The New Yorker

Kindle Edition, 2022 © Condé Nast

Contributors

ANA MIMINOSHVILI

Rachel Aviv (

“Impaired Judgment,” p. 34

), a staff writer, will publish “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us” this month.

D. T. Max (

“Fish Kebabs,” p. 28

) has been a staff writer since 2010. His new book, “Finale: Late Conversations with Stephen Sondheim,” will be out in November.

Andrea Cohen (

Poem, p. 52

) is the author of seven poetry collections, including “Everything” and “Nightshade.”

John Cuneo (

Cover

) has contributed to the magazine since 1994. An exhibition of his drawings, “Paperwork,” will be on display at Manjari & Partners, in Paris, starting September 14th.

Leanne Shapton (

Sketchpad, p. 17

) is an artist and a publisher. Her “Swimming Studies” won the 2012 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for autobiography.

Adam Gopnik (

A Critic at Large, p. 64

), a staff writer, is the author, most recently, of “A Thousand Small Sanities.”

Jonathan Blitzer (

“Strongman of the People,” p. 44

) became a staff writer in 2017. He is at work on a book about the U.S. and Central America.

Jennifer Homans (

“The Return,” p. 20

) is the magazine’s dance critic. Her book “Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century” is forthcoming in November.

Joan Silber (

Fiction, p. 56

) has published ten books, including the novels “Secrets of Happiness” and “Improvement.”

Roz Chast (

Sketchbook, p. 39

), a longtime

New Yorker

cartoonist, is the author, with Patricia Marx, of “You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time.”

Harkaitz Cano (

Poem, p. 61

) is a Basque writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His latest book of poems, “Good Wolf, Bad Wolf,” was translated into English by Kristin Addis.

Helen Shaw (

The Theatre, p. 74

) became a theatre critic for the magazine in August.

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

ANNALS OF MEDICINE

Matthew Hutson writes about whether we can predict which viruses will leap from animals to humans.

KEVIN COOLEY/REDUX

A WARMING PLANET

Ingfei Chen on the terrifying choices that Californians living under the threat of wildfires face.

Download the New Yorker app for the latest news, commentary, criticism, and humor, plus this week’s magazine and all issues back to 2008. ■

The Mail

SEEKING JUSTICE IN UKRAINE

Masha Gessen’s grim account of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine makes plain the invaders’ brutal tactics (“The Law of War,” August 8th). More than two decades ago, I co-wrote a human-rights report on Russia’s atrocities in Chechnya—an early indication of Putin’s way of war. Gessen rightly asks whether punishments for such acts can ever fit the crimes, whether prosecutions can deter further atrocities, and whether victims can ever gain closure or adequate compensation. The piece suggests that quick prosecutions might bring about a more just end to the war in Ukraine. Yet there is another, equally profound, reason to pursue justice: doing so formally expresses to the world that such horrors cannot be inflicted with impunity.

Leonard Rubenstein

Professor of the Practice

Bloomberg School of Public Health

Johns Hopkins University

Alexandria, Va.

I admire Gessen’s reporting, and I generally share their skepticism about the likelihood of bringing to justice the Russians responsible for the war crimes and crimes against humanity being committed in Ukraine. As someone who has been deeply involved for four decades in the global struggle to hold perpetrators of such deeds accountable, I am disappointed in what we have achieved. Even so, I feel that Gessen slights the accomplishments of two of the instruments that were intended to serve this purpose: the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (I.C.T.Y.) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (I.C.T.R.). Gessen writes that some of the major war-crimes trials of the twentieth century “yielded only a few verdicts.” Yet the I.C.T.Y. was relatively successful: it indicted a hundred and sixty-one individuals. Some were acquitted, some were referred elsewhere, and some—such as the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević—died in custody. Ninety were sentenced. They include the wartime civilian leader of the Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadžić, and their military leader, Ratko Mladić. The I.C.T.R., in turn, indicted ninety-three people and sentenced sixty-two, including a former Prime Minister of Rwanda, Jean Kambanda. The tribunal also secured the first-ever convictions for genocidal rape, as well as convictions for inciting the genocide through radio broadcasts.

While these successes are worth acknowledging, it is undeniably a shortcoming that we fail to hold to account the largest and most powerful countries—such as China, Russia, and the United States. As Gessen indicates, bringing Russians to justice for their crimes in Ukraine represents a crucial test for the human-rights movement.

Aryeh Neier

Co-founder

Human Rights Watch

New York City

SOUNDS OF SILENCE

I read with great interest John Seabrook’s article about making sounds for electric vehicles, or E.V.s (“On Alert,” August 8th). Although I learned much about how these soundscapes are made, I was disappointed that Seabrook did not mention the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. The million deaf people in the U.S. typically cannot hear internal-combustion-engine vehicles, or even their horns—yet we manage to survive! Silent E.V.s put the public in the same precarious situation that deaf people have been in since the automobile was invented. Perhaps our perspectives, and the skills we’ve developed to protect our lives, could usefully inform the work of those thinking about the future of E.V.s—as well as heighten the awareness of anyone encountering these cars.

Madan Vasishta

Ellicott City, Md.

Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. ■

CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Goings On About Town: This Week

SEPTEMBER 7 – 13, 2022

PHOTOGRAPH BY JONAH ROSENBERG

New York’s roller discos may have dwindled since the Koch era, but this summer a sparkly throwback called

the DiscOasis

has materialized at Central Park’s Wollman Rink, complete with mirror balls and Donna Summer anthems. Lorded over by the disco-funk veteran Nile Rodgers, who curated the music, the roller rink welcomes both tentative date-nighters and seasoned skaters (such as Harry Gaskin, above), with interspersed dance routines by a cast of thirteen, through Oct. 2. Neon-bright attire encouraged.

As ever, it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements.

MUSIC

Derrick Carter

HOUSE

Derrick Carter tends to give the side-eye to heavy pronunciamentos about his music, but there’s little question that his work as a producer and, especially, as a d.j. defines Chicago house. There’s a consistent playfulness whenever Carter gets on the decks: the hi-hats slip around as if on ice, the horns tend to sound rhythmically smeared rather than triumphal, and the swing is as severe as a John Malkovich line reading. Carter closes Golden Hour, a day-into-evening outdoor party; Bears in Space and Dee Diggs get things started.

—Michaelangelo Matos (3 Dollar Bill; Sept. 10.)

The King Khan & BBQ Show

ROCK

If rock and roll is a seesaw teetering between sweetness and debauchery, King Khan & BBQ are the kids leaping on both sides with a bit too much force. Arish Khan (the self-proclaimed king) and Mark Sultan (BBQ) glimmer with wickedness in their comically donned S & M costumery; pity the unsuspecting journalist who once phoned for a scheduled interview only to be greeted by a loudly urinating Khan. Yet the duo’s music tempers any ungentlemanly instincts with tenderness and nostalgia. Their new single, “Going Down,” works blue while paying loving homage to doo-wop, like an old under-the-counter party record performed with heartfelt panache. They crackle onstage, with the flamboyant Khan on guitar and vocals while BBQ, in a feat of coördination, simultaneously sings, drums, and plays guitar. The coolly noirish garage band Miranda and the Beat opens.

—Jay Ruttenberg (Brooklyn Made; Sept. 10.)

Lee “Scratch” Perry: “King Scratch”

REGGAE

The retrospective “King Scratch (Musical Masterpieces from the Upsetter Ark-ive)” concentrates on the late sixties and seventies work of Lee “Scratch” Perry, the dub pioneer who helped codify the reggae beat. The collection, available in various configurations, is best heard in its most luxuriant form—a box containing four LPs plus four CDs. The vinyl features a sharply selected best-of, and the first two compact disks offer a surprising number of gems that haven’t been anthologized to death elsewhere. Working with Junior Byles, Max Romeo, the Congos, and also on his own, Perry was the era’s most adventurous and fecund record producer.

—M.M. (Streaming on select platforms.)

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: “Let’s Turn It Into Sound”

EXPERIMENTAL

The Washington composer and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith studied sound engineering and composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston, but she didn’t discover her love of micro-tuned electronic music until a neighbor back home introduced her to the Buchla 100 synthesizer. By 2016, Smith had grown into her sound, and she released “Ears,” a whirring odyssey that blends the analog and the digital, and “Sunergy,” a serpentine collaboration with the synth trailblazer Suzanne Ciani. Smith has since expanded ever outward—she has made an LP of cosmic exploration and, with the composer Emile Mosseri, a surging ambient record. Smith’s description of her fun new album, “Let’s Turn It Into Sound,” as a puzzle is apt; it is a tough record to crack open, riddled with bending layers of overlaid voice and tricky synth work. This is eclectic music that never stops changing shape. At its most scintillating, each transformation reveals a new dimension.

—Sheldon Pearce (Streaming on select platforms.)

Michael Spyres

CLASSICAL

An American singer best known for high Rossini repertoire, Michael Spyres began his operatic life as a baritone before finding success as a tenor. Last year, he released “Baritenor,” an album that narrowed the gulf between the two vocal categories. The title employs a term more commonly used to classify Broadway singers today, but the record represents an intriguing experiment: Spyres brings lightness and suavity to beloved baritone roles, such as Mozart’s Almaviva and Rossini’s Figaro, without sounding as though he is straining to inhabit a lower tessitura. The experiment continues with this recital at the Armory’s Board of Officers Room, where Spyres and the pianist Mathieu Pordoy perform song cycles associated with a range of voice types—Beethoven’s “An die Ferne Geliebte,” Liszt’s “Tre Sonetti di Petrarca,” and Berlioz’s “Les Nuits d’Été,” whose soaring lines make it a favorite among sopranos and mezzo-sopranos.

—Oussama Zahr (Park Avenue Armory; Sept. 7 and Sept. 9.)

Vincent Herring & the Something Else! Band

JAZZ

Drawing inspiration from one of the great albums of the late fifties, Cannonball Adderley’s “Somethin’ Else,” the newly organized collective Vincent Herring & the Something Else! Band wears its hard-bop heart on its sleeve. Bringing together the saxophonists Herring and James Carter, the trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, the guitarist Paul Bollenback, the pianist David Kikoski, the bassist Essiet Essiet, and the drummer Johnathan Blake, this packed-to-the-gills outfit taps into a classic repertoire of funk-tinged tunes by the likes of Bobby Timmons, Horace Silver, and Lou Donaldson. It practically dares audiences to sit still and remain on their best behavior.

—Steve Futterman (Birdland; Sept. 7-10.)

DANCE

Miguel Gutierrez

The works of this beloved choreographer and performance-art charmer have always been strong on song. “Sueño” started as a music project, with dreamy songs in English and Spanish, high on harmony, melancholy, and longing. For this free performance, Gutierrez adds dance inspired by early modern and expressionist (and sometimes campy) choreographers such as Ted Shawn and Harald Kreutzberg.

—Brian Seibert (The High Line; Sept. 12-14.)

John Jasperse Projects

The dances of John Jasperse, always intelligent and formally intriguing, are often allusive and eccentric. In his new work “Visitation,” he trains his eye on séances, mesmerism, and the occult, swinging between inward reflection and outward explosion. The score, by Jasperse’s longtime collaborator Hahn Rowe, is infused with doses of Wagner, summoning the unsettling, multivalent associations of his music.

—B.S. (N.Y.U. Skirball; Sept. 9-10.)

Bijayini Satpathy / “Dohā”

In Hindustani poetry, a

dohā

is a couplet, a single thought laid out in two lines of rhyming verse. The renowned Odissi dancer Bijayini Satpathy has taken this form—two lines by the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir—and spun it into an evening of dance whose underlying theme is the balance between prayer and play. The solo was developed in the course of Satpathy’s artistic residency at the Metropolitan Museum during the past year; in a way, the museum’s spaces have been her muse. The forty-five-minute solo is set to recorded music by the young Indian composer Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy.

—Marina Harss (Metropolitan Museum of Art; Sept. 13.)

THE THEATRE

Into the Woods

Lear deBessonet directs this delectable revival of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s musical from 1987, which braids several classic fairy tales into a two-act piece that begins as farce and then takes a turn toward the tragic. Everyone starts out wishing for something: Cinderella (Phillipa Soo) to go to a festival at the palace; the overgrown boy Jack (Cole Thompson) to coax his beloved cow, Milky-White (skillfully manipulated by the actor Kennedy Kanagawa), to produce some milk for his family; Little Red Riding Hood (Julia Lester) to buy a loaf of bread to take to her granny; the Baker (Brian d’Arcy James), who sells her the loaf, to have a child. Too bad—he and his wife (Sara Bareilles) are barren, thanks to a curse placed on them by the Witch (the ravishing Patina Miller). In Act II come the consequences of so much wish fulfillment, and Sondheim’s personal favorite theme, the journey from innocence to knowledge. Lester’s maximally sassified Little Red is a highlight; the duo of vain princes, played by Gavin Creel and Joshua Henry, pull off “Agony” to preening perfection. Even when the giant starts stomping around and the cast goes boomsquish, you still find reasons to laugh. It’s a tonic.

—Alexandra Schwartz (Reviewed in our issue of 8/8/22.) (St. James; through Oct. 16.)

Once Upon a (korean) Time

An excellent cast and a video-rich design animate the playwright Daniel K. Isaac’s sensitively structured epic, which traces the way that grief moves through a bloodline, and how storytelling (the most abused term in art) actually functions. In 1930, two Korean soldiers (David Lee Huynh and Jon Norman Schneider) escape the horrors of war by repeating folktales; in the forties, three “comfort women” (Teresa Avia Lim, Sasha Diamond, and Jillian Sun) reënact a story to distract themselves from their sexual enslavement. In the fifties, a little girl (Sonnie Brown) hides from the Korean War as her imaginary friends Tiger and Bear occupy her with a myth about grief and rescue; she grows up and does the same for a Korean American child (Sun, again) whom she cannot fully understand. Stories do not console, exactly, in Ralph B. Peña’s exquisitely judged production, for Ma-Yi Theatre Company, but their structures do serve as bridges, carrying a person from one unthinkable moment to the next. The play works the same way, moving us swiftly across images that catch at us, and lodge, and recur, even after the play is over.

—Helen Shaw (La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theatre; through Sept. 18.)

Two Jews, Talking

An old Jew of Moses’ tribe shuffles onto a set that evokes “Godot”—some boulders and a scraggly tree—soon followed by a fellow-wanderer. Lou (Hal Linden), a cynic, and Bud (Bernie Kopell), patient, hopeful, and faithful, have been thirty years in the desert together. Bud trusts in Moses and believes in the promised land. Lou thinks Moses doesn’t have a clue, has been taking them in circles, and is, in fact, lost, “l-o-s-t in the desert,” as he likes to say. So begins a joke-filled debate on subjects theological and mundane, ranging from the Ten Commandments to dietary laws and beyond. After a pause, the rocks are replaced by a park bench, and the players return as Marty and Phil, strangers but basically the same guys, a few thousand years later. The talk turns to health, Heaven, family, and, again, faith. The writer, Ed. Weinberger, who’s been concocting quality comedy since the sixties, has modelled the script with a comfortable Borscht Belt rhythm. He and the director, Dan Wackerman, give deadpan Kopell (“Get Smart,” “The Love Boat”) some of the biggest laugh lines, but it’s Linden—whose theatre bona fides stretch back to 1957, on Broadway opposite Judy Holliday in “Bells Are Ringing”—who kills. Comic timing like you wouldn’t believe. The b-e-s-t.

—Ken Marks (Theatre at St. Clements; through Oct. 23.)

ART

Nina Beier

Tucked into the High Line’s summer prairie garden near the elevated park’s entrance at Little West Twelfth Street is an unusual fountain—at once a slapstick comedy and a horror show—by this Danish artist. Titled “Women & Children,” it’s an ensemble of salvaged bronze statues transformed into weeping nudes, thanks to water streaming from holes bored into their pupils. The mix of patinas and styles, ranging from the classical to the contemporary, makes the dozen or so figures a ragtag bunch. But, despite their apparent displacement and unlikely recombination (not to mention their tears), the over-all mood isn’t one of distress. Instead, the statues’ relaxed poses call to mind a group of benignly ghoulish bathers, a witty counterpoint to the title’s allusion to a helpless crowd waiting to be rescued. In Beier’s wryly transhistorical vision, the act

of crying becomes decoratively symbolic—an absurdist critique of outmoded, dismissive clichés about the allegedly fairer sex.

—Johanna Fateman (The High Line; through April.)

“Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe”

This overdue retrospective of the remarkable Yanktonai Dakota painter Oscar Howe, who died in 1983, at the age of sixty-eight, graces the always enthralling New York branch of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Howe is a frequently misunderstood American master who bridged ethnic authenticity and internationalist derring-do, although condescension from establishment institutions and proprietary tribute from some sectarian advocates have hindered his recognition as a straight-up canonical modernist. Crisply curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby, the show consists almost exclusively of works on paper, in tempera, watercolor, gouache, or casein. The execution is phlegmatically deliberate. The upshot is a channelling of sheer, visionary imagination, as if the artist were taking dictation from an unseen demiurge. Do some of the effects seem cartoonish, with figuration that anticipated popular styles of graphic fiction which took hold in the nineteen-seventies? Perhaps. Still, generic characters in melodramatic poses strategically depersonalize subjects to the benefit of thematic punch and decorative finesse. The results exalt audacity and breathe beauty. Howe seldom repeated himself. Each work can feel one-off, fulfilling a special mission to a fare-thee-well. If any quality is consistent, it’s suddenness.

—Peter Schjeldahl (National Museum of the American Indian; through Sept. 11.)

“Matisse: The Red Studio”

What remains to be said about a familiar icon of modern art painted by Henri Matisse in 1911? Quite a lot, as this jewel box of a show at MOMA proves. The exhibition surrounds “The Red Studio,” a rendering of the French artist’s atelier, with most of the eleven earlier works of his (paintings, sculptures, a ceramic plate) that, in freehand copy, pepper the canvas’s uniform ground of potent Venetian red. The ensemble immerses viewers in the marvels of an artistic revolution that resonates to this day. Gorgeous? Oh, yeah. Aesthetic bliss saturates—radically, to a degree still apt to startle when you pause to reflect on it—the means, ends, and very soul of a style so far ahead of its time that its full influence took decades to kick in. (It did so decisively in paintings by Mark Rothko and other American Abstract Expressionists in the years after the museum’s acquisition, in 1949, of “The Red Studio,” which had, until then, languished in obscurity.) The works that are visually quoted in the piece cohabit with furniture and still-life elements. Contours tend to be summarily indicated by thin yellow lines. Part of a pale-blue window obtrudes. But nothing disrupts the composition’s essential harmony, the details striking the eye all at once, with a concerted bang.

—P.S. (Museum of Modern Art; through Sept. 10.)

“Writing a Chrysanthemum: The Drawings of Rick Barton”

Three months before the Morgan Library opened its doors to the public, in 1928, Rick Barton—a remarkable draftsman who died in obscurity in 1992—was born a few blocks away. Now, thanks to the discerning eye and considerable detective work of the museum’s associate curator Rachel Federman, a selection of Barton’s deeply affecting ink-and-brush renderings of crowded cafés, lonely rooms, and majestic architecture is on view for the first time ever. An autodidact, Barton dropped out of high school to haunt the city’s museums; works in the show slip in references to Dürer, Hokusai, and Vermeer. A teen-aged stint in the Navy brought the artist to China, where he was introduced to the fine-brush form of pen-and-ink drawing that he quickly mastered. Discharged from the service (probably owing to mental illness), he settled in the Bay Area, like so many gay men of his generation. He worked there with near-graphomaniacal intensity during the nineteen-fifties and sixties, attracting a small circle of acolytes before vanishing from the scene. As the late artist Etel Adnan wrote in an essay from 1998, excerpted in the Morgan’s excellent catalogue, “Rick Barton should have been a San Francisco legend.” With this intimate, astonishing exhibition, he finally is.

—Andrea K. Scott (Morgan Library & Museum; through Sept. 11.)

MOVIES

The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

In Luis Buñuel’s gleefully perverse mock melodrama, the wealthy Mexican dilettante of the title rediscovers—through the madeleine-like device of a long-lost music box—his childhood fantasies of erotic violence, which he now plans to put into action. Archibaldo (Ernesto Alonso) never manages to do so, but, with a guilty conscience, he confesses to the authorities nonetheless. His stifling courtship of the pious hypocrite Carlota, his dalliance with the married playgirl Patricia, and his ardent pursuit of the wittily practical Lavinia are all shrouded in the profound evil of his comically thwarted intentions. Against a background of revolution and restoration, Catholic mysteries and aristocratic manners, Buñuel unfolds, in images akin to Freudian X-rays, the repressed desires that respectable society both embodies and conceals. In Archibaldo’s gloriously imagined, carefully planned, and meticulously staged schemes, the art of murder and the art of movies appear to be closely aligned. In one of the most ludicrously harrowing and repellently exuberant scenes ever filmed, Archibaldo—an amateur ceramist—finds a killer app for his kiln. Released in 1955. In Spanish.

—Richard Brody (Streaming on HBO Max starting Sept. 12.)

Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.

The first feature by Adamma Ebo deploys mockumentary and sketch comedy for a serious subject. Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown) is the pastor of a Baptist megachurch in Atlanta who, in the wake of a sex scandal, has lost almost all of his parishioners; Trinitie Childs (Regina Hall), his wife, works with him to reëstablish the community’s trust. While arranging a legal settlement with Lee-Curtis’s victims, the couple hire a documentarian (Andrea Laing) to make a promotional film that ends up recording far more of their life than they’d intended. Meanwhile, the pair face competition from a church in which another husband and wife (Conphidance and Nicole Beharie), a younger couple, are co-pastors. The Childses are flamboyantly, profligately materialistic, and Lee-Curtis—railing against “the homosexual agenda”—proves brazenly hypocritical. Ebo doesn’t look closely at the church’s business side or the protagonists’ inner lives; nonetheless, Hall provides the film with a solid emotional core as she embodies Trinitie’s mighty and poignant struggles to maintain her fervor, and her composure, in the face of humiliation and doubt.

—R.B. (In theatrical release and streaming on Peacock.)

9

Shane Acker’s 2009 animated science-fiction drama begins with an ending: the world reduced to a dead zone of rusted, unpopulated townscapes, the result of some ancient clash between triumphalist politicians and machines. The machines have won. No organic beings remain, just a bestial contraption that stalks the streets, and, crouching in its shadow, a group of toylike creatures, patched together from leftover materials and known only by the numbers on their backs. Against the advice of 1 (voiced by Christopher Plummer), who hides in a ruined church, the dauntless 9 (Elijah Wood), the spunky 7 (Jennifer Connelly), and a handful of others set out to vanquish the mechanical brutes and prepare to resume normal existence. How they achieve this is, to say the least, nebulous: something to do with hidden codes and the mint-green wraiths of their dead companions. But the film is itself given life by the wit and exactitude of the computer animation, which finds real texture and pathos in the fantastic.

—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 9/14/09.) (Streaming on Prime Video, Apple TV, and other services.)

The River’s Edge

This lurid quasi-Western, from 1957, starts as a film-noir twist on “Green Acres.” Meg Cameron (Debra Paget), a stylish city woman who’s out of jail on probation, is miserable on a Southwestern desert ranch with her gruff but worshipful husband, Ben (Anthony Quinn). Then a pink convertible bearing her ex-lover and former partner in crime, Nardo Denning (Ray Milland), rolls up. Meg can’t get him out of her system; Nardo, with an aluminum briefcase full of cash, wants to escape with her to Mexico and forces Ben at gunpoint to get them there. The drama morphs into raw survivalism, with the two men bound in a violent standoff pitting Ben’s country wiles against Nardo’s psychopathic menace. The director, Allan Dwan, fills the sunbaked landscape with an acrid haze of moods and a suffocating tangle of emotions, which he conjures with sharp, stark images of stifled frenzy. One sequence in particular, of a border-patrol inspection gone bad, is an anthology piece of efficient, expressive action filmmaking; in a few slashing brushstrokes, Dwan captures the ecstatic horror of life on the edge.

—R.B. (Streaming on the Criterion Channel.)

FESTIVAL

ILLUSTRATION BY MATT WILLIAMS

The

Afropunk Brooklyn

festival has shape-shifted radically since it began in the mid-two-thousands as a grassroots celebration of Black alternative music rooted in punk. Now expanded, with a capacious spirit of community manifested in iterations around the world, Afropunk emphasizes the vastness of Black musical expression, with acts representing rap, soul, pop, rock, jazz, R. & B., and Afrobeats. This year’s summit at Commodore Barry Park, Sept. 10-11, marks Afropunk’s first home-town installment since 2019. The Nigerian pop singer Burna Boy and the hip-hop darlings the Roots, whose performance promises to encompass its storied career, headline. The festival offers a wellness initiative and a bevy of merchants, as well as sets from the prismatic rappers Earl Sweatshirt and Pink Siifu, the hip-hop miniaturist Tierra Whack, the indie-rock fusionist Bartees Strange, and the ferocious Tennessee rapper BbyMutha.

—Jenn Pelly

IN THE MUSEUMS

© HULLEAH J. TSINHNAHJINNIE / COURTESY THE ARTIST / MOMA

In the nineteen-eighties, after four decades as a psychotherapist in St. Louis, Helen Kornblum began collecting photographs by women artists; in 2021, Kornblum donated a hundred pieces to MOMA, where

“Our Selves,”

a rich exhibition excerpting that gift, is on view through Oct. 10. The show’s title recalls that of the feminist health bible “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” published in 1970, but the pictures, which span the twentieth century, tend to portray bodies obliquely. Louise Lawler’s “Sappho and Patriarch,” from 1984, is an ingeniously framed, starkly moody image of Greek statuary which foregrounds a draped female figure to make a pointed statement about gender and power dynamics in Western art history, as well as in the conventions of museum display. Surrogates also feature in the Italian photographer Tina Modotti’s dramatic black-and-white image “Yank and Police Marionette,” from 1926, in which two puppets cast towering shadows, a tableau inspired by a scene in Eugene O’Neill’s anti-capitalist play “The Hairy Ape.” The Navajo-Tuskegee artist Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (who is also a professor and a museum director) addresses the erasure of Native American identity and the hollow spectacle of televised game shows in her photo collage “Vanna Brown, Azteca Style” (above), from 1990, by reimagining the “Wheel of Fortune” hostess as an Indigenous beauty in dancing regalia. In Lorna Simpson’s salon-style installation “Details,” from 1996, twenty-one poetically captioned archival photogravures, many of them cropped views of hands, evoke dispersed fragments of a family album.

—Johanna Fateman

WHAT TO STREAM

EVERETT

Morgan Freeman earned his first Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a violent, scarily manipulative pimp called Fast Black in Jerry Schatzberg’s hard-edged 1987 drama set in New York,

“Street Smart”

(streaming on Tubi and on Pluto TV). The character, rooted in stereotypes, anchors a story that holds a mirror up to them. Christopher Reeve stars as Jonathan Fisher, a Harvard-educated journalist who escapes from the life-style beat by profiling a pimp named Tyrone—whom he made up. When Fast Black is charged with a murder, he is assumed to be the basis for Tyrone, and his attorney (Frederick Rolf), knowing that he isn’t, subpoenas Jonathan’s notes in order to turn the criminal case into a “constitutional confrontation”; then Fast Black lures Jonathan into his inner circle and forces the issue. The plot focusses on the oblivious—and almost all-white—mainstream media, immured in its glass towers, whose reporters and editors are anything but street-smart. It takes one of the few Black journalists on the scene (Donna Bailey) to call Jonathan out; Freeman, investing the Machiavellian schemer with high-wire control and pent-up fury, hints at worlds that Hollywood could hardly fathom.

—Richard Brody

For more reviews, visit

newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town ■

Goings On About Town: Podcasts

ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL LIÉVANO

The Icelandic musician Björk makes albums that are difficult to classify. Are they rock? Folk? Experimental pop? A dreamy mishmash of performance, visual, and outsider art? On the new podcast

“Björk: Sonic Symbolism,”

from Talkhouse and Mailchimp Presents, the woodland-fairy-voiced singer works through these questions. Each episode explores the creation of one album—beginning with her first, fittingly titled “Debut”—with Björk, in conversation with her friends the writer Oddný Eir and the musicologist Ásmundur Jónsson, serving as a whimsical guide through her musical mind. This is a rare chance to listen in as one of the most mysterious and mystical artists working today explains herself—but never so clearly as to totally unravel her own mythology. Björk keeps it weird; would you have it any other way?

—Rachel Syme ■

Tables for Two: Gugu Room
143 Orchard St.
Jiayang Fan

PHOTOGRAPH BY KENYON ANDERSON FOR THE NEW YORKER

ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

The Filipino-Japanese

izakaya

Gugu Room, on the Lower East Side, has a few origin stories. The most romantic has to do with José Rizal, a national hero of the Philippines, who had a brief love affair with a Japanese samurai’s daughter, in 1888, during a six-week pit stop in Japan on his way to the U.S. (No one knows if the two lovebirds discussed fusing their cultural cuisines, though.) The most glamorous involves the actor Adrien Brody, a friend of one of the restaurant’s owners, who, I’m told, proposed the Japanese-Filipino mashup at a Manny Pacquiao boxing match, as a way to make Filipino food more accessible to a New York audience. My favorite story, though, is the plainest: “We wanted to bring Filipino night life to the Lower East Side,” the restaurant’s twenty-nine-year-old Manila-born chef, Mark Manaloto, told me. “Good dinner and party afterward.”

This helps explain the chaotic, merry décor—a silvery disco ball and a bust of José Rizal inside, a frenzy of red lanterns and cherry-blossom-adorned cabins outside. Gugu Room’s food is infused with some of this more-is-more pizzazz, with an eclectic, expansive menu that includes items portable enough to carry onto the dance floor.

When I consulted a server on what to try the other night, he didn’t pause before referring me to the skewers, the most memorable of which were porcine. It is customary to give short shrift to offal, but forsake the

tenga

, or pig ears, at your own risk. At Gugu, slices are marinated in banana ketchup and grilled on binchotan charcoal, lending their gelatinous exterior a crispiness that matches the wink of cartilage crunch on the inside. On the other end of the texture spectrum is the

isaw

, or intestines: wrinkly whorls that give off a wild musk inextricable from the organ’s primal umami. I could have eaten half a dozen skewers if I hadn’t wanted to leave room for the

longanisa

, a descendant of Spanish chorizo; the fragrance and the flavor of the meat—smoky and sweet, with notes of smoked paprika and garlic—were broadened by the heat of an open flame.

The most persuasive dishes unapologetically layer richness upon richness.

Lengua gyutan

, or beef tongue, soaked in a creamy mushroom gravy, seemed destined to cloy but turned out to be smooth, balanced, and savory. Similarly, the short-rib udon with bone marrow, which inspired an anticipation of heartburn, delighted from the first sip; punctuated by peppercorn, fish sauce, and white shoyu, the

bulalo

-style broth (traditionally, a heavy Filipino stew of bone-in beef shank) was voluptuous rather than unctuous. In fact, one of the choicest bites of the entire meal was an unladylike gnaw of the generous gristle on a bone followed by a spoonful of marrow-thickened soup, bobbing with cubes of cleansing daikon.

If the best things on the menu are organic celebrations of mostly Filipino inspiration, the less successful dishes taste like concessions to the fusion narrative. The chicken

inasal,

marinated and grilled, is pallid and without conviction, and the

agedashi

tofu, with its tired, gummy exterior, tasted like an afterthought.

There are no sweets on the Gugu menu, but there is an impressive and varied cocktail list that seems designed to prepare you for the after-hours dance floor. On a recent evening, while sipping a Wasabi Mar-Gari-Ta (tequila, calamansi honey, lime, wasabi), I watched a group of twentysomethings haltingly find their groove (presumably after drinking a respectable number of wasabi margaritas themselves) under the disco ball while I justified an order of fried intestines as a savory dessert. Around the room, skewers of meat were being delivered at a fast pace, some rapturously waved into the frames of gleeful selfies. The music was revving up, and the place was slowly if indubitably thrumming to life. It was close to 11 P.M. when I left—the end of my

isaw

spelling the end of my night—but the party had only just begun.

(Dishes $6-$25.) ■

Comment: First and Last

David Remnick

When word came last week that Mikhail Gorbachev, the first and last President of the Soviet Union, had died, it was front-page news in the West and a matter of studied indifference in official Moscow. After issuing a tepid acknowledgment of Gorbachev’s passing, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, announced that the Russian President’s “work schedule will not allow him” to attend the funeral. Instead, Putin paid his respects by dropping by the hospital where Gorbachev had died. He placed a bouquet of flowers near the casket, lingered for half a minute, and, his obligation fulfilled, headed for the exit. Gorbachev, in his time, not only attended a memorial for Andrei Sakharov, the country’s most prominent dissident, he stood in the rain at the foot of Sakharov’s coffin, in a prolonged gesture of humility.

Considering Putin’s contempt for Gorbachev, one should be grateful that he didn’t toss the bouquet through the window of his speeding limousine. In his eyes, Gorbachev was contemptibly weak, a heedless custodian of a great empire. He was naïve. He fetishized foreign democratic values. He failed to see the United States and Europe as bastions of hypocrisy and aggressive intent. In the course of a seven-year reign, Gorbachev, Putin clearly believes, granted the people freedoms they did not deserve and reduced a superpower to the level of a global supplicant.

Putin seems to view himself as the anti-Gorbachev, an imperial revivalist reasserting Kremlin authority over Russian institutions, Russian citizens, and former Soviet republics. He calls the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century, and he doubtless blames the “necessity” of invading Ukraine on Gorbachev. The regression is profound. While Gorbachev initiated the end of the Cold War and greatly diminished the risk of nuclear conflagration, Putin now wages his proxy war with the West on Ukrainian territory and, in doing so, he has threatened the use of atomic weapons and destabilized control of the reactors at Zaporizhzhia.

By his own admission, Putin was, and remains, a product of the K.G.B. Gorbachev was a far more complex human being. He was, as he once put it, both a “product” and an “anti-product” of the Soviet system. In 2006, William Taubman, a scholar who had written an exceptional biography of Nikita Khrushchev, was researching a book on Gorbachev and had a conversation with him about it. Taubman admitted that he was struggling. Gorbachev was sympathetic: “Gorbachev is hard to understand,” he said, using the grandiose third person. What is truly hard to understand is how Gorbachev, the son of peasants, became himself—how a young Soviet politician promoted by Party bosses and K.G.B. chieftains set out to replace “reptilian values with human ones,” as the Russian journalist Oleg Kashin put it.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

Gorbachev was born in 1931, in Privolnoye, a village in southern Russia. While he was an infant, famine killed nearly half the inhabitants, including two of his uncles and an aunt. These were the Stalin years. Both of Gorbachev’s grandfathers were arrested on bogus charges and sent to prison: Andrei Gorbachev for failing to fulfill an agricultural quota, Pantelei Gopkalo for belonging to “a counter-revolutionary Trotskyite organization.” Both were released after relatively short terms, but they had suffered miserably. Gorbachev, in his memoirs, wrote of Gopkalo’s plight, “The interrogator blinded him with a bright lamp, broke his arms pressing him against the door, and beat him brutally. When these ‘standard’ tortures didn’t work, they thought up new ones: they wrapped grandfather tightly in a wet sheepskin coat and placed him on a hot stove.”

As a young man, Gorbachev went to Moscow to study law and to climb the ladder of the Party apparatus. By the late nineteen-fifties, the Party was filled with mediocrities who had eluded the worst predations of the Stalin era. Khrushchev tried to inch the Party and Soviet society beyond the Stalinist system, inspiring a

network of

shestidesyatniki

, “people of the sixties,” relative liberals within the system, to begin—quietly, cautiously—to discuss the possibility of reform. This was Gorbachev’s world, an ambiguous realm that combined ambition, cynicism, compromise, and measured idealism. These were people who eventually concluded that all was ruin, that neither Communist ideology nor its foundation of coercion and violence promised any degree of prosperity or a sustainable future.

After a series of decrepit General Secretaries—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko––died in rapid succession, Gorbachev came to office, in March, 1985. He was confident, lively, eager to project a sense of hope; his ability to stand upright and talk with people on the street was considered positively Kennedyesque. But it was not until thirteen months after his rise to power, when Reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear facility exploded, that he came to understand fully the corruption of the Soviet system. The local authorities sought to cover up their negligence, and the Kremlin authorities, in turn, did not acknowledge the accident for two days. Gorbachev said nothing publicly for two weeks. Finally, that July, he went into a Politburo meeting and berated everyone concerned. “They all fucked up,” Gorbachev declared. “The day after the explosion, weddings were still being held nearby. Children were playing on the streets.”

“Chernobyl was not

like

the Communist system. They were one and the same,” Yuriy Shcherbak, a physician and a journalist who later became Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S., said a couple of years afterward. “The system ate into our bones the same way radiation did.” Such metaphors and realities were not lost on Gorbachev. In the dramatic years that followed, his initiatives came in stunning succession: the release of dissidents from prison or exile; the policy of glasnost, which permitted unprecedented freedoms for the press, writers, artists, and scholars; summit meetings with Ronald Reagan and arms-control agreements with the West; a military withdrawal from Afghanistan; the liberation of Eastern and Central Europe from Soviet control; multi-party elections; a reassessment of Soviet history that included criticism of Lenin; increased independence for the Baltic states and other Soviet republics.

Gorbachev, of course, made mistakes, serious ones. He tried, for too long, to reconcile irreconcilable ideas and power bases. He failed to reform the K.G.B., which led a coup against him, in August, 1991. And so on. Yet he possessed both the idealism and the political skill to generate something in the world that is, at this dark historical moment of global illiberalism and malevolence, exceedingly rare: a sense of decency and promise. Here was someone raised in a totalitarian system who came to believe in democracy, the rule of law, and the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. Imagine. The hope is that, around the world, his example will prevail. ■

Visiting Dignitary: Slowly, Slowly

Adam Iscoe

Things between the United States and Iran are tense: groups affiliated with Tehran have warned that its missiles could turn New York City into “hellish ruins”; Salman Rushdie was brutally attacked by a young man allegedly executing a fatwa issued decades ago by Iran’s former Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. But optimists suggest that diplomacy remains possible, and diplomacy can take many forms. (Greatest hits: Ping-Pong, panda bears, space travel, and the Guinness Book of Records.) The other day, an amateur diplomat, Shahin Tivay Sadatolhosseini, arrived in New York after spending more than a thousand days walking across Europe and the Middle East. His mission: restoring U.S.-Iranian relations. His method: pushing a two-metre-tall gymnastics wheel, which he’d named Rocinante, for Don Quixote’s horse.

“You know, all people should be friends,” Sadatolhosseini, who is an Iranian gymnast and filmmaker residing in Germany, said. “It’s important for Iran to have U.S. as enemy, and for the U.S. it’s very important to have Iran as an enemy. And that’s so sad. But it’s not important. Important is to make friendships between normal people.”

Making friendships between normal people, such as when a journalist living in Harlem spots a man with a gymnastics wheel—loaded with waterproof duffels containing camping equipment, clothes, video cameras, and a 4K quadcopter drone—standing in the rain, and offers him a place to spend the night. It was one o’clock in the morning, and Sadatolhosseini’s salt-and-pepper beard was soaked. “A pleasure to meet you,” Sadatolhosseini said. “This is one hundred per cent the universe.” The journalist welcomed the amateur ambassador inside.

Accommodations: a sleeping bag next to a coffee table, and a bike lock to secure Sadatolhosseini’s wheel to an iron railing out front. Beer and water were offered. Sadatolhosseini, who wore black sandals, gardening gloves, and a felt bowler hat, said, “Can you give me the Wi-Fi code?”

Inside, after a cold Budweiser, Sadatolhosseini said, “I am very surprised and happy that I’m here. In the morning, I don’t know where I’m sleeping. Every night, it’s the same.” He laughed. “I meet people in the street, or I’m staying outside in the nature.”

Shahin Tivay Sadatolhosseini

In 2015, on the winter solstice, Sadatolhosseini set out walking from his home in Aachen, Germany, bound for Tehran. Six hundred and twenty-five days, almost four thousand miles, all the while pushing the wheel. “I’m like a snail. A snail is moving very slowly, but can manage what other animals can’t,” he said. “That first travel to Iran was like a pilgrimage to my roots—the first

time I go to Iran after thirty-three years.”

Sadatolhosseini and his mother fled Tehran in 1983, during the Iran-Iraq War. “I was a young boy when I left. In my mind, it was a horrible country,” he said. “I come to Europe, and I love my home city, in Aachen, but I’m not true German. When Germany football plays Italy, I’m more German than Italian, but when Iran and Germany will play football I’m definitely more Iranian.” Last year, on the summer solstice, Sadatolhosseini started walking from Aachen to Washington, D.C.—a diplomatic art project called “YavashYavash,” which is Persian for “Slowly Slowly.”

“The deeper meaning is ‘Be respectful. Think before you do something,’” he said. “To be enemies is the wrong way to do something.”

He had arrived at J.F.K. after three hundred and fifty-three days of wheel-pushing through Europe: “I fly with American Airlines!” He spent a few days trekking across Queens and Brooklyn, and through midtown. “Now that I’m here, the most important part is the reaction of the people,” he said. “The reaction of the normal people is so fantastic.”

After resting in Harlem, he set off for the Guggenheim, before heading south to Washington. “When I’m rolling, you’ll see that it looks very stupid. There definitely exists a more easier way to travel,” Sadatolhosseini said. “Get ready for a rumble!”

Rocinante tumbled down the sidewalk, and a few neighbors watched from their stoops. Women in a passing car hollered, “Can we try it?” Then a deliveryman on an electric bicycle pulled over to gab. “I’m from Zagreb, Croatia! I travelled from Croatia on a bicycle,” the guy said. “I was on a trash boat. You know trash boat? It’s very cheap.”

Down the block, a middle-aged man in a wheelchair shouted, “Watch out for monkeypox! It’s in the Bible, man. These are probably the final days.” Sadatolhosseini smiled politely, and rolled Rocinante onward.

Later, two violinists, Aniela and Rebecca, stopped to chat about violins and small German towns.

“Give me your left hand,” Sadatolhosseini said to Aniela, and proffered a bracelet he’d made.

“Amazing! Wow, I love it,” she said. “Yavash, yavash!” A crowd had gathered.

Someone took a selfie. Someone else asked to do a pullup on the wheel.

Two hundred and seventy miles later, Sadatolhosseini arrived at the White House with a torn tendon in his left leg (“I limp,” he said), a sense of accomplishment (“I make bridge between Iran and U.S., and I make new friendships”), and a new goal (“I will climb the highest mountain in Iran”). He’d slept on nineteen couches and eaten a lot of Burger King, while dodging big trucks on the freeway. Back in New York, the journalist received a text from Sadatolhosseini: ■

Jazz Dept.: Disputable

Andrew Marantz

Jazz fans are notorious for navel-gazey debates about what constitutes “real jazz.” DOMi & JD BECK, indisputably the buzziest new duo playing disputable jazz, preëmpt the debates by being both more and less real than the competition. They use their real first names, abbreviations and caps-lock glitches aside. Domitille Degalle, twenty-two, is from France; JD Beck, nineteen, is from Dallas. In an age of studio ghostwriters and digital sleight of hand, they are a true duo, and a virtuosic one: she plays keys, he plays drums, and their four hands and four feet cover a lot of ground. The bios on their Web site are a jumble of bold truths (“domi is a … prodigy from France”) and blatant lies (“jd beck is a 6-year-old sheep investigator”). They perform canonical jazz standards (“Giant Steps”) but announce them with noncanonical titles (“Giant Nuts”). They dress like humanoids from “The Fifth Element”—nylon tracksuits, ski masks, huge Dickies overalls—but they talk like normal swaggering kids. “We don’t only want our shows to be cold and brainy, full of jazz dudes who know exactly what’s going on,” Degalle said.

JD Beck and Domitille Degalle

“We want seven-year-olds and seventy-year-olds,” Beck said.

“We want people going, ‘I don’t know what the fuck this is, but I like it!’” Degalle said.

When Beck was six or seven, he said, he “mostly listened to rock and R. & B., but then the YouTube algorithm would start pushing me down a jazz rabbit hole, or some random video-game theme or J Dilla beat, and I just learned to play all of it. If I have one big influence on my playing, it would have to be the YouTube algorithm.”

Degalle moved to the U.S. to attend the Berklee College of Music (intermittently—her senior recital was called “DOMi Finally Graduates”). “In school, they love to analyze: ‘This sounds good because it has this structure or that tempo,’” she said. “Me and JD, we don’t fucking think about any of that. We just sit around and play and play, and we end up with, like, a verse in 7/4, a hook with a bunch of vocal harmonies, and a drum-and-bass outro.”

“Shit either works or it doesn’t,” Beck said.

Recently, they booked two nights at the Blue Note, on West Third Street. On the second night, they were still worried that their shit wouldn’t work. “That one was really hard,” Beck said, after finishing a blazingly fast tune in a variety of inaccessible time signatures. “And this next one is way harder.”

Degalle said, “It’s called ‘Pussy with Balls.’”

“That’s not what it’s called,” Beck said.

It was actually called “NOT TiGHT”—the title track from their album, which came out in July. “We had a version three years ago that was sort of done, and we almost put it out,” Beck said. Their mentor and label head, the musician Anderson. Paak, dissuaded them with a Solomon-like stunt. “He invited us to his family’s Easter party,

and started playing a track from the album,” Degalle said. When they balked,. Paak said, “If you’re embarrassed to play it in public, you’re not ready to release it.” They kept working, often out of. Paak’s home studio in Los Angeles. “I’d get back, late night, with my guests, and they’d be, like, the after-hours entertainment,”. Paak said recently. “I had Puff in there rocking with them,” he later added. That would be Puff Daddy, a.k.a. P. Diddy, a.k.a. Love. “Janelle Monáe rocked with them. Bruno would sit in and make ’em do Michael Jackson covers.” That’s Bruno Mars,. Paak’s bandmate in the pop-R. & B. supergroup Silk Sonic. “Bruno and I did have conversations with them, like, ‘Can’t you guys just write a straight-ahead joint?’ But eventually I realized, you wouldn’t go to Basquiat and be, like, ‘This is cool, but can you just make a straight-ahead portrait of my friend?’”

In the Blue Note’s greenroom after the set, Degalle and Beck were visited by the pianist Robert Glasper, along with his young son. “Y’all were smashing,” Glasper said. He complimented their rendition of “My Favorite Things,” which led to a discussion about how to play standards—when to trade fours, when to comp, when to lay out. “This may be the nerdiest conversation I’ve ever been a part of,” Beck said.

Sitting nearby was Cameron Celebuski, a college student who had taken the train from Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Degalle and Beck are gamers, and they have a Discord server with nearly fifteen thousand members; Celebuski is a moderator. How had he discovered their music? “Oh, the YouTube algorithm,” he said. “They’re the only thing I’ve found that literally never gets old.” ■

L.A. Postcard: Fungible

Sheila Yasmin Marikar

The other day, Anthony Hopkins stood before a green screen in a Culver City film studio, contorting his face and arranging his limbs according to the demands of Ramy Romany, a director in a fedora. Hopkins wore textured black loafers and had a fuzz of white hair.

“Now, monster!” Romany called. Hopkins made his eyes wide. “Now, strength and happiness!” Hopkins flexed his biceps. “Now, savior!” Hopkins extended an arm and unfurled his fingers, the big bad wolf in Bottega Veneta.

“Oh, my God, that is so scary,” Stella Arroyave, Hopkins’s wife, said. She wore brown clogs and had her hair in a ponytail. “Evil, evil savior!” Nearby, crew members mingled between a squat black couch and a table of picked-over taco salads.

Hopkins had agreed to star in a series of N.F.T.s, or digital art works, “built on Jungian archetypes,” according to one of his recent tweets, but also derived from his best-known Hollywood characters.

“You obviously know the iconic Hannibal Lecter,” said Dante Ferrarini, a co-founder of Orange Comet, the company producing the N.F.T.s. “But we’re not going to be able to

use

that exact mask.” (Copyrights and intellectual property being among the least fungible things there are.) Instead, Ferrarini and Hopkins came up with archetypes associated with Hollywood movies—the Jester, the Narcissist—that Hopkins would embody with facial expressions and physical movement.

“Now, do a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn,” Romany commanded, while Hopkins finger-wagged to “Staying Alive.” The footage will be combined with renderings of paintings by Hopkins—a triangular self-portrait; a morose visage—as well as digital art works by others.

“We’re bringing the darkness of human nature, the—What are we even calling the collection?” Dave Broome, Orange Comet’s other co-founder, called out to the crew. He had close-cropped black hair and wore a black-diamond-studded dog tag.

“Anthony Hopkins, the Eternal Collection,”Ferrarini said.

A thousand units of the Eternal will be made available to online buyers in October. Starting price: about a thousand dollars. “I was a baseball-card collector as a kid,” Broome, whose credits include producing “The Biggest Loser,” said. He put his cards in a shoebox. He went to college. The shoebox went to the garage. “Eventually, it went to the garbage can,” he said. “Gone forever.

Now, in the world of N.F.T.s, I never have to blame my parents for throwing my shit out. If you own an N.F.T. of Anthony Hopkins, he’s immortalized on the blockchain. It’s not going anywhere.”

“It’s almost like ‘Westworld,’ isn’t it?” Hopkins chimed in, settling into an Aeron chair across from Broome. He held a mug of hot water.

“Tape disappears,” Broome said. “It gets digitized, but it does go away. This is a very unique way of taking a legend and bringing him to life.”

A lifelong doodler, Hopkins made a more concerted investment in producing art twenty years ago. “Over the years of doing films, I had scripts, and I used to do drawings on the blank pages opposite the text,” he said. “Stella found them before we got married. She said, ‘You’re an artist. I want you to do some paintings for our wedding.’” Hopkins churned out seventy-five, including renderings of the Welsh countryside in which he grew up. “Then she said, ‘Now you’re going to start painting.’” Hopkins protested: “‘I’m not an artist.’ She said, ‘Of course you are.’” Now his canvasses sell for as much as eighty thousand dollars.

A bit later, Hopkins found himself in a house formerly occupied by another hobbyist painter who didn’t quit his day job, Henry Miller. (The house is now a library that Hopkins called “a small California treasure.”) “Miller said, ‘Paint and die happy.’ I took it as a principle: the more we think about it, the less likely we are to accomplish it,” Hopkins said. “The point is to leave the critic behind and just paint. I’m a prolific painter because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I have no training, and that’s the best freedom I have.”

He went on, “It’s what I say to young actors. You know, ‘We’re all gonna die and it’s not important.’”

Hopkins said he didn’t own any N.F.T.s. (He has subsequently bought a few.) “It’s all completely new to me. It’s all Aaron Tucker,” he said, referring to the C.E.O. of Margam Fine Art, the Los Angeles gallery that represents him. “They started this project and they got it together. I just came in as a, you know, ‘Move here.’” He wiggled his fingers, as if to indicate an actor for hire. “I mean, I don’t quite get the whole gist of it,” he added, with a shrug. “It’s an extraordinary age we’re in.” ■

Sketchpad: The Swimming Scene: Sunset Park Pool

Leanne Shapton

11:00 A.M.

“We’re waiting for the cops,” a woman standing in line says. “They’re usually late.” A man, armpit-deep in the water, is vacuuming the pool. A squirrel sniffs the edge and runs away. Two cops arrive; pool’s open.

12:45 P.M.

Sixty-one swimmers, three in bikinis and four in burkinis. A sign states what is allowed: Towels. Books/magazines. Not allowed: Street clothes. Flotation devices. Newspapers. Food. Electronics. Glass.

1:00 P.M.

A woman with a tattoo of a fox on her thigh spreads a towel and opens a book. Another woman does laps, stands, and adjusts her bikini cups. A man in a prayer cap splashes a child in a Speedo and a head scarf.

2:00 P.M.

For anyone under eighteen, free lunches are offered. Choices: chips and hummus, a chicken or peanut-butter wrap. Each bag has a bean salad, yogurt, a fat-free chocolate milk, presliced apples, a cookie, and baby carrots.

2:45 P.M.

The lifeguards blow their whistles to clear the pool for an hour. A breaststroker wearing prescription glasses gets out. The two cops sit in the shade and chat from behind their aviators.

4:05 P.M.

Twenty people in the pool. Then forty. More families, more small children in swim diapers. With no diving board, the most popular move is running hard to the edge and jumping. Splashing like cymbals.

5:00 P.M.

Clouds roll in and the sky is dark mauve behind the treetops. Eighty-nine people in the pool. A teen-ager does a handstand. Two friends link elbows and fall backward into the water.

6:11 P.M.

Forty-nine swimmers. The air is filled with one alto voice shouting “Marco!” and eight bassos shouting “Polo!” Loungers sit askew, draped in towels from Portugal, Puerto Rico, Malibu.

6:45 P.M.

Four people are reading paperback books. The lifeguards begin collapsing umbrellas and whistle to clear the pool. Shadows are long. A child sleeping beneath a pink towel wakes up. ■

Life and Letters: The Return
Touring the Soviet Union, George Balanchine confronted his homeland’s fate.
Jennifer Homans

HARVARD THEATER COLLECTION / HOUGHTON LIBRARY / HARVARD UNIVERSITY / BARBARA HORGAN AND THE GEORGE BALANCHINE TRUST

Balanchine in Tbilisi. The more he was applauded, the more depressed he became.

On October 6, 1962, the members of New York City Ballet boarded a plane in Vienna, bound for Moscow, the first stop on an eight-week tour that had been arranged by the State Department. The party numbered around ninety, including the dancers, the conductor Robert Irving, two mothers (escorting underage dancers), several translators, the company doctor, and the company’s co-founder and artistic director, George Balanchine. Balanchine had not wanted to go. Born in St. Petersburg in 1904, during the reign of the last tsar, he had experienced cold and starvation in revolutionary Russia, before fleeing the country, in 1924, going first to Europe and then, in 1933, to America. The U.S.S.R. filled him with dread, and his return brought to light one of the great themes of his life: he had set his own path away from the Marxist materialism of the Bolshevik Revolution, and quietly built, in N.Y.C.B., a village of angels and a music-filled monument to faith and unreason, to body and beauty and spirit. It was his own counter-revolutionary place, an alternative vision of the twentieth century.

The dancers had stocked up on peanut butter, candy, tuna, Spam, toilet paper, and other necessities. Balanchine had also asked that they please dress well, since he wanted his company to present an elegant image. When they landed at Sheremetyevo, Balanchine emerged from the Jetway in a suit and bow tie, a trenchcoat draped casually over his arm. A full-court reception awaited him, with klieg lights, flashing cameras, Soviet officials, American diplomats, and a press corps eager to record his return. The sparring began immediately: “Welcome to Russia, home of classical ballet,” one of his hosts began, and Balanchine proudly responded, “No, Russia is home of Romantic ballet, America is the home of classical ballet,” by which he meant his modern ballet.

It was Cold War code: culturally, the war was being fought in part on the battlefield of abstraction, and Balanchine was taking a defining role. Stalin’s doctrine of socialist realism had long defined art in the U.S.S.R., and in dance this meant lavish narrative “drambalets,” often with socialist themes. Balanchine had pushed classical technique and the human body to new physical extremes, especially in his recent plotless dances, “Agon” (1957) and “Episodes” (1959), performed in simple practice clothes on an empty stage. In the U.S.S.R., such abstraction was still deemed a political threat, a slippery artistic form dangerously free of any fixed meaning that could be approved or censored. (Who could say exactly what “Agon” was about?) Balanchine flashed his American passport in case anyone didn’t get the message. But his attention was not fully there. He had seen his brother Andrei, who was standing patiently to one side, waiting.

“Andruska! It’s you,” he said, as they embraced, and his expression softened with emotion. They had not seen each other for some forty years, since the Revolution had torn their family apart. He was surprised that Andrei was so short, and it was true that Balanchine, who thought of himself as small, seemed to tower over him. At fifty-seven, Andrei was already gray, and next to his dapper sibling he appeared aged and shy, in a rumpled suit with drooping, oversized pockets (stuffed with tobacco, cigarette papers, and homemade filters composed of cotton and sugar). Although he was younger than George, he looked like an old man.

Andrei, who lived in Tbilisi, had followed the path of their father, Meliton Balanchivadze, a Georgian composer who had spent his career collecting traditional Georgian music and forging a style influenced by it. By now, Andrei

was a well-known composer in Georgia, but his life had nonetheless been constrained by the harsh realities of Soviet existence—and by his brother’s American success. In the eyes of the state, Balanchine was a traitor, and a curtain of fear had fallen between him and his family. Fear, in his mind, of recrimination; in theirs, of association and disappearing into a Soviet night. Since leaving, Balanchine had received only one letter from his brother, and it had been delivered to him by a man he suspected of being an agent of the secret police. In it, Andrei had implored George to return to the U.S.S.R., but George sensed, correctly, that his brother had written the letter under duress and ignored it. Andrei had also sent a terse cable notifying him of their mother’s death. That had been the extent of their communication. It was a peculiar fact of exile and the Cold War that, in order to care for each other, they couldn’t know each other. The only protection they had was silence—its own kind of family tie.

The brothers went to dinner together at a nearby restaurant that served Georgian food. Balanchine eagerly selected favorite dishes from the menu, only to be told each time that the item was not available, so they finally settled on coriander chicken—all that was on offer that evening. The Hotel Ukraina, where Balanchine was staying with the company, had a similar empty grandeur. It was monumental, a fortresslike complex in yellow stone with eight turrets and a central tower with a high spire topped by a Soviet star. One of the “Seven Sisters” commissioned by Stalin to compete with American skyscrapers (and modelled in part on the Manhattan Municipal Building), the Hotel Ukraina was devoid of human scale, built in a style that Lincoln Kirstein, the company’s co-founder, called “Stalinoid Gothic.” Completed in 1957, it already felt old and run-down.

The enormous gray marble lobby resembled a train station, with a large restaurant emitting a pervasive Soviet smell of onions and cabbage. The thirty-seven floors and more than a thousand rooms were served by only a few very slow elevators, manned by stolid ladies in suits, and the wait could be more than half an hour to travel a few floors. The thirteenth floor was said to house the bugging apparatus for the whole building, and on each floor a uniformed matron sat at all times (with a cot for sleeping), controlling keys and entry. Once a guest passed muster, the walk to a room could seem miles long, down dreary carpeted corridors, and the rooms themselves were decorated in a worn Biedermeier style with Oriental throws. Everyone had been told that the ceilings were lined with bugging devices, and the dancers made a sport of discovering them.

They ate at the restaurant in the lobby: pirozhki, dark bread, cucumbers, pickles, borscht, chicken Kiev (“gray leather,” one of the dancers said), bottled sweet sodas, Russian ice cream. Balanchine asked for Borjomi, a sulfurous mineral water he remembered from childhood; to the dancers, it reeked of rotten eggs, but he guzzled it down. A pall of surveillance hung over everything. Their movements outside the hotel were tightly controlled, and buses carried them to rehearsals every morning, as well-wishers shouted, “No politic, no politic!” A few of the dancers ignored the restrictions and walked through the wide streets and crowded markets anyway. The requisite “interpreters” (undercover secret police) were their constant companions and occasional adversaries in chess matches, played with ice hockey blaring on TV in the background. Contact with family back home was difficult. Mail arrived erratically via diplomatic pouch, usually already opened, and making an international phone call could take hours. If the caller was lucky enough to get a connection, it was often only one-way—the person in Moscow could hear but not be heard, as operators seemed to be controlling the flow of information leaving the U.S.S.R.

On October 9th, after three days of rehearsals, N.Y.C.B. opened at the Bolshoi Theatre—elegant, Old World, plush red and gold, with crystal chandeliers—to a house packed with Soviet brass, including Yekaterina Furtseva, the Minister of Culture, a tough and cultivated woman neatly dressed à la Ninotchka, whom Balanchine grew to like. Nikita Khrushchev, the U.S.S.R.’s leader, was notably missing from his private box. As the evening began, the audience solemnly stood for the Russian national anthem, followed by “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with Robert Irving at the podium conducting an orchestra of Soviet musicians. Balanchine had chosen a program of four ballets, all plotless: “Serenade,” “Interplay” (by Jerome Robbins), “Agon,” and “Western Symphony.” For this momentous opening night, he wore his Sunday best: a Mississippi riverboat gambler’s pegged pants with a rodeo rider’s silver-embroidered shirt and string tie.

The response to the performance, by this audience of officials, was polite but restrained, and Balanchine found himself devastated, confused, and angry that he was angry or that he cared at all. Once the official contingent finally cleared out, however, a group of students from the upper balconies rushed enthusiastically to the front and applauded the dancers. A fancy reception followed, hosted by the American Ambassador, Foy D. Kohler, at his elegant residence, Spaso House, formerly a merchant’s palace. The gracious, imperial-style rooms were crowded with dancers and the Soviet artistic and political élite—including, it was noted, Khrushchev’s son-in-law, whom Balanchine studiously avoided in order to minimize any political complications.

The next day, the production moved to the gigantic, six-thousand-seat Palace of Congresses, which had been sold out for days. It was an impressive, if cold, new theatre, a huge stone-and-glass structure originally built to host the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party, in 1961. The dancers were amazed to find air-conditioning, a fully stocked restaurant, and marble bathrooms with plenty of toilet paper.

Seeing the cavernous stage, Balanchine immediately pulled the planned dancers for “Serenade,” who could barely be seen in the vast auditorium, and replaced them with taller ones. This time, and for most of the rest of the run, the Soviet people stood and cheered for the company, urging on their favorite artists by chanting their names (“Meetchell! Meetch-ell!” for Arthur Mitchell) and, at the end, calling for Balanchine to take a bow—“Ba-lan-chine! Ba-lanchine! Spa-si-bo! Spa-si-bo!”—until he appeared from the wings and bowed modestly. As the Russian crew began

to extinguish the lights, he gently implored the audience to go home; the dancers needed to rest.

He had to admit his immense satisfaction that audiences especially loved “Episodes” and “Agon,” his new abstract dances to largely atonal Webern and Stravinsky scores. The dancer Allegra Kent was even dubbed “the American Ulanova,” a reference to the beloved Soviet dancer Galina Ulanova. Critics were more ideologically constrained and complained that these dances were cold and lacked the warmth of theatrical dress and a human story. Balanchine patiently endured interview after interview, tirelessly explaining his approach to beauty and the human figure. His un-Sovietized Russian flowed, and, at times, even the facial tic that had been with him since childhood—a kind of nervous sniffing and nose twitching—melted away as he meticulously answered in his native tongue those who called his work mechanical, grotesque, or “repulsive.” But when a prominent critic told him that his ballets had no soul he sharply retorted that since Soviets didn’t believe in God they couldn’t know about the soul. And, when a delegation from the Ministry of Culture asked him, please, to cancel “Episodes” because “the people” couldn’t understand it, he responded, in a rare show of temper, with a Russian equivalent of “Fuck you” and walked out.

It all wore on him—the daily petty humiliation of waiting in the freezing cold while some guard, who by then knew exactly who Balanchine was, double-and triple-checked his papers before allowing him into the Kremlin or the theatre. One day, he forgot his official pass, and the guard turned him away, leaving a gaggle of frustrated journalists shouting from the other side of the barrier, a scene that delighted him by exposing the comedy of Soviet officialdom. Everything seemed grim and gray, he said—the food, the dress, the way people warily checked their every movement, even while walking down the street. His stomach clenched when an old friend invited him to his home, two cramped and dingy rooms, and proudly showed him that he had his own bathroom. Balanchine complained that the phone in his hotel room rang mysteriously in the middle of the night and that the radio would suddenly turn on. He was haunted by nightmares about losing his passport or being thrown into prison or suffocating. “A little green devil is following me,” he said, and he was not joking. He was losing weight fast and looked noticeably gaunt, and bursitis was making his shoulder inflamed and painful.

His temper flared. One night, after a bravura technical performance by Edward Villella in “Donizetti Variations,” the cheering audience called Villella back for bow after bow, until he finally performed an impromptu encore. Balanchine was beside himself with rage and stood in the wings fuming. Such a deviation from the score was everything he had fought against, and he was as angry as the company had ever seen him. As he later put it, “This is not circus.” The dancers were on edge, too: one got so drunk at a reception that he started smashing glasses and bad-mouthing “America of purple mountains majesties,” until he was escorted out and put on a plane back to the United States. Allegra Kent recalled “horsing around in crazy ways,” and other dancers remembered her performing an “improvised beatnik twist” for a gathering crowd of astonished Russians. There were whispers of dancers having affairs with their K.G.B. handlers and falling in love with Soviet musicians. The dancer Shaun O’Brien was arrested for taking pictures of pigeon tracks in the snow and held in custody for hours, where he was questioned at length about Little Rock, Marilyn Monroe—and Cuba.

Cuba. On October 22nd, in the middle of the company’s Moscow run, President Kennedy went on national TV to inform the American people that the U.S.S.R. had installed offensive nuclear missiles in Fidel Castro’s Cuba that were capable of reaching American cities. He coolly announced a strict quarantine of the island and the readiness of the United States to retaliate on Soviet soil in the event of a nuclear strike. When the news of this terrifying standoff reached the Embassy in Moscow, Kirstein, Balanchine, and a couple of others were informed of the situation. Kirstein and Betty Cage, who helped run the company, quickly came up with a disaster strategy. Plan A was to charter a plane; if the word came from the Embassy, the dancers could board waiting buses to the airport and take off immediately. If they couldn’t get to the airport, they’d resort to Plan B: get everyone inside the Embassy. Plan C was to then arrange a “prisoner swap” with the Bolshoi dancers, who were on a cultural-exchange tour in New York. When Kirstein shared these wildly unrealistic scenarios with the Ambassador’s staff, the response was swift: “The first thing we will know at the Embassy is that the phone will be cut off.”

For the moment, he was told, there were no plans for evacuation, and the Ambassador would attend rehearsals to allay any panic. As a comfort, the Embassy kitchen was made available to the dancers, who occupied themselves eating hamburgers and steaks, and in a touching sign of solidarity the staff at the Ukraina placed vats of flowers on the tables for the company. While N.Y.C.B. continued to perform at the Palace of Congresses, Khrushchev and other officials went to see an American singer at the Bolshoi Theatre—a way of signalling calm while still snubbing Balanchine. (Kirstein nervously scuttled back and forth.)

On October 27th, “Black Saturday,” an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft was shot down over Cuba and the pilot killed. Information was not widely available, and secret negotiations were under way, but the surprise downing of the plane (by a local commander) further frayed nerves in Washington, Moscow, and Havana. By then, the United States was already at DEFCON 2, one level below war; U.S. long-range missiles and bombers were on alert; and planes carrying atomic bombs were taking off around the clock, prepared to move on targets in the U.S.S.R. In Cuba, surface-to-surface missiles and nuclear

warheads were ready in the event of war, accidental or otherwise.

In Moscow that afternoon, in a separate incident, Soviet troops moved into place around the American Embassy to protect protesters who were throwing ink and eggs in a large demonstration against the imperial capitalist United States. (The protest was staged, it later transpired, by Soviet authorities, who bused in confused students and workers for the event and supplied them with posters and things to throw.) The American Embassy told the dancers to stay away and informed Kirstein that, if war broke out, it would be powerless to help them, and they would all have to use their wits to survive. Officials warned that the audience that night might rush the stage and advised the company to be prepared to immediately bring down the heavy safety curtain in the event of a riot.

That evening, the dancers, aware of some vague but imminent danger, nervously gathered at the theatre. Balanchine was strangely calm and commented dryly that he hadn’t yet seen Siberia. He never believed there would be a war, he later explained, because neither Khrushchev nor Kennedy wanted one, but there was more to his detachment than that. Russia had held a gun to his head once before, with the Revolution, and this time he had been training himself for years to expect death and to live only in the present moment. That “now” for him was one of the greatest skills in ballet. (He liked to say to his dancers, “What are you saving it for? You might be dead tomorrow!”) As the curtain rose on Bizet’s “Symphony in C,” the dancers stood for a moment in disciplined anticipation, staring into the blackened house of the theatre. Irving was poised at the podium, baton raised for the downbeat, and at that moment the audience suddenly grew larger than itself and rose in spontaneous applause. With the first note, an adrenaline rush brought on by pent-up fear and relief flowed through the dancers’ bodies, and they danced with the energy of life-giving release. At the end of the piece, Bizet and Balanchine’s exuberant and decisive close elicited rhythmic chanting from the audience, until finally Balanchine, looking small and thin, stood center stage and spoke quietly into the hushed auditorium. He thanked them all and then asked them to please go home; the dancers were tired and would be back tomorrow.

“I can’t believe I’d been carrying them in my mouth.”

When tomorrow came, Armageddon had been averted. Kennedy and Khrushchev had reached an agreement, and late that afternoon the news was broadcast in Russia and around the world. As it happened, that night was N.Y.C.B.’s last performance in Moscow, and after the cheering and chanting at the end of the show Balanchine took the stage again. This time, he graciously invited the audience to follow the company to its next destination, which would be Petrograd, he said, deliberately using a name for St. Petersburg that predated the Revolution. Despising Lenin, Balanchine refused to use the name Leningrad for his beloved native city.

The moment they arrived and checked into the Hotel Astoria, Balanchine grabbed a couple of company friends, saying, “Let’s go to my old house”—by which he meant his aunt’s old rooms on Bolshaya Moskovskaya, across from the old Vladimir Cathedral, which he had often visited while a student at the Imperial Theatre School. The apartment building was still there, and he could see his aunt’s window, but his heart sank when he saw that the once beautiful house of worship across the street was now a factory. Worse, the mighty Kazan Cathedral, which they had passed on the way, had been converted into an anti-God museum. Still, he raced to the Imperial Theatre School, on Rossi Street—but to his companions’ surprise he stopped short at the entrance. His mind locked, and he couldn’t go inside. How would he manage the memories that were so tightly packed inside this old building? He found a small church that was still open and lit a candle there instead.

The people he had known were still alive; he just didn’t recognize them—didn’t want to recognize them, perhaps. His once beautiful young teacher Elizaveta Gerdt, for example, was now an old woman, he sadly noted. He had wanted to see the choreographer Kasyan Goleizovsky, an idol of his youth, but when he saw Goleizovsky’s “Scriabiniana” performed by the Bolshoi he was so embarrassed that he cancelled the visit. He didn’t want to meet a feeble and wrinkled old man and preferred his memories of this crucial iconoclast. In Leningrad, he met a few members of his first dance company, Young Ballet, but now they just seemed to him “old and brown and bent like mushrooms. How can you feel affectionate and sentimental about a mushroom?” He did

want to see Fyodor Lopukhov, whose “Dance Symphony” had been such a formative influence, but the old choreographer declined a visit. Balanchine’s obsession with aging was irrational, of course, and he was older, too, but he couldn’t stand that his colleagues, who had been so lovely and vibrant, had grown old and “dumpy,” as if the ruin of their bodies was part of the ruin of Russia itself.

The more he was fêted, applauded, and celebrated, the more depressed, self-controlled, and in charge he became. When he learned that students and artists couldn’t get tickets for the company’s performances, he arranged a free performance of his most radical works at the Palace of Culture: “Apollo,” “Agon,” and “Episodes.” He met with Soviet choreographers to discuss the principles of his art, and when the youngest among them asked for more he met them again informally at the theatre. When Konstantin Sergeyev, the artistic director of the Kirov Ballet (and an apparatchik), obsequiously presented him with a silver samovar and flowers onstage, noting that Leningrad was Balanchine’s home town, Balanchine pointedly accepted on behalf of New York and America. It all reminded Kirstein of the coronation scene in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible.” “Do you remember that scene?” he said to a journalist. “Ivan is on his throne. The nobles bow down before him; they heap gold upon him. And he sits there, implacable—he is absolutely implacable.”

Balanchine was also tense, moody, competitive, and despondent. When he taught class at the theatre, he seemed distracted, and the dancers watched quietly as he peered out the window in a daze, vacantly recalling how he had watched the tsar’s uniformed parades out of these very windows as a child. Ironically, the company happened to be there for the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which brought out the Soviet fleet, flags, tanks, banners, huge photographs of Lenin, parades, loud slogans, and carousing crowds. What Balanchine remembered of the Revolution were piles of bodies in the street, and people eating dead horses and rats. At the theatre, the celebrations were marked by the cancellation of “Episodes” because the musicians were too drunk. It was hard for Balanchine not to see everything through the lens of 1917, or else through the rose-tinted glass of the tsar’s empire, and he angrily complained that the theatre was full of dowdy working-class people who ate and drank noisily during the performance and didn’t care a whit for what they were seeing—something that was manifestly untrue. One night, he stood immobilized in the wings as the crowds chanted, and when one of the dancers urged him to go onstage he refused to move, saying, “What if I were dead?” Betty Cage thought that Balanchine was on the verge of collapse and had already arranged for him to skip Kyiv, the company’s next stop, and return to New York for a week before rejoining the company for its final performances, in Tbilisi and Baku. He needed a break. For him, Kirstein said, being in Russia was “a kind of crucifixion.”

“I would kiss you, but there can only be one hot person in a relationship.”

Balanchine flew to Helsinki on November 8th, spent the night, and left the next morning for New York. Eugenie Ouroussow, a White Russian princess who ran Balanchine’s school, met him at Idlewild, and reported in a letter to her son the two “main points” he had made on the car ride home: that the company had produced an artistic revolution in Russia, and that Russia had “crushed” Balanchine. That week, he and his wife, Tanaquil Le Clercq, entertained guests constantly, as if cooking and hospitality could repair his battered mind. Barely a week later, he departed again for the U.S.S.R., bags stuffed with extra pointe shoes for the dancers.

He rejoined the company in Kyiv just in time to board the plane for Tbilisi, where, again, Andrei was waiting, this time with family in tow. It was a looking-glass moment, the life he might have had. Suddenly, he was little Georgi, and he met the relatives he did not know: Andrei’s glamorous wife, their darkly handsome sons (one named after Balanchine), and their daughter, a dancer. There was also Apollon Balanchivadze, George’s half-brother from his father’s first marriage, whom he had known briefly as a child. Talking freely was difficult. They were shadowed, and at Andrei’s apartment George nervously pointed to the ceiling, indicating that everything was bugged and they couldn’t speak. Still, in snatches and pieces, he learned the story of his family’s sad fate.

Worst of all: his sister, Tamara. His voice later turned ashen when he spoke of her, in the only recording we have of

his account of her tragic end. George had last seen her as a child, and, in the years after he left Russia, Tamara had grown tall and angular, with intense, skeptical eyes and none of her mother’s fragile beauty. She had become a set designer and, after marrying a German who deserted her to return to Germany, ended up working in theatre in Moscow and Leningrad. The last the family heard from her was in 1941, just days before the German siege of Leningrad began. She may have been killed during the siege, or she may have died of illness or starvation or perhaps on a train in the war zone trying to get back to Georgia. No one quite knows. She simply disappeared.

Andrei was a survivor. Like his father, Meliton, he was outgoing and prone to excessive toasts and speeches, and he had a wonderful singing voice. He won Soviet medals and honors for his Georgian-style music, and occasionally enjoyed arraying them on his jacket like a general’s insignia. At the right moment, he would strip them off, grinning, make some loud anti-Soviet declaration, and then restore them all again. He played at the margins, calculating in part that the cost to the authorities of arresting the brother of the famous George Balanchine would be too high. But in fact he also did everything he was supposed to do: led the composers’ union, taught at the academy in Tbilisi, composed music in the correct style, and won the requisite awards. So they let him play the jester—within limits. His career was celebrated, but he was rarely permitted to travel to the West. He must not defect, and he never tried.

Apollon was older and less fortunate. Arrested and indicted in 1924 for fighting in a special gendarmes unit of the White Army, he had spent years in prison, in isolation, and although he was eventually released, he was arrested again in 1942 and this time sent for ten years of hard labor in Kazakhstan. Upon his release, he became a quietly practicing priest, and kindly organized a vespers service at a local church specially for George.

George knew that his mother, Maria, had died three years earlier, but he knew little of her sad life. He had last seen her when he was eighteen, in 1922, when she left Petrograd to join Meliton in Tbilisi. Meliton was away much of the time, and she ended up living modestly on a small street in an old church converted by the Bolsheviks into apartments. The frescoes were still on the walls, and some of the nuns who had once made fresh Communion bread in the front rooms resided there, too. Often alone, she wore a brooch with pictures of Tamara, George, and Andrei, and would sit anxiously by the radio listening for word of her Georgi—would they ever let him come home? She watched the mail closely and couldn’t understand why he wrote to say how much he hoped to receive letters from her but didn’t send a return address. In a letter to Andrei, she worried that they had lost the “thread of connection to Georgi. Where is he?!” She faded away as quietly as she had lived, and Andrei arranged a small plot in a large and prestigious cemetery in Tbilisi, as befitting his stature as a famous Georgian composer.

Balanchine wanted to visit his father’s grave. Not his mother’s—she had always been a kind of spirit figure in his mind, and he didn’t need her bones. He had her snowy ethereality instead. It was his father whose photo had sat propped on his bedside table for years, and yet Meliton had often been absent as a father, and he had doted not on George but on Andrei, as his musical son and successor. The image of his father, next to his icons, perhaps wasn’t really there for comfort; rather, it was there so that George could

show him

. See me. Watch me. I am a musician, too. And now George wanted to see his father’s grave. Not because he loved him—seeing is not the same as loving—but because his father was music, which was what he had become, whereas his mother was the soft inner sanctum that was destroyed, or left behind, that he could get to only through women and dance. Besides, his father was his roots, his soil, and he wanted to see and smell the Georgian heritage he had claimed for so long as his own. Meliton was buried in Kutaisi, near the Balanchivadze family enclave of Banoja, some few hours west of Tbilisi, and George went there with Andrei, Apollon, and his colleague Natasha Molostwoff, accompanied by the inevitable K.G.B. posse. They departed by trainat 7 A.M., and Molostwoff later recalled that their car was full of “wild Georgians,” who flocked around Balanchine, taking pictures, talking, touching, celebrating their lucky encounter with this famous artist. When they finally arrived in Kutaisi, exhausted, Balanchine insisted that he and his brothers go alone to Meliton’s grave, at the Green Flower Monastery (Mtsvane Kvavila). Their escorts waited at the tall iron gates to the cemetery.

The story of Meliton’s death, it turned out, was not simple. Andrei told George that Meliton had died, in November, 1937, of a gangrenous leg he’d refused to have amputated, and recalled finding their father lying in bed at home saying that death was a beautiful girl who was coming to take him in her arms, and that he was looking forward to it. But it was later whispered among grave keepers that Meliton had been taken away in the night and shot before being ceremoniously buried—not here, but in the “Pantheon” of famous Georgians under a large pine tree at the foot of the Bagrati Cathedral, a magnificent church turned into a museum by the Bolsheviks. It wasn’t true that he was shot: Meliton most likely died of gangrene, as Andrei had said, but the rumors were a sign of the violence engulfing Georgian life at the time, and they cast an additional pall over Meliton’s passing. It was the height of the Great Terror, led in Georgia by Lavrentiy Beria, one of Stalin’s cruellest henchmen and, like Stalin, a Georgian. In the year before Meliton’s death, Beria had begun purging the local Party and intelligentsia, a process which accelerated in the next two years. Thousands were killed or sent to the Gulag, including family and friends of Meliton and Andrei. In 1936, at a dinner before a performance of Andrei’s ballet “Heart of the Mountains,” Beria allegedly poisoned the Party stalwart Nestor Lakoba (who had fallen from Stalin’s favor) and then escorted him to the elegant Moorish-style opera house, where the Tbilisi élite witnessed the spectacle of his agonized convulsions as the ballet continued; he died the following morning.

Friends of Meliton whom Georgi and Andrei had met in their home as children had been victims, too. Mamia Orakhelashvili, who had become highly

placed in the Party, was arrested on June 26, 1937, and tortured and shot in front of his wife, Maria. By one account, she was forced to watch as her husband’s eyes were gouged out and his eardrums perforated before his execution. She and her daughter were then arrested and sent to the Gulag, and her daughter’s husband, the famous conductor Evgeni Mikeladze, was blindfolded, tortured, and eventually executed. There were show trials broadcast by radio, and Beria’s agents had quotas and routinely slaughtered hundreds of “enemies” in a single night. No one was safe. Closer to home, Meliton’s nephew Irakli Balanchivadze was arrested later that year for “Trotskyism” and shot.

But not Meliton, who was probably too old and too studiously apolitical to matter. Official reports did not mention his gangrene and merely noted that his dead body lay in state in the main hall of the music school he had founded in Kutaisi, and that a small service was performed by a local folk choir before he was interred under the pine tree at Bagrati. Then, in 1957, in a macabre finale, Meliton’s bones were dug up and reinterred in a new, official Pantheon at the Green Flower Monastery, where he now lay near a small church used by the Bolsheviks, it was said, to store cement. His grave, unlike the others around it, was left unmarked except for a large rock and a miniature carving of piano keys. The K.G.B. didn’t give George or Andrei much time with their father, but before they left the brothers poured some wine and spilled the first glass over the grave in the Georgian way.

They also visited the medieval Gelati Monastery, high on a mountain above Kutaisi. Founded in 1106, it had been closed by the Communists in 1923 but preserved as a historical monument, because kings were buried there. Among them was the king who ordered the monastery’s construction, David IV, revered by Georgians as “the builder,” the architect of their country’s medieval Golden Age. David envisioned Gelati as a “second Jerusalem,” and it became a center of Christian culture and especially of Neoplatonism. Its misty grounds, practically in the clouds on a wooded hillside, include the Church of St. George, the Church of St. Nicholas, and the astonishing Church of the Nativity of the Virgin. This was what Balanchine came from and believed in—these were his saints—and although formal worship was not permitted and the monks had long since dispersed, he and his entourage were allowed inside the Church of the Nativity. There they found themselves under a massive arch that seemed to reach as high as Heaven, with light flooding in through the small windows onto the faded but still colorful ancient frescoes. An intricate mosaic of the Virgin and Child with the archangels Michael and Gabriel appeared high in the apse, and a photo shows George in his trenchcoat standing stoically before them.

By the time they left Kutaisi, on the night train back to Tbilisi, it was pouring rain, but Balanchine had seen what he had come for: his father’s Georgia was now his own. It felt to him primal, a Biblical land, and he even enthused to some of the dancers that after Noah’s flood there had been a flight to the Caucasus. Ancient Greece, he said, was settled by Georgian tribes, and these were his tribes, his people. Being Georgian was another way, too, of setting himself against Russia. No wonder some of the dancers were sure that he had been born there. He had told them so. At moments, he may even have believed it.

None of this seemed to deepen his relations with Andrei, who enthusiastically proposed that they make a ballet together, as they had put on shows as children. After dinner one evening at his home, Andrei hopefully played recordings of his music for George and even sat at the piano and regaled his brother with his prize-winning compositions. Balanchine sat bent, with his head buried in his hands, and said nothing. Finally, in frustration and despair, Andrei stopped and waited in painful silence, before awkwardly changing the subject. Natasha Molostwoff, who was there, was appalled: couldn’t Balanchine just say something nice, anything at all? He couldn’t.

The N.Y.C.B. performances were sold out, and on opening night the streets around the opera house were thick with crowds. A sea of people parted for Balanchine as he made his way into the theatre, as if he were some kind of Christ figure—or movie star. The police had been summoned, in anticipation of a crush of people pushing their way in, but the crowds were orderly and civil as, night after night, they pressed into the packed house. On the last night, after the final curtain fell, Balanchine stepped onto the apron of the stage to thank them all. Before the dancers boarded the train to Baku, they piled their extra tights, leotards, leg warmers, and pointe shoes into a bin and left them for the local dancers, who had none.

“Baku or bust”: for the company, Baku was a countdown. They marched through four days of performances, and on the final night a group of them stayed up until dawn dancing and playing strip poker with no heat and the hot-water faucets running full blast until the walls sweated. On December 2nd, the company packed into buses to the airport, then departed on a rickety plane for Moscow. It was snowing hard as they changed for a flight to Copenhagen, destination New York, and by this time the dancers were all chanting in unison: “Go, go, go, go!” As the jet lifted off the icy tarmac at Sheremetyevo, the exhausted company broke into cheers, relieved to, as one of the dancers later put it, “get the hell out of the U.S.S.R.” No one was more relieved than the gaunt Balanchine. “That’s not Russia,” he said. “That’s a completely different country, which happens to speak Russian.”

Soon after landing at Idlewild, Balanchine made a trip to Washington, D.C., for a debriefing at the State Department. By all accounts, the tour had been a personal and political victory, but Balanchine was unmoved. To him, the company’s success meant nothing. Instead, this was the moment when a mirror broke in his mind. He could no longer hold a nostalgic reflection of himself and an imagined tsarist past. That image, which had sustained him even as he also stood against it, no longer existed, and for all his proclamations of Americanness he was left feeling even more homeless and unmoored than he had felt before he set out. Russia really had disappeared. There was no more place to be exiled from. Exile was no longer a state of being; it was a flight—a flight into the pure glass-and-mirrored realm of the imagination, its own kind of home. ■

Shouts & Murmurs: Ranking My Covid Testers

Seth Reiss

LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

Here are the people who have tested me for Covid, ranked from worstto best.

No. 77:

Some guy. Eyes: brown. Upper cheeks: fleshy. Ears: uniform. Only said “Next.” Didn’t ask “How’s your day been?” Decent hair, though.

No. 76:

A woman. Normal hair, normal upper cheeks, normal eyes, normal ears. Swab work inconsistent. Swirled the left nostril one more time than the right. Did she lose count? Also confirmed my birthday in a monotone I didn’t like.

No. 75:

Forget the gender. Forget the upper cheeks, eyes, ears, and hair. Remember an offhand remark about how dry the inside of my nose was. I said, “That’s none of your fucking business.” Well, I thought it.

No. 74:

Self-tested. I hate myself.

No. 73:

Male. Made a show of the way he affixed the adhesive label with my name around the vial containing the pinkish Covid liquid. It just felt very performative.

No. 72:

I’ll spare you the details, but I left bleeding from my eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Not ranked the worst because bleeding is something I enjoy.

No. 71:

They say the eyes are the windows into the soul. Not with this person.

No. 70:

Some guy who was very excited about his upcoming trip to Belize. He kept talking about Belize and what he was going to do there. I felt at a disadvantage because I’ve never been to Belize, nor had I ever thought about going to Belize, so I couldn’t add anything except to ask whether they have any good museums in Belize. I felt like an idiot. When I left, I overheard him talking to the next patient about the trip to Belize.

Nos. 69-64:

Not great, not terrible.

No. 63:

“So, how was your trip to Belize?” I asked. And, when he looked at me with that blank expression in his eyes (blue-green; upper cheeks: pudgy; hair: brown), I realized he didn’t remember me. I was just a number.

I said, “In case you ever tested me for Covid again, I was prepared to ask you about the Actun Tunichil Muknal.” He said, “What?” And I said, “It’s a cave in the Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve. In Belize.” And he said, “Oh. We stayed at the beach.”

No. 62:

Woman. Eyes: fine. Upper cheeks: fine. Hair: fine. Ears: average.

No. 61:

Another woman. Eyes: hollowed-out holes. Upper cheeks: charred. Hair: singed: Ears: gone.

Nos. 60-9:

These are foggy, because during this time my father and I were in conflict. I don’t want to get into it much, for legal and personal reasons, but, long story short: My father is ignoring me. Are you familiar with the film “Jaws”? My father directed it. He is pretending not to know who I am and has sent word through his legal representatives that I am not his son. This is hurtful, as you can imagine. So, apologies for the vagueness here.

No. 8:

Glasses!

My first one with

glasses!

And not just protective goggles! Glasses underneath the goggles. I never thought I’d see the day.

No. 7:

British accent.

No.

6:

Albert Einstein hair. Like, exactly.

No. 5:

Here’s what happened: I entered the testing area looking pretty bad—coughing, not breathing well, weak. I said, “Look, I’m pretty sure I have Covid.” (Full disclosure: I have not been vaccinated, because I believe every single reason that one should not get vaccinated. You may ask, “Why would someone who doesn’t believe in vaccination get tested so much?” And, well, hey, I’m bored and it’s a lonely life.) Where was I? I said, “I’m pretty sure I have Covid,” and then added, “But, if you could find it in your heart to make sure I test negative, maybe switch the vials with the person in front of me, that would be great. See, I have to take my monthly maskless flight to Toronto so I can look at the city from the CN Tower, and I don’t care who I infect.” And he did it.

No. 4:

I said to the woman doing my test, “I’m sorry, I know this is weird, but do I know you? Your eyes, upper cheeks, hair, and ears look awfully familiar.” She looked around to see if anyone was watching, and I whispered, “The coast is clear,” which is something I’ve always wanted to whisper. Then she lowered her mask to reveal her mouth. It was … Jennifer Aniston.

I said, “I thought I recognized you!” She blushed and gave—I’ll just say it—a very Rachel-like shrug. I asked, “What are you doing here giving Covid tests?” And she said, “Hey, it’s a lonely life.” And I said, “I’m not vaccinated,” and she said, “Neither am I.” And then she confirmed my birth date, tested me for Covid, and we dated for a year.

No. 3:

Matt LeBlanc. Not from “Friends.” A different Matt LeBlanc.

No. 2:

“I did remember you the second time I tested you,” he said. “I was trying to play it cool.” It was the man who went to Belize. “See, I thought I laid it on too thick about Belize. So, when I saw you again, I decided to pull back. Anyway, of course I went to the Actun Tunichil Muknal. The cave contains several sets of human sacrificial remains, one of which—known as the Crystal Maiden—has been entirely covered in calcite crystals.”

“Yeah, I know all that,” I said.

No. 1:

Some woman who also watches “Better Call Saul.” ■

Annals of Nature: Fish Kebabs
Is massacring an invasive species a virtuous sport?
D. T. Max

ILLUSTRATION BY JOHNNY DOMBROWSKI

“What you’re hunting isn’t prey,” a lionfish diver told me. “It’s the enemy.”

Rachel Bowman is a diver who specializes in the hunting, catching, and killing of lionfish, a species native to Indo-Pacific waters. Off the coast of Indonesia or Australia, an adult typically grows to about twelve inches; groupers, eels, and sharks are its natural predators, and in many countries divers cannot spear one without a permit. Lionfish have also long been popular in aquariums. Tens of thousands of American homes have them in saltwater tanks. Lionfish spend their days hovering in the water, which makes them particularly well suited to the job of being looked at. They are also striking, with shimmery white bodies overlaid with bold red or orange stripes, a Mohawk of spikes on their backs, and clashing patterns on their fins and faces. They look at once sleek and tacky. Bowman, who is forty-three, recalls that, in 2012, “when I first saw one, I thought it was a fish dressed up for Mardi Gras.” She wasn’t staring through aquarium glass, though, or diving off Japan. She was in the waters of the Florida Keys, a few miles from where she lives.

At some point in the past half century, somewhere in the warmer latitudes of the Western Hemisphere, lionfish jumped from aquariums to natural salt water. The first recorded sighting was in 1985, off Dania Beach, just north of Miami. Lionfish have succeeded mightily in their new environment—there are now many millions of them in the Western Atlantic—and this is bad news: they are destructive to native species, devouring other sea creatures and upending the equilibrium of reef life. Although there is an obvious conservation benefit to eliminating lionfish, Bowman does not think of herself primarily as an environmentalist. She sees her targets as invaders, and considers it her job to repel them. “What you’re hunting isn’t prey—it’s the

enemy

,” she told me, adding, “Isn’t it nice to be on the side of the good guys?” She also appreciates the fact that there are no regulations about lionfish killing. “No bag limits, sex limits, seasons, boat limits, gear limits,” she said. “Lionfish is the only species that is one-hundred-per-cent wide open.” Hunting them is a throwback to an era when you could go into the water and come out of it with whatever you wanted—to an era, paradoxically, before conservation measures were needed.

Lionfish divers are a close-knit community, staying in one another’s houses, trading diving stories, and amiably competing for who can kill the most fish. Their goal is a balanced, usable ecosystem: killing a lionfish saves a yellowtail snapper that, in turn, can be caught for dinner. Hunting lionfish is satisfying but labor-intensive. They won’t chase a hook, and a dragnet is impractical, because it would snag on the reefs where they live. Lionfish must be killed one by one, with a pole spear: a metal rod, with jagged prongs at the end, that you launch through the water by deploying a rubber sling. There are many variations on these poles—three-foot, seven-foot, three-pronged, five-pronged—and they have such names as the Lionfish Buster and the Lionator.

In the past two decades, many divers have made hunting lionfish their obsession, but nobody appears to have done it with the intensity of Bowman. In the ten years that she has been diving, she has gone out roughly three times a week. An image of a lionfish spear is tattooed on her arm. On the Internet, there is a photograph of Bowman holding a pole spear studded with more than a dozen freshly killed lionfish—a gaudy fish kebab.

Lionfish can be dangerous: their spines contain one of the most powerful neurotoxins in the aquatic world; their Mohawk is venomous, as are the two spikes on their pelvic fins and the three by their

anal glands. Like most lionfish hunters, Bowman has been stung repeatedly—at least thirty times, she told me. She wears gloves when she dives, but that makes little difference. “You can tell me you have a puncture-proof glove, blah blah blah,” she said. “But I’m gonna laugh at you.” In rare cases, the venom can cause paralysis in humans. Being stung, Bowman said, “feels like your bones and joints are pushing out—it’s a fucking misery.” She keeps four Vicodin in her dive bag.

Frequent diving strains the sinuses, and Bowman spends so much time underwater that she uses industrial quantities of Sudafed and bromelain, an enzyme derived from pineapples, to keep her air passages open; she often gets facial massages. She recently sent me an image of herself on a dive boat during last year’s Emerald Coast Open Lionfish Tournament—a gruelling two-day competition off Destin, in the Florida Panhandle, that is the largest such event in the world. In the photograph, her lower face is streaked by a bright-red smear of blood, the result of ruptured nasal capillaries. Nevertheless, she won the Open—her third victory.

At this year’s event, there was even more money at stake: almost a hundred thousand dollars in total. The team that caught the most lionfish was to receive a cash award of ten thousand dollars. A five-thousand-dollar prize would be given to whoever caught the largest lionfish. Lionfish are edible and marketable, so the winners would also make thousands of dollars selling their catch. More than a hundred and forty-five people had registered and were getting ready to dive as often as ten times a day, sometimes to depths of two hundred feet. Bowman and her team of three, competing under the name of Lionfish University—a nonprofit that was sponsoring them—were up against squads they’d competed with previously, sporting such names as the Deep Water Mafia and Alabama Jammin’. During the tournament, the contestants were expected to kill more than ten thousand lionfish. As Bowman put it to me, “This is the biggie.”

The most likely reason for the success that lionfish have had crossing over into Atlantic waters is precisely what makes them so harmful today: their insatiable appetite. The Rate My-Fish Tank site warns about “the tendency of the lionfish to eat any fish small enough to fit in its mouth.” The upshot of this behavioral trait was expulsion from aquariums—and freedom. Steve Gittings, the science coördinator for the marine-sanctuaries program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who leads the agency’s efforts to control lionfish, told me, “I’ve got to believe that people saw them eating all their other fish and just threw them in a canal.”

After the initial sighting off Dania Beach, there was a gap of some years before the presence of lionfish became palpable. They reached Bermuda by 2004, Cuba by 2007, and the Yucatán Peninsula by 2009. Their spread was helped by the fact that their eggs, encased in oily sacs, remain on the surface of water, allowing them to drift on ocean currents. Lionfish have been seen as far north as Rhode Island, though they do not last the winter there, and they recently made it to the Brazilian coast.

Since lionfish tend to congregate around any sunken object, it’s reasonable to guess that there are millions of them near submerged structures that no humans have ever visited. In 2014, Alex Fogg, the organizer of the Destin tournament, was a master’s student in biology at the University of Southern Mississippi, studying lionfish. In a GoPro video taken that year, Fogg, who is now the coastal-resource manager for Destin-Fort Walton Beach, is diving for lionfish southwest of Destin. He descends about a hundred feet to a small military aircraft that he has just discovered on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The area around the wings and the fuselage is carpeted by lionfish—they look as thick and sluggish as sea urchins. Fogg spears two hundred creatures, in two trips, before returning to his boat. They make no effort to elude him. Though the name lionfish suggests a fearsome quality, killing one is not reminiscent of Papa Hemingway in Africa. Lionfish go quietly. They do not scatter when their neighbors disappear. The best comparison might be stinkbugs on a wall, another invasive species that doesn’t know enough to flee. (Fogg has posted his video on YouTube, and it has been watched more than a million times.)

It took quite a while for Americans to realize that the arrival of lionfish wasn’t just a colorful accident but a serious problem. At first, concern centered on their venomous spines. In 2002, the Charlotte

Observer

described the lionfish as “a beautiful but dangerous new addition” to local waters, warning, “The fish are slow, but they are also capable of rapidly lurching forward a few inches, making them dangerous to swimmers who move too close.” Only in the late two-thousands did divers begin noticing that, when they saw a lot of lionfish, they sometimes didn’t see other fish that they expected to see. Had the lionfish chased them away? Taken their habitat? Eaten them? Lionfish appeared no more aggressive in natural water than in aquariums, yet the same eerie complaint kept being made whenever divers compared notes: where once there was abundant and diverse life—the arrow blenny, the purple chromis—now there was a disturbing predominance of lionfish.

Around 2007, researchers started to take stock of the scale of the damage, and data about the negative effects of lionfish populations began pouring forth from academia. Holden Harris, a marine ecologist at the University of Florida who was on Bowman’s team in this year’s Emerald Coast Open, told me, “Lionfish are probably the most studied marine invasive species ever.” Scientists’ findings have been alarming. A female lionfish lays an average of twenty-seven thousand eggs every two and a half days. In Asian waters, the lionfish’s diet is limited to a narrow range of smaller reef fish, but in the Atlantic and the Gulf it will eat Nassau grouper, parrot fish, yellowtail snapper, banded coral shrimp, juvenile spiny lobster, octopus, slippery dick, and sandfish, among a hundred and seventy or so species. They corral their prey into a corner, using their ornate pectoral fins, then swallow them whole. They can blow water at their prey to make the victims turn and face their hungry, distended mouths.

A 2008 study in the Bahamas calculated that lionfish arriving at a new reef can eliminate more than eighty per cent of other species within five weeks. The researchers were amazed to see one lionfish eat twenty wrasses in half an hour. Other studies have revealed additional remarkable qualities. A lionfish can

expand its mouth to accommodate prey more than half its own body size, and its stomach can expand up to thirty times its normal size, allowing it to gorge at length. But a lionfish can also exist on nothing for three months, by putting itself into a kind of hibernation. When lionfish occupy a reef, they vacuum up not just fish but also larvae, diminishing the variety of future generations. One of the lionfish’s favorite meals is young parrot fish; the species plays a key role in cleaning a reef of algae, and its absence can lead to reef damage or death.

Americanized lionfish, researchers have learned, sometimes behave differently from their Indo-Pacific forebears. Most notably, lionfish in American waters are not afraid of other fish or of divers. They hang motionless when approached—just as they do in an aquarium. They also grow larger in American waters than in the Indo-Pacific, sometimes up to nineteen inches. Many American reefs are artificial and have more nooks than natural ones, allowing lionfish to pack themselves as much as a hundred times more densely. Western Atlantic lionfish can live for fifteen years, and can descend a thousand feet or more. (Sylvia Earle, the noted oceanographer, told me that once, when she was exploring the Bahamas in her submersible, she passed a lionfish at twelve hundred feet.) One study found that lionfish can even survive in estuaries, where the water is barely salty. And, although lionfish want to eat everything, nothing in American waters seems to want to eat lionfish, at least not in quantity—either because the native fish do not recognize the foreign species as food or because they are deterred by the venomous spines.

To environmentalists, the moral was clear: pet owners, by thoughtlessly releasing lionfish into Atlantic waters, had upset the order of nature—just as other pet owners had when they let loose the pythons now destroying Florida’s Everglades. The best path forward, many conservationists argued, was to redouble our commitment to leaving nature in peace. “Kill, kill, kill … is not the solution,” Sylvia Earle declared. “Lionfish have replaced a void created by the loss of apex predators. The best way to protect the ocean reefs is to create more Marine Protected Areas … to bring back healthy numbers of predators that will, in turn, bring balance back to the reef.”

At first, it seemed that a more hands-off approach would work. Conservationists tried to gently goose nature. They experimented with teaching grouper to eat lionfish. But the practice didn’t appear to catch on. In a similar vein, teams in Cuba, Honduras, St. Kitts, and the Bahamas attempted to encourage sharks to develop a taste for the invader by having divers offer them skewers with speared lionfish on them. This didn’t really work, either, and the sharks grew distressingly interested in the divers.

During the past decade, as the invasion grew worse, a new consensus emerged: humans had created the lionfish problem, and humans would have to clean up their own mess. Some proposed solutions were ingenious. In 2016, iRobot, the company famous for the Roomba autonomous vacuum, designed an unmanned submersible robot that, it said, could kill lionfish by zapping them with an electric pulse. The executive director of the project told the Web site Live Science, “They won’t see us coming.” But they did. As Alex Fogg, of the Destin tournament, put it to me, the robot was too “clunky”: “When lionfish see this large thing coming at them with a lot of lights and jets, they’re going to move.”

The general idea carried the day, though. “Be the predator”—a phrase coined by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission in 2015—became the rallying cry, even among ecology-minded groups that usually confine themselves to education and beach cleanups. Probably the foremost environmental organization to endorse lionfish hunting is Reef Conservation International, a U.S. nonprofit that operates in Belize. For the past fifteen years, on a private island there, the group has taught a course in lionfish population control. Volunteers, many of them young people from Europe and America, train by using their spears on coconuts, then go after lionfish on local reefs. (My son recently went on one such trip and killed eighteen.) The program’s director, Anthony Saner, estimates that his volunteers have killed more than six hundred thousand lionfish—and possibly many times that. “We can definitely see, with the areas that we patrol, a rebound in native fish population—there is a serious increase in native coral reefs,” Saner told me. “Their numbers are controlled.” I asked him if other environmental organizations objected to his approach. He said no, adding that taking direct action amid so many overwhelming environmental crises appealed to nearly everyone. “It’s real,” he said. “It’s tangible. And I’m not going to deny it’s fun.”

To some hard-core wildlife-resource managers, all these approaches remained insufficient. I asked Fogg what the ideal solution would be. He mentioned a trap

that Steve Gittings, the marine-sanctuaries coördinator, had been working on for the past six years. It would rest open on the ocean bottom and close slowly enough for other fish to escape while clueless lionfish remained inside; an attached rope would allow people to haul the catch onto a boat. The device could be deployed in deep water where spearing is not a realistic option. Gittings’s team had brought a sample of the trap to the Emerald Coast Open. Fogg told me that he had published more than two dozen research papers on lionfish, enough to know that dogooder environmentalists and weekend lionfish warriors were not going to solve this problem alone. “You’ve got to get commercial fishermen to slaughter the hell out of them,” he said.

Bowman, the daughter of a commercial shrimp-boat captain, grew up in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. In her early twenties, she wanted to be a music journalist, but after 9/11 she fled conventional life and its goals. She moved to the Florida Keys and enjoyed the raffish vibe there, tending bar at a joint called Barracuda Grill. A few months after she arrived in the islands, Adolphus Busch IV, one of the scions of the Budweiser brewing family, had a drink at her restaurant and asked her to run his boat. In 1998, Busch, who had a house in the area, had paid to sink a two-hundred-and-ten-foot cargo ship near Looe Key, thus creating an artificial reef. Bowman would watch Busch dive to the wreck and emerge with lionfish on his spear. “I saw him getting out of the water with these bizarre-looking fish,” Bowman remembers. “I thought, May be there’s something down there for me, too.” She received her diving certification in 2011. By this time, lionfish had been in the Keys in quantity for a decade.

Bowman found that local restaurants were happy to accept a lionfish catch. “They’re low in mercury and have some of the highest omega-acid content of any fish,” she told me. It was not particularly important to her that her activity could be described as environmental activism. “I’m just a bartender who goes diving,” she said. Nor did she know that she was breaking the law—restaurants can serve only fish acquired from authorized providers. (That way, if there is an illness, the source can be traced.) She recalled, “The wonderful people at F.W.C.”—the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission—“reached out and said, ‘Hey, what you’re doing is awesome. It’s also illegal.’” Instead of fining her, though, they encouraged her to sell her fish through proper channels, and with supporting paperwork.

In May, 2016, Bowman became the first person to sell lionfish to Whole Foods. For a while, her photograph accompanied a display of lionfish dumplings at the supermarket chain. Bowman’s father died before this happened, but she thinks he would have been thrilled to find that she had also ended up a commercial fishing captain. “That would have been the moment I finally made up for not being a boy,” she told me. The Whole Foods purchase became an important crossover moment for eating lionfish. Al Massa, who is the chef at Brotula’s, a seafood restaurant in Destin, told me, “A lionfish’s sweet, flaky light-white meat can take a wide variety of sauces, from classic beurre blanc to a roasted-redpepper broth or a yellow-tomato gazpacho.” (In 2017, Gordon Ramsay filmed himself incorporating lionfish into a Caribbean seafood curry.)

Thanks to lionfishing, Bowman started making real money. She bought a boat of her own, a twenty-five-foot vessel that she named the Britney Spears. And she soon found a community. Her catches became an important source of harvest data and fish samples. She was thanked in peer-reviewed publications. “Rachel is absolutely magical,” Gittings told me. Other Gulf divers sometimes found Bowman too intense, but she fit in with the lionfish researchers—and even got to play the cutup. The lionfish community is “really collaborative,” she told me. “You become friends—you’re dive buddies shitting off the back of the boat together.” (She contrasted the fellowship she felt among lionfish hunters with the behavior of other conservationist types: “Turtle people treat each other like shit and backstab each other.”)

Bowman became an exceptional lionfish diver—fast and focussed. Another diver told me, “Rachel is sitting on the gunwales, ready to go, as soon as the captain says we’re on the spot.” Many lionfish divers have a methodical grace to their movements: after closing in on a fish, they release their spear from the sling, carefully unthreading each victim and placing the body in a container before resuming the hunt. Bowman and I recently watched a 2021 video of her diving, and in the clip she looks frenetic, almost angry. Sometimes she skips the sling and dispatches her prey with a quick jab of the prongs. She said of the process, “It’s like picking up garbage along the side of the road.” In the video, her arms and legs are often at odd angles, and her container seems about to float away. “I used to think I was this elegant mermaid,” she told me. “But I look like a turd trying to float the wrong way down the river.”

In 2017, she went to Destin to participate in the event now known as the Emerald Coast Open. She and the two other women on her team speared a thousand fish in two days, winning the tournament. Bowman was thrilled, but it bothered her that “a huge big deal was made not because we won it but because it was three girls.” (One online headline: “cuties confront lionfish menace.”)

During these years, Bowman was so competitive that she took risks she now sees as foolish—she’d dive for too long, or she’d go too deep for someone with her level of experience. Another diver remembers her using shoddy equipment. She grew out of many of these habits, but on a dive two years ago disaster still struck. She was diving with a friend who came up too quickly. “He had what we call a ‘hit,’” she told me. He couldn’t feel his fingers when he got on the boat, and couldn’t remember Bowman’s name. To treat decompression sickness, you are supposed to administer oxygen from extra tanks kept on the deck—but Bowman had forgotten to bring any. The friend was medevacked to a hospital in Miami, but he suffered lasting nerve damage to

his spine. Bowman vowed to be more careful. She told me, “How can it not change you—how I dive, how I look at my divers?”

On the first day of the Emerald Coast Open, I went to a pier in a residential part of Destin to see off Bowman and her teammates: Holden Harris, the University of Florida researcher; a biologist named Kara Wall; and a young diver, Casey Brann, whose day job was at Amazon. It was five in the morning. Harris, his girlfriend, and Bowman had stayed at Alex Fogg’s house the previous night; I had stopped by, and rumpled beds, air mattresses, and a barking puppy gave it the feel of off-campus housing. At the house, Bowman had prepped some spaghetti and meatballs for the first evening of the tournament. Harris’s girlfriend, an astrophysicist who doesn’t dive, would heat it up before the team got home, late that night.

The team members felt that they were in a strong position to win. Their boat’s captain, Kyle Howard, was in control of what everyone saw as the most valuable item on board—a G.P.S.-equipped “fishfinder,” which uses sonar technology to identify objects deep beneath the waves. The key to winning the Open, Bowman told me, was not the diving. It wasn’t about who was the fastest diver or the best diver: “It’s about who has the spots—who has those G.P.S. numbers.” Howard was both a local and a beneficiary of Fogg’s unparalleled knowledge. As Howard backed out of the boat-launch pier, Bowman was putting on her wetsuit. She sniffed her booties. “They smell like fish,” she said. “That’s a good sign.” The sun began to peek above the horizon.

More than an hour away was the first stop: an artificial reef of prefabricated modules, almost a hundred and fifty feet below the surface. On the way, Howard opened a beer to celebrate. He put Cheez Doodles in his nose to keep the mood light. About twenty-five miles out, he idled the boat, and Bowman and Wall went into the water. When they came up, Howard moved the boat a quarter mile or so; then Harris and Brann went in. The sky was clear and the water visibility was excellent—you could see the bottom from eighty feet above. But each diver surfaced with only six fish. Howard consulted his fishfinder—he has thousands of reef sites logged—and motored west for another half a mile. The team dived again.

They repeated this all morning, without much success. Conditions improved in the afternoon: each team member was regularly getting about thirty lionfish per dive. Around 5 p.m., when Wall was on her ninth dive of the day, she saw something huge pass overhead. An experienced diver, she thought it was a great white shark. (Later, she demoted it to a fourteen-foot dusky.) They called off the last dive and headed home as it started to rain and lightning lit up the sky. They had speared five hundred and forty-two lionfish, which rested on ice in coolers belowdecks. On the way in, Bowman asked Howard to call around and see how they were doing against the competition. “Everyone’s cagey,” Bowman explained to me later. “You sniff around a little, but nobody’s giving out numbers.” She went on, “We felt like we had done good. But you don’t get too hyped up one way or another.”

Two days before the competition started, I went out on a dive boat with Alex Fogg, the event’s organizer, to try my luck as a lionfish hunter. I had expected to dive to the bottom of the Gulf, but, as an uncertified diver, I would be limited to a depth of fifty to sixty feet, and in Florida lionfish tend to be found in deeper waters. So we agreed that we would go about six miles offshore, where the depth was around eighty feet, and if Fogg dived and found any lionfish he’d deposit them at the surface. I would be snorkeling, armed and ready to deliver the coup de grâce.

We set off from the harbor and headed for a bridge that marked the entrance to the Gulf. There were dozens of boats in the bay, all of them devoted to fishing, to drinking, or to fishing and drinking. There were day cruisers, cabin cruisers, skiffs, banana boats, Jet Skis, octagonal tiki barges that floated along under thatched roofs, and yachts—with water slides and without.

Tourism has become one of the region’s largest businesses: the Destin area has more than fourteen thousand rooms for rent, the biggest charter-fishing fleet in the country, and a terrible traffic problem. The week of the tournament overlapped with the Billy Bowlegs Pirate Festival, and in my hotel lobby at night T-shirts bearing the slogan “LIONFISH PATROL” clashed with tricornes.

Fogg, who is thirty-four, wants people to have fun at the Open—he likes the fact that lionfishing has become a sport, but a casual one. At the same time, he is also trying to educate the public. This year, he gave top Destin restaurants free lionfish, in return for their training servers to explain to customers why the species is an invasive pest (and how tasty one can be). Fogg had also set up an information booth on the waterfront. A veteran sea captain explained the lionfish problem to passersby on their way to dolphin tours or funnel cakes. It had taken a while for local officials to realize that ecology could be a tourism draw, Fogg said, but they were beginning to understand the potential.

The water off Destin was the most vivid shade of emerald I’d ever seen. The beaches looked like snow. It took us about half an hour to reach our intended spot in the Gulf. Coral cannot survive at such northern latitudes—the majority of dives off Northwest Florida are to wrecks or to artificial constructions. Out of sight below us were chicken coops that had been sunk more than a decade ago. Fogg put on a camo-patterned wetsuit and dived in while I put on fins and a snorkel. A few minutes later, he came up with a few small lionfish and a flounder. “Someone must have hit that reef,” he said, meaning that there had been spearing there shortly before. It takes several months for a lionfish population at a given structure to recover.

Figuring out how to use the pole spear took some work. It was shockingly fast once you released it, and by accident I shot one over the stern. When I asked for a longer pole, I was told it would cost me four hundred dollars if it followed the other, so I settled for a two-foot sticking pole. With some practice, I was able to control its release. It had three nasty prongs on the end—far scarier than a lionfish.

My prey was floating by the stern of the boat, stunned by the sudden change in water pressure. But the chop was strong, and I kept losing sight of the fish once I was in the water. I tried to kill it several times with my spear but kept missing. In the wavy sea, it was hard to align the shot, easy as it looked.

Finally, I got close and released the spear. The lionfish twitched briefly and died. I brought it up on the end of my stick like a discarded party favor.

You could say that I’d just helped protect an ecosystem, but I didn’t exactly feel heroic. The artificiality of my spearing experience only underscored the artificiality of the entire reef ecosystem. The Destin reefs had been created by humans—and, if you got rid of them, you’d get rid of most of the lionfish. But, at another point in the day, as I stared down toward the submerged modules of a different fake reef, I could see all sorts of native life swirling around: grouper and snapper, tomtate and angelfish. If you wanted to keep all this around, maybe you had to treat the Florida coast like an aquarium. At least Fogg was making the cleanup fun. He knew his audience. He told me, “We added a beer festival this year—to lure people.”

The second day of the Emerald Open dawned with even better weather than the first. Bowman’s team put its boat in the water just before sunrise and was soon out at the reefs. This time, Howard took the group about twenty miles to the west of where they had started the day before. The tanks that Bowman had dived with on the first day had been too bulky for her—she is only five feet tall—and she had pulled her back out. On the way in that night, as soon as they were in cell-phone range of the shore, she had called a diver named Josh Livingston, perhaps the most storied lionfish hunter in the world. Livingston, who is thirty-seven, has killed more than a hundred thousand lionfish—“To be honest, it’s a hundred per cent commercial for me,” he told me, adding that he’d made a quarter of a million dollars from their sale—but he was sitting out the Open this year. It was physically too draining. Informally, though, he was advising the chief competition to Bowman’s team: the DeepWater Mafia. That team consisted of four divers from Mississippi: a plumber, a used-car wholesaler, and two contractors.

Nevertheless, when Bowman explained to him her problem with the heavy tanks, he got up from his dinner and went to fill some smaller tanks for her, then left them at Howard’s garage. “That’s what makes this community awesome,” Bowman told me. “We are competitive, but we will drop our shit and take care of another team in a heartbeat.”

For Bowman’s boat, the second day was more productive than the day before. On one dive, Harris nabbed sixty-two lionfish. His teammates cheered. Bowman topped out at thirty-one. The final dive of the day was her worst; she came up with only two fish. “In the end, it’s the luck of the draw,” she said. “We are relying on pinpoints on a map.” In total, Bowman’s team caught nearly thirteen hundred fish in two days—just under the winning total from 2021. When the tournament was over, the group headed in singing along to a rap track by Lil Jon, jumping up and down in their wetsuits.

They stopped to give a stranded boat a tow, and didn’t arrive at the pier until nine-thirty. They still had to get their boat out of the water and carry out the tanks and the coolers of fish. By then, the high had evaporated. Bowman was groaning, trying to stretch her back by folding herself across the pier. “The level of exhaustion, frustration, and fear you feel!” she said. “Did we do enough? Should we have done more? It’s now out of our hands.”

The next day, Fogg and his staff counted the fish. DeepWater Mafia, which had taken sixth place the previous year, won by nearly three hundred and fifty fish—a significant victory. It turned out that Bowman had been wrong: the fish-finder wasn’t what mattered most. This wasn’t the fishing equivalent of Moneyball. “There’s only so much G.P.S. can do for you,” Josh Livingston explained to me after the tally was finalized. He had advised the Deep-Water Mafia to prioritize how many dives it got in. You had to be out at the reefs early, Livingston said, and get in and out of the water faster. The Deep-Water Mafia ended up going out in two boats; as a result, each diver was able to average eighteen dives a day, compared with ten for Bowman’s team.

Diving that many times in a single day can be dangerous—you’re more likely to get an overload of nitrogen in your blood. Tim Shivers, who headed the DeepWater Mafia team, acknowledged to me, “A lot of people would call us foolish for diving that much in a day. We were pushing the limits.” Shivers told me that his team had made a profit of eighteen thousand dollars, after accounting for the price of two hundred and fifty gallons of fuel. The environmental cost of the gas did not matter to him. “I’m not a tree hugger,” he said, though he added that he cared about marine conservation.

In the end, the participants all agreed, the DeepWater Mafia had simply wanted the win more. Most of the sites they dived at were publicly known; it’s just that they went to a higher number of them. “They did the work and earned it,” Livingston said.

Later, I reached Bowman at her home, in Marathon Key. She surprised me by saying that the defeat had felt good. “I was on a team that is not über-competitive, and they made this weekend fun for me,” she said. She now regretted how wound up she had been in previous tournaments. She’d twisted herself in knots for the wrong reasons. “I don’t have a first-place trophy this time,” she said. “But I had so much fucking fun. My face hurts from laughing.” As ever, it was the social aspect that she loved. One year, she mentioned to me, Steve Gittings had come down to the Keys to do research. “Why is the chief science officer from the N.O.A.A. staying in my spare bedroom?” she marvelled.

Bowman had already planned her next expedition, to the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, off Galveston, Texas, in June. She makes the trip every year to cull lionfish for scientific study. (The fish are dissected on the boat and then sent to a lab in Galveston.) The goal, in part, is to determine the impact of lionfish on other species at a remote reef. On this trip, the group—about two dozen divers—speared only two hundred and twenty-eight lionfish. But, as she wrote to me afterward, Fogg “landed the new Texas-lionfish size record,” with a seventeen-and-a-half-inch catch. And, for three days, everyone was hanging out together on the water. “It was really cool,” she said. “Like camp.” ■

A Reporter at Large: Impaired Judgment
Arica Waters believed she had been taken advantage of sexually. Why was she on trial?
Rachel Aviv

PHOTOGRAPHS BY RYAN CARDOSO

Waters, the only Black female cop in her department, said, “Something happened, you know, and I don’t remember all of it.”

Put-in-Bay, a village on an island off the northern coast of Ohio, is sometimes called the Key West of the Midwest. In the winter, the population is roughly three hundred, nearly all white. In the summer, hundreds of thousands of tourists arrive by ferry or private plane to drink at the island’s fifty-two bars. Men celebrating bachelor parties go around in golf carts, carrying inflatable naked women. The police chief told me that he’s known as “the guy who pulls people over and deflates the blow-up dolls.”

In July, 2020, Arica Waters, the only Black female cop on the island, was invited to a pool party. She was twenty-seven and had been hired five weeks before, as a seasonal employee without benefits. She was ebullient and quick to make friends. “Some people say, ‘Oh, Waters is a flirt,’” she told me, “but that’s just my personality. I’m a friendly person. I give out compliments. I like to hype people up.” Meri LeBlanc, a bouncer on the island, said that Waters was open about her sexual desires, freely expressing her attraction to women and men. “She wasn’t plain,” she said. “She wasn’t the square cut of what they thought a police officer should be.”

The party was hosted by Jeremy Berman, a detective in the department, who had a house on a private road overlooking Lake Erie. Berman’s wife and young son were there, but he seemed to be paying extra attention to Waters, who wore a long yellow sundress. In a text message to a friend, Waters wrote, “The rich ass dude definitely has a thing for me lolol.”

As they were sitting by the pool, Waters told Berman, who was close with members of the village’s government, that she was hoping to get a full-time job in the department. Berman offered to put in a good word. “I think she would be fantastic for a full-time position,” he texted the mayor from the party. “She’s got the perfect disposition.” (The mayor responded, “Noted. Little interaction I’ve had with her it makes sense.”)

Berman’s house was next to the island’s airport, a small runway in a field near the water. When Waters and another guest said that they had never been in a private plane, Berman called a friend who runs an aviation business. Within fifteen minutes, a helicopter had landed near the pool. Berman handed Waters three hundred-dollar bills to give to the pilot.

“I’m in a helicopter holy crap,” Waters texted her mother from the air. She told her mom that the trip—a lap around the island—had been arranged by “the rich cop.”

“I don’t get it,” her mom, who lived in Cleveland, responded.

“He also just texted the mayor and told her to hire me full time,” Waters wrote. “He just said he has noticed my abilities.”

When the ride was over, Berman and Waters sat in his neighbor’s hot tub, drinking. She had several mixed drinks and then took off her bikini top. At dusk, the party migrated to a bar. Waters rode with Berman in his golf cart, but, instead of going to the bar, they stopped at an empty apartment owned by one of Berman’s friends. They quickly had sex, and then Berman drove home to his family and Waters went to the bar alone.

The captain of the police department, Matthew Mariano, was at the bar, and he observed that Waters was so intoxicated that “she could barely talk.” He had learned to be cautious with what he and others called “Berman drinks”: they were so strong that, at the pool party, he had secretly poured two of them out.

That night, lying in bed drinking Gatorade, Waters texted her friends that she had just had sex with the “richest person on this island.” She wrote, “He will give me whatever I want.”

“Do he need an assistant?? lol,” her friend responded. “Is he a sugar daddy???”

“Girl yes,” Waters responded.

The next morning, a little before eight o’clock, Berman texted Waters, “If it’s in the equation, I would love to have a round two.”

Waters said that she was hung over and needed to sleep. An hour later, Berman texted that he was driving by the bunkhouse where she and other employees lived.

“I honestly still don’t feel good,” she told him.

Twenty minutes later, he wrote, “I don’t have a long time but let me pick you up.”

Waters said that she had her period, but offered, “I can service you though!”

He drove her back to his friend’s apartment, and they had sex again. Twenty minutes later, she was back at the bunkhouse. She called her friend Monifah Lamar and said that she felt exploited. “She was really torn up and wanted to know, ‘Did I put myself in this situation?’” Lamar said.

She tried to process what had just happened through dozens of texts to her friends. Their interpretation of the encounter led her to modify her original assessment. She realized how beholden to Berman she had felt, given what she perceived as his power on the island. In a text to a friend, she described it as “sexual assault due to job title.” She felt like she’d been groomed. “Bottomline I need to get out of this department and go home,” she wrote.

Waters had made three allegations of sexual assault as an adult; two of them had involved situations in which she had consented to some degree of intimacy but, when the sexual encounter escalated, she had felt violated. No charges were brought in any of the cases. When a friend suggested that she report the incident with Berman, she wrote that she would just “live with it.” She knew that

she had drunk too much. “I’m not going through that process again,” she wrote. “Who is going to believe me.”

The next day, however, Waters spoke with a friend who was an emergency medic on the island, and he, too, encouraged her to report what had happened. He mentioned that the island had a history of sexual assaults that the police department had not properly investigated. An article in the Cleveland

Scene

, from 2014, about the problem was titled “Roofie Island: A Summer of Reported Druggings and Rapes.” Waters didn’t necessarily think that she had been drugged, but she no longer felt comfortable at work, and she was motivated by the thought of other women who had felt disregarded. She had been adopted and brought up by a single mother—after being removed from her biological mother’s custody by the state—and, as a preteen, she was the object of sexual advances by adult men whom she had met on chat-line services advertised on TV. “I understood what I was looking for—affection,” she said. “But I didn’t understand why these guys were answering what I was looking for.” It wasn’t until she described these sexual encounters to her mental-health counsellor that she was told that what had happened was a crime. Her counsellor accompanied her to the police to report the incidents, but charges were never brought; one man was mentally disabled, and another was untraceable.

She believed that she had been abused as a preteen in part because she had gone through puberty too early. “I was a five-foot-two, bra-wearing fourth grader with a deep voice,” she told me. “I didn’t look like a child, and there were men who saw me and didn’t fully acknowledge that I was a child, or didn’t care.”Monifah Lamar, who went through puberty early, too, said, “Sometimes, when people see you in that sexualized way, you kind of mold yourself into that.” Waters was bullied throughout school: for her deep voice, for coming out as bisexual, for being “fast,” as she put it. She wanted to help troubled kids in her work as an officer, but Lamar wondered if the job also appealed to her because “it was the symbolism that stuck with her—no one is going to mess with a cop.”

The emergency medic gave Waters the number for a female sergeant, Amy Gloor, who often handled sexual assaults for the sheriff’s office in Ottawa County, which includes Put-in-Bay. Waters recognized that, in the eyes of law enforcement, she was not a “good victim.” But she felt harmed, and she wanted to tell someone. Perhaps on some level she was also seeking a remedy for wrongs that hadn’t been acknowledged when she was a child. “I really don’t know what to do, but it’s also, like, I need to do something,” she told Gloor on the phone. She explained that she felt as if Berman “holds my job in his hands.” She went on, “This isn’t O.K. You outrank me. Something happened, you know, and I don’t remember all of it.”

Although Waters did not use the word “rape”—she said that she felt “completely taken advantage of”—Gloor took her to get a rape exam on the mainland. Then Waters signed a form granting Ottawa County permission to search her cellphone records.

The next day, Gloor tried to interview Berman, but he declined to answer her questions. Not long afterward, he put himself on administrative leave. “I was taking time away from the situation, to allow it to work out properly,” he later said.

That week, a private investigator, Robert Slattery, left a message on Gloor’s voice mail. “I have been retained by Mr. Jeremy Berman to gather some information,” he said, in a recording obtained through public-records requests. “I would like to actually pass some information on to you.”

Slattery sent Gloor footage from Berman’s neighbor’s surveillance cameras, one of which had been pointed toward the hot tub and showed Waters topless. He also told Gloor about an episode of the MTV reality show “Catfish” on which Waters had appeared. When she was fourteen, she had dated an eighteen-year-old, and, after her mother forced her to break it off, she secretly stayed in touch with him by creating a fake Myspace profile, using the face and name of another girl. Years later, when Waters was in college, she saw an ad seeking participants for “Catfish,” and she contacted the show to tell her story. She had just gone through a period of depression, and, she said, “I had this idea that I needed to acknowledge what I had done by showing the world that I could own up to it and have an open conversation. And honestly I shouldn’t have. But at the time I felt like this was a way to close a chapter and move on, because a lot of the bullying when I was young was on the Internet, so it all felt connected.”

On the show, Waters apologized to the person whom she had pretended to be, a white woman from Utah, explaining that when she’d used the profile she’d been despondent and lost. “I’m not expecting anyone to feel bad,” she said. “I’m just explaining to you what it is, and, in a sense, what judgments you make from there you have that right.” (Some of Waters’s friends had used the profile, too, to check if their boyfriends were being unfaithful.) Waters said that she had already deactivated the profile, but the show dramatized and distorted the events, making her ruse look more consequential. In her notes, Gloor wrote that she’d been informed that Waters “took the identity of a white female for years.”

Gloor reviewed messages that Waters had sent to Berman, and to family and friends. A few of the messages contained nude selfies. The sheriff of Ottawa County, Stephen Levorchick, said that at one point, as he was walking by Gloor’s desk, she asked him to look at her computer. On the screen was a naked picture of Waters that showed her vagina. Levorchick said that Gloor told him, “Look at this. You’ve got to see this. This is disgusting.” (Citing pending litigation, Gloor declined to comment.)

In October, shortly after Waters had finished working the summer season in Put-in-Bay, Gloor invited her to a second meeting. It had been three months since their last interview, and Gloor had talked with other guests at Berman’s party who said that Waters seemed happy to have his attention. Gloor said that she was struggling to understand why, given Waters’s texts, particularly the one about whether Berman was a sugar daddy, she had reported the incident. “I guess this is where, literally—I’m not sure where we take this,” Gloor said.

Waters said that the subject of sugar

daddies came up because her friend had tried that kind of arrangement. “That’s her thing,” she said. “I don’t knock her for it.” She acknowledged that the texts were confusing, but she said that she had still been drunk and in shock: “It was me trying to cope with the whole situation.”

“I mean, you’re a police officer,” Gloor said. “How do you put that together? How do you make that look like something different?”

“I mean, as you know, every rape case is hard,” Waters responded. “Any sexualassault case is hard.” She told Gloor, “I’ve been through other traumatic experiences, honestly, worse than this.” But, she asked, “I guess where I’m confused is, where does someone’s impairment come in? So are people saying I wasn’t impaired?”

“People are saying that you were not as impaired as you said that you were,” Gloor responded.

“I don’t understand how people were saying that I wasn’t as impaired as I was when I damn near fell out of the hot tub”—a moment that the surveillance camera had captured. “I know I slipped.”

“You did slip,” Gloor said. “But you caught yourself.”

Two days later, a Put-in-Bay officer texted Waters to ask if she was O.K. and then sent her a screenshot from the docket of the Ottawa County Court of Common Pleas. Waters read it repeatedly, confused. She had been indicted for the felony of “making false alarms”—for reporting an offense despite “knowing that such offense did not occur.” She faced up to eighteen months in prison. The charge had been brought by the office of Dave Yost, the attorney general of Ohio.

Waters was booked into the Ottawa County jail, where her department took many suspects. Her right to carry a firearm was immediately suspended. She was released that day under bond conditions that forbade her to leave the state, go to a bar, stay out past 10 p.m., or have contact with her victim. Next to the word “victim,” the court magistrate had written Jeremy Berman’s name by hand.

Waters was terminated from the police department. She had put herself through the police academy by working as an Uber driver, but, because of her felony indictment, Uber no longer let her drive. Without a steady income, she moved into public housing. The attorney general’s office told her that if she pleaded guilty and gave up her police certification she would not serve any jail time, but she refused. (The attorney general declined to comment.) Jessica Dress, the mayor of Put-in-Bay, said that she was shocked by the turn of events. “To go after her like that—that was unbelievable,” she told me. She sensed that Berman “had been pushing his agenda.”

“I invited a lot of industry people.”

Berman had an unusual arrangement in the department: he was said to be paid a dollar a year, and he worked mostly on the weekends. He told Gloor that he was the liaison between the island community and the police. He used his own golf cart when he was on duty—he had put the department logo on the vehicle and equipped it with a siren. In 2018, his first year on the force, he had hosted a ceremony at his house where he won Officer of the Year. During the week, he lived in Findlay, Ohio, where he coowned a prosthetics business and worked as a prosthetist, fitting artificial limbs.

In a text to a member of the village council, Berman explained that he was “targeted & accused of something that I did not do,” but that he had been “officially cleared.” He sent a screenshot of the indictment. “So happy with this outcome,” the council member responded. “Thank you for your service to the island.”

Levorchick, the Ottawa County sheriff, told me that he had welcomed the investigation into whether Berman had been unjustly accused. “In law enforcement, you better have integrity—otherwise you shouldn’t be in this job,” he told me. “The minute I heard that she lied, I’m no longer thinking of her as a victim. My initial thought was anger at her.”

The offense of making a false report—punishable by law in most states—was originally applied to people who had wasted public resources by reporting nonexistent fires or catastrophes. But beginning in the seventies, when the women’s movement was advocating for a broader understanding of sexual assault, these statutes began to be adapted to allegations of rape. According to Joanna Bourke, a British historian of rape, “a large group of feminists were turning to the carceral state to prosecute abusers, but abusers were also turning to it: to prosecute women making these claims.” In “The Word of a Woman?,” from 2004, the cultural historian Jan Jordan described how “a new breed of rape ‘victim’ has been championed: the falsely accused man.”

There are no data, either at the state level or nationally, about the number of people who have been prosecuted for

falsely accusing someone of sexual assault. Lisa Avalos, a law professor at Louisiana State University who studies false-rape prosecutions, told me, “It absolutely happens regularly throughout the country, but it’s an ad-hoc system.” With the help of a researcher, Cleuci de Oliveira, I filed public-records requests in every county in Ohio and found that, in the past fifteen years, at least twenty-five people have been prosecuted for the crime, including one who was thirteen years old. Nearly all of them pleaded guilty. The only false-alarms rape case in Ohio known to reach an appeals court involved a woman who had been convicted of the crime, in 1997, after she reported that a man she had met at a bar had followed her home and forced her to have sex. She and her alleged rapist agreed on most facts of their encounter except whether the sex was consensual. The appeals court overturned the woman’s conviction and questioned the “wisdom and fairness” of charging someone with making false alarms when the crucial question—whether an encounter was rape—“depends on whose version of the event is believed.” (The court wrote that the police “believed from the outset that [the woman] was lying and proceeded to investigate a claim against her rather than the reported rape.”)

False-allegation prosecutions offer a response to the imperative, popularized by the #MeToo movement, to believe women. News of the cases often circulates on men’s-rights Web sites, providing a counternarrative: women are vindictive and desperate for attention, and believing them is a waste of public resources. Nancy Grigsby, who has worked for forty years in organizations that address violence against women, said she has observed that, in the wake of #MeToo, “the eye rolls are bigger now, like ‘Here they come with their liberation stuff.’” Last year, in the county where Grigsby lives, in Ohio, a woman reported to the police that her ex-boyfriend had raped her and then forced her to go to stores to return gifts that he had given her. But when video footage at a mall showed that the woman did not appear the way the police imagined a rape victim to look, the police dropped their investigation against the ex-boyfriend. Instead, the woman was charged with filing a false report. Grigsby told me, “It is a rural county, and it doesn’t take very long for people to hear that story and decide, I’m not calling the police if I get raped.”

The legal system generally puts sexual intercourse into two categories—rape or not rape—a binary that is at odds with the way these things often unfold: two drunk people with unequal power who find themselves sexually involved for reasons that are complex and unstated. Such encounters are rarely not confusing. It may be impossible to locate an objective truth about each participant’s state of mind. And yet the spectre of the lying, manipulative woman is sufficiently pervasive that reports of assault that lack evidence can get wrongly classified as acts of willful mischief or revenge. The most comprehensive analysis of sexual-assault reports, published by the Home Office in the U.K. in 2005, found that, in a sample collected during a fifteen-year period, the police had labelled about eight per cent of rape complaints “false,” but often for shaky reasons, such as the complainant being inconsistent or mentally ill. Jordan, the author of “The Word of a Woman?,” told me that even when a complaint is false the circumstances that give rise to the report rarely indicate malice. She said, “Women with past abuse histories may conflate past trauma with present experiences, so the falseness comes from a place of genuine confusion and signals high vulnerability, not vindictiveness.” We expect victims to have unblemished histories, in part because sexual violence is addressed at the individual level, where, for good reason, the burden of proof is high; less attention is paid to the social and structural reasons that people become victims—the imbalances of power that shape identities over a lifetime.

In some cases, women are accused of lying about rape if they are thought to be promiscuous—an assumption that overlooks how this reputation can contribute to a social context in which their protests may be ignored. In 2016, in Connecticut, an eighteen-year-old named Nikki Yovino had just started college when she reported that she’d been raped by two football players. She had met them at a party, and ten minutes later they all went into the bathroom and had sex. One of the men recorded a video of the encounter without her knowledge. Two months after she made her report, a pair of detectives came to her house and interviewed her alone in the basement using interrogation techniques designed to elicit confessions from criminal suspects. They lied to her, telling her they had other video footage from that night which didn’t actually exist. “I want you to really tell me the truth, because I have this on video,” a detective named Walberto Cotto said. “I saw what I saw.” He told her, “People don’t get this opportunity.”

“I know,” she said.

“We’re talking about people’s lives,” he said. “And we’re talking about yours as well.”

When she explained that she’d been scared in the bathroom, he told her, “Come on. I’m not—you can’t trick me.” He said, “In the bathroom, you pulled your pants down. You said yes.”

“Uh-huh,” she said quietly.

“And it’s not that far-fetched. It’s actually common.” He went on, “If you think you’re the only college girl that went with athletes … let’s nip what got out of control now.” He asked, “Were you forced to have sex?”

“No, but I would consider it—I would consider it peer-pressured into it.”

“So what? I mean, so what? I mean, come on. We’re eighteen years old.” He told her, “So let’s stop the peerpressure nonsense, because they didn’t force you.”

“No, but I wasn’t comfortable with it—”

“There’s a big difference between being comfortable—” the other detective said.

“Being comfortable and being forced,” Cotto continued. “And if you want to say that you’re comfortable because you don’t want people to think you’re less than, you know, less than a wholesome girl or whatever.” He asked her, “You went in there to have sex?”

“Yes, that’s what I assumed at that point,” she responded.

“You’re the one who did it,” he said. “Not a third person. Not a person outside of you who is Nikki.”

She agreed, but said the situation was so upsetting that she cried when it was over.

“I’m going to tell you when you

started crying,” he said, “because I know this for a fact.” The real reason she cried, he said, was that she thought a male friend would judge her for what she had done.

Sharon Tovar said, “I came forward when they were about to try Arica Waters.”

“No,” she said. “I was upset at the situation.”

“That you created?”

“What happened,” she said.

“That you created?”

“Yeah.”

“Upset over your embarrassment,” the other detective said.

She was charged with making a false report, a misdemeanor, and with “tampering with or fabricating physical evidence,” a felony—for requesting a rape exam that, the state said, she didn’t actually need. She pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor, and the prosecution agreed to drop the felony charge. Nevertheless, she was punished with half a year in prison and three years of probation. Her lawyer, Ryan O’Neill, told me, “When you’re a young lady who has made a report to a trusted authority figure and he didn’t believe you, why would you—regardless of your own feelings about guilt or innocence—face the risk of going in front of another group of strangers and ask them to believe you?” O’Neill sensed that law enforcement in Connecticut had wanted to send a message that women can’t get away with lying about rape, but he didn’t understand why Yovino’s case had become the vehicle. “It’s like, Is this really the best you can come up with?” he said. “A scenario where there is a genuine perception from both sides that may lead to opposite results?”

In June, 2021, Sharon Tovar, a white forty-seven-year-old home-health aide, called the sheriff’s office in Hancock County, about seventy miles from Put-in-Bay, and reported that she believed she had been the victim of a crime, thirteen years earlier. Tovar had been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. “I was very naïve—the type of loner nerd who stayed at home writing poetry and sending letters to sick people in the congregation,” she told me. In 2008, a year after leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, she went to a networking event, at a bar and grill in Findlay called the Landing Pad, for people in the assisted-living industry. She had had one or two drinks when a man who she assumed was a bartender handed her one more. Suddenly, she felt more drunk than she’d ever been in her life. She didn’t know the man’s full name, but he guided her out of the bar and drove her to his office, which had a large bed in a finished basement where they quickly had sex. Then he returned her to the bar. She remembered little from the encounter except that when they had left the bar he had told her, “I want to hurry and get you back here before anyone notices you’re missing.” She said, “Those words kept ringing in my ears, and the more I repeated them the more I realized what happened was very calculated.”

A few months later, Tovar took her father to get his foot fitted for a prosthetic limb. When the prosthetist entered the exam room in a white lab coat, she said, she recognized his face: he was the man from the bar. It seemed to her that he was avoiding eye contact. “It was as though he were looking through me, like I didn’t exist,” she said. The prosthetist was Jeremy Berman.

At the time, Tovar, who was recently separated, was raising four children on her own. “I didn’t have time to sit around and dwell on something that I only remembered the half of,” she told me. As her children grew older, she became active on Facebook groups for former Jehovah’s Witnesses who were struggling with depression and with experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Through letters and petitions to lawmakers, she advocated for bills to extend the statute of limitations for reporting sexual assaults. In 2021, after years of encouraging other women to go to the police, Tovar decided that she should do so, too.

Tovar told her story to a Hancock County detective, but after a while she became anxious that she wasn’t hearing any updates about her complaint. As she waited for news, she searched on

line to see what had become of Berman. At that point, there had been only one article that mentioned Arica Waters, a brief summary of her indictment, seven months earlier, and Berman’s name was not included. But Tovar did find an article in the Sandusky

Register

noting that Berman had won “detective of the year.” The article also described the problem of unsolved roofie rapes in Putin-Bay. “My mind was reeling,” she told me. “I was, like, What the hell? He’s a doctor during the week and a detective on roofie island on the weekends?” She called the editor of the paper, Matt Westerhold, to ask for more information. She said, “I wasn’t planning on telling him, but the next thing you know I was, like, ‘This is what he did to me.’”

Westerhold had always been curious about Berman’s arrangement with the Put-in-Bay police department. “I had never heard of such a thing,” he told me. “It didn’t sit well with me.” He wanted to read Tovar’s complaint, so he called Levorchick, the sheriff of Ottawa County, mistakenly thinking that the incident had happened there. Levorchick assumed that Westerhold was asking about Waters, and he explained that her rape complaint wasn’t credible and that she had been charged.

Westerhold called Tovar to share the news that she wasn’t the only woman who had complained about Berman’s sexual behavior. Tovar told me, “I don’t even know if a God really exists, but the fact that I came forward when they were about to try Arica Waters—and no one knew about it, because they had all kept it quiet—makes me think maybe there is.”

Several weeks later, a Hancock County sergeant named Jason Seem went to Berman’s prosthetics office to ask about Tovar’s complaint. “She thinks that you spiked one of her drinks and brought her back here and sexually assaulted her,” he said, according to a recording of their interview. (Tovar wasn’t sure that her drink was spiked, but she remarked that she didn’t understand how a few drinks had made her feel “that out of it.”)Berman groaned softly. “Never happened,” he said.

Berman did confirm that he had a bedroom in his office basement and that he’d once co-owned the Landing Pad. But he didn’t know who Tovar was. “Doesn’t ring a bell at all,” he said. “I’ve never spiked anyone’s drink. I haven’t done anything of that sort.”

Berman told Seem, “There’s also ramifications for false allegations, too. I hope you’re looking at that.” He warned, “Moving forward, unfortunately, this is a serious felony accusation.”

After the meeting, Slattery, the private investigator, sent an e-mail to Seem proposing that Tovar and Waters were conspiring. The two women had been in California at roughly the same time—evidence, he said, that they may have been planning their allegations in concert. “They both seem to be professional victims that use and abuse people and strain the justice system with these false complaints,” Slattery wrote. The areas of California that the women had visited were more than three hundred miles apart, but Seem took the allegations seriously enough to request that the Hancock County prosecutor issue a subpoena for Tovar’s phone records. The subpoena was granted, but the records revealed no communication between the two women.

Not long afterward, Seem sent his assault report to the county prosecutor, who determined that Berman should not be charged, because of insufficient evidence, and Seem closed the case. When Tovar received a copy of her closed-case report, she saw a reference to a “second investigation from 2008” that had “some similarities to this one.” She called Westerhold and said that it appeared as if a third woman had accused Berman of sexual assault. Westerhold was skeptical. “It was almost like ‘I don’t want to know,’” he said. “This is a rabbit hole. It just goes deeper and deeper.”

Westerhold sometimes consults a woman named Tracy Thom, who is known in the area as a kind of volunteer victims’ advocate—she began the work after struggling to get a restraining order against an ex-boyfriend. Although Thom likes to refer to herself as a “dumb blonde with an iPad,” she is a rigorous investigator, who, having seen how hard it is to navigate the legal system alone, tries to help others in her free time. She read through Tovar’s records, concluded that there was indeed a third woman, uncovered the woman’s name and number, and then called her. They talked for more than an hour. Then she e-mailed Waters’s attorney to say that she had spoken with two other alleged victims of Berman. She wrote, “Their stories are similar and validate each other’s claims.”

The third woman, whom I’ll call Bridget, had gone to the police and got a rape exam in 2008, but several days later she decided that she did not want to “pursue this matter any further,” Levorchick, the sheriff, wrote. “She told me she believed that she had too much alcoholic beverage to drink on the date of the incident and that she believed that she could have been an active participant in the sexual behavior, although it is quite unlike her. Especially since she has had no sexual activity for over one year.” She asked Levorchick to tell her the results of her urine test, because she was concerned that a drug had been put in her drink, but it’s unclear if the test was ever completed. Seven months after Bridget’s report, the urine analyst called Levorchick to ask what he should do with her sample. The analyst wrote in his notes, “He told me not to proceed with analysis of evidence since she doesn’t want to prosecute.”

Bridget signed a form stating, “Of my own free will, and after careful consideration, [I] choose to no longer pursue the case.” But a statement that she had written by hand contradicted the description of her as an “active participant.” She wrote that she had been at a bar on an island near Put-in-Bay when she began talking with Berman, who offered her a job and then invited her to his condominium on the mainland, where he gave her a drink. “The next thing she remembers is ‘coming to’ while in the hot tub,” Levorchick’s report said. She was naked. A friend of Berman’s was having sex with her, and Berman was touching her sexually. “I broke down I began to cry really hard I was telling Jeremy that this is not me,” she wrote. “I would never do this.”

Berman declined to be interviewed, though he did say that all three allegations are false. Bridget also chose not to speak with me, saying that the idea caused her distress. James VanEerten, Ottawa County’s prosecutor, said that he recently discussed the case with Bridget and that she did not want it reëxamined. He said, “She told me, ‘I was sexually assaulted. I

know I was sexually assaulted. But I made a conscious decision not to pursue the case. I still stand by that.’” VanEerten was made uneasy, however, by evidence suggesting that the sheriff’s department had mishandled her allegation, and, after he asked the court to consider appointing a special prosecutor, an investigation was launched into possible irregularities in her case. (Levorchick denies that Berman received special treatment.)

Tovar created a petition on Change.org to demand that Yost, Ohio’s attorney general, stand on the “right side of sexual assault.” She wrote, “Three women who do NOT know each other, who live in different cities, who have never talked to each other, but all 3 women have accused the same man.” She posted a glamorous photograph of herself—she was wearing makeup and her hair was windswept—next to Waters’s mug shot. “I had a big old grin on my face,” she said. “And Arica Waters had a forlorn look and she was in an orange jumpsuit.” Tovar didn’t think that her case had been handled well, but, “when I saw the two pictures, it really hit me—this is how a white woman is treated, and this is how a Black woman is treated,” she said.

In an e-mail to the prosecutor, Berman complained that he was being treated worse than a rape victim. “They don’t let rape victims be slandered and dragged through the mud on all their past sexual history,” he said. Referring to Tovar, he wrote, “She is 100% lying to support the sexual assault narrative.”

Although the phone records did not uphold the theory that Tovar and Waters had planned their complaints together, Slattery, the private investigator, argued that there may have been another channel of communication: he suggested that Waters’s defense attorney, Sarah Anjum, had been a kind of mastermind, coördinating the reports against Berman. He told Seem about the episode of “Catfish” that featured Waters. “The entire history of Arica Waters makes it very believable that she could and would attempt to help her criminal defense,” Slattery wrote. Anjum had never spoken with Tovar. She was alarmed by the allegation and the possibility of a private investigator delving into her life. She had taken on Waters’s case, pro bono, because she, too, had once been accused of filing a false report. “I wanted to be there for Arica in the ways that no one had been there for me,” she told me.

In 2017, when Anjum was thirty-two, she had gone to the Toledo Police Department to report that a prominent local defense attorney had repeatedly groped her. She told the police that she did not want to press charges—she just wanted to acknowledge what had happened and to create an internal record, in case the behavior escalated or other women came forward. The report was not public, but, four days later, the defense attorney received a phone call informing him that he was the subject of a complaint. He called a friend, a retired homicide detective, and asked him to look into the report; after learning the details, the defense attorney called the chief of the Special Units Division in the Lucas County prosecutor’s office and requested an investigation into whether Anjum had lied. In an interview with two investigators, the defense attorney said, “I’m not telling you guys how to do your job at all or what the conclusion should be, but there needs to be a consequence for what she’s doing to me and my family, and I don’t know what it is. I’m hopeful that you guys can figure out some way to show that she’s lying.” He also said, “She is either a liar, crazy, or both.”

“I told you not to wear the bear hat.”

Anjum was called in for an interview with the investigators, but she was never charged. Still, to avoid encounters with the attorney, she stopped working on cases in her own county and went a year with barely any income. In an anonymous article on Medium, she wrote that, after she was groped the first time, “I did the sane thing—absolutely nothing. I knew that he was the more powerful player, and reporting meant additional harm to myself.” But, even after calculating the risks and benefits of reporting, she had never expected to be put in the category of potential criminal suspect. “I’m really not asking for much,” she wrote. “I would like my friends and colleagues to have backbones. I would like to matter. I would like to be able to work again.”

Now she worried that Slattery would dig into her own history, she said, and “use it, because one way to hurt Arica’s case is to take out her legal team.” She considered removing herself from the case. “I didn’t understand how Slattery could call in with these ridiculous allegations that I was somehow the ringleader of these women and that it was enough to get an investigation going,” she said. But she also felt that she had a duty to see the trial through. “I just kept thinking, It ought not to be me defending Arica, because I understand

own trauma while trying to protect your own reputation and ability to work,” she said. “I felt like it couldn’t be me—but also, having walked this path, it had to be me.”

Anjum filed a motion asking that Tovar and Bridget be permitted to testify at the trial, as evidence that Berman had a “modus operandi of assaulting intoxicated women.” In response, the state’s attorney, Drew Wood, wrote, “There is a time and a place for JB”—Berman’s initials—“to be held accountable for sexual assaults he may have committed in 2008. But it is not the Defendant’s trial for Making False Alarms.” The request was rejected.

In a pleading, the state explained that the question before the court had little to do with Berman’s own behavior. “The primary issue,” Wood wrote, “will be Defendant’s knowledge—did she know that she had not been raped?”

Waters waived her right to a jury, and a bench trial was held in December, 2021. Tovar and Thom, the victims’ advocate, sat in the courtroom, to show their support for Waters, though they had never spoken to her. “I felt so bad that she had to sit there all prim and proper with her hair just so—pulled back, straightened,” Tovar told me. “She couldn’t just be herself without being judged.”

The state argued that the government had wasted $14,340.58 investigating Waters’s allegation and that Berman had incurred more than twenty-five thousand dollars in fees for his lawyer and private investigator. (In an e-mail to Wood, Berman said that the total was actually higher, because he hadn’t included the costs of “private aviation to handle the allegation.”) Wood told the judge, “The defendant knew she had not been raped. She knew it in the moment. She knew it afterwards, and she never forgot it.” He said her texts showed that she was after Berman’s money—“whether by becoming a sugar baby or perhaps through some future civil liability for quid-proquo sexual harassment.”

On the first day of the trial, Berman, who has short brown hair and a bulky chest and neck, testified. After his administrative leave in the summer of 2020, he had tried to return to his job, but the chief of the Put-in-Bay police decided to stop holding his commission, a requirement to maintain active status as a police officer. Berman had since found a different department in Ohio to hold his commission.

Recalling the encounter with Waters, Berman said that he hadn’t made her any drinks, and that she wasn’t drunk at all. “She was clear, concise, articulate,” he said. “She knew exactly what she was doing.” Once they were in the apartment, he said, Waters had unbuckled his shorts and performed oral sex on him.

A lawyer named Laura Dunn had joined Waters’s defense team a few weeks before the trial, on a pro-bono basis, and she asked Berman why he had picked up Waters at her bunkhouse for “round two.” She said, “She actually did not want to meet you, did she?”

“I did not get that tone or that feeling,” Berman said.

“So she didn’t say, ‘I’m not feeling well. I need to sleep before work’?”

“She did say that.”

“So she was declining,” Dunn said.

“You call it declining—I didn’t take it that way,” he said. He added that, after having sex, he told Waters he’d had a vasectomy. “On her face, you could see just the disappointment,” he said. “I felt she had ulterior—”

“We’re not here for feelings,” the judge, Janet Burnside, interrupted.

Two former Put-in-Bay officers who had been at Berman’s party testified: one described Waters as having been blacked out, and the other said that she was only moderately drunk. Amy Gloor, who had raised the possibility of bringing charges for false-rape accusations in at least two previous cases, acknowledged that Waters had not used the term “rape.” “She felt coerced,” Gloor said, explaining that Waters had felt intimidated by “Jeremy Berman’s power, money, and what he had over the department.”

Burnside deliberated for thirty minutes. When she returned, she said, “I was floored yesterday when I heard that the defendant did not accuse Jeremy Berman using the word ‘rape.’” She went on, “I’m not sure she was altogether clear what exactly had happened, but certainly by the time she doesn’t want to go with him for round two—and yet says ‘I can service you though’—she was getting a fair indication of what this was all about.” She said, “Look at this interesting way that she’s providing the bottom line, ‘I can let you use my body for your sexual pleasure.’” The sentence expressed “no joy, no materialism, no attraction,” she said. “There’s just obligation.”

She acquitted Waters, saying that it appeared as if Berman had been “grooming her to do what he wants.” She added that Berman’s account of events had been shaped by a “built-in bias because … well, let’s put it this way: Mr. Berman can only tell one story, because the other story makes him a person who could be charged with a serious firstdegree felony.”

Wood texted Berman, who was not in the courtroom: “Not guilty.”

“Fuck,” Berman responded.

“Remember, when you weren’t charged with rape, you won your battle,” Wood encouraged him. “This was something different.”

Waters has never met the other two women who made accusations against Berman, but she feels a sense of camaraderie. “I think we are all kind of doing the same thing—waiting for each other to make that step,” she told me. Tovar is still trying to get her case reopened, though she is unlikely to succeed. Westerhold, of the Sandusky

Register

, said, “I keep telling her, ‘You’ve done your job—none of this would have happened without you. They thought they could run Arica Waters out of town.’”

Waters has applied to about a dozen police departments throughout Ohio. When Lamar, her friend, learned that she planned to return to law enforcement, “I was, like, Girl, what the hell?” But she also told her, “I get it. That’s what you went to school for—that’s your dream, your life plan, your sense of self.”

With an indictment on her record, Waters has struggled to secure a new job. She feels cautious asking for references, knowing that the names of people she admires could somehow be sullied by association. “I need to be honest and say, ‘This is what your name will be attached to,’” she said. She is reminded of the way she felt in her early twenties when, after years of being bullied, it finally stopped. She tries to reassure herself with the thought that, when a department finally hires her, it will be a sign that “this time you’re going to have my back.” ■

Sketchbook: Food "Poems"

Roz Chast

Letter from El Salvador: Strongman of the People
How President Nayib Bukele rode an authoritarian crackdown to become Latin America’s most popular leader.
Jonathan Blitzer

PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRED RAMOSE

Outside El Penalito, the little jail. El Salvador has long been ravaged by gang violence. In recent months, Bukele’s government has declared a state of emergency and detained some fifty thousand people.

El Penalito, the little jail, is a squat concrete structure on a busy commercial street in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. On the morning of April 7th, a Thursday, fifty women were lined up along its front wall, wearing surgical masks and holding umbrellas against the sun. They’d been gathering there all week. It was nine-thirty, and about ninety degrees. Most of the women had been waiting since eight to reach a small window where a police official shared information on the whereabouts of their sons and husbands.

Toward the back of the line, wearing a long denim skirt and a red T-shirt, was a middle-aged woman with dark, lined skin and deep-set eyes. Her name was Yanira, and her son, she said, was a twenty-year-old with autism. He’d been arrested three days earlier, at home, where the two had been working throughout the pandemic, cleaning and reselling discarded plastic sleeves that hold bottles of hand sanitizer. Yanira rarely leaves him alone, but she had to run an errand. When she returned, thirty minutes later, the police had taken him away. “Sometimes he’ll wander into the street without his shoes,” she told me. “All the neighbors know him. But someone who doesn’t might think he’s a criminal, or crazy.”

A week before, members of El Salvador’s largest gang, MS-13, had murdered eighty-seven people in three days. The country has long been ravaged by gang violence, but these killings were unusual in their ruthlessness. People with no ties to crime were targeted: a fruit seller, a surf instructor, a homemaker, a cobbler. The gangsters went after everybody, but their message was directed at one person—the country’s President, Nayib Bukele, who has promised to radically reduce crime and to change El Salvador’s image abroad. Gang members left a corpse on the road leading to Surf City, a stretch of beachfront real estate on the Pacific Coast which Bukele had refurbished and renamed to attract international tourists.

In recent decades, every Salvadoran President has contended with the gangs. One administration sent soldiers to poor neighborhoods and filled the country’s prisons, under a policy it called

mano dura

, or “strong hand”; another reprised

it as

super mano dura

. When Bukele was the mayor of San Salvador, he called these responses “immoral” and “impractical.”But now he declared war. Just after midnight on the second day of the homicide spike, the National Assembly, which Bukele’s party controls, instituted a “state of exception,” under which authorities could arrest anyone they considered suspicious. Detainees were not entitled to a legal defense. The right to gather in groups larger than two was suspended, and all minors would be tried as adults. On his Twitter account, Bukele, who is forty-one years old and has an approval rating of more than eighty per cent, shared a running tally of the arrests that followed, along with scabrous commentary, posting photographs of tattooed men in handcuffs and underwear (“little angels”), some of whom appeared to have been roughed up (“He must have been eating fries with ketchup”). Critics of the new policy—whether common citizens, journalists, or foreign governments—supported “the terrorists,” he wrote.

Yanira’s son was one of six thousand people arrested in the first week. By the time I met her, the total had risen to about nine thousand. A month and a half later, it would reach thirty thousand. Bukele conceded that one per cent of the roundups might result in wrongful arrests, but the public could only take his word for that figure. “As we continue arresting more gangsters, more people are going to protest,” Bukele said. “Because there will always be a mother of a gangster, a family member, or a friend who isn’t going to like that we are cleansing that cancer.”

Yanira was joined in the line by her daughter, who’d been missing work at a clothing shop to help locate her brother. The previous day, the daughter told me, they’d spent six hours visiting courthouses, searching for him. “We’re not the kind of people who have any experience in these sorts of places,” she said. She crossed the street while Yanira held their place in line. A bodega in front of El Penalito offers food and hygiene packages for detainees, ranging from a single meal ($2.50) to basic toiletries ($7.00) or a change of underwear ($15.50). (Prisoners without this assistance eat only intermittently.) Yanira’s daughter returned just in time to press a receipt for three meals into her mother’s hand before they reached the window. Farther down the block, a group of soldiers armed with rifles had stopped a public bus and were ordering the male passengers to step out and lift up their shirts. They were checking for tattoos that might indicate gang membership.

As the official at the window examined her son’s records, Yanira stood ramrod straight. Suddenly, she recoiled; when she turned away from the window, her eyes were wide. “Izalco” was all she could say, and she staggered off, sobbing. It was the name of a maximum-security prison that houses hardened gangsters. Her son had been sent there earlier that morning.

While the women waited outside El Penalito, another crowd was gathering, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. It consisted of investors and tech entrepreneurs, who were there to see Bukele, a keynote speaker at an annual Bitcoin conference. Last summer, he announced that El Salvador would be the first country in the world to accept bitcoin as legal tender. Within a few months, there were some two hundred special A.T.M.s set up across the country, and the government had launched an app, called the Chivo Wallet, on which each Salvadoran was given thirty dollars’ worth of bitcoin. At the conference, Bitcoiners, technoutopians, and libertarians assembled to hear about a series of ambitious projects that Bukele had been promising ever since. They would have to wait a little longer. The conference, Bukele wrote in an apologetic note, was “one of the biggest celebrations of the power of freedom, decentralization, and human ingenuity in its fight against ignorance, centralization, and dogma.” But, owing to the state of exception, he needed to stay put. “Everything happens for a reason,” he went on. “Hopefully we’ll be able to learn soon why this had to happen this way.”

When Bukele was elected President, in 2019, he was the youngest head of state in Latin America and embodied a new national beginning. At his inauguration, his heavily pregnant wife stood beside him as he instructed crowds of ecstatic voters to raise a hand along with him after he swore the oath of office. Three of his recent predecessors had been either arrested or indicted, and all of them came from El Salvador’s two main political parties, which had governed without interruption for more than two decades. It had been a period of chronic poverty, violence, and mass emigration. “If you left to live in the United States and returned twenty years later, you’d find the same politicians,” Amparo Marroquín, a professor at the Central American University, in San Salvador, told me. “They were dinosaurs.” Bukele, who’d defected from one of the main parties, pitched himself as an anti-corruption reformer. His campaign slogan—“There’s enough money to go around as long as no one steals”—is a line that he has used for almost as long as he’s been in public life. He began his career at the age of thirty, as the mayor of a town of fewer than ten thousand people. After a single term, he ran for mayor of San Salvador. Fresh off that job, at thirty-seven, he was elected President.

Bukele, who wears leather jackets and backward baseball caps and has a beard, invokes Alexander the Great and Steve Jobs, and his brand is meant to be a bit of both: a potentate with an anti-establishment streak. At the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, he took a selfie from the dais, mid-address, reminding the world leaders in attendance that a “couple of images on Instagram can have a greater impact than any speech in this assembly.” Social media, he once said, “has shown us what people really are.” Before, “everybody was pretending.”

During the years of his ascent, the public heard from him constantly—on Twitter and Facebook, and in a continual procession of ribbon cuttings and other public appearances. As the mayor of San Salvador, he cleaned up parts of the city’s ramshackle downtown; renovated a trio of historic plazas; opened a high-end market, which has escalators and rooftop restaurants, in addition to a library equipped with computers and play areas for children. At one point, he unveiled a twenty-four-million-dollar

public-works project, called 100% Iluminado, to install lamps on every street corner. “You can call it PR if you want to be a little cynical. But I’m talking about inspiration,” he told the

Virginia Quarterly Review

, in 2016. “I’m talking about something sublime.”

Usually, public adoration dims as the realities of governing set in, but Bukele’s support has grown. He is now the most popular leader in Latin America. In part, this is the result of his war on the gangs, his handling of the pandemic, public-infrastructure projects, an increase in the minimum wage, and low gas prices. It is also the product of a mammoth propaganda campaign. But, more profoundly, Bukele has succeeded in generating a palpable sense of collective expectancy and pride: the country is finally getting its act together.

The United States, the European Union, and the Organization of American States have criticized Bukele’s most audacious acts as President. These include threatening members of Congress with troops, and firing Supreme Court magistrates and replacing them with judges who have allowed Bukele to run for a second term despite a constitutional ban. But the foreign criticism has enabled Bukele to unify Salvadorans against a common enemy, and has put him, and his country of six and a half million people, on the map. “Why are they so concerned about a country so small?” he has said. In 2021,

Time

included Bukele in its list of the world’s most influential people, alongside Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, and Naftali Bennett. “Ok boomers,” he recently tweeted, in English, at members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “You have 0 jurisdiction on a sovereign and independent nation. We are not your colony.”

For much of his career, Bukele has basked in the limelight of the press: visits to Washington, to address the Americas Society and the Heritage Foundation, interviews with Jorge Ramos and Ben Smith. When the coverage turned critical, however, he stopped engaging with international journalists. I was no exception. As one of his advisers put it, “Why talk to you when he can speak directly to the people?”

Bukele may represent the future, but he talks a lot about the past—the politicians who robbed public coffers, the gangs that sowed terror, the institutions that never worked. “It’s a kind of revanchism,” Juan Antonio Durán, a judge, told me. He was demoted last year, after criticizing the President for forcing a third of the federal judiciary into early retirement. By then, at least fifty government officials and high-profile critics had had to leave the country, according to

Revista Factum

, a Salvadoran news magazine. Bukele, after many accusations that he was concentrating power, changed his Twitter bio to “the coolest dictator in the world.” A member of his party identified himself on social media as “Minister of Trolls.” Bukele’s voters expected him to have enemies, a member of Congress told me. “What the President is selling the people is revenge.”

All through the nineteen-eighties, El Salvador was a place of obsessive U.S. interest. Ronald Reagan said that it was “on the front line of the battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere, and eventually at us.” When fighting broke out between the country’s right-wing government and leftist guerrillas, the U.S. sided with the government; it armedthe military, trained and advised its officer corps, and covered up their worst abuses. For twelve years, the guerrillas fought the U.S.-backed government to a stalemate, and some seventy-five thousand civilians died. Eighty-five per cent of the killings were committed by the military and the security forces, which massacred large numbers of the rural poor for sympathizing with the guerrillas. Bukele was ten when peace accords were signed, in 1992. Nearly a quarter of the Salvadoran population ended up moving to the United States.

“I’ve been extra nice to people—I should be getting some thank-you notes.”

Bukele grew up in San Salvador, as a privileged outsider. His father was a Muslim businessman of Palestinian descent, who opened the country’s first McDonald’s franchise, ran a textile company, helped build four mosques, and owned a public-relations firm. He was also a polygamist with six wives. Bukele, who has three brothers and seven half siblings, went to a bilingual private school. Most of his well-heeled classmates shared their families’ conservative outlooks. But Bukele’s father was a man of the left and a supporter of the guerrilla forces, called the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, or the F.M.L.N., which became one of the two major political

parties after the war. Muslim leftists stood out in Salvadoran high society. In the late nineties, after Al Qaeda gained international notoriety, the Bukele family was stopped by customs agents at the airport because of their suspicious-sounding name, according to a deep investigative profile by the journalist Gabriel Labrador. If the incident rattled Bukele, he refused to let on. Popular enough to be elected president of his high-school class, he captioned his yearbook photograph “Class terrorist.”

Bukele’s political apprenticeship began after he dropped out of college and was managing a night club in downtown San Salvador. He took over his family’s public-relations firm, whose key client was the F.M.L.N. The Presidency and the Assembly were controlled by the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista, or ARENA, which was founded, in the early eighties, by a member of a rightwing death squad. The Party catered primarily to the business élite, but its members included ex-military men and religious conservatives. An accumulation of corruption scandals sank ARENA, in 2009, allowing the F.M.L.N. to gain power, which it held on to for the next decade. In 2011, Bukele launched a selffunded bid for mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, an old ARENA stronghold outside the capital. “Don’t get involved in politics,” his father had once warned him, according to an interview recovered by the investigative newspaper

El Faro

. “Politicians who lose are … thrown away. You’ll be damaged goods.”

But Bukele already had a plan: he would run on the F.M.L.N. ticket while downplaying his associations with the Party. “I did not live the war,” he said in a television interview during the campaign. “I’m of the postwar generation, a generation that has new ideas.” His politics were leftist—progressive taxes, increased public spending—but he avoided the F.M.L.N.’s hoary pronouncements about revolution. He also rejected the Party’s trademark colors of red and white, instead blanketing the streets with campaign materials that featured his name in white against a backdrop of light blue. “I have friends who are conservative, and they’d never vote for the F.M.L.N.,” he told one of his advisers.

Bukele won by less than two per cent, and governed as if he were still campaigning. He erected a large stone sign with a white “N” engraved in a circle at the entrance to Nuevo Cuscatlán. He also opened a twenty-four-hour medical clinic, a library, and a community center. Each month, seniors received a free basket of food. Bukele vowed to donate his entire salary to a new program funding grants for students to take classes in English and computer science. The town’s debt ballooned, but his popularity soon eclipsed that of the Party elders.

The F.M.L.N. encouraged him to run for mayor of San Salvador, a job widely seen as a stepping stone to the Presidency. “The leader of the Party told everyone that Nayib’s candidacy would get us two or three more seats in Congress,” a former Party official told me. “They all thought that it would help them.”

Bukele, who felt his power growing, shut the Party out of his campaign, relying instead on family members and old friends. One of them was Ernesto Castro, his chief secretary in Nuevo Cuscatlán, who now serves as the president of the National Assembly. Another was his younger brother Karim. In public, Nayib was polished and poised, but in private meetings he tended to be distracted and jittery. He checked his phone constantly, drank four Red Bulls a day, kept odd hours, and struggled to focus on individual tasks. A former associate told me, “If an idea occurs to him, and he thinks it’s brilliant, he does it. Then, afterward, if it’s illegal? Oops!” Karim would sit quietly before making calm, authoritative pronouncements. “It wasn’t a meeting unless Karim was there,” the former Party official said. Together, the brothers reprised the high points of the Nuevo Cuscatlán campaign—the same colors, the same insignia (“N”), and the same slogan (“New Ideas”). By the time Bukele won, he had developed a recognizable brand and had more Twitter followers than the country’s President did.

When journalists dug into Bukele’s accomplishments in office—the market downtown, the revitalization of San Salvador’s historic commercial district—they found evidence of irregularities. The mayor’s office had disregarded permits and zoning ordinances. It paid inflated prices to contractors, and kept information from the city council. One businessman who worked with Bukele at the time told me, “Before Bukele, you’d want to get something done, and when you’d go in to meet with the mayor you’d find a long table full of council members, lots of bureaucracy. With Bukele, you’d sit down at the same long table, but it would just be him with an assistant. On the one hand, it was great because it was just one guy. On the other, you’d leave thinking, Uh-oh, it’s just one guy.”

Bukele came to regard any investigation into his leadership as a personal attack. Edwin Segura, a pollster and a political columnist, told me, “Anytime the media put out something questioning his accomplishments, it was because they were against him.” Bukele started building an alternative media landscape: TV programs, a network of trolls on Twitter, an army of YouTubers, and several publications that posted pro-Bukele stories on Facebook.

Bukele’s portrayal of himself as a contrarian truth-teller was effective, but it was a falling out with the F.M.L.N. that turned him into a political juggernaut. In the fall of 2017, an argument broke out in a San Salvador city-council meeting over the issuance of a building permit for a revitalization project. According to reporting by Labrador, Bukele accused the council’s legal director, a lawyer with the F.M.L.N., of conspiring against him. At one point, she claimed, he threw an apple at her and said, “Take this apple, you witch!”

The incident led to a formal vote expelling Bukele from the Party, but the F.M.L.N. was divided. “The leaders were also scared that Bukele might resign,” the official told me. “He was so popular. He had this huge reach on social media. The breaking point was when he wanted to be President. They used the apple to cover it up.”

Shortly afterward, Bukele, at a gathering in the U.S. with Salvadoran immigrants, said, “ARENA and the F.M.L.N. are really the same.” He announced the formation of a new party, Nuevas Ideas. In February, 2019, he was elected President with fifty-three per cent of the vote.

The arm—bare and handcuffed at the wrist, the hand in a fist—came into view on a two-lane road leading from the capital to San Vicente. It was jutting out from the back of a police

pickup truck that was driving past a store called Tulita’s Classic Sweets. A man was lying in the bed of the truck, but all that was visible was his arm, chained to a rack attached to the cab.

“What the President is selling people is revenge,” a member of Congress said. His voters expect him to have enemies.

One of the strangest aspects of the state of exception was how infrequent sightings like this were, unless you went looking for them. The government was broadcasting its harshest acts, and on Twitter there was a flood of photographs, videos, and menacing announcements. But on the main streets of the country’s biggest cities nothing seemed out of the ordinary. “The state of exception is directed at the poor, marginalized areas,” Rina Montti, the director of investigations at Cristosal, a human-rights group, told me. “These are stigmatized communities with people who are seen as having

dudosa confiabilidad”—“

questionable trustworthiness.” She continued, “You hear people say, ‘Surely they must have done something if they’re being taken away.’”

On a Saturday night, an old Salvadoran friend of mine proposed that we shoot pool at a billiard hall in San Salvador’s historic downtown. He is a father of three in his mid-forties who runs a small business in the capital. The last time I’d seen him—about six years earlier, at the start of Bukele’s mayoral term—he made trips downtown only during daylight hours, because it was too dangerous after dark. He was encouraged by the President’s actions during the state of exception, as is more than ninety per cent of the population, according to recent polls. “Nayib is fighting,” he said. “Of course he has his critics. He’s doing new things, radical things. It’s all on the up and up. People are always trying to be so down on El Salvador. But I don’t hear Salvadorans talking about leaving, like before.” At the pool hall, it was Eighties Night, and a d.j. played the Sugar Hill Gang and Run-DMC while people danced and ate tapas. We left after midnight. As we strolled through the illuminated downtown plazas, he snapped photos of the Art Nouveau National Theatre.

In the

zonas marginalizadas

, where the gangs had been in control, however, residents were effectively trapped between them and the government. I arrived in Distrito Italia, a community of ten thousand people about an hour north of San Salvador, on a Monday evening, to find a cordon of some twenty soldiers in combat fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles. They had set up a checkpoint for anyone entering or leaving the residential area. Soldiers searched bags and checked I.D. cards, and as people returned from work the line grew long. The commanding officer sought me out as soon as I arrived. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ll be fine,” he said. “People outside El Salvador probably don’t understand.”

A few minutes later, I noticed a woman in a green striped shirt, with dark, frizzy hair, standing at a slight remove from the crowd. Her two sons—ages eighteen and twenty-one—were returning from work, and she was waiting to meet them, so that they could all walk home together. Mostly, she felt

alivio

—“relief”—she said: “There are soldiers inside patrolling.” When I asked her whether she worried that her sons might get arrested, she shrugged. “Until it happens to you, it doesn’t matter what

happens to someone else,” Verónica Reyna, a security expert who works at a nonprofit called Servicio Social Pasionista, told me. “It’s a survival instinct. The more violence people live with, the less they can care about other people. Getting involved in other people’s lives is deadly.”

“Can you roll it back for nine more minutes?”

Gangs have dominated life in El Salvador since the late nineties, but they didn’t originate there. MS-13 and Barrio 18 both began in Los Angeles, at least a decade earlier, as hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled the civil war. Many of the teen-agers, adrift when they arrived, turned to crime in the inner city, where Mexican and Black gangs enforced a brutal racial hierarchy. After thousands of Salvadoran youths were arrested, the Clinton Administration saw an opportunity to demonstrate its toughness both on immigration and on crime. It deported violent offenders without telling the Salvadoran government who they were. “The United States lets these dangerous types out and tells them, ‘Go back to where you came from,’” the President of El Salvador said in 1997. “But we have no way to try them or jail them … and so we must not only let them in but let them go free.”

Cliques from Southern California arrived in El Salvador, bringing their rivalries and their turf wars with them. “They consumed everything in their path,” the anthropologist Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson has written. “Piecemeal neighborhood gangs saw no choice but to join one of the two for their own survival. The alternative was complete annihilation.” By 2015, there were some sixty thousand gang members in El Salvador, and seventy per cent of the country’s businesses were being extorted, leading to annual losses of four billion dollars, according to estimates by the Salvadoran Central Reserve Bank. The homicide rate was higher than it had been during much of the civil war.

A series of Salvadoran administrations launched dramatic crackdowns that played well with the public but failed to curb the violence. In 2012, David Munguía Payés, who had served as a general during the war and was now the Minister of Security in an F.M.L.N. government, decided that the gangs, like the guerrillas, couldn’t be beaten with force alone. He brought in a former guerrilla, a Catholic bishop, and a representative from the Organization of American States to negotiate with them. A deal was reached, and the homicide rate dropped for almost eighteen months, but revelations of the talks incited public outrage. The next President, who also came from the F.M.L.N., renounced the deal, and the government negotiators were eventually prosecuted for their involvement. In 2020, Munguía Payés was arrested for “unlawful association.” Other members of the F.M.L.N. and ARENA have faced jail time for making ad-hoc deals with the gangs, either to enforce higher turnout at election time or to periodically blunt the death count.

As the mayor of San Salvador, Bukele made an agreement with members of Barrio 18, who controlled the area around the Mercado Cuscatlán, according to

El Faro

. The government gave them space among the venders’ stalls, and, in return, the gang allowed the market to operate. Bukele has denied this, and as President he adopted visible measures to combat the gangs. He called his policy the Territorial Control Plan; it increased the police presence in some municipalities and declared a state of emergency inside the national prisons, which had the immediate effect of mixing rival populations that had long been kept apart. At the start of the pandemic, the authorities arranged hundreds of bare-chested prisoners in their underwear, pressed tightly together in rows, for a photo opportunity. One of the President’s advisers told me, “Look how he’s treating the gangs. How could he be talking to them?”

But Bukele started negotiating with MS-13 as soon as he became President, according to another story in

El Faro

. During his first year in office, he didn’t have a majority in the Assembly, and for his fledgling party to win seats he needed the homicide rate to fall. “The big drops in homicides were never just the work of the government,” Verónica Reyna told me. “Bukele learned the lesson from what happened before. He closed ranks. No one had access to the prisons for a year and a half.”

The

El Faro

story relied on hundreds of pages of prison documents, in addition to logbooks from facilities where secret meetings were held between gang leadership and government representatives. In an intercepted message, one leader of MS-13 told another, “Things are going step by step.” The govern

ment, he said, was increasing enforcement to keep up appearances, so that the negotiations could continue. “These measures are just a coverup,” he went on. “They’re looking out for the wellbeing of us homies.”

Less than a week after the story was published, Bukele announced that the government would investigate

El Faro

for money laundering. Since then, he has attacked the newspaper relentlessly, sometimes calling out journalists by name. A few of them have been forced into exile; many others have adopted the practice of leaving the country after publishing a story and waiting to return until the threats have died down. The newspaper has a large international following, but inside El Salvador Bukele’s campaign against it has succeeded. Many people have come to see

El Faro

as partisan and unreliable.

The night before I arrived in El Salvador, the National Assembly passed a sweeping law to block news outlets from reporting on the gang situation. Journalists could now face up to ten years in prison if they “reproduced” or “transmitted” information that might have come from gang sources or could otherwise “panic” the public. The law was ambiguous by design, César Fagoaga, then the president of the Association of Journalists of El Salvador, told me. “This isn’t a legal problem—it’s a political problem,” he said. “They want to control the only thing they don’t have—journalism.” Claudia Ortiz, a first-term congresswoman from a fledgling party called Vamos, told me, “The real opposition right now that’s doing substantive things is outside the Assembly. It’s investigative journalism, the universities, social organizations exposing real problems.”

In the nine days that I spent in El Salvador in April, three more journalists had to leave the country after being falsely accused by the President and members of his party of conspiring with the gangs. One of them—a reporter named Bryan Avelar, who works with the New York

Times

—was the target of a viral campaign that claimed his brother was a prominent gangster. (He doesn’t have any brothers.) “They know that they can have us arrested if they feel like it,” Julia Gavarrete, a reporter with

El Faro

, told me. Last year, she was one of thirty-five journalists and human-rights advocates to discover that their cell phones had been infected with the surveillance software Pegasus.

The government could deny press reports, but certain facts remained. Last year, Bukele refused a U.S. request to extradite fourteen top-ranking members of MS-13. The Salvadoran government secretly released some of the men from prison, and they are now at large. According to a joint investigation by

La Prensa Gráfica

and InSight Crime, one of the gangsters, whose nom de guerre is Crook of Hollywood, walked out of the country’s most secure prison during a crime wave last November. The following month, homicides decreased.

Recently, the journalist Carlos Martínez published a story in

El Faro

based on seven audio recordings of conversations between members of MS-13 and a government negotiator close to Bukele. The code name they use for the President is Batman. There are explicit references to two years of secret talks, and the official takes pains to describe everything he’s done for the gang to prove his “loyalty and trustworthiness.” What caused the killing spree in March, according to three gang members cited in the story, was the arrest of a group of gangsters who were travelling in a government vehicle. They felt betrayed because they’d been promised “safe passage.”

Uncharacteristically, the government did not attack the article when it came out. In June, 2022, Patrick Ventrell, the American Chargé d’Affaires, gave a press conference in San Salvador at which he said, “The best way for the government of El Salvador to show that it is serious” about fighting the gangs “is to extradite the most dangerous leaders.” Later in the summer, Bukele extradited two of them with little fanfare. This news was eclipsed by the construction of a prison to hold more suspected gang members, which he was calling the Terrorism Confinement Center.

It’s taken as an article of faith that the public cares about such abstract principles as the rule of law and the health of public institutions. But voters also want to see their man win, because it means that

they’re

winning. Often, authoritarian tactics play better than highminded poise does. On February 9, 2020, eight months into Bukele’s term, a crowd of a few thousand demonstrators gathered outside the National Assembly, which was not in session. They’d arrived in government vehicles and in buses driven by soldiers, and were there to protest the refusal by members of the Assembly to fund a key plank of Bukele’s security budget. Shortly after 4 p.m., a caravan of S.U.V.s pulled up, and Bukele emerged. Surrounded by bodyguards, he strode to a stage set up at the end of an alley leading to the chamber, and the crowd roared. “Wait here,” he told them, then headed inside. Armed soldiers in combat fatigues followed him.

While the troops fanned out across the gallery, Bukele called a symbolic session to order. “I think it’s clear who’s in control of the situation,” he said into a microphone. He put it down and bowed his head in prayer. After a few seconds, he rose and returned to the crowd outside. This time, when he approached the stage, half a dozen soldiers stood beside him, their rifles drawn.

“I asked God, and he told me, ‘Patience,’” Bukele said. He’s never made clear which religion he practices, yet he frequently invokes God, projecting a firm but flexible piety. (“It’s one of his key characteristics,” Marroquín, of the Central American University, told me. “He can seem Catholic or Protestant, Christian, or even Muslim.”) Bukele’s religious rhetoric generally sways the public, but this crowd was expecting something more dramatic. People started to groan. “Patience, patience,” he repeated. “These

sinvergüenzas

,” he continued, gesturing behind him in reference to the obstructionist congressmen. “We’ll get rid of them democratically…. In several months, we’re going to have the Assembly.”

In Central America, the symbolism was lost on nobody: a head of state had

just breached another branch of the government with troops. “The whole thing got out of hand,” a former government official told me. But those people who thought Bukele would suffer consequences were mistaken. “The most significant thing wasn’t what happened but what didn’t,” Johnny Wright, a congressman with the party Nuestro Tiempo, told me. “That was the moment when he knew, he tested that he would not have resistance.”

Hours after the incursion, Bukele received a text message from his former attorney Bertha Deleón. “You’ve gone too far,” she wrote. When he didn’t reply, she decided to tweet. His response was swift. “Delete this,” he told her. “You’re attacking us.” Deleón refused, and the government launched a smear campaign against her. She was a trending topic on Twitter for days, accused of protecting the gangs and of abetting criminals. People shouted at her on the street. “I worked for the prosecutor’s office for years on organized crime,” she said. “Old colleagues came up to me saying, ‘Now we’re supposed to be investigating you. Fix this, or leave.’” Months later, with multiple corruption charges lodged against her and an Interpol warrant out for her arrest, she told me the story from Mexico, where she had recently been granted asylum.

Bukele’s most conspicuous enabler during this period was the Trump Administration. The American Ambassador to El Salvador was a former mid-level C.I.A. staffer named Ronald Johnson, whose relationship with Bukele was characterized by friendly informality. All Trump cared about, a former Administration official told me, was immigration, and Bukele acted accordingly. In 2019, he was so eager to comply with a deal on asylum processing that his advisers e-mailed a signed copy of the agreement straight to the Department of Homeland Security. U.S. officials had to call them back to explain that the protocol was more involved. In return, Bukele “really wanted the State Department to lower the threat level for travel to El Salvador,” the former Administration official told me. “That was a really big thing to him. He was promoting Surf City.” (Eventually, the U.S. reduced the threat level, which officials claimed to have been reviewing before Bukele pushed for the change in status.)

A few weeks after Bukele’s stunt at the National Assembly, the first case of Covid-19 was detected in El Salvador. On March 21st, Bukele declared a state of exception, issuing strict guidelines for a national quarantine. Those people who violated its terms were arrested and sent to “containment centers.” In theory, the centers were reserved for Salvadorans who’d been travelling abroad and needed to be tested. But they soon became de-facto jails, where returning travellers and anyone accused of ignoring the rules were held indefinitely, in many cases for longer than a month. Ten thousand people were detained in the early months of the pandemic.

The Supreme Court twice declared Bukele’s measures unconstitutional, but he ignored the rulings and accused the judges of threatening public health. “If I really were a dictator, I would shoot all of them,” Bukele said. “You save thousands of lives in exchange for five.” He publicly commanded the police and the military to make more arrests, in contravention of the judges’ orders. “The inflection point was the pandemic,” the former government official told me. “That’s when Bukele really started taking advantage.”

The public was too overwhelmed with its own survival to worry about the finer points of governance, and El Salvador’s infection rate stayed low compared with those of neighboring countries. In June, a gleaming new hospital for Covid patients went up, billed as the biggest such facility in Latin America. (It remains unfinished.) The military distributed food to poor areas, and Bukele gave three hundred dollars in cash relief to more than a third of the country. “The people are seeing that he is working hard and doing things for the public,” a thirty-three-year-old named Gisele de Hernández, who worked in a tortilla shop, told the Spanish newspaper

El País

. Another person said, “Bukele isn’t dividing El Salvador. The country is already divided.”

The following February, when El Salvador held legislative elections, Nuevas Ideas won fifty-six of the eightyfour seats—a super-majority. The new members of the Assembly were a mixture of true believers and opportunists,

but all were united in their loyalty to the person who had brought them to power. “Bukele

is

the Party,” a senior U.S. official told me.

The new legislators went after their first target on the day of their swearing in. They arrived at nine in the morning, and the session ran past midnight. “We entered without knowing anything,” Claudia Ortiz, of Vamos, told me. The Supreme Court magistrates who had opposed Bukele’s pandemic measures were summarily fired, for acting against the best interests of the public. The Nuevas Ideas bloc also fired the Attorney General, whose term was up at the end of the year. The President’s personal lawyer told an opposition lawmaker in private, “We have to be disruptive. People voted for us for a reason. They wanted us to change things radically. We’re going to change this place for good.” Four days later, the Assembly approved a law blocking all investigations into the government’s pandemic spending and shielding officials from corruption charges.

Bukele had assumed office saying that his relationship with the U.S. was “the No. 1 priority for us.” But the U.S. had a new President, and both countries had changed. “When we tried to normalize the relationship, he felt like we were pulling the rug out from under him,” the senior U.S. official told me. “We didn’t have the red carpets out, so he thought it was a deliberate attempt to embarrass him.” The Biden Administration began drawing up a list of sanctions against members of Bukele’s administration, for actions including corruption and conspiracy with the gangs. Bukele continued to meet Johnson, the previous Ambassador, in Miami, and he retained another American adviser, who shared the view that the Democrats wouldn’t control the White House for long. When Bukele decided to give a big interview in the winter of 2021, it wasn’t to the Salvadoran news media or to CNN but to Tucker Carlson. “He’s trying to ride the culture war,” the senior U.S. official told me. “But El Salvador does not have the luxury of deciding that one party is going to protect its interests forevermore.”

For the past three years, crypto evangelists from all over the world have made a pilgrimage to a rustic beach in El Salvador called El Zonte, where a middle-aged surfer from Californianamed Mike Peterson launched an experimental charity. Its financing came from an anonymous philanthropist who imposed a single condition: the money had to be distributed entirely in bitcoin. Soon, mom-and-pop businesses, markets, and food stalls in the area were accepting the currency. El Zonte came to be known as Bitcoin Beach.

In the spring of 2021, Bitcoin Beach drew a minor crypto celebrity—Jack Mallers, a twenty-seven-year-old tech entrepreneur who was building an app called Strike. The service allows users to make money transfers, with no fees, on Lightning, a high-speed network that is linked to the technology behind Bitcoin. El Salvador fascinated Mallers for reasons that went beyond Bitcoin Beach. Twenty per cent of the country’s gross domestic product comes from remittances sent by Salvadorans living abroad, mostly in the U.S. But when immigrants use Western Union to transfer money they typically pay a hefty fee. “Lightning solves that,” Mallers has said. “It costs nothing to send one dollar or one thousand.” After living in Bitcoin Beach for a month, he started spending time in San Salvador. He was having a sushi dinner with friends one night when he noticed a direct message on Twitter. “Hi, Jack, this is a message on behalf of President Bukele,” it began. A few days later, Karim Bukele, wearing a hoodie, greeted Mallers and introduced him to his brother.

At the Bitcoin Conference in Miami that summer, Mallers presented Bukele, who addressed attendees by video, in fluent English. He announced that El Salvador would begin accepting bitcoin, and presented a heady case for how Bitcoin could solve some of El Salvador’s problems. Seventy per cent of Salvadorans don’t have bank accounts, but more than half of them use cell phones. “El Salvador has not been the country that’s recognized to be the first in innovation,” Bukele later told the podcaster Peter McCormack. “But why not this time?” Championing the currency has turned him into a global cult hero, a crusader against U.S. hegemony. “This is just exercising our sovereign right to adopt legal tenders, like we adopted the U.S. dollar in the year 2001,” he continued. “In 2001, it

was probably done for the benefits of the banks, and this decision is done for the benefits of the people.”

Salvadorans found out about the Bitcoin policy from news reports after the Miami announcement. The following September, the Bukele administration presented its Bitcoin Law, which Mallers helped shape, and the National Assembly passed it without debate or modification.

Bitcoiners are skeptical of governments and central banks, but their goal is the universal adoption of the currency, and they need more countries to follow El Salvador’s lead. Even so, some of them were troubled by its example. The rush to create the Bitcoin Law resulted in confusing provisions: one article mandates that all merchants accept bitcoin, but another seems to hedge on that requirement. “The government operated on a startup’s timeline—move fast and break things,” Jill Gunter, the chief strategy officer at Espresso Systems, a blockchain company, told me. “But you’re talking about an actual sovereign nation, with the well-being of millions of people at stake.”

“Man needlessly dressed in professional cycling outfit on your right.”

There were some red flags. Bitcoin users need both a public key and a private one to access their money, and many people rely on a “digital wallet” to store these keys. The government created its own—the Chivo Wallet app—but shared virtually no information about who was designing it or how it would work.

One afternoon, I was walking through the main plaza in Usulután, a small city in the country’s southeast, when I saw two soldiers standing guard outside a gleaming blue Chivo A.T.M. The unused machine looked like a monument, or a shrine. The businesses that accept bitcoin tend to be large international corporations (Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Starbucks); a recent survey by the Chamber of Commerce found that eighty-six per cent of the country’s commercial businesses have never conducted a bitcoin transaction.

Last November, during Bitcoin Week in El Salvador, Bukele made another announcement, this one from a beachfront stage rigged with strobe lights and jets of smoke. The sky lit up with fireworks, and on a giant screen behind him, in neon-blue letters, were the words “El Presidente.” The aesthetic was somewhere between a Kiss concert and an I.P.O. “When Alexander the Great was conquering the world, he established ‘Alexandrias,’” Bukele said. “These Alexandrias would be like beacons of hope for the rest of the world. We should build the first Alexandria here, in El Salvador. So we were thinking of building”—a pause for effect—“Bitcoin City.”

Bitcoin City would be an actual municipality, powered by the geothermal energy of a nearby volcano and funded by a new financial instrument called Bitcoin Bonds, or Volcano Bonds, which will pay yields tied to the sale of bitcoin. The issuance of these bonds, according to Bukele, would raise a billion dollars. The rush of investment would help fund schools, hospitals, and public works—in theory, at least. The question was who would invest in the bonds, given that, by most accounts, their returns were no better than those of the alternatives. Matt Levine, a columnist at Bloomberg, wrote, “People who like crypto will buy them and trade them with each other and feel a sense of kinship and community and fun. They are HODLers and whales, they get to hang out with the president of a country on a Saturday night.”

In attendance at the announcement was an American investor and early Bitcoin adopter named Max Keiser, who runs a fund called El Zonte Capital. He’s part of a group of international financiers who are selling the image of a dynamic new El Salvador. When we spoke, Keiser had just dined with Bukele at the Presidential Palace. He had flown in with his wife for the occasion, on a plane belonging to “Uncle Ricky,” the Mexican businessman and TV magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego, who is a passionate Bitcoiner and a pro-Bukele partisan. Keiser tends to see conspiracies in high places. He suggested to me that the U.S. State Department had been involved in the gang killings in March, but he praised Bukele’s state of exception as “phenomenal.” “Some suggest human rights have been violated. I would say that the human rights of seven million Salvadorans are what matters,” he said. “Imagine J.F.K. if he had Bitcoin to do battle with the C.I.A. and central banks—and what you get is President Bukele today. El Salvador is the new Camelot.”

Since El Salvador adopted bitcoin, the currency’s value has fluctuated wildly. But Bukele continued to buy more of it with state funds, including a hundred coins last November and five hundred more in early May, after the price dropped. “El Salvador just bought the dip!” he wrote on Twitter. The country now holds some twenty-four hundred bitcoins, worth approximately fortyeight million dollars, or roughly half what Bukele paid for them.

Short-term losses are hardly the biggest danger to the Salvadoran economy. The International Monetary Fund, from which El Salvador sought a $1.3-billion loan, considers bitcoin a threat both to the global financial system and to the country’s immediate solvency. In January, 2023, El Salvador will need to make one eight-hundred-million-dollar bond payment, followed by another, in 2025. “The financial markets now see El Salvador as much riskier than before,” the economist Ricardo Castaneda told me. “The reasons are failures of democratic institutions, the adoption of bitcoin, and the lack of certainty about plans for paying off the country’s debt.” The former government official told me, “Bitcoin investment is a cloud that doesn’t exist. The state reserves are the last resource for the government to pay for basic needs. Maybe it can get them to the 2024 elections.”

Nuevas Ideas shows no signs of losing its super-majority in Congress, yet its members live in fear of misspeaking. Late last year, two of the Party’s congressmen were recorded sharing concerns over the phone about losing their travel visas as a result of U.S. sanctions. Both have been forced from their jobs and are currently under investigation.

The only member of the Bukele government willing to speak with me was the Vice-President, Félix Ulloa, Jr. He received me one morning at his official residence, in an upscale neighborhood of San Salvador. He sat in a high-backed wood chair with blue velvet trim. On the wall was a surrealist painting of Lady Justice, blindfolded, with her body floating in three unconnected pieces among the clouds. Ulloa, a short man with long hair and a copper-colored beard, is a constitutional scholar with degrees from universities in three countries. He is thirty years older than the President he serves, and a veteran of left-wing causes.

“I have been a social warrior all my life, and I fought not just with words—we took up arms,” he told me. This was a reference to the war years, when he was a student radical. “We fought against a dictatorship…. Those who say this is a dictatorship don’t know what a dictatorship is.” He continued, “We spent the two years of the pandemic clashing with Congress.” It was “an assembly dominated by the two parties which blocked everything the President proposed.”

We spoke for an hour, during which he delivered a litany of economic-growth figures, improved homicide statistics, and news of prominent foreign investors who had visited the country. Tourism was up, and preparations were under way for an international surfing competition. But all topics led back to a fact that no one could refute: the President and his party had won their elections and continued to enjoy overwhelming public support. Until Bukele lost a vote or rigged an election, the rest was academic. At the end of the month, the state of exception was due to expire. Would the Assembly extend it? I asked. “During the war, we lived six years with a state of exception,” he replied. There was “nothing strange” about doing it again.

On a recent night, I was speaking with a woman named Karen, whose husband had been arrested during a work break at a taxi stand in a town near San Salvador. He and his employee were eating pupusas on the street, and, when a cook from the food stall walked over to collect their money, a group of officers converged on the three of them. The charge was “illegal gathering.” A jealous neighbor may have called in a tip—Karen’s husband had never been arrested, and he was a fixture at their local church. He had also enthusiastically voted for Bukele in 2019. Baffed, Karen tried everything, including speaking to local reporters to publicize the case, but nothing changed. When she first told me the story, we were hunched over a small table in the food court of a mall, her face teary.

We stayed in touch as the state of exception kept getting extended. It is still in effect, even though daily homicides have dropped. Each month, when the Assembly has to renew it, the Speaker convenes the body with an announcement on Twitter. Nuevas Ideas members reply enthusiastically, with emojis and updated profile pictures. Most of them retweet Bukele, who routinely announces days with zero homicides. “

Seguimos

,” he says, at the end of each one—“Onward.” Fifty thousand people have now been detained.

“There’s no official policy beyond giving people blanket sentences and keeping them detained,” Rina Montti, of Cristosal, told me. “We’ve been to hearings where there are between three hundred and five hundred people being tried en masse. But there’s no actual criminal investigation.” Cristosal has been documenting detention conditions based on individual complaints brought by family members of detainees. At least seventy people have died while in custody.

Karen has two small children, and she was now caring for them while working two jobs—her own and her husband’s. In the first weeks after his arrest, she found time every morning to visit Izalco, the prison where he was being held. It was a two-hour trip, and she made it to prove her vigilance, since the prison didn’t allow visitors. The crowds of women who’d once gathered outside small police precincts were now reassembling each day in front of Izalco and Mariona, the two prisons, both overcrowded, where nearly everyone had been sent.

The last time Karen and I spoke, she told me that she could no longer make the trips to see her husband. “Too much work,” she said. Her voice was dry, almost raspy with exhaustion. “Everyone is getting six months” in prison, she added. He was now more than halfway through, though his crime remained a mystery. ■

Fiction: Evolution

Joan Silber

ILLUSTRATION BY KATE DEHLER

I was ten when my mother had to take me to the emergency room. I’d sort of skidded on our fire escape while I was recklessly dancing around on it, showing off for the kid in the apartment across the way. I’d done a bump-de-bump, and I was singing “whoopty-whoopty” and starting a foxy little move while waving the ends of my bathrobe sash when I slipped on the rusted flooring that was splashed with snow, and collapsed on its see-through slats in an unnatural crumple. The back yard was three floors below, too visible.

I screamed when I tried to get up. I wanted my mother to hear me. She was watching TV, she thought I was asleep—how would she guess where I was? I knew I had done something very bad to my leg. Fortunately, Nini Seidenbaum, for whom I’d been showing off, screamed for her own mother. In the frozen air between our buildings, I heard her wail that I was dead.

Every part of me was shaking. It was winter in New York and I’d been fluttering around in my nightclothes. And now I’d gone from entertainment greatness to being a heap of cracked bones in the wind. When my mother finally appeared, she carefully dragged me over the black metal slats and lifted me through the window. I was still trembling too much to speak, but I could see that my mother’s face was pale and weird. I understood that dying, which I might be about to do, was something I’d have to manage alone, and no one had taught me how. I was angry about this. “I’m fine,” I said, not that nicely, either.

Because this was New York in February of 1974, nobody bothered to call an ambulance—you’d get old waiting—so Nini’s mother ran to get us a taxi. Her father, whom I’d always liked, carried me down the stairs. But when he jostled my leg handing me to my mother I screamed again.

“Why did you do this, Cara?” my mother kept saying. She said it as we moved through traffic, and she said it as she carried me into the hospital, into the big scuffed hall, crowded with New York at its bad-news worst (a man held a bloody towel to his neck), which was the waiting area for the emergency room. “We’re O.K. now, sweetie,” my mother said.

We had to wait. “She needs attention,” my mother had to tell them over and over. She filled out a form, she kept walking up to some desk to ask questions. I hated this room. A man was shouting that the President of our country wanted to kill everyone here, and that he was doing a good job, too. Nobody said one of the doctors would be with us very soon. There was no soothing behavior in this room. Wait or die waiting. Take it or leave it.

Ahead of us in the line of chairs was a man with a mustache, with his arm around a man who was slumped against his chest. The leaning man was wearing his sweater inside out, and he was sleeping. Maybe he wasn’t sleeping. Maybe he was dead. Would you bring someone dead to a hospital? Did people do that?

The mustached guy was talking to him. “I know you hate St. Vincent’s, but it was the closest. We’re almost in, don’t go under. Hear me, Eddie?”

They could’ve been brothers, but I thought they were friends. My own friend Nini had yelled to high heaven to save me. If no one else had been around, she would’ve phoned someone to help. And if she’d been the one to fall I would’ve dragged her outside and talked a taxi into taking us. I had more nerve than she did and was better at persuading people.

My leg was on fire now, even when I didn’t move it. I told my mother this, and she went up to the desk one more time. Meanwhile, the guy next to us had got to his feet and was settling his limp (maybe drugged-out) friend into the molded plastic chair, getting him positioned so he didn’t fall to the floor. He smoothed his friend’s hair down, he patted his head. And then he edged out of the row and along an aisle and headed through a hallway. Where was he going? He was gone! When I told my mother, she said, “Oh, he’ll come back.”

But he didn’t. The friend was alone. Well, they weren’t friends, were they? A long time went by. I knew people did terrible things—I lived in New York, and I’d always been warned about what they might do. When a nurse called the man’s name, my mother said, “Just let my daughter go in instead. You have to let her. We can’t wait while you figure out what to do.”

Had I ever seen my mother cheat like this? I understood that she was cheating for my sake. But if he died because of us, what then? I was sure we’d never forget, though I think now that people do forget such things.

The nurse was stumped for a few seconds. “Hey, Edward,” I said, and I shook his shoulder, in a rough way, as if I were just a kid making fun of him. It hurt my leg when I moved. The man made a choking, burbling sound, desperate and liquid. He terrified us then. He was alive, but he was a dying monster. The nurse got an orderly to move him onto a gurney, and she was wheeling him away from us before we knew what was happening. And then we had to wait again.

I left there with a huge plaster cast on my leg, and I looked forward to having all my friends sign it. I had broken and splintered my tibia in a fairly major way. But what I took from that night most of all was the shock at the man walking out on his unconscious friend, the silent story of it. My mother said the man probably had reasons we couldn’t know. Which was definitely true. But what I held on to was the lasting certainty that I was going to have to look out for myself.

It wasn’t my mother’s fault; she never neglected me, before or after the divorce, or led me to think that she would. But I saw what the world was. I saw how things could get. Nobody’s sweetness could take that away.

I ran away with a boy when I was sixteen. He was three years older, and I was enormously flattered that he wanted me to run off with him. We didn’t say we loved each other—we didn’t bring that up—but my lust for him was great and constant. Lust was a big deal in the world around me; people believed in sex in a way that they don’t quite anymore. Did we run that idea into the ground, overplay it? I could not have been prouder of myself, in those days, to be following sex

as my guiding star. I thought that it was an exalted idea, as well as a source of beautiful sensations. I thought that anyone who didn’t have my opportunities was living a lesser life.

I should have paid more attention to Brody, the boy in question. I was much too abstract in the way that I viewed him. We both worked at a doughnut shop on West Eighth Street. Ronald, the owner, was never there and told me to do whatever Brody said. We had the long weekend shifts, busy in the morning and dull in the late afternoon. “Do you care about the hostages in Iran?” I asked him. This was a leading question—I didn’t care all that much myself. Was I bragging about how heartless I was? Probably, and it drew Brody’s interest. He said, “They’ll be O.K. Getting skinny though.”

How pleased we were to be indifferent together. I said they were proof the U.S. wasn’t as powerful as it thought it was. Brody said, “People keep discovering that over and over. Like it’s news each time.” “Totally,” I said. I was so thrilled when I went to get more boxes from the back and he found me behind the storage shelves. For weeks after, the shop was our love shack. Up to a point. We kept our clothes on, though we did a lot of reaching around and under them. What delights we hid in that back room! I thought of them whenever I wasn’t with him. Then he decided we should start cutting school, and I sneaked him back to the apartment while my mother was at work.

I had slept with two other boys, a few times each, so I knew something but not that much; the male anatomy was still an unfolding mystery to me. From the get-go, my mother had said Brody was too old for me, and, when she found out I was cutting school (I did it too many times), she banned him from our apartment and tried to get me to promise never to see him, which wasn’t even the sort of thing she did. “Cutting school,” she said, “is the gateway to a lot of things I hate to have to think about.” In fact, she was right about that.

Brody hardly ever talked about his family. His father drove a truck for the New York

Post;

that was all I knew. Brody’s mother stayed home, so there was no sneaking off to his place.

He made fun of my mother, called her the mouse mother because she worked in a library. They’d met a few times, when he came over, and it had gone O.K., normal terse exchanges. He told her his favorite kind of books to read were true-crime books. “I like action and death,” he said.

“True crime is a very popular genre,” I said.

Brody said I should just lie to her about seeing him. So I did. The only person who knew I had a secret life was Nini. What scared her about Brody was the way he got money. At work, he sometimes rang up his own version of sales, but not too often. His other, more ambitious scam was stealing items from department stores and then returning them for cash. Once a cashmere sweater, once a silk shirt, once a watch. “No one ever really goes to jail for that,” I informed Nini.

They were allied in my mind, the new bodily thrills and Brody’s lawlessness. Sometimes we smoked weed in the park. I was very adamant about not drinking. I thought civilization had advanced beyond alcohol, which made people violent, to more peaceful drugs like cannabis. An evolutionary change. Smoking pot made me nestle in Brody’s arms on the park bench, curve against him in delight.

By May, Brody had finished a year of community college, allegedly studying business administration, and he said he’d had it with school crap. “Want to hitch to Arizona?” he said. “It wouldn’t be hard.” He had a friend there we could stay with. It was a good place to live. He’d heard. The wide expanse of the desert.

We had found a new place to have sex—Nini’s bedroom, when her parents weren’t home—and he said this after a long, intricate session. My mother had said she hated seeing me hang all over him, like a doting idiot, and why wasn’t he with someone his own age? Did I know how pathetic I looked, flinging myself at him? This insult had broken my loyalty to my mother. So I could go wherever I wanted, couldn’t I? I’d never been farther away than Washington or Boston.

My mother was horrified that I was so unlike the Cara she’d always known, but that was what elated me, the new depths I’d found in myself. My untapped capacities. I thought my mother had probably never had really good sex.

Brody had ideas about what clothes I should bring to Arizona. It was early June in New York—not really hot yet—but we’d do better picking up rides if I brought some of the nice things I had that showed my figure. I was a small, skinny girl with a big bust, and he admired the sundress with the plunging neckline and the T-shirt that was tight and orange. Oh, also the ripped jeans with the tear near the crotch. “We have to think ahead,” he said.

In the end, a friend of his drove us as far as the New Jersey Turnpike, and I stood by the highway in my little orange T-shirt and jeans, with Brody lurking behind a tree. How smug I felt when a large truck stopped right away, and Brody suddenly ran up to get in with me. The driver was an old fat guy, and we squashed ourselves next to him by having Brody put me on his lap. My mother thought I was on a class trip to the Adirondacks.

“You cozy?” the man said. He had a growly voice, and snorted when he heard that we were heading all the way to Arizona. Did we know how far that was? “Watch out for the rattlesnakes,” he said, when he let us off five exits further. We had to wait much longer there, and the guy in a Ford van who finally stopped had me sit in the front and Brody in the back, and he patted my knee the whole way and began to stroke the zipper and put his finger into the ripped spot. I didn’t say a word. I thought it was my job to be polite and friendly. I got more worried as his hand got more insistent, and I had endured quite a lot by the time he let us off near Pennsylvania.

Brody thought it was funny when I told him, and I said, “Oh, men.” I was unhappy about it, but I wasn’t frightened. Whatever happened was something I could put up with.

Our next rides were guys who just wanted to talk, and Brody made up stories for them. We were going to Arizona so we could work on a date farm. We were going to Arizona to help manage his uncle’s silver mine. We were going to Arizona to work in his grandmother’s hotel and I was going to sing in the hotel’s restaurant. He had me sing for the driver. I could carry a tune O.K., and I did “Home on the Range” and “Muskrat Love” without my voice cracking. I liked this part.

And what were we going to do when night fell? How trusting I was. Brody had the driver drop us at a strip mall somewhere at the edge of Ohio, where a motel advertised rooms for twelve dollars a night. He told the clerk we’d pay in the morning, when we checked out, but the clerk said, “I don’t think so.” Brody said we were going to eat first and come back.

I was starving and very glad to be chomping down on a Filet-O-Fish at the nearby McDonald’s. “Hits the spot, doesn’t it?” Brody said. We were going to be on the road for the next three or four days at least, he added, and we didn’t have money for hotel rooms if we wanted to eat. We were eating indoors at McDonald’s, but the Rancho DeLuxe restaurant a few doors down had picnic tables outside. We had to wait till everything closed and we could sleep on the benches—no one would even see. It was a nice night, just a little chilly.

I was only sorry that we’d have to sleep on separate benches. “What a great girl you are,” he said. McDonald’s didn’t stay open much longer, and then Brody had us hike laps around the strip mall, to keep us in our beautiful health. He carried the pack with our things in it, and we had our arms around each other’s waist as we walked, and I was in a glorious moment of my life. We walked past the dark stores, with neon signs still lit, and past a few eating joints whose brightness stayed on. The Rancho took forever to close—we went around the mall any number of times—but then we rounded the corner and saw it dark at last. Brody put a blanket down on a bench for me, and he settled himself on another bench, and we held hands under the table. Brody lit a roach and we passed it back and forth. I fell asleep on that plank of wood, like a passenger on a boat.

“You’ll work nights and the pay is garbage.”

But how were we ever going to have sex if we never had a bed? Brody solved this for us one night somewhere in Missouri by deciding we could camp out at a rest stop, behind a giant bush at the end of a parking lot. Though I had the blanket under me on the grass, once Brody got going, the pounding, pounding of the act was more than I wanted, and I wondered what aim of evolution was served by designing it this way. What force of nature wanted Brody’s enthusiasm to leave welts on my back? When it got too bad, I shifted around so I was on top, which Brody liked fine, but I was already battered.

And yet I believed, more than ever, that we were nature’s dearest creatures, its adepts, its glowing initiates. My battered self slept on Brody’s chest.

On the way to Oklahoma the next day, we had a creepy driver who told dirty jokes and laughed at the punch lines—“It was her pussy all along!” He didn’t try to touch me, but he kept repeating the lines and grinning. When he dropped us off at a rest stop, I decided I had nine dollars in my wallet that we could spend for a motel.

“You are such a princess,” Brody said.

“We’re starting to smell,” I said.

“Excuse me, Miss Royalty.”

We fought over this until I thought he really was going to sleep outside by himself, but in the end he let me check us in. And I took a rapturous shower, for so long that the hot water ran out on Brody. Who had no interest in making love that night. O.K., if that was how he felt. I slept poorly and sadly, hearing the murmur and whistle of his breath.

Our last day in Texas was steamy hot and had one unpleasant incident. Brody

tried to steal a pack of American cheese and three pepperoni sausages from a gas-station grocery, and the guy followed us to the door and said, “People get shot for less.” I was terrified. Brody said nothing and kept his head down as he gave up the goods.

Arizona was thrilling to see outside the windows—there really were cacti!—but it was midnight on a dark desert night by the time we got close to Tucson, where his friend lived. “He won’t mind our showing up so late?”

We’d been let out at a bare strip of closed snack joints along the highway. There were two pay phones, and one of them worked. Brody fed it all his change and dialled a number that rang and rang. After what seemed like hours, I heard him say, “Russell? Yeah, it’s me. Really. I

told

you.”

He wanted Russell to come pick us up, wherever we were, but Russell apparently wanted us to hitch to his house. So we stood with our thumbs out, but no vehicle of any kind was stopping at this hour. Brody got more change from me and went back to the pay phone to call again. And in the wee hours of the morning an old Dodge Dart came out of the black highway and stopped for us. “What an asshole you are,” the driver said. He looked O.K., skinny in his T-shirt, wearing a straw cowboy hat to keep out the sun to come.

“Russell, my man, so good to see you,” Brody said.

“Who’s the girl?”

“Cara. Isn’t she cute?”

“Not really,” he said.

I was in the back seat, they were in the front, and Brody looked back at me, scowling.

“I don’t even know you,” Russell said, “and you’ve got me driving all over the state for you.”

They had met, by Brody’s account, at a retreat in Nebraska that his high school, St. Somebody’s, had had with other Catholic schools. He and Russell had sneaked away from the sylvan premises together and had been sent home in disgrace, thereby forming a lifelong bond, or so Brody had decided.

“I’m so happy to be in Arizona,” Brody said. “It just feels freer here. The air.”

I fell asleep in the car, with the free air blowing on my head, and Brody woke me up later to walk me into a very small adobe house, cluttered with furniture I couldn’t see. I was put in an armchair to sleep, and I didn’t wake up till bright daylight got me, and I could hear voices from what turned out to be a kitchen alcove.

“The girl is awake,” Brody said, looking over at me.

The two guys were laughing about something (that was good) and eating toast, and Brody actually gave me a piece from his plate. I scarfed it down without even speaking—I hadn’t known how hungry I was. Russell said I could finish the loaf if I went out for supplies afterward with Brody. A fifteen-minute walk to the grocery store, and we could admire the scenery.

I saw that Russell’s cube of a house was one room, with too many chairs in it. In the corner was a mattress with blue sheets, which seemed to be where Russell slept.

“You know what I think?” Brody said. “You know that retreat we were on? They were right about one thing.”

“Father Mike. Don’t remind me.”

“He said that nature was how God revealed Himself to us. Have you been outside yet? What kind of God wants it to go up to ninety-seven by noon?”

Russell said, “Well, the great thing is, this house has a swamp cooler—you know how they work? You’re only sweltering a little, right?”

“You’ve gone very local,” Brody said.

I was still thinking about God and nature. I had my own secret theory, that sexual feeling existed to impress on humans the sense of a beyond, the reality of another plane. There was no other reason for it to be the way it was. I certainly wasn’t going to say any of this to Brody, though I’d once talked to Nini about it.

I sort of loved the landscape—so flat you could see forever—with its clusters of houses, the vivid blue sky, and a horizon with mountains on one side. And I liked the little bodega where we pooled our money to get bread and peanut butter and hot dogs and milk. I felt sure that we could find jobs in this city. Russell worked in a Xerox store a few days a week—we could do that. Brody and I could be a couple, living together.

We got a bit lost walking back to the house, and once we were there I washed fast and then collapsed on the armchair and fell asleep. I woke up—who knew when?—with Brody nestled next to me and his hands all over me, ready for action. He was lifting my T-shirt over my head, unhooking my bra. I was doing my part, in glee and reunion, rising to our bodily celebration, when I heard the sound of water running in the kitchen sink, and I knew then (with my eyes closed) that Brody had us performing for his friend. I went on with it anyway, but the arousal was like a bad dream, a friction with a burn to it. I did what I could to speed him on—I wanted it over. We were coiled in the armchair, in a twisted pose that was hard on my bad leg, and when he collapsed against me he said into my neck, “You liked that, didn’t you?”

I had never really loved Brody, if love requires adoration, but everything about his body was very dear to me. What a simple life I’d tried to lead. “You were great,” I said. Why was I afraid to make him angry? Maybe I just always took what I thought was the easy road.

Russell was gone by the time we stirred ourselves and got up from the chair. He came back sometime later, when we were trying to make a dinner out of hot dogs and bread and some cheese we found in his fridge. “The girl is a great cook,” Brody said, offering him some.

Russell chomped on it and said, “How long did you think you could stay here? What was your plan?”

“Five or six years,” Brody said.

Russell didn’t laugh. “You have another day,” he said. “That’s it.”

He offered recommendations. There was a Y, there was a homeless shelter, there were places where you could camp but you shouldn’t have anything valuable on you. “You have each other,” he said. I wasn’t sure how ironically he meant that.

“You know, I have a friend in Phoenix,” Brody said. “We can hitch there.”

“You never told me!” I said. “That’s great.”

“Plan B,” he said. “Since some people don’t know what friendship is.”

That night, in our big armchair, he was a force of non-stop ardor, a zealot of every orifice. More than ever before. I didn’t forget that Russell was there, on his mattress across the room. A flush of horror came and went, but I did what we were doing. I was used to it.

And I thought that Phoenix would probably be better. The friend there lived in a big house, with a great view, according to Brody. “Good night, babe,” he said, when we were done, and he fell asleep in seconds, with his weight on my chest.

In what seemed like the middle of the night, I woke to feel Brody twisting around and getting up. By the time I opened my eyes, he was standing nearby, pulling on his pants. “I’m going out to see the sunrise,” he said. “Sleep on, my girl.” Which I did.

He wasn’t there when I woke up, and I was glad to have the bathroom to myself, though I didn’t hog the shower for too long. The little house was very quiet when I emerged. I thought it was soulful of Brody to stay on after sunrise, still looking at whatever the vista was. Maybe I’d walk a little myself. I was looking for my baseball hat—everybody said you needed a hat here—but I couldn’t find our backpack. Not anywhere. Had I put my hat in my shoulder bag? My bag was on the floor, with its contents spilling out. My wallet was still there, right on top, and I could see immediately that the billfold was empty.

I was suddenly very afraid that a robber had come in, while we slept, and I wanted to tell Brody. As if Brody weren’t gone. I went back to the bathroom to check—no Brody shampoo, no Brody shaving cream. He’d made a clean sweep.

In the kitchen there was a note on the table.

Looks like your asshole boy-friend is gone. I’m at work, see you later. Here’s a key—DO NOT leave the door

unlocked if you go out. R

. There wasn’t much food left—three slices of bread, two slices of cheese. And that was the moment when I couldn’t stand it. I was weeping, little soft sobs that turned louder; I heard myself howl. Brody had left me without anything, in the middle of nowhere. Brody whose penis had been in every portal of my body, Brody whose skin I’d licked and loved the taste of. Whose smell was in my clothing.

I took Russell’s key and walked outside, past trees with branches like gnarled fans and houses the color of sand and rust, but I didn’t get very far in the heat. Without a hat, too. Where had Brody looked at any sunrise? I was heading back and I knew what I was going to do. My mother was at the library, at her job, but she’d be home by six, which was three here, and I could call her collect. I’d given my mother a bad scare, and I was sorry now.

I got the door to Russell’s house unlocked, which wasn’t easy, and when I went back inside I was hoping that Brody would be there, but of course he wasn’t. How could I keep on longing

for him? Well, I could. I knew he had dishonored the power of our bodies by running away. I’d stayed faithful to my beliefs. I buoyed myself with this truth while I waited for Russell to get home.

My poor mother. Russell had been home for a while—he’d been grouchy but had fed me some spaghetti—when I finally tried phoning her. “Oh, Cara,” she said, when she heard my voice. “Why did you do this?” She had pestered and plagued Nini (who would say only that we were on the road), she had called Brody’s family (who thought he was at a friend’s but weren’t sure), she had called the police (who took the details but said it was difficult to track runaways across state lines). “You’re O.K.?” she said. “Tell me how you are.”

“I’m totally O.K., I’m fine,” I said.

And she knew how to send me a money order, she knew how to buy me a plane ticket that I could pick up, she knew how to get me out of there. “You’ll be home soon, sweetie,” she said.

“We can do this the smooth way, or we can do it the crunchy way.”

“Arizona’s not a bad state,” I said.

“Oh, Cara,” my mother said.

Russell was not happy about my staying one more night, and when he drove me into town the next morning to get the money order he said, “I think you owe me some for room and board.”

I peeled off a twenty and said, “I’ll never forget you,” which was true if not kindly meant. He took me to the airport; he could’ve been much worse.

All those hours of travel, I was longing for Brody. I had to switch planes in Phoenix—I’d never done such a thing alone—and of course I kept looking for him in the airport. Wherever I was, I occupied myself by remembering all that we’d done in bed or in that ridiculous easy chair. My mind was furnished with Brody.

My mother met me at the gate, and she crushed me to her in a long hug, saying, “Do not do this again.” In truth, I was really very happy to be home, and I hoped she was going to make me pancakes, the way she’d done when I came back from science camp.

“You have no idea what you put me through,” she said. “Do you?”

And I had to go be a junior again, with three weeks left in the semester. I was a walking ghost. I couldn’t talk to anyone except Nini. Nini said, “You’ll never be the same, will you?”

But, after a while, I had stories for those who asked. “The thing about hitching,” I told people, “is that you can’t let drivers leave you in some nowhere spot. You have to speak up.” I told them that a person could get by on no money at all. “My boyfriend said I was too reckless, but we came out of it fine.” Who in my class had done what I’d done? (Well, it was 1980; some had done worse.) I was good at reporting certain scenes—me singing songs for a truck driver, Brody stealing delicious food for us from a gas station, Brody bragging about me to his friend.

My mother was afraid I was going to escalate, take off into drugs and crime, dare myself into bigger trouble. And I might have, but I didn’t. Not then. Why didn’t I? I was still hungry for Brody for a long time, and I wasn’t sure I liked anything else. I knew perfectly well that he was an asshole—I’d sort of always known it—but I thought that what we’d had was a tremendous thing. In its way. It had taken me more than two thousand miles across the country; it had caused me to sleep on the ground, on benches, in chairs, without even minding; it had led me to eagerly slip into dozens of vehicles driven by strangers; it had its own unnamed beauties of feeling. I didn’t have to call it love, and I didn’t, but even as I thought pretty poorly of him, I believed it was something. I’d been through my days and nights of initiation, testing my mettle, and I took pride in that. I had now passed beyond a lot of what went on around me.

I turned out to be much closer to normal than my poor mother ever expected. I got into cocaine a little in college and some of my boyfriends were alarming, but I was all right; I never held up a bank or O.D.’d on anything or joined a cult or even dropped out of school. I did things I still regret—I slept with the best friend of a boyfriend I really liked, I slept with a professor my dear female pal was in love with. I did this because I could, and because such adventures were still irresistible to me.

I thought that I was onto something that had been known throughout history but never acted out as candidly. Nini, who was studying anthropology at N.Y.U., pointed out to me that sexual behavior was always a social construct. “O.K., I’m a creature of my times,” I said. Actually, Nini had had affairs with women and was much more up-to-date than I was.

I lived at home during those years—I took the subway up to City College, in Harlem—and I let my mother meet only one of the boys I dated, if you could call it dating. He was a nice guy, anyone could see that, nerdy but alluring, who talked to my mother about geophysical research. She thought it was fine when I went off to Berkeley for grad work, following him, though we split up midway through the first semester.

Northern California, it turned out, was a great place for me. What a pleasant and civilized climate, what cool people. So when I came home to frozen New York for Christmas break, I felt distant and older. Long ago, I had lived here. But I was happy to see Nini again, and I fondly walked by my old high school, even stopped by the doughnut shop on Eighth Street that had once been rash enough to employ me. My old boss, Ronald, was behind the counter, a little balder and more creased. “Look at you!” he said. “You were a pipsqueak when I saw you last, and now you’re a grown woman.”

“How’s it been going without me?” I said.

Business was down, Eighth Street wasn’t what it once was, but he was always glad to see his old workers. Crullers weren’t selling, did I want one for free? I did.

“It was so sad about Brody, wasn’t it?” he said.

What?

Brody had never been completely out of my thoughts, and I used to guess how far he’d hitched and where he’d ended up. Las Vegas? Baja? Ronald, who couldn’t get over my not knowing—“I thought you two were friends”—finally got to the sentences about how Brody had been killed some years ago, when he drove through a stop sign right into another car somewhere in Maine. Brody had a car? In Maine?

“I thought you two were friends,” Ronald had to say again.

And then I was walking down Eighth Street, with the cruller in my hand. My first thought was to be struck with remorse for the mean things I’d said in our fights. (

Brody, I’m sorry

.) And my next thought was to want back what he’d stolen—my hat that I liked and a favorite scarf that had been in the backpack. No Brody to blame anymore. Brody was gone. How could it be that even if I’d never planned to see him again our story was a different story now?

He’d been dead for years without my even knowing, which made me feel ignorant and shallow. I hoped he’d thought of me, often and well, in whatever time he’d had. Was I allowed to hope that? I would’ve liked to do something in his memory, set down a bunch of flowers somewhere, but I couldn’t really think of a symbolic spot. Nini always said Americans were totally feeble in their death rituals. Her senior thesis had been on Bali, which had big cremation ceremonies that even the tourists went to. According to Nini, Balinese Hindus thought cremation freed the soul to enter the upper realm, where it might eventually be released from the cycle of birth and death. Evil residents of the lower realm were always trying to claim the soul. It would be just like Brody to walk into such a battle.

I did light a candle for him in my room, but I didn’t tell my mother, and I never told Nini, either.

In California, a decade later, I had my daughter Isabel four weeks earlier than anyone expected. My ex didn’t even know that he was the father. My mother wanted to fly cross-country to help, but I wouldn’t let her. This was stupid of me, actually.

Six years later, after I had my second daughter, Elena, my mother said, “I thought you were smarter than me. You were.”

“Life is not all progress,” I said.

In fact, I have loved being the mother of two daughters. Amazing creatures, with distinct characters, ever changing. As teen-agers, they confided in me much more than I would have expected.

How innocently upbeat I’d been about sex, compared with them. Well, I knew what they knew, but I had other terms for it, other measures. Isabel lived with her raging disappointment—her entirely correct moral horror—at the state of the world, and said that heterosexual sex (she didn’t like other kinds) was marked by selfishness and prone to violence. Violence? I couldn’t get her to give me a for instance, except to say that choking was sort of a thing. It wasn’t freedom to her, this sex. Elena hated the way certain people were always posting their intimate reports on social media. And yet most of the time they had crushes on various men. They managed, in their ways. My clever, despairing girls.

When I was ten and jumping around on the fire escape, doing my foxy little moves, what did I think I was doing? As my mother asked. Putting on my power: that’s what I thought I was doing. I remembered Nini wailing to her mother that I was dead. Ha ha, I wasn’t.

But I was taken to the land of the dead, that demented emergency room. My mother tried to edge me away from the worst, the bleeding and the ranting. Later, I told Nini it was all very interesting. I acted as if I’d wanted to know everything, though I didn’t—who does? When I was back in school with my plaster cast with all the signatures on it, I’d look at those names and feel superior. For having been in that room, with its evidence of what the body was. I believed my tibia would grow back fine—I was a confident girl—but bone didn’t last forever, did it? I kept this question to myself, as

if no one were in on the mystery but me.

NEWYORKER.COM

Joan Silber on the mystery of the body. ■

Puzzles & Games Dept.: The Crossword
A beginner-friendly puzzle.
Robyn Weintraub

ACROSS

1 “Your Majesty”

5 Funny-bone location

10 Emulates a lumberjack

14 Tech site that says it reports on “what’s new and why it matters”

15 Way to go

16 Landed, as a bird on a branch

17 X-ray units

18 Something that helps everyone, in a nautical metaphor

20 Off-roader’s ride, for short

21 “Keep going … you’re almost there!”

22 Fancies more

24 Witches’ ___ (concoction in a cauldron)

25 Catwoman portrayer Berry

26 Bobby who co-founded the Black Panther Party

29 Deadly sin that sounds like a postal abbreviation

30 Dramatic inning ender

35 “Snoopy Flying ___” (video game with aerial combat)

36 Racing vehicle at the Circus Maximus

37 Texter’s “Here’s what I think”

38 Labor of love, perhaps

40 Footballer Flutie or magician Henning

41 ___ numerals (symbols that can be used to spell “mix,” “livid,” and “civil”)

42 High-I.Q. society whose name means “table” in Latin

43 Fragile ones may need to be massaged

45 Bad error for a gymnast on a balance beam

47 Growing at an exponential rate

51 “I ___ Man of Constant Sorrow” (song in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”)

52 Goes away with a new spouse

53 Bit of foreshadowing

54 Amber or pale quaffs

55 Impressionist known for his paintings of water lilies and haystacks

56 Unload one’s grievances

57 Planet with the moons Phobos and Deimos

58 “La Bohème” or “La Traviata”

59 Newspaper section with theatre and film reviews

DOWN

1 Junk-yard pile

2 Hypnotized

3 Type of cake whose distinctive color sometimes comes from beets

4 Aliens, for short

5 Fielder’s goof

6 Butcher-shop selections

7 Go over twenty-one, in blackjack

8 “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” singer-songwriter Redding

9 Took one’s turn

10 Free Khan Academy offering for collegebound H.S. students

11 Basic skirt style

12 Black ___ (Natasha Romanoff’s superhero moniker)

13 Goulash or bœuf bourguignonne

19 Wineglass fit for a queen

21 “Look at Me, I’m Sandra ___” (“Grease” song)

23 Soar

26 “Pull over!” sound

27 Tale on a grand scale

28 Many

30 Yorke of Radiohead

31 Indian prince

32 Really big cat person?

33 Type of park that’s not especially conducive to relaxation

34 Athleisure bottoms

36 Bandmate of Stills, Nash, and Young

39 Skill

40 Word in the name of Iowa’s capital city

42 Food additive that imparts umami flavor, for short

43 “___ Holmes” (Netflix adaptation about Sherlock’s younger sister)

44 Person who’s toast

45 Bashful or Sneezy, by trade

46 App whose logo is a stylized camera, informally

47 Decorative pillow cover

48 Pies, in a slapstick fight

49 Basic layout for a model-train track

50 ___ Star State (nickname for Texas)

53 Cells that may be fertilized by sperm

Solution to the previous puzzle:

Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at

newyorker.com/crossword ■

Poem: Roosevelt Dargon

Andrea Cohen

Roosevelt Dargon, how often I have thought of you

and your leg. We were driving that last stretch

of slow road home, in snow and ice, in the blue

Vista Cruiser—what was I, five?—when your big

rig crashed. We didn’t see it happen, but got there

right after, before the ambulance and cops, before

the snarl of cars that would have kept us from

reaching you. I say

us

, but what I mean is my father,

who told my brothers and me,

Stay here

, while my mother

toggled between static and Tommy Dorsey and he ran

to the jackknifed cab and found you pinned in there,

left leg mostly severed but tethered enough under

the crushed front dash to keep several bigger men

from pulling you out. There was a lot of blood you

were losing, and the tumbled lumber and concrete

blocks from the load you’d been hauling, and the smashed

glass of cling peaches in syrup from the truck you’d

swerved into, and all around you fuel was pooling,

collecting, threatening to catch fire, and I have to imagine

what you would have heard: my father’s voice, calm

and measured, saying,

I’m a doctor

. He might not have

said

a psychiatrist

. What he showed you was

his Swiss Army knife, what he did was ask

permission to finish what the accident had started—

to cut the tendon, cleanly, to free you. I guess

we never know which part of ourselves we’ll

have to sacrifice, or when we might need to say

to a stranger with a pocketknife,

I’d be obliged

.

And that was that. They pulled you out. Someone

may have grabbed the mangled leg as an after-

thought, but this was 1966, before the age

of reattachments. My father knelt in the snow

and wiped his knife blade clean. This was before

there would be people on the road we could

not help, before the next Christmas, and the ones

after that, when a crate of oranges would come

from Baltimore, with a card that said

Best

wishes from the leg and me

, never specifying

which leg you meant—the one you kept

or the one you let go. What the mind

keeps, it keeps. I still have my mother

humming “I Thought About You,” still

have my brothers punching each other

in the wayback, still have my father,

still running with his Swiss

Army, as if he could, in some

coming blizzard, save us all. ■

Poem: Reasons

Harkaitz Cano

15 REASONS TO REMAIN SILENT

Because I have nothing to say.

Because, though I’ve got plenty to say, you’re not paying attention.

Because I’d rather listen to what you’re saying.

So as not to talk to myself.

So as not to talk to the wall.

So as not to talk to the crack in the wall.

So as not to waken the cricket who lives in the crack in the wall.

Because they’ve sealed my lips with honey.

Because I’m kissing you.

Because I’m sulking.

Because I’m sulking and I’m kissing you.

Because I like to remain silent.

Because our breath is speaking all on its own.

Because I’m keeping a secret larger than words.

Because my heart is in my mouth.

15 REASONS TO YELL

Because you haven’t let out a yell in ages.

To make sure all your vowels are still in their proper places.

Because you’re alone and in desperate need of an echo.

To measure the height of a Gothic cathedral.

To cheer on an Italian cyclist.

To shoo off a grouchy mouse.

So they hear you from the last row of the theatre.

So they hear you from the other side of the creek.

So the fishes caught in the fish trap hear you.

When you’re in water up to your neck, to call for a ring buoy.

To measure the depth of a bottomless well.

To invite the wolves to your birthday party.

So everyone knows that yelling is not so easy.

Because some others are unable to yell.

So that the woods will learn your name.

(Translated, from the Basque, by Elizabeth Macklin.) ■

A Critic at Large: System Upgrade
Can we find a better model of government than liberal democracy?
Adam Gopnik

LALALIMOLA

“Democracy is the worst form of government,” Churchill is said to have said, “except all those other forms that have been tried.” Actually, what he excepted was “all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” with that last phrase implying that democracy is the root form, and the others mere occasional experiments. It was an odd notion, but was perhaps called for by the times in which he was speaking, the mid-nineteen-forties, when a war was won for democracy at a nearly unbearable cost. The art historian Kenneth Clark recalled appearing in those years on a popular BBC radio quiz program, “The Brains Trust,” and fumbling a question on the best form of government. The “right” answer, given by all the other panelists, was “democracy,” but this seemed to Clark “incredibly unhistorical”; he had, after all, studied the rise of Botticellian beauty in the Medici-mafia state of Florence, and of Watteau and rococo under the brute dynastic rule of France, and generally valued those despotic regimes where more great art and music got made than has ever been created under a bourgeois democracy. Wrong answer, nonetheless. He was never again trusted to be a Brain.

One doesn’t have to look far, even within the received canon of English literature, to find impatient dissent from the idea of the natural superiority of democratic government. Shakespeare found nothing good to be said for democracy or egalitarian impulses, trusting entirely to order and compassion to lubricate the joints of the state, even though he is the author, in “King Lear,” of the greatest of lines on the social perils of privilege: “Take physic, pomp, / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” Dr. Johnson thought that democracy was obviously silly, and Dr. Johnson, let us remember, was a prescient, 1619 kind of guy, seeing the impending American Revolution as a slaveholders’-protection enterprise. (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) It is not only possible to be an anti-liberal and not be reactionary but easily done.

These days, liberal, representative democracy—moribund in Russia, failing in Eastern Europe, sickened in Western Europe, and having come one marginally resolute Indiana politician away from failing here—seems in the gravest danger. Previously fringe views certainly find new forums, with monarchists speaking loudly, if a touch theatrically, but that is mostly strut and noise. What would a plausible alternative actually look like? “We’d all love to see the plan,” John Lennon sang sensibly about revolution.

And so, in search of a better blueprint for governance, we race back to Athens, the birthplace of the demos, to figure out what went wrong and how it might be set right. It’s a model that “Two Cheers for Politics” (Basic Books), by the political essayist and law professor Jedediah Purdy, keeps in sight, if in varying focus. Purdy sets out a program for fundamental change rooted in the virtues often thought to repose in the Athens of the fifth century B.C.E. Borrowing his title from E. M. Forster’s famous collection “Two Cheers for Democracy”—which included the unfortunate line about betraying one’s country before betraying one’s friends, a kind of motto on the shield of the Cambridge spies for Stalin—he has a nearly religious faith in the power of voting. Although his allusive manner makes it hard at times to distinguish the background of the argument from the

point

of the argument, what he has in mind would be distant from the liberal democracy we know.

At first, Purdy’s account seems a fluently erudite version of a familiar leftist critique of “procedural” liberalism. Liberals underestimate (or are fatally disingenuous about) the real role of money in bourgeois representative politics; politics in America, in particular, has been wholly “colonized” by capital. Our legislative assemblies are filled with rich people who mainly talk to other rich people. Reagan and Thatcher, or their financiers, brought about an era of plutocratic planetary rule, which hasn’t been reformed since. Blair and Clinton were mere handmaidens of the market, neoliberals making their peace with globalization and its inequality. Purdy treats the Occupy Wall Street movement with admiration, as a torch that burned too briefly. Obama was a failure who raised hopes and then defaulted on them; the first Sanders campaign was an authentic but also somehow dashed hope. Trump, significantly, is downgraded to a mere epiphenomenon, a symptom rather than a cause—a predictably decadent extension of neoliberal nihilism.

Yet Purdy does think that Trump’s campaign, like those of Obama and Sanders, signalled an appetite for democratic

renewal, and a revival of “political energies that had receded far from the center of public life”:

In each case, some core of listeners felt “Yes! This is real. This is what it’s actually about.” The campaigns grew through the discovery that the listener was not alone: the political epiphany was shared. People felt freer to say things that they had kept to themselves or not quite known they believed and to take stances they had shied away from, assuming no one would join them.

Democracy was always the wrong ideal, Kōjin Karatani argues; far superior was the isonomia of the ancient Ionians.

ILLUSTRATION BY BERKE YAZICIOGLU

The dead wasteland of a procedural liberalism managed by an élite, Purdy believes, has produced a crisis that only true politics—a popular belief in the possibilities of common purpose—can solve. For the worst form of capitalist depredation is exacted in the realm of the political imagination: “It has to do with whether we believe that we can decide the shape of our shared world.” He is angry at the élites who supervise the bureaucratic capitalist state on behalf of their overlords while keeping up an elaborate masquerade of equality of opportunity. Harvard gets hit particularly hard here: slots at Harvard College, he tells us, are bought and sold, while its Crimson meritocrats go on to staff “Democratic administrations,” the

Times

, and, well,

The New Yorker

. (Purdy was a chaired professor at Columbia Law School when he wrote the book, and, curiously, Columbia is left out of the complaint, presumably having arrived at a way of separating bold freethinkers deserving of their place from those dastardly meritocrats.)

Books of this kind, as all who write them know, invariably call up remote philosophical figures and have them hover about the text like floats at a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, to be shown off or else deflated with a peashooter. So we get the usual run of Hobbes said this and then Locke said this and then Rousseau said the opposite and now here we are with Donald Trump having been elected President. A sensitive and subtle account of Adam Smith is followed by a less subtle, and less sympathetic, account of Friedrich Hayek, two centuries later. Walter Lippmann comes on, and Tocqueville, of course, is everywhere.

Yet a more radical thesis at last emerges, and with it the originality of Purdy’s position: he is not merely in favor of a renewed egalitarianism but disgusted with “representative” democracy in all its forms.

Rejecting the Founders’ faith in constitutional self-governance, he believes that a form of direct democracy must replace it—a “rough-hewn” kind, traditionally associated with what the ancient Athenians enjoyed, when any citizen might be called on to take immediate part in the decisions of the whole. There seemed then to be little space between the people and their decisions; if you wanted to convict Socrates of impiety—or finance the Parthenon with tribute from the Ionians—you cast your vote and the democratic deed was done. Purdy recognizes that the Athenian system was far from perfectly democratic; the voting population couldn’t all fit into the spaces for public assembly, and the polity did not include women or slaves. But, for the Athenians, it was

effectively

democratic: it functioned as a “synecdoche,” not as a metaphor, in a striking formulation of Josiah Ober’s. A small part of the citizenry stood for the whole.

The villain of the story, then, is not just the interposition of a “representative” class but the idea of representation itself, with its guaranteed declension into bureaucracy and élite rule. Nor is this an abstract or merely historical issue. Any New Yorker who has walked into his voting station to vote, only to confront a choice of unknown names listed for dimly understood offices—the deliverance of an inscrutable Democratic Party machine—can share the emotion that precedes the argument.

If Purdy does not have a very detailed plan, he has at least a plan for a plan. He wants to transform American life through mass participation in engaged and shared decision-making, of the sort presaged by Zuccotti Park. To get where we need to go, he argues forcefully for a reformed Supreme Court and a new Constitutional Convention every three decades, to rewrite the whole damn thing.

The familiar parts of Purdy’s polemic have familiar rejoinders. Occupy Wall Street was a marginal, not a mass, movement, never gaining popular support, and Sanders ran twice and lost twice. Purdy blames “market colonization” for the Supreme Court’s reactionary decision-making, but the Court’s most reactionary decisions have little to do with the desires of capitalism or, anyway, of capitalists: the Goldman Sachs crowd is fine with women’s autonomy, being significantly composed of liberal women, and would prefer fewer gun massacres. And though the struggle to maintain democratic institutions within a capitalist society has been intense, the struggle to maintain democratic institutions in anti-capitalist countries has been catastrophic. We do poorly, butthe Chinese Communist Party does infinitely worse, even when it tilts toward some version of capitalism.

For that matter, would our democratic life really be improved by a new Constitutional Convention—to which Alex Jones’s followers, demanding to know where the U.F.O.s are being kept, are as likely to show up as Elizabeth Warren’s followers, demanding that corporations be made to pay their fair share of taxes? The U.S. Constitution, undemocratic though it is, is surely an additive to the problem, not the problem itself. Parliamentary systems, like Canada’s, have also been buffeted by populist and illiberal politics, while Brexit, a bit of rough-hewn majoritarian politics in a country without a written constitution, shows the dangers of relying on a one-night plebiscite.

Purdy’s basic political position seems to be that politics would be better if everyone shared his. Those of us who share his politics might agree, but perhaps with the proviso that the kind of sharing he is cheering for has more to do with the poetics of protest than with politics as generally understood. Politics, as he conceives it, is a way of getting all the people who agree with you to act in unison. This

is

a big part of democratic societies. Forming coalitions, assembling multitudes, encouraging action on urgent issues: these are all essential to a healthy country, even more than the business of filling in the circle next to a name you have just encountered for an office you know nothing about.

But the greatest service of politics isn’t to enable the mobilization of people who have the same views; it’s to enable people to live together when their views differ. Politics is a way of getting our ideas to brawl in place of our persons. Though democracy is practiced when people march on Washington and assemble in parks—when they feel that they have found a common voice—politics is practiced when the shouting turns to swapping. Politics was Disraeli getting one over on the nineteenth-century Liberal Party by leaping to electoral reform for the working classes, thereby trying to gain their confidence; politics was Mandela making a deal with de Klerk to respect the white minority in exchange for a peaceful transition to majority rule. Politics is Biden courting and coaxing Manchin (whose replacement would be incomparably farther to the right) to make a green deal so long as it was no longer colored green. The difficulty with the Athenian synecdoche is that getting the part to act as the whole presupposes an agreement among the whole. There is no such agreement. Trumpism and Obamaism are not two expressions of one will for collective action; they are radically incommensurable views about what’s needed.

Purdy’s faith in “collective rationality” as the spur to common action—his less mystical version of Rousseau’s general will—leaves him not entirely immune to what could be called the Munchkinland theory of politics. This is the belief that although the majority population of any place might be intimidated and silenced by an oppressive force—capitalism or special interests or the Church—they would, given the chance, sing ding-dong in unison and celebrate their liberation. They just need a house dropped on their witch.

The perennial temptation of leftist politics is to suppose that opposition to its policies among the rank and file must be rooted in plutocratic manipulation, and therefore curable by the reassertion of the popular will. The evidence suggests, alas, that very often what looks like plutocratic manipulation really is the popular will. Many Munchkins like the witch, or at least work for the witch out of dislike for some other ascendant group of Munchkins. (Readers of the later L. Frank Baum books will recall that Munchkin Country is full of diverse and sometimes discordant groupings.) The awkward truth is that Thatcher and Reagan were free to give the plutocrats what they wanted because they were giving the people what they wanted: in one case, release from what had come to seem a stifling, union-heavy statist system; in the other, a spirit of national, call it tribal, self-affirmation. One can deplore these positions, but to deny that they were popular is to pretend that a two-decade Tory reign, in many ways not yet completed, and a forty-nine-state sweep in 1984 were mass delusions. Although prowitch Munchkins may be called collaborators after their liberation, they persist in their ways, and resent their liberators quite as much as they ever feared the witch. “Of course, I never liked all those scary messages she wrote in the sky with her broom,” they whisper among themselves. “But at least she got things done. Look at this place now. The bricks are all turning yellow.”

Purdy’s vision of democracy would, of course, omit the bugs in the Athenian model: the misogyny, the slavery, the silver mines. But what if the original sin of the democratic vision lies right there—what if, by the time we got to Athens, democratic practice was already fallen and hopelessly corrupted, with the slaves and the silver mines and the imperialism inherent to the Athenian model? This is the hair-raising thesis advanced by the illustrious Japanese philosopher Kōjin Karatani. In his book “Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy,” Athenian democracy is exposed as a false idol. He does not see this from some Straussian point of view, in which Plato’s secret compact of liars is a better form of government than the rabble throwing stones at Socrates. On the contrary, he is a staunch egalitarian, who believes that democracy actually exemplifies the basic oppressive rhythm of “ruler and ruled.” His ideal is, instead, “isonomia,” the condition of a society in which equal speaks to equal as equal, with none ruled or ruling, and he believes that such an order existed around the Ionian Islands of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., before the rise of Athens.

If Purdy is susceptible to the Munch-kinland theory of social change, Karatani is tempted by what might be called the Atlantis theory of political history. Once upon a time, there was a great, good place where life was beautiful, thought was free, and everyone was treated fairly. This good place was destroyed by some kind of earthquake—perhaps visited from outside, perhaps produced by an internal shaking of its own plates—and vanished into the sea, though memories of it remain. The Atlantis in question

may be Plato’s original idealized island, or it may be the pre-patriarchal society of Europe, or the annual meeting of Viking peasants in nightless Iceland. In every case, there was once a better place than this one, and our path to renewal lies in renewing its tenets.

Karatani’s Atlantean view is plausibly detailed. The settlement around the Ionian Islands in the centuries after Homer (but before the imperial ascent of Athens) was marked by an escape from clan society; the islands welcomed immigrants of all kinds. Free of caste connections and tribal ties, the Ionians were able to engineer a new kind of equality. They didn’t become hunter-gatherers, but they “recuperated nomadism by the practice of foreign trade and manufacturing.” Like fourteenth-century Venice or seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Ionia was a place where there wasn’t much land to till, let alone a landed aristocracy to own and exploit the terrain and its tillers, and so people had to earn a living making and trading things. As a result, they were open in ways that mainland Greece was not.

A key point, in Karatani’s account, is that Ionian trade wasn’t captured by a state monopoly but conducted through networks of makers and traders. The earnings of trade, under those conditions, were more evenly distributed, and the freedom of movement put a limit on abusive political arrangements. “The reason class divisions multiplied under the money economy in Athens was that from the outset political power was held by a land-owning nobility,” he writes. “That kind of inequality, and ruler-ruled relation, did not arise in Ionia. That is to say, isonomia obtained. If in a given polis such inequality and ruler-ruled relation did arise, people could simply move to another place.”

“You said it. I heard it. There’s no taking it back, Harold!”

For Karatani, working in a Marxian tradition, ideas tend to mirror the economic exigencies of their contexts, and he thinks that in Ionia they did. The line of philosophers who came of age around the islands, usually called the pre-Socratics, were notably unconcerned with hierarchy or with religious mysticism. They imagined the universe as governed by material, transactional exchanges. Thales, who lived in the Ionian city of Miletus and thought that everything was made of water, was making an essentially empirical attempt to understand the world without recourse to fate or divine supervision. (So, for Karatani, was Heraclitus, a century later, who thought everything was made of fire.) Karatani insists that the pre-Socratic physics is inseparable from an Ionian political ideology. Ionian physics posited an equilibrium of forces, not a hierarchy of them with a mystical overseer. Anaximander, Thales’ protégé, “introduced the principle of justice (or

dikē

) as the law governing the natural world.” The play of forces in the physical world, fluid and forever in exchange, mimicked and governed the forces in the social world. Isonomia was at the root of it all.

Isonomia in Ionia—it has the rhythm of a song lyric. One feels again the shape of a familiar and accurate historical meme: trading and manufacturing centers tend to be markedly more egalitarian than landholding ones. Democratic practices of one kind or another—though limited and oligarchic in Venice, bloodied by sporadic religious warfare in Holland—usually take root in such places, only to be trampled as power consolidates and an élite takes hold.

Was Karatani’s Atlantis, that utopia of isonomia, actually anything like this? Early on, he cheerfully admits that “there are almost no historical or archaeological materials to give us an idea of what Ionian cities were really like.” But he suggests that we can argue by indirect evidence and by drawing “inferences in world history from cases that resemble Ionia.” These turn out to include medieval Iceland, also a refuge for exiles, with its famous Þingvellir, or meeting place, and pre-Revolutionary New England, settled by refugees as well, and marked by its isonomic townships and town meetings.

It is an odd way to argue history and has odd results. In Iceland, you can visit the Þingvellir, where the Viking democrats gathered—and the next thing you are shown is the drowning pool, where women were executed. The drowning pool came into use later, to be sure, but is part of a similar social inheritance. Rough justice, the sagas make plain, is as much an Icelandic tradition as shared goods are. And one has only to read Hawthorne to have a very different view of life in those New England townships, especially for people who did not quite fit the pattern.

Karatani’s historical approach—projecting his ideals upon an idealized past—has other confounding consequences. What are we to make, for instance, of his insistence that the poems of Homer, the bard of Ionia, are not aristocratic? In truth, the force of the occasional protests against aristocratic practices in Homer are moving because of their rarity, rather like the cries of the peasants in “King Lear.” “Blood will tell” is pretty much the motto on every inspired page. But Karatani needs Homer to be isonomic and will make him so. More practically, how did Ionians resolve the perpetual fact of political conflict? Perpetual secession seems to be the answer; when things get bad, simply go to another island. (The old liberal huff “I’m moving to Canada!” is more serious when “Canada” is just a rowboat ride away.) This is not always ridiculous advice—a series of successive secessions in New England is how we got Rhode Island—but it doesn’t seem like much of a plan for settled modern countries.

Greek islands before the rise of Athens, chilly and isolated medieval Iceland, the New England townships of the Colonial era: these sound like oddly sparse and remote spots to build a dream on. Perhaps all such dreams can be built only so. Reading Karatani’s account of ancient Ionia, one recalls the parallel dream of ancient Sparta, the militaristic state that so inspired authoritarians from Plato to Hitler. An isonomic Ionia is infinitely preferable to an authoritarian Sparta but seems of the same imaginative kind. We can’t build back better from a place that didn’t really exist. Certainly, from what little we do know, the Ionians seem not to have been egalitarian at all in the sense we mean and have gone far toward achieving—the aim of equality between the sexes, or among religious groups, or among ethnicities or sexualities. Yet the basic inquiry into the possibility of human relationships that Karatani undertakes is moving, even inspiring. Though he doesn’t cite them, his Ionians most resemble the classic anarchists, of the Mikhail Bakunin or Emma Goldman kind: repudiating all power relations, ruler to ruled, in a way that shames more timid liberal imaginations.

And if real-world isonomia seems likely to produce a group of refugees perpetually on the run as they flee one tyrant after another? This may not be a plausible basis for a polis, but it is a plausible description of a globalized intelligentsia. Here one comes to a really striking thing about books like Karatani’s. They reflect the existence of an absurd luxuriance of liberal and open institutions, which, for the moment at least, still engirdle the planet. In a translator’s note to “Isonomia,” Joseph Murphy tells us that “the text incorporates extensive quotation from Greek, German, Japanese, French and Chinese sources,” and he explains his elaborate methods of rendering all these quotations into one text. We take it for granted that a Japanese scholar will write about them all, in Japanese, and that his translations will be rectified with existing ones, and that Slavoj Žižek will be reached to blurb the work in his hideaway in Slovenia, and that Duke University—named for a toxic tobacco family—will label it Marxist theory, and that grumpy liberals will critique it. That this network exists, on a scale unknown to previous eras, is in itself astounding.

Liberal institutions—and nothing is more of a liberal institution, in its small way, than a university press—matter as much to our isonomic prospects as democratic practices do. Karl Popper’s point in his 1958 essay “Back to the Pre-Socratics” (although Karatani is critical of Popper, he echoes him here) is that what matters is not the content of the scientific theories of the Ionian philosophers (everything really

isn’t

made of water) but their “second order” traditions, their tolerance of dissent and appetite for argument. What matters is that, by arguing it out without feuds or heresy hunts, they eventually arrived at the theory of the atom, of which everything

is

made.

These institutions of open inquiry are foundational to the practice of democracy. As Amartya Sen argues, good primary schools contribute as much to democracy as strong political parties do, and, as Robert Putnam has shown many times, the presence of choral groups and cafés in an Italian town tells us more about its prospects than the wisdom of the laws in its statute book does. Such institutions involve gatherings of equals where authority matters less than argument, and where originality is prized—we want to hear from the guy who thinks everything is made of fire, since we have had enough of the one who thinks it’s all wet. Those gatherings aren’t as charged as the ones Purdy heralds in “Two Cheers for Politics,” but they matter in their very everydayness. Without the values, the practices are mere mummery, as in Russia; with the values, societies can remain open, even if the democratic practices are for a time limited—as in late-seventeenth-century France or even (look at that election list again) contemporary New York. Liberal institutions, what Frederick Law Olmsted imagined as commonplace civilization, are embodied in the circles of participation that silently surround both books. The effort to keep these institutions healthy, to keep the presses running and the coffee coming, is work we can do every day, and some small ground for hope.

Churchill was right: better than all the others that have been tried, from time to time, and here we are, in one of those times again. But is there ever any other kind of time? The nature of politics is to be permanently stressful. In Oz, once the house had dropped on the witch, Dorothy would discover that the Mayor of Munchkinland and the Leaders of the Lollipop Guild (not to mention the oppressed women of the Lullaby League) had violent differences in values and views, which the witch did not cause, though she might have exploited them. Politics, as opposed to pure power grabs, involves an acceptance of the truth that these conflicts can never be cured but only contained, and made as peaceable as humanly, or as Munchkinly, possible.

Politics is stress. The objective of practicing it should be to keep the stress from turning into cardiac arrest. Politics is, in this respect, a more desperate and tragic pursuit than those who pursue utopian ideals in its place may take it to be. The first cheer for politics is surely for getting people to act in unison; the second is for getting them to stop. ■

Books: Object Lessons
Kathryn Scanlan’s violent compression.
Leslie Jamison

ILLUSTRATION BY CAMILO HUINCA

Scanlan’s evocation of a horse trainer’s life sits between fiction and oral history.

When I was a child, my grandmother and I played a game that involved walking around her neighborhood pretending to be aliens, from a planet called Algernon, trying to discern the nature of every object we saw. That garden hose? It was a snake that spewed poisonous tears from its rusty mouth. Those tree roots? They were the knobby fingers of a giant sleeping under the sidewalk.

Nothing has brought back the thrill of these walks—the pleasures of excavating strangeness from banality—as sharply as reading the prose of Kathryn Scanlan, who describes a suburban home and its back-yard playhouse as “two of the same animal, large and small, grown and juvenile,” or an ordinary tart as a wild creature at rest: “The thing I’ve made is resting. It has a powder I don’t like to disturb, but I cut it apart and set it between us.” The “thing” and its eerie pronouns, the casual violence of its dissection, the lurking beastbaby of a playhouse—all these turns of phrase are saturated by the quiet menace that Scanlan brings to her estranging evocations of daily life. Scanlan makes art about ordinary living—ordinary people, ordinary days, ordinary events—by distorting it: she distorts narrative arcs by alighting on jagged arrangements of anecdotes, distorts her descriptions with unsettling comparisons, and distorts time by stretching it like taffy or compressing it into searing instants. Her work traffics in moments and lifetimes, but rarely in the in-between units (days, weeks, years) that compose most narratives.

Scanlan’s books are hard to slot into traditional genre categories. Her début, “Aug 9-Fog,” which appeared in 2019, consists of fragments whittled from a diary that Scanlan found at an estate sale. It recounts a year in the life of an eighty-six-year-old woman in rural Illinois, seasons spent tending a home and nursing a dying husband: “He called. Not so good. Bleeding again. Trying to knit pincushion.” The next year, Scanlan published a collection, “The Dominant Animal,” that shrank the short story to its barest bones: forty stories in just a hundred and forty pages. These narrative shards lay bare the menace and desperation lurking inside mundane moments: a boy sticking his hand between his cousin’s legs; a constipated boyfriend trying to eat enough salami to “force it out”; a daughter bending to pick up her mother’s stray white hairs after the overdue installation of an air-conditioner. (“It couldn’t help her because she was dead.”) Animals are everywhere—as mysteries, nuisances, accomplices—but the human characters, as the book’s title suggests, are the most animal of all. The stories are wry, startling, and feral, full of malice and hunger, where “Aug 9-Fog” is full of pragmatism, curiosity, and quiet engines of domestic wonder.

Scanlan’s new book, “Kick the Latch” (New Directions), interlaces the dark threads of violence that run through “The Dominant Animal” with the unsentimental rituals of caregiving that anchor “Aug 9-Fog.” “Kick the Latch” is perched ambiguously between novel and oral history. In an author’s note, Scanlan calls it a “work of fiction” based on interviews that she conducted with an Iowa-born horse trainer named Sonia. The book narrates Sonia’s life in a series of vignettes that play out across the gritty, intoxicating fever dream of the horse-racing world, as Sonia travels from race to race, living in trailers and motels. It’s a landscape full of exhausting labor and habitual violence, but also ecstatic devotion and joy. Sonia trains a one-eyed horse named Dark Side to victory; a racetrack band called the Bug Boys (jockey singer, trainer drummer) plays at local bars; priests come to bless the legs of the horses. Fleeting characters are sketched with unsparing but often fond attention: “Thorby was gentle but when he got drunk he’d pick a fight with a cigarette machine or a jukebox.”

The idea that ordinary life can be the subject of great art has long been accepted when it comes to poetry and literary fiction—in these genres, its status as a worthy subject feels self-evident—but it can still raise hackles in creative nonfiction. An invented life can be ordinary, but an

actual

life had better be seasoned by either extraordinary suffering or particular achievement. Scanlan, however, is almost insistently drawn to ordinariness. The shortest vignette in “Kick the Latch” is titled “Racetrackers,” and it’s just a single sentence: “You’re around some really prominent people and some are just as common as old shoes.” Sonia’s own allegiance is clear—to the old shoes, the jukebox fighters, and the Bug Boys.

In all her books, Scanlan writes about ordinary life in extraordinary ways by compacting it radically, like pressurizing carbon into diamonds. When Sonia describes the force absorbed by a single hoof in every stride of a horse’s gallop—“a thousand pounds of pressure held up by that one thin leg”—she could also be describing Scanlan’s syntax: compact phrases holding so much pressure. The work is structured by recurring themes: the violence and pleasures of intimacy, the balm and exhaustion of hard work, our bonds with animals and with our own animal natures—those surges of desire and aggression that unseat and rearrange us.

But the effect of Scanlan’s work rises as much from its form as from its content. As with a sculpture, you’d be as likely to describe it in terms of its shape as its materials. Reading Scanlan often feels like encountering something akin to Wallace Stevens’s jar on a hill (“it did not give of bird or bush”): forceful in its presence but hard to penetrate, self-contained and opaque. “I try to write a sentence as unbudging and fully itself as some object sitting on a shelf,” she has said. Her prose has a cool efficiency, the kind of spare disclosure that makes you feel ashamed to want more, as if you were asking for a third serving of dessert. Her minimalist style accomplishes a sleight of hand. At first glance, her compression seems to elide the evidence of its making—reticent in its concision, rather than broadcasting its artifice. Yet this radical brevity ultimately demands that we see it as a crafted thing. The efficiency is both graceful and aloof. The crude repetitions of need and desire become elegant asides; the mess of years becomes a single sentence.

Scanlan, who is forty-two, lives in Los Angeles but grew up in Iowa. Her mother came from a family of farmers, her father from a family of racehorse trainers—the itinerant world of races, jockeys, and groomers that Scanlan takes up in “Kick the Latch.” Her writing sits at the confluence of two artistic lineages: the art of the ordinary and the art of distillation. One is a tradition of form, the other of content. She is an inheritor of the poignant terseness of Lydia Davis and Diane Williams (she has been published many times in Williams’s literary journal,

NOON

) but also of the documentary poetry of Charles Reznikoff and Muriel Rukeyser, the rural dramatic monologues in Edgar Lee Masters’s “Spoon River Anthology,” and the grotesque character sketches of Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio.” Scanlan has cited Walker Evans’s declaration that his “photography was not ‘documentary’ but ‘documentary style,’” and her description of this aesthetic could also describe her own: it gives off “the raw, immediate feel of the unedited everyday,” but “you quickly realize how shaped it is.”

In “Kick the Latch,” Scanlan’s anecdotes (with titles such as “Pickled Boiled Eggs,” “Call Your Owners, Call Home,” and “Gallon of Blood”) do not unfold quite like a traditional plot, with deepening relationships and a narrative arc. They are more like rosary beads, each a tiny, contained unit. Born in 1962, Sonia starts working full time at a horse farm just after she graduates from high school, travelling the circuit with her “racetrack family”—a greenhorn amid seasoned “grooms, jockeys, trainers, racing secretaries, stewards, pony people, hot walkers, everybody,” all of them hitting the same grocery stores, laundromats, and bars at every stop, for every race. Sonia’s life is bound by the constant, gruelling rhythm of her work: “Four o’clock feed, seven days a week.” The jockeys are experts at starving themselves for minimum weight and maximum velocity, a process that feels not entirely dissimilar to Scanlan’s craft: “The jockeys flip their food or they don’t eat at all. They get so good at puking they brag about it—

I can flip the rice but leave the beans!

” This is Scanlan’s particular skill: flipping the rice but not the beans. Getting rid of all the language that isn’t absolutely necessary but keeping the essential details that fuel the text, and give it life. The visceral specificity of her writing, by refusing to sanitize our physical presence in the world, makes the ordinary strange. It’s like saying a familiar word so many times that it starts to sound as if it were from a foreign language.

Sonia emerges as a compelling character: kind beneath her gruff exterior, charmed by surprising things (a Thanksgiving turkey roasted in a motel bathroom, for example), dry as a bone and cool as a cucumber, consistently understated about her own pain. Describing a riding accident that puts her in a coma, she says simply, “I was at the bottom of the pile.” When Sonia eventually leaves the racetrack life, she moves back home to take care of her ailing parents and ends up working as a corrections officer at a maximum-security prison. “I tried to be a normal person,” she explains. Yet the racetrack still occupies what W. B. Yeats might call her deep heart’s core. “People say you never get racing out of your blood,” she remarks. “I still dream about it most nights.”

Whenever Sonia is talking about horses, tenderness cuts through her stoicism like vinegar through oil. She describes birthday celebrations for her horse Rowdy (“frosting on his muzzle”) and nursing a “skin and bones” mustang named Chico, rescued

from a rodeo sale: “I got some weight on him, some calm.” She has a soft spot for underdogs who have been cast aside, mistreated, reviled, or deemed unworthy of care, from horses like Rowdy and Chico and Dark Side to the incarcerated men at the prison where she works. Or like the drunk grandpa who lived on her block when she was young; she let him stay in her room when his daughter kicked him out.

The longest vignette in the book describes Bicycle Jenny, a figure from Sonia’s childhood, a woman whose house burned down:

What was left of her house was a scorched concrete hole in the ground. That’s where she lived…. She had clothes-pins and wire hanging from trees. Down in her hole in the ground was an old-fashioned bathtub and a little castiron camp stove. She had test tubes with rubber stoppers, little blue bottles, jars of jellies she made from her raspberry bushes…. Her voice was high, cracked, eerie like a witch’s. She had her big men’s work gloves, her hat and her other hat, and she’d usually have some chihuahuas stuffed in her coat.

In her burned-out home, Bicycle Jenny keeps an incredible number of “little yipping chihuahuas”; Sonia remembers “sixty, seventy chihuahuas without stretching it a bit.” The extended memory of Bicycle Jenny not only allows us to register Sonia’s tough-minded empathy (“How’d they not freeze in the winter? I didn’t think nothing of it when I was a kid but I’m thinking of it now—how’d the dogs survive?”) but also illuminates how our lives are often shaped by seemingly unimportant figures, the kinds of relationships and moments that are frequently overlooked. Bicycle Jenny takes up more textual room than any of Sonia’s romantic partners or family members, more room even than the racetrack accident that leaves her in a coma.

“It may be easier to brew it here, but I say we go to that expensive coffee shop over yonder.”

When life becomes art, it can honor the disproportionate impact of those peripheral moments and figures which end up composing us—even if we have no ready-made language for their influence. Bicycle Jenny mattered because she survived and bore her hardship without a fuss, because she was a woman with nothing but a charred hole in the ground who made jam anyway—and took care of those chihuahuas, who somehow survived the winter.

In a vignette called “I Seen Him Every Day,” Sonia describes a man breaking into her trailer in the middle of the night when she was a teen-ager: “He was taking pills. He was a jockey trying to cut weight. He told me he’d just shot a dog.” He puts a gun to her head. She says, “I got raped,” and not much more than that—to anyone in her community, or to the reader. In closing, she says only, “The guy sobered up, I knew him, I seen him every day, I knew exactly who it was—it was bad, but anyway, I survived. I cut my hair real short after that.” This is trauma stripped to its essentials: the silence, the daily exposure, the curt “it was bad,” the shorn hair as a wordless articulation of damage. The title “I Seen Him Every Day” reveals the handprint of an author who is explicitly absent from these pages but is always choosing what to include and what to leave unsaid, what to juxtapose, where to end. The title forces us to spend a moment longer in that dimension of Sonia’s trauma—to acknowledge it. No introspection or catharsis, only the hair cut “real short,” and the white space afterward—so that everything unsaid can fill the silence.

Sonia’s penchant for understatement and Scanlan’s stylistic compression go hand in hand, tonal collaborators, to the point where it becomes hard to tell if Sonia’s consciousness—the understatement that seems so crucial to her character—is a function of her own sensibility or of Scanlan’s. But does it matter? In these pages, Sonia is a character, not a faithful representation of a person in the world beyond.

Wherever it comes from, this compression amplifies the effect of violence rather than diluting it—the way a blade gets sharper the more precisely it’s ground. No extra words offer solace, distraction, or epiphanic recuperation. This violence is often gendered: a horse owner forces a new girl to jerk off his stallion while bystanders gawk; Sonia’s ex-lover Mister Baker tries to strangle her, stalks her, and then kills her cat. Gendered violence also courses through “The Dominant Animal,” from the casual degradation of an offhand phrase (“I bet you

like to fuck”) to the malicious amusement that a girl observes in a group of boys as they hold her underwater (“I understood this as their birthright”). Over and over again, characters turn back to the very things that harm them, refusing plotlines of resolution or catharsis. These stories are about living alongside darkness. When a woman calls her doctor after expelling the “clotted, rotted wad of gauze” that he used to stop her bleeding after giving birth, she tells him, “I think you forgot something.” He replies, “You survived, didn’t you?”

Sonia, too, has survived. In her short sentences, we can hear both the imperative to simply

endure

all this violence (“I seen him every day”) and the rage of enduring it. The day after Mister Baker attacks Sonia—leaving her gurgling blood, with bruises around her neck—the police release him from jail, informing her, “This is just to let you know that Mr. Baker—

Mister

Baker—has been released.” The italics belong to Sonia, and the title “Mister Baker” belongs to Scanlan: both female narrators are calling him to task, exposing his violence, and insisting on the dignity of saying exactly as much as they’d like about him, nothing more.

The relationship between Sonia and Scanlan, subject and writer, becomes briefly explicit near the end of the book, when Sonia, for the first time, addresses a “you”: “This week I’ve been busy, but I’ve got to get those pictures of Rowdy in the mail for you.” In this turn toward the “you”—an address that could easily have been excluded from the text but was instead preserved—we are reminded of the interview process that Scanlan has told us about. The “you” of Scanlan has been shaping the story all along, of course, choosing, arranging, and perhaps even transforming everything we see.

In the closing lines of the book, Sonia observes that “a racetracker doesn’t say

We won a race

. A racetracker says

We win

. It’s not proper English…. The race is over, it’s already won, but we say

We win, we win, we win

.” Every world develops its own ways of speaking. Every experience demands its own ways of being spoken. This text, in its final breath, invokes the literary present tense—like a spell, or an incantation. Once a life becomes text, it no longer has a body. But it can live forever. ■

Books: Briefly Noted

Elizabeth Finch

, by Julian Barnes (Knopf)

. The title character of this cerebral novel is an enigmatic professor whose personal papers are inherited, after her death, by the narrator, Neil, her former student. The book begins with a finely drawn character study of Finch, a freethinker idolized by her students. Neil, overwhelmed by adoration, failed to turn in his final essay, a task to which he now applies himself. That essay, on Rome’s last pagan emperor, Julian, makes up a full third of the book. What would the world be like, it asks, if Julian had succeeded in halting the rise of Christianity? Barnes boldly resists providing answers, inviting the reader to ponder the ways in which history shapes our lives.

Autoportrait

, by Jesse Ball (Catapult)

. A novella-length unbroken paragraph of observations and recollections, this latest work from a gleeful absurdist toggles between matters philosophical (“I don’t believe books are about anything. A frog is also not about anything”) and mundane (“I like to see people boiling pasta. I find it exciting”). The most telling moments come when seemingly inconsequential thoughts bump up against weightier ones: “Once, some years ago I was mean to my mother and she cried. I never wear watches. I believe I stopped about twenty years ago.” The cumulative impression is of a scaldingly droll, unredacted personal inventory of likes, dislikes, body parts injured, pets formerly owned, and loved ones lost.

The Newlyweds

, by Mansi Choksi (Atria)

. This examination of love in India follows three couples whose relationships contravene societal norms concerning religion, caste, and sexuality. In India, where marriage is seen more as an act of duty than as one of passion, the families of people who buck expectations can suffer harassment and violence. Choksi’s couples run away to be together but must then reckon with the costs of their actions. A woman who marries into a less prosperous family notices her mother-in-law’s “empty-stomach stench”; another woman’s frustration at people’s refusal to recognize her samesex partner morphs into dangerous cruelty; a couple leaves their village only to return later. Choksi writes that each of her subjects “is tormented by one central question: Was it worth it?”

Shadowlands

, by Matthew Green (Norton)

. The author of this “itinerary of destruction” visits eight ruined British settlements, including Wharram Percy, “Europe’s best-known deserted medieval village,” which barely survived the Black Death and was then obliterated by greedy landlords who took its fields for sheep pastures; Norfolk villages cleared in 1942 to serve as an ersatz German town used for military training; and Hirta, a remote Scottish island, whose inhabitants, seen as noble savages by Enlightenment thinkers, had to be evacuated in 1930, when life there became untenable. For Green, such lost places are not mere historical curios, filled “with emotional preoccupations and present-day concerns”—they provide cautionary tales about sustainability and remind us that “many of our communities … are ghost-towns-in-waiting.” ■

The Theatre: Folly in the Park
Music, high jinks, and community in “As You Like it.”
Helen Shaw

ILLUSTRATION BY HOKYOUNG KIM

Rebecca Naomi Jones stars as Rosalind, one of Shakespeare’s sharpest heroines.

If on a warm September night you amble through Central Park, you might find a group of hopeful people gathered around the Delacorte, waiting for free tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. Inside the open-air theatre, there’s a late-summer-amusement-park spirit to Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery’s musical adaptation of “As You Like It,” which comes merrily stuffed with absurdities like shepherds with no sheep and a hippie commune run by a hierarchy-averse Duke. The audience is greeted with maximalist mayhem as the stage shakes beneath an enormous cast, which includes some seventy singing-and-dancing everyday New Yorkers. Is this theatre? A community pageant? A parade? It’s hard to tell. It’s hot—definitions melt.

Rosalind (Rebecca Naomi Jones), one of Shakespeare’s sharpest heroines, has fled a hostile court for the Forest of Arden. Her father, the usurped Duke Senior (Darius de Haas, in swinging, welcome-to-my-key-party mode), has sought refuge there, too, but she barely looks for him. Instead, she and her plucky cousin Celia (Idania Quezada) and the jester Touchstone (Christopher M. Ramirez) are in search of romance and freedom. In order to enjoy their Rumspringa safely, Rosalind disguises herself as a young man, Ganymede, and Celia pretends to be a commoner. Everybody falls in love with someone, with the exception of Rosalind: she’s already entranced by the young Orlando de Boys, who turns up under the trees as well.

The lines characters say are razored-down, heavily edited Shakespeare, but some context and the musical numbers are new. In the original, Orlando wins Rosalind’s heart at a wrestling contest; here, the bout is a pro-wrestling match, with the (actual) Bronx Wrestling Federation providing the talent. Orlando’s opponent is a masked lucha-libre champion who, after a bit of gentle fighting, basically body slams himself. No one seems more surprised by this victory than Orlando, played by Ato Blankson-Wood as a shy jock who is only newly aware of his effect on women. When he imagines proposing to Rosalind (the hilarious “Will U Be My Bride”), four backup dancers rise from the stage to preen and body roll as he murmurs silkily into a microphone, doing his best (de) Boyz II Men:

Girl, I feel like I confused you earlier with that flower metaphor so let me put it a different way my love for you is like … a hamburger rare, but also well-done

Clearly, the emphasis in the production (directed by Woolery) is on adorability: Myung Hee Cho’s set is a storybook forest of three cheerful trees with gauzy, loofah-pouf foliage. The costume designer Emilio Sosa has dressed everyone in bright, poppy hues. A largerthan-life lioness and some yellow deer are the cuddly work of the gifted James Ortiz, who designed the rambunctious dinosaur for “The Skin of Our Teeth.”

“There’s no clock in the forest,” says Orlando, and, indeed, there’s nothing to do but picnic, participate in a weird courtship game in which Ganymede pretends to be Rosalind (who, of course, he actually is), and poke fun at the locals. Rosalind in disguise is the mean girl of Arden, self-lacerating and bitter about womanhood. Underneath her glittering comic technique, Jones seems complex and wounded, her voice catching hoarsely at such lyrics as “Even though your heart is breaking/Act like you’re alright.” In a musical full of goofballs, cartoons, and

luchador

contests, she’s a person staring, clear-eyed, at her options. What is this real, frightened woman doing here in Candyland?

Well, she’s in a Public Works production. This Public Theatre program, now a decade old, is an interlocking set

of workshops and meetups that culminates in a musical at the Delacorte, performed by hundreds of amateur actors from all over the city, members of local performance groups (like those Bronx wrestlers), and a handful of Broadway stars. These shows, which are typically performed at the end of the Shakespeare in the Park season and have included “Twelfth Night” and “The Winter’s Tale,” involve plenty of homespun spectacle and little kids doing step-touch choreography. I worked on the first of these, “The Tempest,” in 2013, and, watching “As You Like It,” I was struck by the way the program fosters longterm engagement: some of the current ensemble members go back to the early days. The 2020 documentary “Under the Greenwood Tree” makes clear the pain of losing this production—first performed in 2017 and originally slated for a longer 2020 revival—to the COVID shutdown. It also suggests that Public Works doesn’t really need a big show. “We have community,” Christine Yvette Lewis, a longtime Public Works participant, says. “How could that be broken?”

Public Works has a signature aesthetic—the stage design is colorful, the storytelling straightforward, the mood buoyant and breezy and meant for a summer night. For those of us in the audience,

this

can be broken, or at least fractured. In the sometimes awkward case of “As You Like It,” a viewer has to ignore a certain amount of the text to embrace the Public Works spirit. The play is an end-of-the-Elizabethan-age work, full of wry contempt for its own pastoral form and rueful melancholy for a golden age already in sunset. Beneath its effortful bumptiousness (the British director Peter Brook once called it “a sort of advertisement for beer”) lie bleak thoughts: Eden isn’t an escape; poetry is “feigning”; lovers lie.

There’s a struggle between the source material’s cynicism and the production’s determination to be nice. Taub and Woolery’s ninety-five-minute adaptation is brisk, tuneful, and inclusive. As a lyricist, Taub, who also wrote the recent voting-rights musical “Suffs,” defaults to earnestness; her infectious melodies, which draw from hoedowns, Levantine wedding songs, and vintage cabaret, tend to rollick and repeat. Many of the lovers now are in same-sex couples: Touchstone falls for a hot local guy instead of for the daffy, rustic Audrey; the lovestruck shepherd Silvius is recast as Silvia (a clear-voiced Brianna Cabrera). Love is love is love—although Shakespeare’s plot does continue to require a certain amount of hetero panic about cross-dressing.

Taub herself plays Jaques, the skeptic who witnesses everything with a gimlet eye. At least, that’s what Shakespeare’s character does. Taub and Woolery have buffed away much of that negativity. Jaques’s Seven Ages of Man speech, which finishes with a nightmarish image of old age (“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”), is turned into a heartfelt curtain-raiser:

All the world’s a stage and every day, we play our part acting out our heart year by year, we grow learning as we go

Taub, dressed in patchwork overalls, sings while younger versions of Orlando and Rosalind parade past. It’s a celebration instead of a nihilistic view of life’s grim predictability. Even the couple’s senior selves, revealed in the “All the World’s a Stage” reprise, look like #retiredcouplegoals. What could they possibly be without? Maybe they’re sans stress?

The lines from Shakespeare that remain, though, keep fighting against the ice-cream sweetness of the production. In her wild truth-telling mood, Rosalind still says terrible things about women, and mismatched couples still wind up blithely marrying in the comedy’s four-way-wedding finale.

Happy, happy, happy

goes Woolery’s show, which crescendos into a thrilling crowd dance choreographed by Sonya Tayeh. But Taub and the juggernaut Jones have done too good a job of portraying Rosalind’s ambivalence for us to believe lyrics like “love makes magic real.” Taub is on firmer ground with, well, the ground itself. Her eyes light up when she sings about the Forest of Arden, particularly its theatre-like state as a place both unreal and real. Like Public Works—whose deeper project of community building is unconcerned with passing criticism—Arden is best suited to recovery and utopian thinking. It also looks, unsurprisingly, a lot like Central Park. ■

On Television: Lost Youth
Two new documentaries on HBO Max and Netflix.
Doreen St. Félix

ILLUSTRATION BY LEONARDO SANTAMARIA

“Katrina Babies” is a study of how the government abuses its youngest citizens.

What makes a generation a generation? Collective identity is often forged through catastrophe. In the United States, we bicker over cohort-establishing events: an endless war, economic collapse, the onslaught of illness. “Katrina Babies,” a documentary by Edward Buckles, Jr., released on HBO Max before the seventeenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, argues for the ordination of the storm as a defining American tragedy. Buckles’s memory piece springs from a well of frustration. The director, a Katrina baby himself, and his subjects, other Black survivors of both the storm and the government’s opportunistic response to the storm, make anobservation that becomes something of a refrain: “Nobody ever asked the children how they were doing.”

In the late summer of 2005, Buckles was thirteen years old. The director’s wistful narration captures the back-to-school excitement in the neighborhood. He goes to a relative’s house for games and rice and gravy; it would be the last family gathering at the house, which was soon destroyed. Much of “Katrina Babies” consists of archival disaster footage interwoven with modern interviews; Buckles shot the film over a period of seven years, beginning in 2015, as the oldest of his peers were entering their late twenties. He frames his film with correlative scenes that communicate the depth of loss and dislocation. When we first meet him, he is primping a living room: attending to a throw blanket, organizing photos. Near the film’s end, the camera zooms out to reveal that the living room is a set, one that the crew comes to disassemble.

Although the mayor of New Orleans issued a mandatory evacuation order shortly before the hurricane, thousands of residents stayed, lacking the resources to leave. The Buckles family left town at the last minute, at the sudden urging of Buckles’s mother, whose son claims she has a knack for prophetic visions. Would Buckles have stayed, had he been an adult with the ability to make his own choices? He recalls being told by an elder, while watching footage of the storm in horror, that everyone he knew back home must be dead. He maintains a survivor’s guilt, even though the storm made him a refugee, in Lafayette. Obliquely, “Katrina Babies” is a study of the autonomy of the Black child, and of how the government abuses its youngest citizens.

One survivor, who stayed in New Orleans with her family during the storm, remembers hearing a loud sound, followed by eerie silence. The levees had broken. When she awoke the next morning, the street was flooded. Non-New Orleanians think this is a story they can understand, rooted in the universality of a merciless natural event. But “Katrina Babies” refuses to feed the notion that we all felt Katrina equally. Buckles stays close to the ground, letting the first-person testimonies accrete. Survivors recall spending days in their attic waiting to be rescued. Others describe the chaos at the Superdome, the football stadium that was turned into a public shelter. One high point is Buckles’s interview with twenty-six-year-old Arianna Evans. The documentary includes footage of Evans, at age nine, delivering an impassioned speech to a reporter about the conditions at the Superdome: “We just need some help out here.” (At the time, Evans’s grandmother was running out of insulin.) In the present day, Evans’s reserve is striking. She is no longer the prophet child.

“Katrina Babies” is deeply conversant with “The Shock Doctrine,” Naomi Klein’s exploration of how governments, in the wake of disaster, take advantage of a stunned populace to fulfill a political agenda. Buckles argues that P.T.S.D. from Katrina was not inevitable; the experience of young people in New Orleans was essentially engineered by an inhumane government. “Katrina Babies” also thoroughly indicts Bush-era media for its criminalization of Black New Orleanians. Survivors of the hurricane were shuttled to trailers contaminated with formaldehyde. They were forced to relocate to nearby cities that were not equipped to take them in. And, when they tried to return to New Orleans, they discovered that their city had been taken from them by gentrification prospectors and post-disaster tourists.

Buckles is now thirty. He is supporting the generation behind him—those who have no active memory of the storm but have had to reckon with its after-effects all the same. When he filmed the documentary, he was a high-school teacher in New Orleans, trying to get his pupils into filmmaking. The kids are exuberant, when we meet them, but it takes only a few minutes of interviewing for their anxieties to surface. How many generations of Katrina babies might there be?

The football player Manti Te’o is now a saint. He was canonized by LeBron James. A week after the release of “Untold: The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist,” a two-part Netflix documentary about Te’o, a wunderkind linebacker whose life was torn asunder by a catfishing scandal, James tweeted, “Manti Te’o you good brother!!,” with a raisedfist emoji. “Good” as in exonerated, granted entrance again to a fraternity that had ejected him from its halls. In 2012, Te’o, a native son of Hawaii, was a public hero for his resolve: he played a game while mourning the deaths ofhis grandmother and of his girlfriend, which had occurred on the same day. Months later, after it was revealed that his late girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, was a fake Internet persona created by Naya Tuiasosopo, Te’o became a pariah. Directed by Tony Vainuku and Ryan Duffy, this latest iteration of the explainer series “Untold” is a tenacious, sometimes lyrical dissection of sports media. But as a portrait of forbidden love? It halts.

Te’o did not just agree to speak for the documentary; he offered up his big, beautiful body to the production. In visual interludes that stud the conventional sequences of archival footage and talking-head interviews, he is made to genuflect on a church bench and float in the sea. He is elevated to a sacrificial figure. Te’o, his parents, and his friends provide his biography. As a child, Te’o was a disciplinarian’s wet dream. When his father asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, Te’o replied, “The best.” A gifted high-school athlete, he was heavily recruited by colleges, and went to Notre Dame, where he became a star. He navigated an intense triangulation—the expectations of Polynesian, Mormon, and football cultures—with grace. Tuiasosopo, born into a similar matrix, struggled by comparison. “I truly believed in my heart, being a natural-born male, I could never be who I wanted,” she says, recalling her alienation from “faith, family, and football.” Smartly, the documentary presses lightly on its main “twist,” which is that Tuiasosopo, who was exposed as Te’o’s male catfisher in 2013, has since transitioned. The light touch is out of respect, but also out of provocation: it suggests Tuiasosopo and Te’o as mirror images.

The documentary has a mandate, which is to eliminate all suspicion that Te’o was involved in the “hoax.” We need to believe his naïveté, in order to understand why he would maintain a relationship with Lennay, who dodged requests to meet him in person, and why he fell for an elaborate scenario involving a car crash, a cancer diagnosis, death, and resurrection. We need to link that naïveté to football fanaticism. And we must become repelled by the institutions—from Notre Dame to the N.F.L. to sports media like ESPN and Deadspin, which broke the story—that chewed up and spat out a vulnerable boy. Afterward, Te’o, the presumed first-round draft pick, fell to the second round. His image as a leader was utterly shot. It’s a tragedy, with no death.

“The most fucked up thing for me was what was the point in all of this?” Te’o’s childhood friend laments. He can’t fathom the possibility that Tuiasosopo may not have had a clear endgame in mind. He certainly can’t imagine that she was just as love-drunk and irrational as Te’o was. “The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist” has gone viral, echoing the original hysteria; this time, however, instead of being pilloried, Te’o has been exalted. It’s a different moment, one that Te’o, an emotionally intelligent and generous man, is fit to represent. In his willingness to forgive Tuiasosopo, he is the ideal hetero victim. Tuiasosopo, too, seems to have forgiven herself her trespasses—an act that carceral minds can’t abide. And so she has emerged as the trans villain. No wonder, as the film sidesteps the fragile truths of this tale, which are that all love is maintained on distortions, and that Lennay was real to the only two people who mattered. ■