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Conversations
that change
your world.

Join The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick,

for in-depth interviews and thought-provoking
discussions about politics, culture, and the arts.

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 NOVEMBER 4, 2024

4 GOINGS ON
7 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Dhruv Khullar on the body politic;
a city braces; the Trump family’s hair looms;
Madonna’s personal d.j.; door knocking.
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS
Julian Lucas 12 Take Me Home
Mati Diop and the cinema of impossible returns.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Jay Martel 19 Nextdoor Reacts to the Rapture
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Dorothy Wickenden 20 The Last Mile
How aid workers risk their lives in Gaza.
PROFILES
Benjamin Wallace-Wells 26 The Convert
Is J. D. Vance the new face of MAGA? A crime
THE POLITICAL SCENE committed.
Nicholas Lemann 36 The Big Deal
What Bidenomics is building. A crime
forgotten.
FICTION
Yukio Mishima 48 “From the Wilderness” A crime
THE CRITICS unpunished.
BOOKS
Kathryn Schulz 54 What other creatures understand about death.
Adam Gopnik 60 The Enlightenment’s great female intellect.
65 Briefly Noted
DANCING
Jennifer Homans 66 Compulsion, complicity, and the art of Bunraku.
THE THEATRE
Helen Shaw 68 “Sunset Blvd.,” “Romeo + Juliet.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Justin Chang 70 “Blitz.”
SEASON 3
POEMS
Diane Mehta 31 “Backbend”
Laura Kolbe 42 “Pregnancy on Street-Cleaning Day”
Listen wherever you
COVER
get your podcasts.
Lorenzo Mattotti “Strides” newyorker.com/season-3

DRAWINGS Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby, Seth Fleishman, Adam Douglas Thompson,
Johnny DiNapoli, Tom Chitty, Elisabeth McNair, P. C. Vey, Roland High,
Liana Finck, Sarah Kempa, Frank Cotham, Meredith Southard, Guy Richards Smit,
Roz Chast, Drew Dernavich, Asher Perlman, Sam Gross SPOTS Edward Steed
Scan to listen.

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 CONTRIBUTORS
Benjamin Wallace-Wells (“The Con- Nicholas Lemann (“The Big Deal,”
vert,” p. 26), a staff writer who covers p. 36), a staff writer, is a professor at
politics, began contributing to the mag- Columbia’s Graduate School of Jour-
azine in 2006. nalism. His book “Higher Admissions:
The Rise, Decline, and Return of Stan-
Dorothy Wickenden (“The Last Mile,” dardized Testing” came out last month.
p. 20) is a staff writer. Her most recent
book is “The Agitators: Three Friends Lorenzo Mattotti (Cover), an illustrator
Who Fought for Abolition and Wom- and a graphic novelist, first contrib-
en’s Rights.” uted to The New Yorker in 1993.

Yukio Mishima (Fiction, p. 48), a Jap- Julian Lucas (“Take Me Home,” p. 12), a
anese writer, died in 1970. His fiction staff writer, began contributing to the
includes the “Sea of Fertility” series magazine in 2018.
and the story collection “Voices of the
Fallen Heroes,” due out in January. Dhruv Khullar (Comment, p. 7), a con-
tributing writer, is a practicing physician
Bob Morris (The Talk of the Town, p. 10) and an associate professor at Weill
first contributed to the magazine in Cornell Medical College.
1995. His books include “Assisted Lov-
ing: True Tales of Double Dating with Jennifer Homans (Dancing, p. 66 ), the
My Dad” and “Bobby Wonderful.” magazine’s dance critic, is the author
of, most recently, “Mr. B: George Bal-
Laura Kolbe (Poem, p. 42), a medical anchine’s 20th Century.”
doctor and a writer, is the author of
the poetry collection “Little Pharma.” Diane Mehta (Poem, p. 31 ) is the
author of the forthcoming “Happier
Brooke Husic (Puzzles & Games Dept.) Far: Essays.” She is poet-in-residence
is the crossword editor at Puzzmo. at the New Chamber Ballet.

THE NEW YORKER INTERVIEW

Jesse Eisenberg Has a Few Questions

VICTOR LLORENTE

By Michael Schulman

Read this digital-only story on the New Yorker app, the best place to find
the latest issue, plus more news, commentary, criticism, and humor.

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 THE MAIL
UNION STRONG represented by the late Pulitzer Prize-
winning Los Angeles Times colum-
Eyal Press’s piece about the political nist Jonathan Gold; the 2015 film made
shift among blue-collar workers re- about him, “City of Gold,” captures
minded me of my own experience a rebel humanist food writer show-
(“The Worker Revolt,” October 7th). ing that L.A. is a democratic place
I grew up in a union household, and, made up of diverse diners, and that
when both my parents got sick, we food can be a matter of community,
became poor. Despite this, with the not just of ego.
help of Social Security, Medicare, and Olivia Joffrey
union benefits, we were lifted up by a Santa Barbara, Calif.
strong social safety net. I received a 1
good education and became a lawyer READING WITH VED
and then a judge. It helped that my
youth and my early professional life I was interested to learn from Sage
occurred from the nineteen-forties to Mehta’s essay about her father, the
the eighties, a period when income New Yorker writer Ved Mehta, that I’m
inequality and wealth inequality were a member of a group I didn’t even know
actually decreasing. Then came the existed: the Vedettes (“The Sighted
Reagan revolution, and those inequal- World,” October 14th). Living in New
ities began a steep rise, which contin- York City in my twenties and trying
ues to this day. to scrape together rent, I answered an
It amazes me how little the Repub- ad in Craigslist that intrigued me: an
lican Party in general, and Donald unnamed New Yorker writer needed
Trump in particular, has to do to earn an amanuensis. The mysterious word
the support of working-class Ameri- alone was enough to make me read
cans. It also amazes me how those on. After showing up at an Upper East
same Americans take for granted the Side apartment, I was hired instead as
benefits gained for them by unions one of Ved’s readers, and soon spent
and Democrats. many a weekend morning reading to
James M. Cronin him. I remember how he induced me
Westport, Mass. to read “faster, faster!” and how I came
1 to enjoy the challenge of keeping his
EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES desired speed—that is, until one day
when I arrived still stoned from the
Hannah Goldfield nailed the nuances night before and felt as if I were hur-
of Southern California’s wellness cul- tling off some kind of word cliff.
ture (On and Off the Menu, Octo- I found Ved to be bold, confident,
ber 7th). I live in SoCal and refer to amiably teasing, and generous. A few
this community, with its health-food sessions in, he asked if I was a writer,
zealotry and proximity to the film in- and offered to read a short story I’d
dustry, cults, and pseudo-science, as written. He read it, and by way of feed-
the wellness industrial complex. What back he said simply: Keep writing. It
I find most disconcerting about the was the best advice about writing I
W.I.C. and its orbit of capitalist en- have ever gotten.
terprises (see Goldfield’s description Jackie Delamatre
of a twenty-five-dollar bottle of water Providence, R.I.
at Erewhon) is how utterly navel-
gazing it is. We Californians seem un- •
able to tear our attention away from Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
the micro-fluctuations in our glycemic address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
index after a keto smoothie, despite themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
everything that is going on in the world. any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
Californian eaters might be better of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

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 and Daft Punk, the last of which earned him the
2014 Grammy for Album of the Year.—Sheldon
GOINGS ON Pearce (Carnegie Hall; Nov. 2.)

OCTOBER 30 – NOVEMBER 5, 2024 OFF BROADWAY | Drag, at its best, is a union of

glamour and camp, spectacle and heart. “Drag:
The Musical”—a tale of two night clubs, written
by Tomas Costanza, Justin Andrew Honard, and
Ashley Gordon, and directed with pizzazz by
Spencer Liff—delivers the goods, with some
rock and roll to boot. One club is owned by
What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. Kitty Galloway (the “RuPaul’s Drag Race” sen-
sation Alaska Thunderfuck); the other, across
the street, belongs to her ex, Alexis Gillmore
Few, if any, dance performances of the nineties provoked more controversy (a distractingly muscular Nick Adams). But
than Bill T. Jones’s “Still/Here,” débuted by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Alexis’s establishment may soon fold because of
Company in 1994. Originating in workshops with volunteers who had financial mismanagement, prompting an appeal
to her straight accountant brother (Joey McIn-
faced, or were facing, life-threatening illnesses ( Jones himself was H.I.V. tyre, bringing his own thunder). He arrives with
positive), the piece incorporated video interviews into a multimedia work his young son (Remi Tuckman/Yair Keydar),
performed by conspicuously healthy dancers. When The New Yorker’s who discovers—to his father’s consternation and
Alexis’s delight—a love of drag. With Jujubee,
dance critic, Arlene Croce, refused to see it but wrote about it anyway, Jan Sport, and a shit ton of rhinestones.—Dan
decrying it as “victim art,” the amens and the outrage in readers’ letters Stahl (New World Stages; open run.)
and op-ed pieces grew into a signal event in the era’s culture wars. Now
DANCE | Since being named the resident chore-
a thirtieth-anniversary revival at BAM (Oct. 30-Nov. 2) offers a chance ographer at Paul Taylor Dance Company, Lauren
to consider the work and its evocation of survival at a distance from the Lovette has proved adept at channelling the
uproar, in the very different context of today.—Brian Seibert dancers’ exuberantly warm style and grounded
technique. She has provided two new works for
the fall, “Chaconne in Winter” and “Recess.”
There are other premières as well: Robert Bat-
tle, until recently the director of Alvin Ailey,
has made a tribute to Carolyn Adams, a beloved
former member of the troupe. And there are,
of course, the Taylor dances, from the famil-
iar—“Aureole,” “Arden Court,” and “Esplanade,”
which turns fifty next year—to the rarely per-
formed, such as “Images,” a dance inspired by
the friezes of antiquity, set to Debussy.—Marina
Harss (David H. Koch Theatre; Nov. 5-24.)

ART | You can see the thirty-four-year-old

painter Samuel Hindolo pushing himself in
the two-part exhibition “Eurostar”—made up
of photo collages, drawings, and paintings in-
spired by train-station architecture—not to be
identified by one genre. So doing, he avoids a
common pitfall: the artist’s commodification
and getting stuck in a signature style. Passing
intimacies are keenly felt in small paintings
such as “Vitrine III” (2024), where the figures
are rendered with a kind of awkward grace,
a hallmark of Hindolo’s draftsmanship. His
faint and subtle renderings of domestic scenes
remind one at times of the beginning of Wim
Wenders’s “Wings of Desire”—and of the dis-
tance and the privilege inherent in privacy
being observed, and recorded.—Hilton Als
ABOUT TOWN (15 Orient and Galerie Buchholz; through Nov. 9.)

ART | For some time now, Dietmar Busse has at Wigstock or people lounging on Harlem MOVIES | Edward Berger’s plush thriller “Con-
been painting his photographs until the origi- stoops.—Vince Aletti (Amant; through Feb. 16.) clave,” based on a novel by Robert Harris,
nal image nearly disappears, but when he first details a fictional meeting of cardinals at the
arrived in New York, in the early nineties, AFROPOP | For more than four decades, the Be- Vatican, after the death of a Pope, to choose
after a childhood in a farming village in Ger- ninese French singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo his successor. Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal
many, he made mostly small, black-and-white has been a titanic figure working to dispel the Thomas Lawrence, who is working behind the
Polaroids. More than a hundred of these, Western myth of “world music.” From the 1991 scenes to prevent the victory of a reaction-
plus some knockout blowups, are included album “Logozo” to three Grammy-winning ary (Sergio Castellitto). But an outspoken
in the sprawling, sensational show “Dietmar LPs—“Eve” (2014), “Sings” (2015), and “Mother liberal (Stanley Tucci) has trouble winning
Busse Fairy Tales 1991-1999.” Mostly, but never Nature” (2021)—Kidjo has fiercely advocated for votes, and the resulting action involves deft
merely, snapshots, Busse’s pictures were taken African music, from Afrobeat to Afropop, jazz, coalition-building and the papal equivalent
on bike trips around the city, and the curios- and classical. She is joined on the first U.S. stop of October surprises. The drama is clever but
ity on both sides of the camera makes them of a tour celebrating her forty-year career by the stodgy, spotlighting picturesque settings and
vibrate. There are a number of editorial as- Colour of Noize Orchestra, directed by Derrick arcane rituals, and relying on a formidable cast,
DAN REST

signments, including subjects such as Pedro Hodge, and the funk ambassador Nile Rodgers, which also includes John Lithgow and Isabella
Almodóvar and Ultra Naté, but they can’t the Chic front man who worked on hits for Rossellini, to invest stock characters with a sem-
really compete with a trio of homely queens Diana Ross, David Bowie, Madonna, Beyoncé, blance of life.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

4 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024

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 1
PICK THREE
Sarah Larson on standout podcasts.
1. “The Wonder of Stevie,” bursting with music
and hosted with extreme exuberance by Wes-
ley Morris, tells Stevie Wonder’s life story
from, roughly, “Fingertips” to “That Girl,”
with an emphasis on his five extraordinary
albums released from 1972 to 1976. Wonder
himself appears in the final episode; peers such
as Smokey Robinson tell stories, and musicians
and fans including Questlove, Janelle Monáe,
and Barack and Michelle Obama (whose
Wonder-inspired company, Higher Ground,
helped produce) articulate the nature of Won-
der’s genius. Also: Barack sings!
1
TABLES FOR TWO
or brunch (through 2 P.M.) and then
reopens for dinner. By day, there’s ex-
2. In “Empire City,” Chenjerai Kumanyika, of
the excellent podcasts “Uncivil” and “Seeing
cellent coffee—including a revelatory White,” provides a bracing history of the
Cocina Consuelo combo of espresso and pineapple juice N.Y.P.D., the country’s largest police force,
130 Hamilton Pl. over ice—and a menu that’s both brief
beginning with its early connections to slavery
and including its history of brutality and over-
Cocina Consuelo, a restaurant in and serious. Quesadillas showcase a reach. Kumanyika, a warm and shrewd presence,
Hamilton Heights that opened in smoky, stewy tinga made not with personalizes the narrative with stories about his
civil-rights-activist father, who was detained by
August, is small but jam-packed with shredded chicken or pork but with the N.Y.P.D., and his young daughter, who still
color and life. A blue-painted wooden braised hibiscus flowers. Picaditas— believes that police “keep people safe.”
banquette runs against a wall painted the corn cakes sometimes known as
3. Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes’s “Backfired:
summer-corn yellow. In the back of the sopes—are piled up with green chorizo, Attention Deficit,” which follows their previous
room is a bar, which is also the kitchen; homemade and herbaceous. A dish un- strong series, “Backfired: The Vaping Wars,”
at the front, just inside a great casement derstatedly called “grilled cheese” has illuminates the complex history of attention-
deficit disorder and of stimulant use in the
window, is a spinet piano confettied undeniable star power: made on, of all U.S., which began decades ago and skyrocketed
with stickers. You could fit another table things, a croissant, it features orange during the pandemic, leading to an infamous
or two in that space instead, but then, cheddar and salsa macha, a Veracruzan drug shortage. It’s empathetic and quietly funny;
reflecting on Adderall and college, Neyfakh says,
well, there wouldn’t be a piano, or the condiment akin to chile crunch. “Never in my life have I thought my ideas were
books and plants that sit along its top, In the evening, the lights go down, better and more original than when I was in
or the sheaf of menus resting above the and that communal coffee-shop energy the library, high as a kite, tapping out mediocre
essays about things I barely understood.”
keys on the music stand. transmutes into something a little sex-
The restaurant is the joint project of ier. A jalapeño-spiked Caesar dressing
the chef Karina Garcia and her husband, coats long, pale leaves of endive that
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHRISTOPH NIEMANN (TOP); MICHELLE PEREZ (BOTTOM)

Lalo Rodriguez. Garcia formerly worked beg to be picked up with the fingertips
in the front of the house at Eleven and eaten, lustily, out of hand. A pair of
Madison Park. Rodriguez put in time bright-red peppers, stuffed with tangy
PHOTOGRAPH BY EVAN ANGELASTRO FOR THE NEW YORKER;

at Cosme. During the pandemic, out tuna confit, are plated leaning against
of their jobs, they sold tacos out of their one another, almost romantically. Mole
then apartment in Harlem. That venture negro, ladled over a confited leg of duck,
evolved into a supper club, also called is as enrapturing as quicksand, luxu-
Cocina Consuelo, serving food rooted in riously smooth and complex, with a
Rodriguez’s childhood in Puebla, Mex- welcome edge of bitterness. With their
ico. It’s been wonderful, during the past elegant plating and sophisticated fla-
few years, to see scrappy projects from vors, these dishes wouldn’t feel out of
that uncertain era—among them Wiz- place at a ritzy downtown dining room,
ard Hat Pizza, the taquería Border Town, but they fit in just as seamlessly here, in
and the bakery L’Appartement 4F—live Cocina Consuelo’s multicolored space,
on and form a thriving new generation surrounded by personal touches in a NEWYORKER.COM/NEWSLETTERS
of New York City food culture. room full of music. ($12-$32.) Get expanded versions of Helen Rosner’s reviews,
Cocina Consuelo serves breakfast —Helen Rosner plus Goings On, delivered early in your in-box.

THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 5

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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT ciated with age-related disinhibition. The cedent in public life? In the first half of
NATIONAL HEALTH health-news site STAT has reported that this year, major U.S. newspapers ran doz-
since Trump left office his use of extreme ens more articles about Biden’s mental
couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump and binary linguistic constructions such acuity than they have about Trump’s in
A turned in one of his strangest per-
formances in a campaign with no short-
as “always” and “never”—which can also
be a sign of cognitive decline or depres-
the past nine months, and, in the end,
the Democratic leadership prevailed upon
age of them—part of a series of oddi- sion—has increased some sixty per cent, Biden to step aside for coalition and
ties that may or may not constitute an and that his speech now contains much country. Republican leaders, confronted
October surprise but has certainly made more negative and backward-looking lan- with the unravelling of their own nom-
for a surprising October. “Who the hell guage. Trump himself has felt obliged to inee, have only reaffirmed their fealty.
wants to hear questions?” he hollered at address his digressive rambling. “I do the Yet growing numbers of Americans
a town hall in Pennsylvania, after two weave,” he said recently. “I’ll talk about, seem to harbor misgivings about Trump’s
attendees had suffered medical emer- like, nine different things, and they all age and cognitive abilities. In Wiscon-
gencies. Then he wandered the stage come back brilliantly together.” He added, sin, according to polling from Marquette
for nearly forty minutes, swaying to “English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most Law School, more than six in ten vot-
music from his playlist—“Ave Maria,” brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’” ers say that Trump is too old to be Pres-
“Y.M.C.A.,” “Hallelujah.” Joe Biden’s deficiencies became ap- ident; a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found
Trump has always given off Twenty- parent in part because he has always that, nationally, around half of Indepen-
fifth Amendment vibes. But, even by that behaved like a normal politician. But dents say that he doesn’t have the men-
standard, his behavior has grown unnerv- Trump’s conduct has been so aberrant tal acuity for the job. The question is
ingly bizarre, prompting new questions for so long that separating genuine de- whether, after all that Trump has said
about his mental fitness and his emo- terioration from routine volatility is no and done—maligning the military, fawn-
tional stability. In recent weeks, he has easy task—on what basis does one judge ing over dictators, bragging about sex-
said that Haitian migrants should be de- oscillations in something without pre- ual assault, refusing to accept election
ported “back to Venezuela,” rebranded results—the spectre of a man now even
the January 6th insurrection a “day of less in control of his faculties could be
love,” mused about the size of Arnold what moves voters.
Palmer’s genitals, and criticized Abra- The 2024 campaign has been unusual
ham Lincoln for not having “settled” the both in its intense focus on the health of
Civil War (though he did allow that Lin- the candidates and in its relative inatten-
coln was “probably” a great President). tion to the health of the people. Whether
Trump has also increasingly cancelled owing to pandemic fatigue or to over-
interviews, reportedly owing to exhaus- worn slogans about Obamacare repeal
tion; he has held less than a quarter as and Medicare for All, health care has
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

many rallies in 2024 as he did in 2016. been less central to this election than to
Over time, Trump’s language has be- any in a generation. Bill Clinton fought
come angrier, simpler, less focussed, more for universal health care, and George W.
violent, and more profane. According to Bush secured prescription-drug coverage
the Times, his rally speeches are, on av- for seniors. Barack Obama oversaw the
erage, about twice as long as they were passage of the Affordable Care Act, and
in 2016, and he swears nearly seventy per Trump nearly orchestrated its demise.
cent more often, a trait that can be asso- This year, a health-care transformation
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 7

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doesn’t seem to be in the offing—Trump’s democracy may matter more than the rule of law fuels innovation, by curbing
“concepts of a plan” notwithstanding— size of its economy. On average, nations corruption and protecting intellectual
but something more fundamental is on that transitioned from autocracy to de- property; and independent agencies
the ballot: a system of government that mocracy saw near-immediate improve- check power and implement regulations
makes good health possible. ments—within a decade, life expectancy to promote clean water, breathable air,
Not long after the American Revo- increased by more than two years—and and safe food.
lution, Benjamin Rush, a physician and those which slid from democracy to au- The real danger of a second Trump
a signatory to the Declaration of Inde- tocracy experienced the opposite. Bo- term is not that Trump is a man in de-
pendence, proposed a link between llyky estimates that, in the decades be- cline. It is that, this time around, he would
healthy politics and healthy people. Rush tween the fall of the Soviet Union and be surrounded by a cast of characters
argued that there is an “indissoluble Trump’s glide down the golden escala- who aim to reify, not restrain, his worst
union between moral, political, and phys- tor, democracy helped prevent some six- impulses. John Kelly, Trump’s longest-
ical happiness,” and that “elective and teen million deaths from cardiovascu- serving chief of staff, has argued that
representative governments are most fa- lar disease alone. Trump is “certainly an authoritarian”;
vourable” to both individual and socie- Democratic governments are ac- Mark Milley, the former chairman of the
tal well-being. His contention seems to countable to people, and people like to Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned that
have been borne out: research increas- be healthy. Health care is what econo- Trump is “fascist to the core.” Healthy
ingly supports a salubrious effect of dem- mists call a superior good, meaning that democracy, like good health, requires ad-
ocratic governance. as societies get richer they want more herence to a particular set of norms and
A recent study in The Lancet, led by of it. Democracies, accordingly, spend behaviors, and the price of neglect is not
Thomas Bollyky, the chair of global more on health than autocracies do, and just sick polities but sick people. With
health at the Council on Foreign Rela- are likely to preserve access to care even both, it’s better to push for prevention
tions, suggests that, for many health when the economy tanks. Meanwhile, than to hope for a resuscitation.
outcomes, the strength of a country’s a free press keeps people informed; the —Dhruv Khullar

GUT CHECK of George Templeton Strong, a wealthy brutes and devils. This is very bad in-
VERY BAD INDEED nineteenth-century New York City law- deed.” Of the events, the shopkeepers
yer, and his eyewitness account, from at the edge of what is now Stuyvesant
1863, of the Draft Riots, in Manhattan. Town were entirely unaware. Those
This was the insurrection, the week after houses are long gone. Neither Marcos
the Battle of Gettysburg, of mostly poor, Lopez, a Trump supporter from Wash-
mostly Irish New Yorkers against Lin- ington Heights, working the wine racks
coln’s new policy of conscription into at the Rouge & Blanc liquor store, nor
week and change until Election the Union Army. A class riot (the Beverly Wilpon, a Harris partisan and
A Day. How you feeling, N.Y.C.? Is
it fair to say that people seem anxious,
wealthy could buy exemptions) became
a race riot (Black residents bore the
one of the owners of Ess-a-Bagel, a cou-
ple of doors down, had heard of the
afraid, weary, angry, and confused, and brunt). Buildings were looted and burned Draft Riots, and so perhaps were dis-
yet also (or otherwise), in some corners, to the ground; more than a hundred inclined to imagine such scenarios.
oddly complacent, blinkered, fatalistic, people were killed, including eleven During the George Floyd protests of
or detached? How to gauge the mood lynchings. It was, arguably (Tulsa would 2020, both shops had declined to heed
in a town of eight million moods, espe- like a word), the bloodiest riot in Amer- the advice to board up their windows.
cially when the moods, like the polls, ican history, and, as Kevin Baker, the The liquor store’s was smashed. Wil-
keep swinging? author of “Paradise Alley,” a novel set pon said, “We were spared. Apparently,
It’s hard to believe much of anything, during the riots, put it the other day, they weren’t looking for bagels.”
with the slanted data and wishful think- “the worst thing New Yorkers ever did On the first days of the riots, Strong
ing swirling around. The only certainty to other New Yorkers.”The mind scrolls worked his way uptown, toward the epi-
seems to be that, whatever comes to pass, through old baseball rivalries and pine- center of the violence. “Reached the seat
we’re in for a mess: a month—O.K., apple pizza toppings and concedes that of war at last, Forty-sixth Street and Third
maybe a lifetime—of ugly partisan war- this must be so. Avenue,” he wrote. “Three houses on the
fare, bloodless or not. This, then, is the Last week, an apprehensive citizen Avenue and two or three on the street
week we put tape on the windowpanes. set out in Strong’s footsteps. On First were burned down.” A few blocks away,
Will we tear ourselves to pieces, or go Avenue, near Nineteenth Street—in a mob burned down a building that
on living, imperfectly, as we have done 1863, the rioters dominated the terrain housed a draft-lottery barrel (operated
so many times before? The mind shuf- east of there—Strong described how by a blindfolded man, to insure fairness)
fles through decades of horror and farce, some of his fellow-Unionists were “fired and then, when the police superinten-
conjuring worst cases. upon from houses, and had to leave six- dent arrived, beat him nearly to death.
For an example of one such case, a teen wounded men and a Lieutenant Last week, at the former seat of war,
friend suggests a dive into the diaries Colonel Jardine in the hands of these two men working a street-food cart
8 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024

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hadn’t heard about any of this, but they “I tried to stay away from the sub- tual hair sufficed for the film’s early
did know about the murder of Big Paul ject,” Côté said on a recent afternoon. scenes, when the pre-Trump Ivana Zel-
Castellano, in 1985, outside Sparks Steak She added, “When one of the produc- níčková wore her hair simply, if fetch-
House, a few dozen yards east, and they ers approached me about the project, I ingly; a pair of wigs alternated to re-
pointed the way. was, like”—here she vocalized some- create the more imperial styles Ivana
Inside, a Sparks manager, Jeffrey thing halfway between a groan and retch- adopted once she took on the dual roles
Streem, was sitting at the bar, relaxing ing, from the privacy of her office in of wife and brand extension. Côté
after the end of the lunch rush. He was guessed that the real Ivana didn’t have
wearing a tuxedo. He knew all about the to spend as much time in the chair as
Draft Riots. “They were taking people Bakalova did: “An hour, maybe two, at
from the poor, shit places to fight the her salon, three times a week. It wasn’t
war,” he said. “That’s what’s happening like the mom.” That would be Donald’s
now in Russia.” mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump,
There were three large gentlemen at also featured in the film, who was given
the other end of the bar. Newsmax, the to monstrous bouffants resembling giant
conservative news channel, often hosts redwood burls. “She was getting roller-
a talk show, “Wise Guys with John Ta- set, going under the dryer for hours,”
bacco,” in a private room downstairs. Côté continued. A colleague of Côté’s
Devin Nunes, Rudy Giuliani, Kari Lake. was responsible for styling the movie
Streem, seventy-one, grew up in Los Mary Anne. When the actress playing
Angeles, and allowed that his politics her, Catherine McNally, was brought
did not jibe with theirs. “It’s pretty fucked to the set, Côté recalled, “Sometimes,
up,” he said. And the preëlection vibes? we were, like, ‘That’s a lot. But then you
“Fucked up.” He went on, “I don’t sleep look at the photos. . . .”
well at night. Trump, you look at it, he The greater challenge was styling fe-
has created so much tsuris. You know male extras. “Women wear their hair
what I do, if people talk shit about Trump Michelle Côté longer now,” she explained. “It’s hard to
to me?” On his phone, he pulled up a create that volume when the top is lon-
document he’d made chronicling Trump’s Montreal, where she lives. (The film was ger, because in the eighties the hair was
transgressions. He began to read it aloud shot in Canada, with Toronto mostly very short on the top and you could
and then stopped. filling in somehow for grimy, gritty tease and crimp it.” For the uninitiated,
“It’s just another part of American Koch-era New York.) But Côté liked that might seem like a paradox: big hair
history. Come on. Nothing’s the end of the movie’s creative team, including the requiring short hair. By way of histori-
the world.” The phone rang, and he director, Ali Abbasi, and she liked the cal perspective, Côté said that Jennifer
picked it up: “Good afternoon, Sparks cast, including Sebastian Stan as Don- Aniston’s “Rachel” cut, a nineteen-nine-
Steak House. Jeffrey speaking. How can ald and Maria Bakalova as Ivana, the ties standby, long on top and parted in
I help you?” first Mrs. Trump. the middle, remains popular with many,
—Nick Paumgarten Another appeal of “The Apprentice”: many women—which is neither here
1 Côté began her career at around the nor there unless you’re trying to make
THE PICTURES same time as the movie opens, in the a movie set in the nineteen-eighties and
BIG HAIR nineteen-seventies, when she had her you don’t have the budget for dozens of
first job behind a chair at a Quebec City wigs. Fortunately, Côté and her team
salon. This was the era of the wedge came up with work-arounds for the lon-
cut, when women were enthralled by ger-haired extras. “We’re not doing a
the Olympic figure-skating champion documentary,” she pointed out.
Dorothy Hamill; hair was worn short, But what about styling Donald?
napes exposed. Côté’s introduction to There was no question of using Stan’s

Ishefistheprefers
movie hairstylist Michelle Côté
going to work on a period picture,
the restrained elegance of
big hair came with a move to Montreal,
in 1985: “I was working downtown in a
big salon with women coming in at
real hair, Côté said. “He has very, very
thick hair—beautiful hair. No way we
could have done this with his own hair.”
the nineteen-fifties. But neither restraint lunchtime. That was the time of teas- Côté had three wigs at her disposal:
nor elegance was on hand with a recent ing, and we were also doing perms and one for young Donald, one for pre-
job, for which she was tasked with re- frosty highlights.” scalp-reduction-surgery Donald, and
creating the pouffy locks of the nineteen- Thus, though Côté rarely takes time one for post-scalp-reduction-surgery
eighties. The movie was “The Appren- to style her own hair, she was intimately Donald. “The second one was thinner,”
tice,” which dramatizes Donald Trump’s familiar with the various cloud forma- Côté explained. “The effects-makeup
rise from outer-borough hustler to the tions and conchlike structures that swad- people put a bald plate underneath it,
pinnacle of, if not status or wealth, at dled Ivana Trump’s head through much so we could see his scalp.” In other words,
least Trump Tower. of the nineteen-eighties. Bakalova’s ac- Stan’s real hair was covered in part by
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a fake scalp, which was covered in turn Estere in the recent “Celebration” tour, oree, said. He wore a pink velvet Paul
by a wig—a tonsorial turducken. in which the girl vogued in a black- Smith tuxedo. “I admire any kid with
“The Apprentice” ends in the nine- and-yellow catsuit and thigh-high sti- the presence of mind to know herself
teen-eighties, so Côté was spared hav- letto boots. Then she d.j.’d onstage, in so young.”
ing to plumb the engineering mysteries front of her mother’s fans. “When I was twelve, I wanted to be
of Trump’s latter-day hair, but she did “I definitely felt something up there,” thirteen,” Beau McCall, an artist known
offer one two-word theory she’d picked Ciccone said in a soft voice, as she fin- for his use of upcycled buttons, said. “I
up on: “Little extensions.” ished cuing up for the gala. “But when wanted to be a teen-ager, but when I
—Bruce Handy you do a lot of shows you get used to became one nothing happened.”
1 it.” She likes being a d.j., she said, “be- Later, when Queen Estere did her
WHO’S THAT GIRL? cause you really don’t need anyone else. set, her mother wasn’t in the house, but
NO PINK, PLEASE You just need to keep doing it.” Pierre-Antoine played the stage-mother
Ciccone was adopted from Malawi role. “She’s twelve years old, and I’m
and, last month, was bat mitzvahed along gonna take my credit!” she yelled to the
with her twin sister, Stella. At the mu- crowd. “Give it up for Queen Estere!
seum, a phalanx of protective handlers She wants you to show her some love
(including a nanny and a family entou- tonight!” The pinked-out intergenera-
rage) hovered to make sure she didn’t tional mob cheered while Ciccone, with
welve-year-old Estere Ciccone fid- say too much, citing privacy concerns. the concentration of a child doing some
T dled with a small control board in
a big room at the Museum of Arts and
But she did get a chance to say that it
was nice to work at the museum, even
very engaging schoolwork, focussed on
her console, occasionally leaning over to
Design, preparing for the museum’s an- ask Pierre-Antoine a question.
nual gala and the opening of an exhibit “Everyone is dancing, so just go for
called “Barbie: A Cultural Icon.” Her it,” she told the girl. Peggy Gou, Crys-
navy polo, gaucho shorts, and make- tal Waters, and Diplo tracks kept the
up-free face evoked an innocent school- guests bumping and grinding.
girl. But her glittery, earmuff-size head- “I guess she comes to this music nat-
phones were, in the parlance, giving urally,” Marilyn Eiges, an octogenarian
global glamour. museum docent, said from the dance
“Right now, she’s checking out her floor. She tried to remember what being
mixes and deciding on her cue points so young felt like. “All I know is that,
and transitions,” Mary Mac, Ciccone’s when I was twelve, I wanted Fred Astaire
d.j. mentor (real name: Maryse Pierre- to swirl into my living room to dance
Antoine), said, watching her charge. “She’s with me,” she said. Moments later, at
my best student and already showing me around ten o’clock, Queen Estere was
stuff.” Ciccone is one of Madonna’s six being hustled out by her posse. Mary
children, and under her d.j. name, Queen Mac would keep the dancing going with
Estere, she has just released, on Sound- Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” among
Cloud, a raunchy dance track called “I’ll others on her playlist.
Tech House U Mix.” “A d.j. has to keep “Love you, Mary Mac! See you Fri-
up with the latest music and dance moves,” Mary Mac and Queen Estere day,” Ciccone said, waving.
Pierre-Antoine said, “and at twelve she It was a school week, with d.j. les-
already knows it all.” though Barbie isn’t her thing. “The sons, piano lessons, and homework in
Pierre-Antoine, who is fifty-two, has movie was O.K. for younger kids, not the mix.
been Madonna’s personal d.j. for more me,” she said. She had to go change for —Bob Morris
than a decade, since the pop star heard the pink-themed party. “But I’m not 1
her at an Adidas store. She warms up wearing pink,” she said. “I’m wearing SHOE LEATHER DEPT.
audiences before concerts and gets black.” Last question: Was she a fan of DOOR KNOCKING
crowds dancing at after-parties. In New Taylor Swift? “I like Billie Eilish and
York, she has a residency at Henrietta Charli XCX,” she said.
Hudson, a lesbian bar in the West Vil- Downstairs, in the exhibition hall,
lage. She grew up in the area as the word had got out about Queen Estere’s
basketball-playing daughter of Haitian presence. It was unclear whether her
immigrants. “My mother still asks if mother would show up, although the
I’m making money, and is the work security staff was ready to manage a n a Tuesday morning in Septem-
steady,” she said. Queen Estere’s mother,
on the other hand, actively promotes
back-entrance arrival.
“This opening is a very good gig for
O ber, as Bernice Smith lay asleep in
Forsyth, Georgia, her phone rang. It was
her daughter’s avocation with posts on a twelve-year-old d.j.,” Robert Best, a Yvonne Stuart, a fellow-member of the
Instagram. She also featured Queen Mattel executive and the evening’s hon- Monroe County Democratic Party, call-
10 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024

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ing from a phone-banking event. “I got
someone here for you,” Stuart told Smith,
who was rubbing her eyes. “Tim Walz
wants to speak to you.”
Walz had just given the phone bank-
ers a rah-rah speech, in person. Now he
was surprising their callees. “I sat up
straight in bed,” Smith recalled. “He
said, ‘Bernice, this is Tim Walz.’ I couldn’t
hardly talk. He said, ‘What are y’all doing
in Forsyth?’ I finally said we’re doing all
we can until Election Day.” Then Smith
called everyone she knew. Smith knows
a lot of people in Forsyth, where she’s
lived for eight decades. As a child, she
picked cotton. Later, she worked in day-
care centers and special-needs class-
rooms. For more than fifty years, she’s
knocked on doors for Democratic can-
didates, “starting with a peanut farmer “I’m just saying it would be nice to be invited over sometime
from Plains, when I was nineteen,” she when there wasn’t a murder.”
said. Door knocking is how she met
Stuart, a retired librarian. These days,
the two are often joined by Juanita Pitts,
• •
a retired nursing-home assistant, who’s
been knocking just as long. appreciate it if you’d consider Kamala seeing enough of my check,” he said.
“My son and my mother have be- Harris.” He nodded politely. “Black, white, whatever, I don’t look at
come Republicans,” Stuart said at a “We’re with the Democratic Party,” race.” He went on, “Trump said he’d cut
Hardee’s, where the three women had Smith added. taxes on overtime. If you believe him.”
met up before making their rounds. “I know you!” Pitts told them. “Both King said that he wasn’t inclined to.
“It’s gonna be all right, darling,” Pitts of y’all are registered to vote? You know Four more for Harris, none for
said. “That’s what I tell her.” we’re doing early voting.” Trump; next, on to James Street. The
Smith and Pitts wore blue T-shirts “When is it?” the woman said. ladies knew that an unpredictable dog
that read “Rise Up and Vote.” Stuart “It started Tuesday,” Smith said. “Go often ran loose, so they peered around
had on a lavender flannel shirt and a tomorrow, please. We need every vote before getting out. They spotted an older
beaded bracelet, which spelled out we can get.” woman named Linda on a porch drink-
“VOTE”: a gift from a teen-ager who’d “I’m trying to still look into it,” the ing a beer and scrolling on her phone.
gone knocking with them. woman said, carefully. “I’m trying to see.” A bottle of wasp spray sat at her feet.
“She said she didn’t know how she “See what, baby?” Pitts said. “What “Linda, we come to kidnap you and
was gonna take a Harris sign home,” you need to see?” take you to vote,” Pitts said. Linda smiled
Pitts said. “Her family is for Trump.” “Kamala,” Smith said. “Kamala.” and pointed to a woman in a nearby car:
Talk turned to their favorite Presi- “She’s gonna do right by us, honey,” her ride to the voting precinct.
dents. “Clinton was just cool,” Smith Stuart added. They kept walking. Three men sat
said. “And he balanced the budget.” “Yes, Ma’am,” the woman replied. in front of a brown house. One wore
“I fell out with Clinton about ol’ “They’re gonna do it,” Smith said full camo.
Monica Lewinsky,” Stuart said. “I loved firmly, after the couple left. “How you doing, sweetie?” the man
President Obama.” The next door was open when they in camo asked Pitts.
“Kennedy,” Pitts said. “He was a righ- arrived. A man came out wearing a yel- “I’ll be even better if you vote Dem-
teous person. He could have done so low do-rag and a black Reebok sweat- ocrat,” she said.
much more.” She offered her take on shirt. “We’re voting on Monday,” he said. Who did he plan to vote for? “Ca-
Trump: “Can’t dance. Tells lies.” “Y’all supporting Kamala Harris, I milla,” he said. “I don’t even know about
Sufficiently hydrated and hyped up, hope?” Smith asked. her, but Trump talking crazy right now.”
they piled into Stuart’s Honda and He paused. “Yeah.” Crazy talk was everywhere. A few
headed over to an apartment complex “She gonna do right by you,” Stuart weeks earlier, a lady had opened her door
that was decorated for Halloween. Con- said. and told the women that Trump sent “a
sulting her clipboard, Smith approached “Hope so,” said the man, who intro- trillion of his personal money to the hur-
Apartment A3, and a young couple duced himself as Orlando King and said ricane victims.” Stuart shook her head.
emerged from a neighboring unit. “You that he worked in a cabinet factory. “I’m “What can you tell people like that?”
know me,” she said to the man. “We’d tired of working all these hours and not —Charles Bethea
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 ing, manipulative, and, switching to
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS English, which she speaks f luently,
“fucked up.” Everything was wrong, she
insisted, from the folkloric condescen-
TAKE ME HOME sion of the walls’ earthy colors to the
crowded shelves of musical instruments
The filmmaker Mati Diop turns her gaze on plundered art. in visible storage, which reminded her
of bodies in a morgue. Most troubling
BY JULIAN LUCAS were the grim-faced security guards,
nearly all of them elderly Black men.
“Psychologically, what does it do to a
person to spend an entire day in a space
whose violent context”—colonial-
ism—“has been completely effaced?”
Diop whispered. “And yet it’s every-
where.” She indicated a man in a dark
suit beside a colorful beaded crown
from the kingdom of Dahomey, now
southern Benin. “The presence of these
men and of this patrimony in the mu-
seum are part of the same story,” she
continued. “It’s dizzying.”
Her new film, a fantastical docu-
mentary titled “Dahomey,” chronicles
the return of the so-called Dahomey
treasures, comprising twenty-six of the
many art works that French troops
seized in the eighteen-nineties while
subjugating the kingdom. (A newspa-
per of the time crowed that the van-
quished natives, whose “painted gods”
had failed to defend them, “wouldn’t
miss the wood.”) Dahomean sculptures
were placed in anthropology museums,
where they were admired by Picasso
and Apollinaire. But in 2018 decades
of diplomacy and activism culminated
in Emmanuel Macron’s historic deci-
sion to repatriate the art works to Benin.
Diop’s film follows them from the Quai
he Musée du Quai Branly is a curatorial apparatus would “vanish be- Branly to a hero’s welcome in Coto-
T long ark of a building perched
over a garden, whose foliage screens
fore the sacred objects so we may enter
into communion with them.” But the
nou, the country’s largest city, where
they are discussed by students at a local
the museum from its busy namesake vibes within are less enchanting than university after an exhibition at the
thoroughfare on the banks of the Seine. uncanny. The cavernous main gallery Presidential palace. “I cried for fifteen
Literally overshadowed by the Eiffel is a maze of shadows and imitation minutes,” one student says after see-
Tower, it houses more than three hun- mud walls, where masks look out from ing the show. Another declares, “What
dred thousand pieces of art from Af- between oversized photographs of was looted more than a century ago
rica, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, tropical vegetation. “I’ll never be fa- is our soul.”
most of them legacies of France’s co- miliar with this space,” Mati Diop said Vexing questions shadow the jubi-
lonial empire. Its opening, in 2006, was when we visited last month. “It’s like lant homecoming. What does it mean
billed as an enlightened departure from ‘The Matrix.’ ” for art works to “go back” to a country
the practice of exhibiting non-Euro- Diop, a French Senegalese filmmaker that didn’t exist when they were taken?
pean works as anthropological speci- who won international renown for her Can they have any meaning for a pop-
mens; the building’s architect, Jean début feature, “Atlantics,” seemed vis- ulation alienated from their history?
Nouvel, described it as a place of spir- cerally disturbed by the museum, de- Or do they risk becoming mere tools
itual regeneration, where the Western scribing its “mise en scène” as depress- of state propaganda? And what about
the countless stolen objects that West-
Diop’s new film about art restitution has made her a French media fixture. ern museums haven’t returned? In
12 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBBIE LAWRENCE
Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
Diop’s otherworldly conceit, these anx- idea of transmitting at the same time.” grant crisis. She made “Dahomey” after
ieties are voiced by “26”—a defiantly “Dahomey” arrives in American the- passing on multimillion-dollar proj-
posed statue of the Dahomean king atres buoyed by its critical success in ects in Hollywood. It was hard to doubt
Ghezo, who speaks for the treasures Europe. (Later, it will be available on her when she said that she became a
in a fathomless, reverberant growl. (It’s the streaming platform mubi.) This filmmaker because it was her “only
one of a trio of royal bocio, or power February, it won the Golden Bear at possible path to liberation.”
figures, depicting Dahomean sover- the Berlinale, on the heels of Germa-
eigns, and is attributed to the artists ny’s decision to transfer ownership of pplause broke out on Lyon’s Rue
Sossa Dede and Bokossa Donvide.)
“I’m torn between the fear of not being
its Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. Its pre-
mière in France, last month, reignited
A du Premier-Film as Diop, with
an obliging flourish, pulled a red cloth
recognized by anyone and not recog- a moribund national debate around the from the “Wall of Filmmakers” to re-
nizing anything,” 26 frets in Fon, the issue, transforming Diop into a fixture veal a plaque inscribed with her name.
kingdom’s language, wondering, with on radio and television and landing 26 A small crowd took pictures. Thierry
something like survivor’s guilt, why on the cover of the leftist daily Libéra- Frémaux, who runs the Cannes Film
he’s been chosen to “return to the sur- tion. “She’s already had an effect,” Fel- Festival and the Lumière Institute—
face of time.” wine Sarr, a Senegalese intellectual and where this impromptu ceremony un-
We asked a security guard where the co-author of the 2018 Sarr-Savoy folded last month—clasped her in an
the treasures had been exhibited be- report, which guided France’s restitu- avuncular embrace. Soon, dozens of
fore their removal from the museum. tion of cultural heritage to African students, many of them Black or brown,
Diop had filmed there, but couldn’t countries, told me. “This question was had gathered around Diop under the
find where she’d set up her cameras; framed in terms of the Western de- street lights. A young woman with over-
between the announcement of the bate. ‘Do you have museums? Are you sized glasses invited her to visit her
works’ deinstallation and their flight able to take care of the objects? Are film school. Another, in a kaffiyeh and
to Benin, she’d had only two weeks to you emptying Western museums?’ Now, fingerless gloves, asked the filmmaker
prepare. “It was like commando oper- with the film, we are hearing the voices to sign her DVD of “Atlantics.”
ations,” she recalled. The Quai Branly of the people who are supposed to be Diop’s début is a gothic romance, a
did not grant her request for access mainly concerned.” political fable about labor and migra-
until Beninese officials, who wanted “Originally, I’d planned to write a tion, and an homage to Dakar, Sene-
to record the handover for posterity, fictional epic, the whole journey of an gal. A group of young men helping to
interceded on her behalf. Now, back at art work from the moment of its pil- build a luxury tower fall victim to wage
the scene of her cinematic heist, she lage to the moment of its restitution, theft and resolve to seek a better life
gasped at the sight of a mask familiar which I imagined to be in the future,” in Spain. Like thousands of others,
from Chris Marker and Alain Res- Diop says of “Dahomey,” explaining they perish at sea. But then, impossi-
nais’s “Statues Also Die,” a film-essay that it became a documentary only bly, they return, possessing the bodies
on plundered art which France banned after she read that the treasures were of the young women they left behind.
after its release, in 1953. “It’s her,” she about to be returned. Before its release Inexplicable fires and fevers strike the
said, retrieving her phone from a blue in France, the film premièred in Benin city; Dakar, at continental Africa’s west-
Telfar handbag to take a picture. “She’s and Senegal, where Diop recently es- ernmost point, is depicted as a sprawl
so beautiful. She’s so beautiful.” tablished a production company, pun- of dust-choked motorways and ghostly
Diop, forty-two, is a slight, poised ningly named Fanta Sy. (Fanta and Sy beaches edging into the Atlantic’s dark
woman with delicate features and a are common Senegalese names.) Res- expanse. In one of the final scenes, the
coolly vigilant bearing. Often seen, titution has become her synecdoche boys force their boss to dig graves for
much to her chagrin, as “cute,” she has for creatively empowering African them at a seaside cemetery. “Every time
wavy, center-parted hair and a beauty youth. As she put it to me, “I wanted you look at the top of the tower, you’ll
mark in one corner of her feathery to make a film that would restore our think of our unburied bodies at the
eyebrows, with doe eyes that leaped, as desire for ourselves.” bottom of the ocean,” one says.
we wandered the galleries, from vitrine The filmmaker’s fervor is inspiring, Diop cast nonprofessional actors
to vitrine. She can be almost aggres- if occasionally self-serious. Who else from across Dakar. Amadou Mbow
sively reserved; at one point, when an- would speak, as she did at a recent crossed her path at two in the morn-
other museumgoer blundered into her press event, of restitution as an “irre- ing in the chic Almadies neighbor-
personal space, she reacted with mute sistible march” that promises to shake hood, where he’d been out clubbing.
pique. Yet, when she speaks about her the very “order of the imaginary”? Yet “Me, I believe in destiny,” he told me;
work, it’s with a zeal that propels her Diop’s work justifies such auteurial though he had never considered act-
outward. At times, she gesticulated pronouncements. Hers is a yearning, ing, and feared religious backlash for
so emphatically that she touched my nocturnal cinema of ambiguous ad- the sex scenes, he ended up starring as
shoulders without seeming to notice. ventures and impossible returns, shut- a young police detective—and occa-
“I need to have a sensual and physi- tling between intimate loneliness—a sionally interpreting for his co-star,
cal relationship to ideas,” Diop said. statue’s, a has-been actor’s—and vast Mama Sané, who spoke no French.
“It’s hard for me to create without the issues like decolonization and the mi- The film was shot in Wolof, Senegal’s
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lingua franca, which Diop herself la- ing of “Dahomey” in one of the insti- the pioneering French Beninese key-
bored to understand. But her determi- tute’s theatres. “The sound was per- boardist Wally Badarou. “Some direc-
nation was a language all its own. “If fect,” she told Frémaux. (In Marseille, tors are musicians who make films, and
she had to do the scene fifty times, we where she’d just held another avant- I feel like one of them,” Diop explained.
did the scene fifty times,” Mbow said, première, it had been far too low.) She’s “Before it does anything else, a film
recalling an instruction to be “exhausted exacting about audio, especially 26’s ought to emit a frequency.”
within an inch of your life” during an voice, which is meant to resound like Her evocative minimalism is par-
interrogation scene. The shoot went a tremor from below. “The presence tially motivated by a desire to accord
on all day: “With Mati, there is no needs to be disturbing and provoca- her subjects a degree of autonomy. In-
‘timing,’ only searching until you find.” tive,” she said. “The film isn’t a bal- audible conversations recur in her films.
“Atlantics” débuted at the 2019 lad—it’s a journey.” She conceives of In “Atlantics,” the young migrants re-
Cannes Film Festival, where Diop was “Dahomey” as an opera with two cho- solve to leave Senegal in a scene with-
the first Black woman ever to com- ruses: the students, representing Afri- out dialogue. Their deaths occur off-
pete as a director. Her invitation came ca’s future, and the treasures, trailing screen; we learn of their last moments
as a shock. The film was not only a history’s ghosts. “It should be funda- only when Sané’s character, Ada, briefly
début but a genre fantasy in which mentally strange to experience such reunites with the anguished ghost of
nonprofessional actors delivered their traces of coloniality, which are here in her lover, Souleiman. “It puts the spec-
lines in an African language. Yet it France, as over there.” tator in an active position, because it’s
took home the Grand Prix. (It was Lyon, a tidy provincial capital, feels she who has to imagine the shipwreck,
subsequently picked up by Netf lix, worlds away from West Africa. Yet make the journey,” Diop says. “It’s not
breaking the diaspora language bar- not far from the institute was the Cath- something that you consume.”
rier to join a Black film renaissance in olic Society of African Missions, which A different approach reigns in most
the United States.) For Diop, who owns, and is expected to return, Da- Western films about Africa. Last year,
until then was largely known for star- homean works. Nearby was the uni- Matteo Garrone ventured into terri-
ring in Claire Denis’s intimate fa- versity where Frantz Fanon wrote tory not dissimilar to that of “Atlan-
ther-daughter drama “35 Shots of Rum” “Black Skin, White Masks.” The hid- tics,” with “Io Capitano,” loosely in-
(2008), its victory was an “LSD expe- den afterlives of empire are a through spired by the true story of a West
rience.” The vertigo was evident in her line in Diop’s films. “Dahomey” opens, African boy who attempted to reach
acceptance speech. Four minutes in, in Paris, with a nocturnal scene of Italy. Garrone’s Senegalese protago-
and not yet through with her solemn flashing Eiffel Tower tchotchkes, sold nist endures torture in a Libyan prison,
expressions of gratitude, Diop was es- by an undocumented African street crises at sea, and a harrowing Sahara
corted offstage by Sylvester Stallone vender just offscreen. It’s a character- crossing that features C.G.I. mirages
to the tinkling strains of Camille Saint- istically oblique touch; as Judith Lou and sumptuous aerial photography.
Saëns’s “Aquarium.” Lévy, who co-produced the film, told Diop avoided the film until it was of-
“I was impressed by this woman— me, “Mati has a special relationship fered as an in-flight movie. In her view,
so young, looking so cute and fragile— to the invisible.” Garrone’s Dakar is too sanitized, his
but so strong and so precise in con- Sensory precision is crucial to her narrative too sentimental, and his mi-
versation,” Frémaux recalled over films, because they leave so much to grants so touchingly naïve as to defy
drinks. We were at the institute’s café, credibility. “If it can help white racists
just across from the hangar where some to have a bit of empathy, maybe it’s
of the world’s first films were created. good,” she said. But it’s “the antithe-
The menu specializes in wines made sis of my approach.”
by filmmakers; we had Francis Ford Diop feels that her own work is often
Coppolas. “Atlantics” had a “Senega- misunderstood in Europe. “France is
lese essence” that transcended Diop’s too much,” she complains. “They don’t
mixed origins, Frémaux went on, char- get it. ‘She’s a filmmaker, but she looks
acterizing the filmmaker as “a pure art- like an actress. She’s French, but her
ist, a pure poetess, and a great politi- films are so strange, hybrid and talking
cian, too.” In 2022, she directed and the imagination. “Atlantics” evokes the Wolof. There’s zombies.’” She observed
narrated a campaign ad for La France spectral presence of its drowned mi- that she hadn’t appeared on a single
Insoumise, a left-wing party. It zooms grants with little more than tinted con- magazine cover in the country since
in on the faces in a movie theatre, tact lenses—to change the eye color of winning the Grand Prix. The audience
celebrating the diversity of a country the possessed—and a soundtrack of that Diop really wants to reach is in
where the Lumière brothers invented austere electronica, by the Kuwaiti com- Africa, but she sometimes wonders if
cinema as we know it. “In every genre poser Fatima Al Qadiri. (The director that’s a realistic aspiration. She was
and color, we laugh, we ponder, we cry,” wanted a score that conveyed the feel- gratified by the response to “Dahomey”
Diop intones. ing of being possessed by a djinn.) “Da- in Benin, but the entire country has
The filmmaker joined us midway homey” owes much of its atmosphere just one movie theatre—which, in a
through drinks, having just left a screen- of elemental futurism to the synths of further irony, belongs to a chain con-
14 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024

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trolled by a right-wing French billion-
aire known as the “King of Africa,”
Vincent Bolloré. “I’m addressing this
film to these youth, who don’t go to
the theatres,” Diop said. “Sometimes
I question the pertinence of the me-
dium I chose.” But she had little time
to explore those doubts before she was
whisked off to a Q.& A. A glass of red
wine remained full on the table. Diop
had left her Coppola untouched.

he next morning, Diop and I rode

T the high-speed train from Lyon
to Paris. We took two seats in the café
car, where she neatly quartered a croque
monsieur as fog-shrouded countryside
raced by. Her mother, Christine Bros-
sart, was born in Paris, and worked as
a photographer—and once as a Sahara
guide—before pursuing a career as
an art director in advertising. Mati’s
father, Wasis Diop, is a guitarist and
composer, who emigrated from Dakar
to Paris; his jazz-rock fusion band,
West African Cosmos, helped to es- “Now we can hibernate whenever we want.”
tablish the city’s world-music scene.
(Father and daughter recently collab-
orated on a video.) The marriage of
• •
sight and sound would have been ob-
vious enough without the addition of separated when she was eight, nurtured institute, in 2007. But staying behind
Diop’s uncle, the legendary Senega- her creativity but neglected the pecu- the camera proved a struggle. “I felt
lese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty. liar challenges of her identity. “My par- myself to be prey very early,” she told
Mambéty, who made only two ents were very out of it,” she recalled. me, recalling the overtures of male
feature-length films, earned a perma- “They seemed to romanticize the idea filmmakers who wanted to cast her in
nent place in the pantheon of world of me being mixed, as if it meant the their projects. Directing was a preëmp-
cinema with “Touki Bouki” (1973), a end of racism.” Diop has been described tive rejection of being objectified on-
picaresque adventure set in and around as “African film royalty,” a phrase that screen. Diop said of her thinking, “I’m
Dakar just after independence. The conjures up a Sofia Coppola of the going to control my narrative. I’m not
city is saturated with color and dizzy Sahel, but neither cinema nor the con- going to become the ‘cute’ mixed ac-
with life. A young couple gallivants tinent was an inevitable discovery. At tress of white cinema, only directed by
around on a motorcycle with the skull first, she wanted to become a singer- old white men.”
of a zebu between its handlebars, man- songwriter, training her voice on Aa- Ironically, it was her role in “35 Shots
aging to scrape up enough cash for liyah songs and learning bass in emu- of Rum” that set her course. After a few
passage to Europe. Then, when the lation of Meshell Ndegeocello. months at Le Fresnoy, she was alerted
time comes to embark, the two are sep- By eighteen, she wanted to direct. by a friend, the actor Grégoire Colin,
arated—the man balks and the woman One culprit was a scene of Gena Row- about an open role in a new film by
boards. Mambéty’s camera never leaves lands dancing in John Cassavetes’s “A Claire Denis. She was thrilled. “I wanted
Senegal, but the film is pervaded with Woman Under the Influence,” which to be in a film like ‘Trouble Every Day,’”
a fantasy of elsewhere, conveyed showed her how camerawork could she told me—Denis’s erotic thriller,
through the hypnotic repetition of Jo- expand a performer’s range of self-ex- starring Vincent Gallo, about a man
sephine Baker’s “Paris, Paris, Paris.” pression. “I was moved by the space obsessed with a female serial killer.
His niece’s longing ran in the op- that was made for that woman to be,” “This was my fantasy, to do something
posite direction. Mati Clementine Diop Diop recalled. She became similarly rock.” She’d long idolized a “white trash”
was born in 1982 and reared in Paris’s infatuated with the work of American aesthetic associated with directors like
Twelfth Arrondissement, a quiet resi- filmmakers like Larry Clark and with Harmony Korine. But Denis’s new film
dential area whose Hausmannian ar- the photography of Nan Goldin. Diop was about an aging Black train con-
chitecture and lack of diversity felt briefly enrolled in a self-directed film ductor living on the outskirts of Paris,
stultifying. Christine and Wasis, who course at Le Fresnoy, an art school and who gently pressures his too dutiful
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 15

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daughter to leave their apartment and Diop, appearing in “35 Shots” would and mine.” She began to feel that it
live her own life. mean coming to grips with her Afri- was time to take her place as an art-
“When I read the script, I was so can roots. “She told me that she never ist in the family, and to establish a di-
disappointed,” Diop recalled, burying saw herself as Black before my film,” alogue with an earlier wave of Afri-
her face in her hands. “ ‘This is so un- Denis recalled. “I thought she was jok- can film.
cool!’ ” She admired Denis but had ing.” Diop told me that playing a Black The result was the short “A Thou-
no desire to appear in a “social Black man’s daughter was a “huge coming sand Suns” (2013), in which the male
French film.” Then she learned that out,” and said it confirmed her belief lead of “Touki Bouki,” Magaye Niang,
another biracial woman considered for in cinema’s power to emancipate. “I plays a version of himself. “That’s me,”
the part had been unwilling to stop went through the mirror, and not just he tells a group of kids at a Dakar
straightening her hair. Diop, who then as a director-actress,” she said. “Some- screening of the 1973 film; they mock
wore her hair similarly, was jolted. thing had actually changed.” him in response. His acting dreams
“I had read Fanon, I knew that it have gone nowhere, and it begins to
was fucked up,” she explained, but she fter “35 Shots of Rum,” Diop vis- seem that his entire post-independence
hadn’t truly confronted her own self-
avoidance. At their first meeting, she
A ited Dakar for the first time since
her late teens. It was the tenth anni-
generation—scorned by the young and
abandoned by émigrés—has missed its
told Denis that she wanted to be a di- versary of Mambéty’s death, and she rendezvous with destiny. When he calls
rector, not an actress. But when Denis travelled with her father, who had his co-star in “Touki Bouki,” who is
saw her opposite Alex Descas, who scored one of his brother’s films. Dji- working on an oil rig in Alaska, she
played the father, and Colin, who played bril and Wasis had shared a house on seems equally unfulfilled. “You don’t
her character’s paramour, it was clear the tiny island of Ngor, where nearly have a home until you leave,” he tells
that they had chemistry. “When I fin- everyone knew them. (The family is the woman in one dreamlike sequence,
ished,” Denis told me, “the link with Lebu, an ethnic group believed to be which envisions him pursuing her naked
Mati was very strong.” Dakar’s original inhabitants.) Diop spectre across the tundra. “And, once
Denis had no idea that her young recalled being struck by seeing her you’ve gone, you can’t come back.”
lead was the niece of Mambéty, whom father back in his birthplace. “I felt While beginning to shoot the film,
she’d once met, and whose “Touki the weight of the exile’s vertigo—of in 2009, Diop saw Dakar anew on rides
Bouki” was one of her favorite films. the choice to leave or stay—condensed with a beloved cousin, Cheikh Mbaye.
Nor could she have known that, for in ‘Touki Bouki’ but also in their lives “We spent our time exploring the city
on his scooter, making images day and
night,” Diop said. “It’s all you need for
cinema.” Mbaye, who now lives in
Texas, told me about Diop’s passion
for seeing the city from a lighthouse,
and catching it unawares at dawn.
“There were times when we missed
the sunrise because I’d been hanging
out late with my friends,” he recalled,
laughing. “She would be super, super
upset about it.”
As Diop embraced her Senegalese
heritage, Mbaye’s friends dreamed of
migrating to Europe. But theirs was
no longer the fanciful aspiration of her
uncle’s time. It was born of a period of
economic contraction and of a despair
that she managed to film one night
during a fireside conversation between
her cousin and two of his friends on
the beach. One, a poor tailor, recounts
his deportation from Europe, and
swears that he’ll try to make it there
again: “May I die en route if I lie—I
would get on board. There’s nothing
but dust in my pockets.”
“Dakar started to feel like a city of
the living dead, with youth throwing
themselves into the ocean,” Diop told
“Ah, to be young!” me. She felt an almost supernatural

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calling to tell the story of this “ghost to do it,” she explained, but the proj-
generation,” and made a short called ect was in “absolute contradiction” with
“Atlantics” with her footage of the con- her own mission. “My name is Mati
versation on the beach. But her feature Diop,” she went on. “I’m African. If
of the same name took ten years to re- you come to me to propose a film that
alize. Back in Paris, she began a fruit- deals with Africa, you’ve gotta speak
ful collaboration with Judith Lou Lévy. the language.”
The two met at a night club, and bonded
over a shared interest in genre films.
Before long, Lévy had established a
“I won’t budge!” Claire Denis ex-
claimed, lifting her knees to let a
small company that went on to co- group of newcomers make their way
produce “Atlantics” and “Dahomey.” to their seats. We were in the Max
“Mati loves to put her camera on Linder Panorama, a historic Paris cin-
feminine figures, on their desiring ema. The place was full of artists and
bodies, on their relationship with activists, including Assa Traoré, a leader
what’s missing,” Lévy told me, char- in France’s racial-justice movement. A
acterizing her films as obsessed with prominent rap journalist introduced
the links between death and sensual- Diop—whose success had even reached
ity. The two co-wrote a homoerotic his mother, in Benin—as “une nana de
short called “Snow Canon,” about a ouf,” or an amazing chick. Diop thanked
teen-ager who develops feelings for her audience for coming out “in force,”
her American babysitter in the French alluding to France’s rightward tilt as
Alps. The short’s exploration of aban- she stressed the political importance
donment, nature, and the bonds be- of Black imagination. “Macron doesn’t
tween women ultimately found its have the power to restitute,” she de-
way into “Atlantics.” clared as the lights went down. “We
Nowadays, Diop is at work on a fea- have the power to restitute.”
ture, set between France and Africa. Creative works about art restitution
But she also fantasizes about moving have tended to look backward. Films
to New York and buying a dog. (A few like “Statues Also Die”—and, more re-
weeks ago, she visited for the New York cently, Isaac Julien’s video installation
Film Festival, where “Dahomey” was “Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die)”—
screened before a packed house at Lin- are melancholy reckonings, dwelling
coln Center.) “I feel so respected as a on looted art works as witnesses of co-
young filmmaker,” she said of working lonial devastation. A more mischievous
in the United States—where, she be- conceit is the artifact as avenger: Kill-
lieves, it’s easier to cross boundaries monger seizing a vibranium axe from
like French and African, actor and di- a British museum in “Black Panther,”
rector, genre fantasy and cinéma d’au- or Yinka Shonibare’s recent sculpture
teur. “I would definitely make a great “Monument to the Restitution of the
American film.” But she’s still waiting Mind and Soul,” a ziggurat packed with
for a Hollywood pitch tempting enough replica Benin Bronzes and a bust of a
to draw her away from her own fixa- British officer imprisoned in a vitrine:
tions: “I’m an artist, I’m a creator, so I Who’s the artifact now? By contrast,
need to invent.” Diop’s film leaves behind history and
Diop was approached about direct- wish fulfillment, preferring to explore
ing “The Woman King,” a big-budget what restitution means in the messy
action movie about Dahomey’s legend- present and uncertain future.
ary “Amazon” warriors, set in the eigh- Onscreen, we were back at the Quai
teen-twenties. (The movie, which was Branly, watching a curator bandage
released in 2022, drew criticism for 26’s damaged leg. “I was already in phys-
minimizing the kingdom’s involvement ical relation with the statue,” Denis
in the slave trade.) She says she would later told me. The scene left her “moved
have loved to work with Viola Davis, like a child.” Denis spent part of her
who starred in the film, but couldn’t youth in Cameroon, where her father,
bring herself to shoot an epic about a colonial administrator, disapproved
the Fon kingdom with English- of colleagues who decorated their
speaking actors. homes with ritual masks. “Dahomey”
“I don’t think it’s wrong for them dramatizes the rebirth of such curios

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as living entities. The journey from (France exiled Béhanzin to the Carib- dred years, they’ll restitute two. We
Paris to Cotonou unfolds in the womb- bean; Diop hired a Haitian writer, won’t be there then!”
like darkness of the airplane’s hold— Makenzy Orcel, to compose the voice Is 26 too late? Earlier this year, leg-
which we experience from 26’s perspec- of 26, playing on the parallels between islation on the restitution of cultural
tive through a camera that Diop had the scattering of African art and life property was indefinitely postponed in
sealed in the sculpture’s crate. in the diaspora.) “All I want to say, I France’s National Assembly, where the
The art historian Bénédicte Savoy, can’t say it,” a young woman laments, rise of the far right, in parallel with a
who co-wrote the restitution report, arguing for the use of Fon and other generational turn against Paris in Af-
travelled in parallel with the treasures, national languages in schools. “I’m rican countries, has left little appetite
on a plane with Beninese officials. “Ma- speaking French, but I’m not French. for further transfers. Last year, Nige-
ti’s film is a U.F.O.,” she told me. Jackie I’m from Abomey.” ria’s government alarmed Western art
Chan had made action movies about After the screening at the Max professionals by giving the traditional
the theft of Chinese art works, and Linder Panorama, Diop, her friends, ruler of the Benin kingdom—not to
there were documentaries (and a Nol- and several students from the film gath- be confused with the nation of Benin—
lywood melodrama) about the British ered at L’Embuscade, an African- authority over the returned Benin
sacking of Benin City. But “Dahomey” Caribbean restaurant in the Ninth. Be- Bronzes, leaving him free to decide
confronted the epistemological ques- yoncé played as a disco ball revolved. whether and how to exhibit them.
tion at the heart of restitution, Savoy Diop flashed a toothy smile I’d seldom Today, Dahomey’s twenty-six treasures
said: “How can Western museums tell seen. Her films tend to reach their cli- are back in boxes, because the construc-
us that such objects are just objects— max in moments of unexpected cele- tion of the new museums meant to
with a weight, an age, a material, et bration; in “Atlantics,” the bereaved house them is behind schedule.
cetera—when so much agency swirls young lover awakens from her ghostly “Dahomey” is full of sly acknowl-
around them?” farewell smiling, as morning light fills edgments that repatriation isn’t quite
Savoy has argued that restitution a bar on the beach. “It’s not so much liberation. Diop zooms in on a white
should involve not just the return of the impossibility of return as the pos- supervisor barking orders at Beninese
plundered works but their reintegra- sibility of transcending it,” Diop says workers. She cuts from a Dahomey
tion into sacred and communal con- of her films. “I want to create a space throne decorated with shackled slaves
texts. But you don’t have to believe that where lost lives can find second breath.” to laborers at work on the Presiden-
art works are alive to see them as ac- For “Dahomey,” she wrote a sci-fi tial palace in Cotonou. During an
tors in history. The heart of Diop’s film epilogue set in the twenty-seventies, eerie night scene at the fortified cap-
is a spirited discussion among students and another sequence that envisioned ital complex, where sprinklers mist
at the University of Abomey-Calavi, the spirits of the treasures possessing a the air in time with the patrolling sol-
just outside Cotonou, which moves Beninese youth. But they didn’t fit diers, 26 says that contemporary Benin
fluidly between the art works them- within the budget. Instead, like “Atlan- is “far removed from the country I saw
selves and the broader questions they’ve tics,” the film concludes with a closeup in my dreams.” One wonders how the
engendered. The students touch on of a young woman at a night club. The Dahomean kings might have reacted
class, religion, language, geopolitics, camera zooms in on her slumbering to a future in which French is the of-
and even Benin’s government, a staunch face as revellers dance in slow motion ficial language, the currency is con-
ally of France with an increasingly au- amid green lights and empty beers. On trolled from Paris, and billboards—as
thoritarian leader. a second viewing, it occurred to me that one shot reveals—advertise skin-light-
“We all know that an ancestor of she might be the source of the statue’s ening creams. But the subtlest insight
our President, Patrice Talon, was one voice, the whole century-long saga tum- of Diop’s film might be that restitu-
of the interpreters who facilitated the bling out of a Black girl’s dream. tion doesn’t have to undo the past in
plunder,” a student claims. Others see order to be right for a necessarily im-
the return of so few works as political atching “Dahomey,” I was often perfect future.
pandering or even a “savage insult,” and
wonder what economic or military con-
W reminded of a story from “A
Thousand and One Nights.” A djinn
Just before the pomp and circum-
stance of the official exhibition of the
cessions their own government has of- entombed in a jar on the seabed gets works in Cotonou, we see two con-
fered in exchange. Still more compli- caught in a fisherman’s net and lifted struction workers admire the newly re-
cated are the students’ feelings about to the surface, where he tastes free- turned treasures in an otherwise va-
the treasures. One says that if the ob- dom for the first time in centuries. cant gallery. They can’t be older than
jects were reconnected to Benin’s vodun He offers the fisherman a reward— twenty, and their silent fascination is
rituals they would inspire fear; another not three wishes, but a choice as to more persuasive than a thousand Sarr-
worries that at museums they’ll be in- the manner of his death. Deliverance Savoy reports. The boys speak, look-
accessible to ordinary Beninese. has been so long in coming that its ing up at a towering throne, in a con-
“I grew up with Disney, I grew arrival inspires only resentment. They versation to which we aren’t privy. Then,
up watching ‘Avatar,’ ” a student says, take from us thousands of pieces, a at a signal from above, they amble up-
but never an animated movie about debater in the film thunders, and they stairs, recalled to the endless work of
Dahomey’s last sovereign, Béhanzin. restitute only twenty-six: “In a hun- building their country. 
18 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024

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 I am looking for an aquarium-service
SHOUTS & MURMURS person.

This big black dog appeared on our

doorstep. Please message if it belongs
to you. We cannot keep it as it is not a
family-friendly pet because of fleas and
serving the Antichrist.

Irresponsible motorists floating away

have left their cars in the middle of my
street, causing endless traffic jams. Tried
calling city to get them towed but spent
twenty minutes on hold. Typical.

See photo of winged homeless man

caught in the act of littering. Asked
him to pick it up and he said, “The vials
of God’s wrath are now empty.” As if
that’s an excuse for not taking care of
NEXTDOOR REACTS TO your garbage!

THE RAPTURE When I moved here, I intentionally

chose an apartment near the cemetery
BY JAY MARTEL because I work from home and value
the quiet. Big mistake! Now constant
arlier this morning, abusive and Anyone know of a reliable house stream of dead rising into the air is un-
E deluded homeless man dressed in
white was shouting up and down our
cleaner? Can’t deal with flakes. believably distracting. Complained to
my landlord, then he started flying away!
street, blowing on trumpet. Asked him Have this ongoing dispute with my Nobody’s accountable anymore.
politely to take it somewhere else and neighbor about his tree growing out
he got even more aggressive. Actually of control over my fence, dropping So today I got off work early, was
felt scared. WTF??? Hate to see this staining seedpods all over my newly really looking forward to heading to
happen. Used to be great neighborhood. tiled patio (see photo), and he finally the beach, but then hit this huge traf-
agreed to meet about it. But then he fic jam. Turns out, four a-holes are rid-
Does anyone know what’s going on doesn’t show up! I go over, and his wife ing their horses right down the mid-
in the Smithfield area? People flying says he “ascended to Heaven.” Seri- dle of the street! Seriously??? So sick
around, hellfire, terrible traffic. ously? Some people will do anything of people needing to take their stupid
to get out of their obligations! #need- pets everywhere. Can’t wait to see all
Inconsiderate driver partially blocked newneighbors the comments from animal-lovers, but
my driveway with his car, then f lew there it is.
up into the sky before I could get him Very suspicious man with wings seen
to move it. Super annoying! What is on North Elm yelling about end of the Avoid winged homeless tending
wrong with people??? world. Hate that mental patients are altar of fire near Third and Central Ave.
just free to harass whomever and the One of them gave both me and my wife
Anyone else experiencing a power police can’t do anything about it. grievous sores. Thanks for that, liberals!
outage? And hundred-pound hailstones?
Anyone notice the lake of f ire First earthquake, then hailstorm, then
These three suspicious men dropped blocking access to the park? You’d think stars falling from sky, then ocean turn-
out of sky in front of my house, on the the crazy property taxes we pay would ing to blood: Do we need more evi-
400 block of North Jones, hung out be enough to keep a damn lake from dence that current leadership in City
there for a bit, then ran toward my drive- burning! Hall isn’t working?
way blowing horns and flew off, head-
ing toward Oakwood. They were wear- Can we please do something about Anyone else hear that this is the be-
ing white hoodies, feathery wings, halos. these winged homeless? Used to be ginning of seven-year period of tribu-
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

Doorbell camera fortunately caught the so quiet where I live. So sick of their lation during which Antichrist will
whole thing. Be on the lookout—they bugling and flitting around. Plus, their rise from Hell and trigger Armaged-
may be the porch pirates who’ve been altars of fire are making air quality don? Maybe he can do something about
stealing our Amazon packages. worse—not to mention all the litter! the litter! 
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 19

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 development aid, from donors around
A REPORTER AT LARGE the world, and oversees many of the pro-
grams that it supplies. Sean Carroll, An-
era’s president and C.E.O., describes it
THE LAST MILE as a “last-mile delivery partner in Gaza.”
These days, the last mile is difficult
The aid workers who risk their lives to bring relief to Gaza. to navigate. Gaza is uniquely isolated—
governed for the past seventeen years by
BY DOROTHY WICKENDEN Hamas and subject to an unremitting
blockade by Israel. After thousands of
Hamas soldiers and other militants
surged into Israel on October 7th, kill-
ing some twelve hundred people and
taking more than two hundred hostages,
Israel began dropping more than sev-
enty thousand tons of bombs, devastat-
ing an already precarious place. As aid
agencies mobilized, the Israeli govern-
ment prepared to obstruct them. “Hu-
manitarian aid to Gaza?” Israel Katz,
who was then the energy minister, said
on social media. “No electrical switch
will be turned on, no water hydrant will
be opened, and no fuel truck will enter
until the Israeli abductees are returned
home.” For two weeks, not a single aid
truck entered Gaza.
During the past year, as more than
forty-two thousand Palestinians have
been killed, the Israel Defense Forces
have restricted foreign journalists’ access
to Gaza to brief and highly controlled
“visits.” But I have been in close contact
with Najjar and some of his colleagues
since the spring. Throughout the war,
they have made unthinkable choices
with precious few resources. With most
of the Gazan health system in ruins,
they established field clinics—makeshift
The residents of Khan Younis cycle between fleeing bombs and trying to rebuild. structures of white nylon and wooden
struts—and recruited displaced medical

IthenAhmad
an unheated warehouse in Rafah,
Najjar ran a power cable from
battery of a banged-up company car
one for a desk, where he propped his lap-
top to set up a distribution plan. The
supplies were urgently needed. After half
personnel to staff them. In one note,
Najjar said that he and his team had
saved a man’s leg from amputation by
to his laptop and sat down to work. a year of war, fewer than a dozen hospi- treating a suppurating wound, but had
Najjar, a thirty-eight-year-old pharma- tals in Gaza remained functional, and to turn away a mother whose child had
cist, is a medical-donations officer for then just barely. Nurses used dishcloths hemophilia. “This is out of our hands
American Near East Refugee Aid, a as bandages; surgeons operated by cell- because we don’t have the medication,”
nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. It phone light, steadying themselves against he wrote. Najjar was known for a buoy-
was a cold day in March, and he wore the booms of incoming shells. ant sense of humor, but he could man-
MOHAMMED SALEM / REUTERS / REDUX

a jacket and a vest as he inventoried tow- The organization Najjar worked for, age only a resigned equanimity: “We
ers of shrink-wrapped cartons of dona- known as Anera, was founded in 1968, have success days and fail days.”
tions. There were blood-pressure cuffs, to provide aid to Palestinian refugees of
disinfectant, and medicine, but no the Six-Day War. Today, it has a perma- efore the war, Anera’s work in Gaza
crutches or oxygen cylinders. Trucks
headed for Gaza that contain any metal
nent staff of twelve in Gaza and a hun-
dred in the region, supplemented by vol-
B was focussed less on saving lives
than on improving them. It funded early-
are sent back at the border. unteers and contractors as needed. Anera childhood education programs, trained
Najjar had jerry-rigged a workstation: disperses about a hundred and fifty mil- adults in software engineering, and
two stacked boxes for a chair and a larger lion dollars a year in humanitarian and supported entrepreneurial ventures by
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women. Electricity, always erratic in nis residents to Rafah, in the far south, tainers to grow seeds, and how to
Gaza, was a primary concern. Without and to al-Mawasi, a newly designated recycle the foil wrapping inside for
power, pumps don’t work, and sanita- safe zone to the west. Najjar and his drawing paper.
tion fails. In heavy rains, septic tanks family were ordered to al-Mawasi. A As the first bombs fell, Lubbad—a
overflow, flooding the streets and spread- scrap of sandy Mediterranean coast with single mother since her husband died,
ing disease. Anera installed new waste- virtually no electricity, water, fuel, or eight years ago—fled Gaza City with
water facilities, along with wells for food, it had become a congested en- her three grown children. Until I asked,
drinking water and solar panels to run campment for hundreds of thousands she didn’t mention that she’d left family
them. Its employees on the ground, all of refugees. Though no bombs fell there behind; an air strike had killed fourteen
Palestinian, scouted communities’ needs in the early months of the war, there was of her relatives, including her sister and
and suggested new projects to Anera’s little protection from the elements, and her sister’s children. Like some ninety
office in Washington. When Najjar the sanitary conditions were abysmal. per cent of her fellow-Gazans, she was
wasn’t distributing medical goods, he “When you see your children get ill sev- now an internally displaced person.
was developing proposals for diabetes eral times because of unclean water, and In a video tour, Lubbad walks through
treatment and children’s dental care. you know the cause but you don’t have Anera’s corner of al-Mawasi: sandy al-
The bombardments last October up- the solution,” Najjar wrote, “to see them leyways, white tents, a few plastic stools,
ended priorities. The I.D.F. ordered more shiver from the cold and you have noth- clotheslines sagging under the day’s
than a million Palestinians to evacuate ing to do, to see the water leaking in- wash. A diminutive woman in a beige
the north, and refugees began pouring side the tent when it rains—this made head scarf, she squints at the camera
into Khan Younis, Najjar’s home town. me die inside a million times.” He de- and says, “The good thing here is that
At first, he recalled, he couldn’t imagine scribed the winter at al-Mawasi as “the we are having olive trees around us.” At
that he would be displaced: “I didn’t ex- black months in my life,” saying, “They times, she described displacement to me
pect for a moment that I will experience killed our humanity.” as an educational experience: “We have
it myself.” He had a comfortable home, people who had no idea how to light a
shared with his wife, their five children, n al-Mawasi, as in the rest of Gaza, fire who now do this every night.” But
and his extended family.
But the bombing was getting closer.
Icessities
life revolved around securing the ne-
for survival. Even after Israel
in candid moments she conceded that
life in a tent camp was gruelling. “We
Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in began allowing some aid to enter, the sleep on the floor,” she said in June. “I
Gaza and a principal planner of the Oc- trucks had to wait for days at the bor- have backaches. We see many kinds of
tober 7th assault, grew up in a refugee der; witnesses at the Rafah crossing ob- insects. It’s very, very hot, and the sun-
camp in Khan Younis, and Israel be- served lines backed up for miles. Once shine is everywhere. We don’t have gas
lieved that he and his lieutenants were inside, convoys were sometimes beset by to cook our food.” The obstacles of the
hiding in a labyrinthine tunnel network desperate crowds and armed gangs. The war made her job nearly impossible.
beneath the city. The campaign to dis- transit of aid is overseen by an Israeli “You want to sleep to get rid of the whole
lodge them would clearly be devastat- agency called COGAT, for Coordination exhausting day,” she said. “Then you
ing. The Israelis used two-thousand- of Government Activities in the Terri- wake up another day to go to work.”
pound bombs, many of them U.S.-made, tories. Amid the shortages, COGAT be-
which smash every structure and living came a target of outrage among Pales- ubbad opened mobile clinics where
creature within six hundred feet. Deter-
mined not to flee, Najjar moved his rel-
tinians and aid workers, likened by one
security expert to a prison gatekeeper.
L they were needed most, setting up
in tents or unoccupied buildings. Her pa-
atives from the third floor of their house One of Najjar’s colleagues, a program tients seemed almost as if they were being
to the first, then reconsidered and moved manager named Suad Lubbad, served as attacked by the camp itself. They suffered
back up. He’d decided to “be killed with an unofficial shelter coördinator for Anera from skin ailments caused by contami-
my family quickly, instead of dying under workers in al-Mawasi. Lubbad, fifty-five, nated sand, or by scabies, bedbugs, and
rubble and suffering.” is an even-keeled woman with a Ph.D. lice. Rat bites were a hazard, as were
In November, Israeli jets began drop- in human development and a warm, brisk infections from bathing in seawater
ping leaflets, warning the residents of manner. Since June, she has been run- polluted by garbage and human waste.
Khan Younis to evacuate. Some con- ning a series of mother-and-child clin- Hepatitis and dysentery afflicted people
tained a verse from the Quran, referring ics, which Anera established with sup- already stricken with grief. One fourteen-
to both the Biblical deluge and the at- port from Unicef. Between shifts, she year-old boy told Lubbad, “I’m sad that
tacks of October 7th, which Hamas called arranges cleaning details and organizes my father has been martyred and I couldn’t
Operation Al-Aqsa Flood: “Then the women to bake bread. say goodbye to him. And I’m sad because
Flood overtook them, while they per- Before the war, Lubbad led an Anera even our house that has so many mem-
sisted in wrongdoing.” Najjar remained program that worked with farmers and ories with Dad has exploded.”
at home for another six weeks, but, as women’s coöperatives to provide break- Traumas were compounded by
battles escalated nearby between the fast—fruit, milk, cheese, and spinach the lack of basic commodities. It was
I.D.F. and Hamas’s Khan Younis Bri- pies—to schoolchildren. Learning ma- common for women to go a week with-
gade, he and his family finally left. terials were scarce, so she showed stu- out bathing because they had no soap.
The I.D.F. was sending Khan You- dents how to use Styrofoam food con- Others, lacking shampoo, cut off their
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hair. A colleague of Lubbad’s told me, purposefully held back food and medi­ taken for militants or inadvertently
“They’ve lost what it feels like to be a cine from Gaza, President Biden chose enter combat zones. Before missions,
woman. They feel like their identity has to go ahead with weapons shipments. Anera supplies the names and nation­
been taken away.” Lubbad issued “dig­ Lubbad evaded the debate, relating only alities of the workers involved, the cars’
nity kits,” containing a hairbrush, a what she saw in her clinics. This sum­ makes and contents, and the convoys’
toothbrush, undergarments, sanitary mer, she said, “moderate acute mal­ routes. COGAT is expected to convey
pads, and light head coverings. nutrition” was more common than life­ the information to fighting units, but
The most pressing problem was hun­ threatening “severe acute malnutrition.” I.D.F. and intelligence officers can over­
ger. When nonprofits were able to get For the less dire cases, at least, she rule its plans and directives.
food trucks across the border, they began had the necessary nutritional supple­ Carroll, Anera’s C.E.O., said that
a fraught process of triage, distributing ments—“So far, so good.” But it was the decision of whether to fully coöp­
such staples as beans and lentils, and erate with COGAT was tricky: “Should
occasionally meat, to wherever there you be more or less visible?” Humani­
were passable roads and the need was tarian workers don’t carry weapons, and
most urgent. For people without cook­ they worry about attracting attention
ing facilities, Anera set up community from the I.D.F. and from militants, who
kitchens, where cooks tended stock­ are known to hijack trucks. Some or­
pots that produced meals for hundreds ganizations reportedly avoid trouble by
of families. It was not remotely enough. paying Hamas, or by handing over a
Lubbad spoke about the pressures portion of the cargo. (Carroll said em­
on pregnant women, hearing the bat­ phatically that Anera has no contact
tles at night “and not knowing how to worse in the north, which was virtually with Hamas or any belligerent.)
reach the hospital, not having enough inaccessible to aid convoys for months. Goren maintained that the decon­
food for this baby.” Women were de­ Oxfam reported that people there were fliction process operated smoothly. “We
pressed, she told me: “They are facing subsisting on the equivalent of less than are working shoulder to shoulder,” he
a lot of troubles to make life easier for a can of beans per day, and that nine­ said. “When an ambulance needs to
their families,” going out each day to ty­five per cent of the territory had no move, when a U.N. team needs to bring
search for food and firewood, and cook­ access to clean water. medical supplies, when a pipeline needs
ing whatever they secured. Their hus­ After Israeli intelligence found con­ to be fixed, it’s coördinated perfectly,
bands apparently weren’t much help. tinued Hamas activity in Gaza City, the with not an incident.” He conceded,
“You know, women can do many I.D.F. resumed a concerted initiative, ef­ though, that at times “complications
things,” she said. “Men, I don’t know, fectively blockading the north. Sami arise.” Observers enumerate such com­
they aren’t able to do so many things Matar, who leads many of Anera’s de­ plications as blocked roadways, looting,
at the same time.” liveries, described harrowing journeys Hamas activities, and misdirected I.D.F.
As hunger deepened, the U.N. regu­ there over the summer. On one, I.D.F. targeting orders.
larly reported that Israel curtailed truck soldiers fired a machine gun at his car, The relationship between COGAT and
deliveries into the territory, and the In­ damaging the tires and the gas tank. On aid groups was more strained than Goren
ternational Criminal Court alleged that another, a drone lowered to eye level, admitted. Israel has complained for de­
Benjamin Netanyahu and the defense and a disembodied voice ordered him cades that UNRWA, the United Nations
minister, Yoav Gallant, were using the to get out and unpack bags of clothes agency that provides the majority of Ga­
“starvation of civilians as a method of and hygiene products for inspection: za’s health care, education, and social ser­
warfare.” Brigadier General Elad Goren, “Open the green bag. Open the yellow vices, is a hostile presence. In January,
who directs COGAT’s efforts in Gaza, bag.” In August, he managed to deliver the Israeli government named a hundred
brusquely dismissed the charges, insist­ twelve hundred parcels of produce to and ninety UNRWA staff members as
ing that the real problem was the U.N.’s Gaza City. Upon returning, he reported “hardened fighters”—nineteen of whom
inefficiencies. Though he acknowledged extreme shortages of milk, vegetables, it accused of taking part in the October
some challenges—“Food insecurity, meat, and medicine. Scarcity led to 7th attack. Eighteen countries immedi­
maybe. Difficulties in access and move­ preposterous prices: tomatoes cost nine­ ately suspended more than four hundred
ment, maybe”—he claimed, “There is no ty­six dollars a pound. His boss told him and thirty million dollars in funding. An
famine in Gaza, period. We check how that he was being reckless; he had a fam­ independent investigation acknowledged
many calories are entering every day per ily to care for. He told her, “If I die, I’m that UNRWA facilities could have been
person. We are not limiting the number going to die doing my job.” used to store weapons, but concluded
of trucks. We are facilitating.” that Israel had provided no persuasive
Stories in the American press have nder international law, nations at evidence that significant numbers of staff­
refuted that claim, and more directly im­
plicated the Biden Administration in
U war are obligated to protect hu­
manitarian personnel. In Gaza, aid
ers were terrorists. The donations re­
sumed (except for the U.S. portion, fro­
the crisis. In April, after U.S.A.I.D. and groups rely on COGAT to facilitate the zen until March). The U.N.’s internal
the State Department’s refugees bureau practice of “deconfliction”—rules meant inquiry cleared ten employees and fired
presented clear evidence that Israel had to reduce the risk that workers are mis­ nine others, while saying that Israel had
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not sufficiently verified evidence against that something horrible had happened. vocably damaged. Others are being used
them—a waffling response that enabled They became crazy about my safety. to house displaced families. The I.D.F.
UNRWA to continue its work. They were sure that they might hear justifies such attacks by saying that mil-
Carroll objected to what he sees as about my death anytime.” It was the itants shelter in schools, making them
a reflexive Israeli assumption: “ ‘All Pal- first time in Anera’s history that an em- legitimate targets. Najjar said that the
estinians are terrorists.’ Really? ‘Every ployee had been killed by the Israeli mil- schools “will take years to rebuild; homes
humanitarian worker is a sympathizer’?” itary. Carroll got a call from a COGAT will need tens of years.” In the mean-
Although Anera has never been ac- official, who offered condolences but no time, he added, “the killing machine
cused of employing militants, it has its explanation. “I want to believe that it continues to kill our people.”
own problems with COGAT. “Let me was a mistake,” Carroll told me. “But, By October, more than three hun-
count the ways,” Carroll said. “Machi- wait a minute—are we being targeted? dred humanitarian workers had died.
nations. Arbitrary changes in rules, How could anyone in their right mind Aid groups speculate that one reason
down to nail clippers removed at a not come up with the same question?” for the high death toll is the I.D.F.’s in-
checkpoint and the truck turned back. This spring, reports from the Times creased reliance on artificial intelligence.
In May, we started preparing shipments and Human Rights Watch looked into In April, the left-wing Israeli magazine
of frozen meat for the Eid al-Adha fes- eight bombings of sites and vehicles oc- +972 published an investigation about
tival in June. The first was delivered in cupied by aid groups and found that in A.I.-powered targeting systems that op-
September. Tons of meat are still stuck every instance their location had been erate with breathtaking speed and reach.
in Jordan and Egypt.” provided to COGAT. In Shawwa’s case, In the first weeks of the war, one tool,
Carroll had e-mailed in coördinates and called Lavender, reportedly populated
n the afternoon of March 8th, photographs of the building where he a “kill list” with tens of thousands of
O Najjar was working at the distri-
bution center in Rafah when he got a
was living, and reconfirmed the infor-
mation four days before he was killed.
suspected militants. Another, Where’s
Daddy?, tracked the suspects and sig-
visit from Anera’s logistics coördinator, Goren said that the strike on Shawwa nalled the Army when they were at
Mousa Shawwa. The two had busi- was “an incident we haven’t been able home. (The I.D.F. has denied the exis-
ness to transact—Shawwa was pick- to look into.” In fact, the I.D.F. had told tence of a kill list, and described Lav-
ing up supplies for mobile clinics— the Times months earlier that its target ender as a database that simply collates
but there was also gossip to catch up was a Hamas terrorist who had partic- intelligence sources.) In some cases, the
on, and Shawwa wanted to ask Najjar ipated in the October 7th incursion, and information has been catastrophically
about treating his mother’s hyperten- that an investigation was expected. But wrong; three intelligence sources said
sion. Shawwa was known as a con- Shawwa was not a terrorist, and the they had learned after the bombing of
summate fixer. When Anera officers bombing had the marks of a precision a family home that the target wasn’t
were told that they’d have to wait a strike: it demolished only his floor, leav- there. Carroll said, “You combine the
week for a permit to enter Gaza, he ing the one below standing. A.I. systems with the expansion of the
secured it in a day. When his boss asked acceptable level of damage and you get
if jackets could be made with the Anera ajjar told me that he used to dream many innocents killed.”
logo, a tailor he knew rushed to fill
the order. Najjar, who’d worked with
N about his children’s future, “think-
ing about the colleges they would at-
Miri Eisin, a retired I.D.F. colonel
and a fellow at Israel’s International
Shawwa for thirteen years, described tend.” Now he worried about whether Institute for Counter-Terrorism, told
him as “Anera Superman.” they could resume their studies at all. me it was wrong to conclude that a
After packing up his supplies, All twelve of Gaza’s universities, and machine was making the decisions:
Shawwa returned to the apartment in some eighty-five per cent of its primary “Nothing, zero, is done without a human
central Gaza where he and his family and secondary schools, have been irre- being.” In fact, Eisin suggested, human
were staying. As he chatted with his
wife, Dua, and her brother, an Israeli
missile crashed into the building. Dua
later told Human Rights Watch, “I lost
consciousness immediately and only
woke up later in the hospital to find
out that I had lost Mousa and my
brother.” She was treated for a fractured
hand and for a head wound. Dima, their
thirteen-year-old daughter, had cuts all
over and a broken foot. Karim, their
six-year-old son, had a brain bleed. He
died on March 19th.
When Najjar got the news, “I was
not able to speak for a day,” he told me.
“My children knew from my expression “I’ve connected four, but I feel nothing.”

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fallibility was the problem. The I.D.F. daughters, slaughtered elders.” The ring cauldrons with paddles or wading
“doesn’t always have the right person I.D.F. argues that Hamas invites civil- through high water to deliver food to
at the right time,” she said. “Some are ian deaths by hiding among them. “If stranded families. An essential premise
too fast on the trigger.” they sacrifice their people to save their of World Central Kitchen is that disas-
The I.D.F. boasts of being “the most own skin, that’s their historical failure,” ter relief should be run like a restaurant
moral army in the world.” Yehuda Shaul, Yakubovich said. “In a war, you stop kitchen: intense, efficient, improvisa-
who served in the occupied territories being polite.” Still, he added, Israel was tional, and attuned to local products.
between 2001 and 2004, has spent much obliged to improve coördination before World Central Kitchen arrived in
of his career gathering evidence of how issuing orders to strike: “We’re judged Israel on October 8th, to feed families
far the military has deviated from this by higher values. We don’t want to be that had lost their homes in the attacks.
standard. After completing his service, compared to Hamas.” After the counterstrikes began, Anera
Shaul and some Army friends founded Dave Harden, an expert in crisis helped W.C.K. obtain permission to
a nonprofit, Breaking the Silence, to management in the Middle East, noted enter Gaza, and the two groups began
compile testimonies from similarly dis- that “Israel, as the occupying power, is opening community kitchens together.
illusioned soldiers. legally responsible for the safety of the Carroll knew that Andrés, who has
Shaul said that the “incrimination general population.” When questioned more than a million followers on Insta-
process” for assassinating enemy com- about excessive collateral damage, gram, would bring attention to the cause.
manders was once long and arduous. I.D.F. spokespeople issue slight vari- “José Andrés in Gaza—with his charm,
According to his sources in military in- ations on the statement “We make ef- visibility, and connections—that was a
telligence, “you needed a file this thick, forts to reduce harm to civilians to the big deal,” he said.
and then a committee of officers made extent feasible.” To warn residents to On the night of April 1st, seven em-
the decisions.” There were added re- evacuate areas that are about to be at- ployees of World Central Kitchen fin-
strictions for strikes on such targets as tacked, the I.D.F., in addition to drop- ished unloading a hundred tons of food
schools and hospitals. For apartment ping leaflets, sometimes sends S.M.S. supplies in central Gaza, then headed
buildings, the I.D.F. engaged in “roof- messages or makes phone calls. In many south to their quarters, in Rafah. It was
knocking,” dropping a small rocket as a strikes on aid workers, there were no late, but they were travelling on an ap-
warning that a missile was going to hit. such warnings. proved route, in three white cars, two
Over the years, the rules loosened, and of which had W.C.K.’s logo, a bubbling
the number of deaths seen as tenable or years, Carroll talked with José pot, stamped on their roofs. Around 11
rose drastically. Today, Shaul contended,
“rules of engagement don’t exist for
F Andrés about forming a partner-
ship on the ground in Gaza. Andrés, a
P.M., a targeted drone missile hit the
first vehicle; soon afterward, the second
ground troops.” Over all, “there is de- burly, charismatic Spanish American was struck, and then the third. Grue-
liberate disproportion—‘You hit my chef who owns dozens of upscale restau- some footage showed the burned chas-
nose, I run over you with a tank.’” rants, founded World Central Kitchen sis of the cars, bloodied passports, the
Colonel Grisha Yakubovich, a for- in 2010 to supply aid in natural-disas- remains of bodies in bulletproof vests.
mer head of COGAT’s Civil Depart- ter zones. His motto is “Food is a uni- Air strikes on aid workers, a regular
ment, rejected that argument, and em- versal human right.” occurrence since November, were sud-
phasized that what happened on Andrés—friendly with world leaders, denly the source of international out-
October 7th was unlike earlier rounds television personalities, and the mega- rage. Andrés accused the I.D.F. of tar-
of escalation: “Three thousand terror- rich—presents himself as a kind of hu- geting the convoy “systematically, car by
ists invaded our towns, moshavim, and manitarian action figure, filmed at the car.” Christopher Lockyear—the secre-
kibbutzim, burned families, raped our scenes of earthquakes and floods, stir- tary-general of Médecins Sans Fron-
tières, which had seen five staffers
killed—excoriated a “pattern of deliber-
ate attacks on humanitarians, health
workers, journalists, U.N. personnel,
schools and homes.”The Israeli govern-
ment’s response was perfunctory. Net-
anyahu, stone-faced in a video statement,
called the attack “a tragic event in which
our forces unintentionally harmed non-
combatants,” adding, “This happens in
war.” An I.D.F. statement described it
as “a grave mistake.”
On April 4th, President Biden called
Netanyahu to demand that he act im-
mediately to reduce harm to civilians and
aid workers. Netanyahu, a longtime prac-
titioner of political sleight of hand, prom-

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ised a thorough inquiry and said that the ical condition to the overflowing wards scribing them variously as “armed as-
military would “do everything to prevent at Nasser Hospital. sailants” and as hard-up locals who had
a recurrence.” The next day, the I.D.F. The I.D.F. reported striking more joined the convoy as escorts. Sami Matar,
issued the initial results of its investiga- than fifty infrastructure sites in its of- who’d been in the second car, was un-
tion. Two officers were fired and three fensive: a weapons depot, tunnel shafts, hurt; he completed the delivery, leaving
reprimanded, though the report main- buildings occupied by Hamas. As it pro- the dead behind.
tained that the officials who had ap- ceeded, Najjar wrote to me, “The Israeli On September 1st, Najjar wrote that,
proved the attacks “were convinced they tanks are not far from my home, and since he’d sent the photo of his family’s
were targeting armed Hamas operatives.” the situation is very dangerous.” He in- backpacks, they had evacuated back to
Anera, like other organizations, sus- cluded a photo of a suitcase and several al-Mawasi several times. They wouldn’t
pended operations in Gaza, but it went backpacks (two small pink ones for the do it again: “We prefer that they kill us
back to work the following week, after girls), all ready to leave. When I asked one time instead of killing us hundreds
COGAT assured Carroll that his work- where he would go if they had to evac- of times via their evacuation orders.” But
ers would not be at risk. World Cen- uate again, he replied, “I swear to God, he had some good news about work. He
tral Kitchen returned a month later, al- I don’t know. I’m just thinking of res- had recently hired a pediatric surgeon to
though Andrés wrote in a Washington cuing my family.” perform circumcisions. “We’ve done the
Post opinion piece that “little has Gazans knew from experience that circumcision for 91 newborn boys so far,”
changed.” On August 7th, another “safe zones” offered no real protection. Najjar wrote, “and tomorrow, we are going
W.C.K. staffer, a Palestinian warehouse The military had recently tracked two to do another 20.” He was in the process
worker in central Gaza, was killed in an top Hamas commanders to a fenced of hiring some ten additional doctors, to
air strike. The death received only pass- compound in al-Mawasi. On July 13th, handle everything from respiratory in-
ing mention in the press. F-35 jets dropped eight tons of bombs fections to general surgery.
there. The I.D.F. described the strike as Lubbad, too, found reasons for opti-
n April, after the I.D.F. declared its the result of a careful vetting process that mism. The first confirmed case of polio
INajjar
mission in Khan Younis complete,
and his family went home. The
went all the way up to the Prime Min-
ister. The Gaza Ministry of Health re-
in Gaza had got everyone’s attention, and
Israel had agreed to a series of pauses in
city was a wasteland. They passed bull- ported ninety civilians killed and three hostilities; COGAT facilitated vaccine de-
dozed mountains of exploded concrete, hundred wounded. liveries, and aid workers spread out to
skeletal remains of high-rises, and peo- Suad Lubbad went out to assess the administer the drops. Lubbad’s clinic di-
ple wearily loading donkey carts with damage and started to cry. “I couldn’t rected patients to sites where the vac-
filthy mattresses, clothing, toys, and bro- see what happened to the children and cines were being given. “Most children
ken beams for firewood. One woman, to the people,” she told me. For the first are reaching out for vaccination,” she said.
despairing over the wreckage of her home, time, she sounded desperate. “People “It is present everywhere and easy to get.”
told a reporter for NPR, “There’s no sometimes get a warning just half an The wider picture was bleak. In
Khan Younis. God damn Sinwar.” hour before, and leave everything be- mid-October, with winter setting in, a
Najjar refused to speak about Hamas hind, and just go around in the street. State Department spokesman said that
or Israel: “I don’t like to talk about pol- There are no other places left for them the amount of aid reaching Gazans had
itics. I believe that always civilians are to go.” Her voice rising, she added, “We dropped to its lowest levels in a year.
the victims.”Though his home was badly reached a limit. We are not able to con- According to Save the Children, Gaza
damaged, his family moved back in, and tinue in such a situation.” Two young had the highest rate of child malnutri-
he resumed work at the wound clinic. boys her team was treating, one of them tion in the world. Lubbad reported
Before long, the city was showing scat- deaf, had been killed in another air strike. ever-dwindling supplies, adding, “Many
tered signs of renewal: venders selling “We were trying to get them out of their don’t have winter clothes, and people
falafel, a barber cutting hair amid blown- psychological distress,” she said, “but we are worried about their shelters.” Heavy
out shop windows, tailors at sewing ma- could not keep them alive.” winds and flooding had already begun,
chines salvaged from a destroyed fac- In July, COGAT established the Joint destroying dozens of families’ tents.
tory. Then, in July, the I.D.F. returned Coordination Board, focussed on “the On October 17th, the I.D.F. an-
to Khan Younis, having determined that safety and effectiveness of humanitar- nounced a major development: Israeli
Hamas was regrouping there. ian operations.” The next month, a soldiers had finally killed Yahya Sinwar.
For a month, Najjar sent only a few World Food Programme truck was shot Lubbad was skeptical that it would make
cryptic messages, and when he resur- up as it approached an Israeli security a difference—Israel had killed many
faced he wrote, “We spent very painful post. “The current deconfliction system Hamas leaders in the past year, and the
and scary weeks recently.” During one is failing,” Cindy McCain, the agency’s war hadn’t stopped. Still, she clung to
operation, an Israeli bomb struck fifty executive director, said. Two days later, the idea that her family would one day
yards from his clinic, killing seventeen Anera was delivering supplies to a hos- resume a semblance of their former life.
people and injuring twenty-six. Najjar pital in Rafah when an air strike hit the “Imagine—by car, I could be in Gaza
and his team administered first aid, lay- lead car, killing four men inside. The City in less than an hour,” she said. “We
ing out the wounded on tarps in the I.D.F. and Anera have offered conflict- hope that we may go home soon, if we
sand. Ambulances took victims in crit- ing reports about the dead men, de- still have a home.” 
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 25

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 PROFILES

THE CONVERT
The sudden rise of J. D. Vance has transfixed conservative élites. Is he the future of Trumpism?
BY BENJAMIN WALLACE-WELLS

O
n a warm, gray morning in Yuval Levin, a Vance ally, said, “J.D. is west from within. Vance’s partnership
mid-September, a small group the single most successful member of his with Trump, whom he once derided, rep-
of reporters waited under the generation in American politics.” resented his shift to a more tribal poli-
wing of a plane at a private terminal at At Yale Law School, where the Vances tics. Remember, the adviser said, even in
Ronald Reagan National Airport, antic- met, Usha, who had been a Yale under- Vance’s Never Trump days he hadn’t re-
ipating the arrival of the Vice-Presidential graduate, operated as an interpreter of ally opposed Trump on policy: “His ob-
candidate J. D. Vance. Earlier in the week, Ivy League folkways for the rougher- jection was that he thought Trump didn’t
a would-be assassin had tried to ambush hewn J.D. She kept a spreadsheet of mean anything he said.”
Donald Trump on his golf course in West things she thought he should try, a mu- But this theory is complicated by how
Palm Beach, the second attempt on tual friend of theirs recalled—“I remem- perfectly Vance’s rightward turn has
Trump’s life this summer, and the appa- ber one of them was Greek yogurt.”Vance tracked the fixations of conservative ac-
ratus accompanying Vance had the feel talked with another friend about becom- tivists and élites. His rise has been backed
of an armed brigade. The travelling party ing a househusband; he had not had a by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel,
included a dozen staffers and about the father, and it was important to him to Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, Jr.,
same number of Secret Service officers. become a good one. (In an echo of Bill whose complaints about woke politics
When Vance’s motorcade pulled up to Clinton’s experience, Vance used the last and tech censorship Vance has ampli-
Trump Force Two—a Boeing 737 with name of a stepfather, Hamel, until after fied on the trail. In the view of one of
the names of anonymous donors (Ed- college.) But, as he began to consider a his old friends, Vance, in becoming a
ward M., Victoria W.) painted on the political career, it was Usha, a former national figure, has also become more
tail fin—it contained twelve cars. In the clerk to two Supreme Court Justices, thin-skinned, not unlike many of the
only other political campaign that Vance who moved to Ohio. When he joined tech titans who support him. Some com-
had run, for the United States Senate, Trump’s ticket, she left her job at a pres- mentary on Vance’s political transforma-
in 2022, he had ridden to events in an tigious law firm. At this year’s Republi- tion after the 2020 election identified the
aide’s old Subaru. Now he and his wife, can National Convention, Usha, the beard he had started to grow as a sym-
Usha, accompanied by their ten-month- daughter of Indian immigrants, sat next bol of his newly bristling politics. But at
old dog, Atlas, emerged from a long black to Trump as her husband said that “Amer- least as noticeable is the weight he’s lost
Suburban, both trim and elegantly ica is not just an idea” but a people bound and the fitted suits he now wears. Such
dressed for the campaign trail. by a “shared history.” The scene would a change isn’t unusual for powerful peo-
Vance’s selection as Trump’s running have been unimaginable to many of her ple in the Ozempic era, but it also sug-
mate had punctuated an astounding rise. friends just a few months earlier. “I’m gests the ways in which Vance, who po-
Born in the small manufacturing city of not sure what deal J.D. made with Usha,” sitions himself as an enemy of the élite,
Middletown, Ohio, he was raised by a a person close to the couple told me. “But is still a part of it.
drug-addicted mother and his beloved it had to be something, because they On the tarmac, Vance let Usha board
Appalachian-born grandmother, Mamaw. make every decision together.” the plane first and then lumbered up the
He worked his way up through storied Vance, too, had only recently made a stairs, somewhat more in the manner of
American institutions: the Marine Corps, full accommodation with Trump. A long- his dog than of his wife. He turned to
Yale Law School, Silicon Valley. “Hill- time political adviser to Vance told me, the cameras and let his right hand vi-
billy Elegy,” the best-selling memoir “The problem that J.D. had always been brate in a quick tremor of a wave. He
Vance published in 2016, made him fa- trying to solve is what to do about the was making two stops that day, first in
mous, and his denunciations of Trump decline of the Midwest.” Many of his Grand Rapids, Michigan, a long-stand-
as “cultural heroin” for the white work- prior solutions, the adviser went on, had ing conservative bastion where Demo-
ing class even more so. A few years later, simply not worked. “Hillbilly Elegy” had crats had lately made inroads, and then
he was a senator from Ohio, the Repub- been, in part, an attempt to make liberal in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. More than
lican Party’s most effective spokesman readers sensitive to the plight and the one of Vance’s advisers told me that his
for Trumpism as an ideology, and—both anger of rural whites. Vance’s subsequent selection as the Vice-Presidential can-
improbably and inevitably—the Vice- efforts to establish an addiction-treat- didate had depended partly on poll num-
Presidential nominee. “If you think about ment nonprofit in Ohio and a heartland- bers in July, which had suggested that
where he came from and where he is, at focussed venture-capital fund were, in Joe Biden posed a bigger threat in Penn-
forty years old,” the conservative analyst this view, intended to rebuild the Mid- sylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin than
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REDUX

After the 2016 election, a friend recalled, “he thought that he wasn’t going to have a political future with Trump in charge.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK PETERSON THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 27

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in the Sun Belt states. Had the Demo- plans. “And J.D. says, ‘Oh, I’m going to Ninety-five per cent of the school’s stu-
crats been stronger in Arizona, Georgia, the Marines,’” Tape told me. “I was, like, dent body at the time came from upper-
and North Carolina, the advisers thought, ‘Oh, R.O.T.C.?’ And he went, ‘No, I’m middle-class backgrounds, and many
the Florida senator Marco Rubio might enlisting.’ And I was stunned. Like, dude, were obviously wealthy. “Your classmates
have been the pick. you can write your ticket. And he says— are the coddled children of hospital ad-
But, even if Vance was an emblem of I’ll never forget this—‘I love this coun- ministrators and faculty members and
the Midwest, he was also a drag on the try. And I talk about it a lot. But, if I corporate lawyers,” the longtime adviser,
ticket, significantly less popular than his don’t do anything about it, it’s just talk.’” who finished Yale the same year as Vance,
Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, the In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance relays how told me. “They ain’t like you, and there’s
governor of Minnesota. The stances he had emerged from a highly chaotic just whole swaths of existence that seem
Vance had taken that endeared him to foreign to them.” Vance had “heard
the conservative base—his support for through the grapevine” that a professor
a national abortion ban and his association who had criticized his work thought that
with Project 2025, the think-tank initia- the law school should only accept stu-
tive to weaponize the federal govern- dents from élite private institutions, be-
ment for right-wing causes, which Vance cause students from public schools needed
had once termed “de-Baathification”— “remedial education.” “I have never felt
were so toxic to the general electorate out of place in my entire life,” he wrote
that Trump had disavowed them, and in “Hillbilly Elegy.” “But I did at Yale.”
then Vance had, too. The question of Such alienation seems like one seed
what kind of populism would follow childhood—in one scene, a twelve-year- from which Vance’s politics eventually
Trump into office, should he win, was old Vance dashes out of a car on the sprouted. But people who knew him then
entangled with the question of what shoulder of a highway after his mother recall a boisterous, bighearted student at
kind of populist his chosen political heir threatens to kill them both in a crash— the center of Yale’s social life. “He was
is: a tireless representative of the alien- with a desire for order, which he found at every party,” a female classmate said.
ated Midwest, or—like Thiel and Musk, in the Marines. He was deployed to “He was the guy who, when you were
who urged Trump to pick Vance in the Anbar Province, Iraq, in 2005, where he going through a hard time, would be,
first place—a rich, very online man, mo- worked in public affairs—shepherding like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s just drink ourselves
tivated by a sweeping rejection of pro- visiting journalists and writing articles silly,’ and talk you through it.” During
gressive culture? Vance disappeared for the military press. “He wasn’t kick- his first year, Vance met Usha and de-
through the door of Trump Force Two, ing down doors,” as the former congress- veloped a close relationship with Amy
and within a few minutes he was up and man Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who Chua, a law professor and the author of
away, soaring high above Arlington Na- supports Kamala Harris, said earlier this the book “Battle Hymn of the Tiger
tional Cemetery. The Republican Vice- summer, but he was working in a very Mother,” in whose class Vance would
Presidential candidate was headed some- dangerous place. A senior officer in his write the first draft of “Hillbilly Elegy.”
place like home. division was killed by a roadside bomb (Chua later connected Vance with her
in Ramadi, while escorting journalists literary agent.) When Thiel came to Yale
n a Friday morning at the end of from Newsweek. Cullen Tiernan, Vance’s to speak before the Federalist Society,
O September, before the start of the
school day, I drove to a slightly oversized
best friend in the Corps, with whom he
trained Stateside, recalled that Vance was
the conservative legal group, of which
Vance was a member, Vance seized the
house just outside Cincinnati to meet more politically engaged than most ma- opportunity. “At the end of his talk, Peter
Vance’s old physics teacher, Christopher rines. “When Dick Cheney visited,”Tier- said anyone should feel free to write him
Tape. Of all the people I interviewed— nan told me, “J.D. was the only person for career advice,” a law-school friend
Vance’s advisers, political allies, co-ideo- who was excited.” But he was also at- told me. “J.D. took that literally.”
logues, and law-school friends among tuned to the darker aspects of the inva- Vance’s politics weren’t doctrinaire—a
them—Tape had seemed the most eager sion. “There’s civilian contractors that friend at the time remembers him as a
to meet with me, perhaps because his are getting paid six times as much as you, devoted reader of The Dish, the blog of
enthusiasm for Vance runs the purest. just to supervise third-party nationals. the iconoclastic gay conservative Andrew
“A phenomenal learner,”Tape said. “And Halliburton and KBR are having a feast Sullivan—and he had a natural facility
always such a jovial, friendly kid.” of war,”Tiernan said. “Those were things as a writer. “J.D. really was a maverick
Not every student at Middletown we discussed and were disenchanting.” ideologically,” Josh McLaurin, a room-
High School was poor—some, especially Vance earned a degree from Ohio mate of Vance’s at Yale, who is now a
those who lived closer to the interstate, State University, then entered Yale Law Democratic state senator in Georgia,
had parents who worked in Cincinnati School in the fall of 2010, the same year said. “I was intimidated by his sensibil-
or Dayton—but many were, and Tape as the former Republican Presidential ity. He would go off and read something
tended to be circumspect when he asked candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. If Yale of- and study it and come back with a view-
students about their future. But one day, fered an established track for ambitious point that was uniquely his.” Some friends
during Vance’s senior year, Tape inquired young conservatives, it could also make struggled to recall whether Vance was
about his star student’s post-graduation a kid from the sticks feel less assured. pro-life or pro-choice, but many of them
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described him as instinctively partisan. In 2018, Vance and Chua held a pub- going to have a political future with
The friend remembered telling Vance lic discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festi- Trump in charge.”
about a breakup with a girlfriend: “J.D. val titled “Can Americans Resist the Pull The political group with which Vance
said, ‘She’s dead to me.’”This same friend of Tribalism?” A friend brought him along was then associated—the wonkish Re-
thought that Vance likely planned to vote to a private dinner at the lakeside châ- formicons—had encouraged the Repub-
for Hillary Clinton in 2016, until Clin- teau of Lynda Resnick, the billionaire lican Party’s rhetorical turn toward a
ton said that some portion of Trump’s owner of Fiji Water and a Democratic working-class conservatism, advocating
supporters were in a “basket of deplor- mega-donor. During a garden cocktail for entitlements like pro-family tax cred-
ables.” Vance’s sister was planning to vote reception, Resnick told Vance that be- its and denouncing the donor class. But
for Trump. In the end, he wrote in Evan cause he hadn’t been formally invited he Trump put forward a “nightmare version”
McMullin, who campaigned as a Never needed to leave. (Only later did Resnick of that vision, as one leading Reformi-
Trump conservative. (A spokesperson learn who Vance was.) Vance took it gra- con, the former George W. Bush speech-
for Vance said that he never considered ciously, the friend said, and walked off writer David Frum, said in 2016, with
voting for Clinton.) down the home’s long, winding drive- everything “horribly twisted and dis-
After law school, Vance and Usha way. McLaurin, the Democratic state torted.” At the same time, a generation
moved to Washington, D.C., where Usha senator, said, “The way I think about it, of conservative dogma had suddenly been
clerked for Brett Kavanaugh, who was it’s like a dial. If you’re a politician, you washed away. New think tanks and mag-
then a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court carry around all these personal griev- azines explored the boundaries of what
of Appeals, and later for Chief Justice ances and memories of all the things that an America First conservatism might be:
John Roberts of the Supreme Court. were done to you, and you get to decide more combative about progressive values,
Vance spent the late Obama years as an whether to keep that dial turned down more isolationist in foreign policy, more
unhappy junior associate at a Washington or to turn it up. And J.D. has turned it nationalist on immigration, and more
law firm, and then as a principal at a all the way up.” open to government intervention to stem
venture-capital fund co-founded by Thiel. free trade. Some of these views weren’t
But the project in the background was ance spent Election Night in 2016 all that dissimilar from what the Refor-
his book. “Hillbilly Elegy” was released
in June, 2016, and was widely regarded
V explaining on TV why Trump had
won, a victory he hadn’t expected. A friend
micons had offered, but there was an
important distinction: members of the
as a key to understanding the experience who spoke with him shortly afterward New Right, as the movement came to be
of the Trump voter. Rod Dreher, a socially recalled that Vance was also vexed about known, were among Trump’s strongest
conservative writer who was then op- his own career prospects. During the supporters, echoing, often gleefully, his
posed to Trump, gave it an early rave re- campaign, he had publicly said that he most outré and politically incorrect ideas.
view on his blog for The American Con- considered Trump “noxious” and “a total In Washington, Democrats and in-
servative. The book’s success, as with fraud,” which, he told the friend, had trig- vestigative reporters were scrutinizing
many up-from-poverty narratives, also gered “some really racist attacks from Trump’s career for evidence of Vladi-
drew on the tension between the harsh Trump supporters because of Usha’s race.” mir Putin’s influence over the election.
circumstances of the author’s upbring- (In private, Vance had gone further, call- For Vance, the fixation on Russia to ex-
ing and the erudition with which he re- ing Trump “a moral disaster” and poten- plain Clinton’s defeat was drowning out
called them. At a book party that Chua tially “America’s Hitler.”) Even so, in the the self-reflection that he had hoped to
threw for “Hillbilly Elegy” in Manhat- friend’s recollection, Vance was strategic inspire among the liberal establishment
tan, Vance’s old law-school classmates about it. “He said, ‘The Trump people with “Hillbilly Elegy.” Vance’s longtime
remembered him being a little astonished want me out.’ He thought that he wasn’t adviser told me, “He was just, like, ‘This
when Tom Brokaw walked into the room.
Vance and the élite—it wasn’t a seam-
less fit. He sometimes recounts an inter-
action he had at a Business Roundtable
event, where the C.E.O. of a large hotel
chain complained that Trump’s tighten-
ing of the border meant that his prop-
erties had to hire native-born workers
who “just need to get off their asses, come
to work, and do their job.” Sofia Nelson,
a law-school friend of Vance’s, who has
since broken with him politically, said,
“He was hanging out with these people
he found very vapid, and I was, like, ‘You
know, you can just stop it—you don’t
have to do this.’ I think he very much
wanted to rise within that world, but he
also kind of hated it.” “Children hate me.”

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just seems like conspiracy theory.’ They while Vance was preparing to deliver a Douthat, referring to the Nazi legal the-
lost and they were clinging to it.” speech at the National Conservatism orist. “There’s no law, there’s just power.
In 2018, Vance considered challeng- Conference, the defining New Right And the goal here is to get back in power.”
ing Sherrod Brown, the incumbent confab, in Washington, he wrote to ask In the wake of the COVID-19 shutdowns
Democratic senator from Ohio, “for about “if I thought élite universities were be- and the Black Lives Matter protests,
thirty-six hours,” the adviser said. Re- yond redemption.” Vance was also mak- Vance said on “The Federalist Radio
bekah Mercer, who had been a promi- ing a personal turn to Catholicism. Dre- Hour” that American conservatives “have
nent Trump donor, was enthusiastic about her, who was close with Vance at the lost every major powerful institution in
Vance’s potential, but the timing was time, introduced him to a group of Do- the country except for maybe churches
wrong. Vance’s first child had been born minican friars in Washington. In Au- and religious institutions, which, of course,
less than a year earlier, and his network gust, 2019, Vance converted in a cere- are weaker now than they’ve ever been.
in Ohio was thin. (In law school, he had mony attended by, among others, his We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance.
also told a friend that Brown, a progres- biological father. (Usha, who was raised We’ve lost the culture.” No compromise
sive populist, was a Democrat he ad- Hindu, did not convert.) In an essay pub- was possible with the liberals in control,
mired.) The following year, a whistle- lished in The Lamp, a Catholic maga- he added. “Unless we overthrow them in
blower revealed that Cambridge Analytica, zine, Vance wrote that his conversion some way, we’re going to keep losing.”
a political-consulting firm in which Mer- was the result of a search for a system of
cer and her father, Robert, were investors, “duty and virtue,” in part so that he could rive across Ohio, and it can be a little
had secretly harvested Facebook user data
and then shared the analytics with the
become a better husband and father. But
his essay also suggested that he was be-
D startling to remember that, just ten
years ago, a near-empty factory parking
Trump campaign. Facebook eventually coming a more stringent social conser- lot with a union hall nearby was a signal
agreed to pay five billion dollars in fines vative. He quoted at length from St. Au- that Democrats were irrefutably in charge.
for its role in the venture; Cambridge gustine’s denunciation of Roman excess, When Trump flipped the state, in 2016,
Analytica went bankrupt. Vance regarded of the “plentiful supply of public prosti- he brought a wave of new voters into
the scandal as an extension of the Dem- tutes for every one who wishes to use the Republican Party. The change was
ocrats’ Russia obsession—a way to de- them.” This broadside from a fifth-cen- concentrated in the union towns of the
flect attention from the neoliberal policies tury bishop, Vance wrote, was “the best Mahoning Valley and in the southeastern
that he believed had pushed working- criticism of our modern age I’d ever read.” part of the state—“the pockets of Ohio,”
class voters to Trump. Vance’s past friendships with progres- as the former Republican state chair Jane
That fall, the Senate confirmation sives began to inform the manner in Timken put it to me, “that were hit so
hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s nomina- which he fought the other side. During hard by the opioid epidemic.” In these
tion to the Supreme Court turned on an a podcast with American Moment, a places, the turn was so sudden and abrupt
accusation by Christine Blasey Ford, a young-conservative organization affili- that it could seem like a magic trick.
California psychologist who said that ated with the New Right, Vance said Mark Munroe, the former chair of
Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her that, for his liberal classmates at Yale, the Mahoning County G.O.P., is an ami-
decades earlier, during a high-school “pursuing racial or gender equity is like able retired television executive. He re-
party. The Guardian and HuffPost re- the value system that gives their life members a time when he would press
ported that Chua had privately told a meaning,” and that “they all find that on reporters a sheet detailing the cor-
group of law students that it was “no ac- that value system leads to misery.” Mean- ruption of the mobbed-up Democratic
cident” that Kavanaugh’s female law clerks while, he went on, the masculinity of Party in Youngstown, where the Repub-
all “looked like models,” and had offered young boys was “suppressed.” Such views, licans were heavily outnumbered. As
to give them advice on how to dress if one of Vance’s friends from the Refor- Trump’s campaign gathered momentum,
they wanted to work for him. Usha, whom micon movement told me, ref lected Munroe started hearing from residents
Chua had recommended for the clerk- Vance’s “reinvention as a public persona.” who’d never been interested in his party
ship with Kavanaugh, sent a stiffly worded “Some of these currents, call them cul- before, but who saw the immigration
e-mail to her law-school class distanc- tural currents, are very deep for him— issue primarily in terms of security, rather
ing herself from Chua’s reported com- what men need, what women need from than of the economy. “For folks around
ments and asserting that she knew, from men,” the friend said. But there was also, here, it really is protecting the southern
her time interviewing candidates as a the friend went on, “a level of becoming border from drugs,” Munroe said. “It’s
Kavanaugh clerk, that appearance was the thing one needs there to be.” about strength.” Munroe was sitting at
not a factor in who got hired. “Kind of Vance was building a political network the office of the election board on pri-
a dork,” Vance said of Kavanaugh in an of supporters and donors among anti- mary night, in March of 2016, when thou-
interview with Ross Douthat, of the establishment conservatives, with whom sands of Mahoning residents requested,
Times, this past spring. “Never believed he increasingly shared a tendency to ac- for the first time, a Republican ballot.
these stories.” cuse the left of operating with a might- “We doubled our registration in one
After the Kavanaugh hearings, Vance makes-right moral authoritarianism. night,” Munroe told me recently, still
began to contemplate a more thorough “The thing that I kept thinking about somewhat awestruck.
remaking of American institutions. An liberalism in 2019 and 2020 is that these The bigger surprise was that the new
academic friend recalled that in 2019, guys have all read Carl Schmitt,” he told voters stuck around. In 2020,Trump main-
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 close with both Vance and Donald Trump,
Jr., called the former President’s son to
BACKBEND get his opinion on Vance, who, he noted,
“talked a lot of shit about your dad in
Clever in the fold, you bend 2016.” As the friend recalled, Don, Jr., said,
backbend (uplift, clouds), “Honestly, dude, I fucking loved ‘Hillbilly
bend again as if the spine, Elegy’ back in 2016, and I fucking never
excited to perform, understood why he wasn’t on our side.”
thinks without uncertainty The 2022 Republican Senate primary
that it is dance itself. attracted six well-funded contenders, all
of whom promptly set about establishing
Uncertainly, we see their America First bona fides, in both
grace, fracas, memory— substance and style. Candidates flew to
we are always seeking Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach to
good inversions, chiefly audition for an endorsement. Josh Man-
because we know discomfort del, Ohio’s former state treasurer, trav-
and want to conquer it. elled to Arizona to observe an audit of
contested ballots and proclaimed 2020 a
I wonder how it feels “stolen” election. A wealthy investment
inch by inch to find the floor banker named Mike Gibbons, during
and, forsaking safety, leave it. an exchange with Mandel on the debate
So much your body is meshed stage, appeared to call him a “pussy.” Po-
in flex and yet yields tougher litico described it as “the dumbest Sen-
than softness suggests. ate primary ever.”
Vance had laid the groundwork for
But do you ever feel your body his run by appearing on conservative
is a noose? Do you see podcasts and television shows, offering
my shoulders moving in my seat? often extreme accounts of cultural con-
I think you must be limber flict. “American history is a constant war
in the heart the way I used to be. between Northern Yankees and Southern
You are the opposite of an elegy. Bourbons, where whichever side the hill-
billies are on wins,”Vance told a YouTuber
I almost look away, thinking in the spring of 2021. The Northern Yan-
we pay for each performance, kees, he went on,“are now the hyper-woke,
to sit there in our vanishings— sort of coastal élites,” the Bourbons are
life is cold, the stage is hot, the “same old-school Southern folks,” and
you backbend to eternity the hillbillies “have really started to mi-
half in air, and firmly on your feet. grate towards the Southern Bourbons.”
That July, a few weeks after he for-
—Diane Mehta mally announced his candidacy, he ap-
peared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News
show to discuss an idea he had been de-
tained an eight-point margin in the state. was an increasingly reliable Trump par- veloping: that élites in the U.S. “have
As an adviser to Vance who is based in tisan, who dismissed concerns about the played their entire lives to win a status
Ohio described it, the new voters were former President’s efforts to overturn the game,” and that more power should ac-
among the most populist in the state— election. The following year, he joined crue to people who had children, and
the most explicitly anti-Washington and the conservative anti-vaccine-mandate thus a “direct stake” in the future. “We
anti-élite—so that not only did the state chorus. A friend asked him why he was are effectively run in this country, via the
become more Republican but the Repub- on Twitter telling people not to get vac- Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs,
licans became more aligned with Trump. cinated when he himself was—people by a bunch of childless cat ladies who
The word in conservative circles was might die. In response, Vance raised some are miserable at their own lives and the
that Vance, too, had become “thoroughly safety concerns, and then added that it choices that they’ve made,” Vance said.
red-pilled.” Privately, he still had some didn’t help that Biden had insinuated “And so they want to make the rest of
reservations about Trump—as late as that people like his father—who hadn’t the country miserable, too.”
2020, as messages published by the Wash- gotten vaccinated—were “sewer rats.” Such arguments did little to help his
ington Post this September showed, he That summer, after the Ohio senator cause. By the following spring, with the
told an acquaintance that the President Rob Portman, a stalwart of the pre-Trump primary nearing its conclusion, Vance’s
had “thoroughly failed to deliver on his G.O.P., announced that he would retire, public image was still largely defined by
economic populism.” But in public Vance Vance decided to run. Someone who is the attack ads his rivals were running,
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 with the exaggerated disdain of New
Right activists—“I remember getting in
some argument with some loser on Twit-
ter a year or so ago,” he said—and he de-
livered a status update on the movement.
As a basic matter, Vance said, the old con-
servatism of expansive overseas involve-
ments and élites who “flooded the zone
with non-stop cheap labor” no longer had
a political foothold. Trump was not a
threat to democracy, he told the crowd:
“The real threat to democracy is that
American voters keep on voting for less
immigration, and our politicians keep re-
warding us with more.”
More than a year earlier, before Trump
had even announced his candidacy, Vance
had sent a note to Susie Wiles, one of
the former President’s senior advisers,
saying that he was prepared to endorse
Trump anytime. But, according to Vance’s
advisers, the prospect that Trump might
“I’m just trying to get through the rest of my life pick him for the ticket emerged only
without buying another umbrella.” around the time of the New Hampshire
primary, in January, when word began
leaking from operatives close to Mar-a-
• • Lago. Relatively quickly, Vance decided
that he wanted the job—with Biden fal-
highlighting his past anti-Trump com- son coming across our border.” The fol- tering, the Republicans stood a good
ments. He was stuck at around ten per lowing week, Trump—egged on by his chance of winning. Vance’s circle also
cent in the polls. It wasn’t until a Repub- son—endorsed Vance, which effectively felt that some of the alternatives Trump
lican-primary debate in March that he guaranteed him the nomination. “The was said to be considering, such as the
found a way to stand out. The moder- whole team worked on that ad,” the ad- South Carolina senator Tim Scott and
ator asked the candidates whether they viser said. “But the first line was all J.D.” the North Dakota governor Doug Bur-
would support a no-fly zone in Ukraine. When I called the former Democratic gum, might take the Party back toward
Only Vance was strongly opposed to the congressman Tim Ryan, whom Vance what Vance, at the National Conserva-
idea. Polls showed that a majority of Re- went on to beat in the general election, to tism Conference, called the Wall Street
publicans supported aid to Ukraine. But ask his opinion of Vance as a campaigner, Journal consensus.
Vance, like Trump, did not. Don, Jr., called he sounded distinctly unimpressed. “He The plan was for Vance to appear
the friend he shares with Vance: “He’s, was never on the trail,” Ryan said. Ryan relentlessly on TV, often in adversarial
like, ‘Dude, I saw this fucking clip on would drive his son’s dog, Zoie, around contexts, where he hoped to capture
Ukraine. Fuck this shit. J.D. is the guy.’” the state during the campaign, a gim- Trump’s attention by outwitting liberal
The next day, Don, Jr., tweeted, “JD is mick that eventually he started using as pundits. Several key conservative fig-
100% America First.” a talking point: “Zoie has been in Lima ures lobbied Trump not to pick Vance,
At that point, a Vance adviser told me, twice, and J. D. Vance never has.” But including the billionaire donor Ken
the campaign figured it had “one bullet” the most important question in the race Griffin, Rupert Murdoch, and Lindsey
left. Vance was convinced that what had was who could claim the MAGA mantle. Graham, who made an appeal to the
particularly infuriated ordinary conser- Who brought a dog to Lima—that was former President on Trump Force One
vatives since the Obama Administration campaigning for the twentieth century. on the way to the Republican National
was the suggestion that any opposition Convention, in Milwaukee. Elon Musk,
to immigration was rooted in racism. In his past July, a week or so before the Tucker Carlson, Don, Jr., and the tech
a campaign ad that appeared in early
April, Vance spoke directly to the cam-
T Republican National Convention,
Vance delivered a speech before a V.I.P.
investor David Sacks, a vociferous op-
ponent of the war in Ukraine, pressed
era. “Are you a racist?” he asked. “Do you audience at the National Conservatism Trump on Vance’s behalf. The contrast
hate Mexicans?” The media thought so, Conference. It had been five years since between the two groups might have
he went on, simply because Ohio con- he’d first appeared there, as a clean-shaven clarified the choice for the former Pres-
servatives wanted to build Trump’s bor- young man with a pointy-headed pre- ident: Was he with the establishment
der wall. “This issue is personal,” he sentation on moving right-wing politics Republicans or with the rising nation-
said. “I nearly lost my mother to the poi- beyond libertarianism. Now he spoke alists he’d brought into being?
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 On the morning of Saturday, July 13th, the press in the theatrics of his rallies, had made a few years earlier: “They’re
Vance met secretly with Trump at Mar- spending the last portion taking ques- following their own Twitter activists off
a-Lago; Trump did not offer him a spot tions from reporters. Even so, there was a cliff.” Conservatives often liked to say
on the ticket, but he intimated that he an observable irony in how small that that every Republican activist under forty
might. Early that evening, Trump was day’s press pool was and how central the belonged to the New Right, French went
shot in the ear at a rally in Butler, Penn- media has become in the conservative on, but he had been watching students
sylvania. Vance was among the first political imagination. at the Christian colleges where he spoke
elected officials to politicize the event. Of course, Vance, in many ways, is a and taught and doubted that this was
Within hours, he tweeted, “The central product of the media. That weekend, he the case. At present, French said, he had
premise of the Biden campaign is that had appeared on three separate Sunday exactly one student who identified as
President Donald Trump is an authori- shows. On X, he sometimes seems to be New Right. “Nice guy,” French said, and
tarian fascist who must be stopped at all operating as a universal reply guy. “Hi you could sense the grin. “But, I mean,
costs. That rhetoric led directly to Pres- Hannah,” Vance recently wrote, at the he wears an ascot.”
ident Trump’s attempted assassination.” beginning of a multi-paragraph response It’s perhaps unsurprising that, when
(The motives of the shooter, a registered to an author of Bible-study and self-help Vance needed to connect with conservative
Republican who had donated to a Dem- books, who had taken issue with his po- voters, he returned to the subject of im-
ocratic turnout effort, remain unclear.) sitions on child care. While on Trump migration. In July, Vance tried to draw
Vance did not speak with Trump again Force Two, I idly looked at my phone the press’s attention to a situation un-
until the following Monday, at the start and noticed that Vance was on X at that folding in Springfield, Ohio: a city whose
of the Convention, when the former very moment, somewhat angrily tweet- population had previously been less than
President called to ask if he’d join the ing at David Frum, who is now a staff sixty thousand was struggling to handle
ticket. Half an hour later, Trump posted writer at The Atlantic. Frum had tweeted an influx of as many as twenty thousand
the news on Truth Social. that the difference between the Demo- legal Haitian immigrants, many of whom
Two days later, Vance’s prime-time cratic and the Republican tickets was that had been drawn from other parts of the
speech at the Convention elevated the “the upsetting things said by Trump and United States by the promise of factory
experiences of the left-behind. In his tell- Vance are not true.” Vance, surrounded jobs. Early in September, Vance shared
ing, their endurance, rather than the fight by his wife, his dog, and his advisers, had a story being passed around by conser-
of outside groups for rights and prosper- fired back, “I’d say the most important vative users on social media that “people
ity, was the central feature of the national difference is that people on your team have had their pets abducted and eaten
story. If there was a discordant note, it tried to kill Donald Trump twice.” by people who shouldn’t be in this coun-
was in how generically he described the Some conservatives suggested to me try.” The next day, Trump repeated the
working-class Republicans whose inter- that one source of Vance’s combative- claim during his Presidential debate with
ests he was supposedly championing in ness is that the America First movement, Kamala Harris, in a memorably ham-
a newly populist G.O.P.: “the factory though very much alive as an electoral handed way. (“In Springfield, they are
worker in Wisconsin who makes things prospect, is losing intellectual steam. Yuval eating the dogs. The people that came
with their hands and is proud of Amer- Levin explained that, since 2000, he had in, they are eating the cats.”) There was
ican craftsmanship”; “the auto worker in been part of three waves of attempted no evidence that this was true—the Wall
Michigan wondering why out-of-touch Street Journal, chasing down the rumor
politicians are destroying their jobs.” But of an abducted feline, found her safe in
Vance’s own story remained powerful. her owner’s basement.
He invoked the family cemetery in east- In the following days, a series of bomb
ern Kentucky where five generations of threats closed schools in Springfield and
his forebears were buried. “People will spooked the local population. The city’s
not fight for abstractions, but they will Republican mayor and the state’s Re-
fight for their home,” Vance said. “Our publican governor pleaded with Vance
leaders have to remember that America to stop repeating the claim, but he re-
is a nation, and its citizens deserve lead- fused to do so. On September 15th, Vance
ers who put its interests first.” conservative reforms, each of which had told CNN’s Dana Bash, “The Ameri-
tried to turn the Party away from liber- can media totally ignored this stuff until
press seat on the plane of a mod- tarianism and toward social conserva- Donald Trump and I started talking
A ern Presidential campaign costs
about as much as a spot on a chartered
tism, but that each had fizzled because
“if you wake up any given Republican
about cat memes. If I have to create sto-
ries so that the American media actu-
jet. Embeds from the major networks, congressman in the middle of the night ally pays attention to the suffering of
along with Michael Bender, of the Times, and ask him what he wants to do, he’s the American people, then that’s what
are constant presences on Trump Force still going to say cut the marginal tax I’m going to do.”
Two. For most of the rest of us, the trip rate.” David French, the conservative Clips from the campaign trail have
from D.C. to Grand Rapids and Eau Never Trump columnist at the Times, emphasized Vance’s awkwardness—there
Claire represented something closer to told me he thought the Republicans were was the encounter at a doughnut shop
a onetime splurge. Vance often enlists making the same error that the Democrats in Valdosta, Georgia, where Vance, tall
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and slightly hunched, brightly greeted point of the critics?” Vance added. “When had overwhelmed the schools, leaving
a clerk, who quickly said that she did not you’re criticizing somebody’s rhetoric, native-born children disengaged “for
want to appear on camera. “She doesn’t when you’re criticizing what somebody eight hours.” A Navy veteran who was
want to be on film, guys,” Vance said said, are you trying to tone down the vi- planning to vote for Trump for a third
loudly, “so just cut her out of anything.” olence or are you trying to silence him?” time noted that most of the Haitians
He turned back to the shop worker, in- were legal immigrants and asked why
troduced himself, and said that he was he following Thursday evening, I Republicans were focussing on deporta-
running for Vice-President. “O.K.,” she
said. The silence was faintly excruciat-
T paid a visit to Springfield, where the
conservative firebrand Vivek Ramaswamy,
tion rather than on the drugs and home-
lessness that had been problems before
ing. Which doughnuts did he want, any- whose hard-line populism in the Repub- they arrived. Listening to these com-
way? Vance indicated the glazed, the cin- lican primaries drew Trump’s praise, had plaints, I thought that the politicization
namon rolls. “Some sprinkle stuff,” he organized a town hall. Earlier that day, of ordinary people in Springfield had at
said. “Whatever makes sense.” he had met with representatives of the least been built on actual suffering. But
He was better in more structured set- Haitian community, but none had come their concerns weren’t about any strange
tings. Vance is an excellent debater, to the town hall, and neither had the cultural practices of the Haitian com-
against both political opponents and the mayor or any members of the city coun- munity. They were about policy.
press, and even in hostile environments cil. Outside, conservative influencers con- Vance’s claims had started with some-
he maintains emotional control—when ducted video interviews with locals on thing like that, too. In his Convention
he’s angry, it’s because he wants to be. their iPhones. MAGA gear abounded. speech, he had insisted that the spike in
At the rally in Grand Rapids, held in a The conservative activist Christopher housing prices nationally was due to an
refurbished barn north of the city, he Rufo had offered a five-thousand-dollar influx of undocumented immigrants. But,
brought up the attempts on Trump’s life: reward to anyone who could find proof when the pressures on the housing mar-
“I think that it’s time to say to the Dem- of people in Springfield eating cats. I ket and institutions in a mid-sized Ohio
ocrats, to the media, to everybody that expected to hear more stories of migrant city failed to make a dent in the national
has been attacking this man and trying misdeeds at the town hall. A woman news, he tried to create a different nar-
to censor this man for going on ten years, said that her daughter had been chased rative, about how foreign and culturally
cut it out or you’re going to get some- by an “immigrant” wielding a machete. threatening the Haitian migrants were.
body killed.” But that was the exception. Several peo- Populist panics often bubble up from the
An hour later, back under a wing of ple said that they had good personal re- grassroots, only to be refined by politi-
Trump Force Two, Vance came over to lations with their Haitian neighbors. cians. In this case, Vance had amplified
take a few questions from the press. Some worried about the poisoned en- the crudest version, ostensibly on behalf
Bender, from the Times, asked him vironment: one mixed-race man who of Springfield’s residents.
whether denouncing Democrats for in- had lived in Springfield his whole life Ramaswamy had offered to give me
flammatory rhetoric while falsely accus- said that he had been called the “N-word” a ride back to Columbus, where I was
ing Haitian migrants of eating cats and twice in the past week, and that a friend staying. After he finished an appearance
dogs wasn’t a very narrow needle to had been heckled at a grocery store while on Fox News, we set off contemplatively,
thread. “I don’t think it’s a needle that in his chauffeured black S.U.V. Rama-
we’re trying to thread,” Vance replied. swamy is an extreme figure himself—he
“There’s a massive highway down which built his Presidential stump speech around
we can draw two very important distinc- the argument that Trump’s revolution
tions, the first of which is Donald Trump was equivalent in scope to the events of
has had two assassination attempts in 1776. But he also seemed to think that
the last couple of months. So, if you look Trump and Vance’s fabrications about
at this, and you try to both-sides it, the the Haitians in Springfield were under-
problem is only one candidate has ac- mining what might have otherwise been
tually suffered very serious attempts on a winning issue. “I had the feeling—just
his life, including him being literally shot holding a six-month-old baby and told my intuition—that, if I had wanted to
in the head.” to leave the country. There were mur- take the crowd in a hard anti-immigrant
The Senator kept his voice polite, but murs of sympathy. direction, I could have,” Ramaswamy
he was arguing a fundamental piece of But the attendees mostly focussed on said. “It wasn’t where they were going to
his current politics—that the rupture in the stresses that the new arrivals had go on their own. But that’s the point:
American life, which for a decade had put on the city. A fifty-nine-year-old leadership. People need to be led.”
been blamed on Trump, was, in fact, the resident with a disability said that he
fault of the Democrats and the media. was struggling to get appointments at t the campaign event in Eau Claire,
Vance sounded a little exasperated; up
close, I noticed for the first time the gray
the local hospital; he’d heard a since-
debunked rumor that this was because
A the crowd was bigger, a little row-
dier. Derrick Van Orden, a white-bearded
hairs in his beard. The second big dif- so many Haitian migrants needed to be Republican House member, gave a
ference, he said, was that conservatives treated for H.I.V. A woman mentioned warmup speech that dwelled on a vio-
did not call for censorship. “What is the that an influx of foreign-born students lent crime allegedly committed by a
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Venezuelan migrant in his home town
of Prairie du Chien. Only Trump, he said,
could make Wisconsinites feel “comfort-
able walking the streets.” The response
of the crowd seemed to energize Vance.
Onstage, he inveighed against the Dem-
ocrats. “If you’re willing to throw a per-
son in jail because you disagree with what
they say,” he said, “then you’re going to
be willing to put a bullet in their head,
too.” Something a little dangerous was
happening—Vance was accusing his op-
ponents of wanting to kill Trump, in the
guise of telling them to chill out. He ad-
dressed the Democrats directly: “Stop
trying to silence people you disagree with.”
As Vance has risen in prominence,
some have speculated that much of his • •
life, following a largely fatherless child-
hood, has been a search for a mentor
who might fill a parental role: Mamaw, have to protect rural health-care access?” An adviser to Vance told me that the
the Marines, Amy Chua, Peter Thiel, Vance was quiet for a moment. At an transformations that had defined the
Donald Trump. One of Vance’s former earlier point in his public life, this would conservative project since the 2016 elec-
professors said, “I think there might be have been a perfect question for him. As tion remained under way. “We’re in the
something to that.” a senator, he had said that he was open third or fourth inning,” he said. The sug-
But it’s also the case that Thiel and to the politics of the “Bernie bros,” had gestion was that ambitious young right-
Chua are both serial mentors, and that praised the Biden Administration’s ag- wingers were still shaping the MAGA
Trump needed an heir—the scarce com- gressive antitrust regulator Lina Khan, movement. But Vance, in coming so
modity in American conservatism isn’t and had walked a U.A.W. picket line in completely into alignment with Trump
fathers but sons. Along the way, Vance’s Ohio, where a veteran pro-labor Dem- in this election, has helped usher in a
liberal friends seemed to think, he’d made ocratic House member had asked him, similar change across his party. The con-
elisions to his persona, pruning off the “First time here?” When it comes to servative élites, like the rest of the G.O.P.,
inconvenient biographical details so that rural health care, themes of fairness and are more fully Trumpist now. Vance may
what remained was as unnatural as a economic populism naturally lie close be playing in a much later inning.
bonsai.This summer, shortly after Vance’s to the surface. Instead, Vance said, “This Vance said he had time for one more
nomination for the Vice-Presidency, goes back to the immigration issue.” He question, and he awarded it to Bender,
Charles Johnson, a far-right conspiracy argued that the hospitals were under the Times reporter. The crowd bridled
theorist, gave the Washington Post a pressure because they were being forced a bit, but Bender—acting politically for
trove of text messages between himself to take care of migrants, adding, “Kick a second, too—quieted them by thank-
and Vance, including an exchange in these illegal aliens out, focus on Amer- ing the Senator for “inviting the tough
which Johnson had highlighted Vance’s ican citizens, and we will do a lot to questions.” What he wanted to know of
relationship with Chua. Vance had re- make the business of rural health care Vance, Bender said, pivoting back to
plied dismissively. “Chua doesn’t tell me much more affordable.” Springfield, was where his red line was:
anything,” he wrote. “I am pretty sure I The elisions were happening in real “What’s something you’re willing not
don’t even know another Chinese amer- time now. At such moments, I had the to say in order to make a point that’s
ican.” It was this last beat that caught sense of a mismatch between Vance’s tal- important to you?”
the attention of some of Vance’s former ents and the timing of his trajectory. His Vance cut him off. “The media al-
law-school friends, because a number of sudden rise to power would not have ways does this,” he grumbled. When he
them are Chinese American. been possible without the scorched-earth told CNN that he had been trying to
In Eau Claire, when Vance turned his Trump wars that took out a whole gen- “create a story” about what happened in
attention to the back of the room to take eration of conservatives ahead of him. Springfield, he’d meant only that he was
questions from the press, James Kelly, a Vance and his allies in the New Right trying to create a narrative, a “media
reporter from a Wisconsin public-radio had spent years working out a theory of story,” because people there were telling
network, asked about the recent closure Trumpism—economic populism, an him that no one was taking their con-
of two rural hospitals and several clinics ideological makeover of the administra- cerns seriously. The crowd was with him;
in the Chippewa Valley. “I’m glad you tive state, a hard line on social-conser- he grew more self-assured. “I’m not mak-
mentioned providing actual concrete an- vative issues like abortion—and then, ing anything up,” Vance said. “I’m just
swers to questions,” he said. “What con- when it was time to campaign, Trump telling you what my constituents are tell-
crete plans would your Administration had simply moved on. ing me.” 
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A
mong Joe Biden’s afflictions
and miseries, his wormwood
and gall, there are the insults
(about his diminished capacities), and
then there are the compliments un-
paid (about his achievements). We are
exposed to more of the first, but it
seems that to him the second are more
painful. In his first interview after he
withdrew as the Democratic Presi-
dential nominee, Biden—wounded,
proud, self-pitying, defiant—said, by
way of defending his record, “No one
thought we could get done, including
some of my own people, what we got
done. One of the problems is, we knew
all the things we did were going to
take a little time to work their way
through. So now people are realizing,
‘Oh, that highway. Oh, that . . .’ ” He
trailed off for a moment and then re-
covered. “The biggest mistake we
made, we didn’t put up signs saying
‘Joe Did It.’ ” He ended this with a
bitter chuckle. Biden isn’t wrong. Ob-
jectively, and improbably, he has passed
more new domestic programs than
any Democratic President since Lyn-
don Johnson—maybe even since
Franklin Roosevelt.
In the early weeks of 2021, very
few people saw Biden as the obvious
winner in the large field of potential
candidates for the 2024 Democratic
nomination. His victory over Donald
Trump had not been overwhelming. THE POLITICAL SCENE
The Democrats had lost seats in the
House even while maintaining a nar-
row majority, and got to fifty votes in
the Senate only after two runoff elec-
THE BIG DEAL
tions in Georgia broke their way. Then, Joe Biden’s economic policies are starting to
with nothing close to a mandate, Biden transform America. Will anyone notice?
passed domestic legislation that will
generate government spending of at BY NICHOLAS LEMANN
least five trillion dollars, spread across
a wide range of purposes, in every cor-
ner of the country. He has also redi-
rected many of the federal govern-
ment’s regulatory agencies in ways
that will profoundly affect American
life. On Biden’s watch, the govern-
ment has launched large programs to
move the country to clean energy
sources, to create from scratch or to
bring onshore a number of industries,
to strengthen organized labor, to build
thousands of infrastructure projects,
to embed racial-equity goals in many
government programs, and to break The Administration has passed legislation spending trillions of dollars on manufacturing
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and infrastructure across the country. “The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying ‘Joe Did It,’ ” Biden said.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CAROLYN DRAKE THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 37

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up concentrations of economic power. political scientist Jacob Hacker: it re- of “opportunity” and “mobility”—that
All of this doesn’t represent merely jects redistribution as a guiding liberal such liberal rhetoric has limited appeal
a hodgepodge of actions. There is as principle, in favor of “predistribution,” among people who want to live safely
close to a unifying theory as one can an effort to transform the economy in and securely in the communities where
find in a sweeping set of government a way that makes redistribution less they grew up, surrounded by strong in-
policies. Almost all the discussion of necessary. Predistribution entails un- stitutions that are not subject to relent-
“Bidenomics”—by focussing on short- derstanding the economy as something less economic and social disruption.
term fluctuations of national metrics that structures the balance of power (According to a recent Pew Research
such as growth, the inflation rate, and among institutions, rather than as a Center survey, ninety-two per cent of
unemployment, with the aim of deter- natural phenomenon that must be man- Americans say that financial stability
mining the health of the economy— aged in order to lessen its harmful ef- is more important to them than up-
misses the point. Real Bidenomics up- fects on individuals. So Bidenomics ward mobility.) What people see hap-
ends a set of economic assumptions has overturned a number of unwritten pening around them matters far more
that have prevailed in both parties for rules that you previously had to fol- than what the latest statistics tell us
most of the past half century. Biden is low if you wanted to be taken seriously about the state of the economy. As Eliz-
the first President in decades to treat as a policymaker: economic regulation abeth Wilkins, who worked in the
government as the designer and ongo- is usually a bad idea; governments Biden White House, told me, “It’s na-
ing referee of markets, rather than as should balance their budgets, except tional G.D.P. numbers versus how peo-
the corrector of markets’ dislocations during recessions and depressions; sub- ple feel about their lives, their families,
and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t sidizing specific industries never works; their communities. It’s their job, the
speak of free trade and globalization unions are a mixed blessing, because jobs of the people around them, what
as economic ideals. His approach to they don’t always promote economic those jobs pay—not the aggregate num-
combatting climate change involves no efficiency; government should not try bers. We fully embraced that in our
carbon taxes or credits—another major to help specific regions of the country policy orientation.” And that meant
departure, not just from his predeces- or sectors of the economy. shoring up specific places and institu-
sors but also from the policies of many At least in domestic affairs, nobody tions as a primary political strategy.
other countries. His Administration makes policy without thinking about The irony of Bidenomics is the vast
has been far more aggressive than pre- politics. One grand ambition behind gulf between its scale—measured in
vious ones in taking antitrust actions all the Biden economic initiatives is to money and in the number of projects
against big companies. usher in a political realignment that that it has set in motion—and its po-
What would you call these policies? would make the Democrats competi- litical impact, which is essentially zero,
One apt label might be “post-neolib- tive again in the more sparsely popu- even though a major part of its ratio-
eral,” a term that does not resonate at lated parts of the country, which have nale is political. It has become a stan-
all with the public. Another way of disproportionate political power. The dard talking point of the engineers of
thinking about Biden’s approach is idea is that Americans are not as mo- Bidenomics that it will take at least
through terminology devised by the tivated as you might think by notions five years, maybe ten, possibly even

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longer, for the public to understand its is the Blue Bird Corporation, one of a room where we could talk for a few
effects. “That’s the way it was with the the country’s largest manufacturers of minutes. She is a lawyer who started
New Deal,” Steve Ricchetti, one of school buses. During the next five years, her career in civil-rights organizations
Biden’s closest and longest-serving nearly a billion dollars in grants will and then worked in state labor agen-
aides, said. “It wasn’t just three or four be awarded to dozens of school dis- cies in California. (Her liberal past has
years of new programs. It was lever- tricts nationwide through the Envi- made it difficult for her to be con-
aged for twenty or thirty years into ronmental Protection Agency’s Clean firmed by the Senate, and that is why
the future.” But the short-term poli- School Bus Program, some of which she is the “acting” Secretary.) She told
tics worked out a lot better for Frank- will go toward the purchase of Blue me about the amount of effort that
lin Roosevelt; he carried all but two Bird’s electric buses, and Blue Bird will had gone into making the Fort Valley
states in his first reëlection campaign. receive eighty million dollars from the announcement possible. Phil Horlock,
There is little evidence that the Dem- Blue Bird’s C.E.O., had been brought
ocrats will be similarly rewarded in to the White House for a meeting
2024. Only late in the race, when she with Biden. Then, this spring, Su had
was spending much of her time in the come to Fort Valley to urge Horlock
Midwest, did Kamala Harris begin to speed up his slow-moving negoti-
speaking regularly about Biden’s major ations with the United Steelworkers.
economic initiatives. It’s unclear how Was the conclusion of the negotia-
committed to them she will be if she tions connected to the eighty-million-
becomes President. Trump has prom- dollar grant to build the electric-bus
ised to repeal many of them. Still, Pres- factory? “I’m going to answer this way,”
ident Biden can rest assured that many Department of Energy’s Office of Man- Su said. “The way you asked me im-
signs are being put up. They just don’t ufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. plies conditions. Whether workers
say “Joe Did It.” They say “Investing In essence, the Administration is gen- want to join a union depends on them.
in America.” erously funding a private business. Be- Politicians should not interfere. It is
cause the money will go to electric not a condition. What I said to Phil
ver the summer, I accompanied vehicles, the plan is part of both the was ‘There’s no reason not to have a
O two Biden Cabinet members, Julie
Su, the acting Secretary of Labor, and
transition to clean energy and the Ad-
ministration’s project of bringing man-
contract after a year of negotiations.’
They got that done. The company took
Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Trans- ufacturing back to the American heart- it seriously. Phil said, ‘We heard the
portation, as they travelled around the land—rather than letting it happen, in Julie Su challenge, and we accept.’ ”
country promoting the Administra- particular, in China. And Blue Bird,
tion’s projects. These visits took place for the first time in its ninety-seven-year ow did this new era in economic
away from the coasts, mainly in small
towns. Watching the Biden officials in
history, has coöperated with its em-
ployees’ effort to unionize, a develop-
H policy come to pass? How did
Biden, the most familiar of politicians,
action made me feel like a time trav- ment that aligns with Biden’s support and previously not seen as someone
eller transported back to the social- for unions. with sweeping policy ambitions, be-
realist days of the thirties and forties. For the event in Fort Valley, there come the organizer of such a big pro-
At every stop, it seemed, we’d come was a temporary canopy to protect the gram? In retrospect, it’s possible to see
upon a tall chain-link fence and drive audience from the summer sun, a few what happened as the convergence of
through an open gate, past a guard- rows of folding chairs, a makeshift po- a number of forces that have been build-
house, and then down a long, lonely dium in front of a yellow school bus, ing for fifteen years. It’s a story line
road leading to a factory. All around and “Investing in America” signs posted that seems clearer now than it did as
would be forklifts, cranes, pickup trucks, at every possible location. The mayor, it was unfolding.
huge metal sheds, silos, and lengths of Jeffery Lundy, opened the event by In 2008, Barack Obama swept into
pipe so wide that you could stand up saying that he was “excited and ec- office with three hundred and sixty-five
inside them. static” about the new plant. He thanked electoral votes and firm control of both
On a Friday morning in July, I went the federal government, the Blue Bird the Senate and the House. It seemed
to Fort Valley, Georgia, the seat of Peach Corporation, and God, and ended by as if the Democrats were on their way
County, to watch Su promote a new quoting a few lines of Scripture. Then to securing a lasting majority, as they
factory that will build electric school came Yvonne Brooks, the president of did in the New Deal era, this time with
buses. If the over-all goals of Biden- the Georgia A.F.L.-C.I.O. Finally, Su, a coalition of educated urban and sub-
omics sound abstract, this project makes who has a brisk, cheerful charm, took urban voters and racial and ethnic
for a good concrete example, because the podium and said that the plant minorities. The last stage of Obama’s
it unites all the major ideas. Fort Val- would help solve the climate crisis, campaign and the beginning of his Ad-
ley is a majority-Black town in a rural create jobs for the local community, ministration took place against the back-
swing county, in a historically Repub- and give schoolchildren a chance to drop of the worst financial crisis in eight
lican state that the Democrats have breathe cleaner air. decades, but Obama seemed well
targeted. The biggest business in town After the ceremony, Su and I found equipped to handle it. He and a team
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 Democrats’ reach. Hacker describes
the mood around that time this way:
“Trump gets elected. You can’t under-
state this. People woke up. Nothing
concentrates the mind as much as the
prospect of losing your democracy. We
lost the heartland.”
After a defeat, parties often rethink
their strategies. The 2016 election was
such an extreme shock to the Demo-
crats that the rethinking had a special
urgency. “Sanders and Trump tapped
into something,” Elizabeth Wilkins
noted. “We had to speak to economic
populism as we hadn’t before.” People
who had expected to be working in a
Hillary Clinton Administration “spent
a lot of time coming up with policy
proposals because after 2016 they had
“She feeds us, she walks us, she even picks up our poop—the least nothing to do.” There was an explicit
we can do is bark at every single thing that passes by.” focus on finding ways to address peo-
ple’s problems in their own communi-
ties—particularly in the places where
• • the political tide had turned against
Democrats. As Hacker put it, “A lot of
of experienced economic advisers got reason to invest here—led to inequal- America had been devastated by trade
Congress to pass a large stimulus bill, ity and massive dislocation,” Lael Brain- and by inequality. You lose civic capi-
aimed at preventing another Great De- ard, the head of Biden’s National Eco- tal in places. It’s one thing to compen-
pression. But we wound up having a nomic Council, who also worked in sate the losers. But, if you don’t, it’s a
Great Recession. The unemployment the Clinton and Obama Administra- total fucking disaster.”
rate rose to a peak of ten per cent in tions, told me. “You saw a downward In high-level policy circles, a num-
October, 2009; it took until 2017 for spiral of investment.” Deregulation of ber of Democrats took up efforts to re-
employment to recover fully. The re- the financial system made it less risk- connect with the working class and
cession generated populist revolts on proof and helped to set the stage for distanced themselves from past eco-
the right (the Tea Party movement) and the 2008 crisis. Some argue that, if nomic policies. Jake Sullivan, now
the left (the Occupy movement), and Obama’s stimulus package—initially Biden’s national-security adviser, con-
made what had appeared to be broad estimated at seven hundred and eighty- ducted a public self-examination after
public acceptance of pro-market bro- seven billion dollars—had been bigger, the 2016 election; he wrote an article
mides seem like an illusion. In the 2010 the Great Recession, and the resulting in which he argued, “The American
midterms, the Democrats lost six seats level of political discontent, would have electorate as a whole is moving to em-
in the Senate and sixty-three seats, along been less severe. brace a more energized form of gov-
with the majority, in the House. Obama was reëlected easily, in 2012, ernment—one that tackles the excesses
Democrats concerned with eco- but the Democrats’ bill came due in of the free market and takes on big, se-
nomic inequality began identifying 2016. During the primary season, Ber- rious challenges through big, serious
what they saw as the Party’s original nie Sanders, a politician whom the legislation.” Even before 2016, John Po-
sins. There was the Clinton Adminis- Democratic establishment didn’t take desta, another Clinton-Obama veteran
tration’s enthusiastic embrace of the seriously, performed unexpectedly well now back in the White House, had co-
North American Free Trade Agree- by running to the left of Hillary Clin- founded a think tank called the Wash-
ment, and its lengthy negotiations to ton on economic issues. In the Novem- ington Center for Equitable Growth.
bring China into the World Trade Or- ber election, Trump—another outsider, The argument that the Democratic
ganization. Bill Clinton delivered a running as a right-wing populist— Party can win by moving to the center
healthy economy as measured by the peeled off enough formerly Democratic is a staple of op-ed pages, and it seems
standard national statistics, but inside voters, especially white working-class to be shaping the Harris campaign. But
it were large pockets of woe, thanks to men, to win. It wasn’t just that the Re- inside the political world the economic
rising inequality and the departure of publicans flipped contested states such left had earned significant clout by prov-
manufacturing jobs for Mexico, China, as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania; for- ing that it could produce new policy
and other locations abroad. “We saw merly competitive states, among them ideas and win votes. In 2020, Sanders
that this approach—get government Florida, Iowa, and Ohio, now seemed ran another spirited Presidential cam-
out of the way, don’t give business a to be moving permanently out of the paign, and his reward for dropping out
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of the race and endorsing Biden was tions, in his new home town, Portland, idea of sending people two-thou-
the creation of two Unity Task Forces, Maine. During the Obama era, Deese, sand-dollar checks was invented by
one populated with some of his sup- a onetime aide of Larry Summers, was Trump.” (Economists prefer tax cred-
porters and the other with some of seen as a neoliberal; during the Trump its.) “Nancy Pelosi and Biden adopted
Biden’s. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s years, he worked for BlackRock. Biden them to troll the Republicans and to
Presidential campaign had ended ear- appointed Deese, then in his early for- win the Senate races in Georgia. Peo-
lier, but the broad array of policy pro- ties, as the director of the National ple already had money in the bank be-
posals that she put forth, generated by Economic Council, a business-facing cause they couldn’t buy anything,” with
a network of young lawyers she had unit of the White House which Bill stores closed and supplies short, on ac-
cultivated over the years, gave her a Clinton created. I met Deese—a slight, count of the pandemic. So the price of
great deal of influence, too. The Unity bearded, blue-eyed man who has the everything rose.
Task Forces jointly released a hundred- informal manner and the intensity of By that time, it was clear that more
and-ten-page set of potential policies a Silicon Valley executive—at a new traditional economic voices like Fur-
in July, 2020. Biden didn’t wind up try- graduate school created to promote man’s would not be dominant in Biden’s
ing to enact everything in this docu- the development of tech companies in White House. On economic policy,
ment, but just about everything he has Maine. He gave me his version of the most of the people who served under
proposed is in there somewhere. origins of Bidenomics: “Two things Clinton and Obama had been, as Fur-
Also in July, 2020, Biden made a were going on in the spring of 2020: man put it, “Robert Rubin”—a former
few economic-policy speeches that Biden secured the nomination, and head of Goldman Sachs and the first
clearly signalled his retreat from neo- COVID. He did something that’s un- director of the National Economic
liberalism—one on reviving Ameri- usual in politics. He shifted his policy Council—“and his children and grand-
can manufacturing, one on climate and vision to be more expansive. Usually, children,” figuratively speaking. (He’s
infrastructure, one on racial economic it’s the other way around.” one of the grandchildren.) But the fer-
equity, and one on the “care economy.” The result was the American Res- ment of the years after the financial
There was, at the time, a sense of forces cue Plan, a $1.8 trillion bill—more than crisis had produced a new talent pool,
within the Democratic Party and ex- double the size of Obama’s stimulus associated especially with Elizabeth
ternal events converging to yield a new legislation. It came only a year after Warren. Former aides and allies of War-
political consensus. The COVID pan- Trump had signed a bill of equivalent ren’s, and former staff members at think
demic, and the high level of alarm size, in the early days of the pandemic, tanks like the Economic Policy Insti-
about Trump throughout the Party, that was also meant to prevent a reces- tute, wound up on the Council of Eco-
meant that the Biden Administration sion or a depression. And, indeed, the nomic Advisers, working for Deese at
was coming to power during a dire na- COVID recession was far shorter and the National Economic Council, or at
tional emergency. No prominent Dem- less severe than the recession that fol- many of the federal regulatory agen-
ocrats were arguing that it was a time lowed the financial crisis. There were cies. Jobs that customarily had gone to
for the government to exercise restraint. many items in the bill that signalled economists, who are predisposed to
As one member of a rising generation Biden’s priorities beyond just getting trust in markets, went instead to law-
of activists, who ended up working in through the worst of COVID. Nearly yers (like Deese), who are trained to
the Biden White House, put it, “It’s ninety billion dollars went toward in- focus on rules and institutions.
not clear that there’s a neoliberalism creasing the child tax credit, eighty bil- I asked Deese whether he consid-
to go back to.” lion went to shoring up union pension ers himself a repentant former neolib-
funds, eighty-eight billion went to in- eral. He wasn’t willing to agree to that,
ne feature of this post-neoliberal frastructure projects, and three hun- but he did say that some of the ideas
O period is that super-ambitious,
impeccably credentialled Administra-
dred and fifty billion went to state and
local governments.
he was charged with implementing in
the Biden Administration would not
tion officials now feel the need to The rap on the rescue bill is that it have been given serious consideration
demonstrate that they have not become set off several years of inflation—now under Obama. “If you had said to me
clueless creatures of the coastal élite. finally under control—which made in 2010 that I would be supervising in-
Jake Sullivan’s wife, Maggie Good- Biden’s management of the economy dustrial strategy, I would have said,
lander, another former White House widely unpopular. Jason Furman, who ‘That’s crazy. Nobody would listen,’ ”
official, is currently running for Con- was Obama’s last chair of the Council Deese told me. “If you wanted to say
gress to represent a district in north- of Economic Advisers and now teaches ‘industrial strategy,’ you couldn’t. It was
ern New Hampshire, and if she wins at Harvard, has been a persistent pub- ‘picking winners.’”
he would presumably join her there. lic critic of the bill, especially for its Deese said that his perspective
Buttigieg has moved to Traverse City, provisions authorizing more than four changed when he was in the Obama
Michigan, the home town of his hus- hundred billion dollars in checks to be White House, working to keep Gen-
band, Chasten Glezman Buttigieg. sent to families with annual incomes eral Motors and Chrysler in business
Over the summer, I visited Brian of less than seventy-five thousand dol- during the financial crisis. “That made
Deese, another high-ranking official lars. “Nobody could defend it as the me see the potential for government
in the Obama and Biden Administra- right policy,” Furman told me. “The to shape the economy,” he said. “I gained
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a deeper and more ground-level sense
of what it meant to have economic
capacity and why it’s essential. Those PREGNANCY ON STREET-CLEANING DAY
ideas were made super real for me by
seeing an industry in free fall. We have When I thought myself most honest
intervened time and again in the auto I was merely moving
industry, including in the Reagan Ad- aside from the relevant surface
ministration. Saying we don’t do that
is a wrong description of what we’ve and not getting down
done as a country.” to the nature of things.
The Biden Administration passed
three more colossal bills in 2021 and Me in my rattletrap
2022: the Infrastructure Investment baring the black road
and Jobs Act ($1.2 trillion), the CHIPS so the sweeper truck touches
and Science Act ($280 billion), and the its gray skirts there and departs
Inflation Reduction Act (originally es- with ratty nibbled leaf.
timated at $380 billion, now thought
to have an actual cost of more than Then I would roll my vehicle back
$800 billion). Together, these laws have to the lip of stone fringed above
hundreds of provisions. But, broadly what’s happening in the street.
speaking, the first is intended to fund Little changed.
bridges, roads, harbors, and other build-
ing projects; the second brings semi- I mean to announce the coming of a child.
conductor production back to the Not a god, not more particular
United States; and the third finances than all particulars,
the transition to non-carbon-produc- but I get lost in simple repetitions
ing energy sources. In our conversa- and forget to speak
tion, Deese argued that the three ini- with my whole heart.
tiatives should be thought of as one
big legislative package. They share the I was what’s known
same goal: to rebuild and redirect the as a good girl, completing the exercises,
industrial capacity of the United States. claws trimmed, a zip on my coat.
“We don’t just want the economy to O diagnosis!
grow,” Heather Boushey, a member of
the Council of Economic Advisers, I see myself now in those forgotten unbeloved
said. “Growing from the middle out presidents of the nineteenth century
means that what we make and how we gaunt even when they were fat—
make it matters.”
That idea animates many other
things the Biden Administration has Obama Administration opened an an- co-author, with the behavioral econo-
done (and one thing it hasn’t done: ne- titrust investigation of Google and then mist Richard Thaler, of the book
gotiate any new trade agreements). In dropped it. The Biden Administration “Nudge.” That selection was a gesture
addition to passing legislation, the sued Google and won. Obama, after in the direction of light-touch regula-
White House has issued a number of recruiting Elizabeth Warren to design tion. Biden reversed course by putting
significant executive orders. Probably the Consumer Financial Protection Bu- K. Sabeel Rahman, a Warren ally, in
the most important came in July, 2021— reau, rejected her request to be nomi- the job, and approving a new way for
an order on competition which stands nated as its initial director. Biden ap- the government to calculate the cost-
as the strongest Presidential statement pointed to the position Rohit Chopra, benefit ratio of initiatives, giving more
on monopoly and antitrust in Ameri- one of Warren’s aides from those days. weight to social benefits. Such consid-
can history. Biden also filled the coun- Then there are parts of the govern- erations are embedded in the Biden
try’s regulatory agencies with appoin- ment that are practically unknown to legislation. The CHIPS Act allowed the
tees from the economic left of the Party. the outside world—Biden remade government to mandate company-paid
The best known of these is Lina Khan, many of those, too. One example is the child care for the workers in the new
of the Federal Trade Commission, but Office of Information and Regulatory factories it’s financing, and for the con-
similar appointees are running the Jus- Affairs, which Clinton established in struction workers building them, too.
tice Department’s antitrust division, the the first year of his Presidency, to re- Forty per cent of federally backed cli-
Securities and Exchange Commission, duce the number of federal regulations. mate investments are required to be
the National Labor Relations Board, Obama’s head of the O.I.R.A. was made in disadvantaged communities.
and all the environmental agencies. The Cass Sunstein, a law professor and the “We were trying to fuse the realities
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 of it was divided into two parts, called
the American Jobs Plan and the Amer-
zones of flesh who lied ican Families Plan. The Democratic
a bit, bluffed, bought items House passed a bill combining the two,
not quite for sale, came down called Build Back Better, but it died
with wintry infections and warred in the Senate. The senator with the
on small islands. key vote, Joe Manchin, of West Vir-
ginia, made it clear that he opposed
Who chose a tiny corner the American Families Plan—which
of a big borrowed house as the one place included child care, paid family leave,
to slake their muzzles in and free community college—because
foreign stamps, say, or Latin, or theatrical he considered it to be a series of hand-
women. outs. But he opened negotiations on
the American Jobs Plan, which was
There is nothing to pity devoted mainly to business-friendly,
them for, and yet, watching my white breath globalization-skeptical clean-energy
lather and shave provisions. It was eventually renamed
these brick edifices, (actually, misnamed) the Inflation Re-
duction Act and passed that August.
I am dumbstruck by all those of us “It came together, and we were able to
who evade true grandeur and the crimson get it over the finish line,” Deese said.
calypso of feeling, The Inflation Reduction Act heav-
ily bears Manchin’s stamp. At its core
unwrite our own parts are generous tax credits to businesses,
faster than the couriers mostly but not entirely in clean en-
can lay sheaves of script at our feet, ergy, and West Virginia will do very
well. Once you get past understand-
slide our phones in and out of pockets— ing it simply as a landmark piece of
silvered oars sculling up and down— climate legislation, the act is a large,
unkempt thing. With the exception of
as though by dint a couple of relatively minor provisions,
of our small motions it penalizes no one for anything. Some
the great river would stay down of its provisions will benefit fossil-fuel
and be stroked and not enter us. companies. More than eighty per cent
of its projects are being built in Re-
publican districts—partly because they
—Laura Kolbe have more empty land and looser reg-
ulatory environments. (Conversely,
around the country, feuds have broken
of race and other structural inequities trade, which allows companies to buy out between environmentalists who
with economics,” Rahman told me. and sell emission allowances. The pro- want to push the clean-energy revo-
“Some people say, ‘Just talk about the posal never came to a vote in the Sen- lution forward and environmentalists
economics of it.’ But we were trying ate, and Biden wound up abandoning who are opposed to, say, establishing
to put these economic programs to- these ideas entirely. John Podesta, who’s mines to extract the minerals used in
gether in a way that would actually ad- now responsible for climate policy in electric-vehicle batteries.) The proj-
dress structural inequalities.” the White House, said that any Biden ects have been rolling out slowly. One
Biden’s most dramatic departure proposal “had to be politically viable, reason that the law will cost so much
from past Democratic policy might be and to show a path forward for Amer- more than was estimated when it
on climate change. For decades, in- ican workers. So we flipped the poli- passed is that some of its subsidies
centive systems have been the domi- tics of it—shifted from ‘What do we come in the form of uncapped tax cred-
nant idea for reducing carbon emis- need to shut down?’ to ‘What do we its—anybody below a fairly generous
sions. Leah Stokes, a professor at the need to build?’ ” income ceiling who wants a seventy-
University of California, Santa Bar- The way this played out was deter- five-hundred-dollar tax credit for buy-
bara, who’s also a prominent climate mined in the summer of 2022. The ing an electric vehicle can have one,
activist, said, “It’s wildly unpopular to American Rescue Plan had passed and the credits can’t be applied to
make fossil fuels more expensive. You quickly, though with no Republican cheaper Chinese E.V.s, because of
put up the cost of everything.” The votes, and the infrastructure bill had the Administration’s ethic of “build
Obama Administration’s major cli- followed, but another four trillion dol- American, buy American.” European
mate initiative was based on cap-and- lars in Biden proposals remained. Most allies are upset because the Inflation
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Reduction Act’s tax credits are so pany is applying for an infrastructure gieg and the farmers talked about five-
generous that they are enticing busi- grant that would help it ship products axle versus six-axle trucks, the economic
nesses in their own countries to build from the city’s small port. In Milwau- potential of processed soy meal, and
new factories in the United States. kee, the port got nine million dollars Port Milwaukee’s ability to handle
The White House says that, by the in federal funds to help Wisconsin non-containerized cargo. A couple of
end of this decade, the bill will reduce farmers send their crops through wa- times, Buttigieg tried gently to steer
carbon emissions from 2005 levels by terways to markets around the world. the conversation toward the larger
forty per cent, and that it has created In Kokomo, Indiana, an auto manu- themes of the Biden Administration,
three hundred thousand new jobs across facturer showed off facilities for its specifically climate change and anti-
more than three hundred projects. transition to producing electric vehi- trust efforts. The farmers were polite,
Deese told me that more than five per cles, one of which has been awarded but these issues obviously didn’t reso-
cent of all new investments in the a two-hundred-and-f ifty-million- nate with them at the same level as
United States are now being made in dollar grant from the Department of immediate, practical matters. After the
clean energy, up from about one per Energy. In each of these cases, the breakfast, Buttigieg went to the port
cent in 2018, because of how power- project bundled multiple Biden goals: for a public event, where, in front of
fully the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax clean energy plus working with busi- a pair of enormous corrugated-metal
incentives change the economic cal- ness plus unionization plus rebuilding silos and an “Investing in America”
culus for private companies. the Midwest’s industrial base. sign, flanked by local dignitaries, he
Back in the New Deal days, the Buttigieg—crewcut, trim (he’s a tri- told a small audience about the eight
Democrats were straightforwardly the athlete), dressed in a dark-blue suit, a hundred thousand manufacturing jobs
party of labor, and the Republicans white shirt, and a tie—is very good at that the Administration had created.
were the party of business. That sim- being the Midwestern boy who left Afterward, Buttigieg and I met in
ple division became much more com- and then decided to come home. He’s an empty conference room in the port’s
plicated in the nineties. The Biden Ad- polite, punctual, respectful, and fully office building, and I asked how he
ministration showed its loyalties by briefed, scrubbed of all traces of the explains the long-running industrial
doing a lot for at least some businesses, attitudes that Midwesterners find sus- decline that the Administration is
and for labor, and for all its other major pect in people from the coasts. At each working to reverse. “I think in most
constituencies and hoped-for constit- stop, he found a way to mention his accounts the familiar culprits are glo-
uencies. Whether that approach is sus- local roots and his military service in balization and automation,” he said. “I
tainable, especially with Biden gone, is Afghanistan—but not the Republican- would put it a little differently, though.
another question. zinging appearances that he’s been More than anything, it was an unwill-
making on Fox News. On the south ingness to invest in the kind of indus-
amala Harris hasn’t spent a lot of side of Milwaukee, Buttigieg met a trial policy and the kind of infrastruc-
K time on the campaign trail visit-
ing Biden Administration-funded in-
group of farmers at a restaurant—
mainly beefy guys with beards who,
ture development that made our
original industrial economy possible.”
frastructure projects. That duty falls while they were waiting for him, chat- Brian Deese had made a similar point:
primarily to her former rival in the ted about the upcoming state fair. industrial strategy is a venerable Amer-
2020 Presidential campaign, Pete Butti- ican tradition, going back to the days
gieg. He is the public face of the in- of the Erie Canal, one that was for-
frastructure bill, which got sixty-nine gotten for a few decades, with terrible
votes in the 50–50 Senate, partly be- effects, and is now being revived. As
cause it’s hard for politicians to op- Buttigieg said, Biden’s economic pol-
pose noncontroversial building proj- icies recover “some of the things we
ects in their districts. (By contrast, no were wrong to walk away from, like
Republicans voted for the Inflation industrial policy, support for labor
Reduction Act.) Buttigieg has held unions, support for big investments in
public events at infrastructure sites in shared things like infrastructure.”
all fifty states. I spent the better part Buttigieg walked in at 7:45 A.M. and I asked Buttigieg whether he could
of a week touring the Midwest with shook hands. “Thanks for stayin’ up offer a single rubric that would en-
him, visiting Administration-funded late to see me,” he said. (Farmers wake compass all the Administration’s eco-
projects. up well before dawn.) Then he sat down nomic policies. He said that he’d been
In Menominee, Michigan, we went at a long table and spent an hour hear- thinking about this. “What I landed
to a small, privately owned port on ing from everybody. In the background, on,” he said, “was the idea that we’ll
Lake Michigan that often ships large on a wall-mounted television with the one day come to remember this as the
wind turbines. It got a twenty-one- sound turned off, an ad came on for Big Deal. There’s the New Deal. There’s
million-dollar grant, its first ever from Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin’s more- the Square Deal”—Teddy Roosevelt’s
the federal government, to deepen and popular-than-you’d-expect Democratic name for his domestic programs. “Now
upgrade its shipping channel. In Man- senator, pointing to her role in insti- we’ve got the Big Deal, because in some
itowoc, Wisconsin, a local malt com- tuting price caps for inhalers. Butti- ways its bigness is the defining factor.”
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In infrastructure-building, at least, “the
prior examples were more one mode
at a time. The interstate highway sys-
tem was massive, but that was con-
fined to highways. The transcontinen-
tal railroad was massive, but that was
about one mode: railroads. The Big
Deal is more multimodal.”
That brings us back to the question
of why the world hasn’t thought to call
the Administration’s programs the Big
Deal, or even to consider them a big
deal. In Kokomo, I had another con-
versation with Buttigieg, in an empty
classroom at a community college that
trains people to work in electric-vehi-
cle production, and I asked him about
this. He gave the standard argument
of Administration officials who are
leading the implementation of the new
economic programs: it will take a while
for their political effects to arrive. “We’re not going to just stand here and let you give the boss bad news.”
“Two things I think are going to
happen in terms of political impact,”
Buttigieg said. “They’re totally sepa-
• •
rate and apart from ‘Oh, you did the
bridge, we’re going to support you gap between 2019 and 2022 is really comes but also the care industry and
now.’ I don’t just mean project-level important. I’m not saying that a voter its employees’ unions. All these policies
political impact. The two things I consciously gives the elected official would help Black and Latino families,
would point to are more subtle, but I who engineered that credit twenty years and so might shore up their wobbling
think very powerful. One of them is down the line, but I do think it just loyalty to the Democratic Party.
public trust. If you look—as we often creates a better environment for all of Here’s a specific example of the way
do as Americans on the left and cen- our political processes to play out.” Democrats are hoping things work out
ter left—to the Nordic countries, one politically. On January 23, 2017, the first
of the things you find there is a high f you squint, you can see the outlines full workday of the Trump Adminis-
level of confidence that the system is
fair, partly because they use tax reve-
Icoalition.
of a new post-neoliberal Democratic
Fast-growing clean-energy
tration, Sean McGarvey, the president
of North America’s Building Trades
nue to deliver services that people ap- industries—wind, solar, batteries, hy- Unions—a muscular, heavily male zone
preciate. And so you have a higher drogen, electric vehicles—could join of the labor movement which the Re-
level of social and political trust, be- Hollywood and Silicon Valley in sup- publican Party has been wooing inter-
cause things are delivered. There’s a porting the Democratic Party. Purple- mittently for decades—stood in front
virtuous cycle where, if people see tinted states, such as Georgia and of the White House, at the head of a
something for their tax dollars, they’re Arizona, which are getting lots of clean- platoon of union leaders and members
more likely to be confident that they energy projects (Georgia is in the “bat- in the construction industry, and made
can and should support public things tery belt,” Arizona in the “hydrogen a brief, exuberant public statement:
with their tax dollars.” belt”), could turn bluer. (The Biden “We just had probably the most in-
He went on, “The other is when Administration even has plans to spend credible meeting of our careers with
you reduce inequality, and especially hundreds of millions of dollars reviv- the President, and the Vice-President,
when you reduce inequality across so- ing the steel industry in J. D. Vance’s and the senior staff. . . . The respect
cial lines, like racial wealth gaps, that home town of Middletown, Ohio.) The that the President of the United States
is conducive to a better political envi- Administration’s insistence on union showed us—and when he shows it to
ronment for everybody. Tony Judt, in labor in its building projects could begin us he shows it to three million of our
‘Ill Fares the Land,’ put forward some to reverse the long decline of private- members across the United States—
data showing that, even on the same sector unionization. (The national rate was nothing short of incredible.” Five
average income, the society with more is currently six per cent, down from years later, McGarvey took the po-
inequality will have worse public-health about a third in the fifties.) A more dium at a convention of the build-
outcomes, more violence, you name it. successful push for the policies that ing-trades unions and offered up half
So, for example, the data we’ve seen were part of the American Families an hour of ardent love for the Biden
on the reduction in the racial wealth Plan could bolster not just family in- Administration. I asked McGarvey
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what happened. Trump, McGarvey plain that politics organizes itself quite different from that of other Biden
said, “never did anything he said he around perception, not reality. Here’s officials. If Biden’s actual economic pol-
was going to do. He never did infra- the reality: one party, the G.O.P., icies were the main topic of the cam-
structure. His National Labor Rela- ditched its establishment, embraced a paign, perhaps the outcome of the elec-
tions Board was laden with anti-labor form of economic nationalism and pop- tion would determine their future. Their
ideologues. He never did pensions. ulism, and surprised everybody by win- absence from the election makes their
Pretty much you name it. That first ning a Presidential election. This wasn’t fate more of a mystery.
meeting was all the things he was going just a freak event; versions of the same If Harris wins, will she stay the
to do. And then we had four years of thing happened around the world. In course that Biden has set? Biden hasn’t
a knife fight in a phone booth.” The the United States, the Trump Admin- been articulate enough lately to lay out
Biden Administration, by contrast, had istration, once it was in power, mostly his economic vision, and Harris’s in-
“delivered every possible thing we could pursued not what it ran on but an stinct is to present all her ideas, in-
ever possibly ask for or imagine. There old-fashioned Republican program of cluding economic proposals, in spe-
have been things they did for us that tax cuts and deregulation. Meanwhile, cific, tangible, personal terms. Rohini
we wouldn’t have had the chutzpah to the Democrats began competing for Kosoglu, a former policy director for
ask for.” Partly because of the Admin- the voters Trump had attracted, and, Harris, told me, “Sometimes she tells
istration’s projects, the building-trades after this helped lead to a victory in people who work for her to imagine
unions have added fifty thousand new 2020, they enacted an ambitious pro- going to someone’s wedding and then
members in the past year—their most gram aimed at the economic lives of being invited to their house and see-
significant growth since the fifties. working- and middle-class Americans. ing the wedding album on a table. If
In the view of the designers of And still, outside a limited cadre of ac- you open it, what are you going to be
Bidenomics, this kind of shift would tivists and policymakers, none of this looking for? A picture of yourself at
be just the beginning, because, once is the dominant narrative of American the wedding. The American people
you put into place the idea of the gov- politics. Another complaint that peo- want to know that we see them when
ernment remaking the economy, pol- ple make about politicians is that they we think through our policy.” Harris’s
icy and politics will begin to operate are all talk, no action. With Biden, on earliest economic proposal, a ban on
together in a continuous self-reinforc- these issues, it has been almost the op- price gouging in supermarkets, meets
ing loop. But that’s far closer to being posite: lots of action, very little talk. As the wedding-album test—you can see
a hope than a certainty. Harris’s campaign wore on, she began yourself in the policy—but nobody
Where we are now, near the con- speaking more about economic issues, thinks of it as a major economic re-
clusion of the 2024 campaign, is pro- especially during her visits to Midwest- imagining. Her economic background
foundly strange. People love to com- ern states, but her language has been and Biden’s bear little resemblance. He
comes from a downwardly mobile fam-
ily who had to relocate to the declin-
ing blue-collar city of Scranton, Penn-
sylvania, and who lost everything after
the Second World War. Her parents
were upwardly mobile immigrants, and
her home ground is the booming, in-
novation-celebrating Bay Area. Peo-
ple who work with Biden say that he
has an instinctive mistrust of econo-
mists, especially those from élite uni-
versities. Harris is the daughter of suc-
cessful academics; her father is an
economist who worked for years at an
élite university.
Harris’s career has not centered on
economic issues, as Sanders’s and War-
ren’s have, and she has strong ties to
Silicon Valley, which is skeptical of
Biden’s economic policies, especially
on antitrust, trade, and unions. (Her
brother-in-law Tony West is a senior
executive at Uber, now on leave to work
on the campaign.) Economically ori-
ented Democratic policymakers have
“What’s the German word for ‘feeling of satisfaction derived from been obsessively parsing her every move
catching up to the car that flew past you miles ago’?” for clues about how post-neoliberal

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she will or won’t be. Having become Chinese electric vehicles. (As Butti- to impose new tariffs that would be
the nominee much later than Biden gieg put it in one of our conversations, much larger than the ones he put in
did in 2020, she hasn’t had time to set “There is a legitimate national inter- place when he was President. J. D. Vance
a full policy agenda or to create a cadre est in insuring that these programs has proposed more than doubling the
of future officials for her Administra- create American jobs, even if that in- child tax credit, to five thousand dol-
tion. Gene Sperling has left the White terest is not free of charge.”) Will Har- lars, a move that would cost trillions.
House and joined her campaign full ris keep these tariffs? Will she retain The most vulnerable of the major Biden
time—but Karen Dunn, the lead law- Lina Khan, the bête noire of the Dem- bills is the Inflation Reduction Act, but
yer for Google in one of the Admin- ocratic donor class, at the F.T.C.? Did Trump has stopped short of promis-
istration’s lawsuits against the com- Harris’s one anodyne line about unions ing to repeal it. Its largest provision is
pany, was on the small team that a subsidy for domestically produced
prepared her for her debate with Trump. electric vehicles, and one of Trump’s
Harris frequently says that she wants richest and most vocal supporters is
to create an “opportunity economy,” the leading manufacturer of them, Elon
which isn’t language that post-neolib- Musk. Consistency has never been
erals would use—they’d prefer “shared Trump’s hallmark.
prosperity.” She has ratcheted down a A great deal depends not just on
Biden proposal on capital gains and who is elected President but on whom
corporate taxes, to lower the rates, and that person puts in key economic po-
she has been notably silent on the ac- sitions, and on the results of the House
tivities of regulatory agencies, such as in her first speech—“you should be and Senate elections. A divided Con-
the S.E.C. and the F.T.C., that are in- able to join a union if you choose”— gress and a sense that the country isn’t
tensely unpopular with business. War- signal a loosening of Biden’s intimate immediately in crisis would not make
ren, in an interview on a Boston radio embrace of organized labor? for favorable weather for major
station back in January, declined to say If Trump wins, will he dismantle changes. Still, American politics feels
whether she thought Biden should re- Bidenomics? Maybe not, or not en- very different from the way it did at
nominate Harris as his running mate; tirely. Trillions of dollars’ worth of tax the turn of the millennium—we have
it seems unlikely that Harris would cuts that Trump passed during his Pres- been through the political version of
use Warren as an informal personnel idential term will expire at the end of climate change. In his 1996 State of
director the way that Biden has. On next year. If Trump gets another term, the Union Address, Clinton declared,
the other hand, Harris is obviously he will likely try to extend them, and “The era of big government is over.”
enthusiastic about care-oriented pol- that will constrict what the govern- Inside the daily chaos of politics, there
icies like the child tax credit and paid ment can do. But Biden’s major legis- seems to be a new invisible founda-
family medical leave. She gives no hint lation is designed to be difficult to re- tion: the era of the era of big govern-
of being a limited-government person peal. The money is legally committed, ment being over is over. Both parties
on principle. and there are quiet efforts under way have accepted the premise that the
Harris rarely talks about antitrust, to speed up the slow pace of project government has failed voters without
or industrial policy, or trade, or the launches, and to make project cancel- a college degree, especially in the mid-
larger idea that the government should lations legally difficult, in order to dle of the country, and both are ac-
actively structure the market economy. Trump-proof the Biden program. Be- tively wooing them—partly because
Because these are rather technical is- cause so much of the spending is going they determine the balance of power
sues, she can promise to help the mid- toward the kinds of projects that in American politics. (That’s why
dle class without being very specific. elected officials love, and is in Repub- Trump and Harris chose the running
In the debate, she was vague about her lican-held political territory, and is mates they did.) Both accept that the
economic plans, but she took pains to aimed at the voters Trump claims to wrong to these voters was done
mention that Goldman Sachs, the represent, it’s meant to be difficult for through excessive faith in unfettered
Wharton School, and many promi- Republicans to abandon. markets. That faith isn’t miraculously
nent economists prefer her plans to Also, underneath the bluster, threats, going to reappear as the controlling
Trump’s. That wasn’t a very Biden- and theatrics, Trump is running on an principle of American politics any-
esque message. In Harris’s first major economic program that would have time soon, but that hardly leaves mat-
economic address as the Democratic been unimaginable coming from any ters settled. The parties have radically
nominee, in North Carolina in Au- previous Republican nominee, includ- different ideas—different in substance,
gust, she attacked Trump for levying ing him. He is now officially devoted different in values, different in meth-
tariffs that would “in effect” raise taxes to preserving Obamacare, which he ods, maybe also different in sincer-
on the middle class. This seemed to spent his previous term trying to over- ity—about how to achieve what they
imply that she accepts the standard turn. He has promised not to cut Medi- present as the same goal. The question
view of economists that tariffs are taxes care, to increase Social Security by mak- that will dominate the years to come
and are a bad idea. But Biden has im- ing its benefits tax-free, and to eliminate is whose version of the new, enlarged
posed heavy tariffs on, for example, taxes on tips and overtime pay. He wants role of government will prevail. 
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 47

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 FICTION

From the
Wilderness
Yukio
Mishima

48 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 ILLUSTRATION BY JOANNA BLÉMONT

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O
ne morning in the rainy sea- tical to the rapping at a door in the Pushing past her, I climbed the stairs.
son, I went to bed at 6 a.m. Kabuki theatre—“Open up! Open up!” I intended to get the sword in my study.
after working all night and I could almost see the violence in the As I had finished my work for the
was on the verge of falling asleep when fist, the fury as it rose and fell. day, the study I was picturing was de-
I was startled by the sound of my fa- I sprang out of bed, wrapped my- serted, a quiet place in semidarkness.
ther’s voice coming through the air-con- self in a dressing gown, grabbed my All I needed to do was get my weapon
ditioner next to my bed. kendo sword made of solid oak, and before proceeding to look for the room
Ever since the device was embed- dashed into my wife’s bedroom, next where a window had been broken.
ded in my bedroom wall, my sleep has door. My wife was up. I started to enter the study but halted
been frequently interrupted by the “I saw a face,” she said, as I entered. in the doorway.
noise of construction in the neighbor- At that moment, I wasn’t sure what In the corner behind my desk, I saw
hood or electioneering from a passing she meant. We ran downstairs. The a face suspended in the dimness of the
campaign truck. No matter the sea- housekeeper and the maid were terri- heavily curtained room.
son, the air-conditioner conducts sound fied. It was likely that my mother had I knew where the sword was; with-
from the outside as efficiently as if it already called 110 from her wing, but out taking my eyes off the face, I groped
were a speaker. my wife, thinking that she should call, my way to it, picked it up, and bran-
My parents live on the same prop- ran into the kitchen and turned on the dished it, assuming a fighting stance.
erty as me and my family, in a separate light. In the rainy morning, the house I felt myself calming down.
wing. At their advanced age, they wake was dark. “Please don’t turn the lights The figure standing there was a tall
up early; there are times when they get on, Missus,” the maid objected. “It’s youth, painfully thin, in a cream-colored
up before I’ve gone to bed. maybe safer—” jacket. The face he turned toward me
My father was yelling at someone. My wife dialled 110 but kept get- in the gray light was horribly pale, the
“You there! We’re still sleeping here. ting a busy signal. Meanwhile, the bang- most ghostly face I have ever seen. He
Be quiet.” ing on the kitchen door had stopped. was holding open in his hands a large
There was no response. Eventually, the emergency operator an- green book, a volume of an encyclope-
Only half awake and unaware of swered: “We’re on the way—we’ll be dia. Clearly, he had taken it from a set
the time, I assumed that someone in right there.” on the shelf behind the desk. Curiously
the house had asked a tradesman, a The pounding moved somewhere enough, I was instantly relieved. Is that
carpenter maybe, to do some work, else—we couldn’t tell which door. In all this is? I thought. The usual crazy
and that my father was worried the the stillness of the house, that violent with his wacko literary ideas! If I’m
noise might disturb my sleep. If I was pounding was the only noise. right, I know this character inside and
right about that, it was in fact his words I raced back to the second floor. out. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
of caution that had pulled me back It was the French windows in my “Why are you here?” I asked, the
from the brink of sleep and would have wife’s bedroom that were under at- sword ready in my right hand.
to be deemed the actual annoyance. tack. The curtains were drawn, so I The youth’s ashen face was so tense
There was a brief interval of silence. couldn’t see the person outside. As it looked about to crack and fall apart.
My father’s objection must have been though they had abruptly rebelled in Staring at me impassively, only his eyes
effective. I tried to fall asleep again. the gray light of early morning, the alive with purpose, like those of an an-
His next words were sharper than sturdy windows in one corner of the imal sizing up a meal, he said in a trem-
before. room were creaking and groaning and bling voice, “A book—I’ve come to
“Hey, you! I told you to knock it off!” the lace curtains swayed and the frames borrow a book.”
There was no answer to this, either, strained at their hinges. He seemed to step two paces closer,
and I heard a noise like hammering on I stared at the windows until stand- but it was only his body lurching, his
wood. I was getting angry. Some peo- ing there helplessly began to feel un- chin thrusting forward.
ple are so inconsiderate! I thought. bearable and I went back downstairs. “I want you to tell the truth!” he said
“Hey! If you keep pounding on the In the kitchen, my wife and I dis- more gravely.
door that way, you’ll break it!” my fa- cussed in rapid whispers how to pro- “About what? What do you mean
ther yelled. tect the children. We had to decide on by the truth?”
That was when I realized something the most appropriate rooms, first where The youth was breathing hard,
abnormal was going on. Because I sleep to hide and then where to flee. gasping, yet he repeated himself
during the day, my room has thick cur- Just then, from somewhere in the mechanically.
tains to block the light. In order to read house we heard the icy cascade of “Please tell the truth.”
the clock on my bedside table I had to breaking glass. I didn’t know what he meant, but I
move my face close to the dial: it was “He’s after you,” my wife said. “It’s was at pains to keep my response calm.
nearly seven. safer if I have a look.”Taking the wooden “Of course—I’ll be sure to tell the
Suddenly, I heard a man’s shrill sword from my hand, she turned to go truth about everything,” I said, stalling
scream, and the pounding on the door up the stairs. for time.
became a flailing beyond the realm of “That will leave me empty-handed,” Just then, someone jostled my shoul-
anything normal. The sound was iden- I said. “I’ll get another—” der and a policeman pushed past me
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and entered the room. Two other po- grounds were still locked. It didn’t dawn door, he shouted, “That’s breaking and
licemen followed and they surrounded on her that no one should have been entering! You’ll be in big trouble. You
the youth. standing there inside the gates. As- don’t care about that?”
“Please tell the truth!” he shouted suming it was an early-morning trades- “I don’t care,” the man replied, his
once more, as though delirious with fever. man, she called out through a gap in eyes glinting.
“Come along now,” one of the po- the door, “If you’re looking for Mishima, “What do you want?” my father
licemen said. “Let’s go somewhere quiet turn right and go to the kitchen door called from the entrance to the path.
and talk this over.” at the back.” “I can take a message to Mishima!”
Escorted by two policemen, the The man turned, stared for an in- “I’ve come to meet with Mishima-
youth went unprotestingly. The third stant at where her voice had come from, san about a serious problem.”
police officer took the green encyclo- then dashed out of sight toward the “Fine. I told you I’d take him a
pedia from his hands and left the room back of the property. message.”
with it. I noticed a small bloodstain on That was when my mother real- “A message won’t do. I have to speak
the spine of the book. ized that the gates wouldn’t have been to him in person,” he screamed over
I had foolishly assumed that the open yet. his shoulder and, turning back to the
police were intending to sit the youth On the intercom to my wing of the door, charged it like a bull, pushing
down calmly and encourage him to house, she warned our maid that a sus- and pulling with all his might. I imag-
have a conversation with me. But, as picious person was heading that way ine it was then, sensing a degree of vi-
they approached the kitchen door, one and hurried to wake my father. My fa- olence that exceeded the capacity of a
of the policemen abruptly shoved him ther jumped out of bed, opened the rain normal man, that my father hurried
in the back and tried to force him out- shutters, and stepped into the garden. back to instruct my mother to make
side. The youth put up a struggle, and “Not there! In back!” my mother the call.
in a f lash all three policemen fell shouted. Before long, the man abandoned his
on him in an impressive display of Just then, the intruder’s face came assault on the kitchen door and circled
coördinated action designed to drag distinctly into focus in my mother’s around to the garden in front. From
him out. There was a practiced tech- mind for the first time. She was sure there he called my name.
nique in the way they seized his arms that this was the obsessive youth who My wife, awakened, cracked open
and pressed his shoulders down. Even had appeared two or three times over the French windows in her bedroom
so, the youth continued straining to the past year to request a meeting with and saw a man shouting in the front
look back until it seemed he might me, and had been turned away each garden. It seems likely that the man
twist his neck off. I don’t remember time. If it was indeed him, my mother had also caught a glimpse of her. She
the expression on his face at the time. thought with mild relief, my father could recognized his face, and was startled
But I have a feeling that it didn’t bear be counted on to send him packing with to see the youth she had chased away
looking at directly. a scolding. more than once standing in the gar-
“Mishima-san, Mishima-san . . .” But, when my father suddenly re- den so early in the morning. Stepping
It seemed to take forever for his appeared at the kitchen entrance and back, she locked the window. That was
cries to recede to a distance beyond my shouted, “Call 110!,” she grasped the when she said to me, as I appeared in
hearing. gravity of the situation and rushed to her room with my sword in hand, “I
the phone. Someone picked up at once saw a face.”
he foregoing is everything I saw While we were conferring down-
T of the incident with my own eyes.
Following is an attempt to place my
stairs, the man had grabbed the eaves
of the roof and hoisted himself up to
account into context after hearing from the outer wall on the second floor, and
my parents and my wife. was banging on the French windows
The first person to lay eyes on the where my wife had appeared just a min-
intruder, having woken up in her wing ute ago. When he couldn’t open them,
a little earlier than usual because she he had moved along the ledge to the
planned to go out, was my mother. window of my bedroom. Breaking the
Normally, she went into her kitchen as window with his fist and inserting his
soon as she woke up, and her rattling and commenced a long interrogation arm, he had released the latch and then
around summoned the maid from her that kept her on the line: Address? Di- dashed from room to room until he
bed, but this morning she happened to rections? Nearby landmarks? Keys? reached my study, where he had taken
notice groggily a shadow flickering by Current situation? And so on. down a volume of the encyclopedia be-
the small window in the kitchen door. Meanwhile, my father had gone hind my desk and was perusing it.
She approached and squinted around to the back from the garden, I saw later that he had chosen Vol-
through the peephole. A man was tug- and I was awakened by his shouting ume IX, from kun to kenchi. What was
ging on the door to the shed. from the entrance to the path that led he trying to look up? Or was Volume
Not fully awake, my mother forgot to my kitchen door. Perceiving that the IX a random selection? Then again,
that the front and rear gates to the battering was about to break open the having taken leave of his senses, was
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he even aware that the volume he had
chosen was part of an encyclopedia?
Still engaged on the phone in an
endless dialogue with the emergency
operator, my mother heard the sound
of glass breaking in my bedroom.
“Oh, my God! I heard a window
breaking—he must’ve come inside!”
she shouted. “Please help us right away!”
At this, the operator at the other end
of the line finally disconnected.
The long, frustrating phone call had
tired my mother out. A patrol car might
take forever to arrive, but surely the po-
lice at the local station had been noti-
fied and would be arriving any minute.
Too impatient to get dressed, my
mother opened an umbrella and left
the house in her nightclothes. It was
drizzling. Turning right at the corner,
she climbed the gentle hill to the apart-
ment building at the top, where she
encountered an old patrolman from
the local police box whom she recog-
nized. He ambled toward her, twirling
his nightstick, but when my mother
shouted that there was an emergency
he broke into a run. My mother ran
after him back to the house.
By that time, a patrol car had ar-
rived with two policemen.
At home, my wife was about to fol-
low me up to the second floor when
she was stopped by a knock at the “ Yes, I suppose that within the narrow scope of nocturnal
kitchen door. The knock was repeated rodent behavior I am indeed very wise.”
more loudly, and a voice shouted, “Let
me in!” Failing, in the confusion of the
moment, to recognize my father’s voice,
• •
my wife thought the man had gone
back outside. A minute later, she real- long enough for the sun to rise higher termined that he was not mentally
ized her mistake and opened the door. in the sky: daylight oozed across the sound enough to take responsibility,
The three policemen entered with my frosted glass in the door like a break- a psychiatric facility should be ex-
father. They took off their raincoats ing egg yolk and brightened the inter- pected to provide treatment that would
and politely removed their shoes. rogation room. insure that he was no longer a danger
“Please don’t bother with your I was recovering my sense of my- to society.
shoes,” my wife urged, but the shoes self as an aggrieved citizen; it helped We had completed our statements
were removed and neatly arranged just that I knew one of the policemen from and were relaxing in the office when
inside the door. Then the three police- kendo. Identifying the perpetrator’s a lone detective brought the perpetra-
men climbed the stairs to the study actions as an actual crime and demon- tor in to be identified. He was wear-
with my father and my wife. strating that they constituted a so- ing a spotless cream-colored jacket; his
Judging by this, I don’t believe that called “incident” obliged the police to face was no longer pallid; and the hand
my confrontation with the youth could scale a mountain of paperwork. I was he had used to break the window had
have lasted more than a minute. fine with that. I wasn’t moved to pity; been treated and was wrapped in a
nor did I wish for the court to be le- bandage. As he was paraded through
y father and I went to the police nient. Never mind me—the culprit the room, past policemen sitting or
M station thirty, maybe forty min-
utes later. A patrol car came for us.
had threatened my family’s right as
citizens to peace and quiet. He de-
standing at their desks, he appeared
entirely untroubled, even proud, and,
Our statements were taken in sep- served the prescribed punishment for when our eyes met, the glimmer of
arate rooms. That took nearly two hours, what he had done; and, if it was de- poignant beseeching I had seen before
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had disappeared: all I saw now was ing to blackmail me for a trumped-up forcing his way into my home and was
someone else’s face. indiscretion. Not that a blackmailer is clearly a criminal, he didn’t make me
After the youth was led out, my a madman; he has enough knowledge feel that I had to subdue him.
father asked why he was wearing a red of the law to skirt the parameters of I wouldn’t like this to be interpreted
armband. legal extortion while sneaking up on a as pity or some other humanistic im-
A detective who appeared to be a person cunningly through the back pulse. Nor does it have to do with my
black belt, his neck buried in his shoul- door of his psyche. People like that fill self-esteem, or, beyond that, my van-
der muscles, replied, “Times are, we get me with violent hostility and even ha- ity, being gratified by the act of a mad-
so many suspects with refined faces tred. I feel that even the briefest con- man who not only means me no harm
that we can’t tell them from honest tact with the meanness of their inten- but has deluded himself into thinking
folks. We put an armband on him so tions fouls me physically. The day the of me as a paragon of virtue, is deter-
he’d stand out.” blackmailer appeared, it was as though mined to meet me despite repeated
evil had permeated my skin like the rejection, and ends up breaking the
eturning to the house, I napped smell of garlic and clung to me no mat- law. I am not so starved for popular-
R for an hour or two. I had an ap-
pointment that afternoon and needed
ter how hard I tried to scrub it away.
But this time was different. That
ity that I must welcome adulation from
a psychopath.
whatever sleep I could get. pallid face hadn’t smelled of evil in the No, I was feeling something differ-
I woke up to dazzling summer sun- least. Accordingly, it had aroused no ent. On that morning in the rainy sea-
light in the street outside; the dark, hint of hostility or combativeness in son, when I saw the preternaturally
misty morning of drizzle had become me. Confronting in my study that odd, pale face of that youth trembling in the
a distant phantom. But that unearthly fragile intruder with an open encyclo- dimness of my study, where no one but
pale face floating in the dimness of my pedia in his trembling hands, I’d had I should have been, I had the feeling
study stayed with me the whole day. no desire to attack with my kendo that I was looking at my own shadow.
Come to think of it, since I became sword. Naturally, if he had come at me Not that I had ever been a madman.
a novelist I’ve been troubled by strange I would have defended myself, I might I had never sought a meeting, with-
visitors like this one more than once. even have aimed a blow at his forearm, out an introduction, with an author I
One time, someone showed up intend- but although he had broken the law by admired, not even in my early twen-
ties, when I was infected with literary
fever. And I certainly hadn’t broken a
window to gain entrance to an author’s
house because he had declined to meet
me and pulled from a shelf in his study
an encyclopedia, of all things. I can
safely say that it never occurred to me
to do anything even remotely like that.
In general, I’ve never had the experi-
ence of obsessing over someone else.
I have never once felt close to the
world of madness; nor have I made any
effort to understand it. Until now, an
incident or a psyche has interested me
only if it embodied a logical consistency
similar to the order imposed by a work
of art; what I love about fictional char-
acters who are haunted is that, to me,
logical consistency and the state of being
possessed are interchangeable. Logical
consistency has the capacity to become
infinitely unrealistic yet remains far re-
moved from madness.
I will say that there are times when
I can’t help feeling that writing novels
and putting them out in the world for
sale is an immoderately odd and dan-
gerous profession. What is it that I ra-
diate through the medium of language?
There is something about an artist that
resembles a liquor salesman. His prod-
uct must contain alcohol; selling a bev-

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erage without alcohol would amount provided a portion of it. There must to work, the solvent on the mimeo-
to desecrating his own profession. In a have been various mornings, various graph machine smells like the end of
word, he sells drunkenness. A normal middays, various nights. Loneliness the world.
person knows he’s buying alcohol, en- had coated the inside of his cabinets When he opens his desk drawer,
joys a night of intoxication, and regains like mold and thrived in the weave loneliness stares out at him. And I am
his senses when he sobers up. But there of his tatami. And I was there in all always there, too.
are other possibilities. Unaware that he those places. Where did my young man come
is buying alcohol, a man consumes what I have always felt a certain repug- from? Naturally, the police didn’t tell
he supposes is a nourishing drink and nance for excessively lonely people and me his address. But gradually I began
becomes blind drunk. Or again: a man am inclined to avoid them, but my to sense that I knew the answer. He
who isn’t normal to begin with buys soul, conveyed by my writing, contin- came from inside me. From the world
the drink, and the standard amount of of my ideas.
alcohol in it produces in him a terrify- I feel certain that my young man is
ing result beyond imagining. . . . my shadow and my echo, but I am not
In any event, the police didn’t talk the simple black and white he imag-
much about the youth. All I overheard ined. A novelist’s being is expansive:
was that he had moved a considerable If there are airports, there are also bus
distance away from his parents and was terminals. Surrounding the central sta-
working at a newspaper, leading a lonely tion, roads extend in all directions—
life in Tokyo. to business districts and shopping malls,
No surprise! While his variety of tree-lined boulevards and residential
madness may have had a genetic com- ues night and day to frequent just those areas, suburban train stations and hous-
ponent, it was clear to me from my first people. If possible, I would choose to ing projects, baseball fields and the-
glimpse of him that it was fed by lone- live among a bright and lively crowd, atres. I have memorized every side street
liness. Although the same madness can people who love to joke; yet it seems and back alley in the farthest corner
present in a variety of ways, it was also that a second self, an “I” unknown to of my being; a detailed map is care-
clear that my writing was somehow an me, is making his lugubrious rounds, fully folded and ready to use.
accessory to his particular illness. If I like a welfare officer in a shabby suit, But there is a large area, which I
hadn’t been a novelist, there’s no way from house to lonesome house. have continually disregarded, that re-
he would have run wild with delusions In those dwellings, loneliness is rag- mains uncharted. I’ve lived my life ig-
garnered from my work and gone so ing. That youth’s pale face was swollen noring it, careful to avert my eyes, but
far as to attack me. with the bacteria of loneliness. The there is no denying its existence.
Reading a novel is a lonely enter- smallest gesture or slip of the tongue I’m speaking of the vast wilderness
prise, and so is writing one. Through is all it takes for a person like that to surrounding the metropolis of my
the printed word, our loneliness pen- be despised; and over time, before he being. Unmistakably, it’s a part of me,
etrates the loneliness of others we have knows it, as a carrier of loneliness that but it is an unexplored, barren area
never met. I have never once been pres- could spread to others, he will be iso- that doesn’t appear on my map. It is a
ent to witness that bizarre infiltration. lated. (In the past, I myself have been region of desolation as far as the eye
Nor is there any chance that I shall not unfamiliar with such loneliness.) can see, no verdant trees or flowering
witness it in the future. But thanks to For now, with a certain degree of plants, only a biting wind that dusts
this intruder, thanks to his madness, I affection and a certain degree of con- the surface of jutting rocks with sand
feel as if, in his bloodless face, I actu- tempt, I think I’ll call the intruder “my and then blows it away. Though I know
ally beheld the face of “the reader,” young man.” the location of this wilderness, I’ve
which an author is meant never to see. My young man wakes up in the managed so far to stay away; still, I
(To be sure, what he was reading at the morning and probably brushes his know somehow that I was there once
time was merely an encyclopedia.) teeth. When he chokes on the tooth and that someday I will have to make
There is little room for doubt that powder, his mouth is already filled with the journey again.
I had unwittingly been supporting the the ashes of loneliness. (I’m not unfa- Clearly, my young man came from
loneliness that was the root of his mad- miliar with this, either.) He prepares that wilderness.
ness. To guarantee another’s loneliness miso-shiru and it boils over and leaves I’m not sure what he had in mind
in that way is discomforting, but there a burned smell on the stove. By that when he demanded the truth from
it is: there is something that creeps out- time, the smell of loneliness is already me, but I have complied. I have told
ward from a writer’s work like a vine, in his nostrils. the truth. 
and that sinuous extension had doubt- The toilet, the jammed commuter —1966
less wrapped itself around his loneli- train, the garbage can, all replete with (Translated, from the Japanese,
ness and protected it. loneliness. If he buys cigarettes, they by John Nathan.)
I didn’t know how much fertilizer are invariably damp and hard to light;
would be needed to grow so much if he bets on the horses, his tickets NEWYORKER.COM/FICTION
loneliness, but I felt certain that I had end up in the trash. When he goes in Sign up to get author interviews in your in-box.

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 THE CRITICS

BOOKS

EACH MORTAL THING

What other creatures understand about death.

BY KATHRYN SCHULZ

T
he Virginia opossum, accord- to begin its Oscar-worthy performance, new. Monsó traces its origins to 2008,
ing to John Smith—that ex- does it know that it is in mortal dan- when sixteen chimpanzees at a rescue
plorer of all things Virginia— ger? Does the implacable fact of death center in Cameroon huddled together
“hath a head like a Swine, & a taile like have any purchase whatsoever on its and watched, in utter, un-chimplike si-
a Rat, and is of the Bignes of a Cat.” possum-y heart? And if it does not— lence, as a deceased member of their
Had Smith looked closer, he might which seems likely, given its unusually cohort was wheeled away. A photo-
have discovered that it also has oppos- small brain—what of all the other crea- graph of the scene, published in Na-
able thumbs, fifty teeth (more than any tures that feign death: frogs, snakes, tional Geographic the following year,
other land mammal except the equally spiders, sharks, swifts? And what of all triggered an explosion of sympathy and
improbable giant armadillo), and, if fe- the other creatures in general? The oc- curiosity, both among the general pub-
male, thirteen nipples, which are ar- topus, the elephant, the great horned lic and among scientists, psychologists,
ranged like a clockface, with twelve in owl, the house cat, the giant tortoise, and philosophers who were interested
a circle and one in the middle. These the chimpanzee: who, in all the vast in ascertaining what exactly those seem-
nipples are concealed inside a pouch animal kingdom, joins us in having in- ingly bereft chimps were feeling.
on its belly, because the Virginia opos- timations of mortality? That photo also captured, acciden-
sum is a marsupial, the only one native That is the animating question of tally, one of the fundamental difficul-
to North America. “Playing Possum: How Animals Un- ties with studying what animals under-
All this is strange, but none of it is derstand Death” (Princeton), a new stand about death: you have to be there
as strange as the behavior for which this book by the Spanish writer Susana to watch them. In theory, you could
possum is most famous: playing pos- Monsó. She is not a biologist or a zo- conduct all kinds of experiments to help
sum. Contrary to what you might imag- ologist; she is a philosopher, with a par- gauge their comprehension, but only if
ine, that does not simply entail curling ticular interest in the nature of animal your curiosity is considerably stronger
up and holding still. A possum that is minds. And yet, though “Playing Pos- than your moral compass. You could,
playing possum keels over to one side, sum” parses with sometimes excruciat- for instance, present various creatures
its tongue hanging out, its eyes open ing precision the possible inner states with decapitated animals that have been
and unblinking. Saliva drips from its of an entire menagerie of creatures, it stuffed and rigged to move around; you
mouth while its other end leaks urine is our own intellectual and emotional could use hidden speakers to expose
and feces, together with a putrescent condition that haunts its pages. How mothers to prerecorded audio of their
green goop. Its body temperature and much, the book implicitly asks, can any dead babies.
heart rate drop, its breathing becomes living being, human or otherwise, truly Both experiments have been pro-
almost imperceptible, and its tongue grasp about what it means to die? posed, although mercifully not per-
turns blue. If, in a fit of sadism or sci- formed, overt cruelty and gruesome-
entific experimentation, you cut off its he field into which Monsó has ness having mostly faded from favor in
tail while it is in this state, it will not so
much as flinch.
T ventured in “Playing Possum” is
known as comparative thanatology—
academic circles. But that leaves com-
parative thanatology largely reliant on
Idiomatically, “playing possum” the study of how different species re- anecdotal evidence—incidents like that
means “pretending to be dead,” but what spond to death. This question is not of the chimps in Cameroon, witnessed
ABOVE: PIERRE BUTTIN

exactly playing possum means to a pos- new: “Who can say,” Charles Darwin by chance and recorded with varying
sum is considerably harder to say. Does mused, in “The Descent of Man,” “what degrees of accuracy and acuity. Partly
the possum have any idea what it means cows feel, when they surround and stare as a result of this, and partly because of
to be dead (to say nothing of what it intently on a dying or dead compan- its emotionally potent subject matter,
means to pretend)? When it is moved ion.” The discipline, however, is very the field is extremely susceptible to
54 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024

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How much can any living being, human or otherwise, truly grasp about what it means to die?
ILLUSTRATION BY JASON HOLLEY THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 55

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unwarranted anthropomorphic inter- something), universality (all living things five days later. The morning of its death,
pretations. Monsó’s goal is to clear this must die), personal mortality (that in- Evalyne refused to eat, instead staying
haze of subjectivity from the discipline, cludes us), and unpredictability (al- in her enclosure and screaming; after
using the foremost tool of philosophy: though we know we will die, we can’t that, she carried the infant’s body ev-
logical rigor. To establish whether an- know exactly when). And that’s before erywhere, grooming it, licking it, and
imals have any concept of death, she you get to beliefs about the afterlife and at one point putting her fingers in its
says, we must begin by establishing ex- expressions of grief and mourning: wear- mouth as if to stimulate the suckling
actly what a “concept of death” means. ing crêpe, reciting the Kaddish, writing reflex. For seventeen days, she never
Consider, for instance, the behavior “Hamlet.” The fact that we have such even set it down.
of your average ant. If an ant is trapped an elaborate concept of death has some- Evalyne’s behavior is not altogether
in sand, its fellow-ants will attempt to uncommon in the animal kingdom.
save its life, pulling on its limbs and dig- Many primates, including male ones,
ging away at the sand to try to free it. have been observed carrying dead ba-
And if an ant dies inside its colony, other bies, albeit typically for only a few hours
ants, acting like tiny insect undertakers, or days. So have several cetaceans—
will swiftly remove the body, often tak- most famously, an orca known as Tah-
ing it to a designated location outside lequah, who, without the primate’s ad-
the nest. At first, those behaviors seem vantage of hands, carried her deceased
to suggest that ants understand death, infant on her back continuously for
since they react appropriately to both weeks, across more than a thousand
its imminence and its actuality. But in times been used to argue that other an- miles of the Salish Sea. Occasionally,
reality the ants are only responding to imals can’t possibly have one at all, be- such behavior is spotted in other spe-
certain chemicals—in the first case, one cause to do so would require, say, the cies as well; in 2008, in Queensland,
that serves as a kind of distress call, and, ability to comprehend annihilation. But Australia, a dingo was observed carry-
in the second, ones emitted by a carcass. that’s nonsense, Monsó insists. The ing her deceased pup from place to place
If you take a live ant and dab those car- question isn’t whether animals have any- for four days while tending to its sur-
cass chemicals on it, as E. O. Wilson thing like a human concept of death; it viving littermates.
did in the nineteen-fifties, other ants is whether they have any concept of It is almost impossible to read such
will treat it as dead and promptly carry death at all. accounts and not feel that these ani-
it out of the colony, even if the alleged mals understand what happened to their
corpse is waving its antennae, resisting word of warning: you should not babies and are profoundly bereft. But
its would-be pallbearers, and otherwise
displaying every possible sign of life.
A pick up “Playing Possum” expect-
ing a series of heartwarming tales
Monsó counsels caution. When pri-
mates carry around their dead babies,
The ants, in other words, have no demonstrating the existence of a love she tells us, they often do so not ten-
concept of death; their reaction to it is stronger than death between animals. derly but carelessly, in their mouths or
governed solely by instinct. We can rec- If that’s the book you want, it was pub- dangling from one hand, letting the
ognize such reactions, Monsó explains, lished back in 2013: “How Animals body bang into rocks and trees while
because they are automatic, provoked Grieve,” by the anthropologist Barbara J. they engage in all their ordinary activ-
by specific stimuli, and entirely predict- King. King makes no claims about ities, including mating. As for Evalyne,
able: each individual ant will always whether animals comprehend death, nineteen days after her baby died, she
react the same way when confronted but she does assert that they feel grief— began to eat it. When the corpse started
with death, and every ant will exhibit because they care about and bond to to fall apart, she would gnaw on one
the same behavior as its peers. By con- one another, “because of a heart’s cer- scrap of it for a while before discard-
trast, animals with a concept of death tainty that another’s presence is as nec- ing it in favor of another.
will react to it in ways that are learned essary as air.” In support of this hypoth- This is not the only story in Monsó’s
rather than instinctive, not rigidly re- esis, she offers touching accounts of book which takes place at the intersec-
sponsive to specific stimuli, and highly responses to death in every corner of tion of love, death, and dinner. We also
variable: the same individual will react the animal kingdom, from the big- read about a dog that, following the
differently to different deaths, and dif- brained megafauna (primates, elephants, suicide of its owner, proceeded to eat
ferent individuals will react differently whales) to the domesticated crowd- the dead man’s face, even though the
to the same death. pleasers (cats, dogs, horses) to the com- man was found less than an hour after
We should recognize our own spe- pletely surprising (chickens). death and the dog had plenty of food
cies in that sentence. Adult human be- Monsó serves up stories like these, left in its bowl. This probably strikes
ings—even the callous, tone-deaf, emo- too, but far more sparsely, and with far you as an appalling violation of a rela-
tionally immature ones—demonstrate more scrutiny—and the longer she scru- tionship we typically imagine to be
an understanding of death that is re- tinizes the more complicated they seem. based on love and trust, but it is not
markable in its sophistication. It incor- Back in 2017, for instance, a female exceptional. Good data are hard to come
porates a grasp of, among other things, Tonkean macaque known as Evalyne by, but estimates suggest that almost a
causality (every death is precipitated by gave birth to her first baby, which died quarter of pet owners who die alone
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will be partly consumed by their erst- down version, death entails the perma- this test, since they take for dead a stinky
while animal companions. nent cessation of functions associated but fully functional fellow-ant. Rats
Taken together, such anecdotes illu- with life. Tucked inside that definition fare better, in an interesting way: they,
minate the limits of what you might are the two ideas she believes an ani- too, will remove the body of a living
call our intuitive thanatology. On hear- mal must grasp in order to have any rat that is dabbed with eau de decay—
ing that a fellow-primate won’t let go concept of death: irreversibility and but, as Monsó observes, only if that rat
of her dead baby, we ascribe to it ma- non-functionality. is also anesthetized. That means rats
ternal tenderness and piercing grief; on This schema lends some precision understand something ants do not,
hearing that a dog ate its late owner, to a subject that is often story-driven which is that normal motion is incom-
we ascribe to it blind appetite and brute and sentimental, and it leads to some patible with being dead.
indifference. But neither inference is fascinating discussions. On the mat- Do rats also understand irreversibil-
necessarily correct. The primate’s be- ter of non-functionality, for instance, ity? The conventional wisdom says no,
havior could instead suggest a failure Monsó begins by pointing out that on the ground that understanding ir-
to grasp the fact that the baby has animals don’t need to understand that reversibility requires engaging in so-
died; far from being inconsolable, every function ceases at the moment phisticated reasoning about the future,
maybe the animal in question is just of death, only that certain salient func- a capacity that is likely beyond many
oblivious. More persuasively, maybe it tions do. Even humans, after all, don’t nonhuman animals. But does the raven
is optimistic, since baby-carrying agree on what exactly stops working really need to understand “nevermore”
seems to occur only in so-called K- when we die. Maybe you believe that to understand death? Monsó doesn’t
strategists—creatures, including pri- your late grandmother is watching think so. Knowing that a dead creature
mates and cetaceans, that invest enor- over you in Heaven, and your brother won’t come back to life, she argues, re-
mous amounts of time and resources believes that she is moldering away quires nothing more than being able
into a small number of offspring. For in her grave—but surely he does not to reclassify an animate entity as an in-
such creatures, it might make sense, no believe that you lack a workable con- animate one—categories that are rec-
matter how lifeless a baby appears, to cept of death simply because you re- ognized across great swaths of the an-
hold out for the possibility that it will gard fewer of her functions as having imal kingdom.
somehow revive. terminated. Whether or not Monsó is right that
As for the dog: before you give yours Similarly, for an animal to under- animals use this kind of category-
away, consider this. Wild dogs that en- stand non-functionality, it need not swapping to understand irreversibility,
counter a carcass generally begin con- understand the whole spectrum of ca- the evidence that some do understand
suming it at the nutrient-rich abdo- pacities that terminate with death, only it is on her side. In 2018, for example,
men, then move on to the limbs; ninety those it regards as characteristic of liv- a chimpanzee in Uganda gave birth
per cent of the time, according to ing beings. Our friends the ants fail to an albino baby, a vanishingly rare
Monsó, they never even bite the face.
By contrast, pet dogs go for the face al-
most three-quarters of the time, only
rarely biting the abdomen. Monsó con-
cludes from this that they don’t set out
to eat their deceased owners but, rather,
to get them to react, and that they focus
on the face because they have always
done so previously, studying it to as-
certain their owners’ meaning and mood.
The moral, Monsó says, is that sim-
ply observing an animal’s reaction to
death cannot, on its own, tell us any-
thing about what that animal is think-
ing or feeling. The chimp could be clue-
less and content; the dog could be wild
with grief. But, if the stories themselves
don’t make this plain, how can we go
about determining what, if anything, a
given animal knows about death?

o answer that question, Monsó

T proposes a bare-bones definition
of death, the absolute minimum an an-
imal must understand about it in order
to understand it at all. In that stripped-

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 predators face such long odds, they are
highly attuned to any potential vulner-
abilities in their prey. A study of Alas-
kan wolves, for instance, found that
they struggle to catch healthy caribou,
even young ones, often choosing in-
stead to hunt animals that display signs
of sickness or injury—or, in Monsó’s
terms, signs of impaired functionality,
which the wolf might successfully turn
into the irreversible non-functionality
it needs in order to eat.
The pressures on predators, in other
words, make them excellent candidates
for possessing a concept of death. Con-
sider, again, that possum who is play-
ing possum. Monsó points out that
this state is biologically distinct from
another condition with which it is
often confused: tonic immobility, a
“I kinda thought the subtitles would be more helpful.” kind of freeze-in-place reaction com-
mon to many animals facing a threat
from which there is no obvious escape.
• • Tonic immobility is extremely useful,
both because it can effectively camou-
occurrence in the species. Although sessing a concept of death requires pos- flage an animal, since motion is eas-
chimps typically react to newborns with sessing a concept of life). ier to detect than stillness, and because
the doting excitement of Italian grand- Still, “Playing Possum” represents a some animals lose interest in prey that
parents, the albino one provoked ter- major contribution to comparative doesn’t move. But if temporary paral-
ror; its fellow-chimps shrieked the way thanatology. The field, throughout its ysis would suffice, Monsó asks, why
they do in response to mortal danger, brief history, has mostly focussed on does the possum bother with its far
until the group’s alpha male snatched apparent instances of intraspecies ten- more elaborate display?
the baby from its mother and, aided by derness, care, and distress in the face The usual answer is that playing
others, killed it. The moment the baby of death. Monsó, usefully breaking with possum induces disgust in a would-be
died, the attitude of the chimps utterly that tradition, pays sustained attention predator. But nature provides many far
changed, from panic to curiosity. They to violence and predation, in both intra- simpler ways to do that, as you know
sniffed the corpse, inspected it, and and interspecies relations. Death, she if you’ve ever smelled a skunk; in fact,
stroked its fur, evincing perfect confi- reminds us, is everywhere in nature, possums themselves sometimes forgo
dence that the object of their terror from wildly high rates of intraspecies the whole death drama and simply ex-
would not come back to life. infanticide—the cause of death of some crete that putrid green goo to ward off
Monsó’s focus on defining a con- twenty per cent of hyenas and up to an unwelcome animal. What, then, is
cept of death helps render stories like sixty per cent of chimps—to the red- the point of all the rest—the reduced
this not just interesting but meaning- in-tooth-and-claw character of the car- heart rate, the low body temperature,
ful, by clarifying what we can infer nivore’s every meal. the blue tongue? The point, Monsó
from them—in this case, that chimps For predators, who must constantly writes, is that the possum is not “try-
understand irreversibility. But though act as agents of death in order to sur- ing to appear disgusting, but to appear
her approach is often productive, it can vive, each kill is a chance to learn more dead ”: recognizably, incontrovertibly,
also be frustrating. Monsó, in her de- about death—but so is each failure. irreversibly dead. And the only reason
sire “to take nothing for granted, to One of the clear, if tangential, take- it would do that, she argues, is if one
question every assumption,” can leave aways from Monsó’s book is that pre- or more of its traditional predators un-
us feeling as though we’re constantly dation is a very tough business. If you’re derstood death. In other words, such
putting off the big questions rather ever in a position to bet on a contest an understanding not only exists in
than delving deeper into them, and she between a red-tailed hawk and a gray nature but has shaped it: because some
does not always take care to distin- squirrel, back the squirrel; by one count, animals can recognize death, others
guish straw men (such as the claim it will get away nine times out of ten. have evolved to mimic it, by way of
that animals don’t have minds, a view Likewise, your tender heart might side thanatosis. That is an elegant and
that has few if any credible proponents with the antelope, but the lion is the interesting argument, and one with
today) from serious and substantive underdog in that competition, losing far-reaching implications. Because
disagreement (such as whether pos- the vast majority of the time. Because thanatosis occurs across so many dra-
58 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024

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matically different species, Monsó con- The same may well be true of a ca- and that chimps display “mouth-to-
cludes, the concept of death must be pacity for grief, although Monsó, with mouth contact” rather than kiss. Maybe
widespread in the animal kingdom. her instinct for caution, treads more animals just like each other; maybe they
lightly here. She is right not to con- just grieve. Maybe the focus on behav-
ur traditional reluctance to grant flate the two qualities, since it is per- ior misses the undercurrent of emo-
O this possibility is part of a long-
standing if increasingly untenable com-
fectly possible to recognize death with-
out feeling grief (as we humans do
tions that makes all the behavior mean-
ingful, as our own emotions do.
mitment to human exceptionalism: the when, say, reading the obituary section There are, I suppose, practical rea-
idea that we are unique among species of the newspaper), just as it is perfectly sons that we hesitate to grant so po-
because we possess countless traits possible to feel grief in the absence of tent an emotion as grief to animals. To
found in no other creatures. Like lan- death (as when your cherished dog begin with, doing so would oblige us
guage, tool use, altruism, and numer- runs away or the love of your life an- to reckon with how routinely and bru-
acy, a grasp of mortality was long cor- nounces that she is leaving you). And tally we humans expose them to peril
doned off as the special, if difficult, Monsó is also right to point out that and slaughter, including from the
birthright of human beings. “An ani- comparative thanatology has been spread of roads and the loss of habi-
mal will never know what it is to die,” skewed by searching for evidence of tat, to say nothing of industrial food
Rousseau wrote, “and knowledge of grief, that quintessential human reac- production. But behind that lurk other,
death and its terrors is one of the first tion to death, rather than focussing on more shadowy motivations. For many
acquisitions which man made in mov- all the other ways an understanding of of us, our first exposure to death in-
ing away from his animal condition.” death might manifest in the animal volved an animal: the firef ly in the
That claim is wrongheaded in two kingdom. (Thus the field’s relative Mason jar, the bird beneath the win-
directions, limiting our understanding indifference to the concept of death dow, the deer beside the highway, the
not only of other animals but also of among predators.) beloved cat gone gaunt with age, curled
ourselves. One of our many reactions Still, it is impossible to read “Play- up stiff below the basement stairs. We
to death, for instance, is the awareness ing Possum” without returning again ameliorate our sorrow at these deaths,
that dead bodies present a threat to and again to the question of sorrow and at all death, by imagining that it
our well-being, both as signs that dan- and mourning. In its pages, an elephant is different for animals: that there is
ger might still linger in the area and keeps coming back to the place where some better, wiser way to die; that if
as sources of pathogens. Accordingly, its closest companion died, like a widow we lived closer to the bone of things,
like ants and rats, we are unconsciously making a weekly trip to her husband’s we would neither fear the end of life
sensitive to necromones: chemicals grave. A dying dolphin is supported nor grieve it.
emitted by corpses, which activate our by its pod, which forms a raft to hold Thus our strange relationship to
fight-or-flight mechanisms. And that it up and help it breathe. Two chim- animals and death—we aren’t sure
is only one way our response to death panzees who were not particularly fond whether they understand it, and if they
is likely continuous with that of other of each other grow close after both of do not we aren’t sure whether that
creatures. Anyone who has ever been them suffer the death of their babies. makes them lesser than us or luckier.
in mortal danger or in the grips of pri- A healthy young chimp loses first his This is a problem as old as Eden: we
mal grief will recognize the error of long to be distinct from the rest of na-
Rousseau’s claim that knowledge of ture, and we long to be more fully part
death and its terrors moves us away of it. And, of course, when it comes to
from the animal condition. understanding death, we are distinct.
As for limiting our understanding No dolphin will ever perform an au-
of other animals: sometimes seeing an- topsy, no dingo will read Heidegger,
other creature for what it is requires no macaque will write a requiem for
rather than forbids seeing ourselves in piano and violin. But who’s to say that
it. Although Monsó is appropriately they don’t know things about death
critical of anthropomorphism, she is that we do not? However sophisticated
equally troubled by the opposite impulse. mother and then his interest in life, re- our own concept of death may be, after
We impoverish our sense of our fellow- fusing to eat and eventually dragging all, it is necessarily, self-evidently in-
creatures, she writes, not only when we himself off to the place where he last complete. If you are devout, death is
attribute to them human qualities that saw her body, and dying there, too. part of God’s plan, but what could be
they lack but also when we refuse to At some point, the effort to find al- more mysterious than that? If you
attribute to them human qualities that ternative explanations for such behav- believe instead that death amounts to
they possess—or, more precisely, qual- iors comes to feel not conscientious but the annihilation of consciousness, what
ities that do not deserve the modifier simply contortionist. The late prima- could be harder for the mind to fully
“human” in the first place, because they tologist Frans de Waal once criticized fathom than its own nonexistence? For
are not uniquely our own. For many the kind of hedged scientific language us, then, as for all species, some part
species, she argues, the ability to under- that insists animals have “favorite af- of death will always remain the way it
stand death is one such characteristic. filiation partners” rather than friends so often feels: unthinkable. 
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 nobody’s ever heard of ”—as one of
BOOKS his champions insists, comparing him
favorably with Rupert Brooke and
Wilfred Owen, and ascribing his obliv-
A PIECE OF HER MIND ion to his being working class and
Jewish—but his work’s excellence is
Does the Enlightenment’s great female intellect need rescuing? established by the fact that Ezra Pound
and T. S. Eliot were impressed by it.
BY ADAM GOPNIK Vindicated and victimized: this two-
step is very much on view in “The
Enlightenment’s Most Dangerous
Woman: Émilie du Châtelet and the
Making of Modern Philosophy” (Ox-
ford), Andrew Janiak’s engrossing life
of the French scientist, mathemati-
cian, and philosopher.
Janiak, a professor of philosophy at
Duke University, makes the largely per-
suasive case that du Châtelet was not
just a significant figure in eighteenth-
century physics but one of the most
important women in European history.
So we hear of the universal fame she
enjoyed after publishing her “Founda-
tions of Physics,” which was first printed
in 1740, revised for a second edition in
1742, and translated into so many other
languages that she gained a European
audience. Janiak reports that the work
“was then cited, debated, and praised
by major figures in science, mathemat-
ics, and philosophy,” and “read from
Prussia to Russia, from Italy to France,
from Switzerland to England.” But we
also hear much of her subsequent ne-
glect, and pages are spent inveighing
against the way she has been referred
to as “Voltaire’s mistress.” (She and the
philosophe had a passionate and pub-
lic love affair that started in the sev-

H istorians championing previously

marginalized intellectual and lit-
erary figures are often caught on the
jects have had far less attention than
they deserve. So they must be shown
to have been keenly appreciated by the
enteen-thirties, working and sleeping
side by side in her castle at Cirey with
the acceptance of her complaisant hus-
horns of an odd dilemma. On the one better spirits of their time as well as band.) “She was not merely betrayed
hand, the subject—the woman scien- wrongly consigned to oblivion. by later misogynist portrayals in re-
tist, the Black composer, the Indige- This reflects a historical truth— cent times,” Janiak writes. “Even as she
nous military strategist—must have the marginalized often are esteemed, rose to the highest levels of intellec-
met with some degree of social accep- at least by some, before being neglected tual fame in eighteenth-century Eu-
tance in their day or the work would by all—but it creates a strange biog- rope, she was first betrayed by the En-
never have had enough support and rapher’s two-step. We regret that Lou- lightenment itself.”
attention to have flourished and sur- ise Farrenc, the French Romantic com- Yet, in trying to save her from being
vived. Since historians wish to draw on poser, has fallen into obscurity, while an appurtenance of Voltaire’s, her bi-
the wiser judges of the era to establish reporting how much her contempo- ographer disembodies her a little. We
the importance of their subjects, we are rary Hector Berlioz admired her lose sight of her as a French marquise
told about whom they wowed and how in order to establish the injustice of of the eighteenth century, with lovers
they wowed them. On the other hand, her obscurity. Isaac Rosenberg might to juggle, a watchful husband in an
the point must be made that such sub- be “the greatest English war poet arranged marriage to mollify and ma-
nipulate, family properties to manage,
For Émilie du Châtelet, romance and research could be twinned enterprises. children to bear, raise, and marry off,
60 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 ILLUSTRATION BY JULIE BENBASSAT
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footmen and parlormaids to hire and late nineties, and was famous for hav- that nonetheless had a tribal charge:
fire, card games at which to gamble ing said, at ninety-two, on meeting a the clash between Newton’s “English”
extravagantly, literary-society feuds to beautiful woman, “Ah, to be eighty theory of gravitation and the cosmic
arbitrate, and, not least, health crises again.” He credited his long life to a theories of the dominant French
around every corner. Instead, Janiak diet of strawberries.) thinker, René Descartes. It was the
makes her sound more like an assis- Wildly precocious, Émilie mastered scientific crisis of the era. Descartes,
tant professor at an American univer- Latin, Greek, and English. In such a though better remembered as a phi-
sity, with theses to present, colleagues milieu, she was encouraged to read and losopher of mind than as a physicist,
to placate, abstract arguments to win study, but was soon married off to an posited a lucid, mechanical model of
and lose, and tenure to pursue. In truth, even grander aristocrat, the Marquis motion and matter: invisible vortices—
we diminish her by lifting her out of du Châtelet, a well-meaning, some- cogwheels somehow situated in space—
her own time and circle; making her what bumbling Army officer, who was pushed at each other across eternity
even more of a mind needn’t make her interested only in his military exploits and were responsible for the move-
less of a woman. In Janiak’s account, and soon forbidden by his wife to dis- ment of the spheres and the stars.
Voltaire’s central role in her life, as her cuss them at the table. He was com- Against this was Newton’s vision—
friend and teacher and ideal mate and pletely outmatched by her and wise ridiculously occult, to the logical French
intellectual wrestling opponent, is cor- enough to know it. But she pined for mind—of action at a distance, with the
doned off, for fear of making her once more study and chafed at the stric- sun moving the Earth by a mysterious
again Voltaire’s mistress. The term is tures placed upon women: “I feel the pull that spread across space, the Earth
indeed deplorable and demeaning, but full weight of prejudice that excludes then moving the moon, and the moon
her being Voltaire’s lover was a deci- us universally from the sciences, and then moving the tides. Why Voltaire
sive aspect of who she was and how it is one of the contradictions of this took up the very abstruse Newton, and
she lived and why she wrote so well, world, which has always astonished how thoroughly he understood his the-
just as Harriet Taylor’s mind was lib- me, that there are great countries where ories mathematically, as opposed to
erated, not limited, by her love for the law permits us to decide our des- ideologically, is much debated, but the
John Stuart Mill. (As his was by his tiny, but none where we are brought reality that Voltaire’s enemies in the
love for her.) Du Châtelet wrote as up to think.” French academy were all Cartesians
movingly as anyone ever has about Madame du Châtelet solved the was as good a reason for his Anglo-
love found and lost, and that, too, is problem in a way that only a very smart philic allegiance as any. In the event,
as much a part of her legacy as her (and very rich) woman could: since she Voltaire was a passionate, evangelical,
now rediscovered “pluralistic” vision couldn’t get to the colleges, she would monomaniacal Newtonian, and he
of physics. Indeed, one draws on the make her home one. She drew a pro- spent his time making war on New-
other. In trying to protect du Châtelet cession of philosophes to her country ton’s behalf, and persuading du Châtelet
from a tradition of condescension, we house in Cirey, while her husband fussed to join him, a mutual venture that, in
subject her to another form of con- and watched, unable to comprehend time, led her to produce a French trans-
descension, denying her the sensual the arguments but eager to see his lation, long the standard one, of New-
wholeness that matched her intellec- beautiful wife happy. Like any French ton’s “Principia.”
tual heft. woman of her class, she immediately That she loved Voltaire no one can
began to collect a series of lovers: first doubt, and she wrote a beautiful little

G abrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de
Breteuil, as she was born in 1706,
came from the top of French society;
the very grand Duc de Richelieu, who
remained a lifelong friend, and then
Jean François de Saint-Lambert.
book about happiness, sometime in the
seventeen-forties, that remains the most
vivid record of her mind. A perfect in-
she was introduced to the world in Among the intellectual luminaries stance of French wit, with its mixture
what is now the Place des Vosges in a of the time, Voltaire was the big “get,” of sharp candor about human motives
building that still survives on that and she got him. In 1730, just back from and sincere sentiments about the human
matchless square of matched red brick a prudent self-imposed exile in En- heart, she briskly lists the necessities
homes, which was among the earliest gland, he had succeeded Fontenelle in for happiness as good sense, good
modular urban developments in Eu- the French role of maître-penseur. He health, good taste, and a capacity for
ropean history. She had an unusually was a passionate Anglophile—French self-deception, since “we owe the ma-
happy childhood, with a family bent Anglophilia, with its Savile Row suits jority of our pleasures to illusions.” She
toward the sciences. Bernard de Fon- and Scotch in preference to cham- went on, “Far from seeking to make il-
tenelle, the great Academician and the pagne, being at least as passionate a lusion disappear by the torchlight of
author of one of the first books of pop- pursuit as English Francophilia—and reason, let us try to thicken the veneer
ular science, the “Conversations on the had become enamored of Newton’s it places upon the majority of objects.”
Plurality of Worlds,” was a regular at physics and Locke’s laws. Yet, however thick the veneer, she writes
her father’s table, and was said to de- A preoccupation of du Châtelet and plaintively and honestly about the great
light in conversing with Émilie. (Al- Voltaire’s, in the château and then in love of her life. “I was happy for ten
ready old when he knew her, Fon- later households in the Faubourg Saint- years through the love of someone who
tenelle lived in good health into his Germain, was a highly abstract one had subjugated my soul; and these ten
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years were spent in intimacy with him, structure of space and time, or the shape ity of shared speculation, she insisted
without one moment of loathing, or of of knowledge, du Châtelet seeks to find that, though no number of positive af-
weariness,” she recalls, adding: the insights hidden in opposed posi- firmations can establish a theory, one
tions.” Voltaire and his Enlightenment falsification can disprove it. “A single
It takes a terrible jolt to break such chains:
the gash in my heart bled for a long time; I confrères, the argument goes, were experiment is not enough to confirm
had reason to pity myself and I forgave every- drawn to great-man theories of scien- a hypothesis, but one alone is suffi-
thing. I was sufficiently fair to feel that . . . if tific discovery—Newton and the apple cient to reject it,” she wrote, two cen-
age and ill health had not entirely extinguished bonking him on his head were enough turies before Karl Popper made the
desires, I might perhaps again experience them to usher in a revolution—and so si- idea a commonplace of twentieth-
and love would return them to me; lastly, that
his heart, incapable of love, felt for me the lenced the collective, proto-feminist century science.
most tender friendship, and he might have de- Another guiding impulse in “Insti-
voted his life to me. The certainty that a re- tutions” foreshadowed a less edifying
kindling of his desire and his passion was im- tendency. Du Châtelet was searching
possible, since I know full well that this is for a grand synthesis of Newtonian,
contrary to nature, led my heart impercepti-
bly to a peaceful feeling of friendship. Cartesian, and Leibnizian ideas, in the
way that Viennese visionaries of the
She does not omit a candid note of nineteen-twenties hoped to unify all
qualification: “But can such a tender the sciences, and in the way that later
heart be satisfied by a sentiment as thinkers tried to reconcile quantum
peaceful and as weak as that of close physics with Einstein—and both with
friendship?” Her wistful worldliness is view purveyed by the “Institutions.” theology. On the one hand, then, there
captured in another sharp bit of breakup This is the sense in which Janiak be- is her persuasive idea that science is a
counsel: “Never show an eagerness when lieves that du Châtelet was “betrayed” social act with many assessors; on the
your lover cools off, and always be a by the Enlightenment. other is the view that no one hypoth-
degree colder than they are; that will Certainly her “Institutions” dis- esis can win, and that the truth is best
not bring them back, but nothing will.” played a far subtler understanding of available in a composite of theories and
the limits and the power of Newto- ideas. Either can be called “pluralism,”

Iontnorhappiness
is neither du Châtelet’s love affair
the wise, melancholy little book
that makes her reputa-
nian physics than Voltaire did. New-
ton was right, she understood, not be-
cause he saw farther than anyone else
but the biographer does not always
keep the two senses straight; to be fair,
neither did du Châtelet.
tion in scholarly circles today. Instead, but because his weird idea was open The view that the models of celes-
it’s her “Foundations of Physics”—orig- to public inspection by people capable tial mechanics proposed by Leibniz,
inally published as “Institutions de Phy- of criticizing it. Edmond Halley could Descartes, and Newton all contain truth
sique”—which she wrote while she was show that Newton’s physics predicted is appealingly broadminded; it is not,
still with Voltaire and finished toward the paths of comets, and experiments unfortunately, true. Descartes’s legible,
the end of their affair, in 1740. The work conducted by Pierre-Simon Laplace sensible view that it took one thing to
is a formidable read, and it has only re- could show that Newton’s theory about push another just isn’t so, while New-
cently been translated into English in the speed of sound was basically right, ton’s weird idea—that action can take
full, by a collective of women scholars. once some adjustments were applied. place in a vacuum through occult at-
Exactly what the book is about is hard It was this understanding of science traction—describes the way the world
to say; some insist that it is a search for as a collaboration across time that in- works, and not just the world but the
the metaphysical foundations of phys- spired du Châtelet to offer a memo- whole damn universe. A pluralistic
ics, others that it is a search for the rable aphorism: “Physics is an immense marriage of the two is no more possi-
physical foundations of metaphysics. building that surpasses the power of a ble than is a true marriage of Lamarck
Janiak, though, fairly summarizes single man.” (who thought that giraffes grew tall
its importance as the first blossoming Her understanding of science as a by seeking to eat the tops of tall trees)
of a pluralistic, social view of the growth social enterprise was genuinely pre- and Darwin (who guessed that they
of scientific knowledge. “Voltaire’s vi- scient. She grasped, as early as anyone, developed long necks by chance and
sion of science and of Newton’s heroic the critical difference between science stepwise selection, with the treetop
role in helping to make it a modern as a specific set of ideas and science as eating a lucky and lingering after-
site of intellectual progress is far more a peculiar kind of social practice. That effect). The pluralistic souls who tried
familiar today than du Châtelet’s al- was the point of her architectural met- to augment Darwin with some idea of
ternative vision of science as a collab- aphor. Many hands make light work, transgenerational acquired traits were
orative endeavor that exceeds the pow- the old saw has it, and many heads ex- wrong—sometimes catastrophically
ers of even the greatest genius,” he plain light. Her chapter on the role of wrong, as with the rise of Lysenkoism
writes. “When confronted with a de- the hypothesis would by itself be in Stalinist Russia. (Various modern at-
bate among the revolutionaries of the enough to earn her a large place in the tempts to rescue neo-Lamarckism have,
past, whether it concerns hypotheses, history of the philosophy of science: so far, failed, or been subsumed by the
the nature of matter, the large-scale recognizing the imaginative central- neo-Darwinian synthesis.) Science is
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Social Media Pakistan 0342-4938217
inhabited by a community, but it isn’t context of French society life. We learn it is an anachronism to see Voltaire’s
built by a committee. exactly how and when those servants single-minded sponsorship of Newton
Where du Châtelet was certainly were fired and then rehired, and Mit- as having been fathered by ideological
right, however, was in recognizing the ford makes much of what is omitted rigor. Voltaire’s avidity was, instead,
error in using a scientific model, vali- elsewhere, that du Châtelet was a com- part of the performance of his role as
dated within its domain, to explain ev- pulsive gambler who loved high stakes Top French Thinker—a position that
erything else. She saw, as Voltaire did but, despite her mathematical prowess, might be unofficial but is as sharply
not, that attempts to extend Newtonian almost always lost, sometimes at enor- defined as the papacy and has been
attraction at a distance to electricity and mous expense. handed on from one intellectual to the
even to animal secretions—to make of Yet Mitford’s book is never once next over the centuries. It is incumbent
it a theory of everything—were mis- cited, even in a footnote, in the new on anyone in the role to be aggressive
taken. To do so was like imagining that, one; in a curious irony, Janiak has, in and audacious, and more so in public
because a key is perfectly shaped to fit effect, done to Mitford what he com- manner than in private belief. Ameri-
a particular lock, it possesses some en- plains was done to du Châtelet—writ- cans and Brits, being less royalist and
ergized quality of “keyness” that can ten a brilliant woman right out of his- more empirical in temperament, are
open any other. The scientific revolu- tory as a mere amateur. That’s too bad, bewildered by the general French un-
tion did not depend on the constant re- since Mitford was extraordinarily derstanding that the top thinker is sup-
placement of spiritual explanations with knowing about the social milieu in posed to be imperious and maximalist.
mechanical ones—action at a distance which du Châtelet moved, which had But it comes with the role. The po-
hardly qualified as mechanical. It de- changed little from the Marquise’s day litical absolutism of Sartre was a way
pended on what actual experience said to hers. Her storytelling makes du of asserting fearlessness: Nothing, not
afterward about the truth of a hypoth- Châtelet and Voltaire both come alive even the presence of the U.S. Army,
esis. (In French, the words for “experi- as Enlightenment people. She tells the can intimidate me! French intellectu-
ment” and “experience” are the same.) hilarious story of how Voltaire and du als no more expect their top figure to
Newton did not give us a clockwork Châtelet, when she became pregnant split the differences and see the mid-
universe, working blindly to rule; he by another lover, arranged to bring her dle way than Catholics expect the Pope
gave us a universe in which everyone husband back to the dinner table and to see all sides of an issue. (As the fa-
can see the hands on the clock, and encouraged him to tell his military mous motto had it, “Better to be wrong
check the time for themselves. tales, while du Châtelet wore a con- with Sartre than right with Raymond
spicuously low-cut gown to encourage Aron,” the sane pro-democracy cen-
overing behind Janiak’s book is his concupiscence. Husband and wife trist.) For Voltaire, asserting Newto-
H another, Nancy Mitford’s “Vol-
taire in Love,” her 1957 account of the
went off to bed, three weeks later she
announced her pregnancy, and the pro-
nianism was simply a strategic way of
asserting Voltairianism, which he cared
same story and people, albeit with prieties were saved. Apocryphal? Per- about more than he did about gravity.
an emphasis marginally more on the haps, but anyone who knows the still Danton’s line “L’audace, toujours l’au-
man and far less on the science. Her intact social habits of the Parisian gra- dace”—audacity, always audacity—ex-
book captures the spirit of the couple tin will vouch for its plausibility. presses a shared tenet of French intel-
perfectly and places their intellectual Mitford also grasped the politics of lectual life.
adventures intelligently within the Parisian intellectual life and knew that
hatever the truth of the tale
W about the décolleté dress and
the husband’s deception, the pregnancy
had a tragic result: though the baby
was delivered safely, the Marquise, like
so many women of the time, fell sick
shortly afterward, and died within the
week. Voltaire mourned her. “It is not
a mistress I have lost,” he wrote, em-
phatically. “Rather, I have lost half of
myself, a soul for which mine seems to
have been made.”
The subtitle of this new book seems
earned—du Châtelet really did play a
significant part in the making of mod-
ern philosophy. But the Enlighten-
ment’s “most dangerous woman”? Surely
this grafts the preoccupations of a later
era onto her eighteenth-century life.
“I’m getting rid of a bunch of dinosaurs.” In her book about happiness, “danger”

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is a word that occurs only once, in the
context of gambling, while amour rings
throughout the text. She never would BRIEFLY NOTED
have taken herself to be dangerous;
she would have wanted to be known The Barn, by Wright Thompson (Penguin Press). Thompson,
to be wise. who was born into an old Mississippi planter family, grew
And loving. She learned more than up only miles from the barn where Emmett Till was tortured
we may realize from her childhood men- and killed. This book is not only a retelling of the crime—a
tor, Fontenelle. His “Conversation on story that Till’s family, among others, has already published—
the Plurality of Worlds,” which she but also a rich and wandering history of the township in
must have read as an adolescent, tells a which Till died: the few square miles of plantations that
story of courtship through learning: a helped birth both the blues and the Ku Klux Klan. Thomp-
philosopher woos a marquise by intro- son writes movingly of more than one “enormous web of in-
ducing her to a Copernican-Cartesian terconnected people” in the Delta, and of the ongoing fight
view of the universe, and particularly to commemorate its lynchings. He brings a local’s intensity
to the doctrine that the stars we see to the project: the book is as much about his neighbors, and
have worlds like ours orbiting them. even his kin, as it is about his country.
The plurality of worlds becomes the
foundation for a plurality of viewpoints. When the Ice Is Gone, by Paul Bierman (Norton). This sci-
Science emerges as a version of the entific history recounts the drilling, in the nineteen-sixties,
pastoral, with the physicist as swain. of the world’s first deep ice core—a cylinder of ice that ex-
Romance and research are seen as tended more than four thousand feet below the surface. Ef-
twinned enterprises, a vision that set a forts like this one contributed to the creation of a new sci-
keynote for du Châtelet’s own life. entific discipline. By analyzing the dust, ash, oxygen isotopes,
It was a keynote, too, for the era. and air bubbles preserved in ice cores, scientists could now
One of the easily overlooked master- reconstruct the history of Earth’s climate. In 2019, Bierman,
pieces of the romance of science is right a geologist, and his team discovered plant fragments in the
here in New York: Jacques-Louis Da- frozen soil collected from the base of the core—evidence that
vid’s incandescent portrait of Antoine Greenland’s ice sheet had melted before, under climatic con-
and Marie-Anne Lavoisier, at the Met. ditions similar to today’s. Unless we curb climate change, he
It shows the great father and mother writes, “the island will be green again.”
of chemistry not as a male thinker and
a female muse but as the married, work- Bright I Burn, by Molly Aitken (Knopf ). Inspired by a real
ing couple they were. Their love and woman, Alice Kyteler, who was born in the thirteenth cen-
their work are shown as one, and the tury and accused of witchcraft, this gripping novel follows
pure world of experiment they in- its protagonist from her youth in Kilkenny, as the captivat-
habit—with the form of a test tube lik- ing daughter of an innkeeper and lender, to her old age, hid-
ened to that of a Doric column—is ing out as a priest in England. In between, Alice takes over
compatible with the poised, erotic el- her father’s business; is struck by lightning; marries four times,
egance they display. (Antoine was mur- each with violent ends; births two children; and amasses sig-
dered by the Jacobins during their Ter- nificant wealth. “I am a rare case,” she says, of her story. “Once
ror; Marie-Anne survived him, married brightly I burned, I drew them all to me and consumed them
an American, and kept their work alive.) all, unwittingly and wittingly, in my fire.”
The social aspect of science has been
bureaucratized in our time; what “peer Gifted, by Suzumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Al-
review” often means is something that lison Markin Powell (Transit). In this unsentimental novella,
no reviewer wants to peer too deeply a young woman working as a bar hostess and sex worker in
into. But in an earlier era it was a hap- Tokyo reckons with several unresolved personal traumas in
pier matter of encyclopedias and so- the course of a few weeks. Her mother, an unsuccessful poet,
cieties. Science is communal in the is dying—first at her daughter’s house, in the entertainment
first instance, a matter of clubs and, district, then in the hospital. The unfortunate circumstances
not infrequently, pairings. Most of force the unnamed protagonist to reflect on the abuse she en-
these have been friendships, brooding dured at her mother’s hands, as well as on the recent deaths
Charles Darwin and blunt Joseph of two of her friends. Based on Suzuki’s own experiences in
Hooker; but a few of these partners, the adult industry, the book chronicles the young woman’s
often French—the Curies, the Lavois- wanderings from bar to bar, hospital to home, with brutal hon-
iers, and Voltaire and du Châtelet— esty. “This district is rife with women walking around with
were lovers, too. It’s a cheering thought two million yen,” the character remarks. “Nearly the same
in a lovesick time.  number who say they want to die.”
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 65

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 of one: Oshichi, whose beloved will have
DANCING to commit ritual suicide if she cannot
help him recover a lost sword. To do this,
she must sound a false alarm on the fire
THE PUPPET MASTERS drum, opening the city gates—an offense
that, in a city of largely wooden build­
Compulsion, complicity, and the art of Bunraku. ings, is punishable by death. As Oshichi
enters, she is convulsed with fear and de­
BY JENNIFER HOMANS termination, and her puppet body, half
the size of a person, flings violently for­
ward at the waist as she makes her way
to the watchtower, escorted by three pup­
peteers, two shrouded head to toe in
black, the other unmasked.
I was so engrossed in Oshichi’s mis­
sion that I hardly noticed the puppeteers
at first; she seemed to be acting alone as
she scrambled up the tower steps, fell
back, and tried again. But in an extraor­
dinary moment, when the drum is struck,
she meets her barefaced puppeteer at the
top of the tower stairs. All I could see was
him, his thick right arm coiled around her
frail limb as she—he—struck the bell. A
crucial shift had occurred: she appeared to
be watching as he pumped her arm and
the alarm sounded. Which of them did
the deed? The puppeteer is implicated, or
is he? We saw his hand, but, in the world
of the story, he does not exist, and Oshi­
chi alone will ultimately pay the price.
After this came a jarring interlude that
looked to me like a puppet autopsy. With
comic delight, the puppeteers took poor
Oshichi apart and revealed her naked,
inert form. In Bunraku, one puppet is
handled by three puppeteers, each of
whom is responsible for a different por­
tion of the puppet’s body: the lead pup­
peteer takes the head and the right arm
he National Bunraku Theatre, in suicides that led to a ban on further per­ and guides the torso; the second puppe­
T New York recently for the first time
in more than thirty years, presented an
formances. This mirroring of life and art
is all the more astonishing given the fact
teer handles the left arm; and the third
operates the lower half. Moving a single
evening of suicides. The performance, at that the actors are not people but puppets. body part in synchrony with the whole is
the Japan Society, consisted of excerpts Bunraku, named for Uemura Bun­ a skill that takes years of training; Kiri­
from two of the company’s most cele­ rakuken, the owner of an Osaka puppet take Monyoshi, one of the lead puppe­
brated productions. In the Fire Watch­ theatre, has its roots in the seventeenth teers, has been practicing his art for more
tower scene from “The Greengrocer’s century, and especially in the plays of than thirty years. He explained how his
Daughter,” by Suga Sensuke and Matsuda Chikamatsu. Writing often for puppets right hand enters the puppet, how hidden
Wakichi, from 1773, the titular character rather than actors, he was interested in strings move the eyes or raise the eye­
sacrifices herself to save a temple page boy the clash between duty and passion in brows, and how he and the second pup­
she loves. In a scene from “The Love Sui­ the lives of a rising merchant class. Bun­ peteer cue each other to coördinate the
cides at Sonezaki,” by Chikamatsu Mon­ raku was a kind of people’s theatre, but puppet’s arms. Perhaps most shocking of
zaemon, from 1703, two lovers are driven it wasn’t light entertainment, showing all, the puppet’s skirts were thrown up so
to take their own lives. Both plays were fascination with tragedy and ritual vio­ that we could see her missing legs (female
inspired by real events, and Chikama­ lence in ordinary lives. puppets have no legs, only a kimono that
tsu’s was followed by a wave of double The Fire Watchtower scene has a cast falls to the floor), and we glimpsed how
the third puppeteer nonetheless makes
The title character in the eighteenth-century play “The Greengrocer’s Daughter.” her appear to kneel and walk.
66 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN J. WEE
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 Presumably, someone thought that vision of labor, in which body and soul,
this Japanese art form needed to be de­ movement, sound, and speech are par­ RESCUING AND
mystified for an American audience, but celled out among different players—wit­ DELIVERING
I was dismayed by the jokey and me­ nesses who (like us) are also players in
chanical treatment of a puppet that, mo­ the events onstage. Who is responsible FRESH FOOD
ments before, had conveyed a devastat­ for the terrible deaths that will follow?
ing human drama. Are the individuals to blame, or are they
IN NYC TO
impelled by a cruel society or a divinely EMPOWER A
he next scene, from “The Love Sui­ sanctioned hand? With Bunraku puppets,
T cides at Sonezaki,” comes from the
end of the play, when Tokubei, a clerk
culpability for unbearable individual acts
is shared, making intimate human vio­
STRONGER
TOMORROW.
ruined and humiliated by a cheating lence possible and even disturbingly beau­
friend, drifts onto the stage with his be­ tiful. None are guilty; all are complicit.
loved courtesan, Ohatsu. It is night: they In the lovers’ final hour, we see poor
THAT’S HOW WE
skim ghostlike through the dark, and we
sense their faint breathing and taut nerves.
Tokubei draw his sword and despair. He
moves to strike Ohatsu, who opens her­
FEED GOOD.
The lovers, knowing that society will self to his blow, but he hesitates, over­
never let them be together, set out to end come by her vulnerability. Then, in a
their lives and be together in the after­ piece of choreography that momentar­
world. They stand on a bridge, weeping ily brings puppeteers, chanters, and mu­
into the water; they embrace and flow sicians all into view, Ohatsu pulls her
apart, reflecting with remorse and pride long obi across the stage, a complicated
on the act that they are about to commit. maneuver that ends in a striking tableau:
An animated backdrop (designed by Oga Tokubei at one end of the sash and her
Kazuo, a frequent collaborator of Hayao at the other, with the black figures of the
Miyazaki’s) moves them along a path puppeteers between them—a silently ad­
through the forest. Ohatsu expresses sad­ judicating human presence—and the
ness at leaving her parents behind, while musicians completing the visual arc.
Tokubei, whose parents are dead, says Finally, the lovers wind themselves
that he will meet them in the hereafter. tightly together and the sash falls away.
These are intimate moments, but the Ohatsu solemnly turns to Tokubei, her
lovers are not alone, because of the pup­ back to us, and falls to her knees before
peteers tenderly carrying them. Human him. His arm shaking with tension, he
and puppet limbs are entwined, and there raises the blade high above her and
is a sense, both comforting and discon­ plunges it into her neck. She sinks back­
certing, of a group­individual, like the ward, and he immediately turns it on
shadowy figures who merge with the his own throat and falls on her, as if in
dark in Goya’s Black Paintings. Each love. It is a riveting scene but, for the re­
puppet is both itself and a small society, cord, was edited for this performance to
and even the puppets’ materiality is un­ spare the audience the most gruesome
canny—they are floating, airy creatures parts. In Chikamatsu’s version, the nar­
weighted by earthly human spirits. The ration tells us that, when Tokubei first
puppeteers are not the only artists giv­ thrusts, “the point misses. Twice or thrice
ing the puppets life. On a separate plat­ the flashing blade deflects this way and
form to the right of the action, three that until a cry tells it has struck her
male chanters sit in a neat row, next to throat. . . . He twists the blade deeper
men playing the shamisen, a stringed in­ and deeper, but the strength has left his
strument with a raw and piercing tone arm. When he sees her weaken, he
which is often used in vocal accompa­ stretches forth his hands. The last ago­
niment. The chanters give the puppets nies of death are indescribable.” RESCUING FOOD FOR NYC
voice with intense and compressed Which may be why I did not need to
screeches, gasps, and tears of terror, shame, be lifted to the skies by the animated
and remorse—but they themselves slip backdrop, which now flew the lovers’
from our awareness. Their disembodied bodies upward and turned them into a
voices operate like a soundtrack, syn­ rocklike monument to incarnation and
chronized with puppet gesture and emo­ passing lives, a pretty distraction from
tion: a sinking chest, the kink of an elbow, the tragedy at hand which left me re­
a feverish shake. winding in my own mind to the real final
What we are seeing is an elaborate di­ image: dead puppets.  CITYHARVEST.ORG

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 St. James (after winning seven Olivier
THE THEATRE Awards), and starring Nicole Scherzinger,
onetime lead singer of the Pussycat
Dolls. Casting a gleaming Scherzinger
STAR-CROSSED as the fading Norma is deliberately
counterintuitive: a burlesque dancer,
“Sunset Blvd.” and “Romeo + Juliet,” on Broadway. she twerks her way through Fabian Alo-
ise’s club choreography barefoot, wear-
BY HELEN SHAW ing only a black negligee. Everything—
the “reality” of 1949 and even Norma’s
supposed decrepitude (she’s meant
to be, like, fifty)—will have to exist in
the imagination.
Like Webber, Lloyd enjoys both the
gothic and quoting himself. (From “A
Doll’s House” to “Cyrano,” there seems
to be no drama he won’t stage in a stark
emptiness, whether that makes the story
hard to follow or not.) The set and cos-
tume designer Soutra Gilmour, his fre-
quent collaborator, has created another
elegant void for him, filled with white
fog and an immense movie screen. En-
semble members, in black-and-white
streetwear, carry cameras mounted on
Steadicam frames, shooting live close-
ups of the main characters: Scherzin-
ger’s Norma; the screenwriter Joe (Tom
Francis); and Max (David Thaxton),
Norma’s butler and chief enabler. Al-
most every projected face stares directly
at us—I was reminded not of film noir
but of Andy Warhol’s lonely, mug-shot-
inspired “Screen Tests.” Even when Joe
and Norma kiss, they seem depersonal-
ized; cold mannequins, colliding in space.
During the Act II overture and the
subsequent title song, the video design-
ers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ramson have
arranged a thrilling coup de théâtre: a

Irian“Sunset
Billy Wilder’s ur-camp masterpiece
Boulevard,” from 1950, Glo-
Swanson plays Norma Desmond, an
Andrew Lloyd Webber débuted his
musical adaptation of “Sunset Boule-
vard” (co-written with Don Black and
live camera tails Francis from his dress-
ing room down through the guts of the
building, then into the street. The com-
aging grande dame of silent film, who Christopher Hampton) in 1993, return- pany glides behind him as he sings and
slides from self-regarding eccentricity ing to the dark sensibility of his then strides along, staring down the camera’s
into homicidal delusion. Intent on a recent mega-hit, “The Phantom of the barrel. It’s been done before—Lloyd
comeback, Norma has seduced a young Opera.” Webber might have felt on fa- sent Jessica Chastain out of “A Doll’s
screenwriter named Joe Gillis (William miliar ground.The Phantom and Norma House”; Ivo van Hove did a live walk-
Holden), but, when both he and the stu- are both attention-hungry spiders in and-talk video in “Network”—but here
dio reject her, she swerves into a perma- glittering lairs; both are fantasists whose the spectacle is so precise, the superim-
nent dream. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m faces, either twisted or simply aging, position of Broadway on L.A. so droll,
ready for my closeup,” she famously become their obsessive focus. that Lloyd turns the cliché fresh again.
purrs to a wall of crime-scene photog- Faces—gigantic, black-and-white A camera makes its own decisions
raphers, her face smoothed flat with ones—are certainly the main scenery about who has star quality. Francis, as
grease and powder. In the film, Gillis of the director Jamie Lloyd’s souped-up a physical presence, can be recessive,
still narrates—though he’s just been shot and stripped-down “Sunset Blvd.,” but there’s a silvery charisma in his pro-
dead, like Jay Gatsby, in the pool. newly transferred from London to the jected image that his co-stars never find.
For all her beauty, Scherzinger onscreen
Nicole Scherzinger is Norma Desmond in Jamie Lloyd’s cinematic production. remains unexceptional; she mugs for
68 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 ILLUSTRATION BY MANDDY WYCKENS
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the camera, like a TikTok influencer the costume designer Enver Chakar-
taping a reaction video. But, in the final tash include Hello Kitty backpacks, mesh
mad scene, she abandons sarcasm, tanks, and lots of baggy pants—they’re
drenches herself in blood, and turns already avatars for Gen Z romance.
into a terrifying harpy. Tellingly, she’s But the couple must also kindle
best when she stops vamping for the something together. I found myself
camera’s attention and starts reaching, thinking wistfully of the National The-
her fingers curled into claws, for the atre’s recent film with Jessie Buckley
people in the room. and Josh O’Connor, in which Buckley’s
For much of the previous two hours, clever Juliet reads as being capable of
though, she’s been rolling her eyes. diverting O’Connor’s Romeo from his
Maybe she can’t believe how shoddy a violent path. Here, Zegler and Connor
big-deal musical can be? Despite its many both seem like innocents, with a kind
lush passages, Webber’s sung-through of inverse chemistry—as they get far-
score is bloated with repetitive vocal fig- ther away from each other onstage, their
ures, and the lyrics by Black and Hamp- connection appears to strengthen. Their
ton fall flat in comparison with lines finest moment is their first one, when
lifted from Wilder and his co-writers, they’re almost a full twenty feet apart.
D. M. Marshman, Jr., and Charles Brack- Zegler sings a song (written for the show
ett. For instance, Norma’s iconic “I am by the über record producer Jack An-
big. It’s the pictures that got small” is tonoff) at a Capulet party, and her per-
followed almost immediately by the lyr- formance roots Romeo, an otherwise
ics “No words can tell /The stories my flighty fellow, to the spot.
eyes tell/Watch me when I frown /You After his work at Circle in the Square
can’t write that down.” with “An Enemy of the People,” Gold
If Webber’s uneven musical is a grainy has clearly taken the measure of in-the-
copy of Wilder’s film, this production is round space, and so the rough-and-
an intentionally distorted copy of a copy. tumble Montague gang—which in-
But Lloyd is less interested in the spe- cludes the wonderful Gabby Beans as
cifics of either work than in the chthonic Mercutio—clambers around in the cat-
rage underneath. For the folks giving walks overhead, dropping down near
standing ovations during the show, the theatregoers in the standing-room sec-
strategy seems to work. Scherzinger’s
voice does contain a terrific power: in-
tion. Connor is particularly deft at in-
teracting with the audience: he plays THE REAL
ACTION IS
stead of phrasing lines as thoughts, she Romeo as an inexperienced softboi, of-
attacks every clause with big, jackham- fering the whole room his flustered cour-
mering blows. I was reminded that she tesy. (When he does a chin-up to kiss
has been a judge on “The X Factor”—
there’s a sense of desperate competition
in the way she delivers her numbers,
Juliet on her balcony, his biceps bulg-
ing, the audience gasps. All that flirting
really pays off.)
OFF THE
holding nothing in reserve. The audi-
ence responds gratefully to this level of
self-abnegation, and the frankly chilling
Gold and his company seem most
comfortable in these swoony sections.
The fights are silly; the final scene in
COURT
sounds that come out of her. That’s all the tomb is bizarrely quick and awk-
Norma Desmond wanted! She doesn’t ward. But, earlier, the mood is wonder- GET TO KNOW THE
mind suffering, as long as the people in ful, and Antonoff’s electronic underscor-
the dark love her for it. ing gives everything a kind of fuzzed-out,
BIGGEST ATHLETES
after-midnight sweetness.There’s a lovely ON EARTH AT
eanwhile, “Romeo + Juliet,” at the moment when the circular black stage GQ.COM/SPORTS
M Circle in the Square, takes a more
straightforward approach to its star cast-
floor flips itself over to show a field of
flowers. (The set design is by the col-
ing. Sam Gold’s inventive, emo-lite pro- lective called dots.) I know that the “bank
duction features Rachel Zegler, from where the wild thyme blows” line is from
the recent film version of “West Side a different play, but it somehow feels as
Story,” as Juliet, and Kit Connor, from if it belongs to this production. The cast
the teen-Brit TV show “Heartstopper,” here is most believable as young peo-
as Romeo. The moment we see them, ple—enemies or not—who stay up all
running full-tilt out of a shouting gang night and then fall asleep in a pile, like
of rowdy youths—the 2024 stylings by puppies in long grass. 

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 lone bulwark against a city’s cruelty. He
THE CURRENT CINEMA has never met his father, Marcus (CJ
Beckford), a Grenadian immigrant who
was deported, years earlier, for the crime
SONGS OF WAR of defending himself against two lout-
ish white men. George has encountered
“Blitz.” the same bigotry; in a flashback, a neigh-
borhood kid calls him a “Black bastard,”
BY JUSTIN CHANG and the pain that springs into George’s
eyes makes sense of his every subse-
arly on in “Blitz,” Rita Hanway (Sao- of a Blitz-ravaged childhood, with im- quent flinch, frown, and outburst. Hef-
E irse Ronan), a London factory
worker, puts her nine-year-old son,
probably buoyant results; the mother in
that film pulled her children back from
fernan, a gravely captivating newcomer,
wraps each expression and gesture
George (Elliott Heffernan), aboard a the train, unable to let them go. But around a hard little nubbin of distrust.
train. Rather, George puts himself Steve McQueen, the writer and direc- A surfeit of flashbacks can topple a
aboard; he twists angrily free of his moth- tor of “Blitz,” is not making a memoir. narrative, but “Blitz” bends time spar-
er’s grasp—“I hate you!” he cries—and He was born more than two decades ingly, and with great purpose, in a story
tears off down the platform. Rita, dis- after V-E Day and raised in London’s that surges forward with multipronged
traught, tries in vain to say a proper good- burgeoning West Indian community— urgency. It has much ground to cover,
and much devastation to show. The ter-
ror of the nightly German assault comes
at us in dark, disorienting aerial bursts:
bombs fall in what feels like slow mo-
tion; ripples of movement coalesce into
Luftwaffe planes, ref lected on the
Thames. At one point, McQueen cuts
to a staggering overhead view of the
city, a smoking and hauntingly silent
ruin in Adam Stockhausen’s intricate
production design. Most of the tale,
however, unfolds at ground level, and
in astoundingly intimate detail. The
opening images plunge us into a roar-
ing conflagration, but Yorick Le Saux’s
camera is mesmerized not by burning
buildings but by a rogue fire hose, whose
high-pressure spray nearly defeats the
workers trying to wrest it under con-
Saoirse Ronan and Elliott Heffernan star in Steve McQueen’s film. trol. The image tells McQueen’s story:
here is a nation, and a defense effort,
bye, knowing that they might never see the rich inspiration for his five-part film divided against itself.
each other again. It’s 1940, German anthology, “Small Axe” (2020). While George’s mother nonetheless toils in
bombs are falling across the city, and researching that project, McQueen dis- noble service of that effort. By day, she
George is being evacuated to the coun- covered a wartime photograph of a young labors in a munitions factory—Rita the
tryside, as millions of English children Black boy with an oversized suitcase. Riveter, resplendent in denim. By night,
will be in the course of the war. His bit- Who was this child, and what became she and her girlfriends knock back drinks
ter resentment at this upheaval is star- of him? “Blitz” imagines an answer. in a bustling pub, trying to keep calm
tling, even in the annals of Second World Its conclusions, though daubed with and revel on. She also volunteers at an
War cinema, where fraught farewells in Dickensian whimsy and child’s-eye up- air-raid shelter run by a real-life hero of
crowded train stations abound. lift, are remarkably tough and unyield- the Blitz, the organizer Mickey Davies
You may recall another boy telling ing. George rages at Rita for the same (Leigh Gill), and she shares his activist
his mother “I hate you” on a railway reason that, an hour into his journey, he spirit. In one of the film’s loveliest mo-
platform, though with a mitigating ten- leaps from the train and hightails it back ments, she croons a tender ditty on the
derness in his voice. So began “Au Re- to London: for a child of a white mother factory f loor for a BBC program—a
voir les Enfants” (1987), Louis Malle’s and a Black father, reared in intolerant scrap of melodious cheer to chase away
sobering account of his coming of age times, a prolonged family separation a nation’s gloom. Once the song ends,
in Nazi-occupied France. For “Hope would itself be intolerable. For nine years, though, so does any gauzy sentimental-
and Glory” (1987), the director John Rita and her father, Gerald (Paul Weller, ization of working-class women. Rita
Boorman drew on intimate memories quietly magnetic), have been George’s and her sisters-in-arms, presented with
70 THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2024 ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN LEE
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a radio microphone, put it to defiant terweight in Ife (Benjamin Clémen- of Amsterdam. “Blitz” offers a swifter,
good use. This is McQueen’s method: a tine), a kindly blackout warden who more accessible vision of a city under
passage of lyrical beauty, a chaser of righ- meets George during his rounds. When siege, but it is guided by the same im-
teous struggle. You cannot survive a war, racial tensions suddenly ignite among pulse: to give definition to horrors that
he suggests, without both. Londoners in close quarters, it falls to often turn abstract in the imagination.
Ife, a Nigerian immigrant, to chasten For McQueen, the boundary be-
or those of us who first saw Ronan the citizenry: bigotry is Hitler’s evil, he tween the conventional and the uncon-
F as Briony, the impulsive teen-age
antiheroine of “Atonement” (2007),
reminds them, not theirs.
That’s a flattering message, and not
ventional has always been porous at best.
His movies unfold, thrillingly, on a scale
“Blitz” can feel like a spookily full-circle exactly subtle in its appeal to our better between classical narrative and radical
experience. A slightly older, wiser angels. Yet some of us in the audience, form, and he is versatile enough to ad-
Briony was played by Romola Garai, disgusted by the persistence of Nazism just the slider according to the material.
but it is hard not to picture the grownup and anti-immigrant invective in the pres- In “Hunger” (2008), “Shame” (2011), and
Ronan in her place, stepping deter- ent, may well appreciate the force of Mc- “12 Years a Slave” (2013), he transfigured
minedly through the London rubble. Queen’s rhetoric. There is nothing tact- various abuses of the body into stark
(Here, too, as in “Atonement,” walls of ful, after all, about the prejudices that tableaux of spiritual torment, and his
water surge through a Tube station, turn- assault George on every corner. Watch camera looked on with unflinching, al-
ing a refuge into a death trap.) In “Lady as the camera follows him one night, to- most ritualized composure, as if it were
Bird” (2017) and “Little Women” (2019), ward a storefront window display larded recording the Stations of the Cross. But
Ronan incarnated the fiery stubborn- with grotesque African caricatures. The his gaze relaxed considerably, and beau-
ness of youth; now she stokes her nat- next morning, he will be rudely shooed tifully, amid the communal panoramas
ural warmth into the consuming blaze away from another shop by a proprietor, of “Small Axe,” in which joy commin-
of a mother’s love. When Rita learns who would doubtless treat a white child gled openly with sorrow, and singing
that George is lost in London, she sets differently. There is, in short, another and dancing became their own forceful
out to find him, aided by a police offi- war raging in this movie, and it exacts assertions of life.
cer, Jack (Harris Dickinson), who qui- its grimmest damage not from above “Blitz,” too, is filled to bursting with
etly loves her. He remains a fuzzily be- but from within. The Blitz doesn’t just music. Hans Zimmer’s dread-infused
nevolent presence, and any hint of plunge London into chaos; it reveals and score at times evokes the drone of planes
romance is snuffed out too soon; whether exacerbates the chaos that has been seeth- and the scream of sirens, but McQueen
this is a casualty of war, or merely of a ing there all along. practically cues up an orchestra in jubi-
screenwriter’s haste, remains unclear. This is a bracing, even novel, perspec- lant response. He steers us through the
It is George’s perspective, not Rita’s, tive on a war whose film depictions so red lights of a night club where Rita
that dominates “Blitz” and troubles it often traffic in sententious Greatest Gen- and Marcus once embraced with lov-
most deeply. Over a few hellish days eration platitudes. But that hasn’t kept ing abandon, and through a lavish din-
and nights, the boy is hurled from one “Blitz” from being dismissed in some ing hall where a Black jazz band per-
misfortune to the next, none ghastlier critical quarters as “conventional”—and forms for white partyers. In his most
than an encounter with two leering it is, I suppose, next to McQueen’s pre- audacious stroke, McQueen dramatizes
Fagins (Stephen Graham and Kathy vious work, the monumental documen- the ghostly purgatory of an Underground
Burke), who are not just thugs but prof- tary “Occupied City” (2023), which used station where newly arrived spirits, some
iteers.They force the boy to rob bombed- extreme formal limitations (a method- of whom aided George on his journey,
out shops and, horrifically, dead bodies. ical recitation of past atrocities, layered stand transfixed by song. “Blitz” shows
If their malevolence threatens to throw over present-day footage) to convey the us their courage, if not the train that
the story off balance, it has a moral coun- immense scale of the Nazi occupation will bear them onward. 

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 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three
finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Liza Donnelly,
must be received by Sunday, November 3rd. The finalists in the October 21st contest appear below. We will
announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the November 18th issue. Anyone age
thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“Would you have any interest in spending

the night on my porch?”
Lee Ellen Kirkhorn, Apple Valley, Minn.

“I come here a lot . . . but you probably know that.” “Just be glad we don’t live in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Paul Angiolillo, Weston, Mass. Christopher Jablonski, Dublin, Ireland

“Are you going to stare at the entrance all night?”

Hugo Konno, Tokyo, Japan

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from head to tote.
Check out new offerings, evergreen favorites,
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 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

13 14

THE 15 16

CROSSWORD 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24
A moderately challenging puzzle.
25 26 27

BY BROOKE HUSIC
28 29 30

31 32 33
ACROSS
1 Accessory with a medallion 34 35 36
8 Consume eagerly
13 Las Vegas football players 37 38

14 Pass gingerly
39 40 41 42 43
15 No fewer than
16 Refrigerator drawer for produce 44 45 46 47

17 Deep space?
48 49 50 51
18 Ladybug’s prey
20 Reason to do something 52 53

21 Key for getting out of a window

54 55
22 Hardwood option with warm tones
24 “La ___” (Debussy work with an
aquatic theme) DOWN 31 “Abbott Elementary” principal Coleman
25 Alternative to body butter 1 Ankle stabilizer 36 Tea holder
26 Goosebump-inducing 2 Swear words often broadcast uncensored? 40 Metallica drummer Ulrich
28 Vegetable purchased in heads 3 Shrub with purple flowers 41 Boygenius and Hanson, for two
30 Chunks caked in cleats 4 Celebrations in verse 42 Plant used to make mezcal
31 Smart-___ 5 “Pokémon” villains who announce 43 Muscular
32 College-level H.S. classes that they’re “blasting off again” after 44 Symbol of St. Louis
being defeated
33 Gives an edge 45 Act sulky
6 Org. whose headquarters bears the
34 Hand-wavy inscription “Taxes are what we pay for a 47 Penne ___ vodka
35 Ice machines? civilized society” 49 Chain whose first theatre was in
7 Home venue for Mexico’s national Kansas City
37 Uneasy feeling
soccer team 51 Roof-repair goo
38 Drug-safety studies
8 ___-back (relaxed) Solution to the previous puzzle:
39 Kit ___ Club (“Cabaret” setting)
9 The “A” in “wap”
40 “Our adventure awaits!” P S S T I N C A S O F F S
10 Pie option I O W A S O H L A W R I T
41 Bit of ink
11 Some door-to-door trips P R I X T W I L L L E N O
44 Brunched, e.g. E R S J O I N T E D N G O
12 Fire starter, for short
45 Nordstrom rival S Y S C O S E A A R C E D
14 Miami Heat coach Spoelstra I C O N E S L B O H R
46 Ship’s haul
16 1982 Wayne Wang film set in San S A H L L E E K S A B B A
48 “Lonely Together” singer born in Francisco’s Chinatown U S E D C D H A D R O N
Kosovo 19 Occasion for making a splash with friends E K E C L I C H E D E A T

50 Language in which “I’m sorry” is M E S A S B A O S C A R S

23 “. . .” equivalent E D E N D E B T S A D D Y
“mi dispiace”
24 Honeydew, casaba, and the like Y E A R B O O K S
52 Trudges
25 Bug in a Biblical plague C A N A D I A N B A C O N
53 Nineteenth-century cowboy who claimed B A L E R A G E R A D A R
to have earned the nickname Deadwood 26 Deploy the bat signal?
C R O W N N E S A D O P T
Dick in a roping contest 27 Yiddish “Eat!” C R E S S T E R S E
54 Therefore 28 Versatile Scrabble piece
Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
55 Prepped a cookie sheet, perhaps 29 Genre for Ivy Queen newyorker.com/crossword

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