying the use of antipsychotics in com-
bination. “It is tempting to add a sec-
ond drug just for the sake of ‘doing
something,’” a 2004 paper in Current
Medicinal Chemistry warns.
Shortly before Laura was discharged,
she drafted a letter to the staff on her
unit. “I truly don’t know where to begin
in putting in words the appreciation I
feel for what you’ve all done to help
me,” she wrote. “It’s been so many years
since I’ve felt the positive emotions—
hope, mostly—that have flooded over
me.” Unpersuaded by her own senti-
ment, she stopped the letter midsen-
tence and never sent it.
aura moved back home to live with
L her parents in Greenwich and spent
her nights drinking with old friends.
She told her psychiatrist, “I don’t feel
grounded. . . . I am floating.” Her fa-
ther encouraged her to “try to reach
for one little tiny positive thought, so
you can get a little bit of relief.” When
she couldn’t arrive at one, he urged her,
“Just think of Bitsy,” their cairn terrier.
When it was clear that positivity
was out of reach, Laura began seeing
a new psychiatrist at McLean, who
embraced the theory that her under-
lying problem was borderline person-
ality disorder. “It is unclear whether
she has bipolar (as diagnosed in the
past),” he wrote.
The concept of a borderline per-
sonality emerged in medical literature
in the nineteen-thirties, encompassing
patients who didn’t fit into established
illness categories. Describing a border-
44 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
line woman, the psychoanalyst Helene
Deutsch, a colleague of Freud’s, said,
“It is like the performance of an actor
who is technically well trained but who
lacks the necessary spark to make his
impersonations true to life.” In 1980,
the diagnosis was added to the DSM,
which noted that “the disorder is more
commonly diagnosed in women.” One
of its defining features is a formless,
shifting sense of self. An editorial in
Lancet Psychiatry this year proposed
that “borderline personality disorder
is not so much a diagnosis as it is a
liminal state.”
In 2010, Laura moved in with her
aunt Sara, who lived outside Boston,
and attended a day-treatment program
for borderline patients. “It was another
offering of what could fix me, and I
hadn’t tried it,” she said. At her intake
interview, she wore stretchy black yoga
pants from the Gap, one of the few gar-
ments that allowed her to feel invisi-
ble. She said that the director of the
program told her, “So, you went to Har-
vard. I bet you didn’t think you’d end
up at a place like this.” Laura immedi-
ately started crying, though she knew
that her response would be interpreted
as “emotional lability,” a symptom of
the disorder.
Laura had been content to be bipo-
lar. “I fit into the DSM criteria per-
fectly,” she said. But borderline person-
ality disorder didn’t feel blameless to
her. Almost all the patients in Laura’s
group were women, and many had his-
tories of sexual trauma or were in de-
structive relationships. Laura said that
she interpreted the diagnosis as her doc-
tors saying, “You are a slutty, manipu-
lative, fucked-up person.”
Laura sometimes drank heavily, and,
at the suggestion of a friend, she had
begun attending Alcoholics Anony-
mous meetings. Laura was heartened
by the stories of broken people who
had somehow survived. The meetings
lacked the self-absorption, the constant
turning inward, that she felt at the
clinic, where she attended therapy every
day. When Laura’s pharmacologist pre-
scribed her Naltrexone—a drug that is
supposed to block the craving for al-
cohol—Laura was insulted. If she were
to quit drinking, she wanted to feel
that she had done it on her own. She
was already taking Effexor (an antide-
pressant), Lamictal, Seroquel, Abilify,
Ativan, lithium, and Synthroid, a med-
ication to treat hypothyroidism, a side
effect of lithium. The medications made
her so sedated that she sometimes slept
fourteen hours a night. When she slept
through a therapy appointment, her
therapist called the police to check on
her at her aunt’s house. “That really
jolted something in me,” Laura said.
In May, 2010, a few months after
entering the borderline clinic, she wan-
dered into a bookstore, though she rarely
read anymore. On the table of new re-
leases was “Anatomy of an Epidemic,”
by Robert Whitaker, whose cover had
a drawing of a person’s head labelled
with the names of several medications
that she’d taken. The book tries to make
sense of the fact that, as psychophar-
macology has become more sophisti-
cated and accessible, the number of
Americans disabled by mental illness
has risen. Whitaker argues that psychi-
atric medications, taken in heavy doses
over the course of a lifetime, may be
turning some episodic disorders into
chronic disabilities. (The book has been
praised for presenting a hypothesis of
potential importance, and criticized for
overstating evidence and adopting a
crusading tone.)
Laura wrote Whitaker an e-mail
with the subject line “Psychopharms
and Selfhood,” and listed the many drugs
she had taken. “I grew up in a subur-
ban town that emphasized the belief
that happiness comes from looking per-
fect to others,” she wrote. Whitaker
lived in Boston, and they met for coffee.
Whitaker told me that Laura reminded
him of many young people who had
contacted him after reading the book.
He said, “They’d been prescribed one
drug, and then a second, and a third,
and they are put on this other trajec-
tory where their self-identity changes
from being normal to abnormal—they
are told that, basically, there is some-
thing wrong with their brain, and it isn’t
temporary—and it changes their sense
of resilience and the way they present
themselves to others.”
At her appointments with her phar-
macologist, Laura began to raise the
idea of coming off her drugs. She had
used nineteen medications in fourteen
years, and she wasn’t feeling better. “I
never had a baseline sense of myself,
of who I am, of what my capacities
are,” she said. The doctors at the bor-
derline clinic initially resisted her re-
quests, but they also seemed to recog-
nize that her struggles transcended
brain chemistry. A few months earlier,
one doctor had written on a prescrip-
tion pad, “Practice Self-Compassion,”
and for the number of refills he’d writ-
ten, “Infinite.”

ollowing her pharmacologist’s ad-

F vice, Laura first stopped Ativan, the
benzodiazepine. A few weeks later, she
went off Abilify, the antipsychotic. She
began sweating so much that she could
wear only black. If she turned her head
quickly, she felt woozy. Her body ached,
and occasionally she was overwhelmed
by waves of nausea. Cystic acne broke
out on her face and her neck. Her skin
pulsed with a strange kind of energy.
“I never felt quiet in my body,” she said.
“It felt like there was a current of some
kind under my skin, and I was trapped
inside this encasing that was constantly
buzzing.”
A month later, she went off Effexor,
the antidepressant. Her fear of people
judging her circled her head in permu-
tations that became increasingly inva-
sive. When a cashier at the grocery store
spoke to her, she was convinced that
he was only pretending to be cordial—
that what he really wanted to say was
“You are a repulsive, disgusting, pathetic
human.” She was overstimulated by the
colors of the cereal boxes in the store
and by the grating sounds of people
talking and moving. “I felt as if I couldn’t When on the drugs, Laura said, “I never had a baseline sense of myself.”
protect myself from all this life lived
around me,” she said. neuro-regret. Another word that mem- coincided with a burgeoning doubt
She began to experience emotion bers used was “dystalgia,” a wash of de- about a diagnosis that had become a
that was out of context—it felt simul- spair that one’s life has been futile. kind of career. When she’d experienced
taneously all-consuming and artificial. For many people on the forum, it symptoms of depression or hypoma-
“The emotions were occupying me and, was impossible to put the experience nia, she had known what to do with
on one level, I knew they were not me, into words. “The effects of these drugs them: she’d remember the details and
but I felt possessed by them,” she said. come so close to your basic ‘poles of tell her psychiatrist. Now she didn’t
Later, she found a community of peo- being’ that it’s really hard to describe have language to mark her experiences.
ple online who were struggling to with- them in any kind of reliable way,” one She spent hours alone, watching “South
draw from psychiatric medications. person wrote. Another wrote, “This Park” or doing jigsaw puzzles. When
They’d invented a word to describe her withdrawal process has slowly been her aunt Sara updated the rest of the
experience: “neuro-emotion,” an exag- stripping me of everything I believed family about Laura, the news was the
gerated feeling not grounded in real- about myself and life. One by one, parts same: they joked that she had become
ity. The Web forum Surviving Antide- of ‘me’ have been falling away, leaving part of the couch. Her family, Laura
pressants, which is visited by thousands me completely empty of any sense of said, learned to vacuum around her.
of people every week, lists the many being someone.” Had she come from a less well-off and
varieties of neuro-emotion: neuro-fear, It took Laura five months to with- generous family, she’s not sure she
neuro-anger, neuro-guilt, neuro-shame, draw from five drugs, a process that would have been able to go off her
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 45
medications. Others in her situation
might have lost their job and, without
income, ended up homeless. It took six
months before she felt capable of work-
ing part time.
Laura had always assumed that de-
pression was caused by a precisely
defined chemical imbalance, which her
medications were designed to recali-
brate. She began reading about the his-
tory of psychiatry and realized that this
theory, promoted heavily by pharma-
ceutical companies, is not clearly sup-
ported by evidence. Genetics plays a
role in mental disorder, as do environ-
mental influences, but the drugs do not
have the specificity to target the causes
of an illness. Wayne Goodman, a for-
mer chair of the F.D.A.’s Psychophar-
macologic Drugs Advisory Commit-
tee, has called the idea that pills fix
chemical imbalances a “useful meta-
phor” that he would never use with his
patients. Ronald Pies, a former editor
of Psychiatric Times, has said, “My im-
pression is that most psychiatrists who
use this expression”—that the pills fix
chemical imbalances—“feel uncom-
fortable and a little embarrassed when
they do so. It’s kind of a bumper-sticker
phrase that saves time.”
Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and
historian at the University of Toronto,
has written that the chemical-imbal-
ance theory, popularized in the eight-
ies and nineties, “created the percep-
tion that the long term, even life-long
use of psychiatric drugs made sense as
a logical step.” But psychiatric drugs
are brought to market in clinical trials
that typically last less than twelve weeks.
Few studies follow patients who take
the medications for more than a year.
Allen Frances, an emeritus professor of
psychiatry at Duke, who chaired the
task force for the fourth edition of the
DSM, in 1994, told me that the field
has neglected questions about how to
take patients off drugs—a practice
known as “de-prescribing.” He said that
“de-prescribing requires a great deal
more skill, time, commitment, and
knowledge of the patient than prescrib-
ing does.” He emphasizes what he called
a “cruel paradox: there’s a large popu-
lation on the severe end of the spec-
trum who really need the medicine”
and either don’t have access to treat-
ment or avoid it because it is stigma-
tized in their community. At the same
time, many others are “being overpre-
scribed and then stay on the medica-
tions for years.” There are almost no
studies on how or when to go off psy-
chiatric medications, a situation that
has created what he calls a “national
public-health experiment.”
oland Kuhn, a Swiss psychiatrist
R credited with discovering one of
the first antidepressants, imipramine, in
1956, later warned that many doctors
would be incapable of using antidepres-
sants properly, “because they largely or
entirely neglect the patient’s own expe-
riences.” The drugs could only work, he
wrote, if a doctor is “fully aware of the
fact that he is not dealing with a self-con-
tained, rigid object, but with an indi-
vidual who is involved in constant move-
ment and change.”
A decade after the invention of anti-
depressants, randomized clinical stud-
ies emerged as the most trusted form
of medical knowledge, supplanting the
authority of individual case studies. By
necessity, clinical studies cannot capture
fluctuations in mood that may be mean-
ingful to the patient but do not fit into
the study’s categories. This methodol-
ogy has led to a far more reliable body
of evidence, but it also subtly changed
our conception of mental health, which
has become synonymous with the ab-
sence of symptoms, rather than with a
return to a patient’s baseline of func-
tioning, her mood or personality before
and between episodes of illness. “Once
you abandon the idea of the personal
baseline, it becomes possible to think of
emotional suffering as relapse—instead
of something to be expected from an
individual’s way of being in the world,”
Deshauer told me. For adolescents who
go on medications when they are still
trying to define themselves, they may
never know if they have a baseline, or
what it is. “It’s not so much a question
of Does the technology deliver?” De-
shauer said. “It’s a question of What are
we asking of it?”
Antidepressants are now taken by
roughly one in eight adults and adoles-
cents in the U.S., and a quarter of them
have been doing so for more than ten
years. Industry money often determines
the questions posed by pharmacologi-
cal studies, and research about stopping
drugs has never been a priority.
Barbiturates, a class of sedatives that
helped hundreds of thousands of peo-
ple to feel calmer, were among the first
popular psychiatric drugs. Although
leading medical journals asserted that
barbiturate addiction was rare, within
a few years it was evident that people
withdrawing from barbiturates could
become more anxious than they were
before they began taking the drugs.
(They could also hallucinate, have con-
vulsions, and even die.)
Valium and other benzodiazepines
were introduced in the early sixties, as
a safer option. By the seventies, one in
ten Americans was taking Valium. The
chief of clinical pharmacology at Mas-
sachusetts General Hospital declared,
in 1976, “I have never seen a case of ben-
zodiazepine dependence” and described
it as “an astonishingly unusual event.”
Later, though, the F.D.A. acknowledged
that people can become dependent on
benzodiazepines, experiencing intense
agitation when they stop taking them.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibi-
tors, or S.S.R.I.s—most prominently
Prozac and Zoloft—were developed in
the late eighties and early nineties, filling
a gap in the market opened by skepti-
cism toward benzodiazepines. S.S.R.I.s
were soon prescribed not just for de-
pression but for the nervous ailments
that the benzodiazepines had previously
addressed. (There had been other drugs
used as antidepressants, but they had
often been prescribed cautiously, because
of concerns about their side effects.) As
Jonathan Metzl writes, in “Prozac on
the Couch,” S.S.R.I.s were marketed es-
pecially to female consumers, as drugs
that would empower them at work while
preserving the kind of feminine traits
required at home. One advertisement
for Zoloft showed a woman in a pants
suit, holding the hands of her two chil-
dren, her wedding ring prominent, next
to the phrase “Power That Speaks Softly.”
Today, antidepressants are taken by one
in five white American women.
Concerns about withdrawal symp-
toms emerged shortly after S.S.R.I.s
came to market, and often involved preg-
nant women who had been told to dis-
continue their medications, out of con-
cern that the drugs could affect the fetus.
A 2001 article in the Journal of Psychi-
atry & Neuroscience chronicled thirty-six
women who were on either antidepres-
sants, benzodiazepines, or a combina-
tion of the two, and who stopped tak-
ing the drugs when they became
pregnant. A third of the patients said
they felt suicidal, and four were admit-
ted to a hospital. One had an abortion,
because she no longer felt capable of
going through with the pregnancy.
Internal records of pharmaceutical
manufacturers show that the companies
have been aware of the withdrawal prob-
lem. At a panel discussion in 1996, Eli
Lilly invited seven experts to develop a
definition of antidepressant withdrawal.
Their findings were published in a sup-
plement of the Journal of Clinical Psychi-
atry that was sponsored by Eli Lilly and
was highly favorable to the company’s
own product, Prozac, which has the lon-
gest half-life of all the S.S.R.I.s; the drug
clears slowly from the body. The panel-
ists observed that withdrawing from
other antidepressants was more likely to
lead to “discontinuation reactions,” such
as agitation, detachment, “uncharacter-
istic crying spells and paralyzing sad-
ness.” “Although generally mild and
short-lived,” one paper in the supple-
ment explained, “discontinuation symp-
toms can be severe and chronic.” The
panel defined “discontinuation syndrome”
as a condition that could be “rapidly re-
versed by the reintroduction of the orig-
inal medication.”
Shortly after the Eli Lilly panel,
SmithKline Beecham, which manufac-
tured Paxil, distributed a memo to its
sales team accusing Eli Lilly of “trying
to hide” the withdrawal symptoms of
its products. “The truth of the matter
is that the only discontinuation syn-
drome Lilly is worried about is the dis-
continuation of Prozac,” the memo said.
In another internal memo, SmithKline
Beecham instructed staff to “highlight
the benign nature of discontinuation
symptoms, rather than quibble about
their incidence.”
Guy Chouinard, a retired professor
of psychiatry at McGill and at the Uni-
versity of Montreal, who served as a
consultant for Eli Lilly for ten years and
did one of the first clinical trials of
Prozac, told me that when S.S.R.I.s
came on the market he was thrilled to
see his patients, previously crippled by
self-doubt and fear, living tolerable and
fulfilling lives. Chouinard is considered
one of the founders of psychopharma-
cology in Canada. In the early two-thou-
sands, he began to see patients who,
after taking certain antidepressants for
years, had stopped their medications
and were experiencing what he described
as “crescendo-like” anxiety and panic
that went on for weeks and, in some
cases, months. When he reinstated their
medication, their symptoms began to
resolve, usually within two days.
Most people who discontinue anti-
depressants do not suffer from with-
drawal symptoms that last longer than
a few days. Some experience none at
all. “The medical literature on this is a
mess,” Chouinard told me. “Psychia-
trists don’t know their patients well—
they aren’t following them long-term—
so they don’t know whether to believe
their patients when they say, ‘I’ve never
had this experience in my life.’ ” He
thinks that withdrawal symptoms, mis-
diagnosed and never given time to re-
solve, create a false sense that patients
can’t function unless they go back on
their drugs.
Giovanni Fava, a professor of psy-
chiatry at the University of Buffalo, has
devoted much of his career to studying
withdrawal and has followed patients
suffering from withdrawal symptoms
a year after stopping antidepressants.
A paper published last month in a jour-
nal he edits, Psychotherapy and Psycho-
somatics, reviewed eighty studies and
found that in nearly two-thirds of them
patients were taken off their medica-
tions in less than two weeks. Most of
the studies did not consider how such
an abrupt withdrawal might compro-
mise the studies’ findings: withdrawal
symptoms can easily be misclassified
as relapse. Fava’s work is widely cited,
yet he said that he has struggled to
publish his research on this topic. To
some degree, that makes sense: no one
wants to deter people from taking drugs
that may save their life or lift them out
of disability. But to avoid investigat-
ing or sharing information on the sub-
ject—to assume that people can com-
prehend the drugs’ benefits and not their
limits—seems to repeat a pattern of
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 47
paternalism reminiscent of earlier epochs
in the history of psychopharmacology.
David Taylor, the director of phar-
macy and pathology at the Maudsley
Hospital, in London, and the author of
more than three hundred peer-reviewed
papers, told me, “It is not as though we
haven’t been burned by this before.” If
he hadn’t experienced antidepressant
withdrawal himself, Taylor said, “I think
I would be sold on the standard texts.”
But, he said, “experience is very differ-
ent from what’s on the page.” Taylor de-
scribed his own symptoms of withdrawal,
from the antidepressant Effexor, as a
“strange and frightening and torturous”
experience that lasted six weeks. In a
paper published last month in Lancet
Psychiatry, he and a co-author reviewed
brain imaging and case studies on with-
drawal and argued that patients should
taper off antidepressants over the course
of months, rather than two to four weeks,
as current guidelines advise. Such guide-
lines are based on a faulty assumption
that, if a dose is reduced by half, it will
simply reduce the effect in the brain by
half. The paper asserts that the increas-
ing long-term use of antidepressants
“has arisen in part because patients are
unwilling to stop due to the aversive na-
ture of the withdrawal syndrome.” But,
Taylor told me, his research “wouldn’t
stop me from recommending an anti-
depressant for someone with fully fledged
major depression, because the relief of
suffering is of a different order of mag-
nitude than the symptoms when you
stop taking them.”
In the fifth edition of the DSM, pub-
lished in 2013, the editors added an entry
for “antidepressant discontinuation syn-
drome”—a condition also mentioned
on drug labels—but the description is
vague and speculative, noting that “lon-
gitudinal studies are lacking” and that
little is known about the course of the
syndrome. “Symptoms appear to abate
over time,” the manual explains, while
noting that “some individuals may pre-
fer to resume medication indefinitely.”
hree months after Laura stopped
T all her medications, she was walk-
ing down the street in Boston and felt
a flicker of sexual desire. “It was so un-
comfortable and foreign to me that I
didn’t know what to do with it,” she
said. The sensation began to occur at
48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
random times of day, often in public
and in the absence of an object of at-
traction. “It was as if that whole part
of my body was coming online again,
and I had no idea how to channel it,”
she said. “I felt occupied by this over-
whelming power.” She had never mas-
turbated. “I was, like, Why do people
like this? It didn’t make sense.”
When she was thirty-one, she began
a long-distance relationship with Rob
Wipond, a Canadian journalist. Both
of them became emotional when talking
with me about Laura’s sexuality. Laura
told me, “I felt like a newborn. I hadn’t
ever figured out what my body was
meant to be.” Rob said, “She was open
and awake. Everything was new to her.
We were, like, ‘Well, gee, what is this
sexuality thing—what shall we do?’ ”
For years, Laura had been unable to
have stable relationships—a symptom,
she’d assumed, of borderline personal-
ity disorder. “I honestly thought that,
because I was mentally ill, the numb-
ness was just part of me,” she told me.
“I looked at beautiful sex scenes in
movies, and it never crossed my mind
that this was in the cards for me.” Now
she wondered about the effects of the
many medications she had been tak-
ing. “On this very sensory, somatic level,
I couldn’t bond with another human
being,” she said. “It never felt real. It
felt synthetic.”
Laura bought a book about wom-
en’s sexuality, and learned how to give
herself an orgasm. “It took so long and
I finally figured it out, and I just broke
down in tears and called Rob, and I
was, like, ‘I did it! I did it! I did it!’ ”
She felt fortunate that her sexual-
ity had returned in a way that eluded
other people who were withdrawing
from drugs. Although it is believed that
people return to their sexual baseline,
enduring sexual detachment is a recur-
ring theme in online withdrawal fo-
rums. Audrey Bahrick, a psychologist
at the University of Iowa Counseling
Service, who has published papers on
the way that S.S.R.I.s affect sexuality,
told me that, a decade ago, after some-
one close to her lost sexual function on
S.S.R.I.s, “I became pretty obsessive
about researching the issue, but the ac-
tual qualitative experience of patients
was never documented. There was this
assumption that the symptoms would
resolve once you stop the medication.
I just kept thinking, Where is the data?
Where is the data?” In her role as a
counsellor, Bahrick sees hundreds of
college students each year, many of
whom have been taking S.S.R.I.s since
adolescence. She told me, “I seem to
have the expectation that young peo-
ple would be quite distressed about the
sexual side effects, but my observation
clinically is that these young people
don’t yet know what sexuality really
means, or why it is such a driving force.”
aura felt as if she were learning the
L contours of her adult self for the
first time. When she felt dread or de-
spair, she tried to accept the sensation
without interpreting it as a sign that
she was defective and would remain
that way forever, until she committed
suicide or took a new pill. It felt like a
revelation, she said, to realize that “the
objective in being alive isn’t the absence
of pain.” She remembered identifying
with a sad little bubble pictured in a
popular advertisement for Zoloft—the
bubble is moping around, crying and
groaning, until it takes the medication
and starts to bounce while birds sing—
and became increasingly aware that her
faith in the drugs’ potential had been
misplaced. “I never felt helped by the
drugs in the sense that I have meaning,
I have purpose, I have relationships that
matter to me,” she said. Overprescrib-
ing isn’t always due to negligence; it
may also be that pills are the only form
of help that some people are willing to
accept. Laura tried to find language to
describe her emotions and moods, rather
than automatically calling them symp-
toms. “The word I use for it is ‘unlearn,’”
she said. “You are peeling off layers that
have been imposed.”
Laura still felt fondness for most of
her psychiatrists, but, she said, “the loss
of my sexuality is the hardest part to
make peace with—it feels like a be-
trayal. I’ve discovered how much of the
richness of being human is sexuality.”
She wrote several letters to Dr. Roth,
her favorite psychiatrist, requesting her
medical records, because she wanted to
understand how the doctor had made
sense of her numbness and years of de-
terioration. After a year, Dr. Roth agreed
to a meeting. Laura prepared for hours.
She intended to begin by saying, “I’m
sitting in front of you and I’m off all Angela Peacock, a thirty-nine-year- recommend that people reduce their
these drugs, and I’ve never felt more vi- old veteran of the war in Iraq, told me, doses by less than ten per cent each
brant and alive and capable, and yet we “I want to be Laura when I grow up.” month—and a place to communicate
thought I had this serious mental ill- Peacock had been on medications for about emotional experiences that do
ness for life. How do you make sense thirteen years, including the “P.T.S.D. not have names. For many people on
of that?” But, in Dr. Roth’s office, Laura cocktail,” as it has become known: the the forums, it was impossible to sepa-
was overwhelmed by nostalgia: the fa- antidepressant Effexor, the antipsychotic rate the biochemical repercussions from
miliar hum of the white-noise machine, Seroquel, and Prazosin, a drug used to the social ones. The medicines worked
the sound of the wind sucked inside as alleviate nightmares. “I never processed on their bodies, but they also changed
Dr. Roth opened the front door. She the trauma of being a twenty-three- the way people understood their rela-
had always loved Dr. Roth’s presence— year-old at war, and how that changed tionships and their social roles and the
the way she would sit in an armchair my view of humanity,” she said. “I just control they had over elements of their
with her legs folded, cradling a large pressed Pause for thirteen years.” lives. A common theme on the forums
mug of coffee, her nails neatly polished. Laura realized that she was spend- is that people felt that at some point,
By the time Dr. Roth walked into the ing her entire workday on these con- having taken so many medications for
waiting room, Laura was crying. versations. Because she needed to be- so long, they’d become disabled—and
They hugged and then took their come financially self-reliant, she began they were no longer sure if this was due
usual positions in Dr. Roth’s office. But charging seventy-five dollars an hour to their underlying disorder, the effect
Laura said that Dr. Roth seemed so (on a sliding scale) to talk to people. of withdrawing from their medications,
nervous that she talked for the entire Few psychiatrists are deeply engaged or the way they had internalized the
appointment, summarizing the conver- with these questions, so a chaotic field idea of being chronically ill.
sations they’d had together. It was only of consultants has filled the void. They Peter Gordon, a Scottish psychiatrist
when Laura left that she realized she are immersed in what Laura describes who has worked for the National Health
had never asked her questions. as “the layperson withdrawal commu- Service for twenty-five years, told me
nity,” a constellation of Web forums and that he has struggled to find doctors to
aura started a blog, in which she de- Facebook groups where people who help him with his own process of with-
L scribed how, in the course of her ill-
ness, she had lost the sense that she had
have stopped their psychiatric medica-
tions advise one another: Surviving An-
drawal, so he turned to the online com-
munities, which he believes are “chang-
agency. People began contacting her to tidepressants, the International Anti- ing the very nature of the power balance
ask for advice about getting off multi- depressant Withdrawal Project, Benzo between patient and doctor.” He went
ple psychiatric medications. Some had Buddies, Cymbalta Hurts Worse. The on Paxil twenty-one years ago, for social
been trying to withdraw for years. They groups offer instructions for slowly get- anxiety, and has tried to go off several
had developed painstaking methods for ting off medications—they typically times, using a micropipette to measure
tapering their medications, like using
grass-seed counters to dole out the beads
in the capsules. Laura, who had a part-
time job as a research assistant but who
still got financial help from her parents,
began spending four or five hours a day
talking with people on Skype. “People
were so desperate that, when they found
someone who had gotten off meds, they
were just, like, ‘Help me,’” she said.
David Cope, a former engineer for
the Navy, told me that Laura’s writings
“helped keep me alive. I needed to know
that someone else had gone through it
and survived.” In the process of with-
drawing from Paxil, Ativan, and Ad-
derall, he felt detached from emotional
reactions that had previously felt habit-
ual. “The way I would explain it to my
wife is, I know that I love her,” he told
me. “I know that I care for her. I know
that I would lay down my life for her.
But I don’t feel love. There’s no emo-
tional-physical response: the sense of
comfort and tingly love when you smell
your spouse’s hair—I don’t have that.” “Let me start by saying no one is a bigger feminist than me.”
a small reduction of the liquid form of
the medication each month. It has not
worked. Each time, he said, “I find my
temperament different. I am not an angry
person—I am gentle, I am affectionate,
I am open—but in withdrawal I found
that these qualities were less clear. I was
more irritable. I was critical of my wife
and focussed on things I wouldn’t nor-
mally care about.” He continued, “I per-
sonally find it really hard to try to cap-
ture that experience in words, and, if I’m
finding it difficult to translate it into
words, how are the studies going to cap-
ture it? There’s going to be an additional
loss from words to quantifiable ratings.
We are trained to understand the evi-
dence base as paramount—it is the pri-
mary basis for mental-health prescrip-
tions around the world, and I fully
subscribe to it—but this evidence base
can never be complete without listen-
ing to the wider story.”
fter consulting with people on the
A phone for nearly five years, Laura
worked with Rob Wipond and a phy-
sician’s assistant named Nicole Lam-
berson to create an online guide for peo-
ple who wanted to taper off their pills.
There were few precedents. In the late
nineties, Heather Ashton, a British psy-
chopharmacologist who had run a ben-
zodiazepine-withdrawal clinic in New-
castle, had drafted a set of guidelines
known as the Ashton Manual, which
has circulated widely among patients
and includes individual tapering sched-
ules for various benzodiazepines, along
with a glossary of disorienting symp-
toms. “People who have had bad expe-
riences have usually been withdrawn
too quickly (often by doctors!) and with-
out any explanation of the symptoms,”
Ashton wrote.
Laura’s Web site, which she called
the Withdrawal Project, was published
online in early 2018 as part of a non-
profit organization, Inner Compass Ini-
tiative, devoted to helping people make
more informed choices about psychiat-
ric treatment. She and Rob (whom she
was no longer dating) created it with a
grant from a small foundation, which
gave her enough money to pay herself
a salary, to hire others who had con-
sulted with people withdrawing from
medications, and to cull relevant in-
sights about tapering strategies. “Anec-
50 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
dotal information is the best we have,
because there is almost no clinical re-
search on how to slowly and safely taper,”
Laura said. The Web site helps people
withdrawing from medications find oth-
ers in the same city; it also offers infor-
mation on computing the percentage
of the dosage to drop, converting a pill
into a liquid mixture by using a mortar
and pestle, or using a special syringe to
measure dosage reductions. Lamberson,
who had struggled to withdraw from
six psychiatric medications, told me,
“You find yourself in this position where
you have to become a kitchen chemist.”
Swapnil Gupta, an assistant profes-
sor at the Yale School of Medicine, told
me that she is troubled that doctors
have largely left this dilemma to pa-
tients to resolve. She and her colleagues
have embarked on what she describes
as an informal “de-prescribing” initia-
tive. They routinely encounter patients
who, like Laura, are on unnecessary
combinations of psychiatric medica-
tions, but for different reasons: Laura
saw her therapists as gurus who would
solve her problems, whereas poor or
marginalized patients may be overtreated
as they cycle in and out of emergency
rooms. Yet, when Gupta, who works at
an outpatient clinic, raises the idea of
tapering off patients’ medications, she
said, some of them “worry they will lose
their disability payments, because being
on lots of meds has become a badge of
illness. It is a loss of identity, a differ-
ent way of living. Suddenly, everything
that you are doing is yours—and not
necessarily your medication.”
Gupta, too, is trying to recalibrate
the way she understands her patients’
emotional lives. “We tend to see patients
as fixed in time—we don’t see them as
people who have ups and downs like
we all do—and it can be really discon-
certing when suddenly they are saying,
‘See, I’m crying. Put me back on my
meds.’ ” She said, “I have to sit them
down and say, ‘It’s O.K. to cry—normal
people cry.’ Just today, someone asked
me, ‘Do you cry?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I do.’”
n the fall of 2018, a few days after
I Thanksgiving, Laura’s sister Nina
texted me: “10 years to the day, Laura
has some news for you that may be a
great ending to your story.” The previ-
ous year, Laura had moved to Hartford
to live near a new boyfriend, Cooper
Davis, and his four-year-old son. Now
they had just returned from spending
the holiday with her family in Maine.
Standing in the kitchen of their sec-
ond-floor apartment, Laura told Coo-
per that wood and thin plastic utensils
can’t go in the dishwasher. He asked if
a number of different household items
were safe for the dishwasher, before say-
ing he had one last question and pull-
ing an engagement ring out of his pocket.
Cooper had been planning to propose
for several weeks, and he hadn’t realized
that the moment he’d chosen was pre-
cisely a decade after her suicide attempt.
Laura had met Cooper, who works
at an agency that supports people with
psychiatric and addiction histories, two
years earlier, at a mental-health confer-
ence in Connecticut. Cooper had been
given Adderall for attention-deficit hy-
peractivity disorder at seventeen and
had become addicted. As an adolescent,
he said, he was made to believe “I am
not set up for this world. I need tweak-
ing, I need adjusting.”
His work made him unusually wel-
coming of the fact that people in vari-
ous states of emotional crisis often want
to be near Laura. A few months after
they were engaged, Bianca Gutman, a
twenty-three-year-old from Montreal,
flew to Hartford to spend the weekend
with Laura. Bianca’s mother, Susan, had
discovered Laura’s blog two years earlier
and had e-mailed her right away. “I feel
like I’m reading my daughter’s story,” she
wrote. Susan paid Laura for Skype con-
versations, until Laura told her to stop.
Laura had come to think of Bianca, who
had been diagnosed as having depres-
sion when she was twelve, as a little sis-
ter navigating similar dilemmas.
While Bianca was visiting, a friend
from out of town who was in the midst
of what appeared to be a manic episode
was staying at an Airbnb a few houses
down the street. Laura was fielding phone
calls from the woman’s close friends, who
wanted to know what should be done,
but the only thing Laura felt comfort-
able advising was that the woman get
some sleep—she had medications to
help with that—and avoid significant
life decisions. The woman had been trau-
matized by a hospitalization a few years
earlier, and Laura guessed that “she came
here because she didn’t want to be alone,
and she knows that I would never call
the cops on her.”
Laura and Bianca spent the week-
end taking walks in the frigid weather
and having leisurely conversations in
Laura’s small living room. Bianca, who
is barely five feet tall, moved and talked
more slowly than Laura, as if many more
decisions were required before she con-
verted a thought into words. She had
been on forty milligrams of Lexapro—
double the recommended dose—for
nearly nine years. She’d taken Abilify for
six years. Now, after talking to Laura,
Bianca’s father, an emergency-medicine
doctor, had found a pharmacy in Mon-
treal that was able to compound decreas-
ing quantities of her medication, drop-
ping one milligram each month. Bianca,
who worked as an assistant at an ele-
mentary school, was down to five mil-
ligrams of Lexapro. Her mother said, “I
often tell Bianca, ‘I see you coping bet-
ter,’ and she’s, like, ‘Calm down, Mommy.
It’s not like being off medication is going
to wipe me clean and you’re going to
get the daughter you had before’”—the
hope she harbored when Bianca first
went on medication.
Bianca, who had reddish-blond hair,
which she’d put in a messy bun, was wear-
ing a bulky turtleneck sweater. She sat
on the couch with her legs curled neatly
into a Z—a position that she later joked
she had chosen because it made her feel
more adult. Like Laura, Bianca had al-
ways appreciated when her psychiatrists
increased the dosage of her medications.
She said, “It was like they were just
matching my pain,” which she couldn’t
otherwise express. She described her
depression as “nonsensical pain. It’s so
shapeless and cloudy. It dodges all lan-
guage.” She said that, in her first conver-
sation with Laura, there was something
about the way Laura said “Mm-hmm”
that made her feel understood. “I hadn’t
felt hopeful in a very long time. Hope-
ful about what? I don’t know. Just hope-
• •
ful, I think, because I felt that connec-
tion with someone.” She told Laura,
“Knowing that you know there’s no
words—that’s enough for me.”
At my request, Laura had dug up sev-
eral albums of childhood photographs,
and the three of us sat on the floor going
through them. Laura looked radically
different from one year to the next. She
had had a phase of wearing pastel polo
shirts that were too small for her, and in
this phase, when Laura was pictured
among friends, Bianca and I struggled to
tell which girl was her. It wasn’t just that
she was fatter or thinner; her face seemed
to be structured differently. In her débu-
tante photos, she looked as if she were
wearing someone else’s features. Bianca
kept saying, “I don’t see you.”
Since I’d known Laura, she had al-
ways had a certain shine, but on this day
she seemed nearly luminous. She had
taken a new interest in clothes and was
wearing high-waisted trousers from Swe-
den with a tucked-in T-shirt that ac-
centuated her waist. When Cooper re-
turned to the house, after an afternoon
with his family, she exclaimed, “Oh, Coo-
per is back!” Then she became self-con-
scious and laughed at herself.
I told Laura that I was wary of re-
peating her sister’s sentiment that mar-
riage was the end of her story. She
agreed. “It’s not, like, ‘Laura has finally
arrived,’” she said. “If anything, these
trappings of whatever you want to call
it—life?—have made things scarier.”
She still felt overwhelmed by the tasks
of daily life, like too many e-mails ac-
cumulating, and she cried about five
times a week. She was too sensitive. She
let situations escalate. Cooper said that
his tendency in moments of tension was
to get quiet, which exacerbated Laura’s
fear that she was not being heard. She
did not see a therapist—she felt ex-
hausted from years of analyzing her
most private thoughts—but, she said,
“If I actually sat in front of a psychia-
trist and did an evaluation, I would to-
tally meet the criteria for a number of
diagnoses.” But the diagnostic frame-
work no longer felt meaningful to her.
Perhaps we all have an ugly version
of ourselves that, in our worst moments,
we imagine we’ve become: when Bianca
felt hopeless, she thought, mockingly,
This is you. How could you possibly
think otherwise, you poor thing? Lau-
ra’s thought was: You are not a legitimate
person. You don’t deserve to be here. In
many of our conversations, Laura said,
she was trying to ignore the thought:
Who do you think you are, speaking with
this journalist? Shut up and go away. She
said, “And yet we’re also having this con-
versation and I’m totally present in it.”
Bianca said, “It’s like your darkness is
still there, but it’s almost like it’s next to
you as opposed to your totality of being.”
Laura agreed that she was experienc-
ing “the stuff of being alive that I just
had no idea was possible for me.” But,
she said, “it’s not like I’m good to go.
Literally every day, I am still wondering
how to be an adult in this world.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 51
A field assistant, Rudy Pascucci, left, and the paleontologist Robert DePalma, right, at DePalma’s dig site. Of his discovery,
52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
 ANNALS OF THE FORMER WORLD

THE DAY
THE EARTH DIED
A young paleontologist makes the find of his life.
BY DOUGLAS PRESTON

DePalma said, “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICHARD BARNES
 f, on a certain evening about sixty-
I six million years ago, you had stood
somewhere in North America and
looked up at the sky, you would have
soon made out what appeared to be
a star. If you watched for an hour or
two, the star would have seemed to grow
in brightness, although it barely moved.
That’s because it was not a star but an
asteroid, and it was headed directly for
Earth at about forty-five thousand miles
an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid
hit. The air in front was compressed
and violently heated, and it blasted a
hole through the atmosphere, generat-
ing a supersonic shock wave. The as-
teroid struck a shallow sea where the
Yucatán peninsula is today. In that mo-
ment, the Cretaceous period ended and
the Paleogene period began.
A few years ago, scientists at Los Al-
amos National Laboratory used what
was then one of the world’s most pow-
erful computers, the so-called Q Ma-
chine, to model the effects of the im-
pact. The result was a slow-motion,
second-by-second false-color video of
the event. Within two minutes of slam-
ming into Earth, the asteroid, which
was at least six miles wide, had gouged
a crater about eighteen miles deep and
lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons
of debris into the atmosphere. Picture
the splash of a pebble falling into pond
water, but on a planetary scale. When
“. . . and those are my deepest, most intimate feelings about our friendship.”
Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher
than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The
energy released was more than that of
a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast
looked nothing like a nuclear explosion,
with its signature mushroom cloud.
Instead, the initial blowout formed a
“rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten
material, which exited the atmosphere,
some of it fanning out over North Amer-
ica. Much of the material was several
times hotter than the surface of the sun,
and it set fire to everything within a
thousand miles. In addition, an inverted
cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose,
spread outward as countless red-hot
blobs of glass, called tektites, and blan-
keted the Western Hemisphere.
Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s
gravitational pull and went into irreg-
ular orbits around the sun. Over mil-
lions of years, bits of it found their way
to other planets and moons in the solar
system. Mars was eventually strewn
with the debris—just as pieces of Mars,
knocked aloft by ancient asteroid im-
pacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013
study in the journal Astrobiology esti-
mated that tens of thousands of pounds
of impact rubble may have landed on
Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Eu-
ropa and Callisto, which orbit Jupi-
ter—three satellites that scientists be-
lieve may have promising habitats for
life. Mathematical models indicate that
at least some of this vagabond debris
still harbored living microbes. The as-
teroid may have sown life throughout
the solar system, even as it ravaged life
on Earth.
The asteroid was vaporized on im-
pact. Its substance, mingling with va-
porized Earth rock, formed a fiery
plume, which reached halfway to the
moon before collapsing in a pillar of
incandescent dust. Computer models
suggest that the atmosphere within
fifteen hundred miles of ground zero
became red hot from the debris storm,
triggering gigantic forest fires. As the
Earth rotated, the airborne material
converged at the opposite side of the
planet, where it fell and set fire to the
entire Indian subcontinent. Measure-
ments of the layer of ash and soot that
eventually coated the Earth indicate
that fires consumed about seventy per
cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile,
giant tsunamis resulting from the im-
pact churned across the Gulf of Mex-
ico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes
peeling up hundreds of feet of rock,
pushing debris inland and then suck-
ing it back out into deep water, leaving
jumbled deposits that oilmen some-
times encounter in the course of deep-
sea drilling.
The damage had only begun. Sci-
entists still debate many of the details,
which are derived from the computer
models, and from field studies of the
debris layer, knowledge of extinction
rates, fossils and microfossils, and many
other clues. But the over-all view is con-
sistently grim. The dust and soot from
the impact and the conflagrations pre-
vented all sunlight from reaching the
planet’s surface for months. Photosyn-
thesis all but stopped, killing most of
the plant life, extinguishing the phyto-
plankton in the oceans, and causing the
amount of oxygen in the atmosphere
to plummet. After the fires died down,
Earth plunged into a period of cold,
perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two
essential food chains, in the sea and on
land, collapsed. About seventy-five per
cent of all species went extinct. More
than 99.9999 per cent of all living or-
ganisms on Earth died, and the carbon
cycle came to a halt.
Earth itself became toxic. When the
asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of
limestone, releasing into the atmosphere
a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten bil-
lion tons of methane, and a billion tons
of carbon monoxide; all three are pow-
erful greenhouse gases. The impact also
vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted
ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds
aloft. The sulfur combined with water
to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as
an acid rain that may have been potent
enough to strip the leaves from any sur-
viving plants and to leach the nutrients
from the soil.
Today, the layer of debris, ash, and
soot deposited by the asteroid strike is
preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a
stripe of black about the thickness of a
notebook. This is called the KT bound-
ary, because it marks the dividing line
between the Cretaceous period and the
Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been
redefined as the Paleogene, but the term
“KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above
and below the KT layer. In the late Cre-
taceous, widespread volcanoes spewed
vast quantities of gas and dust into the
atmosphere, and the air contained far
higher levels of carbon dioxide than the
air that we breathe now. The climate
was tropical, and the planet was per-
haps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists
know very little about the animals and
plants that were living at the time, and
as a result they have been searching for
fossil deposits as close to the KT bound-
ary as possible.
One of the central mysteries of pa-
leontology is the so-called “three-metre
problem.” In a century and a half of as-
siduous searching, almost no dinosaur
remains have been found in the layers
three metres, or about nine feet, below
the KT boundary, a depth represent-
ing many thousands of years. Conse-
quently, numerous paleontologists have
argued that the dinosaurs were on the
way to extinction long before the as-
teroid struck, owing perhaps to the
volcanic eruptions and climate change.
Other scientists have countered that
the three-metre problem merely reflects
how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or
later, they’ve contended, a scientist will
discover dinosaurs much closer to the
moment of destruction.
Locked in the KT boundary are the
answers to our questions about one of
the most significant events in the his-
tory of life on the planet. If one looks
at the Earth as a kind of living organ-
ism, as many biologists do, you could
say that it was shot by a bullet and al-
most died. Deciphering what happened
on the day of destruction is crucial not
only to solving the three-metre prob-
lem but also to explaining our own gen-
esis as a species.
n August 5, 2013, I received an
O e-mail from a graduate student
named Robert DePalma. I had never
met DePalma, but we had corresponded
on paleontological matters for years,
ever since he had read a novel I’d writ-
ten that centered on the discovery of a
fossilized Tyrannosaurus rex killed by
the KT impact. “I have made an incred-
ible and unprecedented discovery,” he
wrote me, from a truck stop in Bow-
man, North Dakota. “It is extremely
confidential and only three others know
of it at the moment, all of them close
colleagues.” He went on, “It is far more
unique and far rarer than any simple
dinosaur discovery. I would prefer not
outlining the details via e-mail, if pos-
sible.” He gave me his cell-phone num-
ber and a time to call.
I called, and he told me that he had
discovered a site like the one I’d imag-
ined in my novel, which contained,
among other things, direct victims of
the catastrophe. At first, I was skepti-
cal. DePalma was a scientific nobody,
a Ph.D. candidate at the University of
Kansas, and he said that he had found
the site with no institutional backing
and no collaborators. I thought that
he was likely exaggerating, or that he
might even be crazy. (Paleontology has
more than its share of unusual peo-
ple.) But I was intrigued enough to
get on a plane to North Dakota to see
for myself.
DePalma’s find was in the Hell Creek
geological formation, which outcrops
in parts of North Dakota, South Da-
kota, Montana, and Wyoming, and con-
tains some of the most storied dinosaur
beds in the world. At the time of the
impact, the Hell Creek landscape con-
sisted of steamy, subtropical lowlands
and floodplains along the shores of an
inland sea. The land teemed with life
and the conditions were excellent for
fossilization, with seasonal floods and
meandering rivers that rapidly buried
dead animals and plants.
Dinosaur hunters first discovered
these rich fossil beds in the late nine-
teenth century. In 1902, Barnum Brown,
a flamboyant dinosaur hunter who
worked at the American Museum of
Natural History, in New York, found
the first Tyrannosaurus rex here, caus-
ing a worldwide sensation. One pale-
ontologist estimated that in the Creta-
ceous period Hell Creek was so thick
with T. rexes that they were like hyenas
on the Serengeti. It was also home to
triceratops and duckbills.
The Hell Creek Formation spanned
the Cretaceous and the Paleogene pe-
riods, and paleontologists had known
for at least half a century that an ex-
tinction had occurred then, because di-
nosaurs were found below, but never
above, the KT layer. This was true not
only in Hell Creek but all over the
world. For many years, scientists be-
lieved that the KT extinction was no
great mystery: over millions of years,
volcanism, climate change, and other
events gradually killed off many forms
of life. But, in the late nineteen-sev-
enties, a young geologist named Wal-
ter Alvarez and his father, Luis Alva-
rez, a nuclear physicist, discovered that
the KT layer was laced with unusually
high amounts of the rare metal irid-
ium, which, they hypothesized, was
from the dusty remains of an asteroid
impact. In an article in Science, pub-
lished in 1980, they proposed that this
impact was so large that it triggered
the mass extinction, and that the KT
layer was the debris from that event.
Most paleontologists rejected the idea
that a sudden, random encounter with
space junk had drastically altered the
evolution of life on Earth. But as the
years passed the evidence mounted,
until, in a 1991 paper, the smoking gun
was announced: the discovery of an im-
pact crater buried under thousands of
feet of sediment in the Yucatán pen-
insula, of exactly the right age, and
of the right size and geochemistry, to
have caused a worldwide cataclysm.
The crater and the asteroid were named
Chicxulub, after a small Mayan town
near the epicenter.
One of the authors of the 1991 paper,
David Kring, was so frightened by what
he learned of the impact’s destructive
nature that he became a leading voice
in calling for a system to identify and
neutralize threatening asteroids. “There’s
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 55
no uncertainty to this statement: the
Earth will be hit by a Chicxulub-size
asteroid again, unless we deflect it,” he
told me. “Even a three-hundred-metre
rock would end world agriculture.”
In 2010, forty-one researchers in
many scientific disciplines announced,
in a landmark Science article, that the
issue should be considered settled: a
huge asteroid impact caused the extinc-
tion. But opposition to the idea remains
passionate. The main competing hy-
pothesis is that the colossal “Deccan”
volcanic eruptions, in what would be-
come India, spewed enough sulfur and
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to
cause a climatic shift. The eruptions,
which began before the KT impact and
continued after it, were among the big-
gest in Earth’s history, lasting hundreds
of thousands of years, and burying half
a million square miles of the Earth’s
surface a mile deep in lava. The three-
metre gap below the KT layer, propo-
nents argued, was evidence that the
mass extinction was well under way by
the time of the asteroid strike.
n 2004, DePalma, at the time a twenty-
I two-year-old paleontology under-
graduate, began excavating a small site
in the Hell Creek Formation. The site
had once been a pond, and the deposit
consisted of very thin layers of sediment.
Normally, one geological layer might
represent thousands or millions of years.
But DePalma was able to show that
each layer in the deposit had been laid
down in a single big rainstorm. “We
could see when there were buds on the
trees,” he told me. “We could see when
the cypresses were dropping their nee-
dles in the fall. We could experience this
in real time.” Peering at the layers was
like flipping through a paleo-history
book that chronicled decades of ecol-
ogy in its silty pages. DePalma’s adviser,
the late Larry Martin, urged him to find
a similar site, but one that had layers
closer to the KT boundary.
Today, DePalma, now thirty-seven,
is still working toward his Ph.D. He
holds the unpaid position of curator
of vertebrate paleontology at the Palm
Beach Museum of Natural History, a
nascent and struggling museum with
no exhibition space. In 2012, while look-
ing for a new pond deposit, he heard that
a private collector had stumbled upon
56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
an unusual site on a cattle ranch near
Bowman, North Dakota. (Much of the
Hell Creek land is privately owned, and
ranchers will sell digging rights to who-
ever will pay decent money, paleontol-
ogists and commercial fossil collectors
alike.) The collector felt that the site,
a three-foot-deep layer exposed at the
surface, was a bust: it was packed with
fish fossils, but they were so delicate
that they crumbled into tiny flakes as
soon as they met the air. The fish were
encased in layers of damp, cracked mud
and sand that had never solidified; it
was so soft that it could be dug with a
shovel or pulled apart by hand. In July,
2012, the collector showed DePalma
the site and told him that he was wel-
come to it.
“I was immediately very disap-
pointed,” DePalma told me. He was
hoping for a site like the one he’d ex-
cavated earlier: an ancient pond with
fine-grained, fossil-bearing layers that
spanned many seasons and years. In-
stead, everything had been deposited
in a single flood. But as DePalma poked
around he saw potential. The flood had
entombed everything immediately, so
specimens were exquisitely preserved.
He found many complete fish, which
are rare in the Hell Creek Formation,
and he figured that he could remove
them intact if he worked with pains-
taking care. He agreed to pay the rancher
a certain amount for each season that
he worked there. (The specifics of the
arrangement, as is standard practice in
paleontology, are a closely guarded se-
cret. The site is now under exclusive
long-term lease.)
The following July, DePalma re-
turned to do a preliminary excavation
of the site. “Almost right away, I saw
it was unusual,” he told me. He began
shovelling off the layers of soil above DePalma’s thesis adviser estimated that the
where he’d found the fish. This “over-
burden” is typically material that was when molten rock is blasted into the
deposited long after the specimen lived; air by an asteroid impact and falls back
there’s little in it to interest a paleon- to Earth in a solidifying drizzle. The
tologist, and it is usually discarded. But site appeared to contain microtektites
as soon as DePalma started digging by the million.
he noticed grayish-white specks in the As DePalma carefully excavated the
layers which looked like grains of sand upper layers, he began uncovering an
but which, under a hand lens, proved to extraordinary array of fossils, exceed-
be tiny spheres and elongated droplets. ingly delicate but marvellously well
“I think, Holy shit, these look like mi- preserved. “There’s amazing plant ma-
crotektites!” DePalma recalled. Micro- terial in there, all interlaced and inter-
tektites are the blobs of glass that form locked,” he recalled. “There are log-
site will keep specialists busy for half a century. “Robert’s got so much stuff that’s unheard of,” he said. “It will be in the textbooks.”
jams of wood, fish pressed against
cypress-tree root bundles, tree trunks
smeared with amber.” Most fossils end
up being squashed flat by the pressure
of the overlying stone, but here every-
thing was three-dimensional, includ-
ing the fish, having been encased in
sediment all at once, which acted as a
support. “You see skin, you see dorsal
fins literally sticking straight up in the
sediments, species new to science,” he
said. As he dug, the momentousness
of what he had come across slowly
dawned on him. If the site was what
he hoped, he had made the most im-
portant paleontological discovery of
the new century.
ePalma grew up in Boca Raton,
D Florida, and as a child he was fas-
cinated by bones and the stories they
contained. His father, Robert, Sr., prac-
tices endodontic surgery in nearby Del-
ray Beach; his great-uncle Anthony,
who died in 2005, at the age of a hun-
dred, was a renowned orthopedic sur-
geon who wrote several standard text-
books on the subject. (Anthony’s son,
Robert’s cousin, is the film director
Brian De Palma.)
“Between the ages of three and four,
I made a visual connection with the
gracefulness of individual bones and
how they fit together as a system,” De-
Palma told me. “That really struck me.
I went after whatever on the dinner
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 57
table had bones in it.” His family buried
their dead pets in one spot and put the
burial markers in another, so that he
wouldn’t dig up the corpses; he found
them anyway. He froze dead lizards in
ice-cube trays, which his mother would
discover when she had friends over for
iced tea. “I was never into sports,” he
said. “They tried to get me to do that
so I would get along with the other
kids. But I was digging up the baseball
field looking for bones.”
DePalma’s great-uncle Anthony,
who lived in Pompano Beach, took him
under his wing. “I used to visit him
every other weekend and show him my
latest finds,” DePalma said. When he
was four, someone at a museum in Texas
gave him a fragment of dinosaur bone,
which he took to his great-uncle. “He
taught me that all those little knobs
and rough patches and protrusions on
a bone had names, and that the bone
also had a name,” DePalma said. “I was
captivated.” At six or seven, on trips to
Central Florida with his family, he
started finding his own fossilized bones
from mammals dating back to the Ice
Age. He found his first dinosaur bone
when he was nine, in Colorado.
In high school, during the summer
and on weekends, DePalma collected
fossils, made dinosaur models, and
mounted skeletons for the Graves Mu-
seum of Archaeology and Natural His-
tory, in Dania Beach. He loaned the
museum his childhood fossil collection
for display, but in 2004 the museum
went bankrupt and many of the spec-
imens were carted off to a community
college. DePalma had no paperwork to
prove his ownership, and a court re-
fused to return his fossils, which num-
bered in the hundreds. They were mostly
locked away in storage, unavailable for
public display and enjoyment.
Dismayed by what he called the
“wasteful mismanagement” of his col-
lection, DePalma adopted some un-
usual collecting practices. Typically, pa-
leontologists cede the curation and the
care of their specimens to the institu-
tions that hold them. But DePalma in-
sists on contractual clauses that give
him oversight of the management of
his specimens. He never digs on pub-
lic land, because of what he considers
excessive government red tape. But,
without federal support for his work,
58 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
he must cover almost all the costs him-
self. His out-of-pocket expenses for
working the Hell Creek site amount
to tens of thousands of dollars. He
helps defray the expenses by mount-
ing fossils, doing reconstructions, and
casting and selling replicas for muse-
ums, private collectors, and other cli-
ents. At times, his parents have chipped
in. “I squeak by,” he said. “If it’s a tossup
between getting more PaleoBond”—
an expensive liquid glue used to hold
fossils together—“or changing the
air-conditioning filter, I’m getting the
PaleoBond.” He is single, and shares a
three-bedroom apartment with casts
of various dinosaurs, including one of
a Nanotyrannus. “It’s hard to have a life
outside of my work,” he said.
DePalma’s control of his research
collection is controversial. Fossils are
a big business; wealthy collectors pay
hundreds of thousands of dollars, even
millions, for a rare specimen. (In 1997,
a T. rex nicknamed Sue was sold at
a Sotheby’s auction, to the Field Mu-
seum of Natural History, in Chicago,
for more than $8.3 million.) The Amer-
ican market is awash in fossils illegally
smuggled out of China and Mongo-
lia. But in the U.S. fossil collecting on
private property is legal, as is the buy-
ing, selling, and exporting of fossils.
Many scientists view this trade as a
threat to paleontology and argue that
important fossils belong in museums.
“I’m not allowed to have a private col-
lection of anything I’m studying,” one
prominent curator told me. DePalma
insists that he maintains “the best of
both worlds” for his fossils. He has
deposited portions of his collection
at several nonprofit institutions, includ-
ing the University of Kansas, the Palm
Beach Museum of Natural History, and
Florida Atlantic University; some spec-
imens are temporarily housed in vari-
ous analytical labs that are conducting
tests on them—all overseen by him.
In 2013, DePalma briefly made news
with a paper he published in the Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sci-
ences. Four years earlier, in Hell Creek,
he and a field assistant, Robert Feeney,
found an odd, lumpy growth of fossil-
ized bone that turned out to be two
fused vertebrae from the tail of a had-
rosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur from the
Cretaceous period. DePalma thought
that the bone might have grown around
a foreign object and encased it. He took
it to Lawrence Memorial Hospital, in
Kansas, where a CT technician scanned
it for free in the middle of the night,
when the machine was idle. Inside the
nodule was a broken tyrannosaur tooth;
the hadrosaur had been bitten by a ty-
rannosaur and escaped.
The discovery helped refute an old
hypothesis, revived by the formidable
paleontologist Jack Horner, that T. rex
was solely a scavenger. Horner argued
that T. rex was too slow and lumber-
ing, its arms too puny and its eyesight
too poor, to prey on other creatures.
When DePalma’s find was picked up
by the national media, Horner dis-
missed it as “speculation” and merely
“one data point.” He suggested an al-
ternative scenario: the T. rex might have
accidentally bitten the tail of a sleep-
ing hadrosaur, thinking that it was dead,
and then “backed away” when it real-
ized its mistake. “I thought that was
absolutely preposterous,” DePalma told
me. At the time, he told the Los An-
geles Times, “A scavenger doesn’t come
across a food source and realize all of
a sudden that it’s alive.” Horner even-
tually conceded that T. rex may have
hunted live prey. But, when I asked
Horner about DePalma recently, he
said at first that he didn’t remember
him: “In the community, we don’t get
to know students very well.”
Without his Ph.D., DePalma re-
mains mostly invisible, awaiting the
stamp of approval that signals the be-
ginning of a serious research career. Sev-
eral paleontologists I talked to had not
heard of him. Another, who asked not
to be named, said, “Finding that kind
of fossil was pretty cool, but not life-
changing. People sometimes think I’m
dumb because I often say I don’t have
the answers—we weren’t there when a
fossil was formed. There are other peo-
ple out there who say they do know,
and he’s one of those people. I think he
can overinterpret.”
fter receiving DePalma’s e-mail, I
A made arrangements to visit the
Hell Creek site; three weeks later I was
in Bowman. DePalma pulled up to my
hotel in a Toyota 4Runner, its stereo
blasting the theme to “Raiders of the
Lost Ark.” He wore a coarse cotton
 various digging tools and some metal
pipe for taking core samples, leaned
THE EL against the far side of the hole. As we
strolled around the site, I noticed on
No one ever grabbed my ass on the stairs down to DePalma’s belt a long fixed-blade knife
the D. But on the stairs up to the El, it happened and a sheathed bayonet—a Second
all the time. I guess it was anatomically more natural, World War relic that his uncle gave
like reaching for an apple, but the first time, him when he was twelve, he said.
I wasn’t sure how to feel. I think I felt warm, He recalled the moment of discov-
which wasn’t an emotion. It felt like a rite of passage, ery. The first fossil he removed, earlier
though I’d never heard of rites of passage. that summer, was a five-foot-long fresh-
Disgusting is what I said when I told my friends. water paddlefish. Paddlefish still live
A grown man. I was twelve then. It felt like flattery. today; they have a long bony snout,
with which they probe murky water in
From the El, I could look into other people’s windows, search of food. When DePalma took
but if I saw them at all, what they were doing mostly out the fossil, he found underneath it
were the same kinds of nothings we did in our own a tooth from a mosasaur, a giant car-
apartment. What I usually saw were their curtains nivorous marine reptile. He wondered
blowing in and out, ’cause their windows were wide open. how a freshwater fish and a marine rep-
It wasn’t like the High Line, where many years later tile could have ended up in the same
I saw two men in a hotel room doing a performance place, on a riverbank at least several
just for me. The High Line used to be an El. It still is in a way, miles inland from the nearest sea. (At
though it’s covered with flowers. And I’m the train. the time, a shallow body of water, called
the Western Interior Seaway, ran from
When I turned nineteen and got married, I went to live the proto-Gulf of Mexico up through
up by Mt. Eden. It was cheap and noisy and the El part of North America.) The next day,
ran below our window and our daughter died and we were he found a two-foot-wide tail from an-
still in school and took the D train to Manhattan now. other marine fish; it looked as if it had
But coming home one night, I looked up and saw curtains been violently ripped from the fish’s
blowing in and out of someone’s window. I was on an El, body. “If the fish is dead for any length
I don’t know where, or how I made it home. It wasn’t our El, of time, those tails decay and fall apart,”
but it’s the El I dream about: I’ve just come down the stairs, DePalma said. But this one was per-
and now I’ve got to figure it out. Up on the platform fectly intact, “so I knew that it was trans-
you could buy peanuts from a dispenser and either ported at the time of death or around
give them to the pigeons or eat them yourself. then.” Like the mosasaur tooth, it had
somehow ended up miles inland from
—Joan Murray the sea of its origin. “When I found
that, I thought, There’s no way, this
can’t be right,” DePalma said. The dis-
work shirt, cargo pants with canvas into the ground. Over millions of years, coveries hinted at an extraordinary con-
suspenders, and a suède cowboy hat the Hell Creek layer has been heavily clusion that he wasn’t quite ready to
with the left brim snapped up. His face eroded, leaving only remnants, which accept. “I was ninety-eight per cent
was tanned from long days in the sun jut from the prairie like so many rot- convinced at that point,” he said.
and he had a five-day-old beard. ten teeth. These lifeless buttes and pin- The following day, DePalma noticed
I got in, and we drove for an hour nacles are striped in beige, chocolate, a small disturbance preserved in the
or so, turning through a ranch gate and yellow, maroon, russet, gray, and white. sediment. About three inches in diam-
following a maze of bone-rattling roads Fossils, worked loose by wind and rain, eter, it appeared to be a crater formed
that eventually petered out in a grassy spill down the sides. by an object that had fallen from the
basin. The scattered badlands of Hell When we arrived, DePalma’s site lay sky and plunked down in mud. Simi-
Creek form an otherworldly landscape. open in front of us: a desolate hump of lar formations, caused by hailstones hit-
This is far-flung ranching and farm- gray, cracked earth, about the size of ting a muddy surface, had been found
ing country; prairies and sunflower two soccer fields. It looked as if a piece before in the fossil record. As DePalma
fields stretch to the horizon, domed by of the moon had dropped there. One shaved back the layers to make a cross-
the great blue skies of the American side of the deposit was cut through by section of the crater, he found the thing
West. Roads connect small towns— a sandy wash, or dry streambed; the itself—not a hailstone but a small white
truck stop, church, motel, houses and other ended in a low escarpment. The sphere—at the bottom of the crater. It
trailers—and lonely expanses roll by in dig was a three-foot-deep rectangular was a tektite, about three millimetres
between. Here and there in the coun- hole, sixty feet long by forty feet wide. in diameter—the fallout from an an-
tryside, abandoned farmhouses lean A couple of two-by-fours, along with cient asteroid impact. As he continued
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 59
excavating, he found another crater with
a tektite at the bottom, and another,
and another. Glass turns to clay over
millions of years, and these tektites were
now clay, but some still had glassy cores.
The microtektites he had found earlier
might have been carried there by water,
but these had been trapped where they
fell—on what, DePalma believed, must
have been the very day of the disaster.
“When I saw that, I knew this wasn’t
just any flood deposit,” DePalma said.
“We weren’t just near the KT bound-
ary—this whole site is the KT bound-
ary!” From surveying and mapping the
layers, DePalma hypothesized that a
massive inland surge of water flooded
a river valley and filled the low-lying
area where we now stood, perhaps as a
result of the KT-impact tsunami, which
had roared across the proto-Gulf and
up the Western Interior Seaway. As the
water slowed and became slack, it de-
posited everything that had been caught
up in its travels—the heaviest material
first, up to whatever was floating on
the surface. All of it was quickly en-
tombed and preserved in the muck:
dying and dead creatures, both marine
and freshwater; plants, seeds, tree trunks,
roots, cones, pine needles, flowers, and
pollen; shells, bones, teeth, and eggs;
tektites, shocked minerals, tiny dia-
monds, iridium-laden dust, ash, char-
coal, and amber-smeared wood. As the
sediments settled, blobs of glass rained
into the mud, the largest first, then finer
and finer bits, until grains sifted down
like snow.
“We have the whole KT event pre-
served in these sediments,” DePalma
said. “With this deposit, we can chart
what happened the day the Cretaceous
died.” No paleontological site remotely
like it had ever been found, and, if De-
Palma’s hypothesis proves correct, the
scientific value of the site will be im-
mense. When Walter Alvarez visited
the dig last summer, he was astounded.
“It is truly a magnificent site,” he wrote
to me, adding that it’s “surely one of the
best sites ever found for telling just what
happened on the day of the impact.”
hen DePalma finished showing
W me the dig, he introduced me
to a field assistant, Rudy Pascucci,
the director of the Palm Beach Mu-
seum. Pascucci, a muscular man in his
60 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
fifties, was sunburned and unshaven,
and wore a sleeveless T-shirt, snake-
proof camouflage boots, and a dusty
Tilley hat. The two men gathered their
tools, got down on the floor of the hole,
and began probing the three-foot-high
walls of the deposit.
For rough digging, DePalma likes to
use his bayonet and a handheld Marsh
pick, popularized by the nineteenth-
century Yale paleontologist Othniel C.
Marsh, who pioneered dinosaur-hunt-
ing in the American West and dis-
covered eighty new species. The pick
was given to him by David Burnham,
his thesis adviser at Kansas, when he
completed his master’s degree. For fine
work, DePalma uses X-Acto knives and
brushes—the typical tools of a paleon-
tologist—as well as dental instruments
given to him by his father.
The deposit consisted of dozens of
thin layers of mud and sand. Lower
down, it graded into a more turbulent
band of sand and gravel, which con-
tained the heavier fish fossils, bones,
and bigger tektites. Below that layer
was a hard surface of sandstone, the
original Cretaceous bedrock of the site,
much of which had been scoured smooth
by the flood.
Paleontology is maddening work, its
progress typically measured in millime-
tres. As I watched, DePalma and Pas-
cucci lay on their stomachs under the
beating sun, their eyes inches from the
dirt wall, and picked away. DePalma
poked the tip of an X-Acto into the
thin laminations of sediment and loos-
ened one dime-size flake at a time; he’d
examine it closely, and, if he saw noth-
ing, flick it away. When the chips ac-
cumulated, he gathered them into small
piles with a paintbrush; when those
piles accumulated, Pascucci swept them
into larger piles with a broom and then
shovelled them into a heap at the far
end of the dig.
Occasionally, DePalma came across
small plant fossils—flower petals, leaves,
seeds, pine needles, and bits of bark.
Many of these were mere impressions
in the mud, which would crack and
peel as soon as they were exposed to
the air. He quickly squirted them with
PaleoBond, which soaked into the
fossils and held them together. Or, us-
ing another technique, he mixed a batch
of plaster and poured it on the spec-
imen before it fell apart. This would
preserve, in plaster, a reverse image of
the fossil; the original was too short-
lived to be saved.
When the mosquitoes got bad, De-
Palma took out a briar pipe and packed
it with Royal Cherry Cavendish to-
bacco. He put a lighter to it and vigor-
ously puffed, wreathing himself in
sickly-sweet smoke, then went back to
work. “I’m like a shopaholic in a shoe
store,” he said. “I want everything!”
He showed me the impression of a
round object about two inches wide.
“This is either a flower or an echino-
derm,” he said, referring to a group of
marine life-forms that includes sea
urchins and starfish. “I’ll figure it out
in the lab.” He swiftly entombed it in
PaleoBond and plaster. Next, he found
a perfect leaf, and near that a seed from
a pinecone. “Cretaceous mulch,” he
said, dismissively; he already had many
similar examples. He found three more
small craters with tektites in them,
which he sectioned and photographed.
Then his X-Acto blade turned up a
tiny brown bone—a jaw, less than a
quarter inch in length. He held it up
between his fingers and peered at it
with a lens.
“A mammal,” he said. “This one was
already dead when it was buried.”
Weeks later, in the lab, he identified the
jaw as probably belonging to a mam-
mal distantly related to primates—in-
cluding us.
Half an hour later, DePalma discov-
ered a large feather. “Every day is Christ-
mas out here,” he said. He exposed the
feather with precise movements. It was
a crisp impression in the layer of mud,
perhaps thirteen inches long. “This is
my ninth feather,” he said. “The first
fossil feathers ever found at Hell Creek.
I’m convinced these are dinosaur feath-
ers. I don’t know for sure. But these are
primitive feathers, and most are a foot
long. There are zero birds that big from
Hell Creek with feathers this primitive.
It’s more parsimonious to suggest it was
a known dinosaur, most likely a thero-
pod, possibly a raptor.” He kept dig-
ging. “Maybe we’ll find the raptor that
these feathers came from, but I doubt
it. These feathers could have floated
from a long way off.”
His X-Acto knife unearthed the
edge of a fossilized fin. Another pad-
dlefish came to light; it later proved to
be nearly six feet long. DePalma probed
the sediment around it, to gauge its po-
sition and how best to extract it. As
more of it was exposed, we could clearly
see that the fish’s two-foot-long snout
had broken when it was forced—prob-
ably by the flood’s surge—against the
branches of a submerged araucaria tree.
He noted that every fish he’d found in
the site had died with its mouth open,
which may indicate that the fish had
been gasping as they suffocated in the
sediment-laden water.
“Most died in a vertical position in
the sediment, didn’t even tip over on
their sides,” he said. “And they weren’t
scavenged, because whatever would have
dug them up afterward was probably
gone.” He chipped away around the
paddlefish, exposing a fin bone, then a
half-dollar-size patch of fossilized skin
with the scales perfectly visible. He
treated these by saturating them with
his own special blend of hardener. Be-
cause of the extreme fragility of the fos-
sils, he would take them back to his lab,
in Florida, totally encased in sediment,
or “matrix.” In the lab, he would free
each fossil under a magnifying glass, in
precisely controlled conditions, away
from the damaging effects of sun, wind,
and aridity.
As DePalma worked around the pad- In one fell swoop, DePalma may have filled in the gap in the fossil record.
dlefish, more of the araucaria branch
came to light, including its short, spiky two-by-four and sawed off two foot- DePalma resumed digging. Gusts
needles. “This tree was alive when it long pieces and placed them like splints of wind stirred up clouds of dust, and
was buried,” he said. Then he noticed on either side of the sediment-encased rain fell; when the weather cleared, the
a golden blob of amber stuck to the fossil. One by one, he dipped the bur- late-afternoon sun spilled across the
branch. Amber is preserved tree resin lap strips in the plaster and draped prairie. DePalma was lost in another
and often contains traces of whatever them across the top and the sides of day, in another time. “Here’s a piece of
was in the air at the time, trapping the the specimen. He added rope handles wood with bark-beetle traces,” he said.
atmospheric chemistry and even, some- and plastered them in. An hour later, Plant fossils from the first several mil-
times, insects and small reptiles. “This when the plaster had cured, he chis- lion years after the impact show almost
is Cretaceous flypaper,” he said. “I can’t elled through the rock pedestal be- no signs of such damage; the insects
wait to get this back to the lab.” neath the fossil and flipped the spec- were mostly gone. The asteroid had
An hour later, he had chiselled all the imen over, leaving the underside likely struck in the fall, DePalma spec-
way around the fish, leaving it encased exposed. Back in the lab, he would go ulated. He had reached this conclusion
in matrix, supported by a four-inch-tall through this surface to access the fos- by comparing the juvenile paddlefish
pedestal of rock. “I’m pretty sure this is sil, with the plaster jacket acting as a and sturgeon he’d found with the spe-
a species new to science,” he said. Be- cradle below. Using the rope handles, cies’ known growth rates and hatching
cause the soft tissue had also fossilized, DePalma and Pascucci lugged the seasons; he’d also found the seeds
he said, even the animal’s stomach con- specimen, which weighed perhaps two of conifers, figs, and certain flowers.
tents might still be present. hundred pounds, to the truck and “When we analyze the pollen and di-
He straightened up. “Time to plas- loaded it into the back. Later, DePalma atomaceous particles, that will narrow
ter,” he said. He took off his shirt and would store it behind a friend’s ranch it down,” he said.
began mixing a five-gallon bucket of house, where all his jacketed fossils In the week that followed, fresh
plaster with his hands, while Pascucci from the season were laid out in rows, riches emerged: more feathers, leaves,
tore strips of burlap. DePalma took a covered with tarps. seeds, and amber, along with several
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 61
other fish, three to five feet long, and
a dozen more craters with tektites. I
have visited many paleontological sites,
but I had never seen so many speci-
mens found so quickly. Most digs are
boring; days or weeks may pass with
little found. DePalma seemed to make
a noteworthy discovery about every
half hour.
When DePalma first visited the site,
he noted, partially embedded on the
surface, the hip bone of a dinosaur in
the ceratopsian family, of which tricer-
atops is the best-known member. A
commercial collector had tried to re-
move it years earlier; it had been aban-
doned in place and was crumbling from
years of exposure. DePalma initially dis-
missed it as “trash” and decried the ir-
responsibility of the collector. Later,
though, he wondered how the bone,
which was heavy, had arrived there, very
close to the high-water mark of the
flood. It must have floated, he said, and
to have done so it must have been en-
cased in desiccated tissue—suggesting
that at least one dinosaur species was
alive at the time of the impact. He later
found a suitcase-size piece of fossilized
skin from a ceratopsian attached to the
hip bone.
At one point, DePalma set off to
photograph the layers of the deposit
which had been cut through and ex-
posed by the sandy wash. He scraped
smooth a vertical section and misted it
with water from a spray bottle to bring
out the color. The bottom layer was
jumbled; the first rush of water had
ripped up layers of mud, gravel, and
rocks and tumbled them about with
pieces of burned (and burning) wood.
Then DePalma came to a faint jug-
shaped outline in the wall of the wash.
He examined it closely. It started as a
tunnel at the top of the KT layer, went
down, and then widened into a round
cavity, filled with soil of a different color,
which stopped at the hard sandstone
of the undisturbed bedrock layer below.
It looked as though a small animal had
dug through the mud to create a hide-
out. “Is that a burrow?” I asked.
DePalma scraped the area smooth
with his bayonet, then sprayed it. “You’re
darn right it is,” he said. “And this isn’t
the burrow of a small dinosaur. It’s a
mammal burrow.” (Burrows have char-
acteristic shapes, depending on the spe-
cies that inhabit them.) He peered at
it, his eyes inches from the rock, prob-
ing it with the tip of the bayonet. “Gosh,
I think it’s still in there!”
He planned to remove the entire
burrow intact, in a block, and run it
through a CT scanner back home, to
see what it contained. “Any Cretaceous
mammal burrow is incredibly rare,” he
said. “But this one is impossible—it’s
dug right through the KT boundary.”
Perhaps, he said, the mammal survived
the impact and the flood, burrowed into
the mud to escape the freezing dark-
ness, then died. “It may have been born
in the Cretaceous and died in the Pa-
leocene,” he said. “And to think—sixty-
six million years later, a stinky monkey
is digging it up, trying to figure out
what happened.” He added, “If it’s a
new species, I’ll name it after you.”
When I left Hell Creek, DePalma
pressed me on the need for secrecy:
I was to tell no one, not even close
friends, about what he’d found. The
history of paleontology is full of tales
of bribery, backstabbing, and double-
dealing. In the nineteenth century,
Othniel C. Marsh and Edward Drinker
Cope, the nation’s two leading pale-
ontologists, engaged in a bitter com-
petition to collect dinosaur fossils in
the American West. They raided each
other’s quarries, bribed each other’s
crews, and vilified each other in print
and at scientific meetings. In 1890, the
New York Herald began a series of
sensational articles about the contro-
versy with the headline “Scientists
Wage Bitter Warfare.” The ri-
valry has since become known as the
Bone Wars. The days of skulduggery
in paleontology have not passed; De-
Palma was deeply concerned that the
site would be expropriated by a major
museum.
ePalma knew that a screwup with
D this site would probably end his
career, and that his status in the field
was so uncertain that he needed to for-
tify the find against potential criticism.
He had already experienced harsh judg-
ment when, in 2015, he published a paper
on a new species of dinosaur called a
Dakotaraptor, and mistakenly inserted
a fossil turtle bone in the reconstruc-
tion. Although rebuilding a skeleton
from thousands of bone fragments that
have commingled with those of other
species is not easy, DePalma was mor-
tified by the attacks. “I never want to
go through that again,” he told me.
For five years, DePalma continued
excavations at the site. He quietly shared
his findings with a half-dozen lumi-
naries in the field of KT studies, in-
cluding Walter Alvarez, and enlisted
their help. During the winter months,
when not in the field, DePalma pre-
pared and analyzed his specimens,
a few at a time, in a colleague’s lab
at Florida Atlantic University, in Boca
Raton. The lab was a windowless,
wedgelike room in the geology build-
ing, lined with bubbling aquarium tanks
and shelves heaped with books, scien-
tific journals, pieces of coral, mastodon
teeth, seashells, and a stack of .50-calibre
machine-gun rounds, dating from the
Second World War, that the lab’s owner
had recovered from the bottom of the
Atlantic Ocean. DePalma had carved
out a space for himself in a corner, just
large enough for him to work on one
or two jacketed fossils at a time.
When I first visited the lab, in April,
2014, a block of stone three feet long
by eighteen inches wide lay on a table
under bright lights and a large magni-
fying lens. The block, DePalma said,
contained a sturgeon and a paddlefish,
along with dozens of smaller fossils
and a single small, perfect crater with
a tektite in it. The lower parts of the
block consisted of debris, fragments of
bone, and loose tektites that had been
dislodged and caught up in the turbu-
lence. The block told the story of the
impact in microcosm. “It was a very
bad day,” DePalma said. “Look at these
two fish.” He showed me where the
sturgeon’s scutes—the sharp, bony
plates on its back—had been forced
into the body of the paddlefish. One
fish was impaled on the other. The
mouth of the paddlefish was agape, and
jammed into its gill rakers were mi-
crotektites—sucked in by the fish as it
tried to breathe. DePalma said, “This
fish was likely alive for some time after
being caught in the wave, long enough
to gasp frenzied mouthfuls of water in
a vain attempt to survive.”
Gradually, DePalma was piecing to-
gether a potential picture of the disas-
ter. By the time the site flooded, the
surrounding forest was already on fire,
given the abundance of charcoal, charred
wood, and amber he’d found at the site.
The water arrived not as a curling wave
but as a powerful, roiling rise, packed
with disoriented fish and plant and an-
imal debris, which, DePalma hypoth-
esized, were laid down as the water
slowed and receded.
In the lab, DePalma showed me
magnified cross-sections of the sedi-
ment. Most of its layers were horizon-
tal, but a few formed curlicues or flame-
like patterns called truncated flame
structures, which were caused by a com-
bination of weight from above and
mini-surges in the incoming water.
DePalma found five sets of these pat-
terns. He turned back to the block on
his table and held a magnifying lens
up to the tektite. Parallel, streaming
lines were visible on its
surface—Schlieren lines,
formed by two types of
molten glass swirling to-
gether as the blobs arced
through the atmosphere.
Peering through the lens,
DePalma picked away at
the block with a dental
probe. He soon exposed a
section of pink, pearles-
cent shell, which had been pushed up
against the sturgeon. “Ammonite,” he
said. Ammonites were marine mol-
lusks that somewhat resemble the pres-
ent-day nautilus, although they were
more closely related to squid and oc-
topi. As DePalma uncovered more of
the shell, I watched its vibrant color
fade. “Live ammonite, ripped apart by
the tsunami—they don’t travel well,”
he said. “Genus Sphenodiscus, I would
think.” The shell, which hadn’t previ-
ously been documented in the Hell
Creek Formation, was another marine
victim tossed inland.
He stood up. “Now I’m going to
show you something special,” he said,
opening a wooden crate and remov-
ing an object that was covered in alu-
minum foil. He unwrapped a sixteen-
inch fossil feather, and held it in his
palms like a piece of Lalique glass.
“When I found the first feather, I had
about twenty seconds of disbelief,” he
said. DePalma had studied under Larry
Martin, a world authority on the Cre-
taceous predecessors of birds, and had
been “exposed to a lot of fossil feath-
ers. When I encountered this damn
thing, I immediately understood the
importance of it. And now look at this.”
From the lab table, he grabbed a
fossil forearm belonging to Dakotarap-
tor, the dinosaur species he’d discov-
ered in Hell Creek. He pointed to a
series of regular bumps on the bone.
“These are probably quill knobs,” he
said. “This dinosaur had feathers on
its forearms. Now watch.” With pre-
cision calipers, he measured the diam-
eter of the quill knobs, then the diam-
eter of the quill of the fossil feather;
both were 3.5 millimetres. “ This
matches,” he said. “This says a feather
of this size would be associated with a
limb of this size.”
There was more, including a piece
of a partly burned tree trunk with am-
ber stuck to it. He showed
me a photo of the amber
seen through a microscope.
Trapped inside were two
impact particles—another
landmark discovery, be-
cause the amber would
have preserved their chem-
ical composition. (All other
tektites found from the im-
pact, exposed to the ele-
ments for millions of years, have chem-
ically changed.) He’d also found scores
of beautiful examples of lonsdaleite,
a hexagonal form of diamond that is
associated with impacts; it forms when
carbon in an asteroid is compressed so
violently that it crystallizes into tril-
lions of microscopic grains, which are
blasted into the air and drift down.
Finally, he showed me a photograph
of a fossil jawbone; it belonged to the
mammal he’d found in the burrow. “This
is the jaw of Dougie,” he said. The bone
was big for a Cretaceous mammal—
three inches long—and almost com-
plete, with a tooth. After my visit to
Hell Creek, DePalma had removed the
animal’s burrow intact, still encased in
the block of sediment, and, with the
help of some women who worked as
cashiers at the Travel Center, in Bow-
man, hoisted it into the back of his truck.
He believes that the jaw belonged to
a marsupial that looked like a weasel.
Using the tooth, he could conduct a
stable-isotope study to find out what
the animal ate—“what the menu was
after the disaster,” he said. The rest of
the mammal remains in the burrow, to
be researched later.
DePalma listed some of the other
discoveries he’s made at the site: several
flooded ant nests, with drowned ants
still inside and some chambers packed
with microtektites; a possible wasp bur-
row; another mammal burrow, with
multiple tunnels and galleries; shark
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 63
teeth; the thigh bone of a large sea tur-
tle; at least three new fish species; a gi-
gantic ginkgo leaf and a plant that was
a relative of the banana; more than a
dozen new species of animals and plants;
and several other burrow types.
At the bottom of the deposit, in a
mixture of heavy gravel and tektites,
DePalma identified the broken teeth
and bones, including hatchling remains,
of almost every dinosaur group known
from Hell Creek, as well as pterosaur
remains, which had previously been
found only in layers far below the KT
boundary. He found, intact, an un-
hatched egg containing an embryo—a
fossil of immense research value. The
egg and the other remains suggested
that dinosaurs and major reptiles were
probably not staggering into extinc-
tion on that fateful day. In one fell
swoop, DePalma may have solved the
three-metre problem and filled in the
gap in the fossil record.
y the end of the 2013 field season,
B DePalma was convinced that the
site had been created by an impact
flood, but he lacked conclusive evi-
dence that it was the KT impact. It
was possible that it resulted from
another giant asteroid strike that oc-
curred at around the same time. “Ex-
traordinary discoveries require extra-
ordinary evidence,” he said. If his
tektites shared the same geochemis-
try as tektites from the Chicxulub as-
teroid, he’d have a strong case. Depos-
its of Chicxulub tektites are rare; the
best source, discovered in 1990, is a
small outcrop in Haiti, on a cliff above
a road cut. In late January, 2014, De-
Palma went there to gather tektites
and sent them to an independent lab
in Canada, along with tektites from
his own site; the samples were ana-
lyzed at the same time, with the same
equipment. The results indicated a
near-perfect geochemical match.
In the first few years after DePal-
ma’s discoveries, only a handful of sci-
entists knew about them. One was
David Burnham, DePalma’s thesis ad-
viser at Kansas, who estimates that
DePalma’s site will keep specialists
busy for at least half a century. “Rob-
ert’s got so much stuff that’s unheard
of,” Burnham told me. “Amber with
tektites embedded in it—holy cow!
64 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
The dinosaur feathers are crazy good,
but the burrow makes your head reel.”
In paleontology, the term Lagerstätte
refers to a rare type of fossil site with
a large variety of specimens that are
nearly perfectly preserved, a sort of
fossilized ecosystem. “It will be a fa-
mous site,” Burnham said. “It will be
in the textbooks. It is the Lagerstätte
of the KT extinction.”
Jan Smit, a paleontologist at Vrije
University, in Amsterdam, and a world
authority on the KT impact, has been
helping DePalma analyze his results,
and, like Burnham and Walter Alva-
rez, he is a co-author of a scientific
paper that DePalma is publishing about
the site. (There are eight other co-au-
thors.) “This is really a major discov-
ery,” Smit said. “It solves the question
of whether dinosaurs went extinct at
exactly that level or whether they de-
clined before. And this is the first time
we see direct victims.” I asked if the
results would be controversial. “When
I saw his data with the paddlefish, stur-
geon, and ammonite, I think he’s right
on the spot,” Smit said. “I am very sure
he has a pot of gold.”
In September of 2016, DePalma
gave a brief talk about the discovery
at the annual meeting of the Geolog-
ical Society of America, in Colorado.
He mentioned only that he had found
a deposit from a KT flood that had
yielded glass droplets, shocked min-
erals, and fossils. He had christened
the site Tanis, after the ancient city
in Egypt, which was featured in the
1981 film “Raiders of the Lost Ark”
as the resting place of the Ark of the
Covenant. In the real Tanis, archeol-
ogists found an inscription in three
writing systems, which, like the Ro-
setta stone, was crucial in translating
ancient Egyptian. DePalma hopes
that his Tanis site will help decipher
what happened on the first day after
the impact.
The talk, limited though it was,
caused a stir. Kirk Cochran, a profes-
sor at the School of Marine and At-
mospheric Science at Stony Brook
University, in New York, recalled that
when DePalma presented his findings
there were gasps of amazement in the
audience. Some scientists were wary.
Kirk Johnson, the director of the
Smithsonian’s National Museum of
Natural History, told me that he knew
the Hell Creek area well, having
worked there since 1981. “My warning
lights were flashing bright red,” he
told me. “I was so skeptical after the
talk I was convinced it was a fabrica-
tion.” Johnson, who had been map-
ping the KT layer in Hell Creek, said
that his research indicated that Tanis
was at least forty-five feet below the
KT boundary and perhaps a hundred
thousand years older. “If it’s what it’s
said to be,” Johnson said, “it’s a fabu-
lous discovery.” But he declared him-
self “uneasy” until he could see De-
Palma’s paper.
One prominent West Coast pale-
ontologist who is an authority on the
KT event told me, “I’m suspicious of
the findings. They’ve been presented
at meetings in various ways with var-
ious associated extraordinary claims.
He could have stumbled on some-
thing amazing, but he has a reputa-
tion for making a lot out of a little.”
As an example, he brought up De-
Palma’s paper on Dakotaraptor, which
he described as “bones he basically
collected, all in one area, some of
which were part of a dinosaur, some
of which were part of a turtle, and he
put it all together as a skeleton of one
animal.” He also objected to what he
felt was excessive secrecy surround-
ing the Tanis site, which has made it
hard for outside scientists to evaluate
DePalma’s claims.
Johnson, too, finds the lack of trans-
parency, and the dramatic aspects
of DePalma’s personality, unnerving.
“There’s an element of showmanship
in his presentation style that does not
add to his credibility,” he said. Other
paleontologists told me that they were
leery of going on the record with crit-
icisms of DePalma and his co-authors.
All expressed a desire to see the final
paper, which will be published this
week, in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, so that they could
evaluate the data for themselves.
fter the G.S.A. talk, DePalma re-
A alized that his theory of what had
happened at Tanis had a fundamental
problem. The KT tsunami, even mov-
ing at more than a hundred miles an
hour, would have taken many hours to
travel the two thousand miles to the
site. The rainfall of glass blobs, how-
ever, would have hit the area and stopped
within about an hour after the impact.
And yet the tektites fell into an active
flood. The timing was all wrong.
This was not a paleontological
question; it was a problem of geo-
physics and sedimentology. Smit was
a sedimentologist, and another re-
searcher whom DePalma shared his
data with, Mark Richards, now of the
University of Washington, was a geo-
physicist. At dinner one evening in
Nagpur, India, where they were at-
tending a conference, Smit and Rich-
ards talked about the problem, looked
up a few papers, and later jotted down
some rough calculations. It was im-
mediately apparent to them that the
KT tsunami would have arrived too
late to capture the falling tektites; the
wave would also have been too di- “I like this painting because it has a bench.”
minished by its long journey to ac-
count for the thirty-five-foot rise
of water at Tanis. One of them pro-
• •
posed that the wave might have been
created by a curious phenomenon or so. This fact, if true, renders the site than ferns. Furtive, ratlike mammals
known as a seiche. In large earth- even more fabulous than previously lived in the gloomy understory.
quakes, the shaking of the ground thought. It is almost beyond credibil- But eventually life emerged and blos-
sometimes causes water in ponds, ity that a precise geological transcript somed again, in new forms. The KT
swimming pools, and bathtubs to slosh of the most important sixty minutes of event continues to attract the interest
back and forth. Richards recalled that Earth’s history could still exist millions of scientists in no small part because
the 2011 Japanese earthquake pro- of years later—a sort of high-speed, the ashen print it left on the planet is
duced bizarre, five-foot seiche waves high-resolution video of the event re- an existential reminder. “We wouldn’t
in an absolutely calm Norwegian fjord corded in fine layers of stone. DePalma be here talking on the phone if that
thirty minutes after the quake, in a said, “It’s like finding the Holy Grail meteorite hadn’t fallen,” Smit told me,
place unreachable by the tsunami. clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy with a laugh. DePalma agreed. For the
Richards had previously estimated Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.” first hundred million years of their ex-
that the worldwide earthquake gener- If Tanis had been closer to or farther istence, before the asteroid struck, mam-
ated by the KT impact could have been from the impact point, this beautiful mals scurried about the feet of the di-
a thousand times stronger than the big- coincidence of timing could not have nosaurs, amounting to little. “But when
gest earthquake ever experienced in happened. “There’s nothing in the world the dinosaurs were gone it freed them,”
human history. Using that gauge, he that’s ever been seen like this,” Rich- DePalma said. In the next epoch, mam-
calculated that potent seismic waves ards told me. mals underwent an explosion of adap-
would have arrived at Tanis six min- tive radiation, evolving into a dazzling
utes, ten minutes, and thirteen minutes ne day sixty-six million years ago, variety of forms, from tiny bats to
after the impact. (Different types of
seismic waves travel at different speeds.)
O life on Earth almost came to a
shattering end. The world that emerged
gigantic titanotheres, from horses to
whales, from fearsome creodonts to
The brutal shaking would have been after the impact was a much simpler large-brained primates with hands that
enough to trigger a large seiche, and place. When sunlight finally broke could grasp and minds that could see
the first blobs of glass would have through the haze, it illuminated a hell- through time.
started to rain down seconds or min- ish landscape. The oceans were empty. “We can trace our origins back to
utes afterward. They would have con- The land was covered with drifting ash. that event,” DePalma said. “To actually
tinued to fall as the seiche waves rolled The forests were charred stumps. The be there at this site, to see it, to be con-
in and out, depositing layer upon layer cold gave way to extreme heat as a nected to that day, is a special thing.
of sediment and each time sealing the greenhouse effect kicked in. Life mostly This is the last day of the Cretaceous.
tektites in place. The Tanis site, in short, consisted of mats of algae and growths When you go one layer up—the very
did not span the first day of the im- of fungus: for years after the impact, next day—that’s the Paleocene, that’s
pact: it probably recorded the first hour the Earth was covered with little other the age of mammals, that’s our age.” 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 65
 FICTION

66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY RAPHAEL GREAVES

 he hour of our birth had been
T carefully forecast, a winter’s day
Cesarean timed to coincide with
Dr. Feng’s lunch break.The doctor pulled
me out first, indignant and squalling,
like a hotel guest roused and tossed
before checkout. Lulu came next, and
was so perfectly quiet that at first they
thought she wasn’t breathing at all. Then
they thwacked her on the back and her
cries joined mine and they laid us side
by side, boy and girl, two underwater
creatures suddenly forced to fill our lungs
with cold dry air.
Dr. Feng had operated on our mother
as a favor to our uncle, his old class-
mate. Otherwise we would have been
born in the hospital down the street,
where a woman had bled to death after
a botched Cesarean the previous year.
The family had been in the waiting
room for hours, and at last the father-
to-be pounded on the doors of the op-
erating room. When no one responded,
the family pushed them open to find
the lifeless woman on the table, blood
pooling on the ground. She was alone:
the staff had stripped the medical cer-
tificates that bore their names from the
wall and fled as soon as the surgery
went wrong.
From the start we were lucky, not
least because we had each other. As
twins we’d been spared the reach of the
government’s family-planning policies.
For the first few weeks of our life, our
skulls had matching indentations from
where they’d been pressed against each
other in the womb, like two interlock-
ing puzzle pieces. Later in life, when
we were apart, I used to touch my hand
to the back of my skull when I thought
of her, as if seeking a phantom limb.
We weren’t in any way an extraordi-
nary family. My mother worked as a
warehouse clerk, my father as a govern-
ment sanitation planner. When he was
forty-seven, his division chief—a fan-
ciful man who once dreamed of being
an artist—decided to build a public toi-
let in the shape of a European clock
tower. He’d been to Europe and had
been impressed by the cleanliness of
the toilets and the loveliness of the ar-
chitecture and wanted to combine the
two. Like most artists, the division chief
had a fragile ego, and shortly after my
father balked at the project’s expense
he was fired. It was the sole act of in-
dependence he’d committed in his life,
and it cost him his career.
From the time Lulu was ten, my par-
ents worshipped at her altar. Her pre-
cocity was evident early on; it was like
a flag being waved energetically from
a mountaintop. Neither of our parents
had much education, and it stunned
them to find themselves in possession
of such a daughter.
When we were small, we played de-
votedly together. Lulu was a great in-
ventor of games, which often incorpo-
rated whatever she’d read most recently:
one day we were stinkbugs looking for
the right leaf on which to lay our eggs;
another we were herdsmen fleeing Mon-
golian invaders. She was braver than
me; once, she even snuck into the apart-
ment of the elderly woman who lived
opposite us and had left her door ajar
while retrieving the mail downstairs.
“It’s full of newspapers, stacked as
high as your head,” Lulu said excitedly,
eyes glowing as she dashed back to our
apartment. “There’s a giant orange cross-
stitch on the couch, with a peony and
six fishes.”
As a child she was always reading:
even at meals she would sit and scan
the back of the juice box. She must have
read it a million times, aspartame and
xanthan gum and red No. 9. It wasn’t a
conscious thing—she just seemed to
feel uncomfortable when her eyes weren’t
fastened to a page. She had a mania for
lists, too. By eleven she’d memorized
every bone in the human body, and she
used to recite their names to me at night
in an eerie voice as I held a pillow over
my head: sternum, tibia, floating rib.
In high school, I rebelled against her
brilliance by playing video games, lots
of them, spending hours whipping a
gun back and forth across dusty land-
scapes empty of people, except for those
who wanted to kill you. Usually there
were six or seven of us at my friend
Xingjian’s apartment, and we would
take turns and cheer one another on.
We were an army, invincible, or if we
weren’t invincible we could hit Replay
at any time, which was pretty close to
the same thing.
Lulu, meanwhile, was a model among
model students. She studied so intensely
that it left her physically bowed and ex-
hausted, like an athlete running a daily
marathon, and at night she dropped off
to sleep without a word. My mother fed
her stewed mushrooms that looked like
tiny brains when their stems fell off—
they would be good for Lulu’s studies,
she said. She gave me some as well,
though by then it was plain that any
hopes for academic glory resided with
her daughter, not her son, the construc-
tive effects of mushrooms be damned.
When we sat for the college-entrance
exam, it surprised no one that Lulu scored
high enough to earn a place at a univer-
sity in the nation’s capital, a bus and a
train and a plane ride away. My mother
wept with what she said was happiness.
“A scholar,” she kept saying. “A scholar.”
She and my father, she liked to remind
us, hadn’t studied long before going to
work in the factories.
“We are so proud,” my father told
Lulu. There was an intensity to his ex-
pression that unnerved me. One of our
schoolbooks had a black-and-white il-
lustration of a long-ago eunuch serving
a feast, staring hungrily at the food on
the emperor’s table, and there was some-
thing of that look on my father’s face.
The night Lulu left was overcast,
the twilight that preceded it a peculiar
mixture of orange and ochre. Earlier
that day, my father had given her a gift:
her very own laptop. It was thick with
promise, like a fat slice of cake, sheathed
in blue plastic. It wasn’t like the old
computer that we all shared, which stut-
tered and stalled, its keys sticky with
grease and crumbs and bits of hair. This
one had keys that yielded obediently
when you touched them. I’d stared at
it enviously, too filled with longing for
words. “Don’t worry, you’ll get one, too,
when you leave, the exact same,” my
father said.
At the airport, our parents assumed
expressions appropriate for refugees
being abandoned at a border. “Lulu, be
good,” my father said. I stood there awk-
wardly, a little resentfully. Lulu turned
and flashed a peace sign as she went
through security, and we watched her
pink hoodie and striped zebra base-
ball hat retreat into the crowd until
she was gone.
departed for college a week later, with
I considerably less fanfare. The school
was just an hour’s drive away and had
an empty feel to it, as though it had
been erected with much ambition years
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 67
ago and then forgotten. In the winter
the dorms were freezing, as if their con-
crete walls held in all the damp, cold air
and kept it close to your skin.
The best thing about college, I de-
cided, was that the dorms were wired
for the Internet. There were five other
boys in our room on the second floor,
sharing rickety metal bunk beds draped
with mosquito nets, which afforded both
a thin sense of privacy and protection
from bites in the summer. At night,
when we sat in front of our computers,
you could hear the same tinny chirping
of chat alerts all around you, emanat-
ing from the floorboards, the ceilings,
and the walls, as though hordes of in-
visible, electronic crickets had stormed
the building.
I wasn’t old enough to miss Lulu.
Anyway, I could see her chat statuses
whenever I logged in on my new lap-
top, smooth and shiny and housed in
a blue plastic sleeve just like my sis-
ter’s. Studying, they might say. Going to
class. At some point they got more fan-
ciful. Floating down the green river, one
read. Digging into a stone with no edges.
Sometimes, bored while waiting for my
gamer teammates to log on, I looked
them up. A few belonged to old poets,
but the rest, I suspected, she was in-
venting herself.
I died repeatedly that semester, but
amassed several hundred gold coins and
was made first a warlock, then a mage.
The other boys in my dorm were ad-
dicts, too, and we played fiercely into
the evening, cussing, headphones on,
until midnight, when the power was cut.
Classes were a negligible affair: what
mattered was your grade on the final
exams, and those could readily be
crammed for by memorizing ten or fifteen
pages of mimeographed notes sold by
upperclassmen. Honestly, I had no idea
who actually went to class: I pictured
teachers sitting with their laptops in front
of empty rooms, one eye on the clock,
maybe playing video games of their own,
maybe taking a nap.
In our second year of school, I
searched idly for one of Lulu’s statuses
and found just one result: a public mi-
croblog with a profile photo featuring
a yawning yellow cat. There were sev-
eral dozen posts, mostly the same kinds
of snippets of poetry that Lulu had
been posting to her statuses, and by the
68 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
FRENCH NOVEL
You were my second lover.
You had dark eyes and hair,
like a painting of a man.
We lay on our stomachs reading books in your bed.
I e-mailed my professor. I will be absent
from French Novel due to sickness. You put on
some piano music. Even though
it was winter, we had to keep
the window open day and night, the room was so hot, the air so dry
it made our noses bleed.
With boots we trekked through slush for a bottle of red wine
we weren’t allowed to buy, our shirts unbuttoned
under our winter coats.
The French language distinguishes
between the second
of two and the second
of many. Of course
we’d have other lovers. Snow fell in our hair.
You were my second lover.
Another way of saying this:
you were the other,
not another.
—Richie Hofmann
time I finished scrolling through them near the campus entrance. The place
I was sure the account was hers. For called itself Pretty O.J.; its sign adver-
the bio she’d written qiushi, a reference tised Italian noodles. I’d walked by doz-
to the old Communist maxim “to seek ens of times and never gone in. Inside,
truth from facts,” but the name of her the tables were topped with glass and
account was qiu zhushi, “to seek carbo- the seats were an uncomfortable white
hydrates,” which made me laugh. You wicker that crackled when you shifted
wouldn’t have suspected it to look at and there were white vases to match,
her, but Lulu was a glutton—she could filled with plastic flowers. Lulu took
eat reams of noodles or fried crullers hold of the menu and confidently or-
without missing a beat. dered a pizza and tomato pasta for us
One day in the dorm, I answered a as though she’d done it many times be-
knock at our door to find a classmate fore. “With coffee, please,” she added,
grinning at me. “Your sister’s here,” “and bring us some bread.”
he said. I gaped and went downstairs. I stared at her. “You look happy,” I
There she was, wearing an old-fash- said. She was. She was debating at a col-
ioned padded blue coat, the kind com- lege an hour’s drive south, she said, and
mon in the fifties. Lulu had her hair had taken a bus to come and see me. I
in two braids, carried a knapsack slung asked her if our parents knew, if she was
over one shoulder, and was smiling. planning to see them as well.
She’d joined the college debate club, “No,” she said, smiling. “We fly back
she said, and they were travelling for a tomorrow night, but I wanted to see you.”
competition. “Big Brother,” she said— Beside her I felt very young in my
it was an old joke of hers, since I was rubber slippers and T-shirt and shorts.
born only a minute or so before her— She asked me about my classes and my
“want to buy me dinner?” friends. I told her that I was watching a
I suggested the cafeteria. She said lot of television on my laptop and play-
she had something nicer in mind, and ing even more video games. Lately, I’d
took me by the arm to a coffee shop been playing with a team of Russian
teen-agers who were pretty good. We
didn’t speak the same language, so we
communicated in a kind of pidgin En-
glish: don’t worry guys I got phantom prin-
cess no no no, you NOOB, dafuq.
“I know you think it’s a waste of
time,” I said.
“A lot of kids play it at my school,
too,” she said, not contradicting me.
“It’s a profession now, you know,” I
said. “They have competitions, you can
win big prize money.”
It embarrasses me now to realize
that, up until that point, we’d spent the
whole evening talking about my life. I
don’t think I asked her anything about
her own, and it was only at the end of
our dinner that she volunteered a few
facts. She was pregnant, she said, two
months along, and very much in love
with the baby’s father.
I choked on the coffee. Lulu waited
for me to compose myself, and then
she told me the rest of the story. The
father, an upperclassman studying ac-
counting, was from a poor county in
the northeast. No, they weren’t keep-
ing the baby, though she and Zhang-
wei would likely get pregnant again in
a few years, “after we’re married,” Lulu
said, with a calm matter-of-factness
that astounded me. Someday, the two
of them hoped to travel abroad.
She told me more about him, choos-
ing her words carefully. “He’s not like
other people,” she said at last. “He’s
very noble.” It was a strange word, an
old-fashioned word. I just stared at her.
“You’re sure about all this, Lulu?”
“I’m sure.”
I envied her for a moment, sitting
there looking so certain. When had I
ever been sure of anything? For Lulu,
everything had always come so easily
and confidently: homework, answers
on tests, college, and now, it seemed,
love as well.
When the bill arrived, I didn’t have
enough money with me, so she paid.
“Thanks, Big Brother,” she said when
we left, and at first I thought she was
being sarcastic, but she looked glad
when she said it. “I haven’t told any-
one else,” she confessed as we walked
out into the blue twilight, the boxy
concrete façades of the campus around
us. “I knew I could trust you.”
This was the first time it had oc-
curred to me that I was trustworthy,
and it was a relief to hear that I had
been evaluated and not found want-
ing. “Of course,” I said.
n the following months, I checked
I her account more often. I got flashes
of insight into her life that way: pho-
tos of the yellow shocks of forsythia
that blossomed in the spring, more odd
bits of poetry. I pictured her tapping
away at her identical, blue-sheathed
laptop across the country, clicking Send.
That fall, she started posting daily
about someone named Xu Lei. It was
a name that even I’d heard by then,
enough people were talking about him.
He was a college student who’d been
picked up by the police outside a kar-
aoke joint, and been beaten, and died
while in custody. Photos of him before
his death had circulated online: skinny
legs in shorts, glasses, a purple T-shirt
that read “Let’s Go.” He and his friends
had been standing outside after sing-
ing karaoke, a little drunk, and when
the police told them to move along
Xu Lei got caustic and the officers
took offense. His friends had filmed
them beating him and then loading
him into a police van. As quickly as
censors took down the footage, it was
uploaded again.
Mostly, Lulu was just sharing other
people’s messages, adding her own hash-
tag #justiceforXuLei or an indignant
frowning face. At some point, she added
her own commentary: “This country,
these police, are simply too dark.”
When the police autopsy came out,
it found that Xu Lei had died of a heart
attack. The conclusion was promptly
met with scorn—he was only eighteen.
The coroner’s report said that, prior to
his death, he’d been working hard and
not sleeping well. “It was a young per-
son’s heart attack,” it concluded, a phrase
that quickly trended online until cen-
sors snuffed it out. Lulu was not im-
pressed. “I have studied hard all my life
and I don’t sleep well,” she wrote. “Will
I, too, be made to have a heart attack?”
After that, Lulu’s account became
more active. At first she was just re-
posting news from other accounts: the
tainted-formula scandal that killed three
babies, the college-admissions admin-
istrator found to be taking cash bribes—
the kinds of things we all knew and
groused about.
A few months after that, though,
she began to flood her account with
images and videos that were genuinely
surprising. I had no idea where she was
getting them. They were of scattered
street protests from around the coun-
try, some just stills, others clips of per-
haps a few seconds, rarely more than
a minute long. Hubei, Luzhou city, Tian-
bei county, Mengshan village: 10 villag-
ers protest outside government offices over
death of local woman, one might say. Or:
Shandong, Caiyang city, Taining county,
Huaqi village: 500 workers strike for three
days, protesting over unpaid wages.
There were dozens of these posts,
and they usually looked similar: police
in pale-blue shirts, lots of shouting,
crowds massing in the streets, occa-
sionally someone on the ground being
beaten. In one video, several men were
attempting to tip over a police van.
In another, a group of villagers were
shouting as something that looked
horribly like a human figure smoldered
on the ground.
They were like dispatches from a
country I had never seen, and they dis-
turbed and confused me.
After seeing the video of the self-
immolation, I messaged her. Are you
O.K.? I asked. The reply came a few
hours later: Hi Big Brother! I’m doing fine.
Are you in Beijing?
Of course I’m in Beijing.
I stared at the blinking cursor. I’d
never told her that I knew her iden-
tity online, and I worried that if I said
something she’d see me as somehow
untrustworthy, as though I’d been spy-
ing on her.
Beijing must be very cold now, I wrote
at last. Make sure you wear warm clothes.
hat February, we both went home
T to see our parents and to celebrate
the Spring Festival. I took charge of
the dumplings, chopping the fennel
and leeks, cracking an egg and swirl-
ing it about with gusto. I was happy.
The week before, our team had entered
a local competition and had won a
month’s supply of instant noodles and
certain bragging rights. Replay, replay:
my hands knew the commands so in-
stinctively that sometimes I’d wake in
the dark with fingers twitching.
Lulu, though, seemed only partly
present: often you had to call her name
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 69

“We really need to get laundry in our building.”
• •
twice to get a response. Sometimes I’d
get up to use the bathroom in the mid-
dle of the night and see a glow in the
living room, which meant she was awake
and online.
One night we gathered around the
television to watch the Spring Festival
gala. It was an annual tradition put on
by the state broadcaster: cheesy skits,
patriotic odes, terrible slapstick—the
whole country watched. I excused my-
self and logged on to check Lulu’s ac-
count. The most recent post was from
that evening, just before we sat down to
dinner. It was a line of text in quotation
marks: “If you want to understand your
own country, then you’ve already stepped
on the path to criminality,” it read. And
then: “Happy Spring Festival, comrades!”
A shiver ran through me. I logged
out and walked back into the living room.
Our parents sat on the couch, with Lulu
on a stool beside them, their faces pal-
lid in the television’s flickering light as
I joined them, stealing glances at this
strange person, my twin sister.
70 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
The next day, the two of us went
out to buy some ingredients for my
mother: flour, fermented bean paste,
ground pork. It felt strange to walk the
half mile to the supermarket together,
the first time we’d been alone since she
visited me at college.
On the way, we passed a park where
we used to play as children, and we
could hear the sound of children there
now. It was sunny, and the warmth
lulled my skin.
“Where did that quote come from?”
I said. “The one from last night.”
She kept walking. “What do you
mean?”
“I’ve been reading your account.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking
about.”
“Come on, Lulu.” I stopped walk-
ing. “I’m worried about you.”
She stopped a few feet ahead of me
and stood there, not looking at me,
arms crossed. “How did you know?”
I explained about the poetry. “Do
other people know it’s you?”
She shrugged. “A professor. Some
other students.” When I pressed her,
she said reluctantly that a classmate
had reported her to the department
head, and that one of her professors
had taken her aside and gently warned
her that she should stop her activities
online, lest it “influence” her future.
“They’re right, you know,” I said.
“Don’t you worry about how this might
affect you?” One of the videos she’d
posted, I remembered, showed a woman
kneeling on the ground and wailing,
“The government are traitors! The gov-
ernment doesn’t serve the people!”
Lulu just stood there, staring at the
little shopping complex opposite us as
if she were trying to memorize it. There
was a bilious-orange fast-food restau-
rant, three test-prep centers, and two
real-estate agents’ offices.
“Or our parents?” I said. They’d both
retired by now, but each had a modest
pension that I imagined could be taken
away, and, anyway, the ruining of Lu-
lu’s prospects would be the greatest loss
of all. When I thought of having to sup-
port them on my own in their old age,
my stomach creaked unhappily.
She nodded. “Of course,” she said,
finally. “I’m not stupid.”
“So you’ll stop, then?”
She looked at me for a moment, a
little dreamily. “Did you know that in
the Song dynasty it was illegal to throw
away any pieces of paper with writing
on them?” she said. “People had to go
to certain temples with sacred fires set
up where they could burn them in-
stead. That’s how much they revered
the written word.”
I wanted to shake her, but I didn’t.
“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
She started walking again.
“Where are you getting all this stuff?”
I asked. She unbent slightly and ex-
plained that she had downloaded a tool
that unblocked overseas Web sites. “It’s
not hard,” she said. “But things get de-
leted quickly, so I have to keep repost-
ing them.”
“I had no idea these kinds of things
went on,” she added, soberly. “We were
lucky.”
“We weren’t rich.”
“Dad worked for the government.
We were comfortable.”
Of course we were, I told her, but
so were lots of people, and it didn’t
mean that she had to expose herself
to trouble.
“It’s better than just playing video
games all day,” she shot back, sud-
denly angry with me. “What’s the point
of that?”
I stuck my hands in my pockets and
shrugged, taking a few extra breaths to
calm myself. It was strange to see Lulu
angry; she was usually so even-keeled.
“Fair enough,” I said. We kept walk-
ing, not looking at each other. Inside
the supermarket we parted, as though
with relief.
ack on campus, spring brought
B translucent white buds to the trees,
like the tiny cores of onions. Lulu had
stopped posting, I was pleased to see.
I began working part time at a restau-
rant downtown that served large, ex-
pensive banquets, helping to prepare
plates of cold chopped meats and glassy
collagen and frilly slices of cucumber
dolled up to look like miniature pea-
cocks. There was a rhythm and a rep-
etition to the work that I liked, a sense
of contentment in washing up at the
night’s end and putting things back
where they belonged.
One day in May, just before grad-
uation, I checked back in on my sis-
ter’s account. Lulu had stopped updat-
ing her chat status; for several weeks,
it had read simply “out,” and I’d grown
worried.
It was as it had been before: she’d
gone back to posting frenetically, as
though she’d lost control—in one day
alone she had posted forty-three times.
There were the same postcards of pro-
tests around the country, the videos
and photographs she’d been sharing
before, and a lot of simple text posts,
too, one after another. 3:34am: if this
country were a vegetable it would be
a rotten, bitter melon. 3:36am: I am the
daughter of a government sanitation
worker. I know the smell of s---. 3:37am:
I’m sorry, friends, just a little tired today
after so many posts. There are many beau-
tiful things, too, in this life. And then
she’d shared a series of pictures of small
goats leaping in the air, tiny hoofs aloft
against green grass. 3:41am: O.K., I am
sufficiently soothed to go to sleep. Good
night comrades, until tomorrow.
The posts went on and on—thou-
sands of them had accumulated in
the time since I’d stopped checking. I
scrolled through them with a mount-
ing sense of horror, and then paged
back up and felt my stomach flip: some-
how she’d amassed eight hundred thou-
sand followers.
I messaged her frantically, fingers
scrabbling at the keys. Goats?
A few hours later, she answered me.
Did you like them?
They’re O.K. Overcoming depression
I’m sorry, Big Brother. I couldn’t stop.
I sat and watched the cursor blink,
and anxiety is no joke.
like a slow pulse. But it is possible.
A lot of people are paying attention to
you. I couldn’t tell if I should be proud
of her, worried for her, or angry with
her. I supposed I was all three.
Let us show you why
94% of our patients
Yes, they are. Another long silence. would recommend
Don’t be upset, Big Brother. I just felt McLean to a loved one.
this was something I had to do. Don’t
you agree?
I’m working now, I wrote her, hop- 844.355.5140
ing she could sense my anger. Running
late, got to go.
After she graduated, Lulu moved
in with her boyfriend, Zhangwei, in Ranked #1 by
U.S. News & World Report
Beijing. She started her own anony-
mous Web site, a constant stream of
news about protests and human-rights
abuses around the country. There was
the story of a woman, beaten to death
by police, whose daughter had paid to
keep her body frozen in a morgue for
six years, unwilling to inter the evi-
dence. There was the story of the vil-
mclean.org
lage where officials had torn down an
elderly grandmother’s home in the
middle of the night to make way for
a shopping mall; she’d been given no
warning and had died in her bed as
the roof collapsed around her. Each
post carried its own mordant title:
ADVERTISEMENT
“The Mother Popsicle,” “The Frus-
trated Sleeper.”
They came for her one night, to the WHAT’S THE
third-floor apartment that she and
Zhangwei were renting. They burst in BIG IDEA?
through the door without warning and
informed her, politely, that she should Small space
go with them. “The landlord must has big rewards.
have given them the key,” she told me
later, stunned. It was that particular
detail, oddly, that seemed to haunt her. To find out more, contact
It was midnight when Lulu called NATALIE STROBL
me from the police van to say that she at
was being taken away. “Tell our par- 305.520.5158.
ents,” she said. “Please. I’m sorry.” Her
voice broke, and I barely recognized
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 71
her. She sounded like a child in a bliz-
zard who’d lost her scarf. It was easier
to think of that than to think of the
alternative: Lulu, cuffed into a van and
taken away by four men who sneered
at her for being unmarried and living
with her boyfriend, for trying to stir
up trouble, for spreading rumors—
a crime punishable by seven years’
imprisonment.
When they began interrogating
her, it was worse. “Did you go to any
of these places?” they kept asking. “Did
you confirm any of these things your-
self before spreading these rumors
online?”
No, Lulu said. No.
“So you didn’t know if they were
true, then.”
Later, they laid her on the ground
and kicked and beat her. They didn’t
fracture any bones, but I pictured her
bones anyway, each individually ab-
sorbing every blow. Lulu would have
known them all by heart: sternum, tibia,
floating rib.
I called my mother, who on receiv-
ing the news, still half-asleep, went
blank. “You must be mistaken,” she
told me sharply. “Let me call Lulu to
straighten things out.” It was an old
reflex of hers, this instinct to turn to
her daughter. “You can call, she won’t
answer,” I said, but she’d already hung
up. When I called back, my father took
in the news helplessly, as though he’d
been expecting it. I tried to explain the
kinds of things she’d been writing, but
he cut me off. “Lulu is my daughter. I
can imagine,” he said. There was a par-
ticular heaviness in his voice that sur-
prised me, and it made me think that
maybe he’d known her better than the
rest of us.
Lulu was freed after six days, and
went back to her apartment to conva-
lesce. We flew to Beijing the next day
to see her. It was the first time I had
been in her apartment, whose living-
room wall bore a giant decal from the
previous tenant, featuring silver and
pink trees and a striped pink kitten.
You are my happy surprise friends are
better in autumn, it read. Lulu’s skin
looked yellow and darkly bruised, and
there was a dart of something red in
her right eye that peeked out when she
looked in certain directions.
“I’m all right,” she said. She seemed
acutely embarrassed to see us. They’d
only wanted her to stop what she was
doing, she said. She’d been a good stu-
dent, one of the best in her class—she
didn’t have to ruin it all. It was a mis-
understanding, she told us. They’d let
her go, after all.
It seemed that she wanted us to go,
too. We stayed for a week, our mother
fussing in their tiny kitchen, preparing
large meals of things sliced and intri-
cately diced and cooked over a high
flame. “I’m O.K.,” Lulu said, until we
stopped asking.
ack at home, Lulu started chatting
B me late at night, at odd hours. I was
usually awake anyway: after graduat-
ing, I’d moved back home to work in
the kitchen of a local hotel. I spent my
days chopping and rinsing, bleary-eyed,
and my nights with teammates, locked
in online combat. There was something
that intensified in her messages during
those months. She wanted to know how
our parents were, if it was raining, if
I’d eaten yet. She wondered if she could
sue the police who’d beaten her; she’d
been having stomach pains ever since.
She wanted to know if I remembered
the story of the mother who had died
in the hospital down the street from us
before we were born. She wondered if
there was any way to locate the dead
mother’s child today—it would be about
our age by now.
After that, the posts on her site started
up again, thick and fast. I watched with
a sinking heart, trying to distract her.
When are you and Zhangwei getting mar-
ried ? I tried. Didn’t you want to have a
baby? Soon, she said. Maybe.
When the police came and took her
away again, she was prepared; she got
up quietly from the couch and went
with them without a word, leaving her
keys behind. This time, when they al-
lowed her access to a phone, she called
a lawyer, not me. The police raided the
apartment, taking her computer, the
blue-sleeved laptop my parents had
given her. They also left behind a no-
tice saying that she was formally being
arrested and charged.
At the trial, Lulu wore an orange
jumpsuit and her hair had been shorn
so short that she was barely recogniz-
able. She stared straight ahead at the
prosecutors, never once looking out at
the audience. We’d flown out for the

occasion—we hadn’t seen her for six
months. She was given a sentence of
three years, then jerked away through
a door at the opposite end of the court-
room, and that was all.
On the plane, my mother wept all
the way home. “What more did she
want?” she kept saying.
To her left, my father hushed her.
“There’s nothing we can do now,” he
said. The thought, strangely, appeared
to console him.
Back at home no one seemed to
know that anything had happened to
my sister, and no one asked, either. It
was as if a great white blanket of snow
had descended, softly muffling every-
thing in its path.
Time passed, and eventually I was
made a sous-chef at the hotel, with a
modest raise and a new, slightly taller
paper hat. When I felt restless or agi-
tated, which was often, I’d log on and
join my teammates online.
One night I brought my girlfriend
home for the first time. I’d met her
the month before on the lowest base-
ment floor of a warrened-out block
devoted to the sale of electronics: a
fluorescent-lit maze of close-set tiny
booths selling secondhand phones, cases,
speakers, and power banks. Her name
was Mao Xin, and she was one of the
few girls working behind the counters
there. She could tell you the difference
between 100 Wh and 161 Wh, could
quote the price per gigabyte of differ-
ent models.
As it turned out, she’d grown up rid-
ing the same bus route as I had, and
in a city as big as ours that was enough
to feel like fate. We liked to imagine
that we had seen each other on the bus
as children, stiffly bundled in the win-
ter or swinging our legs impatiently in
the summer, had maybe even clung to
the same pole.
Over dinner that night, as we sat
and slurped potatoes stewed with gin-
ger and pork, my mother quizzed Mao
Xin. I could see that she wanted to like
her, had observed the way she’d helped
chop the garlic and cut the yellowing
tips off the chives. Mao Xin exuded a
kind of benevolent competence that
soothed everyone, even my mother,
who had grown jittery since Lulu’s trial,
prone to repeat herself, easily annoyed.
As we talked, I could see Mao Xin’s
sullivan + associates
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curious eyes flicking around, eventu-
ally landing on a photo of Lulu atop a
bookshelf across the room, high enough
that you needed to squint to really see
martha’s vineyard
it. “Who’s that?”
“It’s his sister,” my father said. The
photo had been taken the day she had
won our district’s top score for math THE REVELRY DINING TABLE
in the college-entrance exam. In it she
was grinning maniacally at my father
behind the camera, a little out of focus.
“I didn’t know you had a sister,” she
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“Where is she?”
“She’s in the northeast, preparing to
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“I’m so sorry.” When she was growing
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there that month, which felt like a sort
of wedding gift. We served big platters
of cold, jellied meats and swans made
of mashed-up radish, with carrot beaks
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As the banquet wound down, my
father, unnatural in a rented tuxedo,
began coughing violently. When he
didn’t stop, Zhangwei signalled to one
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“Drink up,” Lulu said. He drained
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 73
the glass, almost angrily, it seemed.
The coughs sputtered, subsided. “You’re
O.K.?” she said.
He had been drinking, his face was
flushed, and his eyes focussed suddenly
on her, as though surprised that she
was there. “Do you think what you’ve
done is meaningful?” he said.
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“You didn’t even know these peo-
ple,” he said. “Whatever
their problems might have
been, they had no relation
to you.”
Lulu looked down at
her plate, seeming not to
hear. She’d grown adept
at that while in prison, or
maybe she’d always had
that skill: how to sort the
world into clear catego-
ries, what she thought was
worth paying attention to and what
wasn’t. I was in the latter category now.
She’d nod at me occasionally and re-
spond when spoken to, but that was
all. I tried not to let it upset me.
His face was getting redder—none
of us had ever seen him like that
before. “Dad, let’s just leave it,” I said.
Guests at nearby tables had stopped
their conversations, craning to hear.
“It’s no use.”
“You are our daughter,” he said
fiercely, ignoring me. “Everything we
could, we did for you. You were all our
worries, all our hopes.”
He was coughing again, small man-
gled noises sticking in his throat. Lulu’s
expression softened. “Dad, drink more
water. It sounds like you’re really sick.”
He ignored her, setting the glass
down in the same ring of condensa-
tion. He was suddenly an old man, or
maybe I’d only just noticed. “Do you
think I had your chances in life?” he
said. “Do you know what I could have
done if I had them?”
It was hard to believe that the two
of them were fighting; it was something
I hadn’t seen before. Our mother and
I looked at each other, then looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Lulu said quietly.
“You want to help people, Lulu, but
don’t deceive yourself,” he said. “All you’ve
done is hurt yourself, hurt your family.”
My mother laid a hand on his and
stilled him with a look. Zhangwei stood
up, as though to end the discussion. It
74 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
made you aware of what a tall, fine-
looking man he was, stiff black hair
that stood up in a dense thatch, thin
lenses highlighting his watchful brown
eyes. “I think Lulu had better get some
rest now,” he said to my parents. There
was nothing impolite about his tone,
but there was a finality to it that re-
minded us all of his solidity, his deter-
mination to protect my sister, and I
liked him the better for it.
“Don’t worry,” he told
me as he ushered her out-
side, away from the noise
and the lights of the wed-
ding party. “I’ll take care
of her.”
She hadn’t been treated
badly in prison, she’d said
when we were all first gath-
ered again in our parents’
living room. There had
been a female guard she suspected of
having a crush on her, who used to
smuggle her packets of instant noodles
and an occasional stick of gum. During
the day they’d worked on a manufac-
turing line, assembling Christmas lights.
At night they’d watched the evening
news and whatever sports match was
being televised. But she’d missed the
sunlight, she said. She’d missed Zhang-
wei, missed us.
“Thank you for your letters,” she
said to me, and I looked at the floor,
away from our parents. “It was no prob-
lem,” I muttered, embarrassed for them.
It hadn’t occurred to me that they hadn’t
been writing regularly as well.
Lulu changed the subject. “So you’re
playing in the Shanghai invitational?
That’s really wonderful.”
It was: after playing together for six
years, my team had finally qualified. Out
of four teammates, I’d only ever met
one in person before. I thanked Lulu.
“Is there prize money?” she asked.
I told her yes, a little.
“Excellent,” she said, grinning.
Our parents were very quiet. I sus-
pected that they wanted an apology, and
also that it wasn’t forthcoming. When
Lulu said that she and Zhangwei were
planning to move nearby, our mother
froze, as though she’d been handed a
cracked egg and didn’t know what to
do with it.
“He thinks it’ll be good for me to
be closer to home,” Lulu said, breaking
the silence. “At least while I get used
to a normal life again.”
“What can you do out here?” my
mother asked stiffly. “Can you find work?”
Lulu tossed her head, and a flash
of her old arrogance flared in her. “Yes,
Mother. I was the top-scoring stu-
dent in our year for math, don’t you
remember?”
“Maybe Mao Xin could help her
get a job,” my mother said. It wasn’t a
tactful remark, but then my mother
loved Mao Xin, had come to rely on
her in a way that reminded me of her
relationship with Lulu before she went
to college.
“Sure,” I said, with an apologetic
glance at Lulu. “Anyway, that’s great
news. We’ll have to celebrate.”
She smiled at me, a little sadly.
“Thanks, Big Brother.”
Eventually she found work hand-
ing out tea samples at the mall, a chain
store with neon-green hills in its sign.
It was an easy job, and the boss didn’t
ask questions about her past. In the
meantime, she was learning a lot about
tea, she said, about the oxidation pro-
cess, about the proper way to steep
different varieties.
“Wow, they really train you over
there,” our father said. In the weeks
since her release, he had become a
champion government booster, missing
no opportunity to point out to Lulu
how nicely the roads had been paved
since she’d left, how grand the malls
were that had been built. “There are so
many opportunities for young people
now,” he said. It was a new tic of his,
and it grated. Earlier that day, as we
strolled the neighborhood, he’d taken
the chance to point out a set of recently
upgraded public toilets across the way.
“They even installed a little room where
the sanitation workers can rest,” he said.
“It has heating and everything. You see
what good care they take of all the
workers now?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Anyway, it’s temporary,” Lulu said
of her job, and that, of course, was what
scared us most of all.
I could see that she was planning
something. Once, when she was using
my laptop, I saw over her shoulder that
she had a document open, titled “An
Open Letter to the National People’s
Congress.” When she got up to use the
bathroom, I scrolled hastily through
the text, seeing a list of half a dozen
names signed, her own and those of a
few lawyers and professors—no one I’d
ever heard of. I didn’t say anything to
her, but later that afternoon I pulled
Zhangwei aside and told him what I’d
found. He nodded.
“I know,” he said. “Your sister doesn’t
change.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I
bristled a little anyway. “She wasn’t like
this when she was younger,” I said.
“Of course not, she was too young
then.”
“You don’t know what she was like.”
“O.K.,” he said patiently, his eyes
on the door behind me, waiting to
see if Lulu would walk in. He was al-
ways mentally tracking her location,
the world’s most devoted bloodhound.
“I mean that. She was smart. She was
probably the smartest in our school.”
“And you think she isn’t smart
anymore?”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said,
but Zhangwei was already flicking the
ash from his cigarette and walking away,
disappointed in me.
flew to Shanghai for the mid-season
I invitational alone, shrugging off Mao
Xin’s offer to accompany me, but when
I arrived I immediately wished she were
there, just to see the spectacle. The
games took place in a stadium down-
town, the floor lit up with strips of red
and blue L.E.D. lights. The stadium
was packed, and as we played in pad-
ded seats onstage, headsets on, the crowd
waved red and blue glow sticks.
We won two rounds, and went on
to trounce the South Korean team in
the third. In the background, the crowd
was moaning, the sounds mingling with
the noise of my own blood as we clicked
frantically, sending out great gusts of
orange fire. “Never give up! Never say
die!” the crowd chanted.
When the games were over, the
flashing scoreboard had us in third
place. The cameras flocked to the floor,
descending on us like black hooded
birds. We gave sheepish smiles and said
how proud we were, how we’d be back
next year to win for sure. Somehow we
were ushered onto a podium, beside
the other winning teams. They handed
us a trophy as silver confetti rained
down, great clouds of delicate parallel-
ograms. When I watched the video
later, it looked as if we were standing
The New Yorker
in a hail of razor blades. We hoisted Crossword Puzzle
the trophy into the air, all five of us. It
wavered and nearly tipped, but the tall-
est among us righted it and we let it
hover there, admiring it.
Four months later, Lulu went back
to prison, this time on charges of try-
ing to subvert state power, after she
and others had circulated an online pe-
tition calling for all government spend-
ing to be made transparent. This time
the prison was not so nice, and the judge
gave her a ten-year sentence. The last
time I saw her, she had lost fifteen
pounds and looked shrunken, the same
size she’d been in high school.
A few years after she was jailed,
Zhangwei moved back to his home
town to be closer to his parents and got
married to someone else. He wrote us
a letter apologizing. I threw it away
after seeing the return address, but Mao
Xin fished it out of the trash and in-
sisted that I read it. “Your sister is a truly
rare person, and it is with the greatest
sadness that I have to move on,” he’d
written. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help her
more.” I stood there for a minute, ad-
miring his penmanship, which I’d never
seen before. It was elegant, balanced—
almost noble, I observed, before toss-
ing the letter out again.
After the Shanghai invitational, our
team started competing heavily on the
1. Stack for a publisher’s
domestic circuit, winning actual prize
pools now and again. With Mao Xin’s
assistant.
encouragement, I cut back my hours 2. Dulce et
at the hotel and devoted more time to (Horatian maxim).
training. The following summer, we
flew to Sydney for the global finals. It 3. Flavoring used in
was my first time abroad. By then we biscotti.
had fans, even sponsors; we entered the 4. Landmark 1973 court
arena wearing identical jumpsuits with case, familiarly.
the name of an energy drink printed
across our chests.
On the plane, we crossed the ocean,
heading south. I took out my camera Do the rest of the puzzle,
and snapped a photo for my next letter and find a new one every week,
to Lulu. The flight attendants passed at newyorker.com/crossword
out headsets, and I slid one on, suddenly
homesick. I closed my eyes and thought
of my sister. I prayed for victory, and
hoped that she would be proud. 
THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
Te-Ping Chen reads “Lulu.”
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 75

For a dozen years after the Civil War, true black citizenship seemed in reach. What happens to a dream dismantled?
ot so long ago, the Civil War was
N taken to be this country’s central
moral drama. Now we think that the af-
termath—the confrontation not of blue
and gray but of white and black, and the
reimposition of apartheid through ter-
ror—is what has left the deepest mark
on American history. Instead of argu-
ing about whether the war could have
turned out any other way, we argue about
whether the postwar could have turned
out any other way. Was there ever a fight-
ing chance for full black citizenship,
equality before the law, agrarian reform?
Or did the combination of hostility and
indifference among white Americans
make the disaster inevitable?
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his new
book, “Stony the Road: Reconstruction,
White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim
Crow” (Penguin Press), rightly believes
that this argument has special currency
in the post-Obama, or mid-Trump, era.
He compares the rosy confidence, in
2008, that the essential stain of Ameri-
can racism would fade through the ele-
vation of a black President with the same
kind of short-lived hopes found in 1865,
when all the suffering of the war seemed
sure to end with civil equality. Instead,
the appearance of African-American
empowerment seemed only to deepen
the rage of a white majority. Then it
brought forward Klan terrorism and Jim
Crow in the South; now it has brought
to power the most overtly racist Presi-
dent since Woodrow Wilson, openly ca-
tering to a white revanchist base. It’s a
depressing prospect, and Gates is prop-
erly depressed and depressing about it.
The broad outlines of the Recon-
struction story have long been familiar,
76 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
THE TAKEBACK
BY ADAM GOPNIK
though the particular interpretive pres-
sures put on particular moments have
changed with every era. Toward the end
of the war, Washington politicians de-
bated what to do with the millions of
newly freed black slaves. Lincoln, after
foolishly toying with recolonization
schemes, had settled on black suffrage,
at least for black soldiers who had fought
in the war. (It was a speech of Lincoln’s
to this effect that sealed his assassina-
tion: John Wilkes Booth, hearing it,
said, “That means nigger citizenship.
Now, by God, I’ll put him through.”)
After Lincoln’s death, his hapless and
ill-chosen Vice-President, Andrew John-
son, did as much as he could to slow
the process of black emancipation in
the South, while the “radical” core of
the abolitionist Republicans in Con-
gress tried to advance it, and, for a while,
succeeded. Long dismissed as destruc-
tive fanatics, they now seem to be voices
of simple human decency. Thaddeus
Stevens, the abolitionist congressman
from Vermont, proposed shortly after
the war’s end, in his “Lancaster” speech,
a simple policy: punish the rebel lead-
ers; treat the secessionist states as terri-
tories to be supervised by Congress, thus
protecting the new black citizens; take
the confiscated plantations on which
masters had worked slaves like animals,
and break up those plantations into
forty-acre lots for the ex-slaves to own
(a form of the classic “forty acres and a
mule”). That this minimally equitable
plan was long regarded as “radical” says
something about how bent toward in-
justice the conversation quickly became.
Freed slaves eagerly participated in
the first elections after the war, and dis-
tinguished black leaders went to Con-
gress. The 1872 lithograph of “The First
Colored Senator and Representatives,”
by Currier & Ives, no less, shows seven
black men given the full weight of mid-
century Seriousness, including the first
black senator from Mississippi, Hiram
Rhodes Revels.
But white state governments steadily
reconstituted themselves. By the eigh-
teen-nineties, they were passing laws
that, piece by piece, reclaimed the right
to vote for whites alone. All of this was
made worse by one of those essentially
theological “constitutional” points which
American professors and politicians love
to belabor. Lincoln’s argument was al-
ways that, since it was unconstitutional
for states to secede on their own, the
rebel states had never seceded. The reb-
els were not an enemy nation; they were
just a mob with a flag waiting to be po-
liced, and the Union Army was the
policeman. The idea was to limit any
well-meaning attempt at negotiation,
and to discourage foreign powers from
treating the Confederacy as a separate
state. After the war, though, this same
idea implied that, since the state gov-
ernments had never gone out of exis-
tence, their reborn legislatures could in-
stantly reclaim all the rights enjoyed by
states, including deciding who could
vote and when.
As Stevens pointed out, the reason-
ing that says that no states seceded be-
cause the Constitution won’t allow it
would also say that no man can ever
commit murder because the law for-
bids it. “Black Codes” were put in place
in most Southern states that, through
various means, some overt and some
 PHOTOGRAPHS: HIRARCHIVUM PRESS/ALAMY (KU KLUX KLAN); SMITH COLLECTION/GADO/GETTY (BUILDING);
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/GETTY (FLAGS); EVERETT/ALAMY (GALLOWS); OPPOSITE: LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

ILLUSTRATION BY CRISTIANA COUCEIRO

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
Black political power during Reconstruction was short-lived—eclipsed, in significant part, by a campaign of terror.
77
insidious (anti-vagrancy statutes were
a particular favorite), limited the rights
of blacks to work and to relocate. The
legislative reconquest was backed by
violence: the Ku Klux Klan, formed as
a terrorist organization by ex-Confeder-
ate officers, began murdering and maim-
ing assertive black citizens. In 1877, after a
mere dozen years in which black suffrage
and racial equality were at least grudg-
ingly accepted national principles, the
federal government pulled its last troops
from the South and, in what could be
called the Great Betrayal, an order of
racial subjugation was restored.
It’s a story with fewer pivotal three-
day battles than the war fought over
slavery, but its general shape is oddly
similar: after a stunning series of victo-
ries and advances in the early years by
the “rebels”—in this case, egalitarian
forces—the armies of Reconstruction
began to fall victim to the sheer num-
bers of the opposing side and to the ex-
haustion of their allies and reserves. Some
battles, both real and rhetorical, do stand
out. There were the arguments in Con-
gress, pitting newly minted and almost
impossibly eloquent black representa-
tives against ex-Confederate politicians
who a few years earlier had been send-
ing hundreds of thousands of young men
to their death in order to preserve the
right to keep their new colleagues in
perpetual servitude. There was the so-
called Battle of Liberty Place, in New
Orleans in 1874, a riot on behalf of the
White League, a gang of ex-Confeder-
ate soldiers who sought to oust Louisi-
ana’s Republican governor and its black
lieutenant governor. In a moment of
extraordinary moral courage, as worthy
of a film as any Civil War battle, James
Longstreet, the most capable of Gen-
eral Lee’s Confederate lieutenants, agreed
to lead municipal police, including black
officers, to put down the white riot and
restore the elected government. He knew
what it would cost him in status through-
out the old Confederacy, but he did it
anyway, because it was the right thing
to do. Naturally, the city’s monument to
the attempted coup bore an inscription
that conveyed the White League’s point
of view, and, sobering fact, it was scarcely
two years ago that the racist memorial
to the riot finally came down—with a
police escort to protect the movers.
Gates emphasizes that Reconstruc-
78 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
tion was destroyed not by white terror-
ism alone but also by a fiendishly com-
plicated series of ever more enervating
legal and practical assaults. The Supreme
Court played a crucial role in enabling
the oppression of newly freed blacks,
while pretending merely to be protect-
ing the constitutional guarantee of states’
rights—one more instance in which
“calling balls and strikes” means refus-
ing to see the chains on the feet of the
batter. The overtly racist decision in
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) arrived long
after the worst was already done, but it
sealed the earlier discrimination in place,
and Jim Crow thrived for another half
century. Meanwhile, at least some of
those Northern liberal abolitionists—
including the likes of Henry Adams and
the well-meaning Horace Greeley—
managed, in the way of high-minded
reformers, to let their pieties get the bet-
ter of their priorities: recoiling against
the apparent improprieties of the pro-
suffrage Grant Administration, they
made common cause with the Demo-
crats who were ending democracy in the
South. “When, therefore, the conscience
of the United States attacked corrup-
tion,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in his clas-
sic 1935 study, “Black Reconstruction in
America,” in many ways the most astute
account of the period ever produced, “it
at the same time attacked in the Repub-
lican Party the only power that could
support democracy in the South. It was
a paradox too tragic to explain.”
ates is one of the few academic
G historians who do not disdain the
methods of the journalist, and his book
(which accompanies a four-hour PBS
series he has made on the subject) is
flecked with incidental interviews with
and inquiries of other scholars, includ-
ing the great revisionist historian Eric
Foner. Though this gives the book a
light, flexible, talking-out-loud texture,
it is enraging to read—to realize how
high those hopes were, how close to
being realized, how rapidly eradicated.
That Currier & Ives lithograph of the
black legislators, which Gates repro-
duces, takes on almost unbearable pa-
thos. The last black U.S. representative
from North Carolina was forced out of
office in 1901—and there would not be
another until 1991. The eclipse of for-
mal black political power happened, in
significant part, by violence. The histo-
rian David Blight estimates that, be-
tween 1867 and 1868, something like ten
per cent of the blacks who attended con-
stitutional conventions in the South were
attacked by the Klan.
Gates quickly moves beyond the im-
mediate political context of black dis-
enfranchisement to tell the sad story of
how an ideology that justified racism as
science, and bigotry as reason, grew and
governed minds across the country.
There’s the pseudoscientific racism pro-
mulgated by Louis Agassiz, of Harvard,
who sought to show that blacks be-
longed to a separate, inferior species; the
repellent but pervasive popular cartoon
spectre of the black defilement of white
women; the larger ideology of shame that
also assigned to black men a childlike
place as grinning waiters and minstrels.
When they weren’t raping white women,
they were clowning for white kids.
The historical literature that arose to
defend white supremacy was soon ac-
cepted as a chronicle of truths, espe-
cially in the countless sober-seeming
memoirs of the former leaders of the
slave states, including Jefferson Davis,
the President of the Confederacy, who
insisted that slavery was a side issue in
a states’-rights war. The “Lost Cause”
took on popular literary form in Thomas
Dixon’s novel “The Clansman,” which
became the basis for D. W. Griffith’s
1915 “The Birth of a Nation,” the first
great American feature film. In Griffith’s
Reconstruction, blacks, many played by
white actors in blackface, are either men-
aces or morons (black legislators of the
kind depicted in that lithograph spend
their time in the statehouse drinking
and eating), and are, thankfully, routed
by the Klan—shown dressing in sheets
because they have grasped the primi-
tive African fear of ghosts.
It is still difficult to credit how long
the Lost Cause lie lasted. Writing in
the left-wing The Nation, James Agee,
the brilliant film critic and the author
of the text for “Let Us Now Praise Fa-
mous Men,” could announce, in 1948,
that “Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair,
and understandable, is written all over
the picture; so are degrees of under-
standing, honesty, and compassion far
beyond the capacity of his accusers. So,
of course, are the salient facts of the so-
called Reconstruction years.” Even as
late as the nineteen­sixties, the Harvard
historian Samuel Eliot Morison, in what
was then a standard “Oxford History
of the American People,” called for “ten
thousand curses on the memory of that
foulest of assassins, J. Wilkes Booth”—
but for a surprising reason. “Not only
did he kill a great and good President;
he gave fresh life to the very forces of
hate and vengeance which Lincoln him­
self was trying to kill,” Morison wrote.
“Had Lincoln lived, there is every like­
lihood that his magnanimous policy to­
wards the South would have prevailed;
for, even after his death, it almost went
through despite the Radicals.” The
thought that the failure of Reconstruc­
tion had been its insufficient attention
to the feelings and the interests of the
white majority—like the thought that
“The Birth of a Nation” should be con­
sidered to hold the “salient facts” of Re­
construction—strikes us now as as­
tounding, but it was orthodox textbook
history and criticism for an unimagin­
ably long time, and among people who
believed themselves to be progressive.
A turn in the South has happened,
though. Reading Richard White’s vol­
ume “The Republic for Which It
Stands,” in the new Oxford History of
the United States, we could not be fur­
ther from an aggrieved account of how
mean Reconstruction was to the South.
White, writing with a microscopically
attentive eye to the fine shadings of the
period, gives a full picture of terror ram­
pant, justice recumbent, and liberty re­
pressed. Curiously, however, he uses the
old vocabulary of disdain, designating
pro­Reconstruction Southern whites as
“scalawags” and pro­Reconstruction
Northerners as “carpetbaggers,” just as
their enemies styled them. (What are
the limits of appropriating a derogatory
vocabulary? It is fine to call painters
who had no desire to give us their im­
pressions Impressionists, but it some­
how feels unfair to use epithets that
imply bad intentions where one can find
purposes largely good.)
Could things have gone otherwise?
Contingency counts and individuals
matter. When it came to the exacting
task of managing the postwar settle­
ment, it’s hard to imagine a worse suc­
cessor than Andrew Johnson. Chosen
in the good­enough­to­balance­the­
ticket way that Vice­Presidents so often
“That can’t be good.”
• •
were, right up through Harry Truman,
Johnson was openly racist, poorly edu­
cated, and bad­tempered. But President
Grant followed President Johnson, and
Grant, as Ron Chernow showed in his
recent biography, tried very hard for a
while to end the terror and to maintain
what were already being called civil rights.
His Attorney General, Amos Akerman,
declared that the Ku Klux Klan was “the
most atrocious organization that the civ­
ilized part of the world has ever known,”
and helped bring in more than eleven
hundred convictions against it. In 1872,
the year of that glorious lithograph, the
Klan was, as Chernow says, “smashed in
the South.”
Yet even that hardly helped. One
mistake the North made was to allow
the Confederate leadership to escape
essentially unscathed. Lincoln’s plea for
charity and against malice was admira­
ble, but it left out the third term of the
liberal equation: charity for all, malice
to none, and political reform for the
persecutors. The premise of postwar de­
Nazification, in Germany, was a sound
one: you had to root out the evil and
make it clear that it was one, and only
then would minds change. The gingerly
treatment of the secessionists gave the
impression—more, it created the real­
ity—that treason in defense of slavery
was a forgivable, even “honorable,” differ­
ence of opinion. Despite various half­
hearted and soon rescinded congressio­
nal measures to prevent ex­Confederate
leaders from returning to power, many
of them didn’t just skip out but skipped
right back into Congress.
One might at first find it inspiring to
read the gallant and generous 1874 re­
marks of Robert Brown Elliott, a black
congressman representing South Caro­
lina, as he defended civil rights against
Representative Alexander Stephens, of
Georgia, the former Vice­President of
the Confederacy. Elliott’s voice is so ring­
ing and defiant, and at the same time so
uncannily courteous. “Let him put away
entirely the false and fatal theories that
have so greatly marred an otherwise en­
viable record,” he declared, addressing
Stephens. “Let him accept, in its fullness
and beneficence, the great doctrine that
American citizenship carries with it every
civil and political right which manhood
can confer.” But then one recalls Abra­
ham Lincoln’s beseeching letters to Ste­
phens in 1860, between his election and
his Inauguration, seeking some possible
compromise before war came. Stephens
then made it plain that slavery was the
only thing at issue, and its permanent
perpetuation the only demand that could
never be compromised. What the hell
was he doing back there in Congress, one
wonders, after all that death and suffer­
ing? He should have counted himself
lucky not to have been hanged. But he
was there and, soon enough, Elliott wasn’t.
Surprisingly few in the educated
classes in the South had the foresight to
recognize that reform was needed for
the South’s own sake. Du Bois repro­
duces an 1866 speech from Governor
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 79
Brownlow, of Andrew Johnson’s own
state of Tennessee, in which he stated
bluntly, “I am an advocate of Negro
suffrage, and impartial suffrage. I would
rather associate with loyal Negroes than
with disloyal white men. I would rather
be buried in a Negro graveyard than in
a rebel graveyard.” Yet Robert E. Lee—
subsequently ennobled for not actually
leading a backwoods guerrilla cam-
paign—never made a statement accept-
ing the new order, never
said, in the language of the
time, something like: “A
great struggle has gone on,
and Providence has set-
tled the question on the
anti-slavery side. We must
now accept these men as
citizens and comrades, if
not fully as brothers.”
One Confederate gen-
eral who did make the turn was Long-
street, a genuinely heroic figure. The only
member of Lee’s inner circle at Gettys-
burg who was smart enough to grasp
that Lee’s aggressive strategy, and thus
Pickett’s Charge, was doomed in ad-
vance, he was also smart enough to see
that the strategy of permanent segrega-
tion was ultimately ill-fated. Yet the
broader legacy of Pickett’s Charge is part
of the story, too. Fifty thousand casual-
ties in three days at Gettysburg: for us,
those are numbers; for their country-
men, it was fifty thousand fathers and
sons and brothers wounded or dead. War
weariness is essential to the shape of the
postwar collapse. The hope that, in 1870,
even a well-intended cohort of former
abolitionists would focus properly on the
denial of civil rights to blacks in the South
was morally ambitious in a way that is
not entirely realistic. Richard White, like
many others, points to the retreat on the
part of Northern liberals from aggres-
sively advocating for black rights, while
perhaps not sufficiently stressing one
good reason for it: the unimaginable bru-
tality many had experienced in fighting
the war. In ways that Louis Menand ex-
plored in his book “The Metaphysical
Club,” it left a generation stripped of the
appetite for more war-making and even
(as Menand has argued) of any confi-
dence in moral absolutism. The horror
of the Civil War made it difficult to ac-
cept that more fighting might be nec-
essary to secure its gains. Nothing is eas-
80 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
ier to spark than an appetite for war, and
nothing harder to sustain than a contin-
ued appetite for war once a country learns
what war is really like. War hunger and
war hatred are parts of the same cycle
of mass arousal and inhibition.
The other brutality lay in the strange
demographics of race in America: ba-
sically, the black people were in the
South, and their natural allies were
in the North. Even today, African-
Americans form a huge
nation, almost forty-four
million people—bigger
than Australia or Can-
ada—but they also repre-
sent only about thirteen
per cent of the U.S. pop-
ulation, never large enough
to act without allies. In the
postwar period, clustered
in the South, they found
that their chief ethnic allies were far
away. This demographic paradox—a
population large enough to be terrify-
ing to the majority population nearby
but not large or concentrated enough
to claim its own national territory—was
part of the tragedy, and increased the
brutality by increasing the fear. The ad-
justed percentage of the Jewish popu-
lation in Poland before the Holocaust
was similar, and had similar implica-
tions: enough to loom large in the minds
of their haters, not enough to be able
to act without assistance in the face of
an oppressor.
Gates goes on to illuminate the com-
plex efforts of black intellectuals, in the
face of the reimposition of white rule,
to find a sane and safe position against
it. The “New South” was met by the
“New Negro,” a phrase that arose in the
eighteen-nineties. The emancipated, ed-
ucated, fully literary black bourgeoisie
would undeniably be a full citizen. This
urge to “earn” full citizenship by effort
instead of by claiming it as a birthright
seems forlorn now, a product of minds
exposed so long to toxic bigotry that
some of it had seeped inside and cur-
dled into self-hatred. But, as Gates shows,
it was possible to be entirely committed
to the rights of black people while still
being convinced of the need for educa-
tion to uplift them—indeed, while still
voicing sympathy for the travails of the
defeated South. Hiram Rhodes Revels,
the black senator from Mississippi, who
is on the left in that Currier & Ives litho-
graph, blamed Republican interlopers
for bringing racial discord to the South,
writing to Grant in 1875 that, “since Re-
construction, the masses of my people
have been, as it were, enslaved in mind
by unprincipled adventurers, who, car-
ing nothing for country, were willing to
stoop to anything, no matter how infa-
mous, to secure power to themselves,
and perpetuate it. . . . The bitterness and
hate created by the late civil strife has,
in my opinion, been obliterated in this
state, except perhaps in some localities,
and would have long since been entirely
obliterated, were it not for some unprin-
cipled men who would keep alive the
bitterness of the past, and inculcate a ha-
tred between the races, in order that they
may aggrandize themselves by office.”
Revels himself left his Senate seat after
a year and became the head of the newly
formed Alcorn University, devoting the
rest of his life to educational uplift.
It is easy to regard leaders like Rev-
els (including, later, the electorally ret-
icent Booker T. Washington) as “Uncle
Toms”—a term that, Gates notes, doesn’t
become pejorative until the next cen-
tury. But their reading of the circum-
stance assumed, optimistically, that once
blacks had earned equality they would
be treated equally. They believed pas-
sionately that the ex-slave population,
degraded by centuries of slavery, needed
to be educated into the professions. The
New Negro, as he emerged in the twen-
tieth century, was so narrowly focussed
on literary and scholarly accomplish-
ment that he tended, Gates insists, to
neglect the most astounding cultural
achievement of his own country and
kin. “There was, in fact, a genuine re-
naissance occurring during the Harlem
literary renaissance, but it wasn’t among
the writers,” Gates observes. “The re-
naissance was occurring among those
great geniuses of black vernacular cul-
ture, the musicians who created the
world’s greatest art form in the twenti-
eth century—jazz.” The New Negroes
were hardly alone among aspirational
Americans in the pathos and dignity of
their respectability; one sees the same
attempt to outwit the oppressor by be-
coming like the oppressor among the
lace-curtain Irish or the stained-glass
Jews. Indeed, combining the New Negro
emphasis on formal education with a
more capacious understanding of the
riches of black inheritance was a task
that, Gates understands, had to be left
for later generations, not least his own.
evisionism always risks revising right
R out of existence not just the old, too
rosy account but also the multi-hued re-
ality. Here there are lessons we can take
from Du Bois’s extraordinary, prophetic
history. For the curious thing is that Du
Bois pays more attention to the endur-
ing legacy of Reconstruction than have
many of his revisionist successors. At a
time when the era had been reduced to
the D. W. Griffith fable of illiterate blacks
conspiring with opportunistic whites,
Du Bois wanted to assert the lasting
value and significance of what had been
achieved in the all too brief period of
black political enfranchisement. We
couldn’t understand the enormity of the
betrayal, Du Bois thought, if we didn’t
understand the magnitude of what was
betrayed. So, along with the horrors of
terrorism and the slow crawl of rena-
scent white supremacy, Du Bois also
registers the accomplishments that Re-
construction created in its brief moment:
public-health departments were estab-
lished where none had existed before;
public education for blacks began—mis-
erably underfunded, but, still, there were
schools where less than a decade before
it had been a crime for a slave to learn
to read. This is a view that Foner shares
as well. As he writes, “Although black
schools and colleges remained woefully
underfunded, education continued to be
available to most African Americans.
And the autonomous family and church,
pillars of the black community that
emerged during Reconstruction, re-
mained vital forces in black life, and the
springboard from which future chal-
lenges to racial injustice would emerge.”
It’s also why Frederick Douglass, in
ways that seem puzzling to us now, was
not so single-mindedly incensed about
the Great Betrayal as one might have
expected. Described by his detractors as
simply having lost the appetite for the
fight, in truth he must have had a clear
enough memory of what chattel slav-
ery had been like not to confuse it with
subjection. The oppressed—blacks on
their land, Jews in their shtetl—can build
cultural fellowships that ease their bur-
den and point a path out.The enslaved—
blacks in the cabins, Jews in the camps—
have no plausible path at all. It is at once
not enough of a difference and all the
difference in the world.
Du Bois tries strenuously to fit the
story of the end of Reconstruction into
a Marxist framework: the Southern cap-
italists were forcing serfdom upon their
agricultural laborers in parallel to the
way that the Northern ones were forc-
ing it on their industrial workers. His
effort is still echoed in some contempo-
rary scholarship. But an agricultural class
reduced to serfdom is exactly the kind
of stagnant arrangement that capitalism
chafes against. Sharecropping is not
shareholding. When the entrepreneur-
ial white South wanted to assert its de-
parture from the antebellum order, it in-
voked a South emancipated from the
planter classes and, in a slogan from the
next century, now “too busy to hate.” At
the same time, the agrarian rhetoric of
the restored South was always an anti-
modernist rhetoric, antagonistic toward
bourgeois free enterprise. (That the so-
called “Southern Agrarian” school later
assembled some of America’s leading lit-
erary modernists is among the long-term
ironies in the story.)
In truth, sharecropping, coupled with
a cotton monoculture, was a terrible
model for economic development, and,
indeed, left the South long impoverished.
Du Bois poises “property and privilege”
against “race and culture” as causes that
“Of course having dinner with your parents is important to me. I just
don’t know how much longer I’m going to be in this whale.”
led to the reconquest of the South by
white supremacy, and, though his Marx-
ist training insists that it must somehow
all be property and privilege, his experi-
ence as an American supplies a correc-
tive afterthought or two. The motives of
the South were, as Du Bois eventually
suggests, essentially ideological and tribal,
rather than economic. He recognized
that, in a still familiar pattern, poor whites
“would rather have low wages upon which
they could eke out an existence than see
colored labor with a decent wage,” and
saw in “every advance of the Negroes a
threat to their racial prerogatives.” It is
the same formula of feeling that makes
the “white working class” angrier at the
thought that Obamacare might be sub-
sidizing shiftless people of color than
receptive to the advantages of having
medical coverage for itself. Du Bois called
it a “psychological wage,” but this is to
give a Marxist-sounding name to a non-
Marxist phenomenon: ethnic resentment
and clan consciousness are social forces
far more powerful than economic class.
It reflects the permanent truth that all
people, including poor people, follow
their values, however perverted, rather
than their interests, however plain.
here’s no era in which thought is
T monolithic, and late-nineteenth-
century America was probably as dis-
putatious as any era has been. Gates
charts the growth of Social Darwinism
as well as the “biological” racism of Louis
Agassiz—but it’s worth emphasizing
that Agassiz was a racist because he was
fervently anti-Darwinian. His student
William James, on a naturalist’s expe-
dition with him to Brazil, saw through
his prejudices. There is no shortage of
radical egalitarian thought at the time,
coming from figures who were by no
means marginalized. Thaddeus Stevens
chose to be buried in a black cemetery,
with the inscription on his stone read-
ing “Finding other Cemeteries limited
as to Race by Charter Rules, I have cho-
sen this that I might illustrate in my
death, the Principles which I advocated
through a long life: EQUALITY OF MAN
BEFORE HIS CREATOR.”
And then the most famous Amer-
ican text by the most famous Ameri-
can writer of the period was Mark
Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn,” which, published in the eigh-
teen-eighties and set half a century ear-
lier, manages to take in all the stereo-
types of the post-Reconstruction era
( Jim is a type of the comic Negro) while
complicating them in ways that remain
stirring, and ending with an unequiv-
ocal gesture toward the equality of black
and white, when Huck decides that he
will go to Hell rather than betray a
black friend. When the right side loses,
it does not always mean that the truth
has not been heard. We are too inclined
to let what happens next determine the
meaning of what happened before, and
to suppose that the real meaning of
Reconstruction was its repudiation.
It’s a style of thought that sees the true
meaning of dinner as the next day’s
hunger and the real meaning of life as
death. And yet yesterday’s good deeds
remain good even if today’s bad ones
occlude them.
There is plenty of cause to denounce
the liberal institutions of the era, North
and South and West, in the face of the
reënslavement of the era’s black people.
But, even reading White’s fiercely dis-
abused history of the period, one can
still be astonished by the degree to which
liberal institutions worked to curb the
worst social sadism that, until then, had
been a commonplace of human history.
It can be helpful to expand the histor-
ical scale just a tad. Although the fail-
ure of the Republic to sustain its ideals
is appallingly self-evident, elections in-
82 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
volving millions of people were held
routinely, if imperfectly; venal bosses
like Boss Tweed, instead of sending on
power to his son, were tried and im-
prisoned; Jews worshipped freely; free-
thinkers flourished; immigrants settled;
reformers raged against corruption, and,
in a few key cases, won their battle; dis-
sent, even radical dissent, was aired and,
though sporadically persecuted was, on
the whole, heard and tolerated. No ar-
rangement like it had ever been known
before on so large a scale in human his-
tory. Compared with the system’s am-
bitions and pretensions, it was as noth-
ing. But, compared with the entirety of
human history before, it was, in its way,
quite something.
What is true and tragic is that the
black population benefitted least of all
from these institutions. Yet the same
more than flawed institutions, in turn,
enabled freed slaves, as Foner maintains,
to build the social capital that would
allow them to find ways around the su-
premacists. How did that happen? One
turns back to Gates’s best book, the in-
candescent memoir “Colored People,”
with its evocation of Piedmont, West
Virginia, in the nineteen-fifties and six-
ties. Gates is clear-eyed about the pat-
terns of bigotry that still obtained—
only he would see that “Leave It to
Beaver” was, above all, a television show
about property—but he provides an in-
timate and affectionate sense of how all
the richness of clan connection becomes
cultural connection, of how the world
of his childhood was illuminated by
profound family relations and an enor-
mously bountiful cultural heritage, in
music, certainly, but in dance and liter-
ature and, yes, athleticism, too. (Athlet-
ics because it was the one place, he says,
where blacks and whites directly butted
heads, and blacks won.)
Accepting Gates’s observation that
jazz, and the popular music that flowed
from it and through it, is the greatest
of American inventions, we have to rec-
ognize both the bigotry that impeded
it and the extraordinary self-emerging
social institutions that empowered it.
Every life of a great jazz musician shows
us both—social sadism beyond belief
to be endured, but also social networks
of support, filled with intimately colla-
borative and competitive relationships,
artists both sustaining and outdoing
one another—the creation of the great
cutting contest that E. H. Gombrich
long ago identified as the core engine of
artistic progress. The most influential of
American musicians, Louis Armstrong,
suffered from bigotry in New Orleans,
but there was the Colored Waif ’s home
to teach him the cornet, a sympathetic
Jewish émigré family with a thriving
tailor shop to help him buy one, a tal-
ent contest at the Iroquois Theatre that
a poor black boy could win, and even a
saloon where he could go to hear, and
later be hired by, the great King Oliver.
In the town where the white mob had
lynched blacks to end their freedom,
the black victims had improvised insti-
tutions to enable it. Sustaining tradi-
tions were available, at a price.
The moral arc of the universe is long.
Eight years of Obama may be followed
by eight of Trump, but the second can-
not annihilate the first. At one point
in “Stony the Road,” Gates writes wisely
of images as weapons. Imagery can in-
deed have agency, but this takes actors—
bad actors who weaponize the imagery.
Anti-Semitic caricatures had persisted
for centuries; Der Stürmer’s anti-Semitic
cartoons had to be weaponized by Hit-
ler. Patterns of oppression can be held
in place only by oppressive people.
This is why the greatest divide among
historians is between the academics who
tend to see people as points of com-
pressed social forces and those popular
historians, chiefly biographers, who see
the actors as nearly the whole of the
story. The academics study the tides of
history, while the popular historians go
out fishing to find (and tag) the big fish
that presumably make the ocean worth
watching. The tidalists have the tenure,
but the fishermen sell all the books.
Gates, who is expert at both, catching
fish while seeing tides, leaves us with a
simple, implicit moral: a long fight for
freedom, with too many losses along
the way, can be sustained only by a rich
and complicated culture. Resilience and
resistance are the same activity, seen at
1
different moments in the struggle. It’s
a good thought to hold on to now. 
From the Santa Maria (Calif.) Times.
‘THE AMERICAN’ WONDERS
AIMLESSLY THROUGH EUROPE
Gets us to wondering, too.

BOOKS
THE PLAY’S THE THING
In “Trust Exercise,” high-school drama is a performance that never ends.
BY JOANNA BIGGS
here are many ways of hiding
T knowledge from ourselves that are
not really hiding at all. Not too far
from the beginning of Susan Choi’s
new novel, “Trust Exercise” (Henry
Holt), there is a party after a high-
school production of “Guys and Dolls.”
The high school is a performing-arts
academy, and so it follows that the
fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds at the
party are dramatic beyond even ordi-
nary adolescents. Greg Veltin, the star
of last year’s production of “Anything
Goes,” and the sort of guy who causes
girls to agree to share him, leads three
For the aspiring actors in Susan Choi’s novel, reality takes place onstage.
PHOTOGRAPH BY YUDI ELA
of them off to sit cross-legged with
him in a gazebo. “I want you to know
that I love you,” he begins, squeezing
the girls’ hands with “a surfeit of feel-
ing,” and then he breaks the news: he’s
gay. They respond with the appropri-
ate theatrics—OMG—and tell him
how honored they are to be the first
ones to know. Only one of them, Sarah,
recognizes that this secret was in fact
no secret at all. Greg “was so clearly,
inevitably, no-other-possibility gay that
Sarah cannot believe she never real-
ized—but that was 15 in a nutshell,
she’ll think when she’s twice, and then
three times, that age. The obvious and
the oblivious sharing the same men-
tal space.”
That quality of negative capabil-
ity—being able to see that Greg is gay
when you’re equally hoping you might
marry him one day—is a part of grow-
ing up that never seems to go away,
and is the sort of thing we like fiction
for. Isn’t a novel, as we might have said
in high school, one of the falsest things
going as well as one of the truest? In
“Trust Exercise,” an intelligent and lay-
ered portrait of a school’s legacy, Choi
takes this idea and embeds it deep
within the structure of her book. What
do we know that we don’t seemingly
know? And can fiction—writing it, en-
acting it, or just reading it—get us
closer to the lives we want to live?
J ustblesasininthethelunch
movie “Fame” the ta-
hall are for danc-
ing on, not eating from, “Trust Exer-
cise” also makes something dramatic
and memorable from the simple ele-
ments of a teen movie. An adored, ec-
centric teacher, Mr. Kingsley, presides
over a theatre program (one of the first
things he insists on is that English
spelling; revert to the American and
“you will fail the assignment”) in a
school in a vast Southern city. A girl
in his class from the wrong side of the
tracks, Sarah, falls in love with a boy,
David, who’s from the sort of family
that vacations in Europe. Mr. Kings-
ley—one in a line of bad teachers who
are in love with their own badness,
stretching all the way back to Miss
Jean Brodie—has his own method of
ego deconstruction and reconstruc-
tion: the burst of “recognition” between
Sarah and David happens when Mr.
Kingsley turns out the lights in the
drama studio and encourages his class
to consider their fellow-students anew.
“Is that some other creature with me
in the darkness?” the teacher whispers,
as David’s hand finds Sarah’s knee and
then her thigh.
The school year begins in the dark
and culminates in the sex that David
and Sarah have during the eight weeks
of summer, “a span that seems end-
less, but with the intuitive parts of
themselves they also sense it is not a
long time and will go very quickly.
The intuitive parts of themselves are
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 83
always highly aggravated when they
are together. Intuition only tells them
what they want, not how to achieve it,
and this is intolerable.” Repeating “in-
tuitive” and “intuition” once, twice, then
three times creates an expectation that
Choi gently frustrates. This rise and
fall is both a celebration and a deni-
gration of the quality of intuition it-
self. Many novels teach their readers
how to read them; the reader of this
one must learn something else—to stay
with the not-knowing long enough to
find the truth.
People say that love is when you
know, but in “Trust Exercise” that in-
tuitive physical connection is the start
of David and Sarah’s interpretive trou-
bles. Being exquisitely connected in
bed (how did you know exactly where
to touch me?) might emphasize being
horribly disconnected in life (how could
you not know exactly the right thing
to say to me?). Good sex brings a kind
of connection—one that can feel like
trust—that doesn’t necessarily come
with the desire to do the work of know-
ing someone and letting him know
you. Before a lover can put her ego to
one side and speak honestly, she grabs
on to other things, to roles she knows
from the family romance that plays
out at home, or onscreen, or, indeed,
onstage. Perhaps this is also the work
of growing up: learning to act in a way
that doesn’t feel like acting.
On the first day back at school,
David strides “through the big dou-
ble doors, in fact bouncing, in fact
funny-walking from lightness of heart
because he was finally stepping on
stage in the role of her boyfriend.”
This is the only role he decides he
cares about: “Who gave a shit about
Hamlet?” (Hamlet, like Polonius, ad-
vises actors not to act at all but to hold
“the mirror up to nature”; for him as
well as David, life is worth more than
art.) David has a small square box in
hand, and Sarah recoils: “To David,
love meant declaration. Wasn’t that
the whole point? To Sarah, love meant
a shared secret. Wasn’t that the whole
point?” The reader almost doesn’t need
to be reminded that this isn’t a play
but a dumb show—the characters’
thoughts are what the novel can al-
ways offer, whereas a play can only
represent what they say.
84 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
It’s as if their love had all along
been conceived as a play, with a ready-
made audience in their fellow-students,
eager for the next twist. Mr. Kingsley
invites Sarah into his office. “Tell me
about life outside school,” he says, and
Sarah, flattered—like any amateur
being offered the lead—starts to tell
him things. Soon David and Sarah are
volunteered for one of Mr. Kingsley’s
so-called trust exercises: onstage be-
fore the whole class, they are told to
sit with their knees touching and make
eye contact, reprising roles they’ve al-
ready abandoned. “Is that the best you
can do?” Mr. Kingsley asks when they
hesitate. He wants the spark of the
real to be the basis of the simulacrum.
“Those hands know each other, don’t
they. What do they remember?” Sarah
begins sobbing—is she a good actress
or a very bad one? David’s eyes are
“gleaming” with anger—is he com-
pletely in control of himself or dan-
gerously close to exploding? Their play
has acquired a gleeful, unrepentant di-
rector in Mr. Kingsley, who doesn’t
seem to know how far he will go to
get an authentic reaction out of them:
“Don’t lie to her now and don’t lie to
yourself! ” Another student cries out,
“Foul!,” and suddenly the exercise is
over and we’re back to reality—what-
ever that means.
n alert—or mistrustful—reader
A may have already noticed that
this version of the story serves one of
its characters more than the others.
Sarah cries obediently because she is
the one, we discover almost exactly
halfway through the book, who has
been telling the story. What we’ve
been reading thus far is a novel writ-
ten by Sarah, narrated in the third
person, more than a decade after the
events that it describes. At this point
in Choi’s novel, narration is handed
over to Karen, an old classmate of
Sarah’s, who has read the book and
recognized herself in it. Unlike the
twist in the final pages of Ian Mc-
Ewan’s “Atonement,” which has al-
ways made a reader like me feel fool-
ish for believing in the wish fulfillment
in the main body of the book, Choi’s
break occurs in the middle of her nar-
rative, and so the feint isn’t rug-pull-
ing but, as in Lisa Halliday’s recent
novel, “Asymmetry,” something more
interesting.
Once “Trust Exercise” is handed over
to Karen, Sarah’s story changes. The
proportions of truth to untruth shift,
and dynamics that seemed latent now
seem overt. And there is a new ques-
tion: Can Karen get closer to the truth
than Sarah could? To what end will she
put her own act of authorship—to set
the record straight, or to go further and
enact revenge? Karen persuades David,
now in charge of his own theatre com-
pany in their home town, to put on a
play written by another bad teacher,
Martin, who seduced Karen when she
was a teen-ager. (He has been recently
disgraced after getting a sixteen-year-
old pupil pregnant.) Karen will no lon-
ger be sidelined as she was in Sarah’s
book. She will play the main female
role; she will take care of the props and
the décor. She isn’t quite the author, but
she’s learned to take control, despite
the training she was given. “The exer-
cises Mr. Kingsley made them do,”
Karen says of Sarah’s onstage sobbing
and David’s onstage raging when they
were all fifteen, “it occurred to me many
years later, were a kind of pornogra-
phy.” What had seemed like teaching
at the time (at least to some of the pu-
pils, if not to their parents) now looks
like a sinister initiation: feelings aren’t
for intimate relationships but for ap-
plause and display. In such a system,
truth can be safely approached only in
art; in life, it is too much.
At the play’s première, Sarah, David,
Karen, Mr. Kingsley, and Martin will
be under one theatre roof together, for
one night only, and Karen will have a
perfect opportunity—not just to imag-
ine what might have been but to cor-
rect the official record. Yet even this
dramatic climax isn’t the whole truth.
“Years later,” we’re told at the start of
the novel, “Sarah will see a play in
which an actor asks, ‘Can’t there be a
silent language?’ and be surprised when
her eyes fill with tears.” If that silence
1
had spoken, what might have been
made to live? 
From politickernj.com.
Rabbi denounces son accused of being fed
informant.
Presumably for failing to keep kosher.

BOOKS
TWIST AND SCOUT
The lessons of baseball.
BY LOUIS MENAND
he subject of Christopher Phillips’s
T “Scouting and Scoring: How We
Know What We Know About Base-
ball” (Princeton) is baseball, but it’s
worth reading for more than just the
baseball. The book is an effort to help
us understand one of the oldest prob-
lems in modern societies, which is how
to evaluate human beings. Do we scout
or do we score?
The “scouting” in Phillips’s title re-
fers to the traditional baseball scout. He’s
the guy who sizes up the young pros-
pect playing high-school or college ball,
gets to know him away from the dia-
mond, and draws on many years of ex-
perience hanging out with professional
Scouts judge and “scorers” measure. Which method should we trust?
ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID PLUNKERT
ballplayers to decide what the chances
are that this one will make it to the bigs—
and therefore what his price point should
be for the club that signs him.
The “scorer” is what’s known in base-
ball as a sabermetrician. (And they don’t
call it scoring; they call it “data cap-
ture.”) He’s the guy who punches num-
bers into a laptop to calculate a player’s
score in multivariable categories like
WAR (wins above replacement), FIP
(fielding independent pitching), WHIP
(walks plus hits per inning pitched),
wOBA (weighted on-base average), and
O.P.S. (on-base percentage plus slug-
ging). Quantifying a player’s production
in this way allows him to be compared
numerically with other available play-
ers and assigned a dollar value.
The scout thinks that you have to see
a player to know if he has what it takes;
the scorer thinks that observation is a
distraction, that all you need are the stats.
The scout judges: he wants to know what
a person is like. The scorer measures: he
adds up what a person has done. Both
methods, scouting and scoring, propose
themselves as a sound basis for making a
bet, which is what major-league baseball
clubs are doing when they sign a pros-
pect. Which method is more trustworthy?
The question is worth contemplat-
ing, because we’re confronted with it
fairly regularly in life. Which applicant
do we admit to our college? Which com-
rade do we invite to join our revolution-
ary cell? Whom do we hire to clean up
our yard or do our taxes? Do we go with
our intuition (“He just looks like an ac-
countant”)? Or are we more comfort-
able with a number (“She gets four and
a half stars on Yelp”)?
Many readers will already be famil-
iar with the scout-versus-scorer dilemma
in baseball from Michael Lewis’s best-
selling “Moneyball,” which was published
in 2003 and made into a movie, starring
Brad Pitt. “Moneyball” is the story of
how a baseball team that did not have a
lot of money to spend on players, the
Oakland A’s, deployed a new way of eval-
uating talent and proceeded, for several
years, to compete with teams that had
much bigger stars and much higher pay-
rolls, like the New York Yankees. It was
a way for small-market teams to keep
up with their richer big-city rivals.
Lewis colorized his story a bit by
casting the scouts as a bunch of Don
Zimmer-y old-timers who spit tobacco
juice and say things like “I can see this
guy in somebody’s pen throwing aspirin
tablets someday” (meaning he throws
hard) and “This kid wears a large pair of
underwear” (meaning his body is wrong
for baseball). The scouts put a lot of stock
in whether a player has “the good face”—a
time-honored term of the scouting art.
Lewis writes, “The old scouts are like a
Greek chorus; it is their job to under-
score the eternal themes of baseball.”
Lewis’s “scorers” are geeky Harvard
grads who speak stats-talk and who ac-
tively disidentify with the culture of the
game. Their whole approach is based on
disdaining the wisdom of the scouts. They
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 85
don’t need to see prospects, they don’t
even need to see games, because, for them,
a player is not a body; he’s a row of num-
bers. As it must be for all industry dis-
rupters, the scorers’ advice has to be the
opposite of the scouts’: if it was identi-
cal, their services would not be needed.
As Lewis puts it, “The new outsider’s
view of baseball was all about exposing
the illusions created by the insiders on
the field.”
Between the scouts and the scorers
in “Moneyball” is the general manager
of the A’s, Billy Beane, a former hot pros-
pect who fizzled out in the major leagues,
and therefore knows the world of the
scouts, but who, from a kind of manic
desperation, puts his faith in the geeks
and is rewarded for it by the sporting
gods. Lewis is a journalist; he’s trying to
tell a story. But his sympathies are with
the scorers. Phillips is an academic. His
field is the history of science, and he is
not telling a story. He is making an ar-
gument based on scholarship. And
“Scouting and Scoring” is basically pre-
sented as an answer to “Moneyball.”
eople-measuring arose with the mod-
P ern nation-state—the word “statis-
tics” comes from the word for “state.” In
the beginning, the data that states col-
lected were demographic: population
“Why would I want to bring a hot dog into this messed-up world?”
size, birth and death rates, marriage, dis-
ease. In the early nineteenth century, sta-
tistical methods started being applied to
human beings, and were used to deter-
mine, for example, the chest size of the
average Scot.
Statistics were also used to make pre-
dictions. How many suicides would there
be in France next year? How many ho-
micides? How many homicides involv-
ing the use of poison? It turned out that
there were regularities in all these cate-
gories. There was a kind of natural law
governing the rate of murder by poison.
Debate ensued about whether the
state could reduce the average annual
number of these murders by, say, restrict-
ing access to poison. The statistician’s—
the scorer’s—answer was that poison
doesn’t kill people; people kill people.
Homicides are going to occur at a cer-
tain rate per unit of population no mat-
ter what the laws are. We’re having the
same debate today.
More scandalously, statisticians also
began to correlate one measurement with
other measurements to determine things
like, for example, the relation between
the marriage rate and the price of corn.
Many people found this sort of thing
deterministic and upsetting. Why? Again,
it was a case of scouts versus scorers.
Scout types refused to believe that peo-
ple decide to marry in accordance with
some statistical law. Marriage is about
feelings, not the price of goods. Scorer
types argued that, whatever unique sen-
timents might motivate the partners to
marry in any specific case, the numbers
do not lie. The fact is that when corn is
cheap more people will get married. It’s
a prediction you can take to the bank.
It is during this period of statistics
mania, the mid-nineteenth century, that
baseball, basketball, tennis, football, rugby,
soccer, and other forms of organized ath-
letic competition come into prominence,
and we start to get leagues and champi-
onships and standardized rules of play.
It is also when we start to get widespread
scoring in sports. As both Phillips and
Lewis point out, baseball scoring begins
almost as soon as there is baseball. The
first known box scores, breaking down
the stats of games, appear in 1845; by the
eighteen-sixties, Phillips says, “nearly ev-
eryone in baseball was counting in one
form or another.”
The key figure in making these num-
bers official and insuring their accuracy
was a man named Henry Chadwick, a
British émigré who ended up working
as a sports reporter in Brooklyn. Chad-
wick was obsessed with scorekeeping
not just because it was a way to memo-
rialize games but because he thought
that data science could explain why
games are won or lost. “In time,” he said
in 1868, “the game will be brought down
almost to a mathematical calculation of
results from given causes.” Chilling
words for fans who think that today’s
game is overquantified.
Welcome words, however, for gam-
blers. Keeping score is a natural pastime.
Some fans bring their own scorecards
to games, and most fans check the box
scores and other stats when they read
the sports page. Numbers are part of the
sports experience—especially for fans of
baseball, which seems to have a statis-
tic for everything. Since at least the eigh-
teenth century, though, a lot of people
have followed sports mainly for the pur-
pose of placing bets, and there is little
question that the creation of reliable sta-
tistical summaries of players’ perfor-
mances had something to do with the
gambling market.
Baseball bettors don’t bet only on out-
comes. They bet on how many runs the
teams will score, how many bases will be
stolen, how many bunts will be laid down,
how many pitches will be thrown. They
could not do this if they did not have a
lot of data on the players involved. A
team’s manager wants to be able to pre-
dict how certain players will perform in
certain situations. So does the gambler.
In fact, the stats revolution that Lewis
writes about in “Moneyball” took off at the
same time as a gambling-like offshoot of
the game, fantasy baseball—or, as it used
to be known, after the Manhattan restau-
rant in which it was conceived, in 1980,
Rotisserie Baseball. Fantasy baseball is
played for money (usually small amounts).
Participants select a lineup of active play-
ers, and winners and losers are deter-
mined by how those players end up per-
forming on a given day. Obviously, the
better the information about the players
who are available for selecting, the bet-
ter the chances of winning.
In the beginning, as Lewis points out,
fantasy leagues used conventional mea-
sures of performance, because that’s all
there was—things like earned-run aver-
age and runs batted in, categories that
the scorers in “Moneyball” would view
with derision. But fantasy baseball gave
participants an incentive to find or to
create stats with better predictive power;
the man who is most closely associated
with the stats revolution in baseball, Bill
James, has said that he started rethink-
ing how games are won because he
wanted to win at a tabletop game that
was a precursor to fantasy baseball.
In 1982, two years after Rotisserie
Baseball got started, James’s book of new
statistical measures, “Baseball Abstract,”
became a best-seller. Two years after that,
“The Hidden Game of Baseball: A Rev-
olutionary Approach to Baseball and
Its Statistics,” by John Thorn and Pete
Palmer, came out, and sabermetrics was
born. The success of those books, as Phil-
lips says, showed that baseball data could
be monetized. Today, virtually every-
thing in baseball that can be measured
is measured: exit velocity, launch angle,
spin rate. Even sportscasters load the
play-by-play with statistics. Geeks rule.
hillips says complimentary things
P about “Moneyball,” and his own book
is more a correction than a refutation.
He brings considerable historical knowl-
edge to the task of establishing a point
that does not actually seem all that con-
troversial, which is that scouting involves
measuring and scoring involves judging.
“Facts don’t just appear,” as Phillips puts
it. “They must always be made.”
Scouts and scorers may be looking at
different things, but knowing which
things to look at involves a judgment.
Do we care about how far a ball was hit?
What the defensive alignment was? The
quality of the umpiring? Turning knowl-
edge of the things that are judged rele-
vant into a prediction requires a quan-
tification, even if it’s only of the “on a
scale of one to ten” variety. That’s still an
act of reducing information to a number.
“What I discovered was that histor-
ically the ways scorers and scouts pro-
duced knowledge and established facts
were not all that different,” Phillips
writes. “Any claimed division between
scouting’s judgment-based subjectivities
and scoring’s data-based objectivities
doesn’t have a strong purchase.” The
scout’s job is the same as the scorer’s: he
puts a number on a player, and that num-
ber represents the player’s potential value.
To show how intertwined judging and
measuring are, Phillips spends a lot of
time on a concept that was crucial to
player evaluation: the error. The error was
an object of fascination for Henry Chad-
wick, too. If a fielder drops the ball, you
don’t want to credit the batter or charge
the pitcher with a hit (or an earned run,
if the batter eventually scores). So, if you
are evaluating batters or pitchers, it’s im-
portant to get it right: was it really an
error? Here, the scout has the advantage,
because the error is a judgment call. You
have to have seen a lot of games to know
whether the fielder should have made
the play. There is no substitute for expe-
rience. You are not going to learn how
to score an error in a Harvard math class.
(But the math department is working on
it. It has become possible, based on the
hang time of a batted ball and its dis-
tance from a defensive player, to calcu-
late the probability that it will be caught.)
Errors are a subset of a much more
cosmic category: luck. It’s an adage of
professional sports that lucky breaks, like
bad calls, even out in the course of a sea-
son. (Actually, given a normal distribution
of lucky breaks, there must be outliers.
There is a luckiest person in the world.
Probability theory requires it.) A major
aspect of scoring, therefore, is figuring
out how to take luck out of the equation.
Largely, this means discounting for
fielding. Once a ball is put into play, many
things can happen to it. A spectacular
catch of a ball headed for the seats is re-
corded as an out; a dribbler in front of
the plate that no defender can get to in
time is a hit. And the evidence shows that
these occurrences don’t necessarily even
out. One of the findings of sabermetri-
cians (as reported by Lewis) is that the
number of hits surrendered by a pitcher
can be quite inconsistent from year to
year. Batted balls that are caught one year
just happen to “drop in” in another.
But outcomes that a pitcher can con-
trol—mainly walks, strikeouts, and home
runs—are predictable, which argues for
making those, rather than hits and runs
allowed, the proper basis for evaluating
pitchers. Over all, the luck factor makes
the scorer’s job harder, since scorers need
reliable numbers to work with. But it
hardly affects the scout’s job at all, since
scouts are looking at intangibles like dis-
cipline, athleticism, and the will to win.
alent has to be evaluated in every
T professional sport. Why all the at-
tention to baseball? One answer is that
the gap in the level of play between
high-school or college ball and major-
league ball is very great. In basketball
and football, many college stars can play
in the N.B.A. or the N.F.L. right away.
That’s not the case in baseball.
More than a thousand baseball play-
ers are drafted every year, and less than
ten per cent of them ever play in the
majors. Everyone else toils away some-
where in baseball’s enormous farm-
team archipelago: two hundred and
forty teams, more than seven thou-
sand players. (There are seven hun-
dred and fifty active major leaguers.)
Virtually everyone in baseball spends
time in that system, which means that
scouts and scorers are often trying to
guess what a seventeen- or twenty-
year-old is going to play like when
he’s twenty-five and finally arrives in
the big leagues.
What makes this process even more
difficult is that the game changes, and
precisely according to what teams value
in their players. The “shift” is a much
discussed recent example—moving most
defenders to one side of the field against
hitters who are predicted to pull the ball.
With a lower chance of getting base hits,
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 87
those batters now try to hit home runs.
(This is why “launch angle” has become
so important.) So do you value future
home-run hitters? Or hitters who can
put the ball in play anywhere on the field?
You can’t know which type of player will
be needed five or eight years in advance.
The ideal type is a moving target.
This is why, for scouts, a prospect’s
numbers don’t mean much—college ball
is so much less competitive—but body
type does. For the scorers, though, play-
ers who know how to get bases on balls
in college will get bases on balls in the
majors. It doesn’t matter what sort of
physique they have. In either case, eval-
uation is not simple, and since there is
more and more money involved, there
is a high premium on getting it right.
Lewis’s book has a lot of examples
where scouts got it wrong but scorers
got it right, so it’s regrettable that Phil-
lips doesn’t provide much in the way of
examples where the reverse is true. That
may be because he wants to make a
more philosophical point about the na-
ture of data—that they’re always a hy-
brid of objectivity and instinct, analyt-
ics and intuition. He concludes that
scouting has as much claim to being
scientific as scoring does: “it serves as a
well-developed and well-crafted set of
heuristics for arriving at stable, gener-
alizable, and reliable facts about the nat-
ural world.” He argues that since teams
continue to use scouts, their experience
must be irreplaceable.
Phillips does appear to sidestep what
may have been for many readers the re-
velatory takeaway of “Moneyball,” which
is that, for decades, baseball was sunk
in the sports equivalent of primitive the-
ology. Baseball minds genuflected be-
fore idols—the stolen base, the sacrifice
bunt, the hit-and-run—that turned out
to have little to do with winning games
in the real world of professional sports.
Baseball players are notoriously super-
stitious, and this trait seems to have in-
fected the culture of scouting a little.
That’s what Billy Beane—who didn’t
do the math himself—learned from his
scorers. A lot of the action in “Money-
ball” is not about draft prospects but
about players who are already big leaguers
and who either become available for
trade or are on the market as free agents.
This is an area where Beane’s approach
paid off. He was able to snatch up play-
88 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
ers who were undervalued according to
the old rubrics, and to acquire players
no one else saw value in, because they
didn’t know the new rubrics.
One of Beane’s favorite strategies re-
lied on the overvaluation of closers. The
closer is a relief pitcher who typically en-
ters the game in the ninth inning with
his team ahead by three runs or less and,
normally, with no runners on base. If he
preserves the lead, he is credited with a
save. If you think about it, this is the eas-
iest job on the pitching staff. The closer
comes into the game with a fresh arm
to face batters who are seeing him for
the first time, and he starts out already
ahead. All he has to do is get three outs
before the other team can tie the score.
But, starting in the nineteen-seven-
ties, a mystique grew up around the
closer, partly because pitchers like Sparky
Lyle, Goose Gossage, and Al (the Mad
Hungarian) Hrabosky—and, later on,
Jonathan Papelbon and Brian Wilson—
developed outsized mound personali-
ties. Major facial hair, hulking frames,
Frankenstein’s-monster windups, and
demonic intensity became the attributes
of the closer persona. The closer was a
berserker, a danger artist, a Lord High
Executioner—even though all he was
doing was mopping up games his team-
mates had already won.
The monetary value of the closer got
inflated accordingly. So Beane took so-so
minor leaguers and starting pitchers who
had begun to fade with age, and he turned
them into closers. This drove up their
stats and hence their market value, and
they became trade bait for other teams.
Beane could swap those pitchers, repur-
posed as lights-out relievers, for younger
and cheaper players.
t’s not hard to see how the scouting-
I or-scoring dichotomy figures in per-
sonnel decisions in other realms—for
example, college admissions. The de-
bate today over fairness in college ad-
missions is oversimplified to the point
of absurdity. There is no single standard
for admissions at select colleges, because
there are many different buckets to fill.
When one applicant displaces an argu-
ably more meritorious applicant, she is
almost always displacing an applicant
within her own bucket.
Still, you can see the scout-versus-
scorer opposition in the way people talk
about admissions. Some critics of the
current system deplore the reliance on
standardized-test scores, on the ground
that privileged students are prepped for
the tests. And some critics—often they
are the same ones—identify certain ac-
cepted applicants (legacies, varsity ath-
letes, Jared Kushner) as undeserving be-
cause their test scores are below average.
In other words, people want college
admissions to reflect SAT scores and
G.P.A.s (scoring), but people also want
them to consider an applicant’s back-
ground, motivation, and personal qual-
ities, like having overcome disadvantages
(scouting). One standard is frequently
going to be at the expense of the other.
Are there other lessons to be learned
from these stories about baseball scouts
and scorers? Lewis and Phillips both
seem to think so. For Lewis, the impor-
tant lesson was about business. What the
scorers working for the Oakland A’s
showed was that markets have inefficien-
cies, and that if you can find those in-
efficiencies and exploit them you can
beat your competition.
This was a lesson appropriate to the
era in which “Moneyball” was written,
shortly after the first dot-com boom, in
the days of a startup-, hedge-fund-,
derivatives-fuelled gold rush. To put it
in scout-versus-scorer terms, that was a
time when hands-on experience, bred-
in-the-bone wisdom, and seat-of-the-
pants intuition—the “human element”
in decision-making—were perceived as
obstacles to less expensive and more
efficient ways of doing things. Crunch-
ing the numbers was how you got ahead.
Today, this seems a very 2000 way of
thinking. Reading “Moneyball” back
then, you found yourself rooting for
Billy Beane and his geeks against the
bloated Yankees and their bullying
owner, George Steinbrenner. Now you
realize that what you were actually root-
ing for was a bunch of guys who were
trying to figure out a way to underpay
their players. In exchange for the chance
to be in the big leagues, Oakland’s play-
ers settled for less compensation than
they were worth, simply because no one
else knew how to value them. There are
foreshadowings of the gig economy in
the “Moneyball” story.
Phillips’s book is appropriate to our
more chastened post-recession moment,
when social confidence in Big Tech is
going through a rough patch. His book
is a reminder that algorithms and ma-
chine intelligence are only extensions
of the men and women who create them,
and that there is no substitute for human
judgments based on experience with ac-
tual people. Scorer types aren’t inter-
ested in history; Phillips tries to show
us that knowing the past can help us
grasp what’s at stake in the choices we
make in the present.
Phillips has another lesson to draw,
though. This one is about the death of
expertise. “Though it is a leap from Mon-
eyball and data science to the rechristen-
ing of falsehood as ‘alternative facts’ in
2017 by a special advisor to the president
of the United States,” he writes, “self-
styled outsiders, armed with a bit of data,
have had success in challenging expert
consensus. . . . Data analysts’ down-play-
ing of expertise ironically made it harder
for ‘objective facts’ to triumph over ‘per-
sonal belief ’ in a world in which every-
body is a putative expert.”
Whoa. It does seem a bit of a leap
from “Moneyball” to climate-change de-
niers and post-truth politicians—O.K.,
lying politicians. Is our political mess re-
ally a scouts-and-scorers situation? The
deniers and the liars in public life don’t
use “bits of data.”They just assert, on the
theory that many people prefer to be-
lieve what they already want to believe.
The comparison also seems out of pro-
portion. We need to trust our public in-
stitutions, and that crisis deepens every
day. But we don’t need to trust our team’s
front office. They are free to make up
the facts. The peril is on them.
Phillips seems to be ignoring the les-
son of his own book, which is that his-
tory shows that the tension between
scouting and scoring is always with us.
It’s never going to go away. If we’re tip-
ping toward a scoring phase right now,
somewhere down the road we’ll tip back
the other way.
And in the end a fresh consensus, a
new conventional wisdom, does emerge.
Now that everyone in baseball has figured
out how to use sabermetrics, we’re back
to where we started, with the rich clubs
lording it over the rest. Bill James now
works as a consultant for the Boston Red
Sox, who won the most recent World
Series and have the highest payroll in
baseball.They are planning to get through
next season without hiring a closer. 
BRIEFLY NOTED
My Young Life, by Frederic Tuten (Simon & Schuster). This ab-
sorbing portrait of the writer as a young man chronicles his
experiences growing up in the Bronx in the nineteen-forties
and fifties while dreaming of moving to Paris to become a
painter and a novelist. Paris doesn’t happen, thanks to pov-
erty, rebelliousness, and obsessions with girls—his masturba-
tion habits are recounted with Portnovian zest—but mid-
century New York provides its own inspiration. Tuten conjures
a city of small bookstores, vibrant cafés, seedy bars, and
crummy apartments, and the artists and intellectuals who
populated them. Their wisdom is presented with an urgency
that affirms the timeless nature of the artist’s struggle.
Sounds Like Titanic, by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman (Norton).
As a cash-strapped student at Columbia University, the au-
thor of this sardonic, moving memoir discovers that her vi-
olin playing, deemed extraordinary at home in Appalachia,
is merely mediocre in New York. Nevertheless, she is hired
to tour as a violinist, lulling “loud, sun-burnt ladies and their
shy, baseball-capped husbands” with music that is “languid,
insistent, and faintly menacing.” The catch: she’s playing
along to CDs, turned up so high that no one hears her fum-
bles or notices her gradual disintegration. Grappling with
the pressures of young womanhood, she finds that although
classical music “gives a girl weight in a world that wants her
to be weightless,” faking it is not enough.
The Nocilla Trilogy, by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated from
the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
Published in Spain from 2006 to 2009, these avant-garde
novels (“Dream,” “Experience,” and “Lab”) brought their au-
thor, a physicist, great acclaim. The first two, each compris-
ing more than a hundred short chapters, combine quotations
from scientists and artists with brief stories of men in deso-
late areas or engaged in odd pursuits. (One man tries to “cook
the horizon”; another wants to walk the length of U.S. Route
50.) The third novel, faster-moving, starts with an eighty-
page sentence and ends as a graphic novel. A character’s de-
scription of “transpoetic fiction” epitomizes Mallo’s project:
“hybrid artifacts somewhere between science and what is tra-
ditionally known as ‘literature.’”
The Altruists, by Andrew Ridker (Viking). In this début novel,
two millennial New Yorkers, Ethan and Maggie, return home
to St. Louis to reconnect with their irascible father, Arthur.
Hurt by his affair during their mother’s terminal illness,
they’ve acted out in rather contemporary ways, Maggie re-
nouncing success, Ethan quitting consultancy and racking
up debts. As Arthur delves into a fraught family history, we
encounter questions about how to live without contradic-
tions (Ethan ponders ancient-Greek ethics in his bougie
apartment) and riffs on current absurdities. Ridker’s focus on
the Zeitgeist curbs his characters’ individuality, but the novel
is still an incisive inquiry into the point at which self-interest
ends and compassion begins.
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 89

BOOKS
A STILL SMALL POEM
David Baker bears witness to the natural world.
BY DAN CHIASSON
avid Baker is a poet of American
D anti-pastoral. His mind operates
against the vividly rendered landscape
of small-town Ohio, where he has lived
for more than thirty years. Baker’s poems
depend on long acquaintance with a
small place, where year-over-year com-
parison makes even the arrival of a feed-
ing monarch or a nagging blue jay a
standout event. His work evinces the
moral courage of keeping still in the
landscape: in our era of climate change,
poetry’s mandate to measure the rhythms
of the year has become a valuable form
of witness. Baker’s reports from the in-
terior leave in all the encroachments
that threaten it. He is heir to such writers
A poet of systems, Baker is attuned to cycles and processes, not to outcomes and effects.
90 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
as Henry David Thoreau, who marked
the loss of Sudbury River shad after a
dam was built upstream, and Robert
Frost, who heard in the song of “The
Oven Bird” the ominous news that “the
highway dust is over all.”
Baker is a professor of English at
Denison University and the longtime
poetry editor of The Kenyon Review.
“Swift: New and Selected Poems” (Nor-
ton) samples eight of his collections
and adds a ravishing suite of new ele-
gies for his parents. The volume affords
a longitudinal view of a sensibility that
is itself devoted to observing change
over time.
Baker’s early work names preoccu-
pations that he hadn’t quite figured out
how to embody, but these balder expres-
sions help pinpoint what is later only
implied. “A figure of speech is where de-
sire forces a crisis, a crossing—/one world
and its weather suddenly brilliant with
meaning,” he writes, in “Snow Figure,”
from his third book. Baker, like Yeats,
was an elegist even before he’d suffered
much loss. In “November: The End of
Myth,” from 1985, he scolds himself for
his tendency to “mistake such things for
signs/and for our sustenance.” A hedge
apple fallen on a car’s hood is “not the
body/of a green, malignant thought, nei-
ther omen nor even/punishment for our
evening’s joy.” The presumptuous foist-
ing of significance upon the natural world
is a less visible human trespass.
Baker’s poems often veer toward this
kind of hubris, then abruptly away. His
style is full of second guesses, and as his
work matures he makes a virtue of hes-
itation. “Swift” is organized in reverse
chronology, but I started at the back, to
watch Baker’s early motifs return and
change. The hedge apples reappear, as
food for starving deer, not as fodder for
symbolism. The deer themselves keep
returning, grim timekeepers, seemingly
hungrier and in greater numbers. In
“Late Pastoral,” from 2005, they are
“driven towards us”:
by nothing to forage,
by vanishing trees
and razed fields, by exurbs, by white-
flight and our insatiate hunger for size
and space and tax
advantages.
In “Too Many,” a poem published
in 2009, the deer have become, in the
eyes of Baker’s neighbors, “a menace;
plague”—though he sees that the real
plague is human sprawl. Nearly run-
ning the creature over with his mower,
Baker discovers in the tall grasses a
just-
come-to-the-
world fawn, speckled,
wet as a trout
His metaphors buckle to contain this
extraordinary, delicate sight: the fawn
endangered by the plow, a common pas-
toral motif, is also “like a tan seashell”
and a mewing “kitten.” The only con-
clusion to be drawn is that “there are so
ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF ÖSTBERG
many, too // many of us”; and yet “the
world keeps making—this makes no
sense— /more.”
In his later work, from “Midwest Ec-
logue” (2005) forward, Baker has trou-
bled the idea that poems might tame
the world by metaphor. But he is not
dismissive of the human need to try, and
he has built a style out of his own and
others’ setbacks. In “Hyper,” a beautiful
poem about his daughter’s diagnosis of
A.D.H.D., Baker describes how seeing
four deer in a neighbor’s bean field be-
comes, for father and daughter alike,
an “absolute attention, a fixity.” Both of
them must decide what representing the
deer requires. The girl, momentarily self-
forgetful, is absorbed in her process,
“hunkered over her drawing pad, /hum-
ming, for an hour.” She edits the four
deer down to a classical three and draws
the beans in idealized rows. Her father,
the poet, keeps qualifying and refining
his descriptions. “Then a stillness de-
scended the blue hills,” he writes. After
a beat, as though doubting the word: “I
say stillness.” By the end of the poem,
he has settled on a version of a sentence
that the reader has seen him struggle to
get right: “We watched four deer in still-
ness walking there.” It’s in perfect iam-
bic pentameter.
aker’s poems swerve with tangents
B and reversals, and often move for-
ward by branching out. Sometimes you
feel the tension between the torrent of
language and the rigid banks of his cho-
sen stanza forms. In “The Rumor,” from
2009, a poem about a “big cat,” proba-
bly a mountain lion, in the nearby coun-
tryside, he describes the remnants of a
deer’s corpse at the base of a beech tree:
Consider thus
the tufts and tail piece,
hooves cleft from the legs, the legs
what’s left of them where
they dropped con-
centric beneath
the beech.
The abrupt line breaks suggest a formal
face-off between composure and vio-
lence that in some ways mimics the an-
imal’s struggle. But Baker can also mod-
erate tension to allow sentences and the
effects they describe to unfold at their
own pace, as in this lambent descrip-
tion of monarch butterflies:
Migrant, they’re more than two dozen today,
more long-lived than the species who keep
to the localized gardens—they’re barely Thank you
a gram apiece, landing, holding still for
the common milkweed that feeds their
larvae,
for being
or balanced on bridges of plume grass stalks,
and bottlebrush, wings fanning, closing,
calmed
a reader and
by the long searchlight stems of hollyhock.
supporting
The present participles (“landing,”“hold-
ing,” “fanning,” “closing”) keep the sen- independent
tence, and the butterfly, open to change,
before a single past participle, “calmed,” journalism.
gives both a place to rest. Never a parti-
san of any single poetic school or creed,
Baker is free to toggle between tactics
of attention. His forms vary depending
upon what his senses perceive: jagged
and tense around a mountain lion, long
and languid next to a butterfly.
To read Baker’s poems collected in
this way is to appreciate the full range
of their formal resources, their attune-
ment to cycles and processes rather than
to mere outcomes and effects—their pa-
tience over the long haul. He sees little
economies everywhere he looks. In “The
Spring Ephemerals,” a trillium belongs
to a complex ecosystem of “rue anem-
one, masses//of colt’s foot, wild ginger,
blood root and may- /apples, bracken
and fiddlehead fern.” The entire cata-
logue, which sounds like something from
Milton’s “Lycidas,” is in fact a list of frag-
ile plants “imperiled by road graders,”
their tenuous network disrupted.
Baker is a poet of systems, and of the
interrelatedness of apparently discrete
phenomena. A poem about an empty Read even more
field is also, of necessity, a poem about
developers, zoning boards, and town
original pieces from
meetings. The poems are often them- your favorite writers
selves complex systems, their vocabular-
ies interlocking like machine parts. Now,
on newyorker.com.
assembled as a whole, the machines
can be perceived as an even larger op- All current subscribers get access
eration—a mind susceptible to change, to the Web site and the online
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long, astonishing sequence in “Scaven-
ger Loop,” from 2015, begins with a trash
picker and passes through Facebook
shares and likes, cell mutations, G.M.O.s,
and compost. Each of these threads tracks,
with intelligence that feels both adver-
sarial to lyric poetry and vital to it, the
metastatic path of matter. The poem is
an elegy for Baker’s mother, but there’s
something in it for everyone to grieve. 
THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019 91
 complex reasons, Moondog is banished
THE CURRENT CINEMA from his own home, and, in one scene,
he breaks back in, bringing with him a

SECOND ACTS
“The Beach Bum” and “Dumbo.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
hat a pleasure it is to meet cer­
W tain characters in the movies, and
what a relief not to know them in real
life. One cup of coffee with Michael
Corleone might be your last. An eve­
ning with Ace Ventura would seem like
an eternity. Ditto Donald Duck. And
pretty much anyone played by Joe Pesci
would be worth steering clear of, espe­
Matthew McConaughey stars as a wastrel writer in Harmony Korine’s film.
cially in restaurants. What, then, to make
of Moondog, the rapscallion played by
Matthew McConaughey, in “The Beach
Bum”? You’ve got to love Moondog—
or, rather, you haven’t got to, but some­
how he sucks the love toward him. Not
for one second, mind you, does he cease
to be a pain in the neck.
Moondog is a writer living in Key
West, but any thoughts of another Hem­
ingway should be laid aside. First, Hem­
ingway never owned a boat called Well
Hung, though I bet he wished he had.
Second, he never wore his hair in long
blond straggles, like a stoner Messiah;
that, however, is the style favored by
Moondog, as an accompaniment to his
cacophonous shirts and his silver Ugg
boots. Third, Moondog is a poet, of an
92 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 8, 2019
extremely rare sort—not a major or even
a minor poet, to judge by what we hear
of his work, which he recites at every
opportunity, but a rich poet. The wealth
flows from his wife, Minnie (Isla Fisher),
with whom he shares, on and off, a villa
beside the ocean. They have a daugh­
ter, Heather (Stefania LaVie Owen),
who gets married at a tender age. Her
father, as expected, rolls up to the cere­
mony late and drunk, inquiring politely
of the groom, “What’s your name, again?”
In case you hadn’t guessed, the movie
is directed by Harmony Korine, and, in
its behavioral excess, it follows on from
“Spring Breakers,” his debauch of 2012,
which feels as if it came out last week.
Both films were photographed by Be­
noît Debie, who specializes in the snap
of hot colors at the height of the day,
and in the softer luminescence, at once
tacky and touching, of the Florida dusk.
It’s as though someone had spilled peach
juice all over the sky. The difference is
that the earlier movie was steeped in
youth culture, whereas the new one
warms to those who have already lived,
and misspent, the bulk of their lives. For
crew of homeless men. They leap into
his swimming pool and splash about,
and it’s heartening to find Debie’s cam­
era, which leered so sweatily over teen­
age flesh in “Spring Breakers,” rejoicing
in these used and busted bodies—even
shifting into slow motion, and thus
granting the men the kind of leisure
that the harrying years have denied them.
There is plenty of plot here. It just
doesn’t feel that way. Moondog is be­
reaved, arrested, packed off to rehab,
and so forth; yet everything washes
over him, as if existence were one big
beach. If he isn’t worried, why should
we be? What right do we have, Korine
is asking, to agonize on a character’s
behalf ? During a burial, Moondog
smokes a graveside joint, and, in court,
he is cheerful and charming with the
judge. Such blitheness could easily seem
heartless, or witless, but so winning is
McConaughey that we come to accept
this mirthful hippiedom, which allows
him to greet all slings and arrows with
an uncomplaining shrug, as a sensible
course of action.
The clincher, and the proof of Moon­
dog’s radicalism, is that he can take or
leave the prospect of success. “I’m off
to write the next great American novel,”
he declares, with no more fuss than
somebody visiting the bathroom.
Against all odds, the book gets writ­
ten, on an old manual typewriter, and
the author is duly fêted, reciting one of
his poems (a fond encomium to his
own penis) at a distinguished literary
event, and winding up with money to
burn. And burn it he does. Nothing, in
this or any other Korine film, is more
thoroughly irresponsible, or more beau­
tiful, than the sight of cash curling
downward through the night air, on
fire, like gentle and wasteful snow.
“The Beach Bum” should not be mis­
taken for a one­man show. Fisher and
Owen have fun as Moondog’s nearest
and dearest, not least because the fun is
tinged with a wistful tolerance. (“He may
be a jerk, but he’s a great man,” Heather
says, half proudly, of her father.) Jonah
Hill is his seamy agent, and Snoop Dogg
is a rapper named Lingerie. There’s a
cameo by Zac Efron, playing a punkish
bad boy at the rehab facility and trying
ILLUSTRATION BY ZOHAR LAZAR
hard to match the antics of James Franco
in “Spring Breakers”—so hard, I’d say,
that the effort only highlights the finer
arts of McConaughey, who knows how
to underplay the act of going over the
top. When Moondog passes a guy with
a sousaphone, parping away on the dock,
he simply pushes the poor schmuck into
the water, horn and all. As you do. And,
E is up for transfiguration. Nothing
when he alters his dress sense, donning
a red sequinned bikini top and a sarong,
he does so not just without fanfare but
almost without noticing. “What’s up with
the women’s clothes?” someone asks.
“What women’s clothes?” he replies.
“The Beach Bum” is milder than
“Spring Breakers,” and far less scabrous
than some of Korine’s early offerings,
such as “Gummo” (1997). But, as the
new film demonstrates, he still enjoys
bumping into Surrealist flotsam (note
the parrot who does coke) and lazing
in doldrums of narrative where next to
nothing happens. McConaughey is ideal
for these purposes, especially when
adrift; watch him turning circles in a
small speedboat, or lounging so snugly
in its stern, beside the outboard motor,
that his prow is practically vertical. In
a triumph of labor-saving innovation,
Moondog goes down on his wife as
she’s having a pedicure, and has sex
with somebody else in a restaurant
kitchen while the cook, a few feet away,
keeps flipping burgers.
In short, the pursuit of pleasure is not
confined to our hero alone but extended
to all comers, with a horny democratic
good will, and it’s typical of Korine to
suggest that, in an era as acrimonious as
ours, the true provocation is to harbor
no grudges, to forgive us our trespasses,
and to drift along, catching the tide of
contentment. Moondog, perverse to the
end, basks in benign paranoia. “I’m quite
certain that the world is conspiring to
make me happy,” he says. Now, that’s a
conspiracy theory.
very old Disney movie, these days,
is safe. In recent years, we have had
live-action remakes of “Cinderella,”
“The Jungle Book,” and “Beauty and
the Beast.” Meanwhile, “Aladdin,” “The
Lion King,” and “Mulan” are ready to
pounce. Whether you view such proj-
ects as a flourish of digital legerdemain,
or as a dead weight and an insult to
Uncle Walt, is of no consequence. What
matters is that they rub the lamp and
rack up the gold.
The latest classic to get the treat-
ment is “Dumbo,” directed by Tim Bur-
ton. The story is set in 1919, and stars
a nonspeaking computer-generated
mini-elephant with ears the size of spin-
nakers. Almost as noticeable are his eyes,
which are so alarmingly blue that he
appears to be ninety-five per cent pachy-
derm and five per cent Paul Newman.
When this prodigy, born in a circus,
first emerges from a small stack of hay,
the ringmaster, Max Medici (Danny
DeVito), takes one look and exclaims,
understandably, “Wozzat?”
The original “Dumbo” came out at
a tricky moment for Disney, in 1941,
with the studio reeling from strike ac-
tion by the Screen Cartoonists Guild.
(“Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off from work
we go,” the animators sang, as they shoul-
dered their pencils and stumped away.
Or so I have always believed.) The film
made a weighty profit, and some of its
graphic simplicity—think of the noc-
turnal scene, stark and rainswept, in
which the elephants help to raise the
big top—has endured surprisingly well.
Then, there was one of Disney’s weird-
est reveries: the dance of the pink ele-
phants, as imagined by a champagne-
fuelled Dumbo. Burton’s decision to
replace the dancers with big, boring soap
bubbles strikes me as a failure of nerve.
The best parts of the new film, by
a long stretch, are the flying sequences,
in which Dumbo wheels around inside
the tent. Sometimes he even has a
jockey, in the daring shape of Colette
(Eva Green), the in-house trapeze art-
ist. Elsewhere, however, we are dragged
through patches of glum and listless
drama, with Colin Farrell as a one-
armed veteran of the First World War
and Michael Keaton as the oily mae-
stro of an amusement park, who wants
Dumbo for himself. I was psyched for
the reteaming of Keaton and Burton,
who together cooked up “Beetlejuice”
(1988) and two of the better Batman
films, but the chemistry, sad to say, pro-
duces no magical brew.
Something else nags at this movie,
and it won’t be brushed off. We no lon-
ger conceive of old-fashioned circuses,
and the schooling of animals to be props
and comic attractions, as harmless fun.
Burton is aware of the problem, and he
seeks to solve it with a twist, but you
have to ask, in the end, whether he
picked the right Disney feature to re-
boot. Does his lifelong fixation on
misfits and oddballs not cry out for “Pi-
nocchio”? Can you not hear Burton
giggle at the liar’s tumescent schnoz? 
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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 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 Jeremy Nguyen,
must be received by Sunday, April 7th. The finalists in the March 25th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the April 22nd issue. Anyone age thirteen
or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“There are cheaper ways to find an audience, Jim.”

Josiah Tsui, San Francisco, Calif.

“We’ll end on that note.”

Michele Lagoy, San Diego, Calif. “Before you go, describe the iceberg salad.”
Adam Santiago, New York City
“Who is ‘coming around the mountain,’ John?
Could it be your mother?”
Russ McKinney, Philadelphia, Pa.
 Dr. Jim Allison | Nobel Laureate in Medicine
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saving the lives of countless patients. Groundbreaking research like this allows our world-renowned team of experts
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