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99 MAY 16, 2016

 THE INNOVATORS ISSUE
MAY 16, 2016

11 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

31 THE TALK OF THE TOWN

George Packer on Donald Trump’s class appeal; Trump, Jr.,’s sport; elevator
man; playing Camus; James Surowiecki on the banks and Dodd-Frank.
ANNALS OF EDUCATION
D. T. Max 40 A Whole New Ball Game
A rolling robot teaches kids to code.
SHOUTS & MURMURS
Jen Spyra 47 To the Class of 2050
OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS
Lizzie Widdicombe 48 Happy Together
A startup re-creates dorm life for millennials.
SENSORY STUDIES
Adam Gopnik 56 Feel Me
Exploring the new science of touch.
PROFILES
Alexandra Lange 68 Play Ground
Adriaan Geuze reimagines the city park.
UNINVENT THIS
Mary Karr 45 High Maintenance
Charlie Brooker 52 Dance, Off
Carrie Brownstein 60 Call Me Crazy
Lee Child 67 Telling Tales
Alexandra Kleeman 70 Seeing Double
Ted Chiang 77 Bad Character
FICTION
Akhil Sharma 78 “A Life of Adventure and Delight”
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Adelle Waldman 84 Samuel Richardson invents the modern novel.
BOOKS
Louis Menand 90 The irrationality of sports fans.
95 Briefly Noted
POP MUSIC
Hua Hsu 96 Drake’s “Views.”
THE ART WORLD
Peter Schjeldahl 98 A Nicole Eisenman retrospective.
THE CURRENT CINEMA
Anthony Lane 100 “The Lobster,” “Captain America: Civil War.”
POEMS
Rebecca Hazelton 43 “Letter to the Editor”
Kevin Young 58 “Little Red Corvette”
COVER
Christoph Niemann “On the Go”
View this week’s cover in augmented reality. See page 4 for details.

DRAWINGS Will McPhail, Brian McLachlan, Jason Patterson, Mick Stevens, Benjamin Schwartz, Pat Byrnes, Danny Shanahan,
John Klossner, David Sipress, Jack Ziegler, Trevor Spaulding SPOTS Hudson Christie

Adam Gopnik (“Feel Me,” p. 56) has been
a staff writer since 1986. His books in-
clude “Paris to the Moon” and “The
Table Comes First: Family, France, and
the Meaning of Food.”
George Packer (Comment, p. 31) won
a National Book Award for “The Un-
winding: An Inner History of the New
America.”
Mary Karr (“High Maintenance,” p. 45)
recently published “The Art of Mem-
oir” and “Now Go Out There.”
Elisabeth Zerofsky (The Talk of the Town,
p. 36) is a member of the magazine’s
editorial staff.
Jen Spyra (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 47), a
former senior writer for the Onion, is
a staff writer for “The Late Show with
Stephen Colbert.”
Christoph Niemann (Cover) will pub-
lish “Words,” a visual dictionary for
children, and “Sunday Sketching,” a
book of illustrations of his creative pro-
cess, in the fall.
CONTRIBUTORS
Lizzie Widdicombe (“Happy Together,”
p. 48) is a New Yorker writer and an ed-
itor of The Talk of the Town.
Charlie Brooker (“Dance,Off,” p. 52), a
former columnist for the Guardian,
hosts the BBC comedy show “Weekly
Wipe” and is the writer and creator of
“Black Mirror,” which airs on Netflix.
Carrie Brownstein (“Call Me Crazy,”
p. 60) is a writer, a musician, and an ac-
tress. She is the author of the memoir
“Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl.”
Rebecca Hazelton (Poem, p. 43) has pub-
lished two books of poetry, “Fair Copy”
and “Vow.”
Lee Child (“Telling Tales,” p. 67) is the
author of the Jack Reacher novels, in-
cluding, most recently, “Make Me.” He
will publish another, “Night School,”
in November.
Ted Chiang (“Bad Character,” p. 77) is a
science-fiction writer. His book “Sto-
ries of Your Life and Others” comes
out in paperback in June.
D. T. Max (“A Whole New Ball Game,”
p. 40), a staff writer, is the author of
“Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story:
A Life of David Foster Wallace.”
Kevin Young (Poem, p. 58) was inducted
into the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in April. “Blue Laws” is
his latest collection of poetry.
Alexandra Lange (“Play Ground,” p. 68),
an architecture and design critic, is the
author of “Writing About Architec-
ture: Mastering the Language of Build-
ings and Cities.”
Alexandra Kleeman (“Seeing Double,”
p. 70) will publish “Imitations,” a short-
story collection, in September.
Akhil Sharma (Fiction, p. 78), the author
of the novel “Family Life,” is working
on a book of short stories, entitled “Cos-
mopolitan.” He teaches at Rutgers.
Adelle Waldman (A Critic at Large,
p. 84) writes for the Page-Turner col-
umn on newyorker.com. “The Love
Affairs of Nathaniel P.” is her first novel.

THIS WEEK’S COVER: “ON THE GO”

An augmented-reality journey illustrated by Christoph Niemann.

Explore Christoph Niemann’s animated cityscape by downloading

CHRISTOPH NIEMANN

the free Uncovr app and pointing your tablet or phone at the magazine. Move your device
around the cover to find moments hidden in the metropolis.

SUBSCRIBERS: Get access to our magazine app for tablets and smartphones at the
App Store, Amazon.com, or Google Play. (Access varies by location and device.)
4 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
 THE MAIL
FAMILY MATTERS
Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his article on
genetics and mental illness, reflects that
our psychoses, anxieties, and manias,
however destructive, are inextricable parts
of our identity (“Runs in the Family,”
March 28th). The complexities of the
“self ” is a conversation we begin even in
childhood. In my school cafeteria, a group
of classmates began talking about a friend
who had been prescribed antidepres-
sants to treat manic depression. Having
grown up with a mother who suffered
from clinical depression, I suggested that
maybe she needed the medication, say-
ing, “It might make her brain go back
to how it should be.” But other friends
insisted, “When she takes the pills, she’s
just not herself anymore.” Like Mukher-
jee noticing his uncle’s sweetness despite
his schizophrenia, we could see the par-
adox of a cure that might diminish our
friend’s exuberance and warmth.
Diya Kazmi
Weston, Mass.
Muhkerjee’s piece emphasizes the link
between heredity and mental illness. I
would add that the knowledge of this link
can itself provide a measure of healing.
As a college student, I developed agora-
phobia so intense that I had to drop out
of school. When a doctor explained that
genetics predisposed me to mental-health
issues, because family members on both
sides, for multiple generations, had suffered
from mental illness, I remember feeling
that a burden had been lifted. It was not
that I could now blame my panic attacks
and suicidal depression on my parents or
grandparents but, rather, that none of us
could blame anyone. It was simply a prob-
lem that needed to be acknowledged and
accepted, without the shame that so often
accompanies mental illness.
Sara Benincasa
Los Angeles, Calif.
1 •
THINKING BIG
Nicholas Lemann’s article rightly notes
the geographical divide in the conflict
between the Hamiltonians, who sup-
ported centralized government and
big companies, and the Jeffersonians,
who preferred distributed power and
a largely agrarian economy (“Notori-
ous Big,” March 28th). Even today,
many people on the Coasts lean to-
ward Hamiltonian politics, while many
Midwesterners identify with Jefferso-
nian politics and resent large corpo-
rations that send jobs elsewhere and
that degrade our agricultural heart-
land. What was once a debate about
the size of government has become
linked to the power of large institu-
tions. Bernie Sanders’s supporters, for
example, believe that wealth concen-
tration not only creates crushing stu-
dent debt and endless wars but that
the Hamiltonian “big-is-beautiful”
mantra poses a profound threat to our
environment.
Bonnie Blodgett
St. Paul, Minn.
1
WHAT TO FEAR
I agree with Amy Davidson’s views
on the Republican political spectacle
(Comment, April 4th). Regardless of
how Trump expresses his positions,
his fear-mongering about Muslims
and “the other” amounts to a policy
of appeasement toward terrorists, who
crave notoriety. The more our politi-
cians make us afraid of them the more
we appease them. Obama has fol-
lowed a useful rhetorical path, en-
couraging vigilance but also avoiding
empowering terrorists. Every time
Trump pushes us to surrender an
American principle—such as religious
freedom—or turns to combative rhet-
oric that promotes bigotry, torture, and
isolation, we play into the hands of
extremists.
William D. Stinnett
Phoenix, Ariz.
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name,
address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to
themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited
for length and clarity, and may be published in
any medium. We regret that owing to the volume
of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.
 MAY 11 – 17, 2016

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

New York City pigeons get a bad rap. But for every Woody Allen, who dismissed them onscreen as “rats with
wings,” there’s a Nikola Tesla, who fell in love with a female bird that flew into his room at the St. Regis. The
artist Duke Riley sides with ardor in “Fly by Night,” his new piece for Creative Time. Each weekend until
June 12, Riley will tie little L.E.D. lights to two thousand homing pigeons and release them at sunset from
a Vietnam-era aircraft carrier, docked at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Somewhere, Tesla is smiling.
PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORDIE WOOD
 theatrical, are oddly touching—Collier doesn’t
mock artifice, she revels in it. Through May 14.

ART (Kern, 532 W. 20th St. 212-367-9663.)

1 “Marionette Maker,” a diorama installed in a

MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES
Metropolitan Museum
“Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of
the Ancient World”
Closed for renovations until 2019, Berlin’s Per-
gamon Museum has sent the Met its greatest
marbles and effigies from the centuries after Al-
exander the Great, resulting in this epic study
of how Greek ideas and images were transmit-
ted and transformed in western Asia. The city
of Pergamon (present-day Bergama, Turkey)
was the capital of the Attalid dynasty, whose
power in the third and second centuries B.C.
was expressed through a new style of art, less
idealistic and more baroque than its Athenian
counterpart. A towering, ten-foot-tall statue of
Athena, now armless, shows the scale of Perga-
mon’s new artistic ambitions. Even the smaller
works convey the shifts in regional power: a del-
icate terra-cotta statuette of a victorious ath-
lete has the washboard abs and strong thighs of
the Greek original on which it was based, but
the figure was elongated for Asian tastes. The
transition from Athenian restraint to Hellenis-
tic luxury comes through in a display of opulent
jewelry, including a gold diadem topped by a
figure of Nike. War, too, offered a pretext for
Pergamon’s artists to Hellenize a dying Gaul,
seen bleeding from his abdomen. More than
a mere blockbuster, this show is a radical and
wholly rewarding rethinking of the art we call
“Greek.” Through July 17.
trailer, which suggests both an autobiographical
reverie and a horror-film Nativity scene. Pan-
els cut in the caravan (whose license plate reads
“Beautiful British Columbia”) reveal a model-
maker hunched over his worktable, crafting
the latest addition to the battalion of trolls and
goblins that surround him. He’s accompanied
by a sleeping woman—modelled on Cardiff her-
self—and an unnerving rock-music soundtrack,
which occasionally gives way to Tchaikovsky,
sung by a marionette on a stage. Installed in
another room is a seventy-two-channel sound
piece, activated by visitors’ shadows. Through
June 11. (Luhring Augustine, 531 W. 24th St. 212-
206-9100.)
Anne Collier
In these elegantly spare pictures of pictures,
women are defined by the camera, whether
behind or in front of the lens. Extending the
Pictures Generation legacy of appropriation,
Collier exhibits images of album covers, book
spreads, and advertisements. A naked woman
strides into the surf in a huge, grainy black-and-
white shot that feels like a sixties flashback. Its
mood of exhilaration and freedom is offset by
closeups of other women, including Ingrid Berg-
man, crying on record sleeves. The tears, while
Henry Horenstein
The American photographer is best known for
documenting the country-music scene, and
this show of black-and-white work from the
nineteen-seventies includes pictures from the
Grand Ole Opry (notably, a portrait of a dewy
Dolly Parton). But they’re overshadowed by
subtler and more probing images, which recall
Diane Arbus. A boy in glasses, alone in an au-
dience, looks startled by the camera’s attention;
by contrast, two women, arm in arm in clash-
ing checks and stripes, beam happily. A mas-
seur stands outside a steam room full of young
jockeys like a sentry. Through May 21. (Clamp-
Art, 531 W. 25th St. 646-230-0020.)
Tom Wesselmann
An entertaining attempt to boost the reputa-
tion of the Pop-art paladin, who died in 2004,
soft-pedals his specialty of pneumatic nudes in
favor of the inanimate: foodstuffs, household ap-
pliances, cigarettes, a Volkswagen Beetle. Wessel-
mann’s grabby colors beguile, and he had a win-
ning way with shaped canvas, cutout metal, and
vacuum-molded plastic. Nonetheless, all the im-
ages and forms still orbit the rejoicing sensuality
of the “Great American Nude,” as the artist called
his signature theme—monumentalized breasts,
lips, and feet, like an explorer’s happy sightings
of a carnal Xanadu. Through May 28. (Mitchell-
Innes & Nash, 534 W. 26th St. 212-744-7400.)

Museum of Modern Art

“Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty”
This wonderful but oddly finicky show—the
museum’s first devoted to Degas—makes a
big deal of an uncommon printmaking me-
dium: monotype. The unfamiliarity of most of
the works—some hundred and twenty mono-
types, from museums and collections world-
wide, augmented with more conventional pic-
tures—makes the show special, in both the good
and the pejorative senses. Magnifying glasses
are provided to let us feel like hot-shot connois-
seurs, bending in to delectate in the nuances.
The occasion might rankle without its payoff
of a final room of first-rate paintings, pastels,
and drawings: Degas hitting on all cylinders.
On its own limited terms, the show yields use-
ful insight into the artist’s modernizing tran-
sition from careful to spontaneous style, start-
ing in the eighteen-seventies. It underlines the
truth that his genius was essentially graphic,
on a historical arc of linear sorcery from In-
gres to Picasso. You sense his delight, in “dark
COURTESY THE ARTIST/METRO PICTURES

field” monotypes, at the effects enabled by at-

tacking spreads of wet ink with incising tools,
rags, and his hands. Shapes and atmospheres
loom in whites and textured grays from Sty-
gian blackness: sculpted light, with a muscu-
lar feel. Through July 24.
1
GALLERIES—CHELSEA

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

The Canadian gothic of this audio-inclined duo In her new photographs, at Metro Pictures in Chelsea, the brilliant Cindy Sherman turns a
reaches David Lynchian heights in the intense bittersweet gaze on women in the autumn of life, as ready as they’ve ever been for their closeup.

12 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016

1
ART
GALLERIES—DOWNTOWN
Caleb Charland
The title of one work here, “Camera Placed
on My Solar Plexus While Laying on the
Ground at Night for Several Hours,” says
a lot about the artist’s dedication to his pro-
cess. The image merits the effort: stars skit-
ter across a midnight-blue expanse high above
a broken red line, evidence of an airplane’s
tail-lights. Other pictures record more dis-
crete phenomena, including what look to be
science experiments with pendulums and a
horseshoe magnet. A series of intricately plot-
ted photograms—geometric abstractions that
range across a shaded spectrum from black to
white—suggest a lost Op-art period of M. C.
Escher. Through June 4. (Wolf, 70 Orchard St.
212-925-0025.)
Mangelos
This vital showcase of one of the most import-
ant figures of the Yugoslav avant-garde re-cre-
ates five witty, metaphysical, and sometimes
clandestine shows mounted in Zagreb between
1972 and 1981. Dimitrije Bašičevic, who died in
1987, was an art historian who worked in state
institutions by day but on his own time, under
the alias Mangelos, he produced a wide-ranging
œuvre, including globes (in which the world
map is obscured by philosophical inscriptions
and black, white, and red paint) and collages
(packed with references to Heidegger, Dosto-
yevsky, and Gertrude Stein). One piece here re-
produces Picasso’s declaration of allegiance to
the French Communist Party—a biting irony
coming, as it did, from the other side of the Iron
Curtain. Through May 27. (Freeman, 140 Grand
St. 212-966-5154.)
Jon Pilkington
The young British painter makes an intriguing
New York début with soft-toned abstractions
that at first appear intuitively gestural but turn
out to be more calculated. Hazy backgrounds
of brown, pink, and malachite green subtend
proficiently executed cross-outs, zigzags, and
curlicues—markings so tight and agglutinated
that the action of their making seems immate-
rial. There are some jejune citations of Laura
Owens (flowers), Albert Oehlen (squiggles),
and other à-la-mode painters, but the appeal
here is the ease with which such quotes get
emulsified in Pilkington’s cloudy fields of color
and line. One work is even called “Typical Pil-
kington,” as if to confirm that the true subject
of his paintings is style itself. Through May 22.
(247365, 57 Stanton St. twentyfourseventhreesix-
tyfive.biz.)
Pedro Wirz
The organic, often fragile sculptures of this
Swiss-Brazilian artist draw on time spent in
the Paraíba Valley, a once lush, now industrial-
ized region in Brazil, north of São Paulo. Irregu-
larly scythed bands of tree bark, which Wirz has
coated with latex, are studded with holes that
contain eyeball-like globules. Spiders and other
creepy-crawlies are suspended in amber-col-
ored silicone; a roughly cast door ornament in
the shape of a dragon plays cat’s cradle in its lit-
tle claws. What prevents the show from feeling
like warmed-over Arte Povera is Wirz’s evident
love for a disappearing landscape, in which the
supernatural retains a power that’s on the brink
of extinction. Through June 5. (Matsumiya, 153 ½
Stanton St. 646-455-3588.)
14 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
DANCE
New York City Ballet
Robbins or Balanchine? That’s the question
this week at N.Y.C.B., which will offer pro-
grams devoted to each choreographer. The
all-Balanchine bill combines the bubbly “Ballo
della Regina” (set to ballet music from Ver-
di’s “Don Carlo”) with the angular and antic
“Kammermusik No. 2” and the swooning op-
ulence of “Vienna Waltzes.” The Robbins pro-
gram opens with what may be his greatest
work, “Dances at a Gathering,” followed by
his suite of dances from “West Side Story.”
If you can catch Tiler Peck in “Ballo della Re-
gina” and Teresa Reichlen in “Tales from the
Vienna Woods,” from “Vienna Waltzes,” you
won’t regret it. • May 10 at 7:30 and May 12 at
8: “Ballo della Regina,” “Kammermusik No. 2,”
and “Vienna Waltzes.” • May 11 at 7:30, May
13 at 8, May 14 at 2 and 8, and May 15 at 3:
“Dances at a Gathering” and “West Side Story
Suite.” • May 17 at 7:30: “Serenade,” “Hallelu-
jah Junction,” “Duo Concertant,” and “West-
ern Symphony.” (David H. Koch, Lincoln Cen-
ter. 212-496-0600. Through May 29.)
American Ballet Theatre
The company takes up residence at the Metro-
politan Opera House, where the season kicks
off with a week of performances of “Sylvia.”
This stylish period piece is Frederick Ash-
ton’s homage to the French mythological bal-
lets of the late nineteenth century. The story,
drawn from Tasso, deals with a proud nymph
(Sylvia) who, with some help from Cupid, falls
in love with a beautiful, love-struck shepherd
(Aminta). Various adventures ensue, leading
to a big, happy finale and one of the most rav-
ishing pas de deux ever made. (The score, by
Délibes, is reason enough to see it.) At the gala
on May 16, the company will introduce Alexei
Ratmansky’s newest ballet for the company,
a work for seven men and one woman, set to
Leonard Bernstein’s “Serenade, After Plato’s
Symposium.” Alessandra Ferri, who is sched-
uled to give a single performance of “Romeo
and Juliet” later in the season, will also make
an appearance, in the mournful “Pie Jesu” solo
from Kenneth MacMillan’s 1976 “Requiem.” •
May 11 at 2 and 7:30, May 12-13 at 7:30, and
May 14 at 2 and 8: “Sylvia.” • May 16 at 6:30
(gala): excerpts from “Sylvia,” “The Sleeping
Beauty,” and “La Fille Mal Gardée,” the “Pie
Jesu” solo from “Requiem,” the new Ratman-
sky ballet, and “Firebird.” • May 17 at 7:30:
“Shostakovich Trilogy.” (Lincoln Center. 212-
362-6000. Through July 2.)
Cuba Festival
In opening up cultural exchange between the
United States and Cuba, the Joyce Theatre has
been out ahead of the Obama Administration.
This appearance of Malpaso Dance Company
(May 10-12), one of the only dance troupes in
Cuba that isn’t dependent on the government,
is the third in as many years. Along with a piece
by the company’s leader, Osnel Delgado, the
program includes a Joyce-commissioned work
by one American choreographer (Ronald K.
Brown’s “Why You Follow”) and a gift from an-
other (Trey McIntyre’s “Bad Winter”). Follow-
ing Malpaso in a ten-day festival is DanzAbierta
(May 14-17), an older troupe with an aesthetic
closer to that of European dance-theatre. Its
“Showroom” offers an ironic, critical, beneath-
the-mask view of tourist stereotypes of the is-
land’s music and dance. (175 Eighth Ave., at 19th
St. 212-242-0800. Through May 22.)
Keely Garfield and Mariangela Lopez
As part of its Repertory Initiative for Tomor-
row, the Gibney Dance Center presents a re-
vival of Keely Garfield’s well-received 2014
work “WOW,” along with a new dance by the
Venezuelan-born Mariangela Lopez. In “WOW,”
the usually deadpan Garfield makes an impas-
sioned (and partly tongue-in-cheek) plea for sin-
cerity, as dancers leap and mime and gaze into
the eyes of audience members. The piece is also
a bit of a throwback to nineteen-eighties fab-
ulousness: the dancers wear sequins and body-
suits, and move to reinterpreted versions of
throaty Kate Bush ballads. The combination is
strangely moving. Lopez’s new “Repairing Per-
missions” is a large work, for twenty-five danc-
ers. (280 Broadway. 646-837-6809. May 11-14.)
“La MaMa Moves!”
The festival continues with the première of Tif-
fany Mills’s “After the Feast,” which applies her
signature style, heavy on partnering, to a dys-
topian environment and a struggle to reform
human bonds. In “Supper, People on the Move,”
Cardell Dance Theatre—directed by the Argen-
tine-born, Philadelphia-based choreographer
Silvana Cardell—investigates the dislocation
caused by migration, with performers clamber-
ing across folding tables and climbing up walls.
At the end, the audience joins the dancers for
a meal. The husband-and-wife flamenco team
of the singer Ismael Fernández and the dancer
Sonia Olla lead a large cast of mixed genera-
tions and experience in “Al Son Son.” (66 E. 4th
St. 646-430-5374. May 12-15. Through May 29.)
Juliette Mapp
Though elliptical and open-ended, Mapp’s in-
telligent, finely wrought pieces often have an
autobiographical character. “Luxury Rentals”
is about dancers: Mapp and three of her peers
and old friends, the highly distinctive Kay-
von Pourazar, Levi Gonzalez, and Jimena Paz.
It’s about dancers’ lives, inside and outside
the studio, in a city where it’s ever more diffi-
cult to find space to live and work. (Danspace
Project, St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, Sec-
ond Ave. at 10th St. 866-811-4111. May 12-14.
Through May 21.)
Mark Morris Dance Group
Always appealing, this group is especially so
in the small theatre of its Brooklyn home,
where all the details of choreography and the
live music that it illuminates register in the
intimacy of a salon. This program is notable
for the world première of “A Forest,” set to a
Haydn piano trio, and the first New York per-
formances of “The,” which finds victory and
the shadow of death in a piano-four-hands
arrangement of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Con-
certo No. 1 in F Major. (Mark Morris Dance
Center, 3 Lafayette Ave. 929-399-6634. May 17.
Through May 22.)

David Hare’s play “The Judas Kiss,” at BAM’s Harvey Theatre May 11-June 12, imagines Oscar Wilde before and after his downfall.
Gross Indecency
Rupert Everett takes the role he was
born to play: Oscar Wilde.
On April 5, 1895, Oscar Wilde was
holed up at the Cadogan Hotel, in
London, torn between fleeing the coun-
try and facing a parlous fate. Spurred
by his sometime paramour Lord Alfred
Douglas, known as Bosie, Wilde had
brought a libel suit against the Marquess
of Queensbury—Bosie’s father—who
had publicly called Wilde a sodomite.
But the plan backfired disastrously.
During the trial, Queensbury’s lawyer
threatened to produce a number of
young men who could testify to Wilde’s
degeneracy, and the case fell apart. It
now seemed inevitable that Wilde him-
self would be arrested for gross inde-
cency if he didn’t leave England. Why
did he stay? That’s the question posed
in Act I of David Hare’s 1998 play, “The
Judas Kiss,” which comes to BAM’s Har-
vey Theatre May 11–June 12, starring
Rupert Everett.
Reflecting on Wilde, Everett said
recently, “He’s a very touching, human
16 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
THE THEATRE
character, because he’s incredibly bril-
liant but at the same time he does some
really idiotic things.” For the fifty-six-
year-old actor, Wilde has become less
a character than a way of life. Everett
has spent the past eight years develop-
ing “The Happy Prince,” a film about
Wilde’s disconsolate last days, but the
financing has been slow to materialize.
In 2012, he starred in a revival of “The
Judas Kiss,” in London, then toured the
U.K. with it. He’s a natural for the role.
Since his breakout performance, in the
1997 film “My Best Friend’s Wedding,”
he has proved adept at blithe disdain,
often with an undercurrent of melan-
choly. As one of the only openly gay
actors working in movies in the nine-
ties, he saw his sexuality, like Wilde’s,
become a topic for public consumption.
“I suppose in that sense he’s like a pa-
tron saint,” he said.
Everett’s memories of Wilde
stretch back to his own Norfolk boy-
hood, when his mother read him
Wilde’s children’s stories, including
“The Happy Prince.” As a young stage
actor, he appeared in “The Importance
of Being Earnest” and “The Picture
of Dorian Gray,” and he later starred
in film adaptations of “Earnest” and
“An Ideal Husband.” Still, he’s drawn
less to Wilde the writer than to Wilde
the tragic figure, destroyed by the era
he anatomized so tastily. “He was cru-
cified by society and then, through
that crucifixion, became immortal,”
Everett said. “The fall, I think, is an
artistic statement of its own.”
In Act II of “The Judas Kiss,” Hare
imagines Wilde, having served two
years of imprisonment and hard labor,
reuniting with the insolent Bosie in a
run-down hotel in Naples. Wilde
would die soon after, penniless and ex-
iled, at the age of forty-six. “It was a
riches-to-rags story,” Everett said. “He
found enormous reserves of sympathy
and compassion in himself when he
ILLUSTRATION BY KEITH NEGLEY
was down, although there was a bitter
side to him as well.” Asked if he had
ever longed to meet his patron saint,
Everett delivered something like a Wil-
dean epigram: “Meeting people is al-
ways, I think, one of the great mistakes.”
—Michael Schulman
1 THE THEATRE
OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS
A Better Place
Evan Bergman directs Wendy Beckett’s comedy,
presented by the Directors Company, about a
gay New York couple obsessed with their neigh-
bors’ real estate. (The Duke on 42nd Street, 229
W. 42nd St. 646-223-3010. In previews. Opens May 15.)
Cal in Camo
In William Francis Hoffman’s drama, directed
by Colt Coeur’s Adrienne Campbell-Holt, a new
mother’s ne’er-do-well brother comes to visit her
and her husband. (Rattlestick, 224 Waverly Pl. 866-
811-4111. In previews.)
Daphne’s Dive
Thomas Kail directs a play by Quiara Alegría
Hudes, featuring Vanessa Aspillaga and Daphne
Rubin-Vega, about the owner of a cheap bar in
North Philly and her adopted daughter. (Persh-
ing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-
244-7529. In previews. Opens May 15.)
Do I Hear a Waltz?
“Encores!” stages the 1965 musical, with music
by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Stephen Sond-
heim, in which a middle-class woman (Melissa Er-
rico) saves up for a trip to Venice. (City Center, 131
W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. May 11-15.)
A Doll’s House
At Theatre for a New Audience, Arin Arbus di-
rects John Douglas Thompson and Maggie Lacey in
Thornton Wilder’s adaptation of the Ibsen drama,
in repertory with Strindberg’s “The Father.” (Po-
lonsky Shakespeare Center, 262 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn.
866-811-4111. In previews.)
Hadestown
Anaïs Mitchell’s folk opera, developed with and
directed by Rachel Chavkin, is a retelling of the
Orpheus and Eurydice myth. (New York Theatre
Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. 212-460-5475. In previews.)
Himself and Nora
A new musical by Jonathan Brielle explores the
romance between James Joyce and his wife and
muse, Nora Barnacle. Directed by Michael Bush.
(Minetta Lane Theatre, 18 Minetta Lane. 800-745-
3000. Previews begin May 14.)
Indian Summer
In Gregory S. Moss’s comedy, directed by Carolyn
Cantor, a city kid spends the summer at a Rhode
Island beach town, where he meets a feisty local
girl. (Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. 212-
279-4200. Previews begin May 13.)
Peer Gynt
Gabriel Ebert plays the Norwegian adventurer
in the Ibsen drama, adapted and directed by John
Doyle and featuring Becky Ann Baker and Dylan
Baker. (Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. 866-
811-4111. In previews.)
The Ruins of Civilization
In a new play by Penelope Skinner (“The Village
Bike”), directed by Leah C. Gardiner for Manhat-
tan Theatre Club, a married couple living in a rav-
aged future open their doors to a stranger. (City Cen-
ter Stage II, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212. In previews.)
Shining City
The Irish Rep returns to its renovated home with
Conor McPherson’s drama, directed by Ciarán
O’Reilly and starring Matthew Broderick as a
18 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
widower who seeks counselling after he sees his
wife’s ghost. (132 W. 22nd St. 212-727-2737. Pre-
views begin May 17.)
Signature Plays
Lila Neugebauer directs a trio of one-acts: Ed-
ward Albee’s “The Sandbox,” María Irene Fornés’s
“Drowning,” and Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funny-
house of a Negro.” (Pershing Square Signature Cen-
ter, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529. In previews.)
Skeleton Crew
A return engagement of Dominique Morisseau’s
play, part of her “Detroit” trilogy, in which the
workers at an auto plant face the threat of fore-
closure. Ruben Santiago-Hudson directs. (At-
lantic Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St. 866-811-
4111. Previews begin May 13.)
Spermhood
Mike Albo (“The Junket”) recounts his experi-
ences trying to make a baby with a lesbian cou-
ple, in his new one-man show, directed by David
Schweizer. (Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie St. 866-811-
4111. Opens May 13.)
The Total Bent
This new musical by Stew and Heidi Rodewald
(“Passing Strange”), directed by Joanna Settle,
follows a black musical prodigy in midcentury
Alabama, whose father is a famous gospel healer.
(Public, 425 Lafayette St. 212-967-7555. In previews.)
1 rects Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake’s jazzy score,
NOW PLAYING
Dear Evan Hansen
The most charming male performer in the women-
led “Pitch Perfect” movies was Ben Platt, who played
an awkward college student with an unlikely gift for
a cappella. In this new musical, with a book by Ste-
ven Levenson and music and lyrics by Benj Pasek
and Justin Paul, Platt plays a similar kid in a darker
key. Evan is a nearly friendless high-school senior
who stumbles on a social opportunity when a class-
mate commits suicide. What follows, for a while, is a
satirical take on teen-age life, fuelled by propulsive
songs in a familiar emo-musical style. But this isn’t
“Heathers”: it’s all headed for a sincere emotional
landing that the show can’t entirely stick—even if
Rachel Bay Jones, excellent as Evan’s harried mom,
provides much needed ballast. It seems certain, re-
gardless, that earnest theatre kids across the coun-
try will be singing these songs, over and over, very
soon. (Second Stage, 305 W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.)
Kentucky
The playwright Leah Nanako Winkler has created
a sort of millennial Odyssey, chronicling the rustic
homecoming of a New York City transplant. Long
in flight from a troubled upbringing, Hiro (Satomi
Blair) returns to her native Kentucky in the hope
of preventing the marriage of her younger sister
Sophie. But Sophie (Sasha Diamond) has found
her own kind of escape, in born-again Christian-
ity, and confounds the alienated Hiro with her
church-centered contentment, which the play treats
with sensitivity. Hiro’s sense of autonomy is fur-
ther challenged by her abusive father, her immi-
grant mother, and the childhood friends she left
behind. Morgan Gould’s lively production, which
includes a Greek-style chorus and a talking cat, has
an antic, unruly spirit. Still, Winkler’s story is ulti-
mately a serious one, about the commonplace na-
ture of childhood trauma and the radically differ-
ent paths people take to recovery. (Ensemble Studio
Theatre, 549 W. 52nd St. 866-811-4111.)
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
In the Roundabout’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s
unsurpassable drama, Mary Tyrone (Jessica
Lange) longs for a real home, if only she knew
what that was. For most of her adult life, she has
lived in hotels with her husband, James Tyrone
(Gabriel Byrne), an actor who tours year-round—
which is why he thinks of their summer abode as
a stable resting place, one that he and Mary can
share with their sons, Jamie (Michael Shannon)
and Edmund (John Gallagher, Jr.). Lange is en-
tirely free onstage, because she’s sure of her craft,
of how to move when going in for the kill or just
trying to show interest in someone other than her-
self. The actress forces us to listen more acutely
to what Mary is saying, to register how her body
language contradicts her brazen imagination. The
director, Jonathan Kent, handles Lange’s genius
the way it should be handled—by stepping to the
side, letting you see that it’s there but not inter-
fering. (Reviewed in our issue of 5/9/16.) (Amer-
ican Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St. 212-719-1300.)
Shuffle Along
The director George C. Wolfe mounts one show-
stopper after another in this razzle-dazzle history
lesson, choreographed with panache by Savion
Glover. In 1921, the musical “Shuffle Along,” writ-
ten by and starring black entertainers, opened on
Sixty-third Street and became a pioneering hit.
Aided by sumptuous costumes (by Ann Roth)
and sets (Santo Loquasto), Wolfe grandly resur-
including “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” jettison-
ing the original book for his own story of the mu-
sical’s squabbling creators (Brian Stokes Mitchell,
Billy Porter, Brandon Victor Dixon, and Joshua
Henry) and its hopeful cast, led by Lottie Gee
(Audra McDonald, sterling as usual). Though
he tries to avoid making a musicalized PBS spe-
cial, Wolfe finds much importance, but too little
drama, in his behind-the-scenes story. Still, his
stagecraft is insurmountable, and the syncopated
thrill of the original speaks, sings, and taps for it-
self. (Music Box, 239 W. 45th St. 212-239-6200.)
A Streetcar Named Desire
This execrable production of a great play is yet an-
other example of the director Benedict Andrews’s
desire to upstage artists more significant than
himself. The wonderful actress Gillian Ander-
son is Blanche, but she plays her as though she’s
a madcap heiress, now down on her luck. Pre-
sumably, this is because Andrews wants to bring
out the humor in the play, but it’s already there
if you listen to what Williams wrote. As Mitch,
Corey Johnson easily gives the best performance
in the show, understated and centered, while Ben
Foster’s Stanley, though sexy at first, ultimately
devolves into a parody of butchness. Vanessa
Kirby does the best she can as Stella, but even
her strengths are not enough to combat Andrews’s
use of contemporary songwriters like PJ Harvey
to jazz the piece up and make it “sexier.” (St. Ann’s
Warehouse, 45 Water St., Brooklyn. 718-254-8779.)
Toast
The English playwright Richard Bean hymns the
pleasures and the sorrows of hard work in this ge-
nial comedy, part of the “Brits Off Broadway” fes-
tival. Set in the flour-caked canteen of a rundown
bread factory in nineteen-seventies England, liber-
ally strewn with the tea bags of yore, the action fol-
lows the grudging efforts of a motley crew of yeast
monkeys to meet a large last-minute order. Amid
cigarettes, endless cuppas, and roistering banter,
they manage to get a little baking done, but the
 THE THEATRE

factory’s comfortable rhythms are thrown off by a

dough error. Tragedy is narrowly averted, but it’s
clear that the crew is working on borrowed time:
mechanization looms on the horizon. Leavened
with pungent slang and bawdy humor—the ensem-
CLASSICAL MUSIC
ble works together as smoothly as the best assembly
line—the play conjures a bygone world of indus-
trial work, as doomed to obsolescence as the bakers
themselves. (59E59, at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)

Tuck Everlasting
Natalie Babbitt hit on something elemental with
her 1975 children’s novel, about a family that
drinks from an enchanted spring and receives
eternal life. What child doesn’t wonder at the
idea of immortality—its possibilities and its ter-
ror? In this bighearted musical adaptation, the
talented eleven-year-old Sarah Charles Lewis
plays Winnie, the young girl who discovers the
clan in her family’s woods and befriends Jesse
Tuck (Andrew Keenan-Bolger), forever seven-
teen. Casey Nicholaw’s production matches the
story’s sweet simplicity with visual dazzle: trans-
lucent storybook sets by Walt Spangler and fan-
ciful costumes by Gregg Barnes. The score, by
Chris Miller (music) and Nathan Tysen (lyr-
ics), is mostly schmaltzy and generic, held up by
Claudia Shear and Tim Federle’s snappy script.
But the show’s trump card—its only real inno-
vation—is the balletic finale, choreographed by
Nicholaw: wordless, time-hopping, and lovely.
(Broadhurst, 235 W. 44th St. 212-239-6200.)

Waitress
Jenna (the astounding Jessie Mueller), the her-
oine of this winning new musical, based on
Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 film, is a server at a
small-town diner, caught between her genius
for making pies and a redneck husband (Nick
Cordero) who doesn’t want her to have any inde-
pendence. When she finds out she’s pregnant, she
starts an affair with her bumbling gynecologist
(Drew Gehling)—it’s less creepy than it sounds—
and leans on the sisterhood of her gal pals at the
restaurant (Kimiko Glenn and Keala Settle). The
celebrated singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles wrote
the music and lyrics—ethereal, gorgeously har-
monic, and even funny—and Mueller (“Beau-
tiful”) is just the performer to put them over,
with equal parts warmth and grit. Diane Pau-
lus’s production boasts an all-female creative
team, and the show is mindful of the obstacles
that working women face, even as it dusts them
with show-business cinnamon. (Brooks Atkinson,
256 W. 47th St. 877-250-2929.)
1 at how their unshowy neighborhood has
ALSO NOTABLE
American Psycho Schoenfeld. • Bianco St.
Ann’s Warehouse. • Blackbird Belasco. • Blood
at the Root National Black Theatre. Through
May 15. • Bright Star Cort. • Cirque du Soleil—
Paramour Lyric. • The Color Purple Ja-
cobs. • The Crucible Walter Kerr. • The Dingdong
Pearl. Through May 15. • Eclipsed Golden. • The
Effect Barrow Street Theatre. • The Father Sam-
Musicians will play in several spaces within the Cloisters, an increasingly popular tourist attraction.
Romanesque Riffs
“Audible Cloisters” brings a gaggle of
guitarists to Fort Tryon Park.
When the Metropolitan Museum de-
cided to lease the Whitney Museum’s
old building, on the Upper East Side
(now reopened as the Met Breuer), it
re-purposed a structure that many New
Yorkers have admired for its unrepentant
Brutalist ugliness. But just about every-
one loves the Cloisters, the Met’s branch
in Fort Tryon Park—including the res-
idents of Hudson Heights, who marvel
begun to feel just a little bit touristy. The
beautiful building, assembled from frag-
ments of Romanesque and Gothic ar-
chitecture that were shipped over from
Europe in the mid-twentieth century,
draws crowds as much for its own re-
cumbent glory as for its exceptional col-
lection of medieval art, tapestries, and
concentrated on specific repertories, but
these concerts will be as much about the
intangible qualities of space as about the
virtuosity and style of the musicians
themselves. Dylan Carlson, the lead (elec-
tric) guitarist and singer of Earth, the
doom-drone metal band from Seattle,
will ply his dolorous gifts in the spacious
Pontaut Chapter House, where Benedic-
tine monks once discussed issues both
sacred and profane. The Early Gothic
Hall, graced with stained glass from ca-
thedrals in England and France, hosts
Min Xiao-Fen, on pipa, whose repertory
extends from Chinese folk songs to Monk
and Cage; Simon Shaheen brings his
renowned mastery of the oud, the Middle
Eastern lute, to the twelfth-century Lan-
gon Chapel. But the building’s most fa-
miliar space for concerts, the Fuentidueña
Chapel, offers the broadest selection of
events. Amid the architectural grandeur
of twelfth-century Spain and Tuscany,
ILLUSTRATION BY LESLIE HERMAN

uel J. Friedman. • Fiddler on the Roof Broad-
way Theatre. • Fully Committed Lyceum. • Fun
Home Circle in the Square. • Hamilton Richard
Rodgers. • The Humans Helen Hayes. • Incog-
nito City Center Stage I. • Mike Birbiglia: Thank
God for Jokes Lynn Redgrave. • The Place We
Built Flea. • Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again.
SoHo Rep. • The Robber Bridegroom Laura
Pels. • School of Rock Winter Garden. • She
Loves Me Studio 54.
manuscripts. Now the Met, collaborating
with the New York Guitar Festival for
the first time, will show off its prize like
never before, with “Audible Cloisters”
(May 14), a six-hour marathon of four-
teen free concerts spread throughout the
hallowed spaces and gardens.
Previous editions of the Festival have
one can appreciate music by Britten and
Bach, in the hands of Colin Davin; Pur-
cell and Biber, performed by the lutenist
Nigel North; or Gyan Riley, a one-man
American-music machine, amicably
ranging across the fields of jazz, world
music, and post-minimalism.
—Russell Platt

20 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016

1
CLASSICAL MUSIC

OPERA

Vertical Player Repertory

Though he wrote more than eighty operas in his
lifetime, the bel-canto master Giovanni Pacini
has been effectively blocked from entering the
canon by his more stylistically distinctive con-
temporaries Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini. The
adventurous Brooklyn-based company, however,
is giving his late-career work “Malvina di Scozia”
its first airing in more than a hundred and fifty
years, using a new performing edition of the
piano-vocal score created by Hans Schellevis.
Judith Barnes directs. (Christ and Saint Stephen’s
Church, 120 W. 69th St. malvina.brownpapertick-
ets.com. May 11 and May 13 at 7:30.)

Center for Contemporary Opera

The librettist Royce Vavrek has been much in de-
mand for daring, often high-concept works by
David T. Little, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Missy
Mazzoli, and he now joins the composer Ra-
chel Peters for “The Wild Beast of the Bunga-
low,” which has a concert reading with piano at
the Center for Contemporary Opera. (National
Opera Center, 330 Seventh Ave. centerforcontempo-
raryopera.org. May 12 at 8.)
1
ORCHESTRAS AND CHORUSES

New York Philharmonic

The stalwart Finnish conductor John Storgårds,
admired for his mastery of music by his coun-
try’s greatest composer, makes his début with
the orchestra in a program featuring not only
Sibelius’s limpid Second Symphony but, be-
forehand, a fascinating rarity by Schumann (the
“Genoveva” Overture) and magisterial songs
by Mahler (from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,”
intoned by the compelling bass-baritone Eric
Owens). (David Geffen Hall. 212-875-5656. May
12 at 7:30 and May 13-14 at 8.)

Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble:

Stockhausen and Cage
The conductor Petr Kotik’s ensemble, endur-
ing ambassadors of the Euro-American exper-
imentalist tradition, marks the seventieth an-
niversary of the Darmstadt Institute—a place
where the course of Western music was decid-
edly changed—with concerts honoring two of
its leading lights. This extensive performance
at Roulette (in collaboration with the Talea En-
semble) features major works not only by Stock-
hausen (“Zeitmasse”) and Cage (“Concert for
Piano and Orchestra”) but also by Alvin Single-
ton, Kotik, and Feldman (“Why Patterns?”). (509
Atlantic Ave., Brooklyn. roulette.org. May 11 at 8.)

Philadelphia Orchestra
Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, a daring and daunt-
ingly complex work (heard here in the perform-
ing version by the musicologist Deryck Cooke),
can easily take up a program all by itself. But
Yannick Nézet-Séguin has Lang Lang on hand,
so he will pace the pianist and his refulgent or-
chestra in a generous prelude, the Concerto No. 1
in F-Sharp Minor by Rachmaninoff, Mahler’s
contemporary and colleague. (Carnegie Hall.
212-247-7800. May 11 at 8.)

Trinity Church: “Revolutionaries”

The great church’s festival celebrating the music
of two forthright personalities, Beethoven and
Ginastera, is in its final month. One of this
week’s concerts (free, as always) is especially
 CLASSICAL MUSIC

grand, offering the Argentinean master’s vivid

Cello Concerto No. 1 (with a distinctive solo-
ist, Matt Haimovitz) and the Viennese titan’s
major sacred work, the “Missa Solemnis.” Ju-
lian Wachner conducts Downtown Voices, the
Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and the NOVUS
NY ensemble. (Broadway at Wall St. May 15 at 5.
No tickets required.)
1 Musicians and night-club proprietors lead
RECITALS
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
May 13 at 7:30: In celebration of Friday the 13th, the
Society presents a program devoted to the macabre,
with C.M.S. regulars, including the pianist Inon
Barnatan, the violinist Sean Lee, and the Escher
String Quartet, as well as the baritone Yunpeng
Wang, performing works by Caplet, Ravel (“Gas-
pard de la Nuit”), Schubert (“Erlkönig,” and the
String Quartet No. 14, “Death and the Maiden”),
and even Bernard Herrmann (music for strings
from “Psycho”). • May 15 at 5: In “Spring Winds,”
some of the Society’s finest instrumentalists (in-
cluding the oboist Stephen Taylor, the clarinet-
tist David Shifrin, the bassoonist Peter Kolkay,
and the hornist Julie Landsman) present corner-
stone works for woodwind ensemble by Beethoven
(the Octet in E-flat Major), Gounod (the “Petite
Symphonie”), Ibert, and Mozart (the Serenade in
C Minor). (Alice Tully Hall. 212-875-5788.)
Jennifer Johnson Cano and Dimitri Pittas
The twentieth season of the George London Foun-
dation recital series concludes with a concert from
two past winners of its annual competition. Each
performs a sparkling set piece—Johnson Cano sings
“La Maja y el Ruiseñor,” from Granados’s “Goyes-
cas,” and Pittas delivers Bellini’s “La Ricordanza”—
in addition to songs by Wolf, Brahms, Duparc, and
Jonathan Dove. The mezzo-soprano and the tenor
will be accompanied at the piano by their spouses,
Christopher Cano and Leah Edwards, respectively.
(Morgan Library & Museum, Madison Ave. at 36th St.
212-685-0008. May 15 at 4.)
Emerson String Quartet
The eminent group has been exploring some well-
trod territory this spring: late string quartets by
Haydn and early quartets by Beethoven, written
at almost the same time. Its final concert brings
two of Haydn’s Op. 76 Quartets (including No. 3
in E-Flat Major, “Emperor”) together with two
works from Beethoven’s Op. 18 (No. 2 in G Major
and No. 6 in B-Flat Major). (Alice Tully Hall. 212-
721-6500. May 12 at 7:30.)
NIGHT LIFE
1
ROCK AND POP
complicated lives; it’s advisable to check
in advance to confirm engagements.
Cage the Elephant
This year’s SummerStage concert series kicks off
with a set from these Kentucky rockers, who’ve
taken many shapes. Since its start, in 2007, Cage
the Elephant has jumped between jazz-punk funk
and loud-quiet-loud shredding, before “Come a Lit-
tle Closer,” off of its Grammy-nominated album,
“Melophobia,” took on the noblest cause in rock:
embarrassing honesty. The group’s latest release,
“Tell Me I’m Pretty,” takes the best of its disparate
sounds and molds them into perfect pop forms.
The excellent single “Trouble” lands somewhere
between dewy surf punk and whiskey-stained rock-
abilly. “You know what they say, the wicked get
no rest,” Matthew Shultz sings, in winking refer-
ence to a Cage jam from 2008. There will be lit-
tle downtime at this opener for a long summer of
events on the Great Lawn. (Rumsey Playfield, Central
Park, mid-Park at 69th St. 800-745-3000. May 16.)
Clams Casino
The twenty-eight-year-old Michael Volpe spurred
a tectonic shift in rap sounds in 2009, from his
sleepy attic in Nutley, New Jersey, while study-
ing to become a physical therapist—an unlikely
innovator, he shows just how tightly webbed hip-
hop’s social network has become. The strained ca-
cophonies of hazy Lite FM samples, stadium-sized
drums, and wall-to-wall bass lines bewildered and
transfixed fans in equal measure. Some critics tried
to get the categorization “cloud rap” to catch on,
and notable, Web-savvy startups like A$AP Rocky
and The Weeknd floated off with the style. Volpe
hasn’t exactly come full circle, but he’s consistently
broadened his scope. This spring’s excellent “Psy-
cho,” by A$AP Ferg, loops together strings and
horns, over which Ferg tells the wrenching story
of a slovenly uncle whom he grew up admiring for
all the wrong reasons. The producer will share a
rare d.j. set of the instrumentals and collabora-
tions he’s self-released since 2010. (Trans-Pecos,
915 Wyckoff Ave., Queens. thetranspecos.com. May 11.)
Freestyle!!!
One urban legend that has persisted for decades
suggests that New York City’s 1977 blackout
helped to spur a musical movement, after teen-
agers ransacked audio and electronics stores for
d.j. equipment and production gadgets. Whether
the tale is true or tall, the proliferation of audio
technology during the late seventies and early
eighties fuelled countless innovations and sub-
genres that kept kids dancing in the street. Up-
town, the densely Puerto Rican enclaves of the
Bronx offered freestyle music, which laid R. & B.
over hard-bopping electronic dance beats built for
boxy subwoofers and sweaty nightclubs. Freestyle
spread to Miami, L.A., and Chicago, with each
city adding its own twist. As part of this year’s
excellently programmed Red Bull Music Acad-
emy Festival, two of the era’s fixtures, Jellybean
Benitez and Louis Vega, help revive the scene for
an evening of freestyle, with live performances by
the hit vocalists Shannon and Lisa Lisa. (Capitale,
130 Bowery. nyc.redbullmusicacademy.com. May 13.)
Gallant
It’s nice that R. & B. has become broader, darker,
and more eclectic in recent years, with many
breathless hat tips to Frank Ocean for leading
a new generation of songwriters. Chris Gallant
has a sinister falsetto and writes ambling ballads
that flaunt it well, but his most interesting move

Yuja Wang
Lang Lang is not the only Chinese piano superstar
at Carnegie Hall this week. Wang, a consistently
charismatic artist, offers a solo recital, performing
repertory nuggets by Brahms, Schumann (“Kreis-
leriana”), and Beethoven (the “Hammerklavier”
Sonata). (212-247-7800. May 14 at 8.)

Metropolis Ensemble: “Brownstone”

Give these young performers points for novelty.
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL KRALL

Their latest venture, a “multisensory exploration,”

mounted inside various rooms of the American
Irish Historical Society (just down the road from
the Met Museum), combines electro-acoustic
compositions by Jakub Ciupinski, Christopher
Cerrone (“Memory Palace”), and Ricardo Roma-
neiro, who co-curates the event with the prodigy
chef Jonah Reider (known for his Columbia Uni-
versity dorm-room restaurant, Pith). (991 Fifth Sadie Dupuis, Mike Falcone, Darl Ferm, and Devin McKnight punch out clever, laggard noise punk as
Ave. metropolisensemble.org. May 16, beginning at 7.) Speedy Ortiz. They’ll stop by Greenpoint’s Warsaw before touring through the heartland.

22 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016

 NIGHT LIFE
might have been skipping past R. & B.’s new it
kids. At this year’s Coachella Music Festival, he
was joined by Seal during a cover of the Brit star’s
“Crazy,” before they dove into Gallant’s slow-snap-
ping “Weight in Gold.” Gallant is on tour, offset-
ting the headlining electronic producer ZHU with
a softer sound that hits just as hard. (Terminal 5,
610 W. 56th St. 212-582-6600. May 11-12.)
Glenn Branca’s Symphonies
When the gallery rockers Y Pants decided to re-
cord an album, in 1980, they grabbed a toy piano,
a ukulele, a Mickey Mouse drum kit, and Glenn
Branca. The composer and No Wave icon had de-
veloped an ear for eclectic arrangement while
collaborating with avant-garde bands through-
out the early eighties, stretching the electric gui-
tar to its technical limits and eventually stack-
ing dozens of them to create his own ethereal
symphonies. Celebrating his influence and leg-
acy, Red Bull Music Academy gathers an ensem-
ble of young musicians, including Justin Frye, of
PC Worship; Mick Barr, of Krallice; and Randy
Randall, of No Age, to perform Branca’s infa-
mous guitar compositions, led by his longtime
conductor John Myers. (Grand Lodge of Free &
Accepted Masons, 71 W. 23rd St. nyc.redbullmusic-
academy.com. May 15.)
Kode9
Steve Goodman founded Hyperdub as a Web-
zine, in 2000. By 2004, he’d turned the platform
into a record label for the electronic sounds that
were brewing in underground clubs and on stat-
icky broadcasts in London. Dubstep, jungle, grime,
footwork, Cooly G, Buriel, Wiley, Joker—the spir-
itual commonalities across the label’s diverse ros-
ter are audible in Goodman’s grinding, adventur-
ous mixes as Kode9, where all blips and kicks are
fair game. If the obtrusive synths of dubstep’s mid-
aughts explosion felt like a social-science experi-
ment, consider that this scene stalwart split time
between club sets and university labs. Goodman’s
first book, “Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the
Ecology of Fear,” from 2009, examines the politics
of sound frequencies and their capacity to produce
discomfort, from auditory torture techniques used
by the military to sustained high-frequency notes
blasting on street corners to repel loitering teens.
There’s an ideology behind his ear—hear it in ac-
tion after sets from J-Cush and Dutch E Germ, mar-
quee names in their own right. (Trans-Pecos, 915
Wyckoff Ave., Queens. thetranspecos.com. May 14.)
Låpsley
On “Station,” this English singer-songwriter lays
down a line of leading vocals pitched several oc-
taves lower than her naturally feathery singing
voice. In an accomplished bit of auditory illusion,
the two vocal tracks seem to harmonize, creat-
ing a one-woman duet. At just nineteen, Låps-
ley’s garnered acclaim (and a record deal with
the can’t-miss London label XL Recordings) for
her ambitious arrangements, and lyrics that go
just as far above and beyond the expected. “So
if you’re gonna hurt me, why don’t you hurt me a
little bit more?” she challenges, in the brooding
ballad “Hurt Me”—a dark twist on overachieve-
ment that suits the brilliant and woeful singer.
(Music Hall of Williamsburg, 66 N. 6th St., Brook-
lyn. 718-486-5400. May 11-12.)
Speedy Ortiz
It makes sense that Massachusetts, with its
permanently installed student population
and near-endless winters, is incubating dedi-
cated young bands like this Allston outfit. Self-
described as a group of “French-club dropouts,”
Speedy Ortiz is led by Sadie Dupuis, who nim-
bly pulls off smirking snark on the band’s best
tracks. “So if you want to throw, you better have
an awfully big stone,” she sings on “Raising the
Skate”—it’s slacker for sure, but the hopscotch
guitar changes are more complex than the group’s
affect lets on. Speedy Ortiz released “Foil Deer”
last April, and this spring the group is tour-
ing with Philadelphia’s Hop Along. (Warsaw,
261 Driggs Ave., Brooklyn. 718-387-0505. May 11.)
1
JAZZ AND STANDARDS
Michael Feinstein
No, he won’t address the repertoire of Muddy
Waters or Charley Patton, but, in a program de-
claring his “Right to Sing the Blues,” Feinstein
and his vocalizing guests will take on blues-
inflected songs that have become popular stan-
dards, including Harold Arlen and Johnny Mer-
cer’s “Blues in the Night” and “Good Morning
Heartache,” made famous by Billie Holiday.
(Appel Room, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at
60th St. 212-721-6500. May 11-12.)
Jose James
The singer James has more of a signature style
than a singularly identifiable musical identity,
but that may be just fine in an era that rewards
open-eared eclecticism. While his most recent
album, “Yesterday I Had the Blues,” was a highly
personalized tribute to Billie Holiday, don’t as-
sume that jazz is the path James is sticking to—
he’s surprised us before. (Blue Note, 131 W. 3rd
St. 212-475-8592. May 10-15.)
Joe Lovano
John Coltrane, like his onetime employer and
mentor Miles Davis, would have turned ninety
this year. Lovano, a contemporary Coltrane
acolyte of the highest rank, assembles a glit-
tering ensemble to honor the master, which in-
cludes the pianists Geri Allen and Steve Kuhn and
the drummers Andrew Cyrille and Brian Blade,
as well as two players closely connected to Col-
trane: his former bassist Reggie Workman and
his son, the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. Among
the spiritually inspired Coltrane work to be ad-
dressed is the half-century-old masterpiece “A
Love Supreme.” (Appel Room, Jazz at Lincoln Cen-
ter, Broadway at 60th St. 212-721-6500. May 13-14.)
Miles Davis: Sorcerer at 90
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra will also
dive in deep for a celebration of what would have
been the ninetieth birthday of Miles Davis, pre-
senting a panoply of refashioned Davis work
drawn from recordings stretching from “Birth
of the Cool” (1949-50) to the 1968 proto-fusion
album “Miles in the Sky.” The musical directors
will be the trumpeter Marcus Printup and the
drummer Ali Jackson. (Rose Theatre, Broadway
at 60th St. 212-721-6500. May 12-14.)
Jenny Scheinman’s Mischief & Mayhem
A look at the audacious collaborators that the
violinist and singer Scheinman surrounds her-
self with in her Mischief & Mayhem outfit—the
guitarist Nels Cline, the drummer Jim Black,
and the bassist Todd Sickafoose—speaks vol-
umes about her multifarious musical inclina-
tions and the genre-morphing tangents (new
jazz, rock, Americana) that she’s all too willing
to follow. (Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker St. 212-
505-3474. May 12.)
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 23

Alexandra Hay, Carol Channing, and John Philip Law unite the brass-knuckle underworld and the hang-loose counterculture in the 1968 comedy “Skidoo.”
Rebel in Disguise
Otto Preminger turned Hollywood
genres into social criticism.
Ineffectual or wounded men unfit
for military service, a tough cop in love with
the image of a dead woman he has never
met, the miraculous return of a person
marked missing in action: Otto Preminger’s
first hit film, “Laura,” from 1944, is steeped
in grief and mourning. A crime drama set
in New York’s glossy stretches, it shows
an ambient violence that, without a word
about the Second World War, conjures
the jangled mood and the social turmoil
of the home front at the time. Preminger,
an Austrian-Jewish luminary of Vienna
theatre who emigrated to the United States
in 1935, had hypersensitive antennae for
societal breakdowns. As seen in the fif-
teen-film retrospective running at MOMA
through June 30, he perched his dramas
and his style on the leading edge of vast
cultural and political shifts.
Preminger’s romantically agonized
1947 drama, “Daisy Kenyon,” also set in
New York, is steeped in postwar trauma.
The title character (played by Joan Craw-
24 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
MOVIES
ford), an illustrator who lives in Green-
wich Village, is juggling an affair with a
married Park Avenue attorney (Dana
Andrews) and the overheated attentions
of a recently discharged Army officer
(Henry Fonda) who is depressed, tor-
mented by nightmares, struggling with
civilian life, and overwhelmed by the
changes that have occurred in his absence.
The depiction of high-powered operators
links traditional morality, with its winking
assumption of women’s chastity and men’s
prerogatives, to sexual violence (a recur-
ring theme in Preminger’s work). The
fabric of city life seems torn by the fury
of warped and damaged men.
“In Harm’s Way,” filmed in 1964 and
released in 1965, just as the Vietnam War
was heating up, connects the disruptions
of war to predatory sexuality. It’s a story
of the Second World War, in which John
Wayne plays a naval officer whose mili-
tary career destroyed his family, and
whose brave maneuvering during the
Pearl Harbor Day attacks nearly gets him
court-martialled. Preminger offers an
unsparing view of war and its overturning
of the natural order, as the young die and
the old grieve, romance yields to blind lust,
and soldiers wounded in body and in soul
find victorious battle as tragic as defeat.
Preminger’s ultimate embrace of youth
culture, “Skidoo,” from 1968, is one of the
most wonderfully strange movies ever
made in Hollywood. It stars Jackie Glea-
son, Carol Channing, Groucho Marx,
Mickey Rooney, and a host of other brassy
old-school entertainers in a comic tale of
clashing cultures. Gleason plays a gangster
whose Vassar-bound teen-age daughter
(Alexandra Hay) joins a caravan of hippies.
Smuggled into Alcatraz to murder an in-
mate, he shares a cell with a draft dodger
(Austin Pendleton), who has a stash of
LSD. Preminger’s depictions of psyche-
delic fantasies result in his giddiest visual
inspirations—which come with a sharp
political twist. He links these wild imag-
inings to the hippies’ repudiation of war,
rejection of conventional mores, and pur-
suit of a peaceful and egalitarian sexual
COURTESY OLIVE FILMS
freedom. Preminger’s hallucinatory im-
ages dissolve narrative and moral norms
alike in a utopian vision that has yet to be
fulfilled—in movies or in society at large.
—Richard Brody
1 MOVIES
OPENING
High-Rise An adaptation of a novel by J. G.
Ballard, about residents of an apartment build-
ing that enforces rigid class distinctions. Di-
rected by Ben Wheatley; starring Tom Hid-
dleston, Sienna Miller, Jeremy Irons, and
Elisabeth Moss. Opening May 13. (In limited
release.) • The Lobster Reviewed this week
in The Current Cinema. Opening May 13. (In
limited release.) • Love & Friendship Whit Still-
man directed this adaptation of Jane Aus-
ten’s novel “Lady Susan,” about a widow (Kate
Beckinsale) who competes with her daugh-
ter (Morfydd Clark) for an eligible bache-
lor (Xavier Samuel). Opening May 13. (In lim-
ited release.) • Money Monster Jodie Foster
directed this drama, about a TV financial ad-
viser (George Clooney) who’s held hostage by
a viewer (Jack O’Connell) who lost money on
his advice. Co-starring Julia Roberts. Open-
ing May 13. (In wide release.) • Sunset Song Re-
viewed in Now Playing. Opening May 13. (In
limited release.)
1 pound: What could go wrong? The writer and
NOW PLAYING
A Bigger Splash
Tilda Swinton teams up again with Luca Gua-
dagnino, who directed her in “I Am Love”
(2009), for a more scorched and southerly af-
fair. This time, she strikes the eye as gilded and
semi-divine; appropriately so, for her charac-
ter is a rock goddess named Marianne. As with
almost everything in the film, though, hers is
a perilous condition: she is a singer who has
lost her voice. Accompanied and shielded by
her boyfriend, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts),
she goes to ground on a volcanic island be-
tween Italy and Africa. Their sequestered calm
is soon invaded by the arrival of Harry (Ralph
Fiennes), Marianne’s raucous ex, and his daugh-
ter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson). These two
constitute a breach of the peace, not to men-
tion a threat, and the movie, written by David
Kajganich, feels both as sly as a snake and bra-
zenly open to carnal possibilities. (Fans of “I
Am Love” will be relieved to learn that food
is once more the object of worship.) The plot
takes a cruel turn, and the principal figures are
as likely to repel as they are to attract; yet they
fit the landscape in which they disport and dis-
grace themselves, and the whole film swelters
with a sense of mystery, never quite solved,
that reflects the beating sun. Also, when did
you last see Fiennes, in shorts and an unbut-
toned shirt, gyrate to the Rolling Stones?—An-
thony Lane (Reviewed in our issue of 5/9/16.) (In
limited release.)
Elvis & Nixon
This comic fictionalization, directed by Liza
Johnson, of the events behind the famous 1970
Oval Office photo of the King and the Presi-
dent is a giddy historical delight. The premise
is rooted in pathos: Elvis Presley, no longer
at the crest of popularity, inveighing against
the Beatles in particular and the Age of Aquar-
ius over all, wants to volunteer for the war on
drugs and wants Nixon to swear him in as a
federal agent. The main drama is whether the
meeting will ever take place; the story piv-
ots on Elvis’s friendship with the film edi-
tor Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer), whose de-
votion hits its limit. Michael Shannon plays
Elvis with understated cool and sly swagger,
turning a skillful impersonation into a per-
formance that’s filled with empathetic energy.
The script, by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal, and
Cary Elwes, shows Presley in a startling range
of ordinary contexts that highlight all the
more his extraordinary character. As for Kevin
Spacey’s incarnation of Nixon, it, too, passes
quickly from mannerisms into a thoughtful
effort to capture a singular world view. John-
son stages the action with delicate attention
to gestures as well as to visual and tonal bal-
ance. The dialogue sparkles with gems of his-
torical allusion and perceptive asides, and
the actors virtually sing it; the film plays like
a whirling sociopolitical operetta.—Richard
Brody (In wide release.)
Green Room
Things go wrong for the Ain’t Rights as soon as
the Virginia-based indie-punk quartet reaches
the Pacific Northwest town where they’ve been
booked for a concert. The student organizer
has messed up, but compensates by getting
them a gig at a remote white-supremacist com-
director, Jeremy Saulnier, answers this ques-
tion with an hour or so of bloody horror. Stum-
bling upon a murder scene, the band members
are held hostage by the brutal security forces
of a neo-Nazi cult headed by the coolly char-
ismatic Darcy (Patrick Stewart), who plans
to pin the crime on the musicians. When they
resist, his idea is to kill them, and the movie
devolves into a tale of the raw will, strategic
calculation, and macabre happenstance of a
primal struggle to survive. A viewer may well
share the feeling of captivity, whether arising
from an interest in the amiable band mem-
bers’ fate or from the narrow limits of the plot.
One screenplay riff, on the taking of good ad-
vice, is piquantly memorable, but Saulnier’s
clever methods are insubstantial and the mov-
ie’s stakes, though mortal, seem slight. With
Alia Shawkat, Imogen Poots, and Callum
Turner.—R.B. (In limited release.)
A Hologram for the King
There may be no opening sequence this year
more exhilarating than the Talking Heads-
inspired musical number that the director Tom
Tykwer dreams up to introduce his gleaming
take on Dave Eggers’s novel. Tom Hanks gives
a terrific performance as Alan, a struggling,
desperate American salesman of holographic
software who travels to Saudi Arabia to broker
a deal with the King, who wishes to expand his
rapidly growing tech sector. While waiting for
the King to appear, Alan and his team chat in
often comical I.T. jargon and meet a few local
characters—notably, his wisecracking Saudi
driver (Alexander Black) and his doctor and
love interest (Sarita Choudhury)—who keep
the “Godot”-like proceedings buoyant. The
story, about Alan’s impending midlife crisis
while he awaits the deal, offers a shaky, Amer-
ica-in-decline vibe as well as a technophobic
undercurrent that never really takes hold. In
one of Tykwer’s neatest visual tricks, Alan vis-
its a sweltering world of empty skyscrapers—a
desert illusion of a soulless future that looks
too fabulous to fear. The film plays like a sci-
ence-fiction parable in which humor and pa-
thos jostle for attention. Although it falters
in flashback sequences (which present a su-
perfluous backstory), the unusual tone and
arresting visuals hold interest.—Bruce Diones
(In wide release.)
The Jungle Book
The latest Disney movie is a loyal adaptation,
and the loyalty is strictly in-house. The direc-
tor, Jon Favreau, and his screenwriter, Justin
Marks, honor Disney’s own animated version,
from 1967, rather than Kipling’s original texts.
Live action replaces the finely drawn cartoon;
given the tumult of computer-generated im-
ages (the whole thing was filmed in Los Ange-
les), viewers may struggle to establish where
the liveliness resides. Mowgli (Neel Sethi), at
least, is a recognizable human, but the urge to
root for him is tempered by the bumptiousness
of his tone; reassuring though it is to see him
befriended by Bagheera (voiced by Ben King-
sley) and Baloo (Bill Murray), you can’t help
thinking that a more natural fate for such a child
would be to end up as breakfast for Shere Khan
(Idris Elba). Other old hands include Kaa (Scar-
lett Johansson) and King Louie (Christopher
Walken), both of whom appear to have suffered
a startling inflation since 1967; the coils of the
python are now as thick as a tree. The movie is
scrupulous and richly detailed, yet peculiarly
shorn of charm, and nobody seems to have de-
cided how much of a musical it should be; Mur-
ray sings “The Bare Necessities,” Walken only
half sings “I Wan’na Be Like You,” as if he were
Rex Harrison in “My Fair Lady,” and Johans-
son’s delectable crooning of “Trust in Me” is
consigned to the final credits.—A.L. (4/25/16)
(In wide release.)
Keanu
A sketch comedy writ large by two masters
of the form, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan
Peele, and their longtime collaborators, Alex
Rubens (who co-wrote the script with Peele)
and the director Peter Atencio. The high-con-
cept hijinks—involving an abducted kitten,
some action scenes, and a generous ribbing
of old-school movie tropes—recall such nine-
teen-eighties blockbusters as “Beverly Hills
Cop” and “Lethal Weapon.” Key and Peele play
a couple of suburban guys who set out to res-
cue their kitten, Keanu, who’s been stolen by a
cat-loving drug lord (Method Man). In order
to infiltrate the gang, they pretend to be swag-
gering thugs, giving rise to riffs on the subject
of black identity and Hollywood stereotyping.
Though the satire isn’t always on-target, the
film’s loose tone gives the slackness of some of
its scenes a little leeway. Along the way, there
are many fine comic bits (featuring an addled
Anna Faris, a weed-dealing Will Forte, and the
great Luis Guzmán, as a rival drug lord) that
give the movie a genuine feel-good vibe.—B.D.
(In wide release.)
Last Days in the Desert
Ewan McGregor plays both Jesus (here called
Yeshua) and the Devil in the writer and di-
rector Rodrigo García’s dramatization of the
temptation in the desert, but the movie’s real
star is the location scout who found the spec-
tacularly intricate and rocky California set-
tings that turn the arid action photogenic.
In García’s take on the New Testament tale,
Jesus’s wanderings are interrupted by an en-
counter with a young man (Tye Sheridan)
whose father (Ciarán Hinds) keeps him in
the desert as they build an altar at the edge
of a cliff while the boy dreams of working in
the city. Meanwhile, the boy’s mother (Ayelet
Zurer) is seriously ill, but neither her malady
nor the old man’s dangerous work prompts
Jesus to yield to temptation and show off his
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 25

miraculous powers. (Jesus must learn to ac-
cept human suffering as an aspect of his own
burden.) The story turns the Messiah into a
family therapist who reveals his own neuro-
ses in snippy exchanges with the Devil about
their Father. To top it off, sunlight starbursts
sparkling in the lens and the honeyed tones
of late-afternoon magic hours turn the story
into postcard-ready religious kitsch.—R.B.
(In limited release.)
Lothringen!
This short film, from 1994, has a vast histori-
cal purview and painful personal import. The
title is the German name for the French prov-
ince of Lorraine, the subject is Germany’s con-
quest of the region in the Franco-Prussian War
of 1870-71, and the setting is the city of Metz,
the home town of the filmmaker Jean-Marie
Straub (who co-directed with his wife, Danièle
Huillet). The movie’s twenty-two-minute span
condenses Maurice Barrès’s 1909 novel, “Co-
lette Baudoche,” into a handful of sharp-edged
and searingly declaimed recollections and a
tale of intimate protest. In 1872, after the Prus-
sian conquest of the city, tens of thousands
of panic-stricken French residents, refusing
to become German citizens, abandon homes,
businesses, and families to flee to unoccupied
France. When Colette (Emmanuelle Straub),
a young woman who stays in the city, is be-
friended by a wise and benevolent German
professor, she exerts her own form of political
resistance. Filming the costumed performer
enacting the nineteenth-century story on lo-
cation in current-day Metz, Straub and Huil-
let make the modern cityscape and countryside
resound silently with the bloody clashes of the
past. The blood may have dried, but the wounds
remain: the story recalls the Nazi occupation
of Metz in 1940, which Straub experienced as a
child.—R.B. (MOMA; May 12.)
The Man Who Knew Infinity
Matt Brown’s film tells a remarkable tale that’s
familiar to mathematicians, but less so to the
wider world. Dev Patel plays Srinivasa Ra-
manujan, a young Brahmin clerk from Ma-
dras who was invited to England in 1913 on
the strength of his mathematical powers. His
summoner was G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons),
himself a figure of repute in the field, who
forged with Ramanujan not just a professional
partnership, whose fruits are still being evalu-
ated even now, but also—insofar as Hardy al-
lowed himself such things—a private friend-
ship. Irons, though decades too old for the
role, gives it his all, providing a portrait of a
heavily defended yet far from dispassionate
soul. Regrettably, the rest of the movie cannot
match him; the scenes in Ramanujan’s home-
land are notably thin (one dreams of what
Satyajit Ray might have made of the story),
and Patel doesn’t plumb the unfathom-
able character of a hero whose scholarly ex-
ploits defy all dramatization. In theory, this
could have been absorbing—but where, as
Hardy would insist, is the proof? With Toby
Jones.—A.L. (5/9/16) (In limited release.)
Ninotchka
Despite the bubbly erotic wit of Ernst Lu-
bitsch’s 1939 comedy, the movie’s political sat-
ire is chillingly serious. Greta Garbo stars as
Nina Ivanovna Yakushova, a stone-faced So-
viet agent who arrives in Paris to sell jewelry
confiscated from an exiled noblewoman, Grand
26 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
MOVIES
Duchess Swana (Ina Claire). There, she allows
herself to be seduced by Count Léon d’Algout
(Melvyn Douglas), a debonair French idler,
who happens to be Swana’s lover. The roman-
tic roundelay, linking fine emotions with fine
lingerie, is shadowed by the brutality of So-
viet tyranny. Ample comic references to exe-
cutions, forced confessions, Siberian prisons,
censorship, and the secret police are matched
by a sharp scene evoking the corrupt and blood-
thirsty arrogance of the czarist aristocracy that
the Revolution overthrew—as well as two jolt-
ing, pointed “Heil, Hitler” jokes that spot-
light another menace. The movie was shot in
mid-1939. By the time it was released, later that
year, France was at war, and it’s painful to imag-
ine how Ninotchka and the Count would fare
under the Occupation; the charming ending
gives them a surprising way out.—R.B. (Film
Forum; May 15.)
Private Lives
An early talkie attempt at glittering theatrical
sophistication—and, somehow, in its own terms,
it works. This M-G-M version of the Noël Cow-
ard play was made soon after the play came out,
and perhaps the play’s style and excitement car-
ries the cast along. Norma Shearer isn’t so bad,
and Robert Montgomery is very, very good. It
was a dazzling success. A performance of the
play was filmed so that the stars, the director,
Sidney Franklin, and a raft of adaptors would
get the idea; that may explain Franklin’s show-
ing a little zip, for a change, and Shearer’s act-
ing halfway human. With Reginald Denny, Una
Merkel, and, in a role added in the film, Jean
Hersholt. Released in 1931.—Pauline Kael (Film
Forum; May 17.)
Sing Street
This insipid comic drama, about the fifteen-
year-old Connor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a stu-
dent in a tough boys’ school in Dublin in 1985
who starts a band and improves his life, feels
like a forced march to good cheer. Connor’s par-
ents fight bitterly and loudly while his older
brother, Brendan (Jack Reynor), a reclusive
stoner, gives the diffident guitar-strummer
stern lessons in musical taste. Connor falls
for Raphina (Lucy Boynton), a much world-
lier sixteen-year-old girl, and starts a band (the
movie’s title is the group’s name) solely to in-
clude her in its music videos (which are shot
on VHS). Confronting a bully in the courtyard
and a brutal headmaster in the corridors, and
facing his parents’ impending divorce, Connor
seeks refuge in his music and finds friendships,
a social identity, self-confidence, and even the
spirit of revolt. It’s all too sweet and easy, and
the band’s music—which is composed by John
Carney, the movie’s writer and director, and
Gary Clark—is bland and overproduced. The
songs sound like the work of prematurely old
teen-agers.—R.B. (In limited release.)
Sunset Song
This mighty drama of emotional archeology,
adapted from a novel by Lewis Grassic Gib-
bon, deepens the director Terence Davies’s ca-
reer-long obsession with memory and its blend
of the intimate with the historical. The movie
traces the fortunes of a young woman, Chris
Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), who lives in an iso-
lated farm village in Scotland, from around
1910 until the end of the First World War. Bru-
talized by her tyrannical father (Peter Mullan)
and unprotected by her long-suffering mother
(Daniela Nardini), the sharp-minded Chris
plans to leave the farm and become a teacher.
But after her parents die in quick succession
(in separate, gravely dramatic incidents) she
marries Ewan Tavendale (Kevin Guthrie), a
young farmhand, and settles down with him on
her family’s property, until they’re wrenched
apart by his military service in the war. Chris
bears the drudgery of farming and the stifling
norms of rural society in order to realize her
private passion, which is greater than roman-
tic love or intellectual fulfillment: an ecstatic
devotion to the land, which she realizes only
by liberating it, and herself, from the domin-
ion of men. Davies depicts Chris’s dedication
in frankly sensual and glowingly lyrical images
that compress grand-scale melodrama into the
quietly burning point of a single soul.—R.B.
(In limited release.)
Tale of Tales
The Italian director Matteo Garrone is best
known for “Gomorrah” (2008), a plunge into
the criminal clans of Naples. At first glance,
his new movie, set in imaginary lands, deep
in the myth-riddled past, seems like quite a
swerve. But his source is also Neapolitan, Giam-
battista Basile, whose collection of fairy sto-
ries—earthy, bracing, and unsentimental—was
printed in the sixteen-thirties. Three of the fa-
bles, with monarchs at their heart, have been
plundered for the film. The first king (Toby
Jones) rears a giant flea and sees his daughter
(Bebe Cave) carried away by an ogre, the sec-
ond (John C. Reilly) battles a sea beast for the
sake of his childless wife (Salma Hayek), and
the third (Vincent Cassel) is an inexhaustible
satyr, tricked by a pair of wizened sisters (Shir-
ley Henderson and Hayley Carmichael). Gar-
rone makes only a paltry attempt to interlock
the narratives, and the final convocation is an
awkward affair; yet the movie nonetheless holds
firm, bound by its miraculous mood. Wonders
are everywhere (if you slice into a tree, it will
bleed water, like a spring), as is a casual carnal-
ity. Luxury entwines with filth. Following Ba-
sile, Garrone grasps a basic rule of folklore: no-
body must flinch at prodigious events, for they
are part of the mortal deal.—A.L. (4/25/16) (In
limited release.)
Viktoria
The Bulgarian director Maya Vitkova’s ep-
och-spanning family drama about Commu-
nism, motherhood, and freedom ingeniously
blends personal life and grand history, earnest
passion and tragic absurdity in a mighty out-
pouring of imagination. The action starts in
1979, when a young librarian, Boryana (Irmena
Chichikova), refuses to have a child with her
husband (Dimo Dimov), a doctor, unless they
emigrate to the United States. But when an at-
tempted self-induced abortion fails, the baby,
Viktoria, bears the mark: she’s born without a
belly button. This odd distinction is given a po-
litical slant. Viktoria is publicly celebrated by
the country’s real-life dictator, Todor Zhivkov
(played by Georgi Spasov), who envisions a
workforce of women freed from pregnancy.
Nine years later, the child, granted a chauf-
feur and a hot line to Zhivkov, is a Commu-
nist spoiled brat and the terror of her class-
mates. Meanwhile, Boryana refuses to let her
mother (Mariana Krumova), a lifelong Party
member, see Viktoria. Then, the Iron Curtain
falls and the balance of family power shifts.
Vitkova’s spare, precise yet richly textured
 MOVIES
images sing with restrained emotion and nat-
ural metaphors and catch the characters in
self-revealing gestures of an overwhelming in-
timacy. Women’s bodies are the center of the
film, with milk, blood, and even intrauterine
images joining political pageantry and pro-
test in a quietly fierce yet compassionate vi-
sion.—R.B. (In limited release.)
Zootopia
Disney’s new animated film is about a rab-
bit cop, eager and optimistic: Thumper with a
badge. Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Good-
win), raised on a peaceful farm, comes to the
city to fight crime, undismayed by being the
smallest mammal on the force. As in “The Lion
King,” the world presented by the movie is en-
tirely human-free, although, in this case, no
friction exists between predators and the lesser
beasts. In Zootopia, everybody lives pretty
much in harmony—a mushy conceit, yet the di-
rectors, Byron Howard and Rich Moore, take
care to suggest how vulnerable such peace can
be. Only by a whisker is it preserved, thanks
to Judy and her sidekick, a hustling fox (Jason
Bateman), who have two days to crack a dif-
ficult case; their comradeship, unlikely as it
sounds, is a furry sequel to that of Nick Nolte
and Eddie Murphy, in “48 Hrs.” There are no
songs, apart from those performed by a super-
star gazelle (Shakira), but the beat of the movie
barely dips, sustained by a steady profusion
of gags. With the voice of Idris Elba.—A.L.
(3/14/16) (In wide release.)
1 out to the plazas for an afternoon of activities and
REVIVALS AND FESTIVALS
Titles with a dagger are reviewed.
Anthology Film Archives “Québec Direct Cin-
ema.” May 12 at 9: “Geneviève” (1965, Michel
Brault) and “Between Sweet and Salt Water”
(1967, Brault). BAM Cinématek “Labor of Love.”
May 13 at 2 and 7: “Clueless” (1995, Amy Heck-
erling). • May 13 at 4:30 and 9:30: “American
Psycho” (2000, Mary Harron). Film Forum Noël
Coward. May 13 at 2:10, 5:40, and 9:40 and May
14 at 2:45 and 6:40: “Design for Living” (1933,
Ernst Lubitsch). • May 17 at 12:40, 4:10, and 7:35:
“Private Lives.” F • May 17 at 9:25: “Boom!”
(1968, Joseph Losey). • “‘Hollywood’s Happi-
est Couple’: Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett.”
May 15 at 5:20: “Ninotchka.” F • May 16 at 8:20:
“Sunset Blvd.” (1950, Wilder). IFC Center “Be-
coming Meryl Streep.” May 12 at 7:30: “Kramer
vs. Kramer” (1979, Robert Benton), followed by
a Q. & A. with the director, moderated by Mi-
chael Schulman, a contributor to The New Yorker
and the author of “Her Again: Becoming Meryl
Streep.” Metrograph The films of Amy Heck-
erling. May 14 at 6 and 8:30: “Fast Times at
Ridgemont High” (1982). • May 15 at 6 and 8:30:
“Clueless” (1995). Museum of Modern Art “The
films of Otto Preminger.” May 11 at 1:30:
“The Moon Is Blue” (1953). • May 12 at 1:30: “The
Man with the Golden Arm” (1955). • “The films
ILLUSTRATION BY PABLO AMARGO
of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.” May
12 at 4: Short films, including “Lothringen!” F •
May 13 at 6: “Antigone” (1992). • “Univer-
sal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries,
1928–1937.” May 14 at 7: “Broadway” (1929, Paul
Fejos). • May 15 at 2:30: “Air Mail” (1932, John
Ford). Museum of the Moving Image The films
of Terence Davies. May 13 at 7: “The House of
Mirth” (2000). • May 14 at 2:30 and May 15 at
4:45: “The Neon Bible” (1995).
ABOVE & BEYOND
Bayou N’ Brooklyn Music Festival
The Louisiana spirit descends on King’s County
for a three-day festival of Creole and Cajun food,
music, and entertainment. The sixth annual Bayou
N’ Brooklyn Music Festival gathers top talent, both
local and Louisiana-native, for workshops, dance
lessons, and a jambalaya supper. On Friday, Blake
Miller and Courtney Granger perform; on Satur-
day, a community jam and open stage invites the best
local players; and Sunday closes out the fest with the
C’est Bon Cajun Dance Band and the Dirty Water
Dogs. (Jalopy Theatre and School of Music, 315 Colum-
bia St., Brooklyn. bayou-n-brooklyn.com. May 13-15.)
Spring Fling
Lincoln Center hosts this spring welcome week-
end, which invites parents to bring their children
performances. The Fling offers the best of Lin-
coln Center’s arts and culture, shrunken down to
knee height: the schedule includes a reading at
the Atrium, featuring the children’s author Todd
Parr; a performance by the string quartet from the
Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; and a
concert by the Verve Pipe, followed by a private
meet and greet for lucky contest winners. Pint-
sized attendees can try out an instrument with
the New York Philharmonic, chalk up the plazas
with imaginative drawings, and scale the grounds
during a scavenger hunt. (10 Lincoln Center Plaza.
212-875-5456. May 14 at 11.)
1 of a Baptist pastor in Arkansas, Garrard Con-
AUCTIONS AND ANTIQUES
The spring extravaganza of high-priced Impres-
sionist, postwar, and contemporary art is in full
swing at the big auction houses. Hoping to repeat
its success from last year, Sotheby’s leads its auc-
tion of contemporary art on the evening of May
11 with two canvases by Cy Twombly, “Untitled
(New York City)” and “Untitled [Bacchus 1st Ver-
sion V].” Francis Bacon, another top performer, is
represented by a pair of studies for a self-portrait,
from 1970. The less overheated sale the following
day includes works by Dubuffet, Calder, Lee Ufan,
and Richard Prince. (York Ave. at 72nd St. 212-606-
7000.) • After two additional sessions of postwar
and contemporary art, on May 11, Christie’s moves
on to the Impressionists and modernists, on May
12. The evening sale is filled with familiar images:
Monet waterlilies, a melancholy young woman by
Modigliani (“Jeune Femme à la Rose”), a French
village by Cézanne (“Village Derrière des Ar-
bres”). And, for the first time since 2006, a Frida
Kahlo painting: two women in a dreamlike land-
scape (“Dos Desnudos en el Bosque”). Earlier in
the day, the house holds a single session of Af-
rican and Oceanic art, containing eleven sculp-
tures from the Ivory Coast, Mali, Cameroon,
Gabon, and Congo—an attempt to capitalize on
the connection between African art, which fasci-
nated painters like Modigliani and Picasso, and
early modernism. (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th St.
212-636-2000.)
1
READINGS AND TALKS
Maple Street School
Elizabeth Isadora Gold writes vividly and hu-
morously about the trials and trip-outs of new-
motherhood. Her recent book, “The Mommy
Group,” turns the lens outward: instead of a dos-
and-don’ts list for young mothers, it examines the
lives of seven Brooklyn women, who discuss the
challenges that they faced during early parenting
and the political blind spots that have left mothers
to fend for themselves. Gold’s subjects are edu-
cated and financially stable, privileges that do not
insulate them from the traumas that many moth-
ers may face, including postpartum depression,
infidelity, and raising children with developmen-
tal disabilities. Gold reads from “The Mommy
Group” at this local grade school in partnership
with Greenlight Bookstore. (21 Lincoln Rd., Brook-
lyn. 718-246-0200. May 12 at 7.)
BookCourt
In “Boy Erased,” an autobiographical record
of his upbringing and experience as the son
ley traces his tumultuous experience reconcil-
ing his faith with a conflicted understanding of
his sexuality. After being outed to his parents at
nineteen, Conley faced an ultimatum: attend a
conversion-therapy program, sponsored by his
church, in order to be “cured” of his homosexual-
ity or lose the love and support of his family and
close friends—as well as the spiritual core he’d de-
pended on for his entire life. Conley and the Nar-
rative Prize winner Maud Newton will discuss
the new book after readings of select passages.
(163 Court St., Brooklyn. 718-875-3677. May 16 at 7.)
New York Public Library
The New Yorker’s Claudia Roth Pierpont connects
several pivotal works of art, literature, and criti-
cism in her new book, “American Rhapsody: Writ-
ers, Musicians, Movie Stars and One Great Build-
ing.” Tracing the development of modern culture
through benchmark moments and figures, from
flapper girls to Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, and
Peggy Guggenheim, Pierpont highlights the pat-
terns and parallels that have driven American in-
novation in the face of various challenges. She’ll
read from this collection, along with the author
and publishing veteran Jonathan Galassi. (Celeste
Auditorium, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. 5th
Ave at 42nd St. 917-275-6975. May 17 at 6.)
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 27

TABLES FOR TWO
El Atoradero
708 Washington Ave., Brooklyn
(718-399-8226)
As the chef Denisse Lina Chavez
pushes out of the kitchen of her new Mex-
ican restaurant, in Prospect Heights, peo-
ple on bar stools tower over her. She’s tiny,
but as electric as her hot-pink bandana:
Chavez has famously gone on spice pil-
grimages through drug-cartel-controlled
stretches of the Mexican desert to collect
chilis and anise-flavored avocado leaves
for her Poblano cuisine. She surveys the
room. Micheladas slosh to cheers of “Mex-
icans in a Mexican restaurant!”; a couple
whispers, “Huevo, that’s Spanish for egg.”
Chavez is a long way from the South Bronx
bodega where her reign as the Queen of
Carnitas began, in 2002.
The stringy carnitas available elsewhere
in New York had nothing on Chavez’s bo-
dega offerings, corn tortillas stuffed with
juicy cubes of pork and melting strips of
fat. Demand was so great that she opened
a restaurant next door. The craze contin-
ued. When her landlord made noise about
raising the rent, she shuttered the restaurant
(the bodega’s still there, but carnitas pro-
duction ceased last month) and moved the
operation to Brooklyn.
The new place bumps with hip-hop
and Mexican pop; a bar TV plays Yankees
games on mute; hand-painted pineapples
on the walls brighten the candle-lit room.
28 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
FßD & DRINK
The portions are enormous, and the price
just right, inspiring diners with even the
most abstemious of intentions to indulge
in an artery-corking feast. But, four months
after the restaurant’s opening, the food is
inconsistent. The albondigas enchipotla-
das—pork meatballs drenched in chipotle
sauce—are dry and dull one meal, tran-
scendent the next. The mixiotes, master-
fully undersold by the bartender one night
as “a mixture of dark chicken in a bag,” is
a standout. The meat—drowned in orange
juice, covered in those hard-earned avo-
cado leaves, and steam-braised in a plastic
baggy—is impossible to stop eating. Mean-
while, the squash-blossom quesadilla lan-
guishes, stuffed with a sad vegetable hash.
Most sacrilegious of all, those famous car-
nitas are disappointing, with grizzled bits
of fat and cartilage.
Chavez knows that things aren’t up to
snuff. The spit-fired al pastor basting in
fresh pineapple juice one evening is gone
a week later. “Chef wasn’t happy with it,”
the bartender says. Chavez’s daughter Diana,
behind the counter of the Bronx bodega,
attests that compromise does not exist for
her mother. Abducted by Los Zetas in 2013,
the fearless chef returned to Mexico in Feb-
ruary for more spices. There’s a great chance
that, by the time the back patio opens and
the liquor license finally comes through,
Chavez will have things whipped into shape.
As her daughter says, she will stop at noth-
ing short of perfection. (Dishes $3.50-$20.)
—Becky Cooper
1
BAR TAB
The Ship
158 Lafayette St. (212-219-8496)
Some evenings ago, a pair of drinkers moored
themselves at the bar of this cocktail lounge, at
the bottom of a long staircase, reached through
an unassuming black door on Lafayette Street,
near Grand. There are no prizes for guessing
PHOTOGRAPH BY LAUREN LANCASTER FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE
the decorative theme of the Ship, but, thankfully,
it’s not so excessively nautical as to present a
drowning risk: benches and booths are subtly
upholstered with off-white sails, and large ships’
vents hang from the two-story-high ceiling, like
Cyclopean worms poking their heads in to check
out the space. It’s where Captain Haddock would
meet Tintin, if he trimmed his beard and had a
loft in SoHo. The conditions outside were cold
and windy, so the Where There’s Smoke ($14),
a “steamed” mix of mezcal, pear liqueur, lemon
juice, and agave syrup, was a pleasant way to
warm up. “It makes me want to take a bubble
bath,” someone said. In a drinking scene in
which overwrought cocktails can sometimes
have the bitter taste of competitive machismo,
the Ship’s crew do a good job of not throwing
their expertise in your face; they’ll happily serve
you a drink that will delight the palate without
going on about muddling techniques or stirring
directions. Instead, the bartender plays an in-
souciant magician, conjuring a drink from a
customer’s suggestion of flavors. One wore a
single black latex glove and smashed a large ice
cube with a wand-like spoon to make the gin-
based Gloria, with Campari, dry vermouth, and
triple sec, from a recipe he’d “found in a book
not too long ago.” A patron was enchanted. “Do
you find it’s like a rabbit hole?” she asked.
“Cocktails? Kind of.”—Colin Stokes
 THE TALK OF THE TOWN
COMMENT
HEAD OF THE CLASS
ast week, Donald Trump became the leader of the
L Republican Party. He thrashed his way to this summit
by understanding what many intelligent people utterly failed
to see: the decline of American institutions and mores, from
Wall Street and the Senate to cable news and the Twitter-
verse, made the candidacy of a celebrity proto-fascist with
no impulse control not just possible but in some ways in-
evitable. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise. An early
tremor came in 2008, in the person of Sarah Palin, who en-
dorsed Trump before almost any other top Republican. In
her contempt for qualifications, her blithe ignorance, she
was an avatar for Trump. A lot of Republicans, many of
them female, saw in the small-town common woman an
image of themselves; many men see in the say-anything
billionaire an image of their aspirations. Palin showboated
her way from politics to reality TV, while Trump swaggered
in the opposite direction. Together, they wore a path that
is already almost normal.
Trump also grasped what Republican élites are still strug-
gling to fathom: the ideology that has gripped their Party
since the late nineteen-seventies—anti-
government, pro-business, nominally
pious—has little appeal for millions of or-
dinary Republicans. The base of the Party,
the middle-aged white working class, has
suffered at least as much as any demo-
graphic group because of globalization,
low-wage immigrant labor, and free
trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared
from this pain and made it the fuel of
his campaign. Conservative orthodoxy, al-
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
ready weakened by its own extremism—
the latest, least appealing standard-bearer
was Ted Cruz—has suffered a stunning
defeat from within. And Trump has re-
placed it with something more danger-
ous: white identity politics.
Republican Presidential candidates
received majorities of the white vote in
every election after 1964. In 2012, Barack Obama won about
forty per cent of it, average for Democrats in the past half
century. But no Republican candidate—not even Richard
Nixon or Ronald Reagan—made as specific an appeal to the
economic anxieties and social resentments of white Ameri-
cans as Trump has. When he vows to “make America great
again,” he is talking about and to white America, especially
the less well off. The ugliness of the pitch will drive some
more moderate and perhaps more affluent Republicans to
sit out the fall election, or even to vote for Hillary Clinton,
the nearly certain Democratic nominee. #NeverTrump and
#ImWithHer are trending on select Republican Twitter feeds.
Trump’s toxicity, combined with a decline in the white elec-
torate—which, since 1976, has dropped from eighty-nine
per cent of the American voting public to seventy-two
per cent—might make this a year of Democratic routs.
The Democratic Party has a strange relationship with the
white working class. Bernie Sanders speaks to and for it—
not as being white but as being economically victimized. He
kept his campaign alive last week, in Indiana, in large part by
beating Clinton nearly two to one among
whites without a college degree. Cover-
age of Sanders has focussed on his sup-
port among the young and the progres-
sive, but he has also outperformed Clinton
with the white working class. Even in
losing, Sanders has shown that a candi-
dacy based on economic populism can
win back some voters who long ago de-
serted the Democratic Party. It’s hard to
know whether these voters, faced with a
choice between Clinton and Trump, will
revert to the Republican side, stay home,
or vote for a Democrat who until now
hasn’t known how to reach them.
Identity politics, of a different brand
from Trump’s, is also gaining strength
among progressives. In some cases, it
comes with an aversion toward, even
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 31
contempt for, their fellow-Americans who are white and
sinking. Abstract sympathy with the working class as an
economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on con-
tact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with
disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments—who might
not sound or look like people urban progressives want to
know. White male privilege remains alive in America, but
the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-
year-old man working as a Walmart greeter in southern
Ohio. The growing strain of identity politics on the left is
pushing working-class whites, chastised for various types of
bigotry (and sometimes justifiably), all the more decisively
toward Trump.
Last fall, two Princeton economists released a study show-
ing that, since the turn of the century, middle-aged white
Americans—primarily less educated ones—have been dying
at ever-increasing rates. This is true of no other age or eth-
nic group in the United States. The main factors are alco-
hol, opioids, and suicide—an epidemic of despair. A subse-
quent Washington Post story showed that the crisis is
particularly severe among middle-aged white women in
rural areas. In twenty-one counties across the South and the
Midwest, mortality rates among these women have actually
doubled since the turn of the century. Anne Case, one of the
Princeton study’s co-authors, said, “They may be privileged
by the color of their skin, but that is the only way in their
lives they’ve ever been privileged.”
According to the Post, these regions of white working-
class pain tend to be areas where Trump enjoys strong sup-
port. These Americans know that they’re being left behind,
by the economy and by the culture. They sense the indiffer-
ence or disdain of the winners on the prosperous coasts and
in the innovative cities, and it is reciprocated. Trump has
seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for
the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of work-
ing-class whites, while giving these voters a reassuring but
false promise of their restoration to the center of American
life. He plays to their sense of entitlement, but his hollow-
ness will ultimately deepen their cynicism.
The Democrats probably won’t need the votes of the
white working class to win this year. Demographic trends
favor the Party, as does the bloated and hateful persona of
the Republican choice. Nonetheless, the Democratic nom-
inee can’t afford, either politically or morally, to write off
those Americans. They need a politics that offers honest
answers to their legitimate grievances and keeps them from
sliding further into self-destruction.
—George Packer

SCION DEPT.
TARGET PRACTICE
ast Monday afternoon, in Trump
L Tower, twenty floors up from the
Trump campaign headquarters, Don-
ald Trump, Jr., surveyed his desk, on
which sat a bronze statue of Theodore
Roosevelt, a rifle cradled in his arm
and a Cape-buffalo skull at his feet.
“He was a big hunter and started much
of the conservation movement in this
country, which is why we have as much
public land as we do,” Trump, Jr., said,
adding that, as “a brash New Yorker,”
Roosevelt might seem “an unlikely ad-
vocate” for such things. “But he was all
about getting away from the city and
out into the woods.” On a table lay a
camo cap bearing the words “Make
America Great Again.”
Trump, Jr., the thirty-eight-year-old
eldest son of the presumptive Repub-
lican candidate for President, and an
executive vice-president of the Trump
Organization, has been running the
family business while his father makes
a case for why he should run the coun-
32 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
try. He had spent Saturday night at the
White House Correspondents’ Asso-
ciation dinner, catching a 5 a.m. flight
home for an archery tournament. Al-
though he is more mild-mannered than
his father, he has a trace of the family
braggadocio. “I won both the traditional-
bow category and the compound-bow
category,” he said.
He took the elevator down to Fifth
Avenue and headed to Central Park,
walking faster and talking more loudly
than everyone in his path. Trump, Sr.,
has been courting the votes of the na-
tion’s nearly forty million sportsmen,
and Trump, Jr., a less bronzed but amply
gelled reflection of his father, often
serves as his proxy. The son has given
interviews to Bowhunter and Deer &
Deer Hunting, and frequently appears
in full camo. He and his brother Eric
shot pheasants in Iowa and talked with
reporters while wearing neon-orange
vests, shotguns slung over their shoul-
ders. In 2012, photographs of the broth-
ers posing with animals they’d killed
in Zimbabwe caused a stir, particu-
larly one in which Trump, Jr., held a
severed elephant tail in one hand and
a knife in the other. (PETA referred to
the killings as “two young millionaires’
grisly photo opportunity.”)
Trump, Jr., owns “dozens” of fire-
arms, which he keeps “in a gun safe or
two.” For shooting waterfowl, he uses
a Benelli Super Black Eagle II, a util-
itarian twelve-gauge shotgun; when
hunting big game or shooting com-
petitively, he favors a modified Rem-
ington Model 700 rifle, or an AR-
platform semiautomatic rifle. He con-
siders proposed measures to curb the
easy availability of weapons like the
AR to be un-American. “If someone
wants to commit mass homicide, that
person is going to do it whether he
drives a car into a crowd or builds a
bomb,” he said.
Like his father, he breaks with Re-
publican orthodoxy when he feels like
it. Trump, Jr., is a defender of keeping
public land public, a contentious issue
among sportsmen. “I’m in the fortu-
nate position to be able to buy some
land on my own, but not everyone has
that ability,” he said. Near the zoo, he
bought a Diet Coke from a hot-dog
vender. “As it stands, if the states get
the lands back, they could remain pub-
lic or they could be sold off. So, say
you have a ten-thousand-acre area.
Well, a state could turn that into fifty
golf courses that would be private and
exclusive.”
Trump, Jr.,’s affinity for the out-
doors comes from his mother, Ivana’s,
side of the family. It bloomed during
summer visits with his maternal grand-
father, Miloš Zelniček, in Czechoslo-
vakia. “He was a blue-collar electri-
cian,” he said. “In Communist Czecho-
slovakia, in the eighties, hunting was
reserved for Party élites. But he was a
fisherman, and he taught me woods-
manship. He’d say, ‘There are the
woods—I’ll see you at dark.’ ” He added,
“He taught me how to shoot an air
rifle; I was a total natural.”
After graduating from the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, Trump, Jr.,
spent a year working in a Colorado
bar, hunting in his free time. He has
pursued Cape buffalo in Zimbabwe,
caribou and Dall sheep in the Yukon,
and sockeye salmon in Alaska. He
and his wife, a former model named
Vanessa, who have five children, live
on the Upper East Side (he used to
have an archery range in his apart-
ment) and spend weekends in the
Catskills, where he likes to go trout
fishing. “I don’t want my kids grow-
ing up to be city kids,” he said. “You
can’t stay out all night partying if
you’re waking up at four or five to
head to the tree stand.”
Trump the candidate has flip-
flopped on gun control and doesn’t share
his son’s sportsmanship. “He’s shot be-
fore, but his only real thing is work,
with some golf mixed in,” Trump, Jr.,
said. “To try something new and to be
an amateur again, that doesn’t appeal
to his competitive side. He knows what
he’s good at, and he likes to win.”
—J. R. Sullivan
“Well, this is troubling.”
1 sex,” he said the other day. Carr, who re-
AT THE MUSEUM
LOVE OF THE ELEVATOR
ine years after the popping of
N the last real-estate bubble, we may
be in the latter stages of another. The
market for super-luxury apartments that
no one ever seems to occupy (let’s call
them billionaeries) has softened, but in
the first quarter of 2016, for the first time
ever, the average—average—sale price of
an apartment in Manhattan was more
than two million dollars. The high costs
still trickle down. Low interest rates man-
ifest as tall towers, steep rents, vacant
storefronts, and long commutes.
How does this make us feel about el-
evators? Vertical-transportation enthu-
siasts often remind us that elevators en-
able height, and therefore density, and
therefore energy efficiency and cultural
ferment—urbanity itself. Opponents of
tall buildings, sometimes citing Jane Ja-
cobs, say that they cast a pall over neigh-
borhoods, like gated communities stacked
skyward. Both sides have a point.
The city’s keenest vertical-transpor-
tation enthusiast may be Patrick Carr,
who has spent sixty-one years in the el-
evator trade—as a repairman, a manu-
facturer, a consultant, and an expert wit-
ness. In his zeal, he even disdains the
cardiovascular fad of taking the stairs.
“You should reserve those heartbeats for
cently changed his name from Carrajat,
is seventy-two, stocky and cantankerous,
with white hair and a beard. When he
says he’s a cousin of Ian McShane, the
English actor who played Swearengen
in “Deadwood,” you believe him.
Five years ago, Carr opened the El-
evator Historical Society, the world’s only
museum devoted to elevators, escalators,
dumbwaiters, and outside hoists. It con-
sisted mainly of artifacts from his per-
sonal collection, which he has been as-
sembling since he started working, at the
age of eleven, as an apprentice to his fa-
ther, an elevator mechanic. Carr tried to
get people in the industry to help him
fund the museum. He raised three hun-
dred and fifty dollars—“not even enough
to pay my lighting bill,” he said. The pub-
lisher of the magazine Elevator World
donated a grand, and some press, but
apart from that Carr carried the weight.
Last month, Carr announced that he
was closing the museum. “It’s a sad day,”
he told a visitor. The museum, which
did not charge admission, was on the
second floor of the so-called Taxi Build-
ing, in Long Island City. It was clut-
tered with several thousand pieces of
vintage bric-a-brac, among them an
array of analog floor-indicator dials (both
“half-moon” and “full moon”), which
summoned memories of old-movie el-
evator scenes. Above the entrance, al-
tarlike, there was an airbrushed paint-
ing of a topless elevator girl. On a wall
nearby was a photograph labelled “El-
evator to Hitler’s Summer Retreat.”
Helping to move the tour along was
Carr’s associate director, Daniel Levin-
son Wilk, who, as an associate professor
of American history at the Fashion In-
stitute of Technology, often gets to in-
dulge his inner elevator evangelist. “The
elevator industry’s lack of support for the
Elevator Historical Society is typical of
a lack of vision that goes back more than
a hundred and fifty years,” he said. “The
elevator industry could help save the
world, but it hasn’t tried hard enough.”
Carr opened an Otis Elevator Com-
pany order book from the eighteen-sev-
enties, with purchases entered in the me-
dieval-seeming script of one of the sons
of Elisha Otis, the company’s founder.
He and Wilk advanced the hot take that
it was another Otis, a Massachusetts in-
ventor named Otis Tufts, who deserved
more credit for the introduction of the
elevator as a passenger conveyance. Tufts
had designed a “vertical railway” that as-
cended on a giant screw thread, in the
old Fifth Avenue Hotel.
Above a sign that read “My First Item
1955” was a small brass plate from Perth
Amboy, New Jersey—a cover for an in-
terlock, the mechanism that keeps the
doors closed when an elevator is on the
move. Carr and Wilk discussed an acci-
dent that Carr blamed on an interlock
situation. (A woman had died after being
pulled into the shaft.) “Still, riding an
elevator is safer than walking in a straight
line,” Wilk said.
Carr lives in Long Island City, on the
water, facing Manhattan. The dominant
feature of his view is 432 Park Avenue,
the slender new ninety-six-story luxury
tower on East Fifty-seventh Street.
“What a friggin’ abomination,” he said.
“That’s empty verticality,” Wilk said.
“It’s not creating density. It’s ironic that
the best residential space in the city is
empty most of the time. I wish there
were more Kato Kaelins.”
Carr was in conversation with peo-
ple from the International Union of
Elevator Constructors Local 1, in New
York, and Local 4, in Boston, who were
coming to have a look at the collection.
Wilk’s favorite item: a photograph of a
Pinkerton agent holding a double-bar-
relled shotgun, protecting a lift from a
mob during the elevator-operator strike
of 1936. Wilk said, “People understood
you control the elevators, you control
the city.”
—Nick Paumgarten
1 don, had helped transform the text into
DO-OVER DEPT.
CAMUS AGAIN
lexandre Alajbegovic, a thirty-
A two-year-old Frenchman, strolled
through the campus of Columbia Uni-
versity the other day, freshly arrived from
Lourmarin, a small town the color of a
sunset, concealed in the hills above the
Côte d’Azur, where Albert Camus is
buried, and where Alajbegovic helps man-
age the writer’s estate. Camus made a
similar voyage to New York when he was
36 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
thirty-two, in 1946, on his only visit to
the U.S. The war had ended, and Camus
watched with relief, from the deck of the
S.S. Oregon, as the “very edge of a
wounded earth” receded and gave way,
several weeks later, to the “orgy of vio-
lent lights” of Manhattan. He complained
that he was the only passenger to be de-
tained at immigration—the F.B.I. had
heard that he ran a Paris newspaper with
the motto “From Resistance to Revolu-
tion”—and he found New York, at first,
to be a “hideous, inhuman city.” But the
city liked him—A. J. Liebling described
him as “unduly cheerful”—and his Amer-
ican host noticed that in the elevator of
his hotel, on West Seventieth Street, an
attractive girl glanced longingly at him.
Alajbegovic was at Columbia to meet
the actor Viggo Mortensen, who, that
evening, was to reënact a lecture that
Camus had given at the university during
his trip, on no less a topic than “The Cri-
sis of Humankind.” Camus’s daughter,
Catherine, who also lives in Lourmarin,
had sensed something in Mortensen’s
pensive performance in a film adapta-
tion of her father’s short story “The
Guest.” Alajbegovic had reached out to
Mortensen—“I just threw my bottle at
Viggo’s sea,” he said—and a week later
had a response in the affirmative.
The Danish-American actor appeared
in a black suit over a tight-fitting navy
T-shirt, an American Spirit dangling,
Camus-like, from the corner of his
mouth. Mortensen, who speaks Quebe-
cois French, Argentine Spanish, and a
bit of Algerian Arabic, and can get by
in the Russophone underbelly of Lon-
an English version that he considered
faithful to the author. “I’m so delighted
that you tinkered with the translation!”
Shanny Peer, the director of Columbia’s
Maison Française, told him when he
arrived at the Miller Theatre. Mortensen
shrugged.
He did a sound check on the stage,
in the same place where, exactly seventy
years earlier, Camus had stood.
“We received an e-mail from a stu-
dent who was at Brooklyn College when
Camus was here,” Alajbegovic said. “The
students went and saw him at his hotel,
and she remembers how gentle and sim-
ple he was.”
“The students went to his hotel room?”
Madeleine Dobie, a French professor at
Columbia, said. “Can you imagine if
Camus came today?”
“He would have to have an obliga-
tory sort of sex-ed workshop,” Alice
Kaplan, the chair of the French depart-
ment at Yale, said.
The academics agreed that Camus
is enjoying a comeback. “He is facing
and answering the questions that tor-
ment us today,” Souleymane Bachir
Diagne, the chair of Columbia’s French
Viggo Mortensen
department, said. Camus had initially
declined the university’s invitation to
speak—“I’m not old enough to give lec-
tures,” he wrote—but had nonetheless
delivered a sprawling treatise on his gen-
eration, which came of age in a world
of terror, ruled by a political machine
that had erased the individual.
“What he was saying is that politics
as we know it needs to take a second-
ary position,” Mortensen said. He added
that he admired the writer’s indepen-
dence in standing up to both the left
and the right: “He was fearless.” Camus
felt that an absence of values had led
Europe to disaster, that societies had de-
cided that a leader was right merely be-
cause he’d succeeded. Mortensen said,
“All of these things Camus is saying
about politicians, buffoonery—it’s like
this respect for Trump. He’s winning,
he’s the strongest, so that makes it good.”
After the talk, which he delivered be-
fore an enchanted crowd, Mortensen
suddenly realized he had to get going.
As part of his attire for the evening, he’d
left off an article of clothing that he holds
dear—his Bernie Sanders watch.
—Elisabeth Zerofsky
THE FINANCIAL PAGE
BANKING’S NEW NORMAL
f you listened only to speeches from the Presidential
I campaign trail, you’d come away with the strong impres-
sion that, eight years after the financial crisis, Wall Street re-
form has been a bust. Every Republican candidate called
Dodd-Frank, the centerpiece of the Obama Administration’s
reform effort, a dismal failure. Donald Trump called it “ter-
rible”; Ted Cruz said that it had only helped “the big banks
get bigger and bigger and bigger.” Hillary Clinton has been
tepid in her defense of Dodd-Frank, and Bernie Sanders
called it “a very modest piece of legislation” that changed lit-
tle about the way the Street does business.
Tell that to the bankers. Banks performed dismally last
year, and their 2016 first-quarter-earn-
ings reports show that this one is off to
an even worse start. Returns on equity
have fallen. Bonuses and salaries are being
slashed; in the past quarter, Goldman
Sachs cut the amount it set aside for
compensation by forty per cent. Payroll
is down, too: banks have eliminated tens
of thousands of jobs in the past couple
of years and are now embarking on a
new round of severe job cuts. Some of
these struggles can be attributed to short-
term factors, such as low interest rates
and unusually volatile markets. But there’s
no avoiding the deeper conclusion: reg-
ulations have simply made banking less
profitable than it once was. Before the
financial crisis, financial companies (not
including the Federal Reserve banks) ac-
counted for nearly thirty per cent of U.S. corporate profits. By
2015, that number had fallen to just seventeen per cent.
“Dodd-Frank was supposed to curb certain kinds of risky
behavior on Wall Street,” Mike Konczal, a fellow at the Roo-
sevelt Institute who studies financial reform and inequality,
told me. “And by that standard it’s gone very well.” Big banks
now have to carry almost twice as much capital as they did
before the crisis, and new Fed rules will require them to set
aside another two hundred billion dollars on top of that. Those
capital requirements should be even higher, but the current
ones have already made the system safer. And, since the big-
ger the bank, the bigger the capital requirements, there has
been a welcome move toward downsizing. Citigroup has shed
seven hundred billion dollars in assets over the past seven
years, while Goldman and Morgan Stanley have shed a quar-
ter of their assets. JPMorgan cut assets last year to avoid a
capital surcharge. And G.E. effectively got out of the finan-
cial business altogether by selling off most of G.E. Capital.
Profit-making opportunities for banks have also shrunk.
Thanks in part to the new capital requirements and to new
38 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
rules curbing banks’ proprietary trading, fixed-income trading
has dried up, costing banks billions of dollars in revenue. Dodd-
Frank has also reduced the middleman fees that banks col-
lect—for instance, by moving much of the trading of deriva-
tives onto the open market. More than half of credit-default
swaps and seventy per cent of currency swaps now trade through
a public clearinghouse. (Before the crisis, only a small percent-
age did.) Until recently, big banks were able to borrow money
much more cheaply than small ones, because investors assumed
they’d be bailed out in a crisis. But recent studies suggest that
that funding advantage has nearly disappeared.
Dodd-Frank’s success is important in its own right. But
it also teaches us an important lesson about regulation more
generally. For decades, the debate over regulation in the U.S.
has been dominated by those who believe that, in the words
of the Chicago School economist Eugene Fama, “even the
best-constructed regulation is bound to fail.” As Fama put
it a couple of years ago, “Eventually, the regulators get cap-
tured by the people they regulate.” Reg-
ulatory capture is always a danger. But
the history of financial reform after the
crisis shows that it’s not inevitable: if
you have well-designed rules, and if reg-
ulators have the resources and the pub-
lic support to enforce them, industry
does not always win. Before Dodd-Frank
became law, Wall Street lobbied furi-
ously to emasculate it, but the attempt
failed. Likewise, the banks’ efforts at
softening the bill’s provisions during its
implementation have often been unsuc-
cessful. A paper by the political scien-
tists John T. Woolley and J. Nicholas
Ziegler looks in detail at the fight over
derivatives-trading regulations. “Most
of the industry was violently opposed
to the new rules,” Ziegler told me. “But
a combination of small but very engaged advocacy groups
and gutsy regulators made sure they got through.”
Of course, there’s much about Wall Street that Dodd-
Frank has not changed. Bankers still make absurd amounts
of money. Hedge-fund and private-equity managers still
benefit from the carried-interest tax loophole. The big banks,
though smaller, are still too big. “If you wanted financial re-
form to radically downsize the financial sector, or thought it
was going to make a major dent in income inequality, you’re
bound to be disappointed,” Konczal says. And Dodd-Frank’s
work is still unfinished: many of the rules it authorized have
yet to be written, and the banks are lobbying to have them
written in their favor. As Ziegler told me, “The progress that’s
been made is precarious. It can be unravelled.” But precari-
ous progress is progress. Regulation involves a constant strug-
gle to keep rules in place and to enforce the ones that are
CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
there. Dodd-Frank shows that that struggle is not necessar-
ily a futile one: sometimes government really does regulate
business, and not the other way around.
—James Surowiecki

ANNALS OF EDUCATION
A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME
The rolling robot that teaches kids to code.
BY D. T. MAX
t Trail Ridge Middle School,
A which is forty minutes north of
Denver, in Longmont, the old Colo-
rado is giving way to the new. A stuffed
grizzly that once stood at the entrance
has been banished to a dusky back hall-
way, and many of the students are the
children of tech workers. On a recent
weekday morning, Anna Mills, a sixth-
grade science teacher, shouted from the
front of the classroom, “Grab your iPads
and your Spheros!” When her com-
mand didn’t work, she clapped twice,
and this code was successful: her two
dozen students clapped back, roughly
in unison, and began getting up from
Children can program Sphero, a white plastic orb, to traverse land and water.
40 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
their desks. Mills had divided her class
into groups of three, and the leaders of
each trio hurried over to a counter
where ten Spheros—milky white orbs
about the size of navel oranges—sat in
blue charging cradles. The leaders
grabbed their Spheros and hurried with
the other students to the school’s for-
mer library, now known as the Digital
Commons.
You tap a Sphero twice to turn it
on, and it flashes three colors in quick
succession; once it has established a
wireless link to your iPad or your smart-
phone, it strobes like a fortune-teller’s
crystal ball and is ready to move. A
Sphero, which costs a hundred and
thirty dollars, is chiefly a toy. Its “out-
of-the-box experience,” to use the in-
dustry parlance, is excellent. You down-
load an app, and, by pressing and swiping
and swirling your finger on your smart-
phone or tablet screen, you can com-
mand the ball to travel a zippy five or
so miles an hour on land. It also moves
in water, though much more slowly. A
Sphero can make hairpin turns, and,
thanks to its gyroscope, it is aware of
your location; with one gesture, you
can order it to roll back to you. It will
vibrate softly, like a purring cat, and
you can code it to do a lot of fanciful
things: dance to the “Dance of the Sug-
ar-Plum Fairy,” perform playful flips,
find its way around the things it bumps
into, and blink if it falls over an edge.
(It has an accelerometer.) Because it
looks like an ordinary ball, it outper-
forms your expectations. The makers
of the device, a company that is also
called Sphero, are in Boulder, and at
their offices I was encouraged to toss
one of the balls out a second-story win-
dow. It bounced off the concrete side-
walk, hit my rental car, and came to a
stop. As soon as we linked it up with
a smartphone, off it rolled.
Spheros aren’t just fun; they are also
an excellent teaching tool. Students
have begun using them to learn every-
thing from geometry to genetics. They
can code them, too, to take a first step
into computer programming. The toy’s
infiltration of the classroom came about
mostly by accident. Ian Bernstein and
Adam Wilson, the inventors who came
up with the Sphero, six years ago, were
immersed in hacker culture, and they
planned to disseminate portions of their
code to anyone who wanted to improve
on it or add to it. Eventually, they re-
alized that if the app came with a sim-
plified form of that code, kids would
fiddle with it.
It was a fortuitous moment to cre-
ate such a crossover product. The stem
movement—the effort to incorporate
science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics into the classroom—was
gaining in popularity. Educators avidly
debated how to help kids transition
from the analog world of early child-
hood to the digital world of adults.
Many teachers foresaw a crisis: only
sixteen per cent of high-school seniors
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HERSEY
contemplate a career in stem fields,
even though the number of stem jobs
is increasing rapidly. Sphero and sim-
ilar toys like Lego Mindstorms—sim-
ple robots that you build and then
code—have come to be seen as stops
on the road to the well-salaried posi-
tion of programmer.
There are objections to this frame-
work. Putting young children in front
of screens will likely make them bet-
ter coders, but what will go unlearned
during those hours? Education is not
merely job training. And some studies
suggest that the more children inter-
act with devices the harder time they
have interacting with one another. Yet
technical fixes are often seductive to
educators, especially a technical fix like
Sphero, whose surface has two cute
blue dots and an upswept blue coif,
suggesting a tiny face.
Mills’s goal that day was to harness
the class’s ongoing study of the envi-
ronment to promote some basic pro-
gramming skills. The students, in their
groups of three, gathered around low
tables, and Mills, projecting Power-
Point slides, described a process of “de-
sign thinking” that would be familiar
to any Silicon Valley entrepreneur:
“Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype,
Test.” She reminded the students that
feedback sessions should begin with
such phrases as “I like” and “You all
have done a great job with” rather than
with criticism. The students’ tables had
whiteboard surfaces, and the children
wrote down conservation goals—sav-
ing gorillas from poachers, keeping sea
turtles out of fishermen’s nets—and
tried to ideate how a Sphero could help.
“Go for volume!” Mills advised. “And
include ten lines of code.”
Some students seemed reluctant to
leave their analog idylls. Earlier in the
environmental unit, one of the groups
had constructed a sea turtle out of card-
board, and a boy asked Mills for green
polyester fabric to cover it. “I love that
you guys want to make your turtle, but
what should we be focussing on?” she
replied. “What role would a Sphero
play in helping a turtle avoid a trap?”
Another group wanted to use Spheros
to reduce smoking and, thus, air pollu-
tion. They proposed coding their Sphero
to run over and crush all the cigarettes
in a house. The group that hoped to
save gorillas from poachers suggested
strapping a banana to their Sphero; they
imagined a gorilla following its favored
fruit to safety. At feedback time, Mills
praised the students’ idea but asked
them if it would be unwieldy to attach
a lure to the device.
Soon, most of the threesomes had
left the Digital Commons and headed
into the school’s large atrium, where
the rasp of unspooling masking tape
dominated. The children were mark-
ing out simple mazes on the carpet;
the nut of the exercise was to code
the Sphero to navigate a course accu-
rately. When Mills was busy elsewhere,
Spheros were often skidding and skip-
ping and rolling underfoot—a toy is a
toy—but she is a talented teacher, and
when she got down on the floor to re-
view their coding the students focussed.
Afterward, Mills told me that “mid-
dle-schoolers find it surprisingly diffi-
cult to understand the correlation be-
tween a numerical value and a physical
movement.”
One of Sphero’s design strengths is
its flexibility. You can be anything from
a novice coder to a high-school com-
puter student and still get something
out of programming it. The orb’s app
has a dual interface. The students in
Mills’s class used simple drag-and-drop
balloon commands to make their
Spheros move, but by swiping on a but-
ton they could also see some of the raw
computer syntax that lay behind the
commands—in Oval, a subset of the
canonical programming language C.
The balloon command “Set heading
178 degrees” reveals itself to be “con-
trolSystemTargetYaw = 178” in Oval.
The children who wanted to save
the gorilla had abandoned the banana
idea and now wanted to douse the
Sphero with the odor of foods that go-
rillas crave. They taped a curving maze
to the carpet. But the fun of just mak-
ing a Sphero move competed against
the strictures of making it go some-
place in particular. The students were
able to complete just two lines of code:
[Start] [Roll 3 seconds].
The real world kept intruding on
the experiments: there are limits to
what a little plastic ball can do. In a
later class, I watched Jack, a spirited
boy who wore the jersey of the Colo-
rado Avalanche’s star forward Nathan
MacKinnon. Jack’s two companions
were sick that day, so he worked alone.
His project was to make a vehicle that
could be dispatched quickly to natural-
disaster sites—floods, earthquakes, vol-
canic eruptions—and provide food
to survivors. The truck was a copier-
paper box on wheels; Sphero was sup-
posed to pull it. When I asked Jack if
the ball was strong enough for its load,
he shrugged. “Well, we’re going to find
out,” he said.
His more immediate problem was
his food supply—boxes of macaroni.
Other kids had ripped open one of the
packages and tossed the pasta around.
Jack put the noodles back into their con-
tainer. Then it turned out that he had
only one caster. Mills had promised to
get her hands on three more, from wher-
ever teachers find such things. But when
would this be? In the meantime, Jack
attached a string to his Sphero with pink
duct tape, threaded the string through
a cardboard paper-towel tube, and taped
the “reins” to the box. A girl wandered
over to watch. Jack tapped his Sphero
twice and used his iPad to connect to it.
By swiping the screen, he tried to get
the Sphero to pull the box, but it strug-
gled on the Digital Commons carpet. It
looked like a rodent with a pinned tail.
The girl wandered off.
“Yeah,” Jack told me, resigned.
“Wheels are going to be necessary.”
Hope and achievement sometimes
coincided. That day, three students pos-
ited that they could save a koala from
hunters by attaching a Sphero to its
back. They created a maze shaped like
the number three to simulate a path
out of the forest. Their code reached
twenty lines, starting with “Roll .5 sec-
onds at 57% of Sphero’s maximum
speed, direction 0 degrees,” “Roll 0.4
seconds at 78% of speed, heading 45
degrees,” and “Roll three seconds at
55%, course 106 degrees.” After two
dozen twists and turns, the Sphero,
weaving and bobbing nimbly, found its
way to safety.
ll happy tech stories are alike:
A two geeks and junk food, a lucky
meeting with a well-connected mentor,
a product they didn’t even mean to make
that people turn out to want desper-
ately. Bernstein and Wilson, Sphero’s
founders, were both in their twenties
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 41
when a mutual friend decided that they
should meet. Wilson, a Colorado Springs
native, was a reformed hacker—a “black
hat turned white hat,” as Paul Berbe-
rian, the chief executive officer of Sphero,
describes him. Bernstein was the home-
schooled child of a classical guitarist
in New Mexico; he had moved to Col-
orado for college. They were both
confirmed tinkerers, Wilson on the soft-
ware side, Bernstein on the hardware
side. Bernstein had become an inven-
tor when he was young. His father gave
a local professor of electrical engineer-
ing free guitar lessons in return for in-
struction for his son, and soon Bern-
stein was studying with Mark Tilden,
a researcher at Los Alamos National
Laboratory who was interested in ro-
bots. Before getting a driver’s license,
Bernstein had built a solar-powered
robotic orb.
One day this winter, I met Wilson
and Bernstein in Sphero’s research
lab, an unmarked studio in a strip
mall about two miles from the com-
pany’s main offices. Now both thirty-
two, they slouched on beanbags and
told me how Sphero had come to be.
Wilson had on a backward gimme
cap; Bernstein wore a woollen ski hat.
One night in 2009, Bernstein was
messing around with an iPhone and
playing with a robot, and he wondered
why the one couldn’t control the other.
Soon he was introduced to Wilson,
then a temporary instructor at the Uni-
versity of Northern Colorado. Wilson
remembers the first contact: “A guy
comes out of the woodwork and says,
‘Dude, we should be controlling robots
with phones.’ ” Wilson disdained most
phone apps—he didn’t even own a
phone—but he was enticed by the chal-
lenge; they agreed to collaborate.
After Bernstein’s father lent them
two thousand dollars, they bought an
Android phone and went to work. Goo-
gle had recently released a protocol
that allowed Android phones to inter-
face with non-phone devices through
Bluetooth, the short-range wireless-
connection protocol. Bernstein made
a printed circuit board while Wilson
developed software. Their first goal was
to create a Bluetooth platform that per-
mitted a phone to control anything
from home lights to a television set.
It took them just a day to figure out
how to use Bernstein’s phone to start
his car and roll down the windows.
Bernstein and Wilson had skill and
they had timing: the Internet of Things,
which enables smoke detectors and other
appliances to transmit data to the dig-
ital cloud, was just beginning to attract
attention. But they did not have a lot
of business experience. The tech world
has ways of assisting young entrepre-
neurs—help with brainstorming and
with attracting venture capital. In 2010,
Bernstein and Wilson were accepted to
a mentoring program in Boulder called
Techstars. There they were told that no
one would buy a Bluetooth communi-
cations platform from a couple of no-
bodies; they needed a product. What
did they want to make? They arrived at
an answer late one night. Bernstein re-
members, “At, like, three in the morn-
ing, I was just like, ‘We just need some-
thing simple, something I could keep
in my pocket, pull it out, throw it on
the table, and it does something cool.’
And Adam said, ‘What about a mar-
ble?’ And I thought back to this robot
ball I had built when I was fourteen.”
Wilson and Bernstein developed
a robotic ball—the original plastic shell
came from Hobby Lobby—and the
code to guide it using a phone. At Tech-
stars, they met Berberian, who became
Sphero’s C.E.O. He was an appealing
mixture of high and low, serious and
larky, and he had founded or run six
startups. Some had failed, but one com-
pany, a Web conferencing service, had
sold for a hundred and sixty million
dollars. Berberian was impressed with
Sphero and its creators. “They were
smart, coachable, and passionate,” he
remembers. “And I believed the area
would be huge.”
The Sphero was launched at the end
of 2011. The new company shipped five
hundred balls for the holidays, to mixed
response. Wired.com dismissed the
product as “the future of cat toys.” But
luck was again on Wilson and Bern-
stein’s side. One day in April, 2012, Pres-
ident Barack Obama came to the Uni-
versity of Colorado at Boulder to give
a speech on the importance of a college
education. Two Sphero employees drove
around the campus until they spotted
yellow police tape, waited nearby, inter-
cepted the President and his entourage,
and persuaded Obama to try a Sphero.
Once a phone with the app was placed
 time. At a demonstration of “Star Wars”
tie-ins in September, 2015, Wired.com
LETTER TO THE EDITOR reported that Sphero’s BB-8 was “the
only gasp-inducing moment of the en-
I do not think you cannot have meant I assume it’s in error tire presentation.”The product received
it comes to my attention it rises from the muck it sways twelve hundred media mentions in a
elephantine in a Gulf Stream breeze you surely meant day. Sphero sold three hundred thou-
other you must have encountered others you are much sand BB-8s in its first four days on the
mistaken in this and in all other circumstances I assume market and quickly ran out of stock.
it’s in error I cannot think you mean to suggest it comes The Creamsicle-colored robot became
from a childhood spent waiting for someone to notice the most coveted Christmas gift of
it comes from an unexamined life it clings to your skin 2015. Last year, the BB-8 made up
like gold leaf there is no other explanation for your hubris three-quarters of the company’s sales;
your Jacobean politics your glitter and spit I assume Sphero now has a hundred and sixty
it’s in error you cannot mean what I have meant but employees, and Disney has become an
I have taken it back you must take it back also you must investor.
scoop up its sagging flesh and ball it up tight you must
open your mouth and shove it all in every tentacle I assume lay is a kind of learning, and the
it’s in error you cannot mean you must take it in you must P culture that Sphero emerged from
expand your mouth your argument you must assume is a teaching culture. In the winter of
responsibility for your childhood you must assume the past 2012, about a year after the toy débuted,
is the past you cannot retract anything you’ve said I assume the company invited kids to come to
in error I do not think you meant what you said its offices and program a simplified ver-
about your parents about the elephant in the room you are sion of its code. “There was a major
mistaken snowstorm,” Berberian remembers.
I do not think it was harmed by the hooks or the electric whip “Still, fifteen people showed up, and
its feet were already painted gold it cannot remember it already they loved it. The parents loved it, too.”
knew The company held such events regu-
the circle but I assume they remember those elephants larly and called the young attendees
they do I assume in error your childhood this dust. Sphero Rangers.
Teachers, meanwhile, were using
—Rebecca Hazelton Sphero alongside other tech tools such
as Arduinos—circuit boards that can be
used to make robotic devices. Sphero
in his hand, Obama quickly grasped that Disney had designed for the new provided student worksheets and cre-
what to do. “Give me some space to “Star Wars” movie, “The Force Awak- ated lesson plans, and ultimately started
drive my ball,” he called out to the crowd. ens.” It was a clear opportunity. Berbe- an education division. Teachers began
“This is cool. Whooah! ” He sent the ball rian remembers telling himself, “We sharing online the most interesting ac-
whizzing into a woman’s foot. make robot balls, and that looks like tivities that they’d devised: using Spheros
The company had fewer than twenty a robot ball.” The main difference to act like atoms; substituting a Sphero
employees at the time, but one of them was that the BB-8 had a littler sphere for the ball in a game of miniature golf.
was a full-time videographer, and his perched on top of the main one, as in There were plenty of educational ro-
camera captured the President’s emerg- a snowman. In short order, Bernstein bots on the market, but Sphero stood
ing inner boy. It was a vignette per- and Wilson had attached a smaller ovoid out for the simplicity of its coding; more-
fectly formed for YouTube. (The clip to a Sphero using magnets. They had a over, unlike robotic cars, tanks, or dolls,
has been viewed more than a quarter prototype. Soon afterward, Disney gave a ball was equally inviting to boys and
of a million times.) Soon Apple was them a license to make a BB-8 toy. girls. And there were no pieces to lose.
stocking the product in some of its Models and drawings had to be stored Teachers are like parents whose chil-
stores, and in 2013 a much improved in a locked room, and the startup raced dren never grow up, and one after an-
Sphero 2.0 went on the market. to have the product ready by the mov- other told me how glad they were that
The next leap came in the summer ie’s opening weekend, in December, a Sphero has no extra parts.
of 2014, when Bernstein, Wilson, and 2015. “They can make a movie faster In a bid for classroom adoption,
Berberian met with executives at the than we can make a toy,” Berberian jokes. the company began offering a dis-
Disney Accelerator, a division of the Like the Sphero, the BB-8 had count for twelve-packs of previously
entertainment company, which invests whimsical touches. As soon as you plug owned Spheros. The company also sent
in new technologies. Robert Iger, Dis- it into a charger, even before you link free twelve-packs to some teachers in
ney’s chairman, showed the Sphero con- it to a smartphone, BB-8 swivels its the Apple Distinguished Educator pro-
tingent something confidential: a pic- head around, as if looking for its mas- gram—in which the company recog-
ture of BB-8, a white-and-orange robot ter. The tech press was smitten this nizes teachers who have done innovative
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 43
things with its products. According to
Sphero, since 2014 it has sold robotic
balls to more than a thousand schools;
it estimates that more than a hundred
and fifty thousand students have used
them. The Sphero now has four iter-
ations. sprk is a transparent version,
permitting children to examine the ma-
chinery that powers it. Ollie is shaped
like a barrel with treads and, to the sur-
prise of your pets, it can go fourteen
miles an hour.
“I love the Sphero and have one in
my classroom,” Vicki Davis, a technol-
ogy instructor from Georgia, wrote last
year on her blog, Cool Cat Teacher, add-
ing, “Happy Hour of Code week!” Cod-
ing can be tedious for novices, and teach-
ers like Davis see robotic toys as a way
around this hurdle. As children, many
of them had slogged through educa-
tional programming languages such as
Logo, which, like Sphero, emphasized
directional commands, but offered half
the fun: instead of moving a ball around
a room, you directed a turtle around a
screen. These teachers, who have Twit-
ter handles like @apptasticteach and
@MrJTechCoach, now write and share
programs that make Spheros pull tiny
chariots and knock down bowling pins.
Jon Corippo, an education-technology
consultant in California, told me that
Spheros have a stealth quality: when stu-
dents use them to replicate the motion
of the planets or delineate complex geo-
metric shapes, “they don’t realize that
they’re doing really advanced math.” An
elementary-school class in
Wisconsin built a Sphero
“solar system” that was dis-
played at the White House
one night last year.
Many schools wouldn’t
be able to pay for Spheros
were it not for the money
that stem and related ini-
tiatives provide. In some
ways, the guiding concern
of stem—that other nations are out-
competing the United States in the race
to educate new engineers and scientists—
is merely a revival of the worry that fol-
lowed the Soviet Union’s launching of
the first Sputnik satellite, in 1957. But
stem is also a response to fresh anxi-
eties. In the aughts, researchers observed
that many American students were ini-
tially enthusiastic about science and math
44 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
but eventually lost interest. Moreover,
though girls do well in math and sci-
ence, they tend not to end up in coding
jobs, and many students of color don’t
have access to adequate tech facilities.
“Right now, it’s mostly white and Asian
men,” Ruthe Farmer, of the National
Center for Women and Information
Technology, told me. “We’re not tapping
seventy-five per cent of the population.”
American education also tends to
be stovepiped: you learn English from
English teachers, math from math
teachers, and biology from biology
teachers. A stem curriculum is predi-
cated on the notion that the best teach-
ing is interdisciplinary, because similar
patterns of thinking underlie many sub-
jects and integrating them makes stu-
dents smarter. Taking a sculpting class
can help researchers understand pro-
tein folding; a course in storytelling can
aid doctors in communicating with pa-
tients. A stem class in English might
use computer algorithms to explore lit-
erary style. Richard Perry, a high-school
teacher on Long Island, has his stu-
dents code Spheros to trace the path
of the Joad family in “The Grapes of
Wrath.” Along the way, the children
write down observations about what
their “arduous virtual trip” from the
Dust Bowl to California feels like.
“The robots allow the students to get
into the heads of the characters through
direct tangible experiences,” Perry told
me, in an e-mail. Many Sphero teach-
ers buy a Nubby—a bumpy ball cover
that allows students to
dip their Spheros in paint
and leave a literal paper
trail. Teachers often com-
pare the results to a Jack-
son Pollock. (No one
mentions Michelangelo.)
Even in a time of tight
education budgets, stem
funding is plentiful: the
federal government cur-
rently contributes three billion dollars
a year to stem-related curricula. (The
Spheros I saw at Trail Ridge Middle
School were paid for with funds from
a Race to the Top grant that has a stem
focus.) Last year, the city of Boston
declared itself committed to giving all
its middle-school students access to
“high-quality stem experiences.”
Not everyone who is interested in
children’s education is impressed by the
stem concept. Does Sphero actually
make Tom Joad’s frustration more vis-
ceral or just help you through a read-
ing assignment that doesn’t much in-
terest you? In a field that loves data,
the benefit of moving young children
from tactile experience to the world of
screens is unclear. After all, Steve Jobs
wouldn’t allow his children to use iPads,
steering them instead toward books
and conversation. Bernstein, by con-
trast, told me that if he had children
he would definitely encourage them to
be online. “Everything I know I learned
from the Internet,” he said.
Even within the tech field, some
people are skeptical of stem’s voguish-
ness. David Wells, who runs a Maker
Space, a high-tech version of a shop
class, at the New York Hall of Science,
told me, “When I hear people say, ‘I
want stem learning,’ I think, What
does that mean, exactly?” He does not
see much new in its cross-disciplinary
emphasis: “If you take a look at edu-
cational theory through the ages—
Dewey, Vygotsky, Freire—they all say
that independent thought influences
the creative process.” Moreover, the
concerns about a shortfall in tech work-
ers may be overblown: last fall, thirty-
six per cent of undergraduates at the
University of Texas at Austin were ma-
joring in stem fields; at Stanford, com-
puter science is now tied with biology
as the most popular major for women.
Nevertheless, stem, with its combina-
tion of the high tech and the voca-
tional, is likely here to stay. The stem
educator has become a familiar figure
in schools, with some of the cool of a
guitar teacher in the sixties.
stem has bipartisan political sup-
port. Many high-paying jobs in the
future economy are expected to be in
fields where technical expertise is val-
ued, and, appealingly for fiscal conser-
vatives, the expertise could be taught
without the inconvenient cost of a
liberal-arts curriculum. In other words,
stem may lead to the revival of the
trade school. Steve Robinson, a former
education adviser to the President, told
me, “The Republicans have been op-
posed to pretty much everything Obama
has done, but less opposed to things in
the stem areas.”
As I watched children play with

UNINVENT THIS MARY KARR
high maintenance
his spring, I donated to Dress for Success a box
T of high heels that I—over decades—almost bank-
rupted myself for: four-inch sandals with leafy vines
that twine up your leg, five-inch leopard pumps I
could lurch about five feet in. The money I spent on
them might have freed me to retire by now.
And had the high heel never bulldozed its way back
into popularity, in the nineteen-fifties, thanks to de-
signers like Dior, who never suffered a woman’s so-
cial mandate of daily wear, I wouldn’t be visiting a
pricey podiatrist. Add on the four-figure plaster foot
cast, which gets tossed at year’s end, because the bas-
tards know your beleaguered and bunioned foot will
keep spreading like yeasty dough. The neuroma be-
tween metatarsals will inflame more nerve endings.
(For the uninitiated, a neuroma is like a stone in your
shoe that you can’t shake out.)
Before I taped up that container of shoes, I stared
into its abyss. Wasn’t I perpetuating misery by passing
JOON MO KANG
these along to hobble my sisters-in-arms/-feet? The
vision of my young foot that came made me misty.
While the rest of my physique is mediocre by the lax-
est standards, I started adulthood with an exemplary foot.
My toes tapered evenly, and my high arch was ballerina-
worthy. I even copped a job as a foot model for an exer-
cise sandal. Yes, I am bragging.
By sixty, those feet had gnarled up like gingerroot.
I don’t grieve my less than pert tatas. When my ass lies
down on the back of my leg, I think, Oh, rest, you poor
thing. Given new bra technology and some spandex, I
can squish stuff in and—spray a little PAM on me—still
slither into a size 4. But standing for an hour in heels
sets red lightning bolts blazing off my feet.
And no one warned me about this! In the health-
and-booty-obsessed age I came up in, every woman
enjoined me to take care of my teeth and skin, heart
and bones. But no one detailed how those stilettos—
named for a dagger—would irreversibly cripple me.
(Yes, there is a surgery sometimes involving metal and
screws which no one I know had any luck with.)
Only one loafer-wearing detractor, in long-ago Pu-
ritan Boston, scolded my spikes: “If God wanted you
in those, he’d have made your feet different.” Yet, I said,
He made my legs look like this in them.
For I was a slave to the desire that rules our libidinal
culture. And an elongated foot and leg just announces,
Hey, y’all, there’s pussy at the other end of this. Yet every pair
of excruciating heels also telegraphs a subtle masochism:
i.e., I am a woman who can not only take an ass-whipping;
to draw your gaze, I’ll inflict one on myself.
Hope came from a lunch with the style prophet
André Leon Talley. He predicted that flats were rush-
ing into fashion. “As smoking is to human breath, so
the stiletto is to a woman’s stride.” Soon, I spied a fash-
ionable writer I know at a gala in wingtips, then Mi-
chelle Obama in kitten heels—both women plenty
tall. I just wasn’t ready to scuttle around at belt level in
clodhoppers.
Then, this past Fashion Week, Victoria Beckham was
snapped on the runway in sneakers, claiming that she
“can’t do” heels anymore. Weensy Beckham, once pho-
tographed on a treadmill desk in a needle heel, had come
to my rescue.
Thanks to her, a woman’s comfort finally meant more
than her significance as a brood sow. I hobbled out to buy
slides, then shipped off my old tormentors. Parties no
longer meant popping anti-inflammatories and slipping
heels off under a tablecloth. My feet rejoiced. I snagged
every taxi I loped after, took subway stairs at a sprint.
But recently I spotted Beckham jammed into spikes
again. Traitor! Then, at a soirée, a concerned friend
asked, “What’s with the shoes?” Looking down, I sud-
denly saw myself shod in large loaves of rye bread.
Oh, womenfolk, as we once burned our bras could
we not torch the footwear crucifying us? How about
this Independence Day? Our feet and spines will un-
knot, and high heels will fade from consciousness along
with foot-binding and rib removal to shrink your waist.
The species may stop reproducing, but who the hell
cares. Come back, Victoria. Your sisters await you. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 45
Spheros and other robotic toys, the de-
bate over stem seemed obsolete. The
question of whether to integrate the
digital more fully into children’s lives
has already been decided, and not just
because so much time outside school
is spent in front of screens. For many
kids, the boundary between analog and
digital no longer exists. Adults like to
make distinctions; childhood is lived
as a continuum.
In April, I visited the Academy of Our
Lady of Peace, a small Catholic school
in New Providence, New Jersey.The arch-
diocese had bought a dozen Spheros to
circulate among its schools, but Our Lady
of Peace got the funds to pay for its own
from a private donor. The balls are locked
up in the computer lab, like children in
a Grimms’ fairy tale, but one of the days
I visited, four students had the opportu-
nity to fool around with them in a long
hallway by the art classroom. The chil-
dren were trying to get their Spheros to
go thirty feet down a hallway, loop under
a track hurdle that had been borrowed
from the gym, then return to the start-
ing point. There was a cheat: they could
just drive them with their fingers, using
the preinstalled software. Sometimes the
children did this, sometimes they coded.
They flitted in and out of the two with-
out particular concern. Meghan, a fifth
grader, smoothly pulled down commands
and got her Sphero to roll, execute a
nice circlet, and come back. She also pro-
grammed it to light up in different col-
ors to make it “pretty.”
Kieran, a sixth grader, boasted, “Cod-
ing is my second language.” At home, he
uses Scratch, a drag-and-drop program-
ming language, and does animation with
judo, a simplified version of Java. His
regulation white button-down shirt was
untucked, and it hung below his regula-
tion navy-blue sweater vest. Kieran’s face
glowed as he added commands with easy
swipes; he clearly had the gift. He set
his Sphero to go, but it stopped well
short of the hurdle. “I will get this,”
he said. “I think I got it. I think I got it.
Nope? O.K.” He began furiously edit-
ing his program. The route could be nav-
igated with just three commands, and,
looking over his shoulder, I saw that he
had put in a bunch of extraneous steps.
He explained that this was deliberate.
He was trying to fashion a more wind-
ing path through the course—another
46 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
kind of pretty. Kieran never did quite
find the flaws in his program, but a few
days later he and Meghan met in the
gym and shared a Sphero. Meghan con-
trolled the iPad, and Kieran suggested
additional commands. Coding was at
once thought and gesture. Was it play-
ful coding or code-filled play? Together,
they got the ball to roll to the gym wall
more than a hundred feet away, while
changing colors constantly. They kept
refining the steps, chasing their Sphero
down and doing it over again. I had
brought a BB-8, and the two robots did
a nice minuet at mid-court.
n February, at the annual Toy Fair
I held at the Javits Center, in New
York, Paul Berberian trawled an area
reserved for tech products, affably ex-
amining displays of MaKey MaKeys
and Cubelets. “There’s a ton of drones,”
he said, as one launched in front of us.
“But at the end of the day how do you
differentiate between them?” He liked
Kamigami’s battling robotic bugs,
whose movements were based on real
insect motion. “You guys have done a
great job,” he told the employees at the
display. “I’ll come back and chat.” At
another booth, someone asked Ber-
berian about Sphero’s funding. “We’ve
raised, like, ninety million dollars,” Ber-
berian said. He added that BB-8 had
changed everything: “We don’t need
any more money!”
Berberian may not need money, but
he does need something new to sell.
You can’t sustain a company with one
successful product—not even with four
versions of that product. What does
Sphero want to be when it grows up?
Berberian noticed a huge poster of
Edwin the Duck, a bathtub toy with
simple programming tools. “It’s kind
of bringing connected play all the way
down to two-year-olds,” he said, im-
pressed. The manufacturer calls Edwin
“a duck with personality,” and that’s
what interested Berberian most. He
wants to start building robots that forge
an emotional attachment with their
owners. Sphero encourages users to
name their orbs, and the children I saw
playing with them clearly regarded
them as more than machines. “BB-8 is
greeted like a class pet, a hamster or
turtle,” Chris Schmitz, a teacher in Erie,
Colorado, wrote to me. Such bonds, he
said, promoted learning. He told me
about a difficult kindergartner in his
class who, when he first saw Schmitz
playing with a BB-8, greeted it “like a
long-lost friend.” Schmitz went on,
“He was very gentle toward BB-8, and
he wanted to know how I made BB-8
go around my legs. This led to a con-
versation about the program, and then
he wrote a program of his own.” Last
month, I visited a San Francisco school
and watched two second graders play
with Dash & Dot, a pair of robots that
have anthropomorphic features. After
programming them, one girl set them
face to face. “I’m going to make them
kiss,” she said.
To promote this sort of connection,
Bernstein and Wilson have hired ex-
perts on humanlike computer inter-
faces and natural languages. (One young
employee’s job description is “Robot
Brain Architect.”) And at Sphero’s
headquarters a veteran gaming pro-
grammer is creating backstories for fu-
ture products. The first one, out in the
fall, will be a robotic incarnation of a
well-known comic-book superhero.
Berberian promises, “You’ll be able to
bring him into your home and have a
conversation with him where he en-
gages and asks you questions and starts
to learn about you.”
For Sphero, this is just a beginning;
it wants its robots to not only learn your
needs but communicate their own.
Bernstein told me that he wants their
next brainchild to become the friend
you call on to listen to your problems
or help with your homework. His mod-
els are the beloved robots of the mov-
ies, like Johnny Five, from the 1986 film
“Short Circuit,” and Wall-E, the win-
some trash-collecting robot from the
2008 Pixar movie. “It’s gotta become
part of the family,” Berberian said. “And,
by becoming part of the family, it has
to know its environment and know the
people in the family, and change its
behavior based on who it’s interacting
with.” Pixar is routinely invoked as a
model at Sphero. “We’re not trying to
make a robotic pet,” Wilson points out.
“We’re making a pet robot, really. They’ll
come with a brain and a past.” When
I told Bernstein I’d like such a robot as
long as I could turn it off, he smiled a
gentle smile. If their robot was success-
ful, he answered, I’d feel bad if I did. 

SHOUTS & MURMURS
TO THE CLASS OF 2050
BY JEN SPYRA
lass of 2050, faculty, alumni, fam-
C ily, and friends:
I remember when I sat where you
sit today. The year was 2020. The fires
from the Impact still smoldered in their
craters. Madonna’s “Dance Dance Boom
Boom” had just hit the airwaves. Ath-
leisure was bigger than ever, and it
seemed like everyone I knew was ei-
ther dead or enslaved by the Tall Ones.
I had no idea what I wanted to do
with my life. I was all over the place.
A couple of friends were talking about
combing the wreckage for survivors,
and a couple of other friends were
talking about combing the wreckage
for food. Meanwhile, my boyfriend was
begging me to come with him to Chi-
cago, to do improv. It all sounded good,
and I didn’t know where to start.
I had no money, no flint, and no
WALTER GREEN
plan. Sure, I had a bachelor’s degree in
English, but what was I going to do
with that? Walk into some office and
say, “Hi, I can use the theories of Der-
rida and Lacan to deconstruct your
company’s use of language”? Fat chance.
Plus, like many survivors, I no longer
had skin on my face or my hands.
Luckily, it didn’t take me long to
learn that there’s only one thing you
have to worry about. And that’s fol-
lowing your passion. If you do what
you love, you’ll never work a day in
your life. So let your heart sing. Maybe
you’re passionate about making spears,
or cudgels, or daggers, to fend off our
oversized invaders. Perhaps you’re more
interested in nunchakus, or spikes, or
clamps. Whatever it is—whether it’s
slingshots, pikes, axes, or even maces,
hammers, sickles, and arrows, simply
follow your interest and have at it.
If you take away anything from this
speech, let it be this: don’t buy into so-
ciety’s definition of success. Success
doesn’t mean having a big house or a
fancy corner office. It’s not about how
much money you have in the bank or
how many cars you have in your ga-
rage. There’s only one true measure of
success, and that’s how close you can
get to deciphering the Mayan hiero-
glyph that will show humanity how to
defeat the Tall Ones.
And keep in mind that you don’t
know how your life will turn out. When
I was your age, I had big plans for my-
self. I was going to find the glyph, which
legend says is carved into a stalactite
in a cenote, a freshwater underground
pool. I was going to decode it and use
its ancient wisdom to free my fel-
low-humans from our tragic captivity.
But then you know what happened?
I fell in love with long-form jour-
nalism. I met the love of my life at
U.S.C. We had two beautiful children,
and, eventually, the cenote and the an-
cient hieroglyph and being humanity’s
savior fell by the wayside.
Do I have regrets? Sometimes. The
Tall Ones tore my husband and my
children apart in front of my eyes. As
I stared at their bodies melting in the
pyre I’d lit to ward off marauders who
would sell their corpses for meat, did
I wish that I’d put in a little more glyph
time? Sure. I made mistakes. That’s
called being human. Remember: life is
ten per cent what happens to you, ten
per cent how you respond to it, and
eighty per cent how good your reflexes
are when the Tall Ones come at your
throat with their pincers.
Today, you guys are going to be
awarded diplomas. And that’s wonder-
ful. You’ve earned it. But remember
that a diploma’s just a piece of paper.
What really matters is what you do
with that piece of paper. And I strongly
recommend burning it to ward off the
Tall Ones, for they fear an open flame.
So, in conclusion, as my husband
said right before he was ripped apart
by the Tall Ones, “Karen, go to the ga-
rage and get the backup generator.
Crank up the floodlights to six hun-
dred to scare the fuckers off while you
take the kids through the tunnels for
help.”
So, Class of 2050: go to your garage,
and get your backup generator. Laugh,
love, take risks, and, if you find the car-
cass of a Tall One, preserve it in snow-
pack. They will barter for their dead.
Thank you, and good luck. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 47
 apartment turned out to be a one-room
OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS loft. Patrick slept upstairs. Kennedy’s room
was a former closet. Still, he was excited.

HAPPY TOGETHER
Why give up dorm life?
BY LIZZIE WIDDICOMBE
ole Kennedy moved to New York
C a year ago. He was twenty-three and
had recently graduated from the Univer-
sity of Missouri with a degree in English.
He applied for copywriting jobs all over,
and assumed that he’d end up in the Mid-
west. “Moving to New York seemed cool,
but it was, like, a thing that happens to
other people,” he told me. Then his lot-
tery ticket arrived: a paid internship at
Foursquare, the search-and-discovery app,
which is based in Manhattan.
First stop: Craigslist, for a place to
live. Kennedy was unfamiliar with the
city’s neighborhoods, but he’d seen
HBO’s “Girls,” and, he said, “I pretty
Co-living startups promise to wait for the cable guy and replace the toilet paper.
48 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
much knew I was going to be in Brook-
lyn.” He checked out one-bedroom apart-
ments in Williamsburg, where the aver-
age monthly rent is around three thousand
dollars. Nope. He eventually landed in
Bedford-Stuyvesant, where a guy named
Patrick was subletting a room in his
two-bedroom apartment for a thousand
and fifty dollars a month.
The annals of Craigslist are filled with
roommate horror stories: the scammer,
the party animal, the creep. But Patrick
turned out to be an easygoing twenty-
nine-year-old photographer from South
Carolina. Kennedy liked him immedi-
ately, even though the two-bedroom
His job was great. He was in New York.
But what to do when work ended?
He loved Jane Jacobs’s evocations of
Greenwich Village, with its friendly
shop owners and its “ballet” of the city
streets. But, he said, “I’d end up going
to a bar and just sitting there, talking to
a bartender and staring at Twitter.” A
thought surfaced: I’m surrounded by
people and things to do, and yet I’m so
fucking bored and lonely.
All of this seemed very far away on a
Sunday night this winter, in the basement
of a renovated four-story brownstone in
the Crown Heights neighborhood of
Brooklyn. The building, Kennedy’s new
home, is run by the co-living startup Com-
mon, which offers what it calls “flexible,
community-driven housing.” Co-living
has also been billed as “dorms for grown-
ups,” a description that Common resists.
But the company has set out to restore a
certain subset of young, urban profes-
sionals to the paradise they lost when
they left college campuses—a furnished
place to live, unlimited coffee and toilet
paper, a sense of belonging.
Common has three locations in
Brooklyn: the brownstone in Crown
Heights, on Pacific Street—which, when
it opened, received more than a thou-
sand applications for eighteen rooms—a
second, smaller brownstone in the neigh-
borhood, and a fifty-one-bedroom com-
plex in Williamsburg, which opens this
week. Instead of signing a lease, resi-
dents sign up for a “membership.” On
average, they pay eighteen hundred dol-
lars a month for a furnished bedroom
and common areas. The company solves
what it calls “the tragedy of the com-
mons”—waiting for the cable guy and
hiring housecleaners.There’s a chat room
on Slack, where members can plan ac-
tivities, and a “house leader,” who func-
tions a bit like a college R.A.
Kennedy, who is now a copywriter for
the startup Handy, found Common
through a BuzzFeed article. Initially, he
was put off by the price tag. A room at
Common doesn’t just cost more than a
room in a shared Brooklyn apartment (av-
erage price: twelve hundred dollars); it
costs more than some studio apartments on
Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which Gary
Malin, the president of the real-estate
ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY CAMPBELL
broker Citi Habitats, told me can be ob-
tained for “fifteen hundred dollars and up.”
But Kennedy did a little math. “Eigh-
teen hundred—if you want to pay that
little for a studio or one-bedroom, you’re
going to get a really junky place,” he said.
With a discount for promising to stay
at Common for at least a year, he now
pays a little less than fifteen hundred
dollars a month.
Co-living businesses are still in the
startup phase. Some people are incred-
ulous. Under an article about the phe-
nomenon on Curbed, a commenter wrote,
“Why the fuck would anyone want that?”
But Common, which is based in mid-
town and has twenty employees, recently
raised more than seven million dollars
from investors, including Maveron, a
venture-capital firm started by Dan Lev-
itan and Howard Schultz, the chairman
of Starbucks. Jason Stoffer, a partner at
Maveron, anticipates that companies like
Common will transform residential hous-
ing by creating a brand that is “emotion-
ally and culturally resonant with millen-
nials” who aren’t served by some aspects
of apartment living. (Instead of land-
lord-ese, Common uses startup argot,
advertising its “core values.” In his appli-
cation, Kennedy wrote that he most ap-
preciated the value “Be Present.”) Stoffer
brought up AirBnb, the vacation-rental
business valued at twenty-five billion
dollars: “People sleeping on couches in
someone else’s apartment for thirty dol-
lars a night felt absolutely crazy ten years
ago! But now it’s normal.”
Common encourages its members to
organize group activities. “I thought they
were going to force me to do these events
I don’t want to do,” Kennedy said. “Like,
let’s sit in a drum circle and do basket
weaving.” But the events turned out to
be things like movie nights and bowl-
ing. He decided to organize a book club.
The night of its first meeting, the
brownstone’s basement was clean and
warm. At the back of the room was a
screening area, where four members
lounged on modern couches and adult-
size beanbags. Kennedy, who has chin-
length, sandy-colored hair, was wearing
jeans and a flannel shirt. Most of his
housemates were in their twenties, re-
cent transplants to New York. Kenne-
dy’s selection was “The Art of Fielding,”
by Chad Harbach, and he led the dis-
cussion. He mentioned the fictional base-
ball manual at the center of the plot:
“Did any of you guys look to see if ‘The
Art of Fielding’ is real?”
Another Common member, Jeremy
Schrage, spoke up. At forty-four, Schrage
was the oldest member of the group. He
makes a living “flipping apps and advis-
ing startups,”and had recently moved from
California. “I actually put it into Goo-
gle and read the Wikipedia,” Schrage said.
There was a pause. Kennedy asked,
“What else, guys?”
Annelie Chavez, the brownstone’s
twenty-seven-year-old house leader, grew
up in a large extended Filipino family in
California. “After being in New York for,
like, a year and a half and not really
having that many overlapping circles of
friends, it made me a little homesick for
the connections that the four or five main
characters have with each other,” she said.
Kennedy agreed. “New York is the
loneliest city in the world,” he said. “You
basically go to work, work ridiculous
hours, and come home.”
Schrage offered a theory: “It’s where
the headquarters of all these corpora-
tions are, and people are coming here
and they want to kick ass. During the
day, everybody just has horse blinders
on. They’re getting on the 6 train and
going to work and stepping over some
bum and not thinking about it.” He
sighed. “It’s kind of crazy,” he said. “I
don’t want to lose that California part of
me. That compassion or empathy.”
Kennedy looked at his phone. It
was getting late. “What book should we
read next?”
Matt, another housemate, asked,
“Have you guys read ‘The Poisonwood
Bible’?”
first met Kennedy in December,
I after most of Common’s members had
moved in. The company threw a holiday
party in the brownstone on Pacific Street.
A flat-screen by the door showed which
floors were serving which ethnic cuisine,
all catered by nearby restaurants. In the
basement, where people were drinking
wine from plastic cups, Kennedy dis-
pensed advice about restaurants in the
area. (After his time at Foursquare, he
considers himself the house’s “concierge.”)
At the Pacific Street brownstone, the
smallest social unit is the floor. Each floor
includes four single bedrooms off a long
hallway, with a shared living room and
kitchen, and a door that can be unlocked
with an iPhone app. The first floor is
male, the second floor is female, and the
third and fourth floors are mixed. Ken-
nedy lived on the third floor, along with
Leon Thorne, a twenty-year-old who
had taken time off from Brandeis to at-
tend a coding course at Fullstack Acad-
emy. He told me that he was happy about
his choice: “Everyone here I can have a
conversation with! In college, there were
a lot of very unengaged people who were
just there because they needed to go to
college and get a job.”
Kennedy confessed, “Yesterday, I sat
on the couch and literally watched Netflix
for twelve hours.”
Chavez is a kind of “co-” professional.
During the day, she is a community man-
ager at Industry City. Before moving into
the Common brownstone, she lived in
a house run by a now defunct co-living
company called Campus, which she also
worked for. “I get to learn a lot about
sharing,” she said. “Organizational be-
haviors and communities are interesting
to me.” In college, at U.C.L.A., she stud-
ied cultural anthropology.
Brad Hargreaves, Common’s founder
and C.E.O. , was at the party. An affable,
nerdy twenty-nine-year-old with a scruffy
beard, Hargreaves grew up in rural Ar-
kansas before going to Yale, where he
ran intercollegiate computer-game tour-
naments called GoCrossCampus. After
graduation, he moved to New York, with
plans to turn the gaming tournaments
into a business. On Craigslist, he found
a roommate in the financial district: a
real-estate broker with a taste for mari-
juana and, consequently, bacon.
When Hargreaves’s gaming company
didn’t pan out, he and a few techie friends
started a co-working space—a coffee-
shop alternative for freelancers and no-
madic tech entrepreneurs—which in 2011
became a programming school called
General Assembly. General Assembly
now has twenty-five thousand students
taking classes in everything from data
science to stress management. Its fifteen
campuses are mostly in major cities—
New York, San Francisco, Washington,
D.C. Students often move to a city to
take classes, and, Hargreaves said, they
“would usually end up in really sketchy
roommate situations.” He had an alter-
nate vision: “roommate communities.”
Instead of leasing properties and then
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 49
subletting them, Common acts as a
property-management company. Real-
estate developers hire the firm to oper-
ate a building in exchange for a percentage
of the income. “We look at our audience
as people who make between forty and
a hundred thousand dollars a year,”
Hargreaves said. “There’s a certain set of
neighborhoods that fit that price point
really well.”
Inevitably, the company has been
caught up in larger tussles over gentrifi-
cation. In Crown Heights, traditionally
a West Indian enclave, vegan cheese
shops, wood-fired pizza ovens, bourbon-
spiked milkshakes, and fluke seviche are
springing up alongside restaurants serv-
ing jerk chicken. Hargreaves told me,
“It’s a friendly neighborhood. People
say hi to you on the street. It’s conve-
nient to mass transit. There are some re-
ally cool bars. And we were able to find
a wholly vacant multifamily building.
We don’t want to evict people.”
Some locals are wary. Ayanna Prescod,
a twenty-eight-year-old blogger whose
family has lived in the area since the
nineteen-fifties, said that many friends
have been forced out by rising rents. She
added, “I’m a young professional, and I’m
definitely not spending eighteen hun-
dred dollars on a room.” She worried that
an influx of transient young people would
erode the community. “It started with
AirBnb,” she said. “When I grew up, you
knew who your neighbors were, you ac-
tually looked out for each other. Now we
say hi in passing to be courteous. But you
see someone going into a house, and
it’s, like, What? Who is this person?”
The contemporary phenomenon of
co-living began in San Francisco, with
“hacker mansions,” rambling Victorians
that programmers furnished with bunk
beds and turned into startup factories. In
2014, Campus, founded by a twenty-
three-year-old named Tom Currier, at-
tempted to formalize the process. It leased
homes in San Francisco and began sell-
ing memberships. When you joined Cam-
pus, you weren’t just joining a house; you
were choosing a life style. You could
bounce among the company’s various
locations. Houses were equipped with
hot tubs, and members had access to
vacation houses in Tahoe and Napa.
(Hargreaves, too, has network ambitions:
he hopes that members will eventually
be able to move around Common loca-
50 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
tions, spending a week in Los Angeles,
a week in Brooklyn.) By last year, Cam-
pus had rented thirty-four properties, in-
cluding several brownstones in New York,
when, like many startups whose dreams
are bigger than their wallets, it ran out
of money and folded.
Other companies have not been de-
terred. They range from Pure House,
which is based in Williamsburg and ad-
vertises “an intentional way of living for
those committed to transforming their
lives” (and has hosted a group story-
telling session called Collective Sex),
to WeLive, a spinoff of WeWork, a
co-working company that was recently
valued at sixteen billion dollars. We-
Work describes itself as a “physical so-
cial network,” and most co-living com-
panies see themselves as participating
in the sharing economy, with their build-
ings a blend of residential hotel and
Facebook group. WeLive’s first residen-
tial space, at 110 Wall Street, features
small apartments and shared common
areas, which include yoga studios and
screening rooms. Eventually, the space
will house four hundred and fifty peo-
ple on twenty floors. In a leaked pitch
document from 2014, WeWork pro-
jected that co-living would account for
twenty-one per cent of its revenue—
$605.9 million—by 2018.
Hargreaves took me on a tour of
Common’s brownstone, pointing out the
laundry room, the back-yard patio, and
the bike rack by the stairs. “Bike racks
were the No. 1 thing people requested
on our surveys,” he said. He referred to
the home’s décor as its “user experience.”
It channels a familiar Brooklyn aesthetic:
hardwood floors, exposed brick walls,
midcentury-modern furnishings from
stores like West Elm. Sophie Wilkin-
son, the company’s design director, told
me that a member once described it as
“someone awesome’s parents’ house,
without any of the parents.” In a living
room, the design staff had stuffed a book-
shelf with quirky tchotchkes: a bronze
armadillo, plants in geometric planters.
Common members share bathrooms
with one other person. The kitchen-
living room on each floor is shared by
four people. (A cleaner comes once a
week.) Hargreaves said that the arrange-
ment was meant to create a family at-
mosphere: “If you give people an op-
portunity to eat dinner alone in their
bedroom, they’ll do it.”
We looked into a bedroom on the first
floor, and I felt a pang of envy. It was spare
but chicly furnished—a double bed with
a fabric-covered headboard, a Scandina-
vian-style nightstand, and a small Aztec
rug. Hargreaves noted that the mattress
and the fluffy white bedding were from
the of-the-moment companies Casper
and Parachute. “We try to work with other
startups whenever we can,” he said.
In the kitchen-living room, three men
of the first floor—including Jeremy
Schrage, the forty-four-year-old app-
flipper—were drinking beer and eating
nouveau-Caribbean food from a nearby
restaurant called Glady’s. Schrage pre-
dicted that co-living would soon become
normal: “Twenty or thirty years from
now, we’ll look back and be, like, how
did we ever question it?”
His suitemate, Mike Walsh, said, “I’m
from Madison, Wisconsin, and you hear
about co-op living all the time there.
How is this any different?”
Another suitemate, Danny Pirajan,
twenty-seven, had hair shaved on one side
and wore Elvis Costelloesque glasses. He
had spent the past few years working at
design-related jobs in Chicago and Miami
and was trying to decide on a permanent
location. “I’m city shopping,” he told me.
Walsh said that he had moved to New
York to study user-experience design at
General Assembly. Before that, he lived
in Colorado for ten years, working as a
professional mascot for the Colorado
Rapids, a major-league soccer team, and
for the Denver Broncos.
Schrage raised his eyebrows: “You
were the Bronco?”
“I was just a backup,” Walsh said. “I
didn’t do all the games.”
“Can you do your horse sound?”
Schrage asked, making a little whinny.
“Tell everyone about being a mascot,” he
continued. “What do people not know?”
Walsh sighed. “Wow,” he said. “Well,
it’s a lot of fun. People assume that. You

UNINVENT THIS CHARLIE BROOKER
dance, off
ancing. Ban dancing. Break its legs and bury it.
D And don’t make me do it. Don’t make me dance.
Jesus, the indignity. I’d sooner defecate on live TV than
dance at your wedding.
I vaguely remember my first visit to a night club;
must’ve been around 1988. I was seventeen and sober;
the music was shockingly loud and my limbs had no idea
what was expected of them. I tried to join in, but it was
immediately clear that this was a physical language I was
never going to grasp. A hundred years later and nothing
has changed. People who dance voluntarily are unknow-
ably alien to me. I don’t relate.
See, I’m awkward at the best of times. Expecting me
to coördinate my movements in time to music, in what
amounts to an unofficial public assessment of perceived
sexual competence, is astronomically cruel. Push me onto
the dance floor and I’m like a pig repeatedly losing its
footing, a malfunctioning distress signal made flesh.
Dancing forces me to engage with corporeal reality. I
resent it for that. Having to endure any kind of physical
existence whatsoever alarms and annoys me. There are
things out there that you can bang your knee on. And
haircuts. You have to get haircuts. Again and again and
again. It’s relentless. It’s awful. I can’t wait till some al-
coholic research scientist unleashes the nanobot horde
and we all get knitted into a single, superintelligent sen-
tient gas with no dividing lines or toenails. Until then,
I’m stuck here, awkward and clumsy and not knowing
52 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
what to do with my face, let alone my arms and legs. So
please don’t make me dance. When my parents celebrated
their golden wedding anniversary, I refused to dance. I
felt guilty at the time. You’d think that guilt would fade,
but no: it sits there, inside, undiminished, a deep black
stone. This is what society has wrought. Because society
keeps expecting me to dance.
Oh, what’s that? Dance like no one’s watching? Imbe-
cile. You fucking imbecile. I’m watching, even when I
close my eyes. Watching and judging. My brain won’t
wander away. It stands there with its arms folded, loudly
asking me what the fuck me thinks it’s doing.
So you, at the party. Stop trying to make me dance.
Cajoling. Bullying. Grabbing my arm and jerking me to-
ward the dance floor. Do you want me to start crying?
Sobbing in front of you? Is that what you want? How
come this tyranny is socially acceptable?
I know the theory. They repeat it over and over: Hey,
Grumpybones, just get on the dance floor. You’ll enjoy it once
you’re on it.
I won’t. I’ll shift from foot to foot with the lumpen
gracelessness of a deck chair unexpectedly granted the
power of motion, worrying about what to do with my
elbows and screaming in silence at the inside of my own
face. You’ll enjoy yourself. I will not.
I know you’re worried about looking stupid, but, honestly,
no one cares.
Thanks for the pep talk but I already look stupid. Sit-
ting rigid at the periphery of the wedding, like an ex-
ile—I care about that.
Look! There’s even a guy in his seventies up there—ter-
rible dancer, but by Christ he looks happy.
And I’d settle for that. I would. But it’s not going to
happen. So go now. Leave me here to die.
Off they slink, radiating pity. And then they dance till
four in the morning, guffawing like ancient kings. They’re
lucky.
Society judges the dance-averse harshly. As party
poopers. Sticks in the mud. Cowards. It doesn’t help that
dancing is widely portrayed as the most life-affirming
thing a human body can do short of giving birth. I know
you haven’t sat through a TV ad in two years, but did
you realize that ninety-five per cent of all commercials
now depict overweight people dancing for comic effect?
Things are worse at the movies. C.G.I. animation is
a wonderful thing, but, on the downside, it makes con-
vincing dance moves comparatively simple to create. In
1967, Disney’s “Jungle Book” animators had to painstak-
ingly craft the “I Wan’na Be Like You” routine by hand.
These days, they synch their animation software with a
Spotify account, hold down the function key, and count
to five while it shits out an end-credits sequence in which
a trio of lovable gophers triumphantly shake their rumps
JOON MO KANG
to “La Bamba.” I’d rather see a cartoon end with the
Zapruder footage. At least then the kids would leave the
auditorium in silence.
And not one of them would be dancing. Victory. 
get beat up. At the end of the day, you’re
exhausted physically.”
Schrage did a lightning round of
app-development research. “Is there a
market for Uber ice delivery for mas-
cots—yes or no?”
Walsh considered. A Common
member stuck his head in the door to
announce a delivery from Elsie’s: “Care
for a doughnut? Fourth floor!”
eople live in group homes for many
P reasons, and in many circumstances—
think of retirement homes, rehab cen-
ters, and communes and kibbutzes. But
co-living isn’t just about a living situa-
tion. It’s about a specific stage in the
modern bourgeois life cycle: the period
that sociologists call “extended adoles-
cence.” This phase of experimentation
and transition is generally associated
with people in their twenties, but its
boundaries are fluid. It has appeared in
endless TV incarnations, where it’s
mocked and worshipped in equal mea-
sure: “The Real World,” “Melrose Place,”
“Friends,” and “Girls.” The comedian
Aziz Ansari has described it as the “dick-
ing around and having brunch stage.”
Paul Groth, a professor of urban ge-
ography at the University of California,
Berkeley, told me, “In the nineteenth
century, the single person was sort of a
social problem. What do you do with a
single person?” In cities, the solution was
the boarding house, often run by a ma-
tron, who served meals family style and
might scold you if you got home too late.
In 1842, one resident, Walt Whitman,
declared that Americans, or at least New
Yorkers, were “a boarding people”: “Mar-
ried men and single men, old women
and pretty girls, mariners and masons,
cobblers, colonels, and counter-jumpers,
tailors and teachers; lieutenants, loafers,
ladies, lackbrains, and lawyers; printers
and parsons . . . all ‘go out to board.’ ”
As a new, mobile workforce flooded
into cities, demanding more freedom,
boarding houses were largely replaced by
cheap hotels designed for long-term stays.
Groth said, “As late as 1930, maybe one
housing unit in ten was some variation
of a residential hotel.” The Barbizon, a
women’s-only establishment at Lexing-
ton Avenue and Sixty-third Street, opened
in 1927, when large numbers of women
were beginning to work outside the home.
To its guests, the Barbizon offered closet-
size rooms and lavish shared facilities: a
beauty parlor, a swimming pool, a sun
deck, Turkish baths, a coffee shop, squash
and badminton courts, a solarium, and a
roof garden. To their parents, it offered
the assurance of respectability: chaper-
ones roamed the hallways, and men were
not allowed above the first floor. Sylvia
Plath, a resident in the nineteen-fifties,
featured the Barbizon in “The Bell Jar,”
where it appears as the Amazon, a hotel
for rich young women who “were all going
to posh secretarial schools.”
By the nineteen-sixties, hotel life had
given way to the new dream: a place of
one’s own. In the sitcom “That Girl,”
which premièred in 1966, Marlo Thomas
played an aspiring actress, Ann Marie,
who moves to New York to try to make
it while working a series of odd jobs:
waitress, department-store elf. In the
show’s second episode, a friendly door-
man helps her move into her own apart-
ment. Standing on the threshold, she an-
nounces, “I’m my own occupant!” Like
Ann Marie, young women seized
one-bedrooms near First and Second
Avenues, which became known for sin-
gles bars and “stew zoos”—buildings
packed with female flight attendants.
The inaugural issue of Cosmopolitan called
the neighborhood “The Girl Ghetto”:
“Thousands upon thousands of single
girls flock to the upper East Side, cram-
ming themselves into small apartments,
subsisting on an apple and a quart of diet
soda a day, waiting for a telephone to
ring and having a mad, wonderful time.”
In “Going Solo,” from 2012, the so-
ciologist Eric Klinenberg describes how
these trends persisted, leading to our
current state of affairs: a third of house-
holds in New York consist of one per-
son. Klinenberg told me that, based on
his surveys, “most people who can afford
it want and feel great pride in getting
a place of their own.”
These days, however, the most pop-
ular cities—notably New York and San
Francisco—are mired in a housing cri-
sis, the result of fifty years of under-
building combined with the desire of
wide-eyed youngsters to move to them.
A modern Ann Marie would have a
hard time finding her own place in Man-
hattan, where the average studio apart-
ment goes for between two thousand
and three thousand dollars. Instead, she
would probably spend a few weeks couch
surfing, perusing Craigslist postings in-
viting her to “Share My Apartment”
and rent a “Great Room for a Girl.”
The proposed solutions to the hous-
ing crisis are endless: more zoning (so
that luxury apartments don’t take over
the city); less zoning (so that developers
are encouraged to build more); micro-
apartments (a tower of three-hundred-
square-foot units is currently being leased
in Kips Bay). Adam Neumann, the co-
founder and C.E.O. of WeWork, told
me, “The future is more expensive and
less room! That’s just a fact.” Co-living
is about rejiggering our expectations.
n marketing to its first members,
I Hargreaves said, Common hoped to
include people from different age
groups and professions. “We didn’t
want it to just be housing for the tech
industry.” Many applicants have come
from overseas, because foreigners have
a hard time renting from New York
landlords, who usually require credit
and background checks. (Common
uses other methods, like bank accounts
or paycheck stubs, to evaluate tenants.)
And yet tech workers predominate.
Chavez, the house leader, had a the-
ory about co-living, borrowed from a
music lesson she learned in high-school
band. “You need balance, patterns, and
timing,” she said. Balance: “There needs
to be a balance between the company
defining what the community is and tak-
ing suggestions from the group.” Pat-
terns: “Things need to be consistent.”
Timing: “Three months—it’s still pretty
chaotic. At six months, you start seeing
what people are drawn to.”
In January, I attended a cheese-
themed Sunday “potluck dinner” at the
brownstone on Pacific Street. The offer-
ings included mozzarella sticks and
cheese-stuffed peppers. In February came
an event called a Pecha Kucha, co-
organized by Mike Walsh, in which each
person presented a slide show with
twenty pictures. The prompt was “De-
scribe something you love.” Everyone
crowded around a projector in the base-
ment, and Chavez gave a talk on pan-
cakes. “It’s my passion,” she said. “I’m
the one setting the fire alarm off mak-
ing pancakes on the second floor, in case
you haven’t noticed.”
The floors had different personalities,
which were, to a large degree, shaped by
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 53

• •
the amount of turnover they experienced.
The fourth floor was the most transient.
The third floor, which included Ken-
nedy and Thorne, the college student,
was more of a party floor. (Thorne was
becoming a kind of house pet. “We all
make fun of him for being young,” a
member told me.)
The second floor, whose residents
were all women, was known for its do-
mestic rituals. “People are always cook-
ing and making tea,” Chavez said. On
Monday nights, the women watched
“The Bachelor” together. Lauren, a thirty-
one-year-old lawyer, had left a one-
bedroom apartment on the Upper East
Side. (Rent: twenty-four hundred dol-
lars.) “I wanted to know what it would
be like to have people be there when I
get home,” she told me.
The gender ratio at Common tilts
male. Lauren offered a few theories about
why women might be reluctant to move
in: concerns about safety in Crown
Heights (which she hadn’t found to be
a problem), and the fact that they tend
to move in groups. “I think often with
girls it’s hard to do things on their own.”
On the first floor, Schrage and Pira-
jan, the city-shopping designer, liked to
go out to bars. Walsh, the former mas-
cot, was more business-oriented. “We go
to startup events together, like tech stuff,”
Schrage told me. The fourth suitemate,
Steven She, was a thirty-one-year-old
software engineer from Toronto. Schrage
said, “He got a girlfriend after, like, a
month.” She met his girlfriend on the
dating app Coffee Meets Bagel. He liked
54 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
living in Common, he told me. But, he
said, “having any roommates makes it a
little more difficult with a girlfriend,
which is why I ended up spending more
time at her place.”
“I think the neighborhood’s not the
best thing to tell women,” Schrage said,
claiming that some potential dates had
dropped him on Tinder, assuming that
he couldn’t afford a more expensive area.
Pirajan said, “I explain that I share
an apartment with three other guys
and a building with eighteen people.
They always ask the same question: ‘Do
you have your own bathroom?’ ” He’d
noticed that the single people often re-
acted badly, and that the people who
seem really interested are engaged or liv-
ing with someone as a couple. “They’re,
like, ‘Oh, this is like living in a dorm with
your friends!’ They always ask me to in-
vite them if I throw a party.”
ot long ago, I stopped by the
N headquarters of WeWork to talk
to Adam Neumann about WeLive.There
seemed to be a hint of curiosity and ri-
valry between members of the two build-
ings. “A couple of us went and checked
out WeLive,” Lauren told me. “From
what I saw, it seems like that’s way more
of a 24-7 party atmosphere.” A WeWork
employee lived briefly at Common, and
Hargreaves told me, half joking, “We
think he was a spy.”
WeWork started as a co-working com-
pany, leasing office space and converting
it into a trendy zone for startups and
itinerant laptop workers, complete with
arcade games and beer on tap. It is now
used by organizations ranging from Gen-
eral Electric to Lululemon. The com-
pany has an app, which its more than
fifty thousand members can use to net-
work; it hosts events like “mixology labs”
and offers accounting services. WeWork
has raised more than a billion dollars
from Fidelity and other investment banks,
part of which it plans to use to branch
out into co-living. Within three years,
WeLive expects to have 10.3 million
square feet of real estate, housing thirty-
four thousand people.
Neumann is a tall Israeli with flow-
ing black hair and a strong accent. His
T-shirt read, “Do What You Love.” As
a teen-ager, in Israel, he spent several
years living on a kibbutz. “The joy I felt
living on a kibbutz!” he said. “My par-
ents were divorced, it was a tough time
in my life. The fulfillment I felt being
part of a community was so real, gave me
so much strength to deal with my own
personal challenges, that it’s always been
ingrained in me that being together is
better than being alone.” At nineteen, he
moved to New York to study entrepre-
neurship at Baruch College. He lived in
the financial district with an older sister,
who was a model. Neumann recalled, “I
said to my sister, ‘Something really weird
has happened. Every time I take the el-
evator with other people no one says hello
to me.’ ” He went on, “I said to her, ‘Let’s
play a game.’ ” The game was to knock
on the door of every apartment in the
building and try to wrangle an invita-
tion for coffee. After they met everyone,
he said, “the building changed.” It be-
came a community. “I saw how excited
everyone was getting about it, and I was,
like, ‘Wow! This is what I should do
here.’ It was called Concept Living.”
Neumann imagined the New York
City apartment building as a kind of urban
colony. His plan was rejected by judges
in a business-school competition, but,
with the success of WeWork, he’s bring-
ing it back, with some tweaks. In We-
Live buildings, the apartments come in
different configurations. You can rent a
suite with up to four bedrooms, for ten
thousand dollars a month, or a one-bed-
room apartment, for less than four thou-
sand dollars.
Unlike those at Common, WeLive
apartments have their own bathrooms
and kitchens. The shared amenities on
each floor are a bonus: they include a
terrace with multiple hot tubs, a “chef ’s
kitchen,” and a copious supply of beer
on tap. For the tightest spaces, WeLive
is designing eight types of “nooks”—
podlike enclosures, with a bed, air-
conditioning, and a sound system—that
allow you to get away from your room-
mate. The idea is to provide everyone
with both privacy and a “social layer”—“If
they want to, they can be alone, but if
they don’t want to they will never be
alone in their life!” Neumann said.
The first WeLive building, at 110
Wall Street, only recently opened to
the public, and some residents are
WeWork employees. The hallways are
painted in bright greens and purples
and furnished with thrift-store-style
furniture. Decorations include framed
album covers—Taylor Swift, the Postal
Service—and posters with jokey slo-
gans created by the company’s design
staff: “Home Is Where Your Pants Are
Off,” “Home Is Where Pizza Gets De-
livered,” “Home Is Where the WiFi
Is.” It feels like stepping into Urban
Outfitters’ Instagram feed.
I visited the studio apartment of a
twenty-five-year-old WeWork employee
named Kley. The four-hundred-and-
fifty-square-foot space contained a
kitchenette, a couch, and a bathroom,
and two beds, tucked into nooks. A flat-
screen TV played “Morning Joe.” Kley,
who wore a white polo shirt and red
pants, told me that he’s from Green-
ville, South Carolina. “I’d always loved
the hustle and ambition of the city,” he
said. He’d come North with a thousand
dollars in cash—“I thought that was a
lot”—and wound up in Bed-Stuy, liv-
ing in a hostel. He then moved into a
series of informal barracks in the West
Village, packed with young men toiling
in the lower levels of finance and P.R.
The WeLive room had come “eighty-
five per cent” furnished, which he ap-
preciated. “Frankly, no one under the
age of thirty has the capital to drop ten
grand and get everything from West
Elm that actually makes your home
look beautiful,” he said. “It’s easy to
make it your own with a few little
touches.” He’d added a shelf of books
(“The Power Broker”), Mason jars filled
with pasta on the kitchenette shelves
(“to show that I cook”), and some flags
above the bed in his nook.
He showed me the building’s commu-
nal spaces, which included a “whiskey
lounge” (an empty bar area), a laundry
room-arcade with a Ping-Pong table, and
a “flex” space, where a yoga class was run-
ning through poses. In one corner was a
feature called the Corner Store: shelves
of products, like laundry detergent and
Listerine, that members could pay for
using the WeLive app. Dance music was
being piped in through hidden speakers.
Kley took out his phone and changed it
to “I’m in a Hurry,” by Alabama.
The contrast between Common and
WeWork reminded me of the difference
between Brooklyn and Manhattan. Com-
mon was domestic, with hints of pseudo-
bohemianism. WeWork was slicker, with
shades of Wall Street. (I sensed a culture
clash when Kennedy, from Common,
described spending a Friday night at We-
Work: “It was total ‘bro.’ Like, dudes in
tank tops drinking beer.”)
In the communal kitchen, where
platters of yogurt parfaits and break-
fast burritos had been set out, members
were streaming in after the yoga class.
One of them didn’t seem to fit the demo:
Joe Leggio, WeWork’s chief informa-
tion officer. Leggio, who is fifty and
married, with two kids, lives in Long
Island. He was renting a WeLive stu-
dio as a Manhattan crash pad, for late
nights at the office. “It’s been fun,” he
said. “You don’t have to do anything.
You just bring your clothes.”
o-living skeptics doubt its long-
Cterm appeal. “It’s like a shiny penny,”
Malin, the president of Citi Habitats,
said. “The excitement’s going to wear
off.” After six months in Common, Ken-
nedy told me, the novelty had faded: “Now
it’s just, like, this is where I live. This is
my home.” (The founders of both Com-
mon and WeLive told me that, ultimately,
they hope to build co-living facilities that
are designed for people with families: in-
stead of whiskey bars, the shared zones
will include playrooms.) Kennedy was,
however, wondering how Common’s cul-
ture would change with the opening of
the Williamsburg building. “There’s no
way that you can be friends with all the
people in every house,” he said. “I won-
der what will happen. Will the commu-
nity start shrinking into individual houses?
Will there be networks? Boroughs?”
The Williamsburg property has a
different aesthetic from the Crown
Heights brownstone, according to Wil-
kinson, Common’s design director. “It’s
much more minimalist,” she said. “It has
more of an industrial, exposed-cement
vibe.” Hargreaves noted that it also in-
corporates “learnings” from the first ven-
ture: rooms for couples, with a private
bathroom, entrances and exits designed
so that you don’t have to chitchat with
roommates when you don’t want to, fewer
tchotchkes. “People wanted to do more
of their own decoration,” he said. It will
not include the most requested feature:
a hot tub. Common’s Crown Heights
members had first dibs on the rooms,
and many are relocating, including
Chavez, who wants to try out a new
neighborhood, and She, who wants to
be closer to his girlfriend.
Jeremy Schrage is moving to WeLive,
on Wall Street. “It was about wanting to
be in Manhattan,” he told me, sounding
a bit guilty. “That was the main thing.
And getting my own place.” He’d signed
up for a studio “plus,” which goes for
about three thousand dollars a month.
He said that he felt “apprehensive” about
the move. “I have really strong relation-
ships in Common.”
Late one night, after the Pecha Kucha
presentation, I followed Schrage and his
suitemates back to their first-floor com-
mon room. Pirajan changed into plaid
pajama pants and flip-flops. Walsh sank
into an armchair, and Schrage curled up
on the couch. (Steven She was at his
girlfriend’s apartment.)
Schrage said, “We had a night where
it was the three of us and Steven and
Lauren were here. We were laughing
hysterically.”
“We were screaming and chanting
until 1 a.m.,” Pirajan said. “We didn’t
even drink!”
I brought up the television version of
their lives: “Friends” and “The Real
World.”
“I don’t think this is anything like
that,” Schrage said. “People want you to
tell them there’s crazy orgies going on!”
Walsh said, “We come home from
work and watch ‘Broad City’ and TED
videos.”
Schrage added, “Lying on Fatboy
beanbags.”
So, nothing like “The Real World”?
“No,” Schrage said. “This is just real
life.” 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 55

What the new science of touch says about ourselves.
n a bitter, soul-shivering,
O damp, biting gray February day
in Cleveland—that is to say,
on a February day in Cleveland—a
handless man is handling a nonexis-
tent ball. Igor Spetic lost his right hand
when his forearm was pulped in an in-
dustrial accident six years ago and had
to be amputated. In an operation four
years ago, a team of surgeons implanted
a set of small translucent “interfaces”
into the neural circuits of his upper
arm. This afternoon, in a basement lab
at a Veterans Administration hospital,
the wires are hooked up directly to a
prosthetic hand—plastic, flesh-colored,
five-fingered, and articulated—that is
affixed to what remains of his arm. The
hand has more than a dozen pressure
sensors within it, and their signals can
be transformed by a computer into
electric waves like those natural to the
nervous system. The sensors in the
prosthetic hand feed information from
the world into the wires in Spetic’s arm.
Since, from the brain’s point of view,
his hand is still there, it needs only to
be recalled to life.
Now it is. With the “stimulation”
turned on—the electronic feed cours-
ing from the sensors—Spetic feels
nineteen distinct sensations in his
artificial hand. Above all, he can feel
pressure as he would with a living hand.
“We don’t appreciate how much of our
behavior is governed by our intense
sensitivity to pressure,” Dustin Tyler,
the fresh-faced principal investigator
on the Cleveland project, says, observ-
ing Spetic closely. “We think of hot
and cold, or of textures, silk and cot-
ton. But some of the most important
sensing we do with our fingers is to
register incredibly minute differences
in pressure, of the kinds that are nec-
essary to perform tasks, which we grasp
in a microsecond from the feel of the
outer shell of the thing. We know in-
stantly, just by touching, whether to
56 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
SENSORY STUDIES
FEEL ME
BY ADAM GOPNIK
gently squeeze the toothpaste or crush
the can.”
With the new prosthesis, Spetic can
sense the surface of a cherry in a way
that allows him to stem it effortlessly
and precisely, guided by what he feels,
rather than by what he sees. Prosthetic
hands like Spetic’s tend to be super-
strong, capable of forty pounds of pres-
sure, so the risk of crushing an egg
is real. The stimulation sensors make
delicate tasks easy.
Spetic comes into the lab every other
week; the rest of the time he is busy
pursuing a degree in engineering, which
he has taken up while on disability. The
researchers try to use their time with
him energetically, so there is an excited
murmur while the experiments go on—
shoptalk conducted mostly in acronyms
and initials. It is perfectly possible to
hear a sentence beginning “One of the
difficulties about being the P.I. on a
DARPA-funded study, post I.R.B. . . .”
and see gentle nods of agreement.
Though Spetic is an industrial worker,
he has been in the study long enough
to have absorbed the language of the
investigators, and he now speaks eas-
ily of “the double-blind data” and “fol-
lowing the expanding parameters of
the experiment.”
Spetic, burly and broad-faced, with
the quietly powerful look of someone
accustomed to working hard with his
arms and hands, is undertaking a new
set of tests: with no prosthesis on at
all, simply by willing the nerves—in
what is crudely called his stump, what
is politely called his residual—he is
manipulating a virtual hand in a vir-
tual space, represented on a flat screen
in front of him. He moves his hand
through the muscles in his arm by using
his head, and the hand on the screen
moves, too, reaching out and grasping
the ball.
“Turn the stim on,” he says, almost
longingly. An experimenter raises an
eyebrow—protocol stipulates that the
subject should not know when the stim
is turned on—but he does, and imme-
diately Spetic begins to pick the ball
up easily. “I can feel it in my thumb
and my fingers,” he says. Then he cor-
rects himself: “In this space.” Tyler whis-
pers to an observer, “He began saying
‘the’ thumb or ‘the’ finger. Now he says
‘my’ thumb, ‘my’ finger!”
Touch is not a one-way deduction
of sensation but a constant two-way
interchange between what Tyler calls
the “language” of sensation and the raw
data of reception. “What we’ve discov-
ered is that the language of touch is
what matters most,” he says. “When
we first fed the stimulus in, Igor only
felt a tingle. The question was, how do
we go from tingle to touch? By anal-
ogy, pure sound is something we read-
ily do.” Tyler stops and makes a kind
of inarticulate cry. “I make a noise, but
there’s no information in it. Break it
up in the right way, and it’s words.
That’s what happens when you have
epilepsy—it’s a kind of constant brain
sound. But the healthy body works with
patterns of information. And there’s a
narrow window within which the body
interprets. Shouting ‘Baaah!’ is not very
different from talking sense.”
Tyler’s lab is a hive of busy gradu-
ate students and assistants, monitor-
ing screens and fiddling with cables.
Tyler glides among them encourag-
ingly. “When we started,” he says, “we
couldn’t get past the tingle. We couldn’t
make the tingle become touch. There’s
a nerve called the digital nerve, and
it’s superficial, close to the skin, so we
hooked me up to the stimulus, and I
started to feel sensation. It took for-
ever, ninety-eight per cent failure and
two per cent success. There were so
many things to vary! But finally one
pattern emerged: a sinusoidal enve-
lope, modulating at one hertz, that fits
within the biological range of rhythm
Our skin is no neutral envelope; it is a busily sensing organ that situates us in relation to others and the world.
ILLUSTRATION BY JAVIER JAÉN THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 57
and change. Tighten the wave, and tin-
gle becomes touch. It may be coinci-
dence, but that wave, the one that com-
municates touch, is just around the
rhythm of a heartbeat, a sort of essen-
tial bodily beat.”
The day wears on; Igor Spetic gets
a little sad. “I hate to go,” he says, paus-
ing in the doorway and looking back.
“When I leave this room, I leave my
hand behind.”
started thinking about how touch
I happens when something buzzed in
my pocket that wasn’t there. Some-
times we think we’re going crazy when
we’re actually in tune with our time
and in synch with our fellows. We go
to watch a high-fidelity, high-frame-
rate movie, think it looks eerily like a
local television news show from our
childhood, and discover that this is a
well-noted phenomenon, called the
“soap-opera effect.” We feel a strange
compulsion to leap off a high cliff, and
discover that it’s the high-place phe-
nomenon, and that, far from a death
wish, it may be a backward phenome-
non of self-recording: we come to the
edge, instantly retreat, and then our
brain explains our actions to us and
retrospectively reorders our memory to
believe that we must have actually been
thinking of jumping. And we see a
blue-and-black dress and think it’s
white and gold, and everybody else in
the country has the same problem.
Or we begin to get the jumps at
feeling a cell phone vibrate that isn’t
there. I’d feel a distinct, small buzzing,
would reach down and—nothing. I
thought maybe some nerve ending in
my thigh had become so habituated
to the vibration that it had gone into
permanent iPhone spasm. In fact, as
the neuroscientist David Linden ex-
plained to me, it involves a predictable
misread by something called a Pacin-
ian corpuscle.
“The phantom cell phone is such a
widespread thing,” Linden says. We
were speaking in his office at Johns
Hopkins University, in Baltimore. “I
think something like ninety per cent
of college students report it at one time
or another. Something else stimulates
the Pacinian—one of the sense recep-
tors in your thigh—and the skin says,
‘Oh, it must be that damn cell phone
58 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
LITTLE RED CORVETTE
When You Were Mine
Nothing passed us by. Baby,
you’re much too fast. In 1990
we had us an early 80s party—
nostalgic already,
I dug out my best
OPs & two polos, fluorescent,
worn simultaneously—
collar up, pretend preppy.
When Blondie came on—
Rapture, be pure—
things really got going & then
the dancing got shut down
by some square.
What was sleep even for?
again!’ It’s a nice example of how our as busy, body-sensing organs. We see
entire skin is a sensing, guessing, logic- our skins as hides hung around our
seeking organ of perception, a blanket inner life, when, in so many ways, they
with a brain in every micro-inch. So are the inner life, pushed outside.
any vibration near the pocket, and the “More papers have been published
system organizes it in advance, and in- on the molecular and cellular basis of
terprets it as the buzz of your phone.” touch in the past decade than in the
Linden’s original research involves past century,” Linden says. “Over the
glow-in-the-dark neurons in mouse past fifty years, there have been prob-
brains—he manipulates the mouse’s ably a hundred papers about vision
DNA, allowing its neural pathways to for every paper about touch in the
shine under blue light like psychedelic scientific literature. Part of that is that
poster patterns—but he has written at vision is more accessible to our expe-
length about the science of touch and rience. People go blind often. But al-
has become widely expert in the field. most no one is touch-blind—the fact
For Linden, it is where the tingle is. that you have to say ‘touch-blind’ is
Only recently has brain science fully a hint of the problem. Being touch-
grasped that skin and touch are as rich blind isn’t compatible with life. There
and paradoxical as any other part of are no national foundations for the
our humanity. Touch is the unsung hard-of-touch.”
sense—the one that we depend on most David Ginty, a neuroscientist at
and talk about least. We know the il- Harvard Medical School who studies
lusions that our eyes or ears can cre- the “low-threshold mechanosensory
ate. But our skin is capable of the same neurons” that allow our brains to in-
high ordering and the same deceptions. terpret touch, emphasizes the break-
It is as though we lived within a five- throughs in animal models that have
or six-foot-tall eye, an immense, en- led to what he calls a renaissance in
closing ear, with all an eye or ear’s il- touch science. “For the basic research,
lusions, blind spots, and habitual it was the conquest of mouse genet-
mistakes. We are so used to living within ics,” he says. “Rodents as animal mod-
our skins that we allow them to intro- els have come of age, and our ability
duce themselves as neutral envelopes, to bring modern molecular-genetic
capable of excitation at the extremities approaches to age-old questions on
(and at extreme moments), rather than somatic sensation is now incredibly

Housequake
What was sleep even for?
The year before, a freshman, I threw
a Prince party, re-screwed
the lights red & blue—
the room all purple, people
dancing everywhere—clicked
PLAY on the cassette till
we slow-sweated to “Erotic
City” or “Do Me Baby.” I’m going down
to Alphabet Street. Did anyone
sleep alone that night? “I Feel
For You.” Shut up already, damn—
cabbage patch, reverse running man—
get some life wherever you can.
—Kevin Young
powerful.” He goes on to explain how loving caress—and other kinds, like a
mouse genes allow us to explain human threatening or a clinical grope, involves
touch: “We can turn an itch system off two different sensing systems working
or turn it on. We’re interested in the in close concert.
sensory neurons that innervate the skin. Still more strikingly “specific” work
And we try to make sense of the com- is being done, down the hall from Lin-
plexity: Why are there so many kinds den’s office, by another Hopkins neu-
of sensory neurons? What do they do? roscientist, Xinzhong Dong. Dong is
How are they integrated to give rise to the Einstein of itch, the scientist who
the perception of a touch?” established that the itch system qual-
The world of tactile research is di- ifies as a labelled line, with dedicated
vided into a bewildering variety of neurons of its own. A native of China,
names and specialties—haptics, pros- he speaks a clipped, intense, and ami-
thetics, somatosensory studies, haptic able English. “People used to assume
feedback prosthetics, and on and on— that itch was just small pain, the lit-
but they all have in common the rela- tle brother of pain,” he says. “But not
tions between our skin and our sense so. It’s a separate system loaded by it-
of ourselves. Linden believes that, self. There’s a lot of debate about how
among all the new discoveries about itch and pain are coded in the sensory
touch and haptic sensation, the most neurons. A few years ago, we discov-
important are the least generalized. ered a group of cells that function as
Startlingly specific touch systems, or a specific itch receptor. And that was
“labelled lines,” as they are called, have a breakthrough.”
been identified. “Each time we study Dong bred mice whose gene for the
the touch system more deeply, we re- suspected receptor was turned off. But,
alize that it is more specialized than to test the itch system, a reliable means
we’d known,” Linden says. “These sys- of making mice itchy was required.
tems aren’t usefully understood just as “Many bodybuilders develop severe
different cognitive responses to the itch,” he said. “If you go online to body-
same stimuli—they’re completely builders’ sites, you can find a drug they
different integrated systems. There are take to prevent acid buildup. Without
separate labelled lines for so many muscle fatigue, they say it feels like a
seemingly intermingled systems.” The thousand mosquito bites! So we tried
difference between “affective” touch—a it in mice and they scratched very ro-
bustly. And the ones without the re-
ceptors become insensitive. So that
showed the receptor we found was the
right one. For itch we have very dedi-
cated behavior. It’s really cool. We in-
ject a chemical into a face. If it’s pain-
ful, the animals use a front paw to
gently rub it. If you inject an itchy sub-
stance, they use a hind leg to scratch.
Almost always animals use their hind
paw to scratch. So we can tell if they
are itchy or painful.”
In videos, you see the difference:
mice delicately pawing their faces in
mild pain; mice scratching fiercely at
an itch—two separate systems, turned
on and off like porch lights. Even more,
the experiments suggest an odd asym-
metry between the two systems. You
can trade pain for itch, Dong points
out: that’s why mice and men both
scratch. But it won’t work the other
way around: you can pain your itch,
but you can’t itch your pain. A signa-
ture of itch is that it’s specific to the
skin. Your bones can ache, but they
can’t itch. In still one more experiment,
Dong made his itch-specific fibres fluo-
rescent. They appeared, as expected,
only in the skin.
Why should itch be so catchy? Why
should itch be, as it were, pre-installed
and so neatly differentiated from pain?
Several theories present themselves.
The most probable is that it arises from
the paramount adaptive need for ani-
mals to guard against parasites, which
are more likely to produce itch than
pain. If we put insect bites on a dimen-
sion measured in pain, they would not
register sufficiently or at all. There could
be survival value in being able, so to
speak, to tell a bug up the ass from a
pain in the rear.
ne strange thing about the un-
O sung sense is that it has no songs.
Every other sense has an art to go
with it: the eyes have art, the ears have
music, even the nose and the tongue
have perfume and gastronomy. But
we don’t train our hands to touch as
we train our eyes to look or our ears
to listen. Every now and again, some-
one comes up with a “touch museum”
or starts a program for the visually
handicapped to experience art through
their fingers. But such enterprises often
have a hopeful, doomed feeling to
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 59

UNINVENT THIS CARRIE BROWNSTEIN
call me crazy
hereby uninvent the conference call. That’s right,
I there is now no means by which six or twenty or—
God forbid—a hundred people can all meet and dis-
cuss a topic over the phone. Personally, I feel like that
brief sentence alone should be enough for anyone to
pause and think, Multiple people trying to speak at
once? That sounds unwieldy and inefficient. It is. But,
for those of you who need further convincing that we
can do away with conference calling, allow me to
explain.
Imagine this:
You are collaborating on a project with a group of
people who live in different cities or work in separate
spaces. In an e-mail, someone blithely suggests, “Let’s
set up a call.” Thirty to a thousand e-mails later, a day
and a time are established. We agree on Thursday at
9 A.M. P.S.T., noon E.S.T. Count on at least one person
to think that the meeting is at noon P.S.T. Get ready to
fill that person in later via a lengthy e-mail.
The conference-call details include a dial-in num-
ber followed by a PIN. The PIN is too long to memo-
rize. (Wait, I just got a text message from the orga-
nizer: that pin isn’t working, here’s a new one.) Once
you enter your pin, you are prompted to state your
name, and then to press the pound key. This is the audio
version of your passport photo. Your name will never
60 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
sound worse. I have entered the conversation as Rrie.
Ephen, Ob, Nfer, Sbrfmewnlkk, and RICK!!!! have en-
tered the call as well, but you don’t know that. So we are
forced to play the game of “Who do we have on?” For
a moment, this roll call is amusing, like the opening
credits of “The Brady Bunch”: “Hey, there you are! Here
I am!” Then we all realize how outdated that reference
feels, and the frisson of nostalgia-meets-novelty is re-
placed by a redundancy-induced ennui.
The head count is over, but we can’t get down to
business quite yet. First, we have to have a tangent
orgy. Voices tangle, it’s three on one, I can’t always tell
who’s who. Michael, or I think it’s Michael, notes that
Christine posted a picture from a Rihanna concert on
her Instagram. Was it good? That does sound like a
miserable Uber ride to the venue. Adam’s baby is how
old now? And Elizabeth is calling from her vacation
in Taos. OoooOooOoo. She’ll forward the name of
the restaurant later. There’s a quick update on the un-
seasonal weather. What’s seventy degrees in Celsius?
(Mark is in London.) Wait, did we lose Beth? She’s
texted Graham that she’ll try us back when she has
better reception. Should we wait for her? Let’s. O.K.,
so who watched “Empire” last night? Taraji P. Hen-
son is killing it.
A few of the fellow-conferencers are in a room to-
gether. They are gathered around a special speakerphone
that resembles the Star Trek insignia. I find this partic-
ularly egregious, because this plastic spaceship is pre-
tending to be a cool invention when it’s really just a land-
line phone in a Halloween costume.
We’re eight minutes into the call when Barb sug-
gests that we get started. I agree. Except that I can
barely hear what anyone is saying once we’re no lon-
ger speaking in clipped or stentorian phrases. There is
a hiss, a delay, and two people who sound like ailing
robots. Any ideas told at length are as distinct as a voice
mail from a friend who pocket-dialled you while sky-
diving. It is for these reasons that most people prefer
to be silent during the call, with their phones in speaker
mode and muted. This is a good time to shower, write
the word “Why?” on a notepad until the ink runs dry,
or organize your closet by color. Every once in a while,
I like to unmute and chime in with a “Yes,” “No,” or “I
agree.” About what, I have no idea.
A conference call is over when someone uses one of
the many conversational gaps, false starts, or “No, you
go” truces to suggest that perhaps for clarity we should
put our ideas in writing. As if to say, “Yeah, I guess flip-
flops weren’t a good choice for this 5K run.” Acknowl-
edging that we’ve engaged in the discourse equivalent
of a toddler’s squiggle drawing. Hinting that next time
we play Marco Polo we could try a swimming pool in-
JOON MO KANG
stead of the Indian Ocean.
Do you understand what I’m trying to say with these
analogies? Phew. Because if we were on a conference call
none of this would make any sense. 
them: they seem more willed than
wanted.
Is it possible that the absence of
tactile art is a mere accident of his-
tory? The historian Constance Clas-
sen reminds us that in the eighteenth
century touching the objects in proto-
museums—cabinets of curiosities and
amateur collections—was invited and
expected and even, in a way, compul-
sory. “When the underkeeper of the
Ashmolean in 1760 tried to prevent a
museum visitor from handling arti-
facts he was accused of incivility,” she
writes, in “The Book of Touch,” an
anthology of writings on the tactile.
The current reign of the optical mu-
seum—where all the objects are shut
away, even ones that demand to be
touched to be understood at all, like
scientific or musical instruments—is,
Classen shows, in “The Deepest Sense,”
a cultural history of touch, a recent
one, due to “the association of touch
with irrationality and primitivism.”
The museumgoer who touched was a
woman or a child; the patriarchs shut
things up in cases and then looked at
them imprisoned.
Of course, there may be more in-
surance than episteme in this change:
when ten people a week come to see
your Greek bust, letting them caress it
is one thing; when ten thousand come,
it is something else. And, indeed, one
of the ways in which the ten still dis-
tinguish themselves from the ten thou-
sand is that they are allowed to touch
the objects: seeing and handling art
objects out of their frames and cases
is one of the perks of becoming an art
professional. (Art pros will often, per-
haps unconsciously, talk or even brag
about handling a famous thing—“I saw
‘The Scream’ without its frame and
held it up!” “The Jasper Johns flash-
light was actually in my grasp and I
got a sense of its magic!”—to assert
their authority.)
In the absence of art, touch turns
easily to entertainment. The high-
water mark of the touch world can be
found at the haptics conferences that
fill the calendar of hapticians every-
where, most notably the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers’
annual Haptics Symposium, which this
spring was held at a hotel in down-
town Philadelphia, on a perfect April
weekend. Since the upper hall of the
hotel is eerily like a high-school gym,
one can get the impression of being at
a science fair to which only really smart
kids can submit projects. It helps the
effect that, haptics engineers being pro-
fessionally unpretentious, they custom-
arily refer to their innovations as “in-
credibly cool,” as in “Did you see the
locating device they developed at
M.I.T.? It ’s incredibly cool!” An
I.E.E.E. haptics fair is exactly what
Ben Franklin would have dreamed of
for American science—practical-
minded, eccentric, and, as with bifo-
cals, solving problems that one was not
entirely aware were problems until an
inventor found a solution to them.
The crowd includes the usual engi-
neering types—Midwesterners, Asian-
Americans, Asians from Asia—and, in
a historically male-dominated disci-
pline, a surprising number of women.
There are also numerous special visi-
tors from Apple and Google, extremely
anxious about saying too much about
what, exactly, they’re looking for, the
wrong word likely both to spill the
beans to the competition and to boost
undue speculation about somebody’s
startup. The air crackles with the dis-
tinctive combination of altruism and
entrepreneurialism which governs the
tech world.
Many and cool are the devices on
offer: a “Novel Vibrotactile Feedback
Assisted Mid Air Writing device”; a
“New Wearable Fingertip Haptic In-
terface for the Rendering
of Virtual Shapes and Sur-
face Features.” And here is
the Animotus, designed by
Adam Spiers, of Yale, and
intended “to communicate
proximity and heading to
navigational targets”; it’s a
small white two-story cube
that sits innocently in your
hand, willfully changing
shape as—Wi-Fi’d or Bluetoothed to
a G.P.S. system—it nudges and pushes
you in the right direction down streets
and around corners and up alleys, lead-
ing you with silent efficiency to what-
ever destination you have entered. It is
like having a tiny guide dog in the cen-
ter of your hand, nudging your palm
with his tongue. (Eventually, it might
be connected to an obstacle-spotter, so
that it actually could replace those guide
dogs for the blind.) Another new hap-
tic device allows for long-distance
Swedish massage; created by a team of
Mexican engineers, it allows the mas-
seuse to simply wave her hands over a
motion sensor, which reproduces the
precise sensitivities of her touch on
the back of a patient lying on a pin-
point-tuned motion-sensor pad. Swe-
dish masseuses would no longer have
to leave Sweden; they could stay in
Stockholm and e-mail massages any-
where in the world.
The attendees like to assure you,
and one another, that it is only in the
past few years that they have really put
the happy in haptics. The haptics de-
vices that most of us are familiar with
are the simple ones that make a con-
troller vibrate when the assassin is killed
in Assassin’s Creed or the defenseman
crunches a forward in NHL 16. The
new generation of haptics-makers tend
to be a little embarrassed by these prim-
itive devices, which they have been
known to refer to as “joy buzzers” or
even “whoopee cushions,” in compar-
ison with the new generation of hap-
tics. A standard trope in an I.E.E.E.
demo is to place the old trembly tech-
nology beside the new, sleek and per-
suasive full-range touch illusion.
William Provancher, formerly a
professor of mechanical engineering
at the University of Utah, now runs a
startup called Tactical Haptics, and
had the hit demo of the conference.
He can create astonishing
touch illusions using sim-
ple gaming controls. With
the HTC Vive—those
virtual-reality goggles—
he conjures a vast, empty
white skin of space, stretch-
ing out to every horizon.
Life-size zombies come at
you from zombie-style
holes that expand within
the white sheets, like the resurrected
dead in Signorelli’s painting of the Last
Judgment. Armed only with a bow and
arrow—though what you are actually
clutching is a controller with a trigger,
shaped more or less like a gas-pump
nozzle—you can feel the tension on
your virtual bow as you release the arrow,
and then the flutter of the arrow and
the thunk of the ground trembling when
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 61

“It’s a new service from Amazon. It sends you something every
day and if you don’t like it you just send it back.”
• •
the arrow strikes an onrushing zom-
bie and he falls.
Heather Culbertson, now a postdoc
at Stanford, worked at Penn in its fa-
mous GRASP lab—the acronym stands
for General Robotics, Automation,
Sensing, and Perception—and she has
returned to Philadelphia to show off
her own invention. It is a haptic sys-
tem that can create the illusion of a
hundred distinct textures when you
hold it and drag it against a neutral
surface. Metal mesh, metal shelving,
sandpaper, linoleum, bubble wrap, card-
board, coffee filter, painted brick: hold-
ing a pen-shaped utensil in your right
hand, you touch the desired texture’s
name and then drag the utensil across
a countertop, say, and in your fingers
you feel exactly the sensation that
you would feel if the tool were being
dragged across the material you speci-
fied. You feel wood; you feel brick; you
feel paper. More astonishing, the vir-
tual textures change in feeling, as real
ones do, depending on the force and
speed with which you move the tool
across them.
The Queen of Haptics is Kather-
ine J. Kuchenbecker, the brilliant Stan-
ford-trained engineer who oversees the
haptics group at the GRASP lab and su-
pervised Culbertson’s work. The daugh-
ter of a developmental psychologist—
62 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
and, one is not surprised to learn, a
member of the Stanford volleyball team
that twice won N.C.A.A. titles—she
recognizes the gratifyingly large num-
ber of women engineers in haptics. (It
was Kuchenbecker who trained Cul-
bertson, then passed her on to her own
supervisor, the formidable Allison
Okamura, at Stanford.) She is under-
standably reluctant to say that women
study feelings better because they have
more of them than men, but then she
more or less says it. “We have a long
tradition of women as team leaders in
haptics,” she volunteers—the founder
of the GRASP lab is a legendary robot-
icist named Ruzena Bajcsy—“and I
think it’s fair to say that women are
drawn to areas of engineering with ob-
vious human interface. Places where
what you’re doing obviously reaches
people, touches them, you might say.”
She likes the potential of haptic de-
vices to serve both pros and amateurs.
Heather Culbertson’s tool allows de-
signers to choose fabrics at a distance
and someone searching for clothes on-
line to feel the linen of a summer shirt
while sitting at her computer. “What
Heather and I did was to take a hap-
tic camera—a touch-based camera—
and a swatch of material, and record
ten seconds of interaction, dragging
the tool back and forth, fast and then
slow, light and then heavy,” she explains.
“But the key to creating a compelling
illusion that you’re touching a real ob-
ject is that the sensations you feel match
all the motions that you make. So we
cut that recording up into tiny pieces,
fifty milliseconds or a hundred milli-
seconds of touch, so that we got the
minute details right—exactly what you
felt on canvas when you moved fast
but pushed lightly, and the next time,
when you were going slower but push-
ing harder.” The illusion of texture
arises when the vibration pattern is
played back. The sensing stylus you
hold, which resembles a very fat ball-
point pen with a cable attached to its
rump, transmits patterned vibrations
to your fingers. In a way, it’s something
like the needle in the groove of an
old-fashioned vinyl album, only it plays
back into your fingers rather than into
your ears. “When you change how hard
you are pressing or how fast you are
moving, the spectrum of the vibration
waveform changes to match the spec-
tral changes we measured during the
original data recording,” Kuchenbecker
says. “It’s like recording a certain nat-
ural sound, like a waterfall, and then
being able to generate a synthetic sound
that sounds the same but goes on for-
ever and never repeats, so it’s not just
a looped recording. The trick is that
we constantly change the properties of
the waveform to match the explora-
tion conditions, like adjusting how fast
the waterfall seems to be flowing. And
it creates a fluid, moving, three-dimen-
sional illusion of texture.” Choose your
texture, drag the tool across nothing,
and you feel touch plus time, which is
all that texture is.
ressure is tone, and texture mel-
P ody, but touch presses itself on us
most urgently at the extremities, in the
experience of pain and of sexual plea-
sure. In phantom pain, limbs and ap-
pendages that no longer exist continue
to feel and even to suffer. In sexual
touching, as distinct from the affective
kind, touch seems driven toward ne-
cessity. Both are forms of hyperbolized
touch, making more of the stimulation
than the stimulation alone would sug-
gest was plausible.
Igor Spetic, in Cleveland, suffered
after his amputation from extreme,
persistent pain, which he felt perma- child because of it. It’s not that the its own, as though there were a hun-
nently emanating from the hand he no soldier doesn’t feel the wound, or the dred things to hear and one that must
longer had. “It was unbearable, twen- mother the labor; but they reorganize be listened to. Yet while we tend, ex-
ty-four seven, as though my hand were their experience to suit their situation. perientially, to separate sexuality from
in a clamp,” he says. Since the last thing It is one reason that, as has often been other forms of touching—or at least
he vaguely recalls about his accident is pointed out, those who suffer even men do, seeing sex not as a blossom
his hand clutched in a vise as he reached from debilitating neuropathic pain from the world of the tactile but as a
out toward the mechanical press that often lead satisfying lives, while those thing unto itself—sexual touch seems,
crushed it, it seems that his mind had who are born unable to feel pain usu- in the realm of neurophysiology, curi-
continued to feel that final moment, ally die young. We can retune the ously unspecified.
like a clanging bell that is the last thing warning system; we can’t live without “You’d think this would be a real
remembered, and still heard on his hos- one. Pain is, of course, a critical part obvious thing, with conferences about
pital bed, by the victim of a train acci- of the new science of touch: most of it,” David Linden says. “But there
dent. His hand is so much there from the money for projects like Dustin seems to be nothing special about the
the brain’s point of view that the brain Tyler’s comes from a research arm of sexual skin. We’ve got this nerve end-
may be creating the pain it thinks the the Department of Defense, and the ing we’ve looked at and we don’t know
hand ought to be feeling, the last tac- Department of Defense has invested if it’s involved in sexual sensation.
tile sensation it can recall. tens of millions of dollars in sensing There are a lot of them in the clito-
This kind of phantom pain in am- prosthetics because so many soldiers ris and a lot in the glans penis, at the
putated limbs is a widely observed came back from Iraq and Afghani- highest density where most men re-
phenomenon, but for a long time it stan missing arms and legs—having port the strongest sexual sensations.
was thought to be a response to trauma survived injuries that in earlier wars But that’s not proof.” It has long been
of the “cauterized” nerves in the re- would have left them dead. established that on the somatosen-
sidual limb. One of the things that Most touch acts are surreptitious or sory cortex—the “map” that exists in
Dustin Tyler’s project in Cleveland subconscious or quietly social, but sex- the brain, relating specific areas of the
has helped confirm is that it is also a ual touching is sought, specific, pointed cortex to specific places on the skin—
cognitive phenomenon, placed much in desire, and enormous in consequence. the genitalia are represented both in
“higher up” in the system. After the It is, in its way, phantom pleasure—an their expected place (around the lower
sensors in Spetic’s arm were stimu- experience so discontinuous with other trunk and upper leg) and then again
lated, his pain diminished, and then feelings that one expects it to be not below the leg, around the feet and
vanished. Reassured that the hand had merely a labelled but a licensed line of toes. This may help explain why, as
moved on, that the trauma had passed
and was no longer in need of response,
the brain released it from the emer-
gency state of feeling pain. Tyler thinks
that, given the extraordinary cost of
supplying his prosthetic hand to am-
putees—the eventual cost of the op-
eration and the equipment, if it ever
becomes widely available, would prob-
ably reach tens of thousands of dol-
lars—its brightest future may lie ex-
actly in this kind of therapeutic use
for patients with extreme neuropathic
and phantom pain. The stim can heal.
In a similar way, even normal pain
has turned out to be intricately story-
driven. The severity of pain, as Ron-
ald Melzack, of McGill University,
and his students showed many years
ago, varies dramatically according to
the context it takes place in: soldiers
getting wounds on battlefields which
can send them home from the war are
numb and happy; women in child-
birth—an off-the-charts agony, mea-
sured by any objective standard—report
it afterward as painful but productive
work, and rarely refuse to have another “How we doing on those commandments?”
one student of sexual fetishism re-
ports, “in search data there were 93,885
sexual searches for feet and only 5,831
sexual searches for hands.”
“And then there are small mean-
ingful oddities,” Linden goes on. “There
are people who have orgasm syndrome.
They’re like what we call pain asym-
bolics—people who lose the emotional
content of pain. You hit them with a
hammer, and they know they’ve been
hit, but it doesn’t trouble them. The
same thing is true of pleasure—we
think of orgasm as intrinsically plea-
surable. But you can have an orgasm
that is more convulsive than compel-
ling. All the same things happen on
the periphery—rhythmic contractions
of the rectum and so on. But it doesn’t
feel like much more than a sneeze.
What are they missing?” A favorite
case in the literature is that of a woman
who would get a seizure every time
she brushed her teeth—the seizures
are probably triggered by the repeti-
tive physical activity—and then the
seizure would provoke an orgasm. The
steady regimen of tooth-brushing or-
gasms was exhausting, rather than ex-
alting, and led to an unusual morning
dilemma: to brush or not to brush.
Among ordinary people, though,
the two touch systems that seem most
“Then the messenger shouldn’t have been such a jerk.”
automatic and involuntary, relating to
hurting and wanting, turn out to be
among the most socially embedded.
Pain is not a shared illusion, and sex is
not a cultural condition: cut yourself
with a carving knife and it will hurt no
matter what company you’re in; an or-
gasm felt like an orgasm to Cleopatra
as to a Meg Ryan character. But both
are surprisingly dependent on our ideas
about what they ought to be like. Itch
passes through our bodies in direct cur-
rents, as if from ancient history; sex
and pain enter our lives communally,
loaded with the local news.
And so if the acceptable frontier of
haptic technology is virtual-reality gam-
ing, the unspoken but quietly recog-
nized frontier is romantic. There is al-
ready a “hug shirt” that can transmit
touch from sender to wearer. It was de-
signed by Ryan Genz and Francesca
Rosella, of the London fashion firm
Cutecircuit, who decided, more than a
decade ago, that touch was the miss-
ing link in modern talk: “We can trans-
mit voice, we can transmit images—
but we couldn’t transmit touch,” Ryan
Genz says. Originally made as a sort
of giant blood-pressure cuff, constrict-
ing and releasing the wearer in haptic
harmony with another wearer, the shirt
proved alarming, and now one hug shirt
merely vibrates in long-range synch
with another. The first transatlantic
hug happened during a conference in
2006, and still longer, fiercer hugs can
be imagined. (The newest designs in-
clude L.E.D. elements, so that the trace
of the embrace lights up.) The hug
shirt’s love children are almost too ob-
vious to be enumerated. “The only log-
ical advancement in haptics is to full-on
virtual sex,” the sex-tech journalist
Emma McGowan writes. “Full-body
haptic suits are no longer a far-fetched
sci-fi nerd’s dream.” Haptics engineers
chat about allowing virtual sex with
fictional characters or famous celebrities.
At that point, haptics crosses over not
just into erotics but into accessories. As
the Canadian researcher Meredith Chiv-
ers points out, however, there is a de-
monstrable disconnect between what
women, at least, respond to physically
and what they self-report as provoca-
tive. When it comes to sex, the science
of touch confirms that stories, more
than sensations, are what stir us. A sto-
ry-making machine is more likely than
a haptic suit to turn us on, as has been
the rule of the erotic life of touch since
it began.
very haptic application, once
E its cool stuff is demonstrated, is
followed by a sober explication from
its maker on its four potential uses, al-
ways offered in descending order of
piety: medicine, prostheses, commerce,
and gaming. A haptic device might
help you operate on a prostate, add
touch sensitivity to an artificial hand,
allow you to assess the fabric on an on-
line shirt, or make you feel the trigger
pressure when you shoot at zombies in
a virtual-reality game.
But the real apotheosis of the en-
terprise will be achieved when artifi-
cial haptic intelligence is successfully
modelled in robots. As the long-stand-
ing dream of the artificial-intelligence
community was to make a computer
that could defeat a chess master, it is
the dream of the robotics community
to make, by 2050, a humanoid-robotic
team that can defeat the World Cup
soccer champions. Kuchenbecker says,
smiling, “It’s our BHAG”—the Big Hairy
Audacious Goal.
For her, the core discovery of the
past decade’s research in touch is that
skin-smart is as smart as any other kind
of smart. She talked about this in the
GRASP lab, while showing off a Da Vinci,
a robotlike surgical system. The Da
Vinci—a grinning panoply of robotic
arms and sharp tiny tools, like the tor-
ture device in a Bond film—can oper-
ate internally and make incisions with
a precision that no human surgeon can
hope to have. Although temporarily
down for repairs, the Da Vinci bears a
sign warning visitors to keep clear of
it: “Do Not Touch. Testing Is in Prog-
ress. Robot Is Active.” Though down,
it is apparently far from out, and not
to be trifled with. Nearby, a second,
chubbier robot, designed to have more
cushioned arms and less lethal swing-
back, keeps it consoling company. Both
reside in a room devoted to robots;
nearby are several knee-high would-be
soccer players on an undersized soccer “Ain’t no drab plumage at closing time.”
field. They will, in principle, be scaled
up one day, as they are perfected to
meet the BHAG. (For the moment, they
• •
tend to fall over and lose their heads
when trying to recover the ball and ing it land in the right place in an un- of a continuous self—may be a conve-
kick it accurately in one move.) controlled environment—that’s hard. nient fiction, an organized cognitive
Kuchenbecker’s goal is to provide Haptic intelligence is an almost irre- heuristic that we impose on experience
robots with more than mere mechan- producible miracle! Because people are to let us go on having it.
ical expertise. She wants them to have so good at that, they don’t appreciate When somatic illusions strike, in
“haptic responsiveness,” so that the sur- it. Machines are good at finding the other words, they strike our very sense
geon operating the robot can feel in next move, but moving in the world of who we are. It is possible, by tap-
her own hands the bounce or flab of still baffles them.” ping at sequential spots on the skin, to
an internal muscle, or palpate a liver create the illusion of intermediate taps
from long distance. Ultimately, that in- he study of haptic intelligence between them, as though a rabbit were
telligence could be infused in the robot T leads to even deeper questions hopping down our arm. The so-called
itself, so that it would need no human about the somatic self. Our skin is us “cutaneous rabbit,” whose paws we feel
to control it. because it draws a line around our ex- strongly, can even be made to hop out
“Haptic intelligence is vital to human istence: we experience the world as our- of the body and leap onto a stick held
intelligence,” she concludes. “It’s not self. We can separate ourself from our by a subject. (The stick shakes, or so
just dexterity. It’s finding your way in eyes and ears, recognize the informa- the subject feels, as though the rabbit
the world: it’s embodiment, emotion, tion they give us as information, but had jumped on it.) The rabbit is just
attack. Haptic intelligence is human our tactile and proprioceptive halos us, leaping out of our own skin.
intelligence. We’re just so smart with supply us with the sense that we are In another way, it is increasingly
it that we don’t know it yet. It’s actu- constant selves. possible to imagine oneself as being
ally much harder to make a chess piece There are rare conditions in which discontinuous with one’s skin. Igor
move correctly—to pick up the piece you come to believe that while, say, the Spetic feels something like this when
and move it across the board and put right half of your body is you being he leaves his hand behind. “Think about
it down properly—than it is to make yourself, the left half of your body is it,” Dustin Tyler says. “There’s no real
the right chess move.” She adds, slyly, someone else’s—some uncomfortably constraint on how far in space the con-
“When I took A.I. as a student, I was close-talking, peering stranger you nection could go. You could be sitting
so dismayed to find that most A.I. is would like to get away from. Out-of- here in Cleveland and performing sur-
just stupid brute force, just running body experiences are related to these gery in Tahiti, and actually feel the flesh
through the possibilities a machine can illusions, and they are probably key and organs of your patient. Actually
look at quickly. Computer chess looks both to religious experience and to tales feel them. For that matter, you could
intelligent, but it’s under-the-hood stu- of alien abductions. The possibility of text-message a handshake to a friend.”
pid. Reaching and elegantly picking up such illusions suggests that their op- Even a visitor, playing with Spetic’s
the right chess piece fluidly and hav- posite—our agreed-on coherent sense virtual hand, without the added bonus
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 65
of the “stim” that enables him to feel
the surface shapes of nonexistent ob-
jects, can find the experience of solv-
ing problems so intense that he feels
that his hand, too, is in there, on a
screen, inside a box. You are here; your
hand is six feet away. The philosopher
Daniel Dennett, playing with this idea,
came up with a thought experiment in
which one’s brain sits in a vat in Texas
while artificial, remote-controlled hands
and eyes and limbs engage at its direc-
tion from Oklahoma. The essay he
wrote about this thought experiment
was titled, simply, “Where Am I?” For
the first time, this fantasy is becoming
readily imaginable in the real world: in
a sense, Spetic’s hand is left in the lab
on the weekend. A bit of him is there.
t can sometimes seem as if the
I world of thinking about touch were
divided into that of philosophers and
students of culture who study the “phe-
nomenology” of sensing, and that of
the scientists and engineers who study
its mechanics, with an abyss of under-
standing between them. In the in-
troduction to “The Book of Touch,”
Constance Classen explains that the an-
thology “does not offer any scientific
information about touch,” because “at-
tempts to explain tactile culture through
scientific models tell more about the
culture of science than about the sci-
entific basis of culture.” The human-
ists are certain that what the scientists
are doing is really cultural studies that
don’t yet know themselves.
One of the few “multilinguals” in the
field—someone equally at home with
neuroscience and with phenomenol-
ogy, with the language of data and with
the talk of daily human experience—is
Dacher Keltner. A professor of psychol-
ogy at Berkeley, he is a specialist in the
science of emotions; he was the scien-
tific adviser on Pixar’s “Inside Out,” the
movie about the inner life of a little girl.
I dropped him a line one Sunday morn-
ing, and discovered that, serendipitously,
he was in New York that day. He sug-
gested that I meet him that very after-
noon, in Washington Square Park, where
he was “going to spend some time watch-
ing people be embodied.”
I found Keltner, calm and inquisi-
tive, observing the world from a park
bench. He looks like a Pixar version of
66 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
the emotion of Benevolence: graying
blond hair, worn long and parted in
the middle, a serene smile always on
his lips, and creased eyes suggesting
perpetual, hope-filled curiosity mixed
with wisdom. He explained that he
likes to come out and watch emotions
becoming embodied, by which he
means seeing all the ways in which
people take on the poses of their feel-
ings, with the additional twist that he
thinks, in effect, that the poses come
first. In his view, touch is the primary
moral experience: it is morality as we
experience it in the first instance in the
actual world. The thoughts come after-
ward to administer the thing. “Touch
is the first system to come online, and
the foundations of human relationships
are all touch,” he says. “Skin to skin,
parent to child, touch is the social lan-
guage of our social life. It lays a basis
for embodiment in feeling.”
Keltner has the power, shared by true
students of a science, to make one see
with his eyes: looking out across the
panoply of human interaction in the
sunlit square, one sees at once how much
depends on skin and near-skin encoun-
ters: dating couples lean forward, hair
brushes and fingertips touch; children
bump as they play, not too hard and
then hard enough to be warning and
instructing; chess players off in their
corner imply tentativeness, certainty,
triumph, and mid-game anxiety by the
sureness or the uncertainty with which
they grasp and move their pieces.
“The foundation of human relation-
ships is all touch,” Keltner goes on. “There
are four years of touch exchanged be-
tween mother and baby. Among pri-
mates, the sense of reciprocal altruism
emerges from food sharing, and they are
always systemically touching each other
as they share food. Reciprocity is tactile.
Aggression is tactile. Sex is tactile. It’s
the root moral precept of our sense of
common humanity. In the social realm,
our social awareness is profoundly tac-
tile.” Keltner was one of the co-authors
of a much talked of study that encoded
twelve distinct kinds of “celebratory
touches” among pro basketball players,
including “fist bumps, high-fives, chest
bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest
punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives,
high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team
huddles.” They discovered that teams
whose players touched one another a lot
did better than those whose players didn’t.
Touch lowers stress, builds morale, and
produces triumphs—a chest bump in-
structs us in coöperation, a half-hug in
compassion.
Keltner’s approach to touch turns on
the deeper idea that consciousness itself
is “exteriorized”—that we are alive in re-
lation to others, not in relation to some
imagined inner self, the homunculus in
our heads. Our bodies are membranes
in the world, with sensation and mean-
ing passing seamlessly through them.
Our experience of our bodies—the things
they feel, the moves they make, and the
textures and the people they touch—is
our primary experience of our minds.
“The brain is just simply part of our bod-
ies” is how the philosopher Alva Noë
often puts it. The truer cartoon, in a sense,
would be “Outside In,” with the emo-
tions produced by people bumping
against one another. A key to being em-
bodied in this way is tactile experience—
what we touch, whom we touch, how
many we touch, and why we find them
touching. Grasping, hugging, striking,
playing, caressing, reaching, scratching
backs, and rubbing rears: these are not
primitive forms of communication. They
are the fabric of being conscious. The
work of the world is done by handling
it. We live by feel.
Later, in a café near the square, Kelt-
ner has a cappuccino and, sitting at the
counter, watches the variety of human
touch as it reveals itself in that unend-
ing theatre: fingers flying on the key-
board, hands darting out to make a point,
heads turning to underline a joke, bod-
ies slouching and primping and jostling
and soliciting attention. An intensity of
feeling combines, in our tactile lives,
with a plurality of kinds.
Perhaps the reason that touch has
no art form is that its supremacy makes
it hard to escape. We can shut our eyes
and cover our ears, but it’s our hands
that do it when we do. We can’t shut
off our skins. It is the obscurity of the
other senses that makes us enliven them
with art: touch is too important to be
elaborated or distilled. It just is. What
we see we long for; what we hear we
interpret; what we touch we are. The
art we aspire to is a remote sensation,
always out of reach. Life is the itch we
are still trying to scratch. 

UNINVENT THIS LEE CHILD
telling tales
he other day I saw my father, who is ninety-two
T years old, and in very poor health. Physically, he’s a
wreck, and mentally he’s not much better. At his peak,
he was a capable and intelligent man, by nature rational
to the point of coldness. But the other day he was full
of childlike fear of the darkness that lay ahead. He’s re-
ligious, in an austere way. So I knew what he meant.
“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “You’re a good man, and you
lived a good life.” In fact, neither thing was true. But
what else could I say? I’m sure he said the same to his
own father, for the same reasons, and with the same res-
ervations. Don’t we all?
Ten thousand fathers ago, we would have said noth-
ing, because we didn’t yet have language. We didn’t yet
have much of anything. A passing U.F.O. would have
written us off as a certain dead end. Our contemporary
competitors, the Neanderthals, would have got the nod.
We were weak and slender, and often sickly, and shabby
toolmakers. Then we developed language, and everything
changed. We had grammar and syntax, which turned out
to be the best tools of all. Now we could plan, and dis-
cuss, and theorize, and speculate. We could coördinate
ahead of time, with a plan B and a plan C already in
JOON MO KANG
place. A coöperative pack of early humans was suddenly
the most powerful animal on Earth. So that if the U.F.O.
came back today it would have to admit that its first im-
pressions were wrong.
But along the way something extraordinary happened.
At first, we prospered by planning and speculating based
on what we knew to be true, or could reasonably and re-
sponsibly infer to be true. In other words, we lived in a
nonfiction world. We still do, in every practical way. My
wife might tell me that her phone says it’s going to rain,
so I should take my umbrella, and every step of that
transaction would be meaningless without the funda-
mental assumption of truth. Most of life is like that. It’s
a great strategy. Ten thousand generations ago, our bones
were piled high in hyenas’ dens. Now Voyager has left
the solar system. Or not, depending on how you—rea-
sonably and responsibly—interpret the Oort Cloud. These
are the things we talk about, and this is how we talk
about them.
At some point, though, we invented a parallel option.
We invented fiction. We started talking about things
that hadn’t happened to people who didn’t exist. Why?
Not for entertainment during our leisure time. We were
still deep in prehistory. We had no leisure time. Every-
thing was a desperate struggle for survival. We did noth-
ing unless it had a chance of keeping us alive until
morning. Fiction evolved for a purpose. Warnings and
cautionary tales could be sourced from the grim nonfic-
tion world. A sabre-toothed tiger will kill you. O.K.,
got it. Fiction pushed the pendulum the other way. It
inspired, and empowered, and emboldened. It said, No,
actually, there was a guy, a friend of a friend, who came
face to face with a sabre-toothed tiger, a huge one, and
he turned and outran it, all the way back to the cave,
safe as can be. So don’t panic. It doesn’t always turn out
bad. Then, perhaps a hundred generations later, the story
evolved, and the friend of the friend killed the tiger. The
action hero was born. Strength and courage would save
us. And it worked. Fiction in its various forms proved
just as powerful to our survival as any other factor. Some
would say more powerful. Some would name us not
Homo sapiens but Pan narrans: the storytelling ape. Would
Voyager be leaving the solar system if we hadn’t long
ago formalized and mythologized our inchoate desire
to wander?
But the bad things would not be happening, either.
Every bad thing depends on the same two components
as every good thing: people prepared to lie, and other
people prepared to believe them. The habit of credulity,
bred into us, albeit inspiring and empowering and em-
boldening, has led to some very bad outcomes through-
out what we know of our history. From small things, like
a father believing a son, to much larger things, like a bil-
lion miserable and terrified dead. All balanced against
the good things. Is it fifty-fifty? Or worse than that? And
what about babies and bathwater? Could we give up the
stunning joy that the good side of storytelling brings in
order to erase the appalling horrors of the bad side?
Where does the balance lie?
It’s ironic, given my profession, but the more I learn
the more I would uninvent fiction. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 67

How a Dutch landscape architect is reinventing the park.
he landscape architect
T Adriaan Geuze hopped onto
the grass, cupping his hands to
his ears. “You can hear a million in-
sects,” he said, in his vowelly Dutch
accent. “You think, Wow, you are in the
jungle.” I heard crickets, birds, a pass-
ing jet. Purple and yellow wildflowers
crowded the edges of the asphalt path
where I was standing, which was dra-
matically lined with snow-white con-
crete. Not quite a jungle, but it was
hard to believe that we were seven min-
utes from lower Manhattan, deposited
by ferry on Governors Island.
The island has shimmered with ar-
chitectural possibility since being sold
back to the people of New York for a
dollar, in 2003. Now, because of Geuze,
when you pass from the island’s his-
toric district through a vaulted arch-
way in Liggett Hall, a former Army
barracks designed by McKim, Mead &
White, you shift more than a century
in sensibility. On one side, there are
gracious officers’ homes with porches.
On the other, a curved, man-made land-
scape rolls out in front of you, like a
living map. Ten years ago, the view
would have looked very different: as
flat as a pancake, and dotted with der-
elict Coast Guard buildings, including
a salty Burger King. A visitor in 2016
finds four paths outlined in thick white
concrete curbs that rise and fall from
ground level to seating height, like a
topographic doodle. Signs point to a
lawn, hammocks, and what you are re-
ally here to see: the Hills, New York’s
newest peaks, crowning a forty-acre
park.
The curbs are brilliant in the sun,
as smooth as marble. An aqueous pat-
tern has been lightly pressed into them,
suggesting the wash of tide, frozen in
place. They are irresistible in the man-
ner of the yellow brick road, a red car-
pet, a lighted runway: your eye leaps
ahead, and your body has to follow.
68 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
PROFILES
PLAY GROUND
BY ALEXANDRA LANGE
Geuze pressed pause just at the point
where the surrounding cityscape of
New York disappears and the rise of
the park encloses a visitor. In holding
you here, between the city and the
peaks, Geuze delays the big reveal, fo-
cussing attention on the curtain, on the
way that the landscape architecture has
embroidered the ground beneath your
feet. Then he draws the curtain back
to show a star that needs no introduc-
tion: as a visitor strolls down the path,
the Hills part to reveal the Statue of
Liberty.
“We wanted to manipulate the eye
to create suspense,” Geuze said, of his
design team, “so you have a craving to
see the statue—and then you see her.”
From the top of what’s called Outlook
Hill, you can gaze across the harbor to
Liberty Island. “We expect people will
take a selfie there,” Geuze said. Then,
after updating your Instagram, you can
turn for a three-hundred-and-sixty-
degree view of Staten Island, the Ver-
razano Narrows, the Brooklyn Bridge,
lower Manhattan, Jersey City. “It is like
the Bosporus, or the Table Mountain,
in Cape Town. The beach of Rio,”
Geuze said of the view. “All these cur-
rents, they come together, and there’s
granite rocks, the great estuary. Every
civilization would like to leave foot-
prints here. When I first read about
Governors Island, I thought, This is
the coolest spot on the planet.”
If the High Line provides an ele-
vated perspective on the industrial city-
scape, the new geography of Gover-
nors Island offers one for the bay. In
addition to Outlook Hill, there is Dis-
covery Hill, to the south, which will
be more heavily wooded, the better to
cloak a new, site-specific sculpture by
the British artist Rachel Whiteread.
Kids will surely scramble up and down
Outlook’s set of giant steps, made with
granite blocks recycled from the is-
land’s partly dismantled seawall, and
head toward Slide Hill, to the east,
whose forty-nine-foot slide terrifies
adults. Grassy Hill, to the north, has a
twenty-five-foot roll that looks ordi-
nary by comparison—the greensward
is intended for picnics and play—but
it is still visionary, conjured from a com-
bination of landfill, demolished Coast
Guard buildings, and a carefully cali-
brated soil recipe. As of July 19th, this
landscape will be for everyone. Because
of the mild winter, and the tight coÖr-
dination between the design and the
construction teams, the Hills will open
ten months ahead of schedule.
Governors Island has been popular
since it opened to seasonal visitors,
in 2008. Leslie Koch, the outgoing
president of the Trust for Governors
Island, has guided the island’s devel-
opment for the past ten years. (She an-
nounced last Friday that she was step-
ping down.) She likes to point out that
the island welcomed four hundred
and fifty thousand people in the four
months that it was accessible last year—
a number surpassed only by New York’s
largest cultural institutions.
In 2007, Geuze and his landscape-
architecture and urban-design firm,
West 8, which is based in Rotterdam,
won a competition for the Governors
Island project. In Koch’s recollection,
the conversation around parks in New
York at that time centered on resusci-
tating historic parks like Frederick Law
Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s Central
and Prospect Parks, and on private de-
velopers adding pocket-size open spaces
to midtown. (The High Line and
Brooklyn Bridge Park had yet to open.)
West 8’s winning proposal would bring
a stylized, contemporary park to New
York City, on a site that many thought
would never be developed.
Landscape history is filled with
major earthworks—hills and grottoes,
parterres and canals—but their pur-
pose was often to trick the eye into
SOURCE: FROM LEFT TO RIGHT: TIM CLAYTON/CORBIS/GETTY; KENA BETANCUR/GETTY; IMAGE
SOURCE/GETTY; PAUL SEHEULT/EYE UBIQUITOUS/UIG/GETTY; CAREL VAN HEES (PEOPLE)

When Adriaan Geuze first learned of Governors Island, the site of his new design, he thought it “the coolest spot on the planet.”
ILLUSTRATION BY EDA AKALTUN THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 69

UNINVENT THIS ALEXANDRA KLEEMAN
seeing double
familiar Victorian superstition claims that a mir-
A ror’s reflection captures a portion of the soul; break-
ing a mirror, therefore, injures the spirit of the person
who broke it. For this reason, the use of a mirror entailed
a set of safety guidelines and instructions: if a relative
had recently died, mirrors in the home would be covered
to prevent his or her soul from becoming trapped, and
children under two years of age were to avoid them, as
their souls were still developing and could be stolen en-
tire. These days, we no longer shield our souls from the
mirrors in our home, but the residue of old phobias lin-
gers in the anxiety with which we approach our reflec-
tion. We seek the mirror’s approval, we fear what it has
to tell us. Living in a world full of reflections has helped
us know ourselves better, in a skin-deep sense, but it has
also bred dissociation, obsession. By transforming our
faces into images for scrutiny, the mirror has made us
more careful about ourselves as objects, at the expense
of caring for ourselves as whole beings.
For much of mirrors’ long history, they were luxury
items, fragile and expensive to produce, owned mainly
by the aristocratic and the wealthy. Who could have
70 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
imagined, then, that they would one day be so cheap and
so common that we’d use them to wallpaper our bath-
rooms and dance floors, line our skyscrapers with their
smooth, shiny surfaces, and affix them to our cars? Like
most people, I wake up each morning and look for my
face in the bathroom mirror—but if I wanted to avoid
this it would be nearly impossible to do. I open the doors
of the medicine cabinet, and in the mirrored backs I
see my face projected six or more times, from different
angles, reflections of reflections receding into the far
distance. In the elevator, I watch myself in the convex
security mirror, my head ballooning. When you seek
out—or seek to avoid—your own reflection, the modern
city becomes a hall of mirrors: car windows, reflective
walls, and plate glass are everywhere, transmitting a
cacophony of different versions of you—this one too
short, that one too wide, another one with a sickly color
you’ve never seen before. Your own face runs rampant
through the world and, like a word repeated too many
times, begins to lose its reference.
In this way, what’s whole becomes fractured: a series
of variants is generated, some better than you had imag-
ined, others worse, all converging in an impulse to con-
trol what we see reflected through a more effortful ar-
rangement of the hair, body, and face. Rather than reveal
us to ourselves “as we are,” mirrors show the many differ-
ent ways we might be, and press us to choose from among
them the image that we want to project to the world.
Does the fascination of glimpsing ourselves outweigh
the psychological strain of continually caching, process-
ing, and relating these different likenesses? Are we bet-
ter off for knowing that we’re having a bad hair day, or
that there are wrinkles on our faces where there never
used to be? Early mirrors lacked precision; made from
bronze or obsidian, they revealed the viewer to himself
hazily in their polished surfaces. Our crisp, shiny mir-
rors, which allow us to peer deeply into faults that we
hardly ever notice in others, complicate more than they
clarify.
In the modern imagination, the mirror has been
placed at the center of what defines us as a species, and
what defines us as individuals. While many other spe-
cies can make tools or communicate in some form of
language, only a select few—great apes, dolphins, orcas,
elephants, and the Eurasian magpie—have demonstrated
the self-awareness to recognize their own reflection in
a mirror. But before there was any such thing as a mir-
ror, human beings were still self-aware, possessed of an
individualized sense of self; the only real difference, per-
haps, was the degree to which we relied on others to
view us. Because we could not witness ourselves, except
with difficulty in pools of water, we needed others to
see us, to make us visible. It seems hard, but not impos-
JOON MO KANG
sible, to imagine ourselves back into that earlier, more
unencumbered state: knowing our bodies by how it feels
to dwell in them, instead of by how they shift incre-
mentally over the course of a day, or a lifetime. 
believing that the landscape had al-
ways been that way (the British tradi-
tion) or to overwhelm you with the in-
tricacy of plantings, sculpture, and
fountains (the French tradition). In ei-
ther case, until the nineteenth century
such gardens were strictly an upper-
class diversion. As industrialized cities
grew in density, some leaders set aside
land, often at the edge of town, as plea-
sure grounds intended as a public-health
benefit. When real-estate values around
those parcels rose, they became central
rather than peripheral.
In the past decade, the thinking
about the location of parks has changed.
A major occupation of landscape ar-
chitecture is the reuse and remediation
of industrial and infrastructural sites.
There’s not much virgin territory left
in cities, so to create open space is to
begin again on the ruins of the past.
In 2004, Chicago’s Millennium Park
converted acres of industrial lakefront
into a linear landscape with wildflower
gardens, sculpture, and a Frank Gehry
concert pavilion. In Seattle’s Olympic
Sculpture Park, broad green concrete
bridges zigzag over the roads and rails
that once cut off the city’s art museum
from the water. West 8’s most ambi-
tious completed landscape, Madrid Río,
is a park covering a riverfront highway
that used to divide the city.
Landscape today often abandons
the fantasy of playing Mother Nature
to achieve spectacular designs that
flaunt their manufactured underpin-
nings, enticing architects to cross over
from buildings to the spaces around
them. The half-mile-long Superkilen
park, in Copenhagen, designed by big
Architects, Topotek 1, and Superflex,
places miniature rolling green hills, a
pink patchwork market square, and
star-shaped Moroccan-tile fountains
into one of the city’s most diverse
neighborhoods. Singapore’s Gardens
by the Bay, designed by Grant Asso-
ciates, Wilkinson Eyre, and Atelier
Ten, is landscape as entertainment,
with a grove of steel Supertrees, over-
grown with plants, that provide shade
during the day and light up at night.
In the Cloud Forest, under a glass
dome that resembles Santiago Cala-
trava’s recently opened Oculus, in lower
Manhattan, a thirty-five-metre water-
fall crashes down the side of a cone-
shaped mountain. Parks have become
the new architecture stars, perfectly
suited for our green and community-
seeking age.
euze, fifty-five, is slim and
G boyish, with scruffy hair and a
coat that’s perpetually aflap. (His last
name is pronounced “Huh-zaa,” with
a guttural “H.”) He is restless when
seated, reaching for tabletop bric-a-
brac to model a scene in 3-D. He’d
prefer to cycle, to walk up and down
and around the contours and elevation
changes that his profession inscribes
upon the earth, because that’s when
his conversation and inspiration flow.
Those curbs, the landscape features
that you can stroll beside, sit on, lie on,
or walk on, are a built manifestation
of his own looping energies. When
Geuze won the commission to design
Toronto’s Central Waterfront, in 2006,
one of his first requests was to be taken
to a Canadian lake and taught how to
canoe. At a rustic camp on Lake Al-
gonquin, he got his wish, and, in re-
turn, taught his host how to fish. On
Dutch TV last summer, he was shown
making birdcalls from a cell in a
twenty-foot-tall concrete honeycomb
wall that West 8 designed—and then,
like a naughty schoolboy, walking along
the top.
After leading me to the peak of the
Hills, Geuze sat in the more formal
part of the Governors Island compo-
sition, amid low hedges planted in a
leaf-shaped pattern. This is where you
have a coffee before setting off on your
island adventure. “In my childhood, I
had such a strong experience hanging
around in the landscape,” he told me.
“I was a bird-watcher, but I also hunted
and collected bird eggs. I had a cousin,
he was rougher than I and even more
of a daredevil. We could jump over ca-
nals with a stick, literally cross the land-
scape. We caught pike in an illegal
way—made lines in the evening and
picked them up in the morning—and
sold them to the restaurants. I had a
radius of twenty miles when I was ten
or eleven years old.”
Growing up in Dordrecht, a Re-
naissance city in the western Nether-
lands, Geuze lived on the green edge
between town and country. This being
the Netherlands, there was no mistak-
ing the division: on one side, a canal
bordered by tightly wedged row houses;
on the other, a path and perhaps a house
on top of a high grassy dike, a thin line
of blue water, a flat farm field or a rough
stand of trees. Each plot was a rectan-
gle, or as close to a rectangle as engi-
neers like Geuze’s father and grandfa-
ther could build. “Ecology in Holland
is in grids,” Geuze said. “Every frog in
Holland is in a line, because all the
water is linear.”
But that geometry didn’t bring bore-
dom or conformity. “The smell of the
tide near Dordrecht, it intoxicated my
brains,”Geuze said. “All the boys were
into soccer, but I could not play soc-
cer.” Waiting out the school day, he
would think, he said, “I have a tree hut.
I have secret places you don’t even know
where they are.” When Geuze was a
teen-ager, his father took him along to
international industry and agricultural
shows. “We went to the German Han-
over machinery expos, where there
would be not five machines but five
thousand machines. He took me on
very big boats, at least in my imagina-
tion—ocean steamers—and even an
oil platform. Even into the engine
rooms, where the violent noise was
there. When I am romantic, I am think-
ing about these things.”
The project that first brought West 8
international fame is a prime exam-
ple of Geuze’s romance with nature
and machinery. Schouwburgplein, or
Theatre Square, is a plaza built atop
a parking garage, in central Rotter-
dam, that by the nineteen-eighties had
become a needle park. A methadone
clinic in a nearby church attracted
thousands of drug addicts from across
northern Europe, and, eventually, the
neighbors rebelled against the crime
and the crowds. Geuze lived not far
away, in Lijnbaan, a modernist post-
war development that put housing and
a then revolutionary pedestrian shop-
ping mall in the bombed-out central
city. “I had broken car windows. My
car radio and bicycle were stolen more
than once,” Geuze said. “Politicians
had made crazy plans for the plaza
that were very expensive, but the out-
come was zero.”
In 1994, West 8 was asked to pro-
pose a redesign of the park. “Clean it,
take the terraces out, give the garage a
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 71
face-lift,” Geuze recalls being told.
“Give us a festival plaza that can
be easily cleaned, with benches and
lamps.” The brief was for a defensi-
ble space, with no place to hide, and
no complicated elements that would
be hard to maintain or easy to dam-
age. But a lamppost, in that grim set-
ting, didn’t need to be straight from
Narnia. “We thought, O.K., they asked
us to do a lamp in the city of Rotter-
dam,” Geuze said. “Of course, that
lamp will refer to the docklands—it
will be hydraulic.”
Geuze and West 8 designed four
tall, hinged, gantry-like lampposts
painted the signature red of the city’s
Willemsbrug Bridge, and set them
along one side of the plaza. They loom
over it like dinosaurs. “Six-year-old
boys, they are craving to go to the plaza,
push the button, and set the lamp in
motion,” Geuze said. Children of
Geuze’s button-pushing temperament
can indeed create a mechanical ballet,
but for less playful adults just moving
across the plaza’s different types of
decking—wood, perforated metal, and
rubber—makes you aware of your steps
and the ground beneath your feet. In
the original design, a section of the
floor was patterned with silver maple
leaves.
“It is not an in-between, everyone-
is-happy design,” Geuze said. “It is a
surprising design, a place that you have
never been before, so you are able to
say, ‘What is it?’ Some people didn’t
get it, but younger people like it and
say, ‘Wow, this is our plaza.’ ” In sum-
mer, Schouwburgplein now functions
as a communal space for soccer games
and skateboarders and music festivals.
Videos on the Internet show flash-mob
performances of “Gangnam Style,” as
well as more organized events, with
sofas scattered across the expanse and
spotlighted by the gantries. “It has very
strong imagery if it is raining and it is
at night,” Geuze said. “The steel reflects
a million lamps, the glare of the city.
You can move one of the dinosaur lamps
and illuminate your lover if you want,
which is seductive.”
Schouwburgplein, for Geuze, is also
“self-reflexive,” turning Rotterdam’s
notorious charmlessness into a jump-
ing-off point for design. Rotterdam is
an industrial city that was all but de-
72 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
stroyed by German bombs during the
Second World War. The city’s lack of
historic context is obviously freeing,
and has generated a tremendous quan-
tity of late-twentieth-century architec-
ture that plays off the scale, simplicity,
and material of the modernist box and
the dockland cranes. Picture-perfect
Amsterdam, by contrast, “is a city in a
circle,” Geuze said, drawing his arms
in close. “For me, it is like Dante’s
Hell—I feel I’ll never escape.”
The Netherlands is a country his-
Rotterdam’s Schouwburgplein, or Theatre Square, won West 8 international fame.
torically at odds with the sea, a natu-
ral enemy that it has pushed back with
dikes and canals to create farmland and
new towns. “God created the world,
but the Dutch created the Netherlands”
the saying goes. In the Netherlands,
the desire to make nature orderly and
calculable is ever-present, but there is
also a wariness, a recognition that the
Dutch live in a fragile landscape of ex-
treme contrasts. The name of Geuze’s
firm, West 8, refers to extremity. When
he set it up, in 1987, he and his part-
ner at the time wanted a name that
was short, worked internationally, and
was not one of their surnames. In the
Netherlands, the big storms usually
come from the Atlantic Ocean, from
the west. In the old days, when the
winds reached a certain speed, the na-
tional water board would place people
on the dikes to watch for breaches. A
heavy storm is a nine or a ten on the
Beaufort scale, so the alarm sounds at
Beaufort force 8. On the radio, Geuze
said, “Literally every month you will
hear once, ‘Tomorrow the wind will be
West 8.’ ”
Geuze has a tendency to reach for
natural metaphors. “My profession is
like surfing—you have to wait for the
wave,” he told me. He describes land-
scape architecture as being as much
about “operations” as it is about de-
sign. “I wait, I watch,” he said. As such,
Geuze has long been involved with
Dutch politics regarding land use, ar-
guing that municipal governments are
letting too many buildings encroach
on the green edge that he once tra-
versed by bike and by pole. He admires
figures like New York’s former Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and Madrid’s for-
mer Mayor Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón,
who provided political shortcuts for
the extended and often tedious pro-
cess of making landscape.
Since the founding of West 8, the
office has hopscotched around the Rot-
terdam docklands in search of wide-
open spaces for its sixty-five employ-
GEOGRAPHY PHOTOS/UIG/GETTY
ees. (There are twenty more in New
York.) One early office had room for
football matches and roller-skat-
ing—“That brought a lightness and
freedom to the work,” Geuze said. The
current one is housed in a nineteen-six-
ties steel-framed building raised on
stilts, which used to contain a customs
 office. The top floor is the usual open-
plan array of desks and pinup boards,
but, instead of an architect’s racks of
carpet or countertop samples, there are
chunks of stone, in every shade of gray,
lined up by the long windows.
The employees are a multinational
group, with English as a common lan-
guage. In the office one day, Geuze
stopped to discuss a design for a bou-
levard in Moscow with a small team
of designers, sketching the proper spac-
ing of trees on the plans. He was then
Building the pergola, in Utrecht’s Máximapark, involved the local community.
waylaid by a set of serious, black-clad
young people with renderings of a
tongue-shaped fountain for a private
client. He pointed out, gently, that a
few options looked a little X-rated for
a family home. One floor below, Geuze
picked up a model of the walled en-
closure at Máximapark, in nearby
Utrecht—it’s called “the pergola”—
which he was taking me to see that af-
ternoon. The pergola, rendered in wood
and fitted into a little carrying case,
looked like a classic hexagonal honey-
comb—much less interesting than the
soft, stretched cells that the project had
morphed into.
Geuze used this model to build a
prototype in the back yard of his va-
cation house, in Spain, where he goes
JEROEN MUSCH
with his wife, Jacqueline Blom, who is
a well-known actress, and their three
children. “I made the hexagons for the
first time there, a fifty-foot wall, twelve
feet up,” he told me. “The children and
I filled the hexagons with rocks, like a
drystone wall.” The exercise convinced
him that the hexagons needed curves—
“If you do miles and miles of hexagons,
it starts to look like infrastructure”—
and that the pergola could become a
way of getting the local community
more involved with the building of the
park. Children could plant container
gardens in the cells, and neighbors could
prune climbing vines. Attempts to at-
tract bats and owls and insects could
also be made. Only then would adults
and children feel as if the landscape
were theirs.
The pergola helped solve a design
problem at Máximapark: Geuze and
West 8 knew that the neighbors in
the residential areas around the park
wouldn’t countenance a wall, but they
felt that the park had to have an edge.
The pergola prototype from Spain be-
came a three-and-a-half-kilometre
cast-concrete white cellular structure,
on legs, that stalks across the landscape
like an aqueduct. It also provides the
armature for growing vines and feath-
ering nests, as Geuze intended. It is
beautiful, if very strange, seen as flashes
of white as we drove around the sprawl-
ing suburban park. “Children pretend
they live there,” Geuze said. “This is
the inhabiting-and-sensibility part.
The wet feet, the smell of tides, the
logic that you can inhabit the tree.”
Máximapark is a great example of
the landscape architect as a political
operator, not just a designer. After
West 8 won the competition for the
park, in 1997, the firm decided to con-
centrate on the design of fifty central
hectares of open green space, called
the Binnenhof, or courtyard, which
would hold classic park elements, like
playgrounds, canals, and gardens. The
remaining land was allocated for other
uses. In the twenty years since—this
was a project with many political mo-
ments, many waves—a western sec-
tion has become an archeological mu-
seum, housed in a wooden reconstruction
of a Roman castellum. A hundred hect-
ares were dedicated to local sports or-
ganizations, which built playing fields
and practice facilities.
More hectares were donated back
to the city, to be sold to housing de-
velopers, following the rationale that
the park would be safer with a con-
stituency of surrounding homes. But
West 8 didn’t cede all control: it des-
ignated key building sites “Berlage
parcels,” named for Holland’s pio-
neering modernist architect H. P. Ber-
lage. In a tidy turnabout, architects
of houses on those sites have to sub-
mit their designs for West 8’s review.
Home builders are encouraged to
make landmarks that cyclists can nav-
igate by as they cruise the park’s
eight-kilometre bike path. One house
has a roof that ends in two exagger-
ated white points; another has a tall
brick tower, high above the tree line.
The bike path has its own design
touch, a centerline marked by white
daisies rendered in reflective paint.
When the project was named for
Holland’s glamorous, Argentine-born
Queen Máxima, in 2013, she obvi-
ously got it, showing up for the ded-
ication on a bike, in a dress the col-
ors of a varied bouquet of flowers.
The heroic pergola at Máximapark
gives that flat site a shape and iden-
tity suggestive of a fairy-tale world of
flora and fauna that lies just beyond
the rows of dark, gable-roofed houses.
Alice followed a rabbit, but the archi-
tecture does the luring here. Passing
through the pergola parallels the jour-
ney that you take to get to the Hills
at Governors Island: peering through
the arch at Liggett Hall. At each of
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 73
these thresholds, there’s no telling what
you might find on the other side. “Gov-
ernors Island is an island, and you can
get to an island only through a jour-
ney,” Geuze said. “The island has a no-
tion of being reborn. The island has
the philosophical quality of being on
the other side.”
eacting to the scale and the set-
R ting of Governors Island, West 8
has made a simpler set of design deci-
sions than those in the European parks
I saw. The Hills are the big gesture,
and everything else—from the curbs
drawing you across the ground toward
the grove of trees that will one day
stand between Liggett Hall and the
Statue of Liberty, to the subtle, cutout
steel signs, designed by Pentagram—
serves that gesture and the superlative
views beyond. “Olmsted manipulated
the perspective in a way that Ameri-
cans have the illusion of the wilder-
ness,” Geuze said.“Park history is re-
lated to illusions, and is not far from
the realm of poetry and painting. We
work from a certain narrative anec-
dote or feeling. There are other com-
ponents—functionality, durability, a
timeless component—but illusion is
where it starts.”
One of West 8’s first recommenda-
tions after winning the competition
was that the southern part of the is-
land be raised at least fifteen feet. Terms
“Our marriage has been renewed for another season.”
like “sea-level rise” and “resilience,” now
familiar to all American coastal cities,
were not even in the brief that defined
the competition; there was only a ref-
erence to “sustainability.” “With us in
Holland, Chapter 1 is ‘How did you
deal with the water?’ We have been
dealing with brackish water for a thou-
sand years,” Geuze said. West 8 con-
vinced Leslie Koch that spending a
quarter of the budget to “lift” the park
was necessary.
In 2012, when Sandy hit, the new
park was under construction, so the
Trust of Governors Island moved its
construction equipment to the new,
higher ground. The island’s historic
district lost only eight mature trees.
(Prospect Park lost more than three
hundred.) West 8 and the New York-
based landscape architects Mathews
Nielsen, which was hired to develop
the planting design, decided to spend
that budget on hundreds of spindly
young trees, using more than fifty
species that were native or adapted
to the New York region, rather than
on fewer large-specimen trees. They
believed that trees that grew up in
the island’s salt air and wind would
be hardier and longer-lived. They also
made sure that the new trees would
not grow to obscure the views they
had so carefully planned. Governors
Island’s existing trees reach only eighty
per cent of their species’ potential
height, so the new trees’ crowns should
top out, twenty years hence, just under
the eye line between the top of Out-
look Hill and the span of the Brook-
lyn Bridge.
That particular eye line was one
that Koch guarded closely. “Most New
Yorkers don’t get to experience that
view of the changing skyline,” she said,
because access to the tops of most sky-
scrapers is available only for a fee. In
renderings before the project was built,
West 8 had shown the island as the
center of an asterisk, with lines lead-
ing to all the major visual landmarks
that surround it. But Geuze had never
actually seen that view: the Coast
Guard’s eleven-story dormitory, which
provided access to the vista, was de-
molished before he had a chance to
visit the top. Every inch of an artifi-
cial hill costs tens of thousands of dol-
lars, so two years ago Koch and Geuze
went up in a cherry picker to deter-
mine how high the tallest hill needed
to be. Strapped in and terrified—both
are afraid of heights—they inched up
in the cherry picker, until, at exactly
seventy feet, they glimpsed the full
three-hundred-and-sixty-degree re-
veal over the trees and the roof of Lig-
gett Hall.
The project’s first engineering firm
“approached the building of the Hills
as if we were building a building,” Jamie
Maslyn Larson, West 8’s principal-in-
charge for North America, said. The
firm suggested that such height would
require piles sunken into the soft land-
fill, as if the designers were, in fact,
building a skyscraper. This was both
outside the budget and not what West 8
had in mind. A second set of engi-
neers, from the Seattle-based firm
Hart Crowser, had experience with
landfill, water, and seismic activity
from the Olympic Sculpture Park, and,
after more than a year of back-and-
forth, they helped to create hills that
would stand tall, resist erosion, and
not be so heavy that they would push
the edge of the island—splat—out into
the harbor.
Twenty-five per cent of the bulk of
the Hills is material recovered from
the demolition of the Coast Guard
structures and parking lots, including
that eleven-story building, whose 2013
implosion can be viewed on YouTube.
(It took twenty seconds.) This land-
fill forms the Hills’ core, the work-
horse base beneath the showstopper
elements. To lighten the load on the
man-made island, West 8 also called
for parts of the tallest hill to be made
from pumice, a pale-gray, porous vol-
canic rock that looks like the surface
of a Hollywood moon, drains well,
and weighs half as much as regular
fill. The fill was covered with horti-
cultural soil, made from five different
recipes, engineered to support specific
types of turf, plants, and trees. To cre-
ate steeper inclines, some of the fill
was wrapped in geotechnical matting,
creating rounded edges that resemble
a giant stack of pancakes of dimin-
ishing diameter. The steepest, almost
vertical slopes were made with wire
baskets, stuffed with horticultural soil.
Jute mesh, coir logs, and forty-two
thousand shrubs help to keep the hor-
ticultural soil in place—“the belt and
suspenders” of the operation, accord-
ing to Ellen Cavanagh, the director
of planning for the trust.
The final design of the Hills cre-
ates a sort of mental push-pull for the
visitor: their extreme slopes say “un-
natural,” while their soft curves, stone
scrambles, and brushy forests tell the
body to approach, climb, explore. They
don’t look fake, like the Astroturf-cov-
ered slopes one sees at new play-
grounds, but like an exaggerated ver-
sion of reality. Geuze built very long
slides on Slide Hill, though he was
careful to make them blend with the
rest of the park, so as not to become
a segregated place for families. There
is also the Stone Scramble, an assort-
ment of giant blocks that act as a short-
cut for the many children who will be
too impatient to climb Outlook Hill
on the path.
Hidden around the back side of Dis-
covery Hill is a surprise for the adults:
the sculpture by Rachel Whiteread. “I
was thinking about Walden Pond and
that cabin there—a cabin just the right
size for one person,” Whiteread said.
The sculpture is a concrete cast of the
interior of a wooden shack, a modern-
day hermitage around which the art-
ist has placed bronze casts of actual
trash found on the island, which she
made in her studio, in London. After
Whiteread was done with the trash—
which was considered an archeolog-
ical find, because it was unearthed
in the island’s historic district—she
shipped it back, bubble-wrapped, to
Governors Island. Eighteenth-century
British landscapes often had such build-
ings dotted about their slopes, styled
as temples, grottoes, and Merlinesque
cottages. Like Whiteread’s shack, they
were designed both to or-
nament the landscape and
to provide a lookout point.
“I had the idea of being
holed up there and look-
ing over to the Statue of
Liberty and the site of the
former World Trade Cen-
ter,” Whiteread told me.
“It is a very loaded place.
I didn’t want to spell it
out, but I wanted you to
have a sense of reverie while stand-
ing there and looking out.” Koch says
that she had not thought about the
relationship between the shack and
the skyscrapers until the day the shack
was being installed: “Rachel was there
in a hard hat, and the sculpture was
suspended from a crane as they were
putting it into position.” Koch sud-
denly saw the concrete against the
backdrop of lower Manhattan, its
rough edges clashing with the crys-
talline towers. “I said to Rachel it had
never occurred to me how it would
look against the skyline. She said, ‘It
occurred to me.’ ”
adrid RÍo, whose final section
M will be completed later this year,
is like Boston’s Big Dig, New York’s
Hudson River Park, and the future
plans for the Los Angeles River rolled
into one six-billion-euro public proj-
ect. To build it, West 8 and three Span-
ish architectural offices—Burgos &
Garrido, Porras La Casta, and Rubio
& A-Sala—jointly won a competition
to design the area on top of the M-30
highway, already in the process of being
submerged and capped. To see it prop-
erly, you have to get on a bike, and so,
on a mild day in December, Geuze,
Blom, and I rented bicycles at the Mata-
dero, an early-twentieth-century slaugh-
terhouse that’s being transformed into
a café, theatre, and galleries. As I looked
at the stylish interventions—steel-
framed windows, sans-serif signs made
out of lightbulbs, buffed concrete
floors—it was hard not to dream of
proposals for similar makeovers for the
historic buildings on Governors Island.
We had coffee in a large space outfit-
ted with reclaimed, jewel-colored the-
atre seats and a vintage bar. A book fair
was being held in another space, an art
exhibit in a third. I could have stayed
all day, and we hadn’t even
left the first courtyard.
We set out with Geuze
in the lead, cycling upright
and one-handed, coat flap-
ping, point-and-shoot cam-
era outstretched, snapping
away. It was easy to ride up
and down the gentle slop-
ing paths, but you had to
pay attention. Kids were ev-
erywhere: on a low rise, a
pod of tiny children in pastel skates
were getting an inline-skating lesson,
their legs pumping on their teacher’s
command; on a stone-covered hill that
was a miniature version of one on
Governors Island, a boy shot off the
end of a slide into the sand, laughing,
while a mother behind him looked
nervous as she picked up speed.
Geuze and Blom got off their bikes
at one of the park’s twenty bridges: a
long, flat concrete curve whose under-
side has been painted with giant red
dots. They mounted adjoining one-
rope swings attached to the infrastruc-
ture, leaning back into the sweep for
momentum. It wasn’t clear if the swings
were meant to be for adults or for chil-
dren, but it didn’t really matter. The
whole place was a playground, depend-
ing on your idea of fun. On the south
bank, joggers and Lycra-clad bikers
zipped past us, down the Salón de
Pinos, which was lined with eight
thousand gnarled and windblown
“character” pines. (Nurseries across
Europe had been depleted.) We biked
more slowly past a skate park designed
by an architect and skater in West 8’s
Rotterdam office, and past a series of
oval fountains, vortices, and splash
pads that in summer become the playa
that Madrid never had.
“It’s not one design but seven differ-
ent parks, with seven different design
logics,” Geuze said. “The first was the
boulevard of dancing pines, then one
section after another, with a different
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 75
narrative and identity.” Madrid Río
has been described as a linear park
that knits together a number of neigh-
borhood parks, and that is exactly right.
Lacking Geuze’s excellent balance, I
had to keep getting off my bike to
take a picture of the next beautiful
thing, not a feeling I’ve ever had in a
park of similar shape, like the Hud-
son River Park. Some parts of Ma-
drid Río look sedate, some wild, but
the controlled palette of gray granite,
green trees, and tan paths already feels
settled into the grand design of the
city. The space is quiet, despite the
brash ambition of both its design and
its client. The parts that in photo-
graphs looked rather mad—that bou-
levard paved with marble blossoms,
bridges lined with mosaic portraits of
Madrileños, the brilliantly planted
parterres—provide opportunities to
pause and delight in a sprawling com-
position. Geuze says that experience
brings the wisdom to do less: “When
I was younger, I would never have
been able to keep my hands off.”
The Río is majestic in a way that
Governors Island will never be, an
Old World version of new landscape
ideas, but in New York you can see the
same ideas at work: the mixing and
sometimes overlapping movement
streams of skaters and runners and
pedestrians and bikers, the range of
activities from hot to chill, the fussy
hedges and the love of a soft curb. Our
Slide Hill is bigger, they have fancier
bridges. Our coffee is weaker, they have
streets paved in flowers. The Statue of
Liberty is still the trump card. Madrid
Río is largely an internal experience,
travelling through and looking at the
landscape that the design team created;
Governors Island doesn’t need to do
as much, because the site came with so
much more, gratis—its location in New
York Harbor.
The park wouldn’t hold people’s in-
terest if it were only for selfies with
the Statue of Liberty. There is the
promenade around the island’s rim,
which can be walked or cycled; the
“hide and reveal” approach to the same
horizon from within the park, as you
follow the curving paths and the cor-
ridors that line up your view, in the
Baroque manner, with landmarks such
as the Brooklyn Bridge or Ellis Island.
76 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
“We designed different ways to see the
world, and together they are perfect,”
Geuze said.
overnors Island’s regular ferry
G was in drydock for its biennial
tune-up ahead of the site’s opening, on
Memorial Day, so the vessel that picked
up a dozen families for a test run at
the Hills was a party boat: a blue-glass,
L.E.D.-lit dance floor, and a top deck
with café chairs and tables. It seemed
right for a day off, with babysitters, par-
ents, and offspring sprung from their
desks and playdates. One set of kids
pressed their noses to the window,
pointing out the steady stream of he-
licopters rising from the downtown-
Manhattan heliport, while others went
to the top deck to take in the view.
When the boat reached the island, the
pack took off on the long walk from
the pier, in strollers, on scooters, on
bikes. “Where’s your helmet?” one
mother asked, glancing at her spouse.
The group swept around the west
side of the island, passing between one
end of Liggett Hall and a school. Be-
yond those buildings, the island opened
up, with no structures except for a rest-
room trailer. Before us was the Statue
of Liberty, same as she ever was, and
something new: a tall, tan hill, terraced
like a ziggurat, with a rockfall zagging
down the north side. “Jonas, we are going
to have to climb a mountain today,” my
eight-year-old remarked to his best
friend. As we walked closer, the fall re-
solved itself into large, Minecraft-like
chunks, a frozen river of patinated gran-
ite recycled from the island’s seawall,
tough and gray against the hill’s surface.
“Can anyone tell me what this hill is
made of?” Koch asked. No one answered.
“A building that blew up!” The kids
were not impressed—as daughters and
sons of architects, some of them had
been witnesses to the implosion. “Yes,
we blew up a building that was right
here,” Koch said. “The rocks you are
going to climb on were in the ocean for
a hundred years. It’s up to you to tell us
if they are tough enough for New York.”
With that, the children were off, the
first time that feet under a size 7 had
touched the rocks of the Stone Scram-
ble, sorting themselves by size order as
they jumped, hopped, and bounced up
the hill. In the olden days, one might
have reached for a mountain-goat met-
aphor; today, these kids had probably
all taken a class in parkour. Before most
of the adults had reached the foot of
the hill, the big kids were up top, stand-
ing on the rocks that mark the hard-
won height of seventy feet, looking
across the harbor at Lady Liberty’s face.
They could barely be persuaded to pose
for a photo before they were down, up,
down again. An older child ran up,
panting: “Vera found a wobbly rock!”
The adults were more inclined to
linger up top, looking not just west but
north and east and south, mentally
checking off all the landmarks: the pan-
oramic sweep takes in One World Trade
Center, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Ver-
razano; closer in are the slides, the pic-
nic grounds with gatherings of more
rock seats, and the Whiteread concrete
cabin. No one wanted to call the kids’
attention to Slide Hill, which was
off-limits until the matting required
for a soft landing was installed, but the
slides did look fun, stainless-steel beds
angling across the lower slope, inter-
spersed with Jenga-like constructions
of climbable wooden logs.
When the toddlers started digging
in the dirt of what will soon be a grassy
apron in front of the Hills’ high spot,
it was time to leave. We walked down
the hill with regret, back to the flats.
Koch noted with satisfaction the kids
running along the curbs. She wished
that she could find the woman who
had come up to her after one of the
first planning workshops, in 2008, and
whispered, “Don’t tell anyone, but I let
my kids run free here.”
It isn’t just children who need oppor-
tunities to run free. New York Harbor
offered Geuze a grand borrowed land-
scape, and a ferry ride that sets this park
off from all the others in the city. “There’s
no doubt that mass culture has a hun-
dred-per-cent success in making the
world programmed,” he told me. “Ev-
erything is branded, everything has a
name, has a function that you have paid
for. That makes a very relevant question
for our generation of designers. If we
are interfering in public space, should
we be part of that, or should we offer a
sort of antidote?” His answer, in this
spot, is clear: “Maybe we should make
an environment where everyone can
enjoy the lightness, and you can play.” 

UNINVENT THIS TED CHIANG
bad character
t’s not personal. I never learned anything in the
I Saturday-morning Chinese school I was forced to at-
tend as a child, but that’s not what motivates my choice
here. There were plenty of reasons for my poor perfor-
mance in those classes—my resentment at having to miss
the “Super Friends” cartoon being just one of them—so
I don’t blame Chinese characters for my failure.
No, my objection is a practical one: I’m a fan of liter-
acy, and Chinese characters have been an obstacle to lit-
eracy for millennia. With a phonetic writing system like
an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen
symbols and you can read most everything printed in a
newspaper. With Chinese characters, you have to learn
three thousand. And writing is even more difficult than
reading; when you can’t use pronunciation as an aid to
spelling, you have to rely on pure memorization. The cog-
nitive demands are so great that even highly educated Chi-
nese speakers regularly forget how to write characters they
haven’t used recently.
The huge number of characters poses other obstacles
as well. I’ve flipped through a Chinese dictionary, I’ve seen
photographs of a Chinese typewriter, I’ve read about Chi-
nese telegraphy, and despite their ingenuity they are all
cumbersome inventions, wheelbarrows for the millstone
around Chinese culture’s neck. Computers and smart-
phones are impossible to use if you’re restricted to Chinese
JOON MO KANG
characters; it’s only with phonetic systems of writing, like
Bopomofo and Pinyin, that text entry becomes practical.
In the past century, there have been multiple proposals to
replace Chinese characters with an alphabet, all unsuccess-
ful; the only reform ever implemented was to invent sim-
plified versions of the more complex characters, which
solved none of the problems I’ve mentioned and created
new ones besides.
So let’s imagine a world in which Chinese characters
were never invented in the first place. Given such a void,
the alphabet might have spread east from India in a way
that it couldn’t in our history, but, to keep this from being
an Indo-Eurocentric thought experiment, let’s suppose
that the ancient Chinese invented their own phonetic
system of writing, something like the modern Bopo-
mofo, some thirty-two hundred years ago. What might
the consequences be? Increased literacy is the most ob-
vious one, and easier adoption of modern technologies
is another. But allow me to speculate about one other
possible effect.
One of the virtues claimed for Chinese characters is
that they make it easy to read works written thousands of
years ago. The ease of reading classical Chinese has been
significantly overstated, but, to the extent that ancient texts
remain understandable, I suspect it’s due to the fact that
Chinese characters aren’t phonetic. Pronunciation changes
over the centuries, and when you write with an alphabet
spellings eventually adapt to follow suit. (Consider the
differences between “Beowulf,” “The Canterbury Tales,”
and “Hamlet.”) Classical Chinese remains readable pre-
cisely because the characters are immune to the vagaries
of sound. So if ancient Chinese manuscripts had been
written with phonetic symbols, they’d become harder to
decipher over time.
Chinese culture is notorious for the value it places on
tradition. It would be reductive to claim that this is en-
tirely a result of the readability of classical Chinese, but I
think it’s reasonable to propose that there is some influence.
Imagine a world in which written English had changed
so little that works of “Beowulf ” ’s era remained continu-
ously readable for the past twelve hundred years. I could
easily believe that, in such a world, contemporary English
culture would retain more Anglo-Saxon values than it does
now. So it seems plausible that in this counterfactual his-
tory I’m positing, a world in which the intelligibility of
Chinese texts erodes under the currents of phonological
change, Chinese culture might not be so rooted in the past.
Perhaps China would have evolved more throughout the
millennia and exhibited less resistance to new ideas. Per-
haps it would have been better equipped to deal with mo-
dernity in ways completely unrelated to an improved abil-
ity to use telegraphy or computers.
I have no idea if I would personally be better off in such
a world, assuming that it’s even meaningful to talk about
my existing there at all. But there is one thing I’m certain
of: in a world where Chinese was written with phonetic
symbols, I would never have to read or hear any more pop-
ular misconceptions about Chinese characters—that they’re
like little pictures, that they represent ideas directly, that the
Chinese word for “crisis” is “danger” plus “opportunity.”That,
at least, would be a relief. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 77
 FICTION

78 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION BY PENELOPE UMBRICO

 he side door of the police van
T slid open, rattling, and he was
shoved inside. There were seven
or eight men already sitting on the floor
in the dark, their wrists handcuffed be-
hind them. Nobody said anything. The
van started with a jerk, then picked up
speed. His legs were stretched out in
front of him, and he tried to use his
cuffed hands to balance himself, but
the plastic cuffs tightened, and he and
the other men went rolling across the
floor like loose bottles.
This was the first time that Gau-
tama had been arrested. Before call-
ing the prostitute, he had Googled the
number in the ad to make sure that it
wasn’t being used by the police. In the
van, he remembered how, as he was
being hurried down the stairs of his
building, one of the apartment doors
was slightly ajar, a man in an under-
shirt staring at him as he was led past.
Gautama was twenty-four, tall, slen-
der, with large brown eyes and longish
hair that framed his face. He was a Ph.D.
student in chemistry at New York Uni-
versity. He had arrived in America a
year earlier, and, like many foreign stu-
dents in America who are living away
from home for the first time, he had
immediately begun loitering on Craig-
slist and Backpage.
The arrested men stood in a cell on
one side of a brightly lit room. It was a
little after midnight. A short, stocky po-
licewoman was taking mug shots. When
she was done, she came over and, look-
ing bored, her hands on her hips, said,
“You know, when you have sex with a
prostitute you might as well be having
sex with every guy she’s slept with.”
A bearded Hasidic man sidled up
to the front of the cell. “I was just e-mail-
ing the girl,” he said. “I only offered
money to help.” He had a high crack-
ing voice, and his eyes were very wide.
He spoke so sincerely that he seemed
to believe himself. A Latino guy in a
blue mechanic’s uniform was crouched
in a corner of the cell, speaking ten-
derly through the bars to an underage
prostitute who was seated on a folding
chair, her slender wrist handcuffed to
a bar. Until he began talking to the girl,
the Latino had said only one thing,
while being shoved into the van: “Shit,
it’s my birthday.”
Around two in the morning, the
men, all chained together, were led
shuffling down the precinct steps. Gau-
tama was near the end of the chain.
The cold night air felt alien. He saw
cars go by, their wheels hissing, and
wanted to hide his face in his shoulder.
The men ahead of him began climb-
ing into the back of a white van. Gau-
tama waited his turn, and as he did he
felt that he and the other men had en-
tered some strange enclosed world—
there was a world that was spacious and
normal, where people drove home at
night, and, next to it, off to the side,
was another world, a world so con-
stricted that living in it was like walk-
ing a narrow passage between two walls.
In Central Booking, the men were
led one by one into separate cells. The
cells had bunk beds and steel toilets. In
Gautama’s cell, the wall beside the toi-
let bore long fingerlike streaks of shit.
He lay down on the lower bunk. He
was wearing a gray sweatshirt. He hug-
ged himself and pulled his knees to his
stomach.
autama was from Gwalior, a
G small city in Madhya Pradesh, one
of those wretched places where the
streets are narrow and crowded and
where shopkeepers in the central mar-
ket sell illegal postcards of satis sitting
on bonfires. When a merchant sold one
to you, he’d touch the card to his fore-
head as if he wanted a last blessing be-
fore letting the goddess leave.
Gautama was an ordinary mid-
dle-class boy. He knew he would have
to get married one day, and he hoped
to have as much sex as possible before
then, but he also believed that any In-
dian girl who had sex before marriage
had something wrong with her, was in
some way depraved and foul and also
unintelligent. He wished he could have
sex with Sunny Leone.
Gautama rolled over to face the cin-
der-block wall. From down the hall came
the voice of a young man who had been
in the holding cell with him. The young
man had tried to start up conversations
by asking the other men about their jobs.
“I have cigarettes,” he now called to
whoever might be listening. “You O.K.,”
someone answered in fake solidarity.
Gautama’s favorite thing about hir-
ing prostitutes was negotiating the price.
This was because actually having sex
with a prostitute seemed so immoral
that it was hard to enjoy it. As soon as
he’d called a prostitute and left a mes-
sage with a made-up name, he’d start
to feel scared of what he’d set in mo-
tion, and a part of him would not want
the woman to call back. If she did, he’d
get excited. His mouth would go dry.
He’d ask whether the hundred and fifty
roses that she asked for in her ad could
be reduced. Often the woman hung up.
Periodically, he and the prostitute would
reach an agreement and set a time for
her to come over. Most often then, in
a panic, he would hurry out of the apart-
ment. He lived in the Bronx, next to a
bodega near the Grand Concourse. He
would rush to put some distance be-
tween him and his building and then
walk for hours, his heart racing. When-
ever people glanced at him, he’d feel as
if they might grab him and beat him.
Occasionally, Gautama stayed in his
apartment and waited for the woman
to arrive. His building was a walkup,
and he lived on the fourth floor, in a
studio with a single large window, which
was divided by metal brackets into many
small panes. When the prostitute got
to his apartment, she’d be out of breath
and look irritated at having had to climb
the stairs. He would invite her in and
then tell her that she didn’t look like
the photos she’d texted and ask her to
reduce her price again. As he did this,
he was hoping that the woman would
just demand cab fare and leave. Usu-
ally, she shouted at him. Sometimes, curs-
ing him, she reduced the price by ten
or fifteen dollars. The actual sex after
all this was almost always wretched:
Gautama wearing double condoms, and
the woman beneath him looking angry,
telling him, “Don’t touch the breasts.”
As he lay on his side in the cell, a
thought came to him: he should just get
married. Most of his cousins who were
his age were married already. He felt
that if he were married he wouldn’t hire
prostitutes, he wouldn’t be ridiculous, he
wouldn’t do things like call a hooker and
ask if the “afternoon delight” rate still
applied, even though it was evening.
At eleven the next morning, Gau-
tama was released.
For two days, he went to a park and
picked up litter while wearing an orange
vest. Kids went whizzing by him on bi-
cycles, calling, “What you did, punk?”
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 79
When he didn’t respond, one of them,
emboldened, stopped a few feet from
him and shouted, “I’ll make you my
bitch!” It seemed to him that this was
the world that his actions had brought
him into. He picked up garbage and
imagined being married, being a father,
having a son. He imagined working hard
and earning money to take care of his
family. Imagining this, he felt comforted,
as if he were already living that life.
irmala was a little over five feet
N tall. She had a round face and a
round body and shiny black hair. She
liked to gossip and laugh, especially
about politicians. She, too, was from a
small city, from a family of doctors. She
had not been able to get into medical
school, so she was getting a Ph.D. in
biology. Nirmala was popular among
the foreign graduate students. Partly
this was because she was cheerful. Partly,
also, it was because she was kind. She
always remembered people’s birthdays
and tried to organize a cake or a din-
ner or at least a card. When somebody
was sick, she visited and brought food.
Gautama had spoken to Nirmala only
a few times. Since other people respected
“Can you please stop arguing in your TED Talk voice!”
her, he assumed she was admirable.
Nirmala worked at the circulation
desk in the big atrium at Bobst Library.
Gautama began drifting among the
shelves of reference books to look at
her. Normally, she took her lunch break
at twelve-thirty. One day, he walked
up to the circulation desk. He felt self-
conscious about his face, about his long
body, about the fact that his breath
might smell of coffee. “Do you want
to have lunch?” he asked and giggled.
“With you?”
“Yes.”
The graduate students from India,
even when they didn’t know one another
well, treated one another with the polite-
ness of neighbors living in the same lane.
Gautama and Nirmala went to a sem-
inar room to eat. There was a confer-
ence table, a whiteboard, a projector
on a rolling table. They had brought
their lunches in plastic grocery-store
bags and, when they sat down, she asked
what kind of water his city had. “Hard
water,” he said, and she told him that
she still found it amazing that in Amer-
ica one could drink from the tap.
They removed the aluminum foil
their rotis were rolled up in. The crin-
kling of the foil sounded loud to Gau-
tama. At first, they ate in silence, like
people travelling together on a bus. Gau-
tama had been imagining what kind
of marriage he wanted, and he felt he
needed to be as honest as possible in
order to have the sort of relationship he
was envisioning. He told Nirmala the
thing that felt most precious to him.
“My sister has epilepsy.”
Gautama’s parents had not told his
sister, his only sibling, what condition
she had. They had told him, instead,
because he was a boy. His sister was
four years older than he was, and his
relationship with her had always in-
volved his feeling that he’d had good
luck while she’d had bad. He was haun-
ted by the image of his sister swallow-
ing pills whose purpose she didn’t un-
derstand, standing beside the kitchen
sink, taking one pill from their moth-
er’s outstretched palm and then a sec-
ond and then opening her mouth to
show their mother that it was empty.
In India, public knowledge of his sis-
ter’s epilepsy would have marked the
whole family as defective. Telling some-
one about her for the first time, Gautama
felt careless, immature, selfish. “When we
began looking for a boy for her, my par-
ents had to tell whoever was consider-
ing her about the epilepsy,” he said. Sev-
eral of the families his parents negotiated
with declined to pursue a marriage. One
finally agreed to it after his parents prom-
ised a house in the city, a farm, and a
foreign car. After the dowry had been
agreed upon, the groom’s grandfather,
feeling that he had not been adequately
consulted, forbade the marriage.
Gautama was seventeen then. He
went with his father to the electronics
shop that the groom’s family owned.
They stood in the parking lot outside
the shop, surrounded by scooters. The
sun was hot, and the diesel in the air
hurt Gautama’s eyes and throat.
His father pleaded with the grand-
father, who was wearing a white kurta
pajama. “What is the matter?” his fa-
ther said, touching the old man’s elbow.
“She is a good girl. We have ordered
the food for the engagement.”
“You tried to be smart, didn’t you?”
the old man scolded. “Trying to hide
your shame with such a large dowry.”
Because of her epilepsy, his sister,
who had a bachelor’s degree, was now
married to a laborer who had not finished
high school. The man lived in Saudi Ara-
bia doing construction work, and his par-
ents treated Gautama’s sister as a servant.
As Nirmala listened, she looked con-
cerned. After he’d finished speaking,
she was silent for a while. Softly, she
said, “When your sister’s children are
ready for education, you can pay for it.”
She said this because she knew that
sometimes the only relief possible is
the thought that one day we’ll be able
to help in some small way. But Gau-
tama had so much adrenaline in him
that he had a hard time understand-
ing what she was saying. She seemed
to be talking about something other
than what he had just told her.
Several hours later, sitting in an office
chair, looking at a computer screen, in
a very cold lab, he began to feel an un-
clenching. Having told somebody about
his sister made the world feel bigger,
as if there were more space around him.
Simultaneously, the way fresh air can
cause a cut to sting, arrived a new sense
of horror at the image of his mother
standing by his sister, making her swal-
low pills whose mysteriousness fright-
ened her, and then saying, “Open,” until
his sister opened her empty mouth.
irmala and Gautama began hav-
N ing lunch together every day. After
a few days, Gautama stopped being
nervous about asking her to join him.
They ate in seminar rooms that had
glass walls and whiteboards. When they
finished eating, they’d wipe down the
table with wet paper towels. Then they’d
take the plastic bags they’d brought their
lunches in into the hallway and put them
in the trash cans there, so that the odor
would disperse. They did this because
they felt self-conscious about the stereo-
type of how Indians smell.
Nirmala was flattered by Gautama’s
attention. She saw herself as fat, lum-
bering. Once, a friend, a white girl who
also worked at the circulation desk, ges-
tured with her head toward Gautama
as he walked over to them. “Your shadow
has arrived,” she said. Nirmala knew
that her friend was teasing, but having
a shadow pleased her. She thought more
often about Gautama, and as she thought
more often about him he began to gain
in importance for her.
After his arrest, Gautama had stopped
going onto Backpage. Once he started
having lunch with Nirmala, he also stop-
ped looking at pornography. He did this
because he wanted there to be no shame
in his relationship with her.
As the days went by and they con-
tinued having lunch, he told her stories
and found himself relieved of old anx-
ieties. His family ran a nuts-and-dried-
fruit business, and he told her how, when
he was thirteen or fourteen, he had con-
spired with a family employee to steal
money from one of the shops that his
family owned. The man had then black-
mailed him. After he told Nirmala this,
the guilt of having stolen from his fam-
ily, the sense of self-disgust for being so
weak that he could be blackmailed, dis-
sipated almost immediately. It vanished
so quickly that it was like waking from
a nightmare and within minutes not
being able to recall what had happened
in the dream.
One night, a month after they started
having lunch, they went out to dinner.
An Indian restaurant had opened on
crowded Macdougal Street, and Gau-
tama had read in a magazine that the
restaurant, for its opening weeks, while
it worked out its menu, was allowing
guests to pay whatever they thought was
fair. Gautama’s plan was to pay nothing.
It didn’t occur to him that Nirmala would
mind this.
The restaurant was in a basement.
They went down some steps and en-
tered a room with a dozen or so tables
with white tablecloths. Only a few of
the tables were occupied. Eight young
Indians, probably undergraduates, were
seated around the largest table, in the
middle of the room, and the manager,
an Indian man with a mustache, went
over to them frequently to see how
they were liking the meal. He didn’t
go as often to the tables with white cus-
tomers. Gautama understood that the
manager was suspicious that the Indi-
ans would try to get away with paying
nothing. He saw this and felt in his
stomach that he, too, would not have
entered a restaurant with no intention
of paying if it were owned by white
people.
The manager came over to Gautama
and Nirmala. He explained the pricing:
“What would food like this cost in an-
other restaurant? That is one way to think
of it.” He spoke in the stretched vowels
of an Indian trying to sound American.
He left them to look at the menu.
Nirmala watched him go. “Are you
planning not to pay?” she asked.
“I’ll pay something,” Gautama mur-
mured. He stared down at the menu,
which was a single page with a list of
items on the left side and nothing on
the right.
“Shrimp is expensive,” Nirmala said.
“Fish is expensive. We can’t steal from
these people.”
The fact that she wanted to pay
when she didn’t have to surprised him.
A part of him couldn’t believe it. He
felt that she was showing off.
“I didn’t bring my purse. You should
have told me to bring my wallet,” she said.
Hearing her frustration, he had the
sense that he did not know her, that
he had been revealing himself to some-
one who might have been thinking bad
things about him.
The manager came back with a
waiter. He explained again that they
should bear in mind what the food might
cost in another restaurant.
Nirmala ordered without looking
up. She asked for the lentils, which
would probably have been the cheap-
est item on the menu. “I’ll have the
turmeric fish,” Gautama said, “and the
seafood biryani.” He ordered two en-
trées because, despite the fear of em-
barrassment, he couldn’t pass up some-
thing free.
“It is a lot of food,” the manager
said. At his American-sounding ac-
cent, Gautama felt even more judged.
He kept looking down. The manager
stood there for a moment and then left.
Gautama and Nirmala sat in silence.
The food came. They began eating.
“This isn’t very good,” Gautama said.
“I don’t want to talk.”
He continued eating. He wondered
what he should pay.
The meal ended. The manager came
to their table and asked how they had
enjoyed the food.
“It was very good,” Nirmala said.
“We’ll come back.”
He put down a printout of all the
items they had ordered. Gautama placed
seventy dollars on top of it. This was
all the money he had.
Outside, it was a cold February night.
There were people waiting in lines to
get into restaurants. Some of them were
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 81
arm in arm. One couple walked in cir-
cles, laughing at how cold it was. As
Gautama and Nirmala walked down the
crowded sidewalk, Nirmala bumped into
him. “Sorry,” Gautama said, not look-
ing at her. After a few steps, she bumped
into him again. He glanced at her.
“It’s over,” she said and laughed.
Gautama felt relieved that he
had not embarrassed himself before
Nirmala.
s he got to know her better, Nir-
A mala began to seem more compli-
cated to him. She told him that her fa-
ther’s younger brother had “bothered”
her. She didn’t say what he had done to
bother her, but she said that, when her
uncle was living with her family, she had
begun pulling out her hair. “I get white
hair where I used to pull it out,” she said.
The fact that this had happened to
her made Gautama see her as being like
any other person, someone with her own
past, someone who needed love, who was
scared and embarrassed, who had pulled
out her own hair and was convinced that
it turned white because of this.
The two started going on walks in
the evening in the West Village, near
Nirmala’s dorm. One day, they held
hands for the first time. It was mid-
March. The air was cold and heavy with
moisture. They were walking past a
pizza parlor, and Nirmala put her hand
in his. The first thing Gautama noticed
was the calluses on her palms. But, as
soon as he had closed his hand around
hers, he had the feeling that he would
never need anything else. All the other
things he worried about—his research,
what job he would get, what might hap-
pen to his family in India—none of this
mattered, because this thing was O.K.
He looked on YouTube for guid-
ance on kissing. He watched a video
in which an old white-haired couple
kissed and then told each other what
they had liked about the kiss.
French kissing seemed disrespectful.
Kissing with closed lips had the bravery of
kissing—a declaration of not caring what
society thought—but was also not vulgar.
Every new thing that he and Nirmala
did, such as standing on a street corner,
each with a hand in the other’s back
pocket, gave him a sense of freedom.
They began lying together on her bed
in her dorm room, kissing until he stop-
82 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
ped being able to think. He would move
her hand to his crotch, and she would
move it away.
Gautama began looking at pornogra-
phy again. He felt that if he did not ejac-
ulate he would go mad. The first time he
did this, sitting at his small wooden desk
in his apartment, his laptop open before
him, he immediately wondered why he
had worried so much about doing it.
He began to find Nirmala incredi-
bly beautiful. Her ears, small with lit-
tle diamond studs, appeared both mod-
est and intelligent. When she spoke, her
soft insistent voice resounded as if it
were inside his own chest.
In early June, they decided to have
sex. They removed their clothes and
stood in Nirmala’s dorm room.
“Don’t look at me,” she said, hold-
ing her hands over her stomach.
He knelt down and kissed her belly.
“Does it smell bad?” she asked.
“No. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
In the days afterward, in the happi-
ness of someone having chosen to have
sex with him, he felt that he was grow-
ing more real, more substantial. Before,
he had been only thoughts and emo-
tions, and now he was becoming solid.
He found himself constantly think-
ing about Nirmala, how he teased her
about her nervousness about her weight:
“You are so small that you get lost in
the bed.” He pictured some of the things
they had done, him, half sitting, with
her on top of him, telling her that she
was not heavy, that she was like a lit-
tle girl. To be able to be kind to some-
one you loved seemed a fortunate thing.
Until then, they had kept their in-
volvement a secret. Once, at a Holi party,
a large, dark-skinned woman from Hy-
derabad had begun praising Nirmala
in front of Gautama, as if inviting him
to join in. Gautama had immediately
become suspicious that the woman
might be a gossip, that if he were to
say what he felt the woman would then
tell others and the information might
somehow make its way to India, where
it could be used to embarrass Nirma-
la’s family.
But now Nirmala began introduc-
ing him to people as her boyfriend. This
felt dangerous to Gautama, as if they
were taking on a problem they could
have avoided. He wondered whether
Nirmala was doing this so that he could
not back out. He decided that he did
not want to think such a thing about
her, that she was simply declaring her
love to the world.
He and Nirmala began to be treated
as a couple. People would ask him what
hours she was working. Once, a woman
came to him and wanted to know if Nir-
mala’s aunt in New Jersey was going to
be visiting India soon, because she wanted
to send a blood-pressure cuff to a rela-
tive. There was a strain to being known
as a couple. One man advised him to
propose in the morning; that way he and
Nirmala would have the whole day to
enjoy being engaged. At a party, he talked
to a woman who was a new Ph.D. stu-
dent, and one of Nirmala’s friends stood
nearby glaring angrily at him.
Because Nirmala’s parents were
bound to learn about him, it seemed
important to tell his parents first, so
that they might reach out to hers and
keep them from feeling shame.
Gautama sat cross-legged on his futon
bed and Skyped with his mother. She
started crying. She wiped her eyes with
a fold of her sari while his father’s legs
paced behind her. They were contem-
plating the dowry they could have nego-
tiated, Gautama assumed, the elation
there would have been in finding a match
for a son who was educated in America. “I
blame you, not her,” his mother said, and
from this he understood that all was not
lost. His father shouted, “I blame her, too!”
Afterward, Gautama went to the re-
frigerator and stood by it drinking milk
to ease his stomach.
In the next few days, he got calls from
his sister, from his favorite cousin, from
an uncle whom everybody in the family
was scared of because he was a small-
time politician and gangster. The tension
of this was constant, and Gautama felt
that he could not talk about it with Nir-
mala, because he had had sex with her,
and so she had tied her fate to his.
 Weeks went by, and then months.
He periodically told his mother that
she should talk to Nirmala, that Nir-
mala was a good girl. “When I have to
drink that poison, I will,” she said.

ome things about Nirmala began

S to irritate him.If they went to a movie,
she would take the tickets from his hand
after he had purchased them. When
they went to buy groceries, she would
check that all the items on their list were
in the cart, even though he had already
crossed them out on the scrap of paper
they were written on. To Gautama, this
behavior seemed to come from Nirma-
la’s belief that if she were not in charge
things would go wrong. Sometimes he
wondered what he had started.
What bothered him most about Nir-
mala was that, if he was incorrect about
something, she would point it out im-
mediately. If he did the same to her,
she became sullen. Once, he told her
that the argument she was making about
genetics was probably not correct. When
he explained why he’d said this, she be- “The people in my new novel have started rejecting
came angry and asked why he was in print media. That’s a bad omen.”
such a bad mood.
September came, and the university
became busy again. The weather was still
• •
warm, and every afternoon two young
women on Rollerblades performed in undressing. He sat on the edge of his “You’re pretty,” he said.
Washington Square Park. They wore futon and browsed through Backpage. “Thank you.”
white shorts and skated around the arch He had his jeans at his ankles, and he “Could you take off all your clothes?”
while playing trumpets. Gautama liked remained that way for an hour. She pulled her dress over her head.
looking at these women so much that The prostitute who walked into his She was slender with big breasts. She
he would try always to be in Washing- apartment later that night was nineteen looked as if she had been Photo-
ton Square when they were there. or twenty and black. She had white plas- shopped. Folding the dress, she put it
One evening, almost a year after tic beads in her hair. It was dark outside, on his desk, which stood near the head
he was arrested, he sat at his desk and and his studio’s wide window, divided of the bed. She came back to the cen-
opened his laptop and went to Back- into panes, was like a bank of TV screens ter of the room.
page. The screen filled with ads: lines in which the girl hung bright and tilted. “May I hold your breasts while you
of text, some words in bold, others cap- The girl stood at the center of the jump?”
italized, phone numbers written out as room, and Gautama’s heart pounded. Be- The girl laughed. “Sure.”
words. He felt as if he were floating, as fore she arrived, he had planned to tell She was smiling as he put his hands
if it were someone else’s finger click- her that she did not look like her photo on her breasts. She started jumping. Her
ing on an ad. A new screen opened: and give her cab fare home. But she was hair flew up, and the beads clicked. Her
more text with images below, a His- much more beautiful than her photo, and feet made soft thuds when she landed.
panic girl in a bikini, her face hidden he thought that the luck of getting some- His hands on her breasts, Gautama
by a flash, the picture taken in the bath- one so lovely might not occur again, and, became happier and happier. He knew
room mirror. Gautama recognized the since he would eventually end up hav- that tomorrow he would feel guilt and
photo from other ads he’d seen, and ing sex with a prostitute anyway, it was shame, but he did not care. The girl
he suddenly became exhausted at the best not to waste this opportunity. jumped, and he had the sense that no-
memory of calling prostitutes and then The girl was wearing a gray dress with body else anywhere could be leading
running away from his apartment. He thin blue horizontal stripes. Gautama a life of such adventure and delight. ♦
shut down the computer. handed her the money. He stepped away
A few days later, he came home and from her and again was amazed by her NEWYORKER.COM
opened his laptop before he’d finished beauty. Sharma on the complicating forces of shame.

THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 83


THE MAN WHO MADE THE NOVEL
Loving and loathing Samuel Richardson.
t’s hard to imagine a more unlikely
I novelist than Samuel Richardson.The
son of a carpenter, he attended school
only intermittently until he was seven-
teen, when his formal education ended
and he was apprenticed to a printer. He
didn’t publish his first novel until after
he turned fifty. The undertaking was al-
most accidental. He had become the
proprietor of a printing press when, in
1739, two London booksellers asked
him to put together a “letter-writer,”an et-
iquette manual consisting of letters that
“country readers” might use as models
for their own correspondence.
Richardson quickly expanded the
project’s scope. A diligent worker who
had risen from tradesman to middle-
class property owner, he longed to im-
part what he had learned. He wanted,
he wrote in the book’s introduction, to
teach readers not only how to write el-
egant letters but “how to think and act
justly and prudently in the common
concerns of life.” Recollecting a true
story he’d heard years earlier, he com-
posed several letters to and from a pious
servant girl whose boss was making lewd
advances, in order to warn young women
of “snares that might be laid against
their virtue.”
In the fall of 1739, Richardson began
to absent himself from his wife in the
evenings, after work at the printing press.
Instead of proceeding as planned on the
letter-writer, he was quietly adding to
the stock of letters by the servant girl,
bringing her story to a happy conclu-
sion. It took him just two months to
produce “Pamela,” a book many con-
sider the first modern English novel.
Not that Richardson made this claim.
He associated novels with improbable
84 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
THE CRITICS
A CRITIC AT LARGE
BY ADELLE WALDMAN
romances, or mere entertainments; “Pa-
mela” was intended to be instructive.
But a novel it was. More than the ad-
venture stories of Daniel Defoe or Jon-
athan Swift, “Pamela” was concerned
with the representation of interior life. It
is also organized around a single, uni-
fied plot, which distinguished it from
Defoe’s more episodic “Moll Flanders”
(1722), a pseudo-memoir that recounts
its protagonist’s varied and largely illicit
pursuits, from her inauspicious begin-
nings through her late years in the col-
onies. Flanders’s story is told from the
complacent perspective of a woman
who has achieved wealth and security,
and generally adopts the matter-of-fact
tone of a case history. Pamela’s letters,
in contrast, are lively and conversational,
their language a reflection of both her
native cleverness and her inexperience.
Richardson was fond of saying that his
characters’ letters are written “to the mo-
ment”; that is, as the characters expe-
rience the events they describe. This
lends “Pamela” a palpable sense of im-
mediacy. In its first letter, our fifteen-
year-old heroine describes to her par-
ents the attention she has begun to
receive from her young, unmarried em-
ployer—who “gave me with his own
hand four golden guineas, and some sil-
ver.” Her parents urge Pamela to keep
her distance. “We had rather see you all
covered with rags, and even follow you
to the churchyard, than have it said, a
child of ours preferred any worldly con-
veniences to her virtue,” they write—to
which Pamela responds, “I will die a
thousand deaths, rather than be dishon-
est in any way.”
This can sound like the exaggerated
language of farce. It isn’t. To read Rich-
ardson is to enter a moral universe in
which the terms “virtue” and “honesty”
are used, unironically, as synonyms for
virginity. Richardson’s puritanism was
extreme even for his period. (Flanders,
for example, spoke playfully about her
virginity as a “trifle . . . to be had” easily.)
But the sanctimonious tone didn’t deter
many readers. The novel was so popu-
lar that “Pamela”-inspired merchandise,
from teacups to fans, quickly sprang up,
as did spurious sequels, a theatrical ver-
sion, and even a comic opera. The book
also drew praise for its edifying story
line. (“Virtue Rewarded” is its apt sub-
title.) Alexander Pope gave it a jolt of
publicity when he said that it would “do
more good than many volumes of ser-
mons,” a quote that may have been so-
licited by Richardson’s brother-in-law,
a bookseller.
Not everyone was won over by the
self-taught moralist. A number of “Pa-
mela” parodies also appeared, including
two by a not yet famous Henry Field-
ing, then a thirty-four-year-old failed
playwright studying to be a lawyer.
Fielding, whose Tom Jones would
gain renown for his cheerful sexual ex-
ploits, found Richardson’s platitudinous
Sunday-school morality unbearable. He
launched his own novel-writing career
with the spoofs “Shamela,” in which the
virginal young maid is recast as a slat-
ternly schemer who manipulates Squire
Booby into marrying her, and “Joseph
ABOVE: GUIDO SCARABOTTOLO
Andrews,” which purported to be about
Pamela’s brother. Strapping young Jo-
seph’s impassioned speeches about his
virtue, though nearly identical in sub-
stance to Pamela’s, read rather more
comically coming from a man’s mouth.
Fielding articulated a squeamishness
Richardson was an accidental novelist, and an accidentally great one; his powers of empathy clashed with his pinched piety.
ILLUSTRATION BY LEIGH GULDIG THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 85
about Richardson that outlasted either
man’s lifetime. Though Richardson went
on to write two more novels—includ-
ing the masterly “Clarissa”—he has long
inspired an unusually intense mix of ap-
preciation and irritation. “So oozy, hyp-
ocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious,
concupiscent,” Samuel Coleridge de-
scribed him in his notebooks. It pained
Coleridge to admit that he nonetheless
admired the man “very greatly.” A self-
satisfied bourgeois, with a scold’s hor-
ror of impropriety, Richardson certainly
confounds the image of the writer as
tortured artist. The bigger problem is
that these qualities bleed into his work.
His self-serious moralizing and the os-
tentatiousness of his characters’ recti-
tude make Richardson difficult to em-
brace. Yet, unlike the more urbane and
congenial Fielding, Richardson has a
knack for psychological realism and an
ability to craft characters whose clam-
orous inner lives continue, almost three
centuries later, to feel real to us. He pos-
sesses a sometimes dizzying rhetorical
intelligence—his characters argue with
the agility of top litigators—and seem-
ingly boundless imaginative sympathy:
the figures who populate the most win-
ning of eighteenth-century picaresques
are cardboard cutouts compared with
Richardson’s principals.
Even “Pamela,” prudish and didac-
tic as it is, feels far less limited or quaint
“Nice work—let’s take a quick social-media break.”
than we might expect. The story is ro-
bust enough that readers needn’t accept
Pamela’s belief that she’ll be “ruined” if
she has sex (consensual or otherwise)
in order to sympathize with her situa-
tion; it’s enough that she doesn’t want
sex on the terms offered. It helps, too,
that her narration is engaging and tartly
comic. If Mr. B, her employer, had his
way, she writes to her parents, he “would
keep me till I was undone, and till his
mind changed; for even wicked men, I
have read, soon grow weary of wicked-
ness with the same person.” Meanwhile,
Mr. B—“the finest young gentleman in
five counties”—assumed that what he
wanted from Pamela would not be so
very unwelcome, especially since, like
any decent “gentleman of pleasure,” he
was prepared to reward her for her fa-
vors. He is baffled by her reaction to his
overtures—somewhat understandably,
given that Pamela says things like “How
happy am I, to be turned out of door,
with that sweet companion my inno-
cence!” (In spite of being on Pamela’s
side, we can’t help feeling some sympa-
thy with Mr. B when he calls her a “ro-
mantic idiot.”) Even as his actions be-
come increasingly desperate, he has a
coherent rationale for his behavior. He
thinks Pamela is overreacting. “I am sure
you . . . frightened me, by your hideous
squalling, as much as I could frighten
you,” he says after he tries to kiss her.
Richardson’s wit and ability to con-
ceive characters who feel “natural”—as
he rather immodestly put it in the book’s
original introduction—enable the novel
to outpace his own didactic intentions,
to become something far more lifelike
and original than a morality tale. But
“Pamela” is, at bottom, a Cinderella story,
and so Mr. B eventually proposes mar-
riage to his former maid. Pamela is
transported with joy that he is willing
to “stoop” so low, but what’s good for
the character is less good for the reader.
With a story to tell, Richardson the writer
of instructional material was distracted,
but when the conflict is resolved, about
halfway through, we enter a narrative
dead zone in which the author’s more
irksome qualities come to the fore.
Mr. B becomes a mouthpiece through
which Richardson delivers life lessons
(for example, that a woman ought not
grow “careless in her dress” after mar-
riage). Lest we forget that Pamela’s hap-
piness is due to her exemplary virtue,
we watch as she is embraced, one after
another, by all the neighboring gentry
as “an ornament to our sex,” “a worthy
pattern for all the young ladies in the
county,” “the flower of their neighbor-
hood,” etc.—a tedious procession of
praise that starts to undermine the good
will we felt for Pamela when her cir-
cumstances were less prosperous. The
novel closes with a last word from our
zealous author, who briefly tears off his
epistolary robes to list the various moral
teachings the book contains, in case we
somehow missed them.
“S amuel Richardson and the Art
of Letter Writing” (Cambridge), a
new book by Louise Curran, who teaches
at Oxford, looks for fresh insight into
this perplexing author and his milieu
by scouring his correspondence. The
premise is an intriguing one. As the En-
glish canon’s best-known writer of epis-
tolary novels, Richardson would seem
likely to be a noteworthy letter writer
in private life.
It turns out he isn’t. An 1804 piece
in the Edinburgh Review that assessed
the first published edition of Richard-
son’s letters had it that “they consist
almost entirely of compliments and
minute criticisms on his novels, a de-
tail of his ailments and domestic con-
cerns … the whole so loaded with gross
and reciprocal flattery, as to be ridicu-
lous at the outset, and disgusting in the
repetition.” Little unearthed in Curran’s
sober, academic study contradicts this
characterization. Skeptics of literary bi-
ography have long held that everything
worth knowing about a novelist is evi-
dent in the work itself. Richardson’s cor-
respondence constitutes strong support-
ing evidence for this proposition.
If, for example, Richardson’s aim in
“Pamela,” with the surfeit of overblown
compliments bestowed on her, was to
guarantee that readers knew exactly what
they were supposed to think of his her-
oine, he also sought by the same method
to insure that readers thought highly of
the work itself. For the second edition
of “Pamela,” as Curran notes, he took
the unusual step of including as an in-
troduction twenty-four pages of fawn-
ing letters he received about the book.
“There was never Sublimity so lastingly
felt, as in PAMELA,” reads one, by Rich-
ardson’s friend Aaron Hill (one of five
from Hill that were included). Not sur-
prisingly, these “greasy compliments,”
as one clergyman described them, didn’t
go over well with everyone. Fielding
took a potshot by beginning “Shamela”
with several made-up letters composed
in much the same style: “How happy
would it be for Mankind, if all other
Books were burnt, that we might do
nothing but read thee all Day, and dream
of thee all Night.”
Richardson’s life might be divided
into two phases: before “Pamela” and
after. About the former period, rela-
tively little is known—he appears to
have destroyed most of his letters from
these days. We know he married the
daughter of his former employer in
1721, the same year he set up his own
printing shop. All six of their children
died in infancy or early childhood; his
wife died young as well. He was re-
married the next year, once again to a
woman from a family with whom he
had long-standing business ties. Both
were sound alliances in a worldly sense,
but Richardson appears to have been
relatively happy in each of his mar-
riages, although the first was charac-
terized primarily by grief over the loss
of so many children. To friends and
business associates, including strug-
gling writers, he was frequently gen-
erous, more generous than unalloyed
prudence or the burgher work ethic
that he embodied might lead us to ex-
pect. His strict middle-class morality
may seem uninspired, but, as his bi-
ographers T. C. Duncan Eaves and
Ben D. Kimpel have pointed out, he
doesn’t appear to have been petty or
hypocritical.
After “Pamela,” the once obscure busi-
nessman became conscious of himself
as a public figure. He cultivated episto-
lary relationships with a coterie of ad-
mirers, many of whom were women—
several, he bragged to a friend, were
women “of Condition”—and he began
to preserve his correspondence with an
eye to future publication. Over the years,
this deferential circle of correspondents
became his most important sounding
board. (After his death, Samuel Johnson
quipped that Richardson “died merely
for want of change among his flatter-
ers.”) When Aaron Hill, the author of
those glowing letters about “Pamela,”
delicately suggested ways to shorten “Cla-
rissa,” Richardson responded first defen-
sively and then with what appears to
have been aggrieved silence; his favored
correspondents presumably learned over
time not to repeat Hill’s error. Richard-
son’s letters, like his heavily internal nov-
els, rarely engaged with events in the
outside world or even with books aside
from his own. He claimed not to have
read “Tom Jones,” although in deriding
its “bad Tendency” to members of his set
he demonstrated a suspiciously detailed
knowledge of its contents.
It’s surprising enough that this touchy,
straitlaced, and rather narrow man wrote
a novel like “Pamela,” in which he deftly
inhabited the turbulent emotional life
of a teen-age girl. Even more surpris-
ing is the fact that he went on to write
“Clarissa.” “Pamela” is, for the first half,
a crisp, shrewd delight of a romantic
comedy. But “Clarissa” is of a different
order. Johnson called it “the first book
in the world for the knowledge it dis-
plays of the human heart.” Even Field-
ing admired it.
ichardson has a habit of putting
R his heroines in harrowing binds, and
“Clarissa” is no exception. At the nov-
el’s outset, eighteen-year-old Clarissa
Harlowe’s family is pressuring her to
marry for money. The Harlowes believe
that, if she doesn’t marry the wealthy
but unappealing Solmes, she will run
off with the “too-agreeable rake” Love-
lace. Clarissa insists that she will give
up Lovelace if her parents will let her
remain single. It’s a testament to Love-
lace’s perceived desirability that abso-
lutely no one seems to feel she will hold
up her end of this bargain. A standoff
ensues, in which, to prevent her from
eloping with the “whoremonger,” her
family keeps a close watch over her. Her
only outlet is writing long letters to her
friend Anna Howe. Their ongoing cor-
respondence is one major portion of
“Clarissa.” Another consists of letters
between Lovelace and his confidant,
Belford.
What separates the novel’s setup from
the gothic melodrama that emerged
later is how well it’s constructed. Each
of the Harlowes has his or her own rea-
sons for wanting Clarissa to marry
Solmes; their distinct personalities op-
erate on Clarissa and on one another in
a way that’s both operatic and in keep-
ing with how families work. Then, there
is Clarissa herself. “So much wit, so much
beauty, such a lively manner, and such
exceeding quickness and penetration!”
Lovelace writes. A more sophisticated
model of virtue than Pamela, Clarissa
is philosophical in an old-fashioned
sense, teasing out maxims about human
nature from everyday observation. For
her, morality begins with the attempt
to remove the taint of self-interest from
her judgments. She wouldn’t, she writes
to Anna, be pleased with herself “if I
should judge of the merits of others as
they were kind to me. . . . For is not this
to suppose myself ever in the right; and
all who do not act as I would have them
act, perpetually in the wrong?” If she’s
a bit of a Goody Two-Shoes, most of
us are, like Lovelace, inclined to forgive
her. She’s too fair-minded, too impres-
sive in her repartee, too rigorously self-
critical (“Is not vanity, or secret love of
praise, a principal motive with me at the
bottom?”), and too uniformly kind for
us to hold her over-earnestness too much
against her.
One of Richardson’s avowed pur-
poses in “Clarissa” was to caution young
women against “preferring a Man of
Pleasure to a Man of Probity.” This
aim would have been achieved had he
written Lovelace as a simple villain. But,
libertine though he is, Lovelace is also
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 87
intelligent, full of feeling, and a terrific
talker, who amuses even in his offhand
remarks, as when he sneeringly de-
scribes Belford—who goes in for pros-
titutes, fallen women, and other easy
prey—as “determined . . . to glutton-
ize on the garbage of other foul feed-
ers.” He is the only character who is
Clarissa’s match in wit and the only
one, aside from Anna, to fully compre-
hend her merit. Plus, he’s the best-
looking man Clarissa has ever seen, a
man whose “bountiful temper and gay
heart attach every one to him.” Whether
Clarissa is, as her family believes, in
love with him is a question that has
spurred debate ever since the novel was
published. She denies it, but, from John-
son on, the critical consensus has mostly
held that she is lying to herself. “There
is always something which she prefers
to the truth,” Johnson said. I confess I
tend to part ways with Johnson et al.
on this point. My instinct is to believe
Clarissa when she says that she likes
Lovelace “better perhaps than I ought
to like him,” given “all his preponder-
ating faults,” but that she would hap-
pily, and “without a throb,” as she puts
it to Anna, give him up in order to be
reconciled with her parents and her
uncles. Still, she winds up doing ex-
actly what the Harlowes most dread.
Afraid that they will force her to marry
Solmes and manipulated by a less than
wholly truthful Lovelace, she panics
and runs off with her dashing admirer.
Here the novel takes a turn. Clarissa
and Lovelace seem at first to be, like
Pamela and Mr. B, a familiar if well-
rendered example of a virtuous woman
and a marriage-resistant playboy, but
their fully elaborated inner worlds begin
to transform them into beings far more
ambiguous. Clarissa vacillates between
attraction to and moral revulsion to-
ward Lovelace, who is as slippery a char-
acter as fiction has produced. At one
moment, he laments that he and Clar-
issa fight so often: “we fall out so often,
without falling in once; and a second
quarrel so generally happens before a
first is made up.” He is so endearing
that we almost forget that the cause of
their arguments is his endless duplicity,
the “dog’s tricks” he almost can’t help
but engage in. Of his designs, Clarissa
knows less than the reader—who has
access to his letters to Belford—but she
88 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
picks up on things all the same. She
writes to Anna:
He says too many fine things of me, and
to me. True respect, true value, I think lies not
in words. . . . The silent awe, the humble, the
doubting eye, and even the hesitating voice,
better shew it. . . . The man indeed at times is
all upon the ecstatic; one of his phrases. But,
to my shame and confusion, I must say, that I
know too well to what to attribute his trans-
ports. In one word, it is to his triumph.
Clarissa is in a mortifyingly depen-
dent position. She needs Lovelace to
marry her for the sake of her reputa-
tion. “I behold him with fear now, as
conscious of the power my indiscretion
has given him over me,” she confesses
to Anna. If she knew as much as the
reader, she’d be even more afraid. “Cla-
rissa” is one of fiction’s most terrifying
“he said, she said” dramas because the
facts are seldom what’s at issue: the char-
acters’ private thoughts are. Clarissa
would be both furious and humiliated
if she knew to what extent Lovelace is
torn between his real tenderness for her
and his baser impulses.
“Heaven give me the heart to be hon-
est to my Clarissa!” he writes, and means
it—at that moment. But even in a po-
sition of dependence Clarissa is too
truthful, or proud, to cater to Lovelace’s
ego or to cease regretting that she left
home with him: he is not, she tells him,
“a man . . . who improved upon acquain-
tance.” Whether because his vanity is
wounded by this treatment (she is “like
a haughty and imperious sovereign,” he
complains) or simply because it’s his na-
ture, once Clarissa is in his power he
can’t help but pursue the ultimate coup—
making this young woman of unusually
high repute into his mistress. He now
cunningly sidesteps the issue of mar-
riage, concealing his ambivalence in a
sea of “lip-deep” promises. He isn’t en-
tirely sure he won’t behave honorably
by her—eventually. “I resolve not any
way,” he says. “I will see how her will
works; and how my will leads me on.”
Meanwhile, he prides himself on at least
being honest with his chosen confessor.
“Never was there . . . a man so ready to
accuse himself,” he says to Belford.
When depicting his main charac-
ters’ inner turmoil, Richardson moves
well beyond his hortatory preoccupa-
tions. From one page to the next, it’s
never clear which motives will hold
sway over Lovelace (“This cursed aver-
sion to wedlock, how it has entangled
me!”) or how Clarissa, with her deli-
cate pride and shifting perceptions, will
respond to him. Clarissa’s and Love-
lace’s letters to their respective confi-
dants are as probing as any therapy ses-
sion, and as riddled with defensiveness
and self-deception. The epistolary form,
it becomes evident, plays to Richard-
son’s strengths and minimizes his weak-
nesses: writing from the perspectives
of his best-realized and most complex
characters, and especially writing “to
the moment,” filters his didactic inten-
tions, preventing him from sermoniz-
ing in his own voice.
Relentlessly analytical and unabash-
edly prolix—Johnson once said, “If
you were to read Richardson for the
story, your impatience would be so
much fretted that you would hang
yourself ”—“Clarissa” is as unlike most
of the novels to have come after it as it
is from anything written before. No ran-
dom twists of fate, no plots set in mo-
tion by jealous rivals keep the lovers
apart; even the disapproving parents
have been sidelined. The only obstacles
to their happiness are the ones they cre-
ate themselves. It’s hard to think of a
work of fiction so exclusively internal
until Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” and
harder still to think of a romance. “The
finest novel in the English language,”
Harold Bloom has said. “The only novel
that can rival even Proust.” If most read-
ers aren’t prepared to go quite that far,
this dark, strange romantic dance cer-
tainly marks the flowering of Richard-
son’s talent for morally and emotionally
sophisticated psychological realism.
ne can’t talk about “Clarissa”
O without acknowledging its most
notorious feature: its length. By far the
longest novel in the English canon,
“Clarissa” runs to some nine hundred
and seventy thousand words. For ref-
erence, “War and Peace” clocks in at
five hundred and sixty thousand words,
and “Infinite Jest” a slender four hun-
dred and eighty-four thousand. My
Penguin Classics edition—at 1,499
pages—dwarfs the other paperbacks
on my shelf, more like a phone book
than like a novel.
Even its most ardent admirers tend
to concede that some sections are over-
long. Richardson anticipated such crit-
icism and included a rebuttal in its post-
script: “The letters and conversations,
where the story makes the slowest prog-
ress are presumed to be characteristic.
They give occasion . . . to suggest many
interesting personalities, in which a
good deal of the instruction essential
to a work of this nature is conveyed.”
His pedantic, slightly hectoring tone is
telling. One wonders if he was arguing
with himself—searching for a justifica-
tion for not having had the wherewithal
to take a scalpel to his own work.
But this is less of a problem for “Cla-
rissa” than it would be for his third and
last book, “Sir Charles Grandison.”
Richardson’s three novels bear an in-
teresting relationship to one another.
He had always been uncomfortable
with the happy ending he had given
“Pamela,” and the resulting implica-
tion—remote from his actual view—
that “a reformed rake makes the best
husband.” (Pamela’s marriage to Mr. B
had ostensibly been imposed on him
by the true story he remembered and
sought to re-create.) “Clarissa” had been
intended as something of a correction.
With Lovelace, Richardson aimed to
introduce a rake so chilling as to set
women straight about these kinds of
men. Perhaps he should have paid more
attention to readers’ response to Mil-
ton’s Satan. To his dismay, many read-
ers blamed Clarissa’s coldness for what
goes wrong between them. “O that I
could not say, that I have met with more
admirers of Lovelace than of Clarissa,”
he wrote to a friend.
With “Grandison,” he sought to cor-
rect the correction, writing about the
sort of virtuous man women ought
to prefer to a Lovelace. Grandison is
handsome, brave, and kind to women
and the poor. Unfortunately, he is also
an insufferable prig. He is apt to pro-
nounce that there are “innocent delights
enough to fill with joy every vacant hour”
in order to persuade a friend to give up
womanizing—which the friend does.
The bulk of the book consists of Gran-
dison delivering life lessons to, and being
praised by, his many admirers; what lit-
tle plot it has concerns a love triangle
in which our hero, though blameless—
according to his own protestations—
winds up entangled with two women,
both desperately in love with him. Sadly,
only one can marry him. So inconsol-
able is the one who can’t that our hero
has to talk her out of becoming a nun.
With more expansiveness than “Pa-
mela” and less moral and psychological
complexity than “Clarissa,” Richard-
son’s third novel offers a comprehen-
sive distillation of the generally sound
and humane worldly wisdom that its
author valued. It also contains occa-
sional germs of the subtle drawing-room
comedy that in the nineteenth century
constituted such a crucial development
for the novel. But its sermon-to-action
ratio is so high, and its adulation of its
self-satisfied hero so breathless, that it
often reads as if it were written by one
of Richardson’s parodists.
What is surprising is that “Grandi-
son” was, of Richardson’s novels, a par-
ticular touchstone for Jane Austen, who
(her nephew recounted) could describe
with exactitude “all that was ever said
or done” by each of its many characters.
This partiality, difficult to account for
on aesthetic grounds, is likely attribut-
able to a certain overlap in sensibility
between the authors, an unembarrassed
belief in prudence and scrupulosity over
unchecked feeling. Richardson’s crusade
against rakish men was one of several
themes that Austen would take up in
her own fiction, oftentimes more con-
vincingly (as in “Sense and Sensibility”).
Working in the early years of domestic
realism, she seems to have felt a kinship
with its originator, someone who as-
sembled his massive narratives—what
he recognized as a “new species of writ-
ing”—without models or maps. A lit-
tle more than half a century after Rich-
ardson, she brought to the realist novel
a discipline and a concision and an irony
that enabled her to transform her own
didactic impulses into the basis of art.
Richardson, on the other hand, often
succeeded despite himself. It was when
his instructional aims were crowded out
by the tortuous inner lives of his char-
acters that he achieved greatness.  
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 89

BOOKS
SHOW THEM THE MONEY
Is the sports business a bubble?
BY LOUIS MENAND
“T his Is Your Brain on Sports”
(Crown Archetype), by L. Jon
Wertheim and Sam Sommers, is a
reader-friendly look at what the authors
refer to as “all the batshit craziness that
courses through the sports ecosystem”—a
phrase that captures nicely the jocular
and good-natured spirit of their under-
taking. Some twenty sports-related top-
ics are taken up, from why people be-
“This Is Your Brain on Sports” explores what studies tell us, and don’t tell us, about the way we behave around sports.
lieve that quarterbacks are good-looking
(they’re not, apparently, or not especially)
to why international sporting events like
the Olympics and the World Cup don’t
make Earth a more peaceful planet. (On
the contrary, they often seem to inflame
tensions.)
Wertheim and Sommers’s basic con-
ceit is that although people seem to
behave irrationally when it comes to
sports, they’re acting no differently from
the way they do in the rest of their
lives. If cheering on the underdog, lov-
ing perennial losers, and risking life
and limb to snag a cheesy T-shirt fired
out of a cannon are, objectively, absurd
things to do, then it’s natural to be ir-
rational. “Your brain on sports,” they
conclude, “is really just your regular
90 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
brain acting as it does in other contexts.”
The authors nail their points down
with the mighty hammer of cognitive
science. “As outlandish as sports conduct
might seem,” they explain, “it is rooted
in basic human psychology, neuroscience,
and cognitive tendency.” Their proce-
dure is therefore to find for the various
sports-related attitudes and behaviors
they discuss (Wertheim is an editor at
Sports Illustrated ) scientific findings
(Sommers is a psychologist at Tufts) that
ground them in biology.
The result is a large number of “as
studies show” constructions. As in: “Stud-
ies from across the behavioral sciences
have identified a veritable bias blind spot,
a failure to recognize in ourselves the
prejudices and ethical violations we so
easily spot in others.” And: “Research
tells us that we are not helplessly at the
mercy of a hypocritical brain—under the
right circumstances we can be equally
sensitive to our own and to others’ moral
transgressions.” And: “Studies of the brain
suggest that the difference between sex-
ual and competitive arousal may not be
that large at all.” (Really? Try doing both
at the same time.) And: “Those who
have studied the effects of physiological
arousal on thought and behavior report
that we seem to have two personalities:
one for cool conditions and one for when
we are gripped by hot passion.”
It is good to know that these asser-
tions have been proved in a laboratory,
because they have been part of the folk-
lore of common sense for pretty much
ever. “This Is Your Brain on Sports” is a
book for people who think that if, in-
stead of saying that people are happy
when their team wins, you say “Activity
increased in a region called the ventral
striatum,” or, instead of talking about
stress, you talk about “a surge of corti-
sol,” then you are on to something.
What you’re on to is physicalism,
which (leaving the metaphysics aside) is
simply a method of redescription. We’re
conscious of our thoughts and feelings;
what we’re not conscious of is their phys-
ical correlates, the chemical states in our
bodies that constitute them and without
which nothing could be felt or thought.
“The experience of rooting for your fa-
vorite team can actually be captured at
a neural level,” Wertheim and Sommers
say. This is true, because so can the ex-
perience of everything.
The fallacy to watch out for is the as-
sumption that brain states tell us some-
thing about what an experience means
to the person having it. Brain states of
the kind that Wertheim and Sommers
describe—that is, things like hormonal
increases and changes in the ventral stri-
atum—are indifferent to meaning. On
that level, the brain of someone whose
ILLUSTRATION BY NISHANT CHOKSI
team has just lost the Super Bowl is in-
distinguishable from the brain of some-
one who is grieving for the death of a
loved one. No one would say that those
experiences are equivalent.
Anxiety is a classic case. I can be made
equally anxious by the thought of miss-
ing my bus and the thought of being
struck by a meteor. The first is (usually)
rational and the second irrational. But
the brute chemistry is the same. This is
why it’s not that hard to find non-sports
situations in which the brain seems to
act like a brain “on sports.” The more in-
teresting question has to be whether we
really treat the two situations as the same,
or have a “sports” mode that we switch
on and off. And, if we do, what that mode
cognitively is. What do we think we’re
doing when we’re on sports?
To their credit, Wertheim and Som-
mers are on to this. They are enthusiasts,
but they are not fanatics, and they fre-
quently concede that, whatever the suit-
ability of a given behavioral pattern with
regard to sports, it is often inappropriate,
and hence overridden, in life’s other are-
nas. They frequently pull the rug out from
under their own arguments. In sports, for
example, we like to root for the under-
dog—the team or the player who, by defi-
nition, is more likely to lose—partly be-
cause the marginal psychic payoff for being
right is so much greater than the poten-
tial pain on the downside. But we’re play-
ing with house money. When it’s our own
money, we tend to back the favorite.
Similarly with fan-centric hypocrisy.
If you are a Boston sports fan, you are
confident that Tom Brady never ordered
anyone to deflate his footballs, and you
are equally certain that Peyton Manning
is a big fat liar. Would you be surprised
if someone pointed out that you might
be suffering from a “bias blind spot”? I
don’t think you would. The whole basis
for being a sports fan is that there are no
consequences for hypocrisy. In fact, if
you are not a hypocrite in this sense, if
you cannot favor one side for no decent
reason over the other, then you cannot
enjoy sports at all.
There is another fallacy lurking here.
That is the assumption that the “baser”
impulse—in this case, the impulse to
prefer your cheater to their cheater—is
more hard-wired than the “nobler” im-
pulse, which would be to put favoritism
aside, ignore the fact that one quarterback
 is married to a Brazilian supermodel
while the other does Papa John’s pizza
commercials, difficult as that may be, and
weigh the cases impartially.
We don’t think we need to do this,
because sports is one of those conse-
quence-free zones in life in which a dou-
ble standard is acceptable. Armchair po-
litical debate is another. Hillary Clinton
voted for the Iraq War? An honest mis-
take, made by many. Bernie Sanders voted
against gun regulation? Disqualified to
be President! But, once consequences for
us or for people we care about come into
the picture, we strive to assess candidates
objectively. We may be—we undoubt-
edly are—still limited by blind spots, but
we are not flagrantly prejudiced. To be a
fan is to make a point of being unreason-
able. Sports is a vacation from prudence.
Is hating on Peyton more “rooted in
basic human psychology” than appreci-
ating his case with judicious disinter-
est? People toggle effortlessly between
these behaviors every day, because peo-
ple are astute readers of context. We
know the difference between sitting in
a bar and sitting in a jury box. We con-
demn bias when it matters just as in-
stinctively as we root for the home team
when it doesn’t.
ne purpose of explaining behav-
O ior by reference to “basic human
psychology” is to naturalize it. It’s true
that, as far as we know, some people have
always enjoyed athletic contests, hoping,
no doubt, to pump up ac-
tivity in their ventral striata.
An athletic competition is
described in detail in the
Odyssey, which is set in
the twelfth century B.C.E.
Does this have evolutionary
significance? I think it’s one
of those species character-
istics, like singing or writ-
ing poems, about which you
could argue either way. It’s either a per-
formance to attract mates or a by-prod-
uct of adaptive characteristics that have
been selected for other reasons. We have
evolved to chase animals and kill them
with stones and sticks. Why not stage
some foot races and discus throws when
we’re not in the mood to hunt?
What does change, of course, is the
social role that games play. In ancient
Greece, they were performed at funer-
92 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
als or as demonstrations of regional pride.
In ancient Rome, the site of gladiato-
rial excesses, they were used to promote
military virtues. In eighteenth-century
England, sports were an excuse for gam-
bling. Organized spectator sports, of the
kind we have today, with leagues and
championships and codified rules, vir-
tually all date from the nineteenth cen-
tury. One of the earliest attempts to
codify soccer was at the University of
Cambridge, in the eighteen-forties,
around the same time that the first rules
of rugby were set down, at the Rugby
School. Ice hockey was made a sport at
McGill in 1877, the same year that Wim-
bledon began. In the United States, or-
ganized baseball began in the eigh-
teen-seventies, football and basketball
in the eighteen-nineties. The first mod-
ern Olympic Games were held in 1896,
the first Tour de France in 1903. The
N.C.A.A. was formed (under a differ-
ent name) in 1906, the P.G.A. in 1916.
Still, even though football games, ten-
nis matches, and golf tournaments today
take virtually the same form they did a
hundred years ago, there has been one
big change in the ecology of modern
sports. That change is, in a word, money.
In 1971, Roger Staubach, who was a quar-
terback for the Dallas Cowboys, the Super
Bowl Most Valuable Player, and one of
the most popular athletes in the United
States, had a salary of fifty thousand dol-
lars. During the off-season, he worked
in real estate. Today, the team’s starting
quarterback, Tony Romo,
who has never won a cham-
pionship, plays on a six-
year contract worth a hun-
dred and eight million dol-
lars. Matthew Futterman’s
“Players: The Story of
Sports and Money, and the
Visionaries Who Fought
to Create a Revolution”
(Simon & Schuster), from
which this example is taken, is a book
about how that happened.
As his subtitle suggests, Futterman
has cast the story in a heroic mode—as
a series of actions in the tradition of the
storming of the Bastille, the Boston Tea
Party, and the ninety-five theses nailed
to the door. A few individuals with
guts and vision risk all to challenge a
reactionary status quo and bring mod-
ern sports into an era of (relatively)
enlightened liberality, in which business
is booming and everyone is better off.
Futterman’s story begins in 1960, and
his revolutionaries include Mark Mc-
Cormack, the founder of the sports and
fashion agency IMG (originally Inter-
national Management Group); Nick Bol-
lettieri, the tennis coach who created the
first full-time tennis boarding school
(which was eventually bought by IMG);
Marvin Miller, the union organizer who
established free agency in major-league
baseball; and John Paul (Sonny) Vaccaro,
a businessman who persuaded Nike to
put all its advertising money into one
star, Michael Jordan. There are also ter-
rific stories about the great hurdler Edwin
Moses and the tennis star Stan Smith,
about Arnold Palmer (McCormack’s first
client) and Catfish Hunter (from whose
contract dispute Miller fashioned his
breakthrough).
Although the dramatic effect of the
stories is fine, the premise is false. For
everyone knows what the social role of
sports is today. It is, via commercials and
endorsements, to sell stuff. And every-
one knows what makes that possible:
television. It did not require a revolu-
tionary genius to figure this out. How
the various interested parties managed
to get access to that giant teat did re-
quire some legal and financial savvy.
But if it had not been managed in one
way it would surely have been managed
in another.
utterman knows this perfectly
F well, too, and when, in his final
chapters, he gets to the part played by
television in modern sports, he makes
his most provocative observations. For
he thinks that the enormous financial
sports empire built up since 1960 may
be teetering on collapse.
Two things especially concern him.
One is what might be called the Michael
Jordan effect. As Futterman is not the
first person to note, the model for con-
temporary sports marketing was set in
Hollywood in the nineteen-fifties, and
the key figure was Lew Wasserman, who
ran the talent agency M.C.A. What Was-
serman and the studios figured out was
that stars sell a picture. If you promote
the actors, rather than the story, you will
sell more tickets.
This meant paying the stars a lot more,
and sometimes giving them a piece of
the action—“points”—as Wasserman
did, starting in 1950, with his client Jimmy
Stewart. The result is what we might
call, if the analogy were not a little gro-
tesque, entertainment-industry income
inequality. Stars make astronomically
more than the rest of the talent. For “Star
Wars: The Force Awakens,” Harrison
Ford is reported to have been paid be-
tween twenty and thirty million dollars;
Daisy Ridley, one of the leads, got be-
tween one and three hundred thousand.
Futterman argues that in team sports
like basketball this has a damaging effect.
The organization has a big financial stake
in the performance of one or, at most,
two players. The more people tune in to
watch Kobe Bryant, the more points Kobe
Bryant has to score, and the more points
Kobe Bryant scores, the more money he
is paid. The game itself is reshaped, or
deformed, to get the ball to Kobe. His
salary this year was twenty-five million
dollars, and his team, the Lakers, lost sixty-
five of the eighty-two games it played.
(By the way, Staubach, underpaid as he
might have been by the Cowboys, did
turn his moonlighting job to some ad-
vantage. He made a fortune in real estate
and, in 2008, sold his company for more
than seven hundred million dollars.)
Futterman’s other concern is more
alarming, at least to the oligarchs of pro-
fessional sports. He thinks that the in-
dustry has expanded beyond the scale of
its actual audience. “One of the great il-
lusions of the sports industry is mass fas-
cination,” he says. It’s true that hundreds
of millions of people watch special events
like the World Cup and the Olympics,
but the day-to-day audience for sports
is tiny. In the United States, it amounts
to about four per cent of households.
Fewer than three per cent on average
watch their local N.B.A. games; fewer
than two per cent watch their home-
town N.H.L. teams.
The exception proves the rule. The one
major sport that continues to attract view-
ers and high Nielsen ratings is football,
and that, Futterman argues, is because it
is the only sport that broadcasts all of its
games on network television. Its income
is an accurate reflection of the size of its
audience. All the other leagues and teams
have deals with cable companies, like
ESPN. Some, like the Yankees, own a
stake in their own cable companies.
Cable works by bundling: your monthly
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 93
cable bill is split up among the channels
your carrier provides, whether you watch
those channels or not. Futterman says
this means that about twenty per cent of
the average cable bill goes to sports chan-
nels, which pay the teams or the leagues
for the right to show their games. Which
means that sports are currently enjoying
a very large subsidy from a public that
doesn’t watch them. Cable looks to be
on the way to disaggregation, and, when
that happens, sports will be worth what
the actual audience is willing to pay for
them. We may be looking at a bubble.
A statistic related to the shrinking
market is the rising age of fans in some
sports. According to Futterman, in 2009
the average age of a postseason baseball
viewer was forty-nine; in 2014, it was
fifty-five. The average age of someone
who watched a regular-season baseball
game that season was fifty-eight. Men
over fifty-eight is not a demographic ad-
vertisers are dying to reach, unless they’re
selling erectile-dysfunction or bladder-
control medications—which is why you
see so many commercials for those prod-
ucts on local sports broadcasts. When
“ask your doctor” commercials start show-
ing up, you know the end is near. Sports’
“cultural relevance,” as Futterman puts
it, may be in decline.
In fact, if any industry looks primed
for disruption, it’s sports. The North
American sports business is valued at
half a trillion dollars. Annual revenue
from ticket sales, broadcast rights, mer-
chandise, and other sources is about
sixty-one billion dollars. But the major
sports leagues are operated as cartels.
They are, in the terms of the Sherman
Act, combinations in restraint of trade.
The teams (the Green Bay Packers are
the only American exception) are pri-
vately owned, and the leagues, which
is to say, the owners, have rules to re-
strict the ability of players to sell their
services in the open market. These in-
clude the college draft (imagine that,
in your line of work, the “right” to em-
ploy you was owned by one company)
and the salary cap.
he entire industry rests on the
Tlabor of athletes.The number of ath-
letes is actually quite small, but, as a class,
they are not getting that much of the
money. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, only 13,700 people make their
94 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
living playing spectator sports in the
United States (compared with, for ex-
ample, sixty-nine thousand people who
are actors). The median annual wage for
athletes is $44,680.
If that number sounds low, it’s be-
cause we’re accustomed to reading
about players signing multi-year con-
tracts for sums north of a hundred mil-
lion dollars. There are not many such
players, and there’s a reason that their
contracts are so heavily publicized by
the industry: they mask actual labor
conditions. In the National Football
League, for example, where annual rev-
enue is close to thirteen billion dol-
lars, the median player salary is $839,000
and the average career lasts three and
a half years.
In Major League Baseball, where rev-
enue is $9.5 billion, the average player
salary is $4.25 million, but that figure
reflects the fact that a couple of dozen
players are making more than twenty
million dollars a year. The median salary
in baseball is $1.5 million, and the aver-
age career lasts a little more than five and
a half years. Player compensation in base-
ball accounts for less than forty per cent
of total revenue, down from fifty-six per
cent in 2002.
We may think—we are more or less
conditioned to think—“But they’re get-
ting paid just to play a game!” We read
about the number of dollars a star ath-
lete makes per goal or per at-bat and
feel that social priorities are out of whack.
But that one person is watched by mil-
lions of people—on the truly big stage,
like the Super Bowl, by more than a
hundred million people. Star athletes
deliver the biggest audiences in the world
to advertisers. They are making many
people besides themselves rich.
For the stars, signing bonuses and
endorsements provide additional in-
come. Which can be a lot: in 2015,
LeBron James made sixty-five million
dollars, forty-four million from en-
dorsements. On the other hand, ac-
cording to Forbes, Daniel Gilbert, the
man who owns James’s team, is worth
$5.4 billion. At sixty-five million dol-
lars a year, it will take James eighty
years to catch up. Tony Romo’s base
salary last year was eighteen million dol-
lars, but the National Football League’s
commissioner, who is employed by
the owners, made $34.1 million. No
one pays to watch the commissioner.
Once you get below the major leagues,
player compensation shrinks dramati-
cally. In the minor leagues in baseball,
players can make as little as fifty-five
hundred dollars a season. In basketball,
the highest minor-league (the D-League)
pay is twenty-five thousand dollars; in
hockey, the minimum is forty-two thou-
sand. Practice-squad players in the N.F.L.
can make as little as six thousand dol-
lars a week, and only during the season.
Women athletes make far less than men
who play the same sports. This is in part
because not a single women’s sport is
scheduled for prime-time viewing, apart
from events like Grand Slam tennis
matches, the Women’s World Cup, and
the Olympics. And, finally, four hundred
and sixty thousand college students play
organized sports. In 2014, the organiza-
tion that governs those sports, the
N.C.A.A., had an income of $989 mil-
lion. Some college athletes receive sup-
port from the N.C.A.A. for tuition and
other expenses, but none receive a salary
or are allowed to accept income for en-
dorsements or other activities related to
their work as athletes.
The irony, if that is the right word, is
that sports is essentially aestheticized
labor. It is the spectacle of men and
women exerting all their mental and
physical powers to produce . . . nothing.
Kant defined art as “purposiveness with-
out purpose.” I think (gulp) Kant was
wrong about art—artists have purposes,
and people who watch, listen to, or read
works of art try to grasp what those pur-
poses are. But he would have been right
about sports.
Sports, Maxim Gorky wrote, makes
people “even more stupid than they are.”
Fran Lebowitz, not always known for
agreeing with Soviet writers, agreed.
“What is truly chilling is that there are a
lot of smart people interested in sports,”
she said. “That just gives you no hope at
all for the human race.” Still, leaving aside
all the trash talk and chest thumping
(maybe you can’t), there is something
beautiful and touching about watching
fellow-members of what is fundamen-
tally a klutzy, badly engineered, and un-
derpowered species perform difficult phys-
ical acts. A squirrel watching a gymnastics
routine would just laugh. On the other
hand, squirrels can’t endorse pizza. We’re
way ahead of them in that department. 
BRIEFLY NOTED
Guapa, by Saleem Haddad (Other Press). Rasa, the narrator of
this vibrant, wrenching début novel, is a young gay man liv-
ing in an unnamed Arab city. During the Arab Spring, he
joined protests, but now an autocratic regime rules while zeal-
ots seethe in the slums. Worse, Rasa’s fiercely traditional
grandmother has just seen him with his lover, and his lover
is growing distant. In the course of a day, as Rasa hunts for
a missing friend, who has likely been hauled in by the vice
squad, his city and his memories roil, sensuous and caustic,
full of smoke and blood. A lavish political wedding that forms
the book’s final set piece brings revelations and epiphanies,
but they don’t feel forced.

Hard Red Spring, by Kelly Kerney (Viking). This century-span-

ning novel examines the violent relationship between Guate-
mala and the United States through the connected stories of
four American women. In 1902, the young daughter of cochi-
neal farmers witnesses the violent disintegration of her family;
in 1954, the wife of an ambassador has an affair with her hus-
band’s best friend; in 1983, a missionary experiences misgivings;
and, in 1999, an adoptive mother takes her Mayan daughter on
a trip to explore her roots. The book’s ambitious scope entails
some creaky coincidences, but Kerney’s insights are rewarding.
Of happiness, one character concludes, “How unexpected, how
encompassing, how close to disappointment it felt.”

Landscapes of Communism, by Owen Hatherley (New Press).

Part history, part travelogue, this survey of Soviet architecture
explores how a society’s values, real or professed, inform phys-
ical space. Hatherley takes us down Moscow’s deep, grandi-
ose metro stations, which doubled as bomb shelters, and
through gentrifying prefab workers’ districts. We encounter a
“shamelessly phallic” television tower in Prague and a show-
piece of “Stalinoid angry-yet-maternal womanhood” in War-
saw. Triumphalist monuments to revolution—“muscles, beards,
guns”—abound. Hatherley also addresses the dilemma of what
is to be done with structures freighted with a bygone ideol-
ogy, and quotes Deng Xiaoping on Mao’s Mausoleum: “It was
inappropriate to build it and it would also be inappropriate
to demolish it.”

Charlotte Brontë, by Claire Harman (Knopf ). In this masterly

biography, Harman captures the contradictions that defined
the life and work of the author of “Jane Eyre.” Together with
her sisters Emily and Anne, Brontë led a life that was tedious
when it was not tragic: spent largely in rural isolation, and
punctuated by the untimely deaths of loved ones and stints
teaching and governessing. To explain how genius flourished
in such circumstances Harman leads readers on a precipitous
journey through the writer’s interior landscape. The Brontës
were odd, antisocial, enmeshed, obsessive, and violent; on one
occasion, an adult Emily terrorized her siblings by punching
the family dog in the eyes till it was “half-blind.” Harman’s
psychologically astute portrait deftly bridges Charlotte’s world
and her work.

POP MUSIC
THE SELF-CONFLICT ZONE
Drake’s perpetual sadness.
BY HUA HSU
he Toronto rapper and singer
T Drake got his big break in 2009,
back when describing someone as both
a rapper and a singer still seemed like a
way to undermine his credibility. That
year, he released “So Far Gone,” a mix-
tape that showcased him as a one-
man distillation of modern hip-hop and
R. & B. In the past, the impassive out-
law rapper and the gushing doe-eyed
singer crossed paths only as a way of
combining their genres’ respective charms
for a hit single. Drake cracked the code:
he collapsed the distance between these
archetypes, seeming equally comfortable
rhyming about dodging bullets and bar-
On “Views,” the rapper bleeds onto the page and then admires the pattern.
96 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
ing his insecurities in a come-hither
hook.
There had been artists before him,
like Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott,
who toggled between rapping and sing-
ing. But what distinguished Drake was
a sense of shameless guile, a confidence
in his complex persona that was due
partly to his background as an actor.
(Under his birth name, Aubrey Gra-
ham, he played a basketball star on
“Degrassi: The Next Generation.”) As
with his predecessor Kanye West, there
was something novel about a male rap-
per who appeared to be so sensitive.
Since the success of “So Far Gone,”
Drake has become one of pop music’s
most polarizing figures as well as one
of its most influential. He is like an al-
gorithm cycling through a set of du-
rable themes: Nobody believed in me;
always be loyal; my enemies are out to
get me; we should be together; I’ve
tried to be faithful, but I just can’t. And,
above all: nobody’s perfect.
This last motif has defined Drake’s
growth as an artist. Starting with the or-
nate melancholia of “Take Care,” from
2011, Drake elevated the unfurling of
one’s imperfections into an art form. It
wasn’t just his interest in scrutinizing his
own contradictions, by now a trope for
any thoughtful rapper. It was the harsh-
ness of his raps and the unabashed soft-
ness of his singing, the way his music
flitted between styles and rhythms, ex-
pressing a restless desire to become some-
one or something better. The music
sounded intimate and precise, owing
largely to a close-knit circle of produc-
ers, led by his friend Noah (40) Shebib,
who swaddled his voice within their dig-
ital purrs and tolling bells.
The thing about introspection,
though, is that it allows us to think of
ourselves always as works in progress.
While this is a healthy realization with
which to greet every day, it doesn’t make
for the most compelling narrative. In
recent years, Drake has grown perhaps
too comfortable in this perpetual state
of self-examination and light sadness—
he bleeds onto the page and then ad-
mires the pattern he leaves behind. He
mines his past, not as a reason to change
but as rationalization for his worst be-
havior. Late last month, Drake released
his fourth album, “Views.” On the cover,
he poses high up on Toronto’s CN
Tower—an apt, if melodramatic, image
of loneliness at the top. “All of my ‘let’s
just be friends’ are friends I don’t have
anymore,” he croons on “Keep the Fam-
ily Close,” one of the many songs on
the album which function as autopsies
for relationships past. Maybe there was
something there? Probably not, he con-
cludes, comparing a certain woman to
a Chrysler designed to fool passersby
into thinking it’s a Bentley.
A lot of the songs on “Views” find
Drake running through his relationship
woes, recounting arguments at the
Cheesecake Factory or dead-end dis-
cussions about trust, wondering if he
ILLUSTRATION BY STANLEY CHOW
was so “good” that it was inevitable that
he would be taken for granted. “Views,”
like much of Drake’s music, is relatable
because of its vagueness, balancing tales
of betrayal and self-loathing with win-
ning celebrations of loyalty and friend-
ship. “Weston Road Flows” is a remi-
niscence of more carefree days; the title
track, built on a swelling gospel sam-
ple, follows the pressures of fame—
“The paranoia can start to turn into ar-
rogance / Thoughts too deep to go work
’em out with a therapist.”
For Drake, redemption lies in his city
and in his past, as well as in his broth-
erhood-above-everything approach to
the good life. On the delightful “With
You,” he and the singer PartyNextDoor
take turns playfully begging their lovers
to come back, though it seems as if they
would rather hang out with each other.
For the listener, redemption comes from
Drake’s knack for producing motiva-
tional anthems. It’s humbling to think
how many birthdays, graduations, and
promotions have had his music as their
soundtrack.
Drake understands how people live
with music, how it helps us get through
life, whether it’s a breakup, a court date,
or an unusually long jog. One of his most
endearing habits has always been the
way he weaves other people’s music into
his own. “I think I’d lie for you / I think
I’d die for you / Jodeci ‘Cry for You,’ ” he
sings, over deconstructed dancehall
chirps, on “Controlla.” Elsewhere, he
samples the vocals of a Mary J. Blige
song from the nineties and a Ray J track
from the aughts, as if the album were an
index of the music that accompanies life’s
heartbreaks.
“You send the ‘Are you here?’ text
without an invite,” he sings, on the sat-
iny “U with Me?” “That’s that shit that
I don’t like.” Here he is paraphrasing
the Chicago rapper Chief Keef ’s 2012
hit “I Don’t Like.” Drake turns the
original’s sociopathic stomp into some-
thing sweet and breezy, before retreat-
ing to more cocksure footing. “How’s
that for real?” he raps, finishing the
song with a gruff surliness. If you were
to cook Drake’s music down to its es-
sence—the intimacy, the effortlessness
of its craft, the absurdity—you would
probably get this song: a narrative about
texting with an ex-lover, veering back
and forth between vulnerability and
passive-aggressive nagging, and man-
aging to make that moment when “three
dots” appear in the text window seem
epic.
ast July, Drake found himself in
L a tiff with the pugnacious Philadel-
phia rapper Meek Mill. Though Drake
had appeared on Meek’s album, he
seemed uninterested in helping him pro-
mote it. What started as a minor snub
metastasized into a referendum on the
current state of hip-hop, as Meek ac-
cused Drake of hiring a lesser-known
rapper named Quentin Miller to write
his rhymes, a charge that might once
have been a career-ender. Drake quickly
responded with a pair of withering dis
tracks, as well as “Hotline Bling,” a sin-
gle that did little to resolve questions
about Drake’s originality. “Hotline Bling”
bore a close resemblance to “Cha Cha,”
a minor hit by the Virginia rapper
D.R.A.M., sparking an additional dis-
cussion of whether Drake was just a styl-
ish fraud.
But old, meritocratic notions of au-
thenticity have never vexed Drake. After
all, he is a former child actor from Can-
ada whose grittiest raps seem to por-
tray a life that was never his, and who
has been largely responsible for rebrand-
ing his home town, Toronto, as “the 6,”
a reference to the city’s area codes as
well as to its six original boroughs. In-
stead, he has succeeded by pursuing
ubiquity, particularly when it comes to
understanding and embracing the un-
predictable rhythms of the Internet. “I
do my own propaganda,” he raps on
“Hype,” something that’s evident when-
ever you see him gesticulating court-
side at a Toronto Raptors basketball
game, or goofily dancing to an up-and-
coming artist he may want to claim as
a protégé, or releasing videos, like the
one for the color-washed “Hotline
Bling,” and album art, like the cover of
“Views,” that seem tailor-made for re-
circulation as memes and GIFs. Even
his lyrics seem engineered to be tweeted
or used as hashtags.
There is no reason to feel sorry for
the version of Drake who floats through
this album, gazing forlornly out win-
dows, scrolling through his phone for
someone to text, heartlessly boning his
way out of his malaise. And yet as I lis-
tened to “Views” I felt a sense of ex-
haustion that wasn’t necessarily Drake’s
fault. In early April, he announced the
album’s release date—a rarity in this era
of the surprise drop, when artists seem
intent on ambushing their fans—and
teased us with “One Dance,” a won-
drous, global dance party of a single,
featuring the British singer Kyla and
the Nigerian singer Wizkid. But be-
tween his announcement and the al-
bum’s release, at the end of April, Be-
yoncé put out her provocative new
“visual album,” “Lemonade,” and Prince
died. It’s not just that these events up-
staged him—they were a reminder, from
the distant past and a possible future,
of how outdated our traditional notion
of albums has become.
At a time when Kanye West and Ken-
drick Lamar have produced messy, am-
bitious albums full of statements on art
and accountability, Drake’s goals seem
modest and quaint. It’s the difference
between trying to do something impor-
tant and trying to stay relevant.
Make no mistake: Drake’s songs will
be unavoidable come summer, as the
soundtrack for sports highlights, in-
spiring some to grind a little harder,
helping others to mend a broken heart.
But it’s hard to stay in the world of
“Views” for too long. My field of vi-
sion kept shrinking until I felt that I
was looking at a narrow band of light.
There’s something universal about
Drake’s inwardness, certainly, but it be-
gins to feel tedious to linger too long
in the self-conflict zone when so much
other music aspires to take in the world
all at once. He continues to make music
that sounds magnificent but leaves you
feeling a bit unfulfilled. I imagine that
this is what it would feel like to be the
antagonist in one of Drake’s songs, one
of the featureless exes whose only pur-
pose is to support him, to hold a mir-
ror up to him, stuck in a relationship
where sweet nothings are tossed off for
the sake of a clever phrasing, where
you are little more than furniture in
someone else’s movie. 
1
Pyrrhic Victory Department
From the Londonderry (N.H.) Times.
12:22 p.m. Report of angry squirrel in house
on King Henry Drive. Squirrel left the house.
6:19 p.m. Squirrel is back in house under
couch on King Henry Drive. Animal removed
from house.
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 97
 known: liked, not liked, loved, perhaps
THE ART WORLD feared. The longer you look the more
meaningful the picture becomes. It

SERIOUSLY FUNNY
A Nicole Eisenman retrospective.
BY PETER SCHJELDAHL
Political and personal: Eisenman’s “The Triumph of Poverty” (2009).
succinct Nicole Eisenman ret-
A rospective of twenty-two paint-
ings and three sculptures, at the New
Museum, is accidentally well timed
to the recent news that the Mac-
Arthur Foundation has awarded a
“genius” grant to the spectacularly
talented, darkly hilarious New York
artist. That’s good. Any attention drawn
to Eisenman benefits conversation
about contemporary art. At fifty-one—
tall and stovepipe slim, with a strik-
ingly long face beneath close-cropped
black hair—Eisenman has mellowed
only slightly from the raucous wun-
derkind who burst onto the scene in
feeling. They must be judged in per-
son; in reproduction they lose the mas-
terly touch that is Eisenman’s signa-
ture. The MacArthur Foundation cited
her for restoring “to the representa-
tion of the human form a cultural
significance that had waned during
the ascendancy of abstraction in the
20th century.” I’d like it to be true.
Eisenman’s resourceful Expression-
ism hints at the power of narrative
painting to re-situate the art world in
the world at large.
Eisenman is an artist of overlap-
ping sincerities. One of them suggests
that of a bohemian community orga-
does indeed recast bohemia in a con-
vincingly up-to-date guise—in Brook-
lyn, of course, where thousands of the
art world’s threadbare strivers reside.
Similarly compelling are two big, pop-
ulous paintings that signal Eisenman’s
response to the Great Recession. In
“Coping” (2008), poignant citizens of
a strange village meander waist-deep
in a caramel-colored flood. In “The
Triumph of Poverty” (2009), a crowd
treks past a beat-up car in a rural scene;
one of them is a dishevelled rich man
whose dropped pants reveal that he is
ass-backward.
Another theme that has come nat-
urally to Eisenman since the begin-
ning of her career, and which she has
furthered almost to the extent of a
civic duty, is sexuality. A detail of “It
Is So” (2014), reproduced on the cover
of the show’s catalogue, depicts les-
bian cunnilingus. You see, in sculp-
tural forms, the tops of the women’s
heads and their linked hands, brack-
eted by the recipient’s spread legs.
Eisenman quipped to an interviewer
in 2014, “I feel totally inhabited in
my role as a possessed-like lesbian
authority. Somebody’s got to step up
and do it.” But when the show’s co-
curator Massimiliano Gioni, inter-
viewing her for the catalogue, haz-
arded that she is “the voice of a queer
community,” she said, “No. God, no.”
She explained, “I couldn’t draw a line
around a group of people and claim
to have a voice for anyone other than
myself.” The apparent contradiction
goes to the heart of her singularity, as
an artist delighted to find herself in
common cause with others, but only
by way of visions and opinions that
feel authentic to her. You needn’t sign
on with any constituency to enjoy her
audacity.
Eisenman was born in Verdun,
COURTESY THE ARTIST/LEO KOENIG INC.

the 1995 Whitney Biennial. Since then,
she has led a kind of one-woman in-
surgency, bidding to reshape the field,
with figurative works that collapse the
political into the personal and the per-
sonal into an erudite devotion to paint-
ing. She paints narrative fantasies that
look bumptiously jokey at first, but
reveal worlds of nuanced thought and
98 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
nizer. In “Biergarten at Night” (2007),
dozens of characters—some realist, in-
cluding a self-portrait; others fanciful,
such as an androgynous figure pas-
sionately kissing a death’s-head—hoist
brews in velvety shadow and glimmer-
ing light. Each face is painted a bit
differently, in a range from filmy to
impastoed, and each feels individually
France, in 1965. Her father was a U.S.
Army psychiatrist, and her mother is
an urban planner. When I spoke with
Eisenman recently, she told me that
her father’s Freudian orthodoxy both
tormented and inspired her as a child.
They were at odds for years, but have
reconciled. She paid homage to his
analytical bent and his interpretations
of dreams in a 2014 retrospective of
her work that appeared in museums
in St. Louis, Philadelphia, and San
Diego. Titled “Dear Nemesis,” it was
dedicated “To my Dad, who has taught
me to see things that are not there
and to see through things that are.”
Also important to Eisenman was her
maternal great-grandmother Esther
Hammerman, who died in 1984. Born
in Poland, Hammerman was an un-
schooled painter of cityscapes and
scenes of Jewish life who emigrated
from Vienna in 1937. Eisenman re-
mains close, she told me, to the “Eisen-
man clan,” including two brothers and
a centenarian great-aunt who is the
subject of her painting “Death and
the Maiden” (2009), as a blowsy nude
tippling wine at a table with a patient
and even tenderly companionable death
figure.
In 1970, the family settled in Scars-
dale, where Eisenman embraced her
vocation as an artist while still in high
school. She received a degree in paint-
ing from the Rhode Island School of
Design and spent a year in Rome, en-
raptured by Renaissance painters. Re-
turning to New York in 1987, she lived,
by turns, on the Lower East Side, in
Chinatown, at the Chelsea Hotel, and,
for a few months, in the gallery of her
dealer, Jack Tilton. She worked for a
bed company in Jersey City and for
an outdoor-mural firm in Manhattan.
In the meantime, she experimented
with installations, sculpture, and video.
But she mainly drew, crowding the
walls of the Tilton Gallery with tacked-
up cartoons and sketches for a mem-
orable solo show, in 1994. Her sensa-
tional contribution to the 1995 Whit-
ney Biennial was a thirty-foot-long
mural of the museum blasted to ruins;
victims lie on the ground, and only
one wall remains, at which she sits on
a scaffold and paints. Her early paint-
ings could be nasty. The Norman
Rockwellish pastiche of “Dysfunc-
tional Family” (2000) features a father
smoking a bong, a mother exposing
her crotch, and a baby boy who has
taken a hammer to his private parts.
But even her darkest visions exude
ebullient panache.
Guessing Eisenman’s historical prec-
edents has been something of a sport
among her critics. Her favorite Old
Master, she told me, dating to her days
in Rome, is Andrea Mantegna—the
brother-in-law of Giovanni Bellini, who
is as astringently flinty as Bellini is melt-
ingly honeyed. She helpfully provides
references with the spines of books
stacked in “It Is So” and another paint-
ing of sexual intimacy, “Night Studio”
(2009): Bruegel, Goya, Vuillard, Munch,
Nolde, Kirchner, and Ernst, among
other forebears, and her figure-paint-
ing contemporaries Nicola Tyson and
Peter Doig. The influence of Philip
Guston is plain in “Selfie” (2014): the
stubbly, boulder-shaped head of a man
in bed holding his phone so close that
its camera picks up only half of his cy-
clopean eye. Eisenman likes rhyming
contemporary subjects with motifs from
the past, including, as she told Gioni
of a number of pictures, a timeless ges-
ture of “shoulders curled in and our eyes
reverently looking down”; it’s a pose fa-
miliar from classic paintings of religious
piety, reënacted whenever we check our
phones.
Eisenman is an enthusiast for fellow-
artists and, especially, for poets. “Under
the Table 2” (2014) memorializes a
happily dissipated day with a crew of
the latter, she says. Jumbled heads share
a bottle, which a single hand lifts and
pours out, under a table that is topped
with a stuffed olive, a cigarette emit-
ting an arabesque of smoke, and a huge
salami, its sliced end textured with
psychedelic dots of color. The image
is both lovely and gauche—gaucherie
being Eisenman’s when-in-doubt reflex.
The New Museum show is titled
“Al-ugh-ories,” a phrasing that Eisen-
man coined when Gioni proposed
“Allegories.” That “ugh,” in response
to what seems a reasonable charac-
terization of her style—like the “God,
no” with which she rejected being cat-
egorized as a political activist—ex-
presses an important distinction. Like
her sexual self-assertion, Eisenman’s
stylistic genres are means to the end
of sustaining her confidence as an art-
ist. They are about being specific. She
is a pragmatist in service to creativity
that remembers the past, glories in
the present, and eagerly addresses the
future. She has said, “I’d love to jump
ahead thirty years and look back at
this moment in art. What will jump
out?” She will, I bet. 
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016 99

THE CURRENT CINEMA
TRANSFORMERS
“The Lobster” and “Captain America: Civil War.”
BY ANTHONY LANE
Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz play forbidden lovers in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film.
imorous, paunchy, and pale, with
T a sad mustache and a pair of rim-
less glasses, David (Colin Farrell) checks
into a rural hotel. He expects to remain
for forty-five days, and, like the other
guests—all of whom, male and female,
are unattached—he must use the time
to procure a suitable mate. Anyone who
flunks that task will suffer an unusual
penalty. As the hotel manager (Olivia
Colman) says to David, “The fact that
you’ll turn into an animal if you fail to
fall in love with someone during your
stay here is not something that should
upset you or get you down. Just think,
as an animal you’ll have a second chance
to find a companion.” She advises him
that, if transfigured, he should limit his
choice of sweetheart to the same spe-
cies. “A wolf and a penguin could never
live together, nor could a camel and a
hippopotamus,” she says. After a mo-
ment, she adds, “That would be ab-
surd.” As if everything else she has men-
tioned is utterly normal.
Only a film with a tenacious grasp
of absurdity would allow such talk,
and “The Lobster,” the first English-
language feature by the Greek direc-
100 THE NEW YORKER, MAY 16, 2016
tor Yorgos Lanthimos, fits the bill. Tran-
quil in manner yet brisk in momentum,
it lays out the foreground of the story
without pausing to fill in the backdrop;
clue by clue, we have to work it out for
ourselves. The underlying tenet of so-
ciety, we come to understand, is that
people are forbidden to be single. Parts
of the film are set in a city, where we
see that principle in action. A woman
on her own in a mall is stopped by se-
curity guards, who demand, politely
but firmly, to know the whereabouts
of her husband; she explains that he is
away on a business trip. Another solo
shopper is asked to produce his “certifi-
cate,” in order to prove that he has a
spouse.
David is a wretched case. (The cast-
ing of Farrell, who played Alexander
the Great for Oliver Stone, is a subtle
joke in itself.) His wife has recently left
him, and so he is sent to the hotel; no
one must be alone for long. With him
he takes a Border collie—a loyal pal,
and no wonder, for it is in fact his
brother, who presumably tried and failed
to find a partner of his own. (Most such
failures, according to the manager, elect
to become dogs. “That is why the world
is full of dogs,” she says.) One pleasure
of “The Lobster,” all the more striking
for going unremarked, is the array of
passing creatures: a flamingo stalks by,
providing a splash of pink amid the
earth tones of the landscape; and an
Irish guest with long blond hair ap-
pears outside the hotel, after an unsuc-
cessful stay, as a Shetland pony.
So strong is the conceit behind “The
Lobster” that only gradually do you re-
alize how much plot is being packed
in. Things begin to stir as David and
the other residents, armed with tran-
quillizer guns, are forced to go hunt-
ing. The prey is not beasts but loners:
single folk who have gone rogue in the
woods and need to be culled. (The chase
is shot in slow motion, to extraordi-
nary effect.) Loners willingly follow
their own code of conduct, which is ev-
ery bit as severe as that which prevails
at the hotel. They may fraternize, or
dance without touching, but that is all:
two of them wear surgical dressings on
their lips, having been caught in an
embrace and punished with something
called “the red kiss.” David now ab-
sconds to join the loners, and falls in
love with one of them (Rachel Weisz).
The irony could not be more acrid: our
hero, unable to lose his heart at the
hotel, then loses it in the one place
where the loss is considered a crime.
Only in the city, where David and the
woman evade suspicion by pretending
to be a couple, do we see them share a
writhing smooch, and even then they
are told not to overdo it. Wherever you
go, Lanthimos implies, the laws en-
trap you.
That is a serious charge, and, for all
the pranks that he plays on our as-
sumptions, Lanthimos is full of grave
intent. No art, for a filmmaker as for a
novelist, is finer or harder than that of
keeping a straight face as you hold the
world up to scorn. Swift managed it,
and so did Buñuel, but few current di-
rectors, apart from Lanthimos and Todd
Solondz, make the effort. What is more,
there’s nothing paltry or cheap about
the targets that Lanthimos picks.
“Dogtooth” (2009), his breakout movie,
sought to dismantle the family unit;
“Alps” (2011) took on death, no less,
and the culture of grief, with charac-
ters being hired to impersonate the
ILLUSTRATION BY MIKKEL SOMMER
deceased for the sake of the mourners;
and now we have “The Lobster,” which
snaps at love.
You could easily claim that the film
confines its ridicule to the Tinderized—
to those who are offered such elabo-
rate assistance in the speed and the pre-
cision of their wooing that they are left
with no excuse for being alone. The
script, by Lanthimos and Efthymis
Filippou, certainly sports with the no-
tion of the perfect match. At the hotel,
everyone owns up to a defining flaw.
Robert ( John C. Reilly) has a lisp,
for example, and John (Ben Whishaw)
has a limp. So desperate is John to
stay human that, having met a woman
who gets nosebleeds, he keeps bang-
ing his own schnozzle to draw blood,
and thus to dupe her into accepting
him as her equal. As for David, he is
moved to discover that the woman in
the woods, like him, is nearsighted. Why
should they not peer into the future
together?
All this is neatly done, and Whishaw,
in particular, is frighteningly dry, yet
“The Lobster” is more than a satire on
the dating game. It digs deeper, nee-
dling at the status of our most tender
emotions. Even when David and his
fellow-myopic are revealed to be kin-
dred spirits, that kinship affords them
little joy. Not once do they seem happy,
and I fear that Lanthimos regards
romantic bliss, like domestic harmony,
as yet another illusion to be pricked.
Hence the stern voice-over supplied
by Weisz, sounding like a school prin-
cipal. Hence, too, the soundtrack—
mostly jagged snatches of string
music by Beethoven, Shostakovich,
Schnitt ke, and others, scraping away
any patches of contentment. One image,
of four loners walking down a country
road, clad in suits, recalls the similar
strollers who crop up in Buñuel’s “Dis-
creet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972),
yet Lanthimos lacks the master’s blithe
awareness that, in the matter of tone,
the savage can cohabit with the suave.
Although few films this year will make
the kind of impression that “The Lob-
ster” does, it remains grim fare, spiky
and unconsoling, and, where there are
laughs, they die at the back of the throat.
To anyone planning to see this movie
on a date: good luck.
ow do you define the Avengers?
H Two phrases from “Captain Amer-
ica: Civil War” offer alternative answers.
One is “a lot of superpeople.” The other
is “a group of U.S.-based enhanced in-
dividuals,” which for one heavenly mo-
ment suggests that, since we last met
Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) and his
merry mates, they have put on weight.
Imagine a wobbly Black Widow (Scar-
lett Johansson) and a lumbering Fal-
con (Anthony Mackie), with Captain
America (Chris Evans), the incredible
chunk, bringing up the rear.
Alas, the whole gang is in good
shape, although they are having issues
with their bonding. The big news, de-
livered by the Secretary of State (Wil-
liam Hurt), is that Avenging, hith-
erto a privately run concern, will now
be controlled by the U.N. under the
“Sokovia Accords,” named for the loca-
tion of a previous adventure. (Why do
made-up countries always sound like
somewhere ruled by Groucho Marx?)
Iron Man likes the idea, whereas Cap-
tain America hates it. You could parse
their clash as a grownup debate on
the politics of governance, but it’s re-
ally not. It’s an excuse for the two of
them to duke it out on a German
airfield, each with a bunch of friends
at his behest. Even Spider-Man (Tom
Holland) and Ant-Man (Paul Rudd)
get roped in, with mixed results. Both
are nicely played, and they leaven the
mood (a tiny Rudd gets to hop inside
Downey’s metal costume, like a flea),
yet their very presence smacks of des-
peration. The motto of the directors,
Anthony and Joe Russo, appears to be:
If you can make it happen, do it. Don’t
hold back.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes
had a word for this method: “exorbi-
tancy.” Three hundred and sixty-six years
ago, in an uncanny trailer for Marvel,
he wrote, “There are some that are not
pleased with fiction, unless it be bold,
not onely to exceed the work, but also
the possibility of nature: they would have
impenetrable Armors, Inchanted Cas-
tles, invulnerable bodies, Iron Men,
flying Horses, and a thousand other such
things, which are easily feigned by them
that dare.” As the feigning wears off,
and “Captain America: Civil War” crawls
to a close, you sense that the possibili-
ties of nature have been not just ex-
ceeded but exhausted. Even the dialogue
seems like a special effect: “You’re being
uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal,”
Black Widow remarks to Iron Man.
Translation: “Say something.” 
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“Would you feel more comfortable on the floor?”

Karen Banniettis, New York City

“I am required to report those bruises.” “His parents never picked him up.”
Peter Winslow, Washington, D.C. Simon Hale, Boston, U.K.

“It’s normal to feel empty after a split.”

Michelle Deschenes, Fort Collins, Colo.
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