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 Introducing the
Weekend Crossword

1. Expulsion from office.

2. What many hot takes lack.
3. Go straight to the kindergarten authorities.
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 MAY 6, 2019

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Amy Davidson Sorkin on the 2020 Democrats;
Bill Barr’s bagpipes; Brooklyn promenade plans;
Maggie Rogers; Hermès’s guest-botherers.
DEPT. OF JUSTICE
Jeffrey Toobin 20 Fall Guy
Michael Cohen’s final weeks of freedom.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Ian Frazier 27 In Billionaires Is the Preservation
of the World
PERSONAL HISTORY
Guinevere Turner 28 The Others
A childhood in a cult.
PROFILES
Dexter Filkins 32 On the Warpath
Will John Bolton sell Trump on military force?
ANNALS OF SCIENCE
Rivka Galchen 46 The Eighth Continent
The race to develop the moon.
FICTION
John L’Heureux 54 “The Escape”
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Adam Kirsch 60 How Martin Buber reconceived Judaism.
63 Briefly Noted
Thomas Mallon 65 Joshua Furst’s “Revolutionaries.”
Alexandra Schwartz 68 Lena Andersson’s “Acts of Infidelity.”
THE THEATRE
Hilton Als 70 “Ink,” “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 72 “The White Crow,” “Avengers: Endgame.”
POEMS
Matthew Zapruder 38 “My Life”
Sandy Solomon 51 “The Blush”
COVER
John Cuneo “To Fetch or Not to Fetch”

DRAWINGS Paul Noth, P. C. Vey, Benjamin Schwartz, Evan Lian, Ellie Black, Shannon Wheeler, Ward Sutton,
Roz Chast, Frank Cotham, Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby, Maddie Dai, Ellis Rosen SPOTS Ron Barrett
 The New Yorker
Recommends CONTRIBUTORS
Dexter Filkins (“On the Warpath,” p. 32)
Discover your is a staff writer and the author of “The
Forever War,” which won a National
next favorite Book Critics Circle Award.
Guinevere Turner (“The Others,” p. 28),
things to read, a writer and an actor, was a screen-
writer for such films as “American Psy-
watch, and cho,” “The Notorious Bettie Page,” and,
most recently, “Charlie Says,” which
listen to. will be released on May 10th.
Jeffrey Toobin (“Fall Guy,” p. 20), a staff
writer, is working on a book about Rob-
ert Mueller’s investigation.
Sandy Solomon (Poem, p. 51) is the au-
thor of “Pears, Lake, Sun,” which won
the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.
She teaches at Vanderbilt University.
John Cuneo (Cover) has contributed
drawings to the magazine since 1994.
“Not Waving but Drawing,” a collec-
tion of his sketchbook work, came out
in 2017.
Alexandra Schwartz (Books, p. 68) be-
came a staff writer in 2016.
THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM
Our staff and contributors
share their latest enthusiasms
in books, music, podcasts,
movies, TV, and more.
newyorker.com/recommends
ON AND OFF THE AVENUE
Rachel Syme writes about Annette
Green, a grande dame of the perfume
industry, who just turned ninety-five.
Download the New Yorker Today app for the latest news, commentary, criticism,
and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008.
2 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
Rivka Galchen (“The Eighth Continent,”
p. 46) is the author of four books. Her
latest, the children’s novel “Rat Rule 79,”
will be out in September.
John L’Heureux (Fiction, p. 54), who died
on April 22nd, was the author of more
than twenty books of fiction and poetry.
“The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast,” a col-
lection of his stories, will be published
in December, and “The Beggar’s Pawn,”
his last novel, will come out in 2020.
Hannah Goldfield (Tables for Two,
p. 13) is the magazine’s food critic.
Matthew Zapruder (Poem, p. 38) will
publish his fifth poetry collection, “Fa-
ther’s Day,” this fall. He is an editor at
large at Wave Books.
Luci Gutiérrez (Sketchpad, p. 17), an
illustrator based in Barcelona, is the
author of “English Is Not Easy: A
Visual Guide to the Language.”
Thomas Mallon (Books, p. 65) is a nov-
elist, an essayist, and a critic. His most
recent novel is “Landfall.”
LEFT: JOSEFINA SANTOS FOR THE NEW YORKER; RIGHT: DOUG CHAYKA
NEWS DESK
The Christchurch gunman wanted to
go viral. A team at Facebook worked
to keep the shooting off the platform.
 THE MAIL
TRUMP OF THE TROPICS? bers. Meanwhile, his family praises the
real criminals.

Jon Lee Anderson struck the right note
in his piece about Jair Bolsonaro, the
new President of Brazil (“Southern
Strategy,” April 1st). Like Donald Trump,
Bolsonaro is a racist, misogynistic, ho-
mophobic liar. He is also an idiot. But
it’s important not to push the Trump-
Bolsonaro analogy too far. Although
there are similarities in rhetoric and
policy between the two men, the dam-
age that Bolsonaro inflicts on Brazil
will be more severe and longer-lasting
than Trump’s assault on democratic
norms in the U.S. Brazil has been a de-
1
Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela
Princeton, N.J.
SURVIVING CANCER
What I found most striking in Anne
Boyer’s piece about living with cancer
were her descriptions of the extraordi-
narily noxious medicine that she re-
ceived during her treatment (“The Un-
dying,” April 15th). In 2013, my father
was diagnosed with kidney cancer and
flew from Sweden, where he lived, to Ian Fleming, Thunderball, first edition, signed and inscribed to
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mocracy for only three decades, and
its political institutions are weak. Bol-
sonaro’s Presidency threatens to ex-
acerbate these vulnerabilities, and to
menace liberal democracy in Brazil and
elsewhere in Latin America.
Cesar Rocha
Woods Hole, Mass.
As Anderson explains, the network of
alleged personal connections between
Bolsonaro and the country’s militias—
violent paramilitary gangs composed
of current and former police officers—
is outrageous. Bolsonaro’s own family
has been linked to the suspected kill-
ers of the city councilwoman Marielle
Franco. Even if the President isn’t found
to be implicated personally in Franco’s
murder, he has long defended the per-
petrators of this sort of violence. In
2003, he openly commended militia
members for supposedly protecting
neighborhoods against criminality, and
he invited them to come to Rio de Ja-
neiro, where, he said, “the crime of ex-
termination, in my understanding, will
be very much welcomed.” Militias are
now responsible for much of the crime
epidemic that Bolsonaro, during his
candidacy, promised to combat. Un-
surprisingly, the anti-crime legislation
that Bolsonaro’s government recently
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THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 3

TV. Streaming. On Demand.
 Advertisement
of Agitation and Propaganda, and a rela-
tively simple process even long before dig-
ital editing products).

Of course, the conscious and continued

dissemination of distorted information, es-
pecially when coupled with minimization of
unsavory facts and attacks on straw men,
isn’t a transgression limited to the U.S.S.R.—
it’s a practice that’s evident on today’s In-
ternet. If anything, convincingly twisting

Today, thirty-three
years later,
misinformation remains
just as powerful
reality is easier than ever, for anyone and
everyone: private citizens, public figures,
preprogrammed bots, and organized initia-
tives or networks of users focused on en-
forcing norms or pushing agendas.

Courtesy of HBO
What was, in the case of Chernobyl, a
steady stream of propaganda from a mono-

CHERNOBYL
lithic source is echoed (and, perhaps, in-
tensified) in today’s online flood of misin-
formation from numerous wellsprings. And
though it’s true that organized campaigns
and automated bots play a significant role
in spreading distortion, computer scientists,
As HBO’s new miniseries Chernobyl and a companion pod- data analysts, and sociologists have point-
cast highlight, propaganda and obfuscation contributed to his- ed out that individual users very frequently
tory’s worst nuclear tragedy—and modern observers are likely disseminate misinformation, as they per-
petuate falsehoods by creating media,
to notice the same distortions at play in today’s online landscape. sharing with informal friend networks, and
re-posting unverified claims. The subjects
ressed in summer clothes, residents of Pripyat strolled through of science and health are particularly ripe for such trickle-down misin-
the sunlit streets of the atomograd, a planned city built for the terpretation: just as ordinary Soviets remained unaware of the work-
workers and support staff of Ukraine’s sprawling Chernobyl ings of the plant in particular, and of the potential danger posed by
nuclear plant. Children played in the parks, families waded in the river radioactive facilities in particular, most of today’s Internet users have
shallows, and drying laundry fluttered in the breeze. Simultaneously, only a basic understanding of complex scientific topics. Experts and
military helicopters gathered overhead and trucks sprayed down the research institutions rarely present their work to the public—not whol-
pavement with decontamination foam. It was April 26, 1986, and the ly dissimilar to the nuclear investigative commission’s removal from
air was alive with radioactive particles, which penetrated the soil, the public discourse and official coverage of the 1986 nuclear disaster.
water, and the flesh of the citizens. Consequently, it’s less-informed organizations and users that pass
along incomplete or biased details, sending deceptive posts cascad-
In the early hours of that morning, a turbine test at the power station’s ing across the ideological spectrum. The resulting rumors and myths,
Reactor No. 4 had triggered a catastrophic explosion, obliterating the in turn, can cause real, concrete damage.
nuclear core. But, in a series of misrepresentations that look familiar
to anyone used to the current online proliferation of every type of It’s tempting to see the deep harm done to individuals, communities,
misinformation, Soviet officials downplayed the risk, both out of denial and the environment in the wake of Chernobyl as an isolated and un-
of the gravity of the situation and a desire to dodge blame. Author- repeatable symptom of the U.S.S.R.’s propaganda machine. But today,
ities withheld information on the severity of the meltdown, the inju- thirty-three years later, misinformation remains just as powerful—and,
ries to first responders, and the radiation unleashed—which reached as researchers warn, the potential of the Web to spread it is nearly
four hundred times more than the amount released by the A-bomb at infinite. In such a context, one wonders how the case of Chernobyl
Hiroshima. would unfold if it happened today: Would the truth emerge only to be
bombarded and mutated by an outpouring of dueling false narratives?
As hundreds were hospitalized with radiation burns and other symp-
toms of radiation poisoning, plant administrators and government rep- The broad scope of the misinformation and denialism surrounding
resentatives insisted that the core could not have been destroyed, Chernobyl, and the enduring tragic effects, emerge in eerie, poignant
and repeated absurdly low exposure estimates, even after realizing detail in HBO’s five-part miniseries Chernobyl and a companion pod-
that the dosimeters initially used were deficient. Pripyat was evac- cast, The Chernobyl Podcast, which delves deeply into the research
uated a full thirty-six hours after the explosion; the first public ac- behind the miniseries.
knowledgment of the crisis only came on the evening of April 28,
and comprised a twenty-second newscast mention, followed by a
propagandist segment on Western nuclear mistakes. Photos of the
Chernobyl premieres
collapsed reactor hall were doctored to remove the plume of smoke
billowing from the site (a common strategy of the Soviet Department May 6, at 9 P.M., only on HBO.
 MAY 1 – 7, 2019

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Pop and country music’s synergy lives on through Maren Morris. On “Girl,” her second album, the pliable
singer-songwriter navigates womanhood in lush ballads and powerhouse anthems that paint her, in turns, as a
down-home girl-with-guitar and an elegant dynamo diva. But she’s not here to just shut up and sing. In her music,
the bliss of romance mingles with calls for equality and claims to independence, themes that bolster a grander
artistic statement—that Morris, who performs at Terminal 5 on May 4, isn’t interested in being anyone but herself.

PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL MCCULLOUGH

 1
ART
“The Daguerreotypes of
Girault de Prangey”
Metropolitan Museum
Some hundred and twenty daguerreotypes
seem to float in this dramatic, beautifully
designed exhibition. They represent just a
fraction of the output of Joseph-Philibert
Girault de Prangey, a nineteenth-century
French architectural historian, whose archive
of more than a thousand works was discovered
in an attic in 1922. Girault travelled for three
years throughout the eastern Mediterranean,
setting out in 1842, at photography’s dawn,
with colonial enthusiasm and a bulky camera,
in pursuit of ancient Islamic monuments. In
Girault’s day, the medium of daguerreotypy—
in which images were captured directly onto
silver-coated copper plates before being en-
cased in protective glass—was favored mostly
for its documentary function; today, the glim-
mering, shifting holographic presence of these
pictures is novel and enchanting. The ornate
patterning in “Dome of Khayrbak Mosque,
Cairo,” from 1843, appears with gossamer
clarity, and the ruins featured in “Aleppo,
Viewed from the Antioch Gate,” made the
following year, suggest a flickering trans-
mission from a lost world.—Johanna Fateman
(Through May 12.)
“Leonard Cohen”
Jewish Museum
Cohen’s death, on November 7, 2016, may
not have fully registered for many people,
given the rush of bad news that immediately
followed (notably, the results of the American
Presidential election). This uneven exhibi-
tion of commissioned works by more than
forty artists—titled “A Crack in Everything,”
after a Cohen lyric—is at its best when it
functions as a crowd-pleasing tribute to the
Canadian poet and singer-songwriter. On
opening weekend, visitors flocked to George
Fok’s gorgeous film installation “Passing
Through,” from 2017, an hour-long portrait
compiled from decades of live-concert foot-
age; projected onto three walls of a ground-
floor gallery, its effect is at once intimate and
larger than life. It has a less spectacular but
charming counterpart on the third floor: a
listening lounge featuring covers of Cohen’s
best-known songs by musicians from Feist
to Moby. Other, more conceptual homages
and transformations of Cohen’s work are
less successful. An understated exception
is Tacita Dean’s lovely silent film, projected
small and high, like a bird on a wire.—J.F.
(Through Sept. 8.)
“Simone Leigh”
Guggenheim Museum
ILLUSTRATION BY OHNI LISLE
Imagine living for seven years in the crawl
space of an attic, as an enslaved woman
self-sequestered in the pursuit of her freedom.
Leigh’s spare, impressive exhibition—three
towering bronze sculptures, augmented with
raffia and terra-cotta, and a sound-and-stone-
ware installation, made in collaboration with
the musician Moor Mother—borrows its title,
“Loophole of Retreat,” from the abolitionist
Harriet Jacobs’s nineteenth-century account
of such an experience. Leigh’s long-standing
subject is the conflation of the black female
figure and the space of her labor, from the
earthen roundhouses of Togo and Benin to
the vernacular architecture of the American
South. (Leigh’s sculptural hybrids of bodies
and buildings—she describes her approach as
“formal creolization”—earned the American
artist the 2018 Hugo Boss Prize, the occa-
sion for this show and a related film series.)
Accompanying the quartet of art works is a
broadsheet, written by the historian Saidiya
Hartman, which eloquently mirrors Leigh’s
union of the political and the poetic.—Andrea
K. Scott (Through Oct. 27.)
“Tiepolo in Milan”
Frick Collection
The Frick’s lovely, melancholic exhibition
“Tiepolo in Milan” centers on art that doesn’t
exist: ceilings painted in 1730-31, by the ro-
coco master Giambattista Tiepolo, in the
Palazzo Archinto, which, like most of Mi-
lan’s historical buildings, was destroyed by
Allied bombing during the Second World
War. (Sandbags saved Leonardo’s “Last Sup-
per,” but not the convent it was in.) Paintings,
drawings, etchings, books, and photographs
that relate to Tiepolo’s frescoes on mytholog-
ical themes, and to the munificent Archinto
family, vivify glories of a former time. The
gossamer grays of hauntingly beautiful
photographs, from 1897, convey the tones
of colors that are now only guessable. The
commission was Tiepolo’s first outside his
native Venice, but, on the evidence here, he
was already fully mature, crowning architec-
tural spaces with heavens of epic imagina-
tion. If, like many people, you find Tiepolo
hard to appreciate, this intimately absorbing
show may initiate you in the charms—heart,
AT THE GALLERIES
soul, inventiveness, staggering ambition—of
his art.—Peter Schjeldahl (Through July 14.)
Julia Rommel
Bureau
DOWNTOWN From afar, the large geometric ab-
stractions by this New York painter look ener-
getically nonchalant. But get close and you’ll
discover that they are actually the products
of a laborious ritual of folding and unfolding,
painting and repainting, who knows how many
times. The show’s title, “Candy Jail,” suggests
both the frustration of painting oneself into a
corner and the pleasures of Rommel’s palette of
SweeTart pastels and Jolly Rancher jewel tones.
An accompanying statement from the artist
strikes a confessional note: she writes that she
had hoped to keep the paint application thin,
but instead had to “pull life from its thickness.”
She succeeded—especially with the tangle of
racing stripes in “Fredson,” and in the lavender
1
“Great White Shark,” which looks and feels
like a big open window.—J.F. (Through May 5.)
DANCE
New York City Ballet
David H. Koch
The spring gala, on May 2, introduces two
new works, one by the company’s choreog-
rapher-in-residence, Justin Peck, and the
other by Pam Tanowitz, a dancemaker whose
star is very much on the rise. Tanowitz’s ap-
proach is intensely analytical, almost sci-
entific: she removes steps from their usual
context, examines them, then puts them
together in novel combinations. In doing
so, she disrupts the usual flow of phrasing
and coördination and illuminates the quirks
The title of Dash Snow’s first show, in
2005, was, sadly, prophetic: “Moments
Like This Will Never Last.” Four years
later, the talented New York artist died
of a drug overdose, two weeks before his
twenty-eighth birthday. Wildly charis-
matic, relentlessly prolific, and deeply
troubled, Snow was a high-school drop-
out, a child of the streets who was already
notorious by his teens for tagging the
Brooklyn Bridge with graffiti. He was also
an art-world blue blood: a scion of the de
Menil family, which founded a namesake
Houston museum and the Dia Art Foun-
dation. Snow remains a divisive figure, but
the energy and urgency of the Polaroids,
collages, Super-8 films, zines, and sculp-
tures on gritty display in “The Drowned
World: Selections from the Dash
Snow Archive,” at Participant (through
May 12), are undeniable.—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 7
of ballet technique; her work radiates both
intelligence and wit. Her new piece is set
to Bartók, which will be performed by the
FLUX Quartet. Another program this week
includes George Balanchine’s delicate pas
de deux “Sonatine” (1975), in which a man
and woman dance in overlapping phrases to
Ravel, played by an onstage pianist.—Marina
Harss (Through June 2.)
“In Conversation with Merce”
N.Y.U. Skirball
What traces does a choreographer leave after
he’s gone? How are those traces reflected in
the work of others? To explore these ques-
tions, Rashaun Mitchell, a former member of
the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, has
gathered three choreographers, all women
from very different backgrounds, to present
a piece in response to Cunningham. What
does he mean to them? Which aspects of
his work—technical, compositional, phil-
osophical—resonate, or create resistance?
Netta Yerushalmy explores Cunningham’s
dance vocabulary. Mina Nishimura, who hails
from Japan, seeks a nexus between Cunning-
ham’s abstraction and the expressionist dance
style Butoh. The wild card is Moriah Evans,
known for her evocation of sensations within
the body; she describes her Mercian experi-
ment as a “choreographed dialogue.”—M.H.
(May 3-4.)
HIP-HOP DANCE
Australian Dance Theatre
Joyce Theatre
This group, the second of three participants in
the Joyce’s two-week Australia Festival, has a
long history for a contemporary-dance troupe,
having been founded in 1965. But, in “The
Beginning of Nature,” choreographed by the
company’s director, Garry Stewart, it imagines
going back a lot further. Some of the electron-
ica-meets-strings score is sung in Kaurna—an
ancient, nearly extinct, and recently revived
language of the Adelaide Plains—but Stewart
makes up his own physical vocabulary to evoke
natural rhythms: diurnal, tidal, climatic. It’s an
athletic rite, with circles of light and big green
sticks.—Brian Seibert (May 3-6.)
“La MaMa Moves!”
La Mama
The monthlong festival continues with a piece
that the Norwegian choreographer Mia Habib
calls “All—a physical poem of protest.” A large
group of people, ranging widely in age, many of
them strangers to one another, run and walk in
a circle, on behalf of those who are not free to
do so. Some iterations have gone on for twelve
hours; here it lasts only one. Separately, the
American choreographer Colleen Thomas works
with dancers from Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus
to search for belonging and connection in a frag-
menting world.—B.S. (May 3-5. Through May 26.)
1
NIGHT LIFE
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in
advance to confirm engagements.
Gilad Hekselman
Village Vanguard
If the previous generation of jazz guitarists,
flourishing in the wake of seventies fusion,
were open to incorporating the extravagant
sonics of avant rock and R. & B., the six-string
maestros of today—among them, Gilad Hek-
selman—positively throw bear hugs around
transformative contemporary textures. Here,
Hekselman, an entrancing stylist who cleverly
employs a small arsenal of pedals and effects,
is joined by an ensemble that includes the
outstanding saxophonist Mark Turner.—Steve
Futterman (April 30-May 5.)
Nina Sky
Mercury Lounge
Nicole and Natalie Albino, the Puerto Rican
twins together known as Nina Sky, monopolized
the airwaves in the early two-thousands with
two touchstones of the era: “Move Ya Body,”
a sun-drenched single that unspooled over a
bouncy “Coolie Dance” riddim, and N.O.R.E.’s
“Oye Mi Canto,” which featured the duo’s infec-
tious “whoa-a-a” chorus. Both hits gave reggae-
tón a hefty mainstream boost; as today’s Latin
urban music strikes a chord across the globe,
the sisters celebrate a sound that has proved its
staying power.—Julyssa Lopez (May 1.)

Patti Smith and Her Band

Webster Hall
Until Robert Caro steps up his game, Patti
Smith is the only National Book Award winner
who can stride up to a microphone, theatrically
spit, and go on to rally a crowd through song.
In recent years, the singer has become New
York’s prime envoy to its storied rock past; she
has served her position with such zeal that big-
splash charity concerts feel incomplete without
her nervy presence. Smith helps inaugurate
the newly spruced-up Webster Hall, a fellow
downtown fixture with a thousand lives.—Jay
Ruttenberg (May 1-2.)

Boiler Room x Places+Faces

Knockdown Center
For twenty years, Harlem Stage has been making a space for choreographers Two respected names at the nexus of Internet
and music culture—Boiler Room, known for
of color to develop with its “E-Moves” series. That space has always been bringing FOMO-inducing performances and
broad, stylistically speaking, and, even as the focus of this year’s two programs parties to digital spaces via Webcam-style live
(May 2-11) narrows to hip-hop, the category is still capacious enough to broadcasts, and Places+Faces, which began as a
hip-hop photography project on Tumblr and bal-
ILLUSTRATION BY ERIN ROBINSON

include South Korean popping and locking, prayerful mixes of tap and rap, looned into a clothing line and life-style brand—
and the street dancers of It’s Showtime NYC! telling their stories and dreams combine forces for this event, calling on artists
with help from the Congolese postmodernist Faustin Linyekula. In one of from near and far. The blossoming Brooklyn rap-
pers Junglepussy and Jay Critch share a bill with
two premières, the Urban Bush Women performers Tendayi Kuumba and the slick rhymer Valee (from Chicago) and the
Courtney J. Cook, in collaboration with the musician Greg Purnell, sift mercurial SahBabii (from Atlanta), along with
through memories of their mothers and grandmothers. In the other, the Sen- sets from a handful of producers. True to the
reputations of both organizers, it’s a well-curated
egalese-born Ousmane Wiles, who skillfully blends West African styles with showcase that looks to the future through both
house and vogue, looks at abusive relationships and healing.—Brian Seibert new and familiar faces.—Briana Younger (May 3.)

8 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019

 Santigold
Hammerstein Ballroom
When Santigold dropped her first album, in
2008, so much of it—including the cover image
of the Philadelphia-born artist vomiting a tor-
nado of gold glitter—felt like the future. She
loaded the release with cross-genre techniques
that fused ska, New Wave, reggae, and elec-
tro-pop, like a mad scientist meddling with
the avant-garde. Now in her forties, Santigold
continues to experiment (lately with dancehall),
but this concert, honoring the tenth anniversary
of her début, is a chance to revel in her early
punk fearlessness.—J.L. (May 3.)
Houston Person
Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola
The tenor saxophonist Houston Person, dis-
tinguished by an authoritative command of
ballads and blues that is a hallmark of old-
school wizardry, has a tone that has only be-
come more golden since his arrival in the late
sixties. He made the transition from journey-
man musician to genuine artist long ago, and,
in a time-honored fashion, he luxuriates in the
contours of a tune—and we gratefully reap the
benefits.—S.F. (May 3-4.)
Boogie
Baby’s All Right
“Everything’s for Sale,” the début album from
Boogie, offers little respite from the sorrow it
depicts; the Compton rapper stares down his
pain, unblinking and unafraid. He lives besieged
by troubles with women, with law enforcement,
and, most damagingly, with the man in the mir-
ror: “I’m the one in front the gun and the one
behind the trigger,” he admits on the opening
track. There is something grounding about his
raw honesty and scathing self-awareness; his
dexterous flows coupled with his command of
melody make the act of bearing witness somehow
both cathartic and pleasurable.—B.Y. (May 4.)
Dijon
Elsewhere
The singer Dijon described his recent EP, “Sci
Fi 1,” as songs “made in living rooms mostly at
night,” a fitting characterization of its intimate,
folksy sound. As a writer and vocalist, Dijon tends
toward a poetic and confessional style, imbuing
his music with textures that can feel as R. & B.-
heartfelt as they do emo-anguished. When he
was half of the moody duo Abhi//Dijon, his voice
seemed to burrow into the haze of the produc-
tion, but in his solo work it’s out front, running
raw and headlong into the unsteady (but re-
warding) waters of vulnerability.—B.Y. (May 4.)
Horse Meat Disco
Elsewhere
ILLUSTRATION BY NHUNG LE
The London-based d.j.s of Horse Meat Disco—
James Hillard, Luke Howard, Severino Panzetta,
and Jim Stanton—are a key factor in disco’s
club resurgence in the past decade. Their per-
formances tend to lurk in the genre’s most
florid corners, and they are such expert crate
diggers-cum-historians that the most acutely
focussed sets from their program on London’s
K-POP
The reign of U.S. boy bands and girl groups may have come and gone,
but the international community has picked up the slack. South Korea,
in particular, is owning the present moment, thanks, in no small part, to
the history-making ascent of the K-pop girl group BLACKPINK. Through
bombastic, stadium-size music, the quartet makes a strong case for formu-
laic pop rendered through charismatic theatrics. A recent EP, “Kill This
Love,” and a début album, “Blackpink in Your Area,” from last year, revel
in anthemic, rap-laden E.D.M. (and the occasional ballad), seamlessly
integrating Korean and English lyrics. But live performances are where
the group is most convincing: its propulsive sound and ornate videos come
to life through synched choreography and breathless showmanship. The
“In Your Area” tour—BLACKPINK’s first proper run of shows State-
side—stops by Newark’s Prudential Center May 1-2.—Briana Younger
Rinse FM—such as their Aretha Franklin trib- Björk’s gobsmacking residency (running inter-
ute, following her passing, last August, or their mittently through June 1), the singer is at her
African disco overview, from February—are the most intricate: the production comes replete
most rewarding.—Michaelangelo Matos (May 4.) with choreography, stage and costume design,
and, as one might expect, “a seven-piece fe-
male Icelandic flute ensemble.” Finally, the
1
Baaba Maal gallery set gets a Vegas extravaganza to call
its own.—J.R. (May 6-June 1.)
Town Hall
The Senegalese singer Baaba Maal’s voice, a sear-
ingly nasal tenor, has evoked Africa in a number
of films—most recently, on the Oscar-winning THE THEATRE
score for “Black Panther.” Maal launched his ca-
reer playing in the traditional griot style, but he
hasn’t shied away from blending percussive Afri- All My Sons
can music with songs by Gershwin or the Beach
Boys. A similar type of elasticity is required for American Airlines Theatre
this collaboration with the Town Hall Ensemble, Arthur Miller’s tragedy of accountability and
an all-star assemblage of jazz-based improvisers denial, from 1947, unfurls with steady impla-
who join Maal for a retrospective survey of his cability. Even in the relatively breezy first act,
tunes.—K. Leander Williams (May 4.) you sense that ominous forces are lurking. The
idyllic backdrop—the scenic designer Doug-
las W. Schmidt’s realistic rendition of a cozy
“Björk’s Cornucopia” Midwestern back yard—makes the long-hidden
truths that finally come out into the open look
The Shed even uglier. Jack O’Brien’s Broadway revival
Like Björk, Hudson Yards’ lustrous new Shed isn’t as precisely stylish as Simon McBurney’s,
seems impossibly exotic and chic; precisely from 2008, but it benefits from some superb
what goes on inside artist and venue alike performances—most notably by Tracy Letts and
remains a bit of a mystery. In “Cornucopia,” Annette Bening as Joe and Kate Keller, whose
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 9
 on a first date, Guy (Hamish Linklater), an ar-
ON BROADWAY rogant, married designer, is one big red flag,
but Cat (Feiffer), a smart young writer for The
New Yorker, gets sucked in and pushed down
by his horrible, manipulative charm. (“You’re
prettier when you don’t talk” is his idea of flir-
tatious banter.) During their eight-year affair,
Cat develops a terrible case of Lyme disease,
but her relationship with Guy is just as much
of a chronic sickness. The final third delivers
a delightful twist, by way of Guy’s wife, Yuki
(Vanessa Kai). Directed by Trip Cullman, the
performances are absorbingly, queasily good, and
Mark Wendland’s sumptuous wooden set subtly
suggests a gilded cage.—R.R. (Through May 12.)

They Forgot About the Rest

INTAR
Directed by David Mendizábal for INTAR,
this demented post-apocalyptic satire, about an
experimental medical procedure that erases bad
memories and the ad agency (staffed by “three
bisexual Latinas”) that’s been hired to market
it, makes “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless
Mind” look formulaic. Georgina Escobar’s play,
the second in a trilogy, begins in medias res
Terrence McNally’s romantic drama “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de and stays there; it’s never entirely clear how its
Lune” is all about chemistry, between both its characters—two co-workers seven characters relate to one another or what’s
at a greasy spoon who fall into bed with each other and then face the hard going on in their world. It’s impressive, then,
how fully the performers and designers com-
work of true intimacy—and its actors. When it premièred Off Broadway, mit to it. Cha See’s inventive lighting, Enrico
in 1987, Kathy Bates was Frankie, a sarcastic waitress with a fortress of de Trizio’s alarming sound design, and Chris-
emotional defenses, and F. Murray Abraham was Johnny, a short-order topher and Justin Swader’s bunkerlike, corru-
gated-tin set offer a satisfying demonstration of
cook with an almost ludicrous enthusiasm for his bedmate. In Garry unified purpose. The actors, particularly Maki

1
Marshall’s 1991 movie version, the couple was played by Michelle Pfeiffer Borden, are often funny, even when their dia-
and Al Pacino. A Broadway production, in 2002, featured Edie Falco logue is baffling.—R.R. (Through May 12.)
and Stanley Tucci. Arin Arbus’s new Broadway revival (starting previews
May 4, at the Broadhurst) brings together the stage luminary Audra Mc-
Donald and the sui-generis actor Michael Shannon.—Michael Schulman CLASSICAL MUSIC

marriage rests on a shared understanding that
doing business in America has a cost, and that
some things are better left unsaid. The actors
are perfectly matched as avatars of bourgeois
propriety whose façade comes undone when
their coverup is exposed. The devastation on
Bening’s face in the final scene will be hard to
shake from your memory.—Elisabeth Vincentelli
(Through June 23.)
All Our Children
Sheen Center
Stephen Unwin’s playwriting début, directed by
Ethan McSweeny, is set in Winkelheim, Ger-
many, in 1941, and follows Dr. Victor Franz (Karl
Kenzler), the director of a pediatric clinic whose
idealistic dreams have become a Nazi nightmare.
Under the supervision of Eric Schmidt (Sam
Lilja), a young S.S. representative acting as the
clinic’s administrator, it is being transformed
into a clearing house for culling the weakest and
most helpless patients. The doctor, having grave
who has been fatally compromised generates
no real heat.—Ken Marks (Through May 12.)
Killing Time
59E59
Presented as part of 59E59’s “Brits Off Broad-
way” series, Zoe Mills’s play, directed by An-
tony Eden, centers on Hester Brooke (Brigit
Forsyth), an ornery old musician who wants to
die of cancer her own way—by shunning human
company and subsisting on red wine and crack-
ers. (“At least I’ll die thin,” she quips.) Forsyth is
a nuanced performer even in her character’s cello
playing, which captures both her former virtu-
osity and her current decline. But Mills, as Sara,
a tenacious social worker fascinated with death,
seems to have been miscast in her own play; she
conveys naïveté and fretfulness but lacks the
dark spark that the character needs. The ingre-
dients are promising but undercooked; the show
is clearly aiming for something edgy, profound,
and mordantly funny, but it ends up aimless
“Fountain of Youth”
Carnegie Hall
A short new piece, a splashy concerto, and a
consequential symphony: it’s a standard pat-
tern for orchestral concerts. Here, the New
World Symphony, which aims to prepare its
young fellows for the big time, has assembled
an apt and enticing program—classic concert
fare, leavened with a dash of novelty. It opens
with Julia Wolfe’s “Fountain of Youth,” before
the brilliant Yuja Wang plays Prokofiev’s dev-
ilish Piano Concerto No. 5. The main course,
Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” depicts a
besotted young man seeking solace in narcot-
ic-fuelled visions; Michael Tilson Thomas con-
ducts.—Fergus McIntosh (May 1 at 8.)
“The Rape of Lucretia”
Flea
It would be too pat to call Benjamin Britten’s
“The Rape of Lucretia” an opera for the #MeToo
movement. Composed in 1946, it tells a story of
ILLUSTRATION BY JASU HU

doubts and assisted by his faithful maid, Martha
(Jennifer Dundas), is visited by the mother of
one of the patients (Tasha Lawrence) and then
by Bishop Clemens von Galen (John Glover)—
an actual historical figure, known as the Lion
of Münster, who spoke up publicly against this
outrage. But the climactic confrontation be-
tween one man of high morality and another
and earnest.—Rollo Romig (Through May 12.)
The Pain of My Belligerence
Playwrights Horizons
The first two-thirds of Halley Feiffer’s new play
are like the nightmare inverse of a rom-com:
sexual abuse as old as Western civilization—lit-
erally, given that, according to historians from
ancient Rome, Lucretia’s violation, said to have
taken place around 500 B.C., instigated a revolt
against the monarchy that resulted in the found-
ing of the Roman Republic. New Camerata
Opera nevertheless finds a way to represent her
circumstances anew. As an expression of Lucre-

10 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019

 tia’s traumatic dissociation, she is portrayed by
both the mezzo-soprano Allison Gish and the
deaf actress Amelia Hensley (Deaf West The-
atre’s “Spring Awakening”), who signs Lucretia’s
words; Bea Goodwin directs, and Justin Bischof
conducts.—Oussama Zahr (May 2 and May 4 at
7 and May 5 at 3.)
New York Philharmonic
David Geffen Hall
Within its first few minutes, Bruch’s hyper-Ro-
mantic Concerto for Two Pianos moves from
tragic melodrama to monastic quietude and back
again. The sister pianists Katia and Marielle
Labèque and the conductor Semyon Bychkov,
who together recorded the work in the nineties,
reunite to perform it with the New York Philhar-
monic. Bychkov, who takes his Romantics seri-
ously, pairs the piece with Richard Strauss’s auto-
biography-in-music, “Ein Heldenleben.”—F.M.
(May 2 at 7:30, May 3 at 2, and May 4 at 8.)
“Interpretations”
Roulette
The latest installment of the invaluable new-mu-
sic series “Interpretations,” now in its thirtieth
season, offers premières by a pair of vital creators.
Annie Gosfield, whose work reconciles elegant
organization and roisterous spontaneity, presents
the New York début of “A Mother’s Note and a
Single Vote,” which she composed to mark the
centenary of the Nineteenth Amendment. Ex-
panding on the piece’s themes, she plays in group
improvisations afterward. Edmund Campion, a
Berkeley-based composer who explores relation-
ships between sound and space, presents new
and recent works for acoustic instruments with
electronics.—Steve Smith (May 2 at 8.)
B-Minor Mass
Carnegie Hall
Choral masterworks often get the behemoth
treatment: restrained and sedated by massed
voices and a full orchestra, they gain in wonder
but lose in finesse. Bernard Labadie’s two Cana-
dian chamber ensembles—the period-instrument
orchestra Les Violons du Roy and the esteemed
choir La Chapelle de Québec—take a different
approach, with limited forces creating sounds as
limpid as ice-cold water. Bach’s B-Minor Mass,
for which the composer fused music from his
final two decades into a gloriously variegated
whole, should benefit.—F.M. (May 7 at 8.)
Hypercube
DiMenna Center
Hypercube is a high-intensity quartet compris-
ing the saxophonist Erin Rogers, the guitarist
Jay Sorce, the keyboardist Andrea Lodge, and
the percussionist Chris Graham. In its latest
outing, the group performs the U.S. première
of “Voided Cross,” a forty-five-minute work
by Eric Wubbels, who proved his knack for
sustaining listeners’ fascination over a similarly
prolonged span in the début of his Piano Trio, in
February. Pieces by Rogers and Nicholas Deyoe
complete the program.—S.S. (May 7 at 8.)
AT THE OPERA
1
MOVIES
The Big Trail
Raoul Walsh’s rugged and grand-scale 1930 West-
ern stars John Wayne, lank and limber at twen-
ty-three, as Breck Coleman, a trapper intimate
with Native American ways and friendly with
tribal leaders. While searching in Missouri for
his best friend’s murderers, he begins to suspect
a wagon-train boss named Flack (Tyrone Power,
Sr.) of the crime and, to keep an eye on him, signs
on as his scout—leading a band of settlers along
the Oregon Trail, through Cheyenne country.
Along the way, Breck falls in love with one of
the pioneers (Marguerite Churchill). The plot is
centered on sudden violence and, through Breck’s
diplomacy, its avoidance. But the heart of the
drama is survival in the face of natural obstacles,
portrayed in the colossal reconstruction of the
perilous trek, with horses and cattle, through
rough rivers and down sheer rock faces with
tenuous ropes. Walsh’s vast, static tableaux have
the breadth and pace of epic stanzas.—Richard
Brody (MOMA, May 1, and streaming.)
The Curse of La Llorona
Brisk action and spare images lend this mild
but suspenseful horror film a sheen of quality

“Dialogues des Carmélites”

Metropolitan Opera House
In Poulenc’s anxious whisper of an opera “Di-
alogues des Carmélites,” an order of Carmel-
ite nuns from Compiègne, outside of Paris,
confronts the guillotine during the Reign of
Terror. The narrative follows the fearful young
novice Blanche de la Force, who must find her
inner fortitude, but it’s Madame de Croissy who
stops the show cold with her angry, agonized
death throes, which bring down the curtain on
Act I. The role attracts singers looking for a
barn-burning dramatic scena, and the exciting
actress Karita Mattila makes her début in the
part, joining a cast that includes Isabel Leonard,
Adrianne Pieczonka, and Erin Morley; Yannick
Nézet-Séguin conducts.—O.Z. (May 3 and May
8 at 7:30 and May 11 at noon.) It’s nothing new to update the setting of an opera to reflect contemporary
preoccupations, but Heartbeat Opera has earned a reputation for the
Escher String Quartet specificity and the commitment with which it approaches such undertak-
Alice Tully Hall ings. For this staging of Alessandro Stradella’s oratorio “La Susanna”—
The superb Escher String Quartet, presented by based on the Old Testament story of two judges who observe a woman
the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center,
ILLUSTRATION BY DADU SHIN

bathing and then attempt to blackmail her into sex—Heartbeat’s co-artistic

performs Charles Ives’s String Quartet No. 2,
a transcendentally unruly 1913 work that was
years ahead of its time and is still performed
much too infrequently. Also on the program are
two pillars of the quartet repertoire: Mozart’s
spirited “Prussian” Quartet in F Major (K. 590)
and Beethoven’s sublime Quartet in C-Sharp
Minor (Op. 131).—S.S. (May 7 at 7:30.)
director Ethan Heard replaces the male narrator with the character of a fe-
male scholar. Taken with both the beauty of Stradella’s music and the injus-
tice of the story, she puzzles out a feminist reading of a work entrenched in
the male gaze. At Brooklyn Academy of Music, May 2-5, Heartbeat teams
up with the early-music specialists of Opera Lafayette to deliver Stradella’s
lean yet propulsive score for two violins and continuo.—Oussama Zahr

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 11

that its story doesn’t sustain. A quick sequence
set in Mexico, in 1673, shows a mother killing
her two children as revenge for her husband’s
philandering. The rest of the film takes place
in Los Angeles, in 1973, where Anna (Linda
Cardellini), a child-services caseworker and
a widowed mother of two young children, in-
vestigates a woman (Patricia Velasquez) who is
holding her sons in seclusion. It turns out that
the seventeenth-century killer, the “weeping
woman” of the title, pursues other children
through the ages to replace her own; when she
comes after Anna’s kids, Anna turns to a faith
healer (Raymond Cruz) to dispel the curse. The
director, Michael Chaves, grounds the drama
in witty practicalities (including mirrors and
a child’s clear umbrella that harbor spirits)
and tense pursuits, but the script offers little
world-building and scant context; the grandeur
of myth is reduced to mere anecdote.—R.B.
(In wide release.)
Decade of Fire
With this documentary’s blend of autobiogra-
phy, firsthand observation, and historical anal-
ysis, the directors Vivian Vázquez and Gretchen
Hildebran dispel pervasive myths about the dev-
IN REVIVAL
astation of the South Bronx in the nineteen-six-
ties and seventies. Vázquez recalls her childhood
there in the sixties, when the neighborhood
was multicultural and thriving, and reveals the
racist and classist decisions, public and private,
that proved catastrophic, including highway
construction, redlining, mortgage policy, the
closing of firehouses, the layoffs of fire marshals,
and police neglect. When landlords hired local
kids to torch buildings for the insurance money,
journalists reported on the kids but not on the
instigators and profiteers, and officials hardly
blinked. In the eighties, Vázquez returned to
the neighborhood as an activist, mobilizing
residents to restore buildings and persuading
politicians to back the recovery. The movie’s
cautious optimism regarding community or-
ganization and neighborhood stakeholders also
emphasizes the national urgency of diverse and
informed local journalism.—R.B. (Metrograph.)
Fast Color
This small-scale but conceptually vast sci-
ence-fiction drama is set in the Midwest in a
dystopian near-future, when continuous drought
makes water a precious commodity. Amid loom-
ing chaos, a young woman named Ruth (Gugu
Mbatha-Raw) flees the authorities—in partic-
ular, a scientist (Christopher Denham) who’s
on her trail. Endowed with superpowers that
she has trouble controlling, Ruth heads for an
isolated farmstead shared by her mother (Lor-
raine Toussaint) and her daughter (Saniyya
Sidney), both of whom have similar powers
under better control. The director, Julia Hart,
who wrote the script with Jordan Horowitz,
creates an engaging web of supernatural imag-
ination (ranging from eerie household doings
to earthquakes) that maps cleverly onto societal
matters—but her main emphasis is on the mys-
teries and disturbances of family life. Despite
advancing the action routinely, mainly through
information-dosing by the droplet, Hart de-
picts the three women’s emotional bonds and
conflicts with intense sincerity; she conveys the
symbolic import of their mighty abilities with
an affecting melodramatic authority.—R.B. (In
limited release.)
Non-Fiction
This romantic comedy, written and directed
by Olivier Assayas, is set in the cozy milieu of
French publishing and looks lovingly at its set-
tled ways. Léonard Spiegel (Vincent Macaigne),
an old-fashioned fortyish writer, is having trou-
ble with his friend and longtime editor, Alain
Danielson (Guillaume Canet), who’s attempting
a pivot to digital platforms—and who rejects
Léonard’s latest thinly veiled autobiographical
novel. Meanwhile, they’re having affairs, and
the sexual roundelay also involves the women in
their lives—Selena (Juliette Binoche), an actress,
who is Alain’s wife; Valérie (Nora Hamzawi),
a political operative, who lives with Léonard;
and Laure (Christa Théret), a digital-media
consultant. Despite situations aching for par-
ody, Assayas is anything but satirical: as his
characters give the book business, the Internet,
and infidelity a vigorous but empty dialectical
workout, he comes down squarely on the side of
business as usual, which the film itself embodies.
Yet Macaigne, quizzical and impulsive, invests a
rote role with brilliant turns. In French.—R.B.
(In limited release.)

Welcome to New York

This 2014 drama, by the director Abel Ferrara,
is loosely based on the arrest of the French
politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in 2011, on
charges of sexual assault. But Ferrara departs
from the specifics to ferocious effect. Gérard
Depardieu, massively Falstaffian, stars as the
statesman Devereaux, who checks into a hotel
The history of cinema crowds out people of color and female filmmak- where, after a night with prostitutes, he presses
himself naked on a chambermaid (Pamela
ers—all the more so when their work comes from outside Hollywood, Afesi); he’s arrested later that day. As in real
as suggested by the rare revival of Zeinabu irene Davis’s boldly original life, the charges are ultimately dismissed—but
independent drama “Compensation,” from 1999, in BAM’s series “Black legal guilt isn’t Ferrara’s subject. Rather, he
reveals the horrors of the penal system, a living
90s” (running May 3-22). Set in Chicago at both the start and the end of inferno hidden behind the city’s façades and
the twentieth century, the film stars Michelle A. Banks, a deaf actress, as from which its respectable burghers are unduly
the earlier era’s Malindy Brown, a deaf dressmaker who migrates from shielded. While under house arrest in a Tribeca
town house, Devereaux is cooped up with his
the South and is courted by a hearing laborer, Arthur Jones ( John Earl wife, Simone (Jacqueline Bisset), an heiress,
Jelks)—and as Malaika Brown, a deaf printer and artist in the nineties, leading to flaying battles; their scenes are bit-
who begins a relationship with Nico Jones ( Jelks), a children’s librarian. terly revelatory about sex, marriage, and am-
COURTESY WMM/UCLA

bition, and Ferrara films them with wide-eyed

1
Both relationships pivot on the transmission of black American culture terror. In English and French.—R.B. (MOMA,
and deaf culture, and both involve medical matters that are central to their May 3, and streaming.)
times. Davis evokes history with a virtually archeological imagination
and depicts modern life in the urgent light of crisis and change; she hasn’t For more reviews, visit
made another dramatic feature to date.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/g oings-on-about-town

12 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019


1
TABLES FOR TWO
Teranga
1280 Fifth Ave., at 110th St.
In the days after my most recent meal at
Teranga, the new café at the Africa Cen-
ter, a cultural institution in East Harlem,
I found myself conjuring the flavor of
the Senegalese-born chef Pierre Thiam’s
fufu as though it were a song I’d learned
and had been humming to myself ever
PHOTOGRAPH BY HEAMI LEE FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
since. Fufu, a staple in many West Afri-
can countries, is a slightly spongy, slightly
stretchy doughlike substance made from
one or more starchy vegetables or fruits,
such as cassava, plantains, or yams, which
are boiled, pounded, and rolled into balls
for tearing into pieces and dipping into
sauces and stews. The versions I’d had
at other pan-West African restaurants
in New York were mild, if texturally fit
for their supporting role of sopping up.
Thiam’s, made with plantains and red
palm-fruit oil, was stirringly complex:
sweet, nutty, and vegetal, with a distinct
funk akin to that of ripened cheese or
cultured butter.
At Teranga, fufu can be ordered as a
side dish, but also as a centerpiece. It’s the
main component of one of the menu’s
“seasonal bowls”—a term, borrowed
from fast-casual vernacular, that Teranga
does itself no favors in using. The café
may be counter service, and open only
until 7 P.M., but the fufu bowl, bolstered
by scoops of Senegalese ndambe (a lushly
thick stew of sweet potato, black-eyed
peas, and okra) and tangy Ivorian attiéké
(cassava that has been dried, fermented,
and grated, and which resembles cous-
cous), is as skillfully rendered and satisfy-
ing as many more formal meals in town.
Fufu is not the only supporting actor
to get star treatment here. Thiam—who
had a restaurant in Brooklyn until 2011
and opened another in Lagos, Nigeria,
in 2015—is so passionate about fonio, a
tiny-beaded, highly nutritious, and glu-
ten-free grain native to Africa’s Sahel
region, that he started a company, called
Yolélé, devoted to importing it to the
United States. In 2017, he gave a TED talk
about it, during which he served fonio
sushi and made a case for why it should be
a globally consumed crop. At Teranga, he
serves it two ways: steamed, with carrots
and peas, until chewy and tender in a
subtly sweet tomato broth, for a version
of jollof, a warm dish eaten across West
Africa that’s usually made with rice; and
dyed neon pink with beet juice, for a won-
derfully tart cold salad flecked with dill,
pickled carrot, and pomegranate seeds.
Both fonios go beautifully with ev-
erything else on offer: grilled chicken
thighs marinated in thyme, garlic, and
lime; egusi, a hearty stew of collard
greens and melon seeds; Ghanaian
kelewele, or spicy fried plantains. Every
plate and bowl comes with a choice of
sauce—a thick blend of peanuts with a
hint of Scotch-bonnet peppers, called
mafe; caramelized onions mixed with
lime confit—and there are glass jars of
house-made condiments, including a
salty, oily shrimp paste, on each table, for
adding still further layers of flavor. The
menu is as thoughtfully conceived as the
space itself: the bright, open lobby of a
building designed by the architect Rob-
ert A. M. Stern, outfitted with inviting
wooden tables and cozy seating areas, a
library, sundry African objets (including
a painted fishing boat from Dakar), and
art installations.
A wall of windows looks out onto a
regal stretch of Fifth Avenue and one
of the most beautiful corners of Central
Park. On a sunny spring day, it would be
easy, and delightful, to make a picnic on
the banks of the glittering Harlem Meer.
Cold drinks are already conveniently
packaged to go: bissap—a sweetened
hibiscus tea seasoned with mint—and
kicky ginger juice in plastic cups, plus
glass bottles of Maltina, a non-alcoholic
Nigerian malt beverage. Fortified with
vitamins and minerals—it was first sold
in the nineteen-seventies, as a nutritious
food supplement—it’s raisiny when it
hits the tongue, grows slightly bitter as
the hops kick in, then rounds out with
notes of caramel and molasses. And,
for dessert, there’s a dense and creamy
coconut-rice pudding, topped with
honey-roasted mango, a fitting love
letter to another humble starch. (Plates
and bowls, $10-$14.)
—Hannah Goldfield
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 13
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 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
TWENTY FOR 2020
he Democratic Presidential field
T became, last week, a game of twenty
questions, the latest being: Joe Biden?
The former Vice-President finally joined
the race on Thursday, with a three-and-
a-half-minute video that was much less
about him than about Donald Trump’s
apologia for white supremacists in Char-
lottesville. Perhaps Biden figured that
voters already know his story. That’s not
a luxury shared by the nineteen other
candidates, who range alphabetically
from Senator Cory Booker, of New Jer-
sey, to Andrew Yang, a tech entrepre-
neur—or, by first names, from Senator
Amy Klobuchar, of Minnesota, to Mayor
Wayne Messam, of Miramar, Florida—
and, by age, from Mayor Pete Buttigieg,
of South Bend, Indiana, who is thirty-
seven, to Senator Bernie Sanders, of
Vermont, who is forty years older.
The shorthand questions ( John
Hickenlooper? Eric Swalwell?) are
already giving way to deeper inquiry.
Did Biden miss his moment four years
ago, or in 1991, when he failed to stand
up for Anita Hill during the Clarence
Thomas hearings? (Last week, Biden
called her to express his regret; she
was not convinced.) Did Sanders go
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA
too far in seizing his moment from
Hillary Clinton? Is Buttigieg the new
Beto O’Rourke, or the new Booker?
Are you following Chasten Buttigieg,
the candidate’s husband, on Twitter
yet? Why, some would ask, keep talking
about the men?
There are, after all, six women run-
ning. Four are senators: Klobuchar, Eliz-
abeth Warren, of Massachusetts, Ka-
mala Harris, of California, and Kirsten
Gillibrand, of New York. They are joined
by Representative Tulsi Gabbard, of
Hawaii, and Marianne Williamson,
who has never held elected office but
has written best-selling books offering
spiritual advice, and is close to Oprah.
Williamson is running against Ameri-
can “dysfunction.” (And why not?) There
are also candidates who are African-
American (Booker, Harris, and Mes-
sam); Latino ( Julián Castro, a former
Secretary of Housing and Urban De-
velopment); Asian-American (Yang,
who argues that a universal basic income
is crucial to redressing the displacement
of the working class by automation);
Pacific Islander (Gabbard); and South
Asian-American (Harris, whose mother
is from India). Three—Buttigieg, Gab-
bard, and Representative Seth Moulton,
of Massachusetts—are veterans of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, at
an event in Des Moines, when an audi-
ence member asked Buttigieg what to
tell acquaintances who doubted whether
America was ready to elect a gay man,
he said, “Tell your friends I say ‘Hi.’ ”
Polls show that Democrats want
someone who is “electable,” but there is
little agreement about what that term
means, and also a justified impatience
with its use as a euphemism for demo-
graphic blandness. Last week, the group
She the People sponsored a forum, in
Texas, at which several candidates were
asked why, given the richness of the
choices, women of color should vote for
them. For a lot of Democrats, particu-
larly in the Party’s activist wing, this is
a central question, for reasons of both
justice and practicality; in many states,
African-American and Latina women
are the Party’s electoral bedrock.
In response, Sanders and Warren made
impassioned remarks about the racial
dimension of economic inequality. But
Sanders, who is polling only slightly
behind Biden in surveys of likely pri-
mary voters, at about twenty-three per
cent, was booed, while Warren, who is
at just above six per cent, was cheered—a
reminder that, at this stage, neither polls
nor viral YouTube moments are reliable.
Harris talked about her “mentorship
of young women of color.” O’Rourke, an
El Paso native, said that he had been
talking backstage to Representative Sheila
Jackson Lee, of Houston, who was “a
mentor to me.” The real test, though,
might be how well he listens when the
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 15
woman doing the talking is not back-
stage but onstage, competing with him
in the debates, which is where the con-
test will begin in earnest.
As it happens, twenty is the cap that
the Democratic National Committee
has set for the number of participants
in the official debates, the first of which
will play out in Florida, a swing state,
over two nights in June. (The second
will be a month later, in Michigan.)
There is a formula to qualify: candidates
must either have the support of at least
one per cent of respondents in three
recognized polls or have received con-
tributions from sixty-five thousand
“unique donors,” with at least two hun-
dred in each of twenty states. (Sixteen
candidates are already there, including
John Delaney, a former congressman
from Maryland, and Tim Ryan, a cur-
rent one from Ohio.) The candidates
will be randomly assigned to appear on
one of the two nights, meaning that fan
favorites may not be onstage together.
How the candidates interact will be
DEPT. OF HOT AIR
BAGGED
here’s an old saying: “A true gen-
T tleman is a man who can play the
bagpipes, but doesn’t.” In March, when
Donald Trump called in to “Hannity”
to tout Jeff Sessions’s replacement,
he crowed, “Our new Attorney Gen-
eral, Bill Barr, is a great gentleman.”
But new information has come to light.
This magazine has located five indi-
viduals who attest that Barr, who has
come under fire for his SparkNotes
summary of the Mueller report, plays
the bagpipes. And, no, it wasn’t just a
onetime thing, in college, where he
mistook a set of bagpipes for a bong.
Throughout the eighties, Barr per-
formed in the City of Washington Pipe
Band—one of the top bagpipe ensem-
bles in the world—giving new mean-
ing to the cool-dad line “I used to be
in a band.”
“Bill was a serious piper,” Mike
Green, a fellow band member, said re-
16 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
a measure not only of their capacity for
respect but of their instinct for victory.
Will they refrain from demagoguery?
How tough, or how cheap, will the shots
be? (The goal is to defeat Trumpism,
too.) How will the candidates respond
when—as will almost certainly be the
case—someone’s campaign is hacked,
or a “deep fake” video of an opponent
emerges, or their allies set up deceptive
Facebook pages? One risk, in a heavily
contested primary, is that momentous
questions, such as whether to impeach
Trump, or to abolish ICE, will be re-
duced to a litmus test—a matter of hands
raised on a stage. Another, as Barack
Obama recently warned, is that “a cir-
cular firing squad” will form, leaving the
Party fractured. But a search for the safe
haven of an early consensus pick may
not serve the Party well, either; argu-
ably, it didn’t in 2016.
A sensible approach for undecided
Democrats, then, is what might be called
radical agnosticism. The truth is that no
one yet knows who can beat nineteen
cently. “He started playing as a young
kid, in New York. I’ve seen pictures of
him, ten years old, wearing a Balmoral
bonnet, a kilt, a doublet, big bagpipes
on his shoulder.” Barr moved to D.C.,
in 1973, to work for the C.I.A. and at-
tend law school simultaneously. After
graduating, he joined a private law prac-
tice, then a pipe band. “He came ready
to play at the top level,” Green said. In
competition, the band performed such
classics as “The Sheepwife,” “High-
land Wedding,” and “The Cockerel in
the Creel.” It also did contemporary
jigs, hornpipes, and polkas. Green re-
called, “Bill definitely preferred the
military marches.”
Playing the bagpipes is notoriously
difficult. “People who start out on bag-
pipes are like baby turtles going out
into the ocean,” Green said. “Most of
them don’t make it.” Playing compet-
itively, as Barr did, is both time-con-
suming and expensive. (To keep his
pipes from drying up, Barr would have
had to play every day for at least half
an hour.) Charlie Glendinning, who
also piped with Barr, said that a kilt
alone cost upward of five hundred
dollars. When the group travelled to
Scotland, for the world championships,
other Democrats—and Trump. In this
varied field, there is a heightened possi-
bility for surprises or breakouts. (If Gov-
ernor Jay Inslee, of Washington, answers
every debate question with a call to focus
on climate change, will people drift away
or be exhilarated?) Preëmptive dismiss-
als of one candidate or another as a spoiler,
or an impostor, or too young or too old,
or too staid or too outré, or just a big
drag are not likely to be helpful.
Those who want to see the current
President defeated might, in other words,
stop worrying and learn to love this
twenty-person mob. Some of them may
be maddening; none of them is Don-
ald Trump. On Thursday, he tweeted,
“Welcome to the race Sleepy Joe,” with
a prediction that the primaries would
be “nasty,” and involve “people who truly
have some very sick & demented ideas.
But if you make it, I will see you at the
Starting Gate!” One of them will. And
it may not be the candidate Trump, or
anyone else, expects.
—Amy Davidson Sorkin
the airfare was thirty grand. “We could
only afford travelling every four years,”
Glendinning said. “Competitions at
the World Pipe Band Championships
were our Olympics.”
The City of Washington Pipe Band
may be the best evidence we have of
a “deep state.” Barr was in the Justice
Department. Green was a senior offi-
cial in George W. Bush’s Administra-
tion. (“Condi Rice, my boss, would go
to piano camp every summer, so she
said it was O.K. for me to do bagpipes,”
Green explained.) There were mem-
bers of the intelligence community and
the labor unions, a Secret Service agent,
and a congressional general counsel.
Glendinning recalled a piper who was
“an F.B.I. agent with a specialty in hu-
man-flesh decomposition.” Jon Quigg,
one of the band’s drummers, remem-
bered prepping for a performance in
Barr’s office—“the same space that
R.F.K. had occupied thirty years ear-
lier.” He added, “Heady experience.”
Barr quit competing in the late eight-
ies, when things began to heat up at
the Justice Department. “He’d come to
watch us practice and compete, with
his entourage of security, but he couldn’t
keep playing,” Green said. In 1991, when
SKETCHPAD
THE PROMENADE PROBLEM

S ince 1954, Robert Moses’s bi-level Brooklyn-Queens

Expressway has skirted Brooklyn Heights: traffic sped
by as locals (Norman Mailer; Cher, in “Moonstruck”) strolled
on the promenade above. With the B.Q.E. in need of major
repairs, the city is considering proposals to save the promenade.
Here, a few alternatives.

The Sunken Place (Dude, where’s my car?)

ILLUSTRATION BY LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

Barr was appointed Attorney General
for the first time, by George H. W.
Bush, he invited the band to play at
his swearing-in. “We marched in and
played a medley of tunes,” Green said.
Bush made some wisecracks in his
speech, and said, of his bagpiping A.G.,
“I’m wondering if he understands that
the Constitution prohibits cruel and
unusual punishment.”
The band is currently on hiatus, but
old members still meet up to jam. Some-
times Barr talks about getting the band
back together, Glendinning said. A few
years ago, Barr bought a set of matching
chanters—the bagpipe mouthpiece—
and a fleet of drums, for all the out-to-
pasture pipers. “Let’s make real music
again,” he told them, in a note.“Not this
modern, gimmicky stuff that all the
bands are playing these days.”
Barr still likes to host ceilidhs—big
Scottish-music parties—complete with
pipes, fiddles, and whiskey. The most
recent one took place last October. “He
invited Celtic musicians from Scotland,
on his own dime, to join us,” Green said.
Two months later, Barr got the call from
the President. “I was over at his house
when he told me that Trump had asked
him to be the new Attorney General,”
Glendinning recalled. “I said, ‘Take it!
Your country needs you!’ But on my
way home, in the car, the toll of such a
job—not just on Bill but on his fam-
ily—as well as having to leave the com-
forts of semi-retirement, began to gnaw
at me.” Glendinning had trouble sleep-
ing that night, and sent Barr an e-mail
listing all his concerns. But it was too
late. Barr’s response: “Thanks, my friend.
I have crossed the Rubicon.”
Green said, “He didn’t have us play
1
at the ceremony this time around.”
—Tyler Foggatt
IT GIRL DEPT.
HOW BIG IS TOO BIG?
aggie Rogers, the twenty-five-
M year-old singer-songwriter, pro-
ducer, and improbable pop star, had a
couple of days off in the city the other
week, before playing a sold-out show
18 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
at the Hammerstein Ballroom. “Heard
It in a Past Life,” Rogers’s début album,
came out in January, and now she’s try-
ing to figure out, as she put it, “How
big is too big?” and “What do I really
want?” Rogers had just announced two
October shows at Radio City Music
Hall; the tickets sold out in an hour.
That’s pretty big, whether the artist
wants it or not.
Among the items on Rogers’s to-do
list in New York was a valedictory stroll
through her old Greenpoint neighbor-
hood, and a cheeseburger and beer at
Enid’s, her favorite local bar, which
was closing. Her route began at the
Lorimer Street stop on the L. Rogers
had on a long Nike puffer jacket in
bright orange, harlequin-checked jeans,
and chunky-toed boots. She was com-
ing from a four-hour fitting with a
new stylist. “Which feels like some-
thing I don’t really care about,” she
said, wrinkling her freckled nose, “but
I keep ending up not having anything
to wear on TV.”
In a nutshell, this is the dilemma of
being Maggie Rogers. How does she
maintain her sincerity and her I’m-
just-dancing-in-my-bedroom stage
presence as she rises in the pop world?
“Most people see my long hair and
want to put me in velvet bell-bottoms,”
Rogers went on. “And that’s not really
my vibe.” She tried T-shirts and jeans
onstage for a while, she said, until wear-
ing them offstage “made them feel like
a costume.” Rogers is up front about
the fact that she prefers writing to per-
forming. “My degree is in music en-
gineering and production,” she said,
from the Clive Davis Institute of Re-
corded Music, which is part of N.Y.U.’s
Tisch School of the Arts. “I like being
in the studio.”
En route to Enid’s, she gave a cap-
sule bio of her life so far. Born on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland to non-
musical parents—her father was the
local Ford dealer—Rogers begged for
harp lessons as a five-year-old. Why
harp? “I’m sure I saw it in ‘The Little
Mermaid.’ ” At thirteen, she begged to
go to St. Andrew’s, a boarding school
in Delaware, where she soaked up the
DuPont-endowed institution’s deep
musical resources. She played harp in
the orchestra, sang Bach in the choir,
joined a jazz band, learned banjo, taught
Maggie Rogers
herself how to program with Logic,
and made her first record, in a closet
at the arts center. Boarding school and
her many summers at an unelectrified
camp in Maine are the lodestones of
her formative years—not the usual
route to stardom, outside of a Wes An-
derson movie.
Millions of people have seen the
video of the beginning of Rogers’s ca-
reer, as it happened in real time, with
Pharrell Williams sitting in on a class
at N.Y.U.: Rogers played a recording
of a homework assignment, her song
“Alaska.” It’s a folkie-sounding vocal
that Rogers produced with electronic
beats and dance rhythms, and it left
Williams speechless, with tears in his
eyes. Record labels called. Rogers knew
all about record contracts from her stud-
ies at Clive Davis, which caters to stu-
dents seeking careers in the music busi-
ness, management, and production.
She negotiated to keep the rights to
her master recordings. Whenever the
label guys talked over her in the room,
she would interrupt by citing their track
records—mentioning, for instance,
“some weird detail about their signing
the Killers in 2008.” She had absorbed
a lot of industry lore from a student
gig she had transcribing interviews
for Lizzy Goodman’s rock book “Meet
Me in the Bathroom.” “I knew all their
dirt,” she said.
“This was my place,” Rogers said,
stopping before a typical Greenpoint
house with vinyl siding and dirty aw-
nings. “I signed my lease”—a ground-
floor studio—“and my record deal on
the same day.” That was in 2017. She
stayed for a year; now she lives on the
road. “Leaving New York was the first
decision I made that the Internet didn’t
make for me,” she noted.
A fan recognized her. “Wow,” he
said. “Biggest fan. Can I actually ask a
question?”
“Dude, I have no idea what I’m
doing,” Rogers said, laughing.
“That’s what your album is about,
right?” the fan asked. He was her age.
“Exactly,” Rogers said. “I’ve just re-
ally been trying to stay present.”
At Enid’s, she sat down and looked
around. Earlier, she’d said that, when
she was starting out, she “basically lived
here,” adding, “We had after-parties
at Enid’s, and my best friend and I
would d.j.”
“A cheeseburger!” she cried, when a
waitress asked. Decorations had been
put up for the bar’s closing party. “It’s
like one door closing and another door
opening,” she said. “I think I’m com-
ing up on another decision. Which is:
As this grows again, how do I do it in
a way that feels comfortable for me?
What do I find artistically challenging
and exciting? What’s the compromise
1
I’m willing to make?”
—John Seabrook
THE ACTING LIFE
QUELLE FOLIE
J esse Kovarsky is a thirty-one-year-
old actor and dancer whose credits
include a Broadway revival of “Fiddler
on the Roof.” (He played the fiddler.)
He’s also done random gigs, like ap-
pearing as a kung-fu-fighting matcha
superhero at a promotional dinner for
a line of health-food chocolates. Such
is the life of a working actor. Not long
ago, he showed up at a mysterious au-
dition in midtown, for a luxury brand
planning a party with an unusual con-
cept: actors would pose as waiters, greet-
ers, and chefs, and mingle with the
guests, with the goal of making them
feel mildly harassed. Kovarsky recalled
that, at the audition, he “sat on a piano
and then poured someone’s drink into
a trash can and then fed them some-
thing out of their hat.” He got the job.
The luxury brand was Hermès, and
the party was held a few weeks ago, to
celebrate the opening of its new store
in the meatpacking district. A couple
of days before the event, Charlotte David,
an Hermès communications executive,
explained, in a heavy French accent,
“Why an established brand will go to
meatpacking? We wanted to be hon-
est about the prejudice around that by
throwing a party which will reveal our
crazy and fun side!” She was walking
through a defunct trading floor in the
financial district, which workers were
transforming into a sumptuous ball-
room. “This mansion will be slightly
irreverent, slightly topsy-turvy,” David
said. “At the cloakroom, when you leave,
you’re going to give back your ticket
to get your coat, but they are not going
to give you your coat! They are going
to give you a pair of skis.”
“Or a bag of oranges!” a co-worker
added.
The party was intended as an hom-
age to the freewheeling old meatpack-
ing district, where drag queens and club
kids would gather at Florent—back
before the neighborhood was taken
over by luxury brands. (This approach
can backfire, like stomping on a pre-
gentrified burial ground. Last summer,
Target set up a faux-punk pop-up store-
front in the East Village, complete with
a replica of the CBGB awning. Locals
were aghast.) Hermès had hired twenty
New York actors to bother its guests,
and flew in a dozen others from Eu-
rope. At the dress rehearsal, Kovarsky
balanced a silver tray on his head. “I’m
not necessarily catering to anyone but
myself,” he said. Nearby, Adam Vanek
and Taeler Cyrus were getting into char-
acter as a photographer and his assis-
tant, except that when Vanek pressed
the shutter of his “camera” an origami
horse popped out of the lens. Vanek,
who appeared in the national tour of
“Chicago,” said, “We were given in-
structions, like, ‘Make the guests feel
welcome but also uncomfortable.’ ” At
the back of the hall, curtains opened
to reveal a circus troupe dressed as chefs,
including a guy juggling whisks. Af-
terward, two janitors came out with
mops. They were also actors; one of
them, Pierce Cady, said that he had
been a backup dancer for Rihanna at
last year’s Grammy Awards.
On the evening of the party, shut-
tle buses transported guests downtown
from the store opening. A chic Aus-
tralian named Zanita Whittington,
who identified herself as a fashion pho-
tographer and influencer (“I always
stammer before I say that, because I
know what a dirty word it is,” she said),
stepped into an elevator, where two
men behind her started making bird
noises. She got out, perplexed, and gave
her name to a greeter. “Shmashmita
Shmittington has arrived!” the greeter
yelled into a bullhorn. In the ballroom,
Kovarsky approached Whittington with
a magnifying glass and a goblet of ice.
“Would you like some ice from the
Swiss Alps?” he said. “Thirty-five thou-
sand feet up!”
She declined and went off to find
a drink, as actual waiters proffered trays
of cilantro-crusted tuna and beet-cured
devilled eggs. The guests, who included
the actress Emmy Rossum, the fash-
ion designer Jason Wu, and the former
New York Giant Victor Cruz, schmoozed,
interrupted by bits of guerrilla whimsy.
A woman in green walked around read-
ing a Marguerite Duras paperback. A
man in a tuxedo asked guests at ran-
dom if they played the harp. “It’s very
French,” Jennifer Ploszaj, who works in
marketing, said. “I immediately thought
of Montmartre.”
In the banquet hall (where David
had promised “a gigantic feast, with
crazy lobsters and crazy chandeliers”),
a faux server tried to yank away a wom-
an’s plate, along with her uneaten lob-
ster tail, and she yanked it right back.
Another guest eyed a cheese platter,
and a man in a bow tie hacked off a
chunk of cheese and handed it to her.
“Everything tastes better with fingers,”
she said, grimacing. Then a woman in
a flapper dress climbed onto a chair,
kicked off her shoes, and started danc-
ing with two servers (fake ones) to a
jazzy chanson called “J’suis Snob.” Be-
hind the guests, two servers (real ones)
looked on. “Are those plates part of
the set?” one asked, pointing to a table
of dirty dishes. “No, they should be
cleared,” the other said, and they got
to work.
—Michael Schulman
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 19

DEPT. OF JUSTICE
FALL GUY
Michael Cohen’s last days of freedom.
BY JEFFREY TOOBIN
t takes some time for Michael Cohen ocrats who remember his years of
I to work his way to a table at the
grillroom of the Loews Regency Hotel,
service as Donald Trump’s fierce and
profane fixer, and Republicans who
on Park Avenue. He’s been a regular abhor Cohen’s transformation into a
at the hotel’s famous power breakfasts vocal Trump critic. Robert Mueller,
for more than two decades, and on sev- the special counsel, apparently has a
eral recent visits staff members reached different view of him. Cohen pleaded
out to him for handshakes and bro guilty, last year, to campaign-finance
hugs. These days, the restaurant, with and financial-fraud crimes in the fed-
its twenty-seven-dollar pancakes and eral court for the Southern District of
sumptuously upholstered banquettes, New York, in Manhattan, and Muel-
represents a welcome refuge for the ler got Cohen to plead guilty to lying
erstwhile “Personal Attorney to the to Congress. But Mueller referred to
President,” as Cohen used to describe Cohen’s testimony more than a hun-
himself. Outside the friendly cocoon dred times in the recently released re-
of the hotel, he has attracted a bipar- port of his investigation into Russian
tisan coalition of adversaries—Dem- interference in the 2016 election, and
As prison looms, Cohen seems a complicated mix of perpetrator and victim.
20 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
he used Cohen’s testimony to estab-
lish one of his central conclusions: that
Trump and his allies may have ob-
structed justice, by attempting to steer
Cohen into protecting the President.
On May 6th, Cohen will begin
serving a three-year sentence at the
federal prison in Otisville, New York,
seventy-five miles north of Manhat-
tan, leaving in his wake a grieving fam-
ily, vanishing wealth, and gloating en-
emies. In hostile tweets, the President
has called him a “rat” who “makes up
stories,” and insinuated that Cohen’s
family members had committed other
crimes. Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s
lawyer, told me last week, about Cohen,
“I think he is a pathological, dumb
liar.” Prosecutors in the Southern Dis-
trict have rebuffed Cohen’s attempts
to offer evidence against Trump and
others, thwarting his hope of reduc-
ing his sentence or delaying his sur-
render date. Congressional commit-
tees continue to demand his time.
Cohen, who is fifty-two, has an un-
lined face, more or less permanently
set in a hangdog scowl, and a voice
that retains the unmistakable trace of
his childhood on Long Island. In con-
versation, he jumps from topic to topic
in a jittery staccato. To sit with him
today is to listen to a fugue of self-pity
and rage, from a man who also exhib-
its some understandable bewilderment
at his plight. “I now have congressio-
nal committees asking me for more
information based upon information
that I had already given,” he told me
at the Regency. “I’m not going to take
another minute out of my family’s time
with me in order to do anything any-
more without knowing what benefit
there is now to me.”
Cohen is one of only two people to
receive a substantial prison sentence in
the investigation that arose out of the
2016 election. In August of last year,
Paul Manafort, Trump’s former cam-
paign chairman, was convicted of finan-
cial fraud and avoiding taxation on
millions of dollars in income, among
other crimes, and he is currently serv-
ing seven and a half years. Unlike
Manafort, Cohen wasn’t the principal
beneficiary of most of his crimes; Don-
ald Trump was. Cohen pleaded guilty
to violating campaign-finance law by
orchestrating a payment of a hundred
ILLUSTRATION BY BENDIK KALTENBORN
and thirty thousand dollars to the porn
actress Stormy Daniels “at the direc-
tion” of Trump. Cohen also acknowl-
edged violating banking laws to ob-
tain the money to pay Daniels; he
admitted to a campaign-finance charge
regarding a hundred-and-fifty-thou-
sand-dollar payment to silence the for-
mer Playboy Playmate Karen McDou-
gal, to benefit Trump’s Presidential
campaign; and he pleaded guilty to
making a false statement to Congress
about negotiations to build a Trump
tower in Moscow, so that he could align
his account with Trump’s own false
public statements on the subject. In
charges unrelated to Trump, Cohen
also pleaded guilty to tax evasion.
Cohen chose to do Trump’s bidding
for a decade, and that included lying
to reporters and others as well as com-
mitting felonies on his boss’s behalf.
In pleading guilty to all the counts
against him, he surrendered his right
to contest the charges before a jury. In
the light of all this, Cohen has at best
a modest claim on our sympathies. And
yet there can be little doubt that he is
a fall guy in Trump’s web of miscon-
duct, and these days he looks like a
victim as well as a perpetrator.
or many years, Michael Cohen’s
F life amounted to a realization of
the American Dream: personal hap-
piness and financial success on a grand
scale. His father, Maurice, escaped
from Poland during the Holocaust, and
found his way to Canada, where he
went to medical school. A head-and-
neck surgeon, he moved to New York,
met Sondra, a nurse, whom he mar-
ried, and settled with her in Lawrence,
one of the Five Towns, on Long Is-
land. There, the couple raised four chil-
dren, all of whom became lawyers.
Michael graduated from American
University in 1988, and from Thomas
M. Cooley Law School, in Michigan,
in 1991. In New York, he worked at a
negligence-and-malpractice law firm
for five years, until his fortunes turned
when he became acquainted with the
Shusterman family.
Fima Shusterman and his family
emigrated to the United States from
Ukraine in the early seventies, and,
in New York, he first made ends meet
by driving a cab. He did a stint in the
garment business and started buying
taxi medallions when they were rap-
idly appreciating in value. Shuster-
man’s rise was only slightly slowed
when he pleaded guilty, in 1993, to
participating in a tax-evasion scheme.
After he testified against his accoun-
tant, in Brooklyn federal court, he re-
ceived a sentence of probation. Around
this time, Cohen met Laura Shuster-
man, Fima’s daughter, and the two
were married. Cohen ultimately joined
forces with the Shusterman family in
the medallion business.
Cohen prospered during the post-
9/11 recession, which particularly
affected the New York City taxi in-
dustry. Many Sikh drivers, who wore
turbans and beards, felt threatened by
anti-Muslim sentiment and left the
business. Cohen picked up more me-
dallions at depressed prices, and he
and his father-in-law came to control
almost three hundred of them. In time,
Cohen was worth some ninety mil-
lion dollars on paper. In the early two-
thousands, Cohen and his in-laws
bought apartments in Trump World
Tower, at 845 United Nations Plaza.
The families later bought other Trump
apartments as investments, and Cohen
met and became friendly with Don-
ald Trump, Jr.
At the time, the Trump Organiza-
tion was dealing with a rebellion of
the condominium board at Trump
World Tower, and Don, Jr., suggested
to his father that Cohen, who was still
practicing law, might help to resolve
it. Cohen told me, “They wanted to
take his name off the building, and
we quietly got enough votes where we
got rid of that board and inserted our
own. That’s how I got to meet Mr.
Trump, and then he asked me to do
some other things for him.” Trump
never paid Cohen for resolving the
board controversy, but, in 2007, he
hired Cohen to work for the Trump
Organization. Cohen’s title—execu-
tive vice-president and special coun-
sel—reflected his unique position at
the company. “My role was specifi-
cally for him, as his special counsel—
anything that came up, that upset him,
that related to him, that others wouldn’t
be able to deal with or needed special
handling,” Cohen said. He was to take
care of any matters, personal or pro-
fessional, that Mr. Trump, as Cohen
still always refers to him, wanted him
to address.
In the decade before Trump became
President, Cohen used intimidation,
threats, and bluster to do his bidding.
Cohen frequently dealt with the press.
On one oft-recounted occasion, Tim
Mak, then a reporter for the Daily
Beast, asked him about the allegation
by Trump’s first wife, Ivana, which she
later recanted, that Trump had raped
her. Cohen told Mak, “I’m warning
you, tread very fucking lightly, because
what I’m going to do to you is going
to be fucking disgusting.” Cohen earned
a reputation for extreme devotion, even
sycophancy, toward Trump, who re-
paid him, on occasion, with disdain.
In 2009, when Trump was dissatisfied
with Cohen’s performance, he cut his
salary from four hundred thousand
dollars per year to two hundred thou-
sand. (Two years later, he restored the
salary.) Notwithstanding the slights,
Cohen remained loyal to Trump. As
he told me, “I actually enjoyed him,
interestingly enough. When he’s good,
he’s great. When he’s horrible, he’s the
worst human being on the planet. I
mean it. He has no heart and no soul
when he’s mean.”
I n 2016, Cohen helped arrange the
payments of hush money to Dan-
iels and McDougal. In his efforts to
keep their stories under wraps, Cohen
and Trump had an important ally—
David Pecker, a longtime friend of
Trump’s, who was the chief executive
of American Media, Inc., the parent
company of the National Enquirer. The
government’s charging document states
that Pecker committed to “assisting the
campaign in identifying such stories
so they could be purchased and their
publication avoided.” Cohen was the
go-between connecting Trump and
Pecker. (Pecker declined to comment.)
In June, when McDougal began at-
tempting to sell the story of her
months-long relationship with Trump,
which had taken place a decade ear-
lier, Cohen urged Pecker to buy her
account and then bury it—a practice,
in the argot of tabloids, known as “catch
and kill.” Cohen promised Pecker that
Trump would reimburse A.M.I. for
the cost of McDougal’s silence. As
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 21
Cohen told me, “Trump was supposed
to pay them back.” In August, 2016,
A.M.I. bought McDougal’s story for
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
with the understanding that the En-
quirer would never publish it.
According to Cohen, he worked on
the plan with Allen Weisselberg, the
long-tenured chief financial officer of
the Trump Organization. Cohen’s ver-
sion of the payment plan
to McDougal is backed
up by an audio recording
that he made of a con-
versation with Trump at
the time. On the record-
ing, Cohen says to Trump,
“I’ve spoken to Allen
Weisselberg about how
to set the whole thing up
with—” Trump inter-
rupts: “So, what do we got
to pay for this? One-fifty?” Cohen an-
swers, “Yes.”
A.M.I. bought the rights to pub-
lish McDougal’s fitness columns and
to feature her on the covers of two of
its fitness magazines, and so Cohen
and Pecker said that Trump would be
liable for only a hundred and twen-
ty-five thousand dollars of the com-
pany’s payment to her. But Trump
never paid anything to A.M.I. Ac-
cording to Cohen, McDougal’s ap-
pearance on the cover of one of the
magazines, Muscle & Fitness Hers, led
to a sizable increase in sales, and Trump
decided that A.M.I. had received its
money’s worth in the deal. Cohen told
me, “It sold over two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars’ worth of print,
which was the highest for the whole
year. So you invest a hundred and fifty,
you make two hundred and fifty, you
still have her for another cover, and
for two years on the blog. It was a
good deal.” Pecker didn’t pursue Trump
for failing to pay, but, Cohen said, he
used to yell at Cohen about it. Cohen
told me that he would say to Pecker,
“David, why are you yelling at me?
Go yell at Trump.” Other sources sug-
gested that A.M.I. stopped asking
for reimbursement on the advice of
its lawyers. In any event, the National
Enquirer never disclosed Trump’s re-
lationship with McDougal.
Cohen stepped into the Stormy
Daniels story in September, 2016, just
22 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
weeks before Election Day. Daniels’s
attorney was demanding that Trump
himself pay to suppress her account of
a one-night stand with him, which
took place in 2006, shortly after his
wife, Melania, gave birth to the cou-
ple’s son. Cohen took charge of the
negotiations, protecting Trump from
making a direct payment to Daniels.
Cohen told me that he worked through
a series of possible sce-
narios with Weisselberg.
“He was involved right
from the very beginning,”
Cohen said. “I wanted
Allen to pay the mon-
ey—I didn’t want to take
it from my account. He
wanted me to find some-
body who wanted to be-
come a member of a golf
club or was going to have
a party at one of the functions and
they could take the hundred and thirty
off of the bill that way and then they
could pay me—I mean, he came up
with a hundred different ideas.” (Weiss-
elberg, through his attorney, declined
to comment.)
In the end, Cohen put up a hun-
dred and thirty thousand dollars of his
own to buy Daniels’s silence, and set
up a shell company called Essential
Consultants L.L.C. to disguise the
source of the money. He withdrew the
funds from a home-equity line of credit.
“I didn’t want my wife to know that I
was taking a hundred and thirty thou-
sand dollars out of the account,” he ex-
plained. “She’s going to say, ‘Michael,
what’s a hundred and thirty thousand
dollars out of the account for?’ ‘Well, I
really can’t tell you.’ That’s not some-
thing that she would accept. That’s not
something that any wife would accept.”
Cohen said that Trump promised
to reimburse him for the payment to
Daniels, and that Weisselberg would
take care of the logistics: “The amount
of money that they were going to pay
back was created by him. How they
were going to pay me the money back
was created by him. And then the two
of us went, as we did throughout the
entire process, to Trump’s office, and
he approved it.” Cohen put a hundred
and thirty thousand dollars from his
home-equity line into the shell entity
on October 26th, and, on November
1st, a week before Election Day, Dan-
iels signed an agreement not to talk.
Trump got what he wanted.
t’s easy to see why the prosecutors
I in the Southern District regarded
the money paid to the two women as
unlawful campaign contributions. The
purpose of both payments was to help
Trump win the election. Each pay-
ment exceeded the twenty-seven-
hundred-dollar maximum contribu-
tion allowed by any individual, and
neither payment was reported to the
Federal Election Commission as a
campaign contribution. But, if that
was the crime, who were the crimi-
nals? Pecker put up his company’s
money, so he would be a suspect. And
Weisselberg, according to Cohen’s tes-
timony and his recording with Trump,
helped design both schemes, so he
would be one, too. Later, when Cohen
testified before Congress, he produced
copies of the checks that were used
to reimburse him for his payment to
Daniels. The checks were signed by
Weisselberg, Donald Trump, Jr., and
the President. Cohen’s recording
proved that Trump knew of the Mc-
Dougal payment as well, and he alone
was the beneficiary of the entire ar-
rangement. For this reason, he, too,
might be implicated.
The Southern District prosecutors
declined to comment, but one can spec-
ulate about why they gave passes to
Pecker, Weisselberg, Don, Jr., and the
President. The prosecutors were clearly
trying to pressure Cohen into coöper-
ating, and they needed a witness who
could tie him to a scheme to make il-
legal campaign contributions. Pecker
fit that bill, so the prosecutors were
willing to give him immunity. Weiss-
elberg had much to offer prosecutors
about the full range of the President’s
financial life, so they may have wanted
to avoid charging him, too. Don, Jr.,’s
role may have been too minor to merit
prosecution.
When we met, Cohen remained
outraged that he was prosecuted and
Trump was not. “You are going to find
me guilty of campaign finance, with
McDougal or Stormy, and give me
three years—really?” Cohen said. “And
how come I’m the only one? I didn’t
work for the campaign. I worked for
him. And how come I’m the one that’s a staff, he obtained a search warrant was not feasible for a variety of busi-
going to prison? I’m not the one that for Cohen’s personal e-mails during ness reasons and should not be pur-
slept with the porn star.” 2016 and 2017. Under Mueller’s direc- sued further. . . . I did not ask or brief
The Southern District prosecutors tion, the F.B.I. began an extraordi- Individual-1 or any of his family, be-
did acknowledge that Trump orches- narily meticulous examination of Co- fore I made the decision to terminate
trated the hush-money operation. As hen’s life and finances. Later that year, further work on the proposal.”But
they wrote in advance of Cohen’s sen- Cohen had to face the crucible of sworn Cohen had continuing discussions
tencing, “In particular, and as Cohen testimony before the House and the about the project well into 2016 and
himself has now admitted, with respect Senate Intelligence Committees. had kept Trump fully informed. In-
to both payments, he acted in coordi- The committees were investigating deed, Cohen had discussed the Mos-
nation with and at the direction of In- Russia’s interference in the 2016 elec- cow project extensively in e-mails,
dividual-1”—that is, Donald Trump. tion, specifically Trump’s connections which Mueller’s prosecutors had in
Under Justice Department policy, a sit- to business and government leaders in their possession.
ting President cannot be indicted, Moscow. During the campaign, Trump Cohen told me the same set of lies
though it is possible that Trump could said that he had no business interests in early 2018, when I was working on
be charged in the hush-money case in Russia, and, in 2017, Cohen told a story about the 2013 Miss Universe
after he leaves office. Congress that, by the time of the Iowa contest, which took place in Moscow.
caucuses, in February, 2016, he and Trump co-owned the beauty pageant
fter Trump was elected, Cohen Trump were no longer in negotiations from 1996 to 2015, and, in 2015 and 2016,
A did not go to work for his Ad-
ministration. In his testimony before
for a Trump tower in Moscow. On Au-
gust 28, 2017, Cohen wrote a letter to
he spoke to local oligarchs about plans
to build a tower in Moscow; Cohen
Congress earlier this year, he said that Congress about the Moscow project, was his point person for the Trump
this was his choice. “I did not want to stating, “The proposal was under con- Organization at the time. I spoke with
go to the White House,” Cohen told sideration at the Trump Organization Cohen while I was on vacation with
the House Committee on Oversight from September 2015 until the end of my family in Arizona, and I could ar-
and Reform. But, in an interview with January 2016. By the end of January range a phone call only while we were
CNN in November, 2016, he said that 2016, I determined that the proposal driving to the Grand Canyon. During
he would go to Washington if he were
asked. In any event, Cohen agreed to
represent Trump as an outside lawyer,
and he opened a law and consulting
practice in New York in which he sold
himself as the President’s personal at-
torney. At first, Cohen cashed in on
his proximity to Trump. In the mor-
dant words of the prosecutors in
the Southern District, “Cohen also
secured a substantial amount of con-
sulting business for himself through-
out 2017 by marketing to corporations
what he claimed to be unique insights
about and access to Individual-1. But
while Cohen made millions of dollars
from these consulting arrangements,
his promises of insight and access
proved essentially hollow. Documents
obtained by the Government and wit-
ness interviews revealed that Cohen
performed minimal work, and many
of the consulting contracts were ulti- Barbara Kruger, Surveillance is Your Busywork (detail), color lithograph, 1983. Estimate $1,500 to $2,500.

mately terminated.”
On May 17, 2017, eight days after
Trump fired James Comey as F.B.I.
director, Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy
Attorney General, appointed Robert
Mueller to be special counsel. Muel-
ler turned his attention to Cohen al-
most immediately. On July 18th, be-
fore Mueller had finished assembling
Contemporary Art
May 16
Todd Weyman • tweyman@swanngalleries.com
Preview: May 11, 12-5; May 13 to 15, 10-6; May 16, 10-12
104 East 25th St, New York, NY 10010 • tel 212 254 4710 • SWANNGALLERIES.COM
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 23
the call, my wife and son were in the
front of the car, and I was in the back,
and, when I asked about Trump’s
building plans in Moscow, Cohen de-
fended Trump so loudly that they
could hear him even though the phone
was pressed against my ear. He also
displayed the gangsterish belligerence
that was his hallmark, saying of Eric
Swalwell, the California congressman
who is a persistent critic of Trump,
“That lunatic Swalwell deserves a beat-
ing and a half.”
In February, 2018, without Cohen’s
knowledge, Mueller’s office began shar-
ing evidence with the United States
Attorney for the Southern District of
New York. Cohen learned the magni-
tude of his legal problems on April 9,
2018, when federal agents executed
search warrants at his law office, his
apartment, and a suite at the Regency,
where his family was living at the time.
(Their apartment was being renovated.)
In order to obtain the warrants, the
F.B.I. and the U.S. Attorney’s office
submitted an affidavit of more than
two hundred pages describing Cohen’s
potential criminal liability for bank
fraud and illegal campaign contribu-
tions. The affidavit made it obvious
that Cohen would likely be subject to
criminal charges. So Cohen was pre-
sented with a dilemma familiar to every
“ You’re lucky that your parents donated a building to Heaven.”
underling facing pressure to coöper-
ate with law enforcement—whether
or not to flip.
n the aftermath of the raid on Co-
I hen’s property, the Southern Dis-
trict’s investigation of Cohen inter-
sected with Mueller’s investigation of
Trump. The President and his allies
had a strong interest in persuading
Cohen not to coöperate with law en-
forcement, and Mueller’s report raises
the question of whether Trump broke
the law in that effort. This kind of Pres-
idential misconduct has a clear history.
The first article of impeachment against
Richard Nixon, which was passed by
the House Judiciary Committee, be-
fore his resignation, accused him of
“endeavouring to cause prospective de-
fendants . . . to expect favoured treat-
ment and consideration in return for
their silence or false testimony, or re-
warding individuals for their silence or
false testimony.”
Trump’s behavior after the raid on
Cohen’s property was an important
focus in Mueller’s investigation. On
the day of the search, Trump told re-
porters that Cohen was a “good man”
and called the investigation “a real dis-
grace.” A few days later, according to
the Mueller report, the President called
Cohen and told him to “hang in there”
and “stay strong.” Trump followed
those conversations with a tweet that
said, “Michael is a businessman for
his own account/lawyer who I have
always liked & respected. Most peo-
ple will flip if the Government lets
them out of trouble, even if it means
lying or making up stories. Sorry, I
don’t see Michael doing that despite
the horrible Witch Hunt and the dis-
honest media!”
Cohen sought advice from several
lawyers, and he established a frequent
e-mail correspondence with Robert
Costello, who was an especially per-
sistent provider of guidance. In their
conversations, Costello emphasized
that he was a good friend and a for-
mer colleague of Rudolph Giuliani,
who had just been retained as one of
President Trump’s personal lawyers. As
Costello put it in an April 19th e-mail
to Cohen, “I told you my relationship
with Rudy which could be very very
useful to you.” Two days later, Costello
told Cohen that he had just spoken
with Giuliani “and told him I was on
your team. Rudy was thrilled and said
this could not be a better situation for
the President or you.”
Costello’s e-mails to Cohen, which
are now in the hands of congressional
investigators, raise the question of
whether Costello was doing the bid-
ding of his putative client or that of
Giuliani and his client, Trump. Was
Costello trying to keep Cohen in the
President’s camp because that was in
Cohen’s interest, or in Trump’s? In an-
other e-mail, on April 21st, Costello
wrote, “I spoke with Rudy. Very Very
Positive. You are ‘loved.’ . . . They are
in our corner.” He went on, “Sleep well
tonight, you have friends in high places.
Bob. P.S. Some very positive comments
about you from the White House.” As
Cohen told me, about his dealings with
Costello and Giuliani, “It meant that
I was still within the circle, that I was
being protected. I should stay on mes-
sage, part of the team, and we’re going
to get through this, together, as a group.”
Costello and Giuliani insist that
they were simply trying to calm some-
one who was on the verge of suicide
because he so feared alienating the
President. “There was no dual loyalty.
The loyalty was to our client,” Costello
told me. Giuliani called the Mueller
report “totally unfair about the Pres-
ident and Michael.” He said, “We all
told him we couldn’t discuss pardons.
We were nice to him because he was
suicidal and telling people he was
going to jump out a window. He
thought the President was angry with
him, and we told him that wasn’t true,
that we saw him as a victim, that Mi-
chael is still loved. That’s not obstruc-
tion of justice.”
Mueller, it appears, disagrees. He
concluded that the efforts of Trump
and his allies did represent a potential
obstruction of justice. The possible
dangling of a Presidential pardon if
Cohen stayed on the team was at the
heart of Mueller’s evidence. The re-
port states that, based on several con-
versations that Cohen had about par-
dons with Trump’s lawyers, Cohen
understood “that as long as he stayed
on message, he would be taken care of
by the President, either through a par-
don or through the investigation being
shut down.” According to Mueller, there
is evidence that “could support the in-
ference that the President intended to
discourage Cohen from cooperating
with the government because Cohen’s
information would shed adverse light
on the President’s campaign-period
conduct and statements.”
Still, Mueller acknowledged weak-
nesses in a possible case against the
President. He said that Trump’s status
as the President gave him unique pow-
ers to involve himself in law-enforce-
ment investigations, that the evidence
did not establish that there was an un-
derlying crime that Trump might be
covering up, and that many of Trump’s
actions, such as his tweets, occurred in
public view, which might suggest the
difficulty of proving criminal intent.
Nonetheless, Mueller noted one key
factor in favor of a finding that Trump
obstructed justice. His office concluded
that, taken together, various discrete
acts by the President—his firing of
Comey, his attempts to remove Muel-
ler as special counsel, his overtures to
Cohen—may have constituted obstruc-
tion. Mueller wrote that “it is impor-
tant to view the President’s pattern of
conduct as a whole. That pattern sheds
light on the nature of the President’s
acts and the inferences that can be
drawn about his intent. Our investi-
gation found multiple acts by the Pres-
ident that were capable of exerting
undue influence over law enforcement
investigations.”
hroughout the summer of 2018,
T Cohen worried that those close to
Trump weren’t really standing behind
him. Trump’s company and his cam-
paign had paid approximately $1.5 mil-
lion in Cohen’s attorneys’
fees, but they stopped pay-
ing in June. Costello wrote
to Cohen on June 14th,
“It seems clear to me that
you are under the impres-
sion that Trump and Giu-
liani are trying to dis-
credit you and throw you
under the bus to use your
phrase. I think you are
wrong because you are
believing the narrative promoted by
the left wing media.”
In July, Costello gave up represent-
ing Cohen. He sent him an itemized
bill for $43,857.85 in legal services,
which included thirteen phone calls
and one meeting with Giuliani.
(Cohen refused to pay the bill, on the
ground that he had never signed a
retainer agreement with Costello.)
When the news broke, on July 20th,
that Cohen had recorded the phone
call with Trump about the McDou-
gal payment, the breach with the Pres-
ident was all but final. By this point,
Cohen had hired as his criminal-
defense attorney Guy Petrillo, a for-
mer Southern District prosecutor with
no ties to Giuliani. He also retained
Lanny Davis, a Washington lawyer
best known for his work for the Clin-
ton Administration. Through his
lawyers, Cohen began exploring the
possibility of coöperating with the
Southern District.
But there was a hitch. The U.S. At-
torney’s office has a rule that it will
accept only total coöperation from wit-
nesses; if a witness wants to put any
subjects off limits, the prosecutors will
refuse to talk to him. When Cohen
offered to coöperate, he said he wouldn’t
promise to answer every question. The
Southern District rejected Cohen’s
offer of partial coöperation and raised
the pressure, giving immunity to Pecker
and Weisselberg, who could be wit-
nesses against Cohen in a prosecution
for campaign-finance violations.
And Cohen had another problem.
Prosecutors had discovered that, be-
tween 2012 and 2016, he had under-
stated his income by more than four
million dollars, thus avoiding $1.4 mil-
lion in federal taxes during those five
years. Worse yet, the tax returns had
also been signed by his wife, potentially
exposing her to prosecu-
tion as well. Petrillo tried
to dissuade the prosecu-
tors from filing charges,
pointing out that Cohen
had made no effort to
hide this income—there
were no foreign bank ac-
counts or cash transac-
tions. Cohen asserted that
he had provided accurate
information to his ac-
countant, and that the error was his.
(The government disputed this.)
Petrillo pointed to other cases with
even larger tax deficiencies than $1.4
million over five years in which the
government decided to proceed civilly
rather than criminally. But the prose-
cutors were unmoved.
Protecting his wife was uppermost
in Cohen’s mind, he told me. “If they
would have asked me to plead guilty to
the Lufthansa heist, I would have pled
guilty to that, too,” he said, referring
to the notorious robbery at John F.
Kennedy International Airport, in 1978.
“She’s the love of my life. What am I
going to do? You think I’m going to
let them bring her into this craziness?
Not a chance.” His temporizing had
led him into disaster. On August 21st,
he pleaded guilty to multiple charges.
In doing so, he passed up the oppor-
tunity of winning an acquittal; by fail-
ing to coöperate fully, he lost any hope
of receiving a significant reduction in
his sentence.
hen the news leaked that Cohen
W was thinking of coöperating,
Trump reacted with fury. On July 27th,
he tweeted, “Sounds to me like some-
one is trying to make up stories in order
to get himself out of an unrelated jam
(Taxi cabs maybe?). He even retained
Bill and Crooked Hillary’s lawyer. Gee,
I wonder if they helped him make
the choice!” On August 22nd, Trump
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 25
contrasted Cohen’s guilty plea with
Paul Manafort’s refusal to coöperate,
tweeting, “I feel very badly for Paul
Manafort and his wonderful family.
‘Justice’ took a 12 year old tax case,
among other things, applied tremen­
dous pressure on him and, unlike Mi­
chael Cohen, he refused to ‘break’—
make up stories in order to get a ‘deal.’
Such respect for a brave man!” (Man­
afort later pleaded guilty and at­
tempted to coöperate with Mueller’s
prosecutors, who subsequently voided
the deal, saying that Manafort had
lied to them.)
In a series of tweets, Trump wrote
of Cohen, “He makes up stories to get
a GREAT & ALREADY reduced
deal for himself, and get his wife and
father­in­law (who has the money?)
off Scott Free.” He added later, “Re­
member, Michael Cohen only became
a ‘Rat’ after the FBI did something
which was absolutely unthinkable &
unheard of until the Witch Hunt was
illegally started.” In an interview with
Fox News, Trump said that Cohen
“should give information maybe on
his father­in­law, because that’s the
one that people want to look at be­
cause where does that money—that’s
the money in the family.” (Except for
his father­in­law’s guilty plea twenty­
six years ago, there is no evidence that
Cohen’s family is involved in crimi­
nal activity.)
Mueller regarded Trump’s tirades
against Cohen, and especially his im­
plications about Cohen’s family, as fur­
ther evidence that the President could
have obstructed justice. “The Presi­
dent’s statements insinuating that
members of Cohen’s family commit­
ted crimes after Cohen began cooper­
ating with the government could be
viewed as an effort to retaliate against
Cohen and chill further testimony that
might be damaging to the President
by Cohen or others,” Mueller wrote.
“The timing of the statements sup­
ports an inference that they were in­
tended at least in part to discourage
Cohen from further cooperation.”
As Cohen approached his sentenc­
ing date before Judge William H.
Pauley III, the true cost of his failure
to cut a deal with the Southern Dis­
trict became apparent. When the Pro­
bation Department set Cohen’s sen­
26 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
tencing­guideline range at fifty­one to
sixty­three months, Petrillo sought a
sentence of probation. The Southern
District prosecutors responded with a
scathing memorandum, writing that
Cohen “committed four distinct fed­
eral crimes over a period of several
years. He was motivated to do so by
personal greed, and repeatedly used
his power and influence for deceptive
ends. Now he seeks extraordinary le­
niency—a sentence of no jail time—
based principally on his rose­colored
view of the seriousness of the crimes;
his claims to a sympathetic personal
history; and his provision of certain
information to law enforcement.”
Mueller’s team gave Judge Pauley
a much more benign portrait of Co­
hen’s behavior, saying that he “has
taken significant steps to mitigate his
criminal conduct” and provided “cred­
ible and consistent” coöperation. On
December 12th, Pauley gave Cohen
some credit for his dealings with the
government and imposed a sentence
of thirty­six months. He ordered Cohen
to pay $1.39 million in restitution, five
hundred thousand dollars in forfei­
tures, and a hundred thousand dollars
in fines. Parole has been abolished in
the federal system, so even with good
behavior Cohen will be obliged to
serve at least eighty­five per cent of
his sentence.
bandoned and ridiculed by Trump,
A Cohen decided to exact a very pub­
lic form of revenge. On February 27th
of this year, he gave a full day of dra­
matic testimony before the House
Committee on Oversight and Reform.
In his opening statement, he denounced
Trump as passionately as he had once
defended him, calling him a racist, a
con man, and a cheat. Democrats em­
braced him and Republicans dispar­
aged him as a turncoat and a liar.
During one exchange, Cohen said, “I’m
responsible for your silliness because I
did the same thing that you’re doing
now for ten years. I protected Mr.
Trump for ten years.” Cohen offered
tantalizing clues about other miscon­
duct by Trump, including possible bank
and insurance fraud. (He said that
Trump had submitted false financial
statements to a bank in connection
with an application for a loan in order
to buy the Buffalo Bills, and to insur­
ance companies in order to lower his
rates.) But Giuliani asserted that Cohen
had undermined his credibility by fail­
ing to acknowledge that he had sought
a job in the Trump Administration,
and by refusing to admit that he had
discussed pardons. Giuliani told me,
“He gave an interview on CNN when
he said that he wanted a job in the Ad­
ministration. The Mueller report says
he talked about pardons. Those are the
lies of someone who can’t help him­
self.” Cohen’s testimony, for all the at­
tention it received, didn’t have any effect
on his legal predicament, or on his
prison sentence.
Cohen’s legal problems have been
compounded by financial setbacks.
The rise of Uber and other ride­shar­
ing services has caused the value of
his taxi medallions to plummet, just
when he needs to raise funds to pay
his debts to the government and to
provide for his family while he is in
prison. (After his guilty pleas, his law
license was revoked.) In the months
following Cohen’s congressional tes­
timony in February, his lawyers offered
to bring him in to the Southern Dis­
trict to assist in its ongoing investi­
gations, but prosecutors refused to
meet with him. Under the federal
criminal rules, the only way Cohen’s
sentence can be reduced or delayed
now is if the prosecutors ask for it—
and this, it has become clear, is not
something they are going to do. The
prosecutors may regard Cohen as un­
reliable, or they may believe that there
are few outstanding issues left to re­
solve. The Southern District, on which
so many of the President’s adversar­
ies have pinned their hopes, may have
limited potential to bring him down.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, about the
fictional Buchanan family, that they
“smashed up things and creatures and
then retreated back into their money
or their vast carelessness, or whatever
it was that kept them together, and let
other people clean up the mess they
had made.” For a decade, Michael
Cohen cleaned up Donald Trump’s
messes. He embraced Trump so un­
critically that he wound up commit­
ting crimes on his behalf. Thus far,
Trump, like the Buchanans, has escaped
the wreckage he leaves behind. 

SHOUTS & MURMURS
IN BILLIONAIRES IS
THE PRESERVATION
OF THE WORLD
BY IAN FRAZIER
illionaires are all around us, but do
B we ever stop and notice them? We
pass through their habitats and provide
them the tax nourishment that biolo-
gists say is necessary for their survival.
But simply increasing their wealth is not
the same as understanding the impor-
tance of even a single-digit billionaire in
the complex web of life. Take a moment
and examine a video of a billionaire. Seen
from up close, the delicate striations on
the belly of Secretary of the Treasury
Steven Mnuchin (to pick one example)
reveal mini-universes. Nature, wearing
its hat as the free market, has made him,
and every billionaire, unique.
Observing billionaires in situ takes
patience. Only a few of us will ever get
to watch a billionaire feeding. If you are
lucky enough to see a billionaire behind
his enormous desk masticating his ec-
centric diet of choice while you sit quietly
in front him, hungry and unfed—a con-
dition the billionaire seems to require in
order to accept your presence—you will
have four minutes to make your pitch.
Avoid sudden movements that might
startle the billionaire, for if that happens
he will signal to the others and they will
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
hurry off shrieking through the pent-
house canopy. Billionaires are notoriously
shy and often take on an ordinary ap-
pearance to escape detection, even mask-
ing themselves in khaki such as anybody
might wear. Thus the observer must exert
extra caution in identifying them.
Formerly, billionaires were so plenti-
ful in Western trout streams that, it was
said, you could walk from bank to bank
on their hats and never wet your feet.
And once, historians claim, the endless
flights of billionaires darkened the skies
above Long Island until their cackling
drowned out ordinary conversation. For-
tunately, those bygone days are still here.
Thanks to increased public awareness,
billionaires remain plentiful and provide
a vital resource. Today the fate of global
ecosystems often depends on nature’s
own life preserver, the billionaire.
Here is how the healing process works.
Say you are a nonprofit out to save the
oceans. First, you find a billionaire. Using
due diligence, you search out exactly the
right billionaire—one who, as you dis-
cover, loves netsuke. To help nature along,
you get some netsuke and put it on a
trail where the billionaire is likely to jog
by. Soon the billionaire appears; he sniffs
the netsuke, and absorbs it into his pri-
vate collection. Then, and only then, do
you emerge from the brush to tell him
about your deep and long-held admira-
tion for him. From this point your pre-
sentation is carried out carefully, until,
suddenly, the plight of the oceans clicks
with the billionaire! Now that crucial
part of the planet can be saved.
Certain billionaires have evolved traits
specially adapted to saving rain forests.
Others have inherited characteristics well
suited for preserving woodlands and open
spaces near their multi-thousand-square-
foot fourth homes. A particular kind of
billionaire has developed extra financial
digits ideal for making beachfront dunes
off limits to out-of-towners. Some bil-
lionaires’ adaptations seem to serve dec-
orative purposes only, or their conserva-
tion functions have yet to be discovered.
It is up to us to discover them. Any bil-
lionaire left untapped equals a part of
the Earth that will consequently die.
We have all read about Croesus, the
highest-wealth individual of classical
times, and how his underwriting of the
process of plant photosynthesis pro-
vided for the generous production of
atmospheric oxygen that we still enjoy
today. But the people of Croesus’ own
time took him for granted, as we do too
often with billionaires. They do not have
to save anything if they don’t want to.
Only if we cultivate them will they fulfill
the functions that nature has designed
them to perform. For each of us, that
means being nice to them, paying at-
tention to their needs, and never speak-
ing of them in such demeaning or out-
of-date terms as “capitalist swine.”They
are no more swine than we are, merely
very different human beings with a par-
ticular role to fill in making the planet
able to support life. Our job is to draw
them out and give them comfort. Is that
too much to ask?
Consider what is at stake:
We now face an existential challenge
to the planet in global warming. Fixing
this problem will be beyond the power
of any one billionaire. It might take
three of them, or even four. But the ques-
tion is: which four? With life itself de-
pending on it, how do we determine
which billionaires to kiss up to? This is
where our knowledge of billionaires—
our “billionaire-ology”—will have to be
improved. A massive group effort will
be called for. Every one of us, from uni-
versity presidents to museum heads to
caterers to legislators to florists, will have
to get together and pool what we have
learned, by hard, boots-on-the-ground-
at-the-luncheon experience, about our
valuable friends, the billionaires. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 27

PERSONAL HISTORY
THE OTHERS
Growing up in an apocalyptic cult wasn’t nearly as hard as leaving it.
BY GUINEVERE TURNER
“ W here are you from?” For most
people, this is a casual social
question. For me, it’s an exceptionally
loaded one, and demands either a lie
or my glossing over facts, because the
real answer goes something like this: “I
grew up on compounds in Kansas, Los
Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Bos-
ton, and Martha’s Vineyard, often trav-
elling in five-vehicle caravans across
the country from one location to the
next. My reality included LSD, gov-
ernment cheese, and a repurposed school
bus with the words ‘Venus or Bust’
painted on both sides.” And that, while
completely factual, is hard to believe,
and sounds like a cry for attention. So
The author, at right, photographed in 1971, at the Lyman Family’s Boston compound.
28 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
I usually just say, “Upstate New York.”
Let me elaborate. I was born into a
family of a hundred adults and sixty
children in 1968, and spent the first eleven
years of my life among them.The Lyman
Family, as it was called, referred to it-
self in the plural as “the communities.”
It was an insular existence. I had no
contact with anybody outside the Fam-
ily; my whole world was inhabited by
people I had always known. I was home-
schooled and never saw a doctor. (Only
the direst circumstances called for med-
ical professionals: fingers cut off while
we kids were chopping wood, or a young
body scalded by boiling water during
the sorghum harvest.)
I was also raised to believe that we
were eventually going to live on Venus.
In my early twenties, years after I left
the Family, I was describing my child-
hood to someone and she said, “That
doesn’t sound like a commune—it sounds
like a cult.” I still balk at this word and
all the preconceived notions that come
with it. What’s the difference between
a commune and a cult? Here’s one: a
cult never calls itself a cult. It’s a term
created by people not in cults to label
and classify groups they view to be ex-
treme or dangerous. So it feels judgmen-
tal, presumptuous, and narrow in scope.
It makes me feel protective of my up-
bringing. You don’t know how it was.
But in time I’ve had to consider some
irrefutable truths. I grew up under the
reign of a charismatic, complicated leader
named Mel Lyman, who was constantly
issuing new rules for living. True, Lyman
never ordered his followers to kill any-
one, the way Charles Manson did. But,
if Lyman had asked, I’m pretty sure that
they would have complied. In 1973, three
members of the Lyman Family attempted
to rob a bank; one of them was killed,
and the other two went to prison. Also,
Mel Lyman wrote a book called “Au-
tobiography of a World Savior.”
o people who grew up in more or-
T dinary circumstances, my childhood
sounds exotic, scandalous, and fascinat-
ing. Cults are fascinating—but one thing
the Manson Family and the Lyman
Family have in common is the banality
of daily life inside these worlds. If you
live in a large group of people, there are
always dishes to wash and heaps of laun-
dry to hang up to dry. The travel plans
for Venus took place against a backdrop
of these everyday chores. As I like to say
when I tell people about my background,
“It wasn’t all acid and orgies.” (Acid
was used by adults, as a tool for spiritual
growth. To my knowledge, there were
no orgies.) What I don’t always say
is that I also had a happy childhood,
or, anyway, parts of one. The young
Family members sang together almost
MICHAEL DOBO/DOBOPHOTO
every day as we harvested strawberries
or corn—Woody Guthrie songs, or folk
songs like “Down in the Valley.” We for-
aged in the woods for morel mushrooms.
Fishing was big, and every time an adult
caught a bluefish or a bass I pasted one
of the scales in my diary. We had dogs,
goats, cows, chickens, a Shetland pony
named Stardust, and a cockatiel named
Charles. Older kids read younger kids
stories before bed—“The Chronicles of
Narnia,” “A Wrinkle in Time”—and we
fell asleep in piles, three or four to a bed.
Even the mystical stuff had a mun-
dane quality for those of us who didn’t
know anything else. The Ouija board,
for instance, was a regular part of our
lives. Shelves were lined with notebooks
containing transcriptions of the conver-
sations adults had had with various spir-
its. We kids were allowed to talk to only
one spirit, Faedra, and sometimes after
dinner we’d gather around the board to
summon her. The Ouija board was hand
carved, the woodgrain beautifully pol-
ished, the pointer covered in purple vel-
vet. Only the older kids were allowed to
ask questions, and our eyes would be
glued to the pointer as it slid over the
smooth surface, gaining momentum, the
low swish of felt on wood the only sound
as we held our breath for answers. One
night, one of the questions was “What
does Guinevere need to learn?” The an-
swer came back that I was a lazy little
girl. After that, I cleaned every ashtray
in the compound for weeks, ashamed
but also secretly thrilled that Faedra even
knew who I was.
It might make sense, then, that when
I was told I had to leave the Family, in
1979, I begged to stay, tears streaming
down my face. That night, August 25th,
I wrote in my diary, “I am totally stunned
and heartbroken. I am speechless. . . . I
can’t live away from everything I love.
I can’t sleep tonight, nothing. . . . But I
swear to GOD I am coming back and I
will be the same person. I will fight the
world and get back where I belong.”Even
now, it’s hard for me to write about the
Lyman Family. It’s been four decades
since I begged to stay, and I still care
what they think.
y mother joined the Lyman Fam-
M ily when she was nineteen and
pregnant with me. Children and their
biological parents tended to be sepa-
rated early on in the Family, and I was
no exception. My mother and I were
rarely on the same compound, and I
didn’t know her very well. The after-
noon when, at the age of thirty, she
sneaked out of the Family’s Manhattan
brownstone, knowing that she would
never be able to return, I was on the
Family farm in Kansas.
On every compound, there was a
house for kids and a house for adults,
which we called the Big House. That
night, I was at dinner in the kids’ house,
a chaotic ruckus of thirty of us eating
and laughing, with only a few women
there to keep us in line. We were ex-
cited about a play we were writing—it
was about a man who had the power
to end the world with a giant button,
and historical figures came and went,
trying to persuade him to press the but-
ton or let the world go on. I was going
to play Eleanor Roosevelt. We heard
the buzz of the intercom that was used
to communicate between the houses.
Then one of the women approached
the table and told me, “They want you
up at the Big House.”
Everyone got quiet. I assumed that
I was in trouble, though I was pretty
sure I hadn’t done anything wrong. Of
course, we were all used to being in trou-
ble for nothing concrete: I was punished
once for looking at someone “with that
Scorpio soul in your eyes.”
I went out into the summer night
and started the long walk uphill, listen-
ing to the crickets and katydids, pull-
ing anxiously on my braids. I wanted to
be alone in the quiet, to linger on those
smooth pieces of slate embedded in the
grass. But I didn’t dare walk slowly.
When I got to the Big House, the
adults were more serious than usual.
“Go talk to Jimmy,” someone said.
“He’s upstairs.”
I breathed a little easier. Jimmy was
the least scary of all the adult men: he
had taught me how to play the banjo and
sang kids’ songs with us, making us laugh.
When Jimmy told me that my
mother had left the Family, my first re-
action was relief. It meant that I wasn’t
in trouble. I was scared for what would
become of my mother, and that made
me cry. But Jimmy had more to say, and
it was far scarier: I had to go join my
mother, wherever she was.
I was devastated. He hugged me.
“Why?” I asked.
“Every kid here has at least one of
their parents in the communities, and
your father isn’t here,” he said in a sooth-
ing tone. I didn’t bother arguing—I just
begged and sobbed.
It is hard to convey the shock of being
kicked out. I had been raised to believe
that World People—everyone but us,
that is—were soulless. If you had too
much contact with them, you might get
your soul sucked out as well. It wasn’t
something I was eager to test.
Nonetheless, the next morning I was
driven to the airport and put on a plane
to Boston by myself. I then went to the
compound there, at Fort Hill, in the
center of Roxbury, and picked up my
four-year-old sister, Annalee—my
mother’s second child, whose father had
died three years earlier. I again begged
to remain in the communities, to no
avail. The next day, we were driven to
my grandmother’s house, in a small New
Jersey town, where I found my mother
sitting on the front steps.
“I knew they’d send me Annalee,”
she said, folding my sister in her arms.
“But I never thought I’d see you again.”
I looked up at the sky, where a rain-
bow had actually appeared. “See?” my
mother said. “It’s all going to be O.K.”
I couldn’t imagine that to be true, not
out here among the World People. I saw
my mother as a traitor who had destroyed
my life, and I felt completely alone. For
the next few weeks, I cried myself to sleep
every night. I wasn’t crying about the fact
that she had clearly defected with the as-
sumption she’d never see me again—after
all, I had been just as willing to live my
life without her. I cried because I wanted
to go back. Every night, I would tell her
so, and she would say, “Just wait a few
more weeks.” I cried because she was the
obstacle between me and going home.
Then came a new frontier: school. I
was nervous (because, you know, the
soul thing). But I was excited, too. Ac-
customed to being surrounded by doz-
ens of kids my own age, I had been
cooped up in my grandmother’s house
for two months. I was dying for people.
I was wearing green velour bell-bottoms
and a blouse with big purple flowers on
it, both prized items I had sewn myself.
My hair hung down to the small of my
back, and I brushed it until it shone.
It was the middle of the school year,
and as my mother talked to the admin-
istrator I could see that girls were crowded
around the office window, straining to
get a look at me.
“Where can we send for her school
records?” the administrator asked.
“Oh, the school burned down,” my
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 29
mother replied, in a matter-of-fact tone.
It was the first of many lies we had to
tell to seem normal. I soon learned to
say I was from Boston.
School was a minefield. While I was
being introduced to my sixth-grade
teacher, Mrs. Winter, a girl raced past,
crying out, “The hamster is in the zig-
gurat, the hamster is in the ziggurat!” I
sank into an immediate despair: would
I ever understand the outside world?
It turned out that there was a model
of a ziggurat in the room, and it was
just the right size to appeal to the class
pet. I was relieved that this small mys-
tery could be so easily solved. Still, my
classmates could sense that I was a
stranger in a strange land.
“You look like Laura Ingalls, from
‘Little House on the Prairie,’ ” one girl
said. My homemade clothes and long,
straight hair stood out among all the
designer jeans and Farrah Fawcett feath-
ered looks. I learned that bragging about
playing the banjo and how much I loved
Glenn Miller wasn’t going to make me
popular. I learned to pretend that I got
all those references to “The Brady
Bunch.” (I had never seen any modern
television.) Most important, I learned
a lesson about eye contact. “You can’t
just stare at people,” one girl whispered
to me, in an act of kindness. Never hav-
ing met anyone who hadn’t known me
since I was born, I hadn’t grasped that
direct eye contact with someone for
more than a few seconds makes you
seem very weird.
ears later, when I visited the Lyman
Y Family’s compound on Martha’s
Vineyard, I noticed how everyone I
grew up with looked into one anoth-
er’s eyes, always. It all seemed perfectly
normal again.
I was eighteen at the time. I had
been out in the world for six years. In
high school, I had effectively erased any
signs of my childhood—I didn’t talk
about it, and that made life so much
simpler. A year after I left the Family,
one of the more powerful adults had
written me a letter. “I want you to know
that you are always welcome here and
that everyone misses you,” it said. A
letter I received a few weeks later ex-
plained, “We work at it, striving for
inner consciousness, self development
on the inside instead of the outside.
30 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
This life we live is not for everyone,
only if you have Mel inside of you. ”
When I was about to go off to college,
I wrote to the Lyman Family to ask if
I could visit before I went. The mem-
bers welcomed me warmly, and I spent
a glorious few days there. Slowly, peo-
ple in the Family encouraged me to
stay with them instead of going to col-
lege: this was home, they said, where I
belonged. I did feel as if I were home,
and, after a day or two, I thought I
might not go to college after all. These
people really knew me. They looked
into my eyes.
One night after dinner, as everyone
sat around in the living room drinking
wine and talking, as they usually did, I
was sitting on the floor, taking it all in.
I felt a surge of love and belonging. I
was just about ready to stay for good.
At that moment, a man who was seated
in a nearby armchair put his empty glass
in front of me as he was talking, the
unspoken command being “Get me
more wine.”
Dutifully, I took the glass and got up
to refill it. As I entered the kitchen, it
struck me that most of the women were
doing dishes, floating around to refill
glasses, or getting the kids ready for bed.
Women served men here. I had been
raised that way, of course—but now the
custom put me in a kind of panic. Sud-
denly, I couldn’t imagine staying.
I suspect that I latched on to the
rigid gender hierarchy of the Family
because it was easier than facing up to
some of the other disturbing truths about
them. At the very least, I had to accept
that I had become a World Person. Just
as the Family had warned, the outside
world had seeped into my soul. I didn’t
consider myself better than them, but
I did feel different—as if I no longer
belonged. Letting go of that sense of
belonging was hard, and I cried when
I said my goodbyes, two days later.
I went off to Sarah Lawrence, where
I discovered that an ironic inversion
had taken place. When I was in high
school, I effectively erased my past; at
college, my background became a valu-
able commodity. Everyone there tried
to outdo one another with his or her
wild backstories. Mine inevitably won.
When people asked me where I was
from and I grew circumspect, my best
friend would egg me on: “Tell them
about the Moonies! Tell them about
the Moonies!” He couldn’t wait to see
their reaction to my stories.
I eventually tried to write about my
past in a fiction workshop, and found
the experience frustrating. Instead of
critiquing my writing skills, readers sim-
ply wanted more details about my ex-
otic origins. I understood their curios-
ity, but that didn’t solve my dilemma.
How could I talk about an upbringing
that was so strange to people? How
could I make sense of my own history
without sensationalizing it, or turning
it into a punch line?
I’m starting to learn that I can’t be
afraid to reveal the hard things. That
kids like me were punished by being
locked in a closet for a whole day, or
being deprived of food, or being beaten
while everyone else was brought out to
watch, or being the object of shunning,
when no one was allowed to look at you
or talk to you for days. Sometimes we
were pitted against one another. I over-
heard adults having sex in a bed just a
few feet away from me, while half a
dozen other kids slept, or maybe didn’t,
on the floor.
Several girls who were thirteen and
fourteen had been “chosen” by adult men.
They called it marriage, though there
was no ceremony or anything official.
One thirteen-year-old lived in a room
off of Mel Lyman’s room. It was com-
monly known that she belonged to Mel,
and no one else would be allowed to
have her or think about having her, for
the rest of her life. When we were alone,
she would cry and say that she didn’t
want to have sex with Lyman but knew
that soon she would have to. She already
slept in his bed. If I had stayed a few
months more, I probably would have
been chosen by a man, too.
See, now the whole story has taken
a turn. You’ve maybe forgotten every-
thing I wrote before. You’re horrified;
you want to know more. I’ve told you
these things because I didn’t want you
to think I was weak or timid, or apolo-
getic about some of the uncomfortable
truths. Now I can’t take them back.
oday, as a fifty-year-old screen-
T writer, I’m drawn to the stories of
cults and their behavior. My next film,
“Charlie Says,” focusses on the women
who killed for Charles Manson and the
time they spent in a prison isolation
unit. One thing I wanted to show was
how keeping these women in that unit
trapped them for years in the echo
chamber of Manson’s manipulations.
I’ve always been struck by the sensa-
tionalist and reductive way that sixties
and seventies cults are portrayed in the
media. In a nation fixated on individ-
ualism, cults and communes are easy
objects of disdain—and perhaps envy.
Their members are breaking the rules,
discarding the sacred nuclear family. It’s
libertarianism plus sex and drugs, and
it’s wrong, but do tell me more.
The truth is far more complex,
though no less insidious. As individu-
als, how well are we positioned to say
which systems of belief are right or
wrong? When I was a teen-ager, I would
ask my mother, “Did you really believe
we were going to live on Venus? I mean,
just for starters, we know that Venus is
uninhabitable by humans.”
“It’s complicated,” she would say.
“You can hold a lot of conflicting ideas
at once sometimes.”
She clearly didn’t want to talk about
it. There was, I came to see, an impor-
tant distinction between us. I had been
born into a belief system and simply ac-
cepted it, as children do. She, on the
other hand, had made a choice to be
there, and that choice was no doubt be-
coming increasingly hard to live with.
Did she feel embarrassment? Regret?
Guilt? She never told me.
“Not everything is black-and-white,”
she would say. “You’ll understand when
you’re older.”
I don’t, really. Because I neither chose
to be in the Lyman Family nor chose
to leave it, I can describe my experi-
ence without being judged for it. But,
to be fair, the notion that U.F.O.s are
going to take you to live on Venus is
not obviously crazier than the Chris-
tian idea of Heaven and Hell, not to
mention the unscientific beliefs put
forth by other mainstream religions.
Sheer popularity and longevity can do
a lot to render odd convictions reassur-
ingly familiar.
Compensating for their smaller size,
perhaps, cults usually outdo conven-
tional religions in their commitment
to apocalypse. The Big Confrontation
is coming, they always seem to insist.
We need to be ready, and even willing,
to die. We will be brought to a higher
consciousness, or to a better place. The
Lyman Family predicted that the world
would end on January 5, 1974. On that
date, Mel Lyman told us, we would be
taken away to Venus. As the day ap-
proached, we children were told to put
on our favorite clothes and pick one
toy to bring on the journey. We sat in
the living room all night,
listening for the hum of
the U.F.O.s.
The prophecy’s failure
didn’t make anyone be-
lieve in Mel Lyman’s wis-
dom any less, though. We
were told that the space-
ships hadn’t come because
our souls weren’t ready. We
hadn’t done the work on
ourselves that we needed
to, and we had ruined things for Mel,
whose soul was exactly where it needed
to be. The year was set to 00, he de-
cided we would no longer observe
daylight-saving time (there would now
be World Time and Our Time), and
we kids weren’t allowed to speak for
the foreseeable future. We passed notes;
we whispered to one another when we
were sure no adult was within earshot.
Meals were silent. It was a dark and
uncertain time.
Manson preached the coming of Hel-
ter Skelter, when black people would
rise up against white people but spare
his followers (all of whom were white).
David Koresh claimed that he was the
final Christian prophet, who needed to
father lots of children in order to make
it all work. Marshall Applewhite, who
led the Heaven’s Gate cult, near San
Diego, persuaded dozens of his follow-
ers to commit suicide in order to board
a spaceship that would convey them to
a “level of existence above human.”
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh focussed on
the need to create a new society because
“the third and final war is on its way.”
None of these apocalypses came to
pass. Which doesn’t mean that some
version of them never happens. In 1993,
during the standoff between the F.B.I.
and Koresh and his followers, in Waco,
Texas, I remember thinking, Don’t con-
front them like that! You’re making his
predictions a reality. People are going
to die! And seventy-six people did. That
was preferable, it seems, to admitting
that your God had failed, or that the
Great and Powerful Oz was in fact a
small, desperate person.
At least these self-anointed leaders
earned themselves a measure of fame.
In my experience, people tend to be al-
most apologetic that they’ve never heard
of the Lyman Family. What I tell them
is that, if you haven’t heard of a cult, it’s
because it didn’t go down
in flames. Its members are
just quietly doing what
they do, which means that
there are many more ac-
tive cults today than we
are aware of. The commu-
nity founded by the late
Mel Lyman is still around
today and runs a flourish-
ing home-renovation
business in the Los An-
geles area. I don’t know much about
how they live now, but I am certain they
wouldn’t call themselves a cult. They’ve
always called themselves a family. They
would also urge you to discount my
childhood memories as “sometimes in-
accurate, incomplete, exaggerated, or
otherwise flawed” (as their law firm as-
sured this magazine); make of it what
you will.
For the cult members who’ve sur-
vived over the decades, it’s possible that
the ideals they started with have given
way to the demands of their daily lives,
to the buffeting effects of the larger
culture, to the familiarity of routine. Or
maybe they just haven’t been found out.
There will always be people in search
of what cults have to offer—structure,
solidarity, a kind of hope. In the back
yard of our Los Angeles compound, the
adults built a wooden pyramid, big
enough to hold about twenty kids, small
stilts raising it a few feet off the ground.
The smell of blooming jasmine sur-
rounded us as we climbed into it at
night, sat cross-legged in a circle, and
sang one note all together. We would
do this for hours. There were skylights
in the ceiling, and we stared up at the
stars as we sang. I loved those moments,
holding on to the note until I thought
my lungs would burst, then taking a
deep breath and starting again. It felt
as if we were one being, and we were
proud of that. Most of all, we hoped
that the spaceships could hear us, and
that they would be summoned at last. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 31
 PROFILES
ON THE WARPATH
Can John Bolton sell an isolationist President on military force?
BY DEXTER FILKINS
arlier this year, as Donald Trump
E prepared to meet the North Ko-
rean Supreme Leader, Kim Jong
Un, in Vietnam, he took a moment in
the State of the Union address to con-
gratulate himself on a diplomatic mas-
terstroke: “If I had not been elected Pres-
ident of the United States, we would
right now, in my opinion, be in a major
war with North Korea, with potentially
millions of people killed.” For John
Bolton, the national-security adviser, the
summit represented a conundrum. Two
months before he entered the White
House, in April, 2018, he had called for
preëmptive war with North Korea.
During the past two decades, Bolton
has established himself as the Republi-
can Party’s most militant foreign-pol-
icy thinker—an advocate of aggressive
force who ridicules anyone who dis-
agrees. In an op-ed in the Wall Street
Journal, he argued that Kim’s regime
would soon be able to strike the United
States with nuclear weapons, and that
we should attack before it was too late.
“The threat is imminent,” he wrote. “It
is perfectly legitimate for the United
States to respond to the current ‘neces-
sity’ posed by North Korea’s nuclear
weapons by striking first.”
Trump—erratic, impulsive, and
largely ignorant of foreign affairs—has
promised since the start of his Presi-
dency to scale back America’s foreign
commitments and to cut its expenses.
With North Korea, he began by trying
to intimidate Kim into surrendering his
nuclear arsenal, threatening “fire and
fury” and mocking him as “Little Rocket
Man.” When that failed, Trump em-
barked on a campaign of diplomacy by
sentiment, meeting Kim in Singapore
and, despite their failure to reach an
agreement, declaring, “We fell in love.”
In Hanoi, he intended to try again.
Since the early two-thousands,
Bolton has told anyone who would lis-
ten that North Korea will never seri-
32 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
ously consider giving up its nuclear
weapons, no matter what threats or in-
ducements the Americans present; ne-
gotiations only bought the regime more
time. Privately, he told aides that the
summit in Hanoi was unlikely to suc-
ceed. “It’s hard to find people here who
aren’t deeply skeptical,” an Administra-
tion official said to me. “But this is some-
thing the President wants to try, and
Bolton has promised to support him.”
When I saw Bolton in his office, on
a frigid winter day, he was mild-man-
nered and spoke in a reedy voice that
belied his ferocious opinions. His long
face seems assembled around his mus-
tache, a bushy walrus that evokes the
late German author Günter Grass.
When I asked Bolton about the con-
trast between his views and Trump’s,
he said, “The President knows where
I stand on all the issues, because he
watched me on Fox News. You have to
know in advance the President’s views
are not always yours. When you enter
government, you know that you aren’t
going to win everything.”
In North Korea, he told me, Trump
believed that the situation had changed
enough to justify negotiations. He noted
the combination of crushing economic
sanctions and the ascension of Kim Jong
Un, in 2011. Bolton argued that Kim,
whose grandfather and father built a
state based on terror and scarcity, was
so eager to revitalize the economy that
perhaps he could be persuaded to give
up his weapons. Bolton wasn’t very con-
vincing, after a career spent scoffing at
such talk, but he went on gamely. “Kim
told us, ‘I’m not like my father or the
Founder.’ He has an ability to see an-
other future that his country could have,”
he said. To help persuade Kim, Trump
had made a four-minute video extolling
the possibilities of Western investment—
an ersatz movie trailer, billed as a Des-
tiny Pictures Production.
In Hanoi, the two sides gathered at A former official said, of Bolton’s world view,
“A lot of nasty people out there want to do us harm. If our country’s interests align with another’s, it’s a fleeting phenomenon.”
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK PETERSON THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 33
the Metropole, a grand hotel built during
the French colonial era, where they met
in a conference room by the swimming
pool. Trump brought six aides, Kim two.
According to White House officials,
the negotiations stalled when Kim
offered to shut down the Yongbyon
plutonium-manufacturing plant, which
represents only a fraction of the coun-
try’s nuclear program, in exchange for
a near-total lifting of U.S. sanctions.
American negotiators had warned their
North Korean counterparts beforehand
that they would not consider such a
proposal. “It was a preposterous posi-
tion—preposterous—and they had no
fallback,” a senior Administration offi-
cial told me. After four and a half hours,
it became clear that the meeting had
failed. As the two leaders stood up,
Trump told Kim, “Let’s keep talking.”
Within hours, suspicious activity—pos-
sibly construction—had been spotted
around the Yongbyon facility.
For Bolton, the outcome of the sum-
mit vindicated a twenty-year argument
that the North Korean regime wouldn’t
be moved by negotiations. But, even
though he was now in the White House,
it seemed that the rest of his argument—
that America needs to strike immedi-
ately—was having little effect. A West-
ern diplomat who knows Bolton told
me, “The trouble for Bolton is, Trump
“If this gets boring, I can tell you how I borrowed money from the Mob,
and how, right now, we’re actually on the run from them.”
does not want war. He does not want to
launch military operations. To get the
job, Bolton had to cut his balls off and
put them on Trump’s desk.”
hen Bolton moved into his office,
W down the hall from the Presi-
dent’s, he hung a framed copy of Trump’s
executive order nullifying the U.S.’s nu-
clear agreement with Iran—one of Pres-
ident Obama’s signature foreign-policy
achievements, which Bolton, a ferocious
critic of Iran, has described as “execra-
ble.” Nearby is a black-and-white pho-
tograph of Johnny Unitas, the quarter-
back for the old Baltimore Colts, Bolton’s
home-town hero. During my visit, he
asked if I knew whom it depicted. When
I guessed right, he gave a half smile and
said, “Good answer.”
Bolton was born in a working-class
neighborhood, the son of a firefighter
and a homemaker, neither of whom
finished high school. He is often referred
to as a neoconservative—a former lib-
eral who endorses a hawkish foreign
policy and wants to spread democracy
abroad. In fact, he has been a conserva-
tive his whole life. His father, though a
member of the firefighters’ union, was a
steadfast Republican, and Bolton ab-
sorbed his values early. As a teen-ager,
at the McDonogh boarding school, which
he attended on scholarship, he volun-
teered to support Barry Goldwater during
his run for President, in 1964. Goldwa-
ter, a Republican from Arizona, pitched
himself as an unapologetic conservative,
fighting for foundational liberties against
“the Eastern establishment.” Bolton was
enthralled. “I cheered when Barry said
we should cut off the eastern seaboard
and let it drift out to sea,” he wrote in
his memoir, “Surrender Is Not an Op-
tion.” Goldwater lost, in one of the most
lopsided electoral defeats of the twenti-
eth century, but Bolton only grew more
inspired. “If the sustained and system-
atic distortion of a fine man’s philoso-
phy could succeed, abetted by every major
media outlet in the country,” he wrote,
“it was time to fight back.”
In the fall of 1966, Bolton started at
Yale, on scholarship. He was a work-
ing-class kid among the upper class—at
the time, twenty per cent of freshmen
came from just five exclusive boarding
schools—and a conservative on a liberal
campus. (Bolton’s was the last all-male
class at Yale; he opposed coeducation.)
Yale was riven by the Vietnam War, which
Bolton supported, at least rhetorically.
The draft board was calling up tens of
thousands of college-age men to serve,
and Bolton preëmpted the possibility by
joining the Maryland National Guard.
In his memoir, he explained that he felt
that the war had already been lost, by
liberals who had prevented America from
doing what it needed to do to win. “I
wasn’t going to waste time on a futile
struggle,” Bolton wrote. “Dying for your
country was one thing, but dying to gain
territory that antiwar forces in Congress
would simply return to the enemy seemed
ludicrous to me. Looking back, I am not
terribly proud of this calculation.”
A former American official who
worked closely with Bolton suggested
that Yale had inspired Bolton’s lifelong
contempt for “élites,” whom he regu-
larly lambastes in his writing and on
Fox News: “I think John looked around
at Yale and said to himself, ‘This is the
soft élite. They’ve always had it easy.
Mommy and Daddy took care of them.
These guys are weak. They’re always
looking down on me.’ He has a chip on
his shoulder.” His classmates went to
hear Muhammad Ali speak about re-
sisting the draft; they argued that the
Black Panthers were being unfairly per-
secuted and inveighed against Richard
Nixon. Bolton spent a summer as an in-
tern for Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro
Agnew, whom he later described as “a
kind and humorous man, a real Middle
American.” (Agnew, after years of cor-
ruption allegations, resigned in 1973 and
pleaded no contest to tax evasion.)
In 1971, Bolton won another schol-
arship, to Yale Law School. There, he
submitted an article to the law journal
arguing that a local government-funded
nonprofit that assisted indigent clients
with filing lawsuits was helping free-
loaders stay in their apartments, thereby
raising rents for paying tenants. The ar-
ticle inspired months of deliberation,
until a new editor—Richard Blumen-
thal, who is now a Democratic senator
from Connecticut—broke the deadlock
by deciding to publish it. “John was very
much shaped by the fact that he was a
minority of one or two at Yale,” Ralph
Winter, a professor of Bolton’s, said. “All
the stuff you read about, that he’s hard
to get along with—every conservative
at Yale who debates and is a logical per-
son is difficult to get along with.”
Bolton found a few allies. During law
school, he lived in a dorm room one floor
up from Clarence Thomas, the future
Supreme Court Justice. One day, Thomas
lost his wallet, and Bolton found it and
turned it in to the school’s front office.
“I had heard of John, mostly in a pejo-
rative sense—that he was a right-wing
conservative guy,” Thomas told me. “I
tended to be left-wing and radical. I was
wearing bib overalls and combat boots
to class.” There was no money in the
wallet—“I didn’t have any money to put
in it,” Thomas said—but he was never-
theless grateful. He walked upstairs to
thank Bolton. “We struck up a real friend-
ship,” Thomas said. “I was tired of pa-
ternalism. John isn’t like that. He didn’t
assume that I had to have a particular
set of views. With John, you’re an equal.”
When Bolton’s parents came to visit, he
would invite Thomas upstairs. Years later,
as Thomas began turning toward liber-
tarianism, he asked Bolton for some read-
ing recommendations. He soon received
a box of articles and books, including
works by Milton Friedman and a trea-
tise on regulatory distortions in the New
York taxicab market. “It was a sort of in-
tellectual care package,” Thomas said.
Bolton graduated from law school as
the Reagan revolution was taking shape.
He moved to Washington, joined the
law firm of Covington & Burling, and
immersed himself in the conservative
cause. Bolton was active in a series of
conflicts that helped define the battle-
ground of contemporary politics. He
worked as Ralph Winter’s assistant and,
while still in his twenties, was involved
in guiding a landmark federal lawsuit,
Buckley v. Valeo, to the Supreme Court.
Winter and Bolton made
the case that strict limits on
campaign spending violated
the right to free speech.They
won, and the decision helped
release a flood of private
money into the American
political system. In 1985,
Bolton joined the Reagan
Justice Department; there,
he helped shepherd the Su-
preme Court nomination of
Robert Bork, whose ultimately unsuc-
cessful bid began the era of fiercely par-
tisan high-court nominations. During
the contested Presidential election of
2000, Bolton flew to Florida to help in-
sure that George W. Bush secured the
office. In his memoir, he notes, with only
slight embarrassment, that Republican
colleagues called him “the Atticus Finch
of Palm Beach County.”
olton has spent decades in federal
B bureaucracies, complaining often of
hating every minute. He has written wist-
fully of a note that Goldwater sent to an
offending colleague: “Dear Bill: I am
pissed off.” Though Bolton says that he
has never written such a letter, he has
established himself as a ferocious in-
fighter—often working, either by design
or by accident, against the grain of the
place to which he’s assigned.
In May, 2001, Bolton was named Un-
der-Secretary of State for Arms Control
and International Security Affairs. The
terror attacks of September 11, 2001, came
a few months later, and the State De-
partment and the White House were
often in conflict about how to react: Dick
Cheney, the Vice-President, urged an as-
sertive use of military power abroad, while
Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, was
more restrained. Lawrence Wilkerson,
Powell’s chief of staff, told me that Bolton
was appointed to his position only at
Cheney’s insistence. “Everyone knew
that Bolton was Cheney’s spy,” Mark
Groombridge, an aide to Bolton at the
time, told me.
George W. Bush’s Administration had
vowed to attack any “rogue nation” that
developed weapons of mass destruction,
and Bolton began a public crusade against
America’s enemies, real and presumed.
In May, 2002, he spoke at the Heritage
Foundation, where he accused the Cuban
government of developing an ambitious
biological-weapons pro-
gram and of collaborat-
ing with such pariah
states as Libya and Iran.
As he prepared to give
similar testimony to Con-
gress, Christian Wester-
mann, an analyst at the
State Department’s in-
ternal intelligence bureau,
told him that the bureau’s
information did not sup-
port such a view. (Westermann declined
to comment for this story.) Bolton, ac-
cording to several officials, threatened to
fire him. “He got very red in the face and
shaking his finger at me, and explained
to me that I was acting way beyond my
position for someone who worked for
him,” Westermann later testified. “I told
him I didn’t work for him.” Bolton began
excluding Westermann’s supervisor from
daily briefings and, after an unsuccess-
ful attempt to fire him, tried to transfer
him to another office.
Carl Ford, who oversaw the intelli-
gence bureau, complained to Powell that
Bolton was misrepresenting the views of
its officials. Powell decided to have Ford
brief Congress in Bolton’s place. Bolton
was angry enough that he didn’t speak
to Ford for six months. Then, as Ford
was preparing to retire, Bolton called
him on the phone. “He told me he was
glad I was leaving,” Ford said. (Bolton
denies making this call.)
Bolton’s immersion in the arcana of
weapons of mass destruction encouraged
an absolutist view. “The first thing he
thinks about in the morning is protect-
ing Americans from nuclear weapons,”
Sarah Tinsley, who has worked as an aide
to Bolton since the eighties, told me. In
2003, as he prepared testimony for an ap-
pearance before Congress, he described
Syria’s efforts to produce nuclear and bi-
ological weapons as an urgent threat—
an assessment that intelligence agencies
thought was exaggerated. A bitter internal
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 35
debate ensued; the accusations endan-
gered the Syrian government’s coöper-
ation in hunting suspected terrorists.
“We were getting some of our best, if
not our best, intelligence on Al Qaeda
from Damascus,” Lawrence Wilkerson
told me. Richard Armitage, the Dep-
uty Secretary of State, took Bolton aside
and “told him to shut up,” Wilkerson
said. Before Bolton testified to Con-
gress, much of his language was diluted.
Armitage reached out to a team of in-
telligence officers who vetted public
statements made by State Department
officials, and asked them to give special
scrutiny to Bolton’s. “Nothing Bolton
said could leave the building until I
O.K.’d it,” Thomas Fingar, who led the
team at the time, told me.
As the Bush White House made the
case to invade Iraq, Bolton came into
conflict with José Bustani, who was in
charge of overseeing the Chemical
Weapons Convention—a treaty, en-
dorsed by the U.S. and a hundred and
ninety-two other countries, that bans
the production of chemical weapons.
Bustani, a former senior diplomat from
Brazil, was negotiating with the Iraqi
government to adopt the treaty, which
mandated immediate inspections by
outside technicians. He thought that, if
inspectors could verify that Iraq had
abandoned its chemical-weapons pro-
gram, an invasion wouldn’t be necessary.
But, he told me, when the Iraqis agreed
to accept the convention, the Bush Ad-
ministration asked him to halt his ne-
gotiations. “I think the White House
was worried that if I succeeded it would
mess up their plans to invade,” he said.
Not long afterward, Bustani recalls,
Bolton showed up at his office in The
Hague and demanded that he resign.
When Bustani refused, Bolton said, “We
know you have two sons in New York.
We know your daughter is in London.
We know where your wife is.” (Bolton
has denied this.) Bustani held firm, and
the White House, determined to re-
move him, convened an extraordinary
session of the Convention’s members—
in many cases, Bustani said, paying the
travel expenses of delegates to insure
that they attended. The group voted
forty-eight to seven, with forty-three
abstentions, to cut short Bustani’s term.
Later that year, Bustani was nomi-
nated for the Nobel Peace Prize, for his
36 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
work against chemical weapons. When
U.S. troops moved into Iraq, they found
no evidence of weapons of mass de-
struction. Commentators across the po-
litical spectrum have decried the inva-
sion—even Trump calls it “a big, fat
mistake”—but Bolton hasn’t changed
his view. In 2015, he told the Washing-
ton Examiner, “I still think the decision
to overthrow Saddam was correct.”
n March, 2005, Bush nominated
I Bolton to be the Ambassador to the
United Nations, a move that was widely
seen as an expression of contempt for
the institution. Bolton had a history of
deriding the U.N., once saying that if
the headquarters “lost ten stories, it
wouldn’t make a bit of difference.” Still,
Democrats in the Senate anticipated a
routine hearing; they were the minority
party and could do little to resist. Tony
Blinken, who was the staff director of
the Senate Foreign Relations Commit-
tee, told me that the members began to
reconsider as they examined Bolton’s
work in the State Department. “We saw
a pattern of Mr. Bolton trying to ma-
nipulate intelligence to justify his views,”
Blinken told me. “If it had happened
once, maybe. But it came up multiple
times, and always it was the same un-
derlying issue: he would stake out a po-
sition, and then, if the intelligence didn’t
support it, he would try to exaggerate
the intelligence and marginalize the
officials who had produced it.” After
several days of testimony, Senator
George Voinovich, a Republican from
Ohio, declared, “John Bolton is the
poster child of what someone in the
diplomatic corps should not be.”
The committee declined to advance
Bolton’s nomination, but Bush moved
ahead anyway, sending him to the U.N.
on a “recess appointment,” a temporary
assignment made when the Senate is
out of session. His old friend Clarence
Thomas swore him in. Bolton’s associ-
ates from that time told me that he re-
frained from ordinary diplomatic nice-
ties: he did not engage in small talk,
linger at cocktail parties, or attend na-
tional commemorations. Not long after
Bolton took the job, Bush visited him
in New York. “Are you having fun?”
Bush asked. “It’s a target-rich environ-
ment,” Bolton replied.
In “Surrender Is Not an Option,”
Bolton gives a minute-by-minute ac-
counting of his time at the U.N., de-
scribing both foes and allies in strik-
ingly undiplomatic language. He refers
to “EUroids,” the European diplomats
whom he generally regarded as soft on
America’s enemies; to “the Crusaders
of Compromise,” as he describes the
national-security establishment; and to
“the True Believers and the High
Minded.” He even derides the U.K.,
traditionally America’s closest ally.
“Many Brits believed that their role in
life was to play Athens to America’s
Rome, lending us the benefit of their
superior suaveness, and smoothing off
our regrettable colonial rough edges,”
Bolton writes.
Bolton built a reputation for being
abrasive but knowledgeable, with tre-
mendous powers of recall. A U.S. dip-
lomat told me that he once walked into
Bolton’s office at the U.N. to ask about
an issue concerning Somalia. Bolton
replied by quoting, verbatim, from a
memo written during the Reagan Ad-
ministration, some twenty years before.
“As John’s talking about it, I can see his
eyes moving back and forth like he’s
reading the memo—he was reading it
from memory,” the diplomat told me.
Colleagues from other countries
struggled to accommodate him. “On a
personal basis, you can joke with him,”
the Western diplomat who knows
Bolton told me. Working with him was
a different story: “Coöperation was pos-
sible, but very much on his conditions.”
Bolton had spent decades refining an
argument that multilateral institutions
and international agreements often did
more harm than good—that each one
represented a loss of American sover-
eignty. “Bolton has a Hobbesian view
of the universe—life is nasty, brutish,
and short,” the former American offi-
cial who worked with Bolton told me.
“There are a lot of nasty people out
there who want to do us harm. If our
country’s interests align with another’s,
it’s a fleeting phenomenon, and the mo-
ment our interests diverge they will sell
us down the river.” Bolton doesn’t ordi-
narily concern himself with the inter-
nal affairs of other nations, or with try-
ing to democratize them, the former
official said: “The U.S. has values do-
mestically, but he doesn’t give a shit about
the values of others. If it advances your
 Bolton at an event in Florida for Cuban exiles who fought in the American-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, in 1961.
interests to work with another country,
then do it.”
As Bolton relentlessly pursued what
he saw as America’s interests, perfunc-
tory exercises—such as drafting the
closing communiqué of the General
Assembly—became time-consuming
ordeals, in part because he refused to
countenance language that he found
anti-American. The U.S. diplomat re-
called stopping by Bolton’s office, after
arduous negotiations over a Security
Council resolution, to report that he
had secured a favorable outcome. Bolton
sent him back, several more times, to
push for a better deal. “I was like the
dog that brings the bone back to his
master and says, ‘Look what I did.’ And
Bolton says to me, ‘You just don’t get
it. You’ve got to have more.’ I went back
a fourth time, and I got it. But they
hated me.”
Bolton had some successes at the
U.N. Most notably, he helped persuade
the Security Council to impose its first
economic sanctions on North Korea for
its nuclear-weapons programs. But when
his post expired, after sixteen months,
REDUX
the Democrats had won back the ma-
jority in Congress, and it was clear that
Bolton would not be confirmed. On
December 31, 2006, he stepped down.
few months later, Bolton appeared
A on Fox News to warn viewers that
their government was intolerably com-
placent. “Six years after 9/11, people are
simply not focussing the way they should,”
he said. “I hope it is not going to take
another 9/11 to wake us up—particularly
not a 9/11 with weapons of mass destruc-
tion.” Bolton, for years a favored guest
on Fox, became a paid commentator.
During the next decade, he made hun-
dreds of appearances, often arguing that
America needed to act urgently to counter
threats from abroad. He spoke in favor
of military strikes on Iranian training
camps (“This is not provocative or
preëmptive—this is entirely responsive”),
forced regime change in North Korea
(“the only solution”), and punitive mea-
sures against Vladimir Putin for shelter-
ing the intelligence leaker Edward
Snowden (“We need to do things that
cause him pain”).
After decades of public-sector work,
Bolton grew rich in the private sector.
According to a financial disclosure that
he filed before joining Trump’s Admin-
istration, he made at least two million
dollars in 2017, including some six hun-
dred thousand from Fox; two hundred
and fifty thousand from the American
Enterprise Institute, where he was a se-
nior fellow; and a hundred and twenty
thousand from Rhône Group, a private-
equity firm. In the course of ten years,
Bolton wrote at least six hundred news-
paper articles, and the uncompromis-
ing beliefs that had piqued colleagues
in government found a willing audience
outside it. After the Bush Administra-
tion reduced sanctions on North Korea,
he wrote, in an op-ed, “Nothing can
erase the ineffable sadness of an Amer-
ican presidency, like this one, in total
intellectual collapse.” When Bush was
asked about it, he said, “I don’t consider
Bolton credible,” and lamented spend-
ing political capital on him. The Obama
Administration and its diplomatic efforts
in the Middle East inspired even greater
scorn. Following Obama’s acceptance
speech for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize,
which Bolton criticized as “turgid,” “re-
petitive,” and “high-school level,” he
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 37
 MY LIFE

four years ago in a room alone

on Martin Luther King Day under a soft white light,
in the afternoon one nurse came
the little strip to say it was all right,
said it was time, you were not
so we did it twice but you were there,
laughing through I talked to him,
that grim comical whatever I said
despair familiar I don’t remember,
to all modern then came the proud
conceivers, sleepless happy
it was magical sorrow months
only that it worked then slow realizing
but now I know playground dread,
it was then the year
my life began, of diagnosis when
we made so our life kept
many plans being a place
circumstances for worsening fears
already waited in enviable comfort
to obviate, to occur as we
suddenly he was born, graciously received
a room full of blood the humiliation
and shouting, of being the ones
he stayed calm gratefully not to be,
sleeping on my chest those many hours
a long time while in the bedroom screaming
they sewed you up, then lurching out
he and I for exhausted walks,

dismissed the President as fundamen-
tally naïve. “Homo sapiens are hardwired
for violent conflict,” he said. “We’re not
going to eliminate violent conflict until
Homo sapiens ceases to exist as a sepa-
rate species.” Later, he wrote a book-
length jeremiad about international law
titled “How Barack Obama Is Endan-
gering Our National Sovereignty.”
Bolton found an especially enthusi-
astic reception for arguments about the
dangers of Islam. From 2013 to 2018, he
was the chairman of the Gatestone In-
stitute, which describes itself as “dedi-
cated to educating the public about what
the mainstream media fails to report.”
The institute, which paid Bolton a hun-
dred and fifty-five thousand dollars in
2017, has published virulently anti-
Muslim articles of questionable accu-
racy. During Bolton’s tenure, one arti-
cle warned of an impending “jihadist
takeover” of Europe, and another claimed
that immigrants from Somalia and other
38 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
countries were turning Sweden into the
“rape capital of the West.” A report ti-
tled “History of the Muslim Brother-
hood Penetration of the U.S. Govern-
ment” suggested that both the anti-tax
activist Grover Norquist and the State
Department official Huma Abedin were
sleeper agents. According to a database
maintained by NBC News, at least four
articles published by Gatestone were
retweeted by the Internet Research
Agency, the Russian intelligence front
that led efforts to sow dissension during
the 2016 election.
Like many conservatives in Israel
and in the U.S., Bolton rejects the idea
of a two-state solution. At a speech in
Israel in 2017, he instead advocated a
“three-state solution,” in which Israel,
Jordan, and Egypt would divide up the
Palestinian territories in Gaza and the
West Bank, abolishing the political en-
tities that now exist there. For that
speech, Bolton received a hundred
thousand dollars and a Guardian of
Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University.
As Bolton became a celebrity in con-
servative media, he used his visibility to
establish himself in electoral politics. In
2013, he set up a political-action com-
mittee, John Bolton Super PAC, which
raised money to support Republican
candidates. The most significant donor
was Robert Mercer, the right-wing ac-
tivist, hedge-fund billionaire, and co-
founder of the data firm Cambridge
Analytica, which later became notori-
ous for capturing private information
from some eighty-seven million Face-
book users. Mercer gave the super PAC
a total of five million dollars. During
the elections in 2014 and 2016, Bolton’s
organization paid Cambridge Analyt-
ica $1.2 million, for psychographic data
to tailor messages that would help Sen-
ate candidates, including Scott Brown,
in New Hampshire, and Thom Tillis,
in North Carolina. But Groombridge,
 trying with no favorite word
success to protect remembrancer,
us from everything why am I telling you
anyone could say, you know it all
gradually all our friends and yet to say
and family lovingly my version
without intention of our story
back into their lives in the morning
abandoned us, very early
we did not know imagining you
it was just us sitting behind me
growing stronger touching my shoulder
in relation to a future scares and
where no one comforts me,
without permission before I go
may join us, I want to tell you
now we’re moving something new,
fortunate ones all the time
from our beloved house I walk around
to another on a hill thinking this life
near a school yes but is this lovely
where his mind accident correct
happily alive and someday
in music can grow, how will it happen
can I say he is to our bodies
my painful joy, and when it does
he thinks will we feel
in rhyme, like we lived
the truest friend or just lived through
to no one yet
he is my —Matthew Zapruder

Bolton’s former aide, told me that the
data turned out to be less effective than
promised. “It was useless,” he said. “We
used it the way they told us, and it had
no discernible impact whatsoever.”
After forming the PAC, Bolton briefly
considered running for President, but
people close to him said that he was more
focussed on another job. “He was running
for Secretary of State,” Groombridge
told me. As with Bolton’s nomination
for U.N. Ambassador, there were reasons
for concern that he wouldn’t pass Sen-
ate confirmation. In Bolton’s financial
disclosure, he listed a forty-thousand-
dollar payment, for a speech that he gave,
in 2016, to Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Ira-
nian exile group dedicated to overthrowing
the government in Tehran. The M.E.K.,
which professes an eccentric variant of
Islam, has been characterized by many
experts as resembling a cult. From 1997
until 2012, the United States listed it as
a terrorist group, owing to a campaign
of bombings and assassinations that it
led in Iran. Bolton’s association with the
group apparently went back at least to
that time. During the speech in 2016, he
told the crowd, “I just say again what
I have been saying for ten years that
I’ve been coming to this rally: the regime
in Tehran needs to be overthrown at the
earliest opportunity!”
Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at
the Carnegie Endowment for Interna-
tional Peace and a frequent critic of the
regime, said that Bolton’s relationship
with the group should have disqualified
him from senior government jobs. “Any-
one who pimps himself out to the M.E.K.
fails the litmus test for integrity,” he said.
In 2011, Bolton became the head of
the National Rifle Association’s inter-
national-affairs subcommittee.Two years
later, he gave a video address to a con-
ference hosted by a Russian gun-rights
group, the Right to Bear Arms. In it,
Bolton offered congratulations on the
twentieth anniversary of the Russian
constitution, which, he said, “signalled
a new era of freedom for the Russian
people and created a new force for de-
mocracy in the world.”
The conference appears to have been
connected with the Kremlin’s campaign
to influence politically powerful groups
in the United States. It was organized
by Maria Butina, who was recently sen-
tenced to eighteen months in prison for
conspiracy, after attempting to infiltrate
the N.R.A. on behalf of the Russian
government. Butina worked closely on
the Right to Bear Arms with Alexan-
der Torshin, a politician and an associ-
ate of Putin’s with links to organized
crime. Last May, three days before Bol-
ton became the national-security ad-
viser, the Treasury Department imposed
sanctions on Torshin, barring him from
the Western financial system.
Bolton’s disclosure also listed pay-
ments, totalling a hundred and fifteen
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 39
thousand dollars, from a foundation
controlled by Viktor Pinchuk, a Ukrainian
oligarch. Pinchuk presents his founda-
tion as a forum for diverse views, but his
allegiances are murky. In 2012, he report-
edly paid Gregory Craig, a former coun-
sel for the Obama White House, to write
a report intended to exonerate Ukraine’s
pro-Russian President for jailing his
chief opponent. (Pinchuk denies this.)
Craig is now under indictment for lying
about the matter to investigators work-
ing for the special counsel Robert Muel-
ler. (Bolton’s connections later inspired
questions about whether he posed a se-
curity risk. In March, 2019, Tricia New-
bold, a White House personnel officer,
testified that Trump had given security
clearances to twenty-five White House
officials who had failed to pass back-
ground checks. The names of those peo-
ple were not released, but, after the news
broke, the House Oversight Commit-
tee asked to see Bolton’s personnel files,
along with those of several others.)
In his bid for Secretary of State,
Bolton had support from populist con-
servatives. According to a former senior
Administration adviser, the Mercer fam-
ily “pushed hard for him.” But his can-
didacy was derailed by members of the
Republican establishment. Robert M.
Gates, the former Secretary of Defense,
and Condoleezza Rice, the former Sec-
retary of State, suggested that Trump
appoint Rex Tillerson, an oil C.E.O.
with experience in international busi-
ness. “I wanted to recommend someone
who would be good,” Gates told me.
Tillerson got the job.
One weekend in 2017, Bolton and
General H. R. McMaster were invited
to Mar-a-Lago, the President’s Palm
Beach mansion, to audition to become
national-security adviser. McMaster
won. A decorated veteran of the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan with a reputation
as an iconoclast, he came to Mar-a-Lago
in full-dress uniform. According to the
former senior Administration adviser,
McMaster had support from Jared Kush-
ner, who thought that his appointment
would play well in the press. Trump ad-
mired Bolton’s Fox appearances—he has
praised him as “a tough cookie.” But the
former senior Administration adviser
told me that Trump, who prefers that his
officials look the part, was put off by
Bolton’s mustache—and, more signifi-
40 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
cant, by his interventionist mind-set.
“Trump had big reservations,” the offi-
cial said. “John wants to bomb everyone.”
f Bolton was disappointed at being
I passed over, McMaster’s experience
in the White House might have reas-
sured him. McMaster was sorely out of
place: a seasoned navigator of interna-
tional institutions working for a Presi-
dent who often seemed determined to
tear them down. The chemistry between
McMaster and Trump was never good.
“H.R. is intense, and he would try to tell
the President as best he could the con-
sequences of his decisions,” a former
senior Administration official told me.
McMaster also clashed with Secre-
tary of Defense James Mattis. On nu-
merous occasions, current and former
officials say, Mattis tried to block White
House initiatives, leaving McMaster
caught in the middle. In the fall of 2017,
McMaster was planning a private ses-
sion to develop military options for the
possibility of conflict with North Korea:
a war game, with Trump in attendance,
at the Presidential retreat in Camp
David. McMaster asked Mattis to send
officers and planners. Mattis ignored
him. “He prevented the thing from hap-
pening,” the former senior Administra-
tion official told me. Later, Mattis kept
General John Nicholson, the com-
mander of American forces in Afghan-
istan, from meeting with Trump.
Administration officials speculate
that Mattis was trying to avoid a war,
or that he simply wanted to control the
flow of information, so that the Presi-
dent could not make ill-advised deci-
sions. “There are a lot of people in the
Administration who want to limit the
President’s options because they don’t
want the President to get anything
done,” the former senior Administra-
tion official told me.
Mattis declined to comment for the
record, but a former senior national-se-
curity official told me, without confirm-
ing any incidents, that a strategy had
evolved. “The President thinks out loud,”
he said. “Do you treat it like an order?
Or do you treat it as part of a longer
conversation? We treated it as part of
a longer conversation.” By allowing
Trump to talk without acting, he said,
“we prevented a lot of bad things from
happening.” In 2017, Mattis and his staff
helped forestall a complete withdrawal
of American forces from both Afghan-
istan and Syria.
Mattis’s obstinacy inspired deep frus-
tration in the White House. “Who the
hell elected Mattis President of the
United States?” a former aide said to
me. When Trump felt that he was being
ignored, he sometimes blamed Mc-
Master. “The President thought it was
H.R. who was blocking him,” the for-
mer senior Administration official said.
The atmosphere grew so tense that
at one point Mattis, visibly agitated,
walked into McMaster’s office and
asked if there was a problem between
them. McMaster excused his aides
and shut the door. Over the sound of
a turned-up television, the two men
engaged in what one person present
described as an “animated discussion.”
McMaster also acquired enemies
outside the White House. Mort Klein,
the head of the Zionist Organization
of America, told me he believed that
McMaster was “hostile to Israel,” cit-
ing offenses that ranged from advocat-
ing “Palestinian self-determination” to
dodging a question about whether the
Western Wall is in Israeli territory. Klein
began a quiet campaign against Mc-
Master, with help from Sheldon Adel-
son, the Republican casino magnate,
and Safra Catz, the C.E.O. of Oracle,
both of whom are fervent supporters
of the Israeli right wing. “We were push-
ing for him to be fired,” Klein told me.
For Klein and his allies, Bolton’s poli-
tics were more appealing. He has deep
connections to the Israeli national-se-
curity establishment and to Prime Min-
ister Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2018, he
gave a well-compensated speech to the
Friends of the Israel Defense Forces.
“John almost regards Israel as part of
the United States,” the former official
who worked with Bolton told me. “He
thinks our interests and their interest
are identical.”
In March, 2018, according to a for-
mer Administration official, the Presi-
dent called McMaster and asked what
he would think if Bolton became the
new national-security adviser. It was clear
to McMaster that he was being fired,
but less clear that the President was cer-
tain Bolton was the right replacement.
The official, who overheard Trump’s side
of the conversation, recalled that the
President ended the call with an uncom-
fortable joke: “Bolton is a hawk like you.
He’s going to get us into a war.”

hen Bolton took over, he quickly

W demonstrated an unsentimental
style: he told Trump that he could not
work with McMaster’s former aide Keith
Kellogg, a seventy-three-year-old vet-
eran who had won a Silver Star in Viet-
nam. Trump decided to send Kellogg
to work for Vice-President Mike Pence.
The former senior Administration offi-
cial told me that there was widespread
sympathy for Bolton: “Kellogg doesn’t
have all of his faculties. He’s like the
crazy uncle at Thanksgiving. But Trump
liked him, so Pence had to take him.”
McMaster had set up a rigorous pro-
cess for discussing issues with staff mem-
bers, making recommendations to the
President, and disseminating decisions
through the bureaucracy. Under Bolton,
there are fewer meetings, less collabora-
tion; he often disappears into his office “Any cocktail can be a shrimp cocktail if you just set your mind to it,
to immerse himself in documents. “H.R.’s and if you carry lots of loose shrimp in your pocket.”
door was always open—Bolton’s is closed,”
a former national-security official told
me. “He reads the memos. There just
• •
isn’t a lot of feedback.” Some former offi-
cials believe that Bolton’s insularity could The comparison to the first Bush Ad- have found that detailed briefings pro-
be dangerous, particularly in a crisis, when ministration doesn’t go far. Scowcroft and voke impatience; graphics and bullet
various arms of the government and the Bush were temperamentally similar— points work better, and relatable photo-
military have to mount a quick and coör- both reflective, cautious members of the graphs better still. “Bolton gets to the
dinated response. “It’s chaos under Bol- establishment. Trump is restless and im- point very fast,” a senior Administration
ton,” the former senior national-security pulsive; Bolton, who goes to bed at nine- official told me. “He’s very brief, and the
official told me. “The national-security thirty every night and rises at three-thirty President appreciates that.” Groombridge,
adviser is supposed to facilitate the Pres- in the morning, is known for his lawyerly the former aide, said, “John is thinking,
ident’s directives and coördinate national focus. Scowcroft and Bush were close To the extent I can modify or mollify the
policy among the various government friends before they began working to- President’s actions, I will. He is truly a
agencies. That process has completely gether; Trump and Bolton were only patriot. But I wonder how he goes into
broken down.” The official added, “Bolton vaguely acquainted. As national-security work every day, because deep in his heart
hasn’t set any priorities. No one knows adviser, Bolton has unrivalled proximity he believes the President is a moron.”
what the policies are—what’s important, to the Commander-in-Chief. But he de- Trump’s foreign policy, to the extent
what’s less important. The head is not scribed their relationship as businesslike. that he has one, tends toward isolation-
connected to the body.” Principals’ meet- “I don’t socialize with the President, I ism, while Bolton’s is expansive but heav-
ings—crucial gatherings involving the don’t play golf with him—I see him in ily unilateral, spurning allies when nec-
President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the morning and I talk to him at night,” essary. At times, though, unilateralism
the heads of intelligence agencies—have he told me. In addition to giving Trump can sound a lot like America First. Both
become rare. “I don’t remember the last a rundown of potential national threats Bolton and Trump are dismissive of the
time there was a fucking principals’ meet- each morning, Bolton attends the Pres- international architecture of treaties and
ing,” the official said. ident’s Daily Brief, a top-secret meeting alliances, which was largely constructed
When I raised the issue with Bolton, with Gina Haspel, the head of the C.I.A., by the United States following the Second
he seemed unconcerned. He pointed to and Dan Coats, the director of National World War. At the 2018 G-20 summit,
an oil painting on his office wall which Intelligence. Trump prefers to hold these in Buenos Aires, a gathering of the world’s
depicted George H. W. Bush with a meetings just two or three times a week, largest economies, Bolton instigated a
small group of close aides, including and is famously susceptible to distrac- confrontation over the communiqué that
Brent Scowcroft, his national-security tions—people walking into the office, announced the meeting’s results. As the
adviser. “That’s decision-making,” he said. telephone calls, even houseflies. Aides document was being drafted, according
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 41
to an American official who was pres-
ent, one of Bolton’s aides began taking
out phrases—“gender equality,” “multi-
lateral institutions,” “rules-based inter-
national order.”The official told me, “He
would point to a phrase and say, ‘This
won’t pass the Bolton test.’ ” Bolton’s
unilateralist approach permeates the
N.S.C. “ ‘The post-World War Two rules-
based global order’?” a Bolton staffer said
to me. “What does that mean?”
Most national-security advisers work
behind the scenes. Bolton has been un-
usually visible, travelling to Moscow to
meet the Russian foreign minister, Sergey
Lavrov; to Jerusalem to meet Netanyahu;
and to Ankara to meet the Turkish Pres-
ident, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. On Twit-
ter, he has admonished the Russians for
attempting to project influence in Latin
America, and expressed gratitude to
Ivanka Trump for “supporting women’s
economic empowerment” in Africa. The
Western diplomat told me that Bolton
differed from other White House advis-
ers, such as Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo, who reflexively agree with the
President. “Pompeo is really interested
not in foreign policy but in what is good
for Trump. When you are out of the
Trump field, he has nothing to say,” the
diplomat told me. “When you meet
Bolton, it’s a real conversation on any
issue, no matter how obscure.”
“Sorry, kiddo. Your old man has to work so you can go
to the best drug trials in the country.”
The former senior national-security
official told me, “Trump feels aligned
with Bolton. He talks tough—he’s a
hawk. Trump likes that.” Still, it’s not
clear how much influence Bolton—or
any senior adviser—has over the President.
In April, 2018, during Bolton’s first
week in office, Bashar al-Assad’s regime
in Syria dropped chemical weapons—
probably chlorine gas—into a densely
populated suburb of Damascus. The gas
caused agonizing deaths for at least for-
ty-nine people and sickened at least six
hundred and fifty others, many of them
women and children. The previous year,
Trump had responded to a similar attack
by ordering a strike, in which fifty-nine
missiles were fired at a government air-
base. This time, when Bolton asked the
Pentagon for options, Mattis gave only
one, a limited strike with cruise missiles.
Bolton was furious, a person familiar with
his thinking told me: “Mattis is an ob-
structionist. He seemed to forget that it
was the President who was elected.” After
some modifications, Trump authorized
the attack. But Bolton wanted more; he
believed that the U.S. needed a more en-
during military presence in Syria.
When McMaster was the national-
security adviser, he had carefully lim-
ited the scope of the mission in Syria,
maintaining a deployment of some two
thousand troops, dispatched by Obama
in 2014. Their orders were to kill ISIS
fighters and to train local soldiers, but
not to fight Assad’s government, his Ira-
nian and Russian backers, or their prox-
ies in Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed
group and political party. An adviser on
Middle East issues told me that senior
officials at the Pentagon and in national
security had regarded the deployment
as highly successful. “We were trying to
follow the President’s guidance that this
force was there to destroy ISIS, and that’s
it,” the adviser said.
Last summer, at a meeting with offi-
cials involved in Syria, Bolton announced
that the mission was being expanded.
According to the adviser on Middle
East issues, who attended the meeting,
Bolton told the group, “I don’t care about
Syria, but I do care about Iran.” He said
that the American forces would stay in
Syria until the Iranians left—potentially
for years. Bolton told his aides to com-
municate the new policy to the Rus-
sians, and he declared it publicly in Sep-
tember, 2018.
Trump had been suggesting for
months that the mission in Syria was
nearly concluded. “We were very suc-
cessful against ISIS,” he told a group of
Eastern European leaders that April.
“We’ll be successful against anybody
militarily. But sometimes it’s time to
come back home.” Now he was saddled
with an open-ended military commit-
ment, of a kind that he had repeatedly
vowed to avoid. Bolton told me that he
had secured the President’s permission
to expand the mission, but the adviser
on Middle East issues disagreed: “What’s
obvious is that Bolton does not speak
for the President.”
In December, Erdoğan, the Turkish
leader, offered Trump a way out. During
a phone call with the President, he said
that his troops could take over the job
of securing Syria, leaving American
forces free to go home. Turkey had its
own interest in this arrangement: a large
swath of territory near the Syrian bor-
der is controlled by ethnic Kurds, whom
the Turks consider mortal enemies. The
U.S. considers the Kurds allies, but
Trump nevertheless leaped at the offer.
“Erdoğan told the President that he
could kill the terrorists in northeastern
Syria, and the President said, ‘Fine, O.K.,
you do it,’ ” the source familiar with
Bolton’s thinking told me.
 The White House announced the
withdrawal of American forces shortly
after Trump hung up, sending a wave
of concern through the Middle East.
These troops, even with a limited mis-
sion, had served as a counterweight to
the various armed groups that are ac-
tive in Syria—Turks, Russians, the re-
maining ISIS loyalists, Assad’s soldiers.
They also helped give the U.S. leverage
in determining whether Assad’s regime
remained in power after the war. “I think
they are drinking champagne in Da-
mascus,” the former senior Administra-
tion official told me.
To Bolton and others, it was clear
that Turkey took the announcement as
a green light to send troops into north-
eastern Syria. “For Erdoğan, that meant
killing our Kurdish allies there,” the
source familiar with Bolton’s thinking
said. He suggested that Erdoğan and
Trump had simply misunderstood each
other: “They were two ships passing in
the night.” After conversations with
aides, Trump reconsidered, the source
said: “The President has spoken to Er-
doğan several times since then, and he
has made clear to him, ‘Don’t come
across, don’t kill Kurds.’”
Trump has recently expressed will-
ingness to leave a small American force
in Syria, but its exact size has not been
settled; officials say that it may be as few
as two hundred troops. “They are mak-
ing it up as they go along,” a Senate
staffer who works on national-security
issues told me. When I first spoke to
Bolton about the reduction in forces, he
seemed disappointed. “Sometimes you
win, sometimes you lose,” he said. A few
weeks later, though, he was more cheer-
ful as he outlined an ambitious roster of
operations that appeared to mirror the
one the President had tried to scale back:
restraining the Iranians, limiting the
Russians’ territory, keeping the Turks
away from the Kurds. The adviser on
Middle East issues suggested that Bolton
was responsible for the entire affair, be-
cause he’d tried to push the President
too far. “It’s a catastrophe, and I blame
Bolton,” he said.
n July, 2017, after Kim Jong Un test-
I fired a new missile, Trump posted
an arch tweet: “Does this guy have any-
thing better to do with his life?” But,
that summer, there was evidence that
the White House was concerned. As
the regime launched a series of ballis-
tic-missile tests, Trump ordered the
Pentagon to begin removing the spouses
and children of military personnel from
South Korea. (“Mattis just ignored it,”
the Administration official told me.)
Since then, Trump has alternated be-
tween belligerent tweets and attempts
to find a diplomatic solution. At the
summit in Hanoi, he was seeking “the
big deal”—the denucle-
arization of the country
at one stroke.
Shortly before joining
the White House, Bolton
described a grimly con-
strained set of options,
which seemed to preclude
diplomacy. “You’re getting
down fairly quickly to a
binary choice: live with a
North Korea with nuclear
weapons, or look at military force,” he
said. “These are not attractive options,
but that’s where we’re headed.”
In fact, Bolton has believed for
decades that these are the only two
choices. In the early two-thousands, as
the Bush Administration was negoti-
ating to limit North Korea’s nuclear
program, Bolton stridently advocated
war. Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff,
was so concerned that he brought
Bolton into a private meeting on the
consequences of military strikes: “I gave
him a ten-minute brief on what a war
with North Korea would look like—a
hundred thousand casualties in the first
thirty days, many of them Americans.
The Japanese that would die. The Chi-
nese that would die. The fact that Seoul,
one of the most modern and forward-
looking cities in the world, would prob-
ably be reduced to the Dark Ages. I
told him, ‘That’s Passchendaele, John.
That’s Ypres.’ ”
He said that Bolton was unmoved:
“John looked at me and said, ‘Are you
done? Clearly, you do war. I don’t do
war. I do policy.’ ”
Bolton’s skepticism about negotiat-
ing with North Korea has largely been
confirmed; several successive Admin-
istrations have failed to talk the regime
into giving up its nuclear program.
Now that the problem has fallen to the
Trump Administration, though, Bolton
is in the same position as the officials
he’s been deriding for twenty-five years.
The failure of the talks in Hanoi means
that the North Korean regime can work
toward a nuclear weapon capable of
hitting the United States. “They haven’t
demonstrated that capacity yet,” the
Administration official said. But even
a medium-range weapon would pose
a threat to much of Asia.
The Administration official, like
others, was reluctant to speak about
what might happen if
North Korea does not
back down. A strike to de-
stroy the country’s nuclear
capability would have cat-
astrophic effects through-
out the region. Even if
the United States could
cripple North Korea’s nu-
clear facilities, it could not
eliminate its conventional
weapons quickly enough
to prevent them from being used. These
include thousands of artillery pieces
and mortars near the border with South
Korea. Seoul, which has a population
of ten million, including some two hun-
dred thousand Americans, could suffer
tens of thousands of casualties. In 2017,
Mattis told reporters that a conflict on
the Korean Peninsula would be “prob-
ably the worst kind of fighting in most
people’s lifetimes.”
Even in the White House, there
seems to be a growing realization that
military force is not a realistic option.
“I think we could have destroyed the
North’s nuclear program in the nine-
teen-nineties—it was more concen-
trated, and we knew where everything
was,” the Administration official told
me. “Not anymore. It’s too big and too
dispersed.”
But Bolton still believes that such
a strike is possible, the source familiar
with his thinking said: “We can still
do it. We know where most, if not all,
of their weapons are—we could de-
stroy their nuclear capability. There are
ways to deal with their artillery.” When
I asked about potential casualties, he
said that Bolton “wishes we weren’t at
this point. But the military option re-
mains viable.”
The primary negotiating tool that
remains is economic sanctions. The se-
nior Administration official told me
that the fiscal pressure on North Korea
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 43
is greater than ever. Kim, the official
said, has repeatedly told the North Ko-
rean people that their years of suffering
and hardship will finally end. “We think
that he has raised expectations, and now
he has to follow through,” he said.
Not long after the summit, Kim com-
plained in a speech that the American
team had come to Hanoi with “com-
pletely unrealizable plans.” Unless Trump
changed his thinking, Kim said, “the
U.S. will not be able to move us one iota
even if they sat with us a hundred, a
thousand times.” He added, however,
that he was open to a third summit—
extending an eighteen-month sequence
of insults and meetings, during which
the North Korean regime has contin-
ued to refine its weapons. In response,
Trump described his relationship with
Kim as “excellent.” In April, North Korea
test-fired another missile.
Bolton was nonplussed by Kim’s test.
“That was their way of giving us the
little finger,” the source familiar with his
thinking said. “Not the big finger—just
a little one.” The big finger came a week
later: Kim held a summit with Vladi-
mir Putin to discuss the nuclear situa-
tion. Afterward, Putin called for a re-
turn to “international law, instead of the
rule of the fist.”
eople who have worked with Bolton
P say that he is focussed less on North
Korea than on Iran, where his vigilance
can sometimes seem out of proportion
to the apparent threat. “There are only
two countries that can really threaten
the United States—China and Russia,”
the former senior national-security
official said. “But Bolton has had this
anal focus on Iran for twenty years. I
don’t know why.” When I asked Bolton
about it, he said, “I care about Iran be-
cause I care about nuclear weapons.”
On February 11th, Bolton released
a video on Twitter, in which he ad-
dressed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the
Supreme Leader of Iran. In a profes-
sorial tone, he noted that it was the for-
tieth anniversary of the Iranian Revo-
lution and enumerated what he saw as
its results: repression at home, terror-
ism abroad, a dismal economy, and the
enmity of the world. “So, Ayatollah,”
he said, “for all your boasts, for all your
threats to the life of the American Pres-
ident, you are responsible for terroriz-
44 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
ing your own people and terrorizing
the world as a whole. I don’t think you’ll
have many more anniversaries to enjoy.”
The Trump Administration has per-
sistently spoken out against Iran, but it
has also made scattershot efforts at di-
plomacy. A senior Iranian official told
me that, in 2017, Trump sent eight
requests to meet with the Iranian Pres-
ident, Hassan Rouhani. “Trump invited
President Rouhani to dinner!” the offi-
cial told me. Rouhani evidently de-
clined, but, a few weeks before Bolton
posted his video on Twitter, there was
another apparent attempt. Admiral Ali
Shamkhani, the secretary of Iran’s na-
tional-security council, told an Iranian
news agency that a U.S. official had ap-
proached him, during a visit to Afghan-
istan, and “asked to hold talks.” Sham-
khani didn’t say whether Iran had
responded, but a Middle Eastern busi-
nessman told me that, around the same
time, an Iranian official had asked him
to pass a message to the White House.
Mattis served as a brake on confron-
tation. In late 2017, Iraq was preparing
for parliamentary elections, and Mc-
Master grew concerned about Iran’s
efforts to influence the outcome. He
asked the Pentagon to provide options
to counter the Iranian campaign. As
the elections approached, one of Mc-
Master’s aides told me, a Pentagon offi-
cial came to the White House. “I asked
him what happened to the options,” the
former aide said. “He told me, ‘We re-
sisted those.’ You could feel everyone
in the meeting go, ‘Excuse me?’”
In December, Mattis resigned, leav-
ing Bolton as the most persistent voice
on Iran. The Administration’s policy
has gone well beyond withdrawing from
the Obama-era agreement that limited
the Iranian nuclear-weapons program:
it has also put in place exceptionally ag-
gressive economic sanctions and finan-
cial controls, along with a policy of dras-
tically reducing oil exports. The new
campaign also aims to force Iran to cur-
tail its aggressive behavior in the region,
which includes bankrolling Hezbollah
and sending fighters to prop up Assad.
During the Obama Administration,
the sanctions on Iran were designed to
force the regime to agree to limit its nu-
clear program. Under Trump, the goal
is apparently to make the Iranian peo-
ple so miserable that they will overthrow
the government. “After all the experi-
ence we’ve had with regime change, I
think we’re out of that business,” a se-
nior member of Trump’s foreign-policy
team told me. “We can collapse their
economy—it’s not that difficult. But it’s
up to the Iranian people.”
Bolton suggested that the policy was
working. “The opposition to the regime
has widened,” he said. “There have been
riots. You don’t always read about this in
the Western press, because they don’t let
reporters see it.” Although the United
States has withdrawn from the nuclear
accord, the Iranian regime continues to
adhere to it. Funding to Hezbollah, Iran’s
primary foreign proxy, has been cut sub-
stantially. Nervousness about the future
has frozen foreign investment. With in-
flation at nearly fifty per cent, and with
one in four young Iranians out of work,
the economy is under extreme stress. Ira-
nian oil exports, which rose to 2.8 mil-
lion barrels a day after sanctions were
lifted, have been severely diminished, at
times to less than a million barrels a day.
It’s possible that the Iranian government
will be ousted. But allies worry that the
White House is squeezing the regime
so hard that it might force a confronta-
tion, perhaps a military one. “They’re not
giving the Iranians any room,” the West-
ern diplomat told me. “It’s implosion or
surrender.”
If the Iranian regime decides to stop
adhering to the nuclear accords, the
senior member of Trump’s foreign-
policy team told me, “the military op-
tion comes back on the table.” In No-
vember, as Iran prepared to test-fire a
medium-range ballistic missile, White
House officials fiercely debated whether
to destroy the missile on the launch-
pad. (“Anything that happens, they lurch
to kinetic options,” the adviser on Mid-
dle East issues said, ruefully.) Eventu-
ally, they decided against it. The source
familiar with Bolton’s thinking declined
to discuss specifics, but said, “You can
imagine where he came down.”
Sadjadpour, the Iran expert, believes
that the tensions inside the White
House over Iran have not been resolved.
“Trump doesn’t want to go to war—he
doesn’t want to intervene anywhere,” he
told me. Trump’s real goal, he suggested,
was the pageantry of public negotia-
tions. The main obstacle to direct talks
is Khamenei, he said; having the United
States as an enemy has been a linchpin
of the regime’s self-justification. “Bolton’s
worst nightmare is that Khamenei will
write Trump a letter saying, ‘Why don’t
we get together and talk?’ Because he
knows that Trump would jump at that
opportunity.”
n April, Bolton travelled to Coral Ga-
I bles, Florida, to speak to the surviv-
ing members of Brigade 2506, a group
of Cuban exiles who fought in the Amer-
ican-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs.
It was the fifty-eighth anniversary of
the operation, which ended in catastro-
phe; the annual commemoration has
become a kind of Miami Passion play.
As the aging veterans gathered for
lunch, at the Biltmore Hotel, large
screens played a documentary about the
operation, with black-and-white foot-
age of combat and interviews with sur-
vivors, many of whom still feel that they
were betrayed by irresolute allies in the
United States. “The invasion failed pre-
cisely because of President Kennedy’s
order not to provide air support and to
destroy the Cuban Air Force,” one vet-
eran says.
As Bolton came to the lectern, the
veterans, some of them in wheelchairs,
gave him a hero’s welcome. Bolton an-
nounced new economic sanctions on
the Cuban government and assailed
Obama for attempting a rapproche-
ment, which Trump has rolled back.
“The Trump Administration will never,
ever abandon you!” Bolton declared.
“We will always have your back.”
As the crowd applauded, Bolton
broadened his speech to attack other
leftist governments—especially in Ven-
ezuela, where the regime of Nicolás
Maduro is trying to ride out an eco-
nomic collapse and a nationwide up-
rising. Bolton has led the White House’s
charge against Maduro, accusing him
of forming, along with Cuba and Nic-
aragua, a “troika of tyranny” in the West-
ern Hemisphere. They aid one another,
Bolton said, pointing to the Cuban se-
curity forces inside Venezuela, and all
of them were aided by Obama. “In no
uncertain terms, the Obama Adminis-
tration’s policies toward Cuba have en-
abled the Cuban colonization of Ven-
ezuela,” he said.
For a national-security adviser, this
was remarkably close to a campaign
“Before we begin, I am obligated to remind you that anything you do or
say can be used against you in a group chat with all my friends.”
• •
speech—a radical departure from the
habits of Bolton’s predecessors. It was
also a departure from Bolton’s habits;
he resists being called a neocon, but in
Venezuela he was trying to oust a re-
gime that poses no immediate threat.
When I asked him about it, in his office
soon after the speech, he argued that
Venezuela was dangerous, because it
was allowing Russia to gain a foothold
in the region. He said that there were
twenty thousand Cubans in Venezuela
who served as “surrogates for the Rus-
sians.” There were also at least a hun-
dred Russian soldiers and mercenaries
on the ground, helping Maduro stay in
power. “To get the Russians out, you
have to change the regime,” he said.
Latin America has not been an abid-
ing interest of Bolton’s. But, for the mo-
ment, it is a place where his incentives
align with Trump’s. Florida has nearly
a million and a half residents from Cuba,
Venezuela, and Nicaragua; many of them
remain politically engaged with their
home country. With the 2020 elections
looming, the prospect of appealing to
voters may create a strong temptation
to launch a military intervention. “The
Electoral College math practically de-
mands it,” Reed Hundt, a former class-
mate of Bolton’s at Yale Law School,
who served as chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission under
Clinton, told me.
The source familiar with Bolton’s
thinking pointed out another incentive:
Venezuela has the largest proven oil re-
serves in the world. “Who is in control
of the oil fields—the United States or
Russia?” he asked. “The President said
he would have taken the oil in Iraq. Well,
look at how much oil Venezuela has.”
With Trump’s national-security team
depleted—no permanent Secretary of
Defense, no Secretary of Homeland Se-
curity, no Ambassador to the United
Nations—Bolton would have extraor-
dinary latitude in a crisis. “John under-
stands that you have to get the elected
leader the approval of the audience that
matters,” Hundt said. “As long as Trump’s
base is still applauding, then Bolton can
do whatever he wants.”
For Bolton, it is ultimately a ques-
tion of sovereignty. “The Monroe Doc-
trine is alive and well,” he said. “It’s our
hemisphere.” The doctrine, he noted,
was a prohibition against outside pow-
ers interceding in Latin America. “That
doesn’t mean armed force,” he said.
“That’s the Roosevelt Corollary. I
haven’t invoked that—yet.” But, he ar-
gued, as he has innumerable times in
the past thirty years, “all options are on
the table.” 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 45

THE EIGHTH CONTINENT
The new race to the moon, for science, profit, and pride.
n January, the China National Space
I Administration landed a spacecraft
on the far side of the moon, the side
we can’t see from Earth. Chang’e-4 was
named for a goddess in Chinese myth-
ology, who lives on the moon for rea-
sons connected to her husband’s prob-
lematic immortality drink. The story
has many versions. In one, Chang’e has
been banished to the moon for elixir
theft and turned into an ugly toad. In
another, she has saved humanity from
a tyrannical emperor by stealing the
drink. In many versions, she is a lumi-
nous beauty and has as a companion a
pure-white rabbit.
Chang’e-4 is the first vehicle to alight
on the far side of the moon. From that
46 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
ANNALS OF SCIENCE
BY RIVKA GALCHEN
side, the moon blocks radio communi-
cation with Earth, which makes land-
ing difficult, and the surface there is
craggy and rough, with a mountain
taller than anything on Earth. Older
geologies are exposed, from which bil-
lions of years of history can be deduced.
Chang’e-4 landed in a nearly four-mile-
deep hole that was formed when an an-
cient meteor crashed into the moon—
one of the largest known impact craters
in our solar system.
You may have watched the near-
operatic progress of Chang’e-4’s graceful
landing. Or the uncannily cute robotic
amblings of the lander’s companion, the
Yutu-2 rover, named for the moon god-
dess’s white rabbit. You may have read
that, aboard the lander, seeds germinated
(cotton, rapeseed, and potato; the Chi-
nese are also trying to grow a flowering
plant known as mouse-ear cress), and
that the rover survived the fourteen-day
lunar night, when temperatures drop to
negative two hundred and seventy de-
grees Fahrenheit. Chang’e-4 is a step in
China’s long-term plan to build a base
on the moon, a goal toward which the
country has rapidly been advancing
since it first orbited the moon, in 2007.
If you missed the Chinese mission,
maybe it’s because you were focussed on
the remarkably inexpensive spacecraft
from SpaceIL, an Israeli nonprofit or-
ganization, which crash-landed into the
moon on April 11th, soon after taking a
ILLUSTRATION BY ALLAN SANDERS
selfie while hovering above the lunar sur-
face. The crash was not the original plan,
and SpaceIL has already announced its
intention of going to the moon again.
But maybe you weren’t paying attention
to SpaceIL, either, because you were an-
ticipating India’s Chandrayaan-2 moon
lander, expected to take off later this year.
Or you were waiting for Japan’s first lunar-
lander-and-rover mission, scheduled to
take place next year. Perhaps you’ve been
distracted by the announcement, in Jan-
uary, on the night of the super blood wolf
moon, that the European Space Agency
plans to mine lunar ice by 2025. Or by
Vice-President Mike Pence’s statement,
in March, that the United States intends
“to return American astronauts to the
moon within the next five years.”
Fifty years ago, three men journeyed
from a small Florida peninsula to a dry
crater some two hundred and forty thou-
sand miles away called the Sea of Tran-
quillity. Hundreds of millions of people
watched on black-and-white TVs as a
man from Wapakoneta, Ohio, climbed
slowly down a short ladder and reported
in a steady voice that his footprint had
depressed the soil only a fraction of an
inch, that “the surface appears to be very
fine-grained as you get close to it, it’s
almost like a powder down there, it’s
very fine.”
Shortly before NASA launched
Apollo 11, it received a letter from the
Union of Persian Storytellers, begging
NASA to change the plan: a moon land-
ing would rob the world of its illusions,
and rob the union’s members of their
livelihood. During the spacecraft’s flight,
the Mission Control Center, in Hous-
ton, asked the crew to look out for
Chang’e, and for her bunny, too. Hous-
ton said that the bunny would be “easy
to spot, since he is always standing on
his hind feet in the shade of a cinnamon
tree.” Buzz Aldrin responded, “We’ll
keep a close eye out for the bunny girl.”
he moon is hot again,” Jack Burns,
“ T the director of the NASA-funded
Network for Exploration and Space
Science, told me. NESS’s headquarters
are at the University of Colorado Boul-
der, which has educated nineteen astro-
nauts. (Boulder was also the setting for
the television sitcom “Mork & Mindy,”
in which Robin Williams played an
alien from the planet Ork.) Part of NESS’s
mission is to dream up experiments to
be done on the moon. An informational
poster at the entrance reads “Challenges
of Measuring Cosmic Dawn with the
21-cm Sky-Averaged, Global Signal.”
In the decades since Apollo 11, NASA
has invented Earth-mapping satellites,
launched the Hubble Space Telescope,
collaborated on the International Space
Station, and studied Mars. But none of
these projects have generated the broad
and childlike wonder of the moon.
Burns, who is sixty-six years old, re-
members the Mercury, Gemini, and
Apollo missions—the Cold War-era
efforts, beginning in the late fifties, that
put men in space and finally landed them
on the moon. He teaches a course on the
history of space policy. “The U.S. had
already lost the start of the space race,”
he said, of the origins of Apollo. “The
Soviet Union was first with a satellite
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 47

“Where do you get your ideas?”
• •
in space. They were first with an astro- hundred billion dollars, whereas NASA’s
naut in space.” Yuri Gagarin’s journey funding is $21.5 billion, or around half
into outer space took place in April, of one per cent of the national budget.
1961. President John F. Kennedy deliv- The U.S. is still believed to spend more
ered his moon-shot speech the follow- on space programs than the rest of the
ing month, and Congress eventually al- world combined. (China’s budget, how-
located 4.4 per cent of the national ever, is unknown.) Hapke said, “The
budget to NASA. “But, if you live by po- trouble is, there was always some kind
litical motivations, you die by political of emergency, always some war going
motivations,” Burns said. “Apollo died. on. Though that Cold War mentality
Nixon killed the program.” Only twelve also got us to the moon.”
people have walked on the moon, all of Hapke recalls being told by several
them between the summer of 1969 and scientists and NASA employees that,
Christmas, 1972. All the moonwalkers “when the moon landing was first con-
were men, all were American, all but ceived, it was a strictly political stunt:
one were Boy Scouts, and almost all lis- go to the moon, plant the flag, and come
tened to country-and-Western music back to Earth.” The original design of
on their way to the moon; they earned the spacecraft allotted little to no room
eight dollars a day, minus a fee for a bed for scientific payloads. “When the sci-
on the spacecraft. Since the last moon- entific community got wind of this,
walk, humans have launched crafts that they pointed out strongly to NASA all
have orbited the moon, crashed probes the fantastic science that could be done,
into it, and taken increasingly detailed and the whole tone of the project was
photos of it. But no one has been back. changed,” he said. Hapke was then at
The planetary scientist Bruce Hapke, Cornell, where he and his lab mates
who has a yellowish, opaque lunar min- studied what the lunar soil might be
eral—hapkeite—named for him, said, like; the moon’s characteristic reflectiv-
“Almost every President since Nixon ity helped them deduce that the sur-
proposed going back to the moon.” face must be a fine dust. For Hapke,
(President Obama focussed instead on the Apollo era remains the most excit-
studying an asteroid near Earth and ing time in his scientific life. He also
working toward the distant goal of send- recalls “the widespread puzzlement in
ing astronauts to Mars.) “But the money both Congress and the general popu-
was never allotted. Congress decided lace after the first landing: ‘We beat the
we couldn’t have guns and the moon at Russians. Why are we going back?’ ”
the same time.” The Department of Burns said, “This time we need a
Defense’s budget is now nearly seven more sustainable set of goals and rea-
48 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
sons” for going to the moon. He meant
a science mission, or a business mis-
sion, or both. “We don’t like to say we’re
going back to the moon,” but forward,
he added. “Our objectives are differ-
ent. Our technology is different. Apollo
had five kilobytes of RAM. Your iPhone
is millions of times more powerful.”
Watching the footage of Neil Arm-
strong’s first steps, it takes a moment
for one’s eyes to make sense of the
low-resolution image, which could eas-
ily be overexposed film or a Robert
Motherwell painting. “It’s amazing they
made it.”
Burns told me that advances in en-
gineering could turn the moon into a
way station for launching rockets and
satellites farther into the solar system,
to Mars and beyond. (The weak grav-
ity on the moon dramatically eases
launches.) Lunar construction projects
now look feasible. “Down the hall, we
have a telerobotics lab,” Burns said. “You
could print components of habitats, of
telescopes. You use the lunar regolith”—
the dust of the moon—“as your print-
ing material. You could print the wrench
you need to fix something.” Fifteen
years ago, the moon was believed to be
a dry rock; now we know that there’s
water there. Both private industry and
national agencies regard the mining of
water and precious materials as some-
thing that’s not too far off. There’s space
tourism, too, though the quiet consen-
sus among scientists seems to be that
the idea is goofy and impractical.
NASA would like to establish a per-
manent presence on the moon, using
reusable rockets and landers. The agency
is working on the largest, strongest,
fastest—of course—rocket yet, but it
plans to purchase other equipment, in-
cluding rockets and landers, off the
shelf, from commercial companies. Bob
Jacobs, a spokesperson for NASA, told
me, “Eighty-five per cent of NASA’s
budget is for commercial contracts. We
build what only we can build; the other
services we look to purchase from ap-
proved venders.”
Burns likens this de-facto govern-
ment support of commercial space ex-
ploration to the dawn of the airline in-
dustry: “In the nineteen-twenties, early
airline companies survived only because
the government paid them to deliver
the mail.” It wasn’t until later, when or-
dinary people became aeronauts, that five, he knew that he wanted to study the dark. On the top floor, she pressed
the airline industry became economi- the stars. When I asked him what he a button, and the roof noisily rolled back.
cally viable. “I think we’re looking at hopes to see on the moon, he became There it was, with all its starry friends.
something similar with space explora- suddenly boyish: “I’d love to set up a Johns explained how the telescopes
tion,” Burns said. low-frequency radio telescope on the worked—they are essentially buckets of
There are also more emotionally lev- far side of the moon, free from the in- light. She said that children often shout
eraged business models, like that of Ce- terference of Earth signals. It could see when they see the moon so close.
lestis, a funeral-services company, which to the beginnings of time. And the far Johns showed me a collection of
puts cremains into space, and has plans side of the moon has craters there that small telescopes, and discussed the
to take them to the moon. The Japa- were formed during the Late Heavy eighteenth-century French astronomer
nese beverage Pocari Sweat wants to be Bombardment, four billion years ago.” Charles Messier. “Back then, the way
the first sports drink on the moon. Its During the Late Heavy Bombardment, astronomers made money was finding
manufacturer has booked a spot on a large numbers of meteors crashed into comets and telling kings they had a
lunar lander developed by a Pittsburgh- the inner solar system. The period co- comet to name after them,” she said.
based company, Astrobotic, which is incides roughly—and perhaps not co- When Messier was eleven, his father
scheduled to launch in 2021, and to land incidentally—with the beginnings of died, and afterward he received no for-
in the Lacus Mortis—the Lake of life on Earth. Burns said, “Earth was mal schooling. But he developed an ex-
Death, which is actually a dry, flat area. also bombarded, but here that history ceptional gift for finding comets. “To
Pocari Sweat employees have collected has been erased or buried by weather, find those comets, he documented ev-
stories of children’s dreams from across erosion. On the moon, it’s still right erything he could see in the sky,” Johns
Asia and etched them onto titanium there on the surface. It’s a history book. said. “Once he was sure a sky object
plates. The plates will be put inside a I’d like to read that book.” wasn’t a comet, it was of no interest to
capsule designed to look like a Pocari him. Some of that stuff he found turned
Sweat can, and will travel with some he night I met with Burns was the out to be Andromeda, and the Crab
Pocari Sweat powder that will one
day—so the plan goes—be mixed with
T eve of a supermoon—when the
moon is both full and as close to Earth
Nebula.” She showed me a large tele-
scope on a mount developed by John
moon water. as it gets. I walked over to the Sommers- Dobson, a chemist by training, who
Even in fantasy, space ventures have Bausch Observatory, not far from Burns’s worked briefly on the Manhattan Proj-
always mingled idealistic and worldly office; there was a bunny in the bushes, ect, then resolved to spend the rest of
motives. H. G. Wells published “The trying not to be noticed. Carla Johns, his life as a monk. While living at a
First Men in the Moon” in 1901. The who operates the observatory’s tele- monastery in San Francisco, he would
novel’s narrator, Mr. Bedford, wants to scopes, met me in the hallway, which is walk the shipyards, gathering old port-
make money. His collaborator, Mr. lit in red, to keep your eyes adapted to hole glass to fashion into homemade
Cavor, dreams of knowledge. Together
they go to the moon. When they en-
counter moon dwellers—“compact, bris-
tling” creatures, “having much of the
quality of a complicated insect”—Bed-
ford wants to destroy them; Cavor wants
to learn from them. Bedford finds gold,
and embarks “upon an argument to show
the infinite benefits our arrival would
confer upon the moon,” involving him-
self “in a rather difficult proof that the
arrival of Columbus was, on the whole,
beneficial to America.” Cavor is indiffer-
ent to the gold—it’s a familiar mineral.
Moon dwellers capture and chain Bed-
ford and Cavor, then march them un-
derground. Cavor assumes that there
must be other, less brutal moon dwell-
ers, as enlightened and knowledge-lov-
ing as he. In the end, Bedford makes it
back to Earth. Cavor is presumed dead.
But no one with a heart reads the novel
and wants to be Bedford.
Burns grew up in Shirley, Massa-
chusetts. Neither of his parents gradu-
ated from high school. From the age of “Do you have a moment to save our marriage?”
telescopes, which he would share with
others in sidewalk astronomy lectures.
“The monks eventually asked him to
leave,” Johns said.
Johns became a telescope operator
relatively late in her professional life.
She had worked in human resources,
and enjoyed it, but at a difficult mo-
ment she found herself at the Denver
Museum of Nature & Science, where
her parents used to take her as a child.
“I looked through the telescope and I
began to cry,” she said. She had always
loved science, but had chosen another
career because of family and financial
issues. “I said to myself, ‘I need to be
involved with this.’”
hortly before the turnoff for the town
S of Mojave, California, there were
train cars along the right side of the
road, painted old-fashioned black and
standing still. On the left were hun-
dreds of white wind turbines, spinning.
Soon I came to a slightly weathered
sign for the Mojave Air and Space
Port—“Imagination Flies Here”—
which features a picture of a young boy
holding a toy plane. You’re allowed to
launch rockets here; you’re allowed to
fly objects beyond the atmosphere. A
number of aerospace firms have offices
at the port.
In November, 2018, NASA named
nine companies to be part of its Com-
mercial Lunar Payload Services pro-
gram: if NASA wants to send some-
thing to the moon, these companies
are approved to provide
transportation. “FedEx to
space,” I was told to think
of it. “Or DHL.” Some of
them are large and well
known, like Lockheed
Martin Space. Masten
Space Systems has sixteen
employees. It is based at
the Air and Space Port,
down the road from Vir-
gin Galactic, in offices
that resemble the extra building my el-
ementary school put in the playground
when enrollment exceeded capacity.
When Masten won a NASA-funded
prize—for vertical takeoff and preci-
sion landing in conditions simulating
those of the moon—it had five em-
ployees. Its winning rocket, Xoie, looks
like a slim, silvery water tower, only
50 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
ninety inches tall—two stacked spheres
on a tripod, with tanks of helium on
the sides.
“Our focus is on reusable rockets,”
Masten’s C.E.O., Sean Mahoney, told
me. “We have a rocket that has flown
two hundred and twenty-seven times.
We want space to be affordable.” Mas-
ten plans to begin taking payloads to
the moon in 2021: “Mostly science pay-
loads, mostly NASA. Some commercial.”
Among the items that NASA wants to
send are a solar-power cell and a nav-
igation device that the agency will test
in lunar conditions.
Mahoney and I talked over a meal
at the Voyager Restaurant, on the
grounds of the spaceport. The Voyager
looks like Mel’s Diner, from the TV
show “Alice.” (A lot about lunar explo-
ration reminded me of old television
shows, especially “Bonanza.”) I had a
grilled-cheese sandwich—spaceport
food. Mahoney said, “There’s the PBS
version of space, which is beautiful. And
that is real. But, also, space—well, you’ve
heard of the military-industrial com-
plex? Space is an offshoot of that.” Some-
thing shiny and fleet was taking off in
the distance, and the windows shook.
Mahoney pointed out a tumbleweed
blowing across the lot. “I’m a business
guy by background, not a space guy, so
I had to learn all of this,” he said. Ma-
honey believes that, because the space
industry was a government-sanctioned
monopoly for decades, there was no room
for risk, or for competition; the fear of
failure dominated. “Lock-
heed Martin and Boeing
could charge exorbitant
prices,” he said. “As a busi-
ness person, when you
see a fat margin—when
you see a service that can
be provided much more
cheaply—you see value.”
We walked through
strong winds to the han-
gars where Masten does
its manufacturing. There were none of
the vacuum chambers and clean white
rooms that one associates with rocket
science. Instead, there were trailer beds
loaded with rocket parts for testing;
there were purple-and-yellow long-
sleeved T-shirts for launch days. There
were tanks of helium, wrenches of every
size. A young man wearing an Embry-
Riddle Aeronautical University sweat-
shirt and a welding mask was making
an engine casing.
Mahoney pointed out an engine
without its casing, next to a small com-
puter. “Some of these rocket models
are literally operated by Raspberry Pi,”
he said.
“Raspberry pie?”
“That’s a very basic computer. A
thirty-five-dollar computer. My point
being, some of our parts we can buy at
Home Depot.”
Masten was founded, in 2004, by
David Masten, a former software-and-
systems engineer, who remains the chief
technical officer. “When I was a kid, I
was going to be an astronaut,” Masten
told me. “But, by the nineteen-eighties,
space was getting boring—it wasn’t
going anywhere—and there was this
new thing called computers.” He be-
came an I.T. consultant, and eventually
worked at a series of startups. Through-
out, Masten’s hobby remained rockets.
“My thought was that, maybe, instead
of doing the heavy analysis traditional
of the aerospace industry, you do some-
thing more like I was used to,” he said.
“You write some code, you compile it,
you test it, and you iterate over and over
in a tight, rapid fashion. I wanted to
apply that method to rocketry.”
When a Masten rocket takes off, it
has a delicate appearance. One of the
newer ones, the Xodiac, looks like two
golden balloons mounted on a metal
skeleton. A kite tail of fire shoots out
as the Xodiac launches straight up; at
its apex, it has the ability to tilt and
float down at an angle, as casually as a
leaf. When Xodiac nears its designated
landing spot, it abruptly slows, aligns,
seems to hesitate, lands. It’s eerie—at
that moment, the rocket seems sen-
tient, intentional.
In one demonstration, the Xodiac
performed a deceptively mundane task:
it carried a “planetvac”—an invention
intended to vacuum dust from the lunar
surface—up and over one metre, de-
ployed the vacuum, then scooted up
and over another metre, hopping like a
lunar janitor. The rockets are self-guided,
unless overridden by a human; they are
doing their own thing. “We believe com-
puters can fly rockets better than peo-
ple can,” Masten told me.
Many scientists see little need for
 ets of lunar and asteroid simulants, was
a small 3-D printer. Four graduate stu-
THE BLUSH dents were assembled there with Angel
Abbud-Madrid, the center’s director. I
“Two people, two baths,” the boy behind the counter asked them how difficult it would be
said, as he checked us out of our budget room. to 3-D-print, say, an electrolyzer—the
The hotel, which overlooked Notre-Dame, machine needed to separate the hydro-
was cheap, but charged, it seemed, for everything, gen and oxygen in water to make rocket
including a key to the bath. I corrected, “Two people, fuel. They laughed.
“Here, let me show you something
one bath.” Less to pay. The boy, very fancy,” Hunter Williams, who was
maybe eighteen, blushed to the tips of his ears, wearing sapphire-colored earrings, said.
smirked, then looked away. Hired for the summer, He poured some Morton sea salt into
I guessed. We paused. I couldn’t not recall a plastic cup and added water. He stuck
me and you at either end of the large, two silver thumbtacks through the bot-
tom of the plastic cup, then held a bat-
claw-footed, cast-iron tub tery up to them. Small bubbles began
down the hall from our room. We’d sat, cramped, forming on the thumbtacks. The oxy-
but laughing; between us, the drowned pockets of our night’s gen was separating from the hydrogen.
pleasure and the dripping, hard-edged tap. You probably did this experiment in
That blush remains—more vivid than our night, middle school, without knowing that
you were doing rocket science. “The
more vivid, even, than the view across the Seine idea is for whatever goes up to the moon
for which we paid another, extra charge. to be that simple,” Williams said. “To
Opening the clanking shutters, we’d found be that basic.”
the scene: our own Western façade, the towers “It would be like living off the land,”
then uncleaned, so black with soot, so fine. Ben Thrift, another graduate student,
added. Thrift studied theatre as an un-
—Sandy Solomon dergraduate, and later ran a bakery, be-
fore earning a degree in engineering
and enrolling in the space-resources
humans on the moon, since robots designs, among other things, small ve- program. “I decided to grow up and do
would do the work more safely and hicles that could one day be controlled something real,” he said.
inexpensively. by artificial intelligence and used to “By ‘real,’ he means go to the moon,”
mine lunar water. Abbud-Madrid said.
“ N ow, you will ask me what in the
world we went up on the Moon
Water in space is valuable for drink-
ing, of course, and as a source of oxygen.
for,” Qfwfq, the narrator of Italo Calvi- Sowers told me that it can also be trans-
“ T ransportation is not an end in it-
self,” Sowers told me. He is ex-
no’s “Cosmicomics,” says. “We went to formed into rocket fuel. “The moon could cited about solar power, which already
collect the milk, with a big spoon and be a gas station,” he said. That sounded runs many satellites in space, where
a bucket.” In our world, we are going terrible to me, but not to most of the sci- there is no night, or clouds. He specu-
for water. “Water is the oil of space,” entists I spoke to. “It could be used to lates that, if we had a base on the moon,
George Sowers, a professor of space re- refuel rockets on the way to Mars”—a we could use 3-D printers to make giant
sources at the Colorado School of trip that would take about nine months— solar panels, as large as two kilometres,
Mines, in Golden, told me. On the “or considerably beyond, at a fraction of which could be launched into orbit; the
windowsill of Sowers’s office is a bumper the cost of launching them from Earth,” resulting power could be beamed back
sticker that reads “My other vehicle Sowers said. He explained that launch- to Earth via microwave radiation. “Space
explored Pluto.” This is because his ing fuel from the moon rather than from solar would be an unlimited, inexhaust-
other vehicle did explore Pluto. Sowers Earth is like climbing the Empire State ible source of green energy,” Sowers said.
served as the chief systems engineer Building rather than Mt. Everest. Fuel “It requires no magic, and much of the
of the rocket that, in 2006, launched accounts for around ninety per cent of technology is ready. I think we could
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which the weight of a rocket, and every kilo- do it by 2030, if we wanted to.” Another
has flown by Pluto and continued on gram of weight brought from Earth to bumper sticker in Sowers’s office reads
to Ultima Thule, a snowman-shaped, the moon costs roughly thirty-five thou- “Physicists have strange quarks.”
nineteen-mile-long rock that is the sand dollars; if you don’t have to bring Other specialists have a different view
most distant object a spacecraft has fuel from Earth, it becomes much cheaper of the resources available in space. As-
ever reached. “I only got into space re- to send a probe to Jupiter. teroids contain precious metals, such as
sources in the past two years,” he said. Down the hall, in the Center for platinum, palladium, and gold. A num-
His laboratory at the School of Mines Space Resources’ laboratory, near buck- ber of asteroid-mining companies have
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 51
come and gone since 2015, when Neil
deGrasse Tyson remarked that “the first
trillionaire there’ll ever be is the person
who mines asteroids for their natural
resources.” But asteroid hunting is like
whaling, in the length of its missions
and the speculative nature of its success;
the moon is only three days away, and
its movements are extremely well known
to us. NASA recently named ten com-
panies as potential contractors for equip-
ment to gather and analyze soil in space.
One of them was Honeybee Robot-
ics. I visited its exploration-technology
division, in Pasadena, which, from the
outside, looks as dull as fro-yo, a col-
lection of beige concrete buildings. In-
side were lunar-rock samplers, the plan-
etvac that was tested on a Masten rocket,
some Nerf guns, and WINE (which
stands for “World Is Not Enough”), a
steam-powered spacecraft designed to
find water in lunar dirt (or on aster-
oids), convert it to energy, then hop to
the next site, to pull up samples and
more water for fuel.
Kris Zacny, a vice-president of Honey-
bee Robotics, was expecting his third
child in the next few days. “So much
has to do with where you’re born,” he
said, explaining how he came to the field
of space mining. Zacny is originally from
Poland, the son of a musician father,
who wanted him to be a musician as
well. “What a disappointment I must
have been,” Zacny said. “I spent my time
thinking about the moon.” When he
was seventeen, his family moved to
South Africa. Zacny went to college on
a scholarship from De Beers, and worked
in the diamond mines while in school.
“I graduated top of my class, with a de-
gree in mechanical engineering, and
next thing I knew I was twelve thou-
sand feet underground,” he said. He
spent two years in a coal mine, and a
month in a gold mine that at the time
was the deepest mine in the world. “I
always dreamed of space, but it wasn’t
an option for me,” he said.
In 2000, he landed a one-year posi-
tion as a research assistant for a profes-
sor in Berkeley’s Materials Science and
Engineering Department. “I knew it
was too late for me to be a space guy, I
accepted that. But I had the mining ex-
pertise. I said to the professor, ‘Don’t
laugh at me, but I’d like to do extrater-
restrial mining.’” What can be found
on the moon remains for the most part
unknown, though there is reasoned spec-
ulation. Honeybee is one of a growing
number of companies that are devel-
oping standardized lunar rovers. Small
countries with no national space agency,
as well as private entities, could soon
have their own robotic resource hunt-
ers roving around the moon, with lit-
tle honeycomb emblems on their sides.
uzz Aldrin had hoped, and briefly
B expected, that it would be he, and
not Neil Armstrong, who would take
the first human step on the moon. The
astronaut Michael Collins, who manned
the control module that orbited the
moon while Armstrong and Aldrin
walked below, has said of Aldrin that
he “resents not being first on the moon
more than he appreciates being second.”
On the moon, Armstrong took photos
of Aldrin posing, but Aldrin took none
of Armstrong doing the same. One of
the few photos that shows Neil Arm-
strong on the moon was taken by Arm-
strong himself—of his reflection in Al-
drin’s helmet, as Aldrin salutes the flag.
We are petty and misbehave on Earth;
we will be petty and misbehave in space.
The guiding laws of space are defined
by the Outer Space Treaty, from 1967,
which has been signed by a hundred and
eight countries, including all those with
substantial space programs. “Laws that
govern outer space are similar to the
laws for the high seas,” Alain Berinstain,
the vice-president of global develop-
ment at the lunar-exploration company
Moon Express, explained. “If you are
two hundred miles away from the con-
tinental shelf, those waters don’t belong
to anybody—they belong to everybody.”
Moon Express describes the moon as
the eighth continent.The company, which
is based in Florida, is hoping to deliver
its first lander to the moon in 2020; on
board will be telescopes and the Celestis
cremains. “If you look down at the wa-
ters from your ship and see fish, those
fish belong to everybody,” Berinstain
continued. “But, if you put a net down
and pull those fish onto the deck of the
ship, they’re yours. This could change,
but right now that is how the U.S. is in-
terpreting the Outer Space Treaty.”
Individual countries have their own
interpretations of the treaty, and set up
their own regulatory frameworks. Lux-
embourg promotes itself as “a unique
legal, regulatory and business environ-
ment” for companies devoted to space
resources, and is the first European coun-
try to pass legislation similar to that of
the U.S., deeming resources collected in
space to be ownable by private entities.
It’s not difficult to imagine moon
development, like all development, pro-
ceeding less than peacefully, and less
than equitably. (At least, unlike with
colonization on Earth, there are no na-
tives whose land we’re taking, or so we
assume.) Philip Metzger, a planetary
physicist at the University of Central
Florida, said, “I’m really glad that all
these countries, all these companies,
are going to the moon. But there will
be problems.” Any country can with-
draw from the Outer Space Treaty by
giving a year’s notice. “If any country
feels it has a sufficient lead in space,
that is a motivation to withdraw from
the treaty,” he said.
So there is a tacit space race already.
On the one hand, every national space
agency applauded the success of the
Chang’e-4 lander. The mission had sci-
ence partnerships with Germany, the
Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, and Sweden.
NASA collaborates with many countries
in space, sharing data, communications
networks, and expertise. Russian rock-
ets bring American astronauts to the In-
ternational Space Station. When, in re-
sponse to economic sanctions, the head
of the Russian space agency said that
maybe the American astronauts could
get to the I.S.S. by trampoline, the com-
ment was dismissed as posturing. Still,
NASA has contracted with Boeing and
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company,
to begin taking astronauts to the I.S.S.
this year—which means the U.S. will no
longer rely on Russia for that. Russia
and China say they will work together
on a moon base. NASA used to collabo-
rate with the China National Space Ad-
ministration; in 2011, six months after
members of NASA visited the C.N.S.A.,
Congress passed a bill that effectively
prohibited collaboration.
It’s natural to want to leave the moon
undisturbed; it’s also clear that human-
ity will disturb it. But do we need to live
there? Jeff Bezos, the founder of Ama-
zon, envisages zoning the moon for heavy
industry, and Earth for light industry
and residential purposes.
Bezos’s company Blue
Origin is developing reus-
able rockets intended to
bring humans reliably back
and forth from space, with
the long-term goal of cre-
ating manufacturing plants
there, in zero gravity. Earth
would be eased of its in-
dustrial burden, and the
lower-gravity conditions
would be beneficial for making certain
goods, such as fibre-optic cables.
“There’s the argument that we’ve
destroyed the Earth and now we’re
going to destroy the moon. But I don’t
see it that way,” Metzger said. “The re-
sources in space are billions of times
greater than on Earth. Space pretty
much erases everything we do. If you
crush an asteroid to dust, the solar wind
will blow it away. We can’t really mess
up the solar system.”
he most likely origin story for the
T moon is that it was formed four
and a half billion years ago, after a Mars-
size planet called Theia crashed into
Earth. Theia broke into thousands of
pieces, which orbited Earth. Slowly—
or quickly, depending on your time
scale—the shards coalesced and formed
the moon we know today, the one that
is drifting away from us, at a rate of
four centimetres or so per year. If we
had two moons, like Mars does, or sixty-
two, like Saturn, we wouldn’t feel the
same way about our moon.
Zou Xiaoduan, a scientist who
worked on all phases of the Chang’e
project, was born in 1983 in Guizhou
province, in southwest China—“a very
poor place back then,” she told me. As
a child, she said, she “was stunned to
learn that the moon was not a weird
monster following me around.” She re-
members hearing her family chatting
about the Apollo missions. That men
had been on the moon seemed unfath-
omable to her. She asked every adult to
confirm it. She wanted to become an
astronaut—a goal she attributes to there
not being any Disney movies for her to
watch. She began work on China’s lunar
program in 2006. “I still recall the first
lunar image from Chang’e-1 being shown
to me,” she said, of the images sent home
in 2007, during China’s first lunar or-
bital mission. “And the first
time Chang’e-2 flew by an
asteroid, 4179 Toutatis,”
three years later. “No one
had ever seen that aster-
oid.” Zou came to the U.S.
in 2015, and now works for
the Planetary Science In-
stitute, in Tucson. She is
part of a NASA mission
studying the asteroid
Bennu, which NASA de-
scribes as “an ancient relic of the solar
system’s early days.” Like everyone else
I spoke to who studies the moon, she
loves her job. Of her work on the Chang’e
missions, she said that every image has
been “thrilling, every moment is a ‘wow.’”
She continued, “I’m just so excited and
super happy that I picked this career.”
The twelve men who walked on the
moon, who saw Earth as a distant ob-
ject—did they lose their illusions? A
couple had alcohol problems, one co-
founded the Institute of Noetic Sci-
ences, and one became an evangelical
preacher. One became a one-term Re-
publican senator who has denied that
humans are responsible for climate
change; another became a painter, of
the moon. Neil Armstrong was one of
the few who had a mostly steady, un-
remarkable post-moonwalk life. He
moved to a dairy farm and became a
professor at the University of Cincin-
nati. Nearly a decade after his trip to
the moon, he wrote a poem called “My
Vacation”:
Nine Summers ago, I went for a visit.
To see if the moon was green cheese.
When we arrived, people on earth asked:
“Is it?”
We answered: “No cheese, no bees, no trees.”
There were rocks and hills and a
remarkable view
Of the beautiful earth that you know.
It’s a nice place to visit, and I’m certain that
you
Will enjoy it when you get to go. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 53
 FICTION

54 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA VENTURA

 ddie Prior, age twenty-one, with
E his black hair slick and his blue,
blue eyes, enters this story with
a great clatter.
He is about to go down the Pavilion’s
long, curving staircase to the dance floor
when the leather heels of his dancing
shoes meet the polished parquet and he
stumbles forward . . . but, instead of plum-
meting down the stairs, he finds his bal-
ance, commandeers the momentum of his
downward plunge, and—upright, smiling,
his heels clacking—he creates a kind of
musical descent, tapping out the tone of
each new step as he makes his entrance.
He comes to a stop, as he intended,
between two striking girls, one blond
and one brunette, both named Millie.
They are intrigued but embarrassed to
be the center of attention. Eddie realizes
that the effect he has created is corny,
but it’s too late now to undo what he has
done, so he smiles at one girl and then
at the other. They are both beauties of
the day, their faces perfectly oval, their
bowed lips colored a reddish brown.
The blond Millie says, “Is that a trick
you learned or are you just lucky you
didn’t kill yourself?”
Eddie smiles, uncomfortable, because
this kind of public stunt is not really
his way.
The brunette Millie says, “Everybody
is staring. I hope you’re satisfied.” He is
handsome enough, but she turns her back
on him and says to the girls from the
office, “Who does he think he is, anyway?”
“I’m Eddie,” he says to her. “Do you
want to dance?”
“Not with you,” she says. “Showoff.”
And then, true to himself, he disap-
pears into the crowd.
The Pavilion is the place to go on
Saturday nights, so it is certain that they
will meet again. And they do.
“Just one dance,” he says.
“I’d rather die,” Millie says.
A year later, they marry, and Eddie’s
wild entrance to the dance floor becomes
a story they tell, and then a memory they
share, and finally just one of those crazy
things they talk about which may or may
not have happened.
• one evening as she watched him paint.
Years pass, and there are children—a son
and, eventually, a daughter, who dies at
birth—then Millie’s breakdown, the war,
and her long recovery, lying all day on
the beach and at night learning to ac-
cept again her husband’s love. There are
quarrels, bitter words that cannot be un-
said, and are thus remembered forever.
Has this all been a mistake, this mar-
riage, this trap? But laughter helps, and
the memory of love, and they are Cath-
olic, so they just get on with it.
Time goes by, folds in on itself, and
brings them sudden prosperity. The son,
Daniel, is grown now and has married
well. Theirs is evidently a happy family,
with few worries and lots to be grateful
for. But then Daniel divorces. Eddie and
Millie have never considered divorce; it
is not an option. They grow old together.
• and found a photograph of Millie that
Somehow, somewhere, long before he
was ready to begin painting, Eddie got
the notion that painting was what he
had to do. He had spent forty-some years
as a civil engineer, building churches,
schools, bridges—practical, useful
things—and he knew nothing about
painting. Nonetheless, it was what he
was determined to do.
Meanwhile, he read the Arts & Lei-
sure section of the Sunday Times and
found that contemporary painting baffled
him. What had happened to paintings
that looked like the thing you painted,
with subjects you could recognize? Eddie
considered a plain white canvas to be just
that, a plain white canvas, but he sus-
pected that the fault was his: he didn’t
know how to look. He could remedy that,
and he did. He bought books on art his-
tory, and then some how-to books from
the college bookstore, and, with a begin-
ner’s assortment of oils and brushes, he
set up a studio in the basement, where
he’d be safe from interruption, and, ready
at last, he began teaching himself how
to paint things as they were.
Eddie painted every evening after din-
ner, while Millie watched television up-
stairs, but sometimes, for company, she
would come down to the basement to
chat as Eddie painted. She liked his work,
because she knew what she was looking
at. She was proud of him, and a little
jealous, but in this way they grew closer.
“Your left hand shakes,” Millie said
“Only the left,” he said. He guessed
it was harmless, a familial tremor maybe,
but he didn’t want to think about it now.
“Luckily I’m right-handed.”
“All the same. You should have that
looked at.”
“I will, I will,” he said. “Later.”
•
Eddie took evening classes at the local
college and discovered that craft—but
only craft—could be taught. Nobody
could teach you talent. He didn’t know
if he had talent but he didn’t really care.
“I wish you could paint me,” Millie
said. “Like I was when we met, I mean.
Not now when I’m shrivelled up like a
monkey.”
Eddie shuffled through the big desk
with the drawerful of important papers—
birth certificates, insurance policies—
was taken just before their wedding.
After several false starts, he managed to
paint a portrait of her, copied from the
photograph. It was a piece of folly, he
knew, neither a photo nor a painting,
but to Millie it was a great success and
she loved it.
“Look,” she said, thrilled. “You’ve
caught me just as I was. It’s even better
than the photograph.” And, indeed, there
she was, thin, delicate, and—she had to
admit—attractive. It was Millie as she
remembered herself, full of life and hope.
They hung the painting in the living
room, where guests could see it. After a
while, because nobody had commented
on it, she asked Eddie to move it to the
bedroom, because, really, it should be
private. And she was tired of its being
ignored.
Eddie made three tries before getting
the picture hung. His left hand had begun
to shake all the time. A week later, a neu-
rologist diagnosed the problem as Par-
kinson’s. Millie wanted to talk about it,
but Eddie said that it was just something
they had to live with. “And die with.”
They had the same thought at the same
time. Like lovers.
•
Daniel, the divorced son, began to write
poetry. He published some short poems,
and then—in the magazine Poetry, no
less—a long poem about St. Augustine
and Spanish dancing and eternal salva-
tion. It was called “Rituals.”
Millie read it and said, “Isn’t it won-
derful! Danny has published this won-
derful poem!”
Eddie read “Rituals” and found it
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 55

“When we’re under siege, don’t wait for the elevators!”
• •
confusing. He knew the words, and the
words made sentences, but the poem
itself remained a plain white canvas.
“Rituals, yes, but what is it about?”
Eddie asked.
“It’s a poem,” Millie said. “A poem
doesn’t have to be about anything. It
just is, and it’s wonderful in itself !”
Daniel came on a weekend visit
from Boston, where he taught com-
parative religion at M.I.T. Immedi-
ately, being a good son, he asked about
Eddie’s paintings, and they went down-
stairs to look at them. Daniel had no
great expectations, and so he was re-
lieved to find that the paintings were
conventional and not embarrassing.
Still-lifes, landscapes. He was gener-
ous with his praise.
Before dinner, Millie asked Daniel
about his poetry, which he shrugged
off as unimportant, just something he’d
found he could do, but then Eddie
asked him to explain “Rituals.” Dan-
iel felt challenged—they would never
understand, so what was the point? “I
can’t explain a poem.” He forced a
laugh. “It makes me feel like I’m in
class.” Millie understood what was
56 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
happening and said she thought “Rit-
uals” was lovely, such beautiful lan-
guage—she would love to hear him
read it aloud. But then Eddie, oblivi-
ous, asked, “Why the flamenco? What
does it have to do with the poem?”
Daniel swallowed his annoyance, but
he was defensive, the way he got when
a student confronted him.
Finally, he said, “Eddie, listen! Poetry
is . . . all art is more than engineering!
You can no more explain a poem than
a painting.” He pointed to the landscape
over the couch. “Look at that,” Daniel
said. “Can you explain that?”
“It’s a field in winter, with trees and
a stream, and the sun going down be-
hind the hills.”
“But that’s a description, not an ex-
planation! There’s more to art than just
representation.” Daniel was triumphant
and, because he had defeated his fa-
ther, ashamed.
Eddie said, “Yes?” And at the same
moment he began to see beyond things
as they were.
“Not everything can be explained,”
Daniel said, imploring now, calling him
“Papa.”
But Eddie wasn’t listening. He had
glimpsed—all at once and with great
clarity—the infinite possibilities of
painting the world of the mind.
“It’s just a poem,” Daniel said, “and
it’s not even very good.” He reflected
bitterly that his father had always been
this way, undermining everything he
attempted, even his marriage. Could
Eddie leave nothing to him?
“Drinks,” Millie said into the great
silence. “We all need a drink before
dinner.”
•
Eddie gave up painting things as they
were and, quietly, provisionally, he
moved on, studying the hurried brush-
strokes of van Gogh, Manet, and Monet,
and then the hard, bloody surfaces of
Kandinsky, copying what he could un-
derstand and leaving the rest, until, inev-
itably, he found himself lost once again
in the mysteries of the white canvas.
•
The neurologist experimented with dif-
ferent medications in different dosages
until he found the combination that
worked best to ease Eddie’s stiffness and
enable him to walk almost normally
again. Eddie remained unsure of his bal-
ance—he might fall at any time—but
gradually he developed a better sense
of his body in space. With only a finger
poised on something stable—a door, a
chair—he could catch himself before he
fell. This worked for a while.
Eddie carried on as if Parkinson’s were
a temporary nuisance, rather than the
beginning of the end. But the Parkin-
son’s mask had settled on his face, mak-
ing expression impossible. He could no
longer laugh and, unless surprised by joy,
he could barely smile.
Millie watched what was happen-
ing to her husband, and she made a se-
cret pact with God that she would be
his caretaker—both wife and nurse—
no matter what the cost. She would do
it. She would sacrifice her life for him.
If only God would give her the strength.
It never occurred to her that God
might not sign on to her secret pact.
•
When Daniel came for Thanksgiving,
Eddie was at his best. He walked with
assurance and his voice was strong and,
for once, there was nothing vague about
him. Nobody would have guessed that
he had Parkinson’s. Millie was annoyed
that now, with their son, he seemed
his old self, whereas when they were
alone—well, it was unfair. She stayed
in the kitchen and fussed with dinner
while Daniel went down to see Ed­
die’s new paintings.
Eddie propped a canvas on the
easel and waited. The painting was
large and forbidding. Splintered rocks
hung in the air, unsupported, menac­
ing. There was a rawness to it, a lack
of life. Only stones—black, gray, an
earthen brown edging into bruised pur­
ple—that seemed about to topple out
of the canvas.
“Holy shit,” Daniel said.
He was astonished into silence, be­
cause, if this was a scene from nature, it
was a nature rooted in barbarity.
Later, at dinner, he could not stop
talking about the paintings, how tech­
nically fine they were, how original.
“They’re bleak,” he said, “and they’re
unforgiving. But they’re exploring
something important. Well done, Papa!”
“I think they’re scary,” Millie said.
“All those cliffs and falling stones.”
Daniel fell silent and thought about
his poetry. He saw it now as an intel­
lectual sham. It was contrived and di­
dactic. Like everything in his life.
Eddie glowed with pleasure and sat­
isfaction. His mind had wandered off
and he was thinking of the time when
he made that entrance of his, racketing
down the stairs on his leather heels as
he turned a potentially disastrous fall
into music, tapping out the tone of each
new step.
The silence made Millie frantic. “Say
something, Eddie,” she said. And to
Daniel, “He’s always going off into his
thoughts, your father is.”
But Daniel and Eddie remained lost
in the moment.
They finished dinner and Daniel
insisted that they go downstairs for
one more look at the paintings. His
father was an artist, the real thing,
and Daniel felt that he could forgive
him . . . well . . . everything.
Daniel stood before the easel with
Millie beside him, judging. “I still pre­
fer his landscapes,” Millie said. Dan­
iel was praising Eddie’s use of color,
its calculated affront to the eye, and
something else he couldn’t quite get,
when abruptly he made a discovery.
“Wait!” he said, and pointed out a
barely visible line that ran down the
center of the painting. He traced it with
a long skinny finger, and then he pointed
out a similar line in the previous paint­
ing, and another in the next. “It’s a re­
current theme, Papa. As if you’re paint­
ing a world that will eventually crack
open.” He was excited at his father’s
chance brilliance.
And then it occurred to him that this
line, this recurrent fracture, was an image
of what was happening to his father. It
was, in fact, a map of his father’s men­
tal destruction. Horrified, Daniel went
pale. The mind, even in its collapse, was
capable of terrible insight. Though he
feared Eddie’s answer, Daniel asked him,
“What is this a painting of, Papa?”
Millie said, “It’s a painting of rocks
and it gives me chills. I wish he’d go
back to his old way.”
“Papa?”
Eddie was exhausted suddenly and
unable to find words for what he felt.
• tempt to get away—anywhere—she
Eddie became withdrawn in company.
He was often distracted, making the
odd comment rather than joining in
the conversation. His voice was patchy
and hard to hear. He sometimes left
his sentences unfinished, as if he had
lost interest in what he was saying.
Millie was worn out from constant
worry. She was eighty­four, after all,
“Look! The first robin of spring and the worst robin of spring.”
a year older than Eddie, and her whole
life now was caring for him. And then
he fell and fractured a rib. He refused
to see a doctor, and the next day he
fell again. This time he took the skin
off his leg from knee to ankle. Millie
was distraught. She imagined disas­
ters—falls and fires and terrible car
accidents. She hid the keys to the car
and to the house, but she was never
able to get a night’s sleep, because,
though Eddie couldn’t get into bed
without her help, he managed to get
out of it with apparent ease. Then he
was off to the bathroom, where he was
careful not to pee in the toilet and to
use the wastebasket instead. This was
too much for Millie. She burst into
tears, and screamed at him: “You’re a
pig! That’s what you are! A filthy pig!”
He looked at her, uncomprehending.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you can’t
help it, but, dear God in heaven, why
can’t you use the toilet like everybody
else! You’re a pig, Eddie, and that’s the
truth.” She could see that he didn’t
understand.
Despairing, and in a desperate at­
threw herself into the hall closet, pull­
ing all the clothes down on top of her,
the hangers jangling, as she shouted,
“Bastard life! I can’t endure another
minute. Bastard. Bastard life.” And then
she gave way to sobbing.
Eddie, terrified, retreated to the
bedroom.
Later, when Millie had raged past
the point of exhaustion, she returned
to the bedroom, and said quietly, “Are
you all right, Eddie?” And Eddie said,
“That poor woman. She can’t go on like
that. She’s going to die.”
• room, where she lay down and sobbed
Eddie was downstairs painting, and
Millie, unable to nap, lay on her bed,
wondering about her life and how it
would end. The afternoon sunlight fell
on Eddie’s portrait of her.
She had been in love—that was what
Eddie had captured. And he had been
in love. With her. Even now, when he
was ruined, he loved her. That love was
something she could save.
She took the picture down and
wrapped it in a silk scarf and hid it at
the back of her private drawer.
Next to it was a photo of Eddie, at
age seven, on the day of his First Com-
munion. It had been her favorite. Yet,
early in their marriage, enraged by
something he said, she had taken a nail
file and scrubbed out his innocent face.
She had kept the scratched photo as a
kind of penance. She cried when she
thought of it.
And there were the love notes Eddie
had written whenever he was away for
work. He had been a loving husband.
She wondered now, Was she a bad
woman? Had she always been like this?
She heard a crash from downstairs
and at once she was off the bed and,
swiftly, like a woman half her age, she
was at the stairwell, shouting down to
Eddie, “It’s all right, sweet-
heart! I’m coming.”
•
The neurologist convinced
her that Eddie needed a
professional caregiver, and
so Millie hired Carlo, or
Carlito, as he insisted she
call him. Though she dis-
liked having a stranger in
her house, she knew she
had to have help. So on her hair day—
every Wednesday, a wash and a set—
she gave Carlito instructions and tele-
phone numbers and headed off with a
heavy heart to the beauty parlor.
The first two Wednesdays went well,
but on the third Millie returned home
to find the kitchen full of smoke. Eddie
had put on the teakettle, and then wan-
58 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
dered off to his paintings. Eventually,
the handle of the kettle had melted from
the fierce heat, setting off the fire alarm
just as Millie came in the door. Carlito
was taking a nap upstairs.
Shaken, sick, Millie went to the bed-
until her head ached. This was her life
now. An unending nightmare.
That night, Millie finished getting
Eddie into bed and gave him a good-
night kiss. Suddenly he sat up, with his
eyes fixed on her, and, in a strong, clear
voice, he said, “My beautiful girl. My
Millie. You’re the only reason I go on
living.” Then his face went blank.
• was brilliant, bloody. Eddie sat, mes-
Daniel visited every other weekend now.
He was going through a difficult period,
he confessed, and it was a consolation
to see his father. And Millie, too, of
course. He was no longer able to write—
not poetry, not anything—and his per-
formance in class was less than good,
but seeing his father gave him the cour-
age to go on. He missed his ex-wife, or
maybe it was just marriage that he
missed, but right now, strangely, it was
his father he needed to see.
•
Eddie had not painted in a long time.
He began a huge canvas of the kind that
upset Millie so much—cliffs, falling
stones, and, again, that barely visible
crack at the center.
“Why is it so grim?” Millie asked.
“It’s all different shades of
black, Eddie.” She studied
it and said, finally, “I think
you’d be a happier man if
you painted something
red.” She turned to go up-
stairs. “Or yellow. Some-
thing with a little life.”
Eddie gave up on the
painting. It was too large
and too ambitious and,
to be honest, he didn’t
know where to take it next. It stood
on the easel, untouched.
But Carlito was at him: “You’ve got
to work, Eddie. Work stimulates the
brain, and the brain sends messages to
the body, and tells your hands not to
shake and your legs not to trip and
your private thing not to peepee in the
wastebasket.”
Eventually, Eddie gave in to Carlito’s
nagging. He sat in front of the easel,
dutifully, looking at the abandoned
painting. He began to examine the
painting’s basic structure. He dabbed
the canvas experimentally with a pal-
ette knife and built up a thick texture,
making the rocks and craters even more
menacing. Then, uncertain but curious,
he opened up the mysterious thin line
that ran among the rocks to discover
its possibilities. A cave, a home? He
began to get a sense of what he was
doing. Excited now, he cleaned his pal-
ette knife and reached for his brushes.
He squeezed a large squiggle of ver-
million onto his palette. The raw color
merized by the sheer naked redness of
the paint, until, with no conscious in-
tent, driven only by some natural in-
stinct, he reached into the cave and
painted a door. A crimson door. He
sat back and looked at what he had
done. Millie was right. He was a hap-
pier man already.
Carlito understood that Eddie’s
painting was modern, so you didn’t
have to like it. He cared only that Eddie
was looking better and feeling stron-
ger every day.
•
Eddie and Millie sit in their sunny
kitchen, enjoying a late-afternoon cup
of tea. Millie says, “Now, this is nice.”
She is tired from a long day of keeping
Carlito out of the way while she got her
broken husband washed and dressed,
made his toast, and stirred his orange
juice the way he likes. Now it’s after-
noon and Carlito has left. At last, there
is peace in the house.
“It’s nice to just relax and be together,”
Millie says.
Eddie sips his tea and his eyes wan-
der to the painting that Millie has hung
in the kitchen. It is a landscape, fields
and a brook with hills in the distance.
He likes it. He does not remember that
he painted it. He still paints every day,
or at any rate he’s downstairs in his stu-
dio, where she doesn’t have to worry
about him.
“It’s nice with the sun coming in,”
Millie says, determined to make con-
versation, but then they are quiet for a
long while. At last Eddie speaks.
“I remember one night at the dance
hall—the Grove, I think it was, the
Grove—when I skidded at the top of
the stairs and tap-danced all the way
down.” He smiles. “I don’t know what
I was thinking.”
“It was at the Pavilion,” Millie says.
“And you didn’t slip. You did it deliber-
ately on the stairs. Don’t tell me you’ve
forgotten that.”
“I never really liked to dance, but I
did it. Everybody did in those days.”
“You were a good dancer,” she says.
“One of the best.”
“Those were strange days.”
She is encouraged because he’s talking
normally.
“You know, I had two Millies in my
life . . .” His voice trails off.
“Is that right?” she says. “Tell me
about the two Millies.”
“She was beautiful, but at heart she
was a bitch.”
“Who? Who was a bitch?”
“Millie.”
“ Yes, we’re a charity tackling skyrocketing income inequality, but we’re
“The blond one?” Millie herself had
black hair.
also a charity that should be saying ‘I love my billionaire funder.’”
He falls silent, thinking.
She remembers that night at the Pa- • •
vilion, with the whole world opening
before her, and then suddenly there was home. Carlito means well, but Eddie die’s shoes anyway. He has his pride,
Eddie, with those blue, blue eyes. Love needs a proper facility where he can get after all, like anybody else. But they’re
is so quick. twenty-four-hour care. They select Sun- new and . . . Millie sits on the bed and
“One was blond and she was—what’s light Nursing Home. It has reassuring cries softly.
the word?—she was boring. She was testimonials, and it’s near enough that Daniel knocks at the bedroom door
smart, too, but . . .” His voice trails off Millie will be able to visit him. and says, “It’s time.” He wants her to
again. Millie fights the idea—no husband be the one to tell Eddie that he is
“What about the other Millie? The of hers will be thrown on the mercy of going to the Sunlight Nursing
brunette.” strangers—but in the end they convince Home. Millie makes a silent and ter-
“Oh, she was a beauty. Black hair her that she can no longer care for him rible reckoning. God will forgive her
you couldn’t believe, it was so beauti- by herself. She cries at the thought of it, this betrayal of her husband, and
ful. You wanted to drown in it. And and she kisses Eddie a hundred times. maybe Eddie will forgive her, because
could she dance! In fact, I married her, He seems to understand. of their old love, but she will never
the brunette. She was a good wife, too. The day arrives. forgive herself.
A good mother.” Eddie has been downstairs all Millie goes down the basement
Even in this loony state he remem- morning, alone. Millie has spent the stairs first. Her steps are deliberate.
bers that she was beautiful. Millie is time packing clothes for him. There She will see this to its end, for Eddie.
happy. But she knows him, and if he are so many things he has never worn. Daniel, behind her, is surprised to hear
says anything more he will ruin every- Sweaters she bought for birthdays and nothing.
thing, so she brushes away her tears anniversaries, a suède jacket he never There is no sound, because Eddie
and makes a fuss with the cups and had a chance to wear, because he has is not here. He has disappeared.
saucers, but, through all the noise, Mil- gone out only rarely since the Parkin- On his easel now stands his final
lie hears him say, “I don’t know what son’s began, and then he preferred to painting, finished at last. The cliffs are
ever happened to her,” and she dies, wear old things in case he spilled food as menacing as ever, and those gigantic
slowly, once again. on them. There are shoes he’s worn stones still threaten, but at its center is
only once, because of the burning in a plain red door.
• his feet. She could give them to Car- Eddie has escaped. ♦
Daniel has consulted the neurologist lito if he wore the right size. But Car-
and, together, they have decided that it’s lito is gone now, everything is gone, NEWYORKER.COM
no longer possible for Eddie to be at and maybe Carlito wouldn’t want Ed- John L’Heureux on death and dignity.

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 59


DIVINE GUIDANCE
“ I and Thou,” a short treatise by the
Jewish theologian Martin Buber,
was published in German in 1923; by
the time it appeared in English, four-
teen years later, the translator could al-
ready call it “one of the epoch-making
books of our generation.” When Buber
died, in 1965, his Times obituary focussed
mainly on this one book, crediting it
with making Buber “a pioneer bridge
builder between Judaism and Christi-
anity.” Buber’s philosophy of dialogue
had been enthusiastically embraced by
such Protestant thinkers as Reinhold
Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Even today,
“I and Thou” remains a staple of reli-
gion courses and bookstore spirituality
sections, and inspirational quotes from
it—“An animal’s eyes have the power
to speak a great language”—circulate
endlessly on social media.
Yet “I and Thou,” which uses a gen-
eralized, ecumenical vocabulary, has never
enjoyed the same stature among Jewish
readers as it has with the world at large.
After Buber’s death, the novelist Chaim
Potok observed, “It was a source of con-
siderable anguish and frustration to Mar-
tin Buber that he was more appreciated
by Christians than by Jews.” This was a
painful irony, since few people in the
twentieth century had thought more
passionately about Judaism and Jewish-
ness. Buber had written dozens of books
about Jewish history, theology, mysti-
cism, and scripture. He was an early ad-
herent of Zionism, worked on translat-
ing the Hebrew Bible into German, and
popularized Hasidic folklore; during the
Nazi period, he ran a Jewish adult-ed-
ucation program in Germany, to sustain
the morale of his persecuted people. To
60 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
Modernity, faith, and Martin Buber.
BY ADAM KIRSCH
Jewish historians, this is the Buber who
matters: the writer and teacher whose
career spanned the most important events
of Jewish modernity, including the end
of German-Jewish civilization and the
creation of the State of Israel, where he
spent the final decades of his life.
“Buber was a contested figure,” Paul
Mendes-Flohr writes in his new biog-
raphy, “Martin Buber: A Life of Faith
and Dissent” (Yale). “He evoked pas-
sionate, often conflicting opinions about
his person and thought.” There were
always readers who distrusted Buber’s
thinking about Judaism, which was
defiantly innovative and anti-traditional.
Some people questioned whether he
really was a major thinker or just a char-
ismatic impresario of ideas. In the nine-
teen-twenties, when Judah Magnes, the
chancellor of the newly founded He-
brew University, in Jerusalem, tried to
hire Buber as a professor, the faculty
repeatedly refused to accept him, con-
sidering him not quite a true scholar.
Only in 1938, as Buber tried to leave
Nazi Germany, was a chair found for
him—not in religion or philosophy but
in the sociology department. The snub
was hard for him to bear, and he ac-
cepted the appointment only after much
internal struggle.
Reading Buber, it’s not hard to un-
derstand why he might inspire suspicion.
His prose, shaped by the literary tastes
of the early twentieth century, tends to
be high flown rather than precise. His
book “Daniel” (1913) is written in a rhap-
sodic style that owes something to Nietz-
sche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” and
something to Symbolist poetry: “Because
we cannot circle above all existence—
sleepless, unbroken, boundless, glow-
ing—we content ourselves with being
submerged and awakening.” Even some
of his admirers admitted that they couldn’t
always be sure of what he was trying to
say. (“I have read it to the end and—un-
derstood nothing,” Magnes wrote after
reading “Daniel.”) The American trans-
lator of “I and Thou,” Walter Kaufmann,
acknowledged that Buber “tends to blur
all contours in the twilight of suggestive
but extremely unclear language. Most of
Buber’s German readers would be quite
incapable of saying what any number of
passages probably mean.”
Such haziness was inevitable, because
the questions Buber was trying to an-
swer were the most ineffable ones of
human life: What is the meaning of our
existence? How can we achieve the feel-
ing of wholeness that we so painfully
lack? Above all, Buber asked, how do
we find our way to God, now that reli-
gious belief has become so challenging
for modern, educated people? Anyone
who believed it was possible to give crys-
tal-clear answers to such questions would
have to be a messiah or a charlatan, and
Buber was neither.
t the heart of Buber’s theology was
A his theory of dialogue—the idea
that what matters is not understanding
God in abstract, intellectual terms but,
rather, entering into a relationship with
him. Such a relationship, he believed, is
ABOVE: LUCI GUTIÉRREZ
possible only when we establish ge-
nuine relationships with one another.
“Whoever goes forth to his You with
his whole being and carries to it all the
being of the world, finds him whom
one cannot seek,” he wrote. In daily life,
Buber’s conception of Judaism was mistrusted by Jewish thinkers but influential among Protestant theologians.

ART WORK BY ANDY WARHOL THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 61

we usually fail to live up to this ideal.
We tend to treat the people and the
world around us as things to be used
for our benefit. Without this mind-set,
which Buber called “I-It,” there would
be no science, economics, or politics.
But, the more we engage in such think-
ing, the farther we drift from “I-You,”
his term for addressing other people
directly as partners in dialogue and re-
lationship. Only when we say “You” to
the world do we perceive its miraculous
strangeness and, at the same time, its
potential for intimacy. Indeed, it’s not
only human beings who deserve to be
called “You.” As Buber wrote, even a cat
or a piece of mica can summon up in
us the feeling of a genuine encounter
with another: “When something does
emerge from among things, something
living, and becomes a being for me . . .
it is for me nothing but You!”
This way of thinking about God and
faith may seem to be remote from Ju-
daism as most Jews traditionally under-
stood it. But, in a sense, Buber’s rejec-
tion of Jewish orthodoxy made him a
good representative of his generation of
German-speaking Jews, many of whom
turned decisively away from Jewish prac-
tice. Buber was born in 1878 in Vienna.
The course of his life was changed when
he was three years old, when his mother
ran away with a Russian officer, leaving
without saying goodbye to her son.
Mendes-Flohr emphasizes that this
early loss left Buber with a lifelong feel-
ing of abandonment, which in turn fed
and shaped his religious longings. The
God he describes in his work is neither
a stern lawgiver nor a merciful redeemer
but a close presence to whom we can
always turn for intimacy. “That you need
God more than anything, you know at
all times in your heart,” he wrote. “But
don’t you know also that God needs
you—in the fullness of his eternity, you?”
His mother’s abandonment deter-
mined Buber’s fate in a more concrete
way, too: he was sent to live with his
paternal grandparents, in the city then
known as Lemberg (today’s Lviv), the
capital of the province of Galicia, in the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they
raised him until he was an adolescent.
His grandfather Salomon Buber was
a wealthy philanthropist and a Jewish
scholar of renown; Martin grew up in
an observant household and was edu-
62 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
cated in Hebrew and in Yiddish, as well
as in German. But, when he was four-
teen, he moved in with his father, who
had remarried and moved to Lemberg.
This household was more secular and
assimilated, and Buber stopped observ-
ing most Jewish customs. By sixteen, he
was ripe for rebellion: he recalled feel-
ing “a raging hatred of the entire nause-
ating atmosphere in which I lived, a
wrathful aversion against the official mo-
rality, the official education.”
Like many young people of his era,
Buber kindled to the writings of Nietz-
sche. As a teen-ager, he came to school
every day carrying a copy of “Thus Spake
Zarathustra,” and for the rest of his life
he was influenced by Nietzsche’s ideas
about the need to create new values and
to seek intense experiences. But his re-
bellion was not only intellectual: as a
twenty-one-year-old student, Buber fell
in love with a Christian fellow-student,
Paula Winkler, who herself became a
significant writer, and they had two chil-
dren out of wedlock. In time, they mar-
ried—they remained a loving couple until
her death, in 1958—and she converted
to Judaism. But he kept the relationship
secret for a long time, so as not to risk
losing his family’s financial support.
Having private means enabled Buber
to devote himself to a life of ideas. Hand-
some and delicate—he stood no taller
than five feet two—he was a charismatic
presence. A student at the University of
Vienna, where his studies included phi-
losophy, literature, and art history, he
also spent a few semesters in Zurich,
Leipzig, and Berlin, and his circle came
to include various kinds of rebels, such
as proto-New Agers living in communes.
One of his closest friends was Gustav
Landauer, a Jewish intellectual who took
part in the socialist revolution in Ba-
varia after the First World War and was
murdered by counter-revolutionary sol-
diers. Buber cut a thoroughly bohemian
figure, and it would hardly have been
surprising if, like Landauer, he had lost
interest in his ancestors’ faith.
Instead, as his thinking grew more
radical, his engagement with Jewish pol-
itics and history deepened. He became
a supporter of Theodor Herzl’s Zionist
movement shortly after it was founded,
in 1897, even serving as editor of the
official Zionist newspaper for a short
period. In 1902, he co-founded a Jew-
ish publishing house, which produced
German translations of many impor-
tant works in Hebrew and in Yiddish.
(Later, during the First World War, Buber
also launched an influential monthly
journal, Der Jude.)
By the age of thirty, then, Buber was
a leading figure among what Mendes-
Flohr calls the “nonacademic literati”—
he was what we might call a public
intellectual. But, although he became
perhaps the most famous Jewish thinker
PREVIOUS SPREAD: “TEN PORTRAITS OF JEWS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: MARTIN BUBER,” 1980. THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM, PITTSBURGH; FOUNDING COLLECTION, CONTRIBUTION THE ANDY WARHOL
and writer in Germany, Buber separated
himself from institutional religious life.
He avoided synagogue even on Yom
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Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish
calendar. When he was reproached for
this on one occasion, he replied, “It is
more difficult for me not to observe
Yom Kippur than it would be to ob-
serve it.” In other words, his rejection
of Jewish orthodoxy was not a matter
of convenience—still less of assimila-
tion—but of religious principle.
Buber drew a distinction between re-
ligion—a body of received beliefs and
rituals—and what he called “religiosity,”
the molten spiritual core from which re-
ligions are born. Traditional Judaism held
that living according to law was itself a
source and an expression of spiritual fer-
vor. But Buber was convinced that Or-
thodox Judaism was no longer a real op-
tion for people like him. “Once religious
rites and dogmas have become so rigid
that religiosity cannot move them or no
longer wants to comply with them, re-
ligion becomes uncreative and therefore
untrue,” he wrote. This equation of truth
with creativity was something that Buber
learned from Nietzsche, and it marked
a radically new way of thinking about
Judaism. Truth was no longer a question
of what had happened in history—for
instance, whether God had really given
Moses a set of laws on Mt. Sinai—but
of what would best be able to sustain the
Jewish people in the future. To preserve
Jewish religiosity, Buber was willing to
sacrifice much of the Jewish religion.
hat twentieth-century Judaism
W needed, Buber believed, was to
find inspiration in the moments of its
history when the divine spoke directly
to the people. In his view, three such mo-
ments were supremely important. One
was the age of the Biblical prophets, who
preached divine justice against the back-
sliding of the people and the arrogance
of the powerful. Another was the birth
of Hasidism, in the eighteenth century,
which used a fervent democratic mysti­
cism to wrest authority away from Juda­
ism’s learned élite. Starting in 1906, Buber
published translations and adaptations
of Hasidic legends, which caused a sen­
sation among German Jews, who had
long looked down on what they consid­
ered ancestral superstitions. Hasidism,
Buber insisted, was nothing for modern
Jews to be ashamed of—it was one of
the world’s great spiritual traditions.
The third of Buber’s Jewish inspira­
tions was the most surprising: the teach­
ings of Jesus. Buber held that it was a
mistake to see Jesus as the founder of a
new Christian religion. He was, rather,
a quintessentially Jewish teacher, whose
moral passion and poetic creativity made
him an heir to Isaiah and to Jeremiah.
In Buber’s view, the core of Jesus’ teach­
ing was that “God wants to be realized
within the world and its worldliness
through their purification and perfec­
tion.” Here is the point of connection
between Judaism and Buber’s theology
of dialogue: the world is holy because
it is where we can encounter God. That
is why any theology or politics that seeks
to bring this world to an end—through
an apocalyptic transformation or a total
revolution—is fundamentally opposed
to Buber’s Jewish ideal.
It is no wonder that a theologian
who saw Jesus as quintessentially Jew­
ish should be controversial among Jews.
But Buber’s goal was not to undermine
Judaism; instead, he wanted to redefine
it in ways that would make it intellectu­
ally compelling and spiritually fulfilling.
That is what made him such an impor­
tant influence on a generation of young
German Jews for whom religion was a
source of bitter conflict. Buber promised
that they did not have to become Ger­
man, as assimilated Jews sought to do.
He taught that being Jewish was itself
a way of being modern.
“Why do we call ourselves Jews?” he
demanded, in one of a series of lectures
to the members of a Jewish student group
in Prague. “Only out of inherited cus­
tom—because our fathers did so? Or out
of our own reality?” Buber exhorted his
listeners—who included the then un­
known Franz Kafka—not to abandon
their Judaism but to reinvent it: “To be
BRIEFLY NOTED
L.E.L. , by Lucasta Miller (Knopf ). Few figures of the Roman­
tic era are as enigmatic as the poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon,
who published her poems under her initials. Dismissed after
her untimely death, in 1838, as a writer of frivolous sentimen­
talities, she was once as celebrated as Byron and Shelley. This
intrepid biography examines her eclipse in light of the scan­
dal that surrounded her: a relationship with her editor, a mar­
ried man twenty years her senior, produced three children
who were secretly given away at birth. Miller documents the
literary establishment’s effort to conceal this, and argues that
L.E.L.’s verse is filled with veiled implication, encoded lan­
guage, and subversion. Miller’s subtle readings of a poet whom
she calls “proto­postmodern” restore a lost reputation.
Sleeping with Strangers, by David Thomson (Knopf ). A noted
film historian and critic embarks on a characteristically am­
bitious and feverish exploration of sex and sexuality on cel­
luloid, and of the way that Hollywood’s vision of desire has
seeped into the spaces behind and beyond the camera. Thom­
son interweaves personal memoir and cinematic history, in­
dulging a penchant for searching, grandstanding questions,
as he tacks from steamy classics to Tinseltown scandals. He
also makes a detailed case for the debt the movies owe to
queer filmmakers and the gay world—which he attributes
to a “mounting suspicion that America’s approved romantic
formulae might be demented.”
The Ash Family, by Molly Dektar (Simon & Schuster). Berie,
the protagonist of this stunning début, recalls her decision,
at nineteen, to join the Ash Family, a community in the
North Carolina mountains which forbids possessions, ro­
mantic relationships, and children. Its leader, Dice, gives her
a new name and she embraces asceticism, learning to herd
sheep and work the land, and thinking with pity of her
mother, back in their tchotchke­filled house. But Dice’s
stranglehold on the community tests loyalties, the Family’s
environmental protests grow violent, and some members go
missing. Dektar has a gift for describing the wonders of the
natural world, and sensitively inhabits a young cultist’s frag­
ile state: “I’d never been so dirty or so clean, so protected,
so exposed.”
Walking on the Ceiling, by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead). This
début novel shifts between Paris and Istanbul, in sharp
flashes of memory, as Nunu, a young Turkish woman adrift
in France, walks around with M., a British novelist who
writes about Turkey. In spare prose, Nunu recalls her silent
mother and dead father, offering glimpses of her past and
of her losses, as she and M. “cross the city unspooling our
invisible thread,” creating a “shared memory palace.” Her
narrative is an elegiac rumination on the nature of recollec­
tion and identity. The stories she tells M., embellishing and
refracting her experiences, become a source of self­knowl­
edge: “I began to remember something about myself I had
been looking away from.”
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 63
a Jew truly from within, to live as a Jew
with all the contradiction, all the trag-
edy, and all the future promise of his
blood.” When these lectures were pub-
lished, in 1911, as “Three Addresses on
Judaism,” they had an electrifying effect.
Among their readers was the young Ger-
shom Scholem, who was to become one
of the twentieth century’s greatest Jew-
ish scholars and thinkers. “The voice
speaking from [Buber’s] books,” he
recalled, “was promising, demanding,
fascinating, uncovering the hidden life
beneath the frozen official forms, uncov-
ering its hidden treasures. . . . He de-
manded attachment to and identifica-
tion with the heart of the people.”
This emphasis on the heart of the
Jewish people was at the core of Bu-
ber’s idiosyncratic Zionism, which was
cultural rather than political. Despite
his early support for the movement, he
was a poor fit for an organization ded-
icated to a concrete territorial goal—
the creation of a Jewish homeland in
Palestine. Buber supported this aim,
but only as a means to the end he re-
ally cared about: the spiritual and cul-
tural renaissance of the Jewish people.
In the “Three Addresses,” he insisted
that, although “a central Jewish settle-
ment in Palestine would undoubtedly
have great significance,” it could not
“beget the only things from which I
expect the absolute to emerge—return
and transformation, and a change in all
elements of life.”
Buber’s unease with Zionism grew
as the prospect of a Jewish state became
more real. In 1917, when the Zionists
were celebrating Britain’s endorsement
of their aims in the Balfour Declaration,
Buber objected that he did not envision
the redemption of the Jews as some-
thing that could be achieved through
political victories. Later, after Buber
moved to Jerusalem, in 1938, he opposed
a Jewish declaration of statehood, argu-
ing that Palestine should become a bi-
national state shared by Arabs and Jews.
And, after the State of Israel came into
being, in 1948, Buber continued to crit-
icize its policies and its leadership on
many issues—including, especially, its
treatment of Arab refugees—becoming
a thorn in the side of David Ben-Gurion,
the Prime Minister.
Characteristically, though, Buber
would not renounce the Zionist ideal
64 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
just because he was disappointed in its
reality. “I have accepted as mine the State
of Israel, the form of the new Jewish
community that has arisen,” he report-
edly told a friend. “But he who will truly
serve the spirit . . . must seek to free once
again the blocked path to an understand-
ing with the Arab peoples.” Like other
liberal Zionists then and since, Buber
found himself exposed to criticism from
all sides. In Israel, he was famous but
unpopular, suspected of disloyalty to the
Jewish community. “Whether on the
street or in a café, among the intellec-
tuals of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv,” a disap-
pointed follower told him, “nowhere did
I hear a kind word about Martin Buber.”
The man also upbraided him for dis-
playing a cross in his house. (The offend-
ing item, Buber explained, was actually
a Piranesi engraving of a church.)
Meanwhile, Buber also had to face
progressives and pacifists who con-
demned Zionism altogether. In 1939, he
engaged in a polemic with Gandhi, who
had published a statement saying that
Zionism was an injustice to the Arabs
of Palestine, and also recommending
that the Jews of Nazi Germany stay
there and resist by means of nonviolent
satyagraha, or “soul force.” The ago-
nized open letter Buber wrote in re-
sponse explained that, although such a
course might work against the British
Empire, against Hitler it was meaning-
less: “An effective stand in the form of
non-violence may be taken against un-
feeling human beings in the hope of
gradually bringing them to their senses;
but a diabolic universal steamroller
cannot thus be withstood.” Buber in-
sisted that Zionism was not an aggres-
sive or violent movement. “No one who
counts himself in the ranks of Israel can
desire to use force,” he wrote. This was
its own kind of wishful thinking, and
Buber admitted that his attitude toward
violence involved a contradiction: “We
should be able even to fight for jus-
tice—but to fight lovingly.”
Buber’s escape to Jerusalem under-
scored the need for a refuge for Jews.
Had he remained in Germany, he surely
would have perished in the Holocaust.
Instead, he went on to live for another
twenty-seven productive years, in Pales-
tine and in Israel. Yet the destruction of
the Jews of Europe also destroyed the
basis of much of Buber’s work. He had
hoped to provide modern European Jews
with a sustaining connection to their tra-
dition, and now those Jews were almost
all dead or scattered. He had preached
the importance of saying “You,” but the
Holocaust represented the ultimate tri-
umph of the “It,” reducing human be-
ings to mere things.
n old age, Buber was the perfect image
I of a sage, with twinkling eyes and a
white beard. Mendes-Flohr opens his
book by recounting a perhaps apocry-
phal story of children pointing at Buber
in the street and calling him God. Late
in life, when he was living in Jerusalem,
he was visited by a stream of young kib-
butz members seeking solutions to their
religious quandaries. Buber responded
by denying that he had anything to
teach. “I do not know what ideas are,”
he claimed. “Whoever expects of me a
doctrine . . . will invariably be disap-
pointed.” His words sound like the ut-
terance of a Zen master contemplating
a koan, and, indeed, Buber had long
been fascinated by Taoism and Bud-
dhism. The best way to understand
Buber, ultimately, may be not as a thinker
but as a seeker—a religious type that
became common in the twentieth cen-
tury, as many Europeans and Americans
turned to Eastern faiths or modern ide-
ologies in their search for meaning.
In 1951, Buber delivered a series of
three lectures in New York that served
as a pendant to the Prague lectures he
had given forty years earlier. In the in-
tervening decades, the position of the
Jews had changed more dramatically
than in any comparable span of time in
the previous two thousand years, and
Buber had witnessed those changes at
first hand. As a young man, he had
sounded a call to rally the Jewish spirit;
now he pondered whether Judaism had
a future at all. “How is a life with God
still possible in a time in which there is
an Auschwitz?” he asked. “The estrange-
ment has become too cruel, the hidden-
ness too deep.”
Yet Buber remained convinced that
the human need for a relationship with
God was indestructible. That is why he
hoped to speak not just to Jews but to
a whole broken world. For all of us, he
wrote, the question we ask “in the in-
nermost recesses of the heart” is the
same: “Can you teach me to believe?” 

BOOKS
STEAL THIS BOOK
Reappraising hippies and Yippies through historical fiction.
BY THOMAS MALLON
n June, 1967, Abbie Hoffman, the
I antic gadfly of the Vietnam years,
wed his second wife, Anita, in a hip-
pie happening on Central Park’s Great
Lawn. That August, he rained dollar
bills onto perplexed—and then madly
grasping—traders on the floor of the
New York Stock Exchange.Two months
later, he participated in a wishful at-
tempt to levitate the Pentagon, and
the following year, with Jerry Rubin,
he led the prankish Youth International
Party (the Yippies) toward the bloody
fray outside the Democratic National
Convention. At the subsequent trial of
the Chicago Seven, he was convicted
of crossing state lines to incite a riot.
Joshua Furst novelizes the life of Abbie Hoffman, as told by an embittered son.
ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE CUSHMAN
Hoffman was still appealing the verdict
in 1971, when he and Anita became the
parents of a son. Jonah Raskin quotes
the new father in “For the Hell of It”
(1996), his biography of Hoffman: “We
decided to call our kid america because
we believe that when the state finally
fades, nations will be named after peo-
ple and people will be nations.”
In the late sixties, Hoffman, who
was born in 1936, always looked, and
was, too old to be doing the sorts of
things he did. He had begun the de-
cade as a buttoned-down young man
of the civil-rights movement, organiz-
ing with the Student Nonviolent Co-
ordinating Committee. But one sensed,
when watching his televised reinvention,
that he was struggling to keep up, that
the explosive hair and the American-
flag shirt were less a matter of natural
exuberance than of aspirational color-
ing. Even the title of his guide to cre-
ative protest and freeloading, “Steal
This Book” (1971), seemed more plain-
tive than audacious.
In a new novel, “Revolutionaries”
(Knopf ), Joshua Furst has done Hoff-
man the historical-fiction honor of steal-
ing his life and refracting it, slightly, into
the tale of Lenny Snyder. Narrated by
Lenny’s son, Freedom, the book depicts
the younger man’s struggle to remain
awed by his father’s capering even as
he draws up a lengthy bill of particulars
against Lenny’s neglect and egomania.
The novel opens with a mashup of
Melville and Salinger: “Call me Fred.
I hate Freedom. That’s some crap Lenny
dreamed up to keep people like you
talking about him.”This narrative voice,
garrulous and aggrieved, spares us none
of Lenny’s grandiosity and offstage
rages, or his panicked “premonition of
failure” and secret inability to believe
his own shtick. His approach to par-
enting is an extension of his activism:
“I was a party trick Lenny pulled from
his sleeve,” Freedom says. As a baby,
Freedom had been strapped to a pon-
derosa pine by his stoned parents as
part of an environmental protest. “Is
that abuse?” he wonders now. “I don’t
know. You tell me. When Lenny told
the story, he played it for laughs.” Later,
hoping for some like-father-like-son
success, Lenny teaches Freedom how
to steal from a bodega, only to be dis-
gusted when the kid chickens out. And
yet, for all his awareness that he was
“raised in a cult” of Lenny’s personal-
ity, Freedom pushes himself to under-
stand his father, to attain at least am-
bivalence and, on occasion, to show a
sentimental mercy.
Never seen from the inside out,
Lenny remains the sum of his loud
and repetitious behaviors, and, as with
Hoffman himself, a little of him goes
a long way. “Revolutionaries” is best
when Lenny is out of sight—locked
up or on the run. He gets arrested for
selling cocaine to two undercover cops
on August 14, 1973, two weeks before
Hoffman’s real-life bust at the Hotel
Diplomat in New York. Lenny has
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 65

“I’ve heard tell of a Ray’s even more original.”
• •
trouble making bail and otherwise find-
ing much support. The charges against
him are too grubby, the country has
moved on from his moment, and his
former allies feel “a personal desire to
see Lenny suffer. Everyone had some
grudge or other that they’d been clutch-
ing tight.” With Suzy, his acid-tripping
mother, in tow, young Freedom wheat-
pastes “FREE LENNY SNYDER” posters
all over the Lower East Side.
Furst vividly depicts figures from
the period, sometimes under their own
names (the radical attorney William
Kunstler) and sometimes sporting ro-
man-à-clef tags. “Sy Neuman” is clearly
Jerry Rubin, one of Hoffman’s old Chi-
cago co-defendants. By the mid-sev-
enties, Neuman is well into his Yip-
pie-to-yuppie transformation, selling
vitamin supplements, refusing to donate
to Lenny’s defense, and giving Free-
dom a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Anthem.”
Phil Ochs, appearing without an alias,
is the book’s most poignant figure—
and, in fact, a far richer subject for a
novel than Abbie Hoffman. The reader
initially cringes as this gentle folksinger,
spiralling through delusions of perse-
66 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
cution, becomes a fat and drunk maun-
derer. But Furst’s portrait of him ends
up being rounded and tender. The singer
provides Freedom not only with money
but also with a kind of sodden stabil-
ity. The actual Ochs committed suicide
in 1976, at the age of thirty-five. Thir-
teen years later, Hoffman killed him-
self, at fifty-two.
Suzy remains a hapless figure, inca-
pable of much growth or clarity. When
Lenny jumps bail and decides to go un-
derground, she’s left stranded. Hiding
beneath bleached hair and rhinoplasty,
Lenny refuses to take any blame for the
poverty and surveillance to which his
wife and son are now subjected. Suzy
writes him pathetically reassuring let-
ters, and is slow to accept a splash of
cold water that she receives from a fem-
inist acquaintance about her supposedly
equal partnership with Lenny: “You
keep saying we, but all I ever saw was
him.” A secret family reunion, a cou-
ple of years into his exile, reveals Lenny
to be as manipulative as ever, and at
last seems to give Freedom a defini-
tive sense of his father’s fakeness. More
than a dozen years later, at a magazine-
sponsored gathering of sixties radicals,
Lenny is the most self-important and
humorless of the lot.
urst’s previous book, and first novel,
F “The Sabotage Café” (2007), is also
a dive into rebellion gone squalidly
wrong. A Minneapolis mother named
Julia imagines what her runaway teen-
age daughter, Cheryl, is experiencing
in the grunge dens of Dinkytown,
twenty years after Julia herself disap-
peared into the same bohemian neigh-
borhood. Furst does a good job with
the grime and gross-outs of junky am-
bience, and he creates strung-out dia-
logue that’s aimlessly believable—even
as Julia, a hearer of voices who explains
that she has “been cursed with too much
empathy,” reaches a pinnacle of narra-
tive unreliability.
The author’s attraction to the ag-
onies of the young has been evident
from his first book, a collection of sto-
ries, “Short People” (2003), whose child
and adolescent protagonists suffer at
the hands of peers and parents. The
latter can be as immature and troubled
as the children they’re raising. One
story, “The Good Parents,” concerns a
permissive mother-father team whose
high-minded plans for rearing a son
and a daughter go so awry that “they
called Social Services on themselves.”
Just as Lenny Snyder’s programmatic
anarchy can’t disguise his own vain-
glorious needs, the father in “The Good
Parents” can’t suppress violent inclina-
tions toward his wife and daughter. In
the middle of a crisis, after a phone
has been flung across the room, the
son tries to get inside his father’s head:
Dad, reeling from Mom’s accusation, and
fumbling for something to moor him in place,
picked up the pieces of the phone. Everything
seemed unfamiliar to him, slightly shifted, the
perspective skewed, diced and cubed, and he
wasn’t sure when or how this had happened.
A page later, the narrator, only five years
old, admits the problem with his own
method: “I’ve been trying to under-
stand this from Dad’s point of view. I
didn’t have one of my own at the time;
I was too young and was still moving
forward.” The story wants to be both in
the moment and retrospective, but it de-
pends on perceptions that the boy is too
young to have recorded and retained.
In “Revolutionaries,” Freedom is
apologetically aware of being a child
for most of the events he describes.
He confesses to readers, “These weren’t
thoughts a six-year-old could manage,
and I couldn’t have articulated them
like this, but I felt them flickering just
beyond my comprehension.” Even if
we believe that he somehow processed
them later, it’s still a challenge to ac-
cept all the things that the forsaken
tyke supposedly said and did at the
time. “Songs don’t fix anything,” he
tells Phil Ochs, whom he occasionally
cares for with the precocity of the Art-
ful Dodger:
All I had to do was roll him into a cab, coax
his wallet from his pocket and pay off the driver.
“Twenty-four Clinton Street,” I’d tell the guy.
“Here’s an extra five bucks in case he throws up.”
“Revolutionaries” also has to fight
its way out of the long shadow cast by
“The Book of Daniel”(1971), E. L. Doc-
torow’s novel about the surviving son
of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, a cou-
ple closely modelled on the Rosenbergs.
Barely adolescent at the time of his
parents’ execution, in 1954, for conspir-
acy to commit espionage, Daniel be-
gins coming to terms with his family
history as a Columbia graduate stu-
dent. (Artie Sternlicht, a flamboyant
anti-Vietnam War activist in the novel,
is clearly based on Abbie Hoffman.)
Daniel’s movement between pride and
self-loathing is amplified by deliber-
ately jarring shifts between first- and
third-person narrative, as well as by an
assortment of devices and flourishes
meant to give the novel a mythic air.
“The Book of Daniel” feels unabashed
in its desire to be a great book, a re-
demption of a dark America. “Revolu-
tionaries” is a much more modest pro-
duction. It is, to be sure, over-exampled
and overdetermined, but it knows how
to get out of its own way—how, inter-
mittently, to turn down the political
and historical volume to let a reader
see instead of just hear. Lenny has “the
sweat pouring off him like he’d burst a
pipe”; at Freedom and Suzy’s house,
“everyone lived on top of everyone else,
like layers of paint splashed over the
same wall.”
At forty-eight, Furst is part of a
broad literary demographic that has
discovered the sixties and seventies to
be a kind of shuttered gold mine. Break-
ing into it requires imaginative nerve,
a drive to appropriate experience that
the authors just missed living. The re-
sults have sometimes been exceptional,
like the sleek reanimation of Red Bri-
gades terrorism in “The Flamethrow-
ers” (2013), by Rachel Kushner (born in
1968); or the leisurely, sometimes mor- MotherÕs Day order by 5/8!
dant characterization of Wendy Yoshi- Your
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elists: like Furst’s new book, “The Girls”
(2016), by Emma Cline (born in 1989),
gives off a sense that the narrator (a pe-
ripheral figure in a Manson-style cult)
carries not only a burden but also a
weird privilege by being connected to
something legendary. All this may have
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he is tormented.
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lore that is decried can still shimmer,
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thing a great deal that made people
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easily taken for granted, accepted as a
given, even when they go sickeningly
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them? And what exactly were Lenny
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conceded to him, no matter how bit-
terly, by his son?
For all the scales that drop from Small space
Freedom’s eyes, a thick rose-colored has big rewards.
lens remains in place. However clearly
he comes to see Lenny the man, he still
propounds his father’s politics as baldly
as Lenny did himself. When describ-
ing Phil Ochs’s decline, Freedom ex-
plains the post-antiwar early seven-
ties: “We all know what happened. The
jackboots were called out. Autocratic
power, both overt and covert, kicked To find out more, contact
the life out of everything beautiful in NATALIE STROBL
the land. A lesson in raw political re- at
ality that Phil had ignored for far, far, 305.520.5158.
far, far too long.” Freedom is still Len-
ny’s boy, still scorning the world that
Lenny scorned, still believing he’d be
there but for fortune. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 67

BOOKS
LOVELORN
The novelist Lena Andersson makes anguished comedy from obsessive love.
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ
cts of Infidelity” (Other Press), the
“A new novel by the Swedish writer
Lena Andersson, begins with a plaintive
act of devotion. A woman calls a flower
shop and asks that a single gerbera daisy
be delivered to an actor at Stockholm’s
Scala Theatre, along with a note signed
with a false name. She’s so anxious that
her request be carried out to the letter
that she phones the florist back several
times. “Quite a handful,” the florist tells
her husband, and readers who are famil-
iar with Andersson will agree. The wom-
an’s real name is Ester Nilsson; she first
appeared as the protagonist of Anders-
son’s cerebral cat’s cradle of a novel, “Will-
ful Disregard,” published in Sweden in
2013 and in the United States three years
Andersson is fascinated by how easily rationality can topple head over heels.
68 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
later. At the start of that book, Ester is
thirty-one, a poet and a philosopher who
prides herself on her logical approach to
life. She travels only when necessary, eats
cheaply, and generally keeps clear of any-
thing that might obstruct her intellec-
tual pursuits—“decoding reality and lo-
cating language’s most truthful illustra-
tion of it.”
Then she meets Hugo Rask, a famous
older artist, and her principles go to hell.
Readily abasing herself in the name of
love, she pops up unannounced at Hu-
go’s studio, sends him lengthy text mes-
sages on the nature of desire, and circles
the same block twice so that she will bump
into him—Oh, hello!—when he has ob-
viously been keeping his distance. But
nothing is obvious to Ester. When Hugo
stops calling after they have sex, she ties
herself in metaphysical knots to interpret
his evasions as signs of forthcoming com-
mitment. Only when she discovers that
he has started seeing another woman does
the spell break. “In a week’s time she would
have endured a year of suffering,” An-
dersson writes at the novel’s close, like a
ship’s captain making a final log entry
after a disastrous voyage. “There was
nothing left to understand.” The book
practically shuts itself in your face.
“Acts of Infidelity,” published in Swe-
den in 2014, follows a similar trajectory.
What makes these simple stories of un-
requited passion so unusual and grip-
ping is Ester. Here is how she is intro-
duced in the first novel, in a triumphal-
ist march of a paragraph (the translation
is by Sarah Death):
From the horizons of her own conscious-
ness she perceived reality with devastating pre-
cision and lived by the understanding that the
world was as she experienced it. Or to be more
precise, that people were so constituted as to
experience the world as it was, as long as they
did not let their attention wander, or lie to them-
selves. The subjective was the objective, and
the objective the subjective.
Many novels document a journey from
ignorance to knowledge, or something
like it. Fewer perform the opposite trick.
Ester thinks of herself as a scientist, run-
ning the stuff of life through experiments
of her own devising. Actually, she is An-
dersson’s lab rat, infected with ardor and
left to wander through the novels’ maze,
bashing blindly into its obstacles.
Those obstacles can be delightfully
basic. In one early scene in “Willful
Disregard,” Ester drops in on Hugo at
his studio. It’s fall, and she is wearing
a new jacket, bought for the occasion,
but she can’t figure out what to do with
it. If she keeps it on, she’ll get too hot;
if she removes it, she fears that Hugo
will realize she never wants to leave:
“Ester Nilsson, who generally dismissed
shame and glory because both of them
made the individual a slave to the judg-
ments of others, now sat there wonder-
ing how much or how little she should
take her jacket off to ensure nobody
noticed how much she was in love.” The
moment is funny—see the smart lady
slip on a mental banana peel—and also
a little sad, as consciousness of self, a vir-
tue Ester believes she has mastered, is
ILLUSTRATION BY RACHEL LEVIT RUIZ
flipped into a plaguing self-consciousness.
“Willful Disregard,” which won Swe-
den’s top book prize, was Andersson’s
fifth novel, and her first to be published
in English. She’s forty-nine, and a col-
umnist for a leading newspaper—a big
name in a small country. In 2016, she re-
ceived a critics’ award praising her as “a
rational voice in an irrational time.” The
frightening, hilarious speed with which
a rational voice can turn irrational is largely
what the Ester Nilsson chronicles are
about; Andersson uses fiction not to en-
shrine critical principles but to reveal
their limits. Her style is blunt, pragmatic,
dogged. “Small talk drained her,” she
writes of Ester, and you sense that the
same is true of Andersson. Politics, bi-
ology, and the law are all frames of ref-
erence, in surprising ways. One chapter
of “Willful Disregard” begins with a long,
dryly comic comparison between love
and the Swedish welfare state. (Both in-
volve “the dissatisfaction of rising expec-
tations.”) Then, there’s the book’s epi-
graph. Rather than pick some redolent
quotation from the garden of literature,
Andersson plunks down a dense excerpt
from the Swedish Penal Code, which
states that the charge of “unlawful dis-
possession” applies not only to a thief but
also “to a person who, without any ap-
propriation, by fitting or breaking a lock
or by other means unlawfully disturbs
another’s possession.”
The act of “disturbing” another per-
son’s property is akin to stealing it; you
may be punished for locking up some-
one’s bicycle even if you never ride it,
since you have restricted the owner’s
rightful use. Ester, disturbed by her love
of Hugo, wants to hold him similarly
liable. “You’ve laid claim to me,” she tells
him. “You’ve been inside my body. Don’t
you think that puts me in some sort of
privileged position in which your integ-
rity has to yield and it’s kind of incum-
bent on you to talk to me about actions
you take that affect me so badly I can
actually hardly stand upright?”
Her idea that Hugo’s lovemaking en-
tails obligations on his end, and entitle-
ments on hers, sounds a lot like old-fash-
ioned romantic morality, which she used
to dismiss as “a meaningless concept
from an irrational age.” Things weren’t
equal for women then. But nor are they
equal now, in the open field of modern
relationships—“this idiocy of caprice
and sentiment,” Andersson calls it. An-
dersson’s critique of the modern order
is particularly sharp when it touches on
ghosting, that torture by technology. “It
was a perfect demonstration of how to
kill a person by social means,” Ester
thinks, when Hugo stops answering her
text messages.There are sanctions against
physical murder; why not against the
social kind?
hen you open “Acts of Infidelity”
W and discover Ester in the throes
of a second doomed obsession, you want
to send her an underlined copy of “Will-
ful Disregard.” Has she learned nothing
from that misadventure? Well, yes and
no. Ester is now in her late thirties. She
has published four more books of phi-
losophy and poetry (“anti-lyrical,” of
course) and is wary of love, but not closed
to it. This time, the object of her affec-
tion is Olof Sten, the actor to whom she
sends the flower at the novel’s start. They
meet when he is cast as the lead in a play
that she has written, about a married man
who meets another woman but won’t
leave his wife. “The play was not pro-
phetic,” Andersson tells us, chiding us for
our conventional narrative expectations.
Almost immediately, though, Ester
finds herself acting out the same scenario.
Olof is married to a doctor who works
in a different city and comes to Stock-
holm only on weekends. As if drawing
up war plans, Ester sets out on a cam-
paign of flirtation. She and Olof eat and
drink together, take walks, go to muse-
ums and, eventually, to bed. This time,
she decides, “ambiguity would not pre-
vail.” Ester swiftly announces that she
wants to spend the rest of her life with
Olof; her metaphorical jacket comes right
off. But Olof makes it plain that he has
no intention of ending his marriage, so
Ester once again persuades herself that
her lover’s passivity is a prelude to action.
When he asks her not to text him at
Christmastime, she decides it means that
he’s preparing to get a divorce. When he
says he won’t get a divorce, she reminds
herself that it’s only a matter of time.
This sort of thing goes on for three years.
Where Hugo treated Ester with de-
tachment or contempt, Olof can some-
times be tender, admiring, even amorous.
The problem is that the ambiguity of
their relationship suits him too well. Ester
finds herself in a traditional romantic ar-
rangement after all, just not the one she
wanted: she is a mistress, a woman to be
enjoyed, ignored, hidden, spurned, and
reeled back in, all at her lover’s conve-
nience. In a moment of clarity, Ester tells
Olof that he treats her like a bank, tak-
ing what he needs, always knowing when
his credit is running low so that he can
make a deposit of affection. In her mind,
it is his wife who has become the ille-
gitimate Other Woman.
Like most sequels, “Acts of Infidel-
ity” isn’t flattered by a comparison with
its predecessor. Its rhythms are already
familiar; it seems baggy, overlong. (The
translation, by Saskia Vogel, is stodgier,
too.) You can sometimes feel like tear-
ing your hair out watching Ester repeat
her painful errors. “Ester Nilsson had
striven for psychological realism, and
that’s exactly what she thought she’d
achieved, but the critics would call it ab-
surdist,” Andersson writes, of Ester’s play.
Her point is that this isn’t necessarily a
contradiction in terms.
Watching Ester run adoringly after
Olof can recall the heartsick Helena, in
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” chas-
ing after her disgusted ex-lover, Deme-
trius. Helena compares herself to a faith-
ful spaniel: “The more you beat me, I
will fawn on you.” Demetrius is hardly
worthy of this kind of fealty, and nei-
ther is Olof. A hallmark of Andersson’s
novels is how spiritually and intellectu-
ally insipid the male love interests are.
Olof ’s only edge over Hugo is that, while
Hugo thought of himself as deep, Olof
knows he is shallow.
Ester knows it, too, but these brainy
books are not all brain. Their wheels are
turned by lust, and by some other cate-
gory of desire that can’t be as easily
named. She tells Olof that she isn’t blind
to his “awful ambivalence and the cru-
elty that it causes.” But, she goes on,
“when I think of your essence, your pres-
ence in a room, the way you receive me
sometimes, not to mention everything
that radiates from you—inside and out—
and all the things that just have to be
right between two people, because they
can’t be engineered . . . when I think of
all this, I never hesitate.” Her honesty,
usually disconcerting, is also brave; she
refuses to suffer with quiet propriety. Yet
what’s most touching is that uncharac-
teristic ellipsis, marking a place that not
even words can reach. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 69

THE THEATRE
BIG SHOTS
Underdogs take center stage in “Ink” and “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus.”
BY HILTON ALS
“ I nk” (at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre) and
“Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus”
(at the Booth) are both exciting plays, or,
more specifically, plays that should excite
something in the audience, if only a
greater understanding of how certain
genres work, or don’t. Of the two, the
ninety-minute “Gary” is the more engag-
ing spectacle; it takes a “what if ” situa-
tion and explodes it. “Ink” is your fairly
standard slice-of-life drama, but one that’s
been tricked out to feel more contempo-
rary than it really is. How the playwright,
James Graham, and the director, Rupert
Goold, achieved this effect accounts for
what’s interesting about the nearly three-
hour drama—and for why it fails.
The time is 1969 to 1970; the place,
London. A young publisher from Aus-
70 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
tralia named Rupert Murdoch (Bertie
Carvel) knows a guy named Larry Lamb
( Jonny Lee Miller). Lamb, a married
man and a father, is the Northern edi-
tor of the Daily Mail, England’s best-sell-
ing tabloid. Murdoch and Lamb are both
outsiders in a class-conscious society, and
Murdoch has no problem saying so; for
him, recognizing a fellow-underdog
when he sees one is a point of pride.
Over dinner one night, Murdoch,
who likes his steak rarer than rare—one
gets the feeling there could never be
enough blood on the plate or in life for
him—tells Lamb who Lamb is, at least
from Murdoch’s perspective. Is there
any other? “You were the best Sub on
the Street,” Murdoch says—meaning
copy editor. “Did your time at the Mir-
ror and after a decade it began to dawn
on you they would never let you sit in
the pilot’s seat. Not you. Not Larry
Lamb, the Yorkshire-born son of a black-
smith, not the guy who didn’t get a de-
gree from Oxford or Cambridge, who
didn’t get a degree from anywhere. Not
you.” Resentment is Murdoch’s fuel, and
he knows it has driven Lamb, too.
Despite an initial reluctance, Lamb
agrees to take on the role of editor-in-
chief of Murdoch’s new purchase, the
Sun. They want the moribund broad-
sheet to trounce the Daily Mail and be-
come the voice of the British working-
man. “Ink” had its première in 2017, in
London’s West End, and it’s filled with
allusions and references to the British
character and news culture that don’t
translate to the U.S. Another problem is
that Graham never really tells us who
Murdoch is, so we’re left to rely on what
we’ve read in various exposés about the
mighty patriarch, his children, and the
lengths to which he’s gone to acquire
what he has. But what accounts for his
grim determination? Was his background
as humble as Lamb’s? If not, what at-
tracted him to Lamb and his kind?
Bertie Carvel won an Olivier Award
for his performance, and it’s a sexy one,
for the same reasons that his Miss Trunch-
bull, another bully, in the Royal Shake-
speare Company’s 2010 production of
“Matilda the Musical,” was a turn-on:
Carvel loves putting himself out there
and showing us a good time. He’s not a
naturalistic performer, but he’s not a
shticky one, either; he embodies bravado,
and has fun overindicating. Dressed in
his habitual black suit, Carvel’s Murdoch
pulls his neck back when he speaks or
listens: he’s a reptile waiting to strike. As
played by the forty-one-year-old Carvel,
Murdoch wields his narcissism like a
shield; it insulates him from what others
might think of his reptilian ways. Lamb’s
need for Murdoch’s approval is the filial
drama that frames the play, providing a
little homoeroticism along the way.
Miller’s Lamb is totally credible. But,
in a way, the forty-six-year-old amour is
too sensitive for the role; he’s an inter-
nal performer whose intensity is best ex-
perienced onscreen, in closeup. Miller
doesn’t play Lamb as a villain but as the
kind of guy who commutes from Scars-
dale, trying to do the best he can for
himself and his family (none of whom
we meet). Like the rest of us, he’s a mor-
ILLUSTRATION BY BILL BRAGG
ally compromised person who wants to
succeed but doesn’t know what consti-
tutes success. At the end of the show,
after he has persuaded a young woman
named Stephanie Rahn (Rana Roy) to
pose nude for the Sun, thereby achiev-
ing the kind of popularity for the paper
that Murdoch craves, Lamb is grave as
Rahn demands to know whether he
would have had his daughter do the same.
He can’t really answer the question, be-
cause he’s barely acquainted with his own
motives; he was hired by Murdoch only
to react. Now he’s being asked to think,
by someone who has no power but car-
ries a lot of moral weight, and Miller
captures the moment beautifully.
Graham and Goold aren’t comfort-
able with intimacy, and this is just one
of the ways in which their show is mod-
ern: one is hard put to find young play-
wrights who talk about love. In addition,
there’s Goold’s embrace of the contem-
porary penchant for throwing in a little
dancing as a comment on “entertain-
ment.” But nothing can really obscure
the fact that Graham has written a buddy
newspaper story—one without a buddy
but with all the wisecracking and smok-
ing and typing that we’ve heard and seen
time and again, onstage and in movies
ranging from “The Front Page” to Ste-
ven Spielberg’s “The Post.” What Gra-
ham jettisons in his writing is precisely
what Murdoch and Lamb dumped from
the Sun altogether: history.
he beginning of “Ink” sounds a bit
T like Harold Pinter—it’s the same
staccato, testosterone-amped dialogue
but without so many pauses. Certainly
Pinter has influenced Graham’s writ-
ing, and what’s wrong with that? In an
era when young playwrights mostly
imitate Elizabeth LeCompte, of the
Wooster Group, or any number of the
theory-laden professors they’ve hung
out with in drama school, it’s a good
thing to hear a literate playwright try-
ing to create a world.
Graham gets as close to his charac-
ters as he can, but those wily, bullheaded
subjects weren’t fashioned from his bones.
Perhaps he’s too intelligent for them; his
piece certainly builds nicely, weaving
into a traditional narrative little asides
about the show-business aspect of tab-
loid life. One could make an easy argu-
ment for “Ink” as a treatise on the rotten
rise of celebrity culture, but its intellec-
tual properties aren’t that expansive.
By contrast, Taylor Mac, who wrote
“Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,”
has the smarts to take on the big themes—
death, power, betrayal, responsibility—
and to find credible and incredible argu-
ments in each. In 2015, I saw Mac’s “Hir,”
an unforgettable drama about the death
of patriarchy (but not the end of power).
Entering the world of the family he de-
picted was like walking into a cold and
unknown body of water, in which the
bottom was visible but the shapes on its
surface were almost unrecognizable. I
kept blinking to make sure that what I
was seeing onstage was really happening.
I had a similar experience while watch-
ing Mac’s latest effort, but this time it
was my ears that shivered with pleasure
first. The language of “Gary” is marked
by the play’s high style, by its pathos and
its rhythm. Many plays on Broadway use
dialogue primarily as a means of exposi-
tion; Mac, a well-known performer, writes
as his thinking and his performing self.
“Titus Andronicus,” believed to be
Shakespeare’s first tragedy, contains,
among its violent events, the cutting out
of a woman’s tongue and the murder of
a man who is then baked in a pie. From
this five-act horror show, Mac has taken
three minor characters, servants, and
named them Carol ( Julie White), Gary
(Nathan Lane), and Janice (the brilliant
Kristine Nielsen, who also played the
scary mommy in “Hir”). The space they
share is Titus’s banquet room, where, at
the end of Shakespeare’s play, the bod-
ies have piled up—the carnage of war
and betrayal. It is up to the practical Jan-
ice to teach the newly recruited Gary
how to dispose of all that flesh—remov-
ing the jewels from the corpses, bleed-
ing them, cutting them up—in order to
prepare the room for the next inaugura-
tion. The problem is that Gary traffics
not in bodies but in souls. He’s a clown
with more than a modicum of self-knowl-
edge. Gazing out at the audience—the
circles around his eyes give him the look
of a perpetually sad poodle—Gary says:
I guess I’m what you’d call, comic relief.
A joke, that’s what I was, and not a good
one.
’Cause when that joke’s on you, it ain’t that
fun.
I used to juggle pigeons in the gutter.
So didn’t clean but helped to make the
clutter:
I always was a clown who hated clowns.
Ya know the type who stumbles ’bout the
towns
With off-timed jokes invariably that flop,
And so becomes a target for the slop—
For when your talent’s barely juggling birds
It makes a bloke a bull’s-eye for the turds—
Not metaphorical and not from fowl
But actual poo found in a human bowel.
My great-great granddad was a clown. They
claim
He wasn’t good as well but all the same
He passed routines on down to us that
followed
And every generation grinned and
swallowed
Our place inside the square with poo and
pigeons
As clowning was inherited like religions.
Mac’s ability to elevate doggerel
to verse—and to a mirror of his prota-
gonist’s essence—is no small thing: it is
the work of a real writer expressing
depths in a popular form. In Mac’s ver-
sion of a revenge fantasy, Gary and the
girls shoulder the burden of responsi-
bility without the catharsis of having
done the job themselves. Their oppres-
sors are dead, but, as in “Hir,” power re-
mains a terrible human need. I have
never liked Lane and White as whole-
heartedly as I did watching them in
“Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus,”
mostly because of their and Neilsen’s ad-
miration for the script, and where it takes
them as performers. Mac’s words illu-
minate them, somehow, because the
ninety-minute intermissionless piece
showcases the risks they’re willing to
take for good material.
It’s impossible to tell how much the
savvy director, George C. Wolfe, added
to the broadness of the proceedings. But
Mac has been moving in this direction
for a long time. “Hir” had its share of
mayhem. This show is part burlesque,
part lyric. Although I am not especially
attracted to the former genre, this doesn’t
detract from the lyricism we hear and
see as Carol, Gary, and Janice scoop up
all that awful wreckage. Sometimes they
do it without saying a word, and I lived
as much for those moments as for the
sound of Mac’s dialogue, which re-
minded me, at times, of Tennessee Wil-
liams in its poetry and its ability to il-
lustrate, among other things, how, if we
let alone the powers that be—well, they’ll
never fail to leave their shit for some-
body else to clean up, and the next some-
body might just be you. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 71

THE CURRENT CINEMA
LEAPS AND BOUNDS
“The White Crow” and “Avengers: Endgame.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
ho should play the snake? That
W was a big issue for the creators of
“The Bible: In the Beginning” (1966),
an all-star version of Holy Writ—or, at
least, of its first twenty-two books. The
director, John Huston, when asked how
the production was faring, had a stock
reply: “I don’t know how God managed.
I’m having a terrible time.” For the Gar-
The dancer Oleg Ivenko plays Rudolf Nureyev in Ralph Fiennes’s bio-pic.
den of Eden section, he found an Adam
from California and an Eve from Swe-
den. (This was the mid-sixties, after all.)
Better yet, for the fiend with the fangs,
the bringer of all our woe, Huston had
someone special in mind: Rudolf Nure-
yev. “He will slither down the tree,” Hus-
ton said, adding, “He will be a man-ser-
pent, a kind of hybrid, homo-reptile.”
How could you not take advice on apple
consumption from somebody like that?
This casting coup, alas, did not come
to pass. For moviegoers, it’s a matter
of enduring regret that Nureyev, the
most celebrated ballet dancer of his
era, left so little trace onscreen. True,
there are plenty of filmed records of
him in performance; his duet with Mar-
got Fonteyn in “Le Corsaire” is a no-
72 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019
table favorite. But his lone starring role
in the cinema was as another much-
mobbed Rudy, in Ken Russell’s “Val-
entino” (1975), a project that anyone
could have told Nureyev to avoid. More
than once, he was lured toward a bio-
pic of Nijinsky. One such enterprise, as
Julie Kavanagh recounts in her 2007
life of Nureyev, was to be written by
Edward Albee and directed by Tony
Richardson, with Paul Scofield as Serge
Diaghilev. It was never made.
Now, by way of rueful compensation,
we have “The White Crow,” a film about
Nureyev—or, at least, about his first
twenty-three years. The script, by David
Hare, is inspired by Kavanagh’s thor-
ough and thrilling biography, and the
director is Ralph Fiennes, who also takes
the role of Alexander Pushkin, Rudy’s
teacher at ballet school in Leningrad.
Nureyev is played by Oleg Ivenko, in
his movie début, who reminds us that
dance films, like sports films, come with
a built-in headache. Do you cast actors
who lack the specialized skill of the char-
acters and hope to smooth over the joins,
if you can, with body doubles, cutaway
shots, and so on? Or do you cast people
who do have the requisite skill but can’t,
broadly speaking, act? The first option
leads to clunkers like “Escape to Vic-
tory” (1981), a wartime soccer drama that
strove to convince us that Sylvester Stal-
lone would make a plausible goalkeeper.
(The director was, yes, John Huston. He
was a glutton for challenges.) The sec-
ond option brings us “The White Crow.”
Ivenko is a trained dancer. How good
he is, and how accurate his imperson-
ation of Nureyev’s style manages to be,
I’m not qualified to judge. But he seems
a couple of notches too tame; you never
imagine, as you did with Nureyev, that
one of his great-grandmothers, on a trip
to the East, had a fling with a Siberian
tiger. Ivenko is also lumbered, poor lad,
with dialogue in English as well as in
Russian, and some of his line readings
are as flat as the boards on which he
treads. And yet, despite that, you warm
to him and will him on. He finds just
the right angle of arrogance when tilt-
ing his head, and draws close to the orig-
inal in his beauty of face and form. Most
important of all, he is framed in full
figure as he moves. Whether onstage or
at the barre, whether practicing alone
or bringing an audience to a boil, this
Nureyev can be seen whole, in leaps and
bounds, with no editor’s sleight of hand.
As any Cyd Charisse fan will confirm,
that honesty matters more than acting.
It’s what we are used to, if we were raised
on Kelly and Astaire, and what we feel
entitled to, in our greed for grace.
Structurally, the film is all chop and
change, with Hare and Fiennes tacking
back and forth across Nureyev’s early
years. Some viewers will find the result
too fussy by half; I liked its restlessness,
and the sense of a chafed and driven
spirit that refuses to be boxed in. We see
Rudolf as a child, raised in drastic pov-
erty, with the colors around him drained
to the brink of monochrome. We see
him as a lanky youth, taken not just under
Pushkin’s wing but into his home, too,
and into the furtive arms of Pushkin’s
wife, Xenia (Chulpan Khamatova). And
we see him in Paris, in 1961, touring with
the Kirov and dazed by the shock of the
West—by its cultural storehouse as much
as by its unfenced liberties.
There is something boldly unmod-
ish about “The White Crow,” staffed
as it is by high-minded and unironic
ILLUSTRATION BY TATSURO KIUCHI
folk. Nureyev is first in line to enter the
Louvre one morning, so that he can
stand alone in front of Géricault’s “Raft
of the Medusa,” inspecting its bundle
of bodies arched in despair. Despite
the interlude with Xenia, plus a cursory
glance at a male bedmate, his cultural
appetites get way more attention from
the movie than his carnal wants. Of the
stormy pansexual surfeit of his later life
(he died of AIDS in 1993, at the age of
fifty-four) we see no sign.
It’s hard, nowadays, to recall how fa-
mous Nureyev was. His renown, like
that of Maria Callas, was such that he
was known far beyond his field of ex-
pertise. (In François Truffaut’s 1970 film
“Bed and Board,” the heroine sits in
bed, engrossed in a book on Nureyev,
ignoring the lover beside her.) What
placed him squarely in the spotlight
was his defection to the West, at the
end of the Kirov tour, and the dénoue-
ment of “The White Crow” occurs at
Le Bourget airport, in suburban Paris.
There, Nureyev is encircled by Soviet
officials, as if by a pack of wolves. He
has just learned that, rather than ac-
companying the rest of the troupe to
London, he must return to Moscow
and dance for Khrushchev: a blatant
trap. If he wants asylum, he has to re-
quest it from the French police, who
are standing nearby, at a bar—“six steps
exactly,” as he later recalled. Even his
flight for freedom is like a dance.
“The White Crow” is muted and re-
strained, leagues away from the vault-
ing ecstasy of “The Red Shoes” (1948),
and the best performances—from Alek-
sey Morozov, as Strizhevsky, Nureyev’s
K.G.B. minder, and from Fiennes him-
self, as Pushkin—are also the most dole-
ful. The first man is more of a rumina-
tor than a brute, though his threats are
solid enough (“I know you must love
your mother,” he says darkly to the de-
fector, hinting at reprisals back home),
and the second is a sad-eyed stoic, pious
in his fidelity to ballet and resigned to
his status as a cuckold. Asked about his
protégé’s escape from Russia, he ascribes
it, with a touch of envy and awe, to “an
explosion of character.” Although the
airport sequence quickens the pulse,
as intended, with our hero forced to
decide his own fate on the spur of the
moment, the entire movie, even in its
calmer passages, strikes me as mysteri-
ously tense. Maybe Nureyev was primed
to explode from the start. For him, I
guess, every moment was a spur.
t the close of “Avengers: Infinity
A War” (2018), the mighty Thanos
( Josh Brolin) took it upon himself to
eradicate half the universe. He had
clearly read “The Life-Changing Magic
of Tidying Up” and set his heart on be-
coming a cosmic Marie Kondo. Among
those swept away were several valued
members of the Avengers team (plus,
for what it’s worth, a huge chunk of the
human race), and, ever since, specula-
tion has fizzed as to whether they could
possibly come back.
The answer is provided by “Aveng-
ers: Endgame,” directed by Joe and An-
thony Russo, which represents the final
chapter of the franchise. Among the
survivors are Iron Man (Robert Downey,
Jr.), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson),
Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor
(Chris Hemsworth), Rocket (Bradley
Cooper), and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo),
who has somehow fused his two selves,
the small clever person and the large
green one, and now looks exactly like
Shrek. If you’d asked me, in advance,
how these heroes could undo the rav-
ages of the past, my money would have
been on time travel; that certainly
worked in “Superman” (1978), when the
Man of Steel circumwhizzed the globe
to resurrect Lois Lane. My other hunch
was that the new film might turn out
to be based on Samuel Beckett’s “End-
game,” and that the Avengers would
spend their days squatting miserably
inside ash cans. Captain America could
use his shield as a lid.
For a while, in fact, that scenario
seems quite likely, since most of the
characters have gone to seed. Thanos
has renounced mass destruction in favor
of tending his vegetable patch, Black
Widow sits around eating peanut-butter
sandwiches, and Thor is a fat slob. How
they eventually get their shit together
for a grand and redemptive slugfest, I
refuse to reveal. One must, after all, re-
spect the feelings of the saga’s devotees,
who demand nothing from reviewers
but sobs of nonspecific adulation. Any-
thing else is treason. (In future years, I
suspect, Marvel fandom will be regarded
as a very peculiar phenomenon, and I
wish that Michael Moore, say, could
interrogate the faithful while the flame
still burns.) The one thing you do need
to know about “Avengers: Endgame” is
that it runs for a little over three hours,
and that you can easily duck out during
the middle hour, do some shopping,
and slip back into your seat for the cli-
max. You won’t have missed a thing. 
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, MAY 6, 2019 73

 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 Victoria Roberts,
must be received by Sunday, May 5th. The finalists in the April 22nd contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the May 20th 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

“Are you here about the sublet?”

Dana Rosen-Perez, Westfield, N.J.

“If you’re going out, we need eggs.” “Want to go for a w-a-l-k?”

Neil Jaworski, Manchester, U.K. Dawn Mockler, Fredericton, N.B.

“Can you believe someone just left it here?”

Scott Taylor, Chapel Hill, N.C.
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 THE I N S TA N T N E W YO R K T I M E S
BESTSE LLE R
L IT E R A RY
EVE NT T WO N O R M A L
OF 2019 PEOPLE, ONE
WINNER OF THE AN POST IRISH EX T R AO R D I N A RY
BOOK AWARD
WINNER OF THE COSTA
LOV E STO RY
NOVEL AWARD
“A novel that demands to be read
LONGLISTED FOR: compulsively, in one sitting.”
—T H E WA S H I N G T O N P O S T
THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
THE DYL AN THOMAS PRIZE “A masterpiece, pure
THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION and simple.”
THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE — M i n n e a p o l i s S ta r T r i b u n e

THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL

OF THE YEAR AWARD “Laser-focused and word-perfect.”
— N PR.ORG

“Rooney has . . . a seismo-

grapher’s attention to the dips
and tremors of social value.”
— T H E AT L A N T I C

“[Rooney] understands the particular,

peculiar shape of love and longing.”
—T H E WA L L S T R E E T J O U R N A L

“A stunning novel about the

transformative power of relationships.”
—PEOPLE

“Rooney’s novels have the unusual

power to do what realist fiction was designed
to do: bring to light how our contemporaries
think and act in private.”
Available everywhere books are sold. —T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S B O O K R E V I E W