PRICE $8.

99 MARCH 7, 2022
Mitchell Johnson
Paintings from Europe, New England,
Newfoundland, California, and New York

Cap d’Ail (Pool), 2022, 32 x 22 inches, oil on linen. © 2022 Mitchell Johnson.

Digital catalog by request: [email protected]

Follow on Instagram: @mitchell_johnson_artist
More info at www.mitchelljohnson.com
 MARCH 7, 2022

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
David Remnick on Vladimir Putin’s historic delusion;
building a better COVID test; “The Music Man”;
Ai Weiwei’s exhibit of fakes; the chill rise of glaive.
DEPT. OF SCIENCE
James Somers 16 The Final Frontier
Penetrating the mysteries of the cell.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
David Kamp 21 We Demand Age Forgiveness Now!
ANNALS OF ACTIVISM
Andrew Marantz 22 Not Dark Yet
The Sunrise Movement’s climate campaign.
PORTFOLIO
Mark Neville 30 Days of War
with Joshua Yaffa On the ground in eastern Ukraine.
A REPORTER AT LARGE
Lawrence Wright 44 The Elephant in the Courtroom
Should animals have legal rights?
FICTION
Camille Bordas 58 “One Sun Only”
THE CRITICS
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 65 Faith Ringgold at the New Museum.
BOOKS
Louis Menand 67 A new biography of Charles Dickens.
69 Briefly Noted
B. D. McClay 73 Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Checkout 19.”
THE THEATRE
Alexandra Schwartz 76 Sanaz Toossi’s “English.”
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 78 “Huda’s Salon,” “After Yang.”
POEMS
Saeed Jones 51 “Alive at the End of the World”
Jana Prikryl 63 “Why Not”
COVER
David Plunkert “Putin’s Tracks”

DRAWINGS Julia Suits, David Sipress, Liza Donnelly and Carl Kissin, Roz Chast, Maddie Dai, P. C. Vey,
Jason Adam Katzenstein, E. S. Glenn, Liana Finck, Ellis Rosen, Colin Tom, Michael Maslin, Jerald Lewis SPOTS Edward Steed
An Evening with
Mary Beard CONTRIBUTORS
in Conversation with
Lawrence Wright (“The Elephant in the Andrew Marantz (“Not Dark Yet,”
Tim Gunn Courtroom,” p. 44) has been a staff writer p. 22), a staff writer, is the author of
since 1992. His latest book, “The Plague “Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-
Year,” came out in June. Utopians, and the Hijacking of the
Live from the New York American Conversation.”
Public Library Camille Bordas (Fiction, p. 58) teaches
creative writing at the University of Mark Neville (Portfolio, p. 30) is a photo-
March 15, 2022 6:30 p.m. est Florida. Her most recent novel is “How grapher and an activist based in Kyiv,
to Behave in a Crowd.” Ukraine. He recently published “Stop
Tanks with Books.”
James Somers (“The Final Frontier,”
p. 16) is a writer and a programmer Alexandra Schwartz (The Theatre,
based in New York. p. 76), a staff writer since 2016, is a
theatre critic for the magazine.
Joshua Yaffa (Portfolio, p. 30), a Moscow
correspondent for the magazine, is the Saeed Jones (Poem, p. 51) is the author
author of “Between Two Fires: Truth, of the memoir “How We Fight for
Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Our Lives” and of the poetry collec-
Russia.” tion “Prelude to Bruise.” His next book
of poems, “Alive at the End of the
Jana Prikryl (Poem, p. 63) will publish World,” is forthcoming in September.
her third book of poems, “Midwood,”
in August. She is the executive editor B. D. McClay (Books, p. 73) is an essayist
of The New York Review of Books. and a critic.

David Plunkert (Cover), an illustrator Daniel Penny (The Talk of the Town,
and a graphic designer, received the p. 14), a journalist and a critic, writes
2018 National Magazine Award for about art, design, fashion, books, tech-
Best Cover for “Blowhard.” nology, and culture.

THIS WEEK ON NEWYORKER.COM

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 THE MAIL
RIDING CLEAN able capacity for much longer than this.
(Recently, there has also been an up-
As a journalist who has focussed on tick in research and investment in re-
electric vehicles for the past decade, I purposing used E.V. batteries for sta-
enjoyed John Seabrook’s article about tionary electricity storage.) In 2020,
the coming wave of electric pickup researchers at the Eindhoven Univer-
trucks (“Green Giants,” January 31st). sity of Technology found that the un-
However, I noticed a few meaningful derestimation of battery lifetimes was
omissions that might lead a reader to one of the most common mistakes in
underestimate the environmental sus- E.V.-related studies. Upon conducting
tainability of electric vehicles, or E.V.s. their own review of empirical data, the
First, in his discussion of the lifetime Eindhoven researchers concluded that
emissions of E.V.s as compared with most modern E.V. batteries can prob-
those of gas-powered vehicles, Seabrook ably last for more than five hundred
cites a scientist, Rahul Malik, who thousand kilometres—or, for the aver-
claims that, in part because of the emis- age American driver, just over twenty-
sions that result from battery manufac- three years.
turing, an E.V. becomes less emissions- Charles Morris

THE WAY
intensive than a gas-powered vehicle Senior Editor, Charged
only after twenty-five thousand miles Treasure Island, Fla.

NEW YORKERS
of driving. Malik is a distinguished bat-
tery scientist, but he is not the only one Seabrook’s article on electric pickups
who has researched this complex issue; overlooks a significant challenge to E.V.
many other researchers have found that
this equilibrium can be reached much
adoption: areas that lack not only
charging infrastructure but also wire- CREATE
sooner. A model developed by the Ar-
gonne National Laboratory indicates
that, last year, a Tesla Model 3 driven
less-network coverage. I own a prop-
erty in upstate New York. I have to take
a boat across a river to get there. The
LEGACIES
in the U.S. would have reached lifetime boat landing where I park my truck
emissions parity with a Toyota Corolla does not have power and is fifteen miles With a bequest to
after thirteen thousand five hundred from cell service. The experience of ar-
miles. Tesla, in its 2020 Impact Report, riving in the middle of a cold, dark,
The New York
claims that its Model 3 has lower life- rainy night with a low battery that Community Trust,
time emissions than a comparable car couldn’t be charged on-site, combined you can champion
powered by an internal-combustion en- with the inability to use an app to find the causes and
gine after only five thousand three hun- nearby compatible chargers, would be,
dred and forty miles. The point at which as Seabrook notes of his own north- communities you
driving an E.V. becomes less emissions- ward journey on a dwindling battery, care about—for
intensive than driving a gas-powered “neither seamless nor delightful” in the generations to come.
car varies widely, depending on the car least. E.V. technology may be improv-
model in question, the sources of the ing swiftly, but the lack of wireless cov-
electricity on the grid of the region erage in rural and remote areas has to
where it is driven, and the vehicle with be addressed before most people living
which it’s being compared. there will consider an electric pickup
Seabrook also states that a majority to be a safe and reliable option.
of E.V. batteries are “rated to last no Josh Garbarino
more than eight to ten years.” Accord- Philadelphia, Pa.
ing to federal law, all E.V. batteries must
be warranted against failure for eight • Kickstart your charitable legacy
years. (In California, the requirement Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, with NYC’s community foundation.
is ten.) Several studies have measured address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to giving@nyct-cfi.org
real-world battery degradation over a [email protected]. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in (212) 686-0010 x363
number of years and concluded that a any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
typical E.V. battery should retain us- of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. giveto.nyc
 MARCH 2 – 8, 2022

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

Around twenty-five hundred years ago, an Indian prince awoke to the suffering of other beings and, long
story short, became the Buddha. In late January, the Brooklyn Museum unveiled a far more complex and
visually rich history of Buddhism in a new gallery on its second floor. Some seventy objects are displayed,
made in fourteen countries between the second century A.D. and the early two-thousands, including this
“Seated Buddha Torso,” carved from green limestone, in Andhra Pradesh, India, in the late third century.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC HELGAS

 As ever, it’s advisable to confirm engagements Beginning in the sixties, Monk has used her Hammer” in 2014, returns for this concert in

1
in advance and to check the requirements for voice to do things that the human voice has Zankel Hall. Performances of “Cruel Sister,”
in-person attendance. not traditionally done, contorting her vocal written for string orchestra, and the Pulitzer
cords to produce guttural, often wordless ulu- Prize-winning “Anthracite Fields,” for chorus
lations and wielding them like a high-octane and chamber ensemble, follow in April and
instrument being invented in real time. Listen May, respectively.—Oussama Zahr (Zankel
MUSIC to “Education of the Girlchild: Travelling,” Hall; March 3 at 7:30.)
from her 1981 studio album, “Dolmen Music,”
to hear Monk push the conceivable limits
Suzanne Ciani of singing so far that they fall out of view Tibet House U.S. Benefit Concert
ELECTRONIC Since its launch, in 2016, the roving entirely. For “Duet Behavior 2022,” at the BENEFIT In the course of its thirty-five years, the
Ambient Church series has become a fixture in Williamsburg art space National Sawdust, Tibet House Benefit Concert has perfected a
the lives of musically imaginative New York- Monk, now seventy-nine, is joined by the curatorial stew, merging debonair New York
ers, particularly those who prefer their night percussionist John Hollenbeck for a survey of elders, critically lauded newcomers, chanting
life with celestial light shows and kombucha. her discography. Through improvisation, the monks, and the spiritually cleansing vision of
Returning to the series this week is Suzanne two stretch her expansive compositions even Iggy Pop’s unclad torso. Show business offers
Ciani, the seventy-five-year-old Californian further.—J.P. (National Sawdust; March 6.) few venue downgrades as stark as the one suf-
electronic-music pioneer who is like a pa- fered by the concert during the past two years,
tron saint to the whole enterprise, thanks to as the pandemic bumped it from Carnegie Hall
such albums as the sublimely melodic “Seven “Steel Hammer” to the realm of live streaming. Yet the booking,
Waves” and her idiosyncratic sound design for CLASSICAL The composer Julia Wolfe uses vocal superintended, as always, by Philip Glass, the
advertisements. Ciani has been exploring the ensembles to tell shared stories. “Steel Ham- concert’s artistic director, remains enviable.
modular Buchla synthesizer since the nine- mer,” the second entry in a Carnegie Hall The Tibet House mainstay Patti Smith anchors
teen-seventies, when, for many, electronic series dedicated to Wolfe’s work, renders “The a lineup that extends to inscrutable dazzlers
instruments may have seemed to come from Ballad of John Henry” in three-part harmony, (Laurie Anderson, the Fiery Furnaces), open-
another planet. She is now the perfect art- but only fragments of the lyrics, sometimes eared African-centered pop (Angélique Kidjo),
ist to soothe inhabitants of this one. Ciani drawn from conflicting versions, emerge in and brainy roots acts (Margo Price, Jason Isbell,
performs both an afternoon and an evening Wolfe’s borderline-obsessive treatment of Punch Brothers). Meanwhile, Iggy Pop, Paul
set, in quadraphonic sound, inside an Upper the text. The work’s rhythmic accompaniment Simon, and others drop by with greetings. But
East Side cathedral.—Jenn Pelly (Church of the punctuates the story of the steel-driving Black no major event would feel appropriate to the
Heavenly Rest; March 5.) folk hero with mountain dulcimer, banjo, per- current moment without an uncanny twist: enter
cussion, and even hand clapping, and Bang Keanu Reeves, reading Allen Ginsberg.—Jay
on a Can All-Stars, which recorded “Steel Ruttenberg (thus.org/benefit-concert; March 3.)
EXEK: “Advertise Here”
PUNK The gray-steel lo-fi racket that the
Melbourne post-punks EXEK perform is
built around bass lines, played by both the DREAM POP
bassist Ben Hepworth and the singer-writ-
er-producer Albert Wolski, and dryly echoing
drums, from Chris Stephenson, that reek
of long hours monkeying with low-end ru-
diments learned from Public Image Ltd.’s
“Metal Box.” The songs themselves have
the nonchalance of Brian Eno’s solo record-
ings from the mid-seventies, with Wolski’s
plangent voice evoking Eno’s, and they
come wrapped in wonderfully droll titles,
including “(I’m After) Your Best Interest”
and “Parricide Is Painless.”—Michaelangelo
Matos (Streaming on select platforms.)

Kendra Shank Trio with Gary

Versace and Dean Johnson
JAZZ For the vocalist Kendra Shank, a song
is an orb of malleable clay to be molded
according to mood and inspiration. In less
sure hands, that risk-taking could spell sonic
disaster, but Shank has the chops to uproot
well-worn standards and offbeat jazz origi-
nals and relocate them in fresh terrain. Her
album “Half Moon,” a live duet recording
with the pianist Geoffrey Keezer, sprinkles
chestnuts such as “Alone Together” in with Since 2006, the Baltimore-based duo Beach House have continually
songs co-composed by such worthy instru- discovered heightened sensations within their patented dream-pop sound-
mentalists as Fred Hersch, Thad Jones, Cedar scape. The eighth record from the singer-producer Victoria Legrand and
Walton, and Kirk Nurock. Shank’s equally in-
the multi-instrumentalist Alex Scally, “Once Twice Melody,” a double LP
ILLUSTRATION BY MARÍA MEDEM

the-moment accompanists are the pianist Gary

Versace and the bassist Dean Johnson.—Steve divided into four chapters, is their most extensive release yet, as sprawling
Futterman (Soapbox Gallery; March 4.) as it is undefined. Pushing aside the impulse to cut back the overgrowth,
the band opted instead to lean into this music’s scope and variety. Like all
Meredith Monk Beach House albums, this one is absorbing and disorienting—a rolling
EXPERIMENTAL The avant-garde icon Meredith fog that consumes the listener—but here we wade deeper into the haze
Monk is a pioneer of extended vocal tech-
nique, a sensibility defined by the perennially than ever before. By the fourth chapter, Legrand’s disembodied voice has
unexpected and the profoundly unknown. become a guide to somewhere else, somewhere beyond.—Sheldon Pearce

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 5

 Joyce features the première of “The One to Stay
ON TELEVISION With,” a critique of corporate greed by the rising
duo Baye & Ase, who draw on hip-hop in their
work. Also on the bill: Micaela Taylor’s James
Brown-inspired ensemble romp, “Snap,” and
Fernando Magadan’s schizophrenia-inspired the-
atrical duet “(D)elusive Minds.”—Brian Seibert
(Joyce Theatre; March 1-6.)

Caleb Teicher and Conrad Tao

In recent years, the tap dancer Caleb Teicher
and the pianist Conrad Tao, both bold and
virtuosic performers, have been teaming up
for duo concerts, fun affairs in which they
revel in each other’s gifts. For “Counterpoint,”
at the 92nd Street Y (and also available to
stream for a few days after the live show), the
program begins and ends with the aria from
Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In between come
more classical classics (Brahms, Mozart), jazz
and tap classics (“Cherokee,” the Coles and Bu-
falino soft-shoe), and the hybrid classic “Rhap-
sody in Blue.”—B.S. (92nd Street Y; March 3.)

Tiler Peck
New York City Ballet’s can-do ballerina Tiler
Peck is now also a can-do director. This program
Is there a more overused prop on television than the overfull wineglass? A of new works, which Peck curated as part of
woman of any age enters her home, exhausted from a crisis mild or extreme, City Center’s “Artists at the Center” series, is
and unthinkingly self-soothes with that adult milk. Simone Finch’s new made up of four dances, including a piece cho-
reographed by Peck and a co-creation with the
series, “Single Drunk Female,” on Freeform, brings critical thought, breezily innovative tap artist Michelle Dorrance. “The
shaped, to the phenomenon of alcoholism among young women, without Barre Project,” by William Forsythe, was com-
hardening into preachiness. Samantha Fink (the wonderful Sofia Black- posed entirely during the pandemic, and entirely
remotely, via Zoom. The four dancers, including
D’Elia), a recovering alcoholic in her late twenties, sulks back to her home Peck, rehearsed in different locations across the
town after a drunken display at her digital-media job leads first to her firing country while Forsythe gave instructions from
and then to her arrest. Securing a job at the local supermarket and manag- his computer in Vermont. “Swift Arrow,” by
the San Francisco-based Alonzo King, is a duet
ing her relationship with her emotionally unavailable mother, Carol (Ally for Peck and the rising phenom Roman Mejía.
Sheedy), prove difficult for Samantha as she struggles to maintain her newbie Other dancers include Herman Cornejo and
sobriety. “Single Drunk Female” keeps its examinations of temperance and Isabella Boylston, of American Ballet Theatre,
and Lauren Lovette, recently retired from City
indulgence fizzy and light, which feels weirdly radical; here is a show that Ballet.—Marina Harss (City Center; March 4-6.)
presents the alcoholic as neither a maverick nor a demon but simply a regular
person. The series is the sort of formulaic, low-stress charmer that could Raphael Xavier
further distinguish Freeform, a branch of Disney’s ABC Family that hasn’t This Philadelphia choreographer has been study-
been able to truly excite its target audience of young adults for some years ing the possibilities of b-boying for decades. In

1
now. The show can be corny, but also surprisingly sexy.—Doreen St. Félix “The Music & the Mover,” which is now getting
its New York première, he continues those explo-
rations with the accompaniment of a jazz quar-
tet. Now in his early fifties, Xavier surrounds
spectrum themselves, which can give the perfor- himself with two younger dancers, the highly
TELEVISION mances a documentary feel. The flaw is in the skilled Josh Culbreath and Martha Bernabel,
situating of the “normal” perspective. There is a and pushes his b-boying into a metaphorical zone

1
As We See It disconcerting sense that, through figures such as with history-minded spoken word and symbolic
the adults’ caretaker, Mandy (Sosie Bacon), and boxes.—B.S. (New York Live Arts; March 3-5.)
This new eight-episode series on Amazon is Violet’s overbearing brother, Van (Chris Pang),
smart schmaltz. It’s the latest from the writer the show is offering controls for the autistic char-
Jason Katims, a well-known purveyor of the acters—a kind of icky translation of the neuro-

1
shameless tearjerker soap (“Friday Night divergent brain for the neurotypical viewer. But THE THEATRE
Lights,” “Parenthood”). Katims is curiously in- the charm overwhelms the ick.—Doreen St. Félix
consistent, and “As We See It” is a fine platform
Space Dogs
ILLUSTRATION BY JASJYOT SINGH HANS

for both his talents and his faults. The show

follows three twentysomething roommates who Two puppyish dudes in navy-blue jumpsuits—
are all on the autism spectrum: the shy Harri- DANCE Van Hughes and Nick Blaemire—wrote and
son (Albert Rutecki), whose fear of loud noises perform this musical tribute to the forty dogs
prevents him from going out in public; the tech that the Soviet space program propelled sky-
programmer Jack (Rick Glassman); and Violet, Bodytraffic ward during the Cold War. In comparison with
played by the excellent Sue Ann Pien, a spirited Founded, fifteen years ago, by two New York other history-fascinated rock duos, they’re
young Asian American woman pining for real dancers who had decamped to Los Angeles, something like a smarter Bill and Ted crossed
romantic and sexual connection. “How am I Bodytraffic has always been a dancer-focussed with a dumber They Might Be Giants. Directed
supposed to have a normal life?” asks Violet. company, inviting an eclectic list of contem- by Ellie Heyman, for MCC Theatre, and cen-
The show’s sweet and unoriginal argument is porary choreographers to make pieces for its tered on the largely imagined best-friendship
that normalcy is a fiction. The actors are on the agile members. The group’s return visit to the between Laika (Blaemire)—the first animal

6 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022

 to orbit Earth—and a leading Cosmodrome the monumentality of his definitive achievement. Moses Sumney
scientist (Hughes), the show is goofy and sen- I came away at once thrilled and frustrated by the
timental, with Russian accents that sound like legacy of a flabbergasting talent.—Peter Schjeldahl For two days in July, 2020, this Ghanaian Amer-
Borat by way of Transylvania. But the songs are (Morgan Library & Museum; through May 15.) ican musical phenom filmed himself giving
engaging—especially the one about the ex-Nazi an outdoor concert, without an audience, in
rocketeer Wernher von Braun—and the stage is the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
stuffed with fun puppets and props, designed Anne Ryan The resulting feature, “Blackalachia,” screens
by Amanda Villalobos, including a disco-ball This American modernist—a poet, a painter, six times a day in this exhibition. (Beanbag
Sputnik.—Rollo Romig (Susan & Ronald Frankel and a printmaker—didn’t begin to make collages chairs are supplied for comfortable viewing.)
Theatre; through March 13.) until she was in her late fifties. Seeing a Kurt The panoramic sweep of the remote landscape
Schwitters exhibition in 1948 prompted the shift. serves as a metaphor for the epic quality of
But Ryan, who was part of the New York School, Sumney’s work—his vocal and emotional
Wolf Play didn’t favor the German artist’s Dada-inflected range, his easy merging of genres (soul, jazz,
This smart, sweet, sad new work, written by style; instead, her exacting, lyrical sensibility was orchestral pop, alternative R. & B.), and the ex-
Hansol Jung and directed by Dustin Wills, a quiet strain of Abstract Expressionism. The ceptional scope of his lyrics. Performing songs
is fixated on legal and theatrical fictions. It untitled works, made between 1948 and 1954 (the from his first two albums, including “Græ,”
starts off speculatively: a performer called Wolf year Ryan died), on view in this elegant show released during lockdown, with a small band,
(Mitchell Winter) pops onto a stage overhung are small, many just five by four inches. But Sumney glitters in his verdant surroundings
with pulleys and sandbags, asking a series of wisps of torn paper and scraps of fabric assume wearing black sequinned or beaded couture
questions that frame the story to come: “What bold proportions in these compressed composi- ensembles. Yet the film, however spectacular,
if I said I am not what you think you see?” This tions. Stray fibres become decisive lines; minor isn’t slick. The illusion of a levitation trick is
abstract speculation gives way to a concrete tale. wrinkles offer rich texture. One particularly undercut by a reveal of the rigging, and there
Wolf handles a puppet that represents a boy striking work centers on a black oval, within is a rough edge of urgency to Sumney’s moody
named Jeenu, who was adopted as a small child which a beige crescent and a burgundy paral- lighting effects as night falls. Gallerygoers
and has essentially been sold, through a Yahoo lelogram, bisected by a line of shredded gauze, will need to time their arrival with care in
message board, by his first adoptive family to are terse phrases in an abstract stanza.—Jo- order to catch the film in its entirety, but it’s
another. Jeenu’s new parents are Robin (Nicole hanna Fateman (Washburn; through April 2.) worth the effort to see Sumney’s plein-air,
Villamil) and Ash (Esco Jouléy, a lovely study
in subtle movement), a queer couple into whose
already strained relationship the troubled kid AT THE GALLERIES
drops like a bomb. The play’s sometimes painful
suspense hangs on whether these structures—
legal and loving—can withstand an external
onslaught, embodied by Jeenu’s former adoptive
father, Peter (Aubie Merrylees), and Robin’s
brother, Ryan (Brandon Mendez Homer). What
if I said that that question haunts us all? And
what if I said that the answer, all too often, is

1
no?—Vinson Cunningham (Reviewed in our issue
of 2/28/22.) (SoHo Rep; through March 20.)

ART

“Holbein: Capturing Character”

There’s a new old painter in town: Hans Holbein
the Younger, the dazzling Renaissance specialist
in portraiture, with his first major American
show of paintings, at the Morgan Library & Mu-
seum. It has been a long wait since 1543, when the
German artist died while in service to England’s
Henry VIII. Why? Holbein is an awkward fit
in art history—overqualified, in a way, for the
sixteenth century’s march of eclectic Mannerist
styles toward the aesthetic revolution of the
Baroque. He is familiar to New Yorkers from a More than fifty ambassadors from the Peruvian Amazon—jaguars,
hands-down masterpiece, on loan from the Frick: monkeys, armadillos, parrots, caimans, anacondas, capybaras, river dol-
“Sir Thomas More” (1527), a portrait of the great
humanist and future Lord High Chancellor of phins, red squirrels—are assembled at Salon 94 until March 26, in the
England. That More’s head was lopped off, in surprisingly moving exhibition “The Council of the Mother Spirits
1535, for objecting to Henry’s religious poli- of the Animals.” Their creator is Celia Vasquez Yui, who works in the
cies is an incidental piquancy—you can’t de-
duce much about the period’s upheavals, except Indigenous ceramic tradition of her people, the Shipibo, in the city of
obliquely, from Holbein’s career as a hired-gun Pucallpa, where she was born in 1960. (The show was co-organized by
celebrant of whoever employed him, most de- the nonprofit Shipibo Conibo Center, based in Harlem.) The coil-built
cisively Henry. But Holbein proved very, very
COURTESY THE ARTIST / SALON 94

good at modernizing the kicked-up realism of process she uses is thousands of years old, and its practice is matrilin-
Northern Renaissance styles. Consider, and be eal—for the Shipibo, all great artists are women. To call Vasquez Yui
wowed by, his renderings of skin: aglow with an artist is also to call her a healer; the concepts are indistinguishable
light that can appear either to fall upon or to
radiate from within a subject, if not somehow in her world. Kené, the mazelike patterns that cover the surfaces of her
both at once. His virtuosity with fabrics and remarkable menagerie, represent sonic vibrations, and the show has
heraldic ornament stuns, preternaturally. Could an audible element: a two-hour recording of an ayahuasca ceremony
Holbein have been a greater artist if he’d been
granted imaginative license? Maybe and maybe performed in the Amazon by a group of ancestral healers, in which the
not. He would be different, and we would miss patient being administered to is nature herself.—Andrea K. Scott
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 7
lemons-into-lemonade pandemic artistry pro- here; the Borrowers are most entertaining, and (Anna Svierkier, in a brave and heartrending

1
jected on a grand scale.—J.F. (Nicola Vassell; most true to themselves, when they are simply performance), who seeks refuge with Anne
through March 5.) hanging out, dining off a single pea or hiding and reveals that Anne’s own mother had faced
among the toy soldiers in a child’s bedroom. such charges. (In German-occupied Denmark,
They move from a dusky English cottage to a the characters’ use of the word “witch” rings
neat suburban street, but behind them looms a like “Jew,” and Anne’s torture evokes Gestapo
MOVIES surreal cityscape that suggests an H. G. Wells methods.) Furious passions burst through the
fantasy of the future. Small world, huh? Re- movie’s quiet sobriety: Anne, gliding word-
leased in 1998.—Anthony Lane (Streaming on lessly, ensnares Martin in her gaze as if with
The Borrowers Prime Video, Google Play, and other services.) a dance of the seven veils. Dreyer’s impious,
It took filmmakers a surprisingly long time anarchic drama is a cry of rage at abusive au-
to latch onto Mary Norton’s endearing tales thority, whether political, familial, religious, or
of the Borrowers—miniature humans, six Day of Wrath moral; he celebrates erotic love as the natural
inches high, who live under floorboards and The subject is religion and the style is chaste, order of things. In Danish.—Richard Brody
behind wainscots in English houses. On the but Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1943 drama is ac- (Playing March 5-7 at Anthology Film Archives
other hand, it takes advanced technology to do tually a defiant paean to pleasure. The story, and streaming on the Criterion Channel.)
them justice: witness the scene, early in Peter set in a Danish village in 1623, concerns Anne
Hewitt’s movie, when Pod (Jim Broadbent), (Lisbeth Movin), the young wife of a grim,
the gallant head of a Borrower family, bounces aged minister (Thorkild Roose). Living love- Dear Mr. Brody
around a full-sized kitchen and lands in the ice lessly with him and bitterly under his mother’s In January, 1970, Michael James Brody, Jr., a
dispenser. Hewitt wraps the family in a slice tyrannical yoke, Anne begins a passionate affair twenty-one-year-old heir to a fortune made in
of overheated hokum, involving a ravenous with her husband’s grown son, Martin (Preben the margarine business, sparked a media frenzy
villain (John Goodman) and a pest extermi- Lerdorff Rye). The framework of the drama, by declaring his intention to give his many
nator (Mark Williams), but violent slapstick though, is witch-hunting, starting with the millions away to anyone who asked. Keith
and low scatological gags seem way out of place interrogation and torture of an elderly woman Maitland’s inspired documentary about this
strange, ultimately melancholy story features
interviews with Brody’s widow, Renee; their
son, Jamie; and others in Brody’s circle, along
ON THE BIG SCREEN with a vast array of archival news footage and
press clippings (and some ill-advised reënact-
ments). But the dramatic heart of the film is
diligent and empathetic detective work. Mait-
land and the film’s producer, Melissa Robyn
Glassman, gained access to tens of thousands
of letters sent to Brody’s Scarsdale home and
New York office by people asking for money—
and, after reading many of them, managed to
connect with some of the applicants or their
descendants. Through these letters and re-
lated interviews, Maitland uncovers a world
of pain and need, tales of misfortune and of
frustrated ambition that make for mini dramas
in themselves. The sensationalism of the cov-
erage that Brody received at the time contrasts
poignantly with the realities that his scheme
laid bare.—R.B. (In limited theatrical release.)

Strawberry Mansion
This wildly imaginative low-budget science
fantasy, written and directed by Kentucker
Audley and Albert Birney, is set in 2035, when
dreams are subject to product placement and
taxation. Audley also stars as Jim Preble, a
federal dream auditor who shows up at the
remote house of Bella (Penny Fuller), an el-
One of the highlights of this year’s edition of “Rendez-Vous with French derly widow. As he scrutinizes the dreams that
Cinema,” playing March 3-13 at Film at Lincoln Center, is Axelle Ropert’s are stored on her trove of VHS cassettes, he
new feature, “Petite Solange,” a modernist twist on a coming-of-age story discovers that he’s a part of them—he has an
inside-the-dreamworld connection with Bella’s
by way of classic melodrama. The title character, played by the pensive and younger self (Grace Glowicki)—and that her
precise Jade Springer, is a studious middle schooler who’s growing up in a dreams spill over into his real life. As Bella’s
close-knit, culturally sophisticated family in Nantes—her father (Philippe greedy relatives show up and confront Jim,
chases through multiple levels of consciousness
Katerine) owns a musical-instrument store, her mother (Léa Drucker) is ensue; in the most spectacular of them, a closet
an actress, and her older brother (Grégoire Montana) is a budding mathe- leads to a free fall from the sky into the ocean
matician. The placid flow of Solange’s orderly existence is disrupted by the and, from there, to a desert island. The movie’s
teeming decorative loopiness has a point; its
heated whispers and hushed fury of her parents’ arguments; amid the threat talking animals, skeletal monsters, and crea-
COURTESY AURORA FILMS 2021

of their separation, her studies, her friendships, and her self-control risk tures draped in foliage and videotape antically
falling apart. Ropert pares the drama to stark, sharply defined moments; mirror the ambient menace of mind control
through moving images and the present-day

1
she spotlights, in tight closeups and discerning panoramas, the turmoil of corporate hegemony over inner life.—R.B. (In
Solange’s keen perceptions as they overwhelm her immature yet intense theatrical release and video on demand.)
emotions. The action builds to a virtually operatic, dialogue-free sequence,
of Solange’s lonely wanderings amid nighttime street life, which puts into For more reviews, visit
images her unspeakable anguish.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town

8 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022

 Balogun said the other day. “Every night he says. “Come on, guys—it’s just milk!”
here is a party.” For now, Dept of Culture With gallons of discreetly purchased
is open only fourteen hours a week, and unpasteurized cow milk, he prepares
reservations are required. You sign up for wara, spongy fried curds served warm

1
one of the week’s seven two-hour blocks, and dressed in a red-pepper sauce called
show up on time, and make your way obe ata. It pairs nicely with gbegiri, a rich
through the same sequence of dishes as and funky stew made with fermented
TABLES FOR TWO your fellow-diners. Balogun employs a locust beans.
hostess-waitress and a dishwasher to Another recurring dish is suya, a
Dept of Culture Brooklyn help keep pace, but he does all the cook- popular street food consisting of steak
327 Nostrand Ave., Brooklyn ing himself, with only the most essential strips that are tossed with yaji, a fra-
equipment: two induction burners, a grant and fiery spice mix, then skew-
The most conspicuous piece of fur- blender, a food processor, a KitchenAid ered, grilled, and presented on sheets
niture at Dept of Culture Brooklyn, a mixer, and a convection oven. of newspaper. For his yaji, Balogun
new Nigerian restaurant in Bed-Stuy, With each course, Balogun emerges deploys a proprietary blend of spices
is the communal table. It’s built of solid from the kitchen and offers a bit of that his mother brought over from Ni-
oak and monopolizes the floor space. context on the food’s origin and signif- geria on a recent visit, along with gin-
The small room is the site of a former icance. A recent evening commenced ger, roasted groundnuts, and turmeric.
barbershop; you can tell by the many with a scorching fish pepper soup, a Breaking with tradition, he uses octopus
outlets that still line its walls, which are staple of beer parlors that’s meant to be or trumpet mushrooms in place of beef
now ornamented with photographs of enjoyed with lager or stout. (Balogun, a and balances the dish’s heat with chilled
the owner-chef Ayo Balogun’s relatives teetotaller for many years, has a supply cucumber slices.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ZACHARY ZAVISLAK; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE

in Nigeria. The lighting is warm and of complimentary wine, mostly South Nigeria is home to more than two
dim. An antique record player spins African, and a B.Y.O.B. policy for ev- hundred and fifty ethnic groups and
Fela Kuti and other eminences of nine- erything else.) The soup is flavored with twice as many languages; the offerings
teen-seventies Afrobeat. And there, in thyme, cilantro, and ata rodo, one of the at Dept of Culture represent but a small
an open kitchen, is Balogun himself, hottest chilies anywhere; Balogun uses sample of the nation’s food. Balogun
bopping to protest songs as he cooks, one or two peppers for an entire batch. has signed a ten-year lease and plans to
for a dozen patrons per seating, four On this night, he used succulent chunks expand his tasting menu to cover the
courses, all inspired by the cuisine of of swordfish, but sometimes swaps in cuisines of other states. He’s consid-
his native Kwara State. catfish, red snapper, or tilapia. ering going on a kind of sabbatical to
The atmosphere he’s trying to con- The menu morphs based on what’s Nigeria to study with assorted chefs and
jure is that of a buka, a generally casual in stock at African markets around esteemed home cooks, but, for now, he
eatery that’s ubiquitous in Nigeria. After town. Balogun will cross state lines for has decided to offer his space to other
two years of social distancing, banquet- certain ingredients. There are strict pro- Nigerian chefs in the city, as a platform
ing on pounded yam and delectably salty hibitions around the selling of raw milk for them to showcase their own regional
mackerel alongside unmasked strangers in New York, so he drives over to lawless fare. “I already have some aunties lined
still feels slightly indecent, if undeniably Connecticut for the real stuff. “I feel like up,” he said. (Prix-fixe dinner $75.)
wonderful. “I feel like Boris Johnson,” I’m buying drugs every time I go there,” —David Kortava
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 9
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT a Ukrainian “genocide” against the Rus- control. This has long been the case in
LET HISTORY JUDGE sian-speaking population in that coun- Russia. In 1825, Tsar Nicholas I put down
try. His deployment of distortion and the Decembrist uprising and then sought
ladimir Putin delivered a bitter and deception as weapons is hardly unique. to expunge the affair from the official
V delusional speech from the Krem-
lin last week, arguing that Ukraine is not
After the First World War, many Ger-
man reactionaries and military leaders,
history books, lest the revolt be repeated.
What little freedom scholars had under
a nation and Ukrainians are not a peo- in their humiliation, declared that they the Communist Party vanished when,
ple. His order to execute a “special mil- had not lost on the battlefield; instead, in 1928, the All-Union Conference of
itary operation” came shortly afterward. disloyal leftists, scheming politicians, Marxist Historians declared that the
The professed aim is to “demilitarize and and, above all, the Jews had stirred up chief historian of the Soviet Union was
de-Nazify” this supposedly phantasmal labor unrest in the arms industry in order its dictator, Josef Stalin. He was the pu-
neighbor of forty million people, whose to undermine the war effort. This was tative author of “Kratki kurs”—“The
government is so pro-Nazi that it is led the legend of the Dolchstoss im Rücken, Short Course”—which described how
by a Jewish President who was elected the stab-in-the-back story that Hitler all of human history had led inexora-
with seventy per cent of the vote. used to denigrate the Weimar Repub- bly to the glorious revolution and the
Like many aging autocrats, Putin has, lic, in general, and the Jews, in particu- Communist Party; all his Bolshevik ri-
over time, remained himself, only more lar, as he built support for his fascist vals were “White Guard pygmies whose
so: more resentful, more isolated, more movement and another war. strength was no more than that of a gnat.”
repressive, more ruthless. He operates in History is never a settled matter. No alternatives to “The Short Course”
an airless political environment, free of American politics is no stranger to fierce were permitted.
contrary counsel. His stagecraft—seat- arguments about the past. But, when an In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev took a
ing foreign visitors at the opposite end autocrat is the sole narrator of the na- step toward restoring history. In his
of a twenty-foot-long table, humiliating tional archive, history becomes subsumed so-called secret speech to the Commu-
security chiefs in front of television cam- into the instrumental aims of policy and nist Party leadership, he criticized Sta-
eras—is a blend of “Triumph of the Will” lin for carrying out purges of Party mem-
and “The Great Dictator.” But there is bers, inadequately preparing for war
nothing comic in the performance of with Nazi Germany, and cruelly deport-
his office. As Putin spills blood across ing and oppressing ethnic minorities.
Ukraine and threatens to destabilize Eu- Khrushchev’s remarks, though concealed
rope, Russians themselves stand to lose from the population, led to a short-lived
immeasurably. The ruble and the Rus- “thaw,” and to the release of many thou-
sian stock market have cratered. But Putin sands of Soviet political prisoners.
does not care. His eyes are fixed on mat- But it was not until Mikhail Gor-
ters far grander than the well-being of bachev came to power that a Kremlin
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA

his people. He is in full command of the leader opened a true discussion of the
largest army in Europe, and, as he has past. “Even now, we still encounter at-
reminded the world, of an immense ar- tempts to ignore sensitive questions of
senal of nuclear weapons. In his mind, our history, to hush them up,” Gorbachev
this is his moment, his triumphal his- said, in 1987, in a speech marking the
torical drama, and damn the cost. seventieth anniversary of the October
Putin’s official media outlets echo his Revolution. “We cannot agree to this. It
claim that the Army’s mission is to stop would be a neglect of historical truth,
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 11
disrespect for the memory” of those who leader who succeeded him, for catering Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelensky,
were repressed. to the West and failing to hold back the the President of Ukraine, has behaved
That speech proved shrewd and trans- expansion of NATO, reveres strength with profound dignity even though he
formative. Gorbachev signalled that the above all. If he has to distort history, he knows that he is targeted for arrest, or
time had come to examine the history will. As a man who came into his own worse. Aware of the lies saturating Rus-
of the Soviet Union, including the “se- as an officer of the K.G.B., he also be- sia’s official media, he went on televi-
cret protocols” of Stalin’s pact with Hit- lieves that foreign conspiracy is at the sion and, speaking in Russian, implored
ler, which paved the way for the annex- root of all popular uprisings. In recent ordinary Russian citizens to stand up
ation of the Baltic states and the brutal years, he has regarded pro-democracy for the truth. Some needed no prompt-
subjugation of Poland. Nearly overnight, protests in Kyiv and Moscow as the work ing. On Thursday, Dmitry Muratov,
Soviet citizens learned how the deci- of the C.I.A. and the U.S. State Depart- the editor of the independent newspa-
sions had been made to invade Buda- ment, and therefore demanding to be per Novaya Gazeta, and a winner of the
pest, in 1956, Prague, in 1968, and Kabul, crushed. This cruel and pointless war Nobel Peace Prize, said that he would
in 1979. One of the watersheds of the against Ukraine is an extension of that publish the next issue in Russian and
Gorbachev era was the creation, in 1989, disposition. Not for the first time, though, Ukrainian. “We are feeling shame as
of Memorial, an organization charged a sense of beleaguerment has proved well as sorrow,” Muratov said. “Only
with exploring Soviet history and its ar- self-fulfilling. Putin’s assault on a sover- an antiwar movement of Russians can
chives and upholding the principles of eign state has not only helped to unify save life on this planet.” As if on cue,
the rule of law and of human rights. Pu- the West against him; it has helped to demonstrations against Putin’s war
tin’s regime, mobilizing against civil so- unify Ukraine itself. What threatens broke out in dozens of Russian cities.
ciety, has tellingly designated Memorial Putin is not Ukrainian arms but Ukrainian Leaders of Memorial, despite the re-
a “foreign agent” and ordered the group liberty. His invasion amounts to a furi- gime’s liquidation order, were also heard
to be shut down. ous refusal to live with the contrast be- from: the war on Ukraine, they said,
Putin, who blames Gorbachev for de- tween the repressive system he keeps in will go down as “a disgraceful chapter
filing the reputation and the stability of place at home and the aspirations for in Russian history.”
the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin, the liberal democracy across the border. —David Remnick

INNOVATION DEPT. on so many things.” He ran through forward. In his twenties, he said, he
PUT YOUR LIPS TOGETHER an abbreviated C.V.: college dropout came up with the idea for the modern
(four times), coder, welder, artist, sci- motorcycle disk brake, which helped
entist, filmmaker, designer, defense con- him slow down before corners. (He
tractor, and decorated motorcycle racer. claimed a third-place finish at the 1964
Some of his technical skills owe to a Grand Prix at Daytona.) It did not make
stint in computer animation. In the him rich, thanks to an overworked pat-
seventies, he found work on a McDon- ent lawyer.
he problem with COVID tests is ald’s ad starring a young Carl Weath- Starting over after a divorce, broke,
T that they’re easy to get when you
don’t need them and impossible to get
ers and a flying hamburger that Geh-
ring programmed using Microsoft
he got a job as a welder at a foundry
upstate. When his employer learned
when you do. When the Omicron wave BASIC. “At that time, Microsoft was that he knew about computers, he
was peaking, people stood in testing two guys in an office in Albuquerque, began working with Jeff Koons (“a great
lines for hours, and store shelves were Bill Gates and Paul Allen,” he said. guy with a terrific eye”) and other well-
wiped clean of kits. The next wave may “When I had a problem, I’d call up and known artists, rendering ideas into 3-D
not be any easier. Is this a job for a base- talk to one of them.” computer models. Gehring eventually
ment inventor? Not long ago, Bo Geh- Gehring’s 3-D images caught the set up a studio in a decommissioned
ring, an eighty-year-old with a nearly eye of Steven Spielberg. “He calls up high school in Beacon. Among other
full head of wispy gray hair and six ti- one day, and he is obsessed with the things, he figured out how to mount
tanium ribs, sat in the living room of idea of using our C.G.I. to do a landing- cameras on a track above a flatbed mill-
his aerie in the woods near Woodstock pad sequence in the film he was mak- ing machine to make life-size, full-
and discussed his attempt at a home- ing,” he said. It turned out to be “Close body portraits. When he was seventy-
made solution: a portable, Breathalyzer- Encounters of the Third Kind.” Later, one, one of them won a prize from the
style gadget he calls Sarsie. Gehring helped “fly” the Starship En- National Portrait Gallery.
“I was looking at this two-minute terprise on “Star Trek” and invented a Gehring led the way into a spare
video simulation of airflow in a Chi- 3-D sound system for the Air Force bedroom that doubles as his workshop.
nese restaurant and could see in a sec- that enabled pilots to hear an oncom- A prototype of the Sarsie was on a
ond what needed to be done,” he said, ing missile. dresser. Each of the machine’s compo-
over bowls of soup with his wife, Carol After lunch, Gehring moved to the nents has roots in Gehring’s past ca-
March, a painter. “The skills to do it basement. He dug out a blurry photo- reers. Its circuit board was built by an
were ones I had because I’ve worked graph of himself on a racing bike, pitched old motorcycle-racing buddy. The unit’s
12 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
blue plastic housing, which is about his 1948 memoir, “And There I Stood
the size of a pack of playing cards, is with My Piccolo.” Willson played in
a design he programmed for a 3-D his high-school orchestra, and later in
printer. Some of Sarsie’s code comes John Philip Sousa’s marching band; he
from software he once created to spot went on to write “The Music Man,”
melanoma. (“I got the idea when I was about a musical faker so deft that he
doing Smithsonian-style portraits of conjures an imaginary marching band
people decorated with tattoos,” he said. for kids, and mesmerizes an entire town.
“One of the guys had these ugly red Last month, “The Music Man” returned
bumps on his back, and I happened to to Broadway, with Hugh Jackman and
have an appointment with my derma- Sutton Foster, after two decades and
tologist.”) The gadget’s name derives two pandemic delays. Opening night
from “SARS,” for the respiratory illness, featured Harold Hill levels of chutz-
with an “-ie” because, he said, “I thought pah: a red carpet full of dignitaries and
it was cute.” movie stars; signs reading “OPENS TO-
He held up the machine. “It’s dirt NIGHT!” and “WHADaYATALK!”; and,
simple,” he said. He inserted a straw under the marquee, a forty-five-piece
(“the ones for bubble tea work per- teen-age marching band, in plumed-
fectly”), pressed an oversized yellow busby regalia, playing “Seventy-six Hugh Jackman
button in the middle of the device, and Trombones.” The musicians had been
blew. Within seconds, a light on top recruited from Brooklyn and Staten Is- grim-looking Mike Bloomberg, then
turned green. “Which shows I’m neg- land high schools; jacket inspection re- continued down the red carpet, remind-
ative!” he said. He went on, “All the vealed distinctions between Fort Ham- ing everybody that he was “the night-
COVID tests on the market today work ilton, Susan E. Wagner, and Tottenville. life Mayor.” “I’m going to see ‘Tina’ in
on chemistry. That’s very old technol- They wore masks, as did the wind in- a few days; I’m going to see Michael
ogy. My device works on physics.” A struments, but the sound oompahed up Jackson,” he said. Did he play an in-
sensor in Sarsie instantly picks up the and down Times Square. strument growing up? “No. Only the
presence—or not—of the lipids that David Banks, the chancellor of New bongos!” Seth Meyers and his wife,
encase all respiratory viruses. (He’s now York City schools, addressed the crowd. Alexi Ashe, have three little kids, too
working to differentiate results for What would it take, post-isolation, to young for a band. “They’re just on drums
Covid from other contagions.) He’s get the city’s kids back to where they now,” Meyers said. “Sort of a loose,
been consulting with an E.R. doctor need to be? he asked, with a dash of “Ya annoying drum.” The actors Mariska
in Albany to test the device, and so far Got Trouble” panache. “Well, I’ll tell Hargitay and Peter Hermann, who are
the results are promising. Two patents you what it’s going to take!” he said. “It’s married, said, in unison, that onstage
are pending. With some luck, he hopes, going to take music! It’s going to take Jackman and Foster (“dear family
a bigger company might buy the de- theatre! It’s going to take the arts! ” Peo- friends”) “can do anything. Anything! ”
sign. “Like one that makes smoke de- ple cheered, and the band kicked into (On the series “Younger,” Hermann’s
tectors,” he said. “The Wells Fargo Wagon.” Cops and character declared his love to Foster’s
“This is my whole life now,” Geh- publicists cleared a path for the musi- character after watching her sing “The
ring went on. “If I succeed, it will be cians, who marched onto Broadway, as- Lonely Goatherd.”)

1
the most important thing I’ve ever done.” sembled into the shape of a square, and The marching band decamped to
—Sue Halpern played on. the Palm—the gig came with dinner—
Some theatregoers—Governor and ate steak under caricatures of Broad-
THE BOARDS Kathy Hochul, Senator Chuck Schumer, way luminaries. Uniform jackets hung
HARCH! HARCH! HARCH! Speaker Nancy Pelosi—didn’t linger on chairs; stretchy overalls were revealed.
outside; others paused to reflect on the A teacher happily observed that the stu-
occasion and on youth. Carla Hayden, dents, who had been encouraged to min-
the Librarian of Congress, in a bookshelf- gle—“sousaphone from Fort Hamilton,
print scarf, had recently met Foster, who meet sousaphone from Tottenville”—
plays Marian the Librarian. “I said, were doing so. After two years of iso-
‘You’re showing a librarian with spunk,’” lation and disruption, playing for a
quiz Hazelton, flute teacher of the Hayden said. “She brought up the cen- Broadway opening was “surreal,” a six-
S young Meredith Willson, of Mason
City, Iowa, had come to town with a
sorship thing in the show”—locals of-
fended by Chaucer, Rabelais, Balzac.
teen-year-old clarinet player named Jada
said. She has a nose ring and is a Jack-
musical show, and his methods em- “When you deal with what kids should man fan. “I kept thinking, I can’t be-
ployed a travelling performer’s inven- have, and what kids should do, those lieve this is happening.” The event also
tive pragmatism. “Squiz found out I are perennial themes.” Mayor Eric gave clarinet players a chance to let it
could fake, so he suggested my dou- Adams, beaming in a tailored blue-gray rip: “You can’t have a song that men-
bling on the banjo,” Willson wrote in suit, posed for a photograph with a tions all these clarinets and not be able
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 13
to hear the clarinet.” Victoria (eighteen, he said. Then he went to rally the mu- at Cheffins, an auction house in Cam-

1
euphonium and trombone) and her sicians for an after-show encore. bridge. Ai had recently moved to the city
fellow-trombonists had long been “beg- —Sarah Larson with his partner and his son, after four
ging” to play “Seventy-six Trombones.” years of exile in Berlin. He was on the
Stamatios (seventeen, saxophone) saw U.K. POSTCARD road and looked at the auction house’s
Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively watch- PHONIES Web site. “Several pieces looked charm-
ing them play. “You want to say hi to ing,” he said, and the prices were “un-
everyone, but you’ve got a job to do,” he thinkably low.” To amuse himself, he
said. Genesis (eighteen, trombone) made placed a few bids, and he ended up win-
eye contact with Lively: “I stopped play- ning about fifty items.
ing for a second, I was so thrown off.” One of Ai’s most famous works is a
.
Mekhi, a snare-drum player since the photographic triptych of him dropping a
age of fourteen, helped guide the band he Chinese artist, activist, and film- Han-dynasty urn; the piece is reproduced
through multiple red-carpet surprises.
“We teach them to be flexible,”Thomas
T maker Ai Weiwei slumped in a
chair at the Kettle’s Yard gallery, in
at Kettle’s Yard in gray-scale Legos. He
is also an obsessive collector who has
Oberle, the Fort Hamilton band direc- Cambridge. He had a trimmed goatee spent years trolling Beijing’s antiquities
tor, said: “ ‘Mekhi, count ’em off!’ ” and was dressed all in black, the heels markets. When the items he bought
The three bands had practiced sep- of his shoes crushed to be worn like from Cheffins arrived, he found that
arately, and met for the first time that house slippers. He yawned and scratched they had been “badly wrapped” in news-
day for a rehearsal, followed by a group his calf. “It’s so boring,” he said. He got paper. As he began examining them, “I
bus ride. “In our band, we have a tradi- up and began wandering the empty realize some of them are not real,” he
tion, pass it back—before every big com- galleries, inspecting a pair of ancient- said. “On iPhone, you don’t see the pa-
petition or event, we do a fist bump, looking Chinese sculptures in glass dis- tina.” He consulted an antiquities expert
and you pass it down the line,” Victo- play cabinets. The objects were part of back in China, who confirmed his sus-
ria said. “Today, it went all throughout his new exhibit, “The Liberty of Doubt.” picions. The expert then said, “I know
the different schools, and it was so nice— Ai had overseen the installation from who made some of them.” Ai pointed
like, aww! ” his studio in Portugal, and this was the out that there’s a long tradition of copy-
David LaMorte, the Tottenville band first day he had actually seen the show ing and one-upmanship among Chi-
director, said, “Band kids are, like, the in person. nese artists that is at odds with West-
highest-level kids. They know about “Are you trying to tell which ones ern concepts of authenticity.
teamwork. They know about camara- are real, Weiwei?” Greg Hilty, the cura- As it happened, Ai had just been asked
derie, being respectful to one another. torial director at the Lisson Gallery, to do an exhibit at Kettle’s Yard. The one
Deadlines. Music teaches you about which represents the artist, asked. requirement, according to the gallery’s
life.” Like what Harold Hill inspired? The show is based on a peculiar con- director, Andrew Nairne, was that the
Oberle looked politely dubious. “The ceit. In 2020, one of Ai’s friends tipped works utilize “local materials.” Ai had
Think System worked out well for him,” him off to a sale of Chinese antiquities the mischievous notion of mixing his
phony (and real) auction acquisitions
with pieces of his household furniture,
ceramics, and stone reproductions of ev-
eryday objects: he had a CCTV camera
and a takeout container rendered in mar-
ble, and a pair of handcuffs and an old
iPhone were carved from hunks of jade.
In the exhibit, some of the marble and
jade works are arranged in an antique
mahogany case purchased from the Brit-
ish Museum. It once stored ancient Chi-
nese earthenware.
When the show opened, a critic from
the Guardian wondered whether the
artist was just “phoning it in, on a jade
iPhone.” Ai seemed troubled. “I still
struggle with whether or not I am a
good artist,” he said.
He perked up when a group of Cam-
bridge students arrived for a private tour.
A pair of young men admired a plate
featuring a scan of Ai’s brain after he’d
“That word-puzzle gloat of yours is getting old fast.” been beaten by police, in 2009.
 “I had a few while I was at the doc- himself “glaive,” after a weapon from minutes before their deadlines. He leaned
tor’s, for these tests about language- Dark Souls III, a role-playing video game, toward the screen and whispered into his
acquisition aptitude,” one of the stu- and uploaded the track to Spotify. Neumann microphone. “My parents don’t
dents said. “They would show you your A lot of people listened. Gutierrez re- know this, but I have a 54 in math class
brain. I thought it was great at the time. corded more songs in his bedroom: “Sick,” right now,” he said. “With seventeen ab-
I’ve since realized that doing that re- “Astrid,” “Pissed.” Within a few months, sences. And the max I can get is ten! But
peatedly . . .” He trailed off. he had whizzed through the steps that Imma finagle it. I promise. I have time.”
In another corner, a trio was examin- lead to pop stardom—EP, record deal, He made a cringe face.
ing large blue-and-white porcelain plates tour announcement. He still managed There is also the issue of classmates
featuring contemporary scenes of polit- to get to his Zoom chemistry class. who are now fans. “There’s been some
ical strife, takeoffs on the Blue Willow Speaking over Zoom from his dimly picture-taking in school bathrooms and
pattern. In the center of one plate, masked lit bedroom the other day, Gutierrez re- girls freaking out in the hallway,” he
protesters are surrounded by clouds of flected on his productivity. “I could get said, squirming.
swirling tear gas. upset so easily,” he said, explaining where There’s a lot to notice. His wrists are
An upstairs gallery had been turned his lyrics came from. “I could probably wrapped in beaded bracelets. The blond
into a screening room and was show- get upset about anything if I really wanted hair is new. “I feel like a little pop girl
ing the artist’s 2020 documentary about to”—even “that it’s too warm out.” Be- now,” he said, cupping his face with his
the Hong Kong protests, “Cockroach.” hind him were walls that he’d covered hands, as if he were Baby June in “Gypsy.”
Muffled screams, cheers, gunfire, and with Sharpie doodles in the style of Bas- His parents and his sister are in his cor-
police sirens echoed through the build- quiat and lyrics he’d thought up and scrib-
ing. “If we give up like this, we won’t bled down. (“My mom said if I get really
be able to pay our debts we owe to famous she’s going to take the drywall
the people who have left, who have and sell it.”) He was wearing a gold
been hurt, arrested . . . or who have to sweater, and his eyes peeked out from be-
live in exile,” a young protester says in hind bleached curls that were inspired by
the film. Afghan hounds. “I was, like, ‘I really like
In the gallery, a student mentioned the way that dog looks,’” he said. Other
that she was from Hong Kong and had inspirations: girls (“that’s always a kicker”),
been part of the protests. “These kinds living in a small town, and “just, life, man!”
of images bring me back,” she said. Gutierrez is seventeen now, and has
“Was it pretty scary?” a boy asked. a bouncy energy that echoes his music.
The girl paused. “It was less scary The b.p.m. (beats per minute) on his
than the news reports,” she said, her tone songs often exceeds a hundred and sixty,

1
growing wistful. “Those were the days.” about twice the speed of a resting heart-
—Daniel Penny beat. Beneath his Auto-Tuned vocals,
he layers in the sorts of scratchy early-
D.I.Y. DEPT. Internet sounds that could have come
BEDROOM WALLS from a Windows 98 computer. A typi-
cal, Holden Caulfield-esque chorus goes, Ash Gutierrez
“I wanna slam my head against the
wall/She doesn’t really like me, she likes ner. He showed off his alternating laven-
alcohol.”The songs are like bite-size ep- der and cream fingernails with a high-
isodes of “Euphoria.” beam smile. “My mom used to do it,” he
Critics call the music hyperpop—a said, “but I’m really good at it now.” He
wo years ago, a shaggy-haired fif- burgeoning genre of maximalist techno went on, “My mom’s always putting me
T teen-year-old named Ash Gutier-
rez spent his free time playing video
dance pop. But Gutierrez doesn’t think
about labels. “I’m just chilling,” he said.
on to stuff.” He mentioned a shared love
for the British grime rapper Skepta.
games and streaming TV shows. He was He had no formal training, but found Math grades permitting, Gutierrez
nobody special online, either—his social- the singing a snap. “For some reason, I has laid out a fast-tracked graduation
media accounts were mostly followed by understand keys and all that. And I still plan so that he can get on with his ca-
friends and family. Then Covid hap- don’t really know how to play the gui- reer. A deluxe edition of his 2021 EP “All
pened, and his story—like so many peo- tar. I’m not that good at playing the Dogs Go to Heaven” was recently re-
ple’s—changed. Gutierrez’s high school, piano. But I’ve definitely gotten better leased with five new songs, and last month
in Hendersonville, North Carolina, piv- over the past four months.” YouTube he played shows in Los Angeles and D.C.
oted to remote learning. He sank into tutorials and Reddit boards have helped. After that, he’s not sure. “It’s whatever
ennui. So he wrote a song called “Life It can be tough to find time for music, I want, right?” he said. “I might move to
Is Pain” and recorded it with a micro- touring, and school, which is in-person L.A. I might not. I might move to, like,
phone that he’d purchased for gaming. again. Sometimes he hastily works at on- Delaware! I haven’t thought that far out.”
Pleased with the result, he rechristened line math assignments in green rooms, —André Wheeler
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 15
 science would ever advance enough to
DEPT. OF SCIENCE reveal the inner structure of anything
that small.

THE FINAL FRONTIER

Today, we take for granted that we
are made of cells—liquidy sacs con-
taining the Golgi apparatus, the endo-
Biologists are discovering the true nature of cells—and learning to build them. plasmic reticulum, the nucleus. We ac-
cept that each of us was once a single
BY JAMES SOMERS cell, and that packed inside it was the
means to build a whole body and main-
tain it throughout its life. “People ought
to be walking around all day, all through
their waking hours, calling to each other
in endless wonderment, talking of noth-
ing except that cell,” the physician
Lewis Thomas wrote, in his book “The
Medusa and the Snail.” But telescopes
make more welcome gifts than micro-
scopes. Somehow, most of us are not
itching to explore the cellular cosmos.
Cell biologists know that the rewards
for comprehension are substantial. The
cell is the fundamental unit of life, shared
by plants, animals, and bacteria. If we
understood the cell in its entirety, bio-
medical progress would accelerate dra-
matically, the same way nuclear science
did once physicists understood atoms.
The trouble is that the interiors of cells
are too small to easily see. Cells are hard
to work with under controlled condi-
tions, and incredibly intricate. A poster
hanging in many labs shows the Roche
Biochemical Pathways diagram, a flow-
chart of cellular metabolism. It’s oddly
beautiful—like an engineering blueprint
beamed down from an alien civilization.
Fifty years ago, we were less sure how
to interpret the blueprint.The 1966 movie
“Fantastic Voyage” imagined scientists
t was by accident that Antoni van Leeu- his cells moved with apparent purpose. who’d shrunk themselves in order to scuba
I wenhoek, a Dutch cloth merchant,
first saw a living cell. He’d begun mak-
No one believed him when he told peo-
ple what he’d discovered, and he had to
dive inside a person’s bloodstream; in one
scene, antibodies attack a character in a
ing magnifying lenses at home, perhaps ask local bigwigs—the town priest, a no- wetsuit like a school of predatory fish.
to better judge the quality of his cloth. tary, a lawyer—to peer through his lenses The film assumed that the cellular world
One day, out of curiosity, he held one up and attest to what they saw. would be a miniature version of our own.
to a drop of lake water. He saw that the Van Leeuwenhoek’s best optics were Today, although there’s still no micro-
drop was teeming with numberless tiny capable of more than two hundred times scope capable of showing everything
animals. These animalcules, as he called magnification. That was enough to see that’s happening inside a living cell in
them, were everywhere he looked—in an object a millionth the size of a grain real time, biologists grasp the strange-
the stuff between his teeth, in soil, in food of sand. Even so, the cells appeared mi- ness of the zone, bigger than atoms but
gone bad. A decade earlier, in 1665, an nuscule. He surmised that they were smaller than cells, in which the machin-
Englishman named Robert Hooke had “furnished with instruments for mo- ery of life exists. They’ve analyzed the
examined cork through a lens; he’d found tion”—tiny limbs that must “consist, in tiny parts from which cells are made and
structures that he called “cells,” and the part, of blood-vessels which convey learned how those parts interact. They’ve
name had stuck. Van Leeuwenhoek nourishment into them, and of sinews frozen cells, photographed them, and
seemed to see an even more striking view: which move them.” But he doubted that used computer simulations to revivify
the pictures. They’ve studied the appar-
JCVI-syn3A, the “minimal cell,” is a base model designed for expansion. ently empty spaces inside cells and dis-
16 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID S. GOODSELL
covered that they contain a world gov- against a comparatively blank canvas. grows quickly and uniformly, and is ge-
erned by unintuitive physical laws. Venter assembled a team of biologists netically manipulable. It also hunts and
Several groups of “synthetic biolo- that included Glass, who was one of the eats, has a rudimentary kind of memory,
gists” are now close to assembling liv- world’s leading experts on a bacterium and possesses around five thousand genes,
ing cells from nonliving parts. If we called Mycoplasma. “If you went to the compared with the minimal cell’s roughly
could design and control such cells with zoo and lined up all the mammals and five hundred. After Cook loaded the
precision, we could use them to do what swabbed their urogenital tracts, you would syn3A slide, I peered through the eye-
we want—generate clean energy, kill find that each of them has some myco- piece, but struggled to distinguish the
cancers, even reverse aging. The work plasma,” Glass told me. Because the bac- minimal cells from the floaters in my eyes.
depends on understanding a cell’s inner teria live in such a nutrient-rich envi- Then I looked at the other slide. An
workings to a degree that van Leeu- ronment, they rarely have to forage for E. coli swam by. It was about thirty-five
wenhoek could not have imagined. food, or even do much to digest it; their times bigger than the minimal cell by vol-
lack of a sophisticated metabolism al- ume, and crenellated with complexity—a
he first step is to reduce the prob- lows them to have the smallest known destroyer rather than a dinghy.
T lem to its essence. The human body
contains brain cells and fingernail cells,
genome of any free-living organism. The
researchers bombarded millions of these
In his office, Glass told me that
the minimal cell was “a movement.”
blood cells and muscle cells, and doz- cells with special genes called transposons, He showed me a poster noting all of
ens of species of single-celled bacteria. which randomly splice themselves into JCVI-syn3A’s genes. About a third were
Each has been shaped to fit its niche by a DNA strand, disrupting any gene they labelled as having an unknown func-
aeons of evolution. An alien trying to happen to land inside. Many of the bac- tion. When the project began, there
understand automobiles would be mys- teria died from this treatment, and the were a hundred and forty-nine mystery
tified by the differences between sedans researchers sequenced the genomes of genes. Now about a hundred were left.
and sports cars, and by the details of those which survived. It was like exam- “In those hundred, there could be things
heated seats and infotainment systems. ining fighter planes that have returned going on that are essential to life,” Glass
It would need to strip all that away, re- from war: if you never saw bullet holes said—not just syn3A’s life, but all life
vealing the components common to all in the fuel tank, you knew that damage on earth. Dozens of research groups
cars: engine, wheels, fuel tank, exhaust. there was always fatal. By 2016, after a from around the world are now using
A group of biologists hoping to engi- few revisions, they had devised a mini- the minimal cell in their labs. Some are
neer cells have done something similar. mal Mycoplasma genome half the size of exploring its basic functions, while oth-
They’ve modified a species of bacterium the original. A researcher named Carole ers are trying to add new capabilities,
to create a “minimal” cell. It contains Lartigue spent years during her postdoc such as artificial photosynthesis, to the
only what’s necessary for life—it’s the solving the daunting problem of implant- base model. The poster was really a sci-
cellular equivalent of a stock car onto ing the genome in a cell. The bacterium entific war plan—it outlined a mission.
which new components can be bolted. that eventually resulted from the work Decipher the labelled genes and you’d
John Glass, one of the project’s leaders, was called JCVI-syn3.0. It was an en- approach a comprehensive understand-
described the minimal cell to me as “a gine bolted to some wheels. ing of cellular life.
platform for figuring out the first prin- One morning last fall, Glass greeted
ciples in biology.” He said, “A way to me at J.C.V.I. wearing a blue hoodie and enerally, what a gene does depends
get at big questions is to think small.”
Glass, sixty-seven, leads the Synthetic
black gym shorts. Upstairs, we met András
Cook, a research associate, who led me
G on the protein it tells our cells to
make. It’s proteins that run the cellular
Biology and Bioenergy Group, at the to a bench on which some petri dishes world, by sparking chemical reactions,
J. Craig Venter Institute, which occupies were arranged. The dishes were a wan sending signals, and self-assembling into
an artfully modern building set on a hill pink, with pinpricks in them; each pin- biological machines. To understand and
in San Diego. In the early two-thou- prick was a colony of minimal cells—a control a cell, or to design a new one, bi-
sands, when the minimal-cell project version called JCVI-syn3A. Cook gestured ologists need to know exactly how a given
began, the field of genomics was only a to a nearby microscope. Through the lens, protein behaves in the cellular environ-
few decades old. Biologists were se- the colonies looked like fried eggs. ment. What shapes can it take? What
quencing DNA from every creature they There was a higher-resolution mi- does it interact with? What happens
could find—virus, bacterium, lab rat, croscope in another room. Glass took when a small molecule, like a drug, gets
human—and drowning in the data. a seat on a stool nearby. The week be- lodged in one of its crevices?
J. Craig Venter, an instrumental player fore, he’d undergone a round of chemo- Until fairly recently, proteins have been
in efforts to sequence the human ge- therapy for colon cancer, and the treat- too small to see except when they’ve been
nome, felt a need to simplify. Why not ment was slowing him down. “My isolated outside a cell and crystallized.
create a cell with as few genes as possible, hundred-year outlook is really bad,” he Our best pictures of the protein-rich cel-
and use it as a model organism? If you said, smiling. “But my near-term out- lular interior have come not from a mi-
wanted to understand a more complicated look is quite good.” croscope but from the brush of David S.
biological process, you could add the For contrast, Cook had prepared sam- Goodsell, a sixty-year-old biologist and
genes for it to your minimal cell. Their ples that contained both JCVI-syn3A watercolorist at the Scripps Research In-
function would be easier to comprehend and E. coli. The lab rat of biology, E. coli stitute. When I met Goodsell at Scripps,
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 17
which is just down the road from J.C.V.I., credible speeds. It’s sometimes tempting are five hundred thousand of these in
he had long hair, a full beard, and a funky for biologists to think of proteins mainly the red blood cell. But to actually expe-
face mask. A painter since the age of ten, in terms of their individual structures, or rience it, in the sense of being in the
he illustrated his first E. coli during his as nodes in an abstract biochemical flow- landscape . . .” He trailed off. I thought
postdoc, in 1991; the article that resulted, chart. Goodsell’s art makes vivid the of the ribosome extending all around us.
“Inside a Living Cell,” became a sensa- messy reality in between. It seemed like an environment you could
tion, and his cellular watercolors have As Goodsell painted, Arthur Olson, get to know, like a park near your house.
since become ubiquitous in textbooks one of his colleagues, stopped by. Olson
and databases and appeared on the cov- is a pioneer of 3-D computer modelling; he cellscapes created by Goodsell
ers of Cell, Nature, and other journals.
Goodsell’s work is partially funded by
among other things, his research group
is working on CellPaint-VR, virtual-reality
T and Olson are best guesses—like
an architect’s 3-D renderings of an un-
the Protein Data Bank—a project of the software that takes users into the cellscape. built house. The other side of the equa-
Research Collaboratory for Structural “It’s a totally different world,” he said. tion is microscope imaging, which,
Bioinformatics—and while painting he Later, Olson showed me around the Goodsell told me, has made a “quantum
frequently consults the P.D.B., which virtual cell. He put on a V.R. headset; I leap” in recent years. A technology called
maps large biological molecules, includ- watched on a monitor, sharing his point cryo-electron microscopy, or cryo-EM,
ing protein shapes, in atomic detail. He of view. We began in a void. Then, using had developed to the point where it could
scours the literature for information about a glove controller, he conjured some polio help reveal the cellscape as it actually is,
relative concentrations, metabolic rates, viruses—purple planetoids with bumpy, in startling detail. “They’re getting re-
and the dynamics of protein interactions. almost fuzzy surfaces. He added some ally close to seeing cells at the level of
In his office, Goodsell was working antibodies—a host of pink, pockmarked the paintings I do,” he said. “It’s going
on a new painting. A pencil sketch on an shapes, which swarmed the invaders. to put me out of business.”
easel was to be a molecular-level depiction “These are atomic representations that Nearby, Elizabeth Villa, a physicist
of milk. “We think of milk as just being you can also interact with,” Olson said, turned biologist, runs the cryo-EM lab
this white, opaque, you know, nothing,” fiddling with a menu. He used his con- at the University of California, San Diego.
he said. “This is going to help put some troller to select a ribosome, and attached When I visited, Villa, who is originally
structure to it, showing all the bits and it to a strand of RNA. It looked like a from Mexico City, had whirlwind en-
pieces that are inside.” The sketch con- head of cauliflower. ergy: in the past few months, she had
tained a few dots of color. Using a brush, Olson dragged the slider that con- become a U.S. citizen, received tenure,
he applied wash below a tangle of hour- trolled scale, so that the ribosome seemed and been named a Howard Hughes Med-
glass blobs representing casein proteins, to fill the world. There was nothing in ical Investigator. The title comes with a
which are abundant in milk. He started view but individual atoms. He laughed, grant that provides her lab with millions
painting an antibody. In all, there were then reversed course, until the smoother of dollars for at least the next seven years.
more than a thousand molecules to fill in. contours on the ribosome’s surface “It’s been a big summer,” she told me. “I
Goodsell showed me some recent emerged. He tugged at the ribosome, fell in love with cryo-EM. Now it’s on
paintings: a particle of the coronavirus trying to orient himself. the cover of every journal.”
trapped in a respiratory droplet; a closeup “That’s the other thing,” he said. Light microscopes, like those you’d
of the flagellar motor of E. coli. One of his “You can get lost.” find on a high-school lab bench, have a
favorites was a portrait of JCVI-syn3A, Olson told me about an experience fundamental limitation: light’s wave-
the minimal cell. In order to capture it he’d had while building a virtual scene length is a quarter of a micron, about the
whole, he had made a painting nearly size of three minimal cells laid end to
three feet across. A cleave was pinching end. Such microscopes have difficulty
the cell in half. Cells divide by splitting resolving anything smaller. In the nine-
in two; it is believed that every cell in teen-thirties, scientists experimented
existence is a direct descendant of a sin- with electrons, which can resolve indi-
gle original—a split of a split of a split, vidual atoms. But electron beams risk
through the generations. The membrane damaging the biological material at which
was light green, and the ribosomes— they’re fired. “Imagine if you took a pic-
molecular machines that assemble pro- ture with a camera and your subject
teins—were pink. Shaded coils and blobs melted,” Villa said. By the eighties, a
of various sizes and orientations hung inside a red blood cell. The environment team led by a biophysicist named Jacques
off one another, layered in a trippy cartoon. was so crowded that he had to make Dubochet discovered that samples could
The image communicated a sense of himself small. “I had this feeling that I be better preserved by f lash-freezing
crowdedness. Diagrams often show a was in a small plot of land in a huge val- them: this was cryo-electron microscopy.
cell’s “organelles,” or specialized, factory- ley that rose all around me,” he said. “It The technique, which later won Dubo-
like structures, as islands in a sea of empty gave me a totally different sense of the chet and his collaborators a Nobel Prize,
cytoplasm. But the cytoplasm is actually scale.” He had been planting individual transforms water molecules into glass-
jammed with proteins, RNA, and other membrane proteins in the cell. “I mean, like ice, in effect stopping life in medias
small molecules, all commingling at in- you can read in the literature that there res. By the twenty-tens, further advances,
18 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
including better cameras and image-
processing software, gave rise to the “res-
olution revolution”: cryo-EM became
powerful enough to image molecular
structures inside living cells. Proteins
could be captured in candid photos, not
just in meticulously staged portraits.
Cryo-EM practitioners routinely pro-
duce highly detailed, panoramic views
of cells. Some cells are easier to work
with than others. E. coli, for instance, is
often too thick to image at high reso-
lution. “The minimal cells are very cute,”
Villa said. Inspecting one was like peer-
ing into a little glass house rather than
into the Pentagon.
In Villa’s lab, Lindsey Young, a post-
doc, showed me a dish of what looked
like tiny holes punched out of tinfoil.
“Most of these are single particle grids,”
she said—the cryo-EM equivalent of a
glass microscope slide. Young handed
me one of the grids. “That’s like the size “New format—this is the semifinal.”
of the ‘O’ on your keyboard, right?” she
said. “But, if you look at it under the mi-
croscope, it looks like a whole continent.”
• •
Villa demonstrated the cryo-EM
process for JCVI-syn3A cells. The me- of television static. “The beauty and the approaches. Their goal is to create an in-
tallic grid is dipped in a solution con- horror of cryo-EM is that you see every- tegrated view of life inside the cell, in the
taining cells, then flash-frozen in liquid thing,” Villa said. The data can be very form of a computer simulation that puts
ethane and stored in a cryo-chamber. hard to analyze. She pointed at the screen. the whole system into motion. In grad
We walked past a new microscope that “These are ribosomes, these big guys over school, at the University of Illinois Ur-
was being installed. It was roughly the here. Those are membranes. This is chro- bana-Champaign, Villa studied under a
size of an Apollo moon lander, housed matin”—the complex structure into which biologist named Klaus Schulten, who,
in a humidity-controlled, electrically our genetic material is coiled. with his wife, Zan Luthey-Schulten,
shielded, acoustically dampened room She clicked through a few slides, and helped develop the field of whole-cell
designed to eliminate all vibrations. soon everything was colored in. computational modelling. Klaus worked
“The higher energy an electron mi- “This is the picture from David from the bottom up, favoring “all-atom”
croscope has, the taller it is,” Villa said. Goodsell,” she said. She’d overlaid his simulations, in which virtual atoms fol-
She pointed to a small metallic box painting onto the raw image. It made low the laws of quantum mechanics, while
within the machine, into which the the chaos more legible. “Look how well Zan worked from the top down, with
cryo-chamber would be inserted like a it matches! It’s nuts. And he did this “kinetic” models that track the cell’s larger
VHS tape. “The microscope is, like, without having these kinds of pictures.” traffic patterns. By the twenty-tens, the
that thing and a couple of more lenses,” With Wolfgang Baumeister, a Ger- state of knowledge had advanced enough
she said. “Everything else is just elec- man biophysicist, Villa helped develop for them to try building a hybrid model.
tronics and stuff to keep it cool.” This an approach that combines FIB milling Klaus died in 2016. But, last month, Zan’s
model cost around six million dollars, with cryo-electron tomography—a tech- group—which includes some of her cur-
and would cost close to two thousand nique in which a sample is rotated in rent and former students—published a
dollars a day to operate. place, allowing snapshots from differ- paper in Cell that outlined a computa-
In her office, Villa pulled up an image ent angles. Villa described it as “like a tional model of JCVI-syn3A. The model
of the inside of a human cell—an un- CAT scan but a million times smaller.” drew on cryo-EM images from Villa’s lab
precedented view. To get a better look at The physicist Richard P. Feynman once and on a genetic inventory supplied by
cells that are larger and hardier than quipped that biology would be easy if John Glass’s group at J.C.V.I. It included
JCVI-syn3A, Villa’s lab uses a technique you could “just look at the thing!” Villa all four hundred and fifty-two of JCVI-
called FIB milling, in which a focussed supposed that we were nearly there. “All syn3A’s proteins, plus other cellular bits. In
ion beam is directed over the surface of these questions that people have,” she the simulation, these parts interact among
a cell, carving little windows into it. The told me. “I think you’re going to be able themselves as they would in real life.
result, in this case, was hard to make out; to say, ‘Let’s just do a tomogram.’ ” The software aims to simulate a world
the black-and-white image reminded me Some biologists are now combining that’s very different from ours. If a cell
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 19
were blown up to the size of a high- to the number of examples that are being ing factories for the production of bio-
school gym, you wouldn’t be able to see discovered,” James Rothman, a cell bi- fuels or drugs, or as hyperefficient sites
across it. It would be filled with tens of ologist and a Nobel laureate, told me re- of artificial photosynthesis. But although
thousands of proteins, most about the cently. “Every week, if you pick up your the right parts are there, none have crossed
size of a basketball. Other biomolecules favorite journal in biology, you’ll find an- the border from nonliving to living. En-
no bigger than your hand, and water other half a dozen.” dy’s group was experimenting with slightly
molecules the size of your thumb, would The discovery requires a shift in our different ingredients; if that failed, the
fill the spaces between. (To scale, your basic ideas about cellular life. For de- problem might be in how they’re physi-
whole body would be about the size of cades, biologists had assumed that activ- cally arranged. He told me, “I think there’s
a ribosome.) The mixture would have ity in the cytoplasm was essentially ran- a milestone right in front of us. I don’t
the consistency of hair gel. In such a dom; the cellular world churned with think it’s that far away.”
world, gravity would be virtually mean- such dramatic speed that the right pro- Roseanna N. Zia, a physicist who stud-
ingless—you would be weightless, as if teins would eventually bump into one ies cells, emphasized the importance of
suspended in a ball pit. And everything another. But it turned out that some mol- physicality in biology. She told me that
would be moving. The mixture would ecules in the cytoplasm weren’t randomly there were other “colloidal” properties of
buzz constantly; spend just a few seconds circulating. They were swirling in ways the cytoplasm, besides liquid-liquid phase
inside it and every medium-sized object that brought related parties together. separation, that nature might be using
around you would have explored every Suppose an important reaction involved to its advantage—for instance, the fact
square inch of your body. It would feel five proteins out of ten thousand; the that a shove at one end of the cytoplasm
like pandemonium, but it wouldn’t be. five tended to hang around one another, propagates, nearly instantly, to the other.
loosely attracted. (They sometimes had Her group models how individual mol-
n 2009, a bioengineer named Clifford floppy regions that exerted a mutual pull, ecules subtly interact. “This area of un-
I Brangwynne and his colleagues made
a discovery that filled in what could be
and which had been missed in images
made of the proteins when they were in
derstanding how colloidal-scale physics
is regulating and orchestrating cell func-
the final piece of the new cellular pic- crystallized form.) Brangwynne and oth- tion—this is the frontier,” she said.
ture. Brangwynne was studying a crucial ers found that, under the right condi- In Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek’s
early moment in the life of a small worm tions, groups of proteins could “phase time, it was easy to imagine that prog-
called C. elegans. Before it can build a separate,” like bubbles of oil in a salad ress in biology was a matter of zooming
body, the worm must figure out where dressing, forming structures. For decades, in further—seeing what parts the parts
to put its head and its tail; this process, researchers had known that complex bio- were made of. But, having seen to the
called polarization, begins when it’s a chemical reactions tended to happen bottom, we’ve found that reductionism
single cell. Small deposits form in the faster in living cells than in test tubes. is a dead end. What’s needed now is syn-
cytoplasm, creating what scientists call Now they knew why: the lava-lamp-like thesis. Many of the scientists I spoke with
the P granule; the granule marks one conditions inside a living cell allow chem- work in different disciplines, at a cluster
side of the cell, and eventually the ani- icals to take advantage of subtle attrac- of separate institutions in San Diego; oc-
mal, as “left” and the other as “right.” Bi- tive forces more efficiently than is pos- casionally, they swirl together, and our
ologists could spot the granule in their sible in the looser and more uniform understanding advances.
microscopes, but they couldn’t say how environment of a tube or a dish. We’ve Before I left town, Glass gave me a
it got to one side. long imagined a spark of life—but it memento. It was a strange-looking cube,
Brangwynne, who began his career in could be the physical structure of cyto- a sort of clear plastic paperweight with
materials physics, was familiar with how plasm that’s the key. a pink square suspended inside. Glass
liquids become solids and vice versa. This new understanding has begun explained that the square was a plate of
Watching the P granule swirl into exis- to open doors. In 2017, Glass helped found agar on which colonies of the minimal
tence, he thought that it acted like an the Build-a-Cell consortium—a steering cell had been grown. The colonies were
oily patch in liquid. If you poked it with committee for hundreds of labs that are encased in a few inches of resin.
a needle, it broke apart, then coalesced trying to build a working cell from scratch. It’s on my desk now. Holding it up
again. Through careful observation, he Researchers in the consortium began to the light, I can make out perhaps a
saw that it wasn’t being built piece by combining nonliving parts—proteins, ri- dozen pinpricks. I wonder what these
piece by a molecular machine. Instead, bosomes, RNA, and other molecular con- colonies—some of the first examples of
it self-organized, like steam condensing structions—into membranes that resem- synthetic life—will come to be seen as
into a droplet. Researchers soon found bled cells, hoping that the mixture would initiating. In science, the consequences
the same mechanism in other circum- come to life by expressing genes, doing of understanding are often unpredictable.
stances, and in other cells. In 2009, an metabolic work, and eventually dividing. A year after neutrons were discovered,
article by a British cell biologist named Drew Endy, a professor of bioengineer- in 1932, a Hungarian American physicist
Tony Hyman pinned down the phenom- ing at Stanford who is one of Glass’s named Leo Szilard was waiting to cross
enon, sometimes called “liquid-liquid co-founders, described the group as try- the street in London. As the light turned
phase separation,” and other articles ing to solve the Humpty Dumpty prob- green, he saw how one might use the
began appearing; a trickle of papers be- lem: could the parts add up to a whole? new particle to create a chain reaction.
came a flood. “There seems to be no end Such artificial cells could be used as liv- He took a step, and his mind reeled. 
20 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
 Super Bowl champion. Gleyber Torres
SHOUTS & MURMURS shall revert to being a budding star who
can hit for power and average. Aaron
Rodgers shall revert to being likable.

Drinking-Age Amnesty: A young adult of

twenty-one shall revert to being nine-
teen, but the legal drinking age shall be
lowered to eighteen, because existing law
effectively promotes pseudo-transgres-
sive campus binge drinking anyway. The
resultant windfall for the spirits industry
shall offset the corresponding federal ban
on hard seltzer, a ban that U.S. Citizens
for Age Forgiveness Now! is calling for
simply because hard seltzer is nasty.

Patio-Heater Reimbursement: The fed-

eral government shall send a check for
five hundred dollars to every American
who has proof of purchase for an out-
door heating source that failed to make
patio dining in February bearable. Eli-
gible heaters include propane-powered
models, electric models, and Solo Stoves.

WE DEMAND AGE Gal Gadot Forgiveness: Gal Gadot shall

FORGIVENESS NOW!
be forgiven for the “Imagine” thing.

Hair-Loss Restitution: For those who opt

BY DAVID KAMP in, the newly established Follicular Rec-
ompense Agency shall offer gratis Pro-
Dear President Biden, additional schooling commensurate with pecia prescriptions and/or interest-free
March 13, 2022, will mark a full two the two years lost to botched, improvised “Diedi Bae” loans toward hair trans-
years of Covid-19-occasioned lockdown. tele-education by stressed teachers fend- plants, to make up for hairline reces-
Though P.P.P. forgiveness and student- ing off the shrieking and the juice-box sion caused by the march of time and
loan forgiveness are part of the public demands of their own children. by pandemic stress. The loaning entity
discourse surrounding the pandemic is so named for the actor Diedrich Bader,
and its fallout, too little attention has Universal Pre-2020 Body: U.S. post offices who frequently laments his own hair
been paid to age forgiveness. As such, shall become distribution centers for loss on social media.
we, U.S. Citizens for Age Forgiveness vouchers entitling every citizen to free
Now!, are agitating for an executive one-on-one Pilates for eighteen months, Second-Chance Celebrations for Done-
order, to take effect on March 13th, which or until peak 2019 abdominal fitness has Wrong Youth: The Naval Observatory
will officially decree that the past two been achieved, whichever comes first. residence of Vice-President Kamala
years do not count toward the age of Harris and First Gentleman Doug Em-
any American. Cultural Restitution: The Fugees reunion hoff shall be made available for catered
As such, an individual who is cur- tour shall be reactivated. Taylor Swift celebrations for any eligible teen, here-
rently fifty-one years old would legally shall be allowed to tour her album “Lover” tofore aged fourteen to seventeen, whose
become forty-nine years old. A twenty- as if it were brand new; listeners shall bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah, or quinceañera
six-year-old would become a twenty- indulge the artiste and pretend that “Folk- was an underwhelming back-yard event
four-year-old. A new centenarian would lore” and “Evermore” don’t yet exist. involving a sheet cake, string lights, and
revert to being ninety-eight, providing the tinny Zoom presence of confused
inducement to live to a hundred again. Pro-Sports Forgiveness: The results of grandparents who didn’t know how to
In addition to the subtraction of two the past two seasons of professional mute themselves.
years from the age of every U.S. citizen, sports, which have been characterized A final note: One aspect of the past
LUCI GUTIÉRREZ

this order would stipulate the following: by stop-start play, skill regression, and two years that shall not be reversed or
Covid-related roster churn, shall be re-litigated is the 2020 Presidential elec-
Educational Rewind: A child of nine shall erased from the records. Tom Brady tion; this was already attempted on Jan-
become a child of seven, and shall receive shall revert to being merely a six-time uary 6, 2021. 
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 21
 cased Pelosi’s office at the Capitol, pos-
ANNALS OF ACTIVISM ing as tourists, then returned to the
church and rehearsed their blocking,

NOT DARK YET

using plastic chairs and recycling bins
to approximate the layout. The Dem-
ocrats had just won their first House
The Sunrise Movement wants to revolutionize climate politics. majority in eight years, but, when Pe-
losi was asked about her legislative pri-
BY ANDREW MARANTZ orities, addressing climate change did
not make the list.
Varshini Prakash, Sunrise’s executive
director, was twenty-five. When Tlaib
and Ocasio-Cortez arrived, she was on
a small couch, sneaking a nap. Now she
rushed to the nave of the church, car-
rying a handheld mike, and introduced
Ocasio-Cortez, who climbed onto the
folding table to give an impromptu
speech. At times, she spoke from the
perspective of a politician (“We’re tear-
ing it up in there, but we need you to
make pressure”); at other moments, she
sounded like any movement foot sol-
dier (“We need to show people that this
is a fight for our fucking lives”). After
a few minutes, she handed the mike to
Tlaib, who smiled but kept her feet on
the floor: “I’m not getting on the table,
sis.” As Ocasio-Cortez put on her coat
to leave, she told the activists, “I’ll be
tuning in tomorrow.”
Privately, she was considering doing
more than that. A couple of days earlier,
Evan Weber, the closest thing Sunrise
had to a policy liaison, had asked Ocasio-
Cortez’s staff if she might be willing to
amplify the sit-in on social media. The
response was that she didn’t just want to
tweet about it; she wanted to join it. For
a newly elected Democrat, taking even
n the evening of November 12, 2018, Hill—and they were in business attire, a minor swipe at Pelosi was risky; join-
O six days after being elected to Con-
gress and six weeks before being sworn
making them the most overdressed peo-
ple in the room. Ocasio-Cortez, trying
ing a protest in her office seemed like
political suicide. “It was absolutely ter-
in, the socialist Democrats Rashida Tlaib to close the sartorial gap, dropped her rifying,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “But I
and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked handbag and blazer to the floor; Tlaib felt like if these sixteen-year-olds are
into an Episcopal church in Washing- picked them up and, with the silent grin willing to sleep in a church and get an
ton, D.C. Inside, more than a hundred of a forbearing elder sibling, placed them arrest on their record and possibly mess
activists in their teens and twenties milled on a nearby folding table. up their college prospects, if that’s what
around a font of holy water, wearing The Sunrise organizers had gath- they’re willing to risk, then I can risk a
nametags on their flannel and fleece, eat- ered in D.C. for a long weekend, spend- committee placement or whatever.”
ing pizza from paper plates. They were ing their days exchanging PowerPoints After the training in the church, a
organizers with Sunrise, a youth-led cli- and, for many, their nights curled up small group of Sunrise leaders and
mate-justice group that was then about on the church floor in sleeping bags. Ocasio-Cortez staffers went to Weber’s
a year and a half old and almost univer- The trip would culminate, the follow- apartment to finalize the logistics of
sally unknown. Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez ing morning, in a sit-in at the office of the sit-in. Weber alerted his roommates,
had come from a congressional orienta- Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Democratic who didn’t usually take much interest
tion—their first day of work on Capitol Speaker of the House. Organizers had in his activism, that “A.O.C. might be
stopping by.” (“I never saw them clean
Sunrise models itself on the civil-rights movement of the fifties and sixties. up that fast,” he recalled. “They even
22 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 PHOTOGRAPH BY EVAN JENKINS
made warm cider.”) Ocasio-Cortez had the words “Green New Deal” were no- climate organizer and a contributor to
expressed interest in joining every part where in sight. this magazine, said. Ali Zaidi, who
of the action, which would mean po- The night before the sit-in, Waleed worked in the Obama White House
tentially getting arrested. “Some of us Shahid, a political consultant who had and is now Biden’s national deputy cli-
thought that could be cool,” Weber advised Ocasio-Cortez, texted Prakash mate adviser, a job that did not previ-
said, but “if she was in jail she would and Victoria Fernandez, Sunrise’s dig- ously exist, told me, “The outer reach
miss congressional orientation, and we ital director, to ask if they had settled of what was possible, in terms of cli-
thought it was important for the move- on a unified message. They hadn’t. mate policy, is now table stakes.” He
ment that she learn, you know, how to “Pick one!” Shahid responded. He added that, throughout American his-
be a member of Congress.” linked to a tweet in which Ocasio- tory, “whenever we have achieved a
Sunrise’s goal was to reframe the cli- Cortez had written, “We will need a phase change it’s been young people
mate crisis as a once-in-a-generation Green New Deal to survive.” making it happen.”
opportunity. The Obama Administra- This was enough for Prakash to make Last fall, Biden delivered a speech
tion had pursued an incremental, “all- an executive decision. “GND!” she in Ocasio-Cortez’s district, while as-
of-the-above” energy strategy—a tax texted. The consensus was ratified via sessing the damage from Hurricane
credit here, a public-private partnership thumbs-up. Ida. “He spoke at length about how
there. Sunrise argued that only a multi- The following morning, the Sunrise our approach to climate must create
year, whole-of-government mobiliza- activists knocked on the door of Pelo- millions of union jobs,” Ocasio-Cortez
tion would suffice, and that it would si’s office, then opened it without wait- said recently. “I was, like, This is the
also spur economic growth, the way the ing for an answer. A TV on the wall message we spent years pushing the
New Deal had in the nineteen-thirties. was tuned to CNN; a correspondent Party to adopt, and now it’s so com-
This is now the default logic on the left, was reporting from Paradise, Califor- monplace and widely accepted that it’s
but just five years ago it was considered nia, which had just been razed by wild- coming out of the mouth of the Pres-
somewhere between marginal and ris- fire. The activists sat in a circle on the ident of the United States.”
ible. When Bernie Sanders ran for Pres- office rug, singing protest songs. After
ident in 2016, climate change was not almost an hour, Ocasio-Cortez walked his past September, I travelled from
central to his agenda. Everyone knew
what kind of health-care system left
in, trailing a pack of reporters. She wasn’t
there to admonish Pelosi, she insisted,
T New York to an Airbnb in down-
town Philadelphia, where a dozen Sun-
populists wanted—Medicare for All— but to offer political cover to any elected rise organizers were gathering for a re-
but there was no similarly catchy meme official who would “commit to a Green treat. Normally, I’d take the train, or
for safeguarding a habitable planet. In New Deal.” An hour after Ocasio- maybe a bus. Gaze out the window,
2017, Jeff Stein, an economic-policy re- Cortez left, about fifty of the activists sample the sluggish Wi-Fi, spend an
porter, tweeted, “What is the left’s de- were flex-cuffed and arrested, mid-song. hour dozing off—before you know it,
mand of the Democratic Party on cli- That night, the sit-in was covered you’ve arrived, without feeling too guilty
mate change?” on CNN and MSNBC. By January, the about your carbon footprint. This time,
Ocasio-Cortez, then an obscure can- Green New Deal had been the subject given the pandemic, I drove. It was a
didate polling in the single digits, of- of thousands of news articles, opinion beautiful day, so I cracked the windows,
fered an unsolicited reply: “A Green columns, and TV segments—still po- saving fuel by forgoing air-condition-
New Deal, which is a sweeping agenda larizing but now part of the dominant ing. But, come to think of it, this cre-
around jobs, energy, + infrastructure.” conversation. In the next two years, Sun- ated drag, which surely made my gas
This got seven likes—from, among rise’s annual budget exploded from fifty mileage worse. Then again, my car is a
others, a Taylor Swift fan account, a thousand dollars to more than ten mil- hybrid! Maybe I could offset the trip
small labor startup, and an anime en- lion. During the Presidential primary, by planting a tree?
thusiast who went by Jesus Christ— Sunrise activists bird-dogged the Dem- The moment I got to the Airbnb,
and zero retweets. ocratic candidates, repeatedly insisting these frantic mental calculations started
In Ocasio-Cortez’s long-shot cam- that they come out in favor of a Green to seem a bit silly. The organizers were
paign, she’d been trying to popularize New Deal; in the end, twenty of the scanning the menu of a Middle Eastern
the “Green New Deal” slogan, which, twenty-six candidates supported it. restaurant on Uber Eats. Aru Shiney-
by invoking the Greatest Generation, If President Joe Biden’s agenda Ajay, Sunrise’s training director, sat at
implied that pooling public resources passes in anything like its current form, a laptop, taking orders. “Can you get
toward an ambitious goal was a tradi- it will be the most ambitious climate me a beef kebab?” Dejah Powell, an or-
tional idea, even a patriotic one. But legislation ever enacted, without a close ganizer from Chicago, said. “Or, no.
some Sunrise leaders were ambivalent, second. This would have been difficult Beef is the worst, right? Maybe chicken.
in part because the original New Deal to imagine when Biden first announced Or falafel?”
had been racially discriminatory. At his candidacy, in 2019, much less five “Dejah,” an activist named John Paul
the church, as they rehearsed for the or ten years ago. “The Pelosi sit-in has Mejia said, in a mock-scolding tone.
sit-in, the Sunrise organizers held up got to be one of the most beautifully He started reciting a movement adage,
banners that read “GREEN JOBS FOR handled pieces of political theatre in using the singsong rhythm of a call-
ALL” and “STEP UP OR STEP ASIDE”; American history,” Bill McKibben, a and-response: “The biggest driver of
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 23
emissions is . . .” The others joined him, Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore re- organization’s moment of peak influ-
in unison: “. . . the political power of leased “An Inconvenient Truth,” a doc- ence is still to come. It’s also possible
the fossil-fuel industry, not individual umentary that accurately described the to read it as a cautionary tale: what if
behavior.” In other words, if you want scope of the crisis before offering such the Green New Deal, like the Poor Peo-
the beef, get the beef. solutions as “Plant trees” and “Buy en- ple’s Campaign of 1968, is a dream that
During the retreat, the activists re- ergy efficient appliances + lightbulbs.” will never be fully realized?
cycled, but they didn’t compost. When William Lawrence, one of Sunrise’s
they ordered takeout, they didn’t al- co-founders, told me, “Even if you rakash grew up in the Boston sub-
ways check the “go green” box to decline
plastic forks and straws. At
change all the light bulbs in the coun-
try, you don’t come close
P urbs; her family is from South India,
which, in recent decades, has been bat-
home, some of them aspired to preventing catastro- tered by f loods, droughts, and heat
to bike everywhere, or to phe. What kind of plan is waves. For as long as she can remem-
eat vegan; others flew all that, where even if you win ber, she has experienced climate change
the time and found vegans you still lose?” Sunrise ap- as a source of profound anxiety. “As a
annoying. This could seem proached the problem the kid, you first have the thought, This is
like apathy, or hypocrisy. To other way around, f irst the most dire problem, so surely there
Sunrise’s way of thinking, determining what would are adults in the room who are fixing
trying to prevent climate mitigate the crisis—leav- it,” she said. “That quickly turns to, Oh
change by giving up dispos- ing most of the remaining no, the adults are actually the ones mak-
able straws is like trying to gas, coal, and oil reserves in ing it worse, and no one has a plan.” As
ward off a tidal wave with a the ground—and then try- a high schooler, she was desperate to
cocktail umbrella. Besides, if you want ing to build the political will to make take action, but the only group she could
to build a mass movement it’s best to that happen. The only way forward, as join was her school’s recycling club.
avoid life-style shaming. the group saw it, was to act less like a “Then I got to college and figured out,
In 1988, a NASA scientist named James special-interest lobby and more like a Oh, you don’t sit around waiting for the
Hansen gave congressional testimony confrontational social movement. If the people in power to fix things,” she con-
about “the greenhouse effect.” This was Big Greens were like medical research- tinued. “You have to force their hand.”
largely understood by the general pub- ers at the beginning of the AIDS epi- As a junior at the University of Mas-
lic as a matter of interspecies altruism demic, politely asking for more govern- sachusetts, Amherst, in 2014, she got a
(“Think of the polar bears!”), not as an ment funding, then Sunrise would be call from William Lawrence, then a re-
existential human risk. Culturally, the like ACT UP, scattering ashes on the cent Swarthmore graduate. Both were
environmental movement overlapped White House lawn. involved in campus fossil-fuel divest-
with the crunchy left, but its political Internally, Sunrise patterns itself on ment campaigns, modelled on cam-
instincts were small-“c” conservative, the civil-rights movement, which was paigns that had pressed American uni-
as in “conservation.” The Natural Re- very unpopular in its time. “Some peo- versities to divest from apartheid South
sources Defense Council, which is now ple wanted them to do pure outside Africa. Lawrence was starting a non-
a major environmental group, was game and street protest; others advised profit, the Fossil Fuel Divestment Stu-
founded in 1970; one of its first big cases them to only negotiate with L.B.J.,” dent Network, and he asked Prakash
sought to prevent the construction of a Prakash told me. Instead, she contin- to join. The year after she graduated,
hydropower plant on the Hudson River. ued, they used a hybrid strategy: “You UMass Amherst became the first large
The plant would have made New York make the moral case, rally the public, public university to give up its direct
less reliant on fossil fuels, but it risked and then you try to secure policies that fossil-fuel holdings. “But we didn’t feel
disrupting the local ecosystem, includ- lock that new common sense into place.” like we were winning, in the scheme of
ing a population of striped bass. When This is hardly a foolproof plan. When things,” Prakash said. “Because we kept
the so-called Big Greens, like the Sierra Martin Luther King, Jr., first called for doing the math: even if we win every
Club and the Nature Conservancy, made a federal Civil Rights Act, it was seen single divestment campaign, that still
demands, they tended to use patient as an impossibility; only after a series doesn’t get us where we need to go fast
forms of persuasion such as letter-writ- of galvanizing events, including the enough.”
ing campaigns and amicus briefs. “The March on Washington and the church In late 2015, a coalition of youth or-
proto-environmentalists’ instinct was to bombing in Birmingham, did it become ganizations—climate groups, racial-
convince and convert those in power,” a reality. Taylor Branch, the civil-rights justice groups, immigrants’-rights
Douglas Brinkley, a historian of the historian, told me that King “spent years groups, and others—led a march to the
movement, told me. “Not to finger-point groping around in the dark, looking for White House. “It was supposed to be
or protest outside their homes.” tactics that would resonate.” He added, our show of force,” Sara Blazevic, one
As the climate crisis has accelerated, “Trying to mobilize people to save the of the organizers, told me. “It ended up
though, it has become clear that revers- planet now, during a time of deep po- being a pretty sad scene.” The activists
ing it will require building a new clean- larization and cynicism, is, in some ways, tried to condense their various demands
energy infrastructure, which is, politi- a harder task.” This analogy can be in- into a cogent message, but “the best we
cally speaking, a heavier lift. In 2006, terpreted in Sunrise’s favor: maybe the could come up with was ‘Our Gener-
24 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
ation, Our Choice,’ which didn’t mean As for how an incipient far-left group their new organization, looking for one
anything to anyone.” The White House could achieve all of this, the organiz- that sounded “radically hopeful” and
offered to send a senior official to meet ers envisioned an escalating cycle of came with an implicit color scheme and
with them, but the activists, unable to nonviolent actions, including a future a corresponding emoji. Eventually, they
agree on who should represent them, campaign called Moral Crisis 2019, settled on Sunrise.
turned it down. Afterward, Prakash, which they referred to, in one planning Movements don’t generally go ac-
Blazevic, Lawrence, and another cli- document, as their “Birmingham”: cording to plan, but, to an unusual de-
mate organizer named Guido Girgenti “Choose one iconic conflict, one set of gree, this one did. Sunrise launched in
went out for Ethiopian food and had tactics, after the midterm elections, and 2017 and engineered its first moment of
a frank conversation. “The upshot was: go HAM.” Paul Engler, a founder of the whirlwind the following year, with
We have to take a step back and figure Momentum, and his brother Mark, a the Pelosi sit-in. In 2019, a group of chil-
out a new strategy, or we’re going to writer, emphasize the importance of dren and teen-agers walked into Sena-
hit a dead end,” Prakash said. “moments of the whirlwind,” when for- tor Dianne Feinstein’s office and asked
They sought the guidance of an or- merly niche issues erupt into public her to support a Green New Deal. She
ganizer-training institute called Mo- view. A well-designed organization can responded with remarkable condescen-
mentum. Founded by millennials who use such a moment to consolidate sup- sion. “You come in here and you say, ‘It
had met in the aftermath of Occupy port, the way a wind turbine harnesses has to be my way or the highway,’ ” Fein-
Wall Street, Momentum aimed to build energy. An unprepared organization stein, arms crossed, chided an eight-
on the strengths of such spontaneous will let the moment pass, like a gale year-old. “I don’t respond to that.” Video
movements (their ability to galvanize whistling through an empty field. footage of the encounter went viral, and
public attention) while correcting for The organizers wrote a metanarra- it was parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”
their weaknesses (once they command tive. “We started out telling a very in- (Child: “Our planet is dying.” Senator
attention, they don’t always know what tense doom-and-gloom story: The bil- Feinstein: “Why don’t you stay in your
to do with it). When organizers want lionaires have conspired to destroy the lane and step the fuck off ?”)
to start something new, Momentum’s planet, and we’re all gonna die unless Six months later, Ed Markey, the
trainers lead them through a painstak- there’s a revolution,” Weber said. “Our senator from Massachusetts who spon-
ing, year-long process called front-load- socialist activist friends were into it, sored the first Green New Deal reso-
ing, during which they arrive at a de- but all our normie friends were pretty lution, found himself trailing his pri-
tailed consensus about what they want freaked out.” You can’t build a mass mary opponent, Joe Kennedy III, by
to achieve and how they plan to get movement by scaring off all the normies. fourteen points. Sunrise amassed an
there. Beginning in the summer of 2016, Weber continued, “Where we eventu- army of volunteer phone bankers to
Prakash, Blazevic, Lawrence, Girgenti, ally landed was more of an Obama- save Markey’s seat. The Democratic
and about eight others gathered at rented Bernie hybrid: Things are bad, but if Party took note. The day after Markey
farms and movement houses, giving we pull together we can have a brighter won the primary, Weber got a call from
their project the placeholder name Di- future.” They brainstormed names for the office of Senator Chuck Schumer,
vestment 2.0. As students, they had de-
manded a say in how their universities’
money was being invested. Now they
realized that, as American citizens, they
also had a stake in a much bigger pot
of money—the one appropriated by the
U.S. government.
When asked which issues were most
pressing, Americans consistently ranked
“jobs” near the top of the list and “the
environment” near the bottom. The
front-loading team brainstormed ways
to close this “urgency gap”—to con-
vince the public that overhauling the
energy sector would mean not just dis-
placing old jobs but creating new ones.
“We know ‘winning on climate’ in the
U.S. will generally involve: shutting
down the fossil fuel industry; massively
transforming our energy system; and
responding to existing and incoming
crises,” Girgenti wrote in an internal
Google Doc. This would require “epoch-
defining pieces of federal legislation.” “Bad enough you’re leaving—did we really need a closing ceremony?”
who wanted to co-sponsor a piece of Prakash among them, but it mostly con- Each front-loading session started
climate legislation. sisted of the next microgeneration of with an “energizer,” such as a group song,
In the 2020 Democratic Presidential Sunrise leaders, several of whom were or a “grounding exercise,” usually a guided
primary, Sunrise endorsed Sanders, teen-agers. stretch. The organizers spent as much
whose campaign platform, this time The original front-loading team had time discussing their internal culture as
around, prominently featured a Green been overwhelmingly white, Northeast- they did their long-term goals. The book
New Deal. After Biden secured the nom- ern, and middle class, which was both on Prakash’s bedside table at the Airbnb
ination, he and Sanders convened six an optics problem and a practical one: was not “Capital” or “The Uninhabit-
“unity task forces,” hoping to bridge the you can’t build a mass movement by ap- able Earth” but “Dare to Lead,” by Brené
gaps between the center and the left of pealing only to middle-class white kids. Brown. The front-loaders often repeated
the Party. The task force on climate was Aru Shiney-Ajay, who had helped as- the mantra “Culture eats strategy for
co-chaired by John Kerry, Biden’s cli- semble the new team, had asked appli- breakfast,” which was coined by the man-
mate czar, and Ocasio-Cortez; one of cants in detail about their racial, regional, agement consultant Peter Drucker and
the other delegates was Varshini Prakash. and class background (“owning class,” later became a staple of employee train-
“It was really constructive,” Kerry told “professional managerial class,” “work- ing at Ford and Google. Haven Vincent-
me. I asked him whether it was diffi- ing class”). Of the eleven front-loaders Warner, an organizer from Massachu-
cult to reconcile the activists’ moral out- there, only three were white, and four setts, told me, “We’re anti-capitalists, but
rage with the calmer register of diplo- were younger than twenty. No one in good advice is good advice.”
macy. “They’re right to be angry,” he the room opposed having children on Sunrise abides by what it calls the
said. “Everyone should be that angry.” carbon-emissions grounds, but none had Rule of Threes: “Any group of three peo-
During the primary, Biden had called got around to it yet. “People with kids ple can take action in the name of Sun-
for the United States to be carbon-neutral is pretty much the only kind of diver- rise,” provided that they follow the group’s
by 2050; after the task-force negotiations, sity we didn’t select for,” Shiney-Ajay basic principles, such as nonviolence. This
he pledged to decarbonize the electric- told me. Perhaps most conspicuous was has helped the organization grow quickly,
ity sector by 2035. The Administration a diversity of personal style. Some people but it also allows local chapters to go
adopted several other demands, including wore the hiking sandals and moisture- rogue, which can put Sunrise’s leaders in
a call for a Civilian Climate Corps, mod- wicking layers you might find in any the awkward position of being outflanked
elled on a popular work-relief program earth-loving, fashion-agnostic crowd; by their more radical disciples. The
from the New Deal. “Obviously, there’s others were intimidatingly stylish, with front-loading team spent a ten-hour day
a part of me that just goes, ‘Who gives a outfits so ahead of their time that I debating the balance between central-
shit that we got this commitment or we’re couldn’t always understand which arti- ized leadership and local autonomy.
having that discussion—just pass some cles of clothing I was looking at, much Should hubs report to national leader-
actual bills or shut up,’ ” Prakash said re- less how they fit together. ship? Should they have to get permission
cently. “But there’s another part of me, Prakash stood in the kitchenette, before issuing a city-council endorse-
the part that remembers how irrelevant wearing a lime-green sleeveless dress ment? A tweet? Gardner wrote a few
we were a few years ago, that goes, ‘It’s and a nose ring, making a cup of tea. dozen proposals on pieces of butcher-
sort of wild that we’re at the table at all.’” Two weeks earlier, she had married a block paper, then broke out boxes of
data analyst she met in college, which multicolored rhinestone stickers.
unrise’s original front-loading plan made her the only married person on “You’re going to go around voting
S was meant to last only long enough
to weather the Trump era. In 2020, the
the team. “I definitely can’t bring my-
self to say ‘wife,’ ” she said. “I keep think-
on how you feel about all these propos-
als,” Gardner said.
organizers assembled a new core team ing, If I were an eighteen-year-old Sun- “Bedazzling,” Shiney-Ajay said.
to draft a second four-year plan. They rise staffer, how would I feel about my “You’re going to bedazzle how you feel.”
called it Sunrise 2.0. A few axioms would executive director being”—she affected Gardner blasted “Good 4 U,” by
be carried over (“We are a movement to an old-crone voice—“a married woman?” Olivia Rodrigo, and the organizers
stop the climate crisis by winning a Green In other contexts, Prakash was the boss; bopped around the room, sticking rhine-
New Deal”). The rest was up for debate. at the Philadelphia retreat, she tried to stones to the paper, to themselves, and
I joined the team at the Airbnb in wear her power lightly. Once each day, to one another. It was the most fun I’ve
Philadelphia, which had industrial-chic she sat outside and meditated using the ever seen a group have while debating
light fixtures, exactly one house plant, Calm app on her phone. Even when organizational bylaws. “None of us are
and a bright-blue accent wall. “I watch negotiations in Washington demanded here because we inherently love spread-
a lot of home-décor TikTok, and color- her attention, she tried not to cancel sheets,” Leah Spinner, a twenty-four-
blocking is a huge thing,” Lily Gardner, therapy appointments or break phone year-old organizer from North Caro-
an organizer from Kentucky who had dates with friends. “My job is to wake lina, told me. “I would much rather be
just graduated from high school, said. up every day and stare into the abyss of a young person just living my life and
Sunrise’s founders were in their late human suffering,” she said. “If I didn’t going to festivals and stuff. When the
twenties, which, in youth-activist years, stick to certain habits that keep me world is burning, that just doesn’t feel
made them movement elders. The new grounded, I would one hundred per cent like a serious option.” A few minutes
team included a couple of holdovers, lose my fucking mind.” later, Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License” came
26 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
on, and Vincent-Warner, who is seven-
teen, said, “I actually did just get my
driver’s license last week!”
During one of the dinner breaks, I
chatted with Mejia, who is from Miami.
He was brought up by his mother, a Co-
lombian immigrant who worked as a
cleaner on yachts and party boats. When
he was in eighth grade, they moved to
an apartment complex built on hastily
reclaimed land. “The building was so
new that when you went to Google Maps
and looked at the satellite image it wasn’t
even there,” Mejia told me. “Just swamp.”
During Hurricane Irma, the building’s
superintendent told the residents to evac-
uate, and, Mejia said, “a lot of people
had nowhere to go.” The following year,
Mejia—inspired by Greta Thunberg’s
climate-strike movement, and by stu-
dents in nearby Parkland who became
activists after the mass shooting there—
organized a climate walkout at his school.
Two years later, he founded Sunrise’s
Miami hub. • •
Mejia is now a first-year student at
American University. “I’m supposed to
be finishing up a paper for a sociology to be naïvely optimistic, but this looks the reconciliation bill passed or until it
class called ‘Hazards, Disasters, and So- promising,” Weber, then Sunrise’s leg- was medically necessary to stop.
ciety,’” he told me. He tilted his screen islative director, told me. When I got to Lafayette Square,
to show me what he was actually work- The swing vote in the Senate was Joe which abuts the northern gate of the
ing on: a heavily footnoted essay about Manchin, the conservative Democrat White House, I found five strikers
“ruptures in neoliberal hegemony,” for from West Virginia. Manchin has taken under a shade tent, three slouched in
a front-loading session. Mejia was one conflicting stances on climate through camping chairs and two dozing on top
of several organizers I heard referring the years, but he has never given up his of sleeping bags. It was a warm Octo-
to Sunrise as “my religion”—a joke, but personal stake in Enersystems, a coal- ber day, and the square was bustling
not entirely. Sunrise aims to make can- brokerage firm that he co-founded in with the usual democratic circus: vend-
vassing feel like a calling, to transform 1988. His shares are now in a blind trust, ers hawking T-shirts, teen-agers in
a 501(c)(3) into a beloved community. but it continues to pay him dividends MAGA hats, a guy called the Truth Con-
When the organizers first told me about and interest, which in 2020 amounted ductor playing Motown at an ear-split-
the Rule of Threes, it sounded familiar, to nearly half a million dollars. The cen- ting volume. Few gave the protest a
but I couldn’t place it. Then I remem- terpiece of Biden’s climate plan was an second glance.
bered Matthew 18:20: “For where two emissions standard called the Clean En- Earlier that day, Kidus Girma, a hun-
or three are gathered together in my ergy Performance Program; Manchin ger striker from Dallas, had confronted
name, there am I in the midst of them.” refused to support it. “We’re this close Ali Zaidi, the White House climate
to winning the biggest climate and jobs adviser, as he walked across Lafayette
f any year was going to inaugurate package in history and one man stands Square. “We’re asking your boss to fight
I “the decade of the Green New Deal,”
as Sunrise puts it, last year started off
in the way,” Prakash wrote in a mass
e-mail. She promised that Sunrise mem-
for us,” Girma said.
Zaidi gestured toward an AirPod in
looking auspicious. In January, on bers would “act quickly,” but it wasn’t his ear and said, “I’m on a call.” A cou-
MSNBC, Rachel Maddow asked the clear what leverage they had. ple of hours later, he joined a Zoom
incoming Senate Majority Leader, Nikayla Jefferson, a twenty-two-year- meeting with the directors of a few cli-
Chuck Schumer, to list his legislative old Sunrise organizer from San Diego, mate organizations, including Varshini
priorities. The first word Schumer said decided to act anyway. Taking advan- Prakash. “Five young people are out-
was “Climate.” That April, President tage of the Rule of Threes, Jefferson side the White House right now, starv-
Biden asked Congress to pass the Build and a few friends put out the call: a hun- ing themselves, because nothing is get-
Back Better Act, the biggest compo- ger strike in front of the White House. ting done,” Prakash said.
nent of which was half a trillion dollars Subsisting on water and packets of elec- “I know,” Zaidi said. “They just
to ameliorate climate change. “I try never trolytes, the protesters would fast until stopped me on my way here.” Apart from
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 27
that, the closest the strikers had come to ing chairs for wheelchairs. “Our doctor off the strike. They stayed in D.C. and
an audience with the President was the told us we were wasting too many calo- started bird-dogging Manchin instead.
thrum of Marine One passing overhead. ries walking to and from the bathroom,” One morning, they followed him from
At the beginning of the hunger strike, Ema Govea, a striker from Sonoma his houseboat to a nearby garage and
Sunrise staffers had asked some of their County, said. The doctor, an internist in surrounded his car, which was, they
allies in Congress, including Ocasio- her sixties, came to check on the strikers discovered, a Maserati Levante. (“Coal
Cortez, to join the protest. But then Sun- at around dusk, wearing a white lab coat. baron drives a Maserati,” Mejia said.
rise’s D.C. hub put out an unrelated state- “My stomach really hurts,” Govea “Too perfect.”) Schumer and Biden con-
ment disavowing a voting-rights rally. said. “Is that normal?” tinued negotiating with Manchin, des-
The rally was hosted by a coalition of “I don’t like how much weight you’re perate to come up with an energy stan-
more than two hundred progressive or- losing,” the doctor said. “If you keep it dard that he would accept. Two months
ganizations; the hub was objecting to up, I’m going to advise you to stop.” later, he announced that he would not
three of them, Jewish groups that were Govea nodded. It was five days after be voting for the bill after all.
“in support of Zionism and the State of her eighteenth birthday. With climate legislation stalled in
Israel.” Representative Jamie Raskin con- The strikers were spending their the Senate, Sunrise has come in for
demned the hub, calling the statement nights at an Airbnb nearby, and Weber more criticism. The Beltway insider
“frightful sectarian scapegoating.” Sun- showed up to give some of them a ride. magazine Politico recently ran a piece
rise’s national arm apologized and pub- “Thank you for putting your bodies on arguing, as Politico might be expected
licly repudiated the D.C. chapter; be- the line,” he said, making eye contact in to argue, that Sunrise “may not be so
hind the scenes, the repudiation was even the rearview mirror. At the apartment, savvy when it finally comes down to
harsher. (A Sunrise staffer told me, “I Govea warmed up a pot of water by run- governing”; the socialist magazine Jaco-
called the kid who wrote the statement ning it through an empty coffeemaker. bin ran a piece arguing, as Jacobin might
and went, ‘If you needed to spout some “My dessert water,” she said. The previ- be expected to argue, that Sunrise should
dumb shit, couldn’t you at least have ous day, volunteers had scoured the apart- adopt “a more clearly defined ideology,”
waited until we were not in the middle ment for stray calories, lest the strikers e.g., socialism. One climate expert, a
of negotiating a once-in-a-decade cli- succumb to temptation, throwing away former senior environmental official,
mate bill?’”) Still, Ocasio-Cortez kept a few old packets of ketchup and soy told me, “At first, my feeling was: They’re
her distance. Instead, she tweeted about sauce. Outside, I asked Weber if there mobilizing their generation around the
a different hunger strike being held at was any hope of reviving the clean-energy crisis—that’s awesome. But then, when
the same time, in Manhattan, by the program. “It’s gone,” he said. “It’s heart- you see the fine print, it’s, like, Wait,
New York Taxi Workers Alliance. breaking, but it’s not coming back.” you guys are opposing this hydropower
The next day—their fourth without Two weeks later, after three of the project, or that nuclear-power plant? I
food—the strikers traded in their camp- strikers were hospitalized, they called thought you said there was a crisis!”The
expert called this “the Sunrise chaperon
problem—these kids get all fired up
about how we have to dream big and
overhaul our infrastructure, but then
the boomer parent who’s taking them
to the march goes, ‘Yes, sweetie, but not
like that.’ ” Some of the most reliable
climate hawks in Congress, including
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, argued for decommissioning
the Indian Point nuclear plant, an ac-
tion that increased New York City’s car-
bon emissions by at least twenty per
cent. (Sunrise is not categorically op-
posed to nuclear energy, but it didn’t
take a formal position on Indian Point.)
The generous interpretation is that ac-
tivists want to move forward judiciously.
The less generous one is that they some-
times fall into a classic trap: supporting
development in theory but opposing it
when it’s sited in their back yard.
Matthew Yglesias, an independent
journalist, has been particularly dismis-
sive of Sunrise, calling it a “fake climate
“Oh, this is coffee. I’m just an intern.” group” that “doesn’t move the needle on
things that really matter.” In addition effective start to a multi-decade proj- on “the climate thing.” If this doesn’t
to calling for emissions standards, a ect. He came to think of this as a uni- happen—if Congress falls one vote short
Green New Deal would include a fed- versal law of social movements: When of passing the largest climate-change
eral jobs guarantee and universal health you set out to achieve the impossible bill in history, and then Republicans gain
care. Sunrise argues that a climate tran- and merely achieve the improbable, you control of the House or the Senate in
sition without a social safety net would feel like a failure. 2022, or the White House in 2024—it’s
occasion a broad backlash, the way fuel He wrote what he called a Move- hard to imagine the identity crisis of
taxes in France led to the gilets jaunes ment Action Plan, laying out “the eight powerlessness that could result. When
protests. Yglesias and others contend stages of successful social movements.” I asked John Kerry about this scenario,
that this is a Trojan-horse maneuver that The anti-nuclear activists, he said, “I’m only going to
makes climate legislation harder to pass. he argued, had rushed from think positively, because the
“Sunrise talks the talk of a big grassroots Stage One, “Normal Times,” worst outcomes are so prob-
movement, but Democratic politicians to Stage Four, “Social Move- lematic.” When I asked the
actually prioritize climate change more ment Take-Off.” This was Sunrise 2.0 organizers about
than their base is demanding, not less,” the good news.The bad news it, they shared with me a
Yglesias continued. “If they’re a mass was that they were now en- Google Doc outlining a
movement, who are the masses they’re tering Stage Five, “Identity “Twilight Zone” strategy, to
speaking on behalf of ?” He conceded Crisis of Powerlessness.” be implemented if the Dem-
that Sunrise has been around for only “After a year or two, the high ocrats lose their trifecta in
five years, and is still growing: “It’s to- hopes of movement take- Washington. At that point,
tally possible that twenty years from off seem inevitably to turn would it make more sense
now they’ll be a super-powerful move- into despair,” Moyer wrote. “Most ac- to focus on corporate boycotts? Could
ment and I’ll look like an idiot. So far, tivists lose their faith that success is just pieces of the Green New Deal be won
though, I don’t see it.” around the corner and come to believe at the state or city level, building mo-
that it is never going to happen.” mentum from there? The short-term
n 1977, more than fourteen hundred “I keep trying to tell everyone: Sunrise outlook might be dispiriting, but the
I activists broke into a construction
site in Seabrook, New Hampshire,
is in Stage Five,” Mejia said to Nikayla
Jefferson. He delivered this news as if
over-all strategy and the long-term goal
remain the same. “We fight for massive
where a nuclear-power plant was being it were a cancer diagnosis, but he meant federal intervention no matter what,”
built. They wanted to draw attention it to be reassuring. “You read Moyer and the document reads.
to the national anti-nuclear-energy you’re, like, ‘Oh, yeah, it sucks right now In Chicago, when their work was
movement, which was then considered because it has to suck.’ ” They were in done, a group of organizers went to an
either marginal or risible, among peo- downtown Chicago, in an old union all-ages bar and arcade. Some, who
ple who were aware of it at all. (This hall with W.P.A.-style murals on the were older than twenty-one, ordered
was two years before Three Mile Is- walls, meeting with hub leaders from drinks; others, who weren’t, ordered
land, and nine years before Chernobyl; around the country. French fries and played shuffleboard.
the Nixon Administration had launched An organizer named Stevie O’Han- Mejia and Jefferson squeezed into a
Project Independence—a plan that lon gave a PowerPoint, previewing some banquette, musing about the threat of
called for, among other things, the con- of what the front-loading team had come societal breakdown and the possibility
struction of a thousand nuclear-power up with, and then led an informal poll of revolution. At some point, some-
plants—to little resistance.) The pro- of the room. “I’m going to list three how, Jefferson ended up acquiring a
testers were arrested, and they spent things that Sunrise 1.0 set out to do, in stranger’s half-eaten birthday cake.
the next two weeks in jail. “During those 2017, and you respond with how well “There are still beautiful things in this
two weeks, nuclear energy became a you think we did,” they said. “The first world,” she said.
worldwide public issue as the mass- is ‘Get the public to agree that there’s a Stage Seven of Bill Moyer’s Move-
media spotlight focused on the activ- crisis.’” Most of the thumbs went up. ment Action Plan is “Success,” but, of
ists,” a movement strategist named Bill “Cool,” O’Hanlon continued. “No. 2: course, not every movement gets there.
Moyer later wrote. “We wondered how ‘Get the public to agree on our solution.’” There is now an operational nuclear
on Earth they did it.” Some thumbs up, some thumbs plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, but
When Moyer went to meet with sideways. it’s one of fifty-five nuclear plants in the
some of the protesters, though, they “ar- “Fair enough,” they said. “Last country, not one of a thousand. It’s de-
rived with heads bowed, dispirited, and one: ‘Get the government to enact our batable whether this is a good thing, but
depressed, saying their efforts had been solution.’” it’s proof of what movements can achieve
in vain.” After a year of activism, they A near-unanimous vote of thumbs- against long odds. Today’s climate ac-
hadn’t even blocked the construction of down. Mejia leaned over and whispered tivists face even longer odds, and they
the Seabrook plant, much less all of to me, “See? Stage Five!” have less time. According to Moyer’s
Project Independence. Moyer thought The Build Back Better Act is dead, model, they may not win major conces-
that they had it all wrong. Their first but Joe Manchin indicated last month sions for several years. The question, at
year wasn’t a waste; it was an unusually that he’s willing to “come to agreement” that point, will be whether it’s too late. 
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 29
30 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
 PORTFOLIO

DAYS OF WAR
For Ukrainians facing a new wave of violence,
life has long been defined by conflict.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARK NEVILLE

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 31

 n the weeks before Vladimir Putin launched Mark Neville, a British-born photographer

I an invasion of Ukraine, as Russian troops

took up positions along the Ukrainian bor-
der, my friends and acquaintances in Kyiv went
who lives in Kyiv, has travelled through east-
ern Ukraine and captured the sense of deter-
mination he found there. Neville’s previous work
to lengths to maintain their cool. In bars and has documented other places in turmoil: in his
restaurants across the city, and in endless con- “Port Glasgow Book Project,” he recorded the
versations at people’s homes, I heard far less resilience of a community in Scotland amid
alarm about the prospect of war than I did from post-industrial decline; as the U.K.’s official
Washington, London, Berlin, or Paris. That war artist, he embedded with British forces in
changed last week, starting with Putin’s an- Helmand, Afghanistan, and produced a book,
nouncement that Russia was, in effect, annex- “Battle Against Stigma,” about mental-health
ing the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of issues among the soldiers. In 2015, the Kyiv Mil-
Ukraine. Practiced self-possession was no lon- itary Hospital asked Neville, who himself suf-
ger sustainable. People didn’t immediately fered from post-traumatic stress, to make a
panic—very few, at that point, packed up and Ukrainian version of this book. Since then, he
left—but they did begin to talk in darker tones has spent much of his time in the same cities
about what might come next, about what the and towns in the Donbas that I’ve been visit-
Russian military machine could do to Kyiv and ing. A new volume of his photographs, draw-
to the rest of the country. ing from his travels in Ukraine, is titled “Stop
On the day of the announcement, I took an Tanks with Books.”
overnight train from Kyiv to eastern Ukraine, “What I find most remarkable is the resil-
close to what is known as the “line of contact” ience of the people there,” Neville says. “As a
in the grinding war in the Donbas. Shelling photographer, I’ve been in many places where
had increased dramatically, and the train was people are going through incredible trauma.
almost empty. Travelling from city to city, town They would reach out to me for help, for money,
to town in the east, I saw the effortful compo- to get them out, and I would say, ‘The only way
sure of the capital replaced by something else. I can help is to take your picture and tell your
The quality of anxiety and exhaustion is dif- story.’ But with Ukrainians, and with some of
ferent here. In towns like Stanytsia Luhanska, the many hundreds of thousands of people who
Hirske, and Popasna—all of which had, in 2014, have been displaced, no one—not one—has
been claimed by pro-Russian separatists and asked me for anything. The only thing they want
then wrested back—people have been living is to sit me down and tell me what’s happened
with a Russian-backed assault for eight years. to them. They have lost people, seen people
Amid routinized brutality, they have tried to wounded terribly, seen their streets obliterated.
fashion some semblance of a normal existence. All I want is for people who are looking at these
They’ve experienced war not as a grand strug- pictures to recognize a version of themselves.
gle of civilizations but as something nasty and Schoolkids taking gymnastics lessons, people
gruelling, to be managed and survived. But now, just going about their lives despite the shelling
as the Russian military unleashes the full force and more. For eight years! Can you imagine?”
of its arsenal throughout the country, any pre-
tense of normalcy has been ripped away. —Joshua Yaffa

Previous spread: “What’s most important is to carry on,” Nazar, a Ukrainian soldier stationed
near Stanytsia Luhanska, said last week. Opposite: Alla Melnichuk watched the conflict
escalate from her home in Hirske. “There was whistling overhead, and instead of ducking and
covering, as the instructions say, I went, Huh? Fear didn’t come until later,” she said.

32 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 33
Nastya, Masha, and Yana at an
athletic center in Stanytsia
Luhanska, where children take free
gymnastics lessons. “There’s never
enough time,” Tatiana Kopanaiko,
an instructor, said. “I wish I could
give every child some personal
attention.” As fighting intensified
before the Russian invasion, she
continued holding practices: “We
had some shelling recently, after
lunch, but when we put the music
on you can’t hear a thing.”

34 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 35
36 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
Opposite: Olexander, a twenty-year-old Ukrainian soldier, near Stanytsia Luhanska in a
makeshift barracks, which has since been destroyed by bombing. Above: “My entire family is in
Russia, even though I was born here, and I consider Ukraine my homeland, too,” Karina
Shyian said, in Popasna. “I have family there, and I have family here. So I’m neither against
Russia nor against Ukraine. I am for peace.”

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 37

Khristina Ovcharenko, a third-
grade teacher, in her classroom
in Stanytsia Luhanska, in early
February. She left the area on
February 17th, hours after a nearby
kindergarten building was shelled.
Ovcharenko, who has been a
teacher for eleven years, said that
children who are old enough to
remember the start of the separatist
rebellion “stand out—they’re more
anxious, less calm.”

38 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 39
40 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
 In Lysychansk, a single train
track at a defunct beverage factory
was used as a pedestrian bridge
to a park, until it was bombed
by Russian-backed separatists, in
June, 2014. Ukrainian forces
regained control of the area later
that summer, but the bridge
was never repaired.

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 41

A woman passes through a
checkpoint near Stanytsia Luhanska,
on February 9th. As fears of a
Russian invasion mounted, some
residents evacuated into Kyiv-
controlled territory; others crossed
into separatist-held territory or
boarded buses headed for Russia.

42 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022

THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 43
 A REPORTER AT LARGE

THE ELEPHANT IN THE COURTROOM

A curious legal crusade to redefine personhood.
BY LAWRENCE WRIGHT

ccording to the civil-law code recognized a herd of hippopotamuses mans, to bear legal duties, or to be held

A of the state of New York, a writ

of habeas corpus may be ob-
tained by any “person” who has been il-
originally brought to Colombia by the
drug lord Pablo Escobar as “interested
persons” in a lawsuit that would pre-
legally accountable for their actions,”
and that the animal therefore could
not be entitled to habeas corpus. The
legally detained. In Bronx County, most vent their extermination. The Parlia- NhRP countered that “probably ten
such claims arrive on behalf of prison- ment of the United Kingdom is cur- per cent of the human population of
ers on Rikers Island. Habeas petitions rently weighing a bill, backed by Prime New York State has rights, but can-
are not often heard in court, which was Minister Boris Johnson, that would not bear responsibilities, either because
only one reason that the case before consider the effect of government ac- they are infants or they are children
New York Supreme Court Justice Al- tion on any sentient animal. or they are insane or they are in comas
ison Y. Tuitt—Nonhuman Rights Proj- Although the immediate question or whatever.”
ect v. James Breheny, et al.—was ex- before Justice Tuitt was the future of Manning urged Justice Tuitt to fol-
traordinary. The subject of the petition a solitary elephant, the case raised the low precedent: “The law remains well
was Happy, an Asian elephant in the broader question of whether animals settled that an animal in New York sim-
Bronx Zoo. American law treats all an- represent the latest frontier in the ex- ply does not have access to the habeas-
imals as “things”—the same category pansion of rights in America—a pro- corpus relief, and that’s reserved for hu-
as rocks or roller skates. However, if the gression marked by the end of slavery mans. So, there is nothing in this case
Justice granted the habeas petition to and by the adoption of women’s suf- dealing with any claim of mistreatment
move Happy from the zoo to a sanc- frage and gay marriage. These land- or malnourishment or anything with
tuary, in the eyes of the law she would marks were the result of bitterly fought respect to Happy the Elephant.” Man-
be a person. She would have rights. campaigns that evolved over many ning summarized, “In short, Your Honor,
Humanity seems to be edging to- years. According to a Gallup poll in Happy is happy where she is.”
ward a radical new accommodation 2015, a third of Americans thought that
with the animal kingdom. In 2013, the animals should have the same rights appy’s pen, at the Wild Asia ex-
government of India banned the cap-
ture and confinement of dolphins and
as humans, compared with a quarter
in 2008. But protecting animals in this
H hibit in the Bronx Zoo, exempli-
fies the aesthetic of late-twentieth-cen-
orcas, because cetaceans have been way would have far-reaching conse- tury zoo design: creating the illusion
proved to be sensitive and highly intelli- quences—among them, abandoning of a natural habitat and disguising, as
gent, and “should be seen as ‘non-human a centuries-old paradigm of animal- much as possible, the fact of captivity.
persons’” with “their own specific rights.” welfare laws. There is a beaten path, which Happy
The governments of Hungary, Costa Arguments in Happy’s case began has trodden alone for the past sixteen
Rica, and Chile, among others, have is- in earnest on September 23, 2019, in years, encircling a small pond with water
sued similar restrictions, and Finland an oaken courtroom populated with lilies, where she can bathe and wallow.
went so far as to draft a Declaration of reporters, advocates, and attorneys for Leafy trees surround a one-acre enclo-
Rights for cetaceans. In Argentina, a the zoo. Kenneth Manning, represent- sure, which is dominated by an artifi-
judge ruled that an orangutan at the ing the Wildlife Conservation Soci- cial dead tree trunk, artfully fashioned
Buenos Aires Eco-Park, named San- ety, which operates the Bronx Zoo, with hollows and scaling bark. The en-
dra, was a “nonhuman person” and en- made a brief opening argument. He closure has to be cleaned constantly, as
titled to freedom—which, in practical pointed out that the plaintiff—the a female Asian elephant can eat up to
terms, meant being sent to a sanctuary Nonhuman Rights Project, or NhRP— four hundred pounds of vegetation a
in Florida. The chief justice of the Is- had already bounced through the New day and excrete about sixty per cent of
lamabad High Court, in Pakistan, as- York court system with half a dozen that. Another elephant, Patty, lives in
serted that nonhuman animals have similar petitions on behalf of chim- an adjacent pen. From November to
rights when he ordered the release of panzees. All had failed. Manning read May, when the New York weather can
an elephant named Kaavan, along with aloud from one of those decisions, be cold, the animals are reportedly quar-
other zoo animals, to sanctuaries; he which ruled that “the asserted cog- tered in separate stalls scarcely twice
even recommended the teaching of an- nitive and linguistic capabilities of a the length of their bodies.
imal welfare in schools, as part of Is- chimpanzee do not translate to a chim- Happy, who weighs approximately
lamic studies. In October, a U.S. court panzee’s capacity or ability, like hu- eighty-five hundred pounds, has a high,
44 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
Advocates of animal rights want the Bronx Zoo to release Happy, an elephant smart enough to recognize herself in a mirror.
ILLUSTRATION BY GÉRARD DUBOIS THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 45
twin-domed head, resembling that of Wildlife Conservation Society, which, that, at the age of eleven, he wrote a
an octopus, and the small, round ears in addition to the Bronx Zoo, operates letter to a state representative to call
that distinguish the Asian species from the Central Park Zoo, the Prospect Park his attention to the subject. The rep-
the larger African species. When I re- Zoo, the Queens Zoo, and the New resentative wrote back, but nothing
cently visited the zoo, her back was cov- York Aquarium. The society focusses changed for the chickens.
ered in dust, which elephants often use on the conservation of six “f lagship” As a teen-ager, Wise joined a cou-
to guard against the sun and insects. groups: apes; big cats; sharks, skates, ple of rock bands, vaguely hoping to
Happy’s heavy-lidded eyes are almost and rays; whales and coastal dolphins; make a career in music. In 1968, he en-
invisible in the great mass of her head; tortoises and freshwater turtles; and el- rolled at the College of William &
elephants are color-blind but see espe- ephants. One of the society’s first proj- Mary. Drawn to protests against the
cially well at night. Her skin is gray and ects, in 1905, helped save the American Vietnam War and issues of social jus-
uniform, and has the soft, wrinkled com- bison from extinction. A campaign tice, he became active in left-wing pol-
plexity of a cerebral cortex. called 96 Elephants—named for the itics. He thought about going to med-
She and Patty will be the last ele- number of elephants thought to be killed ical school, but his grades weren’t good
phants to inhabit the Bronx Zoo: in every day by poachers—was launched enough. He attended law school at Bos-
2006, the institution announced that in 2013. James Breheny, the director of ton University instead, but he was drift-
no more would be acquired. Across the Bronx Zoo, stated that the society ing. He had the profile of someone who
the country, zoos have been respond- had “led the charge to help stop the was looking for a cause.
ing to the growing public sentiment ruthless slaughter of 35,000 African el- Momentous social revolutions often
that elephants do not belong in cap- ephants each year for the ivory trade.” begin with a book. The modern ani-
tivity. Although elephants are social As for Happy, Breheny declared, mal-rights movement was born in 1975,
animals, Happy and Patty don’t get with evident frustration, “We are forced with the publication of Peter Singer’s
along, so they are separated by a cable to defend ourselves against a group “Animal Liberation.” Singer, an Aus-
fence, living in parallel solitary con- that doesn’t know us or the animal in tralian philosopher, popularized the
finement. The zoo’s attorney was cor- question, who has absolutely no legal concept of “speciesism,” which he com-
rect, though, in stating that there had standing, and is demanding to take pared to racism and sexism. “All ani-
been no charges of abuse. Nothing in control over the life and future of an mals are equal,” he asserted, adding,
the vast portfolio of animal-welfare elephant that we have known and cared “The basic principle of equality does
laws prohibits zoos from locking an for over 40 years.” He went on, “They not require equal or identical treatment;
elephant—who, in the wild, ranges continue to waste court resources to it requires equal consideration.” Singer
many miles a day—inside a pen a fifth promote their radical philosophical did not actually advocate for legal rights
the size of a New York City block. view of ‘personhood.’” but for expanded welfare, declaring that
Most elephants in American zoos have According to the NhRP, it has re- the moral argument for equality rests
lived in spaces half as large. peatedly offered to drop the case if exclusively on an animal’s capacity for
Happy was born in 1971 and was the zoo consents to send Happy to suffering and happiness, not on its in-
kidnapped as an infant from a herd in one of two sanctuaries, in Tennessee tellect or its abilities. His thinking can
Thailand, likely through the method and in California, that have indicated be traced to the utilitarianism of Jer-
of killing her mother and other female a readiness to accept her. Given the emy Bentham, the Enlightenment-era
protectors. According to a database zoo’s stated intention of eventually English legal philosopher and reformer.
maintained by Dan Koehl, a renowned shutting the exhibit down, its refusal The guiding principle of utilitarianism
Swedish elephant keeper, Happy was to settle the case suggests an institu- is that society should attempt to pro-
sent to a drive-through zoo in Laguna tional desire to put an end to the cam- vide the greatest happiness to the great-
Hills, California, which had purchased paign for animal personhood. Officials est number, which is typically achieved
her and six other baby Asian elephants, for the society and the Bronx Zoo re- by maximizing pleasure and minimiz-
naming them for the Seven Dwarfs. fused repeated requests to comment ing pain. Bentham made an enduring
One of them, Sleepy, died soon after for this article. case for animal welfare when he wrote,
arrival. The others were eventually trans- “The question is not, Can they reason?
ferred. Dopey and Bashful became cir- teven Wise, the founder of the nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suf-
cus performers. Sneezy went to the
Tulsa Zoo, where he still resides. Doc,
S NhRP, grew up in Maryland, and
his family went to a farmers’ market
fer?” In 1980, a friend of Wise’s handed
him a copy of “Animal Liberation.” Like
renamed Vance, broke his leg while once a month. There were animals for many of Singer’s readers, he was in-
doing a hind-leg walk at a zoo in On- sale—in particular, chickens, crammed stantly transformed. Wise’s mission in
tario; his leg never healed, and he was into small cages. To Wise, they ap- life became blazingly clear. He would
euthanized. That left Happy and peared to be suffering. Although he defend the most brutalized and de-
Grumpy, who arrived in 1977 at the had pets—a dog, named Gravy, and a fenseless creatures: nonhuman animals.
Bronx Zoo, often ranked as one of the succession of goldfish, mostly named Over Thanksgiving weekend in 1981,
world’s best. Jack—he had given little thought to Wise attended a meeting in New York
Few organizations have done as much the question of animal welfare. But the of the Society for Animal Rights. The
for protecting animals in nature as the plight of the chickens so moved him participants were interested in improv-
46 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
ing welfare laws, but Wise eventually cluded lawyers, law students, and aca- Wise’s legal team spread across New
saw limitations in this approach. The demics. Their first task was to determine York, searching for “imprisoned chim-
caged chickens in the farmers’ market, where to make their case. His organi- panzees.” They found seven, two of
for instance, were not covered by the zation began scouring jurisdictions them in a roadside zoo. Before the
Animal Welfare Act of 1966, the main across the U.S., seeking amenable judges team could act, three of the chimps
federal law, which excepted from reg- and charismatic animals that would died, creating a sense of urgency. Wise
ulation all livestock, as well as birds, make appealing plaintiffs. The NhRP dubbed the remaining animals the
rats, and mice used in research. And decided to initiate lawsuits in New York Chimpanzee Four. One, living in Glov-
even in cases where, say, pets were nom- State. “It had a strong tradition of ha- ersville, northwest of Albany, was
inally protected by welfare laws, it was beas corpus and the right to appeal Tommy, a former performing chimp
rare for abuse cases to be prosecuted: judges’ decisions, which was critical,” who had been in a Matthew Broder-
animals were property, after all. Wise said. The point was to get into ick movie called “Project X.” Tommy
In 1985, Wise had an epiphany: “I dialogue with the upper courts, where, was watching cartoons on a television
concluded that the real problem was he believed, judges would be more will- stationed outside his cage when Wise
rights. Only entities that had rights ing to overturn precedent. first saw him. Another, Kiko, was liv-
were ever going to be able to be appro- By 2013, Wise was in his sixties, with ing in a private sanctuary with a few
priately protected.” In common law— tousled white hair that looked as if it dozen monkeys in Niagara Falls; he
the law generated in the courtroom by had been cut with garden shears, and had been rescued from an abusive ca-
judges, not by elected legislators—rights a tie that was perpetually askew. He reer in the entertainment business. At
accrue to persons, not things, so Wise had poured his entire career into the Stony Brook University, on Long Is-
settled on a strategy of seeking person- cause of animal personhood, remain- land, the Department of Anatomical
hood for animals. In 1998, he unveiled ing relatively obscure despite having Sciences had been studying the chimps
the Nonhuman Rights Project in an published several significant books, in- Hercules and Leo to examine differ-
article for the Vermont Law Review ti- cluding “Rattling the Cage: Toward ences in human and chimpanzee lo-
tled “Hardly a Revolution—The Eli- Legal Rights for Animals” (2000), which comotion. For six years, the animals
gibility of Nonhuman Animals for the primatologist Jane Goodall had were kept in a laboratory with no view
Dignity-Rights in a Liberal Democ- hailed as “the animals’ Magna Carta, of the outdoors. “Chimps swing their
racy.” The organization’s goal was to get Declaration of Independence, and Uni- hips much more than humans when
state courts to accept that a nonhuman versal Declaration of Human Rights they walk,” the researchers found.
animal has the capacity to possess “at all in one.” (Goodall is on the NhRP’s The courts were unconvinced by
least one legal right”: to be a person in board.) Wise was finally ready to strike. Wise’s arguments. A judge in Suffolk
the eyes of the law. Of all the animals the NhRP might County summarily rejected a petition
Wise later explained to a class at have chosen to represent, it settled on on behalf of Hercules and Leo, saying
Harvard Law School that he had ini- chimpanzees—among the closest rel- that in New York habeas corpus ap-
tially tried to protect animals by taking atives to humans—for its first cases. plied only to persons. Of course, this
on “doggy-death cases”—defending ca-
nines who, after biting or mauling in-
cidents, had been ordered to be killed.
“I thought to myself, I can save five or
six dogs’ lives a year and save some other
animals, too. And that should be enough
to get me into Heaven. But the prob-
lem is that, in the United States alone,
for every beat of my heart one hundred
and sixty animals are killed”—that is,
euthanized. In the class, he listed the
animals he thought should be promoted
to personhood: “I argue that these non-
human animals—all four species of great
apes, all of the elephants, all cetaceans—
are so cognitively complicated that these
beings should be persons today.” In a
2002 book, “Drawing the Line: Science
and the Case for Animal Rights,” he
also listed dogs, African gray parrots,
and honeybees.
For a decade, Wise was the project’s
only employee, but he eventually as- “The police want to ask you a few questions about where you
sembled a team of volunteers that in- get such good health insurance at such an affordable rate.”
 thousands lived in British territories.
Recognizing Somerset as a legal per-
son would not just liberate a single in-
dividual but set a precedent that could
be financially ruinous for slaveholders.
Mansfield declared, “Let justice be
done, though the heavens may fall.” He
ruled that slavery was “so odious” that
common law could not support it.
“That was the beginning of the end
of slavery, first in England, then at least
in the northern part of the U.S.,” Wise
said in Tuitt’s court.
“Did they actually say the person
who was enslaved was a person?” the
Justice asked.
“No, they said he was free, he had
rights,” Wise responded. “A person is
an entity who has the capacity for rights,
any entity who has a right was auto-
matically a person.”
“That’s not what we are arguing
here,” Tuitt said. “We are arguing rights
or duties.”
“He’s got a weak left hook, but what do I know, I’m only your mother.” “Lord Mansfield never inquired as
to whether James Somerset could bear
duties,” Wise replied. “It didn’t mat-
• • ter whether he could bear duties—he
was entitled to rights.” He mentioned
was the very point that the NhRP was wrote. “Women in England were once that, under U.S. law, the category of
contesting. Although an appeals-court considered the property of their hus- personhood is so elastic that “corpo-
judge, Eugene Fahey, concurred in an bands and had no legal recourse against rations are persons, ships are persons,
opinion that denied liberty to Tommy abuse until the Court of King’s Bench the City of New York is a person.”
and Kiko, he also acknowledged that began in the 17th century to permit Not long before, he noted, a young
the litigants had raised important eth- women and their children to utilize ha- man had been convicted of vandaliz-
ical questions: “The issue whether a beas corpus to escape abusive men. In- ing a car dealership in Seneca Falls.
nonhuman animal has a fundamental deed, the overdue transition from thing- On appeal, the defendant’s lawyer had
right to liberty protected by the writ hood to personhood through the legal argued that the prosecution needed
of habeas corpus is profound and vehicle of habeas corpus must be deemed to prove a human being had been
far-reaching. It speaks to our relation- among the proudest elements of the damaged by the destruction—and that
ship with all the life around us. Ulti- heritage of that great writ of liberation.” Bill Cram Chevrolet was not a human
mately, we will not be able to ignore it. A precedent that Wise particularly being. The court ruled that the deal-
While it may be arguable that a chim- favors is a 1772 case in England con- ership was a nonhuman person with
panzee is not a ‘person,’ there is no cerning James Somerset, a Black man standing in the court.
doubt that it is not merely a thing.” enslaved to Charles Stewart, a customs Not everyone agrees with Wise that
off icer in Boston. When Stewart human slavery is an appropriate prece-
aving lost the chimpanzee cases brought him to England, Somerset dent to invoke. When arguing on behalf
H in New York, Wise and his team
armed themselves with dozens of friend-
briefly escaped, and upon his recapture
Stewart had him imprisoned on a ship
of the chimpanzee Tommy, Wise cited
the Somerset case, and one of the em-
of-the-court briefs in support of per- bound for Jamaica, where he was to be panelled appellate judges, Karen Peters,
sonhood for Happy. One of them came sold on the slave market. English sup- sharply warned him off. “I keep having
from Laurence Tribe, the Harvard legal porters of Somerset filed for a writ of a difficult time with your using slavery
scholar. “It cannot pass notice that Af- habeas corpus to gain his freedom. The as an analogy to this situation,” she
rican Americans who had been enslaved case came before Lord Mansfield, a said. “A very difficult time. So you might
famously used the common law writ of consequential figure in the British legal want to pursue another argument.”
habeas corpus in New York to challenge tradition. Although slavery had not In front of Justice Tuitt, Wise also
their bondage and to proclaim their hu- been legally endorsed in Britain, an brought up a 1972 abortion case, Byrn
manity, even when the law otherwise estimated fifteen thousand enslaved v. New York City Health & Hospitals
treated them as mere things,” Tribe people lived there, and hundreds of Corp., which, he said, was “a spectac-
48 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
ular case for showing that ‘humans’ that the zoo had also acquired. Dar- University, decided to try the mirror
and ‘persons’ are not synonyms.” In win’s world view was shaken. Anyone test on elephants. They both knew
Byrn, the question was whether a fetus who witnessed an orangutan’s “pas- that self-awareness was often associ-
was a person and had the right to life. sion & rage, sulkiness & very extreme ated with empathy—a quality that
The New York Court of Appeals ruled of despair,” he declared, would not “dare seemed highly developed in elephants.
that a fetus may be human, but it is to boast of his proud preeminence.” In 2005, Reiss and one of de Waal’s
not also a person. The apes could even use tools: Dar- graduate students, Joshua Plotnik, set
Animals already have certain claims win observed in his notebook that up video cameras on the roof of the
on personhood. Welfare laws give an- Jenny would “take the whip & strike elephant barn at the Bronx Zoo. Three
imals the right not to be abused, and the giraffes” that were being kept in of its elephant residents were given
courts have recognized animals as ben- the same enclosure. And the orang- the test: Patty; her companion, Max-
eficiaries of trusts—say, when a be- utans were transfixed when Darwin ine; and Happy. All the elephants were
loved pet is included in a will. Some showed them a mirror—they “looked exposed to a huge mirror that the re-
divorce courts have recently required at it every way, sideways, & with most searchers had bolted to a wall. Patty
judges to consider the interests of an steady surprise.” and Maxine awkwardly got down on
animal that is being contested. These A hundred and thirty years after their knees to peer under the mirror
developments indicate a tacit under- Darwin’s encounter, Gordon Gallup, and stood on their hind legs to look
standing that animals are not “mere Jr., a psychologist at the University at over it. They repeatedly moved their
things,” even if U.S. courts have been Albany, wondered whether an animal heads in and out of view, as if won-
reluctant to declare that they are per- could recognize the image reflected dering why the animal in the mirror
sons. Wise has been canny about fram- in a mirror as itself. If so, would that kept doing the same thing. They also
ing his current case around a single el- imply the presence of a self-conscious entertained themselves by bringing
ephant—not all elephants or all sentient mind with a sense of the past and, food over to the mirror and then look-
animals. That being said, he admits possibly, of the future? These quali- ing at it while they ate.
that “it only takes one.” ties were assumed to be exclusively A short time later, a large white
Manning, speaking on behalf of the human. Gallup improvised on Dar- “X” was painted on the right side of
zoo, warned, “As you can tell from the win’s experiment by presenting a mir- the forehead of each elephant, and an
pleadings, this is not really about ele- ror to four adolescent wild chimps. invisible sham mark on the other side
phants. It’s about elephants, it’s about Initially, they bared their teeth and of their heads, just in case there was
giraffes—” charged the mirror, but then they set- some residual feeling or odor from
“It’s about animals,” Justice Tuitt said. tled down and began making faces the mark. When faced with the mir-
and blowing bubbles in the direction ror, neither Maxine nor Patty touched
n the spring of 1838, Charles Dar- of their image. Next, Gallup anesthe- the “X” on their foreheads.
I win, recently returned to England
after a five-year voyage on the Bea-
tized the animals and used an odor-
less dye to paint red spots on an eye-
Happy reacted differently. As Reiss
and Plotnik later noted in a paper, the
gle, visited the London Zoo. The first brow ridge and on top of an ear—places elephant walked straight to the mir-
orangutan ever to be exhibited there chimps can’t ordinarily see on them- ror, “where she spent 10 seconds, then
was on display. Named Jenny, she walked away.” Seven minutes later,
drank tea from a cup and wore a pat- Happy returned to the mirror:
terned dress and trousers. Darwin,
She moved in and out of view of the mirror a
who had never seen a great ape, was couple of times, until she moved away again.
then formulating his theory of evo- In the following 90 seconds, out of view of the
lution. After watching Jenny, he wrote mirror, she repeatedly touched the visible mark
to his sister: but not the sham-mark. She then returned to
the mirror, and while standing directly in front
The keeper showed her an apple, but would not of it, repeatedly touched and further investi-
give it her, whereupon she threw herself on her gated the visible mark with her trunk.
back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty
child.—She then looked very sulky & after selves. When the animals regained Happy touched the white “X” twelve
two or three fits of pashion, the keeper said, consciousness, they again stared into times, becoming the first elephant to
“Jenny if you will stop bawling & be a good
girl, I will give you the apple.”—She certainly
the mirror. Each of the chimps touched pass the mirror self-recognition test.
understood every word of this, &, though like the spots repeatedly, indicating that Gallup discounts many tests that
a child, she had great work to stop whining, they understood they were looking at have purportedly demonstrated self-
she at last succeeded, & then got the apple, themselves. Psychologists now con- recognition in other animals, includ-
with which she jumped into an arm chair & sider mirror self-recognition a canon- ing magpies, dolphins, and orcas.
began eating it, with the most contented coun-
tenance imaginable.
ical test of subjectivity. Human babies typically don’t recog-
Diana Reiss, a research scientist nize themselves in a mirror for eigh-
Darwin returned twice that fall and working with dolphins at the Wild- teen to twenty-four months. “There
was permitted to enter Jenny’s cage to life Conservation Society, and Frans have been literally hundreds of attempts
interact with her and a young male de Waal, a primatologist at Emory to demonstrate mirror self-recognition
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 49
in other animals,” Gallup told me. sonhood, should they be held legally an amicus brief that Cupp had writ-
“There are only three species for which responsible for injurious actions? In ten on behalf of the Bronx Zoo, term-
we have compelling experimental, re- the past, a number of animals, includ- ing him “a deeply reactionary” aca-
producible evidence for mirror self-rec- ing elephants, have been subjected to demic who “dispenses junk history”
ognition: chimpanzees, orangutans, and capital punishment, and the stories now and “junk jurisprudence.”
humans. That’s it. So, Happy stands as strike us as morally perverse. In 1916, Cupp’s brief argued, in part, that
an outlier.” following a circus performance in Ten- “whether Happy stays with the Wild-
nessee, an elephant named Big Mary life Conservation Society or is moved
hen Happy and Grumpy first stepped out of line after spotting a wa- to a different location should be a mat-
W arrived at the Bronx Zoo, they
were about six years old. They were
termelon rind. Her inexperienced han-
dler, who was riding atop the animal,
ter of human responsibility . . . not a
matter of pretending that Happy is a
pressed into service as entertainers, stabbed her with a bull hook. Accord- person.” If Happy or other animals are
alongside an older female, Tus, wear- ing to one account, the elephant hurled being mistreated, then legislatures have
ing costumes and giving rides to kids. him to the ground, plunged her tusks an ethical duty to aggressively enlarge
A trainer of that era described Happy into his body, trampled him, and then laws that protect them. This position—
as “a more physical elephant than any- kicked his bloody corpse into the hor- which Cupp has called “edgy animal
thing I’ve seen,” explaining, “That’s why rified crowd. A local magistrate ordered welfare”—holds appeal for judges who
I put all the physical tricks on her—the that Big Mary be hanged. A chain was prefer to see such issues resolved
hind-leg stand, the sit-up.” placed around her neck, and she was through legislation. Cupp warned that
Some years later, Happy, Grumpy, slowly hoisted off the ground, as her granting personhood to one elephant
and Tus were moved to the Wild Asia feet pawed the air. The chain broke, would flood the courts with similar
exhibit, where Patty and Maxine were and when Big Mary landed she shat- appeals for other animals and for
also on display. In 2002, Tus and Grumpy tered her pelvis. She lay there, moan- broader rights. “The question is ‘How
died. Dan Koehl, the Swedish elephant ing, until another chain was found and far do we go?’” he told me.
keeper, looked into Grumpy’s death and she was hanged successfully. The cir- In the nineties, Cupp was a new ar-
determined that she had become crip- cus’s other elephants were made to ob- rival at Pepperdine, specializing in torts.
pled after being attacked by Patty and serve the execution. He said, “I heard about a case in which
Maxine, and was euthanized. Happy Wise argues that elephants “cannot somebody had a dog that was negli-
was placed in a separate pen. be held criminally or civilly responsi- gently killed, and there was an effort by
In November, 2018, an ailing Max- ble, any more than can a human child.” the owner to seek emotional-distress
ine was also euthanized. The zoo at- He pointed out to me that the killing damages.” The dog, a German shep-
tempted to pair up Patty and Happy. at the Bronx Zoo was likely a result of herd named Bud, had been shot three
Breheny, the zoo’s director, observed the animals’ captivity: “Female ele- times by a security guard. The matter
at the time, “We hoped with the change phants in nature almost never kill an- was settled out of court, for thirty thou-
in herd structure and dynamics, the other elephant—especially a female or sand dollars, and it made Cupp think
elephants might look to each other young elephant. Their imprisonment about how a pet’s life should be valued.
for companionship.” The experiment under terrible conditions for so long If a cow was killed, the market—not
was a bust. “The issue with Happy is sentiment—would supply the answer.
that she, as an individual, is subordi- “It struck me, because I was single, and
nate in nature and has always been at for a lot of my adult life I lived by my-
the bottom of any social grouping of self, always with a dog,” he said. Cupp
elephants of which she has been a part,” loved his family, but he realized that “it
Breheny explained. “Happy has con- would influence my day-to-day life more
sistently demonstrated to us that she if somebody negligently killed my dog
is more comfortable with her keepers than if they negligently killed my par-
and with safe barriers between her and ents or siblings.”
other elephants. The stress she felt Cupp grew up in Silicon Valley, but
whenever in the direct company of has greatly disturbed their emotional his parents had spent their childhoods
more dominant animals had a nega- and mental health to the point that on farms in Indiana, and thought noth-
tive impact on her welfare.” More re- they would kill Grumpy.” ing of killing chickens for dinner. These
cently, Breheny has said that Happy days, the only living animals that most
and Patty are “like sisters who don’t
want to share the same room.” Steven J forudgesanimal
skeptical of the NhRP’s claims
personhood often cite
Americans encounter are pets. “Their
utility is emotional, rather than eco-
Wise told me that the source of Hap- the work of Richard L. Cupp, Jr., a nomic,” Cupp says. (That is how Ste-
py’s hostility toward Patty and Max- scholar at Pepperdine’s law school who ven Wise got to know animals as well:
ine was obvious: “Those elephants has written extensively about the dan- to this day, he keeps on his desk a box
killed Happy’s friend.” gers of granting legal rights to animals. containing the ashes of Ditto, a beloved
Wise did not use the word “mur- Steven Wise spent much of his time dog who passed away in 1987.)
der.” But if animals were granted per- before Justice Tuitt trying to discredit Scientific advances have also had a
50 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
 grief, and empathy. Joyce Poole, an el-
ephant biologist who has worked at
ALIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD Gorongosa National Park, in Mozam-
bique, told me that all this is evidence
The End of the World was a nightclub. of consciousness. In an affidavit filed
Drag queens with machetes and rhinestoned on behalf of Happy, she described what
scientists call a “theory of mind”—that
machine guns guarded the red and impassable is, “the ability to mentally represent
door on Friday nights. Just a look at the crowd, and think about the knowledge, beliefs
and emotional states of others, whilst
all dressed up and swaying outside, made people recognizing that these can be distinct
want to yell the truth about themselves to anyone from your own.” Poole added that el-
ephants “are truly communicative, sim-
who’d listen, but no one heard. The End of the World ilar to the volitional use of language in
was loud. The End of the World leaked music humans.” Elephants have a variety of
calls—roars, cries, rumbles, snorts, and
like radiation, and we loved the neon echo, even various trumpets—all of which can
though it taunted us or maybe because it taunted us: convey meaning.
One of the most startling modern
kids leaning out of windows hours after bedtime, changes in the African-elephant pop-
cabdrivers debating fares at the curb just for an excuse ulation is the rapid evolution of tusk-
lessness. Poole told me that, by the end
to linger, pastors who’d pause at the corner and vow of the Mozambican civil war, which
that if they ever got inside, they’d burn it all down. lasted from 1977 to 1992, ninety per cent
of the elephants in Gorongosa had been
—Saeed Jones slaughtered. Only those without tusks
were safe. Now, in the next generation,
a third of the females are tuskless. In
profound effect on popular attitudes. marked. “What about the slippery nature, elephants live in large, matriar-
“We understand so much more now slope? How much intelligence do you chal clans. Male African calves stay with
about animals’ capabilities than we did have to have to be able to be autono- their mothers for about fourteen years,
in the past—how smart they are, how mous?” Cupp then observed that men- then merge into smaller, male groups.
much they can suffer,” Cupp told me. tally disabled and comatose people, Competition for territory has led to
“As that knowledge is spreading through not to mention infants, may have cog- conflict with humans. Elephants will
society, it is just naturally going to push nition levels below that of an intelli- raid crops and knock down fences, oc-
us to say we need to value these ani- gent animal. “If we start including in casionally killing livestock; in places like
mals more highly.” our considerations of who is a ‘person’ the palm plantations of Indonesia, farm-
Cupp and Wise have occasionally some sort of individual intelligence ers may poison the animals. According
sparred in public debate. In 2017, they analysis, we’re going to erode our en- to the World Wildlife Fund, more than
appeared on a podcast called “Law- thusiasm for the healthy degree of a hundred people every year are killed
yer 2 Lawyer.” At the time, a court in rights that we afford people who have by elephants in India alone, and ele-
New York had just struck down ap- severe cognitive impairments,” he said. phants are sometimes killed in revenge.
peals for two of the NhRP’s chimpan- “The real determinant of whether Non-lethal approaches to controlling
zee suits. “The only thing our argu- chimpanzees or elephants or cetaceans elephants may help diminish the num-
ments were based on was the fact that or any other animals are treated well ber of fatalities, but poaching and the
chimpanzees are autonomous beings,” or not treated well is going to be hu- loss of habitat create ongoing stress.
Wise said. His preferred definition of mans. . . . We need to be focussed on Despite the hazards, Poole rejects
“autonomy” is grounding one’s behav- that human responsibility.” the common argument that elephants
ior “on some non-observable, internal Wise responded, “The idea of ani- are safer in zoos than in the wild. “They
cognitive process, rather than simply mal welfare failed a long time ago.” have a better chance of living to old age
responding ref lexively.” Any animal in the wild,” she told me. “They don’t
that met that standard should be en- lephants are the largest mammals suffer the diseases of captivity—obe-
titled to “bodily liberty”—the right to
be free and left alone in an appropri-
E on land. (The African species can
reach ten feet in height and weigh more
sity, arthritis, foot ailments, behavioral
abnormalities, and infanticide. Is it bet-
ate environment, either in the wild or than thirteen thousand pounds.) Their ter for them to face poachers? I think
in a dedicated sanctuary. huge brains are capable of complex it is.” Such are the alternatives currently
“Steve says ‘autonomy,’ but notice thinking—including imitation, mem- available to elephants.
that the animals that he is talking about ory, coöperative problem-solving—and After examining videos taken of
are all highly intelligent,” Cupp re- such emotions as altruism, compassion, Happy in her pen, Poole observed only
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 51
five activities or behaviors: standing and tion,” Black actors sang minstrel songs. A delegation of Black ministers went
facing the fence; lifting one or two feet It was a sprawling human zoo. Benga, to the zoo. The Reverend James H.
off the ground, perhaps to take the whose teeth were sharpened into points, Gordon, the superintendent of the
weight off painful, diseased feet; dust­ as was common among Congolese Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, in
ing herself; eating grass; and swinging males, was presented as a “cannibal.” Brooklyn, said, “Our race, we think, is
her trunk in what appears to be “stereo­ When the fair closed, Verner es­ depressed enough, without exhibiting
typic” behavior—the kind of repetitive corted Benga and the other tribes­ one of us with apes. We think we are
action sometimes displayed by animals people back to the Congo Free State. worthy of being considered human be­
who are bored or mentally unbalanced. He claimed that, when he was pre­ ings, with souls.” Some papers con­
“Only two, dusting and eat­ paring to return to Amer­ demned the “shameful” exhibit while
ing grass, are natural,” Poole ica, Benga threatened sui­ also puzzling over how to classify
testified. “Alone, in a small cide if Verner wouldn’t take Benga. The Indianapolis Sun deter­
space, there is little else for him along. mined that he was “more man than
her to do.” They stopped in New beast”; the Minneapolis Journal de­
Poole appreciates the York, where Verner per­ creed, “He is about as near an approach
work done by the Wild­ suaded the director of the to the missing link as any human spe­
life Conservation Society, American Museum of Nat­ cies yet found.” Hornaday professed to
which has helped fund her ural History to house Benga, be puzzled by the outrage, explaining
studies. “They have some along with two chimpan­ that Benga had “one of the best rooms
of the best scientists, but I zees, while Verner spent in the primate house.” But the zoo even­
don’t see any of them back­ more time in St. Louis. tually released Benga to Gordon’s or­
ing up the zoo’s claims,” she told me. Benga became the museum’s sole resi­ phan asylum.
“They’re not standing up, saying that dent. He could wander through the gal­ Pamela Newkirk, in her compre­
Happy should remain in the zoo.” She leries alone after closing hours, passing hensive biography, “Spectacle: The As­
compares elephants to whales and lions, dioramas and taxidermied animals as if tonishing Life of Ota Benga,” found
who need huge amounts of space to he were a character from “Night at the evidence that Verner had kidnapped
roam: “Their social lives demand it. Museum.” But he became restless, and Benga from his village when he was
Elephants are complex enough to weigh the museum grew wary of the arrange­ thirteen—meaning that he would have
the challenges they face. They discuss ment, so Verner arranged for him to been fifteen, not twenty­three, when
among themselves and make collec­ move to the zoo in the Bronx. he was displayed at the Bronx Zoo.
tive decisions. You take all that away The zoo had been founded by mem­ Benga despaired of ever returning to
and you take away what it means to bers of the Boone and Crockett Club, Africa, and on March 20, 1916, he shot
be an elephant.” an organization of influential sports­ himself in the heart. A hundred and
men—including Theodore Roosevelt— four years later, the Wildlife Conser­
n 1906, seven years after the founding dedicated to hunting and conservation. vation Society apologized for its “role
I of the Bronx Zoo, a human being was
put on display in a cage. Ota Benga, a
One of the founders, Madison Grant,
was a white supremacist who later wrote
in promoting racial injustice,” and
acknowledged that Benga had been
young man from what was then the “The Passing of the Great Race,” mourn­ “robbed of his humanity.”
Congo Free State, was placed in the pri­ ing the decline of the Nordic people. Steven Wise would like us to con­
mates hall, alongside an orangutan. He Adolf Hitler occasionally quoted the sider Benga’s story as a parable for zoo
had been brought to the United States book in speeches. animals. We think of them as coming
two years earlier by Samuel Phillips Verner met with the zoo’s director, from the wild, and the St. Louis World’s
Verner, a missionary from South Caro­ William Temple Hornaday, and offered Fair similarly presented Benga as a
lina. Verner told the tale that he had dis­ to loan him a chimpanzee and two rep­ man untouched by civilization. But,
covered Benga for sale in a cage, and had tiles, throwing Benga in as well. Hor­ for a long time now, there has been no
purchased him with a bolt of cloth and naday was thrilled. Days later, zoo­goers such thing as “the wild.” The Congo­
a pound of salt. What’s certain is that found Benga in the primate house, lese people were decimated by the geno­
the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair had com­ where a sign read: cidal violence perpetrated by the bru­
missioned Verner to round up a dozen THE AFRICAN PYGMY, OTA BENGA,
tal colonial army of King Leopold II
Pygmies for an anthropology exhibit. Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. of Belgium. In Thailand, Happy’s birth­
What happened to Ota Benga can Weight 103 pounds. Brought from place, poaching and deforestation have
be seen as a commentary on the evolv­ the Kasai River, reduced the once vast elephant popu­
ing boundaries of personhood. Along Congo Free State, South Central Africa, lation to endangered status—only an
By Dr. Samuel P. Verner.
with the African tribespeople, the fair Exhibited each afternoon during September.
estimated seven thousand remain, about
included Inuits, with sled dogs and an half of them in captivity, giving rides
igloo; Ainu people, from Japan; more The Times covered the exhibit’s open­ to tourists or laboring in the illegal
than a thousand Filipinos; and two ing, noting that Benga and the orang­ logging industry. Thailand still has an
thousand Native Americans. At an ex­ utan “both grin in the same way when active black market for ivory, and lately
hibit called “Home in the Old Planta­ pleased.” there has been a flourishing trade in
52 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
elephant skin, used in Chinese tradi- the Bronx Zoo.” Moreover, if an ele- out the use of animals—and in this
tional medicine. Of the two species of phant can be deemed a person, “why case, comparatively intelligent ani-
African elephants, forest elephants are not a pig, a cow, or a chicken?” The mals—the world might have been de-
critically endangered, and savanna el- NhRP called this argument “prepos- prived of a discovery that promises to
ephants have declined in number by terous,” pointing out that Happy is not save innumerable lives.”
at least sixty per cent in the past fifty an agricultural animal, although Wise A brief filed by veterinary groups
years. Scientists have talked about “el- himself had often acknowledged that argued that providing a writ of habeas
ephant breakdown” in certain commu- he had other species in view. corpus to Happy would “completely
nities, because of chronic trauma the In New York alone, the National redefine the human-animal legal rela-
animals have experienced. On the other Association for Biomedical Research tionship” by undermining the status of
hand, herds in some parks and reserves represents Columbia University, Cor- ownership: “If animals do not receive
have enjoyed modest increases in pop- nell, the New York University School the timely care they need, including
ulation, thanks to such groups as the of Medicine, and the Memorial Sloan during legal battles over their fate, they
Wildlife Conservation Society. Kettering Cancer Center. A brief by are the ones who will suffer. Owner-
the group noted, “Excluding rats and ship is the true pro-animal position.”
everal amicus briefs in the Happy mice, approximately 800,000 animals (Their brief added that, according to
S case have represented institutions or
professions economically dependent on
were used in research in fiscal year 2019.
. . . If rats and mice were included, that
New York law, any animal not privately
owned is owned by the state.)
animals, including zoos, aquariums, number would likely be in the mil- The veterinarians noted that the
farmers, and the pet fanciers of the Fe- lions.” Extending habeas rights to an- NhRP had been raising money based
line Conservation Foundation (origi- imals would “impede important med- on the Happy case. If the lawsuit suc-
nally the Long Island Ocelot Club). All ical breakthroughs,” the brief continued. ceeded, other groups “would vie to ‘rep-
these parties consider themselves prop- It invoked the recipients of the 2020 resent’ animals in zoos, aquariums, and
erty holders. “Should Happy be pro- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medi- other facilities in an effort to sustain
vided with habeas corpus rights, farms, cine, whose work led to a cure for hep- their organizations,” even though “none
zoos, and aquaria would be at risk to a atitis C: “Critical to the laureates’ dis- of them would truly be speaking for
plethora of similar lawsuits purportedly covery was the use of chimpanzees—the those animals.”
made on behalf of the animals residing same species that the Nonhuman The NhRP countered that owner-
in their facilities,” one brief stated. “Pet Rights Project has sought to endow ship offered no guarantee of protection
owners would no longer be able to be with habeas corpus rights. . . . With- for animals, comparing the “undeniable
certain that they will be able to keep
caring for the dogs, cats or fish that
they possess. . . . NhRP seeks nothing
less than to uproot and overturn the
social order.”
The state of New York is home to
nearly a million and a half cows, eighty
thousand sheep, and more than sixty
thousand hogs. Milk is the state’s larg-
est agricultural commodity. “Should
the Pandora’s Box of habeas corpus be
opened on behalf of animals, New
York’s multibillion-dollar agricultural
industry would be at risk,” the prop-
erty holders warned, and that prospect
might lead farmers and businesses to
flee the state for “more friendly con-
fines and jurisdictions.” Any order
transferring Happy to a sanctuary
might constitute a “judicial taking”—a
form of property seizure that is uncon-
stitutional under the Fifth Amend-
ment, unless the government’s action
is for public use and fair compensation
is provided. “This Court cannot mag-
ically convert legally-defined property
like Happy into non-property,” another
brief argued. “This Court itself neither
has the money nor the authority to pay “Did you get my e-mail about who takes out the trash today?”
injustice” of Happy’s circumstance to We have deeper and richer social ties social transformation. “There’s been rel-
the tragedy of Ota Benga. Granting ha- that cut across kinship. We have mem- atively little progress in terms of real,
beas-corpus relief to an unusually bright ories of the distant past, we have plans on-the-ground change in the treatment
elephant would not disrupt “the entire of the near and distant future. And it of animals,” he said. Some states have
human-animal legal regime,” the group isn’t as if there’s one single criterion passed laws governing factory farms,
said. “This Court is only being asked that’s relevant for personhood, because but “there is still a lot of pretty horri-
to recognize one right for Happy.” personhood itself is a vague concept.” ble stuff going on—on the whole, I’m
“The qualities that you’ve listed dif- somewhat disappointed that we haven’t
hat makes mirror self-recog- fer in degree, not in kind,” I said. moved faster.” In “Animal Liberation,”
“ W nition interesting is that it’s an “My point is there may be some de- Singer wrote that “the language of rights
indicator of self-awareness,” Gordon grees of difference in kind plus many is a convenient political shorthand,”
Gallup said. “And by ‘self-awareness’ I differences in degree, all of which—in adding, “In the argument for a radical
mean the ability to become the object the whole space of traits that are rel- change in our attitude to animals, it is
of your own attention, the ability to evant to personhood—make humans in no way necessary.” Nevertheless, he
begin to think about yourself, and the quite distant from other mammals,” decided to support the case for Hap-
ability to make inferences about expe- he said. py’s personhood. He told me, “I think
riences and mental states of other in- I asked him if animal-welfare laws that’s entirely justifiable, in that we give
dividuals.” But is self-awareness the provided sufficient protection. “Proba- legal status to nonhumans, like corpo-
same thing as personhood? In a way, bly not,” he said. “But there are countless rations, and also to humans who clearly
what else can it be? ways of strengthening them without, say, lack the capacity to act on their own—
The Harvard psychology professor granting personhood to chickens. It to infants and to those with profound
Steven Pinker is best known for his seems more rhetorical than morally intellectual disabilities. We allow habeas-
work in linguistics. Like many critics sound to take a concept that was de- corpus writs for them. So I can’t see any
of animal rights, he is wary of blurring signed for us in the first place and try reason why we shouldn’t allow them for
the line between humanity and other to shoehorn very different species in.” animals whose mental capacities are
animals. “They are similar in some He added, “If our concern is reducing similar or superior.”
ways (such as the ability to suffer), but the avoidable suffering of other species, Martha C. Nussbaum, a noted phi-
different in others (language, social let’s just minimize the suffering.” losopher at the University of Chicago
complexity, complex cognition),” he Minimizing suffering, of course, was who also teaches at its law school, was
told me, in an e-mail. He also explained, the goal of Peter Singer’s “Animal Lib- surprised when Wise asked her to write
“Humans depend on know-how and eration.” Singer recently told me he feels a brief supporting Happy’s case. “I had
acquired technology. We coöperate. that his work has failed to inspire a true clashed with Wise,” she told me. “I had
said that his own particular theory of
animal rights is a bad theory, because
it predicates rights on likeness to hu-
mans.” She submitted a brief that staked
out a path between welfare and rights.
Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, the Nobel
Prize-winning economist, have devel-
oped a theory called the “capabilities
approach.” In her brief, she explained
that, “instead of animal rights being
based on the capacity to engage in a
social contract and to bear legal duties,”
the capabilities approach “asks how the
law can help animals like Happy not
only live but thrive.” Welfare laws, Nuss-
baum observed, “protect only a small
number of animals and fail to constrain,
to any meaningful extent, the wide-
spread infliction of suffering. They ban
only the intentional, purposeful suffer-
ing of some animals, and fail to recog-
nize the impact that captivity, lack of
relationships, and solitude cause a crea-
ture like Happy.” Nussbaum believes
that, in order to apply the capabilities
approach in a substantive way, animals
“Well, my baby finally left me. Where do I sign?” must be given legal standing. “Right
now, we have scraps and pieces of law luga and the rugby ball is more com- learning to identify objects by their
that are not comprehensive,” she argues, plicated than it initially appeared. The color, shape, and texture, and to add
pointing to the lack of legal protection whale was first noticed in Norwegian sums up to six. When shown a mirror,
for animals raised for food. waters in the spring of 2019, when he Alex asked, “What color?” That’s how
Nussbaum identifies “a happy har- approached a fishing boat, wearing a he learned the word “gray.” He is the
binger of what may be a new era in harness with a camera mount that said only nonhuman animal known to have
law”: a 2016 opinion by a U.S. Court “equipment st. petersburg.” Some asked a question. During the same pe-
of Appeals. A lawsuit had charged the people speculated that the whale was riod, Jan van Hooff, a scholar of chim-
National Marine Fisheries Service with an escapee from a Russian naval base panzee behavior, developed a deeply
violating the Marine Mammal Pro- and had been trained as a spy. Norwe- affectionate relationship with a chimp
tection Act by allowing the U.S. Navy gians began calling him Hvaldimir—a named Mama; when the chimp was
to use low-frequency sonar in areas play on the Norwegian word for whale, dying, in 2016, van Hooff was the only
where it could interfere with the abil- “hval,” and the name Vladimir, as in person who could get her to eat. A
ity of whales and other sea creatures Vladimir Putin. (Russia and the U.S. video depicting the intense emotions
to communicate, reproduce, migrate, have both trained marine mammals for between van Hooff and the chimp went
and forage. The court ordered the gov- various deep-sea tasks, but there’s no viral. “These relationships are friend-
ernment to live up to its own statu- evidence that Hvaldimir was a spy.) ships,” Nussbaum insists, despite the
tory requirement to effect “the least The whale began following fishing fact of the animals’ captivity.
practicable adverse impact” on marine boats into the harbor of Tuf jord, Making friends with animals in
life. Whales weren’t injured by the Na- charming the locals, who petted and nature poses a greater challenge, be-
vy’s actions, the court admitted, but fed him. When it became apparent cause it requires entering into the an-
they weren’t free to realize their capa- that Hvaldimir was malnourished, he imals’ world delicately, and for long
bilities as whales. was put on a feeding program, sup- periods. Nussbaum cites Joyce Poole,
Because animals can’t speak for ported by the SeaWorld & Busch Gar- the elephant biologist, as an example
themselves, welfare laws tend to pro- dens Conservation Fund. Eventually, of a scientist who has established pro-
tect them only when there is clear proof he began foraging on his own. A new found connections with the animals
of grievous physical harm. How can an- charity, the Hvaldimir Foundation, an- she studies. Nussbaum proposes that
imals secure protections for their capa- nounced that its “ultimate goal and researchers who amass such intimate
bilities? Nussbaum proposes a model hope was for Hvaldimir to be able to knowledge of animals create invento-
based on fiduciary law. Guardians, trust- hunt and remain in the wild without ries of capabilities to be honored. Last
ees, and conservators have the legal au- any human interaction.” But why? The May, Poole posted to her Web site,
thority to act in the interest of benefi- story of Hvaldimir is, in no small part, Elephantvoices.org, a dazzling mul-
ciaries unable to take care of themselves. about the longing between people and timedia catalogue of more than three
Nussbaum suggests that the govern- a curious animal to get to know one hundred behaviors exhibited by Af-
ment could designate a suitable animal- another, and about the transforma- rican savanna elephants. The archive
welfare agency to act as a fiduciary for tions that can result. Why not advo- contains some twenty-four hundred
specific animals, which would allow cate for more interaction between hu- video clips, including one in which a
them to be represented in court. “Happy mans and animals, when they naturally female adorns herself with a clump
should first of all be given standing,” and safely occur? of grass as if it were a tiara.
Nussbaum told me. “And then things I asked Nussbaum if animals might Poole began studying elephants in
could begin to happen!” have their capabilities enhanced, rather 1975, at a camp at the base of Mt. Kili-
than diminished, by encounters with manjaro, which had been established
eople in both the welfare and the humans. “The very idea that there can three years earlier by the researcher and
P rights camps often speak as if an-
imals got nothing out of their rela-
be friendships suggests that,” she said.
In a forthcoming book, “Justice for An-
conservationist Cynthia Moss. Few
have done more than these two scien-
tionships with humans. Before talking imals: Our Collective Responsibility,” tists to describe the complexities of el-
with Nussbaum, I was stirred by a viral she argues that such relationships don’t ephant society, cognition, and emotion.
video of a man playing fetch with a occur solely between people and their Poole has explored the manifold ways
beluga whale off the coast of Norway. pets—or “companion animals,” as she that elephants communicate—not only
The man throws a rugby ball and the refers to them. Friendships with ani- through sound but also through touch
whale streaks off to retrieve it—an ap- mals in captivity pose a challenge, be- and gesture. The range of their voices
parently spontaneous game. YouTube cause of the coercive nature of the re- is astonishing, with some sounds pro-
and TikTok have repeatedly opened lationship, and yet rich interactions do duced by the larynx and others through
new windows on unexpected animal occur. In the nineteen-seventies, Irene the trunk. Many sounds that are well
behavior. No doubt, the shift in atti- Pepperberg, an animal behaviorist, below the range of human hearing can
tudes about animal rights is in part began working with an African gray be detected by elephants, sometimes
the product of the delight that such parrot named Alex, and over the next more than six miles away. Sounds at
glimpses award us. three decades the bird acquired an as- such low frequencies transmit a replica
As it turns out, the story of the be- tonishing mastery of English words— signal through the ground, which means
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 55
that elephants “hear” through their ears, in 2018—thought to be the first in three documentary, “Blackfish,” which chron-
their feet, and sometimes their trunks, years—but lived for less than a day. icles the story of Tilikum, a perform-
too, recognizing the meaning of the The grieving mother, surrounded by ing orca who killed a trainer at the
call as well as the identity of the caller. other females in her pod, carried the SeaWorld in Orlando in 2010. The
In 1990, Poole became the head of calf ’s body with her for seventeen days, film makes the case that the trainer’s
the elephant program at the Kenya across a thousand miles of ocean. It death was the inevitable result of con-
Wildlife Service, which is based in would be going too far to say that the ditions that orcas experience in cap-
Nairobi. Three years later, she returned mother knew her loss was a step to- tivity. (There’s no record of orcas kill-
to the camp near Mt. Kilimanjaro, ward the extinction of her community, ing humans in the wild.) After the
supposing that the elephants had for- but it might also be going too far to film aired on CNN, SeaWorld’s stock
gotten her. She brought along her in- say that she didn’t. plummeted, and there were protests
fant daughter, Selengei. The elephants SeaWorld became famous because outside its parks. Since then, the or-
surrounded Poole’s car, and when of an orca named Shamu, who per- ganization has restricted interactions
Poole held out her daughter, the ma- formed aquatic tricks at the original between trainers and whales, and an-
triarch suddenly emitted a loud rum- park, in San Diego, in the sixties. Like nounced the end of its captive-breed-
ble. Poole recalls the scene in her mem- Happy, Shamu had been captured in ing program.
oir, “Coming of Age with Elephants”: the wild after her mother was killed— Zoos and aquariums want to be
“The rest of the family rushed to her harpooned by whalers. Shamu bit an seen as embassies where the human
side, gathering next to our window, employee in 1971, and might have killed and animal kingdoms can come to-
and, with their trunks outstretched, her if a colleague hadn’t pried the gether, and to some extent they are.
deafened us with a cacophony of rum- whale’s jaws open with a pole. Sea- Along with sea lions and vaulting be-
bles, trumpets, and screams until our World was building up the Shamu lugas, tail-walking dolphins are main-
bodies vibrated with the sound. They brand, though, and one dangerous in- stays of the SeaWorld spectacle. Tail-
pressed against one another, urinat- cident wasn’t going to derail that. walking was unknown in nature until
ing and defecating, their faces stream- Southwest Airlines painted some of its a bottlenose dolphin named Billie was
ing with the fresh black stain of tem- jets in killer-whale black-and-white. rescued from a polluted harbor in Aus-
poral gland secretions.” Adorable stuffed Shamu dolls were ev- tralia, in the late nineteen-eighties,
Poole had seen this behavior before: erywhere. Captive orcas in SeaWorlds and sheltered for a few weeks at a water
it was “an intense greeting ceremony around the country were given the name park showcasing dolphins. She appar-
usually reserved only for family and Shamu. Audiences invariably gasped ently learned the skill by watching
bond group members who have been as the whales rocketed out of the water, others do it, and after being returned
separated for a long time.” And yet its and squealed when splashed by their to the wild she taught it to dolphins
ultimate meaning was mysterious. As tail flukes. Trainers rode on the backs in an estuary on Australia’s southern
Poole puts it, “Who can know what of the orcas, and the whales would shoot coast. Tail-walking became a fad
goes on in the hearts and minds of el- them into the air for a swan dive. among dolphins in the neighborhood,
ephants but the elephants themselves?” The orcas in San Antonio are as though it died out a couple of decades
graceful as ever, but as I watched them later. It was a vivid example of social
n December, I visited SeaWorld San perform I recalled the elephant shows learning—a prime signifier of sen-
I Antonio. Five orcas are kept in pools
at the park, where they flip, twirl, and
that used to be put on by Ringling
Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Cir-
tience—and of the marvels that can
arise from the interactions between
splash in shows. Whales have much in humans and animals. The question is
common with elephants. They are giant whether such encounters can occur
mammals with long life spans who without exploitation.
form matrilineal pods; in the ocean,
whales range over vast distances, and n February 18, 2020, Steven Wise
they can communicate at frequencies
below the level of human hearing, with
O lost his case. “This Court agrees
that Happy is more than just a legal
sounds that travel for miles; they are thing, or property,” Justice Tuitt wrote.
extremely social and can express joy “She is an intelligent, autonomous
and curiosity. being who should be treated with re-
Orcas have no natural predators, cus—performances so elaborate that spect and dignity, and who may be en-
other than humans, and yet one pop- George Balanchine was once commis- titled to liberty. Nonetheless, we are
ulation in the Pacific Northwest is crit- sioned to choreograph a pachyderm constrained by the caselaw to find that
ically endangered—at last count, it had ballet. Under unrelenting pressure from Happy is not a ‘person’ and is not being
only seventy-three residents. They are animal-rights organizations, the cir- illegally imprisoned.” Tuitt stated that,
threatened by overfishing, pollution, cus retired its elephants in 2016, and in her view, the legislative process was
and noise disturbance from boats that a year later it went out of business. better equipped to decide whether zoos
interferes with echolocation, which SeaWorld has been similarly belea- should be allowed to keep elephants,
they use to forage. A new calf was born guered since the release of a damning but she noted that she found the ar-
56 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
guments “extremely persuasive for
transferring Happy from her solitary,
lonely one-acre exhibit at the Bronx
Zoo, to an elephant sanctuary on a
2300 acre lot.”
The NhRP said that it was “deeply
encouraged” by Tuitt’s sympathetic
order. Wise noted that “she essentially
vindicated the legal arguments and
factual claims about the nature of non-
human animals such as Happy that
the NhRP has been making.” The
group is working on an appeal. (Oral
arguments are pending.)
Given the courts’ demonstrated re-
luctance to grant personhood status to
chimpanzees or to elephants, Happy’s
case will likely end where the others
did—in an unambiguous rejection of
setting such a far-reaching precedent.
Since Wise began pursuing person-
hood litigation, though, judges have
repeatedly expressed misgivings, ac-
knowledging in their decisions that an-
imals deserve more protection and con-
sideration; they just believe that the
courts are not the place to make such
• •
a momentous cultural adjustment.
The sentient animals in our cus- by the scope of the change required. the much larger damage civilization
tody have served as sacrificial ambas- “We’re at the beginning of a big eth- has done to the natural world.
sadors, helping us to see the majesty ical awakening,” Martha Nussbaum, In this important dialogue, Happy’s
of life outside the realm of human the philosopher, told me. “It’s only the voice is silent. No doubt, within the bor-
domination. Awarding certain appeal- beginning, because people are not re- ders of her small pen in the Bronx Zoo,
ing animals such as Happy the status ally prepared to make sacrifices.” She she is well cared for. And she may be ex-
of personhood would not remedy the advocates for vegetarianism, smaller ceptional in having a sense of self, which
cataclysm of extinction so many spe- families, and the end of the factory- adds to the tragedy of her circumstance.
cies face, or the vast exploitation of meat industry. Happy has become both a symbol and
animals for food and labor. If Wise’s How are we to recalibrate our re- a pawn—in the contest between advo-
campaign succeeds, it will arguably lationship with animals that live in cates of animal rights and advocates of
push human society toward a more complex societies and have a sense of animal welfare, and in the contest be-
equitable bargain with the animal themselves as individuals? The ques- tween humans and animals to fulfill their
kingdom, but the courts are rightfully tion becomes more urgent as the fu- capabilities. “There will be conflicts which
concerned about the proliferation of ture of such species grows increasingly we have to arbitrate,” Nussbaum told me.
lawsuits that might follow, and the perilous. They are penned in, harassed “We think that, because we found our-
difficulty of discerning which species and hunted, subjected to experiments, selves on this globe, we have a right to
deserve such consideration. That has eaten, used in medicines. Zoos and use it for our own sustenance. Animals
been an issue with the sentience bill aquariums have certainly been part of have the same claim. They, too, didn’t
under consideration in the U.K., which the human exploitation of nature, but choose to be where they are.”
was originally aimed at protecting at this stage they can also act as a res- Joyce Poole observes that what el-
vertebrates and has already been ex- ervoir for creatures that have been ephants really need is something we
panded to include octopuses, crabs, forced out of their natural environ- can’t give them: freedom. “All we can
and lobsters. ments because of expanding human do is give them more space,” she told
In the past several decades, as the populations and climate change. Many me. The sanctuaries that would adopt
human population has doubled, the animals live longer, and more securely, Happy are an “imperfect solution,” per-
populations of animal species have in sanctuaries and nature parks overtly haps, but a fair compromise. And a
declined by an average of nearly sev- managed by humans than in their be- sanctuary would at least allow Happy
enty per cent. Clearly, we need to con- spoiled habitats. Focussing on the in- to rediscover some of her elephant ca-
tain our heedless rapacity. There is dignities of captive elephants or orcas pabilities. As Poole put it, “If we can’t
also a danger of becoming paralyzed can inadvertently divert attention from save elephants, what can we save?” 
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 57
 FICTION

58 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVIER SCHRAUWEN

 his is not a rewrite of that story art,” my father had said. “He’s eight when I’d picked him up. We’d exchanged

T in which plants and animals

and people keep winding up
dead over the course of a school year,
years old,” I’d said. “He cares about his
grandpa.” They’d all spent two weeks
touring Italy—Venice, Florence, and
smiles and all.
“He shouldn’t be thinking about
death so much,” Nikki said. “I think he
but it starts the same, and it feels odd Rome—a trip Sally still mentioned might be traumatized.”
not to acknowledge, so I will. I just at least once a day. A trip that I, alone “Let’s not bring trauma into this.
did. Things kept dying. My father with my father as a child, had also taken He’s had a rough year.”
first, in June, then the puppy my ex- a version of. “I’m surprised he didn’t draw your fa-
wife had adopted to help the children “Can you look up Bill Murray’s net ther’s grave,” Nikki said. “He misses him.”
get over their grandpa, and then the worth?” Ernest asked me, turning away “Does he?”
school janitor, Lane. Right after Hal- from the window. “We all do.”
loween, Lane had died during lunch- He’d watched “Groundhog Day” I heard some glasses clink in the
time in the cafeteria, in front of the again at his mother’s the day before. background.
kids. Heart attack. A few weeks later, He could’ve asked her to search for Bill “Do you have company?”
my son, Ernest, came home from Murray’s financial situation, but for “Just Franny,” she said. “Just having
school and told me that he hoped some reason he kept these kinds of re- drinks with Franny.”
there was no afterlife. quests for me. I looked up Bill Mur- “Hi, Franny,” I said.
“I hope there’s no afterlife,” he said. ray’s fortune online. Nikki echoed my hello, and I heard
We were in the living room, looking “And how rich are we?” Ernest asked. Franny say, “Is he offering you more
through the window, waiting to see if “A lot less than that,” I said. money again?” (I kept suggesting that
the rain would turn to snow. “I hope I don’t know why I wasn’t ready to I increase Nikki’s alimony, but she kept
he’s not watching over me.” tell him the actual number, why it felt refusing, on the ground that she’d mar-
I asked who he meant. I thought wrong. My father had left behind a sig- ried—and divorced—a struggling nov-
maybe he was talking about my father, nificant amount of money, and I was elist, not an art-world heir.) “Take the
but perhaps it was Lane on his mind. still getting used to it. I hadn’t known fucking money,” I heard Franny say.
I didn’t think it could be the dog. that he had so much. “I’ve been using this wine-delivery
“I just don’t want there to be an af- My phone rang. Nikki couldn’t help service,” Nikki said, at random, hop-
terlife, is all,” Ernest said, after think- checking on the kids on the two week- ing, I could tell, that I hadn’t heard
ing about it for a few seconds. “For any- ends a month they weren’t with her. Franny. “They’re so responsive. Every
body. I think when you’re dead you “I got a call from Ernest’s teacher,” time I have the smallest question, the
should stay dead.” she said. slightest issue, they answer right away.
I had him and his sister for the “How are you doing?” I wonder if I’m their only customer.”
weekend. Sally, who was now eleven “Sorry. Yes. How are you doing? She Sally came into my office then.
and exploring Catholicism (to her says Ernie’s drawings worry her. She “Is that Mom on the phone?” she
mother’s alarm), kept talking about says he keeps drawing dead people.” asked.
her hope that my father was watching I left the living room. “Yes, honey. Do you want to talk to
over us. My father had been very fond “We know this already,” I said, once her?”
of her. He’d taken her to the Art In- I reached my office. “It’s just a phase. “I just saw her this morning.”
stitute every Wednesday, taught her Little boys are drawn to violent scenes.” “They really make you feel special,”
painting techniques and a lot about Nikki asked me to look through our Nikki said.
art history. They’d been obnoxious to- son’s backpack for what he’d drawn at “At least she didn’t draw me dead
gether, playing games like who could school that day. in five years,” I said.
most quickly recite the titles of all the “Describe what you see,” she said,
art works in Gallery 397 (Sally’s favor- once the drawing was in my hand. •
ite), or all of Pablo Picasso’s middle What I saw was a single page with Sally wanted to hang some art. She
names in order. (The full name was the instruction from Ernest’s teacher thought that my new apartment lacked
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula “Draw yourself many years in the fu- life, and since I’d inherited (on top of all
Juan Nepomuceno María de los Re- ture!” and my son’s response: a drawing his money and books) my father’s last
medios Cipriano de la Santísima Trin- of his own gravestone, with mine, his series of paintings, a series Sally had seen
idad Ruiz y Picasso, a succession of mother’s, and Sally’s surrounding it. take shape in the old man’s studio for
sounds I came to know as well as the “Are there dates on the gravestones?” months, she thought that what we should
alphabet.) A few weeks before my fa- Nikki asked. hang was a no-brainer.
ther died, he had asked me if he could “Only on mine,” I said. “According “There’s no room for all four,” I told
take Sally to the Venice Biennale, where to our son, I’ll die in 2024. August.” her. “You’ll have to pick one.”
one of his paintings was being shown. My ex-wife audibly shivered at the “I like the walls white like that,” Er-
We both knew that this would likely other end of the line. nest said.
be his last trip abroad. I’d told him he “It’s just a drawing, Nik.” “It’s depressing,” Sally said. “It feels
could take Sally to Venice if he took I was pissed that Ernest’s teacher like a hospital in here.”
Ernest, too. “Ernest doesn’t care about had called her instead of talking to me “You’ve never been in a hospital,” I
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 59
said, deciding, apparently, to side with everyone said: they grow up so fast. Even “He didn’t think you were stupid. He
my son. seeing them every other weekend, I no- just wanted you to like the museums and
“There’s stuff everywhere at Mom’s,” ticed no changes. the churches more.”
Ernest went on. “It’s suffocating.” I guess Ernest had changed some- Sally again. I still hadn’t spoken to re-
“‘Suffocating’?” Sally said. “That’s a what, though. One time, when he was in assure my son that his grandfather had
big word for you.” kindergarten, I picked him up and the loved him. I thought it was pretty weird
“Shut the fuck up,” Ernest said. teacher’s summary of his behavior read, of Ernest, too, after seeing the Bargello,
I should have said something, and “Cried often but participated!” I’d shown or the Bridge of Sighs, for that matter,
maybe I would have, had I been given it to Nikki (we were still married then), to have liked the Trevi Fountain so much.
more time, but Sally lost a and we’d both laughed at it My own favorite part of the Italy tour,
tooth then, her last cuspid, for minutes, commenting on as a child, had been the San Marco con-
on the breadstick she’d been how wonderful an epitaph vent in Florence—a good choice, accord-
snacking on. She spit the it would be, before pretend- ing to my father, though he’d seemed
tooth onto the coffee table, ing that we hadn’t just joked surprised by it. Perhaps he’d been more
and the sound it made hit- about a day when our son surprised by my capacity to make good
ting the glass was the last would be dead. We hadn’t, choices than by the choice itself.
thing Ernest and I heard for really. We’d joked about a “I was going to say let’s not hang
a while, as Sally quickly left hypothetical epitaph, for Grandpa’s paintings anyway,” Sally went
the room, leaving us to stare a hypothetical person, way on, “but maybe we could hang some of
at the piece of bone she’d in the future. Now he was our stuff, you know? Just so it’s less sad
just expelled, sitting amid a drawing all of us dead, and in here.”
little blood and half-chewed dough. Was I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen “That’s a great idea,” I said.
it a piece of bone, by the way? You al- him cry. Not at his grandfather’s funeral, Even Ernest thought so.
ways hear that your smile is the visible not for the dog, and not for Lane.
part of your skeleton, but are teeth made •
of actual bone? Ernest started blinking • While I made dinner, I let them pick
rapidly, every blink drawing the left cor- Sally came back into the kitchen with their best work to Scotch-tape on the
ner of his mouth up with it. a toothbrush to polish her tooth and a walls. After dinner, there would be bed-
“Are you O.K.?” I asked. little cup to place it in. She informed time, I determined. After bedtime, I could
He dipped a finger in the blood next me that she would leave the tooth right try to work, maybe finish that chapter I
to Sally’s tooth. This seemed to calm outside her bedroom door tonight, as had been writing for weeks. The nights
him down, so I let him do it. He drew opposed to under her pillow, because I had the kids were usually more produc-
a red circle on the glass. she didn’t want to be woken up by the tive. Since I’d bought myself a new apart-
tooth fairy. ment, a new desk, the right ergonomic
• She didn’t say anything about Ernest chair, and a year off from my job, I’d dis-
The reason my father had liked Sally messing with her blood. Instead, she covered that I was the kind of writer who
more than Ernest was that Ernest wasn’t jumped back into the conversation we’d worked better when he was stealing time
very good at drawing. Or, rather, he wasn’t been having before the tooth, preparing from other obligations. An hour here,
curious about how to get better at draw- to offer a compromise. two hours there, in between meetings, on
ing. He’d gone with his grandfather to “I can tell you’re not ready to hang my lunch break. I was better in a rush.
the Art Institute once a week, too, for a Grandpa’s paintings,” she told Ernest. Three months now of entire days at my
time, but soon he asked to be excused, and “Maybe it’s too soon.” disposal, and I’d written so little. In the
my father never forgave him. One thing Ernest didn’t seem to understand what mornings, I looked at what I had, de-
he’d recognized in Ernest, however, was Sally meant by “too soon.” spaired, and then read better writers than
a talent for drawing near-perfect circles “Grandpa hated me,” he said. me for the rest of the day. Lately, I’d been
in freehand. I think that’s why he was so “No, he didn’t,” Sally said. looking at art books, too. My father’s col-
pissed at him, in the end. An assured cir- It would have been better if I’d said lection had made its way to my living
cle in freehand was a sign that you could it myself, or immediately backed up Sally, room. But tonight I would work well, I
be great at drawing, according to my fa- but looking at Ernest I had the most told myself, breading the cutlets. Because
ther, if only you put your mind to it. vivid memory of being his age, of hav- I’d been deprived of the possibility for a
“It’s a nice circle,” I said to my son. ing to go to my father’s studio to show few hours, I would work well. Dinner,
He clenched his fist and, with the him the drawings I’d made that week, put the kids to bed, work. I’d told Nikki
meaty side, erased what he’d drawn. something that I’d had to do every Sun- I would talk to Ernest about his draw-
The rain had now acquired the con- day night. I remembered him discard- ing of our family graves, but I knew I
sistency of mucus, each drop sticking to ing drawing after drawing, and how con- wouldn’t. How did one start a conversa-
and sliding down the window. vinced I’d been that he hated me. tion like that? How did one keep it on
How could it only be 6 P.M.? Time “He thought I was stupid because my track? It always looked easy in the mov-
moved so slowly when the kids were favorite part of the Italy trip was the ies. Mothers telling daughters how hard
around. I couldn’t wait to experience what Trevi Fountain,” Ernest said. it was being a woman, fathers explaining
60 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
death to sons in less than a minute, and, dicate developing psychosis, or even where with the leather case her grand-
in both cases, explanations making sense, psychopathic tendencies. What you father had given her years ago (her “port-
big warm hug, conversation over. I couldn’t wanted, really, as a parent, was for your folio”), but most of Ernest’s production
do it. And what was wrong with draw- child to draw one sun and one sun only. was at Nikki’s, and so he hadn’t had much
ing your own grave, anyway? There was And where would a sun have fit in Er- to pick from. Sally was a big fan of the
something therapeutic about it, wasn’t nest’s drawing, anyway? The drawing cross-section, always had been. Through
there? We’d done it since Ernest was old of our family plot? Wouldn’t it have the years, she’d drawn countless varia-
enough to draw stick figures—drawn the been worse if Ernest had drawn a sun tions of apartment buildings whose
things he was afraid of. there, over all our gravestones? façades had been cut away to reveal what
every family was doing, each in its little
• • square. Tonight, she’d hung cross-sec-
This reminded me of a book I’d read as We ate dinner. Sally made a big deal out tions I’d never seen, of our local super-
a college student, one weekend when I of her missing tooth, but all in all she market and of her pregnant aunt (Nik-
was visiting my father. I’d taken it from was happy, a happy girl who kept talking ki’s sister), who was expecting twins.
his shelf, a slim volume about the draw- and talking—about the exhibition she’d “I don’t understand something,” Er-
ings made by children in war zones, what just prepared in the living room, her day nest said as we observed the twin fetuses.
could be learned from them. I don’t know at school, her memories of Florence. It “Are the babies going to be from two
why it had appealed to me. I guess I’d was hard to relate to Sally sometimes. different dads?”
always been attracted to technically poor When she was too happy, I could feel Sally told him he was an idiot, that
drawings—lines for limbs, squares for like I was in a commercial. Like I was even though Aunt Sophie had used a
buildings, things that looked like I watching a commercial, rather. For sperm donor it was still only one guy’s
could’ve drawn them myself. My father healthy snacks. I’d be happy that she was jizz, that they didn’t just mix a bunch of
had tried to make my interest sound happy, of course, but I’d also feel like I different jizzes in a glass before they gave
fancy, said I liked “art brut,” but I don’t was losing her, like I couldn’t reach her it to the woman to drink.
know if I liked it, exactly, or if I simply where she was. I’d had this fear, before Ernest had only three drawings in the
found comfort in it, its naïveté. If I could becoming a father, that my children exhibit: two he’d made in a rush right
reproduce a drawing easily, then it meant would be like me, mostly sad and over- before dinner of the Trevi Fountain (piles
that I could’ve been its creator in the first anxious, but Nikki had promised me of shiny coins at the bottom of the foun-
place, right? At least that’s what I thought they wouldn’t, that we would raise them tain in the first drawing, and then, in the
as a child, when I copied Bill Traylor’s to be happy and only reasonably wor- second, nothing left after the cleaning
crooked houses and Henry Darger’s lit- ried. I’d told her that the fear, then, be- crew had come—no sun in either pic-
tle girls with penises. My father had this came that my children and I would have ture), and one he’d made the day before
rule that I had to make at least one sketch nothing in common. She’d laughed at at his mom’s, a still from “Groundhog
a day. I could keep copying, sure, you that. She’d thought that I was joking. Day”—the scene where Bill Murray or-
learned a lot from copying, he said, but ders the whole diner menu for breakfast.
it was important to come up with things • He liked drawing food. What he’d done
of your own, too, your own way of ren- The exhibition in the living room was best there was the glisten on the blob of
dering the texture of a lemon on a wooden mostly of Sally’s work. She went every- wine-colored jam in the middle of the
table, for example, your own way of in-
terpreting shadows on a sill. It was a per-
son’s way of dealing with the small things
that made him unique.
I drowned the cutlets in boiling oil,
and realized as I watched them golden
that I remembered quite a few things
about the book. The book about chil-
dren in war zones and what they drew.
I remembered that roads that suddenly
stopped, or mouthless faces, could be in-
terpreted as signs of trauma. I remem-
bered that traumatized children tended
never to draw the sun. Ernest didn’t draw
suns anymore, hadn’t drawn a sun in
months, but maybe it was all right. Maybe
he thought the sun was implied in most
drawings, or boring to draw. And no sun
in a child’s drawing was still better than
several suns, according to the book, if
memory served. Several suns could in-
doughnut, and I congratulated him for it. something I knew he asked his mother and I were still married, I waited until
“Great job on the jam,” I said, and he every night as well. I promised he she was home at night to have one. She
asked me to look up how much money wouldn’t. I’d been afraid of sleep at his didn’t drink when she was alone with
was at the bottom of the Trevi Fountain. age, too, of being unconscious, of what them, either, but when we were to-
“It changes all the time,” I said. “You could happen then, that perhaps I would gether we often had a glass or two, and
know that.” go too far in and unplug my brain for- didn’t worry about who would do what
Ernest actually knew a lot more about ever instead of just turning it off for the in an emergency. We were good drunks
the Trevi Fountain than I did, fascinated night. I remembered asking my father together. We would figure it out, was
as he’d been after seeing it scraped clean once, “Will I die during the night?,” and the thought. I wanted to talk to her
one morning under police surveillance. him saying that he didn’t know, that no again. I looked at the weather forecast
He’d been the one to tell me that the one could know. I never asked again. To on my phone instead, even though I
fountain had to be cleaned once a week, Ernest, though, I’d always answered the knew that the only way Chicago could
because people threw so much money only thing a modern parent could an- work, as a city, was if we all agreed to
in it, and that the money went to the swer—“No, honey, of course not”— stop doing that. Outside my windows,
homeless of Rome. which reassured him but also made it twentysomethings, but also people my
“I think there should be a Web site that so that he had to ask again and again age, were flocking along Damen Ave-
tells you how much money they pull out every night. And made me worry that, nue to gather at Gold Star, Big Star,
of the fountain every week,” Ernest said. on the off chance that he did die in his Violet Hour, Rainbo, to drink and for-
“The Trevi is so boring,” Sally said. sleep, the last thing my son would have get about something, or think about it
“At first, I thought you could wish for heard from me was a lie. harder. It was barely nine, the night
anything there, but the wish is actually was only starting for them. I under-
mandatory. You have to wish to go back • stood that the reason people moved to
to Rome one day.” I think that’s why I’d loved my father, the suburbs to raise their kids had lit-
“I think that’s just a guideline,” I said. in the end. His honesty. It turned peo- tle to do with the schools—it was be-
“You’re always free to wish for whatever.” ple off—it had turned me off, too, when cause they had to stop seeing how much
“I wish for Grandpa to be able to see he started applying it to Ernest—but it fun the childless were having.
us right now,” Sally said, closing her eyes. was meant to help. It had taught me
Mine met Ernest’s as she said this, not to be a wimp. Not that I thought •
and I saw sheer panic there, and I saw Ernest was a wimp. But he definitely I sat at my desk and looked at the last
that he saw me see it. He broke eye con- hadn’t come out of his visit to the San few lines I’d written, but I’d forgotten
tact immediately. Marco convent with my father as trans- to put my phone on silent and was im-
I pretended to look at my watch and formed as I’d been. At San Marco, going mediately interrupted by a string of texts
said that it was time for bed. into cell after cell, one friar’s bedroom from my friend Henry, who was on his
“But I didn’t finish my placards!” after another, I’d understood something way to Paris to promote his sixth novel,
Sally said. “I haven’t named all my draw- that I think my father was trying to im- which had just been translated into
ings yet!” part to me without words, that one slept French. He was still at the airport, tak-
I said that she could finish tomorrow. alone and didn’t complain, that being ing off in an hour, but he’d already met
Sally said, “I can’t wait for tomorrow,” a French fan (he was fairly famous), a
and I felt it again, the distance between us. cute lawyer who was on the same flight
as him. He sent me a selfie of them eat-
• ing tortas at O’Hare’s Frontera, Hen-
While her brother brushed his teeth, ry’s latest novel on the table between
Sally told me we could just hang one of them. “Lucky bastard,” I texted back.
her grandfather’s paintings in her bed- “All that happened to me tonight was
room, if Ernest was really dead set against Sally lost a tooth.” “That’s amazing,”
seeing them in the rest of the apartment. Henry responded. “You should write a
“It could be just for me,” she said. “I story about it.” I couldn’t tell if he was
could fall asleep looking at it, like the alone was not only fine but what one being serious. Henry was constantly tell-
monks in San Marco fell asleep to their had to aspire to. That day, even next to ing me that I should write more per-
own personal Fra Angelico every night.” Fra Angelico’s frescoes, my father had sonal stuff, that the reason my first (and
It felt wrong to me, hanging such an looked like a giant to me. so far only) novel had sold so little was
expensive work of art in an eleven-year- that people didn’t want to read about
old’s bedroom. Like jewelry on a newborn. • hundred-per-cent-fictional characters
“I’ll think about it,” I said. I cleaned up the kitchen. I wanted a anymore, they wanted real humans, real
That was good enough for her. drink. I never drank when I was alone life, and I’d had such an interesting life,
with the kids, though, not even a glass being the son of a big-deal artist, trav-
• of wine once they were down. In case elling the world with him as a boy, los-
Ernest, as I tucked him in, asked me if something happened and I had to drive ing my mother so young, meeting Nikki
he was going to die during the night, them to the hospital. Even when Nikki after having been originally set up with
62 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
 fore age two, how early she’d asked about
God, when her brother seemed con-
WHY NOT cerned only with what was in front of
him—if that. I’d told my father that girls
The snow sparkled, and boys developed at a different pace,
each shift but he’d countered that even I had been
in my sled’s smarter than Ernest at his age, and that
position I had been a boy. I’d felt a split second
caused it to sparkle again of relief at not being last, at not faring
as I sped down that way and thought as poorly in my father’s estimation as
why not Ernest did. A relief immediately fol-
enjoy this, meaning lowed by guilt, of course, which had
look at it, driven me to defend Ernest’s honor with
so I looked, what allowance, and later even more passion—to no end. “Look
at this drawing,” my father had con-
can’t sleep cluded, pointing at one of Ernest’s ma-
came back out roon crayon storms on our fridge, ruin-
glance up ing it for me. “Sally already had the
the sky full of unexpected stars intuition of perspective at his age. What
surprised is this shit?” I’d believed before then that
it looks like a vast piece all children’s drawings held some inter-
of quartz, sparkling, veiny and I thought, oh est, that they could never be bad. But
the sky has always been like this of course they could.
a rock
of course •
I went to the living room, Ernest’s draw-
—Jana Prikryl ing in hand, to look for the book about
children in war zones. I didn’t think my
son was traumatized by his grandfa-
her sister (yes, the one with the twins), nevolent. I’d converted to Judaism to ther’s death, or the dog’s, or Lane’s, but
and then the divorce. People loved di- put her mind at ease that we would rest maybe? How could you tell trauma from
vorce stories, Henry said. The book he together for eternity, but now she’d ei- fear, or from deep sadness? When my
was going to Paris to promote had, in ther forgotten ever wanting this or felt mother died, I’d been horribly sad, not
large part, been inspired by his own. For like an idiot for having wanted it, which traumatized, I don’t think. My father
a minute, I considered writing about were two completely different things had taken me to Italy the following
Sally’s tooth. I texted Henry, “Are teeth but still looked exactly the same to who- week, to see the San Marco convent and
actually bone, or some other material?,” ever wasn’t in Nikki’s head. other things that lasted longer than peo-
and he answered, “Look it up!,” which ple. It had helped.
I did. I learned that bones were made • I found the book and started reading
of living tissue and could therefore heal, Ernest’s drawing wasn’t that bad, I it, taking occasional breaks to look at the
but teeth couldn’t. Teeth were deader thought. Technically speaking. Why had drawings on the wall. I had children who
than bones. My daughter had lost some- my father insisted that he was weak? drew supermarkets, I thought. I had chil-
thing that had been dead inside her for He’d never told Ernest this directly (“I dren who drew well-lit places, an abun-
a long time. I wondered if Nikki still know you can’t tell children they’re weak dance of fresh produce, an abundance of
kept the kids’ teeth. anymore”), but he’d told me. I hadn’t food, babies about to be born, flowers on
wanted to make too much of his obvi- some of our graves—not massacres, not
• ous preference for Sally before then. I’d enemies, nothing like the drawings I was
I looked at Ernest’s drawing again. He’d wanted to believe that it was only nat- seeing in the book, which their creators
drawn some flowers on his mother’s and ural, that the first grandchild always had had titled “Nuclear Winter,” “Dead Dad
his sister’s graves, at least. Both of ours to hold a special place in an old man’s on Threshold,”“Three Bodies at a Cross-
were just gray. I wondered for the first heart, but he’d explained to me one day roads,” “Headless Children in Ditch.”
time what happened to children of di- that it wasn’t so: he preferred Sally be-
vorce when they died, which parent they cause she was smarter than Ernest. Er- •
got buried next to, if they died before nest was about three at the time. My As I checked my kids’ drawings for signs
having families of their own. Now that father couldn’t help comparing them, of trauma, it occurred to me that my fa-
I’d split with Nikki, and planned on noting what Sally had already achieved ther might have been doing the same for
never remarrying, I assumed I would be when she was Ernest’s age, how she’d me at the time, on Sundays. Not check-
buried with my own parents at Rose- spoken in full sentences and shown cu- ing for signs of trauma, exactly—I don’t
hill, and not with her at Hebrew Be- riosity about the written word long be- think he much believed in that word
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 63
applied to upper-class American chil- start by drawing the most frightening After a while, during which he added
dren—but perhaps the reason he’d asked aspect of a scene, and only then move and colored more peas, he asked me if
to see my drawings every week wasn’t so on to décor, tweaking secondary elements there was anything I wanted to draw and
much that he’d hoped I would become and polishing up details at length with- burn in the sink myself. I said there wasn’t,
a great artist (he had to have abandoned out ever going back to the first part. Er- but he insisted.
that idea quickly, he wasn’t an idiot) but nest sure drew Lane first, Lane lying on “Don’t you want to draw Grandpa?”
that he’d wanted to make sure I was all the ground, eyes closed and mouth open, he asked.
right. For the first time since he’d died, his tongue sticking out, then went on to I waited too long to say anything.
I wished I could give him a call. sketch the tiles he lay on, a group of kids “It would be nice if we forgot about
gathered around the body, all connected him,” he said. He wasn’t looking at me,
• to arrows that stated their names. Then was still coloring peas.
Around 1 A.M., Ernest came in. He’d just he filled the background with a food “Why do you think that?” I said. “Did
had a bad dream and wanted cereal. The counter, rectangles of mashed potatoes, you not like Grandpa?”
way I’d always dealt with nightmares was fish nuggets, and peas—each nugget and “It makes you sad to think about him.
the way my father had taught me to deal pea drawn individually. I’m sure that all You’ve been sad since he died. I think
with them: you had to draw what had of this had been on the menu that day. we should all forget about him. It was a
happened in the dream, and burn the re- When scared, children were able to com- long time ago.”
sult in the sink, to prevent the nightmare mit a great amount of detail to memory, I told him that it wasn’t that easy, that
from ever coming back. The technique the book had said. Even running for their you had to remember the people you
worked exactly a hundred per cent of the lives, they were able to catch glimpses of loved, but he seemed impervious to the
time, and when Ernest came into the military logic, they noticed how many argument.
living room he already had his box of planes were in the sky, in which direc- He’d put a roof on top of the school
crayons and a piece of paper in hand. I tion they were flying. They remembered cafeteria, and was about to get to work
took him to the kitchen, so he could eat where bombs had fallen and what had on the sky above it.
his cereal while he drew. been destroyed, who’d jumped in the They said never to act shocked when
“What did you dream about?” I asked. river. Ernest went to pee, and I assumed your child told you what was on his mind,
“Lane,” he said. he was finished with the drawing. to welcome any thought of his with an
He never spoke of Lane. There’d been “Do you want to burn it in the sink?” open heart, and I guess I’d internalized
counselling at school for the kids who’d I asked when he returned. the advice well enough. I didn’t tell Er-
seen him fall dead in the cafeteria, and “I’m not done,” he said, and went back nest how fucked up it was, suggesting
the counsellor had reassured us that Er- to work on Lane’s body, to which he that we all forget about my father. I didn’t
nest’s mental health was sound, that our hadn’t added a detail since he’d first drawn tell him he worried me.
son would let us know if and when he it, to which he hadn’t even added any “Was it sunny that day?” I asked him
needed to talk about Lane. color. He drew Lane’s right hand, which instead. “The day Lane died?”
“What was Lane doing in the dream?” had been a strange hand, one with a I thought of Nikki’s sister, then, for
“He was dead.” thumb the size of a slider bun. I knew some reason, the twins in her stomach,
“O.K.,” I said. “Do you want to . . . the thumb had made Lane the object of the four hands, the twenty fingers grow-
draw him?” a lot of jokes. Macrodactyly, his problem ing in there. I thought of Henry, too,
Ernest nodded. He’d had another was called—Lane himself had told me who was going so far and at such speed
nightmare just before the one about Lane, about it once. Though I knew the kids right now, to Paris, another place my fa-
though, about an octopus-like thing kill- made fun of him for it, I wasn’t sure ther had loved. He had to still be up
ing us all, and so he wanted to draw that whether Ernest ever had. there in the dark. Henry, I mean.
one first. He drew us all murdered by a “Did Lane’s hand frighten you?” I Ernest said that it had been raining
many-legged monster, the whole family asked Ernest. the day Lane died, and grabbed a gray
other than himself torn to pieces; he’d He shrugged. crayon. He handed me a black one, so I
simply witnessed the scene. He knew as “I didn’t care, really,” he said. “Max could get started on my own drawing.
he drew it that that creature in particu- made fun of him all the time, but I He was staring at me. He wouldn’t stop
lar would never come haunt his dreams didn’t care.” staring at me until I started drawing.
again, and so he applied himself: this was “Do you wish you’d defended him, Maybe I could draw a part of my father,
goodbye. We burned it. though?” I asked. “Against Max and I thought. One specific memory. Surely
the others?” there was something about him that I
• I thought maybe that was what could stand to forget. Ernest smiled when
When the time came for Ernest to start was haunting my son, his first-ever I took the crayon. Then, right when I
drawing Lane, the scene of his death, I regret, not having stood up for Lane put it to paper to get to work on my out-
paid attention. I watched my son work. and his enormous finger, but Ernest line, he asked how much I’d left by Sal-
The book I’d just been reading had taught shrugged again. ly’s door, for the tooth. 
me that the order in which children drew “I guess it was a little weird,” he said.
episodes from their lives was significant, “But when you’re weird people make fun THE WRITER’S VOICE PODCAST
that a traumatized child would always of you. You have to accept it.” Camille Bordas reads “One Sun Only.”

64 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022

 THE CRITICS

THE ART WORLD

HOLDING FORTH
Faith Ringgold’s place in the canon.

BY PETER SCHJELDAHL

he most provocative curatorial were made exactly sixty years apart: you settle, if you’re open-minded, on
T coup in the Museum of Modern “Demoiselles” in 1907, while Picasso any unambiguous interpretation of
ART WORK © FAITH RINGGOLD / ARS AND DACS / COURTESY ACA GALLERIES.

Art’s recent series of rehangings of was living in Paris, and “Die” in New what it symbolizes.
DIGITAL IMAGE © THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART / SCALA / ART RESOURCE

its permanent collection has been the York in 1967, a year of eruptive racial On loan from MOMA, “Die” ap-
placement of a mural-size painting and political violence in America. pears in “Faith Ringgold: American
of an apparent, sanguinary race war, The Ringgold and the Picasso have People,” an overwhelming six-decade
“American People Series #20: Die,” cohabited surprisingly well, bracket- retrospective at the New Museum,
by the veteran American artist and, ing a complex civilizational if not sty- which consists of more than a hun-
at times, political activist Faith Ring- listic history. Contrasting but simi- dred works by an artist, now ninety-
gold, alongside works by Pablo Pi- larly terrific energies—clenched in one years old, who is sorely overdue
casso. For a museum that had long “Demoiselles,” explosive in “Die”— for canonical status after a protracted
championed a teleological account of generate meanings that are subtler defiance of art-world fashion. First
the development of twentieth-cen- than their initial shocks imply. The came her stubborn fidelity to figura-
tury aesthetics, this startled, especially pairing substantiates lately prevalent tion in times favoring abstraction, and
by having the Ringgold displayed near revisionist considerations of what mat- then her eschewal of Pop and post-
Picasso’s touchstone of modernism ters, for what reasons and to what modernist irony—as opposed to
“Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” with ends, in past and present visual cul- humor, a wellspring of her creativity.
which the Spaniard introduced plan- ture. Does the Ringgold hold up? It (Those tendencies toward represen-
gent allusions to tribal African masks holds forth, for sure, and you won’t tation and sincerity happen to tri-
to European art. The two pictures forget it as long as you live, nor will umph, retroactively, in the penchant

Ringgold’s “American People Series #20: Die,” from 1967, a year of eruptive racial and political violence in America.
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 65
of many younger contemporary art- shapes, in paintings that are bordered The American Collection #1” (1997).
ists today.) An intermittently active with quilted, woven, or dangling fab- Black survivors of a distant, burning slave
participation in feminist and identity ric fringes: sheer delight. ship swim in seething waters toward a
politics has also caused Ringgold to Black Statue of Liberty who is cradling
be embraced in some circles and dis- orn in 1930 and raised in a mid- a Black child. Victimhood is rarely at
counted in others. Both estimations
obscure the truth of her personal au-
B dle-class home in Harlem, Ring-
gold is a driven, true artist of indepen-
issue in Ringgold’s work, however awful
the circumstances; irrepressible vitality
thenticity and artistic originality, which dent mind. Her mother, the fashion always is. A party scene from the same
register powerfully in the New Mu- designer Madame Willi Posey, taught year shows guests of various races at
seum show with effects that can be her needlework and took her on the first what looks to be a Parisian performance
deeply moving and that feel as fresh of her museum-haunting trips to Eu- by jazz musicians and, repeated in five
as this morning. rope. Ringgold has said, “If I had to cite dancerly poses, Josephine Baker, who is
I single out “Die”—in which the single artist who inspired me the nude but for a skirt of bananas that has
blood-spattered Black and white char- most, I would name Picasso.” She ac- to strike us as demeaning but that also
acters suffer impartially while doing knowledges his 1937 blockbuster “Guer- comes off as a teasingly barbed com-
scant depicted harm to one another nica” as a particular influence on “Die.” ment on the clueless terms of her Con-
(a gun and a knife intensify the drama But fandom hasn’t prevented her from tinental celebrity. Baker figures elsewhere
but appear to menace no one in par- kidding the master in a suite of big, gor- as a cheerful odalisque, eloquently em-
ticular)—for the recuperative prom- geous, hilarious canvases, from 1991, that ulating a motif from Matisse.
inence that it grants Ringgold and convene women, mostly Black, and oc- In “The Sunflowers Quilting Bee at
because it represents an extreme in- casionally children amid cunning pas- Arles: The French Collection Part I, #4”
stance of her forte of truth-telling tiches of famous paintings. As a detail (1991), eight Black women produce sche-
from a fundamentally humane point in one of these, Picasso apes a pose from matic sunflower designs while in a field
of view. The picture’s furor is atypi- Édouard Manet’s “Luncheon on the of sunflowers, with the skyline of Arles
cal of Ringgold’s generally ingratiat- Grass” while clad only in a hat. Ring- in the background, as Vincent van Gogh
ing narrative and decorative qualities, gold’s irreverence can serve as an equal- arrives with a superfluous bouquet of
as witnessed by abundant pieces in opportunity instrument. the same blooms. Subjects drawn from
the show that incorporate ingeniously Racial causes are a given for Ring- Ringgold’s own complicated family his-
quilted, colorful fabric and celebrate gold, but they are nuanced by a wisdom tory, three generations on from slavery,
Black lives, including her own. No- in matters of class, which are often a are more often upbeat than not. Afri-
table are such mixed-media depic- sticking point for would-be radicals. She can-styled, stuffed-cloth sculptures of
tions as “Street Story Quilt, Parts has stayed candidly true to her own con- hieratic or comic personages pepper the
I-III: The Accident, the Fire, and ditioning in a solidly prosperous fam- show. Ringgold doesn’t so much elide
the Homecoming” (1985), featuring ily. (The men in “Die” wear ties and the ethnic boundaries as electrify them. They
tenements with distinctive characters women dresses.) But a special histori- constitute gifts, to her, of surefire imag-
in nearly every window and passages cal value in her evocations of cross-cul- inative potency.
of hand-lettered expository and dia- tural alliances and even friendships is a I had a moment at the museum of
ristic prose. sensitivity to their endemic tensions. wondering whether some viewers might
As effective a writer as an artist, She has testified to the experience of decide that Ringgold’s aesthetic flair and
Ringgold is justly known for elating often having been the only—or nearly emotional buoyancy, exercised with such
children’s books like “Tar Beach” only—person of color in rooms filled independence, vitiate her progressive
(1991), which memorializes practical with well-heeled liberal whites who, as bona fides. Just another artist after all?
pleasures and inspiriting fantasies of written in an introduction to the show’s Then it sank in that Ringgold’s confi-
a childhood in Harlem, as remem- catalogue by the pioneering feminist art dent peculiarities point toward a vibrant
bered from her own. Those infectious critic Lucy R. Lippard, tended to be pluralism of minds and hearts within
volumes, sampled in the show, dis- “merely well-intentioned and hoping and between divided acculturations. Let
dain formulaic sentimentality or ex- for sisterhood.” Being politically correct everyone speak, with neither rancor nor
hortation, as do Ringgold’s propagan- doesn’t automatically instill political, let apology, as what and most significantly
distic works from the sixties and early alone interpersonal, savvy. Ringgold was who they are. That’s a standard liberal
seventies—posters demanding free- not about to be a token ornament to hope, of course, against the grain of our
dom for Angela Davis, for example, naïve idealisms. incurably churlish country. But Ring-
and collages endorsing the Black Pan- A profound personal essay in the gold conveys what it might be like if it
thers. No matter how polemical their show’s catalogue by Michele Wallace, came to be fulfilled as a matter of course.
purposes, such works employ inven- an important critic and one of Ring- “It must needs be that offenses come,”
tive, elegant designs that are ever more gold’s two daughters, expertly tracks her Abraham Lincoln acknowledged. Here
striking as their occasions recede in mother’s full-on mergers of racial con- and there, so may remedial sophistica-
time. Ringgold has extended some of tent and art history, both African and tions, which, by making offenses more
the poster forms to purely abstract European. These culminate in such pic- unbearable in the present, dilute their
pattern, usually gridded diamond torial epics as “We Came to America: virulence bit by bit in times ahead. 
66 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
 installments, with advertising, bound
BOOKS in paper and priced at a shilling. (The
final installment was a “double part,”

THE INIMITABLE
and cost two shillings.) Then the nov-
els were published as books, in edi-
tions priced for different markets. The
Charles Dickens’s sense of what the public wanted was unfailing—almost. exceptions were novels he serialized
weekly in magazines he edited and
BY LOUIS MENAND owned a piece of.
Demand was huge. The parts of
Dickens’s last, unfinished novel, “The
Mystery of Edwin Drood,” were sell-
ing at a rate of fifty thousand copies
a month when he died. By contrast,
the parts of George Eliot’s “Middle-
march” and William Makepeace Thack-
eray’s “Vanity Fair”—not exactly minor
works by not exactly unknown authors,
both of them adopting the method of
publication Dickens had pioneered—
sold an average of five thousand cop-
ies a month.
Dickens gave his full energy and
attention to everything he did. Peo-
ple who saw him perform conjuring
tricks, or act onstage, or read from his
books, were amazed by his prepara-
tion and his panache. He loved the
theatre, and many people thought that
he could have been a professional actor.
At his public readings to packed
houses, audiences wept, they fainted,
and they cheered.
None of the photographs and por-
traits of him seemed to his friends to
do him justice, because they couldn’t
capture the mobility of his features or
his laugh. He dressed stylishly, even
garishly, but he was personally without
affectation or pretension. He avoided
harles Dickens took cold show- tain and travel with. He gave money socializing with the aristocracy, and for
C ers and long walks. His normal
walking distance was twelve miles;
to relatives (including his financially
feckless parents), orphans, and people
a long time he refused to meet the
Queen. He disliked argument and never
some days, he walked twenty. He seems down on their luck. Thomas Adol- dominated a conversation. He believed
to have never not been doing some- phus Trollope called him “perhaps the in fun, and wanted everything to be
thing. He wrote fifteen novels and largest-hearted man I ever knew.” He the best. “He did even his nothings in
hundreds of articles and stories, deliv- was a literary celebrity by the time he a strenuous way,” one of his closest
ered speeches, edited magazines, pro- turned twenty-five, and he never lost friends said. “His was the brightest
duced and acted in amateur theatri- his readership. Working people read face, the lightest step, the pleasantest
cals, performed conjuring tricks, gave his books, and so did the Queen. Peo- word.” Thackeray’s daughter Anne re-
public readings, and directed two char- ple took off their hats when they saw membered that when Dickens came
ities, one for struggling writers, the him on the street. into a room “everybody lighted up.”
other for former prostitutes. He was by far the most commer- His life force seemed boundless.
He and his wife, Catherine, had cially successful of the major Victo- It was not, of course. He had heart
ten children and many friends, most rian writers. He sold all his novels and kidney troubles, and he aged pre-
of them writers, actors, and artists, twice. First, they were issued in nine- maturely. When he died, of a cerebral
whom it delighted Dickens to enter- teen monthly “parts”—thirty-two-page hemorrhage, in 1870, he was only fifty-
eight. He had stipulated that he be
A captivating entertainer, Dickens sought to make life as enchanting as a show. buried without ceremony in a rural
ILLUSTRATION BY WESLEY ALLSBROOK THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 67
churchyard, but since he failed to spec- But Douglas-Fairhurst realizes his “Dombey”: “It might be worthwhile,
ify the churchyard, his friends felt au- intention, which is to enrich our appre- sometimes, to inquire what Nature is,
thorized to arrange for his burial in ciation of the social, political, and lit- and how men work to change her,
Westminster Abbey. erary circumstances in which Dickens and whether, in the enforced distor-
No one objected. “The man was a conceived “Bleak House.” And, as ad- tions so produced, it is not natural to
phenomenon, an exception, a special vertised, “The Turning Point” is gran- be unnatural.”
production,” the British politician ular. You learn a lot about life in mid- This marks the moment when Dick-
Lord Shaftesbury wrote after Dick- century England, with coverage of ens’s literary imagination acquired its
ens’s death, and nearly everybody ap- things like the bloomer craze—a fash- sociological dimension. We behave in-
pears to have felt the same way. Dick- ion of short skirts with “Turkish” trou- humanely not because of our natures
ens’s nickname for himself was the sers worn by women—and mesmerism. but because of the way the system forces
Inimitable. He was being semi-face- (Dickens was intrigued by mesmerism us to live. Dickens’s contemporary and
tious, but it was true. There was no as a form of therapy, and he became, near-neighbor Karl Marx thought the
one like him. naturally, an adept hypnotist.) same thing. “How men work to change
You could say that Dickens lived Still, Dickens did not begin writing her”—how we transform nature into
like one of his own characters—al- “Bleak House” until November, 1851, the goods we need—was what Marx
ways on, the Energizer Bunny of em- and this means that most of “The Turn- called “the means of production.”
pathy and enjoyment. Good enough ing Point” consists of closeups of Dick- “Bleak House” is what is known as
was never good enough. Wherever ens editing his magazine Household a condition-of-England novel. The
he was or whatever he was doing, life Words; producing a play called “Not So phrase was coined by a writer Dickens
was histrionic, either a birthday party Bad as We Seem,” which apparently knew and liked, Thomas Carlyle, whose
or a funeral. And, when you read the was pretty bad; running a home for style—a mixture of Old Testament
recollections of his contemporaries “fallen women,” Urania Cottage, with brimstone and German Romanticism,
and the responses to his books from its benefactor, the banking heiress An- with frequent apostrophizing of the
nineteenth-century readers, you can’t gela Burdett-Coutts; and buying and reader—Dickens sometimes adopted.
doubt his charisma or the impact his renovating a large house on Tavistock Half the chapters in “Bleak House” are
writing had. The twenty-four-year- Square, in London. written in the historical present, the
old Henry James met Dickens in 1867, Was 1851 a “turning point” for the tense Carlyle used in “The French Rev-
during Dickens’s second trip to Amer- United Kingdom? The eighteen-for- olution,” a book that Dickens said he
ica, and he remembered “how tre- ties were a rocky decade politically and read five hundred times.
mendously it had been laid upon economically. There were mass pro- Condition-of-England novels like
young persons of our generation to tests in England, famine in Ireland, “Bleak House” are generally thought
feel Dickens, down to the soles of and revolutionary uprisings on the of in relation to what John Ruskin called
our shoes.” Continent. After 1850, economies re- “illth.” Illth is the underside of wealth,
But even the Bunny sooner or later bounded, dissent subsided, and En- the damage that change leaves in its
runs out of room, hits a wall, or tum- gland enjoyed two decades of prosper- wake, the human cost of progress. Nov-
bles off the edge of the table, and Dick- ity, an era known as “the Victorian high els show what statistics miss or dis-
ens had his crisis. It was in the cards. noon.” But it would be hard to iden- guise: what life was actually like, for
tify something from 1851 that caused many people, in the most advanced
obert Douglas-Fairhurst describes the European world to turn this cor- economy in the world.
R his new book on Dickens, “The
Turning Point” (Knopf ), as a “slow
ner. Robert Tombs, in his entertaining
and sometimes contrarian book “The
Dickens was a social critic. Almost
all his fiction satirizes the institutions
biography.” Douglas-Fairhurst teaches English and Their History” (2014), and social types produced by that dra-
at Oxford, and this is his second book suggests that it was the discovery of matic transformation of the means of
on Dickens. “Becoming Dickens,” a gold in California and Australia in 1849 production. But he was not a revolu-
study of the early years, came out in that triggered the boom. Suddenly there tionary. His heroes are not even re-
2011. In this book, he takes up a sin- was a lot more money, and therefore a formers. They are ordinary people who
gle year in Dickens’s life and walks lot more liquidity. have made a simple commitment to
us through it virtually week by week. In Dickens’s own career, the turn- decency. George Orwell, who had
The year is 1851, which Douglas- ing point had, in a sense, come ear- probably aspired to recruit Dickens
Fairhurst calls “a turning point for lier, in 1848, with the commercial suc- to the socialist cause, reluctantly
Dickens, for his contemporaries, and cess of “Dombey and Son.” After that, concluded that Dickens was not in-
for the novel as a form.” He never he knew he could command large terested in political reform, only in
quite nails the claim. It’s not a hun- sums, and he never worried about moral improvement: “Useless to
dred per cent clear why 1851 is a key money again. “Bleak House,” pub- change institutions without a change
date in British history, or why “Bleak lished five years later, is a more am- of heart—that, essentially, is what he
House,” the book Dickens began to bitious book, but it is based on a the- is always saying.”
write that year, is a key work in the sis Dickens set out for the first time In fact, a major target of Dickens’s
history of the novel. in the “Thunderbolt ” chapter of satire is liberalism. We associate lib-
68 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
eralism with caring about the poor
and the working class, which Dick-
ens obviously did. But in nineteenth- BRIEFLY NOTED
century England the typical liberal
was a utilitarian, who believed that Rebels Against the Raj, by Ramachandra Guha (Knopf ). An
the worth of a social program could eminent historian of India and biographer of Gandhi turns
be measured by cost-benefit analysis, his attention to seven “white-skinned heroes and heroines”—
and very likely a Malthusian, who allies in the country’s bid to end colonial rule. Among them
thought it necessary to lower the birth are the British theosophist Annie Besant, a leading figure in
rate so that the population would not the home-rule movement until she was eclipsed by Gandhi
outstrip the food supply. (who’d been inspired by her as a boy); B. G. Horniman, a rad-
This was the thinking behind the ical British editor; and Samuel Stokes, a Pennsylvania Quaker
legislation known as the New Poor who helped eliminate forced labor. Guha notes that his sub-
Law, whose consequences Dickens sat- jects campaigned not only for freedom but also against nu-
irizes unforgettably in the opening merous social ills, such as environmental abuse and caste-based
chapters of “Oliver Twist.” The New discrimination, laying the groundwork for a movement that,
Poor Law was a progressive welfare he writes, “may yet be relevant for India’s future.”
measure. It was a reform. To take an-
other example: Mr. Gradgrind, in “Hard Eating to Extinction, by Dan Saladino (Farrar, Straus & Gi-
Times,” is not a capitalist or a factory roux). This chronicle of the local relationships between hu-
owner. He’s a utilitarian. He thinks that mans and what we eat reveals a pattern with dire implications
what’s holding people back is folk wis- for the future of food. “Where nature creates diversity, the food
dom and superstition. Dickens is on system crushes it,” Saladino writes. Mass production and glo-
the side of folk wisdom. balization are eradicating the small, the wild, and the unique,
One of Dickens’s memorable cari- at a cost to our stomachs and to traditional ways of life. Sal-
catures in “Bleak House” is Mrs. Jel- adino extolls ancient strains of Anatolian wheat, sees an Af-
lyby, and she, too, is easily misread. We rican pea grown in the American South as an act of culinary
see her at home obsessively devoted resistance, and observes that plants and animals modified for
to her “Africa” project, while neglect- higher yields are often susceptible to disease and reliant on
ing, almost criminally, her own chil- ever-dwindling resources. Ultimately, the most dangerous thing
dren. (In the Dickens world, mistreat- about our appetites is how they threaten to consume our in-
ing a child is the worst sin you can creasingly fragile food system.
commit.) But Dickens is not ridicul-
ing Mrs. Jellyby for caring about Af- Strangers I Know, by Claudia Durastanti, translated from the
ricans. As Douglas-Fairhurst tells us, Italian by Elizabeth Harris (Riverhead). Blending fiction, essay,
she was based on a woman Dickens and memoir, this narrative migrates from the Italian Ameri-
had met, Caroline Chisholm, who op- can neighborhood of Bensonhurst to rural southern Italy and
erated a charity called the Family Col- contemporary London, and encompasses autobiographical ep-
onization Loan Society, which helped isodes, musings on film and music, and current events. At its
poor English people emigrate. And heart is the story of Durastanti’s charismatic parents, both deaf,
Mrs. Jellyby’s project is the same: she who came to America from Italy only to return. “The story of
is raising money for families to move a family is more like a map than a novel,” Durastanti writes,
to a place called Borrioboola-Gha, “on as the work expands to encompass lovers, teachers, and other
the left bank of the Niger,” so that relatives. Her inventive approach yields touching portraits of
there will be fewer mouths to feed in the characters, while respecting their ultimate unknowability.
England. She’s a Malthusian.
Very Cold People, by Sarah Manguso (Hogarth). Ruthie, the
ouglas-Fairhurst picked 1851 as teen-age narrator of this début novel by a noted poet and
D a turning point because of the
Great Exhibition, and he is right that
memoirist, bluntly unspools the story of her girlhood in a
grim Massachusetts town. Growing up in a frigid home, she
“Bleak House” is best understood as “dutifully played the part of a child having fun,” but traumatic
Dickens’s answer to that event. The incidents leave her feeling “indistinct, like someone else’s
Great Exhibition of the Works of In- dream.” Manguso’s characters are constantly withholding;
dustry of All Nations was a world’s fair. when Ruthie’s mother finally divulges a childhood ordeal,
More than forty nations sent their in- Ruthie realizes that “what happened to her was too horrible,
ventions and natural treasures—a hun- so she never said it.” In minimalist, austere prose, Manguso
dred thousand in all—for display in a conjures the torpor, stasis, and ambient suffering that envelop
building known as the Crystal Palace, a whole town: “The background of my life was white and
a glass-and-cast-iron structure, like a angry, with violent weather.”
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 69
gigantic greenhouse, 1,848 feet long and But what look like exaggerations in Nor is “if this day ever broke.” That’s
456 feet wide, designed and erected for “Bleak House” are not simply literary the other opening image, fog:
the Exhibition in Hyde Park. conceits. The novel opens:
The Exhibition was a monument Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where
London. . . . As much mud in the streets it flows among green aits and meadows; fog
to the Victorian faith in progress and as if the waters had but newly retired from down the river, where it rolls defiled among
free trade, and it was attended with the face of the earth. . . . Foot passengers, jos- the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollu-
enormous fanfare. Prince Albert, a big- tling one another’s umbrellas in a general in- tions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the
tech enthusiast, was an organizer. In fection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog
at street-corners, where tens of thousands of creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog
the five and a half months that the Ex- other foot passengers have been slipping and lying out on the yards and hovering in the rig-
hibition ran, from May to October, sliding since the day broke (if this day ever ging of great ships; fog drooping on the gun-
1851, the Crystal Palace had six million broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon wales of barges and small boats.
visitors. Receipts totalled a hundred crust of mud, sticking at those points tena-
and eighty-six thousand pounds, the ciously to the pavement, and accumulating at The Thames had long been an open
compound interest.
equivalent of twenty-seven million sewer, choked with refuse, carcasses of
pounds today. Do readers ever wonder where all dead animals, and human remains—“the
This kind of vainglorious self- that mud came from? The answer is waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty)
regard disgusted Dickens. When peo- that there were twenty-four thousand city.” London had no properly function-
ple are suffering in your own back horses in London, and you cannot ing sewer system. Human waste accu-
yard, how can you strut around con- toilet-train a horse. Horse-drawn con- mulated in two hundred thousand cess-
gratulating yourself on your latest in- veyance was how people got around. pools, many of which went uncleaned
ventions, or how much pig iron you And a horse produces forty-odd pounds for years. Even the basements of Buck-
are producing? He imagined “another of manure a day. There was also a ingham Palace smelled of feces.The waste
Exhibition—for a great display of En- wholesale meat market in central Lon- leached into the groundwater. Cholera
gland’s sins and negligences . . . this don, to which 1.8 million cattle, pigs, is transmitted by contaminated drink-
dark Exhibition of the bad results of and sheep were driven through the ing water, and between 1831 and 1866
our doings!” His counter-exhibition streets every year. When people who there were three major cholera outbreaks
to that palace of crystal would be a lived in the countryside visited Lon- in London. Tens of thousands died.
bleak house. Bleak House in the novel don for the first time, they were sur- The stretch of the Thames that Lon-
is not an unhappy place. It is decent prised to f ind that the entire city don lies on is naturally foggy, but nine-
and unpretentious. And that is what smelled like a stable. teenth-century fog was a mixture of
he thought England should aspire Crossing the street could be an water vapor and smoke from coal fires,
to become. adventure, particularly for women in and it enveloped the city. You could see
In “Bleak House,” Dickens wanted the full-length dresses and petticoats it from a long way off. “London’s own
to show London from the underside, they wore in the eighteen-fifties, and black wreath,” Wordsworth called it.
and he knew the underside well. Be- this gave work to crossing sweepers, The fog smelled of sulfur; it made the
fore he was a novelist, he who made their living by mud on the streets turn black; and it
was a reporter, and, later clearing a path in the hope left a coating of soot on every surface.
on, many of his walks were of a tip. (It also may ex- People had to wash their faces after they
on London streets, some- plain the bloomer craze.) had been outside. The term “smog”—
times at night and often The term for street filth smoke plus fog—was coined to describe
in the sketchiest neigh- was “mud,” but that was a London air.
borhoods. In 1851, Lon- euphemism. Four-fifths of The images Dickens chose to open
don was the world’s larg- London mud was shit. his novel are images of literal pollution,
est city, the political and The population had but they are also metaphors for moral
financial center of a na- outgrown the space. In pollution, the corruption of human na-
tion whose possessions 1800, a million people ture by vanity, greed, and ethical blind-
stretched from New Zea- lived in London; by 1850, ness. If you replace “mud” with “dung,”
land to South America—an empire there were more than 2.6 million, and as the Victorians called animal waste,
on which the sun never set—and another two hundred thousand walked you get the metaphor, and “compound
whose gross domestic product was into the city every day to work. Side- interest” gives the clue. Money taints
the highest in the world. But on the walks were congested. A German vis- everything. “Filthy lucre” is the phrase
street it was not the place you see on itor complained that a Londoner “will used in the King James Bible. Jarndyce v.
“Masterpiece Theatre.” run against you, and make you revolve Jarndyce, the Chancery case at the cen-
Dickens is always accused of exag- on your own axis, without so much ter of the novel that ruins the lives of
geration. Tombs, in “The English and as looking around to see how you feel several of its characters, is a dispute over
Their History,” complains that we have after the shock.” Dickens’s “tens of a will—a dispute about money. So when,
a distorted idea of living conditions in thousands of other foot passengers in court, a barrister addresses the Lord
the Victorian era because we see them have been slipping and sliding since Chancellor as “Mlud” he is calling him
through the lens of Dickens’s novels. the day broke” is not hyperbole. a piece of shit.
70 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
 The London of “Bleak House” is a
sink of addiction, disease, and death.
One character is disfigured by small-
pox; another is disabled by a stroke. A
character spontaneously combusts from
alcoholism, and one dies of an opium
overdose. A poor woman’s baby dies; a
child is born deaf and mute; and four
characters perish prematurely of dis-
ease, exhaustion, or despair. One char-
acter is murdered.
The central figure in the book, ap-
propriately, is a crossing sweeper, named
Jo. We are made to understand that he
contracts cholera in the slum where he
sleeps, called Tom-All-Alone’s, and his
death is the principal display in Dick-
ens’s “dark Exhibition.” Dickens had
originally considered using “Tom-All-
Alone’s” as the title of the book.

ickens’s novels are not just social

D criticism, though. Considering
that his method of publication pre- “Wow, the stars are really organized tonight.”
vented him from revising, the the-
matic and imagistic intricacy of the
books is remarkable. Each of the major
• •
novels is constructed around an in-
stitution—the poorhouse in “Oliver tance, that we can see what made Dick- fate of Florence Dombey and the
Twist,” Chancery in “Bleak House,” ens inimitable—in “Bleak House,” for death of Little Nell, in “The Old Cu-
the prison in “Little Dorrit”—that example, when the law clerk Mr. Guppy riosity Shop.”
gives Dickens a figurative language takes two friends to lunch. They are The utopia of Dickens’s fiction, also
to use throughout the story. Shake- Victorian-era bros, swaggering and impossibly outdated today, maybe even
speare composed in a similar way: clueless, a young male type Dickens outdated in 1850, is the domestic idyll.
blindness in “King Lear,” blood in loved. Any novelist today would kill to The nuclear family is the touchstone of
“Macbeth.” Once you start looking be able to produce such a scene. Dick- “naturalness” in his books, and its an-
for these tropes, you find them woven ens made dozens. chor is a woman who exemplifies all the
into everything. But, possibly because of the demands bourgeois virtues—like Esther Sum-
In “Bleak House,” Dickens uses two of serial publication, Dickens’s comic merson, in “Bleak House.” Fallen women,
narrators who split the chapters be- figures run through their whole reper- like Lady Dedlock, Esther’s natural
tween them—an innovation contem- toire of tics each time they appear, and mother, are punished, doomed, in her
porary reviewers seem to have com- the plots, highly contrived to begin case, to die in a paupers’ cemetery,
pletely missed. In fact, all of Dickens’s with, are stretched out, on the “Perils sprawled across the grave of her lover.
later novels, beginning with “Bleak of Pauline” theory of leaving the audi- In life, there is little evidence that
House,” were largely ignored or dis- ence eager for the next installment, far Dickens was, in the context of his time
missed by reviewers. They complained beyond the point of novelistic plausi- and place, a sexist or a prude. He did
that the books were formless, labored, bility or readerly patience. And the au- think that most women were happiest
too dark. They wanted more of the thor sermonizes freely. “Dead, your Maj- in the home, but he treated with re-
early, funny stuff. esty,” the narrator in “Bleak House” spect the “fallen women” whom he and
Reviewers in Dickens’s time gener- intones on the death of Jo the crossing Burdett-Coutts supported, refused to
ally did not complain about what mod- sweeper. “Dead, my lords and gentle- allow religious teachings in the house,
ern readers find hard to process: the men. Dead, right reverends and wrong and did not expect the women to ex-
melodrama, the rhetorical overkill, the reverends of every order. Dead, men and press regret or repentance. He just
staggering load of schmaltz. The comic women, born with heavenly compas- wanted them to be able to lead con-
characters are still astonishingly vivid. sion in your hearts. And dying thus ventional lives. Jenny Hartley, in
You get them right away. They might around us every day.” “Charles Dickens and the House of
have stepped out of a Pixar movie. And Everything is underlined, usually Fallen Women” (2008), estimates that
it’s in throwaway scenes, comic epi- twice. Still, that was the stuff the Vic- in the years Dickens ran the home he
sodes with no special dramatic impor- torians loved. Grown men wept at the successfully rehabilitated a hundred
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 71
women. He never made his association while, he set up Nelly in her own house, Scotland, and the United States. His
with it public. a short distance by train from his home, health was failing, but he gave every
Dickens thought that it was per- Gad’s Hill, in Kent, and would sneak reading his histrionic last ounce. Some-
fectly suitable for talented women to off to see her. There is good reason to times, when it was over, he had to be
have careers. His older sister, Fanny, believe that Nelly became pregnant; helped off the stage. But he kept on,
whom he adored, was a professional that Dickens sequestered her in France, even after his friends and doctors begged
musician. He serialized Elizabeth Gas- making frequent surreptitious visits to him to slow down. It was manic. He is
kell’s novels “Cranford” and “North and her; and that a child was born there estimated to have given four hundred
South” in Household Words. He admired who either died in infancy or was put and seventy-two public readings.
George Eliot’s work and appears to up for adoption. The accounts left by people who
have been the first person to guess that They kept this going for thirteen attended them make it clear that these
it was written by a woman. And he years, until Dickens died. Nelly out- were not like most author readings,
worked with many actresses in the the- lived him by almost forty-four years. where it is easy for the attention to
atre. One of these was Ellen Ternan. She married and had two children. But wander. This was theatre. Here is a
she seems not to have told her husband, description:
he only thing that makes sense at least at first, and she never told her
T about the Ellen Ternan story is
that, when they met, Dickens was forty-
children, that she had once been the
mistress of Charles Dickens.
In the glare of the gas-burners shining down
upon him from the pendant screen immedi-
ately above his head, his individuality, to so
five and famous; she was eighteen, not Almost no one thought that Dick- express it, altogether disappeared, and we
famous, and relatively unprotected; and ens behaved well, and he lost some saw before us instead, just as the case might
he fell for her. Such things happen. But friends, including Burdett-Coutts. But happen to be, Mr. Pickwick, or Mrs. Gamp,
or Mr. Marigold, or little Paul Dombey, or
the rest is a puzzle. it was his treatment of Catherine as Mr. Squeers, or Sam Weller, or Mr. Peggotty,
Dickens could have taken up with much as the liaison with Nelly that or some other of those immortal personages.
Nelly (as everyone called her) without made people drop him. Claire Toma-
undue scandal. There would have been lin, who has written biographies of both And this, in a way, is the solution to
talk, but he was Charles Dickens, and Ternan and Dickens, suggests that Nelly the problem of reading Dickens. As
it was understood that actresses played insisted on the separation, that if she Ruskin once explained it, Dickens
by different rules. The great English had only been a little naughtier and “chooses to speak in a circle of stage
actress Ellen Terry left the stage to live given him what he wanted, things would fire.” The reason the books are melo-
with a married man and had two chil- not have got out of hand. dramatic is that they are melodrama. If
dren with him, then returned and re- It seems likely, though, that Dick- you’re looking for something else, read
sumed a successful career. In Dickens’s ens was the one insisting on the “just Anthony Trollope. The best generic
own circle, there were plenty of uncon- friends” pretense and the deception. counterpart to Dickens is the Broad-
ventional arrangements. The novelist Whether or not he really loved Cath- way musical, where feelings are splashed
Wilkie Collins, his good friend and erine or Nelly—and he was a passion- with color, where people dance and
dramatic collaborator, had two women ate man; there is no reason to suppose break into song, where every com-
in his life, neither of whom he married. he didn’t love them—there was one plication can be magically resolved
Dickens’s illustrator George Cruik- thing he loved more, something that by showing a little heart, and all join
shank supported two families. George he had brought into the world and that hands at the final curtain. As hokey as
Eliot lived with a man, George Henry belonged to him alone: his readership. it seems in the cold light of day, Broad-
Lewes, who was in an open marriage He called it the “particular relation way audiences suspend their skepticism
to another woman—and moral seri- (personally affectionate and like no for the pleasure of the performers and
ousness was George Eliot’s brand. other man’s) which subsists between the spectacle.
Or Dickens and Ellen Ternan could me and the public.” He could not show Some people may wish that life could
simply have had a discreet affair. In- readers that the Charles Dickens they be like a Broadway musical. A few peo-
stead, he turned the whole business into knew from the books was not the real ple may even believe that life essen-
a spectacle. In a letter that he had his Charles Dickens. He must have felt tially is a Broadway musical, or at least
agent leak to the press, and that he sub- that his only play was to blame the that we can make it so if we commit
sequently published a version of in the breakup of his marriage on his wife, ourselves to living like that day by day.
Times, he accused his wife, Catherine, and for once he miscalculated. But it That seems to be the kind of person
of being mentally disturbed and claimed was a choice between betraying his Dickens was. He tried to make life as
that her children had never loved her, feelings for Nelly and betraying his enchanting as a show. When the en-
and he defended, in language so indig- fans. He tried, madly, to keep both. chantment began to curdle, when com-
nant that it gave the game completely The stress may have killed him. plications arose that could not be re-
away, the purity of the woman rumor He began his public readings in ear- solved in a curtain call, he went onstage
had already associated him with. nest in 1858, the year he separated from himself. And there, believing in their
He reached a settlement agreement Catherine. And from then until his immortality, their immunity from time
(not ungenerous) with Catherine, then death he was on an endless tour. He and change, he disappeared into his
forbade their children to see her. Mean- sold out arenas across England, Ireland, own creations. 
72 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
 nent men.” In this lacklustre world, our
BOOKS narrator’s closest friend is Dale, a poet,
a fellow working-class transplant, and

DON’T MIND ME
a budding alcoholic. He, too, eventu-
ally betrays her.
Bennett, an English writer living in
How Claire-Louise Bennett rewrites experience. Ireland, seems to draw many of these
details from experience. But to place
BY B. D. McCLAY them in order, or to match them to au-
tobiography, is to miss most of what
makes “Checkout 19” singular. Bennett
is interested not in the shape of a life
but in its substance. Her début, “Pond”
(2015), was a collection of linked sto-
ries about a woman who abandons her
academic career, moves to a cottage in
Ireland, and putters about, composing
odes to tomato purée. Bennett’s narra-
tors are sensualists, exquisitely attuned
to taste and to texture, with appetites
they prioritize over their own well-
being. (In “Checkout 19,” the narrator
drinks gin “until it came back up into
my mouth . . . as if I really was filled to
the brim.”) For them, life is found in
sensation: long baths, the sharpness of
an orange, underlining their books in
jewel-toned inks. They have no clear
story to relate to us, but in their strange-
ness, their sense of ritual, their inabil-
ity to respond precisely as needed, they
draw us in.
It’s this last quality that’s most on
display in “Checkout 19,” from the nar-
rator’s musing that the color of her men-
strual blood is “very pretty—it’s a shade
of red I’ve been looking for in a lipstick
since forever” to her saying, to Dale,
who has raped her, “Don’t dwell on it,
I don’t, I hardly ever think of it—I think
he girl doesn’t have a name. Or, “Checkout 19” is a coming-of-age it’s OK.” Detached from what should
T rather, she does, but not one we
are privy to. We meet her first in the
story in which no one comes of age, a
domestic novel with no fixed address,
matter and attracted to what should
not, she exudes a particular charm. Even
hazy world of childhood memories, as and a depiction of someone who, for her namelessness seems apt. If she had
she drifts through and refines her rec- good and for ill, both clings to and dis- a name—Alice or Janet or Stephanie,
ollections of brief, seemingly insignifi- owns her life. Dissected and recon- say—it would evoke other people we’ve
cant moments. She doodles in class, structed, it yields a conventional enough met, whether in life or in literature. Be-
badly, because she doesn’t want to draw story: that of an intelligent working- cause she doesn’t have one, our experi-
resemblances, only what things are “re- class girl, in southwest England, who ence of her is pure.
ally like.” She is usually “I,” often “we,” is encouraged to write by one of her But unfiltered experience is hostile
rarely “she,” and even, sometimes, “you.” teachers. She goes on to a depressing to expression. Like our doodling pro-
And she is, finally, the narrator and her- university in London, and dates men tagonist, we are stuck with the problem
oine of Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Check- who are poorly suited to her. One, who that representation remains represen-
out 19” (Riverhead), a novel that is de- “liked me being a writer, but didn’t very tation, no matter how much closer we
liberate in its construction, down to the much like me to write,” destroys a man- think we’ve got to the heart of a thing.
individual word, and yet aggressively uscript she’s working on; another reads Even the vivid colors of abstraction are
resistant to definition. tiresome biographies about “very emi- choices. There is no way to cut to the
real, no way to show us a beloved teacher
In “Checkout 19,” the narrator yearns to live in the world without being known. or a long-ago friend without choosing
ILLUSTRATION BY ELEANOR TAYLOR THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 73
what aspects made them who they were, becoming lighter and brighter, homo- she is, leaning into her tastes and pro-
summed them up, and—in the emo- geneous in their increasing need to be clivities. But this comes at a certain cost,
tional sense—named them. increasingly operational”: and, for her, the cost is self-knowledge.
And who, exactly, is doing most of the work
f the many containers into which heckout 19” draws its title from a
O we fit the stuff of life, “Checkout
required day in day out to ensure that all these
homes are unfailingly lighter and brighter and
“C job the narrator had as a teen-ager,
19” concerns itself with two: the book operational? Convenience replaces ritual, de- working as a cashier at a supermarket.
and the home. Bennett’s women have vices replace daydreaming, spotlights replace We’re told just one story about her time
an anarchic, almost feral domesticity; shade, and the discord between one’s inner there, in two different ways. The first is
world and their immediate surroundings goes
their abodes are full of moldy cups of through the roof. . . . And whoever lives in-
fairly straightforward. A Russian shop-
tea. But these are not places of neglect. side there is bewildered to her wit’s end that per hands her a copy of Nietzsche’s “Be-
The objects inside them are fastidiously she experiences such a penetrating and abid- yond Good and Evil,” and she reflects
observed—treated, in fact, as subjects, ing—almost accusatory—sense of estrange- that her hands resemble the hands of the
exerting their own will and agency. ment in a place where she is surely supposed woman on the cover: “My hands were
to feel inspired and at ease. When everything
“Things hold life in place,” the narrator is illuminated and the shadows have been san-
like hers, exactly like hers, and I couldn’t
tells us. She goes on to describe some itised, where goes the creature inside and what help but believe that the Russian man
memories from childhood: “Party dresses happens to her need for reverie? . . . It seems must have thought so too.”
with smooth sashes. And oxblood loaf- to me entirely indefensible that anyone ever The second time, the encounter is
ers and argyle socks and a rosebud pitcher thought it necessary and correct to send an framed almost as a fairy tale, in which
electric current blazing through the furrows of
and bowl and croissants on Sundays . . .” anyone else’s mind in order to dazzle the inti-
the Russian man shops as if “the splen-
Yet even as she tells us about these mate blackness at its core into rapid extinction. didly arrayed shelves of pickled vegeta-
things she lets slip that she is always los- bles were in fact the stalls of a magnifi-
ing them; and the life the things were From the home we slide suddenly cent Viennese auditorium,” and that he
meant to hold in place has been lost, too, into the mind—another place where we were being watched by an audience that
“wrapped up in newspaper and put into are sometimes at peace and sometimes followed “his astonishing hands.”The re-
separate boxes.” Much is invested in robes, at odds, a place we inhabit but don’t sponse of this audience becomes increas-
a silver lamé skirt, eggplants “tightly control. The prized darkness at the cen- ingly erotic; a wife takes her husband’s
sheathed in a shining bulletproof dark- ter of the human mind, the place where fingers and sucks on them to the root.
ness.” Still, like a spider that builds its whatever is really real about us resides, The Russian “can feel oh so clearly that
dwelling between a chair and a wall, our is what “Checkout 19” dedicates itself the women are emboldened, that the
protagonist has a relationship to these to protecting. There is nowhere to go women are ready for anything,” and the
items that is not one of confident own- but inside, and yet what is inside is what story again ends with the gift of “Beyond
ership. Things are necessary, totemic. But must be saved from illumination. Good and Evil.” This time, though, the
she is not their master, never at home. Indeed, for all her digressive self- narrator experiences it as a shattering in-
Homes recur constantly in “Check- narration, her imperiously delivered trusion: a stranger has seen “through my
out 19,” whether in idiom (things are opinions, it is not always easy to know ruffled yet unbroken flesh . . . into the
often described as being “at home”), what our protagonist feels about the quickening revolutions of my supremely
metaphor (“the dark, where sleep has aberrant imaginings.”
its house”), or in their literal and solid Books, Bennett’s second vessel of
form. Bennett knows that, for most of experience, are a site of both fear and ob-
us, these are structures to which we adapt, session. Much space is devoted to our
not places we build from the ground up. narrator’s reading: Junichiro Tanizaki’s
We ditch the furniture we thought we’d “In Praise of Shadows,” E. M. Forster’s
have for years; if we rent, we are going “A Room with a View,” the diaries of
to find nails in the wall, small installed Anaïs Nin, Françoise Sagan’s “Bonjour
improvements. We are always to some Tristesse.” In the novels she reads, life is
degree interlopers, harnessing some- mostly depicted through events and ac-
body else’s designs for our purposes. events of her life. When she reassures tion, one thing that leads to the next. But
(One of the stories in “Pond,” for in- Dale that she barely thinks about what there’s another kind of novel, one with “a
stance, is dedicated to the knobs on the he did, she seems to be telling the truth, kaleidoscopic sort of prose that is con-
cottage’s stove, which are breaking and but in the aftermath she cannot really stantly shuffling the distinction between
impossible to replace.) To be at home determine if she is upset or not, even objects and beings, self and other, and
is also to be dislocated, in between. as her body shakes—which, to this conceives of the world in terms of form
Unsurprisingly, our narrator, who stays reader at least, is a response that should and geometry, texture and tone.” This is
in bed for days on end, believes the provide some kind of answer. What it the narrator describing the work of the
cleaner the home the more dubious the means to be upset is physically expressed British writer Ann Quin, and it’s her con-
sanity of the person inside it. “Modern but not articulated as emotion. Our ception of what working-class literature
homes, now frequently referred to as narrator is in one way thoroughly de- should be: writing that reflects a sense of
bases and living spaces,” she says, “are voted to the project of living out who having no future, no privacy, no control.
74 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022
 It’s also, of course, a good description
of Bennett’s writing, which aims to cap-
ture experience without revealing its core.
This is the Russian’s violation: he exposes
the narrator to herself. She is somebody
with hunger and ambition, despite ap-
pearances, and beyond the bounds of her
class. Thinking of herself and of Dale,
the narrator comments that they “read
in order to come to life.” Literature means
something different to them than to their
wealthy classmates; it’s more visceral,
more of a need. Books create a world in
which there are signs, omens, and prom-
ises, in which things happen for reasons,
in which people can be singled out as
special, laden with potential.
But potential, or promise, can mean
different things. Perhaps it means you
have some kind of destiny, a natural blos-
soming that’s lying in wait. Or perhaps
it’s simply an illusion—years pass, and
you become whatever they made you.
Books first appear in “Checkout 19” as
things, kept close for their possibilities
but never read. “With just one book in
the grass beside us we sat there wonder- “Sorry, if you want access to my emotions, you’re
ing about the sorts of words it contained going to have to subscribe to my Patreon.”
in a really tranquil and expansive kind of
way,” the narrator recalls. “That was nice.
It was actually.” Here texts and people
• •
face the same conundrum. Once opened,
they inevitably transform into something impossible to share. Tarquin, initially coherence and definition. Bennett’s nar-
tidier: a story. elated by this news, is quickly flattened rator, though intent on protecting her
by its implications. The endless poten- “own little bit” of “all-consuming dark-
he story our narrator writes—the tial of the library is too much; wading ness,” the unseen kernel that makes her
T one that her boyfriend destroys—
follows a wealthy wanderer named
through its blankness to find enlighten-
ment, unbearable. He dumps the books
who she is, often returns to moments in
her life, only to find that she reads them
Tarquin Superbus. He lives in an ambig- into a courtyard, sets them on fire, and differently. Some things matter more
uous time, but in a single location: his instantly knows that he has made a mis- than she expected them to; others lose
apartment, which is placed in any num- take. Smoke rises, and the story ends— their lure. If she is fleeing being known
ber of cities according to mood. (When not because it was meant to, but because in order to protect something important,
he is triumphant and “licking his fin- it was here that it was stopped. she is also trying to see what’s impor-
gers,” Vienna; when in need of comfort Neither the blank books nor the bon- tant, in order to preserve it.
and a little delusional, Venice.) Tarquin fire can soothe Tarquin’s soul: it’s real Perhaps it was wrong to bring language
is extravagantly domestic, delighting in books he needs, with their real tension into what had been a cheerful animal ex-
the dark luxury of his home, which is re- between sacred mystery and plain mean- istence. But it has arrived, and it is here
plete with the color of eggplants. One ing. We often say that books are “about” to stay. We must now say and repeat, rep-
day, hoping to impress a friend, the Doc- something, but, strictly speaking, books resent and represent again, draw the fig-
tor, he acquires a vast library. But when simply are. They are not houses for ideas ures of our lives in different ways to try
the Doctor arrives, he discovers what or gestures toward a point. Like a name, to get at the real thing, not in one go but
Tarquin would have known had he like a mind, they are experiences in their in a thousand facets. It’s fitting that
opened his books. Every one is blank. own right, and they remain opaque de- Tarquin’s story—or the story of his story—
The Doctor softens the blow: some- spite our attempts to sum them up— ends in destruction of a different sort. It’s
where in the library, he says, is a sentence as one must in (for instance) a review. ripped to fragments by another man, one
that unlocks the secrets of the universe, Still, completely yielding to this mys- who hated not that the pages were blank
ushering a person into transcendence. tery, obliterating even the possibility of but that they’d been written on. Instead
This sentence cannot be read, only seen; understanding, does not create pure ex- of endless promise, they contained some-
and, once seen, it disappears, making it perience. Experience resides between in- thing else—something like life. 
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 75
 guage. Omid (Hadi Tabbal) has a green-
THE THEATRE card interview coming up. Roya (Pooya
Mohseni) needs to be able to commu-

DOUBLESPEAK
nicate with her granddaughter, who lives
in Canada. Elham (Tala Ashe) has been
accepted to medical school in Austra-
Language and identity in “English.” lia. Goli (Ava Lalezarzadeh) is only
eighteen, but she’s been captivated by
BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ the language since she was small; En-
glish may be the key to her future, but
it’s also a deep aesthetic pleasure. We’re
in a toefl (Test of English as a For-
eign Language) class in the Iranian city
of Karaj, near Tehran, in 2008. The stu-
dents’ native tongue is Farsi, but, with
one big exception, we hear only English
onstage, because Toossi, who is Iranian
American and grew up in California,
has found a simple and fantastically ef-
fective way to depict the double self of
the novice language learner. When her
characters are “speaking” Farsi, we hear
quick, idiomatic American English. But,
when they speak English itself, their
voices slow down, and their accents grow
thick; they drop their indefinite articles,
struggle to pronounce their “W”s, and
have to search for the right words to
stitch together into rough sentences.
There’s no shortage of easy comedy
to be wrung from the conceit of foreign-
ers who talk “funny,” as these students,
preparing to be foreign, know all too
well. They’re haunted by the spectre of
Borat: is that how they’ll sound to an
Anglophone ear? But, while Toossi’s play
frequently delights in the infelicities of
imperfect speech, it’s never cruel. Guided
by their teacher, Marjan (the sensitive
Marjan Neshat), the students play
cabaret-size crowd at Joe’s Pub. In hot-potato vocab games and conduct the
T o learn a second language as a
grownup, when the pliable, plastic
brain has hardened to brittle glass, is to
France, Elmaleh is a star who sells out
arenas. In his forties, he had decided to
sort of stilted small-talk dialogue about
nothing which will be brutally familiar
know the locked-in sensation of being see if he could be funny in another lan- to anyone who’s taken a class like this:
shut out—from other people, with their guage, one that he spoke with creaky
enviable, easy fluency, and, worse, from grammar and a limited vocabulary. The Elham: Hello what is it your favorite color?
Roya: It is red my favorite color.
your own articulate self. We are as much performance that resulted from this Elham: Red it is . . . strong. Strong color.
made of words as we are of flesh and self-imposed dare was notable less as Very strong.
blood. Personality dissolves in an unfa- an exercise in humor than as a test of Roya: Very strong. It is strong. I am strong.
miliar language like a sugar cube dropped endurance, a feat undertaken in pursuit One time I carry six boxes.
into a cup of tea; estrangement from a of becoming someone new. Elham: Okay. Wow. Six.
Roya: One time big chair. Big big chair.
mother tongue can be as painful as es- Each of the four students learning (Beat.)
trangement from an actual mother. It English in “English,” a new play by Elham: It is over now.
can be freeing, too, the way that leav- Sanaz Toossi (a Roundabout and At-
ing home often is. A few years ago, I lantic Theatre Company co-production, Elham cuts the exercise short be-
saw the Francophone comedian Gad directed by Knud Adams), has a differ- cause she can’t tolerate sounding “like
Elmaleh perform a set in English for a ent reason for wanting to speak the lan- idiot”—“an idiot,” Marjan corrects her—
when she knows herself to be anything
In Toossi’s play, four Iranian students become friends or rivals in an English class. but. She has the most urgent reason for
76 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY SOPHI MIYOKO GULLBRANTS
being in the class: she aced her mcats, the way that the light (designed by Reza
but she needs to pass the toefl to ma- Behjat) sifts through the classroom’s
triculate and to qualify as a paid teach- windows, and from the classroom itself,
ing assistant, and time is running out. which rotates to give each day its own
She also has the worst English of the angle. (Marsha Ginsberg did the plain
group, and an attitude to match. Roya but evocative set design.) Flashier nar-
is dignified and unflappable. Goli is rative structures are dangled as decoys.
sweet and eager. Omid is a showoff, and Marjan likes to screen English-language
suspiciously fluent, almost as if he doesn’t rom-coms during her office hours, to A DV ERTISE ME NT

need to be there at all. But Elham is which only Omid consistently shows
sullen, sarcastic, combative; she locks up; as they watch “Notting Hill,” a will-
horns with Omid, insults Goli’s accent, they-or-won’t-they tension begins to
and can’t stop herself from breaking into build, fuelled by Omid’s blatant affec-
rapid-fire Farsi, even after Marjan in- tion for his teacher. (You can almost hear
stitutes a demerit system, keeping a tally the tagline: “They both love English.
of linguistic infractions on the class- Can they learn to love . . . each other?”) WHAT’S THE
room whiteboard. To learn a language,
you have to be willing to abase yourself.
But Marjan is married, and Omid, for
all his boldness, is keeping secrets about BIG IDEA?
Elham’s pride is her ruin. She’s already his life. They aren’t the leads in a studio Small space has big rewards.
failed the toefl five times, though she movie, destined for some offscreen hap-
can bring herself to confess that shame- pily ever after—they’re just two people
ful truth only to Marjan. “Word is hu- who find themselves joined by a private
miliation,” she says. “I look it up.” language before life pulls them apart.
Marjan may understand how Elham There’s an obvious political valence
feels, but she refuses to indulge her. She to the project of learning English in Iran, TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT
JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159
spent nine years living in Manchester, which Toossi treats lightly but atten- [email protected]
England, before returning to Iran, and, tively, pressing on cultural bruises just
spiritually, she’s still abroad. “It took me enough to make them ache. “Today I
two years alone to figure out the bus will ask you to feel any pull you have to
routes,” she says, wistfully. What can your Iranian-ness and let it go,” Marjan
she do with that knowledge now? She tells the students when they backslide
misses the city, the culture. She misses into Farsi. “In this room, we are native
herself, too. In England, Marjan was speakers. We think in English. We laugh
called Mary, a renaming that her stu- in English. Our inhales, our exhales—
dents, when they discover it, interpret we fill our lungs in English.” This isn’t
as a gross affront, another case of the a hard assignment for the enthusiasts in
homogenizing West asserting its dom- the class, but Elham and Roya are re-
inance over anything that smacks of pelled. “You talk about Farsi like it’s a
otherness. But Marjan loved being Mary. stench after a long day’s work,” Roya
It was an adventure, an escape. So was snaps. It’s one thing to be told to assim-
speaking English. It wasn’t just a way ilate abroad, but Marjan is asking them
to say the same things differently but a to give up home before they’ve even left.
way to be different—not a truncation “English is not to be conquered,”
of the self but an expansion of it. “I al- Marjan insists. She wants her students
ways liked myself better in English,” to woo the language, to cozy up to it,
she confesses. Back in Iran, she feels to welcome it into their lives as she It’s Raining
like an immigrant again, unmoored by does. But it’s English that has already
her longing for a lost land. done the conquering. “I have this amaz- Cats and Dogs
ing dream sometimes that the Persian Featuring George Booth’s
semester, with its natural beginning, Empire kept growing,” Elham tells Goli.
A middle, and end, makes a smart
structure for a play. Strangers become
“And Cyrus the Great would still be
our king. Instead of the Americans, the
irascible cats and dogs,
the collapsible New Yorker
umbrella is the perfect
friends, or rivals; together, they form a British, everyone telling us what to speak companion for a rainy day.
little society before being sent off into and how to say it, all of us would speak
the world to continue their stories alone. Farsi.” Is that the best proof of a lan-
The bulk of Toossi’s intermissionless guage’s value: totalizing victory? Toos-
piece, which runs for an hour and forty si’s play doesn’t answer that question, To order, please visit
minutes, takes place over six weeks; we and it shouldn’t. Why settle what you newyorkerstore.com
get a subtle sense of time passing from can discuss? 
THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 77
 of the occupied territories; but some-
THE CURRENT CINEMA how it doesn’t feel like an issue movie.
When Huda is onscreen, played with

INVESTIGATIONS
sublime command by Awad, the story
becomes unremittingly about her.
In a dank room, lit by a single lamp,
“Huda’s Salon” and “After Yang.” Huda is interrogated by a guy called
Hasan (Ali Suliman). He is taller than
BY ANTHONY LANE her, and he holds her life in his grasp,
yet she acts, from the word go, as if she
he less you know about the opening because we know her to be innocent, we were calling the shots. Watch carefully
T scene of “Huda’s Salon,” a new film
from Hany Abu-Assad, the better. Yet
have the grim privilege of witnessing
the effects of blackmail on body and
as he tosses a pack of cigarettes onto
the table between them; she takes one
all that ensues is shaped by what occurs soul. It’s a fine performance from Abd and then leans back, compelling him to
in the first quarter of an hour. Suffice it Elhadi, who stares at nothing, with dark reach across and light it for her, as if
to say that the scene unfolds in, yes, a wide eyes, and quakes with trepidation. she were a grande dame toying with an
hairdressing salon run by Huda (Manal So doggedly does the camera harry Reem overeager beau. There’s not just a mea-
Awad). Friendly, brisk, and loquacious, around the tight spaces of her apartment sure of dignity in Awad’s portrayal of
she has just the one customer, a young that we are left with a sinister illusion: Huda but also, to one’s astonishment, a
certain calm. It is the tranquillity that
comes from knowing, for sure, that you
are in the antechamber of death. Reem,
too, believes that her end is near, but,
like most of us, she is blankly terrified,
whereas Huda stands firm—even, now
and then, braving a ghost of a smile.
“I’ve been expecting this moment to
come for a long time,” she declares. “I’m
ready.” If Awad ever takes to the stage
as Andromaque or Phèdre, I’ll be there.
Another reason for the intensity of
this film is that it lasts a mere ninety-one
minutes. “Paradise Now” and “Omar”
were similarly curt. The three of them
are clammy and committed thrillers, nei-
ther laboring nor loitering; by the end,
you feel not so much hectored as drained.
What singles out the new movie is its
Manal Awad and Maisa Abd Elhadi star in Hany Abu-Assad’s film. insistence on female experience, and it
glances aside from the main events, trau-
woman named Reem (Maisa Abd El- she appears to be crowded and jostled matic as they are, toward the broader
hadi), who has brought her baby daugh- even when she’s alone. predicaments in which women, not only
ter, Lina, with her. We are in the town But this is a tale of two women, and in this region, are snared. Those picked
of Bethlehem: by tradition, hardly the you’d be hard put to nominate one of out for blackmail, we are told, were all
safest of havens for a mother and child. them as the obvious heroine, or to say “girls whose husbands were assholes,”
As the movie begins, Reem’s prob- who is sweating under the greater stress. and there’s a terrific exchange, like a
lems are mild—whether to have bangs, The narrative clicks back and forth, rest- clash of swords, between Hasan and
and how to reassure her husband, Yousef lessly, between Reem, clutching her baby, Huda, after she admits to infidelity. He
( Jalal Masarwa), that she’s not interested and Huda, who is dragged from her asks why she cheated in the first place:
in anyone else. Fifteen minutes later, home, held captive by members of the
though, for reasons that I will not dis- Palestinian resistance movement, and “Do you know my husband?”
“I haven’t had the honor.”
close, she finds herself in the talons of accused of doing the enemy’s dirty work. “Try living with him one day and get back
a devastating deal. Either she must work Whether she is guilty as charged, and, to me.”
for the Israeli secret service in the West if so, why she chose—or was forced—
Bank, feeding information to its agents, to collaborate isn’t really the point. It Touché. How can you not applaud
or else she will be publicly dishonored goes without saying that, like most of such heroic irony, under conditions as
and shamed. Reem is not the first vic- Abu-Assad’s films, especially “Paradise pressurized as these? “Huda’s Salon” has
tim, we soon realize, to slip into this trap; Now” (2005) and “Omar” (2014), “Hu- the doubleness of film noir: it offers a
but she is the only one we meet, and, da’s Salon” is rubbed raw by the politics satisfying dramatic snap while bequeath-
78 THE NEW YORKER, MARCH 7, 2022 ILLUSTRATION BY TRACY CHAHWAN
ing a more lasting anxiety. As Huda trouble is that Yang has gone kaput. “If rarefied as his professional conduct. In
says, “It’s easier to occupy a society that’s we can’t fix Yang, we’re not going to buy snatches, we observe the other humans
already repressing itself.” There are no another sibling for Mika,” Kyra says. whom he served before coming to look
solutions. She takes the only way out. “That would just be”—pause—“strange.” after Mika; we hear the valuable lessons
Unlike, say, getting a family robot in the that he instilled in her, such as “Butter-
an a film be too beautiful for its first place. flies were one of the favorite subjects of
C own good? Those of us who infest
cinemas may remember asking ourselves
Pauses proliferate in “After Yang,”
enriching the air of rumination, and the
Chinese trade art in the mid-eighteen-
hundreds”; and we share his everyday
that uncomfortable question for the first line readings tend to accentuate the neg- visions, including a peeled tangerine on
time. In my case, it arose midway through ative. Kyra says to Jake, “You’ll need to a plate. Boy, was Yang fun.
“Death in Venice” (1971), as I began to take Mika to school and get her ready Hang on, though. Who is the young
drown in a warm lagoon of Mahler. The for the day,” as if telling him to prepare woman, unrecognized by Jake, who flits
question becomes urgent, I’d say, when for his impending crucifixion. Most of through Yang’s downloaded past? She’s
a movie no longer seems willing or able the interior sequences suggest that the some sort of clone, by the name of Ada,
to accommodate the unbeautiful—when nation’s light-bulb manufacturers have and she’s played by Haley Lu Richard-
we can’t imagine that anything raucous gone on strike. And yet, amid the gloom, son, who starred in “Columbus” (2017),
or ungainly could disturb its exquisite a promising plot creeps into view. One Kogonada’s previous feature. That was
surface. Take, for example, three succes- option is to have Yang recycled, like a an absorbing work, set amid the mod-
sive images in “After Yang,” which is laptop, but a technician who opens him ernist architecture of Columbus, Indi-
written, directed, and edited by Kogo- up to expose his core—basically, his ana, and the presence of Richardson,
nada: a woman sitting on a bench with hard drive—warns that “you might not spirited and questing, supplied an emo-
a book, framed by foliage, behind tall want this bot in your house anymore.” tional momentum that “After Yang,”
panes of glass; washing hung on racks Have Yang and his kind been pro- sadly, struggles to reproduce. I would
and pegs, the standouts being a blue grammed to spy on their owners by the love to report that Colin Farrell shows
garment, a red shirt, and a pair of or- state? Was he a mashup of Alexa and the same menace and thrust that he
ange socks arranged just so; and, last, a Mary Poppins all along? brought to “Minority Report” (2002),
circular cobweb, its strands backlit by Alas, this thread of inquiry is not another sci-fi fable in which the hero
the sun. Here, in short, is perfection. pursued. Of more concern to Kogonada forages through digital recollections in
You may start to wish you’d gone to see are the private memories that are stored search of the truth. In “After Yang,” how-
the new “Jackass” movie instead. within Yang. Jake reviews them, wear- ever, Farrell’s character is rabbity and
The story, adapted from a tale by Al- ing a pair of cool red-tinted spectacles. anxious, with a modest mustache and a
exander Weinstein, is set in an unspec- (That’s about as high tech as the movie lofty devotion to tea. “There are no words
ified city, in a spooky future; we glimpse gets, and there’s a peculiar grace to its to adequately express the mysterious
newspaper cuttings that refer to a war economy. We see the inside of a driv- nature of tea,” he says. Try telling that
between America and China. Yeah, as erless car, with light flowing over its to the young Farrell in “Intermission”
if that’s ever going to happen. The Yang translucent roof, but never the car it- (2004), seated at a café table with a mug
of the title, played by Justin H. Min, is, self.) I was hoping for evidence of crimes of strong Irish tea, and persuaded to add
or was, a handy android—the term used and misdemeanors—Yang partying with a squirt of spicy brown sauce. He squirts,
is “technosapiens”—who was purchased punky cyborgs when the family was he stirs, he sips, and then he exclaims,
by Jake (Colin Farrell) and his wife, away, or donning the orange socks and “That’s fockin’ delish.” 
Kyra ( Jodie Turner-Smith), as a pseudo- making out with Kyra in the laundry
brother for their adopted daughter, Mika room. But no. Yang’s secret existence, NEWYORKER.COM
(Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). The it turns out, was every bit as prudently Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three
finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Brian Hawes
and Seth Roberts, must be received by Sunday, March 6th. The finalists in the February 14th & 21st contest
appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the March 21st issue.
Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“I’m part Great Dane.”

Corinne Sills, Clinton, N.J.

“Don’t you ever feel like they wanted a bigger dog?” “Do you have to come in here every time I turn on the light?”
Ardie Khonji, San Diego, Calif. Greg Hahn, Brooklyn, N.Y.

“It’s got an indoor tree.”

Paul Nesja, Mount Horeb, Wis.
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PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT.

13 14 15

THE 16 17

CROSSWORD 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26
A moderately challenging puzzle.
27 28 29 30 31

BY AIMEE LUCIDO
32 33 34

35
ACROSS
1 Film-synchronization element 36
6 Some summer parties, briefly
37 38 39
10 Pennies: Abbr.
13 Disturbance potential 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47
15 ___ deck
16 Full of robots and hoverboards, maybe 48 49 50 51 52

17 First plus-size model on People’s “Fifty

53 54 55 56
Most Beautiful People” list (1994)
18 Mined matter 57 58
19 Citrus-drink suffix
59 60 61
20 Person who may collect packages
22 X-ray units
24 Site of a famous fruit tree DOWN 35 Pay
26 Dark times in Lyon 1 Regarding 36 “I want to learn!”
27 Linebacker Manti 2 Sci-fi lieutenant whose first name 41 It may be held together with saliva
29 Sign of neglect is Nyota 43 Hold tight
31 One of an alpaca’s eight 3 Lavished gifts (on), say 45 Some slushy drinks
32 Campaign manager? 4 Frequent “Chicago Med” setting, briefly 46 Lactose-intolerance symptom
35 Anxiety over the impending workweek 5 Bhindi, in Indian cuisine 47 Puts in the mail
36 “It’s now or never” 6 Rooted 49 Former Disney bigwig Bob
37 Common Market letters 7 Crunchy sandwich, for short 51 “Downton Abbey” countess
38 Lead-in to -drome 8 Busybodies 55 Start of the Torah?
39 Also 9 Dry, on a Spanish wine label 56 DVD precursor
40 Like many horror-movie victims . . . so 10 Model U.N. unit
they think Solution to the previous puzzle:
11 Projectiles thrown in an annual festival
42 Creep in the Spanish town of Buñol A S M U C H A S W I S E S T
44 Cacao ___ (crunchy additions to an 12 “The Faerie Queene” poet H A L L O U M I I R E N E S
açai bowl) I T S M A G I C M A R I N E
14 Fallout or Quake S H A K E W E I G H T
48 Makes aware
15 Cuzco’s country S T A D T E V E A M O S
50 “Funky Cold Medina” rapper Tone ___
P H L E G M N O N G L A R E
21 Lake that can be seen from the CN Tower
52 The Browns, on scoreboards A U T E U R S N D A

53 ___ d’œuvres 23 Double act? M R S P A U L N E R F W A R

R N A E R D R I C H
54 “Make it snappy!” 25 Shoreline phenomenon
N O S E D I V E S E E S T O
57 Moldy scent 28 Salad greens I N T L V E X N E H I S

30 Residence that may have voice- C L A I R E D E N I S

58 David Lynch film that gets its title from
a scene at a pencil factory controlled lighting E A S T E R M O T L I E S T
S T E E D S P R O U N I O N
59 Palindromic French season 32 The normal amount of time
T E S S I E T A N G E N T S
60 “LMK,” on invites 33 They may be liquid
Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at
61 Helpers: Abbr. 34 Nurse newyorker.com/crossword