PRICE $8.99 JAN.

30, 2017
 JANUARY 30, 2017

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Amy Davidson on the Inauguration;
Philip Roth on Donald Trump; self-targeting;
Daniel Barenboim’s return; Pete Holmes’s life.
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
Jill Lepore 22 Autumn of the Atom
Nuclear winter and climate change.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Colin Stokes 29 Translating the Noises My Radiator Makes
PROFILES
Adrian Chen 30 The Troll of Internet Art
An attempt to disrupt the system.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Evan Osnos 36 Survival of the Richest
Preparing for the worst, in luxury.
ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY
Raffi Khatchadourian 46 Alternate Endings
Now you can direct the movie you’re watching.
FICTION
Alix Ohlin 56 “Quarantine”
THE CRITICS
POP MUSIC
Amanda Petrusich 64 John Cale’s reissues.
BOOKS
Laura Miller 68 Paul Auster’s “4 3 2 1.”
70 Briefly Noted
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 72 A Marisa Merz retrospective.
THE THEATRE
Hilton Als 74 Martin McDonagh’s
“The Beauty Queen of Leenane.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 76 “The Salesman,” “Split.”
POEMS
Mary Jo Bang 53 “The Head of a Dancer”
Simon Armitage 63 “Tiny”
COVER
Gayle Kabaker “Downhill Racers”

DRAWINGS Mick Stevens, Paul Noth, Harry Bliss, Roz Chast, Jason Adam Katzenstein, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Peter Kuper,
Joe Dator, Barbara Smaller, P. C. Vey, Frank Cotham, Zachary Kanin, Amy Hwang, Lars Kenseth, Liza Donnelly
SPOTS Klaas Verplancke
 CONTRIBUTORS
Jill Lepore (“Autumn of the Atom,” p. 22), Evan Osnos (“Survival of the Richest,”
a professor of American history at Har- p. 36) writes about politics and foreign
vard, is writing a history of the United affairs for the magazine. His book “Age
States. of Ambition” won the 2014 National
Book Award for nonfiction.
Adrian Chen (“The Troll of Internet Art,”
p. 30) became a staff writer in 2016. Alix Ohlin (Fiction, p. 56) is the author
of four books, including the short-story
Judith Thurman (The Talk of the Town, collection “Signs and Wonders” and the
p. 18) has written for the magazine since novel “Inside.”
1987 and been a staff writer since 2000.
Among her books is “Cleopatra’s Nose: Raffi Khatchadourian (“Alternate End-
39 Varieties of Desire,” a collection of ings,” p. 46) has been a staff writer since
her New Yorker essays. 2008.

Colin Stokes (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 29) Amanda Petrusich (Pop Music, p. 64) is
is a member of the magazine’s editorial a contributing writer for newyorker.com
staff and a contributor to the Onion. He and the author of “Do Not Sell at Any
has written humor pieces for The New Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for
Yorker and newyorker.com since 2014. the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.”

Laura Miller (Books, p. 68), the author Peter Schjeldahl (The Art World, p. 72),
of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s the magazine’s art critic, is the author of
Adventures in Narnia,” is a books and “Let’s See: Writings on Art from The
culture columnist for Slate. New Yorker.”

Gayle Kabaker (Cover) is an illustrator. Mary Jo Bang (Poem, p. 53) will publish
She contributed her first cover to the the poetry collection “A Doll for Throw-
magazine in 2012. ing” in August.

NEWYORKER.COM
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2 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
 THE MAIL
FINDING JUSTICE stargazing gene, in corn snakes. Later
in the article, Parker dismisses the
I was inspired by Rachel Aviv’s arti- conservation efforts of zoos as incon-
cle on Albert Woodfox, one of the sequential given the rapid loss of hab-
Angola 3, whose commitment to the itats for animals in the wild. But zoos
principles of the Black Panther Party themselves do not have much control
helped him endure four decades of over habitat loss, and their breeding
solitary confinement, even after the projects may help insure that there will
Party itself had fallen apart (“Surviv- be a supply of endangered animals to
ing Solitary,” January 16th). But I dis- release if habitat-restoration groups
agree with the friend of one of his are successful. Instead of demonizing
fellow-inmates, who said that this zoos, we should recognize that they
commitment to the Party was like are full of experienced professionals
that of Japanese fighter pilots who and that their role in conservation
were still fighting thirty years after efforts is indispensable.
the war ended. For most African- Kira Becker
Americans, the war is not close to Newton, Mass.
over. It rankled me to read that the 1
only way out of prison for Woodfox HEARING VOICES
was through a plea bargain—admit-
ting guilt where there was overwhelm- Jerome Groopman’s article on the
ing evidence of innocence. This is one phenomenon of talking to oneself and
of many mechanisms by which black hearing voices made me think that
people end up with restrictions on psychologists would benefit from a
their freedom as a result of institu- new term for the phenomenon, one
tionalized racism. Only with system- without the negative connotations of
atic and wholesale criminal-justice “hallucination” (“Books,” January 9th).
reform will black and brown people I suggest borrowing a word from the
have equality in court. Woodfox’s field of music education: “audiation.”
quote toward the end of the article It describes the experience of hear-
says it all: “The more things remain ing and comprehending music with
the same, the more things remain the the mind’s ear, much as we can pic-
same.” ture and apprehend something in the
Marcia Brown mind’s eye. The Gordon Institute for
Hamburg, N.Y. Musical Learning calls audiation “the
1 musical equivalent of thinking in lan-
SHOULD ZOOS KILL? guage.” Indeed, the best musicians
“hear” the sound they want to make
Ian Parker’s article on the breeding before they make it. Audiation has
policies of zoos touches on cultural positive associations with creativity
differences between Europe and the and craftsmanship, associations that
U.S. regarding the value of animal life might appeal to many people who
(“The Culling,” January 16th). But it’s hear private voices, whether they are
worth noting that culling is practiced poets, mystical theologians, or psy-
in both places, and not only in zoos. chologists themselves.
All responsible breeders of livestock, Rebecca Biber
pets, and privately collected animals Ann Arbor, Mich.
cull the non-viable or genetically un-
necessary offspring of their animals. •
A failure to do so can disrupt the gene Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
pool and result in animals that suffer address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
from genetic disorders such as brachy- themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
cephaly, in pugs; strabismus and club- any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
foot, in white tigers; and the so-called of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 3

 JANUARY 25 – 31, 2017

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

This hand-colored portrait of an unidentified woman was taken by an unknown photographer circa 1935.
But to a contemporary eye, trained by social media, it may suggest hashtags from #ThrowbackThursday
to #BlackLivesMatter. It’s one of some hundred still and moving images, spanning a century and a half,
in the International Center of Photography’s exhibition “Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social
Change,” which considers how advances in technology have politicized visual culture. Opens Jan. 27.
 this show, after a yearlong hiatus, she revives
her exquisite quartet, Reverse Blue, which

NIGHT LIFE
1
features Chris Speed on tenor saxophone and
clarinet, Eivind Opsvik on bass, and Tomas Fu­
jiwara on drums. The group’s eponymous 2014
début includes compositions from each mem-
cades of thump for a rare set of disco classics ber and stands out for its seamless integration
ROCK AND POP and forward-thinking electronic cuts. (Flash of disparate elements—ruminative balladry,
Factory, 229 W. 28th St. 212-929-9070. Jan. 27.) prog-tinged guitar solos, atonality—into a lyr-
Musicians and night-club proprietors lead ical, abstract whole. (The Owl Music Parlor, 497
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check Show Me the Body Rogers Ave., Brooklyn. 718-774-0042. Jan. 27.)
in advance to confirm engagements. This punk outfit has described itself as “three
Jews from New York”—Queens, specifically— The Latin Side of Dizzy with Carlos
Julie Byrne and the city recurs in the group’s music and im- Henriquez
Byrne has been engrossed in music since she agery. They’ve developed in public since 2014, To investigate Dizzy Gillespie’s deep inter-
left Buffalo, at the age of eighteen, with stops when Julian Cashwan Pratt, Harlan Steed, and est in Latin music is not exactly delving into
in Pittsburgh, Chicago, Seattle, and New Or- Noah Cohen-Corbett went from playing local unexplored territory, but it’s always welcome
leans. Not long after moving to New York, this parties to a no-frills tour with Ratking. They and couldn’t be more timely. Henriquez, the
country-folk songwriter found herself starved aren’t the loudest or the fastest players, but bassist with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Or-
for open green spaces and the mental state that they give their songs spacey reverb and a rap- chestra, takes charge of his own hand-picked
they abet. So she found a job as a park ranger, friendly swing for an unfamiliar texture—last ensemble for a program that will touch upon
with Central Park providing an ample office year’s album, “Body War,” trafficked in An- such expected Afro-Cuban jazz masterpieces
for her day gig. The slow, sparse songs she thony Kiedis and Death Grips in fairly equal as “A Night in Tunisia” and “Manteca,” as well
wrote off the clock revel in meditativeness; she measure. Coachella-bound fans can see them as less familiar but equally propulsive Gilles-
has a mature, weighty mid-range, employed to at this year’s festival after all (an initial dustup piana fare. Stepping into Dizzy’s shoes are the
describe clouds that buzz by, double rainbows, led the band to deny the booking, despite their trumpeters Terell Stafford and Mike Rodri­
and “natural blue” skies. Byrne marks the re- appearance on the lineup), but, if you’re skip- guez; the percussionist Pedrito Martinez will
lease of her sophomore album, “Not Even Hap- ping the desert, you can catch them on Green- invoke the spirit of Dizzy’s invaluable col-
piness,” with an intimate show—her minimal- point’s northern tip. (Saint Vitus, 1120 Manhat- laborator of the late forties, the influential,
ist guitar and understated tone beg for Rough tan Ave., Brooklyn. Jan. 27.) ill-fated Cuban conguero Chano Pozo. (Appel
Trade’s rustic acoustics. (64 N. 9th St., Brook- Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th
lyn. roughtradenyc.com. Jan. 27.) Esperanza Spalding St. 212-721-6500. Jan. 27-28.)
“Emily’s D+Evolution,” Spalding’s shift to-
Machinedrum ward pop, was a 2016 gem, arguably overshad- Lee Konitz and Dan Tepfer
Travis Stewart, the man behind the Machine- owed by flashier releases in a stuffed year. The One of the defining individualists of modern
drum moniker, is a producer and beatmaker jazz bassist, who wowed with her composi- jazz, the alto saxophonist Konitz has, through-
capable of swiftly moving through a dizzy- tional skills long before this creative turn, felt out his seven-decade career, cemented persua-
ing array of genres, from juke to pop, while compelled to try her hand at pop pageantry, sive relationships with distinguished pianists
retaining intense focus. His greatest talent, and the results land somewhere in between. including Lennie Tristano, Hal Galper, and
though, is crafting music that’s engulfing and Take your pick of the album’s surrealist art- Martial Solal. Recently he’s found another
communal, spurring connections with fellow- rock songs: “Judas,” “Rest in Pleasure,” and fellow-spirit in the pianist Tepfer, who shares
rumpshakers on the dance floor. Stewart, who “Elevate or Operate” are all inventive, en- the eighty-nine-year-old patriarch’s obsession
also records with Praveen Sharma in the duo grossing tracks that pull off R. & B. and jazz with cliché-free improvisation and without-a-
Sepalcure, recently moved from Berlin to Los in quick steps and then shoot for something net excursions. Konitz, who has also been sing-
Angeles. Judging from the ebullient sound of more. After joining Solange Knowles and oth- ing, sans words, these days, may dust off his
“Human Energy,” his latest album, the new- ers in Washington, D.C., for a concert enti- too rarely heard soprano saxophone, if we’re
found sunniness seems to have made an im- tled “Peace Ball: Voices of Hope and Resis- lucky. (Jazz Gallery, 1160 Broadway, at 27th St.,
pression. On the album, bolstered by collabo- tance,” Spalding performs as part of “Virgin Fifth fl. 646-494-3625. Jan. 27-28.)
rations with the R. & B. singer Dawn Richard, Whites,” a staging of the Greek mythological

1
he makes a strong case that something divine story of Iphigenia. (Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Mike Longo and Paul West
can be found through CDJs and MPCs. At St., Brooklyn. Jan. 27.) Dizzy Gillespie’s ensembles of the fifties and
Webster Hall, Stewart will treat audiences sixties were a breeding ground for formidable
to a live A/V performance-cum-dance party players, including James Moody and Kenny Bar-
that will also feature the visual artists Strange­ JAZZ AND STANDARDS ron, as well as for less heralded but vital figures,
loop & Timeboy, as well as Taso, DJ Spinn, like the pianist Longo and the bassist West, who
and DJ Earl, of the Teklife label, and the res- Butler, Bernstein, and the Hot 9 unite here for a snug duet. The no-nonsense rap-
idents Alex English, Hiyawatha, and DJ Dali. The stylistically omniverous brass man Ste- port of these bop-based stylists can be sampled
(125 E. 11th St. 212-353-1600. Jan. 27.) ven Bernstein has a soft spot for early jazz, so on the 2007 recording “Float Like a Butterfly,”
his fertile hookup with the New Orleans pia- dedicated to another Longo mentor, the pianist
Giorgio Moroder nist and singer Henry Butler, a virtuosic per- Oscar Peterson. (Mezzrow, 163 W. 10th St. mez-
This Italian disco pioneer mapped four-on- former who honors tradition while remain- zrow.com. Jan. 26.)
the-floor patterns of kick and snare drums be- ing unbound to it, always delivers big fun.
fore many of today’s working d.j.s were tall The fruits of their collaboration—fortified Brad Mehldau and Fleurine
enough to reach decks. From his string of hits by the spirited Hot 9 unit—were first heard Fleurine, a Dutch vocalist who sings in English,
with Donna Summer during disco’s fever pitch on “Viper’s Drag,” from 2014, a recording that French, and Portuguese, and Mehldau, a
(“Last Dance,” “Hot Stuff”) to the soundtrack gave a joyous dusting-off to formative mate- primary pianist of his generation, share both a
for the nineteen-eighties hedonist classic “Scar- rial from Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller, and marriage and a leaning toward eclectic material
face,” Moroder’s catalogue was already envi- others. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th St. 212-576- that swerves away from the jazz mainstream.
able before his modern renaissance. The dance- 2232. Jan. 26-29.) It takes brave spirits to attempt a rehauling
music mascots Daft Punk tapped him for their of the Supertramp hit “The Logical Song,”
2013 comeback, “Random Access Memories,” Mary Halvorson but that’s just what these two did on the duet
and the producers behind the controversial vid- This innovative guitarist works mainly in the album “Close Enough for Love,” which also
eo-game series Grand Theft Auto asked him to eclectic corners of the jazz world, but she also found room for Hendrix’s “Up From the Skies”
score their sprawling, seedy digital world. Then holds a deep feeling for rock, rooted in a life- and “Chanson De Delphine,” from the Jacques
there are his own releases, such as “Déjà Vu,” long appreciation of Hendrix, whose music Demy film “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”
from 2015, which continue to surprise old fans first inspired her to take up the electric guitar, Eclectic, indeed. (Birdland, 315 W. 44th St. 212-
and intrigue new ones. Moroder brings five de- at the age of eleven, in suburban Boston. For 581-3080. Jan. 29.)

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 5

 DANCE

“The Fairy’s Kiss” has been attempted by many choreographers; Ratmansky discusses his latest version at the Guggenheim’s “Works & Process.”

Kiss and Tell not have gladdened Tchaikovsky’s ghost. pression of a trick.” Tellingly, Balanchine,
“It was like a drawing room in which the choreographer who probably strug-
Alexei Ratmansky revisits an old favorite.
someone has suddenly made a bad smell,” gled the longest with the ballet—he
“The Fairy’s Kiss,” based on a bone- Diaghilev wrote. “Everyone pretended made his first version in 1937 and then
chilling Hans Christian Andersen story not to notice.” Diaghilev was not a dis- revised it again and again—was not
and with a score combining the gifts of interested witness. He felt that Stravin- satisfied until he switched over to the
Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, is some- sky should be writing music for him, not shorter “divertimento” that Stravinsky
thing you would think that many cho- for Rubinstein. But the reviewers agreed. made of the score, and dumped the fairy.
reographers would like to get their hands Later choreographers—George Bal- Soon Balanchine will have a rival for
on, and many have. The first version, by anchine, Frederick Ashton, Maurice the most “Fairy’s Kiss”es. In the nine-
Bronislava Nijinska, was made in 1928, Béjart, Kenneth MacMillan, John Neu- teen-nineties, Alexei Ratmansky, now
for Ida Rubinstein’s company, in Paris. meier, James Kudelka—took a turn with the artist-in-residence at American Bal-
Rubinstein, not a great dancer but a great “The Fairy’s Kiss,” but many of them let Theatre, made a version for the Kiev
beauty, had lent her exotic presence to had trouble with it. One problem may Opera, and then one for the Maryinsky.
early productions of Serge Diaghilev’s have been Stravinsky’s scenario. With a But he found both a little boring, so now
Ballets Russes. By 1928, she was older, fairy rescuing an abandoned baby and he is making a third attempt, for Miami
and stooped, and had had a bad face-lift. then, like Rumpelstiltskin, returning City Ballet, to première in Miami on
Still, she had the money to commission years later—first as a gypsy!—to claim Feb. 10. He has put all the old stuff back
work from Europe’s best theatre artists, what’s hers, the story could have seemed in: fairies, gypsies, peasants, the baby. On
and so she got this piece from Stravinsky, old-fashioned to audiences who had seen Jan. 29 and 30, as part of the Guggen-
who intended it as an allegory: the artist, beach-party ballets. The musicologist heim’s “Works & Process” series, he,
ILLUSTRATION BY ANGIE WANG

in return for his gift—the “fairy’s kiss”— Eric Walter White had another theory: together with his designer, Wendall K.
gave up his hope for happiness in life. that the Tchaikovsky salon pieces that Harrington, and M.C.B.’s artistic direc-
Stravinsky crafted the score out of Stravinsky chose were simply too fragile tor, Lourdes Lopez, will discuss the new
Tchaikovsky songs and piano pieces and a scaffold to support so fraught a tale. production with the dance historian
dedicated it to his revered predecessor, Stravinsky had to ramp up the music— Doug Fullington, and Miami dancers
who, it was said, had died in despair. The add thicker harmonies, chromatics— will perform parts of it.
reception of “The Fairy’s Kiss” would and, when he did, it gave off “the im- —Joan Acocella
6 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
 DANCE

New York City Ballet soundtrack of Motown and disco. Is it all a joke acknowledges how the couple’s all-consuming
This week, the company alternates between about dance in museums, or does fitness really insularity might inspire viewer boredom, but
programs of Balanchine ballets—including his go with fine art? (Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. 212-570- sticking with it yields emotionally complex re-
seldom-seen one-act précis of “Swan Lake”— 3949. Jan. 26-29. Through Feb. 12.) wards. (Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand St. 212-
and evenings of new works. There are three new 352-3101. Jan. 27-28.)
pieces this season, two by Justin Peck, and one, “Blind: Strength in Vulnerability”
“The Shimmering Asphalt,” by the Swedish-born Tango is often seen—by practitioners and spec- Trisha Brown Dance Company
Pontus Lidberg. Lidberg’s piece is an abstract tators alike—as a metaphor for life. Partnership, “A Night of Philosophy & Ideas” is a free twelve-
and moody work for fifteen, set to a glistening, confessional, chess match, sexual courtship: the hour conglomeration of debates, lectures, screen-
legato score by David Lang. • Jan. 25 and Jan. dance is a flexible fill-in for these and other di- ings, readings, and performances. The early
31 at 7:30: “Allegro Brillante,” “Swan Lake,” and mensions of the human experience. Ana Padrón works of Trisha Brown, so clear in their embod-
“The Four Temperaments.” • Jan. 26 at 7:30 and and Diego Blanco, the creators of this show, add ied concepts, should fit right in. A multigen-
Jan. 28 at 8: “Fearful Symmetries,” “The Shim- yet another layer to the tango dynamic through erational group of Brown company members
mering Asphalt,” and “The Times Are Racing.”• the use of blindfolds: What does it mean to give (including Iréne Hultman and Vicky Shick) per-
Jan. 27 at 8: “Scènes de Ballet,” “The Cage,” oneself to a partner when one is dancing blind? forms such pieces as “Group Primary Accumu-
“Eight Easy Pieces,” “Scherzo Fantastique,” and The evening is set to original music by Pedro Gi- lation” and “Spanish Dance” in various parts of
“Stravinsky Violin Concerto.” • Jan. 28 at 2 and raudo, performed live. (BAM Fisher, 321 Ashland the Brooklyn Public Library’s central branch
Jan. 29 at 3: “La Sonnambula,” “Prodigal Son,” Pl., Brooklyn. tangoforall.org. Jan. 26-29.) throughout the night and early morning. (10
and “Firebird.” (David H. Koch, Lincoln Center. Grand Army Plaza. 718-230-2100. Jan. 28-29.)
212-496-0600. Through Feb. 26.) Jan Martens
Relationships are hard work. That truism is the “Works & Process” / “The Fairy’s Kiss”
Alexandra Bachzetsis theme of “Sweat Baby Sweat,” a duet by this A small contingent of dancers from Miami City
Beyond the allusive hints of Dada and Surreal- Flemish choreographer, and it’s related to the Ballet comes to New York with excerpts from
ism in its costumes, this Swiss-Greek choreog- demands that his dogged aesthetic makes of its new production of Stravinsky’s “The Fairy’s
rapher’s “Massacre: Variations on a Theme” re- an audience. Here, a man and a woman in un- Kiss,” by the globe-trotting choreographer Alexei
calls the tradition of ballet mécanique. The music sexy underwear grapple for a long time, the in- Ratmansky. Originally conceived in 1928, the
is provided by a player piano and two live pia- tense connection between them at once masked ballet is a loose interpretation of the haunting
nists. The dancers are all human, but their behav- and magnified by a slow shifting among canti- Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Ice Maiden.”
ior—repeating and passing around sequences of levered embraces, some sealed with an everlast- (Guggenheim Museum, Fifth Ave. at 89th St. 212-
movement drawn from caged gorillas, the swivel- ing kiss. Through pop lyrics, Martens teasingly 423-3575. Jan. 29-30.)
propelled grooving of Northern Soul dancing,
and Trisha Brown, among other sources—sug-
gests automation. The intended implication,
though, is less about men becoming machines
than about gender and sexuality being shaped by

MOVIES
1
cultural conformity. An accompanying video in-
stallation, directed by Bachzetsis and Glen Fogel,
is also on view. (Museum of Modern Art, 11 W. 53rd
St. 212-708-9400. Jan. 24-28.)
Much of the action takes place in the stagelike
Complexions Contemporary Ballet OPENING setting of the Maxson home and yard; despite
The latest aesthetic justification advanced by the the actors’ precise and passionate performances,
choreographer Dwight Rhoden for the senseless, A Dog’s Purpose A comic drama, about a dog Washington neither elevates nor overcomes the
slam-bang spectacles that he inflicts upon his al- (voiced by Josh Gad) who is reincarnated in artifice, except in his own mighty declamation
ways attractive and hyper-flexible dancers is that order to help several families. Directed by Lasse of Troy’s harrowing life story. With Mykelti
he is a collage artist. The first entry in his “Col- Hallström; starring Britt Robertson and Dennis Williamson, as Troy’s brother, Gabriel, a griev-
lage Series” is an electronica piece with a title Quaid. Opening Jan. 27. (In wide release.) • Gold ously wounded veteran; and Russell Hornsby,
that could serve for much of his work: “Gutter Matthew McConaughey stars in this drama, as as Troy’s son Lyons, a musician who’s struggling
Glitter.” Also débuting is “Star Dust,” the first a mining executive who seeks gold in an Indo- for success and his father’s love.—Richard Brody
installment of a David Bowie tribute ballet. (Joyce nesian jungle. Directed by Stephen Gaghan; (In wide release.)
Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at 19th St. 212-242-0800. co-starring Édgar Ramírez and Bryce Dallas
Jan. 24-29 and Jan. 31. Through Feb. 5.) Howard. Opening Jan. 27. (In wide release.) • The The Founder

1
Salesman Reviewed this week in The Current After “The Blind Side” (2009) and “Saving Mr.
Paulina Olowska Cinema. Opening Jan. 27. (In limited release.) Banks” (2013), John Lee Hancock dishes up his
In “Slavic Goddesses—A Wreath of Ceremo- most peculiar movie to date. Michael Keaton
nies,” this gifted Polish painter looks back at the plays Ray Kroc, whom we first meet in 1954, in
work of the Art Deco artist Zofia Stryjeńska. NOW PLAYING San Bernardino, where he has an epiphany while
Olowska’s set and costumes borrow imagery watching the burgers and fries being served, at
from Stryjeńska’s painting series “Slavic Dei- Fences top speed, by the McDonald brothers Mac (John
ties,” reactivating neglected ideas of paganism Chatting it up from the back of the garbage truck Carroll Lynch) and Dick (Nick Offerman). Kroc
and femininity. Katy Pyle and members of her they operate for the city of Pittsburgh, Troy Max- suggests that they establish a franchise, which
gender-bending company, Ballez, personify the son (Denzel Washington) and his best friend, he will oversee; slowly and inexorably, he pulls
goddesses in folk-dance solos set to an original Bono (Stephen McKinley Henderson), launch control of the company out of their hands, and
score by Sergei Tcherepnin. (The Kitchen, 512 this adaptation of August Wilson’s 1983 play winds up with an empire. Keaton is at his most
W. 19th St. 212-255-5793. Jan. 26-28.) with a free-flowing vibrancy that, unfortunately, carnivorous, rendering Kroc, however disgrace-
doesn’t last long. Under Washington’s earnest but ful his dealings, impossible to dismiss, let alone
Monica Bill Barnes & Company plain direction, scenes of loose-limbed riffing— to ignore, and the movie submits to his will.
“Bringing dance where it doesn’t belong” is such as a sharp-humored trio piece in the Max- We get shots of people chewing their fast food
Barnes’s characteristically tongue-in-cheek son back yard for the two men and Rose (Viola in a state of bliss: perfect for the purposes of
motto, and her latest project, “The Museum Davis), Troy’s steadfast wife—soar above the dra- Ray, who compares a branch of McDonald’s to
Workout,” certainly has chutzpah. She and her ma’s conspicuous mechanisms and symbolism. a church. The screenplay, by Robert D. Siegel, is
longtime dance partner, Anna Bass, lead tours Troy, a frustrated former baseball player from peppered with bullet points and words of huck-
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art which in- an era before the major leagues were integrated, ster’s wisdom, while the score, by Carter Bur-
corporate choreographed exercise. Their collab- tries to prevent his son Cory (Jovan Adepo) from well, abets the triumphalist timbre of the plot.
orator is the illustrator and frequent New Yorker seeking a football scholarship to college. Mean- With fine support from Laura Dern, as the he-
contributor Maira Kalman, who designed the while, the embittered paterfamilias threatens his ro’s lonesome wife, and from Linda Cardellini,
course and provides recorded commentary on a marriage by having an affair with a local woman. as Joan Smith, who wins his heart by introduc-

8 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017

 MOVIES

ing him to powdered milkshakes.—Anthony Lane pounds the mood by trapping her, with no means
(Reviewed in our issue of 1/16/17.) (In wide release.) of escape, in the center of the frame. Respect-
ful viewers may find the results tendentious and
Hidden Figures even tactless; do we really need to see inside the
A crucial episode of the nineteen-sixties, centered Presidential limo after the shooting? Still, Port-
on both the space race and the civil-rights strug- man gives the film her all, assisted by Peter Sars-
gle, comes to light in this energetic and impas- gaard, as Robert Kennedy; John Carroll Lynch,
sioned drama. It’s the story of three black women as Lyndon B. Johnson; and John Hurt, as a rumi-
from Virginia who, soon after Sputnik shocked the native priest.—A.L. (12/5/16) (In limited release.)
world, are hired by NASA, where they do indis-
pensable work in a segregated workplace. Mary La La Land
Jackson (Janelle Monáe), endowed with engineer- Breezy, moody, and even celestial, Damien Cha-
ing talent, has been kept out of the profession by zelle’s new film may be just the tonic we need. The
racial barriers; Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spen- setting is Los Angeles, with excursions to Paris
cer) heads the office of “computers,” or gifted and Boulder City, and the time is roughly now,
mathematicians, but can’t be promoted owing to though the movie, like its hero, hankers warmly
her race; and the most gifted of calculators, Kath- after more melodious times. Sebastian (Ryan
erine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), is recruited for Gosling) is a jazz pianist who dreams of opening
the main NASA rocket-science center, where, as a club but, in the meantime, keeps himself afloat
the only black employee, she endures relentless in- with undignified gigs—rolling out merry tunes,
sults and indignities. Working from a nonfiction say, to entertain diners at Christmas. Enter Mia
book by Margot Lee Shetterly, the director, The- (Emma Stone), an actress who, like Kathy Selden
odore Melfi (who co-wrote the script with Alli- in “Singin’ in the Rain,” is waiting for that big
son Schroeder), evokes the women’s professional break. Haltingly, they fall in love; or, rather, they
conflicts while filling in the vitality of their inti- rise in love, with a waltz inside a planetarium that
mate lives; the film also highlights, in illuminat- lofts them into the air. The color scheme is hot and
ing detail, the baked-in assumptions of everyday startling, and the songs, with music by Justin Hur-
racism that, regardless of changes in law, ring in- witz and lyrics by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, ferry
furiatingly true today. With Kevin Costner, as the action along. If the singing and the dancing
Katherine’s principled boss; Mahershala Ali, as her lack the otherworldly rigor of an old M-G-M pro-
suitor; and Glen Powell, as John Glenn, a hero in duction, that is deliberate; these lovers are much
space and on the ground.—R.B. (In limited release.) too mortal for perfection. With John Legend, as
a purveyor of jazz-funk, and J. K. Simmons (who
The Hired Hand commanded Chazelle’s “Whiplash”), as a wither-
Peter Fonda’s directorial début, from 1971, is a lyr- ing maître d’.—A.L. (12/12/16) (In wide release.)
ical flight—ninety minutes of impassioned imag-
ery about marital and fraternal loyalty, manhood, Live by Night
and (what’s rarer for a Western) womanhood, too. Ben Affleck—as director, screenwriter, and star—
It picks up a pair of decent, affable drifters (Fonda revels in the juicy historical details of this Prohi-
and Warren Oates), just when Fonda has sickened bition-era gangster drama (adapted from a novel
of the winding trail that was supposed to lead to by Dennis Lehane) but fails to bring it to life. He
California and has decided to go home to the wife plays Joe Coughlin, a disillusioned First World
and daughter he abandoned seven years before. War veteran and small-time Boston criminal who
After a horse thief kills their young third partner, tries to keep apart from both the city’s Irish gang,
Oates chooses to settle down for a spell, too. Oates run by Albert White (Robert Glenister), and its
never gave a subtler, warmer performance than Italian one, headed by Maso Pescatore (Remo
as a man who unexpectedly takes to domesticity. Girone). But, after being brutally beaten for ro-
Always robust and true, Verna Bloom, as Fonda’s mancing Albert’s mistress, Emma Gould (Sienna
wife, conveys an extraordinary aura of sexual mor- Miller), Joe goes to work for Maso in Tampa, tak-
tification. Fonda, touching as an actor, proves as- ing over the rum racket and falling in love with a
tonishing as a director, using a fluid, tactile style local crime lord, Graciella Suarez (Zoe Saldana),
to conjure a life lived close to the elements and a dark-complexioned Cuban woman—and their
to sudden death. The way he stages violence ram- affair provokes the wrath of the K.K.K. The drive
ifies shock into diverse stunned emotions: awe, for power, the craving for love, the hunger for re-
grief, remorse, even a troubled satisfaction. And venge, and a rising sense of justice keep the gory
the cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond operates and grandiose gangland action churning and fur-
at the summit of his powers: the final shot of a nish a hefty batch of plot twists and reversals of
barn has the quiet confidence of a classic still- fortune. But Affleck’s flat and flashy storytelling
life.—Michael Sragow (Metrograph; Jan. 30.) omits the best and the boldest behind-the-scenes
machinations that Joe and his cohorts pull off, de-
Jackie picting instead the noisy but dull fireworks that
Natalie Portman plays Jacqueline Kennedy, and result.—R.B. (In wide release.)
does so with such careful intensity that it will be
hard for future actresses to take on the role afresh Manchester by the Sea
and make it theirs. No one, certainly, will capture Kenneth Lonergan’s new film is carefully con-
the First Lady’s voice with quite such breathy pre- structed, compellingly acted, and often hard to
cision. Much of Pablo Larraín’s film, scripted by watch. The hero—if you can apply the word to
Noah Oppenheim, is set after the death of John F. someone so defiantly unheroic—is a janitor, Lee
Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), although we are led Chandler (Casey Affleck), who is summoned from
a sorry dance between the period of mourning, the Boston up the coast of Massachusetts after the
day of the assassination, and some of the brighter death of his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler). This is
times that went before—Jackie’s televised tour of the definition of a winter’s tale, and the ground
the White House, for example, in 1962. That nar- is frozen too hard for the body to be buried. Piece
rative restlessness owes something to an interview by piece, in a succession of flashbacks, the shape
that she gives, when newly widowed, to a visiting of Lee’s past becomes apparent; he was married
reporter (Billy Crudup), but more to the frailty to Randi (Michelle Williams), who still lives lo-
of her grieving mind, and Larraín often com- cally, and something terrible tore them apart. Joe,

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 9

 MOVIES

too, had an ex-wife, now an ex-drinker (Gretchen they, too, face the authorities’ wrath. Rodrigues is space where his daughter makes her deals. We get,
Mol), and their teen-age son, Patrick—the most the protagonist of this picaresque epic of oppression among other things, sexual humiliation involving
resilient character in the movie, smartly played by and martyrdom, which Scorsese ingeniously infuses petits fours, and a party that takes an unexpected
Lucas Hedges—is alarmed to learn that Lee is to with tropes from classic movies, as in the manner- turn. If the film has a fault, it lies with Ade’s reli-
be his legal guardian. What comes as a surprise, isms of a good-hearted but weak-willed Christian ance on embarrassment as a weapon of attack. For
amid a welter of sorrow, is the harsh comedy that (Yosuke Kubozuka) and a brutal but refined official a generation reared on “The Office,” that may not
colors much of the dialogue, and the near-farci- (Issey Ogata), whose intricate discussions of reli- be a problem. In German.—A.L. (In limited release.)
cal frequency with which things go wrong. Far- gion and culture with Rodrigues form the movie’s
reaching tragedy adjoins simple human error: such intellectual backbone. Many of the priests’ wander- 20th Century Women
is the territory that Lonergan so skillfully maps ings have the underlined tone of mere exposition; In Santa Barbara in 1979, Dorothea Fields (An-
out.—A.L. (11/28/16) (In wide release.) but as Rodrigues closes in on Ferreira the movie nette Bening) presides, with genial tolerance, over
morphs into a spectacularly dramatic and bitterly a mixed household. She is in her mid-fifties, with
Minnie and Moskowitz ironic theatre of cruelty that both exalts and ques- a teen-age son, Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), who
Weary of the aggression that he faces in New York, tions central Christian myths. It plays like Scorsese’s is nurturing an interest in feminism, and a couple
Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel), a pony- own searing confession.—R.B. (In limited release.) of lodgers—Abbie (Greta Gerwig), a russet-haired
tailed, happy-go-lucky car parker and overgrown photographer with violent tastes in music, and the
mama’s boy, moves to California, where he learns Toni Erdmann more serene William (Billy Crudup), whose talents
that the aggression he faces is, in fact, his own. Maren Ade’s new film is a German comedy, two range from meditation and effortless seduction to
This romantic drama by John Cassavetes, from hours and forty minutes long, and much of it is set fixing the ceiling. Mike Mills’s movie, like his ear-
1971, comes with a ready-made dose of fantasy— in Bucharest. These are unusual credentials, but lier “Beginners” (2010), is a restless affair, skipping
Seymour and Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands), the result has been received with rapture since it between characters (each of whom is given a potted
the single, middle-aged woman he rescues from a showed at Cannes. What it grapples with, after all, biography) and conjuring the past in sequences of
lout and loves at first sight, spend their free time at is matters of universal anxiety: the bonds, or lack stills. Plenty of time is also devoted to the friend-
Bogart revivals. But, where Seymour sees a touch of them, between parent and child, and the ways in ship, threatened by looming desire, between Jamie
of Lauren Bacall in Minnie, she has few illusions which the modern world—in particular, the world and Julie (Elle Fanning), who is older and wiser
about him. Brutality is everywhere—as many of business—can compress the spirit. Sandra Hüller than he is, but no less confused; at one point, they
punches are thrown as in a boxing match, and far plays Ines, who works as a smoother of deals in the take his mother’s car—a VW Beetle, naturally—
less fairly—and there’s a special place in Hell for oil industry; her father is Winfried (Peter Simo- and elope. Amid all that, the movie belongs unar-
Minnie’s married ex-lover (played by Cassavetes, nischek), a shambling hulk who thinks that a set guably to Bening, and to her stirring portrayal of a
Rowlands’s real-life husband), yet, in this sham- of false teeth is amusing, and who tracks her to woman whose ideals have taken a hit but have not
bling tale of punch-drunk love, the rage is a part of Romania in a bid to disrupt her life and, perhaps, collapsed, and who strives, in the doldrums of mid-
romantic passion. The sculptural physicality of the to alleviate its ills. His method involves assuming dle age, to defeat her own disappointment.—A.L.
images, a 3-D explosion without glasses, embodies a new identity (hence the title) and invading the (12/19 & 26/16) (In limited release.)
that violence while preserving the antagonists’ in-
nocent grace; love smooths things out to a dreamy
and reflective shine.—R.B. (Metrograph; Jan. 26.)

Patriots Day

THE THEATRE
1
Peter Berg’s docudrama, about the 2013 bomb-
ing of the Boston Marathon and the hunt for its
perpetrators, is vigorous, sentimental, and unre-
flective. It briskly establishes the identities and
personalities of its protagonists, including police Man from Nebraska
officers involved in the investigation, victims of OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS David Cromer directs a 2003 play by Tracy Letts
the attack and its aftermath, and the Tsarnaev (“August: Osage County”), about a Midwestern
brothers. Much of the action is purely illustrative, Evening at the Talk House man (Reed Birney) who sets off on a quest to re-
keeping a narrative flow between several elabo- The New Group stages Wallace Shawn’s play, store his sense of faith. (Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd
rate and dramatic police-procedural set pieces, in which a playwright and a group of actors re- St. 212-246-4422. Previews begin Jan. 26.)
starting with the takeover of the investigation by unite ten years after a flop. The cast features
the F.B.I., under Special Agent Rick DesLauriers Shawn, Matthew Broderick, John Epperson, Our Secrets
(Kevin Bacon). He establishes a command center, and Claudia Shear. (Pershing Square Signature Béla Pintér and Company presents a new piece
where a small army of information technologists, Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-279-4200. Previews by the Hungarian director and playwright, about
retrieving and analyzing videos from cell phones begin Jan. 31.) a community torn apart by surveillance and be-
and surveillance cameras, display powers that are trayal in Communist Budapest. (Baryshnikov Arts
both dazzling and chilling. The explosive show- Everybody Center, 450 W. 37th St. 866-811-4111. Jan. 25-29.)
down that resulted in the capture and death of Ta- In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s latest work, a mod-
merlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze) turns a sub- ern spin on the fifteenth-century morality Ring Twice for Miranda
urban street into a virtual war zone; the arrest of play “Everyman,” the main character is cho- In Alan Hruska’s dark comic fable, directed
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff) is astonishing in sen from the cast by lottery each night. Lila by Rick Lombardo, a chambermaid serving an
its depiction of militarized law enforcement. Mark Neugebauer directs. (Pershing Square Signa- all-powerful master flees with a butler into the
Wahlberg is front and center throughout, as a pas- ture Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. Pre- rough outside world. (City Center Stage II, 131
sionate officer of abiding principle; the story ul- views begin Jan. 31.) W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. In previews.)
timately pivots on the bravery of one endangered
civilian (Jimmy O. Yang).—R.B. (In wide release.) Fade Yen
Primary Stages presents Tanya Saracho’s play, di- Lucas Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea”) stars in
Silence rected by Jerry Ruiz, about a Mexican writer at Anna Jordan’s play, directed by Trip Cullman for
Martin Scorsese has never made a Western; this ad- a Hollywood studio who befriends her office’s MCC, in which two under-parented kids meet
aptation of Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel, set in the Latino janitor. (Cherry Lane, 38 Commerce St. 866- a neighbor who takes an interest in their dog.
seventeenth century, is the closest thing to it. Two 811-4111. In previews.) (Lucille Lortel, 121 Christopher St. 212-352-3101.
Portuguese priests, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew In previews. Opens Jan. 31.)
Garfield) and Francisco Garrupe (Adam Driver), The Liar
have heard rumors that their teacher and confessor, Michael Kahn directs David Ives’s adaptation Yours Unfaithfully
Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson), a mission- of the Corneille farce, in which a seventeenth- The Mint stages a comedy by Miles Malleson, pub-
ary in Japan, has betrayed his Christian faith, and century gentleman causes havoc by telling lished in 1933 but never produced, about a depressed
they travel to search for him. En route, they learn outrageous fibs. (Classic Stage Company, 136 writer (Max von Essen) whose wife tries to reignite
of the bloody persecution that Christians face in E. 13th St. 866-811-4111. In previews. Opens their marriage. Jonathan Bank directs. (Beckett, 410
Japan, and when they’re smuggled into the country Jan. 26.) W. 42nd St. 212-239-6200. In previews. Opens Jan. 26.)

10 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017

 THE THEATRE
1 NOW PLAYING Cameron Hardy’s play is most interesting for its
tonal shifts, even if they’re not always smooth.
The Front Page The show often flirts with sitcom tropes, espe-
This outstanding revival of Ben Hecht and Charles cially in the scenes with Alice (Jennifer Tsay), a
MacArthur’s 1928 comedy has a surfeit of fantastic wide-eyed hedge-fund employee who discovers
actors, who give the production everything they’ve the sex industry’s odd subculture. (Porn karaoke—
got. Hildy Johnson (John Slattery) is a newspa- it’s a thing!) But the real subject here is the white
perman who is trying to get out of the game, de- American lumpenproletariat’s disaffection, as
spite pressure from his boss, Walter Burns (Nathan Trevor, bored and angry, blames everybody but
Lane). Hildy is drawn back into journalism, against himself for his failures. We’re likely to see more
his better judgment, when a beleaguered worker plays about these men in the coming years. (En-
named Earl Williams (John Magaro) escapes from semble Studio Theatre, 549 W. 52nd St. 866-811-4111.)
prison on the eve of his execution. The director, Jack
O’Brien, utilizes the best of what Broadway has to The Present
offer: a big stage, a solid budget, slick production The writer Andrew Upton has adapted one of
values. The cast (including Sherie Rene Scott) is Chekhov’s earliest pieces for the stage, known
sizeable, and it takes a director of O’Brien’s skill to as “Platonov”—he started it when he was eigh-
keep all those hoops in the air without losing sight teen—and one wonders why, especially since Mi-
of the story, or of the internal lives of the characters. chael Frayn did such a masterful adaptation in
(Reviewed in our issue of 11/7/16.) (Broadhurst, 235 1984. Upton’s version is set in the nineteen-nine-
W. 44th St. 212-239-6200. Through Jan. 29.) ties, in post-Communist Russia, where, after de-
cades of repression, tempers flare easily, and even
Jitney the most boring conversation, apparently, leads
The director Ruben Santiago-Hudson handles to sexy talk. All of this takes place at a birthday
the large cast of August Wilson’s 1982 drama with celebration for Anna (Cate Blanchett, doing her
verve—an actor himself, he is sensitive to their best), who’s turning forty. When she was younger,
needs—while he keeps the story moving. The cen- Anna was the unhappy trophy wife of a powerful
tral plot concerns Becker (John Douglas Thomp- general. Now various elements of her life come
son), the earnest owner of a gypsy-cab business together at the general’s summer dacha. He’s just
in Pittsburgh. It’s 1977, and the world is changing: one ghost in the spectacle, as is the love that the
the block Becker’s business is on may be razed in schoolteacher Mikhail Platonov (Richard Rox-
the name of progress. Still, he and his drivers, all burgh, crying every chance he gets) felt, and ap-
played by actors of great skill and humor, want to parently still feels, for Anna. It’s sad to watch ac-
hold on to the past even as the past seeks to reject tors of this calibre try to swim in such a mess, and
them. Particularly excellent are Michael Potts, as they’re not helped by the director, John Crowley,
the emotionally tightfisted Turnbo, and the rising who does nothing to parse the confusion, let alone
new star André Holland, who plays Youngblood. to spare Susan Prior, as Platonov’s wife, from the
Holland brings to mind late black actors like How- misogyny that hobbles her role. (Ethel Barrymore,
ard Rollins and Paul Winfield—performers who 243 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200.)
didn’t play their race but added it to a character’s
complexities. (Harvy Blanks, as the numbers run- The Tempest
ner Shealy, adds lots of comic jolts.) There’s a lit- Given its themes of imprisonment and liberty,
tle too much blues music to mark the transitions, this play makes an ideal conclusion to the di-
but that’s a minor drag compared to the uniformly rector Phyllida Lloyd’s acclaimed trilogy of all-
good work of Manhattan Theatre Club’s ensemble. female Shakespeare shows set in a women’s prison.
(Samuel J. Friedman, 261 W. 47th St. 212-239-6200.) Harriet Walter conjures Prospero by way of a re-
spected old lifer named Hannah Wake. She and
Made in China her fellow-inmates seem to be imagining their
This musical is almost certainly the first puppet lives into Shakespeare’s scenes (the storm that
show to open with a giant panda rapping a Don- opens the play is a cell-block riot, and shipwrecked
ald Trump supercut and conclude with a midco- characters arrive as new inmates), sometimes los-
ital love duet. The loopy and cerebral company ing themselves in its fantasies, until harsh prison
Wakka Wakka uses small objects to think big: pre- horns abruptly end their play-acting. The most
vious works have taken on the creation of the uni- painful interruption comes during Miranda and
verse and the financial collapse of Iceland. Here Ferdinand’s betrothal masque, which takes the
the focus is on fraught Sino-American relations, form of a dazzling consumerist reverie projected
as exemplified by Mary, a gloomy divorcée, and onto giant white balloons, and which Prospero lit-
Eddie, her lonely Chinese-immigrant neighbor. erally punctures, forcing the women back to the
After Mary receives a plea from an imprisoned hard reality of the cell block. (St. Ann’s Warehouse,
Chinese worker, a ravening toilet abducts her and 45 Water St., Brooklyn. 718-254-8779.)
Eddie, landing them in Beijing. Unsurprisingly,
the critique of American consumerism and Chi- 1
nese labor practices pales in comparison to the ALSO NOTABLE
giddily surreal staging and kooky Bunraku-style
puppetry. But when imaginative force summons The Beauty Queen of Leenane BAM Harvey
humping dogs, stalking dragons, a high-kicking Theatre. (Reviewed in this issue.) • A Bronx Tale
Mao, and a singing toilet plunger, who can com- Longacre. • Dear Evan Hansen Music Box. • Finian’s
plain? (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.) Rainbow Irish Repertory. Through Jan. 29. • The
Great American Drama A.R.T./New York
Mope Theatres. • In Transit Circle in the Square. • Martin
Trevor (Eric T. Miller) is a, ahem, working stiff Luther on Trial Pearl. Through Jan. 29. • Natasha,
in the porn industry. A low-level performer—the Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 Imperial. • Orange
“mope” of the title—he’s seething with resent- Julius Rattlestick. • The Oregon Trail McGinn/
ment. Women on set and off reject him, and his Cazale. • The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart
roommate, the genial Shawn (RJ Brown), is climb- The Heath at the McKittrick Hotel. • Tell Hector
ing the adult-entertainment ladder while Trevor I Miss Him Atlantic Stage 2. • Waitress Brooks
makes extra cash as a night-club doorman. Paul Atkinson.

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 11

 an inherent theme of both mediums; it echoes
here in Matthew Buckingham’s “Celeritas,”

ART
1
a chalkboard noting the fraction of a second
it takes the room’s fluorescent light to reach
it, and in Moyra Davey’s grid of color photo-
graphs, documenting Abraham Lincoln’s ma-
with such virtuosity that it’s impossible to be- jestically ravaged profile on a hundred differ-
GALLERIES—CHELSEA lieve it’s not real; more obviously handmade ent pennies. Through Feb. 4. (Murray Guy, 453
touches, like the lettering on a crumpled cup W. 17th St. 212-463-7372.)
Louise Bourgeois from the fast-food chain El Pollo Loco, raise un-
In a dimly lit space, eight small holograms cast settling questions about production and value. “We Need to Talk”
a red glow. The diorama-like images—a lit- What makes a wooden sculpture of a wooden The gallery hosts an emergency family meeting
tle-known body of work produced by Bourgeois shipping pallet any different from the origi- of sorts, as most of the art world still reels from
in 1998, at the invitation of a holographic stu- nal, except its location in a gallery? Johnson’s the Presidential election. While public partici-
dio—feature familiar motifs from the French art- work is so labor-intensive that one takes it as a pation is emphasized (visitors are invited to re-
ist’s lexicon. Chairs, beds, and bell jars seem to labor of love. But there is an implied critique cord their thoughts in sketchbooks, submit short
float just in front of the frames, the ghostly 3-D here, too, about the market’s insatiable appe- videos for a looping program, and attend a se-
effect rendering her oneiric assemblages more tite, which runs the risk of treating art as a form ries of Saturday symposiums), a spirited exhi-
nightmarish than usual. A sculpture rests on the of fast food. Through Feb. 25. (303 Gallery, 555 bition of cris de coeur and sophisticated agit-
floor in the middle of the room: a dollsize bed W. 21st St. 212-255-1121.) prop is also on view. Judith Bernstein offers a
and two pairs of disembodied feet, which are en- pointedly salacious, decidedly feminist take on
twined like lovers’. It offsets the intimate scale of “January Show” our political moment with the ultra-bright 2016
the other vignettes, while echoing the very Bour- An elegiac tone runs through this group show, canvas “All-American Spread Eagle.” A painting
geoisian psychosexual situation of one of them, with very good reason: after eighteen years, the by Sarah Morris takes a shot at the new POTUS
in which the artist positions the viewer as a voy- discerning gallerists Margaret Murray and Jan- with a single glossy word: “Liar.” Glenn Ligon’s
eur, crouching dangerously close to the action ice Guy are closing their space. (Like the pro- new red-neon sculpture “Another Country (After
at the foot of the bed. Through Feb. 11. (Cheim & prietors, the show also boasts a winning streak Baldwin)” evokes the 1962 novel’s blaze of rage
Read, 547 W. 25th St. 212-242-7727.) of mordant humor.) Works by current and for- and longing. The show, with its scrappy, ad-hoc
mer gallery artists include Leidy Churchman’s energy and first-rate works, is an admirable,
Matt Johnson “Nontheistic Dharma,” a text painting explain- and, one hopes, generative, circling of the wag-

1
Exacting reproductions of everyday objects ing, elaborately, that nothing lasts forever, ons. Through Feb. 11. (Petzel, 456 W. 18th St. 212-
aren’t breaking news (the work of Robert Gober and an impressively elegant pencil drawing by 680-9467.)
or Fischli & Weiss come to mind), but in this Fiona Banner of a giant black period, known
carefully orchestrated show the Los Angeles in some circles as a “full stop.” The gallery’s
sculptor takes the technique on a challenging shows have favored conceptual art and pho- GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN
ride. A piece of white Styrofoam is rendered tography, and the relentless passage of time is
Katherine Bradford
Mysterious, ecstatic paintings of water and sky
by an artist who divides her time between New
York and Maine. “Storm at Sea” is a night view
of swimmers, splotchy peach figures in a field
of inky purple. Incoming weather is rendered as
a tangle of scratches and lavender scumbling at
the horizon, illuminated by lightning. At odds
with her aquatic subject matter, Bradford works
with dry paint, in thin or rubbed-out layers,
to achieve the murky and luminous depths of
her otherworldly vistas. In “Shell Seeker, Large
Night,” a lovely line of dusky planets skimming
the top edge of the image suggests that a mysti-
cal universe may lurk at the edge of the known
world. Born in 1942, the artist is hardly new on
the scene, but she has only recently begun to get
her due. If this forceful, intriguing show is any
indication, there is much more to look forward
COURTESY WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; © 2016 THE
to. Through Feb. 11. (Sperone Westwater, 257 Bow-
ery, at Stanton St. 212-999-7337.)
ESTATE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT/ADAGP, PARIS/ARS, NEW YORK

“AAa:Quien”
This two-person show of works by Erica Baum
and Libby Rothfeld, who share an interest in
palimpsests, is opaque but beguiling. Rothfeld
is a young sculptor who combines objects and
images—potatoes in laundry baskets, topped
with ceramic crowns; a Velásquez reproduction
partially obscured by a snapshot of a laundry
room—with gravity and precision. (A washcloth
nestled into a carved-out section of beige
tilework in one work is especially poignant.) In
Baum’s beautiful closeup photographs of partially
erased blackboards, made during her studies at
Yale, in the nineteen-nineties, language plays
hide-and-seek, as words arise from smudgy
clouds of chalk. In one picture, the phrase “to
depth” might serve as a motto for the whole
“LNAPRK” (1982), by Jean-Michel Basquiat, in “Fast Forward” at the Whitney. The show, which show. Through Feb. 5. (Bureau, 178 Norfolk St.
opens Jan. 27, revisits the resurgence of painting in downtown New York in the nineteen-eighties. 212-227-2783.)

12 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017

 1 OPERA

CLASSICAL MUSIC Metropolitan Opera

With a new production by Bartlett Sher, the Met
finally has a “Roméo et Juliette” that suits both
Shakespeare’s tragedy and Gounod’s rhapsodic
music. The curtain rises on a handsome Veronese
piazza, where the chorus is bedecked in glinting
jewelry and lavishly colored eighteenth-century-
style finery. Vittorio Grigolo brings boyish en-
ergy and a sweet tenor voice to the role of Roméo;
Diana Damrau is a lovely Juliette, her voice now
fuller (though less flexible) than in years past.
The conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, sometimes
gets swept up in Gounod’s seductive reveries,
but he keeps the critical later acts taut with por-
tent. (Amanda Woodbury replaces Damrau in
the first performance.) Jan. 25 at 7:30 and Jan. 28
at 8. • The Met is going all-in on Michael May-
er’s flamboyant production of “Rigoletto,” which
is set in a Las Vegas casino: the company has re-
vived it almost every season since its première,
The provocative art of Max Klinger was a surprising enthusiasm of the composer Johannes Brahms. in 2013. Stephen Costello, Željko Lučić, and Olga
Peretyatko—all wonderfully effective in the lead
roles—reprise their portrayals from previous sea-
sons; Pier Giorgio Morandi conducts. Jan. 26 and
Hand in Glove is the most fascinating of all. As Jan
Jan. 30 at 7:30. • The French mezzo-soprano Clé-
Swafford notes in his biography of the mentine Margaine, making her Met début, takes
Leon Botstein explores Brahms’s
composer, “in taking up Klinger,” whose on the fiery gypsy of Bizet’s “Carmen” in Rich-
relationship to his artist friends. ard Eyre’s tightly conceived production, which
work had “seized” him, Brahms “unknow-
evokes the period of the Spanish Civil War with
Amid the cultural turmoil of late- ingly made a connection to the future, to cinematic sweep. She leads a fine cast that also in-
nineteenth-century Europe—driven, Modernism.” Klinger received early ac- cludes Marcelo Álvarez, Maria Agresta, and Kyle
most powerfully, by the revolutionary claim for “Paraphrase on the Finding of Ketelsen; Asher Fisch. (Derrick Inouye replaces
Fisch in the first performance.) Jan. 27 and Jan.
operas of Richard Wagner—Johannes a Glove,” a series of etchings from 1881 31 at 7:30. • Bartlett Sher’s first production for
Brahms continued to explore the early- that traces a man’s fetishistic obsession the Met, a fleet-footed and sun-soaked “Il Bar-
nineteenth-century musical genres per- with a glove dropped by a young lady at biere di Siviglia,” remains one of his best. Three
distinctive singers—Pretty Yende, Peter Mattei,
fected by Beethoven: the symphony, the a skating rink. Its most famous image, of and Dmitry Korchak—head up the cast as Ros-

1
sonata, and the concerto, forms in which the glove being carried off by a mon- sini’s lovable rapscallions; Maurizio Benini. Jan.
the composer used craftsmanship to strous, vulture-like creature, is in the 28 at 1. (Metropolitan Opera House. 212-362-6000.)
transform pure emotion into musical Met’s collection.
structure. Brahms did keep up with the When Brahms travelled to Wiesbaden, ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES
trends of his time, of course, if only to be on the Rhine, in 1883, to compose his
New York Philharmonic
familiar with the kinds of music he po- Symphony No. 3 in F Major—which “Beloved Friend: Tchaikovsky and His World” is
sitioned his own works against. But his Botstein will conduct at the Met—his the brainchild of Semyon Bychkov, a distinguished
keen interest in the visual art of his day mind was full not of vultures or gloves but conductor who has been devoted to the compos-
er’s music for decades; in the next three weeks, he
is less well known—an aspect of his cre- of memories of his late mentor Robert and the Philharmonic will roam through a selec-
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, PURCHASE FROM THE ISAACSON-DRAPER

ativity that Leon Botstein will explore Schumann. Its opening bars (which quote tion of favorite works, with some surprises thrown
with The Orchestra Now (TōN) in their Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony) are in. The first program features a powerhouse so-
loist, Yefim Bronfman, who will be out front in
latest concert at the Metropolitan Mu- decisive but destabilizing: Major key, or a relative rarity, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto
seum, “Sight and Sound: Brahms, Men- minor? Two beats to the bar, or three? Its No. 2 in G Major, a piece followed by the confi-
zel, and Klinger” ( Jan. 29). second movement contains passages of dent Symphony No. 5 in E Minor and preceded
by Glinka’s “Valse Fantasie.” Jan. 26 at 7:30 and
Late in his career, Brahms came to such harmonic complexity that they could Jan. 27-28 at 8. (David Geffen Hall. 212-875-5656.)
know the painters Adolph Menzel, whose have been written by Wagner, Brahms’s
FOUNDATION GIFT, 2009 / SOURCE: ART RESOURCE

work combined penetrating realism with great rival, who died earlier that year, as Daniel Barenboim and Staatskapelle
Berlin: The Bruckner Symphonies
proto-Impressionist brushwork, and Ar- could have the unexpectedly soft and lull- Barenboim, a man of both dazzling musicality and
nold Böcklin, who became renowned for ing coda of the finale. Brahms’s classicism considerable intellect, leads Carnegie Hall’s first-
such mysterious but classically grounded was deeply rooted. But his enthusiasm for ever traversal of the complete Bruckner sympho-
nies in one season. He has a profound sympathy
works as “Island of the Dead.” In Bot- Klinger, an artist whose work points ag- for these works, which need special care: for all
stein’s view, Brahms shared with these gressively to the innovations of the French their sonic glory and emotional depth, they lack
artists a “creative if inspired historicism” Symbolists and the fascinations of Sig- Mahler’s expressive range and technical élan. This
week brings the final performances, with the Sym-
and a “bittersweet, nostalgic ethos” that mund Freud, can give us a new perspective phonies Nos. 6-9 performed in sequence; each of
had parallels in the composer’s symphonic on the piece, the most enticingly subjec- them—except for the mighty, capacious Eighth—
music. But Brahms’s friendship with Max tive and psychologically complex of the is paired with a Mozart concerto, for piano (with
Barenboim conducting from the keyboard) or oth-
Klinger, a younger man whose work he composer’s four symphonies. erwise (the Sinfonia Concertante in E-Flat Major
began to know in the eighteen-seventies, —Russell Platt for Violin and Viola, which precedes the Seventh

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 13

 CLASSICAL MUSIC

Symphony). Jan. 25 and Jan. 27-28 at 8 and Jan. 29 that betray Glass’s universal interests: the samba- by Schumann, Chopin, and Beethoven (the So-
at 2. (212-247-7800.) inspired “Days and Nights in Rocinha,” “Ifé: Three nata in A Major, Op. 69) but also a modern clas-
Yorùbá Songs” (the New York première, with the sic by Webern (Three Little Pieces, Op. 11) and
Juilliard “Focus!” Festival acclaimed West African vocalist Angélique Kidjo), a world première by Yves Chauris (“D’Arbres,

1
Every January, Joel Sachs and his New Juilliard and the Symphony No. 11 (in its world première). de Ténèbres, de Terre”). Alexander Melnikov
Ensemble launch into an invaluable series of Jan. 31 at 7:30. (212-247-7800.) is at the piano. Jan. 25 at 7:30. (212-247-7800.)
concerts that highlights a world of music, some-
times off the beaten path. “Our Southern Neigh- Yefim Bronfman and Members of the New
bors” covers a swath of music by Latin-American RECITALS York Philharmonic
composers, mostly from the present day. The As part of the Philharmonic’s ongoing Tchaikovsky
six-concert festival concludes with an orches- Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center festival, “Beloved Friend,” Bronfman joins the or-
tral program with the school’s flagship ensem- In a concert stacked with two prominent piano chestra’s concertmaster, Frank Huang, and other
ble, the Juilliard Orchestra, conducted by the quartets—by Brahms (the Quartet No. 2 in principal strings for a concert that features selec-
able Carlos Miguel Prieto. It begins and ends A Major, Op. 45) and Fauré (the Quartet No. 2 tions from the piano cycle “The Seasons” in addi-
with premières (by Reinaldo Moya and Gabri- in G Minor)—the Society exhibits a selection tion to two tempestuous masterworks, the “Sou-
ela Ortiz), but is anchored by music from two of artists from its A-team: the pianist Alessio venir de Florence” for string sextet and the Piano
giants: Alberto Ginastera (the Harp Concerto, Bax, the violinist Ani Kavafian, the violist Yura Trio in A Minor. Jan. 29 at 3. (92nd Street Y, Lex-
with Katherine Siochi) and Silvestre Revuel- Lee, and the cellist Paul Watkins. An amuse- ington Ave. at 92nd St. 212-415-5500.)
tas (the volcanic “Sensemayá”). Jan. 27 at 7:30. bouche arrives first in the form of Brahms’s fiery
(Alice Tully Hall. To reserve free tickets, which are “Scherzo” from the collaborative “F-A-E Sonata” Dmitry Masleev
required, visit events.juilliard.edu.) for violin and piano. Jan. 29 at 5. (Alice Tully Hall. The Russian pianist, the winner of the 2015 In-
212-875-5788.) ternational Tchaikovsky Competition, makes his
Bruckner Orchestra Linz: “Celebrating New York recital début at Carnegie Hall in a pro-
Philip Glass’s 80th Birthday” Jean-Guihen Queyras gram that recalls those of a much earlier Russian
Glass, long anchored in New York and beloved The esteemed French cellist, who has always phenom, Vladimir Horowitz: bushels of Scarlatti
around the world, will be fêted at Carnegie Hall been willing to range outside the comfort zone of and Rachmaninoff, in addition to Liszt’s “Toten-
by a trusted colleague, Dennis Russell Davies, most of his colleagues, offers a recital at Zankel tanz” and sonatas by Prokofiev and Beethoven
who conducts his fine Austrian ensemble in works Hall which includes not only repertory nuggets (“Les Adieux”). Jan. 30 at 8. (212-247-7800.)

ABOVE & BEYOND

Lunar New Year ing was recently rediscovered in France and Hip-Hop and the Crack Generation” and “Sex:
There are several ways to celebrate the Chi- has been (cautiously) attributed to Velázquez. The Revolution,” sets his sights on the rough
nese Lunar New Year, and most involve lavish Also on the block is a portrait of a sensual and days of early jazz and the drug-fuelled culture
displays of fireworks. Red and gold, the tradi- round-faced blonde by the Italian Baroque that followed it. “Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race,
tional shades of good luck, burst over the Hud- painter Gentileschi. The sale is preceded by the Beats, and Drugs” aims to trace jazz’s roots
son River and color the Empire State Build- one of drawings, on the same day, and followed through its canonization as a classical Amer-
ing on Jan. 26; in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, on by one of slightly less pricy paintings and ican form, and to unearth the moment when
Jan. 28, more than six hundred thousand fire- sculptures, on Jan. 26; works from the nine- drugs became inseparable from the country’s
crackers will be set off to ward away evil spir- teenth century are added into the mix on Jan. popular culture. He follows the birth of jazz
its. The park will also host lion dances (dis- 27. (York Ave. at 72nd St. 212-606-7000.) • Chris- in New Orleans, its development as the origi-
tinct from the more famous dragon dance in its tie’s holds two days of Old Master sales, begin- nal soundtrack for drop-offs and underworld
use of just two performers), decorations give- ning with drawings on Jan. 24, including a de- underlings, and its eventual progeny, the Beat
aways, craft venders, and food booths. Organiz- piction of a hunter and his dog, by Goya, and generation. The biographer John Tytell joins
ers suggest that the more dumplings attendees continuing with prints on Jan. 25. (20 Rocke- Torgoff at this book launch. (828 Broadway.
eat, the more money they’ll earn that year, an feller Plaza, at 49th St. 212-636-2000.) • Swann 212-473-1452. Jan. 24 at 7.)
easy enough proposition. The New York Phil- offers a group of Art Nouveau posters from a
harmonic welcomes the Year of the Rooster private collection that includes a particularly McNally Jackson

1
with a concert and gala at Lincoln Center on large selection of affiches by Alphonse Mucha Elliot Ackerman, an author, journalist, and
Jan. 31. (Various locations. Jan. 26-31.) (Jan. 26). The Czech-born, Vienna-trained contributor to this magazine, reads from
ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO

Mucha was best known for his alluring posters “Dark at the Crossing,” which mines the
for perfumers, cigarette papers, and the 1900 tensions between Turkey and Syria for the

1
AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES Universal Exhibition in Paris. (104 E. 25th St. backdrop of a modern love story. The former
212-254-4710.) White House fellow and Marine served five
Neither as sexy as contemporary art nor as tours in Iraq and Afghanistan before he began
coveted as the works of the Impressionists, reporting on the Syrian conflict, in 2013, and
Old Masters nevertheless function as a kind READINGS AND TALKS his dense immersion allows for delicate per-
of hedge in the overheated art market, more or spectives on the fictional lives he conjures.
less impervious to trends. A sale at Sotheby’s Strand Bookstore Ackerman is joined by the literary journal-
on Jan. 25 includes a still-life depicting the in- Martin Torgoff, the author and documentary ist Lucas Wittman. (52 Prince St. 212-274-
terior of a humble bodegón, or pub; the paint- producer behind “Planet Rock: The Story of 1160. Jan. 25 at 7.)

14 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017

 F§D & DRINK

TABLES FOR TWO oxtail-dotted gravy (“Better than the one

1 BAR TAB
Fries with That? we had in Canada,” one diner said). But
how are the burgers? Bloomfield nails
Salvation Burger, 230 E. 51st St.
the details in both the Classic, with two
(646-277-2900); Black Tap, 529
smashed-thin patties dripping with house-
Broome St. (917-639-3089)
made American cheese (a natural liquid
The city’s obsession with burgers had Velveeta that should be bottled), and in
already reached peak LaFrieda when, a the Salvation, which arrives gigantic,
The Creek and the Cave
year ago, long after Daniel Boulud had dense, and funky, topped with Taleggio 10-93 Jackson Ave., Long Island City
upped the burger ante with foie gras and and caramelized onions. (718-706-8783)
Shake Shack had gone public, April Meanwhile, Black Tap has been build- New York has long been an epicenter of standup
Bloomfield opened Salvation Burger. ing an empire of another sort, based not comedy; Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, and George
This was a natural move for the British on the strength of its burger, which is Carlin got their starts here, and countless comic
legends have followed. But in 2017, when a spot on
nose-to-tail devotee, as Bloomfield has considerable, but on the Willy Wonka a late-night show or a turn at the Comedy Cellar
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSH DICKINSON FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

buttressed her gastropub mini-empire decadence of its milkshakes. Everything no longer holds the promise of success, the many
with two exemplary specimens: a hefty, about the shakes is ridiculous: the store- little fish of the New York standup world swim
toward the Creek and the Cave, a digitally savvy
salt-bombed Roquefort-covered beef bought taste of the frosting that adheres and sprawling comedy complex that sits at the lip
gem, at the Spotted Pig, and, at the Bres- the candy to the glass; the dry, cloying of Queens. It includes a Mexican restaurant at street
lin, a lamb burger that may be the juiciest brownies in the Brooklyn Blackout; the level, which has churro ice-cream sandwiches and
an abundance of beers on tap; a bare-bones theatre
in the city. In May, Salvation Burger mounds of blue and pink spun sugar and accessed under a bright marquee; and a basement-
closed after a damaging fire (no one was the giant lollipops protruding from the level bar flanked by pinball machines, where com-
hurt); last month, the restaurant re- Cotton Candy. But none of that matters. ics rehearse their acts in lieu of conversation. On
most Wednesdays, the “Legion of Skanks” show
opened, wood-fired burgers intact. People wait in lines around the block not offers up good-natured filth; Cave Comedy Radio,
Bloomfield is not only a perfectionist, to have a culinary epiphany but to make a thriving podcast operation based in the building,
she’s a purist. She recently débuted White a declaration, preferably on social media: churns out bawdy opinions on everything from
celebrities to murder; occasionally, icons like Han-
Gold, an Upper West Side butcher Watch me! I’m having fun!! The burgers, nibal Buress and Chris Gethard show up for a set.
counter and café, where whole steer and on the other hand, are delicious. From day On a recent visit, the gin-and-tonics were ice-cold
pigs are broken down, supplying the one, before the crazy crowds, before the and cheap, and aspiring comedians thronged the
bar in advance of an early-evening open mike. One
ground beef for her restaurants. (White expansion to the Village and midtown, there was scrawling in a notebook—“I think my brain
Gold’s chopped cheese sandwich, a pris- was an unusually excellent burger. Large, needs a roommate,” he wrote—while another moved
tine take on a quickie deli staple, is a thing loosely packed, seared on the outside, soft his lips soundlessly. In a glassed-off room next to
the bar, before an audience composed primarily of
of beauty.) Salvation Burger offers a pa- pink inside, the Black Tap burger is still comics waiting their turn, a young man in a thread-
rade of well-executed dishes, such as a one of the best in the city. Get it to go, and bare gray T-shirt had the stage. “I watch hockey,”
comforting roasted marrow bone and an skip the shake. (Salvation Burger: burgers he said, “just because I know a guy from high school
who’s in the N.H.L., and I want to see him get hurt.”
exemplary poutine, a mound of fries and $17-$25; Black Tap: burgers $14-$19.) On Thursdays, the wine is five dollars, but getting
cheese curds, soaked in a deeply savory —Shauna Lyon up to say your piece is always free.—Talia Lavin

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 15

 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
TRUMP TAKES THE OATH

couple of hours before Barack Obama became a and his wife, Rosalynn, had arrived the day before, on a
A former President, he was walking along the White commercial flight, on which he shook the hand of every
House colonnade. A reporter called out to him, “Any final passenger. When Bill and Hillary Clinton gamely walked
words for the American people?” He had just two. “Thank down the steps to join them, someone could be heard to
you,” he said, without breaking his stride. Donald and Me- say, “We’re here for you.” Hillary’s presence was, by many
lania Trump were expected for coffee, and he had run out measures, an act of civic courage.
of time. There were no more speeches to deliver, no more Once everyone was in place, the ceremony moved quickly.
warnings that he could issue. In language, deed, and de- Justice Clarence Thomas administered the oath of office to
meanor, Obama had done his part to make the transfer of Vice-President Mike Pence. After an interlude of song
power an orderly one. It might have been reasonable for from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, John Roberts, the
him to hope that, at least for the next few hours, the pro- Chief Justice, swore in the new President, and got the words
gression of Inaugural rituals would provide some semblance right—he hadn’t in 2009, the first time he swore in Obama.
of civic grace to what had been a notably unsettling time Melania, who had been holding Abraham Lincoln’s Bible
of transition in America. The causes included the talk of and one given to her husband when he was a child, sat down
Russian hacking and the antic appointment to many of the to listen to him speak. As he began his oration, she lifted
most important Cabinet posts of dubious executives, men an umbrella. It had started to rain.
and women who are tragically unfit, from ideological ex- Trump’s Inaugural Address was remarkable for its caus-
tremists to unschooled plutocrats. There was the matter, tic bitterness, its metallic taste. He portrayed the United
too, of financial conflicts and nepotism, an autonomic reflex States as a forsaken nation—a landscape of “American car-
of aspiring authoritarians. At a pre-Inaugural black-tie din- nage”—and himself as its sole redeemer. He opened by say-
ner, Trump said to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, “If you ing that the Obamas had been “magnificent,” by which he
can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can.” meant that they had been magnificent to him. Then, hav-
When the Trumps arrived at the White House, Mi- ing dispensed with this gesture of courtesy, he bore in, equat-
chelle Obama, wearing a dark-red dress, ing Obama with a deposed dictator. Jan-
hugged Melania, in impeccable powder uary 20, 2017, would be remembered,
blue. Michelle, a practiced performer, Trump said, as “the day the people be-
smiled warmly. Still, then and later in came the rulers of this nation again.” He
the day, there were moments when her embraced the ceremonial aspects of the
expression lost focus, as if she had finally day, the honor being paid to his person,
exhausted her supply of forced cheer. while scorning the possibilities for co-
The two women rode to the Capitol to- mity and community that the occasion
gether; their husbands were in a sepa- traditionally offers. Instead of affirming
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL

rate car, as were the incoming and out- the continuity of democratic progress,
going Vice-Presidents. Already seated he expressed his contempt for its non-
on the Capitol steps were all of the liv- Trumpian past.
ing former Presidents and First Ladies In the new President’s brief oration,
except for George H. W. and Barbara Bush, those who had come before him—all
who were too ill to travel. George W. of “Washington”—were guilty not sim-
Bush appeared to supply a stream of wise- ply of an inability to enact good policies
cracks. Jimmy Carter, who is ninety-two, but of corrupt bad will, even treachery: of
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 17
“refusing” to safeguard the border; of protecting only them- that he had often referred to John Winthrop’s image of
selves, and forgetting the country’s citizens. “Their triumphs America as “a shining city upon a hill,” adding, “But I don’t
have not been your triumphs,” he said. Trumpism, by con- know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I
trast, would bring riches and greatness. He spoke of the said it.” He tried one more time, painting a picture of a
need for unity with Americans who live with “the crime “tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-
and the gangs and the drugs,” terms that he has often used swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds.”
to describe minority communities but that in this case ex- And, Reagan said, “if there had to be city walls, the walls
tended to those living among the “tombstones” of facto- had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the
ries. And yet this was not a plea for fellowship. Again and will and the heart to get here.” Trump, like many before
again, there was the petulant ring of Trump’s demagogu- him, attempted to emulate Reagan’s rhetoric. America
ery—us versus them. would “shine as an example,” he said. “We will shine for
Above all, he asked his followers to turn their anxious everyone to follow.” His version had neither the poetry
gaze to foreigners, whom he portrayed as the thieves of nor the principle. Along with the rest of his address, it
their money and their dreams. “From this day forward, it’s provided only disquieting answers to the question of what
going to be only America first,” he said. “America first.” kind of city he saw.
Trump is, by now, well aware of the xenophobic history as- After Trump’s speech, the mingling of the dignitaries
sociated with that label. As a candidate, he seized on the resumed, with a more reserved air. The Obamas climbed
darker moments of the American past to turn voters’ dis- into a helicopter, headed to Palm Springs. The Bidens got
content into disdain, their doubts into conspiratorial sus- into a car, bound for Delaware. The crowd at the Capitol
picions. His speech was a warning of how deeply he might dispersed onto streets already populated by protesters. Don-
be willing to divide the country in order to deflect atten- ald Trump went to an office where, surrounded by congres-
tion from his own policy failures, and how dangerous the sional leaders and his family, he began signing executive
resentments he blithely plays upon could be. orders.
In 1988, Ronald Reagan, in his farewell address, noted —Amy Davidson

WHAT-IF DEPT. In real life, U.S. intelligence agencies are simistic, daringly inventive novel—Mel-
ROTH ON TRUMP investigating Trump’s ties to Vladimir ville’s last—that could just as well have
Putin and the possibility that a dossier of been called ‘The Art of the Scam.’ ”
secret information—kompromat—gives American reality, the “American ber-
Russia leverage with his regime. serk,” Roth has noted, makes it harder
Roth wrote in the Times Book Review to write fiction. Does Donald Trump
that “The Plot Against America” was outstrip the novelist’s imagination?
not intended as a political roman à clef. Roth replied, “It isn’t Trump as a char-
n 2004, Philip Roth published “The Rather, he wanted to dramatize a series acter, a human type—the real-estate type,
I Plot Against America.”The four main of what-ifs that never came to pass in the callow and callous killer capitalist—
that outstrips the imagination. It is Trump
characters of the novel, which takes place America but were “somebody else’s re-
between June, 1940, and October, 1942, ality”—i.e., that of the Jews of Europe. as President of the United States.
are a family of American Jews, the Roths, “All I do,” he wrote, “is to defatalize the “I was born in 1933,” he continued,
of Newark—Bess, Herman, and their two past—if such a word exists—showing “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated.
sons, Philip and Sandy. They are ardent how it might have been different and He was President until I was twelve years
supporters of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, might have happened here.” old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever
but, in Roth’s reimagining, Roosevelt loses Last week, Roth was asked, via e-mail, since. I found much that was alarming
his bid for a third term to a surprise Re- if it has happened here. He responded,
publican candidate—the aviator Charles “It is easier to comprehend the election
Lindbergh—whose victory upends not of an imaginary President like Charles
only politics in America but life itself. Lindbergh than an actual President like
The historical Lindbergh was an iso- Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his
lationist who espoused a catchphrase that Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities,
Donald Trump borrowed for his Presi- was a great aviation hero who had dis-
dential campaign, and for his Inaugural played tremendous physical courage and
Address: “America First.” The fictional aeronautical genius in crossing the At-
Lindbergh, like the actual Trump, ex- lantic in 1927. He had character and he
pressed admiration for a murderous Eu- had substance and, along with Henry
ropean dictator, and his election embold- Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous
ened xenophobes. In Roth’s novel, a foreign American of his day. Trump is just a con
power—Nazi Germany—meddles in an artist. The relevant book about Trump’s
American election, leading to a theory American forebear is Herman Melville’s
that the President is being blackmailed. ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pes- Philip Roth
18 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
about being a citizen during the tenures the most pointedly anti-Semitic decade Ross Smith recalled how, in 2005,
of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. in world history. I wanted to imagine firing a handgun at a range in South San
But, whatever I may have seen as their how we would have fared, which meant Francisco, he’d noticed something odd.
limitations of character or intellect, I had first to invent an ominous Amer- “The targets were all, like, caricatures
neither was anything like as humanly ican government that threatened us. As from a cops-and-robbers scenario,” he
impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of for how Trump threatens us, I would say said. “There were a lot of Arab dudes
government, of history, of science, of phi- that, like the anxious and fear-ridden with rocket-grenade launchers, and even
losophy, of art, incapable of expressing families in my book, what is most terri- the white guys were supposed to look
or recognizing subtlety or nuance, des- fying is that he makes any and every- like gangbangers.” The targets, he said,
titute of all decency, and wielding a vo- thing possible, including, of course, the “didn’t resemble who you’d actually shoot.”

1
cabulary of seventy-seven words that is nuclear catastrophe.” So he dug up studio portraits of him-
better called Jerkish than English.” —Judith Thurman self and his friends, which he’d made for
Roth retired from writing at seventy- another series, and started firing at those.
seven, but, given Trump’s threats to muz- HEAD SHOTS “The first few times I did it, I felt weird,
zle journalism that is critical of him, BULL’S-EYE like it was a bad omen or something,”
what role does he see for American writ- he said. “But it was fascinating how
ers of today? quickly they start to become simply tar-
“Unlike writers in Eastern Europe in gets and stop looking human.”
the nineteen-seventies, American writ- The Westside event was produced by
ers haven’t had their driver’s licenses For Freedoms, “the first artist-run super
confiscated and their children forbidden PAC,” which, this past election cycle, raised
to matriculate in academic schools. Writ- O. 20 West Twentieth Street hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund
ers here don’t live enslaved in a totalitar- N looks like an ordinary office build- “art to inspire deeper political engage-
ment.” One of For Freedoms’ co-found-
ian police state, and it would be unwise ing, but go down to the basement and
to act as if we did, unless—or until— you’ll hear an unusual sound—gunshots, ers, the artist Eric Gottesman, ushered
there is a genuine assault on our rights frequent and close. On a recent evening, everyone into a classroom at the range
and the country is drowning in Trump’s a group of around a dozen creative for safety instruction.
river of lies. In the meantime, I imagine types—funky jewelry, high-minded tote “I’m starting to feel a little scared,”
writers will continue robustly to exploit bags—arrived at Westside Rifle & Pis- Lizania Cruz, a designer and artist,
the enormous American freedom that tol Range and nervously milled about as confided. On a wall nearby was a
exists to write what they please, to speak they waited to shoot at blown-up black- bumper sticker that read “Save Free-
out about the political situation, or to and-white photographs of themselves, dom—Stop Hillary.”
organize as they see fit.” in the name of art. The majority of them The instructor, John Aaron, who had
Many passages in“The Plot Against had never touched a gun before. horned monsters tattooed on his neck
America” echo feelings voiced today by “We’re virgins,” Juliana Patiño, who and arms, began, “Anyone shot a gun be-
vulnerable Americans—immigrants and works in advertising, said, gesturing to- fore? Video games? Super Soakers? You’re
minorities as alarmed by Trump’s elec- ward her friend Josh Silberberg. kind of halfway there.”
tion as the Jews of Newark are fright- “I build for startups,” Silberberg said. The students practiced loading mag-
ened by Lindbergh’s. The book also They giggled at a novelty target on the azines into dummy rifles. Reading his
chronicles their impulse of denial. Lind- wall featuring a cartoon zombie holding audience, Aaron cautioned, “If you want
bergh’s election makes clear to the seven- a box of pizza. to take a selfie, no sweat, but do real-
year-old “Philip Roth” that “the unfold- Their portrait targets were made by ize you have a lethal weapon in your
ing of the unforeseen was everything. the artist Bayeté Ross Smith, who had hand.” He went on, “Now, you want to
Turned wrong way around, the relent- earlier photographed participants. Ross shoot at a target. You have your con-
less unforeseen was what we schoolchil- Smith is a self-described “visual anthro- ventional bull’s-eye, then you have your
dren studied as ‘History,’ a harmless his- pologist;” in the past, he has photo- large human-form target.” The latter,
tory, where everything unexpected in its graphed gun owners and female boxers. provided by the range, featured a blue
own time is chronicled on the page as At the range, wearing a black T-shirt man-shape, and, at the bottom, the
inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen emblazoned with a white boom box and words “Homeland Security.”
is what the science of history hides, turn- the message “Turn the Hate Down,” “Can you shoot machine guns here?”
ing a disaster into an epic.” he informed the creatives, “Today, we Gottesman asked.
Asked if this warning has come to hope to raise the questions of who is a Aaron shook his head and said, “This
pass, Roth e-mailed, “My novel wasn’t victim, who is a target, who is a threat, is New York City!” But, he suggested,
written as a warning. I was just trying to and how is that related to how we per- if you had five thousand dollars and the
imagine what it would have been like ceive violence.” He added, “I’m always inclination, you might try Kentucky.
for a Jewish family like mine, in a Jew- curious who people think should have “You can rent a helicopter with an elec-
ish community like Newark, had some- guns. I’m black and American and I don’t tric Gatling gun and strafe cars. That,
thing even faintly like Nazi anti-Semi- trust only the police and the military to to me, is the pig’s ass.”
tism befallen us in 19 0, at the end of have them. So who gets to have them?” As protective earmuffs and glasses
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 19
circulated, Brian Boucher, an art writer,
asked if people had heard the news about
1
ENCORE DEPT.
negie Hall, New York?’And then he
asked me what piece. I said, ‘Beethoven,
NO CIGAR
a fourteen-year-old who’d opened fire at No. 3.’ He said, ‘Good. You will play
a South Carolina elementary school. Prokofiev, No. 1.’ Goodbye.” Barenboim
“I use this word all the time—‘shoot- laughed. “Carnegie Hall had then—still
ing,’ ” a photographer from Padua does—the aura of a temple of symphonic
named Francesca Magnani said. “It’s music. It’s like La Scala, where some
so strange. In Italian, they are not the singers hate its acoustics. Actually, I’ve
same word.” aniel Barenboim, the matchless always thought that Carnegie Hall is
In a long cement room with seven D Argentine-Israeli pianist (his two absolutely wonderful for orchestra and
shooting stations, a sign warned, “No Mozart-concerto cycles remain refer- not that good for piano; you cannot fill
head shots regulation targets ences), conductor, activist (the West-East- the hall with sound.”
only,” but the arty marksmen had been ern Divan Orchestra, which he founded He went on, “But I loved playing in
given permission to open fire on their with the late Edward Said, bringing to- public—still do. I had a wonderful time!
own images. gether Israeli and Palestinian musicians, And I was very prepared. Difficult
The response was giddy. “I nailed this is now in its seventeenth year), and gen- piece—I’ve never played it since. And I
target!” Boucher said, after putting a bul- eral bon vivant (his taste for cigars led had, forgive me for the lack of modesty,
let through his forehead. him to meet with a reporter at a cigar some kind of success. So I played an en-
The shooters traded targets. Ross club opposite Carnegie Hall), came to core—the Bach chorale ‘Jesu, Joy of
Smith had brought extras, featuring im- town last week, for the sixtieth anniver- Man’s Desiring.’ Stokowski was mad as
ages of himself (a recent self-portrait and sary of his first appearance in New York hell. ‘You don’t play encores in my con-
a photo of him as a smiling boy). Wyatt City. Since he was only fourteen then, certs!’ And then he didn’t talk to me for
Gallery, the executive director of For this dates him less than it might seem. about twenty years.”
Freedoms, peppered the adult Ross “Of course, I remember every mo- In the sixty years since, Barenboim
Smith’s face with bullets. ment of it,” he said, sipping pineapple has returned to New York many times,
Afterward, Cruz exclaimed, “That juice in the cigar club. He had politely but his program at Carnegie this month
wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be!” declined a smoke after contemplating is unusual: he is conducting a full cycle
“Shooting a gun or shooting a per- the club’s menu, still lamentably short of the Bruckner symphonies, and con-
son?” someone asked. on Cubans. (“Itzhak Perlman,” he said, ducting and performing several of the
“It’s a lot of fun—that’s an import- “used to buy Cubans in Toronto and late Mozart piano concerti. “I believe
ant thing to understand,” Ross Smith bring them to me in his crutches.”) that composers always have one genre
said. “People don’t do this for no reason.” “Twelve I was, and Stokowski”—the that is their intimate diary,” he said. “Bee-
“I did my fifty bullets,” Patiño, the ad conductor Leopold Stokowski— “audi- thoven—it’s not the symphonies! It’s the
woman, said, packing up. “I think if I tioned me in Paris. He always put on a piano sonatas and the string quartets.
shoot any more I’ll start to like it.” voice, speaking bad English on purpose: Mozart, for me, is the Da Ponte operas
—Emma Allen ‘Would you like to play a concert Car- and the piano concerti, and there is a big
link between those two, and I feel that
every time I play them.”
There seems something fateful about
the coincidence of Trump’s Inaugura-
tion and Barenboim’s playing the often
melancholic late Mozart and the fa-
mously apocalyptic Bruckner. “I’m not
a politician,” he said. “The East-West-
ern is not an ‘orchestra for peace.’ It
shows that if Palestinians and Israelis
have equality of rights they have also
equality of responsibilities, and this is
why they can play so well together.
“But I have been thinking for a long
time now about the fall of the Berlin
Wall. The aftereffects were not all
positive. I think the West committed
many mistakes. Yes, the Communist
system collapsed—it didn’t work. Yes!
But the triumphalism of the West was
so shortsighted.”
“I’m going to send you to someone who’s more Describing his far-ranging musical
familiar with the law of the jungle.” travels, he said, “One day I might write
a book about what I lived through be- moved a prop wedding ring. “One of the ness,” King said. “It feels sleepy,” Apa-
tween 1991 and 2006: four times a year, things I pushed for is that the character tow, watching from a monitor in another
I would go from formerly Communist always wears his ring,” he said. room, commented.
Germany and the Staatskapelle Berlin In 2014, on his TBS show, Holmes After a few takes, they broke for lunch.
to Midwestern America—Chicago— filmed a sketch in which he pitched ideas “Did we get it?” Holmes said, smiling.
and it was schizophrenic. I learned a lot. to Judd Apatow, that night’s guest. First, When he saw Apatow’s expression, his
The attitude to culture, to knowledge, to he suggested bad Pixar movies, such as smile faded.
education was actually far superior in the “Beargician” and “The Eellusionist.”Then Apatow, Holmes, and the writers went
East than in the West. The musicians of he turned serious: “There’s a man. He’s out for lobster rolls and discussed how
the German orchestra understood de- twenty-two. He gets married because to make the scene brisker. Then Holmes
mocracy because they practiced it in their he’s religious. Six years later, his wife returned to his dressing room and wrote
daily life, even under the Communist re- cheats on him with a small Italian man. a new draft. “Our writers are great, but
gime. They chose the musicians them- I get my heart broken, but I learn life most of them are Jewish, so with the
selves; they appointed their conductor— lessons.”
they were far more independent than “That doesn’t seem like a comedy,”
American orchestras. In Chicago, I had Apatow responded. “That sounds tragic.”
the feeling that everything that was “That’s my life,” Holmes said.
achieved in America was achieved A few months later, Holmes fleshed
through legal means, not through human out the idea, and he and Apatow sold
means. It was always the contract. Never it to HBO. Holmes, playing a fictional
human contact.” version of himself, catches his wife in
After he completes the Bruckner cycle, flagrante delicto; he spends the rest of
Barenboim may turn to music previously the season sleeping on friends’ couches,
left unplayed. “Someone asked me to learning to do standup, losing his reli-
play Rachmaninoff the other day. I gion, and finding himself. In addition to
thought, Really? But go listen to him starring in the show, which premières on
play his music himself on YouTube. It’s February 19th, Holmes co-wrote all eight
nothing like what you expect. Really! Go episodes. “Sometimes I’ll hand in this

1
listen to Rachmaninoff on YouTube!” little gem of a scene that conveys all the
—Adam Gopnik necessary information, with laughs in all
the right places, and Judd will go, ‘That’s Pete Holmes
TRAGEDY PLUS TIME great that you wrote that. Now let’s try
CRASH LANDING improvising and see what happens.’ And, Christian stuff I usually take a crack at
of course, he’s right—that feels more it myself,” he said.
alive. I wrote this line where someone Using the new script as a guide, King
asks Pete if he’s read the book ‘Code- and Holmes reconceived the scene as a
pendent No More,’ and he says, ‘We were “prayer-off,” in which prayers became
gonna read it together.’ I think that’s a negs. “Heavenly Father, we ask that You
nice joke. The script went through twelve forgive our brother Peter for forcing his
ete Holmes is a comedian whose drafts, and that joke was in all twelve. wife into the arms of another man, or
P work has taken many forms: a short- We never even ended up shooting it.”
On the soundstage in Greenpoint,
possibly two men,” King said, his head
lived talk show on TBS, several standup bowed.
specials, cartoons for this magazine, a Holmes was filming a scene in which “Father, help us not to heed gossip or
podcast called “You Made It Weird.” Anthony King, an improviser from the slanderous speech,” Holmes said.
“Some jokes want to be tweets,” he said Upright Citizens Brigade, played his pas- “Lord, we ask that You not allow the
recently. “Some jokes want to be funny tor. King wore a white robe and sat be- Devil to tempt Pete into Hell,” King said.
paintings. Sometimes, on the podcast, hind a desk. “It’s summer—wouldn’t he Holmes, speaking not as his charac-
there’ll be a funny premise, then noth- take the robe off?” Oren Brimer, one of ter but as himself, said, “Go into detail
ing for a hundred minutes, and then a the show’s writers, asked. on what would happen to me in Hell.”
perfect callback, and you go, ‘Oh, that “Let’s see it both ways,” Apatow said. King nodded, then started ad-libbing:
was a joke that wanted to be a two-hour The décor in the pastor’s office was neu- “Lord, we know that as wolves tear the
conversation.’ ” tral: a computer, a file cabinet. “Can we skin from Pete’s body, and as it grows
Holmes was in Greenpoint, Brook- add a cross or an angel or anything that back and then is ripped off again, he will
lyn, on the set of a joke that wanted to reads religious?” Apatow said. “He’s slip- have eternity to wonder whether he has
be an HBO series called “Crashing.” He ping into insurance salesman.” made the right choices in life.”
is thirty-seven, tall and unchiselled, with They shot the scene as written, with “Oh, go flock yourself,” Holmes said,
an eager smile and a cascade of brown the pastor trying to coax Pete back into then burst into laughter.
hair; he has referred to his look as “les- the church’s orbit. “If you’re open, God “Cut!” Apatow said. “Much better.”
bian Val Kilmer.” After a take, he re- has a way of working with that open- —Andrew Marantz
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 21
 nal that “the world is now on the prec-
AMERICAN CHRONICLES ipice of a new and dangerous nuclear
era . . . that will be more precarious, psy-

AUTUMN OF THE ATOM

chologically disorienting, and econom-
ically even more costly than was Cold
War deterrence.” The time had come,
How arguments about nuclear weapons shaped the climate-change debate. they argued, for the eradication of nu-
clear weapons. Global Zero, an interna-
BY JILL LEPORE tional nuclear-abolition organization,
was formed the next year. In 2009, in a
speech in Prague, Barack Obama pledged
“America’s commitment to seek the peace
and security of a world without nuclear
weapons.” That speech helped earn him
the Nobel Peace Prize. The reality did
not match the rhetoric. Congress ex-
empted nuclear weapons from manda-
tory cuts in the military budget, and, in
exchange for support for the New START
treaty, which reduced deployed warheads
by two-thirds, the President pledged
eighty-five billion dollars to modernize
the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal. “I think
we can safely say the President’s Prague
vision is dead,” the Alabama congress-
man Mike Rogers said in 2015, at a weap-
ons conference sponsored by Lockheed
Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop
Grumman. “And I’ll leave it to the Nobel
committee to ask for its prize back.”
The new President’s vision is unclear.
“We have to be extremely vigilant and
extremely careful when it comes to nu-
clear,” Donald Trump said during the
campaign. But he also refused to rule out
“Nuclear winter” skeptics created institutions that later challenged global warming. conducting a first strike, even on Europe
(“Europe is a big place”); suggested that
nuclear weapon is a certain have taken place had the police not been it might be a good thing for more coun-
A thing—atomic or hydrogen, fission there, but you can’t know that for sure. tries to acquire nuclear weapons; and ar-
gued that it was pointless to manufac-
or fusion, bomb or missile, so many mega- Nuclear-weapons policy is a body of
tons—but nothing could be more un- speculation that relies on fearful acts of ture weapons that could never be used,
certain than the consequences of using faith. Doctrinally, it has something in asking, “Then why are we making them?”
one. Nine nations have nuclear weapons; common with a belief in Hell. In December, Vladimir Putin told mil-
only the United States has ever used one, This belief is about to be tested. The itary leaders in Moscow that he intended
and that was in 1945. Our nuclear-weap- United States and its only nuclear rival to bolster Russia’s nuclear arsenal. “Let
ons policy rests on a seven-decade-long have been reducing their arsenals since it be an arms race,” Trump said in re-
history of events that have never hap- the end of the Cold War. In 1985, the sponse. “We will outmatch them at every
pened: acts of aggression that were not United States and the Soviet Union held pass and outlast them all.”
committed, wars that were not waged, a combined stockpile of more than sixty Trump has often contradicted him-
an apocalypse that has not come to pass. thousand warheads; today, the U.S. and self on the subject of nuclear weapons,
Strategists attribute the non-occurrence— Russia have fewer than fifteen thousand but one of the more interesting things
the deterrence—of these events to the between them. Dangers remain: a com- he’s said about them is that they are
weapons themselves, to bombs on air- puter error, a malfunction in a silo, a rogue far more dangerous to the planet than
planes, missiles in silos, launchers on sub- state, nuclear terrorism. In 2007, the for- global warming is. It’s a revealing com-
marines. The power of deterrence, how- mer Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger parison. The damage from a nuclear ex-
ever, is a claim that cannot be proved. and George P. Shultz, the former De- plosion does not respect national bound-
If, while a police car is parked in front fense Secretary William J. Perry, and the aries, and this adjustment in scale, from
of your house, your house is not robbed, former senator Sam Nunn warned in an the national to the global, was the key
you might suspect that a robbery would essay published in the Wall Street Jour- argument put forward by advocates of
22 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL SAHRE
disarmament. That argument has been coined the word “fallout.” Researchers stop testing nuclear weapons in the at-
won: Trump’s tweets aside, there is a bi- considered making the quantity, spread, mosphere. Using longitudinal data to
partisan consensus in favor of significant and duration of fallout the standard mea- study the ozone both before and after
arms reductions. Bipartisan agreement sure of the force of a nuclear explosion, the test ban, the Berkeley chemist Har-
about the future of the planet falls apart but found that approach to be too de- old Johnston found that stopping the
not over the bomb but over the climate. pendent on the weather. (Instead, they testing had slowed the depletion. Re-
Historically, though, they’re inseparable: chose blast radius.) They measured and search into the environmental conse-
the weapons and the weather are twisted modelled the best weather conditions quences of nuclear explosions and of
together, a wire across time, the long fuse for explosions and the effects of those other kinds of pollution shared a plan-
to an ongoing debate about the credi- explosions on the natural world; they etary perspective, a vantage greatly en-
bility of science, the fate of the Earth, invented and refined tools to detect at- hanced by the space program; gradually,
and the nature of uncertainty. mospheric weapons tests conducted by the meaning of the word “environment”
the Soviets; and they investigated the changed from “habitat” to “planet.” The
n 1981, when Jimmy Carter delivered possibility of using nuclear weapons to first photograph of the whole Earth was
I his farewell address, part of it was alter the weather and even the climate taken in 1972, by the crew of Apollo 17.
written by Carl Sagan. The Senate had of adversaries. Sagan, after finishing his It became an icon of the environmental
proved unwilling to ratify a treaty that Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, in movement. It also shaped arguments
had come out of a second round of Stra- 1960, worked on a secret military proj- about arms control.
tegic Arms Limitation Talks; Carter ect code-named A119, which had begun Nuclear-weapons research was usu-
wanted to take a moment to reckon in 1958, a year after Sputnik. Sagan was ally classified; other environmental re-
with that loss, for the sake of the planet. charged with calculating “the expan- search was not. During the nineteen-sev-
He turned to Sagan, whose thirteen-part sion of an exploding gas/dust cloud enties, military-funded environmental
documentary, “Cosmos,” first broadcast rarifying into the space around the scientists continued their top-secret re-
in 1980, was the most-watched PBS se- Moon.” The idea was to assess whether search into the environmental effects of
ries ever. “Nuclear weapons are an ex- a mushroom cloud would be visible nuclear weapons. Given the test ban, these
pression of one side of our human char- from Earth, and therefore able to serve studies relied less on experiments on Earth
acter,” Carter said, in words written by as an illustration of the United States’ than on computer models and on em-
Sagan. “But there’s another side. The military might. pirical findings involving dust on other
same rocket technology that delivers Government-funded environmental planets, most notably Mars. Meanwhile,
nuclear warheads has also taken us scientists began noticing something cu- some environmental scientists pursued—
peacefully into space. From that per- rious: nuclear explosions deplete the and published—research on how chloro-
spective, we see our Earth as it really ozone layer, which protects the Earth’s fluorocarbons, the exhaust from jet en-
is—a small and fragile and beautiful atmosphere. This finding related to ob- gines, and fossil-fuel consumption affected
blue globe, the only home we have.” servations made by scientists who were the ozone layer; this research demon-
Sagan was an astronomer, but he’d not working for the military. In the wake strated, crucially, that even tiny amounts
begun his career working on a classified of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” pub- of certain chemicals could catalyze dra-
nuclear-weapons project. This was not lished in 1962, the U.S. government matic changes, with planetary conse-
unusual. Since the Second World War, formed a number of advisory and over- quences. In 1974, the director of the U.S.
the military has funded the preponder- sight organizations, including the En- Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
ance of research in the field of physics, vironmental Pollution Panel of the Pres- asked the National Academy of Sciences
and, as historians have now established, ident’s Science Advisory Committee. to prepare a report on the effects of nu-
a close second was its funding of the The panel’s 1965 report, “Restoring the clear explosions on the ozone. That re-
earth sciences. Although the environ- Quality of Our Environment,” included port, “Long-Term Worldwide Effects of
mental movement may not have started an appendix on “Atmospheric Carbon Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations,”
until the nineteen-sixties, the research Dioxide,” laying out, with much alarm, married the logic of nuclear deterrence
that lies behind it began in the fifties, in the consequences of “the invisible pol- to the logic of environmental protection,
the U.S. military. Indeed, the very term lutant” for the planet as a whole. In 1968, or what might have been called pollu-
“environmental science” was coined in S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist tion deterrence. Stephen Schneider, a cli-
the fifties by military scientists; it was who had worked on satellites and was matologist at the National Center for
another decade before civilian scientists now a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Atmospheric Research, speculated that
used the term. Interior, organized a symposium on the fallout from a nuclear war might make
Beginning on the day black rain fell “Global Effects of Environmental Pol- the world colder by blocking sunlight,
on Hiroshima, nuclear weapons shaped lution.” Four papers were presented at a and that the diminished industrial pro-
environmental science. In 1949, the U.S. panel on “Effects of Atmospheric Pol- duction in a postwar world could change
Weather Bureau launched Project Ga- lution on Climate.” the climate, too.
briel, a classified meteorological study of Changing weapons policy opened Sagan had by this time become an
weapons and weather. The next year, the new avenues of research. In 1963, the advocate of nuclear disarmament, a
Department of Defense, in a study ti- U.S. and the U.S.S.R. signed the Lim- cause that gained a great deal of mo-
tled “The Effects of Atomic Weapons,” ited Test Ban Treaty, an agreement to mentum early in 1982, when The New
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 23
Yorker published a four-part series by means of rendering these nuclear weap- tists. James Pollack, his first graduate
Jonathan Schell called “The Fate of the ons impotent and obsolete.” To its many student, had written a dissertation, in
Earth,” which did for nuclear weapons critics, S.D.I. undermined the nuclear 1965, on the greenhouse effect on Venus.
what Carson had done for chemical paralysis that had set in with the idea of Thomas Ackerman had attended Cal-
pollution: freaked everyone out. That mutual assured destruction: neither the vin College, a Christian school, as an
fall, Representative Al Gore, the chair U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. would launch a undergraduate, earned a Ph.D. at the
of the Subcommittee on Investigations missile, the theory went, since everyone University of Washington, and then
and Oversight of the House Commit- would end up dead. But, if the U.S. could worked with Pollack at NASA. (Later, he
tee on Science and Technology, con- defend itself against a missile attack, declined an invitation to work on S.D.I.,
vened hearings into “The Consequences M.A.D. no longer applied. The Union citing his moral objections as a Chris-
of Nuclear War on the Global Envi- of Concerned Scientists prepared a tian.) Richard Turco, an atmospheric
ronment.” The consequences of nuclear hundred-and-six-page report opposing scientist, was the co-author of a study
war on the environment, like its con- the project. Sagan, who had just had an called “Possible Ozone Depletions Fol-
sequences on the balance of power, were emergency appendectomy and two full- lowing Nuclear Explosions,” which was
difficult to prove; most data came from body blood transfusions, dictated a let- published in Nature in 1975, the year that
computer models, and from research ter of objection from his hospital bed. Owen Brian Toon, a graduate student
on other planets. A battle began be- What Sagan did next is recounted at Cornell, submitted to Sagan a disser-
tween those who were willing to place in a new book by Paul Rubinson, “Re- tation called “Climatic Change on Mars
their faith in the speculations of mili- defining Science,” a history of science and Earth.” Sagan decided to use his ce-
tary strategists and those who were will- in a national-security state. The story lebrity to bring the research of these sci-
ing to place their faith in the specula- of Sagan’s campaign against S.D.I., entists to the broadest possible public
tions of environmental scientists. though little remembered, has been audience, as fast as the scientific method
At the center of that battle was a plan told before, in Lawrence Badash’s 2009 allowed—or maybe faster.
to build a defensive missile shield: weap- book, “A Nuclear Winter’s Tale”; in
ons that would orbit the planet. On
March 23, 1983, President Ronald Rea-
“Merchants of Doubt,” by Naomi
Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, in 2009; “T ocarry
the village square we must
the facts of atomic energy,”
gan announced the Strategic Defense and, most richly, in a terrific 2011 jour- Albert Einstein said in 1946. “From there
Initiative, in what came to be called his nal article by Matthias Dorries. Sagan must come America’s voice.” Sagan, in
“Star Wars” speech: “I call upon the sci- launched a campaign to warn the world his understanding of the role of science
entific community in our country, those about “nuclear winter”; the very term, in a democracy, had Einstein behind him,
who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn as Dorries points out, brought together but, more, he had John Dewey, along
their great talents now to the cause of the weapons and the weather. with a generation of Progressive engi-
mankind and world peace: to give us the Sagan collaborated with four scien- neers, New Deal reformers, and Man-
hattan Project-era atomic scientists. In
1946, the Federation of Atomic Scien-
tists, which had been founded to advo-
cate for international, civilian control of
atomic energy, had established the Na-
tional Committee on Atomic Informa-
tion. Atomic scientists organized a speak-
ers’ bureau: they spoke at Kiwanis clubs,
at churches and synagogues, at schools
and libraries. In Kansas alone, eight
Atomic Age Conferences were held. The
F.B.I. launched an investigation. In 1948,
the head of the National Committee on
Atomic Information, suspected of being
a Communist, was fired. His entire staff
resigned in protest, and the committee
disbanded. The next year, the Soviet
Union tested its first nuclear weapon.
Public-spirited science yielded to the de-
mands of a national-security state.
Sagan received his training in that
world. But that world did not survive
Vietnam, or the Love Canal disaster.
This much Sagan understood. But what
he could not have fully understood were
“Look, if I have to explain the meaning of existence, then it isn’t funny.” two forces that had gained strength in
the nineteen-seventies, both of which (Unknown to Sagan’s critics, the two adjustments—Stephen Schneider ran
were at odds with his neo-Deweyism: a Science papers had already been accepted his own numbers and determined that
postmodern critique of objectivity, fash- for publication when the Parade article the likeliest consequence of nuclear war
ionable among intellectuals, artists, and appeared.) In the Wall Street Journal, was something more like a nuclear au-
writers; and a conservative movement S. Fred Singer, at that time a fellow at tumn—the theory gained widespread
determined to expose the liberal bent of the Heritage Foundation and later a scientific acceptance. Declassified doc-
the academy and of the press. Sagan consultant for the tobacco industry, ar- uments demonstrate that Navy scien-
waded into these waters early in 1983, gued that the theory relied too heavily tists, for instance, were persuaded by
with a paper he prepared with Turco, on predictive models. The physicist and TTAPS. In May, 1984, William Cohen,
Toon, Ackerman, and Pollack. The paper, S.D.I. enthusiast Edward Teller wrote a Republican senator from Maine, wrote
known by its authorial acronym, TTAPS, Sagan, privately, “My concern is that to Reagan about the paper and sug-
used meteorological models derived from many uncertainties remain and that these gested that the Administration conduct
the study of volcanoes to calculate the uncertainties are sufficiently large as to a study. The House Republicans Jim
effects on light and temperature of differ- cast doubt on whether the nuclear win- Leach and Newt Gingrich joined their
ent kinds and numbers of nuclear explo- ter will actually occur.” He added, “I can Democratic colleagues Tim Wirth,
sions, factoring in the dust, smoke, and compliment you on being, indeed, an Buddy Roemer, and Al Gore in pro-
soot produced by the burning of cities; excellent propagandist—remembering posing a budget amendment mandat-
some of the data came from Mars. Mov- that a propagandist is the better the less ing a “comprehensive study of the at-
ing beyond Schell, whose essays had pre- he appears to be one.” In Nature, Teller mospheric, climatic, environmental, and
dicted the end of humanity, TTAPS fore- attacked the theory (“A severe climatic biological consequences of nuclear war
cast a nuclear winter that might result change must be considered dubious and the implications that such conse-
in the end of all life on the planet. rather than robust”), and offered this quences have for the nuclear weapons
Sagan circulated a draft to fifty sci- sermon: “Highly speculative theories of strategy and policy, the arms control
entists, then convened a conference at worldwide destruction—even the end policy, and the civil defense policy of
the American Academy of Arts and Sci- of life on Earth—used as a call for a par- the United States.”
ences in April, 1983, which was attended ticular kind of political action serve nei- Hearings on nuclear winter were
by twice as many. Meanwhile, he sent ther the good reputation of science nor held that summer, before a House sub-
George F. Kennan a draft of an essay dispassionate political thought.” That committee that, Paul Rubinson says,
he’d written for Foreign Affairs. “I can- S.D.I. rested on highly speculative the- “essentially put deterrence on trial.” If
not tell you what a great thing I feel you ories of worldwide destruction was not a misfire or an accident would mean
have done,” Kennan wrote in reply, thank- lost on Teller’s many critics. the end of all life on the planet, could
ing him for providing a “clear and irre- Sagan’s grandiosity helped him gain there really be any strategic argument
futable demonstration of the enormity a vast popular audience; it also hurt his in favor of a nuclear stockpile? During
of the danger presented by these vast nu- cause. So did his partisanship: he de- another round of congressional hear-
clear arsenals.” Next, Sagan and an as- clined an invitation to dine with the ings, Sagan said that he’d give a recent
sortment of colleagues submitted two Reagans at the White House. His ce- and inconclusive Department of De-
papers to the peer-reviewed journal lebrity knew no bounds. The Pope asked fense report on nuclear winter a D or
Science and planned another conference, him for an audience. Talking about war- “maybe a C-minus if I was in a friendly
to be held at a Sheraton in heads seemed like a fabulous mood.” Assistant Secretary of Defense
Washington, with five hun- way to be famous. “This Richard Perle said that he’d give Sagan
dred participants, a hundred morning, Trump has a new an F. “I didn’t hear a word of science
members of the press, and a idea,” Lois Romano wrote in this morning,” Perle declared. “I heard
live “Moscow Link.”The day a Washington Post profile of a shallow, demagogic, rambling policy
before the conference, Sagan Donald Trump in Novem- pronouncement.” William Buckley ob-
published an article about nu- ber, 1984, the week after Rea- served, “Carl Sagan gave a half-hour’s
clear winter in Parade. Using gan defeated Mondale. “He performance so arrogant he might have
only the worst-case numbers, wants to talk about the threat been confused with, well, me.”
he admitted no room for of nuclear war. He wants to In December, 1984, Reagan’s National
doubt about what was, after talk about how the United Security Council presented the Presi-
all, a theory, presenting nuclear winter States should negotiate with the Sovi- dent with a summary of a report on nu-
as the consensus of more than a hun- ets. He wants to be the negotiator.” He clear winter prepared by the National
dred scientists from around the world. knew just how to do it. “It would take Academy of Sciences. While allowing
Two charges were levelled at Sagan: an hour-and-a-half to learn everything that the model’s quantitative risk assess-
that he shouldn’t be writing for a Sun- there is to learn about missiles,” Trump ment involved uncertainties, the report
day newspaper supplement, and that he’d told Romano. “I think I know most of argued that the model’s calculations sug-
exaggerated the certainty of an untested it anyway.” gested “temperature changes of a size
theory. “In the scientific community you Sagan was widely resented, and he that could have devastating consequences”
don’t publish first results in Parade mag- made some poor decisions, but he was and, with urgency, called on all avail-
azine,” George Rathjens, of M.I.T., wrote. a serious scientist. Despite a number of able agencies and scientists to conduct
26 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
investigations to narrow the range of un-
certainty. Nuclear winter could be de-
bated, but it couldn’t be dismissed.

uclear winter did not end the

N Cold War, but it did weaken the
logic of deterrence, and not merely by
undermining the idea of a winnable nu-
clear war. Nuclear winter relied on com-
puter models and projections; its predic-
tions were uncertain. Deterrence relies
on computer models and projections; its
predictions are uncertain. At one point,
Richard Perle said that he wished Sagan
would go back to his laboratory and stop
“playing political scientist.” And that, in-
advertently, got to the heart of the mat-
ter. However much Sagan might have
overreached, his intellectual extravagance
was nothing compared with the entirely
hypothetical musings and game-theory
models of the political scientists and
strategists on the basis of whose specu-
lations the United States government
spent more than five trillion dollars be-
tween 1940 and 1996.
Reagan was himself persuaded by nu-
clear winter; a nuclear war, he said, “could
just end up in no victory for anyone be- “ You were always my favorite to manipulate.”
cause we would wipe out the earth as we
know it.” In the U.S.S.R., nuclear win-
ter energized dissidents. In 1985, when
• •
the Soviet physician Vladimir Brodsky
was arrested, one of the charges was change for the assurance that they could if that’s what it took.) The U.S. has
“transmitting a letter to the Soviet Acad- develop nuclear energy, and for a prom- stopped several states from developing
emy of Sciences requesting greater pub- ise from nuclear powers to pursue dis- nuclear weapons, either by threatening
licity about the nuclear winter.” Protest- armament in good faith. Since then, no to abandon an alliance (in the cases of
ers in Moscow’s Gagarin Square chanted, nuclear nation except South Africa has Taiwan and West Germany), or by threat-
“Tell the truth about the nuclear-winter dismantled its arsenal, which is why ening, indirectly, to use military force
phenomenon to our people.” Eduard non-nuclear states continue to press nu- (Libya), or by using it, a perilous course
Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign min- clear states to make good on the prom- (Iraq). Under what circumstances do
ister, talked about nuclear winter in a ise they made in 1968. states develop nuclear weapons? Debs
speech at the U.N., and Mikhail Gor- In a new book titled “Nuclear Poli- and Monteiro argue that most states
bachev alluded to it on another occasion. tics: The Strategic Causes of Prolifera- are too weak to do so; most weak states
In 1985, the Federation of American Sci- tion,” the Yale political-science profes- aren’t interested; some weak states aren’t
entists presented Sagan with an award sors Alexandre Debs and Nuno P. Mon- especially threatened; and most weak
honoring him as the “Most Visible Mem- teiro struggle with a very small data set. states that are threatened are protected
ber of the Scientific Community on the Of the eight nations other than the U.S. by stronger states. These findings ques-
Planet Earth.” In 1986, Turco won a that have nuclear weapons, three (the tion conventional wisdom, which has it
MacArthur prize. After that year, the U.K., France, and Israel) are American that the bomb is a tool of weak states.
number of nuclear weapons in the world allies; two (India and Pakistan) are “No doubt, the atomic bomb would en-
began to decline. friendly; and three (China, North Korea, able a weak state to stand up to more
Since the end of the Cold War and and Russia) are adversaries. Two of these powerful adversaries,” they write. “So far,
the collapse of the Soviet Union, most countries (North Korea and Pakistan) however, no weak unprotected state has
nuclear-weapons talk has been about acquired nuclear weapons since the eight- ever managed to obtain it.”
non-proliferation and coercion. Under ies, which is very worrying, but both ac- In “Nuclear Weapons and Coercive
the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, quired them at great cost. (Zulfikar Ali Diplomacy,” just published, another pair
signed in 1968, non-nuclear powers Bhutto, then the Pakistani foreign-affairs of political scientists, Todd S. Sechser
agreed to forgo nuclear weapons in ex- minister, said his people could “eat grass” and Matthew Fuhrmann, investigate
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 27
nuclear coercion, an idea that has all but communications. Every crisis would be a nu- S.D.I. The report represented the views
replaced deterrence in some policy cir- clear crisis, any war could become a nuclear of three scientists—Jastrow, Seitz, and
war. The urge to preempt would dominate;
cles. Deterrence involves stopping your whoever gets the first few weapons will coerce
Nierenberg—while a statement express-
enemy from doing what you don’t want; or preempt. It would be a nervous world. ing concerns about the science behind
coercion involves getting your enemy to S.D.I. had been signed by sixty-five hun-
do what you want. The theory of deter- Schelling’s nervous world is the set- dred scientists. Nevertheless, most PBS
rence rests on an analysis of the balance ting for “The Case for U.S. Nuclear stations decided not to broadcast the
between two roughly equal superpowers. Weapons in the 21st Century,” a careful documentary. With funding from the
Those conditions no longer apply. Co- and balanced study by Brad Roberts, the Marshall Institute, Seitz’s cousin Russell
ercion is a theory for a single superpower: director of the Center for Global Secu- Seitz, a physicist at Harvard’s Center for
a new game, requiring a new game the- rity Research at Lawrence Livermore International Affairs, published an essay
ory. Does it work? Not really. As Sechser National Laboratory. Lamenting the in The National Interest, in the fall of
and Fuhrmann demonstrate, nuclear pow- hardened lines between advocates and 1986, dismissing the nuclear-winter paper
ers have not generally been able to co- abolitionists, Roberts calls for a fresh and as nothing but “a long series of conjec-
erce other nuclear powers: in the sixties, broad-minded debate: “Whether nuclear tures” and declaring nuclear winter dead:
the Soviets’ nuclear superiority didn’t help weapons will continue to be effective in “Cause of death: notorious lack of sci-
solve territorial disputes with China; and, preventing limited wars among major entific integrity.” In 1988, funded, in part,
more recently, the United States hasn’t powers is an open question.” The case by ExxonMobil, the Marshall Institute
been able to coerce North Korea into for deterrence began to fall apart in the turned its attention to the science be-
abandoning its nuclear-weapons devel- nineteen-nineties and two-thousands, hind global warming.
opment. Nor have nuclear powers been he argues, owing to a lack of leadership. Another of Sagan’s most vociferous
able to alter the behavior of non-nuclear This isn’t entirely correct. Presidents in critics, S. Fred Singer, had repeatedly
powers, the authors argue, and their list that period did fail to make the case for challenged nuclear winter on the grounds
is long: “The shadow of America’s nu- deterrence, but deterrence had already of its uncertainty. “Sagan’s scenario may
clear arsenal did not convince Afghan been dismantled by the spectre of nu- well be correct,” Singer wrote in 1983,
leaders to hand over al Qaeda operatives clear winter. “but the range of uncertainty is so great
after the group conducted terrorist at- The biggest consequence of the that the prediction is not particularly
tacks against American targets in 1998 nuclear-winter debate, though, has had useful.” A longtime consultant to ARCO,
or 2001. Great Britain could not coerce to do not with nuclear-weapons policy Exxon, Shell Oil, and Sun Oil, Singer is
Argentine forces to withdraw from the but with the environmental movement. currently the director of the Science and
Falkland Islands without a fight in 1982, In the short term, the idea of a nuclear Environmental Policy Project at the
despite deploying nuclear forces to the winter defeated the idea of deterrence. Heartland Institute, founded in 1984. Its
South Atlantic. The Soviet Union could In the long term, Sagan’s haste and ex- position on global warming: “Most sci-
not force Iran or Turkey to hand over uberance undermined environmental entists do not believe human greenhouse
disputed territory in the early 1950s, after science. More important, the political gas emissions are a proven threat to the
Moscow acquired the bomb. China has campaign waged against nuclear win- environment or to human well-being,
similarly been unable to make relatively ter—against science, and against the despite a barrage of propaganda insist-
weak states—including Brunei, Malay- press—included erecting a set of struc- ing otherwise coming from the environ-
sia, Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam— tures, arguments, and institutions that mental movement and echoed by its sy-
abandon their claims to the disputed have since been repurposed to challenge cophants in the mainstream media.”
Spratly Islands in the South China Sea.” the science of global warming. The nuclear-winter debate has long
These arguments are very interest- In 1984, in an effort to counter Sagan since been forgotten, but you can still
ing, but they are based on the shaky sci- and to defend the Strategic Defense Ini- spy it behind every cloud and confu-
ence of very small numbers. An nth case tiative, the George C. Marshall Institute sion. It holds a lesson or two. A public
could unravel any of them. The most was founded by Robert Jastrow, a NASA understanding of science is not well
contested number in this debate is zero. physicist; Frederick Seitz, a former pres- served by shackling science to a national-
In 2009, Thomas Schelling, an econo- ident of the National Academy of Sci- security state. The public may not nat-
mist, national-security expert, and Cold ences; and William Nierenberg, a past urally have much tolerance for uncer-
War deterrence theorist, who had won director of the Scripps Institute of Ocean- tainty, but uncertainty is the best that
a Nobel Prize for his game-theory anal- ography. Jastrow argued that “the Nu- many scientific arguments can produce.
ysis of conflict, issued a dire warning: clear Winter scenario could not serve Critics of climate-change science who
A “world without nuclear weapons” would the needs of Soviet leaders better if it ground their argument on uncertainty
be a world in which the United States, Russia, had been designed for that purpose.” have either got to apply that same stan-
Israel, China, and half a dozen or a dozen other One of the Marshall Institute’s first proj- dard of evidence to nuclear-weapons
countries would have hair-trigger mobilization ects was to try to persuade PBS affili- strategy or else find a better argument.
plans to rebuild nuclear weapons and mobilize ates not to air a documentary critical of Because, as Sagan once put it, theories
or commandeer delivery systems, and would
have prepared targets to preempt other na- S.D.I.; citing the Fairness Doctrine, the that involve the end of the world are
tions’ nuclear facilities, all in a high-alert sta- institute argued that equal time ought not amenable to experimental verifica-
tus, with practice drills and secure emergency to be given to its own report, in favor of tion—at least, not more than once. 
28 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
 complicit in creating an unrealistic
SHOUTS & MURMURS life-style fantasy.”

TRANSLATING THE NOISES

BANG
“Hey, are you awake? Sorry, just

MY RADIATOR MAKES
wanted to check.”

Clonpft
BY COLIN STOKES “You know, I can hear you com-
plaining about me. It’s rude, and I don’t
like it. If we’re going to make this liv-
Click-ick-ick my repeated jokes about me being hot. ing situation work, we’re both going
“Hey, what’s up?” As a radiator, I’ve got very little per- to have to make compromises. I’ll see
sonal material to work with.” what I can do about not peaking in
Tck-tck-tck temperature around three in the morn-
“It’s me, the radiator.” P-p-p-p ing, so you don’t wake up sweating
“Just a quick reminder that you profusely, and you can make sure to
Fth-ath-ath-ath shouldn’t stack your books on my head. say hello to me when you get home.”
“I’m good—just chilling. Not liter- I find it disrespectful, and if you do it
Rong-rang-a-ga-ga
“Don’t even think about trying to
adjust me. I’m the exact temperature I
want to be right now. You being over-
heated is just in your mind. Also, I’ll
burn you if you try to touch my knob.”

Tick-ick-ick-tick
“Oh, wow, now you’re too cold? What
happened to Mr. I Can’t Believe I’m Wear-
ing a T-Shirt and Shorts in January?”

Ruff-ur-fu
“It’s not like I enjoy being stuck in
the corner of your bedroom. Did you
ever think that I might like to accom-
pany you when you go to the outside?”

Ashh-shahh
“I’ve been in here since before the
war! That’s what the real-estate broker
told you, anyway. Imagine all the things
I’ve seen and heated in that time.”
ally, of course. I’m a heating device.” again I’ll have no choice but to dry
them out and make their jackets fall Lack-ck-a-lack
Pfft-pfft-pfft apart in your hands when you’re read- “Yeah, I mean, obviously everything
“Boy, it’s cold outside, right? You ing them on the subway.” I’ve seen has been in this room. It’s
should stay in here and keep me com- not like I was walking around on the
pany. I know, I’m a radiator, but I need Shh-sh-shh streets in the sixties.”
warmth, too. No, don’t hug me—I mean “Don’t put your wet socks on my
I need emotional warmth. If you hug head, either. That’s gross.” Fka-ka-ka-a
me, I’ll burn you like I did when you “It’s fine to warm up your towel on
moved in your sleep and put your foot Tok-ok me while you’re in the shower, but I
against me.” “Please don’t wrap rope around me don’t love seeing you run toward me
to make the apartment that you share naked to get it.”
Clack-ack-lack-a-clack with four roommates look like an Ar-
“Don’t complain about me burning chitectural Digest spread. Obviously, Helloiamtheradiator
RYAN PELTIER

you. You chose to put your bed next consensual bondage is great for those “The sound of an English phrase is
to me. You never asked if I might like who are into it, but, sexually, I’m not just a coincidence. I can’t speak English.
some space. And don’t complain about that kind of radiator, and I won’t be Only radiator.” 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 29
 lar, too full of gatekeepers, and too de­
PROFILES pendent on the financially onerous and
time­consuming practice of making art

THE TROLL OF INTERNET ART

objects; it could benefit from an Amazon­
style disruption. Troemel’s project is si­
multaneously a jab at the rigid rules of
Brad Troemel’s attempt to disrupt the art world. the art world and an experiment in what
art might look like if those rules didn’t
BY ADRIAN CHEN exist. “You can’t make this with a straight
face,” Troemel said. “You’d have to be a
real lunatic to do that.”
Troemel is best known as the co­
creator of the popular Tumblr blog the
Jogging, an online art factory that, start­
ing in 2009, produced thousands of
strange images that blurred the distinc­
tion between art and meme. A closeup
photograph of a MacBook submerged
in a bathtub went viral, and remains a
staple of gag Web sites. The most com­
pelling products of Internet culture—the
videos, catchphrases, and characters that
surface in our social­media streams—get
their power from radical shifts in con­
text. A meme might begin as a running
joke between friends or as an obscure
message­board trope, and this intimacy
clings to it even as it circulates among an
ever­expanding audience. Troemel’s work,
at its best, gives the viewer the thrill of
stumbling on an authentic viral gem.
The Jogging marked a shift in how
artists approach the Internet. While prac­
titioners of “Net art” in the nineteen­
nineties and early aughts largely consid­
ered the Internet a virtual space, separate
from the real world, by the early teens
many artists regarded it as “something
Troemel finds the gallery system too slow, too insular, and too full of gatekeepers. that pervaded existence in every way,”
Lauren Cornell, a curator at the New
n a recent afternoon, Brad Troe­ withstand. The sculpture would probably Museum, told me. They were respond­
Omel showed me an image of a sculp­ last for just an instant, like an element ing to the Internet “not as a new medium
but as a mass medium.” Many of these
ture that seemed beyond belief: seven from the periodic table that can exist only
hundred monarch butterflies stacked on briefly, before it crashed to the floor. artists—like Petra Cortright, Parker Ito,
a levitating magnetic pedestal. Troemel The sculpture was one of seventy­ Artie Vierkant, and Amalia Ulman—had
had devised the sculpture six months be­ eight art works that Troemel and his col­ grown up with Napster and AOL and
fore, and listed it, for twelve hundred dol­ laborator, the artist Joshua Citarella, had Myspace; now they hung out on Face­
lars, in his online art store, Ultra Violet conceived in the past six months and put book and Tumblr. The Internet was both
Production House. The work looked up for sale in their store on Etsy, the on­ an obsession and an everyday reality.These
catalogue­slick, but it didn’t actually exist; line marketplace for handmade goods. artists made up a quasi­movement that
the image had been created in Photo­ Many were everyday objects with odd came to be known, at first somewhat fa­
shop. The buyer would receive the com­ details that rendered them absurd: a couch cetiously, as “post­Internet.” (The term
SOURCE: PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA

ponents to make the work, along with di­ was covered with hardcore­punk­band quickly fell out of fashion and is now
rections for assembling it and a certificate patches; a plank of wood atop two Apple mostly met with groans of embarrass­
of authenticity. Then she would build it computers functioned as a bench. ment.) The Jogging’s self­conscious em­
herself, gluing on the butterflies one at a U.V. Production House was Troemel’s brace of the Web’s vernacular, its shame­
time. Troemel had calculated that the but­ latest attempt to use the Internet to make less courting of attention, and its blurring
terflies would weigh about thirteen ounces, art outside the commercial­gallery sys­ of the real and the virtual were well suited
the heaviest load that the pedestal could tem, which he finds too slow, too insu­ to a post­Internet moment.
30 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY PETE DEEVAKUL
 Troemel’s art plays with a central par- Jogging, told me. When I asked Troemel floor during installation. Troemel re-
adox of the Internet: the technology that why he liked his current dealer, Zach placed the blocks with a series of water-
was supposed to liberate us from the Feuer, a co-owner of Feuer/Mesler Gal- filled vases suspended at odd angles above
dreary real world has inspired a whole lery, in downtown Manhattan, he recalled the floor; on opening night, one tipped
new set of anxieties. For the growing that, when they met, Feuer told him, “I’m over and drenched a visitor. “Brad’s in-
number of artists who use the Internet a capitalist. I want to make money from stalls are always chaotic,” Lauren Mari-
to distribute their work, a key problem you and I want to make money for you.” naro, the director at Feuer/Mesler, said.
has become how to stand out amid a At eight o’clock on the morning that “He comes in sure with all of his ideas,
torrent of information—what the digi- the residency began, before the other but he’s sometimes finalizing form.”
tal-art pioneer Cory Arcangel has termed artists arrived, Troemel and Citarella Troemel hoped that U.V. Production
“fourteen-year-old Finnish-kid syn- claimed the corner office, which they House would make creating physical
drome,” in which any teen-ager with an left empty except for two desks shoved work as risk-free as posting a photo to
iPhone can make something attention- back-to-back, with iMacs on top of them, Instagram. No more tedious fabrication
grabbing. For Troemel, the solution is and a tattered suitcase that Troemel had process or expensive studio rental: sim-
to embrace frantic creative production used to carry the computers. The men ply slap together a concept image, source
and the skillful use of social media. In planned to double the number of ob- the necessary materials on the Internet,
an essay from 2014, Troemel coined the jects in the online store in three weeks. and wait for the orders to roll in. When
term “aesthlete” to describe the type of Even for artists interested in the dig- I visited the Work in Progress residency,
artist who can maintain relevance today. ital realm, selling physical work is usu- he and Citarella had made thirty-two
The aesthlete, he wrote, “produces a con- ally the only way to make a living. Troe- sales and about three thousand dollars
stant stream of work in social media to mel’s gallery work is an eclectic mixture in gross profit.The most expensive items,
ride atop the wave in viewers’ newsfeeds, of assemblage, sculpture, and painting sold for five hundred dollars each, were
or else become the wave itself.” Troemel that comments on such contemporary two framed checks from a class-action
has some fifty-six thousand followers phenomena as Bitcoin, the art market, settlement against the natural-products
on Instagram, and he typically posts a and the sharing economy. One of his company Tom’s of Maine.
photograph each day at 1 P.M., when he favorite strategies is to combine con-
finds that user engagement is highest. sumer goods that have symbolic value— hen Troemel was thirteen years
coins, organic food, political posters, W old, he discovered the file-sharing
hen Troemel showed me the books of critical theory—to create an services Napster and KaZaA. He and
W butterfly sculpture, he was in the argument, which is usually opaque until his mother lived with her parents, in the
midst of a three-week arts residency, one reads the lengthy artist statements Chicago suburb of Aurora. He estimates
called Work in Progress, organized by that he writes for nearly all his shows. that he illegally downloaded as many as
the twenty-four-year-old British col- Troemel tends to think of his gallery fifteen thousand songs at his grandpar-
lector and curator Tiffany Zabludowicz. work in terms of posting on the Inter- ents’ house. File-sharing “gave me access
Zabludowicz’s father, a prominent col- net. “It wouldn’t make for a very inter- to consuming so much culture, so many
lector, owns the office building in Times esting Instagram feed if for seven years songs and bands, which are always lead-
Square that housed the residency, where I posted the same work every day,” he ins for other things,” he said. “I learned
Troemel and I were talking. A press re- told me. Once, at an art fair, he curated a lot.” But, in 2001, his grandfather was
lease that she handed me at the recep- a booth where he changed the work sued by the Recording Industry Associ-
tion desk stated that the residency “ques- every hour, in an attempt to mimic the ation of America. The family settled for
tions the romantic and idealized notion Internet’s content churn. A lot of his five thousand dollars. “It was just kind
of the artists’ studio.” work disintegrates with the inevitabil- of sad and tense,” he said. “It didn’t ruin
This suited Troemel, whose view of ity of a status update being pushed down us. It was just a setback, and not enjoyed.”
art could not be less romantic. He once a screen. For one show, he placed fresh His middle- and high-school years
described to me the “formula” for a gal- fish he had bought in Chinatown along were dominated by wrestling, which his
lery show: “You have a series of wall with flowers and metal coins represent- father, who lived nearby, encouraged.
works that are meant to sell, and the ing the digital currency Litecoin onto a Troemel trained year-round and went
stuff on the floor that’s meant to make plastic board, vacuum-sealed them, and to a tournament almost every week. He
things look difficult.” hung the bundle on the wall. This cre- admired the meritocratic nature of the
A competitive wrestler in high school, ated an eerily beautiful bas-relief until, sport, where competitors are paired off
Troemel, who is twenty-nine, has an in- after a few days in the hot gallery, the by weight and age. “It’s like a really pure
tense, wide-eyed stare, and when he talks fish rotted, filling the piece with gas and form of competition,” he said. He still
about his art he circles his arms energet- eventually exploding. Not all the entropy follows wrestling closely: one afternoon,
ically, as if he were literally cranking out is intentional. During an opening last while we were at lunch, he pulled out
ideas. He works out a lot and drinks year, a drone piloted by Troemel spun his phone and watched video highlights
N.O.-XPLODE, a fitness supplement. “I out of control and became horribly en- of a recent high-school tournament
think he is a jock deep down, and I think tangled in a gallery-goer’s hair. At the while wolfing down a Cuban sandwich.
he wants to win at art,” the artist Nick same show, three sixteen-foot-tall stacks During his sophomore year of high
DeMarco, a former contributor to the of oversized Jenga blocks crashed to the school, Troemel took a photography
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 31
class. He liked how photography let him needed to sell off its collection. Troemel things on our own without the mar-
reframe the mundane details of his en- was struck particularly by the work of ket, galleries’ or museums’ corrupting
vironment, in a way similar, he said, to Andrea Fraser, whose performances con- effects,” he writes. “The sacrifice Free
how a skateboarder could turn a handrail front the art-world élite. (For one piece, Art asks is your own comfort and com-
into a productive obstacle. He received Fraser filmed herself having sex with a placency; it is easier to continue to allow
a scholarship to a pre-college program at collector, who paid for the privilege.) others to represent and distribute art,
the School of Visual Arts, in New York Today, Troemel is influenced by the but wouldn’t you rather do it yourself ?”
City, and when he returned to Illinois he critic Lucy Lippard, who in the nineteen-
started considering a career in art. seventies argued that “dematerialized” t art school, Troemel and a fel-
His work was inspired by the Ger- conceptual art—tutorials, performances, A low-student, Lauren Christiansen,
man husband-and-wife team Bernd and light—might be able to escape com- his girlfriend at the time, ran a gallery
Hilla Becher, who photographed hun- modification by the art market. He is called Scott Projects out of their apart-
dreds of industrial structures and ar- ment. Scott Projects showed work by art
ranged them in grids that they called students in Chicago, and its shows were
“typologies.” Troemel’s subject was the well attended. When Troemel and Chris-
landscape near his home. It was 2007, tiansen began showing artists from out-
the height of the housing boom, and he side Chicago, however, attendance de-
went around taking pictures of various clined drastically. People had been
artifacts of suburban development. He coming out to support their friends. But
did one series of concrete subdivision Troemel noticed that traffic on the gal-
markers, arranging a hundred photo- lery’s Web site had spiked—fans of the
graphs into a Becher-like grid. The work artists from outside Chicago were click-
looked impressive in a frame on his wall, attracted to what Lippard and the critic ing on photos of their shows—and he
but when he shared a photo of it on John Chandler once called the “ultra- began to think of the gallery as second-
Facebook it was shrunk to the size of any conceptual,” where the idea behind a ary to its blog.
other post, becoming lost in the ocean work is all that matters. Many of Troe- Troemel and Christiansen’s apartment
of content. “The labor-to-visibility ratio mel’s favorite artists aren’t even artists: filled up with leftover bits of material
wasn’t good,” he said. when I asked him to list those he ad- from Scott Projects’ shows, so they began
Troemel enrolled in the School of mires, he included the comedian Andy to use them to make what Troemel de-
the Art Institute of Chicago, where he Kaufman, the BuzzFeed founder Jonah scribes as “trash sculptures.” They posted
became disillusioned by what he saw as Peretti, and Ross Ulbricht, the founder photos of the sculptures on a Tumblr blog
the lack of seriousness among many of of the online drug market the Silk Road. that they named the Jogging, for the sus-
his classmates. He suggests that there As Troemel absorbed the lessons of tained pace that they sought. Like Troe-
is “some truth” to the stereotype that art- institutional critique, he discovered the mel, Christiansen had been a star athlete
ists are layabouts. “The types of people work of popular technology writers such in high school—she had turned down a
who go to art school are often wealthy, as Clay Shirky and the former Wired track-and-field scholarship from Arizona
and it’s a vacation for some of them,” editor Chris Anderson, who believed State University—and they shared a com-
he told me. Troemel was a contentious that the Internet was bringing about a petitive streak, which they funnelled into
figure on campus. He dominated class democratic revolution in other cultural making their trash sculptures as quickly
discussions and was relentlessly critical arenas. He read Anderson’s book “The as possible. At first, Christiansen said, “it
of his fellow-students. “I recognize it Long Tail,” which argues that the in- was just a fun and, frankly, intimate thing
was obnoxious and pretentious and nar- finite options proliferating on the In- we were doing together.”
cissistic and generally probably unbear- ternet will lead to the success of niche The art was not much to look at.
able to be around,” he said. products and businesses. Troemel saw There was a pile of ice that was spray-
Troemel gravitated toward artists the Internet as a way to circumvent the painted gold and a litre bottle of Diet
whose work falls under the label of in- art world, by distributing art freely. He 7 UP Cherry that was balanced atop a
stitutional critique, which takes as its sub- embraced a radical techno-libertarian pool cue. Troemel and Christiansen
ject the hidden workings of the art world ideology that he summed up in his un- began to use Photoshop to enhance the
itself. Institutional critique was born in dergraduate thesis, a twenty-page man- photos of their sculptures with images
the political climate of the late nine- ifesto titled “Free Art.” and textures found on Google. Even-
teen-sixties, when conceptual artists began “Free Art” reframes the history of tually, they began creating realistic-look-
to mischievously subvert the conventions modern art as a story of power-hun- ing “sculptures” that were made up en-
of the museum and the gallery. For the gry critics and curators trying to con- tirely of images found on the Web.
French artist Daniel Buren’s first solo tain the democratizing power of new The Jogging was an inside joke that
show, an installation of his trademark technologies. But the Internet, Troe- doubled as a form of institutional critique.
vertical stripes, he blocked the entrance mel explains ecstatically, has ushered Each work, no matter how tossed off or
to the gallery. Marcel Broodthaers, the in an era of art as pure information, improvisational, was given a formal title.
Belgian poet and artist, created a fictional uncontainable by the market. “We have In addition to being a satirical jab at art-
museum that had gone bankrupt and been given a chance to achieve great world pretension, this was, Troemel says,
32 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
a deliberate attempt to use the “social relaunched, with virality as an explicit one of the Tumblr blogs I followed. Each
capital” of art museums to help the Jog- goal. Troemel had become fascinated by post was interesting on its own, but the
ging’s crappy images stand out among the anarchic message board 4chan, whose steady rate at which new posts appeared,
many thousands of crappy images on anonymous users are famous for posting every few hours, each displaying a bi-
Tumblr. The Jogging’s sensibility would pornography and explicit gore. They are zarre but consistent aesthetic, was the
come to be defined by this irony; it a powerful force in Internet culture, and real mystery. Who was doing this, and
seemed to be pointing out that the em- Troemel was impressed by the success of why? Instead of names, posts were ac-
peror had no clothes while sprinting by some of their stunts, such as when they companied by abstract symbols that
in an invisible Nike sweatsuit. vaulted the founder of 4chan, Christo- linked to the creator’s Web site. A lot of
In 2010, Troemel and Christiansen pher (moot) Poole, to the top of Time’s them linked to the portfolios of young
moved to New York; he pursued a mas- Person of the Year poll. artists, many still in grad school. At the
ter’s degree in studio art at New York The Jogging’s embrace of institu- time, I was an enthusiast of Internet cul-
University while she opened a gallery tional critique vanished after Troemel ture, but I didn’t care at all about art. One
in Chelsea. The Jogging, which had and Christiansen opened the site to sub- of the main attractions of Internet cul-
gained a small but dedicated audience, missions from outsiders and started to ture is its transparency. A meme or a viral
took a nearly two-year hiatus. At N.Y.U., pay them according to the amount of video can serve as a gateway to another
Troemel began to slightly modify his attention their posts attracted. The Jog- world, since it can often be traced,
anti-art-object stance. He became in- ging had by then grown to be among through links, back to its source. I had
terested in the Silk Road, which used the top one per cent of blogs on Tum- imagined that contemporary art was the
Bitcoin and identity-masking software blr, and attracted widespread coverage Internet’s opposite: hermetically sealed,
like the Tor network to allow users to both inside and outside the art world. rendered opaque by dense theories and
buy and sell illegal drugs. He ordered The critic Paddy Johnson recalls vis- twisted power structures. Yet here were
small amounts of designer psychedel- iting art schools at the time, and “there young artists expending huge amounts
ics, amphetamines, and other drugs, wasn’t a single art student I met who of time and effort to make charmingly
using computers in an N.Y.U. lab so wasn’t reading that site.” The Jogging strange stuff on the Internet for free, and
that he would remain anonymous. The also had detractors. The critic Brian adopting the vernacular of social media
lab had creaky wood floors, and he re- Droitcour published a takedown in Art so effectively that their work slipped into
members feeling as if everyone were in America, arguing that the Jogging’s the consciousness of millions of people
looking at him. It didn’t help his para- appropriation of corporate branding strat- who had little interest in art.
noia that he was liberally partaking of egies amounted to little more than a shal- The rapper Gucci Mane, to announce
the drugs he bought. “I was getting pretty low exercise in careerism. “What appears a mixtape, tweeted a Jogging image of
close to a nervous breakdown,” he said. to be art is basically business,” he wrote. his body merged with a waterfall. A pho-
He was as fascinated by the Silk Road It was around this time that I discov- tograph of a piece of bacon cooked in a
packages as by their contents, the ways ered the Jogging, after it was shared by hair straightener has become a staple of
in which the sellers balanced the need
for anonymity with the desire to brand
their wares. Troemel’s master’s thesis
was a jumbled installation featuring
shipping materials that he had received
from Silk Road venders. There was a
plastic baggie emblazoned with red
dice, a fake I.D. slipped into a voter
pamphlet for a local election in Pierce
County, Washington, and a package of
ketamine taped to the back of a Christ-
mas card. On the floor were thousands
of counterfeit pennies that he had or-
dered online from China, along with a
hundred copies of a “bump key,” made
at a nearby locksmith, that would the-
oretically allow anyone to break into the
gallery. “I was, like, Well, I can make
objects if they’re totally illegal,” he said.

roemel is interested in the ar-

Ttistic potential of a particular form of
attention unique to social media: the rapid
snowballing of clicks, likes, and shares
known as virality. In 2012, the Jogging
 Los Angeles and the magazine Dis. In
2013, they were invited to do a resi­
dency at the Still House Group, an art­
ists’ space in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The
Jogging had grown to about a dozen
official members, but this was the first
time that most of them had worked
together in person. They agreed that
they wanted to make a site­specific in­
stallation that emphasized imperma­
nence. Troemel thought that the pieces
should start out looking extremely pol­
ished, as if they had been Photo­
shopped, before they decayed. Other
members, who had been drawn to the
Jogging for its critique of the art mar­
ket, felt that this approach was overly
commercial. “We were the ones who
loved the shittiness of the Jogging,”
Nick DeMarco told me.
Troemel wouldn’t budge. “Eventu­
“Do we need to do this in public?” ally, I just put my foot down,” he said.
DeMarco and an artist named Aaron
Graham ended up leaving the group
• • over the conflict. “It became very clear
that Brad would not tolerate dissent
Web sites that catalogue online oddi­ rator Lindsay Howard said. “He embod­ and it was not a group,” DeMarco told
ties. Troemel delighted in the way that ies the white male artist to such an ex­ me. “Brad was the boss and we were
these images infiltrated the mundane treme degree that he is just a perfect enemy.” his employees.”
corners of the Web. To him, it proved “The definition of ‘pretension’ is some­ “He will not ever stand down to
that making art on social media, at the body who elevates something that is not anybody,” Christiansen said. “We would
pace of social media, was a new way to worthy of any kind of elevation,” Paddy collaborate on ideas, we would do
achieve an old goal of conceptual art: Johnson told me. “Brad does that quite a things together, but he was very much
producing art that does not just reflect bit, but nothing he makes is straight­up in charge of everything.” Not long af­
society but is a part of it. In an essay dumb.” Still, Troemel has been more suc­ terward, Christiansen and Troemel
about this phenomenon, titled “The Ac­ cessful at attracting attention than at win­ broke up. When I spoke to her, she
cidental Audience,” he asks, “At what ning critical laurels. His solo shows have told me that Troemel is a domineer­
point do artists using social media stop never been reviewed by the Times or Art- ing narcissist who exploited her and
making art for the idealized art world forum, and the critics who do notice them the rest of the Jogging contributors for
audience they want and start embrac­ tend to give them mixed reviews. A com­ free labor to advance his own career.
ing the new audience they have?” mon complaint is that his art seems de­ “To be honest, I want to be as distant
One common trait of works that Troe­ signed to work better in a browser win­ as possible” from the Jogging, she told
mel likes is a provocative ambiguity that dow than on a gallery wall. In Johnson’s me. “It haunts me everywhere I go.”
allows for “multiple vehement interpre­ review for Artnet of Troemel’s first solo (Troemel said that Christiansen’s view
tations,” he said. After the photo of the show, at Zach Feuer, in 2014, which in­ was “clouded.”)
MacBook submerged in the bathtub was cluded a piece made of books by the rad­ The strife was not visible when I
posted, some online commenters were ical publisher Semiotext(e) vacuum­sealed stopped by the Jogging show at the
suspicious that it was a stunt. Others with Litecoins and organic dried beans Still House on opening night. Troemel
commiserated with the owner, assuming from Whole Foods, she wrote that his and Christiansen dashed around the
that it was an accident. “It’s just an ex­ frantic mixture of branding and art didn’t brightly lit space putting finishing
quisite little scene of theatre all in one translate to a physical gallery space, “where touches on the pieces as an art crowd
image,” Troemel said. audiences demand—and deserve—a more of twentysomethings drank cans of
“Multiple vehement interpretations” thoughtful message.” Coors Light held in koozies made from
could also describe the response to Troe­ baguettes. Neon hair extensions were
mel in the art world, where he is well s The Jogging’s reputation grew, frozen in a tall column of ice. Dead
known but divisive. “He just puts him­ A its contributors were offered an fish patterned with pink­and­red
self out there in this cocky way, and I increasing number of opportunities to camouflage were tacked to the wall.
think people either love or hate it, and collaborate with organizations such as My favorite piece was a white table
ninety per cent of people hate it,” the cu­ the Museum of Contemporary Art in coated in a hydrophobic substance on
34 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
which Troemel poured a bottle of green meat. The concept was inspired by in a photo of it, U.V. Production House
Gatorade and a bottle of yellow Ga- D.I.Y. projects that Troemel had come would donate a hundred dollars to the
torade. He removed a divider and the across on Pinterest. Cancer Research Institute.
colors blurred together in the middle. Though Troemel often draws on The spider stunt had caused some
The piece pulsed to the vibrations of darker communities of the Internet— consternation for Lauren Marinaro,
people walking around it. The show hackers, trolls, and drug marketplaces— the director of Feuer/Mesler. She was
stayed up for a week, as the fish rot- he has recently become engrossed in on the selection committee for NADA,
ted, the ice sculpture melted, and the the relatively wholesome scene on Pin- and when she arrived at the fair she
Gatorade evaporated into a pool of terest, where décor and craft enthusi- was repeatedly asked whether the spi-
sticky neon goop. asts gather. (His most recent gallery ders were real. She said that she was
show consisted of objects he had made ninety-nine-point-nine-per-cent sure
few days after my first trip to following tutorials on Pinterest.) He they weren’t, but Troemel and Citarella
Athe Work in Progress residency, is fascinated by the contrast between wouldn’t tell her. “That was very an-
I visited again. It was 9:40 A.M., and D.I.Y. projects whose aim is to make noying,” she said, with the exaspera-
Troemel and Citarella were the only the world a better place through, for tion of an older sister talking about her
artists present. Other offices were clut- example, “upcycling” household trash brother’s latest misbehavior. “There are
tered with work—the French artist into attractive planters, and those which repercussions to that, too, in the sense
Cyril Duval had filled his with selec- are meant to help people survive in an of, like, if the Board of Health thought
tions from an enormous collection of apocalypse. “The connection between that was real, they can shut them down.”
counterfeit Chinese goods—but the ethical consumerism and shit-hits-the- I had laughed when I saw a men-
U.V. Production House headquarters fan survivalism is where our interests tion of the spiders by Paddy Johnson,
was still empty. are right now,” he said. on her blog Art F City, but I could see
Citarella was hunched over a draw- Troemel noticed something that why someone invested in the fair would
ing pad connected to his computer, seemed off, in the lower half of the have deemed it, as she did, an “asshole-
using a stylus to put the final touches image. “Is that can in the woman’s hand boy prank.” While Troemel’s work can
on the display image for their newest the same size as the ones in the chute?” embody the freewheeling creativity that
work. Citarella, who was a key contrib- he asked. A realistic image would help is the best part of Internet culture, it
utor to the Jogging, has a cheerful, laid- convince Etsy that this was actually an often falls into the trap of the troll who
back demeanor and seemed unper- art work and not just two guys selling mistakes a lack of accountability for
turbed by what he described to me as things that they had bought on Ama- freedom, provoking with obnoxious
his dire financial situation. In 2012, at zon. Since November, they had twice antics simply for the sake of generat-
the height of the latest art-market been temporarily banned for violating ing a reaction, then laughing in your
boom, he had moved from freelance Etsy’s guidelines on reselling commer- face when you fall for the joke.
jobs retouching photos for galleries and cial goods. Citarella assured him that Troemel, predictably, had a more
Web sites to selling his own work— the image had the correct proportions. considered take on the NADA-spiders
highly polished composite images that Next, they had to settle on a price. project. He explained that at art fairs
he describes as “post-lens photogra- Troemel estimated that the people are always walking
phy”—for as much as fifteen thousand tube would cost about fifteen around looking down at their
dollars. He spent the next two years hundred dollars. He said, “I phones and that, by making
making extravagant, largely unsellable think maybe making it a something that could spark
art—for one piece, he built a gallery in three-to-four-thousand- discussion on social media,
a forest—and now the market had dollar product will safely U.V. Production House
cooled. He had a show in London the cover us”—he laughed—“in could take part in the fair
weekend after the residency, and, he the unfortunate circumstance without actually being part
said, “If it doesn’t go well I’m going someone actually buys it.” of it. It would “create a pal-
back on Sunday and looking for a job The calendar went up on pable narrative that is more
on Monday.” Etsy. “Next year this time, present in the media than
Troemel was leaning against the wall people will be telling the date by some sort of abstract painting that you’d
behind him, examining the image. It whether they had venison or turkey,” expect to see there,” he said.
showed a plastic tube, filled with Mason Troemel said. He asked if he had told I asked Citarella and Troemel if
jars of preserved meats, hung diago- me about a product called NADA Spi- they had actually released any spiders.
nally on the wall. A woman’s disem- ders for Change, their best-selling item. “None,” Citarella said. “Not any.” Troe-
bodied hand held a jar at the bottom He hadn’t, but I had read about it on mel shot him a look.
of the chute. The tube was marked with the Internet. If you paid U.V. Produc- “I mean, I wouldn’t say that,” Troe-
numbered notches, one for each day of tion House a dollar, it would release mel said. “I don’t see a benefit of say-
the month; the idea was that the user six wolf spiders at the New Art Deal- ing we didn’t do anything.”
would remove a jar of meat every day ers Alliance art fair, which had taken Citarella gave him a look of exag-
and eat it, and the rest of the jars would place earlier in the month in Manhat- gerated incredulity. “It’s . . . bioterror-
slide down a notch, marking time by tan. If anyone found a spider and sent ism?” he said. They both laughed. 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 35
 teve Huffman, the thirty-three-

S year-old co-founder and C.E.O.

of Reddit, which is valued at six
hundred million dollars, was nearsighted
until November, 2015, when he arranged
to have laser eye surgery. He underwent
the procedure not for the sake of conve-
nience or appearance but, rather, for a
reason he doesn’t usually talk much about:
he hopes that it will improve his odds
of surviving a disaster, whether natural
or man-made. “If the world ends—and
not even if the world ends, but if we
have trouble—getting contacts or glasses
is going to be a huge pain in the ass,”
he told me recently. “Without them,
I’m fucked.”
Huffman, who lives in San Francisco,
has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and
an air of restless curiosity; at the Uni-
versity of Virginia, he was a competitive
ballroom dancer, who hacked his room-
mate’s Web site as a prank. He is less fo-
cussed on a specific threat—a quake on
the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty
bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the
temporary collapse of our government
and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a
couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of
guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with
that, I can hole up in my house for some
amount of time.”
Survivalism, the practice of prepar-
ing for a crackup of civilization, tends to
evoke a certain picture: the woodsman
in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the
hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer.
But in recent years survivalism has ex-
panded to more affluent quarters, tak-
ing root in Silicon Valley and New York
City, among technology executives,
hedge-fund managers, and others in their
economic cohort.
Last spring, as the Presidential cam-
paign exposed increasingly toxic di-
visions in America, Antonio García
Martínez, a forty-year-old former Face-
book product manager living in San
Francisco, bought five wooded acres on
an island in the Pacific Northwest and
brought in generators, solar panels, and
thousands of rounds of ammunition.
“When society loses a healthy found-
ing myth, it descends into chaos,” he
told me. The author of “Chaos Mon-
keys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir,
García Martínez wanted a refuge that
would be far from cities but not entirely
isolated. “All these dudes think that one An armed guard stands at the entrance of the Survival Condo Project, a former missile
36 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
 A REPORTER AT LARGE

SURVIVAL OF
THE RICHEST
Why some of America’s wealthiest people
are prepping for disaster.
BY EVAN OSNOS

silo north of Wichita, Kansas, that has been converted into luxury apartments for people worried about the crackup of civilization.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAN WINTERS
guy alone could somehow withstand the guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. thousands of discussion threads, into one
roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going I took classes in archery.” of the most frequently visited sites in the
to need to form a local militia. You just For some, it’s just “brogrammer” en- world, Huffman has grown aware of the
need so many things to actually ride out tertainment, a kind of real-world sci-fi, way that technology alters our relations
the apocalypse.” Once he started tell- with gear; for others, like Huffman, it’s with one another, for better and for worse.
ing peers in the Bay Area about his “lit- been a concern for years. “Ever since I He has witnessed how social media can
tle island project,” they came “out of the saw the movie ‘Deep Impact,’ ” he said. magnify public fear. “It’s easier for peo-
woodwork” to describe their own prepa- The film, released in 1998, depicts a comet ple to panic when they’re together,” he
rations, he said. “I think people who are striking the Atlantic, and a race to es- said, pointing out that “the Internet has
particularly attuned to the levers by cape the tsunami. “Everybody’s trying to made it easier for people to be together,”
which society actually works understand get out, and they’re stuck in traffic. That yet it also alerts people to emerging risks.
that we are skating on really thin cul- scene happened to be filmed near my Long before the financial crisis became
tural ice right now.” high school. Every time I drove through front-page news, early signs appeared in
In private Facebook groups, wealthy that stretch of road, I would think, I need user comments on Reddit. “People were
survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bun- to own a motorcycle because everybody starting to whisper about mortgages.
kers, and locations safe from the effects else is screwed.” They were worried about student debt.
of climate change. One member, the head Huffman has been a frequent attendee They were worried about debt in gen-
of an investment firm, told me, “I keep at Burning Man, the annual, clothing- eral. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good
a helicopter gassed up all the time, and optional festival in the Nevada desert, to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He
I have an underground bunker with an where artists mingle with moguls. He added, “There’s probably some false pos-
air-filtration system.” He said that his fell in love with one of its core princi- itives in there as well, but, in general, I
preparations probably put him at the ples, “radical self-reliance,” which he think we’re a pretty good gauge of pub-
“extreme” end among his peers. But he takes to mean “happy to help others, but lic sentiment. When we’re talking about
added, “A lot of my friends do the guns not wanting to require others.” (Among a faith-based collapse, you’re going to
and the motorcycles and the gold coins. survivalists, or “preppers,” as some call start to see the chips in the foundation
That’s not too rare anymore.” themselves, FEMA, the Federal Emer- on social media first.”
Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old gency Management Agency, stands for
managing director at Mayfield Fund, a “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.”) ow did a preoccupation with the
venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a Huffman has calculated that, in the event H apocalypse come to flourish in
bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up of a disaster, he would seek out some Silicon Valley, a place known, to the
and have these financial-hacking dinners form of community: “Being around other point of cliché, for unstinting confi-
and talk about backup plans people are people is a good thing. I also have this dence in its ability to change the world
doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of somewhat egotistical view that I’m a for the better?
people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryp- pretty good leader. I will probably be in Those impulses are not as contradic-
tocurrency, to figuring out how to charge, or at least not a slave, when push tory as they seem. Technology rewards
get second passports if they need it, to comes to shove.” the ability to imagine wildly different
having vacation homes in other coun- Over the years, Huffman has become futures, Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg
tries that could be escape havens.” He increasingly concerned about basic Beta, a San Francisco-based venture-cap-
said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stock- American political stability ital firm, told me. “When you do that,
piling now on real estate and the risk of large-scale un- it’s pretty common that you take things
to generate passive income rest. He said, “Some sort of ad infinitum, and that leads you to uto-
but also to have havens to go institutional collapse, then pias and dystopias,” he said. It can in-
to.” He and his wife, who is you just lose shipping—that spire radical optimism—such as the cry-
in technology, keep a set of sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs onics movement, which calls for freezing
bags packed for themselves call such a scenario W.R.O.L., bodies at death in the hope that science
and their four-year-old daugh- “without rule of law.”) Huff- will one day revive them—or bleak sce-
ter. He told me, “I kind of have man has come to believe that narios. Tim Chang, the venture capital-
this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my contemporary life rests on a ist who keeps his bags packed, told me,
God, if there is a civil war or fragile consensus. “I think, to “My current state of mind is oscillating
a giant earthquake that cleaves off part some degree, we all collectively take it between optimism and sheer terror.”
of California, we want to be ready.’ ” on faith that our country works, that In recent years, survivalism has
When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo our currency is valuable, the peaceful been edging deeper into mainstream
executive who is now a partner at 500 transfer of power—that all of these culture. In 2012, National Geographic
Startups, a venture-capital firm, consid- things that we hold dear work because Channel launched “Doomsday Prep-
ered his preparations, he decided that we believe they work. While I do be- pers,” a reality show featuring a series
his caches of water and food were not lieve they’re quite resilient, and we’ve of Americans bracing for what they
enough. “What if someone comes and been through a lot, certainly we’re going called S.H.T.F. (when the “shit hits the
takes this?” he asked me. To protect his to go through a lot more.” fan”).The première drew more than four
wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have In building Reddit, a community of million viewers, and, by the end of the
38 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
first season, it was the most popular
show in the channel’s history. A survey
commissioned by National Geographic
found that forty per cent of Americans
believed that stocking up on supplies or
building a bomb shelter was a wiser
investment than a 401(k). Online, the
prepper discussions run from folksy
(“A Mom’s Guide to Preparing for Civil
Unrest”) to grim (“How to Eat a Pine
Tree to Survive”).
The reëlection of Barack Obama was
a boon for the prepping industry. Con-
servative devotees, who accused Obama
of stoking racial tensions, restricting gun
rights, and expanding the national debt,
loaded up on the types of freeze-dried
cottage cheese and beef stroganoff pro-
moted by commentators like Glenn Beck
and Sean Hannity. A network of “read-
iness” trade shows attracted convention- “I released a lot of emotion with my drumming,
eers with classes on suturing (practiced but I still need to have a tantrum.”
on a pig trotter) and photo opportuni-
ties with survivalist stars from the TV
show “Naked and Afraid.”
• •
The fears were different in Silicon
Valley. Around the same time that tion of their net worth to hedge against home. Human motivation is complex,
Huffman, on Reddit, was watching the this . . . is a logical thing to do.” and I think people can say, ‘I now have
advance of the financial crisis, Justin How many wealthy Americans are a safety blanket for this thing that scares
Kan heard the first inklings of surviv- really making preparations for a catastro- me.’ ” The fears vary, but many worry
alism among his peers. Kan co-founded phe? It’s hard to know exactly; a lot of that, as artificial intelligence takes away
Twitch, a gaming network that was later people don’t like to talk about it. (“An- a growing share of jobs, there will be a
sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dol- onymity is priceless,” one hedge-fund backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s
lars. “Some of my friends were, like, ‘The manager told me, declining an inter- second-highest concentration of wealth.
breakdown of society is imminent. We view.) Sometimes the topic emerges in (Southwestern Connecticut is first.) “I’ve
should stockpile food,’ ” he said. “I tried unexpected ways. Reid Hoffman, the co- heard this theme from a bunch of peo-
to. But then we got a couple of bags of founder of LinkedIn and a prominent ple,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going
rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would investor, recalls telling a friend that he to turn against the wealthy? Is it going
have been dead if there was actually a was thinking of visiting New Zealand. to turn against technological innovation?
real problem.” I asked Kan what his “Oh, are you going to get apocalypse in- Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
prepping friends had in common. “Lots surance?” the friend asked. “I’m, like, The C.E.O. of another large tech
of money and resources,” he said. “What Huh?” Hoffman told me. New Zealand, company told me, “It’s still not at the
are the other things I can worry about he discovered, is a favored refuge in the point where industry insiders would
and prepare for? It’s like insurance.” event of a cataclysm. Hoffman said, “Say- turn to each other with a straight face
Yishan Wong, an early Facebook em- ing you’re ‘buying a house in New Zea- and ask what their plans are for some
ployee, was the C.E.O. of Reddit from land’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. apocalyptic event.” He went on, “But,
2012 to 2014. He, too, had eye surgery Once you’ve done the Masonic hand- having said that, I actually think it’s log-
for survival purposes, eliminating his shake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I ically rational and appropriately conser-
dependence, as he put it, “on a nonsus- have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, vative.” He noted the vulnerabilities ex-
tainable external aid for perfect vision.” and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they posed by the Russian cyberattack on the
In an e-mail, Wong told me, “Most peo- kind of look like they would be interest- Democratic National Committee, and
ple just assume improbable events don’t ing to live in.’ ” also by a large-scale hack on Octo-
happen, but technical people tend to I asked Hoffman to estimate what ber 21st, which disrupted the Internet
view risk very mathematically.” He con- share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires in North America and Western Europe.
tinued, “The tech preppers do not nec- have acquired some level of “apocalypse “Our food supply is dependent on G.P.S.,
essarily think a collapse is likely. They insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in logistics, and weather forecasting,” he
consider it a remote event, but one with the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty- said, “and those systems are generally
a very severe downside, so, given how plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s paral- dependent on the Internet, and the In-
much money they have, spending a frac- lel with the decision to buy a vacation ternet is dependent on D.N.S.”—the
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 39
system that manages domain names. and a couple of billionaires were work- private plane. You have to assure that
“Go risk factor by risk factor by risk fac- ing through end-of-America scenarios the pilot’s family will be taken care of,
tor, acknowledging that there are many and talking about what they’d do. Most too. They have to be on the plane.’ ”
you don’t even know about, and you said they’ll fire up their planes and take By January, 2015, Johnson was sound-
ask, ‘What’s the chance of this break- their families to Western ranches or ing the alarm: the tensions produced by
ing in the next decade?’ Or invert it: homes in other countries.” One of the acute income inequality were becoming
‘What’s the chance that nothing breaks guests was skeptical, Dugger said. “He so pronounced that some of the world’s
in fifty years?’ ” leaned forward and asked, ‘Are you tak- wealthiest people were taking steps to
One measure of survivalism’s spread ing your pilot’s family, too? And what protect themselves. At the World Eco-
is that some people are starting to speak about the maintenance guys? If revolu- nomic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
out against it. Max Levchin, a founder tionaries are kicking in doors, how many Johnson told the audience, “I know
of PayPal and of Affirm, a lending startup, of the people in your life will you have hedge-fund managers all over the world
told me, “It’s one of the few things about to take with you?’ The questioning con- who are buying airstrips and farms in
Silicon Valley that I actively dislike—the tinued. In the end, most agreed they places like New Zealand because they
sense that we are superior giants who couldn’t run.” think they need a getaway.”
move the needle and, even if it’s our own Élite anxiety cuts across political lines. Johnson wishes that the wealthy would
failure, must be spared.” Even financiers who supported Trump adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an
To Levchin, prepping for survival is for President, hoping that he would cut openness to policy change that could in-
a moral miscalculation; he prefers to taxes and regulations, have been un- clude, for instance, a more aggressive tax
“shut down party conversations” on the nerved at the ways his insurgent cam- on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund
topic. “I typically ask people, ‘So you’re paign seems to have hastened a collapse managers make more money than all of
worried about the pitchforks. How much of respect for established institutions. the kindergarten teachers in America
money have you donated to your local Dugger said, “The media is under at- combined,” he said. “Being one of those
homeless shelter?’ This connects the tack now. They wonder, Is the court sys- twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think
most, in my mind, to the realities of the tem next? Do we go from ‘fake news’ to they’ve developed a heightened sensitiv-
income gap. All the other forms of fear ‘fake evidence’? For people whose exis- ity.” The gap is widening further. In De-
that people bring up are artificial.” In tence depends on enforceable contracts, cember, the National Bureau of Economic
his view, this is the time to invest in this is life or death.” Research published a new analysis, by the
solutions, not escape. “At the moment, Robert A. Johnson sees his peers’ talk economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel
we’re actually at a relatively benign point of fleeing as the symptom of a deeper Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found
of the economy. When the economy crisis. At fifty-nine, Johnson has tou- that half of American adults have been
heads south, you will have a bunch of sled silver hair and a soft-spoken, avun- “completely shut off from economic
people that are in really bad shape. What cular composure. He earned degrees in growth since the 1970s.” Approximately
do we expect then?” electrical engineering and economics at a hundred and seventeen million people
M.I.T., got a Ph.D. in economics at earn, on average, the same income that
n the opposite side of the coun- Princeton, and worked on Capitol Hill, they did in 1980, while the typical in-
O try, similar awkward conversations before entering finance. He became a come for the top one per cent has nearly
have been unfolding in some financial managing director at the hedge fund tripled. That gap is comparable to the
circles. Robert H. Dugger worked as a Soros Fund Management. In 2009, after gap between average incomes in the U.S.
lobbyist for the financial industry be- the onset of the financial crisis, he was and the Democratic Republic of Congo,
fore he became a partner at the global named head of a think tank, the Insti- the authors wrote.
hedge fund Tudor Investment Corpo- tute for New Economic Thinking. Johnson said, “If we had a more equal
ration, in 1993. After seventeen years, When I visited Johnson, not long distribution of income, and much more
he retired to focus on philanthropy and ago, at his office on Park Avenue South, money and energy going into public
his investments. “Anyone who’s in this he described himself as an accidental school systems, parks and recreation,
community knows people who are wor- student of civic anxiety. He grew up out- the arts, and health care, it could take
ried that America is heading toward side Detroit, in Grosse Pointe Park, the an awful lot of sting out of society.
something like the Russian Revolution,” son of a doctor, and he watched his fa- We’ve largely dismantled those things.”
he told me recently. ther’s generation experience the fractur- As public institutions deteriorate,
To manage that fear, Dugger said, he ing of Detroit. “What I’m seeing now in élite anxiety has emerged as a gauge
has seen two very different responses. New York City is sort of like old music of our national predicament. “Why do
“People know the only real answer is, Fix coming back,” he said. “These are friends people who are envied for being so
the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of mine. I used to live in Belle Haven, powerful appear to be so afraid?” John-
of them give a lot of money to good in Greenwich, Connecticut. Louis Bacon, son asked. “What does that really tell
causes.” At the same time, though, they Paul Tudor Jones, and Ray Dalio”— us about our system?” He added, “It’s
invest in the mechanics of escape. He hedge-fund managers—“were all within a very odd thing. You’re basically see-
recalled a dinner in New York City after fifty yards of me. From my own career, ing that the people who’ve been the
9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com I would just talk to people. More and best at reading the tea leaves—the ones
bubble: “A group of centi-millionaires more were saying, ‘You’ve got to have a with the most resources, because that’s
40 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
how they made their money—are now tastrophe planning, which had languished and hydroponic vegetables under grow
the ones most preparing to pull the rip after the Cold War. During the Septem- lamps, with renewable power, it could
cord and jump out of the plane.” ber 11th attacks, the Bush Administra- function indefinitely, Hall said. In a cri-
tion activated a “continuity of govern- sis, his SWAT-team-style trucks (“the Pit-
n a cool evening in early Novem- ment” plan, transporting selected federal Bull VX, armored up to fifty-calibre”)
O ber, I rented a car in Wichita, Kan- workers by helicopter and bus to fortified will pick up any owner within four hun-
dred miles. Residents with private planes
sas, and drove north from the city through locations, but, after years of disuse, com-
slanting sunlight, across the suburbs and puters and other equipment in the bun- can land in Salina, about thirty miles
out beyond the last shopping center, where kers were out of date. Bush ordered a re- away. In his view, the Army Corps did
the horizon settles into farmland. After a newed focus on continuity plans, and the hardest work by choosing the loca-
couple of hours, just before the town of FEMA launched annual government-wide tion. “They looked at height above sea
Concordia, I headed west, down a dirt exercises. (The most recent, Eagle Hori- level, the seismology of an area, how close
track flanked by corn and soybean fields, zon, in 2015, simulated hurricanes, im- it is to large population centers,” he said.
Hall, in his late fifties, is barrel-chested
and talkative. He studied business and
computers at the Florida Institute of Tech-
nology and went on to specialize in net-
works and data centers for Northrop Grum-
man, Harris Corporation, and other defense
contractors. He now goes back and forth
between the Kansas silo and a home in the
Denver suburbs, where his wife, a parale-
gal, lives with their twelve-year-old son.
Hall led me through the garage, down
a ramp, and into a lounge, with a stone
fireplace, a dining area, and a kitchen to
one side. It had the feel of a ski condo
without windows: pool table, stain-
less-steel appliances, leather couches. To
maximize space, Hall took ideas from
cruise-ship design. We were accompa-
nied by Mark Menosky, an engineer who
manages day-to-day operations. While
they fixed dinner—steak, baked pota-
toes, and salad—Hall said that the hard-
The living room of an apartment at the Survival Condo Project. est part of the project was sustaining life
underground. He studied how to avoid
winding through darkness until my lights provised nuclear devices, earthquakes, depression (add more lights), prevent
settled on a large steel gate. A guard, dressed and cyberattacks.) cliques (rotate chores), and simulate life
in camouflage, held a semiautomatic rifle. “I started saying, ‘Well, wait a min- aboveground. The condo walls are fitted
He ushered me through, and, in the ute, what does the government know with L.E.D. “windows” that show a live
darkness, I could see the outline of a vast that we don’t know?’ ” Hall said. In 2008, video of the prairie above the silo. Own-
concrete dome, with a metal blast door he paid three hundred thousand dollars ers can opt instead for pine forests or
partly ajar. I was greeted by Larry Hall, for the silo and finished construction in other vistas. One prospective resident
the C.E.O. of the Survival Condo Proj- December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty from New York City wanted video of
ect, a fifteen-story luxury apartment com- million dollars. He created twelve pri- Central Park. “All four seasons, day and
plex built in an underground Atlas mis- vate apartments: full-floor units were ad- night,” Menosky said. “She wanted the
sile silo. The facility housed a nuclear vertised at three million dollars; a half- sounds, the taxis and the honking horns.”
warhead from 1961 to 1965, when it was floor was half the price. He has sold every Some survivalists disparage Hall for
decommissioned. At a site conceived for unit, except one for himself, he said. creating an exclusive refuge for the wealthy
the Soviet nuclear threat, Hall has erected Most preppers don’t actually have and have threatened to seize his bunker in
a defense against the fears of a new era. bunkers; hardened shelters are expensive a crisis. Hall waved away this possibility
“It’s true relaxation for the ultra-wealthy,” and complicated to build. The original when I raised it with him over dinner. “You
he said. “They can come out here, they silo of Hall’s complex was built by the can send all the bullets you want into this
know there are armed guards outside. Army Corps of Engineers to withstand place.” If necessary, his guards would re-
The kids can run around.” a nuclear strike. The interior can sup- turn fire, he said. “We’ve got a sniper post.”
Hall got the idea for the project about port a total of seventy-five people. It has Recently, I spoke on the phone with
a decade ago, when he read that the fed- enough food and fuel for five years off Tyler Allen, a real-estate developer in Lake
eral government was reinvesting in ca- the grid; by raising tilapia in fish tanks, Mary, Florida, who told me that he paid
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 41
three million dollars for one of Hall’s con- anxieties. The earliest Puritan settlers light—but were also protesting low
dos. Allen said he worries that America saw in the awe-inspiring bounty of the wages, poor working conditions, and
faces a future of “social conflict” and gov- American wilderness the prospect of corporate greed. “It was very much like
ernment efforts to deceive the public. He both apocalypse and paradise. When, in today,” White said. “It was a sense that
suspects that the Ebola virus was allowed May of 1780, sudden darkness settled the political system had spun out of
to enter the country in order to weaken on New England, farmers perceived it control, and was no longer able to deal
the population. When I asked how friends as a cataclysm heralding the return of with society. There was a huge inequity
usually respond to his ideas, he said, “The Christ. (In fact, the darkness was caused in wealth, a stirring of working classes.
natural reaction that you get most of the by enormous wildfires in Ontario.) Life spans were getting shorter. There
time is for them to laugh, because it scares D. H. Lawrence diagnosed a specific was a feeling that America’s advance
them.” But, he added, “my credibility has strain of American dread. “Doom! had stopped, and the whole thing was
gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this Doom! Doom!” he wrote in 1923. “Some- going to break.”
just seemed crazy that all this was going thing seems to whisper it in the very Business titans grew uncomfortable.
to happen: the social unrest and the cul- dark trees of America.” In 1889, Andrew Carnegie, who was
tural divide in the country, the race-bait- Historically, our fascination with the on his way to being the richest man in
ing and the hate-mongering.” I asked how End has flourished at moments of po- the world, worth more than four bil-
he planned to get to Kansas from Flor- litical insecurity and rapid technolog- lion in today’s dollars, wrote, with con-
ida in a crisis. “If a dirty bomb goes off in ical change. “In the late nineteenth cen- cern, about class tensions; he criticized
Miami, everybody’s going to go in their tury, there were all sorts of utopian the emergence of “rigid castes” living
house and congregate in bars, just glued novels, and each was coupled with a in “mutual ignorance” and “mutual dis-
to the TV. Well, you’ve got forty-eight dystopian novel,” Richard White, a his- trust.” John D. Rockefeller, of Standard
hours to get the hell out of there.” torian at Stanford University, told me. Oil, America’s first actual billionaire,
Allen told me that, in his view, tak- Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” felt a Christian duty to give back. “The
ing precautions is unfairly stigmatized. published in 1888, depicted a socialist novelty of being able to purchase any-
“They don’t put tinfoil on your head if paradise in the year 2000, and became thing one wants soon passes,” he wrote,
you’re the President and you go to Camp a sensation, inspiring “Bellamy Clubs” in 1909, “because what people most
David,” he said. “But they do put tinfoil around the country. Conversely, Jack seek cannot be bought with money.”
on your head if you have the means and London, in 1908, published “The Iron Carnegie went on to fight illiteracy by
you take steps to protect your family Heel,” imagining an America under a creating nearly three thousand public
should a problem occur.” fascist oligarchy in which “nine-tenths libraries. Rockefeller founded the Uni-
of one per cent” hold “seventy per cent versity of Chicago. According to Joel
hy do our dystopian urges emerge of the total wealth.” Fleishman, the author of “The Foun-
W at certain moments and not At the time, Americans were mar- dation,” a study of American philan-
others? Doomsday—as a prophecy, a velling at engineering advances—at- thropy, both men dedicated themselves
literary genre, and a business opportu- tendees at the 1893 World’s Fair, in to “changing the systems that produced
nity—is never static; it evolves with our Chicago, beheld new uses for electric those ills in the first place.”
During the Cold War, Armaged-
don became a matter for government
policymakers. The Federal Civil De-
fense Administration, created by Harry
Truman, issued crisp instructions for
surviving a nuclear strike, including
“Jump in any handy ditch or gutter”
and “Never lose your head.” In 1958,
Dwight Eisenhower broke ground on
Project Greek Island, a secret shelter,
in the mountains of West Virginia,
large enough for every member of Con-
gress. Hidden beneath the Greenbrier
Resort, in White Sulphur Springs, for
more than thirty years, it maintained
separate chambers-in-waiting for the
House and the Senate. (Congress now
plans to shelter at undisclosed loca-
tions.) There was also a secret plan to
whisk away the Gettysburg Address,
“I said, ‘Crush your enemies, see them driven from the Library of Congress, and the
before you, and hear the lamentation of the women,’ but Declaration of Independence, from
the media took that totally out of context.” the National Archives.
 But in 1961 John F. Kennedy en- me a tour. The complex is a tall cylinder running, I’m hoping that his business
couraged “every citizen” to help build that resembles a corncob. Some levels acumen will override some of his knee-
fallout shelters, saying, in a televised are dedicated to private apartments and jerk stuff.” Watching Trump and Clin-
address, “I know you would not want others offer shared amenities: a seventy- ton rallies on television, he was struck
to do less.” In 1976, tapping into fear five-foot-long pool, a rock-climbing wall, by how large and enthusiastic Trump’s
of inflation and the Arab oil embargo, an Astro-Turf “pet park,” a classroom crowds appeared. “I just don’t believe
a far-right publisher named Kurt Saxon with a line of Mac desktops, a gym, a the polls,” he said.
launched The Survivor, an influential movie theatre, and a library. It felt com- He thinks that mainstream news
newsletter that celebrated forgotten pi- pact but not claustrophobic. We visited organizations are biased, and he sub-
oneer skills. (Saxon claimed to have an armory packed with guns and ammo scribes to theories that he knows some
coined the term “survivalist.”) The in case of an attack by non-members, find implausible. He surmised that
growing literature on decline and self- and then a bare-walled room “there is a deliberate move
protection included “How to Prosper with a toilet. “We can lock by the people in Congress
During the Coming Bad Years,” a 1979 people up and give them an to dumb America down.”
best-seller, which advised collecting adult time-out,” he said. In Why would Congress do
gold in the form of South African general, the rules are set by that? I asked. “They don’t
Krugerrands. The “doom boom,” as it a condo association, which want people to be smart to
became known, expanded under Ron- can vote to amend them. see what’s going on in pol-
ald Reagan. The sociologist Richard G. During a crisis, a “life-or- itics,” he said. He told me
Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at death situation,” Hall said, he had read a prediction
Oregon State University, who spent each adult would be required that forty per cent of Con-
twelve years studying survivalism, said, to work for four hours a gress will be arrested, be-
“During the Reagan era, we heard, for day, and would not be allowed to leave cause of a scheme involving the Pan-
the first time in my life, and I’m sev- without permission. “There’s controlled ama Papers, the Catholic Church, and
enty-four years old, from the highest access in and out, and it’s governed by the Clinton Foundation. “They’ve been
authorities in the land that government the board,” he said. working on this investigation for twenty
has failed you, the collective institu- The “medical wing” contains a hos- years,” he said. I asked him if he really
tional ways of solving problems and pital bed, a procedure table, and a den- believed that. “At first, you hear this
understanding society are no good. tist’s chair. Among the residents, Hall stuff and go, Yeah, right,” he said. But
People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What said, “we’ve got two doctors and a den- he wasn’t ruling it out.
do I do now?’ ” tist.” One floor up, we visited the Before I headed back to Wichita, we
The movement received another food-storage area, still unfinished. He stopped at Hall’s latest project—a sec-
boost from the George W. Bush Ad- hopes that, once it’s fully stocked, it will ond underground complex, in a silo
ministration’s mishandling of Hurri- feel like a “miniature Whole Foods,” but twenty-five miles away. As we pulled up,
cane Katrina. Neil Strauss, a former for now it holds mostly cans of food. a crane loomed overhead, hoisting de-
Times reporter, who chronicled his turn We stopped in a condo. Nine-foot bris from deep below the surface. The
to prepping in his book “Emergency,” ceilings, Wolf range, gas fireplace. “This complex will contain three times the liv-
told me, “We see New Orleans, where guy wanted to have a fireplace from ing space of the original, in part because
our government knows a disaster is his home state”—Connecticut—“so he the garage will be moved to a separate
happening, and is powerless to save its shipped me the granite,” Hall said. structure. Among other additions, it will
own citizens.” Strauss got interested in Another owner, with a home in Ber- have a bowling alley and L.E.D. win-
survivalism a year after Katrina, when muda, ordered the walls of his bun- dows as large as French doors, to create
a tech entrepreneur who was taking ker-condo painted in island pastels— a feeling of openness.
flying lessons and hatching escape plans orange, green, yellow—but, in close Hall said that he was working on pri-
introduced him to a group of like- quarters, he found it oppressive. His vate bunkers for clients in Idaho and
minded “billionaire and centi-million- decorator had to come fix it. Texas, and that two technology compa-
aire preppers.” Strauss acquired citi- That night, I slept in a guest room nies had asked him to design “a secure
zenship in St. Kitts, put assets in foreign appointed with a wet bar and handsome facility for their data center and a safe
currencies, and trained to survive with wood cabinets, but no video windows. It haven for their key personnel, if some-
“nothing but a knife and the clothes was eerily silent, and felt like sleeping in thing were to happen.” To accommodate
on my back.” a well-furnished submarine. demand, he has paid for the possibility
These days, when North Korea tests I emerged around eight the next to buy four more silos.
a bomb, Hall can expect an uptick of morning to find Hall and Menosky in
phone inquiries about space in the Sur- the common area, drinking coffee and f a siloin Kansas is not remote or
vival Condo Project. But he points to a watching a campaign-news brief on I private enough, there is another
deeper source of demand. “Seventy per “Fox & Friends.” It was five days be- option. In the first seven days after
cent of the country doesn’t like the di- fore the election, and Hall, who is a Re- Donald Trump’s election, 13,401
rection that things are going,” he said. publican, described himself as a cau- Americans registered with New Zea-
After dinner, Hall and Menosky gave tious Trump supporter. “Of the two land’s immigration authorities, the first
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 43
official step toward seeking residency— planted Singapore as the best country in racial tension, polarization, and a rap-
more than seventeen times the usual the world to do business. idly aging population. “The country has
rate. The New Zealand Herald reported The morning after I arrived, I was turned into the New York area, the Cal-
the surge beneath the headline “TRUMP picked up at my hotel by Graham Wall, ifornia area, and then everyone else is
APOCALYPSE.” a cheerful real-estate agent who special- wildly different in the middle,” he said.
In fact, the influx had begun well izes in what his profession describes as He worries that the economy will suffer
before Trump’s victory. In the first ten high-net-worth individuals, “H.N.W.I.” if Washington scrambles to fund So-
months of 2016, foreigners bought Wall, whose clients include Peter Thiel, cial Security and Medicare for people
nearly fourteen hundred square miles the billionaire venture capitalist, was sur- who need it. “Do you default on that
of land in New Zealand, more than prised when Americans told him they obligation? Or do you print more money
quadruple what they bought in the were coming precisely because of the to give to them? What does that do to
same period the previous year, accord- country’s remoteness. “Kiwis used to talk the value of the dollar? It’s not a next-
ing to the government. American buy- about the ‘tyranny of distance,’ ” Wall year problem, but it’s not fifty years
ers were second only to Australians. said, as we crossed town in his Mercedes away, either.”
The U.S. government does not keep a convertible. “Now the tyranny of dis- New Zealand’s reputation for attract-
tally of Americans who own second or tance is our greatest asset.” ing doomsayers is so well known in the
third homes overseas. Much as Swit- Before my trip, I had wondered if I hedge-fund manager’s circle that he pre-
zerland once drew Americans with the was going to be spending more time in fers to differentiate himself from earlier
promise of secrecy, and Uruguay luxury bunkers. But Peter Campbell, the arrivals. He said, “This is no longer about
tempted them with private banks, New managing director of Triple Star Man- a handful of freaks worried about the
Zealand offers security and distance. agement, a New Zealand construction world ending.” He laughed, and added,
In the past six years, nearly a thousand firm, told me that, by and large, once his “Unless I’m one of those freaks.”
foreigners have acquired residency there American clients arrive, they decide that
under programs that mandate certain underground shelters are gratuitous. “It’s very year since 1947, the Bulletin
types of investment of at least a mil- not like you need to build a bunker under E of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine
lion dollars. your front lawn, because you’re several founded by members of the Manhat-
Jack Matthews, an American who is thousand miles away from the White tan Project, has gathered a group of
the chairman of MediaWorks, a large House,” he said. Americans have other Nobel laureates and other luminaries to
New Zealand broadcaster, told me, “I requests. “Definitely, helipads are a big update the Doomsday Clock, a sym-
think, in the back of people’s minds, one,” he said. “You can fly a private jet bolic gauge of our risk of wrecking civ-
frankly, is that, if the world really goes into Queenstown or a private jet into ilization. In 1991, as the Cold War was
to shit, New Zealand is a First World Wanaka, and then you can grab a heli- ending, the scientists set the clock to its
country, completely self-sufficient, if copter and it can take you and land you safest point ever—seventeen minutes
necessary—energy, water, food. Life at your property.” American clients have to “midnight.”
would deteriorate, but it would not col- also sought strategic advice. “They’re Since then, the direction has been in-
lapse.” As someone who views Ameri- asking, ‘Where in New Zealand is not auspicious. In January, 2016, after in-
can politics from a distance, he said, going to be long-term affected by ris- creasing military tensions between Rus-
“The difference between New Zealand ing sea levels?’ ” sia and NATO, and the Earth’s warmest
and the U.S., to a large extent, is that The growing foreign appetite for New year on record, the Bulletin set the clock
people who disagree with each other Zealand property has generated a back- at three minutes to midnight, the same
can still talk to each other about it here. lash. The Campaign Against Foreign level it held at the height of the Cold
It’s a tiny little place, and there’s no an- Control of Aotearoa—the Maori name War. In November, after Trump’s elec-
onymity. People have to actually have a for New Zealand—opposes sales to for- tion, the panel convened once more to
degree of civility.” eigners. In particular, the attention of conduct its annual confidential discus-
Auckland is a thirteen-hour flight American survivalists has generated re- sion. If it chooses to move the clock for-
from San Francisco. I arrived in early sentment. In a discussion about New ward by one minute, that will signal a
December, the beginning of New Zea- Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a level of alarm not witnessed since 1953,
land’s summer: blue skies, mid-seventies, prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, after America’s first test of the hydro-
no humidity. Top to bottom, the island “Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa gen bomb. (The result will be released
chain runs roughly the distance between NZ is not your little last resort safe haven.” January 26th.)
Maine and Florida, with half the popu- An American hedge-fund manager Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs
lation of New York City. Sheep outnum- in his forties—tall, tanned, athletic— action to prevent it. But élite survival-
ber people seven to one. In global rank- recently bought two houses in New Zea- ism is not a step toward prevention; it is
ings, New Zealand is in the top ten for land and acquired local residency. He an act of withdrawal. Philanthropy in
democracy, clean government, and secu- agreed to tell me about his thinking, if America is still three times as large, as a
rity. (Its last encounter with terrorism I would not publish his name. Brought share of G.D.P., as philanthropy in the
was in 1985, when French spies bombed up on the East Coast, he said, over coffee, next closest country, the United King-
a Greenpeace ship.) In a recent World that he expects America to face at least dom. But it is now accompanied by a ges-
Bank report, New Zealand had sup- a decade of political turmoil, including ture of surrender, a quiet disinvestment
44 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
by some of America’s most successful
and powerful people. Faced with evi-
dence of frailty in the American project,
in the institutions and norms from which
they have benefitted, some are permit-
ting themselves to imagine failure. It is
a gilded despair.
As Huffman, of Reddit, observed,
our technologies have made us more
alert to risk, but have also made us more
panicky; they facilitate the tribal temp-
tation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves
from opponents, and to fortify ourselves
against our fears, instead of attacking
the sources of them. Justin Kan, the
technology investor who had made a
halfhearted effort to stock up on food,
recalled a recent phone call from a friend
at a hedge fund. “He was telling me we
should buy land in New Zealand as a
backup. He’s, like, ‘What’s the percent-
age chance that Trump is actually a “It’s only until spring.”
fascist dictator? Maybe it’s low, but
the expected value of having an escape
hatch is pretty high.’ ”
• •
There are other ways to absorb the
anxieties of our time. “If I had a billion in Sausalito, Brand is less impressed by from all the issues of the world,” he said.
dollars, I wouldn’t buy a bunker,” Elli signs of fragility than by examples of re- Rohrstaff, who co-owns Legacy Part-
Kaplan, the C.E.O. of the digital health silience. In the past decade, the world ners, a boutique brokerage, wanted me
startup Neurotrack, told me. “I would survived, without violence, the worst to see Tara Iti, a new luxury-housing
reinvest in civil society and civil innova- financial crisis since the Great Depres- development and golf club that appeals
tion. My view is you figure out even sion; Ebola, without cataclysm; and, in mostly to Americans. The helicopter
smarter ways to make sure that some- Japan, a tsunami and nuclear meltdown, nosed north across the harbor and
thing terrible doesn’t happen.” Kaplan, after which the country has persevered. banked up the coast, across lush forests
who worked in the White House under He sees risks in escapism. As Americans and fields beyond the city. From above,
Bill Clinton, was appalled by Trump’s withdraw into smaller circles of experi- the sea was a sparkling expanse, scal-
victory, but said that it galvanized her in ence, we jeopardize the “larger circle of loped by the wind.
a different way: “Even in my deepest fear, empathy,” he said, the search for solu- The helicopter eased down onto a
I say, ‘Our union is stronger than this.’” tions to shared problems. “The easy ques- lawn beside a putting green. The new
That view is, in the end, an article of tion is, How do I protect me and mine? luxury community will have three thou-
faith—a conviction that even degraded The more interesting question is, What sand acres of dunes and forestland, and
political institutions are the best instru- if civilization actually manages continu- seven miles of coastline, for just a hun-
ments of common will, the tools for fash- ity as well as it has managed it for the dred and twenty-five homes. As we toured
ioning and sustaining our fragile con- past few centuries? What do we do if it the site in a Land Rover, he emphasized
sensus. Believing that is a choice. just keeps on chugging?” the seclusion: “From the outside, you
I called a Silicon Valley sage, Stew- After a few days in New Zealand, I won’t see anything. That’s better for the
art Brand, the author and entrepreneur could see why one might choose to avoid public and better for us, for privacy.”
whom Steve Jobs credited as an inspira- either question. Under a cerulean blue As we neared the sea, Rohrstaff parked
tion. In the sixties and seventies, Brand’s sky one morning in Auckland, I boarded the Land Rover and climbed out. In his
“Whole Earth Catalog” attracted a cult a helicopter beside a thirty-eight-year- loafers, he marched over the dunes and
following, with its mixture of hippie and old American named Jim Rohrstaff. led me down into the sand, until we
techie advice. (The motto: “We are as After college, in Michigan, Rohrstaff reached a stretch of beach that extended
gods and might as well get good at it.”) worked as a golf pro, and then in the to the horizon without a soul in sight.
Brand told me that he explored surviv- marketing of luxury golf clubs and prop- Waves roared ashore. He spread his
alism in the seventies, but not for long. erty. Upbeat and confident, with shin- arms, turned, and laughed. “We think
“Generally, I find the idea that ‘Oh, my ing blue eyes, he moved to New Zea- it’s the place to be in the future,” he said.
God, the world’s all going to fall apart’ land two and a half years ago, with his For the first time in weeks—months,
strange,” he said. wife and two children, to sell property even—I wasn’t thinking about Trump.
At seventy-seven, living on a tugboat to H.N.W.I. who want to get “far away Or much of anything. 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 45
 ANNALS OF TECHNOLOGY

ALTERNATE ENDINGS
Movies that allow you to decide what happens next.
BY RAFFI KHATCHADOURIAN

aniel Kwan and Daniel by the time he got around to writing

D Scheinert, young directors who

go by the joint film credit Dan-
iels, are known for reality-warped min-
it his hurt feelings had given way to
more indeterminate sentiments, and
the idea grew to become an interactive
iatures—short films, music videos, com- music video. The result, “I Can’t Be
mercials—that are eerie yet playful in Sad Anymore,” which he and his band
mood. In their work, people jump into released online in 2010, opens with
other people’s bodies, Teddy bears dance Bloch at a party in a Tel Aviv apart-
to hard-core dubstep, rednecks shoot ment. Standing on a balcony, he puts
clothes from rifles onto fleeing nud- on headphones, then wanders among
ists. Last year, their first feature-length his friends, singing about his readiness
project, “Swiss Army Man”—starring to escape melancholy. He passes the
Daniel Radcliffe, who plays a flatulent headphones to others; whoever wears
talking corpse that befriends a cast- them sings, too. Viewers decide, by
away—premièred at Sundance, and left clicking on onscreen prompts, how the
some viewers wondering if it was the headphones are passed—altering, in
strangest thing ever to be screened at real time, the song’s vocals, orchestra-
the festival. The Times, deciding that tion, and emotional tone, while also
the film was impossible to categorize, following different micro-dramas. If
called it “weird and wonderful, disgust- you choose the drunk, the camera fol-
ing and demented.” lows her as she races into the bath-
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that room, to Bloch’s words “I want to drink
when the Daniels were notified by their less / but be more drunk.” Choose her
production company, several years ago, friend instead, and the video leads to
that an Israeli indie pop star living in sports fans downing shots, with the
New York wanted to hire them to ex- lyrics “I want to work less / but for a
periment with technology that could greater cause.”
alter fundamental assumptions of mov- Bloch came to believe that there was
iemaking, they took the call. commercial potential in the song’s un-
The musician was Yoni Bloch, argu- derlying technology—software that he
ably the first Internet sensation on Is- and his friends had developed during a
rael’s music scene—a wispy, bespecta- few intense coding marathons. (Bloch
cled songwriter from the Negev whose had learned to write programs at an
wry, angst-laden music went viral in early age, starting on a Commodore 64.)
the early aughts, leading to sold-out He put his music career on hold, raised
venues and a record deal. After break- millions of dollars in venture capital,
ing up with his girlfriend, in 2007, and moved to New York. Bloch called
Bloch had hoped to win her back by his software Treehouse and his com-
thinking big. He made a melancholy pany Interlude—the name hinting at a
concept album about their relationship, cultural gap between video games and
along with a companion film in the movies which he sought to bridge. What
mode of “The Wall”—only to fall in he was selling was “a new medium,” he
love with the actress who played his took to saying. Yet barely anyone knew
ex. He had also thought up a more am- of it. Treehouse was technology in need
bitious idea: an interactive song that of an auteur, which is why Bloch reached
listeners could shape as it played. But out to the Daniels—encouraging them

“The defining art form of the twenty-first century has not been named yet,” one
specialist in interactive media says, “but it is something like this.”
46 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL SAVAGE
 Future” trilogy. In the movie, a cyborg
meted out punishment to baddies while
the audience, voting with handheld
controllers, chose the act of revenge.
The film was released in forty-four
theatres. Critics hated it. “The basic
problem I had with the choices on the
screen with ‘Mr. Payback’ is that they
didn’t have one called ‘None of the
above,’ ” Roger Ebert said, declaring
the movie the worst of the year. “We
don’t want to interact with a movie.
We want it to act on us. That’s why
we go, so we can lose ourselves in the
experience.”
Gene Siskel cut in: “Do it out in the
lobby—play the video game. Don’t try
to mix the two of them together. It’s
not going to work!”
Siskel and Ebert might have been
willfully severe. But they had identified
a cognitive clash that—as the Daniels
“Part of me is going to miss liberal democracy.” also suspected—any experiment with
the form would have to navigate. Im-
mersion in a narrative, far from being
• • passive, requires energetic participa-
tion; while watching movies, viewers
to use the software as they liked. “It was hardly say more than a blank page. must continually process new details—
like handing off a new type of camera Daniel Kwan told me that while he keeping track of all that has happened
and saying, ‘Now, use this and do some- was in elementary school, in the nine- and forecasting what might plausibly
thing amazing,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘I don’t teen-nineties, he often returned from happen. Good stories, whether dramas
want to tell you what to do.’ ” the public library with stacks of Choose or action films, tend to evoke emo-
Your Own Adventure novels—slim tional responses, including empathy
loch was offering for film an volumes, written in the second person, and other forms of social cognition.
B idea that has long existed in liter- that allow readers to decide at key mo- Conversely, making choices in a video
ature. In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges wrote ments how the story will proceed. (“If game often produces emotional with-
a story about a learned Chinese gov- you jump down on the woolly mam- drawal: players are either acquiring
ernor who retreated from civilization moth, turn to page 29. If you continue skills or using them reflexively to
to write an enormous, mysterious novel on foot, turn to page 30.”) The books achieve discrete rewards. While narra-
called “The Garden of Forking Paths.” were the kind of thing you could find tives help us to make sense of the world,
In Borges’s telling, the novel remained in a child’s backpack alongside Gar- skills help us to act within it.
a riddle—chaotic, fragmentary, impen- bage Pail Kids cards and Matchbox As the Daniels discussed Bloch’s
etrable—for more than a century, until cars. For a brief time, they could offer offer, they wondered if some of these
a British Sinologist deciphered it: the up a kind of Borgesian magic, but the problems were insurmountable, but the
book, he discovered, sought to explore writing was schlocky, the plot twists more they talked about them, the more
every possible decision that its charac- jarring, the endings inconsequential. they felt compelled to take on the proj-
ters could make, every narrative bifur- As literature, the books never amounted ect. “We tend to dive head first into
cation, every parallel time line. By to anything; the point was that they things we initially want to reject,” Kwan
chronicling all possible worlds, the au- could be played. “Choose Your Own said. “Interactive filmmaking—it’s like
thor was striving to create a complete Adventure was great,” Kwan told me. this weird thing where you are giving
model of the universe as he understood “But even as a kid I was, like, there is up control of a tight narrative, which
it. Borges apparently recognized that something very unsatisfying about these is kind of the opposite of what most
a philosophical meditation on bifur- stories.” filmmakers want. Because the viewer
cating narratives could make for more Early experiments in interactive film can’t commit to one thing, it can be a
rewarding reading than the actual thing. were likewise marred by shtick. In 1995, frustrating experience. And yet we as
“The Garden of Forking Paths,” if it a company called Interfilm collabo- human beings are fascinated by stories
truly explored every possible story line, rated with Sony to produce “Mr. Pay- that we can shape, because that’s what
would have been a novel without any back,” based on a script by Bob Gale, life is like—life is a frustrating thing
direction—a paradox, in that it would who had worked on the “Back to the where we can’t commit to anything. So
48 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
we were, like, O.K., what if we took the song plays, viewers can flip among painting,” Scheinert said. “We were play-
a crack at it? No one was touching sixteen faux cable channels—sports, news, ing with it getting frighteningly surreal.
it. What would happen if we did?” game shows, documentaries, dramas— Maybe there’s, like, thousands of versions
but on each channel everyone onscreen of your girlfriend, and one of them is on
he Daniels live half a mile from is singing Dylan’s lyrics. The video at- stilts, and one of them is a goth—”
T each other, in northern Los Ange- tracted a million views within twenty-four “It was us making fun of the possible-
les, and they often brainstorm in infor- hours, with the average viewer watching worlds concept, almost—but that be-
mal settings: driveway basketball court, it three times in a row. The Daniels liked came overwhelming,” Kwan said.
back-yard swing set, couch, office. After the restrained structure of the interactiv- “And so we started to zero in on our
making an experimental demo for Bloch, ity: instead of forking narratives, the theme,” Scheinert said. “We realized, Oh,
they signed on for a dramatic short film. story—in this case, the song—remained all the silliness is icing more than sub-
“Let us know any ideas you have,” Bloch fixed; viewers were able to alter only the stance.” The premise was that the viewer
told them. “We’ll find money for any context of what they heard. would be able to explore different ver-
weird thing.” By then, Interlude had de- With this principle in mind, the Dan- sions of the breakup but not alter the di-
veloped a relationship with Xbox En- iels came up with an idea for a horror alogue or the outcome. “We thought there
tertainment Studios, a now defunct wing film: five strangers trapped in a bar vis- was something funny about not being
of Microsoft that was created to pro- ited by a supernatural entity. “Each has able to change the story—about making
duce television content for the com- a different take on what it is, and you an interactive film that is thematically
pany’s game console. (The show “Hu- as a viewer are switching between per- about your inability to change things.”
mans,” among others, was first developed spectives,” Kwan said. “One person The Daniels submitted all three
there.) Xbox signed on to co-produce. thinks the whole thing is a prank, so he ideas—three radically different direc-
While brainstorming, the Daniels has a cynical view. One is religious and tions—for Bloch and his team to choose
mined their misgivings for artistic in- sees it as spiritual retribution. One sees from. Then they waited.
sight. “We’d be, like, This could suck if it as her dead husband. The whole thing
the audience was taken out of the story is a farcical misunderstanding of five nterlude operates from behind
right when it was getting good—if they characters who see five different things.” I a metal security door on the sixth
were asked to make a choice when they Their third idea was about a roman- floor of a building off Union Square.
didn’t want to. And then we would laugh tic breakup: a couple wrestling with the The elevator opens into a tiny vesti-
and be, like, What if we intentionally end of their relationship as reality begins bule. On a yellow table is a wooden
did that?” Scheinert told me. “We started to fragment—outer and inner worlds robot, alongside a stack of Which Way
playing with a movie that ruins itself, falling apart in unison. “We got excited books—a copycat series in the style of
even starts acknowledging that.” Per- about it looking like an M. C. Escher Choose Your Own Adventure. A pane
haps the clash between interactivity and
narrative which Ebert had identified
could be resolved by going meta—by
making the discordance somehow es-
sential to the story. The Daniels came
up with an idea based on video-game-
obsessed teen-agers who crash a high-
school party. “We wanted to integrate
video-game aesthetics and moments
into the narrative—crazy flights of fancy
that were almost abrasively interactive,”
Scheinert said. “Because the characters
were obsessed with gaming, we would
have permission to have buttons come
up in an intrusive and motivated way.”
For other ideas, the two directors
looked to previous work by Bloch’s com-
pany. Interlude had designed several sim-
ple games, music videos, and online ads
for Subaru and J. Crew, among others,
but the scope for interaction was limited.
“It was, like, pick what color the girl’s
makeup is, or, like, pick the color of the
car and watch the driver drive around,”
Scheinert recalled. One project that in-
terested them was a music video for Bob
Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” While “ Your grass-fed beef—are the cows forced to eat the grass?”
of glass reveals a bright office space in- viewers to decide. In less than a minute, and the corrupting effects of self-esteem.
side: a lounge, rows of workstations, he was previewing a tiny film: over a Ben-Shaul feared that, as technology
people who mostly postdate 1980. soundtrack of music fit for a Philippe dissolved the boundaries of conventional
Yoni Bloch occupies a corner office. Starck lobby, Hemingway smiled and narrative, it could also interfere with es-
Thin, smiling, and confident, he main- poured the beverage Bloch had selected. sential elements of good storytelling.
tains a just-rolled-out-of-bed look. In He then returned to the graph paper and What was suspense, for example, if not
summer, he dresses in flip-flops, shorts, added a blizzard of hypothetical options: a deliberate attempt to withhold agency
and a T-shirt. Usually, he is at his desk, “You can decide that here it will branch from audience members—people at the
before a bank of flat-screen monitors. again, here it goes into a loop until it edge of their seats, screaming, “Don’t go
An acoustic guitar and a synthesizer knows what to do, and here it becomes in there!,” enjoying their role as helpless
sit beside a sofa, and above the sofa a switching node where five things can observers? At the same time, why did
hangs a large neo-expressionist paint- happen at the same time—and so on.” the mechanisms of filmmaking have to
ing by his sister, depicting a pair of fan- As Bloch was getting his company remain static? Cautiously, he embraced
tastical hominids. off the ground, a small race was under the idea that interactivity could enable
Bloch’s world is built on intimate loy- way among like-minded startups look- a newly pliant idea of cinematic narra-
alties. He wrote his first hit song, in 1999, ing for financial backing. In Switzer- tive—“one that is opposed to most pop-
with his best friend in high school. He land, a company called CtrlMovie had ular movies, which are built on suspense,
co-founded Interlude with two band- developed technology similar to Inter- which make you want to get to the res-
mates, Barak Feldman and Tal Zubal- lude’s, and was seeking money for a olution, and focus you on one track, one
sky. Not long after I met him, he told feature-length thriller. (The film, “Late ending.” Perhaps, he thought, such films
me about the close bond that he had Shift,” had its American première last could even have a liberating social effect:
with his father, a physicist, who, starting year, in New York.) Closer to home, there by compelling audiences to consider the
at the age of nine, wrote in a diary every was Nitzan Ben-Shaul, a professor at multiplicity of options a character could
day: meticulous Hebrew script, filling Tel Aviv University, who, in 2008, had explore, and by giving them a way to act
page after page. After his father passed made an interactive film, “Turbulence,” upon those options, movies could fos-
away, Bloch began reading the massive using software that he had designed with ter a sense of open-mindedness and
document and discovered a new perspec- students. Ben-Shaul, like the Daniels, agency that might be carried into the
tive on conversations they had shared felt some ambivalence about the form, real world. He began pitching his tech-
long before, experiences they had never even as he sought to develop it. “What nology to investors.
spoken about. When he yearned to con- I asked myself while making ‘Turbu- Yoni Bloch and his bandmates, mean-
fer with his father about Interlude, he lence’ was: Why am I doing this?” he while, were lining up gigs in the Pacific
went looking for passages about the com- told me. “What is the added value of Northwest to pay for a flight from Tel
pany; when his son was born, last year, this, if I want to enhance the dramatic Aviv, to present Treehouse to Sequoia
he searched for what his father had writ- effect of regular movies?” The questions Capital, the investment firm. The trip
ten when his first child was born. Rather were difficult to answer. Some of his had grown out of a chance meeting with
than read straight through, Bloch took favorite films—“Rashomon,” for in- Haim Sadger, an Israeli member of the
to exploring the diary sporadically, out firm, who had handed Bloch his busi-
of time—as if probing a living memory. ness card after seeing a demo of “I Can’t
Treehouse is an intuitive program for Be Sad Anymore” at a technology con-
a nonintuitive, nonlinear form of story- vention in Tel Aviv. Bloch, who hadn’t
telling, and Bloch is adept at demon- heard of Sequoia and thought it sounded
strating it. In his office, he called up a fly-by-night, filed the card away. But,
series of video clips featuring the model once the significance of the interest was
Dree Hemingway sitting at a table. Below explained to him, he worked to get his
the clips, in a digital workspace resem- band to the group’s headquarters, in
bling graph paper, he built a flowchart Menlo Park, California.
to map the forking narrative—how her Bloch speaks with a soft lisp, and in
story might divide into strands that stance—prodded viewers to consider a a tone that betrays no urgency to mon-
branch outward, or loop backward, or story’s divergent possibilities without re- etize, but he is a skilled pitchman. Once,
converge. At first, the flowchart looked quiring interactivity. As a result, they he gave a presentation to a Hollywood
like a “Y” turned on its side: a story with maintained their coherence as works of director who was recovering from a back
just one node. “When you start, it is al- art and, uncomplicated by the problems injury and had to stand. “Even if you’re
ways ‘To be, or not to be,’ ” he said. The of audience participation, could be both standing and he’s sitting, it feels the
choice here was whether Hemingway emotionally direct and thought-provok- other way round,” the director recalled.
would serve herself coffee or tea. Bloch ing. “Rashomon”’s brilliance, Ben-Shaul “He owns the room.” Sadger told me
dragged and dropped video clips into understood, was not merely the result that three minutes into his presentation
the flowchart, then placed buttons for of its formal inventiveness. Its director, Bloch had everyone’s attention. Com-
tea and coffee into the frame, and set the Akira Kurosawa, had imbued it with his ing from the worlds of music videos and
amount of time the system would allow ideas about human frailty, truth, deceit, video games, rather than art films, Bloch
50 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
and his band spoke earnestly, and with
little hesitancy, about revolutionizing
cinematic narratives. “They didn’t see
at the time the tremendous business po-
tential that their creative idea and evolv-
ing technology had,” Sadger said. The
Sequoia investors recognized a business
that could not only earn revenue by li-
censing the technology but also harvest
data on viewer preferences and support
new advertising models; they offered
Bloch and his bandmates more than
three million dollars. “They beat us in
getting large investments,” Ben-Shaul
recalled. “Our investment fell through—
and they took off.”
By the time Bloch moved to New
York, in 2011, and contacted the Dan-
iels, Interlude had raised an additional
fifteen million dollars in venture capi-
tal. Bloch told the directors that if there
were creative options that Treehouse did
not provide he could build them. The
role of enabler comes naturally to him. “When he reached the end of the pier, the rhetoric turned nasty.”
(His best songs, a critic at Haaretz told
me, were those he had written and pro-
duced for other people.) Bringing a music • •
producer’s sense of discrimination to
video, Bloch told the Daniels that they eight, sixteen. The Daniels envisioned in a car and begins to drive away / etc.”
should make the breakup story. “Right viewers using thumbnails to flip among Like a simple melody harmonized with
away, it was, like, Let’s go with the hard- the alternate realities onscreen. varied chords, the story would change
est concept,” he told me. “Love stories Translating the treatment into a script emotional texture in each world. To keep
have been written billions of times, es- posed a unique challenge: because the track of all the permutations, the Dan-
pecially love tragedies. It’s the oldest dialogue needed to be identical across iels used a color-coded spreadsheet.
story in the book. Finding out how to the sixteen different performances, so The Daniels cast Alex Karpovsky (of
make it different while using the audi- that viewers could shift from one to an- “Girls”) and Zoe Jarman (of “The Mindy
ence is something you can’t do easily.” other seamlessly, Rick’s and Polly’s lines Project”) as Rick and Polly, and then re-
had to be highly general. “Early on, we corded the two actors improvising off the
“P ossibilia” is a term of art in meta-
physics, and it is also the title that
came up with all sorts of specific lines,
and they kept falling by the wayside, be-
script. “We kind of fell in love with their
mumbly, accidental, awkward moments,”
the Daniels placed on the cover sheet cause we couldn’t come up with differ- Scheinert said. But these “accidents,” like
of a six-page treatment for their breakup ent ways to interpret them,” Scheinert the written dialogue, would also have to
film—alongside mug shots of twen- said. “It got vaguer the harder we worked be carefully synchronized across the
ty-three uniformed schoolgirls, each on it, which is the opposite of good screen- many possible versions of the story. The
with an orange on her shoulder. The writing.” Kwan added, “Basically, we al- Daniels edited the improvisations into
schoolgirls don’t signify anything, ex- lowed the location, the performance, and an audio clip and gave it to the actors
cept, perhaps, that the remaining pages the actions to give all the specificity.” to memorize. Even so, to keep the tim-
are going to get weird, and that a seri- At one moment of tension, as the film ing precise, the actors had to wear ear-
ous idea will be toyed with. splinters into eight parallel worlds, Polly pieces during shooting—listening to
In the treatment, the Daniels sketched declares, “I need to do something dras- their original improvisation, to match
out a cinematic poem: a brief investi- tic!” The script notes that her line will their exact rhythm, while interpreting
gation of indecision and emotional en- be delivered, variously, in the kitchen, in the lines differently. “At first, it was very
tropy in a dissolving romance. The story a laundry room, on the stairs, in a door- disorienting,” Karpovsky told me. “I had
starts with a couple, Rick and Polly, way, on the porch, in the front and back to keep the same pace, or the whole
seated at a kitchen table. They begin to yards, and on the street—and that in math at Interlude would fall apart: this
argue, and, as they do, reality begins to each setting she will make good on her section has to last 8.37 seconds, or what-
unravel. Soon, their breakup is unfold- outburst differently: “slaps him and starts ever, so it seamlessly feeds into the next
ing across parallel worlds that divide a fight / starts making out with him / branch of our narrative.”
and multiply: first into two, then four, flips the table / breaks something / gets The result, empathetic and precise,
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 51
could easily work as a gallery installa- at an unimaginably large figure: 3,618, August, Interlude decided to make “Pos-
tion. The multiple worlds lend a sense 502,788,666,131,106,986,593,281,521,497, sibilia” viewable online, and I stopped
of abstraction; the vagueness of the lines 120,414,687,020,801,267,626,233,049, by to watch its producers prepare it for
lends intimacy. As Scheinert told me, “It 500,247,285,301,248—more than the release. Alon Benari, an Israeli director
reminded me of bad relationships where number of seconds since the Big Bang. who has collaborated with Bloch for
you have a fight and you are, like, What It is unfeasible to watch every iteration, years, was tweaking the film’s primary
am I saying? We are not fighting about of course; knowing this is part of the tool: a row of buttons for switching
anything.” While working on “Possibilia,” experience. By the time I spoke with among the parallel worlds. The system
the Daniels decided to make the story Karpovsky, I had watched “Possibilia” a took a few seconds to respond to a view-
end in the same place that it begins, dozen times. He gleefully recalled a mo- er’s choice. “A lot of people were click-
dooming Rick and Polly to an eternal ment of particular intensity—“I got to ing, then clicking again, because they
loop. Watching the film, toggling among light my hand on fire!”—that I hadn’t didn’t think anything happened,” he told
the alternate worlds while the characters yet seen. me. “At the moment that viewers inter-
veer between argument and affection, The film, in its structure, had no pre- act, it needs to be clear that their input
one has the sense of being trapped in cedent, and one’s response to it seemed has been registered.” He was working
time with them. There is almost no nar- to be at least partly a function of age on a timer to inform a viewer that a de-
rative momentum, no drive to a definite and technological fluency. When a cision to switch between worlds was
conclusion, and yet the experience sus- screening of the project was arranged about to be enacted. Two days before
tains interest because viewers are caught for Xbox, the studio’s head of program- “Possibilia” went online, Benari reviewed
in the maelstrom of the couple’s present. ming, Nancy Tellem—a former direc- the new system.
As a child, reading Choose Your Own tor of network entertainment at CBS— “Is it good?” Bloch asked him.
Adventure books, I often kept my fingers was uncertain what to do. “I was sitting “Yeah,” Benari said. “I was actually
jammed in the pages, not wanting to at a table with my team, and my natu- on the phone with Daniel, and he was
miss a pathway that might be better ral response was to sit back and say, ‘O.K., happy.” All that was left was the adver-
than the one I had chosen. In “Possi- I want to see the story,’ ” she told me. tising. Interlude had secured a corpo-
bilia” there is no such concern, since all “But then, all of a sudden, my team, rate partnership with Coke, and Benari
the pathways lead to the same outcome. which is half the age that I am, starts was working on a “spark”—five seconds
The ability to wander among the alter- screaming, ‘Click! Click! Click!’ ” of footage of a woman sipping from a
nate worlds serves more as a framing In 2014, a version of the film hit bottle, which would play before the film.
device, a set of instructions on how to the festival circuit, but it quickly be- Watching the ad, he said, “The visuals
consider the film, than as a tool for ex- came impossible to see. Just after its are a bit too clean, so with the audio we
haustive use. “Possibilia” is only six min- début, Microsoft shuttered Xbox En- are going to do something a bit grungy.”
utes long, but when a member of Inter- tertainment Studios, to reassert a focus After listening to a rough cut, he walked
lude roughly calculated the number of on video games—stranding all its dra- me to the door. He was juggling several
different possible viewings, he arrived matic projects without distribution. Last new projects. He had recently shown
me a pilot for an interactive TV show,
its mood reminiscent of “Girls.” The in-
teractivity was light; none of the fork-
ing pathways significantly affected the
plot. Benari thought that there was value
in the cosmetic choices—“You still feel
a sense of agency”—but he was hoping
for more. Wondering if the director was
simply having trouble letting go, he said,
“We like the storytelling, and the act-
ing, but we feel he needs to amp up the
use of interactivity.”

rying to invent a new medium,

T it turns out, does not easily inspire
Early on, Interlude applied its
focus.
technology to just about every form of
visual communication: online educa-
tion, ads, children’s programming,
games, music videos. But in the past
year Bloch has steered the company
toward dramatic entertainment. After
“There are no seats left together, but maybe if you make pouty faces Microsoft shut down Xbox Enter-
at me I can magically add more chairs to the airplane.” tainment Studios, he invited Nancy
 “As of four days ago,” he said, smiling.
Even as the company was expand-
THE HEAD OF A DANCER ing, Bloch was striving to preserve a
sense of scrappy authenticity. “We are
The days when you lean your head forward, then pull your a company run by a band,” he insisted.
head back, to see the sun is only a chrysanthemum, the eye is “Everything sums up to money—I have
a white lake with a black boat moored at a particle pier that learned this—but we still believe that
says what you want back isn’t coming. The white speck says if you make the work about the story it
there is a light source that shines day and night far from a will be powerful.” One of Eko’s creative
balcony on which an audience waits to see us open our doll directors was overseeing a grass-roots
eyes and close them again. I keep my face facing front to see strategy to attract talent, giving semi-
every last thing that is coming. What is coming is this: a hat nars at universities and conferences, en-
to be worn when taking a train, a compact in a pocket, a couraging people to use the software,
letter in a pocket, two hands, a waterfall pouring its contents which is available for free online. Hun-
into a well-worn shuddering mind. I’m as devoted to dreds of amateurs have submitted films.
knowing as the dim fish swimming in an ever-widening The best of them have been invited to
circle. Today outraced the latest hour of midnight, my hat tells make actual shows.
you that. That and that I strangely resemble you: eyes, nose, Of the marquee projects, “War-
lips that refuse to open, knowing the face is glass and that glass Games” is the furthest along in devel-
can make or break you. The dog in the street pauses just as a opment, with shooting scheduled to
car comes. Where does it stop? And now this, someone says. begin this winter. When Bloch’s team
The precise line draws the bone that holds the cheek in place. pitched M-G-M, they had in mind a
The cheek waits to be kissed by air as it was once kissed by project tied to the original film, which
the dark-haired boy in the boathouse whose late-night lesson is about a teen-age hacker (Matthew
was that the distance between what had been described and Broderick) who breaks into a military
what was now happening was immeasurable. The morning server and runs a program called Global
after, the black shoes on the shelf were married to a new Thermonuclear War. He thinks the
all-encompassing idea: the dress is no longer the thing the program is a game, but in fact it helps
future is founded on. You put it on. You take it off. control the American nuclear arsenal,
and soon he must reckon with the
—Mary Jo Bang possibility that he has triggered a real
nuclear war.
Sam Barlow, the Eko creative direc-
Tellem to serve as Interlude’s chief Six months after Tellem was hired, tor overseeing the reboot, worked in
media officer and chairperson. Tellem, Interlude secured a deal with M-G-M video-game design before Bloch hired
impressed by the way Interlude view- to reboot “WarGames,” the nineteen- him. He told me, “The premise in the
ers tended to replay interactive con- eighties hacker film, as an interactive pitch was that there is a game, a literal
tent, accepted. “The fact that people television series. (M-G-M also made game, that you are playing, and then—
go back and watch a video two other an eighteen-million-dollar invest- as with the original—it becomes appar-
times—you never see it in linear tele- ment.) Last April, CBS hired Inter- ent that there is a more nefarious pur-
vision,” she told me. “In fact, in any se- lude to reimagine “The Twilight Zone” pose behind it. The idea was that you
ries that you might produce, the hope in a similar way, and in June Sony Pic- would be able to see the reaction to what
is that the normal TV viewer will watch tures made a multimillion-dollar “stra- you are doing as live-action video.”
a quarter of it.” Interactive films might tegic investment.” By August, Inter- This proposal was soon set aside, how-
have seemed like a stunt in the nine- lude was sitting on more than forty ever, out of fear that toggling between a
ties, but for an audience in the age of million dollars in capital—the money game and filmed segments would be jar-
Netflix personalized content has be- reflecting the growing industry-wide ring. Instead, Barlow pulled together a
come an expected norm; L.C.D. screens interest. (Steven Soderbergh recently new pitch. Hacking was still central, but
increasingly resemble mirrors, offering completed filming for a secretive in- it would be explored in the present-day
users opportunities to glimpse them- teractive project at HBO.) Business context of groups like Anonymous, and
selves in the content behind the tem- cards from other networks, left behind in the murky post-Cold War geopoliti-
pered glass. Employees at Bloch’s com- in Bloch’s office like bread crumbs, cal environment: terrorism, drone war-
pany envision a future where viewers suggested additional deals in the mak- fare, cyber attacks. The story centered
gather around the water cooler to ing; a whiteboard listing new projects on a young hacker and her friends and
discuss the differences in what they included a pilot for the N.B.A. To sig- family. Viewers would be seated before
watched, rather than to parse a shared nify the corporate transformation, a simulacrum of her computer, viewing
dramatic experience. It is hard not to Bloch told me, his company had qui- the world as she does, through chat
see in this vision, on some level, the etly changed its name, to Eko. screens, Skype-like calls, live streams of
prospect of entertainment as selfie. “As of when?” I asked. cable news. On a laptop, Barlow loaded
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 53
a prototype: three actors chatting in sep- machine learning are rapidly improv- had directed the demo, and they had
arate video windows on a neutral back- ing voice recognition, natural-language imbued it with their usual playfulness.
ground. With quick swipes, he moved processing, and emotion detection, and It opens on a couple in a café. Behind
one window to the foreground. The it’s not hard to imagine that such tech- them, a woman in a sexy dress and a
show’s internal software, he said, would nologies will one day be incorporated muscleman walk in; whichever extra
track the feeds that viewers watched, into movies. Brian Moriarty, a special- catches your gaze enters the story.
noting when they took an interest in per- ist in interactive media at Worcester Throughout, an announcer strives to
sonal relationships, for instance, or in po- Polytechnic Institute, told me, “Explicit describe the tracking system, but the
litical matters. The tracking system would interactivity is going to yield to implicit story he uses as a showcase keeps break-
also gauge their reactions to the protag- interactivity, where the movie is watch- ing down as the characters, using a
onist, to see if they preferred that her ac- ing you, and viewing is customized to magical photo album, flee him by es-
tions have serious consequences (say, put- a degree that is hard to imagine. Sup- caping into their past. Viewers, abet-
ting lives at risk) or prankish ones pose that the movie knows that you’re ting the couple, send them into their
(defacing an official Web site). a man, and a male walks in and you memories by glancing at the photos in
“Suppose you have a significant story show signs of attraction. The plot could their album. At key moments, the story
branch,” Barlow said. “If that’s linked change to make him gay. Or imagine is told from the point of view of the
to an explicit decision that the viewer the possibilities for a Hitchcock-type actor you watch the most. “People start
must make, then it feels kind of me- director. If his film sees you’re noticing out looking at both, and then focus on
chanical and simple.” In contrast, the a certain actor, instead of showing you one—and it is not necessarily the one
show’s system will be able to custom- more of him it shows you less, to in- who talks,” Bloch said. “When you look
ize the story seamlessly, merely by ob- crease tension.” at her, she talks about him, then you
serving what viewers decide to watch. Moriarty believes that as computer care about him.”
This design acknowledged that key life graphics improve, the faces of actors, or The future that the demo por-
choices are often not guided by explicit even political figures, could be subtly tended—entertainment shaped by
decisions but by how we direct our at- altered to echo the viewer’s own fea- deeply implicit interactivity—was one
tention—as Iris Murdoch once noted, tures, to make them more sympathetic. that the Daniels later told me they
“At crucial moments of choice most of Lifelike avatars could even replace ac- found exhilarating and disconcerting.
the business of choosing is already over.” tors entirely, at which point narratives “In some ways, as artists, we are sup-
Before an impending story branch, for could branch in nearly infinite direc- posed to be creating collective experi-
instance, the system would know if a tions. Directors would not so much build ences,” Kwan said. “This could get re-
particular viewer was interested in the films around specific plots as conceive ally messy if what we are actually doing
protagonist’s personal life, and her se- of generalized situations that comput- is producing work that creates more
rious side, and could alter the story ac- ers would set into motion, depending isolated experiences.” Alternatively, it
cordingly—perhaps by killing off a close on how viewers reacted. “What we are is possible to imagine the same tech-
relative and having her seek revenge. looking at here is a breakdown in what nology pulling audiences into highly
Barlow was uncertain how much of a story even means—in that a story is similar story patterns—narratives dom-
the “WarGames” tracking defined as a particular se- inated by violence and sex—as it reg-
mechanics he should reveal quence of causally related isters the basest of human responses.
to the viewer. “The two- events, and there is only one “On the upside, interactivity has
million-dollar question is: Do true story, one version of what the potential to push you to reflect on
we need to show this?” he happened,” Moriarty said. your biases,” Scheinert said. Psycho-
said. He believed that inter- With the development of vir- logical experiments suggest that peo-
active films will increasingly tual reality and augmented ple who inhabit digital avatars of a
resemble online ads: unob- reality—technology akin to race, gender, or age unlike their own
trusively personalized media. Pokémon Go—there is no can become more empathetic. “Done
“When ads first started track- reason that a movie need be right, interactivity can shed light on
ing you, for the first few confined to a theatrical expe- what divides us,” he added. “We find
months you’d be, like, ‘How did they rience. “The line between what is a ourselves talking a lot about video
know?’ A couple of months later, you’d movie and what is real is going to be games lately. Video games have blos-
be, like, ‘Of course they knew. I was difficult to pinpoint,” he added. “The somed into an art form that’s become
Googling baby formula.’ And now it’s, defining art form of the twenty-first pretty cool. People are now making
like, ‘I’m still getting spammed for va- century has not been named yet, but it interactive stories that can move you,
cation properties around Lake Placid, is something like this.” that can make you reflect on your
and I’m, like, Dude, we went. You own choices, because they make you
should already know!’ ” n mid-October, Bloch showed me make the kinds of choices that a hero
In many ways, the swiping system I a video that demonstrates the cine- really has to make. At the same time,
that Barlow had designed was a work- matic use of eye tracking—technology it is really hard to make films with
around for technological limitations that is not yet commercially widespread multiple endings, and I wonder what
that will soon fall away. Advances in but will likely soon be. The Daniels shortcuts will present themselves, what
54 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
patterns. Right now, we don’t have
many to fall back on.”
On the morning that Bloch showed
me the eye-tracking demo, the Eko
offices were humming with anticipa-
tion. Two weeks earlier, the company
had been divided into ten teams that
competed, in a two-day hackathon,
to produce mockups for new shows
or games. The competition was a
search for effective ways to tell sto-
ries in a new medium. The solution
that the Daniels had worked out for
“Possibilia”—a fixed narrative play-
ing out across multiple worlds—might
have sufficed for a short film, where
abstract dialogue could be tolerated,
but it was not scalable to feature-length
projects. That morning, an Eko cre-
ative director told me that he was
wrestling with the magnitude of the
creative shift. “What does character
development even mean if a viewer
is modifying the character?” he said.
If a film has five potential endings,
does it constitute a single work of art,
or is it an amalgam of five different
works?
All the teams had completed their
mini films, and Bloch, in his office, was
ready to announce the winner. An em- “No one designs for cat bodies.”
ployee knocked on his door. “Should I
yalla everyone?” he asked—using the
Arabic term for “Let’s go.” • •
“Yalla everyone,” Bloch said.
In the office cafeteria, there was a
long wooden table, beanbag chairs, a something that is more godlike—is problem with them today was the
drum kit. People munched on pop- much more exciting.” naïveté of the execution, but eventu-
corn. On a flat-screen monitor, the The winner, Bloch announced, was ally the requisite artistic sophistica-
staff of Eko’s Israeli satellite office, “The Mole,” in which the viewer plays tion would emerge. “Every time there
which does the technical work, had a corporate spy. The team had written is a new medium, there’s an excessive
video-conferenced in. Bloch held a software that made it possible to ma- use of it, and everyone wants to make
stack of envelopes, as if he were at the nipulate objects in the film—pick them it blunt,” he told me. “When stereo
Oscars, and began to run through the up and move them. Bloch thought the was introduced—with the Beatles, for
submissions. Two groups had used software had immediate commercial example—you could hear drums on
voice recognition, making it possible potential. Walking back to his office, he the left, singing on the right, and it
to talk to their films. Others had toyed expressed his excitement about what it didn’t make sense musically. But, as
with “multiplayer” ideas. Sam Barlow’s would mean to permanently alter a time went on, people started to use
team had filmed a man in Hell trying scene: to tamper with evidence in a crime stereo in ways that enhanced the
to save his life in a game of poker. drama, say, and know that the set would music.” Bloch had started assembling
Viewers play the role of Luck, select- stay that way. “It makes the world’s ex- a creative board—filmmakers, game
ing the cards being dealt—not to win istence more coherent,” he said. designers, writers—to think about such
the game but to alter the drama among Even as a number of Bloch’s cre- questions. “We have to break out of
the players. Bloch said he had cited ative directors were working to make the gimmicky use of interactivity, and
the film in a recent presentation as a the interactivity more implicit, he did make sure it is used to enhance a story.
possibility worth exploring. “The ex- not think that explicit choices would We are in the days of ‘Put the drums
pected thing in that kind of story is fade away. Done well, he believed, they on the left.’ But we’re moving to where
that you would be the guy who comes could deepen a viewer’s sense of re- we don’t have to do that. People, in
to Hell,” he said. “Playing Luck— sponsibility for a story’s outcome; the general, are ready for this.” 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 55
 FICTION

56 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS DOYLE

 ridget lived in Barcelona for “What are you doing?” ered together, had swum naked together

B a year. First she stayed with her

college friends Maya and An-
drew, who were trying to be poets, and
“I wanted to make sure you were
comfortable.”
“I’m comfortable,” she said, and he
at a beach in Sitges. Angela’s flesh was
so pale that if you pressed a finger to
her thigh the skin blushed dark pink,
then she sublet from a man named went back to bed with Angela. as if embarrassed by the touch. Now she
Marco, whom she’d met at a grocery was drinking cheap Rioja, her teeth turn-
store. She had a fling with a woman ngela and her German boyfriend ing purple. “I’m going to enroll in an
named Bernadette, who was from New A were little parents. They liked to education program and get certified to
Zealand and shared a flat with a Scot make a fuss over people and put on elab- teach kindergarten,” she was saying.
named Laurie, whom Bridget also slept orate dinner parties, and then they’d get “Hans will work with my father once
with, and that was the end of things drunk and spend the night bickering. his paperwork is settled. The business
with Bernadette. Bridget smoked For- It was tedious, and yet you had to in- is very secure. Like my father always
tuna cigarettes and wrote furiously in dulge them, because you could see how says, empires may rise and fall but peo-
her journal about people she’d known much they enjoyed it, this performance ple still need light bulbs.”
and slept with, or wanted to sleep with, of adulthood. Bridget stayed with them In Bridget’s stomach, the cockles
or had slept with and then been rejected for two months, and would have felt swam restlessly in a river of wine. “You
by. She was twenty-three years old. guilty about mooching, if they hadn’t so seem young to get married,” she said.
One night at Marco’s apartment, she clearly wanted to gather around them- Angela shook her head, and her braid
was awakened by loud knocking. Still selves a collection of misfits to take care flapped against her shoulder. “Oh, we
semi-drunk from an evening with Maya of. In addition to Bridget, they often won’t get married for at least a year. We
and Andrew, she stumbled to the door hosted an assortment of hard-drinking have to plan. Not to mention book the
and opened it to find three junkies stand- Germans from Hans /Anders’s work, church. The flowers alone! You have no
ing there, asking for Marco. She knew whatever it was, and Mei Ling, a Chi- idea.”
they were junkies because Marco was a nese-Canadian woman who had a clus- She was right about that. Bridget let
junkie—he’d told her this—and all his ter of gray whiskers on her otherwise her go—from the conversation, from
friends were junkies, too. They needed smooth cheek, like a tuft of crabgrass their passing friendship, from the coun-
Marco’s furniture, for reasons that were thriving on a lawn. Mei Ling’s reasons try of Spain. She found another place
unclear, and they shoved her aside and for being in Barcelona were unclear; to stay and, when Angela hosted a last
began moving the kitchen table, the whenever Bridget talked to her, she dinner party to say goodbye, Bridget
futon. For junkies, they were robust and scowled and left the room. Angela said said that she was sick and didn’t go.
rosy-cheeked, and she didn’t put up much that she was very depressed.
defense. Somehow this incident was all Bridget would have stayed there in- o her surprise, she herself was
her fault. Marco kicked her out and she definitely, but one morning Hans/An- T back in Canada within six months.
went to live in a cheap hotel, drinking ders brought her coffee in her dog bed Marco stopped by the restaurant one
anise in bed and staring at the peeling and said that they had to talk. “We’re day to tell her that her mother had been
wallpaper. Later, Marco made her file a leaving,” he said. calling, and, when she called back, her
false police report saying that his lap- “For work?” As usual, she was hung mother didn’t even scold her for being
top had been stolen. He said that it was over. hard to reach. “I have some news,” she
the only way she could make up for her He shook his head and patted her said tightly. “Your father isn’t feeling
transgressions. shoulder. “Angela and I are getting mar- well.”
The person who rescued her from ried and moving to Canada. You can Bridget held the receiver in her hot
the cheap hotel was Angela, whom she’d come visit us anytime.” palm. She was on break, a stained white
met at the restaurant where they both “Does Angela know this?” apron around her hips, her armpits still
waitressed. Angela was from Vancou- He laughed. “It was her idea,” he said dripping from the afternoon rush, and
ver, and some dewy freshness that Brid- tenderly. “Everything is always her idea.” a table of three men eyed her with the
get associated with the West Coast Bridget was stunned and a little ir- impersonal but aggressive sexual hos-
seemed to cling to her always, even when ritated. She was used to a constant ex- tility she’d grown used to. She burst into
she was sleep-deprived or drunk. An- change of friends and lovers, and the tears, and the men rolled their eyes and
gela had a German boyfriend with a idea that one of these relationships turned to a better target. As if in one
face so feminine that he looked exqui- should be considered permanent struck movement, she hung up the phone, un-
site, like a porcelain doll. His name was her as inconsiderate. It went against the tied the apron, collected her passport
Hans, or maybe Anders. He was always way they were all trying to live: step- from Maya and Andrew’s apartment,
nice to Bridget, and when Angela ping lightly on this earth, skirting the and went home.
brought her home he made up a bed folly of human certainty. That night, she Her father lived for a year so dreary
for her in the corner of their tiny living and Angela went out for drinks. They and relentlessly full of pain that she
room, a pile of blankets and pillows, as sat in an outdoor courtyard eating tiny was forced to wish him dead. He had
if she were a stray dog. Once, in the meatballs and cockles in tomato sauce. been a jokester, her father, spilling over
middle of the night, she woke to see Angela’s blond braid nestled against her with inappropriate remarks. Since she’d
him crouching in front of her, staring. neck. She and Bridget had once show- worn a bikini once at age ten, he had
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 57
called her Bardot, after Brigitte, whom kitten heels, and saw her mother every was allowed to skip the dancing. At
she did not resemble in the slightest. other weekend, whether her mother one point Bridget found herself sitting
He gave whoopee cushions as gifts. He wanted her to or not. In the evenings, with an elderly uncle, telling him a long
did impressions so terrible that no one she still sometimes wrote in her jour- story about her father, as he nodded
ever guessed who he was supposed to nal, but the entries tended to turn into and listened gravely, his wife mean-
be. In the hospital, tethered to a tubu- grocery lists, so she stopped. She was while instructing Sam in a dance. An-
lar bouquet of chemotherapy drugs, he not unhappy. She liked being an adult, gela came up behind Bridget and put
gritted his teeth and attempted to make being good at her job, owning a car, her hands on her shoulders, her cheek
light of the situation, but there was no painting the walls of her apartment on against Bridget’s cheek. She was still
light to be made. His body shrank; he a Saturday afternoon. She didn’t know blond and fresh-faced, but skinnier now,
was smaller every morn- why she’d ever resisted it. her dress a severe column of white, no
ing, as if repeatedly robbed When the invitation to frills or lace. Her hair was pulled back
of substance in the night. Angela’s wedding came, in a chignon. Grown up, she was all
Bridget wanted only for his Bridget stared at the enve- geometry.
suffering to end, and, when lope for a few minutes be- “Thanks for being here, Bardot,” she
it finally did, she sobbed fore she remembered who whispered in Bridget’s ear. “It wouldn’t
so hard she felt as if her Angela was. She sent her have been the same without you.” Brid-
lungs were liquefying. Her regrets and forgot about it get squeezed her hand, touched that
mother was a husk, dried until the phone rang at she’d remembered this old nickname.
out by grief. She didn’t want eleven o’clock one night And then Angela was swept away by a
to stay in the house alone, so she sold and on the other end was Angela, crowd that lifted her to the dance floor
it, bought a condo downtown, and took weeping. and demanded she perform. She danced
up choral singing. One day, she pressed “I knew I must have offended you,” gamely, but her hair was coming loose;
her cool palm to Bridget’s forehead she said. “I have to explain. We both she kept raising a hand to poke at the
and said gently, “What will you do know you should have been a brides- strands, and her smile tightened each
now, dear?” maid, but Charles’s family is enor- time she felt the disarray.
Bridget hadn’t thought that far; she mous—I swear he has ten thousand
had conceived of herself as a source of cousins—and, you see, in their culture ridget and Sam moved to Ot-
support and nothing else. Now she saw things are quite different. I wish—” B tawa and had two children, Rob-
that her mother needed her to go, and This went on for some time. Finally, ert and Melinda—Bobby and Mellie.
she felt abandoned. In the year of tend- Bridget said, “Angela, it’s fine. I wasn’t Their kids were joiners; they hated to
ing to her father she hadn’t worked and offended.” be alone, and every weekend they
had lost touch with most of her friends. A pause, a sniffle. “So you’ll come, wanted to see their friends at soccer,
Sitting in a café downtown, she wrote then?” Angela said. Her voice was tinny, birthday parties, figure skating, hockey,
a letter to Angela, the kind of letter you a child’s, with a child’s manipulation dance recitals, sleepovers. This took up
write only to someone you haven’t seen edging around the distress. much of life. Bridget began to dream
in a long time and perhaps never knew Bridget felt trapped. “Of course,” she of travel: spas in Costa Rica, yoga re-
well, the kind of letter you probably said. treats in Scandinavia.
shouldn’t send at all. Angela replied She and Sam, her fiancé—he was “I think I’m burning out,” she said
within a week. “My heart is with you,” also a lawyer—decided to treat it as a to Sam, and he thought she meant on
she wrote, and Bridget’s eyes swelled vacation. They hiked and swam and work, but she meant on everything. Sam
with tears. went zip-lining at Whistler before end- was stable and good for her, absorbing
Angela and her German had not got ing their trip in Vancouver. “How do whatever she threw at him, the tofu of
married after all; he had met a girl you know her again?” Sam asked in the husbands, but it didn’t help. She con-
named Mavis and moved to Edmon- hotel, where she was steaming her dress, sidered an affair, but it seemed like too
ton and “You know what? Good rid- feeling nervous for reasons she couldn’t much work. Anyway, her days were full
dance!” Angela no longer wanted to be define. of meetings and car pools; there was no
a teacher; she was training to be a mas- Bridget smoothed the dress with time for malfeasance. Instead, she spent
seuse instead. She invited Bridget to her hand, as if stroking her own lap. “I more hours than she should have on-
visit anytime. “We’ll cook and have long barely do,” she said. “It’ll probably be line, seeing whose life had turned out
talks just like we used to,” she wrote, a dull. Forgive me for what we’re about to be more dramatic than her own. That
revision of their history that Bridget to experience.” was how she found Angela, who main-
found sweet. “Oh, I’ll make you pay,” Sam said, tained active accounts on Facebook, Pin-
smiling, and kissed her. terest, and Instagram. Angela was still
he didn’t visit. She went to law The wedding, though, was not dull. in Vancouver and, judging by her pic-
S school and made new friends and Angela’s husband turned out to be a tures, she had one child, an astonish-
when she graduated she got a job in Nigerian cardiac surgeon, and his large ingly beautiful boy who was a perfect
labor relations for a midsized corpo- family was raucous and witty. Every- combination of her and Charles—her
ration. She wore suits to work, with body had to meet everybody. Nobody eyes, his nose—as if they’d divided up
58 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
 bed. Her husband was always at the
hospital. He’d suggested that her symp-
toms were psychosomatic.
“Men always say that women are
crazy,” Angela said vehemently, “but
men have been in charge for most of
history, and look how that’s turned out!”
Bridget laughed.
“Bitches be crazy,” Angela went on,
shaking her head and making air quotes.
Bridget didn’t know what, or whom,
she was quoting.
Angela sighed. “I shouldn’t com-
plain, though,” she said. “He keeps us
in frogs and fresh sheets.”
Bridget laughed again. She was en-
joying herself more than she’d expected
to. They ordered another bottle of wine,
which Angela chose because it was or-
ganic and sulfite-free. “I can’t taste the
difference,” Bridget said.
“You’ll thank me tomorrow,” An-
gela said.
Around them, the hotel swelled with
people sitting alone, stroking their
“Personally, I prefer the old White House pressroom.” phones with one hand while eating or
drinking with the other. Even when the
• • place was full, it was quiet. By ten o’clock,
the bar was empty again and the street
outside was dark. It was a government
the genes by legal agreement. Angela around her, pressing herself against city, sedate in its schedules.
photographed him playing soccer and Bridget’s chest. It was the way Brid- “I’m not sure I can drive,” Bridget
baking muffins; she pinned recipes for get’s children had hugged her when said to Angela.
organic pancakes with hidden spinach they were little, holding nothing back, “Why don’t you come upstairs for
and discussed the importance of fish-oil and Angela’s body felt like a child’s, a while first?”
supplements. She redid her living room thin and pliant and eager. She nodded.
and posted the swatches; everything was Bridget asked what kind of work The room was decorated in surpris-
off-white. She said that her favorite color she was doing at the conference, and ingly offensive shades of mauve and
was bone. Bridget clicked “Like.” Within Angela waved her hand shyly. “I’m green. Angela’s things were flung ev-
a day, a message from Angela popped up not working these days,” she said. erywhere, her suitcase open on the
in her in-box, frothing with six years’ “The conference is for people who closet floor, handouts from the day’s
worth of news. Much of it was already have my illness.” The illness was one seminars scattered on the desk, wet
known to Bridget, from the Internet, but that Bridget had never heard of. An- towels dampening the carpet. Bridget
she pretended it wasn’t. As it happened, gela described a set of diffuse symp- lay down on the bed, and Angela sat
Angela was coming to Ottawa for a con- toms—fatigue, muscle aches, cognitive next to her. It seemed lovely to be there,
ference, and they made plans to get to- impairment—that defied diagnosis. with her head on Angela’s lap.
gether. Bridget asked what kind of con- Doctors were perplexed. Much research “I’m sorry you’re sick,” she said, and
ference it was. “Medical,” Angela wrote. still had to be done. Angela nodded, stroking her hair. Brid-
On the day they were to meet, Brid- “What kind of cognitive impair- get turned then, and wrapped her arms
get went straight from the office, in ment?” Bridget said. around Angela’s waist. The two of them
her pencil skirt and heels, to the bar “Oh,” Angela said, smiling. “I’m in fell asleep that way, body to body,
at Angela’s hotel downtown. It was a a fog most of the time.” flushed cheek against warm leg, an em-
modest hotel that catered to visiting She didn’t seem in a fog to Bridget. brace that was not about sex but not
bureaucrats. Angela was sitting in a They sat drinking wine and discussing not about it, either, a hunger for touch
booth, wearing jeans and a light car- the annoying habits of their husbands that was somehow satisfied by this mid-
digan. A bone-colored cardigan. Her and children, the dirty socks left on dle distance, this mutual understand-
hair was cut in a pleasant bob, and she couches, dishes unscraped in the sink. ing. Later, when Bridget thought about
was still blond. When she saw Brid- Angela’s son had bought a frog at a pet the night in the hotel, she would re-
get, she stood up and flung her arms store and tried to sleep with it in his member how Angela, down at the bar,
60 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
had said, with sudden sobriety, “No- get like a euphemism for something, which tens, hundreds of lengthier ques-
body takes care of me,” and then though she wasn’t sure what. Angela tions loomed.
laughed, dismissing her self-pity with had decided that her symptoms were “Because you are her best friend.”
a toss of her pale hair. caused by an allergy to electricity, so On the field, Mellie went down hard,
she lived without it. She had a wood- and Bridget involuntarily straightened
hey swore to keep in better touch, stove and candles. She didn’t use com- in her seat, but a few seconds later her
T but didn’t. Once Angela was back puters and was reading a lot. “I feel a daughter bounced up again, laughing.
in Vancouver, her social-media accounts bit better every day,” she wrote, a state- She shook her ankle and high-stepped
took a turn from organic cooking and ment that seemed to herald its own con- in a circle, as if she were doing the
home decorating to alternative health tradiction. Of her son she said little. hokey pokey. And then everyone was
and New Age spirituality. She was doing Bridget wrote back, wishing her well, running again. Bridget caught her
chelation and oxygen therapy. She and the correspondence seemed to die breath, sometimes, when she saw how
smudged her home with sage. Her a natural death; there was no habitual athletic her daughter was, how reck-
thinking seemed dire. She was preoc- rhythm in Bridget’s life for such let- less her grace, how fully she possessed
cupied with the tensions in the Mid- ters. When, a year later, her cell phone her youth.
dle East and believed that global lit up with a Vancouver area code, she The thing happening in the car—
conflict was imminent. She adopted assumed that it was Angela, but the the phone call, the man’s voice, his be-
two cats because she wanted her son voice that greeted her was low and com- wildering request—did not seem real
to experience as much joy as possible manding and male. compared with Mellie’s loping stride
before the world came to an end. But “This is Dr. Charles Adebayo. We as she deftly stole the ball and toyed
she and her son both turned out to be met at my wedding,” he said. with it, her skittering feet driving it to-
allergic, and “#catproblems” accompa- “Yes, I remember,” Bridget said, con- ward the net and then past the goalie.
nied most of her posts. fused. She was sitting in her car, lis- Mellie clasped her hands above her
Then came a year when Sam—al- tening to music, while Mellie fought head and glanced over at the car. Brid-
ways the steady one, the imperturbable her way through a soccer game in ter- get honked the horn. I saw.
base—almost died of heart trouble. For rible blustery weather. “Are you there?” Charles said. “The
months, Bridget took care of him and “My former wife is ill,” Charles said. situation may be critical. We request
their family, and, when he was better, There was a solemnity to his voice that that you come as soon as you are able.”
their marriage was better, too; it had was hard to reconcile with the laugh- Bridget didn’t say, “I haven’t talked
solidified under the stress, like a build- ing man of years ago. It was the voice to Angela in years.” She didn’t say, “I
ing settling on its foundation. During of a man who’d had practice speaking would have thought she had closer
this time, Bridget rarely went online. about difficult topics and knew to pro- friends.” She simply agreed to answer
She found it hurtful to see other peo- vide them careful containment. “She the summons.
ple’s smiling, healthy families or, even would like for you to visit, and I would
worse, to hear about lives that seemed like so as well.” he landed in a drizzle of rain that
as fragile as her own; she didn’t need “Is this the electricity thing?” Brid- S continued all the way from the air-
to be reminded that everyone’s happi- get asked. She looked out over the port to the hospital where Charles
ness was in jeopardy. dismal soccer field, more mud than worked, obscuring the city behind a
When she checked back in, Angela grass, where teen-age girls swish of windshield wipers.
was gone. All her accounts had disap- were flinging themselves Traffic moved slowly, and
peared. An e-mail sent to her in-box around with abandon. Mel- she saw nothing but other
went unanswered. Bridget didn’t have lie was her aggressive child, cars and a horizonless sky.
her phone number and couldn’t find a lover of tackles and hits; Angela’s son was wait-
one listed. One evening, while the kids Bobby always played de- ing at the hospital, too. He
were in the basement watching a movie fense. They were both more was all gangly legs in skinny
with their friends, she sat down and wholesome, her children, jeans, his eyes half-hidden
wrote a letter by hand, mailing it to than she’d had any right to beneath bangs. Charles
the last address for Angela that she expect. wore a purple shirt and yel-
could find. “We’re all fine now. Just On the phone, Charles low tie, strangely buoyant
wondering what’s new. How are those sighed, a long, soft note. “We are not colors that contrasted sharply with the
pesky cats?” sure,” he said. “Angela continues to be- gravity of his expression. Over the
As she had so many years earlier, lieve that she suffers from electromag- shirt he wore a white coat. He gripped
Angela wrote back quickly. She no lon- netic hypersensitivity. I believe she may his son’s thin shoulder with a strength
ger had the cats, she wrote, with a lack have other significant health problems, that was clearly both dominant and
of explanation that was slightly omi- but she refuses to see a doctor or be reassuring.
nous. She and Charles had got divorced, tested. We hope that you can persuade They drank coffee and talked about
“on good terms more or less,” and she her to do so.” Angela. Charles mentioned Angela’s
now lived in a little cottage outside the “Me? Why?” Bridget said. She felt weight loss and her “ideation.” The
city. “A little cottage” sounded to Brid- capable only of single syllables, beyond son’s eyes were partly closed, as if he
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 61
were trying to fall asleep. At last She was very thin. One hand rested on father shifted a weight in Bridget’s
Charles wrote down directions to the some kind of machine, from which tub- stomach, tilted her center of gravity.
cottage—“you won’t find it with a ing ran up her arms, under her nose, and The sadness of his death was still a
G.P.S.”—and suggested that she ar- around the top of her head. Her whole sinkhole that she could fall into and
rive in the early morning, when An- face twitched, either with tremors or be swallowed by.
gela was most hospitable. He didn’t with an attempt to smile; Bridget wasn’t “My mother got married again,” she
explain what he meant by “hospita- sure. “Do you know me?” she said. told Angela. “To a dentist named Den-
ble.” Then he asked his son whether Angela nodded. Her eyes were nis. Dennis the dentist. She has these
he had any messages for his mother. cloudy, marbled. “I shouldn’t let you beautiful movie-star teeth now. Ve-
The boy shook his head. in,” she said. “For your own good.” neers, I guess they are? She seems happy.
“What do you mean?” They have a time-share in Florida. So.”
he drive to Angela’s cottage took “I’m in self-isolation. What I have Angela bared her own teeth, which
T Bridget through emerald hills may be contagious.” were not beautiful, small and brown,
made brilliant by the previous day’s Bridget didn’t ask what she had. “I little emblems of decay. “Would you
rain. The city fell away, then the sub- don’t care,” she said. “I want to see you.” like some tea?” she said.
urbs, and then she passed through small Angela turned and disappeared into “Yes,” Bridget said. “Let’s have tea.
towns with no posted names. The road the house. The open door was not an You rest. I’ll make it.”
Charles had instructed her to take invitation. Bridget spent some mo- She had anticipated putting together
dwindled from asphalt to gravel to mud, ments staring at the darkness where a tray of biscuits or bread and jam, brew-
and she began to worry that her econ- her friend had been. After a while, a ing a pot and serving it with sugar and
omy rental car wasn’t up to the task. window above her opened and a sealed milk. But there was no food in Ange-
Her phone reception shrank to a sin- plastic package was thrown down to la’s cottage. The cupboards held only
gle bar. Then the road ended. Charles the ground. It was a medical kit, which, bottles: capsules of bee pollen, vita-
had said, “You will have to park and when she tore it open, turned out to mins, apple-cider vinegar. Next to a
walk.” She stepped out into woods that contain a surgical mask, plastic gloves, teapot on the counter was a bowl hold-
smelled like fir and mushrooms, earthy and shoe covers. She put it all on obe- ing what looked like loose tea leaves;
and chilled, and hoped that the tiny diently and waited until Angela came they smelled like mushrooms, like the
clearing between two trees was the start back to the door and nodded, satisfied. forest outside. She boiled water on the
of a trail. She crashed through it, the Bridget followed Angela through a woodstove, brought a tray into the liv-
loudest thing around. Everything else foyer and into a dim room; the far wall ing room with two cups. Angela’s legs
was still, as if some kind of bad magic held large windows, but they were were now tucked beneath her. Her head
had blanketed the place. But, before crowded with greenery that let in al- lolled to the side at a violent angle, as
she could get too worried, she saw An- most no light. As her eyes adjusted, she if her neck could no longer support its
gela’s cottage, a normal and well- saw that the room was comfortable, weight. She was asleep.
maintained A-frame with geraniums with couches and armchairs and a Bridget left the tea. She took off
planted in window boxes. woodstove in the corner. Angela set- the surgical mask, hiked to the car,
“It is best if you approach her gen- tled into one of the chairs with the ma- and drove to the nearest store, where
tly,” Charles had said. chine at her feet like a pet. she bought some root vegetables and
Bridget didn’t knock on the door. “Charles must have called you,” she rice and fruit. Back at the cottage, An-
She stood in front of the house, allow- said. Her voice was raspy, asthmatic, gela was still asleep in the chair, and
ing herself to be seen. How she knew and it made her tone hard to interpret. Bridget arranged a blanket over her
to do this she couldn’t have said. It was “He did,” Bridget said. She didn’t lap, tucking it in at the sides. Then
a calculation made on instinct. There want to talk about Charles, didn’t want she cooked the vegetables and strained
was a flicker of movement at a win- the freight of marital disagreement in them into a broth. She cooked the
dow, and Bridget turned in a full cir- the room. She leaned forward, putting rice to a bland pudding. She mashed
cle, taking in the dense and quiet her hands on her knees, and saw her sweet potatoes into a purée. When
woods, the pine branches dripping, the friend recoil. “Tell me how you are,” Angela woke up, Bridget spooned the
surprisingly rapidly drifting clouds. she said. broth into her mouth, wiping away
Sam and the kids were visiting his par- Angela stared past her. “There’s a dribbles with a tea towel. Angela did
ents this weekend; they had planned light,” she said. “When I close my eyes not object; she parted her lips like a
a cookout and a horror-movie mara- at night, I see it and think it’s waiting baby. Later, Bridget moved her to the
thon with the cousins. They would for me. Sometimes I think it’s my fa- couch. Bridget herself slept in Ange-
hardly think of her. ther. You know he died.” la’s bed upstairs, which was thin and
Behind her, the reluctant opening “I didn’t know that.” narrow and hard. The next day, more
of a wooden door. “I remember when your father died,” broth, a little rice. She read aloud to
Angela stood silhouetted like a girl Angela said. Her eyes grew sharper. Angela from the only material on
in a fairy tale. She was wearing jeans and “You changed so much. I didn’t un- hand, old copies of Chatelaine and
a T-shirt and her blond hair was in a derstand at the time, but I do now.” the Reader’s Digest which must have
long braid, the way she used to wear it. Even years later, the mention of her been left behind by some previous
62 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
 “We’ll drink wine and stay up too late.
You can meet my kids. You’ll like them,
“TINY” Angela. They’ll make you laugh.”
They were holding hands now. Some
Simon has taken his father, Peter, geese flew overhead in a V-formation,
to the town’s museum on No Through Road and the trees swayed back and forth,
to see for himself the world’s smallest dog. as if they, too, were seeking touch. In
Six inches at most from his mouse’s nose one of Angela’s magazines, Bridget had
to the tip of his outstretched paintbrush tail, read an article about a scientist who
“Tiny” was born to pedigree pointers had proved that trees could form a kind
of true proportion the same year Lassell of friendship, twining their roots to-
discovered Triton—Neptune’s largest moon— gether. Sometimes one tree would curve
and Britannia stole the Mountain of Light. its branches away from the other’s, so
He was raised as a regular working hound that its friend got enough sun to sur-
but at three years old chased a rat down a hole, vive. Angela said nothing, and the trees
caught a fatal chill, and was later embalmed. fell silent, too, as if to make sure that
Under a glass dome, skewbald and well groomed, Bridget heard her refusal.
he’s tracking a scent through a diorama
of matchstick fence posts and pipe-cleaner trees; he didn’t see Angela again. She
a warped sky of roof beams and lightbulbs swims S flew home to her family, leaving the
in the bulged, unblinking eye of the case. cottage stocked with soups and stews,
Simon says, “Do you think he’s real? I think and fell gladly back into the mad rou-
he’s real—look at the fine nap of his coat.” tine of extracurricular activities and
But Peter is elsewhere now, admiring conference calls and neighborhood din-
an Iron Age mattock, a chunk of quartz, ner parties. For a while she tried to stay
and a nineteenth-century fishing skiff, in touch with Charles, but he never
actual size. For only twenty pence sounded pleased to hear from her; she
the clockwork tin mine stutters into life. understood that she had failed him.
He finally removed Angela from the
—Simon Armitage cottage by force, and she spent time in
and out of hospitals. She didn’t respond
to Bridget’s letters, and Charles said
occupant; she couldn’t imagine An- you?” Bridget asked her. She didn’t men- she refused to use a phone.
gela buying them. She read recipes, tion that she had seen him in the city. “How long do you think she can go
“Laughter Is the Best Medicine” col- Angela’s eyes brimmed with tears, and on like this?” Bridget asked him the
umns, stories about brave pets and re- she shook her head. last time they spoke.
markable women. It was hard to tell “I lost him,” she said. “I cannot hazard a guess,” he said,
whether Angela was listening; she “But why?” Bridget said. After two and hung up.
mostly lay back with her eyes closed, nights at the cottage, her eyes and Bridget stood in her kitchen, watch-
her fingers playing idly with the tub- skin ached. She couldn’t stop think- ing the wind twist maple leaves off a
ing of her machine. ing about hamburgers and red wine. tree in the yard. The kids were upstairs
Once evening fell, Bridget lit a fire She wondered what Sam and the kids in their rooms. Bobby was going away
in the stove and fed Angela again. were eating, watching, what jokes to college next year; Mellie the year after
When she was about to go upstairs, they’d be making later that she wouldn’t that. Sam was travelling more for work
Angela grabbed her hand and said, understand. these days. Bridget would soon be
“Please, no.” So she took some pillows “Bridge,” Angela said. It was a sunny, stripped back to herself. Sometimes she
and cushions from the armchairs and windy day and her fine hair was lifted thought of this aloneness as a luxury.
made a bed for herself on the floor. in the breeze, floating up and away as Sometimes she was afraid of it. Some-
In the morning, Angela’s eyes looked if it wanted to escape her. “You must times she saw her life as a tender thing
brighter. She disconnected herself from understand,” she said. Her voice was that was separate from herself, a tiny
the machine long enough to take a short patronizing, kind and sad, as if she were animal she had happened upon by
walk around the house. Afterward, they a parent explaining death to a child. chance one day and decided to raise. It
sat outside and drank Angela’s terrible “With what I have,” she said, “I’m past was terrifying to think how small it was,
tea, which tasted like moss and feet. the point of no return.” how wild, how easily she could fit it in
Angela had allowed Bridget to dispense “Come home with me,” Bridget said the palm of her hand. ♦
with the mask, saying only, “I suppose impulsively. “Stay at my house. We’ll
you’ve been exposed. I just hope your watch movies on the couch and eat NEWYORKER.COM
immune system is stronger than mine.” junk food.” She could sense Angela Alix Ohlin on friendships and the casual but genuine
“Does your son come here to visit stiffen but kept going, unable to stop. intimacy of social media.

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 63

 THE CRITICS

POP MUSIC

IN RETROSPECT
John Cale’s reissued albums feature wild new inventions.

BY AMANDA PETRUSICH

or the past several years, John and then articulates it. The result can the soundtrack for the animated film
F Cale, the Welsh musician and co- be challenging and discordant, but this “Shrek”—that most people recognize.
founder of the Velvet Underground, is still a deeply benevolent impulse—to Cale also monkeyed with the lyrics.
has been selectively reissuing his back recognize and free pain. “Fragments of After he heard Cohen singing differ-
catalogue. Some of these efforts are a Rainy Season” opens with a song called ent words to the song during a show
straightforward: an old record is re- “A Wedding Anniversary.” Cale sings at the Beacon Theatre, he asked about
mastered, and given new packaging, lyrics by Dylan Thomas—another ach- alternative verses. Cohen reportedly
an updated set of liner notes, and per- ing Welshman—over a tense piano mel- faxed him fifteen pages of unused lines;
haps a new video. Others are wild re- ody. “Death strikes their house,” he in- from these, Cale pulled together new
imaginings. This spring, Cale will be tones, his voice cavernous and melancholy. lyrics, which change the entire narra-
seventy-five. Lou Reed, his collabo- “Too late in the wrong rain.” tive trajectory of the song, making it
rator in the Velvet Underground, died Thomas imbibed and philandered bloodier, less celestial. It contains a
in 2013, followed by other friends and without restraint, dying, in 1953, of pneu- heartbreakingly succinct account of
peers: Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, monia exacerbated by the several days how it feels to watch someone fall out
the experimental composer Pauline he’d spent drinking whiskey at the White of love with you:
Oliveros. It can feel, at times, as if Horse Tavern, in the West Village. But There was a time you let me know
Cale is tidying his legacy—dusting he wrote often of the possibility of put- What’s really going on below
the house before company comes by. ting off death, or, at least, of defying it. But now you never show it to me, do you?
Last month, Cale reissued “Frag- His poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into I remember when I moved in you
ments of a Rainy Season,” a live album That Good Night,” published in 1951, And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah.
recorded at various stops on a 1991 ends, “Rage, rage against the dying of
world tour. He was usually accompa- the light.” The fifth verse opens, “Maybe there’s
nied only by his own piano playing, It is not hard to sense that same spirit a God above/but all I ever learned from
and the set list included composi- in Cale. In the early nineties, Cale closed love/was how to shoot at someone who
tions from different eras in his dis- most of his sets with a cover of Leon- outdrew you.” On this line, Cale resists
cography, along with covers of lone- ard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which Cale the temptation to sing “you” as the more
some songs like “Heartbreak Hotel.” first recorded in 1991, for a tribute album colloquial “ya,” which Cohen often did,
For the reissue, Cale added eight new titled “I’m Your Fan: The Songs of Leon- and cheekily—to make it rhyme in a
tracks: some alternative versions—in- ard Cohen,” and later included on “Frag- satisfying way with “hallelujah.” He
cluding a second, more jarring “Heart- ments of a Rainy Season.” “Hallelujah,” seems to know that the lyric contains
break Hotel,” with distorted strings which was released by Cohen in 1984, too tough a lesson to be made cute: how
and other inconsonant noises—and has been covered so relentlessly that it to be bested by someone you trusted
some songs that didn’t make the orig- now feels like a shortcut for conjuring but still land a blow on your way down.
inal cut. feelings of despondency. In 1991, though, How to survive.
The album art features an exchange the song was still an obscure track from A week before Cohen died, in No-
from “Macbeth”: “Various Positions,” a record that no- vember, Cale released a video for his
body was paying much attention to. Co- version of “Hallelujah.” It features
Banquo: It will be rain tonight.
ABOVE: LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

1st Murderer: Let it come down. hen’s take is cool and moody, sung in a Cale—sturdy and muscular, dressed in
staid, stately baritone. Cale’s version is black, with heedless white hair and a
Cale is not interested in circumventing sparse and undulating, and he sounds goatee that makes him appear slightly
or prettifying anguish: let it come down. freshly gutted after every verse. It’s this devious—seated at a grand piano over-
But he doesn’t revel in suffering, either; iteration—which Jeff Buckley covered run with crickets and mealworms. A
he figures out what hurting sounds like in 1994 and Rufus Wainwright sings on long string of pearls is wrapped around
64 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
Even as Cale looks back, ingenuity and brazenness still trump nearly every other motive in his work.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GRAEME MITCHELL THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 65
his left wrist. In one sequence, Cale is University of London’s Goldsmiths Col- tiful, but it wasn’t exactly user-friendly.
lying flat on the floor, and the worms lege. In 1963, following an invitation In his notes on the project, Young ex-
are inching around his face. The evoca- from the American composer Aaron plained his mission in mathematical
tion, of course, is of decomposition. Copland, he went to the United States terms, speaking of primes and denom-
to study at Tanglewood, the music cen- inators and intervals. The group’s com-
ale was born in the spring of 1942 ter in the Berkshires, on full scholar- positions had titles like “The Tortoise
C in Garnant, a small village in the ship. Later that year, he moved to New Recalling the Drone of the Holy Num-
Amman River Valley of Wales, a region York and took a job in a bookshop. At bers as They Were Revealed in the
rich in slow-burning anthracite coal. the time, downtown Manhattan was an Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Ob-
Mining began there in the eighteenth incubator for experimental musicians, sidian Gong, Illuminated by the Saw-
century; between 1860 and 1960, more who incorporated into their pieces the mill, the Green Sawtooth Ocelot and
than fourteen hundred workers died in dissonance and the atonality of city liv- the High-Tension Line Stepdown
the coalfields. Cale’s father, William, ing.The minimalist composer La Monte Transformer.”
was a miner, and his mother, Margaret Young worked from a vast, boxy loft on Musically, the pieces combine an
Davies, was a schoolteacher. Margaret’s Church Street that eventually became extended time structure, heavy, sus-
mother insisted that John speak Welsh his Dream House, the “sound and light tained sounds, and ungovernable me-
at home, making it impossible for him environment” that he built with his part- lodic lines that often flit about unpre-
to effectively communicate with his fa- ner, the visual artist Marian Zazeela. dictably, like a mosquito stuck inside
ther, who spoke only English, until he Yoko Ono offered up her home on a car. Young described these move-
was seven, when he started school. Chambers Street as a performance space ments as “the independent entries and
Cale’s adolescence was bleak. He for young players. It suddenly seemed exits of the tones.” Sections of the com-
was hospitalized frequently for bron- as if classical composition could be dein- positions feel improvised, unmoored,
chitis. He later said that whatever syr- stitutionalized just by rerouting it geo- and chaotic; something feral is hap-
upy opiate he was spooned led to hal- graphically. John Cage, Terry Riley, Cor- pening over something staid. Elements
lucinations: “You’d end up sitting in nelius Cardew, John Zorn, Morton of this approach, known as drone—
your bedroom, looking at the wallpa- Feldman, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oli- and of Young’s lawless spirit—stayed
per, and the flowers would change.” veros, Laurie Anderson, Steve Reich, with Cale throughout his career.
Margaret became ill with breast can- Philip Glass, and others were inventing In early 1965, at a party, Cale met
cer, which his maternal grandmother new ways to generate and organize Terry Phillips, an employee of Pickwick
blamed on his birth. At twelve, Cale sound. Their movement became known Records, a British label that released
was molested by a church organist who as Fluxus. children’s records until its founder, Cy
had been giving him music lessons. Cale quickly internalized its direc- Leslie, figured out that he could corral
“The way into the organ loft was nar- tives. Ingenuity and brazenness still pickup musicians into writing and per-
row and, once in, you could not easily trump nearly every other motive in his forming songs that resembled the hits
get out. If you were there with the organ work. “It’s what I must do each day: cre- of the day, and then sell those sound-
tutor, it was even more cramped,” he ate music beyond the premise set be- alike 45s at a discount. Phillips asked
wrote in his autobiography. There is fore,” he has said. By 1964, he was per- Cale to join a Pickwick band called the
an undercurrent of dread in Cale’s work forming with Young’s Theatre of Primitives, which was promoting “The
which seems clearly born of his youth. Eternal Music, an ensemble interested Ostrich,” a goofy, chaotic pop song writ-
Cale exhibited an aptitude for com- in sensory inundation and program- ten by Lou Reed, who was then a song-
position on the viola and the piano, and matic harmonic sequences, usually dic- writer and session musician for Pick-
left Wales to take music courses at the tated by Young. The work could be beau- wick. Reed had a knack for sticky
melodies, but he was interested in drone,
too. He created a new guitar tuning for
“The Ostrich”—a so-called trivial tun-
ing, meaning that all the strings on his
guitar were tuned to the same note. The
results are intense and mesmeric.
The song wasn’t a commercial hit,
but, shortly after its release, Cale and
Reed—with the guitarist Sterling Mor-
rison and the drummer Angus Mac-
Lise—started a band called the War-
locks, later the Falling Spikes, and, finally,
the Velvet Underground. Andy Warhol,
who first saw the group play at a beat-
nik club called Café Bizarre, on West
Third Street, became their first man-
ager, along with the filmmaker Paul
Morrissey. In 1967, after MacLise was symphony orchestra and two members “M:FANS,” his delivery remains mono-
replaced by Maureen Tucker, the Vel- of the blues-rock band Little Feat (the tone, but he sounds nearly earnest.
vet Underground partnered with the guitarist Lowell George and the drum- Cale’s relationship to his past reveals
German singer and model Nico, an ac- mer Richie Hayward). The result is a contemporary mind-set. The idea of
olyte of Warhol’s, and released “The somehow both anomalous for Cale and the album, as a form, has endured, stub-
Velvet Underground and Nico,” the characteristically inventive. bornly. It used to be a pleasurable and
band’s début album. The cover featured Cale has produced, arranged, and efficient delivery method: a dozen or so
one of Warhol’s banana paintings. (If contributed to a number of records, in- tracks collected onto one long-playing
you are lucky enough to find an early cluding the Stooges’ self-titled début, disk and sold to consumers at a dis-
pressing, you can peel off the banana in 1969; Nick Drake’s “Bryter Layter,” counted price. But after the Beach Boys’
skin to reveal a pinkish fruit under- in 1971; Brian Eno’s “Another Green “Pet Sounds,” from 1966, and the Beat-
neath.) Nico’s wan alto is famously dis- World,” in 1975; Patti Smith’s “Horses,” les’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
passionate, but Reed sounds anxious the same year; and Manic Street Band,” from 1967, it became a kind of
and weedy, singing about heroin, sex, Preachers’ “Postcards from a Young creative imperative, a way of eschewing
and masochism. The record did not sell Man,” in 2010. His presence on these the ephemerality of the single and es-
particularly well, but its influence was albums ranges from subtle to overt. tablishing pop music as art. Then the
far-reaching. In 1982, in an interview Sometimes he is so close—either lit- technology changed; a preference for
with Musician, the electronic artist and erally, as a player, or spiritually, as an customization developed and became
producer Brian Eno suggested that ev- influence—that the work feels as much embedded in the culture. Younger art-
eryone who had bought a copy of “The his own as the songs he writes and per- ists look at the idea of the album side-
Velvet Underground and Nico” went on forms. On the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be ways, kicking the tires, imagining a less
to start a band. Your Dog,” Cale is the guy maniacally prescribed, more multidimensional fu-
Cale made one more record as a stabbing that one note on the piano ture for their high-concept work. Kanye
member of the Velvet Underground: for the whole three minutes. Take that West’s newest project, “The Life of
“White Light/White Heat,” which was away, I’d venture, and the entire song Pablo,” has been revised untold times
released at the beginning of 1968. It’s is instantly defanged and made limp. since its release (a snare drum might be
a noisy, difficult record; Cale has since He is the person you want in the room quieted, or a lyric adjusted). It is not ex-
called it “consciously anti-beauty.” In when you are afraid that what you are pected to exist in physical form—merely
its seventeen-minute closing track, “Sis- doing is benign. as a stream or a download—which would
ter Ray,” Reed tells a rambling and only impede its constant evolution. West
mostly incoherent story about a smack ale has been so consistently in- has called the album “a living breathing
dealer trying to plan an orgy. The words C novative, so focussed on ingenu- changing creative expression.”
“sucking on my ding-dong” are re- ity and instigation, that it’s strange to Cale has always thought of art as
peated. Reed and Cale noodle aggres- watch him glance backward. Yet even fluid rather than static—he has rarely
sively at each other through distortion his approach to retrospection feels been satisfied by recapitulations of the
pedals. groundbreaking. Last year, when he re- status quo. Most of the songs on “Music
The two weren’t getting along. The issued “Music for a New Society,” a for a New Society” are about misplaced
simplest explanation is that Cale’s taste bleak and largely improvised record faith and the strange rage that accom-
skewed more avant-garde. (The first from 1982, he also recorded new ver- panies regret. “I wasn’t in a very good
record the band made without Cale, sions of all its songs. In a press release place at the time and it was all about
“The Velvet Underground,” is easily its announcing the two albums—the up- changes, about changing me, changing
sweetest and most straightforward.) dated collection was titled “M:FANS”— the people around me,” he told Uncut
The split was acrimonious, and seemed Cale spoke of the process as a kind of last year. “Some of them I wished would
to haunt both men for a long time. In psychic exorcism. “It was time to dec- go away, and I wanted to go away.”
2014, a reporter for Channel 4 News imate the despair from 1981 and breathe Here, then, was an opportunity to
in the United Kingdom asked Cale if new energy, rewrite the story,” he ex- reclaim and reconfigure his despair. The
he was over Reed’s death. He paused. plained. Miraculously, he succeeded. idea feels deeply human. Who hasn’t
“Not really,” he said. “I don’t think that Some songs, like “Chinese Envoy,” once winced, looking back on a thing they
will happen.” a spare, prickling dirge and now a bois- made—or a place they lived, or a dress
After Cale left the Velvet Under- terous electro-pop song, are almost un- they wore, or a type of tea they drank—
ground, he made sixteen studio albums recognizable in their present-day iter- while enveloped in grief, and hoped for
as a solo performer and released at least ations. An album that felt colorless and a way to neutralize that history with-
ten live and collaborative albums. “Paris desperate—Cale wrote of shame, death, out losing the thing itself? It is easy to
1919,” the best known of his solo rec- “the crawling skin of God”—became be nostalgic about the past when we are
ords, from 1973, is wry, expansive, and contemplative, conciliatory. “I don’t yearning for a time before we knew cer-
playful, featuring an assortment of lit- feel so bad, and always look forward tain disappointments. But it is just as
erary and historical allusions. Nobody with hope,” Cale sings on “Taking Your easy to want to revisit dark days with
was expecting Cale to make such a record, Life in Your Hands.” In the original, the knowledge of fresh triumphs. Cale
for which he had enlisted the U.C.L.A. the line is hollow, if not scornful. On has invented a way to do that. 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 67
 shears off a branch as the boy romps be-
BOOKS neath the trees at summer camp.
Sudden death has been a preoccupa-

FORK YOU
tion of Auster’s since his own summer-
camp days. At the age of fourteen, while
hiking during a storm, he was part of a
A life runs four ways in Paul Auster’s “4 3 2 1.” line of boys crawling under barbed wire
when lightning struck the fence, killing
BY LAURA MILLER the boy in front of him. Chance, under-
standably, became a recurring theme in
his fiction, and in “4 3 2 1” it contributes
to the four distinct paths of Archie’s life.
So, too, does character. In one story line,
his father’s furniture store burns down,
his father collects the insurance for it,
and life goes on relatively undisturbed.
In another, Stanley’s brother confesses
that he’s run up big gambling debts that
can be paid off only if Stanley allows an
arsonist to burn down the store. Stanley
waits in the building to thwart this plan
but falls asleep and dies in the fire. In yet
another, Stanley’s warehouse is burglar-
ized, but he refuses to file an insurance
claim, because he knows that an investi-
gation will reveal that his other brother
was behind the crime. In the fourth, Stan-
ley ends up a rich man after ejecting both
of his ne’er-do-well brothers from the
business long before they can cause any
serious trouble. As a result, one Archie—
let’s call him the Manhattan variation—
grows up fatherless, and clings fiercely to
his mother when the two move to the
city. The Montclair variation grows up
in straitened circumstances but with an
intact family. The Maplewood Archie
lives in bourgeois affluence as his father
Auster’s summarizing style of narration closes like a fist around the proceedings. becomes obsessed with money and his
parents become increasingly estranged.
ccording to a currently popular ish. “4 3 2 1” is indeed a doorstop of fork-
A line of philosophy, a self is merely ing paths. uster’s novels tend to fall into two
the sum of all the stories we tell about All four Archie Fergusons share the A categories, Paris and New York, a di-
a particular human body. It’s an idea same origin story, one that has much in vision of tone, style, and ambition rather
that resonates through the work of the common with Auster’s: a paternal grand- than of setting—paradoxically, some of
writer Paul Auster, in whose fiction both father who arrives in the United States his most Parisian fiction takes place in
selves and stories are precarious con- with a Jewish name, which gets converted New York City. He remains best known
structions, fascinating but unstable, more to something more Gentile-friendly on for the three short novels that make up
illusion than reality. In “4 3 2 1” (Holt), Ellis Island; a family history marred by “The New York Trilogy”: exemplars of his
Auster’s first novel in seven years and, murder; an emotionally remote, entrepre- Parisian mode, they were first published in
at eight hundred and sixty-six pages, neurial father; a childhood in suburban the nineteen-eighties and are the foun-
the longest by far of any book he has New Jersey, a place that Archie, in all his dation for a career far more celebrated in
published, a single man’s life unfolds incarnations, comes to detest. Archie’s fa- Europe than in his native land. Descended
along four narrative arcs, from birth to ther, Stanley, at first adores his young bride, from Kafka by way of Camus and Beck-
early adulthood. “Clearly you’ve read Rose, but as the novel’s four plots diverge ett, these books are existential parables
Borges by now,” the faculty adviser re- after Archie’s birth, in 1947, the marriage about the absurdity of the writer’s life,
marks to one of these iterations of Ar- survives in only one of them. Archie him- calling attention to their own artificiality
chie Ferguson, a character who, like most self doesn’t make it past Chapter 2 in one and grafted onto the apparatus of hard-
of Auster’s heroes, is fanatically book- version of his story, killed when lightning boiled detective fiction. In “Ghosts,” a
68 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY SÉBASTIEN PLASSARD
P.I. named Blue is hired to observe an- first, and in spite of his flirtations with Carol,
other man, named Black, through the win- Jane, Nancy, Susan, Mimi, Linda, and Connie,
dow of a neighboring apartment. After he soon learned that none of these girls possessed
the soul he was looking for, and one by one he
more than a year of watching Black, Blue had lost interest in them and allowed them to dis-
begins to suspect that it is he who has appear from his heart.
been the target all along:
He feels like a man who has been condemned Auster’s medium isn’t really sentences
to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the or paragraphs or scenes but narrative,
rest of his life. This is strange enough—to be only events shoehorned into a sequence that
half alive at best, seeing the world only through endows them with significance: Blue has
words, living only through the lives of others. But been hired to watch Black, therefore Black
if the book were an interesting one, perhaps it
wouldn’t be so bad. He could get caught up in the must be doing something worth watch-
story, so to speak, and little by little begin to for- ing. The narration in Auster’s novels typ-
get himself. But this book offers him nothing. ically dominates every other element in
There is no story, no plot, no action—nothing but a ferocious and doomed assertion that
a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book. the world the book describes is not ruled
In his New York mode, Auster pays by happenstance. Maybe that’s what all
tribute to what Rose Ferguson thinks of storytelling is meant to do: reassure its
as “dear, dirty, devouring New York, the audience that a legible causality shapes
capital of human faces, the horizontal our world and our lives. The main char-
Babel of human tongues.” The young char- acter in the first novel of “The New York
acters in “4 3 2 1” worship the city as only Trilogy,” “City of Glass,” seeking com-
Jersey kids can; it is a manic paradise, vis- fort after the death of his child, loves
ible but just out of reach. In such novels mystery novels because the world of such
as “The Brooklyn Follies” and “Sunset fictions is “seething with possibilities,
Park,” Auster’s evident intention is Dick- with secrets and contradictions. Since ev-
ensian. He packs the books with minor erything seen or said, however trivial, can
characters of assorted races and ages, and bear a connection to the story’s outcome,
attempts to conjure up a jaunty urban ca- nothing must be overlooked. Everything
cophony. becomes essence.” Plots, especially the
That goal, however, is incompatible solution-hungry plots of detective sto-
with Auster’s habitual style, which is a ries, give meaning to the flotsam and jet-
top-down, summarizing narration that sam of lived experience.
closes like a fist around the proceedings. One Archie Ferguson becomes a jour-
His novels are short on dramatic scenes nalist, one a memoirist, one a novelist.
and dialogue, and it’s not easy to celebrate One boy plasters his room with John F.
a polyglot metropolis when you’re unac- Kennedy paraphernalia; another finds
customed to letting characters speak for politics “the dullest, deadliest, dreariest
themselves. Whoever is telling the story— subject he could think of.” All three of
whoever is speaking, period—always the adult Archies pine after a girl named
sounds too much like Paul Auster. His Amy Schneiderman, but only one be-
prose, even when impassioned, has a bland, comes her boyfriend. Were it not for that
synthesized quality, and in his Parisian romance, however, this Archie wouldn’t
mode it has deliberately been boiled down have climbed into a car that crashes,
to the bones; the ease with which this thereby losing the thumb and index finger
style can be translated contributes to his of his left hand. Without this disability,
popularity overseas. In “4 3 2 1,” which is he would not have been exempt from the
more of a New York novel despite the pre- draft, a spectre hovering over all the
dictable metafictional twist at the end, his Archies as they come of age in the
sentences come tumbling out in multiple nineteen-sixties. The dominion of chance
clauses, mimicking the breathless rumi- becomes most explicit when, in 1969, the
nation of his earnest, callow, fairly humor- Selective Service System institutes a draft
less and slightly stuffy protagonists: lottery to determine when eligible men
will be compelled to serve: the Maple-
The fundamental quest both before and after wood Archie thinks of it as “a blind draw
his new life began had always been a spiritual one, of numbers” that “would tell you whether
the dream of an enduring connection, a recipro-
cal love between compatible souls, souls endowed you were free or not free, whether you
with bodies, of course, mercifully endowed with were going off to fight or staying home,
bodies, but the soul came first, would always come whether you were going to prison or not
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 69
 BRIEFLY NOTED
The Original Black Elite, by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor (Amis-
tad). In the decades following the Civil War, a proud “colored
aristocracy” emerged. This history focusses on two of its mem-
bers—Daniel Murray, the son of a former slave, who, in 1897,
became chief of periodicals at the Library of Congress, and
his wife, Anna, a descendant of one of John Brown’s raiders.
Taylor documents the inaugural balls they organized, the prop-
erties they owned, and their political efforts on behalf of their
race. Ultimately, affluence, respectability, and their light com-
plexions couldn’t save them from the humiliations of Jim
Crow. By 1919, Murray had been demoted, his salary slashed,
and he was forbidden to dine in the library’s public cafeteria.

The Genius of Judaism, by Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated

from the French by Steven B. Kennedy (Random House). The
French philosopher and telegenic celebrity offers a medi-
tation on the “inner work on Judaism,” which he says has
guided his adventures in revolutionary politics, in an eclec-
tic treatise that includes a long examination of resurgent
anti-Semitism. His arguments tend to be wayward; a de-
fense of his support for intervention in Libya takes the form
of an interpretation of the Book of Jonah. And there are
moments of real contradiction, as when he calls the Holo-
caust a “crime without parallel” but then professes befud-
dlement at the phenomenon of “competitive victimhood.”
Still, Lévy writes with passion. When people stop reading
Judaism’s great texts, “to challenge and oppose them no
more,” he declares, “the genius dies.”

Moonglow, by Michael Chabon (Harper). This novel narrates

the life of the author’s grandfather, as he lies dying, in 1989,
of cancer. A powerful painkiller has brought “its soft ham-
mer to bear on his habit of silence,” so that stories of his
exploits, failures, and secrets emerge in a non-chronologi-
cal, occasionally cartoonish manner. The form allows Cha-
bon to take on a range of modes and subjects—there’s a
bravura Second World War sequence, and an extended
prison episode following his grandfather’s attempt to kill
his boss after losing his job to Alger Hiss. The most vivid
element of the novel is the old man’s relationship with his
wife, a French war survivor haunted by terrifying visions.

The Animators, by Kayla Rae Whitaker (Random House). This

tender, lively début traces the friendship and the artistic part-
nership of two young women. After meeting in college, Sha-
ron and Mel spent a decade making (per their critics) “small,
thoughtful cartoons and out-of-mainstream animation shorts
for a thinking woman’s audience.” But their first full-length
film, based on Mel’s childhood in a Florida trailer park, wins
a prestigious award. As their work gains recognition, Mel’s
hard-living ways strain her relationship with the quieter, anx-
ious Sharon, until a medical emergency changes everything.
The tension between private life and public art occasionally
feels familiar, but Whitaker’s nimbly created characters are
as vibrant as the novel’s title suggests.
70 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017
going to prison, the whole shape of your through “4 3 2 1.” Auster likes to expli- the memoir he writes about how Laurel
future life to be sculpted by the hands cate his own texts, overtly stating his and Hardy comedies saved his life, the
of General Pure Dumb Luck.” themes in the very books that embody reading program he embarks on in Paris
them, but one rarely acknowledged in- under the tutelage of a chicly enigmatic
he opposite of luck is destiny, a fluence is the legacy of the Second World art historian—is vastly more interesting
T predetermination dictated by genes War. The cynical, fatalistic hardboiled than the generic nineteen-sixties intellec-
or history or, if you’re going to be old- detective novel and film noir of the tualism of his suburban alter egos. By far
fashioned about it, God. The Manhat- nineteen-forties and fifties—popular the most affecting passage in “4 3 2 1” is
tan Archie deliberately sabotages his genres that Auster has often invoked— a scene in which this version of Archie
grade-point average when he returns to murmured of the suppressed memory of experiments, disastrously, with taking
school after his father’s death: “Within the war’s horrors, the trauma and doubt money for sex. It also helps that the Man-
the narrow scope of misdeeds he was ca- scrubbed out of American triumphalism. hattan Archie has little curiosity about
pable of, he understood that the only way The narrative imposed on the Second what he calls “current events,” thus spar-
to answer the question”—of God’s exis- World War was one of straightforward ing the reader the newsreel-like interludes
tence—“was to break his end of the bar- heroism, but Archie’s generation, like of potted history that are constantly in-
gain as often as he could, to defy the in- Auster’s, faced a more ambiguous chal- terjected into the two other story lines.
junction to follow the holy commandments lenge: their refusal to fight on moral When the last Archie is left stand-
and then wait for God to do something grounds could also be construed as cow- ing, he makes a resolution: “As for the
bad to him, something nasty and per- ardice, and often was by the very men Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, as for
sonal that would serve as a clear sign of whom, as boys, they’d so admired for risk- Lyndon Johnson’s abdication, as for the
intended retribution.” Like any storytell- ing their lives to defeat Fascism. The an- murder of Martin Luther King: Watch
er’s audience, he wants to be reassured tiwar protests of the nineteen-sixties were, them as carefully as he could, take them
that whatever happens, however bad it among other things, an effort to replace in as deeply as he could, but other than
may be, it is linked to whatever happened one story—that the conflict in Vietnam that, nothing. He wasn’t going to fight
before by narrative causality. was a necessary bulwark against Com- on the barricades, but he would cheer
But all three adult Archies soon aban- munism—with another: that the war was, for the ones who did.” Then he goes back
don the unreliable consolations of faith as Archie puts it, “not just a political blun- to working on his novel. This isn’t, in
for more secular explanations. The Mont- der but an act of criminal madness.” fact, a material departure from his ear-
clair Archie goes to Columbia (with sev- And yet the longing for that less com- lier style of political engagement, which
eral characters from earlier Auster nov- plicated, more satisfying story persists. mostly consists of reading the newspa-
els listed as his classmates) and becomes Archie’s “sole ambition” is to “become the per. It’s as if Auster had forgotten that
a journalist. He is on hand to cover the hero of his own life,” and both the Mont- he once drove a character mad by forc-
1968 student revolt but finds that “tak- clair and the Maplewood Archies have ing him to watch a man sitting alone in
ing the journalist’s view of impartiality a burnished aura of Boy Scout rectitude a room writing a book.
and objectivity was not unlike joining an that soon becomes tiresome. “If we have Sprawling, repetitive, occasionally
order of monks and spending the rest of more money than we need,” the Maple- splendid, and just as often exasperating,
your life in a glass monastery—removed wood Archie tells his mother when she “4 3 2 1” is never quite dull, but it comes
from the world of human affairs even as announces that the family is moving to too close to tedium too often; there is no
it continued to whirl around you on all a bigger house, “then we should give it good reason for this novel to be eight
sides.” The Maplewood Archie goes to to someone who needs it more than we hundred and sixty-six pages long, or for
Princeton, his writerly inclinations chan- do.” The New Jersey Archies are a pair every Archie’s love of baseball and mov-
nelled into more esoteric literary work. of Goody Two-Shoes, equipped with a ies and French poetry to be rhapsodized
(This story line features some amusing full complement of twenty-first-century over, or for every major headline of the
excerpts that read like undercooked liberal attitudes about gender, race, and nineteen-fifties and sixties to come under
Calvino pastiches.) class, whose primary failing is a disposi- review. The spooky, metaphysical econ-
Instead of God, what directs the evo- tion to love the women in their lives too omy of Auster’s fiction in its Parisian
lution of each Archie seems to be an ir- faithfully and too well. These Archies are mode (“Oracle Night,” from 2003, is the
reducible kernel of identity. Whatever so alike that it’s difficult to remember best of his most recent books), with its
his circumstances, he was always meant which one you’re reading about at a given arresting, uncertain, and dislocated nar-
to be a writer, and also to stand at the moment without the aid of notes. ratives, offers more room to breathe, more
sidelines and observe while other people Not so the fatherless Manhattan Ar- space for the reader’s imagination to
fight. This looks like a reversal of the ap- chie, whose experiments in divine provo- squeeze its way in, more spurs to won-
proach Auster took in his earlier work, cation evolve into such louche activities der. It is this sort of book the surviving
in which a character, simply by chang- as visiting prostitutes, shoplifting (to pay Archie seems to be writing at the end of
ing his name, can be transformed into for the prostitutes), and a loveless affair “4 3 2 1,” when he observes that “as with
another person; in which the self is with a young man who picks him up at all the other things he had written in the
provisional, a product of fiction. Still, it’s an art-house theatre during a screening past three years, he was turning out
possible to detect a consistent thrum of of “Children of Paradise.” Everything about roughly four pages for every page he kept.”
anxiety running from those early works the Manhattan Archie—his bisexuality, That sounds like an excellent policy. 
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 71
 Marisa Merz was routinely iden-
THE ART WORLD tified as the wife and, since 2003, the
widow of one of Arte Povera’s leading

A WOMAN’S VIEW
figures, Mario Merz; for years her own
work was exhibited sporadically and
afforded only glancing consideration.
A Marisa Merz retrospective. But at the Met Breuer she emerges as
the liveliest artist in a movement that
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL was often marred by intellectual and
poetic pretensions, and whose ab-
stracted themes of nature and meta-
physics rarely appealed to American
sensibilities, and still don’t very much.
(Minimalism, which never took hold
in Italy, had pretty well cauterized sym-
bolic content for the art world here.)
Merz is still at work, in her home town
of Turin, at ninety. That’s a late age
for a début retrospective, but this show
will be revelatory to many people, as
it is to me. An occasion that might
have seemed a revisionist historical
footnote turns out to be more like the
best saved for last.
It all started in her kitchen. The
show opens with immense hanging
sculptures of clustered ductlike forms
in shiny aluminum sheeting, home-
made with shears and staples. Cutout
swaths loop and overlap, like snake-
skin scales, to gorgeous, looming,
somewhat sinister effect. The earliest
piece dates from 1966, when Merz was
spending most of her time at home,
bringing up Beatrice, the daughter
who was born to Marisa and Mario
in 1960, the year they married. The
pieces thronged the kitchen walls and
extended into the living room and
around the furniture, encasing the TV
set. Beatrice, who is now the president
of the Merz Foundation, which man-
he Met Breuer is not yet a year female member of Arte Povera, a ages her father’s estate and her moth-
T old, but it has already distin- movement shepherded into existence, er’s career, remembers being scared of
guished itself as a site of beguiling in 1967, by the art critic Germano the sculptures as a child. Here and
and serious surprises: a huge survey Celant, as Italy’s ambitious riposte to there, the gleaming surfaces are faintly
of unfinished works by masters of American Pop and minimalism. About yellowed by cigarette smoke and the
Western art, a provocatively ingenious a dozen artists participated, creating residue of cooking oil.
installation of Diane Arbus photo- large, often sprawling abstract sculp- Merz has said that the series’ En-
graphs, and a terrific retrospective tures in humble materials—dirt, glish title, “Living Sculpture,” paid
(soon to close) of the African-Amer- rocks, tree branches, used clothes, rope, homage to the Living Theatre, a New
ican painter Kerry James Marshall. burlap, industrial detritus—putatively York troupe of Dionysian performers
The latest is “Marisa Merz: The Sky to counter the sterility of consumer that was popular with young Euro-
Is a Great Space,” the first major ret- culture, but also, more practically, pean artists. Soon after the first work’s
rospective of the Italian artist in the to master the capacious exhibition creation, it starred in “The Green
United States. Merz is the least-known spaces that were becoming an inter- Monster,” an underground horror film
and, perhaps not incidentally, the only national norm. made by some of Merz’s friends, in
which it was seen to digest writhing,
Merz’s “Living Sculpture” (1966) and “Untitled” (1976), at the Met Breuer. naked actors. In 1967, it was briefly
72 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCES F. DENNY
installed in Turin’s Piper Pluri Club, is brushed or sprayed, or sometimes her Arte Povera peers, advanced an
one of a number of related performance- both, onto paper, metal, board, or un- avant-garde shibboleth of the era: pro-
and-party venues around the country stretched canvas. Colors shared by posing to close what Robert Rauschen-
that were frequented by the Italian different mediums make it hard, at berg had called “the gap” and which
counterculturati. times, to know which material you Germano Celant, with more starch,
The show proceeds with other see. In one work, from 2004, gold termed “the dichotomy” between art
sculptural works, many of them made paint sprayed onto copper engulfs a and life—as if art is ever meaningfully
of hand-knitted copper wire or nylon sketchy apparition of a woman play- separate from life. The idea has always
filament. Some are prepossessingly ing a flute. Networks of copper wire struck me as a fancy way of exalting a
large. An untitled installation from attached to it might represent rays of simple rejection of conventional dis-
1976, spanning an entire wall, com- light or waves of sound. A copper play—frames, pedestals—and of work-
prises irregularly spaced wire squares shelf at the bottom sanctifies the piece ing with found objects, defined spaces,
the size of pot holders, stretched at as an altar. Merz’s mixed methods and elements of performance. If there
their corners by brass-head nails. Some draw you into the process of the work, was a more political aspect to the Ital-
bare nails suggest squares that are miss- as if your gaze were helping to gen- ians’ works, it was ambiguous, assumed
ing or invisible. A floor piece, dated erate it. First impressions of insouci- rather than expressed. The povera (im-
1990-2003, is composed of a low steel antly woozy execution disintegrate poverished) element counted less as
trough, into which melted candle wax in registrations of texture and touch. activism than as a sentimental gesture
was poured; there, the wax hardened The pictures are like factories turn- of virtue on the biennial circuit and in
around the bases of nine tiny sculp- ing out dreams. the deluxe galleries where their careers
tures, in unfired clay, of indistinct Merz was born in 1926 in Turin, unfolded.
figures and faces that are reminiscent where her father worked at the Fiat But the art/life conceit acquires
of the sorts of prehistoric totem that plant. She may have studied dance. special pith in Merz’s case, beginning
archeologists, in despair, assign to “cer- At some point in the nineteen-forties, with her marginal standing in the Arte
emonial use.” Other works are small, she modelled for the neoclassical Povera group and the way that she
including scarpette (“little shoes”): painter Felice Casorati. I have now navigated it: by making it the keynote
dainty slippers that Merz made from conveyed all that is publicly known of a personal, untrammelled original-
copper wire or nylon thread, for her- of Merz’s life before 1960, which the ity. Both the ferocious “Living Sculp-
self and for Beatrice. The child’s nick- concerted efforts of the Met Breuer ture” and the more ingratiating pic-
name, Bea, is spelled out on a wall in show’s curators—Ian Alteveer, of the tures and little sculptures that followed
clumps of nylon mesh, bristling with Met, and Connie Butler, of the Ham- it made positive content out of being
the knitting needles that were used to mer Museum, in Los Angeles, where consigned to domesticity. Merz re-
create them. the show will travel in June—have fuses to call herself or her art femi-
The show’s title, “The Sky Is a been unable to supplement. (Even nist, to the extent that she banished
Great Space,” comes from a poem Merz’s maiden name is unknown: the word from the title of one of sev-
written by Merz. It relates to a con- searches for a birth certificate yielded eral fine essays in the Met Breuer
ceptual caprice from 1970: a flight that none.) show’s catalogue. I’m reminded of some
she took in a small private plane, and Surely Mario knew more, and oth- strong-willed women artists I knew,
documented, with a series of photo- ers in their circle, now mostly deceased, in the early years of the women’s move-
graphs, as a work of art. The mystique must have, too. The lacuna bespeaks ment, who also resisted having their
of the sky also figures in a 1975 pho- incuriosity about the wife of the great solitary struggles described in ideo-
tograph of Merz, taken from behind, man, which Merz was at no pains to logical terms. But Merz’s very inde-
as she sits in a chair, her scarpette-shod correct. Did she take some compen- pendence makes her an ideal avatar
feet propped against a wall. She looks satory pleasure in being mysterious? for feminist analysis. She pushed
out of a window onto a city (Rome) At any rate, it served her as a mask. against limits in ways that revealed
immersed in a black night pierced by Meanwhile, she had a continual and what and where the limits were, and

1
a few scattered lights. It’s a breath- direct hand in Mario’s art; Alteveer she turned the friction to shrewd and
taking picture, which presages Merz’s told me that she was regularly con- stirring account. 
gradual shift, starting in the nineteen- sulted on the installation of his exhi-
eighties, from sculptural installations bitions. Their relationship was noto- Block That Metaphor!
to drawn and painted imagery. She riously stormy but resilient—and they From the Albuquerque Journal.
has usually rendered faces, often of were a sight to see. He was a large The world was a better place before things
Renaissance-evocative Madonnas and man. She stands about five feet tall. got so out of whack that athletic departments
angels, in a range of styles, from neo- (I’m reminded of the colossal Diego were forced to mortgage their souls to keep
Futurist tectonic to Edvard Munch- Rivera and the petite Frida Kahlo. the lights on.
like Expressionist. There, too, the wife’s art eventually Yet, the awarding of naming rights—in this
case, by the University of New Mexico for
Merz’s most striking pictorial tech- came to rate as at least equal in qual- the Pit to WisePies pizza restaurants—is the
nique involves layering combinations ity to the husband’s.) fedora on the head of the monster we've all
of graphite, wax, pastel, and paint that Merz’s work, no less than that of created.

THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 73

 to reflection. But McDonagh didn’t skimp
THE THEATRE on Katurian’s speeches, and the length-
iness of the text only heightens the ter-

ALLIES
ror and the conflicted excitement we feel
as we wait to hear what happens next.
“The Pillowman” was the culmina-
Ties that bind in Martin McDonagh’s “The Beauty Queen of Leenane.” tion of a sense of promise that had been
growing since the mid-nineties, when
BY HILTON ALS McDonagh’s work was first staged in
London. (He grew up in England, though
his parents are from the west of Ireland,
where he spent time as a youth.) But
“promise” feels like a funny word in this
context, since McDonagh’s scripts were
accomplished from the first, with their
mixture of Irish colloquialisms and
Menippean satire—and, in plays such as
“The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” from
1996 (now in a Druid revival, at BAM’s
Harvey Theatre), a nod to the incredi-
ble and incredibly funny novels of Flann
O’Brien. McDonagh and O’Brien are
literary kin in a sense, not father and son
so much as brothers, with McDonagh
as the younger sibling who goes further
than his older brother ever imagined was
possible, at least onstage. One thing Mc-
Donagh learned from O’Brien, I think,
is that bizarre situations are more effec-
tive when the structure of a work is fairly
conventional: you shouldn’t undo the
power of sensational content by sensa-
tionalizing the form as well.
In O’Brien’s 1941 novel “The Poor
Mouth,” the narrator is a kind of dys-
Mullen and O’Sullivan as a mother and daughter linked by mutual hatred. peptic David Copperfield who finds him-
self in a Gaeltacht memoir. Of his birth
so admire Martin McDonagh as a Donagh’s plays so upsetting is that he’s a and its effect on his poor old Da, the
I playwright that I’m more than a little proper moralist, with a severe heart and a narrator says:
sad that he’s turned his creative attention weird acceptance of the worst.
I was born in the middle of the night in the
to writing and directing films. I can’t blame That moral ambiguity marked “The end of the house. . . . My little bald skull so as-
him; his audience will no doubt grow. It’s Pillowman” (2003), a long and com- tounded him that he almost departed from this
my hope, though, that the people who like plex play that I have yet to get over. In life the moment I entered it and, indeed, it was a
his movies (he won an Academy Award the 2005 Broadway production, Billy misfortune and harmful thing for him that he
in 2006 for his short film “Six Shooter,” Crudup—giving a performance that I did not, because after that night he never had any-
thing but misery and was destroyed and rent by the
and he has wrapped a new feature, star- haven’t got over yet, either—played Ka- world and bereft of his health as long as he lived.
ring Frances McDormand) will circle back turian, a writer living in a police state,
to his plays and find what I found: one of whose bloody tales closely resemble a se- Bald baby skulls, bad health, imminent
the best theatrical minds we have on myth ries of terrible real-life crimes that are doom: McDonagh, too, is interested in
and its offshoot—everyday storytelling. being committed against children. Does both physical and spiritual catastrophe.
McDonagh’s dramatic world is defined Katurian “inspire” the murders? Is the He opens his plays with O’Brien’s sim-
by power and filled with cruelty and in- murderer so invested in Katurian’s tales ple “once upon a time” tone, before ze-
justice; the bad guy takes center stage but of lost, defenseless children who meet roing in on his characters and subvert-
doesn’t always get called out. When he gruesome ends that he wants to act out ing the popular Seán O’Casey version
revels in his wrongdoing, he’s so sly and what he sees on the page? And is using of charming, hardscrabble Irishness by
funny that we forget to disapprove until your imagination, perforce, an act of non- situating them not in an emotionally and
it’s too late—and then we feel doubly conformist wildness against the state? politically fraught world but in an alter-
guilty for having enjoyed swimming in Monologues are difficult to deliver in to- nately repressed and explosive one.
all that filth. Part of what makes Mc- day’s theatre; most audiences prefer action The weather rarely helps. Rain showers
74 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY MIKKEL SOMMER
down on the cottage that Mag Folan this is a play about the colonized and the
(Marie Mullen) shares with her forty- colonizers, and the ways in which a child
year-old single daughter, Maureen can use hate to shape himself. In a sense,
(Aisling O’Sullivan), in “The Beauty Mag is England and Maureen is Ireland:
Queen of Leenane.” It’s as dark outside they can’t live together, but they have
as it is in the kitchen where the action barely lived apart. Maureen tells Pato
is set. In that dingy domestic space, with about the months she spent working as
its stone sink and blackened stove, there’s a cleaner in England. She met a Trini-
a rocking chair, which is Mag’s throne, dadian woman who did the same job,
in a way. Bundled up in woollens, she and wondered, just as the other woman
sits facing the audience, a TV in front of wondered about her, Why would she
her. She’s always waiting for the news to leave such a beautiful place to live in En-
come on, but how can the screen com- gland? For opportunity, of course, but
pete with the ticker tape of complaint what does opportunity mean in a coun-
that spouts from her mouth and onto try that tries to break its outsiders?
the floor and around Maureen’s legs, Pato’s attention allows Maureen not
binding daughter to mother? The two to transform, exactly, but to reckon with
women spend their days tearing at those her body in a different way, in that stul-
bonds, but they wouldn’t know who they tifying atmosphere. It’s indelibly sweet
were without their mutual hatred and to witness Maureen’s anxiety about Pato:
dependence. Back and forth McDonagh the fear that he may like her or reject
goes, with Mag whining about the lumps her for liking him, the dance of vulner-
in her food and Maureen chafing bit- ability. Rea and O’Sullivan play it all so
terly against her mother’s manipulations, beautifully that you can’t quite put your
but nothing changes. Until it does. finger on why these scenes don’t go
One day, the ladies’ peevish neighbor deeper, until you realize that it’s because
Ray Dooley (Aaron Monaghan) arrives of the energy behind the production: the
with an invitation for Maureen. There’s director, Garry Hynes, a real talent, who
going to be a dance—would she like to also directed the 1998 staging (for which
come? But Maureen isn’t at home, and she won a Tony Award, the first woman
Mag, of course, doesn’t pass on the mes- to win in a directing category), hasn’t
sage. She’s not what you’d call a nour- found anything new to draw out here.
ishing mother, though she is an expert She seems more interested in the story’s
nourisher of non-truths. Maureen learns high points—its surefire entertain-
of the dance anyway, and, while there, ments—than in the putrid plantings
talks to Ray’s brother Pato (Marty Rea). growing through that kitchen’s cracks.
Pato is a handsome, agreeable man, a real The misplaced emphasis neuters Mul-
person who knows his potential. He len’s Mag. (Mullen played Maureen in
works construction in London (there are the 1998 production, and also won a
so few opportunities in Leenane), and Tony.) It’s as if Mullen were held back
even in his despair there is something from exploring her character’s rankness—
like hope. Chatting sweetly after seeing and, without that rankness, O’Sullivan
Maureen home from the dance, he says: doesn’t have enough to play against.
After making love for the first time,
I do ask meself, if there was good work in
Leenane, would I stay in Leenane? I mean, with Pato, Maureen, instead of staying
there never will be good work, but hypothet- in the moment and relishing the feeling
ically, I’m saying. . . . And when I’m over there of being touched, gloats. It’s funny, but,
in London and working in rain and it’s more
or less cattle I am, and the young fellas curs-
by treating it as a gag, Hynes fails to ex-
ing over cards and drunk and sick, and the oul plore the transference of power in the
digs over there, all pee-stained mattresses and scene, or to show us how Pato and his
nothing to do but watch the clock. . . . When masculinity are undone by the strength
it’s there I am, it’s here I wish I was, of course.
Who wouldn’t? But when it’s here I am . . . it
of Maureen and Mag’s shared contempt.
isn’t there I want to be, of course not. But I Rather, she distracts us from McDonagh’s
know it isn’t here I want to be either. . . . In uneasiness, his sense of displacement—
England they don’t care if you live or die, and like him, Pato is an Anglo-Irish man
it’s funny but that isn’t altogether a bad thing.
who belongs to neither country. What
The play opens up when Pato starts we’re left with is a measure of fun and
to talk about his experiences away from wholesomeness, when the laughter should
home, because the issues are writ larger: have had us choking back vomit. ♦
THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 75
 and start again.” Sounds like a failed
THE CURRENT CINEMA marriage.) Needing somewhere else in
a hurry, Emad and Rana move into an-

DEPTHS OF FEAR
other apartment, recently vacated; the
previous tenant has left a roomful of
stuff. We never meet her, but, like the
“The Salesman” and “Split.” first Mrs. de Winter, in “Rebecca,” she
hovers over the action. “A woman with
BY ANTHONY LANE lots of acquaintances,” we are told. “She
lived a wild life,” a neighbor remarks.
We get the point.
One of those acquaintances brings
trouble. Rana, taking a shower, leaves
the apartment door open for her hus-
band, who is due home. As the gaze
of the camera lingers on that door,
ajar, we realize that someone else is
coming. (Michael Haneke, the maker
of “Funny Games” and “Hidden,”
would surely commend such linger-
ing.) By the time Emad arrives, there
is blood in the stairwell, and Rana has
been wounded in the head. Beyond
those brute facts, though, everything
blurs. She never caught sight of her
attacker, nor did we. Was a sexual of-
fense committed, too? Was there even
an attack, or did she stumble and fall
Taraneh Alidoosti and Shahab Hosseini in a film directed by Asghar Farhadi. in fear?
What matters is what does not hap-
he first thing we see, in “The beat at the heart of “The Salesman.” pen next. An American woman, taken
T Salesman,” is a double bed. And the The role of Willy Loman is taken by to a hospital—as Rana is—to have her
first words we get are not spoken but il- Emad Etesami (Shahab Hosseini), a injury treated, would be asked about
luminated, in yellow and neon pink: part-time actor who also works as a the circumstances, and law enforce-
“Hotel,” “Casino,” “Bowling.” None of teacher. By a pleasing symmetry, Wil- ment would be called. Not here. When
them, let’s be honest, are what we expect ly’s wife, Linda, is played by Emad’s Emad suggests going to the police, his
in a movie from the Islamic Republic of wife, Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti). Un- wife demurs. “I don’t want to have to
Iran. But the sleight of hand is typical like the Lomans, however, the Etesa- tell it in front of everybody,” she says,
of the director, Asghar Farhadi, who mis have no children—no Happy or and her fellow-citizens agree that doing
has—in films like “About Elly” (2009), Biff to tighten the screws of disap- nothing is the smartest option. A neigh-
“A Separation” (2011), and “The Past” pointment. From what we observe, too, bor tells her that, in regard to her as-
(2013)—shown himself to be a master Emad seems pretty good at his day job; sailant, “you’ll have to justify letting
of disorientation. What we are looking his pupils, boys in their teens, engage him in. There would be a trial and
at is a stage set, built for a production of freely in classroom discussion. If, when all kinds of stories.” So that’s it. The
“Death of a Salesman,” in present-day he falls asleep in class one day, they woman is the guilty party until proved
Tehran. Arthur Miller would have ap- grab the chance to take pictures of him innocent. Shame inflicts a secondary
proved. In a 1997 interview, he spoke with their cell phones, well, what high- blow; reputations can be broken as eas-
about productions of the work in other school kid, anywhere in the world, could ily as skulls. Western viewers, watch-
countries, such as Sweden and China, refuse such a gift? ing “A Separation,” which dealt with
and of the discrepancies that arose: The Etesamis’ problems start and divorce and the care of an elderly par-
Some of the etiquette is different. People end at home, a place that soon becomes ent, had to keep pace with an unfamil-
don’t address parents quite the way Americans untenable. A fracture appears in a bed- iar legal system as they went along,
do, and there is also a question of intimacy. room wall of their apartment; windows but the path taken by “The Salesman”
Americans make a play at being very intimate crack without being touched, as if by is less public and more oblique. We
very quickly, which seems disrespectful some- hostile magic. Residents are told to don’t see a single cop, let alone a law-
times to people who aren’t used to instant emo-
tional closeness. leave the building, which is listing and yer or a cleric, yet by their very ab-
shifting because of construction work sence we sense their clamp on society:
These questions of intimacy and next door. (“What a disaster, this town,” a clever move by Farhadi, who shows
respect, and of how both can be violated, Emad says. “If we could only raze it all nothing that could vex Iranian censors
76 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 ILLUSTRATION BY JAMIE COE
but whose intent is nonetheless caus- may wonder if the play itself takes skills, and a taste for human meat.
tic and precise. enough notice of Linda Loman, and At the start of the film, this multi-
Little by little, Emad—bearded and the same applies to Rana. You fully be- valent fellow kidnaps three teen-age
reflective, the grain of his anxiety finely lieve that Emad loves her, yet you also girls, played by Haley Lu Richardson,
conveyed by Shahab Hosseini—turns catch his imperious tone toward her Jessica Sula, and Anya Taylor-Joy, who
into an amateur sleuth. He locates the (“Stay there,” “Don’t interfere”), and was the eldest daughter in “The Witch,”
intruder’s pickup truck and tracks him you want to know: How about her se- and who must be wondering if any-
down. When the culprit is revealed at crets, or her scars? That urge is all the where is safe. They are imprisoned,
last, he sidles inadvertently into view, stronger because she is played by menaced, kept in suspense about which
and the figure that he cuts, to Emad’s Taraneh Alidoosti, who took the title of their captor’s personae will show up
consternation, could not conform less role in “About Elly,” and who has one next, and, over time, stripped down
to the image of a lecherous fiend. What of those neat round faces that have held to their underwear. In short, we are
follows, in the final half hour of the the screen since the infancy of cinema, watching an old-fashioned exploita-
movie, is an astounding chamber piece, shaded by different moods: a dash of tion flick—part of a depleted and de-
worthy of Strindberg, with the hus- the vamp, for Clara Bow; queenly wit, grading genre that not even M. Night
band, the wife, and her aggressor stuck for Claudette Colbert; waspishness, for Shyamalan, the writer and director of
in a dance of doubt and death. With Myrna Loy; and a hint of whiskers, for “Split,” can redeem.
every shot, our sympathies flicker and Simone Simon, in “Cat People.” Ali- Not that he doesn’t make the effort.
tilt. We feel sorry for the shambling doosti, in turn, brings gravity and grief, One girl has memories of being abused
villain (asked about his work, he re- and the stare that Rana directs at Emad, in childhood, but a backstory, however
plies, “I sell clothes by the roadside in after his attempts at reprisal have gone lurid, is no substitute for a character.
the evening”), and then, the next mo- awry, is so coruscating that you doubt Likewise, although we sit in on ses-
ment, abashed at our twinge of pity. their marriage can survive. Hence the sions between Barry and his shrink
Compare this lengthy scene with the unforgettable sequence in a dressing (Betty Buckley), the implication that
no less agonized “Manchester by the room, with the two of them being made personality disorders are doomed to
Sea,” and you hit a cultural gulf: what up before going onstage. Each sits in issue in criminal madness hangs over
the American film presents as emo- front of a mirror, but, as framed by Far- the movie like a rank smell. As for the
tional turmoil comes across, in Far- hadi, they seem to be inspecting each last-minute twist, a Shyamalan trade-
hadi’s tale, as a piercing moral debate, other face to face, without words or mark, it will appeal solely to people
its wording culled not from psychol- mercy. Why must the show go on? who saw a particular Shyamalan film,
ogy but from older schools of thought. years ago, in the days when he told
“Forgive me,” the intruder says. “I was arry works in fashion. Hedwig sombre, grownup stories about gutter-
tempted.” B is a nine-year-old boy with a ing marriages and loss. So what’s left?
Rana is ready to pardon him, but lisp. Patricia is brisk and correct, in a The answer is McAvoy, waltzing from
not Emad, who presses for revenge. In- long skirt and heels. Kevin is as rest- one incarnation to another. I felt vaguely
deed, it is his response to Rana’s or- ful as a land mine. All are played, with cheated that he has time for only a
deal, more than her own trauma, that unstinting relish and oomph, by James handful of the twenty-three, though I
dominates the plot, and the one flaw McAvoy, in “Split.” In all, his charac- guess he can fill in the gaps when “Split”
in this formidable work is that its at- ter possesses twenty-three distinct becomes a Broadway musical. A song
tention rests so instinctively on Emad. personalities, which must come in handy for every personality! Bring it on. 
“I’m not noticed,” Willy complains, in at college reunions. By way of a bonus,
a line from Miller that makes it into he also turns up as the Beast, who has NEWYORKER.COM
“The Salesman,” but today’s audience preternatural powers, limited social Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 30, 2017 77

 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose
three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Jason Adam Katzenstein,
must be received by Sunday, January 29th. The finalists in the January 16th contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the February 13th & 20th issue. Anyone age
thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“Maybe his second week will go better.”

Audrey Orr, Naperville, Ill.

“I’d like to see other people.”

Nick Gaudio, Austin, Texas “Row v. Wave.”
Laura Silver, Brooklyn, N.Y.
“The corrupt media will blow this way out of proportion.”
David Neill, New York City